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H a U ji S Sli - 5 second edition Visit The New Humanities Reader Web site @ www.newhum.com The H«w Humanities Reatfer Home MtnilU Firefox • a * Fie fdt view 50 Toots Help G 0 The New Humanities Reader Richard E. Miller j Kurt Spellmeyef For Students: For Teachers: Lhik-O-M.it Sample Assignments Information aban the wtiei s sicludid In the NHR »ritan by Rlchnrd and Kurt and Untes to síes retated to each rearing Mote Sample Assignments TSeuttto-dri ar encttaed tutorials to help you per ted your wNHriRtttn by othar ttncheri nfth« writing Sample Sequences Gradatwtan Notes to Teactieis Tsaiime pglrea dplarpige crsri eannda tweaec rheecro cmommemnedn, taslong wth Ushtij the NHR Haileila Oto GtatHngCtitetia Examples ot outstanding student papers Che-Check How to distinguish between getting help, collaborating, and plagiarizing Sit» Feedback! Richard E. Millar Cupyrlght © 2003 H«u;hwn Mifflin C«mp«ny ramffnawhum.com All Right« Rtsarvad www.newhum.com provides an invaluable resource for both students and teachers. Students will find: • links to sites with additional information on the writers and the essays in cluded in The New Humanities Reader • self-directed tutorials to supplement classroom instruction * sample papers, including teacher comments and recommended grades * help figuring out what constitutes plagiarism. Teachers will find: • sample assignments and sample assignment sequences written by teach ers from across the country • a complete orientation manual, providing concrete advice on how to use The New Humanities Reader and its companion Web site to improve student writing • suggestions on how to grade and respond to student writing. New Humanities READER Second Edition Richard E. Miller RUTGERS UNIVERSITY Kurt Spellmeyer RUTGERS UNIVERSITY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY Boston New York Acknowledgments This project has been a long time in the making. It has been helped along by the hard work and dedication of the assistant and associate directors of the Rutgers Writing Program, the writing program's teaching faculty and staff, and the undergraduates at our university. We are fortu nate to work in an environment where so many people are willing to innovate and to give cur ricular change a try. We are grateful, as well, for Houghton Mifflin's commitment to this pro ject: the folks in custom publishing, our editors for the national edition of this volume, and the sales reps have all helped us fine-tune our vision for the new humanities. Now, all that remains to do is what always remains: to think connectively, to read creatively, and to write one's way to new ways of seeing. Publisher: Pat Coryell Editor-in-Chief: Suzanne Phelps Weir Assistant Editor: Anne Leung Senior Project Editor: Bob Greiner Editorial Assistant: Robert Woo Senior Art and Design Coordinator: Jill Haber Senior Composition Buyer: Sarah Ambrose Manufacturing Coordinator: Chuck Dutton Senior Marketing Manager: Cindy Graff Cohen Marketing Associate: Wendy Thayer Cover credit: Background image of ripe wheat © by Robert Glusic/Photodisc Green Neon Signs in Shanghai © John Hicks/CORBIS Muslim Women in the town of Taroudannt © by Martin Harvey/CORBIS (Back cover) Prehistoric Cave Painting, Ennedi Plateau, Tschad © Digital Vision/Veer.com Permissions and credits are found in the Acknowledgments beginning on page 709. This Ac knowledgments section constitutes an extension of the copyright page. Copyright © 2006 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 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Library of Congress Control Number: 2005921389 ISBN: 0-618-56822-0 12 3 4 5 6 7 8 9-MP-09 08 07 06 05 CONTENTS Thematic Contents viii Preface xii DAVID ABRAM, The Ecology of Magic 1 When an anthropologist visits Bali and rediscovers the life of the senses, his transformation brings the natural world alive in new and amazing ways. LILA ABU-LUGHOD, Honor and Shame 25 An American ethnographer of Arab ancestry describes the struggles of Kamla, an unmarried Bedouin girl, who wants to find greater personal freedom while preserving her connections to her family and religion. KAREN ARMSTRONG, Does God Have a Future? 55 A historian of religion disputes the widespread belief that we can talk about God without relying on ideas that are limited by our particular time and place. She contrasts the literal-mindedness of fundamentalism to the mystical experience of "higher states of consciousness." JONATHAN BOYARIN, Waiting for a Jew: Marginal Redemption at the Eighth Street Shul 78 A first-person account of the author's disenchantment with the Jewish tra dition of his childhood, followed by his personal reinvention of it after an odyssey through a postmodern world of multiple perspectives and beliefs. AMY CHUA, A World on the Edge 101 As democracy and free markets spread across the globe, we are supposed to see an improvement in the quality of life, but many parts of Africa, South America, and Asia have witnessed an explosion of violence and eth nic hatred. Chua asks us to consider the possibility that too much freedom all at once can tear societies apart. ANNIE DILLARD, The Wreck of Time: Taking Our Century's Measure 120 An essayist and poet contemplates the insignificance of human lives in a universe so huge that it overwhelms our best efforts to understand it. iii iv CONTENTS SUSAN FALUDI, The Naked Citadel 130 A reporter describes the legal battle—and the cultural meltdown—that ensues when The Citadel, an all-male military academy, admits its first female recruit. JON GERTNER, The Futile Pursuit of Happiness 166 Despite the tens of thousands of hours we spend pursuing the American Dream, recent research in psychology demonstrates that we often prove surprisingly inept when we try to predict what will make us happy. Is fulfillment just an accident? MALCOLM GLADWELL, The Power of Context: Bernie Goetz and the Rise and Fall of New York City Crime 178 Why is it that in matters of human behavior, change is so hard to predict? According to Malcolm Gladwell, a journalist and social critic, we seldom see the real causes of social change because we pay too much attention to the big picture. Instead, we need to start with the little things. STEPHEN JAY GOULD, What Does the Dreaded "E" Word Mean, Anyway? A Reverie for the Opening of the New Hayden Planetarium 196 All of us think we know what "evolution" means, but the truth is that critics of the theory—and many of its supporters as well—have gotten the basics wrong. WILLIAM GREIDER, Work Rules 212 Millions of Americans dream of the day when they can become their own bosses, but most of them will spend their working lives in chronic insecu rity. Rejecting socialism as well as corporate capitalism, Greider makes his case for a third way: worker ownership of business. LANI GUINIER, Second Proms and Second Primaries: The Limits of Majority Rule 233 Many people assume that democracy is synonymous with the electoral principle of "winner takes all." But in the South, the winner-takes-all sys tem guarantees that millions of African Americans always find themselves without representation. Is our system really democratic? STEVEN JOHNSON, The Myth of the Ant Queen 247 Do complex systems like ant colonies and megacities have a collective intelligence greater than the intelligence of their individual members? If the answer is "Yes," then can we ever know where our systems are taking us? Contents v MARY KALDOR, Beyond Militarism, Arms Races, and Arms Control 267 If we understand 9/11 as the equivalent of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, then the proper response on the part of the U.S. may indeed be to go to war. But international terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda are not the same as nation-states like Japan, and for this reason conventional warfare may fail. Kaldor argues that we need a new and distinctly international ap proach to the problem of global violence. JON KRAKAUER, Selections from Into the Wild 285 Searching for the fundamentals of life, a young man named Christopher McCandless sets off into Alaska's backcountry. There he dies, apparently of starvation. Was he a fool, or does his journey bear witness to courage, curiosity, and other admirable traits? BETH LOFFREDA, Selections from Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder 309 In Laramie, Wyoming, the gruesome murder of a gay college student puts the town under the media microscope. From one perspective, we see citi zens struggling to spin their public image. From another perspective, we might be able to detect the first signs of genuine cultural change. AZAR NAFISI, Selections from Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books 334 Can art be more powerful than a dictatorship? An account of a women's reading group in the days following the establishment of the Islamic Re public of Iran. MARTHA NUSSBAUM, Women and Cultural Universals 357 Is everything really relative? Does everyone actually have the right to his or her own opinion? Do all the world's cultures deserve equal respect? Confronting the abuse of women around the world, the author answers with a resounding "No," and then goes on to provide us with a checklist for universal freedom. TIM O'BRIEN, HOW to Tell a True War Story 386 When applied to the reality of war, words like "honor," "valor," "courage," and "sacrifice" may be profoundly dishonest. O'Brien's short story asks its readers to take another look at a subject that no one can claim to under stand fully, not even those who have found themselves in the thick of battle. MICHAEL POLLAN, Playing God in the Garden 400 Will bioengineering prove to be the salvation of a planet with an exploding population and an unsustainable agriculture? Or will it unravel the tap estry of life? v vi CONTENTS VIRGINIA POSTREL, Surface and Substance 420 Has conventional thinking misled us about the "shallowness" of style and fashion? Postrel asks us to reconsider style as non-verbal communication— a message as well as a medium. It turns out that the superficial may run deeper than we imagined. ARNOLD S. RELMAN AND MARCIA ANGELL, America's Other Drug Problem: How the Drug Industry Distorts Medicine and Politics 445 Free markets are supposed to meet human needs in the most flexible and efficient way, but the drug industry's drive for profits may be incompatible with the goal of enhancing public health. When advertising targets patients rather than doctors, is the customer always right? OLIVER SACKS, The Mind's Eye: What the Blind See 473 For more than a century people have believed that the structure of the brain was fixed at birth and more or less unchangeable thereafter. But the writings of people who have lost their sight suggest that the brain can "rewire" itself to a degree that scientists have only started to recognize. ERIC SCHLOSSER, Global Realization 493 When people around the world buy Big Macs, they may be buying more than a Happy Meal. According to journalist Eric Schlosser, the arrival of McDonald's on foreign shores ties customers into a new economic regime, a declining level of general health, and a global culture of consumerism. JAMES C. SCOTT, Behind the Official Story 520 Human relations can assume many different forms, but according to Scott, power always plays a central role in our lives because our relations are al ways unequal. If someone occupies the "dominant" position, someone always plays the "subordinate" role. Given the reality of power, is it ever possible to "be yourself" or to speak "openly"? ALEXANDER STILLE, The Ganges' Next Life 537 Religion and science in the history of the West have often been fiercely at odds, but other societies may have managed to sidestep the trouble, hi this account we meet a mahant, or Hindu priest, whose day job as a hydrologi cal engineer has involved him in the clean-up of the sacred river Ganges. In India, modem science may ride to the rescue of an ancient faith. GREGORY STOCK, The Enhanced and the Unenhanced 553 Now that genetic technology has moved off the pages of science fiction novels and into research labs, who will control it? The government? The medical community? Religious conservatives? Stock argues for a genetic Contents vii free market in which parents have the right to enhance their progeny in any way they want—and can afford. MARTHA STOUT, When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday 578 The term "divided consciousness" refers to those times when we withdraw mentally from the world around us. Daydreams and others forms of sub jective escape often help us to keep our mental balance by shutting out events when they threaten to be overwhelming. But when does our power to shut things out begin to close the door on sanity itself? DEBORAH TANNEN, The Roots of Debate in Education and the Hope of Dialogue 600 Anyone who watches the presidential debates or listens to talk radio can see that Americans love to argue. But the truth is that the "winner" in any debate may prove to be mistaken, while the loser may fail to communicate information that everyone could benefit from hearing. According to lin guist Deborah Tannen, there has to be a better way. EDWARD TENNER, Another Look Back, and a Look Ahead 633 Technological innovations happen in response to problems, but each innovation ends up producing a series of new problems in turn—which require new innovations, which produce new problems once again, appar ently ad infinitum. Is all of this change self-defeating? While admitting that technology has "revenge effects," Edward Tenner makes the case that progress is no illusion. ROBERT THURMAN, Wisdom 662 For many people, losing one's self or having an empty self are typically imagined to be a fate worse than death. But Robert Thurman, an expert on the Buddhism of Tibet, argues that we have misjudged the experience of "no self," which is not a dark corridor to oblivion, but the road to what he calls "infinite life." FRANS DE WAAL, Selections from The Ape and the Sushi Master 681 Everyone knows that nature is ruled by the principle of "the survival of the fittest." The only problem is, this principle doesn't tell the whole story. If competition plays a part in biological life, cooperation and altruism do as well. In fact, evolution seems to push many species toward increasing degrees of altruism. Acknowledgments 709 Author and Title Index 711 THEMATIC CONTENTS What should a college or university ask beginning students to think and write about? Our idea is to let them deal with the most pressing problems of our time—problems that resist easy answers and that need to be explored in ways that move across the boundaries separating conventional fields of knowledge. In the process of crossing these boundaries, each of us has to in vent our own ways of thinking and writing, but we offer the following the matic combinations to illustrate how this creative work might be done. Art and the Making of Meaning ANNIE DILLARD, The Wreck of Time: Taking Our Century's Measure 120 JON GERTNER, The Futile Pursuit of Happiness 166 AZAR NAFISI, Selections from Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books 334 TIM O'BRIEN, HOW to Tell a True War Story 386 MICHAEL POLLAN, Playing God in the Garden 400 VIRGINIA POSTREL, Surface and Substance 420 EDWARD TENNER, Another Look Back, and a Look Ahead 633 Culture and Performance DAVID ABRAM, The Ecology of Magic 1 SUSAN FALUDI, The Naked Citadel 130 MALCOLM GLADWELL, The Power of Context: Bernie Goetz and the Rise and Fall of New York City Crime 178 STEVEN JOHNSON, The Myth of the Ant Queen 247 JON KRAKAUER, Selections from Into the Wild 285 MARTHA STOUT, When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday 578 DEBORAH TANNEN, The Roots of Debate in Education and the Hope of Dialogue 600 viii