Jonathan M. Smith

The Texas Aggie Bonfire: A Conservative Reading of Regional Narratives, Traditional Practices, and a Paradoxical Place

Abstract Concepts of place, narrative, tradition, and identity are employed in a conservative reading of the Texas A&M Bonfire. Texas A&M embodied regional narratives of a dual Southern commitment to economic and technological development and conservation of traditional cultural. Institutionalized at Texas A&M in the late nineteenth century, these narratives made a paradoxical place. Bonfire expressed and obscured this paradox. In line with the narrative of tradition, Texas A&M was an all-male military school until 1965. The students were uniform, isolated, and regimented. This social structure engendered intense feelings of loyalty and community. These social emotions were further aroused at events like yell practice, and projected onto Bonfire. After the Second World War the commitment of university administrators to economic and technological progress increasingly threatened the narrative of tradition and the cultivation of manliness. Student veneration of Bonfire intensified. After 1965 mandatory military drill was discontinued, women were enrolled, and the student body was enlarged. Social pluralism fragmented the meaning of Bonfire; conflict and disorderly behavior ensued. By the 1990s the university had partly rationalized Bonfire as a corporate symbol; however, this trend was tragically terminated in 1999 when the cumulative errors of the oral tradition caused Bonfire to collapse, killing twelve students.

Strange encounters: a dialogue on cultural geography across the political divide

ABSTRACT Disagreement is a fundamental aspect of scholarly inquiry, yet it is exceedingly rare for scholars on opposite sides of the political spectrum to engage in a sustained dialogue across the political divide. This article seeks to contribute to precisely such a dialogue with specific reference to the field of cultural geography. The discussion featured herein consists of an encounter between “critical” and “conservative” approaches to cultural geography in the form of a back-and-forth exchange of arguments and counter-arguments by the interlocutors. The dialogue covers a wide range of issues, including the cultural politics of essentialism, white supremacy, racial segregation, patriarchy, traditional morality, secularism, justice, authority, friendship, difference-as-strangeness, and the very question of disagreement itself. The broader aim of this dialogical intervention is not to find some sort of common ground that will resolve all differences but rather to explore what those differences are with the hope of opening up a space for more constructive dialogue on cultural geography across the political divide.

The Guilt of Hollow Men: Global Warming as Postmodern Apocalypse

Our traditional moral system will continue to lose authority with the rate of change likely accelerating. This is caused by secularism , which removes the ground from moral interdicts. The rate of change will accelerate as multicultural mixing of peoples denaturalizes moral conventions. One result will be what T. S. Eliot called “hollow men ” who do not live under judgment. As Irving Babbitt and Philip Rieff argue, traditional inner life requires moral striving, guilt, fear, and gratitude, all of which are attenuated in our humanitarian and therapeutic society. Traditional morality is being replaced by ethics and personal guilt by social guilt over stolen privilege . This is not felt for personal failings, but, as Kenneth Minogue argues, for occupying a privileged place in what is perceived to be an exploitative system. This guilt is expiated by working to overturn the system and institute social and environmental justice. Whether or not global warming is occurring, persons suffering from the social guilt over stolen privilege need to believe that it is occurring. Global warming is for them a literal apocalypse, a vision of the end of the world as we know it, in which a time of tribulation ushers in a new age of social and environmental justice.

Time-Binding Communication: Transmission and Decadence of Tradition

This article sketches a theory of time-binding communication, which is to say communication that unifies widely separated times much as space-binding communication unifies widely separated places. Drawing from the work of Harold Innis, it first describes the function and character of time-binding communication as a means to social continuity. Then, following Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Oakshott, it explains the nature and necessary circumstances of this sort of time-binding communication, or tradition. It discusses the character, consequences, and causes of decadence—radical discontinuity—as these have been described by Richard Weaver, C. E. M. Joad, and Jacques Barzun. Finally, it turns to David Lowenthals notion of the past as a ‘foreign country’ in an effort to explain the relations between modernity and both tradition and decadence, as well as the geography of tradition and decadence in the modern world.

A Geography of the Lifeworld: Movement, Rest and Encounter

This is a reprint of a book first released more than twenty-five years ago, at a time of momentous change in human geography. It is one of the boundary stones marking the frontier that separates modern from postmodern geography. When it was first published in 1979, waves of new geography were eating away positivist spatial science, and at the same time laying foundations of its humanistic, poststructural, and critical successors. These waves had been stirred into action by the political and cultural tempest of the preceding decade, and the conceptual landscape they sculpted is fundamentally the conceptual landscape human geographers inhabit to this day. This book also marks a second boundary, less often recognized or remarked, but perhaps ultimately more consequential. This is the boundary that separates modern from postmodern regimes of academic publication. Word processors, print-on-demand presses, and profit-seeking publishers are just some of the innovations that shattered the old order of academic publication, which had been conducted through the tightly controlled (because costly) channels of university presses, academic society journals, and departmental discussion-paper series. This book appeared at the very beginning of this revolution, as part of the old Croon Helm catalogue, and were it not for this revolution, I doubt it would have been published. It was, after all, the dissertation of a creative, energetic, but decidedly eccentric graduate student, and prior to the publication revolution, such dissertations seldom became books. I am not saying that it should have remained a dissertation, only that the grudging gatekeepers of the old order would not have raised the heavy portcullis for a work such as this. The theoretical revolution of postmodern geography is, in important ways, a child of the publication revolution. At first glance, this book does not appear revolutionary. There is the comfortable old word geography in its title (although the indefinite article is portentous), and its definition of geography resembles the classic formulation of Carl Ritter, that geography is the study of earth as the “home of man.” David Seamon renders it this way: “geography is the study of the earth as the dwellingplace of man” (p. 15). His innovation lies in the difference between what he means by “dwellingplace” and what the older geographers meant by “home.” By home, they meant oikos, a place to which men and women are bound by economic and ecological ties. A dwelling place is, at root, a place of dwellan, which is to say a place in or by which one is beguiled, enchanted, transfixed. The ties are psychological. To the old geographers, earth is man’s

Estrangement: A Beginner’s Guide to the Strangeness of the World

Geographers adopted the concept of Being-in-the-World from Martin Heidegger. However, most have wisely eschewed the philosopher’s larger ontological and pantheistic project. Nevertheless, geographers can make use of basic phenomenological concepts and terms. The world of appearances can be reduced to the three basic phenomena of objects, subjects, and death, and each of these phenomena engenders in humans a feeling of estrangement, angst, or alienation. There are four responses to the world’s appearance as an uncanny place: otherworldliness, existentialism, naturalism, and escapism. Because the events predicted in this volume will almost certainly make the world appear more and more uncanny, an important (but here unanswered) question is which of these responses will prevail.

THE PASSAGE TO COSMOS: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America. By Laura Dassow Walls.

ther enabling these systems to meet the incredible demand of feeding the Atlantic slave trade. Many aspects of these food systems, adapted to conditions of ecological and social uncertainty, were ideally suited for plantation societies and postslavery landscapes in the Americas, where their African heritages have been widely forgotten. In the Shadow of Slavery is an extremely valuable and informative book that offers a novel perspective on Africans in world history. Its clear and accessible style will be useful in teaching upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, but established scholars should also read it to reevaluate what they think they know about Africa, Africans, and the Columbian Exchange.Chris S. Duvall, University of New Mexico

Apotheosis of the Hungry God: Nihilism and the Contours of Scholarship

The modern university is a demoralizing institution, largely devoted to the propagation of nihilism and liberation of desire. The apotheosis of this hungry god of the untrammeled will has taken more than 200 years, but the slow ascent has given humanistic scholarship its basic shape. The ascent of ‘reason’ over tradition and religion, at the end of the eighteenth century, caused conservative thought to emerge, reluctantly, and frame rational defenses of natural (i.e. spontaneously evolved) social institutions and belief systems. This has always been handicapped by the need to fight rationalism with reason. This same ascent inspired revolutionary theorists to frame their ringing denunciations and inspiring panaceas, most of which proved purely destructive because of the tragic inability of revolutionary practice to produce the promised and indispensable metanoia. Partly due to the limited success of conservative thought and revolutionary theory, untrammeled will has, more recently, ascended over reason, tradition, and religion, to give us the postmodern nihilism of Luciferian scholars.

Book Review: Geography, science and national identity: Scotland since 1520

American governments have reneged on a deal with the working class. Given the sheer hard work of their parents and their own continuing struggle to earn a decent living, Beltwayites have a righteous sense of injustice over the fact that even the small amount of security and respectability they have gained can so easily be taken from them. The idea that American governments have institutionalized a culture of class deception (‘the American Dream’) is not the political conclusion Kefalas draws, but it does speak to the resentments, angers and fears that she shows permeating the everyday lives of the people of Beltway. In this respect she provides us with the affective essence of their sense of place, a story of struggle befitting its title Working class heroes. This is rich material for a long-overdue academic engagement with working-class cultural politics.

No community without spectacle: A comment on Olwig's Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic

It would be difficult to accurately summarize Olwig’s complex and rewarding book in short space. It is not at all difficult to summarize it with partial accuracy, however, so that is what I propose to do. I do this not only for the sake of brevity, but also because the intellectual impact of a book that permits a simple and partially accurate summary is so often an impact of the imperfect summary, and not of the book itself. So some of what I am about to say is directed not so much at Olwig’s book, as at statements that are likely to appear in coming years with Olwig’s book appended as a legitimizing footnote. Olwig basically posits two forms of landscape, what we might call the community form and the scenic form. In the community form, a landscape is a particular social order, a “historically constituted” system of persons and practices that gives shape to a particular piece of land. This is the landscape geographers most often study, because it represents the everyday political and economic arrangements of the community. To insider and outsider alike, experience of the community form of landscape is experience of the social order as complex and contingent, as diverse individuals and groups interacting through evolving, negotiated relations. The scenic form of landscape is a particular vista, or type of vista, that is thought to condense, epitomize, or represent a wide territory and the social order that occupies that territory. As the word scenery implies, such landscapes are more often extraordinary than typical, for they are presumed to manifest an essence that lies behind everyday appearances. As representations of the social order, scenic landscapes accomplish two things. By presenting an essential unity of scenery they obscure the actual diversity of persons and places in the social order that occupies that landscape. For instance, the great iconographic landscapes of the United States, preserved in national parks, present wild nature as a unifying American theme, while they obscure the diversity of everyday social, economic, and political life in America. By omitting from the scene representations of the intermediate institutions that stand between the individual and the state, scenic landscapes also, according to Olwig, aid centralization of political power. To view