RICHARD E. MILLER KURT SPELLMEYER THE NEW HUMANITIES READER THIRD EDITION i»»" a" H»" un»' iìll""’,’ 1 1 I»"' 1»»" Hi»""' " ni un»" in»' i »"'‘H ni""' »W’"' 1 » IH " »»"" "II A-ÿjâfl . H»»« h unii»""1 f Visit The New Humanities Reader Web site @ www.newhum.com RICHARD E. MILLER KURT SPELLMEYER www.newhum.com provides an invaluable resource for both students and teachers. Students will find: • 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. T H E New Humanities READER Third Edition Richard E. Miller RUTGERS UNIVERSITY Kurt Spellmeyer RUTGERS UNIVERSITY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT PUBLISHING 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 dedi­ cation of the assistant and associate directors of the Rutgers Writing Program, the writing program's teaching faculty and staff, the undergraduates at our university, and the teachers and undergraduates from around the country who have joined us on this project. We are fortunate to work in an environ­ ment where so many people are willing to innovate and to give curricular change a try. We are grate­ ful, as well, for Houghton Mifflin's commitment to this project: 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 vi­ sion for the new humanities. Now, all that remains to do is what always remains: to think connec- tively, to read creatively, and to write one's way to new ways of seeing. Publisher: Pat Coryell Sponsoring Editor: Lisa Kimball Marketing Manager: Tom Ziolkowski Discipline Product Manager: Giuseppina Daniel Senior Development Editor: Martha Bustin Project Editor: Aimee Chevrette Bear Senior Media Producer: Philip Lanza Senior Content Manager: Janet Edmonds Art and Design Manager: Jill Haber Cover Design Manager: Anne S. Katzeff Senior Photo Editor: Jennifer Meyer Dare Senior Composition Buyer: Chuck Dutton Editorial Assistant: Sarah Truax Marketing Associate: Bettina Chiu Editorial Assistant: Laura Collins Cover credit: Globe, © Doable/Getty Images; The Sentinel Building and The Transamerica Building, San Francisco, California, USA, © Damir Frkovic/Masterfile; Tswana woman on cellular phone, © Strauss/ Curtis/Corbis; Traditional Windmill and Turbines Netherlands, © Andrej Kopac/Masterfile. Permissions and credits are found in the Credits beginning on page 783. This Credits section constitutes an extension of the copyright page. Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or me­ chanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system with­ out the prior written permission of the copyright owner unless such copying is expressly permitted by federal copyright law. With the exception of nonprofit transcription in Braille, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing is not authorized to grant permission for further uses of copyrighted selections reprinted in this text without the permission of their owners. Permission must be obtained from the in­ dividual copyright owners as identified herein. Address requests for permission to make copies of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing material to College Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 222 Berkeley Street, Boston, MA 02116-3764. Printed in the U.S.A. Library of Congress Control Number: 2008926003 Instructor's exam copy: ISBN-10: 0-547-00482-6 ISBN-13: 978-0-547-00482-2 For orders, use student text ISBNs: ISBN-10: 0-618-98856-4 ISBN-13: 978-0-618-98856-3 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9-EB-12 11 10 09 08 CONTENTS Thematic Contents ix Preface xiii DAVID ABRAM, The Ecology of Magic: A Personal Introduction to the Inquiry 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. LEILA AHMED, On Becoming an Arab 25 An Egyptian scholar describes her evolving sense of what it means to be an Arab within the context of the transformation of Egypt from a British colony into a sovereign Arab nation. ANDREW J. BACEVICH, The Real World War IV 47 History textbooks identify two world wars, but the Cold War, which pitted the United States against the Soviet Union, could also be considered a world war, as can the current global war against terror. Bacevich traces World War IV back to President Jimmy Carter and foresees a future defined by perpetual wars fought to advance a notion of American freedom with­ out limits. JONATHAN BOYARÍN, Waiting for a Jew: Marginal Redemption at the Eighth Street Shul 72 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. BRYAN CAPLAN, "Market Fundamentalism" Versus the Religion of Democracy 95 What are the differences between a religious fundamentalist, someone who believes that democracy is fundamentally superior to any other form of government, and someone who believes that the drive for profit is funda­ mentally good for society? Caplan's surprising answer here highlights the corrective value of the markets and of the economists who study them. AMY CHUA, A World on the Edge 123 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, iv CONTENTS 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. DEVRA DAVIS, Presumed Innocent 141 We think of science as the realm in which objective truth can be deter­ mined, but what do we do when the search takes decades and human lives hang in the balance? A case in point is studying the environmental causes of cancer, where the effort to secure conclusive evidence is hampered not only by the complexity of the problem but also by the vested interests of industries manufacturing everything from pharmaceuticals to cell phones to artificial sweeteners. ANNIE DILLARD, The Wreck of Time: Taking Our Century's Measure 167 An essayist and poet contemplates the insignificance of human lives in a universe so huge that it overwhelms our best efforts to understand it. SUSAN FALUDI, The Naked Citadel 177 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. DANIEL GILBERT, Immune to Reality 213 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 ful­ fillment just an accident? MALCOLM GLADWELL, The Power of Context: Bernie Goetz and the Rise and Fall of New York City Crime 233 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. WILLIAM GREIDER, Work Rules 251 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. HENRY JENKINS, Why Heather Can Write: Media Literacy and the Harry Potter Wars 272 Young people are immersed in technology, texting friends, chatting online, wandering virtual realities, and surfing the Web. Does this immersion Contents v work against literacy, or does it redefine what it means to be literate in the twenty-first century? STEVEN JOHNSON, The Myth of the Ant Queen 307 Do complex systems like ant colonies and megacities have a collective in­ telligence greater than the intelligence of their individual members? If the answer is "Yes," then can we ever know where our systems are taking us? CHRISTINE KENNEALLY, YOU Have Gestures 326 Where does language begin? Do animals have access to language? What is the significance of the fact that humans point but apes don't? Kenneally teases apart the differences between human gestures and gestures in the animal kingdom to show how language is present and active long before a human child begins to speak. JON KRAKAUER, Selections from Into the Wild 343 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 367 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. TANYA M. LUHRMANN, Metakinesis: How God Becomes Intimate in Contemporary U.S. Christianity 392 How does God become real to people? Luhrmann, an anthropologist, de­ termines that metakinetic states—hallucinations, trances, hearing voices— give rise to the experience of a viscerally intimate God, a personal God who speaks to true believers. The rise in such believers in the United States might be the result of a lonelier citizenry, made all the lonelier by the spread of trance-inducing technology. AZAR NAFISI, Selections from Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books 416 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 Republic of Iran. TIM O'BRIEN, HOW to Tell a True War Story 439 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 vi CONTENTS to take another look at a subject that no one can claim to understand fully, not even those who have found themselves in the thick of battle. VIRGINIA POSTREL, Surface and Substance 453 Has conventional thinking misled us about the "shallowness" of style and fashion? Postrel asks us to reconsider style as nonverbal communication— a message as well as a medium. It turns out that the superficial may run deeper than we imagined. PIETRA RIVOLI, Dogs Snarling Together: How Politics Came to Rule the Global Apparel Trade 477 Where have American blue-collar jobs gone? The standard explanation is that these jobs have been driven overseas and to Latin America, where cheap labor is to be found in great abundance. Rivoli follows a T-shirt from the rack at Wal-Mart back to the factory and finds that the story of the de­ cline of the American textile industry is much more complicated and has many more players than the standard explanation would have us believe. OLIVER SACKS, The Mind's Eye: What the Blind See 505 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. CHARLES SIEBERT, An Elephant Crackup? 525 The phenomenon known as Human-Elephant Conflict—as measured by events where elephants destroy villages and crops, attacking and killing humans—is on the rise. Elephants, who travel in herds and mourn their dead, are profoundly social creatures. The collapse of elephant culture, brought on by predation, stress, and trauma, may point to what lies ahead for human culture. PETER SINGER AND JIM MASON, Meat and Milk Factories 543 Most of the meat, poultry, pork, milk, and eggs that Americans eat comes from massive factory farms where animals live sedentary, medicated lives before being slaughtered. The environmental consequences of this ap­ proach are known, but Singer and Mason underscore the ethical conse­ quences of turning a blind eye to the suffering of animals. REBECCA SOLNIT, The Solitary Stroller and the City 571 How we move through the world influences how we know the world: seen from above, the city is a grid; seen from the back seat of a limousine, the city is a stage for flaunting one's success; seen through the eyes of the soli­ tary walker, the city becomes a richly textured tapestry, where the citizens enjoy a communal solitude. Solnit invites her readers to see the benefits of an urban stroll, as opposed to a walk through the country. Contents vii SANDRA STEINGRABER, War 597 Steingraber, diagnosed with a type of cancer known to be caused by expo­ sure to environmental carcinogens, returns to her childhood home to ex­ plore the local industrial landscape. A scientist by training, Steingraber traces the use of DDT in World War II and its subsequent use by the agri­ cultural industry, mapping these developments on to the geography of the countryside that surrounds her home. GREGORY STOCK, The Enhanced and the Unenhanced 630 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 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 654 The term divided consciousness refers to those times when we withdraw mentally from the world around us. Daydreams and other forms of subjec­ tive 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 676 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 de­ bate may prove to be mistaken, while the loser may fail to communicate in­ formation that everyone could benefit from hearing. According to linguist Deborah Tannen, there has to be a better way. EDWARD TENNER, Another Look Back, and a Look Ahead 708 Technological innovations happen in response to problems, but each inno­ vation ends up producing a series of new problems in turn—which require new innovations, which produce new problems once again, apparently ad infinitum. Is all of this change self-defeating? While admitting that technol­ ogy has "revenge effects," Edward Tenner makes the case that progress is no illusion. ROBERT THURMAN, Wisdom 737 Losing one's sense of self or having an empty self is typically imagined to be a fate worse than death. But Robert Thurman, an expert on the Bud­ dhism 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." viii CONTENTS JEAN TWENGE, An Army of One: Me 755 What it means to have a self has changed over the course of the past thirty years. While Baby Boomers set out to change the world, Generation Me seeks out fun as the highest value and promotes self-esteem as the greatest good. Drawing on data taken from 1.3 million young people, Twenge argues that this obsessive focus on the self is not just bad for society, it's also bad for the individual. Credits 783 Author and Title Index 787