Brow-Beaten, or The Heimlich Maneuver

There's an interesting conversation afoot in two threads over on Crooked Timber about highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow (first post here, second here), which keeps leaping back and forth between intellectual history (the conversation begins with the 1949 Life magazine chart of highbrow, upper middlebrow, lower middlebrow, and lowbrow taste) and contemporary cultural analysis. In short, our kind of thing (or at least, my kind of thing....no need to unnecessarily implicate my fellow USIHers!).

Along the way we get some Lawrence Levine, a dash of Christopher Lasch, references to a couple recent books that I didn't know but really should have (just what I need....additions to the reading list), and, of course, Bourdieu sauvé des eaux.

Perhaps inevitably, it turns out there's an (actually interesting looking) blog devoted to this pursuit: Hilobrow. In the second Crooked Timber thread, Josh Glenn, one of the Hilorophants, complicates things:

Over at Hilobrow.com ... we agree with Bourdieu that aesthetics and lifestyle choices aren’t entirely independent of social class. Though (along with Carl Wilson) we reject the reductionism of his Distinction, we do rely on Bourdieu’s notion of the “disposition” (a tendency to act in a specified way, to take on a certain position in any field) and the “habitus” (the choice of positions in a field, according to one’s disposition). We’ve named and located 10 bourdieuian dispositions — 4 heimlich (Highbrow, Lowbrow, Neo-Aristocratic (Anti-Lowbrow), Quasi-Populist (Anti-Highbrow)); 2 gemütlich (High Middlebrow, or what Dwight Macdonald called Midcult; and Low Middlebrow, which Macdonald, following Adorno, called Masscult); 2 unheimlich (Nobrow, not to be confused with John Seabrook’s confused use of the term; and Hilobrow, our own coinage); and then there’s Unbrow, which Van Wyck Brooks confusingly called Lowbrow. There are various habituses possible within each of these dispositions, but since the mid-17th-century, these dispositions have formed into an invisible matrix of influence.

Who says intellectual history is dead?

Lauren's Light Listening and a thought on Interdisciplinarity

I'm a Podcast junky. They are a great way to get through my commute, house cleaning, and exercise. Also, a good way to try to sate the insatiable curiosity about everything that had to be narrowed down to a subject that would fit a dissertation. Whenever I get excited about something I've listened to, I remember a comment I read when studying interdisciplinarity--that scholars tend to decry the way their own field is treated in the media, but then turn around and rely upon the media to understand other fields.

With that caveat, I'd like to point out this week's Radio Lab about the potential for change in (human) nature. I still remember sitting in Dagmar Herzog's class my second year in grad school, being introduced to the idea that human nature was malleable over time, particularly in the sense that our understanding of it is. So it was interesting to hear Radio Lab, a science show put on by WNYC, take on the idea. The producers depended largely upon evolutionary biologists for their stories. When reading or hearing about evolutionary biology, my historian's backbone always stiffens a bit. That field seems to ignore human history in order to connect the impulses of our ape or hunter gather ancestors to our compulsions today.

Yet I wonder what a project connecting a historical perspective on human nature with an evolutionary biologist's would look like.

Daniel Wickberg in his Historically Speaking essay mentioned the different fields with which intellectual history works well:

Intellectual historians often find themselves in dialogue with those at the margins of other disciplines: the philosophers who are less interested in analytical philosophy and more interested in the history of philosophy; the political scientists who study the history of political theory; the self-reflexive anthropologists; the sociologists of ideas and intellectuals; the literary scholars of discourse.

It would be good for us to keep this in mind as we try to expand the influence of this blog, and maybe even seek out radically different fields interested in similar questions.

Public Service Announcement for Associate Professors

Job Opening that caught my eye:

University of Maryland - College Park - Associate Professor, U.S. Cultural and/or Intellectual History

Location: Maryland, United States
Institution Type: College/University
Position Type: Associate Professor
Submitted: Friday, October 16th, 2009

---

Main Category: U.S. History

Secondary Categories:

Intellectual History

The Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park, seeks to appoint a scholar with a distinguished record of publication and teaching for the Burke Chair in U.S. cultural and/or intellectual history. Period specialization is open (17th through 20th centuries). This appointment will be made at the Associate Professor level. The University of Maryland is an AA/EOE employer; it encourages applications from women and minorities. Candidates should submit letter of application, c.v. and three letters of recommendation to the attention of Ms. Courtenay Lanier, US History Search Committee, Department of History, 2115 Francis Scott Key Hall, University of Maryland, College Park, 20742-7315. For best consideration, applications should be received by February 15, 2010.

Contact Info:
US History Search Committee
Attn: Courtenay Lanier
2115 Francis Scott Key
Department of History
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742

Website: http://www.history.umd.edu

Tim's Light Reading (10/19/2009)

1. Score One For Blurring Genre Lines With Intellectual History: Dan Ernst at the Legal History Blog highlights a new release that qualifies, I think, as a work on the intellectual history of the U.S. working class: Catherine L. Fisk's Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930 (University of North Carolina Press). I categorize this under "process and technical innovation" as viable parts of the life of the mind.

2. Revisiting the Scandal of the Evangelical Mind: At Religion in American History, Randall Stephens, co-editor of RAH with Paul Harvey, offers snacks from the meal that was a conference hosted by Gordon College—"The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, 15 Years Later." Stephens walks us through the good and the bad in relation to Mark Noll's classic, and more recent scholarship, by recapping some of the conference's panels. As a former Evangelical, I particularly wish I had been there.

3. Perversely Satisfying: It's somewhat self-serving, professionally speaking, but I cannot help but find stories like this perversely satisfying. I particularly love this paragraph from Mr. Shears's HNN promotional summary:

Unoriginal Misunderstanding...certainly does not claim to settle the issue of what press freedom meant in the 18th century; one of the few certainties in this area is that more evidence will be turned up and further examination of historical evidence will allow us to understand it better. Yet originalists say we must base our legal interpretation of the press freedom guarantee on what judges think its meaning may have been two centuries ago. What qualifies judges to declare, as a matter of law, what historical evidence is worthy of consideration and which interpretation is correct? Has any judge ever been appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court because of his or her abilities as a historian? As historical scholarship evolves and shifts, would Constitutional interpretation change with it? What standards apply to judicial determination of history? Without addressing these questions, originalism merely allows judges to cloak their own views as historical truths. Thus, when history is addressed in court opinions, you don’t find discussion of the uncertainties of what we know about the past or all the complexities and contradictions that the study of history reveals, but vehement argument about how historical evidence supports the outcome the judge believes to be correct.

4. A History of History Departments in the U.S.: Sometime in August or early September I printed William G. Palmer's article from the June 2009 issue of Historically Speaking. It took me awhile to read the piece, but I was pleased find in it a number of interesting anecdotes from the author's new book, titled Gentleman's Club to Professional Body: The Evolution of the History Department in the United States, 1940-1980. For instance:

- Many departments in the 1920s and 1930s had "dollar-a year men"---independently wealthy scholars who essentially worked for nothing (or close to nothing). [Me: It's nice to know that adjuncting was formerly an elite, gentlemanly occupation. But having an elite history isn't going to go get those student loans paid, no?!]
- Palmer credits James B. Conant with moving the focus of history faculty credentials away from teaching and toward publication and scholarly achievement.
- George Pierson, formerly chair of Yale's History Department, hired C. Vann Woodward to replace David Potter on the grounds of two vocal recommendations from John Morton Blum and Edmund Morgan, and five minutes of deliberation.
- Pierson also had declared that a woman would teach at Yale only over his dead body. But he ended up hiring the department's first female faculty member, Mary Wright, in 1959.
- Wisconsin's William Appleman Williams directed 37 completed dissertations in an 11-year span.

Apart from these tidbits, another interesting fact about Palmer's book is its publisher: Booksurge, an on-demand publishing division of Amazon.com. This might be the first intellectual history I've seen published in the current on-demand style.

5. A Third Way---In Biology: This InsideHigherEd piece chronicles of the efforts of biologists trying to teach evolution in Christian colleges with faculty confessional statements containing conservative clauses, or interpretations, on biblical inerrancy. I was particularly intrigued by references to the BioLogos Foundation and this book by Richard Colling. From my own readings on the subjects of concern, I thought that "Intelligent Design" could have some crossover with strains of evolutionary theory (if not random natural selection) by way of chaos theory math. By this I mean that apparently "chance" happenings, or developments, are not always chaotic or unintelligible. I wonder if there's a general history out there on the teaching of biology in Christian educational institutions that ranges beyond the Scopes Trial and the 1920s? ...Whenever I ask myself this kind of question I'm invariably surprised by the richness of existing scholarship.

6. Intellectual History on The Daily Show: Jon Stewart interviewed Jennifer Burns, a former student of David Hollinger's, for the Oct. 15 The Daily Show about her new book on Ayn Rand. - TL