Intertextual geopolitics and La Carte et le territoire: a cautionary tale for UNESCO and the repas gastronomique des Français?

ABSTRACT

La Carte et le territoire features a France in decline, saved, entre autres, by attracting foreign tourists with ‘heritagised’ French food. Eight days after the novel won the 2010 Prix Goncourt, the repas gastronomique des Français was inscribed on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list (ICH). Considering Houellebecq’s use of tropes of culinary heritage alongside the French ICH bid reveals parallels in their manipulation of culinary heritage to create globally marketable products. Yet the motivations and ramifications of the ‘gastrodiplomacy’ in the novel and in the French state’s arguably neo-imperialist initiative differ tellingly. Houellebecq’s novel brings into cautionary focus how responding to perceived geopolitical imperatives by creating narratives of cultural heritage can instead eradicate the conditions of renewal upon which it depends and limit cultural diversity. The instrumentalisation of food heritage by a global corporation, national government and UNESCO—an ostensibly benign supranational institution—risks creating new conditions of global competition. However, comparing the novel and the narratives surrounding the repas gastronomique des Français nonetheless suggests that representations of food—like language—can exceed authorial intention, and the gastronomic miscegenation that is strategically missing from Houellebecq’s novel and elided in the ICH bid may yet continue to feed French food heritage.     

THE EVOLUTION AND DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE

In his thought‐provoking book, Alex Mesoudi argues for an evolutionary, unifying framework for the social sciences, which is based on the principles of Darwinian theory. Mesoudi maintains that cultural change can be illuminated by using the genotype‐phenotype distinction, and that it is sufficiently similar to biological change to warrant a theory of culture‐change based on evolutionary models. He describes examples of cultural microevolution, within‐population changes, and the biologically inspired population genetics models used to study them. He also shows that some aspects of large‐scale (macro‐evolutionary) cultural transformation can be studied by using ecological models and phylogenetic comparative techniques. We argue that although Mesoudi's evolution‐based perspective offers many useful insights, his ambition—the unification of the social sciences within a Darwinian framework through the use of the methods and models he describes—suffers from a major theoretical limitation. His reductive approach leads to overlooking culture as a system with emergent processes and features. Mesoudi therefore does not engage with any of the central past and present theories in sociology and anthropology for which the systems view of culture is central, and he does not analyze the emergent, high‐level properties of human cultural‐social systems. We suggest that a systems perspective, using some analogies and metaphors from developmental biology, can complement the evolutionary approach and is more in tune with a systems view of society. Such an approach, which stresses feedback and self‐sustaining interactions within social networks, and engages with the insights of sociological and anthropological theories, can contribute to the understanding of cultural systems by highlighting the evolution of processes of social cohesion, and by making use of the mathematical approaches of complexity theory.     

CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND SOCIAL METABOLISM

The emergence of culture and cultural evolution is the result of an evolutionary process, evident also in non‐human species. What is specifically human is the dominance of cultural evolution. This does not mean that cultural evolution has replaced organic evolution, but rather that both have merged into one coevolutionary complex. Through niche construction, organic modern humans are the product of cultural evolution. This cannot be explained by adaptation to natural environment or by sexual selection. Cultural evolution with its coevolved organic traits did not so much enhance competence towards the natural environment as it did competence to develop and maintain cooperation. In the process, culture became a “system” with its own imperatives and integrating forces, differentiating into several autopoietic subsystems: the symbolic‐cognitive subsystem, the economic subsystem and the political subsystem. There are however social‐metabolic constraints that put limits on their evolutionary degrees of freedom. Culture's autopoietic reach has adaptive boundaries. The concept of social metabolism attempts to capture the unity of “persons” in a physical‐biological sense and “culture” in a symbolic sense, the decisive point being that culture must be understood as an autopoietic system sui generis. The social‐metabolic system of relations and interactions between nature, human population and culture is inherently coevolutionary. The history of social metabolism is the history of the coevolution of two autopoietic systems – an open and blind non‐orthogenetic evolutionary process.     

The Role of Functional Efficiency in the Decline of North America’s Copper Culture (8000–3000 BP): an Experimental,Ecological, and Evolutionary Approach

The copper-using cultures of North America’s Archaic Period (10,000–3000 BP) have long been an archaeological enigma. For millennia, Middle and Late Archaic hunter-gatherers (8000–3000 BP) around the Upper Great Lakes region made utilitarian implements out of copper, only for these items to decline in prominence and frequency as populations grew and social complexity increased during the Archaic to Woodland Transition. From a cultural evolutionary perspective, the trajectory of North America’s copper usage presents a conundrum, as it is generally assumed that “superior” tools, i.e., metals, will replace inferior ones, i.e., stone. For well over a century, scholars have pondered the reason for the demise of copper technology that was once a wide-spread phenomenon. To address this question, an extensive archaeological experimental program was conducted which compared replica copper tools (spear points, knife blades, and awls) to analogous ones made of stone or bone to assess whether relative functional efficiency contributed to the decline of utilitarian copper implements. Here, the results of this three-part research program are presented in concert with population dynamics and ecological change to paint a broader picture of the complex interrelationships between the social, ecological, and technological spheres of past human behaviors. The synthesis of these approaches reveals that functional explanations—derived from experimental archaeology placed in an evolutionary framework—can shed much light on the trajectory of metal use in the North American Great Lakes.

     

Consumption,Environmental Sustainability and Human Geography in Australia: a Missing Research Agenda?

‘Consumption’ is a central concept in the global environmental sustainability agenda. However, one important argument from Agenda 21 — that all social actors must now practise ‘sustainable consumption’— has been publicly and politically marginalised in high‐income countries such as Australia. Geographers potentially have a role in bringing consumption back onto the agenda by constructing a critical geography of consumption. Such research can help understand how the contextual use of natural resources is perceived and practised, and how consumption helps to shape contemporary social relations. This body of knowledge is vital for building sustainable development into everyday lives. Yet a focus on urban consumption perceptions and practices appears somewhat lacking in Australian geography. Ways forward can be drawn from international geography, such as in the United Kingdom where a substantial body of work has drawn a complex picture of contemporary consumption and environmental understanding. It has also challenged prevailing ‘ecological modernisation’ policy approaches, which ignore consumption's cultural facets. In sum, considering consumption in Australia can offer insights into cultural practices expressed through consumption; can challenge and add to European geographical literatures, and can also contribute to sustainability debates by offering alternatives to currently ineffective policy discourses.     

1. CONSTRUCTING A SELECTIONIST PARADIGM

In his latest contribution to the application of Darwinian evolutionary thinking to the social sciences, W. G. Runciman conceives of human behavior as resulting from three levels of selection—biological, cultural, and social. These give rise, respectively, to evoked, acquired, and imposed patterns of behavior. The biological level is hardly controversial, but to draw a distinction between separate cultural and social selective processes is more problematic. Runciman takes memes to be the variants competitively selected at the cultural level and the practices constituting rule‐governed roles to be the variants competitively selected at the social level—thus preserving separate spheres of research for anthropology and sociology. It is not clear, however, what drives cultural and social evolution. Nor are the three levels theoretically well integrated. The book's strength lies in the numerous examples provided of how the application of selectionist theory illuminates and enriches sociological and historical explanations and contributes to the construction of historical narrative.     

Remembering Ancestors: Commemorative Rituals and the Foundation of Historicity

One of the most elaborated responses to the human perception of being‐in‐time (as the essence of historicity) has been the cult of the ancestors. Consequently, the ancestor cult may be considered foundational for historicity. This is the core idea of this article. It is illustrated with Romanian ethnographic data and elaborated with cross‐cultural examples. A few objects used in commemorative rituals—coliva (a special dish), trees and pots—are interpreted according to their symbolic force of enabling people to live temporality not only fragmentarily (past?+?present?+?future), but as a transcendental unity of the temporal continuum. Finally, the functions of history are specified—namely, identity defining, the critical function, and especially (as revealed by the ancestor cult) the function of memorialization.     

Universal,acid: Houellebecq’s clones and the evolution of humanity

ABSTRACT

This article examines Houellebecq’s two genomics novels, Les Particules élémentaires and La Possibilité d’une île and elaborates their relationship with Neo-Darwinian evolutionary naturalism and neoliberal capitalism. In these works, the mutual interdependence of these two regimes of thought both necessitates and makes possible the technology of human cloning, which promises humanity an escape from the misery of its own biological, political predicament. Houellebecq’s work, I show, problematises this dialectic, and in doing so offers an incisive critique of utopian posthumanism, providing instead only an aporetic—but rigorously materialist—form of hope.     

Does Race Matter?

Abstract. This essay contends that behaviour can only be understood within an evolutionary framework that gives equal weight to genes and environment. Our cultural environment itself evolved, in part through natural selection of genes and in part through other mechanisms. Racism, however, involves association of genetically caused differences in physical appearance with characteristics to which they are wholly unrelated. Yet this association has a biological cause: fitness maximisation through nepotism. This association, therefore, has an effect upon the life chances and reproductive success of genetically different groups and, therefore, upon the process of human evolution.     

The Prophethood of Work and the Gospels of The Souls of Black Folk

Abstract

W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the most important American thinkers of the social and the political in the first half of the twentieth century, was involved in labor politics for much of his life, but while some scholars are now beginning to appreciate the extent to which Du Bois is also a thinker of the religious, no one has tried to connect his stance on questions of labor and his religious thought. Yet his early book, The Souls of Black Folk, presents, among other things, a complicated theology of labor. Du Bois criticizes the principle of submission glorified by white American Christianity, and imposed by white Christians on black slaves. At the same time, he confesses a veritable faith in "work, systematic and tireless," but only as it functions as part of a broader cultural renewal, itself dependent on what I describe as a "missiology of cultural knowledge." To accomplish this project, Du Bois must deploy an inegalitarian principle, separating manual laborers from intellectual or cultural laborers as fundamentally different kinds of human being. This principle is obviously in tension with the great struggles for equality in which Du Bois participated all his life. At the same time, Du Bois is not simply interested in consecrating work as such, but in explaining the connection that ties together labor, the aesthetic, and the religious. Our reading of Souls is informed by the hermeneutic practices modeled by Jacques Rancière in his political philosophy.     

The Perpetually Wedded Wife of God: A Study of Shaykh Musa “Sadā Suhāg” as the Founder of Sadā Suhāgiyya Silsilah

Some of the sufis have conceptualised the relationship of human beings with God in gendered terms, and identified themselves with the feminine while imagining God in masculine terms. Such a characterisation can be found in sufi poetry, but it also finds manifestation in certain sufi practices as well, such as the male sufis dressing up as women. A fifteenth‐century South Asian sufi, Shaykh Musa “Sadā Suhāg” of Gujarat — the founder of Sadā Suhāgiyya Silsilah — dressed up like a married woman or a bride. His androgynous appearance, soubriquet, and the name of the sufi silsilah he founded, indicate that he ingeniously indigenised the sufi idea of God's bride keeping in view the Indian cultural ethos and social conventions.     

PINKER AND PROGRESS

Condorcet's classical Enlightenment statement of human progress became an essential element of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century consciousness, but by the millennium grand narratives had fallen victim to a disillusioned cultural climate. Now Steven Pinker, like Condorcet drawing on a wide range of contemporary “knowledges,” has reasserted a sweeping narrative of human progress in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Mapping a spectacular long‐term decline in person‐on‐person violence and reduction in deaths due to war, Pinker celebrates the spread of a cultural pattern of self‐restraint, sensitivity to human suffering, and recent regard for human rights, due to the modern state and gentle commerce capitalism. For Pinker the human condition has gotten steadily better, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible. Why then are so many so negative about modernity? Citing the psychology of temporal proximity to horrific events and the bad‐news predilection of the media, Pinker ignores the specifically modern and less directly brutal institutionalized forms of violence as well as the profound ambivalence of progress. He decisively demonstrates the drop in certain kinds of violence, but his account becomes strangely ideological, recapitulating key Cold‐War themes—the individual against totalitarianism, the Enlightenment against the counter‐Enlightenment, rationalism and freedom against murderous utopianism—distorting his study in the name of gentle commerce, Marxism, and anti‐Communism.     

Marriage and the Law: Politics and Theology in Measure for Measure

Abstract

In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare portrays a clearly political problem: a city whose citizens are so unable to govern themselves that only the most severe legal punishments appear capable of restoring civic order. Yet the play's conclusion, for all its dramatic fireworks, does not obviously resolve this problem. All that happens, it appears, is that everyone gets married. Understanding marriage's political significance, therefore, is key to unraveling the play's political teaching. By carefully framing marriage within Pauline language of sin and grace—and in particular by using the image of death and rebirth through baptism—Shakespeare offers a theological as well as a political image of a kind of self-government capable of easing the city's legal dilemmas and reconciling justice with mercy.     

Commuter lives: a review symposium on David Bissell's Transit Life

This article presents a series of commentaries on Transit Life: How Commuting is Transforming Our Cities, published by MIT Press in 2018. Centring on an in—depth case study of Sydney, the book argues the need to attend carefully to the fine—grained detail of the commuting experience. In all sorts of ways, Transit Life presents a way of thinking about urban transportation radically different from that used by mainstream transport planners and geographers. Geographical Research asked six researchers—Tim Edensor, Michele Lobo, Debbie Hopkins, Helen Fitt, Juliana Mansvelt, and Donald McNeill—to reflect on what kind of research vistas might be opened up bring the tools of cultural geography and mobility research to the world of commuting. Here are their responses, rounded out by a reply by David Bissell, Transit Life's author.     

Causal pathways and causal processes: Studying the evolutionary prehistory of human diversity in language,customs, and biology

An issue of continuing interest to Pacific archaeologists—the “question of Polynesian origins”—is examined (1) to illustrate a set of basic concepts (pattern, pathway, and process) helpful when talking about the origins, maintenance, and stability of similarities and differences among human populations, and (2) to document, by case example, how one particular temporal pathway of development leading to one historically specific pattern of human variability may tell us something in general, as well as something in particular, about the evolutionary processes leading to human diversity in language, customs, and biology. Contrary to the conventional assumption that the first Polynesians migrated from a homeland located somewhere in Southeast Asia, a simple biological model based on perhaps no more than three types or kinds of event sequences—i.e., causal processes—suggests how modern Polynesian speakers may be derived from an ancestral population(s) once resident in the region of the Pacific we now speak of as Melanesia.     

Protecting aquatic ecosystems in heavily allocated river systems: the case of the Oldman River Basin,Alberta

Initiatives aimed at protecting aquatic ecosystems often prove difficult to implement—particularly in water‐stressed, semi‐arid regions where the demand for water for human consumption is high. This article reports on an investigation of the factors that shaped the development and implementation of policies for aquatic ecosystem protection in the Oldman River Basin (ORB), a crucial watershed in semi‐arid southern Alberta. The analysis reveals critical cultural and historical considerations that confront those attempting to protect and restore aquatic ecosystems in the ORB and highlights specific factors that influence implementation of measures to protect it. In addition to the most basic consideration—demand for water exceeds supplies—eight specific factors that influenced aquatic ecosystem protection in this region are identified and evaluated. These include (1) clarity of actors’ roles/ jurisdictional responsibilities; (2) communication; (3) definition of key terms; (4) funding and organizational capacity; (5) leadership; (6) legal standing; (7) data and monitoring; and (8) public education. We argue that while these factors are important, critical cultural and historical considerations that influence water policy in the province also must be addressed in any efforts to protect aquatic ecosystems in southern Alberta.     

Reconnaissance of Prehistoric Sites in the Red Sea Coastal Region of the Sudan,NE Africa

This paper reports results of a recent Stone Age-focused archaeological survey in the Red Sea coastal region of the Republic of Sudan, northeast Africa. Bifaces (handaxes) are the most conspicuous artifact class encountered during the survey and are characteristic of the Acheulean technocomplex. Other recorded artifact types include points, scrapers, and prepared core products referable to the Nubian and recurrent Levallois methods. Most of the artifact-bearing localities lie landward—outside of the coastal margin—thus, the evidence does not signify direct coastal adaptation per se. Our preliminary findings suggest that multiple Pleistocene-age hominin settlements tied to a terrestrial niche existed in the region. The western margin of the Red Sea occupies a pivotal location, linking the Horn of Africa and the Levant, two vital regions in human evolutionary research. Thus, the Stone Age data from the Sudan region has direct relevance for assessing hominin dispersal routes out of Africa.     

Théodore Flournoy on synesthetic personification

In 1893, Théodore Flournoy published a landmark book on synesthesia — Des phénomènes de synopsie [Of Synoptic Phenomena]. The book presented a pioneering chapter on synesthetic personification, including numerous striking case examples, and it is frequently cited by twenty-first-century researchers as providing some of the earliest examples of the phenomenon. Flournoy employed a broad definition of personification — the representation of stimuli as concrete and specific individuals or inanimate objects. This definition encompassed a more extensive set of phenomena than the definition used by researchers today and was illustrated by cases that would fall outside of contemporary subtypes of synesthetic personification. Yet, Flournoy’s seminal work remains unavailable in English, and the extent of the phenomenon that he described has not been discussed in the contemporary literature. We provide an unabridged translation of Flournoy’s chapter “Des personnifications” [“Of Personifications”].     

Terrorism and the banlieues: the Charlie Hebdo attacks in context

In January 2015, French society was shocked by a sequence of fatal attacks at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in Paris. In the wake of these tragic events, many social and political commentators interpreted the killings as an assault on freedom of expression and core French values of liberty, equality and laïcité. Prime Minister Manuel Valls described the perpetrators as disciples of Islamofascism. More than this, the terrorists were represented as the extreme manifestation of a deviant and nihilistic ‘other’—largely concentrated in France’s infamous banlieues—that rejected the Republic and embraced a form of ideological extremism that originated beyond France’s borders. Yet this interpretation fails to adequately consider the complexity of the situation. Drawing on the work on radicalisation by Wiktorowicz, and illustrated with lessons learned from research into the causes of the 2005 French riots, this article has two objectives: to highlight the importance of everyday exclusion in the web of causal factors that frames the path to violent extremism in France; and to offer an alternative view of the role and influence of the banlieues in this context.