Sorry, this entry is only available in Italiano.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Italiano.

The proposal to study muslim religion in school, made by a bipartisan agreement between left and right intelligentsia, reminded me of what Amartya Sen wrote in Identity and Violence:

Increasing reliance on religion-based classification of the people of the world also tends to make the Western response to global terrorism and conflict peculiarly ham-handed. Respect for “other people” is shown by praising their religious books, rather than by taking note of the many-sided involvements and achievements, in nonreligious as well as religious fields, of different people in a globally interactive world. In confronting what is called “Islamic terrorism,” in the muddled vocabulary of contemporary global politics, the intellectual force of Western policy is aimed quite substantially at trying to define-or redefine-Islam.
However, to focus just on the grand religious classification is not only to miss other significant concerns and ideas that move people, it also has the effect of generally magnifying the voice of religious authority. The Muslim clerics, for example, are then treated as the ex officio spokesmen for the so-called Islamic world, even though a great many people who happen to be Muslim by religion have profound differences with what is proposed by one mullah or another. Despite our diverse diversities, the world is suddenly seen not as a collection of peopIe, but as a federation of religions and civilizations. In Britain a confounded view of what a multiethnic society must do has led to encouraging the deveIopment of state-financed MusIim schools, Hindu schools, Sikh schools, etc., to suppIement preexisting state-supported Christian schooIs, and young children are powerfully placed in the domain of singular affiliations well before they have the ability to reason about different systems of identification that may compete for their attention. Earlier on, state-run denominational schools in Northern Ireland had fed the political distancing of Catholics and Protestants along one line of divisive categorization assigned at infancy, and the same predetermination of “discovered” identities is now being allowed and, in effect, encouraged to sow even more alienation among a different part of the British population.

The fact that the proposal was heralded as an attempt to avoid ghettoization of young muslims (”Adolfo Urso propone l’introduzione nelle scuole pubbliche e private di una nuova materia, facoltativa e alternativa a quella cattolica, per evitare di lasciare i piccoli musulmani <<nei ghetti delle madrasse e delle scuole islamiche integraliste>>”, Corriere della Sera, 17 ottobre 2009 p.9) and that it was attacked by the leghisti advocating “our” identity (Roberto Cota: “Noi dobbiamo difendere la nostra identità, non cancellarla.”) shows by itself, if compared to what Amartya Sen wrote, how far we are from having a decent debate on the issue. And how far we are from what is really at stake here.  Sadly enough, I might add, the bipartisan proposal manage to appear educated and even progressive, if compared to what another leghista said, about a mandatory catholic education for muslims: “Ora di religione? Si, quella cattolica obbligatoria per gli islamici. L’ora di religione cattolica obbligatoria per i musulmani nelle nostre scuole serve a far capire i motivi per cui il cristianesimo e il cattolicesimo sono profondamente radicati nella nostra società e perchè noi siamo così” (Padania, 18 ottobre 2009, p.2). So, basically, not only we want to ghettoization of immigrants, but of immigrants and Italians together in a new happily self-ghettoized Italy.

June 22, in Protea Glen, in Soweto was inaugurated the first Sustainable Legacy Park. It’s a park that will be used to uplift communities, bridge gaps between the police and the people they serve, rescue street children, reduce crime, find sportsmen, provide new jobs and too many other benefits. In short is a project that is turning the dreams of a generation into a reality. (Richmark Sentinel reports)

The presence of the Italian squad, gli azzurri, 2006 world champions, was invited to the inauguration but they failed to go, allegedly because they were ashamed by the result against Brazil. Michael Trapido calls it a disgrace. I wonder, was the awful match against Brazil disgraceful enough? Besides, how can you compare the two events? The history and the future of Soweto with a game in the Confederation Cup? Shouldn’t the Italian team notice that there is a difference in importance between the two?

A few quck notes on my online reading. Ann Kirschner, academic and writer, wrote an interesting piece on reading habits. Having to read Dickens’ Little Dorrit for her book club, she decided to try out different formats, noticing that we have several options on how we can “read” a novel, having to make a choice among “a multiplicity of forms and platforms and technologies and interfaces”, choice that “could be dispiriting if you are inclined to worry about the death of the book”.
The question that is haunting us today is then “do I love books or do I love reading?”
Her decision to use different formats, namely paperback, Amazon’s Kindle, iphone text screen and an audiobook. She jumped back and forth from one to the other, according to the different reading situation, and tell her experience and thoughts in Reading Dickens Four Ways. Initially there was the paperback edition, the traditional book, with the inevitable nostalgic feeling (“In a book about how the present is haunted by the past, I was confronting my old self through the medium of the physical book, still in great condition, still fitting perfectly in my hands. How dare we think that anything could replace it?”), then the audiobook, which also has a past to remember. It started with audiocassette in the Sony Walkman, then mp3 players, and finally iPhone, which has the advantage of combining together a text and audio version (and also a mobile phone, of course). The audiobook has practical advantages (you can listen to it practically everywhere) and creates a peculiar atmosphere:
“Audiobooks also impose a certain discipline. I think of this as real-time reading: The author and narrator control your pace, and it is impractical to skim ahead or thumb back to another section. For Dickens, so naturally cinematic and plot-driven, that can have a breathtaking effect. It was my good fortune to be listening when Little Dorrit and Maggie spent their long night wandering the London streets. I shivered with them, I shared their exhaustion, and I sighed with the dull relief of returning to the Marshalsea prison”
Finally, there is the ebook, where the iphone seems to win over the Kindle, for easiness of use and for the possibility to highlight and annotate texts.
The conclusion of the piece is that as much as we love books, we love reading more. That is why I dare to agree with Kirschner when she said that “Regardless of format, Little Dorrit seized me no less forcefully today in its indictment of society’s ability to destroy through greed and crushing self-interest”.

If you spend most of your time in a city, you definitely yearn for the countryside. Margaret Gelling did for sure. That is why she spent a lot of time studying place names and their meanings:

“Early Anglo-Saxon settlers in England, observing, walking and working the landscape, defined its ups and downs with a subtlety largely missing from modern, motorised English. Dozens of words, none of them synonymous, described the look of a hill, the angle of slope and the way trees grew upon it. And after the Anglo-Saxons, no one looked at the landscape in quite that way until Margaret Gelling [...] When it came to understanding English place names, there was no substitute for donning your wellies and using your eyes.”

Modern landscape is  largely human-made, as Asa Briggs said speaking of England:

“There are as many varieties of scene in the English countryside as there are layers of history in English society. The landscape reflects the complex geology and varied weather of the island. Yet it reflects much else besides. Some of the wildest twentieth-century landscapes, like the bleak heathland of Dorset, were cultivated very early in the English history. ‘England’s green and pleasant land’, as the eighteenth-century English poet William Blake called it, is as much the product of history as its ‘dark satanic mills’. The seashore has changed too, although the presence of the sea and the nearness of all English places, however remote, to it, have always been significant in English history, as significant as mountains or deserts in other parts of the world. Nature in the form of hill or valley, lake or fen, copse or forest, has often consoled or inspired the English when events have mumbed or shocked, and the fear that nature may be threatened can still be strong. ‘This is our own, our native land.’ Local loyalties relate too to a sense of local landscape, and nature and culture – the latter a word derived from the land – are inextricably entangled in every part of England.”

Mainly for this reason, Margaret Gelling’s books are particularly fascinating.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Italiano.

This post is haunting me. For quite a long time I felt the need to organise my tagging in a rational way, and this morning I decided to take action. It was supposed to be a quick thing, but I started at 8:30am and I am still here at 11:50. For my online research (which involve also academic papers, journals and even books) I mainly use three social bookmarking sites (I am not moved by a social urge, in fact. Is more that by working in this way I don’t have to be dependent on my own hard disk and I can work from any computer in the world which has a not-too-slow internet connection. So the primary reason is my own sake, not social commitment): » Continue reading “Is tagging really a “delicious” activity?”

I just joined Academia.edu, a new social networking tool that recently entered the web arena. It has been defined as a Facebook for Researchers. Well, it has some similarities, but many differences too. I can only say a few thing at face value, because I just entered into it. The idea is quite interesting.

It displays Academics around the world in a tree structure, first by University, then Departments, then individuals. The tree structure is not very user-friendly, and I am not sure it is really useful. The possibility to create a personal academic page is more valuable. Here is mine (very basic stuff as yet, but there is a link to my own website. Who knows, maybe I will transfer part of it on Academia.edu).

The margin of improvement are huge in my opinion, but there is potential.

I found some critical commentary at cogdogblog. I will come back later today and write my response to them, because now I have a lecture to give.

It has been more than a month since my previous post. This should not happen. Blogging should be more frequent.

The fact is that, in an endless search for sanity (and occasional happiness) I try to put limits to my online activities, and last month most of it has been absorbed in reshaping my website (an academic effort I am trying to do). My relationship with computers is similar to what once Said said about his relationship with humanism, i.e. “a contradictory feeling of attraction and revulsion”. I am dependent on it, because I can see how much it can facilitate a lot of daily tasks in my working life (more than that, it can actually help me discover things, in my research, that I could never have thought of, and making unexpected connections) while at the same time I am well aware of the fact that it can, and does, drain both your brain and your emotions in the process, if you are not careful. To properly use the computer and internet you need to be extremely focused, avoid traps and shortcomings but also informations overload, and always look at what you are doing from the outside. In other words, » Continue reading “My online life”