Cornell, T. J. “On War and Games in the Ancient World.” Sixth International Symposium for Olympic Research, pp 29-40.
29 Great list of resemblances shared by war and sport in intro
29 two prime theories about sports & war: sports are complementary to war and stimulate the attitudes; sports are an alternative to war.
30 while sports promote fitness needed by soldiers, it's an incidental feature not the primary function of sports
30 vital discussion in second paragraph: while sports helped develop the manly virtues needed in war ( a Victorian value/view), sports were not a form of military training.
30 sports training not always relevant to war
30 list of a few generals in classical period who did not like athletics for their soldiers
30 Romans (plutarch) greek athletics led to the feminization of the greeks and eventual downfall of the greeks
30 ancients stressed or denied the value of sports in soldierly training; victorians pomorted the charcter building and abstract vvitres of team, group, selflessness
30 there was little to no team sports in the clasical world—especially contact sports
only the Spartans
31-32 sport as alternative to war discussed
32 proposes that sports and war are autotelic, that is ends in themselves
32 war often had ritual/cultural purpose and not just a political instrument as proposed by Clausewitz
32 primitive war is highly ritualized
32 in Homer war and sports are highly ritualized events by aristocratic men
33 “The agonistic spirit expressed itself not only in athletics, but in competitions in art, drama and music, and in the constant striving to outdo one's rivals in all areas of life—public speaking, law politics, and philosophical argument.”
33 chivalric behavior in war only makes sense with an agonistic sense of war (contest) in which artificial rules ensure a fair fight. this reduces battle to a game
34 Gladiator contests were called a munus, which means gift (of the citizens who promoted them)
35 in Greece the citizens were the atheletes; in Rome, the citizens were usually spectators watching low-class pros, foreigners and/or slaves compete
35-6 discussion/dismissal of links usually made between war and games in Rome: ampitheaters and gladiator training
36 gladiators rarely soldiers; very rare to have large scale combat—usually one on one or pairs
37 battles rarely restaged for the public
37 games were at their height when Rome was at peace
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Pritchard: Sport, War, and Democracy
Pritchard, David. Sport, War and Democracy in classical Athens.
from In Press Sport in the cultures of the ancient world. Special issue of the Int'l journal of the History of Sport
downloaded PDF
Overall, this is an incredibly well-documented and thorough discussion of some of the basic issues which interest me regarding sports, war, and Greece. There are over one hundred footnotes and an extremely useful list of works cited.
Key points:
3 sport atheletes had some of the highest esteem in Athens
3 athletes were rarely targeted by playwrights for abuse
5 athletics were closely associated with justice and moderation
6 two primary roles of athletics in classical athens: festival based agonesand physical education classes
7 athletics one of three traditional subjects in male education; grammar/letters and music were the other two
7 education privately funded; only the wealthiest could afford to send their boys to all three forms of training
8 Athenians held that athletic training was necessary in order to perform well in sports; the result is that only those boys who had been trained were encouraged to compete; hence the athletic heroes of athens were the sons of the rich
9 discussion of role of public schools in England preparing boys to lead the country
10 Orwell: int'l sport creates int'l ill will,not good will
11 popular culture regards sports as safe way to blow of steam & reduce anger
11 steam blowing related to Konrad Lorenz's aggression as innate drive and aggressive activities are drive-discharge catharisis—thus the more sport, the less aggression and war
12 social sciences discredit drive-discharge
12 psych & physiologists for simplifying aggression; phys anthros & biologists for fallacious extrapolation from animals toohumans; cult. anthros for ignoring observed cultural variation in responses to threats
12 multiple studies listed where watching violent sports resulted in agitated folks
12 study of students who responded differently; those who worked out their agg via punching ended up being the angriest and most aggressive
12-13 Berkowitz: aggression related experiences form network in memory and thus current agg potentially summons up past agg
13-14 Sipes finding that war/sport support each other's presence; study on 20 pre-modern culutres found 9/10 violent cultures had combative sports as well
14 battles and sports events were both considered agones
15 agones tested the moral fiber and confirmed/demonstrate the arete of the competitors
16 if men lost in the games, they deserved to receive abuse in the Athenian pespective
17 bc fifth century Athens democratized war
18 poor citizens now experienced war; shared that in common with elite
20-1 experiencing war and that form of agone enabled the poor to identify with the agones of the elite wealthy athletes “As a result, lower-class citizens came to beliee that upper-class athletes exhibited te same moral qualities and experienced the same ordeals as they did when fighting battles.
Review the bib for articles to order/get copy
from In Press Sport in the cultures of the ancient world. Special issue of the Int'l journal of the History of Sport
downloaded PDF
Overall, this is an incredibly well-documented and thorough discussion of some of the basic issues which interest me regarding sports, war, and Greece. There are over one hundred footnotes and an extremely useful list of works cited.
Key points:
3 sport atheletes had some of the highest esteem in Athens
3 athletes were rarely targeted by playwrights for abuse
5 athletics were closely associated with justice and moderation
6 two primary roles of athletics in classical athens: festival based agonesand physical education classes
7 athletics one of three traditional subjects in male education; grammar/letters and music were the other two
7 education privately funded; only the wealthiest could afford to send their boys to all three forms of training
8 Athenians held that athletic training was necessary in order to perform well in sports; the result is that only those boys who had been trained were encouraged to compete; hence the athletic heroes of athens were the sons of the rich
9 discussion of role of public schools in England preparing boys to lead the country
10 Orwell: int'l sport creates int'l ill will,not good will
11 popular culture regards sports as safe way to blow of steam & reduce anger
11 steam blowing related to Konrad Lorenz's aggression as innate drive and aggressive activities are drive-discharge catharisis—thus the more sport, the less aggression and war
12 social sciences discredit drive-discharge
12 psych & physiologists for simplifying aggression; phys anthros & biologists for fallacious extrapolation from animals toohumans; cult. anthros for ignoring observed cultural variation in responses to threats
12 multiple studies listed where watching violent sports resulted in agitated folks
12 study of students who responded differently; those who worked out their agg via punching ended up being the angriest and most aggressive
12-13 Berkowitz: aggression related experiences form network in memory and thus current agg potentially summons up past agg
13-14 Sipes finding that war/sport support each other's presence; study on 20 pre-modern culutres found 9/10 violent cultures had combative sports as well
14 battles and sports events were both considered agones
15 agones tested the moral fiber and confirmed/demonstrate the arete of the competitors
16 if men lost in the games, they deserved to receive abuse in the Athenian pespective
17 bc fifth century Athens democratized war
18 poor citizens now experienced war; shared that in common with elite
20-1 experiencing war and that form of agone enabled the poor to identify with the agones of the elite wealthy athletes “As a result, lower-class citizens came to beliee that upper-class athletes exhibited te same moral qualities and experienced the same ordeals as they did when fighting battles.
Review the bib for articles to order/get copy
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Geertz: Thick Description: Ch 1
Geertz, Clifford. Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture
(this is from a pdf printed out via download from ScribD, so my pages are located that way.)
2 his concept of culture is essentially semiotic
3 (section II) "...if you want to understand what a science is, you should look in the first instance not at its theories or it findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners of it do."
4-5 thin description: what is physically occurring; thick description: what the ethnographer thinks what is occurring means
7 "Analysis, then, is sorting out the structure of signification...and determining their social ground and import."
8 "What the ethnographer is in fact faced with...is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render."
10 "Culture is public because meaning is."
11 people find it hard to understand the significance of what other groups do or intend because of a "lack of familiarity with the imaginative universe within which their acts are signs."
Section IV
12 "As interworked systems of construable signs (what, ignoring provincial usages, I would call symbols), culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly--that is, thickly--described."
13 the object of study is one thing and the study of it is another. REREAD.
14 "In short, anthropological writings are themselves interpretations, and second and third order ones to boot. (By definition, only a "native" makes first order ones: it's his culture.) They are, thus, fictions; fictions, in the sense that they are "something made," "something fashioned"--the original meaning of fiction--not that they are false, unfactual, ore merely "as if" thought experiments."
16 You can't take an interpretation out of the context of what you are interpreting without rendering it vacant.
17 "The ethnographer "inscribes" social discourse; he writes it down. In so doing, he turns it from a passing event, which exists only in its own moment of occurrence, into an account, which exists in its inscriptions and can be reconsulted.
18 "...what we inscribe (or try to) is not raw social discourse...but only that small part of it which our informants can lead us into understanding."
19 "To set forth symmetrical crystals of significance, purified of the material complexity in which they were located, and then attribute their existence to autogenous principles of order, universal properties of the human mind, or vast, a priori (messed up word spelling--I think it is weltanschauung) is to pretend a science that does not exist and imagine a reality that cannot be found. Cultural analysis is (or should be) guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses, not discovering the Continent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape."
VI
sweet phrasing:
17 "gone into dissidence themselves"
Other texts mentioned:
Langer, Susanne. Philosophy in a New Key
Ricoeur, Paul.
Ryle, Gilbert. Developed term Thick Description?
(this is from a pdf printed out via download from ScribD, so my pages are located that way.)
2 his concept of culture is essentially semiotic
3 (section II) "...if you want to understand what a science is, you should look in the first instance not at its theories or it findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners of it do."
4-5 thin description: what is physically occurring; thick description: what the ethnographer thinks what is occurring means
7 "Analysis, then, is sorting out the structure of signification...and determining their social ground and import."
8 "What the ethnographer is in fact faced with...is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render."
10 "Culture is public because meaning is."
11 people find it hard to understand the significance of what other groups do or intend because of a "lack of familiarity with the imaginative universe within which their acts are signs."
Section IV
12 "As interworked systems of construable signs (what, ignoring provincial usages, I would call symbols), culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly--that is, thickly--described."
13 the object of study is one thing and the study of it is another. REREAD.
14 "In short, anthropological writings are themselves interpretations, and second and third order ones to boot. (By definition, only a "native" makes first order ones: it's his culture.) They are, thus, fictions; fictions, in the sense that they are "something made," "something fashioned"--the original meaning of fiction--not that they are false, unfactual, ore merely "as if" thought experiments."
16 You can't take an interpretation out of the context of what you are interpreting without rendering it vacant.
17 "The ethnographer "inscribes" social discourse; he writes it down. In so doing, he turns it from a passing event, which exists only in its own moment of occurrence, into an account, which exists in its inscriptions and can be reconsulted.
18 "...what we inscribe (or try to) is not raw social discourse...but only that small part of it which our informants can lead us into understanding."
19 "To set forth symmetrical crystals of significance, purified of the material complexity in which they were located, and then attribute their existence to autogenous principles of order, universal properties of the human mind, or vast, a priori (messed up word spelling--I think it is weltanschauung) is to pretend a science that does not exist and imagine a reality that cannot be found. Cultural analysis is (or should be) guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses, not discovering the Continent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape."
VI
sweet phrasing:
17 "gone into dissidence themselves"
Other texts mentioned:
Langer, Susanne. Philosophy in a New Key
Ricoeur, Paul.
Ryle, Gilbert. Developed term Thick Description?
Lanham: Electronic Word: Chapter 1
"The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution"
4 "Electronic typography is both creator-controlled and reader-controlled."
5 discussion of text and looking AT it and then looking THROUGH it. This discussion is very important, and it should be reviewed multiple times.
6 "The interactive reader of the electronic word incarnates the resopnsive reader of whom we make so much." I am not so sure about that. Must ponder.
9 "So used are we to thinking black-and-white, continuous printed prose the norm of conceptula utterance, that it has taken a series of theoretical attacks and technological metamorphoses to make us see it for what it is: an act of extraoridnary stylization, of remarkable, expressive self-denial... Obviously these pressures will not destroy prose, but they may change its underlying decorum. And perhaps engender, at long last, a theory of prose style as radical artifice rather than native transparency." [italics author's]
11 digitization provides for endless editing and alteration of texts
15 discussion of competitive games versus play; mention of Greeks and Sophists
17 "Theory is in fact rhetorical practice, as we are becoming increasingly aware, part of a returning rhetorical paideia that began with the didacticism of Futurism and Dada and has been colonizing the humanities and social science ever since."
20 book and text as talismanic objects
24 more on paideia
24 more on AT and THROUGH--revisit this
vocab: aleatory, condign, suspirations, capacious
Mentioned sources that looked interesting:
Havelock, Eric. The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences
Illich, Ivan and Barry Sanders. ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind
4 "Electronic typography is both creator-controlled and reader-controlled."
5 discussion of text and looking AT it and then looking THROUGH it. This discussion is very important, and it should be reviewed multiple times.
6 "The interactive reader of the electronic word incarnates the resopnsive reader of whom we make so much." I am not so sure about that. Must ponder.
9 "So used are we to thinking black-and-white, continuous printed prose the norm of conceptula utterance, that it has taken a series of theoretical attacks and technological metamorphoses to make us see it for what it is: an act of extraoridnary stylization, of remarkable, expressive self-denial... Obviously these pressures will not destroy prose, but they may change its underlying decorum. And perhaps engender, at long last, a theory of prose style as radical artifice rather than native transparency." [italics author's]
11 digitization provides for endless editing and alteration of texts
15 discussion of competitive games versus play; mention of Greeks and Sophists
17 "Theory is in fact rhetorical practice, as we are becoming increasingly aware, part of a returning rhetorical paideia that began with the didacticism of Futurism and Dada and has been colonizing the humanities and social science ever since."
20 book and text as talismanic objects
24 more on paideia
24 more on AT and THROUGH--revisit this
vocab: aleatory, condign, suspirations, capacious
Mentioned sources that looked interesting:
Havelock, Eric. The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences
Illich, Ivan and Barry Sanders. ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind
Lanham: Electronic Word: Preface
Lanham, Richard A. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 1993.
Lanham was raised in Classical Rhetoric class. It sounded intimidating, and then it sounded interesting. So I am slowly reading it.
x Lanham cites Jay David Bolter: we'll lose literacy for print, not literacy itself
xi electronic text liberates language from the rules of print
xi electronic word "incarnates the distinction between literate and oral cultures..."
xi manipulation of scale in electronic realm
xii print is philosophic medium; electronic screen is rhetorical mediuam
xiii "And I think too that the instructional practices built upon the electronic word will not repudiate the deepest and most fundamental currents of Western education in discourse but redeem them."
Lanham was raised in Classical Rhetoric class. It sounded intimidating, and then it sounded interesting. So I am slowly reading it.
x Lanham cites Jay David Bolter: we'll lose literacy for print, not literacy itself
xi electronic text liberates language from the rules of print
xi electronic word "incarnates the distinction between literate and oral cultures..."
xi manipulation of scale in electronic realm
xii print is philosophic medium; electronic screen is rhetorical mediuam
xiii "And I think too that the instructional practices built upon the electronic word will not repudiate the deepest and most fundamental currents of Western education in discourse but redeem them."
Eco: The Wolf & The Lamb
Eco, Umberto. "The Wolf and the Lamb: The Rhetoric of Oppression." Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism. Harcourt, 2006. Orlando.
This is a great essay by Eco on rhetoric and oppression.
45-46 aristotle and some definitions of rhetoric
Lots of discussion about begging the question, how oppressors structure arguments/persuasion to manipulate folks, etc.
A nice linking between classical rhetoric and contemporary issues in the gulf with some WW I and WW II references to help set the tone. As always, it is written beautifully.
This is a great essay by Eco on rhetoric and oppression.
45-46 aristotle and some definitions of rhetoric
Lots of discussion about begging the question, how oppressors structure arguments/persuasion to manipulate folks, etc.
A nice linking between classical rhetoric and contemporary issues in the gulf with some WW I and WW II references to help set the tone. As always, it is written beautifully.
Horn: Writing with A Future
Horn, Robert. What Kinds of Writing Have a Future?
(Speech prepared in connection with receiving Lifetime Achievement Award
by the Association of Computing Machinery SIGDOC,October 22, 2001)
Brief and clearly written overview/introduction to IM and structured writing.
Summarized well here from the end of his presentation:
I do not know if I'll use this in my diss or classes, but I do like having the overview and exposure.
I need to think about this a lot. My mind is caught on the chunking of information, labeling of chunks, and organizing. My instinct tells me that is the way to go.
Interesting mentioned article to get:
Stern, Arthur A. “When is a paragraph?”
(Speech prepared in connection with receiving Lifetime Achievement Award
by the Association of Computing Machinery SIGDOC,October 22, 2001)
Brief and clearly written overview/introduction to IM and structured writing.
Summarized well here from the end of his presentation:
Summary
1. Pay attention to types of stickiness.
2. Make sure you know what you’re putting in and leaving out..
3. Write so people don’t have to read what you write (if they don’t need to).
4. Label every chunk.
5. Don’t always write in a linear fashion.
6. WYSIWYG is not quite dead – but threats to its existence in some parts are looming.
7. Use visual language. Change the ratio of images to words.
I do not know if I'll use this in my diss or classes, but I do like having the overview and exposure.
I need to think about this a lot. My mind is caught on the chunking of information, labeling of chunks, and organizing. My instinct tells me that is the way to go.
Interesting mentioned article to get:
Stern, Arthur A. “When is a paragraph?”
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