I shortened the title of David Bowles’ thorough and groundbreaking post, figuring that “romance” was sort of implicit. In any case, here’s his intro:
When I started studying Nahuatl almost twenty years ago, I noticed—as a queer man—that most analyses of Nahuatl vocabulary concerning LGBTQIA2s+ identities and practices suffered greatly because they had been carried out first by bigoted Catholics (often informed by converted Nahuas trying to make their ancestors’ culture align better with Christian morality), then by straight white men, and then by [mostly] straight “well-meaning” liberal allies who didn’t / don’t really know much at all about how queer people live and love. Horribly insulting glosses in Spanish and English exist of practices and identities that were accepted in most Nahua city-states. And where experts have tried to improve on those, they have still failed to use the language preferred by present-day queer people.
You may have read some of these folks say that there are just a handful of words about “homosexuals” in Nahuatl. But that’s foolishness. People have also denied the existence of romantic love and other such outlandish ideas.
Over the years, I have collected loads and loads of Classical Nahuatl words that surely had particular relevance for the queer individuals of pre-Spanish-Invasion Anahuac (the Basin of Mexico). Thinking about them, both in their written context and as individual markers of cultural behaviors, has helped me immensely with projects like my present series of queer historical romances set in early 15th-century Anahuac.
Note that I don’t use a bunch of euphemisms and scientific language, except where it is clear in the primary sources that the term in question was used euphemistically or for more clinical conversation. That means that to define them, I use the sort of English words that queer adults (in real life and in romance novels) use, which overly conservative or sex-shaming people may consider vulgar.
The de-Victorianizing of scholarship has been going on for a while now in classical studies (though I’m sure there’s still a long way to go), and I’m glad to see it spreading to Nahuatl. More like this, please!
Horribly insulting glosses in Spanish and English exist of practices and identities that were accepted in most Nahua city-states. And where experts have tried to improve on those, they have still failed to use the language preferred by present-day queer people. … to define them, I use the sort of English words that queer adults (in real life and in romance novels) use, which overly conservative or sex-shaming people may consider vulgar.
Those “preferences” have changed a lot over time. I gather that among Portland punk anarchists, even “faggot” has been reclaimed – at any rate according to The Way That You Smiled Was A Promise, I Swear on AO3. It’s so sweet and funny that my laff machine broke.
I prefer the currently up-to-date “queer” for myself, actually – “gay” just doesn’t match my resting bitch face.
I’m a tiny bit sceptical at the large number of Nahuatl expressions which supposedly have the same buzz as “bubble-butt”, for example. Also, what does “logical but unattested” mean ??
#
Oquichtli tepileh — [unattested, but logical considering “cihuatl tepoleh”] intersex person or trans man (lit. “man with a [natal] vulva”)
#
I wonder if there is a risk of error in the opposite direction in lists like these?
What I have in mind is an example like Moorë yẽbe. It seems absurd to translate this as “have sexual intercourse with a woman”, but it’s also misleading to translate it as “fuck”, because it’s a neutral term which is not taboo.* There just isn’t an accurate English equivalent. Likewise Kusaal pɛn, for which neither the Latinate avoidance-term “vagina” nor the proper English “cunt” seems apt. It’s just an ordinary word in Kusaal, like dum “knee.” **)
Not sure how to get round this, given that different cultures (and indeed, subcultures) put their linguistic taboos in quite different areas. But I suppose that is the whole point of the post.
Interesting to see cihuāyotl “womanhood” used for “female genitalia”: Kusaal pu’alim and Mooré pòglém are the same. Kusaal daalim “manhood” similarly, though I don’t think it has quite the ghastly cutesiness of English “manhood” used in that way. (Yu’or “penis” is not taboo or deprecated either.)
* Proverb: Yẽbd pãng yẽb a yẽb-tɛkem-tɛkem “Who fucks by force has fucked his very last fuck.” (The proverb enjoins a patient, cooperative and gradualist approach to life’s challenges. It also strikes me as reflecting some credit on Mossi sexual attitudes, compared with certain other cultures one might think of …)
** Though it evidently originated as a euphemism: the Mooré cognate pèndé means “lower abdomen”, as in yet another proverb: Ned meta neer n zems a pag pende “a man makes a grindstone to match the size of his wife’s lap” (i.e. be realistic in your planning.) The Gulimancema cognate, panli, means “thigh.”
Who fucks by force has fucked his very last fuck.
Somebody quoted a similar English saying recently, without the word “fuck” in it. I think it was you, David. Can you remember it ? Maybe along the lines of “if you hit on a woman too hard, you will get nowhere”.
@de
Know (in Biblical sense). Clearly you are not reading your Bible enough.
I prefer the currently up-to-date “queer”
That’s my default term; I can’t stand this “LGBTQIA2s+” crap. It’s terminology like that (and POC and all the other rebarbative initialisms) that drive ordinary people away from progressive ideas they otherwise would at least listen to. But too many progressives would rather be right in the theoretical/abstract sense than in the gets-results-in-the-real-world sense. They hate it when you say that ’cause it’s true!
The Captain, naturally, has a song that’s at least glancingly relevant.
The Captain, like Kozma Prutkov, is always relevant.
“There ain’t no, there ain’t no other place to go but there” — you tell ’em, Cap’n!
@Stu:
I have cited the Mooré proverb before. If I remember right, I glossed it with the somewhat unsatisfactory French rendering from Niggli’s dictionary: “Celui qui fait l’amour avec brutalité le fait pour sa dernière fois.” This does not reflect the syntax of the original well.
Kusaal has the less vivid
Bi’el bi’el ka ba gban’ad nwaaŋ zʋʋr.
“Little by little, they grab the monkey’s tail.”
@PP:
The Kusaal Bible does in fact use mi’ “know” like that, but it looks like translationese (as, indeed, is the corresponding English usage.) But I think the parallel use of the corresponding negative verb zi’ “not know” is actually craftily idiomatic. “Virgin” is rendered
pu’asadir kanɛ nam zi’ dau
woman.nulliparous who still/yet not.know man
capitalising on the fact that nam zi’ “still not know” is a standing idiom for “have never experienced”, as in
M nam zi’ nyɛ gbigimnɛ.
I still not.know.LINKER see lion.NEGATIVE
“I have never seen a lion.”
This is not a disavowal of bestiality, specifically, although (to be sure) it does have such an implicature.
The Captain is always relevant.
Very true.
But you fuck one lion…
@DavidL: Celui qui fait l’amour avec brutalité le fait pour sa dernière fois..
That’s it.
@David, not @DavidL
@de
Thanks. I must warn you, however, that as a Welshman in a country beset by Saxons, it behooves you to avoid the B word. It is like an Irish friend, who arrived for a job interview in England and stated that he was tired because unable to sleep the previous night.
Autre pays, autres mœurs, as we say in Welsh.
The Mexica empire’s functionary equivalent to J D Vance was called the cihuacoatl “female snake.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cihuacoatl_(position)
The rationale for the name is apparently not known.
In German, the traditional translationese is erkennen – today that means “recognize”, but perhaps the literal meaning “know to successful completion” still made sense to Luther.
I don’t understand why QUILTBAG hasn’t caught on more widely. (Each letter stands for two words, half of which I’ve forgotten; that probably takes care of “2s+”.)
“Gender minorities” or “sexual minorities” seem like they ought to work, but what do I know.
I like the work Bowles has done, but I’m really curious about the sources and the contexts. Are the words in texts written unselfconsciously by Nahuas? Elevated poetry? Neutral descriptive discourse? Condemnatory texts by Europeans?
Yes, that’s what I was wondering. It’s hard to know what to make of these terms without more context.
2S is two-spirit; + is “etc.” WP has a giant list, of course.
In German, the traditional translationese is erkennen – today that means “recognize”
The Mooré Bible uses bānge* “recognise, learn, find out” in e.g.
A Ãdem bãnga a pag a Hawa
“Adam knew his wife Eve.”
Even the 2016 Kusaal version has ka Josef n da nan pʋ baŋ o la “and when Joseph had not yet got to know her” at Matthew 1:18, but that seems to be an isolated survival from the 1976 New Testament. The usual rendering for “have sex with” is digin nɛ “lie down with”, and contrary to what I said above, I don’t think even the older versions actually do use mi’ “know” in that sense, even when the older English versions have “know.”
Evidently SIL and its offshoots have got better at these things over the past forty years (the complete Mooré Bible goes back to 1983, and it doesn’t seem to have been radically revised since, apart from the orthography.)
* No sniggering at the back, there.
drive ordinary people away from progressive ideas they otherwise would at least listen to
I don’t feel like insulting your potential readers is the best idea, either. I’ll just be a conservative and sex-shaming person and not bother to read it, thanks.
i quite prefer “queer” to any alphabetism*, myself, but conservatively cling to its 1990s-era meaning that includes a specific liberationist political stance (anti-racist, anti-misogynist, generally pro-trans and anti-capitalist) and critique of respectability, in contrast to “gay”, “lesbian”, and “bisexual”, which were/are strictly about who you fuck or desire. i don’t think there’s any use for “queer” in its current “LGB but connotationally spicier” sense, so i use it less these days than i used to.
i think that depoliticization of “queer” is part of what’s driven the reemergence of “faggot” these days that Stu pointed out (and “dyke”, too) . my circles never moved away from those terms in the first place, so we’re glad to have more company!
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* the best of the lot, to me, is FABGLITTER, which was used by Anything That Moves magazine but never really elsewhere (“Fetish, Allies, Bisexuals, Gay, Lesbians, Intersex, Transgender, Transsexual Engendering Revolution”)
I’ll just be a conservative and sex-shaming person and not bother to read it, thanks.
Read what, the linked post? It’s basically a list of Nahuatl terms, it’s not a screed.
I can’t stand this “LGBTQIA2s+” crap. It’s terminology like that (and POC and all the other rebarbative initialisms) that drive ordinary people away from progressive ideas they otherwise woulde at least listen to.
Well stated. I have more than a few Luso-Hispanic/Latino friends and acquaintances. Some are straight and some are not. Without exception, they frown with disgust at the term Latinx, and never use it. One speculated that it was probably invented by some overly “woke” sociology PhD candidates who had been forced to sit through too many MLA presentations.
I can’t stand this “LGBTQIA2s+” crap
It’s hard to come up with something better; and I don’t think it’s even possible by simply applying Logic.
“Queer” doesn’t include everyone involved, so it won’t do as a substitute, and trying to list everyone you do want to include either goes on forever or involves you in opaque ever-shifting acronyms that you need to be an expert to remember.
But:
You can’t say “non-standard sexuality” or “non-mainstream sexuality” because (a) it invidiously describes people by what they’re not and (b) literally interpreted, would include things that nobody wants to include.
I suppose an honest conservative objector might say that there is a problem with actually lumping together all these groups anyway, and a dishonest right-wing Blue Labour type would feel impelled to inform us that this is the whole problem with the current Left, focusing on “diversity” instead of concentrating on poor uneducated white people and their Legitimate Grievances.
It’s insoluble.
So it seems to me the only viable solution is to call people by what they themselves want to be called, whether it upsets Daily Mail readers or not, and even if it seems illogical or aesthetically displeasing or something.
Show me someone who tells you they oppose LGBTQIA2s+whatever people’s lifestyles because they don’t like the acronyms (or the activists) and I’ll show you a liar. Or a Daily Mail columnist.
You can’t say “non-standard sexuality” or “non-mainstream sexuality” because (a) it invidiously describes people by what they’re not and (b) literally interpreted, would include things that nobody wants to include.
This is exactly the kind of thinking that paralyzes the left: any conceivable objection must be catered to in advance. It produces constricted thinking and constipated prose.
So it seems to me the only viable solution is to call people by what they themselves want to be called, whether it upsets Daily Mail readers or not, and even if it seems illogical or aesthetically displeasing or something.
Are you claiming that every person who might fit under the “LGBTQIA2s+” umbrella wants to be called that? Or even that a majority do? No such people that I know use it, and my brother for one actively despises it. Of course, he’s an old fart like myself.
“Queer” doesn’t include everyone involved, so it won’t do as a substitute
But nothing includes everyone involved; that’s exactly why the initialism has grown ever longer as the years pass. “But what about us?” “OK, we’ll add another initial.” That way madness, or at least useless sectarianism, lies.
I say let people talk and write as comes naturally to them and see if they come off as friendly or hostile. As the Bard said, “A man may LGBTQIA2s+ and LGBTQIA2s+ and be a bigot.”
The laundry-list-of-initials macro-group makes coherent sense only as a group defined by what it isn’t. Which makes the criticism that the label for the group shouldn’t be structured that way rather peculiar. One problem with “call people what they want to be called” is that many people aren’t interested in activist-coalition politics and don’t have a preferred name for an identity-category at a level of abstraction they don’t personally care about. So e.g. a Samoan-American might dislike the bureaucratic initialism AAPI but not have an alternative to offer because personally not interested into conceptualizing him or herself as being part of a macro-category that also includes Pakistani-Americans while excluding Iranian-Americans.
To take a parallel, as it were, from elsewhere, we sometimes talk of “non-Euclidian geometries” as a category of quite varying things defined contrastively with what they aren’t.
“I identify as a taxicab metric.”
I should add that ever since my college years I have been allergic to people who take the attitude “Use the correct terminology, comrade, or you will be regarded with the gravest suspicion.” In ’60s America it was merely annoying and (when one was out of range) amusing; in the early decades of Soviet Russia it could get you killed. I’m for human attitudes and human speech; call it “bourgeois weakness” if you like.
One speculated that it was probably invented by some overly “woke” sociology PhD candidates who had been forced to sit through too many MLA presentations.
i think i’ve said a version of this before on here, but /shakes head at broken search engines/:
in fact, grassroots latine* organizers (mainly poor/workingclass and young) in the u.s. shifted from using “-@” to “-x” as the gender-inclusive suffix around the turn of the century. that was partly pushed forward by the influence of mexican and argentinian** grassroots organizers’ usage, which i’ve been told (by friends in argentina) was itself shaped by connections between the basque and latin american punk scenes (i suspect there’s likely some catalan punk influence in there too).
as with most language shifts – especially ones that come from social movements – academics didn’t start using “-@” or “-x” until each was well-established, and the fact that they’re still using “-x” is a mark of a similar disconnection from the widespread use of “-e”.
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* the same sphere has generally shifted in recent years to the more transparently pronounceable “-e”. that’s been standard in, for example, nyc’s Make the Road (a mass-membership group centered in spanish-speaking immigrant communities), for over a decade now.
** and people from elsewhere in latin america, too, but there was a lot more influence from movements in mexico (after the EZLN uprising) and argentina (after the month of the five presidents) on u.s. movements during this period – as there had been more from salvadoran, nicaraguan, and guatemalan movements in the 1970s-80s.
That way madness, or at least useless sectarianism, lies.
Exhibit a: The beautiful and iconic rainbow banner becoming divisive by not including enough colors.
Wisdom* may lie in the other direction. We don’t need more genders and sexual minorities, we need fewer. ‘Human’ should be enough.
*As professed by my generally clear-thinking son.
(I know I’m threading into a territory where I’ve nothing to do. These matters of apparent minutiae are obviously extremely important to some, and for good reasons. What I’m trying to say is that we would all be better off if they mattered less. The question is how we get there.)
It would indeed be a better world.
But at present, we live in a world where some sexual choices are persecuted. Opposing the banding together of those persecuted (for disparate reasons, and assigned many different labels, because the persecutors are not systematic or rational, so the only thing the victims all have in common is being persecuted on account of their sexuality) strikes me as analogous to the technofascist objection to trade unions, viz that they are an unconscionable interference with the right of employees to negotiate with their corporate employers on a “level playing field” as isolated free individuals. What could be fairer or more noble?
Us poor folk haven’t got a chance unless we organise.
By all means organize, but it would make sense to do it in ways that do not alienate your natural allies.
Surely you can see the difference between “I’m sticking with the union!” and “LGBTQIA2s+! LGBTQIA2s+!”
I am open to suggestions for a better name, truly! I have no brief whatever for opaque and unpronounceable acronyms.
The only point I’m making is that coming up with better names may not be as easy as all that …
(Well, OK, I’m also doubting the actual motives of those who claim that this sort of thing is what deters them from opposing the persecution of people on sexual grounds. Really? You find the acronym upsets you? Good point … )
There’s an obvious analogy with acronyms like BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic): dunno what (if anything) is the US analogue.
It’s a stupid term. There are no races. “Blacks” and “Asians” are not real groups of human beings. What these groups have in common is solely that they are subject to discrimination by self-deluded self-described “white” bigots. This is a grouping wholly defined by its enemies.
But that enmity is itself a genuine common threat that actually creates a common interest among its disparate victims. And racists object to terms like “BAME”. not because if its illogicality, but to undermine opposition to racism.
I’m also doubting the actual motives of those who claim that this sort of thing is what deters them from opposing the persecution of people on sexual grounds.
Nobody claims that, as far as I know; it is a straw man. My claim is that propaganda efforts that ordinary people can relate to and support without too much mental strain are more likely to succeed than ones that involve unpronounceable acronyms. Your problem is that you feel the need for some all-encompassing slogan that no committed leftist could possibly object to, rather than the need for a big-tent slogan that various sects will certainly object to. I remind you that the Bolsheviks came to power with a slogan of “Bread, land, peace,” not details about how finance capital emerges as a result of the merger of industrial and banking capital. (Their slogan was a lie, of course, but it was effective.)
2S seems NAm-centric. Would the acronym be customized geographically?
Why, yes, it would. To wit, the Pacific-centric MVPFAFF: Māhū, Vakasalewa, Palopa, Fa’afafine, Akava’ine, Fakaleitī (Leiti), and Fakafifine (from the WP list).
Your problem is that you feel the need for some all-encompassing slogan that no committed leftist could possibly object to
News to me. But if you say so …
I think we’re at cross-purposes here. I am wholly familiar with the all too many compromises needed to keep any real political movement together, and with the sad realities of campaigning in an environment where many are hostile but most are just remarkably ill-informed (and, increasingly, just don’t give a toss.)
My own personal preferences are, in fact, for stirring sweeping oversimplifications (as I’ve said before, I’m a natural extremist, and I don’t really get moderates, though many of my best friends, etc … It’s taken me a while to learn to appreciate the messy.)
The Bolsheviks were amateurs at this oversimplification game. Now Trump, he’s the pro …
@Y:
This may be the solution to the acute pronounceability crisis. Polynesian acronyms. (I suppose Georgian acronyms would also always be pronounceable to a Georgian but that idea may be less marketable.)
Mavapafaafafa. It has a ring to it …
Not as good as FABGLITTER, though. Why am I only hearing about this now?
Tok Pisin palopa < “Jennifer Lopez”.
This is true fame. Caesar the Dictator only achieved his family name becoming the word for “supreme ruler” across the known world. Eat your heart out, Manes of Jules!
My more modest ambition has only ever been to become so famous that schoolchildren would be punished for misspelling my name. I should be aiming higher.
News to me. But if you say so …
Apologies, I should have put it more abstractly: “your objections would seem to imply the need for some all-encompassing slogan…” I’m glad we agree on the pleasures of sweeping oversimplifications!
yẽbe.
Obviously cognate with the Russian “jebat’”
Presumably the same Dravidian/Welsh root.
It’s hard to know what to make of these terms without more context.
I hope Bowles follows up with a blogpost on each of the words and gives his textual sources. Probably he plans to make a book of it, The Nahuatl Sexual Vocabulary. I looked at some of the words on his list that caught my eye…
I was amused by tzintamalli. This is in Molina (1571) as tzintamalli ‘nalga’ (‘buttock’, literally ‘butt tamale’). Molina also has some of the other compounds of the word tzintli ‘el ojo del salvonor’ (‘anus, asshole’), stem tzin- (cf. Molina, folio 153, tzoyotl ‘el salvonor’) that appear on Bowles’ list. The compounds with tzin- begin on folio 152 here: tzinnamaca, tzinquetza…
By the way, in Colombia there is a kind of tamale called nalgas de ángel. I wonder if the relationship ‘tamale’ ~ ‘buttock’ is somehow ultimately behind English hot tamale, cf. the song ‘Molly Man’ cited in def 3 here. Green knows the sense ‘clever person’ (1895) from two years before the sense ‘sexy, young woman’ (1897), but I wonder if that is just accidental.
Some other words on the list… In the tenth book of the Florentine Codex, there is a long series of paragraphs describing different sorts of people from all areas and levels of society. Among these descriptions, we find xochihuah (as the spelling suchioa in the codex has been normalized by most scholars) and cuiloni here, folio 25r,v. And patlacheh is here, folio 40v.
There are translations and an extensive discussion of these passages in G Kimball (1993) ‘Aztec homosexuality: the textual evidence’, Journal of Homosexuality, v. 26(1):7-24. A very interesting article. The DOI: 10.1300/J082v26n01_02
It is getting very hot where I am now and I have to go to sleep. Maybe others can follow up on other words in the list.
@Xerib
No doubt you have heard of the Mexican weather forecast: chili today, hot tamale.(70s US comedian?).
Goes way back before the ’70s; here it is in July 1956.
And June 1931.
My concern here is the opposite: not that Victorian science was not inclusive enough, but that modern researchers in some fields are wishcasting a terribly politicized history which, roughly, comes down to “non-European past societies were made up of 2020s era Western progressive ideas”. Even the linked list has a *ton* of logical leaps that, unsurprisingly, accord with the personal politics of the researcher.
A great example of this is “two spirit”. The idea that a transgender identity was common, or attested at all, in most Native North America societies is untrue! There are a handful of examples in some specific regions, generally playing a religious function, of something like this. But there are many *major* Native North American languages for which we have literally no attested words of *any* queer concepts at all. Almost every traditional society did not separate gender and sex linguistically, although some had words along the lines of ‘tomboy’ or for a man who worked in a traditionally female role.
The word Two Spirit was invented in the 1990s. It was an attempt to replace berdache in academic writing because of the linguistic connection to slaves or concubines. It is *incredibly frustrating* how many people are both being taught today, and research is containing, totally nonsense ideas that basically come down to “modern strict sex roles are a result of Christian missionaries.” Of course, as in Europe, Native North America had homosexuals, had men take on feminine job roles (and in some cases, vice versa), made male war slaves act as prostitutes (the origin of the word berdache!), and so on. But there is *incredibly* skimpy evidence for the idea, outside of a handful of cases, that a person physiologically male could “be” female, that homosexuality outside of prostitution was accepted (as in almost all traditional societies, “create children” was considered important!), and so on. Indeed, politics have so polluted research in this area that I barely trust a lot of recent research claims.
Imagining that exotic cultures are or were utopian in some respect that appeals to the imaginer has long been a popular pursuit. But substituting one’s own wish-fulfilment for the actual reality of amother culture is deeply disrespectful.
That’s not to say that our own culture is not in many respects aberrant and weird, and some of its more problematic features may indeed be largely absent elsewhere. (I’ve seen this with my own eyes.)
I think the motivation for this sort of exoticism is often a sort of noble-savage notion, “Look, this is natural human behaviour! It must be good.” A terrible argument – in both directions, both in what it attempts to justify and in what it decries as “unnatural.”
two-spirit
This is an area of which I know nothing, but this article (plainly by no bigot) seems to make some good points:
https://rewirenewsgroup.com/2016/10/13/two-spirit-tradition-far-ubiquitous-among-tribes/
The WP page is quite illuminating on just why the term “two-spirit” is controversial, too (and on its origins.)
@Kevin: There is a fair amount of discussion of the romantic wishcasting of modern values onto past societies in this thread.
IIRC we had a discussion way back in which someone asserted that Roman sexual mores were all liberal and groovy like ours, implying that we had reverted to the natural state of things after that horrid Christian interlude.
This romantic notion of the Sex Life of Ancient Rome does not long survive contact with the actual sources …
(Though actual comparison does tell you that many things which you might take for eternal verities about sex and human society are really no such thing – a valuable lesson.)
@Y “2S seems NAm-centric. Would the acronym be customized geographically?”
Indeed. In Britain LGBT prevailed until recently; now the newer variant LGBTQ is about as common. LGBTQIA is much rarer and has always been. Variants with 2S are much rarer still. I think QUILTBAG (U=unsure) is cute but we don’t need it; LGBT is fine.
OK, a variety of such terms are used. But why need that be a problem? Can’t each of us, even if they preferred to use just one of these terms, accept a variety of terms when used by other people?
@Kevin: As a linguist who has dipped his toe into the linguistics (and associated fields, such as history and ethnography) of Aboriginal North America, I am afraid I find your statement too optimistic. I would amend “non-European past societies were made up of 2020s era Western progressive ideas” with “non-European past societies were made up solely of those 2020s era Western progressive ideas which the researcher backs/supports”.
You write “Indeed, politics have so polluted research in this area that I barely trust a lot of recent research claims”. I am forced to agree, sadly.
This extends into the linguistic study of indigenous North America, by the way. Linguists seeking a language to “demonstrate” the validity of some kind of fashionable formalism or other find it a lot easier to do so with languages which, apart from being grossly understudied by linguists, are either extinct or soon will be.
After all, the precarious state of these languages sharply decreases the likelihood that either a scholar (what few there are working with these languages) or a native speaker (what few are left) will challenge any aspect of the data used in support of the “analysis” in question.
But why need that be a problem? Can’t each of us, even if they preferred to use just one of these terms, accept a variety of terms when used by other people?
Of course! I’m all for people using whatever terms they like. What I object to is people trying to enforce their preferred terms on everyone else, and taking the use of a disfavored term as evidence of Wrong Thought. This is all too prevalent on the more “progressive” fringes of the left.
Linguists seeking a language to “demonstrate” the validity of some kind of fashionable formalism or other
This is a lot less prevalent with linguists attempting to describe a whole language, at least nowadays (though in the past you got largely unusable grammars like the Garland series with all that Generative Semantics, or worse yet, the SIL Pikean tagmemics stuff.)
I imagine the same would be true with cultural anthropology; but in North America the cultures have been so badly damaged, and for so long, that only fragments remain, and the work is either impossible or the ethnographic equivalent of rescue linguistics.
Minority cultures are even more fragile than minority languages. Here in Wales, our language is by no means dead and remains very different from the hegemonic English; but our distinctive culture has been reduced to essentially folkloric elements, and our everyday life is indistinguishable from that of the English.
This is all too prevalent on the more “progressive” fringes of the left
Maybe in the US. Here in the UK, the notion that this is a significant factor in undermining support for the left is laughable. Where it is adduced as a cause, it is done so in transparently bad faith, often by people very evidently trying to import US far-right culture-war tropes into our (so far) saner society.
all identity-terms are political projects – they exist to call into being, to consolidate, or to transform the groups they name. that’s as true of “german” and “italian” (to give two 19thC examples), or of “yugoslav” and “canadian”* (to give two 20thC ones), as it is of “queer” “gods and earths” or “two-spirit”.
what’s exciting is being able to watch how those projects develop – as michael muhammad knight said about the 5 Percenters, getting to talk with the companions of allah** ourselves, rather than having to sift through many layers of hadith and isnad literature in order to guess at muhammad’s companions’ thinking across more than a millenium.
with “two-spirit”, that’s particularly easy, because the project was very clearly articulated at the start, and several streams of the conversations about it since have taken place in print, or been written about. so we can trace it from its starting point as the project of creating a broad umbrella of mutual recognition and support for people from indigenous (generally north) american lineages who live outside the norms of heterosexuality and/or christian/roman normative manhood and womanhood, to a very interesting contemporary division in usage.
as i’ve seen it recently, there’s a deep split between how two-spirit people tend to use the term and how non-indigenous people (especially academics, especially the ones in fields that see either indigenous people or trans people as their subjects) tend to use it. the former move between the original usage and a differently shaped umbrella i’d gloss as “people identifying with specific social roles traditional to their lineage community that don’t line up with christian/roman norms of manhood or womanhood” – understood as a constellation of varied positions, all as distinct from “trans” as they are from “gay” or “lesbian” (joshua whitehead articulates this quite well here). the latter use it basically identically to “berdache”: as a generic, fairly homogeneous, “third sex” category.
but/and: plenty of two-spirit people also understand (and have understood, for as long as “two-spirit” has existed as an available term) themselves as trans, as queer, as gay, as lesbian. and all of these overlaps and distinctions are in constant motion.
right now, there are south asian trans writers making a very strong case that the anthropological “third sex” interpretation of an array of indigenous social positions, from “hijra” in their region to the north american ones grouped under “two-spirit”, goes directly against the documented understandings of those positions by those living in them and other members of their communities. they’ve been making a pretty compelling case that hijra, in particular, have consistently been understood as women, rather than as Something Else – women of a particular type, but not particular in a different way from menopausal women, or unmarried women – and that the “third-sexing” of hijras has served a very specific role in their continuing disenfranchisement and marginalization. it’ll be interesting to see how that analysis is applied, or not, or modified, by two-spirit people, indigenous trans thinkers (both those who use “two-spirit” and those who don’t), and others in intimate relationship to the array of indigenous north american social positions that have been, and continue to be, third-sexed.
those aren’t my conversations / arguments to have – i’ll be excited to hear about how they develop! and i know i’ll be thinking about them in relation to the conversations / arguments that emerge in my communities about how and whether those arguments apply to טומטום, סריס, פֿײגעלע, אײלונית | timtum, saris, feygele, aylones, and other traditional jewish social positions.
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* in its contemporary sense, including newfoundlanders, and québecois (as opposed to just quebecers).
** in his embodied form known earlier as clarence 13x.
@de
“Our everyday life is indistinguishable from that of the English”. Define scope of “everyday life” and “the English”. By some definitions of these terms, you could justifiably make the same assertion for Irish people. If you mean “built environment, institutions, media and legal system”, then I agree that differences are not so obvious to the observer, and if one takes a similar economic demographic for “the English” and “the Irish”, you could find more common ground for “lifestyle”. But this may be too reductionist an approach, leading to misapprehension and cultural gaffes. I personally think that there might be a sort of Swadesh list of core values and their relative priorities that is overlapping between different European cultures, with less overlap with Asian, African, etc., cultures.
Here in the UK, the notion that this is a significant factor in undermining support for the left is laughable.
Oh, I wouldn’t say that it’s a significant factor — the main factor in undermining support for the left, here as elsewhere, is a massive and unrelenting campaign on the part of the rich and powerful to convince people to ignore their own interests. I just find it irritating, that’s all.
@PP:
Life in West Africa led me to conclude that pretty much all of Western Europe is more or less a monoculture, as far as the various local majority cultures are concerned, so my outlook may well be skewed. Or even … wrong …
Actually, I wouldn’t maintain that there aren’t any significant cultural differences between Wales and England at all. But I think they are of much the same order as differences within England itself. And those are small compared with those between the UK and France, and those differences are themselves small compared to those I experienced walking a mile down the road from my house in a largely Kusaasi area to the Hausa zongo in town.
This homogenisation is like language loss. And like that, it’s easy to get unrealistically sentimental about it. It’s mostly* driven by people choosing to align with the ambient dominant culture because that’s where they see their interests lying, and it’s impertinent for an outsider to imagine that he can see their “true” interests better than they do themselves (even though people may be in practice very limited in their options by economic and/or social pressures.)
The inventors of the modern concept of the ethnostate were not wrong about the advantages of their model – advantages which can benefit the citizens. They thought the gains outweighed the losses (helped, of course, by their devaluing of what stood to be lost.)
The cultural Swadesh list idea is interesting. I wonder if anyone has ever tried anything like that? It would be a challenge to overcome one’s own cultural biases in drawing up such a list (this is actually an issue even with the real linguistic Swadesh lists.)
* Not in the case of North American indigenous people, for sure, where it was driven by genocide and expropriation. But in Europe – mostly.
@Hat:
Absolutely.
(with a mild apology for another long one)
(edit: somewhat ninja’d, much more succinctly, by our host!)
Here in the UK, the notion that this is a significant factor in undermining support for the left is laughable. Where it is adduced as a cause, it is done so in transparently bad faith, often by people very evidently trying to import US far-right culture-war tropes into our (so far) saner society.
i think this is generally true in the u.s. as well. the people who loudly declare that these are the things that have “put them off” are generally people who have always materially opposed the things that they claim to have been soured on, and are looking for a more socially acceptable explanation for openly advocating against them. which is pretty visible when we remember that the same rhetoric about language was trotted out against black liberationists (“what’s wrong with ‘Negro’?”; “don’t say ‘Black Power’!”), feminists (see every william safire column on the subject, whose arguments are now repurposed by anti-trans agitators), gay liberationists (“what’s wrong with ‘homosexual’?”; “don’t say ‘Gay Is Good’!”), et cetera.
i do think there is a problem of prescriptivism in some parts of the u.s. left – but those are, generally, the parts that don’t do any meaningful organizing, and spend most of their time on polemics with other people who don’t do any meaningful organizing. those polemics happening on social media, rather than in (say) MIM Notes, makes them disproportionately visible to people looking for lines of attack – which does create genuine problems for people doing actual organizing. but i can’t say that in my own experience over the decades i’ve found many people who had trouble grasping why specificity and individual or community preference matters in talking about identity – almost everyone has some experience of that, whether the reasons have to do with migration/diasporization/colonization, subculture (whether punk, NOI, 5%er, or other things), or individual/familial histories. and as with “latin@/latinx/latine” and “two-spirit” (and “black”, “gay”, and “trans”) , the moves that catch on widely are the ones that come from grassroots usage to begin with.
@DE:
the u.s. parallel to “BAME” is “POC” (People Of Color), which comes originally out of anti-imperialist and feminist circles where it replaced “Third World” as the common umbrella term. in the past 5ish years, it’s been gradually being replaced by “BIPOC” (Black/Indigenous/People Of Color), which i believe began as a term focused on the primary targets of u.s. state violence (“people of color who are black and/or indigenous”), as distinct from other racialized groups in the country, but has now been reinterpreted / recuperated as basically synonymous with “POC” (“black, indigenous, and other people of color”). in some academic (and NGO) contexts, “ALA(A)NA” also circulates – “African, Latine, Asian, (Arab,) Native American” – but it’s never had any wider currency.
Also “black and brown”.
I am glad to see that MIM Notes apparently no longer exists as a printed publication. Those guys were such assholes.
Naaaah, a mundane borrowing from the tragically lost Scandi reflex of the Scandi-Congo root.
I very much agree that The West has become remarkably uniform. The most striking way in which I differ from the French is that they drink from bowls in the morning, not from mugs. Oh, and, some of them are rugby fans.
In particular, the lists by Morris Swadesh and their direct descendants contain way too many pairs of opposites. For many of them, it has turned out in the last half-century that one member is way less stable than the other.
Those guys were such assholes.
i hesitate to direct anyone towards it, but the last fragment of MIM* took a few truly mindblowing excursions into the realms of gender-inclusive language. i can only describe it as what robert anton wilson would have imagined from them – if he had done some specific kinds of background reading that i can’t really imagine of him. i’ll leave finding it to the intrepid rather than linking, because i think theoretical monsters are best appreciated after wandering through textual labyrinths.
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* who, as much as it pains me to say it, are still in operation.
QUILTBAG (U=unsure) is cute
“Ladies and Gentlemen, and those who are not quite sure”
Opening announcement on stage from the drag queen (not that heteros would know that yet) in the *Brit* 1992 movie ‘The Crying Game’. So the opportunity was there for U to catch on.
@rozele i do think there is a problem of prescriptivism in some parts of the u.s. left – but those are, generally, the parts that don’t do any meaningful organizing, and spend most of their time on polemics with other people who don’t do any meaningful organizing.
Yes this. What’s been thoroughly passing me off from Bill Maher recently is his feeding the trolls of the right by complaining about the exclusionary inclusionary language wars/cancel culture. As if anybody on the right is paying a skerrick of attention. But what they will point to is a friend of the left (is Maher any more?) dissing the left.
jennifer miller, the ringmaster of nyc’s Circus Amok, uses “ladies, gentlemen, and the rest of us!” as part of the opening of the show. i think she probably started using the phrasing when she was in the 10-in-1 at Sideshows By The Seashore (which is still running! and may be the last in the country).
Xerîb, thanks for the references, and especially for Kimball’s article. It puts a lot of color and context into the vocabularies, though it opens as many questions as it answers.
There is vast literature now on indigenous gender and sexuality in the Americas and elsewhere, much of it written in the last few decades, much of it by out gay anthropologists. I haven’t followed any of it, though.
From the little that can be extracted from the Florentine Codex about pre-Hispanic Aztec culture, according to Kimball’s article, it seems that there was recognition and maybe some acceptance of male and female homosexuality (±), as a minority behavior, but not as part of a codified social position, i.e. a third gender. That in contrast to, say, the physically male / culturally female māhū of Hawai‘i, or the undertaker caste (if that is the right term) of some California cultures.
It’s not clear to me that māhū and the equivalents elsewhere in the Pacific include all MTFs/gay men, or just certain of them who also participate in particular cultural activities proscribed to them.
I noticed that female-bodied third genders rarely appear in these discussions, maybe because they truly are and were rarer, or maybe because of descriptive bias.
massive and unrelenting campaign on the part of the rich and powerful to convince people to ignore their own interests.
I find that attitude somewhat condescending. It assumes that the only valid interests the lower class are allowed to have are material for one thing. Human beings are also status driven creatures. Your typical American Republican-voting wage earner or medicaid recipient doesn’t measure their own self-worth against Elon Musk or Bill Ackman. The ultrarich are almost comically far away, practically modern Greek gods. But those Republican voters can and do measure their self worth against the local high school teacher, the local liberal attorney, the DMV worker or health care professional. All people who “tell them what to do” and make them feel bad about themselves (and if that professional is a woman that’s even more humiliating). If a Republican politician can knock those “snobs” down a peg, then the voter has received something more worthwhile in their terms than some extra funding (that might even allow the local liberal middle class professionals to feel even more proud of themselves for the good they are doing). There’s probably a reason that the left was also more successful when it preached the politics of resentment rather than preaching “abundance”.
I tend to think there’s a lot of sad truth in the old Russian story about the peasant, who, when offered anything he wanted, as long his neigbor got twice the amount, said “poke out one of my eyes”.
So it’s less condescending to suppose that poor Republican voters are motivated by their own intrinsic petty spite and envy than that they have been deliberately misled by intensive propaganda aimed specifically at engendering such resentments?
There are testable aspects to this. In the UK, for example, there is good evidence that xenophobia is greatly driven by the right-wing media: the story that media coverage encouraging hatred and fear of foreigners is simply reflecting preexisting “legitimate concerns” is a falsehood.
The right-wing “respectable” media in the UK (Daily Telegraph, especially) are currently intensively trying to reframe debates about nationality in “racial” terms. (My mother ends up as not being “white British” by their criteria. But then, so does the King …)
What DE said.
What I notice about US voting patterns is how lamentably low is the turnout. To some extent this is a consequence of gerrymandering, that both sides engage in when they get the opportunity.
But when almost as much of the electorate didn’t vote as voted for Trump or for Harris, I don’t see how anybody here can so confidently assert what they voted _for_. Who were they not-voting ‘against?
That’s a much-discussed and tangled subject, and this is just my random spur-of-the-moment analysis, so don’t take it seriously, but: it seems to me that in the Old Days, before mass-media permeation of everything and the evolution of many protective layers arising between pols and ordinary people, politicians had to go out and mingle and tell people what they stood for, and people looked and listened and decided who looked like a better bet and voted accordingly, and it felt like they had a real say in it. Furthermore, pols (like baseball players) were not forbiddingly rich (though of course some of them enriched themselves from their positions) — Mr. Smith Goes to Washington may have been a fantasy, but it was a believable one. Now the people who run things are a remote elite who hobnob with billionaires and go to Davos, and nobody believes the votes of the commoners really count; why would they bother?
Wikipedia has an interesting list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_United_States_by_net_worth
It also discusses some presidents who were from rich families and some who made themselves rich.
Population size has a great deal to do with this. The more people in a politician’s constituency, the bigger staff the politician needs and the less time they have to devote to individuals—and in our system, the more money they need to raise. Despite having no interest in talking with politicians, here in New Mexico I’ve been to a town meeting with my Congressional representative at the time (Ben Ray Lujan, now my senior senator) when there were no more than twenty other people president, and I’ve been to an event where my governor at the time (Gary Johnson) was just standing around in the small crowd and I had plenty of opportunities to walk up to him and chat. I suspect that would be quite different in California, Texas, etc.
So it’s less condescending to suppose that poor Republican voters are motivated by their own intrinsic petty spite and envy than that they have been deliberately misled by intensive propaganda aimed specifically at engendering such resentments?
As someone who grew up among rural Republican voters, I do think they would certainly find your position more condescending. Who are we to tell other people what they should find important? “Spite and envy” are probably mischaracterizations. Defending one’s social status (aka “heritage”) is not perceived as “spite and envy” by the people who vote on cultural issues rather than their pocketbook. I certainly heard a lot of libertarian dogma, xenophobia, anti-elitism and straight up racism from the people I grew up with well before Fox News showed up. They are hardly alien ideas. Part of the attraction of Fox News is no doubt the feeling that someone on TV is saying today exactly what grandpa used to preach back in the 1950s. Social Media/right wing political propaganda is a lot like any addictive drug – the dealer is certainly at fault but the enthusiastic users have to take some responsibility as well.
Hat makes a very good point which I fully agree with. Mamdani has been successful because he is still a fairly normal guy interacting with the voters at a tangible level.
There is no doubt a certain magnificence in putting your fear and hatred of foreigners ahead even of your own materlal self-interest. And I take your point that looking for external “explanations” of such attitudes is dehumanising, and a offensive denial of agency.
It certainly does appear that rural Republican voters are prepared to put up with a good bit of personal inconvenience as long as people they disapprove of can be deported to South Sudan without trial. The correct response is, indeed, not condescension: it is repulsion.
Liberals are indeed too prone to suppose that people are better than they really are.
It is important to remember that being “good” (in various senses) is greatly affected by the material substratum: the more secure you are in your ability to put food on the table and keep a roof over your head, the easier it is to be concerned for other people’s welfare. When allegedly progressive parties fail to provide for people’s needs, people get grumpy and react in ways that can be both self-defeating and emotionally satisfying. The Democratic Party is having this lesson rammed down its (aging, out-of-touch) throat.
Yes indeed; one of the real insights of Marxism is that, although we flatter ourselves that we arrive at our opinions in the cold light of reason, those opinions are very much a product of our economic circumstances. (Not just those, of course, as a hardcore Marxist would presumably have to maintain. But a lot more than it’s comfortable to think.)
We all (progressive or reactionary) like to imagine that we are far more autonomous intellectually than we really are. (In a church context, it is noticeable that perfectly genuine and reasonably-supported sectarian beliefs mysteriously happen to correlate surprisingly often with those of the tradition you were brought up in or converted by. It is completely beside the point that those who were responsible for my own conversion were Calvinists. It was obviously predestined that I would be converted by people who happened to be so sound in doctrine. All that is nothing at all to do with why I am a Calvinist, which is based entirely on extensive reading of the Institutes, conducted with a completely open mind. I mean, that guy is so persuasive …)
There are some good papers actually supporting a causal link between economic recession and the prevalence of far-right opinion. Pauperising the voters can actually be a rational strategy for far-right parties.
“Laddies, gentlewomen, otherkin”…
There is no difference. Fear always is the highest priority: once the scary people of the day take over, your material, moral and other self-interest will be in grave danger, so you have to stop their takeover first.
It has often been observed that the most fear-based voters are not the ones who have nothing, but the ones who are scared of losing what they have or think they have.
The demographics of our own Trumpite metastasis, Reform, support this. Contrary to their assiduous propaganda, their membership is largely not of very poor people. More like Poujadists, but with ramped-up racism.
https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/reform-members
In general, of course, the serious threat to our democracies is not from poor far-right people. It’s from rich far-right people.
…and that’s status as well as money (even apart from money being a status marker). Various kinds of security/predictability, too.
This aligns quite well with Vanya’s original point.
i actually think that the secret of mamdani’s success does not have much to do with with his personal qualities. he was the only candidate who actually ran on policies. that alone might have gotten him a narrow win – and almost certainly would have if cuomo hadn’t been in the race. he won so comprehensively because the policies he ran on are massively popular ones, despite being actively opposed by both major parties – emphatically including the one whose nomination mamdani won.
mamdani’s personal qualities do matter – he’s been able to deal with the constant attacks because he’s able to respond to them not just by refusing the terms they offer, but by refusing those terms in ways that are familiar and ordinary to new yorkers. but coming across like an actual new yorker is a pretty low bar, given that two of his general election opponents are not from the city in any meaningful way (including basic residence: adams is from newark*; cuomo’s from westchester). he seems like a fine guy – his awestruck-but-handling-it backstage video at the Wu-Tang show is very appealing – but i don’t think that’s has advantage.
it is, however, a convenient explanation for democratic party makhers, who need an answer that doesn’t involve either running on policies or embracing the policies that a supermajority of the country’s voters support.
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* if we had a multiparty electoral system in any meaningful sense, he’d’ve been kicked out of the race in 2021 on residency grounds the instant he won the primary.
the fine-grained electoral maps are fascinating. the areas with high percentages ranking cuomo #1 are basically all either (1) neighborhoods where a disproportionate segment of the black population has been disenfranchised through criminal convictions (and faced other kinds of vote suppression) – east new york, brownsville, soundview, etc – (2) areas with a large non-citizen (disenfranchised) population and a notably conservative electorate – south brooklyn, rego park, the west bronx, etc – or (3) the centers of organized far right activity in the city – boro park*, upper east side, much of staten island, southeast queens, etc.
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* and other enclaves of the jewish religious far right. this election really highlighted how important that specific bloc is within the overall nyc far right; possibly more electorally significant than white suburban queens or staten island at this point, though i doubt the right’s strategists really understand how to take that into consideration beyond the current zionist furor.
My impression was that the Black-for-Cuomo areas were generally Caribbean/East Indian. Not that I have an explanation for it.
The Jewish vote went Reform: Mamdani, Conservative: Lander, Orthodox: Cuomo (though most Orthodox are registered Republican anyhow.)
I meant West, not East.
On the accessibilty -> popularity thing: maybe in the US. But in the UK, most of our MPs are not rich to anything like the levels in the US frankly oligarchical system, and most (not all) are as personally accessible as you like. But here, too, the single biggest political force is the “I don’t care”/”They’re all the same” coalition. Same as the one that delivered the US up to its current regime.
There are no races.
Actually, there are. Yes the boundaries are fuzzy, yes the racists overestimate their import, yes some of the racial categories people come up with truly don’t make sense. But it really shouldn’t be controversial to say for example that the dominant traditional populations of Korea, Zambia, Maharashtra, and the Netherlands belong to four distinctive “macro-populations” sized somewhere above an ethnic group and somewhere below a species.
@Y:
there’s a general common sense that the older slice of the nyc afro-caribbean population is fairly conservative. i don’t think it’s quite as simple as that, but certainly the older part of those neighborhoods are much less affected by the various forms of vote suppression than the younger part, and there’s a substantial percentage of people who own, rather than renting, which correlates rightward.
what’s striking to me about the jewish vote is how definitively the ultra-orthodox and hasidic neighborhoods were cuomo’s strongest bases of support. and not just in places like satmar williamsburg and ChaBaD crown heights, where there’s a single institutional authority that was pushing for him; the core of midwood (aside from ocean avenue, which is less white) is just as solid – 90-100% in the final count!
but i am very interested to see how all the cuomo hot spots go in the general election, with the possibility of cuomo, adams, and sliwa all still in the mix, with very different kinds of mostly-not-overlapping appeal (aside from “not mamdani”, which is what they’re all gonna run on).
rozele: as far as the Jewish Orthodox vote goes, aren’t the Democrats among them a negligible minority anyway? Will they mostly vote for Sliwa or Adams in the generals?
But it really shouldn’t be controversial to say for example that the dominant traditional populations of Korea, Zambia, Maharashtra, and the Netherlands belong to four distinctive “macro-populations” sized somewhere above an ethnic group and somewhere below a species.
Maybe, but the term “race” is terminally skunked. I think if you used “macro-populations” there wouldn’t be much objection. It’s a clunky term, but in this case that’s great — it would only be used in contexts where there was a real need to talk about such groups, which is not that many.
I’m pretty sure my school atlas had the Netherlands and Maharashtra both as “Europid”.
If not, then Maharashtra was definitely “mixture of Europid and Old-Layer Races”. It only had three “main” races, not four.
It’s also important to keep in mind that there is greater diversity in (recently sub-Saharan) African-descended populations than in the entire rest of humanity. Any attempt to draw conclusions about common traits of people from Zambia and Senegal are likely to be worthless—unless they involve purely climatic adaptations.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2012-03-02-chimps-show-much-greater-genetic-diversity-humans
Chimpanzees are classified as four subspecies – but I don’t know to what extent that’s a result of that study.
I’ve also read there’s much greater diversity in India than in the rest of Not-Africa. In both cases it’s 90% : 10%, IIRC.
What’s also interesting is how very low the correlation is between things like skin color and blood types. Blood types have geographical distributions, too, just completely different ones.
Some of the “genetic diversity” arguments may be missing the point. People observe phenotype, not genotype. So dark skin in a light-skinned population (or vice-versa) is a strongly noticeable difference, and perhaps unfortunately correlates with or resembles outward signs of disease in that population.
Some of the “genetic diversity” arguments may be missing the point. People observe phenotype, not genotype.
Exactly, which is why the “actually, race is real” discourse is unhelpful (and fodder for racists). The “real” part has nothing to do with what people mean by “race” (which boils down to “those people have brown skin”) and has little use in the real world (except as fodder for racists).
Talking of racists, Krasnov’s censorship ukase
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/restoring-truth-and-sanity-to-american-history/
specifically objects to a Smithsonian exhibit because it ‘promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating “Race is a human invention.”’
So Americans are now required to subscribe to “scientific” racism, it appears. It seems that the purpose of so doing is to advance social cohesion.
I mean, there’s nothing even a little bit surprising about that; it’s at the center of the current administration’s overall project: bringing back the unchallenged rule of straight white males while keeping the boot firmly on the necks of everyone else.
“greater diversity in (recently sub-Saharan) African-descended populations than in the entire rest of humanity”
I’ve also read there’s much greater diversity in India than in the rest of Not-Africa. In both cases it’s 90% : 10%, IIRC.
I’ve heard the first, not restricted to south-of-the-Sahara Africa, but not the second. I’d be interested in citations for both, for use in these discussions.
We were told back here that according to citations in this paper on the origin of language, the first split in humanity was between Khoiasan people’s ancestors and everybody else’s. If one looks only at black (in the socially constructed sense) Africans in the “everybody else” group, does one still find more genetic diversity than in non-African people?
There are Hatters who can answer this properly, but just to lapse into phenotypes, West Africans can usually tell that someone is East African just by looking at them, and even I learnt to tell fairly accurately whether someone was from the north or the south of Ghana based just on physical appearance. (That’s before you get into “Pygmy” groups …)
Nineteenth/earlier twentieth century racist ethnographers were very keen on their Hamitic “races” as opposed to “true negroes”, but deeply stupid, pseudoscientific and downright repellent as their theories were, they were based on some actual observed typical phenotypic differences. (Nomadic Fulɓe really do tend to look different from their settled neighbours, for example.)
What all this has no necessary connexion to at all, is, of course, culture and language.
I was just recently saying that Sandawe speakers travelling outside their area avoid speaking even to each other in Sandawe, because the clicks are a dead giveaway to other Tanzanians about where they’re from. There wouldn’t be any point in such avoidance if other Tanzanians could tell just by looking at them that they had “Khoisan genes.” (Even Tom Güldemann, who is nearly as hardcore a splitter as me, thinks it’s quite likely that the Sandawe language is related to Central Khoisan.)
as far as the Jewish Orthodox vote goes, aren’t the Democrats among them a negligible minority anyway? Will they mostly vote for Sliwa or Adams in the generals?
it’s complicated! party affiliation in nyc is a funny animal: in most of the city*, you have to be extremely committed to another party to be registered as anything but a Democrat, because the Democratic nominee is overwhelmingly likely to win, and the Republicans are far less likely to have a primary in the first place (the other parties all, i believe, select nominees in other ways). so the best-organized ultra-orthodox communities – the hasidic courts in particular – tend to back Republicans in presidential races (and to a degree in gubernatorial and senate races), but on the local level mainly exert political influence within the Democratic Party structures.
so you get a very vocal far right figure like dov hikind spending his entire very influential career in the NY state assembly (1983-2018) as a Democrat, while representing a heavily ultra-orthodox district that went 69% for trump in 2016 (84% in 2024!) and 75% for romney in 2012, and backing every Republican presidential nominee from bush junior on. hikind himself got over 99% of the vote in his last re-election.
but more importantly, for most of the hasidic and other ultra-orthodox communities, candidates’ party afiliation hasn’t been a central thing**. their leaders have been classically issue-based or transactional (depending how you look at it) – a winning strategy in a party-machine town, if you can deliver a substantial number of votes – with the pro quo they expect for their quid centering on autonomy/impunity for their egregiously abusive educational institutions, continued social support funding for their impoverished majority of rank-and-file adherents, and, increasingly, zionism.
which direction those areas jump in november is going to be about an extended competition among the three non-mamdani candidates for institutional backing, especially from the biggest hasidic courts (and the religious institutions of other large ultra-orthodox communities). i would bet on cuomo coming out ahead, because sliwa’s never won an election and i don’t think adams is seen as having a realistic chance of winning***.
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* in a few areas, this all works the other way around, but that’s “few” as in there are 6 Republicans of 51 city council members, and not all of them come from “safe” districts.
** this may have changed as they’ve become increasingly central to the nyc far right, which is itself increasingly committed to the Republican Party.
*** i, perhaps optimistically, don’t think cuomo does either, but i think more people think he does than think adams’ divine mandate will come through for him.
I’ve heard the first, not restricted to south-of-the-Sahara Africa, but not the second. I’d be interested in citations for both, for use in these discussions.
I remember the former being clearly stated in Cavalli-Sforza’s “The history and geography of human genes”. I’m away from my books and can’t give you a verbatim citation. And with all the progress made in genetics in the last decades that book is probably very outdated, so there ought to be more recent publications that state the same.
Thank you. I’ll see what I can find.
@languagehat
‘That’s my default term; I can’t stand this “LGBTQIA2s+” crap. It’s terminology like that (and POC and all the other rebarbative initialisms) that drive ordinary people away from progressive ideas they otherwise would at least listen to.’
Well, this complaint ignores why such terms have caught on in the community. People who are ‘queer’ in their sexual preferences tend to be ‘queer’ in their way of thinking too. Research suggests that neurodivergent people are more likely than neurotypical people to identify as members of the queer community in the broad sense.
…because they’re more likely to think about in what other ways they might not fit the boxes their culture expects to stuff them into?
Interesting change of tone, though, compared to yesterday when you basically bragged about being a troll.
I did? I’m not sure what you mean and I am neither a troll nor a braggart. In fact I prefer a generally mild tone and avoid sarcasm, irony or personal jabs. And I believe what I say. If there are confusions as to what I think we can resolve them in time with more discussion. This prejudice that some commentators have that I am a Nazi is wrong. I don’t support totalitarian, messianic, hateful ideologies and nomothetic ways of thinking. These things are maladaptive and invariably lead their believers to ruin. Wicked people like Hitler or Stalin or Putin or Catilina – to use an ancient example – tend to be shrewd, they understand weaknesses of character when they see them and are adept at exploiting them. But they don’t believe in the usefulness and practicality of morality, which is the foundation of all virtue. This is their Achilles heel.
One of these virtues is what the ancients called pietas and the Nazis were notoriously impious and were planning to destroy the Christian Church. Martin Bormann who run the famous Berghof estate was fond of destroying the Marterl in the area. This was a disgusting act of sacrilege. He also dismissed staff who were religious or had prayer books. As a person who deeply values piety I could never identify with a movement that condones any form of disrespect towards the sacred or which discriminates against the pious.
Let’s leave the subject of Nazis alone in this thread, shall we?
@DM: FYI, it only looks like a change of tone because you, like most people who have given the matter any thought, take “neurodivergent” as a neutral descriptive term; to him, it’s “what we today euphemistically call neurodivergence (the right word is simply stupidity)”.
This prejudice that some commentators have that I am a Nazi is wrong.
Given that he dreams impotently of a future, more successful Drang nach Osten inspired by the Nazis’ genocidal colonialism, I don’t really care whether he rejects their impiety, or their economic policies or whatever. This will be my last response to any discussion involving him.
@Lameen
The Drang nach Osten, the German colonization of the European East, started centuries ago. I myself descend from German colonists who settled in Transylvania and were forced to move only in the aftermath of WWII.
You have to understand that economic success almost inevitably leads to colonization and colonization leads almost inevitably to some form of political or cultural domination but doesn’t always lead to genocidal violence. The ancient Greeks were economically successful and as a result were able to colonize many parts of Italy, Africa, the Levant and the Orient. They never committed any genocide as far as I know. The Romans colonized Gaul and some say that Caesar committed a genocide there. While there’s no doubt that Caesar was a political criminal, that’s not exactly true. In any case Latin replaced Gaulish there not because of a colonialist genocide (Gaulish remained widespread until at least the 3rd century) but because the native Gauls adopted a language that gave them more advantages.
The Germans didn’t commit any sort of notable crime in the East before WWII. Hitler’s crimes had ideological, not practical causes. There was no need to slaughter entire populations in order to Germanize the East. But the need to confront the Soviet Union existed and even if Hitler had never come to power, the need wouldn’t have gone away. Stalin planned to take over Eastern Europe and unlike Putin, he had the means to do so.
The Euro currency is effectively the DM with another name. I don’t believe that it’s realistic for Europeans to believe that they can use the German currency and enjoy its advantages but that they can happily paper over the problem of European hegemony. Whoever issues your currency inevitably rules you. After the cold war ended the question which European nation will dominate came up and it still has to be resolved somehow. Europeans are trying to avoid confronting that problem but this won’t work.
Well, I’m glad we’ve settled that.
You make it sound like that excused anything. You’re still not enjoying your holiday.
Well, it’s not the German government…
LOL, what a small mind.
@David M.
Nothing can excuse the crimes of the regime but it was the only regime willing and able to curbstomp Soviet aggression. The western democracies can’t even put the Taliban and Kim Jong Un in their place. It took them two campaigns and two fallen towers to get rid of Saddam. They couldn’t deal with Stalin.
The currency is technically issued by the ECB which is in Frankfurt, the same city that incidentally houses the Bundesbank. But it doesn’t even matter where the euro is issued. What makes it a hard currency? The basic answer is: the trust that the international investors put in the German economy. It’s effectively a pan-European German currency.
History teaches us that power struggles are inevitable. No reason to expect that Europe’s future won’t have them. No reason to bet Germany won’t again come on top.
Huh? Not their job.
…that the German government has no power over (except theoretically the power to ruin it, maybe: keyword “mini-budget”).
There is always a first time.