Quiz Jy 17

Post yours please.

1. Who was Michael Young?

2. What term have social scientists substituted for "class" in the postwar era?

3. What does our Constitution declare about titles and nobility?

4. Understanding a society's codes involves grasping what?

5. In the middle class, Appiah says, the key elements of status have above all had to do with what?

6. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre turns what into what?

7. How did professors, mayors, physicians, and lawyers rank in a 2012 survey of occupational prestige?

8. What was Michael Young's lament, late in his life?

9. Who was Virginia Woolf's "Judith"?

DQ-post yours please.

• Post your thoughts on what impressed you at the Tennessee State Museum.
• Speaking of museums: Any thoughts on the TR statue controversy? (see below*)
• Any thoughts on Drumpf's tweets urging AOC and the other young female congresswomen to "go back..."? Or on Lindsay Graham's statement that they're all a "bunch of communists"? Or on the "debased" public discourse of our day, and who's responsible for it? (See below**)
• Have you seen or read Remains of the Day? What was your reaction?
• Were you a Downton Abbey fan? Is any aspect of the old English class system appealing to you? Why do some of us enjoy immersing ourselves in the atmosphere of this bygone era?
• Have you read Henry James? What do you think of his Americans abroad (like Verver, described as "affluent, attractive, amusing, astute...")?
• What do you think of the state of public education in this country, and of the decision of those parents who support its democratic mission but who nonetheless choose to send their children to private schools?
• To what extent do you think America is a meritocracy? Are class divisions less or more predictive of personal success now than in the past?
• What "class structures" in America impede our democratic ideals, and how can they be neutralized?
• How much of Marx's analysis of class divisions, struggles, and historical inevitability is relevant to our times?
• How does "status" motivate you, consciously or not? Do you try to resist pressures to compete for status in work, lifestyle, etc., or do you gladly acquiesce in them?
• What do you see as the difference between class and status, and the role of wealth in determining those conditions in America?
• Have you read J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy? Thoughts?
• How do you rank the prestige of occupations? Or do you?
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10. Who wrote the first work of modern anthropology, and became the first Oxford professor in that discipline?

11. It wouldn't have occurred to Herodotus to think what?

12. What astonishingly persistent idea did Hegel pass along to his students?

13. What historical work introduced many readers to the concept of western civilization ("the West")?

14. What holds us together, if not culture in Matthew Arnold's sense ("the best that's been thought and said" etc.)?

15. Arnold and Tylor would have agreed on what?

16. What identity should bind us all?

DQ

• Is Anthropology a healthy and valuable field of study? 
• COMMENT: "the kind of stage theories advocated by Tylor have been criticized for conflating evolution with historicist theories of progress, by arguing that societies always pass through certain phases of belief and the Western civilization is the pinnacle of development, a belief known as unilinealism. This latter point has been criticized as ethnocentric..." IEP
• Do you agree with Appiah that we should "give up the very idea of Western civilization"?
• Does our country define itself too much through opposition? Do all countries? Is there a better alternative? 195
• Do you agree that nothing essential binds us to our forebears, that it is "simply a mistake" to think so? 199
• Is it harder for individuals to see themselves as others see them, than for nations? 205
• Do intellectuals (and students) overrate the influence of ideas?
• Do you agree that abandoning organicism frees us to embrace cosmopolitanism? Can you cite examples in your own worldview that reflect this? 207
• Is "cultural appropriation" a real problem? Should Paul Simon feel guilty? Should you, if you enjoy the Graceland recording with the South African musicians?
• Were the existentialists right, existence precedes essence? 217
• COMMENT: "If you do not care for the shapes your identities have taken, you cannot simply refuse them..." 218 

* Angered by This Roosevelt Statue? A Museum Wants Visitors to Weigh In

Conversation about monuments has reached a fever pitch, and the city was split on this one. The American Museum of Natural History is opening an exhibition on it.

There’s a quote that takes up its own wall at the American Museum of Natural History’s newest exhibition: It’s more important to tell the truth about the president — pleasant or unpleasant — than about anyone else.

The words were written, in fact, by a president: Theodore Roosevelt. A century later, it’s hard to know if Roosevelt expected his words could be used in a context that highlights unpleasant truths of his own.

The exhibition, titled “Addressing the Statue” and opening Tuesday, is the museum’s way of contextualizing a monument of Roosevelt that towers outside its Central Park West entrance. With the president seated high astride a horse, flanked by a Native American man and an African man standing below, people who look at the statue often see a legacy of colonialism and a visually explicit racial hierarchy.

The statue was installed to honor Roosevelt, a staunch conservationist whose ties to the Natural History museum trace back to his father, a founding member of the institution. But Roosevelt’s own racist views, including statements about Native Americans and Africans, complicate the monument’s implications even further... (continues)

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**

We’ve debased ourselves, but some are more debased and less receptive to calls for mutual civility than others. https://t.co/YzqlhPFv5C

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) July 15, 2019