Stanford University Press Blog

The New Primitives

Ben Etherington, author of Literary Primitivism, on the historical and contemporary notions of primitivism. Excerpt courtesy of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

by BEN ETHERINGTON

 

George Catlin by William Fisk, 1849.

The idea for the Na’vi, the made-up humanoid species indigenous to the planet Pandora in James Cameron’s 2009 primitivist blockbuster Avatar, came to the director via his mother. In the 1970s, she told her son about a dream of a 12-foot blue woman, and this formed the basis for the brief he would deliver to his designers 30 years later. The Na’vi were to be blue, tall, muscular, sleek, and feline. They had to be alien enough to be plausibly otherworldly, but take a form, the concept artist Jordu Schell recalled Cameron stipulating, that “the audience has to want to fuck.” Among other things, this meant that the film’s female Na’vi lead, Neytiri, had “to have tits” even though, Cameron freely admitted to Playboy, the Na’vi are not placental mammals. As he developed prototypes, Schell pinned up pictures of “beautiful ethnic women” to ensure that his feline aliens would reflect the ids of the teenage boys who made up the film’s key demographics.

The plot of the film follows the tested formula of primitivist transformation. A man of civilization, in this case the paraplegic US marine Jake Sully, is sent to colonize the primitive lands beyond civilization’s perimeter only himself to “go primitive” after learning of their innocent beauty and recognizing the barbarism of his own destructive civilization. It’s a structure that underlies other blockbusters like Dances with Wolves, its sci-fi equivalents, and numerous journey-into-the-interior classics (especially the work of Joseph Conrad). Eros is built into this formula. Coition marks the point at which the civilized man gives himself over to the primitive tribe and discovers, or recovers, his primitive self. Primitivist utopias, in short, are fuckable utopias.

The Book of Radiance

An old Jew reflects on what the Zohar illuminates about the nature of the Jewish tradition.

by RABBI YEHIEL E. POUPKO

Photo by Kalie Caetano.

In 2002, Stanford University Press embarked on the ambitious initiative of publishing a 12-volume translation of the foundational work of Jewish mysticism, The Zohar. This monumental, 20-year translation project, generously underwritten by Margot Pritzker, was undertaken by Daniel Matt with assistance on the final three volumes from Nathan Wolski and Joel Hecker. I am honored to have supervised this program at the Press from the beginning, and have had the sincere pleasure of working with both Daniel Matt and Rabbi Yehiel Poupko, who has overseen and managed the work on behalf of the Zohar Education Project, Inc (ZEPI). In two companion blog posts, Daniel Matt and Rabbi Poupko reflect on their experiences. While the translation was completed in 2016, and the final volume was published in 2017, SUP will continue to develop the work and help it to reach new audiences. The beautiful, limited run Collector's Edition was released at the end of 2017, and we plan to release ebook editions of all twelve volumes in the summer of 2018, while at the same time re-releasing native HTML editions of the Aramaic source texts. Watch out for future new works on the Zohar web page.

—Alan Harvey, Director, Stanford University Press

Until the Zohar was written down, or emerged and erupted, or was composed, sometime in the late-thirteenth to early-fourteenth century, a Mitzvah, a Commandment, was just that: It was God’s instruction. If anyone wanted to know why the Jews obeyed the Mitzvot, or if anyone were curious as to the purpose of the Commandments, the answer was very simple: The purpose is to obey God. The reason why the Commandments are obeyed, followed, and observed is because God commanded them. Thou shalt not steal…; Remember the Sabbath Day…; Do not eat everything available out there…; and on, and on, and on. Any time a Jewish person asked that question from the first century onward (and even earlier), the given answer was the same. The reason for the Commandments is that God has commanded them.

Yet the Zohar changed the answer to that question in a fundamental way. One obeys the Mitzvot. One fulfills the Commandments. One integrates the Mitzvot-Commandments into one’s life not only because God commanded it but because the Mitzvot have far-reaching cosmic power. They can in fact have an effect, as if one can imagine it or even say it, on God’s very Self.

A New-Ancient Zohar

On translating the Zohar’s poetic and unruly Aramaic, while staying true to the text’s original ambiguity.

by DANIEL C. MATT

 

 The Zohar Collector's Set

In 2002, Stanford University Press embarked on the ambitious initiative of publishing a 12-volume translation of the foundational work of Jewish mysticism, The Zohar. This monumental, 20-year translation project, generously underwritten by Margot Pritzker, was undertaken by Daniel Matt with assistance on the final three volumes from Nathan Wolski and Joel Hecker. I am honored to have supervised this program at the Press from the beginning, and have had the sincere pleasure of working with both Daniel Matt and Rabbi Yehiel Poupko, who has overseen and managed the work on behalf of the Zohar Education Project, Inc (ZEPI). In two companion blog posts, Daniel Matt and Rabbi Poupko reflect on their experiences. While the translation was completed in 2016, and the final volume was published in 2017, SUP will continue to develop the work and help it to reach new audiences. The beautiful, limited run Collector's Edition was released at the end of 2017, and we plan to release ebook editions of all twelve volumes in the summer of 2018, while at the same time re-releasing native HTML editions of the Aramaic source texts. Watch out for future new works on the Zohar web page.

—Alan Harvey, Director, Stanford University Press

It has been an adventure to spend eighteen years translating the Zohar. This mystical commentary on the Torah is not only the masterpiece of Kabbalah, but also a gem of world literature that has remained mostly hidden ever since it was composed in Spain in the thirteenth century.

When the project was first proposed to me, back in 1995, I was simultaneously thrilled and frightened. How could I hope to complete such a vast undertaking, translating and explicating some 1,600 pages of dense, intentionally cryptic Aramaic? Yet, how could I turn down this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? After thinking about it for a couple of weeks, and then a couple of months, I decided to try it before committing myself to the project; but this experiment drained me so much that I decided to decline the offer, amazing though it was. Then, however, I met Margot Pritzker, who had first proposed the idea to me. She said that she understood my hesitation, and then she asked how long such a project might take. “Twelve to fifteen years,” I replied, to which she responded simply, “You’re not scaring me.” When I heard that, something inside of me flipped. Maybe it was that I heard her words as a challenge: “I’m not scared. Why are you?” In any case, in that moment I changed my mind and said, “Okay, I’ll do it.”

The Zohar is not only the masterpiece of Kabbalah but also a gem of world literature.

Contested Foundations

How 20th-century debates reveal enduring tensions at the core of the human rights project.

by MARK GOODALE

Excerpt from a letter from W.H. Auden to Julian Huxley.

In 1947 and 1948, the bold and controversial first Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Julian Huxley, together with Jacques Havet, the young first head of UNESCO’s philosophy sub-section, took steps that were intended to shape the conceptual framework of what became the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948. During these years, UNESCO put in motion an extraordinary process that was meant to reveal a cross-cultural consensus on the basic philosophical and ethical principles upon which a new global social contract should be based. This process—which involved soliciting opinions on the question of human rights by notables such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Gandhi—took place independently of the much more public one that unfolded somewhat later under the auspices of the UN’s Commission on Human Rights (CHR), which was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt.

UNESCO put in motion an extraordinary process that was meant to reveal a cross-cultural consensus on the basic philosophical and ethical principles upon which a new global social contract should be based.

The work of UNESCO on human rights during this period, the debates surrounding its conflicts with the CHR, the specific results of the cross-cultural survey it undertook, and the broader implications of this survey for the meanings and legitimacy of human rights, were all lost to a history that was dominated by the geopolitical logics of the Cold War. Nevertheless, new research has revisited the UNESCO human rights survey in light of ongoing debates over what a recent volume by Hopgood, Snyder, and Vinjamuri has described as “human rights futures”: the possibilities for and limitations to human rights among the contemporary disorder and violence that Samuel Moyn calls the “neoliberal maelstrom.”

Why Cavemen Needed No Braces

Crooked teeth are a modern phenomenon and a telltale sign of an underlying epidemic.

by SANDRA KAHN and PAUL R. EHRLICH

A 1,000-year-old skull of a Philistine woman excavated in Israel reveals how pre-industrial people did not suffer from crooked teeth to the same extent we do today. Photo by Jim Hollander/EPA.

Modern industrialized societies are plagued by crowded, ill-aligned teeth, a condition that the dental profession refers to as “malocclusion”—which translates literally to “bad bite.” Survey data from 1998 suggests that as much as a fifth of the U.S. population has significant malocclusion, over half of which require at least some degree of orthodontic intervention. Braces, tooth extractions, and retainers are the bread and butter for all the dentists and orthodontists tasked with setting straight our dental deviations. Having braces as a child has become so common in the Western world that it can seem a rite of passage—today, an estimated 50 to 70 percent of U.S. children will wear braces before adulthood. But what did humans do to fix their teeth before modern dentistry, before Novocain, gauze, and rubber spacers?

As it turns out, our ancestors did not suffer from crooked teeth to the same extent that we do today. Our species’ fossil record reveals a telling story: the epidemic of crooked teeth developed in humans over time. Evolutionary biologist, Daniel Lieberman, notes the pattern in his book, The Story of the Human Body:

The museum I work in has thousands of ancient skulls from all over the world. Most of the skulls from the last few hundred years are a dentist’s nightmare: they are filled with cavities and infections, the teeth are crowded into the jaw, and about one-quarter of them have impacted teeth. The skulls of preindustrial farmers are also riddled with cavities and painful-looking abscesses, but less than 5 percent of them have impacted wisdom teeth. In contrast, most of the hunter-gatherers had nearly perfect dental health. Apparently, orthodontists and dentists were rarely necessary in the Stone Age.

Ample evidence abounds in support of Lieberman’s observations. A comparison of 146 medieval skulls from abandoned Norwegian graveyards with modern skulls indicated a trend toward bad bite in our more recent forebears. The skulls of people scored as being in “great” or “obvious” need of orthodontic treatment made up 36 percent of the medieval sample and 65 percent of the modern sample. And evidence of malocclusion in still earlier human fossils is vanishingly rare. The jaws of hunter-gatherers nearly uniformly reveal roomy, perfect arches of well aligned teeth, with no impacted wisdom teeth—a movie star’s dream smile, 15,000 years before the movies!