PARADIGM SHIFTS KNOCK YOU ON YOUR BUTT

My eyes are troubling me and there is a lot of work to do on my environment, so I’m going to post excerpts from a conversation I’ve been having with an entirely honorable and lovable UU minister who used to be a colleague. Without any warning or immediate cause, he was sacked. I don’t think you’ll recognize him but I’ll change any details that might be identifiers. Of course, if he wants to uncloak, that’s fine with me, but the impact on the next congregation (which is already lined up) has to be considered.

I’ve been thinking and writing about these kinds of events for years but have found no minister who would talk to me about it. You’ll remember that I simply walked out on Saskatoon — not without notice and following procedure, but taking my remaining pledge with me, which enraged them.

I see two or three pivot points WORLD WIDE, but played out through the UU world.

1. Everyone is terrified. Bad things (overpopulation, drought, natural disasters, minority riots, etc.) have been predicted to begin about now and they are. Actually, it’s not that different, but our feeling is that the world is ending.

2. There is no “theological” message that really takes hold. The Principles are old and over-familiar. (Go to UUA.org to find them. You won’t be dazzled.) The UU world is not participating in the fabulous inspiring re-framing or paradigm shift that is developing: the Long Now, Deep History, Big History, the Evolution of the Brain, the two hundred kinds of hominins, and a few other ways of organizing the overwhelming new ideas out there.

I call it Mystical Science because it so clearly tells us we are participants in something vast and unknowable, but felt. FELT. Here and there people are organizing groups that are essentially congregations, but they are NOT UUA. Not even identified as religious. Some say humanism, but it’s not about humans. It’s not about salvation, not even saving the planet. It’s about PARTICIPATION. You’re a speck, but a connected speck. This is butterfly-winging: teeny changes can transform everything.

The people who are running the UUA are after self-preservation, compensation for being put down as black or female, and Trumpism, imagining they are CEO’s with a strange notion of that as an entitlement. They have conflated religion with politics. To be UU in the USA is to be a Democrat.

Neubauer Collegium

I think my friend was not fired — they set him free. (That’s more usually called re-framing than paradigm shift.) I myself am penniless, getting old so that pieces keep fall off, but I am FREE. And writing daily. I have not severed my connection with the UUA because I need the credential and I want to know about what’s happening. Same with Meadville, which is no longer Meadville at all. I’ve been following the Neubauer (neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu); which now occupies the building, and is not afraid of thinking big thoughts. The legal Meadville is a rented space in the Loop.

This colleague I’m speaking to is very much in the traditional, nearly genealogical, past of the UUA when it was in the neighborhood of Boston and Emerson was a renegade. That was before the California UU’s cooked up the Aquarian revolution while steaming in a hot tub.

Let’s look at it this way. You are the Al Gore of the UUMA spectrum. Your whole stance is history, honor, heritage, and continuity. It fits with your temperament, your education, and even your portrait. But the present congregations of the UUA in many ways are turning away from the UUA that I knew and joined in 1975. I assume you remember those times, too.

25 Beacon Street, Boston

No one ever imagined that the UU’s would leave 25 Beacon Street. No one ever imagined that the BACA-BAWA scuffle in the Eighties would finally come back almost subversively and capture the big churches and the presidency of the UUA without ever being congregational ministers. No one imagined that the UUA would become synonymous with the Democratic party. How can they turn away from the New England Emerson and Channing mode?

But they did. Now they look to the South and I have no idea who their heroes are or even if there ARE any. They want to win, they want to be rich and secure, and if that means rigging the US Supreme Court, let us not have qualms. But their enthusiasm for levelling and anarchism gets smashed by advertising that pitches everything “better” that will prove status. As someone remarked, “We’re fine with minorities so long as they dress well and have good manners.” You know, “nice” gays who love fine music.

Here’s another interpretation: in the last few decades many people are working more and longer hours than ever before. The women and retired people who used to shoulder almost all the volunteer services are now in jobs or are in demand in a host of NGO’s responding to the greatly increased need in our times because governments are pulling back. So we hire people and call them “professional.” In a peculiar reversal, the minister is considered a “servant.”

Here in Valier, which is highly traditional, many (I think I could say most) women are in comparatively low-pay jobs but make enough to hire someone to clean their houses, which those cleaner women do for even lower-pay. A few years ago a radio station wanting to promote how wonderful they were, said they wanted to organize Thanksgiving and would provide the turkeys, if the women would cook the meal and provide the salad, veggies, etc. side dishes. There was uproar. “Just when,” said the women, “Did you think we had time or inclination to cook the way our mothers did?” The radio people looked for grannies, but they were taking on the kid care or were dead of diabetes.

I'm saying that when society changes, particularly the economics, the churches must also change but are often unaware of the larger culture because they are a self-selected group.

In Valier we have no immigrant class willing to work for pennies out of desperation. The Indians have gotten uppity and earned college degrees. The children are so indulged and praised that every mosquito bite throws them into rebellion. Work? Who, us?

Another element I feel keenly because of my Diabetes 2 is the huge role that communal “feeds” still play in church life. I’m solitary by choice but would be anyhow out of necessity because so many community events are pie sales, cake walks, barbecues, pancake breakfasts and so on. My non-attendance can be interpreted as snobbery. Nowadays, between allergies and food risks, these events still barely work in small rural towns but are close to impossible in cities. BUT the other urban food dynamic is towards eating out or cooking gourmet with good friends. Expensive, exclusive, requiring skill. Not church building activities.

Economic forces are bringing to the front such big questions about money. Maybe churches ought to have economic study groups instead of theological study groups. Both are highly politicized and feel dangerous.

I left, but I’m not you and I’m from a different part of the UU spectrum: prairie humanism. Co-ops, grain elevators as cathedrals and red Indians. Life on a mystical horizon that requires constant vigilance. And Carhartts. (Tough work clothes.) We are already at ground level. Some lean Right.

If the UUA is going to continue to claim to be pluralistic (I’m not sure they are or want to be right now) the denomination may just shrivel, due to hypocrisy, and die. Like Meadville, they are already a bit of a low-attendance/residence operation, in a world that operates through a web of tight relationships. If they go on, they will need an umbrella concept. Tillich’s genius was always looking for the umbrella: being vs nonbeing are united by the Ground of Being.

So how can an historian find an umbrella or through-line that will include these minister-hating savages, these wanna-be CEO’s, and extend history out into the future when the terms of existence will surely change again? I couldn’t do it if I wanted to, but you probably could.

That’s the extent of my advice so far. Except that even congregations evolve, which means change but also getting a better fit with the larger world.

MALVINA HOFFMAN'S HALL OF MAN

Alvina Krause, the legendary Method acting teacher, used as a teaching tool Malvina Hoffman's Hall of Man, sculptures of examples of human groups, life-size.  Our assignment in 1957 was to go look at the bronzes, think about them and research them until we understood each of them as unique, thinking and moving individuals.  It was one of the few times in my undergrad life when it was not assumed that all people were like the campus people, and that didn’t mean the janitor.  But then, acting means accepting the idea that one might need to portray any one of the planet’s humans, including janitors.

This is about Malvina, not Alvina.  Malvina Hoffman was a privileged woman in a high-culture context married to a violinist tuned so tightly that he spent much of his life in hospitals.  She wrote three books: one about traveling around the world creating these portraits, one about how to create and cast bronze sculptures, and one that was a memoir. In 1961, when I came to Browning, MT, to teach high school English on this Blackfeet Reservation, I met Bob Scriver, a major sculptor of Western subjects.  In our first conversation we discovered that Malvina Hoffman was an object of intense admiration from us both.

In the Fifties Bob had earned a Master’s Degree at Vandercook School of Music on the south side of Chicago.  He was just transitioning from teaching music to running a taxidermy business and went to the Field Museum to visit their master taxidermist, who was from Billings, MT.  Of course he explored the rest of the museum and was stunned by the beauty and understanding presented in the Hall of Man. 
   

The Blackfoot Man was Canadian, so we didn't know him.

In the Sixties Bob’s work attracted the attention of Major Eric Harvey at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary and we went up to tour their growing collection, still being curated in warehouses.  Staggered by the amount of material for exhibits, we went up and down ramps, through doorways, through hallways.  Bob was ahead of me.  Suddenly he disappeared around a corner and then came back to grab me by the shoulders, thrust me around the corner for a few seconds, then pull me back.  “What did you see?” he demanded.  In that flash I saw the complete collection of Malvina Hoffman’s sculptures — not the Hall of Man, but portraits, maquettes for monuments, and so on.  Hundreds.

Semang Pygmy -- Bob bought a casting of this from Malvina.

We didn’t see them again until 1965 when Bob was on “To Tell the Truth” and we went to New York City.  We had the address to Hoffman’s studio, which was in a mews, a place where horses were once kept in big spaces with strong floors.  Sniffen Court had become famous for its community of prestigious sculptors.  We made an appointment and arrived with our arms full of flowers as tribute.  The entrance was into the studio space, dim and huge, with the small sculptures on tables, but we hardly had time to linger.

Upstairs Hoffman, dying of emphysema from stone dust, was on her “lit de repose,” and Guldie, her companion and guardian, took us to her side.  Bob had brought red roses, the classic, and I brought anemones.  We were dizzy with the reality of a figure that had been with each of us for so long and so intensely.  We visited a little while and Bob showed her photos of his work, which she praised, saying he was particularly good at fetlocks on horses which so many get wrong.  But then she was gasping and we had to leave.

In 1978 when I returned to Chicago to attend the U of Chicago Div School and Meadville/Lombard Theological School, at the first chance I got, I  went to the Hall of Man.  It was gone. I was stunned.  In the cultural revolution of the Seventies it had been dispersed as racist.  The revolutionaries of the time were Levelers, trying to put aside all differences in order to assure equality.  Of course, that’s not what happened.  Like my undergrad profs, they were simply trying to make everyone agree with them.  As Malvina would say, which she DID say to us about some ridiculous edict we complained about,  “Tell it to the Marines!”

Powered by the fear of stigma and the inability to tolerate difference, it is only now that society has recovered enough to reinstate the Hall of Man for its original purpose of celebrating variousness and the unique individual wherever they might be.  Every acting student who did this exercise of empathy for Alvina Krause, still carries the strong memory of that portrayed body and the mind it carried through a space we could only imagine — but DID to the best of our ability.  Of course, by now Alvina and Malvina are dead, so are the models for the bronzes, so is Bob Scriver, and so are many of Alvina’s acting students, even many of my students on the Blackfeet Reservation — not from a holocaust unless you count the truly universal scythe of old age.  

Now that the sculptures have been brought up out of the Field Museum warehouse (where they might have been in danger of de-accessioning like so many fine artworks), people can again take into themselves the lives of people unlike themselves

The first book of Malvina Hoffman’s that both Bob and I had in our libraries when we met was “Sculpture Inside and Out.”  It was one of our guides when we created the Bighorn Foundry in the backyard and learned to cast bronzes by using the classic Roman block investment method, not the modern chicken-fried bronze (dipped in glass batter) created from a kit.  Those who know about my biography of Bob Scriver will understand the title:  “Bronze Inside and Out.”

The second book we had acquired separately was “Heads and Tales,” the story of the making of the Hall of Man (that word “man” probably needs to be modernized to Human), named since most of the portraits are busts.

The third book is entitled “Yesterday is Tomorrow: A Personal History”.  Besides carrying flowers to her “lit de repose,” we each carried a copy of this book and she signed both copies.  Nothing fancy:  “with cordial good wishes.”  When she died, Guldie let us know, but we never sent any acknowledgment.  There was no way writing could say what she meant to us.  Time has helped.

My seminary in Chicago sold its building which his now occupied by the Neubauer Collegium, a center for reflection — a place where indeed “Yesterday is Tomorrow.”  The following is quoted from their website.

Alaka Wali is curator and applied cultural research director at The Field Museum. She was the founding director of the Center for Cultural Understanding and Change from 1995-2010 and currently curates the sizeable North American collection which includes a contemporary urban collection. Her work concerns the relationship between art-making and the capacity for social resilience. She has curated over 10 exhibits for The Field Museum, with the most recent being  “Looking at Ourselves: Rethinking the Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman.” 

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

Recent shifts in legal, political, and ethical demands on natural history museums have compelled them to open their institutional logics to interventions informed by indigenous peoples’ self-understanding—an understanding that makes specific interpretive claims about the meaning of given cultural phenomena, ontological claims expressed by their religious commitments, and even aesthetic and epistemological claims about the contributions contemporary Native American artists might make to the articulation of a long-standing historical tradition. Our interest, in short, is to understand how these interventions are playing out in the everyday work of the Field Museum and its efforts to engage, educate, and encourage the interest of an increasingly diverse public, Native and otherwise.

We endeavor to undertake this project in collaboration with the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, the Field Museum, and a growing pool of indigenous leaders, museum specialists, advocates, and artists in two ways. First, through on-the-ground participant observation of Field Museum staff as they plan, produce, and execute a major exhibition already under way in Hall 8, the North America Collection. And second, by staging conversations among invited Native American artists and advocates, Field staff, and scholars with a view to exploring how the future possibilities of ethnographic museums can be addressed through the specific efforts being undertaken by the Field in its renovation project. From questions concerning the status of indigenous cultural property rights, material and intellectual, to the enduring problems of reification and the marginalization of Native Americans, ethnographic collections like those at the Field have long been the focal point of debates about the relationship between scientific ethics, religious commitments, and aesthetics.

With its plans for renovation and its willingness to be the site and subject of this inquiry, the Field Museum stands at the forward edge of these questions and how their answers might offer lessons for the future of natural history. 

http://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/faculty/open_fields/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Open%20Fields%3A%20Ethics%2C%20Aesthetics%20and%20the%20Very%20Idea%20of%20a%20Natural%20History&utm_campaign=Lincoln%20and%20Alaka

I want to add that Malvina Hoffman would have loved to have portrayed Alaka Walli and her strong face.

DEEP HISTORY AND HUMAN THOUGHT

The Flesh Made Word

Two books, which are related, have flung open the doors to a paradigm shift that I welcome.  (Also they are the entering edge of a new field of thought.)  They come out of an interaction of several forces:  the new exploration of pre-writing history that reaches unbelievably far back to include “hominins” via traces  -- just like CSI! -- dependent on intense technology analyzing clues never available before, and something like the same examination of the morphology, evolution, mutation and response to environment of the human body.  We now see that it is best to understand the neurology of the whole body as “thinking,” not just the brain.  It’s so new and strange that many well-educated people just can’t get their heads around all this, let alone their "gut."

The two books are “Origins and Revolutions: Human Identity in Earliest Prehistory” by Clive Gamble  (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and “On Deep History and the Brain” by Daniel Lord Smail (University of California Press, 2008).  To some thinkers the ideas here are seen as destructive, tearing down convictions the academic community has felt were absolutely “true”.  Learning those ideas is what justified their Ph.D.  But this is mistaken or at least not eternal.  The new ideas ought to be seen as extensions, exploring underlying assumptions to challenge social contradictions we badly need to resolve.  It does ask the prevailing authorities to consider a broader understanding of hominins, history, and the canon.

Neubauer Collegium

It’s rather ironic that this material, which is EXACTLY the direction I’ve wanted to go for many decades, came to my attention because of Smail’s interval at the Neubauer Collegium where he gave a talk on “Containers,” in the broadest and most metaphorical sense.  The Collegium is housed in what was once “my” seminary, Meadville/Lombard Theological School, which is now leasing in the Chicago Loop.  

In my day (’78-’82) Eliade occupied an office on the top floor and lived next door.  There was a kind of “force field” around him.  People who see religious subjects in terms of “belief,” “dogma,” “prescribed ritual”, and so on -- not just as phenomena to study but as required faiths -- will have trouble with Eliade, myself, and maybe others too tactful to say so.  We operate on “feelings” but “feelings” have been classically defined as ephemeral, possibly neurotic, and unreal.  Every time I raised the issue, it was defined away as Phenomenology, trivial.  Then came post-structural analysis.  Now every phenomenon is a potential metaphor, possibly with great social power.  Like the metaphor of “God.”

UU “principles” are vague enough to evade quarreling, but there is still dogma despite protestations.  It takes a while to pick up the near-subconscious prioritization of academia, publishing, British Empire class systems, prestige and so on.  Inordinate valuing of eminent persons and national or ideological victories have caused neglect of all the post-structuralist revelations.  UU’s are just realizing it themselves, but now what?  Multi-national reconciliation?  The adjunct faculty these days is not the usual old white guys.  But the new people are too assorted to gel into a coherent entity.  And minorities often make progress by accepting the standards of the majority, a strategy of assimilation.

Smail is nimble enough to go around all that to the physiological basis of psychotropic mechanisms that influence our behavior and identity though rarely revealing the dynamics in the blood and organs where we base our thinking.  If the “dashboard” of thought were visible as dials and gauges exhibited on our chests, we could see thinking as clearly as with a brain fMRI, though in a different dimension, revealing the molecules in liquid that are messengers.  (We assume that nerves are like wires carrying info and the brain is a hard-drive.  There’s no good simile for blood molecules.  I use "soup" teasingly.)   

Smail is among new thinkers responding to research.  Many naive people consider “consciousness” to be the verbal description of one’s awareness and reasoning, but the “real” thought is underneath, not conscious.  If words are the pinnacle of human-ness, one must admit it’s a small footing that depends upon deep, broad and unseen forces which as plate tectonics, which are what throw up mountains in the first place.

I do not underestimate the anguish of being forced to give up sources of identity because new research and social forces have dispersed what previously was key.  Once I attended a “peace” conference in which the main address took as theme, “Abba,” Father, and explored the idea that a loving father was protective as a religious truth.  It was very nice, so long as you were actually remembering a loving father, and I suppose the supposition that a father would take a child on his lap for other purposes than protection would not be “nice” and therefore should not be considered.

Being mischievous, in the following discussion I asked the speaker what advice he would give a child who had been raped by the father.  How could that child see God as other than a rapist, or -- slightly better -- a vengeful punisher for wrong-doing.  What of the child who loves the rapist in the bonded way that children do, which is normally a protection?  The speaker said I didn’t “play fair” and avoided me for the rest of the conference.  But I was serious.  All metaphors carry significance that believers may not recognize -- may not want to.  Maybe some abused children do not want to be lambs.  Maybe a better God image for them is a protective wolf pack. 

This quote is from page 113 in Smail’s book:

“ . . .The large human brain evolved over the past 1.7 million years to allow individuals to negotiate the escalating complexities posed by human social living.  This is still what we use the brain for today -- most of the time, at least.  And then there are all the noncognitive features of the brain.  Many of the things we do are shaped by behavioral pre-dispositions, moods, emotions, and feelings that have a deep evolutionary history.  These body states are not ghostly things flitting mysteriously through consciousness.  Recent work in neuropsychology and neurophysiology has shown that they are physiological entities, characteristically located in specific parts of the brain and put there by natural selection.  some of them, including emotions, are relatively automated, no different  from the other areas of life governance -- basic metabolism, reflexes, pain, pleasure, drives, motivations -- that are routinely handled by the brain in all hominoids.  

Most, perhaps all, are also associated with an array of hormones and neurotransmitters such as testosterone and other androgens, estrogen, serotonin, dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin, prolactin, vasopressin, epinephrine, and so on.  Produced in glands and synapses throughout the body, these chemicals facilitate or block the signals passing along neural pathways.  They induce the somatic states revealed on and in our bodies and help determine how feelings actually feel.  We share virtually all of these chemicals with other animals, though the nervous system of an iguana, say, will not necessarily use testosterone in the same way ours does.  In a sense, each of these chemicals has its own natural history.”

Some people are distressed that I have no faith stance that I can describe as doctrine, except the provisional map my path has suggested so far.  But though I insist on staying put in a place I’ve known a long time, it’s because it’s not my body that travels -- just my mind and heart.  But then it turns out that they ARE my body! 

ON CONTAINERS: A Response to Daniel Lord Small

The building that was created for Meadville/Lombard UU seminary was sold and not just repurposed but also totally renovated to house the Neubauer Collegium, which supports scholars and other thinkers in their work.  One of the recent thinking guests was  Daniel Lord Smail whose current work is "On Containers."

  

http://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/events/uc/on_containers/

This abstract but “felt” concept is developing at the intersection of “deep time,” which is the effort to understand very very early humans combined with what we are now learning about how the brain forms concepts, metaphors, cultures out of human lives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6-zVNiItxs   Here is a video of the talk Prof. Smail gave last month in the Meadville/Neubauer building.

The following is a blog post, but also a first response to this powerful but elusive field of study.  Professor Smail’s main formal study is in Mediterranean cultures and history.  But I’m adapting his ideas to what I know about Blackfeet.

___________

The first container was the human hand.

This hand made it possible to create containers from whatever materials were in the environment.

Containers represent wealth because they make it possible to isolate, order, carry and store useful materials such a foodstuffs or fuel.

Containers make “wet cooking” possible by holding the food where it can be boiled even if the container is flammable, so long as it hold water.  Closely watching containers beginning to cook gives us concepts: “will this idea hold water?”  This is called “lattices” of thought -- a structuring that allows progress of ideas.

Cooking causes people to gather to eat, maybe in a shelter, and the bringing and sharing of food reinforces communities and families so that they become containers of relationship and a meaningful unit which can be linked in interaction with others.

Hunter-gatherer uses of containers must be light, convenient for carrying, like sacks made of hides, maybe small enough to attach to belts.   Even a shelter, like a tipi or other kind of tent, will be a “soft container.”  Hard-sided boxes don’t appear until people stay in one place, maybe because of agriculture or possibly because of fishing.  In the Pacific Northwest the people make houses out of easily split cedar boards, so there were boxes there, and the people lived on local fish.  They created canoes that were containers. 

In the Mandan villages, the people make houses out of reinforced earth mounds.  On the prairie along the Rockies, the Blackfeet cut lodgepole pine to make a skeleton on which to arrange a cover of skin.  In marshy land the people may bundle reeds into units of building.

The Blackfeet moved constantly and seasonally according to the sources of food.  When the Camas roots were ready to gather, they camped there to process them: burying them in a hole, building a fire on top and keeping it hot long enough to bake the roots.  People still do that by putting potatoes under a campfire to bake.  Though so far no animals have been observed making containers, some recognize natural containers and will, for instance, put a nut into a stone hole that will allow the shell to be cracked open without rolling when pounded.

baking camas roots

Much more elaborately, Blackfeet used “found” containers, opportunistic formations.  When using the technique called a “piskun” or buffalo jump, the people created a pop-up factory. Part of repeating the use of a certain place was not just the cliff that the animals could be driven over, but a cliff that had on the high side enough of a grassy valley (natural container) for a group of buffalo to linger there, grazing.  On the low side there needed to be another meadow where pits could be dug to throw in bones to cook the fat out of the marrow.  The meat was sliced thin, dried in sun and over smoky fires, sewn into sacks of skin, and stashed in caves high enough in the cliffs to keep the sacks dry.  

All of these strategies depend upon close observation and experience.  This makes human beings containers of knowledge for the others.  In that sense, animals who live in groups store knowledge of place and action.  Often it is a female, like a cow elk, maybe because they are not so likely to be killed young, so she remembers the migrations of the seasons, where the water sources are, and the good places to calve.

A responding use of hands is with tools.  A Plains Indian woman carried a digging stick because so much of the food was roots and rhizomes.  It is an humble object and usually overlooked by young male anthropologists.  This was the valuable object considered sacred because of its meaning at the Sun Ceremonies.  Tools -- in our relentless gender-role binaries -- are for men who must keep hands free for the instruments of hunting and war -- bows and arrows, or atl-atls and their use of containers corresponded:  quivers or small belt sacks -- but because everything was made of local materials, it was simpler to go where the supplies were than to remove them to carry along.  When metal knives, awls, needles arrived through trade, they were small and valuable, so the people of both genders made custom containers and sheaths for them.  For materials like hides, the container was likely to be a parfleche -- a rawhide folded envelope that lent itself to decoration, one of the few square objects in a camp.

parfleche

In places with reeds or straight withy branches, like willows, baskets and woven shapes became containers.  In places with the hard obsidian glassy stones, the people learned flint-knapping, chipping the material into sharp points for knives and arrows and then those could be carried in a sack.  Other special materials that needed containers were paints: red iron ochre, yellow from certain fungi, special charcoals,  or aromatic smudges from dried sweet grass, balsam fir (sweet pine), sage.  No doubt there were medicinal leaves and roots.  The little fossil stones, iniskim,  that look like tiny buffalo were carried along and the advice was to make a little cushion of bison fur to protect them in their bundle.

So, if containers are women’s objects (womb) and tools are men’s objects (like penises) then the two must be brought together in order to create a culture of daily interface with the work of hunting, cooking, and gathering.  Then there are children who can mature.

In the course of this talk called “containers,” Smail presented lists of belongings made for purposes of taxation or inheritance.  On the short lists of poor households, some things were designated as “sad,” which in that area (Tuscany) means something like “tristesse” which means used, worn, shabby, or what in translations from Blackfeet are called “scabby.”  One whole tribal group was called “Scabby Robes” because their tanning was spotty for some reason.  They were a group who did a lot of trading, which meant they were vulnerable to disease from contact.

horsehair bridle

A category of objects that are “restrainers” rather than containers but can do the same work of linking, sorting, keeping at hand, carrying along, is that of the rope.  I once watched a man separate out vegetable fiber by taking tall green weeds between his two hands and vigorously rolling them until the soft green stuff was pulverized and fell away, leaving the tough supporting fibers that could then be twisted together.  Once horses were around, their tail hairs were excellent for fine braiding into beautifully patterned bridles.  Vegetable and sheep fibers are the basis for clothing and linens.  In the Pacific Northwest there was a kind of woolly dog that was kept for its coat, which could be a kind of knitting wool.  That area still produces characteristic sweaters.  

All of these land-based objects, so intimately felt by hands and so constantly in use -- storage is a kind of use -- are a relationship with place that is lost by the kind of urbanization that is made of concrete and plastic.  “Don’t touch,” is a childhood barrier to understanding the world.  

Around “basic” people -- maybe called “paleolithic” -- there is a lot of time in the day to sit doing daily occupations, making and preparing materials, and talking all the while: telling stories, explaining where to find materials, remembering events and who did what, gossiping and criticizing.  In the “anthropocene” the urge is to hurry, to focus on one partial work (one cooks, one sews, one manages money, one makes furniture) and to trust that others are doing their part of the work well.  Relationships are often not intimate, long-term, or in any context but their one duty.

I came to this body of thought (contained) through reflection on designed spiritual experience as in religious ceremonies.  I’ll continue in another post.  It was the subject of my doomed Master’s Thesis at M/L which stalled out in part because this kind of thinking was not done except by Eliade.  But also in part because this new dawn of neurological research had not made a “way in.”  The building itself has become the container that links and preserves my work.

THE NEUBAUER COLLEGIUM FOR CULTURE AND SOCIETY

As acquired from Meadville/Lombard Theological Seminary

I’m editing this quite a lot.  Persons wanting to know more about the Neubauer should use the link.

from the U of Chicago mag: 
Know no boundaries

BY CLAIRE ZULKEY |  DIALOGO—SPRING/SUMMER 2015

With a new director and 16,000 square feet of new space, the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society has grown a lot this academic year—and with ten new research initiatives starting in July, it is prepared for more.

Architects' plan.

Jonathan Lear, the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in Social Thought, was appointed the Neubauer Collegium’s Roman Family Director in October . . . “My interest is in bringing together ancient Greek traditions and ethics with contemporary thinking about psychoanalytic treatment and therapy,” Lear says. “I’m the guy who thinks of these as one thing rather than two.” . . .  One new project he is particularly eager about spans institutions as well as disciplines. Open Fields: Ethics, Aesthetics and the Very Idea of a Natural History, Lear says, involves “not just an anthropologist from here and a professor of art from there, but the curator of the Field Museum, tribal elders from around the country, and young practicing native artists. “When it comes to certain kinds of research projects, we refuse to recognize boundaries.”

I hope he maintains some rigor and scepticism if he’s going to deal with Native Americans because they are intensely political, which means smoke and mirrors.  But my connection to the Neubauer is not intellectual -- it’s the building, which was constructed specifically to be the Meadville/Lombard Theological Seminary -- for the ages.  They assumed that a Unitarian tradition, with all its love of ancient Greeks and psychoanalysis, would last for all time.    

M/L now has no campus, using the money from the sale of the several buildings it owned to lease space for the library, classrooms, and offices in a Chicago Loop skyscraper.  The cynical among us, including me, refer to it as a mail order seminary.  It has pretty much abandoned the Classical world or the psychoanalytic world.  But all that is irrelevant here.

This is the remodeling plan the architects provided.  It’s not quite fulfilled.  It appears that the library stacks are simply removed.  In fact, the interior was simply rebuilt.  I think this is the same as was done to Chicago Theological Seminary some years ago.

Resuming the original article:

The renovated building provides a new space for scholars from around the world to collaborate, establishing the Neubauer Collegium as a locus for global engagement: 1. The building houses multiple suites for visiting fellows to set up office with adjacent versatile areas for collaboration. 2. The seminar room features advanced e-collaboration and videoconferencing capabilities. 3. The reading room, which showcases the building’s original wood paneling, is intended for informal engagement and reflection. 4. The exhibition gallery presents historical and contemporary art, films, and performances. (Illustration courtesy Kliment Halsband Architects)

. . . [the Neubauer’s] new home, which officially opened April 20 at 5701 South Woodlawn Avenue . . .  is a work of adaptive reuse, maintaining the spirit of the former Meadville Lombard Theological School while updating it for 21st century needs. 

Alumni will have an advance opportunity to see the building and witness the Neubauer Collegium in action . . . during an Alumni Weekend UnCommon Core session on the project Past for Sale, where researchers from anthropology, art history, economics, law, and policy will discuss the illicit antiquities market and how to combat it.

Anthropologist Justin Richland and a team that includes Field Museum curator Alaka Wali and tribal leaders from the Hopi and Crow Nations explore the use and misuse of Native American material culture with Open Fields: Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Very Idea of a Natural History.

Most recently, workers installed a sparkling new copper canopy over the main entrance on 57th street. Like the Neubauer Collegium's logo, the canopy's design mirrors the architectural motif found throughout the building's stonework.

So what does all this mean to me personally?  I won’t address the content of the symposiums here.  In the past "Native American Material Culture" has had me by the throat.  I think high intellectuals don’t get it.  They keep trying to convert a political and survival issue into a moral issue.  THEIR morality, not that of the Indians.

Buildings I’ve loved and lost include, from the beginning, some humble structures: a barely post-homestead farmhouse on South Deer Creek near Roseburg, Oregon, where my beloved aunt and her family lived.  The farmhouse was demolished to make way for a modern house three times the size and ten times as convenient.  The house where I grew up in Portland, OR, was both my mother’s bridal dowry and her deathbed.  It's still there, maintained and upgraded by young professionals starting families.  What saved it was location: near downtown, easy commute.

Interior:  Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife

Museum of the Plains Indian

Interior: Starr Gallery, Fort Benton

Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton, new major addition

The most painful change, quite relevant to “Open Fields”, was the conversion of the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife to the Blackfeet Heritage Center.  It is next door to the Museum of the Plains Indian, which was built during WWII to encourage the Blackfeet to create materials for sale to tourists, parallel to the Appalachian quilting projects.  When Bob Scriver, to whom I was married in the Sixties, died of old age in 1999, his fourth wife cashed out his estate and left the country.  (Rumor suggests the amount she cleared was in the millions.)  The contents of the museum were full-mounts of all the Montana game animals, free-standing, not behind glass, and Bob’s own sculpture.  (Today the Scriver bronzes about Blackfeet are in Fort Benton, in a reproduction of a fur trade factor’s house that is in part the Starr Gallery.)  Bob’s museum never displayed NA artifacts -- though among Thad Scriver (who came in 1901) and his two sons, born there, they had a good collection.  The book cataloging them still circulates on the used book market.

When the politics became belligerent (at one point there was a fire in the museum), Bob produced a book that recorded everything in detail and then sold the material culture collection to the Edmonton Royal Alberta Provincial Museum.  The Blackfeet in Browning were so angry that they drove up and cursed Philip Stepney, the acquiring curator.  In a few years he died of cancer.  The Provincial Museum gave all sacred Bundles back to the tribes, except that Bob’s personal materials mysteriously disappeared, including the Bundle he and I acquired ceremonially and kept “alive” over the years.  When things cooled a bit, the tribe -- which had bought the Scriver museum building -- hired William Grant, architect, to design a remodel.  It now sells the sort of products that the Museum of the Plains Indian was meant to promote, including the wealth of fine paintings by local artists, many trained by AIAI. 

Down at the heart of the Scriver Museum is an old warehouse, built in maybe 1900, which Scriver personally disassembled, hauled to the new site, and hammered back together.  There is still no fire protection, but no old valuable material objects either.  The Museum of the Plains Indian was damaged by the 1964 flood and objects were destroyed, but experts say the displays were damaged more from a scientific point of view by a project that “renewed” and “cleaned” them.  By now I am more philosophical about all this.

The scale of the remodeling of the Meadville/Lombard building and the ideas it shelters is remarkable.  When I was enrolled, 1978-82, Mircea Eliade was housed there.  He was our most valuable object.  The academic world was still on the upswing.  Once an arson fire broke out late in the evening in the stacks and I rushed over with my key just in time to save the doors from the firemen’s ax.  Long story.  Mixed.  Like all stories told about structures over time.  Time IS a fire.  It consumes buildings and people alike.

Where M/L rents space