Please join the Committee on Social Theory for the first speaker in our Spring 2024 Speaker Series on the theme of Global Asias happening on Friday, February 16 at 2 pm ET in the UK AA Alumni Auditorium at the William T. Young Library with Dr. Matthew Kohrman! 

This series will be featuring guest speakers engaging with interdisciplinary approaches across the humanities and social sciences to address the intensified contestation about Asia in light of the shifting geopolitical dynamics in the Asia-Pacific area and globally. The framing seminar which incorporates these guest speakers, ST 690/ MCL 525/ GWS 595: Global Asias, is co-taught by Dr. Liang Luo and Charlie Yi Zhang. 

Lecture Abstract

Michel Foucault died in 1984 at age 57. Since his untimely demise, an array of scholars have developed his notions regarding the cross pollination of sovereignty and biopower, with a new wave of publications triggered by Covid-19 (Murray 2022, Rouse 2021). Amidst this vibrant theory building, large blind spots have remained, including two perennials of human experience: patriarchy and easily cultivated psychoactive drugs. In this talk, I chronicle that a specific psychoactive botanical, native to the Americas, has had an oversized role in sovereignty’s shapeshifting amidst biopower. I trace how, from the Columbian Exchange onset, tobacco came to be regularly coded a prerogative of male dominance, placing it ‘in the room’ at the birth of sovereignty-biopower synergies. And I track how such synergies, from North America to China, have regularly piggybacked on a distinctive doubling inherent to tobacco, it being something which people have long characterized as life ending and life enhancing, even medicinal. I dub this pharmakonism: processes wherein regimes, notably patriarchal, accrue power by reconciling and leveraging a commonplace thing's shifting attributes, good and bad, tonic and toxin. I develop this concept vis-a-vis tobacco with the hope it'll aid more than abstract biopolitical musing. May it also help clarify why – despite much condemnation over the last century, despite ouster from many quarters of polite society – tobacco is smoked by more people today worldwide than ever before, it remains the number cause of preventable human death, and why, if you wish, you can lawfully purchase cigarettes in nearly every country you visit. 

Statistical Thinking About Home Run Hitting

Jim Albert

Emeritus Distinguished University Professor

Department of Mathematics and Statistics

Bowling Green State University

Abstract

Baseball is remarkable with respect to the amount of data collected over the seasons of Major League Baseball (MLB) beginning in 1871.  These data have provided an opportunity to address many questions of interest among baseball fans and researchers.  This talk will review several statistical studies on baseball home run hitting by the speaker over the last 30 years.  By modeling career trajectories, one learns about the greatest peak abilities of home run hitters.  We know that players exhibit streaky home run performances, but is there evidence that hitters exhibit streaky ability? MLB has been concerned about the abrupt rise in home run hitting in recent seasons.  What are the possible causes of the home run explosion, and in particular, is the explosion due to the composition of the baseball?

One of the most widespread human experiences is the sense of being descended from those who came before. It is a basic way – sometimes people feel it the most basic way – of understanding, justifying, and contesting the organization of social life, including matters of family, class, place, race, and professions. Along with my co-authors Loka Ashwood and Jay Orne (we’re writing a book about this) in this talk I term this deep and abiding concern heritas: the authority of social relations we contend we did not choose because they descend from our embodied past. Heritas draws on two common conceptions of “blood” heritage, what we term physical blood and generated blood, a more figurative understanding. Embodied heritage gains social power through externalizing identity into the past and into nature through historicization and naturalization. Heritas is inescapably ideological, since no one can know for sure what went on in the past or what will go on in the future. But it is a felt ideology – deeply meaningful, capable of eliciting some of the strongest emotional responses of human experience. There is also a spirited quality to heritas’s felt ideology. Part of what people feel is a sense of the presence of descent, ghostly ties that tingle the flesh and enliven the blood. And heritas is recursive. It structures much of our social organization, which in turn shapes our felt ideology, configuring our sense of the justice of social power and the boundaries of commitment we show for one another’s well-being. Painfully, but crucially, heritas is a common source both of some of our most basic delights and worst torments. Heritas is a troubled joy, for we are troubled beings.

Professor Michael M. Bell is an accomplished agroecologist, environmental sociologist, and community scholar at the esteemed University of Wisconsin-Madison. He boasts an impressive collection of eleven published books, three of which have been granted prestigious national awards. Among his recent works are City of the Good: Nature, Religion, and the Ancient Search for What Is Right (Princeton, 2018), the Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology (Cambridge, 2020), and the 6th edition of Invitation to Environmental Sociology (Sage, 2021). In addition to his scholarly pursuits, Professor Bell is also a gifted composer and performer of grassroots and classical music.

Although today race is generally thought of largely in terms of skin color and blood, its origins lie in part in an ancient conflict that we often overlook: the urban-rural conflict between the bourgeois peoples of the city and the pagan peoples of the countryside. Starting with a close analysis of a work of colonial bigotry, Sir Harry Johnston’s 1920 The Backward Peoples and Our Relations with Them, I sketch out the intersectional implications of pagan-bourgeois conflict for the rise of the idea of race – what might be termed a rural sociology of race. I also use etymological evidence to connect the history of racial hierarchy to the construction of savagery, and the construction of savagery to some three thousand years of urban exploitation of the rural, closely associated with imperialism and rise of urban-centered structures of power. The English words pagan, heathen, savage, rude, villain, and backward (and their equivalents in many other European languages) all etymologically stem from rural metonyms; they are all forms of savaging the rural. Upon this phantasm, an economics of savage exploitation runs through the history of bourgeois exploitation. I also briefly sketch how colonialists used techniques of ruralizing the savage to exploit pagan peoples. I conclude by considering how pagan exploitation could be incorporated into accounts of intersectionality, and how we can interrogate attempts to justify such exploitation through critique of what I have elsewhere termed the natural conscience. to the event.

Professor Michael M. Bell is an accomplished agroecologist, environmental sociologist, and community scholar at the esteemed University of Wisconsin-Madison. He boasts an impressive collection of eleven published books, three of which have been granted prestigious national awards. Among his recent works are City of the Good: Nature, Religion, and the Ancient Search for What Is Right (Princeton, 2018), the Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology (Cambridge, 2020), and the 6th edition of Invitation to Environmental Sociology (Sage, 2021). In addition to his scholarly pursuits, Professor Bell is also a gifted composer and performer of grassroots and classical music.

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