Mexican Masks

Blogdigger Media search for Other Latin American Cultures
Blogdigger Media search for Other Latin American Cultures

New Conversation, New Narrative: Stanley Fish

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Stanley Fish. (41 minutes, 19 mb mp3)

Stanley Fish made the campaign’s most audacious — also the most thoughtful — attribution of a certain aspect of divinity to Barack Obama. Fish was a Milton scholar before he became a culture warrior and, more recently, the New York Times’ “Think Again” blogger on the life of the mind, on campus and off. When Doctor Fish pictured the taunting John McCain and the imperturbable Barack Obama as a version of Satan’s contest with Jesus, he was drawing on Milton’s Paradise Regained — “a four-book poem in which a very busy and agitated Satan dances around a preternaturally still Jesus until, driven half-crazy by the response he’s not getting, the arch-rebel (i.e. maverick) loses it… The power Jesus generates,” in Fish’s reading “is the power of not moving from the still center of his being and refusing to step into an arena of action defined by his opponent. So it is with Obama, who barely exerts himself and absorbs attack after attack, each of which, rather than wounding him, leaves him stronger. It’s rope-a-dope on a grand scale… Jesus is usually the political model for Republicans, but this time his brand of passive, patient leadership is being channeled by a Democrat.”

We are talking in this election-day conversation about what feels already like a redemptive example and a profound turn in the civic culture. Are we ready for a touch of what could also be called a Gandhian model of doing the public business? I am asking Stanley Fish about the Obama challenge to public intellectuals, and about the Obama effect on the American “narrative.” Fish speaks as a Hillary Clinton Democrat who’s ready to make a considered and very large leap of faith.

SF: There will be, I believe, a three to six month period, which we can call a window of opportunity. By that I mean: countries around the world — some allies, some neutral, some our adversaries — will think there is a new opportunity for conversation and an opening up of old questions. So that is one part of the equation, the other part of the equation, if I’m right, is the response of the Obama administration is able to make.

In the Middle East, Latin America, Russia and Africa, there will be an opportunity for the United States, especially for the Obama administration, to start talking with people in ways that might lead to concrete resolutions, not tomorrow but down a road that has a discernable end.

I just heard this morning that Hugo Chavez, who is anticipating an Obama victory, said that he would be happy to sit down with the new American president and see what areas of compatibility and mutual self-interest we might identify so that we may no longer have to think of our two countries existing in an adversarial relationship.

CL: It’s remarkable. When Ahmadinejad calls then you know something has really happened.

SF: It is remarkable. If a bunch of things like that happen, and the administration has the savvy to take advantage of it, then I think we’ll see remarkable changes…

Stanley Fish in conversation with Chris Lydon, November 4, 2008

pundit - podictionary 807

This episode sponsored by Audible.com. For a free audio bookplease visit audiblepodcast.com/podictionary

I always like it when I have a word to play with that does not have the standard French/Latin or Old English roots.  Pundit is one such word.

But it is a word that also presents a few angles of the challenge of etymology.

A pundit in this day and age is most often a commentator; some expert who is asked onto a news show to give his or her opinion.

The dictionaries give this definition but hidden within it is an earlier meaning: expert.

The word appeared first in English 1661 and the Oxford English Dictionary gives its source as Sanskrit.

The British began trading with India right at the beginning of the 1600s when Shakespeare was in his prime and the East India Company grew to be the defacto government of India over the following 250 years until the real British government took over officially in 1858.  To continue that little timeline it was 1947 when Britain finally handed India’s government back to Indians.

At the time that the British began their Indian adventures a pundit was someone who had studied Sanskrit history and tradition and was more or less considered a keeper of those traditions and pieces of traditional knowledge.

India was of tremendous value to England and so in trying to govern the place it didn’t just hammer down laws that had evolved over the centuries in England, since that wouldn’t have worked very well in India.

Instead the English government in India was forced to take into account the systems of laws and customs already on the ground.

To do this they needed local area experts.

In the local language these people were called pundits or pandita.

Hence the second meaning identified in the OED is an official court title appearing first in 1827, Pundit of the Supreme Court.  These were Indians who worked alongside the English and applied their specialized knowledge of the local legal landscape.

Even before this title was recognized however, in 1816, experts in this, that, and the other thing began being called pundits, at first satirically, and later seriously.

This word exposes for me how opaque our western understanding of other cultures is.

First in its etymology.  Here we have a word that clearly has a very long history but what do we know about it before some English guy wrote it down?

Almost nothing.

Somebody must know, but the information is beyond my reach, which means it’s beyond the reach of the vast majority of English speakers.

But pundit points to other tricky angles in crossing cultures.

Not only did those British legal experts find that their systems failed them in the new Indian environment, but the word pundit points to other stumbles and trip-ups.

The American Heritage Dictionary identifies the word pundit is by the as possibly of Dravidian origin.

Dravidian is a family of languages from India first identified to our western eyes as distinct by a guy named Robert Caldwell back about the time the British government officially got to running India.

To underline how complicated understanding the related cultures might be, I see that in Wikipedia it says there are 37 languages within the Dravidian group—most in southern India.

Dravidian as word itself was invented by Caldwell, based on the names of cultural groups that also gave us the word Tamil.

I’m skating on thin ice here because I of course don’t speak any of these languages and even for Caldwell who immersed himself and did speak several the subtleties were legion.

You have to be a true pundit to avoid getting into trouble.

And Caldwell did get into trouble.  He chose one unfortunate word to describe one cultural group he was writing about and it blew up in his face. People were writing angry letters not only to Caldwell’s boss but even to the Archbishop of Canterbury and he was never welcome in that part of India again.