On Start the Week Lisa Jardine discusses how complex maths has broken free of the laboratory and now influences every aspect of our lives. James Owen Weatherall applauds the take-over of the financial world by physicists, Marcus du Sautoy revels in the numbers and Kenneth Cukier explores how big data will change everything from disease control to bargain buys. But the cultural commentator Tiffany Jenkins sounds a note of caution about a world where everything is measurable.
Joy Porter is the author of Native American Freemasonry: Associationalism and Performance in America (University of Nebraska Press, 2011). She has also written several other publications, including, To Be Indian: The Life of Iroquois-Seneca Arthur Caswell Parker (University of Oklahoma Press, 2001) and Land & Spirit in Native America (Praeger Press, 2012), and she co-edited a book with Kenneth M. Roemer, entitled The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2005). In her latest book, she carefully tells the fascinating story of an elusive subject that sparks many historical debates: the organizational history and inclusion of Native American freemasons in America. She covers the broad chronology of freemasonry in general, from the British origins in the sixteenth-century to freemasonry in America from the eighteenth- to the twentieth-centuries. She explains how freemasonry is one of many institutions that exemplified the process of the transatlantic exchange of ideas from Europe to the Americas. More specifically, she examines the Native American freemasonry from an interdisciplinary approach, such as using theories from performance studies and socio-psychological ideas of associationalism. Furthermore, she examines Native American freemasonry from the lense of understanding the idea of “ornamentalism” (a concept borrowed from Edward Said’s work, Orientalism) to evoke the historical and racial perceptions of Native Americans from the colonial era, and how some of these ideas shifted over time. Listen in.
This Day in Skepticism: Space Medicine; News Items: Russian Lake Monster, Bones of Richard III, Scientific Genius, Without Fear, Feathered Dinosaurs; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Tuesday Boy; Interview with George Hrab; Science or Fiction
Hedge fund manager David Einhorn sues Apple. LinkedIn connects. And Dell goes private. Our analysts discuss some of the week's big stories and talk about some stocks on their radar.
Deploying hashtags and hunger strikes, flash mobs and vigils, the Idle No More movement of First Nation peoples in Canada is reaching a global audience. While new technology and political conditions alter the landscape of dissent, Indigenous activists using a wide tactical array to further their demands is not anything new, the media’s breathless claims notwithstanding.
Frederick E. Hoxie has composed a powerful new book highlighting this truth. In eight moving chapters stretching from the American Revolution to the contemporary period of self-determination, This Indian Country: American Indian Activists and the Place They Made(Penguin 2012) introduces us to courageous men and women whose names might not be familiar but whose legacies are still felt. Facing down a settler state determined on their erasure, they struggled to carve out a place for Native nationhood within — but not necessarily of— the polity that surrounded them.
