Boycott or pogrom?
Saturday, July 13th, 2002 05:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerThis article in the New York Times explains how Israeli academics in England were dismissed from their positions as a result of a boycott of Israeli institutions. What follows is two of my posts to the cogling mailing list.
While I am not generally in favour of using this list for political debate (except as it concerns issues such as metaphor in political rhetoric etc.), and have commented on this point in the past regarding certain postings on Kosovo) I feel this is an issue worth supporting (apologies for the convoluted syntax of this sentence). Most of the contributors to this list hold academic posts, often because although we could earn much more in the private sector, we prefer the freedom to
research and teach as we wish, and the relative job-security that academia provides. While I am also opposed to the Israeli occupation, the victimisation of Jewish academics is disturbing (assuming at the claims in this post are true). One day it is the Left trying to get rid of Jews; one day it is the Right. Who knows, after September 11, I could be refused a post at an American university for being a (nominal) Muslim.
What I find ironic is that this is happening in linguistics departments. We do all this research on prototypes, stereotypes, discourse communities and so on, then we get sacked because someone who has
half-absorbed Aristotelean categorisation confuses essential and accidental attributes.
Follow-up ....
There was also a serious point in there, which is that Aristotelean categorisation co-exists with other categorisation methods (e.g. family resemblance, closeness to a prototype etc.). This is particularly true of expert categories, which are more often than not knowingly created; however, these often coexist with folk categories which employ non-Aristotelean categorisation. Someone mailed me off-list to point out that my posting included the slip "Jewish" in the place of "Israeli" (probably because just before writing I'd been thinking about Heidegger's selling out Husserl). ISRAELI is an expert category; JEW is a folk category. The former is Aristotelean, in that there are necessary and sufficient conditions for being an Israeli, while the latter is only Aristotelean in the "strictly speaking" sense (e.g. anyone with a Jewish mother is strictly speaking a Jew, even if they have no religious or cultural affiliation with Judaism or the Jewish nation). In practice, Jewishness is an extremely complex category involving prototypes, stereotypes and radial elements (e.g. "atheist Jew").
What is interesting here is that Israel is unusual in being a state which is nominally secular but in practice highly tied to a religion which is not a majority in any other state. Thus, it is easy to make the Israeli=Jewish conflation. China has a repressive regime, but it is not assumed that Chinese outside China, even if they still hold PRC citizenship, are, ceteris paribus, complicit in the actions of the Chinese state in Tibet, nor would anyone expect them to make a public statement denouncing the regime (something I find reminiscent of the loyalty oaths of the 1950's). To be sure, there are political differences here, but I suspect the Israeli=Jewish factor is involved; unconsciously there is an assumption of an essential Jewishness which gives Jews a stronger connection with the State of Israel than other people have with the governments who claim to represent them (interestingly, Israel seems to support this idea with the "law of return"). There is always a "citizen for state" metonymy going on, but it is much stronger in this case.
As for my quip about essential and accidental attributes, a related point is that Aristotle was correct in drawing a distinction between the two, but missed the important issue of typicality. To use his own example, in the category MAN, the feature WHITE (here I think as opposed to green or purple rather than to brown or black) is accidental in the sense that it is not part of the definition of "man", but it is by no means accidental in the normal sense of the word; humans fall into a certain spectrum of colours for reasons associated with their humanness. Thus in the expert category of ISRAELI, being Jewish is an accidental attribute in the strict legal sense, but it sure as hell is a typical attribute, and this in turn leads to some of the less exemplary features of this debate (ad hominem arguments, anti-Semitism, false accusations of anti-Semitism and so on).
While I am not generally in favour of using this list for political debate (except as it concerns issues such as metaphor in political rhetoric etc.), and have commented on this point in the past regarding certain postings on Kosovo) I feel this is an issue worth supporting (apologies for the convoluted syntax of this sentence). Most of the contributors to this list hold academic posts, often because although we could earn much more in the private sector, we prefer the freedom to
research and teach as we wish, and the relative job-security that academia provides. While I am also opposed to the Israeli occupation, the victimisation of Jewish academics is disturbing (assuming at the claims in this post are true). One day it is the Left trying to get rid of Jews; one day it is the Right. Who knows, after September 11, I could be refused a post at an American university for being a (nominal) Muslim.
What I find ironic is that this is happening in linguistics departments. We do all this research on prototypes, stereotypes, discourse communities and so on, then we get sacked because someone who has
half-absorbed Aristotelean categorisation confuses essential and accidental attributes.
Follow-up ....
There was also a serious point in there, which is that Aristotelean categorisation co-exists with other categorisation methods (e.g. family resemblance, closeness to a prototype etc.). This is particularly true of expert categories, which are more often than not knowingly created; however, these often coexist with folk categories which employ non-Aristotelean categorisation. Someone mailed me off-list to point out that my posting included the slip "Jewish" in the place of "Israeli" (probably because just before writing I'd been thinking about Heidegger's selling out Husserl). ISRAELI is an expert category; JEW is a folk category. The former is Aristotelean, in that there are necessary and sufficient conditions for being an Israeli, while the latter is only Aristotelean in the "strictly speaking" sense (e.g. anyone with a Jewish mother is strictly speaking a Jew, even if they have no religious or cultural affiliation with Judaism or the Jewish nation). In practice, Jewishness is an extremely complex category involving prototypes, stereotypes and radial elements (e.g. "atheist Jew").
What is interesting here is that Israel is unusual in being a state which is nominally secular but in practice highly tied to a religion which is not a majority in any other state. Thus, it is easy to make the Israeli=Jewish conflation. China has a repressive regime, but it is not assumed that Chinese outside China, even if they still hold PRC citizenship, are, ceteris paribus, complicit in the actions of the Chinese state in Tibet, nor would anyone expect them to make a public statement denouncing the regime (something I find reminiscent of the loyalty oaths of the 1950's). To be sure, there are political differences here, but I suspect the Israeli=Jewish factor is involved; unconsciously there is an assumption of an essential Jewishness which gives Jews a stronger connection with the State of Israel than other people have with the governments who claim to represent them (interestingly, Israel seems to support this idea with the "law of return"). There is always a "citizen for state" metonymy going on, but it is much stronger in this case.
As for my quip about essential and accidental attributes, a related point is that Aristotle was correct in drawing a distinction between the two, but missed the important issue of typicality. To use his own example, in the category MAN, the feature WHITE (here I think as opposed to green or purple rather than to brown or black) is accidental in the sense that it is not part of the definition of "man", but it is by no means accidental in the normal sense of the word; humans fall into a certain spectrum of colours for reasons associated with their humanness. Thus in the expert category of ISRAELI, being Jewish is an accidental attribute in the strict legal sense, but it sure as hell is a typical attribute, and this in turn leads to some of the less exemplary features of this debate (ad hominem arguments, anti-Semitism, false accusations of anti-Semitism and so on).
