gradical

they/she/he 30 this is a sideblog

[pspsappho]

it's all reception innit

[pspsappho]

idk why i have such an aversion to citing a whole chapter of something. so often i find myself trying avoid notes to the effect of "on x, see chapter 3 of y" even when y has an entire chapter on x & if you really want to know more about x then chapter 3 of y has got you covered. but in my head for some reason this is bad to do. specifically in books rather than edited volumes tbc my brain doesn't mind me citing a chapter of an edited volume on x

[ringthembells]

god israel's destruction of tyre is like especially depressing tbh like thats one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world. people have lived there since the bronze age. there is so, so so much history and world heritage there that's being blown up and destroyed forever because its existence doesn't fit israel's nationalist vision of history.

[ringthembells]

lots to say about israel's politicized and propagandized use of history and archaeology to further their narrative tbh. here's a good article about it.

'It comes with the territory': How Israel's archaeologists legitimize annexation

Weaponizing antiquities is part of Israel's colonial legacy, says Rafi Greenberg, whose colleagues have largely remained silent about Gaza's

[ghoulodont]

(stumbling out of the document covered in blood) ok i wrote 100 words

[fluentisonus]

gobbet perhaps one of the most charming academic terms to me.............. word that means a lump of some sort of substance. maybe meat but it could be anything. kind of gives the impression of an ambiguous blob of something that has been put wetly down in front of you. But☝️ here we use it to mean a small section or piece of text you are going to dissect and analyse as deeply as you can to the best of your ability

[fluentisonus]

yay <3

[walk-up-songs]

[one single bloodcurdling agonized scream] ok time to lock in

[gaytanic-panic]

[romehbo]

isn’t it so interesting that media about ancient rome consistently chooses to portray black characters as enslaved to white masters even when they have every possibility to do literally anything else. isn’t it so interesting how they not only almost always choose to cast black actors for north african characters when the characters are enslaved, but also consciously portray their clothing, hairstyles, accents and traditions as ~vaguely west african~ even when it is very far from the north african culture they’re claiming to portray? isn’t all of that so interesting

[romehbo]

i was trying to explain to my mom why this pisses me off so badly and i think it comes down to this: time and time again, western media refuses to imagine a world where the enslaved are not black africans and the black africans are not enslaved

[pspsappho]

every year i have to submit a progress report to my funders which basically amounts to several thousand words of me saying "yes i am still working on my phd" and my supervisor confirming "yes they're still working on the phd" and quite frankly i fail to see how it's a good use of anybody's time to be writing or reading it

[pspsappho]

doubly so when they announced out of nowhere 2 months ago that the government is cancelling this whole funding programme and completely retooling it in september (to which i say: lol. lmao) so like. i KNOW they don't give a shit any more either

[pspsappho]

every year i have to submit a progress report to my funders which basically amounts to several thousand words of me saying "yes i am still working on my phd" and my supervisor confirming "yes they're still working on the phd" and quite frankly i fail to see how it's a good use of anybody's time to be writing or reading it

[dragon-in-a-fez]

imagine you're Plato and you get resurrected and the first thing someone tells you is your name now means "not having sex" and you're like haha linguistic coincidences are wild and they're like no it's a direct reference to you as a person

[postarcadian]

generally I try to tread lightly re: neopaganism/reconstructionist European paganism on here but I do think that its false claims to historicity have done a lot of damage when it comes to people understanding what e.g. early modern witch hunting and the Spanish Inquisition were actually about. and I think it’s important for practitioners of modern paganism, as well as people in general, to acknowledge the fact that modern western and southern European reconstructionist paganisms are fundamentally a product of 19th-early 20th century Romanticism, with all of the baggage that that entails. they cannot be practiced in a way that is not inflected with that history, any more than Christianity can be practiced in a way that is not inflected with its own history.

*this is obviously not to say I don’t think people should practice said religious traditions, or find meaning in them! there are plenty of other religious traditions worldwide that are also products of the 19th century (Mormonism is the obvious one that springs to mind, but the Baháʼí Faith also traces its history to the 19th century, among many others). but the neo- in neopaganism is doing a lot of work.

[postarcadian]

re: tags several people have added this post is obviously not intended to imply an endorsement of Mormonism, with which your blogger has a history - it's simply the most immediate religious tradition that springs to mind whose origins are as a 19th century NRM. but it's also a somewhat instructive comparison in that Mormonism also makes claims to historicity and continuity with ancient practice that are, to put it mildly, extremely dubious

[marxism-ex-silium]

im sorry but this is misguided. by the 20thc Romanticism was far less relevant within paganistic worship reconstruction as well as neo-paganism practices. The majority of these sprung out of fascism. Wicca is a good example of this, as well as any modern polly-hellenic website which are often full of various dogwhistles for white supremacy, eugenics, and 20thc European Fascist imagery. To ignore the extremely extensive, well documented, and influential links between modern European and unamerican 'Paganism' and fascism is a huge blind spot.

[postarcadian]

definitely don’t mean to downplay this. my thinking in this post is largely about Margaret Murray’s witch-cult hypothesis, whose origins can be traced to Karl Ernst Jarcke and Franz Josef Mone in the context of early 19th century German Romanticism, and which very much gets picked up by 20th century Wicca and feminist attempts to reconstruct “matriarchal pagan religion” or similar. but the association of neopaganism with extreme nationalism and antisemitism is there from the beginning and as you point out, particularly reconstructionist Germanic paganism and Roman paganism à la Julius Evola and later the reconstruction of Hellenic paganism as practiced by the Golden Dawn cannot be extricated from the history of fascism and the far-right.

[paparoach]

i will be your 30 year old mutual

[mcaelius]

it's awesome because (remembers the civil war) it's not awesome actually. pharsalus

[victoriansecret]

Eighteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeenth ceeeeeeeeeeeentury <- the long 18th century

[kallimakhos]

disability accommodations are a myth abled people tell themselves to make themselves feel better about systematically expelling so many disabled people from their institutions

[fluentisonus]

big day for the "not being able to see both sides of the vase at once in a thematically significant way" enjoyers (me)

[beazley link / text from sappho in the making: the early reception, by dimitrios yatromanolakis]