Why Tenure?*

This past semester, I lived in an academic residence in Madrid called the Residencia de Estudiantes. I knew that in its early days it had been a residence for young students who had gone on to be the leading intellectual lights of Spain’s 20^th century, but I didn’t know all that much about the background of the place until I brought my cultural history students there for a field trip that the original professor had planned for them. As it turns out, the development of the Residencia was a poignant and practical response to clear, present threats to academic freedom and free expression that came about in the late nineteenth-century in Spain, restrictions that sound an awful lot like many things that the American academy is facing today, such as the proposal in Wisconsin, which would enshrine in state law the abolition of tenure and the intellectual protections that tenure affords.

A cleverly FERPA-compliant photo of my students on their tour of the Resdiencia site, guided by a student from the modern languages program at the University of Exeter, working there as part of her Erasmus year exchange program.

An 1875 Spanish law stipulated that nothing that was taught in a degree-granting university could contradict the tenets of the Catholic Church or demean the monarchy, the kind of broad, overarching, blanket prohibition that could be used to stifle virtually any kind of dissenting or “dangerous” or unpopular idea. Almost immediately, a group of progressive academics fled Madrid’s historic Complutense University and founded a kind of independent college called the Institución de la Libre Enseñaza, the institute of free education. The institute was based on the educational principles of Karl Kraus and promoted the idea of free, unfettered, and broad inquiry. By 1915, the ILE had opened a residential center, which was inhabited by the students who would become the vanguard in scientific and humanistic fields in Spain for more than a generation, including Federico García Lorca, Miguel de Unamuno, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. During the Spanish Civil War, the director succeeded in having the Residencia declared to be a neutral zone in Madrid, and so it attracted many more intellectuals, dissidents, and liberals who used it as a base camp from which to plan their escapes from the country.

Government agencies meddling in the curriculum and the broad principles of research and teaching, and religious organizations seeking to tailor curricula to suit their dogmas, necessitated the creation of a separate institution where open-minded people could teach and learn. I am doubtful that, in our credential-obsessed society, such an endeavor would work today in response to threats to free inquiry. Nevertheless, it is an instructive model to keep in mind as a radical way to respond to threats to academic freedom, and perhaps also useful as a reminder that nothing is ever really new.

*The title of this post is drawn from a conversation that is ongoing on Twitter in response to the Wisconsin situation and all the potential implications, with the hashtag #WhyTenure. This post is clearly not a defense of tenure or an exact response to the question, but is an ancillary issue.

Our Colonies, Our Selves

 These are some images from the Museum of America, which is not so much an anthropological museum that covers American civilizations, but rather a museum that is an inadvertent anthropological study of how Spain views the Americas. It's another one of these museums that began its life as a cabinet of curiosities (part of the royal one, in this case) and very much maintains that outlook.

Culture at People's Expense: Convivencia and Anti-Semitism in Contemporary Spain

The university city of Alcalá de Henares, most closely associated with the personal confessor to Isabel I, is now a suburb of Madrid that, like many other small Castilian towns, presents itself as part of the heritage of the "tres culturas" of Spain, a place where Jews, Christians and Muslims forged a kind of coexistence, uneasy and inconsistent, but also vibrant and fruitful.

 

 

There is even a badly-proofread plaque in the "trilingual patio" of the historic site of the college commemorating a "three-faiths" encounter there.

But there is also this anti-US, anti-war mural that buys very directly into the Jewish-cabal-behind-it-all conspiracy-myth, right in the heart of the historic barrio judío. It's quite striking in its details, with a six-pointed Jewish star in the upper right-hand corner of the American flag where the 50 five-pointed stars (or even one large five-pointed star standing in for the tiny ones) should be.

 

 

It is a striking contrast as civic art in a city that is actively playing up its Jewish heritage, perhaps cynically to encourage tourism or perhaps in earnest as a real embrace of its past. But it is also a contrast that draws attention to the phenomenon of Jew-as-historical-artifact. Society at large is happy to embrace its Jewish past. After centuries of a different kind of national narrative, it has suddenly become a bit of a cool thing to do, and a path of liberation from the country's own fascist 20th century history. But it doesn't particularly seem to know what to do with actual, flesh-and-blood Jewish people.

Madrid itself is a city covered in swastika graffiti. I'd estimate that there are just about as many that are Xed out as a statement of general anti-fascism as there are that are painted on in earnest support of neo-Nazi or general fascist ideology, but that small and diffuse gesture doesn't inspire a lot of confidence against such an onslaught. It is a city that is, at a minimum, deeply ill-at-ease with its own position in relation to the whole of the twentieth century.

Alcalá de las Cigüeñas

There are cranes that nest all over the roofs of Alcalá. That is pretty much all. (Except for the fact that I think I did a pretty good job, if I don't say so myself, of taking photos of wildlife with a long lens and no tripod.)

   

19th-Century Kitsch in Alcalá de Henares

 

 My first stop in Alcalá de Henares was the Palacete de Laredo, the former home of the Duke of Laredo, done in the monstrously wonderful neo-Mudéjar style that was popular at the end of the nineteenth century in Spain and in England (and, in a largely more restrained way, in the United States as well). The only way I can think to describe the aesthetic is to say that it is a compete hoot. 

 

 

Images from the Cervantes Dig

There is a small exhibition of photos from the Cervantes dig currently being displayed at the Museo de la Historia de Madrid.  So these aren't my photos. Well, they're my photos of somebody else's photos. Jaime Balaguer was the photographer with the archaeological group and they are his. 

It's really too bad that the museum didn't even see fit to mount this as proper photography exhibition and show real, good prints of the images; it gets back to what I said earlier about nobody wanting to be bothered about cultural patrimony but wanting everyone else to be super excited about it.

The exhibition is presented like a philological exercise: the photos are organized by lemma — niche, exhumation, laboratory, etc. — and each begins with a dictionary definition of the term, explaining how the concept it names was an important part of the exhibition with that depressingly misleading tactic of making it seem like the dictionary is the artiber of all meaning.

This one reads: "Even though the convent isn't the ideal location for this purpose, since the terms in which it is defined specify that it is is the 'the place that is set up with the necessary equipment to carry out investigation, experiement and scientific and technical work,' the crypt and sacristy had to be used as make-shift laboratories." The convent isn't an ideal location for investigation not because the dictionary says that a lab is something else, but for all the actual practical reasons that a lab isn't an ideal location for that kind of work. It's a small distinction, I know; but it betrays a very rigid approach to things. An approach that says that the dictionary is the final arbiter of meaning isn't the kind of approach that makes concessions to practical usage or public concern.

The consequence of this is that I saw some cool photos (and realized that the room I was kicked out of the convent for entering is the one with the trap door down to the crypt) but still don't really have a good sense of what the real purpose of the dig was or what the scientists believe that they have accomplished. It still seems like disturbing human remains for the sake of a badly mishandled PR whim.

Historical Memory in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

1) Photography is permitted throughout the Reina Sofia museum except in the galleries that that exhibit Civil War art.

2) On either side of the canvas of Picasso's Guernica now sits, on a high white metal stool, a guard specifically tasked with scanning the crowd and making sure that everyone complies.

Richard and Miguel: Some Additional Thoughts on Getting Kicked Out of Church

This is a modified and expanded version of a comment I made in the FB thread discussing my earlier blog post; I'm sharing it here because it does allow me to flesh out a little bit some of the issues of handling cultural patrimony that were encapsulated in that bizarre encounter in the church:

***

There are two problems, really. One is that this convent really is not in any way equipped to deal with the wave of Cervantes-tourism that is about to descend upon them; and that's not really excusable because this wasn't a case of a child digging under a tree in some rural little backwater town, finding a finger, digging deeper, and discovering that the other arm is missing a hand and the world suddenly descending. The exact grave was unmarked, but we have always known where Cervantes was buried because it was his last wish to be interred in the convent that ransomed him from Algiers. The location and the significance of the find were known before the first spade-full of earth was ever turned.

This was not the hunt for the lost remains of Richard III. That dig was preceded by an impressive amount of investigative work to determine the location of a church that no longer exists, and then followed by hoping that a highly polemical historical record might not lead them astray.  In this case, though are talking about a man who died 200 years after Richard III, with legal documentation, and a peacetime burial by allies rather than enemies. There was never any real question that once the archaeologists started pulling up the floor they'd find a one-armed skeleton in a coffin marked "M.C." The scientific institute and the convent should have had a plan in place for the interest that this was going to generate — the interest that they were clearly trying to generate by timing the dig to coincide with the 500th anniversary of the publication of the second part of the Quijote.

Except that in a lot of the really important ways, Madrid is a total, little backwater. In lots of ways it isn't, of course: the Prado, the national library, the great places to eat, the bookstores, the boutiques. But in a certain aspect of peoples' manner and way of being and perspective, Madrid is still proudly the sleepy, uncultured little town it was before the royal court was permanently relocated here in the middle of the sixteenth century; and so why on earth and how, even, would they treat something like this as being of national significance and prepare accordingly? It's proof of Madrid still not seeing itself on the national cultural stage or seeing the broader implications of its own cultural patrimony.

That's where the second problem starts: In sites of cultural patrimony — especially but not exclusively Church-run or -owned ones — people take their jobs and responsibilities not just seriously but really personally. It's their own little fifedom and the resources under their custodianship belong to them and not to researchers or citizens. On the one hand it's great and lovely for a librarian to feel a bit proprietorially in love with his library collection, but on the other, it means that if you come to see something or use it for teaching and research, the response, as often as not, is basically going to be: Get out of my room and stop touching my stuff. It's just the prevailing attitude here.

Mounting a dig for the remains of one of the best and most historically important writers of the modern period and completely neglecting to think ahead to the draw that this will have for readers in Spain and worldwide — or even worse, not caring — is very much trying to have the best of both, selfish worlds: The convent is asking for renewed acclaim for being the burial site of Cervantes while keeping all the acclaimers at an arm's length.

(The right arm.)

The One Where I Get Kicked Out of Church

This church, to be precise, the one in the Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarian Sisters:

 As part of my "you're stuck with the cultural history students for the rest of the semester" plan, I'm taking the class on a few field trips to take advantage of what's unique to Madrid and also to make it a little bit simpler to prep classes on topics that are well outside my area of expertise. Yesterday I took them to the archaeological museum, which was brilliant. I think they got a lot out of it, asked good questions, all the good things that you want to have happen on a field trip. I had them read a chapter of Maryam Rosser-Owen's Islamic Arts from Spain (conveniently available in Spanish translation) and we talked about the 19th-century cabinet of curiosities as a way of looking back at the past. We'll have one more field trip, and I was thinking it would be interesting to go to the convent  where they've just discovered Cervantes' body and use that as a springboard to talk about the reception of Cervantes in the 20th century, about the role (physical and metaphorical) of the author, and about concepts of national patrimony.

Our program's admin assistant called to make a reservation for the group to visit. She was told that since the archaeologists are still working on the site they are not having regular visiting hours right now; however, she was told, we were more than welcome to come during the half hour before morning Mass and look around. I went this morning to see in advance how feasible it would be and whether it was really worth taking the students there when they might or might not be able to see much of the archaeological site.

I went this morning at 9, when the church opened, sat for a few minutes and took it all in, and then walked around the chapel a bit. It's exactly what you'd expect from a convent of that period: a lot of gold, nails, and blood.

 There was a room off to the left of the altar and through the grate you could see one of the priests putting his vestments on to prepare for the mass; and to the right of the altar, there was a door that opened onto a room with a few chairs. The door was wide open, so I went into it, thinking that perhaps I would be able to see the dig site in or from there.

But the next thing I know, the woman who had opened the church, a lay person, was standing right behind me, demanding to know what I was doing there:

Me: Nothing, just looking.
Her: No, there is no nothing. What are you doing in here?
Me: I'm not doing anything.
Her: You opened this door. You can't just open doors and go into places.
Me: I'm sorry — I didn't know that I couldn't be in here, but I did not open the door. It was already open.
Her: Yes, you did open this door. I never leave it open. It is always closed. Like this. [She closes the door to demonstrate.] The minute I wasn't looking you came over here and opened the door!
Me: I'm sorry I was in there, but the door was open and I didn't know I couldn't go in.
Her: There is no sorry! This is unforgivable! And unbelievable! You have to leave right now!

Suffice it to say, I will be taking the cultural history students on a walking tour of important sites from the filmmaker Luis Buñuel's life instead.

I think that the most absurd thing is that it's a sixteenth-century wood building. Everything creaks. If you walk across the floor, it creaks. When the woman closed the door, it creaked. If I had opened it, that woman would have heard it creak, and presumably come running rather than just finding me there. That and the fact that if they're telling people that they can come look around during the half hour before mass, they do have to expect that people who don't necessarily know the norms of that particular church will come to visit, and should post signage accordingly (or actually be careful about closing doors they don't want open).

I feel terrible because it's not like I ever want to be disrespectful in somebody else's sacred space; it's also the first time, though, that I've been somewhere where there was no clear indication, either by the floorplan corresponding to what I know to expect or through signage, that I was about to enter a space where I wasn't supposed to be.

There's more to say about sacred spaces and national patrimony and the fetishization of authors' dead bodies, but I'll leave that to another post. I'm feeling a little too rattled to be thoughtful right now. I shouldn't feel bad about it, but I still take getting shouted at kind of personally. Perhaps that's the point, though — an illustration of fostering obedience through intimidation?

Lector/a

Since the last time I was in the Biblioteca Nacional, they have changed over to using gender-specific "reader" stickers. I asked the woman at the desk, and she said the change was fairly recent, that someone had complained and so they made a change. Instead of everyone getting a "lector" sticker, now the women get "lectora" stickers. But, as it's been said, I love the old way best... when we, too, were strong as men.

 

Edited, 3/31/15, to add: It occurs to me, sitting here now with an alarming neon orange "lectora" sticker stuck to my dress, and perhaps only because I'm going to a conference in the fall on the possibility of recovering female authorship from the documentary vacuum of the Middle Ages, that the rate of usage on these stickers will probably be useful to a historian someday in assessing usage of the library by gender...

La Alhambra, inédita

I've not been in Spain since the reopening of the National Archaeological Museum, and so it was high up on my list of things to do while here. Added incentive was the special exhibition called "Una visión inédita de la Alhambra," which tackles the idea of Alhambra photography, and not just the Alhambra itself, as an object of fetishization in the art world.

It's a tiny exhibition, with one gallery of historic photographs by Jean Laurent and one gallery of photographs made in the last few years by Fernando Manso.

 Manso photographs with a large-format camera and the images being shown all had a very narrow depth of field that almost gave them more in common with old etchings and engravings representing the place rather than the historical photography that was pointedly documentary.

But even as his photography deliberately alludes to (and, in fact, uses) older technology, this exhibition showed his photographs not printed but, rather, projected digitally onto the wall. It had a strange effect. Because just as the interplay between hard and soft focus forced by the depth-of-field issue invited the viewer to look more closely at the images, stepping right in front of them, necessarily between the projector and the image, casts the viewer's shadow onto the wall.

 

It's an awful way to look at photographs, but it does make the point that the act of looking at the building and the records of the building changes the way we look at it, and so in that respect it was a successful decision.

Lamps from Lorca

There is a small exhibition at Madrid's Casa Sefarad of glass lamps found during the excavation of the fifteenth-century synagogue in the medieval city of Lorca.

 

They were all in serious need of reconstruction; striking, though is the extent to which they have the same shape as mosque lamps from other Mediterranean sites.

The Burial of the Sardine

Carnaval here ends with a parade that marks the traditional burial of the sardine, supposedly to commemorate the generosity of Carlos III toward his subjects gone very badly wrong: He held a public feast of sardines to mark the beginning of Lent, but they took so long to arrive and it was so warm out (at this time of year?) that his subjects had to bury them in the ground as the only way to eliminate the stench.

For lack of a better cultural reference, it seems a bit like a cross between the Philadelphia Mummers' Parade and a New Orleans Funeral.

The ceremony includes a satirical requiem for the sardine. There is video below, but please be warned that it includes a variety of off-color jokes, many of them about chorizo.