Indus Seal - World History in Objects

Didn't I just ask for more podcasts on the Indus Valley Civilization? (History of India - the search goes on; towards the end of the post) Here was yet another one. In the series A History of the World in 100 Objects (BBC) in the subsection about the first cities and states (4000-2000 BCE) there was an item from the Indus Valley: Indus Seal.

Add this to the few other references we have in podcast (see below) and the information is about as scarce and far apart as the data in the Indus Valley Civ itself. Nevertheless I am immensely fascinated by the Indus Valley and it appears I am not the only one. I guess any mystery civilization is mesmerizing, whether it is probably fictional like Atlantis, or whether it disappeared and its traces were discovered only now as with the Indus Valley Civ. Besides, when you know so little, all the more your imagination can add.

And here, I find, everybody who is fascinated appears to project into IVC what occupies him most. How factual is the assumption the IVC collapsed of climate change; or is that rather projection? How factual is the assumption that IVC was very rational and egalitarian? And when we make assumptions where the IVC people went, apart from factual, this may be very political. Does India have roots in IVC? Does Hinduism? Or do the Dravidians of South-India? Eventually all these projections tend to become political.

The IVC cities appear to have been vast and sophisticated. Their system of measures quite universal and accurate. The area they covered vast and this means probably a lot is still to be found. Among others, the script is in need of deciphering. We know the script from captions and seals, which offer little to go on. And although the script has been found as far as Mesopotamia, there is no Rosetta Stone, that is, no bilingual artifact. And so we are still left to conjecture and thus to our dreams, projections and wishful thinking.

More Indus Valley Civ:
The Story of India BBC,
History of India UCLA,
Podularity,
Engines of our Ingenuity,
David Kalivas World History.

More A World History in 100 Objects (in short: AHOW):
First AHOW Review.

Your opinion on a new look for Anne is a Man

I keep playing with the regular templates in order to find out if they can fit for the blog. Reader Gerald left a comment and recommended taking a stretched template with a header picture. Stretch in this respect means that the width of the blog is adapted to the size of your browser window. That seems like a fine idea, especially since all commenters on the fixed width example I showed previously complained the blog got too narrow.

So take a look here and let me know what you think. And if any of you have some idea how I can make the header picture to stretch as well, that would be great.

Three issues of Speaking of Faith

APM's Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett is a radio program and podcast that I do not listen to all the time, but I keep a close eye on whatever comes up in the feed. And then I try to to pick out issues that appeal to me most. And if I did not think to pick myself, it happens frequently that a reader of the blog alerts me to one of the SOF releases - as happened again recently.

I had already discarded the idea of listening to The Meaning of Intelligence even though the subject on intelligence and how ideas of intelligence are constructed have my interest. It seemed out of place in a show about faith, but than my reader rescued me. Of course, the construction of intelligence is about faith. We have placed faith in intelligence and a very specific kind of school-intelligence at that. Krista Tippett's guest Mike Rose tells of his research and uncovering of other kinds of intelligence and our inconsistent cultural appreciation of it. How can we be anti-intellectual and yet at the same time under-appreciate the practical skills, the handiwork and the amazing intelligence that comes with that and place our esteem and aspiration so singularly on the main stream intellectual academic intelligence? And what do we lose in the process?

Quite interesting were also two other recent issues that I listened through entirely. In Reflections of a former Islamist extremist Tippett spoke with Briton Ed Husain and how he struggled with his mixed Muslem and British identity and how this got him close to Islamism and made him recoil afterward. In Whale songs and Elephant love the guest was biologist Kate Payne who tells about the complexity of communication between large mammals and apart from reflecting this she also relates about her depression and how all of this meaningfully came together.

More Speaking of Faith:
Preserving Ojibwe,
The story and God,
Fragility and Humanity,
The Sunni-Shia divide and the future of Islam,
Wangari Maathai.

Bert ter Schegget - Het Marathon Interview

Het jaar 1989 had een ruim aanbod van gedenkwaardige Marathon Interviews. Zojuist verscheen in de nieuwe feed van VPRO's Het Marathoninterview alweer vijf uur om meteen op te halen en te beluisteren: Het interview met Bert ter Schegget. Toen het uitkwam in de oude feed, heb ik het ook al besproken:

Wat rechtvaardigt het marathoninterview als zodanig? Wat maakt het beter dat de interviewer en geinterviewde niet een half uur of een uur, maar vier, vijf uur bij elkaar zitten om met elkaar te spreken? En dat terwijl de luisteraar zonder enige verdere redactie kan meeluisteren? Er zijn er in de serie marathoninterviews van de VPRO waar de lengte mij een bezwaar lijkt. Of waar het interview eigenlijk een opeenstapeling van meerdere interviews is.

Het interview dat Hans Simonse met Bert ter Schegget had op 11 augustus 1989 is echter een voorbeeld van een natuurlijk voortgaand gesprek, waar de grote verdienste van de tijdsduur is dat het gesprek ook echt de diepte in gaat. De complexe positie van de theoloog en ethicus Ter Schegget tussen Christendom en atheisme, tussen linkse maatschappijkritiek en ook deel van de maatschappij zijn. Uiteindelijk komt er ook fikse kritiek op het liberale pluralisme, dat in 1989 misschien nog heel erg outlandish klonk, terwijl het anno 2007 veel duidelijker is wat Bert daar nu eigenlijk mee bedoeld heeft.

Daarbij gaat het over ethiek in verhouding tot technologie, over tolerantie en multiculturalisme en de afwijzing van bepaalde opvattingen (het voorbeeld Rushdie komt aan de orde). Je zou het interview wel drie keer moeten beluisteren om in de tentatieve, zoekende en intens subtiele opvattingen van Bert ter Schegget antwoorden besloten liggen die vandaag meer dan ooit actueel zijn.

Meer Het Marathon Interview:
Lea Dasberg,
Rudi Kross,
Ina Muller van Ast,
Jan Wolkers,
Henk Hofland (o.a.).

An uncertain wind of change

Normally this would be the podcast list for February 2010. 370 podcasts reviewed in a long, long list, but as of now I will stop making these monthly posts. For one, I felt the list was becoming too long and unwieldy. Another point to take into account is that some of the podcasts on the list are podfaded. And lastly, why deliver the whole list over and over again, when in time, the percentage of change in it is getting smaller and smaller.

I have been thinking about this for much more time than just recently. But what has pushed me over the line and made me decide to stop delivering this monthly post is that my blog provider, Blogspot / Blogger / Google has added new functionality: static pages. This was exactly what I had been looking for and what I have forcibly inserted into the blogs with the foreign template that has been in use for nearly two years now.

First of all this means that the podcast list will still be around for who is interested, and I will regularly update it. Second, this means I want to change templates and start using one from the official offering of Blogger, so that I will be able to adapt to new features in the future and not be rendered with an obsolete template as I am now.

So check with the podcast list and with other static pages (see the list on the left bar of the blog) that are up now, or will be soon and help me choose the new template by leaving feedback. I need the feedback as I am very unsure about which template to choose. Soon I will write about the options open. Stay tuned.

New podcasts in January 2010 - Anne is a Man

Yesterday I gave the list of podcasts that were recommended by readers. Today I want to give the list of new podcasts I mentioned in my posts this month - in these yesterday's mentions are not included. Tomorrow I would normally give the full list of podcasts, but that will go differently from now on - more on that tomorrow.

This month I got to mention a couple of podcasts in languages I do not master, Spanish and Swedish. The short reviews were guest reviews as it were, and I would love to publish good guest posts about podcasts in other languages.

En Akademisk Kvart (mention, site, feed). An academic podcast in Swedish delivering concise talks (15 minutes on average) about a wide variety of topics, many of which are historic.

La Rosa de los vientos (mention, site, feed)
A three hours radio program in Spanish, about history, archeology, astronomy, science, secret services and much more.

Pasajes de la historia (mention, site, feed)
History rubric in the Rosa de los Vientos program as a separate podcast in Spanish.

Ciencia y Genios (mention, site, feed)
A podcast in Spanish about geniuses in science

El Bloguipodio (mention, site, feed)
A conversational podcast in Spanish. Two journalists comment the news, politics and more.

In addition to these foreign language podcasts I had a couple of new history podcasts, a literary and a philosophy podcast:

Byzantine Empire (UCSD) (review, site, feed)
History lecture series by Professor Matthew Herbst about the Byzantine Empire.

History of British India (UCLA) (review, site, feed)
History lecture series by Professor Vinay Lal about the history of India under British rule from the 17th to the 20th century.

France since 1871 (Yale) (review, site, feed)
History lecture series by Professor John Merriman about France in modern times.

Letters and Science 140D (Berkeley) (review, site, feed)
Interdisciplinary lecture series by history professor Thomas Laqueur about development and implementation of the idea of human rights.

History of the World in 100 Objects (BBC) (review, site, feed)
Radio program on BBC 4 with the director of the British Museum Neil MacGregor telling man's history by means of the things he made and used.

Classic Poetry Aloud (review, site, feed)
Classic poems from English literature read to the listener

Philosophy: The Classics (review, site, feed)
An introduction to a series of classical works in philosophy. From Plato's Republic to Kierkegaard's either/or.

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