We Believe in One God, the Invisible Hand, and His One and Only Son, the Invisible Hand

It is an undeniable fact that meanings and meaning or symbol systems are at the heart of human life, human experience, and the human construction of “reality”. Most humans, of course, don’t want to admit that they construct the "reality" that they mistake for reality. They don’t want to admit that that which they think is “real” is, in actuality, a social and cultural construction, because that would mean that those norms, rules, regulations, values, behaviours, and intellectual models, that they have come to believe in, have followed, and have come to see as universals are nothing more than ideological particulars fetishised usually by the powerful.

I was recently reminded of just how central meanings and meaning systems were and are in everyday human life by a post by Libertarians on Facebook. The post, topped off with one of those typically silly memes that dominate social media today, had a smiling Milton Friedman, one of the high priests of the Church of Laissez Faire, proclaiming that “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

Putting aside the fact that there is no evidence that Freidman ever said this, something that any analyst of the libertarian mind might revealing, I think the belief among some of the faithful that Friedman did say this and the meanings inherent in this statement provides analysts with a key symbol that allows meaning archaeologists to explore the libertarian mind.

So what does this key or central symbol tell us about the libertarian mind? The fact that this statement, whether it is meant as a joke or not, is empirically wrong—the 9 million square mile Sahara Desert is part of Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Western Sahara, Sudan and Tunisia—reveals that those who lead and those who worship in the Church of Laissez Faire are akin, in terms of their mentalities, to the faithful of religious communities in general. This statement is a statement of faith, of dogma, of theology, rather than a statement of fact.

At the heart of the Libertarian Faith is fetishised ideologies masquerading as universal verities, universal verities expressed in its creed, “We Believe in the One Free Market” and endlessly in its catechisms, “We Believe in the One Free Market”. Befitting a religion, the Church of Laissez Faire has its own Torah. Its Exodus is the tale of how the Invisible Hand created the world. Its Numbers is the tale of how its Invisible Hand deus ex machina instantiated the Logos, his son the Invisible Hand, in the world it created, in the form of mechanical self operating mathematical formulae. Its Leviticus is the tale of how access to the Logos is only possible through the medium of the holy Laissez Faire Priesthood. Its Exodus is the tale of how the knowledge of the Logos was lost thanks to monopolising monarchs and heretical Keynesians. Its Deuteronomy is the tale of how the Logos was resurrected by the holy Laissez Faire priesthood in those years after they returned from the wildernesses of monarchical mercantilists and the Keynesian welfare states after the 1970s.

Libertarianism is like religious meanings systems in a variety of ways. Like any religion the Libertarian faith has its orthodox, the Holy Laissez Faire priesthood, and its heretics, Keynesians, Communists, Socialists, and, most prominently these days “liberals”, ironic since libertarians too are liberals. Like any religion the Libertarian faith has its scapegoats, usually, these days, an evil “liberal” government in thrall to crony capitalism. Like any religion the Libertarian faith has been subject to sectarianism. You have, for example, your Straussians, your Friedmanians, your Randians, your Christian Libertarians, your Steinerians, your Rothbardians, and your Blockians, to name just a few. Like any religion the Libertarian Faith ignores evidence that contradicts its statements of faith, such as, for example, the fact that the Saharan Desert is still there despite being the part of several governments and despite the realities of climate change it helped bring about.

American Presidential Politics as Apocalyptic Drama

I am not particularly interested in the history of American presidential politics. It doesn't take a PhD. in history (something I actually have), however, to see that virtually every presidential election since the 1960s (and likely every presidential election before World War II) seems, at least if you listen to the media and partisans of each presidential candidate, to be a war between the forces of good and the forces of evil.

In 1964 Republican Barry Goldwater was portrayed as the beast of the apocalypse who would end the world literally if the famous television advertisement of the LBJ campaign was to be believed. In 1968 many suggested that Republican Richard Nixon, if elected, would bring about the end of America and the world as Americans knew it. By 1972 when Nixon ran for re-election the world hadn't ended but many said it would if he were re-elected. In the late 1970s many Republicans and even some Democrats thought that Democratic president Jimmy Carter was bringing about the end of America the great. In 1980 many prophesied that Republican Ronald Reagan would bring about the end of the world if elected. He almost did though not in the way most imagined it would end when the Soviets misread NATO war games in Scandinavia as an attack on them. In the 1990s many thought that Democrat Bill Clinton was the very essence of evil in the modern world and that he was bringing an end to America as "Americans" knew it. In 2000 many prophesied that Republican George Walker Bush would end the world. He didn't even though he led the US into two wars and a massive budget deficit. From 2008 to 2012 many Republicans thought that Barack Obama was involved in a liberal, commie, nazi, Muslim conspiracy to end America as "Americans" knew it. Currently Democrats and Republicans proclaim that if Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton are elected the world world as each of them know it or wish it was will end.

All this end time apocalyptic rhetoric is enough to make one believe that fear is a Democrats and Republicans best friend...

My Country Right or Wrong...

So perhaps the most famous scientist in the world, Stephen Hawking, has decided to boycott the Presidents Conference in Israel in June. As a result some of the apologists and polemicists of state of Israel faith are going bonkers in cyberspace. Several of Israel's aggressive defenders of the faith, in fact, are, according to reports, apparently playing that already far too oft played ultimate trump card, they are calling Hawking an anti-Semite.

The implied equation of criticisms of Israel with anti-Semitism is a specious equation to say the least. I know anti-Semitism and anti-Semitism is not empirical criticisms of Israeli state actions. Israel is one of the last in a long line of settler societies that came roaring out of Western Europe between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries and was so hazardous to the health of so many, a club that includes the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, to name just a few. All one has to do is reflect on the treatment of indigenous peoples by those settler societies to recognise the similarities between what they did to the American Indians, the Canadian First Nations, the Aborigines, the Maori, and the African tribes to what Israel has done and is doing to the Palestinians.

This specious and Foucauldian equation of criticisms of Israel with anti-Semitism is the semiological equivalent of the equation of criticisms of the US and its imperialism with anti-Americanism and intellectual, empirical criticisms of Mormon ideology with anti-Mormonism, and empirical critiques of Islam with Islamophobia. This is what ideologues and demagogues do in an attempt to inoculate themselves and whatever they are emotionally attached to against empirical criticisms. They demonise criticisms with which they disagree making them tabu to those multitudes who they so easily manipulate via, for example, nationalist emotion laden ideology. And they demonise those messengers who make these criticisms turning them into Mormon bashers, traitors, "anti-Semites", and, if they are Jewish, "self-hating Jews", a fascinating and oh so convenient category that includes Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé, many of the reporters at Haaretz, any Jew, in other words, and there are millions of them, who has the audacity to challenge the myths of Israeli political, cultural, ideological, geographic, and demographic, exceptionalism that have grown up around the state of Israel, myths which have come to dominate so much of the rhetoric surrounding the Israeli and Palestinian conflict particularly in the West.

Here is how it all works. First, you ask how anyone could "hate" Israel, a demagogic tactic that turns empirical critiques relating to Israel's origins, the dispossession of indigenous Palestinians after the birth of the state of Israel, Israeli expansionism since its birth and particularly since 1967, Israeli treatment of the indigenous population, and Israeli discrimination policies, into emotions putting them on the same level as those of nationalist apologists and polemicists who play in emotions like others play with porn. Then you play on emotional nationalist myths and use doublespeak turning Israel from what it really is, like any modern nation it is complex and contradictory, into a peace loving, anti-expansionist, democracy just like those other mythic Western "democracies" with similar fictions of national innocence throughout the Western world (the US, Canada, Australia, NZ, UK).
Now don't get me wrong, I care about Israel. I have on many occasions in the past defended the state of Israel in a variety of ways. I am glad Israel exists if nothing else as a safety valve in a Christian and Muslim world which has not been particularly hospitable to Jews in the past or the present. But I am also a historian. I am also someone who cares about empirical truth. I am also someone who cares about what the nation I care about is doing in the name of national security. I am also someone who cares about justice.

By the way, recognition of the above doesn't imply binary thinking, namely that the Palestinians are the essence of all that is good in the modern world. That is another one of those demonisation moves, moves which are really strategies to keep the masses from thinking rationally and reasonably about the issue of Israeli colonialism and imperialism and the brutality that always accompanies colonialism and imperialism regardless of who is doing it.

As to Hawking's decision to boycott the President's Conference, I say bravo. I may not agree with his decision but it is pleasant to see an academic take a stand beyond that of the typical academic armchair variety for a change.

I Believe in One God, Nationalism, and the Emotionalism for Which it Stands...

Patriotism is, rather obviously, a form of nationalism. Nationalism is a belief system. It is a meaning system in Geertzian terms. As such it works very much like religious belief works. It is grounded in emotion. It is often bullyish, thugish, vigilanteish. It constructs heretics, those who don't adequately love the nation, at least in the eyes of those who see themselves as "true patriots", and are often advised by those "real patriots" to leave it. As a belief system grounded in emotions it is not interested in empirical data and often regards empirical analysis of patriotism an act of heresy itself.

I wouldn't say American nationalism is exceptional, though I am sure many Americans would like to believe it is. I spent time in Russia and I found Russian nationalism to be quite intense. I spent time in Australia and I found Australian nationalism to be quite intense as this video of Kylie Minogue leading throngs in the singing of Australia's unofficial national anthem shows. I spent time in Canada and I found that Canadian nationalism can be quite intense as this video of Edmonton Oilers fans singing "O Canada" in English shows. What this video shows, beyond the intensity of love of Canada among hockey fans in Edmonton, should not be lost on those who have been waxing romantically and patriotically about how Boston Bruins fans sang the US national anthem after the tragic bombings at the Boston Marathon in April of 2013. I shouldn't even have to mention how nationalistic--arise citizens of France and save the fatherland from aristocratic counterrevolutionaries--and bloody the words to the French national anthem are. I shouldn't need to remind you dear thinking readers how national anthems can be used for emotional and propagandistic purposes such as how "La Marseillaise" was used in the 1942 Warner Brothers film Casablanca in the depths of World War II. When I first saw Casablanca I was ready to jump out of my theatre seat and go off and kill me some Nazis. It is worth remembering, by the way, that many of those singing "La Marseillaise" in the film were refugees from Hitler's Europe and you can see it in their very emotional faces and that by allowing his night club band to play "La Marseillaise" the heretofore neutral Rick, a symbol of neutral America, finally chooses to side with those opposed to the Nazis (as we all knew he would given his background and the fact that he is the good guy in the film).

There may be varying degrees in the emotional intensity of nationalism in places across the globe and even in specific nations at particular times. Macho US nationalism, for example, clearly declined in the wake of Vietnam and rose again in the wake of 9/11. This does not mean, however, that these variations don't lie on a continuum and as such are comparable and similar, not distinct.

Speaking of English settler societies, one of the things I find quite fascinating about the representations of official and unofficial national anthems in settler societies like the United States, Canada, and New Zealand, is how they are often used to sacralise the national landscape. Just look and listen to this ident as nationalist promo that was made by the Canadian national public broadcaster the CBC. Just look and listen to this ident as nationalist promo made for New Zealand national broadcaster TV NZ. And just listen to the unofficial American anthem America the Beautiful sung appropriately by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Joseph Smith and Mormons after him, after all, have regarded the US as a unique promised land and landscape. I suppose one could argue that these "new" nations without Roman ruins or Christian cathedrals had to sacralise the only monuments they had, the natural beauty or perceived natural beauty of their nations. Interestingly, the citizens and leaders of these settler societies may have sacralised their manufactured national landscapes and as such developed emotional attachments to their respective national landscapes, imagined national landscapes, but that didn't and hasn't stoped them from despoiling Canada, New Zealand, or the United States. Capitalism, and making money, it seems, are also emotions that have been linked to settler society nationalisms (the Canadian, New Zealand, and American dreams of making it).

Some Christians, Schleitheim Anabaptists in particular, argue that all forms of nationalism are a form of idolatry, as having another God before Yahweh. I think, however, that nationalism, like religion, is something through which humans create identities and emotional attachments to blood and soil, socially and culturally constructed blood and soil. That is why nationalisms are all potentially, particularly when allied to economic power, political power, cultural power, demographic power, geographical power, technological might, and military might be quite hazardous to the health of some humans particularly when they are on the wrong side of nationalist shouting matches, and that is why replacing nationalism, which has been around at least since the French revolution in liberal and ethnic forms, so difficult to counter or replace, just like religion. Need I add that a universalistic religion like Christianity became itself nationalised? And needless to say American Christians of an Ebenezer Scrooge capitalist and American ethnocentric and nationalist bent aren't calling for its privatisation.

A Spectre is Haunting the New Atheism, the Spectre of "Islamophobia"

Recently there has been a renewal of that good old time intellectual culture war between the militant “New Atheists”, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins—the other member of the “unholy trinity”, Christopher Hitchens died in 2011—and their critics. In 2008 leftist socially gospeller Chris Hedges, who took a degree from the Harvard Divinity School, took the New Atheists to task for being similar in their anti-religious militancy to the pro-religious and often inquisitorial religious militants they criticized, a fair charge, a charge picked up by primatologist Frans de Waal who argues that the New Atheists are basically engaging in macho chest banging, and that Harris and Hitchens had become shills for 2000s style Bush Wilsonian neoliberalism. Now, following in the footsteps of Hedges, Nathan Lean, Murtaza Hussein, and Glen Greenwald, the most nuanced of the new critics of the New Atheism who focuses most of his ire on Harris, have likewise come not to praise the New Atheists but to bury them for their irrational and un-scientific neoliberal Islamophobia. Jerome Taylor reported on this latest skirmish in the culture war proving, in the process, that reflexivity usually follows quickly upon a body of similar criticism.

As someone who grew up under the shadow of the Holocaust I have long been familiar with the realities of ethnocentrisms of hatred, clan hatred, clique hatred, tribe hatred, religious hatred, national hatred, ethnic hatred among humans historically and contemporarily for years. I have also, if more recently, it probably happened first during my sojourn in Utah, become familiar with the uses and abuses of the Holocaust by those with nationalistic and political agendas, who equate any criticism of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians with anti-Semitism. When I lived in Utah I came to understand how Mormons, particularly Mormons of a defend the faith polemical and apologetic stripe, equated intellectual and theological criticism of Mormonism with a different, but very real I might add, virulent anti-Mormonism that was largely the product of evangelical polemics and apologetics. Such rhetorical strategies can be very useful in the public demonisation of those who disagree with you. Such discursive strategies, in other words, are classic examples of the Foucauldian use of language to marginalize opponents and thereby gain control over the discourse.

I think a lot of what is going on the criticism of the New Atheism is discursive Foucauldianism. Lean, for instance, uses several rhetorical and discursive strategies to metaphorically tar and feather his opponents. There's the character assassination. Dawkins, writes Lean, is a prickly preppy septuagenarian atheist with an attitude while Sam Harris is an ankle biter version of the Rottweiler Dawkins. There's the character assassination of the audience. Hippies and yuppies alike, claims Lean, lap up the atheism of the New Atheists. There’s the silence in the cyberlibrary (had to get a Doctor Who reference in here) where Lean takes the lack of a New Atheist condemnations of Jewish fundamentalism as evidence of their pro-Israel selectivity. There’s Lean’s use of analogy to see what he can get to stick to the New Atheists so he can tar and feather them in the arena of public opinion. New Atheist support for Israel means that they are also supporting Israel’s verbally and sometimes physically violent Jewish fundamentalists. There’s Lean’s strategy of ignoring history when you can. Let’s not link New Atheist criticisms of Islam to the fact that unlike Western Judaism and Christianity it and its theocratic, misogynistic, and homophobic cultures—if unevenly—have been only limitedly impacted by post-Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment modernity. One can, as Harris does, argue from this and other factors that there may be a unique quality of the threat from Islam. One can, in other words, make a Nieburhrian argument. There’s Lean’s strategy of condemning others for lack of definitional precision (see the comments under his article) while failing to provide clear definitions of his own, such as a definition of Islamophobia and how one can distinguish between valid criticisms and ethnocentrism, because ambiguity works in his discursive favour. There’s Lean’s failure to recognise that the impact of Western colonialism and imperialism on the Islamic world does not necessitate the celebration of Islam and its theocratic, misogynistic, and homophobic culture (a product, by the way, of the same Mediterranean culture that gave us the theocratic, misogynistic, and homophobic cultures of pre-modern Judaism and Christianity) as a form of resistance to Western political, economic, cultural, geographic imperialism. There is no need, in other words, to sanctify the victim and thereby ignore the negative aspects of some forms of Islam. There’s Lean's tried and true if clichéd strategy of painting your opponents into a fascist corner by equating Dawkins with the Bush doctrine, Fox News, Mr. Torture Alan Dershowitz, and the ideology of the New Atheism with that of the right wing and ultra nationalist or fascist British National Party and Hussein's tried and true if clichéd strategy of equating the New Atheists with the scientific racists of Nazi Germany.

Greenwald makes some of the same accusations against Harris if in a more intellectually responsible way. For Greenwald Harris's pro-Israeli stance, his overlooking of Israeli and American brutalities against Muslims and beyond, his calls for a kind of "holy war" against the unique threat of Islam, his refusal to see Islam as the diverse religion it is, means that Harris is a bigoted Islamophobe.

I don’t know whether Lean, Hussein, and Greenwald have agendas beyond their concern over ethnocentrisms and the real hazards ethnocentrisms bring the modern world. I don't know why Salon has become the venue for so many polemics against the New Atheism. What I do know, however, is that it is hard to turn those who take an equal opportunity approach to criticising religion, particularly to the irrational, theocratic, misogynistic, and homophobic aspects of traditional Western religious culture, into Islamophobes or anti-Semites or anti-Christian save by a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand. And that is what I think, by and large, the criticisms of the New Atheists as anti-Islamic is, rhetorical and ideological sleight of hand.

I want to end this brief essay by circling back to Chris Hedges point that atheism, like religion, is a meaning system. Is atheism a meaning system? Well of course. But it is a meaning system anchored in empirical evidence at its best, something that religious meaning systems are ultimately not. It is this difference that makes atheism and its scientific grounding so much more compelling that religious meaning systems at least for those who care about accurate empirical evidence. Sadly, not all of us really do care about empirical evidence. Just look at all of those Americans who believe Obama is not an American or all those Americans who deny climate change. And this is, of course, the problem and it is a problem that religion often contributes to over and over again along with empirically challenged political ideologies like those of all those right wing wing nuts.

This Silence Gets us Nowhere: Key Symbols and Anglo-American Quakerism

Once upon a time in an academic galaxy far far away I was a Biblical Studies student. When I first matriculated at university I imagined that one day I would grow up to be a Biblical Studies teacher at a major research university in a land not so far far away.

My interest in Biblical Studies developed out of an interest I had in religion in general. The first class I took at university was a 400 level Comparative Religion course with the brilliant and tough Dr. Andrae at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. In that class I met two brilliant students who became good friends, Duane Stigen and Russell Todd, and I learned about academic “higher” Biblical criticism and developed an interest in Biblical Studies as a result.

It was, in retrospect, quite odd that I became a Religious Studies major when I entered university. I was not religious. Nor was my family religious. We were secular Jews. My interest in religion initially had a political source. I became involved in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements when I was a student at T.W. Browne Junior High School in Oak Cliff, Dallas, Texas, thanks to my friend John Cirillo. By the time I entered college I had become interested in the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) because of its peace testimony. Christians who were peace niks? I suppose I thought that perhaps religious ideology could be used to promote peace in a world in which there was far too many wars. I thus started to attend Quaker meetings now and again though I never really joined. I am not a joiner. Like Mark Twain I could never join a group that would have me as a member.

My interest in Quakerism, and the other peace churches including the Amish, Mennonites, and Brethren, continued long after I gave up the dream of becoming a Biblical Studies scholar. Once I recognized that the Quaker utopian fantasy of converting the world to peace was pie in the sky I became more and more enamoured of Anabaptist separatism. I came to agree with Reinhold Niebuhr and John Howard Yoder that the only viable pacifist Christianity was one that separated from the world and created an alternative beloved community of peace and justice. That hope too was soon dashed as I quickly recognised that it was impossible to escape the "fallen" world of hate, war, perverse ideologies, environmental destruction, and self absorbed narcissism.

Despite my disillusion with worldly Quakerism I still maintained an academic interest in the Society of Friends and wrote my master’s thesis in Anthropology at SUNY Albany on seventeenth century English Quakerism. But I now began to think that my calling, my vocation, was to be a student of American Protestantism with an interest in the role mainstream Protestantism played in the social and cultural construction of American civil religion, of American ideology.

Given my interest in culture and ideology and Quakerism it was almost inevitable that I read Richard Bauman’s book on Quaker key symbols. This paper, written sometime in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is a result of my reflections on Bauman’s work, a work I thought missed the real key symbols at the heart of Quakerism. Needless to say, this paper shows the influence of Max Weber, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Clifford Geertz, Jean Baudrillard, and Roland Barthes on my intellectual life.

Since the 1930s Symbolic Anthropology has been one of the more prominent anthropological approaches to human life in all of its variety. This approach has not only influenced anthropologists, it has also proven to be been influential in the discipline of History. Historians including Keith Thomas, Robert Darnton, Lynn Hunt, Peter Burke, Natalie Zemon Davis, Dickson Bruce, Mary Ryan, and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg have all been influenced by the symbolic anthropologies of Clifford Geertz or Victor Turner.

One major aspect of symbolic anthropology has been its attempt to delineate key cultural symbols. Key symbols are symbolic of a society or a culture. They reveal in summary form the essence of a culture and society. They provide analysts a way into the collective mentalities of social groups. Leading figures in the field like Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, and Sherry Ortner, have (as academics are wont to do) proposed definitions of key, dominant, or core symbol and applied these definitions to the study of a variety of societies and cultures worldwide.

In her work Sherry Ortner excavates the history of the idea of key symbols and explores the varying definitions given to it since social scientists like Ruth Benedict began to use such an approach in the years before and after the Second World War.

Ortner offers a typology of key symbols. She asserts that symbols can be categorised into two general types (both lying on a continuum): summarising symbols and elaborating symbols. Summarising symbols are symbols which sum up or represent for the participants, in an emotionally powerful and relatively undifferentiated way, what their society or culture means to them. Summarising symbols are sacred symbols in the widest sense, objects of reverence and/or catalysts of emotion (e.g., the flag, the cross, and so on). Elaborating symbols, on the other hand, are vehicles for sorting out complex and undifferentiated feelings and ideas in such a way as to make them comprehensible to oneself, communicable to others, and translatable into orderly action. These types of symbols are central to a culture because of their capacity to order experience. The key status of these symbols is due primarily to their recurrence in cultural behaviour or cultural symbolic systems.

There are two forms of elaborating symbols: root metaphors and key scenarios. The former are those which have great conceptual elaborating power. They are the source of categories for conceptualising the world (e.g., the image of the wheel in Sherpa culture). Key scenarios, on the other hand, imply mechanisms for successful social action (e.g., the American Horatio Alger success myth).

Another approach to key symbols is that of Victor Turner. Turner defines symbols as things which refer to something other than themselves. Symbols are characterised by multiple meanings or multivocality, the interconnection of distinct signs or meaning units through analogy or association, the simultaneous representation of many ideas, relations between things, actions, interactions, and transactions, and binary grouping at opposed semantic poles.

Like Ortner, Turner argues that symbols lie on a continuum. On one end of this symbolic continuum are moral or ideological symbols. At the other end are sensory symbols. Turner asserts that we can discern within each symbol system a nucleus of dominant symbols which are characterised by extreme multivocality and a central position in ritual performance.

A number of dependent symbols are associated, in turn, with the dominant symbol. Dominant symbols represent sets of fundamental themes and are learned by members of the culture through repetition, variation, and contrast. Around such symbols one will find symbolic objects, activities, gestures, social relationships between actors of ritual roles, and a variety of verbal behaviour forms (prayers, formulas, chants, songs, recitation of sacred narratives, etc.).

One interesting recent attempt to delineate the key symbols of a culture and society is that of linguist and folklorist Richard Bauman. In his book Let Your Words be Few, Bauman focuses on the key symbols of seventeenth century English Quakerism.

Quakerism arose in an England experiencing great social, political, and economic upheaval in the late 1640s and early 1650s (all of which historian Christopher Hill traces to the rise of early capitalism). The English Revolution was a period of political turmoil. It began with the overthrow of King Charles I, an overthrow that would lead to Charles' execution in 1649, by aristocrats, merchants and a group of sectarian Christians (the Puritans) who wanted to purify the state-church of its Catholic accretions and return the faith to its primitive form. The revolt against the King undermined monarchical or aristocratic control of the state and led to a diminishment of the forces of social control. In this context a number of groups came out from underground. Christian groups such as the Puritans and a number of far more radical Christian and non-Christian sects emerged from the relative safety of the underground and began expressing their views and evangelising for them. Unlike the Calvinist Puritans who saw law and political institutions as institutions necessary for the control human sin, the radical sects were perfectionist proponents of human freedom. Amongst these radical sects were the Levellers, the Diggers, Fifth Monarchists, the Ranters, and the Religious Society of Friends.

The Levellers power base was the army. They urged agrarian reform specifically the opening up of more enclosed land to the poor, security of tenures for copyholders, religious toleration, and legal reform. Levellers believed everyone was equal before the law. They opposed tithes (the state levied tax for support of the priesthood), conscription, excise, privileges for peers, corporations, and trading companies. They were critical of the priests of the state-church and opposed any form of state-church. Levellers were constitutional republicans who favoured the extension of the franchise to all but wage labourers and the poor. They asserted that sovereignty lay with the people and their representatives in the House of Commons. They proposed a new social contract, the "Agreement of the People" in which the franchise would be extended to every free man who approved of this new constitution. Wage labourers would be excluded from voting except for those who fought for the Parliament. Taking note of increasing Puritan political power the Levellers, more than anything else, wanted a piece of the political pie. They wanted to play a similar role in the governance of the new England.

The more radical Diggers emphasised "reason" (believing it to dwell in all men), universal liberty, and equality. Some Diggers denied the existence of God. Others emphasised the freedom that "perfection" brought believing themselves bound only by the pure law of righteousness that existed before "the Fall". Most favoured the extension of the franchise to all men, favoured the abolition of wage labour, opposed tithes, and opposed the state-church. At the time and undoubtedly today, Diggers are best known for their communal ideology and practise. They advocated that land confiscated from the church, the crown, and the royalists be given to the poor. Diggers believed freedom to lie in the free use of the earth and argued that the cultivation of the commons be communal. As a protest against the omnipresence of hunger, particularly amongst the poor, Diggers occupied (usually aristocratic) land and attempted to establish the communes they dreamed of on it.

As one can imagine Digger actions were met with hostility by the powers, particularly the aristocrats on whose land they "squatted". Diggers were harassed, attacked, and boycotted. After their demise some of Diggers, including the infamous Gerrard Winstanley, joined the Religious Society of Friends.

The most political of the sectarian groups was the Fifth Monarchists. Fifth Monarchists were an apocalyptic group who believed that the reign of Christ was about to begin. They asserted that Christ was about to accomplish what political action had not and that the mission of God's elect (Fifth Monarchists, of course) was to eliminate hindrances to Christ's rule on earth. Fifth Monarchists rejected all earthly states and rulers and threatened to overthrow the governments of England several times between 1657 and 1661.

The Ranters were an individualistically oriented group that was anti-monarchical, anti-elitist, and anti-rich. They favoured the abolition of the clergy tax and the abolition of the state-church. Ranters believed in human perfection and that their sinless state made them free from the law. They emphasised the role of the law within which they (like the later Quakers) called the "Divine Light" (though not all Ranters gave this a Christian or even religious meaning). Ranters saw "love" as liberatory and denied the existence of an afterlife. A number of prominent Ranters later became Quakers.

Finally, there was the Religious Society of Friends. Quakers, like many of their radical contemporaries, were anti-monarchical, anti-elitist, anti-clerical, anti-rich, and perfectionist, believing themselves free of sin and the law. Quakers trace their origins to the preaching of the charismatic George Fox. The itinerant Fox preached a radically egalitarian conception of Christianity. He believed that God, in the form of the "Divine light", "the Light within", "the Christ within", "the seed of God", "the pure seed" inhabited every man and woman and had the potential to guide those who attended to that childlike "still voice within" toward the "Christ-like life" (the image of Christ). Fox refused to take oaths and to serve in the military.

The egalitarianism inherent in Fox's conception of the "Inner light" impacted Quakerism in a number of ways. It led Friends to conceive of the ministry in egalitarian terms (the "priesthood of all believers"). All Quakers, whether male or female, regarded themselves as potential ministers and prophesiers of the "Word of God". For Quakers there was no Biblical or spiritual justification for a special priestly caste singularly endowed with a unique relationship with God. Rather, "priestcraft", like other hierarchies, was one aspect of the Church's and worlds fall into error (Roman Catholicism as fallen). Quakers, in a move that was not to win them many friends, prominent or otherwise, urged all Christians abolish this perverse and unbiblical form of ministry.

This notion of a fallen church as well as anti-clericism (Quaker opposition to the "hireling ministry" of the state-church) and opposition to state churches led Friends to create their own worship spaces. Quaker worship took place in homes and later in simple "meeting houses" (as they called their churches). As in Quaker culture in general, Friends made anti-symbolism a symbol in their "meeting houses". Quaker "meeting houses" were free of all forms of "idolatry". Christian symbols such as crosses, baptismal founts, altars separating the priest from the worshippers, were regarded by the Society as priestly creations instituted after "the Fall" and were thus forbidden.

Quakers saw all of these symbols as unnecessary given their constant communion with the "Christ within" (Quakers as perfectionist). Why, they argued, do we need "outward" "baptism" when we have "inward" spirit "baptism". Why do we need "outward" "communion" when our relationship with the "Spirit within" means we are in constant communion with God and Christ through the Holy Spirit?

Quaker "meeting for worship" was also novel and also reflected Quaker anti-symbolism symbolism. "Convinced" Friends and "Seekers" came together every "First Day" (Sunday) to worship (Quakers regarded the terms used for the days of the week as idolatrous and so refused to use them) to sit in a square, silent, eyes generally closed, waiting for the "Spirit" to "move" them to "speak" "preach", or "prophesy" (all of which Friends regarded as intertwined and interrelated).

The "plainess" which characterised Quaker "meeting houses" was also embodied in Quaker dress and speech. Quakers opposed any form of dress that distinguished one Friend from another. They also opposed the use of language which reflected the status and class differentials of seventeenth century England.

Quakers refused to use common greetings and leave-takings such as "you" and "we", preferring instead "thee" and "thou". In seventeenth century English life greetings and leave takings were embedded in rules of use which were intimately tied to status, i.e., to notions of superior, equal, or inferior. One was supposed to address one's "superiors" as "you" and ones inferiors as "thee" and "thou". Friends opposed this practise and refused to use the singular "you" in interactions with their social and cultural superiors. They used "thee" and "thou" when addressing everyone. In another act of symbolic terrorism against ones "betters" Quakers refused to doff their hats to "weighty" members of British society.

Apocalyptic rhetoric and apocalyptically oriented action was another important aspect of early English Quakerism between the late1640s and the late 1660s. Quakers believed that "the Day of the Lord" was at hand, and that this would lead to "loftiness of men [being] laid low". In the world transformed the strong, they believed, would be laid low while the meek would inherit the earth.

Quaker certainty that the world was about to be remade gave rise to a number of (controversial) symbolic body actions. One of these was "going naked as a sign". "Going naked as a sign" involved a symbolic performance in which Friends would go into the "abominable" churches of the English state and prophesy about the coming "Day of Judgement" in the nude. To Quakers "going naked as a sign" was an embodiment of the fact that everyone, regardless of their social or cultural status, would be equally and accordingly, judged by God after the world had been "turned upside down". Neither wealth nor social status, they believed, would save those who lived in the finest homes, dressed in the highest of fashion, and who were adorned with titles and honours, from the judgement of God in the "last days".

Protesting in the nude was not the only form of Quaker symbolic "violence". Another form of Quaker symbolic action saw Friends clothing themselves in "sackcloth and ashes". Friends would attend "meeting for worship", religious revivals, or go to marketplaces and proclaim, in embodied symbolic form, that the world was about to be "laid low".

Still another performance involved "quaking". Quaker apocalyptic prophesying during "meeting" or at outdoor religious revivals or marketplaces often was characterised by Quaker shaking or "quaking" under the influence of the "Holy Spirit", the "voice within". It was from this embodied expression of the "Holy Spirit" that Quakers would get perhaps their most recognisable name.

Perhaps the most famous symbolic performance undertaken by any Friend in the early years of the group was James Naylor's ill-fated ride into Bristol in 1651. Drawing on New Testament descriptions of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem for Passover (with a large pinch of apocalypticism thrown in for good measure), Naylor, resplendent in robes and with Christ-like long hair, rode into Bristol on an ass surrounded by followers many young women amongst them. The ride apparently meant to symbolise the coming cataclysm that would "lay low" the high and the fact that Christ was present within everyone. The powers that were (predictably) weren't all that taken with Naylor's symbolic performance and they very quickly had him arrested. He was tried, sentenced, and brutally tortured for his act of symbolic "terrorism".

Naylor wasn't the only Friend persecuted and viciously mobbed for such actions. Quaker symbolic actions (as well as the activities of other radical groups) and the mobbing and persecution they aroused frightened the powers that be. Combined with the Quaker refusal to pay tithe-taxes, to attend state church services, to take communion, as well as Quaker lobbying and petitioning of Parliament (for the abolition of tithes, religious reform, legal reform, the abolishment of universities, action against evil Catholic Spain and France, and for political reform) these inherently political acts led authorities to take action against the (perceived) Quaker threat to the political, economic, landed, and religious social order of seventeenth century England. The fear of Quakers (as well as other radical groups like the Diggers and Ranters) evident among the ruling elite of seventeenth century England became so tangible that it eventually led to a reconciliation between anti-royalist aristocrats, merchants and Presbyterians (i.e., Puritans), on one side, and their royalist opponents on the other. Together they brought England back from what they considered to be the brink by reestablishing royal rule to the "blessed isle".

Thousands of Quakers were imprisoned for their actions and beliefs. Many were brutally tortured. This persecution was so intense that Friends formed the first executive body in their history to deal with the persecutions, the "Meetings for Suffering. "Meeting for Sufferings" recorded the "sufferings" of imprisoned and persecuted Friends and aided them in their misery as much as they could.

Richard Bauman's linguistically and symbolically sensitive historical anthropology attempts to isolate the key symbols of this political and religious group and movement. He does this by paying (as one would expect from someone who has emphasized linguistic anthropology over the course of his academic career) great attention to the situated use of language in everyday life. For Bauman, language, culture, and society are interrelated and intertwined themselves and with other aspects of human life--political, social, organisational, religious, ideological.

According to Bauman the interrelationship between linguistic, cultural, and social factors becomes clear when one focuses on means of speech such as discourse. For Bauman, discourse is a linguistic variable in which speech style is associated with some particular group or social category, or with some linguistic variable associated with particular contexts and/or genres, i.e., registers. For Bauman it is in key symbols, the richest and most powerful symbols of a discursive group, that one can see most clearly this intertwining of culture, society, and language.

To get at Quaker key symbols Bauman focuses on seventeenth century Quaker speech acts. Bauman asserts that speech acts which are drawn together into a unified and systematically organised frame of reference with settings, goals, genres of communicative means, principles of interpretation and evaluation, and social interactional ground rules, allow the delineation of the key symbols of the Society of Friends, and the ideology which underlies them.

Bauman asserts that the key symbols of seventeenth century English Quakerism were "speaking" and "silence". He points to the ideological importance of waiting in "silence" for the "still voice within" to "move" one to "speak", "preach", "prophesy", or to act. He argues that "speaking" and "silence" expressed itself in all aspects of Quaker thought, behaviour, and organisation. The "Divine Light" spoke out of that "still silence within" and gave individual Friends a testimonies and calling. An individual Quaker's belief that he or she was called to "preach", "prophesy", or "act" came out of the silence. "Going naked as a sign" was a product of divine speech heard in the context of silent worship. Finally the structure of Quaker meetings for worship involved sitting silently in a square, with eyes closed, waiting upon the voice of God to speak out of the silence of worship.

For Bauman, "speaking" and "silence" then constituted seventeenth century English Quaker beliefs, action, and organisation. In other words, speaking and silence gave birth to Quaker culture and Quaker society. Quaker speech and non-speech intertwined to construct Quaker culture and society. They created Quaker meetings. They constructed Quaker worship. They gave birth to Quaker action.

While fully agreeing with Bauman that language, culture, and society interrelate and intertwine, questions inevitably arise as to whether it is language and speech acts, in this instance the key Quaker symbols of "speaking" and "silence", that constructed Quaker culture and society. Can one reduce culture and society to speech acts?

I would argue that it is not language, but ideology (the glue which holds a collectivity together and allows it to speak to itself about itself), along with other cultural (language, theology, philosophy, legal speculation, historical speculation), biological (culture embodied), and social (political, religious, economic, legal) factors which made Quakerism, Quakerism and Quakers, Quakers.

Bauman's contention that language constitutes the cultural and the social, in fact, leads him to miss or ignore a number of factors which are critical for an understanding of seventeenth century English Quakerism and other social groups for that matter. Seventeenth century Quakers, for instance, drew on a number of cultural scripts current in their thought-world. They drew on the Norman Yoke script, a set of philosophical and legal speculations which asserted that England, prior to the Norman Conquest in 1066, had been a representative democracy. They drew on the belief that there had been a pure God-given, Edenic language spoken by Adam and Eve in the paradisiacal Garden of Eden. They drew on historical studies of primitive Christianity which asserted that early Christianity had been egalitarian, communalistic, non-hierarchical, and Holy Spirit led. They drew on Christian views that it was possible to restore the primitive church of Christ to seventeenth century Britain (Christian primitivism). They drew on continental Christian groups like the Anabaptists for some of their ideas and doctrines. They drew on apocalyptic scenarios in which the end of this fallen world and the creation of another better world was near. They drew on a Bible which had recently been translated into English.

Quakers like many of their sectarian contemporaries were also influenced by antiquarianism. Antiquarian notions of an Edenic language and of an egalitarian, charismatic primitive Christianity, were made possible by the translation of the Bible into the English vernacular and the diffusion of this vernacular bible via the technological breakthrough of the printing press. Middle and lower status groups, the less educated classes, could now read holy writ without priestly mediation. What Quakers and their fellow sectarians saw in it was quite different from what self-interested priests said was there. They found a radically communal Christianity which was anti-hierarchical. What they read about was a Holy Spirit who could be present in all humanity. They found an Edenic God-given language (the tongue of speaking in tongues) which Christians could recover with the aid of the "Light within".

Another aspect of this antiquarianism was Quaker primitivism. Quakers regarded themselves, like many other groups at the time (e.g., Puritanism), as a biblical people. They were convinced that they were restoring the Church as it existed in primitive or ancient times. The fact that these biblical peoples did not interpret what the primitive church was in the same way shows that the Bible did not say the same thing to seventeenth century Christians. In other words, even Holy Writ is multivocal.

It was these (and additional) ideological and cultural scripts made possible by the invention of the printing press and the wide diffusion of the vernacular biblical text, along with novel cultural readings of the Bible by Fox and others within the Quaker community, which constructed Quaker key symbols. These key symbols were not "speaking" and "silence". It was the historically, socially, and culturally constructed and biologically embodied "Light within".

Bauman, perhaps unknowingly or unwittingly, provides evidence that the "Inner light" rather than "speaking" and "silence" is the key symbol of Quakerism. It is clear that the "Divine light" stands behind and gives meaning to every linguistic, cultural, and social aspect of early English Quakerism that he delineates. It defines and makes meaningful the secondary symbols of the Society—simplicity in speech, "plainness" in dress, iconoclastic architecture and worship, and apocalyptic rituals. It activated Quaker egalitarianism, perfectionism, pacifism, silent worship, the ministry of all believers, evangelism or missionary work, opposition to bureaucratisation ", "going naked as a sign", and wearing "sackcloth and ashes", All of these were grounded in the Quaker belief in the "Inner light" which inhabited all men and women (making killing the other problematic since there was no other) and which called them to "godly" service.

Bauman's failure to correctly isolate Quaker key symbols and the secondary symbols to which they give definition and meaning has a number of consequences. He provides us with a somewhat misleading view of seventeenth century Quakerism. More importantly he provides us with an approach which is bound to result in a misunderstanding of later Quaker history and its dynamics.

For example, after 1660 with the restoration of the monarchy in England, persecution of the Friends continued and Parliamentary legal action was taken against them. Laws were passed forbidding the practise of Quakerism. It was at this point that Quaker apocalypticism, Quaker individualism, and Quaker miracle working (which Friends saw as proving the truth of their faith) fell out of favour in Quaker circles for obvious reasons. Quaker apocalypticism, individualism, and miracle working were anti-aristocratic, anti-monarchical, anti-theocratic, and anti-priestly. In other words, they were political arrows aimed at the heart of every part of the social order in late seventeenth century England. In the context of a restored monarchical social order which wasn't afraid to use its police powers to restore the ancient social order, Quaker millennialism, individualism, and miracle working were hazardous to Quaker health. As the meek were laid low, pacifism became an integral part of being a Friend.

Another Quaker response to repression and persecution was Fox's establishment of an organisational, semi-bureaucratic structure for the faith. Defeat restored a sense of sin to Fox and to the Quaker community. To discipline the Society, Fox established a pyramid like system of "monthly meetings" (local autonomous "churches" which met to discuss "business" once a month), "quarterly meetings" ("monthly meetings" in a particular region were grouped into "quarterly meetings" to whom they sent representatives on a quarterly basis to discuss Quaker "business"), and "yearly meetings" (the national body to which "quarterly meetings" sent representatives to discuss "business" once a year).

Both pacifism and Quaker institutionalisation led to a change of emphasis in Quaker thought and action. While Quakers continued to maintain an egalitarian emphasis, this emphasis became, after the decline of an evangelical outward propelling eschatology, an internal symbol, a signifier of Quaker pacifism and quietism. It became a sign that Friends were no longer a threat to the social order.

It also meant that the society of equal Friends was no longer so equal. The semi-bureacratisation of the Society led by George Fox transformed Quakerism. This new structure meant that Friends could now discipline themselves (and thereby avoid the fruits of state brutality and terror). It was "weighty" or important (high status) Friends who did the disciplining by modeling the behaviour expected of proper Friends and through the counseling or "disfellowshiping" of errant Friends. This disciplinary practise was particularly aimed at Friends who still maintained the anti-authoritarian charismatic and apocalyptic emphasis of the early period. No longer are "true" Quakers to talk about the high being "laid low", the world in which God would overthrow the evil and corrupt governments and churches of this world. No longer were they to call for the abolition of government programmes or urge the abolition of universities. Rather they were to peacefully witness to the "Truth" of their faith through defencelessness and calmness in the face of suffering and persecution.

Many "Proud Quakers", the more Ranter-like Friends, bridled at the demise of spiritual freedom within the newly disciplined of Society of Friends. By the 1670s schism would occur in the Society when dissidents accused Quaker discipline of subordinating the "Divine light" to the sense of the meeting and to a hierarchical structure.

With the restoration of the monarchy in England in 1660 Quaker conceptions of "speaking" and "silence" changed. Both remained important in Quaker meetings, but their meaning had been transformed because the notion of the "Inner light" had been transformed. The "Inner light" now became oriented toward internal Quaker matters and concerns. While Friends continued to support certain "worldly" causes (e.g., prison reform), but in a less wordly way, they begin to differentiate (with the help of advice from "weighty Friends") between "worldly" activity and Quakerly activity. Additionally, Quaker "meeting for worship" became more and more silent, more quiet (Friends refer to this as their "quietist period"). Friends were no longer sure whether it was the "God within" or something or someone else speaking to them out of the silences of Quaker worship so they stopped preaching (prophesying had declined with the demise of apocalyptic rhetoric in the Society). "Weighty Friends" were the most confident of the source of the "still small voice within". They thus began to play increasingly more prominent roles in Quaker meetings of all types. They came to take their seats on "facing benches" in "meeting houses", symbolising their authority and power in a once putatively egalitarian space. Certain Quakers had now become more equal than others.

Recognising that the Quaker key symbol was the "Inner light" rather than "speaking" and "silence" also gives us better insight into the historical controversies surrounding later Quaker history. In fact, it has been debates surrounding the meaning of "Inner Light" and the relationship of the "divine light" to the Bible which has led to most of the schisms and sectarian movements in Quaker history.

From the beginning there was an inherent tension between the individualism of the "Inner light" and the collective authority of Scripture. While Fox viewed the Bible as a work of men which pointed to the "divine life" of "Christ", he believed that the "Christ within" and the Bible were, in the final analysis, harmonious. However, in practise such harmony has rarely appeared in the Society particularly in America. This discontinuity between spirit and Bible led to varying emphases in different Quaker groups as to what the true basis of religious authority in the Society was. Disagreements over the basis of authority in Quakerism led to controversy, confrontation, and (sometimes) schism.

One of the first schismatic movements in Quakerism occurred in 1691 when a leading Quaker, George Keith, was accused of teaching salvation through the death of Christ rather than through the "Christ within" (the traditional Quaker reading). Keith was "disowned by Friends and, after briefly forming his own Quaker group he joined the Church of England where he became a rather unsuccessful Anglican missionary to the Quakers.

Another schism occurred in the 1820s when the quietist and anti-slavery Long Island farmer Elias Hicks denied the deity of Christ and the saving power of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection. He placed almost total emphasis on the "Light Within" A storm of controversy resulted which led the "Hicksites" to form their own organisational forms.

The "Hicksites" eventually became the core of today’s Friends General Conference (FGC). FGC worship style is largely silent. Their meetings are often found in urban areas and in college communities where professional middle class Friends predominate. Conceptions of the "Light within" in the FGC tend to be quite multivocal and range from more traditional Christian Quaker conceptions too more unitarian-deistic, feminist, world religions conceptions. FGC Quakers usually maintain that "Inner light" leads one on to social activism, particularly peace and social justice activism.

Anothor major controversy soon followed the Hicksite one. This time it revolved around the issue of how much nineteenth century evangelicalism should be allowed to impact the Society. Quaker responses to evangelicalism were symbolised by the positions of two important or "weighty" Quaker preachers, John Wilbur and Joseph John Gurney. The "Orthodox" Wilbur and his followers (who came to be called "Wilburites") held to the traditional Quaker position that while the "Inner light" had primacy, the Bible pointed to the divine life of Christ, and that both, when all was said and done, were in harmony with one another. "Wilburites" held that believers should to try to live the "Christ-like life" to which both the "Inner light" and the Bible pointed. Gurney, the leading exponent of Quaker evangelicalism, and his followers (the "Gurneyites"), on the other hand, and in good evangelical fashion, gave preference to the Bible as the basis of authority in Quaker life. One aspect of the "call" or the "Inner light" that Gurney emphasised, and which struck at the heart of the quietist "Wilburite" movement, was evangelicalism. This, of course didn't go over well with the quietist and separtist "Wilburites".

Today the "Orthodox" or "Wilburite" Friends remain a largely rural group. Currently they are declining in numbers. They continue to separate from the world witnessing to it through their community forms and their testimony of nonresistance. They maintain the "silent meeting" style characteristic of traditional Quakerism, a ministry of all believers, and a charismatic ministry. They identify and mark themselves off through their simple black clothing styles. They bear similarities with other Old Order Groups like the Old Order Amish, Mennonites, and Brethren.

Gurney's group, on the other hand, eventually institutionalised first, as the Five Year's Meeting, and later as Friends United Meeting (FUM). FUM has been strongly influenced by American Protestantism and Protestant evangelicalism. Officially, it sees the "Inner light" and the Bible as harmonious and authoritative. It is thus a very Christian brand of Quakerism. FUM prizes social activism and pacifism and these are important markers of FUM identity. In terms of worship, FUM, more than other Quaker "sects" (save the Evangelical Friends Alliance which is the most "un-Quakerly" of Quaker groups), has adopted Protestant styles of worship. Most FUM "meetings" are "programmed" (i.e., directed services with ministers and quoirs with much in common with Methodist or Presbyterian services) or "semi-programmed" (i.e., directed services with a minister and "silent" worship). FUM has a seminary to train these ministers. Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, an institution run by FUM, has attached to it a School of Religion attached to it which trains ministers.

It was also the egalitarian character of the "Inner light" key symbol which gave impetus to the belief that Quaker women should be allowed to "preach" and "prophesy" alongside Quaker men. Quaker women have long been active both within and outside of Quaker meetings. Quaker women have always preached and prophesied along with Quaker men. Over the years, Quaker women have played active leading roles in a number of reform efforts. They aided Friends imprisoned by the authorities in seventeenth century Britain. They served as missionaries for the faith throughout the world. In this capacity they often become martyrs for the cause of "Truth". In the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries Quaker women have been active in British and American reform movements such as the Indian rights movement, the abolition movement, the peace movement, the temperance movement, and the women's rights movement.

Today the "Inner light" provides the impetus for Quaker activism in peace, social justice, women's rights, prison reform, and economic justice movements. The fact that Quakers see all of these activities against the backdrop of previous Society activities seen as progressive is a major factor in constitution and reconstitution (continuously) of a Quaker sense of identity and the Quaker feeling of historical, social, and cultural superiority. Quakers see their long-term activism as a sign of their chosenness and as a sign that Quakerism is superior to any other form of religion. For Quakers then the guiding "Inner light" has become a dynamic living catechism which represents Quaker choseness through "progressive" Quaker action in the world.

The study of key symbols is important. It allows us to study the relationship between the macro-(broader historical, social, and cultural contexts of action) and micro-(internal historical, social, cultural, and embodied or personal contexts of action) areas of analysis. Within key symbols one can pinpoint the external social and cultural factors which impact key symbols themselves. Key symbols, in turn, can be used to delineate the impact of these external forces on the symbols themselves. They also allow us to explore the ideologies of social groups, contestations over symbols within social groups, and the process or processes by which these symbols are embodied in practise and action. In other words, we can explore how identity is formed and recapitulated in social groups and how that ideology affects the actions of members of a social group.

Since both external and internal dynamics are the products of history it is essential that the study of group symbology and key symbols be historical. More than anything else Bauman's work (if somewhat unsuccessfully) shows us that it is only in this way that we can understand the impact external social, political, economic, cultural, and ideological factors have had on the symbols and identities of social groups.

The study of key symbols and secondary symbols also allows us to explore how symbols have been used by powerful or "weighty" members of social collectivities to legitimise themselves and there particular ideologies regardless of how novel or "traditional" these might be. Symbols are not univocal, as the contestations over the meaning of the "Inner light" in Quaker culture show. They have multiple meanings and these can lead to ideological crises within identity groups.

In the end, while an exploration of speech acts is important and necessary, it is just as (if not more) important to ascertain the key symbols of social groups which constitute the speech acts themselves and which are themselves products of wider external and internal ideological, cultural, social, and biological factors and the interplay and interaction between these. In the final analysis, language is a historical, ideological, cultural, social, and biological product which reflects these factors in its structure and history. We need to treat it as such.

SOURCES
On key symbols see Sherry Ortner; "On Key Symbols", American Anthropologist, 75:5, October 1973, pp. 1338-1346, Ruth Benedict; The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1967), the various essays of Clifford Geertz; The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Basic, 1973), Victor Turner; "Symbols in African Ritual"; Science, vol. 179, no. 4078 (March 1973) and From Ritual to Theatre, Marshall Sahlins; Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1976), and David Schneider; American Kinship: A Cultural Account (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).

On Quakerism and its contexts see Richard Bauman; Let Your Words be Few: Symbolism of Speaking and Silence among Seventeenth Century Quakers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Christopher Hill; The Century of Revolution 1603-1714 (NYC: Norton, 1961), Christopher Hill; The World Turned Upside Down (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), Christopher Hill; The English Bible and the 17th Century Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), Christopher Hill; The Antichrist in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), Barry Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1985), Alan Cole; "The Quakers and the English Revolution", Past and Present 10 (1956), H. Larry Ingle; First Among Friends: George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism (NYC: Oxford University Press, 1994), J.F. Maclear "Quakerism and the End of the Interregnum: A Chapter in the Domestication of Radical Puritanism", Church History 19:4 (1950), pp. 240-270, Elisabeth Potts Brown and Susan Mosher Stuard (eds.); Witnesses for Change: Quaker Women Over Three Centuries (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), Sydney James: A People Among Peoples: Quaker Benevolence in Eighteenth Century America (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press), Peter Brock; The Quaker Peace Testimony, 1660-1914 (York, England: Sessions of York, 1991), Hugh Barbour; The Quakers in the Puritan Revolution (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1964), Hugh Barbour and J. William Frost; The Quakers (Westport, CT.: Greenwood, 1988), Richard Vann; The Social Development of English Quakerism, 1655-1755 (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1969), and Stephen Kent: "Relative Deprivation and Resource Mobilization: A Study of Early Quakerism" British Journal of Sociology 33 (1982).

On American Quakerism see W. Williams; The Rich Heritage of Quakerism (Newburg, OR.: Barclay Press, 1989), J. William Frost; The Quaker Family in Colonial America (NYC: St. Martin's Press, 1973), Frederick Tolles; Meeting House and Counting House (NYC: Norton, 1948), Tolles; Quakers and the Atlantic Culture (NYC: Macmillan, 1960), Jack Marietta; The Reformation of American Quakerism, 1748-1783 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), Larry Hingle; Quakers in Conflict: The Hicksite Reformation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986), and Thomas Hamm; The Transformation of American Quakerism: Orthodox Friends 1800-1907 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

On Quaker women see Margaret Bacon; Mother's of Feminism: The Story of Quaker Women in America (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986) and Keith Thomas; "Woman and the Civil War Sects", Past and Present 13:1 (1958), pp. 42-62.

Musings on Carol Blum's Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue

This is a review of Carol Blum's Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue that I wrote for a seminar on the French Revolution in 1988. I was a doctoral student in Anthropology but I was developing a strong interest in history. I had begun to recognise that a Sociology and and Anthropology without history--the disciplines without history--were anemic and as such problematic. So I started taking History classes and started applying what I learned in these history classes to my exploration of social and cultural theory and the study of culture and ideology.

Perhaps the most controversial issue in late twentieth century social science has been the nature and role ideology has in and continues to play in social and cultural formations. Traditionally, ideology has been conceptualised as political in nature, those interrelated ideas western civilisation has referred to as conservative, liberal, or communist, or as the justifications for particular economic systems, capitalist or feudal, for example. Increasingly, however, social and human scientists have teased another definition of ideology from Marx's text, one at variance with the ideology as false conscious notion above. In this other perspective ideology is naturalisation. It is that which makes "real" a particular world view. This version of ideology perhaps reaches its apex in its Foucauldian variant where ideology becomes discourse, ways of seeing embedded in binary form in human language in all of its forms.

It is this notion of ideology that Carol Blum in her Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution (Cornell University Press: 1986), draws upon, if implicitly, in her analysis of the Rousseauvian discourse of virtue and her exploration of how that discourse of virtue influenced the leading "radical" participants in the French Revolution. Blum delineates how one particular reading of a virtue derived from Rousseau by Robespierre and his coterie of revolutionary disciples gave rise to a specific ideology which emphasized the natural virtuousness of man. This revolutionary reading of Rousseau, claims Blum, had an emotive quality that was mystical in nature and was believed to allow the real revolutionaries to mystically unite their revolutionary virtue with that of the general will, the virtuous common will. Revolutionary intellectuals, claims Blum, came to believe that they, because they had merged their virtue with that of the common will, could, by looking into their own hearts express the will of "the people" and distinguish between the virtuous and good and the non-virtuous and wicked in revolutionary French society. Given this revolutionary intellectuals, claims Blum, came to believe that it was their duty to give definition to and build "institutions" which would allow this revolutionary virtue to flourish. In short they believed it was their duty to build a "republic of virtue" that would allow the good to flourish, the common will to flourish. It was, for Blum, this discourse derived from a reading, or better perhaps a misreading, of Rousseau, and the rise of a dictatorship of the revolutionary intellectuals that led to the Terror.

The Terror, for Blum, is predicated on the distinction between the virtuous and the non-virtuous. Any hindrance of the revolutionary programme was ascribed by revolutionary intellectuals to the heinous and evil actions of anti-revolutionaries. Moreover, since it was believed that this evilness could not emerge from within the general will it had to, it was believed, derive solely from an external source. Hence the Jacobin emphasis on treason and the external counterrevolutionary threat. Thus the need to fight the foreign aggressor.

Blum recognises the role institutional factors like the economic, the political, and other social factors played during the revolutionary years. She convincingly shows how these others were often viewed through the lenses of a particular ideology. She shows, for example, how Robespierre's response to the economic and food shortage crisis of the 1790s was structured by his ideological predispositions. Since his view of virtue was tied to an antimaterialism and to suffering he could not support the mass riots of this period which were aimed at obtaining foodstuffs, including luxury items like coffee and sugar, since it was an abrogation of revolutionary virtue. It was thus ideology, claims Blum, which brought about or furthered the split between the Jacobins and the sans-culottes.

Blum convincingly explicates how this Rousseavian cultural script arose and how it was diffused among particular groups, sometimes somewhat differently. Girondins, for example, had a notion of virtue, they believed also drawn from Rousseau, that was quite different from that of the Montagnards' view of virtue, which they too believed was derived from Rousseau. For the former, virtue was indicated in actions. For the latter virtue was the union with the mystical general will. For the latter it was anti-rational, emotive, and expressed itself in the attempt to "legislate", give birth to, and provide definition to the "republic of virtue". Like Calvinism's notion that one's elect status was revealed in wealth, Robespierre and his colleagues believed that their virtue was revealed in attempts by evil, external enemies to assassinate them, the virtuous mouthpieces of the general will.

What is particularly interesting, for the historical anthropologist, is the binary structure of this ideology, the good/evil or sacred/profane quality of the thought. One cannot help but relate this to Durkheim's notion that humans codify culture into sacred/profane poles, to Levi-Strauss' notion that human thought is binary, and the contentions of many contemporary semiologists that discourse is given meaning by the differences between various signs or meaning-units within the arbitrary sign system.

While showing how the cultural script, the discourse of Rousseau's "republic of virtue" originated, Blum does not, in my estimation, excavate sufficiently, the relationship of this discourse to cultural scripts present in late 18th century France. It did not, one assumes, originate in a vacuum. Moreover, although she differentiates between Rousseau, the actual living and breathing biological being, and "Rousseau", the self-representation of the former, she resorts to psychologistic explanations too often for my taste to explain the differences between the two. Instead of relating Rousseau and "Rousseau" to psychological factors she could and should, instead, have related them more to cultural scripts and to social institutional factors current in Rousseau's time and place and to social and cultural psychology. The issue of self-representation, moreover, raises interesting questions of actuality/manipulation which Blum only touches on. Blum could, in other words, have explored more extensively the differences between Rousseau and "Rousseau". Despite these rather picky caveats, however, Blum draws our attention, as did Weber in his essay on the origins of rationalistic capitalism, to the crucial role ideology plays in everyday life.

Never Was a Cornflake Girl: Thomas Bender, Community, and Identity

I wrote this essay for a seminar on community at SUNY Albany in 1996. As someone interested in the social and cultural construction of reality I have long been interested in community, identity, and the social and cultural construction of community and identity. As someone interested in social movements like Mormonism and Quakerism I have long been interested in how identity construction and community construction are at the heart of the construction of social movements. At the heart of social movements, of course, is a cultural and ideological core. This paper interrogates most of these long term theoretical concerns of mine.

Thomas Bender's Community and Social Change offers us social and cultural theory fleshed out with history. More than anything else Bender’s book takes to task the tendency in social science theories of community to read the famous gemeinschaft/gesellschaft distinction of the influential German theorist Ferdinand Tonnies in geographical and evolutionary terms.

For Bender, it was the influential University of Chicago sociologist Louis Wirth who popularised the notion that face-to-face rural communities (gemeinschaft) were declining in the face of the growth of urban industrial societies (gesellschaft). For Wirth, and others who followed his lead, urbanism, operationalised in terms of demographic variables, specifically, increasing population, increasing population density, and increasing heterogeneity, undermined traditional communal ways, and gave birth to new urban lifeways, new lifeways that replaced these earlier primary forms of social interaction with secondary social contacts, weakened kinship bonds, and undermined the traditional bases of social solidarity.

Bender takes exception to Wirth’s geographical and evolutionary conception of the community/society binary. Instead he argues that Tonnies conception of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft was both geographic-evolutionary and, the aspect which Wirth ignores, behavioural, He argues that it is this behavioural aspect of the community/society split that allows us look at community and society historically rather than evolutionarily.

Bender explores American community history from colonisation to the twentieth century to foreground how important this behavioural understanding of community and society is. According to Bender it was in the late eighteenth century that America experienced a bifurcation in lifestyles. After the ratification of the Constitution two different lifeways, local lifeways arose in the United States, one local in form and grounded in face-to-face interaction and characterised by “consensus”, and another, national in form and characterized by conflict and the idea of majority rules.

There is something to be said for Bender's volleys against the geographic-evolutionary conception of the community/society binary popularized by Wirth. Bender’s attacks on theories of community like those of Wirth, approaches which are grounded in unilinear assumptions, assumptions which posit the straight line movement from gemeinshaft to gesellschaft, from traditional to modern communities, from rural to urban forms, assumptions which continue to impact the contemporary intellectual and academic mind.

Bender is not the first theorist to raise questions about unilinear models of the evolution of community and society which posits that community had been replaced by society, that face-to-face interactions had been replaced by secondary ones. Unilnear models in general, unilnear models which were prominent not only in community theory but in the understanding of the evolution of humans and human life in general, came under serious attack in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s in the writings of Franz Boaz and Julian Steward and by the 1960s had lost its dominant place in anthropological theory. So, to some extent, Bender provides us with yet another example of someone critiquing a social science paradigm that had already gone out of style by the time he criticised it.

Timing apart Bender does offer a systematic account of the problems with the geographical-evolutionary model of community and proffers a behavioural model in its place. But what he doesn’t offer us is an exploration of that historical, social, and cultural phenomena that manufactures community, identity and its social, cultural, and historical construction.

In recent years anthropologists have begun to focus a significant amount of attention on the nature of identity construction. Cultural Anthropologist John Comaroff, for instance, distinguishes between two major identity forms, the totemic and the ethnic. Comoroff sees the former as an identity structured on the belief in a common ancestral origin, in a common ancestry traced to some animal or plant in the natural environment. Totemic identity structures, claims Comaroff, are less likely to demonise the others whom they mark themselves off against than is that other form of identity type Comaroff delineates, ethnic identity structures. Ethnic identity structures, like totemic, are grounded in ideologies of common ancestry. They are generally geographical in nature, tied to soil, and they are often biological in form, tied to blood. Ethnic identities are generally grounded in a distinction between "us" and "them", with the "them" oftentimes characterised in very negative almost demonic terms.

While Comoroff's distinction is very interesting and helpful it does not go far enough. Identity can be defined in a variety of ways, biologically, economically, politically, geographically, ideologically, culturally, ecologically, religiously, historically, and so on. In the modern West with its complex social and cultural formations, for instance, identity can even be defined in terms of all of these above simultaneously. From 8am to 5pm on weekdays we may define ourselves as an employee of Wal-Mart. From 10am to 10:05am on Election Day we may define ourselves in terms of ones political party. From 11am to 3pm on Sunday we may define ourselves as a devout ward going Mormon. In the first few weeks after an attack on our nation we may define ourselves as a patriotic lets respond to the attack citizen of the United States. If we are a student at the University of Utah we may define ourself as a "Ute" and mark ourself off against that evil "Cougar" other of BYU to our south. When with parents we may define ourselves in biological terms, as a daughter of the Demerest family. When trying to get into Harvard we may attempt to define ourselves in minority categories that have been constructed in the nation in which we live. Clearly, identity and thus community, which is built on the broad shoulders of identity, are very complex phenomena and require further systematic study. And it is certainly far more than just a behaviour. It is a culture and a complex of meanings.

One last criticism of Bender's work, like many classic works in early American religious history, works which often place Puritans at the centre of their narrative tales--yet another unilinear academic tale--Bender place New Englanders and their communities in the very centre of his analysis. He asserts that the similarities between New England, the Middle Colonies, the Chesapeake, and the South were more significant than their differences. Even he has to admit that the differences were significant as well, however, particularly when he deals with the differences between the American North and the American South. Nevertheless, he asserts that the back country areas of the South were as locally oriented as the New England colonies and states. But the question remains whether they were locally oriented in the same way? Bender really does need to develop a cultural notion of community in addition to his behavioural notion for if he did he might see that the behavioural similarities are no less important than the cultural variations.

Sources:
Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1978)
John Comaroff, "Of Totemism and Ethnicity: Consciousness, Practise, and the Signs of Inequality"; unpublished paper in possession of the author
Julian Steward, Evolution and Ecology: Essays on Social Transformation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978)
Julian Steward, Theory of Cultural Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990)

Jusify My Love: Reading Madonna

This is an essay I originally wrote way back in 1993 for the late not much lamented and far too short lived countercultural Provo, Utah newspaper the Deseret Free Press of which I was the managing editor and the lone "Gentile", the Mormon term for non-Mormons, on the staff. I was in Utah--where I fell in love with the Rockies--because I was doing research on Mormonism. The Deseret Free Press was an attempt to do long form and opinionated journalism in the buckle of the Mormon belt, Utah County. It lasted for four issues because we, me and my three other colleagues, could not find advertisers for our brand of long form opinionated journalism and ran out of money. During its short run I wrote a critical piece on the handling of the Branch Davidian fiasco in Waco, my take on what it was like to be a "Gentile" in "Zion", and a review of the Nonesuch performance of Gorecki's 3rd Symphony. RIP. As you will see this essay shows the strong influence on me of the semiology I picked up at Indiana University where I was a student in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Speaking of IU and my beloved Bloomington, I remember hearing to "Oh Father" for the first time while ice skating at the public rink on the southside of Bloomington, Indiana, a city I found very difficult leaving and still dream of returning home to. It was a great song to ice skate to. So without further ado...

Yes, I admit it, this dedicated follower of “progressive” and “classical” music, is fascinated by Madonna. Of course, the value one places on a phenomenon, be it Madonna, the Gilded Age, Metallica, or social theory, as Max Weber noted many moons ago, influences ones interpretation of the objects of ones intellectual and academic gaze. One generally engages a “text” that one finds fascinating in the first place. Hence, one's reading of that “text” often reflects one’s pre-textual positive or negative ideological predilections toward the “text” one reads in the first place.

Madonna has engaged and fascinated many commentators from music critics, to rock fans, from academics to cultural critics since she appeared on the scene in the 1970s. Dissertations have been written on the “Madonna phenomenon” becoming themselves part of the very phenomenon they are trying to describe. These critiques whether negative or laudatory, are shot through with a rationalised hermeneutics where one sees in Madonna what one wants to see. This essay is no different. I write on Madonna because I am fascinated by her, because I find something of value in her and her “art”.

My first image, as far as I can remember, of Madonna is from her video for "Like a Virgin". In retrospect this video seems to embody everything I have come to think of when I think of Madonna. There is, or it seems to me there is in the “Like a Virgin” video, a wonderfully ironic critique of the female virgin/whore binary so typical of western culture, with its Madonna, her name itself feeds off of this binary, who is simultaneously pure and soiled and who, as a result, undermines the virgin/whore dichotomy itself by becoming both the virgin and the whore simultaneously.

Madonna followed the “Like a Virgin” video with what seems to me further ironic commentaries on stereotypes and caricatures of women in Western culture. In “Material Girl” Madonna draws on Marilyn Monroe in Howard Hawk’s film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to critique the dumb blonde stereotype and caricature of a woman whose only goal in life is to find a man with money whom she can marry by going off with a man, at the end of the video (the film within a film within a film) who clearly is not a man of means. “Material Girl” was followed by “Open Your Heart” which critiqued the woman behind glass for men's eyes only motif in modern society as the bohemian Madonna freed from the glass cage of patriarchy dances up the street with a young boy at the end of the video in a return to innocence (or is it a comment on how one day that young boy too will lose his innocence and find vicarious solace in peep shows?). Both videos, it must be said, have some of have your cake and eat it too sort of quality for they portray, in the case of “Material Girl” a diamond hungry Madonna and, in the case of “Open Your Heart” a scantily clad and sexed up Madonna dancing mostly for the male gaze during most of the video only to seemingly free Madonna from these caricatures and stereotypes at the very end of each video.

While critiquing or seeming to critique the role of women in contemporary western society, each of these videos plays on the eroticism and sexuality of Madonna. Sexual double entendres weave their way throughout her songs and videos as in “Open your Heart” where heart and key are not only the heart and key of everyday discourse, but also the sexual organs of male and female, and the childlike key which will free our heroine from the seedy world of the porno carousel and the patriarchal gaze. Perhaps this too is having your cake and eating it to for it allows males and females to gaze longingly at Madonna’s body and feminists to read the endings of each video as liberation from stereotypes and caricatures within which women have been locked for centuries.

Eventually multicultural themes and themes of tolerance began to crop up in Madonna’s work. There is the plea for parental tolerance in the face of pre-marital pregnancies in “Papa Don't Preach”. There's the Hispanic textures of “La Isla Bonita” which reveal a multicultural America of whites, Hispanics, and African-Americans. There's the play on interethnic love laced with the strains of black gospel, Catholicism, and forbidden sexuality, a potent and controversial mixture that even corporate America (in this case Pepsi Cola) could not handle when push came to shove, in “Like a Prayer”. There's the exploration of the difficult relations between father and daughter in “Oh Father”. Finally, there’s the gay subculture that is drawn into Madonna's multiethnic and multivocal universe in “Vogue”.

What seems clear from all these videos is that Madonna has a chameleon-like ability to both reflect her times and manipulate them via the media and through cultural bricolage. Madonna is a floating symbol or signifier, a floating signifier who, in a world in which symbols refer only to other symbols themselves, attaches herself to a variety of symbolic forms, in particular those related to sexuality, innocence, controversy, and fashion. Madonna has been able to manipulate cultural simulations thereby selling herself in her varying image forms to a consumer hungry society of record buyers and dedicated followers of the latest controversies and the latest fashions. Madonna herself then is symbolic of the consumer ordered symbolic form that late capitalist society has taken, a symbolic form in which the meanings of symbols are largely determined by their fit, their conjuncture, with consumer society. And in this consumer society nothing sells better than sex and controversy and fashion.

Such creative re-invention becomes necessary in a world of consumption with built in redundancies, in a universe where only the “new” sells and the “old” fades away into obscurity. Over the years Madonna has managed to re-create her image from New York bohemian to the blonde sex goddess, from the I am ready for my close-up vogeur to her Heidi-like pigtailed exhibitionist. Many critics have pointed out that no other “star” in recent years has so successfully surmounted the difficulties of the redundancy built into western consumer culture. These image transformations have been so successful in part because they were tied to controversies related to Madonna's sensual and sexual persona(e). The song and video for "Justify my love", for instance, were highly controversial because of their sexual content. Music Television (MTV), the major advertiser of rock videos and the images they convey in the United States, refused to run it. Here was an erotic Madonna, reveling in sexuality and her need for sexual fulfillment. This was not the bohemian Madonna of an earlier era who wore her sexuality, her lace undergarments, on her shoulders so to speak. This was not the black garbed, bangled, and necklaced Madonna of the early 1980s. Rather this was the erotic, disrobed Madonna of the 1990s, a Madonna we would see more of in her controversial picture book, Sex (1992).

Madonna’s transformations of personae were inextricably linked to controversies, real or manufactured, in Madonna's life, controversies that were often associated with sex and sexual liberation in some way, shape, or form (including Madonna’s and Sandra Bernhard’s are they or aren’t they controversy). Eventually, these persona changes and controversies became a part of the very cultural mythology of Madonna herself and an eager public awaited and consumed Madonna’s next personality shift and the controversies associated with it.

As is the case with so many of the “texts” of the late capitalist West, there appear to be contradictions within the Madonna text. Madonna's universe, as noted above, is multi-ethnic and multi-cultural, peopled by African-Americans, Hispanics, and Gays. This is a far cry from the Norman Rockwellish WASP dominated portrayals of an earlier America. Additionally, there is a liberatory quality in the Madonna textual universe in the form of sensuality and sexuality (e.g., the videos of "Express Yourself" and "Justify my love"). Her Catholic sensuality, as noted by Camille Paglia and other commentators, her joy in her body, her reveling in her own sexuality (whether bi- or hetero-), and her comfortableness with both, is worlds away from, as well as a critique of, the staid Victorian sexual ideologies that still seem to continue to affect and afflict so much of America even today. As Paglia notes, even those who wish to liberate women from the patriarchal sexual ideologies of the past end up re-puritanising women's sexuality and end up hiding women's sensuality and sexuality behind a veil of moralism (a la Andrea Dworkin). Not Madonna, however. Madonna, and those who followed in her wake, are the very epitome of third wave feminists, women who did their ever changing liberated thing while looking sexy while doing it.

For Paglia, Madonna's sensuality derives from her Catholicism and her Italian background, both more attuned to sensuality and sexual expression. Both are quite different from the perceptions of sexual frigidity that some “discover” among North Europeans and Brits, among WASPS, myself included. So while Madonna reflects perhaps the pinnacle of consumer capitalism with its disposable commodities, where even individual images become redundant, she also undermines many of this culture's sacred patriarchal cows. Or does she? Does sex and the controversy surrounding her sexual escapades become just another disposable product in our heroine’s universe? Is Madonna's multicultural and multiethnic world simply another momentary ploy to raise the eyebrows of her target audience? Is it a means to sell product?

Sources, further reading, and further listening:
Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture
Kaplan, Rocking Around the Clock
Allen (ed), Channels of Discourse
Frith, Sound Effects
Baudrillard, Simulations
Madonna, The Immaculate Collection