HumCore Workshop #4: How International Histories Connect
Transcript
Alexander Key:
Hello everybody, welcome. Welcome to those of us on Zoom and those of us here in Levinthal Hall. It's great to see everybody. It gives me tremendous pleasure to welcome everyone to our fourth in the series of Humanities Core workshops. Our speakers tonight — Vered Shemtov and Sharon Kinoshita — need no introduction, but let me just say that Professor Kinoshita is a professor at University of California, Santa Cruz, the co-director of the Center for Mediterranean Studies, the co-director of the Mediterranean Seminar, and a scholar of the global Middle Ages. And this is one of the reasons why we're so excited that she's here because there are a lot of people who say they're scholars of the global Middle Ages without actually being a scholar, and this is not the case with Professor Kinoshita.
Speaker 3:
Professor Shemtov from Stanford, again, needs no introduction but is the editor of a literary journal at Stanford that takes questions of Jewish thought and identity and makes it clear that they are a global question. It's a great resource, it's a live publication venue and I encourage everybody to take a look at Dibur. Professor Shemtov also directs the Hebrew studies program and is a colleague of mine in comparative literature, and perhaps most importantly for this workshop, one of the leading intellectual and pedagogical figures in HumCore at Stanford since the very beginning. Wouldn't be the same without you. It would be worse.
Alexander Key:
Is the audio okay? Is that better now? Okay, good. I think I was maybe just a little far away from the microphone. Both speakers will speak for around 15 minutes, and then they'll respond to each other, pick up on things from their presentations for about another five minutes, and then we'll open it up to Q and A with the audience here and the audience on Zoom. Thanks very much for coming, everybody. Sharon, the floor is yours.
Sharon Kinoshita:
Thank you. Okay, well thank you everybody. Previous workshop speakers have addressed globalizing the study of the humanities at the level of the institution or the program. My presentation today is much more modest. How might one design or adapt a course to make it more responsibly global?
Sharon Kinoshita:
I'm in a department of literature, and while I draw heavily on the work of historians, one of the things that I'm looking for is how to do a cultural global Middle Ages that would put emphasis on the cultural, not just the world historical as inspiring, as I found a lot of that work.
Sharon Kinoshita:
My background is in French and European comparative literature. And what I'm presenting today is something that comes out of both my research and my teaching. I've been working on Marco Polo for some time now. I translated his work, "The Description of the World" in 2016. And I teach him pretty regularly but I'm always looking for ways to contribute to the cultural aspect of how we might think about the world that Marco Polo describes. Hoping I can work this. Uh oh, how do I advance the PowerPoint?
Speaker 3:
Use the mouse to click on the button.
Sharon Kinoshita:
Oh, okay. Okay, so Marco Polo and the global Middle Ages. Marco Polo inhabits a world in the mid-13th century that changes quite a bit from the beginning to the end of the century. And just to give you a sense of the change, when Saint Francis of Assisi dies in 1226 and Chinggis Khan dies in 1227, they really inhabit different worlds with virtually no intersection.
Sharon Kinoshita:
That's going to change within a couple of decades because largely the work of the two Franciscans, disciples of Saint Francis, John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck who undertake missions to Chinggis Khan's successors in the 1240s and the 1250s, respectively.
Sharon Kinoshita:
I wanted to remind you. I'm sure this work is familiar to just about everyone in the audience, Janet Abu-Lughod's "Before European Hegemony: The World System 1250-1350." So she highlights this particular century of the European middle... Or of the global Middle Ages to say, "This is the century that functions as a precursor to the world system," that Wallerstein develops in such detail beginning in the late 15th and 16th centuries. And she attributes it to the Mongol conquest. The conquests of Chinggis and his successors creates a kind of integrated world which enables the sort of communication of peoples, commodities, ideas, et cetera, et cetera, by joining up all of these regional world systems in a way that they hadn't been before and won't be again until well into the modern era. She refers to the Pax Mongolica, obviously riffing on the Pax Romana, as the kind of enabling ground of this century of communication.
Sharon Kinoshita:
Just before I leave that, I wanted to call your attention to a brand new book on the Mongols. It's focused on the golden horde, but it really presents the Mongols in a really kind of new and revisionist light, or incorporates the current state of knowledge of the Mongols. And Marie Favereau wants to move away from the idea of the Pox Mongolica and has introduced instead the phrase "mongol exchange."
Sharon Kinoshita:
Just to situate Marco Polo in the midst of Abu-Lughod's century, you can see his birth and death dates. He left Venice as a very young man in 1271, returns in 1295, and writes the book that's normally known as "The Travels" in 1298. In both my research and especially in my teaching, I say that I'm focusing basically on the first half of Abu-Lughod's remarkable century, so basically about 1250 to about 1300.
Sharon Kinoshita:
Now, Marco Polo's book is normally known, in English anyways, "The Travels." In some other Western languages it keeps some of the more authentic titles, but just... whoops. Yeah, just to give you an idea, the original title... the earliest title of the work is given is "The Description of the World," or Devisement du monde in the one manuscript thought to be closest to the lost original.
Sharon Kinoshita:
Over the next couple of centuries, different manuscript copies are given different titles. And just to call your attention to "The Book of the Great Khan," and then "The Book of Marvels." And then in middle of the 16th century, it's integrated by the Venetian humanist, Ramusio, in this series about travel. So I'd say it's only in the 16th century that it becomes a travel narrative. And for me, this genre is crucial because we have certain kinds of expectations about travel narratives being based in firsthand experience, et cetera, et cetera that simply aren't there in Marco Polo. You don't get the traveling subject eye, and therefore what we get is something quite different from what people often expect when they approach the text.
Sharon Kinoshita:
This is my translation, keeping the original title then, "The Description of the World." And Marco co-writes it, so as told to Rustichello of Pisa who's otherwise known as a writer of Arthurian romance. I like to think that this is part of my contribution since the co-author is known for romance, and romance is one of the things that, as a scholar of medieval French literature, I work on to emphasize some of the otherwise inexplicable or frustrating aspects of the language of the text. Obviously, in fact, they're quite close to the characteristics of 13th-century French prose when you think of works like "The Death of King Arthur" or "The Quest of the Holy Grail." On the one hand, Marco Polo is writing stuff that's never been written in French, but on the other hand, they're adopting a language which is quite familiar.
Sharon Kinoshita:
Okay, so how to think about Marco Polo in global context? A couple of things in the background of my helping me think through how to do that. Sanjay Subrahmanyam's notion of connected histories has been quite inspirational for me. He looks at early modern Eurasia and how things are actually linked up rather than, for example, a world history where you take one from column A and one from column B sort of thing, he really wants to show the integration.
Sharon Kinoshita:
I think that because Marco Polo is functioning in this century of Mongol exchange, it offers the opportunity, and his text materializes the potential of doing a connected history for this period. Essentially, what I'm trying to do is a connected history using Marco Polo's Description of the World as a kind of matrix. Looking at all of the lands that he describes. They are connected because his variability to describe all of these lands attest to their connectivity.
Sharon Kinoshita:
But within that, instead of inserting Marco Polo into a diachrony of the Western discovery of China or something like that, instead I take advantage of his lifespan to offer a synchronic snapshot, and then within that to try to fill in. With my students, I often use the metaphor of a Polaroid that is very sketchy when it first comes out of the machine, but then it gradually assumes detail and color as you let it develop.
Sharon Kinoshita:
My challenge has been to, in the classroom to find texts that would help fill out that thick description of the synchronic snapshot, things available in English, and for me, secondary materials that I can draw on available either in English or one of the Western languages that I can read. I'm stepping foolishly into the void because I don't have the Asian languages even that Marco Polo has.
Sharon Kinoshita:
Okay, so this is just to give you some sign posts of when Marco first... The chronology of his going to Asia and coming back. And this is a half century that's quite turbulent in a world historical setting. Just between the time the Polos leave and the time they come back, you have these major shifts of power. The Byzantine reconquest of Constantinople from the Latins, and then the Mamluk conquest of Acre, the elimination of the Crusader states that had been in the eastern Mediterranean for 200 years at that point.
Sharon Kinoshita:
Okay, so as I said before, I've been looking for what might be a cultural analog to Abu-Lughod's world system, or Subrahmanyam's connected history. And so my mode of scholarship is serendipity. One thing I started with is contemporaries of Marco Polo, figures who were found across the Eurasia that he describes whose birth dates and death dates are roughly close to his.
Sharon Kinoshita:
Takezaki Suenaga is a guy who... a Japanese minor warrior who participated in one of the Japanese successful attempts to repel the Mongol invasion of Japan. He commissions a set of scrolls devoted to emphasizing his role and mainly to complain about the fact that he hasn't been sufficiently compensated for the great role that he and his regional companions played in this naval battle.
Sharon Kinoshita:
The second, Amir Khusrau, is associated with the Delhi Sultanate, which is not an empire that Marco Polo travels to or even describes, but he's one of these polymath poets. His poetry is apparently still well known in the South Asian world. And he has, for example, a celebration of India which is interesting to me because to put side-by-side with Marco Polo's book of India and see the different ways that they... the different features they describe or the different ways they approach similar features.
Sharon Kinoshita:
Maria Palaiologina is interesting. She's the illegitimate daughter of one of the first restored emperors of Constantinople. The emperor gives two daughters in marriage, legitimate daughters in marriage to Christian neighbors in the Balkans, but he gives two illegitimate daughters to the Mongols. This one, Maria Palaiologina, to the Ilkhanate of Persia, and then another daughter to the strongman warlord of the golden horde. And she's well known as an artistic patron, architectural patron in Tabriz but especially when she returns to Constantinople after being widowed.
Sharon Kinoshita:
Zhao Mengfu I'll talk about in a moment. He's a central Chinese painter, calligrapher, poet, just astonishing cultural figure whose work is hugely important in the canons of Chinese art, but his reputation has always been iffy because he, after a period of withdrawal, chooses to go to work for the Mongols, so he has this collaborationist spot on his reputation.
Sharon Kinoshita:
And then Dante I think needs no explanation, but just to put him in context here.
Sharon Kinoshita:
Zhao Mengfu, this is one of his famous drawings, a sheep and a goat. If I have time, I'll come back at the end to why I chose this particular piece of art.
Sharon Kinoshita:
And as far as Dante, famously he's writing in Paradiso. What can you say about the virtuous man born by the Indus who doesn't know about Christ? How can we condemn him? In the meantime, Marco Polo is fully describing Indian religions and practices without any kind of back thought about whether they'll be saved or not.
Sharon Kinoshita:
Okay, so another serendipitous way I've approached Marco Polo is a unit I call Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral. And so rather than looking at the cultures in the way that Marco Polo describes them, he reserves some of his most enthusiastic language for just describing the stuff. Pepper, coming from the Malabar coast, is of course the central driver of the spice trade, going way back at least as far as the Romans and going forward into the European age of exploration and conquest. But the great thing is that pepper goes not only west via Alexandria to the Mediterranean world but it also goes east to China. And one of the things Marco Polo says in describing the port at Zaiton in southern China is for every X-amount that goes to Alexandria, 10 times that comes here to this port.
Sharon Kinoshita:
One of the ways I try to use this to expand is to take this recently translated Syrian cookbook, mid-13th century, at the beginning of our half century. And just to look at the index and pick out a few things with pepper to show how this pepper trade is influencing the cuisines at different ends of the route. Here's a nice one, a cure for nausea. Here's one for... I think this is roasting lamb. Yeah.
Sharon Kinoshita:
Okay, so another animal, the animal part is focusing... My favorite thing to focus on is sheep because Marco Polo, for example, there's a variety of sheep that Marco Polo describes with such enthusiasm that today it's called the Marco Polo sheep. What's interesting is that Marco Polo's description of sheep are different in place to place. Some of them, he chooses the ones with the fat behinds and they're very good to eat. Other times, he'll explain how sheep are used in different rituals. He'll describe different colors. In other words, sheep vary according to location and culture.
Sharon Kinoshita:
Sorry. I want to contrast that with the way sheep would've been seen in Latin Europe. First of all, in bestiaries, for example, or in Christian tradition you'd separate sheep and goats. The sheep are the safe and the goats are the damned. And they'd be on the right and the left hand of God, respectively.
Sharon Kinoshita:
This is from Brunetto Latini, best known for being put by Dante in the circle of the sodomites. But, in fact, he wrote an encyclopedic work in French, and part of it is a catalog of animals. What I'm interested in here is that his sheep is singular. He doesn't go into different varieties but he'll just pick out certain qualities of sheep. They're very profitable animals and here's how you should raise them, here's how you take care of them, et cetera, et cetera. And then concerning them, Aristotle says... We're not surprised to find quotations of ancient authors to literally authorize his take on sheep.
Sharon Kinoshita:
Here's a snippet from the Secret History of the Mongols, and its sheep in quite a different context. And both it emphasizes the centrality of sheep to the nomadic way of life, cooking it, but also sheep herder or sheep keeper as part of a hierarchy in Mongol society.
Sharon Kinoshita:
These are a couple poems I took from just an anthology of Chinese civilization. And this is from the centuries and the dynasty before the Mongols. But these are the Chinese who've been pushed south by the previous central Asian regime, the ... Chen, also from central Asian, the Jin Dynasty. And so these southern Chinese are lamenting the loss of their previous lands. And it just struck me that here are a couple poems where how do you characterize the devastation of the lands that you've lost? Well, these lands where music was played or whatever now smells of goats and sheep. Can you imagine?
Sharon Kinoshita:
Okay, so coming back to Zhao Mengfu and sheep and goat, this is... In English language, captions and stuff, you'll see it titled Sheep and Goat. In fact, I guess in classical Chinese there's one word that can be either sheep or goat. For example, in contrast to the Christian sense where you couldn't imagine a more important distinction between sheep and goats being the saved and the damned, here there's one word that is used for both.
Sharon Kinoshita:
Furthermore, an art historian has recently suggested that the particular representation of the sheep and goat harken back to an older Chinese legend and sort of about the ways that different conquered peoples react to now being subaltern. I'm probably way over time so I'll stop there.
Alexander Key:
Thanks, I will... Yep, it's all yours.
Vered Shemtov:
Thank you, thank you. And thank you so much for... I think that we will find some connections in asking the questions of connections and comparisons and of what it means to talk about cultures and a global world, or global region.
Vered Shemtov:
I'd like to talk about "Local Texts, Global Perspectives: Teaching Ancient Texts." And this title captures, for me, the experience of teaching texts, especially biblical texts that were created for a certain, local community at a certain point in time. But as soon as they were written down and read out loud, they were adjusted, interpreted, rewritten through Midrash and commentary and adaptation and became world literature.
Vered Shemtov:
One of the challenges of teaching the ancient world is the need to constantly work with texts that are like onions. They're layers and layers and layers. And you can choose a layer and it will be from a certain period, but it's really almost impossible to think about ... as all of the layers or something that has a core.
Vered Shemtov:
Okay, can I... Yeah? Maybe not. Sorry, I lost you. Yeah, so I teach the text that changed the world, the ancient Middle East, with Charlotte Fonrobert. And as Alexander said before, this was one of the first humanities core classes at Stanford. And we got this chart of teaching the great books of the ancient Middle East.
Vered Shemtov:
And there were so many problems with it. First of all, the problem of the ancient Middle East. Middle East is a modern term and it is a modern way of looking or cutting this part of the world and seeing it as one. Then there is, of course, the problem of great books. "What is great?" is a difficult question. And the question of "what is a book?" When we work with the ancient texts, we don't exactly work with books. I'm not sure how to move... Oh, here it is.
Vered Shemtov:
Think, for example, about Gilgamesh. We keep on finding new tablets with new versions, sometimes versions that are older than what we have. And yes, there is a standard version that many use, but if you work on the text and you look, for example, at Andrew George book that includes lots of tablets of Gilgamesh, have the Sumerian corpus or Gilgamesh in Akkadian. And you realize that the Gilgamesh that Rilke read and loved is very different from what we know today and that there are constantly new archeological findings that change the text. This text have no beginning and no end, and it's impossible to talk about an author... or at least it's complex thing to talk about an author, an origin, a unity and even about belonging to a certain local space.
Vered Shemtov:
And another well known example will be the Bible. If you think about Genesis, for example, or the Torah, in general scholars think about it as a patchwork of at least four different versions that were put together. Think about the two stories of the creation of women that were placed one next to the other. What does it mean? Even if we don't discuss the question of great, what does it mean to talk about a text?
Vered Shemtov:
There's sometimes an assumption that this was an isolated area and that we became global later, but travelers along the great caravan routes of Mesopotamia and western Asia, as Stephanie Dalley describes translated and embroidered and adapted stories according to local taste to give a wide range of diverse versions. And only a few of them remained with us, so it's not only that there were so many connection in this part of the world, there's also the issue of what's left. What randomly was found, sometimes there is a reason, but in general, the question of what to teach is extremely difficult when we think about the ancient world.
Vered Shemtov:
If you don't want to teach only the texts that were marked as sacred, for example, and if you want to step away from the 19th and 20th centuries Western canon that shows a few items from the ancient Middle East to include in a story of the West, if you want to tell the story of the ancient Middle East you are left with a very rich corpus of texts, with a lot of texts, not a lot of them even translated, that reflect the life in Babylon, in Mari, in Jerusalem, and you are faced with the same issues that we actually face today.
Vered Shemtov:
My first point here is that the issue of texts is something that is completely different when we talk about the spirit, and second of all that the question of what to teach becomes extremely difficult when you have all of these texts and want to teach them not through the perspectives of what will remain sacred or what is important for us today. I've started with this comment because it seems to me that for each one of us, the period that we work on is the fulcrum, the place we stand and from which we lift world literature. I got the sense from hearing almost each one of us and thinking about how do we teach the humanities from the perspective of people who work on the contemporary, that was the last talk, or modernity or liberalism and now the global Middle Ages?
Vered Shemtov:
I'd like to add to our conversation my perspective of teaching the ancient Mesopotamia at Stanford at this specific moment and to share with you how I see from this point what we're doing here. There are at least two people here that are also teaching with the Humanities Core, and maybe they see what we're doing in a completely different way, so it will be interesting for me to see. What I take in now with me here is the idea of no unity, no clear idea of texts, not beginning and end, no core. We think that there is a canon. The canon is very problematic if we want to follow just the canon and a lot of randomness.
Vered Shemtov:
Stanford Humanities Core gives, I think, a really interesting answer to the question of how to teach the humanities all over the world. Well, how to teach the humanities here. And as I described before, when we started thinking about how to teach the ancient Middle East, the main place that got us stuck was, first, the idea of Middle East, but then the idea of the question of what to teach, how do we decide what to teach? And usually when I'm building a syllabus I think about why do we teach something? Why do we teach the Humanities Core? And then for there, go to what should we teach? And then who do we teach it to and who teaches the Humanities Core? And then at the end, we get to: How should we teach? After we get the why and what and who, we can get to, how do we do that?
Vered Shemtov:
We had amazing discussions here, I think, about how do we teach and who do we teach it to in the previous session. But I think what makes the Stanford Core interesting is that we kind of changed the order. We started at the beginning with meetings with Aaron Rodrigue, remember, of asking: Okay, can we come up with a list? Let's have a list of the greatest books of what do we want to teach.
Vered Shemtov:
It didn't work as well as when we change completely the conversation and flipped the pyramid and reverse the order and started asking: How should we teach the Humanities Core? Leave the question of why, leave the question of what, and first start how and who and then move on. I think this is my main point here. I think this is the main thing that we're doing here that really saves us from all the questions that I struggled with when I first thought about teaching the ancient Middle East.
Vered Shemtov:
How do we teach the Humanities Core here? The Humanities Core, and as seen from our ancient world cluster, is a cluster or a set of classes that take place in the fall quarter, and then there is another cluster that takes place in the winter and in the spring and focuses on different periods. The students meet twice a week. On Monday, the first class focuses on a specific area, so opening one of these doors, and the professors and teachers have a complete freedom to choose the texts and the topics. That's how Mondays work. And then on Wednesday, the second meeting, we have a collaboration and a conversation between all the faculty members that are teaching these same cluster. And here, we work together in terms of deciding what to teach. And in the image that we have here, I think about it as opening one door but then moving to the different spaces and the different rooms in the building.
Vered Shemtov:
Once the classes are comparative, we're not so much looking at connections and how did one thing become or turn into another thing? But more on comparison of just putting two things together and trying to figure out what we learned from them. How does the one text change when it is placed next to another text? I think that what is incredible for me about it is not to look at the text and ask: Okay, so what do we teach in order to create, for example, diversity? But to create the diversity by bringing several professors to teach together, each one of them with a completely different perspective and worldview and expertise and then let things happen, and then necessarily there will be diversity. And they'll go to any other value, I think, that you'll find it's almost going in the... It's an, I think, an amazing alternative to the idea of one can post one text, one teacher and one conversation. It teaches our students how to have conversations when we don't have the same knowledge, when we don't have the same list of books that we all know, when we disagree, when... And in part, I think, is what they see is to what extent each one of us is a product of what they're studying and is also presenting what we're studying from their own perspective.
Vered Shemtov:
It's hard to see when you're just one professor standing in class, but when Charlotte Fonrobert and I teach together or the whole five or six or 14, depending on the year, professors in the cluster of the ancient world teach together, it's clear that they love what they're doing, that they are shaping and shaped what they're doing. It's just so obvious. A little bit about the how. And I have here Alexander Key's quote because he's directing the program, and the how is very much his vision or vision that he worked on with us.
Vered Shemtov:
And here we're moving to the next question, and that is who? Again, we're not thinking about the what and then thinking who can teach it? But the whole idea is to ask who is willing to teach? Who is interested in teaching it? And then seeing what kinds of questions they want to bring. And it is giving up on the idea of trying to give a picture of how we got from point one to point two, from the ancient world to today, or giving up on the picture of the entire picture, some kind of a complete picture of the culture at a certain period of a certain region. But assuming that we can choose a topic and no matter what we will choose from this point we'll be able to go to different places to get a sense of time of place to ask interesting questions and that we'll be able to show that we cannot cover everything, that it's random, that it has to do either with... as I said, with what we discover in archeologists discovered, or in this case of who's teaching at Stanford. Which it's not exactly a random question but it's still for us there is a little bit of... And randomness means also freedom. It means also... I think it means also creativity because it allows us to be free to ask the questions that interest us at this specific moment.
Vered Shemtov:
This is who teaches the Humanities Core. Who teaches and how we teach frees us to make, I would say, more creative decisions in terms of, at the end, what we teach. We sat together the people that are teaching the Humanities Core over the fall and came up with five themes. And they're very, very general. And some of these themes are themes that are very important to one tradition but are not that important to another. But we have them there, and it creates interesting new ways to see the cultures in which this is not the central theme. These themes also create connection between us today and the ancient world. And let me give you some examples.
Vered Shemtov:
In origins history and tradition, I really wanted to teach the flood stories. They're extremely important for the ancient Middle East. They're not that important, from what I understood from Professor Egan, to his track, but he taught them with me to create this conversation. And it was an incredible experience for me to see what could be other flood stories, what is it that our flood stories don't have? Or how they narrated it. It was one of my favorite classes.
Vered Shemtov:
Or another example was we were not thinking, Charlotte and I, to teach the Book of Ruth as one of the books. If we have just a few books from the Bible we can teach, we didn't think of the Book of Ruth. But because Professor Egan wanted to teach Du Fu and because he wanted to teach it from the perspective of compassion, we ended up thinking about the Book of Ruth and the issue of immigration and compassion and how low is compassion? And that opened up a whole topic that we didn't think about, about compassion in the ancient world, if in suddenly the beginning of the Hammurabi laws was highlighted for us; that whole connection between compassion and law.
Vered Shemtov:
And Talmud and Cicero, there were just so many combinations that created incredible discussions. And because these discussions were new, they created debate, they created disagreements. We often found ourselves, Charlotte and I in our course but sometimes also all of us together, in a situation in which we realized we don't really agree.
Vered Shemtov:
For example, in the question... I'll stay here for a second. The question of: Who are the first historians? The Greek have their first historians, and for China there is also the first historian. And then we started thinking: Wait a minute. What does it mean that there was no history before that? That history was not recorded before that? And where does the phrase history begin in Sumeria... It got us to think in different ways.
Vered Shemtov:
It got us to teach completely different texts not only in terms of texts that worked together, but the minute you get this freedom, we were able to get into texts that are not necessarily... that you won't necessarily expect such as spells and songs or letters. And we found out that teaching the period through these texts was not always that different than teaching it through, for example, the Love Poems between Inanna and Dumuzi in the sense that if we want to see where the connection between love and fire and the love scene in a pastoral place go back to, we can see that actually in more conventional and in more popular examples, too.
Vered Shemtov:
And it got us to ask the question of: What are texts that changed the world? And what are texts that didn't change the world? And did the texts that changed the world necessarily change it in good ways? And the whole politics behind it.
Vered Shemtov:
I'm going to skip all of that. Maybe just one beautiful question that I don't think that we would've been able to do unless we taught it as a group was when Professor Christopher Krebs and I debated the question of whether the Greek and Rome track and the Mesopotamians should be two different tracks or maybe they are the same. And we got into this whole conversation about what do we benefit from each approach? And so on.
Vered Shemtov:
Who do we teach? Do I have time? If not, I will just... Yeah? Who do we teach? It's not an easy answer, I think. When I was in Israel it was much clearer who am I teaching? Here we are a school with people that come from all over the world, and what brings them together is that all of them were excellent students, extremely brilliant. And they're coming here in order to get something different. And I think for me they coming here not only to learn but to actually go through the experience of working with professors of... learning and studying with professors, because if not, why are we such a small university? The whole idea behind that is that students come here and they are part of what we're doing.
Vered Shemtov:
And so when I'm thinking about who are we teaching to? I think that this model that was created in the Humanities Core really works well for Stanford because what we created is some kind of a lab. We are a lab in which we experience things, we are doing things that are collaborative, we are asking questions together and we're taking the students with us for the ride.
Vered Shemtov:
The outcomes and how to measure the success of the program. I'm here going to quote Alexander Key because when we talked about it, and the question is maybe it's how many people are taking a minor? How do we measure the success? It's really hard to know what stays with people, and so first is what we hear from them, how many of them continue with us, but also, as Alexander Key said, it is how many people want to teach it and how excited they are about it. And if the professors would love teaching it, it's going to happen because it means that then it is part of why they're here. And that, for me, answered the question of why do we teach it? We teach it because we love studying the humanities and we want to share this joy. And we think, for many different reasons, that it is important. And we have these many reasons reflected in the work of each one of us separately.
Vered Shemtov:
But I really believe that the magic of what is happening here is then we gave up on this question of why and what as what's leading us and focused on the how, and then let everything fall into place from that question of the how? That's it.
Speaker 3:
Maybe just the three of us, I think I can do this. I can take my laptop and put it on the table because we might use it. Okay.
Vered Shemtov:
Where would you like to sit?
Sharon Kinoshita:
Here.
Speaker 3:
See the people there. And everybody, I think, can still hear us on Zoom. And so, yeah, now maybe Sharon, do you want to take the first set of responses or thoughts about the two presentations?
Sharon Kinoshita:
Sure. Well, I loved Vered's presentation and I loved, first of all, the map that you had up there to highlight the different areas that your course covers. I love the fact that it was a topographical map where you couldn't see national or other kinds of borders. And it's really unusual to approach a world, anything course, I think, in that way. But it's really crucial to the kinds of questions that you were raising.
Sharon Kinoshita:
And I like the fact that on the one hand there's this tension in the way that you were describing both the program and the process because on the one hand it feels like it was trying to be or started out as this great books component, as you said. And I've always argued that the canonicity... Canon is less, for me, not a list of books but a way of reading. And I think precisely what you've done is starting with the most canonical of texts like Gilgamesh or the Old Testament and you've de-canonized them by emphasizing, first of all, how different they were in their own historical contexts and the way that we imagine a book, for example. But also, you've... I love the point that you made that with Gilgamesh, with every archeological finding it becomes a different text. In a way, that, for me, restores the life to those texts and it restores the fact that they're embedded in particular societies.
Sharon Kinoshita:
And one thing that is obvious in all of our teaching projects is a necessity of translation. First of all, for us for finding translations to teach, but of course translation is such a key exercise in the societies that we study and it's so much more central to the production of texts and knowledge than we acknowledge. And the processes are so much more distinctive whereas we think in the modern world that we're aiming at transparent translations rather than each translation being an adaptation and emotive assimilation of something foreign to our own senses.
Sharon Kinoshita:
And then also your metaphor of the period as a fulcrum I really liked. For my work in Mediterranean studies and to think about how to approach interdisciplinarity when one is trained in a particular discipline. I borrowed a quotation from Djelal Kadir, post-colonial critic who said, "Whatever you're trained in is the foot of your compass," and then when you try to branch out it's the other edge of the compass describing an ever-larger circle. And I think he meant it as a criticism like, you're never going to get away from what the center of your training is. But, in my opinion, well of course, but then it depends on how wide you set your compass and with how much subtlety you bring stuff in within the compass. I think your fulcrum functions as a similar metaphor. You have your lever and you have your spot from which you are lifting the knowledge of the world, and it's inevitable and I think it can... we can make it a virtue as well. It's not a handicap because we can't do without it. So thank you.
Vered Shemtov:
Thank you so much. I think that you're talking about restoring life, and you definitely, in this presentation, were talking about the smells and the details and through different mediums brought things to life for me and the period in this even few moments. And I think about it as being very different from the idea of creating new life. And somehow the period that I work on really focuses on creating new life, and that gives me a little bit of freedom. On one end, things were copied for years in exactly the same way. On the other one, they were used a sentence from here, a sentence from there, and some kind of freedom to create something new with it is part of at least the Jewish tradition in which I work, but not only of course. And so this difference between bringing new smells and discovering the smells is something that really interests me.
Vered Shemtov:
And then the question of the journey, whether it's our journey following Marco Polo and moving from one place to another, whether it is the journey of texts or whether we choose to stay in the same place and just do a journey in time. And so just things that came up as you talked that felt interesting to me when we think about the humanities.
Speaker 3:
Brilliant, brilliant. Any questions from the audience here?
Speaker 5:
Yeah.
Speaker 3:
Oh, Patricia, is that okay with the sound? I think that's okay. Okay? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Harry Carter:
Yeah. I just wondered, Professor Kinoshita, how... You mentioned giving courses on that particular book in the ...ages, and I was thinking of... I just got enrolled in it. I wondered how you assess the students.
Sharon Kinoshita:
Well, it's very hard on a four week... I mean, a 10-week quarter. I typically give them... Let's say Stanford students, I was lucky enough to be a guest professor here a few years ago, and Stanford students are certainly on a whole other level than the students at my university. But I give them a quiz, a sort of midterm quiz just on pretty factual stuff about history and about literary context because I want to make sure that they've assimilated key terms and key concepts, especially to the extent that they differ from a default modern understanding of what a particular thing would be.
Sharon Kinoshita:
And then I'm always reinventing because I'm never satisfied with the kinds of essay assignments that I come up with. One thing I've done with Marco Polo is to take a passage that he will have on a particular place and juxtapose it with the pages from the former Penguin translation of Marco Polo's travels because that translation happens to fold in passages that come from much later versions including that 16th-century version. Now those later versions are often much more sensationalist and they're much more stuff that people who want to find Orientalism or the Western gaze or the Christian gaze, it's located much more in those passages than in the early Marco Polo. So I ask students, "How do these two versions differ? And what can we know, then, about the closest to original text versus its reception over time?"
Sharon Kinoshita:
Students don't frequently take me up on it, but for example, this time I think I'll invite them to do a research paper on a commodity, something like pepper, and offer them a range of texts like that cookbook and say, "Look at pepper in the index and look at what recipes there are. And how is that different from a European cookbook?" Or there's a Chinese medical treatise that plays with all these ingredients. Yeah, if you have any ideas I'd welcome them.
Alexander Key:
Vered, do you want to take the how we do assessment in HumCore?
Vered Shemtov:
I do. And when I think about things that... one of the things that maybe it's just me but I think other professors deal with at Stanford is this idea of assessment. I think that we have such small groups; students are really great. It's more of a matter of how much they put into the class and how engaged they are. And so I don't really think about assessing the students, I'm thinking more of: How do I create a situation in which I have them really engaged and we are in conversation and they got the most they can out of this course? And for that, what we... We did it when we talked together and has stayed with me is that for every class the students read the text and they write comments about them. And for the Wednesday classes they write comments and they need to try to do the comparison themselves, which we thought would be extremely difficult without any context but ended up to be first, very engaging, very creative for them. They were not just passively reading, they were thinking. They came up with questions, and they would send us these questions. And second of all, it allowed us to prepare better, to know what we need to teach and what they got.
Vered Shemtov:
And then another thing we did that I thought worked really well is to ask them, "Okay, these are the themes that we chose. Which theme would you choose? And then how would you reorganize the texts that we already read in class in a different way?" And honestly, once they really get into it, they'll do a good job. Yeah. How do I motivate them? More than this.
Alexander Key:
Yeah, I think I would add to what Vered said, that we see the HumCore as reading rigorous and thinking rigorous but not writing rigorous. You have to come and you have to read, and the reading is difficult, and often the reading can be quite long, or if it's short it's likely to be incredibly complex and far in and there's no context, and you have to think rigorously and be prepared and take a final exam and do the discussion questions every week. But this isn't a writing course, so there's no requirement to be able to produce that particular genre that we've all perfected, the academic essay, the academic humanities essay.
Alexander Key:
Yeah, and to also add onto what Vered said about the no context works and the responses from the students to the discussion. Yeah, just today I gave a lecture, it was me doing al-Khatib al-Qazwini, who's a 13th-century scholar of rhetoric, Arabic rhetoric — very, very, very technical analysis of metaphor in a not hugely accessible translation. They only had two pages, but it was very dense and technical. And then my colleague, Professor Elaine Fisher, talking about Rasa in Sanskrit and Hindi poetry. And we asked the students, "Here's some Sanskrit and some Hindu. Here's some Sanskrit poetry and here's this technical Arabic analysis of metaphor. Do you think you could use the Qazwini to talk about the Rasa? With no context whatsoever. And we really got high-quality responses. It's incredible what students can do without context. It's like a better version of the famous I.A. Richards experiment where he took the poems and deleted all the context and gave it to the students to see what they'd say. But yeah, it's productive, I think.
Sharon Kinoshita:
Could I ask your typical class size?
Vered Shemtov:
Yeah. Oh, we had 40 students in my track, which was way too much for... We had to read so much. And then 90-something students on Wednesdays. So these were big classes. We started with four.
Vered Shemtov:
I want to say something about the writing, if possible, is that our students come from... They have different strengths, and they're not all humanities students. And they all know how to think but they do come with different strengths. Some will write these really long essays and some don't. And some are writing in a very concise way. And I really believe that knowledge today is created in so many ways, and unless they want to work in the humanities I find that it is our way to help them do it in somewhere between their way and our way.
Speaker 3:
Brilliant. Was there a question from the audience on Zoom? Chiara?
Chiara Giovanni:
Yes. I feel like my question has already started to be answered a little bit. I was going to ask about what kinds of students you all have. What kind of student is taking your class on Marco Polo? Just because I felt that the presentations were absolutely fascinating but I couldn't picture who's in the classroom with you, and I'd love to hear a little bit more about that, especially as we're very California-based today, and I think in our previous sessions it's been: What is the student in Karachi doing? And now that we have the luxury of being so local, and with Nasrin Rahmieh in the room as well, who also teaches in a very California setting, I'd love to hear a little bit more about the specific concerns and interests and directions of the students that you all teach.
Sharon Kinoshita:
Yeah, my class in Marco Polo is part of the literature major, which is a quite unstructured set of courses, but we do have distribution requirements so that students need to take at least I think two courses in a period before 1750 and a couple courses in global context. Lots of students walk in the door of my class because they can check two boxes at the same time.
Sharon Kinoshita:
At the same time, we are a Hispanic serving institution. We have a lot of first-generation students, and so students come in with various backgrounds but often virtually no prior knowledge of the Middle Ages, which sometimes I find is an advantage rather than to have the kind of canned knowledge. And what I do every medieval class I teach, the first day I spend saying, "What is the Middle Ages? When was the Middle Ages? Name me a year." Names, anything that... associations often coming from popular culture and so on, but I want to get all of the facts and myths about the Middle Ages out on the table so that I can start arranging them, configuring them. So to take what the students know or vaguely intuit and use that as part of that Polaroid that I'm building. The other metaphor I use is a mosaic. You're assembling the pieces of what the... the different pieces that students bring and use that to build the bigger picture.
Speaker 3:
Yeah. Yeah, [inaudible].
Speaker 7:
I was going to ask about... You said the Middle Ages, and I find those really interesting because-
Sharon Kinoshita:
I'm sorry, I can't hear too well.
Speaker 7:
You can't?
Speaker 3:
We'll turn it up at our end.
Speaker 1:
Try again.
Speaker 7:
Okay, can you hear me better now?
Speaker 3:
Yeah.
Nasrin Rahmieh:
Okay. You were talking about the Middle Ages. Do you problematize those terms? Do the Middle Ages apply across the universe? This is a very, into my mind, being a Persian, is really your centered term itself, right? I know that like your students, ours come from very diverse backgrounds. First gen, predominantly Hispanic but also a lot of underserved minority groups. While we don't try to cover everything, but we do occasionally as far as my colleague was teaching the medieval bestiary, but we shifted from that to my discussion of some of the Persian medieval texts. But the very conceptualization of that had to be trouble, right? Like you, we have a problem of being stuck with the 10 weeks, and how much do we squeeze in there? And what kind of... I'm not suggesting that I have the answer, but what kind of partial knowledge might they walk away with that I sometimes am anxious about? Because it's so easy for a freshman who's never had history or anything to just say, "Oh well, I know all about this period," and goes from this part of the wall to that part. It's a question we try to ask ourselves constantly as the ones who lecture because we typically have nine professors lecturing throughout the year, and very diverse fields. I wonder, is it difficult to do that in 10 weeks?
Sharon Kinoshita:
I think it's less difficult because students come in with so little knowledge. There's obviously a big controversy about the use of the word medieval. Western medievalists are not fond of the word either because it's a disparaging word from the beginning, but for me there's so much fascinating work out there and thinking about Marco Polo and the lands that he describes that I am not interested in getting into the terminological debates about whether medieval can be applied to Persian or to Chinese or whatever. For me, medieval means these centuries, and this is what I'm talking about.
Sharon Kinoshita:
Actually, in my class with medieval French literature I often walk in the first day and write on the board "Medieval French literature." Each of these terms is problematic. Let's discuss that for 15 minutes, and then here's the stuff we're going to concentrate on. I do try to give students "points de repair", sign posts or borders so that they can delimit on the stuff because otherwise it's a 1,000-year period and it's so amorphous.
Sharon Kinoshita:
Recently, plague has been very convenient to use and say, "Okay, well the stuff that we're doing is the century before the plague. When you guys invent the time machine, be sure not to go back to the 14th century. The 12th century would be a much better choice. What names have you heard of?" Oh, Chaucer, blah, blah, blah. Well, that's 200 years after our period. Or I try to situate things like that so they get a sense that trying to collapse these would be the same as trying to understand our situation by whatever Jane Austen wrote, or that kind of stuff, because otherwise looking back so far in the past, things get telescoped and they lose a sense of that perspective.
Alexander Key:
Yeah. Yeah, that's so true. Yeah. I was just going to... A couple of things that have come up. Yeah, what's been interesting about HumCore in terms of enrollment at Stanford is that, as Vered was saying, it's been very... the enrollment at the moment is quite high in the fact that the program does not deliver, unlike, I think, at both UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz, it doesn't really deliver on requirements for the students. Sorry, Irvine. Sorry. But it was the pandemic year that saw the bigger increase in enrollment. The previous years, as Vered alluded to, it was quite low.
Alexander Key:
And also, interestingly, it starts off high in the fall and then goes down in the winter. And we don't know whether that's because of the chronology, the "middle period" is less attractive than the really old period or whether it's just a mechanical Stanford people have more space in the fall than they do in the winter question.
Alexander Key:
The question of chronology is something that we've talked about because the... Vered's presentation of the logic of HumCore is superb, and it does... but the one area in which we don't let ourselves have any freedom is the winter... is the three quarters being chronologically ordered. We really do force ourselves. And Grant has said that this is not... We've talked about this not necessarily being a good thing. We force ourselves to only have the really old stuff in the fall, so Vered and Charlotte's class can only talk to classical Greece and Rome and to Sanskrit-period India. And then in the winter, it's Islamic civilization and the European renaissance and early modern Japan, and post-Sanskrit Hindu, India. And then in the spring you get modernity; you get a variety of courses on aspects of global modernity. And that means that then the global modernity classes can't really talk to the ancient classes because they're locked in their separate quarters. But then if we lose the chronology... I don't know, I don't know. We talked about it a lot and we're still with chronology, but I don't know. What do you think?
Vered Shemtov:
I really believe in the chronology, and I think that the students themselves... And we can also come once at the end of each quarter and join the classes. But the students themselves can bring with them what they took from different quarters. I think that the chronology is extremely important.
Vered Shemtov:
And I'm going to go back to the question of how do we deal with teaching so much in 10 weeks? I think it's the hardest question. The students get so much information that is not built one on top of the other and so how do you hold this whole thing together? It's been really difficult, and I think chronology is one way you do it. You constantly present maps, you constantly put things on a timeline. We constantly recycle in the sense of, okay, so now we're studying this. Let's see in what way is it different from that or respond to that. And then another thing that I've found is, okay, they're not necessarily going to get a picture of the time but they're going to get bits and pieces, and so let's think in the mode of bits and pieces. Let's ask them in every text they read to find the quotes that stays with them and to really stays with this quote. And maybe if they won't remember anything, they'll remember that. But it's an extremely, I think, difficult problem.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, yeah. Sharon? Oh yeah, yeah, Harry. Oh yeah, let me just-
Harry Carter:
Yeah, so I thought it was really cool what you were saying, Vered, about the idea of it being like a lab where the students are involved in the thinking of the professors, and I wondered if in future cycles of the course you're thinking of changing the questions if you get bored of them. Maybe in some cases that's not possible. Maybe you think of questions that you think are cooler, I don't know, at the time.
Vered Shemtov:
We did not come up with the questions ahead of time. And this is obviously not the what coming first. We were in class, somebody says something that triggers you or that I could say in one class when I ask the students, "What was lost in monotheism," for them? Okay, we read all of these text s and now we're moving to... What, in terms of the literature, did they lose? And that was a very difficult question for Charlotte, and that created this whole... And another time, I might not ask this question or this... It's a lab in the sense that it's ongoing. We're not planning to have this question for conversation.
Harry Carter:
Well, what about even the broad groupings like the great floods and things like that?
Vered Shemtov:
Some texts we teach again, but they're always somehow different because not exactly the same professor teaches. We were not the same group every year even though that we are a quite stable group. We were not people going on sabbatical. There are so many other reasons. That's one thing. And there are always changes, but I think that this is where we have to be aware of not making it too comfortable for ourself and say, "Oh, I taught that. I'm just going to..."
Sharon Kinoshita:
I think that responsiveness is important. The pandemic, for one thing, the quarter that was the first quarter that we went online, I just happened to be slotted to teach "The Decameron," so that was really freaky, but it gave a heightened whatever to reading that text.
Sharon Kinoshita:
And then I've taught Marco Polo for years and years, but just reading through it this time, what jumped out at me of... every text is different every time you read it, but with all of the stuff about the environment now all of the ecological things jumped out at me this time in a way that they hadn't before. Little things like this that makes it makes things really interesting and really emphasizes, again, the fact that these are living texts and that they change before your eyes with the different who and the different how.
Vered Shemtov:
Yeah. And the students ask different questions. The minute the students ask a question in our course and they get five answers, it's already a-
Harry Carter:
Yeah. Thank you so much.
Speaker 3:
Thanks. Okay. Any final thoughts from the panelists?
Vered Shemtov:
I want to take the Marco Polo course.
Vered Shemtov:
Yeah, I'm going to go back and co-teach the ancient Middle East again. All right, well thank you ever so much people on Zoom and here. It's an honor and a privilege. I look forward to the next workshop is in April, I think. And yeah, it's been a pleasure. See you soon.