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Kinesthetic Spectatorship in
the Theatre

Phenomenology, Cognition, Movement

Stanton B. Garner, Jr.


Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance

Series Editors
Bruce McConachie
University of Pittsburgh
Department of Theatre Arts
Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Blakey Vermeule
Department of English
Stanford University
Stanford, CA, USA
This series offers cognitive approaches to understanding perception, emo-
tions, imagination, meaning-making, and the many other activities that
constitute both the production and reception of literary texts and embod-
ied performances.

More information about this series at


http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14903
Stanton B. Garner, Jr.

Kinesthetic
Spectatorship in the
Theatre
Phenomenology, Cognition, Movement
Stanton B. Garner, Jr.
Department of English
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN, USA

Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance


ISBN 978-3-319-91793-1    ISBN 978-3-319-91794-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91794-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950067

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018


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Acknowledgments

Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre is a study of movement and move-


ment perception in theatrical performance. Aligning itself with scholarship
on kinesthetic empathy in dance studies, it explores the ways in which we
inhabit the movements of others inside and outside the theatre, and the
ways these movements inhabit us. Because this book is an extension of my
1994 book on theatre phenomenology, Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology
and Performance in Contemporary Drama, it owes a debt to those who
have developed this field in the years since that book’s publication. Eirini
Nedelkopoulou contacted me in 2011 to ask if I was interested in contrib-
uting a chapter to an edited volume on performance phenomenology, and
while the project I embarked on expanded beyond the scope of what
became Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations
(2015), that volume and its contributors have done much to bring phe-
nomenological performance studies into the twenty-first century. George
Home-Cook and Jon Foley Sherman have written important recent books
in this field, and both were a resource to me as I wrote my own. Although
we have met only through email, let me also acknowledge Maxine Sheets-­
Johnstone, whose pioneering book on the phenomenology of dance pre-
ceded the emergence of theatre phenomenology and whose extensive
writings on movement over the last half-century have demonstrated the
centrality of this dimension of human and animal life.
Theoretically and methodologically, Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the
Theatre joins the burgeoning interdisciplinary dialogue between phenom-
enology and cognitive science in philosophy and the empirical sciences. In
so doing, it harks back to my first book, The Absent Voice: Narrative

v
vi Acknowledgments

Comprehension in the Theater, which described (not always convincingly, I


feel) the cognitive dynamics of memory and anticipation. My turn when I
completed this book to the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty was
motivated by my dissatisfaction with the cognitive models I had been
compelled to use, which treated cognition as an information-processing
system, and by my growing suspicion that the book I had just finished was
phenomenological at heart. In an irony I had no way of knowing at the
time, my turn to a phenomenology of embodiment in the late 1980s and
early 1990s paralleled a similar turn in cognitive studies by those propos-
ing an enactive, embodied way of understanding cognition. Many of the
figures in this movement were inspired by phenomenology, and they wel-
comed the exchange between empirical and experientially based method-
ologies. Excited by this dialogue, I am grateful to those scholars working
in cognitive theatre studies who welcomed, challenged, and supported a
phenomenologist fellow-traveler: Rhonda Blair, Amy Cook, Rick Kemp,
Jon Lutterbie, Bruce McConachie, and Lyn Tribble. I have benefited
from their interdisciplinary knowledge of fields not their own, their
patience with a sometimes novice, and their willingness to entertain a dif-
ferent but compatible perspective on areas of common interest.
Because this book foregrounds corporeal variation in its analysis of
movement and movement perception, I value the conversations and inter-
actions I have had with those who live with and have thought deeply
about disability: Carrie Sandahl, Leonard Davis, Janet Erkkinen, Randy
Isom, Rob Spirko, and Hannah Widdifield. I have benefitted considerably
from discussion on disability aesthetics with colleague and art historian
Timothy W. Hiles, whose interests intersect with mine across media.
Others who have encountered disability and deepened my intimacy with it
include my parents Katherine H. Young and Stanton B. Garner, my step-
mother Lydia M. Garner, and my parents-in-law Richard E. Maerker and
Sylvia L. Maerker. Disability transforms the world and one’s movements
through it, and I have been graced by resourceful, often cantankerous wit-
nesses to this formidable realm during the past fifteen years.
I thank Eric Bass, Marla Carlson, Rachel Ann Finney, Christina Schoux
Casey, Kerri Ann Considine, Amy J. Elias, Gabriel J. Escobar, Brad Krumholz,
Kirk Murphy, and Matthew Pilkington for conversations about this book, the
issues it addresses, and the productions I write about in it. Saul Jaffé and
Mary Swan provided extensive information on Proteus Theatre’s production
of Merrick, the Elephant Man and made a significant contribution to my
thinking about able-bodied actors portraying disabled characters. Dan Zahavi
Acknowledgments 
   vii

responded to email questions on Edmund Husserl and the phenomenology


of disability with useful reading suggestions, and Christian Keysers shared his
thoughts on the neuroscience of attention and motor resonance, along with
scientific readings related to this subject. The following individuals provided
insightful written comments on material that appears herein: Nic Barilar,
Michael Shane Boyle, Matt Cornish, Warren Kluber, Brandon Woolf, Peter
Zazzali, and the two anonymous readers who reviewed my manuscript for
Palgrave Macmillan. Earlier drafts of material in this book were presented at
the following working groups sponsored by the American Society for Theatre
Research (ASTR): Methods and Approaches: Cognitive Science in Theatre,
Dance, and Performance (Cognitive Science in Theatre, Dance and
Performance Research Group, Nashville, 2012); Postdramatic Theatre and
Form (Portland, OR, 2015); and Violent Bodies, Violent Acts (Atlanta,
2017). I am grateful to the organizers of these groups for facilitating schol-
arly exchange on topics important to my research and to the participants for
their stimulating discussion and feedback. A brief passage in my introduction
was previously published in a Theatre Survey book review, and material from
chapters “Movement, Attention, and Intentionality” and “Language,
Speech, and Movement” appeared in earlier form in Journal of Dramatic
Theory and Criticism. I thank the editors of these journals for permission to
reprint.
I want to acknowledge Phillip Zarrilli and Jed Diamond for their special
contributions to this book. Phillip, whose theatre scholarship and practice
also embrace the dialogue between phenomenology and enactive theory
and who is currently completing a book on phenomenology and acting,
has encouraged my project from its inception. Over the last several years
he and I have exchanged pieces of our works-in-progress, and I have val-
ued his responses and support. Jed, who heads the University of Tennessee
MFA Acting program and is an outstanding actor himself, has shared his
insights into theatre, acting, and the dynamics of embodiment over break-
fasts and at many other times since well before this book was conceived.
As someone who shares my fascination with King Lear, Jed organized an
informal acting workshop on the play’s blinding scene in which I was able
to deepen my understanding of this sequence’s phenomenological and
sensorimotor dynamics by acting the roles of Cornwall and Gloucester
and observing their traumatic encounter from all sides. I thank Luke
Atchley, Miguel Faña, Ben Pratt, Preston Raymer, Hannah Simpson, and
Lauren Winder for joining us in this workshop.
viii Acknowledgments

I wrote the majority of this book during a sabbatical after stepping


down from a five-year term as department head. I thank former Arts and
Sciences Dean Bruce Bursten for helping to arrange this sabbatical and my
colleagues in the English Department for making this a department I
could relish leading. Judith Welch heads an invaluable administrative staff,
and it is hard to imagine what life would be like without her and them.
Allen R. Dunn, who replaced me as head, has been unwavering in his sup-
port and eager to talk about my project, especially when the subject turns
to ethics. I value my drama colleagues Misty G. Anderson, Heather
Hirschfeld, and Robert E. Stillman, my current and recent graduate stu-
dents in drama, theatre, and performance, and the amazing faculty and
students in the Theatre Department, who keep me grounded in perfor-
mance. The resident Clarence Brown Theatre Company, led by Artistic
Director Calvin MacLean, is a continuing and invaluable source of excel-
lent theatre. Current Dean Teresa M. Lee and her team in the College of
Arts and Sciences were a pleasure to work with during and after my time
as department head and continue to support my work. I am considerably
indebted to the Interlibrary Services staff of the John C. Hodges Library
for securing research material that our collection does not have and the
Library Express staff for bringing me the library books I needed (and tak-
ing them back when I was done with them). Outside the university, I am
grateful to the staff of the Billy Rose Theatre Division Theatre on Film
and Tape Archive and the Jerome Robbins Dance Division Audio and
Moving Image Archive at the New York Public Library for their help dur-
ing two research trips. The performances I studied in these collections
were crucial to the writing of this book.
At Palgrave Macmillan, Tomas René was enthusiastic about this project
from the moment I contacted him, and I appreciate the care he took in
guiding my manuscript through the review and contract process. Vicky
Bates, Mahalakshmi Mariappan, and copy-editor Elizabeth Stone were
important participants before and during the production process. Special
thanks to the Palgrave design team, who turned an image I suggested into
a dynamic and electrifying cover for a book on movement. As theatre and
dance scholars know, performance photographs tend to freeze movement,
fixing the dynamism of action within static, sometimes posed images. This
fact explains why there are no theatrical images in my book, much as I
would have loved to have them there. In contrast, the cover image for this
book (from a long-exposure photograph of fire movement by Emily von
Fraunhofer) is electric and alive; it almost vibrates. The shadowy outline of
Acknowledgments 
   ix

a figure in the background orients this dynamism to the human form,


which—motionless here—is animated in performance.
My final debts are the greatest of all. Alison Maerker Garner and Helen
Elizabeth Garner have been a part of this project from the start, and the
book that emerged is underwritten by their love and support. As a profes-
sional musician, music teacher, writer on music pedagogy, and trained
dancer, Alison is an intellectual companion as well as life partner. It has
been a joy sharing insights and perspectives on performance, movement,
skill acquisition, and art in the years since we first met. Helen, who came
into the world fifteen years before this book will, opened a world of move-
ment to me as she learned to crawl and walk, developed language and
skills, and deepened her cognitive mastery of her environment. She and
her mother are constant reminders that movement, movement percep-
tion, and intersubjectivity are situated, communal, and affectively reso-
nant. I gratefully dedicate this book to them.
Contents

Introduction   1
Watching Movement   1
Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre   5
Empathy, Otherness, and Disability   8
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences  14
Spectatorship and Mimesis  24
Bibliography  32

Movement and Animation  37


Moving in the World  37
Qualities of Self-Movement  41
External Movement Perception  48
Animating Objects  55
“You perceive she stirs”  60
Bibliography  72

 ovement, Difference, and Ability  75


M
Moving Differently  75
Norming Movement  79
I can/I cannot  86
Spectatorship and Ability/Inability  93
Bibliography 106

xi
xii Contents

 ovement, Attention, and Intentionality 109


M
Moving in the Theatre 109
Attending to Movement 112
Intentionality and Movement Perception 119
Post-Intentionality 129
Bibliography 142

Kinesthetic Resonance 145
Kinesthetic Sympathy 145
“Mirroring” Movement 153
Resonance in the Theatre 161
Multi-Directional Resonance 171
Bibliography 180

 anguage, Speech, and Movement 185


L
Moving Words 185
Utterance and Articulation 187
Sounding Brando 195
Language and Kinesthesia 200
Acting with Words 207
Verbal/Kinesthetic Immersions 211
Bibliography 220

Empathy and Otherness 223


What Is Empathy? 223
Empathic Solicitation 228
Empathy and Alterity 234
Acting Disabled 242
Deep Mimesis 248
Bibliography 262

Index 267
Introduction

Watching Movement
This is a book about movement and movement perception: about the
centrality of movement to human life and the embeddedness of theatre in
this sensorimotor reality. Because theatre—like all performance—is a
domain of spectatorship and embodiment, this book addresses the ques-
tions of how we perceive the movements of others in this environment and
outside of it, how we enact movement as part of our sensorimotor engage-
ment with the world, and how the perception and execution of movement
are entwined. Phenomenological in a collaborative and eclectic sense, it
considers these issues through the lens of experience and through the
accounts of movement, embodiment, and movement perception in phe-
nomenology, cognitive science, neuroscience, acting theory, dance theory,
philosophy of mind, and linguistics. In specific, this book pursues an
insight that has developed within and between these disciplines in recent
years: that one of the ways we apprehend the movements of others is by
vicariously enacting these movements at pre-conscious and conscious lev-
els. Inevitably, then, this book is about empathy and other responses to
the actions of others: what these responses are and what they are not, what
they do and what they do not do.
Contemporary interest in these connections was encouraged by the dis-
covery of what have come to be known as “mirror neurons” by neurosci-
entists in the early 1990s. These neurons, which fire in the same way when

© The Author(s) 2018 1


S. B. Garner, Jr., Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre,
Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91794-8_1
2 S. B. GARNER, JR.

goal-directed movement is observed and when it is executed, were discov-


ered in the pre-motor cortex of macaque monkey brains, and equivalent
neural networks were later identified in humans. In the rush of excitement
that followed their popularization in the early 2000s, mirror neurons were
hailed as universal keys to action understanding, imitation, language
acquisition, and empathy. In the years since their discovery, researchers
have provided fuller insights into how these cells work, and some of this
research has challenged or qualified the initial claims made on their behalf.
But despite the controversies that continue over its relationship to other
cognitive mechanisms and its role in action understanding, the discovery
of a neural mechanism that links motor execution with motor perception
continues to focus attention on the cognitive processes linking one’s
movements to those of others.
The idea that human beings take on, are inhabited by, or resonate with
the movements of others is not a new one, nor is it restricted to neurosci-
entific accounts of cognitive resonance. In his Principles of Psychology
(1890), William James wrote: “We may then lay it down for certain that
every representation of a movement awakens in some degree the actual move-
ment which is its object; and awakens it in a maximum degree whenever it is
not kept from so doing by an antagonistic representation present simultane-
ously to the mind.”1 Developmental psychologists study imitative behavior
in neonates, marine biologists look at movement synchronization in fish
schools, and anthropologists study mimetic enactment in states of spirit
possession. In the performing arts, the term kinesthetic empathy has served
as a focal point for practitioners and scholars interested in the empirical
and experiential connections between observing and enacting movement.
Kinesthesia (from the Greek words meaning “to move” and “sensation”)
denotes the experience one has of one’s movements as a result of the sen-
sations generated by one’s muscles, joints, tendons, and the vestibular and
other systems involved in balance and orientation. Referring to this lived
movement sense, it differs from the term kinetic, which refers to move-
ment, or motion, as an objectively describable phenomenon. The concept
of kinesthetic empathy, which originated in scientific studies of involun-
tary motor mimicry in the nineteenth century and philosophical treatises
on the kinesthetic aspect of aesthetic experience, was taken up in the twen-
tieth century by dance studies, where it has continued to be analyzed and
refined in studies such as Susan Leigh Foster’s Choreographing Empathy:
Kinesthesia in Performance (2011) and the research of Dee Reynolds,
Matthew Reason, and others associated with the 2008–2011 “Watching
INTRODUCTION 3

Dance: Kinesthetic Empathy” project in the United Kingdom.2 As


Reynolds and Reason’s 2012 edited collection Kinesthetic Empathy in
Creative and Cultural Practice demonstrates, the idea of kinesthetic
empathy is now being applied to fields outside of dance studies. Reynolds
and Reason write: “We feel comfortable … in stating that kinesthetic
empathy is a key interdisciplinary concept in our understanding of social
interaction and communication in creative and cultural practices ranging
from entertainment and sport to physical therapies.”3 Much of this recent
interest in kinetic embodiment has been informed by the mirror-neuron
research mentioned above.
More than twenty-five years have passed since the initial discovery of
mirror neurons, and it is more than eighty years since New York Times
dance critic John Martin, building on work of late nineteenth and early
twentieth century aesthetician Theodor Lipps, introduced the terms inner
mimicry and kinesthetic sympathy to describe the audience’s response to
modern dance. The intensified interest in these two areas since the early
2000s has established an unprecedented convergence between science,
philosophy, and the arts. It has also deepened and complicated our under-
standing of the operations identified by these terms. Alongside the critical
responses of scientists and philosophers to what one might call “mirror-­
neuron overreach,” Foster and others have challenged Martin’s claims
that kinesthetic empathy provides universal access to the embodied experi-
ence of others. The result is an understanding of mimetic embodiment
more in tune with historical, cultural, and individual difference.
With their shared interest in embodiment, observation, action, and
intercorporeality, the convergence of neural mirroring research and a reju-
venated interest in kinesthetic empathy has proved validating and theoreti-
cally productive to performing arts scholars and practitioners. In the
opening lines of Mirrors in the Brain—How Our Minds Share Actions and
Emotions, Giacomo Rizzolatti (one of the scientists who discovered mirror
neurons in macaque monkeys) and Corrado Sinigaglia cite the director
Peter Brook:

In an interview some time ago, the great theatrical director, Peter Brook,
commented that with the discovery of mirror neurons, neuroscience had
finally started to understand what has long been common knowledge in the
theatre: the actor’s efforts would be in vain if he were not able to surmount
all cultural and linguistic barriers and share his bodily sounds and ­movements
with the spectators, who thus actively contribute to the event and become
one with the players on stage.4
4 S. B. GARNER, JR.

Although not all who embraced the discovery of mirror neurons would
subscribe to the universalism of Brook’s comment, his response to this
discovery was shared by many involved in the arts of movement and imita-
tion, particularly those who have embraced the cognitive turn in theatre
studies. Bruce McConachie’s Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach
to Spectating in the Theatre (2008) discusses mirror mechanisms along
with emotional contagion, facial recognition, and other imitative/
empathic components of social cognition in the theatre. Rhonda Blair’s
The Actor, Image, and Action: Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience (2008)
includes mirror-neuron research in its analysis of cognitive neuroscience’s
contribution to actor training. And in Embodied Acting: What Neuroscience
Teaches Us about Performance (2012), Rick Kemp applies mirror-neuron
research to the actor’s process of identifying with characters. All three of
these studies are appropriately cautious when it comes to applying neuro-
logical claims that are subject to disagreement among scientists.
Because the concept of kinesthetic empathy pre-dated the discovery of
neural mirroring mechanisms, dance theorists have tended to consider
neurological findings, when doing so, within this framework. They have
also integrated this research within a broader range of methodological
approaches—physiological, philosophical, historical, and cultural—for
thinking about movement observation and enactment. Of particular
interest to my work here, many of their accounts have a strong phenom-
enological emphasis, one based on experiential, historically situated
accounts of dancers, choreographers, and spectators.5 Ann Cooper
Albright writes: “Over the course of the last thirty years, phenomenology
has replaced aesthetics as the philosophical discourse of choice for dance
studies, prodding scholars to think about a broad continuum of moving
bodies within the cultures they inhabit.”6 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s
landmark study The Phenomenology of Dance (1966) claimed philosophy
for dance and dance for philosophy, and her subsequent work and that of
others has deepened the phenomenological understanding of expressive
movement. The Winter 2011 issue of Dance Research Journal was
devoted to the topic “Dance and Phenomenology: Critical Reappraisals.”
Several of the essays in this issue explore the limits of phenomenology as
a theoretical point of view, but it is remarkable (as editor Mark Franko
notes) that “phenomenology rarely if ever absents itself from the terms of
dance analysis, despite the attempt to subtract it.” Franko also observes
that “The upsurge of interest in the topic of kinesthetic empathy is
reframing perspectives on phenomenological inquiry.”7
INTRODUCTION 5

Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre


Inspired, in part, by Foster’s work and the “Watching Dance: Kinesthetic
Empathy” project, the last ten years have seen an emergence of kines-
thetic research in performance studies, particularly in the United
Kingdom. Since 2010, for example, the Research Centre for Cognition,
Kinesthetics and Performance at the University of Kent has brought
together scholars and practitioners who are interested in a range of issues
connected to kinesthetic performance. For the most part, however, the-
atre has held an uneasy position in this important area of research. The
relative scarcity of kinesthetically oriented theatrical studies, I suggest,
reflects our underdeveloped understanding of theatre, particularly dra-
matic theatre, as a kinetic and kinesthetic form. While it is easy to recog-
nize the movement dimension in highly physicalized theatre forms such
as Kabuki, commedia dell’arte, and the acrobatic performances of Cirque
du Soleil—in the Biomechanical theatre of Vsevolod Meyerhold and the
immersive productions of Punchdrunk or Sound&Fury—the movement
dynamics of less physically overt theatre styles and traditions are less
immediately apparent. Indeed, one of the most pervasive modern tradi-
tions—theatrical realism—may seem predicated on suppressing a kines-
thetic sensibility. Realist stage settings often inhibit movement as much
as they enable it, and the actor/characters who inhabit these environ-
ments are restricted by historically and socially specific movement con-
ventions. When Nora Helmer breaks into a frenetic tarantella in Act 3 of
Ibsen’s A Doll House, she violates not only the propriety governing
female movement but the kinetic circumscriptions of the realist mode as
well, which has restrained her up to this point like the corset she wears.
In a sequence such as this, Bert States’s observation that realism repre-
sents an “imprisonment of the eye” could be generalized to include the
moving body as well.8
When Nora’s tarantella erupts in the midst of the measured movement
practices that surrounds it, dance emerges, momentarily, in the context of
theatre. In fact, though, Ibsen’s play has been “moving” from its opening
moments, and it continues to move to its end. Navigating their circum-
scribed but concentrated action fields, Ibsen’s actor/characters move
within, at the edges of, and beyond the kinetic conventions of their social
world. They express themselves, consciously and unconsciously, in
­mannerisms and gestures. Their bodies move deliberately and in response
to their physical environment and those who share it. They are sometimes
6 S. B. GARNER, JR.

still, though this stillness can be tense with movements intended, sup-
pressed, released through speech.
And speak they do. Another impediment to theatrical applications of
kinesthetic empathy is the centrality of spoken language to most forms of
theatre. The prevailing model of kinesthetic empathy—and neurological
models of motor perception, which the concept sometimes incorporates—
is directed toward physical movements, and it provides less insight into
how speech and language might function in a broader account of senso-
rimotor experience. Here, too, dramatic theatre is particularly disadvan-
taged. In practice, the more theatre art forms accentuate the physical
aspects of performance (mime is a good example), the more they reward
the existing study of kinesthetic empathy. Conversely, the more these
forms incorporate spoken language alongside physical movement, the
more obviously they require an expanded and refined kinesthetic
vocabulary.
Addressing this need, Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre offers a
theoretical account of the sensorimotor and kinesthetic processes joining
theatre spectators and performers in a dynamic of shared enactment. It
takes up the existing work on kinesthetic empathy in dance studies, discus-
sions of movement and movement perception in theatre studies, and the
extensive insights on these subjects provided by phenomenology, cogni-
tive science, neuroscience, and linguistics. In doing so, it insists that our
response to others’ movements forms part of our broader sensorimotor
attunement with our environment. Experience is fundamentally dynamic,
and movement is the medium through which humans perceive and
encounter their world. Underlying this fact is the phenomenon of ani-
mateness. The word animate, when used as an adjective, means “endowed
with life, living, alive; (esp. in later use) alive and having the power of
movement, like an animal.”9 The etymological linking of these meanings
underscores the phenomenological inseparability of aliveness and move-
ment. When we speak of someone or something (a statue, abstract paint-
ing, piece of music) as “animated,” the liveliness to which we refer
manifests itself as movement, actual or potential—hence the technique of
cinematic and other forms of animation, which brings still images to life
by making them move. The fact that animate in this sense functions as a
transitive verb (“to give life to, make alive or active”) supports the idea
that humans have an active role to play in the animateness surrounding
them.10
INTRODUCTION 7

If kinesthesia is the lived experience of one’s movements, then such


experience, I argue, forms part of our fundamental attunement to the
movements of our world. This phenomenological claim is supported by
research in the cognitive sciences and the practice-related insights of dance
and acting theorists. Shifting the focus on kinesthetic spectatorship to the
experiential dynamic in which it arises allows us to reframe issues such as
the role of mirroring activities in motor apprehension, intersubjectivity,
and empathy. As long as this conversation is conducted only in neurosci-
entific terms, the correlations between functional magnetic resonance
imaging and phenomenal experience remain indeterminable. Descriptions
of empathy and motor resonance that rely exclusively or largely on mirror-­
neuron research must rise and fall with scientific claims and challenges.
Understanding that one’s engagement with one’s own movements and
the movement of others has its own experiential structures, on the other
hand, allows us to orient our investigation toward the givenness of kines-
thetic encounters. A phenomenological turn may not resolve what phi-
losophers call the “hard problem” of consciousness—how do cognitive
operations generate lived experience?—but it does provide a necessary
other perspective for thinking about this question.11 I will have more to
say about this shortly.
One of this study’s contributions to the discussion of movement and
movement observation in the theatre is that it explores the role of lan-
guage as kinesthetic phenomenon. It does so based on two recognitions.
For one thing, embodied utterance is gestural: it mobilizes the body’s
musculature in intentionally directed, meaning-bearing acts. Our atten-
tion to the content of what is said in particular language encounters may
eclipse the dynamics of its production, but this does not change the fact
that utterance is a sensorimotor activity. With its traditional reliance on
vocal training and its projective modes of address, theatrical speech fore-
grounds its corporeal delivery in ways that underscore its kinetic and
kinesthetic foundations. For another thing, language is saturated with
virtual movement. Language embodies actions and agents in its words
and linguistic structures, and as an experience-conveying medium it gen-
erates its own sensorimotor realities. With their rival form of perceptual
address, the movement/gestures embodied in language form part of the
broader movement field that theatrical audiences inhabit and engage
with. In theatre, the movements manifested by language counterpoint,
reinforce, and interact with the physical movements; at times—the
Messenger’s narrative of Oedipus’ self-blinding in Sophocles’ Oedipus
8 S. B. GARNER, JR.

Rex, for instance—recounted movement eclipses onstage movement.


Given that our kinesthetic responses to recounted movements bear simi-
larities to the way we respond to physically observed movements, any
notion of kinesthetic empathy in the theatre must take into account the
stage’s multiple modes of presencing and enactment. By including lan-
guage, I also introduce narrative and imagination to the investigation of
movement perception.

Empathy, Otherness, and Disability


If Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre examines the kinesthesia half of
“kinesthetic empathy” by situating the concept in our broader sensorimo-
tor attunement to the world and expanding it to include the movement
fields of utterance and language, it also joins the longstanding theoretical
discussions concerning empathy in performance. “Empathy” is a widely
applied concept these days, but it is also a contested one. Much of this
results from the term itself, which means different things to different peo-
ple and has proved difficult to define with consistency or precision. In
addition to resonance mechanisms, “empathy” is regularly used to signify
sympathy, compassion, identification, engulfment, perspective-taking, and
mindreading. Underlying most conceptions of empathy is the idea that
individuals recognize and vicariously share the experience and point of
view of others. In his 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith
described this using the term sympathy: “As we have no immediate experi-
ence of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which
they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the
like situation.”12 For Smith, this apprehension relies heavily on imagina-
tion, which allows us to place ourselves in another’s situation and conceive
what it would be like to undergo the other’s experiences. His descriptions
of actual sympathetic encounters, however, have a corporeal force that
sidesteps mentalization:

When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of
another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own
arm; and when it does fall, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt by it as
well as the sufferer. The mob [sic], when they are gazing at a dancer on the
slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies, as they
see him do, and as they feel that they themselves must do if in his
situation.13
INTRODUCTION 9

Over a century later, Theodor Lipps used the giddying spectacle of an


acrobat balancing on a high wire to argue for an organic connection
between the visual and the kinesthetic. The term from philosophical aes-
thetics that Lipps used to describe this connection—Einfühlung, or “feel-
ing into”—was translated into English as “empathy” by Edward Titchener
in 1909.
Scientists and philosophers disagree about the operations involved in
empathy, and they disagree about the priority that these operations assume
in empathic encounters. Given the further muddying introduced by the
term’s psychological, therapeutic, ethical, and popular uses, there were
moments in the writing of this book when I entertained the thought of
sidestepping the term empathy entirely as an experiential and analytic cat-
egory for the study of theatrical spectatorship and restricting myself to less
loaded descriptive/analytic terms. But “empathy” cannot be dispensed
with so easily. The concept is deeply embedded in theatre, dance, and
performance theory; aesthetics; philosophy; cognitive science; and psy-
chology, and it has occasioned a rich tradition of phenomenological
inquiry, where it is frequently described under the broader rubric of inter-
subjectivity. Moreover, the literature on kinesthetic empathy has played a
crucial role in my research, and I want the book that results from it to
contribute to this important interdisciplinary area. So, while Kinesthetic
Spectatorship focuses on the broader subject of sensorimotor experience,
perception, and motor resonance in the theatre—with the word “empa-
thy” not in its title—I address the phenomenon of empathy in the book’s
final chapter. Readers who expect a global or integrative theory of empa-
thy at that point will be disappointed. What this book offers, instead, is a
perspective on theatrical empathy from a sensorimotor point of view atten-
tive to the phenomenological and cognitive complexities of actual theatri-
cal encounters.
In offering this perspective, I do not mean to imply that all empathy is
sensorimotor in origin or kinesthetic in the way it manifests itself. From
the point of view of neuroscience, motor resonance has been shown to be
one neural route to empathy among others. Cognitive scientists and phi-
losophers of mind distinguish between “motor empathy,” “emotional
empathy,” and “cognitive empathy,” and the experiments designed to
study these phenomena often reinforce the distinctiveness of these
­categories. Outside the laboratory, however, our relations with others are
multi-­channeled and holistic; they mobilize all our capacities and engage-
ments. These engagements are animated: they take place within an inter-
10 S. B. GARNER, JR.

subjective field constituted in terms of actual and latent movement. When


we see anger in someone, we see it in the way she tightens her facial mus-
cles, holds her body, directs her voice, walks or does not walk. This is
especially true in theatre, where kinetic acts are foregrounded within the
dynamic of display. The fact that we typically engage such acts while seated
does not negate the kinesthetic nature of this encounter; as I will argue,
sitting and not-moving exists on the movement continuum. While motor
engagement in its many facets may not be the only way to think about
empathy, in other words, it allows us to access a dynamic dimension of the
self–other interaction, which includes (but does not subsume) other
dimensions of empathy, including emotion. This last point is worth under-
scoring, since the notion of sharing another’s feelings has tended to domi-
nate discussions of empathy. Considering the sensorimotor grounding of
theatrical and other forms of spectatorship returns movement to the
empathic equation, and it highlights the role of movement in seemingly
different cognitive operations. What we think of as “empathy” is a
dynamic, interactive process rather than a state of mind or feeling that one
accomplishes then resides in atemporally.
A different obstacle to the study of empathy is the specter of universal-
ism. This specter can be found in the unexamined assumption that empa-
thy provides unproblematic access to the minds and experiences of others.
After centuries in which this assumption prevailed, we know that it is not
true, that our ability to apprehend and empathize with others is condi-
tioned by variables of culture, history, gender, race, and embodiment. The
differences opened up by these variables raise difficult questions about
accessibility, knowability, and identification, and they challenge any notion
that empathy and kinesthetic engagement are automatic, total, or unmedi-
ated. When we claim to empathize with someone else, we run the risk of
universalizing what we feel and mistaking our projections for actual, inter-
subjective apprehension. Others are hard to know, and the history of I–
you (and we–you) encounters is littered with examples of appropriative
empathy.
The present study endorses and builds on the work of Foster and oth-
ers who have challenged universalizing notions of empathy in dance stud-
ies and the work of neurologists who have demonstrated the variability
and situatedness of neurological mirroring mechanisms. An important
task of anyone writing about empathy and the mechanisms underlying it,
this work indicates, is to delimit its achievements and qualify excessive
claims made on its behalf. Crucial to doing so, I believe, is rigorous
INTRODUCTION 11

engagement with the issue of difference. Phenomenologically and cogni-


tively, we come to know others by navigating a perceptual field of com-
monalities and differences. Denying a solipsism that would leave us
imprisoned in our own worlds and a boundarylessness that would have us
merge with those we encounter, we negotiate what we know, what we do
not know but can, and what we cannot know and never will. The limita-
tions and possibilities attendant on this situation complicate the phenom-
ena of movement perception and kinesthetic resonance. What does it
mean to say that we resonate with the movements of others? Do we actu-
ally inhabit their movements in an experiential sense, or do we vicariously
activate our own motor repertoires and experiences? How do we engage
with sensorimotor performances that are radically different from ours? If
my sensorimotor capabilities and practices differ markedly from another’s,
what happens when my sensorimotor orientation to the world encounters
hers?
As a vehicle for understanding the role of difference in sensorimotor
encounters, Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre foregrounds the phe-
nomenon of disability in its analysis. The variability of embodied subjectiv-
ity that disability highlights puts many of the assumptions concerning
movement perception, kinesthetic resonance, and empathy to the test. As
we will see in the chapter “Kinesthetic Resonance”, Martin’s writings on
kinesthetic empathy in the 1930s assume a normative body; when disabil-
ity appears in his discussion it is marked as a deficit or threat. A related form
of ableism can be found in medico-scientific, psychological, and even phe-
nomenology studies of movement that describe perceptual and motor dys-
function using the language of pathology. Most accounts of movement
experience and movement perception, of course—including many of the
ones referred to in this book—ignore disability entirely by taking able-
bodiedness as an epistemological, cognitive, and experiential norm with-
out considering alternative forms of embodiment and motility.
Marginalizing or eliding disability in these ways impoverishes our under-
standing of those who fall into this category, but it also impoverishes our
understanding of those who do not. Impairment and physical limitation
are not restricted to the “disabled,” nor is the ability to execute movement
the sole property of those we consider “able-bodied.” Incorporating dis-
ability by examining its role in movement and movement perception opens
important insights into the ways we move through the world. It also gives
us a sensorimotor perspective on the difficult question of how, and how
much, we can know those who are different from us. While I reject the
12 S. B. GARNER, JR.

universalist position that all experience is essentially the same, I am equally


skeptical of the relativist claim evident or implicit in certain currents of
identity studies that experience is hermetically sealed within individual or
group identities. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty proposed in The Visible and
the Invisible, we are attuned to one another, implicated in one another, as
part of an innate intercorporeality (intercorporéité); our experiences, how-
ever different, are grounded kinesthetically as they are in other ways (cog-
nitively and linguistically, for example).14 Social life—and its elaborated
manifestations, such as theatre—hinge on the fact that another’s experi-
ence is to some degree comprehensible to me. By directing attention to
our sensorimotor resonance with others, kinesthetic responsiveness pro-
vides an important tool for plumbing this apprehensibility and discerning
its limits. If we acknowledge that sensorimotor resonance and the higher-
order empathic projections it enables are never identical to the experiences
they respond to, we can investigate the far more interesting questions of
how we constitute a world that includes other people through our percep-
tual and kinesthetic engagements with it and how we come to know what
disability theorist Lennard Davis calls the “commonality of bodies within
the notion of difference.”15
Socially constructed categories of difference, such as disability, compli-
cate the self–other encounter and the terms we use to discuss it. As
Disability advocates and theorists have demonstrated, “disability” is an
ideological, political, medical, and institutional category as well as—or
more than—a physical condition. To quote Davis again: “The object of
disability studies is not the person using the wheelchair or the Deaf person
but the set of social, historical, economic, and cultural processes that regu-
late and control the way we think about and think through the body.”16
Disability is also, for those who embrace the term, a vehicle for solidarity,
activism, and self-expression. Anthropologist and Disability activist Robert
F. Murphy writes, “Disability is not simply a physical affair for us; it is our
ontology, a condition of our being in the world.”17 The stigmatizing and
empowering effects of this identification have consequences for those it
encompasses in terms of how people with disabilities experience them-
selves and their relationship with others. As a way of acknowledging this
influence, I will use the capitalized “Disability” to refer to the social cat-
egory and the identitarian movement that has emerged over recent
decades to contest its objectifications, while using the lower-case “disabil-
ity” (and other terms, such as “inability,” “impairment,” and “diver-
gence”) to designate sensorimotor and cognitive difference. I do this with
INTRODUCTION 13

the understanding that these levels are not independent of each other:
that being viewed as Disabled by an ableist world is a form of sensorimo-
tor disablement in its own right. For people who are identified with their
impairments, disability is subjectively inseparable from Disability.
As a way of integrating disability into a theory of movement percep-
tion, I highlight the issue of sensorimotor difference in many of the per-
formances I discuss. Five productions involving disability are central to the
chapters that follow: Sandglass Theater’s puppet play about dementia,
D-Generation: An Exultation of Larks (2013); Deaf West Theatre’s revival
of the musical Spring Awakening (2014); an evening of performances by
Oakland’s AXIS Dance Company, a physically integrated company of per-
formers (attended in 2015); Sam Gold’s Broadway production of
Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (2007), with wheelchair-bound
actress Madison Ferris as Laura Wingfield; and Proteus Theatre Company’s
innovative one-man show Merrick, the Elephant Man (2007), which fea-
tured an able-bodied actor. With each of these productions—and other
theatrical moments I discuss throughout this study—I explore kinetic and
kinesthetic-based attempts to navigate the disabled–nondisabled divide.
One of my contributions to the discussion of knowability, kinesthetic reso-
nance, and empathy here and elsewhere in my book as these pertain to
sensorimotor difference is phenomenological. Working from the perspec-
tive of kinesthetic experience, I examine the claim, put forward by some,
that phenomenology erases difference, by considering this tradition’s atti-
tudes toward disability. Taking Merleau-Ponty’s famous statement that
“[c]onsciousness is originally not an ‘I think that,’ but rather an ‘I can’”
back to its original formulation by Edmund Husserl, I show that Husserl
conceived the phenomenon of I can in relationship to an equally funda-
mental I cannot.18 I propose that this counter-phenomenon be devel-
oped beyond Husserl’s limited application of it that I can and I cannot be
understood in dialectical relation to each other. Building on Sara Ahmed’s
critique of Merleau-Ponty’s I can in Queer Phenomenologies, I argue that
I cannot be broadened to include those inabilities and inhibitions that are
imposed from without—the gender-imposed inhibitions that Iris Marion
Young identified in her influential 1980 essay “Throwing Like a Girl,”
for instance, or the constraints that ableist society imposes on those who
are differently embodied. But the limits that I cannot ­represents are also,
I maintain, intrinsic to embodiment itself in a more fundamental way
than Husserl’s ableist perspective allowed him to acknowledge.
Recognizing that my own movements and my perception of others’ are
14 S. B. GARNER, JR.

constituted, in part, by what I cannot do, know, or share provides a foun-


dation for including difference within an understanding of sensorimotor
enactment, resonance, and empathy.
As I hope to demonstrate in the following chapters, a sensorimotor
analysis sensitive to difference challenges the absolutism of disability/able-­
bodiedness binaries without denying the ideological and sociopolitical
realities these categories point to. I understand how fraught this project is
given longstanding discussions of Disability and other identity-derived
categories of experience. I do not propose to speak for those who are
Disabled; when I present this experience, it is through the written accounts
of those who live it. The perspective I take in the performance encounters
I describe is that of a largely able-bodied-up-to-this-point male who has
had intimate contacts with disabled individuals over his lifetime, lived
through episodes of impairment, and become more deeply acquainted
with I cannot as he gets older. There are some things I know about being
disabled (small “d”), some I am almost certain to learn, and many more I
will never know. But the reality of living in a world populated by others
with variable embodiments and sensorimotor/cognitive capacities is
something everyone shares whether they acknowledge it or not. Embracing
this reality, I have written a book less about disability than about the pro-
ductive challenge disability presents to traditional models of phenomenal
experience, cognition, and aesthetic reception. As Carrie Sandahl writes,
“Disabilities are states of being that are in themselves generative and, once
de-stigmatized, allow us to envision an enormous range of human vari-
ety—in terms of bodily, spatial, and social configurations.”19 Given the fact
we are all “other” to everyone else in varying degrees, the issue of how we
encounter difference—what we have access to and what we do not—is as
important as the issue of difference itself. As I hope to show, theatre and
other forms of performance offer a space where such encounters are fore-
grounded, questioned, and enabled.

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences


As the earlier sections of this introduction have indicated, this book is a
continuation of my longstanding interest in the phenomenology of the-
atre; those who are familiar with my earlier book Bodied Spaces:
Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama will see many of
the same preoccupations revisited with the perspective of twenty four
additional years spent thinking and writing about theatre. As in that earlier
INTRODUCTION 15

study, I approach the performing body as an experiential reference point


of the performance space it inhabits and bodies forth, and as a phenome-
nological component of the audience’s perceptual field. The notion of
kinesthetic spectatorship that I develop here allows me to explore this
twinness with a differently attuned phenomenological attention. Because
“kinesthetic empathy” and other models of motor resonance seek to
understand the mutual relation of movement perception and enactment—
the act of perceiving movement is accompanied by a virtual enactment of
it—a focus on sensorimotor perception opens up additional layers in the
actor–spectatorship relationship. Coming to terms with the phenomenol-
ogy of movement and movement perception has allowed me to under-
stand this relationship in more richly dynamic terms.
As even a cursory look at the field demonstrates, the last ten years have
seen a resurgent interest in phenomenological approaches to perfor-
mance.20 In addition to the dance scholarship alluded to earlier, scholars
and practitioners in theatre and performance studies have taken up phe-
nomenological questions and methodologies. This interest has proceeded
from, and in tandem with, the performative, corporeal, and experiential
“turns” in theory and practice of the arts, and it has been inspired by
experimental forms of technologically mediated, immersive, and participa-
tory performance. I cannot do justice to the range of new work in this
area, but I will single out a few exceptional books: Susan Kozel’s explora-
tion of human bodies and digital technologies, Closer: Performances,
Technologies, Phenomenology (2007); George Home-Cook’s study of the-
atrical listening, Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves (2015);
Jon Foley Sherman’s A Strange Proximity: Stage Presence, Failure, and the
Ethics of Attention (2016); and Maaike Bleeker, Sherman, and Eirini
Nedelkopoulou’s collection Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions
and Transformations (2015), which brings together some of the most
exciting performance-directed phenomenological work being done
today.21 Those doing this work draw upon classical tradition of phenom-
enology—Edmund Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, and
Erwin Straus—but they also interrogate this tradition and its conceptions
of subjectivity, perception, and embodiment in light of contemporary the-
ory, new performance practices, and our increasingly technologized, inter-
medial life-world. Scholars and performers have also explored the practical
question of how one does phenomenology, generating valuable insights
into the processual nature of phenomenological inquiry, the modes of
attention and inscription best suited to capturing the nuances of ­experience,
16 S. B. GARNER, JR.

and the differences between phenomenological descriptions and first-­


person impressions. One of the most important insights to emerge from
this “new-wave” research is that performance itself is an important way of
doing phenomenology.
I am indebted to all of this work for carrying the phenomenological
study of performance into a new millennium and for refining the terms
that earlier scholars developed. I am indebted, as well, to scholars in such
fields as anthropology, geography, and architecture for similarly important
insights and applications. The expanding interdisciplinarity of phenome-
nological analysis is one of its most significant developments. In the chap-
ters that follow I join a particularly influential interdisciplinary conversation:
the growing dialogue between phenomenology and what is broadly
defined as the cognitive sciences.22 This dialogue is both inevitable and
methodologically fraught. It is inevitable because phenomenology and the
cognitive sciences (in which I include cognitive psychology, philosophy of
mind, neuroscience, and cognitive linguistics) deal with similar and over-
lapping phenomena. It is methodologically fraught because the two tradi-
tions have historically defined themselves in opposition to each other.
Husserl grounded his phenomenological philosophy on a critique of natu-
ralism, the objectifying belief underlying positivist science that the world
exists as something distinct from the perceiving subject.23 Applying his
critique to all disciplines that treat phenomena, including consciousness,
as entities that can be measured, analyzed, and manipulated, Husserl pre-
sented phenomenology and what he considered naïve empiricism as anti-
thetical. For their part, scientists in the decades that followed usually
dismissed phenomenology as empirically unsound, dependent on intro-
spective rather than scientifically verifiable procedures and claims.
This apparent incompatibility has been reexamined in recent decades
by proponents on both sides of the phenomenology–cognitive science
divide. As Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi note, this rapprochement has
been supported by three developments in the cognitive sciences, all of
which undermined the computational and cognitivist models that domi-
nated studies of cognition to that point.24 One development was a revived
interest in phenomenal consciousness and the methodological question of
how one studies this scientifically.25 A second development was the emer-
gence of embodied and enactive approaches to cognition, which rejected
the mind–body dualism that continued to underwrite the cognitive disci-
plines. The third has to do with advances in neuroscience since the early
1990s. With the advent of technologies such as functional magnetic
INTRODUCTION 17

r­ esonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET), sci-


entists have been able to generate highly detailed images of neural activity
within and across specific brain regions. Not only does this experimental
information suggest neurological correlates to the experiential processes
that phenomenology and the philosophy of mind examine, but the scien-
tists who design, conduct, and interpret brain-imaging experiments often
depend on the reported experiences of experimental subjects. Given these
parallel and intersecting developments, an approach such as phenomenol-
ogy, which derives descriptive models of experience from rigorous proce-
dures, has an important contribution to make to cognitive research.
A number of philosophers with backgrounds in phenomenology have
embraced this rapprochement from the other direction. Abandoning
“pure” phenomenology—which hinges, as Alva Noë describes it, on the
assumption “that phenomenology is free standing in the sense that phe-
nomenological facts are logically and conceptually independent of empiri-
cal or metaphysical facts”—these philosophers propose different ways of
accommodating phenomenology to the naturalized world that science
and other objectifying disciplines examine.26 Daniel C. Dennett’s notion
of “heterophenomenology,” which advocates a third-person approach to
consciousness instead of the autophenomenology that traditional phe-
nomenology is rooted in, is an early shift in this direction, as are the efforts
of Francisco J. Varela and others in the late 1990s to “naturalize”
Husserlian phenomenology under the rubric “neurophenomenology.”27
More recently, philosophers have used phenomenological accounts of
cognitive processes to confirm or challenge the models of science and
analytic philosophy; examined phenomenological assumptions in light of
these models; and opened new areas for dialogue. The robustness of the
conversation is evident in the growing number of books and articles that
explore these convergences.28
My own engagement with the cognitive sciences is methodological and
pragmatic. Having previously argued for the complementarity of phenom-
enology to other disciplines and approaches, I proceed with the conviction
that phenomenology and the cognitive sciences are natural collaborators in
the investigation of experience. In the Phenomenology of Perception,
Merleau-Ponty drew upon psychological and neurological case studies,
such as Kurt Goldstein and Adler Gelb’s 1920 study of Schneider, a
German man who sustained brain injuries during World War I. And Vittorio
Gallese, one of the scientists who identified monkey mirror neurons at the
University of Parma, contributed his understanding of Merleau-­Ponty to
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
supervision of the Secretary of State of the United States,
and was to continue in existence for a period of ten years,
and, if found profitable to the nations participating in its
advantages, it was to be maintained for successive periods of
ten years indefinitely. At the first session of the
Fifty-first Congress of the United States, that body, in an
'Act making appropriations for the support of the Diplomatic
and Consular Service, etc.,' approved July 14, 1890, gave the
President authority to carry into effect the recommendations
of the Conference so far as he should deem them expedient, and
appropriated $36,000 for the organization and establishment of
the Bureau, which amount it had been stipulated by the
delegates in the Conference assembled should not be exceeded,
and should be annually advanced by the United States and
shared by the several Republics in proportion to their
population. … The Conference had defined the purpose of the
Bureau to be the preparation and publication of bulletins
concerning the commerce and resources of the American
Republics, and to furnish information of interest to
manufacturers, merchants, and shippers, which should be at all
times available to persons desirous of obtaining particulars
regarding their customs tariffs and regulations, as well as
commerce and navigation."

Bulletin of the Bureau of American Republics,


June, 1898.

A plan of government for the International Union, by an


executive committee composed of representatives of the
American nations constituting the Union, was adopted in 1896,
but modified at a conference held in Washington, March 18,
1899. As then adopted, the plan of government is as follows:

"The Bureau of the American Republics will be governed under


the supervision of the Secretary of State of the United
States, with the cooperation and advice of four
representatives of the other Republics composing the
International Union, the five persons indicated to constitute
an Executive Committee, of which the Secretary of State is to
be ex-officio Chairman, or, in his absence, the Acting
Secretary of State. The other four members of the Executive
Committee shall be called to serve in turn, in the
alphabetical order of the official names of their nations in
one of the four languages of the Union, previously selected by
lot at a meeting of the representatives of the Union. At the
end of each year the first of these four members shall retire,
giving place to another representative of the Union, in the
same alphabetical order already explained, and so on until the
next period of succession."

{11}

"The interest taken by the various States forming the


International Union of American Republics in the work of its
organic bureau is evidenced by the fact that for the first
time since its creation in 1890 all the republics of South and
Central America are now [1899] represented in it. The unanimous
recommendation of the International American Conference,
providing for the International Union of American Republics,
stated that it should continue in force during a term of ten
years from the date of its organization, and no country
becoming a member of the union should cease to be a member
until the end of said period of ten years, and unless twelve
months before the expiration of said period a majority of the
members of the union had given to the Secretary of State of
the United States official notice of their wish to terminate
the union at the end of its first period, that the union
should continue to be maintained for another period of ten
years, and thereafter, under the same conditions, for
successive periods of ten years each. The period for
notification expired on July 14, 1899, without any of the
members having given the necessary notice of withdrawal. Its
maintenance is therefore assured for the next ten years."

Message of the President of the United States.


December 5, 1899.

AMERICANISM:
Pope Leo XIII. on opinions so called.

See (in this volume)


PAPACY: A. D. 1899 (JANUARY).

AMNESTY BILL, The French.

See (in this volume)


FRANCE: A. D. 1900 (DECEMBER).

ANARCHIST CRIMES:
Assassination of Canovas del Castillo.

See (in this volume)


SPAIN: A. D. 1897 (AUGUST-OCTOBER).

Assassination of the Empress of Austria.

See (in this volume)


AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1898 (SEPTEMBER).

Assassination of King Humbert.

See (in this volume)


ITALY: A. D. 1899-1900;
and 1900 (JULY-SEPTEMBER).

ANATOLIAN RAILWAY, The.

See (in this volume)


TURKEY: A. D. 1899 (NOVEMBER).

ANCON, The Treaty of.


See (in this volume)
CHILE: A. D. 1894-1900.

ANDERSON, General Thomas M.:


Correspondence with Aguinaldo.

See (in this volume)


UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
A. D. 1898 (JULY-AUGUST: PHILIPPINES).

ANDRÉE, Salamon August:


Arctic balloon voyage.

See (in this volume)


POLAR EXPLORATION, 1897, 1898, 1899, 1900-.

ANGLO-AMERICAN POPULATION.

See (in this volume)


NINETEENTH CENTURY: EXPANSION.

ANGONI-ZULUS, The.

See (in this volume)


BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA PROTECTORATE.

ANTARCTIC EXPLORATION.

See (in this volume)


POLAR EXPLORATION.

ANTEMNÆ, Excavations at.

See (in this volume)


ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: ITALY.

ANTIGUA: Industrial condition.

See (in this volume)


WEST INDIES, THE BRITISH: A. D. 1897.

ANTITOXINE, Discovery of.

See (in this volume)


SCIENCE, RECENT: MEDICAL AND SURGICAL.

ANTI-IMPERIALISTS, The League of American.

See (in this volume)


UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
A. D. 1900 (MAY-NOVEMBER).

ANTI-REVOLUTIONARY BILL, The German.

See (in this volume)


GERMANY: A. D. 1894-1895.
ANTI-SEMITIC AGITATIONS.

See (in this volume)


AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1895-1896, and after;
and FRANCE: A. D. 1897-1899, and after.

ANTI-SEMITIC LEAGUE, Treasonable conspiracy of the.

See (in this volume)


FRANCE: A. D. 1899-1900 (AUGUST-JANUARY).

APPORTIONMENT ACT.

See (in this volume)


UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1901 (JANUARY).

ARBITRATION, Industrial:
In New Zealand.

See (in this volume)


NEW ZEALAND: A. D. 1891-1900.

ARBITRATION, Industrial:
In the United States between employees and employers
engaged in inter-state commerce.

See (in this volume)


UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1898 (JUNE).

ARBITRATION, International: A. D. 1896-1900.


Boundary dispute between Colombia and Costa Rica.

See (in this volume)


COLOMBIA: A. D. 1893-1900.

ARBITRATION, International: A. D. 1897.


Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

See (in this volume)


CENTRAL AMERICA (NICARAGUA-COSTA RICA): A. D. 1897.

ARBITRATION, International: A. D. 1897-1899.


Venezuela and Great Britain.
Guiana boundary.

See (in this volume)


VENEZUELA: A. D. 1896-1899.

ARBITRATION, International: A. D. 1898.


Argentine Republic and Chile.

See (in this volume)


ARGENTINE REPUBLIC: A. D. 1898.

ARBITRATION, International: A. D. 1898.


Treaty between Italy and the Argentine Republic.

See (in this volume)


ARGENTINE REPUBLIC: A. D. 1898.

ARBITRATION, International: A. D. 1899.


The Treaty for the Pacific Settlement of International
Disputes concluded at the Peace Conference at the Hague (Text).
The Permanent Court created.

See (in this volume)


PEACE CONFERENCE.

ARBITRATION, International: A. D. 1900.


Brazil and French Guiana boundary dispute.

See (in this volume)


BRAZIL: A. D. 1900.

ARBITRATION, International: A. D. 1900.


Compulsory arbitration voted for at Spanish-American Congress.

See (in this volume)


SPAIN: A. D. 1900 (NOVEMBER).

ARBITRATION TREATY, Great Britain and the United States.


Its defeat.

See (in this volume)


UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1897 (JANUARY-MAY).

----------ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Start--------

ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH:
The Oriental Field.
Recent achievements and future prospects.

"Three successive years have just added to the realm of


Egyptian archaeology, not only the period of the first two
dynasties, hitherto absolutely unrecognized from contemporary
remains, but also a long prehistoric period. Assyriology
likewise has lately been pushed back into antiquity with
almost equal rapidity. Though the subjects will probably
always have their limitations, yet the insight of scholars and
explorers is opening up new vistas on all sides. … Our
prospect for the future is bright. Egypt itself seems
inexhaustible. Few of the cities of Babylonia and Assyria have
yet been excavated, and each of them had its library and
record office of clay-tablets as well as monuments in stone
and bronze. In Northern Mesopotamia are countless sites still
untouched; in Elam and in Armenia monuments are only less
plentiful.
{12}
In Arabia inscriptions are now being read which may perhaps
date from 1000 B. C. The so-called Hittite hieroglyphs still
baffle the decipherer; but as more of the documents become
known these will in all likelihood prove a fruitful source for
the history of North Syria, of Cappadocia, and of Asia Minor
throughout. Occasionally, too, though it is but rarely, an
inscription in the Phaenician type of alphabet yields up
important historical facts. When all is done, there is but
scant hope that we shall be able to construct a consecutive
history of persons and events in the ancient world. All that
we can be confident of securing, at any rate in Egypt, is the
broad outline of development and change, chronologically
graduated and varied by occasional pictures of extraordinary
minuteness and brilliancy."

F. LL. Griffith,
Authority and Archaeology Sacred and Profane,
part 2, pages. 218-219
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons).

ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: In Bible Lands:


General results as affecting our knowledge
of the ancient Hebrews.

"The general result of the archaeological and anthropological


researches of the past half-century has been to take the
Hebrews out of the isolated position which, as a nation, they
seemed previously to hold, and to demonstrate their affinities
with, and often their dependence upon, the civilizations by
which they were surrounded. Tribes more or less closely akin
to themselves in both language and race were their neighbours
alike on the north, on the east, and on the south; in addition
to this, on each side there towered above them an ancient and
imposing civilization,—that of Babylonia, from the earliest
times active, enterprising, and full of life, and that of
Egypt, hardly, if at all, less remarkable than that of
Babylonia, though more self-contained and less expansive. The
civilization which, in spite of the long residence of the
Israelites in Egypt, left its mark, however, most distinctly
upon the culture and literature of the Hebrews was that of
Babylonia. It was in the East that the Hebrew traditions
placed both the cradle of humanity and the more immediate home
of their own ancestors; and it was Babylonia which, as we now
know, exerted during many centuries an influence, once
unsuspected, over Palestine itself.

"It is true, the facts thus disclosed, do not in any degree


detract from that religious pre-eminence which has always been
deemed the inalienable characteristic of the Hebrew race: the
spiritual intuitions and experiences of its great teachers
retain still their uniqueness; but the secular institutions of
the nation, and even the material elements upon which the
religious system of the Israelites was itself constructed, are
seen now to have been in many cases common to them with their
neighbours. Thus their beliefs about the origin and early
history of the world, their social usages, their code of civil
and criminal law, their religious institutions, can no longer
be viewed, as was once possible, as differing in kind from
those of other nations, and determined in every feature by a
direct revelation from Heaven; all, it is now known, have
substantial analogies among other peoples, the distinctive
character which they exhibit among the Hebrews consisting in
the spirit with which they are infused and the higher
principles of which they are made the exponent. …

"What is called the 'witness of the monuments' is often


strangely misunderstood. The monuments witness to nothing
which any reasonable critic has ever doubted. No one, for
instance, has ever doubted that there were kings of Israel (or
Judah) named Ahab and Jehu and Pekah and Ahaz and Hezekiah, or
that Tiglath-Pileser and Sennacherib led expeditions into
Palestine; the mention of these (and such like) persons and
events in the Assyrian annals has brought to light many
additional facts about them which it is an extreme
satisfaction to know: but it has only 'confirmed' what no
critic had questioned. On the other hand, the Assyrian annals
have shewn that the chronology of the Books of Kings is, in
certain places, incorrect: they have thus confirmed the
conclusion which critics had reached independently upon
internal evidence, that the parts of these books to which the
chronology belongs are of much later origin than the more
strictly historical parts, and consequently do not possess
equal value.

"The inscriptions, especially those of Babylonia, Assyria, and


Egypt, have revealed to us an immense amount of information
respecting the antiquities and history of these nations, and
also, in some cases, respecting the peoples with whom, whether
by commerce or war, they came into contact: but (with the
exception of the statement on the stele of Merenptah that
'Israel is desolated') the first event connected with Israel
or its ancestors which they mention or attest is Shishak's
invasion of Judah in the reign of Rehoboam; the first
Israelites whom they specify by name are Omri and his son
Ahab. There is also indirect illustration of statements in the
Old Testament relating to the period earlier than this; but
the monuments supply no 'confirmation' of any single fact
recorded in it, prior to Shishak's invasion."

S. R. Driver,
Authority and Archaeology Sacred and Profane,
part 1, pages 150-151
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons).

ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Babylonia:


Earlier explorations in.

For some account of the earlier archæological explorations in


Babylonia and their results,

See (in volume 1) BABYLONIA, PRIMITIVE;


and (in volume 4) SEMITES.

ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Babylonia:


American exploration of the ruins of ancient Nippur.

[Footnote: Quotations in this account from Professor


Hilprecht's copyrighted reports in the "Sunday School Times"
are used with permission from the publishers of that journal.]

"In the summer of 1888, the University of Pennsylvania fully


equipped and sent out the first American expedition to the
northern half of the plains of Babylonia to effect a thorough
exploration of the ruins of Nippur—the modern Niffer, or, more
correctly, Nuffar—on the border of the unwholesome swamps of
the Affej, and to undertake extensive excavations. A few
intelligent citizens of Philadelphia had met in the house of
Ex-Provost Dr. William Pepper, and formed 'The Babylonian
Exploration Fund,' a short time before this with the purpose
of effecting a systematic exploration of ancient Babylonia.
What science owes to this unselfish undertaking can be
adequately estimated only by posterity. … Two professors,
Peters and Hilprecht, were entrusted with the management of
the expedition, Dr. Peters as director, and Dr. Hilprecht as
Assyriologist."

H. V. Hilprecht, editor,
Recent Research in Bible Lands,
page 47.

{13}

Professor Hilprecht, who conducts for the "Sunday School


Times" a most interesting and important department, in which
the proceedings and principal results of archæological
exploration in Bible Lands have been currently chronicled
during several years past, gave, in that journal of December
I, 1900, the following description of the scene and the
historical importance of the ruins in which the excavations
above mentioned have been carried on: "Nuffar is the modern
Arabic name of an old Babylonian ruin situated about half-way
between the Euphrates and Tigris, at the northeastern boundary
of the great Affej swamps, which are formed by the regular
annual inundations of the Euphrates. In a straight line, it is
nearly eighty miles to the southeast from Baghdad. A large
canal, now dry, and often for miles entirely filled with
rubbish and sand, divides the ruins into two almost equal
parts. On an average about fifty or sixty feet high, these
ruins are torn up by frequent gulleys and furrows into a
number of spurs and ridges, from the distance not unlike a
rugged mountain range on the bank of the upper Tigris. In the
Babylonian language, the city buried here was called Nippur.
According to Jewish tradition, strongly supported by arguments
drawn from cuneiform texts and archaeological objects found at
the ruins themselves, Nippur was identical with the Biblical
Calneh, mentioned in Genesis 10: 10, as one of the four great
cities of the kingdom of Nimrod. It was therefore natural that
the public in general should take a warm interest in our
excavations at Nuffar. This interest grew considerably in
religious circles when, a few years ago, I announced my
discovery of the name of the 'river Chebar' in two cuneiform
texts from the archives of Nippur. It became then evident that
this 'river Chebar,' which hitherto could not be located, was
one of the four or five large canals once bringing life and
fertility to the fields of Nippur; that, furthermore, a large
number of the Jewish captives carried away by Nebuchadrezzar
after the destruction of Jerusalem were settled in the plains
around this city; and that even Ezekiel himself, while
admonishing and comforting his people, and holding out to them
Jehovah's mercy and never-failing promise of a brighter
future, stood in the very shadow of Babylonia's ancient
national sanctuary, the crumbling walls of the great temple of
Bêl at Nippur. The beginning and end of Old Testament history
thus point to Nippur as the background and theater for the
first and final acts in the great drama of divine selection
and human rejection in which Israel played the leading role."

In the same article, Professor Hilprecht indicated in a few


words what was done at Nuffar by the first three of the four
expeditions sent out from Philadelphia since 1888. "It was
comparatively easy," he said, "to get a clear idea of the
extent of the city and the life in its streets during the last
six centuries preceding our era. Each of the four expeditions
to Nuffar contributed its peculiar share to a better knowledge
of this latest period of Babylonian history, particularly,
however, the third and the present campaigns. But it was of
greater importance to follow up the traces of a very early
civilization, which, accidentally, we had met during our first
brief campaign in 1889. By means of a few deep trenches, the
second expedition, in the following year, had brought to light
new evidence that a considerable number of ancient monuments
still existed in the lower strata of the temple mound. The
third expedition showed that the monuments, while numerous,
are mostly very fragmentary, thereby offering considerable
difficulties to the decipherer and historian. But it also
showed that a number of platforms running through the temple
mound, and made of baked bricks, frequently bearing
inscriptions, enable us to fix the age of the different strata
of this mound with great accuracy. The two lowest of these
platforms found were the work of kings and patesis
(priest-kings) of 4000-3800 B. C., but, to our great
astonishment, they did not represent the earliest trace of
human life at Nippur. There were not less than about thirty
feet of rubbish below them, revealing an even earlier
civilization, the beginning and development of which lie
considerably before the times of Sargon the Great (3800 B. C.)
and Narâm-Sin, who had been generally regarded as
half-mythical persons of the first chapter of Babylonian
history."

Of the results of the work of those three expeditions of the


University of Pennsylvania, and of the studies for which they
furnished materials to Professor Hilprecht, Professor Sayce
wrote with much enthusiasm in the "Contemporary Review" of
January, 1897, as follows: "In my Hibbert Lectures on the
'Religion of the Ancient Babylonians' I had been led by a
study of the religious texts of Babylonia to the conclusion
that Nippur had been a centre from which Babylonian culture
was disseminated in what we then regarded as prehistoric
times. Thanks to the American excavations, what were
prehistoric times when my Hibbert Lectures were written have
now become historic, and my conclusion has proved to be
correct. … For the first time in Babylonia they have
systematically carried their shafts through the various strata
of historical remains which occupy the site, carefully noting
the objects found in each, and wherever possible clearing each
stag away when once it had been thoroughly examined. The work
began in 1888, about two hundred Arabs being employed as
labourers. … The excavations at Nippur were carried deeply and
widely enough not only to reveal the history of the city
itself but also to open up a new vista in the forgotten
history of civilised man. The history of civilisation has been
taken back into ages which a short while since were still
undreamed of. Professor Hilprecht, the historian of the
expedition, upon whom has fallen the work of copying,
publishing, and translating the multitudinous texts discovered
in the course of it, declares that we can no longer 'hesitate
to date the founding of the temple of Bel and the first
settlements in Nippur somewhere between 6000 and 7000 B. C.,
possibly even earlier.' At any rate the oldest monuments which
have been disinterred there belong to the fifth or sixth
millennium before the Christian era. Hitherto we have been
accustomed to regard Egypt as the land which has preserved for
us the earliest written monuments of mankind, but Babylonia
now bids fair to outrival Egypt. The earliest fixed date in
Babylonian history is that of Sargon of Akkael and his son
Naram-Sin. It has been fixed for us by Nabonidos, the royal
antiquarian of Babylonia. In one of his inscriptions he
describes the excavations he made in order to discover the
memorial cylinders of Naram-Sin, who had lived '3200 years'
before his own time. In my Hibbert Lectures I gave reasons for
accepting this date as approximately correct. The recent
discoveries at Niffer, Telloh, and other places have shown
that my conclusion was justified. …

{14}

"Assyriologists have long had in their possession a cuneiform


text which contains the annals of the reign of Sargon, and of
the first three years of the reign of his son. It is a late
copy of the original text, and was made for the library of
Nineveh. Our 'critical' friends have been particularly merry
over the credulity of the Assyriologists in accepting these
annals as authentic. … So far from being unhistorical, Sargon
and Naram-Sin prove to have come at the end of a
long-preceding historical period, and the annals themselves
have been verified by contemporaneous documents. The empire of
Sargon, which extended from the Persian Gulf to the
Mediterranean, was not even the first that had arisen in
Western Asia. And the art that flourished under his rule, like
the art which flourished in Egypt in the age of the Old
Empire, was higher and more perfect than any that succeeded it
in Babylonia. … Henceforward, Sargon and Naram-Sin, instead of
belonging to 'the grey dawn of time,' must be regarded as
representatives of 'the golden age of Babylonian history.'
That they should have undertaken military expeditions to the
distant West, and annexed Palestine and the Sinaitic Peninsula
to the empire they created need no longer be a matter of
astonishment. Such campaigns had already been undertaken by
Babylonian kings long before; the way was well known which led
from one extremity of Western Asia to the other. …

"It is Mr. Haynes [Director of the explorations from 1893] who


tells us that we are henceforth to look upon Sargon of Akkad
as a representative of 'the golden age of Babylonian history,'
and his assertion is endorsed by Professor Hilprecht. In fact,
the conclusion is forced upon both the excavator and the
palæographist. Professor Hilprecht, who, thanks to the
abundant materials at his disposal, has been able to found the
science of Babylonian palæography, tracing the development of
the cuneiform characters from one stage of development to
another, and determining the age of each successive form of
writing, has made it clear to all students of Assyriology that
many of the inscriptions found at Niffer and Telloh belong to
a much older period than those of the age of Sargon. The
palæographic evidence has been supplemented by the results of
excavation. … As far back as we can penetrate, we still find
inscribed monuments and other evidences of civilisation. It is
true that the characters are rude and hardly yet lifted above
their pictorial forms. They have, however, ceased to be
pictures, and have already become that cursive script which we
call cuneiform. For the beginnings of Babylonian writing we
have still to search among the relics of centuries that lie
far behind the foundation of the temple of Nippur.

"The first king whom the excavations there have brought to


light is a certain En-sag(sak)-ana who calls himself 'lord of
Kengi' and conqueror of Kis 'the wicked.' Kengi—'the land of
canals and reeds,' as Professor Hilprecht interprets the
word—was the oldest name of Babylonia, given to it in days
when it was still wholly occupied by its Sumerian population,
and when as yet no Semitic stranger had ventured within it.
The city of Kis (now El-Hy-mar) lay outside its borders to the
north, and between Kis and Kengi there seems to have been
constant war. … Nippur was the religious centre of Kengi, and
Mul-lil, the god of Nippur, was the supreme object of Sumerian
worship. … A king of Kis made himself master of Nippur and its
sanctuary, and the old kingdom of Kengi passed away. The final
blow was dealt by the son of the Sumerian high priest of the
'Land of the Bow.' Lugal-zaggi-si was the chieftain who
descended from the north upon Babylonia and made it part of
his empire. … Lugal-zaggi-si lived centuries before Sargon of
Akkad in days which, only a year ago, we still believed to lie
far beyond the horizon of history and culture. We little
dreamed that in that hoar antiquity the great cities and
sanctuaries of Babylonia were already old, and that the
culture and script of Babylonia had already extended far
beyond the boundaries of their motherland. The inscriptions of
Lugal-zaggi-si are in the Sumerian language, and his name,
like that of his father, is Sumerian also. … The empire of
Lugal-zaggi-si seems to have passed away with his death, and
at no long period subsequently a new dynasty arose at Ur. …
According to Professor Hilprecht, this would have been about
4000 B. C. How long the first dynasty of Ur lasted we cannot
tell. It had to keep up a perpetual warfare with the Semitic
tribes of northern Arabia, Ki-sarra, 'the land of the hordes,'
as it was termed by the Sumerians. Meanwhile a new state was
growing up on the eastern side of the Euphrates in a small
provincial city called Lagas, whose ruins are now known as
Telloh. Its proximity to Eridu, the seaport and trading depot
of early Babylonia, had doubtless much to do with its rise to
power. At all events the kings of Telloh, whose monuments have
been brought to light by M. de Sarzec, became continually
stronger, and the dynasty of Lagas took the place of the
dynasty of Ur. One of these kings, E-Anna-gin, at length
defeated the Semitic oppressors of northern Chaldæa in a
decisive battle and overthrew the 'people of the Land of the
Bow.' …

"The kings of Lagas represent the closing days of Sumerian


supremacy. With Sargon and his empire the Semitic age begins.
The culture of Chaldæa is still Sumerian, the educated classes
are for the most part of Sumerian origin, and the literature of
the country is Sumerian also. But the king and his court are
Semites, and the older culture which they borrow and adopt
becomes Semitised in the process. … For many generations
Sumerians and Semites lived side by side, each borrowing from
the other, and mutually adapting and modifying their own forms
of expression. … Sumerian continued to be the language of
religion and law—the two most conservative branches of human
study—down to the age of Abraham. … The new facts that have
been disinterred from the grave of the past furnish a striking
confirmation of Professor Hommel's theory, which connects the
culture of primitive Egypt with that of primitive Chaldæa, and
derives the language of the Egyptians, at all events in part,
from a mixed Babylonian language in which Semitic and Sumerian
elements alike claimed a share. We now know that such a mixed
language did once exist, and we also know that this language
and the written characters by which it was expressed were
brought to the shores of the Mediterranean and the frontiers
of Egypt in the earliest age of Egyptian history."

A. H. Sayce,
Recent Discoveries in Babylonia
(Contemporary Review, January, 1897).

{15}

The third of the Pennsylvania expeditions closed its work at


Nippur in February, 1896. There was then an interval of three
years before a fourth expedition resumed work at the ruins in
February, 1899. In the "Sunday School Times" of April 29 and
May 27, 1899, Professor Hilprecht (who did not go personally
to Nuffar until later in the year) gave the following account
of the friendly reception of the exploring party by the Arabs
of the district, from whom there had been formerly much
experience of trouble: "The Affej tribes, in whose territory
the large mounds are situated, had carefully guarded the
expedition's stronghold,—a mud castle half-way between the
ruins and the marshes, which had been sealed and entrusted to
their care before we quitted the field some years ago. They
now gave to the expedition a hearty welcome, accompanied by
shooting, shouting, dancing, and singing, and were evidently
greatly delighted to have the Americans once more in their
midst. In the presence of Haji Tarfa, their
commander-in-chief, who was surrounded by his minor shaykhs
and other dignitaries of the El-Hamza tribes, the former
arrangements with the two shaykhs Hamid el-Birjud and Abud
el-Hamid were ratified, and new pledges given for the security
and welfare of the little party of explorers, the question of
guards and water being especially emphasized. In accordance
with the Oriental custom, the expedition showed its
appreciation of the warm reception by preparing for their
hosts in return a great feast, at which plenty of mutton and
boiled rice were eaten by some fifty Arabs, and the old bond
of friendship was cemented anew with 'bread and salt.'" …

"Doubtless all the advantages resulting for the Affej Bed'ween


and their allies from the presence of the Americans were
carefully calculated by them in the three years (February,
1896-1899) that we had withdrawn our expedition from their
territory. They have apparently found out that the
comparatively large amount of money brought into their country
through the wages paid to many Arabs employed as workmen, and
through the purchase of milk, eggs, chicken, mutton, and all
the other material supplied by the surrounding tribes for our
camp, with its about two hundred and fifty persons, has done
much to improve their general condition. The conviction has
been growing with them that we have not come to rob them of
anything to which they attach great value themselves, nor to
establish a new military station for the Turkish government in
order to gather taxes and unpaid debts. Every Arab engaged by
the Expedition has been fairly treated, and help and
assistance have always been given cheerfully and gratis to the
many sick people who apply daily for medicine, suffering more
or less during the whole year from pulmonary diseases, typhoid
and malarial fevers, easily contracted in the midst of the
extended marshes which they inhabit."

In the "Sunday School Times" of August 5, in the same year,


Professor Hilprecht reported: "The mounds of Nippur seem to
conceal an almost inexhaustible treasure of inscribed
cuneiform tablets, by means of which we are enabled to restore
the chronology, history, religion, and the high degree of
civilization, obtained at a very early date by the ancient
inhabitants between the lower Euphrates and Tigris. More than
33,000 of these precious documents were found during the
previous campaigns. Not less than 4,776 tablets have been
rescued from February 6 to June 10 this year, averaging,
therefore, nearly 1,200 'manuscripts in clay,' as we may style
them, per month. About the fourth part of these tablets is in
perfect condition, while a very large proportion of the
remaining ones are good-sized fragments or tablets so
fortunately broken that their general contents and many
important details can be ascertained by the patient
decipherer."

In November, 1899, Professor Hilprecht started for the field,


to superintend the explorations in person, and on the way he
wrote to the "S. S. Times" (published December 13): "The
deeper the trenches of the Babylonian Expedition of the
University of Pennsylvania descend into the lower strata of
Nippur, the probable site of the biblical Calneh, the more
important and interesting become the results obtained. The
work of clearing the northeastern wall of the high-towering
temple of Bel was continued with success during the summer
months. Particularly numerous were the inscribed vase
fragments brought to light, and almost exclusively belonging
to the pre-Sargonic period,—3800 B. C. and before. As I showed
in the second part of Volume I of our official University
publication, this fragmentary condition of the vases is due to
the wilful destruction of the temple property by the
victorious Elamitic hordes, who, towards the end of the third
pre-Christian millennium, ransacked the Babylonian cities,
extending their conquest and devastation even as far as the
shores of the Mediterranean Sea (comp. Gen. 14). From the
earliest historical period down to about 2200 B. C., when this
national calamity befell Babylonia, the large temple
storehouse, with its precious statues, votive slabs and vases,
memorial stones, bronze figures, and other gifts from powerful
monarchs and governors, had practically remained intact. What,
therefore, is left of the demolished and scattered contents of
this ancient chamber as a rule is found above the platform of
Ur-Ninib (about 2500 B. C.), in a layer several feet thick and
about twenty-five feet wide, surrounding the front and the two
side walls of the temple. The systematic clearing and
examination of this layer, and of the huge mass of ruins lying
above it, occupied the attention of the expedition
considerably in the past years, and was continued with new
energy during the past six months." At the end of January,
1900, Professor Hilprecht arrived in Babylonia, and wrote some
weeks later to the "Sunday School Times" (May 3): "As early as
eleven years ago, the present writer pointed out that the
extensive group of hills to the southwest of the temple of Bel
must be regarded as the probable site of the temple library of
ancient Nippur. About twenty-five hundred tablets were rescued
from the trenches in this hill during our first campaign.
Later excavations increased the number of tablets taken from
these mounds to about fifteen thousand. But it was only within
the last six weeks that my old theory could be established
beyond any reasonable doubt.
{16}
During this brief period a series of rooms was exposed which
furnished not less than over sixteen thousand cuneiform
documents, forming part of the temple library during the
latter half of the third millennium B. C. In long rows the
tablets were lying on ledges of unbaked clay, serving as
shelves for these imperishable Old Babylonian records. The
total number of tablets rescued from different parts of the
ruins during the present campaign amounts even now to more
than twenty-one thousand, and is rapidly increased by new
finds every day. The contents of this extraordinary library
are as varied as possible. Lists of Sumerian words and
cuneiform signs, arranged according to different principles,
and of fundamental value for our knowledge of the early
non-Semitic language of the country, figure prominently in the
new 'find.' As regards portable antiquities of every
description, and their archeological value, the American
expedition stands readily first among the three expeditions at
present engaged in the exploration of Ancient Babylonia and
the restoration of its past history."

Three weeks later he added: "The Temple Library, as indicated


in the writer's last report, has been definitely located at
the precise spot which, in 1889, the present writer pointed
out as its most probable site. Nearly eighteen thousand
cuneiform documents have been rescued this year from the
shelves of a series of rooms in its southeastern and
northwestern wings. The total number of tablets (mostly of a
didactic character) obtained from the library up to date is
from twenty-five thousand to twenty-six thousand tablets
(whole and broken). In view, however, of more important other
duties to be executed by this expedition before we can leave
Nippur this year, and in consideration of the enormous amount
of time and labor required for a methodical exploration of the
whole mound in which it is concealed, I have recently ordered
all the gangs of Arabic workmen to be withdrawn from this
section of ancient Nippur, and to be set at work at the
eastern fortification line of the city, close to the
temple-complex proper. According to a fair estimate based upon
actual finds, the unique history of the temple, and
topographical indications, there must be hidden at least from
a hundred thousand to a hundred and fifty thousand tablets
more in this ancient library, which was destroyed by the
invading Elamites about the time of Abraham's emigration from
Ur of the Chaldees. Only about the twentieth part of this
library (all of Dr. Haynes's previous work included) has so
far been examined and excavated."

In the same letter the Professor described the uncovering of


one façade of a large pre-Sargonic palace—"the chief
discovery," in his opinion, "of this whole campaign." "A
thorough excavation of this large palace," he wrote, "will
form one of the chief tasks of a future expedition, after its
character, age, and extent have been successfully determined
by the present one. Important art treasures of the Tello type,
and literary documents, may reasonably be expected to be
unearthed from the floor-level of its many chambers. It has
become evident, from the large number of pre-Sargonic
buildings, walls, and other antiquities discovered on both
sides of the Shatt-en-Nil, that the pre-Sargonic Nippur was of
by far greater extent than had been anticipated. This
discovery, however, is only in strict accord with what we know
from the cuneiform documents as to the important historical
rôle which the temple of Bel ('the father of the gods'), as
the central national sanctuary of ancient Babylonia, played at
the earliest period, long before Babylon, the capital of the
later empire, achieved any prominence."

The work at Nippur was suspended for the season about the
middle of May, 1900, and Professor Hilprecht, after his return
to Philadelphia, wrote of the general fruits of the campaign,
in the "Sunday School Times" of December 1: "As the task of
the fourth and most recent expedition, just completed, I had
mapped out, long before its organization, the following work.
It was to determine the probable extent of the earliest
pre-Sargonic settlement at ancient Nippur; to discover the
precise form and character of the famous temple of Bêl at this
earliest period; to define the exact boundaries of the city
proper; if possible, to find one or more of the great city
gates frequently mentioned in the inscriptions; to locate the
great temple library and educational quarters of Nippur; to
study the different modes of burial in use in ancient
Babylonia; and to study all types and forms of pottery, with a
view to finding laws for the classification and determination
of the ages of vases, always excavated in large numbers at
Nuffar. The work set before us has been accomplished. The task
was great,—almost too great for the limited time at our
disposal. … But the number of Arab workmen, busy with pickax,
scraper, and basket in the trenches for ten to fourteen hours
every day, gradually increased to the full force of four
hundred. … In the course of time, when the nearly twenty-five
thousand cuneiform texts which form one of the most
conspicuous prizes of the present expedition have been fully
deciphered and interpreted; when the still hidden larger mass
of tablets from that great educational institution, the temple
library of Calneh-Nippur, discovered at the very spot which I
had marked for its site twelve years ago, has been brought to
light,—a great civilization will loom up from past
millenniums before our astonished eyes. For four thousand
years the documents which contain this precious information
have disappeared from sight, forgotten in the destroyed rooms
of ancient Nippur. Abraham was about leaving his ancestral
home at Ur when the great building in which so much learning
had been stored up by previous generations collapsed under the
ruthless acts of the Elamite hordes. But the light which
begins to flash forth from the new trenches in this lonely
mound in the desert of Iraq will soon illuminate the world
again. And it will be no small satisfaction to know that it
was rekindled by the hands of American explorers."

{17}

ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Babylonia:


German exploration of the ruins of Babylon.

An expedition to explore the ruins of Babylon was sent out by


the German Orient Society, in 1899, under the direction of Dr.
Koldewey, an eminent architect and archæologist, who had been
connected with previous works of excavation done in Babylonia
and northern Syria. In announcing the project, in the "Sunday
School Times" of January 28, 1899, Professor Hilprecht
remarked: "These extended ruins will require at least fifty
years of labor if they are to be excavated as thoroughly and
systematically as the work is done by the American expedition
at Nippur, which has employed in its trenches never less than
sixty, but frequently from two hundred to four hundred, Arabic
workmen at the same time during the last ten years. Certain
parts of the ruins of Babylon have been previously explored
and excavated by Layard, Rawlinson, and the French expedition
under Fresnel and Oppert, to which we owe the first accurate
details of the topography of this ancient city." Writing
somewhat more than a year later from Nippur, after having
visited the German party at Babylon, Professor Hilprecht said
of its work: "The chief work of the expedition during the past
year was the exploration of the great ruin heap called
El-Kasr, under which are hidden the remains of the palace of
Nebuchadrezzar, where Alexander the Great died after his
famous campaign against India. Among the few important
antiquities so far obtained from this imposing mound of
Ancient Babylon is a new Hittite inscription and a
neo-Babylonian slab with an interesting cuneiform legend. Very
recently, Dr. Koldewey, whose excellent topographical surveys
form a conspicuous part of the results of the first year, has
found the temple of the goddess Nin-Makh, so often mentioned
in the building inscriptions of the neo-Babylonian rulers, and
a little terra-cotta statue of the goddess. The systematic
examination of the enormous mass of ruins covering Ancient
Babylon will require several decenniums of continued hard
labor. To facilitate this great task, a bill has been
submitted to the German Reichstag requesting a yearly
government appropriation of over fifteen thousand dollars,
while at the same time application has been made by the German
Orient Committee to the Ottoman Government for another firman
to carry on excavations at Warka, the biblical Erech, whose
temple archive was badly pillaged by the invading Elamites at
about 2280 B. C."

Some account of results from the uncovering of the palace of


Nebuchadrezzar are quoted from "Die Illustrirte Zeitung" in
the "Scientific American Supplement," December 16, 1899, as
follows: "According to early Babylonian records,
Nebuchadnezzar completed the fortifications of the city, begun
by his father Narbolpolassar, consisting of a double inclosure
of strong walls, the inner called Imgur-Bel ('Bel is
gracious'), the outer Nemitti-Bel ('foundation of Bel'). The
circumference of the latter according to Herodotus was 480
stades (55 miles), its height 340 feet, and its thickness 85
feet. At the inner and outer peripheries, one-story houses
were built, between which was room enough for a chariot drawn
by four horses harnessed abreast. When Koldewey cut through
the eastern front of Al Kasr, he came upon a wall which was
undoubtedly that described by Herodotus. The outer eastern
shell was composed of burnt brick and asphalt, 24 feet in
thickness; then came a filling of sand and broken stone 70½
feet in thickness, which was followed by an inner western
shell of 43 feet thickness. The total thickness was,
therefore, 137.5 feet. By dint of hard work this wall was cut
through and the entrance to Nebuchadnezzar's palace laid bare.
Koldewey and his men were enabled to verify the description
given by Diodorus of the polychromatic reliefs which graced
the walls of the royal towers and palaces. It still remains to
be seen how trustworthy are the statements of other ancient
historians. The city itself, as previous investigators have
found, was adorned with many temples, chief among them Esaglia
('the high towering house'), temple of the city, and the national
god Marduk (Merodach) and his spouse Zirpanit. Sloping toward
the river were the Hanging Gardens, one of the world's seven
wonders, located in the northern mound of the ruins of Babel.
The temple described by Herodotus is that of Nebo, in
Borsippa, not far from Babylon, which Herodotus included under
Babylon and which the cuneiform inscriptions term 'Babylon the
Second.' This temple, which in the mound of Birs Nimrûd is the
most imposing ruin of Babylon, is called the 'eternal house'
in the inscriptions; it was restored by Nebuchadnezzar with
great splendor. In form, it is a pyramid built in seven
stages, for which reason it is sometimes referred to as the
'Temple of the Seven Spheres of Heaven and Earth.' The Tower
of Babel, described in Genesis x., is perhaps the same
structure. It remains for the German expedition to continue
its excavations in Nebuchadnezzar's palace."

ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Babylonia:


Discovery of an inscription of Nabonidos,
the last of the Babylonian kings.

"A discovery of the greatest importance has just been made by


Father Scheil, who has for some time been exploring in
Babylonia. In the Mujelibeh mound, one of the principal heaps
of ruins in the 'enciente' of Babylon, he has discovered a
long inscription of Nabonidos, the last of the Babylonian
Kings (B. C. 555-538), which contains a mass of historical and
other data which will be of greatest value to students of this
important period of Babylonian history. The monument in
question is a small 'stela' of diorite, the upper part of
which is broken, inscribed with eleven columns of writing, and
which appears to have been erected early in the King's reign.
It resembles in some measure the celebrated India-House
inscription of Nebuchadnezzar, but is much more full of
historical matter. Its value may be estimated when it is
stated that it contains a record of the war of revenge
conducted by the Babylonians and their Mandian allies against
Assyria, for the destruction of the city by Sennacherib, in B.
C. 698; an account of the election and coronation of Nabonidos
in B. C. 555, and the wonderful dream in which Nebuchadnezzar
appeared to him; as well as an account of the restoration of
the temple of the Moon god at Kharran, accompanied by a
chronological record which enables us to fix the date of the
so-called Scythian invasion. There is also a valuable
reference to the murder of Sennacherib by his son in Tebet, B.
C. 681."

American Journal of Archœology,


January-March, 1896.

ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Persia:


French exploration of the ruins of Susa,
the capital of ancient Elam.

"In 1897 an arrangement was completed between the French


Government and the Shah of Persia by which the former obtained
the exclusive right of archeological explorations in the
latter's empire, coupled with certain privileges for the
exportation of different kinds of antiquities that might be
unearthed. Soon afterwards, M. J. de Morgan, late director of
excavations in Egypt, who had made archeological researches in
the regions east of the Tigris before, was placed at the head
of a French expedition to Susa, the ancient capital of Elam,
the upper strata of which had been successfully explored by M.
Dieulafoy.
{18}
In the Babylonian cuneiform inscriptions Elam appears as the
most terrible foe of the Babylonian empire from the earliest
time: and the name of its capital, Susa, or Shâsha, was
discovered by the present editor several years ago on a small
votive object in agate, originally manufactured and inscribed
in southern Babylonia, in the first half of the third
pre-christian millennium, several hundred years afterwards
carried away as part of their spoil by the invading Elamites,
and in the middle of the fourteenth century B. C. recaptured,
reinscribed, and presented to the temple of Nippur by King
Kurigalzu, after his conquest of Susa. It was therefore
evident that, if the same method of excavating was applied to
the ruins of Susa as had been applied so successfully by the
University of Pennsylvania's expedition in Nippur, remarkable
results would soon be obtained, and amply repay all labor and
money expended. M. de Morgan, accompanied by some engineers
and architects, set hopefully to work, cutting his trenches
more than fifty feet below the ruins of the Achæmenian
dynasty. The first campaign, 1897-98, was so successful, in
the discovery of buildings and inscribed antiquities, that in
October of last year the French government despatched the
Assyriologist Professor Scheil, in order to decipher the new
cuneiform documents, and to report on their historical
bearings.

"Among the more important finds so far made, but not yet
published, maybe mentioned over a thousand cuneiform tablets
of the earlier period, a beautifully preserved obelisk more
than five feet high, and covered with twelve hundred lines of
Old Babylonian cuneiform writing. It was inscribed and set up
by King Manishtusu, who left inscribed vases in Nippur and
other Babylonian cities. A stele of somewhat smaller size,
representing a battle in the mountains, testifies to the high
development of art at that remote period. On the one end it
bears a mutilated inscription of Narâm-Sin, son of Sargon the
Great (3800 B. C.); on the other, the name of Shimti-Shilkhak,
a well-known Elamitic king, and grandfather of the biblical
Ariokh (Genesis 14). These two monuments were either left in
Susa by the two Babylonian kings whose names they bear, after
successful operations against Elam, or they were carried off
as booty at the time of the great Elamitic invasion, which
proved so disastrous to the treasure-houses and archives of
Babylonian cities and temples [see above: BABYLONIA]. The
latter is more probable to the present writer, who in 1896
('Old Babylonian Inscriptions,' Part II, page 33) pointed out,
in connection with his discussion of the reasons of the
lamentable condition of Babylonian temple archives, that on
the whole we shall look in vain for well-preserved large
monuments in most Babylonian ruins, because about 2280 B. C.
'that which in the eyes of the national enemies of Babylonia
appeared most valuable was carried to Susa and other places:
what did not find favor with them was smashed and scattered on
Babylonian temple courts.'"

Prof. H. V. Hilprecht,
Oriental Research
(Sunday School Times, January 28, 1809).

ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Egypt:


Earlier explorations.

For some account of earlier archæological explorations in


Egypt,

See, in volume 1,
EGYPT.

ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Egypt:


Results of recent exploration.
The opening up of prehistoric Egypt.
The tomb of Mena.
The funeral temple of Merenptah.
Single mention of the people of Israel.

"During all this century in which Egyptian history has been


studied at first hand, it has been accepted as a sort of axiom
that the beginnings of things were quite unknown. In the
epitome of the history which was drawn up under the Greeks to
make Egypt intelligible to the rest of the world, there were
three dynasties of kings stated before the time of the great
pyramid builders; and yet of those it has been commonly said
that no trace remained. Hence it has been usual to pass them
by with just a mention as being half fabulous, and then to
begin real history with Senefern or Khufu (Cheops), the kings
who stand at the beginning of the fourth dynasty, at about
4000 B. C. The first discovery to break up this habit of
thought was when the prehistoric colossal statues of Min, the
god of the city of Koptos, were found in my excavations in his
temple. These had carvings in relief upon them wholly
different from anything known as yet in Egypt, and the
circumstances pointed to their being earlier than any carvings

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