Chalyres

In general, this page was created and edited by User:Chalyres. There is nothing of interest here.

Pages

List of pages i've created, worked on or am working on or watching. This is a partial and incomplete list.

• 2006 Oaxaca protests
• Ted Haggard
• Welfare queen
• Pat Tillman
• Prester John
• Slavery
• Christianity and Slavery
• Purity Ball
• U2charist

General Areas of Study/Interest

• European History (graduate work)
• American Religion
• Post-Modern/Continental Philosophy
• North American Corporate History
• European Paganism, particularly as reflected in Catholic rites (graduate work)
• Queer/Gender Theory (graduate work)
• Industrial Music
• Weimar-era Germany, particularly occult and queer history in Berlin (graduate work)
• Prester John (graduate work)
• Indigenous rights movements in Europe, North and South America
• Homosexuality in American Religion
• Non-Progress Models/Theories of History (graduate work)

Non-Progress Narratives

I operate under a rejection of a particular historical narrative, and thus explain myself (and it) here.

Non-Progress Narrative is a "post"/non-colonial theory that rejects "progress" as a construction of western historical hegemony/power. Can be seen best in "post"- and "pre"-"enlightenment" narratives, since, although not entirely isolated, the age of "reason" is suspected of having injected "progress" into the western narrative.

Explained in much more interesting terms: Progress is an artificial idea created by white men who thought their ideas and achievements were the height of civilisation, seeing history as a long march to this one MOMENT before which all life was brutish and short and after which all civilisation would be seen as "mature." It manifests itself within assertions such as

• eighteenth-century slave owners cannot really be blamed for their actions because they lived in the past
• factory owners in early capitalist europe can't be blamed for poor working conditions because they didn't the fourteen-hour work-day was bad for ten year olds
• european colonists who obliterated indigenous cultures didn't really know any better.

the Progress narrative in selective--it ignores all contemporary dissent of any given period of time in order to enforce the notion that the present is more civil, more humane, less barbaric, more enlightened. It uses the past as a false comparison to the present to justify current exploitations by suggesting the present is not as bad as the past (this economic exploitation is not as bad as that slavery, this genocide is nothing compared to that holocaust, this occupation is nothing compared to that sacking, etc.).

The Progress narrative also selects certain pasts as canonical and linear while ignoring others, as can be seen with the general thought that western society is directly descended from the ancient greeks or hebrews (the Judeo-Christian narrative) and thus ignoring all other past civilisations and cultures which have equally (and sometimes more strongly) influence current thought. This is close to the "Foundational Myth" narrative, used by most nation-states to place the state within history (The "third" reich, the french "our ancestors the "Gauls,", the american "Our founding Fathers.").

Non-progress narratives, in contrast, make no linear assertions about history, and thus reject outright Fukuyama's (now retracted) suggestion that "liberal western hegemony" is somehow the end(point) of history.

Languages

Birth Language--English
Fluent in French
Semi-Fluent in German
Semi-Fluent in Latin