Robert Franklin Williams Speaks: A Documentary History is organized into four parts. Part I explores in chronological order the Williams story and the geographical spaces where the family lived, worked, and resided while Robert and Mabel Williams worked in partnership advocating for the civil and human rights of African Americans. It reveals how Williams is and remains a central yet complex figure in the United States. It provides the historical substance and analytical clarity that is necessary for readers to discover for themselves how Williams's messages of resistance, advocacy for armed self-defense, and protests against racial injustice resonate today through “new civil rights movement” causes, efforts, grievances, and protests spearheaded by Black Lives Matter movement activists, proponents, and supporters who continue to dominate the twenty-first-century social justice agenda with renewed liberation demands and themes. In Part II, which follows, the documents illustrate how the Williams couple's activism, travels across continents, and exiled experiences in Cuba and China were flexible and pragmatic. Williams is presented as a defender of African American human rights, fundamental principles and meanings of American democracy, patriotism, armed self-defense, and social justice.

Thank you so much for the invitation to be this year's Jensen Lecturer: it is a great honor to be here at Goethe University and in particular at the Frobenius Institute. And it is a great pleasure, too, to be with old friends and new here in Frankfurt: I have only recently arrived but I am glad to be both at the Institute and in this city, which I have seen sparkling in the distance. I know that the Frobenius Institute has long been at the heart of the intellectual and ethnographic aspects of Frankfurt's cultural offerings.

I am especially pleased to give a set of lectures named for Adolf Ellegard Jensen. In the context of these distinguished named lecture series, it is customary to spend a few moments on the accomplishments and legacy of the person for whom the series is named. Usually the lecturer then moves on to the topic at hand, after some brief niceties and an appropriate homage to a figure of old. But I hope you will excuse me if I spend a little more time with A. E. Jensen than lecturers normally do: I have come to know the work of Jensen over the past few months, and I have become quite charmed by him; Jensen's work is highly significant to the material we consider in the study of religion today. As the advertisers of his most important work, Myth and Cult among Primitive Peoples (1963 [1951]), put it at the time, Jensen's “sympathetic and richly documented” text is able to “demonstrate the importance of anthropology for the study of comparative religion.” Myth and Cult was published in German in 1951, and translated into English in 1963, but, unfortunately, it soon fell out of fashion: it has not been taught even in Germany in decades. And yet, to my eye, the intellectual project is one whose pertinence powerfully endures after almost seventy years.

So let us begin with a little excavation. In 1951, Jensen takes up the mid-twentieth-century question of religion, and shows how we, as anthropologists, can contribute to studying it. Significantly, he asks both what qualities religion has – that is, what qualities of humanity religion displays – and what form, or forms, religion takes over time.

On the first day of the semester, I walked into my Sociology of Inequality course and told the students to design a new society from scratch. They had complete control over every aspect of the society. The only criterion? They had to make sure that the society was socially, politically, and economically divided by hair color. They were to make it crystal clear that dark-haired people were the valued members of society while fair-haired people counted for nothing. Their assignment was to generate as many strategies as they could to send this message. They could set institutional policies, develop popular culture materials, create laws, limit social interactions, or do anything else that occurred to them. The students bent over their notebooks.

Half an hour later, all four blackboards in the room were full, and my arm was tired from writing down nearly a hundred suggestions. The students’ ideas covered every major social institution, every form of popular culture known to humankind in 2005, and a wide range of interpersonal interactions. They figured out how to make fair-haired people feel inadequate in any social setting, whether dark-haired people were present or not. The students made sure dark-haired people would never be held accountable for their mistreatment of fair-haired people. The students even struggled with how to treat redheads; were they valued or devalued? (Most students went with “devalued.”)

We looked at the four blackboards and everyone took a breath. I told them that they had done a great job and added, “Congratulations—now you understand how racism and sexism work in the United States.” I then handed out a pile of statistics and class went on from there.

I had students complete this exercise on the first day of courses on racism, sexism, heterosexism, and inequality more generally. Year in and year out, it never failed.

At some level, we know more about how systemic inequality works than we think. While the students were always creative, their creativity was fueled by real-life examples: newspaper stories, movies, and conversations they had with friends and family. At the same time, as each course continued after that first day, I noticed the same problem. Students struggled to see how different forms of inequality, such as sexism and racism, were similar to one another.

LETTERS BETWEEN RICHARD T. GIBSON AND ROBERT F. WILLIAMS

June 15, 1976, Brussels, Belgium

Dear Rob,

This is a hurried reply to your letter of May 17th, which just arrived today. Of course, I will look into financial problem in Luxembourg. It is ironic that you raise this problem because only a month ago, Lyle Stuart asked me if I would write a book for him on Luxembourg banks, (They have become the poor man's Switzerland, with nearly all the advantages of secrecy and without the negative interest now charged by the Swiss on most foreign deposits). Anyway, while I would hesitate to say that there is no dirty business afoot in your case, it seems to me at first glance like a typical capitalist trick. Luxembourg is three hours away by train or less. In addition, I have some friends there who may be able to provide me with information on this bankruptcy. At the moment, however, I am awaiting vistas from the Tanzanian Embassy in the Hague for a long planned and much delayed trip to Tanzania, Kenya, and Zambia. I hope to get over there by the 1st of July at the latest, once I have my visa. The biggest problem is that none of the three countries has an embassy in Brussels: Tanzania's is in Holland and Kenya and Zambia are in Bonn (another three hours by train from here). Nevertheless, I will try to get the information you want as quickly as possible and will write to you before my departure for Africa. By the way, is there anyone in Tanzania you would like me to lookup? Or in Zambia? (our friend Babu is still in jail, held without trial for years because the Zanaibaris will never give a fair trial and Julius does not want to release him for fear of arousing the ire of the island government). My regards to your wife and family. Cordially as always, Richard.

June 28, 1976, Brussels, Belgium

Dear Rob,

I spoke today by phone with my friend Jean Heisbourg in Luxembourg. He has been investigating your problem there and he tells me that the firm in question is not yet in bankruptcy. It has been placed under the administration of the three people you mentioned in your letter. This means that there are assets and you have a chance of getting your money.

Perhaps this book or the course in which you are reading it is your first introduction to sociology. If so, this appendix is for you. It introduces sociology as a discipline, along with some of the most important insights sociologists have about how society works. Some language in the appendix assumes that you’ve already read the book.

What Is Sociology?

Sociology is the academic study of social patterns (and exceptions to them) at all levels and in all contexts through the use of empirical research. Sociology is also a perspective or way of seeing the world, about which I say more later. Sociology studies the following:

• • Ways in which we are free and ways in which we are not

• • How structure and culture enable and constrain us

• • How belonging to a social group shapes our beliefs

• • How our interactions with people change based on the context

• • How our actions differ depending on the setting

• • How social inequality works

• • How different organizations and institutions interact with one another

• • How our self-understanding is socially shaped

• • How social patterns continue over time and how they change

• • How individuals make sense of their lives

• • How people interact with each other

• • What people learn from culture

• • What people believe, value, and assume, and how those beliefs, values, and assumptions impact our actions

• • How organizations and large-scale institutions work separately and collectively

• • How these facets of life come together to make societies that keep going over time while changing constantly

Since everything we do in our lives involves our relationships with others and with society more broadly, nothing human is off limits to sociology and virtually everything human is of interest to at least a few sociologists.

Some sociologists focus on the smallest levels of human social life: perceptions, values, ideas, identity development, meaning-making, individual behavior, and interpersonal interactions. Some sociologists are more interested in how organizations work, how cultural norms and ideals are disseminated across a society, or how social change movements come into existence, have an effect (or don’t), and fall away again. Some sociologists study the largestscale institutions of a given society, how nations interact with each other, or globalization and other patterns that span multiple countries.

Tennessee governor Bill Lee, the first US governor to sign into law a bill prohibiting certain kinds of drag performances, had some personal experience with drag as it turned out. Lee appeared in his own high school yearbook in drag, wearing a miniskirt, pearls, and a wig. When this information came to light, the governor's spokesperson contrasted the bill's “protection of children” from “obscene, sexualized entertainment” with “lighthearted school traditions.”

The spokesperson made a good attempt at defining the situations differently, but from a sociological perspective, what some people might call hypocrisy on Lee's part was really an example of what sociologist Robert Merton defined as “moral alchemy.” Moral alchemy describes a situation in which a behavior that is viewed positively when a valued group engages in it is viewed negatively when a devalued group engages in it. As Merton put it, “the in-group readily transmutes its own virtues into others’ vices.” Moral alchemy comes down to the idea that members of valued groups can do no wrong and members of devalued groups can do no good—so when a member of a valued group does it, it's good, and when a member of a devalued group does it, it's wrong, as shown in Figure 3.

We find moral alchemy at work in gendered language and in sexual double standards, among other places. This chapter covers a few common examples and then considers the opposite of moral alchemy, false equivalencies.

Justice scholar Warren Blumenfeld and social psychologist Derald Wing Sue are among those who have written about what Blumenfeld called the “double-standard language of gender,” in which a man and a woman behaving the same are described differently. He's “assertive,” she's “bossy.” He's “passionate,” she's “emotional.” He's “firm” while she's “stubborn.” He's “good at details” but she's “picky.” Successful, confident women are also called “abrasive,” “strident,” “shrill,” “aggressive,” “controlling,” “pushy,” and “bitchy,” among other terms rarely used to describe successful, confident men. One trans man reflected on how the definition of his behavior changed after his transition: “I used to be considered aggressive [as a woman]. Now I’m considered ‘take charge.’ People say, ‘I love your take-charge attitude.’ ”

For much of its 150-year-old history, anthropology has been a discipline of the human sciences that has at least implicitly sought the definition of culture. The way we have traditionally set upon our search has been to gather materials from multiple places and times with the tacit presumption that lining them up, or looking at them in comparative relief, would give us a greater knowledge, and maybe even a definition, of culture in its many permutations. For it was culture – the material, embodied (as well as conceptual and verbal) lens through which life is perceived, experienced, and navigated – that we knew to be at the base of collective human existence. Our assumption was that, if we could collect as many examples of its operations on the ground as possible, we could better understand the whole, that great human phenomenon of culture.

And yet “culture” is a contested term if ever there was one. As our discipline has developed, and deepened, we have learned that culture is curiously resistant to definition, both in the singular – “culture” – and in the plural – “cultures.” Cultural meaning has the extraordinary capacity to mean many things to many people, and even to ourselves as individuals over the course of our lives; it is both necessarily fragmented and that which enables coherence. Poke and prod as we might, it seemed that we could not find a way to reconcile our search for the general in perennially expanding investigations of the particular. Everything humans think or do might be culture, or cultural, and yet the more we tried to pin down the concept of culture, the more it eluded our grasp.

This book emerged out of a set of four lectures that together took up the question of our disciplinary search for the meaning of culture through the lens of method. There are innumerable histories of anthropology, and this text is not intended as another: it is rather a reflection on the genealogies – the lineages – of the methods of anthropology, and an enquiry into the historical relation of our subject to the way we have studied it.

This book is addressed primarily to readers who are new to the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. In particular, I hope it finds readers who are interested in recent debates about the status of “the human” and who might wish to learn something about what Jeffers can offer these ongoing conversations. I make the case in this book that Jeffers is an essential precursor for contemporary discussions about inhumanism and that his radical non-anthropocentrism remains deeply relevant for work being done in the environmental humanities, environmental philosophy, animal studies, and related fields.

Advanced scholars in Jeffers studies who find their way to this work will encounter much that is familiar but a few new themes and ideas as well. With my focus on inhumanism, I am not trying of course to break new ground. This is a central—perhaps the central—philosophical and spiritual concern of Jeffers's work, and many scholars before me have examined it. So, too, many of the poems I discuss in this book have been expertly analyzed by previous and present generations of literary critics, and I am much indebted to their scholarship. At the same time, the heavy emphasis I give to the philosophical and theoretical dimensions of Jeffers's work cuts against the grain of some of the existing scholarship, and specialists will readily note the ways in which I push back against certain established readings of Jeffers. Scholars will, I hope, also appreciate how my approach to understanding philosophy as a way of life (as opposed to, say, a mode of discourse focused primarily on making arguments and defending metaphysical and epistemological theses) allows the philosophical dimensions of Jeffers's work to be differently illuminated.

Given that this book is primarily intended for the former (general and non-specialist) audience rather than the latter (scholarly and specialist), I have avoided cluttering the main body of the work with discussions of the secondary scholarship. I have instead provided footnotes in various places pointing readers to secondary works that have proved useful for my own analyses. I have also included “Suggestions for Further Reading” at the end of the book for readers who wish to delve further into Jeffers's poetry and the substantial body of scholarship on his work.

The Tragedy of Humanism

In his poetry and letters, Jeffers both laments and appreciatively acknowledges the highly rigorous education he received under the direction of his father. As I noted in the Introduction, this intensive education began with Jeffers literally having Latin slapped into him by his father in early childhood and continued into his youth and teen years during which he attended a series of demanding European schools (where classes were taught in foreign languages that Jeffers had to learn on the fly). By the time Jeffers had completed his education, he had a solid command of Greek, Latin, French, and German and had read widely in classical literature. Despite the downsides of this demanding program (the most obvious being his abbreviated childhood [CL 2, 1018]), his thorough training in classical languages and literatures left Jeffers with a profound and lasting appreciation for classical Greek poetry and epic; and he regularly draws inspiration and plots for his own poetry from these ancient narrative wells. Greek tragedy plays an especially prominent role in his oeuvre, with plays from Euripides and Aeschylus providing the backbone for some of his longer narratives. Over the course of his career, Jeffers also composed several adaptations of ancient Greek tragedies. These reworkings are no mere translations or paraphrases on Jeffers's part, but are instead original retellings tailored to explore a theme central to his own poetry while also speaking to the perennial issues highlighted by the original text.

Although Jeffers's general relationship to ancient Greek poetry has been ably explored by scholars in both Jeffers studies and in classics, some of his reworkings of ancient Greek tragedies and themes have received less attention than others. One important piece by Jeffers that has received only minimal attention to date, “The Humanist's Tragedy,” and which was published in his collection Cawdor (1928), will form my focus in the initial portion of the present chapter. This narrative is a brief retelling of a few key episodes in Euripides's posthumously produced and historically influential tragedy Bacchae.

Euripides's original play opens with a monologue by Dionysus who explains that he is traveling to Thebes to announce his divinity, where his divine status has been flatly denied by King Pentheus and his mother Agave and Agave's sisters.

Jeffers's “Apology for Bad Dreams” (CP 1, 208–11; SP, 141–44), one of his most frequently cited and analyzed poems, opens with a forceful and memorable description of the beauty of the California coast.

What initially appears to be a straightforwardly loco-descriptive poem shifts dramatically in its sixth line to an account of a disturbing event unfolding on the clearing below: a woman is punishing and beating a horse.

Immediately after depicting this painful scene at a distance, the narrator returns to a description of the natural backdrop against which the horse beating unfolds:

In the opening pages of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Sigmund Freud offers what has become one of the most influential accounts of the origins of religion and religious-based civilizations. Pushing back against his friend and interlocutor Romain Rolland, who argues that religion arises in response to an “oceanic” feeling latent in all human beings, Freud insists that the phenomenon of religious belief (at least for the common person) is grounded in the much more basic fact of human vulnerability. “Life, as we find it,” Freud suggests, “is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments, and impossible tasks.” In response to the difficulties of existence, Freud believes we turn to religion (and here Freud has in mind primarily popular forms of the Christian religion) for salvation and consolation. Religion, he tells us, promises a comprehensive explanation of our condition and assures us that a providential father figure is watching over our lives and will ensure a good end for us. On Freud's analysis, religion thus serves as one of a host of “palliative measures” we use to deal with the hardships of daily life. Further, he believes that civilization itself emerges as one of the chief means whereby we seek to alleviate and prevent suffering. By living and working together in larger groups, conforming to social norms, and submitting to rulers, governments, police, and other state apparatuses, we seek to adjust our relations with nature and our fellow human beings such that our pain is minimized and daily existence is rendered as comfortable and pleasurable as possible.

That the establishment of civilization as a solution to the problem of existence creates a whole host of unintended discontents of its own is, of course, Freud's central cultural-psychoanalytic insight. Modern civilizations, especially the highly religious kind that dominate in Western culture, place excessive normative demands on individuals in regard to their sexual and social lives; the struggle to meet such demands, Freud argues, splinters the psyche and gives rise to the formation of a super-ego and to the persistent discontent of living under the surveillance of an internal watchman.