Cohen, Stanley, and Laurie Taylor
[1976] Escape Attempts: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Everyday Life. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1978.
Both authors male, say they describe men especially. (5)
Grew out of discussions with long-term prison inmates: how do they make the day pass without losing their minds. Saw that outside of prison people face the same dilemmas, resent falling into too much routine, though some routine is necessary (e.g. brushing teeth) to allow people to focus on what’s important to them. Initially interested in open resistance; now see little accomodations as escape attempts (Ch. 1): “This is the story of just how significant, ubiquitous, heroic, comic, powerful and pathetic, such attempts can be. (24)
Ironic or detached attitude towards routine habits and cliched roles can itself be a routine practice. (Ch. 2) It can also be conservatizing: “This is to contradict those liberal sociologists who write about the social construction of everyday life. They tend to see de-mystification of social interaction and social processes as a necessary preliminary to radical structural change…. The fact that we can regard with amusement the conventions of our university life [for instance] and our own roles as university lecturers, actually ensures that we remain within those conventions and those roles.” (35) Sometimes de-myst leads to social action: “But these are occasions upon which there already exists a general subscription to an imagined alternative world. In the absence of such an imaginable world (a political or social utopia perhaps) de-mystification serves primarily conservative functions.” (36)
Not allowed to perform sex as routine (44) or to admit deja vu when falling in love. (48, 61)
“The story is told of the guest who approached the hostess at just such a [phony] party: ‘I find the whole situation absurd, no one seems to realize the silliness, the grotesque artificiality of their behaviour.’ ‘Ah,’ said the hostess, ‘you must join the sociologists in the far corner. The rest of us realized all that long ago but decided to ignore it and enjoy the party.” (45)
Matching feelings against the script: “Should I be feeling happy?” (54)
Scripts from movies, theater, and books are readily available for borrowing elements. (58-9)
Repetition is a problem only when we try to break out of it and find we can’t entirely. (59) Scripts do allow some fooling around with their elements. (65-66)
Even our fantasies are stereotyped. (Ch. 4)
Free areas where we choose to be ourselves: hobbies, games, gambling, sex; holidays; mass culture, art; drugs, therapy. (Ch. 5) “Routine, self-consciousness and co-option then are always lurking outside these activity enclaves, always threatening to burst in….” (100) “Society creates just such areas and assiduously signposts them. Indeed it signposts them so well that they become … part of paramount reality [normal routine life] itself.” (94) “A visit to either one of our respective homes at the moment would reveal a museum of half-abandoned relics from these escape routes and free areas…. / Gloomily surveying the debris of failed escapes, we must wonder if there is some route which is too pure or natural to be spoilt or — failing that — some hope of putting together … [a] composite free area….” (136-7)
Extended free areas “are not stageposts on the way to some alternative reality. However consoling they may be, they still remain compartmentalized features of everyday life.” (140) Back to childhood, utopias and eupsychias (psychic change instead of social, term from Maslow), communes. (Ch. 6)
Reality slips: times “when we look out at the world and suddely find that the familiar perspectives through which we perceived it, the cognitive themes through which we apprehended it, have slipped away.” (155) What’s on the other side: visitors report either order continuous with our own (religion) or absurdity and coincidence (existentialists). Sometimes even these reality slips are scripted in advance, since we’re so ready to believe in them. (Ch. 7)
Some are able to tunnel through (out, in, or above) and create a life of alternate reality: hobby cranks, dada and surrealist artists, Merry Pranksters, temporary visitors to the edge like Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas go outside; religious and drug-induced voyages inside one’s head; Aleister Crowther and Charlie Manson’s attempts to become god-like. (Ch. 8)
Goals of escape: true self, meaning, progress. (Ch. 9) “No sooner has a new road to the true self been encountered than it is boxed and packaged for sale in the escape-attempts supermarket, no sooner has a new vocabulary of meaning been articulated, than it is raided for concepts and slogans by calendar makers and record producers, no sooner have we begun acting in an entirely novel way than we see coming over the horizon a mass of others mimicking our every action.” (213)
Lewis Hanke, The First Social Experiments in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935)
1513 law allowed “capable” Indians to be freed from slavery. (25) In 1516, an inquiry was commissioned by Cardinal Ximénez, to be performed by three reluctant Jeronymite friars: / 7 questions were put to the 12 oldest Spaniards in Española, and to ecclesiastics (surveys not just an invention of annoying post-WWII sociologists and educationalists). (28-9) No colonist considered the Indians to be capable of living in freedom. (29) Better they should be slave men (hombres siervos) than free beasts (bestias libres), said one. (32) In total, the friars found one good Christian Indian capable of enjoying liberty. (37)
Governor Nicolás Ovando experimented with freeing a few Indians; they just got drunk and idle. (36-7) Others tried freeing whole villages, 1519-1530′s, but all these experiments failed too. (46ff) [Because they still demanded that the Indians mine gold and grow crops for the Spaniards, even if they left them alone to organize themselves, it seems.]
Lewis Hanke, “Pope Paul III and the American Indians,” Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 30, 1937, pp.
Influenced by Bernardino de Minaya, a Dominican who went from America to Spain to Rome to plead the Indians’ cause, papal bull is issued in 1537 saying Indians “are truly men” and should not be enslaved but rather converted to Christianity through preaching and good example; Spanish king objects that the bull interferes in his papally-granted rights to govern the Americas as he wishes, forces the pope to retract the bull, but the retraction is little noticed even at the time.
Lewis Hanke, All Mankind Is One: A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians (DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974)
Columbus felt Indians were noble savages, but by 1510′s many Europeans held low view of Indians’ capacity, (4) especially the conquistadores who took booty and the encomenderos who were assigned Indians by the Crown for their own profit. (4) Encomenderos lobbied in late 1540′s for perpetuation of their grants of Indians. (29)
1512 Laws of Burgos promulgated regulations on treating the Indians fairly, supplying them with food and clothes, etc., and preparing them for baptism (previously not a duty of laymen). (8)
Controversy over huge Pedro Arias de Ávila (Pedrarias) expedition of 1514 (2,000 Spaniards, 22 ships) which had been delayed by royal order while committee of theologians drew up instructions for just war. Royal lawyer then wrote up “Requirement” of 1513 to be read to the Indians, claiming the land by virtue of the pope’s grant to the king and queen / and then threatening to enslave them if they resist; “the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault, and not that of their Highnesses, or ours, nor of these gentlemen who come with us.” (35-6) Expedition of course made this a laughingstock and often read it without interpreters. (36-7) The cacique of Cenu insisted on interpretation and responded: “The part about there being one God who ruled heaven and earth he approved; as for the pope who gave away lands that he didn’t own, he must have been drunk; and a king who asked for acquired such a gift must have been crazy.” (37)
Francisco Ruis, Bishop of Ávila and a Franciscan, 1517: “Indians are malicious people who are able to think up ways to harm Christians, but they are not capable of natural judgment or of receiving the faith, nor do they have the other virtues required for their conversion and salvation … and they need, just as a horse or beast does, to be directed and governed by Christians who treat them well and not cruelly.” (11)
African Gold Coast king saw a Dane in 1661, wondered if he was human until he stripped. “Ah, you really are a human being, but only too white, like a devil.” (11, citing Carl N. Degler, Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States, New York: Macmillan, 1971, p. 212)
Early 1530s, elite Spanish university students at Bologna decide that all war is unchristian, even in self-defense, and start a protest movement. (61)
Spanish Council of the Indies sought advice in 1532-3 on Indian capacity; / Domingo de Betanzos, a Dominican long resident in America, calls them incapable in an influential letter that has not been found. (12-3) On his deathbed in 1549 he is pressured into signing a recantation. (30) Betanzos had held in 1545, as did conquistador and historian Gonzalo Fernández de Ovieda y Valdés (Ovieda) in 1535 (44-5), that Indians would soon disappear from the planet. (27)
Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, in his Relación of 1550 giving advice to his successor: “Some will tell Your Majesty that the Indians are simple and humble folk, without malice or evil; others will represent the contrary, that they are very rich and are vagabonds who do not want to cultivate the land. [GRAF] Do not believe either group, but treat the Indians like any other people and do not devise special rules and regulations for them.” (28)
King Charles V orders conquests to cease, 16 April 1550, while Las Casas and Sepúlveda debate just methods of conducting them. Sessions begin mid-August 1550 / and continue in April-May 1551. (67-8) The judges made no collective decision / and at least one had still not responded in writing in 1557. (113-4) [It's unclear when conquests resumed.]
Vicente Palatino de Curzola, a Dalmatian Dominican, 1559 treatise on just war against the Indians: “These Indians are drunken, lying, traitorous, enemies of all virtue and kindness, and they will never abandon these evils unless they are first punished and subjected by force and wars, and afterwards preached to.” (125)
Inquisition, begun in Spanish America in 1571, exempted Indians because of their “incapacity and lack of understanding concerning Christian doctrine.” (127)
But a basic law of 1573 replaced the old Requirement of 1513, incorporating much of Las Casas’s humanitarian arguments. / Conquest is now to be called “pacification” and enslavement is illegal. (120-1)
Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians (London: Hollis and Carter, 1959)
Scottish professor in Paris, John Major, first applied Aristotelian doctrine of natural slavery to American Indians in 1510. (14)
Outcome of 1550 Valladolid debate: same text as in All Mankind Is One. (87-8)