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NordicGame Conference Breaks Records
Zubi Khan
In Sweden, the 14th annual Nordic Game conference took place, with peers and colleagues from the region and all around the world celebrating the Nordics games industry, and in the commotion, the event broke some records.
The event which took place from May 17, 2017, to May 19, 2017 broke all previous records over the three days of the event, more than 2000 NG17 attendees got the chance to meet with their fellow peers, participate in talks by over 150 speakers, while sharing their knowledge, projects and just general passion for games.
Some of the highlights from the conference include events such as the "fireside chat" which featured Fumito Ueda, (Ico and The Last Guardian) and David Polfedt (The Division). As well as intensive tech sessions by INSIDE creators, with additional in-depth talks from Anita Sarkeesian (Feminist Frequency).
From a Nordic developer's standpoint, it was noted that NG17 confirmed and reassured yet again, that the video games industry is indeed expanding and is in high gear. The event itself was sold out, with attendees getting the opportunity to vote for their favourite new and upcoming games that were present during the event, with the winner being a title called "Morkredd" from Norwegian developer Hyper Games.
Prior to the evening Gala dinner, which served over 900 guests, Inside developer Playdead took the show by storm, winning in four categories. The last day of the event on May 19, 2017, featured the debut of an event known as "Discovery Day", co-created by the Copenhagen Game Collective, the segment spotlighted new talent, and or innovated game makers from the region as well as around the world.
Zubi likes videogames that visually impress him, useing it as inspiration for his illustrations. His favourites genres include horror, action RPG and pretty much anything from the East!
Star Wars Open World Game In Development With Ubisoft's Massive Entertainment
MORE FROM Zubi Khan
Call of the Sea (PC) Review
Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate Review
Ashens and the Polybius Heist (2020) Review

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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About Saving Innocence
CSEC Advocacy Course
Foster a Family
Protecting Human Worth
Alan Smyth
Show Bio
With over 25 years of nonprofit management and experience, Alan Smyth joins the team to cultivate strategic partnership on behalf of SAVING INNOCENCE reporting directly to CEO and Founder Kim Biddle. Most recently, he served for 14 years as the Regional Director for Young Life in the Greater Los Angeles Region and before that he was an Area Director for Young Life in San Francisco Bay for 11 years. During his tenure, Alan was responsible to fundraise for and oversee an overall annual operating budget of 4 million dollars as he led a charge to expand work into South LA. His responsibilities included recruiting, hiring, training & supervising staff as well as volunteers. Additionally, Alan executed hundreds fundraising events, strategic planning activities and developed marketing strategies that proved successful for Young Life in Los Angeles. Alan got his Bachelor of Communication Studies from San Jose State University.
*We are unable to share the names and biographies of our Director of Clinical Programs or our Crisis Case Managers to protect their identities.
Joshua Ungerecht (Chair)
CEO and Chief Investment Officer, JRW Research & Consulting, Inc.
Joshua Ungerecht is the CEO and Chief Investment Officer of JRW Investments and is a managing partner for Telos Capital, and ExchangeRight Real Estate. Mr. Ungerecht serves on the board for The Mentoring Alliance, a non-profit focused on partnering with communities to rescue at-risk youth and provide them with meals, educational support, counseling, life skills, and mentoring.
Tyler Krohn, MD, MBA
Vice President of Northern Market Operations, Children's Health
Dr. Krohn is the Vice President of Northern Market Operations at Children's Health, which is one of the nation's largest children's hospitals and the leading pediatric health system in North Texas. Previously a consultant at Bain & Company, Dr. Krohn began his career as a pediatrician and practiced medicine for nearly 10 years. He graduated magna cum laude from Vanderbilt University, received his medical doctorate from the University of Southern California, and graduated with honors from the Masters of Business Administration program at the University of Southern California.
Mike L. Boone
President & CEO, Boone Aerospace, Inc.
Mr. Boone started his commercial aircraft parts company in 1990, growing it into a multinational enterprise before selling it in 2009. Mr. Boone then started Boone Aerospace in 2014. For the past 17 years, Mr. Boone has served as a local board chair for Young Life.
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Partner & Chair, Brand Protection Group, Loeb & Loeb
Melanie Howard is a partner and chair of Loeb & Loeb, a brand protection group. Ms. Howard's practice focuses on data privacy and security and intellectual property issues within the context of both litigation and transactional matters. She represents clients from a variety of industries, including advertising, automotive, technology, entertainment, media and retail. Ms. Howard was an assistant professor at Pepperdine Law School for three years and directed both the Palmer Center for Entrepreneurship and the Nootbaar Institute on Law, Religion & Ethics, and was instrumental in obtaining endowments for both programs. Ms. Howard continues to enjoy adjunct teaching and guest lecturing.
Allison Burkett, MSW
Executive Director, Calvary Church of Pacific Palisades
Allison Burkett is the Executive Director of Calvary Church of Pacific Palisades, where she is primarily responsible for overseeing strategic planning and communications. She has been part of the Ministry Staff Team at Calvary since 2013, and prior to her current role she was the Director of Women's Ministries. Prior to that Ms. Burkett worked as a Behavior Specialist for The Help Group in Los Angeles and Cambridge Public Schools in Massachusetts. Ms. Burkett has a Master's Degree in Social Work from the University of Southern California and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Sociology from the University of Michigan. Ms. Burkett is also the proud mother of two sons and one daughter.
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The hushed talk of the mobile app world town is that in the time to come Native Apps – those made specifically for Android and iOS will face strong competition from the ones developed for both using a single codebase: Cross-Platform.
Drawn by the observation that cross-platform frameworks like React Native and those like Flutter, which are even more advanced, the mobility world is now soon going to enter an era where the voice questioning: Native vs Cross Platform will become even more prominent and loud.
And although sitting on today, there is no match for Native Android and iOS development and the benefits that it offers, there is one sidekick framework that is now emerging to give a completely next level fuel filled competition to the Native approach – Flutter.
The framework which was assumed to be Google's hobby which would soon be forgotten when received its first update Flutter 1.2 and Dart 2.2 changed the complete image.
The tool, in a matter of a few months, not just found a loyal user base in some of the most established names in the world – Alibaba, Tencent, etc. – but also launched a Hemmingway plan where no cross-platform framework had gone before – Web.
The whole industry, seeing the benefit of Flutter association is now warming up to the idea that the day of ultimate competition is near.
Now we are not saying that it would happen overnight, it would take time but the app industry is believed to be heading there.
See how the mobile app community – both on the side of developers and businesses are warming up to the idea of Flutter as the first choice of developing apps.
In fact, that is the reason why more and more developers are now heading out to try their hands at a wide range of tech stack and languages so that they remain in demand when the time of Native demise comes.
Now while React Native has already established itself as a framework that app developers who wish to continue in the development line should get their hands on, the famous tool is now seeing itself getting sidetracked by a whole new tool on the block – Flutter. And the list of advantages of Flutter mobile app development is also not left unknown.
Because we have already deep dived into the React Native vs. Flutter debate in much detail along with Flutter app development benefits over React Native app development, let us, for this article, focus on why it is time that Android and iOS developers shift their focus to Flutter app development and upping their skill in the domain.
What has kept iPhone app developers away from investing their time in cross-platform app development till now is the fact that the tools that allow them to develop two apps from a single code base deliver a quality that evidently shouts something is missing. This sense of incompleteness added to the fact that Swift is one of the best tools to work on has been the reason to keep them from looking into the direction of cross-platform.
But, ever since Flutter has entered the market, it has become almost impossible to find a difference between a Native app and one developed using Flutter framework. The smoothness, slickness, and mere nativeness that the framework comes with, makes Flutter for iOS developers an ideal choice.
Since it has already been established that Flutter has now made itself known in the mobility domain, the timing is apt to see a slight comparison between Flutter and Native iPhone app development to get an idea of which is better than what.
While Swift or Objective-C comes into use when developing Native iOS apps, Flutter makes use of Dart language. The IDEs also, like the languages, are different. While Native iPhone apps are developed using Xcode, Flutter uses Android Studio, IntelliJ Idea, or other text editors like Atom or Sublime Text.
Now what makes Swift built apps truly fast is the fact that all the components that go into it are developed natively. Flutter, on the other hand, uses a Dart framework without the need of bridging to communicate with native modules – meaning, Flutter for iOS developers already has everything which is required for native application development.
When iOS apps are developed natively, developers are made to rebuild the complete app or the third-party dependencies for seeing the changes in devices or the stimulator, every time they make a change in the application.
The answer to why use flutter for ios and android app development, on the other hand, lies in the fact that it gives a hot reload option where all the changes that are made appear on the simulator in real time.
The other productivity affecting feature that is present in Native iOS development is the dependency management program. The dependency management in case of Native development is dependent on several third-party tools such as Carthage or CocoaPods, which comes with a learning curve. Flutter app development benefits, in this case, can be seen in the fact that the framework makes use of its personal dependency management tool called Pub.
The dependency handling system is already built inside the Flutter apps, which makes it extremely easy to get new dependencies as and when needed.
The native framework which is used by Apple to create UI components is known as UIKit – the all-inclusive event-driven user interface that offers a wide range of gesture support. The framework comes with native support for document, animation, printing, and drawing.
The UI engine of Flutter, however, acts very differently. It runs on rendering engine and own framework. The engine which is basically a tree of stateful and stateless widgets holds true to its name and offers loads of widgets that are absolute pixel perfect.
The UIKit of Flutter is, in fact, the number one reason of why should Android and iOS app developers consider Flutter.
Apple offers a native testing framework known as XCTest for integration, performance, and the UI testing of the iOS apps – a framework that doesn't come free of issues.
The XCTest framework comes without a number of important elements like – grouping of test, data-driven testing, snapshots test, etc. But one of the biggest shortcomings of XCTest is mocking and stubbing, while the former asks for a lot of code, there is no native support for the latter.
Flutter offers a rock-solid test framework that allows the developers to write test at a functional, unit, and UI level. The framework even has detailed documentation with example codes, on the process that has to be followed to test apps at different levels. The Flutter integration tests which are similar as the Xcode UI tests are provided by a separate package – Flutter Driver.
Now that we have looked at all the different elements that make Flutter slightly – or in some cases massively – better than Native iOS and have in some ways given the reason of why should Android and iOS app developers consider Flutter it is time to switch the attention to the developers investing their time in the development of apps that go live on the Play Store.
While both Native Android app development frameworks and Flutter come from the same parent company – Google, the shift from Native Android to Flutter is as evident in the case of Android developers as it was for the iPhone mobile app developers.
Here are the pointers that we have to highlight in case of Flutter for Android developers and why Native Android developers should expand their skills and try their hands at the Flutter framework.
Gradle hands down is one of the most important tools in the whole Android app development process but let's face it – the build time are very large and are a huge hindrance in the fast development cycles.
For having a complete impact of Flutter on iOS and Android app development, it too requires Gradle build but not as many times as the Native Android. While a Flutter build also calls for a Gradle build at the beginning of the development the first time around, it does not require it again for a complete app restart.
While Android Studio has also lowered the Gradle build time to a good number, the load time that Flutter comes with, however, beats the Native load time to a huge extent.
Native Android comes with separate layout and Kotlin/Java files which make developers get references for the views and then change them in backend files.
Flutter, on the other side, requires a single language for designing, backend, while its reactive framework removes the need for references to the widgets – becoming the answer to why create apps with Flutter.
Java, even after the launch of Java 8 is leaving behind a trail of the scope of improvements. While Dart has strategically taken in the best of features of a number of different languages, without sliding the much-needed sense of Java familiarity – something that makes the whole development process almost effortless for the developers and profitable for the businesses who choose to invest in a Flutter app development company.
Flutter oversimplifies and optimizes animation patterns to be used in mobile apps. The mere fact that Flutter for Android developers allows loading of animation at a speed of 60FPS says it all.
Now that we have seen how Flutter has become a framework that solves the shortcomings that both Android and iOS developers face and why create apps with Flutter has become a question not being asked, it is time to see if the need to make this switch is urgent. And if the much sort about the cross-platform framework is even ready to replace the Native development processes on both sides.
Is Flutter Ready to be Used for Production?
2018 ended with Google making Flutter come out of the Beta stage and enter the market as Flutter 1.0 for the world of developers to work around and for a number of businesses to add in their app's tech stack with the promise of greater nativeness and higher performance – in the Flutter Live Event.
And just two months later, in February, the now loved cross-platform framework was strengthened with the launch of Flutter 1.2 and Dart 2.2.
The constant updates being made in the Flutter framework ever since it has been made live in December are enough to symbolize how serious Google is about the framework and what it wants the iOS and Android mobile app developers and businesses across sectors plan on achieving through its association.
While the functionalities set that Flutter app development for iOS and Android comes with and the constant endeavors from the Google team and growing Flutter community to make it issue free and scalability ready is enough to stir the grounds for the Native app developers, the switch time is not today. Probably not for another 2-3 years too.
The framework now being used by some of the top app building companies, even after being production ready is struggling with some prominent issues of it all, even after the Flutter developer community having done a brilliant job of eliminating 9000 issues to date. Issues that range from random disconnection of the debugger, crashing of the app with no obvious reasons.
So, sitting in March 2019, Flutter is ready to be used by mobile app developers in low complexity apps and prototyping, but to make the switch for a mid or high complexity app project might turn out to be stupidly risky. While this is from the business front or for the time when you are working on an app that would go live in the market, as Android and iOS developers, timing is apt for you to invest your time in learning Flutter and exploring the features it has to offer.
If not today, Flutter is only a few issues away from becoming the enterprises and startups' first choice. And the time is destined to arrive sooner than later, which makes it imperative for you to be prepared.
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'T20 nomad' Rilee Rossouw writes his name in lights at the BPL
10dMohammad Isam
Rilee Rossouw connects with his drive Raton Gomes
Mohammad IsamBangladesh correspondent, ESPNcricinfo
Rilee Rossouw was pottering around the Shere Bangla National Stadium when it happened.
"Tom Moody came up to me just after warm-up saying that I am playing. I was like, 'what about the big man?' He said no, we couldn't get his NOC," Rossouw tells ESPNcricinfo.
This happened exactly 12 months ago, and before Moody's message, Rossouw was quite sure that Chris Gayle, who had just arrived to strengthen an already impressive Rangpur Riders side, would take his place among the four overseas players. But Gayle couldn't get a clearance from Cricket West Indies.
"I think I made 83 against Dhaka in that game, and I never looked back." Rossouw says.
He made 558 runs last year, the most by a batsman in a single BPL season, at an average of 69.75 and a strike rate of exactly 150. And even though he's switched teams in 2019-20, his form has remained the same. Now part of Khulna Tigers, and getting ready to face Rajshahi Royals in the first qualifier, Rossouw has made 458 runs at an average of 50.88 and strike-rate of 148.47. He has become the ideal T20 batsman, scoring many runs and quickly.
"I think [Khulna] is one of the best teams in the tournament, but unfortunately the results lately haven't gone our way," Rossouw says. "We haven't played the perfect game yet, which is good for us. At the back end of the tournament, hopefully something can click. When we get good momentum, I don't think there's any team that can stop us."
Rossouw, who no longer plays international cricket, now spends most of his time in England as a Kolpak player and the rest of it hopping from one T20 league to another. "It is my job at the moment, to be a T20 nomad. To play cricket around the world."
And to make sure he is an attractive pick for subcontinent teams, Rossouw has been working on playing well on slow and low pitches. "We play half of our cricket on these type of wickets," he says. "I have been to India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka a lot of times. It becomes a second nature. Back home in South Africa, the coastal wickets are slow and low.
"You get to learn and play in these wickets on a daily basis, so one comes prepared. When you get a nice belter of a wicket, you make sure you cash in."
Considering his struggles from the 2017 BPL are a thing of the past, it seems Rossouw's work is paying off.
"You get a mental picture beforehand, about where you are traveling," he says. "What works in Bangladesh - probably don't want to come as much forward. In South Africa, you play off the back foot. It is different everywhere, but you get a pretty good idea about the conditions."
Rossouw says he has been a fan of the BPL since it offers something to every batsman. "We don't rate [tournaments]. Bangladesh has its own challenges. Wickets are sometimes slow and sometimes it turns a lot. It doesn't matter how good or bad as a player, if you can put it in the right spot at the right time, anything can happen.
"I think the BPL is a really good tournament. It is very professional in regards to the game schedules and how things are run."
Rossouw has also turned into a bit of a senior pro with Khulna. Rahmanullah Gurbaz, the rising Afghanistan wicketkeeper-batsman, recently said in an interview that he seeks Rossouw, among some of the other senior players, for advice.
"Couple of years ago, I was in their shoes. I wanted information and knowledge, luckily guys like AB de Villiers and Faf du Plessis helped me," Rossouw says. "I learned from them. In return I can share knowledge with some younger players.
"The time for learning is at practices or before the game. During a game, they are pretty switched on and know exactly what they want to do. It is fantastic to play with people from all over the world. You don't know what type of personality they are. The beauty of cricket is that it brings people from all around the world."
Following the BPL, Rossouw is also looking forward to the English summer where he hopes to give back a little more to Hampshire.
"Funnily enough, I have not yet played my best cricket in England. Sadly as well. I feel like Hampshire deserves a lot more from me. I did alright but according to my standards, it is not good enough.
"I have one more season with them. They backed me throughout the three years that I have been with them, so hopefully I can give something back in the coming T20 season."
Rossouw would like to leave a mark in Bangladesh too, and finishing as the top-scorer in two consecutive BPLs will certainly make him big in these parts. He has stiff competition - team-mate Mushfiqur Rahim is just nine runs behind - but as he found out in the last BPL, he has the ability to rise to bigger challenges.


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Tag: Vikings
December 7, 2022 The Rational Heathen Comments 0 Comment
Image by adriankirby from Pixabay
I thought I'd talk about Viking winter preparations and activities since we're in December. Preparing for winter isn't something we modern Heathens have to worry about much. I mean, maybe you get your car serviced or make sure that you've got snow tires on your car, but actual winter preparations isn't usually something most people in modern, developed countries really have to worry about.
I often ponder how our ancestors coped with their hard lives in the context of the seasons. While many of us are worried about preparing for back-to-school and the holidays, our Northern ancestors were engaged in surviving another winter with brutal cold and an unforgiving landscape. Little wonder that they turned to the gods to aid them when they could.
Viking Winter Preparations and Activities: Food for Thought
Image by Jalyn Bryce from Pixabay
So what were the Viking winter preparations and activities? Most of our ancestors were farmers until modern times. Farming, in most cases, was how people supported themselves, their families, and their communities. They might have been required to pay their lord a certain percentage of food they grew, but in many cases, what people grew was necessary for survival during the winter months.
Most of what people ate were foods that they grew, raised, gathered, or hunted. Sure you might trade with your fellow landowner for something they grew, or occasionally bought exotic foods or spices from traders, but for the most part, your food was what you could produce.
If you had need of work such as a blacksmith, you might employ one, have a slave who could do the work, or do it yourself. You might pay in barter, such as food or products the smith might need, or if you obtained silver from raiding or trade, you might use that as payment.
Winter Celebrations
No doubt winter was a time for celebrating, since the farm work was pretty much done, especially if the harvest was good. After slaughtering the animals you weren't going to keep through the winter, you had an abundance of meat, which meant preserving it or feasting on it.
Image by Siggy Nowak from Pixabay
I was listening to a podcast the other day where the expert pointed out that feasts in the Middle Ages were often used to show status. The lord would often have feasts to show off his wealth by offering foods that perhaps others didn't have. This gave them a higher status in the community, or more cred.
Using feasts to show off one's generousity and wealth makes sense. Cred, even back then, was vitally important in small communities. So, even our Viking ancestors probably showed off their wealth by providing feasts. What better time than after harvest and at solstice?
Winter Fun and Games
So, with all this time, what did our ancestors do? Sure, they hunted, tended to their animals and equipment, and preserved food, but they had free time. Much of it was spend playing games and doing outdoor activities.
tafl Games
Apparently, Northern peoples were gamers and played a lot of "tafl games" or table games. We know they played Hnefatafl, which died out when chess became popular. We only know the play rules because the Sami played a variation of it that is called Tablut. Tablut was still played in the 18th century and a clever botanist wrote down the rules during an expedition to Lapland.
There's a lengthy explanation why Hnefatafl is a reconstucted game, including poor translations of the botanist's writings and that's it's a variant and probably not the actual game.
Anyway, you can play it online, if you want to experience Hnefatafl. I've just downloaded an app to play, so feel free to search for it in the playstore. It's also available as boardgames, so check out the links below.
Kubb or Viking Chess
Kubb is an outside game that some people in Norway call "Viking Chess." It's played with wooden blocks. It's considered more of an summer game than one in the winter, and its dubious whether the Vikings actually played it, but what the Hel? You can have fun playing it anyway. The instructions for playing are in the link above. You can also get some nifty Kubb Games HERE.
Kubb took off in the 1990s, and from the resource mentioned above, there's no mention of it beyond a century ago. However, since our religion is largely a reconstruction with debatably accurate sources, adding Kubb to your family's and friends' game list isn't like Thor or Odin is going to smite you for introducing an anachronism. Besides the game sounds like something a bunch of drunk Vikings could have made up.
Viking Winter Preparations and Activities: Skiing, Snowshoeing, and Ice Skating
I suppose one can't talk about northern peoples without mentioning skiing, snowshoeing, and ice skating. Our Northern ancestors didn't invent any of those modes of transportation, but they sure did make them popular.
Snowshoes. Licensed through the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
Snowshoeing was invented at least 8000 years ago in central Asia, according to Snowshoe Magazine. The first snowshoe artifacts archaeologists have uncovered date to 4000 BCE, and archaeologists believe humans used them well before that. It's assumed that snowshoes existed before skis although there have been skis uncovered in Russia that date to 8000 BCE. Archaeologists hypothesize that people looked at the feet of animals who could walk on snow and mimicked their pads by creating a snowshoe that could spread their own weight over a wider surface area.
We know that the ancestors used snowshoes as their primary transportation when crossing the Bering Land Bridge to North America. How do we know this? Archaeologists have discovered that indigenous peoples still used snowshoes, but not skis. European ancestors tend to favor skis as they traveled west, which is why we see skiing as a popular sport originating in Europe.
Skis came about as people looked for faster ways to move over snow. According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, skis were invented at least 10,000 years ago. Apparently archaeologists found skis in Russia dating to 7500 to 8000 BCE. We know that there's a rock carving depicting skis and skiing in Norway that was carved 4000 BCE and pieces of skis from a Swedish bog date to around 3500 BCE.
As an aside, I expect the discrepancy in time between snowshoes and skis has to do with what is considered a ski and a snowshoe in the past. Skis often resembled snowshoes, and snowshoes might have resembled skis at one point, leaving it all to conjecture.
Although the Vikings didn't invent skiing, the Norse actually gave the name to skis. We got the words ski and skiing from skríða á skíðum—"to stride on skis." How awesome is that? Anyway, in 1274 the Norse had to outlaw hunting moose while the hunter was on skis because moose were in danger of becoming extinct. Wow. That's really bizarre. Who would've thought skis would be a huge advantage when it came to hunting moose?
Bone Ice Skates. Photo by Steven G. Johnson, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0.
Skate like a Viking! Seriously, our Norse ancestors strapped shin bones of deer or oxen to their feet to skate on the ice. They even used animal fat to make them slipperier. Some Norse used iron, but those who used bone skates tended to be faster. Probably had to do with the smoothness and the friction. Unlike skating blades people use nowadays, these were large, flat surfaces.
The Norse even held speed skating competitions where winners would receive prizes in the form of silver spoons, copper pots, swords, and young horses.
I think this blog post is long enough when it comes to Viking winter preparations and activities. Let me know what you think.
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What Autumn Meant to Our Ancestors
September 28, 2019 The Rational Heathen Comments 0 Comment
Now that Haustblot (or Harvest or Winter Finding) has come and gone, you're probably saying, "Okay, autumn is here, so what?" After all, with the exception of pumpkin spice-flavored everything or school starting, fall is pretty much a non-issue in our lives today. Sure, we see cooler weather and the leaves turn, but really, other than that, we really don't see anything particularly special about autumn.
And that's a shame. Why? Because autumn was an important part of our ancestors' lives, even if they considered it as part of summer or winter.
Why Autumn Was Important to Our Ancestors
First, our ancestors lived on an Earth with a warmer climate. (Yeah, I don't want to go into the climate change politics, so we're so not going there.) Earth was about 1 degrees Celsius warmer than it is today during the Medieval warming period. (That's about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit for us Americans.) The Medieval warming period happened between 900 to 1300 CE, which doesn't cover the time before that, but it was certainly warmer than when the Little Ice Age took hold. Before the Little Ice Age, our ancestors dealt with better conditions for farming, but it was often dicey. Bad harvests meant everyone would starve during the winter, including the animals. Good harvests meant that you had a fighting chance for seeing the next winter. Winter was still cold and difficult, so our ancestors used fall to prepare for the upcoming cold and dark months.
Storing for Winter
Harvest wasn't the only thing that happened in the fall. As the temperatures plummeted, people would slaughter and preserve most of their meat for the upcoming winter. Having storehouses where you kept your smoked and salted meats for winter naturally kept the meat cold. The fall temperatures often dipped below freezing, but on days when the temperatures were above freezing, the air still acted like a refrigerator. Smoking and salting were ways of stabilizing the meat so it didn't turn rancid during the occasional temperatures fluctuations. Hence, hunting for big game often happened in the fall and winter months. Unless you were planning on eating the whole critter in a few days, you really had no way to preserve the meat during the summer months, unless you were drying it. Hence eating small game and young animals were more fitting for the spring and summer months.
During this time, people were busy drying fruits and vegetables. Canning hadn't been invented until the Napoleonic Wars, so that didn't happen. People did store in what food they preserved for the upcoming winter months, presumably in precursors to root cellars. They ground grain into flour. It could be stored as flour or baked into bread, which usually stored okay, at least if it was too cold for mold to grow. Grain was also made into ale, which our Northern ancestors drank quite a bit. Milk was processed into cheese. Cheese stores better than milk, so they could have fresh dairy once the cows or goats stopped producing. Often, they slaughtered their milking cows to reduce the herd so they didn't have to feed so many animals. (The cow' heifer it calved the previous spring usually replaced the cow.)
What Northern Peoples Did in Autumn
Beyond hunting and foraging for food as well as harvesting and preserving food, the Northern peoples spent time enjoying themselves too. Those who lived in the Viking era enjoyed playing board games, drinking games, and other indoor games when the weather got too cold or in the evenings when they had a little time to relax. When they had free time outside and the weather wasn't too cold or snowy, they'd practice fighting and even hold mock battles to improve their skills. Some of these "games" ended up pretty bloody.
Our Northern ancestors were into telling stories and creating poetry during these times. The sagas and poetry we have show how our ancestors loved a good story.
When the ponds and lakes froze over, they'd strap bones or short pieces of metal to their feet and ice skate. Of course, there were contests to see how fast one could skate across the ice. Northern peoples often used skis or snowshoes to travel and get around. So our ancestors could still hunt and do other activities outdoors.
How You Can Enjoy the Autumn…Like a Viking!*
If you live in urban or suburban areas, chances are you don't have to prepare much for winter besides dusting off your fall wardrobe. The local coffee shop now has pumpkin-spiced lattes and Hel, even Siggi's Skyr Yogurt has Pumpkin & Spice skyr. (Now, isn't that oxymoronic?) But if you have a farmer's market near you or a particularly good sale at the local supermarket on fall produce, now is the time to stock up and make some jams, dry some foods, or stick some foods in the freezer. Get that honey and start your mead for Yule.
If you're a writer—or even if you're not—spend some time writing or making up stories that you can tell to entertain your family and friends. Hel, you might even have something that's worth putting online and sharing. You never know.
If you hunt, now is the time to prepare for hunting season. If your season is in full swing, it's time to get out there and get some food for the table. This year, pick up a book on how to butcher your deer, if you've never done it before. I like Making the Most of Your Deer. There are other books which work too. Butcher and wrap your deer. I guarantee there will be a lot less waste.
As the nights get longer, consider dusting off those board games or picking up some new ones, and having a gamer's Friday or Saturday night. Invite over your friends or play board games with your family. Have a one night of being unplugged and force them to have to deal with you. (Hide the weapons!)
My point is that autumn was an important time to our ancestors and by doing some simple things, you can be more of a Heathen and offer respect to our ancestors, even though in our modern society we don't necessarily have to do these things. By incorporating these little things in our lives, we can get in touch with what our ancestors did to survive.
*The game is to add "like a Viking" to the last thing you did.
Walking a Razor's Edge: Folkish Beliefs
September 28, 2018 The Rational Heathen Comments 2 comments
A fan of mine and supposedly long time reader took umbrage on my statements about folkish beliefs in Heathenry. Never mind that I've been stating what I have been stating as long as I've had this blog, which puts me in direct opposition of folkish beliefs. Why? Because scientifically, archaeologically, anthropologically, and historically, none of the folkish beliefs have any basis in fact. Unless you count the past 100 years as a reason to be folkish, i.e. Nazi beliefs, there is no record of exclusion from Heathenry.
Anyway, the fan deleted our conversation, left in a huff, and unliked my page (There! That showed me!), giving me plenty to think about why folkish beliefs are a bad idea. So, without further ado, let's get talking about what folkism is, why it's racist, and ultimately in league with white supremacists.
What Folkish Beliefs Are
Let's talk about the root of folkish beliefs. People who believe in folkish beliefs hold that Heathenry is only for those who are of Northern European descent. That our gods can only be worshiped by those whose ancestors lived in the Northern European lands. That our gods do not call to those who are not from those lands.
In other words, they do not believe in a multicultural religion. They believe that people should worship the gods of their ancestors, whichever those are.
Now, let's talk about the fallacy of their arguments.
First, Some Evolutionary Facts
Let's look at the human race, that is Homo sapiens. Our race came out of Africa at least 200,000 years ago, according to scientists, although latest findings suggest that our species came from there before that. I don't want to quibble over time frame. The point is that we all came from a small group of humans. Those who eventually made their way up north eventually became Norse.
It's not like humans beamed in there. It took a fair amount of time, walking, and generations of living in one place for a while before pushing on. We know that many of them were most likely black (even though there isn't a specific gene for being black) due to the genetic material that we have found. Our species is black in Africa to provide some protection against the sun's rays. As humans moved up north, our skin lightened to adjust to the lack of sunlight so that our bodies could make Vitamin D.
Genetics also shows that humans, as a species, nearly went extinct at least twice. We're inbred apes, pure and simple, because of bullshit patriarchy and polygamy as well as sticking with kindreds. Yeah, I get that kindreds were needed back then to survive, but our genetic diversity as a species is sorely lacking because of it.
Racism as We Know it Today Was Nonexistent
Racism–that is, judging people on their physical appearance and skin color–was virtually nonexistent in Viking and Early Medieval times . People were judged according to their belief system and their allegiances, not their skin color. We know this because Marco Polo seldom mentioned skin color unless it added something to the story. Race was considered as religion. You were considered a different "race" if you were Heathen, Jewish, Christian, or some other religion. That gave people the excuse for barbaric acts (like they seldom needed an excuse?).
Not All Vikings Were White
We know that there was at least one "black" Viking, and yes, there are people who have Mongolian genetics in Iceland from him. We know that our Viking ancestors explored, traded, raided, raped, and pillaged all the way south to Africa, east well into Asia, north to Greenland, and west to North America. They found wives and husbands among indigenous folk and settled in those lands.
Some of our northern ancestors added the gods and religions to our pagan practices. Some fully adopted the other religions. We have Viking hoards with Buddha statues and other religious objects.
Heathen Religion in the Grand Scheme of Things
Now, given the facts I've presented (and if you have the doubts as to the veracity of my statements, I back them up in the links provided above), Heathens were pretty willing to take in others who swore allegiance to their leaders and their gods. It made a kindred stronger.
Our northern ancestors practiced a religion that came from an offshoot of a Proto Indo-European religion. That evolved from a much earlier Nostratic pantheon. The further back we go, the fewer religions we have. The fact that there are so many similarities in the Indo-European religions suggests that the ideas and gods came from a central source going back tens of thousands of years.
So, Let's Talk Folkish
So, how does folkishness fit here? If you say it doesn't, you get a star. Our northern ancestors didn't differentiate where you came from. What they did care about was your religion and your loyalties. What was your kindred and whether you were a friend or foe. Given the overall dissemination of Nordic genes, we can assume that everyone had ancestors that lived in the overall Viking sphere of influence, including African tribes and Mongols. Even if this weren't so, if someone who joined up with the Vikings, raided with them, and worshiped their gods, you can bet they would've had status in a kindred.
Segregation or Apartheid, Anyone?
If you take a chapter from history, what the folkish people are doing is the "separate but equal" bullshit that we saw in the United States in the form of segregation. Or the South African Apartheid. They're saying, "Our religion is for white Europeans, but you have your own traditions. Go do those." They shut out people just because of the random chance that they were born with different colored skin.
You are on the Razor's Edge with this if You're Folkish
Folkish people, you may not be Nazis, but you are so on a razor's edge with this. What you are doing is racism, pure and simple. If a black person hears the call of Thor, shouldn't he or she be allowed to practice Heathenry? If the answer is "no, because of their ethnicity" then yes, I am calling you a bigot. Why can't a black person be a Heathen? Don't give me that's not their religion — they should stick to African religions. That is complete and utter bullshit. Separate is NOT equal. We know this from history. People fought hard to end segregation, and you're dragging Heathenry down with your bigoted beliefs.
Furthermore, separate but equal is bullshit because we're all the same race. We're the same people with minor genetic variations. We are Homo sapiens, people. Most of us have a small amount of Neanderthal and Denisovian genes in our DNA, making us not even pure Homo sapiens but a mutt of different races. Hel, that makes Neanderthals more enlightened than you.
Okay, I've railed enough on this. If you're folkish, I hope I've enlightened you why you're racist even if you think you're not. If you are looking at anyone's ethnicity and determining whether someone can do something based on it or not, you are a fucking racist. Period.
Pop Culture Heathens
Quick, without Googling, name five Heathen gods or goddesses other than Odin, Thor, Freyja, Loki, or Hel. Now, assuming you didn't cheat, can you tell me whether they're Aesir, Vanir, Alfar, or Jotunn? (Again without Googling.)
If the names came easily to you, chances are you've been in Heathenry awhile. If you've equivocated on some of the races of the gods, chances are you've been in Heathenry for years.
However, if you really can't name five, let alone understand why anyone would equivocate on what race some of the gods were, then you're probably new at this. You may have come to Heathenry through pop culture, either from watching one of the Thor movies or watching Vikings. And that's okay.
Neophyte Heathens and Asa-popes
The other day, I was talking to an agnostic on Facebook (yeah, you know who you are) who quizzed me about being a real Heathen. I wasn't really bothered by it, but it got me to thinking about the Neo-Heathens who have joined Heathenry from watching pop culture movies and TV shows about Vikings and the gods. (Marvel springs to mind.) I also started thinking about the tendency for certain people in our religion to declare themselves gatekeepers or Asa-popes. Inevitably, there's a clash between the Asa-popes and the neo-Heathens, because the Asa-popes and Gatekeepers are annoyed with the neophytes. They are annoyed that someone would show interest in our religion because of some pop culture reference.
Loki wives. Not historical. Neo-pagans. Neo-Heathens. None of this is particularly new. So, the Asa-popes discourage the newbies, and the newbies think all Heathens are asshats.
That's Fine, Except…
That would all be well and good, except Heathens are pretty much a drop in the overall pagan pool. We don't have the numbers to turn anyone legitimately seeking knowledge away. (Except the neo Nazis, whom we really don't want.) Heathenry and all its forms (with the exception of the white supremacists) might equal 250,000 in the world. If that.
The Good Old Days of Heathenry
Back in the good old days when Heathenry flourished and people were lucky to live to 50 years old, there weren't any Asa-popes telling people what to believe. Sure, there were gythias and gothis, but they weren't connected by some universal Church. Some gods and goddesses were worshiped over others; some stories were told in some parts that weren't told in others. When the Vikings went to new lands, they'd add gods and goddesses from those pantheons. Or maybe they figured that the names of those gods matched the Heathen gods. We have some artifacts that show the Christian god being worshiped alongside Thor for a time.
My point is that people back then didn't have a single view of the gods. Like now, they chose their own traditions and their own gods to believe in. The concept of organized religion occurred with the growth of cities and with priesthoods looking to grab power and keep themselves within the power structure. Sure, you had shamans and whatnot doing the power thing if you were in a tribe, but I suspect most Heathens revered ancestors and tutelary spirits, with an occasional major god or goddess thrown in for good measure.
So, How Does This Work for Today?
Heathens weren't a particular picky bunch when it came to revering gods and goddesses. How you came to what kind of gods you worshiped was probably your own business and really not worried about, as long as you weren't a dickhead about it. You were pretty much considered a Heathen if you believed in the Heathen gods–as far as we know, you didn't get singled out because you believed that Thor was better than Odin, or you worshiped Perun or Frau Holle. Hel, our ancestors probably gave you a pass if you revered Loki as long as you were part of the kindred. When you started identifying with Christian ideals that were aimed at destroying Heathenism, that's when they got a bit tetchy about it.
So, when I look at where new Heathens are coming from, I shrug and think that they have to come from somewhere. If not from pop culture, then where? See, I think a lot of Heathens, especially recons, don't give our gods enough credit. Who is to say that Bragi didn't inspire the original writers at Marvel to dip into Nordic mythology and bring Thor to life on comic book pages? Who says that Odin couldn't have given the mead of poetry to the writer of Vikings? And who can say that the interest in our gods in pop culture isn't fueled by the gods, themselves?
But It's Not Right!
At this point, I can hear the recons screaming: It's NOT right! The stories are screwed up! You know, you're right. The stories aren't the legend and myths, and they don't portray the gods exactly according to our beliefs. Doesn't matter. They have piqued an interest in our gods and the Heathen ways that cannot be denied. Sure, some will become interested in the context of the movies, the shows, or the graphic novels and that's all. Some may blend the pop culture and the legends together. But some will dig deeper and explore what it is like to be Heathen. Those are the ones we need to foster.
What About Pop Culture Heathens?
So, what should we do about pop culture Heathens? Nothing. Let them have their fun. Do you actually think that all Heathens were serious followers of our gods? If they were, then why was it so damn easy for Christianity to take hold? Christianity took hold because the powers that be declared it their religion. The masses joined up because that's what kept them in good graces.
So, that's my take on the neo-Heathens from pop culture. As usual, your mileage may vary.
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Medieval People Were Prejudiced (Just Not the Way You Think)
Our medieval and Viking ancestors were a prejudiced lot. They routinely attacked, enslaved, and killed people who weren't like them. Furthermore, there was a lot of fear associated with those who were not like them. Does this sound familiar?
If you haven't read my posts, you're probably thinking that I'm talking about their prejudice and how it had to do with race. (Never mind that race is a construct.) But, you'd be wrong. I'm talking about their prejudices when it came to beliefs. Particularly, religious beliefs.
What's a Color?
People in Medieval times didn't think much in terms of skin color. Those who traveled through lands where the Mongols, Indians, and other peoples lived didn't bother describing the color of the skin or the superficial characteristics that people nowadays seem to pay attention to. In fact, it was common for people to believe that the skin color was changeable and had to do with where you lived rather than what "race" you were from. It was genuinely thought that if you lived in the area long enough, you too would have the same types of features and skin pigments. Maybe it had to do with your skin tanning if you were out in the sun?
Those who traveled abroad and kept journals seldom, if ever, mentioned the color of the skin, unless it was pertinent to the story at hand, such as using something such as white markings on the skin to mark where the opponent was going to cut. Marco Polo mentioned skin color or other defining features only 10 times in his writings, and all had to do not with the color, but with defining a particular action or to clarify why something was done (like the white markings on dark skin) so it made sense to the reader.
Race was an Odd Concept Back Then
Race actually encompassed not color, but religion and even the station in one's life. For example, nobles were considered another race entirely from serfs and even freemen, Christians were considered a different race from Pagans, and clans were considered different races from each other. In one of my posts, I talk about the "differences" between the Aesir, Vanir, and Jotunn. In our modern way of thinking, they come from the same "race" or same stock — the Jotunn actually intermarry with the gods and beget other gods. What makes the Aesir and Jotunn different races is their clans, kindreds, and beliefs.
In the Rígsþula, a story where Heimdall sleeps with three women from three different houses and begets Þræll, Karl, and Jarl, we see that even though these are all children of Heimdall, they are considered very distinct and different. They aren't just separate classes, but actual separate "races" that should never mingle, even though technically they could have children, should they do.
People Traveled (Surprise!)
People had feet (now, there's a surprise) and they actually journeyed to other lands, even in the Viking Age. Sure, there were people who stayed stuck at home, (serfs and slaves, for example), but the Middle Ages was a happening time. People went on pilgrimages. Traders who sought a livelihood by bringing goods from the East certainly traveled. Many spices people used didn't grow where they lived — someone had to travel to get the goods and bring them back. (As an aside, did you know spices were considered so valuable that people locked them up?)
We know that people from Africa, both Christian and Muslim, traveled in Europe. Coins from Africa turned up in Europe and yes, even England. I've seen a Viking cache with a Buddha statue in it. People encountered other races all the time. If you've read the tragedy of Othello, you know that he is a "Moor," that is, black. You don't get racial overtones from that play and even though Shakespeare lived in the 16th century, which was more the Renaissance than the Middle Ages, you can already see that having a black person as a tragic hero wasn't a far stretch for people.
You're Not of the Body!
People didn't really care about color. Instead, they cared about who you were allied with and what your religion was. Consider the Crusades. It wasn't against people of Arabic descent. It was against the Muslims taking Jerusalem. Now, granted when Crusaders went on the Crusade, they would consider sacking just about any city that looked different, but that is more unfamiliarity and the desire to earn wealth. (Many Crusaders were willing to overlook the moral implications of sacking another Christian city, if it meant gold.)
We know that slave trade existed, but Christians generally didn't own Christians; they owned Pagans, Jews, and Muslims. Muslims generally didn't own Muslims; they owned Christians, Jews, or people of other beliefs. The Vikings had a huge slavery economy (because someone had to tend the farms while they were off raiding) and the slaves were (surprise!) Christian and Muslim. I won't say that there weren't exceptions (there were), but those were the rules (more like guidelines, actually) and if you were of a particular belief, you generally didn't own someone of that same belief.
People also cared about where you came from and who you were allied with. As countries started to solidify, you had people being more nationalistic, like the English considering themselves one country. There were still "others" in the country: Pagans, Jews, Muslims, heretics, and other beliefs. Those were different and were considered "less than" those who were Christian. (Note: it was not race, but religion that separated them. You could easily move from those "others" to Christian if you swore by the beliefs and weren't labeled a heretic.)
Vikings made this concept very clear when it came to raiding. Other people hated them not because they were blond and fair-skinned (and not all were), but because they were pagan, raided the heck out of them, and held different allegiances. What ended the Viking era was that they found lands and became assimilated into the cultures they conquered.
What's the Point?
The point is that yes, our ancestors were prejudiced, but they divided the world into those who held their beliefs and those who didn't, those who were in their class and those who weren't, and those who were in a particular kindred, clan, or followed a certain leader, and those who didn't. Note that there really wasn't a distinction when it came to color or "race." Race to them was something that distinguished them from the "other." But the "other" had to do with beliefs and not physical characteristics.


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Living News
Davesh Soneji on Indian classical dance, working with hereditary artists: 'We need a new, radical epistemology and political grammar'
Withstanding the test of time, Davesh Soneji's book Unfinished Gestures has emerged as a potential litmus test, for academicians and classical dancers alike, to reflect on their response, towards the hereditary community of artists.
Sammitha Sreevathsa February 09, 2020 09:57:53 IST
With an interest in generating accessible writings that makes the connection between the larger social and political landscape of the country and its performing arts more evident, this monthly column is an attempt to un-bracket the dance discourse from its contained category of "Arts for Art's sake". Read more from the series here.
Unlike many romantic historians of classical dance, Davesh Soneji has his finger on the political pulse of the classical field and in the following interview, he holds a critical mirror at it. Withstanding the test of time, his book Unfinished Gestures has emerged as a potential litmus test, for academicians and classical dancers alike, to reflect on their response, towards the hereditary community of artists.
"We need a new, radical epistemology for Indian dance and a new political grammar", he says. Soneji on his work with the hereditary artists, his observations and experiences in the field of classical dance.
Davesh Soneji
Can you share how you became so invested and interested in the history of hereditary artists of South India?
My interest in this history began as a student of Karnatak music in my teens. In my late teens, I met Prof Hari Krishnan (of Wesleyan University), who utterly transformed my perspectives on music and kindled an interest in the relationship between music and dance, and this resulted in a life-long friendship and intellectual camaraderie. We have attempted to re-narrativise this history together with other scholars and artists from devadasi communities in South India over the span of more than two and a half decades, and I owe much of what appears in my work to Hari's deeply sensitive historical and aesthetic understandings. Moreover, my own life-long interlocutors, teachers, and friends in the community – individuals like Kotipalli Hymavathi, for instance – have taught me about the complexities of issues related to the lives of hereditary women artists. These issues are flattened in mainstream discourse about "dance history" that paints women from devadasi communities either as pious goddesses or as victims, as archaic signs of the past, or "unmanageable" annoyances in the present. None of these views enable an understanding of women's realities in these communities, and all of them present untenable visions of what it means to bear the burden of this kind of heredity in today's world.
I would also say, rather unabashedly, that my "investment" in the subject results from sustained social and political clashes with the arts mainstream in India. About twenty years ago, we were heckled off of Madras' stages, and even had things thrown at us for talking about the occluded social histories of performance; that wouldn't happen today I suppose, since the idea of "the devadasi" is trending in new and perhaps even more dangerous ways. My encounters with women from this community have forced me to consider dimensions of women's reality that remain "out of view" for most middle-class urban folks who tend to control the discursive representation of devadasi pasts today. Extreme forms of stigma and suspicion, for example, or the looming threats of sex-work, abusive caste-endogamous marriages, these are things that dancers sitting in Chennai's sabhas, for example, will refuse to talk about, unless of course, it has to do with a misguided and stilted first-wave feminist notion of why "devadasi reform" was necessary. It was this constant refusal in the early 1990s by non-devadasi performers to understand the fundamental failures of "reform" and the constant and malicious harassment of hereditary performers that led me to write about what I think is important in all of this, namely the ethics and humanity of artistic practice in postcolonial South India.
You stand apart as a scholar, not just for your body of work but also for your investment in shifting the public perception of dance history. What kind of public interventions do you think are necessary today in classical dance?
I think that first we must come to terms with the fact that truly critical deliberations on culture in India – ones that deploy deeply intersectional social and aesthetic critique – are virtually non-existent. If there is a gender-based critique, the author will fail to address caste. If caste is addressed, the author will fail to think critically about Orientalism and the category of religion. If nationalism is addressed, the author will fail to address class. What is even worse is that in nearly all of these situations, every critique will fall to the wayside when one sees a "beautiful Bharatanatyam performance" or hears "a beautiful rendition of a raga." Even those academics who produce critiques of caste and class in other contexts love consuming these modern forms "for their beauty." Such is the cultural nostalgia of the intellectual class in India and the Indian diaspora; it cannot read the political into the aesthetic, especially when it comes to the so-called "classical" arts. We therefore need a new pedagogy for Indian dance that is not articulated and voiced by the Bengali bhadralok or by South Indian Brahmin "intellectual elites," or by Hindus alone. The discourse on "culture" in India cannot seem to free itself from the tropes, signposts, and biases of twentieth-century Indian cultural nationalism; it rarely speaks beyond this inherited framework. My research has attempted to show that critical readings of history can move us in this direction, and hopefully shift the public discourse on the arts in India. But the really key issue is that we need not only a shift in understandings of the past, but a repopulation of the arts by those who continue to remain on its fringes. Put more concretely in terms of the practice of dance, we don't need any more Brahmin women dressing up as devadasis and performing "devadasi dance" or "sadir," we need the world of Bharatanatyam to be repopulated at its core by non-Brahmin women and individuals from devadasi families: we need it to become a space of social equity. This is a responsibility that quite frankly no one from the outside has cared to take up. But this alone, in my view, can change the scene when it comes to representing Bharatanatyam and its politically suspect modern history; everything else rests upon histories and practices of appropriation and mimesis.
A lot of people know of your work today. Personally, I feel your book Unfinished Gestures has made its way into the world of classical dancers unlike a lot of other scholarship that came before yours. Do you think there is a shift in the way dancers respond to scholarship?
I'm not sure about the impact of Unfinished Gestures among dancers, to be honest. I know of dancers who have used my book as a roadmap to "track down" persons they insist on calling "the last devadasis" or mining it for "lost compositions." As I've mentioned already, "item hungry" dancers are good at this kind of pillaging. But I'm at a loss to see how many performers actually understand the politics of this project. The book is a call to action; it's very core is about connecting the past with the present. It is about thinking through social inequity, stigma, and the burdens of history. How can a person claim, for example, to appreciate my book, and not support the work of individuals like Nrithya Pillai or Yashoda Thakore? This seems wholly illogical to me. The arguments I make about the "unfinished" nature of women's lives in the community and the problematics of representation are changing before our very eyes today through the efforts for these young women artists. How can we not support them? I certainly hope that more dancers will read the book carefully for its politics – for what it is actually saying – and not simply as a treasure-trove of "data" about "the last devadasis" that they can deploy in their own dance performances or research. As for dancers' responses to scholarship, I can only hope that dancers will finally read about things outside the field of dance itself, and try to connect with theories of the state, caste, gender, race, Orientalism, religious majoritarianism and the politics of Hindu nationalism. When your dance teacher tells you to read the Natyashastra, read Ambedkar, Periyar, Marx, or Edward Said instead – this is what will change the stagnated and socially sullied world of the arts, and move us forward.
When the privilege of caste or appropriation in classical dance is called out, many dancers seem to mistake it as a forceful way of telling them to stop dancing. What do you think should be the response of a classical dancer towards the hereditary past as well as the hereditary present?
I think this is a reaction that is to be expected from upper-caste individuals, as anyone involved in anti-caste work in India can tell you. Indeed, such knee-jerk reactions are themselves symptomatic of the problem: fundamentally, dancers who think that the end-goal of critical thinking is telling them they shouldn't dance are also the people who actually believe that artmaking is hermetically sealed off from the social world and the political world! I suppose one cannot change their rather infantile beliefs, so I think perhaps it's better if we focus on helping a younger generation of performers understand why critical thinking, political conviction, and social awareness are key to artmaking the modern world. I think dancers who share these ethical sensibilities should listen to what hereditary performers and their histories actually say. They should pause when they tie bells on their feet, wear the thalai-saman, put on that redesigned Bharatanatyam costume, and ask themselves: "What am I doing here, what am I representing when I do this, and why?" I'm always curious to ask young dancers questions like "What propels you to do this? What is in this for you? Whose "heritage" are you representing and why? What is the purpose of staging religion in this public and spectacular way in a secular democracy, and what does that mean to you as an individual?" Think about the larger questions and their implications first, and then dance. But when (and if) you dance, make it known that you have thought through these issues in your dancing. Produce new ways of coming to terms with this problematic past ethically, without rehearsing the tired tropes of a nationalist idea of heritage.
The "Devadasi" continues to exist in a mythic realm of imagination among the classical dancers, or are relegated to the past. What are some of the misconceptions about the hereditary artists which are just false?
There are so many misconceptions – circulated both through academic and pseudo-academic writing as well as channels of local gossip – one could easily fill a book with these! From the very idea that "devadasi" is a stable historical and social category, to the supposed "name change" from "Sadir" to "Bharatanatyam" by the so-called "revivalists," to the idea that pottukkattuthal is a "marriage to the deity," to the idea that "the British" enacted laws against devadasis – the list of "fake news" about this community can go on and on. I've spent much of my life unpacking these misconceptions and trying to provide alternatives that can stand up to critical historical scrutiny.
But crucially, I think, the most politically efficacious misconception is that the story of this community has ended with the "passing of the Act" in the middle of the twentieth century.
Today, Indian upper-caste, middle-class artists encounter women from devadasi communities largely as historical ghosts or traces of a phantasmatic civilisational past. Thus, we either see old colonial photographs of nameless "dancing girls" or "nautch women" which are as much objects of curiosity for today's Indian middle-class as they were for Europeans in the colonial period, or twentieth-century photos and archival video footage compiled by agencies like the state-run Sangeet Natak Akademi, in which older, frail, sometimes hunched over women perform abhinaya that evokes a superficial and performative pathos, nostalgia, and judgement from the middle-class, even as they hungrily devour these women's repertoire and technique through acts of mimetic appropriation. These are frozen, stilted representations that make us believe that "this is a reality of the past." Indeed, the opposite is true: women from devadasi communities are vital and resilient, they are all around us, in all walks of civic life, and even in the Indian diaspora. I am therefore fundamentally not interested in historical representations unless they can be activated and mobilised by women from these communities in the present.
Soneji's book Unfinished Gestures
This perpetuates a myth of invisibility that intentionally does not leave space open for young women from the community to participate in mainstream deliberations about their own identities, let alone their hereditary artistic practices. Combatting this "myth of invisibility" today is challenging task; it's one of the reasons why, once a year, Yashoda Thakore and I stage a public event in Hyderabad in which women from an older generation within the kalavantula community are invited from rural coastal Andhra to present their abhinaya traditions, and more importantly, to talk to the public about their experiences. This is a mode of bringing women's articulatory practices front-and-centre. It is not about swallowing up the "rare pieces" they dance, nor is it about pitying them and creating a shallow neoliberal empathy that will only last for a fleeting hour or two. It is about understanding the deep and visceral effects of "reform" discourse and the politics of the "reinvention" on the present lives and potential futures of hereditary women performers. We need to listen carefully, patiently, and critically, to what is being said by hereditary performer. We also can't just turn around and dance Kalakshetra Bharatanatyam the next day, as if we were deaf to what we have just heard, because the "beauty of this art" supposedly trumps everything else. We need to understand that our taste habits – what we consider "beautiful" and why – this is the space where casteism lives. Understanding this fundamental truth, to me, is what it means to take the practice of artmaking seriously.
We're witnessing an extraordinary time in terms of our national political scene. What are some ways in which you think a classical dancer is implicated in this politics?
The central crisis, I think, has always been the ways in which the politics of the reinvention of dance in the 1930s continue to bear upon contemporary practitioners. In other words, these artforms were at their very core constructed for and through the project of Indian nationalism in the 1930s, and this is the problematic legacy that is enacted and revivified every single time a performer ties bells on her feet and performs on stage. When Bharatanatyam, for example, was recast under Theosophical patronage, it was already brought into the fold of both radical Orientalism and Hindu reform (remember that "Theosophical" ideas were conditioned by Blavatsky's interface with neo-Hindu reformers such as Dayananda Sarasvati, founder of the Arya Samaj, and its Protestant-Textualist foregrounding of Sanskrit shastra as "knowledge for the modern world"). These ideas cannot be separated from the very formation of the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh], the Hindu Right's perception of what they call "Hinduism," and certainly the performative politics of today's Hindutva. Bharatanatyam's constant and unrelenting enactment of Hindu gods and goddesses, epic narratives, Brahminic rituals, and Sanskrit stotras thrives at the very heart of a distinctly public staging of Hinduism for the masses. In my view, these are narrative and political strategies that, since the 1930s, have worked to distance dance from its actual social history. A textualised, shastric, hyper-intellectualised historiography has been grafted over a distinctly vernacular practice that was the near-exclusive purview of non-Brahmin women (and sometimes their non-Brahmin male dance-masters). Dance practitioners and academics simply cannot seem to detach themselves from this nationalist mode of scripting dance history that began in the late 1920s.
So the question "how is a classical dancer implicated in nationalist politics?" is thus an existential one: the performance of what we call "Indian classical dance" is itself, by virtue of its very existence, an enactment of somatic nationalism. The question should be, how can we reject these seemingly "foundational" aspects of Indian dance? Few dancers, in my mind, such as Prof Hari Krishnan, who has been doing this for decades at great personal odds, Srividya Natarajan, Yashoda Thakore, and Nrithya Pillai, who has recently fought for a public voice in this regard, have been able to articulate "a way out." Their refusal to perform Bharatanatyam's history in a nationalist mode, their critiques of its links to neo-Vedantic Hinduism and neoliberal Brahminism, and their fundamental foregrounding of its social history stand out in sharp distinction to nearly everything else I see in the world of Indian dance. Moreover, they talk about the heavily mediated nature of what we have received as today's "Bharatanatyam;" they do not want to go back to reconstruct some glorious "golden age" for devadasi dance that never existed. They speak about the layers upon layers of history and mediation we embody when we perform this dance today. Following their lead, we need to let go of the inherited nostalgia for the so-called "reformers" and "saviours" of these forms who were valorised by the nation-state's project of cultural engineering, as well as the aesthetic and pseudo-historical canons they established for understanding the arts. This also means letting go of twentieth-century neo-Orientalist and fundamentalist notions that stone dance sculptures on temples or Sanskrit texts from the medieval period "work truths" in modern India, or ideas that forms like yoga, Kalarippayattu, and Bharatanatyam somehow inhabit "shared somatic worlds." This is the slippery slope of claims to aesthetic universalism that ultimately glosses over the idea of difference and renders social hierarchies in art invisible. Such ideas can never lead to equity precisely because they are still rooted in the telos of art as "civilisational heritage." We need a new, radical epistemology for Indian dance and a new political grammar, one that rises beyond the messy residue of twentieth-century cultural nationalism.
Can you tell us about your current book project on music? How do you see this as an intervention in the ways we think about Karnatak music's history and historiography?
My forthcoming book actually intentionally stays away from the use of the term "Karnatak music." It attempts to foreground aspects of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century history of South Indian raga-based music that did not become part of "canonical Karnatak music" as it was conceived and mobilised in first three decades of the twentieth-century in Madras. Drawing on a range of textual and material histories, the book demonstrates how the music of the modern Tamil theatre (known today as isai nadagam), Islamic, Catholic, and even Jain music in raga, courtesan music, and the music of the wider para-Tamil Indian Ocean world all constituted the soundscape of what I call "popular raga-based music." Each chapter focuses on one of these occluded histories, to shift readers away from the idea that monolithic music moved unidirectionally "from Tanjore to Madras" in order to be reinvented by the city's elites at the turn of the century. It maps the complex social and sonic terrain in South India in the decades immediately before the consolidation and institutionalisation of the idea "the classical" through elitist institutions in Madras. It also complicates the well-established narrative of the musical reinvention by forcing us to confront the fundamentally intermedial histories that lie at the core of raga-based music before it became confined to the dry and insular category of "the classical" by the state and the new self-proclaimed stewards of "tradition."
Updated Date: February 12, 2020 12:45:39 IST
Dancedialogue
Devadasis
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The Enlightenment worked, says Steven Pinker, by promoting reason, science, humanism, progress, and peace. The programs set in motion by the 18th-Century intellectual movement became so successful we've lost track of what that success came from. Some even discount the success itself, preferring to ignore or deny how much better off humanity keeps becoming, decade after decade, in terms of health, food, money, safety, education, justice, and opportunity.
Posted on October 20, 2018 by thepodcastbrowser in Society, Thought and tagged Long Now, Progress, Steven Pinker, The Enlightenment.
Long Now presentation by Julia Galef setting out why our minds weren't built for truth and how we can change that. Our capacity for reason evolved to serve two very different purposes that are often at odds with each other. Reason helps us figure out what's true; but it also helps us defend ideas that are false-but-strategically-useful. Explores these two different modes of thought and what determines which mode we default to.
Posted on October 1, 2018 by thepodcastbrowser in Thought and tagged Julia Galef, Long Now, Rational thinking.


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Sunday 18th: Began with Sunday school; Kathleen's back and brought me letters from Bea, Froy, and Yeh. Will need a translator because there's a lot of text. Made pork chop and slaw dinner which was good, despite chops being in freezer for 18 months. Good news: old frozen chops won't make one sick (but they weren't as moist as they could have been.) Told the folks Tom and Diane plan to drive down after Thanksgiving.
Monday 19th: Class this morning; feeling frustrated about Kim - homeless, clueless, disorganized...visited Kathleen to get letter translated; nice catch-up chat about Cuban friends and so many prayer needs there and at home. Back to yoga tonight; have a feeling I'm going to be feeling some of the moves tomorrow.
Tuesday has already faded in my memory, probably because the time between classes was devoted to UCF interns. Did catch up with DWTS, though. And some vino.
Wednesday 21st: Went to El Leoncito's with yoga group. Truly enjoyed chatting with everyone and getting to know them a little better. Celebrating the October birthdays, and the card they gave me was perfect.
Thursday 22nd: Got to see Ariel! Unexpected surprise, because I knew he'd only be at Kathleen's for a couple days, but he FB messaged me and I zipped right over. Forgot to take picture -- duh. Hopefully I'll see him next month when he returns.
Friday 23rd: Willie began puking and liquid poo-ing. Ugh. Really happy to see Friday come around though; having split schedule obligations Mon-Fri is really tiring me out. Have gotten in a bit more exercise this week, though, and G and I did 2.5 mile walk tonight.
Saturday 24th: Mark Higginson's memorial service; it was lovely. Jim Gavatos was there, along with other faces I remembered from my earlier days at IRCUMC. Doug came down for church, which was nice. Hung out with G in the evening. Willie still has runs, but is eating and active.
For no good reason, I felt a bit blue this week. Lots of nice things happened, and I am richly blessed, so there's no good reason for the feelings, but there they are.
Sunday 11th: no church or Sunday school today; had creme brulee French toast with the folks before driving Josh and Krystal to the airport. G left to spend a couple days in Tampa with pal Parker. I had lovely dinner with Rebecca and Sherry at El Leoncita, which turned out to be surprise for my birthday. Good chat, good food, nice gifts to bring home. Loved it.
Wednesday 14th: Morning class - student numbers haven't settled yet; skipped line dance and yoga (still have blues); spent afternoon with UCF interns on Skype; Joyce Randall came by for visit in the evening. When she left, G and I began catching up on recorded shows. Brightest spot: saw that Mocha-Chino is being adopted! Tears of joy about that; feel like God is reminding me He is still in control and working for the greater good.
Thursday 15th: Relieved it's last day of classes and my calendar is open this weekend. Janice called in sick, so I subbed for her class, which shortened my planning time. Finished up organizing all the papers and materials for the EFSC classes, which I had been avoiding. That felt good.
Friday 16th: FREEDOM! Got on scale and (no surprise) weight is creeping back on. To be expected after weeks of ice cream and packaged food and insane quantities of wine. So, began with 25 minute walk and warm lemon water. Vowed (again!) to lay off wine and get back into healthy eating patterns. Laundry; catching up on some FB - okay, lots of FB - and some prayer time. Got some miscellaneous tasks done, including registering for Corgi picnic, but didn't make as much use of the day as I could have. Did fix reasonably healthy dinner and took another walk afterwards.
Saturday 17th: Began day with lemon water and walk; good start! G and I went to flea market in Melbourne, where I bought a keyboard! What?? Really?? Yes, my new 60th year ambition is to be able to play this instrument. Went to church this evening and asked Sharrett to give me lessons. Wonder if that will actually work...got home and my Vanessa Keys Corgioke print has arrived! Now I have both my Corgi indulgence purchases -- the Corgi nubbins arrived last week.
Anne Lamott's comment sums up this week for me. I'm ready to work again.
Lunch at Crackerjack's with Mom and Dad on Friday. Nice view, good food, happy way to begin my birthday weekend. The evening line dance party was a disappointment: 1 good hour of mostly dancing followed by 45+ minutes of watching advanced dancers dance. Left early feeling disgruntled again. Concluded I'm at an awkward point in the dancing; I'm not a beginner and can't invest enough time to be advanced.
Saturday G and I took the furkids and Subway take-out to SandPoint Park where we walked around and picnic-lunched. Really a perfect way to end the year.
Worship and Sunday school (The Truth Project) is the perfect way to begin my 59th birthday. I left flowers at Mom's on the way home (gift for her pain 59 years ago.) G and I saw The Intern at Merritt Island Mall, followed by a ginormous dinner at Longhorns (which doubled as the next day's dinner, too!) Came home to find the sign plastered on our door; they're so silly. CBS provided the finishing touches with the season premiers of Madam Secretary and The Good Wife. I'm ready to do this!
Interesting week. G did neighborhood patrol.
Monday: morning class, evening yoga, Anthony arrived for visit with folks, finally met Joyce Randall during a nice visit while G napped.
Wednesday: morning class and yoga, but opted to skip line dancing. Feeling like the frustrations are beginning to outweigh the enjoyment, I've decided to take a break. I haven't officially declared that, except to George. Had nice evening visit with Anthony.
Saturday: wonderful day! Picked up Josh and Krystal, had good visit with folks, dinner at my house - Edd joined us - up late chatting with Krystal.