Six on Geography and Science: One Word: Castration; Elizabeth Kolbert: Listening to James Hansen on Climate Change, Thirty Ye
philip panaritis
One Word: Castration
"Gelding animals takes testosterone out of their development, making them less aggressive and more biddable, but also bigger (sex hormones accelerate the closure of the growth plates of bones, so without testosterone, animals’ bones grow longer before fusing). Low testosterone levels also encourage the accumulation of fat. You can leave castrated animals grazing alongside females without fear they’ll reproduce. Agricultural societies used it long before written records: castrated oxen take a yoke more easily and will pull a plough with less whipping. Castrated dogs are simpler to train and will more readily round up the castrated sheep put out to fatten in the fields. Early Assyrian and Chinese civilizations transposed this knowledge to humans: boys born in poverty would be castrated and sent to work under the yoke of the state in the imperial household. (In China, both penis and testicles were removed—these “three treasures” were pickled in a jar, brought out for special occasions, and buried with the eunuch.) Eunuchs were often taller, sometimes stronger than average, and were frequently employed as the core of an imperial guard. They could work in the imperial harem without fear that they’d cuckold the emperor.
When Alexander the Great conquered Persia, he was struck by the utility of such eunuch slaves and adopted the custom—eunuchs were also considered sexually desirable. The Romans copied it from the Greeks: the emperor Nero had a eunuch called Sporus (whom he dressed as a woman and married) and the emperor Domitian had a favorite eunuch called Earinus. There’s usually an element of voyeurism in the Roman accounts, a curiosity about ambiguous gender and genitalia that’s still visible in media coverage of the phenomenon today. Eunuchs were high-class slaves, the most expensive in the market; in losing testicles they were believed to have lost family loyalty and to have become faithful only to their masters and to the empire.
Around the time that Christianity began to spread into the Roman Empire there was already a cult of a eunuch god called Attis, who was celebrated in springtime and was believed to have died three days before being resurrected. His priests committed self-castration in honor of a fertility goddess, and they did it on the hill in Rome where Vatican City now sits. The practice survived the Christianization of the Roman Empire: one of the early church fathers, Origen, is famous for committing self-castration. Castration continued in Byzantium (where gelded boys were trained as choristers) and into the twentieth-century Russian Orthodox church, where the Skoptsy sect encouraged self-castration as late as the 1920s. Saint Paul’s advice that women should keep quiet in church was taken to its logical conclusion during the Italian Renaissance: God’s glory was sung in soprano by castrated men from the mid-1500s. The Jesuit Tommaso Tamburini, active in the early seventeenth century, sanctioned castration only “provided there is no mortal danger to life and that it is not done without the boy’s consent.” How much choice they had in the matter is hard to assess, though reports throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries describe boys “pleading” for the honor of being castrated, to bring both prestige and financial security to their families. The complex, high-pitched melodies for which castrati were most in demand by the Vatican were those sung around Easter week—the same time of year that the priests of Attis celebrated castration.
The Vatican didn’t ban the castration of boys for its choirs until the late nineteenth century, and the last castrato of the Sistine Chapel, Alessandro Moreschi, died in 1922. But twenty years before he died, with his voice already fading in quality, he made a series of recordings for the “Gramophone and Typewriter Company” that would become “His Master’s Voice” or HMV. You can find the recordings online, Moreschi’s voice a wavering, ghostly soprano that makes every song an elegy."
"Gelding animals takes testosterone out of their development, making them less aggressive and more biddable, but also bigger (sex hormones accelerate the closure of the growth plates of bones, so without testosterone, animals’ bones grow longer before fusing). Low testosterone levels also encourage the accumulation of fat. You can leave castrated animals grazing alongside females without fear they’ll reproduce. Agricultural societies used it long before written records: castrated oxen take a yoke more easily and will pull a plough with less whipping. Castrated dogs are simpler to train and will more readily round up the castrated sheep put out to fatten in the fields. Early Assyrian and Chinese civilizations transposed this knowledge to humans: boys born in poverty would be castrated and sent to work under the yoke of the state in the imperial household. (In China, both penis and testicles were removed—these “three treasures” were pickled in a jar, brought out for special occasions, and buried with the eunuch.) Eunuchs were often taller, sometimes stronger than average, and were frequently employed as the core of an imperial guard. They could work in the imperial harem without fear that they’d cuckold the emperor.
When Alexander the Great conquered Persia, he was struck by the utility of such eunuch slaves and adopted the custom—eunuchs were also considered sexually desirable. The Romans copied it from the Greeks: the emperor Nero had a eunuch called Sporus (whom he dressed as a woman and married) and the emperor Domitian had a favorite eunuch called Earinus. There’s usually an element of voyeurism in the Roman accounts, a curiosity about ambiguous gender and genitalia that’s still visible in media coverage of the phenomenon today. Eunuchs were high-class slaves, the most expensive in the market; in losing testicles they were believed to have lost family loyalty and to have become faithful only to their masters and to the empire.
Around the time that Christianity began to spread into the Roman Empire there was already a cult of a eunuch god called Attis, who was celebrated in springtime and was believed to have died three days before being resurrected. His priests committed self-castration in honor of a fertility goddess, and they did it on the hill in Rome where Vatican City now sits. The practice survived the Christianization of the Roman Empire: one of the early church fathers, Origen, is famous for committing self-castration. Castration continued in Byzantium (where gelded boys were trained as choristers) and into the twentieth-century Russian Orthodox church, where the Skoptsy sect encouraged self-castration as late as the 1920s. Saint Paul’s advice that women should keep quiet in church was taken to its logical conclusion during the Italian Renaissance: God’s glory was sung in soprano by castrated men from the mid-1500s. The Jesuit Tommaso Tamburini, active in the early seventeenth century, sanctioned castration only “provided there is no mortal danger to life and that it is not done without the boy’s consent.” How much choice they had in the matter is hard to assess, though reports throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries describe boys “pleading” for the honor of being castrated, to bring both prestige and financial security to their families. The complex, high-pitched melodies for which castrati were most in demand by the Vatican were those sung around Easter week—the same time of year that the priests of Attis celebrated castration.
The Vatican didn’t ban the castration of boys for its choirs until the late nineteenth century, and the last castrato of the Sistine Chapel, Alessandro Moreschi, died in 1922. But twenty years before he died, with his voice already fading in quality, he made a series of recordings for the “Gramophone and Typewriter Company” that would become “His Master’s Voice” or HMV. You can find the recordings online, Moreschi’s voice a wavering, ghostly soprano that makes every song an elegy."
One Word: Castration
Elizabeth Kolbert: Listening to James Hansen on Climate Change, Thirty Years Ago and Now
"This week marks the thirtieth anniversary of Hansen’s testimony, and it would be hard to think of a more lugubrious milestone. In the intervening three decades, nearly half of the Arctic ice cap has melted away, the oceans have acidified, much of the American West has burned, lower Manhattan, South Florida, Houston, and New Orleans have flooded, and average temperatures have continued to climb. Just last week, a team of scientists reported in Naturethat the rate of melt off Antarctica has tripled in the past decade; as the Washington Post put it, “If that continues, we are in serious trouble.” (Were the Antarctic ice to melt away entirely, global sea levels would rise by two hundred feet; if just the more vulnerable West Antarctic Ice Sheet melted, sea levels would rise by about ten feet.) Also last week, scientists reported that most of Africa’s oldest baobab trees have died, probably because of climate change, and last month researchers showed that rising CO2 levels were reducing the nutrient content of rice, which is probably the single most important food source for people. Yet Washington continues to ignore the problem, or, worse still, to actively impede efforts to address it. How can this be?"
Carbon dioxide (CO2) levels this century will alter the protein, micronu...
The demise of the largest and oldest African baobabs
Antarctic ice sheet
Antarctic ice loss has tripled in a decade. If that continues, we are in...
Listening to James Hansen on Climate Change, Thirty Years Ago and Now
Why One Island Grows 80% of the World's Vanilla
The Great Migration and Black Environmental HistoryJ.T. Roane: You frame your book foremost as a history of the Great Migration. What does your narrative about these spaces of self-fashioning and retreat in the rural Midwest—i.e., beaches, forests, resorts, etc.—add to our understanding of the Migration?
Brian McCammack: One of the main arguments the book makes is that nature needs to join other more well-trodden areas of scholarly research like labor, politics, religion, and education in terms of how and why Southern migrants understood the North as a “Land of Hope” during the Great Migration. An important thread of those Great Migration histories is understanding how black Southerners became modern urban dwellers in cities like Chicago, translating some cultural practices into a new environment and abandoning others. Nature contributes to and challenges our understanding of those more well-known histories, and Landscapes of Hope tracks how migrants forged hybrid environmental cultures that blended elements of South and North. In doing so, I also argue that nature was more than mere backdrop or setting, more than a proxy for broader political struggles. Nature was important to migrants in and of itself—just like good jobs, good education, the freedom to vote, and the like. Migrants expressed that conviction in a range of green spaces both in Chicago and in more rural or wild environments outside the city, and I use a range of cultural texts to show how and why those spaces mattered to a majority-migrant population (between the World Wars, approximately three-quarters of black Chicagoans were Southern-born).
In the more agricultural, more rural South, African Americans tended to know nature through labor and leisure. Many held jobs in Birmingham’s steel mills or Atlanta’s factories, of course, but on the whole there were closer connections to agricultural lifestyles in the South than in a city like Chicago, which was then the nation’s second-largest. In Chicago’s modern industrial economy, residents—whether black or white—understood nature almost entirely through leisure. Evidence of black intellectuals’ thinking along these lines is very apparent. Ida B. Wells, toward the end of her storied career, fights to establish a park in the middle of one of the Black Belt’s most impoverished sections, arguing that it is especially important for working-class children to have those recreational opportunities. W.E.B. Du Bois buys property at Idlewild in northern Michigan (which will become the Midwest’s premiere black leisure resort), arguing not only that it should become a locus of race pride and race activism for the black cultural elite, but also that it’s necessary to restore the bodies, minds, and spirits of urban dwellers weakened by the city’s punishing environment. Chicago clubwoman Irene McCoy Gaines argues that rural youth camps for young African American girls and boys need to be funded to give them experiences in nature that few growing up in the city were fortunate enough to have. Taken together, a picture of nature as integral rather than incidental to the promise of the Great Migration emerges.
J.T. Roane: You frame your book foremost as a history of the Great Migration. What does your narrative about these spaces of self-fashioning and retreat in the rural Midwest—i.e., beaches, forests, resorts, etc.—add to our understanding of the Migration?
Brian McCammack: One of the main arguments the book makes is that nature needs to join other more well-trodden areas of scholarly research like labor, politics, religion, and education in terms of how and why Southern migrants understood the North as a “Land of Hope” during the Great Migration. An important thread of those Great Migration histories is understanding how black Southerners became modern urban dwellers in cities like Chicago, translating some cultural practices into a new environment and abandoning others. Nature contributes to and challenges our understanding of those more well-known histories, and Landscapes of Hope tracks how migrants forged hybrid environmental cultures that blended elements of South and North. In doing so, I also argue that nature was more than mere backdrop or setting, more than a proxy for broader political struggles. Nature was important to migrants in and of itself—just like good jobs, good education, the freedom to vote, and the like. Migrants expressed that conviction in a range of green spaces both in Chicago and in more rural or wild environments outside the city, and I use a range of cultural texts to show how and why those spaces mattered to a majority-migrant population (between the World Wars, approximately three-quarters of black Chicagoans were Southern-born).
The Great Migration and Black Environmental History: An Interview with B...
Four Is Not Enough
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