#sparkchamber 031422 — Jamie Kreiner
History is in the news in a big way the past couple of weeks, with the voice of Winston Churchill echoing ominously — Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Taking a step a bit further back, #sparkchamber is thrilled to welcome a historian of the early Middle Ages, Jamie Kreiner. Currently serving as the associate dean for the humanities in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia, she reveals to her students that history is full of surprises — weird in ways you wouldn’t expect, and very similar to our own experiences in ways you wouldn’t expect. “The students who sign up have a great mix of interests. They come to the Middle Ages via Game of Thrones, actual gaming, Christianity, Islam, Monty Python, or all-around history geekiness. It makes class discussions really multi-vectored.”
Jamie’s research focuses on the mechanics of culture, being especially interested in the quieter forces that shape ethical systems — forces that were not always purposeful, individual, or human. “The history of the early Middle Ages basically starts with the end of the western Roman Empire, so it’s a history of how societies were both deliberately and non-consciously changing the ways they worked. It’s a time period that constantly calls our sense of scale in question: Did everyone think that the Empire was ending? What did “the Empire” mean to different groups in the first place? How did events in Constantinople or Damascus or Alexandria continue to reverberate across the Mediterranean? How could seemingly small things, like stories or farm animals, affect the way that people worked or made policy decisions? How could very large things, like a royal government or the diffuse culture we call Christianity, change their way of seeing the world? My research has pointed to some of the less visible forces that altered the politics and ethics of societies in transition [like literature and domesticated animals]. It also showcases their cleverness, subtlety, and sense of humor. We have totally underestimated the Dark Ages!”
Her new book, Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West, is an exploration of life in that particular time and place, using pigs as a lens to investigate agriculture, ecology, economy, and philosophy. She tracks the interlocking relationships between pigs and humans, illuminating how early medieval communities bent their own lives in order to accommodate these tricky animals — and how in the process they reconfigured their agrarian regimes, their fiscal policies, and their very identities. In the end, even the pig’s own identity was transformed. At the close of the early Middle Ages, it had become a riveting metaphor for Christianity itself.
When asked in a recent interview what she hopes students gain from their classroom experience with her, she replied, “I hope they see that any society that seems inscrutable at first can be understood if we’re generous and critical enough to make sense of its perspectives. I hope they’re a bit more skeptical of the idea that “civilization” is constantly improving. I hope they see that there’s a lot of social complexity and competition disguised in bland nouns like “society,” “the church” and “government.” And I hope they can tell you where Constantinople was!”
[I’ll be looking that up now ;-) ]
1.] Where do ideas come from?
When something seems weird or unintelligible, that’s gold for a historian! It’s a sign that something needs investigating. People of the past can seem strange in all sorts of ways to us: their ways of doing things, their priorities, their fixations and associations. But rather than assume automatically that they were less intelligent or capable than we are, we can dig into these differences to see what kinds of experiences and perspectives they unearth. The potential payoff here — of starting from a place of curiosity — is the exciting prospect of seeing the world in utterly unexpected ways.
2.] What is the itch you are scratching?
What makes people change their minds? This is one of my favorite questions to puzzle over as a historian. Even better: how did people in the past answer this question? Sometimes their answers were more sophisticated than ours are. Early medieval analysts, for example, were keenly attentive to the quieter forces that shape human perception, analysis, and decision-making. They took the power of literature seriously, for example, and their working relationships with animals seriously, because they recognized that they could be remade by them. For the same reason, they took cognitive practices seriously, and that's what I'm thinking about these days. Monks in particular were preoccupied by the problem of distraction, precisely because they saw how embedded the mind was in its surroundings. They devised all sorts of strategies for making themselves more attentive, each of which had concomitant problems and limitations. It was a very sophisticated and self-aware subculture!
3.] Early bird or night owl? Tortoise or hare?
I dedicate the early morning to my most intellectually squirrely work — not because I think morning people are morally superior, but because I’m lame and have a really hard time staying up late. The bonus is that the rest of the day could be a chaos or a mess, and I’d still have that morning to keep me in a good mood.
I stick to one project at a time, rather than trying to write or research several things at once. And I write really slowly. One page in a couple hours is a good day’s work! One trick I use to keep myself going is to imagine myself just a few hours into the future. Will my future self be pissed because I bailed? Or will my future be smug and satisfied about having put in the time and worked through something on the page?
4.] How do you know when you are done?
When I get sick of hearing myself or reading myself, then it’s time to surrender to the stuff to other people. But of course there’s never a final word!
