Shrewsbury on the Nile

Among this week's projects was to read Peter Brown's memoir Journeys of the Mind.

Brown is known for studies in the Spätantike. His memoir pretty-much ends in the 1980s, with a postscript. (In that much, it reads like Goodbye To All That. I wonder if we be missing a first-edition.)

Brown approaches "Late Antiquity" as a sociologist. He relates demonology and the Ordeal to the animism of the Nuer in the upper Nile. He sees these rituals as spontaneously arising in the absence of a strong state, allowing for a communitarian approach to justice. Brown comes to Michel Foucault late in his career - I'll deal with that later in this blog.

I'll just point out here that Nuer justice is cancel-culture justice. The communitarian model means that the least-popular kid in the tribe gets blamed for evil. Now: I'll concede here that the least-popular kid is almost always guilty of ... a lot. He's disproportionately likely to be guilty of the crime of which he's accused; if not, he's a burden in other ways. And maybe the real criminal, seeing this kid's sorry fate, will tone down his crimes lest he suffer the same but doubled.

I wonder if instead of Foucault, Brown should have read Girard.

I wonder further whether Brown himself could have lived to the age of 87 in a Nuer society. Possibly. Brown learnt to "tweak", as Salopians called it then, in the best of madrassas.

What I don't wonder is where Brown prefers to live today. It's not South Sudan.