This is the userpage of Slrubenstein, a great guy and a dedicated and skillful Wikipedian, who contributed more than 30,000 edits to Wikipedia since his first edit on December 12, 2001 to his last on March 1st 2012.

Being a cultural anthropologist by profession he made most of his contributions in areas related to human culture, but he was also a prolific editor in other areas, contributing hundreds of edits to pages such as Jesus, Race and Franz Boas. In the world of academia he was a recognized expert on the culture of the Shuar people of Ecuador, as well as an ardent spokesperson for indigenous rights. He was also a dedicated proponent of free knowledge, and over the 11 years he edited he also made many important contributions to developing the basic policies and guidelines by which Wikipedia operates. He will be sorely missed by the Wikipedia community and by all who knew him.

The tale of the fool, the naif, the adventurer, the wiseacre, may be the best weapon against the myths of the state.

— Steven Rubenstein, 2002.


Hi. I used to believe I had nothing to say about myself beyond what I contribute to articles, which I hope reflects my knowledge and interests but not my biases, and to talk pages, in which I try to be honest about my biases, especially if someone asks. I still think that as a Wikipedian I am best judged by my work on Wikipedia, although those who now care to, may judge me by what I read and what I watch. Of course, I am always willing to answer a question if you ask me.

Anyway, I now believe I can do what so many other Wikipedians have done on their user pages: introduce myself:


Everyone has one question. For the Little Prince, the question is whether his drawing #1 frightened them. If they answer "Why should I be frightened of a hat?" he knew that they understand nothing.

Here is my question:

Do you believe that ...
(CHOOSE ONE: Michaelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or statue of David, the Dome of the Rock, The Gilgamesh Epic, the Iliad, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist, Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Arnold's "Dover Beach," Melville's Moby-Dick, Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, Forster's A Passage to India, Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, Greene's The End of the Affair, Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, Fowles's The Magus, Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy (see [1], [2], [3]), Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony or Ninth symphony, Ellington and Coltrane's Duke Ellington & John Coltrane, and for the cognoscente, Springsteen's "Darkness on the Edge of Town," and Elvis Costello's "Alison")
...expresses some great truth?

If the person answers yes (or can answer yes to an appropriate addition), I know they will understand why the fact that I think the Bible was written by human beings and that many parts of it are not historically accurate does not mean that I think it a fraud or an anachronism, nor does it mean that I am a blaspheming heretic, but on the contrary that I believe it to be a divinely profound and truthful work. And if the person answers yes, they will understand why as a scientist I think that research with living people, the aim of which is to understand how they make meaning of their lives and their world — something that cannot be measured and subjected to statistical analysis, and research that is not reproducible — is nevertheless among the most significant and valuable research one can conduct and learn from.

If the person answers "no," I know that they understand nothing.


I think of those people who would answer "no" to my question whenever I read this passage from Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum:

Idiot. Above her head was the only stable place in the cosmos, the only refuge from the damnation of the panta rei, and she guessed it was the Pendulum's business, not hers. A moment later the couple went off — he, trained on some textbook that had blunted his capacity for wonder, she, inert and insensitive to the thrill of the infinite, both oblivious of the awesomeness of their encounter — their first and last encounter — with the One, the Ein-Sof, the Ineffable. How could you fail to kneel down before this altar of certitude?


Foucault's pendulum does not rotate. It swings back and forth, as the earth rotates beneath it

There is one other question I think is rather important (actually, I suspect "my one question" is really a corollary of this question, or this question is just a cruder version of "my one question"):

Do you believe that a text has only one true meaning, generally that intended by the author of the text?
If you answer "yes," you are, by my definition, a fundamentalist, whether the text you are thinking of is The Bible, The Communist Manifesto, Euclid's Elements, Moby-Dick, or something else. If this be the case, sooner or later you and I will find it very hard to understand each other.

Two Poems by Bertholt Brecht

A Bed for the Night

I hear that in New York
At the corner of 26th street and Broadway
A man stands every evening during the winter months
And gets beds for the homeless there
By appealing to passers-by.

It won't change the world
It won't improve relations among men
It will not shorten the age of exploitation
But a few men have a bed for the night
For the night the wind is kept from them
The snow meant for them falls on the roadway.

Don't put down the book on reading this, man.

A few people have a bed for the night
For the night the wind is kept from them
The snow meant for them falls on the roadway
But it won't change the world
It won't improve relations among men
It will not shorten the age of exploitation.

On the Critical Attitude

The critical attitude
Strikes many people as unfruitful
That is because they find the state
Impervious to their criticism
But what in this case is an unfruitful attitude
Is merely a feeble attitude. Give criticism arms
And states can be demolished by it.

Canalising a river
Grafting a fruit tree
Educating a person
Transforming a state
These are instances of fruitful criticism
And at the same time instances of art.

Comments or Questions for me

Since I have been here people have posted questions and comments to my user page and talk page indiscriminately. I have archived all of this material on this page. But if you wish to make a comment, please do so on my talk page.

The rest of this page is somewhat self-indulgent

Some pages I care about

Since I started contributing to Wikipedia I have edited a number of pages. However, there are a few where I am especially proud of the research I did in order to contribute to the article:

Articles

Anthropology

Biblical canon

Cultural anthropology

Cultural evolution

Cultural and historical background of Jesus

Cultural relativism

Culture

Ethnic group

Franz Boas

Incest taboo

Jivaroan peoples

Judaism and Christianity

Karl Marx

Pharisees

Race

Shuar

Tribe

Policies and guidelines

Over the years I have at times put considerable work into:

No original research

Disruptive editing

which I believe have helped maintain the encyclopedic quality of Wikipedia.

Essays on Wiki-Process

Wikipedia:Advice for new administrators

Wikipedia:The role of policies in collaborative anarchy

The Durova Incident (by JzG) (Note: I care about this very clear-headed and informative analysis of one of the many overblown incidents here that are symptomatic of a whole set of systemic problems at Wikipedia. I did not play any significant role in the incident, and did not write or edit this page.)

The continued harassment of Slim Virgin (an account by the victim) (Note: I neither wrote nor edited this page, but consider it another very instructive example of a crippling weakness of Wikipedia.)

Dealing with harassment on wikipedia by User:JzG

Essays on Wiki-Research

Advice on researching with Wikipedia

Suggestions for excellent content by User:AndyZ

Librarian's Guide to the way Wikipedia works by User:DGG

Librarian's view of Wikipedia and Reliability also by User:DGG

Some of my favorite books and poems

Literature

Matthew Arnold

Ray Bradbury

J. M. Coetzee

Denis Diderot

Umberto Eco

E.M. Forster

John Fowles

Graham Greene

Homer

John Keats

Ursula K. Le Guin

William Somerset Maugham

Herman Melville

Rainer Maria Rilke

Philip Roth

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

John Steinbeck

Leo Tolstoy

Unknown

Various Authors

Jewish

Daniel Boyarin

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Max Kadushin

Yechezkel Kaufmann

Franz Rosenzweig

Leo W. Schwarz, editor

Anthropology

For the Neophyte

Ruth Benedict

Marvin Harris

Hortense Powdermaker

Eric Wolf

For the Veteran

Gregory Bateson

Franz Boas

Alan Tormaid Campbell

Terrence Deacon

Johannes Fabian

James Ferguson

William H. Fisher

Ronald Frankenberg

Morton H. Fried

Judith Friedlander

Thomas Gregor

Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Robert F. Murphy

Yolanda and Robert F. Murphy

Marshall Sahlins

Gerald M. Sider

Michael Taussig

D. Lawrence Wieder

Paul Willis

Social Sciences and the Humanities

Jessica Benjamin

John Berger

Marshall Berman

Martin Buber

Nicholas Cook

Jonathan Culler

Charles Darwin

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

Jacques Derrida

Isaac Deutscher

Frantz Fanon

Michel Foucault

Paulo Freire

Sigmund Freud

Anthony Giddens

David Halberstam

William Hinton

Bruno Latour

Jonathan Lee

Karl Marx

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Louis Menand

James Miller

Juliet Mitchell

Ray Monk

Friedrich Nietzsche

Stephen C. Pepper

Thirty-nine of my favorite movies

Movies I have a soft spot for

"Great" movies I hate

How I learned to hate Chick Flicks

The answers to two common questions

Tools

For repeated vandalism by an anonymous IP address, it is helpful to take the following additional steps:

  1. Trace the IP address (cf. http://dnsstuff.com) and add ((whois|Name of owner)) to the user talk page of the address. If it appears to be a shared IP address, add ((SharedIP|Name of owner)) or ((SharedIPEDU|Name of owner)).
  2. For repetitive anonymous vandalism, particularly where registered to a school or other kind of responsive ISP, consider listing it on Wikipedia:Abuse reports.


RfA candidate S O N S% Ending (UTC) Time left Dups? Report
RfB candidate S O N S% Ending (UTC) Time left Dups? Report

No RfXs since 00:50, 23 June 2024 (UTC).—cyberbot ITalk to my owner:Online

Frequently used templates


((subst:W-graphical))
((pp-dispute))
((pp-vandalism))
((pp-semi-vandalism))


This page is often frequented by trolls. Do not feed the trolls by attempting to argue with them.

Archives

User:Slrubenstein/archive 1

User:Slrubenstein/archive 2

User:Slrubenstein/archive 3

User:Slrubenstein/archive 4

The Closet

The Closet Shelf

User:Slrubenstein/The box on the shelf in the closet

User:Slrubenstein/Pharisees

My Sandbox

My filing cabinet

WP:Areas for Reform

I agree to multi-license all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

Multi-licensed with the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License versions 1.0 and 2.0
I agree to multi-license my text contributions, unless otherwise stated, under Wikipedia's copyright terms and the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license version 1.0 and version 2.0. Please be aware that other contributors might not do the same, so if you want to use my contributions under the Creative Commons terms, please check the CC dual-license and Multi-licensing guides.
Categories