In Addition to History

GW NEWS
showcasing new books by gw professors and alumni
BOOKSHELVES
Between a
Rock and a
Soft Place
Expressions like “heart of
stone” and “stone cold” suggest
that living, breathing, feeling
people share little with rocks.
Humans are thought the stars,
while stones are props—at times
useful, photogenic and often
confounding (e.g., stumbling
blocks). In this book, Jeffrey
Jerome Cohen explores how
“human” stone can be.
/By Menachem Wecker, MA ’09 /
In 2006, while finishing a book about race,
GW English professor Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
noticed how heavily anti-Semitism during
medieval times relied upon geological terminology,
for example, calling Jews “stone hearted.”
That set off his active study of the subject,
though he feels that his new book, Stone: An
Ecology of the Inhuman, chose him, and that it
did so years before he realized its grip.
“Maybe the book started earlier when
my parents refused to buy me a Pet Rock,
because they told me it wasn’t really alive,” he
says. “I was one of those kids who returned
from every trip to the beach with a pocket full
of wave-smoothed pebbles.”
His scholarship came to focus on the ways
that “time unfolds for humans at a much
swifter tempo than it does for much of our
planet.” He wondered whether earlier cultures
entrusted their monuments to stone
because they noticed it operated on a slower
time. “They knew it would endure,” he says.
And then Dr. Cohen went on a family
trip to the neolithic structure in Avebury,
in England, not far from Stonehenge, and
he saw his children place their hands on the
rocks. “Stories were being imparted by the
encounter,” he says. The more he studied
both medieval and contemporary texts, the
more he realized that
stone has worked so
well for memorials
not because it’s inanimate,
but because it’s
“lively.”
“We trust it to
endure, to resonate
with our history and narratives. Stone writes
without words. It transmits. Medieval people
knew this well,” he says. “So I delved into the
origins of geology in medieval lapidaries as
well as the use of gems in medicine and magic.
Stone is a powerful, active substance.”
Dr. Cohen structured the book around
anecdotes, many involving his family, offering
a narrative navigation through a scholarly
discussion of the topic. “I tried to craft the
book so that it would be readable by anyone
who is drawn to stone,” he says.
One eye-opening realization in Dr. Cohen’s
research was the etymology of the word “calculus,”
which comes from the Latin word for
small stones used for counting. Across human
history, stone has been mankind’s unwitting
sidekick, serving as “windbreaks for fire,
as axes for war or industry, as a substance
for lasting art,” he writes. In every “rocky
Stone: An Ecology of the
Inhuman (University of
Minnesota Press, 2015)
By Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
encounter,”
wasn’t inert but
proved its “ability
to intensify
our desires and
possibilities.”
stone
LOGAN WERLINGER
24 / gw magazine / Spring 2016