Noone-not even the most ardent defenders of the supermax-would try to argue today that absolute segregation, including sensory deprivation, is restorative and healing.

tal isolation in single cells where prisoners lived, ate, worked,, read the Bible (if, indeed, they were literate!,

he conditions of possibility for this new form of punishment were strongly anchored in a historical era during which the working class needed to be constituted as an army of self-disciplined individuals capable of performing the req­uisite industrial labor for dev~loping capitalist system.

Today this seems ironic, but incarceration within a penitentiary was assumed to be humane-at least far more humane than the capital and corporal punishment inherited from England and other European countries.

s

I have done fieldwork in Egypt over more than 20 years and I cannot think of a sin­gle woman I know, from the poorest rural to the most edu­cated cosmopolitan, who has ever expressed envy of U.S. women, women they tend to perceive as bereft of commu­nity, vulnerable to sexual violence and social anomie, driven by individual success rather than morality, or strangely disrespectful of God.

We need to have as little dogmatic faith in secular humanism as in Islamism, and as open a mind to the complex possibilities of human pro­jects undertaken in one tradition as the other

Spokespersons point out the dangers of confusing govern­ments with people, the Taliban with innocent Afghans who will be most harmed

There was a constant slippage between the Taliban and the terrorists, so that they became almost one word—a kind of hyphenated monster identity: the Taliban-and-the-terrorists.

It is common popular knowledge that the ultimate sign of the oppression of Afghan women under the Tali- ban-and-the-terrorists is that they were forced to wear the burqa. Liberals sometimes confess their surprise that even though Afghanistan has been liberated from the Taliban, women do not seem to be throwing off their burqas. Someone who has worked in Muslim regions must ask why this is so surprising. Did we expect that once "free" from the Taliban they would go "back" to belly shirts and blue jeans, or dust off their Chanel suits?

n both cases, the issue of the war which has caused that moment is effectively depoliticised

It now seems fortunate that few museums have had sufficient initiative to open photographic de­partments, for it means that few photographs have been preserved in sacred isolation, it means that the public have not come to think of any photographs as being beyondthem.

One clue is when the picture evades compositional cliché.

Non-Indians have made images that capture aspects of the endlessly complicated Indian experience, just as have Indian photographers like Ketaki Sheth, Sooni Taraporevala, Raghu Rai and Richard Bartholomew

he pictures are staged or shot to look as if they were.

An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol.

This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence.

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives

there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing 01,1r true spirit rises, "beautiful/ and tough as chestnut/stanchions against (y)our nightmare of weakness/"** and of impotence.