Acclaimed Sociologist Invites Arkansas Professor to Contribute to Inaugural Issue of New Journal

Photo Submitted

Samuel Totten

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Noted American sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz has asked University of Arkansas professor Samuel Totten to contribute an essay from Totten’s latest book to a new journal Horowitz started that is named for the weighty topics Culture and Civilization.

Totten, professor of curriculum and instruction, is accustomed to having his words in print. He has written extensively on the topics of teaching and writing and about genocide. Totten has been invited to speak at universities and scholarly conferences around the world about genocide.

The latest volume of a bibliographic review about genocide that Totten edits caught the attention of Horowitz, the Hannah Arendt University Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Political Science at Rutgers University.

“It’s a great honor to be asked by such a renowned scholar as Irving Louis Horowitz to be involved in this project,” Totten said. “I’m very pleased that he selected a piece on Darfur, Sudan, because it’s so timely in the sense that people are continuing to be brutalized and killed there. I’m hopeful the article will draw more attention to the situation there through the detailed analysis and description.”

Time magazine deemed Horowitz the public image of “the new sociology” in 1970. According to the magazine, Horowitz “developed the humanist approach that places responsibility to mankind before the obligations of science.”

Horowitz’s books include The Decomposition of Sociology; Games, Strategies and Peace: Beyond Deterrence; Science, Sin and Scholarship: The Politics of Reverend Moon and the Unification Church; and Philosophy, Science and the Sociology of Knowledge. He received a special citation from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace for his 1957 book The Idea of War and Peace in Contemporary Philosophy, and he received the National Jewish Book Award in Biography for his memoir of a Harlem childhood, Daydreams and Nightmares.

Other articles in the new journal include “Progressions of Belief in Global Warming” by the late Michael Crichton, “Feminism, Freedom and History” by Christina Hoff Summers and “The Strategic Use of Holocaust Denial” by George Michael.

Totten has written and edited numerous books about genocide and has visited Africa several times to interview survivors of the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur. He was a member of a U.S. State Department-sponsored team that investigated atrocities in Darfur, leading then-Secretary of State Colin Powell to apply the term genocide to the situation.

Totten began studying genocide in 1988, focusing on the Holocaust of World War II. He broadened his study to the larger field of genocide studies when he realized that hundreds of scholars were studying the Holocaust but only a handful were studying genocide prevention and intervention.

He received a Fulbright Fellowship last year to work in Rwanda, where he helped establish a genocide studies program at the National University of Rwanda and interviewed survivors of the 1994 “machete genocide” there.

The article included in Horowitz’s Culture and Civilization is taken from Plight and Fate of Women During and Following Genocide, the seventh volume in Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review, a series edited by Totten. In Totten’s chapter, titled “The Darfur Genocide: The Mass Rape of Black African Girls and Women,” he traces the history of the conflict in the region. He describes the pervasiveness and nature of sexual assaults against girls and women perpetrated by Sudanese government troops and the Janjaweed, or Arab militia. Victims of rape are often ostracized from their families, and they in turn, because of their physical and psychological wounds, often cannot care for babies born of the rape.

Female residents of camps for those displaced by the genocide are targeted when they leave the camps to forage for food or wood for fires, Totten explains. Going out in numbers doesn’t protect them because their attackers often travel in groups and overpower them. The men in the camps fear accompanying them because they will be killed.

Totten’s recommendations for the internally displaced persons camps in Darfur and refugee camps in Chad include the deployment of a large cadre of trained medical personnel and psychologists, a social services program to care for abandoned children and a reliable police force, preferably of women, to accompany the black African females when they must leave the camps.

Fuel-efficient stoves that consume far smaller amounts of wood would also be helpful in the camps, Totten writes.

His other chapter in this volume explores the plight and fate of women and girls following the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

In addition to writing about these current events, Totten and a colleague are trying to assist survivors of genocide by starting a scholarship fund to raise money to send survivors to college. The Post Genocide Education Fund can be found at http://www.postgen.org/.