Ainsley Hawthorn is a cultural historian, sensory scholar, and author who writes about forgotten events, curious folklore, and the surprising connections between past and present.
Since completing her doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale, she has shifted her focus to public scholarship. She writes and broadcasts with CBC, blogs for Psychology Today, and has contributed to a variety of other publications, including The Globe and Mail, the National Post, and the Dance Current.
She is editor of the non-fiction anthology Land of Many Shores: Perspectives from a Diverse Newfoundland and Labrador (Breakwater Books 2021) and co-editor of the academic volume Distant Impressions: The Senses in the Ancient Near East (Eisenbrauns 2019).
She is available for interviews and talks and has previously appeared in Newsweek, Bored Panda, El Mundo, Apartment Therapy, and the Toronto Star, among others.
Since completing her doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale, she has shifted her focus to public scholarship. She writes and broadcasts with CBC, blogs for Psychology Today, and has contributed to a variety of other publications, including The Globe and Mail, the National Post, and the Dance Current.
She is editor of the non-fiction anthology Land of Many Shores: Perspectives from a Diverse Newfoundland and Labrador (Breakwater Books 2021) and co-editor of the academic volume Distant Impressions: The Senses in the Ancient Near East (Eisenbrauns 2019).
She is available for interviews and talks and has previously appeared in Newsweek, Bored Panda, El Mundo, Apartment Therapy, and the Toronto Star, among others.
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In Land of Many Shores, writers share their perspectives about life in Newfoundland and Labrador from often-neglected viewpoints. In this collection, Indigenous people, cultural minorities, 2SLGBTQ+ people, people living with mental or physical disabilities, workers in the sex industry, people from a variety of faiths, people who have experienced incarceration, and other marginalized and under-represented voices are brought to the forefront, with personal, poignant, celebratory, and critical visions of the land we live on.
Land of Many Shores is a collection of pieces that paint a vibrant picture of a province most of us don’t know as well as we think we do. The variety of experience against the backdrop of Newfoundland and Labrador broadens readers’ perspectives on Canada’s youngest province, helping us reimagine both who we are today and who we have the potential to become.
Although we often treat the senses as though they are immutable – fundamental properties of our physiology that provide each of us with a comparable perspective on our surroundings – the way we parse our sensory experiences is dictated by our cultural context. Societies in different times and places have differed vastly in their beliefs about the nature and number of the senses, about where to draw the boundaries between different sensory categories, and about how best to represent sensory phenomena in literature, art, and architecture.
Distant Impressions is the first volume to explore the social aspects of sensation in the ancient Near East. The book is divided into two parts, the first focusing on the Neo-Assyrian period of Mesopotamian history. With its monumental architecture, bas-reliefs, and abundance of tablets, the Neo-Assyrian period is one of the richest milieus for investigating the senses and their cultural values in the ancient Near East. Contributions examine representations of the senses in the written record and analyze the sensory dimensions of two hubs of Neo-Assyrian cultural activity: the temple and the palace.
The second section picks up on the themes of the first, exploring sensory dimensions of the built environment and textual representations of sensation in other times and places in the ancient Near East, such as Neolithic northern Mesopotamia and Hittite Anatolia.
The book approaches the question of sensory experience in ancient Near Eastern societies from philological, literary, art historical, and archeological perspectives; it addresses the means of sense perception (such as vision, hearing, and smell) and the objects of perception (such as light, noise, and odor); and it examines the senses within religious, political, and social frameworks.
Ultimately, the volume paints a portrait of the social life of the senses in these ancient civilizations. The reader is invited to hear the sound of the drum, feel the light of the sun, and smell the scent of the incense as we examine the sensations and sensory codes that underpinned ancient Near Eastern society.
Papers by Ainsley Hawthorn
***
This article traces the historical background of the French term danse du ventre (belly dance), which denotes solo, improvised dances of Near Eastern, Middle Eastern, and North African origin whose movements are based on articulations of the torso. These folkloric dances were transformed into danse du ventre at the Paris Salon of 1864, where Jean-Léon Gérôme's painting The Dance of the Almeh was exhibited for the first time. This painting, which depicted a Frenchman's fantasy of the Near East, caused a public sensation on account of the «nude and bloated belly that is the centre and highlight of the painting» (Charles Asselineau, 1864). Newspapers nicknamed the painting «La danse du ventre» («The Belly Dance»), which swiftly became, first, a moniker for mediocre Oriental dance and, ultimately, the standard French designation for a diverse array of dances from the Near East, Middle East, and North Africa. This term was transmitted and translated into other European languages in 1889 following international press coverage of the Oriental dancers at Paris' Exposition universelle. A close examination of the historical sources demonstrates that the popularisation of this terminology was influenced by European tourism, fine art, and communications technologies, as well as the reductivism and cultural flattening that characterize the colonial mindset.
The motif of body cleaning – including the washing of hair and skin, anointment with perfumes, and the wearing of spotless garments – is woven through the epic narrative. Enkidu, a wild man who has been reared in the steppe, is cleaned and groomed as part of his transition into human society. Ninsun, the divine mother of Gilgamesh, bathes before making a ritual offering to the sun-god Shamash. Gilgamesh washes himself on his return from an expedition to slay the monster Humbaba. In each episode, the cleansing of the body provides entrée to a new social context. Freshly washed, Enkidu gains admission to the company of other human beings, Ninsun to the company of the gods, and Gilgamesh to the intimate company of a woman. When, at the close of the epic, Gilgamesh bathes for a final time following his quest to the end of the earth in search of everlasting life, the cleansing heralds his acceptance of his own mortality and his readmission to the ranks of humanity.
The epic establishes the clean body as a requirement for participation in society, and those who stand outside of the human social order are marked by their uncleanliness: these include wild animals, the grieving, and the dead. In a text whose aim is to establish what human beings can and should aspire to in the face of the inevitability of death, cleanliness emerges as a key value, a prerequisite to leading a rewarding human life of full social participation.
The reluctance to claim ownership over belly dance extends from state governments to the citizenry itself. Many of the words for “belly dance” in Middle Eastern languages attribute the dance to foreign cultures: Turks and Persians have called it “Arab dance” while Egyptians called it “Turkish dance”. Although everyone was belly dancing at celebrations and in the privacy of their own homes, professional performers of the dance in both Egypt and Turkey were historically members of ethnic minorities, particularly the Rom and Dom (Gypsy) peoples, who were considered cultural outsiders and therefore able to operate outside cultural norms.
This paper examines the perpetual outsider status of this dance form in its cultures of origin and argue that this has influenced the globalized belly dance that is now practised in Western countries and around the world.
Newfoundland and Labrador’s Vital Signs has been published annually since 2013 and is one of the only Vital Signs reports that is produced in partnership between a community foundation and its local university. This unique model allows for the inclusion of up-to-minute research from regional scholars, enlarges the networks through which the report can be funded, promoted, and distributed, and makes the production of the report accessible to emerging community foundations that may lack adequate capacity to lead a research-intensive publication project alone. This article gives an overview of how the partnership behind NL’s Vital Signs came about, examines the benefits, challenges, and best practices of foundation-university collaboration, and addresses how a community knowledge project like Vital Signs supports a foundation’s core mission of making strategic grants that respond to local needs and priorities.
Talks by Ainsley Hawthorn
When raqs sharqi was imported to North America and Europe, on the other hand, where few people were exposed to it growing up, classroom instruction became the primary means of transmitting the dance to others. English-speaking dance teachers invented names for movements and those names were passed on orally and, later, published in how-to books.
Taking a lecture-demonstration format, this talk will examine the historical origins of movement names that are widely used in English today. It is part of the Dance Component of the Art in the Time of COVID Fund and will stream online through the YouTube channel of ArtsNL.
Not all nones, though, believe in abandoning church.
When they met in high school, Ainsley and Andrew Hawthorn considered themselves Christian, but they were well on their way to becoming agnostic by the time they were married.
Ainsley is an author, artist, and cultural and religious historian with a PhD from Yale University. Andrew is an author, roller derby announcer, and broadcast journalist with VOCM News. They share a love of writing, travel, and fierce intellectual debate.
The Hawthorns appreciate the important social functions religious institutions have historically filled and are interested in how these can be reimagined, minus the doctrine, for the growing population of secular Canadians.
This public talk was given as part of St. Mark's Weekly Lenten Worship series on reimagining the church.
The full talk is available on YouTube at the link provided.
In Land of Many Shores, writers share their perspectives about life in Newfoundland and Labrador from often-neglected viewpoints. In this collection, Indigenous people, cultural minorities, 2SLGBTQ+ people, people living with mental or physical disabilities, workers in the sex industry, people from a variety of faiths, people who have experienced incarceration, and other marginalized and under-represented voices are brought to the forefront, with personal, poignant, celebratory, and critical visions of the land we live on.
Land of Many Shores is a collection of pieces that paint a vibrant picture of a province most of us don’t know as well as we think we do. The variety of experience against the backdrop of Newfoundland and Labrador broadens readers’ perspectives on Canada’s youngest province, helping us reimagine both who we are today and who we have the potential to become.
Although we often treat the senses as though they are immutable – fundamental properties of our physiology that provide each of us with a comparable perspective on our surroundings – the way we parse our sensory experiences is dictated by our cultural context. Societies in different times and places have differed vastly in their beliefs about the nature and number of the senses, about where to draw the boundaries between different sensory categories, and about how best to represent sensory phenomena in literature, art, and architecture.
Distant Impressions is the first volume to explore the social aspects of sensation in the ancient Near East. The book is divided into two parts, the first focusing on the Neo-Assyrian period of Mesopotamian history. With its monumental architecture, bas-reliefs, and abundance of tablets, the Neo-Assyrian period is one of the richest milieus for investigating the senses and their cultural values in the ancient Near East. Contributions examine representations of the senses in the written record and analyze the sensory dimensions of two hubs of Neo-Assyrian cultural activity: the temple and the palace.
The second section picks up on the themes of the first, exploring sensory dimensions of the built environment and textual representations of sensation in other times and places in the ancient Near East, such as Neolithic northern Mesopotamia and Hittite Anatolia.
The book approaches the question of sensory experience in ancient Near Eastern societies from philological, literary, art historical, and archeological perspectives; it addresses the means of sense perception (such as vision, hearing, and smell) and the objects of perception (such as light, noise, and odor); and it examines the senses within religious, political, and social frameworks.
Ultimately, the volume paints a portrait of the social life of the senses in these ancient civilizations. The reader is invited to hear the sound of the drum, feel the light of the sun, and smell the scent of the incense as we examine the sensations and sensory codes that underpinned ancient Near Eastern society.
***
This article traces the historical background of the French term danse du ventre (belly dance), which denotes solo, improvised dances of Near Eastern, Middle Eastern, and North African origin whose movements are based on articulations of the torso. These folkloric dances were transformed into danse du ventre at the Paris Salon of 1864, where Jean-Léon Gérôme's painting The Dance of the Almeh was exhibited for the first time. This painting, which depicted a Frenchman's fantasy of the Near East, caused a public sensation on account of the «nude and bloated belly that is the centre and highlight of the painting» (Charles Asselineau, 1864). Newspapers nicknamed the painting «La danse du ventre» («The Belly Dance»), which swiftly became, first, a moniker for mediocre Oriental dance and, ultimately, the standard French designation for a diverse array of dances from the Near East, Middle East, and North Africa. This term was transmitted and translated into other European languages in 1889 following international press coverage of the Oriental dancers at Paris' Exposition universelle. A close examination of the historical sources demonstrates that the popularisation of this terminology was influenced by European tourism, fine art, and communications technologies, as well as the reductivism and cultural flattening that characterize the colonial mindset.
The motif of body cleaning – including the washing of hair and skin, anointment with perfumes, and the wearing of spotless garments – is woven through the epic narrative. Enkidu, a wild man who has been reared in the steppe, is cleaned and groomed as part of his transition into human society. Ninsun, the divine mother of Gilgamesh, bathes before making a ritual offering to the sun-god Shamash. Gilgamesh washes himself on his return from an expedition to slay the monster Humbaba. In each episode, the cleansing of the body provides entrée to a new social context. Freshly washed, Enkidu gains admission to the company of other human beings, Ninsun to the company of the gods, and Gilgamesh to the intimate company of a woman. When, at the close of the epic, Gilgamesh bathes for a final time following his quest to the end of the earth in search of everlasting life, the cleansing heralds his acceptance of his own mortality and his readmission to the ranks of humanity.
The epic establishes the clean body as a requirement for participation in society, and those who stand outside of the human social order are marked by their uncleanliness: these include wild animals, the grieving, and the dead. In a text whose aim is to establish what human beings can and should aspire to in the face of the inevitability of death, cleanliness emerges as a key value, a prerequisite to leading a rewarding human life of full social participation.
The reluctance to claim ownership over belly dance extends from state governments to the citizenry itself. Many of the words for “belly dance” in Middle Eastern languages attribute the dance to foreign cultures: Turks and Persians have called it “Arab dance” while Egyptians called it “Turkish dance”. Although everyone was belly dancing at celebrations and in the privacy of their own homes, professional performers of the dance in both Egypt and Turkey were historically members of ethnic minorities, particularly the Rom and Dom (Gypsy) peoples, who were considered cultural outsiders and therefore able to operate outside cultural norms.
This paper examines the perpetual outsider status of this dance form in its cultures of origin and argue that this has influenced the globalized belly dance that is now practised in Western countries and around the world.
Newfoundland and Labrador’s Vital Signs has been published annually since 2013 and is one of the only Vital Signs reports that is produced in partnership between a community foundation and its local university. This unique model allows for the inclusion of up-to-minute research from regional scholars, enlarges the networks through which the report can be funded, promoted, and distributed, and makes the production of the report accessible to emerging community foundations that may lack adequate capacity to lead a research-intensive publication project alone. This article gives an overview of how the partnership behind NL’s Vital Signs came about, examines the benefits, challenges, and best practices of foundation-university collaboration, and addresses how a community knowledge project like Vital Signs supports a foundation’s core mission of making strategic grants that respond to local needs and priorities.
When raqs sharqi was imported to North America and Europe, on the other hand, where few people were exposed to it growing up, classroom instruction became the primary means of transmitting the dance to others. English-speaking dance teachers invented names for movements and those names were passed on orally and, later, published in how-to books.
Taking a lecture-demonstration format, this talk will examine the historical origins of movement names that are widely used in English today. It is part of the Dance Component of the Art in the Time of COVID Fund and will stream online through the YouTube channel of ArtsNL.
Not all nones, though, believe in abandoning church.
When they met in high school, Ainsley and Andrew Hawthorn considered themselves Christian, but they were well on their way to becoming agnostic by the time they were married.
Ainsley is an author, artist, and cultural and religious historian with a PhD from Yale University. Andrew is an author, roller derby announcer, and broadcast journalist with VOCM News. They share a love of writing, travel, and fierce intellectual debate.
The Hawthorns appreciate the important social functions religious institutions have historically filled and are interested in how these can be reimagined, minus the doctrine, for the growing population of secular Canadians.
This public talk was given as part of St. Mark's Weekly Lenten Worship series on reimagining the church.
The full talk is available on YouTube at the link provided.
This presentation will give a historical overview, based on primary text sources, of when various names for the dance were introduced into the English language. The primary source evidence belies some common myths about the origins of the term “belly dance”: in particular, that it was coined by promoter Sol Bloom at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair to publicize the Middle Eastern and North African dancers of the exhibition’s Midway Plaisance. The paper will also detail how the popularity of these terms waxed and waned over time, with “Oriental dance” giving way to danse du ventre, then “belly dance,” followed by a resurgence of “Oriental dance” in the twenty-first century.
The presentation will conclude with an examination of dancers’ attitudes to the various names for the dance in the present day, based in part on a survey of 154 practitioners residing in Canada conducted by the author. Ultimately, due to the shortcomings that dancers have identified in every name for the dance introduced to date, the community has yet to reach a consensus, and this remains a dance of many names.
This presentation will use the Sumerian wordfield of vision as a case study to explore how database compilation and analysis can illuminate obscure aspects of ancient languages. While a variety of bilingual documents, including royal inscriptions and lexical lists, pair Sumerian texts with their translations in Akkadian, a more fully understood Semitic language related to Arabic and Hebrew, many grammatical and semantic features of Sumerian remain enigmatic. The case study to be presented in this seminar concerns an analysis of more than 700 instances of verbs of vision compiled from Sumerian literary texts. Each vocabulary instance was tagged with its morphological and grammatical features, as well as aspects of its context, such as the identity of the verb’s subject and object. Sorting the vocabulary instances according to these attributes revealed characteristics of each verb’s usage that had previously been overlooked, leading to improved definitions for many of the verbs examined in the study and uncovering ideological and theological principles governing their use.
Database technologies allow scholars to search for patterns across a much wider range of information than is feasible using traditional methods. Rather than being at odds with literary and linguistic research, data mining and database approaches allow for new observations that are missed in smaller datasets (Hayles 2007 and Kirschenbaum 2007), and database-oriented research is becoming more common in the study of modern languages (for example, Ktori et al. 2008). The proliferation of online text corpora like the Perseus Digital Library and the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature allow for more comprehensive and sophisticated linguistic studies of ancient languages than ever before. This presentation offers a methodology for database-driven lexical analysis that is adaptable to other ancient languages and asserts that databases should be an integral part of our philological toolkit.
This paper examines the vocabulary used for teaching Middle Eastern movement in North America and considers the verbalization of movement as a space for negotiating competing visions of the dance and its cultural meanings. Based on surveys of Canadian and American Oriental dancers conducted in 2016 and 2017, the paper will compare the terms that are in current use in both countries to represent Oriental dance movement and will analyze trends in the North American Oriental dance lexicon. Ultimately, the paper will interrogate the implications of North American dancers’ choice of terminology for attitudes towards the peoples and cultures of the Middle East.
The motif of body cleaning – including the washing of hair and skin, anointment with perfumes, and the wearing of spotless garments – is woven through the epic narrative. Enkidu, a wild man who has been reared in the steppe, is cleaned and groomed as part of his transition into human society. Ninsun, the divine mother of Gilgamesh, bathes before making a ritual offering to the sun-god Shamash. Gilgamesh washes himself on his return from an expedition to slay the monster Humbaba. In each episode, the cleansing of the body provides entrée to a new social context. Freshly washed, Enkidu gains admission to the company of other human beings, Ninsun to the company of the gods, and Gilgamesh to the intimate company of a woman. When, at the close of the epic, Gilgamesh bathes for a final time following his quest to the end of the earth in search of everlasting life, the cleansing heralds his acceptance of his own mortality and his readmission to the ranks of humanity.
The epic establishes the clean body as a requirement for participation in society, and those who stand outside of the human social order are marked by their uncleanliness: these include wild animals, the grieving, and the dead. In a text whose aim is to establish what human beings can and should aspire to in the face of the inevitability of death, cleanliness emerges as a key value, a prerequisite to leading a rewarding human life of full social participation.
This paper examines the theological implications of the subject-specific usage of vision vocabulary in Mesopotamian literature, based on the grammatical, statistical, and contextual analysis of over 1600 instances of verbs of vision compiled from the Mesopotamian literary corpus. Close scrutiny of the vocabulary reveals that Sumerian and Akkadian distinguish between sight and gaze, where “sight” denotes inward-moving perception and “gaze” signifies outward-moving visual action. The usage of verbs of sight and gaze in both languages falls out dramatically along divine and human lines, with gods being more than three times as likely to gaze as human beings in Sumerian-language texts and twice as likely in Akkadian texts. Moreover, each language includes a particular verb formulation designating gaze that has causative force; this type of influential gaze is under the almost exclusive purview of the gods.
The unequal distribution of vision verbs indicates that the Mesopotamians conceived of their gods as essentially active, emanating power outward to affect the world, and of human beings as inherently passive, perceiving rather than performing. The paper argues that the unique operation of divine vision in the literature is part of a cohesive view of the gods as a source of outward-emanating powers that also include radiance and speech.
This paper draws on a catalogue of over 900 instances of verbs of vision compiled from the Sumerian literary corpus to compare the meanings, morphologies, and usage patterns of igi du8 and igi bar. Statistical analysis of the incidence of the two verbs in the literary sources reveals that their usage falls out dramatically along divine and human lines. Gods occur as the subjects of igi bar about three times as frequently as human beings do, while, conversely, human beings appear as the subjects of igi du8 twice as often as gods. These major discrepancies in usage exist despite only a relatively small difference in the total number of instances of each verb in the literary corpus. Contextual evidence from the literary corpus confirms that dimensional infixes have semantic consequences for igi bar, and the subject-dependency of igi bar’s usage is even more pronounced when this factor is taken into account: terminative-infixed igi bar, designating gaze that has causative force, occurs almost exclusively with divine subjects.
The unequal distribution of these vision verbs amongst subject types in the literary sources suggests a theological paradigm that characterizes gods as essentially active and human beings as primarily passive, perceiving rather than performing. The power to affect the physical world through outward-directed gaze is under the almost exclusive purview of the gods and is part of a cohesive understanding of the gods as a source of outward-emanating powers that also include radiance and speech."
In this presentation, Ainsley Hawthorn, Executive Director of the Community Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador, gives an overview of the findings of the national report at NL's 2017 Vital Signs launch event.
of Canada have focused on our sense of belonging. In light of this,
NL’s 2017 Vital Signs explores the idea of “belonging” by asking
how we fit into a place, how that place welcomes and includes us, and how we build community. In this edition we also explore how issues like financial security, safety, and mental health impact our sense of belonging, and how our neighbourhoods, heritage, and even the food we eat can support our ties to our communities. NL's Vital Signs is produced in partnership between the Community Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador and the Leslie Harris Centre for Regional Policy and Development at Memorial University.
NL's Vital Signs is produced in partnership between the Community Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador and the Leslie Harris Centre for Regional Policy and Development at Memorial University. The Vital Signs program is administered nationally by Community Foundations of Canada.
This presentation gives an overview of the community-university partnership behind the report and describes the benefits, challenges, and best practices associated with this type of public engagement collaboration.
In this presentation, Ainsley Hawthorn, Executive Director of the Community Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador, gives an overview of the findings of the national report at NL's 2016 Vital Signs launch event.
When we look at topics like the economy, health, and housing on a provincial level, we can miss some of the important ways those issues differ if you’re living in Cartwright instead of Corner Brook, Parson’s Pond instead of Paradise. NL's 2016 Vital Signs report considers the differences between the rural and urban communities of Newfoundland and Labrador.
NL's Vital Signs is produced in partnership between the Community Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador and the Leslie Harris Centre for Regional Policy and Development at Memorial University. The Vital Signs program is coordinated nationally by Community Foundations of Canada.
In this presentation, Ainsley Hawthorn, Executive Director of the Community Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador, gives an overview of the findings of the national report at NL's 2015 Vital Signs launch event.
Based feedback from community consultations conducted after release of the 2014 Vital Signs report, the 2015 report considers demographic alongside thematic categories and examines more closely issues of concern for seniors, women, Aboriginal peoples, children and youth, and families.
NL's Vital Signs is produced in partnership between the Community Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador and the Leslie Harris Centre for Regional Policy and Development at Memorial University. The Vital Signs program is coordinated nationally by Community Foundations of Canada.
NL's Vital Signs is produced in partnership between the Community Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador and the Leslie Harris Centre for Regional Policy and Development at Memorial University. The Vital Signs program is coordinated nationally by Community Foundations of Canada.
Eastern Dance, often referred to as Belly Dance, is a captivating and culturally rich form of artistic expression that boasts numerous positive aspects. This ancient dance style, originating in the East Mediterranean , offers myriad benefits, both physical and cultural. First and foremost, it promotes physical well-being. It is an excellent form of exercise that enhances flexibility, core strength, and posture. The graceful and fluid movements engage various muscle groups, making it an enjoyable and effective workout. Furthermore, Eastern Dance celebrates diversity and cultural understanding. It provides a window into the traditions and stories of the East Mediterranean, fostering cross-cultural appreciation and respect. Dancers often learn about the history, costumes, and music of the regions where Belly Dance is rooted. Eastern Dance also promotes self-confidence and body positivity and encourage self-expression and self-acceptance.