{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.018691588785046728, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.802955665024631, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
“Like a Song Gone Silent”: The Political Ecology of Barbarism and Civilization in Waiting for the Barbarians and The Legend of the Thousand Bulls

Of all the ideas that have gone into shaping our conception of history, those that are products of the juxtaposition of the civilized against the barbarian are among the most fundamental, universal, and persistent. History as we know it is the account of civilization which, in this conception, is another way of saying a break with and subsequent conquest of nature and the creation of a physical and social space within which men (and to a lesser extent, women) can overcome the animality of their natures to become human beings. Outside that space is the realm of the barbarian: a realm without history, a realm represented as that which civilization seeks not to be and in which humanity is once again subject to nature and animality. While the boundaries of the two realms may shift and, with them, our ideas of what it means to be civilized (and therefore human), there is little disputing that the conflict between civilization and barbarism is a grand metahistorical theme around which we have thought and written history.