Question: What societal critic contributed to the anthology "Excursions"? 

Lene Auestad is an author and a philosopher from the University of Oslo.  She has written on the themes of prejudice, social exclusion and minority rights, and has contributed to public debates on hate speech.  The book Respect, Plurality, and Prejudice combined critical theory with psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies, examining the underlying unconscious forces and structures that make up the phenomena of xenophobia, Antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia and sexism.  It provides a nuanced, detailed overview of how social prejudices, and the discrimination and violence that often tend to accompany the latter, come into being.  At the same time the author demonstrated that in order to fully understand how a complex phenomenon such as prejudice works, we need to alter our traditional Western philosophical understanding of the subject as a supposedly fully rational, autonomous and individual agent.  Auestad argues that we need a more situated and relational understanding of subjectivity and the subject, as prejudice and acts of discrimination always take place in a contextualized setting between subjects whose thoughts and actions influence each other.  Unlike more conservative forms of philosophy, Auestad examines the processes that make up prejudice from both a theoretical and practical point of view.  This becomes especially clear in the book’s seventh chapter, in which she reads critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality (1950)—together with some of Adorno’s other work—along the lines of object-relations theory.  This attachment to critical theory—and to the work of for instance queer theorist Judith Butler and political theorist Hannah Arendt, and Butler’s thoughts about hate speech, and in Arendt’s case, perspectivism and pluralism, in particular— reveals how much Auestad is invested in analysing prejudice and discrimination not as isolated but societal phenomena that need to be critically examined and also fought against.  The work navigates between subjectivism in psychoanalysis and situationism in sociology that would each in its own way deny how psychic and emotional interiority and sociocultural exteriority become mutually complicit from setting to setting in buttressing the specific inter-subjective molds around which prejudices form as social forces.  Auestad shows how the self-conceptions of those subjected to it become maimed, but she also illustrates the societal costs that must be paid as a consequence of distorted human relationships.  In doing so, she demonstrates how contingent conceptions of social status and group standing permeate and secure what becomes misconstrued as “reality.”  Auestad shows how unconscious fantasy and representations form, combine, and recombine in ways directly relevant to a theoretical interpretation of the psychodynamics of prejudice.  The import is to reveal how silent codes of social consensus and cultural conviction <SEP>  He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States. Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. <SEP> Oureouharé (d. in Quebec, Canada, in 1697) was a Cayuga chief.  He was one of the Iroquois chiefs that were seized treacherously and sent to the galleys in France in 1687, after being invited to a conference at Fort Frontenac by Denonville, the Canadian governor.  He was allowed to return with Frontenac to Canada in 1689, became attached to the new governor, accompanied him to Montreal, and advised him to release the other Indian captives that were then in Canada.  His advice was followed; the Indians were sent back to their tribes, and were exhorted by Oureouhare to persuade the latter to send an embassy to Montreal.  This was done on 9 March 1690, and the envoy said that the French prisoners that had been scattered in the other cantons were now all at Onondaga, and would be disposed of as Oureouhare should direct.  The efforts of the latter to reconcile the Iroquois to French rule were unsuccessful, and Frontenac began to have doubts of his fidelity.  His conduct in 1691, when the Iroquois invaded the French colony, dispelled all doubts, and his bravery at Repentigny contributed greatly to the defeat of the savages.  He commanded the Christian Hurons in an engagement at La Prairie in the same year, and afterward pursued a body of Iroquois and recaptured several French prisoners.  He then went to Quebec and received the thanks of Frontenac, as well as numerous presents.  Several tribes offered to make him their chief, but he replied that he would never leave Ononthio (Frontenac), for whom he seems to have felt a sincere affection.  He retired among the Christian Iroquois of the mountain in 1692, but made frequent excursions among the Cayugas and other tribes in the interest of the French, persuading the Cayugas to release their French prisoners, and keeping them firm in their allegiance.  He visited Quebec in 1697, and fell sick after his arrival.  He was a sincere Christian, and when the missionary who attended him spoke of the crucifixion, it is said that he cried out: “Why was I not there?  I would have prevented them from so treating my God.”  He was buried with pomp.  Frontenac regretted him all the more that he relied on him principally for bringing about a treaty with the Iroquois. <SEP>  The anthology contains an introduction entitled "Biographical Sketch" in which fellow transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson provides a description of Thoreau. Excursions is an 1863 anthology of several essays by American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.