Thursday 21 May 2009

"The Mystery of Printing and the Magnet"

I've recently discovered a really excellent blog called Early Modern Whale, from Royal Holloway lecturer Dr Roy Booth. Dr Booth blogs about 17th century English texts, and he has a habit of ferreting out sources which make the period sound really quite surreal.

(Some examples:
A 1674 pamphlet graphically arguing that coffee causes men to become impotent and 'Frenchified'

A wonderfully petty-sounding squabble between two professional astrologers

A pamphlet relating the "true discourse" on one Stubbe Peeter, alleged werewolf and demonologist

More astrology plus, in the comments, the following gem:

"'Arise Evans had a fungous nose, and said, it was revealed to him, that the King's hand would cure him, and at the first coming of King Charles II into St. James's Park, he kissed the King's hand, and rubbed his nose with it; which disturbed the King, but cured him'." -John Aubrey)

But since I've been looking at missionary history lately, I'm more specifically interested in this passage. This is from A Collection of letters and poems: written by several persons of honour and learning, upon divers important subjects, to the late Duke and Dutchess of Newcastle (published 1678). Specifically, it's from a letter which Joseph Granvill wrote to the Duchess as part of an attempt to persuade her of the reality of witchcraft. In response to the Duchess' counterargument that witches go unmentioned in the New Testament, Granvill replies:

"Negative Arguments from Scripture use not often to be of any great signification or validity. Our Saviour spake as he had occasion, and the thousandth part of what he said, or what he did, is not recorded, as one Evangelist intimates. He said nothing of those large unknown Tracts of America, gives no intimations of the Existence of that numerous People, much less any instructions about their Conversion. He gives no particular account of the affairs and state of the other World, but only that general one, of the happiness of some, and the misery of others. He makes no discovery of the Magnalia of Art, or Nature, no not of those whereby the propagation of the Gospel might have been much advanced; viz. The Mystery of Printing, and the Magnet. [...] I confess the omission of some of these particulars is pretty strange and unaccountable, and an argument of our Ignorance of the Reasons and Menages of Providence, but I suppose of nothing else"

I'm guessing, though not certain, that the 'mystery of the magnet' refers to the invention of compasses, and hence the means to navigate to the Americas. But I guess I hadn't really considered the difficulty that early missions to the Americas would have faced in trying to adapt Biblical evangelism to their new situation. I wonder whether Granvill ever reached any conclusions about why the gospels had opted to remain silent on the topic.

"Earnest idolators make earnest Christians"?

I've been flicking through William John Townsend's biography of Robert Morrison. The latter was a Protestant missionary to China from 1807-1834, and Townsend's biography of him was written around 1890. Since CSR often stresses the role of doctrine in Christianity, I thought this passage (from p.266-7) was interesting.

"At the same time, women form a very important element of society. Their influence in the household, as in England, counts for a great deal. Having far less knowledge, they are far less under the influence of Confucian ideas, the most conservative ideas in the Empire. Their nature is much more religious than that of the men. The men trifle with their beliefs; the women are in earnest. They are capable of a practical faith, the men much less so. As a rule, the male part of the family are Confucian, the women Buddhists or Taoists. [...]

When the men pretend to worship them [the Chinese pantheon] they only play at it. But the zeal of the women has kept alive the faith in these grotesque and senseless deities, and supplied the impulse which from time to time has reconstructed their broken shrines and renovated their falling habitations. On this account they make much better Christians than the men. The men are satisfied with the cold abstractions and moral maxims of Confucianism, are interested in nothing higher than the earth or wider than the bounds of human life; the women must have something warmer and more emotional- they have deep cravings for the spiritual and the eternal. The men talk about their religion much, but practise [sic] it little; the women feel their religion, and thus practise it. The men can do without worship; the women cannot. Earnest idolators make earnest Christians. The affectations and aspirations which clung around and sanctified imaginary and superstitious beings, transferred to a living Christ and a god of eternal love, are the impulse to a new and holy life. Indifferent heathens make indifferent Christians. The habits of insincerity and practical scepticism which through a lifetime have been associated with a false faith are too often, on their conversion, retained in connection with the true.

Until woman, as the ruling power in the home and the influential factor in moulding the successive generations of China, is grasped and sanctified by the spirit of Christ, the work of the missionary will be largely in vain; but as in other great onward Christian movements, let the women be drawn into the Church, and the conquest of Empire will be chiefly accomplished."

Wednesday 13 May 2009

Ramblings about the role of knowledge in doctrinal religions

So I was talking to Bunny the housemate the other day about some of the CSR (cognitive science of religion) stuff I've been reading lately. Bunny is originally from Hong Kong, and we were talking about Robert F. Campany's essay 'Xunzi and Durkheim as Theorists of Ritual Practice'. Campany describes the views on ritual held by the Chinese philosopher Xunzi (a Confucianist or group of Confucianists from sometime around the 3rd century BCE). Xunzi apparently believed that ritual was a very important part of every day life, but disagreed with the opinion (mainstream within his own society) that it was important primarily because it appeased gods, spirits, ancestors and other supernatural beings. Xunzi argued that although his society's rituals contained numerous appeals to supernatural beings, their main purpose was not to appease these beings but to help cultivate and civilise the human participants, by providing a "model" for behaviour (see p.207, 211).

Anyway, we were talking about this, and Bunny mentioned something I thought was interesting: as far as she knows, the concept of "forbidden knowledge" doesn't really exist within traditional Chinese culture. She thinks that in general, the assumption seems to be that more knowledge can only be a good thing (both in the sense that it provides opportunities to better your material position, e.g. by passing exams to get a better job, and also in the sense that it potentially brings you closer to spiritual enlightenment in the Buddhist sense, or Taoist immortality).

Whereas in Western culture, the idea of "forbidden knowledge", "that which man was not meant to know", etc, seems to be pretty pervasive. I don't know if there's actually a continuous line of intellectual descent between the idea as it currently exists and, say, the Tree of Knowledge in the original Genesis account, but it seems like you could plausibly argue at least for continuity in medieval attitudes towards demonology and the more recent image of the "mad scientist" (both being examples of someone who's believed to so hungry for knowledge that they're willing to sacrifice their humanity to get at it).

More recently we've had Lovecraft, and the general idea that progress in ANY field of knowledge will inevitably lead to you learning something terrible which you'll be unable to live with comfortably (obviously Lovecraft was a fiction writer rather than a philosopher or theologian, but his ideas do seem to have resonated with a fair number of people). So while Western culture also frequently endorses the idea that more knowledge is a good thing (e.g. by encouraging greater and greater numbers of people to pursue tertiary education), there are definite contexts in which people become uncomfortable with that idea.

We were wondering whether the roots of this distinction might lie in the Christian idea that your relationship with God is paramount, and everything else is secondary (so that knowledge is good if it brings you closer to God, bad if it threatens to distract you or lead you astray). This would seem to be opposed to the traditional Chinese concept of deities who make certain demands on their followers, but don't seem to assume that they will or should be the immediate focus of anyone's attention 24/7. You further seem to have the concept that spiritual development based purely on knowledge is possible, rather than having a personal connection to a specific being be a necessity for the process.

I hasten to add that these perceived distinctions are highly speculative, and so are probably Just So Stories- I know virtually nothing about Chinese culture. I guess the relevant question is: can anyone here think of a Chinese story or belief system which seems to draw on the concept of "forbidden knowledge"? And if so, does that seem to be a borrowing from Western culture, or something that Chinese culture has traditionally found intuitive?

Thursday 16 April 2009

Frederica Mathewes-Green on Eastern Orthodoxy

I've just added Frederica Mathewes-Green to the 'Food for Thought' list on the right sidebar. It's a list I've set up for people who I mostly don't have an awful lot in common with, but who I think are engaging and good at articulating how/why they reached their current opinions. Mathewes-Green is a writer, public speaker, pro-life activist and a convert to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. She doesn't have any ethnic heritage from the communities we tend to associate with Eastern Orthodoxy (Greece, Russia, etc)- she was originally a mostly-agnostic person who went through a period of identifying as Hindu. Then she and her husband converted to Christianity, and she accompanied him to seminary and helped him establish himself as an Episcopalian pastor. Eventually she and her husband got disillusioned with Protestantism, and so they both converted to Eastern Orthodoxy and established their own church in Baltimore (where he's pastor and she's Khouria, or Mother of the church).

Here are some quotes from her essays which I thought were interesting:

Excerpted from her book At the Corner of East and Now:

"Though westerners tend to think of Protestant and Roman Catholic as the two opposite poles of Christian faith, in eastern eyes this quarreling mother and daughter bear a strong family resemblance. The two circle around questions of common obsession, questions which often do not arise in the east: works versus faith, scripture versus tradition, papacy versus individualism. This very context of habitual argument creates a climate of nitpicking, and every theological topic that can be defined, and some which are beyond definition, gets scrutinized in turn. As a result, the east sees in the west an unhelpful tendency to plow up the roots of mystery."

"Since there is no locus of power where the [Eastern Orthodox] faith may be tailored to fit current fashion, it doesn’t change in any significant way–not over long centuries nor across great geographical distances. The faith of the first century is the faith of Orthodox today. When we meet in this little stone church outside Baltimore, we celebrate a liturgy that is for the most part over fifteen hundred years old. We join in prayers that are being said in dozens of languages by Orthodox all over the world, prayers unchanged for dozens of generations."

"Also, he [her husband] began to believe that the compromising flaw lay at the very heart of Anglicanism. The beloved doctrine of “comprehensiveness” suggested, “Let’s share the same prayers, the same words about the faith, but they can mean different things to you than to me.” Not a common faith, but common words about the faith— mere flimsy words. A church at peace can survive this way; a church attacked by wheedling heresies must tumble into accommodation reducing orthodoxy to shreds."

"The constant experience of doctrinal disagreements contributed to a Western tendency to make the Christian experience more about ideas than about heart-driven living faith, more what you think than what you do; more assensus than fiducia, more ideas about God than surrender to him. The Orthodox Church, escaping this sort of discord, could admire a butterfly without having to pin its head to a board. [...] For example, rather than over-defining Jesus’ presence in the Eucharist, or tossing out the concept entirely, Orthodox are content to say that the bread and wine become his body and blood simply because they “change.”"

From her book Facing East:

"A kaleidoscope of images flashes through my mind. The textures, the scents, the music of the liturgy, a continuous song of worship that lifts me every week. The Great Fast of Lent, a discipline far more demanding than I’d ever faced in my Christian walk. Kneeling on Holy and Great Thursday and listening to the hammer blows resound as my husband nailed the icon of Jesus’ corpus to the cross; seeing my daughter’s shoulders shake with sobbing. Easter morning giddiness and champagne at sunrise."

I thought this was quite interesting in terms of the CSR debate over what role doctrine plays in Christianity. I don't know much about Eastern Orthodoxy- maybe I should go look up some stuff.

Monday 30 March 2009

Slumdog Millionaire

As always with films, I'm a bit late to the party, but I can highly recommend Slumdog Millionaire. I know virtually nothing about actual Indian slums, but it at least feels like it strikes a very good balance between sanitising poverty and dehumanising the protagonists. It's also one of those films I love because it feels like every shot is crammed with fascinating bits of setting detail (Apocalypto is still the best example I've seen of this, but Slumdog does pretty well and arguably edges ahead on the versimilitude front, due to being filmed on location rather than in constructed sets).

Johnathan Foreman has an interesting article on it in Standpoint magazine. I was especially intrigued by this:

"Krishna and his British partner at Reality Tours run a school in Dharavi. He told me that the children liked Slumdog Millionaire - they saw the Hindi version - but hated the name "slumdog", as do slumdweller organisations. This is understandable. The term was invented by the screenwriter, Simon Beaufoy, who seems to have ignorantly assumed that it would be believable as a derogatory but semi-affectionate nickname for young slumdwellers. But even "slumrat" might have been less offensive. You won't ever hear the word "dog" used affectionately in India. Unlike monkeys, elephants and of course cows, dogs have no religious significance and are disliked by both Muslims and Hindus. There are stray dogs everywhere you look in most Indian cities; though rarely dangerous, they are feared and persecuted. In 2007 the city of Bangalore sponsored the mass killing of tens of thousands of them."


Wikipedia elaborates:

"Tapeshwar Vishwakarma, a representative of a slum-dwellers' welfare group, filed a defamation lawsuit against the film's music composer A.R. Rahman and actor Anil Kapoor, alleging that grim depiction of slum dwellers violated their human rights. Vishwakarma's filing argued that the very title of the movie is derogatory, and he was particularly displeased that Indians associated with the film did not object to the use of word "slumdog." Nicholas Almeida, a social activist working in Mumbai, organized a protest against the film on the grounds that it intentionally exploited the poor for the purposes of profit, also arguing that the title Slumdog Millionaire is offensive, demeaning, and insulting to their dignity. The protesters were Mumbai slum dwellers who objected to the film's title and held up signs reading: "I am not a dog."

Wednesday 25 March 2009

Reading Barth's 'The Guru and the Conjurer'

Barth, Fredrik, 1990, 'The Guru and the Conjurer: transactions in knowledge and the shaping of culture in Southeast Asia and Melanesia', Man, 25, 4, pp.640-653

So, cards on the table: I really like this essay, and I agree with a lot of the things Barth says here. But the more I think about this topic, the more I think that the issues Barth brings up here need to be addressed in a much more thorough and rigorous way. This isn't a criticism of Barth per se- I think this essay's meant to be more about asking the first few speculative questions, so while there are areas where he's not as clear as I'd like, I don't think it's an insult to say that these ideas need to be taken up and developed further. One of the people who's done a lot to try to develop these ideas is Harvey Whitehouse. I have some disagreements with Whitehouse's approach, so I'm going to try to express those in a later post, but I think it's worth starting off by going and looking at the person who kickstarted an important part of the debate.

Barth, unlike most social anthropologists, has done fieldwork in several different countries. In this essay, he tries to articulate some of the differences between his fieldwork with the Baktaman of Papua New Guinea vs his experience of Bali and Bhutan. He proposes that some of the differences between these societies comes from the fact that the transmission of religious knowledge is based around very different sets of assumptions. He proposes that the mode of transmission used in Bali and Bhutan could be referred to as the 'Guru' mode, whereas that found among the Baktaman is the 'Conjurer' mode.

The basic difference between the two modes hinges on different strategies of cultural transmission. In the Guru system, people gain prestige by continuously broadcasting religious information (theology, religious history, discourses on ethics, etc) in a verbal form to anyone willing to listen. You see this happening in religions like Islam, Buddhism and Christianity.

By contrast, in the Conjurer system, people gain prestige by having a reputation for knowing many great secrets. This means that, rather than publically broadcast their knowledge, religious experts will only impart their wisdom slowly to a selected few (who are often first required to undergo some sort of taxing initiation ritual in order to prove their worth). This knowledge is often not conveyed in a verbal format, but via ritual, or visual symbols.

These differences have consequences for the way the religion develops. As Gurus compete with each other for prestige, they strive to portray themselves as erudite, learned and logically consistent. This leads to the kind of material that we usually think of when we use the word 'theology': complicated verbal arguments about the relationships between text, or how to apply a particular text to a specific situation. By contrast, a Conjurer may not have spent a great deal of time working out the minutiae of their beliefs about the divine, and if they have then they may not share this with anyone else. There's a good chance that they haven't ever articulated their beliefs in a specifically verbal way, rather than in terms of the associations between specific symbols (like, say, totem animals). This leads to a religious system which doesn't look much like how Western people generally expect it to.

Another upshot of this is that Gurus are much better at invading* populations of Conjurers than vice versa. This is because Gurus have gotten into the mindset whereby they see it as a good thing for them to spread their knowledge to as many people as possible, therefore it's relatively easy to persuade them to start travelling around and infecting* new populations. Also, broadcasting verbal information is a pretty efficient way of reaching a large number of people. By contrast, if a Conjurer for some reason decided that they wanted to convert a new population to their belief system, then any initiation requirements would make it a much slower process with a higher degree of initial commitment required from converts. Also, the Conjurer would probably struggle to convey the largely non-verbal elements of this religion to people who came from a different cultural context. As a result, religions like Islam, Buddhism and Christianity have spread around the world, whereas religions like the Baktaman initiation system have stayed very local.

I think this is a really interesting idea, particulary because if it's true then it has big implications for ethnography. Since Westerners frequently assume that absence of verbal information means absence of information, period, this theory implies that in cultures like the Baktaman ethnographers are frequently going to miss what's going on with the local religious system.

It's also interesting in terms of what it implies for religious history. I'm wondering whether anyone's tried making an AI model of something similar to see if it seems to capture the sort of behaviour you see in real life conversion situations.

One thing I would have liked to see Barth clarify, though: he never specifies what sort of scale he sees most individual Gurus and Conjurers as working on. In his initial examples of Gurus (p.642), he seems to be describing people who focused on preaching to entire communities whenever they got the chance. But elsewhere (e.g. p.643) he describes Gurus as "mystifying" things in order to make his students feel more dependent on him, and to "exclude outsiders from the circle of disciples". The latter strategy doesn't sound like a particularly good way to convert new populations. I'm wondering whether Barth is using the term 'disciples' to refer specifically to the closest students of a guru who also preaches to the masses (as was the case with Jesus), or whether he's describing two strategies which are distinct from a transmission perspective but may be used interchangeably by members of one culture depending on the situation. Either way, I think it would help if he'd clarified what sort of numbers we're talking about in terms of the number of 'disciples' a Guru is likely to have, versus the number of 'initiates' per Conjurer. I expect Barth elaborates on the latter in one of his books, but it would have been helpful to get some idea of what sort of approximate transmission rates we're talking about.


My other criticism is that the paper's a bit androcentric- by which I mean: I think it's fine to decide that you want to focus exclusively on the ways in which men in some cultures transmit information (particularly if you're talking about religious transmission in a context where women don't usually become preachers/ ritualists/ etc), but I think you ought to make a point of saying explicitly that this is your focus. Otherwise you risk giving the impression that when you talk generically about 'people', you actually mean 'men'. It's possible, of course, that the cultures he's referring to have both male and female Conjurers and Gurus, in which case I've jumped the gun, but that's not the impression I've gotten from my (admittedly non-specialist) reading.



*When I say 'invading' or 'infecting', I'm stealing the terms from population genetics, where they're used to talk about how a genetic variant arises in one population and then spreads to another one. I'm not intending to imply that an 'invasion' or 'infection' of Gurus is necessarily going to be military, unfriendly or damaging.

Monday 23 March 2009

Reading List: Richard Hamilton's 'The Social Misconstruction of Reality'

“Men will fight for superstition as quickly as for the living truth – even more so, since superstition is intangible, you can't get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.”

-Hypatia, quoted p.43 of Hypatia: mathematician, inventor and philosopher.


It's worth mentioning that Hypatia's concept of 'truth' probably diverges quite a bit from mine, what with the fact that she lived hundreds of years ago and seems to have been a pretty hardcore Platonist. Having said that, I think this quote is a decent suggestion for why hypothesis-testing doesn't seem to have caught on in the social sciences (not that I'm biased or anything...)

There's a book which I want to get my hands on at the moment called The Social Misconstruction of Reality, by Richard F. Hamilton (who I'm guessing is probably a different Richard Hamilton to this one, although I prefer to believe that he isn't, because that allows me to maintain the mental image of him coming back from the dead to lecture us all on epistemology before disappearing away on his government-funded UFO).

I should stress that I haven't read The Social Misconstruction of Reality (or anything else by Richard 'not really the retired agent in Men In Black' Hamilton), so for all I know I might violently disagree with him if I actually read it, but from review articles written by other people, it sounds like he's arguing that in the social sciences and humanities there's sometimes a tendency for the following to happen:

  1. someone proposes a tentative hypothesis for some social phenomenon, without flagging up the fact that it's tentative and doesn't yet have much evidence to support it.
  2. the hypothesis sounds plausible and so a lot of academics endorse the idea
  3. the idea becomes an 'established fact'
  4. someone subsequently comes up with evidence refuting the hypothesis
  5. everyone ignores this evidence because it clearly contradicts established facts.

Obviously this is something which potentially could happen in any academic field if people are willing to fudge the facts to make them fit their theories (and people are inevitably going to do this to some extent, cf Lakatos). But it sounds like Hamilton's arguing that it's more of a problem in the social sciences and humanities than in the natural sciences (presumably due to the fact that hypothesis-testing is at least a theoretical goal for most natural scientists, whereas it's not for most other academics). Hamilton focuses on three theories which he thinks have been particularly resistant to contradictory evidence. These are:

  • the 'Protestant work ethic' explanation for capitalism
  • the idea that Hitler's rise to power in Germany was largely due to the support of the lower middle class
  • Foucault's theory (as proposed in Discipline and Punish) that the transition from corporal punishment to prison sentences in the West was not a sign that the state was becoming more humane. Rather, it was a symptom of a shift from big obvious expressions of state power (like public maimings) to more subtle and insidious methods of control based largely around intense surveillance of civilian populations.
Interestingly (because I'm pretty sure they're coming at this from pretty different angles) Hamilton seems to have reached a similar conclusion to The Kugelmass Episodes when they say:

"For dedicated opponents of psychoanalysis, and the legacy of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, it is simply impossible for a psychoanalytic argument to be valid: the writer is spinning his wheels, and that is all. No matter how elegantly scientific citations, anecdotes, literary examples, and so on are woven together, the premise is wrong. In many cases, the very elegance and density of a piece becomes a reason to suspect that the author has filtered out reality and built castles in the air.

[...] As long as false premises create opportunities for displays of intelligence, and as long as those displays are worth money, we will never be rid of the falsehoods themselves: we’re just too grateful for them. That’s why liberalism that prides itself on the simple desire for intelligence accomplishes nothing besides staged debates with conservatives. It’s also why “anti-philosophers” turn into philosophers who mix critiques of Kant with paeans to his intelligence."

So now I need to go chase up the critique of Weber, at least (since that's the most directly relevant to my field).

Friday 13 March 2009

Review of 'King Leopold's Ghost' by Adam Hochschild

(2006 [1998], London: Pan Macmillan)

There are a lot of really interesting things about King Leopold's Ghost (no, really, there are. Go read it now and you'll see. I don't mind; I'll wait here until you're done). But I think that maybe the message which I'm getting most strongly from the story is that human outrage is a really surprisingly unpredictable and inconstant thing. I don't know if that's the message which Hochschild intended people to take away from the book, but I think it's one worth discussing here.

Here's a quick summary of the history that unfolds in the book. The people who live in the area around the Congo river mouth were first encountered by Europeans in the 15th century. The Portuguese introduced them to Christianity, at the same time that they started taking huge numbers of them captive so that they could be sold into slavery in the Americas (I may go back to this in another post, because it's an interesting story). However, it was not until the 19th century that Europeans started seriously exploring inland. By engaging in a series of impressively complex political machinations, King Leopold II of Belgium was able to secure control of a very large stretch of land around the Congo river. Leopold gained a reputation for being a humanitarian who was sinking huge amounts of his own personal wealth into 'civilising' the Congo and ensuring that its native inhabitants were protected from the predations of Arab slave traders.

Flash forward to roughly 1897. A man named Edmund Dene Morel is working for a Liverpool shipping company named Elder Dempster. By the standards of Victorian society, Morel isn't particularly educated or well-off, but he's fluently bilingual (his father was French). His job therefore involves helping to supervise the Belgian end of Elder Dempster's operations. This territory is quite important to Elder Dempster, since they've managed to get ahold of a lucrative monopoly on cargo between Belgium and the Congo. Morel makes regular trips to Antwerp and Brussels to keep an eye on things.

Morel starts to notice something weird. Firstly, Elder Dempster's statistics on all the cargo carried between Belgium and the Congo do not match the trade statistics made public by the 'Congo Free State'.

Secondly, the Secretary of State for the Congo seems to get extremely twitchy when someone offhandedly mentions to the Press that cargo going to the Congo includes guns and ammunition.

Thirdly, when you look at the cargo manifests, the Congo Free State is not just receiving occasional shipments of arms- it's receiving virtually nothing else. And in return, it's getting back shipments of rubber and ivory, in amounts worth far more than the profits officially declared by the Congo Free State. But this doesn't make sense- if Belgium was trading with the Congo Free State, then surely they'd have to ship out goods to trade with? Unless the Congo Free State doesn't pay its labourers anything... at which point, the regular shipments of arms start looking a lot more ominous.

So Morel investigated further, and it turned out that King Leopold had a lot more control over the 'Free State' than he was admitting (he was also making a lot more profit from it than he cared to admit to his creditors or the Belgian government). Large numbers of Congolese people were effectively getting worked to death. You could call it a type of slavery, except that in my mental image of 'slavery' the slaves generally at least get fed by the slavemasters*. This stands in contrast to the system of rubber extraction in the Belgian Congo, whereby villages were given quotas of rubber they had to supply before a certain date. To ensure that the quotas were fulfilled, the European officials often took the local women hostage (holding them captive in stockades where food was scarce and the women were frequently raped). Since the rubber quotas were set high enough to require the male population to work more or less constantly, this left hardly anyone free to gather food to sustain the village (especially since the Europeans were frequently also looting all the domestic animals as soon as they arrived). If people tried to resist, they could be beaten with a chicotte (a whip made from hippo hide), or shot en masse until local people got the message. Large numbers of people were also mutilated, especially by having their hands cut off. (p.161-5).

Hochschild notes that it's very difficult to estimate the precise number of deaths resulting from this. But the sources he quotes seem pretty confident that the population of the Congo dropped by about 50% between 1880 and 1920. If the 1924 census is accurate, this would indicate a death toll of approximately ten million people (p.253).

Morel blew the whistle to Elder Dempster, but the company proved unsurprisingly reluctant to publicise the fact that their valuable and respected client was committing mass murder. Morel received offers from various people hoping to pay him to keep his mouth shut. Despite the fact that he had a family to support and could really have used the money, Morel refused the bribes, quit his job and dedicated his life to campaigning on behalf of the Congolese. Morel was not the first or the only person to conclude that something very, very wrong was going on in the Congo (various people, most of them missionaries, had raised questions already), but he was an extremely skilled campaigner who was able to get the issue placed on the public agenda in a way which forced formerly-apathetic politicians to make a decision about whether they wanted to officially endorse Leopold's behaviour or not. The result was a movement that Hochschild calls "the first major international atrocity scandal in the age of the telegraph and the camera" (p.4).

Morel was successful in networking with many people who seemed to have turned up in the Congo and decided quite quickly that the Belgian policies were immoral (even though they were surrounded by people who treated the slavery and death as a matter of course). He was also successful in reaching members of the public who were initially apathetic, and then persuading them to develop a sense of moral outrage over the whole thing. Morel therefore comes across as one of the few historical figures who I'm inclined to admire both in terms of his political ability and in terms of how much we have in common morally-speaking.

Morel ultimately succeeded in turning the Western world against Leopold and his policies. Hochschild could easily have gone off and written the book as a story of the triumph how the Western public's innate sense of injustice triumphed over Leopold's tyrannical greed. But as Hochschild shows, the story's actually a bit more complicated than that. As I say, Morel and many of the other people in the protest movement seem to have concluded fairly quickly that Leopold's policies were unjust and needed to be opposed. This initially seems like a fairly straightforward process, but the picture gets a bit more complicated when we pan out to consider the geopolitical context.

As Hochschild notes, Leopold's policies were by no means unique. Very similar policies were adopted by the colonial rulers of other African countries in areas where the ecosystem was suitable for rubber production. Parts of the French Congo, the German Cameroons and Portuguese Angola all used forced labour for rubber production (in the case of the French Congo, which is best document, there seems to have been a 50% death toll in rubber-producing areas, just as with the Belgian Congo). The major difference seems to have been less that Leopold was unusually tyrannical and more than he controlled more of the rubber territory than anyone else did (p.280).

I don't really want to get into the debate over the definition of 'genocide', but some people would argue that what Leopold did wasn't 'genocide' because it wasn't specifically aimed at wiping out any Congolese ethnic groups (Leopold was pushing to extract the maximum amount of rubber possible from Congolese rubber vines in the window before rubber tree plantations owned by other nations matured and so reduced his market share- so it was in his interests to push for a massively high rate of rubber production in the short tem, even if that meant enormous death tolls. But he wasn't actively aiming to wipe out the Congolese- after all, he needed them as an ongoing source of labour). The outcome was that Leopold wiped out 'only' 50% of Congolese people in rubber-growing areas.

By contrast, when the Herero people of Germany's South West Africa (now Namibia) rebelled against the colonial government in 1904, Germany ordered that "within the German boundaries, every Herero, whether found with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, shall be shot [...] No male prisoners will be taken." This meant that the Herero population within German territory dropped from 80,000 in 1903 to less than 20,000 in 1906. The others had been shot, bayoneted or beaten to death with rifle stocks (to save on bullets), or driven out into the desert to die of thirst (the Germans poisoned the waterholes) (p.282).

There were some protests in Germany, but the international community was silent. This is interesting, given that at this point the anti-Leopold Congo campaign was in full swing. Hoschschild notes: "Morel and other Congo reformers paid so little attention that five years later John Holt, the businessman who was one of Morel's two main financial backers, could ask him, "is it true that the Germans butchered the Hereros- men, women and children? ...I have never heard of this before." Similarly, there was no mass movement to protest American action against Filipinos and Native Americans, or British massacres of Australian Aborigines (p.282).

Morel did attempt to campaign against forced labour in the French Congo, but met with little success. Hochschild argues that this was because Belgium was a minor player in European politics, and so was a safe target- by contrast, Britons were reluctant to criticise France because they could see they would be valuable ally in the shifting conflict of allegiances that would eventually result in WW1 (p.283).

Also, after Leopold II's death, control over the Congo passed to the Belgian government. Reports of specific atrocity incidents (maimings, mass deaths, etc) became much less frequent, but the new taxation system meant that the amount of forced labour being imposed on the Congolese effectively increased, which led to mass famines during WW1 (p.278).

I should clarify that I don't mean this as a personal criticism of Morel- he dedicated decades to the anti-Leopold campaign, and it sounds like during that time he had very little time for anything else (see p.214-6). Also, his public reputation was seriously damaged after he became part of the anti-WW1 movement (although he was not strictly speaking a pacifist: he argued that he would fight if Britain were directly attacked, but could not endorse the conflict in Europe). In 1917 he was arrested and sent to jail for six months, on the basis that he'd violated an obscure law that banned sending antiwar literature to neutral countries. This sentence seems to have pretty much broken his health (p.289-90). Meanwhile, Roger Casement (one of his key allies in the Congo protest movement) became a passionate proponent of Irish republicanism. He went to Germany, attempted to secure German support for an Irish militia, and then was arrested shortly after returning to Ireland via German submarine. He was sent to Pentonville prison and then executed (p.284-7).

So the message here seems to be that mass moral outrage isn't something that 'just happens' in response to an incident- without at least one charismatic and politically-savvy person networking to drum up support for protests, there doesn't seem to be much public reaction. Put like that, it sounds kind of trite and like something which should have been obvious previously, but I don't think I'd ever really considered the issue in exactly this way before.



*To be fair, the stereotypical "chain them up and force them to labour for you directly" type of slavery was also extensively practiced by Europeans in the Congo, e.g. as a source of porters (p.119)

Friday 27 February 2009

Reading: Cherry Leonardi's 'Violence, Sacrifice and Chiefship'

There's been a bit of a delay in posting while I carefully lower my expectations of colonialist morality (I'd thought they were pretty low already, actually, but it seems I was being unduly optimistic). The first reason for this is Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, which I'm about a third of the way through at the moment. So far it's excellent and should probably be mandatory reading for anyone who's the slightest bit interested in European imperialism.

The second reason is Cherry Leonardi's 'Violence, Sacrifice and Chiefship in Central Equatoria, Southern Sudan' (2007, Africa, 77: 4, pp.535-558). Let's kick off with some anecdotes:

"Without any preliminary enquiry, the sheikh was seized and severely beaten, the Officer himself taking a leading part in belabouring the unfortunate man on the head, back or legs, indiscriminately. Having been thus treated he was ordered to show where the game was to be found." (p.544)

When Belgian soldiers arrived in the early 20th century, many local people ran and hid in local caves. Awate, wife of the local rain chief, went out with her child to confront the Belgians. Possibly she believed that a female negotiator would be more likely to be treated peacefully. She was held hostage for a while, but her husband negotiated her release. She went back to her community with a dead child and both hands amputated. It's not clear why the Belgians did this (p.545).

Lasu was a chief from the early twentieth century who is still famous in the area today for his courage and 'stubbornness' (this apparently means his commitment to resisting the demands of the colonial authorities). Leonardi interviewed a Headman about the outcome of one altercation between Lasu and the authorities (although it's not clear what the cause of the disagreement). The Headman reported that "when the French [Belgians] came they were beating Lasu, and they smeared his face with honey and burnt it with fire, but still he persevered." (p.545)

Taking that into consideration- Leonardi's essay is mainly about some modern-day local politics involving the question of what it means to be a chief in Southern Sudan. Chiefs have been criticised by some observers who would prefer a form of local government which is more democratic and/or more sympathetic to values like women's rights (p.538, 553). They've also been criticised on the basis that they're an artefact of colonialism (since the person who colonials decide must be the 'chief of the local natives' is rarely the person who actually held the leading political position before the colonials showed up, and since the chiefs generally strive to pass their office on to their descendants, the upshot is that the lineages which are currently politically powerful are quite different to those who were politically powerful in the time pre-colonial period) (p.536). In addition, many chiefs have played some role in assisting the SPLM (Sudanese People's Liberation Movement) in torturing political opponents (e.g. by allowing their own houses to be used as torture chambers) (p.535, 543).

But, as Leonardi points out, the picture is a bit more complicated than that. The role of chiefs, in general, has been to mediate between ordinary villagers and whichever set of people are currently in charge of Sudanese government (the latter being referred by villagers as the gela- the word used to mean 'white people', but now it also encompasses anyone associated with military, uniforms, offices etc. It sounds like generally it also implies 'urban person', but the rural SPLM guerrillas are referred to as 'the gela of the bush'. See p.540-1).

Basically, the ideal chief is often emically seen as someone who may not be able to make the gela go away, or convince them to stop enforcing hated policies, but who is at least able to reduce the amount of direct contact between the gela and the villagers (and hence reduce the amount of direct violence that the former are able to inflict on the latter). For example, chiefs may offer to personally collect food from villagers for SPLM troops, and then invite local SPLM leaders to dinner at their own house. As one interviewee explained to Leonardi, "if they [SPLM] came to you for food, you quickly collected the food from the people and gave it to them while they are seated with you, because if they entered the village, they would do damages, raping, robbing" (p.542).

But this direct contact with the gela is a double-edged sword for chiefs. On the one hand, it can sometimes bring them privileges, like the ability to take (limited) control of local politics and pass political office on to their sons. On the other hand, chiefs have often been assaulted or even killed by the gela. Also, even if local people agree in an abstract sense that their chief is a necessary buffer between themselves and the gela, they are unlikely to bear massively warm feelings towards the person who interacts with the gela so much, and who's personally responsible for collecting taxes and telling people that their sons have just been conscripted into the gela army (p.543).

This leads to a situation where the person who winds up being chief is often someone who was previously a pretty low-status figure. The pre-colonial political establishment figures were reluctant to sign up for a job which meant risking torture, so the responsibility gets passed on to someone lower-status (p.545). It sounds as though a similar process has been seen with Kenyan Kipsigis chiefs (p.548). Theoretically, this new chief can then establish their own hereditary lineage of political leaders- although in practice, their descendants are often reluctant to accept the job, since they've seen first hand how much danger it puts people in (p.546).

It sounds like at the time when Leonardi was interviewing, the level of violence had dropped down from where it had been a few years previously, and refugees were starting to return to their homes. This led to tension involving people who felt like the current 'chiefs' had served their purpose as a short-term emergency buffer against the SPLM, and so the village could return to being led by the descendants of older ruling lineages (lineages founded by a previous generation of chiefs). Others argued that the current chiefs deserved to keep their positions, since their power had been 'bought in blood'. One elderly woman offered a challenge to anyone who wanted to claim the leadership role for themselves: "Count out your dead people who were slaughtered, through whom the chiefship was obtained! Count your dead ones, your blood poured!" (p.546). Leonardi refers to this as a conflict between "blood descent or blood poured" (p.548) as models of political succession.

(Oh, and while we're on the topic- Omar al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, has just been accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. It sounds like he's unlikely to actually get prosecuted in the near future. He's also a candidate in the presidential election that's been scheduled for this year- planned as Sudan's first democratic election with multiple parties participating for nine years.)

Wednesday 18 February 2009

'The Poison in the Ink Bottle' part 2

Leonardi makes a really nice point here by stressing the fact that knowledge-dissemination is sometimes going to be perceived in a morally negative light. By which I mean: I get the impression that when it comes to magic practiced by colonised populations, the tendency is just to say that "magic = political resistance" (often with an implicit "and resistance to imperial authorities is always something that we as academics should sympathise with" tacked on). I think the 'magic as resistance' viewpoint is an interesting one, but it's an idea that needs to be developed a bit rather than just being the throwaway comment that it sometimes ends up being. In particular, we need to clarify what section of the colonised population is trying to use any particular type of magic to improve their position, and whether this is something which other sections of the colonised population approve of.

Caveat: off the top of my head, I can't think of any specific sources which I would say suffer from this problem, so I may be exaggerating the issue.

Leonardi argues that poisoning during the colonial period was something which may have been emically linked to colonialism (i.e., it sounds like the Kuku people of colonial-era Kajo Kaji may have seen poisonings as somehow being linked or similar to the disruptive practices of the colonial authorities). For example, she notes a 1939 case in which a poisoning attempt seems to have involved writing an Islamic charm on something, then washing the ink back into the ink bottle and painting it onto the body of a sleeping victim (p.44, 47). Leonardi argues that "the colonial economy was thus generating new opportunities for earning wealth, embodied in the new medium of cash, and which required and imparted new kinds of knowledge. The alleged poison in the ink bottle from the police station was a powerful symbol of such knowledge."

Leonardi also thinks that the problems which accompanied colonialism may have been emically interpreted as a type of poisoning. For example, it sounds like human and animal fertility rates may have fallen under colonialism, due to several colonial policies (in particular, the practice of relocating entire indigenous settlements in order to reduce the risk of sleeping sickness- but also other stuff like the economic changes which encouraged individual men to move away from their home settlements, increasing the chances that they would get STDs, etc.) (p.43, 46). In addition, the colonial authorities responded to outbreaks of sleeping sickness and meningitus with medical exams and treatments that were often very painful (e.g. lumbar punctures, or atoxyl injections- the latter carries a risk of blindness and death). Colonial sources from this period report that some members of the indigenous population linked these procedures to poison (p.43). Under these conditions of falling fertility, Leonardi thinks it's interesting that women who refused to inherit their mother's poisoning practices were said to be threatened with sterility (p.46). You could see this as an emic perception that as the community's overall fitness level falls, individual people will become more willing to be ruthless in pursuit of their own fertility (although I'm not sure if there's any data to support that idea).

I'd personally like a bit more information about the extent of our knowledge of emic attitudes from this period (e.g. do we know whether any Kuku explicitly linked the 1937 poisoning case to the idea that the poisoner had been influenced by his participation in the new wage-economy? Obviously there were space constraints on this essay, ) But it's an interesting counterpoint to the assumption that magical techniques must be age-old traditions (or at least represent a sort of resistance to modernity).

Another really interesting point made here by Leonardi is the stress on the fact that knowledge-dissemination is often going to be seen in a morally neutral light. She notes that knowledge "has been shown to be a key resource in older political economies of pre-colonial patronage and survival... [This risks treating] knowledge as a positive resource without exploring its moral ambiguity and the debates over its composition within a community" (p.36).

I'm reminded here of Barth's really great paper on the idea of 'gurus' and 'conjurers' as different models of knowledge acquisition*. He argues that, basically, there are some cultural contexts where knowledgeable people gain prestige by trying to disseminate their knowledge to anyone who will listen. This is the dominant model in the modern West, seen in various forms (like Christian preaching, academia, the mass media, etc). But there are other cultures which have traditionally been dominated by the conjurer model, where knowledgeable people gain prestige by hoarding their knowledge and only doling it out slowly to a select few students (who are often expected to endure difficult initiation rituals). If people from a guru-dominant culture run across people from a conjurer-dominant culture, then we can expect tensions (e.g. anthropologists persuade a local religious specialist to teach them the details of some secret rituals. The ritualist assumes that the anthropologist will automatically see the benefits of keeping this knowledge secret from all except a select few- when in fact, the action which benefits the anthropologist most is actually to run off and publish the ritual in order to demonstrate to their colleagues how learned they are).

From Leonardi's description (and the stuff which Evans-Pritchard wrote about Zande 'secret societies'), it sounds like pre-colonial Sudanese cultures probably leaned closer towards the 'conjurer' end of the scale with regards to poison and magic (but not as close as the New Guinean societies which Barth uses as his archetype of a conjurer-dominant culture). That is, magical knowledge was seen as something secretive which always carried a price, but that price was relatively low (i.e. it was something that people could buy relatively easily, without having to go through years of arduous study or multiple painful initiations- not if I'm remembering Evans-Pritchard right, anyway).

It sounds like this meant that specific poisons and magical techniques were in higher demand when they were known by fewer people. This then creates an incentive for people to import exotic new poisons from foreign cultures (p.37-8).

One question: if people were interested in importing foreign poisons, and believed that the colonial authorities were in some sense 'poisoning' the people of Kajo Kaji, then is it worth asking whether anyone tried to acquire the knowledge of British-style poison for themselves? For example, if British medical procedures were seen as potentially poisonous, did anyone try to appropriate these poisons for use against their enemies? Leonardi does mention that "an overturned fertilizer lorry has rendered one [Sudanese] village notorious for poisoning" (p.35).

A few other random interesting points:
  • The idea of witch hunts as an 'irrational' response to community stress was an emic belief of the colonial officers, as well being as a popular etic theory today (p.43)

  • There are some parallels between the Kuku fear of poisoners and the fear which other communities have experienced over cannibals (which was also present at Kajo Kaji, but not as strong). Leonardi speculates that this is because Kajo Kaji had experienced relatively few problems with slave traders- so their fear was less that people would be abducted and 'eaten', more that their young men would go away to earn a wage and come back with some sort of dangerous knowledge (like new poisons, or like the kind of skills which were in high demand from the colonial authorities and so could be used to displace the authority of people with traditionally high-prestige skillsets, like the rain priests) (p.46).

  • The fact that the secular colonial authorities were unwilling to support the idea of poisonings (for fear of endorsing superstition and thereby causing mass hysteria) may have helped push some Kuku people towards Christianity- on the basis that many missionaries were at least willing to seriously engage with the idea of hidden evil lurking within communities (in the form of Satanic influence) (p.50).


*Barth, Fredrik, 1990, 'The Guru and the Conjurer: transactions in knowledge and the shaping of culture in Southeast Asia and Melanesia', Man, 25, 4, pp.640-653

Thursday 12 February 2009

Reading: 'The Poison in the Ink Bottle' by Cherry Leonardi

Leonardi, Cherry, 2007, 'The Poison in the Ink Bottle: poison cases and the moral economy of knowledge in 1930s Equatoria, Sudan', Journal of Eastern African Studies, 1:1, pp.34-56


This is a really interesting article, but it's a lot to assimilate at once (I think this is probably because it's from the Journal of Eastern African Studies, and so makes the reasonable assumption that people reading it already have a decent grasp of Eastern African history- that probably makes it easier to chunk the rest of the argument).

The article's a response to the body of work surrounding the idea that colonised peoples will often attempt to use magic as a means of political resistance. This is an interesting way to look at the issue, and Leonardi gets a lot of mileage out of it- but she also notes limitations in the way the idea is typically applied, and suggests a new angle we could consider.

Let's start off with Evans-Pritchard's witchcraft vs sorcery framework. Evans-Pritchard (also working in Sudan, though with different ethnic groups and time periods than Leonardi) argued that some cultures draw an important distinction between two kind of magic, which for convenience he labelled 'witchcraft' and 'sorcery'. He defined 'witchcraft' as being basically psychic-style powers which come from within the witch (e.g. the Azande, one of the ethnic groups he studied, held that certain people are born with a special organ inside them, and this gives them the ability to curse people). Conversely, he defined 'sorcery' as magical techniques which involve using tools or substances external to the individual (as with traditions like alchemy and herbalism). These definitions are an endless source of frustration to those of us sad people who grew up on stuff like Pratchett and Dungeons and Dragons (which define 'sorcery' as something very much internal to the individual and 'witchcraft' as something which usually benefits from external tools); but as academic terms they're a useful starting point.

Obviously, as with any other binary dichotomy in the social sciences, it's going to be more complicated than that in practice. For example, in Kajo Kaji (the part of Sudan Leonardi studied), people don't seem to have been very worried about Azande-style witchcraft (i.e., the idea that if someone feels resentful enough towards you, they can somehow cause you to suffer from bad luck even if they don't consciously choose to hurt you). Instead, they were concerned about poisoners: people who take some dangerous external substance and apply it to someone else's food or skin in order to kill them.

So, on the face of things, this seems to be a pretty straightforward case of 'sorcery'. But the waters are muddied by the fact that the local Kuku people apparently believed that the propensity to poison is to some extent inborn or fixed- that is, certain individuals or families just have a sort of inbuilt tendency to try to poison people. Such people were thought to be mostly women- so, while men were sometimes also accused of poisoning, it was believed "that certain women have, and pass on to their daughters, a propensity to poison which is inborn, involuntary and indiscriminate". Such women, however, were believed to require access to means and opportunity in order to satisfy this inbuilt tendency- one British DC reports that Kuku women learned to poison after hearing "tales about the Relli, a tribe away to the south,notorious for their poisonous sorceries" (p.37). Other reports state that knowledge of the art of nyanya poisoning was passed from mother to daughter, "with the threat that if a daughter refused to practise she would become infertile" (p.45).

This is interesting, and I'm wondering how this set of beliefs was perceived by the British (given that we're concerned with the 1930s, and so the idea that certain families or ethnic groups just had an inborn tendency towards malice was kind of a hot topic at the time). Leonardi reports that reports written by the colonisers "largely accepted that women at least intended to poison", even if they were sceptical that local poisoning techniques really worked (p.37). Leonardi goes on to say that this attitude "is unsurprising in the context of the belief among officials that native women were ‘whores at heart’ [...] Female poisoners were reported to poison only the ‘menfolk’, using this threat in the ‘battle of the sexes’. Officials puzzled by their apparent willingness to confess to poisoning recognised that, ‘the power wielded by a reputed poisoner is a bait she cannot resist’." (p.42)

Kuku poisoning cases are an ambiguous category in another way too- while they seem to fill pretty similar social niches as 'sorcery' (and to some extent 'witchcraft' as well), they're not always an overtly 'magical' thing. This made it difficult for the colonial legal system to work out how to deal with them. In the West, we're used to drawing the distinction between 'real' poisons (which can be recognised via forensic analysis) and 'magical' substances (which are said to harm people by means outside any known scientific principle). The legal system is very interested in accusations involving the former, not interested at all in accusations involving the latter. This distinction doesn't seem to have existed in traditional Kuku cultures. This created ambiguity over the role of the colonial courts.

Lots more stuff going on here, so I think I'll shunt responsibility onto my future self. Tune in for part 2!

Wednesday 11 February 2009

Reading: 'Mao: the Unknown Story'

So I've managed to snag a copy of Mao: the Unknown Story (Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, 2005, London: Random House) from some very nice people who are allegedly trying to downsize their library. It's an 800-page monster, so I'm chipping away at it quite slowly right now. First impressions of Part 1: pretty good. Most of it feels meticulously researched, drawing on a really wide range of sources (it did take a decade to write, so that seems reasonable). It does a good job of highlighting areas where the evidence they've uncovered seems to deviate significantly from the official Chinese Communist Party version. Given that there do seem to be a significant number of Maoists around in the world today, I'd like to think that this book would give some of them food for thought (although in practice, I doubt that many of the pro-Communist people in South Asia or Peru are likely to have access to a copy in a relevant language).

One concern I have at the moment is that whenever the author's are analysing Mao's own opinions on anything, they always seem to leap to the interpretation which shows him in the worst possible light (I realise that this may sound like a bit of a weird statement given that we're talking about the guy who may have broken the record for "greatest number of own citizens dead during peacetime"). My take on this is that if we're going to properly engage with Mao's regime then it makes sense to consider the possibility that he had some positive traits (I'm not going to say 'redeeming traits' here, because I don't think that 'killed millions of people' is something one can really consider a personality trait on the same scale as 'was nice to his secretary and liked dogs a lot'. But I do think that it makes sense for a biography of Hitler to consider both of these things- I think the film 'Downfall'/'Der Untergang' does this quite well).

An example of this in the first few chapters is Mao's attitude towards violence. From what Chang and Halliday say, Mao was initially a relatively moderate political activist (as in, when fellow members of the nascent Chinese Communist Party (CCP) suggested that they should try to spark open conflict between peasants and landlords, Mao argued against this. He's quoted here (p.37) as saying that when this approach had been tried in other parts of China, the landlords had quickly re-established control and banned the local Communist organisations, leading the local peasantry to conclude that Communism was good for nothing but stirring up pointless trouble. He's also reported to have argued that "there is nothing to be done among the poor peasants and it is necessary to establish ties with landowners and gentry" (this is a paraphrase of Mao's views, as quoted from a primary source written by another Communist). This attitude got him into a certain amount of trouble with the CCP's Russian financial backers, since it was counter to Soviet policy (p.39).

However, Mao's position seems to have suddenly shifted in early 1927, when he went on a brief trip to the Hunan countryside, where he met grassroots peasant activists who had begun publically assaulting and humiliating local landowners and gentry (sometimes going as far as beating them to death). At this point (as Mao himself later acknowledged), his attitude changed dramatically- he said that witnessing the violence made him feel "a kind of ecstasy never experienced before... It is wonderful!" When he was asked what should be done over the fact that people had been killed, his response was "one or two beaten to death, no big deal." (p.41) When he returned from the countryside, he was active in encouraging rural agitators to adopt violent tactics (the teaching text he used, which he may well have written himself, suggested slicing people's ankle tendons or cutting their ears off if they were "stubborn"). This pleased the Soviets but angered some of the leading Chinese Communists (p.43).

Chang and Halliday's interpretation of this is as follows:


"What really happened was that Mao discovered in himself a love for bloodthirsty thuggery. This gut enjoyment, which verged on sadism, meshed with, but preceded, his affinity for Leninist violence. Mao did not come to violence via theory. The propensity sprang from his character, and was to have a profound impact on his future methods of rule." (p.41)

There's a similar implication in Chang and Halliday's explanation for why Mao chose to stick with the CCP when the violent crackdown against Chinese Communism began in earnest. They note that Mao himself was on the list of wanted criminals, but also point out that Mao had close contacts in the Nationalist party, who were at that point rising in power and distancing themselves from Communism- he could theoretically have jumped ship. So what explanation do they offer for this risky choice?


"Quite apart from all this, to stay with Wang [Nationalist leader and Mao's mentor]would mean having to become a moderate, and respect social order. Mao was not prepared to do this, not after he had discovered his fondness for brutality in rural Hunan." (p.47)

I should start by saying that the authors know vastly more about Mao than I do, so maybe they're onto something here. There's also a chance that I'm just acting on an interpretive tic peculiar to anthropologists ('if someone attributes something to an individual personality quirk, twitch violently and immediately insist that it must actually be a product of their cultural context'). But I'm not terribly happy with the automatic assumption that if someone expresses approval for political violence, then this is likely to be an expression of their inherent sadism, rather than anything to do with their sociopolitical context.

I think Chang and Halliday would argue that Mao's support for violence was definitely not motivated by any desire to improve the lot of the peasantry or Chinese society in general. They repeatedly argue that Mao was indifferent to the position of Chinese peasants. However, at least some of the stuff that they cite in support of this seems to be equally easy to read as saying that Mao wasn't very good at mimicking the style of peasant-related propaganda which was then popular in the USSR (e.g. see p.39, 43). Some of the other stuff they cite to support this involves the argument that Mao later fabricated a story about meeting the leader of a local peasant rebellion, and that as a young man he doesn't seem to have expressed any particular sympathy for the peasant situation (instead arguing that it was relatively easy for peasants to become well-off, and so intellectuals had it harder). In addition, there doesn't seem to be any evidence that he dwelled on or thought about any of the tragedies affecting his local peasantry (e.g. the severe famine which hit Changsha when he was living there in 1921) (p.9). He also doesn't seem to have shown any particular enthusiasm for his early roles in the CCP (running a Communist bookshop and organising labour unions- he was apparently so incompetent at the latter that he failed to get invited to the Second Party Congress) (p.20, 29, 31).

This certainly doesn't sound like my normal mental image of someone so driven by their hardcore commitment to a specific ideology. But I'm not sure that I'm convinced by the argument that Mao stayed committed to the CCP because his experience in Hunan had awakened a kind of latent sadism in him. This is partly because 'sadism' is a bit of a vague word which seems like it might be descriptive rather than predictive. By which I mean: if they're just saying "Mao enjoyed watching people getting beaten up in Hunan because he was a sadist", then does this mean anything more than just: "Mao enjoyed watching others' pain because he's the sort of person who enjoys watching others' pain"?

Chang and Halliday make the interesting point (p.42) that the incident where Mao reassured the Hunan rebels that a few deaths were "no big deal" was probably the first time when Mao had literally held someone else's life in his hands. This is one of the areas where I wish the book had a bit more sociohistorical context (yes, I know it's already 800 pages long and I should probably come back and be picky after *I've* finished a ten-year research project- but I think it would have been more convenient for me personally if they'd split Mao's life into two or more parts and then published a series of books with more fleshed-out context). Specifically, I'm now wondering: what sort of general attitude did this part of China have towards violence at this point? E.g. did Mao grow up in the sort of place where it was relatively normal for people to beat or execute criminals in a public place? I have no idea. But that seems like a relevant bit of information if we're trying to think of what sorts of jobs a hypothetical latent sadist would be attracted to (and whether 'CCP member' would be likely to be at the top of the list).

Another thing which I'm still uncertain about: from what Chang and Halliday say, both the CCP and the Nationalists had member bases with mixed opinions about the role of violence in politics. Chang and Halliday seem to be arguing that when the anti-Communist crackdown started, Mao weighed up the options and decided that although the CCP was currently on the losing side, it was the longterm better option for someone who wanted the power to order beatings and executions. But at this point the Nationalists were increasing in power, and even if Wang was relatively moderate as far as executions and beatings went, they were still attempting a military uprising. It feels to me as though that sort of thing would be quite attractive to a hypothetical sadist. Or at least, more attractive than the idea of being a wanted man tied to a party which was tiny in relation to the Nationalists, doesn't seem to have had any immediate prospects of victory at this point, and also seems to have contained a significant number of influential people who were opposed to the idea of political violence.

Probably I'm making some sort of really basic mistake in my armchair analysis of the situation- but it would have been interesting to see Chang and Halliday go into more detail over this sort of stuff. I'll have to report back if it comes up later in the book.

Another random interesting thing:

"Anyone could be arrested, and killed, simply on the charge of being a Communist. Many died proclaiming their faith, some shouting slogans, others singing the 'Internationale'." (p.47)

For some reason, this image feels very similar to the idea of Christian martyrdom (and martyrdom in some other creedal faiths, no doubt). I wonder whether anyone has looked at the old doctrine vs praxis debate in the context of supposedly secular ideologies? Especially in relation to the idea that doctrinal religion tends to be associated with exposure to one of a relatively small number of cultural centres (the West being one of them).

Friday 6 February 2009

Reading: 'The Material Roots of Rastafarian Marijuana Symbolism'

(by Akeia A. Benard, 2007, History and Anthropology, 18:1, pp.89-99)

Short but interesting article on Jamaican history, tracing the beginnings of cannabis use. Apparently hemp was first introduced to Jamaica by Europeans who wanted to use it as a source of fibre (presumably for stuff like rope), but that idea fell through and it became an invasive weed. During the period where black Jamaicans were slaves, there's no evidence of anyone smoking it (it's possible that the type of hemp growing in Jamaica at this point didn't even contain high enough THC levels for it to be worth smoking anyway). (p.95)

Then slavery ended and black Jamaicans became officially free people. Understandably, they refused to go back to work for their former masters. From 1845 onwards, the white landowners responded by replacing them by shipping in indentured labourers from India.

Cannabis-smoking has a long history in India. The Rig-Veda (written earlier than 1000 BCE) describes 'ganja' or 'gaja' as a gift to humanity from the god Indra, who wanted humanity to “attain elevated states of consciousness, delight in worldly joy, and freedom from fear”. It was also used as a treatment for a very wide range of health problems. The Indian arrivals may have recognised the wild hemp, and probably brought their own varieties of marijuana with them too. Benard reckons that Rastafarian ideas about vegetarianism, each nation having its own God-King and the relationship between caste/class and colour may also have been heavily influenced by this contact with Hinduism (even though there were presumably also tensions between the black population and the Indian labourers who'd been brought in to take their jobs) (p.95).

However, when the practice of cannabis-smoking was transmitted from Hinduism to black Jamaicans, religious meanings were not immediately transmitted along with it. Initially, black Jamaicans used cannabis as a 'drug-food' (that is, as something that doesn't actually have any nutritional value, but is almost like a food because people need it in order to make it through the day. Nicotine and caffeine are common examples. Drug-foods are often good news for business-owners, because it means their employees can keep doing exhausting work for longer) (p.95-6).

Then in the 1930s, shifting economic conditions led to many black Jamaicans migrating to Kingston looking for work. However, when they got there they often found it very hard to find decent jobs. Many ended up squatting on government-owned property ('yards') and living off stuff they'd found in rubbish heaps. Some Kingston yards ended up forming 'camps': places where people (usually men) could buy, sell and smoke cannabis. These camps were also often places where people could hold 'sessions': meetings to discuss politics and religion (collectively referred to as 'reasoning'). It was out of these sessions that central tenets of Rastafarianism emerged (e.g. devotion to the contemporary Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, aka Ras Tafari, and the idea that European society was the 'Babylon' described in Revelations) (p.92).

People who accepted this philosophy started making commitments to oppose Babylon (e.g. by refusing to take jobs in white-owned factories). The adoption of dreadlocks was a symbol of this commitment- since whites felt dreads looked disreputable, they were effectively a statement saying that you didn't care if you couldn't get hired for a factory job. This was also backed up by reference to the story of how Sampson lost his strength after Delilah tricked him and cut off his hair (p.93-4).

However, although cannabis was used during sessions, it was not initially seen as a religious object in and of itself. Benard argues that "when marijuana was criminalized in Jamaica in 1954 at the urging of the United States, it became necessary to make it a sacred form of resistance" (p.97, emphasis hers). She has a citation for this (Rastafari and other Afro-Carribbean worldviews, ed. B. Chevannes, p.84), so maybe she's onto something, but I would have liked to see her flesh out this idea a bit more- what does she mean by 'necessary'? As in, politically necessary, in the sense that calling it a 'religious' practice makes it harder to prosecute? (cf something like the debates over whether peyote should be illegal for secular use but legal for people who belong to specific religious organisations like the Native American Church). I have no idea if the act of calling cannabis a religious sacrament had any effect at all on how willing the Jamaican government was to prosecute users, though. Wikipedia says that the US and UK governments don't consider religious use of cannabis to be legal.

(Incidentally, from the same Wikipedia link, here's an interesting bit of legal logic:

"On January 2, 1991, at an international airport in his homeland of Guam, a US territory, Ras Iyah Ben Makahna (Benny Guerrero) was arrested for possession and importation of marijuana and seeds. He was charged with importation of a controlled substance. The case was heard by the US 9th Circuit Court November 2001, and in May 2002 the court had decided that the practice of Rastafari sanctions the smoking of marijuana, but nowhere does the religion sanction the importation of marijuana. Guerrero's lawyer Graham Boyd pointed out the court's ruling was "equivalent to saying wine is a necessary sacrament for some Christians but you have to grow your own grapes."")

Monday 2 February 2009

Part 3 of 'The Concept of Shamanism'

Interesting blog post from someone who's a Western shamanic practitioner:

http://therioshamanism.com/2007/12/05/this-may-be-blasphemous-to-some/#comment-813

I'm not an expert on Michael Harner's work, but I think I agree with pretty much all of the issues Lupa raises regarding core shamanism (at least, from a theoretical perspective- I have no idea how the two compare from the perspective of people who are actually interested in practicing shamanism and are trying to decide which approach would work best for them).


I've had a look at Henri-Paul Francfort's Introduction to the Prehistoric Section in The Concept of Shamanism (p.31-49). Francfort kicks things off (p.31-2) with a really useful summary:

"Fundamental to the theory of universal shamanism are four assumptions or claims:

  1. A universal spirit present in the brain and neuropsychological system of Homo sapiens sapiens is demonstrated by his/her ability to attain "altered states of consciousness" (trance);
  2. A universal primitive original religion of Mankind is based upon this universal capacity for trance and upon the subsequent concept of a universal "entoptic" visionary sequence, leading from simple geometric forms to reversible transformations human <=> animal;
  3. A universal internal capacity to express the above-mentioned "entoptic" visionary sequence directly and immediately in art forms is displayed.
  4. The special function of "shamans" as creators of art.

The papers presented here strongly question the validity of such an idea of shamanism and artistic creation. They argue by demonstrating:

-contingency and current fashion: this "shamanism" is a product of a contemporary trend (new-age, postmodernism, post-processual archaeology) originating in Western societies;

-the inconsistencies in the definitions and uses of this "shamanism", in spite of the more or less explicit claims for its cross-cultural nature and for the universality of the human spirit;

-the problematic character of the supposed psychologically universal entoptic vision sequence and of the subsequent spontaneous, direct, immediate materialisation into works of art;

-the diversity of cultural activities that can lie at the origin of the creation of art;

-the very limited number of prehistoric images and artefacts that can be related to "shamanism" and their questionable interpretation;

-the variety of rock art expressions and artistic motivations;

-the variability of meanings in rock art;

-the historicity of "shamanism" and its variability through space and time in various cultures;

-the diversity of the individuals and functions subsumed under the general term of "shaman";

-finally the vacuity of a general, shallow, blanket concept of "shamanism for prehistory."


Other things:

p.35- Francfort argues that theories which connect shamanism and rock art are often tautological- "prehistoric shamanism is deduced from cave art only, and the shamanic interpretation of art is inferred from the previous conclusion." For example, in The shamans of prehistory, Clottes and Lewis-Williams argue that "although the art of the San is very different to that of the Upper Paleolithic, it is analogous to it because it too is associated with a form of shamanism." (p.188-9 of French edition, Francfort's translation).


p.36- Francfort notes that the identifying evidence for shamanism in prehistoric rock art is dodgy, since most of these theories are unfalsifiable. Clottes and Lewis-Williams argue that art doesn't need to be unified either stylistically or thematically for it to count as evidence for shamanism, because Christian art is a recognisable genre despite the fact that it occurs in multiple cultural contexts, with a wide range of art styles and a large variety of images depicted. But Christian art is unified by the fact that it all ultimately references stories which art historians can study separately from the art (e.g. by reading the scriptures). We don't have these supporting references when it comes to prehistoric shamanism, so any arguments based on their belief systems are going to have to be much more tentative.

p.37- Francfort remarks offhandedly that Australia, PNG and the Andaman islands have no indigenous shamanic traditions. What does that actually mean, given how massively vague the normal use of the word is?

p.38- Francfort also remarks offhandedly that "it is well-known, for instance, that the concept of god appeared sometimes after the Neolithic." What? Well-known by who? He does cite a source, however (J. Cauvin's The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture), so I may have to go and check that out.

He notes that we've rejected the Marxist idea that art style is linked to a society's economic mode in any sort of way that's obvious to the observer (except in the sense that the content's going to differ in some cases, I guess- non-farmers are much less likely to draw people ploughing, or whatever).


p.41- He notes that anthropologists have rejected the art theory idea that non-Western cultures have a tendency to produce art which is in some way more spontaneous or childlike than traditional Western art. Most non-Western art is produced according to relatively strict schemas or mental plans- it only looks rules-free or spontaneous if you're not familiar with the rules system being used. This includes art which is produced with the aid of drugs or other sorts of ASC.

p.42- even if we look specifically at art produced by Westerners, there probably isn't any way to reliably tell the difference between art inspired by ASCs (whether induced by drugs, mental illness or shaman-style vision quests) and art that's just produced by people who have active imaginations.

Clottes and Lewis-Williams suggest that in prehistory, children who showed artistic talent were directed towards training in shamanism. This seems to imply that they don't think 'art' and 'shamanism' are intrinsically linked (i.e. they'll only be linked within a culture if people are specifically socialised to see a connection). If this is the case, then why assume that a random culture which we know very little about really DID link shamanism and art in this way?

p.44- we also need to recognise that the idea of self-expression in art is not a concept which is necessarily found in non-Western cultures.

Sunday 1 February 2009

Part 2 of 'The Concept of Shamanism'

Just realised that there's some stuff from Hamayon's essay that I missed last time due to it being in the endnotes:

p.24- the definition of shamanism in the work of Mircea Eliade (an influential writer who had a somewhat Golden Bough-ish approach to comparative mythology) was basically phenomenological. Cards on the table: I really don't get what phenomenology IS, as a philosophical movement. Wikipedia seems to be saying it's basically about trying to describe how people experience stuff like consciousness in a way that's anti-reductionist and based on philosophical intuitions (i.e., phenomenologists aren't happy to settle for approach which attempts to teach us something about consciousness by focusing on description of how human neural impulses work- they would prefer to go for an approach which involves philosophers discussing the issue from first principles without relying on empirical research).

Unless I'm misreading the summary, it sounds like there isn't much that phenomenologists could possibly do to make me disagree with them more (at least, not unless they started arguing that our aperception of the subjectivity within another lived-body can only be fully intuited once we radically come to terms with the noema of our lifeworld by killing kittens with flamethrowers). So I wouldn't be massively surprised if you could see a similar line of thought in Eliade, because I'm not a big fan of Eliade either.

Hamayon argues that Eliade's definition of shamanism is "composed of a mere addition of features from which no operative definition can be made". Eliade apparently also wrote in his diary that he hoped his writings on shamanism would be "read by poets, playwrights, literary critics, painters. Would they not better benefit from this reading than orientalists and historians of religions?" (I wouldn't have a problem with this, if only we could just agree to call him a poet or a metaphysical philosopher or something, instead of pushing his writings as stuff which is meant to provide an etic description of what different cultures actually say about shamanism in practice). Hamayon reckons that Eliade only became popular by influencing non-specialists whose ideas then trickled back into academia (rather than by directly convincing researchers that he was onto something). Don't know if that's true.

p.25 Hamayon notes that shamanism is often symbolically linked to hunting (even in cases where the individuals or cultures who practice shamanism don't actually hunt very much these days). Hamayon argues that this is because both shamanism and hunting are linked to a specific type of "relation to the world" (by which I think she means a particular kind of social organisation based on a particular kind of subsistence strategy). I'm leaning towards the idea that subsistence strategies might have more impact on Westerners' views of a culture than they have on the culture itself, but I don't yet know enough about the topic to be confident about making a definitive statement to that effect.

Also, useful quote:
"The contributors of the present book rightly criticise any trance-based understanding of shamanism. I have also done so, on the ground [sic] of the following arguments: "Trance" is used to cover a full range of modes of behaviour that go from convulsions to lethargy, as well as a full range of states of mind that go from loss of consciousness to focused awareness. In native languages the shaman's behaviour is defined as a rule by reference to his meeting spirits, i.e. in terms of symbolic representations. In the multifarious uses of 'trance', a link is implicitly made between physical behaviour, a state of mind and a cultural attitude. This link presupposes a determinist standpoint that is unacceptable as such to most scholars. In addition, the idea that a a given pattern of behaviour implies a given state of mind and vice versa would make social life impossible!"

Hamayon is also dubious about the idea (which I've seen in several places) that people in many cultures share the idea of a tripartite universe- that is, a world where living humans live on one plane, in between a heaven/overworld and a hell/underworld (where the different levels may or may not be assumed to imply a moral hierarchy. Sometimes there's also some sort of World Tree or Axis Mundi or something connecting the different levels). Hamayon thinks this sort of mental image is less universal than some argue. For example, in the Tungus culture that gave rise to the word 'shaman', they apparently haven't traditionally believed in any sort of vertical organisation of planes. According to Hamayon's book La chass a l'âme, when Siberian shamans talk about visiting different "floors" or "levels" of the world, they're usually just talking about nomadic journeys to different bits of the steppe. She reckons that any Siberian shamans who DO talk in terms of an underworld and overworld do so because they're trying to reconcile their indigenous belief systems with Russian Christianity and/or Chinese Buddhism (in a way which other people in their societies often don't find very convincing). I obviously haven't read the original source here, due to having abysmal French, but I'd be interested to see if anyone else backs this up.

p.29- Also she uses the word 'experiential', which is useful because I was trying to think of what the word for something like this yesterday and failed to come up with anything. " 'Experiential' is neither empirical (the fruit of observation) nor experimental (the results of laboratory experiment'. 'Experiential' refers strictly to what the individual feels at the moment and sometimes reports afterwards."

Thursday 29 January 2009

Video of the Day: Korean mudang (shamans) being possessed by changun (warrior-general spirits)

Interesting thing about this one: the mudang being interviewed about how they stand on the edges of chaktu (a type of knife) describe how doing this makes them feel "very good". They don't seem to be talking about what I would normally think of as a stereotypical sort of 'ecstasy' state. They just look cheerful, which is unexpected (by which I mean, unexpected for me, someone who has extremely limited experience when it comes to standing on knives. At least if we're talking about doing it intentionally.)

Also: damn, that armour's pretty.

Wednesday 28 January 2009

Review of 'The Concept of Shamanism: uses and abuses' (part 1)

(edited by Henri-Paul Francfort and Roberte N. Hamayon in collaboration with Paul G. Bahn, 2001, Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó)

So I'm currently reading two different books on shamanism. They take different approaches- Piers Vitebsky's Shamanism is an image-heavy book which feels like it probably works better as an intro book for someone without a social science background (in that it's interesting and well-written and very very pretty, but not as thoroughly referenced as I'd like). The Concept of Shamanism, on the other hand, is an essay collection with a very analytical approach. So far I'm enjoying the latter one more.

If you take a Popperian view of science (which I do), the vast majority of ethnographies are non-scientific studies. Ethnographic data is usually presented in a way that makes it impossible for anyone else to try to test or replicate it. There are many reasons for this. Obviously there's a major issue in that ethnographers tend to work alone and focus very much on local variation (so if someone else feels your ethnography doesn't sound plausible, then even if they have considerable knowledge of the culture in question it's often possible to just say "well, my understanding is very specific to the individuals I spoke to and the time period when I was there. If the study had been done in a slightly different place, at a different time, or with a different researcher, then differences in interpretation would be inevitable."

This sort of attitude would seem to make the idea of reliable replication of results pretty problematic (although it is sometimes possible to go back and re-interview the specific people who acted as informants for an earlier anthropologist, and see if their statements still seem to support the original researcher's conclusions. Derek Freeman's research with Margaret Mead's informants would be an obvious example, although I'm not massively familiar with his work and I'm aware that some people feel he ends up resorting to ad hominems against Mead- I'll have to go read it properly sometime).

However, I think that even if we accept the methodological limitations of research on human belief systems, there are ways in which it's possible to pursue scientific research by phrasing your theories in terms of testable predictions. Not many people actually seem interested in doing this- which is fair enough, and if researchers are interested in a pursuing a humanities approach rather than a scientific one then it makes total sense. What REALLY annoys me, though, is when someone advances a theory which seems to involve testable hypotheses, but then when you actually engage with their research it often turns out that their hypotheses aren't really testable. Or worse, they're testable as initially phrased, but any apparently contradictory evidence is met by attempts by researchers to redefine terms or otherwise move the goalposts in order to save the theory from falsification. That just seems to render the entire debate completely pointless.

Caveat: I'm not totally up to date on the theory that's under question in this book. I read Clottes and Lewis-Williams' The Shamans of Prehistory (1998) about three years ago, but I certainly wouldn't claim to be an expert on that book and I haven't read more recent stuff like Lewis-Williams and David Pearce's Inside the Neolithic Mind (2005). So I'm basically going on the reviews presented by the various essay authors in The Concept of Shamanism (who were published in 2001, so theoretically Lewis-Williams & co. could have penned a devastating rebuttal by now for all I know). So that aside: here's a summary of what I understand to be the core theory that's being proposed:
  • 'Shamanism' is a word which applies to customs practiced in a very broad range of cultures throughout human history. 'Shamanism' here seems to mean localised belief systems inspired by certain kinds of altered states of consciousness (ASCs) experienced on a regular basis by individual ritual practitioners.
  • These ASCs are often induced by drugs, but they can also be caused by other things such as sensory deprivation.
  • There are certain types of vision/hallucination which frequently arise from shamanic ASCs, regardless of the cultural context. This is because all humans share the same sort of brain structure and visual system, and these can internally generate certain kinds of images (e.g. entoptic phenomena).
  • Shamanic ASCs often inspire certain types of artwork (thus leading to certain patterns of images which can be found in art from a broad range of cultures).
  • Therefore, if we find art which fits these patterns, we can infer that the culture which produced it practiced shamanism.
  • European Paleolithic cave art and San rock art show these patterns. Therefore the (long-dead) people who created these works were shamans.

The contributors to this volume are archaeologists and anthropologists who are sceptical of this theory.

The anthology kicks off with 'Shamanism: symbolic system, human capability and Western ideology' by Roberte Nicole Hamayon (p.1-27). Hamayon instantly earns my love by starting off with a quote from Unended Quest (I am a Popper fangirl). The quote in question goes:

"Never let yourself be goaded into taking seriously problems about words and their meanings. What must be taken seriously are questions of facts and assertions about facts: theories and hypotheses, the problems they solve and the problems they raise." (cited p.1).

This is an especially important point in discussions on 'shamanism', where there's rarely a clear consensus over exactly what the word means, and so you tend to wind up with a series of overlapping but non-equivalent definitions plus a substantial number of researchers who don't really care whether the word has a precise definition as long as it can be used in a sort of broad, common-sense, "but at least everyone knows roughly what I mean by this" sort of way (see p.5, 8).

Hamayon is concerned that popular interest in shamanism (from Western subcultures like the New Age and Pagan movements, or people interested in experimenting with drugs) is in danger of distorting research on shamanism in other cultures (by providing an incentive for people to attach the shamanism-label to a very wide range of practices, and then only emphasise the elements of those practices which accord with the vague mental image which non-specialists have of 'shamanism').

A couple of key quotes here:

"At the risk of oversimplifying the debate, we may put it in the straightforward manner it was initially put no matter how obsolete this may appear today: Is shamanism basically and ultimately the expression of a type of religion or worldview or of a type of personality or inner innate disposition? If the former, is it characteristic of certain types of societies and cultures or an elementary constituent of religious systems in general? If the latter, is it specific to a certain type of individuals or inherent in human beings?" (p.4)

"On the basis of this [Korean shamanism] and other similar examples, it has come to be largely admitted that shamanism is inherently oral, not as a reflection of illiteracy and backwardness but as a condition for its specific practice. According to tradition, shamanic efficacy comes from being in 'direct contact' with spirits and acting under their inspiration. It is precisely for this reason that shamanic practice is claimed to be an object of personalised performance exclusively, basically incompatible with the very idea of doctrine and, more broadly, with the idea of fixed ways of expression." (although written songs have been used to train beginner Korean shamans, established Korean shamans argue these songs lack efficacy and so an experienced shaman should only sing songs they have learned directly from their spirits). (p.10)

Hamayon thinks 'shamanism' appeals to some modern Westerners for the following reasons:

  • it sounds 'exotic' and 'primitive', and therefore represents a rebellion against Western culture
  • people feel it's connected with 'nature' and therefore environmentalism
  • it sounds relatively vague and non-culturally specific. Therefore a commitment to 'shamanism' does not not necessarily imply a commitment to any particular culture or way of life (which is good from a memetic transmission perspective, because a definition of 'shamanism' which implied that to be a 'shaman' one must be a hunter-gatherer, for example, would make it much harder for Westerners to participate).
  • shamanism is conceptualised as a phenomenon which encompasses a wide range of cultural variation but has some universal features (such as a specific type of ASC which humans from any culture can learn to induce). This implies that if you want to become a shaman, it's not strictly necessary to learn about specific types of non-Western cultures, or be initiated into an existing non-Western tradition. You can theoretically tap into the universal features of the shamanic experience from the comfort of your own home and culture.
  • sometimes these universal features of shamanism are speculated as being connected to universal features of the human brain. This relatively vague reference to neurology helps reassure some people that 'shamanism's efficacy has scientific backing.
  • 'shamans' are conceived as individuals, working outside of any institutional structure, who are capable of 'mastering' spirits. This means that, compared to some other religious options on offer to Westerners, 'shamanism' seems to make fewer demands which might conflict with individual's existing desires or moral beliefs (p.12-13)

Hamayon then goes on to argue that members of the Western counter-culture are using the concept of 'shamanism' as a tool to reshape Western culture into a form which they find more compatible with their own interests. In some areas, they have been remarkably successful in doing so- for example, concern for the environment and for individual health and well-being are values which began mainly as features of the counter-culture, but have since become widely accepted by mainstream Western society. Hamayon states quotes Bernard Dupuy: "mysticism is the form taken by a religion when new tendencies refuse to break out of the shell of the old religious system to create a new one but instead remain confined within its limits." (cited p.13).

Hamayon believes that the type of shamanism practiced in the West is more individualistic than non-Western 'shamanisms', more internalised within individuals (due to Western conceptualisations of 'ASC' and 'trance' rather than an emphasis on ritual performance), and less focused on spirits (especially spirits with specific roles, such as embodiments of discrete aspects of the natural environment, or of individual ancestors) (p.14). I agree that the Western shamanic movement seems a lot more individualistic than non-Western shamanisms- I can't really comment on the other two points, since I don't know enough about Western shamanism to say what would count as 'typical'.

This leads to my one major area of concern with Hamayon's very intriguing essay: she doesn't make it very clear how much direct experience she's had with the Western shamanism movement. Has she done any textual research, interviews, or participant observation? If not, then does she have a good reason why we should take her arguments on trust? Her description of Western shamanism feels relatively plausible to me, but I'm definitely not an expert and so I'm not convinced that 'plausible to me' is good enough.

For example, she cites Weber's comment that ecstatic states, spirit possession, and ASCs caused by drugs or dancing play the same role for 'peasants' that 'mysticism' plays for intellectuals (see p.14). Setting aside the fact that my level of respect for many of Weber's generalisations is not terribly high, I'm not convinced that this statement really applies to much of the Western shamanism movement. It sounds like it might be a reasonable argument in relation to most of Western history (although I'm not a historian so I don't really know), but it seems to me that most of the people who are drawn to the Western shamanic movement are attracted by the idea that it involves ASCs and/or drugs and/or dancing and physical ritual- this is something which serves to distinguish it from most of the other options on offer. I also don't understand what Weber's supposed to be implying by the word 'mysticism' in this context- earlier we had a quote from Dupuy which seemed to be saying that 'mysticism' is basically just any attempt to radically reform a religious tradition from the inside, rather than starting a whole new tradition in order to achieve the sort of religious framework that you want. Where does that imply 'intellectualism' or a lack of emphasis on ASCs and dancing? Possibly Weber has a narrower definition of 'mysticism' that addresses these questions, but if so it would have been helpful for Hamayon to mention it.

All in all, though, it's an interesting essay- definitely food for thought.