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."

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.

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).

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)