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)

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.)

'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

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!