fuck no.

Mar. 14th, 2009 11:44 pm
intertribal: (petal to the metal)

oh my god:

The Xhosa tribes gave the [South African Cape Hope] colony few problems after the war. This was due, in large measure, to an extraordinary delusion which arose among the Xhosa in 1856, and led in 1857 to the death of some 50,000 people. This incident is one of the most remarkable instances of misplaced faith recorded in history. The Xhosa had not accepted their defeat in 1853 as decisive and were preparing to renew their struggle with the Europeans.

In 1854, a disease spread through the cattle of the Xhosa. It was believed to have spread from cattle owned by the Settlers. Widespread cattle deaths resulted, and the Xhosa believed that the deaths were caused by ubuthi, or witchcraft. In April, 1856 two girls, one being Nongqawuse, went to scare birds out of the fields. When she returned, she told her uncle Mhlakaza that she had met three spirits at the bushes, and that they had told her that all cattle should be slaughtered, and their crops destroyed. On the day following the destruction, the dead Xhosa would return and help expel the whites. The ancestors would bring cattle with them to replace those that had been killed. Mhlakaza believed the prophecy, and repeated it to the chief Sarhili.

Sarhili ordered the commands of the spirits to be obeyed. At first, the Xhosa were ordered to destroy their fat cattle. Nongqawuse, standing in the river where the spirits had first appeared, heard unearthly noises, interpreted by her uncle as orders to kill more and more cattle. At length, the spirits commanded that not an animal of all their herds was to remain alive, and every grain of corn was to be destroyed. If that were done, on a given date, myriads of cattle more beautiful than those destroyed would issue from the earth, while great fields of corn, ripe and ready for harvest, would instantly appear. The dead would rise, trouble and sickness vanish, and youth and beauty come to all alike. Unbelievers and the hated white man would on that day perish.

The people heard and obeyed. Sarhili is believed by many people to have been the instigator of the prophecies. Certainly some of the principal chiefs believed that they were acting simply in preparation for a last struggle with the Europeans, their plan being to throw the whole Xhosa nation fully armed and famished upon the colony. Belief in the prophecy was bolstered by the death of Lieutenant-General Cathcart in the Crimean War in 1854.

There were those who neither believed the predictions nor looked for success in war, but destroyed their last particle of food in unquestioning obedience to their chief’s command. Either in faith that reached the sublime, or in obedience equally great, vast numbers of the people acted. Great kraals were also prepared for the promised cattle, and huge skin sacks to hold the milk that was soon to be more plentiful than water. At length the day dawned which, according to the prophecies, was to usher in the terrestrial paradise. The sun rose and sank, but the expected miracle did not come to pass. The chiefs who had planned to hurl the famished warriors upon the colony had committed an incredible blunder in neglecting to call the nation together under pretext of witnessing the resurrection. They realised their error too late, and attempted to fix the situation by changing the resurrection to another day, but blank despair had taken the place of hope and faith, and it was only as starving supplicants that the Xhosa sought the British.

Sir George Grey, governor of the Cape at the time ordered the European settlers not to help the Xhosa unless they entered labour contracts with the settlers who owned land in the area. In their extreme famine, many of the Xhosa turned to cannibalism, and one instance of parents eating their own child is authenticated. Among the survivors was the girl Nongqawuse; however, her uncle perished. The depopulated country was afterwards peopled by European settlers.

Historians now view this movement as a millennialist response both directly to a lung disease spreading among Xhosa cattle at the time, and less directly to the stress to Xhosa society caused by the continuing loss of their territory and autonomy.

---

In the aftermath of the crisis, the population of British Kaffraria dropped from 105,000 to less than 27,000 due to the resulting famine.

Both Chief Sarhili and Sir George Grey, governor of the Cape at the time, have been accused of engineering the crisis through Nongqawuse. Those who blame Sarhili claim he intended to manipulate the famine-struck into attacking the British settlers. Grey's accusers – most Xhosa people today – believe he used Nongqawuse to deliberately weaken the Xhosa people - Grey had open disdain for the Xhosa, and for Nongqawuse in particular, referring to her as "the laughable Xhosa girl."

intertribal: (petal to the metal)
I almost could not find this song on YouTube - then I realized I was searching for the wrong artist.  I always thought it was by the Postal Service (it's by one member of the band on a solo project, Dntel).  It was not I who mislabeled the file. 

Ugh, I assigned this song to a character once.  This song has scared me from the first time I heard it, because I'm terrified that it applies to me, and now I'm pretty sure it does - so I may as well just admit it.  And the video scares/depresses me even more. 

-----

Oh jesus, Bones is using "A Pain That I'm Used To" in their crappy episode, spare me.  Have I ever mentioned how much I hate the television show Bones?  I had to watch it in Surabaya because it was my boss's favorite show (I think she wanted to be the main character).  It is seriously the worst police procedural I've ever seen.  Yes, worse than CSI: Miami, because at least with CSI: Miami you can tell they don't take themselves seriously.  Bones, on the other hand, seems entirely devoted to congratulating its own characters by making every other segment of society live up to its worst stereotypes.  The most horrendous episode I've seen is "Player Under Pressure", about a dead college basketball star. 

Now we all know that I am not a jock.  I can't play any sports.  I can (sort of) run, and that's it.  I mildly enjoyed roller hockey and lacrosse in P.E., but basketball and I, let me tell you, do not agree.  Basketballs have a tendency to zero in on my head (even from half a gym away!), and I don't even watch it for entertainment.  I did not associate with jocks in high school, and there are no jocks worth mentioning at my college.  The ones that exist look disturbingly like skinheads, I'm not sure what's up with that.  I know that from time to time terrible scandals break out about student athletes.  Duke lacrosse, Lawrence Philllips, the University of Colorado and their strip-recruiting.  As a sports fan I know about them all, and as a sports fan I do hold everyone involved in college athletics to a high standard (as is horrifically obvious from my football posts).  And yes, we all hate how the jocks got all the attention in school, and no one cared about the collective us.  I was on a state-championship-caliber speech team that never got recognition within our own building (but we were a bunch of snobs, so I don't really blame the rest of the school), so I know.  Oh, the temptation to tar and feather those jocks now that we're all grown up and "over it"!  Except, you know, you're not over it if you do that, just like Indonesia isn't "over" colonialism if it's still accusing the U.S., a country that never actually colonized them but who sure did look like a colonizer otherwise, of trying to usurp its national sovereignty by having a naval research center in Jakarta, sixty years later. 


Is that a basketball?  Sports are dumb.  Only dumb people like them.  By the way, I'm better at basketball than you.
 
The point of this episode was basically trying to make college athletics look as bad as humanly possible.  Not just via the main female character's snippety remarks.  The dead player's cheerleader girlfriend didn't care who he slept with ("he can have anybody he wants"), as long as he came back to her, made the NBA, and set her up in a mansion.  She actually said this.  All the basketball players were unapologetic manwhores who slept with their (female) T.A.s to pass classes, even the ugly ones, and they all had STDs.  So did all their cheerleader girlfriends, who were all whores too.  It ends up that the cheerleader who was giving him a blow job minutes before his death was engaged to the player that eventually replaced him on the starting line-up (they were the only committed-looking couple in the whole episode, up till then - it was not a ruse on her part, she just "couldn't resist R.J.").  The star was killed by this chick's father.  Why?  The father, now a campus security guard or something, was a failed basketball star himself, and he always "used women like that, under the bleachers".  Now that he sees his own little girl being used that way, well, he just lost it.  

Of course, this is all hysterically preposterous and comes off as nothing more than the producers' sad attempt at Revenge of the Nerds - pushed over the edge with the main character, the "nerdy" female doctor, being considered "hot" by the basketball players and being able to shoot a basket on her one and only try.  Very, you know, cannibalizing the source of power.  It's not the Societeit Concordia, it's the Freedom Building, and it's mine!  Ja ja, Soekarno, sure it is.  So it was funny in a pathetic sense, but also painful to watch.  That sort of sums up Bones.  Let's not get into the time they mocked Chinese arranged marriages and ancestor worship and used it as an opportunity to show that their heroine can speak Chinese on top of everything else (but the Chinese are still a backwards people). 

There is no power, my pretty power.
intertribal: (east indian girl)
So I had a really intense Colonial Encounters class and for the past couple hours I've just been shaking and trying not to vomit.  I don't think I even articulated my point clearly in class because I was so upset. 

Oddly enough, it took me a couple years to make the connection between Season of Migration to the North and my own family.  

"As it turns out Mustafa was also a precocious student educated in the west but simultaneously harbors a violently hateful and complex relationship with his western identity and acquaintances. The story of Mustafa's troubled past in Europe and in particular his love affair with a British woman, forms the center of the novel. What the narrator then discovers about the stranger, Mustafa Sa'eed, awakens in him great curiosity, despair and anger, as Mustafa emerges as his doppelganger. The stories of Mustafa's past life in England, and the repercussions on the village around him, take a toll on the narrator, who is driven to the very edge of sanity. It is only finally, floating in the river Nile, precariously between life and death, that the narrator makes the conscious choice to rid himself of Mustafa's lingering presence, and to stand as an influential individual in his own right."

Mustafa kills his British wife, by the way.  He's in Sudan because he just got out of prison for stabbing her to death - something she "challenged" him to do.  
intertribal: (protein pills)
I know this guy's been dead for like a hundred fifty years but I still hate him and I can't read anything he says without wanting to vomit on my keyboard: Thomas Babington Macauley. He's an abolitionist who says things like this:

"I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education.

The question now before us is simply whether, when it is in our power to teach this language, we shall teach languages in which, by universal confession, there are no books on any subject which deserve to be compared to our own, whether, when we can teach European science, we shall teach systems which, by universal confession, wherever they differ from those of Europe differ for the worse, and whether, when we can patronize sound philosophy and true history, we shall countenance, at the public expense, medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school, history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand years long, and geography made of seas of treacle and seas of butter."

Retch.  On a related topic, I hate historical trajectories and I hate the assumption that modernization is OMG SO CoOL.  Why do academics have such non-existent imagination and such utter confidence in themselves?  Do they know what happens to professors at Miskatonic University?  When the robot uprising comes, we will not be thanking Europe for the industrial revolution, people!  :( 
intertribal: (into the wild)
Recommended read from my class - which is called, incidentally, Colonial Encounters

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph.  1997.  Good Day, Columbus.  In Silencing the Past: Power and Production in History, 108-140.  Boston: Beacon Press.

In the 1990s, quite a few observers, historians, and activists worldwide denounced the arrogance implied by this terminology during the quincentennial celebrations of Columbus's Bahaman landing.  Some spoke of a Columbian Holocaust.  Some proposed "conquest" instead of discovery; others preferred "encounter," which suddenly gained an immense popularity - one more testimony, if needed, of the capacity of liberal discourse to compromise between its premises and its practice.  "Encounter" sweetens the horror, polishes the rough edges that do not fit neatly either side of the controversy.  Everyone seems to gain. 

Not everyone was convinced.  Portuguese historian Vitorino Magalhaes Godinho, a former minister of education, reiterated that "discovery" was an appropriate term for the European ventures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which he compares to Herschel's discovery of Uranus, and Sedillot's discovery of microbes.  The problem is, of course, that Uranus did not know that it existed before Herschel, and that Sedillot did not go after microbes with a sword and a gun. 

Yet more than blind arrogance is at issue here.  Terminologies demarcate a field, politically and epistemologically.  Names set up a field of power.  "Discovery" and analogous terms ensure that by just mentioning the event one enters a predetermined lexical field of cliches and predictable categories that foreclose a redefinition of the political and intellectual stakes.  Europe becomes the center of "what happened."  Whatever else may have happened to other peoples in that process is already reduced to a natural fact: they were discovered.  The similarity to planets and microbes precedes their explicit mention by future historians and cabinet ministers.
intertribal: (un enfant colonial)
1)  Colonial slash?

"Stamford Raffles was at the romantic edge of this Enlightenment quest, seeking in the rustic Javanese or highland Sumatran the noble vestige of once-great civilisations. Soon after arriving in Penang in 1805 as assistant secretary and commencing his study of the Malay language, Raffles became intimate with Dr John Leyden, a learned Scottish surgeon of almost his own youthfulness and romantic disposition, who had been a collaborator of Sir Walter Scott before leaving Edinburgh. Together they formed their vision of the Malays as one of the language-based ‘nations’ that Johann Gottfried Herder and his counterparts in the English Romantic movement, such as Scott, had seen the world divided into." (Reid 2001: 303)

I doubt that is what Anthony Reid meant.  Still, I LOL'ed.

2)  Goren & Eames?

"LAW & ORDER: CI
NEW ORIGINAL EPISODES
COMING THIS SUMMER"

YAY!

oh, wait.  -_-
intertribal: (parking lot)
The New York Philharmonic has performed in Pyongyang, North Korea.  They played "New World", "Candide", "Arirang", and "American in Paris".  At the press conference they compared it to the New York Philharmonic visiting Soviet Russia in 1959: "It showed Soviet citizens that they could have relations with foreign organizations and these organizations could come in the country freely.  But what the Soviets didn’t realize was, this was a two-edged sword.  By allowing interactions between people from outside the country with people inside, eventually the people found themselves out of power.”  The director, Lorin Maazel, quickly backtracked, not wanting to scare North Korea.

I realized in discussion the other day how similar the Rwandan genocide was to the 1965-66 anti-communist killings in Indonesia: widespread participation by average men, though most of the killings were done by paramilitary-political boy gangs; in-group hierarchy dynamics, resulting in peer pressure and fear; the security risk - they'll kill us if we don't kill them; the constant presence of at least one military or government officer; each attack spearheaded by a local elite; brought about by the murder of a huge figure in politics, as revenge; national and international stress on "they are killing each other - no one group has the upper hand". 



 
intertribal: (unilateralism)
Resistance is immanent to power in the sense that the power mechanism engenders its very own transgression.  it is commonplace to say that colonialism produces a compulsive attachment to national roots.  In Hong Kong's historical context, however, colonialism has shielded the Chinese people living in the city from chauvinistic and violent outbursts of patriotic feeling, such as the Cultural Revolution in mainland China during the 1960s and 1970s; colonialism also has allowed Hong Kong Chinese to take up an abstract nationalist cause without directly and collectively participating in sociopolitical movements or paying the heavy political price that their counterparts in the mainland and Taiwan must pay.

Tsui, in his reinvented Wong Fei-Hung series, manages to take advantage of Hong Kong's in-between position by letting nationalism and colonialism play against each other.

- Kwai-Cheung Lo: "Knocking Off Nationalism in Hong Kong Cinema: Woman and the Chinese 'Thing' in Tsui Hark's Films" in Camera Obscura
intertribal: (just relax)
I am rapidly turning against relativism. I'm still a constructivist, of course, but I'm starting to see a suspicious trend in relativists: basically, blaming the problems (which they insist, condescendingly, are not real "problems" but just "quirks") of developing countries on those countries' cultures, and not, say, on anything anyone else (like their own countries) might have done. Hey, you know who's a relativist? Katzenstein. You know who else is? Samuel Huntington. I tell you, there's Old School Relativism, defined by Huntington, that says, "other countries are poor and decrepit because their cultures are broken, because I say so". Then there's New School Relativism, defined by Katzenstein and now Pye, that says, "other countries are poor and decrepit because their cultures are just 'different', and we should love them despite these differences, the way we love special ed children".  Either way it's a brand of racism.

I mean, you gotta love this guy. First he has the obligatory politically correct statement that he clearly doesn't believe in:
Instinctively we pause before accepting such a conclusion because several generations of Americans, taught by the texts of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, know that it is wrong to be ethnocentric. 28
Right, boys and girls, remember, it's wrong *wink wink* to be ethnocentric *wink wink*.  Then he tells us that Suharto had "bold and imaginative" policies (332) - such thinking will get you disowned in my family.  Here's the clincher, though, his cleansing of his Western guilt and declaration that Asian nationalism (or just all Asians?) are racist:

In the immediate postwar years it was assumed that Asian nationalism was largely a reaction to colonialism and the Western impact, which to a degree it was. Since then it has become clear that the intensity of xenophobia is more closely correlated with the strength of paternalistic styles of authority. The more the culture conceives of authority as being a nurturing force for a ‘family’ collectivity, the sharper the sense of boundary between its members and foreigners. Distrust of the foreigner has resulted not so much from bad experiences with outsiders as from a deeply felt need to repay paternalistic authority and maintain the cohesion of the collectivity. 329

LOVE IT. 
intertribal: (Default)
"We're not like white fellas who can take a photograph and say what pretty country it is; we've got song to sing for that country... Country where we live we've got to show, and country with the song.  We've got to follow the line from a long way.  All we're doing now is still Dreaming, it's still there."
- Mr. Rubuntja, 1988

"We are not savages, sinners or criminals.  There is no need for anthropologists, clergymen or police to look after us specially."
- Jack Patten, 1938

Both quotes taken from the Bunjilaka Aboriginal Centre in the Melbourne Museum.  There is no photography allowed in the Bunjilaka, but this one young man, who looked like a tourist from Europe, went around innocently taking pictures of grave markers and the like.  I wondered if I should tell him he shouldn't do that, but I thought that maybe the pictures would come out cursed, and then he would figure it out.  In the movie Jindabyne, the man who kills the Aboriginal young woman is never caught, but he's seen sitting in his truck in the last shot being bitten by some kind of lake fly, with the implication that he will die from the bite.  Until the 1970s the Victorian government would effectively kidnap Aboriginal children to control their "care, custody, and education" - "civilizing" them, teaching them to pray, making them forget Aboriginal culture. 

On weekends there's an open mic in front of the Melbourne Library, which is right across the street from where I live.  There's always this woman who speaks.  She carries around the Australian flag and talks about how people in other (Muslim) nations spit on the Australian flag, desecrate it, and are disrespectful of Australian soldiers.  I have never heard her ending point.  It's strange and uncomfortable to listen to her here - you can see, beyond her small audience of five or six old people, people who belong to the sizable immigrant community, many of them Southeast Asians, turning and staring at her on their way into the library.  There's also a politician here named Pauline Hanson who wants to keep Africans (because they bring diseases, like AIDS) and Muslims (because the government bends over backwards for them) out of Australia.  In the past, Asian immigration has been her issue:

"I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians.  Between 1984 and 1995, 40 per cent of all migrants coming into this country were of Asian origin.  They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate.  Of course, I will be called racist but, if I can invite whom I want into my home, then I should have the right to have a say in who comes into my country."

From "The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia", by Norman G. Owen:

"In order to continue to believe in their own mission, it was important to the colonizers to be able to defend their prestige in their own eyes.  For this reason Western colonialists often tried to convince themselves that their passion for Asian women was different, inherently less noble, than their love of white women."

"Western women were warned never to lose their tempers with their native servants, because rage in public would destroy their dignity; they were also told to keep their children away from the servants' quarters to prevent them from assimilating improper native ideas about sexuality."

From "On the Wisdom of Our Country to Rely on France", by Hoang Cao Khai (1910):

"Look at England and Germany; the people they send to their colonies are the very poor ones, and poor people, once settled in the colonies, never nurture the hope of one day returning back to their country.  As for France, her people are prosperous; they are used to their bourgeois way of life.  In fact, ever since Napoleon the First, French laws guarantee equal shares in inheritance, so that sons and daughters receive equal parts; they all can afford to live in comfort, even in affluence.  Precisely because of the comfort and affluence of their way of life, even [French] farmers and businessmen, let alone civil servants, will return to their country after a stay of about three to four years [in the colony].  This shows us that the French, in acquiring the colonies, simply wanted a place to vacation and not at all an area for permanent settlement."

"If our people follow that path, sooner or later, say within fifty or one hundred years, we will become the same as the French - that is, an intelligent race.  It is relatively easy for an intelligent race to govern over a stupid one, but it will be difficult even for an intelligent race to dominate another intelligent race.  At that time France will give us back our autonomy, and she will only protect us in foreign affairs."

From "Tearful Conversation over the Mulberry Fields and the Sea", by Nguyen Thuong Hien (1912/3):

"Once, in a certain province, there was a policeman who, after checking the tax card of a peddler, tore it into small shreds and put the pieces into his mouth.  Before he could swallow them, the peddler seized him by the throat.  As the policeman refused to spit out the shreds of paper, the peddler, naturally, was not ready to let go of the policeman's neck.   After a while, the latter died of suffocation.  The affair went to court, where the peddler just told the whole truth.  The judge ordered an autopsy of the policeman's corpse.  Upon finding in his throat all the pieces of the tax card, the judge acquitted the peddler."
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