ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY » India

Encircling Empire: Report #9, 01—07 January 2011

Maximilian Forte — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:14:59 +0000

EE: Report #9, 01—07 January 2011

Encircling Empire Reports is a selection of essays, blog posts, and news reports covering a given time period. They are intended to be useful for those interested in: ● contemporary and critical political anthropology ● public anthropology ● imperialism and imperial decline ● militarism/militarization ● the political economy of the world system ● hegemony and soft power ● counterinsurgency ● revolution ● rebellion ● resistance ● protest ● activism ● advocacy ● critique.

Previous issues are listed here.

[Special thanks to Kerim Friedman (see his linkbunch) and J.P. Barlow]

The special focus this week is on the advance of Maoist rebellion in India, which takes us beyond our usual focus on Iraq and Afghanistan. Then we look at the decline of the American empire. In addition, some of our “usual” sections: Afghanistan and Wikileaks. See also the newest information under Public Anthropology Notes.

THE NAXALITES: MAOIST REVOLUTION IN INDIA

“When the oppressive forces maintain themselves in power against laws they themselves established, peace must be considered already broken.” –Ché Guevara

While many of us have focused on the U.S. “war on terror,” the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions and occupations, the institutionalized Western dread of the Taleban and Al Qaeda, and the acts of U.S. empire, the fact remains that other wars, no less brutal, have been advancing and gaining less notice, and other empires, no less imperial for being inward reaching, continue to fortify themselves. In particular, we are speaking here of the war against the advance of Maoism primarily in India, and the paths of the Indian state which are no less shocking than anything we might read from Wikileaks about Iraq or Afghanistan.

“The Trickledown Revolution,” Arundhati Roy’s extended piece, is a striking and compelling article, possibly one of the best articles I have read online in a long time. Many themes of fundamental concern to political anthropologists appear in this article: from the maintenance of a colonial legal legacy, to the fighting of counterinsurgency at home (in this case called “sub-conventional warfare” by the Indian state), to the existence of empire within, to a description of India’s “shadow people,” the “shadow war,” and the context of elite-controlled developmentalism and the calculated expropriation of resources of tribal areas, ostensibly protected by the Indian Constitution itself, to a description of institutionalized Left parties and their internecine, Eurocentric battles, to various strategies of resistance, and finally the Maoist Naxalite rebellion.

We are first taken to Jantar Mantar, which seems to have become something akin to a protesters’ ghetto, a space on the margins where public protest is permitted. But even that has changed since India decided to host a celebration of British empire, the Commonwealth Games in 2010. Now the protesters are cleared out by 6:00pm, joining the dispersal of the hundreds of thousands of residents and vendors also forcibly pushed out of the city almost overnight, to make way for the international games and for private interests. Developmentalism—showing that the development of some comes at the expense of the underdevelopment of others, is a persistent theme of the article. As Roy shows, this is an India that with the second-highest economic growth rate in the world, has more poor people than 26 of Africa’s poorest countries put together. India’s per capita food grain availability has decreased over the last 20 years—during what happens to be the period of its most rapid economic growth. The 100 richest people hold assets worth a full 25% of India’s GDP. Manmohan Singh, India’s Prime Minister, who has pushed through the economic transformations that have vastly inflated the wealth of the richest, and the poverty of the poorest, was literally hand picked by the IMF as its choice of Finance Minister for India, one of the preconditions for a lending program to the country. Meanwhile, Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul, continue the overt public pretense of care and compassion for the poor, helping Singh to win elections and continue the privatization of everything. Having plundered the country, local elites use money that is effectively stolen from those they have impoverished, and as Roy says, ask why it is then that the Maoists do not stand for elections. And we also learn of the sheer brutality of the state in repressing those who organize to challenge glaring inequalities, the enforced misery, the concerted effort of the state to maul the poor.

“The tenacity, the wisdom and the courage of those who have been fighting for years, for decades, to bring change, or even the whisper of justice to their lives, is something extraordinary. Whether people are fighting to overthrow the Indian State, or fighting against Big Dams, or only fighting a particular steel plant or mine or SEZ, the bottom-line is that they are fighting for their dignity, for the right to live and smell like human beings. They are fighting because, as far as they are concerned, ‘the fruits of modern development’ stink like dead cattle on the highway.”

Roy briefly introduces us to the Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act or PESA, passed in 1996 as an amendment that attempts to right some of the wrongs done to tribal people by the Indian Constitution when it was adopted by Parliament in 1950. The rebellion against the developmentalist violations of this autonomy is what shocks the elites. And there is irony here:

“those who are being called ‘Maoists’ (which includes everyone who is resisting land acquisition) are actually fighting to uphold the Constitution. While the government is doing its best to vandalise it.”

Roy echoes questions asked in public commentary: “Is there anything they can be offered within the existing system that will deflect the Maoists from their stated goal of overthrowing the Indian State?” Her answer:

“The answer to that is, of course not. The Maoists do not believe that the present system can deliver justice. The thing is that an increasing number of people are beginning to agree with them. If we lived in a society with a genuinely democratic impulse, one in which ordinary people felt they could at least hope for justice, then the Maoists would be only be a small, marginalised group of militants with very little popular appeal.”

“Walking With The Comrades,” is another monumental article from Arundhati Roy, she tells us of the “deadly war that is unfolding in the jungle is a war that the Government of India is both proud and shy of,” stating that Operation Green Hunt has been both proclaimed and denied: “P. Chidambaram, India’s home minister (and CEO of the war), says it does not exist, that it’s a media creation. And yet substantial funds have been allocated to it and tens of thousands of troops are being mobilised for it. Though the theatre of war is in the jungles of Central India, it will have serious consequences for us all.” Roy identifies the Indian state “an emerging Superpower,” possessed by its own hubris, backed by the media and massive firepower. On the other side? “Ordinary villagers armed with traditional weapons, backed by a superbly organised, hugely motivated Maoist guerrilla fighting force with an extraordinary and violent history of armed rebellion.” The insurrection, she says, “has spread through the mineral-rich forests of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal—homeland to millions of India’s tribal people, dreamland to the corporate world.”

Roy locates the Maoist rebellion within a long-term history of numerous tribal uprisings against the British colonial regime and the post-independence state. As she explains, “tribal people were at the heart of the first uprising that could be described as Maoist, in Naxalbari village in West Bengal (where the word Naxalite—now used interchangeably with ‘Maoist’—originates).” Naxalite tribal politics and Maoist rebellion are now deeply intertwined. The Maoists themselves have emerged from a series of successive rebellions under different “avatars” as Roy says, each time said to have been exterminated and utterly defeated, and each time resurging stronger than before, over a wider area.

Here we see the continuation of colonialism through “independent” means, a transition to neo-colonialism, and domestically, internal colonialism. As Roy relates, “The Indian Constitution, the moral underpinning of Indian democracy, was adopted by Parliament in 1950. It was a tragic day for tribal people. The Constitution ratified colonial policy and made the State custodian of tribal homelands. Overnight, it turned the entire tribal population into squatters on their own land. It denied them their traditional rights to forest produce, it criminalised a whole way of life. In exchange for the right to vote, it snatched away their right to livelihood and dignity.” Then in comes “development” and “modernization” –state campaigns to fix “the problem” of the tribes, a problem that the state engineered and which it now proclaims to “solve” through even greater intervention.

Please read the article in full, as Roy takes us through her series of critical questions: “When a country that calls itself a democracy openly declares war within its borders, what does that war look like? Does the resistance stand a chance? Should it? Who are the Maoists? Are they just violent nihilists foisting an outdated ideology on tribal people, goading them into a hopeless insurrection? What lessons have they learned from their past experience? Is armed struggle intrinsically undemocratic? Is the Sandwich Theory—of ‘ordinary’ tribals being caught in the crossfire between the State and the Maoists—an accurate one? Are ‘Maoists’ and ‘Tribals’ two entirely discrete categories as is being made out? Do their interests converge? Have they learned anything from each other? Have they changed each other?”

To follow more news see the Indian Vanguard blog.

And please see:

My Book Is Red – The word is Revolution. Maoists give a leg up to tribal languages. By Debarshi Dasgupta, Outlook India,17 May 2010
India’s Dirty War. By Megha Bahree, Forbes, 10 May 2010
Is India’s campaign against Maoist rebels going too far? By Jason Overdorf, 09 March 2010
An Anthropologist In A Police State – Is there no limit to the state’s paranoia? Why is it so scared of those who do nothing more dangerous than teach and write that it feels they should be denied lodging, detained, provided ‘protection’, intimidated, ‘escorted’ out of the state? By Nandini Sundar, Outlook India, 13 January 2010
Life Behind The Iron Curtain–The hounding of activist Himanshu Kumar is a parable about the war and panic in Chhattisgarh and the complete blackout of information, By Tusha Mittal, Tehelka, 16 January 2010
Maoism in India: Panic or Panacea? By Nandini Chandra, Sanhati, 19 June 2009
NAXALITE RAGE
Anthropology of a Genocide: Tribal Movements in Central India Against Over-Industrialisation. By Felix Padel and Samarendra Das
Naxalbari. By Kerim Friedman, Keywords, 12 April 2006
Adivasi Rebels. By Kerim Friedman, Keywords, 13 May 2006

[Thanks to Kerim for this list.]

You can see/hear Roy talk about imperialism, democracy, and India’s war against its tribal peoples in the video list below:

THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

It seems that most Americans want taxes increased for the rich, more than 60%, with the second-largest group (20%) wanting to see cuts in military spending. See: “Most Americans say tax rich to balance budget: poll.” Which part of the world do most Americans see as the most troublesome? Washington D.C. Finally, it seems more Americans are coming around to a way of thinking that we share.

From TomDispatch, see Tom Engelhardt’s “The Urge to Surge Washington’s 30-Year High.” In particular, read Engelhardt’s description of the Soviet path to decline, and the extent to which it is echoed in the current situation of U.S. power:

“To one degree or another, we have been on the Soviet path for years and yet, ever more desperately, we continue to plan more surges. Our military, like the Soviet one, has not lost a battle and has occupied whatever ground it chose to take. Yet, in the process, it has won less than nothing at all. Our country, still far more wealthy than the Soviet Union ever was, has nonetheless entered its Soviet phase. At home, in the increasing emphasis on surveillance of every sort, there is even a hint of what made “soviet” and “totalitarian” synonymous.

“The U.S. economy looks increasingly sclerotic; moneys for an aging and rotting infrastructure are long gone; state and city governments are laying off teachers, police, even firefighters; Americans are unemployed in near record numbers; global oil prices (for a country that has in no way begun to wean itself from its dependence on foreign oil) are ominously on the rise; and yet taxpayer money continues to pour into the military and into our foreign wars. It has recently been estimated, for instance, that after spending $11.6 billion in 2011 on the training, supply, and support of the Afghan army and police, the U.S. will continue to spend an average of $6.2 billion a year at least through 2015 (and undoubtedly into an unknown future) — and that’s but one expense in the estimated $120 billion to $160 billion a year being spent at present on the Afghan War, what can only be described as part of America’s war stimulus package abroad.

“….Sooner than later, Washington, the Pentagon, and the U.S. military will have to enter rehab. They desperately need a 12-step program for recovery. Until then, the delusions and the madness that go with surge addiction are not likely to end.”

“Should we rejoice or not in America’s decline?” –The CBC’s Richard Handler worries: what comes after American dominance? “Careful what you wish for” is the thrust of his piece, which at least is ahead of most articles in the Canadian press in that it actually posits “America’s decline” as something that is actual and factual, requiring that we think about the future.

On the other hand, the article is useful for revealing bundled assumptions that would cause someone to view the future with such trepidation. Handler seems to equate a good world order with a stable one, where stability means normalcy and normalcy means continuity. Perhaps if he were more on the losing end of the world-system, with a long suppressed social agenda constantly defended against extinction, he would have something to look forward to, possibly.

Handler’s article was good for providing us with this link:

“Back to Normalcy: Is America really in decline?” by Paul Kennedy (and behind a pay wall). Kennedy has a direct answer to Handler’s question, had Handler paused to listen: what replaces empire is normalcy. Kennedy’s thesis is that,

“All that is happening, really, is that the United States is slowly and naturally losing its abnormal status in the international system and returning to being one of the most prominent players in the small club of great powers. Things are not going badly wrong, and it is not as if America as becoming a flawed and impotent giant. Instead, things are just coming back to normal.”

THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN

The surge is working—but not necessarily the way the Americans intended, assuming that opinion polls conducted in a war zone are ever anything to take seriously. It seems that more Afghans are supporting Taleban attacks, seeing them as justified, a number that has risen by 8%. In addition, only a minority, 36%, expressed any confidence that the U.S. and NATO would bring “stability.” An overwhelming majority, 73%, want to see negotiations take place with the Taleban.

Crossing over into our ongoing Wikileaks discussion, Anand Gopal’s “How the Wikileaks Are Changing Afghan Hearts and Minds” is well worth reading. Gopal tells us that at least some Afghans are using Wikileaks’ Afghan War Diary to validate their long-denied claims that the deaths of civilian friends and family were caused by NATO. The effect is this:

“Hatred of foreign forces, particularly in the rural Pashtun communities, has been intensifying steadily for years. On first blush this may be difficult to grasp; the Taliban, after all, tend to be quite brutal in their own right, routinely intimidating or abusing locals. But the documents offer evidence of hundreds of small incidents across the country where troops killed civilians, for failing to stop at a checkpoint, or for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or simply for being. Many of these killings came in ones and twos, often too small or in too remote of an area to be reported on. But over the course of five years (the period covered in the documents), they’ve accumulated in the Afghan psyche. And when taken together with night raids and disappearances, it becomes clearer why many rural Pashtuns view the troops as a source of insecurity rather than the other way around.”

Wikileaks itself is criticized by at least one of Gopal’s Afghan friends, for having placed him in danger, since there is a record now of his aiding foreign forces by telling them where to find a weapons cache. He has gone into hiding. Nonetheless, “he praises Wikileaks for the release, condemning only the exposure and imperiling of civilians informants like himself…. ‘It’s always like this with foreigners here. Things are great at first, but the real damage comes only later’.”

WIKILEAKS NEWS, GOOD AND BAD

As “Cablegate” seems to have dried up considerably—with the “media consortium” barely able to release as much as a single cable in the past three days—the stories based on the few cables released have constantly been overshadowed and upstaged by the saga of Julian Assange. We have been faced with stories of his temperament, his sexual habits, reports from his female accusers, and then an arguably inappropriate if not bizarre display of his Christmas celebrations. At the same time, the one we might call the real hero behind the leaks may be the one who is currently in solitary confinement, possibly having sacrificed the rest of his life for the sake of our knowledge. Yet Assange claims that he “owns the leaks,” and asserts his “financial interest” in them. One has to wonder then if John Young at Cryptome has it right in his article, “Wikileaks Rest in Peace,” just as we learn from an extensive piece in Vanity Fair: “Through December, WikiLeaks still wasn’t collecting new documents from potential whistle-blowers. The site is crowded with pleas for donations. ‘He is short of money and short of secrets,’ someone who has worked extensively with Assange told me. ‘The whole thing has collapsed’.” Meanwhile, we also learn from the Wall Street Journal, that Assange has assigned himself a salary of €66,000 per year, out of a total of €100,000 paid for salaries in total, the remainder shared among a handful of full-time staff. Likely of greatest concern to Wikileaks is that while it managed to raise €765,000 before August of 2010, since then donations have dropped off considerably, raising only €235,000 since August.

Considerably more positive articles and reports will include CBS’ “How WikiLeaks Enlightened Us in 2010.” This is an extensive—but by no means exhaustive—highly readable and well organized overview of the most significant news generated from Wikileaks’ multiple releases throughout last year, with global coverage, and a profusion of links to relevant stories.

Noam Scheiber of The New Republic described Wikileaks as the “Game Changer,” adding the subtitle, “Why Wikileaks will be the death of big business and big government.” Scheiber argues:

“The Wikileaks revolution isn’t only about airing secrets and transacting information. It’s about dismantling large organizations—from corporations to government bureaucracies. It may well lead to their extinction.”

In “WikiLeaks, Ideological Legitimacy and the Crisis of Empire,” Francis Shor makes a series of points that have been made abundantly on Zero Anthropology. This is how Shor leads the piece:

“While empires try to maintain their hegemony through economic and military prowess, they must also rely on a form of ideological legitimacy to guarantee their rule. Such legitimacy is often embedded in the geopolitical reputation of the empire among its allies and reluctant admirers. Once that reputation begins to unravel, the empire appears illegitimate.”

And while Bruce Sterling’s “The Blast Shack” was seemingly winning almost all the praise from establishment heads (and wannabes) as the best article ever about Wikileaks, it was this article in Spain’s El País, modestly titled “Why EL PAÍS chose to publish the leaks,” that clinches that honour in our eyes. The article is in English, and here is a sample:

“Cynics will argue that none of what we have learned from WikiLeaks differs from the usual way in which high-level international politics is conducted, and that without diplomatic secrets, the world would be even less manageable and more dangerous for everyone. Political classes on both sides of the Atlantic convey a simple message that is tailored to their advantage: trust us, don’t try to reveal our secrets; in exchange, we offer you security.

“But just how much security do they really offer in exchange for this moral blackmail? Little or none, since we face the sad paradox that this is the same political elite that was incapable of properly supervising the international financial system, whose implosion triggered the biggest crisis since 1929, ruining entire countries and condemning millions of workers to unemployment and poverty. These are the same people responsible for the deteriorating quality of life of their populations, the uncertain future of the euro, the lack of a viable European project and the global governance crisis that has gripped the world in recent years, and which elites in Washington and Brussels are not oblivious to. I doubt that keeping embassy secrets under wraps is any kind of guarantee of better diplomacy or that such an approach offers us better answers to the problems we face.

“The incompetence of Western governments, and their inability to deal with the economic crisis, climate change, corruption, or the illegal war in Iraq and other countries has been eloquently exposed in recent years. Now, thanks to WikiLeaks, we also know that our leaders are all too aware of their shameful fallibility, and that it is only thanks to the inertia of the machinery of power that they have been able to fulfill their democratic responsibility and answer to the electorate.

“The powerful machinery of state is designed to suppress the flow of truth and to keep secrets secret. We have seen in recent weeks how that machine has been put into action to try to limit the damage caused by the WikiLeaks revelations.”

PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY NOTES

Thanks to Daniel Lande at Neuroanthropology for producing this very useful roundup, “Anthropology and Publicity,” with extracts and links to the excellent essays produced for a blog/event we reported on earlier, Anthropology and/in Publicity. They are differently worth circulating and saving in any compendium of public anthropology papers.

Filed under: ENCIRCLING EMPIRE Tagged: afghanistan, Arundhati Roy, imperialism, India, Maoists, Naxalites, public anthropology, Wikileaks

USA Fears Loss of Sri Lanka

John Stanton — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 05:46:37 +0000

“Sri Lanka has been a friend and democratic partner of the United States since gaining independence in 1948 and has supported U.S. military operations overseas such as during the first Gulf War. Commercial contacts go back to 1787, when New England sailors first anchored in Sri Lanka’s harbors to engage in trade. Sri Lanka is strategically located at the nexus of maritime trading routes connecting Europe and the Middle East to China and the rest of Asia. It is directly in the middle of the ‘Old World,’ where an estimated half of the world’s container ships transit the Indian Ocean. American interests in the region include securing energy resources from the Persian Gulf and maintaining the free flow of trade in the Indian Ocean.” Senate Foreign Relations Committee Report, 2009.

Most Americans are not familiar with the long history of relations that Sri Lanka and the USA have together. In fact, most—and to be fair, a good deal of the world’s population—couldn’t pinpoint the country on a map even though Sri Lanka is one of the top trade partners of the USA.

Still, some may know Sri Lanka through the name Mathangi Arulpragasam, better known as M.I.A., a globally recognized musician/singer/artist. Many will remember that science fiction giant Arthur C. Clarke (2001 Space Odyssey) made his home in Sri Lanka. Perhaps a handful will know that Sri Lanka is a Cricket powerhouse.

Others may remember the 2004 Tsunami that destroyed large portions of the Sri Lankan coastline wiping out thousands of lives and leaving many more thousands internally displaced. Some will be familiar with the Sri Lankan’s military defeat of the LTTE—Tamil Tigers—in 2009 after roughly 26 years of conflict. The victory came with a burdensome price tag: thousands killed, nearly 460,000 Tamils/noncombatants confined in holding camps/displaced, and the horrible legacy that is one million landmines that dot former warfighting zones.

So what do they do in Sri Lanka besides producing excellent tea and Cricket players? Here is the industry/services breakdown for 2009:

Sri Lanka’s natural resource base consists of limestone, graphite, mineral sands, gems and phosphate.

The agricultural sector is 12.8 percent of GDP and includes rice, tea, rubber, coconut, and spices. The service industry is 58 percent with key sectors being tourism, wholesale and retail trade, transport, telecom and financial services. The industrial sector comprises 29.2% of GDP and includes garments and leather goods, rubber products, food processing, chemicals, refined petroleum, gems and jewelry, non-metallic mineral-based products and construction.

Major exports (amounting to $7 billion US) in 2009 were garments, tea, rubber products, jewelry and gems, refined petroleum, and coconuts. The main markets for those products were the USA ($ 1.54 billion US), the United Kingdom, India and Italy.

Major suppliers to the Sri Lankan economy were India, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Iran, Malaysia, Japan, U.K., U.A.E., Belgium, Indonesia, South Korea and the USA (totaling $9.6 billion US of which $283 million was with the USA).

USA-India-China: Sri Lanka as Geopolitical/Economic Battlespace

For US policy makers and military planners, Sri Lanka has now become a top geopolitical priority. A sense of urgency is driving the grand brains in the White House and Pentagon to figure out how “not to lose Sri Lanka.” In short, that means an answer to the question, “How can we use Sri Lanka to further US national security interests in the Indian Ocean?”

“Friendly” economic competition (and the concomitant struggle for resources, markets, jobs) between the USA and China/India will inevitably move to military conflict at some future date. Why? There simply are not enough energy stores in the world to meet the needs of the three nations which, combined, make up 41 percent of the world’s population. And this excludes Indonesia and Brazil whom together make up just over 6 percent of the world’s population. The five nations make up 47 percent of the world’s population and their hunger for energy, raw materials, food, construction materials, “the better life”, is insatiable. All are pre-positioning for economic security which, of course, is an element of national security.

In State and Corporate governing circles within the five countries (USA, India, China, Indonesia, Brazil), there is a far graver threat to be dealt with: the prospect of restive populations revolting as their job prospects darken, social programs are cut, income inequality increases, and health/pension benefits become more restricted, even eliminated. Meanwhile, up above, the losing classes watch as their nation’s stock exchanges operate as though it’s business-as-usual. In this volatile environment, internal mass dissent/boycotts are, arguably, the number one threat to each nation’s security.

So where does Sri Lanka fit in?

“Indian threat perceptions have grown as China has become more active in South Asia. Sri Lanka is no exception,” said Maria Kuusisto of Eurasia Group in an interview with Kari Lispschutz of World Politics Review. “Chinese investment has expanded rapidly, including the strategically situated commercial deep-sea port in Hambantota — which is [Sri Lankan] President Mahendra “Mahinda” Rajapaksa’s home constituency — and the two-phase coal power plant in Norochcholai. During the civil war in Sri Lanka, Beijing provided unconditional diplomatic, economic and military support to the Sri Lankan government, winning significant goodwill in Colombo. And China is now offering to provide financing and technical expertise to the Sri Lankan government, which is pursuing an aggressive, multi-million dollar reconstruction program. New Delhi sees this Chinese maneuvering as an incursion into its historic sphere of influence, and is consequently trying to outbid the Chinese for strategically important infrastructure projects.”

While India and China solidify their relationships with Sri Lanka, the USA/West has had a muddled foreign policy that seems to always be fixated—no matter the region–on Iran and China. Writing in Future Directions International, Sergei DeSilva-Ranasinghe indicated that the European Union used the war crimes card following the defeat of the LTTE simply to punish Sri Lanka for its trade relations with Iran and China, not out of any great concern for human rights.

“Following the LTTE defeat in May, the EU sought to pursue a motion against Sri Lanka for war crimes investigations at the UN Human Rights Council, which collapsed when 29 countries of the 47-member council voted in solidarity with Sri Lanka. India itself came out strongly in support of Sri Lanka at the Council and later even criticized the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Commenting on Sri Lanka’s diplomatic feat, Sri Lankan Ambassador to the United Nations, Dayan Jayatillaka, said: ‘This is not a lesson that Sri Lanka taught the West. It is a victory of the developing countries and the global south. It was not a defeat of the Tiger Diaspora alone.

It was the defeat of a powerful bloc of forces. Geneva was a miniature diplomatic Dien Bien Phu or Bay of Pigs for the EU. The unfolding events earlier this year underscored the fact that Sri Lanka’s confrontation with the West, which has seen relations plummet to their lowest point since the 1970s, has had less to do with human rights and more to do with a fierce geopolitical struggle for influence. There is little doubt that Sri Lanka’s move to broaden relations with China and Iran, its rejection of Western demands in its internal affairs, the timing of its victory over the LTTE, and its acceptance in June 2009 as a Dialogue Partner to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) were crucial in influencing the West’s attempts to take punitive action against Sri Lanka — moves which served to further strengthen Sri Lanka’s relations with China.”

Senate Foreign Relations Report 2009: The Americans Are Coming! The Americans Are Coming!

The Sri Lanka Foundation (SLF) reports that former Sri Lankan military commander Sarath Fonseka was favored by the USA to win the Sri Lankan presidential election in 2010 over rival and current president Mahendra Rajapaksa. Fonseka was apparently awarded permanent residency in the USA, according to the SLF, and spent too much time hanging around Washington, DC during the LTTE conflict.

Fonseka is now charged with Criminal Breach of Trust by the Sri Lankan government under Sri Lanka’s Property Act.

Many Sri Lankans here in the USA and in Sri Lanka itself see Fonseka as a tool of the US government and Western interests. Others, of course, don’t.

The SLF derides the Senate Foreign Relations Report of 2009 (see link above, also known as The Kerry Report) as being the product of a dumbfounded US foreign/military policy establishment that was shocked when the Sri Lankan military defeated its LTTE nemesis. Their criticisms of US foreign policy practices (subterfuge, spreading money around via NGO’s, fanning the flames of class conflict) are certainly not without ample historical precedent.

The SLF views the purpose of the Kerry Report as this: “Their mission: to make recommendations to prevent further erosion of US security interests in the island and increase US leverage in Sri Lanka for securing longer term US strategic interests and expanding the number of tools available at Washington’s disposal.”

No problem there, that’s what the large nations do.

But then it gets very interesting. SLF goes on to say, “If the LTTE had succeeded, the US would have gained control of two thirds of Sri Lanka coastline, enabling them to secure Persian Gulf energy resources to Japan, interfere if and when the need arose, with the flow of these same resources to China, selectively interfere with free trade in the Indian Ocean, and undermine stability in India by provoking Tamil and Hindu sentiments in Tamil Nadu…To make matters worse, not only did President Rajapaksa destroy the cornerstone of US policy in the region [by defeat of the LTTE], but he was, as The Kerry Report identified, responsible for the country’s drift towards China (and the non-Western world), considered one of the biggest challengers to US hegemony of the world. All this threatens US national security interests, and President Rajapaksa is considered a threat to US National Security. US policy, the report states, has to be re-charted. A regime change is considered imperative: Rajapaksa must go.

The battle lines were drawn for January 26, 2010. The battle was not between Rajapaksa and Fonseka, but between Sri Lanka and the US. On May 18, 2009, Sri Lanka won a historic proxy war on the banks of the Nanthikadal lagoon, defeating the scourge of terrorism [LTTE] and the threat of neocolonialism. Election day was crucial – Sri Lankans had to defeat the neocolonialist if they were to protect their victory at Nanthikadal.

The sovereignty of Sri Lanka is being challenged and is at stake…

With that in mind, it’s no wonder that Sri Lankan Ambassador Tamara Kunanayakam (Cuba and Venezuela) urged Sri Lankans to study Latin American and USA relations. Writing in Why Latin America is Important for Sri Lanka she states,

“Whereas the economic performance of China and India impress most observers in Sri Lanka and much of our efforts are focused on warding off attacks from our former colonial masters and their allies who continue to have a stake in this country, we have failed to grasp the significance of the history that is being written in Latin America. Sri Lanka cannot remain indifferent to this evolution. The quality of its international relations cannot be appreciated through the narrow vision of those who judge its good health solely through the state of relations with Western powers. Sri Lankan foreign policy must take into account the reality of a world that is changing and Latin America as constituting an important factor in that change.”

Become the Switzerland of the Indian Ocean

How can Sri Lanka—with 21 million people, just .3 percent of the global populace—rebuild and reunite its tattered country after 26 years of war and a Tsunmai, while at the same time avoid Faustian economic and military bargains with the world’s giant nation-states? Can its leaders avoid the lure of bribes (in any form), the sweetheart deals that will inevitably be forthcoming, and the trappings of power?

Can the Sri Lankan people calm the ethnic turbulence between (Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim) that has plagued it and develop a common national consciousness/identity?

Can Sri Lanka avoid getting tangled in the competition between the world’s largest nations that will only escalate in the future?

DeSilva-Ranasinghe made this observation. “So far, at least, Sri Lanka appears to have successfully balanced the competing interests of India and China.” He cited the commentary of a former Sri Lankan diplomat named Jayantha Dhanapala on the delicate balancing act.

“There are elements in America and India who would like to raise the China bogey…This is not a zero sum game where our relationship with China is at the expense of our relationship with India. We cleverly balanced the relationship.”

How long that relationship can be balanced remains to be seen.

As they rebuild their country and amend their constitution, they would do well to look to Switzerland as an example of a neutral—even sane—nation state. Their survival may depend on it.

With the USA shifting focus and resources to the Indian Ocean, they’d best move quickly and warily.

Filed under: COLONIALISM/IMPERIALISM Tagged: China, India, John Stanton, LTTE, Mahinda Rajapakse, sri lanka, Tamil Tigers, trade routes

Sex Beats Money, Hitler Beats Gandhi: More Google Insights

Maximilian Forte — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 15:32:47 +0000

Unlike my previous post on Google Insight statistics for anthropology searches, this time I am not making the mistake of closing the pages without preserving a link so that others can investigate the searches. Having conducted a number of queries using Google Insights, I realize that I risk becoming addicted to this service, with the greater risk of forgetting to ask some very critical questions about the meanings of these results. Nonetheless, here are a few more interesting results.

For example, I was curious to learn if a lot of people search for Adolf Hitler, that is, how popular he might remain as a historical figure, as compared to someone who I believe was genuinely loved by a far greater number of people, Mahatma Gandhi. The meaning of the results is not by any means unambiguous. What is interesting is that the popularity of the “Adolf Hitler,” and Hitler- and Nazi-related searches, is still vastly greater than for Gandhi. At the same time, the interest in Gandhi is steady, almost a straight line on the graph, while for Hitler the fluctuations are extreme, and the peaks seem to recur at the same time each year (is there a Hitler holiday?). (See the overall results here.)

Comparative worldwide popularity of online searches for "Adolf Hitler" (blue) and "Mahatma Gandhi" (red), for 2004-2009

Hitler is relatively more popular in web searches in Norway, Germany, and Nigeria, in that order. Gandhi, on the other hand, is most popular in India, Kenya, and the United Arab Emirates (I assume the reason for the UAE being third is due to the presence of a large number of Indian workers). Gandhi is not just of interest along strict religious lines either, since the next top three areas of interest are Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and El Salvador, all three being predominantly Roman Catholic.

Relative regional interest in "Adolf Hitler," 2004-2009

Relative regional interest in "Mahatma Gandhi," 2004-2009

Having heard for sometime that “sex” and sex-related searches far outstripped any other searches conducted by web users, I had to check if relatively more searches for sex were registered compared with other burning issues of interest, both here in North America, and to varying extents worldwide. I thus compared sex with money, terrorism, and god. The results were surprising, to some degree. (See the overall results here.)

Sex, by very far, is a more popular search term than even money, terrorism, and god combined. Moreover, these interests seem to be stable in each case, which to me suggests that there is less room for ambiguity on the matter. That does not put all questions to rest, as the results cover up a great deal of complexity that ethnographic approaches would be better at uncovering.

Worldwide popularity of "sex" (blue), "money" (red), "terrorism" (orange), and "god" (green) in online searches, 2004-2009

What is interesting is that sex is the subject of greatest interest in Pakistan, Vietnam, and Bangladesh — and interestingly Sudan is in the top 10. Money is a prominent subject of online interest in the United Kingdom, the United States, and India. What about terrorism, which in my mind was a subject of especially intense interest in North America? No North American country ranks in the top 10. The top three are Pakistan, Ethiopia, and India. Trinidad and Tobago, where I did my research for several years, is ranked at 7. When it comes to searching for god online, here the Caribbean dominates among the top three places with a popular interest in god: Jamaica, the Philippines, and Trinidad and Tobago, in that order. For me this is very interesting — after years of endless condemnations by local priests and media commentators on what they perceived to be the “lazy,” “carefree,” and “sexually debauched” lifestyle of Trinidadians, their Internet habits show that they are most interested in god, and terrorism, rather than sex and money — living in fear, rather than living in joy?

Relative regional interest in "sex" searches online, 2004-2009

Relative regional interest in "money" in online searches, 2004-2009

Relative regional interest in "terrorism" in online searches, 2004-2009

Relative regional interest in "god" in online searches, 2004-2009. Note that Jamaica (#1) and Trinidad & Tobago (#3), do not appear clearly on this map.

Questions, more than conclusions

It is not surprising that ethnographers should prefer to interact with living individuals, one on one, and spend large amounts of time learning about their everyday lives and immersing themselves in as much of their realities as possible. Looking at these statistics, by themselves, could lead one to arrive at some rather bizarre conclusions; they could also be the basis for some exciting new questions, both for online and offline ethnography.

For example, since the statistics show the relative interest in a given term for a given population, one has to ask: who tends to have greater Internet access in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sudan, with such large Muslim populations and such an interest in sex online? Sudan, in the grips of a civil war, has individuals searching for sex online in great numbers? Why? Is it to target something to ban, or is it a relief from death and conflict? Why is Hitler apparently so popular in Norwegian web searches — is it related to some of the aesthetics of “death metal” and “black metal”? Or is there a genuine social interest in Hitler broadly speaking? (I am worried of course that as a result of such statistics some might rush to the conclusion that “Norwegians are a bunch of Nazis…and Germans are at least closet Nazis.”)

What kind of “sex” are people looking for? Does it necessarily imply “pornography” (which is not a concept that is either universal in usage or meaning)? Given the industrialization of sex, through prostitution, films, strip clubs, and human trafficking, how are “sex” and “money” so easily and widely separated in the results shown above?

That a nation has relatively more people interested in “terrorism” means what? That they fear it, or that they feel they have been pinpointed in the international media as a source of it, and therefore persons check to see what is being said about their country with reference to “terrorism”? For example, given the high rate of rejection faced by Trinidadians applying for U.S. visas, the presence of groups such as the Jama’at al Muslimeen in Trinidad, and the tendency of other nations to produce travel advisories that could affect local tourism, might it be that this is the reason for such a seemingly heavy Trinidadian interest in terrorism, rather than an expression of their own “fear,” or that they might share the “national security” mindset of Washington elites?

In addition, these search statistics are based on the English words that were used, as far as I know, unless Google is providing automatic translation so as to compile globally comprehensive results (I am not aware of their doing this for these purposes). If, as I suspect, a search for “sex” is a search for sex in English, then the question that presents itself is of the “native point of view.” Is “sex” a popular search term for most Vietnamese, or just for the few who speak English, or for the few Anglophone expatriates living there who conduct their online searches in English? Or is “sex” universally used as an online search term, regardless of users’ native languages, since they might feel that the English search term might bring up more results? In addition, it seems that a particular search term must achieve a substantial (though unspecified) measure of popularity for the term to even appear in Google Insights’ results — therefore, would there be enough Anglophone expatriates in Vietnam searching for “sex” in English to account for the strong relative popularity of the search term there?

By choosing “sex” myself, and discovering that in comparison to other places that also search for “sex” Pakistan ranks highly, does that tell us anything about the overall value of “sex” in Pakistani online searches as a whole? No, because I do not know what are the top Internet search terms used by Pakistani web users, nor would I know what their particular interest in sex is (what if it is about the sexual reproduction of horses?), or whether it is about sex as a category rather than as an act. Moreover, other, more comprehensive and detailed studies of Internet pornography and sex statistics clearly show U.S. dominance in production of pornographic sites, which is what I expected, with China being the world leader in pornography revenues, while a greater variety of sex search terms show that Bolivia and South Africa can appear to be leaders in searches (see here).

And what happened to the “borderless” world of “globalization” and “cultural flows”? Of course most of us knew this to be hype, even when produced by anthropologists for the consumption of other anthropologists. Borders, boundaries and barriers matter more than ever in our world. But do they matter so much that the interest in “sex” stops at Pakistan’s border with India?

Addendum:

Why does Ethiopia appear so frequently, both in these results and in the results shown in the previous post? Is this some sort of statistical anomaly that is the by product of Google Insights’ own particular ways of scaling and normalizing data?

Posted in "OUT THERE", CYBERSPACE RESEARCH, ETHNOGRAPHY, GLOBALIZATION Tagged: Adolf Hitler, Bangladesh, Bolivia, China, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Germany, global search statistics, god, google insights, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Mahatma Gandhi, money, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, sex, South Africa, Sudan, terrorism, the Philippines, Tobago, Trinidad, U.S., UK, United Arab Emirates, Vietnam

Sugar Sammy’s Art: Making Jokes of Ethnicity, Sex, and Conflict

Maximilian Forte — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 03:53:12 +0000

Another installment of Monday Morning Madness takes us to Sugar Sammy, an Indo-Canadian stand-up comedian who offers a narrative that is dripping with racial, ethnic and gender jokes, directed against Indians, and virtually every other major ethnic group in North America. Thanks to UK-based Trinidadian blogger, Jumbie’s Watch, for drawing my attention to these videos.

I do not want to “anthropologize” this to the point that I suck the life out of the humour, but it is always amazing for me to see how well comedians do in deconstructing race, ethnicity, and gender, by inverting, by performing stereotypes, by engaging in self-deprecation, and by playing on the myths that have become the currency of everyday social discourse. By making a joke of it all, Sugar Sammy achieves in a few short minutes what we anthropologists try to convey in numerous lectures and readings: the arbitrariness of culture. Sugar Sammy shows how arbitrary it all is, by revealing its ultimate absurdity, that race, ethnicity, and gender are something to not just laugh at, but laugh with. What he also does is to take various conflicts and fears as given (listen for example to his material on “terrorists” and “sand niggers” in the second video — raunchy, provocative stuff), and thus unlike anthropologists makes no attempt to take the deconstruction further, to examine the roots of conflict. I suppose that is one reason why so few of us anthropologists have time to be funny — and yet I say this while acknowledging that, by far, the funniest academics I have ever known in any discipline (and I studied in most), have tended to be anthropologists, at least in my experience. Enough now, let’s hear Sugar Sammy…

Posted in Monday Morning Madness Tagged: Arabs, Blacks, canada, ethnicity, gender, India, Indians, money, race, sand niggers, sex, Sikhs, Sugar Sammy, terrorism, Whites

A Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava, May He Poop on My Knee: Cross-Cultural Translation Under Conditions of Contemporary Electronic Globalization

Maximilian Forte — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:11:08 +0000

After an absence of more than three months, it is time for another installment of Monday Morning Madness.

The idea of “translating” another language into your own, by assuming that words that sound the same as words in your language are the same, is not a surprising one — the results can be disastrous, or comical. Christopher Columbus apparently believed that fundamentally there was one universal, natural human language, and that if he tried hard enough he could understand Taíno words by listening for similarities. Taíno mentions of what he heard as “Caniba” (later the basis for the word “cannibal”) was first interpreted by Columbus to mean “the people of the Great Khan.” He was so convinced that he could grasp the native language that he had never heard before, that he was reputed to have placed his hands on the mouths of Taíno speakers, to help them better shape their words to sound like Spanish words.

The two videos below do not advance themselves as formal attempts to translate the Hindi heard in Bollywood music videos, but the core of their “joke” is that they notice that some Hindi words, or parts of them, sound like English words — different words with different meanings, but similar sound units. This is either purely an accident, or some phonological echo of what numerous travelers, explorers, missionaries, and then philologists found: the linguistic strands that constitute the Indo-European family of languages.

The results of these particular video episodes of cross-cultural encounters and cross-cultural communication are often hilarious. The first video, titled “Crazy Indian Video” was subtitled by Buffalax in YouTube, someone from Dayton, Ohio, who seems to have made an art of subtitling Indian videos. As far as Internet celebrity status goes, Buffalax is either a star or close to one: this one video alone has been viewed nearly 12 million times over the past two years, and is rated as “awesome” by nearly 40,000 people who bothered to rate it. Almost 36,000 comments have been posted on the video, which inspired the beginnings of a new YouTube genre. “Benny Lava” now appears as a new word in the “Urban Dictionary.” And, someone decided to bring “Benny Lava” to life and turned him into a 33 year-old male in Washington DC, with his own MySpace page. Some are now speaking of a “Benny Lava Phenomenon” seeing that the video has been internationalized, remade, reworked, and reenacted by Brazilians, by Croatian college students, and turned into the basis for another spoof of John McCain and Sarah Palin.

A few months later, Ben174, from Modesto, California, subtitled the second video below, and retitled it, “May He Poop on My Knee.” It has been viewed over two million times so far. This appears to be one of the more popular videos in the Benny Lava Genre, rivaled perhaps by the “Indian Nipple Song.”

The cultural idiocy of globalization?

No longer remembering who the original critic was who made this argument, I recall reading an unforgiving critique of such phenomena, as signs of the cultural idiocy accompanying, facilitating, or inspired by globalization processes — no content, no meaning, just sounds and gestures remade to fit whatever framework. Actually, the target of the attack was a relatively mute figure, that of Mr. Bean, who I first “met” in Trinidad & Tobago, seeing him again in Australia, and finding him back in Canada, as well as on multiple long haul flights just before the featured film was shown, his appearance timed to go together with the free soda and peanuts. People of all sorts of nationalities and language backgrounds could and did laugh at him — he eluded the challenge of cross-cultural translation by basically never speaking, just making funny little gurgles and moans, and over-expressing himself with his face. His overdone facial contortions resembled those of an adult trying to charm a baby in a crib. Do these two videos follow the same principle? To some extent, yes, in that they still render the object virtually mute, lest anything should hinder the supremacy of our individual agency, which the shopping mall ideology of cultural and neo-liberal globalization had us believe should tower above all obstacles to consumption. More than that, both Mr. Bean and the Benny Lava genre — good natured, humorous, to be sure — point to the shallowness of cross-cultural understanding in what was heralded as this wonderful new age of globalized consciousness and global self-awareness (if one listened to Anthony Giddens elegize the topic). A transformation in social ties there may have been, but a transformation in cross-cultural understanding is much more dubious (and I choose my words deliberately in speaking of globalization in the past tense). Instead we were treated to fare such as these, reduced to gestures, tunes, noises, laughing at others, and thanks to the neo-cons, a renewed fear of others. The globalization of electronic communication made hits of “lol cats” and viral videos of dancing teens — in a time of multiple genocides. One wonders then if in place of communication across cultures, what we have instead is heightened cultural dementia on a planetary scale.

Others might find the charm in these videos to be in their simple, child-like humour prompted by difference and lack of understanding, harmless and happy. It certainly did remind me of cases where, for example, a certain relative who heard that the two main Amerindian language groups in the Andes are the Quechua and Aymara, shouted: “Quechua later! Aymara here!” Or that little fellow Italian-Canadian friend of mine from when we were six, who had something rudely taken from him by another boy in the schoolyard, and who in his “broken” English threatened: “Antonio my mother on you!” (In case anyone does not get these examples: the first sounds like “Catch you later, I’m outta here,” and the second was intended by the boy to mean, “I’m tellin’ my mother on you.”)

Still others might say this is harmless stuff, and if anything one way to bridge a divide. Buffalax certainly devoted considerable time to finding this video, watching it repeatedly, listening, imagining, then subtitling. It does not show a complete lack of interest, for certain.

People don’t often post their thoughts here, usually because by this point I have bored them to death. So, after the video, if it is faster and easier than commenting, perhaps you can enter your vote in the poll that follows — not a scientific poll to be sure, but the precision and objectivity of the questions more than make up for any methodological deficit, not to mention the allowance for repeat votes by the same person, which takes into account the recursiveness of social life.

Benny Lava

May he poop on my knee

Your opinions matter!
(Which is I went to the trouble of forming some of them in advance for you):

Posted in CYBERSPACE RESEARCH, Monday Morning Madness Tagged: Benny Lava, Bollywood, Buffalax, Christopher Columbus, GLOBALIZATION, Hindi, India, Mr Bean, Rowan Atkinson, translation

Amitabh Bachchan in Trinidad

Maximilian Forte — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 02:05:46 +0000

Did my post here bring forth this reality? There I was, a mere 13 days ago, talking about my Bachchan conversion experience in Trinidad, and now I read that he landed in Trinidad last night (Saturday, July 19, 2008), in the company of 150 performers for his Unforgettable Tour … which began where? Next door in Toronto. Yes indeed, chant to the spirit image and bring its body into being in reality.

Of course, this can only cause resentment, that I could not be there. How can Amitabh leave his biggest fan behind? Just for that, I will have to go to India.

Monday Morning “Mor Tor”: Wine it up just so…for the Video Notes from the Indian Diaspora, Part 2

Maximilian Forte — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:11:26 +0000

Aside from being an installment of “Monday Morning Madness,” I need this video as background for at least two coming posts, especially for readers unfamiliar with Trinidadian or Indo-Caribbean cultures, with their dances, and some of the terminology that is used. This post follows the previous (Video) Notes from the Indian Diaspora.

This video, featuring Rikki Jai, begins with an Indian wedding. The idea of teaching a bride how to “wine,” shown in this video, comes up later. So what is “wining”? It is not connected with dining, nor is it a misspelling of “whining.” It is a way of gyrating the hips, and more than that, the bottom, or what some Trinidadians call a “boomsie.” The really good winer is the one who can virtually unhinge her boomsie — showing that the boomsie is working it up, as if all on its own, can be emphasized by dancing with a bottle on one’s head. The bottle stays in place, the boomsie does not. Wining of the kind you see here is dancing reserved for women only. Women who do this professionally and regularly appear in commercial venues may be known as “winer girls.”

Some will claim, in the cultural politics of inter-group competition, that wining originates with East Indians. That may or may not have some truth, but let’s put it this way: if they are not monopolists the video shows they can be specialists. There is also a very thin girl in a mid riff and bright green shorts in the video — that is an example of a “tiny winy,” that will come up again. Many chutney soca performances are accompanied by expert “winer girls,” and in a cultural milieu where women’s bottoms are highly valued, their motions count.

There are different wining motions, and even speeds, but one of the classic motions involves doing a ∞ (sideways figure eight) motion with one’s bottom, as if washing windows. I will leave viewers to detect other motions in the video. And one more hint, “show me your motion” will be the centrepiece of another coming post.

Finally, note that this example of chutney soca is sung in both English and Hindi, which shows, to some extent, the success of the revitalization of Indian culture. Even those of us on the outside get to learn some Hindi thanks to these musical productions, the way I recently learned from youtubing my way through Bollywood that “bindiya chamke” means “glittering dot,” as one example.

(Video) Notes from the Indian Diaspora, Part 1: Responding to Modernity and the Tyranny of Tradition

Maximilian Forte — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 10:01:33 +0000

I have to begin by thanking Guanaguanare, one of the Trinidadian bloggers I admire most, for having already done such an excellent job discussing the popular Trinidadian music video below, Sumintra. I will distill some of those notes and add a few comments and sources of my own. So, yes, this is a “derivative” work (or collaboration by relay) that hopefully does as much justice to Sumintra.

“Sumintra” is the title of a well known song in Trinidad performed by the chutney soca artist, Rikki Jai, written by Gregory Ballantyne. I mentioned Rikki Jai at the start of this week, and as I said then, he is brilliance on two legs. There is an important point behind my gushing praises — both Rikki Jai/Ballantyne and Guanaguanare are doing their own engaged anthropology concerning cultural transformations in their home society, with Jai devising a tool, a response, the song Sumintra itself, for dealing with those transformations, and Guanaguanare producing a public commentary on her respected blog. Neither he nor she respectively call themselves anthropologists as far as I know, even though I am aware of some cultural activists in the UK who choose to label themselves “cultural anthropologists” without necessarily suggesting that they have any degree in that field.

•••••••

Before beginning the description/translation and discussion (along with some recommended sources for further reading) let’s look at the video of a young Rikki Jai, with scenes of dancing on top of Naparima Hill overlooking San Fernando (the hill also happens to be a sacred site of the Warao in the nearby Orinoco Delta of Venezuela).

Here are some of the key passages from the text of the video:

Hold de Lata Mangeshkar, give me soca, aha aha
Hold de Lata Mangeshkar, give me soca, aha aha
Tickle me with a lavway, soca me till I sesay
But hold de Lata Mangeshkar, give me soca, aha aha.

Lata Mangeshkar (लता मंगेशकर) is a famous singer in India who has starred in countless Bollywood movies and even sings classic bhajans and ghazals (I am lucky enough to have one of her sets of tapes). For modern traditionalist Indians in Trinidad, respecting much of what comes from the Indian motherland and sourcing it as part of their impressive cultural revitalization in Trinidad which has lasted for generations, a figure such as Mangeshkar is revered. And, as I said, she is also a tremendous singer, and more than just a symbolic figure.

(Trinidad’s Indian cultural revitalization was a subject of interest to Morton Klass, anthropologist at Columbia University who passed away in 2001. His first book on Indians in Trinidad titled East Indians in Trinidad: A Study of Cultural Persistence and published in 1961, really brought the subject of Indian revitalization to the fore, even to the point that he was publicly castigated by the historian and independence leader of Trinidad, Eric Williams, for lending legitimacy to the divisive ethnic claims of what Williams called a “hostile and recalcitrant minority.”)

Sumintra is not hostile and recalcitrant. She is what the traditionalists dread, a defector. She pledges allegiance to a “Trinbagonian” identity (the word is a composite of Trinidadian and Tobagonian). She tells Rikki to hold the Lata Mangeshkar, she wants soca music instead. And there is a silent, or muffled story of cultural creolization right there, since many doubt that soca developed without the input of East Indian musical influences. Even if the creolization theme had been made obvious at this point, it would not lessen the dread for the traditionalists/purists, some of whom have famously gone on record in protesting that creolization is tantamount to genocide.

Sumintra is explicitly against ethnic politics, making this video quite subversive in the Trinidadian context of political antagonism and sometimes even residential segregation dividing those of East Indian ancestry from those of African ancestry, with both forming roughly equal portions of the overall national population. Sumintra has the courage to say:

Sumintra charge me [Rikki Jai] for being racist
And tell mi doh take dem chance wid she
Doh let mih catch you in dat foolishness
Trying to reach de Indian in me
Like you into politics, boy, you comin on dem tricks
Boy, I’m Trinbagonian, I like soca action
Take your Mohammed Rafi and bring Scrunter [soca star] or Bally [Gregory Ballantyne, the author of this very song]
Only then you’d be talkin to me. Yes, Rikki

Sumintra charges Rikki with racism! Why? For trying to maintain her within the fold, for trying to capture her for tradition, for trying to “reach the Indian” inside her. He’s speaking like any of the other ethno-political boys of what is now known as the United National Congress. She will have none of it. Sumintra wants “soca action”. “Tickle me with a lavway” she says — lavway is a creolized version of two French words, most likely “la voix” (the voice), a reference to the call and response form of early calypso music, the progenitor of soca. (I never found anyone who could tell me what “sesay” means.) “Bindiya chamkegi” is the title of one of Mangeshkar’s songs (which you can see and hear, here). You can view Mangeshkar performing here. Incidentally, one can find Mangeshkar’s voice singing for this beautifully nationalistic video, Vande Mataram, the Indian national anthem. I warmly recommend it for the imagery alone, parts of which I think are inspired by epic moments of American nationalism, such as the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima.

(Sumintra would have no time for me either, as I believe that Mangeshkar is a deity, and I am presently busy building an altar in her honour in my study. It is right next to the one for Amitabh Bachchan of course.)

Sumintra is also cast as a woman who has experienced modernity and multiple cultures, far from her birthplace, a shack in the Trinidadian village of Debe, mostly populated by Indians. Rikki Jai says of her:

Must be University or dem trips to Miami
That make she draw a border between roots and culture
She’s a liberated soul, Trinbago in she passport

University. Foreign travel. Her roots are distinct from her culture, just as the tree is larger and broader than the roots from which it sprang. It’s explicit here, she is “liberated,” a “Trinbagonian.” Rikki feels small now, and she even tells him, “Sport, you come short.” (Excuse me miss, please let that be the last time you belittle my beloved little Rikki.)

Rikki is not about to roll over and die. He comes up with a plan. He wants Indian, she wants soca. In comes chutney soca, a partial reindianization, and a creolized reinidanization at that, of something that emerged in part from Indian influences to begin with. He says:

I still believe the best gift is music
’Cause music is the food of love
But now I had to come up with new tricks
For Sumintra to get involve
…
Is soca yuh want eh?
I go give you what you want.
Lavway! Sesay!

•••••••

Guanaguanare is right (see “A Note from the Gull” midway down that page), this is a song one heard in the background of everyday life in Trinidad, and some of us were late in realizing the genius of the song. Guanaguanare also has a love for Mangeshkar, but understands Sumintra’s desire to transcend the binding bonds of the past and experience freedom. In a powerful paragraph, Guanaguanare writes:

While this speaking to difference may be excused or even essential in less open societies, here in Trinbago, it is often quickly seen for what it is – a ploy and often a divisive one that pits one “group” against another, whether these be distinguished by religion, ethnicity, gender, class, political affiliation. We identify the trickery by recognizing that we are being flattened, simplified, categorized, reduced to one dimensionality. We defend our multi-dimensionality by asking ourselves the questions, “Why am I not being addressed as an individual and a human being and a man or woman or child and a Trinbagonian? What aspect or aspects of my being and my life in this country am I expected to neglect, to betray? Why are these artificial distinctions being solidified?” Whether the object(s) of these strategies choose, like Sumintra, to protest, or to play along, depends on if there is the perception of benefits to be received. We are entitiled always it would seem, to sell ourselves to the highest bidder.

Do I detect some bitterness in that instrumentalist view of personal strategies? I may not be following Guanaguanare, and perhaps she will offer a clarification either here or at new collaborative blog some of us are planning (more later).

My questions about the video/song are:

Does the song preach against ethno-political divisions, or does it in fact practice division? Notice that Sumintra is to be the role model of the dominant, national, creolized identity, one that apparently leaves little room for East Indians except perhaps as background influence that is rarely acknowledged.

Does the song obscure the Indian origins of soca, and buy into the traditionalist and purist fears of creolization?

Were Indians in Trinidad ever so marginalized and alienated as some of their most prominent political leaders (for example, former Prime Minister Basdeo Panday) have claimed?

•••••••

Readers who wish to read more along this line of discussion should see these works by Viranjini Munasinghe, anthropologist at Cornell University:

Munasinghe, Viranjini. (2003). Callaloo or Tossed Salad? East Indians and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Trinidad. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Munasinghe, Viranjini. (2002). “Nationalism in Hybrid Spaces: The Production of Impurity out of Purity.” American Ethnologist, August 29 (3): 663-692.

Speaking in an interview, Munasinghe identifies some of the leading food metaphors in the politics of national identity in Trinidad. Callaloo is a stew made from dasheen. Tossed salad requires no explanation, unless the reader has been on a meat-only diet since birth. Munasinghe says:

many Indo-Trinidadian cultural and political activists I spoke with during my fieldwork in 1999 and 2000 took exception to this metaphor for the Trinidad nation. They argued that since the ingredients making up the “callaloo” are boiled down to an indistinguishable mush, the original ingredients lose their respective identities and blend into one homogeneous taste. They disapproved of this metaphor because it represented an extreme level of blending or “mixture.” Instead they opted for the metaphor of the “tossed salad“–an image which also signified diversity but one where, unlike the callaloo, each diverse ingredient maintained its originally distinct and unique identity. Thus the food metaphors of the callaloo and the tossed salad for the nation of Trinidad and Tobago convey very different ideas of mixture — callaloo depicting a process of mixture that produces homogeneity and tossed salad signifying the co-existence of diverse elements in pluralism.

Munasinghe does a great job of condensing discussion of India-Trinidad exchange and the emergence of an Indian cultural revitalization movement in Trinidad:

Identification with India heightened in the 1930s when the independence movement in India added vigor to the Indo-Trinidadian consciousness. As early as the 1930s, young Indo-Trinidadian intellectuals began staging island-wide demonstrations in support of India’s demand for freedom. Public meetings held in Indo-Trinidadian majority areas opened and closed with Indian patriotic songs and “Vande Matram,” the Indian national anthem. Many of the Indo-Trinidadian organizations formed during this period, like the India Club, were intent on spreading knowledge about India and things Indian. Wealthy Indo-Trinidadians visited India and contributed generously to famine relief funds. Visits from a host of Indian missionaries and cultural leaders generated new interest, especially among the Indo-Trinidadian middle class, in the language and culture of their “mother country.” The first Indian movie, “Bala Joban” was shown to enthralled audiences in Trinidad in 1935.

The role of the Indian mass media, especially its powerful film and music industry has been critical, and this is the backdrop against which Rikki Jai must define himself in the video above.

Munasinghe continues in that interview by discussing creolization, colonialism and racism, and contemporary ethnic politics. It is a good synopsis of the range of material she dicusses in her book listed above. With respect to creolization, and the dominant metaphor of creolization has been the callaloo, she says that this historically worked to exclude East Indians:

Creolization is a concept primarily identified with the Caribbean to describe and analyze processes of cultural adaptation and change within deeply hierarchical systems (the plantation/slavery complex and the race/color hierarchy that accompanied it) whereby new cultural forms emerged in the New World. A combination of the Spanish words “criar” (to create, to imagine) and “colon” (a colonist, a founder, a settler), the term Creole in the British Caribbean refers to people and things that constitute a mix of elements originating in the Old World. Through this mix of Old World forms, cultures and people indigenous to the New World were created. The terms creole and creolization, however, emphasize primarily the synthesis of African and European Old World elements, thereby excluding Indians. Thus while those with African and European ancestry are labeled Creoles, Indo-Trinidadians are never considered to be Creole. The implications of this exclusion from creole status is significant for Indo-Trinidadians.

Munasinghe does not explain how a cultural process, which certainly did include Indians, as in the case of soca, and moreso chutney soca, excluded them. What she is leaving out of the discussion is that political representations of creolization can and have emphasized the figure of the “Afro-Saxon” as representative of creole society, but she also should add that, like the people Sumintra rejects, some Indian nationalists are self-excluding, and disavow any ownership of the creole cultural forms that they themselves helped to create.

Creolization also implied indigenization whereby foreign elements could become native to the New World through creative mixings. Thus, all persons and things “Creole” signified native status in Trinidad, and by extension the New World. East Indians who were considered unmixables because they were thought to be so saturated with an ancient (albeit inferior) civilization, were as a consequence not accorded Creole or native status in Trinidad. Thus, Indo-Trinidadians have been symbolically positioned as outside of the nation of Trinidad before and since independence in 1962.

Here is the “hostile and recalcitrant” notion at work again. This is largely true, but let us also remember self-exclusion as well, where mixture was equated with genocide by Indo-Trinidadian political and religious leaders (the process known as “douglarization” — a dougla being the offspring of one Indian and one African parent). Even more contentious have been the occasional claims by some Indo-Trinidadian politicians that black men come to central Trinidad, where most Indians reside, in order to rape Indian women. Suddenly, the discussion has become quite ugly.

Munasinghe also explains how colonial policies of racial division continue into the present, in ways that echoe with what we saw in the video above:

Colonial policies and racial theories continue to influence contemporary politics on the island. The division between the two major ethnic groups comprising Trinidad’s population, the Afro-Trinidadian and the Indo-Trinidadian, which is marked and reproduced by race rhetoric and ethnic stereotypes with both groups jealously guarding what they believe to be their legitimate terrain, can be traced to colonial policy. East Indians were brought to Trinidad as “scab labor” to drive down the bargaining power of the Afro-Trinidadians. Thus, East Indians from the beginning occupied a structurally antagonistic position to Afro-Trinidadians.

The profligate “Negro” and the thrifty Indian are caricatures that survive to this day and inform some of the “outrage” that surrounds some of the music videos will shall be seeing:

Caricatures of the luxury-loving, lazy, immoral Negro and of the docile, hardworking and cunning Indian abound in planter discourses of the period soon after emancipation. Many of these derogatory racial stereotypes continue to this day as the two groups use these same caricatures to undermine one another. Unfortunately, as is the case with ethnic/racial stereotypes, these negative racial traits are thought to signify natural characteristics of the respective groups and the specific colonial history that led to the creation of such discourse is forgotten or remains unacknowledged.

In Part 2 of this series, I will continue by discussing, and showing, “wining”. See you then.

“Head-Decay-Shun”: Literacy, tool of the dependent and displaced?

Maximilian Forte — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 01:07:18 +0000

Given the particularities of the way Jamaican creole English is pronounced, the word education often sounds like head-decay-shun. I once heard a Guyanese professor claim that this pronunciation, in this case, was more than just coincidental: it was a critical rejection of the formal school system by some Rastafarians in Jamaica, given what they saw as the continuing mental colonization being perpetrated and perpetuated in those schools. Volumes, novels, and decades of discussions and debates have been devoted to the subject of Caribbean education, and this is not the place, nor am I the one to do the reprise of all the material, much of it critical with famous examples including learning the history of Oliver Cromwell and Sir Walter Raleigh rather than Sam Sharpe or Paul Bogle, or reading about farms in temperate climates, or poems about nightingales, and so forth. Yet, and yet, there has been widespread recognition in the Anglophone Caribbean that education is the path to “success,” especially among working class urban African descendants, with notable success stories of achievement through education being figures such as Eric Williams. Indeed, it seems that the Anglophone Caribbean has more Nobel laureates per capita than anywhere else in the world.

But, I am not convinced, not entirely anyway.

I recently viewed some documentaries about Canadians overseas teaching poor children and orphans in India how to read, and these teachers were really devoting themselves, body and soul, spending their life savings, changing their lifestyle, and so forth. Seeing the little children reading big pink and blue letters accompanying pictures in their books, their little fingers dragged across each letter as they read each word … prompted me to think some gloomy thoughts.

I thought of people I have known, living in rural areas, whether in Canada, Trinidad, or Central America, who almost seemed to boast that they had no education at all, and lived full and happy lives and had everything they needed and wanted. I then think of these urban children in India, with nothing, no land, no food that they grow for themselves, the exact opposite of self-sufficiency, and the perfect picture of dependency.

Education, centred in cities, in urban civilizations, post-hunting and gathering, post-nomadic, accompanying the rise of inequality and tyranny. If we want to talk about the social context of education, we have to keep in mind the conditions under which education became education, and when it became mandatory. Those children in India need literacy if they are to have any chance of succeeding, of surviving, in modern India — and while that is almost certainly true, is it an endorsement of literacy as good in itself?

Few would question the value of literacy, not even the Taliban (who rejected literacy for females only), people of the book. Literacy is a tool of the dispossessed and displaced, those urban refugees who are born as “citizens” without any stake, without any basis in their nation, divorced and cut off from any independent access to resources of their own. Citizenship comes without land, and with lots of dependency on institutional structures, on wages, on rented apartments, and so forth.

What strikes me as being endlessly ironic is that “development workers” will then take the tools of the refugees, the dispossessed, the urban landless, into rural areas, to peasants and claim that literacy is for their good. To me this is the equivalent of someone who lives in a tent in a refugee camp telling someone with a mansion that if they want to improve their lives they ought to try on a tent for size. It’s always amazing how “we” can make the “fruits” of dispossession and displacement look like “progress.”

Stockholm Bollywood: “Jumma chumma de de” and Memories of a Cultural Shock

Maximilian Forte — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:11:51 +0000

I found my captor and tormentor! I found my captor and tormentor who subjected me to an afternoon of torture, appearing in noisy, nauseating technicolour dreams for long afterwards, until I learned to love him and all those like him. I am referring not only to the supreme Amitabh Bachchan (see this biography as well), but to Bollywood in general. Of course I knew of Bollywood music well before that nightmarish afternoon of delayed ecstasy — it was the sound of women, sounding like shrill mosquitoes, and men who resembled doll-like versions of Elvis. I never cared for the music, that is, until one afternoon in 1992. This is my little story of Stockholm Syndrome, Bollywood-Trinidad style, and the blessed psychosis that is called “cultural shock”, sometimes experienced on the way to “going native.” The hostage-taking unfolded in Monarch Cinema at 49 Eastern Main Road in Tunapuna.

On a dry, hot, bright Wednesday afternoon in 1992 I sought a means of escaping Trinidad, at least in fantasy. It was a bad period, and I had a recurring dream of running through a jungle with a group of bedraggled East Indian men, where we would come to an abandoned airstrip carved out of the jungle, and a huge gleaming Boeing 747 hidden under layers of palms, and how we would climb in and figure out how to fly out of the green hell. (Incidentally, I was in Trinidad as a graduate student in International Relations, an appropriately imperialist field of study taught by technocrats and out-party ex-ministers of this postcolony — yes, Hans Morgenthau and “international politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power” and other Cold Warriors like James Rosenau and George Keenan.)

I rarely went to the cinema alone, but I could find no one who would come with me to see David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.” “Twin Peaks” had come to Trinidad a few months before, when it was shown late on Sunday nights on the then new CCN-TV6 channel, an exciting change for one-station Trinidad. Few people would stay up late to see this bizarre program, and some who caught a glimpse of it would screw up their faces at it (as they did when telling me what they thought about it), unable to comprehend the bizarre surrealism of an evil midget doing the twist on a couch, or the guiding wisdom of a giant who appears in dreams, or the “log lady” and the colonel in the coffee shop, and FBI Agent Cooper who uses dreams to hunt down paranormal crimes. It was too strange, which in itself is strange since Trinidadians can be so very strange in their own tales. And so I went, excited to continue indulging my North American Twin Peaks fantasy.

I reached Monarch Cinema, and it was a Wednesday, as I mentioned. I saw hand painted posters for Indian films plastered on the exterior. One said “Ek ladka, ek ladki.” Given the symmetry and sound, I wondered if this was the Hindi title for the film, “Glengarry Glen Ross.” “Twin Peaks,” and both of the two films just mentioned, all appeared in 1992.

I went to the tiny window of the box office and asked for a ticket. The Indian man looked at me and said, “You mean for now?” Odd question. I got my ticket, bought a few squares of guava cheese, and went to sit down.

After a while, people start coming into the cinema, but very few, and all of them Indian, without a single exception. All of them also glanced at me as they passed, some twice, as if there was something unusual about my being there. I thought that maybe it was just because I looked foreign, or Syrian (back then I was frequently mistaken in public for Anthony “Zoom” Saloom, a Syrian calypsonian — “Syrian” in Trinidad is amorphous, used to describe any person of Middle Eastern origin, and they can be Christians, Jews, and Muslims). I thought that only Indians came to the film the same way that the majority of heavy metal concert goers in Trinidad are also Indian, and that “Twin Peaks” might have been more to their tastes? Whatever, I was desperate for a plausible explanation.

The lights dimmed and then went off … and the nightmare began. I tried to convince myself, “No, it must be just a preview.” When the “preview” went on for longer than 10 minutes, I told myself, “Stay calm, it must be a double feature, and Twin Peaks will come after this.” After two hours nothing changed! The air conditioning was so cold that I got stiff. I did not want to just get out of my chair and storm out — it might be read as offensive by the other patrons, and the man who sold me the ticket would say, “You see he, what an ass, he don’t know what movie he come to see.” So I felt constrained, to stay there, my eyes wide open like saucers in sheer terror at the sight of this oversized, brick-headed cross between Elvis Presley and Frankenstein, doing big pelvic thrusts on stage in a concert in London. If I had the ability, then, to stand outside myself I would have appreciated that I was still getting a Twin Peaks-like experience of a different kind.

The title of that “shocker” was “Jumma chumma in London.” I even found a clip from the very film that subjected me to such anguish resulting from the conflict between confusion over a film not shown, and a desire to flee, and a sense of socially constrained stillness:

The song that had such a lasting impact on me, the feature song of the film, is titled Jumma chumma de de, and is sung by the superhero/superstar Amitabh Bachchan. The full video of what one youtuber calls a “monumental song” is available here, and monumental might really be right … wait until you reach precisely 1:00 into the song, the Nazi point as I call it, stirring rallying cries and demanding summons … and if it makes you suffer, then suffer through the whole blasted thing! This is anthropology here, and anthropology is pain and self-change:

What I had completely forgotten is that for this cinema all Wednesdays were devoted to showing Indian films only, with the scheduled film of the week shown every other day. I returned to my apartment in St. Augustine that afternoon, quiet and brow beaten. I went to lie down on a bed that felt like hot bread just out of the oven, and all I could hear was Jumma chumma and see Bachchan thrusting, thrusting away, with his huge hands and massive head. I told people about this experience, hoping they would say something that would help to cure me, and instead they just doubled over laughing. And yet, the video has a disturbing quality for me: the images suggest that this is a giant gang rape, accompanied with a massive sperm hose, to subjugate the naughty bimbette who presumably asks to become the star Abusiña.

Years later, Trinidadian Chutney Soca sensation, Rikki Jai, would do a memorable remake of this same song, so it was never going to go away. Rikki Jai is brilliance on legs. In fact, I think it was his version that finally converted me to the strength and monumentality of Bachchan’s song, which now rang in my head forever after. I found the Bachchan original by first looking for Jai’s remake. And it was thanks to Rikki Jai that I was eventually turned on to all forms of Indian music, not just Chutney Soca, but also classic bhajans and ghazals. Having the right friends to recommend material to me also made a lasting difference.

To this day I do not know what is said in the Jumma Chumma song, and it does not matter. I am a devoted convert to a sound and to images. I dreamt of this song for months afterwards. And now after 16 years I finally found it, on YouTube, where I realized how I was first called to Bollywood, precisely when and where, and through which song.

Now in Trinidad, on lazy, peaceful, warm Sunday afternoons with long golden, orange rays and tall shadows, a car with two massive megaphones on it will pass, blaring Bollywood music as it leads an Indian wedding party. The Doppler shift is impressive, and in slow motion. And whenever I hear one of these wedding parties approach I feel like I am transported to Heaven and I beg: “God, never take me away from this place.” And when I think about it, my prayers have really been answered.

Note 1: When I mentioned “the Nazi point” I did not mean to suggest anything about Bachchan’s politics, but rather to aesthetics alone, viewed through my lens. Bachchan successfully ran for a seat with the India Congress Party, and was a personal friend of Rajiv Gandhi and his mother, Indira.

Note 2: I am using this post to kick off a new series on this blog, that I will call “Notes from the Indian Diaspora.” Chutney Soca, and the mutual communication and interrelationships between Indians in India, Indians in Trinidad, and the role of anthropologists with roots in the Indian subcontinent, will be the centrepieces of the series. Afterwards, I will go back to the militarization of anthropology, through the work of David Price mostly.

KOBO•TOWN: The Promise of Independence

Maximilian Forte — Wed, 21 May 2008 22:25:44 +0000

SING OUT, SHOUT OUT

Download: 1.mp3

forty years ago today
independence came our way
welcomed by our struggling songs
it came but would not stay
and we, wanting to believe,
let ourselves be deceived
by the well-groomed speech of ambitious men
who time proved to be thieves
but the years went by and nothing came
new flag, new name, same old game
where the lucky laugh and the poor endure
having lost the will to fight again

Chorus
I remember when we were young
and hope was strong
and we had waited long
to hear the midnight bell
that would dispel
the age that kept us down
I recall when we would bleed
’cause we believed
freedom was in reach
of those who seized the day
but freedom came and faded like a dream

children of a passing age
remnants of a dying rage
whose anthems swept across this land
proclaiming a new day
and we waited patiently
for the elusive decree
that would rub away the scars we bore
and set our voices free
but the years wore on and nothing came
tyrants just bore different names
while the official line promised brighter times
we knew all things remained the same

independence, what an elusive dream
things are never ever what they seem
marchin’ hand in hand awaitin’ the command
of the liberator, soon to be the henchman
people’s vanguard, propaganda ministry
freedom fighters fillin’ the ranks of the secret police
while the tale on the times told in obituary lines
we offer our resistance with these humble rhymes

sing out, shout out, the dream never dies….

Speeches: Jawarhalal Nehru, August 15th, 1947, On India’s Independence; Milton Obote, October 9th, 1962, On the Independence of Uganda; Winston Churchill, June 18th, 1940, Address to House of Commons

CNN’s “Mondo Cane”: Screaming Muslim Babies in India, and Gawking Journalists (updated)

Maximilian Forte — Fri, 02 May 2008 17:58:26 +0000

CNN aired a piece on a “baby dropping ritual” in India in the Anderson Cooper segment last night, accompanied by Cooper’s wincing, and news reader Erica Hill’s raised voice exclaiming: “Look at that!“. The transcript on the CNN website is titled, in the mode of the gawker: “Villagers throw babies from temple roof“.

Given the lack of contextualizing, the almost complete absence of any explanation, and the continuous looping of the drop (which looked harmless to me), accompanied by shouts, squeals, and grimaces from the CNN “newsroom”, I realized that this scene was familiar to me, not so much the precise ritual itself, but the picture as a whole of a “bizarre” custom, the lack of ethnographic analysis, and the intent to shock, ending with a moralizing message that introduces “rationalism”. What the CNN piece looked like was something straight out of Mondo Cane, an Italian “skockumentary” in two volumes, from the 1960s, by two Italian fascist writers and directors (Gualtiero Jacopetti and Paolo Cavara). (I used their first film in a course about “Images of Self and Other” when I was still at Cape Breton University.) The leading line in the CNN segment–“In a ritual that would terrify most mothers”–reminds me of the typical tagline for Mondo Cane stressing “shocking” and “astounding” acts, “real archive footage displaying mankind at its most depraved and perverse, displaying bizarre rituals, cruel behavior”, which also imitates the typical posters and bulletins of mid-nineteenth century European ethnographic festivals (see examples in Edwards, 1992). “Most mothers”, CNN says, but then immediately adds: “Indian villagers have cheered as screaming babies were dropped from a 50-foot temple tower”…so not Indian mothers, but most white, Western mothers, i.e., “viewers like you”.

As I have argued elsewhere, what CNN is doing, like other media outlets, is not just displaying, harmlessly and without intention. The more ambitious aim is to train their audience in acquiring and applying certain values which support Western domination. Needless to say, CNN knows what it is doing when it selectively chooses to use a terror word in its opening line. Then we find out these villagers are Muslim (and Hindu, but CNN places them second, even if they outnumber Muslims in India) and they are opposed (despite the absence of any evidence of any harm done to babies) by Rationalist International and the Indian Rationalist Association which both “support secularism”, among other goals (and I do not intend to suggest that there is anything “shady” about these organizations).

It is not at all clear that the rationalists want the practice banned because it is “unsafe”–safety, like the hygiene trope, is one that CNN chooses to insert. It has a colonizing and exclusionary function as a practice of domination: next to the “unclean” other, the dirty savage, we now have the “unsafe” other…who after thousands of years of child rearing still has not learned the basics of how to treat babies.

This is not the most disturbing behaviour one can expect from CNN–after all this was the company that cheered the bloody invasion of Iraq in 2003, with its weeks of whipping up spectators with “countdown to a showdown” (cowboy style), and its glowing assessments of “shock and awe”, and its mild-mannered questions to generals about ballistics and ordnance, some memorable examples from Doha press conferences being: “Are you considering dropping some JDAMS, sir? How have the Cobras fared in the desert climate? Are we going to see the MOAB in action?”. CNN is an insider, at the top of the society it occupies.

It does give us one more example of what mass-mediated discourse looks like without ethnography, without intellectual curiosity, and without honesty. After all, CNN drags in a talking head for every little tid-bit of political gossip, but can’t be bothered to call in one of the thousands of anthropologists in the US to offer a little contextualization.

ADDENDA:
As I posted the item above, I did not realize that this “news story” was slowly beginning to spread from blog to blog, from news site to news site (almost absent is any Indian coverage, with most of the sites I have seen being exclusively Western). Rather than try to comment on each item, let me simply post some descriptive links below (by no means a complete list, nor necessarily representative either), and show two videos, one from CNN and the other from Reuters.

From other blogs:

Red Neck Riches Web 2.0: “When I seen this headline at Foxnews.com I was really afraid to read the whole story….The bizarre ritual of throwing newborn babies off a temple 50ft high….” — notes this as a Muslim practice.

BagOfNothing: “Babies thrown from tower for good luck”–”Worshippers at a Muslim shrine“

Babylune: “Babies thrown off temple for good luck”–FoxNews.com is reporting about a tradition that is done every year in India, I’m not sure on the name but the basic idea is to drop babies off 50 ft from the roof of a temple and landing on a cloth sheet. Once the baby lands on the sheet they bounce, this is considered good luck or health. I have no clue how they think this would be good luck unless they consider the baby not making it to be the bad luck….”

From other news sites:

Fox News: “Indian Babies Dropped 50 Feet for Good Luck in Bizarre Ritual….A jaw-dropping ritual….”

Huffington Post: “India’s Baby Dropping Ritual….Muslims in western India have been observing a bizarre ritual…”

ITV.com: “Devotees drop babies 50ft for luck….Worshippers at a Muslim shrine in western India have been dropping babies from a tower for good luck…”

Reuters: “Apr 30 – Muslims in western India have been observing a bizarre ritual – they’ve been throwing their young children off a tall building to improve their health….”

NBC Zeitgeist: “…shouldn’t you be more shocked that a human baby has just been dropped five stories in front of you?….Stop throwing babies from the roofs of buildings.”

WBKO: “Muslim parents in Indian drop babies from tower….You won’t believe this video…”

Miscellaneous:

From Craigslist, Sacramento, 01 May, 2008: “Baby Drop Day in India”–”Drop the little naked sucker from the top of the temple….TOSS YOUR BRAT from the top of your temple.”

Daily Comedy: “Drop It Like a Tot–Worshippers at a Muslim shrine in western India have been dropping babies 50ft from a tower for good luck…. In other news, Michael Jackson has been named Father of the Year in India.”

From SodaHead: Indian Baby Drop–What do you think of this strange 500 year old ritual?…”This is footage from an actual CNN report…”

Videos:

From CNN

From REUTERS

ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY » India

Encircling Empire: Report #9, 01—07 January 2011

EE: Report #9, 01—07 January 2011

THE NAXALITES: MAOIST REVOLUTION IN INDIA

THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN

WIKILEAKS NEWS, GOOD AND BAD

PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY NOTES

USA Fears Loss of Sri Lanka

USA-India-China: Sri Lanka as Geopolitical/Economic Battlespace

Senate Foreign Relations Report 2009: The Americans Are Coming! The Americans Are Coming!

Become the Switzerland of the Indian Ocean

Sex Beats Money, Hitler Beats Gandhi: More Google Insights

Questions, more than conclusions

Sugar Sammy’s Art: Making Jokes of Ethnicity, Sex, and Conflict

A Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava, May He Poop on My Knee: Cross-Cultural Translation Under Conditions of Contemporary Electronic Globalization

Benny Lava

May he poop on my knee

Your opinions matter! (Which is I went to the trouble of forming some of them in advance for you):

Amitabh Bachchan in Trinidad

Monday Morning “Mor Tor”: Wine it up just so…for the Video Notes from the Indian Diaspora, Part 2

(Video) Notes from the Indian Diaspora, Part 1: Responding to Modernity and the Tyranny of Tradition

“Head-Decay-Shun”: Literacy, tool of the dependent and displaced?

Stockholm Bollywood: “Jumma chumma de de” and Memories of a Cultural Shock

KOBO•TOWN: The Promise of Independence

SING OUT, SHOUT OUT

CNN’s “Mondo Cane”: Screaming Muslim Babies in India, and Gawking Journalists (updated)

Your opinions matter!
(Which is I went to the trouble of forming some of them in advance for you):