The affective loop is dizzying as it moves us between distant places and local homes, political upheavals and natural disasters, raging storms and individual stories, the serious and the absurd. Unable to catch my breath between blows or steady myself according to some sense of scale, I feel like so much has happened since the tsunami struck. And yet, I don’t know what to make of any of it.  Are we just bracing ourselves for the next thing?

In an April article entitled “The Half-life of Disaster” Brian Massumi discusses how this media cycle leads us into a perpetual state of foreboding that brings together natural, economic and political threat perception in a configuration that fuels what Naomi Klein termed “disaster capitalism”. The horror is never resolved or replaced; rather, it is archived, infinitely accessible over the Internet.  Cast into the web of other events, the unendurable tragedy of a particular event dissipates, or as Massumi says, “it decays”.  In today’s catastrophic mediashpere, observes Massumi, the half-life of disaster is at most two weeks.

Why have we let the situation in Japan recede into the background of other “big news”?  Massumi and others suggest that this “post-shock pre-posturing” increasingly delegates collective response to the national security apparatus, obscures the structural causes of “natural” disaster (Katrina as well as Fukushima illustrate this point well), and feeds the increasingly centralized global economy which capitalizes on the instability created by the very disasters it helps potentiate.

While I discussed responsibility and resistance in relation to mass-mediated affect in my last post, here I want to offer another mode of response: stepping out of the affective loop.  While feeling with others in the context of suffering is perhaps the only appropriate response when faced with the immediacy of another’s pain, undoing the social causes of suffering requires a continuously engaged critical perspective. I’d like to offer that the ongoing events in Japan are terribly important to us right now in an unfolding global context.

What’s perhaps most important about the aftermath of the disaster was not what happened in the first two weeks, but what is happening twelve weeks out.  Not only does the US public need to step out of the media-driven affective whirlpool, but we need to step back into the global conversation about energy sustainability and the political, social, economic, and environmental disasters brought about in the effort to maintain the current levels of profit.

The meltdowns at Fukushima temporarily unmask the social and environmental dangers always present in nuclear power.  Likewise, the uprisings in the Middle East reveal the grave economic disparities and instability generated in oil-based economies.  We mustn’t let these revelatory and revolutionary moments pass away.

As proposed by Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis in a letter addressed to Japan, the “international capitalist power-structure” is terrified that the disempowered will seize upon the explosive political potential of these moments.  Their letter suggests that if disaster capitalism runs on an ever-present low-level threat perception, its leading industrial sector—energy—runs on the public’s perception that everything is fine and dandy:

Company men and politicians are aware that the disaster at Fukushima is a tremendous blow to the legitimacy of nuclear power and in a way the legitimacy of capitalist production. A tremendous ideological campaign is under way to make sure that it does not become the occasion for a global revolt against nuclear power and more important for a process of revolutionary change. The fact that the nuclear disaster in Japan is taking place in concomitance with the spreading of insurrectional movements throughout the oil regions of North Africa and the Middle East undoubtedly adds to the determination to establish against all evidence that everything is under control.

Claims like these and others (insert link) about “ideological campaigns” in the name “global revolt” may be motivated by a romantic view of political agency. But the history of nuclear power in the US and Japan suggests that Federici and Caffentzis are right to expose the neoliberal interests that inform the framing of recent events.

Historically, the nuclear-friendly PR machine (with Eisenhower and the “Atoms for Peace” campaign at the helm) played a huge role in Japan’s acceptance of nuclear power.  Of course it did.  How in the world, we might ask, would a country like Japan—the only country ever gutted by a nuclear weapon—come to accept nuclear powered energy at the behest of the very country that dropped the bomb??

Historian Peter Kuznick answers precisely this question and explains the process of propaganda and acceptance in a recent essay.  Putting Japan’s nuclear history Pointo perspective, Kuznick writes: “their nuclear program was born not only in the fantasy of clean, safe power, but also in the willful forgetting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the buildup of the US nuclear arsenal.”  While the human scale of suffering and loss initiated in northeastern Japan will always remain incomprehensible, the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown are being fashioned at this very moment into historically comprehensible events. The social, political and economic stakes in these repertoires of fantasy and forgetting are high.

Most blatantly, perhaps, we find these repertoires rehearsed in mainstream media stories about Fukushima.  Last week President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea and Chinese premiere Wen Jiabao visited Japan to speak with Prime Minister Naoto Kan in a tripartite summit in order to discuss Japan’s handling of the nuclear crisis and foster trade relations.  The conservative Yomiuri Shimbun (Japan’s most widely circulated paper, and one with long-held stakes in the nuclear industry…from the time it conspired with the CIA to promote nuclear development in Japan in the 1950s up until the present day) wrote:

Kan was particularly enthusiastic about realizing the visit by the three leaders to a quake-hit area… Some in the government expressed anxiety over security for the leaders. But Kan said: “The sight of us three eating produce from Fukushima Prefecture will definitely be reported overseas. That’d be the best protection we can get against harmful rumors,” and the plan went forward.

Kan links “security” to “protection … against harmful rumors” and asserts that foreign press coverage will provide the protection. One must assume that these “rumors” consist of statements about the ongoing harm by radioactive materials to people in the area of Fukushima and the hazards of all forms of nuclear energy more broadly.  By using the term “rumor” Kan is delegitimizing these claims, while simultaneously taking them seriously enough to situate their threat within the discourse of national security.  Regarding the stakes at play in controlling this information dissemination, Japanese scholar Yoshihiko Ikegami writes:

The government calls the information shared on the internet “rumors” and repeatedly urges the public not to believe them. In addition, a public advertising organization called Advertising Council Japan is airing a TV commercial asking people not to believe rumors and not to buy-up. (The head of the organization is the president of TEPCO.) The commentators in news programs single-mindedly repeat similar messages.

These widespread attempts to dismiss information circulating in the public sphere as “rumors” has led some anti-nuclear activists to re-appropriate the term in explicit calls for revolution.

The linking of rumor and revolution, however, is probably not the most pertinent point about Kan’s statements.  By shifting the role of “security” from that of protecting individual human bodies (Lee and Wen) to that of protecting the nuclear industry—and by exposing these same bodies to potentially poisonous produce—Kan’s statements foregrounds the devaluation of human life that Federici and Caffentzis attribute to capitalism: “What we are witnessing, most dramatically, in the response to the tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan, especially in the US, is the beginning of an era in which capitalism is dropping any humanitarian pretense and refusing any commitment to the protection of human life.”

If supporting Japan and Fukushima means eating poisoned produce, it is because maintaining current economic trajectories and the continued use of nuclear energy has become more important than the well-being of individual bodies.

At the time of the meeting between the three leaders, the Japanese government had raised acceptable levels of yearly radiation exposure for children from 1 mmSv (the limit set by the WHO) to 20mmSv and was failing to pay for removal of contaminated topsoil at schools.  Children were regularly being exposed to levels of radiation allegedly higher than Chernobyl and traces of radioactive material were being found in the breast milk of women as far away as Chiba and Ibaraki.

Like those displaced by the tsunami, many of the 80,000 evacuees from the 20km radius around Fukushima lacked adequate shelter and provisions.  What’s more, if human life has been undervalued, non-human animal life even more so.   Evacuees were not allowed to take their animal companions with them when they evacuated.  Despite appeals that intensified during the weekend of the summit (and continue thousands of cats and dogs, and ten thousands of farm animals have been starving to death.  Meanwhile, according to prejudices (with historical precedent) about nuclear contamination, people with license plates from Fukushima are being refused service at gas stations and turned away from hotels. Coding discrimination as “reputation damage,” the government is able to claim that supporting the people of Fukushima means ignoring exposure and buying their products rather than worrying over their exposure and accepting them into our communities.  (Japanese Political scientist Chigaya Kinoshita writes about these dual modes of containment in an essay about the uglier aspects of civil society.) In the midst of all this, the three leaders chewed their veggies and posed for the press.

On cue, as if obliging Kan’s earlier statements and this perverse show of solidarity, the first paragraph of the New York Times’ brief coverage of the meeting reads: “The leaders of China, Japan, and South Korea publicly munched on farm produce grown near the stricken Japanese nuclear plant on Saturday in a show of solidarity with Japan’s recovery efforts.”  Nowhere mentioning that this was the fourth in a series of annual meetings since 2008 intended to foster economic relations between the three countries, the article eventually continues, “Before entering the shelter, a converted gymnasium, Mr. Kan steered the group to a table displaying strawberries, cucumbers and other produce grown in Fukushima Prefecture. The leaders, who did not appear to have been surprised by the photo op, smiled and nibbled gamely. “Very delicious,” Mr. Wen said.”

The tone of the Times’ article seems slightly bemused as it acceptingly acknowledges, along with the Chinese and Korean leaders, that this was a highly choreographed theatrical spectacle. What’s troubling in such a tone, however, is the implication that an acknowledgement of posturing somehow exempts the reporting from any responsibility to analyze the scene—both what it stages and obscures.

Why doesn’t the New York Times explain exactly how munching on cucumbers displays solidarity with the people who can’t get the government to clear away debris, rescue their animals, and remove dangerous dirt from children’s playgrounds? Of course these are the very things obscured in the staged scene.  The Times seems to capitulate to the regime of “everything’s fine” that ensures Kan’s “security”.  No matter how ironic the tone, this article portrays solidarity as participating in an anti-panic business-as-usual patriotism, exactly the sort critiqued by Kinoshita in the essay mentioned earlier. While catastrophe and panic were appealing headlines in the initial weeks of the disaster, now in the moment’s fading half-life, they seem to have no place.

Addendum:

Since writing this piece the New York Times has just published an article that exposes the government’s exploitation of poor rural towns and the means through which it makes them financially dependent on nearby reactors.  Although this coverage finally starts uncovering the secrets silence hides, the emphasis on “a lack of widespread grass-roots opposition in the communities around [Japan’s] 54 nuclear reactors” fosters the impression that there isn’t much in the way of anti-nuclear activism taking place in Japan.  Hopefully, the New York Times will start covering the massive demonstrations (of scales rarely seen in contemporary Japan) like the one on April 10^th that brought more that 17,500 people onto the streets of Tokyo.  Cries of protest from the public have brought a halt to development of the Hamaoka Nuclear Plant, and forced the government to revoke the change in acceptable radiation levels for children.  Until these stories earn headlines in mainstream media, I ask you to find projects like Japan – Fissures in the Planetary Apparatus which is translating critical essays by Japanese activists and intellectuals about the ongoing situation in Japan.

As the contours of the disaster accrete into what is undoubtedly a pivotal event, the larger frameworks within which meaning hinges are highly contested.  How the disaster, now officially called the Great East Japan Earthquake, gets spun will depend on which historical and political contexts are acknowledged, and which are ignored.

Here the Hopewell earthworks with their numerological connection to the pyramids of Giza are being deployed as evidence that North America was a site of divine providence. The Bat Creek stone, originally found in Tennessee in 1889, is supposed to be evidence of pre-Columbian Jewish migration west from Phonecia across the Atlantic. Later in the segment a guest offers Tisquantum’s (Squanto) discovery of the Plymouth colonists as another example of divine providence.

The foil to Beck’s argument about divine providence, that America is special in the eyes of God and that the Founding Fathers were doing God’s work on Earth, is what he terms manifest destiny. For Beck manifest destiny is a perversion of divine providence. He states, “Manifest Destiny is, get out of my way, my way or the highway, because I’m on a mission from God. That is Manifest Destiny. That’s Woodrow Wilson. That’s Andrew Jackson. That’s not George Washington. It’s different.”

According to Beck, the purpose of this lecture is to reveal a history that “the Smithsonian, science, government, and commerce colluded to erase.” He continues, “The history that has been erased in our nation and, in particular, with the Native Americans, happened because it didn’t fit the story they created – manifest destiny. It only works if the Indians were savages. And they had to have savages for commerce and government to expand. The ancient artifacts prove otherwise. Why aren’t we looking into those?”

I think its unfortunate that archaeology, perhaps the most popular and most public face of anthropology, is so frequently hijacked by amateurs for nationalist and religious ends. The blog A Hot Cup of Joe just did a noteworthy post on this very topic. With the authority and authenticity that so many cultures ascribe to events in the past a material remainder can, like a fetish, carry great power. An actual physical object from the distant past that is undeniably real to the touch is proof that people were here before and the certainty of that physical reality is conveyed, like Frazer’s principle of magical contagion, onto ideologies making them just as real.

It’s doubly unfortunate that living American Indian people have to put up with this manipulation of the past to suit the ends of non-Indians. On August 13, Indian Country Today reported that the Cherokee Nation was filing suit against the state of Tennessee for extending state recognition to six groups that the Cherokees believe to be fraudulent. Included in this group of six are the “Central Band of Cherokee” which claim to be a Lost Tribe of Isreal.

Meanwhile on Glenn Beck fansites, his viewers did not give the above performance high marks. A common concern expressed on discussion boards was that the history lesson resonated too closely with Beck’s Mormon faith and they feared that the stigma attached to Mormonism would lead some to question their fandom of Beck, possibly leading to less enthusiasm for his general political agenda that they so highly value.

This case is a prime target for the Bad Archaeology blog and I hope they choose to write it up.

Image via Wikipedia

The library at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln has posted a collection of digitized government comics and related material. There are about 180 freely-downloadable PDFs available, on topics ranging from health and human services to military training and recruitment.

Among my favorite is a 1951 AIr Force publication explaining psychological warfare entitled “Bullets? Or Words?” and illustrated by Milton Caniff, a comic-strip artist who gave us the syndicated comic strips “Terry and the Pirates” and “Steve Canyon”.

In fashioning new psychological weapons, it is necessary to base them on sound scientific principles and an understanding of psychology, cultural anthropology, sociology and other allied fields of knowledge.

Indeed.

I’m also a fan of "Bert the Turtle Says Duck and Cover", which offers immensely useful and reassuring advice on what to do in case of a nuclear bomb explosion. “There is always something to shelter you – indoors, a schol desk, a chair, a table.” Funny how they left out lead-lined iceboxes, but perhaps the authors felt that went without saying.

Related material includes briefs for the artists and authors, as well as government reports on the impact of comics, such as the US Senate’s 1955 “Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency: Interim Report”. If you remember your history (or have read Michael Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay) you’ll remember that the mid-‘50s saw a witch-hunt launched against comic book publishers and authors every bit as intense as the one launched against Hollywood, with comic books accused of promoting delinquent and violent behavior as well as homosexuality and anti-Americanism.

Although my interest is more sparked by the Cold War-era material, the collection dates up to the last decade, offering an interesting lens through which to view the last 6 decades or so of US culture and of the US government’s relations with its subjects.

When I was in graduate school at MIT, I remember hearing a talk about a project to digitize newspapers, shortly before this became a widespread reality. An important part of this demo, or talk, or whatever it was, was the claim that what digital newspapers would allow would be the customization of news–an early intimation of the RSS feed–allowing individuals to tailor the kind of news that made up their newspaper so that they could ignore all that other arbitrary stuff cluttering up their world and focus only on the things they really cared about. I also remember that
people in the room were genuinely troubled by this; the argument went something like… maybe it is a good thing that people are confronted with news they don’t necessarily want to see, news that is important but that might be excluded by an algorithm whose purpose is to weed out anything unfamiliar.

I remember being unconvinced by these anxieties, but also unable to put my finger on why, exactly, they seemed so unconvincing. Reading Anderson this time round triggered this memory because of his focus on how newspapers, as part of print-capitalism, contribute to the imagined community that is a nation. What makes newspapers central to nationalism is twofold: first, the arbitrary juxtaposition of stories (famine in Mali one day, sports in the US the next, an inauguration the third) creates the imagination of a community united in “homogenous empty time” such that “if Mali disappears from the pages of the New York Times after two days of famine reportage, this does not mean that Mali has disappeared or that famine has wiped out all its citizens. The novelistic format of the newspaper assures them that somewhere out there the ‘character’ Mali moves along quietly, awaiting its next reappearance in the plot”(33). Second, the production of newspapers as a reliable commodity whose form is familiar (“one-day bestsellers” he calls them) means that large numbers of people “imagine” the same world, and expect others to be imagining it with them.

What makes the digitization of news significant then, and the advent of personalized news feeds and RSS readers troubling, is that it is now possible to imagine that my version of the New York Times is not the same as your version. Or more generally, that my sources for news are giving me an entirely different picture of the same phenomena or events or issues than yours. As such what is troubling is not that I fail to be confronted with things I don’t necessarily want to see (as the critiques of personalized news suggested), but that we can no longer imagine ourselves to all (“all” in the sense of a national public) be reading (or not reading) the same newspaper. Instead, we have introduced the possibility for a very large number of partially overlapping imagined communities. Pluralism? Perhaps. Certainly a successor to the mass consciousness of high-nationalism in the late 19th, early 20th century.

***

A similar issue was raised for me concerning Anderson’s analysis of language and its role in the constitution of modern nationalism. Capitalism and print created “monoglot mass reading publics.” The “fatality” (a confusing term, I think) of linguistic diversity seems to suggest that Anderson thinks these monoglot publics centralized around sovereign states; which is to say, the familiar story of the rise of official languages (High German, the Academie Francaise) is intimately tied to the power of these nationalist imaginary communities. This fact is buttressed by a strange footnote (no. 19 in Chapter 3): “We still have no giant multinationals in the world of publishing.” The point of which seems to be that monoglot reading publics are so important to national power that a multinational *publishing* corporation is an impossibility, unlike, say a multinational *oil* company.

Remember that this is published in 1983; the claim seems a strange one, since corporations like Springer, Elsevier and others clearly have been multinationals for at least as long as they have been publishing, simply setting up shop in many nations and working in many languages. But it also seems odd given Anderson’s careful attention to “Creole Pioneers” as part of the foundation of nationalism. What is strange is Anderson’s seeming failure to recognize English as a global creole. Multinational publishers are, perhaps, the harbingers and laboratories of post-nationalism, giving form to Englishes and Spanishes whose power is not tied to any particular sovereign entity… not even a colonial one in the terms of Anderson’s theory. Perhaps I’m a poor reader of Anderson, or perhaps this is all old news, but it’s made me wonder if there isn’t a way to get at post-nationalism… which is to say, new forms of imagined communities (and I naturally care about such things *cough* recursive publics *cough*) that are not nationalisms of the 19th century variety.

***

One last thing I found fascinating on re-reading Anderson, was his use of the term “piracy” to describe how the “model” of independent national states (typified by France and America) was ported around the globe. Naturally the language of piracy, remixing, re-using or porting has renewed salience today. Anderson’s concern with the “modulation” of practices that make up nationalism is one that I think could bear further abstraction and specification. Even if nations and nationalism are no longer a goal, the creation of imagined communities through practices that give form to shared time (a periodicity of interaction) and meaning to shared stories and narratives is something that continues, and continues to create forms for adoption and modification. All this on the day that a new president is inaugurated who speaks a pragmatic idiom of nationalism that is both a call for a change and an appeal to ‘timeless’ truths.

For me, Savage Minds has always been a place to “mess around”, anthropologically speaking. A place to try out new ideas and thin hypotheses, a wall to throw stuff onto in order to see what sticks. A place where I could try my hand at the kind of argument Yehudi Cohen makes in Disappearance of the Incest Taboo (that’s an AnthroSource link, for those with access) and string together some ideas about the end of marriage, or muse about the moral underpinnings of anthropology. A place to incubate arguments and positions — and to receive feedback from my peers both inside and outside of the field.

It’s been invaluable to have this kind of forum, away from the main channel of academic thought — the journals and academic presses that are our disciplinary mainstream, even if many of them have lower readerships than Savage Minds. So valuable, in fact, that I felt it absolutely necessary to include Savage Minds in my “Acknowledgements” when I published Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War. Here’s what I wrote:

Over the years, two online communities have proven invaluable as both a source of new ideas and a place to rehearse my own fevered anthropological imaginings. To the members of ANTHRO-L (especially Ron Kephart, John McCreery, Richard Senghas, Jacob Lee, Richard Wilsnack, Anj Petto, Ray Scupin, Robert Lawless, Wade Tarzia, Lynn Manners, Martin Cohen, Bruce Josephson, Richley Crapo, Tom Kavanagh, Scott MacEachern, Mike Pavlik, Thomas Riley, and Phil Young) and my fellow Savage Minds, (Alex Golub, Kerim Friedman, Chris Kelty, Nancy LeClerc, Kathleen Lowery, Tak Watanabe, and newbies Thomas Erikson, Maia Green, and Thomas Strong) I offer both my gratitude and respect.

In the end, I’m not sure I could have written Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War without having had this forum to develop those ideas. The other Minds and the many people who comment here not only helped me to refine my thoughts on anthropology and its role(s) in society, but to rethink myself as an anthropologist.

By way of gratitude, then, I asked my publishers if I could offer at least a little something back to this community which has offered me so much. They responded enthusiastically, providing me with a discount code to offer Savage Minds readers. So here’s the deal:

1. Order Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War from U Mich Press.
2. At checkout, enter the coupon code: WAX08UMP
3. Enjoy a 20% savings!

With the coupon code, the US price is $26.00 instead of the usual $32.50. As far as I know, this offer is not limited to US buyers, but I’m pretty sure the price of international shipping will eat up any savings over buying the book at full price locally. The coupon code expires on May 30, 2008.

For more information about the book, check out the review by Penny Howard at the Socialist Review. More reviews and information about the book will be posted at my personal site on the book page as it becomes available.

And if you’re not interested, for whatever reason (maybe your mother was cruel to you as a child?), that’s cool, too — I offer you as a member of the Savage Minds community my thanks.

But really, buy the book. Buy the book or I shall plug at you a second time! Tphptptptptp!

Here’s the skinny on the conference, from the organizers:

Recent events have put new stress on the relationship between anthropology, governance and war. In the context of continuing violence in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military and its planners have taken a new interest in culture and ethnography. Hoping to revitalize counterinsurgency theory and practice, the post-Rumsfeld Department of Defense has called for the production of “knowledge of the cultural ‘terrain,’” in David Petraeus’ words. Simultaneously, global war and governance have emerged as significant objects of ethnographic and theoretical interrogation. This conference explores anthropology’s relationship to the United States’ global projection of its power, while simultaneously mounting an anthropological inquiry into the nature of that power and of the changing world in which it operates.

During World War II, Anthropology was second only to Economics as the social science discipline with the most PhDs in US government service. But at the war’s end, which is to say, after the United States deployed nuclear weapons against civilian populations in two Japanese cities, Anthropologists left government service at an astonishing rate. As Margaret Mead famously put it, “the social scientists…took their marbles and went home.” Since then, and until very recently, only a small minority of anthropologists have worked for US institutions of war and governance—institutions that are increasingly objects of anthropological study.

In quest of a professional and scholarly response to all this, this conference calls upon ethnography to widen our understanding of contemporary war, American power, and the structures and logics of security at domestic and international levels. We seek ethnographic understanding of global responses to recent deployments of the US military, and of US military actions in comparison to other forms of coercion, compellance, and intervention. Reading US military theorists, we seek to understand the emerging interest in study of culture in the broad context of military responses to US military failures (and opportunities). We pursue the full implications of the connection now being sought by the US military between culture and insurgency and turn an anthropological lens on the nature of violence and order in the current era.

Participants Include:
Hugh Gusterson, John Kelly, Beatrice Jauregui, Greg Beckett, Paola Castaño, James Hevia, Mihir Pandya, Brian Selmeski, Rochelle Davis, Dustin Wax, Amahl Bishara, Chris Nelson, Jeff Bennett, Kevin Caffrey, Sean T. Mitchell, Jeremy Walton, Kerry Fosher, Roberto Gonzalez, with a keynote talk by Joseph Masco and a plenary by David Price.

I was only invited a couple of weeks ago, and have been frantically trying to pull together my thoughts on a subject I haven’t written about much in the last year. My plan is to survey some of the ways anthropology has been involved with counter-insurgency since its inception, and why that involvement has been problematic, paying special attention to the anthropologists who worked in the Japanese internment camps during World War II. This is an historical moment I’ve brought up here a few times, and one which, for me, sums up everything that’s wrong about the military’s attempts at appropriation of anthropological legitimacy.

The proceedings will be collected and published, and I will also try to capture some sense of the conference and of my own contribution for Savage Minds.

Update: I forgot to mention — there is supposed to be a website coming with abstracts of the planned presentations. I will post the link as soon as I know it.

When doing research last summer in the British colonial archives I read numerous colonial ethnographies of the so-called “Criminal Tribes” (as DNTs were then known). Many were written by policemen, and the information in them was written for the express purpose of identifying such criminals. Gunthorpe’s 1882. Notes on Criminal Tribes Residing in, or Frequenting the Bombay Presidency, Berar and the Central Provinces, Lemarchand’s 1915, A Guide to Criminal Tribes, and, also from 1915, Naidu’s The History of Railway Thieves : With Illustrations & Hints on Detection are all in many ways the same book with slight variations. They freely stole from each other and the style was essentially the same. Numerous other such guides were circulated among the various colonial agencies.

They are like bird watching guides, identifying common habits and markings which will help you spot a criminal among the crowds. From Lemarchand:

Bhampta: Working in lots of three. Often disguise themselves as Marwadi or Hindu traiders, Lingayats, Jangam, Brahmans or shepherds. They are sometimes seen as minstrels, Sanadikorwas or Dakkhani Bhats. They are most commonly met with as Marathas. When posing as Gosains they add the suffix “das” to their names.

Barwar: Accompanied by women who pose as Brahmains and keep their faces veiled.

Sanoria: Gang consists of 2 to 15 or 20. Never accompanied by women.

Chandravedi: Gang comprises 10 or 20 half men, half boys. They alwasys work with a boy between 8 and 12 years of age called the “Chawa”, the man being styled Upaidar. They work by signs and secret vocabulary.

Some of the information was gathered from the confessions of convicts, but much of it seems to have been the result of embellishments and variations of previous works (“remixing” might be a polite way of describing it). A fair amount has been written about such colonial practices, but it wasn’t until I immersed myself in descriptions of which tribe ate jackal meat and which did not and which community’s women were faithful to their men (with each book contradicting the previous one) that I became aware of the true absurdity of this literature.

What is really shocking is just how little has changed a hundred years later. I was motivated to write this post when I stumbled upon this 1999 article from the Indian Express News Service:

The Modus Operandi branch of the police force, which works under the DCB, based on the evidence and eyewitness accounts can thus exactly point out the gang involved in the crime, sometimes even making it possible to identify gang members based on information provided and previous records.

Among the main gangs active in South Gujarat are the Chaddi Banian Dhari, Dafer, Kevat, Waghris, Bawaris, Nats, Sansis, Shikliyar, Jhaver Thutho, Chharras and other gangs. Police records made available to Express Newsline list distinguishing features of various gangs that help the police identify and track them down.

For example, the Bawari gang is known to camp at railway stations before striking. They use the `rumali’ method, where they bend grills of houses to force their way inside. Other gangs like the Dafers and Chaddi Banian Dharis survey possible targets by posing as beggars, vendors and the like. Dafers are known to possess firearms but use these only when challenged. The Chaddi Banian Dhari gang, as the name suggests, are dressed in shorts and banians and have their faces masked. They strike only on highways and of late, have been known to raid houses on the outskirts of cities and towns. The Shikliyars are known to manufacture country made firearms and sell these to gangs with whom they are connected.

Of course, the continuation of these practices requires explanation. There is no reason the past must necessarily burden the present. A proper critique cannot be content at simply pointing out the crimes of the past, but must also ask why colonial practices are still so prevalent in modern India. (It would also be interesting to compare this to other forms of “racial profiling.”) Still, pointing to these continuities is at least a start.

Previously:

• Fingerprinting, Thievery, and Bob Marley
• Anthropometry: Alive and Kicking
• Hidden World: Visiting The British Colonial Archives

For those who have been sleeping off a bender these past few years, here’s the story. Churchill is an Indian Studies professor (and chair of the department) at University of Colorado, appointed despite his lack of a PhD on the recommendation of the well-respected Indian rights activist and layer Vine Deloria, Jr. Churchill is a popular professor at UC, and easily won tenure. He is the author of several books and articles (apparently more than we suspected, given his proclivity for writing work ascribed to other scholars!) that, taken together, challenge the “master narrative” of American westward expansion as the coming of civilization and recast it as a genocide.

It is his willingness to compare America’s history against the yardstick of Nazi atrocities (and his willingness to challenge deeply-held national mythologies) that eventually landed him in hot water, though originally it was not his scholarship but his popular writing that raised eyebrows. In an essay published shortly after 9/11, Churchill described the victims of the World Trade Center bombing as “little Eichmanns”, a reference to Hannah Arendt’s coverage of the Eichmann trial and the thoughts on the “banality of evil” that arose as a result of her experiences. Eichmann, if you recall, was the petty bureaucrat who ran the trains in Hitler’s Germany, coordinating the deportations and provision of supplies to the concentration camps in the East.

Like most Indian writing, Churchill’s comments were virtually ignored by the mainstream until some time later, when a scheduled appearance at Hamilton College in New York led an enterprising conservative to dig up some of Churchill’s writings as groundwork for protesting the college’s invitation. Soon the “little Eichmanns” quote ripped through the mainstream media, the flame fanned by attention from Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, among others, who called for Hamilton College to rescind Churchill’s invitation and, eventually, for UC to dismiss him (all in O’Reilly’s usual subtle way, of course).

Not to be outdone, Colorado’s governor soon joined the clamor calling for Churchill’s dismissal and, with the backing of UC’s president, a committee was formed to explore the matter. This committee faced a terrible dilemma, however: typical standards of academic freedom draw a line between one’s role as a professor — which encompasses one’s teaching, research, and academic writing — and as a citizen — including one’s political activities and writings in the popular press. Few academics would endorse the firing of a fellow academic for the expression of his personal views outside of the academic setting (and most would object to such action even if the views were expressed inside the academic setting, freedom of speech being what it is). Thus, the exploratory committee was saddled with the task of firing an unpopular figure for reasons unrelated to the reasons why he was unpopular.

Alas, in Churchill’s case, such reasons abounded. Many in the American Indian community had been loudly objecting to his claim to be an Indian for years before the “little Eichmanns” comment brought him to the forefront of mainstream attention. Churchill’s exact tribal affiliation and the grounds for his affiliation remain mysterious — and Churchill has just as loudly objected to the notion that his claim of Indian identity is in any way contestable. Meanwhile, questions about some of Churchill’s academic work had been circulating for some time, particularly his claims about the intentional exposure of Native Americans to smallpox at Fort Pitt in 1763 and Fort Clark in 1837.; As the committee explored Churchill’s work, more and more irregularities emerged. Sources did not match up with he claims they supposedly provided evidence for. Timelines outlined by Churchill did not match up. Eventually, serious questions of plagiarism were raised when passages from his work were compared against essays by Rebecca Robins and M. Annette Jaimes in Jaimes’ edited volume, The State of Native America. When confronted with this evidence, Churchill replied that the work was not technically plagiarized because he had, in fact, written both the articles in question.

Despite the evidence for academic misconduct, the committee was unwilling to recommend dismissal. A second committee was established to decide on appropriate measures to take against Churchill, and they are the ones that voted 8-to-1 in favor of dismissal last month. Churchill has, perhaps wisely, declined to justify his actions, instead defending himself as the target of an academic establishment unwilling to accept or validate unorthodox and revisionary perspectives on American history. Though his protestations may have all the earmarks of a conspiracy-minded nut’s rantings, he is on slightly more solid ground than the typical conspiracy nut; one of his early published works, one that has not been called into question, is a compilation of official FBI documents detailing the work of COINTELPRO, the covert program to infiltrate American political movements such as the American Indian movement and report on their activities — and, apparently quite often, incite illegal activity that could be used as grounds to arrest political leaders. After immersing himself in the work of actual government conspirators, it is probably not surprising that Churchill is particularly sensitive to conspiracy-like behavior.

And, regardless of the academic misconduct charges which are, in fact, quite serious, it is absolutely clear that Churchill’s dismissal is conspiracy-like; if he’d called the victims of 9/11 “fluffy Care Bears” instead of “little Eichmanns”, he’d still be employed. That is indisputable, even if you agree that the academic concerns merit dismissal. And that’s where my own concerns start to take off. Not because I’m suddenly aware that academics can become targets because of their political views — history is full of too many examples of that to be a surprise — but because it took this kind of bold statement to draw attention to the problems in Churchill’s academic work.

Few of us have the time or resources to do the kind of reference-checking and authorial cross-examination that Churchill’s review committee did. We rely on a set of institutional functions — peer review, tenure review, hiring committees, reputation, affiliation, association memberships, works cited pages, and so on — to underwrite the validity (if not necessarily the correctness of the interpretation) of academic material. Surely, we think, the kind of fraud that Churchill is accused of, the kind of (no other word comes to mind but) shenanigans that he has admitted to — surely these problems would be caught somewhere along the way? If not, why do we invest so much of our time and energy supporting this system, working our way through the numerous obstacles the academic system throws in our way?
Here’s the thing: I’m no expert on 19th century Mandan/Hidatsa history. I have no easy access to the sources Churchill (claims to have) used, nor have I read all the secondary sources. I have read a little bit by scholars that challenge Churchill’s claims about the intentional infection of the Mandan and Hidatsa — but am in no position to take a side, to evaluate their arguments. Or here’s another example: Tom Kavanagh, an Indianist whose work has focused primarily on the Comanche but who has also spent time with the Hopi, posted these notes(7/30/07; login required) on Anthro-L a couple weeks ago:

I checked out Churchill’s 2002 “Struggle for the Land” (SF: City Lights), the most recent by WC in our library.
I was mildly interested in the chapter on recent Iroquois land claims. Then I see the chapter, “Genocide in Arizona: The ‘Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute’ in Perspective.” Whose perspective, I wondered?

Since I do know something of the issues, [full disclosure: I lived at Hopi, 1980-81, was hired by Abbott Sekaquaptewa (see below), so I read more carefully].

By the fourth page, in the span of three paragraphs, came the whoopers: “… leadership of the ten-to-fifteen percent segment of Hopi society that had been assimilated into non-Hopi values via compulsory education and Mormon indoctrination–this group represented the totality of Hopi voter turnout during reorganization and in all subsequent Hopi ‘elections’– had long been the station of the Sekaquaptewa family. The men of the family–the brothers Abbott and Emory, later their sons Emory Jr. and Wayne–immediately attained political ascendency within the new Hopi Tribal Council when it was established in 1936 …

“… By 1940, the Sekaquaptewa’s and their followers had converted their alignment with the federal government into control, not only of [lots of stuff], but of the sole Hopi newspaper (QuaToqti) … However, they had still bigger plans.

“These had emerged clearly by 1943, when the council, in collaboration with the BIA … successfully consummated a lobbying effort for the creation of “Grazing District 6…”

So, let’s see, according to Churchill, “the [Sekaquaptewa] brothers Emory and Abbott, later their sons Emory Jr. and Wayne…” get control of the Hopi tribal council ca 1936.

The basic problem with this scenario is … (wait for it) … history.

The elder Sekaquaptewa, Emory, was born ca 1900 in Hotevilla. But although he did serve as a tribal judge under the IRA council, was not particularly involved in tribal politics and was apparently not a member of the council. Moreover, he did not have a brother Abbott.

He did have a bunch of kids, though, including the eldest Wayne, and then in order, Eugene, Emory Jr., Abbott, followed by several others. I can’t find absolute birth dates for most of these, but their mother Helen Sekaquaptewa, in her book _Me and Mine_ (1969 UA Press), says they were born about three years apart. Emory Jr. was aged 73 in 2003, so was born ca 1930. Abbott therefore was born in ca 1933 (and died in the 1990s). It must have been a pretty good trick for Emory Jr. and Abbott, three and six year old kids, Mormon or not, to gain control of the tribal council in 1936.
Then, “by 1940 … the Sekaquaptewa’s gained control … of the sole Hopi newspaper… Qua Toqti.” Well, yes, Qua Toqti was founded by the Sekaquaptewa’s, but that was in 1973, not 1940.

Finally, “… by 1943, … the creation of ‘Grazing District 6’…” The
Hopi-Navajo grazing districts were drawn in 1936.

The errors Dr. Kavanagh highlights here are not the kinds of errors the UC committee investigated, nor the errors Churchill’s enemies — in the mainstream right wing or in academia — have focused on. This is a much different case than his contention that the Mandan were deliberately infected with smallpox by the US Army, when in fact the evidence (other than that which Churchill himself seems to have fabricated) suggests otherwise. It’s a series of smaller, less significant false steps, yet all the more troubling for it, as they are so seemingly insignificant to raise the question of why anyone would deliberately make them.

The mistakes outlined above are so insignificant in their effect that one would have to think they were simply shoddy scholarship — poor comprehension of the source material by a scholar working in a field he didn’t quite grasp yet. But they’re so far removed from the reality — people taking control of the trial council at age 3 and 6! — that it seems unlikely they’re just a misreading. And yet, again, there seems little to be gained from deliberately falsifying this stuff and much to be lost — even a cursory glance by someone with experience in the area would (and has) exposed them.

I’ll admit, I’m baffled. But what really worries me is that, absent Kavanagh’s comments, I’d have no way of knowing this stuff, and I suspect that’s true of most of you. And that raises serious concerns about not just Churchill’s scholarship, but about everybody’s, especially in anthropology where quite often there are only a handful of folks with specialized knowledge of a particular area. The rest of us rely on the mechanisms I outlined above — tenure committees, peer review, scholarly critique, etc. — to assure the trustworthiness of our colleagues’ work. If these mechanisms have failed so egregiously in Churchill’s case, how can we trust them in everyone else’s case?

I’ve been pretty harsh on Churchill in this essay (though not nearly as harsh as many others have been), which doesn’t necessarily reflect my overall stand on his work. Churchill’s strength has always been, it seems to me as a polemecist and gadfly, rather than as a scholar. While the details of his wok seem to be questionable, his overall impact has been, I think, positive — forcing historians and others scholars to grapple with the implications of an American genocide, exposing and documenting the history of government spying and provocation within the American Indian Movement and the Left in general (a fitting warning for today), and spurring one of the only significant debates about the meaning of 9/11 in a time of intellectual laziness and burly-man chest-thumping. I have not yet come to the point of throwing out the three or four of his books that grace my shelves, and doubt I will, though their usefulness as references will obviously be seriously curtailed.

But Churchill’s scholarship aside, what do we do about the rest? Even as the Right has gone after Churchill with the ferocity they once reserved only for Clintons, I hear the same voices raised in support of abolishing tenure. From other quarters come questions about the need for peer review; from still others (and I count myself in his camp) a clamor for open publishing models that would bypass most of the current mechanisms that offer some sort of “quality control”. Perhaps, riddled as these mechanisms are with faults, these voices are right, but what could, or should, take their place? Is the coming order one that’s going to catch more Churchillian fabrications, or is it one that’s going to facilitate them?

Project Naming started in 2001 when Inuit youth took 500 digitized photos taken by Richard Harrington during the 1940s and 50s and asked their elders to help identify the people and places in the pictures. This program was slowly expanded to include more and more photos, but in 2005 they started a new phase of the project in which “more than 1,700 photographs” from Canadian archives “were digitized and sent to Nunavut Sivuniksavut for identification.”

Although much of the project has been about bringing Nunavut youth together with their elders in a very personal way, the project has a page entitled “The Naming Continues” where web visitors can help identify those photos which have not yet been cataloged.

I think it would be great if more archives had sites like this. One possibility I see is that anthropologists could help out by doing what these Nunavut youth are doing. Before going off to the field you could download relevant uncataloged photos and then ask your informants about them. Talking about photos is a great way to start an interview, and who knows, maybe someone will recognize some faces! And it needn’t just be uncataloged photos. That photo listed as “Indian boy in native dress,” surely someone can identify the specific type of clothing and the region of India where it is worn … even if we never find out his name.

At its heart, this book answers that question. It explains how and why municipal swimming pools in the northern United States were transformed from austere public baths—where blacks, immigrants, and native-born white laborers swam together, but men and women, rich and poor, and young and old did not—to leisure resorts, where practically everyone in the community except black Americans swam together.

But the story does not end there. A second social transformation occurred at municipal swimming pools after midcentury. Black Americans challenged segregation by repeatedly seeking admission to whites-only pools and by filing lawsuits against their cities. Eventually, these social and legal protests desegregated municipal pools throughout the North, but desegregation rarely led to meaningful interracial swimming. When black Americans gained equal access to municipal pools, white swimmers generally abandoned them for private pools.

Slightly related: even though Taiwan is an island with numerous rivers and streams and even public swimming pools, many people can’t swim. Each year many drown as a result. I know many girls don’t like to swim because they don’t like to spend too much time in the sun, which could “ruin” the pale white complexions they work so hard to maintain, and if the girls aren’t swimming I suppose the boys are much less interested as well… (Many of my female students also equate getting muscles from exercise with getting “fat.”) So I was glad to hear that my university instituted a policy requiring all students to pass a swimming test in order to graduate.

Benjamin Zimmer at Language Log says:

Originally the buzz surrounding the film was mostly about Gibson’s choice to shoot the entire film in Mexico with local actors speaking Yucatec Maya. Now, of course, observers are more interested in speculating if the film will be dead-on-arrival at the box office thanks to Mel’s notorious anti-Semitic rant and DUI arrest last July. But linguistic issues are still getting some attention in the Apocalypto coverage, for instance in this Associated Press article describing the mixture of excitement and ambivalence among the Yucatec Maya community about a major Hollywood movie filmed in their indigenous language.

He then goes on to discuss the “foreboding Greek title,” after which he links to this post by John Lawler:

The movie is a sort of stew with 900 years of MesoAmerican history and mythology slopped in, overly seasoned with special effects, and stirred vigorously. If Mel Gibson had made the Passion to the same formula, Jesus would have escaped from the cross, swum the Mediterranean, and wound up assassinating Julius Caesar and Hitler.

… Bottom line: Read the Popol Vuh and skip the movie.

He, in turn, links to this article in Salon “by a Maya scholar [who] says roughly the same thing — it’s historically inaccurate and gets the culture totally wrong.”

On the anthropological front, John Hawks asks: “Haven’t you noticed that Apocalypto is basically a novelization of the Maya part of Jared Diamond’s Collapse?” And Traci Ardren has this to say:

Before anyone thinks I have forgotten my Metamucil this morning, I am not a compulsively politically correct type who sees the Maya as the epitome of goodness and light. I know the Maya practiced brutal violence upon one another, and I have studied child sacrifice during the Classic period. But in “Apocalypto,” no mention is made of the achievements in science and art, the profound spirituality and connection to agricultural cycles, or the engineering feats of Maya cities. Instead, Gibson replays, in glorious big-budget technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserve, in fact they needed, rescue. This same idea was used for 500 years to justify the subjugation of Maya people and it has been thoroughly deconstructed and rejected by Maya intellectuals and community leaders throughout the Maya area today. In fact, Maya intellectuals have demonstrated convincingly that such ideas were manipulated by the Guatemalan army to justify the genocidal civil war of the 1970-1990s. To see this same trope about who indigenous people were (and are today?) used as the basis for entertainment (and I use the term loosely) is truly embarrassing. How can we continue to produce such one-sided and clearly exploitative messages about the indigenous people of the New World?

But Kambiz Kamrani says “Who even cares?” its just a good movie, eat some popcorn and enjoy yourself …

Saving the best for last, the award goes to Will at Nomadic Thoughts who posted this amazing Saturday Night Live spoof:

UPDATE: Via Long Road a discussion of the film in The Nation:

Like the owners of the resort hotels that line the beautiful beaches of Cancún and Cozumel, Mel Gibson cast no Maya to work on his project, except in the most minor roles. Maya nationalists think the hotels and tourist packages that use the word “Maya” or “Mayaland” (a translation of Mayab) should pay for what they appropriate for their own use. The Maya patrimony, they say, is neither gold nor silver nor vast stretches of rich farmland; they have only their history, their culture, themselves. Like the hotel owners who bring strangers to the Yucatán to do everything but labor in the laundries and maintain the grounds, Gibson has brought in strangers to take the good parts from the Maya.

Images of Empire today launches its new website at www.imagesofempire.com, providing online access for the first time to the unique archive of historical images held at the British Empire & Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, UK.

Visitors to the website can now explore over 6,000 still images and film clips from the collection, which is currently the UK’s largest dedicated resource of photography and film on the British colonial period. Images from the archive can be navigated and viewed using an advanced search facility and photographs from the collection are available to order online. Registration is free, enabling users to build lightboxes, order high-resolution files and access supplementary information. Further images from the Museum’s collection will be made available online at regular intervals as more of the archive is digitised.

By presenting this collection online, Images of Empire creates a valuable commercial resource for both professional picture buyers and academic researchers, and supports the British Empire & Commonwealth Museum in its mission to provide a national forum for preserving, exploring and studying Britain’s cultural heritage associated with the former Empire and today’s Commonwealth.

From my experience there, I’d say the collection is somewhat idiosyncratic. A lot of film footage of colonial officers and their pets, but lots of wonderful treasures as well. The point being that it is one of those collections that will probably work best for you if you are just curious and browsing around rather than if you are trying to find something specific.

Central to Stoler’s argument is the claim that colonial policy towards marriages between colonial officers and native wives changed when the mixed-race children began to blur the color line that legitimated European rule. She looks at how in Indonesia, India, and elsewhere, the colonial governments began a policy of encouraging officers to bring wives from home, and how the presence of these wives then created new tensions as a result of the perceived need to protect these women from sexual assault. (The number of people executed for attempted rape does not match any changes in the number of such assaults actually reported.)

It was with this discussion in mind that the following account of changes in Indian colonial rule from William Dalrymple caught my eye:

During the 18th century it was almost as common for westerners to take on the customs, and even the religions, of India, as the reverse. These white Mughals had responded to their travels in India by shedding their Britishness like an unwanted skin, adopting Indian dress, studying Indian philo sophy, taking harems and copying the ways of the Mughal governing class they came to replace – what Salman Rushdie, talking of modern multiculturalism, has called “chutnification”. By the end of the 18th century one-third of the British men in India were leaving their possessions to Indian wives.

In Delhi, the period was symbolised by Sir David Ochterlony, the British Resident, who arrived in the city in 1803: every evening, all 13 of his Indian wives went around Delhi in a procession behind their husband, each on the back of her own elephant. For all the humour of this image, in such mixed households, Islamic customs and sensitivities were clearly understood and respected. One letter, for example, recorded that “Lady Ochterlony has applied for leave to make the Hadge to Mecca”. Indeed, Ochterlony strongly considered bringing up his children as Muslims, and when his children by his chief wife, Mubarak Begum, had grown up, he adopted a child from one of the leading Delhi Muslim families.

Dalrymple’s account of the reasons for this change are not at odds with those of Stoler, but the emphasis is different. On the one hand he attributes it to the “rise of British power” which “quickly led to undisguised imperial arrogance,” but he also attributes it to the “ascendancy of evangelical Christianity, and the profound change in social, sexual and racial attitudes that this brought about”:

The wills written by dying East India Company servants show that the practice of cohabiting with Indian bibis quickly declined: they turn up in one in three wills between 1780 and 1785, but are present in only one in four between 1805 and 1810. By the middle of the century, they have all but disappeared. In half a century, a vibrantly multicultural world refracted back into its component parts; children of mixed race were corralled into what became in effect a new Indian caste – the Anglo-Indians – who were left to run the railways, posts and mines.

The focus of Dalrymple’s article is actually on the 1857 mutiny and the parallels to the current situation in Iraq. It is a taste of his new book The Last Mughal.

(via Arts and Letters Daily)

I won’t attempt to distill Grafton’s distillation any further, but here is a snippet which, I think, captures some of the spirit of the piece:

Universities are strange and discordant places because they are palimpsests of the ancient and the modern. Their history follows a Weberian narrative of rationalization, but it also reveals the limits of that rationalization. … Modern universities sincerely try to find the best scholars and scientists, those who work on the cutting edge of their fields, but they are also keen to preserve the traditional aspects of their culture and like their professors to wear their gowns with an air. They hope that some undefined combination of these qualities will attract the best crop of seventeen-year-olds available.

Perhaps universities should seek to incorporate Rate My Professor ratings in their tenure review process – with extra points for a chili pepper?

Many visual archives are offline. One place we visited had a two inch thick sheaf of handwritten notes about their photographs. Two others had computerized databases, but you can only access those databases if you are physically sitting in front of the computer in their office – something that they don’t normally let anyone do. That’s right, unless you are lucky (as I was in one case), you aren’t even allowed to use the database yourself! But I’m jumping ahead of myself – we haven’t even gotten in the door yet. We are still in the Catch-22 position of telling the archivist what materials we want to use without really knowing what materials they have. You might be able to find some kind of broad statement about the nature of their collection, and if you say something vague about the connection between your research and this collection the archivist will do a search themselves before setting up an appointment. Of course, having been vague, it will be a vague search, and they will tell you that they don’t have anything and you probably shouldn’t come. And they are probably correct because some archives charge a lot of money to get in and access the collection. That’s because an archivist will have to help you get out and put away any material you ask to see. Fees can range from $30 to $100 a day, or even higher for some film archives.

In our case we are looking for images of a group of people who went by many different ethnic names with many different spellings: Bhat, Bhantu, Sansi, Sansees, Kanjars, Kanjar-bhat, Adodias, etc. all refer to basically the same ethnic group. Even worse, they might simply be listed as “street performers”, “convicts,” or “vagrants” depending on the context in which their image was taken. As nomads they could also have been just about anywhere in South Asia. And with many archives the pictures are probably not individually labeled at all, but are simply in a big box of photos according to who took it: the name of a missionary, missionary society, or colonial official, etc. So good luck telling the archivist which keywords you want to use. What we wanted was the archivist to explain to us the nature of the collection and how it was organized so that we could zero in on potentially useful documents and spend our time in the most efficient manner possible. What the archivists wanted, on the other hand, was for you to already know which of their pictures you wanted to use. Of course, once we explained everything, they were usually quite helpful, but it did take a while to convince them that we weren’t wasting everyone’s time.

Once in the door you will likely have the best luck with photographs that are collected together with text – such as those found in old books or manuscripts. That is because the books and manuscripts provide textual clues as the contents of the photographs, and are probably indexed – even computer searchable. Photographs, however, are a very different matter. As I said, even if they have a database you are probably not allowed to use it yourself. This is exceedingly frustrating for someone used to trying various odd search combinations on Google to find what they want.

Having (mistakenly) been given access to one such database I have some theories as to why this might be the case: First, archivists are embarrassed about how poor their records are. Much of the keyword entry is done by volunteers, and these volunteers don’t know the difference between North and South India, not to mention between a Bhantu and and Bantu. One archivist told me that she had to personally edit out racist entries by some of her volunteers. This is a difficult problem. Google is now trying to tackle this problem by putting a game online where two people tag the same photo in real time and get points for matching keywords. Actually, Modonna was the first to try something like this, having her fans tag her huge archive of unlabeled photos. A second problem is more mundane: the databases are written using old software and it is very easy to switch from browsing the data to actually editing it, a very risky proposition. And, finally, the vast majority of material still hasn’t been archived.

Another explanation is that these problems are unique to the British archives. There does seem to be a certain ambivalence in England to examining their colonial past. People told us that the left is embarrassed by it and the right nostalgic, so nobody wants to look at it too closely. I’ve also heard people complain that British computer and internet use lags behind other developed countries. The Library of Congress, for instance, has fantastic image archives, much of which are up online. And we even found pictures of Sansis (spelled “Sanseeas”) at the New York Public Library …

Once you do get a hold of some useful photos you are then stuck with another problem. While some archives are generous about letting you snap a picture with your digital camera, others do not, and scanning fees can be exorbitant. I wouldn’t mind so much if they would use the money to create an electronic copy which would be available to everyone online, but when they say scanning they just mean a fancy photocopy which doesn’t damage the original document. Not being able to take your own digital image means that you have to keep meticulous written records describing each photo you found so that you can relocate it later on if you decide it is something worth copying.

Still, despite how cumbersome this process is, I found that I really enjoyed spending my days snooping around these dusty archives. I would almost consider becoming a historian were it not for one problem – I can’t read other people’s handwriting. The letters and journals of various colonial officers seemed to have been written by a seismograph rather than by a human hand. I really don’t know how historians do it without going blind.

Did we find what we were looking for? Some. We were really hoping for some film footage, or photos of the Chharas themselves, but we found images from other “Criminal Tribe” settlements that we might be able to use. More importantly, we found key documents about the history of the Chhara settlement that are very useful to the Chharas (both because they have lost any record of their own history, and because they are trying to claim the land on which their settlement had been built), and may lead us to additional sources of photos. We now have the names of the colonial officers who ran the settlement, so we can perhaps contact their families directly to see if they don’t have anything lying around. We also know the name of the specific office in charge of the settlement which might lead us somewhere …