My own area of expertise is Porgera District, which is far west of the original 1933 contact took place. The Porgera first contact took place in 1938-39, when an exploratory patrol led by Jim Taylor and James Black entered the valley (Bill Gammage has written “Sky Travellers”:http://www.amazon.com/Sky-Travellers-Journeys-1938-1939-Miegunyah/dp/0522848273/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215081985&sr=1-3, a book about this patrol. It is my favorite book about Papua New Guinea. Superb. Also hard to find.) Pretty much everyone agrees this was Porgera’s ‘first contact’ and marked the beginning of Australian control of the valley, the first time people saw metal or cloth, and so forth. So if you ask me, Porgera had first contact 1938-39.

But was it?

In fact Taylor and Black were not the first whites in Porgera. In 1934-35 the Fox brothers _also_ patrolled into the area. Wasn’t that first contact? In some sense yes, but in a more important sense no. There were a hundred people on the Taylor Black patrol, most of them responsible for carrying the supplies. Taylor and Black traveled slowly, stopped often, made maps, recorded languages, and took people from the area back with them. The Taylor-Black patrol was not just the first meeting of people, it was a first meeting of societies. The Fox brothers, on the other hand, were gold prospectors traveling illegally and secretly. They took food instead of bartering for it, and they shot people who got in their way. When they returned home they suppressed knowledge of their patrol, where it had been, and what went on there. Excellent historical research by Chris Ballard and others has retraced the course of the patrol by interviewing people who met it, but the patrol itself never became an ‘event’ — it didn’t stick in history, and would have faded away from memory if Chris’s research hadn’t kept it alive.

But does even _this_ count as first contact? In fact several European diseases spread west towards Porgera before (iirc) the Taylor-Black patrol, so the effects of contact _preceded_ contact itself — a very familiar pattern.

Now at this point you might ask yourself, “we keep talking about the ‘outside world’ but what does that mean?” Does it mean ‘white people’ or were the Ipili totally isolated from other Papua New Guineans before contact? Of course not. Ipili have always been active in the trade networks that spread across Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guineans have eagerly traded pots, feathers, food, and valuables across the length and breadth of the island. And not only that — Papua New Guineans have also traded intellectual property in the form of magic, dances, taboos, and identities. Europeans love drawing boundaries, but Papua New Guineans love crossing them.

Taylor was astounded, for instance, to travel down roads of beaten earth fifteen feet across when he traveled through what is now Enga province. His patrol was guided by locals who knew paths across mountain ridges and deep bush. And everywhere he went around him, he saw evidence of trade. For instance, when Taylor and Black arrived in Porgera they found that the most valuable objects there were shells and pigs. Both were used in customary exchange — they were given when people got married (or to break off an engagement), died, or celebrated other major life events. Now, Porgera is 2,000 meters about sea level and 300 kilometers from the ocean — that is a long way for shells to be traded. But they were — and well before first contact.

Pigs, the other major prestige item, were fed with sweet potatoes, which are also the staple food for Ipili people. The word for ‘sweet potato’ in Ipili is _ulia_. In Hawai’ian, it is _’uala_. Coincidence? No. We have abundant evidence that sweet potato moved from South American across the Pacific into Papua New Guinea hundreds of years before white people arrived on the island. Because sweet potato will grow anywhere and is a great source of calories, it transformed life in the highlands and created, among other things, the large pig herds so central to life in the highlands as Australians found it in the 1930s. The archaeologist Joe Mangi has examined rock shelters in the high mountains south of Porgera that traders would rest at in the course of their journeys between valleys, and he has found evidence of human use of these shelters for as far back as he has examined them. So trade and ‘contact’ is not recent — it has gone on for as long as we can tell.

In their excellent book “The Human Web”:http://www.amazon.com/Human-Web-Birds-Eye-World-History/dp/039305179X (which is the book Guns, Germs, and Steel wanted to be, but wasn’t) the McNeills argue that all of humanity has been part of a web of contact and exchange that goes back to our origins in Africa. At times the web grows extremely weak, having practically no contact at all, at other times it thickens immensely. Highlanders were part of a human web that stretched across their island, into Indonesia and out into the Pacific. The connections were not as strong as they are today, of course. And I think we can still talk about ‘first contact’ because it marked a sudden and intense thickening of the human web that was totally unexpected (at least for the Australians) and proved to be socially consequential. We can even say Porgera was ‘uncontacted’ — but only if we add ‘by Australians’. First contact? Yes. The only contact? No.

For instance, the issue of how “communal land tenure” became the basis for racialized dispossession. Moore does a nice job of giving a potted history of the classic debates about African political systems initiated by Radcliffe-Brown and carried out as part of the structure-functional program of Evans-Pritchard and Fortes, among others. The disputes over the nature of evolutionary versus structure-function accounts are obviously complicated and for any student of the history of the discipline, fascinating in that they seem so much more sophisticated that the current mode of denunciation that greets evolutionary psychology by anthropologists (not that I don’t agree that it needs to be denounced, but only that the sophistication of argument is absent because it has become a war for ears and eyes, instead of an actual argument).

Regardless of the sophistication, however, the key question was not “should anthropologists study Africa” — it was “which version of anthropological knowledge is going to be used by colonial administrators, and how?” As in the case of anthropology in Iraq or the war on terror, the question of ‘whether or not’ is a red herring if one has no political guide to understanding ‘which and how.’ As the ruckus over the supposed use of Patai’s book on The Arab Mind shows, there is always plenty of anthropological knowledge out there to fit the schemes and plans of military and political exploiters — but why Patai? Can anyone actually say how this book instead of some other came up in discussion with Seymour Hersh (a point McNamara made in her short piece in AT (23(2) APRIL 2007, p. 20). Likewise, in the case of Zimbabwe, it was not the most sophisticated ideas of Radcliffe-Brown or Evans-Pritchard that guided colonial administrators, but evolutionary accounts like L.H. Morgan’s:

By placing African subjects in an earlier evolutionary moment, administrators could subject them to collective rather than individual regimes of rights. Communal tenure offered an effective instrument used to dispossess Africans of individual rights that government could then claim to grant in Native Reserves.”

Commitment to theory plays a central role here: if Morgan and evolutionary explanation are your bag (as an administrator) there is plenty of warrant and lots of useful books available for treating the native Africans as racially and evolutionarily separate from the colonizers–despite the vigourous critique of this position by some of the most famous anthropologists of the 20th century. (As an aside, it is also a remarkable echo of the claims Strong posted recently by Andrew Sullivan (give that man a rifle and a pith helmet!). The commitment to theory is not simply wrong, however– it creates new problems that need to be dealt with, such as the competing forms of sovereignty that are necessary if one places the natives in a separate evolutionary role. If Africans cannot simply be equal subjects of the crown, then they must be both subjects of crown and tribe, resulting in exactly the kinds of complex allegiances and “triads-in-motion” of sovereignty and discipline and government that Moore reveals.

What this reveals for anthropology is that it is not simply the question of doing research for, with or against the military, or trying to somehow keep planners and torturers away from our research while still making it available so we can have tenure– no, the key problem is making the key questions under debate highly visible so that disputed theory cannot be treated as incontrovertible evidence. What Moore’s book is good at showing, furthermore, is not that knowledge simply resulted in colonial immiseration, but that planning guided by knowledge creates new conditions and new problems, and that as such the task of anthropological knowledge is renewed. What I haven’t yet managed to figure out is whether Moore’s book would be (or wants to be) of use to anyone in Zimbabwe today.

Chapter 2 runs through the long history of government schemes of
dispossession, repossession, resettlement and new dispossessions. It’s
pretty clear that this chapter alone could be a book, what with the
complicated schemes of colonial, late colonial, post-independence,
post-colonial, and current schemes of displacement and
re-organization. Obviously the very idea of feeling secure about
one’s land in any sense (not least a Lockean, possessive individualist
sense of ownership) has been the exception, not the rule. The action
of the book takes place just before the 1993 passage of the Land
Acquisition act, which overturned the “Lancaster House” negotiations,
brokered by the British, between Ian Smith’s Rhodesia and Mugabe’s
Zimbabwe in 1979-80. The Land Acquisition act started the ball
rolling towards the highly publicized dispossession of land owned by
white farmers in the 2000s, and the current economic chaos in the
country.

It is thus easy to see why of the systems for redistributing and
organizing land in this democracy-cum-dictatorship are complex,
combined as they are with the overlapping histories of colonial rule,
chiefdom and local everyday practices. Moore spends a lot of time
focusing on the government attempts to plan and control of abstract
space: villagization, agricultural grids divided by function, roads
and water supplies, in short a lot of attention on the effects of 19th
century modernist planning carried out iin 1980s-90s, globalizing
Zimbabwe. I return again here to my sense that Moore treats planning
a little too much as if there were planning on the one side
(government) and the practices of people on the other
(governmentality), when it is clear that planning takes all kinds of
forms, and are a central feature of the politics he reveals. Clearly
Moore knows this when it becomes evident (pages 91-92) that Moore was
actively involved in “community based resource management” that would
propose alternatives to the official land-use plans. I was
disappointed therefore not to see more reflection on the question of
where planning ends and execution begins given this kind of
negotiating and intervention. There is an easy story in which
anthropologists discover what “the people” really do, and then go tell
the officials and the government how to best and most humanely plan
around them… but this is not the story Moore is telling.
Nonetheless, it’s still clear to me that there is no way out of
planning and its rationalities, and the real heart of the matter is in
how those rationalities are aligned with differing claims on and
demands for, justice.

Chapter 3 extends this question into the “micropractices” (again, why
micro? I don’t get it) of Karezi residents and how those practices
conflict with the resettlement schemes and regulations of government.
I found this chapter rich and enjoyable… filled with great
storytelling (although frequently Moore fails to finish his stories,
or return to them when it would make sense) of the “cattle dips” and
the cultivation of tsenza. It is here that the ecological sensibility
of people who occupy a place and understand the relation of space and
place is so obvious to the anthropologist, and so ignored by planners
and officials. Latour would be useful here, if only as a straw man–
the clear desire to control the practices of people from a “center of
calculation” seems to fail in Zimbabwe precisely because Moore is
probably the only person doing really quality research into the
political ecology of Zimbabwe– but he certainly isn’t trying to help
Mugabe govern better.

The three chapters of part one have not on balance delivered on the
theoretical promises of the introduction (or if they have, it has been
in ways far too subtle for me to catch); assemblages, articulated or
not, remain little more than a gesture so far, and there is no
conceptual scaffolding that would make me confident that the two
remaining parts will fill it all out… but I look forward to finding
out.

A few good blogs (1| 2| 3) seem to be out there as well… please post others if you know of them.

“I elaborate entanglements with their gnarly knots that defy orderly undoing.” (Donald Moore, Suffering for Territory, p. 9)

The first thing I noticed about Donald Moore’s Suffering for Territory is that the preface and the flap-copy both describe events in Zimbabwe since 2000– the globally significant displacement of white landowners by the Mugabe government– but the research conducted in the book occurred in the early 1990s. At first sight this looks like a way to sell the book (it’s not out of date, it’s background!), but in reality I think there is something much more complex about this book that isn’t articulated until one gets well into the intro: that this is a book for understanding why the events of the last few years make sense. Whereas the news media and the fast-paced world of journalism are excellent at covering and tracking unfolding events, especially in places with dramatic political conditions like Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, ethnography is after something that journalists (insofar as they are not really participating in what they observe) cannot articulate.

Unfortunately, that same sense-making skill that anthropologists develop is also the reason why it is so often hard for people (including authors themselves) to say what an ethnography is “about.” Certainly Donald Moore’s book is “about” Zimbabwe, and in particular, a little district in the north east called Kaerezi, and in particular a little village in that district. But to relegate the book to being merely about this village would miss the fact that it is actually (also?) about how power, sovereignty and discipline make space and place look, and happen, the way they do. But to say that it is merely a theorization of governmentality would miss the fact that it (also?) is about race, colonialism, African histories of liberation, resistance, genocide and suffering… and so on.

Fortunately for Moore, and for me, one of the perquisites of anthropology is that one can address novice and expert at the same time. I, for instance, had to look at a map to know where Zimbabwe is exactly, so I am very much a novice when it comes to one thing the book is about. But when it comes to the parade of familiar theorists (Foucault, Gramsci, Dolce and Gabanna, Appadurai, Lefbvre, James C. Scott, Chakrabarty, etc), I’m an expert whose own classes, syllabi and work have struggled to makes sense of things like governmentality, sovereignty, assemblages, articulations, situated ethnographies, space and place. The real challenge, for Moore’s book, is to integrate novice and expert– to make sense of something that is inevitably highly specific and particular, in terms that make it make sense at a global and historical level (and not only in terms of “governmentality”, but generally, as an ethnographic explanation of a situation, not just a particular place or set of people).

Of course, if you are looking for that elusive thing called fieldwork or ethnography (you know what I’m talking about, that thing that you can’t name but that when it is missing makes people say “where’s the ethnography”) then Moore’s book promises to be as rich a monograph of a specific locale as one could want: during fieldwork, Moore was detained by government officials at the airport, subjected to ruthless and pointless bureaucracy, had successive meetings with people in power overseeing his ability to work, was the subject of a public meeting deciding his fate, lived in a tent in the village, built his own mud and wattle hut, worked the fields, visited the archives, and spent on the order of ten years thinking through the experience. If this isn’t ethnography, then I’d be hard-pressed to say what is. More important however, might be trying to precisely articulate what this ethnography does that others (or other accounts that do not employ this kind of fieldwork) cannot do.

The Introduction

I find that the best way into many ethnographies today is through the last few pages of an introduction… and not the first. My theory is confirmed here in that the most illuminating part for me was the “Ethnographic Positioning” section, followed by the standard map of the text. I needed this first, before I could dive into the details of governmentality and racialized space and so forth. There is no doubt a sense of unhipness (at least) to repeating the classic “arrival narrative” whether consciously or unconsciously, and so many ethnographies today would rather bury this somewhat essential component of the story, than praise it. Regardless of its ideological underpinnings or its putative narrative effect on readers, the arrival narrative is the equivalent of scene-setting in a novel: you almost always need it. And when it is done well it gives the reader an almost instant sense of the possibilities in a story, it motivates and structures to be sure, but that’s exactly why one should take care with it rather than sequestering it in the back end of an introduction.

Moore misses a certain opportunity in this respect. He’s chosen to introduce his own debilitating car accident, which formed a kind of enforced departure from fieldwork, as part of his narrative, but it comes at the end of the story when it should come at the beginning. Because the book is so intensely about a specific location, spatialization, groundedness and situatedness are emphasized at the clear expense of mobility (a concept frequently hailed as a central feature of the contemporary world). Thus the narrative irony of a car accident (a hiatus of mobility, an enforced groundedness, an occasion for suffering) is in many ways the perfect introduction to a story of grounded, entangled, situated production of territory and suffering. Cars and trucks play an important part in the brief introduction, and I’ll be curious how mobility figures in the rest of the text. Given Moore’s concern primarily with the relation of territory to political technologies, and not only mechanical and bio-technical technologies, it has already made me reflect on the ways automobiles and automobile accidents are also sites of government-sovereignty-discipline (see e.g. Injury by Sarah L. Jain, whose more recent work has been about automobile injuries).

Rather than go on at length about the Introduction, let me do this seminar-style, and provide a series of what I think are the key concepts that readers should read for, and invite discussion about how well they are handled here and how to think about comparative work in tracking these concepts.

“Micropractices matter” is a refrain that is threaded through the introduction. To what exactly is never clear, but the implication seems to be that they matter as much as non-micropractices such as the more obvious “legitimate monopoly on the use of force” of Weber, or the bureaucratic, military and economic power of governments generally. What makes them micro, or practices, is also up for discussion. Are they micro in terms of territorial reach, temporal lastingness or some other scalar dimension? Are they practices because they are not ideologies or are they also imaginaries?

In the section on “Provicializing Governmentality” Moore reviews some of the literature on governmentality and its origin in Foucault’s study of governance in Europe. I sense already that this could spark a relatively endless discussion about what Foucault really meant (less likely would be what Chakrabarty really meant by “Provinicalizing Europe”) so let me make a feeble attempt to focus attention on what Moore calls the “triad-in-motion” of “sovereignty-discipline-government”. (Note mobility!) Moore is “grounding governmentality in Kaerezi”. The triad includes not only government (which for Foucault was always larger than the state) but also the concepts of sovereignty and discipline. Questions you might want to ask: Why is it, or must it be in motion? For extra credit, look up the original triangle in Foucault’s works and provide us with a precise distinction.

Moore should be especially appealing to geographers (to say nothing of Savage Minds contributors on the subject) given his emphasis on the spatialization of politics, the production of place through governmentality and the twin concepts of “Racialized space, spatialized race” he offers in the sections on “Racialized Rule” and “Spatiality and Power”. The focus on space and place is “antihumanist” (p. 19), even as it is concerned with classic humanist themes of race and culture, from Soyinka and Cesaire to Mandela. Focus here also on the “geo-body” and the governance of spatial relations over abstract space.

If your assemblage needs some juice, look no further. in “Entangled Landscapes” Moore promises not only to look at the “striated” entanglement of place, history, technology and power, but to combine assemblages and articulations into, you guessed it, “articulated assemblages.”. Pay special attention to the way assemblage “displace humans as the sovereign makes of history” (p. 23)and Moore’s claim (do you buy it? I don’t yet) that “scholarly invocations of assemblage…occlude power relations, historical sedimentations and their forceful effects” which necessitates a supplement of articulation.” (p. 24)

Finally, the section “Ethnographic positioning” promises some good old-fashioned (it’s old-fashioned now isn’t it?) reflexivity or “ethnographic emergence” . I actually think this is really important, insofar as the kind of reflexivity that is useful is the kind in which the ethnographer uses him/herself as a human tool of observation to make sense of things (I mentioned this in connection with my review of Xiang Biao’s recent book). If Moore’s particular situation as a white, first world anthropologist can be used as a tool for revealing social structure and cultural meaning, then I say bring on the reflexivity. If however, it becomes a way to claim that everything is situated, or what’s worse, complex… then I’ll pass.

Next up: “Governing space,” Chapters 1 and 2 (maybe 3, depending on how the discussion goes)…

The book is substantial, 400 pages, 3 sections. I will try to post something by July 15th on the introduction, and then shoot for 1-2 chapters per week until mid-late August. I hope all the Savage Minds will chime in, and if anyone else wants to write anything substantial about a section of the book, I will happily post it here on your behalf. Let the suffering begin!

She suggested they were trying to “stay in the stone age”, described their technology as “primitive” and accused them of “holding the government of Botswana to ransom” by resisting eviction from their ancestral lands. How did she know? In 2002 she had spent half a day as part of a parliamentary delegation visiting one of the resettlement camps into which the bushmen have been forced. Her guides were officials in the Botswanan government.

Interestingly, the trip was funded by a company which owns “the rights to mine diamonds in the bushmen’s land in the Kalahari”!

The linked Guardian article by George Monbiot points out some other examples of people being called “stone-aged” when their land looked attractive.

John F Kennedy approved the annexation of West Papua by the Indonesian government with the words: “Those Papuans of yours are some seven hundred thousand and living in the stone age.” Stone-aged and primitive are what you call people when you want their land.

The animal theme comes up quite often too. “How can you have a stone-age creature continue to exist in the age of computers?” asked the man who is now Botswana’s president, Festus Mogae. “If the bushmen want to survive, they must change, otherwise, like the dodo, they will perish.” The minister for local government, Margaret Nasha, was more specific. “You know the issue of Basarwa [the bushmen]?” she asked in 2002. “Sometimes I equate it to the elephants. We once had the same problem when we wanted to cull the elephants and people said no.”

See earlier.

The Botswana High Court ruled on Friday 28 October that the government must allow Bushman Amogolang Segootsane and his family to return to their land in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. It must also return his goats to him and allow him to bring water into the reserve.

All but a few of the Bushmen living in Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve have been forcibly removed from their homes in recent days in what spokesmen for the affected communities said is a final push by the government to end human habitation there after tens of thousands of years.

The First People of the Kalahari, an activist group in Botswana, said that Bushmen villages had been cut off from their main sources of food and water and that outsiders had been prohibited from entering to provide relief for the past six weeks.

The group said a heavy contingent of police, military and park rangers trucked out about 40 people — most of the remaining residents — at gunpoint on Friday and Saturday. The stragglers face constant harassment, it said.

Before forced removals started in the late 90s, there were over 2,000 Bushmen living there.

More from Mother Jones from earlier this year.

UPDATE: Another story from the Washington Post.

In a tribal society steeped in superstition, the spells of witches often are blamed for stubborn illnesses, a stroke of bad luck, the drying up of wells, crop failure or the inability to give birth to a son. But social analysts and officials said that superstition and faith in witchcraft often are a ploy for carrying out violence against women.

“Superstition is only an excuse. Often a woman is branded a witch so that you can throw her out of the village and grab her land, or to settle scores, family rivalry, or because powerful men want to punish her for spurning their sexual advances. Sometimes it is used to punish women who question social norms,” said Pooja Singhal Purwar, an official at the Jharkhand social welfare department.

“Women from well-to-do homes in the village are never branded witches,” Purwar said. “It is always the socially and economically vulnerable women who are targeted and boycotted.”

Unfortunately, the online fulltext version of Mahasveta Devi’s excellent story Bayen has been removed from the web at the request of the publishers. It is an account of how such witchcraft accusations play out in rural India (and like Zora Neal Hurston’s work, it is ethnographically informed). You can find it in the collection: Five Plays.

A book about witchcraft in South Africa, Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy, sees contemporary witchcraft accusations in a very different light. According to this H-Net review by Gary Kynoch (via Anthropologi.info), the book sees witchcraft accusations as an attempt to explain continued suffering even after the demise of the Apartheid state:

Community solidarity has eroded when compared to the unity of the “struggle” years. At the same time, improved opportunities for black South Africans have enabled a significant minority of Sowetans to accumulate material wealth and enjoy a relatively privileged lifestyle. The less fortunate are often bitter at being left behind and rising inequalities have fuelled community and family conflict in the post-apartheid period. Without “the system” to blame, witchcraft is increasingly considered the source of many of these difficulties. The anxiety engendered by the AIDS crisis has further heightened witchcraft fears.

I personally haven’t read anything Anthropological on witchcraft more recent than Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, but I almost feel inspired to create a course syllabus on witchcraft in the contemporary world. Anyone similarly inspired would definitely want to take a look at this MIT Open Courseware syllabus for James Howe’s course: “Magic, Witchcraft, and the Spirit World.”

Finally, I wanted to add one other witchcraft link: to the excellent Museum of Witchcraft in Iceland. I visited this exhibit in 2000, and enjoyed it tremendously. The witchcraft accusations discussed there were mostly in the seventeenth century, where they seem to have been a European import. The most fun part of visiting the exhibit was watching the Icelandic visitors discussing whose ancestors were accusers and whose were the accused (Iceland is a small country and everyone is related).

Around 130 cases of witchcraft or sorcery are found in court records both from the high court at Þingvellir and in fragments of county court records. Of the approximately 170 persons accused around 10% were women, the rest were males, mostly of the lower classes though some sheriffs and clergymen were also accused. None of the latter suffered physical punishments. It must be remembered in this context that the total population of Iceland at the time was only around fifty thousand.

UPDATE: This story from the Telegraph UK just happened to appear today:

A Sicilian palazzo once used as a headquarters for the Spanish Inquisition has been discovered to contain dozens of pieces of graffiti by “witches” condemned to burn at the stake.

The anguished scribblings and drawings were found on the walls during renovation work on the Palazzo Steri in Palermo, reviving what had been a nightmare for the many women held there to await their fate centuries ago.

One of the damned wrote: “Hot and cold I am / as I be consumed by the fever of malaria / my guts do tremble / and mine heart and spirit grow weak.”