Tag Archives: History

Hidden World: Visiting The British Colonial Archives

Our research trip to England was my first time doing archival research with primary documents. I’ve read a fair number of excellent articles about working with visual archives (Alan Sekula’s 1986, “The Body and the Archive” being the most famous), but I was still surprised to discover how awkward the process actually is. Visiting any archive usually requires some kind of advanced appointment for which you have to describe your project and tell the archivist which of their materials you intend to look at. This requires advanced knowledge about the nature of the archives and what materials they have – all well and good if you can simply hop on the web and search their archives for yourself, but quite difficult with visual archives.

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.
Continue reading →

Ota Benga

I try to avoid linking to MySpace, but when the NY Times mentions that Ota Benga has his own MySpace page, I suppose its news. Even though Ota Benga died in 1916.

Next month it will be 100 years since Ota Benga was put on display in the monkey house at New York’s Bronx Zoo. It may seem unthinkable that something like this would happen today, but the recent controversy over the “African Village” in the Augsburg Zoo suggests that it is important to remember what happened to Ota Benga.

The new resident of the Monkey House was, indeed, a man, a Congolese pygmy named Ota Benga. The next day, a sign was posted that gave Ota Benga’s height as 4 feet 11 inches, his weight as 103 pounds and his age as 23. The sign concluded, “Exhibited each afternoon during September.”

Visitors to the Monkey House that second day got an even better show. Ota Benga and an orangutan frolicked together, hugging and wrestling and playing tricks on each other. The crowd loved it. To enhance the jungle effect, a parrot was put in the cage and bones had been strewn around it. The crowd laughed as the pygmy sat staring at a pair of canvas shoes he had been given. “Few expressed audible objection to the sight of a human being in a cage with monkeys as companions,” The New York Times wrote the next day, “and there could be no doubt that to the majority the joint man-and-monkey exhibition was the most interesting sight in Bronx Park.”

I won’t go into the details, but the Times piece provides some excellent background as to how it was that Ota Benga ended up in the zoo on that day. We are also referred to the book: Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo, by Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume.

The exhibit quickly sparked protests from the Colored Baptist Ministers’ Conference who objected not only to the racism of the exhibit, but also to its Darwinism. This relates to an earlier post I wrote on Savage Minds about how contemporary debates about teaching Darwin in the schools overlook the fact that one of the main objections to Darwin at the original Scopes monkey trial was the racist and eugenic implications of contemporary Darwinism.

The Impact of Real Colonialism on Colonialism “Lite”

Arlene Goldbard has a scathing, and I believe justified, attack on Kwame Anthony Appiah’s recent New York Times Magazine article, “The Case for Contamination.” She writes:

Much of his work has opposed the idea that we are limited by arbitrary facts of identity –race, sexual orientation, and so on — which tend to become dictates; instead, he asserts the individual’s freedom from all imposed categories. From the perspective of individual liberty, I agree.

… But in his Times essay, Appiah elaborates an entire cultural policy based on nothing more than the individual’s right to make his own path by walking through the cultures of the world.

The Appiah article is an extended attack on UNESCO’s “Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions.”

Appiah sets up a straw man to stand in for those who endorse the Convention. He calls them purists and compares their relationship to cultures under pressure from globalization to the anxious “assistant on the film set who’s supposed to check that the extras in a sword-and-sandals movie aren’t wearing wristwatches.” He says (without a shred of evidence) that those concerned to preserve cultures want to force people to “maintain their ‘authentic’ ways,” a goal I have never heard anyone espouse (and I am moderately well-informed on this subject). And he dismisses those who feel their own cultures are threatened by globalization as merely expressing discomfort with change: “[T]he world, their world, is changing, and some of them don’t like it.”

Continue reading →

What Does Jewish Rock Look Like?

A couple months ago, my then-girlfriend and I were surfing channels and happened to light upon Gene Simmons’ reality show. It was the end of the episode, and Simmons was lecturing a young band about something or other.

“He seems really smart,” my ex said, somewhat surprised.

“Of course he does,” I half-jokingly replied. “He’s Jewish.”

She was surprised to hear that The Tongued One was Jewish. Pressing my case, I continued: “Of course, most of your major rock stars are Jewish.” Continue reading →

The First Formosan in Europe

Sometimes I stumble upon a link that forces me to drop all of my work and shift my focus entirely. Such was the case when after lunch I learned of George Psalmanazar, “the first Formosan to visit Europe.”

In 1704, Psalmanazar published a book An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, an Island subject to the Emperor of Japan which revealed a number of strange habits. Formosa was a prosperous country of wealth with capital city called Xternetsa. Men walked naked except for a gold or silver plate to cover their privates. Their main food was a serpent that they hunt with branches. Formosans were polygamous and the husband had a right to eat their wives for infidelity. They executed murderers by hanging them upside down and shooting them full of arrows. Annually they sacrificed the hearts of 18,000 young boys to gods and priest ate the bodies. They also used horses and camels for mass transportation. The book also described the Formosan alphabet.

Of course, it was all a hoax. In fact, I came across it via this Ishbaddidle post linking to the 10 Greatest Impostors in History.
Continue reading →

World Simulation Part Two: The Basics

Using the now classic metaphor, if we imagine all of human evolution to have occurred in the past hour, the last 550 years that the World Simulation attempts to simulate is no more than a few tenths of a second. While these final tenths have brought us tremendous technological advances, they have also brought us unparalleled global inequality, the most deadly wars of all time, and a precarious environmental situation. Our population is more than 10 times what it was just a few short tenths of a second ago. The richest 225 humans on earth have more wealth than the poorest 2.5 billion people combined and the richest 20% of humans on earth account for 86% of consumption and on average make over $25,000/year. Meanwhile, 1.2 billion people make less than $1/day and over half the world makes less than $2/day. Humans produce more than enough food to feed everyone in the world, but at least 800 million people are starving. In 2004, worldwide military expenditures were $950 billion. In that same year, Worldwatch estimated that it would cost just $12 billion for reproductive health care for all women, $19 billion for the elimination of hunger and malnutrition, $10 billion for clean drinking water for all, and $13 billion to immunize every child in the world from common major diseases. In these final few tenths of a second we have created a global economy running on nonrenewable fossil fuels, all of which will be gone within the next second on our imaginary clock. The use of these fuels has increased carbon dioxide levels by almost 30%, nitrous oxide by about 15%, and concentrations of methane have more than doubled – all of which contribute to a rise in global temperature leading to rising sea levels, expanding deserts, and more intense storms. Perhaps most dramatic, it is in these final tenths of a second on our metaphorical clock that we human beings have attained the ability to literally stop the clock and annihilate ourselves. Whether or not the clock keeps ticking into the next hour will largely be up to the students we are now teaching. This is no small task they face. It may take an almost complete reinvention of how we live and a total revision of how we see the world and our fellow human beings.

So how do our students view these problems and what do they plan on doing about them? Some students are well aware of these issues and are seriously engaged in finding solutions. Unfortunately, the more common perception among students is that these problems are not theirs to solve. Technology will take care of the environmental problems and those in poverty should take care of themselves. “We” are rich because we are smart, hard-working, and have our head on straight. “They” are poor because they are lazy, not smart, and probably corrupt. In short, our system works. Their systems do not. There is little recognition that “our system” might in some ways depend on those of others and vice versa – that perhaps there is ultimately only one system after all, the world system.

It is almost impossible to say all that and keep the attention of those who don’t want to hear it. These are statements that are destined to always be preached to the choir and not far beyond. Fortunately these statements are really secondary to what we really need from our students: good questions that will drive them to understand more about our world and become active and responsible global citizens working to ensure our clock keeps ticking.

Continue reading →

Chatting up the Ostrogoths

Amartya Sen vs. Samuel Huntington:

The belief in the allegedly “Western” nature of democracy is often linked to the early practice of voting and elections in Greece, especially in Athens. Democracy involves more than balloting, but even in the history of voting there would be a classificatory arbitrariness in defining civilizations in largely racial terms. In this way of looking at civilizational categories, no great difficulty is seen in considering the descendants of, say, Goths and Visigoths as proper inheritors of the Greek tradition (“they are all Europeans,” we are told). But there is reluctance in taking note of the Greek intellectual links with other civilizations to the east or south of Greece, despite the greater interest that the Greeks themselves showed in talking to Iranians, or Indians, or Egyptians (rather than in chatting up the Ostrogoths).

Ouch!

The Invention of the World: Islam in the West

While it is indeed possible (and at least fun to think) that trained otters in the service of Chinese explorers were the first to discover the Americas from the East, an article on Al-Jazeera’s website details the influence of Muslim scientists on the discovery of the New World from the West — and asserts the possibility that Andalusia Muslims may have gotten here well before Columbus. Whether the latter claim is true or not, certainly the importance of Muslim scholarship to Columbus’ voyage cannot be overestimated; Muslim navigation was the state-of-the-art in the 15th century and for centuries before, providing most of the navigation tools, such as the astrolabe, that Columbus and his crew relied on. By the 9th century, Muslims had proven that the Earth was a sphere, and had worked out its circumference to within 200 km (Columbus apparently knew about this work, but substituted lower figures to help make his case that the voyage he had proposed was at all feasible).

The impact of Muslim science and culture, and especially of the Al-Andalusian culture that dominated the Iberian peninsula between the 8th and 12th centuries, on the development of Western culture is little known and even less talked about. The treatment of Muslim Spain in Western Civ books tends to consist solely of the Song of Roland and, centuries later, the defeat of Granada and subsequent expulsion of Muslims (and Jews) from Spain. In between, a mighty civilization emerged, flourished, and ultimately declined — one that I am beginning to think contributed more to “Western culture” than the Romans ever did. Besides creating a stewpot of cultural and scholastic achievement in its own right, Muslim Spain served as a conduit for the teachings of the Muslim world at a time when Muslim learning was at its peak. For instance, the Catholic Church was utterly transformed by the study of Aristotle in Arabic translation; likewise, the introduction of double-entry bookkeeping by Fra Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli relied on the introduction of negative numbers by Muslims (who themselves had learned from Hindu mathematicians centuries earlier) and the al-jabr (“algebra”) of Al-Khwarizmi (from whose name we also get the word “algorithm”). The work of Ibn Rashid (Averroës) — who also gave us Aristotle — and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) form the foundation of Western medical knowledge; the poetry and dialogues of and about Muslim philosophers and warriors (and non-Muslims deeply embedded in Andalusian culture, such as El Cid, from the Arabic el Sayyid, “leader” or “chief”) laid the groundwork for the birth of the novel (in Spain, of course!); and the pointed arch essential to Gothic monumental architecture was adopted from Muslim architects.
Continue reading →

AchiveGrid

Via ResearchBuzz I learned today of ArchiveGrid. Currently free, it may become a pay site if they don’t get additional funding by the end of the month. It allows you to search descriptions of the contents of hundreds of thousands of archives. If you are doing historical research of any kind it is definitely worth checking out!

Taiwanese Aborigine Memories of Japan

Memories of its fifty years of Japanese colonial rule are very complex in Taiwan. When the Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist (KMT) party took over the island after World War II they used the term “retrocession,” emphasizing the return of Taiwan to China. “Retrocession day” is still a national holiday. However, since the eighties there has been a revisionist historiography which seeks to emphasize the unique history of Taiwan as distinct from that of China. Central to this unique history are three things: Taiwan’s Aborigine population, its long history of resistance to imperial Chinese rule, and the important role of Japan in modernizing the island. You can usually figure out what political party a Taiwanese person supports simply by asking them about the Japanese era. This is more complicated, however, with Taiwan’s Aborigine population.

The Japanese wanted to prove that they could govern Taiwan more efficiently than the British ruled in India or the Americans in the Philippines. As a result, the Japanese colonial experience in Taiwan was much milder than that in Korea or Mainland China … for the Han Chinese. It is thus possible for many Taiwanese to romanticize this era, as one sees in the rampant Japanese-era nostalgia that is consuming Taiwan. For the Aborigines, however, it was a different story. At the dawn of the twentieth century the mountainous parts of the island where still largely under the control of the Aborigines. The Japanese forcibly took over those areas in a genocidal campaign of violence. There is no record of the number of Aborigine lives lost, but the Japanese recorded 10,000 Japanese dead as a result of what was a largely one-sided battle. Once under Japanese rule, however, schools were set up throughout the region and many Aborigines first gained literacy at schools run by the Japanese police. When missionaries later came into the region (under the KMT), they found it easy to use Japanese language bibles. In the end, Aborigines became some of the most loyal subjects of the Japanese emperor, many even volunteering to serve in the Japanese armed forces during World War II.

All this is the background for a curious political event which took place earlier this year:
Continue reading →