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I have been struck by my capacity to admire, well nigh to excess, the writing of people who not only contradict but absolutely detest one another. But my remarks on Terry Eagleton and George Steiner will have to wait for another day.
Likewise, my comments on a couple of fascinatingly cross-cultural artworks in the newly reinstalled African galleries at the Michael C. Carlos Museum will have to wait until the redoubtable Amy Branch has gotten me jpegs to illustrate them. But the museum bookshop is marketing a couple of remainder books that are worth discussing independently. (As is a third book The Root of Wild Madder,about the carpet trade, but apart from its presentation as a societally savvy travel narrative it is awfully hard to link to the other two books.)
And having said that as part of a premature post a couple of days ago, I wrote, this morning, a quite different post that very deliberately discusses them in a context I had no idea I would find. Here it is:
It’s interesting to realize how one’s various interests fit together in unexpected ways simply because everything really is connected. ...Not in the fashion of conspiracy theorists, or of sappy versions of the History of Gaia or the Human Community, but simply because whatever it is that human beings have been doing with and to the planet over the past few hundred millennia is ultimately a single, enormously complex story, and the chapters and frame tales link up through more common threads than any of us ever have time in one lifespan to follow.
Which reminds me, for some reason, of that marvelous parody of 1950s films in Adaptation when the movie begins with the birth of the Earth in cosmic space and quickly brings us through the millennia to the parking lot in Los Angeles where the plot action is about to begin.
I’m reading, concurrently, two books about travels in segments of Africa that are as opposite from one another as one can get, a book about other nearby parts of the world about which I’ve written previously [cf. the less reticent citation above], and (more or less) trying to finish reading the novel about the New York art world I mentioned in an earlier post. I will not try to shoehorn the last-named into this post, but the other books reinforce some of my perceptions from Peter Levi’s Afghanistan book.
About which, briefly: You will recall that my perception was that there really were numerous bodies of hidden knowledge in Afghanistan, but hidden for a dozen different reasons: because fairly innocuous means of social cohesion were suddenly prohibited, because old beliefs about the universe did not accord with the new model presented by the dominant powers, and (maybe) because there were some technologies of the body that actually worked, sometimes, for reasons other than the ones believed, and there was a sense that this information was to be preserved in adverse circumstances. But it all exists in a hodgepodge of hiddenness, and when there is money to be made from seekers after knowledge arriving with backpacks and money belts, cottage industries of supposed secret-revealers will spring up accordingly.
I’m finding evidence for similar structural phenomena in West African societies so squashed by successive invasions and poverty imposed by misguided models of enlightened entry into the global economy that whatever traditions might once have made sense have survived out of context, squished and twisted in successive generations. But this is all based on one travel book circa 2000, which as so often seems to place the observations of generations of anthropologists in a whole new light simply because the traveler doesn’t already know what it is he is supposed to be seeing.
So as has been written about in multiple works of fiction, probably more in science fiction than elsewhere, it is the bewildered visitor who unveils the culture more than the informed outsiders who have arrived with ready-made theories to confirm or disconfirm. This particular traveler has done his reading and been there before, but it is still as if he had never before set foot in such a place.
These pockets of multiply conquered cultures, where gems of information co-exist with the most wretchedly ignorant opinions just as they do in advanced industrial societies, are the phenomenon that has long interested me, though I didn’t know that that was what they had in common.
I noticed at a certain point that the late 20th century’s history and theory of postwar decolonization and Third World identity was tending to be written by members of cultures that were once and future winners. Even the poet-intellectuals who hailed from little islands, such as Aimé Césaire’s Martinique or Derek Walcott’s Saint Lucia, tended to be the exception. When you studied the books and the biographies of ever so many theorists, they often came from the conquerors who had themselves been conquered, and tended to write their countries’ histories in terms of the indignities imposed from outside on the great kingdoms that had unified disparate tribes, or whatever. In any case, it tended to privilege the tales and the viewpoints of the formerly powerful, often on their way to consolidating their power again in a different context.
But the disparate forcibly unified tribes tended to see things differently, and sometimes, in the right circumstances, the occasional colonizer actually functioned for them the way the traditional feudal lord was supposed to in fairy tales, protecting his folks from the depredations of the far-distant capital where the ruling classes had always sneered at the benighted locals down there in the south. (This is from the book about the other side of Africa.) So that an intellectual from the oppressed subgroup in question, after describing the horrors of colonial exploitation and postcolonial neglect, remarks, “No group and no individual is either entirely good or entirely bad. It is wrong to take a Manichaean view of our history.” Which is a self-evident truth that is generally impermissible to explore in any detail because the slightest deviation from receive opinion will be immediately put to bad uses by those eager to demonize or to excuse.
I once wanted to start an online art-and-culture magazine that would devote itself entirely to such unfashionably marginalized subgroups and whatever they had managed to create—but as I read these accounts I come to realize that there are locales in which nobody has been able to create anything for decades, because (as I first read thirty years ago in a book on economic development and global health) there are places where the levels of the food supply have been so disrupted, the ties of traditional social order so severed, and the debilitating diseases become so overpowering that it is all that the regions can do just to keep hold of a few fragments of what previous generations knew and developed, and that little tends to diminish with each generation’s failure to comprehend what the previous one was trying to teach it. (Again, quite a few science fiction novels of the dystopian future are simply describing conditions that exist on earth right now, in places that only make the headlines when sufficient numbers of local take to shooting at one another.)
Sometimes (though this is not in the books I’m reading) even standardized education is not enough, because it does little good to understand the germ theory of disease or the desirability of sanitation if the teachers have no idea what to tell people to do under conditions that are not in the textbooks and where the most sophisticated physicians are likely to tell travelers, “Yeah, you’ve got something, but it could be half a dozen things and by the time we could do the tests to find out which, you’d be dead. So let’s just throw whatever we’ve got lying around at it, because we haven’t got all that much here, anyway.”
This is the context in which our one writer eventually finds strange things that he genuinely cannot explain away, and for once there are no hallucinogenic substances involved.
But that is not what interests me at the moment. What interests me is the particularity of these pockets of survival, and how that fits into Khanna’s hypothesis of the particularity of the second world within which the three superpowers of the early 21st century are conducting their wars of raw materials and low-cost labor power.
The empires that have swept over such regions have usually been looking for raw materials and low-cost labor power, ever since there were empires at all. And the social orders that have been formed and reformed and deformed have operated by the same rules of behavior modification that are presumably set out in that book about brain chemistry I wrote about in a previous post. (The writer to whom I refer repeatedly in this post does suffer from bouts of malaria in which his fever dreams make him all the more sensitive to the necessity of working out experimental conditions in which his own suggestible mental state doesn’t add invalid data to the results.)
Anyway, Khanna’s point that ultimately there are about two hundred distinct national responses to the single-minded purposes of the three imperial entities is one to be pondered earnestly. Because although there are responses determined by the boundaries of nation states, there are also an innumerable number of local accidents, happy and unhappy, and they are not the same from one set of circumstances to another. The same commercial operation that destroys what remains of a local industry in one locale may inadvertently provide working capital to the habitually downtrodden workforce of another one. The ability of one young, enthusiastic couple to interest their own country’s interior designers in the whimsical productions of a few neighboring communities in Mexico may produce a booming business for the building trades there for a number of years. And so on.
You cannot work out a useful theory on the basis of any one of these local experiences. But for the multitudes who have to live out their lives in the 21st century, local experiences are all that there are. And it would be good to have that fact occasionally recognized, as has been done to a surprising extent in the United States this election year.
I began writing a followup to that, regarding how the inevitable blinkers imposed by our daily experience might be removed, and what it might mean to do more than walk as usual through our daily routine (no matter how out-of-the-ordinary the routine might be)…but I quickly realized I was digging myself in deeper. So for now, I stop.
And eventually will talk about the books I have studiously avoided discussing in detail.
Likewise, my comments on a couple of fascinatingly cross-cultural artworks in the newly reinstalled African galleries at the Michael C. Carlos Museum will have to wait until the redoubtable Amy Branch has gotten me jpegs to illustrate them. But the museum bookshop is marketing a couple of remainder books that are worth discussing independently. (As is a third book The Root of Wild Madder,about the carpet trade, but apart from its presentation as a societally savvy travel narrative it is awfully hard to link to the other two books.)
And having said that as part of a premature post a couple of days ago, I wrote, this morning, a quite different post that very deliberately discusses them in a context I had no idea I would find. Here it is:
It’s interesting to realize how one’s various interests fit together in unexpected ways simply because everything really is connected. ...Not in the fashion of conspiracy theorists, or of sappy versions of the History of Gaia or the Human Community, but simply because whatever it is that human beings have been doing with and to the planet over the past few hundred millennia is ultimately a single, enormously complex story, and the chapters and frame tales link up through more common threads than any of us ever have time in one lifespan to follow.
Which reminds me, for some reason, of that marvelous parody of 1950s films in Adaptation when the movie begins with the birth of the Earth in cosmic space and quickly brings us through the millennia to the parking lot in Los Angeles where the plot action is about to begin.
I’m reading, concurrently, two books about travels in segments of Africa that are as opposite from one another as one can get, a book about other nearby parts of the world about which I’ve written previously [cf. the less reticent citation above], and (more or less) trying to finish reading the novel about the New York art world I mentioned in an earlier post. I will not try to shoehorn the last-named into this post, but the other books reinforce some of my perceptions from Peter Levi’s Afghanistan book.
About which, briefly: You will recall that my perception was that there really were numerous bodies of hidden knowledge in Afghanistan, but hidden for a dozen different reasons: because fairly innocuous means of social cohesion were suddenly prohibited, because old beliefs about the universe did not accord with the new model presented by the dominant powers, and (maybe) because there were some technologies of the body that actually worked, sometimes, for reasons other than the ones believed, and there was a sense that this information was to be preserved in adverse circumstances. But it all exists in a hodgepodge of hiddenness, and when there is money to be made from seekers after knowledge arriving with backpacks and money belts, cottage industries of supposed secret-revealers will spring up accordingly.
I’m finding evidence for similar structural phenomena in West African societies so squashed by successive invasions and poverty imposed by misguided models of enlightened entry into the global economy that whatever traditions might once have made sense have survived out of context, squished and twisted in successive generations. But this is all based on one travel book circa 2000, which as so often seems to place the observations of generations of anthropologists in a whole new light simply because the traveler doesn’t already know what it is he is supposed to be seeing.
So as has been written about in multiple works of fiction, probably more in science fiction than elsewhere, it is the bewildered visitor who unveils the culture more than the informed outsiders who have arrived with ready-made theories to confirm or disconfirm. This particular traveler has done his reading and been there before, but it is still as if he had never before set foot in such a place.
These pockets of multiply conquered cultures, where gems of information co-exist with the most wretchedly ignorant opinions just as they do in advanced industrial societies, are the phenomenon that has long interested me, though I didn’t know that that was what they had in common.
I noticed at a certain point that the late 20th century’s history and theory of postwar decolonization and Third World identity was tending to be written by members of cultures that were once and future winners. Even the poet-intellectuals who hailed from little islands, such as Aimé Césaire’s Martinique or Derek Walcott’s Saint Lucia, tended to be the exception. When you studied the books and the biographies of ever so many theorists, they often came from the conquerors who had themselves been conquered, and tended to write their countries’ histories in terms of the indignities imposed from outside on the great kingdoms that had unified disparate tribes, or whatever. In any case, it tended to privilege the tales and the viewpoints of the formerly powerful, often on their way to consolidating their power again in a different context.
But the disparate forcibly unified tribes tended to see things differently, and sometimes, in the right circumstances, the occasional colonizer actually functioned for them the way the traditional feudal lord was supposed to in fairy tales, protecting his folks from the depredations of the far-distant capital where the ruling classes had always sneered at the benighted locals down there in the south. (This is from the book about the other side of Africa.) So that an intellectual from the oppressed subgroup in question, after describing the horrors of colonial exploitation and postcolonial neglect, remarks, “No group and no individual is either entirely good or entirely bad. It is wrong to take a Manichaean view of our history.” Which is a self-evident truth that is generally impermissible to explore in any detail because the slightest deviation from receive opinion will be immediately put to bad uses by those eager to demonize or to excuse.
I once wanted to start an online art-and-culture magazine that would devote itself entirely to such unfashionably marginalized subgroups and whatever they had managed to create—but as I read these accounts I come to realize that there are locales in which nobody has been able to create anything for decades, because (as I first read thirty years ago in a book on economic development and global health) there are places where the levels of the food supply have been so disrupted, the ties of traditional social order so severed, and the debilitating diseases become so overpowering that it is all that the regions can do just to keep hold of a few fragments of what previous generations knew and developed, and that little tends to diminish with each generation’s failure to comprehend what the previous one was trying to teach it. (Again, quite a few science fiction novels of the dystopian future are simply describing conditions that exist on earth right now, in places that only make the headlines when sufficient numbers of local take to shooting at one another.)
Sometimes (though this is not in the books I’m reading) even standardized education is not enough, because it does little good to understand the germ theory of disease or the desirability of sanitation if the teachers have no idea what to tell people to do under conditions that are not in the textbooks and where the most sophisticated physicians are likely to tell travelers, “Yeah, you’ve got something, but it could be half a dozen things and by the time we could do the tests to find out which, you’d be dead. So let’s just throw whatever we’ve got lying around at it, because we haven’t got all that much here, anyway.”
This is the context in which our one writer eventually finds strange things that he genuinely cannot explain away, and for once there are no hallucinogenic substances involved.
But that is not what interests me at the moment. What interests me is the particularity of these pockets of survival, and how that fits into Khanna’s hypothesis of the particularity of the second world within which the three superpowers of the early 21st century are conducting their wars of raw materials and low-cost labor power.
The empires that have swept over such regions have usually been looking for raw materials and low-cost labor power, ever since there were empires at all. And the social orders that have been formed and reformed and deformed have operated by the same rules of behavior modification that are presumably set out in that book about brain chemistry I wrote about in a previous post. (The writer to whom I refer repeatedly in this post does suffer from bouts of malaria in which his fever dreams make him all the more sensitive to the necessity of working out experimental conditions in which his own suggestible mental state doesn’t add invalid data to the results.)
Anyway, Khanna’s point that ultimately there are about two hundred distinct national responses to the single-minded purposes of the three imperial entities is one to be pondered earnestly. Because although there are responses determined by the boundaries of nation states, there are also an innumerable number of local accidents, happy and unhappy, and they are not the same from one set of circumstances to another. The same commercial operation that destroys what remains of a local industry in one locale may inadvertently provide working capital to the habitually downtrodden workforce of another one. The ability of one young, enthusiastic couple to interest their own country’s interior designers in the whimsical productions of a few neighboring communities in Mexico may produce a booming business for the building trades there for a number of years. And so on.
You cannot work out a useful theory on the basis of any one of these local experiences. But for the multitudes who have to live out their lives in the 21st century, local experiences are all that there are. And it would be good to have that fact occasionally recognized, as has been done to a surprising extent in the United States this election year.
I began writing a followup to that, regarding how the inevitable blinkers imposed by our daily experience might be removed, and what it might mean to do more than walk as usual through our daily routine (no matter how out-of-the-ordinary the routine might be)…but I quickly realized I was digging myself in deeper. So for now, I stop.
And eventually will talk about the books I have studiously avoided discussing in detail.
