Tracks

I am reading ‘Cities and Caliphs‘ by Nezar Alsayyad; he argues that the picture we have of the typical Islamic city is a stereotype, a product of what Said called ‘Orientalism‘ rather than of concrete research. In fact, the earliest Islamic towns were garrisons, such as Basrah and Kufah . Their organization was, to a great degree, determined pragmatically by the need to administer the newly conquered territories. To some extent, their form came about as a response to the accidents of the time; thus, for example, at Basrah, the mosque was moved from its original site to one closer to the administrative centre after the latter had been broken into by thieves. It was thought that the continual activity of the mosque would increase the security of the governor’s quarters.

However, Asayyad agrees that regional governors, when planning their settlements, were, however unconsciously, applying to their present circumstances the basic form of the town of Medinah, the town of the prophet and the place from which most of the early governors had originated.

Steven Mithen, in his otherwise excellent ‘After the Ice‘ , seems to stumble when he arrives at Catal Höyük. He is horrified by the enclosed living space, by the protruding bull’s heads, by the stylized representations of vultures and headless torsos; he imagines a family eating in one of the small, smoky rooms, sullenly bent over their plates, while a child is so overwhelmed by her surroundings that she is unable to do more than toy with her food. It as if this ancient township (or, as archaeologists now insist, this overgrown village) had finally pushed the author beyond the open-minded acceptance of other cultures that is the modern anthropologist’s touchstone. He believes that the inhabitants of Catal Höyük were ‘living in a Neolithic Hell’ and that ‘any independence of thought and behaviour’ had been ‘crushed out of them by an oppressive ideology’. This ideology is clearly manifest in the art.This reminds me of the day I visited a house for sale; when the owner proudly showed me into the living room - no baronial hall, by any stretch of the imagination other than his own - I found the space dominated by an enormous rhino’s head. I didn’t ask him if it was real, and he said nothing about it, but clearly he and his family were happy to live with this monstrous object, and probably considered it a major selling point.

Mithen, comparing the inhabitants of the town with the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, suggests that while the latter saw themselves as ‘part of the natural order’, the ‘people of Catal Höyük seemed to fear and despise the wild’. In which case, it is difficult to imagine why they would have wanted to decorate their walls with such imposing reminders. May it not be just as likely that, like my proud householder, the denizens of that ancient settlement saw their art as a celebration of their mastery over the wild bulls, of their courage in facing up to them and bringing them down?

But were they, in fact, hunting, killing and eating the bulls? Perhaps not; although they did eat large animals - mostly sheep and goats -  they seem to have been mainly consumers of fruit and cereals, and of shellfish and small fish that they would dredge from the nearby river.  Ian Hodder, who is the director of digging operations at Catal Höyük, suggests that some of the murals were intended to commmunicate in some way with the world of the dead, whose bodies were buried under the floor. The hunting scences and the bulls’ heads could have been part of a process by which the wild was domesticated. Rather than terrifying the inhabitants, as Mithen believes, the various representational artefacts, each in different ways, are tools that enable the people of the village to live with the Wild and the Dead.

Lucius opens his story with a preliminary encounter; travelling on foot to take the weight off his weary horse, he meets two fellow voyagers who are in conversation. The first has been telling of his unhappy adventures, which involve witchcraft and magic, an account which the second greets with skeptical merriment. Lucius interrupts the scoffer, arguing that there are stranger things on earth than are dreamt of in such a philosophy, and invites the first speaker to continue his tale.

This story includes many of the ingredients that modern ethnologists and historians would recognize as belonging to recipes for witchcraft the world over; the fantastic nature of the narrative merely whets  the appetite of the open-minded young man, who determines that he will get to the bottom of these mysteries.

Thus inspired, Lucius sets out upon a quest that will see him transformed from external observer to unwitting and unwilling participant. Becoming the lover of a minor witch, he uses his influence over her to penetrate the inner sanctum of a more powerful, and apparently more dangerous witch’s bower. Excited by what he witnesses there, he pleads with his girlfriend to work upon him the same transformation that the senior witch has worked upon herself. The results are unfortunate: he is transformed into an ass. Thus disguised, he becomes a participant observer in a world of violence, servitude, and abominable rituals.

It is a trajectory which many an ethnologist will recognize. Moreover, as in many ethnographies, the protagonist, on returning to his earlier self, finds himself changed and purified : the ethnographer’s voyage is one of self-discovery as much, if not more, than one of discovery of the Other. Dedicated to the goddess Isis, he has been lead to higher wisdom by his sojourn.

What anthropologists term ‘rites of passage’ may just as well be termed ‘rites of triage’; inevitably, they lead to selection, to the appointing of a chosen few and the definitive casting out of the leaden-footed. And it seems that if there are no external mechanisms for ensuring that the triage occurs, if there is no bunch of masked and painted elders to terrify, cut, test and promote, then the candidates will organize their own ceremonies. It is difficult to determine whether the latter are apt to be more or less brutal in their manifestations than the former.

Children in our modern, up-to-date, and enlightened societies, are thrust into a liminality at the age of five or six, to emerge later and later, labelled and certified. But the ceremonies by which these etiquettes are conferred are of so little significance that the young seek their own. In France, those that find themselves at the university have been so persuaded of their rights and of their liberties that they are unable to admit to the underlying meaning of their rituals; they march for the good of humankind, for a world of kindness and equality, where the tight-rope walker is guaranteed to never take a tumble.

Yet these rites operate an underhanded triage in which the uncommitted go to the wall. From the tables upon which they stand, the strong look down at the weaklings who are so misguided as to feel the need for lessons. Who needs a professor, they snort.We will have lost a goodly number of students by the time this pantomime is finished. Those who need no teachers will still be there.

Yet again the tables and chairs are piled up against the doors and upon the stairs leading up to the bridge. One small door into B building is open, and a group of students stand around it, checking on who enters. The classrooms on the ground floor are bare; if classes were to be held, students would have to sit on the floor. About ten of the students I should be seeing at nine o’ clock are gathered in front of the main door, and I go and chat with them, handing them back their mid-term test. Most seem resigned, rather than angry or enthusiastic. One of them tells me that we might get a room if we go over to the C building, that they are letting teachers hold ‘alternative’ classes. He adds that they listen at the door to ensure that the teacher is not cheating on them and holding a normal lesson. I tell them they might as well go home, and then adjourn to a nearby café with a colleague to organize next semester’s classes.

A little later I trudge over to A building (the computer and video-projector in my back-pack feel that much heavier for my having brought them over for nothing) to be confronted by yet another set of doors obstructed by tables and chairs. A student is standing on one of the tables, screaming at those of her peers who wish to resume classes. I turn and make my way to the main entrance, where I wait for a while to see if any of my students turn up for the twelve o’ clock class. Cannier than I, they have stayed away. In one corner of the entrance hallway, a bunch of students are playing music, and a Bob Marley sing-alike croons his way through ‘I shot the sheriff’. My teacher’s ear picks up a faulty transition from preterite to base form and I feel the chalk on my fingers.

Two young women, side by side, leaning over their pushchairs. As we approach, we can hear conversation, but they are not talking to each other, or to the children. Each is clutching her own portable telephone to her ear. One coos into hers, cajoling, winsome. The other is more brisk; it sounds as if she may be giving instructions. Passing by, I glance down at the infants; they stare ahead, heads bobbing as the chairs pass over the cracks in the pavement.

Some time later, we come upon a young man. He too is preceded by a pushchair. His ears are plugged with phones, and we can hear the scratch, scrape and bark of rap as our paths cross.

I think back to my own childhood. I remember my mother taking me through the lanes around Port Navas, making our way from my grandmother’s house to a nearby farm. We would stop and inspect the flowers in the hedgerow, look up to where a bird was perched in a tree, pick blackberries, my mother commenting to me upon what we saw, what we touched, what we heard and tasted. At the farm, I remember a bucket of milk, a thick film of cream across the surface. I would watch the cows being milked. One of the women might take me under the cow, and I would pull gently on a teat.

Tim Ingold, in his book on The Perception of the Environment, recalls how his father, a botanist, would show him the plants as they walked through the countryside, how he would encourage him to smell them and nibble at them. He compares this with how the young Walpiri male, just prior to his initiation, would be lead along the songlines of his people, lead to the marks that the ancestors had left upon the landscape, and offered clues as what there was to see in them, as to how to bind them into his life. He writes :

The idea of showing is an important one. To show something to somebody is to cause it to be seen or otherwise experienced - whether by touch, taste, smell or hearing - by that other person. It is, as it were, to lift a veil off some aspect or component of the environment so that it can be apprehended directly. In that way, truths that are inherent in the world are, bit by bit, revealed or disclosed to the novice. What each generation contributes to the next, in this process, is an education of attention. (Ingold, 2000, p. 21-2)

It is tempting to make some generality about how modern parents, cut off from their children by the new toys that take up so much of their lives, no longer offer those opportunities for ‘an education of attention’ that Ingold, the Walpiri boy and I myself enjoyed. But perhaps the young women that I passed on my way to the Oise had, five minutes later, turned their attention most fully to their offspring. Perhaps the young man was returning from an hour or more spent patiently playing ball with his infant son. And I can remember long moments when, as a child, I would be among adults, but not with them. The grown-ups would converse about their own affairs, taking no more notice of me than was necessary to ensure that I came to no harm. Or I would withdraw into some world of my own, leaving my mother’s voice to become a comforting drone in the background, until she might upbraid me for not paying her full attention. But there are signs and clues that suggest that many of our schoolchildren have not been shown the world.

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This week we will be looking at the utopian city. We can start by having a look at Paul Maliszewski’s account of Gillette’s Metropolis, a project which never left the pages on which it was printed. Then go to Mike Davis‘ account of the development of Dubai as a a billionaire’s playground fit for Kubla Khan. While Gillette’s city was intended for everyone - all North Americans were to live in one perfect community - Dubai is reserved for the very rich. At a less exalted level, the gated community or city has been cropping up all over the world, from Five Oaks, with its closed streets, in the USA, to the richer suburbs of Joahnnesburg, in South Africa, or Yosemite Villas in Beijing. See also Stephen Holl’s presentation of the Beijing Looped Hybrid. (For other Beijing projects, see the Urban Planet site).

Perhaps Utopia is now to be reserved for the happy few while, in an increasingly polarized world, the poor are packed into the new slums described in Davis’ “Planet of Slums“, where hyper-urbanization occurs without the economic infrastructure to support it. And if the whole thing goes pear-shaped, well, there are ways of dealing with that too.

Aesop got the story wrong. Here’s how it really happened :

The boy was eight, ten years old. Who knew? He was about the right size, about the right build. It was time for him to go up to the pastures with the goats, his father decided. Why have sons, if not to keep your goats? It was time for the boy to begin to become a man.

In the morning, the man took his son up the rocky pathways to the higher places where the goats could forage for their summer feed. The boy walked in his father’s footsteps and thought of his mother. When they came to the place, his father showed him the shelter in which he could spend his nights. “Don’t let the animals stray,” he said. “Keep an eye out for the wolf. If he comes, you whistle.” His father stuck his fingers over his tongue and blew a long note. After a moment, there was an answer from across the valley. “Three times, quickly, for the wolf.” The boy nodded.

The boy tended to the goats. If they strayed, he threw rocks. Like all the boys, he could throw rocks, and he could whistle. Night fell, and it began to get cold. He rounded up the goats, and huddled against them. He couldn’t sleep. The night was full of sounds. He thought about the wolf. He’d seen one, once; some of the men had killed one, and they showed it to the boys. He remembered it had looked very large. He remembered the long yellow teeth. He knew the howl of the wolf.

Days passed. He saw no-one. He thought of his mother, and he listened to the noises. He thought of his sisters and his younger brothers. The noises seemed noisier. The goats shifted and stirred. He saw a shape against the starlight, and pressed his fingers to his tongue.

His father grumbled. “You imagine things. Next time, don’t bring us out here for nothing.” His elder cousin snorted at him, and his uncle looked very displeased. He giggled nervously. A blow caught him behind the ear. “Laugh will you?” The men left.

More days passed. He slept little. Always the noises. He thought of his little brothers, and of his mother. One night, he was almost sure he heard the wolf. In the morning, he counted the goats. He went out to look for the stray, and found its mauled carcass not far from the shelter. He dragged it to the edge of the pasture, and rolled it over the lip, watching it tumble into the valley. That night, he whistled again.

It was some days before his ears stopped throbbing. It was many days before the wolf came again. It was not alone. He watched, waiting for his whistle to be answered. No-one came. He watched as the wolves devoured the flock. In the morning, he stumbled, wide-eyed, back down to his father’s house.

The wolf is always there. Sometimes he comes, sometimes he does not. You must always answer when the whistle blows.

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At the moment, I’m reading “Planet of Slums ” by Mike Davis. The author, who is a Marxist scholar, paints an apocalyptic picture of the state of the world’s large cities - in particular those of the Third World. The slums of these cities are often little more than waste-disposal grounds - both figuratively and literally, for, argues Davis, their inhabitants are seen by the élites as human excreta, fit only to be dumped amid the open sewers.

And the numbers are growing all the time; in his opening chapter, he cites UN statistics which forecast that “By 2015, black Africa will have 332 million slum-dwellers, a number that will continue to double every fifteen years.” Nor is this growth to be confined to Africa; the Indian slums, he tells us, are growing 250% faster than overall population. He asserts that : “… the cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel, as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recylced plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay.”

Davis’ purpose is political; he is eager to demolish the arguments of the neo-liberals whose policies, administered through the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, have, he claims, been instrumental in tipping millions of people into urban poverty. To make his case, he draws upon a large number of sources: newspaper interviews and articles, World Bank and IMF documents and reports, novels and works of poetry. He cites sociologists, geographers, political scientists, urbanists - and anthropologists. The latter are a rich source of information for today’s urbanist; they have walked the streets, they have smelled the smells, and they have lived with and talked to the people, gaining insights that cannot be acquired by the fast-moving journalist or the number-crunching sociologist.

And so he reaches for quotes from, for example, Teresa Caldeira ’s book, City of Walls, on how urban space in Brazil is becoming increasingly controlled through police violence and vigilante activity, or from Monique Skidmore’s investigations of the slums of Myanamore. On Kinshasa, he can call on the joint work of geographer Angeline Mwacan and anthropologist Theodore Trefon. Caroline Moser’s work on how the lives of the poor in Ecuador were further ravaged by Structural Adaptation Programmes (SAPs) initiated by the IMF is invoked as part of his main argument, which is that the slum conditions that he describes were not the result of some inevitable process, but were the foreseeable consequences of the ways in which development agencies have imposed a unique, ultraliberal, vision on the Third World.

Davis’ book illustrates the extent to which any investigation of the world we live in will need to engage with all the human sciences - indeed, with the humanities as a whole, for he cites Rudyard Kipling , and the Nigerian poet, Odia Ofeimun among his sources. That’s as may be, you reply. But the anthropologists whose work Davis uses study modern populations, living in modern cities, and whose lives are directly affected by the policies and agents of modern institution. We, on the other hand, have been asked to read about archaic tribes, about initiation into secret societies , about magic and about witchcraft . What does all this have to do with us?

Well, I’m tempted to say, “Just look around you.” Look at the city you live in, listen to its sounds and its music. Africa, Asia, the Middle East - they are all here in St. Denis. Some of what you think of as archaic is right in front of your eyes, as vibrant and alive as it has ever been. While you are giggling over your horoscope, think of how many people are turning to other, more exotic sources of enlightenment. I’d want to add that historians, sociologists and political scientists are turning their attentions more and more to the kinds of questions that anthropologists ask; the influence of Durkheim and Mauss runs through the historiography of the Annales school, and historians like Ginzburg or McFarlane read Evans-Pritchard and Malinowski with attention and admiration.

However, I’ll leave that for another time. For now, I will return to ‘Planet of Slums‘. One of the more distressing characteristics of slum-life is to be found in the ways in which the people who live in them are exposed to the predatory activities of criminal gangs who exploit and rob them in many different ways. There is no free space, the squatter pays a rent to the local mafiosi which, when calculated in terms of dollars per square fooot, can be just as costly, if not more so, than a luxury apartment. The women are forced to work as menials, in sweat shops or as prostitutes. Above all, the children are often treated as vermin , as blow-flies to be swatted. The South American vigilantes hunt them down and shoot them. But it is perhaps in Kinshasa that their fate can be most clearly seen in all its terror. For the children become the scapegoats for all the ills suffered by the slum-dwellers. They are accused of witchcraft , and turned out into the streets, where they may be beaten to death by angry mobs. The witch-hunt is still with us, and the magical fills our newspapers.

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The crops are all in and the peaches are rott’ning,
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps;
They’re flying ‘em back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back again

CHORUS:
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees”

My father’s own father, he waded that river,
They took all the money he made in his life;
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees,
And they rode the truck till they took down and died.
Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract’s out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.

We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died ‘neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.

The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, “They are just deportees”

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except “deportees”?

Words by Woody Guthrie, music by Martin Hoffman

What anthropologists term ‘rites of passage’ may just as well be termed ‘rites of triage’; inevitably, they lead to selection, to the appointing of a chosen few and the definitive casting out of the leaden-footed. And it seems that if there are no external mechanisms for ensuring that the triage occurs, if there is no bunch of masked and painted elders to terrify, cut, test and promote, then the candidates will organize their own ceremonies. It is difficult to determine whether the latter are apt to be more or less brutal in their manifestations than the former.

Children in our modern, up-to-date, and enlightened societies, are thrust into a liminality at the age of five or six, to emerge later and later, labelled and certified. But the ceremonies by which these etiquettes are conferred are of so little significance that the young seek their own. In France, those that find themselves at the university have been so persuaded of their rights and of their liberties that they are unable to admit to the underlying meaning of their rituals; they march for the good of humankind, for a world of kindness and equality, where the tight-rope walker is guaranteed to never take a tumble.

Yet these rites operate an underhanded triage in which the uncommitted go to the wall. From the tables upon which they stand, the strong look down at the weaklings who are so misguided as to feel the need for lessons. Who needs a professor, they snort.We will have lost a goodly number of students by the time this pantomime is finished. Those who need no teachers will still be there.

I suggested that there was an irony in the fact that most authentic shamanic traditions are found among the weak and the powerless, whereas neo-shamanism was reserved to the rich and well-educated of the post-industrial countries. But there is more to it than that. Neo-shamanism is promoted as an egalitarian and individualistic ideology; anyone can use the techniques, if they have the money, and they can use them to better their own lives. The world of the traditional shaman, however, is rather different. Not everyone will become a shaman. To some extent, the function is a family affair; in many societies, you have more chance of becoming a shaman if one of your recent ancestors was also a shaman. But heredity is neither necessary nor sufficient; although it is sometimes possible to acquire the techniques through contract, in most cases the individual will be chosen by the spirits and will have to undergoan initiation which can be both long and hard.

First of all, to become a powerful shaman, one must receive a calling. In the shaman’s world-view, the spirits are responsible for many, if not most, maladies, and the young man or woman who is chosen by the spirits will often fall sick. He or she may be epileptic, or may have some form of nervous breakdown. Often the person thus chosen tries to resist, but the spirits will not leave them alone; they must cure themselves. They may retire from their village, and live in seclusion for a while. During this time, they will struggle with their malady. They enter into contact with the spirits, and they will go on a voyage, perhaps helped on their way by a giant bird who carries them up into the air. At some stage, they may meet with powerful beings, or they are taken in hand by the older shamans. They die, and their bodies are torn apart before being put back together, with new, metal bones. Magical stones are left in their bodies, and it is with these that they will later effect their cures.

When they return from this voyage, it is often the case that their apprenticeship is not finished. They may attach themselves to an already established shaman, who will teach them the trade. They will learn to recognize the herbs that must be used, the chants and gestures. As is often the case in initiatory learning, they will come to understand that certain of the effects that they produce are achieved through sleight of hand; the shaman comes to understand that he or she is a manipulator of symbols. (In these, he or she is no different from the English politician - as Bagehot noted when he distinguished between the “efficient” and the “dignified” parts of the British Constitution).

To top it all, the new shaman must be recognized by the people among whom s/he officiates. For unlike the neo-shaman, who suffices unto himself, the traditional shaman depends upon public recognition. Only if accepted by others will he or she be accorded the prestige that is both a reward and a necessity.

The shaman’s position within the group is often a delicate one. S/he will be recognized as having certain powers because of which s/he stands out from the crowd. S/he will be treated with respect. But often s/he is feared, for it is understood that if one may control the spirits for good, one may just as well control them for evil. The powerful are exposed; if the world does not turn as it should, they pay the price.

Within their group, the shaman is of some consequence. A.P. Elkin has described how an Aboriginal ‘Man of High Degree‘ is recognized by his fellows as being a special person, with an outstanding personality. Among groups with a more complex social organization, the shaman is sometimes a person of some consequence; among the Mongols at the time of Genghis Khan, a military leader would not be able to defeat his enemies unless he had the backing of a powerful shaman. In Tibet, the Dalai Lama, who is understood as possessing certain shamanic qualities, is both spiritual and temporal leader of his people. Brian Morris suggests that “almost all early states and empires were based on shamanic power or ritual suzerainty.”

But not all forms of spirit relationship are like this. Although anthropologists disagree about the extent to which one should distinguish between shamanism, on the one hand, and possession cults such asVaudou or Gnawa on the other, it is clear that the latter are more likely to appeal to the powerless, and although they may afford them some status within the group, or even, as in Haiti, some degree of political power, they tend to remain marginal. Often the members of these cults are women of the lower classes, who have little prestige or power either within society as a whole, or in their own homes. Possession by a spirit marks them out, and may even offer concrete benefits; if the spirit demands offerings then the woman’s husband will have to pay for them. If she becomes a cult priestess, then others will offer her presents for officiating at their rites.

But the cults themselves are seldom accorded more than limited status by the wider society. Where they are women’s business, the men will look upon them with sceptical indulgence. Or, as with the Gnawa, who are understood to be the descendants of slaves, they will be stigmatised in some way. Moreover, whereas the shaman’s relationship with the spirits is one of mastery and control, the member of a cult is understood as being ‘ridden’ by her possessor, taken over and used for the time of the ritual.

Mike Presdee’s argument seems to be that human beings cannot stand too much rationality, and that if you attempt to control and channel the demonic elements of our species being, they will emerge elsewhere. Carnival, he says, no longer exists; the events and ceremonies to which we attach the name have been absorbed by the establishment, by the forces of order and merchandising. You cannot, he argues, have a carnival that is funded by a corporation. Perhaps he might add that you cannot have a carnival that is negotiated with the police. (more…)

On Monday and Tuesday, we looked at a number of articles, published in the UK press, dealing with the French riots of the last couple of weeks. Some of you also read an article about the Charivari by the historian Sara Beam. In England, this is known as ‘rough music‘, and was the subject of a seminal article by the well-known social historian, E.P. Thompson. (more…)

Some months ago, I was woken in the middle of the night by a strange noise. Through the drawn curtains and closed shutters of my bedroom, a bright glow shone into the room. I peered out; on the other side of the street I could see the offices of Planète Cars, a small company which provides bus services to North Africa. In the large glass frontage, I could see the reflection of a car, parked just beneath my window, burning , sparks rising up towards me. The fire brigade had already arrived; it seemed to take them a long time to put it out. Windows overlooking the street opened, and people leaned out to watch the blaze. (more…)

This Monday we listened to Anthony Giddens talking about the traditions of Scotland (using Hugh Trevor-Roper’s contribution toHobsbawm and Ranger’s ‘The Invention of Tradition‘. Giddens said that although people believed that the tartan kilt was the traditional dress of the Scot, dating from the mists of time, in fact, it had been invented by an Englishman in the late eighteenth century, and that it had been designed to allow Scottish Highlanders to work in factories. The clan tartans had, for the most part, been designed in the nineteenth century, by enterprising tailors.

I then told you the story of Wawilak Sisters. (more…)

And there is the lecturer, in a crowded ampitheatre, wreathed in smoke. His voice is only momentarily audible, in the clacking of seats and the music on the soundtrack. It is Gilles Deleuze, at Vincennes. I am watching the opening scene of ‘L’Abécédaire‘. The sequence ends, and we cut to Deleuze’s flat. The philosopher is slumped in a chair; behind him is a large mirror. (more…)

Taussig examines the difference between two sorts of magic that he studied in Colombia. One of these is practiced by the Indians of the lowlands, and centres on the ingestion of a strong drug, called yagé. If you wish to become a shaman or healer, you must strike up an acquaintance with someone who already has the power, and pay him or her to initiate you. The initiation involves a ‘drug trip’, taken under the shaman’s supervision. Under his guidance, you will experience a series of encounters with spirit beings, some of them good, some bad, and many simply themselves. (more…)

In my text ‘The Wawilak Sisters’, I have contributed to a process thatGiddens says underlies Modernity; this process he calls ‘disembedding‘. When the people of Arnhem Land give their account of the voyage and theSisters, and of their swallowing by the Rainbow Snake, it is nothing at all like what we think of as a ’story’ or a tale. To begin with, it is not thought to be a fiction; the Sisters and the Snake exist, and the events take place. They may not occur in the mundane world, in the everyday, but occur they do. (more…)

Today the SH 5 group looked at an extract from Godelier’s ‘La Production des Grands Hommes‘ and a longer piece taken from Chris Knight’s ‘Blood Relations‘. I suggested they read my review of Knight and the story of the Wawilak sisters.

In the extract from Godelier’s work, the French anthropologist argues that the Baruya men govern - or governed - their society against women.Social distinctions between the powerful and the less powerful are all founded on this basic oppression of the women by the men. This theme lies at the centre of Baruya initiation ceremonies.

In the second text, Chris Knight quotes from Warner’s analysis of circumcision in Arnhem Land. During the ceremonies, there occurs a ritual acting out of the fate of the Wawilak Sisters, swallowed by the Rainbow Snake. The men use their own blood to decorate their bodies; the blood is transformed by the blowing of the sacred trumpets, and becomes the menstrual blood of the two mythological sisters. The men told Warner that they had stolen the ceremonies from the women.

The move from rural to urban should not be conflated with a shift from the ‘natural’ to the ‘artificial’; humanity has left its traces on all of its habitats, changing them quite dramatically. From the Australian with her fire-stick to the architect with his skyscrapers, our species has fashioned the world to our needs and our desires. The photograph above was taken in Windsor Great Park, which has been bent to the will of England’s kings since about 1250. Both a playground and a productive farm for generations of monarchs, it is the result of artifice and design.

England, the first industrial nation, was also the first urban nation. To some extent, the two processes went hand-in-hand, and many of the men and women who made their way into the cities between 1600 and 1800 will have had some experience of non-agricultural employment. The same was true of the world at large during the 20th Century.

Alejandro Portes alerts us to the need to take several different factors into account when we talk about how migrants make their places in their new homes. In the first place, he suggests that the state may take one of three positions vis-à-vis the migrant. It may welcome the new members, as was the case in Western Europe for refugees from the Eastern Block, during the Cold War, or in the USA for people fleeing communist regimes in South-East Asia. It may be neutral, neither banning nor encouraging entry. It may be hostile, and attempt to restrict or curtail the flow, as has been the case in Europe over recent years regarding migration from Africa, or in the USA regarding Mexican migrants.

Secondly, Portes turns to the home population; is the public prejudiced or not as regards the group in question? In the UK, although there has long been hostility to migrants in general, it has clearly been the case that distinctions are made; Australian and Canadian visitors, however long-term, arouse little ill-feeling, which is reserved for West-Indians, Indians and Pakistanis. This cannot be explained simply as racism; in earlier times, the Irish were regarded with intense dislike, and it seems that today, Poles have become extremely unpopular.

Thirdly, Portes directs our attention to the characteristics of the migrant community itself; this may be either strong or weak. Strength lies in both numbers - a large community is stronger than a small one - and in diversity - a community which includes middle-class and business people will be more resistant than one which is made up of labourers alone. Where migrants are concentrated in specific areas, and are able to set up their own businesses, serving - initially at least - their own markets, they will offer their members better chances of success.

Of course, realities are rather more complex; state agencies may take conflicting decisions. Health Trusts may look to recruit nurses and doctors from Africa while official government policy condemns poaching from countries where medical services are in crisis. Embassies and consulates may interpet governmental directives according to their own assessments of realities on the ground. State schools may insist on educating the children of illegal immigrants, thus binding them more closely into their new land. Moreover, government policy may change rapidly in response to perceived electoral dangers or changes in the international environment; today they may welcome with open arms the people who, tomorrow, will find the frontier closed - and vice versa, as was the case when Australia reversed its “whites only” approach to immigration.

Similarly, public opinion is rarely monolithic. Some sectors of society may welcome migrants who are spurned by others; employers are often pro-migration, while trade-unions may be less so, and some people may find it exciting to live in a multi-cultural community while others are nostaligic for simpler times and places. And again, prejudice can change with time and circumstance; Americans once looked upon the newly arrived Irish and Italians with alarm, but now they are accepted. Parisians once looked upon Auvergnats and Bretons as little more than savages. The terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers lead to a strengthening of anti-Muslim prejudice throughout most of Western Europe.

Migrant communities too can change. But as Portes suggests, such changes will depend to a great extent on the outcomes for the second generation. As he notes of the children of Mexican ‘wetbacks’, where the community has little human capital, and where it has been unable to set up enclaves as did the Cubans in Miami, or find other means of placing the young, the future may be grim, and the young may integrate with that sector of the society which manages to hang on through welfare payments and petty crime.

As some of you mentioned, this looks very much like the situation that faces many migrants from Africa to France. What can be done to forestall such an outcome? Portes points to the ways in which successful migrants to the United States have managed to encourage their children to succeed. Do not rely on public schooling alone, he says. Communities must themselves provide clubs, after-school activities, and high ambitions for their children. A key institution here, he argues, is the church. For the new migrants to France, this means, above all, the mosque; but faced with the hostility of a secular state, on the one hand, and the siren call of religious extremism on the other, it will be a difficult task to maintain a religion-based infrastructure sufficient to the task.

Did Homo erectus have a much smaller brain than modern humans? It depends what you mean by ‘much smaller’. The average endocranial capacity of five specimens of Homo erectus found in China (Homo erectus pekinensis) is 1043 cm3. This can be compared with the estimated 1300 cm3 for modern humans. If we take into account the possible deviationfrom these means, then there is quite a large area of overlap between the two groups; some modern humans have brains that fall within the range for Homo erectus.

But size alone can be misleading; Durkheim believed that modern women were less intelligent than men, citing the fact that they had smaller brains. If he had listened to other contemporary social scientists, such as Léonce Manouvrier and Madeleine Pelletier , he would have known that brains vary according to size, and that women have, on average, smaller brains than men because they are, on average, smaller and lighter. Size for size, women have brains that are as big as - if not bigger than - men’s.

Homo erectus may have been about the same size as modern humans (although the Chinese specimens were rather smaller, if more robust), so the difference in brain volume may not be accounted for by this. But size is not the only factor;  there are other differences which are just as important. One of the things which distinguish the brains of apes from those of hominids is that the areas of the brain which control language -Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area - are absent among the former. Broca’s area appears with Australopithecus africanus (according to Tobias ; others dispute this), while Wernicke’s area apears only with Homo habilis. Tobias and others argue that this indicates that habilis was already able to speak, and that there has been a long evolution of language.

Nevertheless, our immediate ancestors must have had a more flexible language at their disposition than did their predecessors. Clive Gambleargues that it was this that enabled them to spread out over the totality of the globe, whereas habilis had been unable to get much further than the Middle East and Southern Europe. A more flexible language would have enabled humans to make longer plans, to create longer and more robust networks. This, in turn, would have given them the social tools that they needed to make their way across the globe. It was, if Gamble is right, through movement and migration that humans developed their most precious capacities, and it was because they possessed these capacities that they were as successful as they have been.

David Eltis makes the point that from the movement of homo sapiens out of Africa some 100,000 years ago to the Viking visits to North America, migrants struck out for territory that was empty of their kind, and that “people created identities for themselves without the aid of the “other”. (Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives, David Eltis (ed.), Stanford University Press, 2002). The idea is a striking one, conjuring up a vision of a small group of our ancestors striding out towards the rising sun and into the unknown, there to fashion a new social order, free from constraints on practice or imagination. But perhaps we should temper our Romanticism somewhat. In many, if not most, cases, the journeys undertaken would have been short, and the travellers would not necessarily have lost contact with their parent colony. As Steven Mithen depicts it, for instance, the recolonization of Northern Europe, after the retreat of the Ice, was a long slow process, during which pioneers would leave to scout the newly inhabitable territories, returning during the winter months to report on what they had found. Only later would they move permanently, taking their families with them.

In such circumstances, the “other” would be those who stayed at home, those whose grasp of political and economic power the pioneers wished to escape from, or who sent them on their way into the dangers of the North. More recent migrations illustrate this; for the Pilgrim Fathers, the religious conservatives of Europe were at least as significant an “other” as were the original inhabitants of the land they grabbed. Closer still to our own time; many members of modern diasporas maintain relations with their homelands, relations that are often strained by the differences between their own situation and that of the people they left behind. There is always an “other”, if you need one.

Or is there? Eltis was clearly thinking of such exploits as the peopling of America and of Australasia. In these cases, the difficulties inherent in moving from A to B, across the Bering Straits or the Sahul strait might have made it hard to maintain communications. One theory about the migration to America suggests that all the ancestors of modern Native Americans came by foot across the Bering land bridge. This bridge was over 1,000 miles wide; North-Asian hunter-gatherer groups would have crossed it in pursuit of large game animals. When the seas rose and covered the bridge, those who were in America were cut off from their parent populations. They made their way, on foot, or by boat, down to the South.

The first peoples into Australia must have arrived by boat. Archaeologists no longer believe, as they once did, that this occurred by accident; the ancestors of modern First Australians deliberately set out to cross the seas.

In neither case does it seem necessary to assume that the new populations were completely isolated. If a boat can go one way, it can go in the opposite direction, at least in the hands of experienced seamen - and there is every reason to believe that these people were experienced seamen. Although the waters were to rise after the Ice Age, putting more sea between Australia and the mainland, and swamping the Bering land bridge, there will have been perhaps thousands of years during which contact could have been maintained - genetic evidence suggests that Australians arrived in several different migrations. And today, there are groups who move from one side of the Bering Straits to the other in canoes made of leather.

Well, here I am surrounded by boxes. I’m moving; next Monday, we’re leaving our flat in Clichy and taking a house in one of the outer suburbs - a move of some twenty-five kilometres. So when I see you in the morning, I’ll be coming from the flat, and at the end of the lesson, I’ll be off to join the removal company, to accompany them to the house and let them in.

Which means that I don’t have my books to hand at the moment, so I can’t check what I’m telling you now - I hope I’m getting it right. If I remember correctly, my 25k migration is quite typical. This is about the distance that most of our ancestors migrated in their lifetimes, when they migrated at all. When homo-sapiens spread through the world, they did so in very short increments, creeping further and further into the unknown world as the years went by.

So those small increments added up to a very big change. Because our ancestors changed the world; everywhere our species has lived, they have put their marks upon the world. Even at the simplest level of technology, they were able to leave deep traces upon the surface of the globe, for from the very beginning they mastered fire. One of the first things that our hunter-gatherer forebears did when they arrived in a new territory must have been to set light to it.

That’s how the early European adventurers knew that the new lands they came across were already inhabited; they saw smoke rising from beyond the shore. Magellan named the tip of South America Tierra del Fuego because of the fires he could see from his ship; he beieved they were made by the natives - although he may simply have been witnessing natural fires set off by lightning. Cook saw smoke when moving along the Australian coast, and we can be fairly certain that these were man-made: the Australian Aborigine had quite radically refashioned the ecology of the island with firesticks.

So short journeys can have immense effects. These days, of course, our journeys can be much longer - from the Punjab to Birmingham, or from Bamako to Boulogne-Billancourt. Their effects are, perhaps, less evident, less clearly readable - although a French philosopher (French philosophers are rarely troubled by anything so banal as factual enquiry) may hold them to be so. But effects they certainly have, both on the voyager and on those whose territory she finds herself in. And the journey also has affects those who are left behind.

Which brings me to the question I’d like you to reflect on this week; what might be the effects of migration upon the people who stay? What is it like for the women whose husbands leave their village and return only now and then? What is it like for the children whose mothers take a plane ride to another land? What is it like for the parents whose children send them back money from afar?

Some of you found it difficult to see any difference between the two basic models of early migration. You will find a pretty clear explanation atDonald Johanson’s site. As he says, the ‘Out of Africa’ model sees homo sapiens as developing first in Africa and then spreading out throughout the rest of the world, while the Multiregional Model sees an earlier ancestor -homo erectus - leaving Africa and then developing into homo sapiensseveral times over in different places.

It does seem that homo erectus left Africa before homo sapiens developed. But then, according to some, this species did not develop into homo sapiens, but was replaced by the late-comer. How this happened is moot. Perhaps homo sapiens wiped homo erectus out. Perhaps homo erectus died of disease - no-one really knows.