Early Farmers in the Americas - Farming because they wanted to, not because they had to

This is an interesting article, especially for me, with my interest in indigenous precolumbian agriculture in the Americas.

Three thousand eight hundred years ago, long before U.S. plains rippled with vast rows of corn, Native Americans planted farms with hardy "pioneer" crops, according to new evidence of the first farming in eastern North America.

Because the area appears to have been well stocked with wild food sources, the discovery may rewrite some beliefs about what led people to start farming on the continent, scientists say.

Rather than turning to farming as a matter of survival, the so-called Riverton people may have been exercising "free will" and engaging in a bit of gastronomic innovation, archaeologists say.

This does not surprise me in the least. We always assume 'prehistoric' peoples started farming because they had to, as a survival technique, but we don't ever stop to think that they might be just like us, inventing new things simply because they want to. Did we need the iPod or the car? Was our survival significantly enhanced because of either of them? We grow later to think we can't live without electricity, flush toilets, and the internet, because they make our lives easier or more enjoyable.

Around the world and throughout ancient history, people switched from mainly hunting and gathering to farming as a way to cope with environmental stresses, such as drought—or so the conventional wisdom says.

But the new research "really challenges the whole idea of humans domesticating plants and animals in response to an external stress [and] makes a strong case for almost the polar opposite," said lead study author Bruce Smith, curator of North American archaeology at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

Before they began farming, the Riverton people lived among bountiful river valleys and lakes, apparently eating a healthy and diverse diet of nuts, white-tailed deer, fish, and shellfish, the study says.
[...]
But that doesn't mean farming didn't give the Riverton culture a practical advantage: In addition to their normal fare, the people may have relied on the crops as a stable source of food—insurance against shortages of wild food sources..

Great Depression Cooking with Clara

Celebrity cooking is HOT and, lately, so is the Great Depression.

93 year old Clara reminisces about the Depression while showcasing cheap, nourishing food. I love this online cooking show. Maybe it's because I'm a big fan of history, food, frugality, and stories.

Here she makes "Poorman's meal" which is potatoes with hotdogs (her grandkids love it, she says). Clara, peeling potatoes, explains she had to drop out of high school because she couldn't afford socks.


And here's episode 1 where she makes pasta with peas. Enjoy!


More episodes on the Youtube Channel

Controversial Bestseller Shakes the Foundation of the Israeli State

This interesting article reviews some of the main points in When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?, a book by Tel Aviv University scholar Shlomo Zand (or Sand)

What if the Palestinian Arabs who have lived for decades under the heel of the modern Israeli state are in fact descended from the very same "children of Israel" described in the Old Testament?

And what if most modern Israelis aren't descended from the ancient Israelites at all, but are actually a mix of Europeans, North Africans and others who didn't "return" to the scrap of land we now call Israel and establish a new state following the attempt to exterminate them during World War II, but came in and forcefully displaced people whose ancestors had lived there for millennia?

What if the entire tale of the Jewish Diaspora -- the story recounted at Passover tables by Jews around the world every year detailing the ancient Jews' exile from Judea, the years spent wandering through the desert, their escape from the Pharaoh's clutches -- is all wrong?

As I am not a Middle East specialist, I can't comment on the veracity of the book, but as a historian I can say that tradition is "invented" and rarely true. History is never proven. History is a type of story, and even if we knew all the facts (which we never do), there are countless different ways to tell the story, and there are varying meanings to attach to said facts. How we see our past is always coloured by the present.

In the end, we can't base a present day land claim on an unproven (and unprovable) story from the far distant past. People can never be restored to their "rightful" home (when the displacement was thousands of years ago), because people are always involved in voluntary and involuntary migrations. Once people have made a new home and have borne children there, you can't kick them out. This goes for both Palestinians and Israelis. Like it or not, this area has to become a home for both groups in one way or another. I prefer a one-state secular democracy, but recognize the challenges of this solution. We have yet to get over this "clash of civilizations" myth.

Interestingly, there are people arguing in the comments about genetic similarity/difference of Jewish people (for instance, that Jews are all surprisingly alike, or they are more similar to non-Jewish Arabs or non-Jewish Europeans or non-Jewish Ethiopians or whatever). While an interesting intellectual exercise (it can be helpful for tracing migration patterns in the distant past), this seems to me not only silly but potentially dangerous to use in determining current political and territorial rights. I'm pretty sure we no longer believe in reserving specific pieces of land for those with particular genetic sequences.

WW2 Cooking Lessons

Via Treehugger:

Invisible cricket balls, thrifty grandmothers, and unbelievably spoiled and lazy young boys – there’s nothing like a bit of 1940s nostalgia to get you in the sustainability mood. “Two Cooks and a Cabbage” is a war time public information film from the UK’s Ministry of Food, and it's just one of the lessons we can learn from our grandparents.

Lessons learned: Shred the cabbage, add just a little water, cover it with a lid, and save the water for gravy. Or, just get yourself a young girl to cook it for you. Preferably Sally.

History Lesson: Mugabe and Zimbabwe

This is from a review of Dinner with Mugabe by Heidi Holland, which I haven't read but which looks pretty interesting. It also happens to be a pretty good historical summary of Mugabe's Zimbabwe.

In 1957, Ghana became the first European colony in Africa south of the Sahara to gain its political independence. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s new prime minister, invited young Africans from countries still under colonial rule to move to Ghana and help build the new country; a young schoolteacher from Rhodesia, Robert Mugabe, was among them.

In 1960, during a visit home to his mother, Mugabe was invited to join a march protesting the arrest of two nationalist leaders in the Rhodesian capital, Salisbury. Facing police, the marchers stopped to hold an impromptu political rally. Somehow Mugabe found himself hoisted onto the improvised stage alongside other leaders like Joshua Nkomo, who headed the leading black opposition group, the National Democratic Party. Mugabe gave a rousing speech (“The nationalist movement will only succeed if it is based on a blending of all classes of men”) and the nationalist leaders convinced him to remain in Rhodesia and become publicity secretary of the NDP, which soon morphed into the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU). Three years later, Mugabe engineered a split within ZAPU to form the Zimbabwe African National Union. He would dominate the country’s politics from that moment on.

Nothing about Mugabe’s earlier life portended his swift rise, the South African journalist Heidi Holland notes in her “psychobiography” Dinner with Mugabe. Born in 1924 in Kutama, in the central part of the country, Mugabe was a shy, precocious child. When Robert was 10 years old, his father, a carpenter, moved away to start a second family and broke off all contact. Mugabe’s mother clung devotedly to the Catholic Church and to Robert. She told him he was marked for greatness and sent him for a Jesuit education (Mugabe is still a devoted Catholic.) Mugabe would go on to study in South Africa at the University of Fort Hare, the alma mater of Nelson Mandela and other nationalist leaders. He started teaching after graduation, and soon made his way to Ghana.

The Rhodesia that Mugabe returned to in 1960 was a tense, violent country, especially for its black population. The former British colony was governed by a small, tightly-knit and mainly English-speaking white settler population who had been granted “self-rule” by the British at the expense of the country’s black majority. Whites had first arrived in Zimbabwe in the 19th century as part of an aggressive British colonial expansion north from South Africa in search of natural resources. The new arrivals, through a mixture of force and cunning, eventually dispossessed the locals of their land. In 1896 blacks rose up in what would come to be known as the “First Chimurenga”, or liberation war. Though they fought valiantly, they lost and colonisation was formalised. By the 1950s, nearly 80 per cent of the best agricultural land belonged to whites. Most blacks were condemned to life on rural reserves, burdened by heavy taxes that forced men to work on commercial farms and mines or move to the ghettos of Salisbury or Rhodesia’s second city, Bulawayo, in search of wage-work. The country’s whites gradually developed a distinctive political identity and a reputation for unbending racism and prejudice.

In a 1960 speech in Cape Town the British prime minister Harold Macmillan told South Africa’s white rulers that “the wind of change is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.” The South Africans rejected Macmillan’s advice, digging in for another three decades of undemocratic rule. Five years later the Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith announced a “Unilateral Declaration of Independence” from Britain, vowing that blacks would not govern Rhodesia “in a thousand years.”

By this point Mugabe’s new movement, ZANU, had grown into the main opposition force, largely due to its exploitation of ethnic differences. ZANU was dominated by the majority Shona; Nkomo’s ZAPU became associated with the minority Ndebele. In 1964, Mugabe was arrested, and he spent 10 years in prison before he was released as part of an agreement between the Rhodesian government and ZANU guerrillas, by now engaged in a full-scale civil war. Mugabe’s only son died (at age three) during his prison term, and Smith refused to allow him to attend the funeral; in Holland’s account, these slights had a lasting effect on Mugabe.

Holland first met Mugabe in 1975 in Salisbury, where she worked as magazine editor. She arranged for a lawyer friend to meet Mugabe secretly at her suburban home. Over dinner Mugabe said little, but impressed Holland nonetheless: driving Mugabe to the train station after the meeting (his ride had failed to materialise), Holland left her small son asleep alone in the house. The next day, Mugabe called to check that the child was OK.

Over the next 30 years Holland had no further contact with Mugabe, who went on to lead a brutal guerrilla war that would eventually exhaust the government and the appetite of white Rhodesians for segregation at all costs. In the late 1970s, the regime – stripped of British support and abandoned by South Africa’s Apartheid rulers (and their backers in the US Republican Party) – initiated negotiations with the black opposition.

But the war also bred elements of the political culture that independent Zimbabwe would later inherit: the use of violence to settle political scores and to obliterate opponents, disregard for human rights, slavish reverence for authority, ideological rigidness and corruption.

ZANU won a majority in the first democratic elections in 1980, and Mugabe was initially conciliatory to whites, guaranteeing them seats in the new Parliament (one went to Smith) and appointing a white man as agriculture minister. But barely two years into independence – under the pretext of fighting an attempted coup by guerrillas loyal to Nkomo, who had become the opposition leader – Mugabe unleashed a murderous, North Korean-trained army unit in the ZAPU-dominated Matabeleland province, indiscriminately killing civilians and guerrillas alike.

A report by the Catholic Bishops conference later estimated the total number of murdered or disappeared at more than 20,000 people. But Mugabe achieved his political aim: in 1987 he coerced a weak Nkomo into accepting a “Unity Accord”, effectively swallowing ZAPU into the new ZANU-Patriotic Front. Not long thereafter, Mugabe changed the constitution to make himself executive president.

One of the legacies of that time – and a testament of the power of the nationalist narrative that African independence leaders embodied – is that few if any of Mugabe’s present Western critics publicly denounced these murders. Instead he received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II in 1994 and honorary degrees from American universities. The economy was growing steadily even in the hostile shadow of Apartheid South Africa and access to education and health services markedly improved. As Lord Corrington, the British foreign secretary during independence negotiations, tells Holland: “But other than the killing of the Ndebele, it went tolerably well under Mugabe at first, didn’t it? He wasn’t running a fascist state. He didn’t appear to be a bad dictator.”

In 1995, street riots erupted in the capital against rising prices and unemployment. A mineworker, Morgan Tsvangirai, who would emerge as Mugabe’s most formidable opponent, led the newly formed Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions. Academics, human rights activists and lawyers would later join the trade unions to form the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Their main political focus, alongside protesting economic hardship, was reforming the country’s constitution. Mugabe pushed back by announcing a referendum in 2000 to increase his powers and extend his tenure as president. Much to his surprise, the referendum failed, and he was clearly stung by the result.

With parliamentary elections looming and an opposition buoyed by the referendum, ZANU-PF unleashed what Mugabe termed the “Third Chimurenga”. (The guerrilla war against the Rhodesian government had been the second.) This involved an effort at land redistribution; the British were blamed for abandoning promises to fund the acquisition of private commercial farms to distribute to black farmers. Whites, who still owned much of the productive land and who had reluctantly come to accept independence, also provided easy targets.

Squatters identified as “war veterans” (among them were 18-year-olds who could not have fought in the guerrilla war that ended before they were born) soon invaded white farms. But it became clear that redistribution was in the eye of the beholder: the best farms were parcelled out to Mugabe’s cabinet ministers and senior army officers.

A few whites were brutally attacked, and their plight predictably became front-page news in the West. In the British Parliament, members spoke once again of “the people of Rhodesia”. Peter Godwin, a white journalist born in Zimbabwe, later claimed that being white in post-independence Zimbabwe was “starting to feel a bit like being a Jew in Poland in 1939.” What was not apparent at first was that – just like in Smith’s Rhodesia – the bulk of the victims were black: members of the opposition were murdered, tortured or imprisoned. Journalists were harassed, newspaper offices closed or bombed and people denied food if they failed to join ZANU.

In 2002 Mugabe was re-elected to another six year term in an election marred by fraud and violence, and condemned as deeply flawed by both Zimbabwean and foreign observers. Since then Zimbabwe’s economy has crashed – there is large-scale poverty and the currency is essentially worthless. Thousands have fled to neighbouring South Africa (whose president, Thabo Mbeki, remains a loyal ally of Mugabe, though his party and the South African trade union movement have backed the Zimbabwean opposition.)

During this period, Mugabe and his closest aides became more delusional and their government took on a siege mentality. Holland’s account of Mugabe’s political career is book ended with an account of her second meeting with Mugabe in 2007. She describes a banner in his office proclaiming “Mugabe is Right” and his insistence that Zimbabwe’s economy is a “hundred times better than the average African economy.”

On March 29 of this year, Zimbabweans went to the polls again in presidential elections. The opposition was again subjected to intimidation and violence by ZANU paramilitaries; Morgan Tsvangirai was viciously assaulted by police. However, as the first results arrived, it appeared Tsvangirai held a clear lead. The next day the electoral commission, stuffed with government sympathizers, announced that it would delay the results. A month later, following announcements from the army and police that they would not serve an MDC government, a final result was announced: Tsvangirai had won, but not by enough. So an unprecedented second round was scheduled, and intimidation and attacks on opposition candidates and supporters increased. Days before the vote Tsvangirai – citing high levels of violence – withdrew, guaranteeing Mugabe a hollow victory.

Southern African governments belatedly stepped in, forcing Mugabe to meet with Tsvangirai to thrash out the details of a unity government. The best scenario under the circumstances is for Mugabe to retain a ceremonial presidential post while Tsvangirai serves as prime minister with a fair representation of MDC leaders in key cabinet posts. But who occupies State House is not only the issue to resolve.

Larger questions remain about Mugabe’s legacy – and Zimbabwe’s future. Mugabe turned the security and civil services into affiliates of the ruling party, rigged elections, encouraged paramilitaries and stifled public debate. Under the cover of Third-Worldism he also mocked real political grievances – as varied as land hunger and unequal global relations – to forward his own selfish, violent agenda. In the West, he became an example of a supposedly black and specifically African, political pathology. But those critics must now come to terms with the fact that his regime is not an aberration, as Holland depicts it: it is also a by-product of Zimbabwe’s violent colonial and white minority past and the duplicity of the post-Cold War world.

Mugabe’s Zimbabwe demonstrates, among other things, that nationalism as a political ideology is fundamentally flawed, despite its role in the successful struggle for independence. The MDC clearly presents a rupture with the predatory regimes of both Smith and Mugabe, and it bodes well that the MDC was forged as a non-violent post-independence movement. But it remains to be seen whether it can carve its own path between neoliberalism (as its boosters in the West want) and appeals from its constituents inside Zimbabwe for more substantive democracy, including a solution to the land question. But first there’s the small matter of consigning Mugabe to history.


Sean Jacobs teaches African Studies and Media Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He was born in South Africa.

Why Critical History in a Postcolonial World? Part 3

Continued from Parts 1 and 2

This is exactly why history as critical practice is so crucial. Without a relationship to the past (historicity) we assume things like culture are natural, immutable. Something which is the product of history is naturalized as the eternal human condition and then used to justify oppressive practices, as if it is in the nature of people of colour, women, and non-Western peoples to be dominated. Marx brought this to our attention when he unmasked bourgeois man masquerading as universal man. Historicity, then, is a means of recognizing alterity. As Spivak points out, history involves the "transgression of the logical by the historical-geographical." It introduces the problem of difference into the philosophical master narrative, requiring us to be sceptical of claims to timeless truths. This opens up the possibility of changing our present and imagining a very different future. Likewise, Nietzsche's critical history means the prospect of putting a knife to the roots of an injustice, "a privilege, a caste, a dynasty." Ironically critical history lets us be in the present by loosening the hold of the past, "to shatter and dissolve something to enable [us] to live."

The difficulty is how to act without the script, without slotting our story into its place in the grand master narrative. This is more important than ever in our supposed postcolonial world. Despite decolonization and liberation struggles, the hierarchies between the West and the rest of the world are perpetuated; indeed the disparities grow wider. HIV/AIDS, conflicts and intractable poverty prompt some to say the postcolonial project has failed. Trying to follow the blueprint the West has laid out does not seem to be an option, but neither does looking backwards. Time moves forwards so there is no choice about whether or not to progress, but maybe progress must not be unilinear. Maybe, as Nandy suggests, there are alternative universalities. If the universals of the West had to so distort the difference they encountered in order to include it, are they really universal? Instead of othering difference in order to force it to fit into the universals, can we modify the universals to truly accommodate difference? In other words, can we change the script?

According to Spivak's reading, Marx was already dealing with these concerns in his critique of the intending subject. Even the capitalist, in whom we usually see dominance, power and agency, is just an instrument of capital: "capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will." If both those who dominate and those who are dominated are but playing a part, following a script, where is there any room for responsibility, agency, change? Capital may be the historical agent in Marx's historicism, but it is not alive. Indeed any script is dead without actors to breathe life into the part. It cannot function without people, humans to play the part: "the human is the living element that can be instrumental in animating (or operating) inscriptions." A script is not entirely deterministic. If there is no escape from the script, can we perform it creatively?

In some ways, this is what people are doing all the time in their everydayness, when they, "collectively attempt to make their own history as they act (in the most robust sense of agency) a part they have not chosen, in a script that has as its task to keep them silent and invisible." (Yup, her again) Chakrabarty shows us that despite how hard the British worked to enumerate and measure fixed, impermeable and discrete communities, Indians still inhabit fuzzy communities: "In their everyday lives, in negotiating the spheres of friendship and kinship, say, Indians, like human beings everywhere, are comfortable with the indeterminacies of ethnic identities." This is part of what he means by the term History 2. There are ways of being in the world that cannot be explained by even the most rigorous history of capital. All the everyday practices that cannot be captured by scripts and identities are not necessarily subject to temporizing. Because it is outside its logic, History 2 is not the Other of capital. History 2 is its limits, disrupting its totalizing force. While historicism tries to "subjugate or destroy the multiple possibilities that belong to History 2," it cannot complete the "subordination of History 2s to the logical of capital."

In a sense History 2 is simply an attempt to name the radical alterity of the past. The past is often treated as the other of the present, as if it can be captured, but in truth it escapes our grasp. The infinite fullness and diversity of the vanishing present cannot be held onto, preserved, as the antiquarian would desire. It slips through our fingers. We can never capture the past in its rich livingness; we cannot make it present. Neither can we cram it into a single master narrative, to possess its essence or meaning. Its teeming complexity will overflow even the grandest monumental account.

We can never know everything that happened in the past – Nietzsche's superhistorical perspective notwithstanding – but neither can we be outside of history. Though the past has passed, its traces remain in the present. If I have a broken leg, it is because last week's event – say, falling out of a tree – is in some way present today. There is no standpoint outside of history, outside of human experience. As temporal beings, we are imperfect, finite, embedded in a particular history and culture. This contingency of our existence, rather than discouraging, is actually cause for hope. If contingent, it can be created otherwise. We can destabilize history's all-knowing narratives of power by starting with the limits. This opens new vistas. An imaginative source for re-presentation, history can be transformative. This is history in service of life.

---

BTW, I put the points I consider most important in bold - is it helpful or distracting?

Why Critical History in a Postcolonial World? Part 2

Continued from Part 1...

In order to effect comparisons and determine positions in a hierarchy, differences must be made commensurate, usually by the application of a universal category. If by definition universal (Encarta: "applicable to all situations or purposes") means there is nothing outside the universal, how do universals deal with difference? Partha Chatterjee shows that under colonialism claims of both universality and difference had a tendency to slip into a development narrative, as we saw in Hegel, which was a way of temporizing and therefore assimilating cultural and historical difference. Difference thus produced deferral, based on an expectation of education, improvement and progress. Through this not-yet, primitive India could be brought into the grand master narrative, though not equally with Europe. What Chatterjee calls the "Rule of Colonial Difference" meant a deferral of identity or sameness, possibly an eternal deferral: if Europe is still progressing and India is behind, can it ever catch up?

This is the situation inherited by nationalist movements. Fanon explains that colonialism, "not simply content to impose its rule upon the present and the future," also "distorts, disfigures, and destroys" the past of the colonized societies. To fortify and legitimize collective identity in the present, nationalism must rehabilitate the past. Fanon sees this as a response to colonialism's totalizing discourse. In the nationalist psyche, to recreate a pure and uncolonized past is to find and recover the national culture. But for Fanon the attempt to recover the glory of a past civilization is doomed. It makes culture, which should be in constant motion and full of vitality, into an artefact, preserved like a museum piece, dead. This kind of nativist history is, in Nietzsche's words, not serving life. It resembles antiquarian history, which "merely understands how to preserve life, not how to generate it." Mummified, decaying, this is the past sucking the vigour from the present. We can see exactly this tension in Nehru. Although he wants to rejuvenate the universals he finds in India's past (to make that past live), he is also searching for mythological origins of the nation's essence.

This search for origins and essential identities often has the purpose of buttressing boundaries, demarcating identities, making precise the inside and outside of "authentic" culture. Tradition is one familiar means for this, and its invention and preservation seem to have been a feature of nearly all decolonization struggles. This reproduction of the (imagined) past often involves enforcing custom and tradition, sometimes in a repressive manner: "the fact that something has become old now gives rise to the demand that it must be immortal." (Nietzsche) Obsession with tradition is yet another form of fetishism of the past, privileging it over the present. In opposition to the domination of the West, difference is privileged. In the name of emancipation, this nativist history reverses the binary, valorizing the past and rejecting the modern. Different problematic same thematic, it remains within the colonial logic, since it presupposes that the colonized are living in the past, while Europe is modern and more advanced on the unilinear historicist scale.

This is the general problem for Others trying to reconstitute their selves as subjects, because, as Fanon says, sealed in Otherness the only way to have a subject position is to accept being the voice of the Other, to fetishize themselves, reproducing the racialized logic of same and other. It also explains the performance of nativism by native intellectuals and elites who feel they must "go native" to "get away from the white culture." As if the only way to participate in politics and society is to take on these identities. However, identity politics is simply another form of mimesis: first determine the Indian way of doing things, and then follow that script. It is puppetry, following the black man script because that appears to be the only way to enact a subject position. But whiteness has constructed blackness, so this is playing someone else's part without authenticity or real agency; taking on the voice of the Other is about sheer instrumentality.

What is tricky, as Chakrabarty reminds us, is to take on a subject position of difference that does not repeat the racialized self-other logic. Fanon recognizes how difficult this is, and says it indeed produces a sort of melancholy because for this there's no script. We want a living culture, a community with national consciousness, but what the hegemonic order means by "culture" is a given political identity. If culture is that which cannot be captured, the living vanishing present, what Balibar calls everyday practices of meaning, "culture can also function like a nature, and it can in particular function as a way of locking individuals and groups into a genealogy, into a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin."

Part 3

Why Critical History in a Postcolonial World? Part 1

This is a follow-up to yesterday's post.

Let nothing be called natural
In an age of bloody confusion,
Ordered disorder, planned caprice,
And dehumanized humanity, lest all things
Be held unalterable!
Bertolt Brecht

The past has passed, meaning it is no more. By definition not present, it no longer exists. So why bother attending to it? Whether we attend to it or not, we cannot escape the past, since it produced our present – what exists is inherited from whatever came before. Perhaps we could just forget the past and be as happy as Nietzsche's cows. With no memory, they would be forgiven for taking themselves to be the general case. They might assume the whole world is an eternal pasture, and that a herd is the only natural way of being. But this is exactly the concern. Without attention to historicity we run the risk of naturalizing a particular kind of subject, society, culture, economic system, or set of power relations, universalizing the particular, making natural a product of history. Not only does this reduce anything (or anyone) different into an Other, an aberration, it leaves little room for change. The colonial order, racial hierarchies, gender inequality all appear natural and timeless.

A diachronic perspective, by contrast, can show us that things have not always been the way they are now, and therefore immunize us from assuming things will be thus forever. How we tell our past-narrative, our history, impacts how we imagine ourselves, our present, and our future. This is precisely the reason postcolonial thinkers have concerned themselves with the past. Of course, as Nietzsche points out, not just any attention to the past will do – history should serve life. Whatever falls outside of the grand universal narrative of historicism, akin to monumental history, is produced as an Other. Nativist history, a response to this othering, makes a fetish of the past (as does antiquarian history), but is unable to break free of the othering discourse. In contrast critical history and attention to historicity are concerned with the present and have the potential to go beyond the othering discourse.

The grand sweep of colonial history could be seen as an attempt to deal with difference met in the colonial encounter. In order to persevere, historicism had to find a way of fitting very different societies into its universal temporal narrative. Often seen as unhistorical, in stasis, outside of time, these colonized societies were only wrenched back into the stream of time by colonial rule. Although back in the narrative, they were then behind, backward. The colonies were seen as Europe's own past, like Europe but at the same time not like Europe. Historicism is then about both sameness and difference. It brings difference into sameness by temporizing. Nietzsche could have been writing about this when he wrote of monumental history: "how much that is different must be overlooked, how ruthlessly must the individuality of the past be forced into a general form …" Monumental history is inspirational. It advises us that greatness is once more possible if we imitate past greatness. Monumental history thus produces a script, forcing out all specificity. It is nothing but lifeless mimesis, producing "nothing but timidly disguised universal men."

Hegel exemplifies historicism. His juggernaut of a master narrative simply rolled right over alternative histories. He could subjugate them, bringing them all into the grand narrative, because of the totalizing progress of spirit (geist) through the ages. To be all-encompassing his system had to find ways to make these varied narratives commensurate, which is why the India we meet in Hegel's narrative is so distorted. Hegel's question of how to deal with discrepancy – India – was solved by the explanation that ancient India was once great but got stuck in stasis, while Europe kept on progressing. For Hegel, self-consciousness is produced dialectically through experience of the other: "those peoples therefore are alone capable of History... who have arrived at that period of development... at which individuals comprehend their own existence as independent, i.e. possess self-consciousness." But the Indians, steeped in spirituality, did not exercise their reason to separate Man from Nature and God. Without differentiating themselves from the universal, the dialectic could not function. The irrationality and lack of individuation of Indians ("In India we have only a division in masses..." explains Hegel) thus retarded the development of reason. And because reason, or Spirit, is the great mover of history, without it the Indians could have no history or progress. They were doomed to be stuck in the past – at least until Europe's convenient intervention; it was "the necessary fate of Asiatic Empires to be subjected to Europeans." In Hegel, India is othered, then the other is conquered by the same. As Chakrabarty explains this is a united world with an internally articulated hierarchy – the world is both one and unequal.

Part 2 here

Why I Study History

When I was younger (19 or so) I had an.. um... let's just call it a mind-expanding experience. It became so clear to me all of a sudden just how far we as a society are from our roots, or from our foundations. I mean this in a pretty concrete way. From a handful of extended family tribes living close to the earth, we built up these incredibly complex civilizations - technology, religion, bureaucracy, global transportation, trade, electronics, communications. We take it all for granted: cities, highrises, airplanes, universities, supermarkets. But most of it is pretty new.

Catastrophe is always lurking around the corner, as a potentiality. Climate change is one likely trigger for many potential catastrophes, and it is possible that our civilization will end with it. Think about Rome. It was around for a thousand years, and it fell. In post-Roman Britain, for instance, with nobody to maintain the infrastructure in the cities there was hunger and plague. People pretty much abandoned the cities and went back to barely scratching out a living, with small scale subsistence farming. These were what we know as the Dark Ages. If it could happen then, it can happen now. And eventually it will. That is certain; the time frame and causes are less so.

Humans have found and continue to find many solutions to the problems of survival. We must fulfill our needs for shelter, food, companionship, etc. But we have a lot of flexibility in exactly how we do this. The incredible variety and creativity of solutions that people have found become apparent when studying in a field like history (and probably anthropology, too). I love learning how different peoples have organized their societies: the religions and culture and social structures, the ethics and cuisine and mythologies.

In addition, if there are so many different ways we have organized our societies, than that tells me that this particular one is not the immutable reality. That means there is also hope for change. We can do things differently, because we have already done them differently in the past. I wrote a whole theoretical paper going into this in more detail - if anyone is interested, I can post it here (here, actually).

As some of you know, I'm currently working on an MA in History (and International Relations) and considering applying to do a PhD. Problem is, I am interested in everything and have such trouble deciding what to focus on. But I'm pretty sure at least that I want to stay in the field of history.

Howard Zinn makes me swoon - even when he's a cartoon character

Seriously, he's my hero.

Check out the cartoon version of Empire or Humanity? What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me about the American Empire
by Howard Zinn
Narrated by Viggo Mortensen

Torture in 60s South Shows Error of Waterboarding

Tom Gardner:

When I read about the increasing acceptance of waterboarding as a form of torture, I vividly recall how in 1968 members of the Memphis Police Department believed I could tell them information about civil rights insurgents arriving to create havoc. Forty years later I still hide my serrated scars.

I was 14 years old and forgot I was a black boy living in racist America and heading for the devil's den of discrimination.
[...]
Who were these people I supposedly knew who were ready to disrupt the city's infrastructure? My wild eyes could only register pain as the large men kicked, punched and beat me with nightsticks because I was unable to speak coherently between my sobs of sorrow and moans for my mother.
[...]
Like relentless Stalinists, the policemen gave me a few hard, calculated kicks with steel-toed boots in my back and ribs for making them exhausted from their beating. I promised them the names of protesters, when they were coming, and what they were driving. I could hardly speak from my busted lips, chipped teeth and broken jaw, but I forced words from my mouth that sounded like what they wanted as long as they stopped their feverish beating to decipher what my cracking voice was revealing.

But I didn’t know anyone, and I certainly didn’t know about a conspiracy to take over Memphis...

Torture, not only cruel and immoral, but ineffective for intelligence gathering. The rest of the article at Common Dreams. And find out about the history of waterboarding at the torture museum: barbarism then and now.

The Politics of Historicism

Historicism enabled European domination of the world in the nineteenth century... [It] posited historical time as a measure of the cultural distance (at least in institutional development) that was assumed to exist betwen the West and the non-West.
[...]
Historicism - and even the modern, European idea of history - one might say, came to non-European peoples as somebody's way of saying "not yet" to somebody else.

Consider the classical liberal but historicist essays by John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty" and "On Representative Government," both of which proclaimed self-rule as the highest form of government and yet argued against giving Indians or Africans self-rule on grounds that were indeed historicist.

According to Mill, Indians or Africans were not yet civilized enough to rule themselves. Some historical time of development and civilization (colonial rule and education, to be precise) had to elapse before they could be considered prepared for such a task. Mill's historicist argument thus consigned Indians, Africans, and other "rude" nations to an imaginary waiting room of history. In doing so, it converted history itself into a version of this waiting room. We were all headed for the same destination, Mill averred, but some people were to arrive earlier than others.

That was what historicist consciousness was: a recommendation to the colonized to wait. Acquiring a historical consciousness, acquiring the public spirit that Mill thought absolutely necessary for the art of self-government, was also to learn this art of waiting. This waiting was the realization of the "not yet" of historicism.

From Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Paragraph breaks added to facilitate reading)

Behind Iron Bars: A Graphic Novela

From the always amazing Words Without Borders, check out Behind Iron Bars, a short graphic novel by Jorge Garcia and Fidel Martinez in English and Spanish.

The anarchists' union I had joined when I started working at a noodle factory and whom I joined in the streets to defend the republic against the revolt of the armed forces in July 1936.

That summer everything seemed possible: even some of us women went to the front.

We shared the trenches with men who insulted us for refusing to wash their clothes.

But soon they made us retire from combat, accusing us of spreading venereal disease.

We returned to our old prisons, those of being wives and mothers.

Read the whole thing, or check out another by the same authors: Ballad of Ventas Prison. Also try this odd piece, A Bomb in the Family.

The Occupation of Alcatraz: Photo Essay

Thousands of American Indians and their families occupied Alcatraz Island from November, 1969 to June, 1971. The story of this occupation is absolutely amazing and I thought today, on this Day of Action, that it might serve as inspiration.

A proclamation on Alcatraz Island tells new arrivals where they are.

Signs hung on the dock on Alcatraz Island read, from left to right, "Red Power. Indians," "Human Rights, Free Indians," "Remember this land was taken from us!" "Alcatraz for Indians."

For many people, the occupation was the first time they had been surrounded by other Indian people. The experience was one of cultural renewal, exhilaration, and a new-found sense of Indianness.

Indian women played a major role in the occupation. They served on the is land council and the security force and worked in the health clinic, the day care center, and the school.

Stella Leach, a Colville/Sioux woman, took a leave of absence from her job at the All Indian Well Baby Clinic in Berkeley, California, to participate in the occupation of Alcatraz Island, where she operated a health clinic for island residents.

Many of the occupiers brought their families hundreds of miles to live on the island. A preschool and a nursery were operated for those who had children on the island.

Indian occupiers work to bring supplies onto Alcatraz. The island has no natural resources, so all supplies, fuel, and water had to be ferried over form the mainland and transported up the island by hand.

One of the last occupiers leaves Alcatraz Island, June 11, 1971.

On the mainland, on June 11,1971, Harold Patty (left), a Paiute Indian from Nevada, and Oohosis (second from left), a young Cree Indian from Canada, join two friends in demonstrating that the spirit will continue.

Overcoming exhaustion and disillusionment, young Atha Rider Whitemankiller (Cherokee) stands tall before the press at the Senator Hotel after the removal. His eloquent words about the purpose of the occupation - to publicize his people's plight and establish a land base for the Indians of the Bay Area - were the most quoted of the day.

Read more about the Alcatraz Occupation here and see more of these fantastic of photos here

Gays are Subversive

At least that's what Toronto Police thought in the 1980s:
Toronto police spied on gay community in 1980s: report

A surveillance report leaked to CBC News details how Det. Garry Carter went undercover in the community, spying on bathhouse operators, attending conventions in Alberta and tracking gay candidates running for city council.

The detective even reported on how gay activists questioned the police budgets.

Coun. Kyle Rae, a vocal gay rights advocate, said the report confirms what many in the community had long suspected.

"We were seen as a subversive minority that was worthy of ridicule and violence against us by the police," said Rae. "It's part of the paranoia of the '70s and '80s. It's not appropriate, but I'm not surprised."

See also The Toronto Bathhouse Raids of 1981

It wasn't the first anti-gay police action in Canada's history, but it was the biggest and most brutal. At 11 o'clock the evening of February 5, 1981, 150 plainclothes and uniformed police officers staged violent raids on four of Toronto's five gay bathhouses and arrested almost 300 men.

Before Rosie was a Riveter

Rosie, 7, is a regular oyster shucker at Varn & Platt Canning Co. in Bluffton, South Carolina. It is her second year at it. She is illiterate and works all day. Shucks only a few pots a day. February, 1913. From Shorpy, the 100-Year-Old Photo Blog. Via Mental Floss.

Afghanistan: Canadian is the New Soviet

As I previously mentioned, there are many parallels between what NATO is doing in Afghanistan and what the Soviets did.

From the enjoyable Afghanistanica comes this post on The Other Side of the Soviet Invasion:

[...] the strategy in the north on the part of the Soviet Union was to deliver aid and development projects as a reward for cooperation (or merely not violently resisting).

And also point out that:

[..] there was not universal resistance to the Soviets (I am not claiming that there there was no resistance to the Soviets in the north) and that the Soviets actually did give development an attempt. You can take the example of the Soviet attempt at "winning hearts and minds" and note either the striking similarity to or the stark difference with the present NATO/ISAF effort in Afghanistan.

Nothing in history is exactly the same, but there are definitely echoes to be found.

Via Global Voices

The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the US Racial Wealth Divide

For every dollar in assets possessed by the average white family in the United States, the average family of color has less than a dime. This event asks why the distribution of wealth in our nation is so uneven; whether public policy, even when well intentioned, reinforces existing inequalities; and whether or not race and ethnicity continue to play a pivotal role in defining the haves and have-nots in our society.

With:
Meizhu Lui, executive director, UFE
Betsy Leondar-Wright, communications director, UFE
Michelle Cromwell, professor, social systems, Pine Manor

Listen Here - Free streaming audio or mp3 download, approx 1h 25m.

To Map a Green Line or Not

Peter Hirschberg: JERUSALEM, Dec. 18 (IPS) - "A directive by Israel's education minister that all maps in new editions of school textbooks must include the 1967 line that separates Israel from the West Bank has sparked a political firestorm, with right-wing politicians and religious leaders threatening to boycott the books if they are issued."

Read the rest

Puts Things in Perspective, Doesn't It?

If there were... 100 People in the USA:

(From The Rational Radical): If 100 people collectively own $100.00, here's how it would be distributed as per current U.S. wealth distribution:

1 person gets $38.10
4 people get $5.32 each
5 people get $2.30 each
10 people get $1.25 each
20 people get .60 each
20 people get .23 each
40 people get half a penny each

So, as per Democratic Space, is a wealthy country one with the most rich or the fewest poor?

If there were... 100 people on Earth

What would the Earth be like if it were a village of 100 people? Watch The Miniature Earth (It's really good) to find out... Via The Skwib.

How Rich Am I?

To get an idea of how rich we really are, check out the interactive Global Rich List. If you live in a Western country, even a modest income will place you in the top 10% of the richest people in the world.

How Many People are in the World?

As I go about my life, I feel like pretty much the centre of my world, but I am aware that there are billions of other subjects out there (or as a wise woman I know used to say: "you aren't the bellybutton of the world"). Indeed, there's a heckuva lot of people in the world. 6.5 billion is a really big number... too big to wrap one's mind around. So, check out Population:One and remember, one pixel is one person.

Does History Matter?

Anyways, to prove the past really did exist, check out this series of photographs of Iraq in 1918. A_Resident bought them at a yard sale. History is important. The past really did exist, and events of the past affect the present. The Middle East was a colonized area (many countries still are), and the results of that are still being played out.

---

UPDATE: DEC 15
Of all places, in MSN Money: "Got $2,200? In this world, you're rich. A global study reveals an overwhelming wealth gap, with the world's three richest people having more money than the poorest 48 nations combined."