Imagined Communities and "Breaker Morant"

Near the close of Chapter Six Benedict Anderson draws a critical distinction between official nationalisms and the more spontaneous linguistic-nationalisms of the late 19th and early twentieth centuries. Let the following quotation from his summary on pages 109-111 provide a context for you to reflect on the very troubling portrait of nationalism and identity displayed in "Breaker Morant."

...[F]rom about hte middle of the nineteenth century there developed what Seton-Watson terms "official nationalisms" inside Europe. These nationalisms were historically "impossible" until after the appearance of popular linguistic-nationalisms, for, at bottom, they were responses by powerful groups--primarily, but not exclusively, dynastic and aristocratic--threatened with exclusion from, or marginalization in, popular imagined communities. A sort of tectonic upheaval was beginning, which, after 1918 and 1945, tipped these groups towards drainages in Estoril and Monte Carlo. Such official nationalisms were conservative, not to say reactionary, policies, adapted from the model of the largely spontaneous popular nationalisms that preceded them....In the name of imperialism, very similar policies were pursued by the same sorts of groups in the vast Asian and African territories subjected in the course of the nineteenth century. Finally, refracted into non-European cultures and histories, they were picked up and imitated by indigenous ruling groups in those few zones (among them Japan and Siam) which escaped direct subjection....In almost every case, official nationalism concealed a discrepancy between nation and dynastic realm....The reason for all this was not simply racism; it was also the fact that at the core of the empires [think Britain] nations [think Australia] too were emerging...And these nations were also instinctively resistant to "foreign" rule. Thus, imperialist ideology in the post-1850 era thus typically had the character of a conjuring trick.

Taking your lead from this quotation explain the diverse nationalist and dynastic tensions at work in the court martial of Morant, Handcock, and Witton, who it might seem to us now were the witting victims of this "conjuring trick."

Mazlish and Freud on Civilization

In this week's individual webbog post I am eager to learn of your interpretations and/or readings of "civilization" as this phenomenon is understood by Mazlish and Freud. There are key differences between these two figures as well as significant similarities, so make it your goal to offer meaningful reflection on what they have to say about the advantages and disadvantages offered by the historic invention of this key concept. Both men convey distinct concerns about civilization and its implications for the modern quest for individual liberty and self-flourishing. And, in the course of our reading of their critiques of civilization, we learn much about the complex, intertwined history of self and its other. Clearly, civilization is not innate, a product of human invention, and its naming (as Mazlish frequently points out) has a distinct, and curious historicity. I cannot help but wonder if Freud would subscribe to Mazlish's recommendation that we jettison the term civilization, in order to replace it with a Norbert Elias-inspired "civilizing process"? Perhaps Freud's own conjectural history of the origins of human civilization in the ominous, unchecked aggression of the"brudderbund" and the longer evolution of human repression offers a prototype of the "civilizing process"?

Civilization and The Last Wave

In this first installment of our webblog for 2010, I would like each of you to offer comment on "The Last Wave." You may try to sort it out for yourself as one way of writing about it, although I would like it best if you would comment on the film in light of the dialectic of civilization and savagery we have studied these last several months. Should you like to learn more about what Peter Weir was trying to get at by way of the film, have a look at the text of an interview conducted with him in 1979 (2 years after the completion of the film) at:

http://www.peterweircave.com/articles/articlei.html

You may also find some added inspiration for your commentary in the next section of Mazlish we will be reading this coming week. OK, you have until 5 pm Friday to get your comments up. I look forward to seeing them.


"You cannot have have both civilization and truth."

Iris Murdoch


"The savage in man is never quite eradicated."

Henry David Thoreau

Theoretical Curiosity and the Encounter

OK everyone. This is our final group blog assignment for the semester and I invite you to comment on the Greenblatt, Sahlins, Chatwin, Eco, and Zhang in the context of the rise and development of theoretical curiosity. In the spirit of this exercise permit me to share a reflection of my own that appears on page 119 of my book _Manufacturing Confucianism_. In this instance I am addressing how we can see in the European reception of 17th century Jesuit missionary works in translation a critical movement away from the religious to the real, from divine to empirical authority. "Travel literature became increasingly popular in the late seventeenth century because something akin to ethnographic authority was developing, which was, in turn, part of a larger epistemological shift away from faith and insight to experiment and observation as the basis of reliable knowledge. In this intellectual context the Jesuits and their Chinese texts were construed as scientific authorities providing testimony on behalf of the universality of divinely authored creation." This development was a misconstrual, but still a meaningful misapprehension (of the sort discussed by Eco and Zhang) that revealed the self-assertion of the European imagination at the same time that it closed the gap between western self and Chinese other. So, as we glance back across the sweep of the last fifteen weeks let us reflect on the complex history of cultural encounter and take some inspiration from the philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, who once wrote (rather apropos of the disorientation of the encounter):

A traveller, who has lost his way, should not ask, "Where am I?"
What he really wants to know is, "Where are the other places?
He has got his own body, but he has lost them.

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

Chatwin's Fear Hypothesis: Acquired Trait Becomes Genetic?

Armed with the dinofelis skeleton, the remains of Australopithecus Robustus, the earlier sudden climatic changes of the Miocene and the First Northern Glaciation, as well as his magnificent obsession with the human migratory propensity, Bruce Chatwin has constructed a speculative map of hominid social and psychological evolution. It is this speculation about the possible relationship between fear, its object and the crossover from acquired trait to genetic predisposition that occupied most of our reflection yesterday. As there were many people who still wanted to speak at the end of class, I invited each to send me their comments for posting as a continuing discussion thread on our website. So, with the addition of a framing quote from Chatwin,

QUOTATION

Every child appears to have an innate mental picture of the "thing" that might attack: so much so that any threatening "thing," even if it is not the real "thing," will trigger off a sequence of defensive behaviour. The screams and kicks are the first line of defence. The mother must then be prepared to fight for he child; and the father to fight for them both. The danger doubles at night, because man has no night vision and the big cats hunt at night. And surely this most Manichaean drama--of light, darkness and the Beast--lies at the heart of the human predicament.



here they are...

Chris Mork:

In class, I was going to mention that I actually take Chatwin's side of the issue. In my psychology class last year, we discussed fear and its origin. It is evident that many fears have an evolutionary perspective. Fears of the dark and snakes, for example, create an evolutionary advantage in that those things may have threatened the species (fear of the dark improved survivall ability by avoidance of the dinophelis, for example) and by avoiding them, the likelihood of survival is increased. Social Darwinism therefore plays a large role in the matter. Additionally, you seemed to be stressing the issue of where the origin of these instinctual fears arises. Thus, they have their beginning in our prehistoric ancestors and their struggle for survival.
Ryan also brought up the idea of an innate sense of fear in all humans that would cause people to fear the dinophelis for the fact that it was dangerous. However, how would one understand that the dinophelis was dangerous? That could only arise out of a previous experience that demonstrated that the animal was a threat. Thus, many fears appear to be instinctual in the human species in the present day as a result of previous experiences that initially created that fear.


Ryan Lynch:

The two sides of the fear argument are that 1.) it is innate and comes to humans subconsciously from the past, and 2.) that it is experienced through culture by each human and therefore it originates in every individual. If the second case were true, every human would need to experience fear for his-or-herself in order to have an understanding of it. Simply hearing stories about frightening things is not enough to originate fear in a human, for it is not a unique and personal experience. Rather it is must more reasonable that everyone is born with an idea and concept of fear. Thus, when these stories of monsters are heard, humans are able to associate the fear that is already in their possession with these concepts. The fear of these objects (which often have no reasonable basis due to improbability) are simply the associations of the concept of fear to the stories passed down by culture. This reasoning gives possibility to Chatwin's line of thinking. He argues that the fear of a predator shaped the culture of the ancient humans to be cautious in the dark. If fear is indeed innately common among all humans, such practices could be easily understood and assumed by future generations even without experiencing the predator directly. Thus, even when the predator is forgotten, the practices maintain reasonable use in society, where new threats and monsters replace the void left by the original predator.

Conrad, Casement, and the "Horror" of Congo

OK. It is time to get ourselves back to work on the blogsite. We will soon be viewing the American retelling of the Heart of Darkness narrative as presented by Francis Ford Coppola in his dramatic meditation on the misadventure that was the Vietnam War ("Apocalypse Now Redux"). This will give us another way of exploring the problem of the other as that other is found to lie within ourselves. But, before we get too far into this exploration, I wish to share a few comments about Sir Roger Casement (1864-1916) and his report on the savagery of the rubber trade in the Putumayo. While the record of these facts was published in 1913, it offers a window on the mistreatment of indigenous peoples very much like what we have read about already in Heart of Darkness. In the early 1890s, Casement and Conrad were together in the Congo ("The Congo Diary," 13th June, 1890--"Made the acquaintance of Mr. Roger Casement, which I should consider as a great pleasure under any circumstances and now it becomes a positive piece of luck.") and what they observed there would be explicit again in the Putumayo. Intriguing for us in this respect is Conrad's reflection on this time and the manner in which his description of Casement suggests the portrait of Kurtz from Heart of Darkness. Here is Conrad in a letter :

"Before the Congo I was just a mere animal."

Then, inflating prose on Casement, he reports,

"He was a good companion, but already in Africa I judged that he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don't mean stupid. I mean he was all emotion. By emotional force (Congo report, Putumayo--etc) he made his way, and sheer emotionalism has undone him. A creature of sheer temperament--a truly tragic personality: all but the greatness of which he had not a trace. Only vanity. But in the Congo it was not visible yet."

Writing about his experience in the Putumayo, where he was dispatched as a British Consul to report on the treatment of "British Colonial Subjects, and Native Indians" by the government, Casement reveals nothing of this tragic quality. Indeed, quite the opposite. Here, in a letter to a close friend he casts light on the circumstances of his task to represent the outrage in the region:

"I knew the Foreign Office would not understand the thing [meaning his report], for I realized that I was looking at this tragedy with the eyes of another race of people once hinted themselves, whose hearts were based on affection as the root principle of contact with their fellow men, and whose estimate of life was not something to be appraised at its market price." (Casement Report on the Administration of the Congo Free State, 1904. http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/ob73.html)

Another reason why the British might have had difficulty grasping Casement's account was that its facts were appalling to the Victorian conscience, the very conscience against which Conrad strains in telling his narrative of Kurtz at the far inner reaches of the Congo:

"The number of Indians killed by either starvation--often purposely brought about by the destruction of crops over whole districts or inflicted as a form of death penalty on individuals who failed to bring in their quota of rubber--or by deliberate murder by bullet, fire, beheading, of flogging to death, and accompanied by a variety of atrocious tortures, during the course of these 12 years, in order to extort these 4,000 tons of rubber, cannot have been less than 30,000, and possibly came to many more."

And yet, with the scope of this meditated slaughter, as with the irrational violence of the rubber extraction in the Congo, Conrad's portrait of this pitiable terror in the Heart of Darkness "attempted to penetrate the veil [of the deceptions of the civilizing project] and was anxious to retain its hallucinatory quality." The real and the imagined, then, were perpetually intertwined.

This week as we move deeper into the jungle of the Congo and the "epistemic murk" of the colonial rationalization of economic exploitation, let us consider how the history lived and told by Conrad differs from the terror wrought by the Conquistadores. Consider these questions from Michael Taussig's Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing: "Is there not a distinct desire in Heart of Darkness for Kurtz's greatness, horrible as it is? Is not horror made beautiful and primitivism exoticized throughout this book, which Ian Watt calls the enduring and most powerful literary indictment of imperialism."

OK, let's get to work!!

Marco Polo Postings

It seems that it is difficult for teams to make their own posts tot he website, so here is a prompt, under which you can enter your posts on il milione.