CONTENTS

Contents Contents

Print Print

1 1

Send Send email email

CONTENTS Editorial 2

Across the South

Samita Sen, Shamil Jeppie

33

Jomo K. S., The Struggle for History, SEPHIS Lecture Delivered at Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion, Penang, Malaysia, September 2004.

37

Maznah Mohamad, Contested Nationalisms and New Statism, Workshop held in Penang, Malaysia, 2-4 September 2004.

39

Patricia Hayes, Visual South: Using Visual Sources as Alternative Histories, Workshop held at Maputo, 13-19 September 2004.

41

Anne Mager, Teaching gendered history: a personal reflection.

43

Zubaan: A History of a Feminist publishing house in India.

An Encounter 3

With Mahmud Mamdani: Lakshmi Subramaniam

Articles 5

Eloisa Martin, “Aguante lo’ pibe’!”: Redefinitions of “youth” in Argentina.

11

Anna Christie Villarba-Torres, Children of the Mountains: Representations of the Igorot in Philippine Picture Postcards and Print Adverts.

17

Li Anshan, First Chinese and Indians in South Africa.

21

Amit Ranjan Basu, Thresholds in the History of Medicine in India.

Reviews Three recent publications from Kali/Zubaan.

45

Soma Marik, Problematising Democratisation and Women’s Grassroot Movements. Jill M Bystydzienski and Joti Sekhon eds., Democratization and Women’s Grassroots Movements, Kali for Women, South Asia Edition, New Delhi 2002 (original edition Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 1999).

47

Aishika Chakraborty, On the ‘Wives of Dead Men’. Uma Chakravarti and Preeti Gill (eds.) Shadow Lives: Writings on Widowhood, Kali for Women, New Delhi, 2001.

49

Amit Ranjan Basu, Re-thinking reproductive rights. Mohan Rao (ed.) The Unheard Scream: Reproductive Health and Women’s Lives in India, Zubaan and Panos Institute India, New Delhi, 2004.

50

Announcements

57

Correspondents

Contemporary South 25

Ashwin Desai, South Africa and the Pan-African Renaissance.

27

Paula Cristina da Silva Barreto,Youth and Citizenship in Brazil.

28

Rohan Deb Roy, “Of Illusion, Of Compensation”: State Initiated Diaspora in Post Colonial Andhra.

Archives and Field Notes: Experiencing Research 30

Aslam Farouk–Alli & Mohamed Shahid Mathee, Research Potential in Timbuktu’s Manuscript Libraries.

Liquid Thought innovate. evolve. accelerate. If you would like to respond to any of the contributions in this issue or contribute to this e-Magazine, please write to the Editors at [email protected] or [email protected]

Contents Contents

2 2

Print Print

Send Send email email

Editorial Samita Sen, Shamil Jeppie The first issue of the Sephis e-Magazine was launched in Penang, Malaysia, on 3 September 2004, on the occasion of the international workshop on “Contested Nationalisms and the New Statism”. We were fortunate in that the launch was prefaced with a lecture by Professor Jomo K. Sundaram, or Jomo K.S. as so many of us know him from his many publications. His lecture, which outlined the contours of the new Imperialism characterising today’s world order, helped to underline the significance of a project such as the e-Magazine. While history as a field of study is suffering in many parts of the South (he refers to Malaysia as a case in point) yet it is precisely here that notions of empire are getting reinscribed almost as the natural order of things. He referred to the way in which a highly popular strand of historical scholarship in the North is re-marketing ideas of empire in new works of history (often accompanied by historical documentaries) that reach large numbers of readers. It has perhaps never been quite so urgent to build alliances across the South to counter the hegemony of the North over knowledge and information. We are fortunate that we are able to carry an edited version of his lecture in this issue (see section Across the South).

To begin with let us thank all our readers for the very positive responses we have had to the e-Magazine. We have not had formal responses in the form of ‘letters’, which we had hoped to be able to post in this issue, but informal communications to the editors have been extremely encouraging. In one case, we are told, the e-Magazine has been incorporated into a teaching course, a compliment we all appreciate. We have also had a number of suggestions regarding content, layout and design. Not all of these can be incorporated in this second issue, but we are hoping

gradually to take all of them into account. We thank all those who have taken the trouble to give us suggestions. In appreciation of the help and support we have received in Kolkata (India), the e-Magazine team held a local launch on 16 September. We had members of the city’s NGOs, students, members of various faculties from the city’s universities and officers of the Calcutta University attending the occasion. There were a number of valuable suggestions offered by the invitees, some of which we have been able to take on board in outlining the content of this second issue.

On one issue our readers are not in agreement. Some have suggested that we reduce the size of the e-Magazine in order to facilitate downloading by substantially reducing the images and illustrations. Others, however, have been appreciative of the illustrations, and have counselled us to maintain the balance. In this issue, having selected one article, by Anna Christie Villarba-Torres, on postcards and print-adverts in the Philippines, we were already committed to a substantial proportion of visual material. We have opted to maintain, therefore, a mix of textual and visual material. The other three articles-- by Eloisa Martin on youth culture in Argentina, on the historiography of medicine in India, and Chinese and Indian emigration to South Africa were also accompanied by a range of rich visual material. To our regret, we have been unable to accommodate all of these, but we have tried to include as much as possible. The four articles-- and we have increased the number on the advice of our colleagues at the Penang workshop-share no particular thematic unity. We

have tried, instead, for a wider range of thematic and geographical representations. The section on Across the South contains reports of two workshops, including the Penang workshop mentioned earlier. In the last issue, we highlighted the experience of students, in this issue, Anne Mager from the University of Cape Town has written about her experience of teaching gender history in the South. We do have a contribution on the experience of research students, in the specific context of recovering, and conducting historical research in, the unique archives in the famous city of Timbuktu in West Africa, in the section on Archives. The interview features an informal encounter with the Ugandan scholar Mahmud Mamdani by Lakshmi Subramaniam, and his new book Good Muslims Bad Muslims, which addresses one of the most troubling aspects of new Imperialism in the current scenario—the construction of the Muslim as a civilizational ‘other’ and the ethicization of terrorism. We have attempted a special feature with our review section in this issue. We have

a profile (and history) of a rather unusual publishing house—a feminist publishing house in India, and we have included reviews of several books published by them. We would welcome more contributions in this vein. Once again, we appreciate the many comments and suggestions on our inaugural issue, and would like you to keep up the dialogue. Do write to us with your responses to this second number, so that we can continue to modify and improve the e-Magazine. And we would greatly appreciate suggestions for more ways of featuring south-south linkages in these pages.

Contents Contents

3 3

Print Print

Send Send email email

An Encounter An Encounter with Mahmud Mamdani. Lakshmi Subramanian She is now a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. She has taught history at the Universities of Viswa Bharati (Santiniketan) and Calcutta for twenty years. She is best known for her work on trade and mercantile communities in the Indian Ocean in the early modern period. Her current research is on culture and modernity in southern India. She is at present the Co-ordinator of a Regional Centre of Sephis. Her many interests include music, cinema, food and novels. But neither the photograph nor any words can convey her vitality—for that you have to meet her!

The occasion In August 2004, I had the privilege of being part of a workshop organized by ENRECA (Enhancement of research capacity in Africa), in collaboration with Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. As it happened, the workshop coincided with the historic return of the Kenyan poet and literary guru Professor Ngugi wa Thiongo to his alma mater after a gap of more than two decades and with the launch of Mahmud Mamdani’s recently published book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (see publication details below). The occasion was not just celebratory but a poignant moment to take stock of the developing world, its political and social experience in the aftermath of decolonisation and globalization. Responding to the request of the Conference organizers to comment on his monograph, Mamdani came up with a generous preview of his work that was deceptively simple and disturbingly insightful. It was an encounter that left a deep impression on all of us present, for it brought home the damaging implications of what he calls “culture talk”, whose terms of reference, he pointed out, we seem to have internalized almost unconsciously. The interviews that followed in the Ugandan newspapers saw Mamdani speak out against Culture Talk that divided the world into two segments – one, that makes culture and is synonymous with creativity and the other that is a victim of culture and embodies stasis and resistance. Mamdani resolutely maintained that his book was not specifically concerned with Islam or the developments within Islamic societies, but with US foreign policy, which, with its tortuous twists and turns, was directly instrumental in fostering terrorism as a means to fight the proxy Cold War after Vietnam. It was the result of an obsession that had gone out of control. Mamdani’s

informal presentation both during the Conference as well as during the official launch of his book was enough to persuade me to read the book with some interest and attention, and place it within the context of new writings that look at the secret history of the CIA, for instance, Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to 10 September 2001 (Penguin, 2004).

Professor Mahmud Mamdani, Ugandan political scientist, is at present Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is also the Director of the Institute of African Studies at SIPA. He is the founding Director of the Centre for Basic Research in Kampala, Uganda, and the current President (1999-2002) of the Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA). Mamdani holds a BA from the University of Pittsburgh (1967), an MA and MALD from Tufts University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (1969) and a PhD from Harvard University (1974). He was A.C. Jordan Professor of African Studies and taught at the University of Dar-esSalaam (Tanzania) and Makerere University (Uganda). In 1998, he moved from the United States to South Africa’s University of Cape Town (UCT) as Director of the Center for African Studies. He proposed a new syllabus for the core undergraduate course on Africa, which triggered off a major debate: Eurocentric versus Africa-focused. UCT did not accept his syllabus. He taught a general elective course on Africa to UCT undergraduates for two years. The debate over the approach to African history remains a major one. Mahmud Mamdani is an important voice

in contemporary debates about the changing role of Africa in a global context. His book Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton University Press, 1996) has been hailed as one of the best scholarly works on Africa published in English, and won the prestigious Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association of the USA (1998). Other books include When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton University Press, 2002), Beyond Rights Talk and Culture Talk: Comparative Essays on the Politics of Rights and Culture (editor, Palgrave Macmillan, November 2000), Crises and Reconstruction - African Perspectives: Two Lectures (with Colin Leys, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, December 1998), Imperialism and Fascism in Uganda (Africa World Press Inc., 1983), and many others.

Dowloaded from Google Image

Contents Contents

4 4

Print Print

Send Send email email

An Encounter The book Mahmud Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, Fountain Publishers, Kampala, 2004. This book, on closer reflection, is more than the anatomy of an obsession. In an age of fetishised cultural theories, Mamdani endeavours to bring back the political into the realm of analysis. Rather than see politics as the outcome of an archaic culture, he suggests that both culture and politics are outcomes of contemporary conditions, relations and conflicts. Cultural debates have a specific historical context– terrorism is not a cultural residue of a civilization that has stagnated and become antithetical to modernity but is a modern construction, informed and shaped by modern politics and policies. The author singles out for detailed treatment American policy of containment and proxy war against communism in the post-Vietnam decades, but, without balancing the analysis by an examination of the internal dynamics and politics of Islamic societies. It is this gap that makes the book a little disconnected. Consequently, it does not redress the problem of understanding Muslims in the contemporary world, an issue that Mamdani engages with at the outset. Mamdani’s principal concerns in the book are to trace the roots of “Islamic terrorism” and to contest the basis on which the phenomenon has been explained. The explanatory framework is part of a deliberate misrepresentation that came to inform a discourse that Mamdani describes as Culture Talk. It became prominent in the aftermath of the Cold War and the emergence of globalization. Culture Talk assumes that every culture has a tangible essence that defines it and one that informs its politics. Culture Talk after 9/11, for example, explained the process of terrorism as Islamic. This finds expression in either the clash of civilizations, a paradigm put forward by Samuel Huntington or in a clash within civilizations, as suggested by Bernard Lewis. The implication is that there are fault lines within Islam, the moderates or the good Muslim (standing for genuine Islam) against the bad Muslim (associated with radical or political Islam) who advocate militancy traditionally associated with Wahabism founded and promoted by Saudi Arabia. Thus, even for Lewis, who viewed history as the movement of large cultural blocs called civilizations, Islamic civilization had as

its essence an unchanging doctrine in which Muslims took refuge in times of crisis. In fact, as Mamdani demonstrates, the reverse was the case. Islam developed from the early decades of the twentieth century its own version of politics and its agenda of capturing state power. It was the United States that reacted to the Soviet threat with almost a compulsive twitch and chose to buttress one variety of Islam in its crusade against communism. It was the American decision to promote and harness one version of Islam in the struggle against the Soviets that produced a lethal cocktail of terrorism and fundamentalism, and which eventually turned against its creator. Such a denouement is not entirely new – critics of American policy, especially after the Afghan war and the Iraq offensive, have come up with similar assertions. Demonstrations, newspaper articles in the media of the South even if they do not command the same attention, have debated at length the degree of American culpability. Where the difference lies, and this is vital, is the manner in which Mamdani marshals his facts and presents them with a relentless logic and makes a strong and irrefutable case for looking at political explanations and solutions. It is this shift from Culture Talk to political analysis that compels a closer and critical look at the book. A crucial shift in the center of gravity of the Cold War, the US strategy of promoting proxy war and the new terms introduced by President Reagan to describe political conflict, together defined the moment. In this context, the United States chose to deploy one version of Islam against others, and thereby helped a radical fringe move from the periphery to the mainstream of politics in the larger Islamic world. In practice, this translated into a decision to cultivate terrorism in the struggle against regimes it considered pro-Soviet, to deploy mercenaries and right wing dictators against left wing regimes. The determination to kill as many Soviets as possible, to give the USSR, what Zbigniew Brzezinski said its Vietnam war, informed the policy initiatives of the White House and the CIA. From the covert collaboration between the CIA and Renamo in Mozambique and Unita in Angola to the open embracing of terror in South America (Nicaragua) in the 1980s to the rollback in Afghanistan, the Unites States showed a single-minded commitment to a determined, sustained attack on Soviet influence. The manifestation was in Third World insurgencies. Equally serious in its long term consequences were two initiatives that the Reagan administration took: one, to turn to the drug trade for an illicit source of funds and the second, to turn to the religious right to implement

those foreign policy objectives that the Congress had ruled against, thus beginning a trend towards privatizing war. It was precisely here that the interface between the US crusade and the Islamic jihad became so significant and President Reagan openly presented the leaders of the mujahideen in 1985 as the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers. The founding and financing of madrasas, the propaganda that found expression in the form of school textbooks, the privatization of information about how to produce and spread violence by the CIA, make grim reading. While there is a sense of déjà vu about what Mamdani writes, there is also a more sober realization that the world’s greatest super power is not in the habit of taking any moral responsibility for its own actions. Mamdani, however, insists that the question is not whether the United States is responsible for “Islamic” terrorism, or whether it is a homegrown product. What is more important is that the homegrown product could not have flourished except in a global environment where one super power was prepared to use any means to defeat Soviet Communism. However, in terms of analysis, Mamdani does not pay the same attention to the workings of the home environment. Admittedly, that is not his central concern. Yet this remains a lacuna and what we have is a powerful denunciation of the not so secret history of the CIA. He is more innovative when he explains the Israel-US connection, an alignment that he studies in the context of American settler mentality. Mamdani has no ready solutions for the predicaments of the Third World. But, if it is to maintain some kind of independence, it must, according to him, take cognizance of the lessons of its colonial past – not as fodder for perpetuating revenge, but as a reminder for contesting Culture Talk and maintaining independent thought. Ruling governments in the South, are you listening?

Downloaded from Amazon.com

Contents Contents

5 5

Print Print

Send Send email email

Articles "Aguante lo’ pibe’!": Redefinitions of "youth" in Argentina1 Eloísa Martín BA in Sociology, MA in Social Anthropology, she is currently working on a PhD on popular religion at Rio de Janeiro Federal University. She is an Associate Editor in Ciencias Sociales y Religión/Ciências Sociais e Religião (academic journal on Social Sciences and Religion) and General Secretary of the Association of Social Scientists of Religion in the MERCOSUR. She has published on popular culture and religion in academic journals. Likes cooking, cats, all kinds of music. And, despite her Argentinian passport, her heart lives in Rio.

Abstract The situation in Argentina today reflects both the legacies of once the most developed country in Latin America and the unprecedented social changes of the 1990s. Within this context, and as a result of it, the younger generations have developed new definitions of self, based on values different from those of previous generations. The young, among what might for want of a better word be called the “popular” classes, do not define themselves as "youths". But the term used, "pibe", the emic category, while not completely shedding its ties to the relationship between childhood and adult life, is sustained by a new definition of masculinity. Argentina is currently undergoing structural transformations that reflect how the legacies, of what used to be the most developed country in Latin America, coexist with widespread societal changes and politicization of a large portion of the population. These changes have been taking place for the last 25 years but they reached an unprecedented pace and extent during the 1990s.2 During the 1990s, increase in unemployment, decline in real wages, labor legislation focusing on flexibility, and cuts in government expenditure in public health and social security, among other factors, resulted in impoverishment of a large portion of the middle class and a decline in expectations of upward mobility through education and employment for the working class.3 According to the International Development Bank, in 2003, 61.6 per cent of the population lived in poverty, higher than the Latin American average.4 Recent reports all confirm increase in poverty, unemployment, and absolute unemployment, (excluding students and housewives) among the young in Argentina and, particularly, Buenos Aires.5 In this context, people obtain subsistence through: 1) some government managed social welfare programs such as food baskets for families with children under the age of 6 and unemployment compensation; 2) the interstices of the market with jobs such as changas, work of very short duration and low remuneration which require no particular skill or training; 3) the offering, and sometimes imposition, of services, the most common being that of washing car

windows at stoplights; 4) alternative forms of exchanges such as ferias americanas (inspired by North American garage sales) or the Barter Club6 ; and, finally, 5) a category of activities that are more or less illegal, including everything from pan-handling to robbery and trafficking. As a result, the working class “youth” have elaborated new ways of selfidentification that center on values different from those of previous generations. The objective of this paper is to describe and analyze working class forms of selfidentification as pertaining to young people. However, age categories have little to do with the way that these persons identify themselves. A pibe– the emic term– can refer to a 9, 17, or 38-years old if he is considered as such by his peers. And even though it is a term that is defined in opposition to childhood and adulthood, to be pibe is not to be caught in an intermediary stage of a process. The transition can be postponed indefinitely. Based on data taken during two years of ethnographic research in Buenos Aires, I will outline the identity “pibe” by elaborating two case studies: that of Mario, a 24 year old pibe from a lower middle class neighborhood in Buenos Aires, and the lyrics of cumbias villeras, a kind of music that focuses on the pibe and his morality. E. Archetti analyzes the construction of pibe in soccer discourse as someone not an adult, foreign to the disciplinary logic of productive labor and the family, who does not lose his lucid capacity, but rather exhibits and exceeds it. Contrary to the

1 This article was originally presented at the “Youth in the age of development” Workshop, Bahia (Brazil), 20-22 June 2004. I thank SEPHIS for enabling me to attend the meeting. All the images are from www.muevamueva.com. I thank Fermín Cerdán who allowed me to use the pictures from his website. 2 Daniel Filmus, “Presentación”, Los noventa. Política, sociedad y cultura en América Latina y Argentina de fin de siglo, Buenos Aires, FLACSO, EUDEBA, 1999, p. 7– 10. 3 María del Carmen Feijoo, Nuevo país, nueva pobreza, Buenos Aires, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2001; Javier Auyero, Otra vez en la vía: notas e interrogantes sobre la juventud de sectores populares, Buenos Aires, Fundación Del Sur, Gecuso & Espacio Editorial, 1993; Maristella Svampa (ed), Desde abajo. La transformación de las identidades sociales, Buenos Aires, Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento/ Editorial Biblos, 2000; Luis Beccaria & Néstor López, Sin trabajo. Las características del desempleo y sus efectos en la sociedad argentina, Buenos Aires, UNICEF/ Losada, 1997. 4 http://old.clarin.com/diario/2003/03/30/e03401.htm 5 The report analyzes the population between the ages of 15 and 24 in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. During 1991-1999, this segment of the population grew 124 per cent in the villas, while only 2.8 per cent in the City overall. In this age group, unemployment doubled

Contents Contents

6 6

Print Print

Send Send email email

Articles notion of “son”, which implies subordination and the control of a “father”, pibe is a category, however ambiguous, that connotes liberty, creativity and a disorder full of potential.7 This version of the pibe is romantic and nearly mythical, applicable only to a very few. Diego Maradona alone can be considered to fully embody this pibe.8 In my analysis, the category pibe, while maintaining some of the characteristics ascribed by Archetti, includes other connotations. Mario, to be Pibe and to rescue oneself “BRING GAROTOS AND MINIIIIIIINAS WITH KISSES. LO PIBE” (from an e-mail sent by Mario, 2 March 2003) The excerpt quoted above was for me a crucial introduction to the category pibe. It was the way Mario signed an e-mail he wrote to me while I was taking a break in Rio de Janeiro from my fieldwork. He asked me to bring him Garotos, a type of candy that Argentinean tourists often bring back as souvenirs, and meninas, that is, Brazilian girls (he wrote the word phonetically). Mario, who at 24 could be considered a young adult, characterizes himself as a pibe, especially when he gets together to escabiar (get drunk) with his friends, when he chants at the soccer games of San Lorenzo, by the aguante exhibited by his tattoos that he himself made, when he intentionally shouts, sings, or signs off “lo pibe”, plural in spite of the absence of the final “s”s. According to Herzfeld, a successful performance of the self depends on being able to identify oneself within broader categories.9 The excellence of the performance, in this case, does not reside in doing things “correctly” (according to patterns and norms of propriety that Mario is familiar with since he completed the second year of secondary school), but rather by speaking “erroneously” (for example omitting the “s” at the end of plural words), by specific lexical omissions (not using certain words, which, while not necessarily erudite, are recognized as belonging to other cultural contexts), claiming not to be able to perform certain activities (like dancing música cheta10), or other practices that require a high degree of effort (like writing poetry, an activity that is very common among other youths where I did my fieldwork). All these constitute, or are elements, in a successful performance of masculinity among “lo´ pibe”.

The pibes’ language begins to become intelligible the moment we contrast it with the dominant idiom: disciplined and schooled. This particular use of language is not only characterized by what we might call “errors” but also by a certain sub-urban accent, the use of a particular slang, and constant sexual references, which most often are in the form of challenges or insults. We are not concerned here with the proper or standard use and command of Spanish, that many pibes are familiar with from school, but rather with what certain forms of speech tell us concerning the appropriation and re-elaboration of language by the pibes themselves. The “errors” of speech (omission of “s”s) which recall the songs and cheers of soccer matches and are recorded in the lyrics of cumbias villeras11 , must be understood in opposition to proper, standard, and schooled linguistic norms. Given the recurrence and systematization of these forms, it would be impossible, even in the case of illiterate people, that these are truly “errors” or the products of “ignorance” or “incompetence”. Rather, pibes materialize a certain aesthetic intention that serves as a vehicle for a will to rupture. Mockery and provocation are expressed in obscenity and sexual references. In the case of these workingclass youth of the greater Buenos Aires, the presence of the larger and more efficient infrastructure (the level of schooling) suggests that their particular use of language is an effort at constructing a distance from the school. This appears to me not to be coincidental. Sociological studies of the 80s and 90s have argued a final stage of rupture between the educational cycle and the world of work.

between 1992 and 1998 and, among the poorest, unemployment is 150 per cent of the overall average. Besides, 75 per cent of absolutely inactive youth belong to the poor and lower middle class. CONSULTORA EQUIS, Los jóvenes porteños. Informe estadístico sobre la situación educacional, ocupacional, sanitaria y socio-ambiental de los jóvenes de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Defensoría del Pueblo de la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, 1999. 6 Clubs function by generating networks of registered and authorized “nodes” that congregate “prosumers” (producers + consumers) associates who interchange goods (everything from food, clothes, cleaning products and even computers and properties) and services (including everything from plumbing and masonry to English classes, health care, and counseling). 7 Eduardo Archetti, “El potrero y el pibe: Territorio y pertenencia en el imaginario del fútbol argentino”, Nueva Sociedad, n. 154, Caracas, March-April 1998. 8 Maradona is “the golden pibe”, according to the insider use of the term. He exhibits all of the attributes of the pibe mentioned above. Eduardo Archettti, Masculinidades. Fútbol, tango y polo en la Argentina, Buenos Aires, Antropofagia, 2003, p. 246 ff. 9 Michael Herzfeld, The poetics of Manhood. Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1985, p. 10. 10 Dance music for middle and upper classes in Argentina. Genres classified as “chetos” could vary, depending on native contexts, from electronic music to certain types of rock and roll. 11 In the cumbia villera, whose lyrics we shall subsequently analyze, the singing reproduces villero speech, not only in form but also in content. It is possible to distinguish three elements in these songs: the “errors”, the use of slang, and insults or obscenities, are all linked to the questioning of the dominant order.

Figure 1. Pablo Lescano, Damas Gratis leader, in a show. Tattooed in his chest: “100% Negro cumbiero”. http://www.muevamueva.com/grupo /damasgratis/images/enshows/inde x.htm (downloaded 22 September 2004).

12 Mario’s, and his brother’s, educational and work related trajectories illustrate the changes in the past few years. One brother (now 32 years) who found work in the subway helping his father, now has a salary of 1200 dollars a month and is the “rich” one of the family. The younger brothers have not been as lucky. One brother who is 20 years old and illiterate, picks up cardboard in the street to support his wife and two daughters while their brother of 16 “does nothing” even though he finished primary school.

Contents Contents

7 7

Print Print

Send Send email email

Articles Work for Mario, even when he claims to work, is no longer of the previous type, nor does it have the meaning that it did for workers three decades ago. As compared to his father, who retired as a subway employee,12 Mario receives some unemployment compensation that he augments with changas in an ice cream or metal shop, repairing or cleaning things in the homes of his neighbors, or by doing some tasks “in politics” (he is paid for assisting or monitoring elections). He cares for his seven-year-old daughter without the advantages of being the head-ofhousehold (he still lives in his father’s house) or through marriage (he does not have a wife). And although he considers himself peronista, he participates in activities sponsored by the Peronista and Argentinian Socialist parties on an occasional and less engaged fashion than did his father, who was the old contact person for his neighborhood. In this way, he obtains money, food or the worker’s compensation that is his primary source of income. Given the absence of a disciplinary regime in the form of work-schoolmarriage, and its de-valorization as points of reference, new elements must be recruited to support different definitions of a masculine identity. And, I argue, it is aguante that has become the pivotal point of an alternative morality, used to classify not the category of “youth” but that of the pibes. Aguante, a term that is closely associated with the slang used in cheers and chants at soccer games,13 is the central value of the pibes’ masculine world. It refers to courage, to the value of moral and physical strength. It is a harangue, a war cry, and a demand. To have aguante is to not retreat, nor flee, nor complain. It is to bear pain and everything that provokes it. It is to accept challenges, even when one finds oneself in inferior situations. Confrontations at soccer games, in the dance hall or neighborhood, participating in risky activities (such as robbery or “combats” between opposing fans), and the use of drugs and alcohol are all situations where aguante and, by consequence, virility are put into question. To demonstrate that he has aguante, Mario tattooed on his own forearms, with ink and a homemade poker, the names of his daughter and Gilda (a cumbia singer) (Mario is the president of one of her fan clubs). The tattoos are done in the colors of San Lorenzo,

the soccer team that he is a fan of. To have emblazoned on oneself the colors of a soccer team is not so much a form of identification as a badge, a way of taking sides in a markedly decided fashion. The colors signify for him the very “passion” that his daughter and Gilda inspire in him. This is a passion that is experienced neither in Catholic or romantic terms, but rather by means of gestures, values and sentiments that are collectively lived with others in San Lorenzo. “Passion” is the highest level of “sentiment”, ineffable, it demonstrates itself through gestures. There is no “passion” without aguante, and the motor of aguante is in turn the passion that is given expression at soccer games by Mario, as a fan, in cantitos (songs sung to cheer on his team), in “combat” (physical confrontations with fans of other teams), and by “following” (going to all the games even if it means traveling to other cities, to cheer for the team even when it loses, to make banners for display at the stadiums, etc.). If for men like Mario’s father “sacrifice” was a pillar upon which he erected his masculinity (that is by means of the combination of work, deferred consumption, and savings towards the well-being of his family), then the moral leitmotif that now sustains the masculinity of the pibes is aguante. It is not, however, simply a question of semantic substitution. One can not appear in the terms of the other, because each is different and a result of distinct configurations of quotidian circumstances. There is a time when Mario, momentarily, ceases to be a pibe. It occurs the moment he begins to be a father. According to him, his daughter “rescued” him by which he means that he has escaped la joda (drugs), the constant consumption of alcohol, and illicit activities that could lead to imprisonment. He has assumed a different level of responsibility, which is usually associated with entering the world of work. It is possible for somebody else to “rescue” you, as for example, a child or a beloved wife, or one can rescue oneself, as in, “I rescued myself”. “Rescatate!” (“rescue yourself”) is also an admonition, an imperative that pibes use with other pibes who they feel are exceeding limits. As we can see in the case of Mario, pibe is not a complete or total identity, as indeed, he who is rescued is not completely transformed into an adult man along the lines of his father. And even “rescued”, the crux of Mario’s paternal morality continues to be aguante, it determines the way that he goes about procuring sustenance for his daughter, raises and educates her, all without feminine assistance.

13 José Garriga Zucal, “El aguante: prácticas violentas e identidades de género masculino en un grupo de simpatizantes de fútbol argentino”, Undergraduate thesis (Social Anthropology), Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires University, 2000. 14Quoted in José Bellas, “Caminando por el lado salvaje”, Sí, Clarín, 12 January 2001, p. 7. Pablo Lescano, inhabitant of one of the poorest villas of the greater Buenos Aires, is considered by the media as the “creator” of the cumbia villera. The group Flor de Piedra was formed by him in August 1999, and a few months later, he also began to lead the group Damas Gratis, which he had created. 15 Allusion to drugs. See fig. 3. 16 As in “ladies nights”, when women enter free of charge. 17 Bailanta, is a non-native term (used by the media, some analysts, and a large segment of the population) for designating not only certain musical genres, but also the places where these are played and danced. And as an aesthetic adjective it designates those who by association with these styles and places are considered grotesque, laughable, wily, vulgar, and of little creativity. See Alejandra Cragnolini, “Reflexiones acerca del circuito de promoción de la música de la ‘bailanta’ y de su influencia en la creación y recreación de estilos”, Actas de las IX Jornadas Argentinas de Musicología y VII Conferencia Anual de la A.A.M, Buenos Aires, Instituto Nacional de Musicología ‘Carlos Vega’, 1998; Jorge Elbaum, “Los bailanteros. La fiesta urbana de la cultura popular”, in Mario Margulis (ed), La cultura de la noche. La vida nocturna de los jóvenes en Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Espasa Hoy, 1994, p. 181-210. 18 Marta Dillon, “Lona, cartón y chapa”, Las/12, Página 12, año 3, n. 162, 18 May 2001, p. 3. 19 Alejandro Frigerio, “‘Negros’ y ‘Blancos’ en Buenos Aires: Repensando nuestras categorías raciales”, Jornadas “Buenos Aires Negra: Memorias, representaciones y prácticas de las comunidades Afro”, Buenos Aires, Centro de Museos de Buenos Aires, 2002. 20 Helena Wendel Abramo, Cenas Juvenis. Punks e darks no espetáculo urbano, São Paulo, Editora Página Aberta & ANPOCS, 1994, p. 101. 21 Sergio Tonkonoff , “Desviación, diversidad e ilegalismos: comportamientos juveniles en el Gran Buenos Aires – un estudio de caso”, Delito y Sociedad, n. 9, Buenos Aires, 1991.

Contents Contents

8 8

Print Print

Send Send email email

Articles Aguanten los Pibes Chorros! “In the dance clubs I can’t be in your face, but in the demos that I do for my friends in the neighborhood, the phrases are complete. That is when I go all out and sing, ‘Aguante los pibes chorros’” (Pablo Lescano)14

Figure 3. “La vanda más loca” album’s cover, illustrated with an anthropomorphized flower that rises from a stone of drug. The flower also follows villero aesthetic: (cap, dark glasses and the marihuana cigarette). The illustration eventually became the band’s logo. http://www.muevamueva.com/grupo/flordepie dra/fotos.htm (downloaded 22 September 2004). Figure 2. “Las Manos arriba” album’s cover showing villero aesthetic (male long hair, cap, naked chest, a gun and a marihuana cigarette). http://www.muevamueva.com/grupo/los pibeschorros/fotos/galeria1.htm (downloaded 22 September 2004). The “pibes chorros” (the thieving pibes) are the heroic characters of the cumbia villera, favorite subjects of this laudatory poetry of the groups Flor de Piedra (Flower of Stone15 ), Pibes Chorros, and Damas Gratis (Ladies Free16 ). The singers, in their performances, shout, “Vamo’ lo’ pibes chorros” (“Let’s go, the thieving pibes”), or “Aguanten lo’ pibe’ chorros”. Note that, as we saw with Mario, it is not a case of celebrating a unique hero, an ideal individual, but rather a collective. It is the “pibes”, as a group, that represents as a whole the masculine values of the cumbia villera. Pibes are the real villeros, “black”, thieves, vagrants, and crazies. They are the exact inverse of the “yuta” (police) and the “conchetos” (middle and upper class youths that are associated with other kinds of music and styles). They are both the subjects of and the audience for the poetry villera.

Cumbia, a musical form originated in Colombia, was introduced in Argentina in the 1960s. The genre is not by any means homogenous, having many regional and stylistics variations. In Argentina, a dominant version of cumbia emerged during the 1980s, gaining popularity through the mass media as part of a category of music known as bailanta.17 By the 1990s, a production and distribution network was put in place, especially by record companies (Leader and Magenta), television and radio programs (many from local or neighborhood FM transmitters which were not legally registered), special publications, and various Internet sites. Between August and December of 1999, a dozen cumbia villera groups emerged providing evidence and permitting the construction of a certain type of world for young people of the poorest neighborhoods of Buenos Aires and the greater Buenos Aires area. These are not a poor that consider themselves as such, at least not in the sense of being needy and unfortunate, but rather people who take up, positively, that for which they are stigmatized. The cumbia villera does not mask the harsh traces left by poverty but rather underlines them, thematizes them, and converts them into an aesthetic ideal. The adjective villero, used with disdain to designate the inhabitants of the villas– the poorest neighborhoods of a city– is adopted with pride and recuperated as a mark of difference. To be villero, however, in the perspective of the “others”, is worse than being merely poor,

it signifies partaking of and deserving poverty. It is a term used to stigmatize someone as ontologically inferior, incapable of progress. This is why, then, groups of the cumbia villera are made up of individuals who are “black”, have the “face of an Indian”, have a criminal history, or come from particularly infamous villas.18 Popular contemporary musical genres like reggae, rap, or axé, have been able to vindicate blackness as an identity, where blackness or “negritude” refers to an ethnic content. Cumbia villera underlines what “black” signifies in Argentina signifying class, which includes but cannot be reduced to ethnicity— that is, the double signification of being “black” and villero. In Andean, mestizo, and indigenous traces, the imaginary of a white and European Argentina is negated in a play of equivalence between morality and physiognomy. Without denying the importance of phenotype as it relates to negritude, an action that would lead to what Frigerio has called a racist “acromatism”, blackness and whiteness, in the dominant discourses, also are carried “in the soul”; invisible at first, they are verifiable in actions.19 The themes played out in the cumbia villeraindiscriminate consumption of drugs and alcohol, robbery, vagrancy, unrepressed sexuality- confirm the stereotype. They, in the same way as punks, as surmised by Abramo, “take upon themselves the negative perception crystallized by society with respect to poor youth, trying to make explicit their condition, and, at the same time, the character of prejudice: ‘Yes, we are poor, ugly, without opportunities, dangerous’.”20 In the cumbia villera we find a romanticization of a time without rules, when work, saving, and sacrifice are replaced by robbery, spending, and idleness. Far from being considered the culminating point of legitimacy in a system of socially defined roles and a means of economic sustenance, work appears as a source of exploitation and, above all, as an activity belonging properly to imbeciles. Taken negatively, the lyrics of the cumbia villera show how far away is the world of work and spending, associated with legitimate masculinity. They express the conviction that such a world is not a viable alternative, at least in the present. It is important to make clear that the lyrics do not pretend to express widespread tendencies, or total identities. The emphasis on idleness and robbery appear as strategies in a context where work no longer is the pivotal point for a legitimate masculinity, but work has not yet completely lost its positive value. In the lyrics, the place of robbery in everyday life is reconstructed and

Contents Contents

9 9

Print Print

Send Send email email

Articles legitimized. To steal, in the villas, is transformed almost into a natural practice, common for obtaining resources, even to the point of being considered, at least in song, as a “profession”: “We are five thieving friends by profession/ We don’t steal from the poor because we are not small-time thieves/ We look for la fija (the best opportunity) and we enter into a bank/ We peel down the irons and everyone to the ground.” “Somos cinco amigos chorros de profesión/ No robamos a los pobres porque no somos ratones/ Buscamos la fija y entramos a un banco/ Pelamos los fieros y todos abajo” (Los Pibes Chorros, “Los Pibes Chorros”, Las manos arriba, 2001) They steal from the “rich” and not from the “poor”, not because of an intra-class solidarity but because the former are the ones with money. In the morality of the villas, robbery is acceptable or not, depending on who the victim is. Stealing from those who are known or belong to the neighborhood is not acceptable. This of course does not mean that robberies do not occur within the villas, or among neighbors, because they do, nor does it mean that there is an ethic of social banditry in place, because there is not. Nobody steals to later give to the poor a la Robin Hood. They steal, where there is money, and they are men enough, they have aguante enough, to assume the risk, even of armed robbery. In that way the value of money is measured by the quantity accumulated, but especially by the way it is obtained, which speaks, definitively, to the qualities of he who obtain it. The valorization of robbery signals the breakdown of legitimate livelihood (namely work) and puts forth robbery as one possibility among others, and not merely as a happenstance or an accident in the daily life of some people. There exists, then, a certain legitimization of robbery, that makes explicit an evaluative logic that does not aspire to be universal. Tonkonoff shows that there are native categories that inscribe within the symbolic realm the fact that more or less everyone combines legal and illegal activities in making a living, in constructing their ways of life, in spaces where state laws do not organize relationships.21 However, at the same time, the villeros recognize that robbery is seen in a bad light. The “defense” of robbery in the lyrics implies a re-editing of the association between poor youth and delinquency, but it is not a completed

project. What is looked for is not a complete identification with the stigma of a thief, although his courage and aguante are valued. What is raised high as a banner, “los pibes chorros”, the heroes of the villero world, defined in a way markedly distinct from the “bad person” of bourgeois law, is not offered as an ethical model to be followed as such. The frequent mention of weapons in the songs, for instance, has a specific meaning. It can be read as a rhetorical attempt at constructing of a model of masculinity, once extraordinary for being illegal (in the past, in the poorer areas of Argentina, this normative vision was more common). A “real” man today has to be prepared for a shoot-out with the police, with other inhabitants of the villa, or with the persons being robbed. For this definition of masculinity, death is always a possibility, it is the climax of a bravery that is best expressed in a shout of affirmation and strength: “Aguante los pibes chorros!” In this sense, far from being a transitory state, a threshold to adulthood or maturity, the pibes are already completely men, fully formed. The use of weapons and drugs, and their particular sociability do not constitute an apprenticeship, or a rite of passage toward a more complete masculinity, as much as a set of practices that define the pibe as they already are. The time which regulates the pibes, and is celebrated in the cumbia villera, is a time foreign to the discipline of school and work, a time that is neither controlled nor managed. The diurnal succession of day and night, the weekly succession of days, does not regulate activities or mark off periods of rest. On the contrary, more than watches and almanacs, it is the effect of drugs and alcohol, which are consumed at any time of any day, that delimit the border between wakefulness and sleep. In this way, the villeros seize time as property. The day, and the night, belongs to them: “The cumbia sounds/ and the drums/ all of the villerio is partying/ bring wine, a lot of beer/ because the day is ours and today we party./ Since there are no coins/ nor a changuita/ it rains, I will stay at home/ put on a little Colombian cumbia/ and let it accompany the noise of the tin roof.” “Suena la cumbia/ y los tambores/ todo el villerio está de fiesta,/ traigan el vino, mucha cerveza/ que el día es nuestro y hoy se festeja./ Como no hay monedas/ ni una “changuita”/ encima llueve, me quedo en casa,/ poné una cumbia colombianita/ que la acompaña el ruido de las chapas.” (“Cumbia Chapa”, Meta

Güacha Lona, Cartón y Chapa, 2000) The lack of work, which appears in its lowest denomination and lowest value, barely as a “changuita” that is good for a few coins, is not lamented. On the contrary, time, whose availability is absolute, is configured into an uninterrupted idleness and a neverending party. We should not interpret this, however, as a romanticization of the lack of work or even as a situation desired by the villeros. What the song registers is the fact that work is no longer an activity considered the most important and around which everyday life is organized. Work is not the most important foundation for the construction of masculinity. From the lyrics of the cumbia villera emerges the breakdown of the association of idleness and spending with productive and remunerated labor, making the latter appear separate from the former, marking a conceptual rupture with productivity as the organizing principle of time and space. In this construction, the consumption of drugs and alcohol (in the same way as robbery) come to occupy a space where we would expect to see work. This operates at two levels. On one level, it represents a step toward adult life (no longer marked by entry into the labor market and the formation of a family). The transition to adulthood is viewed from the perspective of an idleness different from that of infancy. On another level, it is an important part of the construction of a certain conception of virility, the virtue of “having aguante” sufficient for the collective consumption of substances, defining a masculine space of sociability. This is the way that alcohol is consumed among friends on the street corner: “The pitcher continued to be passed from mouth to mouth/ and getting drunk we continued to drink from that crazy pitcher./ We started to see cartoons/ and all dancing was… Out of control!!!!/ Everyone jump, on your heads/ jump everybody/ things are now out of control…” “La jarra seguía pasando de boca en boca,/ y mareados seguimos tomando, de esta jarra loca./ Empezamos a ver, dibujitos animados/ y todo el baile quedó... Descontrolado!!!!/Salten todos, de la cabeza,/ salten todos,/ pintó el descontrol.” (Flor de Piedra, “La jarra loca”, La vanda más loca, 1999) Inversely, to consume alcohol and drugs alone is something proper to ratones (stingy or self-centered persons) or to someone not man enough to aguantar the effects of the alcohol and drugs, who becomes addicted, who does not derive

Contents Contents

10 10

Articles collective enjoyment, or someone who is out of control: “Look how he is/ abandoned alone in the corner/ smoking and drinking alcohol/ ruining his life/ No longer can you kick it with the gang/ go to the soccer games to yell with the fans/ you who had girls there/ now are alone because you fell asleep (…) that girl hit you bad/ and now you are without strength (re pancho) and alone…” “Míralo cómo se ve/ tirado solo en la esquina/ fumando y tomando alcohol/ arruinándose la vida/ Ya no te cabe patear con la banda/ ir a la cancha a gritar con la hinchada/ vos que a las minas tenías ahí/ solo quedaste y eso fue por dormir/ (...) Esa minita te pegó muy mal/ y ahora re pancho solo te quedás” (Yerba Brava, “Arruinado”, Cumbia Villera, 1999) In this song, which is like a fable, the failure to control the use of alcohol and drugs reveals a specific morality at play. The protagonist used to participate in the activities of the pibes. He had a group of friends with whom he spent time, played soccer, went to the stadium to “follow” his team. Women would die to be with him. Now, because of one of them, he is alone and “abandoned”. He succumbed, he could not aguantar a woman treating him badly and drugs and alcohol leave him without strength (“re pancho”). In the celebration of being “out of control” there is an implicit idea of control, of self-control that is more important when things around one are out of control. Aguante constitutes the limit that never should be transgressed, because to do so implies the loss of masculinity, even death.

FINAL REFLECTIONS Given the context of impoverishment that has affected half of the population of Argentina, and the absence of disciplinary regimes of work-school-marriage as a point of reference for the construction of identities, new elements have come to sustain definitions of masculinity among the young. The limits and rules that work, family and school gave to previous generations have ceased to have the validity that they once had (although they have not been completely de-valorized). They have been substituted by aguante, the moral pillar now defining the masculinity of the pibes. This involves a differential use of time, the passion for a certain soccer club, the consumption of drugs and alcohol, the robbery. . All practices that frame, moreover, space, the border between friend and foe, and legitimate and illegitimate gestures. In this way, we see, that the definition of pibe is not constructed as an intermediate phase between childhood and adulthood, nor does it seek to be grounded in a contraposition of age groups. The pibes are completely men, and what defines them is the newly valorized moral quality of aguante.

Fig.4. Flor de Piedra (identified with white t-shirts showing the band’s logo) in a villa with other pibes. Note the carriage used to pick up cardboard in the streets, at the center of the image. http://www.muevamueva.com/grupo/flordepiedra/images/foto06.jpg (downloaded 22 September 2004).

Print Print

Send Send email email

Contents Contents

11 11

Print Print

Send Send email email

Articles Children of the Mountains: Representations of the Igorot in Philippine Picture Postcards and Print Adverts1 Anna Christie Villarba-Torres She teaches literature and media studies courses in both undergraduate and graduate levels at the College of Arts and Communication (University of the Philippines, Baguio City). Her interests include visual culture, translation (English to Filipino and Filipino to English) and children's literature. She collects postcards and stamps.

Abstract During the colonial period, the photograph, and its companion, the postcard, was used to exoticise the Igorot, a collective term used for the inhabitants of north Luzon in Philippines. The article argues that postcards, print advert and other media forms of and on the Igorot youth sought a specific representation of these peoples. The use of youthful subjects reinforced the colonial label of the exotic, even at times the erotic. But do the present-day agencies of the media allow Igorot youth to express their social agency? Or do they, like the earlier forms of media, seek to capture them within limiting frames? The article looks at both colonial and contemporary representations of the Igorot in specific areas of the visual media.

Colonial History and the Kodak Zone Of all the modes of representation, the photograph is the one most easily assimilated into the discourse of knowledge and truth, it being thought of as an “unmediated simulacrum, a copy of what we consider real”.2 However, distortion of reality may likewise be present in the photograph. As one enters the Kodak zone, the very act of framing provides “the illusion of truth” that effectively masks “the mechanics of deceit”,3 conveying the “workings of order outside their frames”.4 Utilizing Barthean semiology as my mode of inquiry, I will interrogate vintage postcards on Igorot youth (the photos, captions and dedications) that proliferated during the American colonial period to illustrate the tensions involved in the dialectics between history and culture. I feel the choice of topic is doubly charged for two primary reasons. First, the postcard by itself is “the pinnacle of commodification... and a powerful [bearer] of colonial ideology where subjects are removed from their contexts and placed under the viewer’s gaze”.5 The postcard, for the photographer is a cultural commodity to be mastered and marketed, the “perfect find” for the tourist who transmits the objectified image and completes the imagined representation via an articulation to a third party, thanks to the writing space provided by the postcard. Second, Igorot, the collective term used for the inhabitants of north Luzon, Cordillera, Philippines is a highly

politicized term. Hence the Igorot youth as a distinct category lends an element of interest and concern in the context of Philippine colonial history, i.e., the grand American design in the race for empire, and the unraveling of such design up until today. I will argue that the postcard, print advert and other media forms of and on the Igorot youth are misrepresentations. The use of youthful subjects reinforces the colonial label of the exotic, even erotic, as some visuals, captions and dedications illustrate. Leapfrogging the colonial past, I also hope to map the extent to which presentday media are allowing Igorot youth to express their social agency that would enable them to go beyond colonial frames, and establish themselves in a limited space as Filipino youth ready to meet the demands of an increasingly globalizing world.

When Candid Equals Commodification Since the first colonial masters, the Spanish conquistadores were unable to Christianize and thus colonize the Igorots, these mountain peoples were relegated to the margins of Philippine history and culture as barbaros and paganos. The Spanish colonizers emphasized the Igorots’ difference from the lowland Filipinos they were breeding to constitute the colonial society.6 The imagined highland-lowland tension created by the colonizers to further

1 All images of postcards are from Jonathan Best, Philippine Picture Postcards 1900-1920, Manila, Bookmark, Inc., 1994 and A Philippine Album, Makati, Bookmark Inc., 1998. 2 Michael J. Shapiro, The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography and Political Analysis, Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin Press, 1988, p. 124. 3 Benito Vergara, Displaying Filipinos, Quezon City, University of the Philippines Press, 1995, p. 10. 4 Vicente Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Philippine History, Quezon City, Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000, p. 83. 5 Vergara, Displaying Filipinos, p. 14. 6 William Henry Scott, The Discovery of the Igorots, revised edition, Quezon City, New Day Publishers, 1987, p. x. 7 Ibid., p. 7. 8 Rafael, White Love and Other Events, p. 83. 9 Jonathan Best, Philippine Picture Postcards 1900-1920, Manila, Bookmark, Inc., 1994, p. 1. 10 Ibid., pp. 1 and 4. 11 Rafael, White Love and Other Events, p. 81. 12 Best, Philippine Picture Postcards, p. 3.

Contents Contents

12 12

Print Print

Send Send email email

Articles 13 Patricia Afable, “Nikimalika: The Igorots of the Early Twentieth Century Fairs: A Chronology and Name Lists,” The Igorot Quarterly (February 2001) [Draft Copy] p. 1.

marginalize the Igorots is captured in figure 1. “Typical Manila Girl and her

14 Best, Philippine Picture Postcards, p. 103. 15 Carlos Bulosan, America is in the Heart, Rep. Ed. Mandaluyong: Cacho Hermanos Inc., n.d., p. 67

Typical Manila Girl and her Uncivilized Sister Uncivilized Sister” illustrates the contrast between a Christianized and thus civilized female youth with a savage, unconverted heathen. The word “sister” lends an added touch of irony because it establishes a link that is nonetheless absent. Notably, the postcards’ design strengthens the non-linkage. The postcard is a double vignette, two medium shots individually framed in ovals that will never intersect. Also the ovals reflect the creation of a distinction between lowland and highland Filipinos which “contrasted submission, conversion, and civilization on the one hand, with paganism and savagery on the other”.7 America, newcomer in the race for empire, inherited this concept and capitalized on this difference. The American colonial eye, as evidenced by the camera, perceived the Igorot as the pure tribe conveniently thrust in the grand scheme of manifest destiny. Conceptualized as a “modernizing benevolent mission”,8 American colonization sought to save and civilize the Igorot, especially the youth, from the clutches of ignorance.

16 Shapiro, The Politics of Representation, p. 136. Igorotte Backpackers By 1907, postal officials agreed on a standard format: the front was for the picture, while the back was divided into two sections, one for the address and the other for the message.9 This is the postcard format we know today. The arrival of the Americans in 1898 impacted greatly on the production of picture postcards in the Philippines. Apart from a flood of American soldiers, teachers, and tourists into the country, a lesser-known event was a bill by the United States Congress lowering the postal rate for postcards by fifty percent. Almost overnight, “the postcard fad, already in full swing in Europe, came to America and the Philippines,” and by the first decade of the twentieth century became a “highly internationalized business.” Although a majority of the publishers were based in Manila, there was competition from American firms. American entrepreneurs capitalized on the exotica of the latest colonial “possession” and easily came up with a highly marketable “Philippine series”.10

17 Marianne Frei, http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/eco 13.htm, p. 2 18 Ibid., p. 3. 19 Marc Gaba, “Postcard Dreaming”, Mabuhay, June 2003, p. 54. 20 Ibid. 21 http://www.aenet.org/ifugao/barbie.htm 22 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: MultiCulturalism and the Media. London: Routledge, 1994, p. 322. 23 Jean Baudrillard, “The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?” in Simoun Malpas (ed.), Postmodern Debates, New York, Palgrave Publications, 2001, p. 68. 24 Yasmin Mapua-Tang, Diliman, Quezon City. Interview, 23 January 2003. 25 Ibid. 26 Baudrillard, “The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?”, p. 65. 27 John Friske, Understanding Popular Culture, London: Routledge, 1991, p. 181.

The postcard, introduced in Europe in the latter part of the nineteenth century, was an economical and convenient way to communicate. One side was for the message, the other for the address. Soon after, pictures were added to the message side in the 1890s. People bought them as souvenirs and collected them in albums. For example, figure 2 is a postcard of two young Igorot male backpackers who, as the caption claims, were also brothers. A white mans voice among the Igorrotes

Figure 3 portrays the indelible mark of progress through the phonograph. Symbolically, the colonial master did not need to be present to assert his authority. His “voice” is effectively relayed through the musical gadget. In the photo, we find

Contents Contents

13 13

Print Print

Send Send email email

Articles the primitive subjects, huddled around the master’s voice, awed. The phonograph becomes not just a mere agent of civilization but a powerful reminder of the colonial presence. Another effective strategy employed by the Americans to pacify the mountain peoples was education. A mission school shown in figure 4 was only one of many the Americans built in the hinterlands. Note the star spangled banner in the background. In the photo, the Igorot girls were made to wear skirts but the boys were allowed to wear the traditional Gstring or loincloth. If the ultimate aim of colonization was education, why the double standard in gender relations? One wonders if the colonizers simply did not want to violate their own moral propriety.

A mission school The Igorots were also compared to the Indians of North America. Igorot resistance against Spain, their head hunting practices, and their muscular and tattooed bodies evoked fantasies of noble savages as natural allies of white colonizers in the tropical frontier.11 Figure 5 exemplifies this concept. The postcard is an example of a “real photo” card. Cards of this sort became popular in the late 1890s when Kodak sold photobacking paper specifically for shooting

pictures with their new USD2.00 camera. The cards were black and white, usually in sepia shade, with printed postcard backs, in contrast to the regular commercial cards printed from plates from a master photograph or drawing.12 But that was about as real as it got. The young Kalinga warrior, probably not more than 16 years old, is superimposed on a white backdrop. The ground his splayed feet stand upon also appears artificial, as the wide expanse is conspicuously cropped. The photographer attempts to make the full shot of the subject impressive. The young Igorot warrior holds up his spear, his body taut, as if ready to spring to his feet in defense of his colonial ally. But his head tilts a bit, his long mane deliberately draped over his shoulder. These, plus his disoriented look spell unfamiliarity with his environment. His dazed expression reflects the uprooting of the native from his natural state, only to be thrust into a completely alien experience of posing before a camera in an equally alien space of the studio. The caption beginning with “Number 240” seals his objectification. The demand for postcards like figure 6 increased when the Saint Louis Fair took off in 1904, marking the centennial anniversary of the acquisition of the Louisiana territory.13 This fair was followed by more “spectacles” in other parts of the United States. The mother and child subjects in figure 6 are Ag-onai and Washington, a.k.a. Joe who was born in the Igorotte Village in Seattle, Washington. This Bontoc woman was brought to America for the Alaska-YukonPacific Exposition of 1909.14 The sender of the postcard is Mary who writes to her mother:

Ag-o-nai and her baby

Young Kalinga

July 10th This baby was born here. Her name is Washington. Dear Mother, Here is the genuine thing. Joe and her mama out for a walk. In six months from now in Manila (sic). Note the smile on Joe. Love, Mary

Mary’s infectious excitement is evident in her brief note to her mother. A Bontoc woman had given birth to a baby girl in an Igorotte Village that had been transported lock, stock, and barrel to Seattle, Washington. Ironically, even the natural act of childbirth is sensationalized and made part of the entertainment package. It is the “genuine thing” for the viewing pleasure of the colonial masters in their own turf, but at the expense of the Igorot mother and her daughter. Mary’s elation is probably no different from the reaction of the handlers of the endangered Philippine eagle Pag-asa (Hope) when she gave birth to an eaglet in Malagos, Davao, south Philippines. Ag-o-nai and Pag-asa and their offspring are rare, unique, and fit for display.

Fetishizing the Igorot Youth Carlos Bulosan, acclaimed Filipino writer narrates in his autobiographical novel, America is in the Heart: “My clothes began to wear out. I was sick from eating what the traders discarded. One day an American lady tourist asked me to undress before her camera, and gave me ten centavos for doing it. I had found a simple way to make a living. Whenever I saw a white person in the market with a camera, I made myself conspicuously ugly, hoping to earn ten centavos. But what interested the tourists more were the naked Igorot women and children. Sometimes they took pictures of the old men with G-strings. They were not interested in Christian Filipinos like me. They seemed to take a delight in photographing young Igorot girls with large breasts and robust mountain men whose genitals were nearly exposed, their G-strings bulging large and alive (67).”15

Young girls spinning thread

Figure 7 could well be a graphic illustration of Bulosan’s astute observations as an adolescent growing up in Baguio, a city built by the Americans as a colonial hill station, which became a favorite R and R destination of American tourists and servicemen, as well as affluent Filipino lowlanders. The photo is

Contents Contents

14 14

Print Print

Send Send email email

Articles a full body shot of three pubertal Igorot maidens engrossed in their work. But emphasis is not on the traditional art of spinning thread, rather on the developing bodies of the three subjects. The fact that the shot is being passed off as candid heightens the erotic quality of the photo. The unmistakable hint of a frown, the crease on the forehead, and the knitted eyebrows however reveal the uneasiness of the young girls being made to pose, though not quite directly before the camera.

to exploit the subject in the name of civilization. However, unwittingly perhaps, the Igorot male body also becomes the object of erotic pleasure or voyeurism for the then suppressed pleasures of the American female gaze. Through the vintage photographs presented, we see how the postcard medium has successfully “fulfilled its role as a souvenir and keepsake” that is highly accessible and affordable and whose referent, i.e. the Igorot youth, are “taken as real representations” of exoticism and eroticism.16

Print Media, Ecotourism and the Global Studio

Young Igorot woman with traditional lingling earings and tattoos Figure 8 typecasts the subject as a “Tattooed Igorrote Woman.” But the subject is actually a young lass who has just begun her rite of passage into traditional society as proven by her unfinished tattoos. Although the caption points to her tattoos as the main feature of this pseudo-ethnologic photo, her budding breasts remain the focal point of the medium shot set against a stark white backdrop. Not surprisingly, the alleged main feature, the tattoos, are cropped. Only the markings of one arm are emphasized while the lower part of the other arm is cut indiscriminately.

Tourism remains the biggest industry in the world and ecotourism is the fastest growing segment in the international market. The Cordillera is home to diverse indigenous peoples and is one of eight Philippine locations chosen by the Unesco as a World Heritage Site, because of its “outstanding value to humanity” (Philippine Daily Inquirer 4 September 2003). According to the Philippine government, it is an “ideal tourist site,” meaning it “generates income through ecotourism while promoting environmental awareness and preservation of the cultural and natural diversity at the same time”.17 Yet ecotourism is a highly controversial term. It fails to address issues of commercialization and erosion of cultures, environmental destruction, biopiracy, etc. In fact, an internationally recognized definition which would clarify what criteria are to be used to measure the implementation of ecotourism is yet to be formulated.18 So, as the debate rages, print media continues to churn out various misrepresentations of Igorot youth under the banner of tourism.

Young Kalinga warrior upclose The postcard of the young Kalinga warrior could likewise be used in the context of fetish discourse. Here (figure 9) the Igorot male body, represented as a young, virile warrior is displayed in full to highlight the physical differences between the colonial masters and colonized subjects. Barely clad and unshod, the Igorot youth is effectively represented as uncivilized and this provides the master the opportunity

Dreaming” narrates the reporter’s experiences in Kalinga as the province commemorated its celebratory separation from Apayao province. The reporter’s attitudes about Kalinga and her people hardly differ from the colonial exoticization of the native. He writes: “Dear A, It’s Kalinga Day and I’m looking out at a parade. What makes the parade here interesting and strange is that it’s something few are accustomed to: unlike those in Bulacan I grew up watching, the parade here has no saint at the tail-end: pagan as you please....”19 Apparently, the “pagan” label has remained in many a lowlander Filipino media practitioner’s vocabulary and mindset, reinforcing the divide between the so-called Christianized Filipinos and the “primitive” ones. However, the reporter does note signs of progress in an otherwise remote and sleepy town, “Kalinga is changing, that much is clear (signs of development everywhere: construction work, etc.)”20 Surprisingly, he fails to recognize how the Kalinga youth are adapting to these changes. A closer look at figure 10, one of the many photos included in the travelogue, reveals how these youngsters have appropriated the products of consumerism. Their headgear is no longer traditional. Instead they have recycled commercial posters and added feathers and artificial garlands. Even the young boy has not allowed his Tommy Hilfiger underwear (which are probably fake, too) to outdo his native loincloth. Filipino professor and columnist Michael Tan notes that there has been no change in the negative stereotypical images: “...I still have students at [the] University of the Philippines [Diliman], aged 16 and 17, asking if there are still headhunters in northern Luzon, or if tribes in Mindoro [south Luzon] have tails. The exoticization of the native continues because schools and the mass media are not doing enough to correct the stereotypes. At best, articles are patronizing at worst, they are blatantly bigoted, still propagating old myths.” (Philippine Daily Inquirer 8 July 2003).

Pagan paradise Figure 10 captioned “Pagan Paradise” focuses on children performing a “traditional dance.” This photo is part of a travelogue employing the postcard format in Mabuhay, the inflight travel and lifestyle magazine of Philippine Airlines. The travel story, titled “Postcard

Ethnic barbie doll

Contents Contents

15 15

Print Print

Send Send email email

Articles Another form of print media, the print advert illustrates media’s nontranscendence of the imagined cultural identity of the Igorot. Figure 11, “The Ethnic Filipino Barbie Collection” is an advert that also appeared in the Mabuhay. The Barbie doll is more than a pasalubong (gift) of an Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) parent to a daughter. It is the ultimate symbol of American capitalism that commodifies indigenous peoples. Ironically, it is directed at the youth, who at an early age unknowingly absorb this commodification.21 The advert plays up three model Barbies: “in tribal costumes of the northern and southern inhabitants of the Philippines [whose] clothes are made from intricately hand-woven and beaded fabric - the product of two years of extensive research - lending rare value to the popular toy.” The middle Barbie models the Ifugao attire. She is wearing a woven blouse and knee-length skirt embellished with beads. Draped on her shoulder is a scarf of the same material. Her accessories include a headdress, a necklace, and earrings of colorful beads. The Barbie doll already signifies the “hegemony of the Eurocentric gaze”,22 that beauty is defined by western standards. Having Barbie don ethnic costumes and even darkening her synthetic complexion a bit only serve to reinforce this hegemony.

Youth, Space and Simulacra In this final section, I will focus on how media “promotes” youth-related issues to the extent that the promotion of information yields the production of decoys or the likenesses of reality meant to lure us away from the essence of issues. Hence info promo becomes the issue. Informed by Jean Baudrillard’s concept of simulacrum, or the notion of superficial likeness, I will show that as we continue with “the involution and encrustation of [the] youth-related event in and by information, the closer we approach the live and real time, the further we go in this direction”.23 President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (PGMA) has, since 2002, identified the restoration of Ifugao’s rice terraces as one of her flagship projects. Ifugao Governor, Teodoro Baguilat Jr., has been active in reviving the traditional rice rituals to help save the terraces from deterioration. The National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) has funded a video documentary called “LEGACY: Philippine World Heritage Sites,” which includes the Cordillera rice terraces. This project aims to “create the necessary public awareness, especially among the youth, about the richness and

diversity of the country’s natural and cultural heritage, and explain the urgent need for their preservation” (Philippine Daily Inquirer 14 September 2003).

communication program, and its production arm, the Probe Media Foundation Incorporated (PMFI) is giving Igorot youth the chance to shoot, write and narrate news-style videos on national television through the 30-minute program “KNN: Kabataan (Youth) News Network” (figure 13). In 2003, the UNICEF selected 30 young people in the Philippines for a week-long training in video production and child rights advocacy in order to: “[1] promote a culture sensitive to children’s rights and [2] enable children to express themselves and participate meaningfully in society, particularly through TV” (Philippine Daily Inquirer 7 September 2003).

Ifugao youth

The Mountain Province bureau is composed of four high school students from Sagada and Bontoc and a bureau manager, an information officer of the Philippine Information Agency (PIA). The young reporters are considered volunteers while their manager receives a minimal honorarium for supervising the team.24

Another step in the same direction is apparent in figure 12, a newspaper photo of an Ifugao boy with a wooden idol on his shoulder. The caption asserts that the revitalization of the woodcarving trade in Ifugao has “allowed Ifugao children to reclaim their roots.” The power of print media is so arresting that the illusion of a hopeful future for the Ifugaos is magnified. But the intensity created by the photograph is only imaginary. The reality simulated by the photo and caption draws us further away from the truth, creating instead a new truth that is essentially inaccurate and totally misleading. The photo is actually an accompaniment to a news report headlined “State of the regions report: Poverty rift widens” (Philippine Daily Inquirer 27 July 2003). Interestingly, the 2003 regions report points to a “glaring provincial divide” in the Cordillera. The National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) claims government has been more successful in reducing urban poverty (at 13.1 percent compared to 49.9 percent in rural areas). Development continues to be concentrated in the Baguio-Benguet area while the rest of the provinces, especially Ifugao lag behind (Philippine Daily Inquirer 27 July 2003, p. 14). And since the photo is the more visually appealing media form, its simulacrum effect is sealed. The real issue of poverty and its effects on the youth is no longer projected. Hence the more we move further away from it, the more it is made to appear non-existent. What stands out is the illusion of providing the youth with space. Their deterritorialized space becomes all the more pronounced. Of late, however, abundant space is being provided for the youth of the Mountain Province and five other places in the country. The United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund’s (UNICEF)

The Probe or PMFI bureau insists that it is encouraging the group to “veer away from the formulaic method of news writing and reporting to give way to the true voice of the youth.” Even the UNICEF, it adds, reminds the adult production staff to “allow the kids to commit mistakes along the way”.25 Yet, surprisingly, the programme mimics the leading promoter of images and simulacra, the Cable News Network (CNN). Perhaps the choice is a mere pun, a marketing strategy, or better yet, a countering device of ridicule that should first be clarified with the young people involved.

KNN logo Baudrillard notes that in the information production business, “the launch is what counts, the impact on the end results are so uncertain that one frequently hears no more about them”.26 KNN was launched on the private network ABSCBN News Channel (ANC) and government-owned National Broadcasting Network (NBN) last November 2003. (Figure 13) The pilot episode highlighted the program’s objectives and the composition of the six bureaus. However, one detail that stood out was the very well articulated spiels of the citified young couple who served as overall commentators. This early, the

Contents Contents

16 16

Print Print

Send Send email email

Articles privileging of the youth from the center could already be gleaned from the show’s format. Another significant observation was the grammatical flaws in the scripts of the Mountain Province reporters, reflecting the sorrier state of private and public education outside the center. For information to play an integral part in empowering the marginalized Cordillera youth, the medium, in this case TV, has to be effectively utilized. In other words, information technology for and of the youth should be seen in the larger context of education. Scripts of the next two episodes reveal the Igorot youth reporters’ concerns: first, “tracing [their] roots and second, appreciating [their] culture.” Their mini segment on this was classified Saludo Kami (We Salute You) and showcased the Children’s Summit which was part of the celebration of Bontoc’s Foundation Day. The next script carried the show’s main feature, “the effects of tribal conflict on schoolchildren.” The report emphasized that in human conflicts within the Cordillera, school children are the

helpless victims because “their studies are disrupted.” In other words, we learn straight from the mouths of the babes that these youngsters place a high premium on their education, something adult leaders and funding institutions should seriously take note of. The concept of a news network can be taken as a positive step taken by the UNICEF and its partners in the Philippines. But its global agenda on child rights advocacy and information dissemination through popular media forms like television need further clarification. Plans are underway to add three more bureaus in Baguio, Negros Oriental, and Saranggani by this year. Would this merit another launch? Is the launch really what matters most? PMFI Executive Director, Yasmin MapuaTang, admits initial preparations for the show and keeping it going is truly difficult. Likewise she notes that sustainability is the key to the program’s success. Otherwise, the entire exercise becomes a glaring example of how illusory is the

transformative potential of the new information technology and its media agents. In the same fashion, if we stop at airing shows of and for our youth and refuse to listen to them and help them carry out their plans of action, we are in John Fiske’s words, only “incorporating their resistance, their opposition” to the limited space we are allowing media to grant them.27 In the long run, that would make us losers, all.

Contents Contents

17 17

Print Print

Send Send email email

Articles First Chinese and Indians in South Africa Li Anshan

Received his PhD from the Department of History, University of Toronto. Professor at School of International Studies, Peking University, and visiting professor at Menlo College and Center for African Studies, Stanford University. He has publications in The International Journal of African Studies (Boston); The Journal of Modern African Studies (Cambridge); Journal of Religious History (Sydney); and in Chinese academic journals. Author of A History of Chinese Overseas in Africa (Beijing, 2000) and British Rule and Rural Protest in Southern Ghana (New York, 2002), he is interested in African studies, colonialism, comparative nationalism and overseas Chinese studies.

Abstract Soon after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, a new source of labor was sought to meet the increasing demand. Chinese and Indians, either as indentured or as free immigrants, quickly spread across the West Indies, Asia-Pacific areas and Africa. This paper makes a comparative study of these two immigrant groups in South Africa at the turn of the century, highlighting their similarities and dissimilarities, and also reflecting upon the wider issue of relations between different immigrant communities in a new place. After the abolition of slavery in the British empire in 1833, China and India became the new suppliers of labor. The first contact between China and Africa started as early as in the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D.220).1 Although the Chinese appeared in South Africa in early times,2 a large group of indentured labor traveled there at the beginning of the twentieth century owing to the shortage of labor in the gold mining industry.3

the Dutch to serve their sentences. The Chinese convicts greatly increased after 1740, the year when Chinese settlers in Batavia were cruelly suppressed by the colonial government. A Chinese convict named Wancho was sent to the Cape on the Arnhem in 1660, probably the first Chinese who settled in Africa. James Armstrong’s work gives us a vivid description of the life of Chinese convicts. Some served their term peacefully and became rich after several years. Some were left behind for years even after they had finished their term just because of red tape, some served as basket makers, fishermen and masons. Mortality among the convicts was high. “Of the 17 Chinese convicts listed on a roll in February 1727, four of them died within two years, as was one other Chinese.”5

The first batch of Chinese mine labourers arrive at Randfontein in June 1906. As soon as Jan van Riebeeck, the leader of the first Dutch settlers in South Africa, arrived with three ships to settle in Table Bay on 6 April 1652, he began thinking of importing some industrious Chinese to the Cape of Good Hope for the “dirtiest and heaviest” work. In his journal entry of 22 April 1652, van Riebeeck mentioned industrious Chinese whom he met in Asia. He repeatedly urged the Council of Dutch East India Company to import slaves as well as free Chinese laborers, but in vain.4 The early Chinese settlers formed a small part of the convicts of different ethnic origins, Indonesians, Javanese, Singhalese, Chinese and Indians, who were sent to the Cape by

1 Sun Yutang, “China and Egypt in Han Dynasty”, Chinese Historical Studies, 1979, 2, p. 142. See also Li Anshan, A History of Chinese Overseas in Africa, Chinese Overseas Publishing House, Beijing, 2000, pp.43-81. 2 James C. Armstrong, “The Chinese at the Cape in the Dutch East Company Period, 1652-1795” (unpublished paper, 1979). The paper was formally published as part of SA Chinese History Project in 1996. 3 Peter Richardson, Chinese Mine Labour in the Transvaal, London, Macmillan, 1982. 4 Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (eds.) The Shaping of South African Society, 1652-1840, Wesleyan University Press, 1989, p.111; M. Wilson and L. Thompson (eds.) The Oxford History of South Africa, Oxford, 1969, pp. 65-66, 193. 5 Armstrong, “The Chinese at the Cape”, p. 6. Huguette Ly-Tyo-Fane Pineo, Chinese Diaspora in Western Indian Ocean, Editions de l’Ocean Indien – Chinese Catholic Mission, 1985, p. 210.

Chinese gold-miners in South Africa were confined to guarded compounds to prevent them migrating to the cities and competing for European job. The miners in this compound have just been corralled by their European overseers. In the early eighteenth century, some Chinese, classified as part of the group called “free blacks” at that time and

6 The term “free blacks” referred to all free people of African and Asian descent. Elphick and Giliomee (eds.) The Shaping of South African Society, pp. 184, 219, 220; Melanie Yap & Dianne Leong Man, Colour, Confusion and Concessions, The History of the Chinese in South Africa, Hong Kong University Press, 1996, pp. 6-9. 7 Armstrong, “The Chinese at the Cape”, p. 13. 8 Elphick and Giliomee (eds.) The

Contents Contents

18 18

Print Print

Send Send email email

Articles “coloured” later, organized as local militia together with some blacks.6 The Chinese began businesses and expanded quickly. Among the early prosperous Chinese was a man from Guangdong Province named “Horloko” who left traces in the Cape records as a goldsmith and interpreter. In his will authored in 1724, he requested the transfer of his property to the leader of the Chinese community in Batavia, and then to his son and daughter in China.7 Several Chinese even became slave owners.8 However, their success caused concern among the Whites in the Cape colony and they sent four delegates to Amsterdam to hand in a petition. The petition listed the unfair deeds of the Chinese and asked the colonial government to restrict the business activities9 of the Chinese competitors.

Peter Richardson Chinese Mine Labour In The Transvaal Between 1814 and 1882, more than 300 Chinese arrived in the Cape colony, Natal, Pietermaritzburg and Port Elizabeth.10 Most of them were artisans and laborers employed by the colonial government. As for the settled Chinese, they gradually established their own businesses. After the South Africa War (so-called “Boer War”) in 1902, reconstruction followed as well as the rapid development of gold mining industry, which needed a large number of laborers. Within more than one year, 299 new companies were set up in the mining industry.11 The mining capitalists suggested that Chinese labor should be introduced. This proposal was quickly adopted and an agreement was reached between the British and Chinese governments. During the period 19041910, about 64,000 Chinese indentured laborers arrived in Transvaal.12 With the indentured labor came some Chinese as free immigrants and they formed an important part of the Chinese community in South Africa. Different from the Indian indentured labor, who chose to stay in South Africa, most of the Chinese workers returned to China after they finished their contracts. At the beginning of the twentieth century, less than 2,500

Chinese remained in South Africa, most of them as free immigrants.13

Shaping of South African Society, p. 209. 9 E.A. Walker, A History of Southern Africa, London, Longmans, 1964, pp. 101-102. 10 Yap and Leong, Colour, Confusion and Concessions, pp. 5-24, Li Anshan, A History of Chinese Overseas in Africa, p. 129. 11 P. C. Campbell, Chinese Coolie Emigration to Countries within the British Empire, London, 1923, p.167.

The Sruggle for Possession The cartoonist D.C.Boonzaier gives white workers' view on the importation of Chinese labour to the Transvaal, 1905

Like the early Chinese, the first Indians were brought to South Africa as convicts and slaves.14 In the nineteenth century, the development of Natal needed a great number of laborers. Two groups of Indians arrived in Natal. The first group came as indentured laborers working in the sugar plantation since 1860.15 Between 1860 and 1866, some 6,445 Indians arrived in Natal from different parts of India, mainly from Madras and south India. Most of them were low-caste Hindus. When the first indentured laborers had completed their contract, they returned to India on the Red Riding Hood with complaints which caught the attention of the Indian authorities. The Government of India forbade further recruitment and immigration was stopped. An enquiry commission was set up under the chairmanship of the Attorney-General, M. H. Gallwey. In order to stop the abuses disclosed by the Indian indentured laborers and to keep a steady supply, the Natal legislature appointed a Protector of Indian Immigrants in 1872. Immigration resumed, and thereafter a steady stream of Indians arrived each year until the Natal scheme was finally terminated by the Indian authorities in 1911.16

12 Their existence in South Africa was short, but two results were undeniable. First, the introduction of Chinese indentured labor contributed towards the gold mining industry of South Africa. Second, their treatment caused repercussions in British politics, e.g. the failure of the Conservative Party in 1906 election. See C. W. De Kiewiet, A History of South Africa: Social and Economic, Oxford University Press, 1972 [1941], p. 165; Yap and Leong, Colour, Confusion and Concessions, p. 129. 13 Yap and Leong, Colour, Confusion and Concessions, p. 177. 14 Elphick and Giliomee (eds.) The Shaping of South African Society, p. 116. 15 Indians were imported to various parts of the British Empire soon after the abolition of slavery: Mauritius 1834, British Guiana and Trinidad 1844, St. Lucia 1856, Grenada 1858. The French colonies of Reunion, Martinique, Guadelope and Guiana, Danish St. Croise and Dutch Surinam followed the practice after the 1860s. 16 J. B. Brain, Christian Indians in Natal, 1860-1911: An Historical and Statistical Study, Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1983, pp. 3-25; Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1990, p. 65; T.R.H. Davenport, South Africa: A Modern History, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1991, pp. 105. 17 Colin Bundy, “The Emergence and Decline of a South African Peasantry,” African Affairs, 71, 285 (October 1972), pp. 369-388; Colin Bundy, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry, Heinemann, London, 1979. 18 Goolam H. Vahed, “The Making of Indian Identity in Durban, 1914-1949,” (PhD Dissertation, Department of History, Indiana University, 1995) pp. 37-47. 19 According to Bhana’s study based on ships’ lists, indentured Indian emigrants

Cutting the flesh.

Contents Contents

Print Print

19 19

Send Send email email

Articles Table I Indians and Africans in the Cane Fields Year

Indians Number

Africans

Percentage

Number

Percentage

1860-61

436

1875-76

5,292

42

7,457

58

1887-88

6,043

72

2,387

28

1895-96

6,632

77

1,989

23

1907-08

10,924

82

2,484

18

1910

18,270

88

2,380

12

1925

11,440

29

27,873

71

1933

8,020

17

40,263

83

1945

4,500

7

55,778

93

Source: Compiled from Goolam H. Vahed, “The Making of Indian Identity in Durban, 19141949,” PhD. Dissertation, Department of History, Indiana University, 1995, pp.35, 71.

Indian indentured laborers came on fiveyear contracts at agreed minimum wages. The figure in Table I indicates an increase of Indians in cane fields from 1860-1910 and a decline afterwards. Before 1910, there was a stable increase both in number and percentage of the Indian laborers in the fields and the majority of the laborers

Chinese Labour C.-B.-(Radical Delegate visiting Transvaal). "My poor man, I suppose those dreadful Chinamen have taken away all your work?" British Workman.-"Don't you make any mistake. guv'nor. For every ten coolies there's a white man gettin' 1pound a day to boss 'em. What I say is LET 'EM ALL COME!" Conservative cartoon of April 1905. The Macmillan-like figure is Sir Henry CampbellBannerman, then leader of the Liberal opposition. The Conservatives are rebutting the opposition claim that the arrival of Chinese labourers in South Africa would threaten the livelihood of the British settlers there.

in the fields were Indian indentured immigrants. Two factors may have contributed to this. Indian indentured laborers were brought to South Africa to meet the shortage of labor. During the 1870s and after, the African peasant economy expanded in South Africa due to increased marketing of commodities such as wool, hides, timber and crops, the purchase or hiring of farmland and its cultivation with the plough, participation in agricultural shows, and the conclusion of business deals with White merchant houses interested in supplying a growing variety and volume of trade goods. Even as the demand for black workers mounted in the mining industry, so did the requirements for African laborers in farms or cane fields, the urban economy stimulating an expansion of agriculture. The Natives Land Act of 1913 was enacted to meet the demand for African labour, to eliminate once and for all the possibility that rural Africans would continue to maintain a self-sufficient peasant existence.17 The act deprived many African peasants of their land, and they, therefore, had to come to either the mining industry to be workers, or to the White farm and cane fields to be laborers instead. What is more, the Indians gradually adapted to local conditions. Those who stayed on and the newcomers (usually members of extended family) preferred to work on their own rather than to sign

to Natal between 1860 and 1902 numbered 95,382. Surendra Bhana, Indentured Indian emigrants to Natal, 1860-1902: A study based on ships’ lists, Promilla & Co., New Delhi, 1991, p. 20; T. R. H. Davenport, South Africa: A Modern History, p. 105. 20 Brain, Christian Indians in Natal, pp. 202, 247. Among them, 2,150 were Christians, including members of the Roman Catholic, Syrian and Protestant churches. 21 Vahed, “The Making of Indian Identity,” p. 47. 22 The Official Year Book of the Union used to list four groups: White, Indian, Colored and African. The position of the Chinese in South Africa was ambiguous. They were grouped into “free blacks”, “colored” and “Asiatic”. During the 19721990 reclassifications, only 11 Indians were reclassified as White, while 67 Chinese were reclassified as White. Yap and Leong, Colour, Confusion and Concessions, p. 319.

Contents Contents

20 20

Print Print

Send Send email email

Articles a contract. This wish was realised because of two other factors, the arrival of another group of Indians, mostly Gujarati traders, and the favorable policy of the local authorities. From the late 1870s, another group of Indians arrived in South Africa bringing with them a long tradition of trade and business. Obviously, they came as a result of both the encouragement from South African authorities and the demand for service created by the Indians who stayed there.

others acquired small pieces of land and grew fruits and vegetables for sale in Durban or Pietermaritzburg.18 In 1875, there were 10,000 Indians in the Colony. At the end of the nineteenth century, the figure increased to 100,000.19 Between 1860 and 1911, 152,184 Indian immigrants “from all parts of India” arrived in Natal.20 There was a local policy to encourage them to settle down. Indians who wanted to stay could get land allocated by the local authorities. And those who were willing to stay for another five-year contract could get a free passage home. As the Indians had completed their contract, some of them stayed in South Africa, either remaining in cane fields, or working as other servants. Relevant statistics reveal that an increasing percentage chose to stay.21

Good sport.

They were generally involved in three kinds of economic activities, and began to emerge as a sizable and separate Indian community in the colony from the beginning of the twentieth century, eventually to outnumber the Whites in Natal. They were good at retail business which triggered a competition with the Whites in Natal, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Others quickly adapted to local life, became involved in a wide range of economic activities, such as shoemaking, cigarette making, clerking, cooking, domestic service or as firemen, laundry workers, jewellery makers, mineral water manufacturers, plumbers, fishermen and tailors. Still

Belongings packed, Chinese labourers depart from the Rand mines.

We may draw a conclusion by stating the similarities and dissimilarities between the Chinese and the Indians in South Africa. Both have a long history of civilization, and have suffered different degrees of colonialism in the modern period. In terms of the history of migration, the obvious similarity is that both Chinese and Indian immigrants were in a strange land with a policy of racial

segregation, facing the same problem of discrimination. Caught in the middle of the Whites and the Africans and grouped as “Asiatic” in the early period, they were both vulnerable to racial discrimination from the very beginning of their settlement. The dissimilarities are also impressive. It is clear that the Indians were regarded as a distinct racial group in South Africa, but the Chinese were not.22 The most important difference lies in the fact that the Indians were far more in number than the Chinese. In 1904, there were 2457 Chinese in the whole of South Africa while there were 15,631 Indians in Durban alone. By 1910, the Chinese decreased to 2399 while Indians increased to 17,010 in Durban in 1911. This difference may be explained by two reasons. First, the Indians were moving within the empire, and thus came across less obstacles regarding migration. Second, the male/female ratio was much higher among the Indians than the Chinese. Another interesting phenomenon is that the Indians in South Africa had more religious congregational places and social organizations than the Chinese. This was due to the fact that the majority of Indians were Hindu, and the rest Muslim, while the Chinese believed in their local religions, which were less formalized and the worship was not systematic except for annual festivals. In addition, more Indian intellectuals came to South Africa who played the role of organizers in the Indian community. In the fight against the apartheid regime, a number of Indians played leadership roles in the struggle and Indians and Chinese united with other Africans and are now enjoying the fruits of the victory.

Figures 1, 2 & 8: Melanie Yap & Dianne Leong Man, Colour, Confusion and Concessions, The History of the Chinese in South Africa, Hong Kong University Press, 1996. Figure 3: Peter Richardson, Chinese Mine Labour in the Transvaal, London, Macmillan, 1982. Figure 4: T. R. H.Davenport, South Africa: A Modern History, Toronto, University of Toronto, 1991. Figure 5 & 7: An English Eye Witness, John Chinaman on the Rand, London, R. A. Everett & Son, 1905. Figure 6: Philip Snow, The Star Raft: China's Encounter with Africa, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988.

Contents Contents

21 21

Print Print

Send Send email email

Articles Thresholds in the history of Medicine in India Amit Ranjan Basu Dr. Basu is a medical graduate and an independent researcher in social psychiatry based in Kolkata. He is currently finishing his doctoral research: From Lunacy to Mental Health: Formation of Psychiatric Knowledge in Colonial India at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He has published both in English and Bengali journals and edited a volume (Agranthita Girindrasekhar, Kolkata, Granthalaya, 2001) of selected Bengali writings by the first non-western psychoanalyst, Dr. Girindrasekhar Bose. Email: [email protected]

Abstract The study of history of medicine in India started during colonial times as a modern system of knowledge. This essay critically observes the emergence of this new discipline, and the way history played a crucial role in representing our healing practices. Most historical narratives talked of the victory and progress of modern medicine over superstitious, underdeveloped and nonscientific indigenous practices. The discipline changed in postcolonial times, when a new genre, posing critical questions to such claims, opened up possibilities for new histories. 1 Richard Grove, ‘Indigenous Knowledge It is through colonialism that we have doing, I mainly focus on readings of and the Significance of South-West India learned to produce histories of medicine. Girindranath Mukherjee’s work as a for Portuguese and Dutch Constructions Before that, I suspect, history was a part representative text, which projected a of Tropical Nature’, Modern Asian Studies of the therapeutic discourses of nationalist desire through the ideas of 30 (1), 1996, pp. 121-143; Ines G. indigenous systems of medicine. I doubt colonial modernity. Then I touch upon Zupanov, ‘Drugs, Health, Bodies and whether these would be considered as similar responses from Islamic scholars, Souls in the Tropics: Medical Experiments ‘histories’ at all. Healers relied on their and finally conclude with the break in Sixteenth Century Portuguese India’, resources of memories and written brought about by recent scholarship in The Indian Economic and Social History materials to choose the effective remedy postcolonial times. Review, 39 (1), 2002, pp. 1-43. and usually would not consider any method started hundreds of years ago 2 T. A. Wise, Commentary on the Hindu The past of a fading glory: ‘obsolete’! It was the colonial gaze that System of Medicine, London, Trubner & Story of Hindu medicine started examination of our practices with Co., 1860, p. ii. a desire to know, and to know as By middle of the nineteenth century we objectively as possible, thus creating the 3 Ibid. pp. viii-xiv. see many scholarly efforts producing possibility of studying history of medicine. comprehensive books on Hindu medicine. Travelogues from the time of the arrival 4 On critical questions related to power Most of these books, including travel of the Portuguese till the last days of and the disciplines see Partha Chatterjee, writings from the eighteenth century, British colonialism contain ethnographies ‘The Disciplines in Colonial Bengal’, in always mentioned the need to study the of various healing practices unknown his (ed.) Texts of Power: Emerging history of this discipline. The Hindu (and bizarre) to them.1 Disciplines in Colonial Bengal, Calcutta, Medicine project was comparative, aiming Samya, 1996, pp.1-29; and Gyan to show how a great resource of Prakash, ‘Science Between the Lines’, knowledge had become obsolete and in Shahid Amin & Dipesh Chakrabarty how superior was Western medicine with (eds.) Subaltern Studies IX, Delhi, Oxford its unique universal rationality. Thus T. University Press, 1996, pp. 59-82. For A. Wise wrote in 1845: an interesting and thought-provoking critique of the reception of history as a ‘modern’ enterprise in India, see Ashis Nandy, ‘History’s Forgotten Doubles’, History and Theory, 34, 1995, pp. 44-66. On the politics of the colonized body see Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Sarir, Samaj O Rastra: Oupanibesik Bharate Mahamari O Janasanskriti’, Anustup, 23, 1988; and David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Muhammad Zubayr Siddiqi, Studies in Medicine and Epidemic Diseases in Arabic and Persian Medical Literature, Nineteenth Century India, London, Calcutta, Calcutta University Press, 1959 University of California Press, 1993. David Arnold’s recent book Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India, In this brief essay, I narrate the Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, emergence of the discipline of history of 2000, discusses this emerging medicine in India as a scholarly practice historiography and provides a and demarcate the thresholds that bibliographical essay. transformed the ideas of history. In so 5 Waltraud Ernst, ‘Introduction: Historical

Contents Contents

22 22

Print Print

Send Send email email

Articles “Among the sacred records of Hindus there is a system of medicine, prepared at a very early period, that appears to form no part of the medical science, and is not supposed to have enlightened the other nations of the earth: a system for which Hindus claim an antiquity far beyond the period to which the history of the heroic age is supposed to extend.”2 He noticed, however, the decline of this practice since ‘the neglect of the Hindu Medical Science on the part of the Muhammadan conquerors’ and that the ‘diffusion of the European system of medicine operated as a discouragement to the study of the Sanskrit works’.3 The question of History in general, including medical histories of South Asia, has undergone radical transformation in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Crucial questions have been raised over methodology and over the need to address discourses of power in colonial and postcolonial India.4 All histories, it is now argued, are representations and reconstruction of statements of the past seen through questions of the present as asked by researchers. History can no longer be seen as an endless, seamless web in which one event leads relentlessly to the next in causal succession. I would agree rather with the historian who sets about undermining the notion of an apparently smooth continuity by establishing thresholds, ruptures, mutations and transformations. I would speculate that history of medicine in India experienced a break in the early twentieth century when it was turned to the strategic service of colonial power as evidence of ‘progress’ brought by the rulers. This specialized way of knowing worked as an important tool of power based on previous Orientalist and other experiences. D. G. Crawford wrote ‘Notes on the History of the Bengal Medical Service’ in the Indian Medical Gazette in January 1901 and in a subsequent issue. He published his famous two-volume work, History of the Indian Medical Service 1600-1913, after fourteen years. While editing a recent book on Race, Science and Medicine 1700-1960, Waltraud Ernst has said that, there now exists a consensus that scientific racism, racial medicine and colonial rule were for a time closely linked, variously reinforced, and justified each other. One has to read closely colonial accounts of the history of medicine, keeping in mind the hegemonic desire to characterize the colonized as inferior both in cultural terms and in their practice of modern medicine.

As pointed out by Ernst, the colonial discourse of history of medicine has strategically deployed discriminatory categories of race, class, caste and gender to naturalize them as scientific discourses.5 Not only that, for them Ayurveda and Unani became practices of a past which could not achieve scientific advancements. Nationalist responses were not lacking. Innumerable sources in English and vernacular are available that critically assessed the colonial claim. But recent interventions from Subaltern Studies and other contemporary scholars, inform us that nationalist historiography was a collaborative one; a kind of mimicry that highlighted elite practices and attempted to erase the heterodoxy of subaltern healing cultures. Hence we find Dr. Girindranath Mukhopadhyaya being awarded the prestigious Griffith Memorial Prize of Calcutta University for the encouragement of advanced study in science and letters twice, in 1911 and 1913, to write a multivolume book History of Indian Medicine. And in Girindranath’s writings, it was only Ayurveda that featured as ‘Indian’ medicine!6 Let us have a brief look at the long hundred and seventy-two pages of introduction he wrote for the first volume. While criticizing William Jones, who thought that there were not many valuable truths in the eastern science of medicine, apart from informational value to Europeans, and Willoughby, who wrote similar things even after hundred years, Girindranath wrote: “This need cause no surprise, for the majority of medical men practicing in India are ignorant of Sanskrit language in which the ancient medical books are written and the exigencies of a lucrative practice have left them without inclination for the requisite study…. The Sanskrit medical books still exist in manuscripts…. One or two books only have been translated in English in recent times. So practically these works are still sealed books to the world, and the historians of medicine make no room for the study of Indian medicine in their works.”7 Devoting page after page to bibliographical research of European and American works on history of medicine, Girindranath lamented that: “[W]hile so much is being done in Europe and America, we are quite apathetic in India … There is not a single chair of the history of medicine in the Indian Universities, nay, I am sorry to say, even in the English Universities. Far from learning the history of Indian Medicine, the graduates of the Calcutta Medical College scarcely know any history of the

and Contemporary Perspectives on Race, Science and Medicine’, in Waltraud Ernst (ed.) Race, Science and Medicine, 17001960, London, Routledge, 1999, pp. 3-4. 6 Girindranath Mukhopadhyaya, History of Indian Medicine: Containing Notices, Biographical and Bibliographical, of the Ayurvedic Physicians and their Works on Medicine: From the Earliest Ages to the Present Time, Vol. I (1923), Vol. II (1926) & Vol. III (1929), Delhi, Munshiram Manoharlal, 1994. 7 Ibid., pp. 6-7. 8 Ibid., pp. 30-31. 9 Muhammad Zubayr Siddiqi, Studies in Arabic and Persian Medical Literature, Calcutta, Calcutta University Press, 1959, pp. v-vi. 10 For Unani (Greco-Arab) medicine in India also see M.Z. Siddiqi, ‘The Unani Tibb (Greek Medicine) in India’, Islamic Culture, XLII (3) July, 1968, pp. 161-72; S.A. Hosseini, ‘An Elementary Study of the Principles of Individual and Group Psychotherapy and Mental Health in Islam’, Indian Journal of Psychiatry, 25 (4), 1983, pp. 335-7; M.S. Khan, ‘Arabic and Persian Source Materials for the History of Science in Medieval India’, Islamic Culture, LXII (2-3) April-July 1988, pp.113-39; Byron Good and Mary Jo Del Veechio Good, ‘The Comparative Study of Greco-Islamic Medicine: The Integration of Medical Knowledge into Local Symbolic Contexts’, in Charles Leslie and Allan Young (eds.) Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge, Delhi, Munshiram Manoharlal, 1993, pp. 255-71; Kristin L Bright, The Travelling Tonic: Tradition, Commodity and the Body in Unani (Greco-Arab) Medicine in India, Ann Arbor, UMI Dissertation Services, 2000; and Neshat Quaiser, ‘Politics, Culture and Colonialism: Unani’s Debate with Doctory’ in Biswamoy Pati and Mark Harrison (eds.) Health, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Colonial India, Delhi, Orient Longman, 2001, pp. 317-55. 11 Priya Vrat Sharma (ed.) History of Medicine in India: From Antiquity to 1000 A.D., New Delhi, Indian National Science Academy, 1992. 12 ‘Archives Relating to Opening of Departments for History of Medicine’, reprint from Indian Journal of History of Medicine, 1 (2) 1956, p. 66 in Bulletin of the Indian Institute of History of Medicine, XI (1-4), 1981, p. 27. 13 I am mentioning here only three but widely used volumes. O. P. Jaggi, History of Science, Technology and Medicine in India, Delhi, 1969-84. D. M. Bose, S. N. Sen and B. V. Subbarayappa (eds.) A Concise History of Science in India, New

Contents Contents

23 23

Print Print

Send Send email email

Articles system that they practice.”8 After discussing why the history of Indian medicine should be studied, he went on to argue the utility of the Hindu system of medicine, not explaining why the other existing systems were to be excluded. He compared Ayurveda with the Greek system, showing some similarities. In his

a genre that was to dominate the course of the history of medicine in India, with Hindu medicine telescoped into the nationalist agenda. The attempt was to incorporate Ayurveda within the story of ‘progress’ projected by Western science by eliminating its ‘obsolete’ and ‘irrational’ contents. Thus, from then on, every history of Indian medicine would present us with an evolutionary narrative from Ayurvedic antiquity to modern Indian medicine, coterminous with our nationalist history.

The subdued past of Islamic medicine

analysis, the Hindu system was an allencompassing medical discourse, with knowledge of vaccination and venereal diseases. It is not very difficult to identify the nationalist desire within Girindranath’s account of Hindu medical science, and the hope of its re-establishment in modern India. He offered the reader three proposals to make ‘the study of history of medicine popular among the medical practitioners in India’: museums, exhibitions and a scientific library. It is interesting to note that he adopted modern, especially classificatory

Surprisingly, despite the existence of Unani medicine for hundreds of years, no history was written until Dr. Mohammed Zubayr Siddiqi, a professor of Islamic Culture of Calcutta University, published his Studies in Arabic and Persian Medical Literature in 1959! Writing the foreword for the volume, Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy, Chief Minister of West Bengal commented: “The contribution of the Arabic and Persian writers of the medieval period, to the development of medical science is immense…. [They] [m]ade many important discoveries in the field…. It is their achievements in this sphere that served as the foundation for its modern developments…. Dr. Siddiqi…. has fully discussed the earliest Arabic medical compendium which contains a description not only of the Greek system of medicine but also of the Indian medicine….”9

Siddiqi’s book can be called the Islamic counterpart of Girindranath’s. A welltrained historian with a similar nationalist motivation, Siddiqi was working out a factual narrative. However, there are obvious differences between the two and the most striking of them is his rich discussions on the dialogue between Arabian and Indian John Martin Honigberger, Late Physician to the Court of (Hindu) systems of medicine and Lahore, Twenty-five Years in the East. Adventures, the shape Arabian medicine took Discoveries, Experiments and Historical Sketches. Relating in India. Another noticeable to the Punjab and Cashmere in connection with Medicine, feature is that, compared to Botany, Pharmacy & c. Illustrated with a number of studies of Ayurveda, there are Engravings, Containing Portraits, Fac-similes, & c., London, fewer histories of Islamic medicine New York and Calcutta, 1852. or Unani in India despite its existence for seven hundred methods, dividing his exhibits into twelve years!10 Rahman et. al. provided a sections according to Western scientific quantitative analysis of materials on categories as a means of attracting his medicine in Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit: target audience. Girindranath’s book is representative of

Delhi, Indian National Science Academy, 1971, and Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya (ed.) Studies in the History of Science in India, I-II, New Delhi, Editorial Enterprises, 1982. For a quantitative description of the growth of Western medical periodicals in India from late eighteenth to early twentieth century, see B. K. Sen, Growth of Scientific Periodical in India (1788-1900), New Delhi, Indian National Science Academy, 2002. 14 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: The Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1983, and ‘Introduction: Science as a Reason of State’ in Ashis Nandy (ed.) Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem of Modernity, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 1-23. 15 Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2000. 16 U. Kalpagam, ‘The Colonial State and Statistical Knowledge,’ History of the Human Sciences, 13 (2), 2000, pp. 3755. 17 Waltraud Ernst, Mad Tales from the Raj: The European Insane in British India, 1800-1858, London, 1991; ‘Under the Influence in British India: James Esdaile’s Mesmeric Hospital in Calcutta and its Critics,’ Psychological Medicine, 25, 1995, pp. 1113-1123; ‘European Madness and Gender in Nineteenth Century British India,’ Social History of Medicine, 9 (3) 1996, pp. 357-382; ‘Idioms of Madness and Colonial Boundaries: The Case of “Native” Mentally Ill in Early Nineteenth Century British India,’ Journal of Comparative Study of Society and History, 39 (1), 1997, pp. 153-181; ‘The Madras Lunatic Asylum in the Early Nineteenth Century,’ Bulletin of the Indian Institute of History of Medicine, (hereafter B. I. I. H. M.) XXVIII, 1998, pp. 13-20; ‘Asylum Provision and the East India Company in the Nineteenth Century’, Medical History, 42, 1998, pp.476-502; ‘The establishment of ‘Native Lunatic Asylums’ in early nineteenth century British India’, in G. Jan Meulenbeld and Dominik Wujastyk (eds.) Studies in Indian Medical History, Delhi, 2001, p.156. James H. Mills, Madness, Cannabis and Colonialism: The ‘Native-Only’ Lunatic Asylums of British India, London, 2000; Dinesh Bhugra and Ronald Littlewood (eds.) Colonialism and Psychiatry, Delhi, 2001; Christiane Hartnack, Psychoanalysis in Colonial India, Delhi, 2001; and Amit Ranjan Basu, ‘Emergence of a Marginal Science in a Colonial City: Reading Psychiatry in Bengali Periodicals,’ Indian Economic and Social History Review, 41 (2), 2004, pp. 103141.

Contents Contents

Print Print

24 24

Send Send email email

Articles Table I Documents on Medicine by Language and Century Century

8th

9th 10th 11th 12th 13th 14th 15th 16th 17th 18th 19th Undated

Persian

1

3

4

5

7

4

21

18

120

102

133

124

110

652

Arabic

1

16

14

20

14

33

5

1

10

12

6

13

56

201

6

29

26

38

31

50

36

61

122

80

47

3569

4106

Sanskrit 11

Total

Source: A. Rahman, M. A. Alvi, S. A. Khan Ghori and K. V. Samba Murthy, Science and Technology in Medieval India: A Bibliography of Source Materials in Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian, New Delhi, Indian National Science Academy, 1982, p. xiv.

Nevertheless, the tradition of writing the history of Indian medicine of the Girindranath genre continues and we find a recent 527-page volume on History of Medicine in India where Siddha, Tibetan and Indo-Arab relations are covered in only forty pages.11

Hospitals in India in the 16th century. Muhammad Zubayr Siddiqi, Studies in Arabic and Persian Medical Literature, Calcutta, Calcutta University Press, 1959.

Postcolonial medical histories: A new threshold? In postcolonial India, government efforts to establish departments for the history of medicine started in 1956.12 The institution of scholarships for the history of medicine led not only to the publication of large volumes of comprehensive, chronological and evolutionary narratives, but also to compilation of an impressive list of source materials, which were being read for the first time.13 The nationalist strategy of history writing continued, focusing on a linear, progressive narrative, replacing colonial stereotypes and further identifying ‘obsolete’ contents. From nineteen eighties, a new genre of studies emerged, ushering a new threshold. As hinted before, questions

of method, issues of power, translating science, and the role of culture in interpreting medical practices influenced these studies. These scholars pointed out that the process of colonial transformation, and what has come to be described as modernization, was not a simple unidirectional process of scientific and technological ‘transfer’, but rather a complex process of cross-cultural interactions with yet-to-be contextualized social, cultural and political dimensions. These processes were dialogic, influencing both parties argued Ashis Nandy, writing in the eighties and providing a different but powerful critique of modern science and its association with power in the colonial and postcolonial world.14 Not only were the intention of medical education and various health strategies explored, but also hierarchies of caste, gender, class and race were examined in relation to health. Studies from colonial experiences of other countries provided valuable tools with which to understand the heterogeneity of colonial medicine. By the turn of the century, Foucault’s theories grew in influence. Gyan Prakash’s book Another Reason looked into science’s cultural authority as the legitimating sign of rationality and progress.15 Kalpagam also used the Foucauldian framework of power/knowledge, his notion of episteme and governmentality to show how colonial governance produced statistical knowledge, ushering in a new social scientific discourse of ‘progress’, ‘history’, ‘economy’ and ‘society’.16 Even though the majority of histories of medicine focused on public health in one way or another, a critical historiography of colonial psychiatry also made a significant contribution to this new discourse. We are now beginning to understand how colonial power attempted to homogenize a diverse range of practices by excluding what they

considered ‘bizarre’ and ‘irrational’ and tried to hide their racial and imperial agenda in the name of ‘humanitarian’ treatments.17 The discourse on the history of medicine in India is complex and multilayered, which discusses different ways of conceiving ‘history’, its relationship with Western rationality, translation of concepts, and of governmentality in a modernity specific to our culture.

Contents Contents

25 25

Print Print

Send Send email email

Contemporary South South Africa and the Pan-African Renaissance Ashwin Desai He is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Civil Society (University of KwaZulu Natal). A student of community movements in South Africa, his latest book is “We are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa”, Monthly Review Press, New York. e-mail: [email protected]

In many townships of South Africa xenophobia is on the increase. This xenophobia is largely restricted to fellow Africans from outside the country. The most overt perpetrators of xenophobia reside in the sector of society that has not seen much material gain during the transition to democracy. Violent attacks have become commonplace. Witness the following from the Pretoria News, 4 September 1998: “In September 1998, three migrants to South Africa were savaged by a mob on a train: one, a Mozambican, was thrown out while the other two, both Senegalese citizens were electrocuted as they climbed on the roof trying to escape the crowd. This violence was visited by members of a crowd who were returning from a rally in the country’s administrative capital, Pretoria, who had gathered to protest under the banner of an organisation called ‘unemployed Masses of South Africa’ who claimed to represent 32,000 jobless people”. The government White Paper which signals the prelude to legislation, released in 1999 fed into this ‘selective’ xenophobia by signalling an intention to create “an environment which does not offer them (migrants) opportunities of employment and free available public services which they cannot find in their countries of origin.” It calls on civil society and individuals to play a surveillance role: “By checking, in co-operation with the community, whether illegal aliens are receiving services from banks, hospitals, schools and providers of electricity, they should contribute to creating the perception that South Africa is not a good receptacle of illegal immigration”. Just reflect on the case of Portia Dhlamini. Dhlamini was arrested as an illegal alien. She was held at the notorious Lindela repatriation centre near Krugersdorp on the West Rand in the North of the country.

On the brink of being deported to Zimbabwe, she was rescued when her sister arrived with identity documents. According to Portia the police had told her that she had “to be deported to Zimbabwe because my accent did not sound South African. I tried to explain to them but they would not listen.” (ThisDay, 12 January 2004).The tragic irony of Portia’s story is that in the 1970s she went into exile, first in Mozambique and then Tanzania with her family. They only returned in the 1990s. Dhlamini’s case is not isolated. Both the Legal Aid Board and the Legal Justice Centre attested to the fact that it had assisted South Africans accused of being in the country illegally. Some have been arrested for being ‘too dark’ to be South Africans. This was the case of a teacher and South African citizen who was arrested on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant because of her “complexion, facial appearance, accent and her style of dressing”. (The Star, 12 March 2001). This kind of approach by the state can only fuel people to act with impunity and vigilantism. Apartheid was built on the notion of white superiority and blacks as the inferior ‘other’. We are now turning that inside out. Is composing the new South African nation premised on our superiority over the rest of Africa? As Peter Vale puts it in his recent book “the idea of the rainbow nation, the new South Africa signifies a cleansed beginning for the country’s people. But the celebration shows there is a darker side…the constructed face of national identity, the harbinger of nationalism used for the purpose of privileging”.1 The crudeness of this post-apartheid selfish nationalism was laid bare in the invasion of Lesotho in 1998. An invasion that left nine SANDF members, 58 LDF soldiers and 47 civilians dead and was, in the words of Khabele Matlosa, “driven by its interest in the Lesotho Highlands Water Project first and foremost…the fact

1 P. Vale, Security and Politics in South Africa, University of Cape Town Press, Cape Town, 2003, p.93. 2 Ibid., p.129. 3 J. Daniel, V. Naidoo, and S. Naidu, “The South Africans have arrived: Postapartheid corporate expansion into Africa”, in J. Daniel, A. Habib, and J. Southall, (eds) State of the Nation, Pretoria, 2003, p.376-377. 4 D. Miller, “South African Multinational Corporations (MNCs) and Regional Claim-making in post-Apartheid Southern Africa: A Case Study of retail workers at Shoprite-Checkers in Zambia”, paper delivered at Codesria 30th Anniversary Conference, 2003, p.18. 5 Ibid., p.19. 6 S. Rylief, “Does the Emperor really have no clothes? Thabo Mbeki and ideology” in S. Jacobs and R. Calland (eds.) Thabo Mbeki’s World, University of Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, 2002, p.116. 7 P. Vale, and S. Maseko, “Thabo Mbeki, South Africa and the Idea of an African Renaissance”, in Jacobs and Calland (eds.) Thabo Mbeki’s World, p.122.

Contents Contents

26 26

Print Print

Send Send email email

Contemporary South that the project was the first target of the entire military operation makes perfect sense in terms of the hierarchy of South African interests in Lesotho.” The Deputy Minister of Defence Ronnie Kasrils in the aftermath enthused: “the Lesotho invasion proved that the transformation of our armed forces has worked, in spite of all the doubts whether it was truly possible, the historic importance should not be lost. A watershed has occurred in which the unity of the SANDF has been forged in the heat of battle and sealed by the blood of the fallen.”2 The fact that over a 100 citizens of Lesotho had died and millions of Rands of damage caused did not matter. What Kasrils did not add was that the force commander into Lesotho Colonel Robbie Hartslief was no stranger to invasions. He had led one into Angola in the 1980s on behalf of the apartheid government. While we keep the ‘aliens’ out we are quite happy to reel in the profits. In 1999 our trade with Southern African Development Community (SADC) which draws countries into a common Customs Union, amounted to R 20.3 million. Of that, exports were R 17.7 million, an imbalance of 7:1 that rose to 9:1 in 2001. Post-1994 South African corporates have moved with speed into Africa. As John Daniel et.al, researchers attached to the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) have shown, South African businesses are “running the national railroad in Cameroon, the national electricity company in Tanzania, and managing the airports located in or near seven South African capitals. They have controlling shares in Telecom Lesotho and are leading providers of cellphone services in Nigeria, Uganda, Swaziland, Tanzania, Rwanda and Cameroon. They control banks, breweries, supermarkets and hotels throughout the continent and provide TV programming to over half the continent”.3 The South African state has used the Industrial Development Corporation funding for this purpose and also maintains a direct interest in businesses. Accusations of malpractice keep piling up. Cellphone giant MTN faces charges of operating illegally in the DRC; Shoprite Holdings of dumping substandard goods on the African market. Darlene Miller’s research on ShopriteCheckers in Zambia paints a picture of apartheid South Africa. One worker talking about labour conditions: “What can I say is that they don’t have feelings about human beings. If they could feel other people’s feelings, I don’t think they could treat us like this. If I show you my payslip and my budget, and you calculate for me, I don’t you can even manage. It’s really sad.” Many of the workers were aware that South Africa was the net beneficiary: “They (these investors) are not helping Zambia to develop. Shoprite,

whatever they sell, the monies are transmitted to South Africa right away... Even the government is aware that these people, they are just using Zambia as a market just to sell their things and send all their profits to SA. So Zambia’s not benefiting from it”.4 Racism according to the workers was rife: “The company is part of South Africa but it looks as if the ‘boers’ are still ruling South Africa... These boers, they like that system of racialism which they used to in South Africa.”5 The UN Report on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources in the DRC named seven South African companies. When President Mbeki visited the DRC in January, Tokyo Sexwale’s Mvelaphanda Holdings and Zwelakhe Sisulu’s Afriminerals signed deals worth over R 60 million. Beauegard Tromp commented that South African businesses have been quick to use Mbeki’s foray’s into Africa to cut deals “sometimes by hook or by crook”. (Business Report, 22 January 2004). As Sahra Ryklief put it: “Mbeki’s African Renaissance is the best thing that has ever happened to South Africa’s (still overwhelmingly white) capital in a 6 long time.” Here we have Mbeki fulfilling the 1940 dream of Jan Smuts, the Prime Minister of South Africa: “If we wish to take our rightful place as the leader in Pan-African development and in the shaping of future policies and events in this vast continent, we must face the realities and the facts of the present and seize the opportunities which these offer. All Africa may be our market …”.7 We are taking profits from Africa and leaving behind antagonism. As one Kenyan parliamentarian put it: “they bulldoze their way around. It seems like they still have the old attitudes of the old South Africa”(New York Times, 17 February 2002). It is of interest to note that while we hound Africans on the one hand and monopolise their economies on the other, recent Statistics SA figures show that of the 6.8 million tourists visiting South Africa, 5 million were from Africa. Despite these figures, the tourist industry’s marketing resources is geared to the West. This attitude reinforces the view that all Africans come to South Africa to look for jobs and to stay illegally, rather than the country promoting the idea that their desire to come to South Africa is a productive and healthy outcome of the African Renaissance project. Our new black elite has reconciled with our former oppressors and ganged up with them to ensure that Africans from beyond the Limpopo River are segregated from us, kept out of our neighbourhoods, refused employment and maligned as inferior with inherent

criminal qualities and the carriers of disease. It is the African ‘aliens’ that have become the new Blacks, the new swart gevaar (black peril). We have come to believe we are the miracle, the children of God parading ourselves in Africa like the whites who controlled the country before us.

Contents Contents

27 27

Print Print

Send Send email email

Contemporary South Youth and Citizenship in Brazil Paula Cristina da Silva Barreto Department of Sociology, Federal University of Bahia [email protected] Young people have been affected, in ways different from other segments of the population, by general changes in Brazilian society in the last decades of the twentieth century and in the beginning of the twenty-first century. In terms of education, health, job market and political participation, factors such as region, race and gender have been causing variations in the way these changes echo among the youth. These are the conclusions of several studies carried out by governmental and non-governmental organizations. They show that the contemporary condition of the Brazilian youth is complex and multilayered. These studies, as well as projects in which young

people are protagonists (projects dispersed in the whole country), have been stimulating public debate. One outcome of such debate is growing concern with the formulation of public politics focused on the youth, seeking to transform them into empowered citizens. One good example of a Brazilian project with the youth as protagonists is the PROJETO TUTORIA. It is one of the twenty-seven projects selected in a national competition seeking to promote access and permanence of students originating from groups underrepresented in Brazilian universities, through the Programa Políticas da Cor

(PPCor). Launched in 2001, PPCor is hosted in the Laboratory of Public Politics of the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, which is the first Brazilian public university to have reserved vacancies for Afro-Brazilian undergraduate students who had had their education in public schools. PROJETO TUTORIA's first group was composed of 20 undergraduate students of the Federal University of Bahia, selected to several courses and areas of knowledge. The programme was developed between August 2002 and April 2004.

Young undergraduate students of the PROJETO TUTORIA in the Center of Afro-Oriental Studies, Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Bahia.

Contents Contents

28 28

Print Print

Send Send email email

Contemporary South “Of Illusion, Of Compensation”: State Initiated Diaspora in Post Colonial Andhra Rohan Deb Roy

He is an “unemployed youth”, spending his time at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, turning pages of Foucault’s tomes to pass the time. In his leisure moments, he toys with the idea of researching “hunger” in colonial India. He will complete a diploma in Research Training from the Centre in a few months. He then hopes to join the farmers of Andhra in the trek for livelihood away from these shores, if not to East Africa, to some other country, and he is even willing to consider the ‘North’. Email: [email protected]

The panacea to the endemic hunger, malnutrition, malnourishment, poverty in rural India and a judicious way of confronting the vicious chain of drought, dearth, disease, the spate of serial suicides appears to lie in relocating and transposing a section of the peasantry to distant regions beyond the set boundaries of an overpopulated nation. This seems to have been the logic that has motivated the Y.S.Rajasekhar Reddyled Congress government in Andhra Pradesh into a project to finance and organize the outsourcing of farmers to the fertile tracts of East Africa. The hitherto emaciated farmers, it is hoped, shall make a living off the barely cultivated lands of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. The Andhra Pradesh Government has agreed in principle to take land on lease for 99 years and sublet it to farmers' cooperatives, which would send workers willing to migrate to East Africa. A delegation from Andhra recently visited Nairobi to finalize the proposal with authorities in Kenya.1

Resource Outsourcing, assured that the farmers shall face no hindrance in sending their earnings back home to rural Andhra. The government in Andhra Pradesh has promised to pay for traveling expenses of the farmers and also for interpreters. The preliminary draft of the memorandum indicates that the Andhra Pradesh government has resolved to pay the east African countries to lease the land for cooperatives, which will employ the farmers and pay back the lease costs

Downloaded from Reuters website.

through earnings from farm output. 3 This project has been praised in the media following statements in diplomatic circles as mutually beneficial. This is evident from the statement of Mutuma Kathurima, the Commissioner to India, who quite recently argued that, apart from productive employment generation in rural Andhra, this project would allow the agriculturally potent but unexplored land in Kenya to be put to better use.2 The Andhra Pradesh Government is engaged in a series of negotiations with Kenya to get 50,000 acres of land on lease and expects to send about 1000 farmers within a few months. Under this plan, state agriculture officials will accompany the farmers to help establish cooperatives and coordinate with the Kenyan Government. The cooperatives would be run by farmers themselves and will grow sugarcane, tobacco, cotton, groundnut, millet, chickpea, fruits and flowers. C. Chandrasekhara Reddy, Advisor on Foreign Investments and Human

South Asia has a fairly extensively documented history of overseas migration of labor in both voluntary and involuntary manifestations. This project is unique in the history of post-colonial South Asia, conceived, as it has been, as a diaspora initiated by the state to confront chronic hunger and the various faces of death. It would be apt to recall how the Telegu Desam Party of Chandrababu Naidu was voted out of power in the assembly elections held in May 2004. Chandrababu Naidu’s dream of a cyberia turned into a nightmare of electoral debacle, and his own political career foundered in the agrarian hinterland struggling under a cloud of debt-cycles and suicidal depression. It is gradually being acknowledged that at least 502 farmers have killed themselves since May, when Reddy’s Congress party government took over in the state, promising to end their woes. The project is an answer to the

1 The Telegraph, 2 November 2004. 2 Reuters, 28 October 2004. 3 Ibid. 4 Manas Ray, “Nation, nostalgia and Bollywood: In the tracks of a twice displaced community” in Karim M. Karim (ed.) The Media of Diaspora, Routledge, London and New York, 2003. 5 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”, Diacritics, Spring, 1986 .

Contents Contents

29 29

Print Print

Send Send email email

Contemporary South perennially perturbing agrarian land question in rural Andhra. This venture, it is believed, would herald a brighter phase in South-South relations and reveal the beneficial face of globalization. Beneath the cacophony of journalistic assertions and the anesthesia of diplomatic optimism, one should, with greater patience, critically engage with the question of ‘paying back the lease costs through earnings from the farm output’. One might enquire whether this project is anything other than the redeployment of the indenture system with its myriad implications of ‘extraction’ and a physically arduous schedule,

harboring the telos of a post-indenture life of subsistence agriculture and the eventual diversification of occupation. The social commentators on migration might research at this juncture the tensions that await the farmers. The anxiety within a diasporic self: the fear of becoming a ‘nameable held under the sign of erasure’;4 coalescing with the hope for better employment, more food and survival. This project has been quite paradoxically articulated around the rhetoric of development and ‘good’ governance within the parameters of the nation-state. This venture teases its own rhetoric by creating an ‘other’ space of

illusion beyond the nation-state around east Africa. In the ‘suicide-prone’ psyche of the migrating farmer, Kenya is being presented as ‘another real space, as perfect, as well arranged’ in sharp contrast to rural Andhra which is 'messy, ill constructed, and jumbled’. It sets out to construct 'the heterotopia, not of illusion, but of compensation...’.5

Contents Contents

30 30

Print Print

Send Send email email

Archives and Field Notes: Experiencing Research Research Potential in Timbuktu’s Manuscript Libraries Aslam Farouk-Alli & Mohamed Shahid Mathee Aslam Farouk-Alli and Shahid Mathee are researchers in the Timbuktu Manuscripts Project at the University of Cape Town. They travelled to Timbuktu, in northern Mali, at the end of January 2004, for the first time to work with Malian colleagues. They found the journey most exciting but also hard. However, being avid readers of classical Arabic literature and African history they have been more than amply rewarded by the riches of the manuscripts in Timbuktu. Aslam teaches Islamic Studies and Arabic at the University of Cape Town, soon to leave the university to pursue a career in the South African diplomatic service. He hopes simultaneously to begin work on his doctorate. Shahid, who has recently completed M.Soc.Sci. in Religion at the University of Cape Town, will continue to learn and have fun with the manuscripts, and make a return trip to Timbuktu early in 2005 to look at astronomy manuscripts.

Introduction Timbuktu is one of West Africa’s oldest centres of learning. At its intellectual climax in the fifteenth century, Timbuktu boasted three major institutions of learning and syllabi in the religious sciences recognized by major universities in Egypt and Tunisia. The city thus became home to an intellectual elite and the pursuit of knowledge and love of the written word pervaded local culture. The overthrow of the Songhay Empire by Moroccan invaders initiated an era of steady decline but the fruits of Timbuktu’s intellectual legacy were to remain preserved in the vast number of extant manuscripts that are still to be found there today. While most of the estimated 300,000 extant manuscripts in the region are still in private hands, recent initiatives have been made to gather these valuable material and store and preserve them in accessible collections. These efforts go back to 1973, with the establishment of CEDRAB by the Malian government, for the collection and preservation of Timbuktu’s manuscripts. More recently two private manuscript libraries have also been established with the assistance of outside funding.

Manuscripts in a better state of preservation at the Ahmed Baba Centre

These three centres are an obvious starting place for any researcher interested in undertaking any study pertaining to the region and its intellectual tradition. In this article we will give a brief overview of these centres and also try and shed some light upon the manuscript collections they hold. Such information should be of considerable use to the potential researcher.

The Ahmed Baba Centre for Documentation and Historical Research (CEDRAB) The government of Mali had instituted the Ahmed Baba Centre for Documentation and Historical Research or CEDRAB, as it is generally referred to by its abbreviated French title, in Timbuktu in 1973. The centre was built primarily with funding received from Kuwait and immediately began gathering manuscripts. CEDRAB currently holds about 20,000 manuscripts. The Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation has already published a catalogue, incomplete as yet, listing about 9000 manuscripts from the CEDRAB collection.1 The starting point for any researcher interested in this collection would be a careful perusal of the catalogue. It is thus helpful to briefly describe the catalogue before discussing the content of some of the catalogued material itself. The CEDRAB catalogue comprises five volumes subdivided into six parts, with parts five and six incorporated into a single volume. Each volume contains 1500 entries totalling 9000 in all. Out of the 9000 entries only 50 are not in the Arabic language. These unique manuscripts are all written in the Arabic

script but are in African languages such as Songhay, Fulani, Tamasheq and Hassaniyyah. There are also a few manuscripts written in Turkish but also utilising the Arabic script. Volume one is the only part of the catalogue arranged according to subject headings. All entries are grouped under the subjects Qur’an, Law, Theology, Literature, Astronomy, Politics, Documents and Medicine. The manuscripts under each of these topics are arranged alphabetically. Volumes two to six simply contain a random arrangement of the material but do make mention of the subjects under which an entry is to be regarded. We may now turn attention to describing some of the manuscripts in the collection itself. Most of the manuscripts are on law (fiqh) or are collections of juristic opinions (fataawa). Though legal in nature, they highlight important aspects of the social history of the region. For example, manuscript number 4743 (vol. 4: 117) is a fatwa that was issued in response to a wife who refused to grant her husband conjugal access by telling him that he is now forbidden to her in the same way as her father is. In classical fiqh such a phenomenon is known as zihar, but it is usually the husband who repudiates the wife by comparing her to the back of his mother. This incident reflects a unique reversal of roles and is possibly very revealing of the higher status accorded to women in this region. It is equally possible that this may have been an isolated incident, but the interested researcher is faced with the task of seeking corroborating evidence by searching for similar cases in the vast collections of juristic rulings available in manuscript form.

Contents Contents

31 31

Print Print

Send Send email email

Archives and Field Notes: Experiencing Research Apart from law, the subject most commonly dealt with is literature. Many of the manuscripts are anthologies of poetry. There is an equally rich body of prose in the form of stories from the early centuries of Islam. Officially recorded documentation (watha’iq) also constitutes a large portion of the collection. Such documents contain information on the sale and purchase of slaves, livestock, salt, tea, homes, agricultural lands, execution and distribution of estates, bequests, determining of dowries; records of peoples’ charities, disputes over wells between two tribes or families, records on the manumission of slaves containing their personal details etc. These official documents are an important source for understanding conflict of a socioeconomic nature as well as conflict resolution. Unlike classical fiqh works that are rather abstract these manuscripts present us with concrete cases whether social, legal or otherwise. The remainder of the manuscripts deal with astrology, medicine, Qur’anic and hadith sciences, theology, mysticism, heresiography, Arabic grammar and history.

The Mamma Haidara Memorial Library Abdul Kader Haidara conceived the idea of establishing a memorial library to hold his family’s collection while working for CEDRAB. After leaving the centre he devoted all of his time and energy to this project and was successful in setting up the Mamma Haidara Memorial Library, which was the first of its kind in Mali.

the five universal elements necessary for existence, i.e., life, dignity, wealth, intellect, religion and deterrents from committing sin.

The Timbuktu Andalusian Library (Biblioteca Andaluside Tombuctu) Abdul Kader Haidara has also been actively involved in assisting other collection holders in setting up their own libraries. He has given much guidance and assistance to Ismail Haidara, a close relative whose mother hails from the Haidara clan, and who has also recently managed to establish his own private library.

Shahid Mathee (extreme right) with the Imam and colleagues in the Sankore Mosque courtyard, Timbuktu.

Abdul Kader began cataloguing his inherited collection and was assisted by the Al-Furqan Heritage Foundation in London, who agreed to publish his catalogue. Currently four of the projected five volume catalogue has been published.2 The Mamma Haidara collection comprises of 5000 manuscripts and each volume of the catalogue contains roughly 1000 entries. Material in the catalogue is arranged randomly, unlike the first volume of the CEDRAB catalogue, which uses subject divisions. As far as subject matter is concerned, the catalogue comprises of about 3000 entries on Law and its various branches, Hadith studies, Qur’an studies, Doctrine, Arabic grammar, astronomy and literature. About a 1000 entries relate to documents of historical significance, dealing with the nature of the tribes in the region, business transactions, correspondence between scholars and the relationship of Timbuktu with its neighboring settlements. Manuscript number 516 (Vol.1: 287) provides interesting insight into the sociopolitical culture of the region. It is a tract written by the Nigerian Reformist AbdAllah b. Uthman b. Fudi (d. 1829). Divided into several sections, it discusses apostasy, highway robbery, hostile combatants and heretics. The manuscript also deals with the issue of politics and classifies politics as either oppressive or just. An outstanding aspect of this work is a deeply philosophical discussion on

Aslam Farouk-Alli (left) and Tahir Sitoto digitally capturing manuscripts in the Mamma Haidara Memorial Library.

The Biblioteca Andaluside Tombuctu, less elaborately referred to as the Fondo Kati Library was officially opened on 27 September 2003, with generous funding from the Spanish government because of the Kati family’s Spanish ancestry. Ismail’s collection of manuscripts was gathered from the various branches of the Kati family. He endeavours to collect manuscripts that deal with their Spanish roots and concentrates mainly upon works written by scholars from his own clan. The manuscripts in Ismail’s collection are arranged chronologically and the oldest manuscript in his collection is that of a Qur’an dating back to the fifteenth century, which belonged to his great grandfather, ‘Ali ibn Ziyad, who had left Spain for Africa after its Christian reconquest. Ismail’s collection comprises of about 3000 manuscripts that are in the process of being properly catalogued. The Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation in London has undertaken to publish a catalogue of his collection. John Hunwick has studied some of the manuscripts in this collection and has

Contents Contents

32 32

Print Print

Send Send email email

Archives and Field Notes: Experiencing Research found them to be an important source of local history.3 As he discovered, even manuscripts dealing with strictly religious sciences are sometimes a source of local history by virtue of commentary on local events scribbled in the very wide margins of such texts.

A typical Manuscript collection, stored in a steel trunk!

Conclusion Although the two Haidara libraries currently represent the most organized and relatively well preserved private manuscript collections in Timbuktu, they are by no means the only collections of significance. Abdul Kader Haidara has also established an association of private manuscript libraries in Timbuktu. The association has 24 affiliates, which represents an additional source of research information for the researcher devoted enough to spend prolonged periods of time in Timbuktu.

1 Sidi Amar Ould Ely & Librarians of the Centre, Handlist of Manuscripts in the Centre de Documentation et de Recherches Historiques Ahmed Baba, 5 vols. London, Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, 1995-1998. 2 Abd al-Qadir Mamma Haydarah, Catalogue of Manuscripts in Mamma Haidara Library, 4 vols. London, Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, from 2000. 3 John Hunwick, The Islamic Manuscript Heritage of Timbuktu, Unpublished Paper, 2002.

Contents Contents

33 33

Print Print

Send Send email email

Across The South The Struggle for History Jomo K. S.

Jomo K. S. was Professor in the Applied Economics Department, Faculty of Economics and Administration, University of Malaya until August 2004. He is on the Board of the United Nations Research Institute on Social Development (UNRISD), Geneva, and Founder Chair of IDEAs, or International Development Economics Associates. Born in Penang, Malaysia, in 1952, Jomo studied at the Penang Free School (PFS, 1964-6), Royal Military College (RMC, 1967-70), Yale (1970-3) and Harvard (1973-7). He taught at the Science University of Malaysia (USM, 1974), Harvard (1974-5), Yale (1977), National University of Malaysia (UKM, 1977-82), University of Malaya (since 1982), and Cornell (1993). He was a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University (1987-8; 1991-2). He has authored over 35 monographs, edited over 45 books and translated 11 volumes besides writing many academic papers and articles for the media. He is on the editorial boards of several learned journals. Some of his most recent book publications include Malaysia’s Political Economy (with E. T. Gomez), Tigers in Trouble, Rents, Rent-Seeking and Economic Development: Theory and the Asian Evidence (with Mushtaq Khan), Malaysian Eclipse: Economic Crisis and Recovery, Globalization Versus Development: Heterodox Perspectives, Southeast Asia's Industrialization, Ugly Malaysians? South-South Investments Abused, Southeast Asian Paper Tigers? Behind Miracle and Debacle, Manufacturing Competitiveness: How Internationally Competitive National Firms And Industries Developed In East Asia, Ethnic Business? Chinese Capitalism in Southeast Asia (with Brian Folk), Deforesting Malaysia: The Political Economy of Agricultural Expansion and Commercial Logging (with YT Chang and KJ Khoo) and M Way: Mahathir’s Economic Legacy. He is a sharp and well-informed critic of many of Dr Mahathir's policies, 1981-2003, as evident from his book, M Way: Mahathir's Economic Legacy (2003), a collection of 17 thoughtful articles written over twenty years. Since the mid-90s, his research on South East Asia has been in wider regional and international contexts, such as Africa and Latin America. He is to be Assistant Secretary General of the United Nation's Department for Economics and Social Affairs from January 2005.

SEPHIS Lecture delivered at Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion, Penang, Malaysia 3 September 2004

For tonight’s launch of SEPHIS’s new emagazine, I volunteered a title, which has already been subject to considerable misinterpretation. As you know, there is declining interest in the study of history all over the world, particularly in developing countries. Almost all the History Departments in Malaysia have closed down or have been reinvented to study politics, international relations and other ‘more relevant’ subjects. Probably, there is only one Department of History left in the country right now. This is a matter of great concern because people who do not know history run the risk of repeating it. And as we know, when history repeats itself, tragedy becomes farce. So there is an important plea to be made for the study of history. Second, there is a rather urgent need to return to the study of history, and particularly in this period for us in the South, to the study of imperialism and its discontents. We are living in very special times, which require us to return to the study of our past, to better understand the present and anticipate the future.

Recent debates during the last decade and a half have had to address Francis Fukuyama’s claim of reaching an ‘end of history’ in a Hegelian and Daniel Bell sense. Samuel Huntington’s thesis of a ‘clash of civilizations’ dissented with Fukuyama by reifying imagined and real cultural conflicts. This discourse excludes much of the world, of people supposedly without history. In contemporary formulations, the notion of civilization adopts the old assumptions of Orientalism, and often only recognizes Chinese civilization, or what is misleadingly called Confucian civilization, as well as so-called Indian civilization and Islamic civilization, besides Western civilization -- which Gandhi famously suggested would be a ‘good idea’. Societies and cultures without written texts or what are considered sophisticated material artefacts are thus deemed to be without civilization, and thus without history. Civilizations are defined in terms of highly developed written chronicles or material culture, particularly in terms of the use of metal alloys and so on. So, a great number of cultures around the

1 Indeed, most of the richest people in Asia identified in a recent survey make most of their money from state guaranteed monopolies. 2 One of the most interesting acronyms ever created by the Filipinos, they usually decide on the acronym first before they decide on what to call the organization, is the word ‘acronym’ itself, for the Anticronyism Movement. 3 Within a kilometre from here, there is a fort named after Lord Cornwallis, who lost this first war of national liberation and was subsequently consigned to Penang after it was ‘founded’ in 1786. The original idea was to build a fort to protect the whole area now called Weld Quay, but it cost a bit too much, and the English did not want to spend money to pay the Chinese contractors. So Fort Cornwallis is only the size of a football field. 4 Ferguson is no fool, and wrote some substantial books on the rise of industry and finance in Europe plus an influential book on World War One and another

Contents Contents

34 34

Print Print

Send Send email email

Across The South equator -- which have creatively and adequately used wood and other organic materials -- are thus often ignored as societies without history. Hence, in so far as it is empowering to recognize that these are societies with history, it involves yet another struggle for history. However, my concern here is with a third struggle for history, that is, for an appreciation of what increasing numbers of people recognise as imperialism. For a long time, many have hesitated to use the word ‘imperialism’ because it is no longer considered a polite term. One should not talk about imperialism, so instead we use other terms such as transnationalism, globalization, hegemony, dominance or some other surrogate terms, sometimes with greater accuracy, but usually not. But this deference to what is mistakenly considered to be good manners, is really asymmetric, even passé on our part. In the West, for example, in the Washington Post and the New York Times, which are hardly rightwing tabloids, there has in recent years been an unabashed discussion of imperialism or ‘empire talk’, often justified in seemingly benign or even humanitarian terms- not just evoking contemporary versions of the ‘white man’s burden’ to deal with ‘failed states’ and to uphold human rights and democracy, for instance. We should not hesitate to call a spade a spade, particularly in recognizing contemporary imperialism. Unfortunately, much of the contemporary discussion of imperialism is rather lacking in serious economic content. Instead, in the last two decades or so, following the pioneering work of anti-imperialist scholars like Edward Said and others, there has been a focus on cultural imperialism. Of course, the recognition of cultural imperialism is not unimportant, but this focus has limited our understanding of the multifaceted character of imperialism. Hence, it is important for us to go beyond that. In more recent times, particularly after the end of the Cold War, with recognition of the uni-polar world after the demise of the Soviet Union, there is increasing recognition of growing American political and military domination. But again, this recognition is largely unconnected to understanding what should be termed ‘economic imperialism’. For that reason, there is need for better understanding and appreciation of economic imperialism and its consequences. The study of contemporary economic imperialism and its historical origins and transformation should be very high on the agenda for addressing questions

raised by imperialism in the present age. There have been many scholars of cultural and other aspects of imperialism who have looked at some of these economic issues, but with rather mixed results. Perhaps most famous is the book Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and published by Harvard University Press, which has made quite an impact in certain circles. It mainly confirms a pre-conceived, post-modern and post-Fordist ‘network’ view of the organization of contemporary imperialism. This has the serious consequence of distracting us from a better appreciation of other economic dimensions of imperialism. Two letters to the British Guardian by the same Michael Hardt in 2002 and 2003 were almost written like open letters to George W. Bush, pleading that the US President had failed to understand the contemporary ‘network’ character of imperialism, which defined new needs for empire in his fertile imagination. He urged Bush to recognize that capitalism and imperialism had changed, making states less needed if not irrelevant, and there was thus no longer any need for the US President to invade Iraq. While there may have been no systemic need for the US to invade Iraq in 2002, such an analysis is not going to lead us very far analytically and politically. Not surprisingly, Hardt and Negri advocate spontaneous mass action, with no clear direction or end. This is not to suggest that there is nothing for us to learn from the various discourses, which have emerged in the recent period. Critique involves engagement, and not simple rejection, which we do at our peril. The discourse of globalization, for instance, is very interesting, and has emerged at a particular moment in time when there is greater appreciation of cheaper, more affordable means of transportation and communication, and as a consequence, what some people prefer to refer to as the compression of space and time. This is a very important insight because it implies a different view of history, of geography, of the relationship between geography and history, and so on. Understandings of globalization have been rather simplistically polarized in ways which are not particularly useful. A close friend of some of us here, for instance, has coined the term ‘deglobalization’ -- not very different from ‘de-linking’, a term which emerged about three to four decades ago. Unfortunately, this has become a caricature of some critiques of globalization and does not offer a serious and viable alternative to

successful book on The House of Rothschild. He is no intellectual lightweight, but was a professor at Oxford and now a professor at Harvard. They define the history of the world for much of the western world. He made the Empire series for the BBC and is popular with almost all major Anglophone television networks in the US and UK. A recent essay, by Stephen Howe in Open Democracy, about Ferguson, suggests a precocious Thatcherite, intellectually formed in the 1980s. Thatcherism was a very important challenge not only to the left, but also to the old style pro-welfare state ‘soft’ conservatism of ‘wets’ like Harold Macmillan and Ted Heath. 5 The relationship between Penang and the US is longstanding. After Cornwallis, Penang’s role as an exporter and smelter of tin was boosted by the increased demand for tinned food during the Civil War following the decline of Cornwall supplies. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Henry Ford began mass production of automobiles, raising the demand for rubber and encouraging capitalist cultivation on plantations in Malaya to replace supplies from tapping jungle trees. Since the 1970s, Penang has been one of the favourite sites for electronic (re)export processing, even earning the title of ‘Silicon Island’. Recent deindustrialization and growth of cosmetic surgery tourism has already changed this appellation to ‘Silicone Isle’ as Hollywood and globalized aesthetic norms encourage those who can afford it to transform their physical appearances to imitate these perceived new norms.

Contents Contents

35 35

Print Print

Send Send email email

Across The South the challenges of the times we live in. To be relevant, to be taken seriously and to forge popular alliances against imperialism, we have to get away from such simplistic binary choices to develop a much richer and more credible understanding which better captures most experiences of imperialism. After all, many critics or opponents of so-called globalization are first and foremost -perhaps more than the ostensible proponents of what they term globalization -- internationalist in their intellectual formation, political practice, and sense of solidarity as well as priorities. Part of the problem with this analysis and discourse is that there are so many different meanings to globalization, like the proverbial six blind men touching different parts of the elephant, and referring to its different body parts as if they were all the same thing. So we do not get very far with some people talking about globalization in terms of the communications revolution, while others refer principally to the fluidity of finance, and yet others talk about globalization as involving the reduction of barriers to cross border flows of goods, services, investment, finance, ideas and, sometimes, people. This kind of debate forces us to take positions -- are you for or against globalization? This is a binary game that we should refuse to play as it is a caricature of many difficult and complex challenges and choices requiring more creative options. So we need to deconstruct the discourse and refuse to participate on these terms in such debates because they will not help us understand what is going on. It has become almost banal to observe that we are living in a period of globalization, but this, of course, is not the first period of globalization. The synthetic historical review by Janet AbuLughod, Before European Hegemony, reminds us of a period of intense relations among different parts of the world, stretching from China in the East, beyond Istanbul in the West, with many other cities in between, in South Asia, Africa and elsewhere. Her work reminds us of the emergence of a world system not characterized by domination, one which was, in a sense, far more egalitarian than any world system since. Since the Renaissance, we have seen a long period of history, which has always had the domination of one power or another. For instance, after the long century of the Italian city states of Venice, Genoa and Florence, we have seen periods of domination involving, first, the Dutch Republic, subsequently superseded by Britain, thanks partly to the very significant

financial contribution, particularly of the British West Indies in the Caribbean and India to the accumulation process for the Industrial Revolution. In the first half of the twentieth century, the British empire was increasingly superseded by what most now recognize as the US empire. This, of course, has been a very interesting and complicated process because, in many ways, the nature of the US empire is unfamiliar, in that it did not rely on colonial expansionism, which characterized the last era of globalization. A century ago, the English economist, John Hobson, objected to imperialism from a liberal point of view. For Hobson, the growing empire, e.g. in South Africa, was objectionable because it reflected two things familiar to us. For Hobson, the concentration and centralization of capital had betrayed the liberal ethics of economic as well as political freedom. Hobson also found imperialism objectionable because such concentration of economic power had resulted in greater business influence on public policy,1 what we now called cronyism.2 This Filipino contribution to the English language vocabulary also influenced the Reformasi movement in Malaysia. Anwar Ibrahim and his supporters imported the acronym KKN from Indonesia for ‘Korupsi (Corruption), Kolusi (Collusion), Nepotisma (Nepotism)’. They changed ‘kolusi’ to ‘kronisme’ (cronyism) -something more familiar to Malaysians, thanks to the Filipinos’ struggle against Marcos’ cronyism during the mid-1980s, and then Prime Minister Mahathir’s blatant bias for the ostensibly successful businessmen who caught his fancy. Thus, imperialism was recognized from a liberal perspective by John Hobson over a century ago as a problem caused by the rise of monopoly capital and of cronyism. It is that kind of liberal sensibility which is absent among the so-called neoliberals, who seem to have no hang-ups about monopoly power today, or their influence on public policy. It is precisely that kind of recognition which forces us to begin to try to reconstruct very broad, often new coalitions for struggle including people who seriously recognize and pursue nineteenth-century liberal ethics in the present context, which leads us to oppose the concentration of economic power on the one hand, and the intimate – often illicit -- relationship between economic and political power on the other. A major contributor to empire talk in Washington and New York today is arguably the most prominent historian of our age, Niall Ferguson, who is probably the only historian in the media list of the

100 most influential people in the world today. There are also a couple of economists, but almost no other academics. Ferguson’s latest book, Collossus, about the desirability of US empire, directly appeals to the US elite to rise to the challenge of imperial responsibility. His influential previous book, Empire was a coffee table book, accompanying a widely watched BBC television series. Imagine Ferguson’s influence, with millions of people all over the world watching. He claims that the British empire was generally benign, if not modernizing and historically progressive in consequence, in one fell swoop obliterating the painstaking research of thousands of historians and others, and violating the memory of suffering and sacrifice by our forebears. In much of the West today, you have a growing normalization of imperialism, growing acceptance, if not approval, of Western intervention, always presumed to be selfless, if not benign. Ferguson is currently one of the most frequent contributors to Foreign Affairs, the single most widely read semi-academic journal in the West today. His many widely read writings claim that the British empire brought the rule of law, infrastructure, progress, etc. He unabashedly insists that the American leadership today must not hesitate to rise to its imperial responsibilities, and should get over its historical and ideological baggage of ‘empire denial’, partly due to having waged the first modern war of national liberation from 1776.3 Sadly, after all the critical revisionist historical work on empire in the last third of the twentieth century, such claims are going largely unchallenged, especially in most influential western publications.4 We in the South urgently need to set the record straight, but we are in a very weak position, because there is very little serious work going on. As an adviser on public policy on higher education policy in Malaysia put it, ‘We have to stop wasting our time on useless subjects like history, philosophy and so on. Instead, we should devote more resources to the sciences, particularly technology and some other applied social sciences, such as urban planning.’ Everything else is to be consigned to the dustbin including history. Unfortunately, this is the attitude of influential policy makers in much of the Third World. Following Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby, Ferguson assumes sub-Saharan Africa has collapsed mainly leaving failed states. For this reason, they and others argue, developed country governments have to take on the colonial

Contents Contents

36 36

Print Print

Send Send email email

Across The South ‘white man’s burden’ to impose law and order, uphold human rights and bring democracy until the natives are ready to govern themselves. You may smile or think I’m exaggerating, but please read Ferguson, Mallaby and other supposedly liberal advocates of human rights. Much of the research which people like Ferguson build on has actually long been discredited for being partial at best and often biased, if not dishonest, e.g. the work of David Fieldhouse defending British empire 30 or 40 years ago. By selectively citing as it suits him, Ferguson offers an interpretation of imperial history which is not old-style colonial apologia, but instead seems to offer a seemingly nuanced and supposedly balanced view. Thus, the British empire is recognized as flawed and with blemishes, but is not only superior to other colonial empires, but most importantly, benign and progressive on balance. As Hobson and Lenin noted, Britain supplied capital to the world and financed growth in the world economy from around 1870 until the outbreak of World War I. But where did London’s capital come from? Largely from the current account surpluses we in the Empire contributed, initially from the West Indies and India, but later also from Africa and Southeast Asia from around 1880 or so. The massive contribution to capital accumulation by the trade surpluses of the British colonies is hardly ever mentioned in most historical narratives of this Industrial Revolution. After the Second World War, for example, Malaya contributed more to the UK’s economic recovery than any other part of the Empire, including Britain itself, or even by post-war US Marshall Plan and other aid.5 At the beginning of the third Christian millennium, economic historian Angus Madisson’s Millennial Perspective (OECD, 2001) offered his best guesses

of what has happened in the last two millennia. He suggests that until the thirteenth century, the world was quite equal, with China slightly ahead, after which Europe began to catch up with and then overtake China. Thus, contemporary inequalities began to grow with the Italian Renaissance, the rise of Iberia and then, the Dutch Republic. But the ‘great divergence’ -- between ‘North’ and ‘South’ – began around the time of the Industrial Revolution. This divergence from the time of the Industrial Revolution has been slightly reversed after the Second World War, with trends since the 1980s more ambiguous. From around 1950 until the 1970s, there was a temporary reversal of this divergence, with import-substituting industrialization and economic growth following decolonization. The subsequent decline in Africa, much of Latin America and parts of Asia has been offset by the continued tremendous growth of East Asia, now including China and India, in the last couple of decades. Growing domestic inequalities following economic liberalization have also had mixed consequences for overall global inequalities. So while large parts of the South have grown, much of the rest of the South has been falling further behind. This struggle for history is a struggle, which involves far more than history in the sense of the past, but also the present as history. Hence, the stakes are extremely high. Unfortunately, we may be in a situation, where history may repeat itself. And of course, if we do not recognize history, and more importantly, the forces that underlie historical phenomena, outcomes and trends, we run the risk of sliding further into imperial farce. Malaysians know me as someone who has criticized many economic policies associated with former Prime Minister Mahathir. But at the risk of sounding like

a founder of the post-Mahathir nostalgia circle, we are now in a situation of ignoring, if not forgetting some important issues Mahathir raised, albeit in his typically quixotic fashion. In contrast, the new Malaysian regime is trying very hard to ‘normalize’, to be internationally acceptable after the Mahathir interregnum, to be ‘one of the boys’ again. Thankfully, some of the new governments emerging in the South are trying to make a difference, trying to remind us that there are alternatives for the South. This was the significance of Cancun II in 2003 following the two lost decades after Cancun I in 1983, when then late Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley reported how US President Reagan ‘killed the South softly with his smile’. We seem not to appreciate our own history well enough to want to chart a path significantly different from the sad history of our past, including our post colonial experience. Instead, we seem resigned to the processes taking place, which are largely being shaped in Washington DC and on Wall Street, as if we have no alternative to them. It is precisely for this reason that Sephis was founded to promote the study of the history of development, especially the history of the South. By knowing our history, we know ourselves and learn how we can better support the aspirations for development of people in the South, and not just by looking in the rear view mirror of history, we better understand the significance of what has happened and is happening to us, in turn enabling us to act far more knowledgably and effectively.

Contents Contents

37 37

Print Print

Send Send email email

Across the South Contested Nationalisms and New Statism Workshop held in Penang, Malaysia 2-4 September 2004 Maznah Mohamad Director of the Women's Development Research Centre, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang and Associate Professor in Development Studies, her recent publications include Risking Malaysia: Culture, Politics and Identity (co-edited volume, 2001) and "Women's Engagement with Political Islam in Malaysia" (in Journal of Global Change, Peace and Security, 2004). In 2001 she was appointed to the Board of Directors, International Women's Rights Action Watch for Asia-Pacific (IWRAW). In 2002 elected to the Board of Trustees, Women's Centre for Change, Penang, she was the President in 2003-2004. She is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Journal of Gender, Technology and Development.

This workshop, with its quite apparent anti-nation connotations was held, appropriately, at a place with a freeflowing sense of belonging, if not ambivalent national identity. The Island city of Penang is situated northwest of the Malaysian peninsula. With a history of a strong colonial presence, it witnessed the convergence of diverse ethnic and trading communities. In its modern history, it was also a birthplace for various nationally significant social, political and civil society movements. It was here that some 40 people met to confer on the nation and the state. Did the workshop have anything new to say about the historicization of nation, or the nationalization of history? The business sessions included 16 presentations and commentaries and, in the last session, a roundtable with four speakers. Besides, the conference witnessed the launch of the Sephis eMagazine, a public lecture by Professor Jomo Sundaram, four different theme dinners, and many cerebral exchanges over coffee and late evening libations.

• Labour, Transmigration and the Global Economy (papers by Noorashikin Abdul Rahman, Odine de Guzman and Ishita Mukhopadhyay) • Cultural Representation of Identity, Nations and Nationalisms (papers by Goh Beng-Lan, Wong Soak Koon, Pravit Rojanaphruk, Meg Samuelson and Lily Rose Tope) • Political Agency within the Exclusionary/Inclusionary State (papers by Sonia Alvarez-Lequizamon, Maznah Mohamad, Robert Dover and Mohammad Nasir Uddin) Papers within the first theme explored the troubled and uneasy relationships that sub-states or proto-states have in relation to dominant states. The idea of a consensual or homogeneous nationalism is an ideal which many dominant states have failed to actualise.

The representation of identity, nations and the contested nature of nationalism is as much the concern of state control as it is the subject of literature, films and media. Under the third theme, the nature of nationalism, loyalty, belonging and identity is intricately reflected and expressed by producers of cultural symbols but hegemonically defined by the state. The fourth theme covers studies that explore how the state excludes and includes its various constituents. New Statism has its own peculiar agenda in this regard. In most cases, the state’s inclusionary and/or exclusionary strategies seek to harness instruments of law, ideology as well as overt coercive tools. At the Roundtable and summing-up session, participants were reminded that nationalism is inherently a contested ideal and the nation a contested terrain. There was a strong sense that the “New Statism” should be redefined with the forces of new imperialism in mind.

There were altogether nine panels. Each panel featured two papers and a discussant for each paper. We had participants from Argentina, Colombia, Bangladesh, India, Turkey, South Africa, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Philippines and Malaysia. The sixteen papers can be divided into following dominant themes: • The Dominant Nation and Its Challenges (papers by Andrew Aeria, Bodhisattva Kar, Yilmaz Colak and Dave Lumenta)

comes the engenderment of a new form of the International Division of Labour which is now actively driven by transnational statist processes rather than private capital alone.

Under the second theme, all the three papers dealt with the issue of labour movements, in its spatial fluidity, rather than its political efficacy. If global capitalism is at its apex, labour migration is also at its most extensive. With this,

The period of romance with the local, a time when the state’s mediating role was believed to be dispensable in linking the global and the local, according to one observation, is over. The return of the state in academic discourse has seen both disillusionment and desire among scholars and activists in their engagement with it. There is a practical ambiguity within political society– actors identifying

Contents Contents

38 38

Print Print

Send Send email email

Across the South the state as the chief source of “oppression” and yet expecting civic and political solutions to emanate from the state. There is perhaps a creative tension between perceptions of the state as it is and the state as it ought to be. Some felt that the workshop may have been too much of a celebration of the local (as in the primacy of ideas on devolution and indigeneity). Many questions can be posed in relation to this: What does a strong state mean? Should we neglect issues of regulation and law? Why the reluctance to revisit “class”? This last question acquires a wider dimension when we note the relative absence of concerns of equity in the papers. Indeed, the fact that Sephis receives many more proposals focusing on “identity” than on “equality/equity” is a sign of the times, argued one commentator. The use of the term “statism”, and especially its newness, evoked some uneasiness. The concept “New Statism” signals a new regime of regulation that privileges the market and thereby evades the responsibility for welfare and distribution. If such a concept of state is to be useful at all, it must also recognize that the state is certainly not monolithic and neither is its logic new. Discussion

of these issues led to some debate on the authoritarian state. As one participant argued, the state is presently able to be authoritarian and yet be amenable to globalization (including its international rights discourse). But it continues to be instrumentalist not just as a legal regime but also in a Gramscian sense, wherein its powers of oppression have become less discernible.

A few plain truths about the enduring importance of the state hit us during the workshop. First, one of our participants from East Jerusalem was denied travel papers by the Israeli state authorities. Another participant from Angola was held up by the bureaucracy, because he needed to arrange to bring a sick relative out of the country. In both these instances, statist instruments were palpably at work to deny, limit and confine. On a celebratory note, Anwar Ibrahim, the sacked and imprisoned former deputy prime minister of Malaysia was released the day the workshop started. The Second of September was exactly six years to the day he was removed from government. After six years the Malaysian Judiciary had “a change of heart” sending out the message that the power of the state is still deployed at will.

Some final reflections: The post-colonial state is always in search of homogeneity, and is consistently challenged for it, too. The idea of the essential nation has come under question; revealing the search for a post-national dream. Some participants suggested that what we are seeing now is already post-nationalism.

For a more extensive exploration of the workshop visit: www.kanita.org/cnnsworkshop

Contents Contents

39 39

Print Print

Send Send email email

Across the South Visual South: Using Visual Sources as Alternative Histories Workshop held at Maputo 13-19 September 2004 Patricia Hayes Patricia Hayes conducted her doctoral research on the colonisation of northern Namibia, and continues her research on Namibian colonial and postcolonial history. South African colonial photography in Namibia triggered her interest in the medium, and she has extended this research into a project on documentary photography in South Africa itself. She is Guest Editor of a special issue on visual genders of the journal Gender and History in 2005.

This workshop entitled Visual South, organised by SEPHIS and CODESRIA, problematised the visual as a source for historical knowledge production. The engagement with photographs, art and film (to name the most obvious visual materials) has opened up new fields and questions for historians, and one of the main anxieties experienced by young scholars is how to legitimize their use in the discipline. The three striking issues to emerge from this workshop were: 1. the challenge of making the discipline of history attend to ‘sources’ that may not fit the conventional requirements of evidence, e.g. photography, film, art; 2. the crucial importance of visual literacy as a skill that must be developed for historians and scholars in other disciplines; and 3. the need to apprehend and articulate different ways of seeing around the world, as opposed to the hegemony of western/eurocentric histories of vision and looking.

The week was structured around four formal lectures, two by the convenor and one by each of the two resource persons, with four visual literacy sessions. In addition, Professor Joel das Neves

Tembe of the National Archive of Mozambique and the History Department of Eduardo Mondlane University gave an opening lecture introducing the country’s visual arts and history. A final lecture was by Antonio Sopa from the National Archive, on the history of photography in Mozambique. In my first lecture, I addressed the visual turn in history, focusing mainly on photography, exploring notions of time and the different narrative implications of text and image. My main examples were drawn from the colonial photographic archives in Namibia, which were already familiar to some students from the 1998 publication The Colonising Camera. The next lecture was by Leslie Witz, who spoke on film and African history, using three different television series about the continent (Davidson, Mazrui and Gates) to critique film and representational practices. Professor Witz gave inter alia a provocative critique of discourses around truth and the real, and of history itself. In the early unsettled state of the workshop, this flushed out some anxiety among students around the evidentiary status of visual images, as putatively demanded by the discipline of history. A shift in emphasis over the next few days towards more visual and methodological skills helped to negotiate this tension. What Professor Witz also offered very helpfully that day was a personal account of his development as a historian, originally rooted in social history and positivism, then later attracted to the ‘production of history’ discourse. The first substantial literacy session happened by the third day, which was quite late in the programme. It involved projecting a number of photographs and asking participants to engage firstly with the content (denotation), and then move to an interpretive level (connotation).

Several photographs by Ricardo Rangel (revered as the father of Mozambican photography) were included in an attempt to connect more meaningfully with Mozambican history. These two literacy sessions allowed inclusion of pictures that were not tied to presentations or lectures, and Rangel’s work in particular recurred in the poster exhibition we visited, and the wonderful closing lecture by Antonio Sopa. This at least gave some small sediment of Mozambican visual history the opportunity to sink in.

I delivered my last lecture on documentary photography and the parallels with history as a discipline. The other resource person, Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, gave a lecture on folk art in India, and touched on debates concerning the older aspects of India’s visual culture and recent globalisation. Dr Mukhopadhyay’s approach was more theoretical and sociological than historical and visual per se, and his interventions throughout the workshop generated considerable debate. This challenged the students to articulate their responses in more theoretically informed ways, and they in turn pushed for more intensive visual readings of the artworks in his research. The session was enriched by the presence of a number of Indian students and Willem van Schendel. The workshop began to engage with the notion of darsan (explained as the sacred gaze in India) which opened up possibilities of a critique

Contents Contents

40 40

Print Print

Send Send email email

Across the South of Eurocentric approaches to visual studies. The workshop started to ask questions about African and other ways of seeing, which in some ways neatly tied this workshop to some of the debates raised at the August workshop in Cape Town on Gender & Visuality. The student presentations began with photography, running through nineteenth century Barbados, twentieth century Argentina and colonial Kerala in India. Maria Guembe’s work on the centrality of photographs to the Memorias Abiertas campaign was the most remarkable in linking past and present, and in recontextualising ID photos of the Disappeared. India and Africa share important agendas in historicizing photographic practices and questioning colonial categories, and it is clear that this should be built into future collaborative research frameworks. Apart from film and video research presented by Gairoonisa Paleker and Foluke Ogunleye, members of the National Archive screened footage of a traditional ceremony in a rural area, offering the opportunity to see how culture and history are filmed. Farabi Fakih and Sushmita Sridhar gave extremely interesting presentations, on city maps and artistic sketches respectively. Sridhar offered one of the most suggestive ways of approaching different visual media, by arguing that theory developed in one area might throw light on others. In her case she showed the relevance and limitations of photographic theory, and how sketches might expand certain research possibilities. This could offer important methodological innovations, as there is frequent inter-textuality (as it were)

between different visual registers, and her bold move to apply this was very refreshing. The student sessions continued with Babacar Ba’s penal history in Senegal, dealing with forms of graffiti and spatialisation, followed by Mozambican student Paolo Lopes José who spoke about the early stages of his research on cultural patrimony in areas with rock art. Mary Ntabeni made significant breakthroughs in her research of photographs of the Second World War aircrafts donated to Britain by the Lesotho government. The student presentations were rounded up by two research pieces on sculpture, with Mukhopadhyay giving a very accomplished paper on Khiching in India, and Gam setting out some initial parameters on the Kom Fondom. Anna Villarba-Torres presented her work on Cordillera postcards in this last session. This outline of student work is to give a sense of the range and uneven-ness that extended across the workshop.

during the workshop meant little time for local history, and this was unfortunate in terms of helping participants understand some of the public art and monuments they were seeing in the city, as well as in galleries, especially when public texts were in Portuguese. However it must be said that most participants were able to read the city in many interesting socioeconomic and cultural ways despite not having a detailed knowledge of Mozambique’s colonial and postcolonial history. Besides the workshop dinner at Costa do Sol, a popular family restaurant north of Maputo, and another social event at the hotel on the Saturday evening, two formal outings were arranged. The first was to the home of Malangatana Valente Ngwenya, which also serves as a gallery in the Aeroporto neighbourhood. A second outing was organized to an exhibition of posters called Up Front and Personal, sponsored and developed by the British Council. The workshop was timely and appropriate. It addressed various concerns of young scholars in the South, who have been attracted by the visual turn. It offered opportunities for further theorization, and exposed students from different parts of the world to an unusual range of visual cultures.

In retrospect, the workshop needed some strategic orientation literature, film or lecture on the last few decades of Mozambique’s history, which could have made the urban environment much more meaningful to the participants. The overwhelming need to focus on visuality

Contents Contents

41 41

Print Print

Send Send email email

Across the South Teaching gendered history: a personal reflection Anne Mager

Anne Mager with a student

Anne Mager teaches Economic History and Gender History in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town where she holds the position of Associate Professor. Her book Gender and the Making of a South African Bantustan: A Social History of the Ciskei, 1945-1959 was published by James Currey/Heinemann and David Philip in 1999. She has published in leading international journals and is currently an editor of the Journal of African History. Her present research project is on the history of liquor, particularly the significance of illicit and commercial beer for economic and gendered social relations in South Africa. In December 2002, she was awarded the Distinguished Teachers Award for her commitment to teaching and research supervision. In 2002, she convened the Sephis/CODESRIA Extended Workshop on Social History in Dakar, Senegal. Unwilling to break with her past as an anti-apartheid and feminist activist, she remains involved in gender training with several NGOs.

What does it mean to use gender as a category of historical analysis? What does it do for our understanding of history? Before we can get to these questions in an undergraduate course, students challenge us to convince them that gender is neither biologically nor culturally determined. Here one resorts to all sorts of ruses. One trick is to ask students to think of a supermarket item and discuss its gender. A favourite item is a pink ladies’ razor, propped up on a shapely hour-glass holder and engraved with the brand name ‘Venus’. Clearly, specific ideas about femininity are used to market this razor to women. The razor is shapely, pastel coloured, smooth in its effect and reliable. It is not a man’s razor; we consume its femininity as we make the purchase or shave our bodies. To better understand this gendering, we can compare the ladies’ razor with one aimed at a male market. Devoid of biology, these razors are infused with ideas and attributes emanating from dominant perceptions of normative gender behaviours. The point is to challenge the students: Razors are modern items. How did gender manifest before razors appeared? If marketers understand gender and put it to such effective use, is it not important for historians to develop a critical understanding of the ways in which gender shapes societies in different ways over time?

movements contributed to a climate of agitation and questioning of social relations, especially of oppression and subordination. Women’s active participation in this politics led to social change across the continent and generated new aspirations for women as well as men. Not all of this activism or change was, however, mindful of gender.

Gendered history is a new field. In the early 1970s only a handful of scholars were beginning to think about the significance of gender for history. In Africa, the use of gender as a category of historical analysis came about as a result of women’s participation in anti-colonial struggles and nationalist movements, particularly from the 1970s. These social

While early histories tended to add women to the received historical account, more recently, historians have asked: What difference did women’s agency make? And what difference does knowing this make to our understanding of the past? This gendered history demonstrated that women’s opposition to colonial controls was not the same as

Activists and scholars who sought to explain these processes found some inspiration (and also some shortcomings) in the ideas of earlier feminist movements in the north. Simone de Beauvoir and Sheila Rowbotham produced seminal feminist works in France and Britain respectively but these were soon superceded in African contexts by the ideas of Samora Machel and Amilcar Cabral, political leaders in Lusophone Africa. What feminist scholarship (all scholarship that opposes the assumption of a universal male subject) has contributed to gendered history is the insistence that women’s lives, work, politics and ways of knowing are not only legitimate areas of historical inquiry but require the use of new conceptual tools and theoretical explanations. New questions need to be posed about why and how power relations came to be gendered and hierarchically arranged and whether this power was contested, by whom and under what circumstances.

that of the men. It showed that political women often understood that they stood in a different relation to colonial authority than men and recognized the gendered character of both colonial and local power relations. It also shows that this understanding was subsumed within more complex gender power relations. Gendered history does not imply advocacy (promoting a particular worldview). Indeed, the field is rich precisely because of the depth of research and critical thinking of the recent scholarship. To avoid advocacy in an often emotionally laden field, students of gender and history need to be encouraged to interrogate how dominant ideas about gender came to constitute a normative template at a particular moment. Put differently, they need to ask: How did some ideas come to be used by powerful institutions (including liberation movements) to guide beliefs, behaviours and attitudes while others remained submerged? Women and men or black and white students may respond differently to these questions. Pushed to a corner, some students may resort to statements like, ‘But it is my culture’. It is often useful to deconstruct notions like ‘culture’ in an abstract way, or in relation to hypothetical contexts so that students come to see the defensiveness of their own responses in unthreatening ways. Another way of turning unsettled emotions into more thoughtful responses is to invite speakers with stories that fit the themes of the course but pull against the grain of stereotypes: A black activist explained why she had marched against the Apartheid pass laws; an African woman magistrate talked about the difficulties of administering customary law; a black male activist discussed men’s fear of

Contents Contents

42 42

Print Print

Send Send email email

Across the South democracy; a white feminist explained how she got her husband to do the laundry; a black fisherwoman described why she formed an all-women fishing association to expose the undemocratic quota system of the post-apartheid government. These issues are perhaps specific to South Africa and will probably have greater resonance for students in the south than the north. Certainly, the students from the north ‘studying abroad’ in South Africa found the militancy of our history a little daunting at times. Because the cultural contexts in which ideas about gender are constructed and applied are an important area of study for historians of gender, we have learned and borrowed much from scholars in anthropology, sociology and literature. Symbols and symbolic activities through which individuals are gendered male and female, such as naming ceremonies, puberty rites and signs of status require historical as well as anthropological analysis. Apparently fixed and unchanging at one moment, viewed over time, we see how changes in economic

or political activities impact profoundly on cultural elements. We might say that historians see gender not as culturally constructed but as constructed in contexts in which cultural factors play a significant part. Students of gender may find novels, theory or testimonies extremely useful sources for thinking about gender, especially in discussion (tutorial) groups. However, introducing material that has not been contextualized historically places an added responsibility on the teacher to ensure that students historicise, that is, that they discuss when, by whom and under what conditions texts were produced and particular ideas generated. Not all historians use gender as a category of analysis. Some have not caught up with the developments in this area of scholarship; others remain closed to the significance of gender because their own worldview does not allow for the exploration of these ideas. Students, too, may have fixed ideas about gender before they embark on a gender course. One may not succeed in inspiring all, or even very many students to take up the

conceptual tools that enable one to get at gender dynamics in social relations. Perhaps the most one can achieve is to encourage students to think critically and with open-minded tolerance. And to enjoy the time they spend doing so. The reward comes when students choose to do gendered research in the senior undergraduate year or for their postgraduate dissertations. This is where students begin to pose new questions and to think about the specific challenges presented by local issues, or south-south issues. The field is young, the challenges great and the opportunities enormous. It is my hope that more and more students from the south will move in the direction of gendered historical research.

Contents Contents

43 43

Print Print

Send Send email email

Across the South A history of a feminist publishing house in India Zubaan Zubaan is an independent non-profit publishing organisation established in 2003. It grew out of India’s first Feminist non-profit publishing house, Kali for Women, a trust set up in 1984, to increase and expand the body of knowledge on and by women in India in particular, and the Third World in general. The word ‘Zubaan’ comes from Hindustani and means, literally, tongue, but it has many other meanings, such as voice, language, speech and dialect. Women’s language, the language they use inside the home, to communicate with each other, a private language, is often called begumati zubaan (the speech of women). Founded by Urvashi Butalia, who was co-founder of Kali for Women, Zubaan was set up to specifically continue Kali’s work. Kali was Urvashi’s idea. Actively involved in the women’s movement in India, and working professionally in a publishing house, she had come to feel that mainstream publishing paid scant attention to the issues that were being raised by the women’s movement. The existing literature was mainly by western scholars who visited India for short or long periods and wrote books that were then bought by Indians at expensive prices. At that time, Ritu Menon, Kali’s co-founder with Urvashi Butalia, was working in a mainstream publishing house and just beginning the process of publishing a small number of books on women. When she heard of Urvashi’s plan to set up a feminist publishing house (already named Kali), she offered to join this enterprise. The two women left their jobs and teamed up to set up Kali for Women. Within five years of its establishment, Kali had become self-sufficient. The founders followed a formula of keeping the overheads and prices low, publishing quality work, and ensuring that not only the content but also the production quality of their publications met international standards. Kali books began to make a mark in the world of publishing. Kali for Women became one of the most significant publishing houses within India and abroad. Its name stood for quality, editorial attention, excellence of content,

and of enduring value. Its success was evident from the fact that in India, several mainstream publishing houses began to publish books on women, and all of them agreed that this is one of the most profitable areas of their publishing. Kali’s list consisted of three distinct areas: academic and general books, fiction and small pamphlets and booklets. The first were broadly meant for academics, researchers and some general readers, the second for a broader market, and the third to be used by NGOs, women’s groups, and grassroots groups. After nearly two decades of publishing and being trailblazers in creating a market for books on women, the two founders of Kali decided to set up their independent imprints. Urvashi’s imprint, Zubaan, has inherited half the backlist of Kali so that reprints of many backlist titles are assured. While Zubaan is continuing to publish in areas similar to its predecessor, we are also expanding into other fields. In addition to publishing in English, we plan to begin publishing in Hindi and work actively with publishers in other Indian languages who would be keen to translate our books. We also plan to organise workshops and work in collaboration with other organisations. Some of these collaborations have already begun with Pratham, an NGO that works in nonformal education; the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, a non-profit organisation; United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD); and Aman, an NGO that works for peace. This expansion is based on the understanding and realization that the realities of women’s lives in India and elsewhere, have changed and expanded considerably. In keeping with the many changes in the women’s movement, Zubaan is also moving into publishing more broad based, popular books, though the focus on women will continue to remain central.

children, particularly for underprivileged children. In this connection, we have produced a series of six titles, The Magic Key Series (written originally by Dr Zakir Husain, former President of India) in Hindi, Marathi, English and Kannada. A new and exciting project that Zubaan is co-ordinating is a historical, but visual mapping of the women’s movement in India by collecting posters from around the country. These may be in private or institutional collections, but the intention is to chart the women’s movement through some distinct campaigns like Anti-dowry, Sati, family planning etc. Poster Women will culminate in an exhibition in early 2006. We hope to make it a travelling exhibition. Some of the distinct lists that are being built in Zubaan are: • • • • • • • • • •

Zubaan’s objectives are: •

•

• Although we have been in existence only for a year, we have published a number of excellent titles on women, and have begun the process of publishing for

Gender and Reproductive Health/Sexuality Gender and Conflict Gender and Architecture Gender and Law Gender and History/National Movement Gender and Economics The North East of India (including essays and fiction) Fiction in translation, mostly novels Readers on the Women’s Movement/Feminism Biographies/Autobiographies/ Memoirs

To work towards increasing and expanding the body of knowledge on and by women in India in particular and in the Third World in general; To provide a forum where women writers can debate issues they are concerned with, and a space where they can publish and be read; To provide assistance to women’s groups and NGOs in the basics of documentation, publishing, writing, and archiving;

Contents Contents

44 44

Print Print

Send Send email email

Across the South •

•

•

•

•

To train women’s groups and NGO activists in editorial and production skills; To hold workshops in creative writing for young girls and women; To encourage well known women writers to contribute at least part of their work in the form of stories, short novellas, etc for the production of post literacy materials for adults and to publish these, in collaboration with NGOs and others, in several Indian languages; To work towards building up a culture of translating works by Indian writers (particularly women writers) within and between the Indian languages; To ensure that women’s

•

•

writings are given their rightful place inside curricula and syllabi in universities, educational institutions and schools; To increase and expand the body of knowledge about the girl child in India; To lobby for changes, take part in campaigns, to work with government and international and other institutions for the improvement of the status of women in India.

Jaya Bhattacharji Zubaan, K-92, First Floor, Hauz Khas Enclave, New Delhi – 110016 Tel: +91-11-26521008, 26864497, 26514772 Email: [email protected] Website: www.zubaanbooks.com (under construction)

Working with Urvashi in Zubaan is a small editorial team that consists of Preeti Gill, Anita Roy and Jaya Bhattacharji. Like Kali for Women, Zubaan will remain a non-profit publisher, keeping book prices low, putting back all profits into developing books.

Zubaan diary 2005 Celebrate the New Year with a Zubaan diary, featuring Indian calendar art exclusively selected from the collection of Dr Patricia Uberoi. Each month features one of the many faces of Indian woman – as muse, mother, goddess, siren, or powerful symbol of nationality. Subverting and reclaiming these icons of femininity, Patricia Uberoi gives a truly contemporary slant to the kitsch of yesteryear. Along with the week-to-view diary pages, comes a list of over 350 women’s organizations in India and South Asia, fully updated, with addresses, email IDs and websites, making this diary a ‘must’ for anyone interested in women and women’s issues in the region. ORDER YOUR COPY NOW Contact Jaya Bhattacharji or Satish Sharma at: [email protected] or call 0091-11-2685 4497, 2652 1008. Please add postage and handling charges to the total cost at: 10% within Delhi 15% within India 25% for destinations overseas

Contents Contents

45 45

Print Print

Send Send email email

Reviews Problematising Democratisation and Women’s Grassroot Movements Soma Marik She is Reader in History, Ramakrishna Sarada Mission Vivekananda Vidyabhavan, and guest faculty at the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University. She is also a member of the Nari Nirjatan Pratirodh Mancha (Forum Against Oppression of Women), Kolkata, and of the West Bengal based women’s rights network Maitree. Jill M. Bystydzienski and Joti Sekhon (eds.) Democratization and Women’s Grassroots Movements, Kali for Women, South Asia Edition, New Delhi, 2002, (original edition, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 1999), pp. viii + 397, Rs. 350.

The aim of the editors of this volume is to put together a set of essays exploring diverse experience of participatory democracy in women’s movements at grassroot level. It shows how participatory democracy has grown and how through movements and interventions the dichotomy between public and private spaces have been negotiated. The specific focus is on the processes whereby women have become more visible in the age of globalisation, particularly since the fall of dictatorships, both in the ex-communist countries and in Latin America. The concept of participatory democracy implies the emergence of women’s voices at all levels of decision-making, in the family, community, workplace and local/ central administration.

A wide range of countries have been surveyed– those where there have been transitions to liberal democracy, whether from military dictatorships or from bureaucratic dictatorships claiming to be socialist, as well as those where liberal democracies have been in more or less sustained existence, from India to Canada. Apart from a brief and rather inadequate discussion of socialist democracy, the collection constructs a polarity between liberal democracy and direct participatory democracy. Viewed

as an expansion, and feminisation, of an original Aristotelian concept, the gains of direct participatory democracy are seen as manifold for women. Different types of community initiatives in both the North and the South have been situated in their lived realities. Democratisation at the formal political level, along with informal associations, community groups, educational systems, family and kin networks, all come together, it is argued, to widen the scope for human freedom and enhance the ability of people to make choices. Such grassroot women’s activities influence and recreate civil society. Case studies include how NGOs have empowered women through concrete programmes /projects, as well as those that have mobilised opinion, influenced public policies or law making regarding women. Thus, the study of a Hong Kong based women’s network shows how their struggle for inheritance rights led to a democratisation of private and public lives at the organisational level. A report from South Africa illustrates how women are empowered through education so that they can sensitise their families, for instance, making fathers aware of their responsibility in parenting.

Demonstration in Calcutta by a platform of women's groups, Maitree. Photograph: courtesy Kunal Chattopadhyay

Women’s autonomy is brought out in a number of cases and myriad ways. A group in Syria is shown to have autonomously interpreted the Quran avoiding both the male and the western views. But is there a homogenous western view? And could one avoid direct questioning of religious orthodoxy while fighting for women’s autonomy? In Singapore and in Eretria, women have influenced the political process. In East Europe, with the restoration of capitalism, as the state abdicated its responsibilities, community-based women’s groups have stepped in.

Demonstration in Calcutta by a platform of women's groups, Maitree. Photograph: courtesy Kunal Chattopadhyay Even at the global level, the editors suggest, there has been a paradoxical development, since globalisation itself has created the possibilities of solidarity, even in forums created by agencies like the United Nations. Through these forums, such as the Beijing, the Cairo or the Rio meets, women have been part of the world wide resistance to forms of globalisation that involve the control of the national economy by foreign capital. A number of problems are however left unaddressed, or at times created, by the approaches in the anthology. We can barely hint at some of them. Greek

Contents Contents

46 46

Print Print

Send Send email email

Reviews democracy was not merely a grassroots initiative but was rigidly structured all through. And Aristotle like his master, Plato, was a major opponent of the democratic polis. So the idea of expanding from the Aristotelian original is flawed. Secondly, and this is far more important, after all the talk of grassroots and community level organisations, what emerge, all too often, are funded NGOs with the ideology of “facilitators” helping out “beneficiaries”. A beneficiary is not an equal partner in a struggle for selfemancipation. This is merely revised philanthropy. This problem is further heightened by the dichotomy between, on one hand, state, and on the other

hand, local initiatives. Unstructured social movements often cannot go beyond local challenges, and therefore, ultimately accept the premise of the capitalist market economy and a hierarchical organisation of power; and the minimalist neoliberal state withdraws even from social democratic welfare programmes. Social movements that are not structured for political struggle at the central level tend not to go beyond challenging local oppressions and local power structures. They thereby accept the premise of the capitalist market economy and a bureaucratic and hierarchical power structure. This failure makes it easier for the minimalist neoliberal state to withdraw

even from social democratic welfare programmes. Equally, there is an uncritical acceptance of the role of the UN and UN sponsored forums, rather than critically enquiring whether these operate as safety valves for the growing anti-neoliberal struggle as seen at Seattle, Prague, and other places, since then all the way to Cancun.

Contents Contents

47 47

Print Print

Send Send email email

Reviews On the ‘Wives of Dead Men’ Aishika Chakraborty Senior Lecturer in History, Brahmananda Keshab Chandra College, Kolkata (India). She has just submitted a PhD on widowhood in colonial Bengal. She is also a dancer, associated with a well-known troupe, the Dancers’ Guild. She is an exponent of a new dance form Navanritya, a genre innovated by Manjusree Chaki Sircar in Calcutta. Her chief interests are cats and stray dogs. Uma Chakravarti and Preeti Gill (eds.) Shadow Lives: Writings on Widowhood, Kali For Women, New Delhi, 2001, ISBN 81 86706 40 2, pp. 489, Rs.295.

“Since social reform movement was for many years synonymous with the widow reform movement”, argued Uma Chakravarti in her earlier work, “the issue of the ‘status’ of the widow has almost been overworked in writing”. In contrast, there was a simultaneous silencing of widows’ voices, she admitted, leading to an imbalance in sources. To set right this ‘unevenness’, feminist historians have brought forth, since the 1990s, a new range of analyses re-searching women’s agency and voices. Chakravarti’s path-breaking research on widowhood in Western India was pegged on her reading of Pandita Ramabai’s questioning of ideological and symbolic constructions underlying widowhood. To provide another archive, her Shadow Lives: Writings on Widowhood, co-edited with Pretti Gill, re-turns to the widow. Organised in three parts, the book furnishes an array of writings on widowhood in several languages of nineteenth and twentieth century India. Why is widowhood of such overwhelming importance in Indian society? Why is the widow so ubiquitous in Indian writings? It seems to have remained an issue of enduring importance, two centuries after the ‘widow problem’ was ‘discovered’. The ‘discovery’ was imbricated in a heightening preoccupation with marriage, remarriage and sexuality of widows. Widows became the first theatre of action when colonial rulers rescued them from self-immolation on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Rescued from the pyres of death, a large number of women, excluded from active conjugality, and legitimate sexual and reproductive roles, continued to derive their identities as ‘wives of dead men’. The next debate was over whether these widows could marry again. While widespread anxiety about widows’ unfulfilled sexuality led reformers like Iswarchandra Vidyasagar to try to channel them into re-marriage, the ‘enabling’ Widow Remarriage Act (1856) suffered major limitations.

Shadow Lives traces myriad complexities of widowhood from a range of Indian literature—from Dharmasutras, Puranic texts, colonial official reports to personal narratives and fiction. Drawing on contrasting imageries, Chakravarti explains that widows represented the realm of ‘social death’, the structural counterpart of wifehood, life and sexuality. The book could also have marked the ‘shift’ in the construction of the ‘widow problem’ from social reform to cultural nationalism. Widows re-emerged as one of the cultural projects of the nationalist elite. The collection fails to spot the distinctiveness in the writings of cultural nationalists, who inscribed on the body of the pure and pristine brahmacharini the strength and virtue of a Hindu/Indian nation.

The book charts out the journey that widows undertook in the world of imagination. The widow who lay latent in Vidyasagar’s polemical tracts (written to promote widow remarriage) was fleshed out in other contemporary writings, which contributed towards demonising her sexuality. It was around conflicts between the external ‘social normal’ and internal/feminine sanctions that closures in these narratives were organised. Death, denunciation or renunciation frequently provided a facile solution to a widow’s ‘illicit’ love, representing disruptive threats to

conjugality, family and society. To keep alive the myth of spiritual widowhood, male writers denied and sometimes sanitised novels of the sexual agency of widows to satisfy the moral norms of the nation. Shadow Lives extensively surveys elite literature; but the entire gamut of popular writings—farces, plays, scandal literature, ditties and limericks, dwelling equally on widows’ sexual anarchy, has been left unexplored. The mystic image of a pure widow, reinvented by nationalists, was at constant war with real images of indignity and depravation. Unable to retain their status in the family and unfit to render drudge labour, old widows were often thrown out of the shelter of the family to die ‘sacred’ deaths in Kashi or Vrindavan. Skimming through several memoirs and short stories, the book conjures up a poignant vision of many such abandoned widows. The focus is on older widows, who congregated in ‘holy cities’ for food and shelter. Younger widows, however, it has been repeatedly argued, found a niche in the brothels of the holy cities. The volume does not include official and reformist documents underwriting the connection between widowhood and prostitution. The book begins with the strident response to the shooting of a film called Water, directed by Deepa Mehta. The film allegedly portrayed widows living in Kashi as prostitutes. It disturbed the neoHindutva ideologues. These twentieth century cultural nationalists, drawing on the nineteenth century ideal of ascetic widowhood, sought to amplify a resurgent neo-Hindu political identity, and they disrupted the shooting to such good effect that the film had to be abandoned in the preliminary stages. One may recall, in this connection, another controversy besieging the release of the first cinematic version of Rabindranath Tagore’s novel, Chokher Bali. The novel, written in 1903, portrayed a desirous Hindu widow—

Contents Contents

48 48

Print Print

Send Send email email

Reviews Binodini who disrupted a seemingly settled conjugal order. A century after the writing of the novel, in October 2003, Rituparno Ghosh released a film based on the novel. He was accused of producing a ‘passion play’ by ‘deconstructing’ the Tagore original. Binodini, in the film, was portrayed as sexually active and displaying herself shamelessly in a red jacket. The widow, of course, is supposed to be chaste and

clad only in white garments. The one scene that excited much disgust was an unexpected onset of menstruation during Ambubachi, also believed to be the menstruating period of the mother-earth. The young widow was not, as she was supposed to be, ‘sexually dead’. From celluloid to real life Shadow Lives opens up a different trajectory of widowhood. The exploration is three-fold:

it situates widowhood within a wide matrix of textual tradition, recovers widows’ voices from their own writings and explores their multiple imageries from contemporary representations.

Contents Contents

49 49

Print Print

Send Send email email

Reviews Re-thinking reproductive rights Amit Ranjan Basu [email protected]

Mohan Rao (ed.) The Unheard Scream: Reproductive Health and Women’s Lives in India, Zubaan and Panos Institute India, New Delhi, 2004, pp. 312, Rs. 400.

“Dolly Bagdi and her eighteen month old daughter were strangled to death in a village of Mayureswar in West Bengal. It is said that she was accused of giving birth to two consecutive girl children.”

have migrated to other parts of India for seasonal or semi-permanent work). Jha showed that it is virtually impossible for these women to give any priority to their own health.

This news appeared on 15 November 2004 in a leading Bengali daily published from Kolkata. It seems that the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held at Cairo in 1994 and the launching of a new Reproductive and Child Health (RCH) policy in 1997 did not impact much on everyday reality in India! Aptly titled, this book brings to life the situations of and struggles by, chiefly women, activists in India over the issue of sexual and reproductive rights of women. Emerging out of the Panos Health Media Fellowship, this volume is a selection of thirteen articles, each focusing on different areas of inquiry and confronting realities that are cruel, even awesome. The editor writes in his introduction that, despite many contending discourses that intersected each other at the ICPD, the consensus reached at the end ‘signalled a move away from demographically driven population policies’ (p.3). But policies emanating from such insights, such as the RCH, remain apathetic to the struggles of millions of women who are mostly poor and underprivileged.

Gitanjali Gangoli’s article on the health and rights of female sex-workers, and Basant Bhosale’s on women and AIDS in India are somewhat overlapping and re-focus an area that has received fairly good coverage in the last decade. Rupa Chinai has explored an unknown terrain by travelling across several districts of Nagaland to find out how women are struggling to survive amidst poor health facilities, patriarchal politics and insurgency. Lyla Bavadam has argued, provocatively, that the average Indian woman copes with menopause quite easily compared to their Western counterpart. Indeed, menopause, she argues, can be interpreted as a moment of ‘freedom’ (from imposed sexual

Sreelatha Menon treats reproductive and child health (RCH) programmes in two districts of Uttar Pradesh, Ferozabad and Mainpuri, as a forceful ‘sterilisation campaign’ (and not much more)! Sandhya Srinivasan writes about the political economy of the recent mushrooming of infertility clinics all over India. She provides us with a picture of women’s experiences and shows how infertility specialists are guilty of blatantly unethical practices, selling inappropriate and potentially hazardous treatment to desperate women. Dhirendra K. Jha has explored the plight of ‘grass widows’ of Bihar, who are women from lower castes and wives of landless labourers (who

intercourse). Anu Anand’s fieldwork in Madhya Pradesh has provided data on unsafe deliveries in a ‘tribal’ area under the banner of ‘safe motherhood.’ Both Basheer’s and Rajalaxmi’s articles point to a paradoxical fact: that new economic opportunities are counterproductive of women’s reproductive health. Basheer has picked on the Muslim dominated Malappuram district of Kerala where the exodus of workers to the Gulf for more money has resulted

in new forms of domination over teenaged women, who are forced into marriage before completing school education. He has shown links between the new economy and traditional practices and deftly elaborated on the impact on mental health and RCH of these young women. Rajalaxmi investigates two export processing zones (EPZ) in Noida and Santacruz and demystifies the myth of liberalisation by showing the extent to which new forms of exploitation render women workers virtually defenseless in matters of their own health. Manisha Bhalla’s study on sex selective abortion of female foetuses in Punjab exposes the low status of the girl child in a state, which is economically prosperous. Swati Bhattacharya’s critical review of sex education highlights the problems of understanding the concept of sexuality by reducing it to sexual behaviour. Rajashri Dasgupta has delved into the politics of sterilising women with new drugs through unethical means and studied the case of Quinacrine in West Bengal. She has brilliantly traced the genealogy of Quinacrine sterilisation and offers a critical feminist discourse against making women’s bodies the object of experiment. The strength of the book is the fresh data it seeks to analyze and its powerful journalistic prose. However, most of the articles appear somewhat one-sided. They refrain from suggesting possible alternatives or even any radical theoretical conceptualization of ‘RCH’. The lack of history creates a conceptual problem. While the articles provide a trenchant critique of patriarchy, it fails to see the emergence of new masculinity, a proactive discourse that supports the struggle of women to establish their reproductive rights. Nevertheless, this book is a worthwhile contribution to the arsenal of feminist and gender activists not only in India but also in other countries of the south where the situation is not dissimilar.

Contents Contents

50 50

ANNOUNCEMENTS

SCHOLARSHIPS PhD IN COMPARATIVE FILM STUDIES LAST DATE FOR APPLICATION: 20 DECEMBER 2004 NORTHERN IRELAND and BANGALORE, INDIA.

OCCASIONAL PAPERS SEPHIS-CSSSC Occasional Paper Series

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE HISTORIES IN THE VERNACULAR 28-30 DECEMBER 2004 KOLKATA, INDIA.

MULTINATIONAL WORKING GROUP CALL FOR PROPOSALS HIGHER EDUCATION IN AFRICA: TRANSFORMING WITHIN, PREPARING THE FUTURE MARCH 2005.

MULTINATIONAL WORKING GROUP CALL FOR PROPOSALS CITIZENSHIP AND IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICA MARCH 2005.

INTERNATIONAL COLLOQUIUM CALL FOR PAPERS “LUSOPHONIE” IN AFRICA: HISTORY, DEMOCRACY AND INTEGRATION 28-30 APRIL 2005 LUANDA, ANGOLA. TRAINING WORKSHOP MEMORIES AND HISTORY: USING MATERIAL CULTURE AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL SOURCES AS ALTERNATIVE HISTORY 20-26 JUNE 2005 MOROCCO.

A GUIDE WEB SEARCHING USING GOOGLE FOR AFRICAN STUDIES RESEARCH: A GUIDE TO EFFECTIVE WEB SEARCHING.

Print Print

Send Send email email

Contents Contents

51 51

Print Print

Send Send email email

ANNOUNCEMENTS SCHOLARSHIPS PhD IN COMPARATIVE FILM STUDIES LAST DATE FOR APPLICATION: 20 DECEMBER 2004 NOTHERN IRELAND AND BANGALORE, INDIA For further information: http://www.cscsban.org; http://www.arts.ulster.ac.uk The University of Ulster (Northern Ireland) and Centre for the Study of Culture & Society (Bangalore) are announcing four funded PhD Scholarships in Comparative Film Studies. Four scholarships leading to a PhD in Comparative Film Studies are available under a new research programme that seeks to promote research capable of contributing to the newly emerging discipline of Comparative Film Studies. The 3-year full-time programme has been devised and will be conducted jointly by the School of Media and Performing Arts of the University of Ulster (Coleraine, Northern Ireland) and the Centre for the Study of Culture & Society (CSCS, Bangalore, India). It will be hosted and/administered by the CSCS. Selected candidates will be registered with the University of Ulster for a research degree leading to a PhD awarded by the University of Ulster. The University of Ulster's Centre for Media Research will cover all UU fees for 3 years*. Selected candidates will be based at the CSCS although no formal residency requirements apply. * Nominal Bench and Library Fees extra. REQUIREMENTS: The programme is open to applicants with a Masters degree or equivalent experience. Applicants from all parts of the world are welcome. HOW TO APPLY: Interested parties must apply in writing and provide the following documents: o Filled in application form (to be downloaded from the website of the University of Ulster); o Evidence of MA qualification or equivalent; o Curriculum vitae; o A research proposal (600 to 1000 words) outlining the area and nature of the research the candidate intends to undertake; o A copy of one essay on a relevant topic written in English. Send your applications and supporting documents in an envelope marked Ph.D. Programme in Comparative Film Studies' to: Administrative Officer Centre for the Study of Culture and Society 466, 9th Cross Madhavan Park 1st Block, Jayanagar Bangalore 560011, India For further details write to: Dr Valentina Vitali, University of Ulster Dr S.V. Srinivas, CSCS Ashish Rajadhyaksha, CSCS Dr Paul Willemen, University of Ulster Ashish Rajadhyaksha Senior Fellow Centre for the Study of Culture & Society 466 9th Cross Madhavan Park 1st Block Jayanagar, Bangalore 560011. Telephone: 91-80-2-656-2986 Fax: 91-80-2-656-2991 email: [email protected] website: www.cscsban.org

OCCASIONAL PAPER SERIES: SEPHIS-CSSSC Occasional Paper Series: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Babacar Fall, Social History in French West Africa: Forced Labor, Labor Market, Women and Politics, 2002; J.F. Ade Ajayi, Unfinished Business: Confronting the Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism in Africa, 2002; Shahid Amin, Alternative Histories: A View from India, 2002; Mamadou Diouf, Historians and Histories: What for? African Historiography Between the State and Communities, 2003; Wang Hui, The End of History? Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity, 2004.

Electronic version of some of these papers is available. Interested readers are kindly asked to write to [email protected]

Contents Contents

52 52

Print Print

Send Send email email

ANNOUNCEMENTS

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE: ‘HISTORIES IN THE VERNACULAR’ 28-30 DECEMBER 2004 For further information: Email: [email protected], [email protected] Ph: +91 (33) 2462-7252/5794/5795 The Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), is organizing a conference on ‘Histories in the Vernacular’. This conference is to initiate a new research programme at the CSSSC on ‘Writing New Cultural Histories of Eastern India’ funded by the Ford Foundation. It will also inaugurate the new facilities of the Jadunath Sarkar Resource Centre for Historical Research located at the CSSSC building at 10, Lake Terrace, Calcutta. The idea of the conference is to take a fresh look at history writing in the different Indian languages. The main emphasis will be to look at the complicated relation that has emerged between professional history writing in the English language and the many different forms of history writings in the Indian languages. Relevant here will be the new arguments about the pre-colonial or early modern origins of history writing in India in the 16th to 18th centuries (as argued, for instance by Rao, Shulman and Subrahmanyam). There is also an interesting transitional period from the late 18th to the late 19th centuries when several elements of modern Western historiography were introduced into historical writings in the Indian languages. Finally, there is the emergence in the 20th century of professional history writing in the universities and other academic institutions, mainly in the English language. There are many different relations that now emerge between various genres of history writing in the Indian languages with professional history writing in the academic institutions. The conference will try to look at all of these elements with specific reference to particular language areas, periods and genres. Conference Committee: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta R-1 Baishnabghata Patuli Township Kolkata 700 094. India.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: MULTINATIONAL WORKING GROUP ON CITIZENSHIP IN AFRICA HIGHER EDUCATION IN AFRICA: TRANSFORMING WITHIN, PREPARING THE FUTURE MARCH 2005. For more details on the MWG and CODESRIA see www.codesria.org The MWG is the flagship research vehicle employed by CODESRIA for the promotion of multi-country and multidisciplinary reflections on critical questions of concern to the African social research community. Each MWG is led by two to three coordinators and includes a maximum of fifteen researchers. Three senior scholars are designated as independent reviewers who serve as discussants. The life span of the average MWG is two years during which time all aspects of the research process are expected to be completed and the final results prepared for publication in the CODESRIA Book Series. This MWG seeks to promote a critical reflection on Africa's higher education institutions and systems after the prolonged crises which they have faced. Proposed Thematic Areas for Research Focus 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Shifting /competing perspectives on the philosophical foundations of HE in Africa; Shifting/competing perspectives on the role of the university in development and social transformation; The changing roles of the state in HE; Shifting perceptions of the crises of the higher education system; The content and direction of competing proposals for reform in the HE system; Coping strategies evolved by universities and university communities; Trends in curriculum development; The evolution of campus life and academic freedom; Trends in the revival of international exchange programs and internationalisation of HE; The African academic Diaspora and the African University; Issues in the governance of the African higher education system; The changing nature of student -staff relations; Gender, generational, and disciplinary issues in the re-composition of the African academy; University autonomy and the challenges of financing higher education; The rise of the private university in Africa; New forms and types of higher education institutions; Higher education as a public good; ICTs in teaching, research and university-industry relations;

Contents Contents

53 53

Print Print

Send Send email email

ANNOUNCEMENTS 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

The changing notions of community service; The status of basic research in the African academy; University libraries; Regionalisation of university education; The university and the transformation of the public sphere; The university and contemporary globalisation.

CODESRIA invites proposals for research on any one of these and/or related issues. Scholars are encouraged to explore comparative dimensions, including drawing on experiences from other regions of the world. The authors of proposals selected will be invited to be part of the CODESRIA MWG that is to be established. Proposals for consideration for inclusion in the MWG should comprise: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

A clear statement of the purpose of the project and the problematic to be researched; A thorough review of the literature on the sub- theme selected; A description of the research methodology to be used; A detailed work plan; A draft budget; The Curriculum vitae of the author(s).

All proposals must be received by 31 January 2005. The results of which will be made available by 20 February 2005. The selected applicants will be invited to a launch/methodological workshop in the second half of March 2005. Proposals should be sent to: The CODESRIA MWG on Higher Education, Research Department, CODESRIA Avenue Cheikh Anta Diop x Canal IV, P.O. Box 3304, CP18524, Dakar, Senegal. Tel: +221 825 9822/8259823; Fax: +221 824 12 89/825 66 51; Email: [email protected] Website: www.codesria.org

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: MULTINATIONAL WORKING GROUP ON CITIZENSHIP IN AFRICA CITIZENSHIP AND IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICA MARCH 2005 For more details on the MWG and CODESRIA see www.codesria.org The question of citizenship and identity is one of the thematic areas at the core of the current intellectual agenda of the Council. This MWG seeks to promote a critical reflection on the contemporary political economy of citizenship and identity in Africa, doing so in ways, which promote fresh insights, and innovative approaches to both advance knowledge and contribute to overcoming prevalent policy and political stalemates. Research Issues to be Explored Clearly, the citizenship and identity question is one which scholars can no longer ignore and the need for painstaking, empirically-grounded, historically-rooted and comparative studies cannot be over-emphasised. It is proposed to undertake a study, which will encompass the entire African continent and offer insights into critical aspects of the historical, legal/constitutional, political, socio-economic, demographic, gender and generational dimensions of problems and prospects of citizenship and identity in contemporary Africa. More specifically, the study will be a comparative multi-disciplinary project with an Africa-wide coverage. i) ii) iii) iv) v) vi)

vii) viii) ix) x) xi) xii)

The dynamics of identity and citizenship in pre-colonial and colonial Africa; Historical trends in citizenship and identity formation in post-independence Africa; Typologies of the legal/constitutional definition of citizenship in post-colonial Africa and their interfaces with identity formation; The politics of the state-citizen dialectic in contemporary Africa; Trends in the popular mobilisation of citizenship and identity "from below" and the responses which they elicit "from above"; The different dimensions of multiple identities that exist in contemporary Africa and the extent to which these are accommodated within prevailing notions of citizenship and systems of governance, including electoral regimes, politico-administrative decentralisation and federalism; The definition of the rights and responsibilities of settlers and long-term residents vis-à-vis the rights and responsibilities of citizens; The politics of settlers/residents vs. "natives"/indigenes and the sources and dimensions of xenophobia as they have manifested themselves in recent times; The question of when and how a settler can expect to become a "native"/indigene with full citizenship rights; The challenges of defining citizenship rights in Africa on the basis of place of origin and birth, qualification for national identity cards and passports, and eligibility for appointive and/or elective office; The informal markets in passports, national identity cards, and birth certificates and what they mean for the prevailing definitions of national identity and citizenship; The formal procedures for the acquisition of citizenship and citizenship rights and the informal processes of negotiating citizenship

Contents Contents

54 54

Print Print

Send Send email email

ANNOUNCEMENTS xiii) xiv) xv) xvi) xvii) xviii) xix) xx) xxi) xxii)

and identity; The immigration rules in force in different countries and the politics of absorption of new populations, including refugees; The negotiation of citizenship and identity in borderland communities; Constitutional provisions on dual/multiple citizenship; The legal framework as it relates to persons born to parents who are nationals of different (African) countries; The political, social and economic rights of citizens as they are defined and operationalised and the aspects that are justiceable and not justiceable; Gender in the definition of citizenship; The Youth Question in the politics of citizenship; The legal framework and politics of transnational citizenship as demonstrated by the experiences of sub-regional cooperation and integration across the continent; Diaspora dimensions of citizenship and identity; and The challenges of a pan-African citizenship and identity.

CODESRIA invites proposals for research on any one of these or related issues, or on related questions, also (wherever desired) drawing on experiences from other regions of the world. The authors of proposals selected will be invited to be part of the CODESRIA MWG. Proposals for consideration for inclusion in the MWG should comprise: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

A clear statement of the purpose of the project and the problematic to be researched; A thorough review of the literature on the sub-theme selected; A description of the research methodology to be used; A detailed work plan; A draft budget; The Curriculum vitae of the author(s).

All proposals must be received by 31 January 2005. Results will be made available by 20 February 2005. The selected applicants will be invited to a launch/methodological workshop to be held in second half of March 2005. Proposals should be sent to The CODESRIA MWG on Citizenship and Identity, Research Department, CODESRIA, Avenue Cheikh Anta Diop x Canal IV, P.O. Box 3304, Dakar, 18524, Senegal. Tel: +221 825 98 22/825 98 23; Fax: +221 824 12 89/825 66 51 Email: [email protected]; Website: www.codesria.org

CALL FOR PAPERS: INTERNATIONAL COLLOQUIUM "LUSOPHONIE" IN AFRICA: HISTORY, DEMOCRACY AND INTEGRATION 28 - 30 April 2005 Luanda, Angola. For further details: E-mail [email protected] Web site: http://www.codesria.org As part of its strategy for reinforcing its research programmes in the Portuguese-speaking countries of Africa, CODESRIA is organizing an international colloquium from 28 to 30 April 2005 in Luanda, Angola. The theme of the colloquium is: "Lusophonie" in Africa: History, Democracy and Integration History. The Portuguese-speaking countries of Africa, with the kind of relations that linked them to their former colonizer, have developed an identity that goes beyond the simple use of a common language; they have all been shaped by a long history of rapacious external exploitation and domination. The slave trade, colonial domination, fascist administration, a system of economic pillage and an aggressive assimilation policy are some of the salient features of the "Lusophonie" in Africa. Social researchers, whether Lusophonie or not, are invited to reflect on the various analytical issues generated by the experiences of the Portuguese-speaking countries of Africa. In light of the objective of the colloquium, which is essentially to identify the links between history, democracy and integration, CODESRIA is inviting contributions on the following sub-themes: 1. 2. 3.

Perspectives on the Historical Heritage of Lusophone African Countries; Political and Social Mutations in Lusophone African Countries and in the Context of the African Democratic Project; "Lusophonie" and African integration.

These themes are being treated as the three broad clusters around which it is hoped to structure the symposium. However, abstracts on other related themes are also encouraged, including proposals for special panels and roundtables. All the abstracts and proposals must reach CODESRIA by 15 January 2005. Researchers whose abstracts are selected will be informed by 30 January 2005 and will be invited to send their final contributions by 31 March 2005.

Contents Contents

55 55

Print Print

Send Send email email

ANNOUNCEMENTS All correspondence pertaining to the colloquium should be sent to the following address: International Colloquium on "Lusophonie" in Africa CODESRIA P.O. Box 3304, CP 18524 Avenue Cheikh Anta Diop X Canal IV Dakar, Senegal Tel : +221 8259822/8259823 Fax : + 221 8241289

A TRAINING WORKSHOP: MEMORIES AND HISTORY: USING MATERIAL CULTURE AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL SOURCES AS ALTERNATIVE HISTORY 20-26 JUNE 2005 MOROCCO. Additional information about the workshop can be obtained via the CODESRIA web site (http://www.codesria.org) and the SEPHIS web site (http://www.sephis.org). In June 2005, CODESRIA and SEPHIS will organise a training workshop on using material culture and archaeological sources in the writing of histories. The workshop will compare experiences of Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Caribbean. The main goal of this South/South training workshop is to contribute to the research skills of the participants and to exchange experiences, theories and methodologies. The interdisciplinary workshop will bring together junior and senior scholars in history, archaeology, museum science, anthropology and archival studies. Fifteen researchers from Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean will convene for one week. We will provide a stimulating intellectual environment and we will arrange for the travel and living expenses of the participants. The training workshop will address critical issues of theory and method in the study of material culture. It will examine the ideological and theoretical considerations behind the collection, preservation and visual display of material culture, as well as the potential and limitations of material sources for the exploration of histories of the South. It will reflect on cultural interactions and globalization, commodity chains, consumer choice and consumption patterns in relation to the expansion of the world market economy. The programme combines lecture/seminar courses and practical training in roughly equal proportions. Sessions will focus on discussion and debate among participants, with the Convenor helping to direct, facilitate, and moderate discussions. Two resource persons will give lectures focused on case studies using archaeological/material sources. The laureates will discuss their papers and attend theoretical and methodological courses. They will be required to present and submit a paper, which should examine in detail the current theoretical issues or debates about these sources. The training workshop will also include an open forum, thus enabling participants to discuss current issues concerning excavation, recovery, research, analysis and interpretation of archaeological materials. English is the working language of the workshop. Eligibility Applications are invited from active researchers in the fields of archaeology, ethno-archaeology, history and anthropology. Museum professionals, curators, archivists and other practitioners are also invited, if they are active researchers in their fields. Young scholars are expected to be affiliated to a university, institute, museum or research NGO in the South. Senior scholars in the South with a solid reputation in these fields are encouraged to apply for the position of Convenor or resource person. Admission procedure The application should include a three-page academic CV, the proposed paper (maximum of 5 pages), including its summary (500 words) and a recommendation letter. The paper should be based on well-defined theoretical, conceptual and methodological elements and an analysis of the current status of research on this specific issue. The paper should also indicate the methodology used or developed during the research. Applications for the position of Convenor or resource person should include an application letter, a CV and a one-page abstract of their proposed lectures. Applications must be written in English. The deadline for the submission of applications is 1 February 2005. An international academic committee will select the candidates by 15 February 2005. Successful applicants will be notified immediately after the completion of the selection process. Incomplete and/or too lengthy applications will not be taken into consideration. All faxed and e-mailed applications must also be accompanied by a hard copy original version sent by post if they are to be considered. Applications should be sent to: Ndèye Sokhna Guèye “Workshop on Alternative Historical Sources” CODESRIA/SEPHIS Programme Avenue Cheikh Anta Diop, angle Canal IV B.P. 3304, CP 18524, Dakar, Senegal Fax: (221) 824 12 89 Tel.: (221) 825 98 22/23 E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

Contents Contents

56 56

Print Print

Send Send email email

ANNOUNCEMENTS

A GUIDE Using Google for African Studies Research: A Guide to Effective Web Searching A pilot edition of this guide is now freely accessible at http://www.hanszell.co.uk/google/. It is published as an adjunct to the new third edition of The African Studies Companion: A Guide to Information Sources (online at http://www.africanstudiescompanion.com) Although it can also be used on its own. Preceded by an examination of Google’s extraordinary growth and popularity – and looking at issues such as its page-ranking methods and privacy concerns – the guide is designed to help the user get the most out of Google’s Web searching techniques, and at the same time provides a critical evaluation of Google’s many Web search features, services, and tools. The guide is liberally interspersed with examples of searches, and search strategies, relating to Africa or African studies topics.

For your needs in books and periodicals about the Maghreb and the Islamic west see www.ketabook.com the first Maghreb online bookstore

Contents Contents

57 57

CORRESPONDENTS 1.

Claudio Costa Pinheiro, [email protected] Rio de Janeiro Federal University, Brazil.

2.

Mahbubar Rahman, [email protected] Professor, Department of History, Rajshahi, Bangladesh.

3.

Li Anshan, [email protected] Professor, School of International Studies, Peking University, China; and Visiting Professor, Menlo College and Center for African Studies, Stanford University, USA.

4.

Sarfraz Khan, [email protected] Area Study Centre, University of Peshwar, Pakistan.

5.

Erwiza Erman, [email protected] Senior Researcher, Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), Jakarta, Indonesia.

6.

Isaie Dougnon, [email protected] or [email protected] Assistant Professor, Department of Social Sciences, University of Bamako, Mali.

7.

Karamat Ali, [email protected] PILER, Pakistan.

8.

Luciana Contarino Sparta, [email protected] Professor, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

9.

Mirzohid Rahimov, [email protected] Senior Research Fellow, Institute of History, Academy of Sciences, Uzbekistan.

Print Print

Send Send email email