Thanks for the Flowers

I've just realised that I've been nominated for an Australian Blog Award for Australia's Funniest Blog. Since I'm in the running, I suppose that sometime soon I shall have to get around to doing a little electronic ballot-box stuffing or look around for a graveyard of abandoned e-mail addresses to vote.

Anyway, thanks to whoever dobbed me in for this one. I'll be thinking of you when the inevitable happens and the award goes to some tosser who specialises in inocuous posts about the hilarious antics of the birds in their back yard, neurotic rants about dentists and other topics of burning public interest.

Worth Watching

If you missed out on it the first time round, SBS is screening The Staircase again in its "Hot Docs" spot, starting tomorrow night at 10.00 pm.

The ABC is once again repeating Walking With Beasts, on Saturday afternoons at 3.30. The last episode of the series, about homo erectus, is worth taking a look at, if only for the sequence showing two hominids copulating. In any other context, you might call it fucking but this is a nature documentary after all, so it's probably more appropriate to use the more respectable scientific term. It's pretty clear that the producers of the show went out of their way to forestall any accusation that they were just slipping in a gratuitous paleo-anthropological soft porn insert. In your average stick flick, the visuals would have been accompanied by some pretty enthusiastic grunting, gasping and give-it-to-me-babys accompanied by some off-the-peg electronic music, heavy on tinkly chimes and sugary synthetic strings but, instead of that, the action is accompanied by an earnest voice over from Kenneth Branagh, explaining how the vulva of the female erectus shifted forward to accomodate an upright posture, obliging homo erectus to copulate face-to-face. In the missionary position, of course, with the female lying back and distracting herself from the whole sordid business with thoughts of all the berry-gathering she'd be doing tomorrow.

I have no idea how Branagh kept a straight face while he was reading this guff, which tells you a lot more about the sexual experience of the narrative's author than it does about mating behaviour in homo erectus. The truth is, we have no idea how homo erectus went about the business of screwing although the current state of human sexual practice suggests that they had a lot of options. Whether they had the imagination to exploit them is another matter and somewhat moot; anything we say on the subject is completely speculative, however entertaining the possibilities might be.

Nostalgia Spot (Slightly Damp)

Over at Oz Conservative, Mark is pining for the days of good old fashioned romance, exemplified in the fashion philosophy of Alannah Hill:

When I was at uni (more than ten years ago now) one of my disappointments was the mannish style of appearance of the young women on campus. The women would typically wear boots, jeans, a T-shirt, and a windcheater, with no makeup or jewellery or ornamentation of any kind.

They actually managed to look a bit boring, despite being in the full bloom of their womanhood age-wise.

I felt a bit robbed. I thought it a waste of youth, both theirs and mine.

...

Earlier this year, Alannah Hill was interviewed for The Age newspaper. True to form, she described her fashion philosophy as follows:

I spend most days designing the most romantic clothes so that girls when they wear them will evoke some gush of love from the opposite sex.

When I was at uni (well over ten years ago now) a female friend of mine spent one vacation doing the obligatory cheap STA whip around a few European countries where you can't speak the language. Her tour included Paris, the city of eternal romance, where she left a crowded Metro carriage one evening to discover that she'd copped a quite substantial gush of love on her Levi's. It just goes to show that even a "mannish style of appearance" is no impediment to the flowering of romantic feelings in the male heart.

Simply Rotten

I didn't make any New Year's Eve resolutions this year, unless you count "First thing Tuesday I'm getting something done about this bloody tooth" which would make this year my first 100% success for keeping New Year's resolutions. A marked contrast to that disastrous resolution I made in the early eighties (I was totally shit-faced at the time) that "This year I'm going to get a lot more of the other". 100% failure on that one - it brought on a drought of El Ninõ proportions. The fact that I started cleaning up at the regular Friday evening office poker game was little consolation.

One resolution I have made recently is, once again, to cut back a bit on the on-line time but that has nothing to do with this being the first Year of the rest of my life; it's about the exorbitant amount I'm paying for all the time I spend on the web. That resolution got a bit dented when I got around to actually reading the Age I picked up this morning, after watching Thunderbirds on Channel 9 - insomnia again. I went to bed last night thinking that the phantom tooth pain was going away at last - instead, it underwent a weird mitosis and migrated into the two teeth adjacent to the gum crater. They were busily jostling to take possession of the vacant space before one of those poncy ceramic prosthetics moved in and their familiar tumbledown neighbourhood got all gentrified.

After ten days of enduring the world's most trivial agony, I'm feeling pretty pissed off. So I think I can finally produce that post on Phil Ruddock that I've tried to write, on and off, for several months. Our hollow, stuffed Attorney-General, his headpiece filled with straw, his shrivelled conscience pinned to the lapel of his jacket for all the world to see. I despise him.

I've tried, at least occasionally, to look on him as a man of principle who kind of lost his way but it's simply impossible. The first time was when I read an op-ed in The Australian, where the writer bemoaned how the Phil Ruddock he used to know had been ruined by his tenure as Minister for Immigration. Another time was when I saw the story of the split in Ruddock's family over his handling of the Immigration portfolio on Australian Story. I'm still tempted to look for something redeeming about the bloke when I see him interviewed on TV news and current affairs. But it's bloody impossible - he went to dinner with the devil and forgot to take his own cutlery. Just how low he's sunk showed up in this report on page 3 of today's Age:

THE Federal Government has moved to obstruct gay couples wanting to get married in countries that recognise same-sex nuptials.

The Attorney-General's Department last year told at least two of Australia's embassies in Europe to refuse help to citizens requiring proof of their single status for a same-sex marriage...

This comes on top of news on January 7, that:

... After shutting the door on gay nuptials, the Federal Government is clamping down on heterosexuals who deviate from a traditional wedding script.

In a series of edicts to civil celebrants that overturn at least 30 years of accepted practice, the Attorney-General's Department insists couples must exchange vows only as "husband" and "wife". Celebrants must also remind everyone that "marriage, according to law in Australia, is the union of a man and a woman".

(Julie Szego, The Age)

It's worth noting that, in both cases, Ruddock comes up clean under the current conventions on ministerial responsibility; it was the Attorney-General's Department, rather than the Attorney-General, which blocked consular assistance to gay couples seeking to marry overseas and issued the edicts to civil celebrants. In both cases, the Attorney-General's view on the actions of his department came via a spokesperson. On gay marriages overseas, the Attorney-Generals spokeswoman:

... said one purpose of the certificates was to certify a proposed marriage would be valid in Australia.

And on the instructions to civil celebrants a spokeswoman said:

... the Government is simply ensuring the country's growing number of civil celebrants understand their legal obligations ...

There's a couple of statements of principle delivered with all the ringing conviction of Pontius Pilate sending for a handbasin and towel.

I won't deny that these spiteful, petty intrusions into the lives of ordinary Australians can be justified - they are reminders of the legal basis of marriage in Australia and the tradition that underlies them. In their mean little way, both are defences of that tradition. So is the new policy requiring married couples to undergo three hours of compulsory counselling before heading off to the family court. Whether the last will amount to anything more than a gravy train for the organisations that win tenders to run the counselling centres is moot. All three of these defences of the tradition of marriage in Australia are idiotic.

Ruddock's willingness, on behalf of the Government, to accept his Department's obstruction of gay marriages overseas is of a piece with his equal willingness to accept more serious infringements on the rights of Australian citizens who just happen to be offside with government sponsored mainstream opinion. I refer of course to Mamdou Habib and David Hicks. It's of a piece with the willingness he showed, as Immigration Minister, to dump "criminal non-citizens" on countries they had not seen since childhood - a practice that was recently found unlawful by a couple of Federal Court judges (in the Nystrom case). A High Court challenge to this decision is still pending - it would be interesting to see what happens if the High Court upholds the Federal Court's ruling.

Because then we would have as Attorney-General, a man who will have been found by the highest court in the country to have acted outside the law in several cases where he exercised his Ministerial discretion to get rid of one of those "people like that" that we don't want in Australia. I like to think that his position as Attorney-General would become unsustainable. In wildly optimistic moments I imagine him being replaced by either a Burkean conservative or a liberal in the tradition of John Stuart Mill, either of which would be an improvement. The trouble is, off the top of my head, I can't think of any candidates who fit either bill.

The Questionable Consolations of Philosophy

257. "What would it be like if human beings shewed no outward signs of pain (did not groan, grimace, etc)? Then it would be impossible to teach a child the meaning of the word 'tooth-ache'." - Well, let's assume the child is a genius and itself invents a name for the sensation! - But then, of course, he couldn't make himself understood when he used the word. - So how does he understand the name, without being able to explain its meaning to anyone? - but what does it mean to say that he has 'named his pain'? How has he done this naming of pain?! And whatever he did, what was its purpose? When one says "He gave a name to his sensation" one forgets that a great deal of stage-setting in the language is presupposed if the mere act of naming is to make sense. And when we speak of someone's having given a name to pain, what is presupposed is the existence of the grammar of the word "pain"; it shews the post where the new word is stationed.

665. Imagine someone pointing to his cheek with an expression of pain and saying "abracadabra!" - We ask "What do you mean?" And he answers "I meant toothache". You at once think to yourself: How can anyone mean 'toothache' by that word? Or what did it mean to mean pain by that word? And yet, in a different context you would have asserted that the mental activity of meaning such-and-such was just what was most important in using language.

But - can't I say "By 'abracadabra' I mean toothache"? Of course I can; but this is a definition; not a description of what goes on in me when I utter the word.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

And then 'abracadabra' might be a good enough name for the sensation you're left with after the source of a toothache is gone. For what it's worth, Wittgenstein pays a lot less attention to the philosophical issues raised by headaches:

314. It shews a fundamental misunderstanding, if I am inclined to study the headache I have now in order to get clear about the philosophical problem of sensation.

I reckon he's on the money there but it would be a different story had he suffered from migraines.

Just Speak for Yourself

Am I book slut? Hell no! No way would I ever

... go to sleep worrying whether Jennifer Anniston and Vince Vaughan are actually a couple, if Nadine Coyle from Girls Aloud is losing too much weight and how much cosmetic surgery Teri Hatcher has really had.

No, not me - that sort of stuff is pretty much a chick thing, right, and so is

[loving] all kinds of texts equally, refusing to play favourites and treating them all with the same kind of intense but ultimately casual affection.

Isn't that just typical. You'd never catch me doing that: like any bloke, I know that there are those books you just read for fun - cultural quickies you pick up at the library, skim through overnight, or over a weekend at most, then drop casually down the return chute on your next visit - and real, serious books that are actually worth shelling out your own hard-earned (or hard-bludged) readies for. And as for those gossip mags and women's magazines, no way I'd be caught dead reading one of those. You have to wonder what the editorial staff at Cosmo and Cleo are thinking when every time they run one of those articles on "Ten great ways to be better in bed", they follow up with a half a page of sex tips for guys. Who do they expect to read this stuff? I bet you wouldn't find the editors of Ralph making that mistake. Not that I'd be caught dead reading Ralph of course.

I'll admit that I've had a few disappointments with books - like the time I bought "the best novel to come out of New Zealand this year", and decided, after finishing it, that there would have been no great loss to world literature if it had stayed in New Zealand. Some of the alleged classics have been no better - like that fat-arsed tome by some dead Russian fart that begins "All happy families are alike but each unhappy familiy is unhappy in its own way ..." - or something like that. The sort of portentous bull that gets a novelist a totally inflated rep for giving good human condition. Over time I've learnt to ignore a lot of the gossip about authors who give good human condition, just as I learnt how little substance to all that talk about Marjorie Malvern-Starr's precocious sexual accomplishments back in my Greenfields High School days (all my two bob's worth of licorice bullets from the school tuckshop got me was an angry glare and a slap in the face).

"Intense but ultimately casual affection" indeed; you won't catch me ever falling for a book that way. I've read around a bit - I'm wise to their sly little ways, their so called literary conventions. Read 'em and leave 'em, that's the way to go. OK, now and again you find one that's worth keeping around for a while, good solid works of reference and such but they're few and far between. When it comes down to it, reading books is just a pleasant way to pass the time.

Tough Guy, Me

I was just about ready to bite down - hard - on the thumb she was pressing down on my lower jaw, when she said "OK, Gummo, take a breather." While I lay there, taking deep breaths to wash away the pain, she said, "I'm sorry Gummo, but I can't let you leave here with that tooth."

I wasn't fooled by the patient tone. To make sure I got the message, the dnetal nurse grabbed a handful of shirt and pressed the muzzle of a Glock 9mm into my left nostril. "One way or another," she snarled, "That tooth is staying here. Got that?"

I got it.

"OK, OK," I shed, "Issue theel thash thongly abad it, oo can have the toosh. Ish no damn ushe to me. Lesh get thish over widge."

The Misguided Doctor and the Good Sydneysiders

(A Fable for Our Times)

A man was leaving Oxford Street after the Sydney Mardi Gras in his parade costume - a gold lamé posing pouch and he fell among poofter bashers who beat him and departed, leaving him near dead.

Now by chance a doctor was going down that road; and when he saw him he started to cross the road. But his way was blocked by a pastor who said
"That man has been brought low by sin. If you treat him he will just continue in his sinful ways. Is this what you want?"

The doctor gently pushed the pastor aside and carried on but he found his way blocked by a columnist, who said: "That man lives an unacceptable lifestyle. If you treat him he will be back here next year to promote his unacceptable lifestyle. Is this what you want?"

The doctor gently pushed the columnist aside and carried on but he found his way blocked by a politician, who said: "Perhaps you think about the importance of family values before you go any further."

The doctor gently pushed the politician aside and finally reached the injured man. He took up his hand to check his pulse, then looked at his watch He opened a side compartment on his black bag, where he kept his prescription pad and a few other standard forms. He took the form he needed and on it wrote "Pansy Doe, Time of Death 1:37" and signed and dated the form. Then he folded the death certificate in four and gently tucked it into the gold lamé posing pouch.

Postscript: this piece could just as easily have been set in Melbourne after Midsumma. If you find the plot vaguely familiar, you might like to check out the original.

Dame Nellie, eat your heart out.

(With a tug of the forelock to Anthony at spiceblog).

C'mon Huey, Shift Your Bloody Arse

We've just turned on the air-conditioner for the first time in two years. There's enough airflow through the ceiling vent in the lounge to stir the cobwebs; after I finish here I'm going to go lie on the couch to see if under-powered air-conditioners produce a placebo effect. I went out into the back yard for a ciggie a few minutes ago, barefoot on sun baked concrete. Fire walkers are wimps. There were a few promising little clouds on the western horizon; if they actually get overhead before evening, I might shoulder the laundry bag and head up to the laundromat. Based on past experience it ought to start pissing down when I'm about halfway there.

Still, I'm not going to cite this hot spell as evidence of global-warming; that's a false induction, an example of confirmation bias and all the rest of it. All the same, I'm willing to bet that there are quite a few bloggers out there who're shaking their heads over the blizzards and record low temperatures that Europe is experiencing and asking, as usual, if global warming is real, how come this is happening? Don't expect an answer from me - all I want to do right now is get away from all the waste heat being pumped out by the PC's cooling fan.

Oh, and best wishes to all and sundry for the New Year. Hope your 2006 is, in every way, an improvement on your 2005. Actually there are few sundries for whom I'm inclined to wish the opposite but it's probably better not to mention that. Oops, too late.

The Survival Machine of Colin M Turnbull (III)

(Part I, Part II)
A lot of the difficulties in producing a synopsis of The Mountain People come from its novelistic construction so it might be helpful, at this point, to treat it as a novel. Viewing it this way, we see the book as the simple story of Colin Turnbull, anthropologist, who journeys to a remote part of Africa to study a fairly typical tribe of hunter gatherers. During the time he spends with them, he discovers that they are nothing like the obligate noble savages he imagines them to be; instead the Icien way of life turns out to be a grotesque caricature of the advanced western society he has left behind. The story is told in the first person, with three narrative threads running through Turnbull the author's straightforward plot; Turnbull the narrator's slow awakening to the realities of Icien life, the reflections this prompts on human nature and human societies and finally, the simple facts of Icien life as he has observed them. That may sound like a very post-modern take on a work of anthropological research and reporting but it has its uses. Such as, in this installment, finally moving our focus away from the concerns and character of Turnbull the narrator, to what he sees in his stays with the Ik.

First let's note a fact that Turnbull reveals quite slowly; at the time of his study, there was a great deal of starvation among the Ik. The Kidepo valley, their major hunting ground, was no longer available to them - it was a national park. The Ugandan government had encouraged them to take up farming but the mountainous country they had settled in was not good farmland. And there had been a prolonged drought. Turnbull cops a bit of stick around the traps for not noticing that the Ik were a society in crisis but it seems unlikely that this completely escaped his attention during the three years in which he did his field studies or that the realisation completely escaped him during the writing of The Mountain People. Where Turnbull does leave himself open to the charge of insensitivity is in his depiction of the way he learnt of living conditions among the Ik, for example this telling episode from the end of Chapter 3, "the Disenchanted Tree":

... Kauar was exceptional, and he used to volunteer to make the long two day climb back to get mail for me, or buy a few things for others. He was always pleased with himself when he came back, and asked if he had made the trip more quickly than the last time ... Then he used to sit and watch while I read the mail, studying the expression on my face to see if all was well. When we drank tea together he always took exactly the same number of teaspoons of sugar that I took, and helped himself to exactly the same number of biscuits, never more, never less. The biscuits he often kept for the children, who used to snatch them from him and run away laughing at him for the fool he was.

Then one day Kauar went to Kaabong and did not come back. He was found the day after he should have returned, high up on the last peak of the trail before it descends to Pirre, cold and dead. Then you could see how thin he was, or so I was told, for those who found him just took the things he had been carrying, pushed his body into the bush and left it. "Why bother carrying him back? He was dead!" they said as they distributed the goods ... I still think of him probably running up that viciously steep mountainside so that he could break his time record, and falling dead in his pathetic prime because he was starving.

The significance of this episode is difficult to miss; it reveals a great deal about the state of Ik society, the fact of starvation among them and some unpleasant and less than flattering things about Turnbull himself. Earlier in the chapter, there's another episode, whose significance is much less obvious, at least on a first reading:

On this occasion an antelope had been killed by Lomeja, a happy man in his late middle age, which is to say he was in his early twenties. He had set off early in the morning alone, and had picked up his bow and arrows where hehad concealed them during the night so that no-one would see that he was going hunting ... [p82]

Unfortunately for Lomeja, he was observed and followed; after he had killed an antelope another Ik, Lotibok appeared, claiming that it was by chance. While Lomeja and Lotibok were cooking the antelope, taking precautions against being seen, two more Ik saw the smoke of their cooking fire. They immediately set out in the direction of the fire, with Turnbull in hot pursuit. In the end, the antelope that Lomeja had planned to keep to himself had to be shared between five people:

It is a curious hangover from what must once have been a moral code that Ik will offer food if surprised in the act of eating, though they go to enormous pains not to be so surprised. [p81-82]

This is a far cry from the co-operative hunts that Turnbull imagines in Chapter One of the book. But here, once again, I'm going to give myself a break - this time so that I can put in some library time and get into some of the secondary references on Turnbull. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

The Survival Machine of Colin M Turnbull (II)

(Part I)
His lack of enthusiasm for field work among the Ik declared, Turnbull uses the rest of Chapter One to tell us what he knew of the Ik before he set out for Northern Uganda. Just before World War II they had been encouraged to settle in the mountains in the northeast corner of the country, where it borders on Kenya and Sudan. Before then they had roamed as nomadic hunter-gatherers through all three countries. Their major hunting territory was the Kidepo Valley, now a national park:

Kidepo was undoubtedly where they spent the best part of the year, but, like most hunters and gatherers, these depended as much on vegetable resources as they did on game, and vegetable resources can be exhausted even more quickly and permanently than game if a band stays in one place too long. Mobility is essential to the hunting-and-gathering way of life and nomadism is by no means the random, aimless meandering it is sometimes thought to be. At the same time, hunting and gathering, even in a marginal environment, are neither as hard nor as precarious as they seem ... [The hunter] knows the world he lives in as few others do, and he lives in sympathy with it rather than trying to dominate it. He is the best of conservationists, knowing exactly how much he can take from where at any given time. His nomadic pattern is geared to this knowledge... [p 21]

From here through to page 31, Turnbull describes (admittedly in retrospect) the society he expected to find when he was in Kampala, preparing for his trip North. Of the people he expected to meet he says:

The smaller the society, the less emphasis there is on the formal system, and the more there is on inter-personal and inter-group relations, to which the system is subordinated. Security is seen in terms of these relationships, and so is survival. The result, which appears so deceptively simple, is that hunters frequently display those characteristics that we find so admirable in man: kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity and others. This sounds like a formidable list of virtues and so it would be if they were virtues, but for the hunter they are not. For the hunter in his tiny, close-knit society, these are necessities for survival; without them society would collapse...

It was not foremost in my mind, I suppose, but, as with the physical conditions , I took it for granted that the Ik would possess these same qualities. it was a shock to find myself wrong on almost all counts... [p31 - original emphasis]

In Chapter 2, "Careless Rapture," Turnbull describes his journey from Kampala to North-Eastern Uganda. For all that he has said about his coolness toward his project in Chapter One, he depicts himself here as becoming more enthusiastic for it as he travels North:

The Administrator ... discussed freely many of his problems and said he would welcome any ideas that might come out of my researches. Thisis the kind of interest and co-operation that is all too often lacking and it added to my growing enthusiasm. [p38-39]

Turnbull's growing enthusiasm takes a severe hammering when he encounters his first Ik and is introduced to the Ik sense of humour. On the way to the first Ik village he visits, his guides take him along a perilous mountain trail and get a good laugh when he stumbles after traversing a ledge that is too narrow for two feet to be placed side by side. He is also introduced to the brusque, cursory nature of Ik manners; his polite traditional greetings are met with demands for tobacco. One of his guides greets the mother he hasn't seen for two years with the demand "Give me food" to which she replies "There's no food" (p49-50). From chapter 3 onwards the book becomes inceasingly depressing reading. It also defies synopsis, as Turnbull's account of Ik society freely switches between anecdote, reflection and analysis. So here I'll leave you with a choice of options; you can wait for the next instalment of this series, where I'll take on the task of providing a plausible synopsis with selected lowlights or you can bugger off to a library and track down a copy of The Mountain People to read for yourselves.

The Enchanted Toasting Fork - Episode 6

The story so far:
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5

With luck, that'll keep you buggers busy over Yule so I can have a bit of time to honour Freyr in the traditional manner - stuffing oneself with pork smallgoods.

King Otto - A Legend

"Good morrow O wise King," said Lothar the bard, standing before the throne at the north end of King Otto's great hall, "Thou hast summoned me and here I stand before thee, to do thy bidding."

"This is meet, Lothar." replied Otto, "This is indeed meet. In these troubled times of ours it is good that a king should have such faithful servants as yourself."

"And how may I serve thee, O wise King?" Lothar fawned.

"The season of Yule approacheth, as thou kenneth well, Lothar," replied Otto. Lothar nodded - indeed he did kenneth well that the season of Yule would soon be upon them, "And my land is troubled by foes without and traitors within. It is meet that at Yule my subjects shall give great honour to Freyr yet there be those among them who speak ill of the ancient rites and dare to say that we ought temper them, lest we offend the adherents of that milksop, Christ the Redeemer, whose cult is now openly preached in the steads of my kingdom and whose churches have sprung up hither and you, offending the eye. And I say this shall not be."

"Nay, My King, it is not meet that this should be. And how shall I aid thee in this matter?"

"Lothar, thou shalt journey through my kingdom and in the steads of my people and the halls of their Lords you shall sing to them of Yule and the need to make fine sacrifice to Freyr. You shall tell them it is the will of their king that this be so and of my disdain for those who would have it otherwise. Do this, and I shall reward thee greatly."

"This I shall do, O King." Lothar made his obeisance and departed, happy to do the king's will. Freyr should indeed receive fine sacrifice this year and not merely pigs in great quantity. And in his heart, Lothar felt the happiness of a husbandman who has brought in a bounteous harvest - for had he not himself planted the seed of the king's plan and nurtured it to this fruition?

The Survival Machine of Colin M Turnbull (I)

Preamble: a week or so ago, a little fatigued by comments threads where a few commenters seemed to be disagreeing with others purely for the sake of being disagreeable and the feeling that I was getting sucked into playing the same game myself, I decided to have a crack at writing an extended essay. Then I had the bright idea of posting selected passages from the references I intended to use under the title Dark Materials. Cryptic I know, and self indulgent.

After posting Dark Materials I, it occurred to me to do a web search for more up-to-date information on the Ik and Colin Turnbull. What I found was surprising. I changed plans yet again. Whether the essay I originally planned will actually appear is an open question (the odds are pretty long, based on past experience), but given what I've found on the Internet on the subject of The Mountain People, I've decided it's worthwhile to take a close look at the book. This could take a while, because beside the on-line sources, there's going to be off-line literature to track down and take a look at. So this essay will be presented in instalments. Then we might move on to one of the other authors I was going to use for reference.

***

The Ik were, and are, a small tribe living in Northern Uganda in the mountains where Sudan, Kenya and Uganda all meet. They became notorious in the 1970s after the publication of Colin Turnbull's The Mountain People. The book is Turnbull's account of anthropological field studies of the Ik he conducted between 1964 and 1967. The notoriety it brought the tribe was heightened by Peter Brook's 1975 play, called simply The Ik.

According Wikipedia, the Internet's foremost repository of authoritative libel, Turnbull

... was a famous British anthropologist who gained prominence with his book The Forest People (1962), a detailed study of the BaMbuti Pygmies. In 1972, he wrote his most controversial classic, The Mountain People, which portrayed Uganda's hunger-plagued Ik tribe. Turnbull was an unconventional scholar who rejected objectivity. He idealized the BaMbuti and reviled the Ik, whom he recounted as so coldly self-absorbed that they allowed their children to die if they could not survive after being kicked out at the age of three, and refused to share food with anyone, even gorging on the occasional excess of food until they got sick, rather than save or share.

There are two pretty serious charges against Turnbull there - they bothered me enough to make me question whether The Mountain People has anything useful to say at all. Turnbull "rejected objectivity" and "reviled the Ik" says the Wikipedia contributor. How justified are these accusations.

Chapter One of The Mountain People opens with this declaration:

Any description of another people, another way of life, is to some extent bound to be subjective, especially when, as an anthropologist, one has shared that way of life. This is as it should be; but then the reader is entitled to know something of the aims, expectations, hopes and attitudes that the writer brought to the field with him, for these will surely influence not only how he sees things but what he sees. At best his story will only be a partial one.

This I suppose, might be taken as a rejection of objectivity. To me it reads more like a standard disclaimer which I've commonly found in books on the social sciences: a declaration that however objective the writer might aspire to be, his work cannot claim the lofty objectiveness we assume that physiscists say have when they report their experimental findings.

The first few pages of Chapter One is taken up with a description of how Turnbull came to do his field study of the Ik. Turnbull is frank about his lack of initial enthusiasm for the project; it was his third choice and his attitude to the porspect of studying the "Teuso" as he then knew them evoked no enthusiasm, merely a clinical interest:

... But no amount of clinical interest could suppress the disappointment at the failure of the two preferred projects.

I make this point because one of the most delicate tasks of the field anthropologist is to establish a really satisfactory and amicable relationship with the people among whom he is going to live, and to regard them with a jaundiced eye is hardly the way to win favor. [p 18-19]

Once again you can, if you wish, take this as a rejection of objectivity if you wish. Or as an admission of impaired objectivity if that's your preference. Turnbull's enthusiasm for the project took quite a few more knocks as he travelled to northern Uganda, with transport and equipment problems addin gto his frustrations:

... the Land Rover, painted fire-engine red, posessed the singular and by no means welcome ability to attract elephants, particularly male elephants very obviously in search of female company. This, like the leaky roof, remained a constant quality. [p 19]

So by Turnbull's own admission, he was somewhat disgruntled with his project by the time he reached the field and, therefore, not in the best frame of mind to reach an amicable rapport with his subjects. Did his lack of enthusiasm lead him to revile the Ik, as the Wikipedist alleges? To answer that question, we'll have to take a look at what Turbull had to say about them. I'll get back to you on that subject after I've done some more reading and pretty intensive note-taking.

Dark Materials I

Luckily the Ik are not numerous - about two thousand - and those two years reduced their numbers greatly. So I am hopeful that their isolation will remain as complete as in the past, until they die out completely. I am only sorry that so many individuals will have to die, slowly and painfully, until the ned comes to them all. For the individuals one can only feel infinite sorrow at what they have lost; hatred must be reserved for the society they live in, the machine they have constructed to enable them to survive. They have not created it willingly or consciously; it hascreate ditself through their biological need for survival, out of the only materials available, and in the only possible form. It is that survival machine that is the monster... They had a simple choice of living or dying; they had already lost the rest - family, friendship, hope, love - and they made the same choice that most of us, I believe, would make...

There is no goodness left for the Ik, only a full stomach, and that only for those whose stomachs are already full. But if there is no goodness, stop to think, there is no badness, and if their is no love, neither is there any hate. Perhaps that, after all, is progress; but it is also emptiness.
[Colin M Turnbull, The Mountain People, New York 1972 - p285-6]

If we grant, as the evidence says we should, that the Ik were not always as they are, and that they once possessed in full measure those values that we all hold to be basic to humanity, indispensible for both survival and sanity, then what the Ik are telling us is that these qualities are not inherent in humanity at all, they are not a necessary part of human nature.Those values which we cherish so highly and which some use to point to our infinite superiority over other forms animal life may indeed be basic to human society, but not to humanity, and that means that the Ik clearly show that society itself is not indispensible for man's survival, that man is not the social animal he has always thought himself to be, and that he is perfectly capable of associating for purposes of survival without being social. The Ik have successfully abandoned useless appendages, by which I refer to those "basic" qualities such as family, cooperative sociality, belief, love, hope andso forth, for the very good reason that in their context these militated against survival. By showing that man can do without these appendages the Ik show that man can do without society in the sense we mostly mean by th eword (implying those qualities), for they have replaced human society with a mere survival system that does not take human emotion into account...
[p289-290]

Note: the title of this post is a fairly obvious reference to the title of a book that I haven't actually read. Naughty me.

Qu(ot)e?

PRIME Minister John Howard returned to Australia from the East Asian Summit with a plea for Australians to ignore text messages calling for more riots.

"Don't take any notice of them, be sensible, enjoy the sun, it's Christmas and have a good time and, for heaven's sake, remember you don't achieve any advances in this world through the use of violence, thank you," Mr Howard said.
[Brendan Nicholson, The Age]

He's right you know - what it really takes to achieve advances in this world is a bit of diplomacy by other means.

"(Let's) celebrate the fact that this is still the greatest country in the world in which to live and let nobody tell us otherwise and let's not wallow in self-pity and self-flagellation and self-criticism."

And anyone who is the least bit unhappy, or has difficult personal problems, will be prosecuted, under the Happiness Act (1995 as amended).

"If there are some longer-term lessons to be learnt then the time to reflect on those is not right now," he said. "Maybe there were warning signs around that have been ignored and shouldn't have been ignored."

But with Christmas coming up, we'll ignore them a little longer. With luck we'll get through to the resumption of Parliament without another bucket of shit hitting the fan.

"Some of it is just incredibly bad behaviour fuelled by too much drink … We ought to calm everybody down, deal with the law breakers, support the police."

And the rest, let's be quite clear about this, has nothing to do with the R-word.

"I have a very simple view that this country should welcome people from all around the world, and benefit from that, providing when they come to this country they become Australians. That's my simple philosophy full stop."

What is mine and what it is too. If those foreigners aren't prepared to fit in, well what can they expect. It's the Australian way. Which, I remind you, is not at all racist.

Postscript:

With every man and his dog finding dire predictions from yesteryear on how things were going to go terribly wrong sooner or later, I can't see any good reason not to join in. Here's something some poms wrote 32 years ago:

Once upon a time, long long ago, there lay in a valley far, far away in the mountains, the most contented kingdom the world has ever known.

It was called Happy Valley, and it was ruled over by a wise old King called Otto, and all his subjects flourished and were happy, and there were no discontents or grumblers, because Wise King Otto had had them all put to death along with the Trade Union leaders many years before. and all the good happy folk of Happy Valley sang and danced all day long, and anyone who was for any reason miserable or unhappy or who had any difficult personal problems was prosecuted under the Happiness Act.
(from The Brand New Monty Python Papperbok, Palin et al London 1973)

Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494 - 1573)

Another Great Dickhead of History

In 1518 the Spanish colonists in the Carribean wrote to their King, Charles, asking him to allow more black slaves to make up for the loss of the native population of the Carribean islands, who had been worked to extinction. They were supported by the four Jeronymite priors who governed the islands for Spain and by Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, self-appointed defender of the native Americans. Like any enlightened man of the Sixteenth Century he believed that an African enslaved by Christians was better off than one left in Africa. He was less trusting of his compatriots and co-relionists when it came to the natives of the New World.

Around 1524, Las Casas conceived a development scheme for the north coast of South America. Forty Spanish colonists were to set off with ten African slaves each, to remove the temptation of misusing the Indians. The enterprise was a failure. Most of the settlers were dispersed in the Carribean before they reached the site of the new colony. Those who did arrive were slaughtered by Indians "who had not yet learned to distinguish between good and bad Spaniards" (Thomas).

In 1535, Las Casas wrote to the king saying:

the remedy of the Christians is this, that His Majesty should think it right to send to each of the islands 500 or 600 blacks or whatever other number seems appropriate.

I expect you're wondering why Bartolomé de Las Casas isn't named at the top of this post. After all, he does sound a lot like a dickhead. The answer is simple; while I was doing the research, I found a bigger dickhead, the Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda of the title.

While Bartolomé de Las Casas was advocating the interests of the Indians - admittedly at the expense of the interests of the Africans - a controversy was going on, in Spain, about the treatment of the American Indians. The argument began in 1511 when the Dominican Fray Antonio de Montesinos gave the colonists a serve from his pulpit in Santo Domingo. This set off an argument that culminated in the Valladolid Controversy of 1550 which pitted Bartolomé de Las Casas, apostle of the Indians, in the red corner against our protagonist, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, the colonist's friend, in the Blue corner. In front of a judging panel of 15 notables they debated whether the Indians of the New World were Aristotle's "slaves by nature". Nothing was said about the Africans. The judges awarded the debate to Las Casas. Whether thishad any effect in the real world is questionable.

In the 1550s, when writing his Historia de Las Indias, Las Casas explained that he had realised that it was wrong to replace one form of slavery with another. His book wasn't published for another 350 years.

Special Bonus Dickhead: In the 1570s the subject of African slavery finally did become controversial in Spain and one or two people spoke out against it. On the pro-slavery side, Fray Francisco de la Cruz, a Dominican Friar, told the Inquisition in Lima that an angel had told him:

... the blacks are justly captives by reason of the sins of their forefathers and that becasue of that sin God gave them that colour.

Convenient.

Sources:
Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade
Wikipedia

Lazy Day Links Post

Evan Jones (no relation to Alan) at Alert and Alarmed has two good posts on deportations and Phil Ruddock.

Samuel McSkimming does a nice job on Alan Jones at catallaxy. A lot of the comments there make the "Sedition Watch" post I was writing, with selected excerpts of David Marr's article in the SMH, look pretty redundant. So instead of all that stuff, here's a bit of the Commonwealth Criminal Code 1995 (as amended last week):

80.2 Sedition
Urging violence within the community
(5) A person commits an offence if:
(a) the person urges a group or groups (whether distinguished by race, religion, nationality or political opinion) to use force or violence against another group or other groups (as so distinguished); and
(b) the use of the force or violence would threaten the peace, order and good government of the Commonwealth.
Penalty: Imprisonment for 7 years.
(6) Recklessness applies to the element of the offence under subsection (5) that it is a group or groups that are distinguished by race, religion, nationality or political opinion that the first-mentioned person urges the other person to use force or violence against.

Oh, alright, here's a quote from Marr:

[Jones] assured his audience he "understood" why that famous text message went out and he read it right through again on air: "Come to Cronulla this weekend to take revenge. This Sunday every Aussie in the shire get down to North Cronulla to support the leb and wog bashing day …" ...

When John called on Tuesday to recommend vigilante action - "If the police can't do the job, the next tier is us" - Jones did not dissent. "Yeah. Good on you John." And when he offered a maxim his father had picked up in the war - "Shoot one, the rest will run" - Jones roared with laughter. "No, you don't play Queensberry's rules. Good on you, John."

But before we all start up a hue and cry for Jones (Alan, not Evan) to get seven years for sedition, it might be worth taking a look at his last daily comments on the Today Show. We should also remember that the "new" sedition provisions are merely some old law renovated and both John Howard and Phil Ruddock have made it perfectly clear that the sedition laws won't be enforced. Especially, I suspect, in the case of Alan Jones and 2GBH.

Update: guess who's joined the root-causists:

So does Sunday's riot add up to a simple case of damn-us white racism, or to something far more complex and human? Oh, yes, the rioting was cowardly, vile and disgusting. Pack attacks are, which is why we must not merely condemn, but understand.

To prevent. Best start now. There will be more riots before we spruce up this home of ours and only quiet thinking, not screaming, will help us.

And now for something completely irrelevant:

Don't be too proud of never forgetting a face: It turns out even a humble bumblebee can distinguish and recall different human faces, say researchers who have conducted experiments on the surprisingly canny insects.

Researchers in the UK have found that bumblebees show a remarkable ability to spot the same human face even days after training.

I wonder if it's possible to train them to attack on sight as well?

Quick Bits

The Stanford Prison Experiment has its own web-site.

As David Tiley says, now this is a meme: