Presentation Postmortem

In this final installment of the Ethnogeography Weblog you are to render your individual impressions of the research project presentations of the Epistemic Field Teams. As well, you are to post any questions you might wish for the EFTs to address. Here are a few queries to inspire your evaluative commentary on the representations:

What dimensions of the slideshow were effective and which were not? What did you learn from the presentation that you did not know before? How could the presentation have been improved? How would you evaluate the presentation: superior, satisfactory, unsatisfactory?

I encourage you all to be thoughtful and constructive in your comments and, where appropriate, to explore areas of interpretive contiguity, as it were, with your own research. Write away!!

Imagined Communities and "Breaker Morant"

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

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

Taking your lead from this quotation explain the diverse nationalist and dynastic tensions at work in the court martial of Morant, Handcock, and Witton.

Freud and Mazlish on Civilization

In this week's individual webbog post I am eager to learn of your interpretations and/or readings of civilization as this phenomenon is understood by Mazlish and Freud. There are key differences between these two figures as well as significant similarities, so make it your goal to offer meaningful reflection on what they have to say about the advantages and disadvantages offered by the historic invention of this key concept. Both men convey distinct concerns about civilization and its implications for the modern quest for individual liberty and self-flourishing and in the course of our reading of their critiques of civilization we learn much about the complex, intertwined history of self and its other.

"Civilization" and "The Last Wave"

In this first installment of our webblog for 2009, I would like each of you to offer comment on "The Last Wave." You may try to sort it out for yourself as one way of writing about it, although I would like it best if you would comment on the film in light of the dialectic of civilization and savagery we have studied these last several months. Should you like to more about what Peter Weir was trying to get at by way of the film, have a look at the text of an interview conducted with the director in 1979 at:

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

OK, you have until later this week to get your comments up. I look forward to seeing them.

Rethinking the Barbarism/Humanism Dyad

In our readings over the last few weeks, we have been exposed to several perspectives on the history of the global cultural encounter--Sahlins, Zhang, Todorov, Greenblatt, Eco. From the vantage of these interpreters we have learned that the encounter was far more complex than allowed within the conventional interpretative frame of challenge/response, or civilized/uncivilized, or West/East, or transgressor/victim, or domination/subjection. All cultures are active agents at the point of their encounter In our most recent reading in the "New Historicism" of Stephen Greenblatt, we have been encouraged to abandon the conventional lenses through which the encounter has been viewed and to attend to the primary documents of particular historical moments, such as Columbus's expedition. The purpose of this reorienting of our vision is to invite questioning and, later, disestablishment of the colonial discourse underlying the conquest of the "New World."

Scholars like Eco recast the dialectic of domination and subjection as a culturally productive misunderstanding and in this way mitigate the savagery of the historical record. Chinese was not actually the originary language of Adam, of course, but from this mistaken presumption, an imaginative cultural braid was begun joining Europe with Asia. This is the confluence narrative that Eco has called "exchange." (p. 54) Yet, there is no denying that it was conquest and cultural pillage that determined the course of the Great Encounter we have studied. Greenblatt, like Sahlins and others, is keenly aware of this fact, and he wishes for us to obtain a better understanding of the role that literature and humanist culture played in Eurocentric global expansion between 1300 and 1700. The concept of the marvelous or wondrous, standing in as it does in accounts from Columbus's diaries for "gold" or some other credible material wealth, joins both the barbaric and the humanistic urges of the colonialist. It is not so easy to segregate these motivations, still there has been a habit among some scholars (Todorov for example) of identifying colonialism as the problem and humanism as the solution.

What I would like you to reflect upon and write about in the days ahead is the curious simultaneity of barbarism and humanism in most all of the works we have read. Consider how the humanist impulse to understand and appreciate the other is fully implicated in the outrages of the worst of the European adventurers. One way of working through this reflection would be to take up Carl's observation from class of the salient disparity in the observations and conclusions of Columbus and La Casas. How could there be such a dramatic difference in perception (and thus treatment) of the natives by two Europeans living among them at the same time and place?

Conrad, Casement, and the "Horror"

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

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

Then, inflating prose on Casement, he reports,

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

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

"I knew the Foreign Office would not understand the thing[meaning his report], for I realized that I was looking at this tragedy with the eyes of another race of people once hnted themselves, whose hearts were based on affection as the root principle of contact with their fellow men, and whose estimate of life was not something to be appraised at its market price."

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

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

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

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

OK, let's get to work!!

Walkabout Free Association: What is the film about?

In this assignment I would like each of you to share with the class your feelings and thoughts about Walkabout. You need not be generous or kind if you did not like it or could not relate to it, but you must try to explain why you feel or think about the film the way that you do. Consider, if you will, what the film is about. Is it simply what it seems--a parable about the elegiac possibilities of the Aboriginal life and the "crushed spirits of city dwellers," as the film critic Roger Ebert once wrote? (By the way, Ebert, and others, believe that Walkabout is "one of the best-photographed films ever.") Is it the complex tale of cultural encounter wherein both "native" and "foreign" suffer and learn from the encounter? What does the film say about communication and the necessity for meaning in human interchange? Of course, any film of value must operate on many levels of significance and this is certainly true for Walkabout, the story of which gets more difficult to pin down definitively the more you think about it. Indeed, one must wonder if even the sequence of the story, which we may be inclined to understand as linear, is not timeless, occurring perhaps in the "dreaming" wherein imagined and real, mythic and historical are seamlessly intertwined.

Roger Ebert does offer one very intriguing take on the film that may provoke some reflection. It is worthy of quotation here:

"The movie is not the heartwarming story of how the girl and her brother are lost in the outback and survive because of the knowledge of the resourceful Aborigine [sic]. It is about how all three are still lost at the end of the film--more lost than before because now they are lost inside themselves instead of merely adrift in the world...The film suggests that all of us are the captives of environment and programming: there is a wide range of experiment and experience that remains forever invisible to us, because it falls in a spectrum we simply cannot see."

So, let's see what you think and feel about this work that was characterized in the voiceover for the trailer as "just about the most different film you'll ever see." In your comments if you are led down the path of identifying resonances of the film with other works we have read, please elaborate so that we might see how many others were similarly struck.