Loomnie

I have sadly never visited the Oktoberfest, and it seems that the longer I stay in Germany the more difficult it is to find any of my Berliner friends who thinks it is worth visiting. Something about it being too touristy and the beer being ridiculously overpriced. Plus there is some distance between Munich and Berlin.

Anyway, in case you wonder what it is like to be a waiter at the Oktoberfest:

To be a waiter is probably the most arduous job at the Oktoberfest. A typical day starts at 8 in the morning and ends at midnight – a sixteen-hour shift. One person has to be able to stem around 10 steins (traditional beer mugs) on average at once, which is equivalent to over 20 kilos of beer. Nevertheless, Harry Maas, a waiter in one of the 35 tents, finds a joy in serving people. “I have always loved working at the Oktoberfest. I work as a waiter full-time so I love to serve people and especially the atmosphere here is exceptional. You meet all different kinds of people which is the most enjoyable part about it.” However, Mr. Maas is quick to address the myth evolving around his wage. Rumors that waiters at the festival earn more than 10,000 Euros at the Oktoberfest are patently false and way too overdrawn. “One would never be able to earn that much”, he says. The money earned would at best suffice for two months, but there is no chance that people are able to live off of their earnings from the Oktoberfest alone. As Mr. Maas points out, it is not the money that he works for but the special experience. For him, there is nothing better than his current job and the anticipation of working another five years at the Oktoberfest.

That is one of the less serious pieces on Fair Observer, a new commentary and analysis site that ‘seeks to bring clarity to the complex and dynamic world we live in,’ and aims ‘to provide a platform for voices from different disciplines, various philosophies and many parts of the world’. They’re actually still in beta mode, but they’re doing a nice job already. You should check them out.

This is a synopsis:

Elder’s Corner is musical journey through pivotal moments in the colorful history of Nigeria as told through the lives and careers of the nations foremost music legends. It is a story about the eroding effects of colonialism, bitter ethnic clashes, politics, oil, power, money and their combined effects on a nation that recently celebrated its 50th year of self rule.

Click here to support the project.

A couple of weekends ago we hosted a friend who had just returned from Nigeria. She mentioned that penises were currently being ‘disappeared’ in the country. We smiled, we laughed, and I told the story of how I first learnt about disappearing penises. Like a good, self-respecting, PhD-holding anthropologist, I concluded by insisting that I really couldn’t say much else until someone did an ethnographic study of the topic.

I hadn’t thought about it since then until this evening when Teju Cole, during one of the times he breaks character as a writer of Small Fates, tweeted a link to the closest thing to an ethnographic study of disappearing penis – a Frank Bures article titled A mind dismembered: In search of the magical penis thieves. It is a well nuanced piece whose quality does not derive only from the fact that it wounds my Nigerian pride by showing that  we are neither the originators of, nor the exclusive owners of the rights to, disappearing membrum virile.

Much like how a very quick look in the literature, as I was thinking of starting a research project on the study of internet fraud, showed that we cannot claim to have founded – or even be the greatest practioners of – the confidence trick, even though it is now known almost exclusively by its Nigerian name, 419. Bummer.

From the Bures article:

Nigeria was not the first site of mysterious genital disappearance. As with so many other things, its invention can be claimed by the Chinese. The first known reports of “genital retraction” date to around 300 B.C., when the mortal dangers of suo-yang, or “shrinking penis,” were briefly sketched in the Nei Ching, the Yellow Emperor’s Classic Text of Internal Medicine. Also in China, the first full description of the condition was recorded in 1835, in Pao Siaw-Ow’s collection of medical remedies, which describes suo-yang as a “ying type of fever” (meaning it arises from too much cold) and recommends that the patient get a little “heaty” yang for balance.

Fears of magical penis loss were not limited to the Orient. The Malleus Maleficarum, medieval Europeans’ primary guidebook to witches and their ways, warned that witches could cause one’s membrum virile to vanish, and indeed several chapters were dedicated to this topic. Likewise the Compendium Maleficarum warned that witches had many ways to affect one’s potency, the seventh of which included “a retraction, hiding or actual removal of the male genitals.” (This could be either a temporary or a permanent condition.) Even in the 1960s, there were reports of Italian migrant workers in Switzerland panicking over a loss of virility caused by witchcraft.

Read it all here.

Mao Kaci on NigeriansTalk:

Any time I recall scenes from that video showing security officers of the Nigerian state ferret men, young and old, able and disabled, from behind closed doors in their homes and efficiently shoot them to death in the streets of Maiduguri in 2009, I find myself thinking: If that had been a nightmare, and not an event in actual history, it would still have had the power of occasioning some form of insanity. I ask myself: What manner of people would view such scenes of cold mass murder, executed by agents of the state in the country whose citizens they are, and still carry on as though there were something like human society in Nigeria? But apparently we all did carry on that way—and yes, there is human society in Nigeria; maybe not quite humane, or maybe just humane and inhumane by turns. We all watched that video and expressed our shock—I still feel the bile in my mouth when I think of that old man in crutches, escorted out of his house, made to lie face-down in the street, and finished off with a bullet. We all spat out our shock or held our mouths open in disbelief, and afterwards we carried on as if nothing strange, nothing disturbing, had happened. Perhaps nothing strange, nothing disturbing, indeed, had happened. There had been Ogoni, Odi, Zaki Biam, etc., etc., before Maiduguri. The Nigerian state does not only underwrite our citizenship, it also has the right and power to overrule our life and issue us with death, even on a large scale. That, for you, is the Nigerian state under which we organize what may be taken as Nigerian society.

In 2009, there was genocide in Maiduguri. I am not being sensational in making that claim. I am not even being as ‘sensitive’ as Wole Soyinka or as ‘insensitive’ as OBJ. I am only stating the fact as I saw it captured in that video. I do not recall that the dead in the Maiduguri genocide were ever memorialized in a public ceremony or even much remarked in the media and public discourse. For us, sensitive and insensitive Nigerians alike, life went on. We reduced it all, at most, to the extra-judicial killing of one man—Muhammed Yusuf, the leader—or as I believe—the front or fall guy of the Boko Haram.

Part of the tragedy of the matter is that we were not the only ones to forget the dead in the Maiduguri. They were also forgotten by the Boko Haram, the terrorist group whose attacks on the police and the populace provided the pretext for that murderous police action. The people have never mattered to the Boko Haram. Their wellbeing was never the issue; otherwise such a moneyed and globally networked group like the Boko Haram would have used its resources to establish a socio-economic enclave, an alternative to the Nigerian ‘shitstem’, wherein the people may feel a sense of ownership of and participation in governance. Rather the people themselves are the hostages and victims of the Boko Haram, their human shield and cannon fodder, their pawns and counters in the enterprise and gamble of violence. The Boko Haram have never included the dead in the Maiduguri genocide in their bill of grievances. Rather, they supplanted the massacre of people with the murder of their figurehead, making the latter the only issue that requires reckoning on the part of the police force.

Here.

It’s a man’s world by Joy Denalane, Bilal, Tweet, Dwele – and the Dresden Soul Symphony. Enjoy!

Sister Fa is a Berlin-based Senegalese hip-hop artiste. More about her here.

Joris Luyendijk, Dutch anthropologist and journalist, is currently blogging an anthropological study of bankers he’s doing in the City of London for Guardian. From the introduction to the blog:

It is quite a change for me, exploring bankers. I used to do anthropological fieldwork among students in the slums of Cairo, then worked as a Middle East correspondent going back and forth between Hamas leaders and Jewish settlers. The latter were people who knew they might die at any moment for their convictions, and had made their peace with that. Meanwhile those students lived off less than a dollar a day.

Compare this to the bankers and I have moved from freestyle boxing to billiards. Then again, readers’ responses may not be that different.

When I wrote about Israel and the Palestinians some readers would judge an article exclusively by whether it was likely to make one camp look good or the other. In particular, pieces that humanised their objects of hate elicited very aggressive letters to the editor – or worse. I expect the same thing with bankers.

The Middle East is a pretty intense place but unless you have family living or serving there, for most readers it is also a pretty far away place. Finance is not. If somebody told you your savings aren’t safe, she’d have your full and immediate attention, wouldn’t she? But if she then said the words “bank reform” many would have to suppress a yawn.

This is paradoxical. Finance directly affects everyone’s interests, but many have a hard time maintaining their interest in it. But as the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the following three years have shown, the financial world is too important to leave to the bankers – in fact in some countries democracy is beginning to look like the system by which electorates decide which politician gets to implement what the markets dictate. The people in this very powerful sector are worth learning more about. And the good news is, when you listen to them in their own words, that can actually be pretty entertaining. And humanising.

The first batch of posts is a series of profiles of different actors who work in the City. You can read the whole thing here.

The closest thing to this on Wall Street is Karen Ho’s book Liquidated, which I wrote about here.

Manan Ahmed in The National:

Both Stewart and Mortenson illustrate one particular configuration of the relationship between knowledge and the American empire – the “non-expert” insider who can traverse that unknown terrain and, hence, become an “expert”.

Even a cursory examination of the archive dealing with the American efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan demonstrates that there has been no related growth in specific scholarly knowledge about those sites of conflict. The knowledge of Arabic, Urdu or Pashto remains at extremely low levels in official corridors. There is, one can surmise simply from reading the back and forth sway of military and political policy in Afghanistan, very little advancement in understanding of either the text or context of that nation.

In America’s imperial theatre, Stewart and Mortenson exemplify a singular notion of “expert”. We can build, based on the profiles of other specimens – Robert D Kaplan, Fareed Zakaria, Robert Kagan – a picture of what the ideal type looks like from the official point of view. Such an “expert” is usually one who has not studied the region, and especially not in any academic capacity. As a result, they do not possess any significant knowledge of its languages, histories or cultures. They are often vetted by the market, having produced a bestselling book or secured a job as a journalist with a major newspaper. They are not necessarily tied to the “official” narratives or understandings, and can even be portrayed as being “a critic” of the official policy. In other words, this profile fits one who doesn’t know enough.

At the same time there are greater claims, and greater efforts, towards satellite cameras and listening devices; drones which can hover for days; databases which can track all good Taliban and all bad Taliban. Yet who can decipher this data? When one considers the rise of “experts” such as Stewart or Mortenson against the growth of digitised data which remains elusive and overwhelming, one is left with a rather stark observation – that the American war effort prefers its human knowledge circumspect or circumscribed and its technical knowledge crudely totalised.

Continue reading here.

Manan Ahmed’s blog, Chapati Mystery, comes highly recommended.

I was looking through my computer earlier today and I discovered a review I wrote during my first weeks as a Masters in Development Studies student at Uppsala in Sweden. The first thing those guys did was to encourage us to question the whole idea of development by making us read Gilbert Rist’s The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith. Below is a review I wrote of the book – an assignment. As I read through it today I strongly resisted the urge to edit my 24 year-old self, so excuse the sometimes flowery language. 

Words, Spirits and History: A review of Gilbert Rist’s The History of Development

What is it with words? While some hardly make a sound others simply stand out, they call attention to themselves, beg to be heard. One of them is development. It is simply unimaginable that this word, and its most recent offsprings, human and sustainable development(s) should be subjected to as much rigorous examination and criticism as Gilbert Rist does in The History of Development. But the word is not what Rist battles with, it is the philosophy which gives the word life, which makes it relevant; it is the spirit which the word conjures, and the faith which it commands that necessitate such examination. Then, words have long had a way of creeping into our consciousness and dominating our imagination, but not without some aid. Rist set out to explain the process by which this word gained and kept prominence. Perhaps the first thing it would be good to know is that the word has an origin.

Even before opening the book we get an idea of where the word came from. From the subtitle of the book we have a vague idea of the word’s birthplace, but not its birth process. Rist traces the process by which development came to become the dominant paradigm of measuring relations between North and South, he shows that the word has its roots in Western consciousness. He goes as far as to Aristotle’s conception of nature as development in circles, i.e. as a series of beginnings and ends and new beginnings, to St Augustine’s view of history as eschatological as it is presumed to be linked to the Bible, and ultimately to Jean-Baptiste Say and his social evolutionists who saw the western world as the most advanced one because of its high level of production and consumption. Apart from this argument for the western world’s referencing of itself as the ideal, their defeat of “savage races” seemed to lend credence to social evolutionism. It seemed only sensible to conclude that the western human was the most advanced of humans. Of necessity, this set the stage for the next level in the development of the history of development: colonialism.

In the late nineteenth century, the savage needed protection, and guidance in utilising the abundance of natural resources which nature had deemed fit to thrust upon him, or so the colonialists say. It was a period in which global relations marched from conquered/ conqueror to savage/civilised, and so colonised/coloniser. Several arguments were used to convince the people of the nobility of the endeavour, one was economical and another was purely paternalistic. Who wouldn’t blame the civilised world if they failed to bring civilisation to the dark parts of the world? If some parts of the world were uncivilised it was only morally obligatory for the part that was to bring civilisation to the other part. But the dominant paradigm was soon to adopt a different, more portent and enduring concept, that of development.

Rist gives the birth of development as the time of President Harry Truman’s inaugural address. From that time on, the relationship of countries of the north and those of the south came to be defined by the level of development. The paradigm shifted from that of colonised/coloniser to underdeveloped/developed. The main problem of this distinction was its assumption that underdevelopment is a natural stage of humanity. It was not an effect but could only be the antecedent of the “developed” Northern world. It was as if the North could look at the South and see how it was before it was touched by development. This perception of things could absolve the North of any responsibility in making the South the way it was, as underdeveloped is an intransitive verb, it is not an effect but can only be affected. The peoples of the South were no longer viewed as individual nations with individual histories, they were simply underdeveloped countries; they were deprived of the privilege of having their situations explained by history and were instead described as the natural state of being that was embarrassing and so would have to be helped to the state of the industrialised countries. And the way to do this was given as increasing the GDP. Perhaps we should say a little about Rostow’s proposition and his stages of economic growth.

Rostow’s recommendation for economic growth underlines an assumption that is an offspring of the development paradigm. Since it is believed that underdevelopment is a natural state from which the developed countries rose, it was only natural to presume that to effect development all one had to do was to follow the steps through which the North rose and then development would necessarily arrive in the underdeveloped regions. Rostow’s scale of development then starts with the underdeveloped stage, a natural state in which development is lacking and which has to proceed to the stage in which the preconditions for development are taking shape. During this time the society is gearing for the next stage when the preconditions are already set and the society is ready to develop. This stage Rostow calls the take-off stage – the GNP starts rising and the move towards industrialisation is instituted. The fourth stage is the drive to maturity stage. Here, the societies are already experiencing a rise in GDP and since the elite are benefiting strongly from this they would be encouraged to ensure the continuation of growth. The final stage is that of high consumption rates since the gains of productivity is distributed to the people. This stage is also characterised by the welfare state. This is another evolutionist account of development that, needless to say, is doomed to fail in capturing the development process.

Rist also examines the different conferences and reports that were convened and prepared in the name of development. There is almost no need to examine each one in itself, the basic theme that runs though all of them is the desire to write away history by not focussing on the need for a redefinition of development. This is exemplified by the report of the New International Economic Order (NIEO). The text of the report is a reinforcement of the dominant paradigm, it emphasised “economic growth, expansion of trade and increased aid by the industrial nations” as the solution to the problem of underdevelopment. Like many reports produced by such organisations its recommendations were not implemented. Rist says it is really a relief that it was not, as the recommendations would have been more harmful to the Third World than before, it would have widened the gap between the rich and poor countries as it still situated the source of development in the North, and the source would have to help the poor countries to achieve development by assisting them with aid and investment. Experience has shown that private investment in poor countries only come when the investor knows that it can maximise his profit, and this often to the detriment of the economy of the poor countries.

However, there is a report that Rist says stands out for its boldness in declaring that another development is possible. The Dag Hammarskjörld Foundation report extends the concept of development from mere economic growth to something that has to be born by each society out of what is unique to it. This means that there cannot be a universal definition of development. Another thing that sets it aside from all other reports is that it includes the industrialised countries as part of the countries that need to become developed. They need to review their consumption patterns. This report was simply forgotten.

The structural Adjustment Programmes of the 1980s is another point that is worthy of note in the history of development. It was a direct child of the lending activities of Northern creditors who lent money irresponsibly, without enough security, to Southern countries. The major impact of structural adjustment programmes was in impoverishing the peoples the more. It was thought that for the countries to be able to pay off their debt they had to, among other things, cut down on the involvement of government in the economy and the financing of infrastructure projects. The meaning of this is continued impoverishment of the population. This era was the era of the trickle down policies. The harm these policies did in the Third World has been severally studied. Considering that Rist’s mission is to show how contradictory development could be, and in fact is, he paid too cursory an attention to it. For the recency of these programmes and their failure make them scream for attention.

One of the problems with works that set out primarily to criticise a notion is the failure to provide an alternative. Rist’s criticisms are the state of the art in its field; they capture the very contradictions of the term, its actions and proponents. But they fail to provide a way out of the problem. One could try to understand this problem by pointing at the fact that it was not easy to proffer a solution where a whole industry is built around a concept. Rist talks about this when he pointed to the organs of United Nations, and the NGOs, both local and global, that are founded around the development concept. If one were to do away with the concept and its baggage what does one do with the industry? Where does one put them?

Another problem is about what is to be done instead of giving aid and other forms of assistance to poor countries. Rist’s cynicism in criticising these moves as reinforcing the development paradigm is understood but, practically, what is to be done? What is the alternative to this? Isn’t it rather better to continue with these and all its different siblings than to simply sit and whine, especially as the paradigm does not seem about to change in the nearest future? I am saying this at the peril of sounding naïve and simplistic but, being a citizen of the Third World, I understand that a long-term solution would have to take into account not just the immediate satisfaction of hunger but the continued survival, and by extension peaceful existence of a people, it would be more naïve to fail to act for today while being pre-occupied with thinking about tomorrow.

To answer the questions about what to do Rist offers three answers. One of them borrows from Christian Comeliau. This approach advocates economic growth and the proper integration of the Southern economies into the world economy, especially according to how they can gain from it. This is against blindly advocating the promotion of free trade. He is not against loans as long as the terms of the loans ensure that they can be paid back. He also advocates the transfer of technology to poor countries by multinational companies. In the classic Rist tradition he picks apart this proposition by questioning the intentions of the people who are supposed to initiate these moves. Will they be sincere enough to initiate the needed reforms? And even if they are what is the assurance that the programmes won’t be abandoned after the next coup d’etat, or elections? What does this leave us but a feeling of utter dejection and disillusionment? The second answer draws from the experiences of some grassroots movements in some poor parts of the world. Instead of seeking to become like the rich countries they organise to change the attitude and behaviour of the people, encouraging them to concentrate on what they posses and not on what they lack. Although Rist admits that a person who believes in GDP and per capita income would point to the material needs of these people, he concludes that what they feel would nevertheless be fewer discontentments as it would be if they were concentrating on their needs. But for how long can such islands sustain in the world where diffusion of information is the norm and not the exception?

The third and most appealing answer to the question is a total rethinking of the relationship between societies, drawing from the anthropology and history disciplines, as against a purely economic approach. These disciplines should help to study alternative models to achieving the state popularly referred to as development. This is because theoretical models that are expected to capture the reality, and reality, or alternative reality, can be perceived basically from historical and anthropological perspectives. This is a theoretical approach that does not neglect the potency of the two earlier suggestions. For Rist, the three form a good team, although certainly not the best.

These answers are good enough on the surface but considering that development is such a new creature that has grown in so much importance over a short period of time, a creature that can be likened to a religion, with its own priests and institutions, what is the assurance that these are practical answers? Just like Rist criticises the first answer we can almost see resistance to the development of an alternative paradigm. To be practical, are studies advocated by anthropologists not going to be funded by development agencies? Are these anthropologists not going to work within certain frameworks prescribed by development experts? In a world where research-funding agencies provide funding only for projects in their own interest, what would be the incentive to embark on such studies? Rist’s book is a classic deconstructionist text but it falls flat when it attempts to do more than that.