Day 106: Book Excerpt: Vishnu’s Crowded Temple

At their most philosophical, the British saw empire as cricket. For some, cricket was the greatest gift imperialism could bestow, because it could transform ‘natives’ into gentlemen. In 1893 this ‘wicket imperialism’ acquired its most prominent theorist in the shape of Arthur Haslam, Oxford historian and wicket-keeper for the ‘Oxford Eccentrics’, the first British team to tour India. Cricket’s rules and culture, he insisted, were the platonic embodiment of English virtue:

First the hunter, the missionary and the merchant, next the soldier and the politician and then the cricketer – that is the history of British colonization. . . the soldier may hector, the politician blunder, but cricket united . . . the ruler and the ruled. It also provides a moral training, an education in pluck and nerve, and self-restraint, far more valuable to the character of the native than the mere learning by heart of a play by Shakespeare or an essay by Macaulay.

For others, cricket could build not merely character but the nation itself, though there was profound disagreement about the nature of the ‘nation’ being constructed. For Lord Harris, the cricket-loving governor of Bombay from 1890 to 1893, it encouraged the multi-farious castes, communities and religious of India to mingle while retaining their separate identities – an ideal displacement of potentially explosive political rivalries. Those of a more progressive temper than Harris saw it differently. For Sir Lancelot Graham, the first governor of Sindh, cricket was capable of dissolving such divisions to ‘bind communities together and foster harmony on and off the field, and not only in cricket’. For a while, at least, it appeared that Graham’s optimistic view might be vindicated.

Before the First World War cricket did indeed appear to be the cultural glue of an emerging national identity. By 1918 cricket had become a national obsession, played throughout the country, uniting rich and poor, high caste and low, Hindu and Muslim. The great tournaments were kaleidoscopic spectacles: the well-off inside the stadiums in tents and on divans, the less prosperous straining for a view of the pitch from the tops of trees, buses and telegraph poles. There were even signs of integration on the pitch with multi-caste teams and princes playing with paupers. Indeed the greatest stars of the pre-1914 game came from opposite ends of the social spectrum. The outstanding batsman was Kumar Shri Ranjitsinji, Jamsaheb (prince) of Nawanagar (1872–1933). Having taken up cricket at Rajkumar College, the princes’ Eton, he proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he acquired the nickname Smith and a parrot called Popsey, and joined the University team in 1893. He went on to play for England against Australia in 1896, making three centuries in a style characterized by enraptured observers as ‘an oriental poem of action’. The other great pre-war star was the fabulously gifted bowler Baloo, an untouchable, who had honed his spinning as a practice bowler to British officers in the military encampment where his father worked as a camp orderly. Initially, he was not allowed to take tea with other team members but had his served outside the pavilion in a disposable cup. Triumphing over caste prejudice, however, he eventually captained the predominantly high-caste team that sensationally beat the Europeans in 1923.

However, Indian cricket soon came to embody not caste, class and religious unity, but division. This development is best encapsulated in the strange history of the greatest tournament of colonial India: the Bombay Pentangular. Bombay had been the birthplace of cricket for Indians. A proto-tournament had been initiated by Harris in 1893, with teams assembled along racial and community lines. Initially the Parsi team had haughtily declined to play the Hindus: only European opponents were equal to their dignity. But by 1907 the rift between Hindus and Parsis was healed and the first Bombay Triangular, between Hindus, Parsis and Europeans, was held. In 1912 a Muslim team joined, and thus the Quadrangular began. By the early 1930s the tournament was beginning to mirror national politics; the various teams roughly reflected the disposition of forces at the Round Table constitutional talks held at the time – Europeans, Hindus and Sikhs, Parsis and Muslims. In 1932 matches had to be cancelled owing to Congress’s boycott of the constitutional talks. By the mid-1930s the question of how the ‘minor’ minorities should be incorporated into the game arose, just as their place in a reformed constitution was vexing talks in London. In cricketing terms the question was how the smaller communities of Indian Catholics, Protestants, Syrian Christians, Eurasians, Sinhalese, Buddhists, Luso-Portugese Indians and Jews might participate in the game. The solution came in 1937 with the formation of a fifth team, known as ‘the Rest’, and the first Bombay Pentangular was born.

The ethnicization of the game naturally led to conflict. The first Pentangular of 1937 proved something of a fiasco. The Hindus withdrew because they had not been allocated enough seats in the new stadium; the Parsis boycotted it in 1938, only to return in 1939, when the Pentangular commenced in earnest. By 1940, however, political tensions were again disrupting play: the Hindus decided they should withdraw in solidarity with Congress’s resignation from government after the declaration of war. The tournament was not held in 1942 owing to the Japanese triumphs in south-east Asia, but was back in 1943, when the British had great hopes of winning with a team boosted by new infusions of talent from the swollen ranks of British servicemen (they were defeated in the first round). The last Pentangular was held in January 1946.

~~Vishnu’s Crowded Temple: India since the Great Rebellion -by- Maria Misra

Day 105: Book Excerpt: The Box

On April 26, 1956, a crane lifted fifty-eight alumi­num truck bodies aboard an aging tanker ship moored in Newark, New Jersey. Five days later, the Ideal-X sailed into Houston, where fifty-eight trucks waited to take on the metal boxes and haul them to their destinations. Such was the beginning of a revolution. Decades later, when enormous trailer trucks rule the highways and trains hauling nothing but stacks of boxes rumble through the night, it is hard to fathom just how much the container has changed the world. In 1956, China was not the world's workshop. It was not routine for shoppers to find Brazilian shoes and Mexican vacuum cleaners in stores in the middle of Kansas. Japanese families did not eat beef from cattle raised in Wyoming, and French clothing design­ers did not have their exclusive apparel cut and sewn in Turkey or Vietnam. Before the container, transporting goods was expensive­ so expensive that it did not pay to ship many things halfway across the country, much less halfway around the world.

What is it about the container that is so important? Surely not the thing itself. A soulless aluminum or steel box held together with welds and rivets, with a wooden floor and two enormous doors at one end: the standard container has all the romance of a tin can. The value of this utilitarian object lies not in what it is, but in how it is used. The container is at the core of a highly automated system for moving goods from anywhere, to anywhere, with a minimum of cost and complication on the way.

The container made shipping cheap, and by doing so changed the shape of the world economy. The armies of ill-paid, ill-treated workers who once made their livings loading and unloading ships in every port are no more, their tight-knit waterfront communities now just memories. Cities that had been centers of maritime com­merce for centuries, such as New York and Liverpool, saw their wa­terfronts decline with startling speed, unsuited to the container trade or simply unneeded, and the manufacturers that endured high costs and antiquated urban plants in order to be near their suppliers and their customers have long since moved away. Venerable ship lines with cenrury-old pedigrees were crushed by the enormous cost of adapting to container shipping. Merchant mariners, who had shipped out to see the world, had their traditional days-long shore leave in exotic harbors replaced by a few hours ashore at a remote parking lot for containers, their vessel ready to weigh anchor the instant the high -speed cranes finished putting huge metal boxes off and on the ship.

Even as it helped destroy the old economy, the container helped build a new one. Sleepy harbors such as Busan and Seattle moved into the front ranks of the world's ports, and massive new ports were built in places like Felixstowe, in England, and Tanjung Pelepas, in Malaysia, where none had been before. Small towns, distant from the great population centers, could take advantage of their cheap land and low wages to entice factories freed from the need to be near a port to enjoy cheap transportation. Sprawling industrial complexes where armies of thousands manufactured products from start to fin­ish gave way to smaller, more specialized plants that shipped compo­nents and half-finished goods to one another in ever lengthening supply chains. Poor countries, desperate to climb the rungs of the ladder of economic development, could realistically dream of be­coming suppliers to wealthy countries far away. Huge industrial complexes mushroomed in places like Los Angeles and Hong Kong, only because the cost of bringing raw materials in and sending fin­ished goods out had dropped like a stone.

This new economic geography allowed firms whose ambitions had been purely domestic to become international companies, ex­porting their products almost as effortlessly as selling them nearby. If they did, though, they soon discovered that cheaper shipping ben­efited manufacturers in Thailand or Italy just as much. Those who had no wish to go international, who sought only to serve their local clientele, learned that they had no choice: like it or not, they were competing globally because the global market was coming to them. Shipping costs no longer offered shelter to high-cost producers whose great advantage was physical proximity to their customers; even with customs duties and time delays, factories in Malaysia could deliver blouses to Macy's in Herald Square more cheaply than could blouse manufacturers in the nearby lofts of New York's gar­ment district. Multinational manufacturers--companies with plants in different countries-transformed themselves into international manufacturers, integrating once isolated factories into networks so that they could choose the cheapest location in which to make a particular item, yet still shift production from one place to another as costs or exchange rates might dictate. In 1 956, the world was full of small manufacturers selling locally; by the end of the twentieth century, purely local markets for goods of any sort were few and far between.

For workers, of course, this has all been a mixed blessing. As con­sumers, they enjoy infinitely more choices thanks to the global trade the container has stimulated. By one careful study, the United States imported four times as many varieties of goods in 2002 as in 1972, generating a consumer benefit-not counted in official statistics­ equal to nearly 3 percent of the entire economy. The competition that came with increased trade has diffused new products with re­markable speed and has held down prices so that average households can partake. The ready availability of inexpensive imported con­sumer goods has boosted living standards around the world.

As wage earners, on the other hand, workers have every reason to be ambivalent. In the decades after World War II, wartime devasta­tion created vast demand while low levels of international trade kept competitive forces under control. In this exceptional environment, workers and trade unions in North America, Western Europe, and Japan were able to negotiate nearly continuous improvements in wages and benefits, while government programs provided ever stronger safety nets. The workweek grew shorter, disability pay was made more generous, and retirement at sixty or sixty-two became the norm. The container helped bring an end to that unprecedented advance. Low shipping costs helped make capital even more mobile, increasing the bargaining power of employers against their far less mobile workers. In this highly integrated world economy, the pay of workers in Shenzhen sets limits on wages in South Carolina, and when the French government ordered a shorter workweek with no cut in pay, it discovered that nearly frictionless, nearly costless ship­ping made it easy for manufacturers to avoid the higher cost by moving abroad.

~~The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger -by- Marc Levinson

Day 104: Book Excerpt: Graphs , Maps, Trees

The quantitative approach to literature can take several different forms— from computational stylistics to thematic databases, book history, and more. For reasons o f space, I will here limit myself to book history, building on work originally done by McBumey, Beasley, Raven, Garside and Block for Britain; Angus, Mylne and Frautschi for France; Zwicker for Japan; Petersen for Denmark; Ragone for Italy; Martl-Lopez and Santana for Spain; Joshi for India; and Griswold for Nigeria. And I mention these names right away because quantita­tive work is truly cooperation: not only in the pragmatic sense that it takes forever to gather the data, but because such data are ideally independent from any individual researcher, and can thus be shared by others, and combined in more than one way. Figure 1 which charts the take-off of the novel in Britain, Japan, Italy, Spain and Nigeria, is a case in point. See how similar those shapes are: five countries, three continents, over two centuries apart, and it’s really the same pattern, the same old metaphor of the ‘rise’ of the novel come alive: in twenty years or so (in Britain, 1720-40; Japan, 1745-65; Italy, 1820-40; Spain, 1845 to early 1860s; Nigeria, 1965-80), the graph leaps from five-ten new titles per year, which means one new novel every month or two, to one new novel per week. And at this point, the horizon of novel-reading changes. As long as only a handful of new titles are published each year, I mean, novels remain unreliable products, that disappear for long stretches of time, and cannot really command the loyalty of the reading public; they are commodities, yes— but commodities still waiting for a fully devel­oped market. A new novel per week, by contrast, is already the great capitalist oxymoron of the regular novelty: the unexpected that is produced with such efficiency and punctuality that readers become unable to do without it. The novel ‘becomes a necessity o f life’, to paraphrase the title of a book by William Gilmore-Lehne, and the jer­emiads that immediately  multiply around it— novels make readers lazy, stupid, dissolute, insane, insubordinate: exactly like films two centuries later— are the clearest sign of its symbolic triumph.

The rise of the novel, then; or, better, one rise in a history which had begun many centuries earlier, and will go through several other accel­erations, as emerges quite clearly from the data on the publication of new novels in Britain between 1710 and 1850 (figure 2). Here, three phases seem to stand out, each subdivided into a first period of rapid growth and a second one of stabilization, and each modifying in a specific way the social role of the novel. The first phase, from 1720 to around 1770, is the one discussed above: a leap in 1720-40, and a consolidation in the following decades. In the second phase, which runs from 1770 to around 1820, the further increase in the number of new titles induces for its part a drastic reorientation of audiences towards the present. Up to then, I mean, the ‘extensive’ reading so typical of the novel— reading many texts once and superficially, rather than a few texts often and intensely— would easily outgrow the yearly output of titles, forcing readers to turn to the past for (much of) their entertainment: all sorts of reprints and abridge­ments of eighteenth-century bestsellers, British as well as foreign, plus the old, and even the few ancient classics of the genre. But as the total of new novels doubles, compared to the previous phase— 80 in 1788; 91 in 1796; 111 in 1808— the popularity of old books suddenly collapses, and novelistic audiences turn resolutely (and irreversibly) towards the current season.

The third phase, which begins around 1820, and which unfortunately I can only follow for the first thirty years, is the one in which the internal composition o f the market changes. So far, the typical reader of novels had been a ‘generalist’— someone ‘who reads absolutely anything, at random’, as Thibaudet was to write with a touch of con­tempt in Le liseur de romans. Now, however, the growth o f the market creates all sorts of niches for ‘specialist’ readers and genres (nautical tales, sporting novels, school stories, mysteres): the books aimed at urban workers in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, or at boys, and then girls, in the following generation, are simply the most visible instances of this larger process, which culminates at the turn of the century in the super-niches of detective fiction and then science fiction.


~~ Graphs , Maps, Trees -Abstract Models for Literary History -by- Franco Moretti

Day 103: Book Excerpt: Opium, Soldiers and Evangelicals

Nanjing was the first treaty China had concluded with any foreign state for over one hundred and fifty years: since the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk with the Russians. But it was quickly followed by a series of other agreements over the next two years. It has been fairly argued that until 1839 it was the Chinese who set the tone and terms for their dealings with other countries. From 1842 that framework began, slowly, to change.

The most remarkable aspect of that 1842 treaty, though, is what it did not do. Given that China had suffered a complete and unmitigated defeat – indeed, the most decisive defeat the Manchu empire had ever suffered – the terms imposed were remarkably moderate and limited; a point largely obscured in the decades of condemnation of Britain and British attitudes which were to follow very much later. After a war which the Chinese claimed, and went on claiming, had been caused by Britain’s opium trade, the treaty did not mention it. Though the British wanted freer trade, no merchants or traders were involved in the preparation or conduct of the negotiations. There was not even any pressure to open up China to Western missionaries.

Palmerston’s demand to have a British ambassador installed at Beijing was tacitly dropped. Four trading ports, Xiamen (Amoy), Ningbo, Fouzhou and Shanghai were opened, in addition to Canton. China also agreed to accept foreign ‘superintendents or consular officers’ at each of them. Moreover, British and Chinese officials of corresponding rank would in future be treated as equals. Foreign consuls would be ‘the medium of communication between the Chinese authorities and the said merchants.’ 1 As for the old style of communication, those foreign ‘petitions’, which had caused such difficulty and resentment, would be replaced by using words like ‘communication’ or ‘statement.’ On the other hand, the consuls themselves would see to it that British subjects would pay the proper duties and other dues owed to the Chinese government. And ‘... the consul will be security for all British merchant ships entering any of the five ports.’

It was further agreed that in all of these ports foreign merchants ‘with their families and establishments, shall be allowed to reside, for the purpose of carrying on their mercantile pursuits, without molestation or restraint’. Furthermore, ‘in future at all ports where British merchants may reside [they would be permitted] to carry on their mercantile transactions with whatever persons they please.’ That tied in naturally with the abolition of the old Canton Cohong monopoly, and meant freeing foreigners to trade with anyone, to bargain about price, or to rent accommodation or servants, as they might please. However, it was accepted that if a ship was caught smuggling, it and its contraband could be confiscated or the ship banned from further trading.

Palmerston’s original treaty draft had wanted Britain to acquire one or more islands next to the coast, able to serve as a commercial and military base. The idea had been to have some piece of territory on which a British magistrate could properly operate to control British subjects; also a place of refuge. Territorial cession only came up once it was seen to be impracticable to have Chinese residents on any such British-controlled territory remain under Chinese jurisdiction. And once cession became the object, it was Zoushan that Palmerston had especially in mind. It had been recommended by the East India Company’s people, as well as by others who understood the China trade. It was ideally placed for the hugely rich and important trade of the whole Yangzi river basin and, beyond that, to serve as a base for trade all along China’s northern coasts. For all its hostile population and difficult wind conditions, it was sizeable and an important strategic asset. In the event, however, Pottinger, like Elliot before him, preferred the little rocky island of Hong Kong, with its deep, sheltered harbour and easy approaches. In spite of the fact that both Lord Stanley, now at the Colonial Office, and Lord Aberdeen, the new Foreign Secretary, remained unconvinced about it, foreign trade was centred at Canton and seemed likely to remain so. But circumstances at Hong Kong itself forced British hands. As Chinese merchants poured onto the island under British control, the British found themselves with a de facto Sino-British settlement on their hands. London finally accepted the Hong Kong acquisition by letter from Aberdeen on 4 January 1843, and Pottinger became the island’s first governor.

As for the indemnities payable by China, London demanded $21 million: $6 million for British property destroyed by the Chinese, $3 million to discharge the outstanding debts of the Hong merchants, and $12 million for the costs of the war. The money was to be paid in instalments over three and a half years. The Chinese did not argue about the figures. In fact, their negotiators told the Emperor that the relief from blockade and other pressures on China was cheap at the price. The debt, as well as the May 1841 ‘ransom’ of Canton, was paid in silver shipped to London or Calcutta – which may say a good deal about the ‘drain’ of silver from which China was alleged to suffer.

Trading taxes and duties were now set at around 5 per cent on both exports and imports, except for a 10 per cent duty on exports of tea, a commodity on which China still had a monopoly until the British got round to planting tea in Ceylon and Assam. In fact, Pottinger saw clearly enough that though the traders had complained long and bitterly about severe and eccentric Chinese tax demands, they did not actually know how much they were paying. They only knew about the overall prices-plus-charges which they had to pay to – and through – the Chinese merchants. Consequently the Chinese had no difficulty in accepting a British proposal for duty at 5 per cent. It was actually higher than the average of existing official rates, though less than the previous combination of formal duties and illegal exactions. Anyway, while the British insisted on reasonable trading conditions, they relied on a natural evolution of trade and other contacts to produce happier long-term political relations.

~~Opium, Soldiers and Evangelicals -by- Professor Harry G. Gelber

Day 102: Book Excerpt: Overhearing Film Dialogue

In Shakespeare’s As You Like It 2.4, Rosalind, Celia, and Touch-stone enter a vacant stage. However, all it takes is Rosalind’s assertion, “Well, this is the forest of Arden,” for the audience to understand that the travelers have reached their destination; a thicket of noble trees, dappled sun, and birdsong bursts from these seven words.

On the most basic level, dialogue is responsible for “creating” the theatrical diegesis, the fictional world of the narrative. Ericka Fisher-Lichte has pointed out how plays use dialogue to delineate their surroundings:

If the stage is an empty space that the actor states is a forest and subsequently refers to as a palace, a room, or a dungeon, then this empty space becomes the forest, palace, room, or dungeon in the eyes of the audience. If the actor’s words refer to nonexistent objects as if these nevertheless existed, then they do in fact exist for the audience. If, in the actor’s words, dusk draws in and the sound of the nightingale and the songs of farmers returning from the fields are to be heard, then all of this can still be seen and heard by the audience.

Because of their ability to photograph the physical world, films rarely need to rely upon dialogue to the same extent; why use “verbal” scenery when the camera can take you to any natural setting, or the Hollywood Dream Factory can sumptuously fabricate any locale? The catch is that although the camera can take us anywhere, identifying the location is trickier. As Roland Barthes argues, all visual images are polysemous; their meaning must be anchored by resort to verbal signs (which is why paintings are given titles, photographs, captions, and tourist postcards, geographical labels). One city skyline, one mountain region, one medieval castle looks very much like another unless its specificity is identified by some means. One popular cinematic strategy is to resort to the language of familiar iconography: the Golden Gate Bridge means “San Francisco,” the Eiffel Tower, “Paris.” Other methods include utilizing superimposed printed captions—”Phoenix, Arizona” in Psycho (1960)—or conveniently placed diegetic signs. (Julie Salamon’s record of the filming of Bonfire of the Vanities [1990] reveals Brian De Palma’s insistence upon the size of a street sign reading “Alternate Route Manhattan.”)

Yet, in addition to such methods, films use dialogue to identify the diegetic world. That flat farmland could have been anywhere— Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska—but when Dorothy says, “Toto, I don’t think that we’re in Kansas anymore,” it becomes Kansas. Moreover, this process of verbal identification works, not only for major locations, but for all the characters’ movements in time and space throughout a film—the dialogue continually reorients the viewer through what David Bordwell calls “dialogue hooks” (e.g., “Shall we go to lunch?” followed by a long shot of a cafe). For instance, in Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), a reporter calls Elena Harris with the news about Tiger Lily’s marriage to Jimmy Harris and the brawl with Judy:

ELENA: Mr. Harris’s marriage has nothing whatever to do with me.
REPORTER: They’re in the Night Court now. Don’t you want to make a statement?
ELENA: I’m not interested. I don’t care who’s where and I’m not making any statements. (Slams down the phone, then picks it up again.) Where in the blazes is the Night Court?

The next shot is a wipe to a courtroom scene, which the viewer “naturally” infers is the Night Court just discussed.

Using dialogue for “re-anchorage” is especially important if a film is departing from linear chronology. In Andrew Davis’s The Fugitive (1993), the television reporter outside Kimble’s apartment notes:

“We do know this: that he and his wife Helen were at a fund-raiser at the Four Seasons Hotel earlier this evening, a fund-raiser for the Children’s Research Fund.” The screen goes white with the bulb of an exploding flash; cut to a large party scene, now identified for us in both time and space.

Exactly where simple anchorage (identifying of existing, but unspecified, time and space) leaves off and literal verbal fabrication of the diegesis (painting in the viewer’s imagination a locale that does not physically exist) begins, is difficult to define in film. Production practices always allow for one location to substitute for another:

Canadian cities can double for New York, Morocco can be Kafiristan, the Philippines can be Vietnam, the back lot can be anywhere at any point in history. What is important to me here is how implicated the dialogue always is in defining the fictional space. In a real sense, “naming” constitutes “creation.” Or, as Tzvetan Todorov puts it, “One cannot verbalize with impunity; to name things is to change them.”

~~Overhearing Film Dialogue -by- Sarah Kozloff

Day 101 : Book Excerpt : A Billion Wicked Thoughts

The year 1886 witnessed the birth of two remarkable scientific disciplines, each founded by a German. One scientist gazed outward at the hidden patterns of the physical universe. The other peered inward at the secret workings of the mind. One discipline has achieved stunning progress. The other, perhaps surprisingly, lags far behind.

Heinrich Hertz built the very first radio antenna in 1886. He wanted to test for the existence of electromagnetic waves as predicted by Scottish theoretical physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Hertz became the first person to successfully transmit and receive a radio signal, simultaneously proving Maxwell correct and inaugurating the field of radiophysics. The subject of this new field was a strange, invisible “wave” that no philosopher or priest had ever dreamed of in their most extravagant fantasies. Yet over the ensuing century, radiophysicists developed the lasers used in DVD players and eye surgery. They figured out how to scan the brain for tumors. They even listened to the lingering sounds of the big bang, the event marking the origin of the known universe.

We all have a more intimate and personal relationship with the subject studied by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, a subject scrutinized by humankind since we yawped our first words in the valleys of Africa. In 1886, Krafft-Ebing published a landmark book. He deliberately wrote sections in Latin and chose a Latin title in order to discourage laypeople from reading it. The book was Psychopathia Sexualis. It addresses such arcane topics as clitoral stimulation, reduced libido, and homosexuality. The discipline Krafft-Ebing founded is known as sexology.

So in the 125 years since Psychopathia Sexualis initiated the scientific study of a very familiar activity, how do the field’s achievements match up to those of radiophysics? It’s rather like comparing the Olympics gold medal tallies of the United States and Fiji. Unlike the origins of electromagnetic energy, the origins of desire remain mysterious and controversial. There’s no consensus on which sexual interests are normal, abnormal, or pathological. Scientists can’t even agree on the purpose of female orgasm, whether there is such a thing as having too much sex, or whether sexual fantasies are innocent or dangerous.

Today, a wide variety of scientists study desire, including neuroscientists, psychologists, anthropologists, biologists, and pharmacologists. One of their most basic questions is: why do we like the things we like? This question has never been adequately answered, because we must first determine what people like. To steal an expression from American writer William S. Burroughs, we need to “see what’s on the end of everyone’s fork.” But stealing a look at men and women’s true interests has been far from easy.

While modern radiophysicists have discovered black holes and developed the means for communicating with extraterrestrials, scientists studying desire still struggle to identify basic differences between the sexual interests of men and women. Why is there such a gap between the achievements of the fields founded by Heinrich Hertz and Richard von Krafft-Ebing? One big reason is data acquisition.

The best method for acquiring scientific data is direct observation. Nothing beats watching a subject in action. But scientists have an easier time gazing at intergalactic quasars than peeking into someone’s bedroom. Quasars don’t close the curtains out of modesty or suspicion. In contrast, most of us are unwilling to let curious scientists photograph us as we tumble between the sheets. Radio waves may be invisible, but they don’t try to deceive curious physicists and they’re incapable of self-deception. Humans are guilty of both.
Since direct observation of sexual behavior is so challenging, most scientists acquire sexual data using self-report surveys. But are you willing to jot down answers to questions like “Have you ever felt attracted to your pet schnauzer?”—even if the unshaven young grad student surveying you insists, “Trust me—your answers are completely anonymous.”

~~A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What The World's Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire -by- Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam

Day 100 : Book Excerpt : Coffee and Conflict in Colombia

In the closed, stratified Colombian society of the last century, economic resources were monopolized by a small upper class interested in preserving its position and generally unable or unwilling to generate new wealth. The lack of new economic opportunities in a stagnant domestic economy made politics an inordinately important avenue for social mobility. Politics and government provided suitable employment in a culture that encouraged training in the traditional professions and reserved highest prestige for accomplishments in the classical skills of rhetoric and polemics. Government offered opportunities for travel and occasion for enrichment through favors and contracts. Control of government was a prize coveted by new, energetic, ambitious men who sought to improve their social position. Groups of men from all classes of society, bound together by traditional patron-client relationships, disputed for control of government with practically every means at their disposal. Once control was achieved, it was guarded with religious exclusivism.

 Nineteenth-century Colombian politicians and political commentators recognized and deplored this violent competition for public posts and the perquisites of office and often correlated it with the political instability characteristic of the nineteenth century. One observer, Juan Francisco Ortiz, believed that competition for the limited number of public positions contributed in large part to the political disorders of the post-Independence period, and as early as 1833 future Liberal! politicians Lorenzo Maria Lleras and Florentino Gonzalez were denouncing "empleo-mania" in the press. At different times during his long, influential career in Colombian politics, Rafael Nunez linked the lack of economic opportunities outside government to political violence. Nearing the end of his first presidential term, Nunez used harsh language to denounce the "uncompromising materialism" that threatened to make politics a "vile business of plunder," nothing more than "naked commercial speculation." As soon as a new chief executive takes office, Nunez exclaimed, he is besieged by an "army of office seekers" and, unable to satisfy them all with public posts and favors, he must watch them swell the ranks of a new and formidable political opposition."

 The contemporary who most carefully described the link between a stagnant domestic economy and political turmoil was Jose Maria Quijano Wallis, prominent Liberal merchant and politician during the second half of the nineteenth century. Looking back on eighty years of Colombian history from Independence until the end of the War of the Thousand Days, a period marked by seven major civil wars and more than a score of smaller outbreaks of political violence, Quijano Wallis wrote in his memoirs:

The lack of development of our national wealth and the consequent impoverishment of our people, has led the military caudillos, most of the time, to seek their livelihood and personal aggrandizement in the hazards of civil war, or in the intrigue and accommodations of politics. Thus, one can say that in Colombia, the first, if not the only industries of national, popular character, have been civil war and politics.
...
Ironically, the consolidation of the Regeneration in 1886 coincided with the beginning of a new export cycle as Colombians responded to the spectacular rise in world coffee prices which occurred in the late 1880's and early 1890's. Coffee had been cultivated in Colombia on a small scale since the start of the nineteenth century. Although world production and consumption of coffee more than doubled between 1820 and 1855, Colombian expansion did not begin until the 1860's, when improved river transportation and a rise in prices stimulated production.' In the early 1870's Colombian coffee exports exceeded 100,000 bags of sixty kilos each annually, reaching a peak in 1874 when 172,420 bags were exported. Coffee exports declined after that year and, although complete statistical evidence is lacking, probably leveled off at less than 100,000 bags annually for most years until the late 1880's. The decline in production reflected falling world coffee prices after 1875. The average price of Colombian coffee on the New York market fell from 20.5 cents per pound in 1875 to 10.1 cents per pound in 1884. Because coffee trees produce their first crop only four or five years after planting, price generally exerts little immediate effect on coffee production. Consequently, when coffee prices rose precipitously after 1887, there was considerable lag until production figures demonstrated the massive increase in coffee cultivation that occurred in Colombia in the late 1880's and early 1890's. The average price of Colombian coffee on the New York market rose from 10.6 cents a pound in 1887 to a peak of 18.8 cents a pound in 1893. Coffee exports tripled during the same period, rising from 110,866 bags in 1887 to 337,726 bags in 1894. By 1898, when all of the trees planted up to 1893 had come into production, exports stood at 531,437 bags. During the mid-1890's coffee accounted for well over half of the value of Colombia's total exports, and for the peak years 1895 and 1896 coffee made up about 70 per cent of the value of total exports.

 Although much of Colombia's mountainous surface would eventually prove to be uniquely suited to the cultivation of coffee, the early period of coffee expansion was largely confined to the northern section of the eastern cordillera of the Colombian Andes in what was then called the State of Santander. The most serious student of the Colombian coffee industry has estimated coffee production (including domestic consumption) in Santander in 1874 at about 100,000 bags, or almost 90 percent of total Colombian production. In 1888 a British consular official estimated Santander's share of the, nation's coffee production at about 55 percent, with the department of Cundinamarca, situated in the southern portion of the eastern cordillera, contributing about half of the remaining 45 percent. The decline in Santander's position resulted from the high cost and complications of international transport and the relatively poor quality of the coffee from Santander. Since coffee growers in most of Santander were deprived of a viable outlet to the Magdalena River, they were forced to ship most of their coffee out via Venezuelan rivers to Lake Maracaibo, where it was finally loaded aboard ocean-going vessels for transport abroadf Venezuelan transit fees, storage costs, and delays seriously reduced the profit margin on Santander coffees, which sometimes sold for as little as half the price per pound of the prime coffees from Cundinamarca.P Much of the expansion in coffee production in the late 1880's and early 1890's took place in the department of Cundinamarca, and in the departments of Antioquia and northern Tolima located in the central cordillera. Transport of coffee to the sea, although difficult in Cundinamarca and Antioquia, was cheaper than in Santander. Both regions had outlets on the Magdalena, and though much coffee reached the river by mule, by the 1890's both Cundinamarca and Antioquia had partially built railroads that cut transportation costs.

~~Coffee and Conflict in Colombia, 1886-1910 -by- Charles W. Bergquist

Day 99 : Book Excerpt : The World Is Flat

No one ever gave me directions like this on a golf course before: "Aim at either Microsoft or IBM." I was standing on the first tee at the KGA Golf Club in downtown Bangalore, in southern India, when my playing partner pointed at two shiny glass-and-steel buildings off in the distance, just behind the first green. The Goldman Sachs building wasn't done yet; otherwise he could have pointed that out as well and made it a threesome. HP and Texas Instruments had their of­fices on the back nine, along the tenth hole. That wasn't all. The tee markers were from Epson, the printer company, and one of our caddies was wearing a hat from 3M. Outside, some of the traffic signs were also sponsored by Texas Instruments, and the Pizza Hut billboard on the way over showed a steaming pizza, under the headline "Gigabites of Taste!"

 No, this definitely wasn't Kansas. It didn't even seem like India. Was this the New World, the Old World, or the Next World?

 I had come to Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley, on my own Columbus-like journey of exploration. Columbus sailed with the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria in an effort to discover a shorter, more di­rect route to India by heading west, across the Atlantic, on what he pre­sumed to be an open sea route to the East Indies —rather than going south and east around Africa, as Portuguese explorers of his day were try­ing to do. India and the magical Spice Islands of the East were famed at the time for their gold, pearls, gems, and silk—a source of untold riches. Finding this shortcut by sea to India, at a time when the Muslim powers of the day had blocked the overland routes from Europe, was a way for both Columbus and the Spanish monarchy to become wealthy and powerful. When Columbus set sail, he apparently assumed the earth was round, which was why he was convinced that he could get to India by going west. He miscalculated the distance, though. He thought the earth was a smaller sphere than it is. He also did not anticipate run­ning into a landmass before he reached the East Indies. Nevertheless, he called the aboriginal peoples he encountered in the new world "Indians." Returning home, though, Columbus was able to tell his pa­trons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, that although he never did find India, he could confirm that the world was indeed round.

 I set out for India by going due east, via Frankfurt. I had Lufthansa business class. I knew exactly which direction I was going thanks to the GPS map displayed on the screen that popped out of the armrest of my airline seat. I landed safely and on schedule. I too encountered people called Indians. I too was searching for India's riches. Columbus was searching for hardware—precious metals, silk, and spices—the sources of wealth in his day. I was searching for software, brainpower, complex al­gorithms, knowledge workers, call centers, transmission protocols, break­throughs in optical engineering—the sources of wealth in our day.

 Columbus was happy to make the Indians he met his slaves, a pool of free manual labor. I just wanted to understand why the Indians I met were taking our work, why they had become such an important pool for the outsourcing of service and information technology work from America and other industrialized countries. Columbus had more than one hundred men on his three ships; I had a small crew from the Discovery Times channel that fit comfortably into two banged-up vans, with Indian drivers who drove barefoot. When I set sail, so to speak, I too assumed that the world was round, but what I encountered in the real India profoundly shook my faith in that notion. Columbus accidentally ran into America but thought he had discovered part of India. I actually found India and thought many of the people I met there were Ameri­cans. Some had actually taken American names, and others were doing great imitations of American accents at call centers and American business techniques at software labs.

 Columbus reported to his king and queen that the world was round, and he went down in history as the man who first made this discovery. I returned home and shared my discovery only with my wife, and only in a whisper.

 "Honey," I confided, "I think the world is flat."

 How did I come to this conclusion? I guess you could say it all started in Nandan Nilekani's conference room at Infosys Technologies Limited. Infosys is one of the jewels of the Indian information technology world, and Nilekani, the company's CEO, is one of the most thoughtful and respected captains of Indian industry. I drove with the Discovery Times crew out to the Infosys campus, about forty minutes from the heart of Bangalore, to tour the facility and interview Nilekani. The Infosys campus is reached by a pockmarked road, with sacred cows, horse-drawn carts, and motorized rickshaws all jostling alongside our vans. Once you enter the gates of Infosys, though, you are in a different world. A massive resort-size swimming pool nestles amid boulders and manicured lawns, adjacent to a huge putting green.
 ...
 "Outsourcing is just one dimension of a much more fundamental thing happening today in the world," Nilekani explained. "What hap­pened over the last [few] years is that there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables, all those things." At the same time, he added, computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there was an explosion of software—e-mail, search engines like Google, and proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part to Bangalore, and one part to Beijing, making it easy for anyone to do remote development. When all of these things sud­denly came together around 2000, added Nilekani, they "created a plat­ form where intellectual work, intellectual capital, could be delivered from anywhere. It could be disaggregated, delivered, distributed, produced, and put back together again—and this gave a whole new degree of freedom to the way we do work, especially work of an intellectual na­ture . . . And what you are seeing in Bangalore today is really the culmination of all these things coming together."

~~The World Is Flat -by- Thomas L. Friedman

Day 98 : Book Excerpt : Planet of Slums

"Astonishingly," two geographers recently complained, "no writer has traced the changing geography of low-income settlement in any third­ world city over the whole postwar period." Nor, of course, has anyone yet attempted a modern historical overview of the global pattern of informal settlement. So many national histories and urban specificities make such a synthesis a daunting task; nonetheless, it is possible to venture a rough periodization that emphasizes principal trends and watersheds in the urbanization of world poverty.

 But before considering why Third World cities and their slums grew so fast in the second half of the twentieth century, it is first necessary to understand why they grew so slowlY in the first half. Although there are some exceptions, most of today's megacities of the South share a common trajectory: a regime of relatively slow, even retarded growth, then abrupt acceleration to fast growth in the 1950s and 1960s, with rural in-migrants increasingly sheltered in peripheral slums. Earlier in the twentieth century, the massive transfer of rural poverty to cities was pre­ vented by the economic and political equivalents of city walls - both urban entry and, even more importantly, substantive urban citizenship were systematically withheld from large parts of the agrarian population.

 A principal barrier, of course, was European colonialism which, in its most extreme form in the British colonial cities of eastern and southern Mrica, denied native populations the rights of urban land ownership and permanent residence. The British, always the ideologues of divide and rule, feared that city life would "detribalize" Africans and foster anticolonial solidarities. Urban migration was controlled by pass laws, while vagrancy ordinances penalized informal labor. Until 1954, for instance, Mricans were considered only temporary sojourners in racially zoned Nairobi and were unable to own leasehold property. Likewise Mricans in Dar-es-Salaam, according to researcher Karin Nuru, "were only tolerated as a temporary labour force and had to return to the countryside." In Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) Mricans had to wait until the eve of independence to acquire the legal right to own urban homes, while in Lusaka - designed as "a highly ordered city seg­ mented by race, class and gender" - Mrican residents were considered to be "more or less temporary urbanites whose only purpose in town was service to the administration's personnel".

 Apartheid, of course, took this system to its dystopian extreme. Building on a foundation of colonial racism, postwar South African legislation not only criminalized urban migration, but also provided for the uprooting, with enormous brutality, of historical inner-city communities of color. Almost one million people of color were evicted from supposed "white" areas, and as a result, net urbanization hardly increased between 1950 (43 percent) and 1990 (48 percent); indeed, in the 1960s there was a net outflow of Africans from urban areas. Ultimately, however, this ideal of "white cities, black home­ lands" collided with the labor-market needs of big capital as well as the heroic resistance of its victims.

In the subcontinent, the British also segregated and policed the influx from the countryside. In her brilliant study of the cities of Uttar Pradesh during the interwar years, Nandini Gooptu chronicles the unceasing efforts of colonial officials and newly enfranchised native elites to push the poor to the cities' edges and beyond. The new­ fangled Town Improvement Trusts, in particular, were highly effective in clearing slums and removing so-called "plague spots" from the inter­ stices of better residential and commercial areas, and preserving spatial zoning around colonial and native middle-class areas. Vigorously enforced "encroachment laws," meanwhile, outlawed both squatting and street vending. At the same time, urban economic growth under the prewar Raj was fitful at best - even Bombay, with its famed entre­ preneurial elites and textile factories, grew slowly, not even doubling its population in the half-century from 1891 to 1941.

Despite their antipathy to large native urban settlements, the British were arguably the greatest slum-builders of all time. Their policies in Africa forced the local labor force to live in precarious shantytowns on the fringes of segregated and restricted cities. In India, Burma, and Ceylon, their refusal to improve sanitation or provide even the most minimal infrastructure to native neighbourhoods ensured huge death  tolls from early-twentieth-century epidemics (plague, cholera, influenza) and created immnse problems of urban squalor that were inherited by national elites after independence.

~~Planet of Slums -by- Mike Davis

Day 97 : Book Excerpt : Nidotherapy: Harmonising the Environment with the Patient

Nidotherapy (the ‘i’ is long) is a treatment born of despair and desperation. It has been used to date mainly for a group of people with chronic mental illness who have been in the long-term care of psychiatric services in the UK. In describing this population it is necessary to put it into context. Before 1970 mental healthcare was generally split into two groups: a large group of patients in mental hospitals (asylums; it reached a maximum of 150,000 in 1964) who had major mental illness (psychoses, dementias and learning (intellectual) disability), many of whom stayed for many years, and another, larger group who were often characterised unfairly as the ‘worried well’ – as they were neither particularly worried nor particularly well – who lived in the community and were not generally stigmatised as being mentally ill, possibly because the full nature of their troubles was rarely admitted overtly. Most active psychiatric care was given to the second group, many of whom were classified as having either depression or neurotic or stressrelated problems, and as much was given in public (National Health Service) as in private care. Of course treatment for the other group was also given, and there was some crossover between the two, but the treatment for the more severe psychoses was mainly pharmacological and given for those in psychiatric hospitals. Most of the new drug treatments had been introduced between 1950 and 1970 and for a time they were regarded with such high hopes that other treatments were lost in their shade (Sargant, 1966). Gradually, from about 1972 onwards, but only partly as a result of this new therapeutic optimism, the deinstitutionalisation of the mental hospital began, and those in the first hospital group (I will call it thus for short) were returned to the community in one form or another. Large institutions were regarded as bad and counter-therapeutic, and good community services, with a small institutional base linked to a clear geographical catchment area (Thornicroft & Tansella, 2004) were the new form of care for these patients. Oddly enough, the optimism behind this was so great that before long the term ‘recovery’ replaced ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘long-term care’ (see chapter 8) and the notion that no one with a mental illness should be regarded as immune from recovery became almost a politically correct mantra.

This pervasive optimism developed its own momentum. People were not allowed to rest under the label of any form of chronic mental illness. As Berrios has noted, a whole new vocabulary developed to fit this new attitude, which he summarised as psychiatric mercantilism:

In the ‘developed’ Western world, ‘treatment’ and ‘cure’ are embedded in ‘medical acts’ which are being increasingly re-defined as scientific and mercantile transactions (‘health’ has become a ‘commodity’, patients ‘clients’, clinicians ‘purveyors of health’). This new approach demands that the medical act be measured and priced and rendered economically efficient. Like the selling of faulty goods, ‘lack of response’ to treatment is increasingly being considered as a violation of a putative trade descriptions act. Courts need ‘operational criteria’ to decide on whether a breach of trust has occurred, and these are being provided by the so-called treatment guidelines which bodies of experts are increasingly compiling. Non-response to treatment can only be called ‘treatment-resistance’ if the guidelines have been complied with, and this lets the therapist off the hook. In social and legal terms, the notion of ‘treatment resistance’ can thus be used as an alibi as it transfers the responsibility for the lack of response from the therapist to the disease or the patient.

So with this philosophy of care it is very difficult to admit to failure. In both the USA and the UK assertive community or outreach teams were introduced to cope with those who had not responded to conventional care, now rebranded as evidence-based psychiatry, to acknowledge that most standard interventions had been tested and had showed evidence of effectiveness, preferably in randomised trials.

This was the rocky terrain in which nidotherapy was developed. In the teams where it was practised there was no new therapy, only an enthusiastic model of care that involved teams from different disciplines and good collaborative working. But this was not always enough, and when the key purpose behind the introduction of these teams, a saving in the use of psychiatric beds, was not achieved there was an urgent need to find something new. But when time after time each new therapy was thrown back as unacceptable or ineffective some radical changes in both approach and attitude were indicated.

~~Nidotherapy: Harmonising the Environment with the Patient -by- Peter Tyrer

Day 96 : Book Excerpt : The Art Of Community

My best friend is a guy named Stuart Langridge, whom I call “Aq.” (He was nicknamed “Aquarius” in an online user group devoted to a fantasy author, for reasons that make my eyes glaze over when he tries to explain them.) I first met Aq in Wolverhampton in Central England, where I’d moved to go to university. We became fast friends.

With my curiosity initially piqued by Neil’s Linux User Group, I was eager to form my own: the cunningly named Wolverhampton Linux User Group. Six months later, Aq wandered into a meeting, complete with now-trademark bombastic personality.

Over the years, Aq and I shared many a pint and a curry, debating and discussing every imaginable topic about Free Software. No subject was out of reach, and we relished in each other’s passion for the subject. We also relished in the opportunity to prove each other wrong. These debates inspired many projects: one of them was LugRadio.

Throughout the life of LugRadio, Aq and I debated how we— or more specifically, I— recorded the show. As the resident musician in the fabulous foursome, with a room full of recording equipment, I handled recording and editing, using Mac OS X and the Cubase audio production system.

Yes, folks, you read that right: LugRadio was a show all about Free Software but recorded on a proprietary system, with a proprietary application. Fortunately, the community took good steed to remind me of my alleged “freedom hating” pretty much every day. Lucky me. Unfortunately, I didn’t want to spend my life engaged in the rocket science that was Linux audio engineering. I love to play music, not spend my days thinking about which sample size I should set my software to.
...
We thought it would be fun to totally rethink audio recording. We sat down with paper and pens, and more cups of tea, discussing and debating until 4 a.m. When I got home and dragged my drained body into bed, my laptop bag contained three pieces of paper outlining an entirely new approach to audio recording.

Despite our brainstorming efforts, I just didn’t have the time or knowledge to write an audio editor. I could have used my meager audio programming and development skills to produce a rather crufty attempt, but it would have been of little use, and I was already intensely busy. Despite this lack of time and skill, I didn’t want our designs to languish in obscurity, so I drafted some mock-ups and wrote a lengthy blog entry explaining how they worked. I informed the LugRadio community and expected silence: the world moving on, our designs unnoticed.
A few weeks later I wandered onto the LugRadio forums and noticed that some code had been committed to a repository. I downloaded it and it looked like an incredibly simple first cut of the interface that existed in my mock-ups.

I was stunned.
So was Aq.

The author was a rather nice chap called Jason Field who had a passion for coding and Linux. I immediately emailed him to make contact. His simple contribution had inspired me to consider the project further and to see whether the designs were really possible to build. He said yes.
...
Eventually, after months of work, we made a first release. From a few ideas, expressed with my amateur-grade design skills, we built something that people could touch. Today, although I have stepped back to work on other things, Jokosher is a thriving project.

Most Free Software projects form from one person scratching an itch. They write code and release it; if it scratches other people’s itches, collaboration begins. Jokosher was different. It existed entirely on paper before it did in software. The application was rooted in a new approach to interaction design, so having a documented design was essential. The design and accompanied specification of the interface acted as a reference from which to build the software.

What this experience taught me, entirely by chance, was that the speed and success of a community has a direct correlation to strategy, structure, and planning: even a simple set of mock-ups can help drive progress in the right direction. Communities that appear more by accident than by intention tend to be slow to develop and mature. Organized communities thrive because structure provides a sense of worth, conviction, and oversight. A strategy will make things happen for your community.

~~The Art Of Community -by- Jono Bacon

Day 95 : Essay Excerpt: Disciplining The Printed Text

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the publishing industry, comprising the writing, printing, and distribution of books and periodicals, was perhaps the largest indigenous enterprise in Calcutta. In 1911, when the six jute mills located in Calcutta employed 15,111 people, there were ninety-nine printing presses with 11,880 people working in them, making printing the second largest industry in the city. However, unlike other industries, printing posed special problems of supervision and control. As is well known from examples from all over the world, the social impact of the printing of books went far beyond that of the mere triumph of technical ingenuity in the production of a commodity.

The culture of publishing and reading printed texts was, like most other items of everyday modernity, introduced into India by Europeans and, in some sense, grafted to prior indigenous traditions of learning and intellectual activity. James Augustus Hicky, whose otherwise questionable career earned him the disapproval of his contemporary expatriates, was one of the pioneers of printing in Calcutta. After Hicky, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, Charles Wilkins, and the Srirampur missionaries William Carey and Joshua Marshman (and their typecasters, Panchanan Karmakar and his son-in-law Manohar Karmakar) made pioneering attempts at printing in the Bengali language. Although government presses were set up in the late eighteenth century, the year 1800 is really the most crucial date in the history of Bengali printing, because in that year Fort William College and the Srirampur Baptist Mission Press were established. Young officers of the East India Company, freshly arrived in India and unraveling the mysteries of the East at Fort William College, needed texts from which to learn the local language, and the Srirampur Baptists were keen on spreading literacy and Christianity. Together, they gave impetus to the printing and publishing of books in Bengali. Very roughly estimated, a total of 212,000 copies of books were published in forty languages between 1801 and 1832 from the Srirampur Mission. During this time, Bengali entrepreneurs also came forward to try their hand at this new cultural technology. It turned out to be a roaring success.

The first Bengali publisher was Gangakishor Bhattacharya, a former employee of the Srirampur press. Gangakishor set up a press entirely on his own and started a newspaper entitled Bengali Gazette in 1816. He also brought out printed editions of the popular eighteenth-century Bengali ballad Bidyasundar, the longer Annadamangal, and the classical tales from Betal, with woodcut illustrations. A contemporary source claims that the first book published at the initiative of a Bengali was Annadamangal. Gangakishor Bhattacharya can therefore be credited with having been a pioneer who foresaw the potential market for printed editions of popular books that were already in circulation as manuscripts or in oral performance. Nothing much, unfortunately, is known of this man; his newspaper, too, was short-lived.

But Bengali entrepreneurs came into the new trade in a big way as soon as it became apparent that books could become popular as a marketed commodity. The history of these early presses is hard to reconstruct; there is little or no documentary evidence to indicate anything of the background of the printers or the life of each press. For the period between 1820 and 1830, we have the names of twenty presses, from four lists quoted in two sources. As the lists are incomplete, there is no way of ascertaining when these presses were set up or how long each survived. In several cases, their locations are also not mentioned. We have thirteen place-names for seventeen of the presses: Bowbazar, Mirzapur, Sankharitola, and Arpuli were places claiming more than one press. The presses were quite widely dispersed in the Bengali settlements in the northern part of the city.

Sometime later, a major center of printing and publishing grew up along Chitpur Road, in the neighborhood of Shobhabazar, Ahiritola, and Goranhata. Exactly when this happened, it is hard to say because, except for mention of a single press in Shobhabazar, there is no indication in any of the available records of a printing center in the area until the 1830s. The exception was Bishwanath Deb's press, set up perhaps by one of the members of the Deb family of Shobhabazar. Sukumar Sen has suggested that Bishwanath began the press in 1817 or 1818 and was the first person after Gangakishor to start a press. Sometime later (once again, it is difficult to be exact), the presses in this area came to be referred to collectively as the Battala press. Sukumar Sen has declared Bishwanath Deb as the founder of the first Battala press and most scholars today accept this. 10 Battala, as a descriptive term for books and prints, first earned its name from this area of concentration of printing presses, although gradually it came to signify a whole range of popular productions that, in the course of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, found themselves displaced from the podium of high culture. By then, hierarchies had appeared in the domain of the printed text in Bengali and these were beginning to reflect the new social and cultural differences in Bengali literate society.

For our purposes, this sudden boom in the book trade had another very important consequence: it summoned the state to intervene and take cognizance of this rapidly proliferating industry. Ostensibly to keep itself informed about the effects of education on the native mind, the colonial state began to devise mechanisms of control and censure. The state's intervention was not without its effects on Bengal's literate society and how it set out its own criteria of classifying printed literature by quality and taste.

~~Essay Excerpt: Disciplining The Printed Text: Colonial and Nationalist Surveillance of Bengali Literature -by- Tapti Ray from the book "Texts of Power"

Day 94 : Book Excerpt : Muhajababes

Darah is a very tall girl even without heels, a study in androgynous black style—baggy workmen trousers with flaps for hammers, Timberland boots, a big white-hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses. This builder's look was saved by Darah being very handsome, but if it was easy to see why she'd been spotted by Zen TV execs in a Beirut nightclub then it was also easy to see why the glasses plus the trousers plus the boots equalled what was seen as an ambiguous sexuality. The look earned her and Zen TV, where she had worked as a presenter, condemnation, and in the months before all of Zen TV went belly up, she was one of the first casualties. Of all Muslim countries it is only Lebanon that is attempting to legalize homosexuality but region-wide, which was Darah's TV profile, there was no such attempt. Homosexuality was very haram or forbidden. This was why she was now a radio presenter. Her heavy eyelids and, when we sat down, the cloud of shisha smoke she spoke through made her seem like a supercilious Marlene Dietrich and my questions banal. But her answers were always full.

 There was a problem, she said. First off, she agreed with the others that, as Zen TV had made way for the disco divas, bands like Zidan's, real artists, just didn't fit into the current musical scene of the lone, highly lucrative, commercial artist. In the rare circumstances that they were able to afford to cobble together an album, at the end of the process they then had to go to the censors who would inevitably persuade them that certain lyrics might offend people. If they didn't go to the censors then any radio or TV station they approached would also be likely to baulk at incendiary lyrics or outof-the-ordinary riffs. What these guys needed was a boat like Radio Caroline bobbing around off the coast of Lebanon broadcasting illicit Rayess Bek or The Three Esses. Maybe the dead-eyed video-clips were an equivalent to the stultifying torch songs of the pre-Beatles hit parade. Back then the music industry was controlled by fusty middle-aged impresarios, who second-guessed youth tastes and churned out singers like Helen Reddy to croon about being abandoned above a treacly slick of bombastic percussion and soaring violins. I put this to Darah, bonding as I thought we were about the region's shit music but she shook her head.

 'You've got it wrong,' she said, 'the bigger problem is that a lot of people actually like these video-clips.' There was no Radio Caroline because there was no appetite for this kind of grungier stuff. 'For most people, the video-clip stars are the best entertainers they have ever seen.'

 We were now in her car and she was giving me a lift across town. Except she wasn't because it was rush hour and we had been stuck in the same bit of traffic jam for a very long time. 'Have you seen the Saudis hanging around Beirut?' she asked me. Yes, yes. I repeated what Future TV's Khalid had said—that Saudi sheikhs had been closing down things like Zen TV. And then there was Walid's cursing and swearing as we ran into downtown past the Khaleejis.

 'Well, yes and no. In fact, probably, more no than yes. That wasn't what I was thinking about. Have you heard of Rotana?' Signing 80 per cent of Arab artists, and bagging exclusive rights to broadcast their video-clips, Rotana was the largest producer and distributor of Arabic music. It has six satellite channels, three of which show music and movies. 'And you've heard of its owner?' He gave some money to New York's Mayor Giuliani for victims of 9/11, she said, and then the next month urged America to re-examine its policies towards the Middle East. Giuliani sent the cheque back. 'He's a Saudi prince, a keen proponent of change in KSA.' And as owner of Rotana a keen proponent of video-clips.

 By now I knew my Arab pop stars quite well. I knew that the singer belly dancing in Prague was Haifa Wehbe and that Nancy Ajram had got in trouble for pretending to be a waitress and cavorting through an all male cafe. Very different from Umm Kulthoum who sang for millions of Arabs in a long-sleeve top. This Prince's aim was, in his own words, to 'have the number-one entertainment company in the Middle East.' Darah's point was that if they weren't popular, he wouldn't touch them. It is difficult to ascertain because none of the companies has to reveal its viewing figures, but the region's 50 million satellite dishes are popularly thought to be tuned to al-Jazeera and other news outlets for five minutes a day and to Rotana, Mazzika and Melody Arabia for as much as five hours.

~~Muhajababes -by- Allegra Stratton

Day 93 : Book Excerpt : Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage

Understanding the connection between heritage preservation and tourism development requires a grounding in both history and political economy. Studies of colonial urbanism have provided valuable insight into the politics of heritage and the discourse of its preservation. Meanwhile, analysis of the macro-economy of global production and investment have afforded a better understanding of the dynamics of tourism. Such an appreciation for history and economics allows one to see how global consumers today seek 'difference' and 'hospitality' as economic goods, and it helps elucidate the role of those producers or suppliers, often in the Third World, who make their living catering to this demand.

What is it that motivates the interest of tourists in others, prompting them to travel to distant lands, sometimes under uncomfortable conditions, often only to see the mundane rituals of daily life? The answer to this complex question may lie in what John Urry has labelled the 'tourist gaze' . After examining the significance of tourism as a major industry in the waning years of the twentieth century, Urry suggested that this gaze is now a core feature of an industry in which the contemporary tourist - like the old-world pilgrim - seeks authenticity and truth in times and places away from his/her own everyday life. But this gaze is not the same everywhere, and its spatial dimension changes from place to place. In fact, the process by which tourists engage the built environment and are engaged by it is one that deserves special identification. I will call this 'engazement', a term I use to mean the process through which the gaze transforms the material reality of the built environment into a cultural imaginary. It is this imaginary that this book attempts to explore.

Here the historical realities and political economy that have marked the development of a global heritage discourse become relevant. Specifically, in looking at the First and Third Worlds, one may notice that, while both possibly possess equal desire to explore the heritage and culture of the 'other', they have fundamentally different motivations for wanting to do so.   These differences may be attributed to or explained by earlier relationships of colonialism, political nationalism, and economic dependency. Today, as a result of such historical and economic forces, Third World countries often wish to emulate the 'progress' of the First World and adopt its developmental practices - but only without risking the destabilization of their local cultures. This is clearly a situation of wanting to have one's cake and to eat it too. Thus, as Benjamin Barber has pointed out in the appropriately titled Jihad vs. McWorld, such nations want the veil, but they also want the World Wide Web and Coca Cola. IS Meanwhile, for its part, the First World appears more interested in consuming the cultures and environments of Third World societies. First World nations are often the main advocates for and financial patrons of the preservation of Third World built environments as part of what they define as 'universal' heritage - even when the 'natives' do not recognize its historic value. As a wealthy bloc, which often feels a sense of guilt and responsibility toward its former colonies, the First World has also tried at times to maintain or assist in preserving the dying or disappearing lifestyles and traditions of underdeveloped peoples and places. Yet it is also often the case that First World organizations, foundations and governments have engaged in such efforts while at the same time condemning or rejecting much of the social and political practices of the societies whose traditions they claim to want to preserve - especially when it diverges from Western standards of human rights, gender equality, and environmental sustainability.

As an example of the above dynamic one might consider the island of Bali, Indonesia. Here the First World has come to play the role of guardian of Third World traditions, but only so that would-be First World visitors can continue to appreciate them. In such an environment, the behaviour of the local people becomes fundamentally conditioned by the expectations of tourists. But, unlike Disneyland, where employees are given the title of 'cast members', here tourist industry workers are merely supposed to continue 'being themselves', and act out their supposedly still-genuine culture. Such a theatre, which is globally constructed but locally produced, is, of course, continually in danger of coming apart, since it depends on the willingness of the locals to act for the cameras.

Two other examples of this phenomenon were recently presented as chapters in David Howes's Cross-Cultural Consumption: Global Markets, Local Realities. Carol Hendrickson's contribution to this volume looked at how handicrafts heralded as Guatemalan or Mayan may now be purchased through US mail-order catalogues. Not only does this reveal the powerful marketing value of 'cultural difference', Howes pointed out in his introduction, but it also may create a situation of considerable cultural misrepresentation. According to Howes: 'For example, the industrialized cities where many of the Guatemalan artefacts come from are presented as pre-industrial villages in the catalogues. This is so as to agree with the American purchaser's preconceptions about "Mayan life" as well as to foster associations with both "tradition" and "uniqueness".

~~Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage: Global Norms and Urban Forms in the Age of Tourism -by- Nezar AlSayyad

Day 92 : Book Excerpt : Deep History

History is a curiously fragmented subject. In the conventional disciplinary structure of academia, the study of the human past is scattered across a number of fields, notably history and anthropology but also folklore, museum studies, philology, and area-studies programs. Together, these fields constitute a dense layer cake of time. The bottom layer, by far the thickest, is grounded in deep time. The deep time of a discipline is not a specific date range or era: it is simply the earliest period to which the discipline pays attention. Among archaeologists and human evolutionary biologists, deep time is represented by the paleoanthropology of the simple societies of the Paleolithic, from the earliest known stone tools (dated to 2.6 Ma) to the origins of agriculture. Among historians, the deep time of the discipline is located in Greco-Roman antiquity. Though the Paleolithic and the ancient world are dramatically offset in absolute time, each provides the bedrock that supports disciplinary narratives. The middle layers of the cake are given over to the archaeology of complex societies and, among historians, to the study of “early modern” societies. On the very top is a veneer of modern frosting. Seldom more than a few centuries deep, this upper layer is what attracts the interest of most fields of contemporary historical research and almost all fields of cultural anthropology.

The entire span of time may come together in teaching: in the grand sweep of general anthropology, say, or in survey courses of world history. In their own research, however, most scholars limit their work to a single chronological layer and feel ill-equipped to move beyond this layer. In the great age of historico-anthropological writing of the nineteenth century, authors like Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Edward Tylor ranged across vast reaches of human history, producing conjectural arguments characterized by spectacular vision and very little in the way of hard evidence. Today, the pattern is reversed. As methods of analysis improve and knowledge of the recent and deep past rapidly accumulates, the division of intellectual labor has become exceedingly precise. Conjecture and grand vision have given way to hyperspecialization, an intensified focus on ever-smaller units of time and space, and a pervasive reluctance to build analytical frames that can articulate deep history and the recent past.

A century ago, modern historiography was built on the scaffolding of progress, a story line rooted in the rise of civilization and the break with nature that supposedly took place some five thousand to six thousand years ago. This narrative enshrined a triumphalist account of human achievement. In the words of an observer from the 1920s, history describes “the processes by which the chaotic chatter of anthropoid apes has been organized in the wonderful fabric of human speech.” It offers a panoramic vision of man “in every stage of his long climb up from his feeble and brutish beginnings.” The imagination of the age was suffused with sentiments that today seem almost unbearably trite. Cringing at such naiveté, we congratulate ourselves on having purged our anthropologies and histories of this exuberant evolutionism. But the congratulations are premature. The belief in human exceptionalism that drove earlier models of history still shapes narratives of progress, which are now told using the vocabulary of political modernization, economic development, and cultural emancipation from past prejudices. When telling these tales, we sometimes reverse the moral charges of the narrative of progress. We celebrate the merits of the simple and traditional and note the obvious dangers in the modern and complex. This stopgap solution does not eliminate the underlying problem. It leaves in place the idea that human evolution (or the emergence of culture, or the growth of historical consciousness) entails, for good or ill, an ever-increasing mastery of culture over nature, of cultivation over mere subsistence, of civilization over mere habitation. Seeing the humanity of others means recognizing their historical movement toward various forms of mastery, even if the movement is modest and still in its formative stages.

In the wake of the Darwinian revolution, the problem of human origins was transformed from a matter of speculative philosophy into a scientific research program. This transition, which required a radical reassessment of the older, biblical cosmology, was initially made intelligible by linking it to ideas of progress that had proliferated during the Enlightenment. Over the course of the twentieth century, which witnessed two world wars and the collapse of the European colonial order, historians and anthropologists grew increasingly skeptical of Enlightenment ideas, and Victorian-style social evolutionism was rejected as a justification for racism, class privilege, and global imperialism. In cleansing historical and cultural analysis of their nineteenth-century ideological baggage, most of the high modern (and postmodern) versions of cultural anthropology and history turned their backs on the deep human past, leaving problems of evolution to the archaeologists, paleontologists, and historical linguists. The goal of this book is to remove the barriers that isolate deep histories from temporally shallow ones. These barriers have a complex history of their own, but they need not dominate future studies of the human past. Moving them aside solves multiple intellectual and political problems, and this renovation project is not as difficult as it might at first seem. The necessary analytical tools already exist. Some, like genetic mapping and radiocarbon dating, are recent innovations; others, like genealogies, bodily analogies, and predictive modeling, are older than written history itself. The gap between deep and shallow history, we believe, can easily be bridged; indeed, great efforts must be exerted simply to keep the gap in place. What motivates these efforts? How did they develop? And why do so many scholars think it is important to keep prehistory in its place?

~~Deep History -by- Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail

Day 91 : Book Excerpt : Screening Schillebeeckx: Theology and Third Cinema in Dialogue

The Pentagon called for an important meeting in August 2003, predictably, to discuss anti-terrorist strategies. What was of peculiar interest about this meeting was that it was a special screening session for The Battle of Algiers, a film lensed by Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo in 1965. An example of a type of political film known as Third Cinema, “The Battle of Algiers” essays the 1954–1962 Algerian revolt against French occupation and gives ideological visibility to the guerilla-style bombings carried out by the Algerian Liberation Front (NLF) during the turbulent period. The privileged audience of about forty Pentagon officers, along with some civilian experts, huddled to screen Pontecorvo’s film in the hopes of gaining more insight into the motivations and modalities of present day terrorist activities. The obvious lesson for the day: “know thy enemy.”

I am not a big fan of the Pentagon’s activities. Neither is Third Cinema, which casts a gimlet eye on the hegemonic tactics routinely conducted by the globe’s rich and powerful. Yet, ironically, the Pentagon screening session unwittingly confirms the power of Third Cinema; the power to represent and mirror the sociopolitical realities of a Third World that continues to exist, though the zeitgeist would like to believe otherwise. That said, I am convinced that Third Cinema merits regardful consideration and, as in the case of my work, more serious theological attention.

Situated within the interdisciplinary efforts to bridge Theology and Cinema, I explore the ways in which the liberative project of Edward Schillebeeckx’s eschatological perspective is crystallized in Third Cinema. Third Cinema occupies a special niche in Cinema Studies. It is the only major film theory that did not originate from a EuroAmerican milieu. It is also the only type of political film that insists on a dedicated representation of the plight of Third World peoples who continue in the struggle to become agents of their own history in the postcolonial aftermath. Third Cinema is of undeniable value for Third World cultures because it serves as a custodian of subversive memory; a critical counterbalance to the wilful amnesia of dominant western cinema, which almost always insists on the primacy of entertainment value over all other considerations. Films from Hollywood, for instance, usually do not care to examine how the causal structures of social, cultural, and economic inequality impact on two-thirds of the global population. As long as there exists a lopsided global symbolic exchange that separates the metropolitan capitalist First World from its erstwhile colonies in the Third, there will always be a strong case for Third Cinema.

My choice of Third Cinema as a dialogue partner for theology is driven by reasons personal and strategic. Personal because I am not just a scholar committed to the interface of Theology and Film, I am a Filipino, a child of the Third World, in search of soul and story. The films I choose as case studies reflect a world I was born and raised in. By proximity, the title that has the most personal resonance with me is Kidlat Tahimik’s Perfumed Nightmare. Tahimik is a cutting edge Filipino filmmaker who paints from the palette of revisionist historiography. For him, hindsight is 20/20. His Perfumed Nightmare, winner of the coveted Berlin International Film Festival Golden Bear in 1978 and a rare Southeast Asian example of Third Cinema, is a re-visiting of the Philippines’ tortured history of multiple colonizations and a subversive filmic re-telling of a collective deep story of liberation. Being a member of the culture in question, I am an involved participant in Tahimik’s postcolonial “exorcism.” But in a wider sense, each of the chosen case study films confirms my membership in, and solidarity with, Third World cultures.

Strategic because I am convinced that the very stylistic signature of the films carry undeniable ideological weight and thus trigger the hermeneutical impulse. The key point for consideration is Third Cinema’s lucid sociopolitical critique and liberative current, situated within the general rubric of “postcolonial struggle.” Through the various elements of cinematic grammar, the films portray, in one sense or another, the collaboration of human and divine agency, while an innervating vision of emancipative praxis looms in the horizon. Here, the divine is identified with the marginalized culture, represented here in synechdoche by the film’s protagonists, whose growing resistance and protest draw them to an alternative future of greater human flourishing. The filmic texts, as such, lay down a bridge for possible creative crossings with theology.

What emerges as a lucid and nuanced discursive framework for a deeper discussion of Third Cinema is Edward Schillebeeckx’s eschatological perspective. The decisive link between salvation and liberation, an unmistakable touchstone of Schillebeeckx’s later theology, has almost completely fallen below the radar of research works in Systematic Theology. Schillebeeckx’s later theology is always immersed in the concrete, historical situation and epistemologically grounded in human liberation. In a personal interview I conducted in the Dutch city of Nijmegen, Schillebeeckx himself affirms that “the liberation of human beings is the golden thread of my theology.” I submit that the depoliticizing tendencies in the reception of Schillebeeckx’s work represents a myopic reading of Schillebeeckx’s later theology and an undervaluing of the continued intercultural relevance and impact of his thought on the Third World situation. From my own Third World optic, I see these tendencies as missed opportunities; the inordinate muting of the prophetic-liberating voice of Schillebeeckx as a credible and significant western mouthpiece for marginalized peoples who are still in the process of finding their own voice amid dehumanizing sociopolitical realities.

~~Screening Schillebeeckx: Theology and Third Cinema in Dialogue -by- Antonio D. Sison