Author Archives: Joel

by Joel | 2 September 2007 · 10:19 pm

The Guilty Pride of Our Betters

From Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class, by Lawrence Otis Graham (Harper, 2000), pp. 8-9, 18:

One of my first encounters with an early pioneering family in the black upper class was meeting members of the aristocratic Syphax family from Virginia. I had grown up hearing my father tell me about their family history, as one of his father’s business associates had known several family members. Talking to Evelyn Reid Syphax at a Links meeting that my mother had brought me to, I learned one way in which some black families—including her own—gained wealth and a place among the upper class. “My family had owned fifteen acres of the land where the Arlington National Cemetery now sits,” Syphax explained as she recounted the history of her family, which can be traced back to Maria Custis, the mulatto child of First Lady Martha Washington’s grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, who owned the mansion that sits on the cemetery today. “Custis fathered Maria with Ariana Carter, one of his female house slaves,” explained Syphax, a well-to-do, retired real estate broker who lives in Virginia, “and when Maria asked her father, who was also still her owner, for permission to marry Charles Syphax, a black slave who worked for her father, he released both from slavery, gave her a wedding in the mansion, and offered her and her new husband fifteen acres of the Arlington estate. That mansion and the surrounding property—minus Maria Syphax’s fifteen acres—was later given by Custis to his white daughter, Mary Custis, who eventually married Confederate soldier Robert E. Lee—thus making the house a famous building in the southern state.”…

One can find both pride and guilt among the black elite. A pride in black accomplishment that is inexorably tied to a lingering resentment about our past as poor, enslaved blacks and our past and current treatment by whites. On one level, there are those of us who understand our obligation to work toward equality for all and to use our success in order to assist those blacks who are less advantaged. But on another level, there are those of us who buy into the theories of superiority, and who feel embarrassed by our less accomplished black brethren. These self-conscious individuals are resentful of any quality or characteristic that associates them with that which seems ordinary. We’ve got some of the best-educated, most accomplished, and most talented people in the black community—but at the same time, we have some of the most hidebound and smug. And adding even further to the mix are those of us who feel we need to apologize to the rest of the black world for our success and for being who we are. For me, the black upper class has always been a study of contrasts.

I think the same is true of every type of elite in these normatively egalitarian times. Among fellow members of your elite, you perform rituals of solidarity that distinguish you from your inferiors–gratuitous political swipes being among the most common solidarity rituals on college campuses (or in news rooms, apparently) where everyone who matters can be assumed to be of like mind. Those who are more sensitive take care to repress those same ritual behaviors when face to face with their inferiors–most especially when seeking votes or funding from those less like-minded.

My wife and I were witness to many impressive rituals of elite solidarity over last Memorial Day weekend when we attended graduation events at Yale–where the ritual of playing Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance at graduations began at Woolsey Hall in 1905. We had both graduated from little no-name colleges in North Dakota and Hawai‘i, respectively, before completing graduate degrees at a cheap, run-of-the-mill state university (Hawai‘i).

Our first event that Saturday was a Phi Beta Kappa induction ceremony in Battell Chapel. Before it began, the mistress of ceremonies came down the aisle chatting up the audience of parents and friends of the inductees. When she found my wife and me with our noses in books, she exclaimed how you could be sure that Phi Beta Kappa parents were avid readers. She asked me what I was reading, and I showed her the cover of Lawrence Graham’s Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class. That stopped her cold, and she quickly moved on to my wife, who was evaluating Graham Salisbury’s juvenile novel Blue Skin of the Sea for possible use in an ESL class. That allowed our emcee to retreat into the comfort zone of noblesse oblige, expressing concern that Yale was not doing enough for some of its rising numbers of foreign students whose mastery of English was not up to earlier standards. Later in the ceremony, while explaining the not-so-secret Phi Beta Kappa handshake, she managed to adopt just the right tone of irony that allows one to perform required social rituals while purporting not to take them seriously. It was a tone we heard again and again from public speakers throughout that ritual-soaked weekend.

I had planned to begin reading Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class as we traveled through the South during our road trip in May—for which my Minnesota in-laws had prepared by reading up on plantations, slavery, and riverboat gamblers. But Yale was the better venue for it. In fact, it provided belated but valuable context for the tome I bought and read when our daughter matriculated there four years ago: The Emperor of Ocean Park, by Yale law professor Stephen Carter.

I acquired a measure of elitist pretentions during my four years at an international high school in Japan. That was where I eliminated the last southernisms I was aware of in my American accent. (Few Americans can guess my family heritage from my accent.) My ambitions at that time were more literary than academic, but my journalism professor at the University of Richmond—where I started college with little enthusiasm and later dropped out—told me that I wrote more like a scientist than a journalist. He had been a practicing journalist, not an academic, so I’m not sure it was intended to be a compliment.

Although Our Kind of People is a case study of the cultivation and preservation of America’s black upper class, much of it would also seem to apply to the care and maintenance of exclusivity among other types of elites. His final chapter on light-skinned blacks who “pass” as whites is particularly poignant, especially his tales of those who chose to abandon their relatives and engineer their own equivalent of a witness-protection program—and pray like hell their kids don’t turn out too dark.

As a “no-accent” white of expatriate southern heritage who has spent a lot of time among academics, I think I have some sense of how blacks who “pass” episodically or by accident feel when they happen to encounter demeaning or disgusting attitudes from interlocutors who aren’t aware of their hidden heritage.

When we took our daughter to visit Carleton College in Minnesota after her junior year of high school, I overheard another family doing college visits tell about how frightened they were at the prospect of driving through Virginia to Norfolk on highways (I-95 and I-64!) that they imagined to be filled with crazed pickup-driving rednecks taking potshots at cars with northern license plates. I dearly wanted to speak up and assure them, in my best Hollywood southern accent: “Why we wouldn’t shoot y’all! The most we’d do is mebbe take out a headlight or taillight, mebbe aim for one of yo’ rear tires or yo’ Yankee license plate. But we wouldn’t shoot at people, even if they was Yankees!” But, of course, I kept my trap shut, not wanting to ruin my daughter’s chances at the college that was then at the top of our list of prospects.

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by Joel | 1 September 2007 · 5:10 pm

Judt on German Terrorist Empathizers in the 1970s

From Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, by Tony Judt (Penguin, 2005), pp. 472-473:

Reitz and Fassbinder were among the directors of Deutschland im Herbst (‘Germany in Autumn’) a 1978 collage of documentary, movie clips and interviews covering the events of the autumn of 1977, notably the kidnapping and killing of Hans Martin Schleyer and the subsequent suicide of Ensslin and Baader. The film is notable not so much for its expressions of empathy for the terrorists as for the distinctive terms in which these are conveyed. By careful inter-cutting, the Third Reich and the Federal Republic are made to share a family resemblance. ‘Capitalism’, ‘the profit system’ and National Socialism are presented as equally reprehensible and indefensible, with the terrorists emerging as latter-day resisters: modern Antigones struggling with their consciences and against political repression.

Considerable cinematic talent was deployed in Deutschland im Herbst—as in other contemporary German films—to depict West Germany as a police state, akin to Nazism if only in its (as yet unrevealed) capacity for repression and violence. Horst Mahler, a semi-repentant terrorist then still in prison, explains to the camera that the emergence of an extra-parliamentary opposition in 1967 was the ‘anti-fascist revolution’ that did not happen in 1945. The true struggle against Germany’s Nazi demons was thus being carried through by the country’s young radical underground—albeit by the use of remarkably Nazi-like methods, a paradox Mahler does not address.

The implicit relativizing of Nazism in Deutschland im Herbst was already becoming quite explicit in intellectual apologias for anti-capitalist terror. As the philosopher Detlef Hartmann explained in 1985, ‘We can learn from the obvious linkage of money, technology and extermination in New Order Nazi imperialism … (how) to lift the veil covering the civilized extermination technology of the New Order of Bretton Woods.’ It was this easy slippage—the thought that what binds Nazism and capitalist democracy is more important than their differences, and that it was Germans who had fallen victim to both—that helped account for the German radical Left’s distinctive insensitivity on the subject of Jews.

On September 5th 1972, the Palestinian organization Black September attacked the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics and killed eleven athletes, as well as one German policeman. Almost certainly, the killers had local assistance from the radical Left (though it is a curiousity of German extremist politics of the time that the far Right would have been no less pleased to offer its services). The link between Palestinian organizations and European terrorist groups was already well-established—Ensslin, Baader and Meinhof all ‘trained’ at one time with Palestinian guerillas, along with Basques, Italians, Irish Republicans and others. But only Germans went the extra mile: when four gunmen (two Germans, two Arabs) hijacked an Air France plane in June 1976 and flew it to Entebbe, in Uganda, it was the Germans who undertook to identify and separate the Jewish passengers from the rest.

If this action, so unmistakably reminiscent of selections of Jews by Germans in another time and place, did not definitively discredit the Baader-Meinhof gang in the eyes of its sympathizers it was because its arguments, if not its methods, attracted quite broad consent: Germans, not Jews, were now the victims; and American capitalism, not German National Socialism, was the perpetrator. ‘War crimes’ were now things that Americans did to—e.g.—Vietnamese. There was a ‘new patriotism’ abroad in West Germany, and it is more than a little ironic that Baader, Meinhof and their friends, whose violent revolt was initially directed against the Germany-first self-satisfaction of their parents’ generation, should find themselves co-opted by the reverberations of that same nationalist heritage. It was altogether appropriate that Horst Mahler, one of the few surviving founders of Left terrorism in West Germany, should end up three decades later on the far Right of the political spectrum.

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by Joel | 31 August 2007 · 10:45 pm

Islam Marginalized in Southeast Asian Studies

From Robert W. Hefner’s introduction to Islam in an Era of Nation-States: Politics and Religious Renewal in Muslim Southeast Asia, ed. by Robert W. Hefner and Patricia Horvatich (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1997), pp. pp. 11-12 (references omitted):

The other marginalization to which the study of Islam in Southeast Asia has long been subjected unwittingly reinforced this neglect. This marginalization occurred within the field of Southeast Asian studies, particularly the form that took shape in the United States in the aftermath of World War II. In this emerging academic field, it was not uncommon for Islam to be portrayed as an intrusive cultural force or, as another widely used metaphor would have it, a late-deposited cultural “layer.” The real Southeast Asia lay deeper and was somehow less Islamic.

This perspective on Islam in Southeast Asia had deep historical and, more specifically, colonial precedents. In colonial times, particularly in the Dutch East Indies, this notion of Islam as a “thin veneer” appealed to those who wished to justify the suppression of Islam on the grounds that it was a threat to colonial power. In Java, for example, nineteenth-century colonial administrators developed a “structure of not seeing,” overlooking Islamic influences in Javanese tradition, while exaggerating and essentializing the influence of non-Islamic ideals. In the aftermath of the brutal Java War (1825–1830), colonial scholars worked to create a canon of Javanese literature that romanticized pre-Islamic literature as a golden age and portrayed the coming of Islam as a civilizational disaster. These Dutch Orientalists conveniently overlooked the fact that the proportion of Islamic-oriented literature in modern court collections was vastly greater than the so-called renaissance literature (pre-Islamic classics rendered in modern Javanese verse) that colonial scholars portrayed as the essence of things Javanese.

Colonial law effected a similar essentialization. Under the direction of Cornelis van Vollenhoven, the “adat (customary) law school” worked under state directive to develop what amounted to a system of legal apartheid. A classic example of the colonial “invention of tradition,” European experts divided the native peoples of the Indies into nineteen distinct legal communities. Islamic law was acknowledged in each community’s legal traditions only to the extent that colonial scholars determined that local custom (adat) explicitly acknowledged Islamic law. In this manner, colonial authorities reified the distinction between customary adat and Islam. As James Siegel’s study of Aceh and Taufik Abdullah’s of Minangkabau both demonstrate, however, this distinction between endogenous “custom” and exogenous “Islam” imposed an artificial polarity on a relationship that had always been dynamic. In fact, in the decades preceding the European conquest, legal traditions in places like Malaya and Minangkabau (west Sumatra) had already begun to accord a greater role to textually based Islamic norms. It was precisely this growing Islamic influence that prompted anxious Dutch authorities to implement their adatrecht policy.

British legal policies in Malaya differed from those of the Dutch. Drawing on their experience with Muslims in India, the British at first regarded Malay Muslims as “unheretical members of some idealized and uniform civilization.” By treating adat as “custom that has no legal consequences” and allowing the Malay sultans a measure of jural authority, the British allowed the formation of institutional structures in which Islamic law had a substantial albeit circumscribed role. Nonetheless, lacking a framework for integrating the study of local traditions and Islam, British scholars of the colonial era fell into an “anecdotal empiricism” that failed to grasp the dynamics of religious change in Malay society as a whole.

Though there was a tradition of Islamic studies in colonial Southeast Asia, then, it suffered from the subordination of scholarship to the needs of the colonial political order.

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by Joel | 31 August 2007 · 10:19 pm

Southeast Asia Marginalized in Islamic Studies

One of the most serious impediments to the development of a systematic understanding of Islam in Southeast Asia is the fact that the topic has long been marginalized in the fields of Islamic and Southeast Asian studies. In Islamic studies Western and Middle Eastern scholars alike have tended to place Southeast Asia at the intellectual periphery of the Islamic world. Still today in some overviews of Islamic history and civilization, Southeast Asian Muslims are mentioned briefly if at all. Though Southeast Asian Islam has almost two hundred million believers, it is not uncommon for observers, even learned specialists, to identify Islam with the Middle East and to regard Southeast Asia as, at best, intellectually and institutionally derivative of Middle Eastern Islam.

There is a larger and, in one sense, understandable logic to this neglect. By comparison to Persia and the Arabian heartland, in insular Southeast Asia Islam became a civilizational force relatively late in Islamic history. Though Arab-Muslim traders traveled through island Southeast Asia as early as the seventh and eighth centuries, there was little settlement until the late thirteenth, when a Muslim town, inhabited in part by Arab-speaking foreigners, was established in the Pasai region of north Sumatra, an entrepôt for the trade with Muslim India and Arabia. Shortly thereafter, a Muslim presence appears to have been established in port towns along Java’s north coast, territories still then under the control of the Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Majapahit. Ruling elites in the Malay peninsula were converted in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and those in coastal Sulawesi and much of the southern Philippines were won to the faith in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The primary impetus for this wave of conversion was not conquest or religious warfare, as had been the case in Islam’s early expansion in Arabia and North Africa, but trade and interethnic intercourse. Certainly, as Anthony Reid has noted, Muslim potentates (like their Theravada Buddhist counterparts in mainland Southeast Asia) regarded forcible conversion of neighbors as “an honourable motive for conquest,” and Muslim rulers periodically engaged in warfare with their Hindu-Buddhist, animist, or, in later times, Christian neighbors. However, as Thomas McKenna’s essay in this volume illustrates, the causes of these conflicts were as much commercial and dynastic as they were religious.

More decisively, the rapid and relatively uniform spread of Islam to the insular world’s maritime centers was related to broader historical developments, especially the growth of international commerce from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries and the movement of large numbers of people out of localized societies into a multiethnic and interregional macrocosm. Most of the map of modern Muslim Southeast Asia was laid out during this “age of commerce,” as Anthony Reid has so aptly described it. A few remote corners of Southeast Asia have been converted to Islam in this century, some even in the last decades. In general, however, the dynamism of Islam in contemporary times has had less to do with a new wave of conversion than with the reform and rationalization of religion among established Muslim populations.

By itself, the comparatively late arrival of Islam in Southeast Asia neither explains nor justifies this region’s marginalization within the field of Islamic studies. Given the genesis of what has come to be regarded as “classical” Islamic civilization within the Arabic- and Persian-speaking world, however, there was a tendency on the part of early Western Islamicists to devote their attention to regions where the classical tradition was first composed. This emphasis was reinforced by the focus of this early scholarship on Islamic “culture,” not in the modern, social-historical or anthropological sense of this term, but in its great-traditional sense, as in written literature, philosophy, art and architecture, and law. With several notable exceptions, the Orientalist commentaries that introduced Islamic civilization to a Western readership in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were concerned with high culture, not the everyday meaning of Islam for ordinary Muslims. The focus of this writing was leading thinkers and civilizationwide achievements, especially those preserved for time in the printed word.

As a result of this textual emphasis, Southeast Asia—and other areas marginalized in the Orientalist understanding of the Muslim world, such as Central Asia, Bengal, and West Africa—was accorded only a minor role in early accounts of Islamic civilization.

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by Joel | 29 August 2007 · 10:29 pm

Judt on the Secular Religion of the 1960s

From Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, by Tony Judt (Penguin, 2005), pp. 401-403:

The youthful impulse of the Sixties was not about understanding the world; in the words of Karl Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, written when Marx himself was just 26 years old and much cited in these years: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.’ When it came to changing the world there was still only one grand theory purporting to relate an interpretation of the world to an all-embracing project of change; only one Master Narrative offering to make sense of everything while leaving open a place for human initiative: the political project of Marxism itself.

The intellectual affinities and political obsessions of the Sixties in Europe only make sense in the light of this continuing fascination with Marx and Marxism. As Jean-Paul Sartre put it in 1960, in his Critique of Dialectical Reason: ‘I consider Marxism to be the unsurpassable philosophy of our time.’ Sartre’s unshaken faith was not universally shared, but there was general agreement across the political spectrum that anyone wishing to understand the world must take Marxism and its political legacy very seriously. Raymond Aron—Sartre’s contemporary, erstwhile friend and intellectual nemesis—was a lifelong anti-Communist. But he, too, freely acknowledged (with a mixture of regret and fascination) that Marxism was the dominant idea of the age: the secular religion of its epoch.

Between 1956 and 1968 Marxism in Europe lived—and, as it were, thrived—in a state of suspended animation. Stalinist Communism was in disgrace, thanks to the revelations and events of 1956. The Communist parties of the West were either politically irrelevant (in Scandinavia, Britain, West Germany and the Low Countries); in slow but unmistakable decline (France); or else, as in the Italian case, striving to distance themselves from their Muscovite inheritance. Official Marxism, as incarnated in the history and teachings of Leninist parties, was largely discredited—especially in the territories over which it continued to rule. Even those in the West who chose to vote Communist evinced little interest in the subject.

At the same time there was widespread intellectual and academic interest in those parts of the Marxist inheritance that could be distinguished from the Soviet version and salvaged from its moral shipwreck. Ever since the Founder’s death, there had always been Marxist and marxisant sects and splinter groups—well before 1914 there were already tiny political parties claiming the True Inheritance. A handful of these, like the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB), were still in existence: vaunting their political virginity and asserting their uniquely correct interpretation of the original Marxist texts. But most late-nineteenth-century Socialist movements, circles, clubs and societies had been absorbed into the general-purpose Socialist and Labour parties that coalesced in the years 1900–1910. Modern Marxist disputes have their roots in the Leninist schism that was to follow….

The exhumation of the writings of Luxemburg, Lukacs, Gramsci and other forgotten early-twentieth century Marxists was accompanied by the rediscovery of Marx himself. Indeed, the unearthing of a new and ostensibly very different Marx was crucial to the attraction of Marxism in these years. The ‘old’ Marx was the Marx of Lenin and Stalin: the Victorian social scientist whose neo-positivist writings anticipated and authorized democratic centralism and proletarian dictatorship. Even if this Marx could not be held directly responsible for the uses to which his mature writings had been put, he was irrevocably associated with them. Whether in the service of Communism or Social Democracy, they were of the old Left.

The new Left, as it was starting to call itself by 1965, sought out new texts—and found them in the writings of the young Karl Marx, in the metaphysical essays and notes written in the early 1840s when Marx was barely out of his teens, a young German philosopher steeped in Hegelian historicism and the Romantic dream of ultimate Freedom. Marx himself had chosen not to publish some of these writings; indeed, in the aftermath of the failed revolutions of 1848 he had turned decisively away from them and towards the study of political economy and contemporary politics with which he was henceforth to be associated.

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by Joel | 29 August 2007 · 9:43 pm

Photodude Debunks Civil War Photog Mathew Brady

Atlanta-based blogger Photodude takes Andrew Sullivan to task by debunking Mathew Brady‘s role as the photographer of the American Civil War. I’ve seen many, many Mathew Brady photographs, but never heard this angle. Did the Ken Burns documentary series on the Civil War mention this? (UPDATE: I’ve corrected the spelling of Brady’s first name except where quoting Photodude below. More on Brady here and here.)

As someone intimately familiar with both the history of photography and the Civil War, I can tell you that Matthew [sic] Brady was well known as a sour self-promoting character with far more ego than talent. Yes, he did take some famous photos during the Civil War, but he also took the work of talented photographers like Alexander Gardner, Timothy O’Sullivan, and others, and proudly presented it as his own. The quote I recall is along the lines of “that photo is so good I’m going to tell the world it’s a Matthew Brady photograph.” He was brazen about it. You might say Matthew Brady invented the concept of “work for hire.”

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by Joel | 27 August 2007 · 9:27 pm

Missing Date in Philippines History: 31 December 1844

From A History of the International Date Line:

European explorers who approached the Pacific Ocean by sailing to the east such as the Portuguese, and in their wake the Dutch, the English and the French, naturally kept their ship’s journals and diaries according to the day count of their home land and this was of course also adopted by the colonists who settled along the Asian perimeter of the Pacific Ocean.

However, the colonisation of the Pacific Ocean by the Spanish occurred from the opposite direction and more specifically from the Spanish possessions in America. The Philippine archipelago was discovered in March 1521 by Ferdinand Magellan and Spanish dominion over the islands was first firmly established in 1565 by Miguel López de Legazpi (c. 1510 – 1572), the conquistador and first Spanish governor general of the Philippines….

Most of the shipping from the Philippines to Spain went over the Pacific Ocean to the Mexican port of Acapulco, was transported over land to the port of Veracruz, and then shipped to Spain. In order that the Spanish ships crossing the Pacific Ocean between the Philippines and the Spanish Americas would not have to adjust the dates in their journals whenever they sighted land, the Philippines observed the same day count as that of the Spanish Americas….

During the early 1840s the commercial interests of the Philippine Islands turned more and more away from the Spanish Americas (which for a large part had severed their relations with the motherland Spain) and trading with the Chinese mainland (engendered by the ignominious but lucrative ‘Opium Wars’), the Malay peninsula, the Dutch East Indies and Australia became increasingly important.

In order to facilitate communication and trading with its western and southern neighbours, the secular and religious authorities of the Philippines agreed that it would be advantageous to abolish the American day reckoning and adopt the Asian day reckoning.

This was achieved in 1844 when Narciso Claveria, the governor general of the Philippines, issued a proclamation announcing that Monday, 30 December 1844, was to be immediately followed by Wednesday, 1 January 1845.

The 1867 conversion from Russian to American time in Alaska was much more complicated.

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by Joel | 27 August 2007 · 9:10 pm

Suppression of Piracy in the Philippines After 1848

From Iranun and Balangingi: Globalization, Maritime Raiding and the Birth of Ethnicity, by James Francis Warren (Singapore U. Press, 2002), pp. 345-346, 363-364:

By the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the sea war in the Philippines between Spain and the Iranun and Balangingi had taken on a permanent and normal character of a stalemate in which each party recognized the other as an equal with authority generally limited to the territory each controlled. But in 1848 the combined forces of the Spanish navy and army laid waste to the Samal forts at Balangingi, dispersed the survivors, and forcefully relocated the prisoners of war. This was the decisive moment, the turning point in the history of the century-long conflict between Spain and the slave raiders. The Balangingi were on the brink of climbing out of their Samal identity after nearly half a century of constant upheaval, and, according to Frake, “establishing themselves as a different kind of people.” But, in the aftermath of the Spanish devastation of their island stronghold in 1848, they did not succeed. After that event the Balangingi, as ‘notorious pirates’ and a construed single ethnic group, disappeared from the pages of the historical literature and geographical reports. Balangingi fortunes changed in the 1840s and with them the pattern of maritime raiding in Southeast Asia. The destruction of Tempasuk and Marudu by the English in 1845 also forced Iranun groups to relocate on the east coast at Tunku. The loss of these confederate communities made it more difficult for the Balangingi to conduct slave raids in the western sector of the archipelago. This event, coupled with the founding of Labuan by James Brooke and the appearance of steam gunboats on the northwest coast of Borneo, forced them to gradually withdraw from that area and increasingly concentrate their activities on the Dutch possessions.

At the same time, the Spanish adopted a far more aggressive policy in the south. The new governor of the Philippines, Narciso Claveria, understood the strategic importance of the control of Balangingi which became the focal point of a new Spanish strategy. A daring naval attack aimed at the throat of the Sulu, namely Balangingi, was the key to cutting the sultanate in two and stopping slave raiding in the Philippines….

After the destruction of Balangingi in 1848, the Spanish first used the Samal women and children as hostages to force their husbands and kindred to surrender and make peace. The political ploy did not work. So after a short time, the Spanish assembled their steamers and regularly swept the Visayas and the Sulu archipelago from one end to the other. Repeated punitive campaigns ended with a series of major sea battles off the coasts of Samar and Mindanao and attacks on Taupan’s bases to the south. [Julano Taupan was war leader of the Balangingi at Tawi-Tawi.] Hundreds of Balangingi were killed during the six year long war, many of their ships captured, and others destroyed. Taupan sent his raiders to prey on shipping in less troubled waters in the Moluccas, the Banda Sea, the Java Sea, and along the Bornean coasts. But their activities were short-lived. The British and Dutch dealt with the Balangingi menace by joining forces across the region, stationing steamers in all the key straits of the archipelago at certain times of the year when the slave raiders traditionally appeared in those waters. The Dutch navy concentrated on Taupan’s Balangingi operations around Sulawesi and Bonerate, and the British, with James Brooke’s full support, stationed ships at Labuan to protect the Borneo coasting fleets in the South China Sea.

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by Joel | 26 August 2007 · 12:40 pm

Polynesian Languages: Useful for American Football QBs

I don’t have much interest in American football. I grew up paying more attention to baseball and sumo. But an intriguing off-topic comment by football fan BitterOldPunk in a thread on Language Hat pointed me to a story in today’s New York Times about a remarkable quarterback on the University of Hawai‘i football team.

HONOLULU — After every home game, Colt Brennan waves to his probation officer as he leaves Aloha Stadium….

Brennan, Hawaii’s star quarterback, is on the cusp of what could be a transcendent season in his senior year. He is projected to make a run at the Heisman Trophy, and his coach insists that he will be the first quarterback selected in the N.F.L. draft. His strong right arm, combined with a soft schedule, have people around college football’s most remote program believing that Hawaii’s chances of making a Boise State-like run to a Bowl Championship Series game are, well, not remote.

Those possibilities, for the player and for the team, are even more noteworthy considering the improbable, circuitous road that Brennan, 24, took to Hawaii.

Brennan backed up Matt Leinart in high school in Southern California, went 3,000 miles to a prep school in Massachusetts and was the fourth-string quarterback at Colorado as a walk-on before being arrested and thrown off the team. He then spent spring break in a Colorado jail during a year in junior college and landed at Hawaii only because a reporter showed an assistant coach there a film of one of Brennan’s junior college receivers.

The final twists in Brennan’s rise toward stardom and redemption may be the most compelling of all, however. If not for the anonymity of being a backup, the uncertainty of chasing a scholarship and the humiliation of wearing an orange jumpsuit, he probably would not have the thrill of a Heisman chase, the allure of being a possible first-round pick or the recipient of the affection of an entire state.

“The consensus between myself and Colt’s high school coaches is that Colt is the person he is today and the quarterback he is today because of the path he took,” said Dan Morrison, Hawaii’s quarterbacks coach. “I firmly believe he is who he is today because of the road he traveled.”

It’s a fine story of personal redemption and of those who had faith in him, but the bit that got notice on Language Hat was the following.

Soon after Brennan arrived, in the summer of 2005, Morrison, the quarterbacks coach, advised him that the culture of the island valued humility and character. Having spent spring break in jail that year, Brennan hardly needed a humility check.

“I had gone through a real embarrassing time in my life,” Brennan said. “I was humiliated and I needed to go find myself somewhere else. Hawaii had that appeal to it. It was my getaway, my escape.”

So he kept his mouth shut and did his best to blend in. He took three semesters of Samoan as a way to bond with his offensive linemen, all of whom are of Polynesian descent. (Morrison beamed when telling of Brennan calling an audible in Samoan last year.)

I suspect that Brennan has also learned a bit of New Zealand Māori, because Hawai‘i is one of a growing number of American football teams that psyche themselves up (and psyche their opponents out) before games by performing Māori-style haka, first introduced into international sports by New Zealand’s famed All-Blacks.

The blog A Nice Gesture has quite a compilation of commentary and video of haka being performed by, among others, New Zealand’s Tall Blacks before a basketball game against Argentina, and a whole range of American football teams from Hawai‘i to Utah to Texas.

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by Joel | 25 August 2007 · 3:04 pm

Outburst of Piracy in Southeast Asia, 1754-1838

From Iranun and Balangingi: Globalization, Maritime Raiding and the Birth of Ethnicity, by James Francis Warren (Singapore U. Press, 2002), pp. 53-56:

The Iranun burst quite suddenly into Southeast Asian history in the second half of the eighteenth century with a series of terrifying raids and attacks on the coasts and shipping of the Philippines, the straits of Malacca and the islands beyond Sulawesi. Their primary targets were unprotected coastal settlements and sailing boats that travelled throughout Southeast Asia bringing valuable commodities from China and the West back to the most remote parts of the archipelago. Many of these marauders were sponsored by rulers from the trading states of Cotabato, Sulu, Siak, and Sambas. They were soon described as ‘Lanun’ or ‘Illanoon’—‘pirates’—by those who suffered their depradations or either travelled with or hunted them and wrote about their widespread impact on the Southeast Asian world.

It is estimated that during the last quarter of this century (1774–1798) of maritime raiding and conflict against the Dutch and Spanish, between 100 and 200 seaworthy raiding prahus set out from the Mindanao-Sulu area each year. The sheer size of the vessels—the largest joanga measuring upward of 130 feet in length—and the scale of the expeditions dwarfed most previous efforts, marking a significant departure in the naval strategy of Malay maritime raiding as it had been traditionally understood. The Iranun were far more than mere ‘pirates’ or brigands. The colonial powers and precolonial Malay trading states had to reckon with a dominant force in their own right; a force that was capable of inflicting major defeats on the Spanish and Dutch and toppling local kingdoms. The huge numbers of these skilled sea raiders and slavers that the sultanate of Sulu could mobilize during the heyday of the China trade would henceforth have a profound impact upon Southeast Asia’s history.

The geographical range of Iranun-Balangingi slave raiding activity was enormous, spanning all of Southeast Asia and beyond. Until the latter part of the eighteenth century, the joanga of the Cotabato and Sulu Sultanates were more or less integrated into fleets belonging to the respective sultanates, but by the end of the century many Iranun vessels were also operating independently. Iranun prahus sponsored by both states had their own target areas but inevitably, there was some overlap. Cotabato and Sulu raiding vessels cruised between the Visayas and Luzon, and out into the South China Sea. Those from Tempasuk, on the northwest coast of Borneo, harassed shipping to the west of the huge island itself. Samal Balangingi, situated midway between the Iranun communities in Mindanao and those on Borneo, operated vessels throughout the Philippines and in the central and eastern parts of the Netherlands Indies.

Iranun maritime raids affected virtually the entire coastline of Southeast Asia, and even stretches of New Guinea and the Bay of Bengal were not secure from slave raids. In the east, the Iranun sailed down the Makassar Strait to cross the Java Sea and South China Sea to attack the north coast ports on Java and the large tin mining island of Banka. Iranun raided extensively in the Sangir Islands, Halmahera and, to a lesser extent, in the Moluccas. They also pushed beyond the defended limits of the Southeast Asian world, crossing the South China Sea to attack undefended stretches of the coastlines of Thailand and Cochin China. At the opposite extremity they also raided, but failed to dominate, the dangerous coasts of New Guinea. In the 1790s, Iranun slave hunters in search of captives extended the limits of their known world even further, sailing far into the waters of the Bay of Bengal, touching at the Andaman Islands and perhaps exploring the southern coast of Burma. There seemed no practical way for the colonial powers to link their respective ‘dominions’ together in an island-wide network of defense and communication, and consequently the Iranun made the most of the ill-defended seas and ravaged the coastal populations and commerce….

In the second half of the eighteenth century many Philippine ports, towns, shipyards, and monasteries were not adequately defended while others were totally defenseless. From the mid-1750s onward, the scale, ferocity and unexpected nature of the initial wave of Iranun attacks were deeply disturbing. Thousands of Filipinos perished or were seized as captives; the more so as the Iranun were Muslims and recognized none of the accepted conventions and taboos that were meant to protect the property and personnel of the Catholic Church in times of war between Christians…. This terrifying period of Iranun slave raiding activity, which lasted more than 70 years from roughly 1752 to 1832, severely hampered the overall social and material well-being and growth of the Philippine island world and the colonial state.