by | 9 August 2006 · 9:34 pm

Impressions of Persia, c. 1920

The years 1918–20 represented almost as close to a global apocalypse as the world had ever come. Most of the important monarchies of Europe and Asia, having provided stability for hundreds of years, suddenly ceased to exist. The khanates of Central Asia were distant backwaters, but Lev [Nussimbaum, aka Kurban Said] was deeply struck by the spectacle of “those glorious old kingdoms,” collapsing one after another, as “the desert fell beneath the power of the red star.”… There was nowhere to flee but south, so the Nussimbaums joined a caravan of Russian and Muslim refugees heading for Persia.* (*The nation would become Iran only in 1935, as part of a Nazi-influenced name change. As some Iranians will still proudly tell you, they are more closely related by blood to the Germans than to their Semitic neighbors: Iran means “land of the Aryans,” a notion that pleased Reza Shah Pahlavi, the country’s dictator at the time, and founder of a dynasty that would end with his son’s overthrow by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1978.)

The desert borderland between Bukhara and Persia was still quiet, and the caravan crossed into the nominal domains of the shah without incident. Like Turkestan, northern Persia was largely unsettled, but the culture was older and more civilized. The caravan traveled for days across the desert, coming occasionally upon luxuriant oases and the ruins of old cities and forts, dusty and lonely, like some sprawling string of elegant ghost towns. The inhabited cities were surrounded by walls six feet deep and twenty feet high, made of pounded clay; as in the Middle Ages, city gates were opened in the morning and closed at night. The walls could not withstand modern artillery but served to keep out tribes of marauding bandits and nomads. The Kurds were common raiders in northern Persia, but, along with the ethnic Azerbaijanis, they also provided the bulk of the Persian Army. The native Persians did not like to fight. In this class-bound society, they thought it declassé to take up arms….

Of course, Persia was full of life—its forests were filled with wolves, tigers, foxes, and wild boars, while lions roamed the deserts along with Persian horses, which were famed for their beauty, even if they were not as fleet-footed as the Arabians. The country was also known for its agricultural wealth—some of the world’s finest wheat, cotton, sugar, grapes, and tobacco. Everywhere Lev went, he smelled tobacco and hashish, as well as the famous roses of Persian love poetry that bloomed in so many varieties in the gardens and oases. The kingdom of the Qajar shahs seemed like a sanctuary from history, where the people lived among the fig trees and orchards, spending their time distilling roses into precious perfumes, weaving rugs, guarding harems, and composing poetry. In this literary graveyard of versifying tent-makers, he found a land yet to be set upon by the modern world.

The caravan’s journey through post–First World War Persia sometimes sounds like a swing through the American Bible Belt. “In Persia religion alone is alive,” Lev wrote, but it was a religion of many strange branches, sects, and secret societies. He encountered Ismailis, devil worshippers, Babists, and Bahaists, a sect of universalist Muslims who believed that a Muslim messiah had returned to earth sometime in the mid-nineteenth century—around the same time Joseph Smith found the Books of Mormon—and that we were living in a millennium when all religions could come together. Mainstream Muslims despised the Bahaists as blasphemers, and they often persecuted them.* (*Until the 1980s, in fact, anti-Semitism was uncommon in Persia, whereas anti-Bahaism was rampant. In the minds of many of today’s mullahs, the two seem to be merged, so that the disciples of the Ayatollah Khomeini have warned of Zionist-Bahaist-American plots.) Islam’s original triumph in Persia in the seventh century had represented the defeat and banishment of the local religion, Zoroastrianism, whose dualistic creed had prevailed in the Persian court for hundreds of years. But along with the Muslim conquerors came another kind of Koranic proselytizer—refugees, not conquerors—who called themselves Shi’Ali, “the Partisans of Ali,” or simply the Shiites. The Shiites taught the Persians not to trust the Arab conquerors, who claimed to represent the way revealed by the Prophet Muhammad.

The Shiites believed that the right to be caliph, or spiritual leader, of Islam should have fallen after Muhammad’s death to his cousin and son-in-law, Ali. Ali was chosen caliph for a short time, just four years, but then he was murdered with a poisoned sword. A few years after Ali’s assassination, his sons Hassan and Hussein tried to assert their family’s rights and were similarly dispatched: Hassan by poison, Hussein in a heroic last stand in the desert, near the town of Karbala, in modern-day Iraq, where, like Ali, he was killed by the Sunni warriors who opposed him. The martyrdom of Hussein, in which the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad sacrificed himself for the true message of God, was for his followers something like the crucifixion of Jesus was for Christians (though Hussein was not considered divine): in the eyes of the Shiites, Hussein’s death is Islam’s central tragedy. Shiite ideology was complex and kaleidoscopic, varying from place to place, but it all came down to one belief: the Prophet’s rightful successors were murdered, injustice ruled in the House of Islam, and the world would not be made right until the Mahdi, the Shiite messiah, arrived to implement the Divine Kingdom on earth….

Lev found Persia’s Shiite Muslims theatrical and seductive. It was Islam in its most intoxicating form—a self-sacrificial dance of outsiders and rebels. He loved the raw religious fervor all around him, which he had never experienced in Baku. Shiism’s encouragement of the underdog nurtured Lev’s view of Islam as a bastion of heroic resistance in a world of brute force and injustice.

SOURCE: The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, by Tom Reiss (Random House, 2005), pp. 62-65

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by | 8 August 2006 · 5:37 pm

Journalism: The First Draft of What?

I don’t feel the need to join all the sharks circulating around the self-inflicted wounds of Reuters and other propaganda facilitators (on whichever side) covering the latest outbreak of hideous warfare in the Middle East, but I would like to take this opportunity to sneer in the general direction of the legacy media and their much vaunted editors.

In keeping with the Far Outliers focus on items that languish in undeserved obscurity, I’d like to highlight a recent letter to the editor headlined Iwo Jima, Revisited on page A17 of Saturday’s Washington Post, a newspaper for which I retain more respect than most (a very low threshold, I admit). The letter reads:

Regarding “Next Exit Marine Land; Along I-95, a New Military Museum Goes Up — And Up” [Style, July 31]:

Philip Kennicott succumbs to the old canard that the famous photo of the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi during the battle for Iwo Jima in 1945 was “a restaging of an earlier flag-raising on the hill that was not quite so visually dramatic.”

The second and larger flag was put up so that it might be more visible to the troops below. The second raising was not staged, and it was serendipitous that Joe Rosenthal was there to snap one of the most famous photos of all time.

I refer those interested to “Flags of Our Fathers,” a book by James Bradley and Ron Powers.

— Terrence Leveck
Bethesda

For 60-something years, this rumored “first draft” of history has been embedded in newsrooms and press clubs around the world (though not in Tokyo’s press club, I recently learned). If he really cared about accuracy, culture critic Kennicott didn’t need to go to the trouble of consulting the recommended book; he could instead have consulted a source far more accessible and reliable than any piece of fresh news off the wire or cable: Wikipedia. Journalists may wish to think they are writing the first draft of History, but in almost every case they are just writing the 51st draft of (edited!) Conventional Wisdom. (The stench of CW being synchronized is why I can no longer tolerate PBS’s Washington Week even though I regularly watch the NewsHour.) Wikipedia on almost any controversial topic is, by contrast, the 51st draft of History, if not the 101st. And Wikipedia’s editors are usually volunteers, often specialists in their fields, unlike the paid professionals whose job it is to know even less about more topics than the jack-of-all journalists they supervise.

Did the vaunted editors of the WaPo Style section catch the CW myth that the complacent Mr. Kennicott included in his article? No. It took an agitated reader to bring it to the newspaper’s attention. Bloggers and journalists who either provide email addresses or enable comments get the same kind of feedback all the time. What was the difference again?

I’d like to give the last word to a commenter at NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen’s thoughtful blog PressThink.

Michael Schrage of MIT’s Media Lab e-mails:

Sorry to come to Nick’s ‘analysis’ so late. Read your comment and Jeff Jarvis’s. May I just add a couple of cents?

In the course of being the Washington Post’s first “tech” correspondent back in the early and mid-80s, I had to cover Detroit and Ross Perot’s acquisition by GM. I learned a lot about the automobile industry (and, frankly, I really hadn’t planned on that or wanted to…)

Forgive the preamble but it leads to my key point: Detroit just sucked at competition. It thought of itself and behaved like a domestic oligopoly and even Chrysler’s near-death experience didn’t change that dynamic.

Competition from Japan? Establish voluntary export restraints and insist on domestic content and greenfield plants.

It took well over a decade—and literally hundreds of thousands of layoffs—before Detroit even began to be a global competitor. To this day we can see that competition more often drew out the worst of Detroit’s executives and employees rather than their best.

I feel this dynamic replayed in the so-called MSM; in 2001, I would have bet real money that competition from the blogs and Google was going to make the New York Times, WSJ, CBS, CNN, Time, LA Times, etc. better and sharper publications.

What I see and read today are so-called ‘professional’ journalists operating from a defensive crouch and the breathtaking (to me) arrogance that competition from ‘amateurs’ and responses by reader/viewers are, net-net, not worthy of their time. It’s astonishing to me.

My political biases and perceptions aside, I am just flat out disappointed by how poorly the MSM competes. And it’s clear to me why Rupert Murdoch—for whom competition is both fuel and goad—has done so well over the past twenty years.

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by | 7 August 2006 · 6:14 pm

From Glasnost to Nihilistic Terror in the 1800s

In the early 1790s, while the king of France was having his head cut off, Empress Catherine had applied her own novel interpretation of human emancipation to keep revolution at bay: she had granted rights exclusively to the nobility. Since Russia had started with a system where no one possessed rights except the czar, or czarina, this had been deemed great progress and the beginning of enlightened civil society in Russia. Russian nobles now basked in their new freedom from whipping and poll taxes and arbitrary arrest; no noble could be deprived of life, property, or title without trial by a jury of his peers. But with their new inalienable rights, the nobles began to treat the serfs more and more like slaves. Under Catherine, Russian nobles bought, sold, and traded serfs—using them to settle gambling debts or equip brothels—both privately and at open markets, which visiting Europeans and Russian abolitionists took to comparing to the slave markets in the Americas (though Russian nobles like Pushkin violently objected to the comparison).

By the 1830s, a Russian noble’s status was measured in the number of “souls” he possessed. But as Russian nobles came to feel more and more like the elite in the rest of Europe in terms of their own status, they developed a sense of embarrassment and guilt over the outmoded system under which they held human beings in bondage to their land. Abolitionist proposals almost always included plans to sell the emancipated serfs small parcels of land, or to let them sharecrop, after they were freed. But the serfs did not acknowledge that the nobles had the right to sell them anything. A kind of organic socialism already existed among many serfs under which land was held by a rural commune, the mir, that distributed the right to work it according to a household’s size and needs. (Some reformers, like Prince Kropotkin, the famous anarchist, formed their ideas of socialism by idealizing the communal relations of the serfs their family owned.) The serfs believed that when the czar gave them their freedom, the Little Father must naturally also recognize their right to the land as well—for what was freedom without land? It was a potentially devastating clash of interpretations.

Coming to the throne in the 1850s, Czar Alexander II had resolved to modernize his country from the ground up, and he not only set about freeing the serfs but also reformed a host of other institutions: the press laws (eliminating most censorship), the universities (ending most government control over professorships and academic speech), the military (dropping the twenty-five-year draft that had made Russia’s armies a kind of martial serfdom), and the judiciary (replacing secret government courts with public trial by jury). The Liberator Czar also vastly improved conditions for Russia’s Jews. In her Memoirs of a Grandmother, Pauline Wengeroff, who was born in the Pale in 1833, describes the hope she and her family felt after Alexander II “liberated sixty million peasants from bondage and the Jews from their chains.” She described how the czar opened the gates of Russia’s cities, welcoming a generation of Jewish youth “to quench their thirst for European education in the universities. In this brilliant period of intellectual flowering, the Jews took part in the ferment in the whole country, the rise of the fine arts, the development of the sciences.”

It is important to resurrect the forgotten optimism of those days—when the original term glasnost, “openness,” was coined—in order to understand the true horror of what followed.

During Alexander’s reign, the disaffected children of the elite exploited the new freedom at the universities to join countercultural organizations that grew consistently more violent. Always the author to write the headlines, Turgenev, in his novel Fathers and Sons, gave the sixties generation its most popular new word—”nihilist.” The turning point was the “mad summer” of 1874, when Russian students ditched school en masse, in a movement they called To the People. The students dressed like peasants, or at least their romantic impression of peasants—overalls, red shirts, and unkempt long hair for the men; loose white blouses, black skirts, and short hair for the women—and walked or hitched rides out of the cities into the countryside, carrying sacks of tools they barely knew how to use. Like the hippies a hundred years later, they planned to work the land, shoeing horses or planting crops. The students were shocked when “the People” regarded their strange appearance suspiciously, often turning them in to the local police. Stung by the peasants’ rejection, the student radicals returned to the cities determined to shock the system by other means. (“The ideal of the French Revolution, draped in the barbaric vestment of Russian nihilism, inspired the upper classes of St. Petersburg’s youth,” as Lev [Nussimbaum, aka Kurban Said] would later write.) They formed the People’s Will, a self-proclaimed terrorist organization.

SOURCE: The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, by Tom Reiss (Random House, 2005), pp. 23-25

Naturellement. Who better to understand and express the People’s Will than the “disaffected children of the elite”—especially after being rejected by the very people they presume to speak for?

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by | 4 August 2006 · 8:17 pm

Oil Barons of Baku, 1901-1905

By 1901, Baku was supplying half the world’s oil. It became an international city overnight, and the local Azeris were soon outnumbered by Russians, Georgians, Ossetians, and others from the four corners of the earth. Between 1856 and 1910, Baku’s population grew at a faster rate than that of London, Paris, or New York. The Nobel brothers, who dominated the industry in the first decades, invented the concept of the tanker to handle the demand for Baku oil in the Far East, appropriately naming their first tanker Zoroaster. They made the bulk of the family’s fortune in Azeri oil, though brother Alfred’s invention of dynamite is more famous.

The oilmen came in all stripes—Swedes and Jews and Poles and Armenians—but the dominance of big foreign groups like the Nobels and Rothschilds didn’t last long. By the turn of the century, half of the tanker business and much of the production was in local hands. So-called oil barons arose from both the peasantry and the feudal aristocracy—anyone who dug a hole in the ground and got lucky. (The Nobels tried whenever possible to buy out these new oil barons, along with smaller producers. According to documents in the Baku archives, Abraham Nussimbaum sold the Nobels most of his wells in 1913, on the eve of the Great War, a highly opportune business decision.)

The new oil millionaires became great philanthropists, determined to turn their city from a provincial backwater into the finest Islamic city in the world—a showcase of the possibilities of the positive merger of East and West. As the representative local group, the Muslim oil barons felt the most obliged to make showy public statements with their new wealth. They took grand tours of Europe and hired architects to build copies of the mansions, museums, and opera houses they had seen, all in an attempt to anchor their city in the Occidental future rather than its Oriental past. While some Azeri Muslims were outraged by the education of women or their appearance onstage or in an office building, Baku benefited from having been so long at the crossroads of East and West that people were used to new fashions and change.

Equal parts Dodge City, medieval Baghdad, industrial Pittsburgh, and nineteenth-century Paris, fin de siècle Baku was the last great city built before the First World War spoiled the dream that the West could keep expanding forever in a grand civilizing pageant. It was a place of fantastic extremes of wealth and poverty, where gas lights and telephones made a stark contrast to camel caravans and emaciated Zoroastrian monks. The city’s wild and clashing history came to ahead at the turn of the century, when it was the “Wild East” frontier of Europe, the world’s greatest oil-boom town: A British visitor at the time wrote, “One might almost fancy oneself in an American city out west. There is the same air of newness about everything, the same sanguine atmosphere. Everyone is hopeful.”

Yet by 1905, the entire Russian frontier was bathed in blood, as the empire entered the first of its revolutions. The unrest reached from the coast of Korea to St. Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt, and Baku was not spared. The revolution came, as many do, on the heels of a disastrous war, one of the bloodiest in history. The czar’s advisers had dreamed up the 1904–5 Russo-Japanese War in part as a means of diffusing revolutionary tension, by acquiring, via quick victory, an injection of patriotism as well as some much-needed timber concessions on the Korean coast. Instead, the Russians experienced total defeat. The catastrophe in the Far East—against a people the czar called “little, short-tailed monkeys”—made the Russian Empire look fragile and moribund. As the war’s losses sank in—in addition to the hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers, practically the entire Russian Navy was sunk by the Japanese fleet—years of left-wing terrorism and czarist oppression collided in a year of uprisings, ethnic cleansing, and generalized breakdown.

The semi-destroyed Russian military was in no position to quash the unrest. The only part of the vast czarist navy that had not been sunk by the Japanese was the famous Black Sea Fleet, and on its main battleship, the state-of-the-art Potemkin, the sailors rioted in the spring of 1905 and shot their officers. All around the Black Sea and the Caspian, public order broke down. While the staggering numbers of Russian dead, machine-gunned on the icy hills of Manchuria and the Korean peninsula, showed the new lethality of war, the revolutionary terrorism and pogroms that arrived inside Russia that year showed the new brutality of politics—and both foreshadowed what horror might be born through the mediums of modern mass violence.

SOURCE: The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, by Tom Reiss (Random House, 2005), pp. 11-13

One of the most intriguing photographs reproduced in the book is labelled “Muslim-Jewish Christmas party, Baku, 1913.” Days long, long gone.

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Filed under Caucasus, Central Asia, energy, industry, Japan, military, nationalism, religion, Russia, Turkey, war

by | 2 August 2006 · 6:33 pm

The Dalai Lama’s Missed Opportunities

In recent years the Dalai Lama has made several political misjudgements. His handling of the selection of the new Panchen Rinpoche led to an alternative candidate being put up by Beijing, and to a religious crackdown in Tibet. His reaction to conciliatory overtures from the Chinese government during the early 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping invited Tibetan refugees to return from exile, was shortsighted. The Dalai Lama was offered a symbolic post in Beijing, the right to visit Tibet when he wanted, and freedom to speak to the press. By the standards of the time, this was a remarkable offer to come from Mao’s lineal successor. Instead of seizing it and entering into direct negotiations, the Dalai Lama sent numerous fact-finding missions to China and Tibet, and delegates who demanded trivial concessions, such as the right to meet with two ageing Tibetan quislings who had lost political influence many years before. The historian Tsering Shakya has written that the exiled government in Dharamsala “badly misjudged” the situation at this time: “Beijing’s commitment had underlined the involvement of Deng Xiaoping, China’s paramount leader, and of Hu Yaobang, the most senior Party official. Once the Chinese leaders lost interest in the issue … any possibility of reaching a compromise was effectively ended.”

In 1989, the Dalai Lama refused an invitation to take part in the Panchen Rinpoche’s funerary ceremonies in Beijing, despite being told it would be an opportunity for high-level discussions. His advisers in Dharamsala, conscious of protocol and precedent (would the Dalai Lama still qualify as a refugee after being allowed back into China?) and mindful of the rapid growth in popular support for Tibet in the richer countries of the world, advised him to turn down the offer. The writer Tom Grunfeld has suggested that the Dalai Lama’s failure to go to Beijing in 1989 was “probably the gravest error of his political life.”

Since then, the prospects of accommodation have receded. As external support for the Tibetan cause has increased, and political ties between the exiled government and its foreign patrons have grown, China has hardened its position against the Dalai Lama. The Chinese government is unlikely to cut a deal with him, except on terms of total surrender, meaning abandonment of dreams of a greater Tibet, and of a democratic, demilitarised autonomous state within China. The Dalai Lama has come to represent too much; his return to Tibet, with the world’s media travelling in his wake, hoovering up the biggest story of its kind since Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, would be profoundly destabilising to Communist rule.

There were moments, seeing things from inside China, when it appeared that foreign lobbying had only appeared to tighten repression and promote false hopes among Tibetans. Around the mid 1980s, the Dalai Lama turned for guidance to a number of Western lobbyists, lawyers, levitators and Sinophobes, most of whom had minimal understanding of Chinese history or politics. A variation on the cho–yon or priest–patron relationship developed. The Dalai Lama became what Newsweek called “a lama to the globe,” and Tibetans gained apparent political backing, and ceaseless advice of varying utility. In the words of the essayist Jamyang Norbu, sympathetic foreign advisers were soon “battening themselves on the Dalai Lama’s court with the tact and sensitivity of lampreys.”

These well-wishers suggested that the Dalai Lama might raise his political profile in the West, and push hard for democratic self-government for Tibet within the People’s Republic of China. It was the sort of approach that might have worked well had China been a secure democracy, rather than a xenophobic dictatorship. In practice, it turned out to be a disaster, simultaneously aggravating Beijing and fracturing the exile community, which had built its identity around the optimistic notion of “Po Cholkha Sum,” a free homeland comprising the historic regions of ethnic Tibet.

The Dalai Lama presented a “Five Point Peace Proposal” to the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus in September 1987, and another version nine months later at the European Parliament in Strasbourg. He spoke of zones of peace and of the protection of the environment, catching the mood of the time. The location of the speeches might as well have been calculated to outrage the Chinese government, playing on all its old, unreconstructed fears, stretching back to the nineteenth century, about foreign interference and designs on China’s national integrity. The Strasbourg proposal was followed by an ill-judged attempt by the exiles to bounce Beijing into negotiations. When they announced that they intended to include a Dutch lawyer on their team—an act of astonishing miscalculation, internationalising the issue still further—it was inevitable that China would refuse to cooperate.

Three days after the Dalai Lama’s speech on Capitol Hill, a pair of Tibetan prisoners were publicly executed in Lhasa. This was widely viewed by Tibetans inside Tibet as a political statement, and it exacerbated existing social and religious tension. Three days after the executions, demonstrations and riots broke out in Lhasa which lasted, on and off, until March 1989, when martial law was declared. The protests during these eighteen months were brutally suppressed by paramilitary police, with hundreds of Tibetans being killed and injured, and others being tortured, sometimes to death, in prison.

SOURCE: Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land, by Patrick French (Vintage, 2004), pp. 109-112

Yes. False hopes are the foremost export of the rich world’s Street Theatre/Media Circus Internationale, and missed opportunities are the hallmark of their most-favored clientele.

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by | 1 August 2006 · 8:57 pm

Mike Plugh’s Darvish Watch

Japundit contributor and kuwashii Japan baseball fan Mike Plugh has created a Darvish Watch blog devoted to the young Iranian Japanese pitching phenom, Yu Darvish. Here’s an excerpt.

The million dollar question is, “Who in the World is Yu Darvish?” This phenom has burst on the scene in Japan and is a marvel to behold on the mound. He lacks the polish and seasoning that a true star pitcher possesses, but it’s important to keep in mind that we are talking about a 19 year old player that was rushed to the pros by a team [Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters] looking to stake its identity among a field of more famous teams.

The story begins with a Japanese woman and an Iranian man, who married and settled down in Osaka, Japan to raise a family. The elder Darvish was a player for the Iranian national soccer team, and met his wife in the United States while the two attended university. His athletic roots were apparently passed on to his son, as the young Darvish began to show his uncanny baseball skills as a second grader. Progressing quickly, Yu Darvish joined a boys baseball league in junior high school and became the ace of the rotation in no time. As a 16 year old high school student in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, this stellar young pitcher struck out 11 consecutive batters and 13 overall to lead his team to the finals of the prefectural championships. He also threw a 4-hit, 80 pitch, complete game shutout in one hour and nineteen minutes that season topping out at 87 MPH against neighboring Iwate Prefecture’s top club. That was just the beginning of the story.

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by | 1 August 2006 · 5:37 pm

Wandering Russian Camera in North Korea

Russian photographer Peter Sobolev has posted a lengthy travelogue about North Korea, with commentary translated into English by Pavel Sokolov. You’ll have to go there to see the photos, but here is a sample of the commentary.

While Chinese tourists could be recognized by the large number of people in the groups, the Japanese are recognizable in the same way the Americans are in Russia – loud talking, gesticulation….

As a rule, about half the food is very spicy. I.e. it burns so much that it is impossible to eat. Especially prevalent are Kim-Chi – some kind of vegetables with spices. Naturally everyone eats with chopsticks. I used to think that wooden chopsticks were hard to eat with. Boy, was I wrong! : The wooden ones at least catch onto the food, as opposed to the metal ones. However, by the end of the trip I was able to use the metal ones quite well. Although I wasn’t holding them quite right (I couldn’t hold them the way the [tourguide] girls did). Then, forks are handed out as well.

The food hardest too eat is the local noodles. They are very long, sticky, and cooked to form some type of a clot. Before you eat it, you need to break up the clot with the chopsticks (which supposes being good with them). Even after that, when you try to pick up some of the noodles, the rest of them try to follow :)…

Machines typical for village – GAZ (probably made in Northern Korea, not in Russia) and a lorry – with gas generator.

This car works with firewood, but I have to underline, that it’s NOT a steam machine, but GAS-generator (Usual internal combustion engine, just re-made). It’s not gasoline, of course, so the max speed is about 20-30 km per hour.

The firewood (at the right) are prepared for lorry. They’re put by portions into the can (is seen in the back of a lorry) and slowly burn there.

We’ve seen such machines about five times in general….

The interesting fact – in Russia the local rivers usually have their names and the bridges have not. But here is the opposite situation.

There’s a name of bridge aon the stone and also a date when it was built (1974). And the river is nameless.

via the Marmot, who linked to another long Russian photo essay from the countryside, with commentary in Russian.

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by | 31 July 2006 · 6:04 pm

Can Buddhists Get Some … Satisfaction?

In the wealthy world, the pervasive sense of lack drives people to worship at the oddest shrines, and to seek a solution to their formless malaise in bogus shamanism, crystal therapy, hands-free massage, rebirthing, sun salutations, flotation and pesticide-free food. Some people abandon the search for a transcendent explanation quickly, settling on materialism as an alternative, while others continue it for a lifetime. The process of being born and raised within the rituals of an established religion, which has been automatic for most people through the whole of human history, becomes rarer with each year that passes. For many people in rich countries, the certainties of earlier generations now seem implausible, especially the theories and dogmas of revealed religions.

For me, Tibetan Buddhism was a workable approach. Leaving the Roman Catholic faith of my childhood was not hard. It had long seemed less than credible, although its rituals could be reassuring and I liked the emphasis on moral inquiry. But the creator god, the conjuring of bread and wine into flesh and blood, the ban on contraception, the promotion of Christ’s sexless mother as an example to women, the harassment of dissident clergy, the thought that ex cathedra pronouncements by the Pope should be taken seriously—all of these things had pushed me away from my inherited faith.

Buddhism appeared to create contentment among its followers, and reincarnation seemed a fair explanation of what happened to the spirit after death. So my admiration was partially utilitarian: it felt good to be around Tibetans, and if their religion brought good to them, it was worth pursuing. The outward aspects of Tibetan Buddhism, and the celibate male hierarchy running the show, were what I found least appealing, although I still respected the Dalai Lama. It was the Buddhist explanation of life, the universe and everything that drew me, rather than the ritual or the theology.

I was also drawn by the central principle that suffering is universal and pleasure is transient. In secular Western thought, an expectation of permanent satisfaction has become deeply ingrained, and is an important cause of the prevailing discontent. People believe that they can expect fair treatment from life. The idea that loss, death and suffering are to be expected has become obsolete, and a relatively minor trauma can provoke great emotional upset. The Buddha taught in the First of the Four Noble Truths that “discontentment, unhappiness and disappointment are universal … all the things we desire and cherish, not least our own lives, must eventually come to an end.” The Second Noble Truth states that suffering is caused by desire, and that the immediate satisfaction of desire brings only illusory, passing pleasure. By surrendering the self and attempting to break down the delusions of desire, ignorance and hatred, it is possible to find freedom from suffering, and to attain a state of liberation. This free state of mind should be our aspiration. The Dalai Lama has gone as far as to say that “the very purpose of our life is happiness.”

SOURCE: Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land, by Patrick French (Vintage, 2004), pp. 24-25

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by | 31 July 2006 · 5:52 pm

Portrait of Sakya as an Old Town

In the town of Sakya, dung patties were stacked along every wall, covered with brushwood to keep off the rain. There was an empty official building flying China’s national flag, topped by a satellite dish. I found a place to stay. Outside, an aluminium-coated scoop focused the sun to a point on a stand, boiling a kettle with solar power. An outdoor pool table stood nearby, being used by monks with chunky watches and more hair than monks are meant to have. Nearby there were sheds containing a disjointed generator, and drums of oil. In the evening, after several false starts and lots of black smoke and cacophonous noise, lights came on, so dim that you could see only the outlines of things and people. But it was electricity, for three hours. The weather became very cold that night.

I was the only foreigner in town. The next day a wizened old man in a baseball cap saying BOY LONDON came to stare at me. Four young men, with braided hair and trilbies, were flaying sheep by the grain depot, smoking cigarettes while they worked. They peeled off the fleeces easily, like peeling the skin off an orange, using a pair of daggers, one short, one long. The sheep flailed as if they were alive. There was a metal tub filled with blood, and the air was filled with the smell of the blood. Children dressed in rags, with tousled hair and speckled cheeks, played in the puddles. One girl wore shoes made out of a biscuit packet. A slaughtered cow was hanging from a hook, for sale. Before long, only the head was left.

Old men with turquoise earrings and high leather boots circled the monastery, holding rotating prayer wheels. The walls of the monastery were grey, marked with red and white stripes in the Sakya tradition. Prayer flags flew from sticks at the corners of the building. The central part of the monastery had high ochre walls, and behind it across the river were hundreds of derelict buildings from the days of destruction, the Cultural Revolution.

Inside the monastery, I went up a steep metal ladder to a tiny, dark chapel, with an uneven floor and low wooden beams, where monks were chanting and young boys were carrying butter and tubs of tsampa. Rice and banknotes were stuck to the deities. An old monk sat cross-legged on a cushion reciting page after page of scriptures, a low, constant, soothing chant, a torch and a thermos by his side. An opening in the thick wall, like an archer’s slit, let in a bar of light, enabling him to read. In the darkness I could make out katags, thangkas, ferocious masks and butter sculptures, all crammed together. There was a sense in the little chapel of something timeless, that had kept Sakya going for centuries, regardless of the violent intermissions. I felt that this was a remote, independent place, a place that was used to running its own affairs and did not want outside assistance.

SOURCE: Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land, by Patrick French (Vintage, 2004), pp. 236-237

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by | 28 July 2006 · 8:11 pm

Alex Golub on Unfulfilled Consumers in PNG

Another Pacific-area article that caught my fancy is Alex Golub‘s Who Is the “Original Affluent Society”? Ipili “Predatory Expansion” and the Porgera Gold Mine, Papua New Guinea in the latest issue of The Contemporary Pacific at Project Muse (subscription required). Here are a few paragraphs from the introduction and conclusion (some references removed).

In the 1970s, first-world fantasies of “ecologically noble savages” were key to the creation of alliances between indigenous groups, environmentalists, and affluent first-world publics. More recently, however, anthropologists have grown increasingly critical of such stereotypes of indigenous people. In areas as diverse as Amazonia, Australia, North America, and Indonesia, indigenous peoples find their political leverage derives from filling first-world fantasies that are often essentialized and stifling.

This dynamic has taken another interesting twist in Papua New Guinea. Unlike many Commonwealth countries, Papua New Guinea has no settler population, and, unlike many African states, it has no majority ethnic group. Furthermore, Australia’s administration of Papua New Guinea was both well meaning and under-resourced. As a result there has been little alienation of land and it is difficult to recognize Papua New Guineans as “indigenous people” separate from “settler” populations, as is typically done in Australia, Africa, and the New World. At the same time, however, Papua New Guinea is highly reliant on resource rents, and the activities of international logging, mining, and hydrocarbon companies present a picture of a David-and-Goliath struggle between local people and transnational capital that is comfortably familiar to many first-world activists.

Like scholars elsewhere, Melanesianists are increasingly dissatisfied with stereotypes of grassroots Papua New Guineans as ecologically noble savages. A growing literature has, for instance, emphasized the ways in which compensation claims for damage to the environment are part of a complex local politics. Glenn Banks has argued that compensation claims are often a way of expressing a sense of disenfranchisement by people outside of mining lease areas (2002), while Martha Macintyre and Simon Foale have argued convincingly that even for people within mining lease areas, claims of environmental damage are often expressions of dissatisfaction with social concerns couched in environmental idioms (2002).

But there is a danger that these responsible works could be misread by policy elites in Port Moresby, the national capital, who often see landowners as savages more nasty than noble. Papua New Guineans have one of the best track records in the world for extracting concessions from foreign developers and the national government, and the demands of landowners have become so strident that the overall perception nationwide is that they are corrupted opportunists who have given up their traditional culture in order to “go for money” (Filer and others 2000). Thus, at one industry conference in 2000, the president of the Papua New Guinea Chamber of Mining and Petroleum claimed that “people issues are at the forefront of the mining and petroleum industries” in Papua New Guinea. The industry’s biggest challenge, he claimed, were “community problems that could have been avoided” and that were caused by “so-called ‘landowners'” who ripped off the government. “The rip-off is so blatant,” he said, “[that] it penetrates into the fabric of the government” (Golub fieldnotes 2000). Other speakers were more blunt. “Community affairs issues will shut down this country,” said one mining executive, himself from the highlands region (Golub fieldnotes 2000)….

To an audience familiar with stereotypes of noble savages, the reaction of the Ipili to the mine can be startling. Elites in Port Moresby who romanticize a traditional “Melanesian Way” feel betrayed by landowners who fail to conform to their expectations. At the same time, first-world activists interested in finding “guardians of the forest” in Porgera will be disappointed indeed at the alacrity with which the Ipili, as they say, “traded their mountain for development.”

But it may be that the unease the Ipili instill in others is due to the fact that they are driven by concerns remarkably like “our own.” Their desire for new commodities, time-saving devices, and prepared food is in many ways not so different from what one would find in any major city in the United States. Thus it could be said that “they” are not as bad as “we” are, or, to put it another way, that “we” are as good as “they.”

So which is the original affluent society? Just as we see our own weak points in Ipili prodigality, so do Ipili imagine whites, as a version of their present or possible selves. This examination of Ipili culture reveals them to be a bit more like ourselves than we have been led to believe. Sahlins looked to hunters and gatherers to explode the Western, Hobbesian conception of infinite need. Studying the Ipili suggests that the West is not the only place plagued by need and want. Ipili do not denounce consumer society in the name of a pristine, authentic primitivism. They denounce it for failing to make good on its promises. The problem, as they see it, is not enough affluence.

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