by | 13 February 2005 · 6:07 pm

The Selling of the Last Savage

The February 2005 edition of the travel magazine Outside has a long article by Michael Bihar entitled “The Selling of the Last Savage” in which he recounts his experience on a savage-spotting tour in West Papua.

On a planet crowded with six billion people, isolated primitive cultures are getting pushed to the brink of extinction. Against this backdrop, a new form of adventure travel has raised an unsettling question: Would you pay to see tribes who have never laid eyes on an outsider?

Why, no. No, I wouldn’t. Nor would I pay to shoot the last spotted owl, or harpoon the last sperm whale. I just don’t understand the attraction. Nostalgia for the pith-helmet era?

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by | 13 February 2005 · 4:15 pm

How Not to Do Comparative Linguistics

The March/April issue of the pop science magazine Archaeology contains an article by UC Press editor Blake Edgar about Cal Poly San Luis Obispo archaeologist Terry Jones and UC Berkeley linguist Kathryn Klar entitled “The Polynesian Connection: Did ancient Hawaiians teach California Indians how to make ocean-going canoes?” The short answer is, “No.”

Edgar cites convincing archaeological counterevidence from Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History archaeologist John Johnson before conceding that “their strongest evidence may rest on a few words.” That’s sad, because the linguistic argument is almost a textbook example of how not to do historical and comparative linguistics. Here’s the essence of it, as presented in the article.

Any language, says Klar, includes words that are native to it, words borrowed from other tongues, and others of unknown origin. When Klar began studying the island variant of Chumash, she found words alien to mainland Chumash dialects. She looked at distant native languages, from Aleut to Uto-Aztecan, whose speakers could have had contact with Chumash. Each time, Klar came up empty–until she tried Hawaiian, a member of the Polynesian language family.

Klar noticed a Hawaiian word that translates roughly as “useful tree,” kumulaa‘au. This bears a striking resemblance to the ancient Chumash word for “sewn-plank canoe,” tomolo‘o, which Klar reconstructed from the terms for “plank canoe” in different branches of the Chumashan language family. The first letters differ, but in Hawaiian “k” words often derive from older words that begin with “t.” Both the Hawaiian and Chumash words contain four corresponding consonants. That’s too many for a coincidence and to a linguist signals the virtual certainty of genetic kinship or borrowing from the native language. Since Hawaiian and Chumash don’t share a traceable ancestry, that leaves borrowing.

So what’s wrong with this linguistic evidence?

  • Normally, you’d expect Polynesian linguistic evidence to come from a specialist in Polynesian, or at least Austronesian. Not Celtic.

  • Polynesian ocean-going canoes are either double-hulled (like catamarans) or have outriggers. In fact, outriggers are standard all over Oceania. The Chumash canoes were single-hulled, without outriggers.

  • Hawaiians call their canoes wa‘a, from Proto-Polynesian *waka, which has cognates all over Polynesia–and Oceania more generally. They don’t call their canoes ‘useful trees’.

  • The Hawaiian word mistranslated as ‘useful tree’, kumulaa‘au (where aa indicates a long a), translates better as something like ‘tree (with trunk)’, from kumu ‘bottom, base, foundation, trunk’, plus laa‘au ‘tree, plant, wood, timber, forest, stick, pole’.

  • The semantics are a stretch. If the Chumash islanders were going to borrow a form for ‘sewn-plank canoe’, why didn’t they borrow Hawaiian wa‘a ‘canoe’ or kaula ‘rope, cord, string’, or even humuhumu ‘to sew’, instead of the word for ‘tree (with trunk)’. ‘Treetrunk’ would be a better match for ‘dugout canoe’.

  • The sound correspondences are haphazard. The “ancient Chumash” form tomolo’o is paired with modern Hawaiian kumulaa‘au. But the “ancient” Eastern Polynesian form for the latter would have been something like *tumu ‘trunk’ plus *la‘akau ‘wood’. It wasn’t just Polynesian *t that shifted to k in Hawaiian (and that fairly recently); Polynesian *k had earlier shifted to ‘ (glottal stop). So, if we’re going to restore Hawaiian kumu to Polynesian *tumu to make it match Chumash tomo- then we also need to restore Hawaiian laa‘au to Polynesian *la‘akau, where *la‘a would have to match Chumash -lo and *kau would match Chumash -‘o. Let’s not even talk about the vowels, which famously count for little in historical and comparative linguistics.

It wouldn’t be at all surprising if ancient Polynesians had visited the coast of North America. They apparently reached the coast of South America, from which they brought back the sweet potato. But the evidence they had anything to do with Chumash ocean-going canoes is far from convincing.

SOURCE: Hawaiian Dictionary, revised and enlarged edition, by Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel H. Elbert (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1986).

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by | 12 February 2005 · 8:28 am

Gen. Sheridan’s Black Spy, 1864

The victory of the Union’s Army of the Shenandoah on 19 September 1864 at the third battle of Winchester (Opequon Creek) shattered the Confederate army in the upper Shenandoah Valley. Partial credit for the success of General Phil Sheridan was due to Thomas Laws, a Berryville, Clarke County, slave owned by prominent Winchester attorney Richard E. Byrd. Sheridan, in need of confirmation about the disposition of Confederate general Jubal Early’s 2d Corps, sent two scouts to gather military intelligence. Laws and his wife were sitting outside their cabin one Sunday evening when the pair approached and soon ascertained that the black couple lacked admiration for the Confederacy.

Discovering that Laws possessed a pass from the local Confederate commander permitting him to sell vegetables three times a week in Winchester, the scouts arranged for him to meet Sheridan personally. After the two men discussed the impending mission, Sheridan, completely convinced of Laws’s loyalty, composed a message on tissue paper to Rebecca Wright, a Unionist Quaker schoolteacher. The note was compressed into a small pellet and wrapped in tinfoil so that Laws could conceal it in his mouth to be swallowed if he was searched or captured. At worse, Wright risked imprisonment or banishment to Union lines, but for Laws death, the ancient penalty for espionage, loomed as a distinct possibility. Described as “loyal and shrewd” in Sheridan’s memoirs (the general did not mention him by name, only as “an old colored man”), Laws delivered the message without detection. Wright’s reply confirmed that Early’s forces had been substantially reduced by large transfers to Petersburg to reinforce Lee; three days later the Union achieved a major victory, but few knew that the patriotism of one Afro-Virginian had made it all possible. Afterwards Rebecca Wright was rewarded with a position in the Treasury Department in Washington; Thomas Laws died a free and respected citizen in 1898.

SOURCE: Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia, by Ervin L. Jordan Jr. (U. Press of Virginia, 1995), p. 285

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by | 12 February 2005 · 7:21 am

Black Confederates as the Great White Hope

The Confederacy, in dire straits by 1864, began seriously to consider the arming of black men for its armies. Desperate times gave impetus to desperate measures and the need to exploit every possible resource. Southern whites began suggesting the forging of a new biracial military coalition, the war’s second, for the North had begun to enroll black soldiers in 1863.

Afro-Virginians had reason to assume that their situation was going to improve, however slightly. It remained to be seen if the Southern revolution’s alliance with loyal blacks would lead to legislated policies benefiting blacks and eliminating most slavery. However, Afro-Virginians were likely to comprise the majority of any Confederate States Colored Troops (CSCT). Black political and social equality in the fullest sense was an impossibility, but gaining a few minor rights was not inconceivable. Not all Southern blacks acquiesced in the belief of white supremacy, but most ascertained that their peculiar status might be ameliorated into racial coexistence….

The arming of slaves gained in popularity despite objections from Virginia’s neighbor, North Carolina, which passed resolutions denying the confederacy’s right to undertake this precarious war measure. A bill authorizing the use of black soldiers was introduced in the Confederate Congress by Ethelbert Barksdale of Mississippi and approved on 13 March 1865; ten days earlier Virginia’s General Assembly had repealed the restrictions on the bearing of arms by black soldiers after General Lee expressed his crucial need of them….

The new law established a quota of 300,000 blacks between the ages of eighteen and forty-five to be called up from Virginia and the other Confederate states. The slaves and free blacks were to be organized into companies, regiments, battalions, and brigades.

Afro-Confederate soldiers were to receive the same allowances, clothing, pay, and rations as their white counterparts. The Confederate Congress, satisfied with its work, adjourned but not before giving itself a collective pat on the back in the form of a resolution by Virginia representative Frederick W.M. Holliday commending its accomplishments. “We shall have a negro army” wrote a not-too-surprised government clerk. “It is the desperate remedy for the very desperate.”…

Accurate and balanced appraisals must take into account the potential contributions of Confederate States Colored Troops: the availability of black manpower, the potential paralysis of segments of the Union war effort due to Northern blacks being viewed as “fifth columns,” and carefully fostered divisions among black populations South and North to maintain white superiority. Blacks who wore Confederate gray have been denied or forgotten by history. Under appropriate situations the South could have mobilized them into a potent fighting force for independence, but the successful enlistment of black Confederate soldiers could have transpired only with the active participation of Afro-Virginian males, even though one suspects they were inclined to fight for Virginia rather than the Confederacy. But Virginia disregarded the gallant record of black soldiers and seamen during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Many Afro-Virginians awaited a similar call to arms during the Civil War. It came too late.

SOURCE: Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia, by Ervin L. Jordan Jr. (U. Press of Virginia, 1995), pp. 232, 237, 242, 251

P.S. General Lee surrendered at Appomattox on 9 April 1865, less than a month after the bill was enacted.

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by | 11 February 2005 · 9:12 am

Studying in the Soviet Union in the 1960s

David McDuff‘s retrospective on studying in the Soviet Union in the 1960s continues. The following are only short excerpts from each post.

Going Back V

It’s hard now, in retrospect, to recreate or even re-invoke the atmosphere of those years. At home, in Britain, there was a sense of social change, the dropping of old certainties and taboos and also a degree of willingness to experiment with new lifestyles and patterns of living. This was accompanied by the burgeoning pop culture, the new cults of fashion, drugs and sex, the advent of rock music, the Beatles and the Stones, and the Wilson government with its slightly tongue-in-cheek, but none the less real commitment to the “white-hot technological revolution”. It all had an air of adventure, but at the same an innocence whose essence is hard to recapture or understand nowadays. In some ways, as students (our official designation was that of “scholars”) travelling on British Council stipends and the recipients of a Foreign Office briefing, we were, I guess, meant to be representatives of the New Britain, carrying the Western way of life into the heart of the Soviet monolith, in the hope – entertained by some – that some of it would rub off and act as diplomatic grease for the rather rusty state of British-Soviet relations at the time (strangely, perhaps, the installation of a Labour government at Westminster and Whitehall had led to more, not less tension between London and Moscow).

Going Back VI

In the morning, we all left the train with our luggage and were herded into another bus. Our mood was generally cheerful, though also somewhat apprehensive. To begin with, the group was housed at a university hostel (studencheskoye obshchezhitie) on Lomonosovsky Prospekt, with the promise that in a couple of weeks’ time we would be transferred to the main university building. The university district, in Moscow’s south-western suburbs, is a rather characterless and sprawling area of geometrically planned avenues, which also takes in Lenin Hills (Lenskie Gory, now Sparrow Hills, Vorobyevye Gory), and the university skyscraper. Our hostel was a five-storey building, indistinguishable from the other five-storey apartment blocks that stretched for kilometre after kilometre on either side. We were fortunate enough to each receive a room to ourselves, though we soon realized what a luxury this was – most of the Soviet students in the building had to share two, three or even four to a room. For the first day or two we restricted our outside forays to such activities as finding the nearest foodstore – something of a necessity, as the university stolovayas (dining-rooms) were situated some distance away. We got used to queuing for such items as bread, kolbasa (sausage), cheese, and so on, and then joining the second queue at the cashier’s desk, in order to pay. The whole process could take as long as an hour. Back at the hostel, we experimented with cans of pork and salted fish, which we prised open and devoured in the floor’s communal kitchen.

Going Back VII

In the basement of Zones B and V were the stolovayas (dining rooms) and shops and stores. Here we could spend our money. We were fortunate by comparison with our Soviet colleagues, receiving a monthly stipend of 250 rubles, supplemented with a monthly British Council grant of £25 in hard currency traveller’s cheques. Most Soviet students had to subsist on a maximum monthly stipend of 150 rubles, many receiving less than this. At this time, one ruble was supposed to be equivalent to one US dollar. The main stolovaya was a self-service canteen which, for very little money, provided a basic diet of shchi (cabbage soup) or borshch (borsch), kotlety (meatballs, usually served with rice), cabbage and/or carrot salad, sour cream, kumys (fermented mare’s milk), kompot (stewed dried fruit in a tumbler, really a kind of fruit juice), black bread and/or white bread, and tea. This was served for all meals, including breakfast. It could be eaten for two or three days before becoming intolerably repetitive. There was also a coffee bar, which was supposed to serve coffee, though I never saw any during all the time I spent in MGU. There was also a store selling such delicacies as Soviet champagne, wine, cigarettes, Cuban cigars and candy. Outside the main building, on Prospekt Vernadskogo and Kutuzovsky Prospekt there were foodstores (gastronom) which sold staple groceries, and it was even possible to buy fresh meat if one was prepared to queue for a long time. If one was feeling especially extravagant, in certain areas of town there were also the so-called beryozka hard currency stores, earmarked for the use of Communist Party officials and high-ranking bureaucrats, but also open to foreign diplomats and their families. Some of these stores sold fresh fruit (often virtually unobtainable with rubles) and superior quality cuts of meat, and after a little argument one could usually be served by presenting one’s traveller’s cheques to the kassirsha behind the often brutally overcrowded sales counter, though this often involved prolonged arguments about whether one’s signature was genuine or not.

Going Back VIII

Lidiya Prokofyevna, or “L.P.” as we soon began to call her, was in charge of all the foreign “philology” (arts and humanities) students in the building and its environs. Her office was therefore often very busy, and the time spent waiting outside it for one’s appointment, which was sometimes delayed by up to two hours or more, could be considerable. When one did gain access to the inner sanctum, one began to realize why these delays occurred. To begin with, L.P. would fix you with her somewhat steely, but none the less friendly gaze, through thick glasses, and ask you questions about your zayavlenie, or application for research and archive facilities. When she had learned what she wanted to know, she would pick up the telephone and call the relevant authorities – however, the people at the other end of the line usually seemed to be busy or absent: the phone would go and ringing and ringing, and L.P. would sit there looking at you through her glasses. She might then briefly change the subject to the questions of how you were faring in Zone V, or who your group leader was, or some such topic, but would then revert to silent waiting, as the phone at the other end of the line continued to ring and ring. Sometimes this process of waiting went on for ten minutes or more – then she would call another number, with the same result, and so on. Eventually the required information would come through, and L.P. would issue instructions about the appointment with the archive director, librarian or other official. I think most of us found these sessions in L.P.’s office something of a Kafkaesque joke – and what made the joke even funnier was that L.P. seemed to share an awareness of the absurdity of the situation. Eventually one day, the leader (or starosta) of our group and his deputy brought her flowers and chocolates, which finally seemed to break the ice.

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by | 11 February 2005 · 8:42 am

Soviet vs. Western Dissidents

Here’s an excerpt from what A Step at a Time has to say about Cold War dissidents.

In the 1960s and early 1970s there existed an almost complete disparity, a dislocation, even, between the dissident movement in Soviet Russia and the radical movements in the West (those which gravitated around the Paris “revolution” of 1968, for example). While Western radicals sometimes paid lip service to Soviet dissidents – and there was a mild flurry of sympathy for them during the events that immediately followed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 – in general there was an almost total lack of comprehension on both sides. Western radicals could not understand the admiration felt by most Soviet dissidents for Western democracy and culture, while most Soviet dissidents were appalled by the disdain and hatred felt by much of the Western radical left for Western society. Later, this dislocation crystallized out in the situation described by Sharansky in The Case for Democracy, where Western “ban-the-bomb” marchers walked side by side with KGB operatives who were bent on exploiting the radical left-wing and peace movements, while in the Soviet Union, anti-nuclear protesters and peace activists languished in jails and prison camps.

Looking back on it now, it’s hard to see how anyone could seriously have compared the two movements – the radical Western left and the Soviet dissidents. While the Western students and activists were free to utter their opinions, hold public demonstrations and even burn down buildings, in the Soviet Union those who resisted the established order were imprisoned, tortured and killed. “Who could turn away from themselves even under enormous strain, after seeing Ginzburg’s tenacious refusal to compromise?” Cali Ruchala writes. Although the dissident movement was by no means homogeneous, and comprised different levels and qualities of disagreement with the power of authority, the example of fortitude, moral sanity and defiance, even under impossible conditions of repression, shown by Ginzburg and others like him was simply over the heads of most Western observers, even those who for their own political and ideological reasons wanted to sympathize with the Soviet outcasts.

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by | 10 February 2005 · 8:49 am

Nick Kristof on North Korea

In the 10 February edition of the New York Review of Books, Nick Kristof reviews two recent books about North Korea: Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s) and Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies by Victor D. Cha and David C. Kang (Columbia University Press).

Kristof captures at least two interesting ironies:

Americans routinely try to increase the country’s isolation by trying to cut off its few links to the outside world, even though this only increases the longevity of the regime. [This, of course, is exactly why the Kim dynasty tries to keep its subjects isolated.]

For example, Western journalists and commentators have periodically written exposés about North Korean labor camps on Russian territory in Siberia. These are typically logging camps or occasionally mines where North Korean laborers, under North Korean supervision, work for negligible wages, without any freedom to engage in political activity, under constant guard so that they cannot escape. Westerners have assumed that the workers are slave laborers forced to toil in the grim conditions of Siberia, and they have demanded that Russia crack down on such abuses.

The articles seemed persuasive to me. But in fact, Martin writes, the laborers were not forced to go to Russia but went willingly:

Indeed, they had competed fiercely, using bribes and any other means available, to exert enough influence on North Korean officials to get themselves on the list. They saw going to Russia as their tickets to wealth otherwise almost unimaginable by North Korean standards. The work was approximately as arduous as what they would have experienced back at home. The big difference besides huge salary increases was that it was possible to leave the camps occasionally and interact with Russians and ethnic Koreans and Chinese in nearby communities. Many loggers were transformed by experiencing Russia’s relatively liberalized atmosphere.

Martin cites interviews with defectors like Chang Ki Hong, who said that the average income in North Korea was about sixty won a month, but that in Russia he got nine hundred won a month. The thousands of North Korean workers in the camps were all under North Korean supervision and were not permitted to leave the restricted area without a pass but they did get to see something of the country. But those allowed to work in the camps were transformed by the experience. “Until I got to the Soviet Union, I believed in the regime,” Chang Ki Hong said.

But when I got to the Soviet Union and started meeting people there, I realized there must be something wrong back home. It was after I had been there about six months that my mentality started to change. We are taught that the whole world worships Kim Il Sung. I met Russians who made fun of this Kim worship, and then I realized that he was not in fact worshipped by the whole world.

Ultimately, Chang defected from the work camp, as did others among these laborers in Russia. But partly because of pressure from Western human rights activists, and partly because of Russia’s 1998 economic crisis, almost all of those North Korean laborers have since been sent home—a loss, it would seem, for human rights.

Shades of blackbirding (PDF) in the South Pacific! Now compare the role of missionaries in the South Pacific, or the relative success of Christian missionaries in Japan and Korea.

The evidence suggests that Kim Il Sung was a genuine nationalist hero and guerrilla leader, albeit not nearly so heroic as the later hagiographers would suggest, since his group’s attacks on the Japanese were not decisive in the war.

More remarkable, it turns out, Kim’s father was a Christian. Korea was fertile ground for Christianity in the early twentieth century, partly because Christianity was a way to quietly express defiance of the Japanese colonial rulers who had formally annexed the country in 1910. Kim’s father attended a school founded by missionaries, and later attended church regularly; he was also a church organist. He taught Kim Il Sung to be an organist as well, and the boy attended church throughout his teens. “I, too, was interested in church,” he once wrote, but later “I became tired of the tedious religious ceremony and the monotonous preaching of the minister, so I seldom went,” although he acknowledged receiving “a great deal of humanitarian assistance from Christians.” Still, after taking power, Kim completely wiped out Christianity from his country, keeping a couple of churches for show but staffing them with actors and actresses to impress foreign visitors with his tolerance.

Ironically, in view of his ideological extremism in later life, Kim was initially accused by other guerrillas of being a “rightist deviationist,” and he complained that some guerrillas were too ideological and not pragmatic enough. Yet Kim genuinely did fight hard against the Japanese at a time when many Koreans (including many future South Korean officials) were quislings of the hated occupiers. Those nationalistic credentials gave Kim Il Sung an authenticity and moral authority among Koreans that leaders in the South lacked, and that is one reason why many ethnic Koreans in Japan (even those from the southern half of Korea) have sided with North Korea rather than with South Korea. They weren’t Communists; they were nationalists. Some moved to North Korea in the 1960s, thus ruining their own lives and those of their families.

via The Marmot

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by | 10 February 2005 · 8:27 am

North Korea Tries to Censor Czechs

For those of you who are still a bit befuddled how everything on this disparate bunch of blogposts ties together, I give you this headline from the CBC: North Korea calls for ban on ‘Team America’ in Czech Republic. Go Czechs! And congrats Japan! And go Canada!

via NKZone

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by | 10 February 2005 · 7:41 am

Pol Pot’s Slave State

In the 1 February edition of the Christian Science Monitor, Clayton Jones reviews journalist Philip Short’s (psycho)biography of Pol Pot.

Reading the biography of a 20th-century tyrant takes courage. The tales of atrocities can be numbing, the motives unclear, and the lessons uncertain. Evil seems like a lurking character in such books, either in one man, the body politic, or foreign players, and is eventually exposed as, well, a rather stupid mistake….

Short’s contribution is in describing Pol Pot’s Cambodia as a modern slave state, as North Korea still is. Even today, Cambodia is ruled autocratically by former minor Khmer Rouge leaders, despite the efforts of the United Nations to bring democracy there. (Pol Pot’s top men may face trial next year.)

Much like slavery’s demise, the Khmer Rouge’s downfall was due largely to its internal contradiction in denying each person’s basic humanity. Its leaders eventually turned on themselves in a paranoid purge that provided an opening for Vietnam to invade Cambodia.

Just before he died in 1998 in a jungle hideout – unrepentant and unpunished – Pol Pot claimed in an interview that his conscience was clear and that he had done it all for his country. Like other tyrants of his century, we may never know enough about him to draw the right conclusions. Short’s book, however, takes us more than half way there.

via Arts & Letters Daily

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by | 9 February 2005 · 6:10 pm

Generals Grant & Sherman vs. the Press

“Grant was a long way from the flagpole, and he had a pretty long leash. He had taken thirteen thousand casualties at Shiloh, and while he finally had a national reputation, he knew that if he failed here he would be cast aside.”

So far, Grant’s Civil War career had demonstrated how war, like the frontier, provides the opportunity for meritocratic advancement. Grant had exploited one narrow opening after another. Having failed at farming and real estate, Grant, who had finished in the unimpressive lower middle of his class at West Point, showed a knack for leadership once the war began: he volunteered for the army, then recruited, equipped, and drilled troops at Galena, Illinois. In late 1861, he captured Belmont, on the Mississippi River between St. Louis and Memphis, but this campaign had not been specifically ordered, and the press criticized Grant for an unnecessary engagement. Then, in February 1862, Grant won the first major Union victory of the war when he captured fifteen thousand Confederate troops at Fort Donelson, on the Cumberland River in Tennessee. In April at Shiloh Church, near Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, Grant repulsed an unexpected Confederate offensive, but with such heavy losses that the press raged at him, though military historians now see Shiloh as a Union triumph. The captains and majors [on an excursion from Fort Leavenworth] argued that had the interfering press then been more influential than it was, Grant and Sherman both might have been removed from command and the war prolonged for lack of aggressive Union generals. (Sherman celebrated with his aides when he learned that four reporters had been killed near Vicksburg.)

As I had learned at Fort Leavenworth, the power of the media foreshadows the end of the heroic period in American military history. Great battles of the type fought by Grant and Eisenhower mean risk and blood and a wide berth for error.

SOURCE: An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future, by Robert D. Kaplan (Vintage, 1998), pp. 346-347

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