by | 10 May 2004 · 5:47 pm

Anti-Vaccination Fever

The January 2004 issue of Skeptical Inquirer ran a report by William John Hoyt, Jr., under the title “Anti-Vaccination Fever: The Shot Hurt Around the World”:

Sensationalist media, religious fanatics, and alternative medical practitioners fanned the fires created by questionable research to spawn worldwide epidemics of a disease that had almost been forgotten.

“A poignant television story of a victim of a rare reaction to a vaccine can render invisible the vast good brought about by this same vaccine.” — John Allen Paulos

When pertussis takes hold, the infected person makes horrid, whooping sounds as he inhales. When he gets a chance to inhale. Which isn’t often during the torturous “paroxysmal phase,” characterized by sudden attacks of repetitive, severe coughing. The disease’s Latin name, pertussis, translates as “intensive cough.” But whooping cough, the common name, does a far better job of describing the unique whooping sound the disease’s victim makes when, finally, he gets a chance to breathe….

You have probably imagined an adult victim while reading thus far. In fact, before an effective vaccine became available, pertussis had been a worldwide leading cause of infant deaths. Before the 1940s, it was a major cause of infant and child morbidity and mortality in the U.S. (CDC 2002). From 1890 to 1940, in New South Wales, whooping cough killed more children under five than diphtheria. It was second only to gastroenteritis as a cause of infant deaths (Hamilton 1979)….

Fear and Loathing on the Vaccine Trail

In 1906, researchers discovered that the Bordatela pertussis bacterium caused pertussis. Within twenty years of that discovery, the first whole-cell pertussis vaccine was developed (Research Defence Society 1999). After two decades of testing and refinement, many countries accepted varying versions of a whole-cell pertussis vaccine, established vaccination protocols, and began to vaccinate their citizens. Many of the vaccine manufacturers produced a combined diphtheria-tetanus-whole cell pertussis (DTP) vaccine.

For most countries, as vaccination coverage increased, both the frequency and severity of pertussis epidemics markedly declined. Ironically, this success actually may have been the vaccine’s undoing, as presaged in this pointed 1960 British Medical Journal commentary: “When immunization results in the virtual elimination of a disease it is inevitable that some will question the continued need for routine inoculation of all infants” (Editors 1960).

The first hint of a problem came from Sweden in 1960, less than ten years into its vaccination program. Sweden had previously seen pertussis incidence rates as high as nearly 300 per 100,000. By 1960, the incidence rates were merely a third of that and falling (Gangarosa et al. 1998). It was at this time that Justus Ström, an influential Swedish medical leader, questioned the continuing need for pertussis vaccines. In his British Medical Journal paper, he claimed pertussis was no longer a serious disease because of economic, social, and general medical progress. Furthermore, he cited thirty-six cases of neurological conditions that he attributed to the whole cell pertussis vaccine, calculating an alarming neurological complication rate of 1 in 6,000 (Ström 1960)….

Then in the United Kingdom, in 1974, Kulenkampff and his colleagues published a paper citing another thirty-six cases of neurological reactions that they attributed to the whole cell pertussis vaccine. The paper’s evidence was weak on several fronts acknowledged by the authors. They clearly stated they “do not know either the prevalence of natural infection or the frequency of inoculation encephalopathy (brain diseases resulting from vaccination) in the population we serve” (Kulenkampff et al. 1974). And they noted that “in as many as a third of our patients there were contraindications to inoculation with pertussis vaccine, in that there was a previous history of fits, or family history of seizures in a first-degree relative; reaction to previous inoculation; recent intercurrent infection; or presumed neurodevelopmental defect” (Kulenkampff et al. 1974).

Despite the authors’ appropriately cautious approach to their paper, the anti-vaccination advocates seized upon it, and the media ran with it. Soon after the paper’s publication, British television aired a program on the whooping cough vaccine. Focusing on the anecdotal evidence of terrible adverse reactions supposedly caused by the vaccine, it presented little of the clear good the vaccine had done historically.

The negative press and television coverage persisted for years….

Brief summaries and graphs then detail how pertussis infection rates spiked to epidemic levels in countries where panicked medical establishments abandoned or severely cut back on vaccination programs.

Returning to the Status Quo Ante Botchum

The epidemics shocked many of the nations that experienced them, although official and public responses have varied. Many countries introduced acellular pertussis vaccine as a “safer” alternative to the whole-cell vaccine. Some have also tried to control the problem by introducing more vaccination boosters to the protocol. But other countries, those whose vaccination programs were unaffected by anti-vaccination movements, haven’t experienced these epidemics at all. These countries include Portugal, Hungary, Norway, the former East Germany, Poland, and, until recently, the U.S.

Japan’s reaction to its epidemic was swiftest and strongest. By 1981, Japan resumed vaccination with an acellular pertussis vaccine and pertussis incidence rates returned to their pre-fiasco levels. The United Kingdom’s vaccine uptake rate began slowly climbing, and by the 1990s reached levels exceeding those prior to the hysteria. English and Welsh pertussis incidence rates declined accordingly.

Sweden, however, remains plagued with high pertussis rates. As recently as 1996, and despite continuing epidemics, Sweden had yet to resume vaccinations (Cherry 1996). Australia’s efforts to halt pertussis continue to be thwarted by a passive anti-vaccination movement. The 2001-2002 epidemic bears witness to that. The Russian Federation has also failed to regain control and today has one of the highest pertussis incidence rates in the developed world.

Distorted numbers, confusion of correlation with causation, and statistical innumeracy certainly played roles in this sad story. Sensationalist media campaigns fanned the glowing embers. But in each of the countries that experienced the raging fires of epidemics there were other forces at work. Most prominent in passive anti-vaccination movements were religious groups whose opposition was based on religious or moral grounds. Prominent in both passive and active anti-vaccination movements are followers and practitioners of homeopathy, chiropractic, and natural and alternative medicine (Gangarosa et al. 1998)….

When anti-vaccination alarm takes hold–characterized by sudden attacks of the media, mistaken researchers, fervent religious groups, and alternative medicine quacks–the infected society begins to make horrid, whoppingly bad decisions. There is, as yet, no Latin name for this peculiar social disease.

via Arts & Letters Daily

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by | 9 May 2004 · 11:19 pm

Tired of School? Try SBSWMD U.

Tired of college or grad school? Try The Successful Beach and Shallow Water Metal Detecting University (U.K.). We now return to our regularly scheduled posting.

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by | 9 May 2004 · 8:18 am

Orthodox Old Believer Occidentalism

Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit’s new book on Occidentalism stretches the label to cover an awfully wide range of phenomena. (One could no doubt make a similar claim about the range of phenomena to which the label “Orientalism” has been applied since the appearance of Edward Said’s book by that name in 1978.)

In the words of reviewer Daniel Moran in Strategic Insights (May 2004):

The real subject of the authors’ reflections is not the West as a historical reality but modernity as a complex of ideas, attitudes, and practices. For them the “West” is any place where modernity–here broadly synonymous with limited, responsible government and a respect for individual rights and scientific rationality–has prevailed. Occidentalists are those, wherever situated, who have found the modern to be intolerably corrosive of traditional values: decadent, rootless, alienated, materialist, morally soft, and spiritually bereft. Such people arose first in the West, because it was there that the challenges of modernity were first experienced.

The following passage from Occidentalism illustrates how Buruma and Margalit seek to lump Russian Orthodox “Old Believers” into the Occidentalist camp.

The standard theological bone of contention in the Greek Orthodox Church was the nature of the Godhead. Theology was taken very seriously in Roman Catholicism as well. Its various schisms came from theological debates about the nature of man. To be sure, there is always something else involved in a split besides the declared religious issues, but it is a serious mistake to deny that there are true believers, and moreover believers who are willing to fight and die for their beliefs.

The Russian church, however, was not just relatively indifferent to theology; it actively resisted the idea of turning religion into a form of geometry. Religion, it maintained, was a spiritual enterprise, not an intellectual one. Devotion to icons should count more than a clever gloss of chapter and verse. There was, in fact, a major schism in the Russian church, but this did not come from any intellectual rift. In 1652, Nikon, the patriarch of Moscow, tried to reform the Russian church to bring it more in line with the Eastern Greek church. The reforms affected old customs: three hallelujahs instead of two, five consecrated loaves instead of seven, the procession against the sun rather than in the direction of the sun, and even a change of spelling of Jesus’ name. These examples show that the schism was not about creed, even though those who opposed the reforms are described as the Old Believers. It was about ritual customs. The Old Believers threw stones at an official church procession in the Kremlin for walking in the wrong direction, but not because the church was going astray in matters of dogma. Creed is associated with the Western church, but custom belongs to the East.

At least two elements of Russian religious culture anticipated Occidentalism. The stress on intellectual matters in the Catholic church was a sure sign, to Russian believers, that it was lacking in simple and pure-hearted faith. The other element, which was at the root of the schism in the Russian Orthodox Church, was a deep suspicion of any innovation. Novelty, to these believers, was always something that came from the outside. It was deemed to be inauthentic and humiliating, suggesting that there was something essentially lacking in the old ways. This religious sensibility cuts very deep. It views the church not as a source of new knowledge, but as the depository of collective memory, the memory of Rus as a holy community. Memory and simple faith are the main virtues of the human mind, not reason and the newfangled sophistry it produces. Mysticism, expressing a higher mode of existence, was valued much more than the exertions of a methodical mind.

The Old Believers sensed that behind Nikon’s reforms lay a host of Greek priests who had arrived from Kiev with the old strategy of domination by complication–that is, complicating beyond recognition the religious life of the true believers and thus taking charge of telling them what to do. Simple religious life was, to the Old Believers, something quintessentially Russian, whereas Nikon’s new manual of worship was foreign, artificial, and inauthentic.

SOURCE: Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit (Penguin Press, 2004), pp. 84-85

I wonder where Buruma and Margalit’s approach in Occidentalism intersects with that of Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, which I haven’t yet read. The title is certainly catchy.

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by | 9 May 2004 · 7:59 am

Better Pacific-to-Europe Overland Routes Planned

The BBC recently reported on plans for a direct China to Europe rail-link using new narrow gauge tracks through Kazakhstan. The new line would be much faster than the Trans-Siberian link.

The Kazakh rail chief told the BBC work would shortly begin on the first part of a 3,000 kilometre train line to link China to Iran and the Caspian Sea.

It is hoped the time cargo from Pacific Ocean ports takes to reach western Europe will eventually be cut by half.

The current time freight takes on the same journey is 50 days by sea, or 15 days using the Trans-Siberian railway.

“It will definitely be faster than the Trans-Siberian railway,” the head of Kazakhstan’s national railways, Yerlan Atamkulov said.

“If today on the Trans-Siberian railway freight takes 15-16 days, then on the Kazakhstan transit railway, it will take eight days.”

Kazakh and Russian railways use broad gauge tracks while Europe and China use international narrow gauge tracks.

Kazakhstan intends to build a new narrow-gauge railway line straight across its vast territory to the Caspian Sea, eliminating the time and cost needed to transfer goods from narrower to wider trains at the Chinese border….

Earlier this week, 23 Asian nations, including both Kazakhstan and China, signed an agreement in Shanghai to build an international highway network across Asia linking Tokyo with Istanbul in another grand scheme to improve transport links across Asia.

Asahi.com maps the route of the “Asia Highway”: Tokyo – Fukuoka – Seoul – Pyongyang – Beijing – Hanoi – Bangkok – Yangon (Rangoon) – New Delhi – Islamabad – Kabul – Tehran – Istanbul.

It’s all about the freight!

via huixing no nikki

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by | 8 May 2004 · 9:26 pm

Ethnicity, Peasants, and Tribes in Vietnam

Vietnam is a multi-ethnic state composed of fifty-four officially recognized ethnic groups. It is unique among Southeast Asian countries, but similar to China, in that its ethnic minorities constitute only a relatively small fraction of the national population but occupy a vast part of the national territory, giving them a strategic importance greatly disproportionate to their numbers. The Vietnamese minorities, even those in the Central Highlands, also primarily occupy sensitive borders. The minorities are thus an extremely important component of Vietnamese society and ethnic relations are a matter of intense concern to the ruling Communist Party and the state.

Vietnam’s ethnic minorities make up only 14 per cent of the national population. The lowland Vietnamese, who are officially designated as Kinh, form the vast majority … almost 66 million [in 1999] …

All of Vietnam’s ethnic groups live in the uplands with the exception of the Kinh, Hoa (ethnic Chinese), Khmer (Cambodians), and Cham [who speak Austronesian languages apparently most closely related that spoken in Aceh, Indonesia]….

From a political standpoint, perhaps the most significant distinction between groups is whether they have tribal or peasant forms of social organization. Shifting cultivators, … who are often collectively referred to by the French term ‘montagnards’, and the H’Mong and Dao of the northern mountains, display a tribal form of organization. Tribal society is relatively egalitarian and highly individualistic with leadership based on personal achievement rather than holding of a formal status. The Muong, Tay and Thai of the northern uplands were formerly organized as rank-stratified chiefdoms with people divided into nobles and commoners. Today, like the Cham and Khmer of the south they are peasant societies, as are the Kinh. Their social organization is hierarchical with centralized and institutionalized leadership. Of course, since 1954, all these groups have been integrated into the Vietnamese nation-state and their traditional forms of socio-political organizations largely supplanted by state administrative organs. But, at the local level, behaviour is still strongly shaped by traditional cultural institutions and values. These patterns have strongly influenced the extent to which different ethnic groups have been integrated into the socialist nation-state. Peasant societies were readily integrated into the nation-state by a simple substitution of administrative elites in which communist cadre took the place of traditional mandarins or local nobility. Integration of tribally organized groups has proved to be more difficult, reflecting the fact that leadership of such societies is charismatic rather than based on ascribed status or bureaucratic position, making it difficult for the state to either co-opt tribal leaders or replace them with their own cadre. Pan-tribal associations such as clans also provide ready-made channels of communication among different communities within the ethnic group and facilitate organization of separatist movements that are very difficult for state security organs to penetrate. Thus it is among tribal societies that separatist tendencies remain most evident. [emphasis added]

SOURCE: “Vietnam,” by A. Terry Rambo [really!], in Ethnicity in Asia, ed. by Colin Mackerras (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), pp. 108-112

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by | 7 May 2004 · 9:17 pm

Communism and Buddhism in Vietnam during the Colonial Era

On the 50th anniversary of the end of the long battle of Dien Bien Phu, in which French colonial forces were decisively defeated at terrible cost to both sides, it seems appropriate to feature a revisionist book that argues that what most appealed to the reading public in Vietnam during the colonial era was neither Confucianism, nor nationalism, nor modernism, nor even communism, but Buddhism, so central to Vietnamese national identity.

In this ambitious and path-breaking book, Shawn McHale challenges long held views that define modern Vietnamese history in terms of anticolonial nationalism and revolution. McHale argues instead for a historiography that does not overstress either the role of politics in general or Communism in particular. Using a wide range of sources from Vietnam, France, and the United States, many of them previously unexploited, he shows how the use of printed matter soared between 1920 and 1945 and in the process transformed Vietnamese public life and shaped the modern Vietnamese consciousness.Print and Power begins with an overview of Vietnam’s lively public spheres, bringing debates from Europe and the rest of Asia to Vietnamese studies with nuance and sophistication. It examines the impact of the French colonial state on Vietnamese society as well as Vietnamese and East Asian understandings of public discourse and public space. Popular taste, rather than revolutionary or national ideology, determined to a large extent what was published, with limited intervention by the French authorities. A vibrant but hierarchical public realm of debate existed in Vietnam under authoritarian colonial rule.

The work goes on to contest the impact of Confucianism on premodern and modern Vietnam and, based on materials never before used, provides a radically new perspective on the rise of Vietnamese communism from 1929 to 1945. Novel interpretations of the Nghe Tinh soviets (1930-1931), the first major communist uprising in Vietnam, and Vietnamese communist successes in World War II built an audience for their views and made an extremely alien ideology comprehensible to growing numbers of Vietnamese. In what is by far the most thorough examination in English of modern Vietnamese Buddhism and its transformations, McHale argues that, contrary to received wisdom, Buddhism was not in decline during the 1920-1945 period; in fact, more Buddhist texts were produced in Vietnam at that time than at any other in its history. This finding suggests that the heritage of the Vietnamese past played a crucial role in the late colonial period.

SOURCE: Shawn McHale, Print and Power: Confucianism, Communism, and Buddhism in the Making of Modern Vietnam (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2003).

RECOMMENDATION: Adjust your speakers, click on the Dien Bien Phu link, and explore the site for 10 minutes while you listen to the haunting Concerto de l’adieu of Georges Delerue © SCPP, 1999/2000. Whatever one thinks of the cause for which either side fought, there were no “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” at Dien Bien Phu.

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by | 7 May 2004 · 6:10 pm

China’s Changing Policies toward Tibet, and Indonesia’s toward West Papua

The East-West Center has published two more studies, one on China’s evolving policy toward Tibet and the other on Indonesia’s toward West Papua. Abstracts follow. The full reports are available for download.

Beijing’s Tibet Policy: Securing Sovereignty and Legitimacy, by Allen Carlson. Policy Studies 4. Washington, DC: East-West Center Washington, 2004. ix, 71 pp. Paper, $5.00.

This paper examines the main contours of Beijing’s Tibet policy since the start of the reform era (1979 to the present). It argues that throughout this period China’s position on Tibet has always been concerned with defending Chinese sovereignty, more specifically jurisdictional sovereignty, over the region. Since 1979, the ways in which the Chinese acted to secure such rights, however, have varied significantly, in two distinct phases. During the initial phase, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Chinese position was marked by the implementation of relatively moderate policies. In the second phase, which began in late 1987, and continues today, the Chinese position on Tibet has been defined by highly critical discursive moves, pointed diplomatic activity, a renewed commitment to use force to silence all opposition to Chinese rule, and the utilization of economic development programs to augment such efforts. This essay contends that three forces were crucial in determining Chinese policy on Tibet during these two periods: the underlying strategic value of Tibet to Beijing within the regional security dynamic, the persistence of historically conditioned, sovereign-centric values within elite circles in China, and the internal and external pressures created by Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening” line. The complexity of these factors suggest that understanding how Beijing acts vis-à-vis Tibet requires that students of international relations and security studies, as well as policymakers and activists, look beyond parsimonious explanations and single-faceted policy directions when considering the “Tibet issue.”

The Papua Conflict: Jakarta’s Perceptions and Policies, by Richard Chauvel and Ikrar Nusa Bhakti. Policy Studies 5. Washington, DC: East-West Center Washington, 2004. x, 82 pp. Paper, $5.00.

“Without Irian Jaya [Papua], Indonesia is not complete to become the national territory of the Unitary Republic of Indonesia.” In recalling this statement of President Sukarno, her father, Megawati Sukarnoputri gave voice to the essence of the nationalists’ conception of Papua’s place in Indonesia and its importance. Indonesia today confronts renewed Papuan demands for independence nearly three decades after Jakarta thought it had liberated the Papuans from the yoke of Dutch colonialism. Indonesia’s sovereignty in Papua has been contested for much of the period since Indonesia proclaimed its independence–challenged initially by the Netherlands and since 1961 by various groups within Papuan society. This study argues that even though Indonesia has been able to sustain its authority in Papua since its diplomatic victory over the Netherlands in 1962, this authority is fragile. The fragility of Jakarta’s authority and the lack of Papuan consent for Indonesian rule are both the cart and the horse of the reliance on force to sustain central control. After examining the policies of special autonomy and the partition of Papua into three provinces, the authors pose the question: If Jakarta is determined to keep Papua part of the Indonesia nation–based on the consent of the Papuan people–what changes in the governance of Papua are necessary to bring this about?

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by | 6 May 2004 · 10:16 pm

The Ambiguous Role of the Tsushima Governor Between Korea and Japan

During the 15th and 16th centuries, the Muromachi Bakufu (1333-1573) in Kyoto was barely able to control provinces close to the capital, but it was able to establish trade relations with the Ming court (1368-1644) in China and the Chosôn court (1392-1910) in Korea. This was the Sengoku (“Warring States”) Period when powerful local daimyo (feudal lords) clashed with each other and sought their own allies abroad. Local daimyo in Kyushu established trade relations with the Portuguese, the Ryukyu Kingdom (Okinawa), and others. In 1550, Francis Xavier also undertook a mission to the capital, Kyoto.

The enterprising governor of Tsushima was empowered by the Chosôn court to issue access permits to Japanese envoys wishing to trade with Chosôn, according to historian Kenneth R. Robinson of International Christian University in Tokyo, who published an article on “The Tsushima Governor and Regulation of Japanese Access to Chosôn in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries” in Korean Studies 20 (1996): 23-50.

This article suggests that Chosôn government officials did not strictly adhere to the tributary system model of international relations in their dealings with Japanese. Officials borrowed from Chinese example and from domestic policy in designing Japanese access control policies that responded flexibly to political conditions in Japan. The munin access permits issued by the Tsushima shugo [‘provincial governor’] were perhaps the most important feature of these policies. But treatment of Tsushima and the Tsushima shugo by Korean officials made ambiguous the identities not only of Tsushima and the Tsushima shugo, but also the state boundaries of Chosôn and Japan. These negotiable ambiguities raise questions of how to conceptualize relations between Koreans and Japanese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries….

The munin systems of access control, in which Japanese bound for Chosôn obtained a munin (access permit) from the Tsushima shugo, did not originate directly from the tributary system of international relations [that prevailed in China]. Adapted from Chosôn government policies for controlling the domestic travel of Koreans, the munin systems served the complementary needs of the Chosôn government in regulating Japanese contact and of Sô Sadamori and his successors as Tsushima shugo in enhancing the powers of that office. The Tsushima shugo issued three types of access permits to three types of Japanese for three distinct activities: to envoys for diplomacy, which was understood generally to be a fiction for trade; to Tsushima islanders trading in fish and salt along the Chosôn coast; and to Tsushima fisherman for fishing in Chosôn waters. In the space between the vision offered by international relations in the tributary system model and the complexities of policymaking that faced Chosôn government officials, Muromachi Bakufu officials, and the Tsushima and other provincial governors there emerged policies that made ambiguous the administrative boundaries of “Chosôn” and “Japan” and the identity of “Tsushima.”

Apparently, a fair number of these envoys were imposters, according to the abstract of a 1997 paper by Robinson presented at the Association for Asian Studies annual meeting entitled “Japanese Imposter Sovereign Envoys to Choson: The Late Fifteenth Century.”

Royal envoys from Ryukyu, envoys of Japanese provincial governors and traders, and Japanese shogunal envoys began visiting Choson Korea in the late 1300s and early 1400s. In the late fifteenth century, Japanese impostor sovereign envoys began seeking to trade with the Choson government. They donned a variety of disguises, modeling themselves after envoys with whom the Choson court had been trading for decades. Some represented the “King of Ryukyu,” others the rulers of countries unknown to Korean officials. Choson court officials met (impostor) Ryukyu envoys as they had earlier royal envoys until they began to recognize mistakes in the envoys’ documentation. These less fortunate envoys were received at a reduced level of reception, one reserved for foreign government elites. As for the envoys of the rulers of the unknown countries, they failed to convince Korean officials of the existence of those countries. But, rather than turn away these visitors, Choson court officials received them at the same, reduced status as the unmasked impostor Ryukyu royal envoys. Reception of these impostor envoys displays elements of the Choson Korea world order. Formed in part to promote trading over raiding, this hierarchical world order functioned simultaneously with the Ming Chinese tributary system. Choson court officials ranked the Chinese emperor as superior, the rulers of the tributary states of Japan and Ryukyu as equals to the Choson king, and Japanese and Ryukyuan government officials and traders as of lower status. The tributary system informed the structure of the Choson court’s reception system, but tributary status did not confine Choson court officials to a set portfolio of foreign policies. Stated differently, Korean officials did not defer to the Chinese in their conduct of relations with Japanese and Ryukyuans.

The position of Tsushima seems a good deal less ambiguous than it was 500 years ago, but the general nature of international diplomacy doesn’t seem to have changed all that much, regardless of the polite fictions enshrined in the Treaty of Westphalia (at which England, Poland, Muscovy, and Turkey were the only European powers that were not represented).

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by | 6 May 2004 · 2:15 pm

Badly Handled Territorial Pissing Matches

The Marmot has a couple of sad but funny posts about “stupid territorial pissing matches”: the latest flare-up over Dokdo/Takeshima in the East Sea/Japan Sea, and over Hans Island in the North Atlantic, with a few asides about the Great Turbot War between Canada and Spain in the mid-1990s, the Cod War between Iceland and the U.K. in the mid-1970s, the Aroostook (or Pork and Beans) “War” between New Brunswick and Maine in the 1830s, and similar disputes, with a lot of links.

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by | 5 May 2004 · 6:31 pm

Literacy, Emotion, and Authority on a Polynesian Atoll

Is writing just speech in a different medium? Is writing more authoritative, objective, and reliable than speech? Can a text be understood without its context? Not in the literacy practices of the Polynesian atoll in Tuvalu, according to a book by anthropologist Niko Besnier.

The chief value of a good ethnographic description lies not in what its readers learn about others, but in what they learn—or unlearn—about themselves. Besnier (B) provides the ingredients for a healthy dose of unlearning in this useful and stimulating attempt both to describe the roles of literacy on Nukulaelae in Tuvalu and to offer a broader comparative and theoretical perspective, as the series title implies. This work is especially valuable in casting doubt on several assumptions that linguists too rarely question about the written vs. spoken word: (1) that writing is just speech in a different medium; (2) that writing is more authoritative, objective, or reliable than speech; and (3) that a transcribed text can be understood without its context.

B starts with a useful introduction to literacy theory (1–20) and concludes with a very stimulating comparative-ethnographic discussion (169–187). He contrasts two primary approaches: “the autonomous model” primarily articulated in a series of works by Jack Goody, and “an ideological model” primarily articulated in works by Brian Street. (The choice of determiner already reveals B’s sympathies, since it implies that the former has begun to lapse into rigor mortis, while the latter is still growing in new directions.) According to B, the autonomous model proposes that literacy itself is a causal (or at least enabling) factor that explains the differences often described (or imagined) between preliterate and literate individuals, societies, and cultures (2–3). Critics, including B, “find highly suspect the uncanny resemblance between middle-class academic ways of viewing literacy … and the social, cultural, and cognitive characteristics purported to be the consequences of literacy” (3). They argue instead that “literacy should be viewed not as a monolithic phenomenon but as a multi-faceted one, whose meaning … is crucially tied to the social practices that surround it and to the ideological system in which it is embedded” (3). B thus concentrates on the two most important products of literacy on Nukulaelae: letters and sermons.

Although whalers first visited Nukulaelae as early as 1821, literacy was first implanted by Samoan teachers and pastors dispatched by the London Missionary Society (LMS) in the 1860s. Conversion to Protestant Christianity was swift and thorough, but the language of religion and literacy remained primarily Samoan for a hundred years thereafter. Western missionaries rarely visited and the Bible was not fully translated into a dialect of Tuvaluan until 1987. Although English has by now supplanted Samoan as the model for literacy practices, few residents of Nukulaelae command it as well as their ancestors did Samoan. (Those who do so are likely to have learned it elsewhere and to seek salaried work that takes them elsewhere.)

As in many other parts of the world, literacy was introduced to Nukulaelae primarily for evangelistic purposes. Although some thus consider it to be an unredeemably nefarious hegemonic technology, the islanders quickly put it to use for a very important socioeconomic function of their own: keeping in touch with their far-flung networks of relatives and friends, benefactors and beneficiaries. Virtually all adults on the atoll are able to read and write their native language in a rough-and-ready orthography based on Samoan, which lacks only the geminate consonants found in Tuvaluan and several other Polynesian outliers and thus affords no consistent means to write them. Whenever the government ship arrives in Nukulaelae on its unpredictable rounds (at perhaps monthly intervals), the island becomes a hive of activity as people feverishly prepare to receive and then dispatch passengers, packages, and letters by the time the ship leaves the next day. Letters serve the purpose of renewing emotional as well as economic ties across long distances. They tend to be read and written late into the night in the same emotionally charged state that characterizes traditional farewells and returns. If anything, letters often display an even greater emotionality than is socially acceptable face-to-face. Cousins of opposite gender, for instance, are supposed to avoid each other’s presence, and yet letters between them “display as much affect as any other letter” (108). Nukulaelae Islanders thus appear to “define letter writing and reading as affectively cathartic contexts” (111). At the same time, letters undertake the more prosaic task of listing the contents of accompanying packages or the material needs of the writers that their correspondents are invited to fulfill. But here too, letters cannot be considered more objective and reliable than speech. Letters are often lost, damaged, delayed, or misunderstood, so the most authoritative and reliable way to send a message is for someone to deliver it in person and to explain the context in which it was written and answer any questions the recipient might have.

The written word is considerably more authoritative in religious contexts, with the printed Bible the most authoritative of all. However, written tracts distributed by competing religious groups are not accorded the same degree of respect. The authorship of a message confers authority and legitimacy more than its medium….

SOURCE: Review of Literacy, emotion, and authority: Reading and writing on a Polynesian atoll, by Niko Besnier (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1995) in Oceanic Linguistics 35 (1996): 148-151

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