Creative Destruction, Destruction of Creativity

Posted on December 10, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Right about now, a lot of North American colleges and universities, rich and poor, public and private, are realizing that the economic foundations of their enterprise have shifted rather dramatically.

Historians love to argue and argue about whether there are ever revolutions, sudden transformations, disjunctures. Name me a revolution or supposedly sudden transformation and I can find you a body of scholarship that argues that what appeared revolutionary was only the very last act of a very long-standing process of gradual change. (Or that it wasn’t a change at all, only a lot of hue and cry which gave way to a reversion to previous norms.)

I’d certainly argue the many chickens now clucking on the roosts of higher education in this winter of discontent have been lurking about the barnyard for a long time. The 1990s pace of tuition increases became politically and economically unsustainable a few years back. Relying on endowment income has always involved exposure to risk, but the size of endowments at rich institutions had become a political concern in its own right, while institutions with minimal endowments have long since struggled with the problems that lack created in a competitive environment. Perhaps partly because of the size of large endowments, donations were also already under pressure before this year.

I’ll reiterate what I said a few months back about planning for contraction. I’m already seeing signs that as higher education comes under pressure, many institutions are going to handle budgetary shortfalls in the same bad way that flawed or bloated companies do, by getting out a fiscal shotgun and prowling around the herd looking for wounded or vulnerable victims.

When times were flush, a lot of wealthier institutions put money into deferring internal conflicts by supporting all possible pedagogies, all possible missions, all possible institutional identities. Clarity about purpose and approach was largely found in institutions that had to be clear about what they were doing because of limited resources. The need to economize can be an opportunity to clarify, intensify, focus. It can be undertaken as a positive project–but only if some conflicts and disagreements are brought out into the open and worked out as honestly as possible. Leon Botstein can rub a lot people the wrong way with his style, but I think he’s talking a lot of sense in this interview when he notes that institutions flush with endowment money became risk-averse and unable to make tough choices. (via Margaret Soltan). (Though I don’t see why Botstein scorns using endowment income as a part of annual operating expenses. Like tenure, used correctly, that should precisely allow those institutions to take risky choices, even if it hasn’t traditionally led to that.)

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Across the Atlantic and around the Cape of Good Hope, where the Indian Ocean begins, another kind of academic crisis is unfolding. If you read this blog largely to scold me for what you see as my wildly liberal views of Africa, but you would honestly like to help people on the African continent who are fighting for freedom and justice, please hold your powder dry, or I won’t be doing anyone any favors by calling attention to this story.

I’m often asked if I’m optimistic about South Africa. My answer has often been “cautiously yes”, and it still is. But over the past three or four years, there have been more and more critical junctures where the balance between optimism and pessimism is being intensely tested. There will be more to come in the next few years.

One of the things I’ve always liked about South Africa is maybe also one source of vulnerability. I’ve always appreciated the combination of intensity and intellectualism in a lot of South African political discourse. South Africans of varying educational backgrounds care about public debate and political decisions in a very passionate way. Even before things went spectacularly bad in Zimbabwe, I was always struck by the much more muted, private and digressive character of public conversation there in comparison to South Africa both before and after the end of apartheid.

That intensity can very quickly turn sour and vicious, however. As a student observer of the Board of Trustees at my undergraduate institution, I was an advocate of divestment. On one occasion, we had a chance to bring together some board members with an ANC representative at a friendly dinner. The representative who came up from New York proceeded to spend the entire meal screaming at the trustees at the top of his lungs. This did not exactly help us persuade them to change policy, but quite aside from the tactical failure, it had that weird harshness that South African public figures can unexpectedly drop into.

This is part of the unfolding crisis at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) over the past few months. The confrontation between the university administration and the faculty has been building for much longer, but it has come to a point of final, critical explosiveness. Vice-Chancellor Malegapuru Makgoba came into office charged with managing a difficult merger of campuses and divisions, and this might caused bad feelings under any circumstances. Makgoba was also an enthusiast for mangerialism of a type that has bedeviled global higher education in general. His administration has tried to exert very fine-grained control over virtually every aspect of the culture and business of academic life. I’ve argued that whether we’re in South Africa or the United States, this approach not only turns its back on the highest responsibilities of academic communities, it is also bad management that wastes human capital to no good purpose.

What has happened recently, however, goes beyond this ongoing problem. You can read some of the details at the following archive. To summarize, the UKZN administration brought disciplinary charges against two professors who have been careful, civil critics of the UKZN administration in public. The main thrust of the charge against them was that they had criticized their own institution, which Vice-Chancellor Makgoba and his closest supporters maintain is not part of what is meant by “academic freedom”. (The director of personnel replied tersely to a request that these issues be discussed within the faculty senate by writing, ‘Employees are required to act in the interests of their employer at all times, and to show due respect’.)

Facing an expensive legal process (the UKZN adminstration retained its own lawyers using public funds, but the two accused professors would have had to pay for their own defense with little prospect of success under current South African labor law), one of the accused has found a job at another university and the other has signed a statement repudiating his earlier actions.

If you want a good sense of just how ugly and aggressive the behavior of the UKZN administration has become as international and national attention to their actions has escalated, read Vice-Chancellor Makgoba’s lengthy, rambling communique dated December 5th. Every once in a while, a U.S. university administration tries to keep a lid on public criticism by disciplining faculty critics, and it is always a sign that there is some kind of serious malfeasance that such an administration is trying to conceal. But I can’t think of any university president, no matter how desperately beseiged, who would say some of what Makgoba says in this communique: the pettiness and obsessiveness of the tone (such as disputing whether one of the two targeted professors is actually a scholar with a good intellectual reputation) reminds me of Captain Queeg on the stand in The Caine Mutiny. On grounds of pure professionalism alone, this should be enough reason for the national education bureaucracy to dismiss Makgoba and his closest advisors as soon as possible: this is the perfect opposite of leadership.

If you’re an academic professional and you’d like to help, consider signing the petition. (I also think this would make a good opportunity for the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education to update or write a story.) At the very least, though, no matter how bleak things may look for you right now if you’re working in a North American university, this should clarify about how bad things could be.

This is one of those crossroads for South Africa. Once certain thresholds are crossed, certain institutions ransacked, certain fragile possibilities destroyed, it will be very difficult, perhaps impossible, to regain a hope for the future.

Posted in Academia, Africa | 30 Comments

Bruce Wayne Is the Black Glove

Posted on December 5, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Busy week and I’ve been kind of feeling a bit bleak about blogging lately, so excuse the quiet. I think I’m going to completely geek out in my next couple of entries, so if you’re waiting for some African or academic material, keep waiting. (There are things building up in my ought-to-write category on those topics, so lightning may strike at any time.)

This entry is going to be the maximally geeky one, on Grant Morrison’s Batman run. You still have time to turn away if your eyes compulsively rolled at that prospect.

———–

I like Grant Morrison’s work, but I am not a blind worshipper at the temple of the God of All Comics. His run on Batman has had some strong moments and some weak moments, quite aside from the uneven artwork. But all the talk on the intarwebs this week has been about the conclusion of the “RIP” storyline. A lot of readers expected big, clear revelations about the antagonist(s) who have been driving the story, and many feel that Morrison let them down. (Or, for the conspiracy-minded, it was DC editorial that changed Morrison’s original ending.)

I think people didn’t read the issue very carefully in that case, because I thought Morrison was crystal-clear about the identity of the Black Glove, the mysterious enemy that has been hounding Batman for most of Morrison’s run on the title. The problem is that too many people are obsessed with the red herring character of Dr. Simon Hurt: the debate over whether he’s really Thomas Wayne, or a minor actor, or the Devil Himself is a distraction.

There’s been speculation throughout the storyline that the villain behind the scenes is none other than Bruce Wayne himself. Batman #681 pretty much comes out and says, “Yup, that’s it”. Here’s the evidence.

First, before we get to this issue, what do we know about The Black Glove in general? Who are various members of the Club of Villains who associate with The Black Glove? What do we know about them? We know that the one characteristic they share is that they are obscenely wealthy and powerful, and that most have a fetishistic second identity or obsession of some kind. Bruce Wayne would fit in smoothly with them in that respect.

Right at the start, Morrison reminds us: “Batman thinks of everything”. This fits with what we know about Morrison’s take on Batman: that he’s the supremely skilled meta-tactician who outthinks all of his enemies. This is reinforced throughout this story in Morrison’s portrayal of the Joker: the Joker is frustrated because Batman always “builds a box” around him, reimposes order on his pure chaos. So think about it: what would Batman do if he became aware that by becoming Batman, he had opened himself up to evil and madness? That Batman himself was the “something, in the dark, inside”, the “scar on my consciousness”? “Children sometimes develop cover personalities to protect themselves”: that’s not something that Simon Hurt has done to Bruce Wayne, that is what Batman is. Batman himself is the attack on Bruce Wayne’s mind. But Batman thinks of everything: how will he defeat Batman?

Simple: he’s got to restore Bruce Wayne as the real person. Morrison, I think, is attacking the heart of the modern interpretation of the character, that Batman is the real person, Bruce Wayne the mask, that Batman lives at the edge of madness, that Batman is irreparably dark. That’s the point of exploring the crazy-ass Silver Age stories: it’s what Bruce Wayne hallucinated when in sensory deprivation to try and escape Batman.

Look at the conclusion of #681: it’s Bruce Wayne without the mask who goes after Simon Hurt. It’s Bruce Wayne writing the “final entry in the Black Casebook”, who now knows that in making Batman, he “opened up to some pure source of evil”, to the “limits of reason”. When we hear from inside the helicopter the whisper, “The Black Glove always wins”, what do we see next? The black glove on Batman’s fist smashing into the helicopter window.

There’s no mystery about why the trigger phase for Batman’s madness was a garbling of “Zorro in Arkham”: because that’s the moment where Bruce Wayne learned, seconds before his parent’s death, that the romantic figure of Zorro was also someone who would be institutionalized for madness.

So this is what “rest in peace” in the title means. Not that Bruce Wayne would die. Instead, maybe the prospect he’s on the edge of becoming a different, more serene, more at rest kind of Batman. Maybe a Batman who doesn’t have to be grim and dark all the time, but who can have wacky adventures and smile and meet imps from the Fifth Dimension. Maybe a version of the character who is really Bruce Wayne, with Batman his mask.

Or maybe Batman thinks of everything, and Bruce Wayne always loses. That will have to wait for when, or if, Morrison gets to do more on the title, or whether later writers pick up what he’s done with the character and use it to inaugurate yet another turn on the wheel, to offer us a version of Batman who isn’t just awash in blood and madness.

Posted in Popular Culture | 5 Comments

Finding Primary Sources

Posted on December 1, 2008 by Timothy Burke

I wrote up a few notes for my first-year students working on research papers about search strategies to help find primary sources (documents, letters, memoirs, and so on). These notes follow on the students having chosen and refined a topic and having found a few initial scholarly or secondary materials relevant to their chosen subject matter. The key context here is that this is for undergraduates who have access to library collections rather than for researchers who have access to specialized archives, and who are therefore searching primarily for edited collections of primary source material, or for highly relevant memoirs.

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1. Use the bibliographies of the best secondary sources you find. A bibliography is the distillation of someone else’s research, and it’s often the quickest way to get a full sense of what the historiography of a field is (e.g., what the authoritative sources and discussions over time have been). It’s even better if you have two bibliographies to compare in books or articles which are very similar in the topics they address. Bibliographies of scholarly works often break out primary and secondary sources into separate categories. Also: the content of a good secondary work is going to tell you about important primary texts, so you actually have to read some of these materials carefully.

2. Use the keyword “memoir” and “memor*” (memory, memories) in association with subject keywords connected to your topic.

3. Use the keyword “letter” in association with subject keywords connected to your topic.

4. Use the keyword “source” in association with subject keywords connected to your topic.

5. The Library of Congress Subject headings will sometimes turn up significant amounts of primary source material if you use the additional search term “History”. For example, “Cookery–History”. You’ll need to get a sense from titles and other catalogue information which listings in a search like this are primary sources, but this will often be apparent.

6. The Library of Congress Subject headings also use “Sources” as a subheading. Look down an overall listing of a relevant subject heading to see if there are any subheadings for Sources. For example, “Imperialism–History–Sources”.

7. Read sequentially through old newspapers around dates or times you know to be important to your topic–not just or even primarily for news stories, but more for slice of life materials (letters to the editor, commentaries, etc.) Do the same for important magazines that you have access to through your library collection. This only works if you have a fairly date-specific topic in mind, however, or if you have a lot of time to read rapidly through a large amount of material. Otherwise, you’ll need to use one of many possible indices to help refine a search of old periodical material.

8. Use date-sensitive searches in regular online indices. Meaning, go into the advanced interface for searches and constrain the dates for results to some older time period relevant to your topic.

9. There are a variety of digitized, online archival collections which may be available through your local university or college library. For some topics, there will be very little available, for others quite a lot. Some of these collections have very well-designed interfaces for searching within the collection, while others are difficult to search. Assessing what’s available and how to search is a lot easier if you consult your local library staff.

Posted in Academia | 3 Comments

Skimming the Program

Posted on November 23, 2008 by Timothy Burke

I was at the American Anthropological Association meeting this weekend. I decided not to liveblog anything because a) I didn’t go to that many panels and b) the ones I did go to I went to diffidently, including being one of those jerks who skips from panel to panel.

But one thing that came to me as I looked through the program is a renewed sense of irritation with all the program-skimming critics of academia that I’ve read over the years. The MLA is the favorite target of this kind of stunt, but not the only one. I kind of forgive journalists who are stuck with a slow news day and figure that making fun of the eggheads is a reliable bit of copy to file.

I don’t forgive academics who do this, at least if it’s one of those “I read the session titles and the paper titles and I know that it’s all trendy bullshit just from doing that, o tempora o mores, what has academia come to” sorts of screeds. Because what that kind of complaint usually reveals is that the writer has zero understanding of their own professional culture.

It’s not just that you owe colleagues you’ve never met the courtesy of criticizing what they actually said. (I freely grant that there are papers which are trendy, which are nonsense, which are poorly conceptualized. But if you’re going to say so, say it about something which a presenter actually presented.)

It’s also that someone who is just skimming the session titles is ignoring why some of those titles end up as baroque or outre as they do. By and large, session titles are built around three principles. First, build a tent big enough to encompass all of the papers in a given session. Sessions at the major professional associations tend to get built in several waves: you may get two or three people agreeing to build a session together, sometimes because they’re already friends or collaborators, sometimes because they’re scholars who would like to get to know each other because of a recognized common interest in a particular topic. From there, people get added to the session because they’re connected to one of the core presenters, or maybe by happenstance. At least one of the papers is going to be topically a bit of an odd-man-out, for all sorts of reasons. So you build a session title that accomodates all of the kinds of papers in a session, and so of course it’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast.

Second, people building session and paper titles generally try to avoid being too prosaic. Sure, you can have a session title called “U.S. Cultural History, 1860-1895”, but that makes the presenters look a bit like dullards. Session titles try to be a bit more lively and to communicate a sense that the presenters are engaged in original research, talking about new subjects. Yes, some fall very very flat in trying to do so, and end up sounding silly. But if you can’t appreciate why they do, you’re not really attuned to the culture of conferences.

Third, session and paper titles are a shout-out to the presenters’ own immediate potential audience. At the big professional meetings, the basic truth is that most panels have very small audiences. Most of the people attending the meeting are engaged in job interviews (on either side of the fence), are busy meeting up with old friends and acquaintances, or prowling around the book exhibit. A session or paper title isn’t what you’d choose if you were trying to publish in a broader context, or speak to a wider audience. It’s designed to send up a signal flare to the very small group of useful and interesting strangers who might choose to attend because the topic is very near and dear to their own professional interests. That calls for jargon of some kind.

So it’s not just that the content of papers and panels is often far more prosaic and straightforward than the theoretical or jargon-laden titles, and that even at the trendiest meetings the strong majority of papers and panels are pretty straightforwardly framed. It’s that even the conventions that lead to exotic-sounding titles serve purposes that the usual lazy critics seem to understand very poorly.

Posted in Academia | 9 Comments

Irreparable Complexity, Game and World

Posted on November 17, 2008 by Timothy Burke

I’m interested in the kind of complexity that arises through emergent processes, in which relatively simple rules governing the action of autonomous agents within a given environment can give rise to permanent structures or changes within the environment which then change the way that the agents express their rules. Unplanned systems, but often highly functional in their own way.

However, there is also complexity by design, in which a system which is consciously intended to have certain restricted purposes or functions becomes more and more elaborate over time, and more and more of its mechanisms become obscure and hidden in their inputs and outputs. I think maybe there are some natural examples of this kind of movement towards baroque complexity. But baroque complexity dies out when it becomes actively dysfunctional within some kind of fitness landscape.

Human systems can achieve this kind of opacity by accident and by intent. Accidental drift towards a system where no one really understands how cause and effect work within the system happens in institutional life all the time. Stakeholders in individual parts or aspects of a system are inclined to expand the influence or size of their mechanism. New forces or powers outside an institution are often accommodated by being incorporated within it. Procedures or heuristics used by an institution in its everyday business sometimes take on a life of their own, especially when they are incorporated into technological infrastructure and automated in some respect. Histories of past practices accumulate and become binding traditions.

Baroque complexity happens by intent when human agents with some degree of authority over an institutional system want to block off direct access or control to some of its inner workings as a safeguard against easy tampering. It also happens when someone with an interest in a particular system believes that secrecy and confusion will instrumentally advance that interest. I think there are quite a few examples of authorities who set out to make it hard for an outsider to understand how a system or process works only to find that in making it hard for outsiders to understand, they’ve made it hard for everyone, that even people in control who thought that secrecy would conceal selectively have found that it conceals indiscriminately.

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I’ve found that virtual worlds, massively-multiplayer online games (MMOGs) have provided some great examples of this kind of Rube-Goldberg complexity-by-design, and have also demonstrated why this phenomenon can be a source of so much trouble, that you can end up with systems which are painfully indispensible and permanently dysfunctional, beyond the ability of any agent or interest to repair.

The underlying code of any contemporary large software application is approaching a threshold of complexity where no human agent could ever hope to understand all the possible interactions between the code, the hardware and the user. Even if a programmer can understand why a particular failure or negative event happened, they often cannot hope to understand how to reliably stop it from happening in all possible intersections of code, hardware and user without perturbing some other part of the codebase with unexpected consequences. Pull on one thread, and another may unravel.

This is especially true with virtual worlds, where the size and intricacy of the software is enormous and the practices of users are remarkably diverse and often rivalrous. Developers of a virtual world now start with established code libraries of some kind for managing the visual and interactive components of their product, but they also have to deal with and accomodate histories of user expectation and practice in previous virtual worlds.

Virtual world designers end up with baroque complexity both because their design imperatives drift naturally in that direction and in some cases because they’re trying to veil or protect some of the underlying mechanisms and code of a game from the users. Arguably in some cases, I think they may even be trying to protect themselves from knowing too much about how the world works precisely because they’re trying to keep the processes and procedures that players must follow somewhat opaque, because a lot of virtual world player behavior is about seeking opportunities to arbitrage.

This kind of complexity gets designers into trouble when there is some major aspect of their world whose dysfunctionality is driving players away, where there is some desire to fix or change the game’s systems. Baroque complexity taken too far is irreparable: you can literally get to a point where there is no adjustment of one subsystem that will not cause another subsystem to fail or produce unexpected negative consequences.

A lot of my previous analysis of the early history of the game Star Wars: Galaxies centered on this kind of problem. So much of the underlying design had a kind of Rube Goldberg feel to it, with systems and properties tethered to one another at varying levels of code and design, from how information was stored in the game’s databases to how crafting, the environment and the economy were functionally intermingled in ways that were not always how they were intended to be intermingled. I came to feel that there were many cases where the designers literally had no way out of certain problems, that fixing one aspect of the design would produce problems elsewhere, sometimes problems that could not be anticipated in advance of implementing the change. Characters advanced through developing skills within loosely structured classes, but the game design had almost no way to differentiate between the role or value of some of those classes. At launch, most classes had skills that had little value or that were simply not implemented. Fixing one skill generally broke another, or failed because other skills in other professions that were needed to properly support the fixed skill were not working correctly. The developers of Star Wars: Galaxies eventually came to the conclusion that they would just have to gut out most of the game’s design and start again. They did so in a disastrous manner, but I’m not sure they were wrong about the basic insight.

To some extent, I think the developers of the current virtual world Warhammer Online are in the same kind of pickle. In this case, one of the serious issues in the game’s design is that it is almost impossible for players to understand how to achieve victory for their faction. There are two major factions in the game which fight to control certain parts of the game environment at varying stages of the progression of the player-characters. In the endgame, both factions try to accomplish a series of difficult challenges that will allow them to attack and control the major city of their rival faction. At the moment, it is very hard to tell exactly how these systems work, and I think that is not because the players have yet to figure the system out, but because the interaction of many diverse elements in the game design is so messy that it is impossible to figure it out, possibly even for the designers.

The designers have a vested interest in keeping the system opaque. If players understand very clearly what they need to do, they may discover that the system is easy to exploit, or that one side has a structural advantage. But at some point, making a system appear opaque and making a system actually so difficult to understand that it is genuinely opaque even to its creators are actions which shade into one another.

Far more importantly, the system may simply come to seem mechanical and lacking in adaptability. Once players understand exactly what it is that they must do, how they must do it, and when they must do it, they are likely to find competition to be boring and repetitive. I think this is a major reason that baroque complexity is added by design to many human systems, games and otherwise: because they are systems which need to simulate adaptability, portability, flexibility, which need to mimic the organicism and mutability of life itself. In a way, that’s what successful art in all its forms actually accomplishes: the deliberate creation of mystery, of a work which supercedes the narrow intent of its maker. But a system which requires ongoing use, even the mechanics of an online game, needs a functionality that art does not.

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In a limited way, I think the dilemma that some game developers have encountered echoes the vastly more consequential problems of the current global financial system. For both instrumental and accidental reasons, I think the financial system has acquired this same kind of baroque complexity, this same kind of disconnect between the top level that believes it has control over the system’s workings and numerous veiled or incomprehensible mechanisms that have been churning away busily well beyond that control. Like a virtual world whose design has functionally become impossible to easily control, the financial system may now be too complex to repair. Changing one feature may lead to undesirable and unpredictable consequences elsewhere in the system. Pulling on one thread may cause another part of the tapestry to unravel.

And like virtual worlds, there are stakeholders who have a continuing interest in the parts of the Rube Goldberg machine to which they have adapted themselves. In a virtual world that has gone badly wrong, where many players are fleeing its failure, there will always be a few players who have become adroit at using one or more of its broken subsystems. They will be the ones who complain most strenuously at any changes. The emptier the world, the louder their complaints will sound.

Players can leave all their virtual worlds for good: their ludic desires can find other expression, other opportunities. A developer who guts out everything inside of a broken virtual world to replace it with some simpler, cleaner design can hope to bring back all the lost customers, but we know very well that players who quit a virtual world almost never come back. So sometimes you stick with whatever remnant you’ve got left, no matter how dysfunctional the complexities of the design, and ride with them right out to the thinnest margins of profit before closing for good.

The difference between a game and the real world is that the capital which can move away from the broken complexities of the financial system can’t just stop circulating altogether. It needs to go somewhere, wants to go somewhere. The choice may be similar, however. Listen to the actors who’ve adapted to the dysfunctionality of the system, who’ve adapted to live on some cog of the broken machinery, and they won’t want a change. Neither will people who work within some fragment of the system that works pretty well, because they know that a fix to what’s broken has a decent chance to break what works. Gut out the whole system to try and start anew? That’s rarely possible in real life. (So far it’s never really worked with games, either.) Sometimes the best answer is to build a simple, elegant alternative to run alongside the old clanking complexity, to have the System 2.0, and hope that over time, there’s a migration from the old to the new.

Posted in Games and Gaming, Miscellany, Politics | 8 Comments

Scandal

Posted on November 12, 2008 by Timothy Burke

You want to complain about what’s wrong with academia, take a look at this story. Adjuncts at the University of Tennessee system can carry a 5-5 teaching load in a course year and make only $15,000 with no benefits. You could pay someone $200,000 a year, and I doubt they could teach a 5-5 load with any degree of focus or attention to students, but $15,000? No benefits? Seriously, Tennessee: just close down your university system. Or just be honest and make public higher education in the state into a volunteer system, like getting people to work the line at a soup kitchen. And adjuncts there? Seriously, there has got to be a better way to make ends meet, whatever your circumstances and aspirations might be.

Posted in Academia | 13 Comments

So You Want to Know About…the Luo

Posted on November 12, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Another thing that came up in a recent email exchange was a request for “starter scholarship” on a particular African nation. For most contemporary African countries, I really feel that there is not a single great “done-in-one” book that is about that nation’s history in general. There are very good books about regions, about particular ethnic groups, about issues which affect multiple nations in Africa, or about localities and communities. But I get these requests so often in email, often from people who are planning to travel to some particular African country or who are soon to be stationed there in the Peace Corps or for some other reason, that I was thinking that I should publish a regular series of bibliographic recommendations.

So let’s start with a very appropriate list given the November news: the Luo people of Western Kenya, where the President-Elect’s father was from.

The Luo people live in present-day Kenya and parts of Uganda and Tanzania. They speak a Nilotic language related to languages spoken elsewhere in northeastern Africa. Much of the attention to their history and experience as a people centers on their political and social status within Kenya since independence.

None of these books are popular page-turners, keep in mind. I’m very fond of the Cohen-Odhiambo books not just because of personal connections but also as historiographical and methdological statements, but if your goal is to get a simple working knowledge of the Luo, you may find them frustrating.

——

Tom Mboya, The Challenge of Nationhood: A Collection of Speeches and Writings
The words and thoughts of the charismatic Luo nationalist (who started a scholarship program that benefitted the young Barack Obama Senior, the President’s father). Mboya was assassinated in 1969.

E.S. Atieno Odhiambo and David William Cohen, Siaya: The Historical Anthropology of an African Landscape.
Innovative, unusually structured exploration of themes in the 20th Century experience of Luo communities. Don’t read it expecting to get a bullet-point account of Luo history: it’s an attempt to explore the meanings and consciousness circulating within Luo communities from the inside out.

E.S. Atieno Odhiambo and David William Cohen, Burying SM. Like Siaya, a deliberately digressive, meditative account, in this case, focusing on the long legal and political struggle over the right to bury a Kenyan lawyer named S.M. Otieno. His wife wanted to bury him as a Christian, maintaining that his primary identity in life was as a modern, educated and national person, while his Luo relatives wanted to bury him according to Luo traditions, maintaining that Otieno had defined himself first and foremost as Luo.

Bethwell A. Ogot, History of the Southern Luo. A very carefully composed and thorough monograph. Not a page-turner but one of those works of history which everyone in the field ends up using as a standard reference.

Parker Shipton, “Debts and Trespasses: Land, Mortgages, and the Ancestors in Western Kenya”, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 62, No. 3, (1992), pp. 357-388. Goes well with Siaya. Shipton has a new book on some of these themes which I have not read yet.

Posted in Africa | 9 Comments

On Its Stomach

Posted on November 7, 2008 by Timothy Burke

The news from eastern Congo is, as it has long been, not good. I understand why outside mediators and observers want to keep trying to patch up old cease-fires or broker new ones between the ever-shifting array of combatants in the region. It’s a pointless effort, however.

Cease-fires work between combatants who have been using warfare as a means to achieve a political end which is separable from war itself. They work when those combatants are mutually convinced that further attempts to achieve those ends by military means are likely to be fruitless, or that there is more risk involved in continuing to fight than there is in ending the fight. They work when one power has achieved all that it reasonably can hope to achieve through military means and the other power is looking for a graceful way to acknowledge defeat or loss.

War in the eastern Congo is politics. There isn’t any state or sovereignty outside of armed combatants. The state which exists around Kinshasa may technically own the territory of eastern Congo, but it has no real governing authority there beyond its own projection of military force. As Thomas Turner has written, the political economy of eastern Congo is plunder. People who are not part of a band of armed men are resources to the armies, nothing more. They are not ruled or controlled or part of a sovereignty. If you want an analogy in European history, the Hundred Years’ War in France is fairly close: mercenary bands composed of men from many parts of Western Europe prowling the countryside, taking what they please, killing, maiming and raping the peasantry, sometimes working for established nobles or the monarchy, sometimes against them.

Though if that’s the analogy, the Congolese peasantry has yet to have its jacquerie, more’s the pity. Without the civilian population who surge from refugee camp to refugee camp, these armies would struggle to survive. They’d have no labor to conscript for pit-mining, no farmers whose crops they could steal, no women to rape. But there is no way to take the civilian population permanently out of the picture. I almost wish that the U.S., Canada and Western Europe could offer residency permits to every single resident of eastern Congo, agree to transport everyone accepting the offer, and give each of them a transitional allowance until they get established in their host country. That can’t happen, and the local alternative forms of refugee housing simply move the bullseye target for victimization around from place to place, border to border.

No cease-fire will hold until the armed men themselves want to stop fighting because they’re tired of it, see no future in it, or until some regional power (the Congo government or some other) is able to project overwhelming military force in a sustained way throughout the entire region. Given its topography, that’s very unlikely barring a massive investment by outside parties. So the mediators will fret, the UN will rattle its very small sabers, and the suffering will continue.

Posted in Africa | 52 Comments

Good Reportage

Posted on November 6, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Newsweek is putting out some great political reporting on the election now that folks are linking to. Much of what they have to say about Obama and his campaign is actually more interesting than the revelations about Palin that are getting lots of linky-link.

Try this bit, for example:

“The debates unnerved both candidates. When he was preparing for them during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, “I don’t consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, ‘You know, this is a stupid question, but let me try to answer it.’ So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done [that’s green], and I say, you know, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of trees.’ And he says, ‘I’m talking about personal.’ What I’m thinking in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I f—ing changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective’.”

Posted in Politics | 5 Comments

Appalachia and Other Reflections

Posted on November 6, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Interesting discussion of the blue/red map of the 2008 election at Edge of the American West. I think the commentary is very much on the money that the areas which went more strongly to McCain this time than to Bush in 2004 are not the “Old South”, that the South as a voting bloc is now well and truly broken up into distinct entities. The red on the map is mostly Appalachia, and I think that raises some sharply important questions. Elsewhere in the country, even counties that are culturally or religiously conservative went more for Obama in 2008 than Kerry in 2004, even if McCain still won those counties. Meaning that even in some areas that are center-right, some constituencies will swing their votes either because they see the more conservative candidate as less able to deal with the current national situation, or because they prefer something about the character or image of the more liberal candidate.

Not in Appalachia. I think this has to be about economic circumstances, social class, and not just “even more culturally conservative”. E.g., there is something structural about poverty in that belt of red which is deeper and older than the accelerating economic crisis elsewhere which makes white voters in that region feel that a change in government policy is unlikely to change their circumstances. This is a pretty intense crystallization of an issue that American and European leftists have been troubled by for a long time, that some of the constituencies most afflicted by or excluded from capitalist economies are also the most reactionary and in some cases, the most inclined to have strongly felt racial biases.

——

Looking elsewhere on the map, I feel fairly vindicated about some of my arguments after the 2004 election, that the Democrats needed to peel away at least one significant social constituency in addition to mobilizing their existing base. I think both at the level of punditry and at the level of everyday social life, at least some suburban middle-class and upper middle-class voters made a pocketbook judgment that the incompetence and culture-war craziness of the Republican leadership under Bush was simply too costly in terms that they could touch and see in their own lives. When life was more or less in decent shape in the 1990s, despite whatever slow erosion was afflicting the status and well-being of the professional and middle-managerial classes, I think they were indifferent to a lot of the clownshow antics of the Gingrich era, and cared primarily about taxation and a smattering of social questions. When life really started to sour after Bush took office, that changed. 9/11 delayed that shift in consciousness and put fears about terrorism in the driver’s seat for a while.

The question will now be, “How much do you service this constituency in pursuing public policy?” Because getting them in your column was premised on making their lives more secure, and you won’t be able to do that just with a targeted tax cut or small adjustments to few minor entitlement programs.

——–

If the economy was key to Obama’s victory, then the question, “Are things better today?” will be key in 2012. If the answer is very evidently no, it won’t help to say, “It was George Bush’s fault”, however true or not that might prove to be in 2012.

I think making life feel better is important. One part of that is damping down the nastiness of a lot of public debate. I know this is an old message from me, but I think we can all give it new force now.

It’s schadenfreudey fun to read the ongoing psychotic meltdowns at various far-right sites like the Corner, I agree. But there’s little need to take the really bad-faith conservatives seriously now. For the last eight years, we’ve had to take them somewhat seriously because they had access to political power. You had to listen to the hack complaints about academia from endlessly manipulative writers because it was perfectly plausible that whatever axe they were grinding was going to end up as a priority agenda item coming out of Margaret Spelling’s office or get incorporated into legislation by right-wing state legislators. You had to listen to and reply to even the most laughably incoherent, goalpost-moving, anti-reality-based neoconservative writer talking about Iraq or terrorism because there was an even-money chance that you were hearing actual sentiments going back and forth between Dick Cheney’s office and the Pentagon. You had to answer back to Jonah Goldberg not just because making that answer was arguably our responsibility as academics, but also because left alone, some of the aggressively bad-faith caricatures he and others served up had a reasonable chance to gain even further strength through incorporation into federal policy.

There are plenty of thoughtful, good-faith conservatives who need to be taken seriously. And the actual conservatism of many communities and constituencies (in Appalachia and elsewhere) remains, as always, a social fact that it would be perilous to ignore or dismiss.

There are plenty of criticisms of academia which retain their importance and gravity, or which will continue to inform policy-makers in an Obama Administration. Don’t expect pressure for accountability and assessment to go away, for example. It doesn’t matter that Chuck Grassley is a Republican: a lot of the muck he’s raking up deserves to be raked.

But I think we can all make things just ever so slightly better, make the air less poisonous, by pushing to the margins of our consciousness the crazy, bad, gutter-dwelling, two-faced, tendentious high-school debator kinds of voices out there in the public sphere, including and especially in blogs. Let them stew in their own juices, without the dignity of a reply, now that their pipelines to people with real political power have been significantly cut.

Posted in Blogging, Politics | 25 Comments