Twenty Years of the Journal of Historical Sociology: Volume 2: Challenging the Field

Twenty Years of the Journal of Historical Sociology

Twenty Years of the Journal of Historical Sociology: Challenging the Field Volume 2 Edited by Yoke-Sum Wong and Derek Sayer © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-17934-8

Twenty Years of the Journal of Historical Sociology Volume 2 – Challenging the Field Edited by Yoke-Sum Wong and Derek Sayer

Book Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Chapters © Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for ‘The Stars beneath Alabama (for Molly Jarboe)’ © 2006 The Author; and ‘Living In and With Deep Time. Public Lecture XII David Nichol Smith Conference July 19, 2004’ © 2005 The Author. BLACKWELL PUBLISHING 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of Yoke-Sum Wong and Derek Sayer to be identified as the Authors of the Editorial Material in this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Twenty years of the Journal of historical sociology / edited by Yoke-Sum Wong and Derek Sayer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-7934-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Historical sociology. 2. Social history. I. Wong, Yoke-Sum. II. Sayer, Derek. III. Journal of historical sociology. HM487.T94 2008 301.09–dc22 2008004417 Set in 10 on 12pt Bookman by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed and bound in Singapore by Markono Print Media Pte Ltd. The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com

Contents Preface: A Curious Little Magazine

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An Introduction: Volume 2, Challenging the Field YOKE-SUM WONG

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Violence and Resistance in the Americas: The Legacy of Conquest MICHAEL TAUSSIG JHS Vol. 3, No. 3, 1990

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The Stars Beneath Alabama (For Molly Jarboe) ALLEN SHELTON JHS Vol. 19, No. 4, 2006

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Reported Speech and Other Kinds of Testimony MEGAN VAUGHAN JHS Vol. 13, No. 3, 2000

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Modernism and the Machine Farmer ROD BANTJES JHS Vol. 13, No. 2, 2000

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Dutchman Ghosts and the History Mystery: Ritual, Colonizer, and Colonized Interpretations of the 1763 Berbice Slave Rebellion BRACKETTE F. WILLIAMS JHS Vol. 3, No. 2, 1990 The Lips of the Dead and the ‘Kiss of Life’: The Contemporary Deathbed and the Aesthetic of CPR JOHN TERCIER JHS Vol. 15, No. 3, 2002 The Survivors: My Last Sixty-Six Long-Playing Records – For Ray Smith and Bob Glass COLIN RICHMOND JHS Vol. 12, No. 1, 1999 The Strange Career of the Canadian Beaver: Anthropomorphic Discourses and Imperial History MARGOT FRANCIS JHS Vol. 17, No.s 2/3, 2004

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A Response to Margot Francis JACQUES BOVET JHS Vol. 18, No.s 1/2, 2005 Corruption in Low Places: Sewers and Succession to Political Office DANIEL NUGENT JHS Vol. 14, No. 2, 2001 On the local construction of statistical knowledge: Making up the 1861 census of the Canadas BRUCE CURTIS JHS Vol. 7, No. 4, 1994 Borders and Boundaries of State and Self at the End of Empire MICHAEL KEARNEY JHS Vol. 4, No. 1, 1991

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Making Algeria French and Unmaking French Algeria DAVID PROCHASKA JHS Vol. 3, No. 4, 1990

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Living In and With Deep Time Public Lecture, XII David Nichol Smith Conference, July 19, 2004 GREG DENING JHS Vol. 18, No. 4, 2005

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Preface: A Curious Little Magazine

“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English). Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

“A curious little magazine” is how one distinguished historical sociologist, who shall remain nameless, is reported to have once described the Journal of Historical Sociology. It is a characterization we can happily live with, though we are no longer quite so little. Twenty years after the JHS was launched on a wing and a prayer the journal is available in over 2500 libraries worldwide. The range of material we have published certainly stretches the accepted bounds of what historical sociology is supposed to compass. We have by no means ignored the traditional terrain of “big structures, large processes, huge comparisons” (to quote Charles Tilly) that for many is historical sociology, as variously exemplified in the work of Tilly himself, Barrington Moore, Theda Skocpol, Perry Anderson, John Hall, Alan Macfarlane, or Michael Mann. The exchange between Patrick Karl O’Brien and Michael Mann over the latter’s Sources of Social Power, reproduced in the present collection (Volume 1), is one case in point. We have carried commentaries on acknowledged founding figures of historical sociology – Max Weber and Emile Durkheim among them – in our “Schools and Scholars” section. But much of what we have published falls under neither of these rubrics, and a fair selection of our contents, including many of the articles reprinted in this anthology, subverts the intellectual and professional boundaries and identities they define, not to say police. What makes the JHS “curious” – to some – is this abrasion between what the title Journal of Historical Sociology connotes, and what, year in year out, we have actually published. We could, of course, have changed the title. We preferred instead to challenge the field. We believe that historical sociology should be more than a subdiscipline in which, for the most part, sociologists mine historians’ findings in pursuit of large-scale comparative generalizations. We are not convinced that the grand narratives that result from such endeavors are the best, let alone the only form in which either the diverse socialities of the past or the past’s multiple hauntings of the present can be apprehended. Undoubtedly they have their place: which is, we would contend, less to provide über-explanations of the course of human history than to provoke thought, reorient

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research, and raise questions about what should be studied and how. A goodly number of historians, including some of those represented in this collection, find sociologists’ reflections on their subject-matter illuminating – even as they frequently chafe at their colleagues’ disdain for the niceties of detail and disregard for the particularities of time and space. To have an honored place in a field, though, is not – or should not be – the same thing as to define it. Our starting-point was broader. In the words of Philip Abrams (in his posthumously published Historical Sociology), which we quoted at the head of our opening editorial in Volume 1, Issue 1, “In my understanding of history and sociology there can be no relationship between them because, in terms of their fundamental preoccupations, history and sociology are and always have been the same thing. Both seek to understand the puzzle of human agency and both seek to do so in terms of the process of social structuring [. . .] It is the task that commands the attention, and not the disciplines.”1 Our Author Guidelines spell out how we interpret that task. “The Journal of Historical Sociology,” they state, “was founded in 1988 on the conviction that historical and social studies have a common subject-matter. We welcome articles that contribute to the historically grounded understanding of social and cultural phenomena, whatever their disciplinary provenance or theoretical standpoint. We are open as to topic, period, and place, and seek to be as international as possible in both the content and the authorship of articles.” Adopting a deliberately catholic policy as to authors’ disciplinary affiliations, theoretical orientations, and methodological preferences, we have sought the widest possible range of contributions that might variously advance our understanding of what Abrams’s “same thing” might be. We did not set out to be “interdisciplinary” in the impoverished sense that term has since taken on as a fashionable mantra of research funding councils and university administrations. We have always recognized that different disciplines provide different perspectives and insights, whose clashes can often be as intellectually fruitful as any forced collaborations. We have carried articles whose authors are located in anthropology, geography, political science, literature, law, classics, and science and technology studies, not to mention food writers and even one zoologist, as well as historians and sociologists. We have also more than delivered on our promise to publish work that covers an astonishingly wide range of times, places, and topics, and is truly international in its authorship. This variety contributes, diversely, to demonstrating what a historical sociology that is not 1

“Editorial,” JHS Vol. 1, No. 1, 1988, 1.

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confined by the classical questions that have constituted it as a sub-discipline of sociology might accomplish. Indeed, it could be argued that the breadth of what we have published reveals the traditional preoccupations of that subdiscipline – the rise of “the West,” the origins of capitalism, the distinctiveness of modernity, to name some of the most recurrent – to be distinctly parochial, not to say abidingly Eurocentric concerns; with the caveat, as Teodor Shanin (whose original idea it was to establish the JHS) was fond of saying, that in this mindset North America is Europe and Bulgaria is not. Antoinette Burton makes just such a case vis-à-vis “British History” in her essay in this collection (Volume 1). The conceptual geographies and historical periodizations that give the “classical” questions their salience would look very different from the vantage points of Michael Taussig’s shamans or Brackette Williams’s Dutchman ghosts (Volume 2). They seem equally curious when viewed from the perspective of Patrick Wormald’s Anglo-Saxon or John Gillingham’s AngloNorman England (Volume 1), which like many of the terrains our contributors have explored over the last twenty years confound conventional sociological wisdoms about what is and is not definitively “modern”. Some of the most radical work we have published, in fact, has been by “traditional” historians whose obstinate attention to empirical detail has uncovered many a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. The theoretical and methodological diversity, empirical richness, and cross-disciplinary intellectual challenge of the historical sociology encouraged by the JHS over the last twenty years will, we hope, be apparent from the thirty or so contributions gathered in these two volumes. The idea for the collection was the late Daniel Nugent’s, and its possible composition was a frequent topic of discussion among the journal’s editors (Derek Sayer, Philip Corrigan, Gavin Williams, Daniel Nugent, Martha Lampland, and Leon Zamosc) in the later 1990s. Dan used to refer to it as the “JHS Greatest Hits.” The result is not quite that: our selection has been guided not by statistics of most frequent citations or downloads but by our judgment of what mix of contributions would best convey the spirit of the journal. Many other articles might equally well have been chosen, and some have been left out with considerable regret. While we have kept to Daniel’s original plan for two volumes, the first focusing on English (and sometime British) state formation and the second displaying the journal’s attempt to broaden the subject matters and methodologies of historical sociology beyond its traditional limits, the selection of contents is the personal choice of the present JHS Managing Editors, Derek Sayer and Yoke-Sum Wong. A full list of

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what we have published since 1988 may be found on the JHS website at www.blackwell-synergy.com. “Our hallmarks, we hope, will be openness, exploration, and diversity,” proclaimed that same opening editorial in March 1988.2 We offer these volumes not only as a sampler of how far the JHS has come in realizing those objectives during the first twenty years of its existence but also as an invitation to all those who suffer, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, from the fatal disease of a surfeit of curiosity, to keep the submissions coming. Daniel Nugent would have made a particular point of extending this invitation to those he called “the undoctored and the untenured,” for whom he was always insistent on making space. That insistence was typical of him. By training Dan was a Chicago anthropologist, but by vocation he was a historical sociologist in the generous sense we have tried to give the term in the pages of the JHS. One of his last writings, whose topic is shit in high places and low, is included here (Volume 2). Daniel was not one to mince his words. Passionate, cussed, quirky, awkward, ill at ease in polite academic company, disordered and disorderly – and withal a superb and committed scholar, he epitomized everything we ever wanted the Journal of Historical Sociology to be. We affectionately dedicate this collection to his memory. Derek Sayer Yoke-Sum Wong

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“Editorial,” JHS Vol 1, No. 1, 1988, 3.

An Introduction: Volume 2, Challenging the Field

We can always count on something else happening, another glancing experience, another half-witnessed event. – Clifford Geertz, After the Fact1

The papers selected here are by no means conventional. They are not easy to digest – they ask us not to suspend our imagination but to broaden it, stretch the horizons of our intellectual practices and knowledge-making, consider other ontologies, and reject the safety of foundational epistemologies. They ask us to reconsider history and their sociological implications – and to consider the ordinary and the taken for granted as significant inroads into larger questions. These papers – articles, keynote addresses, ‘experimental writings’ – offer us the serendipitous turns of history or indeed histories – found in the dust, lodged in the nooks and crannies of grand events. Whittling twenty years of published papers down was not an easy task. All were chosen because they contained, in some sense, the subversive element of undermining assumptions and unquestioned sanctified concepts and ideas – ethnicity, identity, deep structure, nation-state, knowledge, power, dichotomies of oppressor and oppressed – and historical time, where the past falls into the present, rewritten as monolithic processes that end with clarified statements of good versus evil and triumphant emancipation. They all draw us to convergences we would not normally make. Structurally and methodologically, some of these papers would have found it difficult to find a published home – they defy the standard article form, too messy in their conveyance of ‘facts’ and ‘methods’ – or the refusal of them. Their approach can be unusual, refusing literature reviews – the rehearsal of much quoted texts and the necessity of kowtowing to the current popular ones. Over the years, our editorial advice has often been to ignore literature reviews, and to cut to the argument and leave any necessary references to endnotes and bibliographies. These articles can be infuriating and audacious – drawing together too many diverse disciplinary sources and connecting them to produce rhizomatic paths of arguments. What the authors say can also disturb and

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Clifford Geertz (1995) After the Fact. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 19.

Twenty Years of the Journal of Historical Sociology: Challenging the Field Volume 2 Edited by Yoke-Sum Wong and Derek Sayer © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-17934-8

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discomfort – stating what is most anathema to the academy and challenging the norm. Some of the papers refuse to stay safely within the boundaries of a single subject area. We think of John Tercier’s ebullient article on CPR and its aesthetics, weaving together scripts from the popular ER TV series and historical medical discussions. There is also Rod Bantjes’s import of Marinetti’s Futurism into the Canadian prairies and the aesthetics of modernism he discovers in rural Canada rather than in the urban and suburban built environment. The papers encourage conversations between the disciplines – even very disparate ones such as the discussion between Margot Francis and Jacques Bovet. The latter author is a retired zoology Professor who would not normally have picked up a historical sociology journal were it not for Francis’s discursive romp through the history of the beloved and iconic Canadian beaver. It was only last year that we introduced a new section in the journal called Proust Redux, and our first entries were Allen Shelton, and the inimitable and much respected medievalist, Colin Richmond. To read Allen Shelton’s ‘Stars Beneath Alabama’ is to peer into a Joseph Cornell box – personal, surreal, poignant, and infinitely profound. Carefully, and tenderly arranged objects in a memory play invoke questions of geographies, identities and subjectivities. Shelton’s writing plunges into the historical self and his Deep South ancestry to draw out the larger issues that enable us to explore the sociological imagination – with greater depth. And it is the little details which provoke. We are reminded of Witold Gombrowicz: “I have had, you see, to resort more and more to very small, almost invisible pleasures, little extras. . . . You’ve no idea how great one becomes with these little details, it’s incredible how one grows.”2 Such growth is charted in Colin Richmond’s ‘The Survivors: My Last Sixty-Six Long Playing Records’. Pleasures, perhaps and also less happy moments are intertwined in the mediation between objects and memories. The list of vinyl records are not merely an enthusiastic collection but the record of a life, a passing world, a social fact that crystallizes a memory or memories into a particular performance – and vice versa. A different sort of recording that evokes the geography of affect and emotion over a landscape of selves. Objects constitute voice and narration that are often overlooked in analyses – or to draw from the writing of Jean and John Comaroff, whose work featured in the very first issue of

2 W. Gombrowicz, Cosmos (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1971), 165–168; originally Kosmos (1965); Cosmos, trans. E. Mosbacker (London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1967).

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the JHS, we can find mute meanings in the transaction of goods and practices, icons and images dispersed in the landscape.3 What does voice mean then when we are looking at historical subjects, memory, national truths and pre-colonial pasts through the context of oral history? What are the assumptions governing our ideas on testimonials and recording, and the written text in history-making? How do such texts coagulate in the national imagination, constructing and reconstructing a succession of historical events culminating in the post-colonial present? Rather than only ask who speaks, we ask who can speak and how can one speak then? Megan Vaughan’s paper on reported speech raises powerful questions concerning our auditory ‘itching’ for the speaking subject and the nature of oral historiography, deconstructing our own academic practices of collecting and archiving speech – and our desire for origins. In a near similar argument, Michael Taussig’s Smithsonian Columbus Quincentenary keynote address speaks of academic complicity in the violent making of others, figuring ourselves through the “creation of objects of study”. Greg Dening in his speech ‘Living in and With Deep Time’ echoes this when he speaks of the Aboriginal who is often frozen in time and space – and dispossessed by most representational projects. There are those who locate themselves in metaphorically different times and spaces and we need, as Dening argues ‘a history beyond the polarities’ if we are to engage with them. As Michael Taussig articulates, there must be a need to resist essentializing in anthropological and historical writing – resist suppressing the ‘montage of dissimilars’ into a recognizable wholesome narrative that provides a context for everything and puts everything in its context – and explain the ‘dialectical images’ of history. The late Clifford Geertz says it most eloquently “swirls, confluxions, and inconstant connections . . . pieced together patternings, after the fact”.4 If Megan Vaughan’s Maravi slave jolted her with his indirect speech – and Taussig’s yage-eating Indian offers us a surreal window into another historical reality and time – it is Brackette Williams’s article on the Dutchmen ghosts which challenges us and takes us beyond the post-colonial concept of the subaltern and their relation with the dominant stratum. The location of the ‘subordinate’ or the ‘disenfranchised’ here cannot simply be inserted into the usual categories of economic stratification or binary power relations but is embodied in those long dead, who live on in elabo3 J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff (1992) Ethnography and the Historical Imagination Boulder, Colorado: Westview. 4 Geertz, 2.

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rate rituals which have their own rationale. Where do we place the dead who go on living in society and in the constant rendering of the national body? Such ambiguities and fluidities challenge – and despite poststructuralist and post-colonial interventions, the desire for singularity and origins continues, cause and effect, ultimate conclusions and ethnocentric romanticism. David Prochaska’s paper on the making and unmaking of French Algeria reminds us of historical contingencies and the manifold tensions in nationalist struggles that do not find easy conclusions. Daniel Nugent’s ‘proctological history’, to borrow Bernard Cohn’s clever phrasing, takes us down to the sewers and their epitome of complicated and factious politics in Northwestern Chihuahua. Statistical information, so long cherished by the social scientists, is not to be taken for granted either as argued by Bruce Curtis whose study of the Canadian 1861 census, and its role in identity formation and state regulation show us the problems of enumerators and enumerating conditions in the production of subjects. There are the liminalities of bodies and identities, and boundary-making, and Michael Kearney’s paper on the US-Mexico border crossings magnifies the difficulties of defining selves and others. There are simply no seamless delineations when it comes to imagining communities. We do not wish to go on and on about the papers but will let them speak for themselves. A worry we had was the ‘datedness’ of some of the articles but on re-reading them, it is quite remarkable that their arguments resound with renewed significance in contemporary global times when transnational crossings, displacement, violence and terror are being invoked as key issues. Our historical sociology might be a quirky one, eccentric maybe – but it is one borne by endless curiosity for the overlooked, the discouraged and the prohibited. It challenges the field – and yet ironically, this collection of essays would be most suitable in a graduate methods course, as showing ways of critiquing research and offering other (un)methodological routes. Historical sociology has a long way to go but there should not be one way of doing things. The world is too complicated for such generalizations. Accused once of being a ‘Mom and Pop’ journal, we make no apologies for providing a home for undisciplined and impertinent ideas. We have tried to give space to those who do not normally fit – preserve the different, and differences. We remain, as shown by the collection of writings here, proudly, the little journal that could. Yoke-Sum Wong

Issues and Agendas Violence and Resistance in the Americas: The Legacy of Conquest MICHAEL TAUSSIG Keynote address for the Smithsonian Columbus Quincentenary Conference “Violence and Resistance in the Americas: The Legacy of Conquest”, May 4, 1989

For those of us who spend time wondering if not worrying about the social impact of ceremonial and the reproduction of dominant discourses, codes, and images by means of civic ritual, the Columbus Quincentenary provides much to think about – especially if you are part of the knowledge-industry and even more especially if you are participating, as I am, in a Quincentennial rite. One of the first things such participation alerts us to, so I believe, is that the truth and knowledge produced by the immense apparatus of college teaching, research, scholarship, and funding thereof, is inevitably ritualistic and anchored in remembrance, no matter how scientific, in the Enlightenment sense of that term, such teaching and research may be. Therefore, far from being a special problem, my preoccupation with the way to represent the phenomenon called Columbus is merely a heightened version of the tension involved in this confusing yet ubiquitous mixture of truth with ritual, and ritual with remembrance. A formative influence on the precise constitution of this mixture and its tension is paranoia, as if the make-up of knowledge, the Self, and the very principle of identity itself cannot exist without the fantasmic presence of a feared Other. Today, in this Columbus Quincentenary in the Smithsonian, one of the First World’s great temples of Othering, the Other to be exorcised in this process of self-fashioning is that adulation of the Admiral as the Great Discoverer, an adulation that poetically sustains European Imperialism in the very notion of the newness of the New World. As against this version of Columbus, our being here today perpetuates a different image of the New World’s meaning for the Old, namely the well-known Black Legend, so dear to the Protestant Dutch and English critics of Spanish cruelty and devastation in the Indies. And while it is almost too easy to point out that this Black Legend conveniently served the economic interests of those burgeoning mercantile powers, Britain and Holland, serving to cover over the oppression their own overseas endeavors entailed, it is a Twenty Years of the Journal of Historical Sociology: Challenging the Field Volume 2 Edited by Yoke-Sum Wong and Derek Sayer © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-17934-8

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necessary reminder because in focussing on violence and resistance in the Americas we do too easily project onto others unproblematized notions of violence and resistance that rightfully begin with us. Thus I want to ask what it means to turn the question away from Others, especially poor and powerless Others, and onto ourselves and our own quite violent practices whereby we figure ourselves through the creation of objects of study. Instead of making more knowledge industries about violence and about resistance, what about the politics of violence and resistance in the way we construct legacies and thereby generate power from the great gamut of stories, official and unofficial, of the violent American past? The Heights of Machu Picchu In 1983 I travelled for close to two months with an elderly Ingano medicine-man named Santiago Mutumajoy from the forested lowlands of the Putumayo district of southwest Colombia through the highlands of Ecuador and Peru. With herbs and medicines, ready to take on patients, we hoped to compare notes with other healers in other localities so that we might better understand the ways by which the image of the shaman of the lowland forests served to further or abate misfortune. After many adventures and misadventures we found ourselves in the ancient Incan capital of Cuzco, and the day before we caught the train to visit the ruins of Machu Picchu, the papers were full of the news that archaeologists had at long last discovered the Incan secret by which the massive stones were so precisely fashioned and held together. But hadn’t I seen exactly this story when I first visited Cuzco twelve years earlier, in 1971? I started to realise that this constant puzzling by the authoritative voices of society about purported secrets of monumental and large-scale Incan construction was itself a sort of ritual, an obsession, a way of defining a sense of mystery about the meaning of the pre-European, Indian, past so as to control the life of the present. What makes this defining mystery powerful is that it is part of a virtually unconscious way of constituting an alleged essence and originary point in sacred time of the nation-state, and with that a particularly enduring notion of America, defined and perpetuated in the legacy of massive monumentalization of Indian ruins, nowhere more so than in the iconicity of Machu Picchu itself. I was stunned by Machu Picchu, its sublime grandeur, the warm sunlight on the brooding quiet of the ruins. Of course I had seen it before, not only on a visit but in images adorning glossy magazines the world over. But they were only copies. This was the real thing. I leant over to my Indian companion from the woods of the Putu-

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mayo, like me, so far from home, and asked him what he thought of it all. “Only the rich”, he said phlegmatically. “There weren’t any poor people here. These houses were for the rich”. He paused. “I’ve seen it before”, he casually added. “These mountains. These stones. Exactly the same. Several times”. “What on earth do you mean?” I was not only incredulous but disappointed. Hadn’t I gone to extraordinary lengths to bring him to this extraordinary place discovered if not by Columbus at least by Hiram Bingham and immortalized by the great poets such as Pablo Neruda with his epic poem, Alturas de Macchu Picchu? Of course discovered is a rather self-serving concept here, recalling Edmundo O’Gorman’s displacement of that term by the concept of the invention, not the discovery, of America. After all there were people tilling the fields of Machu Picchu when Bingham was guided there in 1911. What the “discovery” of Machu Picchu amounted to was that local knowledge was exploited, providing the stepping stone to its erasure within a universalizing narrative constructing America, a narrative in which the ruins would achieve not merely significance but magnificence. One can hardly imagine poor Indians cultivating corn and potatoes on the terraces of Machu Picchu today! Yet as testimony to the precious and fleeting moment whereby invention becomes discovery, Bingham’s book captures just that instant when real live Indians worked the soil of Machu Picchu, converting its terraces to their immediate needs. Amongst a dozen or so photographs depicting the discovery, Bingham has an arresting shot of two Indian women he met living there. They have been posed standing bare-feet on the spindly grass against great polygonal blocks of white granite of what he called the Memorial Temple of the Three Windows. In their rough woolen clothes with their respectful yet quizzical gaze back at us, these women seem no less rugged and timeless than the stones of memory themselves, but completely dwarfed by them. “Yes, when I was healing with yagé”, the old Indian man from the Putumayo was saying, “I saw it all before, all these cliffs, all these stones”. I was taken aback. Yagé is the most important medicine in the Putumayo. It comes from a vine in the forest and with the visionary capacity it stimulates, the healer, as much as the sick person who also drinks it, can obtain insight into the cause of serious misfortune and power to overcome it. Such power, however, does not necessarily come from seeing the causes of misfortune but instead can come from having a particular image, a pinta or painting as it is referred to commonly, and one of the ways of becoming a healer is to buy such pinta. Thus when the old healer said that he had seen Machu Picchu in his yagé-induced visioning, you have to

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understand that this means something more than merely seeing something, because it is potentially an empowering and even a curing image. How wonderful, I thought, in the very remoteness of his lowland forests the old man able to see this incredible place by means of mystical insights given to the guardians of ancient American shamanic lore. It made me curious. I wanted to better ascertain his connection to this Machu Picchu place high in the sun and the cold wind, so ponderously still in the muteness of its massive stones. Like a flash it occurred to me. “Look at the size of those stones”, I said. “How was it ever possible to build like that?” I was echoing the newspaper, evoking national discursive formations much bigger than my own limited imaginings. “That’s easy to explain”, he replied without so much as a blink. “The Spanish built all this”. And he waved his arm in a peremptory gesture encompassing the great vista. “What do you mean?” I feebly responded. I felt cheated. “It was with whips”, he said in a distinctly disinterested tone. “The Spanish threatened the Indians with the whip and that’s how they carried these stones and set them in place”. As far as he was concerned this was a thoroughly unremarkable event, just as Machu Picchu itself was unremarkable. “That’s exactly what the Spanish did to my father-in-law”, he added. “An Indian went and told them that he was a sorcerer and so they punished him by making him carry stones to build their church. They said they’d whip him if he didn’t do what they ordered. His wife and children followed him along the path also carrying stones”. For my old Indian friend, at least, there was no mystical secret of ancient Indian technology. To the contrary, the mysticism lay with the need the wider world has to monumentalize the pre-European, Indian, past. For him these glorified ruins were monuments to racism and the colonial authority to wield the whip. And in so far as his yagé-inspired dream-image of the ruins was a curing image – as it most definitely is for the world at large – it is probably because of a deep-seated complicity on his part with that authority, using rather than simply resisting it. Here, at this point where meanings collide and thought is arrested, we should seize the opportunity to sort out our ideas about violence, resistance and the legacy of conquest.

Dream-Work The old man’s perception certainly caught me off balance, and I would assume it is unsettling for most of you, too. There is more

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than a touch of blasphemy here, so reverentially has the mighty Machu Picchu been impressed into our hearts. Come up with me, American love. Kiss these secret stones with me. The torrential silver of the Urubamba Makes the pollen fly to its golden cup. The hollow of the bindweed’s maze, The petrified plant, the inflexible garland, Soar above the silence of these mountain coffers.

Thus, the poem of the esteemed Neruda, his finest work, according to his translator, Nathaniel Tarn, imaging the epic of all America in the stones of Machu Picchu, the city of the dead. Raised like a chalice In all those hands: live, dead, and stilled, Aloft with so much death, a wall, with so much life, Struck with flint petals: the everlasting rose, our home, This reef on the Andes, its glacial territories.

And it is with pain and remorse for the suffering occasioned by the construction of Machu Picchu that the poet shall bring his poem to an end, And leave me cry, hours, days, and years, Blind ages, stellar centuries. And give me silence, give me water, hope. Give me the struggle, the iron, the volcanoes. Let bodies cling like magnets to my body. Come quickly to my veins and to my mouth. Speak through my speech, and through my blood.

Yet the Indian healer from the Putumayo forests resists this mighty nostalgia that converts the tears occasioned by selfcastigation into a lifestream of blood and words presumed to make common cause through the ruins with the travail of the Indian past, sentiments which had such an impact on the Peruvian government that it decorated Neruda in person. “My poem, Alturas de Macchu Picchu”, writes Neruda in his Memoirs, “had gone on to become part of Peruvian life; perhaps in those lines I had expressed sentiments that had lain dormant like the stones of that remarkable structure” (p. 324). But not only capitalist governments warmed to those sentiments. Che Guevara was also a great admirer of the poem. Neruda tells us that Che would read the Canto General, of which the Alturas de Macchu Picchu is a significant part,

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to his guerrilleros at night in the Sierra Maestra in Eastern Cuba. Years later, after Che’s death at the hands of the Bolivian government and the CIA, Neruda was told that in his campaign in Bolivia, Che carried but two books, a math book and the Canto General (p. 323). The question arises, however, as to what sort of identity is being forged through such a representation of Machu Picchu – and on behalf of whom? For is not Neruda’s a distinctly European, let us say a Columbus-derived, vision of the New World’s rawness vis-àvis civilization as a mixture of mathematics and epic verse? In which case one might want to ask what it then means to reawaken, as Neruda in his 1974 Nobel prize acceptance speech defined the poet’s task, the old dreams which sleep in statues of stone in the ruined ancient monuments, in the wide-stretching silence in planetary plains, in dense primeval forests, in rivers which roar like thunder? For might it not turn out that these were all along the colonist’s dreams? In which case the further question might be fairly put as to what other discourse is there, anyway, that is not hopelessly rigged by those dreams and the history such dreams underlay? Can the subaltern speak? Can we speak, let alone weep, for the subaltern? Or does our task lie elsewhere? Here indeed lies the issue of resistance. This is why I think the old man’s flash of memory and interpretation of the meaning of Machu Picchu is significant for us, gathered together to discuss violence and resistance in the legacy of the conquest of America. A mere fragment, whole in its partiality, unheroic yet capacious, coolly bloodless and tearless, drastically unmystical yet dependent on shamanic flights of vision and dreaming, his is quintessentially the marginal discourse that eludes essentialization in the outrageously carefree way it snakes through the semantic mills of colonial subject-positioning – at the cost, of course, of the ambiguities of indeterminancy, the charge of ignorance as to true history, and the political isolation that absorbs marginal discourse. As the object of colonial knowledgemaking and representation, which in fact gives him, just like Machu Picchu itself, much of his shamanic power, this particular Indian stands deafer than any stone to these heartfelt appeals to the Indian past for a contemporary national if not continental identity on the part of states or revolutionary projects. He turns our expectations upside down, no matter how sophisticated or cynical we might be, and what is more he seems to do this in a relaxed and even unthinking sort of way, not trying to shock or consciously resist the frames into which history and our expectations would hold him as fast as the stones of Machu Picchu itself. And in this unintentionality of his, I take his cryptic style

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of montage to be of paramount importance for its pointed effect on us.

The Meaning of Context: Mediation and Montage As such the old man’s style cannot be separated from its context, a context that merely begins with the magnificent heights of the Machu Picchu and extends, through me, the conveyer of this story, to this other, quite different magnificence, of the Smithsonian with which it is today, by virtue of this Quincentenary, indissolubly, instrumentally and symbolically, connected. Thus I want to stress context not as a secure epistemic nest in which our knowledge-eggs are to be safely hatched but context as this other sort of connectedness incongruously spanning times and juxtaposing spaces so far apart and so different to each other. I want to stress this because I believe that for a long time now the notion of contextualization has been mystified, turned into some sort of talisman such that by “contextualizing” social relationships and history, as the common appeal would have it, significant mastery over society and history is guaranteed – as if our understandings of social relations and history, understandings which constitute the fabric of such context, were not themselves fragile intellectual constructs posing as robust realities obvious to our contextualizing gaze. Thus the very fabric of the context into which things are to be inserted, and hence explained, turns out to be that which most needs understanding. This seems to me the first mistake necessary for faith in contextualization. The second one is that the notion of context is so narrow. It turns out in Anthropology and History that what is invariably meant by appeals to contextualize is that it is the social relationships and history of the Other that are to form this talisman called the context that shall open up as much as it pins down truth and meaning. I say, to the contrary, that this is a deeply mystifying political practice in the guise of Objectivism, and that first and foremost the procedure of contextualization should be one that very consciously admits of our presence, our scrutinizing gaze, our social relationships and our enormously confused understandings of history and what is meant by history. This is not autobiography. This is not narcissistic selfindulgence. It is neither of these things because first it opens up to a science of mediations – neither Self nor Other but their mutual complicatedness – and second because it opens up the colonial nature of the intellectual relationship to which the contextualized other has for so long been subjected.

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It is also montage – the juxtaposition of dissimilars such that old habits of mind can be jolted into new perceptions of the obvious. In fact we have been surreptitiously practising montage all along in our historical and anthropological practices, but so deeply immersed have we been in tying one link in a chain to the next, creating as with rosary beads a religion of cause and effect bound to a narrative ordering of reality, that we never saw what we were doing, so spellbound were we by our narrativizing – and thus we repressed one of the very weapons which could resist, if not destroy, intellectual colonization and violence. Therefore, if it is the institution of Anthropology in the context of this Columbus Quincentenary ritual that allows me to act as the conveyor of an old man’s perception of monumentalized ruins, and thus jump-cut and splice space and time, abutting context with context, Machu Picchu with the Smithsonian, then this has now to be seen as its own style of neo-colonial montage – a non-Euclidean ordering of space and time that we took so for granted that we didn’t even see it. All ethnographic practice is blindly dependent on this cutting and splicing, abutting context to context, them to us. The task now is to bring this to conscious awareness, which I choose to do by thinking about the old man’s style of montage – part of my point being that I think you will not easily accept it. For surely it has struck you as interesting, if not bewildering and paradoxical, how wrong he is as regards space and time, yet how unsettling he is with regards to the truth-effect of his statements? He must be mightily wrong when he says he has seen Machu Picchu in his yagé-stimulated dreams and visions. Although we can accompany the poet, and the ethnographic textual representation, for some reason we cannot accompany the healer from the forest on such vast southbound flights of the eye in an instant of time across hundreds of miles of Andean cloud forest. And as regards time, he is decidedly anachronistic in his notion of the Spanish and the timing and nature of what we call, as in this Columbus Quincentenary, “the conquest”. For the Spaniards he is referring to are the Capuchin Fathers from Igualada, close to Barcelona, Spain, serving as missionaries in the Putumayo from 1900 onwards and whom the Indians referred to as Los Españoles. Thus, owing to particularities and coincidences of a local history, the old man has collapsed three centuries of what figures as American history into a flashing instant of time, a monad, in which the ruins are emblematic of recurrent neocolonial violence practiced on Indian labor, Indian land, and on the very concept and image of what it means to be designated as Indian. What, I feel compelled to ask, might this sort of historiography – for it is certainly history in the graphic mode – teach us?

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Monuments create public dream-space in which, through informal and often private rituals, the particularities of one’s life makes patterns of meaning. These patterns are neither terribly conscious nor totalizing but instead contain oddly empty spaces capable of obtuse and contradictory meanings swirling side by side with meaning reified in objects such as the famous stones of Machu Picchu set into the sublime landscape of the Andes. What we daydream about in places like these may well contain images and strands of images that are a good deal more ideologically potent than what we get directly in school or from the Church and political doctrine, but at the same time this very capacity of the monumentalizing day-dream to deepen and strengthen ideology rests upon the existence of strategic vacuities and switch-points that can radically subvert ideology and the authority sustained. A site like Machu Picchu is a sacred site in a civic religion in which daydreaming naturalizes history and historicizes nature. Think back for a moment to the first photographs of Machu Picchu as framefrozen images of this dual process, the photograph, for instance, of the Indian women dwarfed by the great granite block, rugged yet precisely worked and thus poised between nature and culture, on the threshold of history where invention becomes discovery itself. The compelling narrations that make nations, no less than worlds like the New World, utilize this day-dreaming capacity to naturalize history as in stones and Indians, and, conversely, to historicize nature as in reading a history into those stones and those Indians. Hence the heartfelt rhetoric to make the stones of history and the Indian speak, and in lieu of that, speak for them and channel the day-dream into waking consciousness. In this regard Machu Picchu is one of the New World’s great sites, perhaps its greatest, for rendering the collective dream-work that naturalizes America and holds the American project in creative tension with the Primitivism it requires and daily reproduces. And this is why the old Indian healer’s yagé dream-vision perception of the ruins of history is important. Not only because it so easily shrugs aside that Primitivism and hence the Great American Project. Nor because in so doing it creates a discourse counter to the official voices and authorized versions and representations of the past. Surely all of that. But more important still is that his dreamvision so disturbingly engages with our day-dreaming precisely where we have been mobilized as Subjects – indeed professional Anthropologizing Subjects – for the American Project. For in my very attempt to use him as a true Indian voice, he disarmingly dislodges that essentialization. That is the crucial point. His dreaming catches and tugs precisely where the strategic vacuities and switch-points exist in the understructure of our dominant dis-

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courses, and in doing so has the effect of all good montage which is to shock patterns of connections into quite different patterning, capturing what Stanley Mitchell calls in this regard the infinite, sudden or subterranean connections of dissimilars, catching our breath, so to speak. All of which is to ask, what then? Where will this breath go? What song will we go on to sing if not the Canto General? The Mothers of the Disappeared: Dialectic at a Standstill It is here where I want to move from the all too eloquent silence to which the dead of the ruins of Machu Rcchu have been subjected, to consider the role of the mothers of the disappeared vis-á-vis the violent silencing enacted by State terror in much of Latin America over the past decade. First I want to point out that what I think is extremely important in their activity is that they contest the State’s attempt to channel the tremendous moral, and indeed magical, power that the dead hold over the living, especially those who die (or disappear) due to violent or mysterious circumstances – those whom Robert Hertz in 1907 called the souls of the “unquiet dead” forever impinging on the land of the living. As I see it, in assassinating and disappearing people, and then denying and enshrouding the disappearance in a cloud of confusion, the State (or rather its armed and policing forces) does not aim at destroying memory. Far from it. What is aimed at is the relocation and refunctioning of collective memory. It is of fundamental importance to grasp this point. The State’s interest is in keeping memory of public political protest, and memory of the sadistic and cruel violence unleashed against it, alive! (Foucault’s notion of control through norm, through normalization, could not be more irrelevant. Combining violence with law, the State in Latin America rules through the strategic art of abnormalizing. It is Kafka and Bataille that are relevant here.) The memory of protest, and the violence enacted against it by the State, best serves the official forces of repression when the collective nature of that memory is broken, when it is fragmented and located not in the public sphere but in the private fastness of the individual self or of the family. There it feeds fear. There it feeds nightmares crippling the capacity for public protest and spirited intelligent opposition. And that is why the actions of the mothers of the disappeared strike me as so important. For they create a new public ritual whose aim is to allow the tremendous moral and magical power of the unquiet dead to flow into the public sphere, empower individuals, and challenge the would-be guardians of the Nation-State, guardians of its dead as well as its living, of its meaning and of its destiny. And

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it is this that lies behind Walter Benjamin’s injunction (in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”) that “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” I think that Benjamin would have conceived this resurrection of the dead from the privatized interior of the Self into the public sphere as a movement creating a shock, the dialectic at a standstill. At other times he referred to this dialectic as a Messianic cessation of time, equivalent to what he called “a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past”. You can sense the awesome potential of this shock in the dialectic of reality and illusion occurring within the isolated fastness of the dreaming self as you listen to Fabiola Lalinde, for instance, speaking of her son last seen being boarded by the Colombian army onto a truck in October, 1984. Now he returns to her in her dreams. Just as he’s about to answer her question, “Where have your been?”, she wakes up. “It’s so real”, she says, “that at the very moment of awakening I have no idea what’s happening or where I am, and to return to reality is sad and cruel after having him in front of me”. The true picture of the past flits by. Gone. Other nights she dreams of running through bush and ravines, searching piles of cadavers. What is more, her son returns in dreams to her friends and neighbours too. As I scan this thread connecting the purgatorial space of the disappeared with the recuperation of collective memory by the mothers of the disappeared in various Latin American countries, I see the way by which an essentialist view of woman has been radically refunctioned by women in relation to the State, parallel to the way the old Indian healer from the Putumayo refunctioned Machu Picchuism. Such refunctioning of assumed essences is part of the struggle for the definition of the past, as it flashes forth involuntarily in an image at a moment of danger. As I understand this refunctioning with reference to the mothers of the disappeared and current State terror in Latin America, these women are wresting from the State its use of woman to not only embody the nation and the people in a moment of intense political crisis, but the embodiment of memory itself at that precise moment when it is the aim of the State to bury collective memory in the frightened fastness of the individual soul. This can be seen by juxtaposing in the form of a dialectical image two uncannily similar yet radically different photographs, the one presented by Hiram Bingham in his book on the discovery of Machu Picchu, portraying two Indian women posed in front of an immense granite slab said to belong to the temple of memory, and, for comparison, the photograph from Hernan Vidal’s book, Dar la vida por la vida, depicting two women who, on the 18th of April, 1979, together with 57 other people,

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mainly women, chained themselves to a national monument, namely the Chilean Congress. In the former photograph Indian women have been posed to register, so it seems to me, not merely the discovery of the ruins by the mister from the First World, but a powerful sense of almost natural connectedness of the present to antiquity. In the Chilean image, however, the constellation of women, memory, and the eternalization of the present in the past has been radically broken apart and reconstellated through a courageous and inventive ritualization of monumentalized public space – the space which Vidal defines as the most heavily charged with Chilean constitutional history. Bearing photographs of the disappeared, these women (and a few men) have placed their very bodies as symbols of a people enchained against that which would try its utmost to use the symbols of woman and family to sustain the Patriarchal State and Capitalism and therewith justify State terror. The interweaving of individual and collective memory created by this counterritualization of public monuments can unleash feelings of selfconfidence which in turn inspire visions and joy – as we hear in the words of one of the participants. With all the nervousness of the night before, I dreamt of my disappeared husband. I dreamt that there was knocking at the door and then he entered. I felt indescribable joy and knelt in thanks at seeing him. He looked just the same as when he was arrested on the 29th of April, with his blue clothes, just as he was, with his grey hair going bald, with his smile, his small teeth. I felt him in the bed. I felt him in my arms. And when I awoke, with my arm like this, embracing my loved one, I saw that there was nothing by my side. I quickly said to myself, “He’s gone to the bathroom”. But then reality brusquely returned and I realized that everything I had experienced that night was just a dream. I arose early and happy. In all the actions, not only this one. I have a vision. That the day following, in a quarter of the city, a married couple will wake to see in the newspaper a photo of us in a hunger strike or chained, and they will feel good, they will be joyful because someone is showing the face of the people, someone is keeping the fight going (Vidal. p. 132).

Our Move At which point I feel it fair to ask about us. What do we do from this point on? Carry out more studies of other people’s resistance? Surely not. For while it is crucial that the whole world be informed of injustice when it occurs, and makes that injustice its concern, surely part of that concern should now be with the whole Western project of self-fashioning through constructing the Third World Other as an object of study? Surely it is this project that has to be radically rethought and refunctioned? To deny the authority once invested in the memory of Columbus in favor of a project to consider violence – always elsewhere – and resistance – always by the

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poor and powerless strikes me as running the risk of continuing the early colonial project but under a liberal guise made all the more deceitful by the rhetoric of Enlightenment science as in the appeals for an ethnographic practice which strives to grasp the natives’ world and point of view – for their own good, of course! In place of such grasping I think this great occasion of the Columbus Quincentenary can serve as the time to begin the long overdue task of refunctioning Anthropology as a First World pursuit – just as the old healer refunctioned the meaning of the past monumentalized by its ruins, just as the mothers release the power of the spirits of the disappeared so as to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. Such a refunctioning of Anthropology would have to turn its resolute gaze away from the poor and the powerless to the rich and the powerful – to current military strategies of “low intensity warfare” as much as to the role of memory in the cultural constitution of the authority of the modem State. After all, who benefits from studies of the poor, especially from their resistance? The objects of study or the CIA? And surely there is more than an uncomfortable grain of truth in the assertion that in studying other people’s resistance, heroic or Brechtian, one is substituting for one’s own sense of inadequacy? For all the talk of giving voice to the forgotten of history, to the oppressed, and the marginal, it is of course painfully obvious that the screen onto which these voices are projected is already fixed – and that it is this screen, not the voices, where the greatest resistance lies, which is why something more is required than the injunction to study up instead of down, or to study the political economy of the world system rather than local meanings. For what such simplistic injunctions overlook is precisely our profound entanglement and indeed self-constituting implication in that screen of interpretation which in itself is the great arena where world history, in its violence as in its easy harmonies, in its sexualities and National-State formations, folds into rules of customary sense. Yet I do not think, just as Hegel in his parable of the Master and the Slave did not think, that such scrutiny can be undertaken alone. To assume it could, would be to fly in the face of what I take to be axiomatic as to the dependence of being on other. What is more, there are too many ghosts to be settled, too much violent history to be reworked, which is why I have tonight felt impelled to invoke two powerful images of constructed Others whose place in fashioning universal history has been profound beyond words – namely, the woman as mother, embodiment of memory and the people, and the Indian as healer of the American project. In invoking their presence I have not tried to speak for them, whatever that

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might mean. Nor have I made it my goal to carry out what in Anthropology and History is called contextualization and thereby “explain” them, whatever that might mean. What I have tried to allow is for their voices to create in the context of our hearing contradictory images, dialectical images I will call them, in which their attempts to redress the use of themselves as mnemonics for the vast projects of building other selves, white male selves, NationStates, and America itself, bring our own expectations and understandings to a momentary standstill – and thereby present us with the opportunity, if not the necessity, to commence the long overdue discovering of the New World in place of its invention. Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Rachel Moore and Adam Ashforth for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I want also to thank Santiago Mutumbajoy for his perceptions on Machu Picchuism, and the late Walter Benjamin, to whose theories on the philosophy of history I am deeply indebted. References Benjamin, Walter 1969 “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, pp. 253–64. Schocken: New York. Bingham, Hiram 1948 Lost City of the Incas: The Story of Machu Picchu and its Builders. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce. Franco, Jean 1986 “Death Camp Confessions and Resistance to Violence in Latin America”, in Socialism and Democracy, 2. Hertz, Robert 1980 “A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death”, in Death and the Right Hand, Aberdeen: Cohen and West [First published in 1907]. Mitchell, Stanley 1973 “Introduction.” in Walter Benjamin: Understanding Brecht. London: New Left Books. Neruda, Pablo 1966 The Heights of Macchu Picchu, translated by Nathaniel Tarn. New York: Farrar. Strauss, & Giroux. ———— 1976 Memoirs. New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux. O’Gorman, Edmundo 1961 The Invention of America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Vidal, Heman 1982 Dar La vida por La vida: La Agrupacíon Chilena de Farniliares de Detenidos Desaparecidos (Ensayo de Antropologia Simbolica). Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature.

The Stars Beneath Alabama1 (For Molly Jarboe) ALLEN SHELTON ***** “What Proust began so playfully became awesomely serious. He who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of the segments. No image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside – that image, that taste, that touch for whose sake all this has been unfurled and dissected; and now remembrance progresses from small to smallest details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms grows even ever mightier. Such is the deadly game that Proust began so dilettantishly, in which he will hardly find more successors than he needed companions.” Walter Benjamin

The town square was a quarter-mile from my grandparent’s house on Pelham Road. All the big trucks headed north on Alabama 21 came through this square. There was a cluster of small businesses bunched around this grass island; a hardware store with a toy display in the front window, two barber shops, two drugstores with lunch counters, one had a Ouija board for sale over the counter with a specter reaching out from the dark, two dime stores facing each other across the square like two male hyenas on Noah’s Ark, a beauty shop, a department store condensed into a one-story rectangle with merchandise stacked vertically eight feet high, a dress shop, a gas station, and a bank with Greek columns that matched the ones on the bank president’s family home. The architecture was Federal style. Most of the buildings were built during Reconstruction. They were squat, boxlike structures that looked like pieces of a child’s dollhouse arranged around a large dinner plate. An IGA grocery store was part of the square’s frame coming into town from the south. On the other side were an auto supply store, a used car lot, and Zuma’s Café. The town hall was visible on a side street running off to the east, and on two parallel lines in sight of each other were the Episcopal and the Presbyterian churches shooting up into the sky like two rockets headed for Jesus. A mule leg from the courthouse was the library where my grandmother worked. The square was the mechanical heart of the town. The stitch by stitch commercial money was generated here. After the federal 1 This paper is part of a larger manuscript entitled The Dreamworlds of Alabama (forthcoming)

Twenty Years of the Journal of Historical Sociology: Challenging the Field Volume 2 Edited by Yoke-Sum Wong and Derek Sayer © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-17934-8

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district, the businesses quickly thinned into an icehouse, a shoe repair shop, and a dry cleaner. The Dairy Queen was just down the hill off the square. A few gas stations lingered on the main highways. A neighborhood grocery store near the train tracks was packed in between houses. The Rocket Drive-in sat two miles out of town on a flat straight away. I ate three foot long hot dogs with chili in the back of my grandmother’s blue Buick there when I was six years old. She told me I had a hole in my stomach.2 Grandmother ate everything, but in small portions. She drove fast though. I would fly my hand out of the car window, matching the speed of her blue Buick teardrop back to the house. At the radial center of this heart like a stake driven into it was a marble statue of a Confederate infantryman looking north down Pelham Road. His rifle butt was propped on the ground for support. Around his chest was a bedroll. The soldier is just over six feet tall, perched on top of a ten foot marble base. On the pedestal, the soldier looms over the World War One machine guns surrounding the base with their barrels pointing up in reverence. When I was six years old, my family moved from Southern California back to Jacksonville. I remembered the statue, but like it was the colossus in the ancient city of Rhodes whose open legs formed the entrance to the harbor. It had seemed gigantic. When we drove into town, it was December, but still warm. I saw a man that could have been a rolly-polly bug tottering down the main street with a cane. My mother told me that this was my great grandfather. Then I saw through the car window the statue which had shrunk to fit the pages of the encyclopedia and the TV screen where I had seen the colossus. Now I have the opposite problem. The statue is just as unstable, but in feet and inches and smaller details. The bedroll may or may not be there. I have a plastic Confederate soldier, the only survivor from a set of forty Civil War soldiers that has a bedroll strung around his body. He stands in a menagerie of dinosaurs, German knights, trains, and zeppelins in a toy cabinet hanging in my son’s room. He has joined up with the statue like two stragglers heading home after Appomattox. My grandmother used to say 2 On the early 70s TV series Night Gallery I saw an episode about what were called the sin eaters. Food was set around the dead individual. The sin eater was brought in and he stuffed himself with the meats, breads, and sauces. As he ate, he sucked the individual’s sins into his fat, leaving the dead translucent. Memory was gorging till I could feel the skin on my stomach stretch over my grandmother’s gaze. This is the softer version of the architectural technology Foucault describes as the panoptic. Wrapped inside the skin gaze is the experience of sin and the hoped-for redemption. The sin isn’t just a personal experience. It is a historical formation. “The sins of the father are visited on their sons.”

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things come in threes. I just can’t see myself in the picture. I must be the third man coming home, a figure somewhere between a toy plastic soldier and marble. I have been away from home for thirteen years, but it seems far longer like the time between a child’s Christmases had been stretched into a hundred years. My mother died in 1996, followed in the fall of that year by my grandmother Shelton. I sold my farm in the last phase of my divorce settlement. My dog died. For seven-year stretch I lived in Des Moines, the Finger Lake District in western New York, in Walla Walla, Washington against the Blue Mountains in the Southeast, Tacoma, Washington on the coast, Las Vegas, and Buffalo. I have trouble distinguishing things I dreamed and things I did; a consequence of my internal clock being scrambled by how each different apartment in each city always looked identical once my things were arranged into the specific constellation I lived under. The same books were piled in stacks against the wall in three to four foot towers. I have no shelves. The wooden desk made from lumber salvaged from a barn stands on four slender legs cut from a 4 ¥ 4 against the window with a ladder back chair with a seat woven out of baling twine scooted under the desk. The chair is over a hundred years old, handmade, and uncomfortable but my mother gave it to me. Then there was a pair of straight back rocking chairs, graceful and approaching delicate if the body goes over 150 pounds. A 4 by 2 foot rug from Persia before the fall of the Shah lies like a picture on the floor; complemented by a collection of collage pieces on the wall and a postcard rack on a swivel. All I had could be stashed in the bed of my Toyota 1 ton truck inside the camper shell. Each piece was chosen, not for comfort or speed – I would’ve had IKEA but for how each piece could condense into a fog rolling through my apartment as if it were across the pasture behind my farm house, swallowing the bottoms of the alders and willows along the creek and squeezing the long leaf pines into deep green banks in the sky. For me the zodiac wheel was perpetually turned to the sign of Saturn against an imaginary Alabama landscape. The problem is more complicated than my being away from home. Even at home I was away. In the first part of the 20th century an obscure German scholar who was denied his terminal degree which would have granted him entrance into the university system, who made his living writing small pieces for journals and the scripts for a radio show for children, wrote an autobiographical essay about his childhood in Berlin in the years before World War I. This was Walter Benjamin. He spent his life going home to a place that no longer wanted him or even existed. In many ways this is an odd reading of Walter Benjamin’s career. He is more often identified with the Paris of his

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later work and not the nostalgia for his childhood home. But Benjamin’s nostalgia for home was not conventional. He yearned for a magic inside his own childhood in toys, books, and in the constellation of objects. His nostalgia was different from Proust’s. Benjamin had strong Kafka-like currents and a polite brutality that informed his work. In Proust this was manifested in the tourniquet of gossip; in Benjamin’s work it was a state of emergency activated by the Gestapo. He grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in a fashionable district. The department store became a dominant motif in Benjamin’s writing as a spatial intersection of dreams and commodities and culminated in his masterwork, the unfinished Arcades Project. At its simplest the work is a history of 19th-century Paris centered on the glass and iron shopping districts, known as the arcades, the forerunners to the department store.3 At the other extreme, it is a Kabala-like history based on fluid samples of capitalism itself, whose object was messianic – to awaken the dreamer in the 20th century. Benjamin said he wrote under the sign of Saturn though closer up the constellation would have resembled a department store display filled with collections of objects arranged into weird juxtapositions. When he completed the provisional draft of “A Berlin Chronicle,” a nostalgic look homeward in 1932, Benjamin was already 40 years old and a refugee. Berlin was receding from him like the sand under his feet at the edge of the surf. The account is a Proustian remembrance of his childhood home that is not punctuated by vivid recollections but stalked by figures,4 slowly emerging from a myopic fog. The effect the text creates is like gradually becoming aware of a bright green praying mantis in the setting of flowers on the 3 The Arcades Project. “These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass roofed, marble paneled quarters extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of these quarters, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the passage is the city, a world in miniature.” 4 The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Insects and Spiders. “Praying Mantis ‘European Mantid’ 2–21/2 inches, including wings, which extend beyond abdominal tip. Compound eyes tan to chocolate brown, darker at night. Habitat: Meadows, on foliage and flowers. Food: Diurnal insects, including caterpillars, flies, butterflies, bees, and some moths. This mantid was accidentally introduced in 1899 on nursery stock from southern Europe. At a time when Gypsy Moth Caterpillars were burgeoning in the eastern states, it was recognized almost immediately as a beneficial predator. However, mantids are so cannibalistic that they are rarely numerous enough to have much effect into depleting Caterpillar populations.” (397)

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table.5 Nothing particular happened to the young Benjamin, but extraordinary or melodramatic events were not the object of “A Berlin Chronicle.” The essay focuses on the dense landscape of memory, with its lush vegetation and fauna, and its encroachment into the present.6 In his essay on Proust, Benjamin momentarily adopts an insect metaphor, to describe the tenacity and voraciousness of Proust’s extraction of memory. “Proust’s most accurate, most convincing insights fastened on their objects as insects fasten on leaves, blossoms, branches, betraying nothing of their existence until a leap, a beating of wings, a vault, show the startled observer that some incalculable individual life has imperceptibly crept into an alien world.”7 The metaphor emphasizes qualities and dangers often overlooked in the reconstruction of memories. Proust’s project is not a dainty exercise, but a strenuous, powerful desire within an ecological system. But the beetle in the account is herbivorous and not carnivorous. It is the sticky feet of the leaf eating beetle that grip and not the jaws or the forearms of the mantis stalking the beetle.8 Benjamin himself was more of a solitary wood beetle9 in looks and temperament.10 There is a famous photograph of Benjamin hunched over a table in the Paris library extracting the samples that made up The Arcades Project. He is sloped shoul5

“The mantid Gonatista grisea, when lurking in ambush beside the lichens it imitates, is extremely easy to overlook.” (Eisner, 297) 6 “The mantidae were probably the first insects on earth. This may be inferred from the fact that the Mantis protogea, whose fossil print was found in the Oeningen Myocena, belongs to the Paleodictyoptera group, which is defined by Scudder and can be traced back to the carboniferous age.” (Caillois, 70) 7 p. 208. 8 “And when I asked Paul Eluard about the magnificent mantis collection in his home, he confessed that he viewed their habits as the ideal mode of sexual relationship. The act of love, he said, diminishes the male in and aggrandizes the female; so it is natural that she should use her ephemeral superiority to devour, or at least to kill, the male. Dali’s case is even better to use, given his paranoid – critical study of Millet’s Angellus, which is a very complete and impressive document on the relationship between love and cannibalism. He could hardly avoid citing the fearsome insect that actually unites these two savage desires.” (Caillois, 76–77) 9 The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Insects and Spiders. “Patent- leather Beetle. Description: shiny black. Head has a short horn, forward directed. Habitat: deciduous forests. Food: adult eats decaying wood.” 10 While Benjamin may have imagined himself as some kind of solitary wood beetle, I saw myself as a praying mantis. Identified with the insect’s slenderness, folded arms, and the way their head turns contemplatively to the side scrutinizing the fly. There is a school picture of me in the second grade; crew cut, skinny, my head is cocked to the side. I’m wearing a hooded sweatshirt that in my mind made me a monastic insect knight on the run.

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dered, chubby, sprouting a heavy mustache as if it were a sex organ. He is wearing a dark musty suit – it must have been soaked in tobacco smoke. The camera catches him munching unawares. Underneath his exoskeleton his muscles were softly saddled in lard, only his thumb and forefinger like toy pincers had bite. What graphic violence there is in Benjamin’s work occurs outside the text in his life or just passed the sentence in what is implied. It is Benjamin the beetle who is the object of the violence, unaware or resigned to what is materializing around him. His soft beetle eyes, the spongy wood, the methodical chewing into the past as future, all make him vulnerable to what is around him. He was on a Gestapo list. Benjamin’s recollections are in a soft focus throughout most of “A Berlin Chronicle” but there is something acidic in the hazy retelling.11 The writing quickly spreads to something more supernatural. Heart-shaped structures start to dissolve in a ghost world of memories, dreams, and fading cameos of relationships, ending with this scene that is filled with a cool fog and something sharp: “I was perhaps five years old. One evening – I was already in bed – my father appeared, probably to say goodnight. It was half against his will, I thought, that he told me the news of a relative’s death. The deceased was a cousin, a grown man who scarcely concerned me. But my father gave me the news with details, took the opportunity to explain, in answer to my question, what a heart attack was, and was communicative. I did not take in much of the explanation. But that evening I must have memorized my room and my bed, the way you observe with great precision a place where you feel dimly that you’ll later have to search for something you’ve forgotten there. Many years afterwards, I discovered what it was. Here in this room, my father had ‘forgotten,’ part of the news about the deceased: the illness was called syphilis.”12

By the end of Benjamin’s essay, the camouflaged praying mantis has slipped from the flowers to the sleeve and has crawled up the 11

Surrounding the actors is the haze or the vapor given off from commodities. It is the collective representation of the initial mystery Marx pointed to in commodity fetishism where labor as a human endeavor disappears into the activities of things or the feel of velvet. The plush surfaces of the commodity supersede the human. Their substitution goes further than ordinarily allowed. Commodity fetishization makes possible a rethinking of the oedipal circuit in the household and tactilizes the unconscious. The tissue of the unconscious is composed of things like blue velvet cushions, hardwood floors, the cold porcelain in the bathroom, the fluff on the mother’s slippers, and the constellation of objects surrounding the actors in Freud’s family dream. The haze, like the white snow sweeping across the static screen of a TV in the family room, infiltrates the eye lazily slipping back into the socket. 12 pp. 59–60.

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arm and is poised motionless on the shirt collar by the throat.13 The vivid recollection of memory is indefinitely postponed. But Benjamin achieves something else in the essay. There is a haunted, a luxuriant quality to the narrative that is torn to pieces before the reader’s eyes. The essay is just one of the small pieces Benjamin wrote, that was groping towards his enormous mapping of the dead Paris in The Arcades Project:14 dead in that every figure, including himself is alternately fading away or turning into allegory. “A Berlin Chronicle” is a ghostly parlor set down in the desert of a children’s 13 “This insect really seems to be a machine with highly advanced parts, which can operate automatically. Indeed, it strikes me that likening the mantis to an automaton (to a female android, given the latter’s anthropomorphism) reflects the same emotional theme, if (as I have every reason to believe) the notion of an artificial, mechanical, inanimate and unconscious machine – woman – incommensurate with man and all living creatures – the stem in some way from a specific view of the relations between love and death and, in particular, from an ambivalent premonition of encountering one within the other.” (Caillois, 78–79) 14 What The Arcades Project lacked was the creeping luxuriant narration of “A Berlin Chronicles.” The personal narrator is missing, and is mechanically reproduced in the phalanx of samples like those in Benjamin’s earlier surrealist text One Way Street. The book exemplified the strolling, distracted eye and the montage style associated with the surrealist and the flanuer. The flanuer’s mixing of public and private spaces also raises interesting questions about how autoethnographic writing can become critical and not just revelatory. The answer lies in the strategic use of the personal to make explicit the boundaries separating the public and the private and how these lines are patrolled and regulated. This means a self conscious manipulation of one’s own experiences to lure “the police” out into the open and the willingness to see how deeply hegemony has penetrated the author, making him a kind of accomplice in the very process under criticism. As for the flanuer, style is the momentary escape route and the basis of the fleeting critique. Each piece in One Way Street was organized around a phrase, a common phrase lifted from a street sign like the title or “This Space for Rent” and then read as an inadvertent social commentary. Once reset, the phrase opens up suggestive lines for rereading familiar experiences. Benjamin’s move also suggests how street signs, directions and advertisements caption and frame our experiences. The directions on the door “push” point out an ambiguity around how even simple things work and hint at a combination of passivity and aggression as well as a silent authoritarianism. More than a direction, “push” is an experiential caption. What Benjamin suggests is that writing is part of a politics that extends from the page to the street. By constructing a text out of bits and fragments, Benjamin was attempting to shock the tangible into speaking. Adorno would later describe Benjamin’s obsession as a kind of sorcery, at best a mystical Marxism. What holds the page in place is the implicit and overt grammar reproduced in the street signs and the shop windows. By unhinging pieces from their normal frame or position, Benjamin creates holes in the grammar. Through these holes Benjamin put together a new kind of political writing. Writing in bursts of short episodic passages, Benjamin

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book. There are still actors even if they are trapped in Benjamin’s childhood. Sand is mixing with the Persian rugs. An adder is sliding around the loveseat’s curved legs. The gas lamps are extinguished by Bedouin tribesmen who look through the family seated in the upholstered chairs like they were but a small dust cloud. Mr. Benjamin makes a similar point, straight out within the essay: “I wish to write of this afternoon, because it made so apparent, what kind of regimen cities keep over imagination, and why the city, where people make the most ruthless demands on one another, where appointments and telephone calls, sessions and visits, flirtation and the struggle for existence grant individuals not a single moment of contemplation, indemnifies itself in memory, and why the veil that has been covertly woven out of our lives shows the images of people, far less than those of the sites of our encounters with others or ourselves. Now on the afternoon in question I was sitting inside the Café des Deux Magots at St. Germain-des-Pres, where I was waiting – I forget for whom.”15

First the faces and then the bodily assemblages like the shoulder and jacket recede and vanish until there is the empty parlor, which slowly turns to rolling dunes of sand. Benjamin was an avid collector of children’s books and toys. These collections may have functioned for him as a wall to hold his memories intact. Like Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China was finished off at its northernmost quarter. From the southeast and the southwest it came up into sections that finally converged there. This principle of piecemeal construction was also applied on a smaller scale by both of the two great armies of labor, the eastern and western. It was done in this way: gangs of some 20 workers were formed who had to accomplish a link, say, a 500 yards of a wall, while a similar gang built another stretch of the same link to meet the first. But after the juncture had been made the construction of the wall was not carried on from the point, let us say, where this thousand yards ended; instead, the two groups of workers were transferred to begin building again in quite different neighborhoods. Naturally in this way many great gaps were left, which were only filled in gradually and bit by bit, some, indeed, not till after the official announcement that the wall was finished. In fact, it is said there are gaps which have never been filled in at all, an assertion, however, that is probably merely one of the many legends to which the building of the wall gave rise, and which cannot be verified, at least by any single man with his own eyes and judgment, on account of the extent of the structure.”16 Benjamin’s was attempting to build a network of interconnected fragments in which the layers in the writing would produce a heated up reading like layers of quilts piled on a sleeping body. 15 p. 30. 16 p. 235.

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memory wall is built in sections unconnected to other pieces like a mouth being constructed a tooth at a time with gaps on either side of the solitary tooth. He wouldn’t be the first to use collections for memory storage and preservation. Marcel Proust’s apartment was crammed with his family’s furniture. I doubt whether Berlin could be found intact in Walter’s collection or Proust’s beloved childhood home in the piles of furniture stacked like cord wood in the spare rooms. “Unable to relinquish completely the object of his deepest affections, Proust left the family apartment, but refused to part with his parent’s furniture. Resisting his brother Robert’s suggestion that the family heirlooms be put up for sale, Proust transported as much furniture to Boulevard Haussmann as a smaller apartment could hold, putting another three roomfuls in storage. The goal for Proust in retaining these painful reminders of life . . . was to reconstitute the very place he initially sought to escape, “the place where Mama rests.”17 My past persists in the broken foundations in the middle of a pecan orchard slumped with dirt and overgrown with privet and day lilies, a pile of bricks where the chimney was, a broad slate hunk that was the stoop to the side door, a colony of rusty nails burrowed into the first six inches of dirt, deformed into a botanical and mineral skeleton of a house that was here. On my grandfather’s farm there were several house sites from different eras scattered across the pastures and hickory woods. What had been a smattering of farms were by the 1930s consolidated into larger estates. Some of the pastures still carried their dead owner’s names even though their home sites were piles of bricks and orange eruptions of day lilies. My grandfather died in 1986. His last home is still standing. A chicken farmer lives there. The ruins are different. They decay from the inside out as the memories become unwrapped from the still existing shapes. While from the outside the house looks virtually identical to the one my grandfather lived in, on the inside there is an accelerating decay that is not about the literal walls or the ceiling joists, there are no termites, my own memories are rotting, leaving only a hard physical shell in the landscape. Towards the end of his life granddad started selling real estate again. He specialized in farmland. I would occasionally have to drive him out to meet potential buyers. Turning to me from the passenger seat of the car he used on the farm, baling twine was balled up in the long curly knots in the floorboards, a steel bucket sat in the backseat, feed sacks lay on old newspapers, cow medicine in plastic bottles, a tattoo kit in a plastic tackle box, and feed corn scattered on the seat were all mixed together in a Pentecost, he was dressed in a suit with tall, black rubber boots. He 17

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told me. “Allen, you know all this land is being bought up by Arabs.” In his living room discretely shelved were my grandmother’s copies of the Arabian Nights right next to The Prophet. Only now do I see the Bedouins extinguishing the lights in the parlor. My grandfather, A.C. Shelton was a tall man just over 6′2″. He seemed larger because of how small the objects he kept near his person were. He carried a child-sized pocketknife. He wore a thin leather belt and favored delicate half boot, half shoes. He was inseparable from a slender candy cane shaped cattle stick, and instead of a truck, drove a short, boxy Buick sedan around the farm. At his heaviest he approached 180 pounds, though his waist was almost as thick as his chest. He stood perpendicular to the ground, a peculiar reminder that he was for a time a mathematics professor and that he was the decisive line in the algorithm of pieces wherever he was. In photographs, his head is perched like a long necked ibis staring into space over the others. From the side, the slightest slope of his shoulder was noticeable, which looked like the first turn of the pharaoh crossing his arms in death. It was hard to tell whether he was going into or coming out of a deep sleep even as a young man. He wore his hair the same way he did when he was twenty five. The flanks of his head were shorn to the skin and cut straight across as if he were part of a monastic order. His resemblance to a holy man was accentuated by the buttoned top on his shirt collar and the way he carried his cattle stick crooked around his arms folded at his waist. A.C. looked like he was expecting to walk through the Resurrection like it was a tall grass pasture filled with thistle swinging at the weeds with his stick. In his bedroom, his height and posture were out of place. It was too small. He was stuffed into the room like a lanky hound in a plywood doghouse in the backyard. The room was ten feet x twelve feet. Laid on the floor with his arms over his head in a backstroke, there was a two foot margin on the east-west axis and four foot along the north-south. Standing outstretched to the ceiling, there was another two feet. Only still, as a pillar of salt in the wilderness, did the ratio of space expand. There was an iron bed covered in a thin mattress stuck in the room’s gut. The pores of the faded Persian rug were saturated with his odor and were laid on top of another layer of carpet that covered the concrete pad, which was the floor. Even after he died the room smelled like he had just come in from the cows. The bed was the same he had slept in for forty years. The mattress was imprinted with the indentation of his shoulders and hips. The spread filled the cavity in the mattress. The imprint of his body looked like an angel shorn of his wings curled up in a fetal position. At his death the room was closed off from the air conditioning and the hallway. Because of this the room went on just as if he were alive, breathing

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and smelling of him. Marcel Duchamp called this the “infra-thin” where a body touches an object and forms an infinitesimal membrane that is a hybrid of both. Duchamp gave as examples from the early 20th century corduroy pants mixed with thighs or tobacco smoke and lips smelling of each other. Here the presence Duchamp imagined was not singular, but a colony filling the room, an infrathin the size of a giant prehistoric sloth’s carcass stretched into a quivering membrane over the Persian rug and pinned to the floor with the bed’s four iron legs. A.C. was being composted in that room. He was methodically given up to the swirls of dust in the narrow bands of light. And with him the map of my grandfather that was drawn was slowly disintegrating. The map18 “of the arrangement of the room which was so detailed that it ended up covering the territory my grandfather exactly (the decline of A.C.’s double witnesses the fraying of this map, little by little, stretching and its fall into ruins, though some shreds are still discernible in the room – the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, testifying to a pride equal to a young A.C. standing in front of his college math class and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the floor, a bit as the double ends by being confused with the real through aging) – as the most beautiful allegory of simulation, this fable has now come full circle, and possesses nothing but the discreet charm of second ordered simulacra, a cattle stick propped against the corner by the door of an empty house.”19 A.C.’s room kept him a molding ghost in a refrigerated empire at the back of the house. Occasionally pieces were ripped out for redistribution to my relations. Other objects waited for the landfill dolefully, emptied of all value except space. The closet in this room was the same size as the wardrobe that would have stood in the corner of the house he had grown up in. A foot and a half a deep and four feet wide inside, it mimicked an upright coffin. He grew up in a ramshackle dogtrot house with rough pine siding. There would’ve been no closets in this space. Each room was ruthlessly rectangular.20 After his death, straight 18 Simulacra and Simulation. “If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of The Empire drew up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but when the decline of The Empire sees this map become frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts – the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to substance of the soil, in there an aging body double ends up being confused with the real thing) . . .” 19 Baudrillard, 1994, 1. 20 Moby Dick: “Leaning over his hammock, Queequeq, long regarded the coffin with an attentive eye. He then called for his harpoon, had the wooden stock drawn from it, and then had the iron part placed in the coffin along with one of the paddles of his boat. All by his own request, also, biscuits

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objects were put away in drawers or piled inside the closet. In the closet his suits hung like hides that had been drying for years. His pants were long cotton tears slipping off the wire hangers. His shirts ached for oxygen. The king of that cramped space was A.C.’s tuxedo. The other clothes were pushed back 6 inches on their hangers so that nothing touched its blackness. The tuxedo was a formal, double breasted outfit. He had bought the tux for official occasions at the state legislature in Montgomery. He was a state senator for fourteen years. My grandmother insisted I take it. We were close in size she assured me even though I was three inches shorter and broader. On me there was a long drop in the crotch. A.C. wore his pants high on his waist. The tuxedo lay on me like a sleeping black animal whose muscles had gone slack. In the pocket of the tuxedo jacket were two cuff links with the seal of Alabama emblazoned on the face, and a small envelope. The pocket had a fleshy feeling. While I can’t recall what my grandfather’s hands felt like I can still recall how the smooth lining of the jacket felt. Inside the envelope was a Xerox copy of a newspaper article neatly folded to fit exactly the envelope’s shape like a well designed relationship.21 Across the top printed in all capital letters were the end ranged around the sides within: a flask of freshwater was placed at the head, and a small bag of woody earth scraped up in the hold at the foot; and a piece of sail cloth be rolled up for a pillow, Queequeq now entreated to be lifted into his final bed, that he might make trial of its comfort, if any it had. He lay without moving a few minutes, been told want to go to his bag and bring out his little god, Yojo. Then crossing his arms of his breast with Yojo between, he called for the coffin lid to be placed over him. The head part turned over with a leather hitch, and there lay Queequeq in his coffin with little, but his composed countenance in view.” 21 My mother sent me this note (“A man who has been the in disputed favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success.” Life and Works of S. Freud) in an unmarked envelope with no return address. No signature. I couldn’t identify the author. For an instant I thought Freud must have sent it. I had this scenario worked out. He found me in an obscure passage in an antiquarian work; recognized me as his descendent. Then in his will he arranged to have this letter sent posthumously. Or better, he dictated it through a Ouija board to a woman in Birmingham where it was postmarked and she sent the message. It made more sense that it was my girlfriend playing a trick on me, she was at least alive; but they were none of her usual marks on the letter. Still, it was close to a love letter. The shape of the hand writing and the postmark gave my mother away eventually. This is a kind of oedipalism Freud never imagined – the mother combined with the State. I called Mom on the phone to thank her. When I asked her why she hadn’t signed the note, she said, “Why should I have. Who else could have sent it?” It wasn’t like I’ve had a lot of practice with letters from my mother. This was the second letter I had ever received from her. The first happened when I was eight and lived with my grandparents in what I thought was a castle

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was the name of the paper, The Livingston Gazette and the date October 11, 1919. The writing was not A.C.’s. The writing was delicate and had cursive flourishes. It was a woman’s handwriting, but who’s? Was the writing his secretary’s at the insurance company? Could it have been his sister, who still lived in the area? There was no writing of any kind on the envelope that would have provided a second coordinate to fix the identity of the author by. It could’ve of been from my grandmother. My grandparents were never publicly affectionate. The rare occasion for the heart where their hands or shoulders actually touched took place in the architectural emotion crafted for a formal photograph. The envelope was a plain, white business envelope like the kind strewn across office desks. The letter was a reminder that there things I couldn’t quite imagine in my grandfather’s life that were rolling up to the surface like a sea monster. A.C. didn’t carry photographs in his wallet. There were no photographs on his desk at work or at home. The closest thing there was to a sentimental attachment was over my grandfather’s desk at home. It was a 3′ ¥ 4′ reproduction of the relief facing out from Stone Mountain near Atlanta which showed the mighty trinity of the defeated Confederacy. The generals Robert E. Lee and the martyred Stonewall Jackson with his beaver tail sized beard flank the defeated President Jefferson Davis. All three are mounted on horseback. This sentimental portrait of the glorious South had no connection to A.C. except as a business sign signifying a form of commercial stability. He had no reverence for this lost world.22 in Jacksonville, Alabama. My father was a Marine officer and had moved the family to an island off the North Carolina coast. I stayed behind in Alabama to finish the school year. I still have the letter I wrote back, which I found in a stack of papers after she died. The Freud letter was to be the very last one. My mother died a year later. I keep the note stuck to the door of my refrigerator. 22 A.C. and I had driven across Pelham and down a deeply shaded side street. There is a Waffle House on the corner there laid out singularly in the bright sun. The drive was short. We pulled up next to an old brick house. There was an outside staircase to the second-floor. The stairway was clogged with garbage. Underneath that I could feel something akin to my grandmother’s house – the same wood, a similar smell, the color and size of the banister strung like a black boa constrictor the length of the stairs. My grandfather was in a black suit. He had his walking stick, what he called his farm stick. The house had been rented to college students who had skipped out without paying the rent. The house was grand. It must’ve been gorgeous in the late 1800s and in the early 20th century. It would’ve looked at World War One with a beautiful stare beneath the magnolias. Now the house was like a 19th century luxury steamship abandoned in the Amazon jungle or a victim of a weird strategic bombing that ate its insides and left its exterior intact. My grandfather sold it. Its rental value was

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A.C. grew up in the out-of-the-way town of Livingston on the edge of the Mississippi State line at the northern terminus of the black belt and just west of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. When he was young there were still open ranges and big stretches of swamp land. He had rounded up stray cows in the swamps for money and delivered mail on horseback. There was a teaching college there where A.C. got his bachelor’s degree before heading to Nashville and Peabody College. Livingston was an abstract space without any specificity. It was as far away as my grandfather’s belly button. I never saw A.C. without his shirt. No matter how hot it was, his sleeves were at his wrist and the top button at his throat was fastened. Even in August running cows, he wore his long sleeved shirt and undershirt, like an iron skin prosthetic in the broiling, Alabama sun. His skin was as white and creamy as a grub. I never heard him say anything about how he missed his home or wanted to go back for a visit. That part of the world seemed to be dead except for this clipping. He spent his life without ever seeing the ocean or the Mississippi River. I read the Xerox article three times at increasingly slower speeds until I was mouthing each word trying to find a name I recognized or a thread that tied him to the paper. There was no angle that I could see that intersected the world I knew of A.C. The article was an account of the faculty wives club at Mrs. Arnold’s home on the afternoon of October 11th. It was the guest speaker’s birthday. A.C. was born on Columbus Day. Was that the clue I was looking for. The speaker was a missionary from China. She was touring the United States raising money for her mission in a province outside Beijing. Her name was Ester Humphries. She’d grown up in Tonawanda, a community bordering Buffalo, New York. Max Weber, the German sociologist, had visited the area during his tour of the United States in 1905 and interviewed German workers along the docks and lumberjacks in Tonawanda. It seems he too had a China fantasy that permeated his work. What began with these interviews and culminated in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism had a magnetic needle that pointed to China. China stands behind the United States in Weber’s work like Kublai Khan’s daughter behind a silk screen. Who was behind this clipping? Ester had survived what was described by the American papers as the Chinese Titanic. Three hundred people had drowned in the China Sea when their ship capsized in a storm. She described how the emptied. The house was leveled. The stare was forcibly straightened. And what parts could have been Amazonian were buried in a landfill at the edge of Crooked Mountain Road. The tree canopy cut away, the extravagance and luxury were decimated in a flash. He did not grieve its passing.

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lights from the ship looked like stars in the water as it rolled beneath the waves. She had thought of Peter, and when he had walked on the water during the storm, how Jesus grabbed his hand as he sank. Ester led the survivors in devotional hymns until they were rescued by a British steamer. She sang one of them for the gathering without accompaniment. The column quoted her reciting the scriptural verse about doing God’s work and leaving one’s home and family. She recounted her epiphany at the Pan-American exhibition where her imagination and zeal for the Lord were fired by the exhibitions from China. She described the cultivation of a prayer garden at her mission. The Chinese garden reproduced the flowers and shapes that surrounded her childhood home. Buffalo and her family were always in her heart. There was an announcement of next week’s meeting, who provided the refreshments, and a thankful reportage on Mrs. Arnold’s generous hospitality – and with that, the article stopped abruptly like a door closing. When I showed the clipping to my grandmother she shrugged and passed it off as an interesting curio. “Your grandfather must’ve taken classes with Professor Arnold.” A week later, she had a stroke. Her tongue was tied in a spit soaked ribbon. No one could tell me what the intersection was. What I was left with was the lure of arriving at the beginnings of a memory that I never had. I was looking at a vanishing point like a swimmer at the edge of the horizon sliding under the water. My grandfather had articulated a dream or a fantasy about a life utterly foreign to him, not in his own handwriting, but in a copy of a newspaper clipping stuffed inside an envelope inside another pocket in a haunted closet. It was a complicated network of exchanges that my grandfather purloined in his tiny bedroom. But in the tragedies which followed a woman to China and back to Alabama, A.C. must’ve found something he could cling to as if it were he about to drown. She was a scrap of paper designed just for him. This tuxedo was a man in an oblong box floating in an ocean.23 The clipping drew me into a psychic seascape. It was a letter from the dead. Freud opens his book Civilization and Its Discontents with 23 Moby Dick “So, floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, and a half – spent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly drawn toward the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, and then, and ever contracting towards the button like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital center, the black bubble burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin life buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, that floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with

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a story about a series of letters exchanged between himself and a friend. The literal contents of the letters are never given. I had a clipping in an unaddressed envelope with no idea about the transmission link. Freud traces out the shape of a disagreement between himself and his correspondent on the source of religious feelings. My grandfather and I argued about black pepper. Freud is crab walking towards the gradual transformation of the letter into a psychic landscape and then finally into the city of Rome. Freud posits the city as a metaphor for the mind. Rome inexorably draws the earlier themes, images, and the letters Freud discussed into its gates. Like a molten marble vortex, Rome pulls everything back into its empire, including Freud. Seen from the center of the empire, the letters are paper simulations of the ancient city itself slowly turning back into marble. Freud sees in Rome a multidimensional hologram of the mind which all the pasts continue to persist and jut into the present like unruly obelisks. The clipping I had in my hand was just as multidimensional and with no less a simulation of a capital of a world empire. But in this simulation the capital was more powerful and older than Rome – Beijing towers in the clipping. It was into this whirlpool my grandfather and I, a little ac were sucked. I have no idea of who Ester Humphries was other than the brief description of her life given in the clipping. And now the clipping itself is gone, lost probably in a pile of papers stuffed in a garbage sack during my divorce. It is just as likely that my grandfather didn’t know who Esther was other than through the same newspaper clipping. Her visit to Livingston was very brief. He could’ve seen her at the train station from a distance or at Professor Arnold’s house. Professor Arnold was as my grandmother pointed out, one of his teachers. So there is the possibility that he actually met her in passing. But A.C. was inexperienced in such social circumstances. He told me, “You can just as easily love a rich girl is a poor one. Always carry mouthwash with you and use it after a kiss.” The mystery is not who she was or why the clipping was kept in his pocket. Other than his desk drawer in which he regularly kept his business records, the closet was the only private space he had. By the time he died it had been twenty years since he had worn the tuxedo. The tuxedo lay in his closet like an embalmed animal clutching this clipping as its heart.24 And if that were so, the padlocks on their mouths; the savage seahawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last.” 24 Michael Taussig tells a story about a vendor in the market in Bogotá, Colombia. Around this tale he has fashioned the frame of the rubber boom in Colombia of the first years of the 20th century. At the time, so many Indians were slaughtered that their bodies were figured into the weight of

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clipping may have hibernated in his pocket alone for years without ever being touched until I opened it. The mystery is sunk back into the acidic fog that is eating my memories from the inside until only shapes of A.C. remain. Esther is a kind of pressure almost materializing into a face in the mist. I have the pine table that A.C. sat at for meals. It is a six-foot by two foot-wide pine rectangle that moved only three times in fifty years – from his house in town to the farm and then into my house before being held even more still in a storage shed. A.C. never moved. He always sat facing west, and the window to a pasture. He didn’t engage in small talk. The closest was when he and I would argue about how I peppered my food. He was horrified by how I blackened my poached eggs. It will kill you, he’d tell me. In response I would point out that if not for the pepper we wouldn’t be here. Christopher Columbus was looking for Chinese pepper. I’m only doing my part to commemorate history. A.C. was born on Columbus Day, but without his inclination to travel. He never knew I had fantasies about becoming a Marco Polo. Ester Humphries was produced for me. Her production was no different from the commodities Marx describes in Capital or the hoe cakes grandmother made. She was produced on a typewriter with x-number of vowels and consonants ending in a set number of words, at a specific wage per hour. Behind this page screen, her production is more complicated, but still governed by the iron law of hours and dollars. Her value was not in her shape or form. I could only imagine this. She was like the coat or the iron bar Marx writes about in his equation; the rubber. This much fat per pound of rubber. “The crowd is thick and milling there on 26th September, the day of the lost souls of Purgatory. The crowd is swarming like bees. What is going off? On top of a step ladder is perched a wooden square box, each side about 3 feet long. For 100 pesos the man on the street with a megaphone will open the doors of the box. Inside, expressionless, is a bodiless boy. Sweet – sweet as an angel. In his mouth he holds the corner of an airmail letter. It contains a prophecy. It’s yours for a hundred pesos. The doors close on the bodiless face. We want to see more. So sweet. Doors to the future revealed by the cut – off child.” (186) I can get over the letter. I wonder if its stamp is an icon, a thumb print in color stuck on the corner a saint standing in orchids, or a Jaguar stretched out on a limb mimicking the State, another kind of magic hiding in the foliage. The letter goes unopened. Taussig doesn’t have to open it to understand what would be written. The Anglo-Saxon words are irrelevant. The important point is that the letter is a body double for the Indian boy displayed like a rich chocolate in a box. The magic is in the inscription across the body – the letter is a portable sign for the 32,000 Indians killed during the boom, the Indian shamans macheted by whites in the countryside, and the Indian powered healing curios, which all fit hand in glove – body and violence together and to what Taussig describes as a “culture of terror.”

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1 coat = 20 pounds of linen, which equals (¥) number of iron bars. She had no specificity except as a position in an exchange system. Her specificity shifts like the image of the parlor swallowed by the desert sand. Ester was not tangible. She was already a spectral image, even in the world contained inside the society column. Ester’s value was inside the form, in the secret spaces where I was Marco Polo exploring an empire as far-reaching as the Emperor of China. Here is where Ester flickers and shivers like a light on the horizon or what Proust called his magic lantern which cast images on his childhood’s bedroom wall, or what Benjamin described as a phantasmagoria.25 Ester’s one dimensionality is deceptive. She is a sheet that can be passed through. Ester was a letter from someone summoning me to a castle. “It was late in the evening, when a.c. arrived. The farm was deep in snow. My grandfather’s house on the hill was hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a house was there. On the wooden bridge leading from the main road to the farm, a.c. stood for a long time gazing into the illusory emptiness above him.”26

Kafka’s character K. never arrives at the castle. By the end of the novel the writing itself is swallowed by the fog that obscures the castle and what text there is, is beginning to disintegrate from contact with the acid. The novel doesn’t just end in mid-sentence, it is being consumed back to the very beginning; erasing K. to a blank space. No wonder A.C. kept a strict regimen. It was an assertion of boundaries against a slow erasure. What Esther touched off was the destabilization of space and distance. A letter becomes a castle. A door is an envelope. Memory pulls and sucks like a thick muck on a body. The swamp changes distance into depth and slime. Marx opens his massive excursive on the Kafka-like castle, capital with this disarmingly simple observation that belies the swamp like quality of capital: “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.” What makes this opening turn alternately mysterious and perfectly lucid, is Marx’s authorial posture. In the first paragraph he stands like K., the surveyor before the edifice of capital. Marx likens himself to a physicist and 25

The Arcades Project. “Combs swim about, frog green and coral-red, as in an aquarium; trumpets turn to conches, ocarinas to umbrella handles; and lying in the fixative pans from the photographer’s darkroom is birdseed.” 26 Kafka, 3.

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begins the process of dismantling the castle into its elementary or molecular units – a multitude of commodities. He doesn’t begin with a description of the squalid working conditions or an account detailing the monstrous crushing of children in the factories;27 he begins with what would be the clouds in Kafka’s account – the banks of commodities that fill every day life like a literal fog. Still, there is no mystery that threatens to turn into a storm churning the clouds of commodities into immense thunderheads. It is what Marx proposes next that leads him into an underworld that is filled with danger. Marx begins the first solo descent into the commodity and into the system that expands and moves like a sky or an ocean between them. The last sentence in Capital Volume 1 makes this clear: “The only thing that interests us is the secret discovered in the New World by the political economy of the Old World, and loudly proclaimed by: that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property as well, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of that private property, which rests on the labor of the individual himself; in other words, the expropriation of the worker.” The Atlantic is bursting inside Marx’s sentence, leaving the human like a conch pulled from its shell in the shallows. For Marx the commodity, the elemental unit of capitalism is a storage unit for humanness. This is the insight he used to solve the mystery of value. But it is not like a closet or a refrigerator. These spaces are too static. The commodity is closer to a vampirous freezer or the house Edgar Allan Poe imagines in a “Tell Tale Heart” that ticks like a heart swaddled in cotton or a watch stabbed deeply into an abdomen. “It was a low, dull, quick sound – much such a sound as a watch makes enveloped in cotton. I gasped for breath – and yet the officers heard it not.” The dead old man and the murderer were incorporated into the house. In keeping with Marx’s documentation of the commodity – the murdered remain largely anonymous. There are no names in this Poe account, and only rarely does a named individual bob to the surface in Marx. The phrase the introjection of labor is too antiseptic to describe the engorging of the human into the commodity. The commodity soaks up humanness. Personal memories dissolve on contact with the subterranean ocean inside the commodity. Memories are mixed together in a Babel that soars inward. Marx repeats these images in his famous description of the 27 Capital. William Wood, 9 years old, was 7 years 10 months old when he began to work. He ‘ran molds’, (carried ready-molded articles into the drying room, afterwards bringing back the empty mould) from the very beginning. He came to work every day in the week at 6 a.m. and left off at about 9 p.m. “I work till 9 o’clock at night six days in the week. I have done so for the last seven or eight weeks.” (354)

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anonymously possessed table stalking about in his description of commodity fetishization. “The form of wood, for instance, is altered if the table is made out of it. Nevertheless, the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but in relation to other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.” Neither the table nor spirits animating the table have names or an identity. The workers who made this table are strangers in a strange land, inhabiting parlors or dressing rooms of houses unimaginable from inside a wooden coffin. In Marx’s reading of the living conditions of workers in London in the 1860s, he concentrates on the physical dimensions that encase the workers. The measurements are meticulously given us, as are the cubic feet of oxygen available. But Marx shies away from the person like a pupa burrowed into these tight spaces. Marx calculates their life spans running from point to point, mirroring his estimation of the generation of surplus value. Here it would seem to be an anti-surplus, a life running in the negative. The human dimension is not part of the text except in strategic strokes like his description of the death of a seamstress: “In the last week of June 1863, all the London daily papers published a paragraph with a sensational heading, ‘Death, from simple over-work’. It dealt with the death of the milliner, Mary Anne Walkey, 20 years old, employed in a highly respectable dressmaking establishment, exploited by a lady with a pleasant name of Elsie. The old, often-told story was now revealed once again. These girls work, on average, 161/2 hours without a break, during the season off in 30 hours, and the flow of their feeling labor power is maintained by occasional supplies of sherry, port or coffee. It was the height of the season. It was necessary, in the twinkling of an eye, to conjure up magnificent dresses for the noble ladies invited to the ball in honor of the newly imported Princess of Wales. Mary Anne Walkey had worked uninterruptedly for 261/2 hours, with sixty other girls, thirty in each room. The rooms provided only one third of the necessary quantity of air, measured in cubic feet. At night, the girls slept in pairs in the stifling holes into which a bedroom was divided by wooden partitions. And this was one of the better millinery establishments in London. Mary Anne Walkey, fell ill on the Friday and died on Sunday, without, to the astonishment of Madame Elsie, having finished off the bit of finery she was working on.”28

Space is a wooden prosthetic suit that literally squeezes the air out of the worker and their families. Here is an example of Marx’s measurements of the Poe like rooms that surround the individual.

28

p. 634.

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(1) Houses Vulcan Street, number 122 1 room 16 persons. Kitchen: 9 feet five by 8 feet 11 ¥ 6 feet six. Scullery: 8 feet 6 ¥ 4 feet 6 ¥ 6 feet six. Bedroom: 8 feet five by 5 feet 10 ¥ 63. Bedroom: 8 feet 3 ¥ 8 feet four or 563.

What Marx achieves in the strange cubic descriptions is comparable to finding the architect’s blueprint to the House of Usher. He finds in mathematical specifications a haunting and an emptiness that roll like the sound of the sea in an empty sea shell. The rooms measure what is left of how the human vanishes in the cell like cubicles within a carceral empire. The cramped spaces Marx finds are the turned out interiors of commodities and record what happens to the human squeezed inside the commodity netherworld. In the 1973 French novel, Life: A Users Manual, George Perec recalls the vanished and their residues in an abandoned apartment building. In one tiny side story Perec writes: “Its oval top, wonderfully inlaid mother of pearl, was exceptionally well preserved; but its base, a massive, spindle shaped column of grained wood, turned out to be completely worm-eaten. The worms had done their work in covert, subterranean fashion, creating innumerable ducts and microscopic channels now filled with pulverized wood. No sign of this insidious labor showed on the surface. He saw that the only way of preserving the original base – hollowed out as it was, it could no longer support the weight of the top – was to reinforce it from within; so once he had completely emptied the channels of their wood dust by suction, he set about injecting them with an almost liquid mixture of lead, alum, and asbestos fiber. The operation was successful; but it quickly became apparent that, even though strengthened, the base was too weak, and Grifalconi had to resign himself to replacing it. This exact record of the worms’ life inside the wooden mass: a static, mineral accumulation of all the movements that had constituted their blind existence, their undeviating single-mindedness, their obstinate itineraries; the fateful materialization of all they had eaten and digested as they forced from their dense surroundings the invisible elements needed for their survival, the explicit, visible, immeasurably disturbing image of the endless progressions that had reduced the hardest of woods to an impalpable network of crumbling galleries.”29

What are left are the hard parts. The body melts away like a salty butter into emptiness. The plaster then captures the weird patterns in disappearances as something beautiful, as something that moves from how worms track through wood to an allegory of how the human vanishes against architectural scaffolding. A.C. must have had an inkling of this when he was sitting next to a cluster of beehives and a bee crawled into his large ear and burrowed into the orange wax. If he reached up and smacked the bee, he would have 29

pp. 20–30.

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been immediately stung by the hundreds of bees in the air. Bees release an odor when threatened by danger and A.C. was not quick. Once the bee was in the ear it chewed and pushed his ear wax into a hexagon. More bees were drawn by the first buzzing and lighted on his ear. His whole head and then his torso could be transformed into a network of cells filled with honey. Beeswax would replace his brain and lungs inside a bone hive. The green clover pastures were turning into “the agony of water.” “The honey which slides off my spoon onto the honey contained in the jar first sculptures the surface by fastening itself on it in relief, and its fusion with the hole was presented as a gradual sinking, a collapse, which appears at once as a deflation and as display – like the flattening out of the full breasts of a woman who is lying on her back.” In those moments sitting Indian style in the pine woods with the bee inside his head, A.C. could have suspected that the bees were after that which was sticky inside him. After a few minutes of his sitting perfectly still the bee in his ear crawled back out. A.C. got up and walked out of the cluster of hives. After a series of strokes, so small that they were only acknowledged in their cumulative effect, my grandfather was institutionalized in a nursing home that my uncle had built, that I had worked on as a laborer for $2.25 an hour, and on the land that my grandfather had owned. A.C. was ill suited for this world. The only TV he watched were the news in the morning and evening; and on Saturday nights, “The Lawrence Welk Show.” What he ate was regulated by a rigid code. Every meal included honey, applesauce, rice and a glass of tap water with no ice. Now I see the water as a simulation of what he imagined the ocean’s temperature to have been off China. The room was roughly the same size as his bedroom but his own smell was replaced by Lysol. The iron bed, the musty Persian rug were changed to gleaming steel and square tiles – surfaces without patina and incapable of absorbing him as a smell. The most severe change was in the ecological relationship of his room. Before his room was like a dog house for a hound, a place only for sleeping. Now it was a cell. At home, A.C. walked as much as 10 miles a day checking the cattle herd. The pasture was his dream space. Without it, his thoughts must have collapsed on themselves. The distance between him and those around him was emphasized; leaving him like a passenger going down in the China Sea. He steadily starved himself to death. It took a month but he had an iron will. The day of his death he was moved to the hospital and pumped with fluids to combat his dehydration. By 9:30 p.m. he was dead. By 10:15, I was staring at him in the soft light. The TV was blank. The white sheets that held his long skeleton seemed as rigid as steel.

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The cotton formed a prison around A.C., an iron maiden that clutched him to her breast. A.C. would not have been her first lover. Cotton’s history has long been intertwined with what Michel Foucault described as the panoptic institutions as one of its basic molecular unit. In much the same way as the pencil and the tiny white squares became critical parts of the deployment of discipline within the school, cotton’s cost, washability, and the relative ease with which it can be bleached white lent itself to the gathering together of these micro histories into that which makes up the necessary nursing home as something more than the simple stockpiling of old bodies. My grandmother called it the waiting room for the angel of death. In this context, the key word is waiting room, the foyer of the panoptic. But sleeping silently in the back rooms are the white sheets, drawn tautly over the gleaming beds. Unfurled on the floor, the sheets are like bodies without a skeletal system. In his 1905 essay “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” Max Weber imagines a similar materiality hardening into a prison cell around the individual. Weber writes, “In Baxter’s view that care for external goods, should only lie on the shoulders of the saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.30” The cloak mentioned here would be linen or wool, and not cotton, but this was not the important detail that Weber was after. Weber was tracing the development of a specific character that formed an enclosure as hard as steel around the self by the early part of the 20th century. How this was materially manifested was not the kind of question that Weber tried to answer. The world capitalist economy in the 16th century was still unconsolidated. Large stretches of cultural enclaves, even within the future Core States were still not capitalized in terms of market or labor; one of Weber’s key points. The year stuck inside his saint is before the rise of cotton as the dominant materiality. It was the early 19th century 30 The newer translation renders iron cage into steel coating, which is by most accounts closer to what Weber intended. With the steel coating translation Weber’s concepts of character itself becoming an enclosure is clearer as is the closeness and completeness of the fit, literally a steel skin. But the image of iron has certain valuable connotations. The first is its weight pressing on the person, even from a distance with a magnetic force field. The second is its echo of Marx’s opening equation in Capital in which 20 pounds of linen = 1 one coat is eventually transmuted into iron. Here we have the crushing weight Weber was reaching for facing the everydayness across an equal sign. And then there are the physical characteristics of iron: it rusts, the smell, is brittleness at certain temperatures, and its ability to hold heat longer – a vestial humanness persists even if the human goes out.

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before cotton was in widespread use across all classes as underwear according to the French historian Ferdinand Braudel, which fed directly into the gathering hygienic movement that thrived on the discipline of the body, surfaces, and the control of filth. India was the principal source of cotton in the distinctive calico weave before the English took over the market with the Industrial Revolution. Nor could Weber fully grasp that the cotton sheet was part of the deployment of an institutional grip on the person that concretely held the person in an intersection of labor, commodity fetishization, and time schedules. And for all his fascination with China and America as strategic weights in the development of capitalism, he could not conceptualize the oceans that linked them to Europe. His was a dry analysis. In contrast is Marcel Proust’s documentation of how “honey” grips a person in Swann’s Way. The past reaches out in long vegetative tendrils to snare the individual. Proust’s world is wet. “. . . when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, suggested that, contrary to my habit, I have a little tea. I refused at first and then, I do not know why, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, cakes called petite madeleines that look as though they have been mouded in the groove valve of a scallop-shell. And soon, mechanically, oppressed by the gloomy day and the prospect of a sad future, I carried to my lips a spoonful of the tea, in which I had let soften a piece of the madeleine. But at that very instant when a mouthful of tea mixed with cake crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening in me. A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated me, without my having any notion as to its cause. It had immediately made the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusionary, acting in the same way that love acts, by filling me with a precious essence: or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased to feel I was mediocre, contingent, mortal. Where could it have come to me from – this powerful joy? I sensed it was connected to the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it went infinitely far beyond it, could not be of the same nature. Where did it come from? What did it mean? How can I grasp it? I drink a second mouthful, which I find nothing more than in the first, it is time for me to stop, the virtue of the drink seems to be diminishing. It is clear that the truth I am seeking is not in the drink, but in me.”31

Proust’s famous tea and madeleine scene holds in its currents not only the narrator’s past, but the unconscious of the capitalist empire. The sugar, the tea, the seashell shaped cookie made by the servant, the plush setting in which the scene unfolds are made from how India and China were bound up in and with France, and the encroachment of the commodity world into everyday life. This scene is part of a wet empire of signs, which emphasizes how Weber 31

pp. 47–48.

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landlocked his analysis of capitalism. Oceans, winds, ships, and “unconscious currents” are downplayed in his work. Consequently Weber missed that the iron cages encasing individuals are inevitably filled with literal fluids. The encasements act as collection points for runoffs of water, piss, and the green tea in Marcel’s cup. Inside these iron cages the liquids roll into sucking whirlpools just as if they were great oceans even if they are the size of a hospital room or a teacup pulling poor Proust back in time. My grandfather drowned in a cell, the size of a Cadillac’s interior. In his hospital bed he was a stain on a white sheet to be cleaned up. In the Kafka short story “The Metamorphosis” the central character Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman who lives at home with his sister and parents wakes up and finds himself a beetle. There are sock problems. He has six legs. There are communication and dietary problems. The only sounds he can make are a kind of gurgling. Strangely, he can’t make even a chirping or whirling sound. But then Gregor becomes a beetle without any of the superhero attributes he could have acquired. Written in 1908 in Prague the story would seem to be a concrete description of Weber’s steel casing. Working back and forth like the hind legs of the beetle between the literal hard shelled exoskeleton and the smooth hardness of Gregor’s circumstances that trapped him; A.C. never had a single transformational night comparable to Gregor’s. The small strokes were a slow cumulative process that nudged him into the nursing home, which makes his history read like a creeping Kafka story in which piece by piece, Gregor materializes as a beetle. First his left butt cheek turns hard and shiny and then his chest turns into an architectural mock up of a thorax before the last piece turns beetle. Kafka draws a transformative line that he doesn’t push Gregor across. Gregor never loses his tortured humanness. But even without this literal metaphor of an exterior encasement, Kafka’s characters are often both victims and cartographers of character determination and enclosure. How self-conscious A.C. was about his own enclosures is beyond my reach. I know that he adhered to a strict dietary and water temperature regime. But this is not as constrictive as I what I imagined his projection outwards into the pasture, his own green China Sea was. The clipping was a window into a receding ocean, a fluid and is manifested in the pastures and in the figure of the woman herself. In the opening to One Way Street, Walter Benjamin dedicates the book: “This street is named Asja Lacis Street after her who as an engineer cut it through the author.” For my grandfather, there would be no street but an ocean. A hole would have unleashed a wave that would have carried him into a liquid pasture like the swamps where he rounded up cattle as a young man.

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A.C. was 70 years plus when he built his dream house on the farm on the top of the small hill overlooking the two lakes, he had had dozers scrape for the trickle of a creek he diverted through the woods in a narrow ditch overgrown with cotton tail. It was a plain house; one story, brick exterior, aluminum canopy the size of an umbrella over the front door engineered to be as economical as possible. There was nothing lavish about it. It looked exactly like the houses in the low income project on the edge of town. There were three small bedrooms that once the beds were stuffed into the center left no room to move except with careful deliberation. One room each for my grandfather and grandmother and a guest room across from the dining room. The windows of his bedroom faced west and north into a rolling pasture and a bank of small oaks and sweet gums. But the shades were always drawn. Without a view the room was like a tiny cabin in the lower decks of a passenger liner. The kitchen was a long narrow hallway held back from the dining room by the oven and a shoulder high cabinet. 21/2 bathrooms, as Spartan and cheap as possible were spread through the house. The bathroom nearest the side door smelled like the sickly sweet milk formula used for abandoned calves and rubber boots. The ornamental living room was held in a deep glacier waiting to be partially thawed in some kind of apocalyptic event like the imaginary tea parties that my grandmother and an eccentric cousin would have on Sunday afternoons dressed up in long gowns and hats like they were dolls. I was often the visitor to these teas. Suspended inside the glacier were a piano, a fireplace with a brass grate, my grandmother’s collection of porcelain Madonnas, and an enormous 4′ ¥ 5 photographic painting of a family posing outside a two-story house with a bicycle against a picket fence. They weren’t anyone. They had no names. They were just a fiction, something posed like a family. The painting dominated the wall over the piano. I kept imagining that they were somehow connected to my grandfather and that if I could only measure more accurately his prehistory, I would arrive at the solution and the whereabouts of the giant wheeled bicycle that stalked about in the painting. A.C. owned a Blue Tick Hound called Smoky. One of the few pleasures A.C. allowed himself was coon hunting. As a younger man he scoured the mountains at night hunting possums and raccoons. He carried a big, boxy flashlight and a shotgun. He hadn’t hunted in years but in his 80s he bought Smoky, a first-class coon hound. He hunted maybe five times and never treed a coon. Smoky had a nose for foxes and led A.C. in wide circles through the woods without ever cornering one. After that Smoky and A.C. retired from nighttime romps until Smoky got a taste for goat and started killing nannies at night. Smokey was fed kitchen scraps under the carport

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in a brownie pan. Hoe cakes, pieces of fatty meat, field peas, and ruined milk were mixed with dry dog food and dumped into the pan. What Smoky didn’t eat, the ants did. By morning the ants would be working in swarms on the mounds of cornbread, cutting it into pieces to be carried back to the colony. Just before the next feeding grandma would turn what was left of the food in the dish onto the compost heap and then wash the ants stuck in the sticky glob off with a hose. The lukewarm cornbread and the ruined milk mixture formed something like Proust’s cup of tea. But as a model for remembrance, the cornbread emphasizes certain characteristics, dormant in Proust’s conceptualization. The cornbread hovers near the nonhuman. The food is decaying, steps away from the compost heap, a hound’s mouth, and an ant intelligence fed on human scraps. Occasionally, big hunks of cornbread were pushed to the side of the pan, were spilled onto the ground, or ended up set on top of the goo with its hard crust limiting the absorption of the grease and milk. In the morning these pieces would look like mines with the ants cutting the cornbread from the inside out. The cornbread riddled with ants begins to resemble Kafka’s moles underground castle (“Then there would be noises in the walls, no insolent burrowing up to the very Keep itself; then peace would be assured there and I would be its guardian; that I would not have to listen with loathing to the burrowing of the small fry, what with delight to something that I cannot hear now at all: the murmurous silence of the Castle Keep,”) pulled to the surface like a dirt brain in an autopsy with all its intricate passages visible. There is nothing comparable to this in Proust’s world where domesticated vegetation dominates and there are no praying mantises, or ants or even flies. A.C. patrolled the pasture with a can of ant poison. He would jam his stick into the mounds to open up a long hole and then shake the poison into the hole. The colony might rise up a foot or more into a delicate cake like structure laced with tunnels, and then sink easily three feet into the ground into a complicated maze work. Once all was opened, it would fill with thousands of fire ants coming to the surface like a shaken bottle of Coca-Cola. Proust’s work never materializes into a sinister castle; Marcel’s bedroom is the center of a labyrinth that extends back into memories horizontally. Proust crafted a monumental world laid on edge, spiraling into a void sideways. The den contained a metal desk, a rolling metal chair, a junked wooden desk in the corner with potted plants, my aunt’s bland college art experiments stretched on canvases, a glass fronted bookcase with out of date law books, a two foot high, black bank safe in the closet with three feet of newspapers on top, two slope

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backed rocking chairs, and a sofa slumped against the wall. There were a TV set and a fireplace. The surface of the desk had papers slid across it in overlapping thin geological layers like sheets of mica pulled back and relayed in a mosaic. There was a ceremonial pen that didn’t work stuck in a mount, a desk calendar, a cheap ballpoint pen from the local bank, and rubber bands from the newspaper. There were no personal items. No photographs. No recognizable mementos. The insides of the desk were no different – rubber bands, trays filled with pennies and a palm sized rubber eraser. There must have been other pieces in the scene but my memory is pockmarked with blanks as if the eraser were a supernatural creature actively consuming the other pieces that could have been remembered. I have that eraser now in a box in a closet at my house. I have the picture of Stone Mountain that hung like a shadow of a ghost over the desk in a storage shed in Alabama. The chair was the kind a stenographer used in a big office complex. The chair had a green cushioned back arched on a metal frame with rollers on the splayed legs. The desk itself was battleship green with a Plexiglas covering over the surface. At the edges were stuck a calendar and an interest table to calculate payments. A.C. sat here to record the birth records of his registered Black Angus herd – who the sire was, the lineage of the cow, and the date of the calving. A.C. owned nearly 120 brood cows divided into the Warlick, the Barnwell, the Harper, and the Back Barn pasture. In each pasture, there was a different bull. A strand of electric wire augmented the barbwire separating the pastures. The pastures ranged in size from 70 to 120 acres. In the 1970s, a stylistic shift took place in the desired configuration of the Black Angus bull. The classic bull looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger on all fours. A giant, heavy chest plug supported by four short legs. The bull was a big black block that could’ve been used to build an obsidian pyramid. The modern bull influenced by the introduction of the Indian Brahma and the French Limousines were long bodied and tall. The shift caused major problems in calving. More episiotomies had to be performed. There were an increased number of breech births. The jumble of legs had to be straightened in the womb. The height of fences had to be extended. In a frenzy a cow or bull could clear a four strand barb wire fence. Here at his desk A.C. presided over the genetic ocean of his cows; working on his records with a mathematics professor’s diligence. His own ancestry was a foreign territory. A.C. was one quarter Choctaw. He rarely spoke of his family. Instead, A.C. attempted to control genetics with discipline, his own Great Wall of China and standing army. On his 75th birthday, sitting at this desk, working with a pencil, AC wrote this letter to be sent to the local newspaper. He quietly formed another newspaper

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clipping, rather than a personal letter to be saved by his grandchildren. I have this clipping framed in hanging in my kitchen. The following is a letter written recently by gubernatorial candidate and former state senator A.C. Shelton, to his grandchildren on his 75th birthday. This letter is being written to you on my 75th birthday with the hope that you may be as healthy as I am when you reach this age. I am as active physically and as mentally alert as I was 20 years ago. Only a few of my boyhood friends are living today while I am enjoying perfect health. But when I was the age of some of you, I adopted resolutions and principles which have been followed diligently. I thought of my body as the Temple of my soul and resolved that I would do nothing that would weaken or damage it. I even thought it would be religious and immoral to smoke or drink. There are many more temptations today than I had to face and you will have to be stronger than I was to resist them. Many of your friends will not only be smoking and drinking, but will be using dangerous drugs. I hope you will be strong enough to resist all temptations and especially that of using drugs. Too many young people are running, ruining their lives by experimenting with them. One of my principles was that of being honest and fair. I have never made a promise that I could not fulfill. A newspaperman recently referred to me as being the most honest man in Alabama. I’m proud to pass that heritage to you. My chest swells with pride to be able to stand before other people and say that I had never smoked a cigarette or taken a drink of whiskey. I also add to the statement that I do not even drink wine, beer, coffee, tea, or carbonated drinks. I eat properly, and not to excess. I have tried to provide a living example for my children and grandchildren to follow. I hope you will pass this tradition onto readers. A.C. SHELTON The Anniston Star, Tuesday, October 20, 1970.

A.C.’s desk was a machine. There was nothing extraneous. There were no ornamentations. The rubber bands and the opened envelopes were like debris produced by a grinding wheel on a factory floor. The battleship color of the metal was perfectly consistent with the imaginary world A.C. worked with in full view. He and the desk thought in 8% bites, the morally acceptable amount of interest that should be charged. What rich colors lurked behind this façade were carefully guarded. In Kafka’s novel, America, the young immigrant engineer Karl is drawn to his uncle’s desk because of its machinelike quality and the imagined deep memories that are conjured up in its insides. “In his room there was an American writing desk of the very finest sort, one of the kind his father had been longing for years, and had tried to find at an affordably cheap price in various auctions, without ever being able to afford one with his small means. Of course this desk was nothing like the so-called American desks that turn up at European auctions. For instance, the top part of it had a hundred different compartments of all sizes, so that even the President of the Union would have found room for each of his files in it, but even better that it had an adjuster at the side, so that the turning and handle one could rearrange and adjust the compartments in what ever way one wanted or needed. Thin lateral partitions slowly descended to

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form floors of the newly created compartments or the ceilings of enlarged ones; with just one turn of the handle, the appearance of the top would be completely transformed, and one could do it either slowly or at incredible speed, depending on how one turned the handle. It was a very modern invention, but it reminded Karl vividly of the nativity scenes that were demonstrated to astonished children at the Christmas Fairs at home. Karl himself, warmly dressed had often stood in front of these nativities, and had incessantly compared with the turning of the handle, which an old man performed, with the effect it had on the scene, the halting progress of the three Kings, the shining star of Bethlehem, and the shy life in the holy stable. And always it had seemed to him as though his mother standing behind him, wasn’t following the events closely enough and he had pulled her to him, he felt her against his back, and had drawn her attention to various more subtle manifestations by loud shouts, say a rabbit that was alternatively sitting up in the long grass at the front, until his mother put her hand over his mouth and presumably reverted to her previous dullness. Of course, the desk hadn’t been designed to recall such things, but the history of inventions was probably full of such vague connections as Karl’s memory.”32

The description points out that his uncle’s desk is a machine for handling information. But then the passage switches and the desk becomes a machine for reaching back in time. Order and fog ooze from the desk’s pores. The same desk calculates like a wooden computer and conjures up Christmas memories like scaring up a fat goose from the water’s surface with its wings flapping and long neck stretched out. While I could see the computational grinding of A.C.’s desk, Christmas was opaque. Esther could not be here. Even though as an object of memory she was perfectly consistent with Kafka’s desk – a combination of rational practices, type fonts, and desire. Esther was a machine produced unconscious. A.C.’s desk’s unconscious was the underneath of a one dimensionality, a wooden Mobius’s strip. His desk was about business. Even his letter to his grandchildren is a civic, business statement rather than a personal letter. There it is, the desire for the oceanic, underneath, but part of the overt rationality the desk was dedicated to. The pastures, and genetic pools, old swamps persist in the tax records and the sire genealogies. Here was the China Sea. To get there, A.C. sold what I as a child thought was a castle, an antebellum mansion with a wraparound porch and a second-floor balcony built in 1858, to Mr. Brown. He bulldozed the house, the hill it rested on, the three giant magnolias, an oak the size of King Kong, and the meandering flower garden into dump trucks and hauled them off to the dump. He built a gas station. Once uncapped, the hill spewed emaciated ghosts. The last hundred years were erased in a speeded up geological succession. Mr. Brown died of cancer and his service station went out of business to be replaced by a convenience store. But where was here? The home 32

p. 30.

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A.C. built was a memory palace designed to reproduce the house he’d grown up in. But it was not the house that would generate memories. It was how the house forced him out into the pastures rolling out from the front steps like an ocean that generated the memories. A.C. had no sentimentality about home. He had left them all to do something like God’s work in the pastures and the swamps that drew him into a green simulation of the China Sea and the stars beneath Alabama. Bibliography Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books. ————. 1978. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms Autobiographical Writings. New York: Schochen Books. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press. Buck-Morss, Susan. 1989. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT Press. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage. Freud, Sigmund. 1929. Civilization and It’s Discontents. New York: Anchor Books. Marx, Karl. 1977. Capital. Vol. 1. New York: Vintage Books. Milne, Louis and Magery. 1980. The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Insects and Spiders. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Taussig, Michael. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism, and The Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weber, Max. 2002. The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Peter Baehr and Gordan. New York: Penguin Books.

Issues and Agendas Reported Speech and Other Kinds of Testimony MEGAN VAUGHAN Abstract This paper addresses the politics and practices of history and memory through an examination of the historiography of Malawi with reference to the literature on slavery. In the late 1970s, an oral historical research project in Malawi set out to “uncover” the pre-colonial history of part of the Southern Region. Informed by new methods for oral historical research and by the post-colonial context, the testimonies collected were framed by a number of preconceptions and assumptions, particularly those related to the nature of ethnic identity. The paper analyses this framing and the nature of the texts produced. It goes on to examine briefly other forms of historical memory, and the question of “forgetting”.

***** I begin my story of reported speech with a testimony. In 1794 a criminal court in Isle de France (now Mauritius) heard the case of Jupiter, a slave accused of “marronage” and of theft.1 This “hearing”, like all others, begins with a series of questions to the accused: “What is your name? what is your age? who is your master? which ‘caste’ do you belong to?” Jupiter is being asked to testify as to who, exactly, he is. He is being asked to name his ancestry. Perhaps never an innocent question – in the context of a slave society – it may also have been a hard one to answer. Indeed, sometimes slave suspects and witnesses hinted at their difficulties by adding detail and uncertainty – “In my own country”, they might say, “I was known as Marambe, but now I am known as Vincent”. Or, “I belong to the succession of the Widow Verger, but I am rented out to the citizen Roblet”. On the question of “caste” or ethnic origin, there were only a small number of allowable answers. “I am a Mozambique”, said Jupiter. Other slaves appearing in the Isle de France courts answered that they were “Malgache”, “Bengali”, “Wolof” (this more likely earlier in the century) or, indicating that he had been born on the island, that they were “Creole”. These were, of course, generic terms, covering a multitude of traumas and transitions already experienced. When Jupiter replied that he was a “Mozambique”, this did not mean that he had necessarily forgotten who else he was or had been, but that in the here and now of Isle de France society, and most particularly in this court room, a “Mozambique” was what he was. Twenty Years of the Journal of Historical Sociology: Challenging the Field Volume 2 Edited by Yoke-Sum Wong and Derek Sayer © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-17934-8

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A witness to Jupiter’s alleged misdemeanours was “called”. He was called Mercure. It was Mercure who led to my almost falling off my chair in the National Archives of Mauritius. Mercure, though labelled a “Mozambique”, like Jupiter, was found to speak little French and therefore required, as the law demanded, an interpreter. Mercure was, it transpired, of the “Maravi” caste, and so was Thomas his interpreter. Through Thomas, Mercure spoke. He did not, in fact, say a great deal – only that he had seen Jupiter with another slave, Azor, and that Jupiter carried his stolen goods in a great white sheet, whilst Azor had his in a sack. But this was certainly the first time I had ever heard a Maravi speak, albeit indirectly. If the pursuit of “History” is both a rationalist and a romanticist pursuit, romance was certainly in the ascendance at that moment. The history which this moment testified to was less that of the African experience of slavery, than a history which linked me to those nineteenth century audiences of abolitionists who had “itching ears to hear a colored man speak, and particularly a slave”.2 For though I had heard many a slave speak through similar documents, I had never before heard a Maravi – an eighteenth century subject of a Central African polity – speak. It seemed that, though I had not known it before, my ears had long been “itching” for this bit of reported speech. The Maravi in Malawi: Oral tradition and the historians “It is commonly accepted”, writes Matthew Schoffeleers, “that the name Maravi” (or its modern equivalent, Malawi), denotes “fire flames”.3 Sometime in the fifteenth century, Schoffeleers and others argue, an emergent Maravi political culture began to make itself felt in present-day Malawi and in eastern Zambia. In oral traditions, the Maravi polity was associated with immigrants from the north, the Phiri clan. From their origins (as some traditions have it) in the Shaba Province of Zaire, the Phiri brought not only fire, but “a new order, which was both politically and culturally superior to the old order”.4 The Phiri, according to the traditions, some written documents, and the historians who interpret them, ushered in a new kind of “law and order” – Maravi chiefs had no standing armies, but they were judges and arbiters, whose deaths were followed by periods of ritualistic disorderliness. Maravi religious organisation reflected the new political order, or at least its aspirations. Existing territorial shrines, with their spirit wives, pythons and sacred pools were opposed by new hierarchies of spirits of dead chiefs from ruling lineages. With the memorialisation of a line of dead men, History in a Hegelian sense had begun – the succession disputes, the pushes and pulls of centralization and fission, the machina-

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tions of matrilineal relatives, and as Schoffeleers demonstrates in his remarkable account of the Mbona cult, the repression of preMaravi institutions and the resistance that this generated. Certain practices here as elsewhere, showed an extraordinary persistence. In the eighteenth century the Maravi Empire, as it is sometimes called, was in decline. When the last great Maravi chief, Undi, died, things it seems, fell apart – though what exactly was falling apart has always been something of a mystery to me. The evidence for the Maravi “system” seemed in some ways to have been deduced from tales of its decline. Mary Tew (later Douglas) suggested this in her (1950) ethnographic study of the peoples of the Lake Nyasa Region when she wrote that The degree of political unity achieved over this wide area is also uncertain, but it is probable that early accounts which hinted at a Maravi empire exaggerated the real degree of internal cohesion. Most probably the term Maravi was the generic title of a number of petty chiefs, sharing a common language and culture.5

By the mid-nineteenth century a kind of nostalgia had set in. When Livingstone passed through in 1856 he was told that formerly “all the Mang’anja were united under the government of their great chief, Undi, whose Empire extended from Lake Shirwa to the River Loangwa; but after Undi’s death it fell to pieces”.6 “Maravi” was unlikely to have been the primary identity of either Mercure or Thomas – perhaps they were Mang’anja or Nyanja, who became “Maravi” in the course of their transition into slavery, only to become “Mozambique” when they landed on Isle de France. Until I encountered Mercure in the Mauritian archives, I had never imagined the Maravi Empire to have speaking subjects. Nevertheless, when Nyasaland at Independence took the name of Malawi (or Maravi) this marked the beginnings of a new imagining of the history of this region. Under the rule of Hastings Banda the Malawian past and Malawian identity were constructed around a central core of Chewa ethnicity all in the name of “non-tribalism”. Though Banda occasionally referred explicitly to the glorious past of the Maravi Empire (not least to make territorial claims to parts of eastern Zambia and northern Mozambique), it was around a version of Chewa culture and language that Banda pursued his project of nation building.7 The notion of “Chewa” came to mean “Maravi” and hence “Malawi”: a fragment of the Maravi Empire had in fact taken over the nation discursively. Some elements of this process mirrored what the historical accounts told us about the political struggles and machinations of the earlier version of the Maravi nation. It seemed, in an odd way, that the Maravi Empire had not only to be put back in its

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rightful place, but also re-colonised internally, this time around by the Chewa. For like its predecessor, the new Malawian nation was in fact the product of a long history of movement and migration, sedimentation, give and take between many ethnic and cultural groups, a process which had become yet more complex through the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the impact of long distance trade, of slavery, of both peaceful and violent invasion, and of colonialism. One of the tasks of the academic historian in this context was to get things straight. There was in fact quite a bit of confusion around as to who was or was not “Chewa” in the modern state of Malawi, just as there may have been confusion earlier as to who was a “Maravi”. A Chewa Language Board was set up to impose order on the linguistic front, and in the University of Malawi an oral history project was inaugurated. This latter project, in which I was involved, was been described by Leroy Vail and Landeg White as one contribution to the making of a “usable past” for the Banda regime. The message of the history we “found” in oral tradition and then reproduced was, wrote Vail and White, clear: “the Chewa people and Chewa culture was the core of modern Malawi by right of being the most ancient and least compromised by colonialism, and Malawi culture would be considered synonymous with Chewa culture”.8 Though in general terms I agree with Vail and White’s conclusion, my interest here is in exploring the particular route by which we arrived at this end, and whether the oral traditions we collected could have been used to tell a different set of stories.9 The Zomba History Project was set up in the University of Malawi in 1977 at the height of one of the Banda regime’s fits of ethnic paranoia during which “Northerners” in particular were targeted for arrest and detention, and when the President addressed the nation on the question of the “confusionists” who were infiltrating the country and creating – well, confusion. I was in the country teaching and attempting to begin my research on late pre-colonial and early colonial economic and social history.10 My problem was that obtaining research permission was extremely difficult in a political climate in which expatriate historians and social scientists were frequently accused of being “confusionists” themselves, and in which the President himself took a very personal interest in all things historical.11 My applications for permission to research and to consult the National Archives (up to 1920) were repeatedly turned down. On the very first application, as I later saw for myself, the President had written in his large emphatic italic hand NO, and signed himself, equally emphatically, HKB. With this historic document in my file, it was more than anyone’s life was worth to put the case to him again.

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I was therefore more than happy to participate in the new oral history initiative at the University’s Department of History headed nominally by Dr Zimani Kadzamira, an historian who was also a member of the ruling elite. Whilst he obtained the research permission, the real intellectual drive behind the project came from a newly arrived expatriate, Professor Bertin Webster, with a wealth of experience in the collection of oral traditions in different parts of Africa and a strong personal commitment to the retrieval of the African pre-colonial past.12 A powerful romantic attachment to the “real” Africa was allied to an equally powerful commitment to the science of historical research – every tool in the book (which was Jan Vansina’s Oral Tradition) would have to be carefully studied and applied. Excitement at the possibilities of retrieval was mixed in equal quantity with anxiety, for it was clear to anyone who had studied the problems of the collection and analysis of oral traditions in Africa that truth was an elusive thing, that distortion was rife (as was forgetfulness), and that getting things straight, even at the level of the simplest chronology, was not going to be easy. Armed with the right tools, however, and with an appropriate degree of scepticism, we and our students headed off into “the field”. The implications of this kind of approach to the collection of oral traditions in Africa for the kind of history produced have been well-rehearsed and I shall not repeat them all here, except to say that indispensable and valuable as it is, in less able hands than those of Vansina it could have a deadening effect on the whole making of histories.13 When not so very long ago I realised that the distortions were the body of the history whose skeleton we had been so painstakingly unearthing, I felt that a veil had been lifted from before my eyes. Only a historian would have had this problem in the first place. There were, however, some specific features of the methodology we followed in the Zomba History Project which, perhaps, compounded the more general problems with oral historical research at the time. Professor Webster was passionately committed to the truth of the pre-colonial past – to the recovery of the time before the colonial intrusion and everything which went with it. Extraordinary as it now seems, our students were therefore instructed to turn off their tape-recorders the moment the first white man entered the oral testimony. I had read my Vansina and knew this injunction to be a serious distortion of the biblical truth, and so I ignored it, as in fact did most participants in the project, but the exclusive interest in all things purely pre-colonial inevitably had its consequences. One was that the project as a whole was unable to address the question of how colonial and post-colonial political struggles were integral to the telling of the pre-colonial past – in spite (or perhaps because) of

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the fact that we were living this fact daily in Banda’s Malawi. Secondly, and related to this, there was an implied if not explicit association between chronological depth, spatial location and authenticity – the longer a group of people had been in the area, the more genuinely representative of the old Africa they were held to be; the longer the genealogy, the more valuable it was. It was this association between geographical space, chronological depth and authenticity (rather than any deliberate political manipulation) which led us to the “Chewa” bias to which Vail and White refer. There was no real need for the Malawi Congress Party to police our activities since with our tools of rationalism and with our romanticism, we were, in fact, policing ourselves.14 Thirdly, we interviewed almost exclusively men. This was in part an outcome of our preconceptions as to what history was, and our preoccupation with a certain sort of “tradition”, as well as being if not imposed than at least encouraged by the formality of the interview process in a situation of political oppression and anxiety. With our male bias we also created problems for ourselves, since this was a predominantly matrilineal society, and one in which uxorilocal marriage was the norm, so that, infuriatingly, many men turned out to be incomers who knew little about the area (and, with some exceptions, we did not stop to explore their own histories). Women students were carefully steered away from oral history projects for their dissertations, fieldwork being regarded as “unsuitable” for them. When I wrote a paper for our staff/student seminar speculating on the gender bias in our approach to oral history (entitled “Old Wives” Tales: Women and Oral History), I was told that I could not present it. Finally, we were working in an area which, not untypically for many parts of Africa, had an immensely complex history of movement and migration, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which went along with an equally complex history of ethnic creation and assimilation. These were the days (now hard to imagine) before we knew that all identities were “complex”, “shifting” and “multiple”. If we had only known that, we would have been saved all that digging deeper into clan histories, poring over genealogies and all the historical unravelling. We could simply have written into our narratives that identities were “complex, shifting and multiple”, and that would have been enough. But we were pre-linguistic when it came to poststructuralism and worked with an idea that there were originary identities out there which could be uncovered and recovered. Our opening questions to our informants were, then, very similar to those asked of Jupiter before he delivered his testimony to the court – they were about genealogy and ancestry and identity: what is your name, how old are you, and to which ethnic group and clan do you belong? In this case, it was not

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so much that our informants had difficulty in answering this last question (though some, I think, did), but they frequently gave us the wrong answer. As time went on, so it seemed that many people in the area did not really know who they were, or rather, who they thought they were was not what we with our tools of enquiry discovered them to be. This was another route through which we re-inscribed Chewa dominance and recreated the Maravi Empire. It worked like this. According to pre-existing historical accounts the area we were working in was “originally” settled by Nyanja people (a former component of the Maravi, and a group which, in the modern Malawian nation, was being claimed as “Chewa”). From the late eighteenth century, but particularly in the mid to late nineteenth century, the area had been subject to waves of immigration, both peaceful and warlike, from modern day Mozambique by people calling themselves “Yao”, important players in the long-distance ivory and slave trades. Yao dominance had been established in the area in the nineteenth century and had been reinforced by colonial policy. The exact fate of the Nyanja in all this was not known for certain, though written sources told us that they had suffered at the hands of slavers, had been scattered or had taken refuge in the swamps surrounding Lake Chirwa, while later anthropological studies confidently described their location, social organisation and culture.15 The oral historical traditions collected by the project both filled out and complicated this picture,16 proving that our tools of research and the intellectual direction of Professor Webster, though they had their limitations, could at least allow us to glimpse the complexity of nineteenth century ethnicities. It emerged that Yao identity was rather slippery. Indeed, the more one probed back into Yao oral history the less substantial they appeared.17 Not only did it appear that at least some of the “Yao” were really originally “Lomwe” (this was a whole other problem), but that many who now identified themselves as “Yao” were, as their own traditions testified, “really” Nyanja. The “Yao”, in the nineteenth century, had assimilated (both peacefully and less peacefully through the institution of slavery) increasing numbers of Nyanja, and thus reduced their numbers and influence as a separate group. Our historical researches could be read as reversing this process. Whilst the Yao had proceeded by incorporating the Nyanja, we proceeded by stripping away Yao identity to reveal the Nyanja lurking underneath. In the nineteenth century Nyanja had become Yao. In modern Malawi, historians appeared capable of turning Yao into Nyanja – though since little of this work was published, its political influence should not be exaggerated.

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Whilst we could find a Nyanja lurking under most Yao, finding Nyanja who were self-consciously Nyanja was less easy. This was the task assigned to myself and my colleague, Dr Kings Phiri.18 After weeks of scouring the Phalombe plain looking without success for “the Nyanja” we began to despair. Finally we were led to two Nyanja headmen: Bimbi and Nyani, modest men, rather surprised by the attention we paid them.19 They told us that they were Nyanja of the Mwale clan and they told us where their ancestors had come from, beginning with the Tower of Babel; they told us of Nyanja custom and ritual, of the waves of Yao immigration, their intermarriage with the Nyanja and their usurpation of Nyanja chieftaincies. Since we did not turn off our tape-recorder at the entrance of the first white man, we also learned from them, and from others, of the power of inscription. How, we asked another Nyanja informant, did a Yao like Malemia, fleeing from war with his kinsmen, come to be regarded by the British as their chief ? By the time the first white man came into the area, Mpoto [a Nyanja chief ] was under this “house arrest”. This first man was David Living’istonia and he slept for only two days in Zomba and continued northwards. A few days later there came Buchanani [John Buchanan – one of the first white settlers], who we thought was Makanani. All the Yao chiefs and headmen went one after the other to greet him at his place near the Mulunguzi stream. The first to do so was Malemia. Buchanani asked Malemia “Who are you?”. “I’m Malemia, the chief of the Mnjale area”. Buchanani wrote down that, and gave the chief cloth, blankets and salt as gifts.20

Buchanan’s first question – Who are you? (and the inscription of the answer) – was also our first question as we followed the Nyanja trail, just as it was the first question asked by the Isle de France judge of the slaves before him. Sometimes, as I now remember with embarrassment, our interrogations began and ended with this question. Our task was to uncover the pre-colonial history of the area and in particular to clarify the process by which the Yao immigrants had come to dominate in the nineteenth century. But the Yao immigration was by no means the last to make its mark on this area. In the early years of the twentieth century thousands of families had made a similar east to west journey from Mozambique into colonial Nyasaland. Collectively known as the “Lomwe” (the very same “Lomwe” who appeared to have been at the source of some of the “Yao”), they were fleeing from one colonialism to another, from forced labour under the Portuguese to “thangata”, a milder form of the same thing, in Nyasaland. Despite the changed conditions – for much of the area had now been demarcated as white estates and taxation was being exacted by a colonial state – the “Lomwe” immigration proceeded in ways which were familiar from earlier periods. Access to resources and

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integration were effected through inter-marriage with Nyanja and Yao, and facilitated through shared clan identities. Many “Lomwe” had become “Nyanja” and “Yao” in the twentieth century, just as (or so our researches were indicating) in the eighteenth century “Lomwe” had become “Yao” and in the nineteenth century “Nyanja” had become “Yao”. But the first few questions of our interviews had the power to reveal which of our informants were recent “Lomwe” immigrants, even if they thought of themselves (as some, but not all did) as either “Nyanja” or “Yao”. For reasons of politics, and because of our strong bias in favour of long settlement and “authenticity”, we did not stop to interview those whose histories, from our point of view, began in the twentieth century (and who were at the bottom of the political and cultural heap in both the colonial and postcolonial order of things). Landeg White was later to write one of the best pieces of social history written on this part of Africa on the basis of interviews with people who would have been our “rejects”.21 This, then, is how we went about producing historical texts which might later have been, but in fact to my knowledge were never used for the re-creation of Maravi history and the writing of the Chewa nation. Though political oppression and censorship were ever-present realities, they operated not in the foreground but in the background of this story. Furthermore, most of our Nyanja informants appeared unaware of the possible political uses to which they could have put the history which they related to us. Or if they were aware of them, they were not interested in them, for none of them seemed concerned to emphasise their links with the Chewa, and the ruling elite. We lost out to the Yao, many said, because really we deserved to lose – we didn’t have our wits about us. The “Chewa” bias of the text was the product of things other than our informants’ political ambitions or the presence of the local party leader at our interviews. It was produced by our own views of what constituted historical testimony and “real” history, of what were and were not “real” African identities, and of the relationship between space, time, authenticity and ancestry. It would also have required a certain kind of reading, analysis and re-writing to turn these texts into the nation’s Chewa meta-narrative. On their own they appear to speak to a number of other things. They are lyrical in their treatment, for instance, of the beginnings of human time and the role of the Nyanja Bimbi shrine, and prosaic about, for example, the coming of the British. They are full of hesitancy, incomprehension at our lines of questioning and forgetfulness, as well as sometimes displaying a remarkable individual and collective recall. In this way (and this even after the deadening effects of transcription and translation) they show a capacity maybe not to subvert, but certainly to circumvent a rigid and narrow-minded of

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historical agenda. For despite all our efforts we did not produce a set of traditions which (like those collected by Matthew Schoffeleers in the Lower Shire Valley) could be set side by side compared and contrasted, dated and minutely analysed. The testimonies which we collected left open and unanswered a number of issues which would only be inadequately captured in either the metanarrative of the Chewa nation with its sense of long durée, authenticity and essentialist identities, or the postmodernist narrative of fragmentation, multiplicity and complexity. We, and our informants, were still struggling with the difficulty of translating “knowing” something, albeit fragmented into “telling”.22 Their and our narratives were, perhaps fortunately, far from masterly. In Banda’s Malawi the technical tools developed for the collection and analysis of oral tradition did little to guard against the really big “biases” in the production of history. Nevertheless, a set of oral texts was produced which were far from closed and which, despite themselves, shed light on complex processes of ethnic creation and recreation, in addition to giving us a glimpse of the historical consciousness of at least some members of the community. My own narrative above is, of course, greatly dependent on them. Future generations of historians when reinterpreting them and reflecting on the Malawian historical consciousness of the late 1970s, may well be struck by the relative indifference which these testimonies show towards current political concerns. These are histories, remembered and told, no doubt, for a purpose, but perhaps not always for a purpose which is consciously known, and certainly not with the understanding that they might be used in the production of a larger, more encompassingand less open History of the Nation. Yet in Malawi as elsewhere there were attempts to produce local histories with a purpose – histories which would be inscribed, not by the academic historians, but by the people with the memories. These histories, which have all the attributes of the chronicle,23 locate themselves in the space between oral testimony and the meta-narrative of the nation’s History. The “Book of My Clan” The “Book of My Clan” is one such chronicle. It was shown to me by Village Headman Chingondo (Kustacio John Kanchewa) and had been written, he said, by his uncle, Andrea Tambalika, who had died in 1968. Kustacio Kanchewa had copied out the work of his uncle and had added comments of his own, including accounts of recent land disputes and disputes over the village headmanship.24 Though some of Kanchewa’s additions were dated, it was impossible to be certain which parts of the “Book” had been written by

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Kanchewa and which by his uncle, since the original text had been “borrowed” and never returned by an expatriate academic historian who had now left the country (reminding us that Banda’s hostility to “foreign” historians was not simply nationalist paranoia). The “Book of My Clan” is the story of a Nyanja group of the Mwale clan and it is told and written in the context of land shortages and local political disputes in order to “get things straight” for future generations. The Book begins with an account of the origins of the Mwale clan, their migration from Kaphirintiwa, and their first encounters with the Yao. Thus far, the Book of My Clan is indistinguishable from many of the Nyanja oral traditions collected by the Zomba History Project. But the tellers of those traditions, though alive and physically present, were far less intrusive in their tales than was the narrator of this written account. On the second page of the Book, the narrator interrupts his account of early Nyanja history with a diversion into more recent events – a diversion with a clear purpose: In 1915 Chaweza told the Whites at the Boma that his land extended to Matandwe which was a lie. When the Whites accepted this there arose a case which was resolved in favourof us, and not of Chaweza. The land was returned to us in 1915 . . . Today this land is in my hands.

1915 was the year of the Chilembwe Rising and the date recurs throughout the Book as one around which the politics of land and chieftainship pivot. In the aftermath of the Rising the British invested heavily in the Yao as their political agents. They were seen as loyal, traditional, Islamic and unaffected by the radicalising effects of Christianity. Yao headmen were elevated above Nyanja throughout the area, and land, already in relatively short supply, was placed under their control.25 Chingondo’s Book is in part an account of the local Nyanja attempt to put right this perceived wrong and it does so by moving back into the remote past of origins and migrations, and forward into the 1970s. Yet although the heart of the Book is the 1915 Rising, the story is far from being a straightforward one. It is hard, as the narrator tells us, to remember everything; it is hard to get things straight; it is hard in fact to know exactly who is who: I have explained the names because they are known by the people today. There are still many names which I have not written down for lack of space. Having mentioned this people might remember many other names, but those I have mentioned are our main names which those of you coming in the future should keep. You should not be misled by other people. There are a lot of Mwale people but they belong to different groups. When you lack a leader ask Nambaiko and Kamfani, explain all I have written, they understand and keep you.

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One of the things the Book reveals, in a winding sort of way, is that the politics of identity in this area are a great deal more complex than a simple opposition between the “owners of the land” and inheritors of the Maravi Empire (the Nyanja), and the immigrant (and, in the context of colonialism, traitorous) Yao. Attempting to decipher the Book (as I did in the late 1970s, supplementing it with further interviews) was and is hard, in part because the narrator himself is struggling with the same uncertainties. He tries, but ultimately fails, to write a history which will straightforwardly serve the interests of his descendants, because the boundary of the group his history is designed to serve remains indeterminate. Not only do Yaos and Nyanjas share clan names (many Mwales, the narrator warns, are Yaos who had been invited in by the Nyanja on the basis of their shared clan identities, but then turned against them), but even within the Mwale clan of the Nyanja there is the inevitable uncertainty created by a past permeated by the institution of slavery: “All those close to Chingondo belong to the Mwale clan but I cannot say that they are all of the same mother as me. Long, long ago they were slaves in the hands of azimbili andala Chilewani”.26 Slavery, then, complicates the picture. Some now claiming land and political status do so on the basis of an ancestry which is not legitimately theirs, the author argues, for those of slave origin can only be said to have been “carried in the basket” of the real ancestors. No genealogy, we are reminded, can ever be completely certain. To confuse matters further, claims to authenticity can be and are made in a number of different ways within the text. In his additions to the text, for example, Kustacio Kanchewa makes it clear that his case against the claims of others rests on their slave ancestry and his status as the descendant of slave owners. The fact that these slave owners were “Zimbili” (and hence “Lomwe”) rather than Nyanja seems unimportant at this point. His identity as a Nyanja is under certain circumstances dispensable. In an attempt to put some order into this confusing and contradictory picture I wrote that the Book of My Clan demonstrated an appeal to . . . a variety of historical facts, which though taking place over centuries, all hold weight. Alliance and legitimacy appear to depend on a) clan origins, b) slave or free origins and c) behaviour during the colonialperiod. The last has entered into “tradition” and is treated in the book as being of equal importance to more distant events.27

While in a sense this analysis still holds, it is also manifestly an attempt to put order into what is in some ways a far from orderly account. Both Tambalika and Kanchewa are historians and not simply recounters of histories, in the sense that they see events in

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the future as being linked to those in the past. At various points the Book of My Clan “remembers forward”,28 it moralises and grapples with questions of authority. Yet in most ways the Book of My Clan chronicles events rather than tells them. At many points the narrators are only too evident, interrupting the flow of the account to make sure that we, the readers, have got the message: “When Iseek died” [writes Tambalika of distant but still powerfully relevant events], “who shaved? And where did he die? If I was a slave how could Chingondo raise an unknown man without enquiring who he was? The grandfather of Nanthambwe was Ntawa”. If, as Barthes argued, we can distinguish between a discourse that looks out on the world and reports it, and one which “feigns to make the world speak itself and speak itself as a story”, then the Book of My Clan falls into the former category. At many moments we are told about events which can have only one interpretation and whose relevance to contemporary land and chieftaincy disputes is spelt out for us didactically. At other points the Book resembles a chronicle of events, represented as existing in time, but whose meaning in relation to earlier and later events appears not to have been forged. The Book lacks narrative closure, tells its story at times too openly, at others too distractedly. It lacks that integrity of the well crafted story which conveys us its message by producing in us a desire to know what happens next, and then lulls us to sleep. Telling it another way: “Voices”, drums and “embodied” histories Despite our efforts in the Zomba History Project, and those of Tambalika, Kanchewa and others like them, we did not produce a very easily “usable past” for the Banda regime. We are left instead with sets of “traditions”, of unanswered questions, and with locally written histories which combine a retelling of “tradition” with attempts to tell the future, but whose lessons are often either too obvious or too obscure (both to the reader and the author) to negotiate easily the border between “knowing” and “telling”. We were not saved by being “good” historians, acutely aware of the manipulations of our informants, our context and of our own craft; we were saved rather by being “bad” historians, unable finally to create the seamless narrative which would link the past events of the Maravi Empire with the present and the future of the Malawi nation in a way which would in fact be seamless but would allow, within the telling, for the desire of the reader to find their own meaning. We did not in fact tell a very good story. We transformed other peoples’ stories (the journey from the Tower of Babel, the

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origins of fire) into skeletal chronologies and wooden political genealogies. We had no Mercure or Thomas to enliven our accounts. We may have been memorialising the histories of lines of dead men, but they were certainly very dead after, if not before, our telling. In Malawi in the late 1970s, then, while our collection and analysis of African oral historical traditions combined a hard-headed rationalism and scepticism with a heavy dose of romanticism for the pre-colonial past, we could not be accused of fore-grounding individual exploits of historical agency. Our African subjects were collective subjects, and our analysis was a structuralist one. Though great chiefs and warriors featured in the oral traditions we collected and in our accounts, we were aware that they might sometimes be “mythological” or at least the product of a great deal of “telescoping”, merging, and backward projection of wishful thinking. Meanwhile, in history departments of other African universities, attempts to radicalise the practise of oral historical research were underway. The new social history of Africa was a recovery history of a different sort to the one in which we were engaged through our collection of oral historical traditions. It shifted the emphasis from bodies of “tradition” to personal histories and reminiscences, and crucially from kings and chiefs and dynasties to “the common man”. As early as 1978, Terence Ranger was critiquing some aspects of this populist shift and its pretensions to radicalism.29 While there were pitfalls, there were also great possibilities in this turn towards a different kind of oral historical research. The Lomwe villagers whose histories my colleagues and I had rejected as “shallow” could now be listened to by a historian like Landeg White, who could see that these were not only stories of ordinary people, worth telling in themselves, but that they were embedded in longer histories and of ways of recounting and remembering.30 As such their histories could tell us not only about history, but of how it was made. In this I refer not so much to the “African agency” which this new work aimed to demonstrate, but to the related dimension of the making of an account, or sets of accounts which linked the past and present to the future, and the individual to the collectivity. Above all, with these new, more varied, less schematised and “democratic” sources, professional historians were much better able to produce “usable” histories through narratives which really worked. These new sources were the raw material for sophisticated historical accounts which would employ both diegisis and mimesis, would both “narrate” the unfolding actions of time and interrupt this narration, often with the sound of “the voice”. A new kind of reported speech was fore-grounded – not the collectively conserved “tradition” which was told as much in its form as in its explicit content, but the “voice”, often disembodied, but immediately heard.

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“Voices” are voices not choruses, they cry in the wilderness of history and speak, apparently directly, to experience. They represent another kind of fantasy of authenticity, our access to the “real thing”. And they can be immensely powerful, which is why the “voices” of Mercure and Thomas, speaking through the eighteenth century court records, were enough to send me into a reverie on the Maravi Empire. Inserted into our texts at appropriate moments, “African voices” could also help the historian, especially the nonAfrican historian, to negotiate the politics of the production of knowledge, for through these “voices” we could feign “to make the world speak itself and speak itself as a story”. Completely inadequate as this was as a response to certain post-colonial criticisms, it has shown a capacity to fend off a few of the tamer wolves. If you gave space to “voices” of the African oppressed in your text then you were also “giving voice”, or so it seemed to some. “Voices” gave prominence to a different kind of orality to that of “oral tradition”. African “voices” in the text purport to be spontaneous, interrupting the flow of the historian’s narrative. In fact their spontaneity is likely to be part of a (conscious or unconscious) stage-management, which goes far beyond anything which can be achieved through the manipulation of “tradition”. If President Banda had really wanted a usable past, one which linked the past of the Maravi Empire to the present of the Malawi nation, he should have employed the strategies of those very “radical” social historians whose motives and methods he found so suspect. Though “oral traditions” and “voices” were a world apart, historians employing these sources shared the assumption that the history of a largely non-literate people and time could best be captured through an analysis of what was spoken about it – through the word. In the case of oral traditions this was a kind of collective speech or chorus, often transmitted through the mouthpiece of a local expert; in the case of the African “voice”, it was the individual’s spoken word, which seemed to speak immediately to experience. In both cases, however, speech or reported speech was heard as both history (what had happened in the past) and as historical consciousness. This emphasis on the spoken word of particular sorts entailed a neglect of the other forms in which individuals and communities carry forward the past.31 This neglect has operated at different levels. Unspoken practices of one sort or another are constitutive of history – what we do constantly exceeds in some sense our awareness of what is done. History is a sedimentation of practices which work on the human landscape, not all of which are “voiced” or invested with specific meaning by individuals at the moment at which they are performed.

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In our study of the shifting agricultural system of Northern Zambia, citemene, Henrietta Moore and I argued that what people did in this area, their everyday “practices”, were as constitutive of “African agency” and making of history as were their “voices” and more explicit self-interpretations.32 Clearly this raises important questions of what we mean by “consciousness” and specifically, by “historical consciousness”, to which I shall return. Furthermore, when individuals and groups are apparently more directly creating meaning from what they do, there are many different ways in which this meaning can be created and transmitted. Social anthropologists and historians of memory have told us of the many ways in which historical memory, both conscious and unconscious, may be carried forward, linking the past and the future in ways which are very different from those exemplified in the oral tradition or the narrativised “voice”.33 So as Paul Connerton and others have argued, the social conventions of the body may carry a social memory – the way we sit, wield a hoe, carry our babies and curl up or stretch out to sleep are social creations which either endure or change through social action. They distinguish “us” from others, and therefore form part of a collective (small or large, family or ethnic) identity and history – “stories”, temporal sequences of events, are not the only “elements of memory that can be drawn from the storehouse of memory”.34 For example, we know that the historical experience of colonialism can be carried forward and understood through the “mimetic embodiment” of spirit possession.35 And you don’t have to be possessed yourself, by the spirit of an ancestor or an invading foreigner, to experience the history and the future of which they speak. As Paul Stoller argues, the theatricality of spirit possession is about power and about transformation, and has the power to connect the spectator with their embodied memories, like an electrical current that “jolts bodies as they are charged and recharged by the social memories that define and redefine our being-in-the-world”.36 Stoller argues for the case of the Hauka, that spirit possession rituals can be seen as a form of “indigenous historiographic memory” which can be counterposed against the oral traditions and epics. Arguably Stoller falls into the trap of feeling he has, through them, access to “the real” when he goes on to argue that “the way of the text and epic are decidedly disembodied paths to Songhay history. Such disembodiment constrains their messages . . . Whereas the text and the epic speak to the consciousness of the nobility, the bodily practices of possessions peak to . . . ‘conscious’ ”.37 But nevertheless, his and others’ exploration of the non-discursive historical conscious is persuasive. Ritual performance surely need not necessarily be regarded as a kind of “counter-history” to the narratives

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of oral traditions and epic tales. Connerton (upon whom Stoller draws) argues in fact that ritual can be viewed as another kind of “master narrative” – one, like any other, which must be persuasive for it to work, and which in this case relies for its persuasiveness on the habituation of the bodies of its participants and spectators to effect its power. Habituation and repetition are central to the work of ritual performance – you may not be able to “say” why it works, but you can certainly “feel” it working. Steven Friedson’s work on Tumbuka healing (in Malawi), like that of Stoller, draws on phenomenology to take this argument further.38 The role of the ritual specialist here, one might argue from a reading of his account, is continually to realign competing sets of historical memories in their manifestation as spirits. This realignment is effected in and through the transformation of the bodies of individuals and through their suffering. But before he or she can effect this realignment, the ritual specialist must first “see” (or divine) which spirits they are dealing with – he or she must ask, in effect “who are you?”, and only when an answer is made manifest will they be able to “hear” (or understand). Whereas historians have tended to listen or hear before they divine, the Tumbuka healer must divine before she or he can hear. Vimbuza spirits, as they manifest themselves in individuals, are a kind of roll call of Tumbuka history in the world. They manifest “otherness” as experienced historically by the people of this region: the ivory trade, the Ngoni invaders, the European. This is an otherness which, it seems, has been literally incorporated (as in the Hauka case described by Stoller), but as with other kinds of incorporation, it can become uncomfortable. In particular the vimbuza spirits, lying horizontally, come up against those of the individual’s and group’s ancestors, lying vertically. Whereas the vimbuza are an open-ended category of spirits, the mizimu, the spirits of the ancestors, are not. Most of the time these different sets of historical memories39 live together compatibly, but on occasions (perhaps induced by the presence of a third element: witchcraft) they get out of line, vying with each other for space and causing illness. To realign the spirits and to make peace, the healer must first divine which vimbuza and which of the mizimu spirits he or she is dealing with. This “calling” is effected through the drum, through sound and rhythm, for each vimbuza can only be made manifest and brought to the surface if, in effect, he or she is called by the right name. Recognition is effected through a specific drumming rhythm – get it wrong and they refuse to answer. In one sense, it is the drummer and not the ritual specialist who has access to the language which brings to the surface and makes manifest the past – it is he that knows and can enact the code of each spirit, and so can call him or her by the

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right name. But the drumming rhythm is not “merely” a code or a name – it works on and through the body of the participants and through the vimbuza “material” which lies latent in all of them. Unlike the drummer himself, they may “forget” the rhythm, but its memory has become embodied and can be called forth on a future occasion.40 To explore the non-verbal ways in which memory may be carried forward is not to privilege “embodiment” over the word as somehow more authentic, real and closer to experience, but rather to reflect that, as Elizabeth Tonkin says, “people do not need discursive accounts to represent themselves as historical entities”.41 In addition, however, it may bring us back to “oral tradition” and oral performance with a somewhat different perspective. The nonnarrative Yoruba “oriki” which Karin Barber has described and analysed so illuminatingly are composed of words which, like the Tumbuka drumming, have the function of naming and calling forward.42 Like the vimbuza spirit world, the world of the words of oriki is incorporative – “Its mode is to subsist by swallowing other texts”. Words, we should also remember, are also composed of sounds and may sometimes, like the drumming, evoke their meaning and differences through their physicality.43 Words used during ritual performance may work metonymically as much as they work metaphorically. The very sound of the word may work to evoke memories and meanings beyond the immediate one. When anthropologists (and ethnomusicologists) such as Friedson remind us that the texts of songs often appear less important as conveyors of meaning than the music to which they are sung, we might also add that in some cases the formation and utterance of those words is part of the musical experience. Neither the 1970s analysis of oral traditions, nor the 1980s recovery of voices exhausts the potential of “oral” sources of African history and African historical consciousness, even before we consider the non-verbal ways in which memory is carried forward and history made manifest.44 Social anthropologists and students of oral literature take this fact for granted. But the use of this wider repertory of cultural productions (rhythms, dreams,45 riddles and speaking in tongues) raises rather large questions concerning our definitions of historical consciousness – it may be history, but is it History? Mercure, Roland and the Creole Memory Mercure and Thomas, subjects of the Maravi Empire, spoke (as “voices”) not through oral tradition but through the rich written records of eighteenth century Isle de France. We have no equivalent

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records for eighteenth century Malawi. Slavery incorporated Mercure and Thomas into a world system of inscription and turned them into a certain kind of historical subject, with names (albeit newish ones), ages (albeit approximate), and voices (albeit muted). But slavery also violently interrupted the transmission of certain kinds of collective identity and memory. To be a slave in Isle de France, as elsewhere, and to survive, depended on swift learning of the ways of others, and a certain amount of forgetting. Just how much forgetting is hard to know, but in present day Mauritius (in contrast to present-day Malawi) the descendants of Mercure and Thomas appear not to have an “oral tradition” of the kind recognised as “history” by historians, or (more importantly) by other ethnic groups on the island.46 The Maravi slaves of the eighteenth century had already been “creolised” to some degree before they touched Isle de France soil. They had already become “Mozambiques”. This violent rupture was of course different in degree and kind to the transformations which were simultaneously taking place in the region which they had left – “Lomwe” were becoming “Yao”, Nyanja were becoming Yao, new languages, new religions and ways of being were making their way up the caravan routes from the coast. In Isle de France, Mercure would have to learn much faster the ways of his fellow slaves (from East Africa, West Africa, Madagascar and India) and of his masters. Crucially, he would have to learn the island’s language – a French Creole – very fast, for although Thomas could translate for him as he gave his testimony in court, in everyday life he would have to make himself understood. The process of “creolisation” on eighteenth century Isle de France involved cultural compromise, enrichment and loss, on the part of everyone, but some clearly lost more than others.47 African slaves were at the losing end of this process, but it was a long and complex process nevertheless. Slaves here, as elsewhere, created a world which was liveable out of the pieces which they had brought with them and those which they had learned and made their own. The “mimicry” practised by slaves, and much remarked upon by white nineteenth century observers, was an essential practice in such a situation – one which allowed “foreignness” to be incorporated (just as foreign elements were incorporated by the Tumbuka as vimbuza spirits), and simultaneously for difference to be marked out. By the time of the abolition of slavery descendants of African and Malagascy slaves, and of their unions with non-slave others (Indian immigrants from both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “French” settlers, and other “Europeans” or East Asians) had come to be known as the “Creoles”, a nomenclature originally reserved for those of French descent born on the island. This category persists

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in today’s “rainbow nation” of Mauritius. It is, in fact, a residual category within a “multicultural” nation in which all other groups have clear (if invented) historical origins and cultural practices.48 The Mauritian cultural categories of “Hindu”, “Muslim”, “Tamil”, “Chinese” and “Franco” are, of course, troubled and divided (not least by caste and class), but they are held together pretty well by two things – firstly, reasonably coherent accounts of “origins” in other places and the narrative histories which follow from this; and secondly, a visible celebration of difference through dress, bodily comportment, religious beliefs and practices. Though all Mauritians are creoles, only a minority are Creoles. There are Creoles who have Indian, Chinese or European “blood” in them, along with their slave “blood”, but who will nevertheless be Creoles rather than creoles because they are not culturally identified as Hindu, Muslim, Tamil, Chinese or European. Creoles are Creoles because they have, in the words of one Hindu intellectual I talked to, “no history, and no culture”. They do not, in Mauritian terms, know “who they are”, and knowing who you are is essential in Mauritius if others are to accord you respect. Mauritians are rightly proud of their “rainbow nation”, but it is one which shares all the drawbacks of multi-culturalism. In effect, to be a real member of the Mauritian nation, you must first have a “culture” (preferably with origins elsewhere in an “ancient” civilisation) to contribute to the multi-cultural cooking pot. For a variety of reasons, relating to this specific history of slavery in Mauritius and to the politics of the Creole community the Creole appeal to African and Malagascy origins is extremely muted. Creole intellectuals make the very valid point that their history begins on the island – their origins lie in “métissage” in “creolité” itself, and not in a mythic originary moment which came before. And yet, making up (and believing) your stories of origins, looking to your roots, and constructing narrative histories which explain how “we” got from there to here, is what every other group in Mauritius does, and it is this which constitutes, politically, a culture and a History. It is hard, then, to avoid at least asking the question of Creole people – do you know where your ancestors came from? With the few exceptions of individuals who would point out to sea and say “Malgache”, or “Mozambique”, those of whom I have asked this question shake their heads and say, “no, we don’t know”, though they may indeed be able to tell you that the “Hindus” came from India, and that a certain lady in the village has a French ancestor. Other people, then, have origins, but not them. Of course, there are many ways in which an historian can turn disadvantage into advantage in the struggle to produce a narrative account. Forgetting does have a history, or rather, more than one

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possible history, and language can turn spaces into substances. Forgetting is a familiar subject in the historiography and literary representation of the experience of slavery. The nineteenth century North American slave narrative was testimony to both memory and to forgetting. Frederick Douglass’s narrative, we are reminded, began with the sentence: “I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday”.49 Furthermore, we have to allow for the possibility that the violence of slavery, like (in this respect) other violences, could produce “a blankness in memory so radical that it cannot be described as forgetting, amnesia, or repression, but as the absolute prevention of experience, the excision not just of ‘memories’ as a content, but the destruction of memory itself, either as an artificial technique, or a natural faculty”.50 Memory is not only the recollection of past experience by an individual, but its “telling” or passing on to another.51 Remembering, we also know, can be a way of putting a distance and letting go (or “forgetting”), as when we remember and memorialise the dead; whilst we may “forget” precisely those things which we hold on to most deeply.52 It could be, then, that the slave population had, in some sense, not only forgotten how to remember, but forgotten how to forget. A history of forgetting, or of forgetting to forget, may well be part of the history of the Creole population of Mauritius. But the forgetting has been selective. In the late nineteenth century a Franco-Mauritian folklorist, Charles Baissac, was bemoaning the disappearance of what he saw as “true” Creole culture with its African and Malagascy origins.53 He put the forgetting down not to slavery but to its abolition, to the epidemics of malaria which had wiped out a proportion of the Creole population, to the influx and cultural influence of Indian immigrants and, broadly speaking, to a process of modernisation. But at least some of the oral culture described and recorded by Baissac does survive today in Creole communities. Whilst Creole people may not have an oral historical tradition, they certainly do have an oral tradition of riddle and storytelling, and whilst the folklorists have done considerable research into the origins and diffusion of these stories and riddles in the Indian Ocean,54 there is doubtless a great deal more that could be said about them. I have not analysed Mauritian Creole riddles and would need help in doing so, but as far as I can see they are assimilative and expansive, encompassing new experiences and cultural influences in an enduring form. They are not about origins, but they may be “about” the history of creolisation. Though there may not be an oral historical tradition of an African kind in the Creole community, there certainly is an oral culture which, with some pushing and shoving and manipulation from the historian,

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may be made to yield historical content and provide an insight into historical consciousness. And, of course, there are the other ways in which this culture might be bringing forward its memories and making manifest its history. Armed with insights from the social anthropologists and historians of memories (but, I should add, with few of their professional skills), I moved from asking people the “who are you?” questions which drew blanks, to asking them about their practices. I moved from reported speech to reported practice. Monsieur Roland (or Lolo as he is known) is an elderly fisherman living on the far south of the island.55 I have interviewed him several times because he seems to be knowledgeable about various aspects of “Creole ways”, and because he is quite different from other elderly Creole people I have met. Roland lives alone in a small hut in considerable poverty. He fishes a bit, and begs the rum and bread to go with his fish. He has no television (many Creole people do) and no radio, he cannot read and he is very definitively not a practising Catholic (unlike most of the other members of this community). He has an unusual knowledge of the construction of “traditional” creole instruments, and has something of a reputation as a raconteur and singer of “Sega” songs. He was even once featured on television – less surprising than you might think on this small island where, according to a Mauritian friend of mine, “even a rat coming out of a hole makes it onto television”. Like everyone else I have interviewed, Roland is more than a little vague about his ancestral history and his slave origins. He shrugs his shoulders when asked where his ancestors came from, and gestures across the sea. He says he only knows one story about slavery (this is the same one which I have heard repeated all over the island and which features in tourist brochures), and is sure that I will not find anyone who can tell me any more. Not unreasonably, he gets bored answering questions which he cannot answer and in which, or so it appears, he has very little interest. But when asked not about the ancestors but about the spirits of the ancestors (les grands dimounes), Roland has a great deal more to say. There are spirits, he says, which have to be “called”, addressed in a strange foreign language (“They talked Greek”, he says, and gives a demonstration). Perhaps these spirits will do harm to your family, make your child ill; in which case you have to call a specialist, a “traiteur” who will sacrifice a cock like this: “the cock is not cut with a knife, the head of the cock is put directly in the mouth and he cuts it with his teeth. He drinks the blood also . . . the cock will take the child’s illness with him”. Do the spirits have names, I ask. Yes, says Roland, perhaps Alfred or Roland . . . Yes, supposing I Roland died and being a spirit I enter someone, so the spirit is Roland. So the spirits take the names of

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the deceased in the family, rather than others? Yes, replies Roland, even a cousin’s name – alliances are very important.56 Roland can go on with these stories for some time, interspersed with bouts of “sega” singing and improvised drumming. The Creoles, it seems, do have ancestors after all, but they are made manifest not in oral historical tradition but through the drumming of the healing event. Listening to Roland I make frenzied connections. The vimbuza healing rites of the Tumbuka feature an animal sacrifice very similar to that described by Roland – the cock’s neck is broken by the teeth and the blood is drunk. Perhaps Roland is really a Tumbuka, descended perhaps from one of those “Maravi” slaves, Mercure or Thomas. But Roland does not seem to be worried about his roots, and is not the slightest bit interested in the cultural practices of Africa or Madagascar, from which some of his bodily memory, his memory of rhythm, may originate. He bemoans instead the shortage of fish and the price of rum. Perhaps he prefers to leave his ancestors in peace, and more importantly, to be left in peace by them. He will “remember” them on All Saints’ day, but will try and “forget” them otherwise.

Conscious and Consciousness It is possible (but of course it would be extremely hard to demonstrate) that Roland and others like him do hold very deep, unvoiced memories of the practices brought to the island two hundred years ago by their ancestors from Africa and Mozambique. Is this what Stoller means by a “conscious” rather than a “consciouness” – and if so, what are we to do with it, if anything? It is clear that the kind of historical “conscious” or “consciousness” which has been described to me is of a different kind to that expressed through African “oral traditions”, through the writings of historians like Tambalika and Kanchewa, and certainly to narrative histories. Perhaps the rituals described by Roland do constitute the “endogenous historicity” of the Mauritian Creole people, for, as Jean and John Comaroff argue, “the policies of history lie also in mute meanings transacted through goods and practices, icons and images dispersed in the landscape”.57 Roland’s version of history does not claim anything beyond what it demonstrates directly. It has no “origins”, its “authenticity” lies within its lived practice, rather than in any claims to go beyond, or to come from a “before”. Roland’s ancestors are not a long line of memorialised men, but “les grands dimounes”, who in order to be “forgotten” from day to day must be remembered and fed on certain occasions.

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By describing Roland’s account in this way, I have already of course inserted it into another sort of “history”. Perhaps Roland’s ancestors should be left alone by historians like myself. As Johannes Fabian has argued, by translating the experience of others into our own measures of being-in-time, we are laying down the terms in which they may be represented. I have argued earlier in this paper that it was perhaps fortunate that our attempts to so translate the histories of southern Malawi in the late 1970s were flawed and incomplete. And yet, it is hard to escape the conclusion that within a nation state such as Mauritius, we cannot afford to leave Roland’s ancestors alone in their “endogenous historicity”. To be “represented”58 in a way which will allow the Mauritian Creole community to be seen, heard, and recognised, would inevitably involve the insertion of Roland’s practices into a narrative which, if it does not invent “origins”, must at the very least create a kind of coherence; which transforms Roland’s “knowing” into a very specific kind of “telling”, a telling which recognises the existence of the state and expresses the conflict between “desire and the law”. Notes 1

National Archives of Mauritius, JB 80: Case of Jupiter, accused of theft and marronage, 1794. This paper was originally prepared for the conference on “Words and Voices”, held in Bellagio in 1997, and organised by David W. Cohen, Stephan Miescher and Luise White. I am very grateful to the organisers and participants of that conference for their encouragement and comments. 2 Ronald Radano, “Denoting Differences: the Writing of Slave Spirituals”, Critical Inquiry, 22(3), Spring 1996:513. 3 J. Matthew Schoffeleers, Rivers of Blood: the Genesis of a Martyr Cult in Southern Malawi, cA.D. 1600, Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992:41. 4 Schoffeleers, Rivers of Blood: 42. 5 Mary Tew, The Peoples of the Lake Nyasa Region, Ethnographic Survey of Africa, East Central Africa, Part 1, London, Oxford University Press, 1950:34. 6 David Livingstone and Charles Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambezi and its Tributaries, and of the Discovery of Lakes Shirwa and Nyassa, 1858–1864, London: John Murray, 1865:198. 7 For the politics of the Banda regime see John Lwanda, Kamuzu Banda of Malawi: A Study of Promise, Power and Paralysis, Glasgow: Dudu Nsomba Publications, 1993; AfricaWatch, Where Silence Rules: the Suppression of Dissent in Malawi, New York: AfricaWatch, 1990; T.D. Williams, Malawi: the Politics of Despair, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978; Harri Englund, “Between God and Kamuzu: the transition to multi-party politics in central Malawi”, in Richard Werbner and Terence Ranger (eds), Postcolonial Identities in Africa, London: Zed Books, 1996: 136–157. 8 Leroy Vail and Landeg White, “Tribalism in the Political History of Malawi” in Leroy Vail (ed), The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, London: James Currey, 1989:182. More prominent in their account than

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the work of the project I was involved with is the published work of both Ian Linden and Matthew Schofeleers. I feel that they may have also over-stated their case in regard to these two historians. For a “revisionist” account, see Harri Englund’s work (1996). Leroy Vail’s recent death is a great loss to students of Malawi’s pre-colonial history. 9 At this point my narrative becomes overtly autobiographical. Like any other “personal reminiscence” it needs to be read with care. 10 Megan Vaughan, “Social and Economic Change in Southern Malawi: the Shire Highlands and Upper Shire Valley in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries”, PhD thesis, SOAS, University of London, 1981. 11 Hastings Banda’s interest in “History” would make an interesting study in its own right. He gave speeches regularly on such historical subjects as the colonial past of the British (a history of colonisation by the Romans), and on Welsh place names. 12 Professor Webster had already acquired wide experience in the practice of oral history during his time in East Africa, before arriving in Malawi. He had also published a well-received work on African Christianity. J.B. Webster, The African Churches among the Yoruba, 1988–1922 (Oxford 1964); The Iteso during the Asonya (Nairobi, 1973); The Central Luo during the Aconya, 1976. 13 For a full discussion of “oral tradition” and its uses by historians and others see Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: the Social Construction of Oral History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, and Isabel Hofmeyr, “We Spend Our Years as a Tale That is Told: Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom”, Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, Social History of Africa Series, 1993. 14 The only direct policing which I was aware of was that to which we had all grown accustomed – the frequent presence of a local Malawi Congress Party branch chair at our interviews. Of course, there may have been more control of the larger intellectual enterprise than I was aware of, but my impression was that though everyone knew that history was “political” and potentially “dangerous”, there were no very clear directives from above. There were always government “spies” amongst our students, but they were often confused as to their exact mission. 15 Perhaps not so confidently – see Mary Tew, Peoples of Lake Nyasa. Nyanja were, however, “counted” in the colonial censuses and therefore deemed to exist, even in areas dominated by “Yao” and “Lomwe”. 16 All the Zomba History Project interviews are deposited in the University of Malawi Library, Zomba. 17 See the interpretation in J.B. Webster, “From Yao Hill to Mount Mulanje: ivory and slaves and the southwestern expansion of the Yao”, unpublished seminar paper, University of Malawi, 30 November 1977. 18 Dr Phiri is an historian of pre-colonial Malawi, trained in the United States by Jan Vansina. 19 Roderick Graham Chipande (Village headman, Nyani Village, T.A. Malemia, Zomba District and Arnold Frederick Bimbi, Group Village Headman, Bimbi Village, T.A. Malemia, Zomba District, interviewed on 23 November 1977 by Kings Phiri and Megan Vaughan, Zomba History Project: Amachinga Yao Traditions, Vol. 11. 20 Interview with Morgan Sawali, Sawali Village, TA Msamala, 31 August 1977: Zomba History Project, Amachinga Yao traditions, Vol. 11. 21 Landeg White, Magomero: Portrait of an African Village, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

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22 Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987:1. 23 For the attributes of the “chronicle”, I have drawn again on Hayden White, though his discussion does have the drawback of being directed primarily at understanding the nature of narrative through an examination of non-narrative forms. In other words, the chronicle is primarily viewed as an incomplete or imperfect narrative. 24 “The Book of My Clan”: written by Chingondo 1 (Andre Tambalika) and copied out by Chingondo 111 (Kustacio Kanchewa), translated by Ellias Chakwela. Copy in my possession. See also the following interviews: with Granger Matengula, Chingondo Village, T.A. Mwambo, 19 July 1978; with Gravelo Njala, Njala Village, T.A. Kuntumanje, 15 July, 1978; with Clement Palira, Saima Village, T.A. Mwambo, 8 September 1978; and with Kustacio John Kanchewa and Tipa January, Chingondo Village, T.A. Mwambo, 6 September 1978. 25 For the Chilembwe Rising and its political consequences see Landeg White and Leroy Vail, “Tribalism”; Landeg White, Magomero; George Shepperson and T. Price, Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1958. 26 The azimbili were probably “Lomwe” slave traders. 27 Megan Vaughan, “Local Politics” and “Tradition”: Chingondo’s “Book of My Clan”. nd. Unpublished paper. 28 Barthes’ term, (drawing on Lacan and Nietzche) and referring to the capacity to assimilate stories, to tell them, and to be capable of “making promises”: Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives”, in Image, Music, Text, trans Stephen Heath, New York, 1977:115. 29 Terence Ranger, “Personal Reminiscence and the Experience of the People of East Central Africa”, Oral History, 6 (1), 1978. 30 White, Magomero. 31 Of course, historians of Africa have always of necessity engaged with other kinds of non-verbalised histories through, for example, their use of archaeological evidence and art history – but this engagement has been for the purposes of securing alternative, “supporting” evidence, rather than to reflect on the nature of historical consciousness. 32 Henrietta Moore and Megan Vaughan, Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia, c1890–1990, Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 1994:xxii–xxiii. 33 See Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; Patrick Hutton, History as an Art of Memory, Hanover and London, University of New England Press, 1993; Matt K. Matsuda, The Memory of the Modern, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996; Paul Stoller, Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power and the Hauka in West Africa, New York and London: Routledge, 1995. 34 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994:194. 35 For mimesis and memory see Stoller, Embodying Colonial Memories; Fritz Kramer, The Red Fez: Art and Spirit Possession in Africa, London: Verso Press, 1993; Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: a Particular History of the Senses, New York: Routledge, 1993.

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Stoller, Embodying Colonial Memories: 198. Stoller, Embodying Colonial Memories: 34. Perhaps there is a danger of over-privileging “the embodied” here – clearly this point relates to a large literature on the nature and meaning of embodiment. 38 Steven M. Friedson, Dancing Prophets: Musical Experience in Tumbuka Healing, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1996. 39 I am loosely interpreting these spirits as “memories”, but of course there is a great deal more to them than this, and Friedson does not himself make this argument as crudely as I am putting it here. 40 Ronald Radano’s work on the transcription of slave spirituals is suggestive here. The songs, working as a “sound text”, continually exceeded their transcription. The transcribed text could only ever be partial Radano, “Denoting Differences”:525. 41 Tonkin, Narrating Ourselves. 42 Karin Barber, I Could Speak Until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women and the Past in a Yoruba Town, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991. 43 Henrietta Moore, “Sex, Symbolism and Psychoanalysis”, Audrey Richards Memorial Lecture, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford, May 1996. 44 Historians of Africa have much more readily explored the (also important) interaction between written texts and oral culture. 45 See Achille Mbembe’s use of dreams as an historical source in “Domaines de la Nuit et Autorité Onirique dans les maquis du sud-cameroun, 1955–1958”, Journal of African History, 31 (1991):89– 121. 46 A note of caution here: I am not clearly in a position to “pronounce” that no such “tradition” exists, and for reasons which will become evident in the following discussion, am reluctant to do so – it is clear, however, that the kind of collective traditions of an ex-slave society found by Richard Price in Surinam, do not exist in Mauritius. Richard Price, First Time: the Historical Vision of an Afro-American People, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. More research on the African diaspora in the Indian Ocean may well uncover a “hidden history”. See: Edward A. Alpers, “The African Diaspora in the Northwestern Indian Ocean: Reconsideration of an Old Problem, New Directions for Research”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. XV11, 2, (1997):62–81. 47 On “creolisation” as a continuum see the interesting discussion in Richard D.E. Burton, Afro-Creole, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. 48 For what I regard as a rather partial account of Mauritian multiculturalism and nationalism, see Thomas Hyland Erikson, US and Them in Modern Societies, Oslo Scandinavian University Press, 1992. 49 Quoted in Mitchell, Picture Theory: 186. 50 Mitchell, ibid. 51 Mitchell, ibid. 52 This argument is made by psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in On Flirtation, London: Faber and Faber: 1994, Chapter 2. 53 Charles Baissac, Le Folklore de l’Ile Maurice, Paris: Maisonneuve et Ch.Leclerc, 1888. 54 Lee Haring, “Prospects for Folklore in Mauritius”, International Folklore Review 1991, 83–95. 55 Interview with Idesse Rolo, Le Morne, Mauritius, 12 September 1995. Transcribed and translated by Mr Pavi Ramhota. 37

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56 Here my research assistant, Pavi Ramhota, remarked in his transcription of the interview that “amongst the Creoles, kinship among the dead seems stronger than among the living”. Creoles have a reputation amongst other groups for having “unstable” families. 57 Jean and John Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, Boulder: Westview Press, 1992:35. 58 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology makes its Object, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

Modernism and the Machine Farmer ROD BANTJES Abstract In this paper I apply recent theoretical discussions of the spatial character of modernity to a “rural” context. I argue that neither modernity nor “modernism” has been an exclusively “urban” phenomenon in the twentieth century, and that attention to modernism in the countryside yields insights into the modernist project. From the beginning of the twentieth century, the apparently “rural” spaces of the prairie west were already integrated into modern trans-local structures. Wheat farmers were ahead of their contemporaries in their appreciation of the nature and scale of modern distanciated relationships. They were “modernist” in embracing and celebrating the technologies, particularly organizational technologies, for dominating space and time. They were also innovators in modern organizational design, seeking creatively to control the modern “machine” and to bridge the local and the “global.” Their progressive experimentation culminated in a surprising proposal for “co-operative farms” not unlike Soviet collective farms.

***** The machine farmer . . . scorns distance . . . and thinks well of the means of speed on highway and plowland. . . . 1

Galpin’s early bulletins for the Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station echo the bold language of the Futurist manifestos. Both celebrate speed, the modernist motif for the conquest of space, time and tradition. We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched by a new beauty – the beauty of speed. A racing car, . . . rattling along like a machine gun, is more beautiful than the winged victory of Samothrace.2

While Galpin wrote nearly a decade later than Marinetti who is quoted here, his modernist language still has a striking originality. No-one previously had imagined the countryside in these terms. The rural was, and continues to be rigidly coded as static and “traditional” in opposition to the urban. Even in the late twentieth century the city remains “simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity.”3 This opposition is ubiquitous in histories of the rural in the twentieth century and is reproduced even in accounts of the most “progressive” elements of agrarian politics. Danbom, in his classic Resisted Revolution represents the state as modernizer, imposing the industrialization of agriculture “from above”. While sympathetic toward farmers and their organized resistance, he sees that resistance, rather like the Country Life reformers whom he Twenty Years of the Journal of Historical Sociology: Challenging the Field Volume 2 Edited by Yoke-Sum Wong and Derek Sayer © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-17934-8

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criticizes, as stemming from a fundamental agrarian conservatism, localism and individualism.4 In this paper I argue that early twentieth century farmers, or at least the wheat farmers of western Canada, were part of a modernist avant-garde. The machine farmer’s scorn for distance reflects what Soja regards as modernism’s characteristic contempt for “space.” Space in critical modern consciousness, according to Soja, has been conceived as “fixed, dead, undialectical” – the accumulated material constraints hindering change, progress and emancipation.5 The historical work of Foucault suggests, rather, that the modern abhorrence has been for intractable spaces, not space per se. Nineteenth century reformers had wanted to clear away obscure and disorderly spaces. But their reform projects (both bourgeois and socialist) were full of architectural inventions intended to make urban spaces transparent, accountable and visible at a distance, such that they could be ordered and rationally controlled. What marked early twentieth century modernism during the period of Einstein, Cubism and cinematic montage, was the extent to which space was conceived as relative, plastic and subject to fragmentation and recomposition. New and malleable building materials – cast iron and reinforced concrete – made possible a positive “art of space.”6 “Progressive” spaces, such as le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin, were envisioned not only as open but as dynamic, allowing for speed and the free flow of all sorts of traffic: automobiles, commodities, people, ideas.7 Such spaces were consistent with the modernist preoccupation with time and motion. The built environment could in this sense be the “machinery” of modernism and the city its “hero.” Rural space, by contrast, was thought to be embedded in more intractable material – earth and nature’s ineluctable rhythms. While nature was not excluded from modernist spatial design, its role was often nostalgic – a reminder of what the urban was not. Galpin’s manifesto for the machine farmer is a harbinger of a late twentieth century concept of nature as artefact, and the rural as a built environment. The machine farmer’s materials, too, he proclaims, “have become more plastic, subject to rapid change by selection and breeding.”8 While Galpin was only in 1918 beginning to articulate a rural modernism, a self-conscious celebration of the conditions of modernity, those conditions were by that time already well established in north American agriculture. Modernity, according to Giddens, is characterized by the abstraction of time and space from the particularities of lived contexts. Abstraction yields “universal” accounting principles that can be deployed in technologies that restructure social relations “across indefinite spans of time-space.”9 He uses the term “disembedding” to describe the “lifting out” of social rela-

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tions from local milieus of face-to-face contacts. The restructuring of the now “impersonal” relations across time-space he calls “distanciation.” In the rural context, the rectilinear survey provided an early example of the “emptying out” of space, the construction of a space without particulars to be deployed as a technology of regulation at a distance. Without reference to any features of the landscape, a single numerical description uniquely identified the location, area and legal description of each half-mile square of land. The grid made land, as commodity, entirely accountable at a distance to resident and non-resident owners alike, and facilitated a tremendous dynamism, the buying and selling and expansion of landholdings, that was to characterize agriculture in the west. Its bright and dynamic squares, like Piet Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie” drawn horizontally upon the land, were also to compliment the modernist aesthetic. Time-space distanciation, this fashioning of trans-local structures, also applied to the organization of modern markets, states and social classes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The international wheat economy that bound so many of the owners of those half-mile square parcels of land to a global trading regime in the early twentieth century, was the epitome of a modern trans-local structure.10 Relationships within this structure were mediated not only across vast distances, but also through complex mechanisms of time deferral. Hopkins Moorhouse, writing at the same time as Galpin, sketches this trans-local “machinery” as the setting for his account of farmers’ struggles to build a co-operative movement in western Canada. He emphasizes the subordination of physical distances to speed, as railways pushed “eagerly in every direction where new wheat lands could be tapped”11 and as the wheat flowed, circling and eddying through the grain exchange “before in redirected currents it rolled on its way to the ocean ports.”12 He recognized in the giant grain elevators the physical machinery to regulate the erratic timing of the flow of wheat. At the centre, he places the “steadily turning marketing machinery” of the grain exchange, the great “[t]imepiece of International Exchange ticking out the doings of nations, both buyer and seller can know what prices will govern their dealings. In office and farmhouse an ear to the telephone is all that is necessary”.13 Its role was, as his metaphor suggests, to control time. Through the institution of futures trading, transactions could be made independently of the time the wheat was delivered to the final customer and often before it was actually produced in the field. This financial technology bridged both distance and time allowing the buyer and seller, in the words of Simmel, to “. . . exist so far apart that each of them may follow their own precepts to a greater degree than in the period

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when the owner and his possessions still stood in direct mutual relationship, and every economic engagement was a personal one”.14 “With the establishment of exchanges for conducting international buying and selling,” Moorhouse wrote, “the universalizing of wheat was complete.”15 As universal commodity wheat could appear anywhere on the globe stripped of the particularities of place or person of origin. The new abstract relationships within the wheat economy were nonetheless real, and, farmers were convinced, involved asymmetrical relations of power. In other words they were distanciated class relations. A further feature of the wheat economy, associated with modernity, was the spatial division of labour.16 The speed and complexity of global transactions meant that entire regions could depend upon others for most commodities and specialize in the production of, in some cases, a single commodity. This was the case to an unprecedented degree in the wheat-growing province of Saskatchewan. It was a transparent, and to many, a troubling feature of modern agriculture on the prairies. Less evident was what Cox and Mair have called the “scale division of labour.”17 Wheat was produced, or its full commodity value realized, neither entirely on the land nor even in the prairies. Its value on the international market was in part an artefact of the transport and marketing infrastructure, maintained by labour and technologies outside the region. By 1920, simple tilling and harvesting machines and steam powered threshing outfits had substantially increased the output of grain per fieldworker. The labour of distanciated others, off-field workers in the offices and factories of implement companies, was invisibly re-inserted as what Marx would call “dead labour” into wheat production on the field. If we evoke the metaphor of the “vertical” as in “vertical integration” then we can imagine these technologies and divisions of labour operating “above” field production at different spatial levels or on different spatial scales. The significance of the complex, distanciated relationships involved in the scale division of labour was never fully grasped by early twentieth century observers. Their perceptual bias was that what mattered in agricultural production happened in the local, tangible practices on the field. This localism of vision was common among early agricultural experts and frequently left them more mystified by modern agriculture than the farmers themselves. What the experts did recognize was that farming was becoming less an individualistic relation “between man and nature” and would increasingly involve the farmer in relationships with “his fellows.” As Galpin understood it, “modern conditions underlying successful farm practice and profit-making require of the farmer a wider and more frequent contact with men than at any other time

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in the past.”18 He and his followers saw it as their mission to foster these interconnections that would make farming a modern “organized” venture. They sought to break down the “isolation” of the farmer by promoting “town-country co-operation.” The enlarged “rurban” networks that they envisioned would bring farmers into contact with small-town bankers and shop owners, but only within the limited confines of particular locales.19 Their spatial vision was neither adequate in scale nor sufficiently abstract. Their fundamental mistake was imagining modern interconnections in terms of ongoing face-to-face contact. They could not see how, under conditions of modernity, “what structures the locale is not simply that which is present on the scene; the ‘visible form’ of the locale conceals the distanciated relations which determine its nature.”20 The response of Saskatchewan farmers to the obscure logic of modern agriculture demonstrated a better instinct for its spatial properties. They formed a regional trade organization and in 1905 sent one of their members, E. A. Partridge, 500 miles east to observe the workings of the Winnipeg Grain Exchange. Their perspective was trans-local from the start. Partridge declared in 1902, “We are not denizens of a hamlet but citizens of a world and we are facing the interlocking financial, commercial and industrial interests of a thousand million people.”21 Business “combination,” meaning everything from mergers to cartels to the economies of scale involved in mass production, seemed the way of the future in the early twentieth century. Grain farmers embraced the trend and set about creating large scale organizational structures to match those of monopoly capital. They explored a range of innovations in collective ownership and control and attempted to apply them to the key elements of the distribution and marketing system: railways, elevators, grain exchanges and lending institutions. In every grain growing province and state they established farmer-owned companies or Rochdale-style co-operatives that built grain elevators and in many cases bought and sold wheat. Saskatchewan was one of the few places where farmers succeeded for a time in operating a “wheat pool” designed to regulate the market itself. The “pool” was a time deferral mechanism on the scale of a grain exchange but on a new design principle. It was a co-op that bought all of the members’ wheat at a fixed “initial price” at harvest, then timed the sale of that wheat throughout the year so as to “flatten” seasonal price fluctuations, and return the average gain in sale price to members at a later date. In 1930 the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool had 83,000 subscribers or “contract holders,” a substantial majority of farmers in the province.22 It was agitating for a “100% compulsory pool” which proponents hoped would give it the power not just to average the

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final price to farmers, but to raise the overall market price. The idea was to dominate time and territory with a kind of state-like totality. The Pool preferred to use the term “contract-holders” when referring to its members. They were not a face-to-face “group” rather their relations were mediated across space by legal documents and money. Their sense of solidarity with one another was powerful, but abstract, like the solidarity of the “imagined communities” of nations.23 But unlike nations, the focus of that identity was not always geographically bounded. Theirs was much closer to Marx’s vision of a “universal,” trans-national class.24 As the director of the Alberta Wheat Pool proclaimed “Only by world-wide co-operation can the farmer-producer – the largest class of all classes – ensure himself of profit for his toil . . .”25 Farmers were ready to embrace “universal” structures, without however giving up the idea of “local” control. “Decentralization” was the structural feature that received the most attention in Saskatchewan farmers’ ongoing discussions of organizational design. The Pool benefited from a number of prior experiments, but still did not embody the best of a very innovative set of ideas about how to maintain democratic control of large and far-flung organizations.26 Prairie farmers were pioneers in the very contemporary problem of bridging the local and, as we would say in the post-Sputnik era, the “global.” The “local” in agrarian discourse must not be confused with Giddens’ “embedded” relationships in the “locale.” Locals of the Wheat Pool and other farm organizations were only partly based on “found” networks, or the ongoing face-to-face relationships carried on within the bounds of pre-existing “places.” Locals were intentional constructs that brought people together from wider areas than they habitually occupied. The habitual networks of prairie farmers before 1945 were very circumscribed. Farmers generally stuck to the “open country” and to circles that encompassed large areas but, as a consequence of the sparseness of prairie settlement, few “neighbours.”27 Their avoidance of the town, or of personal relations with townspeople, could be mistaken for “localism.” In fact, it frequently had less to do with a spatially circumscribed imagination than a political analysis of class interests that looked beyond the locale and re-figured local small business people as agents of “capitalist” exploitation.28 Saskatchewan farmers experienced modernity’s spatial and temporal dislocations as intensely as urban people did. They responded by attempting to master the technologies of time-space distanciation and employ them for their own ends. They were “machine farmers” in the sense of embracing the organizational machinery of modernity. They were also modernist in their celebration of the machine-like qualities of the organization that they had created. It

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was no small feat to manage a structure that could provide both democratic input and economic performance for tens of thousands of people, spread out across 100,000 square miles. Farmers were justly proud of it. As the Salvador Wheat Pool Committee boasted in 1933 We, the Co-operators, have at least the satisfaction of knowing that we have created an economic machine that works, and if the economists of today are not alive to its significance, they will shortly be compelled to construct their economic structure out of its accomplished results.29

Farmers took a certain delight in the rationalization that was required to make the Pool into “a smooth working machine. . . .” As a spatial grid to keep track of “contract-signers” they used the “rural municipalities” or “RM”s that were in turn based on the survey grid – normally nine township squares per RM. Contract signers in each RM were numbered by last name such that each had a unique numeric designation that located them on the map – the contract of Mr. Abernathy in RM 251 for example, might be numbered #251-1.30 Many farmers identified with their numbers, occasionally adding them to their signature in letters to the Western Producer, or stencilling them on their wagon boxes. Co-ordinating Pool transactions required a huge paper assembly line. Evidently thrilled by its new technologies of speed and scale, the Western Producer in 1925 described the Regina office as . . . the largest single office in the Canadian west, occupying an entire floor of 18,000 square feet of space, and with a staff in the neighbourhood of 150. Here the most modern methods are employed in the interests of the grower members, and supported by the latest in office fixtures and equipment. A large battery of stenographers turn out vast quantities of Pool mail daily, addressed to every corner of the province. Adding machines and comptometers are conspicuous on over thirty desks. In the month of June, preparatory to getting out a second interim payment totalling over $10,000,000, on the basis of 20 cents a bushel, No. 1 Northern Wheat, a group of a dozen Elliott-Fisher machines were installed and the bulk of the 65,000 cheques passed through that equipment.31

The sentiment echoed le Corbusier, who in the same year celebrated the offices of the skyscraper in which “Everything is concentrated . . . the tools that conquer time and space.”32 The Pool also made much of its architectural presence. In 1929 it claimed a space in the Winnipeg Exchange District with an office tower built in the prevailing “Chicago style.”33 It also built “terminal elevators” at ocean ports. A photo of one in 1928 shows industrial architecture on a heroic scale – 60 mammoth cylinders along the building’s face tower, Parthenon-like, over two ocean tankers.34 But the figure most celebrated in Pool iconography was the country elevator. Le

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Corbusier saw in it the functionality and clean lines that he aspired to in his modernist office towers. Like the skyscrapers in his Plan Voisin, grain elevators reflected his ideal of the contrast between “density and open space.”35 Prairie people identified with them as the most visible embodiment of their presence on an otherwise unmarked expanse. Elevator buildings, along with their internal belts and pulleys, appear again and again in Pool advertisements to symbolize the organization: its permanence, its local presence, and the machinery that co-ordinated its operations across time and space. Radical critics feared that this heady embrace of industrial modernity would compromise farmers’ democratic socialist politics. As Partridge warned in 1925, “don’t make a fetish of your wheat pool. It may take you far, but it is not a cure-all, and has the moral defect of giving support to the principle of ‘fighting the devil with fire.’ ”36 But proponents felt that the Pool, like other co-operatives, was not “capitalist” in form. It did not operate on the principles of private ownership, competitive individualism or the profit motive. Co-operative theorists believed that co-operative organizations were more rational and efficient than capitalist ones and would eventually edge them out of the market.37 They were to transform capitalism and usher in a democratically controlled economy – the “co-operative commonwealth.” Modernity would pose a further challenge to this political vision. But it would come through the trans-local restructuring of field production rather than marketing. The survey grid, the regional specialization in wheat and the scale division of labour had all made their imprint on the prairie landscape at the beginning of the century. But the consequences of modernity’s conquest of time and space would not be fully felt in agricultural field production until after the Second World War when chemical herbicides, pesticides and artificial fertilizers began to be used in large quantities. By offering immeasurably greater control over soil chemistry and organic processes, these “green revolution” technologies were to further realize Galpin’s modernist vision of a “plastic” medium for agriculture. Monocrops of engineered hybrids could be “artificially” maintained in a variety of soil and climate conditions through the construction of elaborate machine infrastructures both on and off the farm to manufacture, transport and apply synthetic inputs to the soil. This new degree of “spatial indifference” meant that regional specialization could respond as much to the investment costs of infrastructure as the “natural” assets of the land. A new landscape “aesthetic,” embracing these possibilities, was defined in the Post-war period. Like modernism in architecture it celebrated “universal” spaces that ignored or erased the particularities of the “locale.” Geometric figures were filled with

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introduced hybrids that displaced the diversity of indigenous plant species or traditional varieties. The best contemporary reading of the texts of north American landscape design, Wilson’s Culture of Nature, argues that this “modernist” Post-war paradigm was exemplified in the suburban lawn.38 But it is very likely that suburbanites’ taste for modernism, pursued as a recreational pleasure, was anticipated in wheat farmers’ love for uniform, square, “clean” fields. Wilson contrasts this aesthetic to “pastoralism,” an approach to landscape design that sought to re-create a nostalgic, European, vision of rural “place.” Pastoralism was about transforming and re-making the landscape to suit human uses and tastes. But it was an approach that was much more accommodating to indigenous features of particular places. More effort was made to suit cultivation to existing topography, soil type and climate. There was a greater concern with “sustainability,” a concern that local resources should not be exhausted, or that inputs should be derived locally, rather than through a costly network of trans-local exchanges. Pastoralism was the dominant aesthetic in western Canada in the first half of the twentieth century, at least in official circles. Even agricultural scientists refused to join wheat farmers in their embrace of modernity. They disapproved of prairie farmers’ exclusive reliance on wheat growing and advocated greater diversity of field crops as well as crop rotation. The idea was to add to the nutrient content of the soil with nitrogen fixing crops like clover and to enrich it by increasing its population of “bacterial servants.”39 Agricultural experts were appalled by the fact that many Saskatchewan farmers either burned their manure or allowed it “to accumulate for years” rather than spread it on the fields.40 Even the “Dominion Chemist” felt that Saskatchewan farmers were better to rely upon “mixed farming” techniques (crop rotation, animal husbandry and manuring) rather than artificial fertilizers. The former, and in contemporary terms more “organic,” approach would preserve the “humus” content of the soil and prevent wind erosion.41 The experts also recognized how susceptible crop monocultures were to outbreaks of diseases and insect pests as well as the spread of weeds. The weed problem in Saskatchewan was epidemic and uncontrollable by manual weeding.42 Experts advocated “intensive” farming by which yield per acre was supposed to be increased, not through artificial inputs like chemical fertilizers, but through the labour of those present bodily on the land.43 They believed that the huge wheat farms of the prairies represented a wasteful use of land by farmers who could not be bothered to expend the extra energy involved in replenishing its fertility and building its productive capacity. For them most Saskatchewan

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farmers were land “miners” who did not understand the art of true husbandry. “Agriculture”, professed Dr. Robinson, “is not breaking clods or moving soil by hand or by machinery; it is the care of the surface of old mother earth.”44 The orientation of modern wheat farmers was too industrial, too commercial, and focused on shortterm profit: “. . . the farmers are more concerned about the immediate returns to be received than they are about the system which will eventually be most beneficial to their farms.”45 What is so interesting and ironic about this discourse is that it was adopted by provincial departments of agriculture. The state is typically represented as a proponent of modernization in agriculture. It is supposed to support “business”-oriented approaches to farming, capital-intensive “industrial” techniques and a concentration on cash crops for export markets. Indeed the state as modernizer is supposed to employ its agricultural experts and extension agents to overcome the resistance of traditionalist farmers. In Saskatchewan before 1945, the roles were reversed, with “modernist” farmers resisting the “official pastoralism” of the provincial Department of Agriculture. As wheat farmers embraced the global market, the state sought to protect them from it. The market for wheat was notoriously volatile.46 While farmers sought to control it by building their “economic machines,” the Department urged them to hedge against its fluctuations by diversifying production. It consistently promoted “mixed farming” throughout the first half of the century. The idea was that farmers should have alternative sources of income through other farm commodities, but also that they should be able to fall back on subsistence production during the frequent agricultural depressions. As early as 1884 officials were shocked to learn of the extent to which prairie farmers were dependent upon the cash economy. “That the farmer should be a customer of the country storekeeper for such articles as butter, eggs and bacon,” wrote the Deputy Head of the Department of the Interior on his tour through western Canada, “is almost beyond belief, but it seems to be the fact nevertheless.”47 Dependence on a single cash crop, the “mania” for wheat growing, as the Minister of Agriculture put it in 1907, led to a whole series of evils associated with modernity. Owing to the large returns obtained at times . . . this system of farming, . . . is predisposed to encourage extravagance, imprudence, speculation, landlordism, and indifference to home-making as against money making, the credit system, elevator difficulties, the weed nuisance, together with a general tendency to drift off the farms into towns and villages in search of a less anxious and strenuous life. . . .48

This astonishing last phrase, in which people are represented as fleeing to the towns to escape the dynamism and anomie of the

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countryside, marks a conflicted awareness of the “paradox” of modernity manifest in a rural setting. The market orientation of wheat producers made them lose touch with “nature.” In part this was a traditionalist sentiment encompassing a nostalgia for a natural order of rural society. But it was also based in the agricultural science supported by the state. Profit-hungry farmers were trying to grow wheat in areas where the soil and climate would not support it. Part of the mission of the Department of Agriculture and the College of Agriculture, through its Extension Service, was to convince farmers to think scientifically. What this meant was to confer with departmental experts and through soil testing and judicious experimentation with different crops and varieties adapt farm practices to the “natural” features of the land.49 For large areas of the prairies, official advice was to return it to grasslands for cattle grazing. Scientific “mixed farming” was more about preserving and enhancing the particular and enduring features of the “locale” than transforming it into “universal” space responding to international market pressures and employing trans-local technologies. Farmers resisted the message of mixed farming. State agricultural agents were not well received. As one complained in 1914 “. . . the people think they are not in a position to fall in with the better farming methods until cheaper money [ie. credit] is allowed to circulate.”50 Farmer leaders pointed out again and again that mixed farming did not make money, mostly for lack of adequate distribution and marketing infrastructure. As the editor of the UFC pages in the Western Producer put it in 1930, “. . . our agricultural advisors are continually ignoring the fact that agricultural products are placed on the market in an unsound manner, and advising the farmer to place two products or ten products on the market in the same unsound manner”.51 They defended the principle of “industrial specialization” in agriculture, and pointed to the success of Henry Ford’s assembly line model.52 It was not unjust to imagine prairie farmers as detail workers on a wheat assembly line. Even if state discourse on “better farming” was just about higher productivity, the “question of making two blades of grass grow where one grew before” in the dismissive terms of the UFC editor, it was still too individualistic.53 It diverted attention from the collective and political struggles farmers had to fight in order to transform what they were convinced were the more important abstract structures that organized production and distribution off the farm. All the same, the wheat monoculture was fragile. Crop failure due to disease and pests was chronic. Efforts to promote manual weed destruction through “weed inspectors” had become “a farce.”54 More ominously, there was persistent evidence of the risks of drought

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and soil drifting long before the Great Depression.55 Farmers did not want to hear that their economic woes in the periodic depressions before 1930 were due to “climate” or more pointedly, their failure to adapt to climatic and soil conditions.56 Depressions, they insisted, were structural problems with structural solutions. Crises of overproduction were inherent in the capitalist system57 and could be controlled by the democratic co-operative organization of the economy. Protection from hail, drought and disease could be secured through state or co-operative crop insurance.58 Efforts to influence farmer opinion through Agricultural Societies, organized along the lines of American “Farm Bureaus,” ended in failure. Societies, under the direction of the Extension Division of the College of Agriculture, generally toed the “mixed farming” line. But they were marginalized by farm movement leaders. Society leadership was often drawn from small town business people and professionals. When a farmer, R. D. Kirkham, was elected President of the societies’ association in 1935, he led an attack on Extension orthodoxy. In his address of 1936, Mr. Kirkham stated that when the same effort and thought that is now being given to the production of quality and quantity of farm products is directed toward the marketing of them so that the farmer obtains the reward for his labors that is justly his, then and then only will agriculture be placed on a permanent basis.59

In words that must have been galling coming from someone whom the Extension Division had awarded a “master farmer” certificate, he questioned even the ecological aims of state pastoralism, arguing that “. . . the need of better homes with security of tenure and the surety of a decent standard of living, are of more importance than the planting of trees, the building of dams to confine water, or the retirement from cultivation of sub-marginal lands”.60 The Department of Agriculture had far greater success promoting mixed farming through its “Co-operation and Markets” branch. In promoting and providing financial assistance for co-operative associations and marketing pools, the Branch was taking on the marketing problem in terms that seemed consistent with the struggles of the organized farmers. But its resources were almost exclusively channelled towards product diversification in the areas of poultry, dairy, beef cattle, wool and even honey production.61 In retrospect, it is easy to admire official pastoralism as a rural aesthetic. Its ecological ideals are certainly worth defending, but only with an understanding of the underlying conditions of modernity that they would have to address. Most symptomatic of the failure to grasp modernity were official assumptions about on-farm labour and farm size. Mixed farming was supposed to intensify

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on-farm labour by spreading tasks throughout the season. Wheat farmers were active in spring and fall and comparatively idle throughout the rest of the season. It was thought that their idleness was supported by a wasteful use of large tracts of land. More labour on the land had to mean that more value could be extracted from the land, and in turn, that less land could be used by each farmer. Officials appeared not to understand how trans-local systems could undercut that value. This is still an astonishing feature of international agriculture, but bacon shipped from Denmark could for example be cheaper than that produced locally. Time and resources spent on such products could lead to loss of money for local producers. The localism of the official doctrine blinded its adherents to the machinery of modern agriculture. Farmers saw that it was being built off the farms and that it consisted in organizational technologies as much as physical hardware. As for physical machinery on the farm, there was little evidence of it in Saskatchewan. Most farmers did not own combine harvesters, tractors or even automobiles.62 The machine farmer who proudly wore his contract number stencilled on his wagon box sat behind a horse, and but for the modernist grain elevator looming in the background, could as easily have been photographed in the nineteenth century. As late as 1930, “horseless” farmers were still members of a “charmed circle” of adventurous souls.63 Farmers did anticipate the extension of mechanization into field production, and were aware of the possible implications for farm size and ownership. The problem as they were to define it was how they would control this new manifestation of the modern machine in the countryside. New trends towards greater mechanization in other parts of the world were evidently based on economies of scale. The idea of large-scale corporate control, after the model of the American “bonanza farm,” received a rather cool reception in the pages of the farmer’s weekly the Western Producer. Far more interesting was the news in the early 1930s of the Soviet experiment in collective farming. Despite occasional references to cases of “misjudgement” on the part of authorities, these first reports were very positive and gave a picture of collectivization as it was supposed to have worked. Readers learned of the local village councils and their input into planning and access to up-to-date equipment and expertise through local and regional machinery depots. They also learned of a rational, centralized system of “orderly marketing.” Especially attractive were the accounts of social amenities – the Bolshoi Theatre in countryside tours, but more importantly the socialized health care and the promise of economies of scale in domestic labour for village women.64 Variants of state and collective ownership were discussed,65 and the “Open Forum,” section of the

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Western Producer began receiving suggestions for how these might be applied in the prairies.66 The editor and contributors to the women’s page (“Mostly for Women”) took up the idea of village based co-operation as a way of getting farm women access to modern amenities such as running water, plumbing, electricity and the labour saving devices that went with it.67 Pastoralist assumptions led many to reject both the idea of larger farms, and in some cases, mechanization itself. The authors of a new book on wheat production asserted in 1930 that “To our conception of rural life the idea of the ‘wheat factory’ type of industry . . . is entirely inappropriate.” Production, they argued, is limited by natural fertility, and hand labour is more effective than machinery in “the extraction of plant food from the soil.”68 Many officials, such as the Alberta Deputy Minister of Agriculture continued to subscribe to similar views. If we “commercialize our farming activities” and move towards larger farms, he argued, “we shall lose the effect of the home atmosphere, and the splendid and beneficial relationships which obtain in a closely-settled and prosperous farm district.”69 Agrarian leaders generally accepted the idea of large land holdings, and had begun to face the implications of this for small-scale private ownership. They were unwilling to give up the struggle for “economic democracy” and accept the capitalist model of corporate ownership and a proletarianized farm labour force. From the left, agrarian radicals had for years been hammering away at farmers’ attachment to what Partridge called their “. . . tiny, dilated, and insecure right of ownership.”70 At the same time many leaders had become convinced that the route to democratic control lay in public ownership of the “machinery of production.”71 It was in this context that farm leaders began in the 1930s to contemplate different proposals for the collective ownership of land.72 This was a momentous step to take conceptually, as it would mean formally relinquishing their petty-bourgeois status. In the early 1940s the idea of “co-operative farms” began to be discussed generally within the farm constituency as a concrete possibility for Saskatchewan. The Great Depression and the Second World War were understood to have been the fruits of the competitive capitalist system. By 1942 there was talk of “reconstruction” and the building of a “new order.” The choice for agriculture, as the editor of the Western Producer put it, was between co-operative farming and corporate farming. In one form or another, on wide or narrow lines, the new order about which there is so much writing and talking, will follow one or the other of these plans: either we will move toward greater public control and democratic organization of production and distribution processes, or toward the concentration of economic facilities in great

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trusts, cartels and monopolies, with the workers simply paid hands and possessing no voice whatever in the disposition of the products of their labour.73

He turned the question over to “the hundreds of rural study groups scattered across the Prairie Provinces.” As the end of the War approached in 1944, news of the impending defeat of “fascism” intermingled in the pages of the Western Producer with news of the impending victory of the C.C.F., creating a euphoric sense of the possibilities for the “new order.”74 Farm Women’s Week at the University of Saskatchewan began in June, 1944 “a few hours after the invasion news had been flashed across Canada.”75 The talk throughout the convention returned repeatedly to plans for co-operative farming. The Pool issued a discussion pamphlet on the topic for its local committees that summer.76 By fall the Saskatchewan Reconstruction Council had published a report recommending that co-op farms be set up on an experimental basis.77 All of the details were up for discussion.78 The core ideas included a Rochdale-style79 co-operative that would own at the very least some common machinery and buildings, and perhaps land as well. Public buildings could include barns and storage sheds, a machine shop, a community centre (or perhaps a covered rink) a school and, some suggested, even a “cottage hospital.”80 Homes and public buildings would be clustered at a central location, forming an agricultural village. Their physical proximity would cut down the costs of providing basic utilities (which few farm homes at the time enjoyed). Tasks that were already done in the farm household, such as baking, canning and laundry could be co-operatively organized using the latest labour saving devices. Despite the hint here of plans for domestic self-provisioning, most proponents stuck to a modernist vision. “We must fit this new scheme,” one woman emphasized, “into a world where money is the means of exchange and where much of our food is processed or brought from other places.”81 In addition to enabling the modernization of the rural household and on-farm production, the plan solved another problem, not clearly articulated at the time. That was the impending loss of the architecture of the rural “local.” The core institution sustaining open country networks was the rural school. Mechanized transport and fewer large farms would mean first administrative consolidation, then the physical centralization of schools and increasingly of other local services that sustained open country life. Consolidation was already underway in Alberta in 1944 and critics warned that “Dozens, if not hundreds of school buildings have been sold or moved, leaving large districts without any place to hold church, social or political meetings or voting places.”82 Without these build-

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ings, some new embodiment of the political powers of the “local” would have to be invented to guarantee the “decentralization” of power in agrarian organizations. Rural people in Saskatchewan could not anticipate the rate at which the “personal” relationships that they associated with “community” would soon have to be dissolved and recombined across ever widening “spans of timespace.” The “maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal,” as Berman characterizes the experience of modernity, had so far not troubled this aspect of their lives.83 Perhaps it was naiveté that led Saskatchewan farmers to embrace school consolidation, with barely a word of protest being registered (regrets about “loss of community” would not be heard until the 1970s). But it was also consistent with their general embrace of the principles of rationalization and modernization. The co-op farm, with its economies of scale and spatial efficiencies, was a structure that appeared to link the global and the local in a way that made sense within the framework of “modernist” discourse. From our late-modern vantage point, informed by discussions of disembodied intimacies in cyberspace, the idea of re-embedding communities in face-to-face relationships circumscribed within physically clustered villages does look rather anachronistic. This figure perhaps marks a new ambivalence in the modernist imagination of prairie farmers. Ambivalent perhaps, but the organized wheat farmers of Saskatchewan could not be characterized as conservative or backward-looking. “Progress” as they understood it was certainly not a single path; many of the competing political programs of the day – capitalism, socialism, fascism, “technocracy” – could claim to be forward looking. Certainly “progress” for them should not be confused with the path that led to the present. Most politically active farmers of the 1940s would likely have been baffled and deeply disappointed by the shape of society and prairie agriculture in the late twentieth century. They were “progressive” in the playful, modernist sense of imagining and embracing new and untried possibilities. This creative spirit is reflected in inventions like the Pool and more strikingly in the co-op farm, with its complete renovation of existing terms of land ownership and tenure. While in one sense these inventions were as utopian as the mixed farming ideal of state officials, they were based on a firmer grasp of how the modern processes of space-time distanciation worked. While farmers were concerned to re-invent the “local” within the spatial restructurings of modernity, they were ahead of many of their contemporaries in the trans-local focus of their vision. In contradiction to what has repeatedly been written of farmers, the perspective of Saskatchewan farmers cannot be characterized as “individualistic.” At times, it was decidedly collectivist. Lipset

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(Agrarian Socialism) and Laycock (Populism and Democratic Thought in the Canadian Prairies) have already made the case that agrarian socialism merits greater recognition alongside the progressive traditions of urban politics in the twentieth century. Applying the lens of “modernity” to this history offers a much more fundamental challenge to the ghettoization of the “rural.” The key process of modernity is the restructuring of relations across indefinite spans of time-space. The distanciated relationships of modernity have from the outset traversed the rural-urban divide. Modern translocal spaces are abstract, neither urban nor rural.84 The dynamism of the urban has been predicated on, and is indeed inseparable from the dynamism of rural space. Consequently the history of the modern cannot be written as if it were a history of the city, and must be complemented by a history of modernity in the countryside. Characterizing the response of prairie socialists to the new abstract landscape of the “rural” also confounds easy distinctions between “modernity,” “modernism” and “modernization.” Prairie farmers accepted modernity, its abstract structures and dynamism as “conditions,” found features of the rural environment. In their embrace of the wheat monoculture they went further, enlisting as agents in the making of “modernity,” not passively, but against the explicit opposition of expert advisors. The distinction between “modernity” as condition and “modernism” as project and outlook becomes less useful the more seriously one takes the constitutive role of creative agents. If their commitment to modernity went no further than a love for the rational aesthetic of the rectangular grid of single-crop fields, a confidence in the spatial division of labour and global exchange, a fascination for modern institutional “machinery,” then one might dismiss these farmers as pettybourgeois advocates of “modernization.” But the unique contributions of agrarian socialists to modernist discourse – the architectural figures of the Pool and the co-op farm – were, as innovations employing technologies of time-space distanciation, characteristically modern, yet also explicitly anti-capitalist. Their meaning and intent was quite inimical to “modernization” if that is understood, as it usually is, as a particular path of institutional change guided by liberal assumptions. It is their complex stance vis-à-vis the trans-local forces of the modern that makes the politics of prairie farmers so interesting and potentially instructive. They were seeking a point of opposition, a fulcrum, not naively grounded on the tangible “locale” but upon the abstract terrain of the trans-local. Among the left, and I am thinking here of Berman (All that is Solid Melts into Air), Harvey (Postmodern Condition), and Soja (Post-

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modern Geographies), there has been a renewed fascination with twentieth century modernity and its texts. Their focus is almost exclusively urban or at best suburban. Bringing the countryside firmly into the compass of these discussions may be a corrective in yet another way. It can be exhilarating to be a modernist in the city. In the built environment even socialists can celebrate the creativedestructive dialectic of change. But in ecological terms, the destructive side of that dialectic is much more troubling as played out in the countryside. What is for me perhaps the most surprising outcome of this study is how relevant official pastoralism now appears, given late modern debates about agriculture and ecology. How typical was it for states to endorse this pastoralist aesthetic? What are the implications for our understanding of the role of the state vis-à-vis capitalism and industrialization?

Notes 1

C Galpin, and J A James, Rural Relations of High Schools, Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin no. 288, 1918, p. 5. 2 Fourth proposition of Marinetti’s Foundation Manifesto (1909) quoted in R Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, (London: The Architectural Press, 1960), p. 103. 3 De Certeau cited in D Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 26. 4 D Danbom, The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900–1930 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1979), p. 12. 5 E Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), p. 11. 6 S Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 155–157. 7 Culture of Time and Space, p. 158; R Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 191. 8 C Galpin, Rural Social Centres in Wisconsin. Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin no. 234, 1914, p. 4. 9 A Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 21. 10 On the emergence of wheat trading as a “generalised exchange structure” after 1873 see Freidman, “State Policy and World Commerce: The Case of Wheat, 1815 to the Present,” in P McGowan and C Kegley, eds., Foreign Policy and the Modern World-System, (London: Sage, 1983). 11 H Moorhouse, Deep Furrows (Toronto: G. J. McLeod, 1918), p. 36. 12 Deep Furrows, p. 73. 13 Deep Furrows, p. 74. 14 Cited by Giddens, Consequences of Modernity, p. 24. 15 Deep Furrows, p. 36. 16 D Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production, (London: Macmillan, 1984). 17 K Cox and A Mair, “From Localized Social Structures to Localities as Agents,” Environment and Planning A 23 (1991): 197–213, as cited in

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T Marsden et al., Constructing the Countryside (London: UCL Press, 1993), pp. 135–136. 18 C Galpin, Rural Social Centres in Wisconsin. Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin no. 234, 1914, p. 4. 19 I am referring here primarily to the writings of rural sociologists employed by land grant colleges in the United States, see R Bantjes, “Benthamism in the Countryside,” Journal of Historical Sociology 10 (1997). 20 Consequences of Modernity, p. 19. 21 Deep Furrows, p. 59. 22 Western Producer, July 17, 1930, p. 12. 23 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (London: Verso, 1983). 24 On class as trans-local see C Calhoun, “Class, Place and Industrial Revolution,” Class and Space: the Making of Urban Society, ed. P Williams, N Thrift (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988). 25 “Co-ordination of Wheat Growers Seen,” Western Producer, April 17, 1930, p. 3. 26 On Saskatchewan farmers’ struggles against oligarchy and the co-optation of farm leaders in organizational efforts before the Pool see S Lipset, Agrarian Socialism (Berkeley: California Paperback Edition, 1971), chapter 3, passim. The United Farmers of Canada (Sask. Section) (U.F.C.) is the best example of “decentralisation” (see Western Producer, “Organization Notes,” July 2, 1927, p. 3; “District 8 Convention,” January 5, 1928, p. 3; “Annual Report of the Directors is Submitted to the U.F.C. Convention,” March 1, 1928, p. 3). For an outline of the structure of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, intended to be “. . . as democratic in the true sense of being delicately sensitive to the control of its individual members as human conceptions of democratic control can make it” see Western Producer, January 22, 1925, p. 6. For farmer criticisms of the Pool structure, see “The Open Forum,” Western Producer, March 24, 1932, p. 9; April 11, 1932, p. 9. 27 R Bantjes, “Improved Earth: Travel on the Canadian Prairies, 1920– 1950,” Journal of Transport History 13 (1993). 28 D Willmott, Organizations and Social Life of Farm Families in a Prairie Municipality (Saskatoon: Centre for Community Studies, University of Saskatchewan, 1964), p. 52. 29 “Pool Committee on Co-operation,” Western Producer, January 5, 1933, p. 14. 30 “News of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool,” Western Producer, January 22, 1925, p. 6. 31 “A Brief Outline of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool,” Western Producer, September 3, 1925, p. 7. 32 Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century, pp. 192–193. 33 Saskatchewan Department of Agriculture, Annual Report, 1929, p. 172. 34 Saskatchewan Department of Agriculture, Annual Report, 1928, p. 167. 35 Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century, p. 192. 36 “A Message from Partridge,” Western Producer, January 22, 1925, p. 4. 37 Popular theorists of the “evolution of co-operation” included Kropotkin (Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: W. Heinemann, 1910)) and Warbasse (Co-operative Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1923)).

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A Wilson, The Culture of Nature, (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992). J. W. Robertson, “The Conservation of Agricultural Resources,” in Commission of Conservation, Canada, First Annual Report, (Ottawa: The Mortimer Co., 1910), p. 50. 40 Commission of Conservation, Fifth Annual Report (Toronto: The Bryant Press, 1914), p. 148; see also Third Annual Report, (Montreal: John Lovell & Son, 1912), p. 116. 41 F. T. Shutt, “Fertilizers and Their Use in Canada,” in Commission of Conservation, Eighth Annual Report, (Montreal: The Federated Press, 1917), pp. 57, 62. 42 Commission of Conservation, Seventh Annual Report, (Montreal: The Federated Press, 1916), p. 150; Fourth Annual Report, (Toronto: Warwick Bros. & Rutter, 1913), p. 157. 43 Commission, Eighth Annual Report, p. 57. 44 Commission, First Annual Report, p. 46. 45 Commission, Fourth Annual Report, p. 148. 46 Agrarian Socialism, p. 46. 47 “Report of the Deputy Head Upon His Visit to the North-West,” Dominion Department of the Interior, Annual Report, 1884, p. 16. 48 Address by Hon. W. R. Motherwell at the Agricultural Societies’ Convention, Saskatchewan Department of Agriculture, Annual Report, 1907, p. 181. 49 Motherwell Address, 1907, p. 178. 50 Report of E. H. Hawthorn, Field Representative, in Saskatchewan Department of Agriculture, Tenth Annual Report, 1914, p. 102. 51 Western Producer, May 29, 1930, p. 8; see also January 22, 1931, p. 8; “Does Mixed Farming Pay?” July 14, 1932. 52 Western Producer, May 29, 1930, p. 8. 53 “Mixed Farming,” Western Producer, October 16, 1930, p. 8. 54 From a Report on the Annual Convention of Saskatchewan Agricultural Societies published in The Saturday Press and Prairie Farm, January 8, 1916. 55 Commission of Conservation, Fourth Annual Report, (Toronto: Warwick Bros. & Rutter, 1913), p. 154; Saskatchewan Department of Agriculture, Tenth Annual Report, 1914; Fifteenth Annual Report, 1920, p. 9. 56 On the debate over climate versus economy see “President MaCauley Asks Support for Acre Grain Fund in Address,” Western Producer, July 28, 1932, p. 5. 57 “Women and Professors to Rescue Agriculture,” Western Producer, 1930, November 13, 1930, p. 8. 58 On the struggle for hail insurance see R Bantjes, “An Imperfect Architecture of Power,” Prairie Forum 20 (1995). On crop insurance see “Text in Full of Brief Presented to Ottawa by Sask. Farm Delegation,” Western Producer, January 29, 1942, p. 4. 59 “Saskatchewan Agricultural Societies Hold Convention,” Western Producer, January 23, 1936, p. 24. 60 “Agricultural Societies’ Convention at Saskatoon,” Western Producer, January 24, 1935, p. 19. 61 Co-operation and Markets Branch, (“Co-operative Organization Branch” before 1921), Saskatchewan Department of Agriculture, Reports, 1914–1944, passim. 39

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62 In 1931 only 4% of Saskatchewan farms reported owning combines; 29% percent reported tractors and 45% reported automobiles (Census of Canada, 1931, Table 34.). 63 “Canadian Horseless Farms,” Western Producer, September 25, 1930, p. 22. 64 For accounts of collective farms in the Soviet Union, see Western Producer, May 15, 1930 (“Will Russian Wheat Conquer the World?”), May 29, 1930, p. 8; June, 19, 1930 (“Socialized Agriculture”), p. 13; July 24, 1930, (“Russia’s Greatest Problem of All”), p. 8; November 6, 1930, (“Russia and the Future”), p. 6; November 13, 1930, (“What About Russia?”). 65 In particular the important distinction between state and collective farms (Western Producer, June 12, 1930, p. 12). 66 See for example Western Producer, March 5, 1931, p. 10; January 9, 1936, p. 10; January 8, 1942, p. 24. 67 The editor was Violet McNaughton, who had, since the early part of the century, been an advocate of what Hayden calls “material feminism” (D’ Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981)). For examples of contributions from women other than McNaughton see Western Producer, January 5, 1939, p. 9; January 19, 1939, p. 11; May 14, 1942, p. 11; February 17, 1944, p. 14. April 27, 1944, p. 11; June 15, 1944, p. 11. 68 Swanson and Armstrong, cited in a review of their book Wheat, in Western Producer, May 8, 1930, p. 12. 69 “Whither Agriculture?” Western Producer, September 25, 1930. 70 E A Partridge, “Farmers, Come off the Capitalist Perch,” Western Producer, August 13, 1925, p. 5. 71 Agrarian Socialism, p. 89. 72 The best known is the United Farmers of Canada (Sask. Section) proposal for a “use-lease” arrangement where the state held title but guaranteed farmers’ right of tenure (“Report of the U.F.C. Board of Directors,” Western Producer, March 5, 1931, p. 8); Agrarian Socialism, pp. 175–176; D. Laycock, Populism and Democratic Thought in the Canadian Prairies, 1910 to 1945, (Toronto: UofT Press, 1990), pp. 175–178. 73 “Two Farm Plans,” Western Producer, August 20, 1942, p. 6. 74 The socialist C.C.F. (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation) came to power in Saskatchewan in June of 1944. Not only were the Axis powers associated with fascism, but fascism was understood by many farmers to be the political complement to monopoly capitalism (see e.g., letter to the “Open Forum,” Western Producer, January 29, 1942, p. 25: “Fascismis the last stage of capitalism. What intelligent man or woman wants fascism?”). 75 “Farm Women Get Together,” Western Producer, June 22, 1944, p. 12. 76 Wheat Pool Committees’ Program “Co-operative Farming,” June, 1944, No. 6 (Regina: Saskatchewan Wheat Pool) (SAB). 77 The Saskatchewan Reconstruction Council was formed by order-incouncil, October 20, 1943 under a Liberal government. Its report was issued after the C.C.F. came to power (Report of the Saskatchewan Reconstruction Council, August 2, 1944). 78 In August, 1944 the Saskatchewan Consultation Committee on Co-operative Farming, met and drew up four fairly clear alternative proposals (“Four Alternative Co-op Farm Plans,” Western Producer, September 7, 1944, p. 5). 79 The Rochdale model, developed in England in the nineteenth century, attempted to preserve democratic control by limiting the number of shares

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that each member of the co-operative could own, and more importantly, limiting each member to one vote at general meetings regardless of the number of shares owned. 80 “Pictures Co-op Village,” Western Producer, May 14, 1942, p. 11. 81 Margaret Dickson, “Co-op Farm Our Best Hope,” Western Producer, June 15, 1944, p. 11. 82 “Larger School Units,” Western Producer, April 27, 1944, p. 23. 83 M Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (London: Verso, 1983), p. 15. 84 Mention must be made in this connection of Pahl’s well-known but often unheeded warning that “Any attempt to tie particular patterns of social relationships to specific geographical milieux is a singularly fruitless exercise.” (R Pahl, “The Rural-Urban Continuum,” Sociologia Ruralis 6 (1966): 322).

Dutchman Ghosts and the History Mystery: Ritual, Colonizer, and Colonized Interpretations of the 1763 Berbice Slave Rebellion BRACKETTE F. WILLIAMS Abstract In colonial orders the most impoverished and least powerful subordinates had few opportunities to store their images of the past in forms traditionally used by historians. In this essay I explore historical interpretations of the 1763 Berbice slave rebellion presented in three rituals, the majority of whose participants are impoverished residents of rural Guyanese communities. I contrast the issues addressed in these images with those addressed in accounts of the rebellion presented in colonial and post-colonial accounts written by the colonizers and the colonized. The focus of my description and analysis is the relation between historical accounts and the social identities of those who produce them.

In colonial orders the most impoverished and least powerful subordinates had few opportunities to store their images of the past in forms traditionally used by historians. In these situations rituals became an important means by which to create and maintain such images. As such they are valuable sources of information for the augmentation of ethnohistories, herstories, and other accounts generated by various segments of subordinated class strata. In this essay I explore views of the 1763 Berbice slave rebellion presented in three rituals, the majority of whose participants are impoverished residents of rural Guyanese communities. In these rituals, the varying actions, the character, and the motivations of “Dutchman ghosts”, a category of spirits ritual participants believe to be the product of the rebellion, provide us with images of the impact these Guyanese presume the rebellion had on relations between the Dutch and British as competing categories of the dominant stratum in the colonial order from the 17th to the 19th century. I contrast the issues addressed in these images with those addressed in accounts of the rebellion presented in colonial and postcolonial accounts written by the colonizers and the colonized.1 My focus is not on the rebellion, the Dutchman ghosts or the colonizer/colonized accounts per se. Instead, the focus of my description and analysis is the relation between historical accounts and the social identities of those who produce them. It is a focus on the analytic mysteries surrounding differences in the content and Twenty Years of the Journal of Historical Sociology: Challenging the Field Volume 2 Edited by Yoke-Sum Wong and Derek Sayer © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-17934-8

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construction of historical accounts of the rebellion and the interpretive significance given to events and participants in the different types of accounts. The mysteries to which I refer are: (1) why, if the ghosts are not in fact writing the histories they tell through the contemporary Guyanese they possess, the issues and concerns of the ghost view of history produced by lower class Guyanese seem not to reflect the identities of these non-spirit producers: (2) why, though more Africans died during the rebellion, there are no African spirits produced of the rebellion who might tell their side of the story or interpret its events in relation to their contemporary social identities, as is the case for both colonizer and colonized accounts of the rebellion and its significance: (3) why, given the involvement of non-British Europeans in the historical development of power relations in Berbice, the Dutchman ghosts as “paramount owners of the land”, nonetheless, focus only on the British; and fmally, (4) how might the historical accounts gleaned from the comments and actions of Dutchman ghosts as participants/nonparticipants in different spirit-focused rituals be compared with historical accounts stored in more traditional sources such as histories, biographies, political speeches, etc. Although much is known about the social, economic, and political development of the colony of British Guiana from the early 1800s. much less is known about the formative era (the early 1600s to the late 1700s) of the Colony of Berbice. Because the social and political relations which characterized this era are the focus of the Dutchman ghosts’ account of the factors leading up to the 1763 slave rebellion and the consequences of its aftermath, it is necessary to begin with a summary account of social relations during this era. Berbice: The Pre-Rebellion Era2 In January of 1648, the Treaty of Munster recognized the Colony of Berbice, which eventually became part of British Guiana in 1831, as a Dutch possession. At that time Abraham van Rhee and his partner, Abraham van Rhee, served as joint patroons for the West India Company, which took control, in 1621, of two Dutch settlements established, by some accounts, as early as 1580. With the Company’s agreement, in 1626 the partners founded and operated a trading post in the area. Skippers and traders, serving as Commanders, managed the post and relieved one another at frequent intervals. Unaffected by the British attack in 1666 during the Anglo-Dutch War, which resulted in the capture of the other Dutch settlements in Essequibo and the Pomeroon, the settlement that developed around the Berbice

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trading post prospered and it was the Commander of Berbice who, with French assistance, attacked the British conquerors to restore Essequibo to Dutch control. When the West India Company, and with it the concessions to van Pere and van Wee, lapsed in 1674, van Pere applied for a renewal from the reconstituted West India Company. Under the new charter and agreement granted by the States-General on 20 September 1674 and signed by the Ten on 14 September 1678, from 1678 to 1700 the Colony of Berbice was to be the property of van Pere and his heirs and successors. This agreement was later modified at the request of Abraham van Rhee’s widow on the grounds that the initial agreement did not consider the rights of the late van Rhee. With this modification, joint patroons once again controlled the Colony. Cornelius Demetris, Mrs van Rhee’s second husband, represented the van Rhee’s claim. The form of management remained the same, accompanied by frequent changes in the commandership, between 1678 and 1683, after which there are no records until 1712. The 1678 charter and agreement made the patroons responsible for all facets of the Colony’s preservation, development, and civil order. In addition to maintaining order through the creation of a police and justice system, the patroons were to establish binding contracts and alliances with the natives of the territory, and to see that the Reformed Christian Religion was taught to and professed by the inhabitants. It was the responsibility of the Company to supply the patroons with African slaves. Until 1689, when the Colony was attacked by French privateer Jean Du Casse, order was maintained and the settlement escaped the ravages experienced in Essequibo and the Pomeroon. Although Berbice was financially damaged by Du Casse’s attack, the 20,000 guilders initially demanded by the privateers to ransom the Colony was reduced to 6,000 guilders and several hogsheads of sugar because the Governor of Dutch Guiana (Suriname) held hostage 184 men rescued from one of Du Casse’s ships which had run aground retreating from a earlier, unsuccessful attack on Paramaribo. In 1712 and 1713 French privateers again attacked Berbice. This time privateer Baron de Mounans exacted from the Colony’s Governing Council a sum of 10,000 guilders for the ransom of the goods and estates of private planters (known as such because the two patroons did not own their plantations), and 300,000 guilders for the ransom of properties belonging to the six plantations patroons owned. Of the 300.000 guilders, 118,024 were to be paid in sugar, slaves and other local goods. The balance was to be paid by a bill of exchange drawn on the house of van Pere to the order of the privateer Baron.

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Lacking formal authority to do so, rather than accept the bill of exchange, the patroons nonetheless ceded the Colony to the privateers. In an effort to make good on this bill of exchange, the French ambassador to the Hague approached the States-General with the matter. The States-General, declaring the matter a mere financial transaction between merchants, refused to resolve the problem. As a result, Joseph Maillet, one of the five French merchants who had equipped the Baron for the attack, traveled to Amsterdam intending to sell either the bill of exchange or the Colony. He entered into negotiations with Nicolaas van Hoorn and Pieter Schuurman. With the undisclosed help of Cornelius van Pere, an heir to the van Pere rights in Berbice, van Hoorn and Schuurman were able to obtain the support of the West India Company, which agreed to supply them with slaves to develop the Colony. In September of 1714 they secured the States-General’s sanction for this agreement, after which they paid Maillet 108,000 guilders for the bill of exchange that was originally worth 181,976 guilders. In October of that year, on behalf of the five merchants who had backed the Baron, Maillet executed an act of cession to transfer the Colony to Nicolaas van Hoorn, Pieter Schuurman, and their associates. This transfer of the Colony from the French privateers to a new set of Dutch patroons was complete when the remaining heirs to the van Pere and van Rhee rights ceded these rights through an act of abandonment signed in November of 1714. The end of van Pere control marked a change in the pattern of management. Between 1714 and 1720, van Hoorn and his associates discontinued the frequent change of Commanders that had characterized the van Pere/van Rhee style of management. Seeking a form of organization more conducive to raising the capital necessary to develop new plantations, van Hoorn and associates decided to form a joint-stock company. A board of seven directors administered the company’s business. Five of these were elected by majority vote of shareholders owning more than ten shares. Nicolaas van Hoorn and Pieter Schuurman held the remaining two positions. Directors held their office either for life or until they had fewer than ten shares, failed to attend meetings for a year, or left the Colony. The Directors appointed the Commander who, no longer chosen from among the skippers and merchants, served as their attorney in the Colony. At the close of 1720, with all the Directors elected and 941 of 1,200 shares offered for public sale sold, the Directors informed the Commander of Berbice that the The Berbice Association, the name given the joint-stock company, now owned the Colony. They also informed him that he was to increase the number of plantations from the eight (six sugar and two cocoa)

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already operated by van Hoorn and associates to as many as eighteen, with the goal of having the new plantations produce coffee, cotton, and indigo. Anew charter enacted in 1732, further altered the pattern of management and civil authority. Executive administration and criminal justice were to be handled by a Governor and a Council of Government. Civil authority was in the hands of the Council of Justice, which consisted of the Governor, as president, and six other councillors chosen by the Governor and the Council of Government. Although the Governor controlled military and civil matters, the Directors, bound by the articles of the charter, appointed him and he could carry out no actions other than those they ordered. Under this administration, with the seat of government located at Fort Nassau, the Colony grew as the number of private and Association plantations increased and new ofices were added to the administrative structure. By 1735 there were twelve Association plantations and 113 private plantation.3 On both the private and the Association plantations, the daily management of staff and labor was in the hands of a planter-manager. However, on the Association plantations the planter-managers were not the owners of the estates; they were appointees of the Governor and Directors. Whereas the planter-managers of these estates were responsible for the daily operation, a General Superintendent was also appointed to supervise operations on all Association plantations. The occupant of this office held the second most powerful position on the Council of Government and, in general, was second in importance only to the Governor. Along with Association planter-managers, private planters shared in the power structure through their selection to serve as Burgher officers in command of the Militia. By 1755, a religious authority and a choirmaster/schoolmaster had been appointed. In that same year the Governor was relieved of the duty of acting as Fiscal when this responsibility was added to those of the new Secretary appointed that year. To support these administrative services, taxes became more numerous and diversified. By 1758, the new Governor had added several new taxes and license fees to the usual head tax, church tax and others such as the flag money and tonnage fees. In sum, and, as we will see, contrary to the Dutchman ghost view of history, on the eve of the 1763 slave rebellion, the Colony of Berbice was neither a politically stable overseas Dutch possession nor a wealthy plantation society firmly under the control of local Dutch administrators and landowners. Nonetheless, there were positions of power and authority to be had in the administrative structure of the Colony, and the wealth, such as it was, was generated in and tied to this administrative structure. It is this

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structure and its opportunities which Dutchman ghosts complain of losing to the British as a result of the long-term economic consequence of the 1763 rebellion. Though many of the Dutchman ghosts resulted directly from the immediate events of the 1763 rebellion, others resulted from these long-term economic consequences (i.e., the cost and damages associated with the frequent capitulations to either the French or the British). Their existence correlates not with the rebellion per se but with the “false rescues” the ghost/Guyanese creators of the ghost accounts claimed were staged by the British in relation to non-British privateer actions. In their accounts of Berbician history, the actual events of the rebellion are not a focus, nor are they central to how these ghosts justify remaining in Guyana and the manner in which they interact with contemporary Guyanese. Their histories contrast the power and social position they had in Berbice prior to the rebellion to their ultimate social, political and economic “place” in the social world that followed it. It is this comparison which becomes their reason for being. It explains why, though they are vengeful, they are not out to get revenge against the descendants of African rebels who slew some of them during the rebellion. Hence, though the rebellion figures prominently in their accounts, its significance is not in the events or its participants but rather in its representation as the final blow to Dutch control of their social world. Thus, as we turn now to a summary of the events of the rebellion, we must keep in mind that the ghosts seek to take revenge against contemporary Guyanese as those who ultimately inherited the power and property the ghosts lost during the years when power shifted back and forth between the Dutch and the French, and the Dutch and the British, rather than in terms of their identity as descendants of slave rebels.

“It Was a Horrible and Bloody, Bloody Time . . .” According to traditional historical sources, in 1763 the colony of Berbice had a non-indigenous population of approximately 4,000 African slaves and about 350 Europeans, mainly of Dutch origin, 240 Amerindian slaves, and an undisclosed number of free Amerindians. On 23 February of that year a band of 100 African slaves, led by a house slave named Cuffy, took up arms against their Dutch masters. Within a few weeks their ranks swelled to over 1,000. They quickly gained military control of Berbice as Governor van Hogenheim, commander of the Dutch force, was compelled to abandon, in succession, the region’s two forts. He took refuge at Dageraad, a company plantation on which the slaves are said to have remained loyal to their masters.

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At Dageraad, van Hogenheim, along with a handful of soldiers and a small contingent of civilians, held up to wait for reinforcements. The first of these arrived from Dutch Guiana about two weeks after the fighting commenced. On 7 April 1763, with their help and gunfire from the brigantine “Betsy”, on which they arrived, he managed to repulse the first major attack the Africans launched on Dageraad. On 3 May, van Hogenheim received additional reinforcements from St. Eustatius and with these managed to stave off a second African offensive, launched on 13 May. Following the second attack, van Hogenheim was left with a demoralized civilian contingent, mutinous soldiers, and his newest reinforcements decimated by illness. Under these conditions, another African attack probably would have spelled victory for these fighters. There was no second attack: instead, from mid-May of 1763 to January of 1764, Cuffy tried to negotiate a treaty with the Dutch. In written communications to van Hogenheim, Cuffy initially informed him that hostilities would cease only if he and all other Europeans left the Colony. Later, he modified his demand, proposing a treaty according to which (1) slavery would be abolished in Berbice, (2) all masters accused of extreme cruelty would be expelled from the Colony, and (3) the territory would be divided, allowing the African freedmen to occupy the upper reaches of the Berbice River while the Europeans would occupy and control the lower reaches of the River. Although no treaty was ever concluded, van Hogenheim did respond to Cuffy’s communiques, discussing the merits of his proposal. While involved in this exchange, van Hogenheim continued to plead for, and eventually received, sufficient reinforcements to conduct an offensive against the African fighters. In January of 1764, he launched his offensive. Assisted by a contingent of Carib fighters and two war ships, supplied in June by the States-General Lauren Storms van Gravesande, he was able to defeat the African force. In the end, of the African leaders (Cuffy and his lieutenant Akkara, Atta. leader of a second band, and Accabre, leader of a third band) only Atta and Akkara were still alive to surrender. In a leadership dispute, Atta killed Cuffy, then was himself forced to surrender when Akkara assisted the Dutch in engineering his capture. Accabre, at this point greatly outnumbered, fought until he and his small band of men were captured. By March, authorities held over 2,000 Africans prisoner. Their trials began in February and continued through April. Of the first 100 tried, forty-seven convicted of minor crimes were pardoned. The other fifty-three convicted of serious crimes, were sentenced to death. Jagan (1972:30–31) provides a typical colonized description of the trials:

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The prisoners taken by the Dutch were dealt with cruelly. A hasty trial (a mock trial would be a better description) was held on March 16, 1764. Slaves were not allowed to give evidence in a Court of law: a defendant could not give evidence either on his own behalf or on behalf of others. The trial was concluded on the same day and 53 of the defendants were condemned to death. Next day, 15 of them were burnt to death over a slow fire and 16 were broken on the rab rack. The remaining 22 persons were hanged. Another similar trial took place on April 27, 1764, when 34 persons were condemned to death. Seventeen of them were hanged, 9 were burnt and 8 were broken on the rab rack.

Though singled out by their especially gruesome executions, like all the others subsequently convicted of serious crimes, Atta and Accabre were executed before an audience of African prisoners, Africans who had not taken an active part in the fighting, and Europeans. In addition to these official executions, Africans also lost their lives in the revengeful violence that followed the war. In all, more than 1,500 slaves (37.5 percent of the slave population) lost their lives, while 170 of the estimated 350 Europeans (48.5 percent) were lost to the Colony.4 Not all the Europeans died as a direct result of the war; some simply fled the Colony. By all accounts, the “insurrection” was costly for the Europeans who remained in Berbice. Over the eleven months of fighting, the Colony exported no produce. The assistance they received from outside sources left them with heavy liabilities. The expeditions sent from Dutch Guiana and St. Eustatius, and the vessels and troops supplied by the States-General all carried price tags. The Berbice Association collected 160 guilders per share from shareholders to pay part of this debt. Although this collection was inadequate to meet the incurred liabilities, the private planters refused to bear any part of the expenses. The Directors were forced to turn to the States-General for help because these planters threatened to leave the Colony if charged for expenses incurred as a result of the insurrection. He provided a 12,000 guilder grant and a promise of annual funds for the support of troops over the next twelve years. Other assistance came in the form of loans for 500,000 guilders from the states of Holland and West Vriesland, for which the Association was to pay an annual interest of 2 1/2 percent. Moreover, the Association was to receive the loan funds in installments contingent upon giving an account of its affairs and foregoing any dividend payments until they had repaid the entire debt. Neither these external forms of assistance nor the head-tax the Association levied proved adequate to meet the payment on principle and interest. Instead, by 1772 efforts to meet these liabilities had simply escalated conflicts between the Association and the private planters, who had formed a new organization, the Planter’s Society, to seek relief from the new forms of taxation. In 1774, after

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several rounds of petitions, the States-General decided in favor of the Directors. He allowed them to double the existing taxes for three years and to add a tax of 125 guilders to those already levied against each plantation (up to a ceiling of 12,000 guilders of total taxation) contingent upon the Association equipping and maintaining a force of 200 soldiers (Clementi 1931:76–77). Berbice was still in a period of recovery when, in 1781. British privateers attacked and captured Demerara and Essequibo, also known as Two Rivers. Berbice was in no position to withstand an attack. Several days after the surrender of Two Rivers, it followed suit, accepting similar terms of capitulation. From 1781 to 1784, although its constitutional structure remained largely unaltered, Berbice, along with Two Rivers, were alternately governed by the British and French. In 1784 the French returned control of the territory to the Dutch and its governance was once more in the hand of the Berbice Association, which was again forced to request financial aid from the States-General. Until 1795, when the Batavia Republic was established, nothing much changed. At that point, governing control of the Colony passed from the Berbice Association to the Colonial Council of the Republic. This change resulted in the Berbice Association losing its special status relative to the private planters. Nonetheless, the Association retained most of its administrative power because the 1732 Charter remained in force and its officers retained their positions in the administrative structure. And, with the assistance of the Association, which in 1785 appropriated lands it claimed were granted illegally during the French and British occupations, the Dutch retained their position as the numerically predominant element of the planter population. Yet despite this firm grasp on constitutional and administrative controls, neither the Dutch planters nor the Colony in general experienced much economic progress. The Colony was once again forced to surrender to the British in 1796. The British allowed the governor, van Batenberg, to continue to administer the Colony and the articles of capitulation protected rights in private property. In accordance with these articles, by treating the Berbice Association as no more than a private company, the governor was able to protect its estates. Between 1796 and 1802, when the control of the Colony was again returned to the Dutch, its prosperity increased as the slave population doubled. The Berbice Association estates, competing with an influx of planters from Barbados, did not however account for much of or experience many of the positive benefits of this prosperity. In 1803 the Colony was again surrendered to the British. Fewer than ten years later, the Association had only four plantations and 791

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slaves. Six years later it sold these four plantations and a remaining 683 slaves to three British merchants, and by 1848 it no longer existed as a legal, economic, or social entity. In 1831 Berbice and the Two Rivers were amalgamated to form British Guiana which retained the status of a British colony until 1966 when it gained independence, subsequently to become the People’s Co-operative Republic of Guyana. In textbooks used to teach Guyanese history, the rebellion is now included as a valiant effort at social revolution, and Cuffy has been made the official national hero, replacing St. George, with a statue that gives him a definitive place on the physical and historical landscape. Nonetheless, it is primarily poor rural residents who continue to be directly affected by the consequences of the rebellion.5 Through their participation in rituals and chance encounters, they confront “Dutchman ghosts”. As these ghosts try to regain control of a territory and of opportunities lost to the British well before the emancipation of the slaves in 1838, their actions endanger residents’ health, good social relations, and prosperity. The Origin and Spread of Dutchman Ghosts All ghosts result from problems in the transition from life to death. Among the most typical problems are unjust deaths, especially murders mistakenly presumed to be deaths by suicide or natural causes, improper or no burial, and an inability to stay comfortably in the world of the dead while they “witness” some undeserving person or persons in the world of the living enjoy the benefits of property which belonged to the deceased. In the bloody months during and after the 1763 rebellion, over a thousand African men and women, most of whom had not been rebel soldiers, were boiled, burned to a crisp, cooked over slow fires, or decapitated, their other severed remains flung asunder (heads were placed on poles and other parts ripped to pieces). Ordinarily, humans treated so unjustly in death would not rest peacefully in the world of the dead. It is not, however, these men and women who have become ghosts seeking redress or sympathy from the living. Instead, it is the unsatisfied spirits of Dutch men and women who died during the rebellion who have, since 1764, roamed the land, seeking ways to reclaim their property, to vindicate their untimely deaths, and/or to gain a proper burial. This category of “long-deceased” Dutch men and women is composed of persons slain by the African fighters, those who committed suicide to avoid being slain by the fighters, women who committed suicide to void being raped or because they claim to have been raped by British soldiers, and whole families who committed

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suicide because they were left penniless by the plundering of African fighters or British soldiers. Between 1764 and 1831, when their homeland of Berbice was finally amalgamated with Demerara and Essequibo to officially become British Guiana, these ghosts were joined by other members of the Dutch colonial population. For the most part, members of this latter category died of natural or accidental causes but were all extremely disaffected by personal losses to British planters, merchants or government officials. Though the initial Dutchman ghosts “belong to Berbice” because it is the place of their tragic end (creation), as the first European settlers in the land, they consider themselves the “paramount” owners of the land and, therefore, have made the whole of Guyana their home. They wander the land seeking “resting places”, locations where they lay in wait for an unsuspecting passer-by. Their favorite resting places are usually in secluded locations on property they claim once belonged to them or to one of their relatives. They may also select a place because it is aesthetically pleasing, because it is in some way associated with how they died, because it is the location where they buried their valuables to keep the “rebels” from plundering them, or because the residents of the particular locality are prosperous. Every locality, however, is now thought to have one or more Dutchman ghosts. They wander anywhere they please but are always most “troublesome” to those on whose property or in whose community they select their permanent resting place. As paramount owners of the land, they are first and foremost jealous of anyone who benefits from relations to the land and to the power structure. They are vindictive and vengeful toward all who live and prosper in Guyana because they seek to regain the power and prosperity they believe to have been taken unjustly from them by the slave rebels or lost through the subsequent British succession to power; an accomplishment made possible, these ghosts contend, by the joint ravages of the British soldiers and the slaves from which their Colony never recovered. In addition to this general jealousy and the vengefulness it inspires, because their deaths resulted from specific types of acts committed during the fighting, the members of this category also envy persons now engaged in the same or similar activities. For example, the young Dutch bride, slain in her wedding gown while awaiting the arrival of her groom, is jealous of all brides and newlyweds. Those who, at the time of their deaths, occupied positions of authority are jealous of authority figures, especially anyone in a position similar to the one the ghost vacated. Some of the colonists who became Dutchman ghosts were simply found dead and the causes of their deaths remained unknown. In their interaction with humans, the latter ghosts seek to recount their

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personal tragedies: to have their stories known. Other colonists were very young, or “in the prime of life,” and their ghosts seek humans through whom they might, if not live out the balance of their lives, at least experience the pleasure of some particular aspect of life to which they had been looking forward. In their efforts to resolve past grievances, Dutchman ghosts rob the living of good health, cooperative social relations, and prosperity, making it necessary for humans to try to expel them as quickly as possible. Interactions between humans and spirits of deceased humans need not have a negative impact on humans. That interactions between Dutchman ghosts and humans cannot have beneficial outcomes is part of the image of these ghosts which informants link to their understandings of what happened in 1763, and how that rebellion was related to the general nature of social relations under Dutch rule. Spiritual Power and Historical Specificity Dutchman ghosts are spirits. As such, despite the unique circumstances of their creation, they share some characteristics with other ghosts and supernatural beings. To make clear why Dutchman ghosts are not simply ghosts, informants compare their “talents and powers”, and the character of relations they establish with humans, to those of other types of spirits. Like all spirits, Dutchman ghosts who initiate and conduct interactions with humans, “play on” (possess) the human, taking over the person’s body and committing acts of which others believe that person to be incapable. Or they may take the route of “being with” the person (an unseen force or presence), causing him or her to be inexplicably ill and accident-prone, or causing the person to fail to prosper despite hard work and the development of cooperative social relations. Like other spirits, a Dutchman ghost may direct its attention to an individual or an entire household. In the latter case, the household fails to prosper despite its members’ best efforts. It is constantly beset by intrafamilial conflicts and suffers tragic events, illness or infertility. Spirits may “come” (enter the world of the living or the life of a particular person) on their own or they may be sent by another person or supernatural being. When they are sent, they have no self-interest. They are simply instruments for the satisfaction of the one who sent them. If sent by a human, the spirits’ efforts are most likely directed at simply making trouble for or influencing the target person to do something the sender wants done. When a spirit comes on behalf of a Supreme Being, it is a messenger seeking to gain the target’s attention to encourage him or her to “serve” the

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Being. In such a case the spirit usually cannot be persuaded to leave permanently. Instead, the individual or household makes peace with the spirit by entering into a permanent reciprocal relationship. In exchange for serving the spirit, and through it the Supreme Being, the targets receive protection, good health, and prosperity. They “tie” the spirit (i.e., gain a measure of control over its actions). Through this connection of reciprocity, most initially malevolent interactions with spirits become beneficial ones. In contrast, Dutchman ghosts cannot be “sent” by one human to influence the conduct of another, although one Dutchman ghost, known as the Di and the Landmaster, does act as an emissary for ¯rg. They cannot be tied and so do not develop the kind of Su reciprocal relationships implied by tying. They are, despite their frequent claims to the contrary, always self-interested. Informants say Dutchman ghosts are selfish, interested only in themselves, and forever vengeful. They are tricky, evil liars who pretend to care about humans but whose concerns are always guises for some other, less benevolent. intentions. To explain why Dutchman ghosts differ from other ghosts, informants draw parallels between the behavior of the ghosts and the characteristics they stereotypically associate with colonial Dutch men and women. They say Dutch ghosts are cruel, tricky, uncooperative, and jealous because that is the way the Dutch were in life. They were the cruelest of slave masters and, just as they tricked Cuffy and cruelly slew the captured rebels, so too their ghosts are cruel to those to whom they attach themselves. Just as van Hogenheim made Cuffy promises only to buy time to trick him into defeat, so too Dutchman ghosts make promises they do not mean to keep in order to gain time to accomplish their malevolent objectives. All spirits demand something from the humans with whom they interact. However, Dutchman ghosts, like the stereotype of the Dutch in colonial life, are quintessentially greedy. Informants say that during the rebellion, when warned that the Africans were about to sack their plantations, Dutch men and women took time to bury their valuables before running for their lives. Who except those blinded by greed, informants ask, would take the time to bury valuables under such conditions? As spirits, the Dutch remain secretive and difficult to get along with because they are more interested in guarding their treasures and robbing others than in cooperating even to accomplish tasks they claim would allow them to rest in peace in the world of the dead. All spirits are difficult to control and even more difficult to exorcise permanently. The specific character of Dutchman ghosts makes them especially hard to handle. The following case of an effort by a pujari (a ritual specialist who performs a puja the general

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term for all Hindu religious services) to jharai (exorcise) a Dutchman ghost named Miss Lynch illustrates the typical conduct of Dutchman ghosts and suggests interpretations informants make of the 1763 rebellion as they try to understand and control these spirits. “I Just Wanted to Help Her, You Fool!” The jharai, an exorcism ritual, blends elements of Christianity, Hinduism, and practices based on Amerindian religious beliefs. It is not performed solely to remove Dutchman ghosts but, because some afflicting spirits turn out be Dutchman ghosts, this situation provides both the victim and the ritual specialist the most direct confrontation with such ghosts. When people recount the ghosts’ view of the history of 1763–64, it is often from information they say they gained directly from their observation of a jharai ritual or is based on that provided by others who had been involved in such rituals. So we begin here with a jharai performed by an East Indian male, the person assumed to be most competent to carry out this ritual.6 A pujari of the ideal type was called upon to perform a jharai for a young East Indian woman whose husband was desperate to save his wife, who, made so miserable by repeated spirit possession, was threatening to commit suicide. Through possession, the spirit made the woman act very foolishly, cursing members of the family, breaking dishes, and messing up the house. She also suffered from chronic high fever and occasional delirium. Armed with the Bible, the pujari went to the house where he found the woman quietly sitting in a corner. She did not look at him and he did not speak to her. Instead, he opened the Bible and began reading rapidly, exhaling and clapping his hands. These actions were intended to “pressure” (force into the open) the spirit, because evil spirits, including Dutchman ghosts, must make their presence known when confronted with Good. He continued reading, pausing occasionally to ask the spirit its name. The spirit did not answer until he read several more verses. At that point the woman-spirit started to laugh loudly. She was feeling the pressure and, by laughing, tried to break the pujari ’s concentration to gain relief. Still uncertain of the spirit’s gender and unaware of its identity as a Dutchman ghost, the pujari grabbed a lock of the woman’s hair, an act that prevents a spirit from being able to leave without fist identifying itself. Unable to escape, the spirit identified herself as one Miss Lynch. She told the pujari she was there to protect the woman. She just wanted to help a person in need. When asked from what she was protecting the woman, Miss Lynch said she had seen the woman in

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a fight with another East Indian woman and she had come to her subsequent victim’s aid, helping her to defeat her opponent. She went on to say she had since stayed by the woman’s side for fear that the other woman would again attack her. It was at that point that the pujari asked Miss Lynch if she was White or Dutch. She sneered and cursed him. Then in very standard English (I had never heard the victim speak anything other than Creolese, the term generally used for Guyanese, as opposed to British, English) she asked: “Didn’t I tell you my name is Lynch? Lynch is a Dutch name, you fool!” For several minutes thereafter she cursed with great abandon. When finally she calmed down, she explained that she had died over 200 hundred years before. She had hung herself to avoid being raped by an English soldier. After her death, she went to live in a dirt mound near a bank of the Demerara River. It was from her resting place that she first saw the young woman with her husband on a boating trip they took up the Demerara river. Miss Lynch said she “took a liking” to the girl and followed her, waiting for an opportunity to assist her. The fight provided that opportunity. Accepting Miss Lynch’s story, the pujari told Miss Lynch that, despite her professed concern, she was hurting the young woman and would have to leave. It was raining at the time and Miss Lynch, though claiming she understood and would cooperate, pleaded with the man to allow her to stay until the rain ceased and she would be able find her way back to her resting place. If only he would agree, she would leave and never return! Believing she would only cooperate if he compromised, we waited over an hour for the rain to stop. When it did. Miss Lynch did not leave. Instead, she again started cursing, calling the pujaria fool and claiming she only wanted to help the girl. It was not until the man sprinkled the woman with water while rapidly reading verses from the Bible that Miss Lynch finally left. The woman was herself for only a few minutes before Miss Lynch again possessed her. Between spitting, cursing, and laughing, she explained that she had not been able to make the complete journey to her resting place because she encountered heavy rainfall. That day she was finally banished when the man, taking hold of the woman’s hair and reading biblical verses pressured Miss Lynch to the point that she swore on fire (burning camphor placed in the mouth of the victim) to leave and never return. Before she left, she admitted that she had been attracted to the young woman because, having died before she was married, she was envious of the young woman’s home and attentive husband. Hence, while all spirits are clever and hard to handle, Dutchman ghosts are especially diffcult and the character of their difficulty

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parallels that encountered by the slave rebels in 1763. Their promises are worthless, they cannot be satisfied by any human action, and they enjoy lying and tricking humans who try to deal with them honestly. Yet informants noted that, under siege and in defeat, the Dutch as ghosts display characteristics similar to those attributed to the slaves in colonial descriptions of their “rambunctious character” and their “daily malingering”. Also, in defeat, the Dutch ultimately become like other subordinates as they are placed in a position of having to respond to life through the symbols of the dominant European group. It is only in this symbolism of subordination that informants formulated any connection between the social identity of the human participants and the historical character of ritual interaction with Dutchman ghosts. For example, to note only the most obvious potential symbols, all the names of Dutchman ghosts I collected were English. Though some ghosts I observed would speak a few words of “Dutch” to identify themselves, soon they would switch to English, complaining that the change was necessary because contemporary Guyanese only know English, and are now too stupid to learn Dutch. Thus, in the Lynch jharai, her name, the language she speaks, and the complaints she voices, may all be taken to symbolize as much the ultimate subordination of the Dutch to the British as they symbolize anything about the interaction between the Dutch and the slave rebels during the rebellion or in its aftermath. Miss Lynch pretends, like other Dutchman ghosts accuse the British of having behaved during the fighting, to intervene as a rescuer in a fight between two parties, only later to dominate her victim’s life for her own self-interested purposes. She is a “lynch” though she hung herself; she is jealous of the girl’s attentive husband because she had to sacriflce herself to save her virtue from rampaging British soldiers: she is a tricky liar because, like her leaders during the rebellion, it is the only way she can hold on to her victim. She flees before Goodness – expressions of the right and just thing to do – but also vigilantly awaits her opportunity to return to take advantage of her weakened victim, just as Dutchman ghosts accuse the British of having done in 1764 and at subsequent times of trouble in Berbice. Far more ethnographic detail than is feasible to include here would be necessary to support fully the plausibility of such symbolic interpretations. The important point for present purposes is simply that the structure and the content of the jharai, along with informants’ comments on it, make of the 1763 rebellion a major turning point in Guyanese history. During these rituals, conversations with Dutchman ghosts may be extensive. The ghosts tell their tales, providing their interpretations of the way things were before

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the rebellion. Those tales I listened to and others which informants reported to me included few references to the actions of the African fighters/rebels. The ghosts seek to describe a context in which the Dutch are in competition with foreign powers, especially the British, for the territory. They do not contend that these powers encouraged the slave rebellion, only that they took advantage of it. Their most bitter complaint is about the injustice of rescuers who subsequently become dominators. Their efforts to maintain control of the territory and to expose the injustice of a false rescue shape their personalities and structure their interaction with humans. In their interpretations Dutchman ghosts conveniently forget that the rescuer-villain role was as much played by the French (the metropole returned what some of her privateers had helped to take away) as by the British metropole and her privateers. This bit of forgetfulness is best understood as a representation of the outcome of power relations among Europeans over the course of Guianese history rather than as a representation of Anglo/Dutch relations during the period of rebellion. French privateers set in motion the Dutch downfall and the slave rebellion sped it along, but the Dutchman ghosts focus on the beneficiaries – the Anglo-Guianese and their contemporary counterparts. Contemporary Guyanese informants use characteristics and representations of the history of Anglo/Dutch relations to formulate the content and structure of the rituals in which Dutchman ghosts participate. They also use them to decide in which rituals involving spirits of other deceased humans (all of whom, for reasons to be discussed, are ethnically identifled), Dutchman ghosts cannot or would not be willing to participate. The consequences for Anglo/ Dutch relations that the ghosts allege to have followed from the rebellion account for their self-identification as paramount owners of Guyana and its prosperity, and inform human responses to the ghosts’ continued presence. From Lord and Master to Master of the Evil Spirits The jharai is an effort to be rid of Dutchman ghosts as an evil, afflicting influence. However, not all encounters with Dutchman ghosts are directed at expelling them, some are intended to pay homage to their power as paramount owners of the land. Although one human cannot control them to influence the conduct of another, they can be asked to use their power to control other less powerful evil spirits and to guard against the evil thoughts of ordinary jealous human beings. In this regard, some East Indian informants say the Dig Dutty/Mati Kore, the opening rite (performed for the blessings of Mother Earth) in the series of activities

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that make up the Sanatan Dharma wedding, is also a puja in honor of Di, the master Dutch spirit. Di assumes this position because he is the composite of all long-deceased plantation managers. His power derives from the power – modeled on that of the private planters and their subsequent counterparts in British Guiana – these plantation managers had in the days when their word was law on the estates. Those who believe that the Dig Dutty is also a puja for Di say it is performed to encourage Di to use his considerable power to keep evil thoughts and spirits out of the village while the wedding couple is especially vulnerable both to evil spirits and the ill-wishes of jealous people. Whether they perform the Dig Dutty for Mati Kore or for Di and Mati Kore, the ritual structure and content are the same. Food and flower offerings during the service are simply made in the name of both. However, another ritual, the Di Puja, includes specific symbols and actions to represent and propitiate Di. This ritual is a syncretic blend of elements from Sanakan Dharma jhandi and Shiva-Linga pujas, Kali Mai (Mother Kali) worship, African spiritual thanksgiving based in Christianity, and other general Christian beliefs. Rituals of this type vary in their complexity, in part, in relation to the knowledge and skill the medium brings to the task. An East Indian of South India descent (known in Guyana as Madrassi) performed the most complex version I witnessed. He had been taught to conduct the service by an African woman who operates a spiritual church in Georgetown. He had his own practice, regularly participated in Kali Mai, and continued to act as an assistant to his African teacher during thanksgiving services she conducted. In the Di puja which is most often performed to request divine ¯rg’s assistant. relief from problems of infertility. Di appears as Su Su ¯rg, also known as the Destroyer, is a manifestation of Shiva (the controller of all the forces of destruction and regeneration). He receives human requests for assistance with worldly problems and, lacking the time to handle personally all these requests, he delegates them to the seven “Forms” (angels or saints), to each of which he gives the power to complete tasks of a particular type. ¯rg relays his messages and the However, it is through Di that Su information necessary for a Form to complete its task. Di, also known as the Section Chief and Landmaster, accompanied by his wife, the Landmistress, drives the chariot which transports the Forms from Heaven to Earth. In addition to his roles as messenger and chariot driver, in this guise Di is not simply master of all long-deceased Dutch spirits, but also, because Dutchman ghosts are considered most evil, the master of all Earth-born evil spirits. Yet, whereas he has the power to control all such spirits,

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lacking any interest in helping humans, he will not force any of these spirits to help humans. It is only as Su ¯rg’s subordinate that he has the responsibility to encourage all evil spirits to curtail activities which might interfere with the Forms’s positive work. To encourage his rapt attention to the conduct of these evil ones, Di receives persuads – food and flower offerings – and a share of two white brahmacharri pigs (one should be a castrated boar and the other a virgin sow) which are sacrificed at the end of the puja. Unfortunately, a full symbolic analysis of this day-long service is beyond the scope of this essay. However, a few of the symbols, and informants most frequent interpretations of them, should suffice to illustrate the manner in which they drawn on their “ghostly” understandings of the 1763 rebellion to construct this ritual. Combined with the obvious symbolism of their asexual/virgin status, the pigs sacrificed to Di must have their heads pointing toward Berbice. With their heads placed over shallow holes about three feet apart, a special knife, similar, informants argue, to those typically used in eighteenth-century Berbice, is used for the fist stage leading to ultimate decapitation. The pigs’s throats must be cut in one right-to-left movement, and in a manner such that the blood flows rapidly into the ground. Only then is the head removed with a regular machete. The blood in the holes becomes an offering, primarily to the Landmistress, who, if made jealous, will render the ritual ineffacacious, and secondarily to the spirits of all Dutch colonists who died during the rebellion. To further placate the Landmistress, particularly in pujas performed to alleviate problems of infertility, she is given two white eggs. Unbroken, these are placed in the hole to be buried with the blood. Interpreting of the meaning of these eggs, some informants associated them with fertility/virginity symbolism (for example, restoring raped women’s virtue). Others considered the eggs “buried treasure,” added to “cool” the blood, the heat of which symbolizes the spirits’ anger over their loss of property. These examples by no means exhaust either the relevant ritual symbols or the range and subtlety of the different interpretations informants make of these symbols. Moreover, an informant’s age, the number of such rituals they have seen over the years, encounters they may have had with Dutchman ghosts outside any ritual context, all serve to add layers and dimensions to the images they construct of the rebellion and its consequences. In the final ritual to be considered here – the African Thanks giving – it is the absence of a role for Dutchman ghosts that reveals a connection between history and ritual. Other Dutch spirits, such as persons born in Holland and Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana), may take part in this ritual as types of Europeans but, for reason specific to the circumstances of their creation and the power and

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talents bestowed on them, it is impossible for Dutchman ghosts to do so. To understand why this is so, first we must take a brief look at the role stereotypes play in the construction of both spirits and ethnic group identities in Guyana.

Spirits and Stereotypes: The Interfaces between the World of the Living and Dead Stereotypes serve as the interface between the world of the living and the dead. Spirits retain their ethnic identities. Ghosts, as spirits of ethnically-identified humans attain the powers and talents associated with those stereotypes. Their powers and talents in relation to humans and to one another are partly defined by the stereotypes which Guyanese use to characterize the ethnic group to which the spirit belongs. Hence, stereotypes retain the role they played in the colonial order. During the era of British colonialism (1807–1966) the dominating faction or power bloc of the European population (i.e., primarily planters and merchants) justified its economic and political domination on grounds of cultural superiority (Robinson 1970, Smith 1962). Englishmen and English cultural elements were considered superior to persons and cultural elements associated with the other ethnic groups. Yet, although Anglo-Europeans’ rationalizations linking economic and political domination to English cultural superiority placed Anglo-Europeans and “things English” at the top of a sociocultural status hierarchy, and placed other Europeans, such as the Dutch, above non-European subordinates, they never clearly specified the ranking of the non-European segments relative to one another (Williams 1983, in press). Instead, the relative ranking of other segments tended to shift with changes in stereotypes emanating primarily from the planter faction, as it made decisions about and tried to allocate differentially economic roles along ethnic lines (Bartels 1977). Colonial administrators, especially those who were also planters, tended to justify these allocations in terms of alleged differences in the innate abilities and cultural propensities of the different ethnic groups. For their parts, the Africans. Amerindians, Chinese, East Indians, and Portuguese, who made up the subordinated population, engaged in a two-prong response to stereotypes and rankings. On the one hand, each group adopted the more positive aspects of its stereotypes as criteria to justify claims to certain economic roles. On the other hand, each group pointed to negative aspects of stereotypes of the other groups as justification both for those groups’ exclusion from desired social positions and for restrictions

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on their rights to positions of political and economic power (Bartels 1977). In this stereotyping process, physical characteristic used to distinguish racial/ethnic groups also became “embodiments” in which cultural propensities and intellectual capabilities were conflated. To know another person’s ethnic identity was to know what behavior to expect of him, and what roles and tasks he could best perform. Stereotypes of this kind remain a central medium through which most Guyanese think about social relations, culture, and history (Drummond 1980, Williams 1983, 1990). In the same sense, Guyanese views of relations between the social worlds of the living and dead are, in large measure, descriptions of interactions among embodied and disembodied stereotypes. The spirits who take part in African Thanksgiving rituals are all ghosts of deceased humans. They all have ethnic identities and behave accordingly when they possess those to whom they are tied. They are White (European and North American), African (Guyanese), East Indian, Chinese, and Amerindian. The Portuguese, stereotyped as Jews who betrayed Christ, have no place in a Christian ritual.7 In accordance with stereotyped characterizations of their ethnic identities, spirit participants differ in the powers and talents they have, in the demands they make on those who wish to tie them, and in the way they respond to believers’ requests. In this regard, a first clue to a spirit’s ethnic identity is the language it speaks. White spirits speak either British or American English, or Dutch. When a participant becomes (is possessed by) a White spirit, he or she (there are more women than men involved) alerts the audience by singing or speaking in the appropriate language. However, after a few words, spirits who speak languages other than English state their ethnic identities, often complain about the language barrier, then continue in English for the remainder of the service. British and North American (United States) White spirits speak standard English with the appropriate accent. African spirits speak Creolese rather than an African language or a more standard variant of British or Guyanese English. Throughout the service, each spirit also clues participants to its ethnic identity by demanding that musicians (known as sanko bands) change the music to suit its ethnic taste. To this music, the spirit performs dances that participants associate with a particular ethnic group. For an outsider, some of the music and dance styles are easily associated with ethnic identities, whereas others are recognizable only by knowing the historical relation between the ethnic group and the music or dance style. In some instances this is history in a very loose sense. Music played for the Guyanese

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Amerindian spirits, for example, emphasizes the drum and the style of dance mimics the North American film version of the Plains Indian dancing around a pow-wow fire, complete with interspersed war cries. In addition to language, music, and dance, the ethnic identities of spirits are further marked by their demands for objects of a particular color. British and American White spirits demand white or light blue candles, flowers or clothes. Dutch White spirits are distinguished from other White spirits by their demand for dark blue, an ironic choice because in other contexts it is a color informants associate with slavery. They believe dark blue to have been the typical color of the cloth ration given to slaves each year.8 Africans demand green, East Indians red, Amerindians pink, and Chinese yellow. The colors imply a range of different connections. The green for Africans symbolizes rebirth through struggle and their “roots” in the land as cultivators. The yellow for Chinese is a phenotypical association, whereas red for East Indians is a reference to the red flags of Hanuman that grace the yards of most East Indian Hindus, the largest religious segment of the East Indian population. With red taken, Amerindians are given pink because being “reddish” it is deemed phenotypically correct and its “weak” intensity makes it all the more appropriate. Just as the ethnically-differentiated spirits associated with these colors differ in power and talent, so too does the degree of power associated with the colors differ. White is the color of the most powerful and divine spirits (gods, angels, and saints), but it is also the color of Europeans because they were the most powerful among human beings before they became spirits. As spirits, however, they are less powerful than gods, angels, and saints, and their association with two colors, rather than only one marks this difference. Among humans and ghosts Europeans are white spirits; relative to other supernatural beings they are light blue. From this standpoint, the Dutch, because they were subordinated by the English, are less powerful and dark blue to indicate a Dutch White spirit marks this distinction. This color scheme is the first point of objection Dutchman ghosts take to the Thanksgiving ritual. There is, they and informants say, no place for them because they will not accept the defeat implied by the color scheme. As paramount owners of the land, they are above all such hierarchical representations of the colonial order or the “nations” (i.e., the races) of the world. Although informants frequently stress that each spirit has different, not better, talents, they also contradict this contention in the way they treat the differences. As with the reference to the weakness of pink and hence its appropriateness as a color for the

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Amerindian, they also consider the talents and powers of the Amerindian to be “lowly”. The range of the tasks for which a human would seek Amerindian assistance is most restricted, while that for the European spirits is most expansive. Differences in talents and powers attributed to spirits mean they are capable of accomplishing or assisting humans with different types of tasks. White spirits are very knowledgeable and capable of assisting humans with any task. This does not mean that one ought to turn to them first or exclusively, because they are also very arrogant and unsympathetic. They are difficult to tie because they usually claim to be too busy to be bothered or they insist that the matter is too trivial for them to be concerned with or that the person who wishes to tie them is too unimportant for such a reciprocal relationship. They seldom act as emissaries for Supreme Beings, thus further limiting their availability and the opportunities humans have to tie them. Chinese spirits are also very talented and knowledgeable and, if willing, can handle very difficult tasks. They are seldom willing to help, however, preferring not to become involved in “other people’s problems”. They prefer, instead, to refer the person to a spirit of another ethnic identity. East Indian spirits are hardworking and capable. If they like a human, they will tackle even the most difficult problem. Yet they are faulted for a tendency toward self-aggrandizement which results in their making promises to complete tasks that are beyond their powers and talents. Africans are congenial and cooperative but limited in power and talents. In order to complete most requests, they find it necessary to consult with and to gain the assistance of other types of spirits. Amerindians are not only the most limited spirits: their greatest talents are for destructive tasks. In essence, during African Thanksgiving rituals, spirits are disembodied stereotypes of the ethnic groups to which they once belonged. Although, like their human counterparts, spirits vary in personality, in accordance with ethnic stereotypes only persons of mixed ancestry can genuinely combine talents and powers “belonging” to different ethnic groups. Obviously, Dutchman ghosts find this ritual space objectionable, as well as difficult, if not impossible to enter. Dutchman ghosts act ¯rg, and then only in the guise of Di. Thus only as emissaries for Su they cannot enter this ritual space at the behest of a Supreme Being. They do not permit themselves to be dispatched by humans, so they cannot be sent to participate or to interfere. Most important, given that tying is the way spirits actually enter the African Thanksgiving ritual, and that Dutchman ghosts do not allow themselves to be tied (i.e., will not establish relations of reciprocity) they cannot participate. Further this is a ritual of thanks for protection

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received, for spirit-assisted accomplishments, and for bounty attained. In appreciation the tied spirit is given a share of the wealth his or her protection has made possible. For the Dutchman ghost, to whom all of Guyana and its prosperity belongs, no such gifts are possible. They would simply serve as reminders of the spirits’ losses, thereby branding the giver a thief or one who benefited from British thievery. Even if there were a way for Dutchman ghosts to enter this ritual space, it is doubtful that they could be coaxed to do so. Its color scheme objectionable in general, is made all the more objectionable by the fact that it clearly subordinates the Dutch to the British when, at one point in the ritual, all spirits are renamed spirits of the white water (the sea and ocean) or spirits of the black water (river and drainage ditches). Europeans are the spirits of the white water in this portion of the ritual because they controlled ocean voyages and other things having to do with oceans or seas. Although this is true for Dutchman ghosts as well, it undermines their emphasis on land as the key symbol of their existence. Yet, still later in the ritual, when all spirits are again renamed either “celestial” or “t”lestial” (terrestrial) spirits, Dutchman ghosts face a similar classificatory dilemma. In order to associate themselves with the land, they would have to be in the category with Africans and East Indians rather than in the celestial category with other Europeans. Not only would this symbolically place them beneath the British and all other Europeans, it would place them beneath the Chinese who, for reasons it is not necessary to detail here are also celestial spirits (cf. Williams 1983). It is not surprising then that, as far as I could determine through interviews, no Dutchman ghost has ever been encountered at an African Thanksgiving service. To substantiate further the plausibility of symbolic interpretations gleaned from these ritual and supplementary oral history accounts, and to suggest how they are linked to one another across rituals, requires more detailed information on each ritual and on the variety of other Guyanese cultural conceptions which inform the use of that ritual’s imagery than I can provide here. Hence, I wish to stress a more limited point about the relationship between interpretations of the 1763 Berbice Rebellion: interpretations that mark the involvement of Dutchman ghosts in contemporary Guyanese rituals, and those contained in colonizer and colonized accounts of the rebellion based on traditional sources of documentation. Miss Lynch, Di, the Landmistress, and the variety of other Dutchman ghosts still people Guyana, participate in rituals, and complain about their eighteenth-century losses. Characteristics of their social identity which the ghosts and informants emphasize, as

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well as their behavior during rituals, contrasts in significant ways with features of written accounts which Dutch or British colonizers produced soon after the rebellion took place, and which the elite leadership among the previously colonized subordinated groups – Africans and East Indians – produced during the struggle for Guiana’s independence. Accounts by these colonizer and previously colonized groups tend to amplify those elements of the rebellion that are most consistent with their current social and political identities. Although these ritual accounts of the rebellion, more accurately accounts of its long-term consequences, are not free of influences that can be indirectly associated with the current political and economic positions of those humans who construct and participate them, by contrast with either colonizer or colonized accounts, they are not markedly shaped by the social identities of the humans involved. That, as noted earlier, is one of the mysteries that makes a careful analysis of the Dutchman ghost view of history a worthwhile enterprise. Contrasting Interpretations: Colonizing and Colonized Accounts An examination of pamphlets, memoirs, and more ambitious nineteenth and early (pre-independence) twentieth-century histories written by colonizers, provide a consistent reading of certain features of the rebellion. In general, the colonizing accounts begin with a discussion of the social context in which the 23 February insurrection, rebellion, or massacre, as they interchangeably refer to it, occurred. This context, they argue, was extremely unstable. Intertribal warfare, Iberian conspiracies.9 and the presence of degenerate European renegades undermined the development of the more refined civilized forms of human conduct to be found in the metropolitan societies. In this debauched social environment, they go on to claim, atrocities and cruelty were so commonplace as to dull the sensitivity of the more understanding members of the population. These factors combined with difficult economic times to produce generally poor living conditions for the enslaved population. Quick to follow in these accounts is an argument that the slaves did not rebel in response to general conditions but rather reacted to the extreme harshness of their momentary plight. In noting that the slaves did not rise en masse, authors suggest that under these particular circumstances the more unrefined, debauched masters did nothing to try to ease the suffering of the slaves. Instead, in their own economic frustration, masters heaped additional suffering on them by cruel treatment, and harsh forms of punishment for minor infractions.

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Typical of this interpretive turn are conclusions drawn by the businessman and politician, A.R.F Webber in his Centenary and Handbook of British Guiana (1931). After establishing the general lack of civility and humanity which made atrocities commonplace, he continues, There can be no doubt that the cruelties of the planters in Berbice set ablaze the insurrection of 1763. Some of its inspiration may have come from renegade Europeans, acting under the Iberian conspiracy to which reference has already been made: but without a doubt, the reaction in such cases was from years of resentment against cruelties, rather than objection to slavery per se. To most slaves, slavery was one of the normal social economies of mankind: while flogging was regarded as the parental prerogative of the master. Only such excuses can account for the age long toleration of slavery in all countries of the world. (p. 59)

Colonizing accounts tended to treat the 1763 rebellion as nothing more than “the mighty outbreak of the long bottled up anger and revenge of an uncivilized mass after suffering many years of maltreatment” (Netscher. a major historian of the early colonial period, quoted in Jagan 1972:29). Their consistency on this point derives in large measure from the limits placed on their interpretation by two shared assumptions, or, to use Webber’s term, excuses. First, they insisted that the slaves accepted the legitimacy of slavery as a system. The 1763 insurrection was therefore a rebellion against maltreatment, not a revolution against slavery. Second, they were convinced that the maltreatment which motivated the rebellion was not an inherent feature of slavery as an institution. It was an unfortunate temporary consequence, indicative of what happens when the dredges of an otherwise refined population, inspired by outside agitators and spurred on by their own frustration, are not held in check by the presence of the more refined members of that population. Although colonizing accounts are similar in the conclusions they voice, subtle differences in factors stressed in support of particular conclusions reveal divisions within the colonizer stratum. Englishman Webber, for example, takes as a key factor the debauched character of the European population (a population predominantly of Dutch origin), whereas Netscher, a Dutchman, places equal emphasis on debauchery and the Iberian conspiracy. In Dutch colonizing accounts, it is more often the uncivilized character of the slave population which brings out an otherwise atypical cruelty in those slave masters who, in their frustration and isolation from the civilizing context of metropolitan society, succumb to their baser nature as they struggle against the typical negative propensities of an uncivilized slave population. These differences hark back to general and enduring stereotypes of Dutch versus British character and competence. The Dutch, the

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initial European settlers, eventually lost control of the territory to the British, who then frequently characterized them as slow, lacking in ingenuity, and prone to frustrated reactions to their own incompetence. British stereotypes of the Dutch alleged that among the colonial masters, they were most cruel to slaves, with the implication, and sometimes direct charge, that they were incompetent to hold slaves or to control the territory. That the territory eventually became British was taken as proof of these stereotypical charges. Dutch stereotypes of themselves, of course, stressed positive characteristics while alleging that the British were greedy and jealous of others’ property and success. It is no surprise that general conclusions reached in colonizing accounts, and the stereotypes which characterized divisions among colonizers, would become the issues and coordinates within which colonized accounts were constructed. Colonized politicians and scholars constructed such accounts as part of their struggle for independence, and their post-independence effort to delegitimize and to restructure the colonial socioeconomic order. In speeches, autobiographies, textbooks, and other scholarly works, they note the inhumane treatment, and the rise and fall of extreme cruelties and atrocities. In opposition to colonizing conclusions, however, these factors are considered inherent to the institution of slavery. The “uncivilized” character of the slave population to which masters had to respond is reinterpreted as the varied large and small actions through which slaves daily sought their freedom. In colonized accounts, the 1763 rebellion is distinguished from the slave revolts which preceded and succeeded it in that, unlike those revolts, it was not localized but spread throughout Berbice. It was not, these accounts argue, a momentary response to extreme conditions, but rather an organized effort to overthrow an unjust system. The leaders, these accounts agree, sought a revolutionary change in socioeconomic and political relations between dominant and subordinate strata. They note that Cuffy initially declared himself Governor of Berbice and demanded the departure of all Europeans. Indicative, however, of his humanity and reasonableness, he later compromised on this point, offering the Europeans not identified as the cruelest slave masters the right to remain in peaceful co-existence with a free African population. Because it is outside the frame of their debate with colonizer interpretations, these accounts seldom provide much information on the over 1,000 Africans who, though tried and executed or killed in other forms of violence, were neither leaders nor followers. Colonized accounts aim less to supplement the historical record, adding to it voices not included, than to take issue with points in previous constructions that are potentially detrimental to their

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political agenda. This is a worthwhile goal, but an equally distorting one because it leads the colonized to ignore any factors which they have no need to invoke in their debate. It also leads them to contradict features of previous constructions rather than to aim for entirely different readings based on previously unconsidered features. Thus, in opposition to the colonizing accounts, in the colonized accounts, what is deemed to require explanation is not the root causes of the 1763 revolution, but instead why the African freedom fighters suffered defeat and what lessons about leadership might be drawn from an understanding of their defeat. The “true” nature of their defeat becomes the problematic as creators of these readings search for the features out of which to construct their plausible fictions. Colonized accounts, therefore, selectively amplify particular features of the basic outline of the rebellion in accordance with the commentator’s social situation, identity, and political goals. Cheddi Jagan examines these issues in his autobiography (1972). Jagan, an East Indian, was leader of the People’s Progressive Party which governed Guyana until its administration was toppled, in part, by American and British agitation of racial hostilities which, given the colonial policies of divide and conquer, required little to be set ablaze, and in part by the usual difficulties associated with developing a working relation with the opposition in a two-party system. Not surprisingly, his account stresses divisiveness among the African leaders as both the cause of the defeat and the factor from which his contemporary rivals (Burnham and other members of the predominantly African People’s National Congress) should draw their lessons. First Jagan notes that the true nature of the African defeat was not military. Cuffy and his lieutenant Akkara, Atta (leader of a second band) and Accabre (leader of a third band) defeated one another, he argues, in their inability to control the divisiveness stemming from their different positions (e.g., house versus field slave) in the slave system. In a leadership dispute Atta killed Cuffy, then was himself forced to surrender because Akkara helped the Dutch engineer his capture. Only Accabre, the field slave, although by then greatly outnumbered, fought until finally he and his small band of men were captured. Quoting van Hogenheim’s journal, Jagan further notes that even in defeat and brought before van Hogenheim in irons, Accabre maintained his dignity and his commitment to the legitimacy of their revolutionary cause. Jagan’s effort is to situate the 1763 revolution in the broader context of past and present struggles among those whom he deems the most subordinated of the subordinate stratum. The lesson he draws from the defeat is that it was the most subordinated of the

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subordinates who remained committed to the revolution in the face of insurmountable odds, while others turned on one another. Hence he concludes that defeat could have been avoided only through the formation of a “humanitarian” coalition. Such an interpretation and conclusion is quite consistent with his social identity as a politician engaged in what Mandle (1982) has decribed as an intraclass, as opposed to an interracial, struggle for postindependence power. The late L. F. S. Burnham. an African and leader of the People’s National Congress (PNC) which assumed power following the downfall of the PPP, provides a different reading. His reading shares with Jagan’s and other colonized accounts the view that the 1763 rebellion was a revolutionary effort to eradicate the slave system. Burnham. however, emphasizes certain features of the rebellion which either contradict or ignore those his political opposition, Jagan, stressed. In a speech delivered before the National Assembly on 28 August 1969, he argues that a country without its own history, its own heroes and legends would find it difficult to survive. He continues, “. . . [l]ooking over our historical landscape we come upon what is undeniably a most significant rebellion, the slave rebellion, as it is called by some, the slave revolution, as it is called by others, which started on 23 February 1763, at Magdalenenberg in Berbice” (quoted in Daly 1965:68). After noting in passing that Berbice had given Guyana both her leader of the opposition, a reference to Cheddi Jagan, and her national hero, Cuffy, he goes on to say. Cuffy led that revolt. The revolt was different from many an uprising which had taken place in Guyana. There had been previous uprisings but those were, so to speak, flashes in the pan. Those were, so to speak, merely spasmodtc reactions to cruelty. In the case of the Berbice revolt, we found that for the first time the slaves, under a leader, decided not only that they should end slavery but also that they should run the country and though, in their tradition of reasonableness, they suggested that perhaps a partition of Guyana between the whites and blacks was desired, through their leader Cuffy they made it particularly clear that there was no intention, desire, or willingness, on their part, to return to the system of slavery. What they saw as the future of the country was the existence of two separate and independent nations. No one will disagree that the revolution in Berbice, which started on 23 February, differed from previous uprisings and was the forerunner of the much better known one led by Toussaint I”Overture some 30 years after, in what is now the Republic of Haiti (Daly 1965:68–69).

In another passage from the same speech, Bumham, on the one hand, justifies having selected Cuffy, an African, as national hero in a society still trying to decide what do with the colonial division between Africans and East Indians (the two numerically predominant segments of the multiethnic population) and, on the other

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hand, links this choice to his position on the then unsettled debate over whether Guyana should become a constitutional republic. It is also worth noting that the speech was delivered at a time when rumors abounded concerning African and East Indian desires to partition the country along ethnic lines. Amplification of these features allowed Bumham to construct a usable, plausible fiction which spoke to his most immediate opposition – Cheddi Jagan and his already published views of Cuffy. He needed only to re-examine the meaning of the house versus field slave distinction to complete his oppositional interpretation. Burnham thus maintains that Cuffy’s position as a house slave, the favored stratum of the slave system, made him all the more significant as a leader. Although less badly treated than the field slaves, his willingness to lead demonstrated his commitment to and his aim to carry forward the revolution. He could not, Burnham argues, be bought for a few crumbs and for that reason, “[o]ne may remark on the dignity and presence of Atta and Accabre, but had there not been a Cuffy there might not have been an Accabre” (p. 69). Burnham’s account, like other colonized accounts, is woven in movements back and forth between the reinterpretation of features made prominent in colonizing conclusions and the development of alternative interpretations using features adequate to address positions taken on the temporary political issues. As a politician from a middle-class background, faced with an opposition claiming a lower-class background, Burnham sought to assuage conflicts between characteristics of his social identity and post-independence conceptions of appropriate leadership characteristics. Conclusion Neither the colonizing nor the colonized accounts are surprising or mysterious. They do not try to be neutral. Neither are they disinterested reports of dominant and subordinate relations. Colonized accounts, projecting their present into the past, at best provide alternative interpretations of what effect the actions of an “undifferentiated” dominant stratum had on the actions of a select few members of a “differentiated” subordinate stratum. They, like the colonizing accounts they debate, try to make the past fall into line with their current problems and future speculations. In doing so, they reorder and selectively emphasize features set forth by colonizing accounts as they interpret what effect the actions of a differentiated dominant stratum had on a mass of undifferentiated subordinates. It was, I suspect, this type of effort which inspired Voltaire to contend that there is no history, only fictions more or less plausible.

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Yet as we aim to rewrite histories to construct plausible fictions of our own brushes with the past, we are forced to consider how we should assess the plausibility of our expanded fictions. We might begin with a critical look at our, all too often unstated, assumption that if only we can find where the subordinated and disenfranchised store their memories, we will be able to construct better images of them, their past, and their interactions with members of the dominant strata. Rituals supply such a source. They are historically constituted and constituting catalogues of the diverse features of a variety of past events and of the range of plausible interpretations we might associate with events and their features. In itself, however, this revelation does not resolve the mysteries posed by a source – Dutchman ghosts and their ritual manifestations – the view from which does not tell us about subordinates, either in relation to one another or to the dominant stratum. Unlike the colonizing and colonized accounts, these ghostly renderings are not structured around the social identity – racial, ethnic, or political – of those participants who construct these images of history; that is, assuming we do not really believe in ghosts. Instead, their tale of this brush with the past is constructed selectively out of the features deemed important to their ghostly counterparts. In their own constructions, their ancestors, the long-subordinated population that produced no long-deceased ghosts, become the backdrop for an horrendous and traumatic event that resulted in consequences which for centuries they are forced to pay. But then, maybe that is their history. Notes 1 I have chosen to use the terms colonizer and colonized rather than orthodox and revisionist historical accounts in order to underscore the sense that in colonies, creating historical documents and interpretations is, like social, economic, and political policies, an aspect of colonization and colonialism. Colonizer accounts formulate the premises and problematics according to which colonial and post-colonial subjects must, at least initially, construct their accounts, whether these accounts aim to revise or supplement those produced by colonizers. It is in this sense that I refer to the latter as colonized accounts. I recognize that this dichotomy leaves unexplored the problem of when the colonizer becomes the colonized. This problem is part of the larger process of cultural production and authentication and as such is beyond the scope of this essay. 2 The summary accounts of this era and of the events of the rebellion are based primarily on the works of Clementi (1931). Netscher (1931 [1888]). and Harris, C. and J. deVilliers (1911). 3 A fuller understanding of social relations and the role of national identity in local struggles for power during this period must await the gathering of data on the national identities of the planters who made up the

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Berbice Association compared to those who organized or joined the Planter’s Society because these organizations served as major loci of struggle for social and political control in the territory until the demise of the Berbice Association. 4 Accounts differ on the relative percentage of the African and European population lost to the Colony. For example, Clementi (1931:75) comparing the 1762 and 1764 censuses and excluding free (Ameri)Indians, provides the following figures for 1762: 346 Whites, 244 Indian slaves, and 3,833 Negro slaves, for a total of 4,423. reduced to a total of 3,486 by the census of 1764. Of the latter total, only 116 were White. Hence he concludes that the White population was reduced by 66 percent while the total population was reduced by 21 percent. 5 The data on which this discussion is based were collected in the Guyanese countryside in 1976 and 1979–80. Rituals were observed in Berbice and the Corentyne region. However, those on which my data is most complete were observed in a single community in East Coast Demerara or were conducted by members of that community in other communities of the region. 6 This assumption about his appropriateness is based first on his ethnic identity – East Indians are assumed to have retained more knowledge of spiritualism than Africans because, unlike African religions, Hinduism was not “destroyed” by the Europeans. Second, as a male Hindu, he is thought more knowledgeable than his female counterparts. Even so, the ritual is syncretic and in fact depends primarily on use of the Christian Bible and on Amerindian breathing techniques; knowledge of which the pujari to be discussed gained as a result of having been a Christian convert, dabbled in spiritualism, and studied Islamic practices before returning to Sanatan Dharma Hinduism. In general, on the issue of ethnicity and the ethnic production of culture, a cautionary note is necessary. Although it is frequently done, it serves no useful analytic purpose to reduce all Guyanese cultural forms to a catalogue of “East Indian” and “African” cultural elements. Such a dichotomy, as many critics of pluralism in general and the use of the theory in analyses of Guyanese culture in particular have noted, confuses political ideology with culture and, therefore, makes erroneous and simplistic assumptions about the nature of cultural production in multiethnic situations. Simplistic views of “pluralism” encourage the assumption of an isomorphic relation between cultural production and political divisions that other works on Guyana, such as that of Walter Rodney (1981) have shown to be in error. In addition, as Drummond (1980) and Bartels (1977) clearly indicate, such a simplistic pluralist frame of analysis is inconsistent with the syncretic processes of cultural production which have produced the forms now labeled “East Indian” or “African” and continue to be implicated in the enactment of cultural performances such as the rituals outlined in the essay. 7 Whereas some informants believe the first Portuguese immigrants were Jews, most often the Portuguese-as-Jew designation is explained in terms of stereotypes of their economic behavior in colonial Guiana in the 1840s and 50s, a period during which they developed and maintained a retail trade monopoly. 8 For this ritual and when explaining the significance of the dark blue in other forms of symbolic expression, informants consistently gave this historical explanation as one feature of their understanding of its signifi-

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cance. Nevertheless, their view is contradicted by some historical sources. For example, Jagan (1972:61), summarizing slave regulations, reports that “the quantities stipulated by regulations were six yards of red cloth and six yards of yellow cloth every six months”. 9 “Iberian conspiracies” refer to suspicions about Portuguese and Spanish instigation of insurrection in the non-Iberian areas of the Spanish Main. In part, the recourse to Iberian conspiracies is an obvious commentary on the precarious position resulting from the Colony’s location on the Spanish Main and, in part, it was motivated by reference to an earlier non-slave rebellion on the Rupununi in which some Iberians did take part. Bibliography Bartels, D., 1977 Class Conflict and Racist Ideology in the Formation of Modern Guyanese Society. Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 14(4). Clementi, C., 1931 A Constitutional History of British Guiana. London: Macmillan. Daly, V., 1975 A Short History of the Guyanese People. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Education Ltd. Drummond, L., 1980 The Cultural Continuum: A Theory of Intersystems. Man 15(2). Harris, C. and J. deVilliers. 1911 Storm Van’s Gravesande: The Rise of British Guiana, Complied from his Dispatches. Vols. 1 and 2, Series II, vols. XXVI and XXVII. London: Hakluyt Society. Jagan, C., 1972 [1966] The West On Trial: The Fight for Guyana’s Freedom. New York: International Press. Mandle. J., 1982 The Post-Colonial Mode of Production in Guyana. In J.R. Mandle, Patterns of Caribbean Development: An Interpretive Essay on Economic Change, New York and London: Gordon & Breach. Netscher. P., 1888 [1931] History of the Colonies of Essequebo, Demerary and Berbice From the Dutch Settlement to the Year 1888. Gravenhagen: Provincial Utrecht Society for the Arts and Sciences. Robinson, P., 1970 The Social Structure of Guyana. In The Cooperatiue Republic of Guyana. L. Searwar (ed.). Georgetown: Government of Guyana. Rodney, W., 1981 A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Smith, R.T., 1962 British Guiana. London: Oxford University Press. Webber, A.R.F., 1931 Centenary History and Handbook of British Guina. Georgetown. Williams, B., 1983 Cockalorums in Search of Cockaigne: Status Competition, Ritual and Social Interaction in a Rural Guyanese. Ph.D. dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University. ————, 1989 A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation Across Ethnic Terrain. Annual Review of Anthropology. 18. ————, 1990 Nationalism, Traditionalism, and the Problem of Cultural Inauthenticity. In Nationalist Ideologies and Cultural Production. Richard Fox (ed.) American Ethnological Society Monograph 2. Washington, D.C.: American Ethnological Society. ————, In press. War in My Veins, Stains on My Name: On the Politics of Cultural Struggle and Guyana, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

The Lips of the Dead and the “Kiss of Life”: The Contemporary Deathbed and the Aesthetic of CPR JOHN TERCIER Abstract Over the last four decades, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) has become the medical, legal and media standard for behaviour in the face of sudden death. The key therapeutic techniques of CPR: mouth-to-mouth ventilation, external-cardiac-compressions and defibrillation – with their origins in the eighteenth century, strange peregrinations in the nineteenth, and consolidation in the twentieth – are central to what may be seen as a newly dominant form of deathbed ritual.

***** “Saving a life is the ultimate rush.”1

Introduction How do we picture ourselves dying? A “death with dignity” – the darkened room, the family gathered around the bedside, a few murmured farewells and then a quiet exit “gentle into the good night”? Or is it in the lights flashing, siren wailing, chest-pumping maelstrom of the back of an ambulance hurtling towards the ER?2 Certainly, over the last ten years, popular culture has opted for the latter. In films such as Flatliners and Bringing Out the Dead and in television shows such as ER and Casualty, we are confronted, almost nightly, with a technological whirlwind of death. This sophisticated performance, both on the screen and on the street, is rigidly determined by the American Heart Association’s (AHA) cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) protocol, at the core of which lie three key therapeutic techniques: mouth-to-mouth ventilation, external-cardiac-compressions and defibrillation. These techniques are ordered within the CPR protocol by the ABCD mnemonic: A and B are airway and breathing, provided by airway manoeuvres and mouth-to-mouth ventilation. C is circulation, provided by external cardiac compressions. D is defibrillation, the use of electrical shock to restart the stalled heart (American 1994, 1–4).3 The CPR protocol came into being in the early nineteen-sixties, initially showing great promise, with reported survival rates of above 40% (Cummins et al. 1985, 114). CPR quickly became standard practice within hospitals. It helped give birth to two new medical specialties, the paramedic and the emergency medicine Twenty Years of the Journal of Historical Sociology: Challenging the Field Volume 2 Edited by Yoke-Sum Wong and Derek Sayer © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-17934-8

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specialist. It was instrumental in the development of current Emergency Medical Services (EMS) systems. CPR became the medical, legal and media standard for behaviour in the face of sudden death. Over 50 million Americans have been trained in the technique (American 1992, 2171). Unfortunately, it did not live up to its early promise. In the ’70s and ’80s, survival rates were found to be in the range of 1.3 to 5.2% (Nichol et al. 1999, 517). Even today, given the best-case scenario with pre-selection of patients, short response times and optimal application of technique, survival rates in most cities struggle to reach 12% (Lombardi et al. 1994, 678; Stiell et al. 1999a, 44; Stiell et al. 1999b, 1175).4 Given its somewhat disappointing results, why does CPR hold such a prominent place in the medical armamentarium, and why has it become such a powerful icon within popular culture? Part of the answer may be found in the histories of the individual therapeutic techniques that make up the protocol. However, I hope to show that the power of CPR within medicine and popular culture is due not only to advances in scientific knowledge and a somewhat convoluted history, but to the enduring symbolic needs of the psyche at the deathbed.

Artificial Ventilation Mouth-to-Mouth Now The following is an excerpt from the television series ER episode “Hell and Highwater”: The screen is filled by a blank concrete wall. Its base pierced by a round black hole the size of a standing man. A storm drain. From the drain pours a foaming white cascade. The camera tracks back and we see a turbulent pool of grey water occupying the whole of the front half of the screen. It is night. Rain pits the pool’s surface. Suddenly, in the centre of the screen, a man breaks the surface in a fountain of spray. He hollers: ‘Ben’. It’s the show’s star: Dr. Doug Ross (actor George Clooney). He dives into the water. Emerges left of centre, closer to the camera: ‘Ben’. Dives. Emerges centre stage, filling the whole screen. He clutches the drowned boy to his chest. Water streams off them. We hear the sound of helicopter blades. He struggles to the shore, the child pale and limp across his arms. Lays the child on ground. Crouches over him. Puts his ear to the child’s mouth and the fingers of his right hand to the neck. No breath, no pulse. Opens the mouth with his right hand, breathes in deeply, seals his mouth over child’s. Suddenly, they are illuminated by an explosion of bright white light beamed down from the helicopter overhead. Ross blows into the child’s mouth. Turns his head, listens for air return. Another intake of breath. He seals his mouth over the child’s.

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Blows. Turns head. Listens. Straightens up over the chest and begins chest compressions. The camera circles around to focus on the movement of his arms pumping up and down. The bright light from above blazes off his white shirt. He pumps, one, two, three, four, five . . . fifteen. He bends down and as he gives another breath, the camera swings overhead and pulls up to the viewpoint of the helicopter. Lit in a flood of light so bright it obscures the details of the scene, the last shot is this God’s eye view of Ross bent over the child. Giving the ‘kiss of life’. Cut to commercial break (1995).

Mouth-to-mouth ventilation had been popularised in the late 1700s through the life-saving protocols of the Humane Societies (of which more later), disappearing almost entirely during the nineteenth century, not to reappear until the mid-1950s. Though still sporadically championed by a few practitioners, it endured over a century of disgrace (Waters 1943, 559). Even as late as 1948, mouth-to-mouth was rejected by the National Research Council-National Academy of Sciences’ resuscitation panel based on objections that expired air contained too much carbon dioxide and too little oxygen, that it was too exhausting for the rescuer, and that it might damage the lungs of a small victim. In the early 1950s a number of studies disproved all of the above concerns and demonstrated that the manual ventilatory techniques in use at the time were physiologically unsound (Cooper 1975, 487; Elam 1954, 749; Gordon et al. 1951, 1444; Ibsen 1952, 72; Johns et al. 1957; Nilsson 1951, 1; Safar et al. 1958a, 671). As early as 1952, James Elam remarked to Archer Gordon that manual ventilation methods were doomed. However, the National Research Council-National Academy of Sciences and the American Red Cross were not impressed, and refused to endorse the technique (Safar 1989, 53). In 1956, Elam teamed up with Peter Safar in a set of experiments (Safar 1958, 671; Safar 1959a, 760) which, quoting Safar: . . . convincingly demonstrated that the manual methods of artificial respiration were virtually worthless and mouth-to-mouth ventilation the most effective means of respiration. And, perhaps most important, anyone (rescuers from ten years to old age) could perform effective mouth-to-mouth respiration, even on adult victims, after only minutes of instruction. No bags, masks, or tubes were required (Eisenberg 1997, 97).

After more than a hundred years of disgrace, mouth-to-mouth began its return (Safar 1958, 671; Safar 1959b, 84; Gordon 1958, 320). In March of 1957, the National Research Council-National Academy of Sciences recommended the use of mouth-to-mouth in the resuscitation of infants and children. Although the evidence of benefit was equally convincing in adults, it was thought that the public would be unwilling to perform the technique on adults. One

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member of the panel stated: “People generally have great fear of the moribund and would probably hesitate to apply mouth-tomouth resuscitation to persons who were cyanotic, vomiting, etc.” (Eisenberg 1997, 277). However, in May of that same year, the U.S. Army adopted mouth-to-mouth in adults, and, finally, in 1958, the American Medical Association, the National Research CouncilNational Academy of Sciences, and the American Red Cross also endorsed mouth-to-mouth in adults (Dill 1958, 317). The Canadian Red Cross, alleging that it would be difficult for “a layman to place his lips against the lips of a corpse,” did not give its approval until 1960 (Eisenberg 1997, 102). When the resuscitative protocol that was to become CPR was given its first public airing at a meeting of the Maryland Medical Society in Ocean City in 1960, there was still resistance to the inclusion of mouth-to-mouth. Some delegates expressed the hope that the second component of the protocol, external-cardiaccompression, might be adequate for ventilation (Benson 1961, 398). However, evidence of mouth-to-mouth’s superiority was too strong, and mouth-to-mouth was included in the protocol as the recommended method of artificial ventilation. This protocol was formalised and institutionally sanctioned by the American Heart Association in 1963, through the formation of its Committee on Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation. The resulting CPR protocol, which combined airway maintenance techniques, mouth-to-mouth, and external-cardiac-compression was published by the Committee on CPR of the Division of Medical Sciences: National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council in the Journal of the American Medical Association in October of 1966, and has remained, until very recently, unchanged in its essential characteristics (Committee 1966, 372). Mouth-to-Mouth Then As far back as the fifteenth century, mouth-to-mouth ventilation had been documented as being employed by midwives in the resuscitation of newborns, but it is likely that, as a folk practice, it is so ancient as to be undateable. “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Gen. 2.7). In ancient Greece and Rome, concepts of pneuma and anima, respectively, made the vital link between breath and life. “Sarpedon’s soul left him and mist o’erspread his eyes, then he breathed again and the breath of Boreas revived him, breathing upon him who had previously breathed forth his life” (Iliad, V.696). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, bellows ventilation, an

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important variant of positive pressure ventilation, was used to keep animals alive during vivisection. Andreas Vesalius in De humani corporis fabrica (1542) described the use of tracheotomy, endotracheal intubation and bellows to revive dogs who had been strangled. Paracelcus attempted, unsuccessfully, to resuscitate a corpse using bellows. A few other sporadic reports began to emerge in the mid-eighteenth century. But, by and large, though there was continued use of mouth-to-mouth by midwives and bellows by anatomists, neither technique became widespread in orthodox medicine. The first documented English language case report of the use of mouth-to-mouth ventilation in an adult was in 1732 by William Tossach, a surgeon from Alloa in Scotland (Tossach 1752, 108). Little attention was paid to this report until 1744, when John Fothergill cited it in an essay on resuscitation (Fothergill 1782, 110–119). The first instance of mouth-to-mouth’s formal incorporation into what we would recognize as a formal medical protocol was in a document of 1767 published by the Amsterdam Society for the Recovery of Drowned Persons (Johnson 1773).5 Similar protocols were propagated in Milan and Venice in 1768, Hamburg 1769, Paris 1771, and St. Petersburg 1774. In 1774, The Institution for Affording Relief to Persons Apparently Dead from Drowning was inaugurated in London by Thomas Cogan and William Hawes. In 1776 this became the Humane Society, and in 1783 the Royal Humane Society. In its founding document, Methods of Treatment for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Dead from Drowning, the Humane Society recommended mouth-to-mouth ventilation (Humane Society 1774). The Humane Society found that mouth-to-mouth was easily performed and easily taught. The equipment necessary, a pair of lips and a pair of lungs was always available. It was reasonably safe. And when it was effective it was dramatically so. Yet by the early 1790s mouth-to-mouth had been discredited. This has been largely attributed to the discovery of the compound nature of atmospheric air by investigators such as Priestley, Black and Lavoisier. Air became valorised into a “good” gas, which supported life – vital air;6 and a “bad” gas, which stifled life – fixed air.7 The use of the rescuer’s breath, containing increased quantities of bad gas and decreased quantities of good gas was tantamount to poisoning the victim. In 1790, Benjamin Waterhouse bluntly declared that, “To blow one’s own breath into the lungs of another is an absurd and pernicious practice” (Eisenberg 1962, 64). By the end of the eighteenth century, mouth-to-mouth was in the process of being banished to the same hinterland of shady medical practices as tobacco smoke enemata and emetic tartar.

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Bellows In the late 1780s, mouth-to-mouth was banned outright from the protocols of the Humane Society, and bellows ventilation wholeheartedly endorsed. Bellows ventilation allowed the use of atmospheric or vital air, thus avoiding the danger of poisoning the victim. Nevertheless, bellows ventilation, in its turn, was also discredited and dropped from the protocol in the late 1830s. Bellows had been something of a problem in that they were not always to hand at the scene of an accident, furthermore their use was considered somewhat complicated for the layman. But bellows ventilation came under serious criticism in 1821 in a series of lectures on asphyxia by Sir Benjamin Brodie, president of the Royal College of Surgeons. He pointed out that once breathing stopped, the heart stopped, and artificial ventilation alone would not restart it. True enough, but Brodie seems to have been almost intentionally misunderstood, for he did not say that the inflation method was useless in all cases; he was only pointing out its futility in cases of complete cardiac standstill. As late as 1862, Brodie continued to recommend the inflation method when respiratory intervention was deemed necessary (Brodie 1865, 407). A more serious concern about the use of bellows developed in 1829 when Leroy d’Etoilles demonstrated that it was possible to rupture the lungs of animals by sudden and forceful inflation (Keith 1909, 748). This experiment was much quoted in the English literature, and the unfortunate d’Etoilles has been blamed by modern writers for severely setting back the cause of positive pressure ventilation. In fact, d’Etoilles did not condemn the use of bellows, he merely cautioned their use. He himself continued to use them, but adjusted their volume to the age and size of the patient. The Society’s rejection of bellows in the 1830s appears, at first glance, to be based on a careless, or even wilful, misconstruction of the work of Brodie and d’Etoilles. As with mouth-to-mouth, there was an almost unseemly eagerness to be rid of the technique.

Manual Ventilatory Techniques In the 1830s, mouth-to-mouth and bellows ventilation were replaced by the manual-ventilatory-techniques that were to remain standard practice until the late 1950s. Over a hundred eponymous manual “methods” were developed over that hundred year interval – the Leroy Method, the Dalrymple Method, the Marshall Hall Method, the Silvester Method, the Pacini Method, the Bain Method, the Howard Method, the Schultze Method, the Schroeder Method, the Shucking Method, the Schuller Method, the Bowles Method, the

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Laborde Method, the Schafer Method, the Holger-Nielsen Method, etc., etc. (Keith 1909, 748; Gordon et al. 1951, 1447). It is too painful to go into these in detail, but most involved some form of chest or abdominal compression, often associated with manipulation of the arms or shoulders. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century the Silvester and Schafer Methods dominated. There were regional variations and rival life-saving institutions pushed their preferred techniques with missionary zeal. In 1909, the Humane Society was using the Silvester Method; the Royal Life Saving Society, the Schafer Method; and the National Lifeboat Institution, the Marshall-Hall Method. In 1932, Colonel Holger Louis Nielsen developed the Holger Nielsen Method. Gordon in his 1951 study of manual techniques provided evidence of the superiority of the Holger Nielsen Method over the other manual methods and, in 1953, it was adopted by the International Red Cross (Gordon et al. 1951, 1444). Reasons and Rationalisations Manual-ventilatory techniques were seen as having the advantages of not poisoning the victim with the vitiated breath of the rescuer, not mechanically damaging the lungs with the inflation pressures generated by bellows, and they were thought more “natural” in that they mimicked the normal movements of the diaphragm and rib cage. Most of these “methods,” unfortunately, had one big disadvantage. They simply did not move enough air. This lack of efficacy was, of course, not apparent at the time. In explaining this apparent blind spot and the long period of mouth-to-mouth’s disgrace, medical commentators (meaning medicine, not history of medicine) shake their heads in wonder at what they see as the imprudence of abandoning a simple, safe, effective, intuitively logical technique for one that is, at least in hindsight, none of the above (Eisenberg 1997, 92–102; Lee 1972, 418). What they hint at is folly, though pleading mitigating circumstances. Eisenberg places the blame for the abandonment of mouth-tomouth on over-confidence in an immature, insufficiently sensitive and insufficiently rigorous empirical methodology (1997, 19). In his view the dropping of mouth-to-mouth and retention of less effective techniques, such as friction, was the result of a poorly systematized and anecdotal approach. On the other hand, historians of medicine perceive eighteenth-century physicians falling prey to a different, though complementary, error: that of the over-rigorous application of theory. The spectacular advances of Enlightenment physics and mathematics are seen as giving medicine a desire for a similar Newtonian unity of theory, making it overly dependent on the

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rationalist approach, and thus overly dogmatic (Bynum 1994, 17; Canguilhem 1991, 107; Porter 1999, 246). Thus the apparent folly of mouth-to-mouth’s abolition is, at least in part, seen as due to the clinical misapplication of the discovery of the compound nature of atmospheric air and the valorisation of its components. Furthermore, the particular developmental stage of science and medicine at the turn of the eighteenth century, i.e., the “immaturity” of the scientific method, is blamed for allowing deductive reasoning to override clinical experience and empirical evidence. In this way, the same scientific process by which respiration was proved essential to life, and thus artificial ventilation essential to resuscitation, resulted, ultimately, in mouth-to-mouth being condemned. Folly, lax empiricism and overweening rationalism – all, undoubtedly, contributed to the suppression of mouth-to-mouth, but, I would maintain that, though necessary, these are not sufficient causes for mouth-to-mouth’s banishment from medical practice. Significant as they no doubt are, the cause appears inadequate to the effect. When iatrochemistry, by valorising the components of air, made possible a condemnation of mouth-to-mouth based on physiological theory, one could almost hear a collective sigh of relief issue from the clinical literature. The facility with which the technique was dropped, and the vehemence of its detractors, gives the concept of “bad air” more the appearance of an excuse than a reason. Science was telling the scientists, the doctors and the public exactly what they wanted to hear – that it was no longer necessary to place one’s “lips against the lips of a corpse.” Indelicacy and Disgust It is easy to imagine the hesitation one might feel on being asked to administer mouth-to-mouth to an unconscious, possibly dead, drug addict covered in vomit. Scene from Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead. Three paramedics and a security guard sit in the harsh fluorescent light of the ER coffee room waiting for a call: Older Paramedic: ‘So there I am. This junkie got something jammed ‘tween his teeth. Now none of these junkies want to give mouth-to-mouth. It was a blowdrier. So I pulls it out. His body was cold, ‘cept for his throat. It’d been blow dried for about an hour. Junkie had second degree burns o’ the tongue. Mmhm.’ Rookie: ‘Didja’ ever give mouth-to-mouth?’ Older paramedic: ‘Yeh. Long time ago when I was your age, boy. Never again. Chances are ya end up with a mouthful of puke. Junkie puke.’ Rookie: ‘I’d do it if I had to. Y’know it’s part of the job. How ‘bout you?’ Frank: ‘What?’ Rookie: ‘Didja’ ever do mouth-to-mouth before?’ Frank: ‘Once. On a baby.’

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Security Guard: ‘Babies? Now babies are a whole different thing entirely.’ (Bringing Out the Dead 2000).

In the Humane Society’s literature, even as mouth-to-mouth was being strongly recommended, the “indelicacy” of it was inevitably referred to: The blowinginto the mouth may, upon an emergency, answer . . . ; but the difficulty of getting people to continue it will be easily conceived, on account of the operation being so extremely disagreeable and troublesome (Kite 1788, 140).

Attempts were made to ameliorate this indelicacy through the interpositionof a handkerchiefor the use of a specially designed boxwood or ivory tube. Should these be unavailable, a tobaccopipe, quill, pencil-case, wine-strainer, or even the rolled up sole of an old shoe were recommended (Fothergill 1795, 117; Curry 1815, 48). Anything to avoid the “indelicacy” of mouth to mouth contact. As late as 1944, the textbook Medical Physics mentioned mouthto-mouth as a technique infrequently used, because “the medical profession considered it a vulgar act” (Fisher 1944, 1241). It might well be imagined that the Humane Society, anxious to make inroads into the upper echelons of the profession would show little hesitation in jettisoning a procedure of such questionable “delicacy” as mouth-to-mouth, especially when atmospheric chemistry had given it such a convenient out. And this was, no doubt, contributory. But concepts of propriety and indelicacy conceal the more profound emotion of disgust. The mouth is a liminal area, a zone of transgression, an area of contact between self and other, between the subjective and the objective, a conduit for the impure and a reservoir of the erotic. Of course, none of these are entirely unconnected concepts. The mouth, for a number of reasons, is a danger zone, and that danger is flagged by the emotion of disgust (Bakhtin 1984, 325; Bataille 1985, 59; Turner 2000, 10).

Breath and Contagion Germ theory has been cited as the major factor in the demise of mouth-to-mouth (Eisenberg 1997, 87; Lee 1972, 418). This claim, though not entirely incorrect, is somewhat misleading. Mouthto-mouth was abandoned long before February 19, 1878 and Pasteur’s announcement to the French Academy of Medicine. Germ theory certainly contributed to mouth-to-mouth’s continued exile after that date, but germ theory was but the latest recension of the very ancient fear of contagion. The fear of contagion remains, today, the most common reason given for reluctance in performing

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mouth-to-mouth (Becker 1997, 2102).8 But it is a much more ancient and profound fear than is indicated by our confident equation of it to modern germ theory. Specifically, the mouth and the respiratory tract have always been deeply implicated in both the imagined and actual spread of disease, whether it be ague in the eighteenth century, consumption in the nineteenth or AIDS in the twentieth. Contagion is the process by which the pure is made impure. In mouth-to-mouth contact, though the chance of an infectious disease being acquired is small, albeit real; pollution, on a symbolic level, is absolutely guaranteed. Contagion threatens the purity, the integrity, the very existence of whatever it confronts. The “being” of an object is dependent upon maintaining borders against the outside world, dependent upon it being distinct and “different from.” Agents of contagion, be they evil spirits, miasmas or germs, threaten those borders. The agent of contagion invades and leaves a stain that compromises the purity of the victim, threatening the victim’s very existence and identity. The agent of contagion threatens us not merely with violation, but, and it is in this that its horror lies, it threatens to transform us into that very thing that it is. The agent of contagion threatens to make us like IT – infected and infectious. That is what disgusts (Douglas 1966). Breath and Life Breath has always been linked to life. One of the ways in which the ancient Greeks and, later, the physicians of the Renaissance gave the life-force material substance was through the concept of pneuma, which included, among other things, air and breath. Pneuma was the vehicle by which the divine instilled life in the mortal. The breath of the rescuer is, at some deep level, still the living aer of the Greek cosmos, and the life-giving pneuma of the “life-soul,” that is, the psyche. The psyche is a life-force sustaining the animal functions of the living body, providing for both growth and procreation. Departing from the body at death, it rises from the blood shed in sacrifice and is exhaled in the warrior’s last gasp. It survives as a shadow in Hades. It is that thing by which we live (Onians 1951, 93–123; Tercier 2002, 1–24). But breath is also a veiled threat. The breath of the rescuer, far short of the perfection of aether or oxygen, carries within it the poison of carbon dioxide; carries not only the benefits of life, but its corruption as well. And it is far from a one-way street, it is not only the victim who is placed in danger by the breath of the rescuer, but vice versa. The death-damaged psyche of the victim is a vehicle of contagion. It moves out from his or her body to pollute what comes

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too near. We fear the dead as deadly. Expired breath threatens infection and death in the real world, and contagion and impurity in the symbolic. The breath of life is the kiss of death. In mouthto-mouth ventilation, there is hope and fear in every breath – hope of communicating life to the breathless corpse, fear of death being communicated to the rescuer. What saves also destroys. The lifeforce, manifest in breath, is not inexhaustible: it can be damaged; it can be squandered; it can be stolen. Mouth-to-mouth puts one in danger – danger of losing one’s own life. The discovery of the atmospheric gases, the poisonous status of expired breath and the particular historical state of the scientific method certainly contributed to mouth-to-mouth’s demise. Deeply seated feelings of disgust, and fears of contagion and death made science’s disproof of mouth-to-mouth welcome. Yet, here again, the cause is inadequate to the effect. Scientific evidence and atavistic fears still do not provide an entirely satisfactory explanation for mouth-to-mouth’s disappearance in the nineteenth century; nor do they explain its reappearance in the twentieth. There is as yet another factor involved in both the disappearance of mouth-tomouth and its re-instatement. For this, we must turn to the second technique of the CPR protocol: external-cardiac-compression. External-Cardiac-Compression It is seldom that one can explain the disappearance of any therapeutic technique solely on the basis of its failings, whether they be empirical, symbolic or psychological. In this case, mouth-to-mouth was dropped not merely because of its perceived disadvantages, though of course those played a large part, but, also, because it was actively displaced by another technique: manual-ventilation. Manual-ventilatory-techniques not only appeared to satisfy the practical requirements of ventilation, while allaying the fears implicit in the abandoned procedure of mouth-to-mouth, but, more importantly, they satisfied a repressed, though inescapable, imperative issuing from the deathbed – that of deathbed violence. Folk Practice In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, many of the folk therapies employed in the resuscitation of the drowning victim involved the use of considerable physical force. Victims were hung by the heels and beaten with sticks, rolled back and forth over a barrel, jogged up and down on the back of a horse, and subjected to vigorous friction and other robust physical manoeuvres in attempts to rid the lungs of water and to excite the fading life-force

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back into action (Physician 1747, 6). One of the primary goals of the Humane Society, stated explicitly in its protocol, was to mitigate the more violent of these “pernicious” practices (Humane 1774, 2). In discounting the first of these excuses for therapeutic violence, i.e., ridding the lungs of water, the Society was acting on evidence supplied by the burgeoning empiricism of that period. Post-mortem dissection of drowning victims in the mid-1700s showed that, unless they had been long dead in the water, their lungs were not filled with fluid. Asphyxia was (correctly) ascribed to small amounts of inhaled water causing laryngospasm, thus excluding air from the lungs (Goodwyn 1788, 98). The second justification for the violence of the physical manoeuvres, excitation of the fading life-force, was more difficult to dismiss as most of the techniques recommended by the Society’s own protocol – friction, rewarming, agitation, electrical shocks, tobacco smoke enemata, etc. – also relied upon a certain level of violence in stimulating the mysterious vital force back into action. Vitalism The vexed theory of “Vitalism,” which was based on the existence of the life-force, was to flower fully in the nineteenth century and even extend tendrils into the twentieth. It is too complex to be other than fleetingly touched on here. That the living and the dead are different is self-evident. How they are so is less obvious. One way of apprehending this phenomenon is to postulate a thing – a substance, a form, a force – called “life.” It is present in the living and absent in the dead. At various times “life” has been reified as pneuma, psyche, breath, animal heat, irritability, animal electricity, vis vitae, or vital-spirit. These are all forms of what has been labelled “substantival vitalism” (Burwick 1992, 8). They are all attempts to visualize an occult force, a “fire within,” powering the organism and directing its growth and development. The theoretical basis of the Humane Society’s protocol was the vitalist concept of the vis vitae or “life-force” that, like the dying torch engraved on the Society’s medals, might be fanned back into full flame by the application of the correct stimulatory techniques.9 The violence implicit in the re-excitation of the life-force was only partially suppressed by the Society’s protocol, and returned in full force in the form of the chest compressions of the nineteenthcentury manual-ventilatory-techniques. The theoretical justification for beating on the body shifted from the straightforward folk practice of clearing the lungs of water; to a belief that it might stimulate the vis vitae by encouraging muscular irritability; to then settle on the idea that it might mechanically move air in and out

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of the lungs. Therapeutic violence debunked within one organ system and physiological theory, fled to another, then another, then another. It is a technique that refuses to die. Looking back at the demise of mouth-to-mouth in the early nineteenth century, mouth-to-mouth was dropped not only because of fears of poisoning, contagion and disgust, but because an organ system and a theoretical doctrine were required as vehicles for the continued practice of deathbed violence. Mouth-tomouth didn’t jump; it was pushed. When in the late-1950s mouthto-mouth was re-instituted and manual-ventilatory-techniques were forced out of the protocol, therapeutic violence, in the form of chest compressions did not disappear, but survived by adopting yet another organ system and physiological justification. In the form of external-cardiac-compression, chest compression was put forward as a means of maintaining circulation.

Chest Compression as Cardiac Massage In the eighteenth century, compression of the chest to augment blood flow to the heart had been given some credence within the vitalist theory of stimulation and irritability; however, in the early nineteenth century, it was subsumed under chest compression’s use as a manual-ventilatory-technique. But the use of chestcompression as a means of augmenting circulation was never entirely discounted, and it resurfaced in the late nineteenth century as a means of dealing with chloroform-induced pulselessness. However, it met with very limited success and failed to be taken up generally (Boehm 1878, 68; Robiscek 1983, 569). Rather, open-chest-cardiac-massage began to be used in the operating room to deal with the above mentioned chloroform-induced ventricular fibrillation (Hake 1874, 241). Open-chest-cardiac-massage, though rarely used, became the standard technique for artificially supporting circulation for the next fifty years (Green 1906, 1707; Stephenson 1953, 731). However, this open technique was, as one can imagine, somewhat problematic. It was messy, prone to complications, could be performed only in the hospital by a skilled professional, and if it was to be successful, then it had to be performed very quickly. When, in the 1950s, mouth-to-mouth was re-instituted and manual-ventilatory-techniques were forced out of the protocol, chest-compression did not disappear but jumped from the respiratory back to the circulatory system. In the form of external-cardiac-compression, chest-compression was put forward as a means of maintaining circulation that avoided the excessively invasive trauma of internal massage.

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In 1958, experiments by Kouwenhoven, Knickerbocker and Jude demonstrate that external-cardiac-compression bought time until electrical defibrillation could be accomplished (Jude 1961, 1063). “Anyone, anywhere, can now initiate cardiac resuscitative procedures. All that is needed are two hands” (Kouwenhoven 1960, 1064). In 1960, their findings were united with Safar and Elam’s research on mouth-to-mouth and presented at the 1960 meeting of the Maryland Medical Society in what is now considered the “birth of CPR” (Benson 1961, 398; Eisenberg 1997, 109–129; Safar 1963, 34). Since that time, controversy over the effectiveness of CPR has raged. Though there have been studies out of Seattle with survival rates as high as 49%, it has not been easy to replicate these results in other centres (Cummins 1985, 114; Eisenberg 1997, 259). Most large American cities report long-term-survival-rates for out-of-hospital-arrest-with-bystander-CPR of 2.9 to 5.2% (Lombardi 1994, 676; Stiell et al. 1999b, 1175). Though the whole thing must be ringed by qualifications and caveats, it is probable that 12% is a realistic goal for long-term-survival in a system maximizing present knowledge and technology (De Maio 2000, 139).10 CPR is effective – but much less so than is generally thought. It does work – to a certain extent. It is good for what it is good for – sudden ventricular fibrillation. A survival rate of 12%, though well below public expectation, is still significant, especially if you are one of that 12%. Research continues, and there is, as always in medicine, reason for hope. On the other hand, expectations of the protocol have always, and continue to, outstrip its abilities. Not only is the empirical efficacy of the CPR protocol questionable, but the pathophysiological theory underlying cardiaccompression is also problematic. The two target organs of CPR, the brain and the heart, have metabolic requirements well beyond external-cardiac-compression’s ability to satisfy. The brain requires oxygenated blood flows of 20 ml. per 100 gms. of tissue per minute to prevent cell death: external cardiac compression provides 3 to 7 mls. The heart requires flow in the coronary arteries of 60% of normal to maintain myocardial function: external cardiac compression provides 20 to 25% (Angelos et al. 1999, 583; Paradis et al. 1989, 361).11 Granted, CPR was never meant to be more than a temporising measure, but its discouraging survival rates demonstrate that it struggles to accomplish even that. In an attempt to improve the efficacy of CPR in general and external-cardiac-compression in particular, there has been a succession of external-cardiac-compression techniques put forward in a process similar to that already witnessed in the nineteenth-

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century multiplication of manual-ventilatory-techniques: anteriorchest-compression, lateral-chest-compression, interposedabdominal-compression, high-frequency-CPR, active-compressiondecompression, phased-thoracic-abdominal compressiondecompression, simultaneous-ventilation-compression, vestcompression, mechanical-compression, etc. Despite these many innovations, anterior chest compression, as originally recommended in the 1960 protocol, remains the standard (Neumar 1998, 40).

Defibrillation Whither CPR? The CPR protocol is changing. In 2000, the AHA extensively revised both Basic Life Support (BLS) and the Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) (American 2000; Cummins 2001). Among the many changes, two affect the practice of CPR significantly. The first is an increased emphasis on defibrillation; the second, a disclaimer concerning mouth-to-mouth. “The use of defibrillation now transcends both ACLS and BLS care” (American 2000, I.90). At its inception in 1960, CPR was presented as no more than a temporising measure until definitive treatment, i.e., electrical defibrillation, could be accomplished (Kouwenhoven 1960, 1064). One of the most important consequences of the changes in the AHA’s Guidelines 2000 is defibrillation’s move from ACLS (where it was in the hands of professionals) into BLS (where it becomes a task for the layman). This has been made possible by the introduction of automated external defibrillators (AEDs).12 Early defibrillation is the link in the Chain of Survival that is most likely to improve survival. The placement of AEDs in the hands of large numbers of people trained in their use may be the key intervention to increase the chances of survival of patients with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (American 2000, I–358).

In adult arrest (certain exceptions aside), CPR is now begun by activation of the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) system. Then, if an AED is present, it is applied and shocks are given ¥ 3. And THEN, if those shocks are unsuccessful, the ABCs of airwaymanoeuvre, ventilation, and external-cardiac-compressions are begun. If no AED is present, then the ABCs are commenced until an AED arrives (American 2000. I.22–I.59). Some studies indicate that early defibrillation may double survival rates (Cummins 1985, 114; Eisenberg 1980, 1379; Mossesso 1998, 200; Olson 1989, 806; Stults 1984, 219; Vukov 1988, 318). Other studies show little (e.g.

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2.1 to 2.9%) or no increase in survival after the introduction of AEDs (Brison 1992, 191; Kellerman 1993, 1708; Pepe 1994, 1037; Sweeney 1998, 234).13 The second change affecting CPR is the demotion and qualification of mouth-to-mouth: “Never delay defibrillation! Airway and ventilation are secondary to prompt defibrillation if defibrillation can be performed in the first minutes after arrest” (Cummins 2001, 65–66). However, there is a more serious charge made against mouth-to-mouth than mere delay and it should, perhaps, not come as too much of a surprise: Reluctance on the part of professional and lay rescuers to perform mouthto-mouth . . . is related to fear of infectious disease transmission. If a person is unwilling or unable to perform mouth-to-mouth ventilation for an adult victim, chest-compression-only CPR should be provided rather than no attempt at CPR made (American 2000, I.22–I.59).

The interposition of some “barrier device” (face-shield or face-mask) between the mouth of the rescuer and the mouth of the victim (remember the “rolled up sole of an old shoe”) is the preferred approach to artificial ventilation for the lay rescuer, but, failing that, it has become permissible to forego ventilations entirely. Thus, we meet again the forces of disgust, contagion and the fear of death; forces that, at the deathbed, continually surface, are repressed, and resurface again. Meanwhile, as mouth-to-mouth slips quietly into the background, AEDs are set to become as ubiquitous as fire extinguishers. However, as with manual-ventilatory-techniques and external-cardiaccompression, defibrillation is beginning to proliferate its own set of variant techniques: high energy, low energy, stacked shocks, preCPR, post-CPR, monophasic wave form, biphasic wave form. One begins to experience a sense of déjà vu. Defibrillation, though on much firmer empirical and theoretical ground than either manualventilatory-techniques or external-cardiac-compressions, is, as has been pointed out, far from universally successful. Any time one sees a therapeutic technique spawn a large number of variants, all aimed at the same effect, one can be pretty sure that none of them work very well. Furthermore, when one sees a technique, such as chest compression, in the face of empirical failure, change theoretical justification – in this case jumping from the Vitalist theory of irritability in the neuro-muscular system; to mechanical theories of negative pressure ventilation in the respiratory system; to the thoracic pump theory in the circulatory system – one has to ask whether the efficacy of the technique lies not in its physiological effect, but elsewhere – in the realm of the symbolic.14

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Ritual Murder Death Threats As the human animal gained self-awareness, it was faced with the problem of loss as manifest in death. At the level of the individual survivor, as far as the deceased was internalised as a part of the identity of that survivor, the loss of the beloved represents a threat to the survivor’s identity. On the level of the social, the loss of the individual to the group threatens the functionality of that group. On the metaphysical level, the loss of another pushes consciousness to acknowledge what it cannot grasp, its future non-existence (Davies 1997: 184). And to the dying patient, there are the even more immediate threats of pain, suffering and existential terror. Attempts are made to assuage these fears with religion, opium and, more recently, therapeutic discourse (Seale 1998, 113; Timmermans 1999, 17; Walter 1994, 29). All are attempts to construct a “good” death, but that construction is no easy task. The violation of being and the violence to the self perpetrated by death is especially prominent in sudden death – the mode of death with which resuscitative protocols deal. The sudden death is always, on some level, a violent death, even if protruding bits of broken bone do not break the surface of the skin, even if death is a silent blood clot in a coronary artery. Sudden death violates our ideals of propriety and order. Sudden death is death at the wrong time, in the wrong place, for the wrong person. It threatens the dying and the survivor, the individual and the group, the body and the soul. Neither faith, nor opium, nor reason are entirely effective in dispelling the threat of sudden death. Violence is met with violence. Violence, both symbolic and actual, towards the dying body and towards the corpse, is an integral component of deathbed ritual in many cultures (Hertz 1960, 78; Levi Strauss 1963, 181; Van Gennep 1960, 164). The anthropologist Maurice Bloch has gone as far as saying, that violence is an integral component of all ritual in all cultures (1992, 7). Violence at the deathbed works at practical, psychological and symbolic levels. At a practical level, violence is useful in identifying the dead – they don’t hit back. On a psychological level, violence may be a manifestation of the guilt and anger of the survivors. On a symbolic level, violence is often used to assist the dead soul in its journey from the tribe of the living where, if it lingers, it may cause mischief, to the tribe of the dead, where it now belongs. Violence identifies and orders, transforms and preserves a world disrupted by loss.

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Identifying the Dead One of the major fears hovering over the deathbed is that the dead are not actually so. The fear of premature burial reached almost hysterical proportions in the early nineteenth century. Like the eighteenth-century physician’s opening of a vein on the moribund, CPR fulfils a triple role: it might restore life, it helps diagnose death and, failing all else, it insures it. The declaration of death, both within and outside of hospital, is most frequently based on the patient’s response to a resuscitative protocol. If the patient shows an absence of vital signs (pulse, blood pressure, respiratory activity, consciousness, reflexes) and the patient fails to respond to resuscitative manoeuvres, persistently displaying an absence of those vital signs, then the doctor, with reasonable certainty, declares the patient dead.15 Though the failure of the resuscitative protocol is the failure of revival, it is the successful identification of death. The patient is proved dead by their failure to respond to CPR. There is some point in beating a dead horse – to insure that it is actually dead.16

The Guilt of the Living On a psychological level, violence may be a manifestation of the anger and guilt of the survivors. The death of a person is a loss both to the individual survivor and to the community as whole. It threatens the integrity of the lover’s ego and the viability of community structure. Loss, by threatening the identities of both the surviving individuals and the social group, generates anger. This anger at loss is easily projected back onto the lost object. The dead are always, at some level, seen as being guilty of their own deaths (“Why did you leave me?”), and thus subject to the anger of survivors (Davies 1994, 39). This anger at the dead is, in its turn, worked by the survivors into guilt – guilt at the anger they cannot help but feel, usually displaced and transformed into guilt over one’s past behaviour towards the deceased. Guilt in turn becomes anger directed against the self, other survivors, medical staff, and again, against the dead themselves. This vicious circle of anger and guilt is complex and has been picked apart elsewhere (Davies 1994, 25–29; Freud 1985a; Homans 1989; Kubler-Ross 1973; Saunders 1990; Walter 1994). All I wish to point out here is that survivors are caught in a cycle of guilt and anger, which often takes the form of symbolic, or even actual, violence directed towards the corpse. Deathbed and funerary ritual may be seen as helping to “discharge” some of this anger and guilt, thus initiating the process of mourning, allowing the individuals and the social group who have suffered

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loss to begin to rebuild their post-loss identities. This rebuilding of identity is an active process, and it has been argued that active participation in the dying process initiates it (Davies 1997, 4). The Anger of the Dead It is not only the survivors that are angry, so too are the dead. In myth, the dead are hungry, jealous ghosts. They are angry at being torn from life, angry at the survivors for allowing them to die and angry at them for living while they are dead. Even the most rational of societies have their angry ghosts, be these but unpleasant memories and unresolved conflicts. Again, these complex reflections of anger and guilt have been dealt with elsewhere by others, I merely point out that in all societies, at some level, the dead are perceived as a danger to the living (Davies 1997, 163; Seale 1998, 52; Freud 1985b, 116). As the corpse becomes an unclean and impure source of contagion in the physical world, so also in the metaphysical the dead spirit hovering between this world and the next becomes a malevolent agent harbouring an antipathy towards the living (Hertz 1960, 77). The dangerously liminal state of the incongruous spirit must be resolved. So it is, that deathbed and funerary ritual resorts to violence, both symbolic and actual. In myth-based societies, ritual violence is used to assist the dead soul in its journey from mundane world to the transcendent realm (Davies 1997, 2; Smith 1894, 370). In secular societies (or if you prefer, at a psychological level) ritual assists in the removal of the beloved from presence, so that he or she may be reconstructed in memory: a translation from the present to the past tense. This is always an active process and violence is one, perhaps the only, means of accomplishing it (Bloch 1992, 4–7). Loss is a threat to the individual survivor and to society. Though it is the loss that threatens us, it is the dead themselves that bear and project back our anger at that loss. It is out of the elision between loss and the dead that the violence towards the dying and dead body arises. Underlying CPR’s overt therapeutic purpose is a complex of occult imperatives – diagnosis, catharsis, rite of passage. Each, at some point, at some level, in some form, utilises violence. No one just dies – everyone is, in a sense, murdered. Protocol and Ritual One of the most severe critics of CPR is the sociologist Stefan Timmermans. He points out that the dehumanising violence of resuscitative protocols simply does not appear justified by their empirical success, or rather lack thereof. In his book, Sudden Death

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and the Myth of CPR, he gives an account of the history of the protocol, its science, its uses and abuses similar to, but much more detailed than my own (1999). His conclusion is that it is, by and large, smoke and mirrors. Medicine’s apparently illogical behaviour in supporting such a dubious technique (in the face of empirical failure, and the dictates of reason and compassion) is ascribed to power politics – i.e., both the hegemonic ambitions of the AHA and the desire of physicians to maintain control specifically over the deathbed and more generally over healthcare resources. Furthermore, medical practitioners are seen as blinded by the technological imperative of a positivist worldview: If it can be done, it should be done. They stand accused of colluding in a modernist fantasy of immortality and the denial of death. This critique of the “medicalisation” of death is part of a well-established tradition (Ariès 1974; Baudrillard 1993; Bauman 1992; Elias 1985; Gorer 1955; Illich 1976). And there is no question that all the above factors do operate. It is understandably tempting to see physicians as blinded by science or so enamoured of power that their concern for the patient is displaced. Nevertheless, although these factors may play some part, it is not physicians’ stupidity, malevolence or greed that has kept the technique of CPR in play for forty years. Beneath the power relations of the modern medical bureaucracy, and its positivist, action-based optimism, move deeper and darker forces. Why do we, as physicians, continue to practice an apparently barbaric technique, severely limited in its practical efficacy, with shaky theoretical foundations, in the face of considerable opposition? Do not think that we are unaware of its limited clinical efficacy and of outside pressures. We do know when we are beating a dead horse. Yet we continue to do so, though only half-cognisant of the reasons why, for these reasons seem too far-fetched and ill-formed to be discussed in the coffee room. We too want to deny, as strongly as others appear to want to deny death, the fears, guilt and anger that underlie the violence of what we do. Survival of therapeutic techniques at the deathbed have as much to do with their symbolic content as with their practical efficacy, as much to do with ritual as with protocol. As Timmermans points out, “The ritual aspects of resuscitation help make sense of a senseless death” (1999, 139). My contention is that CPR is not merely ritualistic, it is ritual, the genuine article.17 This suggestion that the scientific protocols practiced by modern medicine might bear some similarities to the ritual practices of “primitive” or “traditional” societies is not likely to be welcomed. Nor is the idea that CPR is done less for the benefit of the dying (or usually dead patient) than for the sake of the surviving family and society and its institutions. This is not to say that CPR does not have legitimacy as

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a therapeutic protocol, limited as that may be, but rather to point out that there is another aspect to it, that of ritual, which may be useful in explaining the apparent anomalies and paradoxes of CPR’s practice. In the early eighteenth century, folk therapies aimed to beat life back into the drowned. The Humane Society attempted to put a stop to those beatings, but itself ended up instituting a similar regime of violence, eventually settling on the manual-ventilatory-techniques. When, in the 1950s, manual-ventilatory-techniques were forced out of life-saving protocols, chest compressions and violence did not disappear but survived in the form of CPR’s external-cardiaccompressions. In the year 2000, chest-compression, though not disappearing, ceded prime position to AEDs and a form of electrical violence, defibrillation. Is the proliferation of AEDs part of the above progression of ritual murder? One does begin to wonder. Or is it that “the infinitely optimistic emergency community has chosen to ignore signs that the effectiveness of automatic defibrillating may be limited. . . . Instead, indiscriminate defibrillation is promoted as a way to achieve immortality” (Timmermans 1999, 77)? It is, I dare say, both. And that is why it is ritual, and why ritual is necessary. For the promise of immortality is inextricably linked to violence. If not the violence of the hand, then the violence of the machine. The recent changes in the CPR protocol have not mitigated the inherent violence of the act; rather, that violence has, again, merely changed form and theoretical justification. The dying patient, stripped naked under the bright lights of the resuscitation room, hooked to monitors, punctured by tubes, pummelled and shocked by a contingent of uniformed strangers, is dehumanised by the violence of that confrontation. First for the sake of preserving his or her life (in an entirely straightforward sense) so that he or she might continue life in human form, and then, when that fails, for the sake of robbing that form of its humanity, so that he or she may be translated to another and different state of being. Both the life-saving actions of the protocol and death-dealing performances of the ritual are, in a strange way, in service to the preservation of being, if not in the mundane then in the transcendent. Paradoxically, it is in the violent enactment of death that immortality is constructed. Redemption As difficult as it is to expunge chest-compression and other forms of violence from the resuscitative protocol, it appears just as difficult to retain mouth-to-mouth within it. Yet, though constantly

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rejected, mouth-to-mouth does return. In the Humane Society’s Method of the eighteenth-century, mouth-to-mouth ventilation was adopted by orthodox medicine on the strength of a burgeoning experimental science and the new rule of reason. However, in the early nineteenth century, mouth-to-mouth had to disappear, not merely because of the danger of poisoning that science had exposed, but because the imperative of deathbed violence, which had been repressed by the Humane Society’s Method, had returned, and required the services of the respiratory system for its expression in the manual-ventilatory-techniques. In the late twentieth century, mouth-to-mouth had to return, not only because the advances of science made it the most logical alternative, not only because a new technique, external-cardiac-compression, and a different organ system, the circulatory, were made available for the expression of deathbed violence but, also, precisely because of those dangers that mouth-to-mouth embodied. Paradoxically, the same dangers of impurity and death that had hampered the use of mouth-to-mouth, were also potent forces in its return. Mouth-to-mouth ventilation encompasses a powerful conjunction of sign and object. The mouth and the exchange of breath call up existential anxiety in the form of disgust and the fear of contagion. The rescuer, on initiating mouth-to-mouth, puts his or her own life-force, manifest in their breath, at risk of being blighted, squandered or stolen. At the deathbed, implicit and explicit signs of life suddenly meet the reality of death – we place our lips on the lips of a corpse. Thus mouth-to-mouth puts us in danger. On a physical level we endanger our health, even our life; on a symbolic level our purity and integrity. We open ourselves up not only to corporeal death, but to existential oblivion. Why? To return to the film Bringing Out the Dead. In the scene previously cited, the reluctance of the older paramedic to give mouth-to-mouth is contrasted with the rookie’s enthusiasm. We see expressed in their conversation fears of impurity, contagion, poisoning and death. Even today, despite the strength of its empirical, experimental, and theoretical justifications, mouth-to-mouth remains “a custom more honor’d in the breach than the observance.” Its use, when it is used, as it is later in this film, is made exceptional, because of its more frequent absence. The climax of the film is Frank’s performance of mouth-to-mouth on Noel, the filthy, crazy, disease ridden “dirtball,” the lowest common denominator of humanity. Frank and his partner, Tom, are slowly cruising the streets. They see Noel – a crazed street person, a well known abuser of the ambulance system, a regular in the ER. Noel saunters down the street, smashing the windows of parked cars with a baseball bat.

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Tom: ‘I know who t’work over. Him. This guy’s been terrorizing the neighbourhood for weeks. Ever since he got out’o jail. Wreakin’ general havoc. Contributin’ to the bad name o’the place. The term menace to society was made up for him.’ Frank: ‘He’s crazy. He can’t help it.’ Tom: ‘Frank, this is the guy. I’ve been after him for weeks. You start talkin’ to him ‘bout baseball or somethin’ and I’ll sneak around behind him and get down and you push him. When he falls we get him.’ Frank gets out of the ambulance and walks over to Noel. He starts talking to him about the world series. Noel sees Tom sneaking up on him and runs away. Tom pursues Noel. Frank follows. Frank walks cautiously down a dark alley strewn with garbage. He turns the corner. Suddenly a loud yell. There is Tom swinging a baseball bat down onto Noel’s head. Noel throws up his arms to protect his head. Down comes the bat onto Noel’s belly. Tom: ‘Motherfucker’ He lifts the bat for another blow. Frank: ‘Nooooooooo!’ Frank lunges forward. Pushes Tom off Noel. The bat clatters to the pavement. Noel, face covered in blood, begins to seize. Frank crouches over him: ‘Get the kit. We’re going to tube him.’ Tom: ‘What the fuck!’ Frank: ‘Get the kit’ Tom: ‘Frank?’ Frank: ‘You’re going to be all right Noel. We’re going to save you.’ Tom: ‘Frank!’ Frank: ‘Do it Tom. I’ll call for fucking backup. I swear.’ Tom: ‘You call for fuckin’ backup.’ Throws bat to the ground. ‘Fuck you!’ Stalks off. Bloody vomit pours from Noel’s mouth. Frank places his left ear next to Noel’s mouth. No breath. ‘You’re gonna make it, you’re gonna make it.’ His left hand goes to Noel’s nose, pinches it closed. Frank gulps in air, seals his mouth over Noel’s, and breathes. Frank leans back. The alley is quiet, just the sound of Frank taking in another breath. He leans forward again, seals his mouth over Noel’s, blows. Again. Again. Again. Suddenly the camera is positioned looking down from the night sky. We can hear Frank’s slow regular breaths. Slowly the camera pans down over the moonlit fire escape of the tenement. Down past the street lights onto the wet pavement. It tracks across the pavement, picking up the discarded baseball bat in a pool of light. Then Frank’s white shirted-back bent over Noel. The camera stops directly above them, looking down on Frank as he rocks back and forth with each breath. Sudden cut to the exterior of the emergency room (Bringing Out the Dead 2000).

Prior to this scene, the film had documented Frank’s downward spiral into alcoholism and depression, occasioned by a fatal error he made in treating a young female asthmatic. Significantly, the fatal result was due to Frank’s insistence on performing, and then failing to accomplish, a technical airway manoeuvre, intubation, when mouth-to-mouth would have sufficed. This girl’s ghost haunts Frank throughout the film. The scene in which he administers mouth-to-mouth to Noel marks the turning point of the movie and Frank’s ascent back into the realm of the human. Following this episode, Frank stops drinking and stops hallucinating, and begins to sort out his troubled relationship with his new girlfriend. Through the heroic act of performing mouth-to-mouth on Noel,

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Frank by conquering disgust, by exposing himself to danger, sacrifices himself, performing a kind of penance and receiving absolution for his failure to provide the “kiss-of-life” to the dying asthmatic. Through an act of transgression he is saved. He is both priest and sacrifice, redeemer and redeemed.19 Why do we resuscitate? Why try to bring back the dead? Most obviously, because in certain, albeit rare, situations we can. Also, quite obviously, to avoid the pain of lost love and to stave off for a while our own mortality. We act so as to demonstrate that we are capable of acting, as well as being acted upon. We act to somehow redeem the guilt of our own mortality. To prove that we are both human and humane. Humanity! The rescuer, through the good act, becomes the good citizen, working to build the good society. Not only is the life of the individual victim saved; but, even if not saved, life in general is valorised as a social good. The rescuer proves (in both senses of the word) his humanity. This was as true for the Humane Society in the eighteenth century as it is today: Tis thine, when vital breath seems fled, To see the awful confines of the dead; Drag the pale victim from the whelming wave, And snatch the body from the floating grave; To breathe in the life re-animating fire, Till warm’d to second life the drown’d respire. Hark! as those lips once more begin to move, What sounds ascend of gratitude and love! Now with the GREAT REDEEMER’S praise they glow, They bless the agent of his pow’r below; New sprung to life, the renovated band, Joyful before their second Saviour’s stand; And oh, far sweeter than the breathing spring’ Fairer than Paradise, the wreaths they bring! The blissful homage rescued friends impart; Th’enraptured incense of a parent’s heart; O’eraw’d and wond’ring at themselves they see And feel the pow’r of soft HUMANITY! – Pratt’ (Hawes 1797, 1).

The conquering of disgust and the dangers of contagion, disease and death, that is, the risking of the integrity of the self, both in physical and metaphysical terms, is the price paid for the valorisation of both life and culture. The heroic use of resuscitative protocols in general, and mouth-to-mouth in particular, is not only proof of the value we place on life and culture, but is necessary for their very survival.

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Without life, culture would be impossible, as the vehicles for it – individual living humans – would cease to exist. The necessity of the social bond, the value we place upon life, and our love of humanity will, supposedly, sweep aside all the fears I have so tediously outlined. And I do not discount that such altruism and philanthropy are real, powerful and necessary forces. They operate quite openly and laudably in the actions of rescuers, be they eighteenth-century Thames watermen or twenty-first century CPR providers. The Humane Society and the American Heart Association are the institutional instantiations of that necessary and praiseworthy goal. There is another answer to the question of whether resuscitation is worth it. It is true that only a few will be resuscitated. But we must also acknowledge a greater truth: the effort of resuscitation is ennobling. . . . As Peter Safar eloquently wrote about resuscitation, ‘Its moral impact and the commitment it represents may have a much broader influence in a world where life has too often been regarded as cheap.’ Resuscitation is the ultimate life-affirming act. ‘Medicine imposes compassion, reason and decency on a random universe,’ says Safar (Eisenberg 1997, 293).

However, our impetus to CPR is not merely about restoring life to the apparently dead. Beneath that altruism, lies our fear of the dead and an intuition of dying as an active process that requires the participation of those ranged round the deathbed. Sudden death in modern Western culture (and it can be argued in many other cultures) issues an imperative to action. If something can be done, it should be done. And that which should be done is, more often than not, a form of ritual murder. Paradoxically, the dehumanising violence CPR perpetrates upon the dying body, transforming it into a corpse; helps to construct in the community and in the imaginary, what it destroys in the individual and in the real – that is, “Humanity.” The fantasy of rescue is also the fantasy of sacrifice; they are the two sides of a single coin. It is death that makes redemption necessary, and it is sacrifice that makes redemption possible. Murder, Redemption and Myth Mouth-to-mouth’s strength within CPR-as-a-medical-protocol is based on the strength of positivist science in contemporary culture, and mouth-to-mouth’s efficacy within that frame of reference. Mouth-to-mouth’s strength within CPR-as-a-deathbed-ritual is based on the very fears it both embodies and surmounts. CPR as a deathbed ritual attempts to counter the dangers that surround the deathbed, by the performance of a series of acts. Externalcardiac-compression: the act of violence, necessary for the identi-

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fication and translation of the dead, is for the survivor, both an act of murder and of catharsis. Both the guilt of the murderer and the joy of survivor must be atoned for. Mouth-to-mouth, precisely because of its transgressive nature, hedged in with danger and impurity, is the sacrificial act that atones for the necessary but forbidden deed. The rescuer’s soul made impure by the violence called forth by death is, by braving impurity, made pure again. The murderer and the hero are one and the same. If we are forced to operate in a positivist world where there is no God, no longer able to save ourselves through faith and prayer; then salvation is only possible through action. CPR, and in particular mouth-to-mouth, is, both in spite of and because of the taboos that surround it, one act towards this redemption. Does CPR “work”? Yes it does. It does save lives. But it does so only in very specific situations. It works well, for those things that it works well for (e.g. mouth-to-mouth for respiratory arrest and defibrillation for ventricular fibrillation). However, it has nowhere near the success rate that is commonly assumed. CPR’s success over the last forty years has been less in the number of lives saved on the street than in its ubiquity on the television screen. So why has CPR become such a powerful force in medical practice, in public imagination and in popular representation? I have argued that it is because CPR, in addition to being a medical protocol, is also a form of deathbed ritual. If this is the case, and CPR is as much performance as act, then CPR’s colonisation of the media should come as small surprise.

Media Only the Good Die Young It is with deliberate intent that I have salted this article with resuscitative scenarios stolen from film and television. Television is credited by the majority of the population (92%) as being their primary source of information about CPR (Schonwetter 1993, 295). Similar claims are made about television and death: “Terminal illness – is for many people no longer part of everyday life. Therefore, images in the media strongly shape the public’s belief about medicine, illness, and death” (Diem 1996, 1581). Television not only opens CPR to the public gaze, but leaves it open to manipulation and distortion, even falsification. Most researchers and practitioners agree that popular imagination, led astray by media misrepresentation, has invested CPR with powers of resurrection well beyond its capacities and claims (Diem 1996, 1581; Gordon 1998, 780; Mead 1995, 39; Timmermans 1999, 4). Survival rates in

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a number of popular American medical dramas of the mid-90s were calculated as 75% short term, and 67% long term.20 As stated previously, most large US centres report long term survival rates of 2.9 to 5.2% (Lombardi 1994, 676; Stiell et al. 1999b, 1175). The main reason for this wide discrepancy is not a barefaced lie: but a bias in patient selection (Markert 1996, 1605). On television, 65% of the cardiac arrests occur in children, teenagers or young adults; as opposed to a figure of around 6% in real life (Gordon 1998, 780). On television, 72% of arrests are due to some form of trauma: gunshot wounds, motor vehicle accidents, or near drowning, which are “diseases” of the young and healthy. Only 28% are due to primary cardiac causes. In real life, 75% to 95% of arrests are due to primary cardiac disease – a disease of the elderly (Diem 1996, 1578). In both real life and on television, the young and traumatised are much more likely to survive than the old and (literally) heartsick. Whereas the survival rate for elderly cardiac patients resuscitated in the intensive care unit (ICU) is around 15%, the survival rate for young adults undergoing resuscitation from trauma is as high as 70% (Markert 1996, 1605).21 Thus, admitting the patient selection bias, the survival rates portrayed on television are not, in fact, unreasonable. Granted, this bias is hidden from the viewer and thus invites optimistic misinterpretation of survival rates, but we must be careful in ascribing this deception solely to the denial of death. Though denial undoubtedly figures hugely, this sleight of hand produced by patient bias is as much in service to youth and a particular form of death – a particularly dramatic form of death. One should remember, this is entertainment: On ER, we often present cases of trauma, in which CPR is required because of high dramatic impact. These episodes are fast-paced and visually exciting. If we were to reenact a minute-by-minute account of actual events in the emergency department,22 we would not have 35 million viewers each week. Real life in an emergency room is often quiet, even boring; a television drama cannot be (Baer 1996, 1604).

There is seldom an episode in these medical dramas in which there is not: a) a resuscitation and b) a death. And, when I say seldom, I mean (almost) never. In these medical dramas, the plot and the main characters often seem to be no more than continuity devices, stitching together an hour of resuscitation and death. Unlike the traditional tragic drama, there is no beginning, middle and end: no hamartia, anagnorisis and peripeteia. No agon and denouement. No foreplay and cigarette following, only a rippling succession of climaxes.

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It is argued that the unrealistic survival rates of resuscitation on television are a manifestation of our culture’s denial of death, and that the false optimism generated by television supports the continued (mis)use of CPR on the streets (Diem 1996, 1578; Timmermans 1999, 4–5, 77). Though this is not incorrect, there is, as with CPR itself, another side to this coin. Optimistic media hyperbole has as much to do with parading death across the television screen, as it does with the restoration of life on the street. Though television’s survival statistics give false hope, they do so in the service of a kind of morbid voyeurism (the term is not necessarily pejorative). Paradoxically, it is the rosy survival stats that make the ubiquity of the deathbed on television possible. Patients in these television dramas do die, and frequently. It is important that they die, for the makers of these shows know that a dramatic death is as important as an heroic “save.” In fact, rather more so, as it sells more soap.23 The fact that, in relative terms, death is the exception, rather than the rule, serves to increase the absolute frequency of its portrayal and to underscore its dramatic impact. Less is more. It is via television that the lay public experiences the deathbed. Fifty or sixty years ago, one could not avoid being present at the moment of death. Most adults would have attended the deaths of siblings, grandparents, parents and friends. Today it is the rare forty year old that has stood close enough to touch a body one minute alive, the next dead. Though death may no longer be (literally and figuratively) at hand, it has not disappeared from view. An investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice revealed that, by the age of eighteen, the average American has seen forty thousand screen deaths (Campbell 1999, 7). Though most of these are the cartoon-like violence of shoot-em-up gangster and horror movies, an increasing number are “serious” portrayals in medical dramas, reality television, soap operas and documentaries. “Television has been, perhaps, the most significant medium for presenting issues of death to an extremely large number of viewers, as both fictional and factual material has reached millions of people’s homes” (Davies 1997, 57). The line between reality and fiction has become increasingly blurred in twenty-first century media. We have “reality” television – Rescue 911, Trauma, Operation – where real life ambulance calls, emergency room resuscitations and surgical operations are broadcast as “entertainment.” We also have the obsessive technical accuracy of medical dramas – ER, Casualty, Scrubs – in which the scripts are written by practicing physicians, the actors trained in the skills of doctors and the progress of “patients” determined by studio-based morbidity and mortality rounds (Morocco 2001). The

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genres draw nearer and nearer to each other, occasionally crossing the line. Medical dramas currently exercise such a high degree of technical accuracy, that episodes of them are used to instruct healthcare personnel in resuscitative techniques (Hotz 2001; Mercier 2001). The real and the represented are consciously confounded by writers and directors in a process that replaces dramatic verisimilitude with instrumental accuracy. This confounding of representation and reality is further complicated in the case of CPR by its position at the deathbed. If all deathbed acts are, as I argue, ritual, then all are performance, and thus a form of representation before they have even been fictionalised and broadcasted. The fact that CPR on television may be a form of representation twice removed from the effects of flesh pressed against flesh brings us to the thorny problem of pornography. Geoffrey Gorer, in his classic 1955 study The Pornography of Death, argued that because death was hidden away by modern society, our thwarted fascination with it emerged in the portrayal of violent death on film. Gorer stated that pornography required two things: repression and a medium for the return of the repressed. That is, what is repressed in real life has a tendency to return in representation. Gorer’s chief criticism of the representation of death in film was that its violence and lack of concomitant emotional content blunted the viewers’ sensitivities to interpersonal violence in the real world (Gorer 1955, 52–53). Similarly, it might be argued that at the end of the twentieth century, television parades death because real life no longer does. The producers of medical dramas are acutely aware that the public feels excluded from medicine, particularly from the deathbed. The television audience is eager to see what lies beyond the curtain. In satisfying this curiosity, television is responding to market forces, filling a gap created by the medicalisation of death, a specialisation inherent in the construction of the modern. That one might view this as pornography is not unreasonable. That one then sees it as necessarily a bad thing because pornographic is perhaps more controversial today than it was in the mid-1950s. Pornography no longer is what it once was. Film, gender, feminist and queer theory have altered our views on pornography over the half-century since Gorer made his observations (Dworkin 1981; Kipnis 1998, 155; Mackinnon 1993; Mulvey 1975, 18). One might argue that death has followed much the same course as the sexually explicit. Death, like the sex act, has become less pornographic, precisely because of pornography; what was once hidden is now broadcast. But, one might argue, death has become, like the sex act, if less pornographic, then more obscene. Where the pornographic is a transgression of internalised norms, the obscene

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is a transgression of the boundary between the private and the public (Gorer 1955, 49–53). Some would say that, in the twentyfirst century, sex and death are acted out only too explicitly on the television screens of the nation. What should be private is made public. What requires proximity is seen at a distance. What should be experienced in its enactment is simulated in representation. We bemoan our inability to get our hands on sex and death; while at the same time, are unable to take our eyes off either. The postmodern argument countering the above would be that in a world where the medium is the message, the relation between representation and reality is no longer one of crude mimesis. Representation is not merely a mediated, second-order reiteration of the physical world, but one in which the world is as validly experienced through the media as through phenomena. ER, the show, and the ER in a hospital are equally valid manifestations (albeit in different registers) of a world that is now recognised as being as much mediated as it is real. It has been argued that our participation in events via the media is more than mere spectatorship – as the experience of the televised destruction of the World Trade Center (perhaps) demonstrates. The relationship between media and behaviour is complex. A direct correlation is hard to prove, for audiences do differentiate between fact and fiction. Denying the audience’s ability to separate reality from representation undermines the very possibility of there being such a thing as representation. On the other hand, asserting that culture, especially in a form as omnipresent and powerful as television, has no impact on attitudes and behaviour is naïve in the extreme. Consistent, repeated portrayals of objects or acts in a certain manner do influence cultural norms. The very concept of culture would have little meaning if it did not. It is difficult to argue that the portrayal of the dying process in the media does not have a profound effect on our expectations of death and in our eventual experience of it. People’s deepest fears and hopes projected onto the television screen are re-imbibed in the seductive accuracy of the medical drama. To take a stance at one extreme, that the (mis)representation of dying is completely responsible for the (unsatisfactory) nature of death in our society, or at the other, that it is completely irrelevant to it, is to miss out on the complexity of this important intersection of biological and cultural phenomena. It is this complexity which gives rise to a number of complications. Complications CPR on the street and on the screen, with its postmodern elision of reality and representation, is not without certain complications.

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The conflation of real-life action with its representation becomes especially fraught when we add to it the ambivalences of a therapeutic act governed by a protocol that is also a ritual – an act that is also a performance. The celebration of protocol and ritual bestows a great deal of power on CPR, both as act on the street and performance on screen. However, in attempting to fulfil the physical, psychological and symbolic needs of victim, survivor, participant and spectator, CPR discloses internal tensions compromising the goals of protocol, ritual, act and performance. On the one hand, the technical demands of CPR-as-a-protocol may overshadow the psychological and spiritual needs of the dying patient and their family – e.g., the problem of the medicalisation of death with its exclusion of the family from the deathbed. On the other hand, CPR-as-a-ritual, in fulfilling those psychological and spiritual needs, may hinder therapeutic advance – e.g., the problem of the retention of chest compression despite lack of scientific evidence. The third problem is that, once the protocol-as-ritual enters the realm of representation, aesthetic considerations may overshadow both the physical and psychological needs of the dying patient, in favour of the needs of representation – thus we have the distortions of TV CPR. These feedback into the medical system through public expectation, resulting in pressure for CPR to be applied as a universal response to death regardless of its medical appropriateness in the individual case. Confusions arise as to what is empirically causative, what is psychologically desirable, what is symbolically communicable, what is socially acceptable. Which should take priority? By what means? To what end? Within the medical profession, there is a great deal of ambivalence about the optimistic media portrayals of resuscitation. On the one hand, patients (or, more correctly in the case of CPR, patients’ families) demand unrealisable results based on false expectations; on the other hand, staff as well as families are appalled at the indignity of an overly aggressive medical technology. Diem cautions that the misrepresentation of CPR on television may lead patients into making unwise choices about resuscitation, and makes a plea to the producers of television programmes to “recognize a civic responsibility to be more accurate” (Diem 1996, 1581). Presumably, the result of a more realistic portrayal would be more sensible expectations on the part of the public, a decrease in futile resuscitative efforts, and more death-with-dignity. This is unlikely to happen. As Diem points out, the overriding needs of entertainment stand in the way. But there are other reasons why the contemporary deathbed, either in real life or on television, is unlikely to be rationalised. I would maintain that CPR is less a prescriptive medical technique picked up by television to add colour and excite-

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ment to drama (though it is that), than the heroic drama itself, with television and film the means of its broadcast. There is the argument that, though it may not be possible to relinquish the heroic drama of CPR, it may be possible to improve the resuscitation ritual by dulling “its sharp edges.” The possibilitythat a simple medical technique might reverse the dying process – like a deus ex machina, which restores order at the end of a Greek play – is too powerful a cultural image to relinquish. Because of the mythical quality of CPR, many deaths will continue to be framed by unnecessary resuscitative attempts. If we let go of the idea that CPR is primarily about saving lives, however, we will find ways to improve the resuscitation ritual. . . . If CPR is here to stay, the way to dull its sharp edges is to turn the procedure into a community-centred event that might ease the transition from life to death, making the needs of relatives and friends the central concern . . . a dignified and compassionate sudden death implies that the possibility of death is made explicit, treatment choices are reached with all parties involved, the dying person’s wishes are honored. and relatives and friends are included in the last moments, if not as care-providers, then at least as witnesses (Timmermans 1999, 192).

However, dulling the sharp edges of CPR by removing its violent and dehumanising content, guts it of its symbolic import. The sharp edges are the point. Without them CPR reverts to the deathwith-dignity paradigm – a simulacrum of sleep supported by therapeutic discourse – not an invalid paradigm, but, as this paper has intimated, not a universally effective one either. It would be nice if death were all sweetness and light, if there was no mess, anger, guilt or fear. It would be nice if therapeutic discourse could do away with the need for ritual catharsis. But that does not appear to be the case. As much as one would like to see the rationalisation of the deathbed, I find that difficult to square with what I believe I have found – that, to a large extent, it is the commission of category mistakes that allows us to deal with death. CPR necessarily confounds screen and street, representation and reality, ritual and protocol because to recognise and then realise death, it must be brought from nature into culture. This work of translation from nature into culture is accomplished through the elision of reality and representation in the concelebration of protocol and ritual. This confounding of protocol and ritual, reality and representation, life and death is a violation of those categories, and violence is a necessary part of that necessary violation. A Good Death At the level of practice, few actually advocate beating the elderly to death in fruitless attempts to revive the unrevivable. The growth of

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hospices, the specialty of palliative care, advance directives, living wills, durable powers of attorney, health-care proxies, do-notresuscitate (DNR) orders, the tailoring of resuscitative efforts to chances of survival, and increased support for families are moves towards humanising the dying process by doing away with futile heroics (Porter 1999, 234). Most of these are part and parcel of good clinical judgement, and are supported by the death-with-dignity movement, the social sciences and medical practitioners. This point of view has been taken up even in that bastion of resuscitation, the AHA. In its Guidelines 2000 (Cummins 2001, 109), it is recognised that pursuing life at all costs is not desirable or even possible. This applies both at the societal level of healthcare balance sheets and on the personal level where suffering, autonomy and dignity are the currency (Bonnin 1993, 1460). Most physicians agree wholeheartedly with recommendations for a rationalisation of the deathbed. We are tired of “beating a dead horse.” The imperative to “do everything” is not entirely welcome. We resent what we see as undue pressure to waste time and resources on the unsalvageable. We dislike being coerced into betraying our own cult of rationality by practicing “futile heroics.” Medicine’s connivance at the deceit necessary for the practice of (what some would term) magic lays heavily on the medical conscience. Much of the literature that recognises the ritualisation of resuscitative protocols, also deplores it. There is a tendency to paint CPR as intrinsically “bad,” and the death-with-dignity as intrinsically “good”: the former “unnatural,” the latter “natural.” Efforts are directed at limiting the former in favour of the latter. Both medicine and the social sciences agree that people’s deaths should be made as comfortable and dignified as possible. I do not wish to downplay the importance of dignity in the dying process, but dignity is not all that death entails. What this paper should make clear, if anything, is that the dying process is not a simple calculus of comfort determined entirely by the logical dictates of reason. It is unlikely that education or even legislation will effortlessly rationalise the deathbed (not that the attempt should not be made). Curbs on CPR, the use of advance directives or living wills, and any number of eminently well-intentioned attempts to rationalise the deathbed have all run into problems in their actual realisation (Timmermans 1999, 23, 142).25 Again, this is not to say that a rationalisation of approach should not be attempted, but that we should not be surprised at its limitations. Despite the very good reasons for limiting resuscitative protocols, CPR, in some form or another, is unlikely to disappear. Largely, because if it were, we would be left standing at the bedside with little in the way of meaningful perimortem ritual. The offered alternative – action based on strict

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statistical analysis of empirical effect, supported by therapeutic discourse, i.e., the death-with-dignity, seems weak beer indeed. In fact, though not openly articulated, our dissatisfaction with that particular rational, modernist approach to the deathbed must be seen as contributing to the persistence of CPR. The automatic equation of a “good” death with a death-withdignity and a “bad” death with the resuscitative protocol is, I believe, currently being called into question. Television in general and medical dramas in particular are central to this shift. The shouted orders and pumping arms of the paramedic as the ambulance hurtles, lights flashing through darkened streets, coupled with shots of the body convulsed by electrical shocks and the glowing flatline on the cardiac monitor – stand as a signifier of contemporary death. This image embraces the individualism of the modern hero, the bright machinery of a technologically entranced culture, and the tensions present within a society that puts both guns on the streets and paramedics in ambulances. The striking success of CPR over the last forty years has been not so much in the improvement of its clinical efficacy as in its instantiation as a cultural icon which represents, if not a good death, then at least an expected one. Though most people express the desire for a quiet, pain free, dignified death, most also find comfort in the positivist ideal of redemption through action. Though most still fantasise a death-with-dignity, the desires of the public reflected in televised fantasy show less concern for that dignity than for a chance to utter the words of self-absolution, “I did all I could.” However, in order to do, one must “be there.”

Being There “Where were you when he died?” The precise geographical location will of course vary, but I can guess, on the basis of statistics, that with few exceptions whether it was the death of JFK or the death of your father, you were on the other side – the other side of the glass of the television screen or the other side of the doors of an ER or ICU. The invasive and violent nature of the medical procedures involved in resuscitation – IVs, catheters, ET tubes, electric shocks, the pummelling and invasion of the body – are considered too traumatic for the layperson. The standard medical line has been, “You don’t want to remember them that way.” Spectators get in the way, carry on hysterically, give you two patients to treat instead of one. There is also the concern over litigation. The ordered chaos that is resuscitation might be misconstrued as error, not to

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mention that real mistakes would be open to public scrutiny. It seemed better to keep the public and the family on the other side of the door. But this is all changing. There is a hesitant, but significant, move on the part of emergency department staff to allow family into the resuscitation room while the resuscitation is in progress (Barratt 1998, 109; Doyle 1987, 673; Eichhorn 1996, 59; Goldman 1988, 148; Hanson 1992, 105; Timmermans 1997, 153). This movement of the family towards the deathbed has actually been going on quietly and informally for at least fifteen years, but has accelerated enormously over the last five, and now has become formalised in the AHA’s Guidelines 2000. A growing number of hospitals and institutions, most often following a local ‘grassroots effort’ by emergency and critical care nurses, have started programs to ask family members whether they wish to be in the same room with the patient during the resuscitation attempts. Accompanied by a calm, experienced social worker or nurse, families can view the professional efforts made by medical personnel attempting to save their loved one. Afterward they rarely ask the recurring question that so often accompanies an unsuccessful resuscitation attempt: Was everything done? Retrospective reports on these efforts note positive reactions from family members, many of whom said they felt a sense of having helped their loved one and of easing their own grieving process. When surveyed before they had observed resuscitative efforts and a loved one’s death, the majority of family members stated a preference for being present during attempted resuscitation. This has been confirmed in several studies in the United States and the United Kingdom (American 2000, I.12).

What may prove to be the most significant change in resuscitative protocols at the end of the twentieth century, may not be the use of AEDs, the demotion of external-cardiac-compression, or the repression of mouth-to-mouth; but the admittance of the family onto the stage. Timmermans nicely summarises the importance of this move: Family attendance situates the patient in a social network. It transforms an anonymous body into an identifiable person. The presence of relatives and friends who care deeply about the outcome restores humanity, compassion, and dignity to the dying process. . . . Presence during resuscitation provides relatives with a sense of control. Resuscitating is about doing something in the face of death, and relatives can do something when they whisper farewells or encouragement to their loved ones, hold the body, stroke the head, or contribute to the decision to continue or stop. In most cases the resuscitative effort offers them precious time to prepare and realize the inevitable. In these situations sudden death has become dignified, not in spite of, but because of, resuscitative efforts (1999, 202–3).

Exclusion of the survivors uncouples the act of dying from the act of mourning. By relegating the family to the hallway, we exclude the congregation, and without the congregation’s participation, the ritual has little point.

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In a way, this re-incorporation of the spectator can be seen as a necessary consequence of the evolution of the protocol/ritual. For it was the protocol that, to a great extent, spawned the emergency medical system that performs it, and it is now the practitioners in that system – paramedics, nurses and emergency department physicians – who, having taken over the protocol (in practice, if not yet formally, from cardiology), have been forced to recognise the need for family participation. Emergency medicine’s familiarity with the protocol, both its strengths and weaknesses, and its growing confidence as a specialty allows it to open the doors of sudden death to the gaze of the public. It is not only increased confidence that has caused shift in attitude, but a realisation, as yet half recognised, that the ER functions as the contemporary deathbed, and that CPR and other resuscitative protocols are the last rites of the postmodern. The medicalisation of the deathbed is guilty, less of violence than of exclusion. This is now being corrected. This move of the family from the hallway into the resuscitation suite is predicated by the move of CPR from the hospital out to the streets, and from streets onto the television screen. The “exploitation” of death by the media has, I would maintain, been crucial to the re-incorporation of the spectator into the death drama. Though a myriad of other social forces are involved, the man and woman on the street have followed the steadicam through the doors of ER to take their places in the ER. Conclusion What then does CPR amount to? A medical protocol that justifies itself in the language of science, yet whose effect is more in the realm of the symbolic than in the physical. A protocol performed more often and more effectively on the TV screen than on the streets. A protocol that, at least initially, participated in the medicalisation of death, moving it out of the home into the hospital; moving it out of the hands of the family and into the hands of strangers. And a protocol that stands accused of robbing the individual of dignity in the process of dying. On the other hand, CPR, through its lights and beeps, and sparking discharges, provides tangible evidence that there is such a thing as “life” and that life has value. Furthermore, it is the means by which the layman is allowed to participate in the death drama, preserving within it certain primitive mechanisms for helping him deal with the dangers surrounding the deathbed. It provides an arena for heroic action in a society in which those opportunities have become increasingly rare. It allows the rescuer to demonstrate

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his or her humanity towards, or even love for, the victim. It allows the rescuer through the good act to become the good man or woman helping to build the good society. For that society, it provides an imagined model for death, which may be represented and reproduced for the consumption of all. CPR, through shows such as ER and Casualty, has become a valid and valued mode of death. When, in real life, the physician exits the doors of the resuscitation room to confront the family with death, the script has, to a large extent, already been written. When he repeats the handy postmortem anodyne of “We did all we could,” the family, nurtured by images in the media, nods its head in sad understanding. Death is a complex problem, perhaps insoluble at social, psychological and philosophical levels, but this does not mean that some form of resolution is not possible for the individual man, woman or child, in the here and now, at the place and time of death. Though it may be impossible to comprehend death, its apprehension is possible – through its enactment. Whether it is in the subdued glow of the hospice bedroom or the bright lights of the ER, it is difficult to mourn the death that you yourself did not participate in. For that, you must be there.

Notes 1 Poster advertising Bringing Out the Dead, a 1999 movie directed by Martin Scorcese, starring Nicholas Cage. 2 The term “emergency room” or “ER” is not well-favoured within medicine. The preferred term is “emergency department” or “ED.” There are also the terms “emergency ward”, “casualty”, and “accident and emergency” or “A & E.” I have no intention of entering this debate. I use the term “emergency room” or “ER” because that is the term most frequently used by the public. 3 Ventricular fibrillation is a state in which the electrical conduction system of the heart becomes disorganized. The heart no longer beats in a coordinated fashion, but its separate muscle bundles contract randomly. No blood is circulated, and it is fatal unless quickly reversed. Its most common cause is myocardial infarction as a result of coronary artery disease – in layman’s terms a “heart attack”. Today, it accounts for 40 to 50% of sudden death (Neumar 1998, 49). Defibrillation, i.e., electrical shock, reverses fibrillation by depolarising the conducting system of the heart, so that all nerve and muscle cells are in identical electrical states ready to resume coordinated activity. 4 This great range in survival rates between different centres continues to be the focus of enormous controversy. 5 This, in turn, was probably based on Réne-Antoine Ferchault de Réamur’s, Avis pour donner du secours a ceus l’on croit noyez (Notice In Order to Give Help to Those Believed to Be Drowned) published in 1740, which has fair claim to being the first modern resuscitative protocol (Réamur 1990). In this, the recommended form of artificial ventilation was with bellows.

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6 The term in general use in the English literature at the end of the eighteenth century for Priestley’s “dephlogisticated air” and Lavoisier’s “oxygene”, what we now call oxygen. 7 Carbon dioxide. 8 There have been anecdotal reports of mouth-to-mouth transmitting Helibacter pylori, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, meningococcus, herpes simplex, shigella, streptococcus, and salmonella (Becker 1997, 2102). These are all single reports, with the exception of herpes simplex (cold sores) of which there have been three cases. The risk of contracting an infectious disease through mouth-to-mouth is so low as to be almost, albeit not quite, nil. 9 The medals portrayed a young boy blowing on the “torch of life,” and were inscribed “LATEAT SCINTILLA FORSAN” – Perhaps a Spark May Yet Remain. 10 This is an area of enormous controversy and those wishing to sift through the evidence themselves should look up the references in the text plus: Blouin 1999, 517; Bonnin 1993, 1460; Cummins 1991, 960; Cummins 1998, 490; Eisenberg 1979, 30; Eisenberg 1990, 179; Gallagher 1995, 1922; Leung 2000, S38; Litwin 1987, 787; Meyerberg 1984, 1118; Nichol 1999, 517; Saklayen 1995, 163; Schneider 1993, 91; Todd 1999, 730. 11 It is impossible to give a detailed discussion of experimental evidence for and against the effectiveness of external-cardiac-compression. In my opinion the case for significant effect in the clinical arrest situation is extremely weak. Readers wishing to decide for themselves should see the articles referenced in the text plus: Abramson 1998, 110; Ames 1983, 219; Berg 2001, S26; DeVita 2001, 58; Little 1999, S90; Safar 1996, 105; Stiell 1996, 1497. 12 “AEDs are computerized, low-maintenance, user-friendly defibrillators that analyze the victim’s rhythm to determine whether a shockable rhythm is present. When the AED detects a shockable rhythm, it charges, then prompts the rescuer to press a shock button to deliver a shock. These devices are highly accurate . . . and can significantly reduce the time to defibrillation. . . . The widespread effectiveness and demonstrated safety of the AED have made it acceptable for use by nonprofessional responders” (American 2000, I–358). 13 After reviewing the literature, my own opinion is that early defibrillation does indeed increase long-term survival, but to no where near the extent that the profession hopes or the public believes. Again, those interested should consult the references in the text. 14 In more technical terms: the persistence of a technique in the face of an apparent lack of practical efficacy, utilizing a constantly changing theoretical justification for its survival, indicates that its necessary effect is external, rather than internal, to its operative frame of reference. The technique survives, not through the theory changes, but rather through the change in theory; not in spite of, but because of its ability to jump from one theoretical justification to another, from one organ system to the another. It is not unreasonable to assume that any technique, or practical act, employed in such close physical and temporal proximity to death could not help but have thrust upon it the enormous burden of symbol. 15 Though the physician has the authority to declare the patient dead without all the rigmarole of CPR, and he often does so, especially in patients in whom death is for any number of reasons expected or “appro-

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priate”; in the case of “sudden” death, death is usually declared only after the resuscitative protocols have been exhausted. It has been pointed out that stopping too soon might be seen as abandonment and could expose the physician to litigation (Timmermans 1999, 119). 16 The declaration of death, both within and outside of hospital, is most frequently based on clinical criteria as outlined above. The infamous “flatline” on the cardiac monitor, I would include within the CPR protocol, although it is not strictly so. Tests, such as electroencephalograms, brain scans and the like, used to determine “brain death” only come into play in the comparatively infrequent situations of irreversible coma or vegetative state. 17 Timmermans does make some concession to CPR-as-ritual, in that it interrupts the suddenness of sudden death, giving the family time to come to terms with the death. But this is only one part, and I would argue a minor part, of a much more inclusive ritual structure (185–191, 1999). 18 The paramedic protagonist played by Nicholas Cage. 19 The idea of CPR as last rites is made explicit in Peter Bradshaw’s Guardian review of Bringing Out the Dead: “In a faithless world the paramedic is the atheist clergyman of the urban emergency, showing up with a bag like a priest ready to administer the last rites” (Bradshaw 2000, 15). 20 The United States, however, is not the only producer of and market for medical dramas. In the UK the short term success rate of resuscitation in medical dramas was 25%, still out of line with real life rates, but less so than in American television (Gordon 1998, 780; Tunstall 1992, 1347). 21 There is a conflation here of CPR and trauma resuscitation – of ACLS (advanced-cardiac-life-support) and ATLS (advanced-trauma-life-support). ACLS and ATLS are not the same things, though both are resuscitative protocols and there is considerable overlap, especially in the initial ABC stages of each. Although this is apparent to the medical professional, in the public’s imagination the two are usually perceived as one. 22 “An evening of treating ear infections and sprained ankles makes for pretty dull television” (Gibbs 1997, 41–43). 23 For an enormously effective example of this, please see the aforementioned “Hell and Highwater” episode of ER, available on the videotape ER: By Popular Demand (1995). 24 This last problem may be expressed in a slightly different register – once the technical manoeuvre becomes a social phenomenon, social imperatives out weigh individual considerations. The physical and psychological needs of the dying victim are sacrificed to the performance needs of the collective structure, whether it be family, hospital, or the society as a whole. 25 The issue of advance directives is a good example of the difficulties of reconciling the conflicting claims of the deathbed. What seems like a straightforward and reasonable proposition (i.e., that people should be able to stipulate, ahead of time, their wishes as to the level of resuscitative effort they want attempted on them should they be dying) is nowhere as straightforward and involves much less reason than one would think (SUPPORT 1995, 1591). Setting aside the legal problems (which have been resolved in many jurisdictions), and the practical problems of implementation (which, though considerable, are surmountable); what has proven difficult is explaining why, even when patients, families and medical staff are firmly committed to such projects, they falter (Schonwetter 1991, 372; Partridge 1998, 590). Recent studies out of Vancouver indicate that, despite con-

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certed attempts to stop the inappropriate application of CPR, limit the length and violence of its application, and encourage changes in the use of advance directives, in spite of the fact that these goals are validated by staff and patients; in fact, the application and practice of CPR has changed very little (VP 1996). Other studies indicate that many elderly patients continue to opt for CPR. Rates vary from 10% to as high as 90%, with most at around 50%. These patients tend to grossly overestimate their chances of survival following CPR. Once these misconceptions are corrected by providing information about actual survival figures, the number of patients opting for CPR drops, but still remains as high as 40% (Murphy 1994, 545). References Abramson, N. 1998. Brain Resuscitation. Emergency Medicine: Concepts and Clinical Practice. Ed. Peter Rosen. St. Louis: Mosby. 107–119. American Heart Association. 1994. Advanced Cardiac Life Support. Dallas: American Heart Association. American Heart Association. 1992. Guidelines for cardiopulmonary resuscitation and emergency cardiac care. Emergency Cardiac Care Committee and Subcommittees, American Heart Association. JAMA 2171–2298. American Heart Association in collaboration with International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation. 2000. Guidelines 2000 for Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and Emergency Cardiovascular Care: International Consensus on Science. Circulation 102 (suppl I). Ames, A. III., and F. Nesbitt. 1983. Pathophysiology of is chemic cell death. I. Time of onset of irreversible damage: importance of the different components of the ischemic insult. Stroke 14: 219. Angelos, M. G., D. P. Rath, and H. Zhu. 1999. Flow requirements in ventricular fibrillation. Ann Emerg Med 34: 583–588. Ariès, P. [1977] 1991. The Hour of Our Death. tr. H. Weaver. New York: Oxford University Press. Baer, N. 1998. Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation on Television: Exaggerations and Accusations. New England Journal of Medicine 334: 1604– 1605. Bakhtin, M. 1984. Rabelais and His World. trans. H. Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barratt, F., and D. Wallis. 1998. Relatives in the resuscitation room: their point of view. J Accid Emerg Med 15: 109–111. Bataille, G. 1985. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. trans. A. Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Baudrillard, J. 1993. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage. Bauman, Z. 1992. Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge. Becker, L. 1997. A Reappraisal of Mouth-to-Mouth Ventilation During Bystander-Initiated Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation. Circulation 96: 2102–2112. Benson, D. 1961. Recent Advances in Emergency Resuscitation. Maryland State Medical Journal 36 (August): 398–411. Berg, R., L. Cobb, A. Doherty, et al. 2001. Chest Compressions and Basic Life Support-defibrillation. Ann Emerg Med 37(4): S26–S35. Bloch, M. 1992. Prey Into Hunter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blouin, D., and S. Moore. 1999. Time to recurrent ventricular tachycardia or ventricular fibrillation after defibrillation. Ann Emerg Med 34: S17. Boehm, R. 1878. Ueber Wiederbelebung nach Vergiftungen und Asphyxie. Arch Exp Pathol Pharmakol 8: 68.

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Bonnin, M., P. Pepe, K. Kimball, et al. 1993. Distinct criteria for termination of resuscitation in the out-of-hospital setting. JAMA 270: 1457– 1462. Bradshaw, P. 2000. Driven Round the Bend. Guardian Weekly, 13 Jan. Bringing Out the Dead. 2000. Dir. M. Scorcese. 1999. Videocassette. Paramount. Brison, R., J. Davidson, J. Dreyer, et al. 1992. Cardiac arrest in Ontario: Circumstances, community response, role of prehospital defibrillation and predictors of survival. Can Med Assoc J 147: 191–199. Brodie, B. 1865. The Works of Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie. ed. C. Hawkins. Vol. 1. London: Longman, Roberts, & Green. Burwick, F. and P. Douglass. 1992. Introduction to The Crisis in Modernism. ed. F. Burwick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1–11. Bynum, W. F. 1994. Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Campbell, D. 1999. Hollywood braces itself for violent end. Guardian Weekly, June 13. Canguilhem, G. 1991. The Normal and the Pathological. trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett. New York: Zone Books. Cooper, D. 1975. Minireview: Mouth-to-Mouth Resuscitation: Influence of Alcohol on Revival of an Old Technque. Life Sciences 16: 487–500. Committee on CPR. 1966. Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation. JAMA 198: 372–379, 138–145. Cummins, R., M. Eisenberg, A. Hallstrom, and P. Litwin. 1985. Survival of Out-Of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest with Early Initiation of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation. Am J Emerg Med 3: 114–119. Cummins, R., D. Chamberlain, N. Abramson, et al. 1991. Recommended guidelines for uniform reporting of data from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest: the Utstein Style. Circulation 84: 960–975. Cummins, R. 1998. Resuscitations from pulseless electrical activity and asystole: How big a piece of the survivors’ pie? Ann Emerg Med 32: 490–492. Cummins, R. 2001. ACLS Provider Manual. Dallas: American Heart Association. Curry, J. [1792] 1815. Observations on Apparent Death from Drowning. 2d ed. London: E. Cox and Son. Davies, D. 1997. Death, Ritual and Belief. London: Cassell. De Maio, V. J., I. Stiell, G. Wells, et al. 2000. Cardiac arrest witnessed by emergency medical services personnel: Descriptive epidemiology, prodromal symptoms, and predictors of survival. Ann Emerg Med 35: 138– 146. Devita, M. 2001. The Death Watch: Certifying Death Using Cardiac Criteria. Progress in Transplantation 11(1): 58–66. Diem, S., J. Lants, and J. Tulsky. 1996. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation on television – miracles and misinformation. N Engl J Med 334(24): 1578– 1582. Dill, D. 1958. Symposium on Mouth to Mouth Resuscitation. JAMA 167(3): 317–319. Douglas, M. 1966. Purity and Danger: London: Routledge. Doyle, C., H. Post, R. Burney, et al. 1987. Family participation during resuscitation: an option. Ann Emerg Med 16(6): 673–675. Dworkin, A. 1981. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. New York: Perigee.

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Eichhorn. D., T. Meyers, T. Mitchell, et al. 1996. Opening the doors: family presence during resuscitation. J Cardiovasc Nurs 4: 59–70. Eisenberg, M., L. Bergner, and A. Hallstrom. 1979. Paramedic programs and out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, I: factors associated with successful resuscitation. Am J Public Health 69: 30–38. Eisenberg, M., M. Copass, and A. Hallstrom. 1980. Treatment of out-ofhospital cardiac arrest with rapid defibrillation by emergency medical technicians. N Engl J Med 302: 1379–1383. Eisenberg, M. B. Horwood, R. Cummins, et al. 1990. Cardiac arrest and resuscitation: A tale of 29 cities. Ann Emerg Med 19: 179–186. Eisenberg, M. 1997. Life in the Balance. New York: OUP. Elam, J., E. Brown, and J. Elder, Jr. 1954. Artificial respiration by mouthto-mask method. N Engl J Med 250: 749–754. Elias, N. 1985 The loneliness of the dying. tr. E. Jephcott. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Fisher, H. 1944. Resuscitation. In Medical Physics. ed. O. Glasser, 1241– 1254. Chicago: Year Book Publishers. Fothergill, A. 1795. A New Inquiry Into the Suspension of Vital Action in the Cases of Drowning and Suffocation. Bath: S. Hazard. Fothergill, J. 1782. Observations on a case published in the last volume of the Medical Essays. A Complete Collection of the Medical and Philosophical Works of John Fothergill. 1744. ed. J. Elliot. London: Robinson. 110–119. Freud, S. [1930] 1985a. Civilization and Its Discontents. Sigmund Freud: Civilization, Society and Religion. London: Penguin. 245–340. Freud, S. [1913] 1985b. Totem and Taboo. The Origins of Religion. London: Penguin. 43–159. Gallagher, E., G. Lombardi, and P. Gennis. 1995. Effectiveness of Bystander Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and Survival Following Outof-Hospital Cardiac Arrest. JAMA 274(24): 1922–1925. Gibbs, H., and A. Ross. 1997. The Medicine of ER, or, How We Almost Die. London: Flamingo. Goldman, B. 1988. May I Watch? It May Become a More Common Question for MDs. Canadian Medical Association Journal. 148–149. Goodwyn, E. 1788. The Connexion of Life with Respiration. London: J. Johnson. Gordon, A., M. Sadove, and F. Raymon. 1951. Critical survey of manual artificial respiration. JAMA 147: 1444–1453. Gordon, A., C. Frye, and L. Gitelson. 1958. Mouth-to-mouth versus manual artificial respiration for children and adults. JAMA 167: 320–328. Gordon, P., S. Williamson, and P. Lawler. 1998. As seen on TV: observational study of cardiopulmonary resuscitation in British television medical dramas. BMJ 317: 780–783. Gorer, G. 1955. The Pornography of Death. Encounter 5: 49–53. Green, T. 1906. Heart massage as a means of restoration in cases of apparent sudden death. Lancet ii: 1707–1714. Hake, T. 1874. Studies on ether and chloroform from Prof. Schiff’s physiological laboratory. Practitioner 12: 241. Hanson, C., and D. Straser. 1992. Family Presence During Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation: Foote Hospital emergency department’s nine year perspective. J Emerg Nurs 18: 104–106. Hawes, W. 1797. Royal Humane Society: The Annual Report 1796. London: Rivington.

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Hell and Highwater. 1997 ER. dir. C. Chulack. prod. M. Crichton. 1995. Videocassette. Warner Home Video. Hertz, R. 1960. A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death. Death and the Right Hand. ed. R. Needham. New York: Free Press. Homans, P. 1989. The Ability to Mourn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hotz, H. 2001. Interview. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Dec. 15. Humane Society. 1774. The Plan of an Institution for Affording Relief to Persons apparently dead, from Drowning. London: Humane Society. Ibsen, B. 1954. The anaesthetist’s viewpoint on the treatment of respiratory complications in poliomyelitis during the epidemic in Copenhagen, 1952. Proc R Soc Med 47: 72. Illich, I. 1976. The Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis: The Appropriation of Health. London: Penguin. Johns, R., and D. Cooper. 1957. Chemical Corp Medical Laboratory Report No. 761. Edgewood, Md: Army Chemical Center. Johnson, A. 1773. An account of some societies at Amsterdam and Hamburg for the recovery of drowned persons. London. Jude, J., W. Kouwenhoven, and G. Knickerbocker. 1961. Cardiac arrest: Report of application of external cardiac massage on 118 patients. JAMA 178: 1063–1070. Keith, A. 1909. Three Hunterian lectures on the mechanism underlying the various methods of artificial respiration practiced since the foundation of the Royal Humane Society in 1774. Lancet 1: 745–749; 825–828; 895–899. Kellerman, A., B. Hackman, G. Somes, et al. 1993. Impact of First Responder Defibrillation in an Urban Emergency Medical Services System. JAMA 270: 1708–1713. Kipnis, L. 1998. Pornography. The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. ed. J. Hill and P. Gibson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 153–158. Kite, Charles. 1788. An Essay on the Recovery of the Apparently Dead. London: Dilly. Kouwenhoven, W., and D. Hooker. 1933 Resuscitation by countershock. Electrical Engineering 475–477. Kouwenhoven, W., J. Jude, and C. Knickerbocker, 1960. Closed chest cardiac massage. JAMA 173: 1064–1067. Kubler-Ross, E. [1968] 1973. On Death and Dying. London: Tavistock Routledge. Lee, R. 1972. Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation in the Eighteenth Century. Journal of the History of Medicine October: 418–433. Leung, L., and H. Tong. 2000. Prehospital resuscitation of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in Hong Kong. Ann Emerg Med 35: S38. Levi-Strauss, C. [1958] 1963. Structural Anthropology. trans. C. Jakobson and B. G. Schoepf. Vol. I. London: Basic Books. Little, C., and C. Cairns. 1999. Restoration of cerebral blood flow does not restore function after brain ischemia. Ann Emerg Med 34: S90. Litwin, P., M. Eisenberg, A. Hallstrom, et al. 1987. The location of collapse and its effect on survival from cardiac arrest. Ann Emerg Med 16: 787–791. Lombardi, G., and J. Gallagher. 1994. Outcome of Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest in New York City: (PHASE) Study. JAMA 271(9): 678–683.

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Mackinnon, C. 1993. Only Words. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press. Markert, R., and M. Saklayen. 1996. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation on television. N Engl J Med 335: 1605–1607. Mead, G., and C. Turnbull. 1995. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation in the elderly: patient’s and relative’s views. J Med Ethics 21: 39–44. Mercier, T. 2001. Interview. CME Associates. December 12. Morocco, M. 2001. Interview. Warner Brothers Studios. December 19. Mossesso, V., E. Davis, T. Auble, et al. 1998. Use of automated external defibrillators by police officers for treatment of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. Ann Emerg Med 32: 200–207. Mulvey, L.1975. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16: 6–18. Murphy, D., D. Burrows, S. Santilli, et al. The influence of the probability of survival on patient’s preferences regarding cardiopulmonary resuscitation. N Engl J Med 330: 545–549. Neumar, R., and K. Ward. 1998. Cardiopulmonary Arrest. Emergency Medicine: Concepts and Clinical Practice. ed. Peter Rosen. St. Louis: Mosby. 35–60. Nilsson, E. 1951. On treatment of barbiturate poisoning. A modified clinical aspect. Acta Med Scand 253 Suppl: 1–6. Nichol, G., I. Stiell, A. Laupacis, B. Pham, V. DeMaio, and G. Wells. 1999. A Cumulative Meta-analysis of the Effectiveness of Defibrillator Capable Emergency Medical Services for Victims of Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest. Ann Emerg Med 34: 517–525. Olson, D., J. LaRochelle, D. Fark, et al. 1989. EMT-defibrillation: The Wisconsin experience. Ann Emerg Med 18: 806–811. Onians, R. 1951. The Origins of European Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paradis, N., G. Martin, M. Goetting, et al. 1989. Simultaneous Aortic, Jugular Bulb, and Right Atrial Pressures During Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation in Humans. Circulation 80: 361–368. Partridge, R., A. Virk, A. Sayah, et al. 1998. Field experience with prehospital advance directives. Ann Emerg Med 32: 589–593. Pepe, P., N. Abramson, C. Brown, et al. 1994. ACLS – does it really work? Ann Emerg Med 23: 1037–1041. Physician, A. 1747. A Physical Dissertation. London. Porter, R. 1999. The Greatest Benefit to Mankind. London: Fontana. Robiscek, F., and L. Littman. 1983. The first reported case of external heart massage. Clinical Cardiology 6: 569–571. Réaumur, R. [1740] 1990. Notice In Order to Give Help to Those Believed to be Drowned. tr. L. Brown, Los Angeles: Garth Huston Jr. Roth, N. 1980. Electroresuscitation in the 18th century. Medical Instrumentation. 14(1): 60. Rowbottom, M., and C. Susskind. 1984 Electricity and Medicine: History of Their Interaction. San Francisco: San Francisco Press. Royal Humane Society. 1812. Reports. London: Royal Humane Society. Safar, P., L. Escarraga, and J. Elam. 1958. A Comparison of The MouthTo-Mouth and Mouth-To-Airway Methods of Artificial Respiration with the Chest-Pressure Arm-Lift Methods. N Engl J Med 258: 671–677. Safar, P., L. Escarraga, and F. Chang. 1959a. Upper airway obstruction in the unconscious patient. J Appl Physiol 14: 760–764. Safar, P. 1959b. Failure of Manual Artificial Respiration. J Appl Physiol 14: 84–88.

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Safar, P., J. Elam, J. Jude, et al. 1963. Resuscitative principles for sudden cardiopulmonary collapse. Diseases of the Chest 43: 34–49. Safar, P. 1989. History of cardiopulmonary-cerebral resuscitation. Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation. eds. W. Kaye and N. Bircher, New York: Churchill Livingston. 1–53. Safar, P., F. Xiao, A. Radovsky, et al. 1996. Improved cerebral resuscitation from cardiac arrest with mild hypothermia plus blood flow promotion in dogs. Stroke 27: 105–113. Saklayen, M., H. Liss, et al. 1995. In-hospital cardiopulmonary resuscitation: Survival in one hospital and literature review. Medicine 74: 163–175. Saunders, C. 1990. Beyond the Horizon. London: Dartman, Longman & Todd. Schecter, D. 1983. Exploring the Origins of Electrical Cardiac Stimulation. Minneapolis: Medtronic. Schneider, A., D. Nelson, and D. Brown. 1993. In-hospital cardiopulmonary resuscitation: a 30-year review. J Am Board Fam Pract 6: 91–101. Schonwetter, R., T. Teasdale, G. Taffet, et al. 1991. Educating the elderly: cardiopulmonary resuscitation decisions before and after intervention. J Am Geriatr Soc 39: 372–377. Schonwetter, R. T., R. Walker, D. Kramer, et al. 1993. Resuscitation decision making in the elderly: the value of outcome data. J Gen Intern Med 8: 295–300. Smith, W. 1894. Religion of the Semites. London: Adam and Charles Black. Stiell, I., P. Hebert, G. Wells, et al. 1996. The Ontario trial of active compression-decompression cardiopulmonary resuscitation for in-hospital and prehospital cardiac arrest. JAMA 275: 1417–1423. Stiell, I., G. Wells, V. DeMaio, D. Spaite, B. Field, D. Munkley, M. Lyver, L. Luinstra, and R. Ward. 1999a. Modifiable Factors Associated with Improved Cardiac Arrest Survival in A Multicenter Basic Life Support/ Defibrillation System: OPALS Study Phase I Results. Ann Emerg Med 33: 44–50. Stiell, I., G. Wells, B. Field, et al. 1999b. Improved Out-Of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest Survival Through the Inexpensive Optimization of an Existing Defibrillation Program: OPALS Study Phase II. JAMA 281: 1175–1181. Seale, C. 1998. Constructing Death: The Sociology of Dying and Bereavement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stephenson, H., L. Reid, and J. Hinton. 1953. Some common denominators in 1200 cases of cardiac arrest. Ann Surg 137: 731–744. Stults, K., D. Brown, V. Schlug, et al. 1984. Prehospital defibrillation performed by emergency medical technicians in rural communities. NEJM 310: 219–223. SUPPORT Principal Investigators. 1995. A controlled trial to improve care for seriously ill hospitalized patients: the study to understand prognosis and preferences for outcomes and risks of treatments. JAMA 274: 1591–1598. Sweeney, T., J. Runge, M. Gibbs, et al. 1998. EMT defibrillation does not increase survival from sudden death in a two-tiered urban-suburban EMS system. Ann Emerg Med 31: 234–240. Tercier, J. 2002. From Aer to Air: The Kiss of Life. Critical Quarterly 44: 1–24. Timmermans, S. 1997. High touch in high tech: the presence of relatives and friends during resuscitative efforts. Sch Inq Nurs Pract 11(2): 153– 168.

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Timmermans, S. 1999. Sudden Death and the Myth of CPR. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Todd, K., S. Heron, M. Thompson, et al. 1999. Simple CPR: A randomized, controlled trial of video self-instructional cardiopulmonary resuscitation training in an African American church congregation. Ann Emerg Med 34: 730–737. Tossach, W. [1745] 1752. A Man Dead in Appearance, Recovered by Distending the Lungs with Air. Medical Essays and Observations. 4th ed. Edinburgh: Hamilton, Balfour & Neil. 108–111. Tunstall-Pedoe, H., L. Bailey, D. Chamberlain, et al. 1992. Survey of 3765 cardiopulmonary resuscitations in British hospitals (the BRESUS study): methods and overall results. BMJ 304: 1347–1351. Turner, C. 2000. The Disgusting. Ph.D. diss. University of London. Van Gennep, A. 1960. The Rites of Passage. trans. M. Vizedom & G. Caffee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. VP Medical Affairs. 1996. Policy/Guidelines on Resuscitative Interventions. Vancouver Hospital and Health Science Centre. Vukov, L., R. White, J. Bachman, et al. 1988. New perspectives on rural EMT defibrillation. Ann Emerg Med 17: 318–321. Walter, T. 1994. The Revival of Death. London: Routledge. Waters, R. 1943. Simple methods for performing artificial respiration. JAMA 123: 559–561.

The Survivors: My Last Sixty-Six Long-Playing Records – For Ray Smith and Bob Glass COLIN RICHMOND 1 Woody Herman: The Thundering Herds 1945–1947 CBS 66378 a three-disc boxed set with booklet. Does big band music get any better than this: I doubt it. Bought secondhand at Ray’s Jazz Record Shop sometime in the 1970s or 1980s for £10 according to Ray’s label stuck on the top left-hand corner of the box. I have kept the booklet. 2 Otis Spann: Blues Roots vol 3 recorded in Copenhagen 16 October 1963 Storyville SLP 4041 Poljazz PSJ 242. The second number is the relevant one as this was bought with other Blues Roots records in Warsaw in 1991 absurdly cheaply: the stick-on label on this one reads 12750 zl. 3 The Amazing Bud Powell vol 1 recorded 14 August 1963. No need to say more about a session which included Un Poco Loco. 4 Bird at St Nick’s: Charlie Parker alto Red Rodney trumpet A1 Haig piano Tommy Potter bass Roy Haynes drums recorded 18 February 1950 Carrere Records JWS 500 and according to Jimmy Knepper writing the sleeve note: a difficult album for some to listen to. Which includes me. I heard Jimmy Knepper at the Bridge St Arts Centre Newcastle one night playing with Bobby Wellins. 5 Dave Brubeck Trio featuring Cal Tjader Vogue Records 113–115 Fulham Rd London SW3 Vocalion LAE-F 581 recorded by Fantasy Records San Francisco late 1949-early 1950. This was picked up secondhand at Cassady Records in Pottergate York in the early Twenty Years of the Journal of Historical Sociology: Challenging the Field Volume 2 Edited by Yoke-Sum Wong and Derek Sayer © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-17934-8

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1990s. Four of the numbers [Blue Moon Tea For Two Undecided That Old Black Magic] were very old friends by then as Margaret Misegades of Washington DC had sent me an EP of the trio’s recordings back in 1956. I still have the cover Fantasy EP-4001 with pictures of Brubeck piano Cal Tjader drums bongos and vibes and Ron Crotty bass on the back-cover. The record itself was of a startling crimson vinyl. 6 Chet Baker sings and plays from the film Let’s Get Lost recorded 1989 is mainly notable for the pictures on the front and back of the sleeve for which it was bought secondhand in York in the early nineties and with Thomas [then playing cornet] in mind. 7 The Musings of Miles: Miles Davis trumpet Red Garland piano Oscar Pettiford bass Philly Joe Jones drums a Prestige LP reissued by Bernhard Mikulski Schallplatten-Vertriebs-GmbH Limburger Strasse 18 D-6251 Elbtal-Dorchheim no date but in fact 7 June 1955: see Barry McRae Miles Davis (1988) p78. Bought secondhand largely because of the stunning photograph on the front of the young Miles-even more stunning than all those photographs of the Young Chet. 8 Jimmy Yancey: In the Beginning Jazz Piano Heritage Series vol 1 Jazzology JCE-51 recorded in 1939 according to the long and informative sleeve note. I found it in one of those folk-art shops which sprang up in the 1970s: in this case called Grapevine in Well Street Newcastle-under-Lyme-a most unlikely place to come across one of the greatest of all boogie-woogie pianists. 9 Lester Young: Jammin’ the Blues (Soundtrack) 1944 and The Apollo Concert Harlem 1946 Jazz Anthology JA 5110. 10 The Immortal Lester Young: featuring Count Basie 1944–1949 Jazz Anthology JA 5182 like the last is from my Buying-Everything-ofLester phase.

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11–12 The Dave Brubeck Quartet: Jazz at Oberlin Fantasy Records Tenth and Parker Berkeley California 94710 recorded 2 March 1953 is the one we played all the time in each other’s rooms at University Hall Oadby in 1956–7. It has the that memorable green sleeve with Brubeck and Desmond above and Lloyd Davis and Ron Crotty below. We also played all the time those Vic Dickenson ten-inch records with Ruby Braff and Sir Charles Thompson on: that so-called Mainstream Music which I remember being so struck by when hearing it in Dobell’s Shop in Charing Cross Rd probably in 1955. As for Brubeck what is there worth saying that hasn’t been said: nothing apart from the fact that the recordings of these years with Desmond were his best. I still have an EP from another college recording of the quartet: At Pacific College recorded 14 December 1953 with Joe Dodge on drums Vogue Records EPV 1108. It comprises Lullaby in Rhythm I’ll Never Smile Again and Laura. It was bought in 1956–7 in Leicester but unlike no 64 not secondhand. 13 Stan Getz Quartet: Sweet Rain with Ron Carter bass Grady Tate drums Chick Corea piano recorded 30 March 1967 is another famous recording. I picked it up secondhand at a stall in Oxford Market a year or two ago (and for the second time) purely for the sleeve. I have fallen in and out of love with Getz over twenty years-apart from his early work the sides cut with Joanne Brackeen in Copenhagen in the 1970s remain in my memory: Ray played the record for me when his shop was round the other way and before Blues went into the basement. In fact I think he recommended the record when I asked him what contemporary Getz I should be listening to. Stan Getz seen with Fred Combley at Sheffield around 1980 was worth crossing the Pennines for. 14 Carla Bley: Heavy Heart Watt 14 1984. Carla looking seriously sexy on the front of the sleeve. Gary Valente one of my favourite trombonists is on this one. 15 The Carla Bley Band: I Hate To Sing Watt 12 And A Half recorded live at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco 19–21 August 1981 is the other half of the next.

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16 Carla Bley Live: Watt 12. Both of these have great covers and great trombone from Gary Valente and both I bought over the phone from Peter Russell’s Hot Record Store 53 New George St Plymouth. Recently Carla Bley Live has joined my CDs. It was purchased secondhand at Ray’s while I was waiting to meet Gideon Lewensohn outside the British Museum: a Hasidic Jewish composer from Israel. 17 Woody Herman and the Las Vegas Herd: Jackpot Capitol Records recorded 1 December 1955. More wonderful Woody. Here he is with Dick Collins trumpet Johnny Coppola trumpet Cy Touff bass trumpet Richie Kamuca tenor sax Norman Pockrandt piano Monte Budwig bass Chuck Flores drums. It was bought in the secondhand bookshop at Aberystwyth on one of those visits to Edmund Fryde half a dozen years ago and when it became necessary to escape for an hour or from his marathon monologues. 18 The Bill Harris Memorial Album Xanadu Records 3242 Irwin Ave Kingsbridge NY 10463 recorded 30 September 1957 Bill trombone Terry Gibes vibes Lou Levy piano Red Mitchell bass Stan Levey drums who are playing a few old favourites with considerable enthusiasm Everywhere Your Father’s Moustache Early Autumn Blue Flame Apple Honey Laura Lemon Drop and Woodchoppers Ball. I had such trouble getting this by post from Mole Jazz but it had to be done for Bill’s sake: the Best of All Trombonists. 19 Jake Hanna’s Kansas City Express: Concord Jazz 1976 Jake on drums Nat Pierce piano Bill Berry trumpet Monty Budwig bass Richard Kamuca sax Mary Ann McCall vocals. An early Concord which was my re-introduction to Woody Herman. 20 The Guest Stars: Out At Night recorded September 1985 Laka Daisical Linda Da Mango Josefina Cupido and a few other young women whom I saw playing at the Queen’s Head Burslem one cold December night. It was the last day of term and I had come from a memorable two-hour Foundation-Year class on E1 Cid to go with

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Sebastian Carter and his sister. We walked from his digs on Porthill through Longport. This has to be a second copy: I bought the first at the session itself.

21 Jackie Cain and Roy Kral: A Wilder Alias CTI Records recorded December 1973. Two of the singers I have always enjoyed although I bought this one as much for the photo of them inside the sleeve as for their singing here. They were better when they were younger cooler and scattier. Acquired secondhand at Ray’s whose label says SCARCE.

22 Amina Claudine Myers: Amina Recorded New York 18–19 November 1987. An interesting pianist with interesting ideas. This however is not as good as the next.

23 Amina Claudine Myers Trio: The Circle of Time recorded Milan 3–4 February 1983 with Amina piano organ vocal and harmonica Don Pate electric bass and countrabass Thurman Barker percussion. Bought secondhand at Ray’s without any idea who she was. Adventure was rewarded. This is the one with Louisville Plowed Fields and Do You Wanna Be Saved on it. Subsequently those three tracks have accompanied me on tape through Poland Lithuania and the Ukraine.

24 Tony Dagradi: Oasis recorded March 1980 is a sextet mainly out of the Carla Bley Band and bought because it has Gary Valente on trombone. I got it cheaply at what I shall always think of as the New Dobells (between Zwemmer’s and the New Theatre) on one of my visits to Sidcup during my father’s last illness: not that I was perceptive enough to realize it was his last.

25 Anita O’Day: Sings The Winners recorded Los Angeles September 1958. She begins with Take the A Train and ends with Peanut

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Vendor and is at her best-as good as if not better than she was at Newport in Jazz on a Summer’s Day when she was high on some illegal substance or other. 26 Annie Ross: A Gasser Vogue Records LAE 12233 – Richard Bock’s World Pacific Records 1959. Picked up in Abbey Street Reading in 1962 when I was not buying much jazz yet for some unknown reason bought this. Perhaps I had been drinking at lunchtime. Annie Ross has exactly the right backing from a quintet which includes Zoot Sims and Russ Freeman. 27 Jazz Samba: Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd recorded in Pierce Hall All Souls Unitarian Church Washington DC 13 February 1962. Like Kind of Blue this was a definitive moment in the history of the music – if not quite as definitive. Where and when did I buy it: I think at Imhoffs in New Oxford Street and in 1963. But why did I buy it? 28 Stan Getz and Bob Brookmeyer recorded New York 12–13 September 1961 with Steve Kuhn piano Roy Haynes drums John Neves bass Verve VLP 9004 is a lovely record. I had to order it at K and R Sylvester The Music Saloon Newcastle-under-Lyme. It was a few months after we had come to Keele: 3 November 1964 says the Music Saloon label. An enduring admiration for Brookmeyer dates from seeing him with Gerry Mulligan at Leicester in 1958 – reinforced by those memorable shots of him bobbing up and down with Jimmy Guiffre playing The Train and the River in Jazz on a Summer’s Day. Steve Kuhn made some interesting records too. Once upon a time I had some of them. 29 Tania Maria: Piquant Concord Jazz 1981. This was my first taste of this remarkable pianist and singer. First is also best to judge from her later work. Like Blossom Dearie she got taken over or overtaken by Commerce. Even so a tape picked up in a record store in Oak Park Chicago en route to O’Hare airport in 1992 I still listen to from time to time while travelling.

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30 Gerry Mulligan: The Age of Steam recorded between February and July 1971. Among other treats this has the great K-4 Pacific of which by far the best version is the Glasgow Concert one of sometime in the early 1990s. That set my scalp tingling on hearing it for the first time when sitting in the garden at 59 The Covert one summer afternoon. And it still does. 31 Holiday With Mulligan recorded 10–17 April 1961 is something of a curiosity. It is Gerry Mulligan’s homage to his companion the actress Judy Holliday who died aged 42 a few years after this her sole recording as a singer. There are some very good songs composed by them What’s the Rush Loving You and Summer’s Over. She is also good on Cole Porter’s It’s Bad for Me. There are some pretty good arrangements too – only to be expected from the listed arrangers: Ralph Burns Bill Finegan A1 Cohn Bob Brookmeyer and Gerry Mulligan himself. Ms Holliday stirred me up no end when I saw her in The Solid Gold Cadillac at Bournemouth on 26 September 1966. 32 Basie and Zoot: Pablo Records 2310–746 recorded New York 9 April 1976 with John Heard bass and Louis Bellson drums is something of a minor classic. It has a compelling cover picture of the two giants listening closely to a take. The sleeve notes are by Benny Green and are the equal of music and photograph: I cited them in John Hopton pll7 fn 69: a reference which brought about a lasting friendship with another jazz-loving historian Barrie Dobson. 33 Gerry Mulligan and the Concert Jazz Band Live: Verve Select Double 2683 057. Now that was a great band as Alan Plater would have said. It is performing here in Milan and Berlin in November 1960 at the Village Vanguard New York in December 1960 and in Santa Monica California either in November or December 1960. It was the Thundering Herd of its day: buy anything you ever come across dear reader. This record was bought at Lovejoy’s Jazz Record Shop near Pugin’s Catholic Cathedral in Birmingham around 1970. It was my first acquaintance with that strange shop where later I bought the Chet Baker-Russ Freeman live recordings on Pacific Jazz: my one and only Mosaic Boxed Set which I have just traded

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at Ray’s [along with my Japanese pressings of the earliest Roy Kral-Jackie Cain recordings bought secondhand there a decade or more earlier: now returned to be resold to a fortunate enthusiast]. It was the man who was strange at Lovejoy’s. Possibly he was Lovejoy. There was always plenty of Lambert Hendricks and Ross in the racks. The last time I was there was with Andy Charlesworth and I bought nothing: too much Nostalgic and Not-Good Swing. 34 Miles Davis: Kind Of Blue the original Fontana mono record with sleeve notes by Benny Green: all the embellishments of modernism have been pared away [he writes] until only the utterly indispensible remains. No need to say much more about this epoch-making recording of 1959 – the equivalent of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five recordings or the Charlie Parker Savoys – except in relation to myself. It still has written on the sleeve in ink: Richmond £1 paid. That was my deposit at Russell and Accott’s the music shop in Oxford High Street. The date was 1960. Lack of money as a penurious research student was no barrier to the purchase of Kind Of Blue: it had to be had after being listened to in one of those booths long since redundant. Why I had gone into the shop and why I had selected this particular record who knows: I had not been listening to much jazz over the previous couple of years and did not know of the record before entering the shop. Then suddenly there was Kind Of Blue in my ears. It was reconversion at once and for ever: an epic moment. I will simply give the titles which by now have a mantralike quality to them So What Freddie Freeloader Blue in Green All Blues Flamenco Sketches. Like all great music Kind Of Blue is instantly recognisable as it was at Jill Hall’s dinner table the other evening. 35 Steve Swallow: Carla Xtra Watt 2. I think I may have bought this for the cover. I certainly bought it after trading in most of my other early Watts and Xtra-Watts during a phase of having had TooMuch-Bley. Nowadays I am back to buying almost all she does on CD. Reconversion in this case seems to have followed the purchase of a tape entitled Sextet in Denmark Square Jerusalem on a preShabbat afternoon towards the end of three weeks at Yad Vashem in July 1990. Incidentally (and not perhaps coincidentally) I bought it after my last mystical experience had been triggered by listening to a tape of Johnny Griffin on the balcony of my room at the Ramada Renaissance Hotel. Which is another story.

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36 The Indispensable Bix Beiderbecke 1924–1930 Jazz Tribune No 48 is Bix playing in the Jean Goldkette and Paul Whiteman orchestras. It is indispensable.

37–38 Bird and Diz Mercury MG C-512 recorded in 1950. Bought in Bern Switzerland on a Saturday afternoon in August 1954. The sleeve still has on it the pencilled price 24 francs and a number 6939. Buying Bird and Diz was as important as the purchase of Kind Of Blue Lester Young: The President and Gerry Mulligan volume one. I think it ranks with the Mulligan in terms of not knowing what I was in for even though I listened to both records before buying them. Whereas the Miles Davis and Lester Young records are in a different category: that of bringing me back to a music I knew or rather thought I knew until I heard them. Bird and Diz is a very exciting record but like Dizzy Gillespie’s The Champ [where the whole history of me and jazz begins in Summer 1952] I knew that was the case before I understood or appreciated or even liked what I was hearing. Buying those records was an act of faith in the unfamiliar. When after countless playings Bird and Diz had become familiar I recognized that Visa the last track of the eight did not have the personnel of the other seven which was (in addition to Parker and Gillespie) Thelonious Monk piano Curly Russell bass and Buddy Rich drums. Nor do I know now as the Polydor Reissue of 1984 which I bought secondhand for £5 at the Jazz & Swing Shop in the Corn Exchange Hall Manchester around thirty-five years later and which unlike the original ten-inch LP gives recording dates as well as personnel does not include Visa. At this point a full discography is needed because Ross Russell Bird Lives! gives dates but not personnel: Visa was recorded by what is called The Charlie Parker Orchestra in April 1949. Still the Polydor Reissue clears up time and place for the wonderfully fast Bloomdido the astounding Melancholy Baby and the other astonishing tracks from the session in New York on 6 June 1950: An Oscar For Treadwell Mohawk and Leap Frog. But what about Relaxing With Lee: Ross Russell has this as recorded on 6 June 1950. It is not however on the Polydor Reissue even though seeing as it is a twelve-inch LP there is room for it. That room is taken up by two takes each of An Oscar For Treadwell Mohawk and Leap Frog as well as by three tracks from a different quartet session of March or April 1950. Bird and Diz was my very first Monk. He did not make a great impression until I heard him playing Little Rootie Tootie in the old Dobells

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shop in Charing Cross Road a year or two later. A year or two after that I bought the EP with that famous session on it and was hooked. Thirty years later I gave the EP to Barrie Dobson. 39 Charlie Parker Memorial: volume one Realm Jazz Savoy Series RM 120. This is the volume with Billie’s Bounce Now’s The Time and Ko Ko on it from the famous indeed historic New York session of 2–5pm 26 November 1945. I bought it for 22s 6p at the Newcastle-underLyme High Street branch of Boots about 1966. Of all places. 40 The Music from The Connection Boplicity Records 132–134 Grafton Rd London NW5 which is a reissue of the original. The music was composed by Freddie Redd who was on piano in the quartet which with Jackie McClean on alto played during the play. It was the quartet I saw from the gallery of The Duke of York’s theatre in St Martin’s Lane in l961. 41 Stan Tracey: Jazz Suite inspired by Under Milk Wood the original 8 May 1965 recording by Stan Tracey Bobby Wellins Jeff Clyne and Jackie Dougan reissued on Steam SJ 101 Steam Record Co 11 Mount Ephraim Road London SW 16. 42 The Stan Tracey Sextet: The Crompton Suite Steam SJ 109 recorded London 29 July 1981 Tony Coe Art Themen Alan Wakeman saxes Stan Tracey piano Roy Babbington bass Clark Tracey drums. 43 Stan Tracey Octet: The Salisbury Suite Steam SJ 106 recorded at the Royal Festival Hall London 25 February 1978 Jeff Daly alto Art Themen tenor and soprano Don Weller tenor Harry Beckett trumpet Malcolm Griffiths trombone Stan Tracey piano Dave Green bass Bryan Spring drums. 44 Stan Tracey Quartet: Captain Adventure Steam SJ 102 recorded live at the 100 Club London 3 November 1975 Stan Tracey Art

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Themen Dave Green Bryan Spring. See Meenah and Doin’ It For Art on the first side Tease “N” Freeze and Captain Adventure on the second side. With a splendid cover designed by Jack Whitbread. On the back Ray himself features holding a pint of bitter in one hand and a whisky in the other: a Lester Young pose if the pint had been another whisky – for which see no 50. Ray by the time I had a drink with him was doing without the bitter: that was sometime in the early 1990s with Bob Glass in The Angel in St Giles High Street around the corner from Denmark Street. Ray told a Lester story which was too subtle for me. This tremendously powerful record almost gets into the Kind Of Blue category. Hearing it played on the radio very late one night in 1975 was a sort of revelation – of Stan Tracey of whom I had not previously heard – of contemporary jazz that is of the 1970s – and of British Jazz of the 1970s. Until then I had always been sniffy about British Jazz. As John Fordham says in the sleeve notes: Remember folks Stan Tracey is British and one of the country’s few assets that is actually going up in value; Captain Adventure means what it says; it represents his music in a new and fiery mood. From that moment I was a Stan Tracey enthusiast seeing the quartet at the Mitchell Memorial Theatre in Hanley in the Walter Mobley Hall at Keele and at the New Vic Theatre in Stoke on Trent. But most memorable was seeing Stan Tracey on his own at the Bridge St Arts Centre Newcastle-underLyme one chilly Winter night when he went around the country after Thelonious Monk had died playing in homage to that exotic and inventive piano-player. He sat at the badly tuned upright piano on the tiny stage and played one Monk tune after another for an hour without saying a word before between or after. Captain Adventure on tape has enlivened many an East European journey – as has that other percussive pianist Yosuke Yamashita whose CD Kurdish Dance is playing as I write: a Christmas present from Tom chosen by me in the Virgin Record Store Birmingham when we met there at the end of his first term at Warwick University. 45 Thelonious Monk: The Complete Genius Blue Note Re-Issue Series. This comprises all Monk’s Blue Note recordings 1947–1952. Monk at the height of his powers some would say. I would say. 46 Stan Tracey Now Steam SJ 110 recorded 9 July 1983 is a celebration of forty years in the business. Here is where I first encountered the marvelous Spectrum No 2.

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47 Playing in the Yard: Charlie Rouse with the Stan Tracey Quartet recorded at the Boathouse Studios London 16 October 1987 Charlie Rouse tenor Art Themen tenor and soprano Stan Tracey piano Roy Babbington or Dave Green bass Clark Tracey drums. It should be said that Steam Records is Stan and Jackie Tracey and it is nice to know that by 1987 they had moved from Mount Ephraim Rd SW 16 [see no 41] to 8 Hadleyvale Court Hadley Road New Barnet Herts: over forty years in the business at long last paying off. I do believe that somewhere or other I have a letter from Mrs Tracey. 48 The Bobby Wellins Quartet Vortex Records VS 1 recorded live at Brighton Jazz Club Hanbury Arms Kemp Town 8 June 1978 Bobby Wellins tenor Peter Jacobson piano and electric piano Adrian Kendon bass Spike Wells drums is a rare record like the next. 49 Bobby Wellins Quartet: Dreams Are Free Vortex Records 70 King Street Cambridge VS 2 recorded at Porcupine Studios 5a Porcupine Close Eltham London SE 9 in 1979. Porcupine Close is no distance from Mottingham Station and the Tarn called on the map a bird sanctuary – in other words that small public park which as a child seeing it so often from the train and never visiting it was as mysterious for me as Proust would have wanted it to be. It could be that the four members of the quartet are walking in the Tarn when they were photographed for the front cover. Although (it has to be said) the park looks remarkably like the one in Antonioni’s Blow Up. 50 Lester Young: The President Vogue Records LAE 12016. This is a real hodge-podge of items from a variety of sessions not accurately noted on the sleeve: Los Angeles October 1945 January and August 1946 and New York December 1947. The date of the Vogue record is perhaps 1956. It was purchased at James Asman’s shop in New Row off St Martin’s Lane in 1962 or 1963: his new shop as I always continued to think of it. After reading about Lester’s death which had occurred on 13 March 1959 I went looking for a Lester record and found this one on my way from the British Library MSS Room to Charing Cross and the Dartford Loop Line to Sidcup. The record-

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ings came from the same period as my old 78 Esquire of These Foolish Things and Lester Leaps In recorded at Los Angeles in April 1946 with Nat King Cole piano Oscar Moore guitar Johnny Miller bass and Buddy Rich drums. It was therefore exactly what I was looking for. Not that I knew very much at all about Lester himself or what he had recorded in those days except that I did remember him coming to Cork with Jazz At The Philharmonic in February 1953 and being fairly mesmerized by the photographs of him like the one on the cover of The President in pork pie hat and with a whisky in either hand. I also remembered that Esquire 78 and how often I had played it in the front room of 101 Burnt Oak Lane Sidcup in the mid-fifties: music as mysterious as the Tarn at Mottingham – taut and economical music. Buying The President confirmed me in what I might call A Return to Jazz initiated by Kind Of Blue. It marked also a return to secondhand buying in and off Charing Cross Road – a return to the habits of adolescence and the early-fifties. It was also the beginning of my love affair with Lester almost all of whose recordings were hunted down over the subsequent thirty years. As Dave Gelly Lester Young (1984) p79 wrote: Lester Young left behind him a volume of recorded work which grows more precious as the years pass, the product of a wonderfully elegant mind contained within the body of a gentle, timid, proud, suffering man. 51 The Horace Silver Quintet: The Tokyo Blues Blue Note 4110 recorded 1962 with Blue Mitchell trumpet Junior Cook tenor Horace Silver piano Gene Taylor bass John Harris junior drums. This is the third in the sequence initiated by Kind Of Blue and continued by The President. The Tokyo Blues confirmed my return to jazz. It was bought in Manchester on an early visit to that great city with Myrna either late in 1964 or early in 1965. We had moved from Reading into a flat at 268 Horwood Keele and I had bought perhaps to celebrate the arrival of the record-player from Reading the EP of Jimmy Guiffre and Bob Brookmeyer playing The Train And The River at the Newport Jazz Festival – that marvelous sequence in Jazz on a Summer’s Day which has already been mentioned – and I had played it fairly continuously in the halfempty flat during the first month without Myrna. I cannot remember why I picked out The Tokyo Blues anymore than I can why I had picked up Kind Of Blue three or four years previously: being so out of touch [or rather out of listening] I had neither heard nor heard of Horace Silver. Did an assistant recommend me the album-just as another assistant in Champaign-Urbana in Illinois thirty years later recommended me an album by someone who thereafter has

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become a great favourite namely Joshua Redman? Over the following couple of years The Tokyo Blues was frequently played. I also associate Horace Silver with Ray’s basement at Collet’s Jazz and Blues Shop in Lower Oxford Street where he was before moving to Shaftesbury Avenue because I recall listening to a Horace Silver recording there one late afternoon after working in the BL MSS Room. Unless it was one early afternoon on my way back to the MSS Room after lunching at Zita’s Sandwich Bar. Ray sat in a sort of cubby-hole in the basement where Jazz was: Blues were upstairs. That was a very 1950s–1960s order of priority. These days I can’t take too much Blue Note music of those decades certainly not too much Horace Silver but I enjoyed it back then. Some of it at any rate. Blue Train was certainly my way into John Coltrane while Monday Night At Birdland with Billy Root Hank Mobley and Co continues to be among my tape-listening on the bus to and from Keele or on the train to and from London. 52 Jackie Cain and Roy Kral: Bogie recorded in performance at the Plush Room York Hotel San Francisco 14–15 February 1986 Fantasy Records F-9643. For these two oldtimers see no 21. Old timers because they began singing in the mid-1940s with the Charlie Ventura Band: that too was an LP I once had. After I had discovered their early work around 1980 I bought everything of theirs I came across: hence this record which is far from being their best. 53 The Milcho Leviev Quartet: Blues For The Fisherman Mole Jazz Stereo Mole 1 recorded at Ronnie Scott’s 27–29 June 1980 Milcho Leviev piano Art Pepper alto Tony Dumas bass Carl Burnett drums. This is a marvellous record with Make a List Make a Wish well-nigh perfect. It confirmed a return to contemporary jazz: a return which Captain Adventure had re-initiated five years previously. Neither Art Pepper nor Milcho Leviev ever played better than here. 54 Myra Melford Trio: Jump Enemy Records Alfons Strasse 9 8000 Munich 19 recorded New York City June 1990. Ms Melford is one of a number of interesting and sometimes exciting woman pianists currently recording: for example Geri Allen Michelle Rosewoman Joanne Brackeen Yoshiko Kishino and above all Jessica Williams.

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55 The Gerry Mulligan Quartet volume 1 Vogue LDE 029 is truly an epoch-making record both for jazz and for me. There is no need to say anything here about what the quartet meant for jazz. What the LP meant and means does however require comment. Having read about the quartet in The Melody Maker which in those far-off days of 1952–3 was a Jazz Weekly which I devoured with all the fresh devotion of my fifteen-year old conversion from popular music [Frankie Laine Jo Stafford Billy May Les and Mary Paul] to jazz – mainly traditional and swing. Buying such avant-garde jazz was therefore a radical departure: I vividly remember listening to this very record in a booth at Imhoff’s where Tony Quarterman Les Richards and I had ended up after our customary journey up the Charing Cross Rd. It was a Saturday morning in Spring 1953 and we had reached Imhoff’s by way of the secondhand racks of James Asman Doug Dobell and the upstairs shop one reached in an entry beside the Marks and Co Bookshop at No 84. I listened not grasping the music in the least and yet knowing how good it was if only because it was so different. The tracks became worn with constant playing: Frenesi Freeway Soft Shoe Aren’t You Glad You’re You Bernie’s Tune Walkin Shoes Nights at the Turntable Lullaby of the Leaves. Its purchase was revolutionary in another way also: this was my first long-playing record and I had not got a player to play it on. Therefore I began saving up for a record-player or rather towards one as my Dad and I went halves on a three-speed model which stayed at 101 Burnt Oak Lane when Myrna and I were married (as Myrna had a record-player) and I think it remained there until my father’s death in 1986. The succeeding ten-inch LPs of the quartet were bought religiously. As for Gerry Mulligan he was a twentieth-century master especially of composition. In the case of Gerry Mulligan Margaret Misegades [see no 5] was behind rather than ahead of the times. The second of the two EPs she sent me across the Atlantic in 1956 was of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet. They are playing Carson City Stage Cherry Makin Whoopee Motel. I have the cover still: Pacific Jazz Records produced by Richard Bock 6124 Santa Monica Boulevard Hollywood EP-4-2.

56 Lester Young: Prez’s Hat vol 3 Live from the Blue Room at The Lincoln Hotel New York May 1944 and Birdland New York April 1953 and August 1956. Bought at James Asman’s one Summer afternoon just before he died. I was with Barry Page a former student who was working for a publisher in Covent Garden. Afterwards Barry took me

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for tea at the Charing Cross Hotel and we sat having it on the balcony overlooking the forecourt: very Betjeman-like. 57 Lester Young: Newly discovered performances vol 1 ESP DISK 290 West End Avenue New York NY 10023 ESP-3017. These are live broadcasts from the Royal Roost NY in November-December 1948. There are great pictures of Lester back and front especially on the front: he is sitting on a chair at the Newport Jazz Festival with his trouser cuff well hitched up to show a very trim ankle. Bought from Ray whose label says ORIGINAL ISSUE £5. 58 Lester Young: Pres Verve with two labels stuck on which I do not recognize proclaiming JAP! and second hand 5 – Lester is very pensive on the front. There are no details of the recordings on the back. In fact these are the quartet recordings of March and July 1950 and January 1951 with either Hank Jones or John Lewis on piano. 59 Lester Young: Prez in Europe Onyx Records Inc Select 2344 044 is a rarity. It is very badly recorded-primitive according to the sleeve notes. The dates are Frankfurt October 1956 (apparently at a club for American servicemen) and either from another engagement of the same Birdland package tour or afterwards when Lester stayed on to play with pick-up groups. Ray’s label reads DELETED £3. There is another wonderful photograph of Lester on the front: concentrated sensitive profound and apprehensive. 60 Lester Young vol 3 Live Recording 1949 Royal Roost NYC Jazz Anthology JA 5214 with the same picture of Lester as on the Onyx LP. 61–64 Lester Young in Washington DC 1956 four volumes Pablo Live 2308 219 225 228 and 230. Picked up at various times and in various places. These are classic recordings and have classic pictures of Lester on their covers particularly that on the cover of volume three. This is the way Lester played night after night for nearly twenty

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years in clubs across the North East United States. All his playing got was polite applause and not very much of that – as here. I now have a fifth volume on CD which has Earl Swope playing trombone on four of the eight tracks. 65 Teddi King Vogue EPV 1204 Boston Spring 1954 with Ruby Braff trumpet Jimmy Jones piano Milt Hinton bass and Jo Jones drums. I am slipping in a last surviving EP because it has been with me a long time: since Autumn 1956 when it was discovered on a secondhand record stall in Leicester market during my first term at the university in that city. It still has 9s inked in on the back. 66 Miles Davis and John Coltrane Live in Stockholm 1960 Dragon Records DRLP 90/91 recorded on the evening of Tuesday 22 March 1960 but not issued until 1985. A famous recording with Coltrane playing famously. How young the famous quintet look: Miles Davis John Coltrane Wynton Kelly Paul Chambers Jimmy Cobb. I bought this new on the Saturday after my Dad died in St Mary’s Hospital Sidcup Kent at 2.10 pm on Thursday 24 April 1986. It still has the red label attached: DOBELLS £12.95. 67 Has long since disappeared but I wish to remember it here in memory of the young woman who ran the Record Shop at Blackfen Sidcup. It was just beyond the Fish and Chip shop on the Blendon Road. She must have been a Jazz enthusiast herself I suppose. She certainly made sure that all the new issues of 78s were available to us as in 1952–4 they appeared each month: those one a month Jazz issues from Parlophone HMV and whatever the other big company was. She also was pleased to let us listen in the shop for as long as we wanted. Once or twice she put on a Jazz Record evening at the roadhouse-type pub at Blackfen whose name I have also forgotten. The record was my second ten-inch LP. It was of Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden and she allowed me to buy it in four weekly instalments of 5s. The last instalment I paid after having been to the dentist in Day’s Lane. It was only then that the record became mine. Those were the days were they not? The front room 26 West Brampton Newcastle-under-Lyme Christmas 1997 [and June 1999]

The Strange Career of the Canadian Beaver: Anthropomorphic Discourses and Imperial History MARGOT FRANCIS Abstract This article traces the shifting representational history of the “beaver” in the Canadian imaginary through analyzing a range of images from explorers’ narratives, to commercial discourses, mass media representations to the ubiquitous sexual slang. I argue that dominant representations of the national rodent have suggested important social territories, like the norms of industry, bodily decorum, sexual respectability and racial progress. At the same time, I also explore how the subterranean language of sexual slang is the logical underside of the narratives found in more “legitimate” representations.

***** Introduction This article is a socio-cultural exploration of the shifting representational history of the “beaver” in the Canadian imaginary, a journey that takes us on an unlikely route from the tales of early explorers to the sexualized slang that so often characterizes the use of this term today. Images of the beaver from contemporary popular culture range from nostalgic reruns of the American television sitcom Leave It to Beaver, to Canadian political cartoons that portray the beaver with bemused affection or faint ridicule. However, my examination of the discourses associated with this animal suggests that the beaver has often articulated elements of the ideological struggle between Euro-Canadian settlers and those groups excluded from the nation-building project. Indeed, the boundaries marked off by representations of the national rodent have suggested important social territories, like the norms of industry, bodily decorum, sexual respectability and racial progress. This article traces the shifts and continuities in these representations through a range of different sites from explorers’ narratives to commercial discourses, mass media images to the ubiquitous sexual slang. I begin my investigation with the period of early French settlement, when writers in the field of natural history developed a remarkably anthropomorphic set of representations of “beaver society.” These discourses of order, enterprise and degeneration provide a telling set of metaphors and a unique vantage point from which to explore broader political and cultural themes that have Twenty Years of the Journal of Historical Sociology: Challenging the Field Volume 2 Edited by Yoke-Sum Wong and Derek Sayer © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-17934-8

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persisted until the contemporary period. While the images from natural history suggested that beavers were defined by their disciplined and patriarchal forms of social organization, inquiries into that most desirable of all head coverings, the “modish beaver hat,”1 illuminate narratives of race, masculinity and bodily decoration – imperial distinctions that shaped founding discourses of Canada and continue into the twenty-first century. The image of the beaver has also functioned as a commercial symbol for a myriad of companies from the earliest Hudson’s Bay crests to the more recent emblems used by, among others, Roots, Sleeman’s Ale and John B. Stetson Company. While these uses of the beaver most often capitalize on its nostalgic associations with the wilderness and tradition the specifically national appropriations portray a country made up of courteous citizens, “busy as beavers.” I analyze these national associations through political cartoons, exploring how representations of the buck-toothed, flattailed rodent illuminate the possibilities and limits of which groups can be portrayed within humourous political caricatures about the Canadian nation. While the symbol of the beaver has usually mediated a series of narratives about industry, masculinity and respectability, establishing it as a benign and authentic image of the Canadian nation, many present-day references to the word “beaver” are very different from this history, suggesting a distinctly sexualized slang. This allusion seems to contradict most earlier meanings that link the image with continuity and tradition in a fast changing world. However, I will argue that the subterranean language of slang is the logical underside of the beaver narratives found in more “legitimate” representations. For if Canadian national symbols have mediated the nation-making process for European settlers who needed to identify themselves as the authentic and deserving owners of this “new” land – unlike those whom settlers found here, Aboriginal people, and unlike those who could not be trusted with full citizenship, women – then the language of sexual slang provides a suggestive indicator of the place of these “others” in the emerging dominion. As this article represents an exploration of the cultural meanings associated with the beaver over the long span of Canada’s exploration and development it is not an “historical” investigation in the traditional sense as I cannot take into account all the complexity of Canada’s colonial experience. However what is attempted here is a socio-cultural tracing of the diverse meanings associated with this important national symbol. I hope this exploration can suggest how an image which became an icon of nation-building has also mediated the conflict between differently racialized, gen-

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dered and classed groups from the time of early colonization to the contemporary period. “Castor Canadensis” In Images du castor canadien, XVIe–XVIIe siècles, François-Marc Gagnon provides a fascinating examination of the “bestiary” of Lower Canada.2 Beavers were the most frequently represented of all animals in New France and the author takes up these images, from maps, illustrations and engravings, examining them as original historical sources, not simply images that corroborate the written word. Following Foucault, he argues that natural history texts were a privileged site for the representation of a new world of ideas in French society.3 I draw from Gagnon’s work to investigate the meanings associated with the beaver in the earliest writings from New France – associations I will return to later in this article when I explore how representations from popular culture reconfigure these early narratives. The central theme emerging from the discourse of natural history is an interest in “beaver society.” In “The Description and Natural History of the Coasts of North America,” (1672) Nicholas Denys asserted that the beaver was most remarkable for its “laborious and disciplinable nature, its industry and its obedience in work.”4 Denys considered the beaver “first among animals” and his descriptions of beaver society are striking for their anthropomorphic characterizations which reflect his own decidedly monarchical tendencies. In his elaborate vision beavers were said to gather in groups of up to 400 animals led by an “architect” while “commanders” directed a host of manual workers who were chastised and beaten to ensure the lazy would work.5 In 1698 Nicolas Guérard, an engraver for “Carte murale des deux Amériques” produced an enormously influential illustration of beavers at work – clearly inspired by Denys’ text. Guérard identifies no less than seven categories of worker-beavers, including lumberjacks, carpenters, carriers, those who made mortar, those who dragged mortar on their tails, those who hit the masonry with their tails to harden it, and the masons who were responsible for actually building the embankment. All these were supervised by an architect or commander and an inspector of the disabled. Gagnon notes that the representation of dam construction as the activity of hundreds of workers in a hierarchically-structured setting actually mirrors a building site at Versailles under Louis XIV.6 Needless to say, the illustration portrays a very different environment than would be observed from beavers in the wild, where the animals live in colonies of one adult

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Figure 1: Nicolas Guérard “Des Castors du Canada”. Detail from “Carte murale des deux Amériques de Nicolas de Fer” reproduced in François-Marc Gagnon, Images du castor canadien, XVIe–XVIIe siècles (Sillery, Québec: Les Éditions du Septentrion, 1994) p. 81. Digital image from the National Archives of Canada/C-122932

pair and several progeny (averaging three to eight beavers per site) with the occasional transient beaver.7 Nevertheless, Guérard’s emphasis on a beaver society characterized by large hierarchical colonies and a punishing regime of work was reproduced in countless natural history texts.8 Future writers continued to focus on beaver society and most displayed similarly anthropomorphic tendencies, although these varied according to the political winds of the time. In “Mémoires de l’Amérique Septentrionale” (1705), Baron de Lahontan proposes a new analogy where hierarchy is replaced with exchange and cooperation in a “beaver republic.” Here the system rests on the virtue of its members and while the concept of order is still important it no longer depends on hierarchy or duty, but on virtuous individuals sacrificing their interests for the common good. In this society beavers were said to speak and reason together in “assemblies” where they consulted on how to maintain the lodges, dikes and

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lakes of the lands they held in common.9 In “Relation du voyage du Port Royal, de l’Acadie ou de la Nouvelle-France” (1708), Dièreville replaces Lahontan’s democratic republic with an “aristocratic” one, where an elder presides over the community affairs and discipline comes from “peer” beavers.10 However, Dièreville’s peers seem remarkably invested in their disciplinary role. He notes: “There are some beavers called Runaways, who can be found wandering everywhere without living in lodges like the others, and these beavers are vagabonds only because, as they did not want to work, they were beaten and chased away by the sedentary ones.”11 In “Histoire de l’Amérique Septentrionale” (1722) by Bacqueville de la Potherie, the focus is on beavers’ “familial” social organization, where the stigmatization of vagabond or single beavers exists in a direct and binary relationship with the valorization of beavers’ supposedly ideal family arrangements. Early naturalists observed that beavers are monogamous and mate for life. However, they also assumed that male beavers were the sternest of patriarchs. Indeed Potherie described the animals as follows: “His house is so admirable that one can recognize in him the authority of an absolute master, the true character of the family Father, and the genius of a skilled architect.”12 Here the values of industry and patriarchy are joined together in an overlord and architect while the single or vagabond beavers are assumed to be both unfit to lead and unproductive. In a striking contrast to this early valorization of the patriarchal beaver, contemporary scientific research tells us that very few “male” beavers actually exist, as the majority of North American and all European beavers are partialhermaphrodites: the male beavers carry a female uterus.13 Nevertheless, narratives about beavers as intelligent, paternal and hierarchically-organized workers survived over several centuries and constituted a collective image, not one that was simply touted by eccentric or isolated writers. Gagnon notes that what is striking about these texts is how the image of social organization projected onto beaver society was so often despotic, conceiving of order amongst these good workers only through the intervention of “police” or fellow workers who castigated the lazy and reminded them of their duty.14 Similarly, beaver society was characterized by distinctly 18th century norms regarding the paternal organization of the family unit. These texts also displayed considerable anxiety about older, single or disabled beavers, who were reduced to the status of wheelbarrows whose bodies were used to carry earth. Indeed, it is these beavers who were chased away from the workers’ society and condemned to become vagrants, because their presence

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might bring with it the degeneration of the good race. When these narratives are transposed on to human society, they are not encouraging regarding the fate reserved for older, disabled or single workers or anyone who failed to conform to the social regimes which characterized New France. Indeed, the image of social organization that emerges from this zoological discourse, when seen as a projection, is far more repressive than narratives about the Enlightenment as a period of learning, culture and refinement might lead us to believe.15 Yet this unassuming literary genre called natural history – through which illustrations of the beaver made their way into so many early texts – provides an important introduction to the strange contradictions which haunt the beaver image. These early representations of beaver society suggest a masculine contest of the will. This seems evident whether the contesting parties were the beaver and the fur trader, or the architects and patriarchs at the top of the beaver hierarchy and the workers below. And this theme of masculine contest continues from the narratives of natural history to the tales told by early traders and explorers. As Elizabeth Vibert notes, many traders professed a deep respect for the beaver, an animal whose slaughter provided their livelihood.16 David Thompson and Pierre-Esprit Radisson both marveled at the feats of engineering and the skills of social organization which enabled the beavers’ to build winter lodges, and at the animals’ ability to change the natural landscape.17 Others, like Ross Cox who traveled to the northwest plateau in the early 1800s, echoed the natural history writers’ comments on beavers’ social organization: “it is no unusual sight to see them beating those who exhibit any symptoms of laziness. Should, however, any fellow be incorrigible . . . he is driven unanimously by the whole tribe to seek shelter and provisions elsewhere.”18 However, the most interesting aspect of traders’ ideas about beavers were the ways these narratives were racialized and then transposed onto human society. As Elizabeth Vibert notes, this discourse was typically directed at Aboriginal peoples. “The traits celebrated in the beaver, industry and providence, are the very ones traders considered to be lacking in the indigenous peoples of the region . . . The central paradox is that the traders’ admiration for the beaver coexisted with – one might even say masked – the most predatory intentions. [And this] paradox is emblematic of the contradictions that characterized traders’ responses to the [people and the] land.”19 One of the interesting contradictions of the later fur trade, starting in the mid-1800s, was that bourgeois traders often considered indigenous hunters wasteful, lazy and far from manly – unlike the traits that early map-makers accorded to the beavers

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themselves. As Mary Black-Rogers has documented, some traders were especially critical of Aboriginal people when they chose to satisfy their own requirements for subsistence rather than stockpiling beaver for trade.20 This is not to say that European discourses about the original North American inhabitants were intractable, as there were many shifts and contradictions in what was “known” about indigenous peoples.21 But images of beaver society reproduced remarkably European norms, while representations of Aboriginal people, tended to characterize their mixed hunting and gathering way of life as “backward.” Indeed, in Adam Smith’s four-stage theory of human development, the “hunting and gathering” mode of life occupies the most rudimentary position.22 The tribes where these designations were mitigated were the Plains and Plateau hunters who tracked the big game buffalo. These men were cast as “brave, industrious, stoic – in a word, manly,”23 clearly a cut-above those who trapped the much admired colonial emblem, the beaver.24 The “Modish Beaver Hat” The projection of laudatory representations of the beaver onto the contested terrain of European – Aboriginal relations is not the only paradox associated with this animal. Discourses relating to the fashionable beaver hat are also an inharmonious chronicle in the theater of racial and gendered distinctions. During the contemporary period it is taken as axiomatic that the market for fur coats and fashion is feminine while the fur trade is unquestionably masculine. Yet it was men’s extraordinary attentiveness to the dictates of fashion in hats that fueled three hundred years of cataclysmic European trade in North America.25 In the pre-modern period shifts in fashion were connected with mutations in political power and prestige and consequently it was men who most often initiated basic changes in style and dress. The rise of the beaver hat was associated with the Swedish cavalier’s hat which gained popularity across Europe after Sweden’s victories in the Thirty Years war (1618–48) and her rise to “great power” status.26 Beaver fur has the unique ability to hold its shape through felting and its resilience allowed for the development of particularly fine quality wide-brimmed hats. However, by the early 1600s beaver had been virtually trapped out in England and most of Europe and the process of making hats with fur imported from Russia or North America was extraordinarily long and costly. Thus, beaver hats were a prestigious luxury reserved for the aristocracy and wealthy merchants, though a thriving trade in second-hand hats allowed some dispersion to a wider populace.

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As Mertes and others have argued, the display of luxury was an important means through which pre-modern political authority was manifested and reproduced.27 While fur has always had a role in establishing the status of its wearers, by the 17th century, scarcity and cost made it indexical of sumptuous display. In this context the beaver hat and other luxurious fashions were evidence of the “honourably futile existence” accorded the wealthy.28 However, early men of fashion did not simply mobilize their privilege over a mute and obliging populace. The extravagance in hat styles was a favorite subject for caricaturists and spoof conduct guides. For instance, Samuel Butler describes the mid-seventeenth century “modish man” as “keen to see and be seen”29 and men of leisure were often ridiculed as self-indulgent and exhibitionist. Indeed, one can still hear the echo of 17th century writers’ satirical barbs in standard 20th century chronicles of fashion. For example, in Hats: A history of fashion in headwear, Hilda Amphlett describes a variation on the Cavalier hat as follows: “By the time Charles I came to the English throne hats had reached a perfection of grace and elegance never since surpassed. . . . with a wide brim cocked up at the back, allowing an ostrich feather of considerable size to be tucked between it and the crown and droop gracefully over the edge . . . ‘He looks for all the world, with those spangled feathers, like a nobleman’s bedpost’, wrote a contemporary”30 (emphasis added). I suggest that close attention to the discourse surrounding the fashionable beaver hat opens up possibilities for examining shifts in both men’s gendered self-expression and their judgement of other men according to the changing norms of “respectable” masculinity in North America and Britain during the period from 1600 to the late 1800s. One example of these shifts can be found through critically re-reading chronicles of the fur trade in North America. These texts usually reproduce an illustration which portrays variations on the beaver hat from 1776 through to the mid-1800s. However the heyday of the beaver hat was considerably prior to this period, starting in the early 1600s. The significance of this elision is that over half-way through the two-hundred-and-fiftyyear reign of beaver headgear (in the mid to late 1700s) there was a sudden change in men’s fashions. This shift has been variously described as the “great renunciation,” “the most remarkable event in the history of dress,” or as Flugel put it, a “great defeat” during which men “gave up their right to all the brighter, gayer, more elaborate, and more varied forms of ornamentation . . .”31 Prior to this period, as we have seen, men of the aristocracy and the merchant class who emulated them were partial to “hats of rococo embellishment” and the lavish use of lace, velvet, powders and highly

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Figure 2: Cavalier hat, in England at the time of Charles I. Hilda Amphlett, Hats: A history of fashion in headwear (London: Richard Sadler Ltd., 1974) p. 106

ornamental dress.32 However, by the time of the French revolution in 1789 the European aristocracy was in decline and the protestant values of hard work, sobriety and frugality were on the upswing with the bourgeoisie beginning to reflect these values in what they wore. As Fred Davis summarizes, “with such parallel developments as the industrial revolution and a more democratic polity . . . men’s dress became [a] primary visual medium for intoning the rejection of ‘corrupt’ aristocratic claims to elegance, opulence, leisure, and amatory adventure that had been so elaborately encoded into pre-nineteenth century dress . . . [this] symbolic adherence to the austere values of the new age [meant that] men’s dress became more simple, coarse, unchangeable, and somber, sortorial tendencies that in many respects survive to the present.”33 Yet the evolution of men’s fashion worked somewhat differently in the imperial outposts taking shape throughout the British empire. In many contexts, the prescribed dress for colonial officers was characterized by what Helen Callaway calls “pomp and plumage enhancing masculinity,”34 and the symbolism of these costumes was a crucial set-piece in the choreography of gender and empire. And for the elite of bourgeois men associated with the fur

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Figure 3: Modifications on the Beaver Hat. Hugh Grant, “Revenge of the Paris Hat: The European Craze for Wearing Headgear Had a Profound Effect on Canadian History,” in The Beaver Vol. 68:6 (December 1988/January 1989) p. 40

trade the task of maintaining the proper social distance from the lower orders of voyageurs and Aboriginal guides was also accomplished, in part, by wearing the correct bourgeois attire.35 In contrast, some traders expressed alarm about the “immoderate” fashions sported by Aboriginal men. Indeed, by the early 1800s, when the “great renunciation” chronicled above was well underway, Vibert tells us there was a perceptible shift toward a morally

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charged physical description of “native others” in travel writing from the Columbian plateau. This trend anticipated the Victorian tradition of physiognomy, the assessment of character and worth from the physical features of face and body.36 While traders in this region admired the rich leather clothing of hunters, they were more ambivalent about their penchant for “decorative accessorizing.” Writing from the Colville region in the mid-1800s, one trader opined: “The young and especially the males . . . occupy no inconsiderable portion of the morning decorating themselves; in point of time, and the degree of pains taken to ornament their hair, paint their faces &c they may compete with the more accomplished fops in the civilized world.”37 This trader’s comments resonate with the bourgeois notions of a respectable and circumspect manhood, which gained greater prominence in the early 1800s.38 In this context men of enterprise, like the new head of the HBC Governor Simpson, saw the penchant of many Aboriginal groups for “flamboyant” dress and ritual as contradicting the emerging European bourgeois values of self-restraint, sobriety and dedication to an allencompassing work ethic. Indeed, as the 19th century proceeded, imperial norms suggested that the predilection for bodily decoration was itself a sign of a fetishistic, feminine, lower-class and even “primitive” nature.39 In the late 1800’s Thomas Carlyle noted, that “the first spiritual want of a barbarous man is Decoration, as indeed we still see amongst the barbarous classes in civilized nations.”40 However, the irony is that for well over 200 years the fur trade – the business on which European exploration and trade was reliant – was fueled by European men’s extraordinary attentiveness to displaying “all the gayer, more elaborate, and more varied forms of ornamentation” in hats.41 Thus in both the anthropomorphic narratives of natural history and in the debates about masculinity, industry and bodily decoration arising in the context of fur trade fashion, beaver discourses served as a symbolic medium for imagining notions of civilization, respectability, and enterprise, while legal and popular representations of Aboriginal peoples presented them as lacking in these same “civilized” qualities.42 If we return to the maps and texts of early naturalists we see that the ideal beavers were pictured as intelligent and hardworking patriarchs who ruled their lodges as their kingdom, while disabled or single beavers were condemned as lazy and cast out to become vagrants because they might bring degeneration to the good race. This discourse constructed an elaborate narrative through which the widely celebrated traits of the beaver, industry and providence, were understood through a distinctly imperial lense. In contrast, by the mid-1800s the racialized and classed hierarchies shaping the representation of Aborig-

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inal peoples frequently meant they were portrayed as lazy and indolent.43 A similar duality emerges in relation to bodily decoration where from 1600 to the mid-1700s European men’s obsession with beaver hats fueled the fur trade. However by the 1800s Aboriginal people’s own preoccupations with bodily decoration were castigated as “immoderate” and savage. I suggest that a critical re-reading of these imperial discourses indicates that the very categories of “colonizer” and “colonized” were secured, among others, through the beaver narratives of enterprise and racial advancement. Indeed, as the beaver came to be seen as an “authentic” marker of this new territory, Aboriginal peoples were increasingly depicted, not only as inferior stock on the racial hierarchy, but also as a “vanishing” race who would soon disappear altogether. This analysis suggests that discourses associated with the beaver as an emblem of Canadianness have a deeply racialized, classed and gendered representational history. Commercial and nationalist uses of the beaver re-articulate this tradition while portraying a symbol that epitomizes ideas about industry, integrity and progressive advancement. “Busy as a beaver”: the phrase seems selfevident as beavers seem “always” to have been associated with dependability and progress. The next section examines how the conflicted discourses associated with the beaver were re-configured so this image could become a benign and trusted icon for commerce and the country. Pro Pelle Cutem and Other Commercial Appropriations In the area now called Canada, the beaver was the first, and for many years, the sole, commodity on which European exploration was based. Consequently, it is not surprising that this animal would become a crucial medium through which setters articulated an imagined relationship with commercial culture. Further, the beaver is indeed a remarkably industrious animal, and this industry provided some basis for early colonists using anthropomorphized beaver narratives as a vehicle for moralizing individual behavior. I explore how the beaver image has gained particular kinds of legitimacy through its specifically commercial incarnations. I start with the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), the enterprise most closely associated with the fur trade in English Canada and a company who claimed the beaver emblem for their coat of arms. Interestingly, while the HBC motto asserts connections with “integrity” and “progress,” it also contains clues for alternate meanings which move beyond its formal declaration of moral purpose. The HBC coat of arms contains four beavers, a sitting fox for a

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crest and two moose with the motto: Pro Pelle Cutem. As beaver pelts were used to make felt for beaver hats the traditional explanation for the Latin motto has been “the skin, cutem, for the sake of the fleece, pro pelle.”44 However, an alternate and equally acceptable reading of the Latin refers to the risks of the business to early traders. Here Pro pelle cutem means “We risk our skins to get furs.”45 Interestingly, E.E. Rich tells us that it was not uncommon for early commercial mottos to have a “puckish” double-meaning.46 I suggest that this second reading of Pro pelle cutem provides a cryptic acknowledgment of an often overshadowed terrain associated with the beaver legacy – European traders’ ambivalence about the risks of the trade and about their own mortality. Indeed, these men did “risk their skins” to establish fur trading posts in far flung areas of the continent, and often in hostile territory. Of course, this alternate translation of the Latin could simply be read as an assertion of bravado by the masters of the trade, and undoubtedly it was. But at the same time it holds a contradiction: memorializing European traders’ dis-ease about the conditions of their livelihood. Not surprisingly, HBC public relations efforts have constructed narratives of the early fur trade which emphasize the heroism,

Figure 4: Hudson’s Bay Company coat of arms. Jim Cameron, The Canadian Beaver Book: Fact, Fiction and Fantasy (Burnstown, ON: General Store Publishing House, Inc. 1991) p. 55

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bravery and romance of white traders, not the potentially unromantic and even “unmanly” feelings of fear and ambivalence implicit in the traders’ show of bravado. The transition of the beaver image from a HBC crest to its use in pictorial advertisements by a range of different commercial interests began in the mid-nineteenth century. McClintock notes that prior to 1851 advertising was rarely used and “was generally regarded as a confession of weakness, a rather shabby last resort.”47 However, with the growing competition amongst several European empires it became advantageous for businesses to brand their products through corporate images. The impetus for this change came from a confluence of factors including a proliferation of new products from the colonies, the increased buying power of a growing middle class, the lower prices of these commercial goods based partly on the low cost of colonial labour, and the savings from technological innovations associated with the industrial revolution. Together, these changes produced the conditions for the first real innovations in advertising.48 While these factors generated a “need” for making distinctions between different mass- produced products, historic representations of the beaver from natural history texts, explorers’ travel narratives and the ongoing commerce of the HBC already associated the animal with “enterprise” and “tradition.” When the new country of Canada was inaugurated in 1867, and especially when control of Rupert’s Land shifted from the HBC to the federal government in 1870, the beaver became identified as a national image, enhancing its cultural currency as a symbol aligned with “stability” and “commerce.” Towards the end of the 19th century the image was taken on by a host of new enterprises including that great engine of progress and national unity, the Canadian National Railways, and widely divergent business interests including the Canadian Illustrated News and the John B. Stetson Company. In the majority of these images the beaver signals a traditionally masculine association with industry and commerce, or the presumptively male pleasures connected to resting from one’s labours, as in the labels for Sleeman’s Ale, Beaver Brand Chewing Tobacco and Crompton’s Corsets. However, in the 20th century the image of the beaver has been used to signal both innovation and respectability in advertising, regardless of its relationship to the product being sold.49 One obvious example of the malleability of this image comes from Roots, whose adoption of the beaver as a concept logo seems meant to signal the company’s association with a benign and authenticating idea of “nature,” a far cry from the dangers alluded to in the early writings of HBC traders. Recently, the company opened a new venture, Roots Lodge in Ucluelet, one of the villages of Pacific

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Rim National Park on Vancouver Island, and decorated this “small, hip, family hotel” with an aesthetic borrowed from the owner’s family cottage in Algonquin Park. Here, as Marnie Flemming suggests, the beaver image seems to stand in as a symbol of “solidity and permanence in the midst of an ephemeral and fragmented world.”50 These commercial appropriations take advantage of an historically laden cultural signifier to provide a symbolic link between a late capitalist consumer society and the apparently benign and authentic past of an untrammeled wilderness of explorers and fur traders. At the same time, this emblem also carries forward a series of discourses, from the early texts of natural history to the presentday, associations that have worked to eclipse other narratives. I suggest that most commercial images of the beaver have materialized a set of meanings associated with European order, commerce and social discipline. However, images of order can also demarcate the boundaries between one community and another, and these distinctions can signal regimes of violence and constraint.51 As the

Figure 5: Crompton’s Corsets and The Beaver Brand Chewing Tobacco. Jim Cameron, 1991, pp. 104 and 103

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image of the beaver became an emblem of commerce and the country, the long and intricate history of Aboriginal labour – a crucial element in both the fur trade and early exploration – was eclipsed. Indeed an increasingly sanitized image of the beaver came to represent European settler traditions of economic progress and paternal entitlement. Thus the beaver came to be seen as a benign and authentic symbol of Euro-Canadian settlement, and shed all but a mildly nostalgic association with Aboriginal people, whose grueling labour had actually enabled this beaver commerce in the first place. Political Caricatures National appropriations of the beaver are intimately linked to these earlier commercial uses, and the connections between the two are well illustrated in the first stamp issued by the province of Canada in 1851, The Three Pence Beaver. Up until the nineteenth century most stamps portrayed the reigning monarch, however in 1850 the beaver was still such an important commercial symbol for the young colony that the government used this image to create one of the world’s earliest pictorial stamps. Over the next fifty years as the province of Canada was consolidated into a country the beaver remained one of the central images featured on a plethora of new currency, crests and monuments. However one of the more populist uses of the beaver image has been in political cartoons. I examine these images based on a review of the caricature collection of documentary art at the Canadian National Archives. Spanning the period from the early 1960s to the early 1990s the collection provides access to hundreds of cartoons which use the beaver image.52 The first and by far the largest group of beaver images found in this collection are cartoons that depict Canada in relation to the United States. And in virtually all of these caricatures the U.S. is presented as a strong-armed neighbour against whom Canadians must exercise constant vigilance. If, as Northrop Frye suggests, the chief distinction between irony and satire is that satire is “militant irony,” or a form of humour which presents clear moral norms against which the grotesque and absurd can be measured, then these caricatures are deeply satirical tales.53 From the cartoons that portray the fraught and dangerous context in which Canada negotiated the Free Trade Agreement; to those representing the United States’ sense of entitlement in negotiations relating to acid rain and participation in NATO, Canada, through the image of the “beaver,” is presented as the “little person” who must negotiate with and against an oversized neighbour.

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Implicit in most of these images is the discursive legacy of the beaver as an honest (if naive and somewhat hapless) representative of an unassuming country.54 However, when the beaver stands in for Canadian citizens in relation to various internally contested social issues, the animal suggests a less benign narrative. In some cartoons the beaver stands in for “innocent” and vulnerable Canadian citizens in relation to the questionable decisions of politicians, for example when it represents the health and social benefits system being subjected to government cuts (“We’ve decided to skin just part of you”); in others the beaver is seen in more ambivalent light, for example as it represents the Canadian Union of Postal Employees in strike action that garnered wide-spread public disapproval. Thus, on the specifically internal terrain of national politics, as opposed to the external territory of CanadaU.S. relations, the beaver image demonstrates a considerable malleability. However, when the beaver stands in for “mainstream” versions of the nation in relation to its internal “others” the situation becomes more complex. An early cartoon titled “What do you see?” pictures Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, flanked by the symbols of a beaver and a moose, staring down the telescope towards the former leader of the Parti Québécois, Premier René Levêsque. This image suggests a familiar tale of surveillance and estrangement between English Canada (which is aligned with the nationalist emblems) and the separatist French population in Quebec. However, in the second cartoon, titled “Jaws,” by Réshard Gool, the artist represents a French Canadian critique of the inequitable relations between the struggling and tiny “frog,” (a derogatory slang term for French Canadians) and English Canada, which is depicted as a gigantic and threatening monster beaver, similar to the shark in the movie JAWS. In earlier sections of this article I argued that commercial representations of the beaver have carried forward a set of meanings associated with European order and social discipline, and my analysis of the “beavers” in Canadian political cartoons suggests a related story. Ross Poole argues that national symbols mediate the “moral character”55 of a homeland. The image of the beaver in political cartoons is most likely to represent Canada as a benign and “moral” country when it is contrasted with an external adversary, most often the United States. When the beaver is used to depict internal conflicts, it presents a more contradictory narrative. It might represent an honest people who must survive cruel government (social and health benefit cuts), or a supposedly greedy and inefficient trade union (the Canadian Union of Postal Employees).56 Most importantly thought, it seems usually to depict a group

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Figures 6 through 10 are from the Caricature Collection of the Canadian National Archives. I have obtained permission to publish from each of the artists. Figure 6: a) “Don’t worry yourself Brian. . . . I have the greatest respect for Canadian culture . . .”. From Victoria Times-Colonist by Adrian Raeside, 1985–87. (C141006) b) “You’re gonna LOVE this guy! . . .”. From The Saskatoon Star Phenoix by Mr. Prichard, May 22, 1987. (C140995)

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Figure 7: c) “Damn Chair Squeaks . . .” (C136647). From The Calgary Herald by Vance Rodewalt, May 30, 1986

Eva Mackey has called “Canadian-Canadians” or those “ordinary people” who consider themselves, and are considered, the mainstream of society.57 In the vast majority of these representations, the beaver image portrays mainstream English Canadians, not French Canadians or other groups who never quite seen to “belong” to the nation-building project.58 Indeed, perhaps the deeply ambivalent relationship between “Canadian-Canadians” and the official rhetoric about our multicultural “mosaic” can best be seen in the final cartoon in this series. Here the former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney turns the crank on a meat-grinder, putting the beaver (mainstream Canadians), through the mill to be ground up into a less valuable grade of meat to produce this multi-ethnic mosaic.

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Figure 8: d) “We’ve decided to skin just part of you . . .” (C145002). From The Calgary Herald by Vance Rodewalt, December 19, 1984

The Strange Career of the Beaver in the Sexual Imaginary In the final section of this investigation, we take what seems like a sharp change in direction from examining political cartoons, natural history discourses and commercial images to exploring the histories of sexuality and respectability that underpin the use of slang. Here I trace the process through which contemporary references to the beaver have encompassed both nationalist associations for the mainstream of Canadian society and vernacular references that associate the word “beaver” with women’s genitals. I begin by briefly tracing the historical shifts that have marked language usage throughout the modern period and conclude with a specific look at the etiology of sexualized associations with the word “beaver.” In Nationalism and Sexuality, George Mosse argues that modern ideas of civility in language and morals are a recent phenomenon that were not generally accepted prior to the 1800s. Indeed up until

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Figure 9: f ) “WHAT DO YOU SEE?” (C151051). From The Globe and Mail, by Ed Franklin, July 1, 1978 g) “JAWS” By Mr. MacKeeman. (C151048)

that time, customs that contemporary westerners would view with incredulity prevailed amongst both the aristocracy and the “lesser” classes of society. Mosse elaborates, “For example, at Holkham, the country seat of the earls of Leicester, ennobled in the eighteenth century, the chamberpots sit in a cupboard in the dining room. They are now merely a tourist attraction, but barely two hundred years ago they would have been used during dinner, perhaps more

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Figure 10: a) “Canada is a quilt work, a mosaic . . .”. By Dan Murphy, from the Vancouver Province (C140981)

regularly than the knife and fork. But then, during that same dinner . . . a true gentleman in some aristocratic circles would have been expected to fondle the bosom of his beautiful female partner.”59 In this context, words that would be considered “crude” or even obscene by today’s standards were widely employed by all levels of society.60 The shift in language and notions of propriety came together through the late seventeenth and eighteenth century rise of the movements of Pietism and Evangelicalism in the growing middle classes. Mosse argues that the middle class could only partially be defined by their increasing economic activity and that “above all it was the ideal of respectability that came to characterize their style of life.”61 He continues: “through respectability the middle class sought to maintain their status and self-respect against both the lower classes and the aristocracy. They perceived their way of life, based as it was upon frugality, devotion to duty, and restraint of the passions, as superior to that of the ‘lazy’ lower classes and the profligate aristocracy.”62 Of course, the over-

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whelming growth of the middle class was also linked to the industrial revolution and to capitalist imperial expansion. However, middle-class social and behavioral standards were shaped by the Protestant religious revivals which united various Christian sects against an “unregenerate world” and thus it was the dynamism of this group that changed the moral climate in both England and North America. As nationalist sentiment progressed in Europe and North America from the period of the French revolution through various wars of national liberation there was increasing importance ascribed to pietism’s belief in moderation and control over the passions to ensure these did not come into conflict with the demands of the family and with the newly industrializing state. Indeed in the 18th and 19th century, a lack of control over the “animal urges” was said to be characteristic of inferior classes and races and might even threaten the foundation of bourgeois society.63 This trend included the sanitization of language, a process that was exemplified by the nineteenth-century publication of an expurgated version of Shakespeare and the King James Bible and by the increasingly powerful movements for social hygiene. Marianna Valverde has analyzed the work of these groups in Canada through exploring campaigns by groups such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union which pursued work against “obscene” literature through the department of Purity in Literature, Art and Fashion.64 In the twentieth century, however, the middle-class obsession with sexual morals has been gradually eroded through a series of legal battles against censorship,65 and a broader trend towards permissiveness, accelerated by two world wars, the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and by the popularization of sexual materials through the mass media. Indeed, perhaps the most powerful indicator in symbolizing and entrenching this change has been the availability of pornography through the Internet and on cable television. Now with the flick of a keyboard or a remote channel changer materials that many people would still be uncomfortable to purchase through a retail outlet are available in the privacy of their own home. In The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang the listing for the word “beaver” suggests that the sexualized meanings for this term were first popularized through pornographic images and pin-up magazines in the late 1950s.66 However shifts in language always have a history, and a search through several historic dictionaries of “street literature” indicates that the term beaver has long been used as a slang for “beard” and that the word “beard” often referenced both men’s beards and women’s pubic hair. Consistent with the class-based shifts in language noted above, the

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popular stories from A Hundred Merry Tales (1526) provides a window onto a period when the use of sexualized language was more common than in subsequent centuries, and did not always imply a male-controlled objectification of women. In the summary below, James Henke describes an incident from A Hundred Merry Tales where the reference to “beard” as pubic hair was, in fact, initiated by a witty gentlewoman. As the two [a gentlewoman and a male youth] are exchanging barbs, the woman comments on the youth’s beard, which has not yet filled in, growing luxuriously over his upper lip but sparsely on his chin: “Sir,” says she, “ye have a beard above and none beneath.” He responds, “in sport”: “Mistress, ye have a beard beneath and non above.” “Marry,” quod she, “then set the one against the t’other” which answer made the gentleman so abashed that he had not one word to answer’ (94). The woman is suggesting that their two half-beards, when joined together will equal a whole. The humor here is of the “beaten-at-his-own-game” school. The youth, who is losing the wit-battle to the girl, attempts to turn the tables with a smirking sexual joke only to be bested at his own tactics with an even cruder counter.67

This sexualized meaning of “beard” survived for at least the next two centuries, as A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, (1796), tells us that Captain Francis Grose defined “beard splitter” as “A man much given to wenching”.68 In the 1600s the word beaver was also often used as a synonym for a hat, arising from the popularity of the beaver hat. Thus the phrases, “He’s sporting a handsome beaver”69 meaning a handsome beaver hat, or the more aggressive, “cock one’s beaver” meaning to “assume a swaggering air” (1642).70 Rawson elaborates that “hat” is also a byword for the female genitals, with the allusion resting on the idea that “hats” were frequently made out of beaver felt.71 Given this history, Rawson suggests that the term beaver may have survived as a kind of slang code amongst heterosexual men. One example can be found in The Limerick, first published in 1927, a section of which goes as follows: There was a young lady named Eva Who went to the ball as Godiva, But a change in the lights Showed a tear in her tights, And a low fellow present yelled, “Beaver!”

Thus, beaver may have been a street cry that men would use with other men “advising them that if they looked sharp, a woman without underpants might be seen.”72 While there is no way to trace a linear trajectory from the early references from beaver as an alternate term for “beard,” which also referenced women’s pubic hair (1500s); to beaver as a some-

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times sexualized synonym for “hat” (1600s); to the slang and street usages of beard and beaver from the late 1700s to the early 1900s, to the overtly sexual references in 1950’s pin-up magazines and the “beaver shot” of pornographic movies – nevertheless, it seems that the recent hyper-sexualization of this term was probably based on its underground usage over the past several centuries. How then to understand the relationship between slang discourses that have usually worked to objectify and degrade women’s sexuality and the beaver narratives that reference the norms of social order and discipline associated with Canadian citizenship and nation-building? I argue that the link between these seemingly disparate stories can be found in the masculinist and patriarchal thrust of virtually all beaver discourses. In the narratives from natural history, the fur trade, commerce and politics – women were not simply under-represented, rather the overtly paternal nature of these discourses worked to make their contributions to nationbuilding both inferior and invisible. Further, when women do appear in national histories, whether as respectable wives, or immoral “sluts,” they were always/already sexualized. To place this theme within a broader context we must remember that Canada like other western countries first became an imagined community through constructing categories that defined some people, primarily British and European male bourgeois immigrants, as fully entitled and deserving citizens while “others,” primarily women and Aboriginal people, were defined as unfit to be full citizens of that same “new” land.73 The specific history of Aboriginal women in the beaver trade is particularly relevant here. During the first three hundred years of European trade and settlement ongoing sexual relationships between Aboriginal women and French and English traders were crucially important in the political and economic life of the early colonies. However, in the mid-1800s, as white women started to arrive in the remote outposts of Rupert’s Land, a redefined colonial morality began to view cross-racial partnerships with increasing disdain. This ideology posited that the emerging British values of “civilized” manliness and pure motherhood might be compromised by the “degeneration” that could result from mixed race liaisons. As Sylvia Van Kirk has shown, marriages that had taken place à la façon du pays began to be denounced as sinful and debased and traders increasingly looked upon Aboriginal women simply as objects for temporary sexual gratification, not as partners to whom they would make a longer commitment. In this context, the stigmatization of Aboriginal women as immoral sexual objects with promiscuous tendencies that were supposedly “inherent in their Indian blood”74 was

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a crucial early development in a specifically white process of Canadian nation-building. Further, this same ideology has been evident in the overwhelming number of North American popular stories, songs and pictures that have represented “Indian Squaws” as crudely depersonalized objects of sexual convenience.75 In this context, while legitimized beaver discourses focused on narratives about Canada as an industrious and benign nation, the underground sexual slang of “beaver” underscored the sexualized nature of women’s, particularly Aboriginal women’s, absentpresence in this same nation-building project. Thus from the anthropomorphic maps and texts of early naturalists where European settlers identified with the paternal traits of the beaver; to the notions of masculinity and bodily decorum associated with fur trade fashion; to commercial representations of the beaver that signified European traditions of paternal entitlement; to the: Canadian-Canadians’ portrayed in political cartoons – the very category of a deserving Canadian was secured through these “beaver” discourses of masculine enterprise and racial advancement. These were the cultural and national investments through which European settlers defined themselves. Conclusion I started this article by exploring popular and historic representations of the beaver to analyze the work of this image in the visual economy of nation-building. As must now be evident, beavers have emerged as a Canadian symbol through the development of elaborate stories about industry and respectability, masculinity and commerce – narratives which also imagined the men who came to settle this territory as their own. I argue that this form of national storytelling has constructed beaver worlds in the contest for a very material world which became, but was not always, Canada. Thus images of the beaver have articulated elements of the ideological struggle between European settlers and those groups who were excluded from the nation-building project while the beaver became a peculiarly benign symbol constructing Canada’s tradition of adventure, integrity and commercial progress. In this context, the natural landscape became a stage for playing out an imperial history. As Donna Haraway has commented, “the role of the one who renamed the animals was to ensure a true and faithful order of nature, to purify the eye and the word. The ‘balance of nature’ was maintained partly by the role of a new ‘man’ who would see clearly and name accurately, hardly a trivial identity in the face of eighteenth-century European expansion. Indeed, this is the identity of the modern authorial subject, for whom inscrib-

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ing the body of nature gives assurance of his mastery.”76 If representations of the beaver have been productive of a symbolic and political community that was achieved through the ordering of differences then I hope this examination of Canada’s national symbol, the beaver, can invite us to examine the unsettling hierarchies and comic ironies in the nationalist imaginary we take for granted.

Acknowledgement

I would like to acknowledge and thank each of the cartoonists and publishers who gave permission for their material to be used in this article, including Adrian Raeside, Vance Rodewalt, the Globe and Mail for the work of Ed Franklin, Mr. MacKeeman and Dan Murphy.

Notes 1 Murray G. Lawson, Fur: A Study in English Mercantilism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1943) p. 68. 2 The book resulted from the first Canadian exhibit to investigate the iconography of the beaver, sponsored by the Musée régional de la CôteNord in Sept-Îles in 1994. 3 François-Marc Gagnon, Images du castor canadien, XVIe–XVIIe siècles (Sillery, Québec: Les Éditions du Septentrion, 1994). Gagnon’s book is the primary text informing the subsequent discussion. As the book is not available in English, I want to acknowledge the expert translation provided to me by my colleague and friend Yolande Mennie. 4 François-Marc Gagnon, 1994, p. 76. 5 François-Marc Gagnon, 1994, p. 76–77. 6 François-Marc Gagnon, 1994, p. 82. 7 Bruce A. Schulte and Dietland Müller-Schwarze, “Understanding North American Beaver as an Aid to Management,” in Peter E. Busher and Ryszard M. Dziciolowski eds., Beaver Protection, Management, and Utilization in Europe and North America (New York et al.: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers) 1999, page 111. 8 Including the famous “A New and Exact Map of the Dominions of the King of Great Britain on ye Continent of North America” by Dutch geographer Herman Moll in 1715, which was reproduced in six editions. 9 François-Marc Gagnon, 1994, p. 90. 10 François-Marc Gagnon, 1994, p. 95. 11 Quoted in François-Marc Gagnon, 1994, p. 96. 12 Quoted in François-Marc Gagnon, 1994, p. 97. 13 Donna Jacobs, “A Sexually Confused National Symbol,” in The Ottawa Citizen (July 10th, 1999). Jacobs notes that a “true hermaphrodite, such as an earthworm, is so-well equipped with both genders’ reproductive organs that no matter which gender it meets on the mating grounds, it’s always the right one.” 14 François-Marc Gagnon, 1994, pp. 103–104.

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François-Marc Gagnon, 1994, pp. 117–118. Elizabeth Vibert, Traders’ tales: narratives of cultural encounters in the Columbia Plateau, 1807–1846 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997) p. 117. 17 Elizabeth Vibert, 1997, p. 117; and Germain Warkentin, Canadian exploration literature: an anthology (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1993) p. 9. 18 Elizabeth Vibert, 1997, p. 118. 19 Elizabeth Vibert, 1997, p. 118. 20 Mary Black-Rogers, “Varieties of ‘Starving’: Semantics and Survival in the Subartic Fur Trade, 1750–1850” in Ethnohistory 33:4 (Fall 1986) pp. 353–383. 21 For some discussion of the complexity and ambivalence of European attitudes towards First Nations people in North and South America see: Robert Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian (New York: Vintage, 1978); Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992); P.J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of Englightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). 22 Elizabeth Vibert, “Real Men Hunt Buffalo: Masculinity, Race and Class in British Fur Traders’ Narratives,” in Gender and History, Vol. 8, Number 1, (April 1996), pp. 4–21; p. 5. 23 Elizabeth Vibert, 1996, p. 4. 24 Interestingly while most think of the risks of the fur trade as a thing of the past, beaver trapping continues to be a multi-million dollar industry in Canada. It is estimated that from 1700–1800 the average number of pelts taken per year was 300,000. As the beaver became trapped out in most areas of the continent this decreased by 1900 to less than 50,000 per annum. However, by 1950 the beaver population had once again increased and 300,000 animals were being trapped again every year. The peak year was 1979–80 when over a million beaver were harvested. Indeed, the period from the 1960s onwards can be described as the height of the beaver trade in Canada. 25 Chantal Nadeau, Fur Nation: From the Beaver to Brigitte Bardot (London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2001) pp. 30–31. 26 J.F. Crean, “Hats and the Fur Trade,” in The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science Vol. XXVIII, no. 3 (August, 1962) pp. 378–379. 27 Quoted in Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996) p. 85. 28 Hugh Grant, “Revenge of the Paris Hat: The European Craze for Wearing Headgear Had a Profound Effect on Canadian History,” in The Beaver Vol. 68:6 (December 1988/January 1989) pp. 37–44: 37. 29 Quoted in Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660–1800 (London and New York: Longman, an imprint of Pearson Education, 2001) p. 140. 30 Hilda Amphlett, Hats: A history of fashion in headwear (London: Richard Sadler Ltd., 1974) pp. 106–107. For more analysis of “effeminacy” and its link to a critique of luxury see: Alan Hunt, 1996, pp. 78–89; Suan Shapiro, “Sex, Gender, and Fashion in Medieval and Early Modern Britain,” in Journal of Popular Culture Vol. 20, No. 4 (Spring 1987) pp. 16

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113–128; Michael S. Kimmel, “From Lord and Master to Cuckold and Fop: Masculinity in Seventeenth-century England,” in University of Dayton Review Vol. 18, No. 2 (Winter-Spring 1986–87) pp. 93–107; and Philip Carter, 2001, pp. 124–162. 31 Quoted in Alan Hunt, 1996, p. 52 and p. 229. 32 Fred Davis, Fashion, Culture, and Identity (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992) p. 38. 33 Fred Davis, 1992, pp. 38–39. 34 Helen Callaway, “Dressing for Dinner in the Bush: Rituals of SelfDefinition and British Imperial Authority,” in Ruth Barnes and Joanne B. Eicher, Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning in Cultural Contexts (New York and Oxford: B ERG, Distributed by St. Martin’s Press, 1992) p. 242. 35 Carolyn Prodruchny, “Festivities, Fortitude, and Fraternalism: Fur Trade Masculinity and the Beaver Club, 1785–1827,” in Jo-Anne Fiske, Susan Sleeper-Smith, William Wicken, eds., New Faces of the Fur Trade: Selected Papers of the Seventh North American Fur Trade Conference (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1998) pp. 31–52: 36–43. 36 Elizabeth Vibert, 1997, p. 248. 37 Quoted in Elizabeth Vibert, 1997, p. 252. 38 Elizabeth Vibert, 1997, p. 252. 39 In her essay The Three Guineas Virginia Woolf wrote a brilliant satire of the links between militarism and masculine costume, which is still rings true today. (London: Hogarth Press, 1938) see especially p. 23. 40 Quoted in Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995) p. 224. 41 Fred Davis, 1992, pp. 38–39. 42 Indeed, the ultimate marker of Aboriginal people’s lower status was the new Canadian nations refusal to grant them the right to vote until after the Second World War. 43 As an anonymous reviewer for this article correctly pointed out, this kind of generalization cannot account for the racialized and classed hierarchies that also existed in mixed race communities, such as the Red River settlement. There is no doubt that historical investigations into racialized and classed ambivalence amongst Metis people complexifies our understanding of the particularly crucial role this group played in Canada’s long mercantile and colonial history and as “middle-men” in the process of nation building. However, my chief concern in this article is to trace the ways in which images of the beaver came to articulate dominant representations of “Canadianness.” 44 E.E. Rich, “Pro Pelle Cutem,” in The Beaver Number 268 (Spring 1958) p. 15. 45 E.E. Rich, 1958, p. 13. 46 E.E. Rich, 1958, p. 12. 47 Anne McClintock, 1995, p. 210. 48 Anne McClintock, 1995, pp. 210–211. 49 Marnie Fleming, “Beaver Tales: Traits and Traditions,” in Reid Diamond and Marnie Fleming, Beaver Tales (Oakville, Ontario: Oakville Galleries, 2000) pp. 7–12: 10. 50 Marnie Fleming, 2000, p. 10. 51 Anne McClintock, 1995, p. 226. 52 Specifically, 398 cartoons in the caricature collection use the beaver image. 53 Northrop Frye, “The Mythos of Winter: Irony and Satire,” in Ronald Paulson, ed. Satire: Modern Essays in Criticism, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971, pp. 233–248; 233.

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The one exception to this conclusion is titled “Beaver Trudeau and Elephant Nixon” from June 18, 1973 by Edd Uluschak. The cartoon depicts Trudeau as a beaver who ties up the trunk of a Richard Nixon elephant to prevent him from drinking from a Canadian “fuel” barrel. Here the depiction of French Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau (as a beaver) shows him not as gullible, naive, and overrun – but crafty, satisfied and successful. 55 Ross Poole, Nation and Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1999) p. 16. 56 Other variations also occur – but these two examples demonstrate the range of possibilities. 57 Eva Mackey, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002) pp. 19–22. 58 The only exception I found to this was a cartoon by John Larter published in the Toronto Star on August 7, 1986 titled “View of the World from Ontario.” In the foreground it features two Aboriginal trappers who are tanning a beaver skin, while anti-trapping protesters emerge over the hillside. The caption depicts a conversation between the two trappers and reads: “So far the white man has killed off our lakes, our rivers, our forests, our wildlife, our fish . . . I wonder what’s next. . . . ?” This caricature does present a sympathetic portrayal of Aboriginal people, and the “beaver,” though dead, is aligned with them rather than the white protesters. 59 George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985) p. 4. 60 Hugh Rawson, Wicked Words: A Treasury of Curses, Insults, PutDowns, and Other Formerly Unprintable Terms from Anglo-Saxon Times to the Present (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1989) pp. 8–10. For example, up until that time words like “arse” were frequently heard in Queen Anne’s court (1702). 61 Mosse, 1985, p. 4. 62 Mosse, 1985, p. 5. 63 Mosse, 1985, p. 151. 64 Mariana Valvarde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885–1925 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1991) p. 59. 65 Examples of these legal battles include decisions which overturned the bans against James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (admitted to the U.S. in 1933 and into Canada in 1949) and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (decriminalized in 1959 in the U.S.; 1960 in the U.K.; and 1962 in Canada). Rawson, 1989, p. 10. 66 Tony Thorne, Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (London: Bloomsbury Publishers Ltd., 1990) p. 32. 67 Henke, 1988, pp. 21–22. 68 Rawson, 1989, p. 39. 69 Thorne, 1990, p. 32. 70 Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English Volume One (London: Routledge & Kegan Ltd., 1961/67) p. 41. 71 Rawson, 1989, p. 39. 72 Rawson, 1989, p. 39. 73 While non-property holding men were frequently excluded from the franchise, they had the potential to gain voting rights, if their economic status improved.

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Sylvia Van Kirk, “Many Tender Ties” Women in Fur-Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670–1870 (Winnipeg, Manitoba: Watson & Dwyer Publishing Ltd., 1980) p. 146. 75 Rayna Green, “The Pochahontas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in American Culture,” Ellen Dubois and Vicki Ruiz eds., Unequal Sisters (New York: Routledge, 1990) pp. 15–21. For an analysis of specifically Canadian narratives see Terry Goldie, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures (Kingston, Montreal, London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), see especially pp. 63–84. Narratives about Aboriginal women have a complex arch which each of these authors address in more detail. Representations range from the pure and non-sexual Indian Princess or Maiden who often succor their white male partners over-and-against their own peoples, with Pocahontas as the most well known example of this genre; to the more crudely sexual images of Indian Squaws who, in a parody of the song “Little Red Wing,” “lays on her back in a cowboy shack, and lets cowboys poke her in the crack.” (Green 19) Goldie sums up that even in the “positive” literary representations “whether she remains the distant [and pure] image or becomes the reality of miscegenation, she must die, must become the past, in order for the white to progress towards the future and move beyond the limitations of his sexual – or at least romantic – temptation and achieve possession of the land.” (Goldie 73) 76 Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York and London: Routledge, 1989) p. 9.

Responses and Rejoinders The Maleness of Male Beavers: A Response to Margot Francis JACQUES BOVET In a paper recently published in this Journal,1 Margot Francis brilliantly and convincingly shows how beavers, their works and social life have long been considered, in the Canadian imaginary, as models of masculinity and of patriarchal, paternalistic types of work and social organization. In a cutting criticism of this traditional view, she states: “In a striking contrast to this early valorization of the patriarchal beaver, contemporary scientific research tells us that very few ‘male’ beavers actually exist, as the majority of North American and all European beavers are partialhermaphrodites: the male beavers carry a female uterus (her typographic double emphasis). Francis’ infectious enthusiasm for making her point leads her to use a vocabulary that goes beyond what “contemporary scientific research tells us”. Neither her proximate source of information2 nor this source’s direct or indirect scientific sources3 use the terms partial-hermaphrodite or female uterus. They rather use terms like: pseudo-hermaphrodite (as pointedly distinct from hermaphrodite, partial or complete); or uterus-like tubes, uterus-like structure, paramesonephric duct remnant, male uterus, masculine uterus, uterus masculinus (as pointedly distinct from female uterus). The presence of this organ in male beavers, which never functions as a female uterus does, is just one example of a condition called intersexuality, which is well documented in a number of mammalian species, and produces masculinized females as well as feminized males.4 This frequent condition in male beavers obviously does not affect their reproductive potential. The 25 pairs of North American beavers that were introduced in 1946 in the Tierra del Fuego Archipelago at the southern tip of South America had an estimated 35,000–50,000 offspring alive in 2004;5 and the estimated 1,200 European beavers that were surviving at the end of the 19th century had nearly 600,000 living descendants a century later.6 Never mind! Contemporary scientific research provides alternative and, in my opinion, better evidence in support of Francis’ point. It shows that male and female beavers behave fairly similarly. Twenty Years of the Journal of Historical Sociology: Challenging the Field Volume 2 Edited by Yoke-Sum Wong and Derek Sayer © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-17934-8

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Specifically with respect to familial needs, both genders are involved in cutting trees, in building and maintaining lodges and dams, in provisioning the kits and the winter food cache, in marking and defending the territory, in caring for the young (except for suckling, of course), etc.7 The degree of involvement of each gender in any of these behaviors may vary among families and/or seasons, but is not systematically male- or female-biased.8 Beavers can thus be considered as practicing an egalitarian share of monumental work and of less spectacular everyday chores among genders. Furthermore, it is impossible to tell male and female beavers apart on the basis of their external morphology, even at a very close look (except when one can see the nipples of a lactating female). Students of beavers have to resort to other means, such as palpation in the so-called cloaca (to check for the presence or absence of a “hidden” penis), counts of unusual neutrophils in blood smears, examination of the color of anal glands secretions, or analysis of DNA extracted from a piece of hair.9 In overall, it can be safely said that the industrious, masculine, disciplined, respectable, patriarchal beavers of the Canadian imaginary are as likely to be females as they are to be males, disregarding the matter of the male uterus.

Notes 1 Francis, M., 2004: The strange career of the Canadian beaver: Anthropomorphic discourses and imperial history. Journal of Historical Sociology 17, 209–239. 2 Jacobs, D., 1999: A sexually confused national symbol: Recent research seems to show that most male beavers have a uterus. In: The Ottawa Citizen, July 10, 1999, p. A.1.FRO. 3 E.g.: Meier, C., G.D. Partlow, K.R.S. Fisher and B. Rennie, 1998: Persistent paramesonephric ducts (masculine uterus) in the male North American beaver (Castor canadensis). Canadian Journal of Zoology 76, 1188–1193. – Doboszynska, T. and W. Zurowski, 1981: Anatomical studies of the male genital organs of the European beaver. Acta Theriologica 26, 331–340. – Conaway, C.H., 1958: The uterus masculinus of Castor canadensis. Journal of Mammalogy 39, 97–108. 4 Raynaud, A., 1969: Les anomalies du développement des organes sexuels. In: Traité de zoologie (P.P. Grassé, ed.), Masson, Paris, Vol. 16 (6), 310–362. 5 Lizarralde, M., J. Escobar and G. Deferrari, 2004: Invader species in Argentina: A review about the beaver (Castor canadensis) population situation on Tierra del Fuego ecosystem. Interciencia 29, 352–356. 6 Halley, D.J. and F. Rosell, 2002: The beaver’s reconquest of Eurasia: status, population development and management of a conservation success. Mammal Review 32, 153–178. 7 Patenaude, F., 1982: Une année dans la vie du castor. Les Carnets de zoologie 42, 5–12. – Patenaude, F., 1983: Care of the young in a

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family of wild beavers, Castor canadensis. Acta Zoologica Fennica 174, 121–122. 8 Sharpe, F. and F. Rosell, 2003: Time budgets and sex differences in the Eurasian beaver. Animal Behaviour 66, 1059–1067; and references therein. 9 Kühn, R., G. Schwab, W. Schröder and O. Rottmann, 2002: Molecular sex diagnosis in Castoridae. Zoo Biology 21, 305–308; and references therein.

In Memoriam Daniel Nugent (1954–1997) a long-haired boy

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This was one of Daniel Nugent’s last writings, prepared for a conference on “State, Colony, Empire” in honor of Bernard S. Cohn at St Peter’s College, Oxford, March 17–24th, 1997, which Dan himself referred to as the Barneyfest. Daniel was one of many anthropology students at the University of Chicago on whose work Barney left a lasting imprint. The paper, though, is pure Dan – clever, irreverent, bawdy, a trifle sly, its subject-matter knowingly chosen to deflate academic pomposities and pretensions; but at the same time a deeply serious and meticulously researched piece of work. Dan got up many people’s noses. He was also one of the ablest and most committed editors this journal ever had, disdainful of the pedestrian, supportive of the adventurous, particularly when it came from those he called the undoctored and the untenured, and equipped with a bullshit detector second to none. We have left “Sewers” mostly unedited, its lavatorial metaphors and down-to-earth colloquialisms intact, out of respect for our friend. Try to imagine it delivered in a stuffy Oxford seminar room by a longhaired boy on the verge of middle age, a long slow smile lighting up his face, who was probably longing to slip out and light up a Camel. We publish it with gracious permission of his partner Eva Tessler, in memoriam. Derek Sayer January 2001

Corruption in Low Places: Sewers and Succession to Political Office DANIEL NUGENT

Setting the Seen1 Namiquipa is a town in northwestern Chihuahua which had about 2,500 permanent residents when I lived there between June 1983 and October 1985. The subject of two book-length monographs of the Big-Books-about-Small-Towns genre,2 Namiquipa was established as a presidio, a military settlement, colony and fort, on Mexico’s northern frontier in 1778. A little more than a century later, at the conclusion of the Apache Wars, residents of Namiquipa were able to adopt a typical riverine settlement pattern, with dwellings concentrated along a ten-mile stretch of the upper reaches of the Santa Maria River on uncultivable lands near irrigated fields adjoining the river. By the start of the twentieth century Namiquipa was comprised of a number of barrios [neighborhoods], separated by arroyos entering the Rio Santa Maria. By the 1980s several of the upriver barrios to the south (El Terrero and El Molino) were towns in their own right, with populations double that of the site of the eighteenth century presidio, now called Namiquipa or La Plaza. When discussing the geographical limits of the pueblo (an issue further confused by the circumstance that the municipio of which Namiquipa is the cabecera or county seat is also called Namiquipa) Namiquipans sometimes said of their pueblo “Namiquipa, larga tripa” [Namiquipa is like the large intestine]. An issue examined in neither of the book-length studies – nor so far as I know in any of the other published work on Namiquipa3 – is the symbolic significance of that remark; for instance, which end of the large intestine is closer to the rectum? That scatologicaly weighted question is not a trivial one; for embedded within it are different possible reciprocal imbrications of conceptions of space, identity, and residence. Furthermore, radically different answers were proposed in the wake of an almost accidental succession to political office of a Municipal President in Namiquipa in October 1983. An on-going conflict between Namiquipa and El Terrero – one of the upriver towns within the municipio which had formerly been a barrio of Namiquipa proper – figured prominently in the efforts of some Namiquipans to construct a sewer system in one of those towns, and not the other. Hence the Twenty Years of the Journal of Historical Sociology: Challenging the Field Volume 2 Edited by Yoke-Sum Wong and Derek Sayer © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-17934-8

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association of succession with sewers, of politicians with flowing shit, is motivated rather less by its obvious alliterative appeal and rather more by what an examination of those associations in a specific ethnographic and historical context might reveal about the relations between public morality and corruption in Mexican social life and particularly about how the moral dimension of corruption is experienced from the trenches of always already incomplete sewers. Throughout my own approach involves a willing immersion in what Barney Cohn, with his outstanding flair for turning a phrase, characterized as “proctological history” (Cohn 1987 [1980]: 39–42), one perhaps unwitting thrust of which has been to bring back history “from the top down” as well as “from the bottom up” as the problematic of social history. Hence our investigations may be (again?) directed “to the study of the structures and meanings involved in the creation of systems of solidarity and authority and to what appear to be the unconscious systems of control which mark many modern societies” (Cohn 1987 [1980]: 40). Setting the Scene What follows is a story about corruption in low places, referring simultaneously to municipal-level electoral politics conducted in the context of what was soon to become a maelstrom of state-wide and eventually national struggles for democracy, and to the organization of public works projects that involve a fair amount of digging. The focus is on the manner in which the forms assumed by the personal and political transformations undergone by one unlikely politician as a result of his unanticipated succession to office were interpreted and understood from the standpoint of other men who dug the trenches and laid the pipe for a sewer system initiated during his term in office. This story may indicate to some only how the politician’s transformation from honorable agricultor [agriculturalist, farmer] to all-too predictable if ineffectual caciquewannabe was overdetermined by structural factors. More interesting, though, is to consider that personal (and political) transformation, not from the standpoint of a macro-political perspective, but “from the bottom up,” even from below ground level – say from the perspective of a fellow digging ditches for a sewer system they know will not function properly. This story indexes the radical disjuncture between “politics [and business] as usual” – an ongoing if uneven and halting process of post “revolutionary” state formation – and quotidian experience in a small rural town during the 1980s in Mexico.4 First the violent context in which the succession to political office was engineered is

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outlined. Next the personal and political possibilities available to the politician are mentioned. A discussion of the practical organization of a public works project – building a sewer system – and how some residents of Namiquipa engaged that project follows. The ultimate trajectory of the politician and of what began as his erstwhile constituency, in a radically transformed political and social landscape, provide a final point of departure for some closing reflections on the relation between state formation and popular culture in Mexico and on “las drenajes abiertas de America Latina” [the open drains of Latin America, playing on the open veins of Latin America]. The Making of a Politician I arrived to do research in Namiquipa in June of 1983, a year during which elections for Municipal Presidencies were being held throughout the state in July. I was fortunate to be armed with a letter of introduction to Namiquipa’s municipal president, Professor David Zorrilla Bencomo, from a Cd. Chihuahua lawyer who as it turned out was a first cousin of a compadre (or perhaps a compadre of a first cousin; I do not recall exactly) of Zorrilla himself. Zorrilla had actually been installed as Presidente Municipal Interino in Namiquipa only weeks earlier by order of the Chihuahuan Governor and the State Chairman of the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the ruling party throughout Mexico) in the wake of an agrarian war in the ejido of Cruces, Namiquipa. There Armando Rico, the Namiquipan Presidente Municipal elected in 1980, his family, and other wealthy allies had claimed control of unirrigated fields near Cruces as their private property. Other Crucenos who came to be known as Los Malvinos had invaded these lands – previously used for common grazing – earlier in the spring, intending to put them under the plow. A gun battle that lasted several days ensued. The severely underarmed Malvinos suffered all of the casualties including two deaths by gunshot wounds while others had arms or legs amputated after being shot. In the wake of the shootout, State Police, the dreaded judiciales, were sent to the plazas of Namiquipa and Cruces to maintain order. Rico was removed from office by the PRI, not wanting a mess such as this to drag on through the summer of an election year. Throughout Chihuahua the PRI was being challenged, particularly – and especially in the large urban zones – by the right wing Partido de Accion Nacional, known best by its acronym PAN (which means “bread” in Spanish) and by the circumstance that its colors – blue and white – are also the colors of the Catholic

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church. But left wing parties such as the PST (Partido Socialista de Trabajadores [Socialist Worker’s Party]), the PSUM (Partido Socialista Unificado de Mexico [Unified Socialist Party, a coalition to which the oldest Communist Party in the New World had brought the most members]), and the PPS (Partido Popular Socialista [Popular Socialists]) among others were also fielding candidates, in the countryside as well as in the cities.5 Within the municipio of Namiquipa, though, it was understood as a foregone conclusion that the PRI candidate would emerge victorious. Hence the struggle to determine the PRI candidate for Presidente Municipal in Namiquipa was an important one, into which flowed other issues of local political importance. One issue involved the efforts of a group of wealthy merchants and landowners in El Terrero – a town upriver from Namiquipa – to have the cabecera or county seat relocated from Namiquipa [La Plaza] to El Terrero. El Terrero had a greater population, was the site of two banks (La Plaza had none), was near the only mine of any significance in the municipio, and had emerged by the 1970s as the commercial town of greatest importance within the municipio, particularly with the massive expansion of apple orchards in the region that occurred in that decade. The people of Namiquipa did not want to give up the cabecera.6 Namiquipa presented my friend Neto as their candidate for Presidente Municipal, but they were unable to raise as much money as people in El Terrero to guarantee that end. Meanwhile the charismatic medical doctor Armando Matsuda – who had run for Presidente Municipal as candidate of the PAN in 1980 but “lost” the election – also tried to secure the PRI candidacy in 1983. He was also unable to raise enough money. As a resident of the outlying hamlet of El Oso, his base was in “los ranchos,” in the hamlets, i.e., among the hicks; it was unrealistic to imagine he could possibly raise as much money as did Hernando Rincón from El Terrero to buy the PRI candidacy.7 The Namiquipans did secure Neto’s candidacy as the Suplente [“substitute” or vice presidente] of Rincón, figuring by that means to at least wield some influence within the municipal government. Failing to secure the PRI candidacy, Matsuda presented himself as candidate of the PST for Presidente Municipal. The electoral contest was set: El Terrero’s man Rincón was the PRI candidate for Presidente Municipal (i.e., the guaranteed winner) and Namiquipans enjoyed Neto as the Suplente. Even if that is in many respects a meaningless office, it would still provide Namiquipans a voice – however limited – in the future of the municipio; enough, perhaps, to guarantee that the cabecera would not be moved. But – and here’s where another thorny issue of local politics intervened – the struggle of los malvinos became implicated in the

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contest for Presidente Municipal, and Matsuda quickly secured an extensive and well-mobilized following. In the months leading up to the elections Matsuda and the PST staged a series of impressive demonstrations, the fervor of which was heightened by political homicides of pesetistas in some of the outlying communities (e.g., Ejido Benito Juárez). The elections in early July resulted in official results according to which the PRI won in Namiquipa, as in other municipios of northwestern Chihuahua where there were contested elections, with the PRI victories acknowledged to be fraudulent even – or perhaps especially – by priistas themselves.8 But the now-galvanized “Matsudistas” of Namiquipa would not relent. On October 9th, one day before the priista Rincón was to be formally installed in office, the PST staged a demonstration in the plaza of Namiquipa. Hundreds of people gathered. Speeches were delivered. Judiciales hung about with fingers on their triggers. The pesetistas determined to seat symbolically Matsuda in the Presidente Municipal’s chair in the Presidencia. Upon trying to enter the building, though, they were greeted by a volley of gunshots; Rincón and twenty-five of his men were already inside. In the moments following, the plaza was cleared. Gunshots rang out. The crowd was clubbed by the judiciales and driven away in a trail of blood, the plaza littered with abandoned high-heel shoes and battered trucks. According to the official version, the judiciales’ rifles were loaded with blanks. Which may well have been true; of course the dum-dum bullets extracted from the walls of houses on the plaza – not to mention the two corpses on the ground and the shattered windshields of trucks lining the plaza – indicated that someone had been shooting live bullets.9 As it turned out, the priista from El Terrero was only in office for ten days. During that period he managed to clean out the municipal treasury, according to some using the money to purchase ten or twelve machine guns.10 But the PRI in Chihuahua, dissatisfied that there had not been a peaceful transition in Namiquipa, perhaps surmised that it wasn’t enough to merely impose the PRI candidate for Presidente Municipal (as they did do in the municipios of Madera and Nuevo Casas Grandes that year, for example). During these days I was living in the house of Neto and was present when the State Chairman of the PST showed up to make The Deal. Demonstrating little trust in Matsuda (who after all had run with the PAN three years prior, and first tried to secure the PRI candidacy in 1983), the PST wanted to broker a deal according to which Rincón would be kicked out and Neto – as Suplente – would be installed in office. And thus it was to be. Neto succeeded to political office.

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Neto Tries to Save the Pueblo From the standpoint of many in Namiquipa, this was a Good Thing. Never mind how he got there, Neto being Presidente Municipal could guarantee that the cabecera would not be moved, the war of Los Malvinos forgotten (perhaps the judiciales would soon leave town); Matsuda had been screwed by his own party after all. So what if the PRI had lost the elections but imposed its candidate anyway; the will of the people – for an end to violence, a restoration of social peace – had been heard. Neto’s installation in office had little to do with his talents as a politico or his qualities as a person; it had a lot to do with an act of state with which many – priistas and pesetistas alike – could live. Neto, after all, was by definition merely the instrument of a Higher Power. Before his unanticipated installation as Presidente Municipal, Neto had been a well respected member of the community: honest and hardworking, he was a member of one of the dozen or so leading families in Namiquipa. A descendent of colonial period settlers, he cultivated his own fields of beans and corn on temporal [rain-irrigated land] across the river from his house. He also worked (with employees) a productive apple orchard on irrigated lands he had inherited from the maternal uncle who had raised him. Until the 1980s the political bug had not bitten Neto in a serious way; some Namiquipans speculated that he had been drawn in primarily as a non-controversial, hardworking individual with little in the way of political ambitions. Neto and his wife Cuca had five children; two teenage daughters and a teenage son, and a pre-adolescent son and daughter. The eldest daughter had just given birth to their first grandchild (a few months after a shotgun wedding) in what was regarded by some in Namiquipa as a sort of dishonoring “family tragedy” (of the “kids with kids; oh, the shame” genre) that Neto bore with his typical stoicism and dignity. The younger teenagers were both attending the Prepa (high school) in Namiquipa and appeared “more responsible.” Cuca, though, was regarded as a sort of wild-card; into dressing up when it wasn’t necessary, for instance. And anyway, her family was from El Terrero! Still, several factors made Neto especially appealing as Namiquipa’s Presidente Municipal. For one thing, he was already wealthy. This is pertinent simply because in private discourse on politics, some degree or other of corruption is fully expected and taken for granted, whether or not it may actually be occurring. As one Namiquipan remarked late in the summer of 1983: We expect the Presidente Municipal to steal. If they don’t appear to be stealing, well something strange is going on. Better, of course, if they only steal just a little. The

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Profe [Zorrilla] is incredible. He hasn’t stolen anything. In fact, he spent more money on the pueblo in four months than Armando [Rico] did in almost three years!

Neto’s already-established wealth encouraged in many the hopeful wish that he might “only steal just a little.” Another of his recognized virtues was precisely that be was not muy politico; hence he could, by definition, be trusted (since politicos, by definition, cannot). His first few months in office were not exactly smooth sailing. To intimidate los Malvinos and maintain “law and order”, judiciales still occupied the plazas of Namiquipa and Cruces, which lent the towns an aura of terror; machine gun-toting outsiders were resented by members of the Namiquipan Comandancia, not to mention by vecinos, the folks who lived in town. In November 1983, Rincón – claiming that Neto’s installation as Presidente Municipal had been illegally conducted (as indeed it had; but so too had Rincón’s election been illegal in the first place!) – tried to reassume office, arriving in Namiquipa with a dozen armed followers. Namiquipans turned out in droves to form a human wall around the Presidencia, preventing the people of El Terrero from entering in a massive demonstration of support for Neto. In short, even while the war of Los Malvinos continued to affect Namiquipans throughout the municipio,11 the long-standing pique [fight, argument] between Namiquipa and El Terrero was still very much alive. In 1984, Neto hit on a marvellous way of resolving once and for all the dispute over where the cabecera should be permanently located. Even though the population of El Terrero was more than twice that of Namiquipa, if Namiquipa could secure recognition as an “urban zone,” a “zona urbana” – and El Terrero prevented from securing such recognition – the cabecera would never be moved. An important criterion for recognition as a zona urbana is to have a sewer system. The Chihuahua state government agreed to increase the amount of money pouring through the Namiquipan treasury to the end of having a sewer system constructed in Namiquipa (and not in El Terrero). Neto would save the pueblo of Namiquipa. What an auspicious immediate follow-up to succession to political office! Obrando Obras The zanjas project turned out to be emblematic of the vacuity of Neto’s pretense to exercise legitimate authority and rule in Namiquipa. The raison d’etre of the zanjas was to secure recognition of Namiquipa as a zona urbana. The magnificently expanded budget for the municipio was icing on the cake, establishing additional potential circuits for the redistribution of wealth. Setting aside the

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public health benefits of the installation of a sewer system in Namiquipa, his project bore the streaks of the sort of “hechos” [actions, deeds] on behalf of the pueblo Mexicano that had long been a hallmark of Revolutionary social justice. (The PRI campaign slogan in 1983 was “Hechos, no palabras” [Deeds, not words, or Accomplishments, not small talk].) Supposing from a panglossian perspective that the sewage system eventually worked, it would provide yet another example of the sort of public works project that the PRI had given to Mexico in the decades since the 1920s. Most people, after all, don’t spend a great deal of time thinking about where their shit and piss goes; not having to think about it at all provides a certain kind of liberation. But the last point depended on the sewer system actually working. The project did not appear to be doomed from the start, and perhaps it was not. But long before the final meters of trench were dug, the last pieces of pipe fitted together, the concluding manhole cover dropped into place, a recurrent topic of conversation among the Namiquipan men who worked on the sewer system had to do with various ways the system would likely fail were the households in La Plaza to tie in to it. About two dozen men from Namiquipa were hired to dig the trenches, set the pipe, and build the manholes. Actually many more were involved, since most would only work on an occasional basis. The Presidencia paid the workers the minimum wage set for jobs in the countryside, which is lower than for urban/industrial jobs. As the work progressed, a dawning realization set in that this small project was turning in to the sort of obra publica [public works project] for which Mexico has long been famous.12 While obras may signify “works” to many, what was not lost on the workers in Namiquipa was the circumstance that the verb obrar also means “to shit”. Their work was fast turning into a sort of public, collective act of defecation, of waste. After the backhoes tore out large trenches in the middle of the streets, crews of men armed with pick and shovel descended into the trenches to finish them, to prepare them to receive the concrete sewer pipes. It was important that a certain slope be maintained in each section of the system to avoid backups or gravity-induced blockage. The pipes were to be packed in sand to assure there was no movement after the trenches were covered over. Manholes and vents were essential to the smooth operation of the system; ideally these would be constructed of brick and high quality mortar. Cast iron manhole covers would be installed on the surface of the roads. As the work progressed, the streets of Namiquipa became an obstacle course; it was difficult to remember which street was torn up which week and new trenches would occur suddenly, with little in the way of advance warning beyond the noise of a backhoe or the

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sounds of pick and shovel advancing down the street. Late one morning, Cuca, dressed to the nines in high-heels and an elegant suit she had sewn herself, was leaving the Presidencia where she had chaired a meeting of the DIF, an official women’s organization financed by the PRI/state. Walking past a crew of ditch-diggers sweating and melting in the sun and dust, she paused, suddenly, to exhort them to work hard, make certain they were doing a good job. Words of encouragement these were not; the message was, “Neto has done you a favor by putting you to work; you owe it to the pueblo to do a good job. Cut the trenches straight and lay the pipe as it should be laid.” That would have been well and good had it not been for the fact that the project was being overseen by engineers from Chihuahua City who wanted nothing so much as to finish the job as fast as possible. Pipes were set in the uneven dirt that had been pulled out rather than in sand, increasing the likelihood they would shift after being covered over. On many occassions, broken pieces of pipe were covered over rather than being pulled out and replaced. Instead of purchasing bricks to build the manholes and vents, stones were used, the mortar weak and the joints questionable. The manhole covers were great on the 1,000 meters of paved road in Namiquipa, but for the rest they only resulted in obstacles of the torn oil-pan variety after a few weeks of rain and traffic. The men who worked on building the sewer system for Namiquipa opined as they were building it that it would never work. The talk on the streets and in the cantinas indicated an awareness of the fact that the whole project was nothing so much as a supremely effective way of literally burying traces and evidence of an immense circuit of “disappearing funds.” And if the sistema de drenaje would not function properly, the only improvements likely to be made would be to Neto’s personal wealth and that of his family. By appearing to provide the canals for one kind of shit, the workers were only providing canals for yet another kind of shit; the routine [mis]appropriation of funds. And if the sewer system didn’t work, well, La Plaza would not be able to claim status of zona urbana. A Career in Politics Turns to Shit Let us now return to Neto’s political trajectory after his succession to low office. By the autumn of 1984, Neto had lost much of the respect previously enjoyed from his vecinos in Namiquipa. Already in the spring of 1984 he was having a cocina integral – kitchen cabinets and associated Modern Conveniences – installed in his house in Arivechi, the barrio just south of La Plaza Namiquipa.13 At the same time his son-in-law, having been given the job of driving

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the Caterpillar roadgrader throughout the municipio (most of the time, of course, parked in Namiquipa awaiting repairs) was building a new house for himself. The next year Neto knocked down the adobe wall surrounding his house lot and replaced it with a concrete wall (perhaps using some of the cement destined for the new bridge crossing the Rio Santa Maria in front of Namiquipa?). By the end of his term in office in 1986, Neto and Cuca had built a house for themselves in Chihuahua City, ostensibly so their children could continue their education there. The other teenage daughter, however, was not a likely candidate for The Higher Learning. In 1984, while behind the wheel of one of the Presidencia’s pick-up trucks14 she had run over and killed an elderly man in El Molino and then driven away. By 1989 Neto’s teenage son was serving an 18-year jail sentence for narcotrafico. Apparently, instead of studying for his bachillerato, he’d hung out with judiciales and cocaine transporters. It is likely he was set up on the charges but, no longer in political office after 1986, Neto was powerless to intervene on his son’s behalf. This is a grim little story. Having lost the respect of what had only shortly before been an enthusiastic political following, Neto fell head-first into a more typical political trajectory, the destiny of which was rather like that of the material intended to be carried through the public works project that was to have been the crowning moment of his career in office. Building the house in Chihuahua City was a wise move, since he pretty much had to retire there after his term in office. Neither muy politico nor particularly ambitious, he had to steal all that he could in the little time available. For the rest (i.e., routine administration of governance in the municipio; e.g., resolving the agrarian dispute in Cruces) he accepted and enforced orders from above and accomplished little else, least of all anything that he himself initiated. In the end, Neto demonstrated himself to be a willing instrument of the interests of the ruling party, deaf to alternative voices, which were gaining prominence and importance throughout Chihuahua in the 1980s. The Outcome At the conclusion of Neto’s term in office in 1986, yet another priista from El Terrero was “elected” and installed in office. That event was hardly noted though, since in that year there were, in the wake of the influential mobilizations by the Movimiento Democratico Campesino [Democratic Peasant Movement] surging out of northwestern Chihuahua (just as during the autumn of 1910), gubernatorial elections as well. As is well-known, the PRI imposed its gubernatorial candidate Fernando Baeza; the response across

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the state was a resounding repudiation of “politics as usual,” to the everyday forms of rule.15 Events in Namiquipa, while symptomatic of what was occurring throughout the state – e.g., in Namiquipa the fielding of candidates from five different opposition parties both night and left of the PRI – were hardly visible. The priista from El Terrero, modelo 1986, was removed from office within a year; his huge field planted with marijuana on the margins of the municipio was too obvious and embarrassing to the state.16 His suplente – a man from the ranchos, a regional officer of the CNC (Confederacion Nacional Campesina, the official peasant organization), and an important supporter of Rincón in 1983 – served out the term, by all accounts handling the job honorably and with a minimum of obvious screw-ups. He deployed the politica de los dinosauros [old-guard style policies17] in Namiquipa, even as in Chihuahua after 1986 the PRI successfully (I think) implemented internal democratic reforms – for instance in selection of PRI candidates – of the kind demanded by Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas before his expulsion from the party the following year. In 1989 Profe David Zorrilla, selected after an unprecedented “primary election” for the PRI candidate, was returned to office. In 1992, a PANista was installed as Presidente Municipal. Neto, by that time, was long gone. Afterthoughts It is possible to argue that Chihuahua in the 1980s, like Chihuahua in the early 1900s, was in many respects a “political barometer” of what was about to happen throughout the country. Before 1988 (throughout Mexico), there was 1986 (in Chihuahua). Before the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, the EZLN, hit the press, the MDC (Movimiento Democratico Campesino) – as unlikely and compelling a combination of political forces and demands as one could imagine – was present. And it was above all as an idiom that electoral struggle – a demand for sufragio efectivo [fair elections], to coin a phrase – was invoked during this period. But few harbored the illusion that justice was waiting to be secured through the convocation of fair elections resulting in communities being administered by popularly selected authorities. The proposition, rather, was something on the order of: These are the rules by which the State insists we play; let’s play. The State cannot; it no longer knows how. Perhaps Neto and his immediate successors recognized neither the nature of the popular peasant movements in Chihuahua in the 1980s nor the novelty of the character assumed by electoral struggle in that period. His moves were symptomatic of the sort of

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reality-denying policy and maneouvering (rather like those of a person drowning in shit) that gripped the highest echelons of power in Mexico by the mid-1990s. Neto, though, could not retire to Montreal or Cuba or Ireland; only to Cd. Chihuahua. One of the novelties of Neto’s abuse of power in Namiquipa was that it came from un hijo del pueblo; Namiquipans were more accustomed to this sort of shit being generated from without. As Derek Sayer reminds us, “Individuals live in the lie that is ‘the state,’ and it lives through their performances” (1994: 374). The guys digging the ditches knew they were a sham. But they also shared a sense of participating in a ritual performance through which Neto could “save the pueblo”; even as the shared knowledge was that the sewers wouldn’t work. What came as something of a shock was that this shallow and poorly executed lie was being promulgated from within the pueblo of Namiquipa, from within one end or another of the larga tripa. The power of a system of rule “works through the way it forcibly organizes, and divides, subjectivities, and thereby produces and reproduces quite material forms of sociality” (Sayer 1994: 374). The identities of political subjects are inscribed in myriad ways. This paper has tried to demonstrate one way that subjects’ identities may be circumscribed in large part by invisible and subterranean, literally underground grids of power and networks of associations. The distinction between “urban” and “rural” for instance here hinges upon the presence or absence of a concrete, material grid through which feces can flow. The alternative to such a grid is for the feces to be expulsed into arroyos or to gather in cisterns, where the people must live with it. And that provides an important element of their identity-formation. Ethnographers whose work is carried out in rural Mexico are subject to multiple, often conflicting, sources of anxiety. For instance: How much of the dirty laundry is it suitable to hang out for scholarly inspection? How can an outsider meaningfully be expected to integrate the often incomprehensible details that comprise elements of day-to-day political struggle in small towns or regions of Mexico? In wending my way between both those anxieties, an effort was made above to highlight the general features of this story for the manner in which this discussion of zanjas and succession relates to other investigations of corruption and society in Mexico, to other studies of “the structures and meanings involved in the creation of systems of solidarity and authority and to what appear to be the unconscious systems of control” (Cohn, 1987 [1980]: 40) marking the societies we live and work in. The general point is not the liberal and racist dismissal of Mexican politicians as “inherently corrupt” but, instead, that the social

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relationships – as between ruler and ruled – generated within the very system of “politically organized subjection” that is the bourgeois state are themselves the root of the problem.18 An instance of “corruption” is a symptom and not the cause of a more thorough going social disorder.

Notes Originally prepared for a conference on “Corruption & Society in Mexico” organized at the University of Chicago by Claudio Lomnitz in December 1995. 1 am grateful for the critical remarks on this essay by Antonio Azuela de la Cueva, the helpful readings by Eva Tessler, and the immensely useful editorial suggestions by Claudio Lomnitz. The standard disclaimers apply. The names of individuals in Namiquipa mentioned below are pseudonyms. 1 This section heading and the next are shameless little appropriations from the essay “Setting-up the Seen” by Philip Corrigan, in Culture in History edited by Joseph Melling and Jonathan Barry (University of Exeter Press 1992). 2 Alonso, 1995; Nugent, 1993. 3 Eg. Orozco, 1995, in which Namiquipa figures prominently. 4 On the ideological disjuncture between the Mexican state and the popular classes in the 1980s, see Nugent, 1987; on state formation and popular culture see Joseph and Nugent, 1994, particularly the empirical studies as well as the contributions by Scott, Corrigan, Roseberry and Sayer. 5 For more detailed discussion of the 1983 elections in Chihuahua see Lau Rojo, 1989: 1–19; Nugent, 1987; Nugent, 1993: 20. 6 The issue of relocating the cabecera had figured as well in a shooting war in the late 1940s, after which some of the Namiquipans who had taken up arms in opposing the relocation – on that occasion to El Molino – fled to the United States, even though they had been successful in preventing the movement of government offices out of Namiquipa. 7 Is an explication of the subtext – namely that the PRI candidacy for Presidente Municipal was for sale in 1983, as it had been in prior years – even required? 8 The only exceptions – i.e., municipios in the countryside where opposition parties not only won but were allowed to assume office – were Ignacio Zaragosa (where the PSUM victory was recognized) and Cuauhtemoc (where the victory of the PST candidate, himself a lifelong priista until he had failed to secure the PRI nomination that year, was recognized). Cf. Lau Rojo, 1989: 10; Nugent, 1993: 20. 9 Cf. Alonso, 1988, for another account of what was called by many in Namiquipa el día de los garrotes (the day of the clubs) even if they knew it had really been el dia de los balazos (the day of the gunshots). 10 More than one Namiquipan remarked with surprise that there were some 200,000 pesos remaining in the municipal coffers after the Presidente Municipal Interino’s 5 month reign. As one put it, “The Profe is the first Presidente Municipal who actually left some money behind!! Maybe he didn’t have enough time in office to steal it?” 11 Los Malvinos did eventually secure recognition from the Chihuahua state government and the SRA (Secretaría de Reforma Agraria, Ministry of Agrarian Reform) of their rights to cultivate the “invaded” lands near

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Cruces; but they had to sleep with guns by their side in the fields at night to keep the wealthy Cruceños – allies of the former Presidente Municipal – from dislodging them. 12 And for which Mexico is now even more notorious in light of the monumental waste generated by Pronasol. I think, for instance, of already crumbling monuments that decorate little-used, poorly-laid four-lane toll roads in Michoacan that are now expected to have “paid for themselves” sometime in the last quarter of the next century. Or the uses to which Pronasol funds were put in the state of Chiapas before 1994 (construction of prisons) and after (road construction to afford Mexican Army access to rebel zones). For a comparative example of the dissonances of the “statesystem” and the “state-idea” in a different place (Peru) and time (nineteenth century) see the article by A. Kim Clark (1994) examining public works, labor recruitment and Indian-state relations. 13 At that time, I was living with the carpenter who installed it, a brother-in-law of Profe David Zorrilla, Presidente Municipal Interino May– Oct 1983. 14 A stolen late-model Chevy that had shown up in Namiquipa with US license plates a few months earlier, but was promptly issued Chihuahua plates and integrated into the Presidencia’s fleet. Tales of “regularization of vehicle registrations” could be the subject for another paper altogether. 15 Again, see Lau Rojo 1989. 16 This bore small-scale echoes of what had occurred elsewhere in Chihuahua in 1984, when Mexican Army troops had to repatriate to other parts of Mexico more than 10,000 migrant workers on three irrigated pot plantations near Coyame, Aldama and El Bufalo; the Bufalo properties probably belonged to former Chihuahua Governor Oscar Flores Sanchez. 17 Mexican politicians of the old-guard, traditional PRI are often referred to as “dinosaurs” in contrast to the putatively more modern and certainly more technocratically-inclined challengers within the PRI, who have been largely responsible for shifting the direction of the ruling party – and the nation – since the 1980s. One of the grandest then-octogenarian dinosaurs of all, Fidel Velasquez, leader of the official trades union organizations, proudly remarked in the 1980s, “They call us dinosaurs, yet they forget that dinosaurs ruled the earth for 60 million years.” Don Fidel later said of the PSUM (or was it the PMS? [the Mexican Socialist Party], another Communist-led coalition of 5 parties and organizations) “Five times Zero equals Zero.” 18 See Philip Abrams, 1988 on the difficulties of studying the state. References Abrams, Philip 1988 “Notes on some difficulties of studying the state” Journal of Historical Sociology 1(1): 58–89. Alonso, Ana Maria 1988 “The effects of truth: Representations of the past and the imagining of community” Journal of Historical Sociology 1(1): 33–57. ————. 1995 Thread of Blood, Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Clark, A. Kim 1994 “Indians, the state and law: Public works and the struggle to control labor in Liberal Ecuador” Journal of Historical Sociology 7(1): 49–72. Cohn, Bernard S. 1980 “History and anthropology: The state of play” in An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987.

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Joseph, Gilbert M. and Daniel Nugent (eds.) 1994 Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the negotiation of rule in modern Mexico, Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 3–23. Lau Rojo, Rubón 1989 Las Elecciones en Chihuahua (1983–1988), Cuadernos del NORTE: Sociedad.Politica.Cultura, Año 1. Número especial, Chihuahua, Chih., Enero 1989. Nugent, Daniel 1987 “Mexico’s rural populations and la crisis: Economic crisis or legitimation crisis?” Critique of Anthropology 7(3): 93–112. ————. 1993 Spent Cartridges of Revolution: An Anthropological History of Namiquipa, Chihuahua, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Orozco, Victor 1995 Tierra de Libres: Los pueblos del Distrito Guerrero en el siglo XIX, Primera parte de ]a Historia General de Chihuahua 111, Cd. Juárez: Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez and Gobeimo del Estado de Chihuahua. Sayer, Derek 1994 “Everyday forms of state formation: Some dissident remarks on ‘hegemony’ ” in G. Joseph and D. Nugent (eds.) Everyday Forms of State Formation, Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 367–377.

On the Local Construction of Statistical Knowledge: Making up the 1861 Census of the Canadas BRUCE CURTIS Abstract Census material is a basic source of information for scholars concerned with many dimensions of Canadian development, yet no systematic examination of census procedures has been undertaken. An overview of the making of the 1861 census of the Canadas is followed by a brief discussion of the reflexive character of census knowledge.

***** This article examines the practices and procedures involved in the making of the 1861 census in the British North American colony of the Canadas (the southern parts of the current Canadian provinces of Ontario, formerly Canada West, and Quebec, formerly Canada East). It outlines practices of localized knowledge production underlying the ostensibly standardized and statistical knowledges published in official census reports. Census compilations were fashioned out of a chain of observations of observations of selected aspects of social experience made by particular kinds of observers. Largely verbal accounts of aspects of experience provided by informants were transposed to the matrix of the official census schedules by census enumerators.1 These schedules were themselves often reworked by enumerators before being passed on to census commissioners, who, in turn, reworked them again before shipping them to a central government agency, where compilers reworked them at least once more. Other officials worked up compilers’ results into published census volumes. Even this simple recounting of the process of census making should lead one to be curious about the mediating practices and processes standing between both “manuscript” census schedules and published census results on the one hand and the lived experience of the subjects of the census themselves on the other. Yet, to date, no one has undertaken a systematic examination of the processes of nineteenth century Canadian census making, nor, with some near exceptions, has anyone attempted systematically to problematize the relation between census making and the realities captured by the census as an investigative instrument. Some immediate qualifications are called for. Canadian researchers working with census data have been alive to technical problems Twenty Years of the Journal of Historical Sociology: Challenging the Field Volume 2 Edited by Yoke-Sum Wong and Derek Sayer © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-17934-8

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of measurement, and of comparability in measures used, across geographical regions and census periods. Attempts have been made to recompile information contained on manuscript census sheets, using standard categories, in an effort to make more consistent observations possible.2 Some writers have attempted to show how alternative methods of compiling returns could better inform our understanding of social organization. Debates have surrounded the construction of units of analysis by those wishing to argue from the census to patterns of social organization, in turn pushing careful researchers to scrutinize some of the processes of “making sense” present in the work of census enumerators. Many researchers have been led to complement census data by comparing and contrasting it with such other sources as municipal assessments, land records, wills, notarial instruments and so forth.3 An early address to the influence of enumeration practices on 1861 census data can be found in attacks on Graffs work on literacy in Canada West. A blank space in the census columns designed to record those people over 20 years of age not knowing how to read or write was taken by Graff to indicate a literate person. On the basis of this assumption, given that many enumerators left all of these spaces blank, popular literacy rates in mid-nineteenth century Canada West were seen to have been remarkably high, with more than 90% of the adult population held to be literate. Such findings were used by some of Graff ’s readers to support social control or political socialization arguments about public educational initiatives. Graff ’s critics argued that multiple indicators of literacy were necessary before historical judgements could be made safely. They broached, but did not pursue systematically, the possibility that enumerators might have left columns blank for reasons other than simple veracity.4 More serious reservations about a naively empiricist use of the census were raised by D.P. Gagan, whose republication of enumerator’s instructions pointed to technical limitations of the enumeration process for the 1852 and 1861 censuses.5 Nonetheless, while his own investigation of a mid-nineteenth century “crisis” in agricultural landholding in one Ontario county attended to the revealing character of inconsistencies in enumeration practices, Gagan saw aggregate census data as giving “the elementary facts of . . . demographic history in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.” Reading across the series of published reports of the censuses of 1852, 1861 and 1871, Gagan concluded, In 1851 the population of Peel County was 24,816. A decade later it had increased by 9.8% to 27,240. When the next census was taken in 1871 it revealed that in the preceding decade Peel County had lost 5% of its 1861 population . . . the rural

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population of Peel County in 1871 (23,331) was not only smaller, by 10%, than it had been a decade earlier, there were actually fewer rural dwellers in the county in 1871 than there had been in 1851. . . .6

These “elementary facts” were interpreted by Gagan to indicate a crisis in which growing population pressure on land led to a variety of changed household survival strategies, including delayed marriages, reduced family sizes, restricted access to inheritance, and non-agricultural education. Other writers have used Gagan’s findings as evidence of a process of proletarianization underway in nineteenth century Canada. Gagan’s critics, in turn, posed questions about the relation between enumeration practices and patterns of property holding, and about his methodological choices in analysing data.7 Despite the remarkably important issues at stake in these debates, historians, sociologists and economists have routinely constructed arguments about aspects of social development taking aggregate census data as “facts”. Yet even those state officials closely involved in the census making process regarded the midnineteenth century censuses of the Canadas with considerable distrust, at times yielding to outright contempt. The 1861 census, in particular, was held to have produced wildly inflated accounts of population size and census procedures were changed radically before the 1871 effort.8 In the absence of scrutiny of the process of census making, arguments about social development based on census data must be suspect. This is particularly the case of arguments, such as those by Gagan, which use the 1861 aggregate census returns as evidence of historical series. “Elementary facts” prove to be neither. A Constructivist Argument Largely through an examination of the 1861 census of the Canadas, I propose a constructivist argument which holds that census information is made, not taken, fabricated through processes that select, and do not simply reflect dimensions of social organization. Census making is a process of abstraction from the lives of its subjects; it is at once a process of discipline and formation which may provide a basis for the establishment of real relations. I do not take a radical constructivist position, which argues that all forms of constructed knowledge are equivalently fictive or that the real is only a human construct. Census and other forms of statistical knowledge, as Williams pointed out some years ago, are potent scientific resources, enabling us to grasp such things as the movement of a world economy or the material conditions of population.9

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Any critical social science must depend upon systematic observation. Yet, this does not mean that we should remain indifferent to the processes and practices of observation. Techniques of observation, locations of observers and the imbrication of observations with social projects shape what is seen and what is recorded. There is no such thing as innocent social knowledge. The process of knowing shapes the real as it is made accessible to the knower. Administrative knowledges, moreover, have the potential, if they are enforced and embodied in policies, to bolster the real consequences of selected dimensions of social existence. Administrative categorizations, themselves typically based upon constructed knowledge of the social, may determine the conditions of life, labour, health and security of members of populations. What historical sociologists can glean from census information is shaped by the broad conditions under which censuses are conducted and the interests underlying them. For a dispassionate interest in finding the “truth” has by no means been the sole motivation for the execution of censuses, anymore than the “truth” sought by census-makers has itself been unitary and constant. In the Canadian context, one can see censuses being made as a statement of sovereignty by parties on both sides of the frontier during the Maine boundary dispute; during the 1850s and 1860s as proof of the success of land and immigration policy; in 1871 as a monument to Ultramontaine visions of family organization.10 Census making also failed on a number of occasions: in 1844 when people refused to answer queries in Canada East; in 1848 when attempts to organize local government bodies in Canada East eliminated officials intended to conduct census queries. A critical examination of the social context and practices of census-making points us to their possibilities and limitations as sources of intelligence.

Making the 1861 Census In principle, the 1861 nominative census of the Canadas was to be conducted on 14 January and was to record conditions and events as they existed on the night of 13 January. A central government body, called the Board of Registration and Statistics, had legal responsibility for the census’s execution, and the Board’s secretary, the amateur statistician William Hutton (1801–61), did the main work of census organization, in addition to his related duties as secretary to the Bureau of Agriculture. Census categories were designed in light of the experience of the 1852 census of the Canadas, but also in the context of an attempt at an empire-wide census that would employ the categories and follow the procedures

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determined by the Census Section of the 1860 London International Statistical Congress. Hutton’s office had a number of at least partly extra-scientific interests in the execution of the census and in the demonstration of a growing population. For almost a decade, Hutton’s attempts to fulfil his agency’s mandate of providing an annual return of vital statistics to Parliament had been frustrated, and he looked to the census as a reliable source of such information. Successive governments had promoted population growth through immigration as central elements in economic policy, and Hutton’s Bureau of Agriculture was responsible for attracting immigrants. During the late 1850s, Hutton had been applying multipliers to returns of school populations in an effort to demonstrate a growing Canadian population, and he had publicized these demonstrations widely. The census was looked to as a vindication of ministerial and administrative policy. Furthermore, heated debates in the colonial parliament surrounded the relative sizes of anglophone and francophone populations and the principle of representation by population.11 The 1861 census was an organizational fiasco. The Board of Registration and Statistics (BRS) had not the time, the financial resources, nor the statistical expertise demanded by census-taking. The drawing up of census schedules was begun in the early part of 1860, and draft schedules, complete by mid-June, were taken by the Canadian Finance Minister to the London Statistical Congress in July. William Hutton was refused permission to attend, yet was forced to await the return of the minister and the report of the Congress before completing his arrangements. Funds for census purposes were not allocated until November 1860. Considerations of political patronage meant that the printing of census schedules was let to five different presses, in Quebec city, Toronto and Hamilton, with most English language forms printed in Quebec and some French language forms printed in Toronto and Hamilton. Printing contracts were not let until early in November, it was the middle of the month before printers had manuscript schedules in hand and the end of the month before their proofs had been approved. The editor of the Journal de Québec found himself responsible for the work of translation of English schedules into French. In principle, all schedules were shipped to the BRS in Quebec for redistribution to census commissioners, despite the fact that many of the latter were close to Toronto and Hamilton. In consequence, a great many local census officers, perhaps the majority, were not provided with adequate supplies of census schedules by the census day. The hurriedness of the printing process meant that the BRS did not catch typographical errors in the manuscript census sheets, nor, more seriously, did it notice the

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existence of several internal inconsistencies in its printed instructions to enumerators. The government appointed a census commissioner for each county. Commissioners in turn were to appoint enumerators, to divide their counties (initially) into districts small enough to be enumerated in a day, to discuss schedules with enumerators to ensure there were no difficulties, and to supply enumerators with the relevant mix of personal and agricultural census sheets. On the basis of a cursory correspondence with the Superintendents of Education East and West, William Hutton proposed that commissioners enlist school teachers as enumerators. Yet commissioners themselves were not informed of their appointments until the last week of November 1860, and many received no official notification of appointment until late December. With their unofficial notice of appointment, it was intended that they receive a skeleton map of their counties, to aid them in determining enumeration districts, and a bundle containing copies of the Census Act, official instructions to enumerators, their own official instructions, and a package of handbills announcing the census. Census schedules were to follow in a few days. The BRS was unable to provide the appropriate mix of forms to commissioners in a timely fashion, especially for those in Canada West. Many commissioners waited on the arrival of forms and the skeleton map before attempting to divide their counties and to find enumerators. It quickly became apparent that the BRS’s plan to use school districts as enumeration districts and teachers as enumerators was impracticable and supplementary instructions were issued allowing commissioners to increase the size of enumeration districts, an occasion of further delay. Handbills announcing the census were unevenly distributed. Many commissioners in Canada West placed newspaper advertisements to prepare residents for the passage of enumerators, only to learn that the BRS would not cover their expenses. In the older settled parts of Canada East, rectilinear patterns of settlement facilitated the work of commissioners in designing enumeration districts and in selecting enumerators. Parishes or parts of parishes and villages usually served as enumeration districts. The work of enumeration was undertaken commonly by members of local elites with proven skills of literacy, especially by notaires, although, in such impoverished counties as Kamouraska, doctors and merchants also acted. Many notaires had the practical advantages as enumerators of possessing both authority and a detailed knowledge of the de jure parish population, and most settled parishes had good and accessible records of vital events. The Church hierarchy issued strong and repeated calls for cooperation with

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enumerators. Commissioners in most established parts of Canada East managed to select enumerators in advance of the census day, and in many cases to meet with them to examine the census schedules. Matters were dramatically different in Canada West and in the new Eastern Tomships of Canada East, where settlements were scattered and village clusters or central parish institutions were largely lacking. Commissioners were not able to design enumeration districts in keeping with school districts, because on such a basis they would often have had to find as many as 150 enumerators, and because many commissioners did not find teachers likely to be “competent” enumerators, a matter of sexual politics, given that women formed about half of the teaching body, and no women were allowed to enumerate. At the announced rate of $.02 per name on the personal census schedules, many commissioners reported finding great difficulty in getting potential enumerators to accept the position, and, in many cases, used the sole criterion of the availability of enumerators to define districts. Differing patterns of settlement and of cultural identity in the francophone parts of Canada East and the rest of the colony meant that anglophone commissioners were compelled to find and engage a great many more enumerators than were their francophone counterparts. In Kamouraska county, for instance, there were 18 enumeration districts, two of them convents enumerated by a religious superior. In Chambly County, 10 enumeration districts were enumerated by 7 enumerators. In the thinly settled Eastern Township region of Brome County, the commissioner defined 16 enumeration districts. In Canada West, by contrast, the Leeds County commissioner named 25 enumerators, his counterpart in Norfolk County named 27, in Middlesex County 53, and in Carleton County there were about 57 enumeration districts. Most commissioners were not placed to seek enumerators until, at the earliest, a month before census day. In the established parts of Canada East, commissioners were able to work within this limited time. However, several commissioners in Canada West managed to find enumerators only by touring their counties personally in the week before the census day and then only by begging, entreating, calling in past favours, and promising higher than the official rate of pay. Several commissioners were unable to provide enumerators with any census schedules before census day, and in many cases, no serious discussions of the schedules can have taken place. Most Canada West enumerators were farmers and their skills of literacy were often dubious. No trial enumeration was undertaken for the 1861 census of the Canadas, and many commissioners did not have sufficient time to

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familiarize themselves, let alone their enumerators, with the census schedules before census day. This was a serious shortcoming, because the instructions accompanying the schedules were incoherent and demanded impossible things of both enumerators and commissioners. Instructions contained a typographical error, by virtue of which enumerators were referred to an inappropriate column in their schedules. More important, on both the personal and the agricultural census schedules, enumerators were instructed to ensure that certain column totals corresponded (and commissioners were enjoined to ensure that enumerators complied), where such correspondence was logically impossible. On the personal sheets, the total number of names on each sheet was to correspond with the total number of names less the names of casual visitors and transients. On the agricultural sheets, the total amount of land held by each person was meant to correspond to the total amount of land each person had under cultivation, under different forms of cultivation, and uncultivated. Supplementary instructions correcting the incoherence in the agricultural schedules were sent to commissioners early in January 1861, too late for at least some of them to inform enumerators. More serious, while at least one Canada East commissioner had pointed to the irrationality of the instructions concerning the personal schedules (there is no surviving indication of an official reply to him), some commissioners in Canada West did not even notice the incoherence until they were attempting to tabulate the completed schedules. Even more remarkable, those who did notice the error were then instructed to count casual visitors and transients as members of the permanent population, an official encouragement of double counting. Overcounting resulted in part from conceptual difficulties in the census design. The BRS, in keeping with propositions of the International Statistical Congress, attempted a mixed de facto and de jure census. Enumerators would record the placement of all members of the population on the night of 13 January, those temporarily out of their “normal” places would be indicated, and a clerical operation during the compiling process would reassign them. Following this logic, enumerators frequently managed to identify casual visitors and transients, but because no definition of “temporarily absent” was provided, many categories of people were enumerated at least twice: residents in inns and taverns, students boarding away from home and school teachers boarding at work, among others. Moreover, some people had more than one “normal” place and were either counted twice or had only part of their relevant activities recorded when these occurred in more than one enumeration district.

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Central officials considered several census columns to be selfevident in their meaning and in instructions to enumerators described them simply as “needs no comment.” The column headed “married during the year” was described in this way. The BRS, hoping finally to get reliable vital statistics for Canada West for 1860, intended that enumerators would record the number of marriages for that year. However, a great many enumerators interpreted their instructions as an encouragement to leave the column blank and did so: others recorded the year in which married couples had been wed; a small minority responded as the BRS had intended. Techniques of social enquiry were in a process of formation. Some commissioners issued supplementary instructions of their own to enumerators in the field, suggesting ways that enumerators could overcome such weaknesses in the schedules as the absence of a space for reporting agricultural land in fallow or in meadow. Other commissioners, and some enumerators, reported the existence of a great variety of interpretations given to the official instructions by enumerators in the field. Enumerators at Work Because the Board of Registration and Statistics was unable to deliver the appropriate mix of census schedules on time to a large number, likely to a majority, of census commissioners, enumerators took to the field with inadequate numbers of census schedules, or did not take to the field on the census day while awaiting the arrival of schedules. Several remote parts of the colony, such as the Magdalen Islands, the Algoma District, parts of Renfrew county and elsewhere, could not be supplied with census schedules before the close of the water navigation season. The official enumeration took place in these areas only in the spring of 1861, still with reference to 13 January. The BRS made no allowance for waste, spoilage or damage in its distribution of census schedules, either from motives of economy or for fear that enumerators would be tempted to inflate returns if provided with surplus sheets. Commissioners were invited to estimate the population of their counties, and the BRS shipped them the number of schedules required by their estimates. Despite the fact that the enumerators’ instructions made mention of a “book” meant to contain their schedules and on the cover of which they were to draw a sketch of their districts, enumerators received their sheets loose, unless they or their commissioner took some extraordinary steps. The schedules were physically large and unwieldy.

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January in mid-nineteenth century Canada was not a clement month as a rule. The official census week in 1861 was bitterly cold and many parts of the colony were subjected to winter storms. “Elizabethtown Jay.24 1861,” wrote the Leeds County enumerator John Young, still at work long after the census plan called for him to have finished, “traveled half mile on the 11 Con, the snow is up to the mares back must return I wont Knock the Senses out of my self and the mare for all the census in the Township into your Stable Nancy”.12 Ink froze. Ink blotted, Ink dribbled across the faces of census schedules and the faces of census enumerators froze. In such conditions, other enumerators may have been tempted to act as did the one in Oxford Township in Kent County who, instead of going from house to house in several concessions, “took such information as he could get from people in the neighbourhood.”13 Enumerators usually carried nothing in or on which to write. They spread their sheets out on tables and on the floors of log cabins and their sheets were smudged, frayed, and destroyed. Henry Pollock from Stanley Township in Kent County noted that his “first page Sheet met with Blots by ink,” because when he “went out first to take the Census it came on a storm and my sheets and my self were abused.” And William Cassidy of Greenock in Bruce county explained, “my papers are not very neat nor clean being almost impossible to keep them tidy for in many places I had to spread them out on the floors and get upon my knees and perhaps kept there for nearly one hour. . . .”14 A Joliette County enumerator named Louis Isaae Dézil explained to his commissioner, Nonobstant toute la bonne volonté possible, et les soins que j’ai pris pour tenir mes feuilles de rensement propres, il m’a été impossible d’ateindre ce but, d’abord le papier étant très Common et très mauvais, ensuite me trouvant parfois privé de table, tant dans l’obligation d’écrire sur mon portefeuille, de plus le mauvais temps qu’il a fait presque durant tous les jours que j’ai été obligé de Marcher, toutes ces Causes ont contribuées à la malpropreté qui parait sur mes feuilles.

The commissioner for Joliette commented that, in part because of the dirtiness of the census sheets, he had had “beaucoup de difficultés pour obtenir des renseignements corrects”.15 Enumerators who had spoiled or damaged sheets, and those who received inadequate supplies of schedules, either awaited the arrival of a fresh supply, or manufactured their own. Exactly how many followed the latter course is impossible to determine, but it is clear that a considerable number did so. A similar number of enumerators copied the information from soiled or damaged sheets, or from homemade sheets, onto the printed schedules before sending these to census commissioners, for preliminary

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compilation. Few, if any, of these homemade schedules have survived as “manuscript” census records, although there are surviving instances of agricultural sheets converted to personal schedules. In such cases, revealingly, enumerators did not replicate all the columns in the printed schedules, but only those they considered to be important. Enumerators engaged in an active process of knowledge construction. They interrogated informants, “made sense” of responses, and transposed them onto the census grid. While one can identify regularly occurring practices of “making sense” present in the enumeration process, many of these practices were not anticipated by the BRS or by census commissioners, and hence did not form the basis of any consciously systematic process. These regularities stem largely from typical ways of making sense common to the men engaged in the practices of social observation that produced the census. Space precludes an exhaustive investigation of such practices, but several can be indicated briefly. First, enumerators were men, and commonly men of property or professional status. They had marked preferences in their selection of informants. In the nature of the case, the census enquiries were matters of oral history and in many instances, of rather distant memory-work as well. Enumerators regarded it as entirely legitimate that only certain informants engage in this memory work. Men and male heads of households were clearly preferred. Enumerators frequently went out of their way to find male informants and, when compelled to rely on information from women, frequently expressed reservations about its quality and reliability. Men, and preferably patriarchs, were commonly allowed to speak to the experience of women and children. Again, enumerators regarded it as legitimate that employers furnish information about workers. In lumber camps in particular, enumerators reported gathering information in this way, without ever speaking to many of the individuals enumerated. Heads of institutions like convents, boarding schools, gaols and asylums, spoke for inmates. With few exceptions, men codified the experience of other men who codified the experience of women and children. Even the use of ostensibly uniform census categories did not prevent the intrusion of enumerators’ personal prejudices into the enumeration process. Many enumerators, for instance, valued their own farms far more highly than those of comparable size belonging to their neighbours. James B. Powell, a Leeds County enumerator, eschewed the suggested indicators in his official instructions with respect to religious affiliations, preferring “Papist,” for instance, to the official “R.C.”. Powell entered the occupation of the notable

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Colonel E. Buell as “Prophet”, described his religion as “true faith of Christ”, and in the births column for Buell’s son Lazerth entered “born by the spirit.” These entries were crossed out on the manuscript sheets, likely by the commissioner or a compiler.16 Enumerators frequently began the enumeration of their districts by entering the names of members of the leading families, something done, for instance, by the enumerator for the Leeds County village of Newboro. In Simcoe town in Norfolk County, one enumerator seems to have allowed merchants, doctors, and professionals to fill in the relevant entries in his schedules themselves. Enumerators in Canada East, especially notaires, tended to attribute relatively fewer occupations to women than did enumerators in Canada West. Notaires reacted to women’s work according to the assumptions of the coutûme de Paris under which married women could not hold an occupation other than that of their husbands; the census was a catalogue of women’s civil disabilities. Enumerators in Canada West were less likely to make such assumption.17 Commissioners’ Corrections Census commissioners also reported copying information from large numbers of homemade or illegible census schedules onto clean printed schedules before sending the latter to the Board of Registration and Statistics. Furthermore, in cases where they found the enumeration schedules incomplete, commissioners either met with enumerators to demand corrections or supplementary information, or corrected returns themselves, guided by their own “local knowledge.” In the fist case, demands for supplementary information often led to a supplementary enumeration or to enumerators reworking their schedules. As David Morrow, the Simcoe County commissioner who met with his enumerators in each township during the last week in February 1861, observed to the BRS, “the Bayham [township] sheets I found on the appointed day as nearly perfect as Possible except the mater of addition . . . the Dorchester sheets not so good particularly the agricultural which have all to be written over again and forwarded to me.”18 Several other commissioners, dissatisfied with the work of enumerators or with the physical condition of the census schedules, ordered the re-enumeration of districts. “Prosper Archambault, un de mes Enumérateurs, ne m’ayant pas envoyé un rapport satisfaisant,” wrote the commissioner and notaire P. Labelle, “son recensement faisant surtout défaut, sous le rapport de la propreté il m’a fallu le faire refaire en entier. . . .”19

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Particularly notorious in this regard was the case of Huron County in Canada West. The census commissioner, John Leary, a former member of the Irish rural constabulary who boasted of his involvement in that colony’s 1851 census, and perhaps the only 1861 Canadian commissioner to have people fined for refusing to answer census queries, first received at least 550 personal census sheets from the Board, but demanded a total of 1,120, more than enough to take the population of the county twice. He sent some of his enumerators out to take the agricultural census a second time when their column totals were found not to agree. In sending in his accounts, Leary explained that he was returning a list of enumerators’ names which did not agree with that originally submitted by him before the census date “as many of these gave it up,” explaining “some state sickness to be the Cause, others incompetency and one of them died Consequently I was obliged to appoint others.” Given this statement and the large number of census sheets used in the county, it seems likely that the entire Huron census had to be taken twice.20 In these sorts of cases, the enumeration became a matter of increasingly distant memory work. Commissioners re-worked the materials shipped to them by enumerators into a form they considered sufficiently intelligible to send on to the Board of Registration and Statistics. The returns of professions, trades and occupations were particularly troublesome to commissioners, especially since many enumerators took literally their instructions and made some entry in the relevant column for every person, regardless of age. The Bruce County commissioner, William Gunn, pointed out that enumerators mixed occupational and status indicators, making entries like “wife,” “daughter,” “boy,” and so on for many individuals. Gunn’s own response to these entries was “to go over them carefully myself, and rectify them, and in any case of a meterial nature, apply for information.” This was “a tedious business,” he added, “but on fully considering the whole matter, it is the cheapest way the work can be done.”21 John Beatty of Cobourg noted that “some Enumerators in entering ‘Laborers’ have included all the male children of a farmer for instance down to the age of one year,” a common response of enumerators elsewhere. Beatty’s recopying of sheets corrected such entries according to his own understanding of the nature of agricultural labour. “I have in all observed cases omitted counting any under the age of Sixteen years, as a laborer, as I think to enumerate boys under that age would give a very false presentation of the labour power of the County.” He made other alterations: “Where I have found Males as well as females entered as ‘Servants’ I have enumerated the former as ‘laborers’ putting down the females as ‘Servants’”.22

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Commissioners “corrected” other instances of what they considered to be “false presentation”, sometimes with the help of enumerators. For instance, the enumerator of district 5 in North Dorchester township, Middlesex County, wrote the commissioner to alert him of an enumeration error that gave pork and beef yields in pounds instead of the barrels demanded by the form. Elsewhere, the Middlesex commissioner found that an enumerator had returned 497 acres of spring wheat as yielding 939 bushels and commented “Spring wheat is evidently a mistake I have allowed the average of the enumerator of the Township.”23 Another kind of activity on the part of commissioners in working up the census sheets also affected markedly the nature of the “manuscript” returns. Faced with incomplete returns, commissioners provided the information required out of their own sources of information. The Algoma District commissioner, Richard Carney, was unable personally to meet his enumerators and could not provide them with sufficient census forms. Enumerators thus manufactured their own “condensed” forms. “It fell to me.” Carney noted “to carry out into the Columns and add up, I have filled in Omissions according to my knowledge and judgement, to make the Sheets complete as possible, to do so was compelled to seek information from various sources. . . .”24 Compilation No explicit account of the compilation process for the 1861 census has survived. It is possible to identify compilers and their supervisors from records of the Bureau of Agriculture, but dimensions of their labour processes must be reconstructed through an examination of traces they left on manuscript census sheets. Some further information can be gleaned from an examination of their published results. Typically, schedules for each county were bound together by the census commissioner and shipped to the Board of Registration and Statistics. Compilers seem to have worked through the schedules county by county, indicating on the covers, by initialled phrases such as “ages taken,” who had compiled what parts of the data. Like the commissioners before them, the compilers engaged in processes of interpretation; the compilation process modified the material recorded on the census sheets. This is particularly evident in the area of the “trades and occupations” columns, where compilers typically placed a check mark beside the entries they counted, at times drawing up sub-totals on the sheets. Compilers

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generally counted few of the occupations returned for women, usually (but not always) omitted status indicators, and usually (but not always) did not record occupations returned for people under sixteen years of age. The counting of multiple occupations where these were returned for adult men was usual practice. Compilers seem to have altered some of the schedules when faced with peculiar entries. For instance, an enumerator in the Norfolk County town of Simcoe returned the names of a pair of merchants on a single line in the personal schedule. The compiler scratched out one of the two names, added it at the bottom of the schedule and corrected the number of names returned.25 There is fragmentary information to suggest that the compilers also “corrected” or altered “manuscript” census schedules in more serious ways. In February 1862, the Grenville County commissioner, William Dickinson, wrote to the BRS in an evident response to a query concerning an anomaly discovered in the Oxford township returns. “Mr Jno Dickinson.” wrote the commissioner, “who was Enumerator tells me he cannot account for the error unless he thinks in Enumerating Mr Meikles property at Burritts Rappids he has put down 100 BBls Saltet fish when he should have written 100,000 Saw Logs.” One can find Mr Meikles on both the personal and agricultural “manuscript” sheets for Oxford township, but nowhere on what are the current “manuscript” sheets does one find any mention of “fish” either “Saltet” or otherwise.26 Several other kinds of “reasonable interpretations” were given to the entries on the schedules by compilers. The manuscript schedules also bear marks suggesting a considerable amount of levity accompanied the compilation process. Blank spaces on the schedules served as areas for the practice of penmanship, sketching, and the composing of doggerel. The compiler Willoughby seems to have been a favorite target of mirth, with caricatures of him and sobriquets for him appearing on some sheets. In a review of the performance of the compilers conducted in 1865, Joseph-Charles Taché, deputy-minister of agriculture, was scathingly critical. As far as he was concerned, the censuses of 1852 and 1861 were “fallacious statements and not to be relied upon in any essential point,” a position he illustrated by pointing to instances of nonsense in the published reports. The 1861 reports, for example, claimed that the 0 ships produced in the shipyards of Canada West were worth $74,700 and that the flour milled in all of the mills of Canada East was worth $100,000 less than the grain ground in its production. All of the births in 1860 were recorded as among the living in 1861, and there were other flaws. Taché undertook to “correct” the 1861 returns.27

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Conclusion The 1861 census of the Canadas is not primarily useful for historical research as a source of reliable data for quantitative manipulation. Its surviving materials, both manuscript and compiled, are not the product of systematic observations of standardized social relations, and hence are poor indicators of large scale population phenomena. The 1861 census of the Canadas almost certainly produced exaggerated measures of population; its totals were rejected by the census agency in the following decade and “corrected” totals – apparently based on a backwards extrapolation of later findings – were substituted for them. Historical sociologists can use systematic observations of social phenomena to construct explanations, but census data must be approached with a clear awareness of the conditions of their production. In the case of the 1861 census of the Canadas, those conditions were such as to give pause to anyone attempting to construct historical series in which its findings constitute one term. In a concluding note to her insightful analysis of the nineteenth century English census commentaries. Catherine Hakim castigates critics of official statistics who, she argues, “commonly fail to make the fundamental distinction between statistical information derived from administrative records, which are necessarily shaped by the administrative system, its objectives and procedures, and statistics obtained from household censuses and surveys, which are produced outside as well as inside government, and are not so affected.”28 My own research suggests this distinction is untenable. Census making depends not simply upon the elaboration of conceptual techniques and practices of enquiry, but upon the incorporation of its subjects in administrative structures. The knowledge produced through census making is a reflexive state knowledge. It is not knowledge of a population in a pristine condition, but of a population known in and through definite conditions of political subjection. Census making both depends upon and practically asserts powers of state. While administrative structures are themselves formed and reformed through particular kinds of social activity, census enquiries depend directly upon existing administrative apparatuses. The relatively underdeveloped character of these apparatuses in the Canadas of 1861 made census execution difficult, especially when the plan to use local administrative officers, in the guise of school teachers, as enumerators fell through. The inevitably imperfect capture of populations by administrative measures and structures necessarily creates a gap between census categories and social experience. The substance of this reflection is evident in the con-

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ventions of enquiry necessary to represent a mobile population as “frozen” at the moment of enquiry. What was the enumerator William Cassidy, whose census papers, we have seen, were “not very neat nor clean,” doing for the hour he often had to spend kneeling on log cabin floors? He tells us he was “trying to get direct Answers giving them time to reckon How old is Jane ‘Well she was 2 years the Christmas after I came in the Bush and took the land up in 1854 and I came in here the winter twelve months following so reckon that up’.” Neither religious nor civil administration in Canada West had captured vital events; many people did not know readily the year in which they were born. In Canada East, by contrast, where the administration of vital events was well developed, enumerators did not report Cassidy’s kind of experience; had they been confronted with such a situation, many of them could have consulted parish records. The nominative census, itself a refinement over the earlier practices of counting heads of household, has been abandoned in Canada. The census agency now employs the administrative grid organized by the postal system, one of the most extensive forms of administrative mapping, both to enumerate elements of population and to aggregate certain kinds of census results. In both of these cases, administrative capacities of state shape the process of enquiry and its products. Finally, one may understand the process of nominative census making in the nineteenth century in part in terms of its cultural continuities with other activities of men in the dominant class.29 I think in particular of that common practice of “giving a character” to departing employees and servants. The census is, on a much wider scale, a set of “identifying practices”, practices that “give a character” to the population. At issue here are questions not simply of political administration in the sense of population management, but also in terms of identity-formation and the regulation of consciousness.30 The census as an administrative exercise is about the recording, but at once the specification and the regulation of political subjectivity, fundamental components of the formation of state sovereignty. Notes Research for this article was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Research Office at Wilfrid Laurier University. It was first presented at the conference. “On the use of Manuscript Census Data in Historical Research.” University of Guelph, March 1993. A note of sources: The bulk of my research centered on state papers in the National Archives [NA] in Ottawa. Manuscript census returns are to be

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found in Record Group [RG] 31, Statistics Canada. Other materials are to be found in various parts of RG 17, Department of Agriculture, including the correspondence files (AI 2) and especially vols. 2418–2420, as well as in the personal papers of census officers. My account of the census making process summarizes these sources. 1 A vast amount of Canadian historical research has drawn upon census material. I make no pretense at being exhaustive in the introductory discussion which follows. My research has not examined in any detail the four cities – Toronto, Hamilton, Montreal and Quebec – in which heads of households were to produce written answers to census queries on sheets distributed by enumerators. It is likely that enumerators were compelled to complete many of the forms distributed to urban household heads, but even were they not, differing urban and rural enumeration practices do not change the tenor of the argument or the conclusions drawn, although the urban manuscript forms are rich sources in ways the rural forms are not. 2 For instance, Régis Thibeault. “Les Unités de Mesure dans les Documents Officiels du Dix-Neuvième Siècle au Bas-Canada et au Québec,” Revue d’historie de l’Amérique française, 43, 1989:221–232. 3 See the discussions in Gilles Lauzon, Habitat Ouvrier et revolution industrielle: Le Cas du village St-Augustin Montréal 1989 and Bettina Bradbury, Working Families: Age, Gender, and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montréal Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993. 4 The early debate can be found in Harvey J. Graff, “Literacy and Social Structure in Elgin County, Canada West: 1861,” Histoire sociale/Social H., VI, 1973:25–48; H.J. Mays and H.F. Manzl, “Literacy and Social Structure in Nineteenth Century Ontario: An Exercise in Historical Methodology,” Histoire sociale/Social H., 13–14, 1974:331–45. 5 David P. Gagan, “Enumerator’s Instructions for the Census of Canada 1852 and 1861.” Histoire sociale/Social H., 13–14, 1974:355–65. 6 David Gagan, Hopeful Travellers: Families, Land, and Social Change in Mid-Victorian Peel County, Canada West, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981:40. 7 David Gagan, Hopeful Travellers. For the proletarianization interpretation, see Brian Palmer. “Social formation and class formation in North America, 1800–1900,” in D. Levine ed., Proletarianization and Family History NY: Academic P, 1984:229–309. See the exchange contained in George Emery and Jose Igartua, “David Gagan’s The ‘Critical Years’ in Rural Canada West’: a Critique of the Methodology and Model,” and David Gagan, “Under the Lamp Post: a Reply to Emery and Igartua,” Canadian H R, LXII, 1981:186–96; 197–206. Marjorie Cohen’s important Women’s Work, Markets, and Economic Development in Nineteenth-Century Ontario Toronto: Toronto UP, 1988 repeatedly argues from aggregate census data to social development without questioning their relation; she is by no means alone in this, nor does her work stand or fall on this question. Gordon Darroch and Lee Soltow, “Inequality in landed wealth in nineteenth-century Ontario: structure and access,” Canadian R S A, 29, 2, 1992: 167–90, dispute the proletarianization thesis, but take the manuscript 1871 census schedules as factual representations. The growing sophistication of debate in the field is demonstrated in George Emery’s “Facts of Life”: The Social Construction of Vital Statistics in Ontario, 1869– 1952 Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s U P, 1993. 8 For example, NA MG29 E18 7. n.d. 1872 “Remarks on the recent Census of Ontario and the Immigration Statistics during the decade from

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1861 to 1870”, marked “Mr Kingston”. I cover these matters in detail in work in progress. 9 Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review L: New Left Books, 1979:171–2. 10 Robert Rumilly Papineau et son Temps. Tomell (1838–1871) (Montréal: Fides, 1977): 133 makes passing mention of census making in the Maine boundary dispute; see also Kris Inwood, “The Representation of Industry in the Canadian Census, 1871–1891” unpublished paper. Department of Economics, University of Guelph. 11 Information on the debates over representation can be found in J.M.S. Careless, The Union of the Canadas Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1967. For an examination of some of Hutton’s other investigative activities, B. Curtis, “The Canada Blue Books and the Administrative Capacity of the Canadian State, 1822–1867.” Canadian H R, December, 1993:535–565. 12 NA RG31 Leeds County Census Returns 1861, District 3 Elizabethtown, p. 99 notation on sheet 2. 13 NA RG17 vols. 2419–20, W.W. Holmes to Hutton, 18 March 1861. This enumerator was found out by Holmes, who ordered a re-enumeration. It is entirely possible there were others who were not found out. On the other hand, as a form of primitive social mapping, the census project was dependent practically upon the “local knowledge” of enumerators. Only on the basis of their accumulated experience of and familiarity with their locales was it possible to generate information about a population relatively little subject to intensive administration. Edward Higgs, Making Sense of the Census: The Manuscript Returns for England and Wales, 1801–1901 L:HMSO, 1989. Public Record Office Handbooks No. 23: 13, makes a similar point for England and Wales. See also B. Curtis, “Mapping the Social: Jacob Keefer’s Educational Tours, 1845,” J. of Canadian Studies, 28, 1993:51–68. 14 NA RG31, Huron and Kent County census returns, 1861, Stanley Township, ward 3, Henry Pollock’s comments on p. 2; RG17 vol. 2419, enumerators’ comments in Gunn to Board of Registration and Statistics, 16 May 1861. 15 NA RG31 Joliette County census returns, 1861, reel c-1287, comments on p. 477 district 7 by Dézil, by Crépeau at the end of the agricultural sheets. 16 NA RG31 Leeds County census returns, 1861, Elizabethtown District 1, p.32. 17 Compare for example, Iberville, Canada East, returned population 1590, where only 4 women are attributed occupations, with Brockville, Canada West’s East Ward, returned population 1815, where 123 women are attributed occupations. Enumerators West did often employ such euphemisms as “farmeress” or “carries on farming” (i.e. after the real farmer’s death) for widowed landholders. 18 NA RG17 vol. 2419, David Morrow, 5 March 1861. 19 NA RG17 vol. 2419, P. Labelle, 26 mars 1861. 20 NA RG17 vol. 2418, John Leary, Huron, 18 February, 15 March 1861. 21 NA RG17 vol. 2419, 26 February 1861. 22 NA RG17 vol. 2420, John Beatty, n.d. 1861. 23 NA RC31 Middlesex County census returns 1861, agricultural census, sheet 63 pt. 2; sheet 94 pt. 2.

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24 NA RG31 Algoma District census returns 1861, [reel c-1091], Richard Carney, 18 April 1861. 25 NA RG31 Norfolk County census returns 1861, Simcoe Town, p. 16; the alteration could have been made by the commissioner, but it looks like the compiler’s hand to me. 26 NA RG 17 vol. 2421, Wm Dickinson, 25 February 1862 (the letter); RG31 1861 census returns, Grenville County agricultural census, and personal census, District 1, Oxford Township. The sheets bear no marks of correction. 27 NA RG 17 vol. 2415. 28 Catherine Hakim, “Census Reports as Documentary Evidence: The Census Commentaries, 1801–1951,” S R, 28, 3, 1980:551–580, n. 76. 29 I’ve tried to argue more systematically elsewhere that developing practices of nineteenth century governance commonly involve the reformulation of cultural activities of men in the dominant classes; cf. True Government by Choice Men? Inspection, Education and State Formation in Canada West Toronto: UTorontoP, 1992, and “Révolution gouvernementale et savoir politique au Canada Uni”, Sociologie et Sociétés. XXIV, 1992, 169–179. 30 A point made already by Bernard Cohn in “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia,” Folk, 26, 1984:25–49; and in the revised edition of Benedict Anderson’s, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism L: Verso, 1991 chapter 10.

Borders and Boundaries of State and Self at the End of Empire MICHAEL KEARNEY Abstract Peoples that span national borders are ambiguous in that they in some ways partake of both nations and in other ways partake of neither. This paper analyzes how the boundary – the power to impose difference – of the United States and Mexico is being eroded by transnational developments causing the structure of the nation-states to become problematic. To the degree that anthropology is an official discipline predicated on the distinction between Self and the alien Other which it presumes to represent, the deterioration of the borders and boundaries of the nation-state have serious implications for its epistemology and legitimacy and its power of representation of transnational communities and of difference in general. Furthermore, as national distinctions decline ethnicity emerges as a consciousness of difference.

***** Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.1 The geopolitical wound called “the border” cannot stop the cultural undercurrents. The “artistic border” is artificial. It shouldn’t be there, and it is up to us to erase it.2

Introduction This paper has been stimulated by my ethnographic work on the U.S.-Mexico Border. The immediate problem that I encounter there is that of representing the social and cultural forms of an indigenous people – namely Mixtecs – who migrate in large and increasing numbers into this Border Area from their homeland, which is in the state of Oaxaca in Southern Mexico. This task of ethnographic representation is made complex not only by the spatial extension of the Mixtec community into the Border Area, but by the ambiguous nature of the Border Area itself, which has become a region where the culture, society, and state of the United States encounter a Third World in a zone of contested space, capital, and meanings. Furthermore, the problem of ethnographic representation of this community in this border region is made yet more problematic by a corresponding decomposition of what now, in the late twentieth century, can be seen as the “classic” epistemological relationship between the anthropological Self and the ethnographic Other. In other words, exploration of these themes is prompted by the need not only to make sense of the ethnographic subject that presents Twenty Years of the Journal of Historical Sociology: Challenging the Field Volume 2 Edited by Yoke-Sum Wong and Derek Sayer © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-17934-8

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itself in this complex field, but also of the changing boundaries and constitution of anthropology itself, that is, its sociology, epistemology, and practice. This is so because anthropology, as an official discipline, is a constituent of the state, and as the boundaries and construction of the nation-state change so should we expect to find a restructuring of anthropology as a “scientific field.” Note that when I speak of anthropology as a “scientific field”, I do so in Bourdieu’s sense of scientific field not only as a field of study, but also as a field of struggle – a point to which I shall return below.3 Also, with respect to terminology, I find it useful to distinguish between “boundaries” as legal spatial delimitations of nations, viz. boundary lines, as opposed to the “borders” of nations which are geographic and cultural zones or spaces, i.e., “border areas”, which can vary independently of formal boundaries. The issues with which I am concerned in this paper have to do with the lack of correspondence between the borders and boundaries of the nation-state. Let me turn now to the question of changing boundaries and borders of the United States, which, due to the exigencies of exposition, I periodize into two phases, the first of which I call the modern, and which corresponds to the growth and maturation of the United States as a “colonial” nation-state. The Colonial Nation-State The nation-state was the necessary form for the development of capitalism of the modern era. And as Corrigan and Sayer have shown the maturation of modern capitalism necessarily entailed the formation of the nation-state as a cultural revolution, which over the course of several centuries put in place not only the bureaucratic and intellectual, but also the more general popular, forms and practices which in their totality constituted the conditions for the development of capitalist society.4 Apart from these internal conditions, the modern nation-state is the product of two processes of global differentiation, one being the tension with other emergent absolute states, the second being the tension between the nation-state and its dependencies. Here we are primarily concerned with the latter relationship.5 The modern period is thus coterminous with “the Age of Empire”, in which the colonial powers, constituted as nation-states, are clearly differentiated from their colonies.6 This external oppositional dimension of the modern nation-state was predicated on a distinct spatial separation between it and its colonies, a structural feature which is integral to what elsewhere7 I call “the Colonial Situation”, and which provides the basis for the cognitive distinc-

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tion between the colonizer and the colonized. Just as the task of the state is to consolidate internal social differentiation as national unity, so must nationalism as a force in modern history effect the differentiation of peoples on a global scale. Globally, the modern age was thus coterminous with the power of capitalism to spatially differentiate the world into developed, underdeveloped, and dedeveloped regions. And in this modern differing it is the nationstate that emerges as the supreme unit of order, a social, cultural, and political form which, as Anderson shows, is distinctive in having absolute geopolitical and social boundaries inscribed on territory and on persons, demarcating space and those who are members from those who are not.8 Thus, whereas absolute states achieved the consolidation of absolute power, it remained for the modern nation-state to construct absolute boundaries. Since its inception until its formal national boundaries became fixed in the mid-nineteenth century the United States enjoyed considerable territorial expansion at the expense of Mexico. During its period of territorial growth the United States rolled back Mexican society and sovereignty to its present Southwestern border. During a period when passports were devised and required for entry from Europe and Asia, movement across the Southwestern boundary was essentially unrestricted. Indeed this lack of concern with firm demarcation of the border was a sign of its de facto categorical absoluteness born of military conquest: Anglo was unitedstatesian and Mexican was Other.9 This firm distinction between Anglo Self and Mexican Other was but one instance of a global system of distinction which was the fundamental structure of what I above refer to as the Colonial Situation, and which reached its apogee in the early twentieth century. This spatial and categorical distinction, this separation of Western nation from its colonies, provided the poles along which an axis of extraction and accumulation was constructed such that net economic value flows from the latter to the former. It was onto this spatial and economic distinction that social and cultural differences were inscribed. Thus the structuring of the colonial situation depended on the spatial separation of peripheral production and extraction of value and knowledge as raw materials from their consumption and transformation in metropoles such that they could be reinvested back into the colonial project. It was within this systematic asymmetry that anthropology as a distinctive discipline assumed its “classic” modern form as an intellectual enterprise structured by and structuring the lineaments of the colonial situation, such that the collection and consumption of anthropological knowledge became a permutation of the extraction, transformation, and consumption of economic capital.10

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As absolute boundaries are necessary for the construction of the modern nation-state so is nationalism.11 For a nationalism without borders and boundaries that can be defended and enlarged is impossible, as Benedict Anderson might say, “to imagine”.12 And it is deemed “natural” therefore that nationalism is the preeminent totemic sensibility of the modern age. And in no other nation did this distinctly modern sentiment have more power to offset other bases of collective identities than in the United States, with its power to dissolve the ethnicity of its huddled immigrant masses and to reconstruct it as “American” and as, inter alia, race and racism. The fundamental project of the state – the inward task of the modern nation-state – is to elaborate and resolve the contradiction of differentiation and unity. The disciplinary power of the state must facilitate the reproduction of social and cultural differentiation within the nation while at the same time perpetuating national unity. Thus, beyond the regulation (licensing, censusing, taxing) of the trades of the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker as they constitute a Durkheimian organic unity, the state must also insure the reproduction of difference as social inequality, and this it does in large part by assuming responsibility for public education whereby it establishes a system of “good” and “poor” schools, and then “grades” – in both senses of the term – students, such that they come to occupy the same social class position as their parents. We will return to this theme. The Nation-State and its Borders in the Age of Transnationalism What I wish to propose – and this proposition is suggested by the ethnography of the Border Area – is that history has passed beyond the “modern age” as I have just described it with reference to boundaries of the nation-state as firm, absolute distinctions between national “We” and distant “They”, and by the same token, between anthropological Self and ethnographic Other – between those who write and those who are written about. Whereas the modern phase was socially and culturally predicated on the nationstate, the present state of the nation-state is aptly characterized as “transnational”. “Transnationalism” implies a blurring, or perhaps better said, a reordering of the binary cultural, social, and epistemological distinctions of the modern period, and as I’m using it here, it has two meanings. One is the conventional one having to do with forms of organization and identity which are not constrained by national boundaries, such as the transnational corporation. But I also wish

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to load onto the term the meaning of transnational as post-national in the sense that history and anthropology have entered a postnational age. THE BORDER: Scene I Cañon Zapata is a deep north-south cleft between hills on the U.S.-Mexico Border where it runs along the edge of the city of Tijuana. Most of the canyon is on the California side of the border, but there are no tangible boundary markers except for an old monument and the broken strands of a wire fence on the hills to the east and west of the canyon. Down in the canyon there are no markers or wire at all. Up the canyon, well into the unitedstatesian side are small food stalls made of scrap wood, covered with old sheet metal or boards for a little shade, and equipped with butane or wood stoves. Venders of second hand clothing and shoes have also set up their stalls. The canyon comes to life around three o’clock every afternoon as hundreds of people start to congregate, waiting until the right time to make an attempt to get to “the other side”. They are of course already on the other side. What they must do, though, is get beyond agents of the Border Patrol that are on the hills overlooking the branches of the canyon above the town of San Ysidro. About a mile to the west of the canyon there is a large unitedstatesian customs facility which sits on the line between San Ysidro and Tijuana. This is the most heavily trafficked official international border crossing in the world. Cañon Zapata is certainly one of the most, possibly the most, heavily trafficked unofficial crossings. As the afternoon shadows move into the canyon the migrants who have assembled eat their last taco, take a final swig of soda pop or beer, and possibly put on new shoes or a jacket that they have just bought. Then in groups of five or maybe ten or twelve, they start to head out, up the canyon, and into its side branches. They walk in single file, each little group led by its coyote, the smuggler that they are paying to lead them to a safe point and to perhaps arrange for transportation to somewhere yet farther north. Or perhaps there are experienced migrants in the group who have made the trip many times and no longer need the expensive services of a smuggler. When the sun is low, Border Patrol agents, the Migra, are silhouetted on the hills above the canyon. They scurry about in jeeps and on motorcycles and horses, responding to the probings of different groups, some of which are serving as diversions to draw the patrols away from others. The Migra almost never comes down into the base of the canyon where the migrants congregate, nor does the unitedstatesian government make any attempt to fence off or otherwise close or occupy this staging area.13

This same basic scenario is enacted at other sites where the border runs along the edge of Tijuana as well as at many other places on its nearly 2,000 mile length between Mexico and the United States. THE BORDER: Scene II A few days before Christmas, 1987, several green Border Patrol vehicles filled with agents swoop down into Cañon Zapata. The ilegales apprehensively move back towards the boundary line. Border Patrol agents pile out of the vehicles. One is dressed as Santa Claus and has a large bag of presents. The agents spread food and soft drinks on the hoods of their vehicles, and call to the ilegales to come and get them. The Santa Claus hands out presents and a “Christmas party” ensues. Then the Migra get back into their vehicles and drive away as the migrants prepare to attempt crossing “to the other side” by avoiding surveillance and capture.14

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THE BORDER: Scene III It is a moonless night. Two sleepy Border Patrol agents sit in an observation post that resembles a gun emplacement. The post is just on the unitedstatesian side of the boundary line where it runs through hills near the Pacific Ocean. Just behind the observation post is a wire mesh fence that runs along the international boundary on the edge of Tijuana. The fence is old, bent, and festooned with rags and scraps of paper impaled on it by the wind. It has many gaping holes through which “illegal” border crossers come and go almost as freely as the wind. The Border Patrol agents scan the hills around them and the fields below them with infrared nightscopes. Peering through these devices they see dozens of human forms, bent over, clutching small bags, parcels and sometimes children, silently hurrying along well worn trails through the dry brush. Two days earlier, some eighty miles to the northeast, one of the agents had been sitting on a hilltop with binoculars scanning trails a two day walk from the national boundary line.15

The nightscopes are but one component in a sophisticated hightech surveillance program that also includes motion sensors, search lights, television cameras, helicopters, spotter planes, and patrols in various kinds of boats and ground vehicles, all coordinated by computers and radio communications. The annual budget for this sector of the Border Patrol is millions of dollars, but no money has been allocated in recent years to repair the fence. The basic thesis concerning transnationalism that I wish to advance is that it corresponds to the political economic and sociocultural ordering of late capitalism.16 Entailed in these new forms is a reordering of the capitalist nation-state. As a global phenomenon the beginning of transnationalism corresponds to an historic moment that might be characterized as “End of Empire”.17 This characterization is most literally apparent for Great Britain at the end of the Second World War, emerging as it did among the losers, or certainly as having lost its empire. Thus, the middle decades of the twentieth century saw the dismantling of the formal European colonial system and with it what had been in effect categorical distinctions between the Western nation-states, and between them and their colonies. The modern age, the age of imperialism, was driven, (according to Lenin, anyway) by the exporting of surplus capital from developed to underdeveloped areas of the world with subsequent destruction of non-capitalist economies and societies, processes which created wage labor much of which was absorbed in these peripheral areas. The current transnational age is, however, characterized by a gross incapacity of peripheral economies to absorb the labor that is created in the periphery, with the result that it inexorably “flows” to the cores of the global capitalist economy.18 This “peripheralization of the core” is now well advanced in Great Britain whose colonial chickens have come home to roost, so to speak.19 The same is also true of former European colonial powers which are being “over-

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whelmed” by former colonial subjects who are now “guest workers”: Algerians in France, Turks in Germany, Guatemalans and Africans in Spain, etc.20 A similar process is well underway in the decline of the unitedstatesian empire which is experiencing a comparable dissolution in the spatial, and symbolic distinction between itself and its dependencies. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Southwestern Border Area and in the cities of this zone which dramatically manifest the transnationalization of identity in the culture, economics, and politics of late capitalism. In recent years the Border Area, after a claimed “century of quiescence” since the Mexican American War of 1848, again becomes contested terrain. Now, however, it is not territory per se that is being contested, but instead personal identities and movements of persons, and cultural and political hegemony of peoples.21 A Latino reconquest of much of the northern side has already taken place. But this Latino cultural and demographic ascendancy is not congruent with jural territorial realities which are still shaped by continued unitedstatesian police power. This incongruity of cultural and political spaces makes of the “border area”, aptly named as such, an ambiguous zone. It is in this border area that identities are assigned and taken, withheld and rejected. The state seeks a monopoly on the power to assign identities to those who enter this space. It stamps or refuses to stamp passports and papers which are extensions of the person of the traveler who is “required” to pass through official ports of entry and exit. But every day thousands of “undocumented” persons successfully defy the state’s power to control their movement into and through this space and in doing so contest not only space, but also control of their identity. Within official policy making circles of the state, discussion of transnational subaltern communities is elaborated within a discourse of “immigration policy” whereby the state attempts to regulate international migration. Rhetoric aside, and as noted above, the de facto immigration policy of the unitedstatesian government is not to make the U.S.-Mexican border impermeable to the passage of “illegal” entrants, but rather to regulate their “flow”, while at the same time maintaining the official distinctions between the “sending” and “receiving” nations, i.e., between kinds of peoples, that is, to constitute classes of peoples – classes in both the categorical and social sense.22 Issues concerning “migrant labor” are indeed at the core of the ongoing immigration debate, and here a major contradiction in official immigration policy appears. This situation results from the special nature of labor as a commodity that is embodied in persons and persons with national identities. Foreign labor is desired, but the persons in whom it is embodied are

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not desired. The immigration policies of “receiving nations” can be seen as expressions of this contradiction and as attempts to resolve it. For the task of effective immigration policy is to separate labor from the jural person within which it is embodied, that is, to disembody the labor from the migrant worker. Capitalism in general effects the alienation of labor from its owner, but immigration policy can be seen as a means to achieve a form of this alienation that increases greatly in the age of transnationalism, namely the spatial separation of the site of the purchase and expenditure of labor from the sites of its reproduction, such that the locus of production and reproduction lie in two different national spaces. This structure of transnational labor migration distinguishes it from the prevalent modern capitalist mechanisms for the appropriation of labor from subaltern groups: namely national labor markets, slavery, and internal colonialism. Only in transnational “labor migration” is there national separation of the sites of production and reproduction.23 Modern capitalism has for several centuries relied in various degrees on transnational labor migration. But the point here is that transnational labor migration has now become a major structural feature of communities which have themselves become truly transnational. Official migration theory, i.e., migration theory informed by and in the service of the nation-state, is disposed to think of the sociology of migration in terms of “sending” and “receiving” communities, each of which is in its own national space. But what the ethnography of transnational migration suggests is that such communities are constituted transnational and thus challenge the defining power of the nation-states which they transcend. Elsewhere I and Carole Nagengast characterize the greater Mixtec Diaspora and other widely extended subaltern communities as comparable to the transnational corporation and we, accordingly, refer to them as transnational communities.24 Both kinds of organizations engage in production orchestrated in two or more national spaces and so reproduce themselves. Thus, just as the transnational corporation in part transcends the Durkheimian power of the nation to impress itself as the basis of corporate identity, so do members of transnational communities similarly escape the power of the nation-state to inform their sense of collective identity. To the degree that transnational corporations and transnational migrants escape the impress of the nation-state to shape their identity, so to a comparable degree must the native, non-ethnic “white citizens” avail themselves of the only totemic capital that they have available to form an identity from an inevitable dialectic

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of opposition with non-nationalist communities which are forming on and within their boundaries. And that totemic capital is of course nationalism (with a strong dash of racism). In areas of California, European-Americans have definitively lost control of much geographic space, of boundaries that have been “invaded” by “foreigners”, by “aliens”. But having lost control of geographic space in the Border Area, they have begun to take fallback positions and we see a shift to defense of social and cultural spaces where the state still has power to legislate identities and practices. Thus, a major part of the discourse on immigration now centers on such issues as English as “the official language”, now so legislated in California, Arizona, Colorado, and Florida. These new forms of discipline correspond to a movement from an offensive jingoist nationalism to a nationalism on the defensive, a shift from a nationalism of expansion and domination to a defensive nationalism concerned with loss of control of its borders. To the degree that the modern nation-state and its associated culture are becoming anachronistic in the age of transnationalism, to that degree should there be apparent expression of disease within the body politic – a concern with the integrity of its boundaries. As Gomez Pena aptly notes, “For the North American the border becomes a mythical notion of national security. The border is where the Third World begins. The US media conceives [sic] the border as a kind of war zone. A place of conflict, of threat, of invasion.”25 The current national obsession with “foreign” drugs and “crime” that are “penetrating” into “our nation” are also forms of transnationalism that also threaten the categorical integrity of the modern nation-state. One only need go down to this border just a short distance south of us to see how wildly out of control it is. And when we speak of out of control, we’re not just talking about a few folks wanting to come in to get a job, we’re talking about a torrent of people flooding in here, bringing all kinds of criminal elements and terrorists and all the rest with them.26

Such nativist sentiments as expressed in the above quotation are symptomatic of the loss of spatial separation between developed and de-developed poles of transnationalism. A major way whereby this blurring of the modern and the “traditional” is effected is via the spatial relocation of “Third World” peoples into the core areas of the “modern” capitalist West. The Transnational Body and Person THE BORDER: Scene IV

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Four Mixtec migrants are sitting around a table in the home of anthropologists having their first meal in several days. For the previous four days they have been walking through the rugged mountains of eastern San Diego County. They are exhausted from cold and lack of sleep and food. Part of their trek was through snow; all of them are wearing light cotton clothing and two of them wear tennis shoes. They are talking with a Paraguayan peasant leader now in political exile, who is living in the house and who is astounded at their manner of entry into the United States. They tell him that when they come through these mountains they try to sleep for part of the day and walk at night when it is too cold to sleep. But one night, they say, they became so cold that they had to stop and build a fire. One of them, the most articulate, says that he was thinking as they were huddled around the small fire, hoping that it would not attract the attention of the Migra. He was thinking, he says, that he felt like a criminal, like someone who had to hide because they were doing some bad thing. But, he says, he could not understand what bad thing he was doing for he is an honest man who comes to the United States only to work, to leave his sweat and earn some money. He says he is a father and husband and a good worker, and that is why his partónes always hire him. They do not think that he is criminal, but he says that he feels like he is a criminal and he cannot understand why. The other men agree that they feel the same when they are exposed to possible apprehension by the Border Patrol or by other police agents.27

As the above sketches reveal, the unitedstatesian-Mexican border is riddled not only with holes, but also contradictions. In the above scene the Paraguayan, who is skilled in his own form of a pedagogy of the oppressed, proceeds to explain to the migrants why they feel like criminals, even though they know that they are honest productive workers. He startles them, he grabs their attention by telling them that they run and hide scared from the Migra and the police because, as he says to them, “You pay the Migra to chase and persecute you.” “How is that possible?”, they ask. He then proceeds to give them a crash course in the accumulation of surplus value in the California farm labor market. These men will seek work as orange pickers in Riverside. The Paraguayan assists them to calculate the approximate unit wage that they are paid for picking a pound of oranges. He then reminds them of the per pound price of oranges in local markets which differs greatly from what they are paid. He then explains how the difference is apportioned into costs of production, taxes, and profits that are paid and earned by the grower. He then calls the men’s attention to the taxes that the grower pays and how their taxes go toward the maintenance of the Border Patrol. Thus he proves his point that the migrants pay the Migra to pursue them like criminals. They of course then ask him why things are arranged this way, and by a Socratic questioning he elicits the answer from them: because they run scared all the time and are desperate to get work before they are apprehended and sent back to Mexico, they accept whatever wage is offered and then work like fiends and otherwise do what they can to satisfy their patrón. In short, in a lesson that might have been taken from

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Foucault, he brings them to understand, that the surveillance activities of the Border Patrol are not intended to prevent their entry into the United States to work, but instead are part of a number of ways of disciplining them to work hard and to accept low wages. The contradiction in unitedstatesian immigration policy noted above is inscribed on the social person so constructed, the “alien”. This “alien” is desired as a body, or more specifically as labor power which is embodied in this person, by employers and indirectly by all who benefit economically and socially from this cheaply bought “foreign” labor. But this alien as a legal person who might possess rights and prerogatives of a national, of a citizen of the nation, is the dimension of personhood that is denied. The ambiguity of the alien results from policy and policing which inscribe both of these identities – worker and alien – onto her or his person simultaneously.28 Being neither fish nor fowl and yet both at the same time, the alien is a highly ambiguous person. The frontier between the United States and Mexico is formally a line with no width. But it is also a social and cultural zone of indeterminate extent, and some might argue that it runs from deep in Mexico to Canada. It is by passage into but never completely through this transnational zone that the alien is marked as the ambiguous, stigmatized, vulnerable person that he or she is. This border area is a liminal region into which initiates pass via what Van Gennep might punningly have called “raites of passage”, but from which they never emerge.29 The alien exists in what appears to be the intersect of one of Edmund Leach’s venn diagrams.30 And as we would expect from the anthropology of liminality, the initiate is reduced to a categorical state of nonhuman – in this case an “alien”. In colloquial Mexican Spanish, “illegal” border crossers are pollos, or pollitos, that is, “chickens” or “little chicks”. This avian identity can be seen as a symbolism of initiation, of the twice born. Moreover, the pollos are also defenseless creatures vulnerable to the predators who prey upon them in the border zone. Indeed, the immediate border area is infested with predators who rob, rape, assault, murder, apprehend, extort, and swindle the vulnerable pollos whose only advantage is their large numbers – most get through alive, although poorer.31 And as Leach and Turner might have predicted, the hero of this liminal border is the supremely ambiguous and contradictory trickster and cultural hero of indigenous Mexico and North America, El Coyote.32 Ironically, but of necessity, the pollos must put themselves in the care of the Coyote who may either deliver them or eat them. We can now return to the Mixtec and ask how they respond to existence in this liminal transnational border area. Denied perma-

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nent residence in their homeland by economic necessity and denied naturalization by the United States, Mixtec “alien” migrants construct a new identity out of the bricolage of their transnational existence. What form does this transnational identity take? It coalesces as ethnicity, as an ethnic consciousness, which is the supremely appropriate form for collective identity to take in the age of transnationalism. In our work we have observed how Mixtec ethnicity rises as an alternative to nationalist consciousness and as a medium to circumscribe not space, but collective identity precisely in those border areas where nationalist boundaries of territory and identity are most contested and ambiguous.33 This situation conforms to Varese’s analysis of how under “normal” conditions the nation-state is able to suppress other possible nations within it. “Yet, sooner or later, it can no longer mask the development of the existing violent contradiction between the nations (that is the Indian ethnos) and the state”.34 As Comaroff notes, “ethnicity has its origins in the asymmetric incorporation of structurally dissimilar groupings into a single political economy”.35 In this case the single political economy is the transnational milieu of Mexico and the United States, where in both regions the Mixtec are construed as aliens. Denied their patrimony in Mexico, legally prejudiced in the United States, and otherwise used and abused in both nations, the Mixtec are marked as subaltern Other by the nations that reject them so as to exploit them. This transnational structured differentiation obviates the impress of nationalism as a basis for collective consciousness and thus opens the possibility for the ascendance into consciousness of ethnicity as a sign that marks difference, a sign that is recognized as such both by those who are marked, those who mark them.36 Moreover, those marked persons also remark on and thus collaborate in the construction of this system of difference.37 The most outwardly visible form of Mixtec self-differentiation is the formation of various kinds of grassroots organizations in the United States and in Mexico that seek to defend their members as workers, migrants, and “aliens”. As Mixtecs say, they come to the United States to leave sweat and take home some money. Sweat is a metaphor of labor which becomes disembodied from the “alien” and as such contrasts with work.38 Sweating for others in the United States contrasts with sweating for oneself in his or her own community in Oaxaca. There, as it were, one’s sweat falls onto their own land and makes it produce for them, not for others. The community in Oaxaca is precisely that, a community, which is to say a social body, and one that retains, more or less, its own sweat, its own labor in the form of work. To be an “alien” is not only to experience the disembodi-

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ment of one’s labor, but also to be socially disembodied, that is, to be removed from one’s community to the degree that one’s sweat, one’s labor and identity, is soaked up in the United States. The individualized migrant is allowed into the unitedstatesian nationstate not as a citizen, but as an “alien”, not as someone to be incorporated into the social body, but as someone to be devoured by it. Migration policy/policing and resistance to it is thus a struggle for the value contained within the personal and social body of the migrant. The individual migrant resorts to micro strategies invented and reinvented by workers throughout the history of capitalism to retain economic capital embodied in their persons and desired by the partón. The worker seeks to be not just a machine, or an “animal”, but to be a human being.39 And as the individual worker seeks to defend his/her person and its embodied economic capital, so in a parallel manner the community attempts to defend the body social and its collective capital. And this it does by converting some of that embodied capital into symbolic capital, and specifically symbolic capital in the form of markers of collective identity, expressions of which are noted by the state and by anthropologists as “ethnicity”. The Mixtec migrants are seemingly paradoxical in that they elaborate what appear to be signs of traditionality under conditions of modernity. But such inconsistency is only a spurious artefact of the discourse of nationalism and its intrinsic component of modernity. In other words, as the borders of the “modern” nation state dissolve under conditions of transnationalism so does the opposition between tradition and modernity self-deconstruct and give way, grudgingly, to ethnicity as the primary form of symbolic capital expended in the construction of community in the age of transnationalism. Disintegration and Reconstruction of Disciplinary Boundaries Deterioration of the borders of the nation can be expected to provoke a reconstitution of the state and its components, among which are its disciplines. Among the official academic disciplines anthropology is unusual in the degree to which it has been assigned responsibility for articulating differentiation, and thus engaging in the intellectual/symbolic reproduction of differentiation, on a global scale, with respect to “less developed peoples” as compared with “us”. The fundamental epistemological structure of this classic form of anthropology – it is classic compared to the baroque anthropology of the present – was its firm categorical separation of anthropological Self from ethnographic Other – of those who undertook to know and those who were to be studied,

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known and, by implication per Foucault, to be controlled. The modern period, as identified above and which comes to an end after the Second World War, corresponds with this age of classic ethnography/anthropology.40 Anthropology (far from uniquely in the social sciences) is predicated primarily on the study of the alien Other, and has its own distinctive social epistemology of a knowing anthropological Self and a categorically distinct ethnographic Other that is to be known. This epistemological asymmetry of subject-object, of Self-Other, is in any ethnographic situation a reflection of a political asymmetry in which power, like the knowledge being discovered and produced, is unevenly distributed. But moreover, this differential production of knowledge is a differentiating production of power. Within capitalist society the social construction of reality occurs within the structured relations of classes of persons – those who study and consume the knowledge produced and those who are the objects, the raw materials of the knowledge. The dualism of bourgeois epistemology is predicated on this social duality and as such is inherited by all social sciences which acquire it as a basic disposition. But, as noted above, anthropology has its own social basis for epistemological dualism which is given to it by the ethnographic distinction between Self and Other which is so structured within the colonial situation and upon which colonial institutions erect parallel distinctions of class. Thus, given the double social origins of anthropology’s epistemological dualism, it is, unlike that of, say, sociology, doubly determined. As noted above, the mission of classic (modern) anthropology was contradictory: it had to humanize while it differentiated. We are all human, but we are all different. This is parallel to the contradiction that the nation-state must resolve. We are all one, but we are internally differentiated into classes, genders, and races. In other words the state states that we are all of one nation and that in this oneness we are all equal, but its policies and practices insure that we shall remain differentiated along lines of class, race, gender, citizenship, etc., such that some of us are more equal than others. Similarly, the historical mission of classic anthropology was to humanize while differentiating. In fulfilling this mission anthropology applied the categories given to it by the ordering of official knowledge, especially the categorical distinction between Self and Other. Anthropological categories were established in the modern era which was associated with a robust nationalism. This classic official anthropology sought to represent an ethnographic Other which was categorically distinct from the national anthropological Self. Now in the transnational era, this dualistic construction of classic anthropology, in both its positivist and interpretive modes,

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is inappropriate for the global, transnational differentiation of late capitalism in which the dualism of the colonial situation has been reconfigured into different spatial relationships. It is not that differentiation at the end of empire lessens, but that it involves a distinctly different spatial and temporal constellation of Self and Other and of the relationship between them. This categorical reordering of anthropological Self and ethnographic Other is most visible spatially in that they become interspersed, one in the geography of the other. Classic anthropology was done in communities of distinct Others; now, increasingly, the ethnographic Other is constituted in highly dispersed communities which are transnational in form. With the collapse of the categorical distinction between imperial Self and colonial Other, the basis was laid for the erosion of the social foundation of the modern nationalism of “the West” and the emergence of new dimensions of global differentiation.42 The imagining of this transnational condition has been reflected in several innovative, what might be called antidisciplines. They are antidisciplinarian in the double sense that they transcend the domains of the standard disciplines and in the sense that they have tended to form themselves outside of the official institutional body of the state and thus to have escaped the necessity of official scholarship elaborated as a constituting component of the nation-state. The project of Annales is one such case in point in that it displaced its vantage point outside of national history and transcended historiography seen as the history of nations as actors, to greater contexts and force fields within which the fates of nations are shaped. It is thus apparent that the objective reality of transnationalism, in both senses, has called forth a historiography which appears on the stage of history at its appropriate moment to reflect this transnational condition in consciousness: the project of the Annales, its global vision, is a reflex of the conditions of the moment of it’s appearance. And why the Annales group and not official scholarship? Bourdieu’s work on the tension between ideas produced by intellectuals institutionalized within the official bureaucracies of the state versus those peripheral to it is instructive43 and suggests that the Annales was disposed to reflect transnational conditions because it was not assigned the task by the state of elaborating a historiography of nationalism, that is, a historiography which is a constituent of the nation-state. It is this sort of antidisciplinary scholarship which has given us the vocabulary to understand transnationalism as global history. Foucault’s project too is an exemplar of antidisciplinary and antidisciplinarian scholarship. Foucault is the herald of the “death of man”, of the death of “the Western” subject in the postmodern

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age, which is to say in the age of transnationalism. The modern subject, the individual “actor” of capitalist society, whose demise Foucault announces, was and is a cultural construction born of two distinctly modern conditions. One of these was the power of commodification to create “individuals” as distinct from the communities from which, by market forces, they were alienated and so formed. The other basis for the cultural construction of the modern individual was the modern distinction between colonial Self and colonized Other. The “Western” subject/Self only exists in relationship to an Other,44 and thus the collapse of the modern global categorical relationship between anthropological Self and ethnographic Other also occasions the “death of man”, of the subject as it was constructed in the modern age. This disappearance of the subject/person of the classic social sciences and humanistic disciplines threatens the constitution of these disciplines as they have been classically constituted. And accordingly, the dissolution of the disciplines which discipline the person/body can be assumed to correspond to a corresponding reconstitution of disciplines. Foucault does not study the transnational age, focusing as he does on the modern age, but his method – the form of his work – personify it, based as it is on Marx whose work was not, as is often observed, “interdisciplinary”, but transdisciplinary in both senses noted above. Unlike and more than the Annales and Foucault, Marx’s transdisciplinary method pointed the way to transnationalism, denoted in his discourse as an “internationalism”, an idea that informed the subaltern counterpart of the transnational corporation, namely “The International”. This internationalism as a vision of global identity is a prescient sentiment that appears in the mid- nineteenth century at the apogee of the modern age and foretells the dissolution of its necessary sociocultural form, the nation-state. As the “alien” presents a challenge to the integrity of the unitedstatesian nation-state it has responded by developing new disciplines to control its territorial boundaries and the cultural constructions upon which they are predicated. This discourse of nations and their borders is manifest, for example, in the current debates on university campuses over “Western Civilization” and “Ethnic Studies” requirements. One can also note here the recent rise and institutionalization of programs of “Border Studies”, which are in some ways the academic counterpart of the Border Patrol. Other homologs of this tension in the boundary of the nation-state are the official language laws noted above and the national debate on immigration policy which was recently punctuated by the passage of the “United States Immigration and Reform Control Act of 1986”.

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The dialectic of transnational exploitation and resistance takes place on the margins of nations and is both a symptom and cause of the progressive dissolution of the power of these nations to impress themselves as nationalities and as nationalisms on the subaltern peoples within their boundaries. One of the various dimensions of this challenge to the nation-state is the increasing refusal of transnational ethnic minorities to be the objects of study by the disciplines of the nation-state – it might be said that this is but one of a number of ways in which they refuse to be disciplined. As transnational subalterns increasingly penetrate into the cores of the world system, their presence there not only reorganizes the spatial differentiation of development and underdevelopment, but also challenges the epistemological basis of classical anthropology, predicated as it was on the Colonial Situation (see above), in which the collection and consumption of anthropological knowledge became a permutation of the extraction, transformation, and consumption of economic capital. One result of this reordering is an increasing refusal of former ethnographic Others to submit to being taken as objects of investigation by the standard disciplines and a corresponding insistence on writing and speaking for themselves.45 Just as the borders and boundaries of the modern nation-state have become contested terrain, so increasingly is the power of official anthropology to describe unilaterally peoples and form policies that affect them being challenged. In the case of Mixtecs this sensibility has manifested as a desire and efforts, among various spokespersons and groups, to develop an autochthonous social science that can inform “the community” about itself and its relationships with the powers that encompass it. This informing thus becomes literally part of the process of forming the ethnic community that is informed. In the Mixtec transnational community this indigenous anthropology thus becomes a constituent of that which it seeks to study.46 Such an anthropology which is brought into being by the conditions of transnationalism, and all that this term implies for the constitution of subaltern communities apart from the impress of national forces and for the dissolution of the traditional disciplining disciplines, is aptly referred to as a Practical Anthropology.47 On the unitedstatesian side of the border, in California, the differentiating project of the state seems to have gotten “out of control”. This is most apparent demographically, what with Los Angeles being simultaneously the largest city in California and, as pundits ironically note, the second largest city in Mexico, following Mexico City which is the largest city in the world. And the second largest city on the Pacific Coast, following Los Angeles, is

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now Tijuana. Clearly, Latin America does not stop at the Border: a Mexican-Latino/a corridor now extends from Tijuana on the Border to deep within unitedstatesian territory, and here and beyond there is a large and growing archipelago of Latino/a peoples.48 Throughout this archipelago practices of differing from below, born of forms of survival and resistance, proceed apace with official differing from above, and combine in a dialexis that defies modernism’s ideology of the “melting pot”.49 For generations, until the late 1970s, one of the main results of this dialexis was “Chicano/a culture” in its various forms ranging from the more defiant and more or less conscious styles of resistance elaborated by “pachucos”, “low riders”, and “home boys” with their distinctive argot to the persistence of more “traditional” forms of Mexican culture such as Mexican language, music, folk medicine, and cuisine. From the dominant European-American perspective all of these “alien” ways were simply Mexican. But to Mexicans – “real Mexicans” – in Mexico, these things Mexican-American were pocho, that is ersatz and inferior. But in the late 1970s el Chicano was “discovered” by Mexican intellectuals and cultural brokers. No longer seen as a bastard son/daughter the Chicano/a became an icon of a particular kind of “Mexican” creativity and resistance deep in the belly of the colossus to the north. In Mexican eyes the Chicano/a has gone from a pocho to a cultural hero/ine living in a region of occupied Mexico.50 The Border has thus taken on a different meaning to Mexicans than it has to EuropeanAmericans. The dramatic revaluing of the Chicano/a and of Mexico’s relation to the North in general that has taken place in recent years is doubtlessly related to the deep “crisis” that Mexico has been experiencing since the mid 1980s in which real income of the middle and low sectors has decreased around 50 percent and foreign debt has grown to around 1,500 dollars per capita.51 Under these conditions there is more pressure than ever for Mexicans to go to the United States to work. Were the Mexicans living and working in the United States to be repatriated into Mexico’s supersaturated labor markets, all commentators agree that an impossible situation would result, aggravated by the loss of the sojourners’s remittances which are no doubt Mexico’s second or third most important source of foreign exchange. There are thus in Mexico deep structural reasons affecting perception of the Border. It has become more of an obstacle, a hindrance in getting to work and back, not unlike commuter problems elsewhere. With respect to the necessity of the Mexican state to export jobs, a porous Border is desirable. But as a modern nation-state,

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an assault on the integrity of its border is an assault on its power – its power to order and to differ. The Border has thus become highly problematic for the Mexican State. And nowhere is this more apparent than in Tijuana which is, as Gómez Peña notes, . . . a place where so-called Mexican identity breaks down – challenging the very myth of national identity. The Mexican government has constructed this myth, which is that we have a univocal identity, one that is monolithic and static, and that all Mexicans from Cancun to Tijuana, from Matamoros to Oaxaca behave, act and think exactly the same. Of course this a very comfortable myth for them to justify their power. By homogenizing all Mexicans and saying that, for example, Mexicans have a hard time entering into modernity, the Mexican state can offer itself as a redemptor of Mexicans, and the one who is going to guide them by the hand into modernity. So Tijuana is a kind of challenge to the Mexican government.52

Tijuana is in its own way as transnational a city as is Los Angeles, and indeed the two are inexorably fusing together into one transnational megopolis spanning the Border. Another variant of this transnationalism is the immense demographic, cultural, emotional, and very “illegal” unofficial transnational bridge now in place between urban areas such as Los Angeles and Central America. As a result of unitedstatesian interventions in Central America hundreds of thousands of refugees from that troubled area now live in the liminal world of the “undocumented” who are in the United States, but not of the United States. What has become apparent now at the end of the twentieth century is that imperial projects to differentiate the colonized Other promote indigestible differences within the colonizing Self.

Conclusion The Border Area has become a liminal area where creative energies are released, creating signs and identities that are born outside of the national projects of the two nations which presume to control identities in this zone. This changing configuration of The Border challenges the ability of the two nation-states involved to define legal and cultural identities of their border populations which transcend the official spatial and legal bounds. Two forms of this decay of the nationalist project are notable: one is the inability – an inability born of contradictory desires – of the unitedstatesian state to “document” the “aliens” in its territory. The other is seen in the “crisis of representation” in anthropology about which so much has been said. This is so because the epistemology of modern anthropology has been constructed as part and parcel of the dualism of

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the modern nation-state whereby it differentiates between its “modern” Self and “traditional” Others. In the Border Area this once spatial, categorical, and very political distinction is becoming increasingly blurred. Whereas the past history of immigration into the nation of the United States has been one of assimilation, the ethnography of the Border Area suggests that its future history will be one of indigestion as the unity of national totemism gives way to the multiplicity of transnational ethnicity.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Paul Chace, John Comaroff, Philip Corrigan, Jean Lave, Carole Nagengast, Daniel Nugent, Mary O’Connor, Roger Rouse, and Jonathan Turner for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper which was originally presented in “Ordering Statements and the Order of the State”, a session of the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Assocn., Washington, D.C., November 1989.

Notes 1 M. Foucault The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York: Harper, p. 17, 1972. 2 G. Gómez Peña “A New Artistic Continent”, High Performance, 35, 1986, p. 24. 3 P. Bourdieu “The Specificity of the Scientific Field”, in C.C. Lemert (ed) French Sociology: Rupture and Renewal Since 1968, New York: Columbia U.P., 1981, pp. 257–292. 4 P. Corrigan and D. Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution, Oxford, New York: B. Blackwell, 1985. 5 For an illuminating discussion of the “dialexis” of differentiation and dominance in general see P. Corrigan, Social Forms/Human Capacities: Essays in Authority and Difference, London: Routledge, 1990, and “Power/ Difference”, University of Exeter, ms, 1990; forthcoming Sociological Review, 1991. 6 See E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914, New York: Pantheon, 1987. 7 See M. Kearney, “The Ethnographic Situation: The Context of the Text”, in Practical Ethnography/Practical Anthropology, ms. 8 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1983. 9 Since 1986 when English became by law the “official language of California”, I began to speak a disruptive English. “Unitedstatesian” is drawn from the Spanish estadounidense and as such is a syn-tactical violation of official speech acts. Thus, like Gómez Peña, “I am very interested in subverting English structures, infecting English with Spanish. Finding new possibilities of expression within the English language that

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English speaking people don’t have”. Quoted in C. Fusco, “The Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo”: Interview with Guillermo Gómez Peña and Emily Hicks’, Third Text 7, p. 74, 1989. 10 Re economic capital and its transformations, see P. Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital”. In J.B. Richardson (ed) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, New York: Greenwood P., 1986, pp. 241–258. 11 Following Marx’s distinction it is useful to see bourgeois society as asserting itself outwardly as nationality and inwardly as state; see Corrigan and Sayer, The Great Arch, p. 1. 12 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities. 13 Observations made by the author on various occasions between 1985 and 1988. 14 Description and photos of this event were presented to the author by Jorge Bustamante, President of El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Tijuana, Baja California. 15 Observations made by the author on various occasions in recent years. 16 See E. Mandel, Late Capitalism, London: NLB, 1975. 17 I have taken this term from a recent BBC Television documentary series of the same name. 18 See M. Kearney, “From The Invisible Hand to Visible Feet: Anthropological Studies of Migration and Development”, Annual Review of Anthropology, 15, 1986. 19 See S. Sassen-Koob, “Recomposition and Peripheralization at the Core”, Contemporary Marxism 5, 1982. 20 See R. Mandel for an illuminating discussion of the cultural politics of ethnicity and difference in the context of foreign labor migration in Europe: “Ethnicity and Identity among Migrant Guestworkers in West Berlin,” in N. Gonzalez & C. McCommon (eds) Conflict, Migration, and the Expression of Ethnicity, Boulder: Westview P., 1989, pp.60–74. 21 J. Heyman discusses and documents how US. policy on the Mexican border since 1940 has tended toward increased use of force, Life and Labor on the Border, Tucson: U. of Arizona P., in press. 22 Immigration policy is, as Cockcroft notes, in practice labor policy disguised as immigration policy; J. Cockcroft, Outlaws in the Promised Land: Mexican Immigrant Workers and America’s Future, New York: Grove P., 1986. This interpretation of unitedstatesian policy re the Border is supported by research of J. Bustamante who has found an inverse relationship between economic indicators of the health of the unitedstatesian economy and the rate of apprehensions of undocumented Mexican migrants. In other words, as the economy enters periods of expansion, the “valve” is opened more, allowing a greater “flow” of Mexican labor, and then when the economy enters recession associated with rising unemployment in the United States, the “valve” is partially closed to reduce the “flow”. J.A. Bustamante, The Mexicans are Coming: From Ideology to Labor Relations’, International Migration Review 17, 1983, pp.323–431. [See Editorial Note p. 74]. 23 See M. Burawoy, “The Functions and Reproduction of Migrant Labor: Comparative Material from southern Africa and the United States”, Amer. J. of Sociology, 81, 1976, pp. 1050–87; P. Corrigan, “Feudal Relics or Capitalist Monuments? Notes on the Sociology of Unfree Labour”, Sociology

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11, 1977; and R. Cohen, The New Helots: Migrants in the International Division of Labor, Aldershot, Hants, England: Avebury, 1987. 24 See, M. Kearney and C. Nagengast, “Anthropological Perspectives on Transnational Communities in Rural California”. Working Group on Farm Labor and Rural Poverty, Working Paper #3. Davis, Calif.: California Institute for Rural Studies, 1989; cf. R. Rouse “Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism”, forthcoming, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies. 25 Gómez Peña quoted in C. Fusco, “The Border Art Workshop”, p. 55. 26 J. Turnage, Director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in San Diego. Quoted from D. Wolf, Undocumented Aliens and Crime: The Case of San Diego County, Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, U. of Calif., San Diego, 1988, p. 2. 27 Observed by the author in 1985. 28 “But the body is also directly involved in a political field: power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. This political investment of the body is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as labour power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection (in which need is also a political instrument meticulously prepared, calculated and used); the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body”. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, New York: Vintage, 1977, pp. 25–26. 29 Raite is a corruption of “ride” and is pronounded “rye-tay”. One of the main services of coyotes is to arrange for raites, which are transportation to points north, or informal transportation in general. A person who provides such services is a raitero. Migrants sometimes punningly refer to raiteros as rateros (thieves). 30 E.R. Leach, “Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse”, in E.H. Lenneberg (ed) New Directions in the Study of Language, Cambridge: MIT P., 1964, pp. 23–63; cf. V. Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage”, in Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society, Symposium on New Approaches to the Study of Religion, 1964, pp. 4–20. 31 Re. collaboration of police and coyotes, police extortion, and other human rights violations of Mexican migrants in the Border Area, see C. Nagengast, R. Stavenhagen, and M. Kearney, “Human Rights and Indigenous Workers: The Mixtecs in Mexico and the United States”, in Neighbors in Crisis: A Call for Joint Solutions, A. Goméz Pompa and L. Meyer (eds) Boulder: Westview, in press. 32 T. Melendez, “Coyote: Towards a Definition,” Aztlán: International Journal of Chicano Studies Research, v. 13, no. 1–2, 1982. 33 See M. Kearney, “Mixtec Political Consciousness: From Passive to Active Resistance” in D. Nugent (ed) Rural Revolt in Mexico and U.S. Intervention. Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, U. of California, San Diego, Monograph Series, 27, 1988; and C. Nagengast and M. Kearney. “Mixtec Ethnicity: Social Identity, Political Consciousness, and Political Activism”, Latin American Research Review, v. 25, no. 1, 1990. 34 S. Varese, “Restoring Multiplicity: Indianities and the Civilizing Project in Latin America”, Latin American Perspectives v. 9, no. 2, 1982.

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35 J.L. Comaroff, “Of Totemism and Ethnicity: Consciousness, Practice and the Signs of Inequality”, Ethnos v. 52, no. 3–4, 1987. 36 Re consciousness of the transnational see J.L. and J. Comaroff, “The Madman and the Migrant: Work and Labor in the Historical Consciousness of a South African People”, American Ethnologist v. 14, no. 2, 1987. 37 J.L. Comaroff comments on this dialectic of ethnic formation. “The emergence of ethnic groups and the awakening of ethnic consciousness are . . . the product of historic forces which structure relations of inequality between discrete social entities. They are, in other words, the social and cultural correlates of a specific mode of articulation between groupings, in which one extends its dominance over another by some form of coercion, violent or otherwise; situates the latter as a bounded unit in a dependent and unique position within an inclusive division of labor; and, by removing from it final control over the means of production and/or reproduction, regulates the terms upon which value may be extracted from it. By virtue of so [doing], the dominant grouping constitutes both itself and the subordinate population as classes; whatever the prior sociological character of these aggregations, they are, in the process, actualized as groups an sich”. J.L. Comaroff, “Of Totemism and Ethnicity”, p. 308. 38 Re. the distinction between “work” and “labor” see J. Comaroff and J.L. Comaroff, “The Madman and the Migrant”, pp. 196–202. 39 A frequent observation of Mixtec migrants in the United States is that, “Here we live and work like beasts”. And as one Mixtec farmworker recently remarked, “The bosses treat their animals better than they treat us. They give their dogs, horses, and chickens houses to sleep in. But us they leave out in the rain. They even have barns for their tractors, but not for us”. The reference here is to the thousands of Mixtecs in California and Oregon who live outdoors in makeshift camps. 40 The “classic” period of anthropology reached its apogee in the interwar period when the “classic ethnographies” were written, e.g., those of Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Firth, Radcliffe-Brown, and their Boasian counterparts in the United States. 41 M. Kearney, Practical Ethnography/Practical Anthropology, ms. 42 The rise of a differently constituted nationalism, a peripheral nationalism propelled by movements of “national liberation”, are an important part of this global shift to transnationalism, but cannot be dealt with here. See P. Chatterji, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, London: Zed Press, 1986. 43 P. Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, Stanford: Stanford U.P., 1988. 44 Re the world view universals of Self, Other, and Relationship see M. Kearney, World View, Novato, Calif.: Chandler & Sharp, 1984. 45 See, e.g., B. Harlow, Resistance Literature, New York: Methuen, 1987; and a forthcoming issue of Latin American Perspectives devoted to testimonial literature. 46 Numerous comparable instances exist among other “traditional” groups that have recently assumed and been ascribed ethnicity; re the Kayapo, for example, see T. Turner, “Amazonian Indians Lead Fight to Save Their Forest World,” The Latin American Anthropology Review, v. 1, no. 1, pp.2–4. 47 M. Kearney, Practical Ethnography/Practical Anthropology, ms.

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48 This image of Latin America as an archipelago is Gómez Peña’s; see Fusco, “The Border Art Workshop”, p. 73. 49 P. Corrigan, “Power/Difference”. ms, 1990. 50 Re cholos, chavos, and punks on the Border see J.M. Valenzuela, La Brava Ese, Tijuana: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 1988. 51 The now chronic nature of the “crisis” has made it a contradiction in terms. 52 Quoted from Fusco, “The Border Art Workshop”, p. 70.

Making Algeria French and Unmaking French Algeria DAVID PROCHASKA Abstract Where the French tended to view the historical saga of Algérie française through such categories as colonization and mise en ualeur, here the making of colonial Algeria is viewed as a classic case of settler colonialism, and the formation of a distinctive colonial society and culture by the First World War is stressed. Where the Algerians tend to view Algérie algérienne as the successful result of an unbroken tradition of resistance to the French throughout the colonial period, here the unmaking of Algérie française is presented in a manner which illuminates the historically contingent nature of Algerian nationalism by tracing over time the multiple and divergent strands of which it was composed. In telling this colonial tale from a postcolonial perspective, description is privileged as much as analysis, individuals as much as issues, by scrutinizing the inhabitants of the latter-day Hippo of Augustine, a town the French called Bône and the Algerians call Annaba, and beginning with a young Albert Camus . . .

Albert Camus is probably the single best-known pied noir, or French settler, of colonial Algeria. And one of the most puzzling, too. Author of L’Étranger (The Stranger) a novel more important in the postwar history of literature and philosophy than in the history of imperialism and colonialism, even though the main event is Meursault’s murder of – signflcantly – a nameless Algerian. Author of La Peste (The Plague) a fable about totalitarianism in Europe but set in the Algerian port of Oran, a city in which the Europeans appear but the Algerians tend to disappear. A man of the Left, a former Communist and résistant, Camus broke with the French Left generally and with Jean-Paul Sartre particularly over the Algerian war, choosing his mother – l’Algérie française – over justice – Algérie algérienne (McCarthy 1982; Lottman 1980; Cruise O’Brien 1970). Camus was born in 1913 in Mondovi, now called Dréan, which is located some 20 kilometers outside Bône, now called Annaba. At the time, Mondovi was one of the chief wine-producing centers in the Bône plain. One of the largest and richest estates, known as Guébar, belonged to Jérome Bertagna, who died in Mondovi in 1903, 10 years before Camus was born there. Bertqna’s position as the single most powerful person in the Bône region at the time of his death was reflected in the grandeur of his estate. Guébar encompassed 7,500 acres; the three-story chateau he had erected at the end of a long, tree-lined drive looked not unlike the stately chateaux of the wine barons of southwestern France. Today in France Jérome Bertagna’s descendants reside in Nice, Cannes and Paris, where they live off the family’s former investments in Algeria. Yet today in Algeria it is not Twenty Years of the Journal of Historical Sociology: Challenging the Field Volume 2 Edited by Yoke-Sum Wong and Derek Sayer © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-17934-8

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easy to find Bertagna’s former estate. The farm has been nationalized, most of the vines uprooted, the brand name of the wine changed, and when you ask Algerians directions, no one seems to recognize the name. But then there it is: set back from the highway, the chateau itself in ruins, the roof caved in, the stone walls collapsing, it is now uninhabited but on the grounds a number of Algerian families have thrown up gourbi-s, thatched huts. Just down the road a piece from Dréan lies the qubba, or tomb, of Sidi Denden. The qubba itself, a white plastered dome, sits on a low promontory which juts out over the surrounding plain of Annaba, visible from the highway long before you reach the cut-off. Qubba-s dot the Annaba plain today like the now vanished jujube trees which give Annaba its name used to. Yet every Algerian you ask has heard of Sidi Denden, and most can provide surprisingly precise directions, from the scruffy taxi driver in town to the bemused guys lounging at another qubba outside town. It is unclear when either the shrine or cult of Sidi Denden was founded, but the tomb was there certainly before the French invaded in 1830. At the time of the 1876 census, Sadek Denden was seven years old and lived in the old city of Bône with his parents, plus five brothers and sisters.1 Perhaps Sadek Denden was a descendant of the original Sidi Denden, perhaps not.2 The former, a secularized, Francophone Algerian, who looked more to France than to Islam, issued from the latter, a family of traditional Muslim religious adepts: that would make for a nice historical irony. Whether descended from Sidi Denden or not, Sadek Denden is the best-known member of the so-called Jeune Algérien movement, the young Algerians, to have come out of Bône at the turn of the twentieth century. Together with his confrère, Khélil Kaid Layoun, Denden edited newspapers, drafted petitions, and staged mass meetings during the same time Bertagna reigned as mayor of Bône. While Denden moved on to Algiers and colony-wide Jeune Algérien activities, Khélil Kaid Layoun remained in Bône to lead the movement there. Sadek Denden may have died penniless and Jérome Bertagna wealthy, but Bertagna’s familial descendants were later run out of Algeria by the nationalist descendants of Sadek Denden and Khélil Kaid Layoun. Therefore, we have on the one hand, Jérome Bertagna, who did so much to make Algeria French, and on the other hand, Sadek Denden and Khélil Kaid Layoun, who did so much to unmake Algérie française. The three men are linked so tightly geographically yet separated by so much in every other way that it is no wonder Albert Camus was so complexé. ***

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Throughout the historiographical literature, the struggle for hegemony in colonial Algeria is depicted primarily as a two-way battle waged between the French on one side, and the Algerians on the other. That the European settlers – the French, Spanish, Italians, Maltese, and other Europeans who became known collectively as the pieds noirs – comprised a third significant force has been recognized yet never systematically analyzed (Nora 1961; Prochaska 1990). Yet Algeria was a settler colony; alongside the Algerians and temporary migrants from France (colonial administrators, military personnel), the permanent European settlers constituted a third major element in the colonial equation. Moreover, this three-way jockeying for political position shifted over time. In settler colonies like Kenya, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, and Algeria – not to mention South Africa – conflicts arise typically between the settlers and administration during the period of colonization. But it is typically only later during the period of decolonization that a full-blown nationalist movement forms, and the indigenous people develop into a third force capable of driving a wedge between the settlers and the colonial power (Denoon 1983; McMichael 1984; Mosley 1983). This three-sided conflict also accounts in large part for why decolonization is often more violent in settler colonies. The historical roles played by the three protagonists in colonial Algeria passed through three distinct stages. During the period of direct colonial rule between 1830 and 1870, the French army established and staffed the basic bureaucratic institutions while the European settlers played a distinctly inferior role. Initially, the interests of the settlers and the army dovetailed, but soon the army replaced the Algerians as the chief barrier standing in the way of the settlers extending their power. Military antipathy, therefore, not Republican sympathy drove the settlers to embrace Republicanism. The settler stage of colonialism began in 1870 when the Third Republic replaced the Second Empire in France, and civilians replaced the military in Algeria. Where the illiberal Second Empire had kept a relatively tight institutional rein on the settlers, the liberal Third Republic inadvertently allowed them to create local pockets of power in the interstices of the “looser” civilian administration. In Bône and elsewhere in colonial Algeria the official bureaucracy was controlled by representatives of metropolitan France while the unofficial patronage network was dominated by the European settlers. Thus, control of the bureaucratic system and the patronage network corresponded by and large to two of the three main forces contending for hegemony in Algerian affairs. No one actualized more the potential of this distinctive political culture – a combination of patronage, bossism and corruption in a settler colonial situation – than Jérome Bertagna.3

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Still reeling from the violent imposition of French colonial rule, the Algerians were kept politically quiescent during the formative decades of settler society. Only during the period of decolonization did the Algerians emerge powerful enough to rival the settlers and metropolitan French, and to win independence as a result. This third stage of colonialism can be dated from the 1945 Sétif riots, and culminated in the Algerian Revolution of 1954–1962. But that gets ahead of our story. *** Jérome Bertagna’s father was an Italian naturalized French; born in Nice, he ran a bakery in Bône. Jérome himself was born in Algiers and educated in Marseille. He joined the Ponts et Chaussées, the French corps of civil engineers, but quit to work for the Maison Lavie as a commercial agent specializing in flour milling and selling wheat. Some of Lavie’s success must have rubbed off on Jérome Bertagna, because when he quit he founded the Maison Bertagna and made his fortune before age 40 when he won the government contract to supply the French army during the takeover of Tunisia in 1881.4 His economic position secure, Bertagna proceeded to boost his social status by plowing his business profits into land purchases and became one of the biggest colons in the Bône region. His 7,500 acre estate in Mondovi included 1,500 acres of vineyards; he employed 500 workers including 100 convicts. Already it is clear how Bertagna combined his practical background – civil engineering, construction, grain – with an élan brought to bear on business. He has a knack for being the right person in the right place at the right time, and he knows it. Bertagna parlayed his economic wealth into not only social prestige but political power as well. He was only 27 when as deputy to the mayor of Bône he was revoked in 1870 by Marshal MacMahon, then presiding over the violent birth of the French Third Republic. Demonstrating his talent for political survival, Bertagna soon regained his seat on the Bône city council, worked his way up again to deputy mayor, and crowned his comeback by becoming mayor in 1888, a post he held continuously for 15 years until his death. It was while mayor that Bertagna enjoyed his greatest successes and experienced his biggest scandals. He had false invoices drawn up for municipal money spent on public works. He lent a local building contractor 100,000 francs in exchange for a cut of the profits – a classic case of conflict of interest. He taxed brothel keepers for each prostitute – a flagrantly illegal municipal law he enacted himself. He colluded with government engineers to deceive the French state by deliberately underestimating costs for the construction of the port of Bône, which in the end cost nearly twice

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the original ten million franc estimate. And when port construction halted after nine years due to lack of funds because the money had run out, the government was interpellated in the Assemblée Nationale in Paris over Bertagna’s role. But the biggest scandal Bertagna was ever involved in was the so-called Tébessa phosphates affair. Getting wind of a vast deposit of phosphates south of Bône, Bertagna peddled his influence in order to obtain the necessary prefectoral authorization so the concession could be sold to an English businessman in Bône named Jacobsen. When word reached Paris that the phosphates of Tébessa – termed a “national treasure” by one French engineer – were to be sold to a foreigner, the government was interpellated again, the prefect’s authorization rescinded, the prefect revoked, and a judicial investigation launched against Bertagna and his co-conspirators. This list of Bertagna’s corrupt practices could be extended ad nauseam, since no fewer than 28 separate instructions judiciaires (analogous to grand jury investigations) were launched against him during his career. Yet the significant point here is that Bertagna was never indicted let alone convicted of any wrongdoing. Why? Because Bertagna successfully played off his position as a settler leader against metropolitan France. As long as settler interests coincided with those of metropolitan France, the colonial French bureaucracy cracked down only on the most egregious excesses of local patronage politics. This situation continued from 1870, when the settlers were given virtually a free hand in determining Algerian policy in exchange for their staunch support of the Third Republic, to the early 1890s. This period coincides precisely with the era when Bertagna was becoming the boss of Bône. What Bertagna did was to capitalize – literally – on opportunities opened up after 1870 for all settlers, profiting ultimately at the expense of the Algerians. Beginning in the 1890s, however, the situation began to change. It was then that a series of reports issued in quick succession alerted parliament in Paris to settler abuses in Algeria: the Rapport Burdeau (1891), Rapport Jules Ferry (1892), Rapport Jonnart (1892), and Rapport Isaac (1895) (Ageron 1968: 447–477). For a while, it looked as though things were about to change. No less convinced a colonialist than Jules Ferry, for example, demanded that France arbitrate between the settlers and Algerians rather than side with the settlers against the Algerians. The 1890s debate in Paris over reform in Algeria was conducted primarily in terms of those who were either for or against the colonial policy of assimilation. By and large, the terms of this debate are carried over in the historiography. In the name of assimilation to the Republic, the settlers pushed to establish the

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full panoply of political institutions in Algeria. But the practice of assimilation in Algeria differed markedly from the theory of assimilation as adumbrated in Paris. Rooted in Jacobin universalism and the revolutionary tradition of 1789, assimilation may have been a progressive, liberal policy when applied in France, but it was clearly a retrogressive, illiberal policy when applied selectively in Algeria. For in the name of assimilation the settlers carved out their own power base within the civil regime which they used to gain hegemony over the Algerians. “Algeria ‘assimilated to France’ was in reality in the hands of colonization”, that is, the settlers (Ageron 1974: 49). At the level of theory, association replaced assimilation as official French policy after 1900 (Ageron 1968: 989–1002). In fact, it made little, if any, practical difference to Bertagna and other settlers in Algeria whether Paris adopted assimilation or association as official colonial policy. What was crucial for the settlers was not the particular colonial policy determined in Paris, but its implementation in Algeria; what mattered was not theory but practice. On the one hand, assimilation had clearly proven advantageous to the settlers. On the other hand, Bertagna could argue à propos the debate on assimilation versus association, “We are destined to live with the Arabs, to utilize their special capacities for the development of this land, and our first duty is to respect their customs by banishing any idea of assimilation” (Quoted in Ageron 1968: 575). Key was the manner in which Bône politicians formed patronage chains with politicians elsewhere, the most important of which connected Bertagna in Bône to deputy Gaston Thomson in Paris, the longest-sitting deputy of the Third Republic. In fact, local settler power throughout Algeria was linked to and cemented by an influential settler lobby in Paris, comprised largely of the so-called élus algériens, the French representatives of Algeria who sat in the Assemblée Nationale. In turn, these élus algériens played a major role in the parti colonial, the foremost interest group lobbying for colonial expansion during the Third Republic. Recent work on the particolonial and its parliamentary component, the groupe colonial, bears out this line of interpretation (Andrew and Kanya-Forstner 1971, 1976, 1981; Kanya-Forstner and Grupp 1975; Andrew 1976; Ageron 1978; Abrams and Miller 1976; Persell 1983; Kanya-Forstner 1974; Binoche 1971). The parti colonial emerges as a highly successful pressure group, largely responsible for late nineteenth and early twentieth century French expansion rather than any widespread, mass-based enthusiasm emanating from ordinary Frenchmen. It is worth stressing that European settlers from Algeria and their representatives comprised the major faction within the parti colonial. Eugène Etienne, deputy

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from Oran, was the unquestioned titular head; he was seconded by Thomson, representative of Bône. So far the parti colonial has been studied mostly from “above” rather than “below”, from Paris rather than Algeria. Yet interest groups such as the parti colonial could not have functioned, indeed, would have had no raison d’être, had it not been for precisely the sort of grassroots support provided by settlers in local Algerian cities like Bône. When the showdown came between France and the settlers, the métropole learned to its dismay how powerful the settlers had become with their patronage-based political network extending from the local municipalities of Algeria to the settler lobby in Paris. The city of Bône and Mayor Bertagna played a key role in this settler political network and were at the center of the ensuing conflict. Amidst calls for reform, Jules Cambon was named GouverneurGénéral in 1891. To clean up local Algerian politics, Cambon began a wide-ranging purge of European mayors. From the end of 1895 to the end of 1896 he suspended or revoked no fewer than nine mayors. Within the context of his purge, Bertagna was clearly Cambon’s biggest and most important prey.5 At this very moment in 1895 the scandal over the phosphates of Tébessa surfaced. Pending the outcome of the judicial inquiry of Bertagna and his cronies, Cambon first suspended then revoked Bertagna as mayor. When the French jurist Broussard investigating the case concluded that Bertagna had indeed peddled his political influence, and recommended that Bertagna be tried, it looked for a minute as though Bertagna was through. But in fact it was already too late. Despite his suspension and revocation as mayor, Bertagna had already been triumphantly reelected by loyal Bône voters in 1896. At the time of his investiture, he went on the offensive lambasting the state administration in general and the judicial system in particular. In the end, the Bône juge who conducted the phosphates investigation concluded – as did every other judge who ever investigated him – that there was insufficient evidence to bring Bertagna to trial.6 As a matter of fact it was not Bertagna but Cambon who was removed from office. With his failure to unseat Bertagna, Cambon’s mayoral purge sputtered out; the coup de grâce came in 1897 when the settlers connived to have Cambon ousted as governorgeneral. A contemporary politician from nearby Constantine, Emile Morinaud, wrote in his memoirs that Cambon was removed as a result of “the repeated intervention of [Gaston] Thomson and [Eugène] Etienne” (quoted in Ageron 1968: 531). ***

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The confrontation in Bône in 1896 which pitted the settlers against the government, and the bureaucracy against the patronage system had clearly been won by the settlers and their representatives. Elsewhere in Algeria, the settlers also beat back the metropolitan French challenge, but somewhat differently. The attempt by metropolitan France to reform Algeria, to act again as an intermediary between Europeans and Algerians, spawned a settler reaction which is usually discussed in terms of an antisemitic crisis between 1898 and 1901, but which amounted in reality to a revolution manquée. Regarding antisemitism, Algeria experienced an outbreak at the very moment the Dreyfus affair peaked in France. Scholars concur that Algerian antisemitism was primarily an electoral phenomenon born as a result of the 1870 Crémieux decree which enfranchised en masse the Jews of Algeria. Yet it became more than simply an electoral phenomenon in finde-siècle Algeria. “Racial antisemitism can be considered one of the givens of colonial Algerian psychology” (Ageron 1968: 588). It functioned as a lightning rod which collected and deflected, as much as it focussed, a whole range of collective resentments. Antisemitism constituted in turn one aspect of a larger Algerian crisis which also included colon insecurity vis-à-vis the Algerians, French settler fears of non-French settlers (“foreign peril”), an economic crisis over colonization, plus a movement for autonomy. Crisis in Algeria added to the crise de conscience felt in France over the course the settlers were steering, and led to a political confrontation, the opening round of which cast Cambon against Bertagna in 1896. But if Cambon’s defeat at the hands of Bertagna resolved in large measure the Bône situation, Cambon’s removal failed to still emotions elsewhere in Algeria. “With Cambon gone, the political crisis only worsened until the revolutionary attempt of the years 1898–1901, misunderstood as the anti-Jewish crisis, and by which the Algeria of the Europeans meant to obtain its autonomy” (Ageron 1979: 39–40).7 Cambon’s departure in 1897 failed to resolve the Algerian crisis, therefore, because it was more than a crisis over antisemitism.8 To antisemitism were added calls for autonomy, and even outright separation from France. The ties between France and Algeria consisted in “a sort of contract” whereby the task of France was to defend the settlers and to maintain their social supremacy over the Muslims; should it fail to do so, the settlers had the right to claim their independance. By 1898 large numbers of settlers felt France had broken this contract (Ageron 1979: 133). At the height of the Dreyfus affair, therefore, a besieged Republic needed all the support it could get, and in the end caved in to the settlers’ more moderate demands in exchange for their support

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against the anti-Dreyfusards. In a series of decrees issued in August, 1898 and completed by a 1900 law, the settlers failed to obtain outright political autonomy, but they did gain financial autonomy, the creation of a colonial assembly, Délégations Finançières, and perhaps most important, the “unwritten promise that metropolitan interference would cease” (Ageron 1979: 39–40). These concessions satisfied all but the hard-core anti-semites, tensions attenuated from the end of 1898, and by the parliamentary elections of 1902 Algeria returned to the Opportunist fold. But at what a cost. Algerian reform had been shelved. And measures for autonomy only strengthened the hand of the settlers at the expense of the métropole. Just as Bertagna had bested Cambon in 1896, therefore, so did the European settlers emerge victorious in their confrontation with metropolitan France at the turn of the century. By capitalizing on, among other things, the possibilities of patronage politics in a settler colonial situation, they had taken a giant stride forward in securing their de facto control over colonial Algeria. *** Yet it is not the big men alone, the bosses of the Bône’s, that made Algeria a settler colony. Bertagna was extraordinary in the sense that he realized the possibilities more than most, he actualized the potential of the colonial situation in Algeria after 1870. But what was extraordinary about colonial Algeria was that it offered similar opportunities to the mass of ordinary European settlers. They, too, seized their opportunity and in so doing created a new society, part French, part Italian, part Spanish, part Maltese, part Jewish, part Algerian; in short, a settler colonial society. “A new race” is precisely how André Gide, who was in the Maghreb at the time, described what he saw (quoted in Baroli 1974: 173, 175–76). Algerians may have outnumbered Europeans six to one in Algeria as a whole, but in the area along the Mediterranean coast where the European settlers concentrated in the largest cities, Europeans preponderated over Algerians two to one. The port cities of Algiers, Oran, and Bône constituted the loci of colonial Algerian society, and played thereby a disproportionately large role in assuring settler predominance throughout Algeria. In Bône Europeans outnumbered Algerians two to one 1848–1926 (see Table 1).9 And in making Bône a European city in the nineteenth century, the French blocked social evolution, attempted to contain history, and precluded thereby any genuine rapprochement with the Algerians in the twentieth century. To take the argument a step further, the single most striking feature of this colonial society is that it not only existed in objective

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terms, an sich, but that it became subjectively aware of its own existence, für sich. Not simply formed around the turn of the twentieth century, it formed itself, it became conscious of itself. It is no coincidence, therefore, that at the very time Cambon was tangling with Bertagna, the settlers in Bône and elsewhere in Algeria were beginning to refer to themselves as the “Algerians”, the “Algerian people”. When the enormously popular literary character, Cagayous of Algiers, is asked, “Are you French?” he answers, “We are Algerians!” As for the Muslim Algerians, they were called the “indigènes”. Thus, at one blow the settlers proclaimed their hegemony in Algeria and at the same time obliterated the Algerians in the very words they used to describe themselves. Nowhere is this settler colonial society, this settler consciousness more evident than in the culture they created, in the language they spoke and the literature they wrote. Consider language first. The language the European settlers of Algeria spoke consisted of an amalgam of the various languages they brought along with them as part of their cultural baggage, namely, French, Spanish, Italian, Maltese, plus Arabic. This language, or more precisely, dialect of French was termed pataouète. It was a language of the cities more than the countryside, especially of the large port cities where the largest number of settlers concentrated. Moreover, accents and usage varied from city to city. In Oran, Spanish predominated: in Bône, Italian. In the Bône case, the variant of pataouète was called, naturally, patois bônois. Italian loan words were known as bônoises, that is related to Bône; parodies of classical literature sprinkled with Italian phrases were termed hipponismes, that is, related to Hippo, the city of St. Augustine, situated on the same site as Bône (Lanly 1962; Bacri 1983; Gautier 1920: 175–205; Audisio 1931; Brunot 1948: 209–210). Although it is more difficult to track the rise and diffusion of spoken discourse, la parole as the French say, than it is to read the literary survivals which remain, la langue, there are a number of clues in the case of the patois bônois. For one, there is the local character Luc, a housepainter by vocation, a bard and balladeer by Table 1: Colonial Bône Population, 1907 (percent) Native French Jews Europeans naturalized French Other Europeans [mainly Maltese and Italians) Algerians Total Source: Gouvemement Général 1908: 132–33.

22 4 29 18 27 100

(8845) (1588) (12041) (7455) (11227) (41156)

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avocation. Luc gained a certain local fame for his poems and songs, all expressed in patois bônois.10 We also know that Bône’s two opposing political parties, the Opportunist Republicans and Radical Republicans, congregated in two cafes on opposite sides of Bône’s main street, from which could be heard “howls and cheers, insults, cries, gibes, guffaws, and those guttural and farting-like onomatopoetic words, which are, it is said, a genuine Bône specialty” (Arnaud 1960: 92). These strange sounds are, of course, those of the patois bônois. Bône political culture, exemplified in Bertagna’s political corruption, employed as its favored mode of discourse, the patois bônois. Turning next to the literature of colonial Bône, the first texts written in the patois bônois consist of a series of columns which appeared under the pseudonym of Pepino. Eighteen of his “Croquis Naturalistes” were published in Les Clochettes Bônoises between May 4, 1895 and November 6, 1897. Another five “Croquis Naturalistes” appeared in Les Gaités Bônoises February 21–March 21, 1897.11 In 1898 an entire newspaper in patois bônois was published, Le Diocane Bônois. Satirical in intent, shocking in effect, Le Diocane Bônois caused a furor because it featured on its masthead the Italian blasphemy, le diocane, loosely “son of a Bônois bitch”. Due to the scandal, only one issue appeared, dated December 31, 1898, but the name was changed to Le Scandale Bônoise and two additional issues appeared on January 7 and 14, 1899.12 Not only newspapers but also books in patois bônois were published. Although the books generally came later, they usually returned to an earlier period, to the local legends and personalities of the age of Bertagna. There is, for example, Harmonies Bônoises by Louis Lafourcade. Jérome Bertagna himself appears, as well as Thaddo, guardian of the European cemetery, and Carloutche, humble Italian fisherman and devoted Bertagna follower. Carloutche served as the model for the fisherman sitting at the base of the statue of Bertagna, which was the largest and most important statue in Bône before it was torn down by the Algerians in 1962. But this local literary genre culminates in Edmund Brua’s Fables Bônoises, “one of the summits of pied-noir literature” (Lentin 1982: 100). The language of the Fables Bônoises is pataouète, the literary model the tales of La Fontaine, and the tone ironic, satirical. In these tales transplanted from La Fontaine’s France to Brua’s Bône, we meet Malakoff the milkman and the Maltese curé too, plus Bagur, Salvator and Sauveur. And when the Fables were collected together and first published in 1938, they were reviewed by that other writer from the Bône region, Albert Camus, who wrote that “the singular flavor of these ironic moral tales belongs only to Brua, and through him to those robust people, the Bagurs, the Sauveurs,

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and the Salvators, who make love and go swimming, who cheat and jeer and bluster in the very places where St. Augustine meditated on the tragedy of the human soul” (quoted in Brua 1972: 7). *** It is time to draw up a preliminary balance sheet. The political culture of Bône, typified by the political corruption of Jérome Bertagna, and the linguistic and literary culture, exemplified by Pepino and Luc, Lafourcade and Brua, together demonstrate the formation in Bône of a distinctive settler society and culture around the turn of the twentieth century. Settler colonialism in Algeria was the necessary but not sufficient prerequisite for the creation of settler colonial culture. In turn, colonial culture contributed to the formation of settler society. As such, the creation of settler society and culture in Bône constitutes one chapter in the making of Algeria French in the decades prior to the First World War. Perhaps the most striking feature about the formation of settler colonial society and culture is the way the Algerians tend to drop out of the picture. Bertagna achieves preeminence in Bône not by taking the Algerians into account but by leaving them out – and getting away with it. Likewise, Bône’s pied noir literature was written by, for and about the Europeans, not the Algerians. It records like a seismograph European preoccupations, but rather than dealing with, let alone coming to terms with the colonial situation in Algeria, the relationship between European colonizers and Algerian colonized, the Algerians are curiously absent. Yet they were there, if you only bothered to look. Even the Bônois could not fail to see them in 1909 when they staged a mass meeting, 1,200 strong according to European estimates, 3,000 according to the Algerians, which amounted to between approximately 10 and 25 percent of Bône’s 10,742 Algerians (Gouvernement Général 1908: 132–133).13 Ostensibly, they gathered to support a recent French law which required French military service of all Algerians, but in actuality they used the occasion to call for reforms. The meeting was organized by none other than Sadek Denden and Khélil Kaid Layoun, who delivered two of the three speeches the crowd heard. Denden urged that Algerians who served in the French military be given the option of becoming French citizens. Kaid Layoun argued that special punitive laws applicable only to Algerians, the Code de l’Indigénat, “constitute an insurmountable obstacle to the assimilation dreamed by French and Arabs”. The next day accounts of the gathering appeared under banner headlines in the local Algerian newspaper edited by Denden, L’Islam.14

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Ageron points out that this was very likely the first mass meeting of Algerians, and that it followed soon after the 1908 Young Turk revolution in Turkey plus a 1908 visit of Jeunes Algériens who met with Georges Clemenceau in Paris (1968: 1037–1038; 1979: 235).15 The first director of L’Islam, ’Abd al Aziz Tebibel, founded a second Jeune Algérien paper in Bône, L’Etendard Algérien, which appeared from November 22, 1910 to January 29, 1911 (Montoy 1982: 663–664, 1529–1530). This mass meeting in Bône constitutes one of the first and most important anywhere in Algeria of the Jeune Algérien movement, that movement of Frenchified Algerians who sought the assimilation of Algeria to France. As we have seen, assimilation was official French policy in theory: in practice, however, it was stymied by settler intransigence. The Jeunes Algériens appealed over the heads of the settlers in Algeria to French reformers in France to implement assimilation. In seeking closer ties to France at the beginning of the century, the Jeunes Algériens pursued a course of action which ironically the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) was later to term “collaborationist”. In 1909 Sadek Denden was 38 years old: it was an eventful year for him. He had joined the colonial administration after studying in a French lycée. In 1909 he quit the administration, co-founded L’Islam, and organized the mass meeting at the end of the year. He edited L’Islam in Bône until 1912 when he moved to Algiers and took L’Islam with him, where it appeared until the First World War. In Algiers Denden became friends with Dr. Benthami, one of the most influential Jeune Algérien leaders in the capital, and the Emir Khaled, grandson of Abd al-Qadir, the leader of Algerian resistance to the French in the 1830s and 1840s. In 1919 Denden was a candidate for the Algiers city council on a ticket headed by Benthami and defeated by a ticket led by Khaled. A talented journalist, a scathing editorialist, a skillful political organizer, Sadek Denden made L’Islam first in Bône, then in Algiers, the single most important Jeune Algérien newspaper. He himself became one of the acknowledged leaders of the Jeune Algérien movement.16 While Denden moved to Algiers, Khélil Kaid Layoun remained in Bône [Montoy 1982: 468, 1347). A year older than Denden, Khélil came from a lower middle class Bône family; he worked as a clerk in a French law office. At the time of the French reform effort back in the 1890s which culminated in Bône with Governor General Cambon’s attempted ouster of Mayor Bertagna, he helped publish an Algerian newspaper in Bône called El Hack, Arabic for “the truth”. Sliman Bengui directed the paper, and Omar Samar served as editor [Montoy 1982: 468).17 Scrupulously apolitical, legalistic, and assimilationist, El Hack called on French reformers to prevent

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settler abuses, it objected to holding Algerians responsible collectively for crimes committed by individuals, and it waxed indignant when all Algerians were lumped together and termed “bandits”. El Hack was printed in French not Arabic; French sympathizers known as indigènophiles contributed articles as well as Algerians. El Hack criticized the practice of French colonialism but it did not question the theoretical foundations of the colonial regime; it did not seek separation from France, but pushed for French reforms in Algeria. What is striking about the reforms advocated by El Hack is not how conservative they strike us today, but how radical they seemed to the settlers then. Nearly the entire European press in Bône plus papers in Algiers and Oran fulminated against El Hack’s alleged “anti-French” and “anti-Algerian” tendencies, claiming it was guilty of urging the Algerians to revolt. Freedom of the press notwithstanding, the settlers demanded El Hack be suspended, the colonial administration banned its sale in rural areas, and in 1894 it folded after publishing 26 weekly issues between July 30, 1893 and March 25, 1894 (Montoy 1982: 468–475, 1347–1350; Ageron 1979: 233). The same editorial staff consisting of Khélil Kaid Layoun, Sliman Bengui, and Samar Omar launched L’Eclair the following year, which soon changed its name to La Bataille Algérienne. However, these latter papers only appeared between March 24 and June 30, 1895 before they, too, folded (Montoy 1982: 475–476, 1353–1355; Ageron 1968: 1036; Ageron 1979: 234).18 Khélil Kaid Layoun surfaced again in 1900. As part of the metropolitan French reform effort of the 1890s now winding down, a group of senators on a fact-finding tour passed through Bône. Khélil addressed them on behalf of a group of “young Bône Muslims”. He described the situation of Francophone young Algerian males such as himself, who favored Algerian assimilation to France but could not convert their French education into a job, who were less and less Algerian but prevented from becoming more and more French, who were in short “floundering in civilization”. What Kaid Layoun wanted was the vote extended to young Algerians with a French education and to Algerian businessmen licensed by the French. His deposition was the most far-reaching the senators heard.19 Earlier in 1900 Khélil had attempted to form the Djemâ’a El Kheiria El Arabia, or Muslim Benevolent Society. Organized by Kaid Layoun and Mahmoud Hassam, a young tobacco merchant, the society consisted of older, honorary members, and younger, active members. The honorary members included many of Bône’s Algerian elite: mostly, they were landowners and businessmen, white collar employees and professionals. The active members were neither as

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well-established nor as well-off; they ranged from artisans and businessmen to clerks, journalists and commercial employees. Two occupations in particular were overrepresented, white collar clerks such as Khélil and those who worked with tobacco either cutting it, selling it, or making cigarettes from it, such as Khélil’s co-founder Mahmoud Hassam. These occupations corresponded to the same two groups of Algerian businessmen and French-educated Algerians which Khélil had singled out in his deposition. At an initial meeting of the Muslim Benevolent Society, 84 Algerians attended and Khélil was named provisional president. All that needed to be done was to obtain authorization from Mayor Bertagna.20 Khélil Kaid Layoun’s activities in 1900 are noteworthy for two reasons. First, Ageron argues that Khélil’s deposition can be compared both in form and content to a later and more widely-known Jeune Algérien manifesto published in 1912 (Ageron 1968: 1031). Thus, Khélil formulated early what became later Jeune Algérien principles. Moreover, the “young Bône Muslims” of 1900 soon became Bône’s Jeune Algériens, which demonstrates Bône’s precocity within this Algeria-wide movement, why Bône and Algiers were “the two Jeunes Algériens capitals” (Ageron 1979: 232). Second, and perhaps even more important, Khélil’s statement together with the Muslim Benevolent Society reflect significant changes occumng in Algerian society at the turn of the twentieth century. It has been argued before that after the Algerians resisted the French actively from 1830 until roughly 1870, they resisted the French passively, largely by retreating into the Islamic religion and holding onto the Arabic language (Desparmet 1931, 1932a, 1932b, 1933). In fact, the French confidently predicted during the decades after 1870 that the Algerians, like the “aborigines” of Australia and America, soon would die out. But around the turn of the century a sea change occured in Muslim society and manifested itself in the Jeune Algérien movement. Although the mass of Algerians continued to live in the countryside and were poverty-stricken, a small number of Algerians in the cities were carving out niches within the French colonial economy. Some, like Sadek Denden and Khélil Kaid Layoun, attended French schools, learned French, and worked in the tertiary or service sector of the urban economy as clerks in French law offices or the colonial administration. Others either grew tobacco on their land and sold it to the French government monopoly each year when it bought in Bône, or sold it to merchants who cut, dried, and rolled it into cigars and cigarettes which were sold in Bône and beyond. Clerking in law offices and raising tobacco may not appear at first glance as particularly promising avenues to economic wealth and social prestige, but in fin-de-siècle Algeria they were. And it is

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precisely these same Algerians making their way in French Algeria who were now clamoring for a political role concomitant with their economic role, and who were now joining the Jeune Algérien movement. One example is Hadj Omar Bengui, the primary financial backer of El Hack in the mid-l890s, and whose son Sliman was director of the paper. Bengui was the only Algerian businessman on Bône’s main street, the Cours Bertagna, where he sold tobacco from a kiosk.21 Another example is the Benyacoub’s, one of Bône’s two leading Algerian families, who had been in eclipse since 1830, and who slowly reconsolidated their wealth and family position due in part to tobacco profits. After the First World War co-founders of a tobacco cooperative with other Europeans, the Tabucoop, and today one of the leading families of Annaba, before the First World War the Benyacoub’s were making money from tobacco, investing in Denden’s L’Islam, and participating in Kaid Layoun’s Muslim Benevolent Society.22 Not surpisingly, Mayor Bertagna viewed the Djemâ’a El Kheiria El Arabia differently than Khélil Kaid Layoun. He agreed with his close Algerian collaborator, adjoint indigène, and head of Bône’s other leading Algerian family, Mohammed Tahar Boumaiza, that Khélil Kaid Layoun and his co-organizer Mahmoud Hassam were “as everyone knows two militant politicians”, that the Muslim Benevolent Society had been created with an exclusively political aim, and that the society’s slogan ought to have been “political society and not charitable society”.23 As a consequence, Bertagna banned it. Earlier, Khélil Kaid Layoun’s El Hack had been hounded out of existence by the settler press in the mid-1890s only to return stronger, more independant, and more militant with Sadek Denden’s L’Islam in 1909. Khélil’s 1900 deposition had no immediate consequences, and his Muslim Benevolent Society was aborted by Bertagna before it got off the ground, but a decade later a number of similar but longer-lasting Algerian societies appeared in Bône and elsewhere, and in 1909 Khélil organized with Sadek Denden their mass meeting attended by many more of Bône’s Algerians than the 1900 society had ever dreamed of. Algerian voluntary associations formed in Bône included la Sadikiya, Société ishmique constantinoise, le Croissant, and le Cercle du Progrès; again, Bône was precocious in this regard (Ageron 1968: 1034; 1979: 234). *** What can we conclude from this tale about Denden, Kaid Layoun and their Jeune Algérien activities? First of all, the Jeunes Algèriens were a movement not of the majority of Algerians but of a tiny

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minority. A new Algerian society was germinating around the turn of the twentieth century, it took root among a number of évoluiés (literally, Algerians who had “evolved” linguistically, culturally and politically towards France), it sprouted with El Hack and the Djemâ’a El Kheiria ElArabia, and it blossomed in the Jeune Algérien movement. Second, the Jeunes Algériens were pro-French, not anti-French. It could not be otherwise considering the historical soil in which they arose. Initially, they emerged as one of the intellectual and political manifestations of the social and economic transformations occurring in Algerian society. Thus, the Jeunes Algériens were pressing for a more active role, they were reacting against the constraints posed by the rules of the colonial game in Algeria, rules determined primarily but not entirely by the European settlers. The long-term historical significance of the Bône Jeunes Algériens lies in the fact that along with their confrères elsewhere they constituted one of the three main strands of what became Algerian nationalism.24 To foreshorten a lengthy historical process, we can say that from the beginning of the twentieth century the Jeunes Algériens pushed for a larger Algerian role in an essentially French Algeria. Their biggest hope and first major disappointment was the so-called Jonnart reforms of 1919, which were aimed at enfranchising those Algerians most French, that is, the Jeunes Algériens themselves. But in exchange for French citizenship, the Algerians were required to renounce their Muslim personal status, and in the end only a miniscule number accepted such terms (Ageron 1968: 1211–1227).25 In 1919 municipal elections were held in their two leading centers of Algiers and Bône, and the Jeunes Algériens split over this very issue. In Bône on a slate headed by Ali and Mihoub Benyacoub, Mahmoud Hassam, Kaid Layoun’s co-organizer of the Djemâ’a El Kheiria El Arabia, was the top votegetter.26 Thus, 1919 marked their first major disillusionment: the Jeunes Algériens had tried to become more like the French, but the French had failed to overcome settler opposition and enact meaningful reform. The initiative passed next to the Salafiyya, or Islamic Reform movement, associated in Algeria with Abd al-Hamid Ben Badis. Where the Jeunes Algériens had attempted to embrace French society and culture, the Reformists turned away to rediscover the fundamentals of Islam. As such, they waged a battle on two fronts, first, against the secular Jeunes Algériens, and second, against the tariqa-s, Sufi brotherhoods, and mrabtin, holy men, both of which had strayed from the teachings of Muhammed. Pan-Arab in orientation but advocates of Algerian nationalism, religious at base but implicitly political, the Reformist movement began in the mid1920s but made significant headway only in the 1930s. Nonethe-

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less, it was already clear by 1939 that Ben Badis and his followers could not transform alone a primarily religious movement of the traditional bourgeoisie into a mass-based nationalist political party (Merad 1967; Colonna 1974; Gellner 1981). The impetus passed then to Messali Hadj and his successive political organizations, namely, the Etoile nord africaine (ENA), the Parti populaire algérien (PPA), and the Mouvement pour le triomphe des libertés démographiques (MTLD). To the Islamic nationalism of the Reformists, Messali Hadj opposed his own militant brand of secular nationalism. At the same time as the Reformists arose to challenge the Jeunes Algériens and the Messalistes challenged in turn the Reformists, the earlier groupings were displaced but not discarded. The most widely remarked-upon example is the Reformists, who succeeded in institutionalizing and thereby legitimizing their program not before but only after independence in 1962 (Colonna 1974). But the same process is clear also in the case of the Jeunes Algériens, who continued to play a significant role at least through the 1930s. The Fédéation des Elus indigènes, the chief organization of elected Algerian officials in the interwar period, was Jeune Algérien in outlook. Ferhat Abbas, the single best known Algerian leader between the wars, answered to the name Jeune Algérien. The Blum-Violette reforms proposed in 1936 were aimed again primarily at those Algerian évolués who still called themselves Jeunes Algériens. In opposition to the Blum-Violette proposals, the European mayors of Algeria resigned en masse; the last best chance to enact meaningful reform had failed egregiously (Ageron 1979: 449–466).27 And even later during the Algerian Revolution 1954–1962, the interlocuteurs valables the French sought but could not find were the Jeunes Algériens’ putative successors, that is, intermediaries with whom they could deal. After riots at Sétif in 1945 had occasioned massive European repression, schisms occurred as nationalist groups disagreed on ways to breach the stone wall of pied noir intransigeance. One such split led to the formation of the Organisation Secrète, the secret army of the Parti Communist Algérien (PCA). Compared to the earlier Jeunes Algériens, the social composition of the OS, like the PPA, was decidedly plebian. In Bône, employees, workers, storekeepers, and artisans predominated; one leader was a chauffeur, another a gas station attendant (Alleg et al. 1981: 1: 350; 3: 496). The French dismantled the OS, but several militants incarcerated in Bône escaped, including four of the “neufs historiques”, the nine leaders of the Comité Rèvolutionnaire d’Unité et d’Action (CRUA), which now formed. On 1 November 1954 CRUA launched the Algerian Revolution.

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Only during the Algerian Revolution did the Algerians succeed in driving a wedge between the pieds noirs and metropolitan France as positions hardened. At Constantine Ferhat Abbas’s nephew was killed in 1955 for criticizing Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) excesses. In December of the same year an alarmed Camus arrived from France to float a joint European-Algerian “civil truce” initiative. But at a public meeting which he addressed jointly with Ferhat Abbas – in one of his last appearances as a moderate nationalist – Camus was booed by the pieds noirs, and only later learned that the two Muslim leaders he had selected had both secretly become FLN members. Overtaken by spiraling communal violence, Camus retreated back to France, never to write about Algeria again save once. At the beginning of 1960 Camus died instantly when the car he was riding in from Aix-en-Provence to Paris careened wildly and went out of control on a straight stretch of trafficless road. Finally, a cease fire was agreed to March 1962. In Bône between 20–22 June 1962 the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS) abetted by the colons destroyed what they could. Jérome Bertagna’s statue on the Cours was dismantled and shipped to France where today it sits in the garden of a Bertagna family member somewhere in the Rhône (Amato 1979: 174–176). The Bonois then left en masse 3–5 July. In a strange premonition dating from 1939 Camus had written, “The whole coast is ready for departure; a shiver of adventure ripples through it. Tomorrow, perhaps, we shall leave together” (quoted in Horne 1978: 531). On July 5, 1962 the Annabis took over Annaba. They tore down what remained of Bertagna’s statue. They changed the name of the city from Bône to Annaba. And they changed the Cours Bertagna to the Cours de la Révolution.

Appendix

It was one of those days. At the entrance to the Annaba mairie (city hall), the only foreigner in a mass of Algerians clamoring to be waited on, the guard waved me by. Upstairs I was passed from office to office until I saw M. le Secrétaire-Général himself. Everyone scrutinized my authorization to the archives, everyone balked – this American, he cannot just walk in here – and everyone dared not do as the letter of authorization from the Conseil de la Révolution in Algiers ordered. I was passed back down the hierarchy, alternately stalled and entertained as a key was searched for. A young Algerian “gofer” finally appeared, I was conducted upstairs to the lowceilinged third floor, and the door opened on the richest local archives extant in Algeria.

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No inventory exists that I was ever able to discover, but a cursory survey of archival series organized by the wooden cabinets in which they are stored would include: Cabinet 1: Politique générale. Conseil général. Cabinet 2: Administration municipale. Services municipaux. Maires et Adjoints. Impôts arabes. Cabinet 3: Sociétés de secours mutuels et autres. Consulats. Banques. Cabinet 4: Budgets. Compatabilité général. Cabinet 5: Contentieux. Actions judiciaires. Avocats de la commune. Cabinets 6–7: Instruction publique. Cabinet 8: Port de Bône. Pêche. Cabinet 9: Affaires militaires et indigènes. Constitution de la propriété individuelle. Sociétés secrètes des indigènes. Demandes de secours. Cabinet 11: Culte. Catholique. Protestant. Hebraique. Musulman. Cabinet 12: Conseil Muncipal. Procès-verbaux des séances. Cabinet 18: Milices. Cabinet 19: Taxes municipales. Cabinet 20: Affaires indigènes. Secours aux indigènes. Renseignements et affaires indigènes divers, 1868–1900. Cabinet 22: Police générale, 1836–1949. Cabinet 29: Personnel. Cabinet 38: Coup d’état, 1851. Cabinets 40–41: Conseil Municipal. Déliberations (1849 on). Cabinet 41: Etats Récapitulatifs, 1840–1948. Statistique agricole. Statistique industrielle. Dénombrements. Cabinet 46: Recrutement registres, 1884–1912, 1914–1917. Naturalisation (1849 on). On open shelves were located: • • • •

Maitrices cadastres des propriétés baties. Listes nominatives, 1848, 1861, 1866, 1872, 1876, 1881, 1886, 1891, 1896, 1901, 1906, 1911, 1926, 1931, 1936, 1948. Mouvement de la population, 1853–1854. Actes de naissance (1830s on). Actes de mariages (1833 on). Migration (1874–1912).

The first of three rooms which housed the archives was lined on two walls with wooden cupboards; in the middle stood a metal cabinet. Inside the cabinet hung the former French archivist’s white coat and feather duster, which the young Algerian, with whom I was to spend many hours, and I examined together. Out came a bronze

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statuette of Bertagna, a miniature replica of the one previously located downstairs on the Cours. We placed it ceremoniously on the table and laughed at the incongruity of it all. Notes This essay is based primarily on the archives of the Assemblée Populaire et Communale de Annaba, the former Archives Municipales de Bône. I thank M. R. Ainad Tabet, former director of the Archives Nationales de l’Algérie, for granting me authorization to use these archives, the first to conduct research in them since 1962. I also thank Secrétaire-Général Jatni Brahim for the alacritywith which he facilitated my research in Annaba, JeanClaude Vatin, Edmund Burke III, and Paul Rabinow. The University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Illinois provided extensive research support. 1 Archives de 1’Assemblée Populaire et Communale de Annaba (hereafter APCA), Liste nominative, 1876, p. 285. 2 The name is the same and the leading contemporary local historian of Annaba, H’sen Derdour, told me he was, but I have no conclusive evidence linking the two. See Derdour 1982–1983. 3 That the settlers constitute a blind spot in the historiography, a datum literally too large to be seen, raises a related issue. The scholars of the so-called “Ecole d’Alger,” based at the Université d’Alger, played a disproportionately large role in the French academic tradition of Orientalism, and at the same time were closely tied to the settler milieu of Algeria when not settlers themselves. This suggests that an analysis of their scholarly production from the perspective of their social background and political involvement, that is, from the angle of colonial discourse, would be highly illuminating. See Colonna 1976; Valensi 1984; Burke 1977, 1980. 4 AFCA, Opérations électorales. Conseil Municipal; Archives Nationales Dépôt des Archives d’Outre-Mer (hereafter AOM), F 80 1836, 1837; Archives Nationales de France (hereafter AN), BB 18 2006; and Ageron 1968: 501–506. 5 Ageron spends 65 pages detailing Cambon’s attempts at reform. But the history of Algerian reforms in general and Cambon’s reforms in particular is the history of the failure of those reforms. In nearly every case, reform attempts failed due to unrelenting settler opposition. See Ageron 1968: 478–543. 6 AN, BB 18 2006, 19 June 1896. 7 The terms antijuif/antijudaisme and antisemite/antisemitism are often used interchangeably in the Algerian case. Antijudaisme is technically more accurate, but antisemitism has the advantage of explicitly linking antisemitism in Algeria to antisemitism elsewhere. 8 Ageron 1968: 489, 491, 511–12, 527. Ageron recognizes Cambon failed to achieve anything, but argues he prefigured reforms enacted in 1919. But just as settlers stymied Cambon in the 1890s, so they prevented France from enacting meaningful reforms in 1919, and again in 1936. Rather than a series of missed opportunities, as Ageron argues, the history of colonial Algeria constitutes a classic case of settler colonialism where the settlers enjoyed a virtually unbroken string of political successes. 9 APCA, Listes nominatives, 1848–1926; and Prochaska 1990. On colonial Oran, see Lespès 1938: Graphique V; on colonial Algiers, Lespès 1925: 89, graph 2.

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10

See, for example, Le Réveil Bônois 27 juillet 1895. These newspapers can be found in the Archives de la Wilaya de Constantine (hereafter AWC), and the Bibliothèque Nationale Annexe de Versailles (hereafter BNV). 12 These newspapers can be found in BNV. 13 The figure for Bône’s Algerian population is for 1907. 14 30 December 1909. L’Islam can be found in AWC. 15 On L’Islam, see Montoy 1982: 662–663, 1515–1521. 16 On Denden, see APCA, Liste nominative, 1876: 285; Montoy 1982: 639, 662, 670, 759, 1515. He died penniless in 1938, despite modest financial support from H’Sen Derdour’s father among others (interview with H’Sen Derdour, July 1983). See Ageron 1968: 1040, 1049, 1050– 1052; Ageron 1979: 234; Kaddache 1970: 42; and Derdour 1982–1983: 463–464. 17 El Hack may be found in AWC. 18 L’Eclair and La Bataille Algérienne may be found in AWC. 19 Mémoire présenté par Khélil Caid Laioun, Procès-verbaux de la souscommission d’étude et de la législation civile en Algérie. Annexe no. 1840 au procès-verbal de la 2e séance du 9 juillet 1900. Tome XXXI (Paris: Imprimerie de la Chambre des Députés, 1901), pp. 661–63 at p. 661. 20 APCA, Affaires Indigènes. Folder on Société Djemâ’a El Kheiria El Arabia, 1900. On Hassam, see APCA, Liste électorale, 1912. 21 APCA, Situation Industrielle, 1883; Montoy 1982: 468, 1349. 22 APCA, Liste nominative, 1911: 1180, 1182–1183, 1188: Listes électorales, 1908, 1912; Conseil Municipal. Opérations électorales, 1900; AOM, 6 H 33, 16 H 31. 23 APCA, Affaires indigènes. Société Djemâ’a El Kheiria El Arabia, February 1900. On the Boumaiza’s, see APCA, Liste nominative, 1911: 246; Listes électorales, 1908, 1912; AOM, 6 H 33, 16 H 31; Montoy 1982: 231, 733, 905. 24 On nationalism and colonialism in Islamic societies, see Lapidus 1987, 1988. For a discussion of “nationalism” as a political and cultural category, see Handler 1988 and Segal 1988. 25 See discussion above regarding French reforms. 26 Kaddache 1970: 41–43; APCA, Opérations électorales. Conseil Municipal 1919; and Ageron 1979: 282. 27 See notes above on other French reform efforts. 11

References Abrams, Larry, and D. J. Miller (1976) “Who were the French Colonialists? A Reassessment of the Parti Colonial, 1890–1914.” Historical Journal l9: 685–725. Ageron, Charles-Robert (1968) Les Algériens musulmans et la France (1870–1919). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ———— (1974) Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine (1830–1973). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ———— (1978) France coloniale où parti colonial? Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ———— (1979) Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine (1871–1954). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Alleg, Henri, et al. (1981) La Guerre d’Algérie. 3 vols. Paris: Temps Actuel.

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Amato, Alain (1979) Monuments en exil. Paris: Editions de l’Atlanthrope. Andrew, C. M. (1976) “The French Colonialist Movement during the Third Republic: The Unofficial Mind of Imperialism”. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26: 143–166. Andrew, C. M., and A. S. Kanya-Forstner (1971) “The French ‘Colonial Party’: Its Composition, Aims and Influence, 1885–1914”. Historical Journal 14: 99–128. ———— (1974) “The Groupe Colonial in the French Chamber of Deputies, 1892–1932”. Historical Journal 17: 837–866. ———— (1976) “French Business and the French Colonialists”. Historical Journal 19: 981–1000. ———— (1981) The Climax of French Imperial Expansion, 1914–1924. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Arnaud, Louis (1960) Bône. Son histoire, ses histoires. Constantine, Algeria: Damrémont. Audisio, Gabriel (1931) Introduction and lexicon. In Musette [pseud. Auguste Robinet] Cagayous. Ses meilleures histoires. Paris: Gallimard. Bacri, Roland (1983) Trésors des racines pataouètes. Paris: Belin. Baroli, Marc (1967) La vie quotidienne des français En Algérie, 1830–1914. Paris: Hachette. Binoche, Jacques (1971) “Les élus d’outre-mer au Parlement de 1871 à 1914”. Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 58: 82–115. Brua, Edmund (1972) Fables Bônoises. Paris: Balland. Brunot, Louis (1948) “Sabirs”. Journal des Instituteurs d’Afrique du Nord. April: 209–210. Burke, Edmund (1977) “Fez, the Setting Sun of Islam: A Study of the Politics of Colonial Ethnography”. Maghreb Review 2: 1–7. ———— (1980) “The Sociology of Islam: The French Tradition”. In Kerr, Malcolm, ed. Islamic Studies: A Tradition and Its Problems, pp. 73–88. Malibu, CA: Undena Publications. Colonna, Fanny (1974) “Cultural Resistance and Religious Legitimacy in Colonial Algeria”. Economy and Society 3: 233–254. ———— (1976) “Production scientifique et position dans le champ intellectuel et politique”. In Moniot, Henri, ed. Le mal de voir, pp. 397–415. Paris: Collection 10/18. Cruise O’Brien, Connor (1970) Camus. London: Collins. Denoon, D. (1983) Settler Capitalism: The Dynamics of Dependent Development in the Southern Hemisphere. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Derdour, H’sen (1982–1983) Annaba. 25 sièles de vie quotidienne et de luttes. 2 vols. Algiers: Société Nationale d’Edition et de Diffusion. Desparmet, Joseph (1931) “La réaction linguistique en Algérie”. Bulletin de la Société Géographique d’Alger 36: 1–33. ———— (1932a) “Les réactions nationalitaires en Algerie”. Bulletin de la Société Géographique d’Alger 37: 173–184. ———— (1932b) “La conquête racontée par les indigènes”. Bulletin de la Société Géographique d’Alger 37: 437–546. ———— (1933) “Elégies et satires politiques de 1830 à 1914”. Bulletin de la Société Géographique d’Alger 38: 35–64. Gautier, Emile-Félix (1920) L’Algérie et la métropole. Paris. Gellner, Ernest (1981) Muslim Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Gouvernement Général de 1’Algérie (1908) Tableau général des communes de l’Algérie. Algiers: Imprimerie Algérienne. Handler, Richard (1988) Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Horne, Alistair (1978) A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962. New York: Viking/Penguin. Kaddache, Mahfoud (1970) La vie politique à Alger de 1919 à 1939. Algiers: Société Nationale d’Edition et de Diffusion. Kanya-Forstner, A. S., and P. Grupp (1975) “Le Mouvement colonial français et ses principales personnalités 1890–1914”. Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 62: 640–673. Lafourcade, Louis (n.d.) Harmonies Bônoises. Algiers: Baconnier. Lanly, Albert (1962) Le Français d’Afrique du nord. Etude linguistique. Paris: Bordas. Lapidus, Ira (1987) “Islam and Modemity”. In Eisenstadt, S.N., ed. Patterns of Modernity, vol. 2: Beyond the West. London: Frances Pinter. ———— (1988) A History of Islamic Societies. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lentin, Albert-Paul (1982) “El Cid: Portrait d’Edmond Brua”. In Robles, Emmanuel, ed. Les Pieds Noirs. Paris: Philippe Lebaud. Lespès, René (1925) Alger. Esquisse de géographie urbaine. Algiers: Carbonel. ———— (1938) Oran. Paris: Alcan. Lottman, Herbert (1980) Albert Camus. New York: Braziller. McCarthy, Patrick (1980) Carnus. New York: Random House. McMichael, P. (1984) Settlers and the Agrarian Question: Foundations of Capitalism in Colonial Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merad, Ali (1967) Le reformisme musulman en Algérie de 1925 à 1940. Essai d’histoire religieuse et sociale. Paris-La Haye: Mouton. Montoy, Louis (1982) “La presse dans le département de Constantine (1870–1918)”. 4 vols., unpublished thèse de doctorat. Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence. Mosley, P. (1983) The Settler Economies: Studies in the Economic Histoy of Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1900–1963. Cambridge: Cambridgé University Press. Nora, Pierre (1961) Les français d’Algérie. Paris: Julliard. Persell, Stuart Michael (1983) The French Colonial Lobby, 1889–1938. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. Prochaska, David (1990) Making Algeria French Colonialism in Bône, 1870– 1920. New York: Cambridge University Press. Segal, Daniel (1988) “Nationalism, Comparatively Speaking”. Journal of Historical Sociology 1: 301–321. Valensi, Lucette (1984) “Le Maghreb vu du Centre: sa place dans l’école sociologique française”. In Vatin, Jean-Claude, et al. Connaissances du Maghreb, pp. 227–244. Paris: Editions du CNRS. Editorial Note. Since this article went to press Edward Said’s Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture, London, 10 October 1989, has appeared in print as “Narrative, Geography and Interpretation” (New Left Review, 180, April 1990, pp. 81–97) which situates “Albert Camus and his several narratives” in terms which are relevant to David Prochaska’s argument.

Living In and With Deep Time Public Lecture XII David Nichol Smith Conference July 19, 2004 GREG DENING I honour the First People, the Ngunawal, on whose land I stand to give this lecture. I honour the First Peoples of the deserts, mountains, shores, forests and islands whose lives and memories and achievements are held in high respect in this institution of the National Library of Australia. I honour the men and women of science and scholarship whose work it is to conserve and understand the heritage of our Deep Time through 40,000 years. I honour all the citizens of this bound-together nation who give of their time energy and money in their committees, their volunteer groups, their fund raising associations to maintain this double heritage of the millennia. ***** We all live in deep time. All of us alive are equally distant from our human beginnings through the generations, through the millennia, through the eons of evolution. But deep time impinges on us differently. The deep time reaching back two thousand years to Jesus Christ marks me, a Christian, differently from the deep time reaching back to Muhammad marks a Muslim, to Buddha a Buddhist. In a period of “discovery”, encounter, settlement, colony and post-colony, deep time impinges differently on those who came first and those who came later to the land. But we – we who came first, and we who came later – we are bound-together in the 216 years of the encounter by the 40,000 years our First People bring to that encounter and the thousands of years still to come. I would like to reflect on what it means to live in and with the deep time of our past, present and future and how we might tell its story. More than forty years ago I was privileged to participate in what I believe to be the founding moment of modern Australian archaeology. I was student labour on John Mulvaney’s archaeological dig at Fromm’s Landing on the Murray River, near Mannum in South Australia. I remember standing on the bottom of the ten-foot pit, Twenty Years of the Journal of Historical Sociology: Challenging the Field Volume 2 Edited by Yoke-Sum Wong and Derek Sayer © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-17934-8

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the brown/black/red stratified soil all around like a 4000-year time chart. Mulvaney could hold in the cup of his hand the exquisite micro-flake artefacts that had come from this pit. But the real knowledge that came from it was in the pollen, the seeds, the soils, the charcoal, the bones and shells which would picture the landscape and life-styles of those who lived through four thousand years. I had seen and still see, the passion and commitment that had driven Mulvaney to that point and ever after. He is the scholar of our Deep Time. He is and always has been the passionate proponent of inclusive history, a bound-together story. In Oceania – the Australasian-Pacific region Mulvaney was introducing us students to – the intellectual puzzle was how to describe a past when all of time was mostly on the surface of things – in the typology of artefacts, in the glottochronology of language, in the genetics of blood groups, in the ethnobotany of plants. Time is in a section of a fish’s ear-bone, time is the rings of growth on a tree; time is pollen count; time is the character of sands in a dune. Time on the surface of things is made up of a multiplicity of assumptions. Inquiry is inevitably a lateral pursuit as assumptions that give depth and time to any shape and design are tested and debated. Knowledge of this sort is hard won, full of claims and counter claims, zigzagging through a dozen disciplines. It is never static. There are no short cuts. It is a brilliant experience to be out there on the frontiers of knowledge. But it is a dangerous place to be. Performance of this sort of knowledge is always a gamble. Fifty years ago I made a discovery that changed my life. I discovered that I wanted to write the history of the “other side of the beach”, of indigenous island peoples with whom I had no cultural bond, of Natives. And on “this side of the beach”, my side as an outsider, as Stranger, I wanted to write history from below. Not of kings and queens. Not of heroes. Not of writers of constitutions, saviours of nations. I wanted to write the history of “Little people”. Those on whom the forces of the world press most hardly. I wanted to celebrate their humanity, their freedoms, their creativity, the ways they crossed the boundaries around their lives, the ways they crossed their beaches. These people on both sides of the beach were to be my Natives and Strangers. I had been taught well at the University of Melbourne to be an historian. I learned from John Mulvaney, Max Crawford, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Geoff Serle. They had taught me that a feeling for the past could only be matched by the hours, the days, the weeks, the months, the years that we sit at the desks in the archives. It is an assurance that one’s extravagance with time there is rewarded with a sensitivity that comes in no other way. It is an overlaying of

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images one on the other. It is a realisation that knowledge of the past is cumulative and kaleidoscopic, extravagantly wasteful of energy. History was magical for me. How could it be otherwise with heroes like R. H. Tawney, Marc Bloch, R. G. Collingwood, Max Weber, and Thucydides? But to do the sort of multi-visioned history between Natives and Strangers that I wanted to do. I thought I needed a reading skill. It was anthropology, I thought. Mainly because anthropology seemed to have ways of entering into both the otherness of Natives and the silences of those who leave few records of their lives. Where agency and event were sparse in the records, anthropology had ways of seeing system and structure. Fifty years ago, forty years ago, thirty years ago – when I was younger – I thought that the past belonged to those who had the knowledge and skills to discover it. I now know that not to be true, or to be only partly true. The past belongs to those whose lives it shapes. The past belongs to those on whom it impinges. That past impinges hardly on our First People. Their health, their life span, their living, their education tells us that. In 1788 this continent became the largest prison in the world for them. All their deaths have been prison deaths for more than 200 years. That past presses hard on us too. Any history that is written of it can never be pure entertainment. The history that we write must also disturb the moral lethargy of the living to change in their present the consequences of the past. Encounters, by the prejudice of our established histories of them are short, sudden and violent. In fact, encounters are slow, drawnout. They belong to the longue durée of living. They never end. Encountering the otherness of our First People, finding our own cultural identity in the mirror of their otherness, seeing their differences to be metaphoric of something familiar in ourselves – all these transforming processes are ever-present in culture. They are rarely episodic. They rarely turn around one event. This creative encountering is a repetitious, reflective thing. It happens not once, but a myriad of times. It is constantly renewed. We always live in and with the deep time of our past. In March of this year 2004, we all saw deeper into time and space than we had ever seen before. The scientists of the Hubble Space Telescope showed us the image of Hubble’s Ultra Deep Field. The light that came from these galaxies took 13 billion light years to reach us. That translates into a kilometric distance that I cannot even read – 122,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. The light of Mars takes 10 minutes to reach us – 200,000,000 km. This glimpse to the edge of the universe, the scientists tell us is like looking at the sky through an 8 ft long straw. The whole of our sky is 12.7 million

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times the size of this image. It would take a million years of observations to observe it all. These are pictures made from 800 exposures from 400 orbits of Hubble, an exposure time of 11.3 days. It takes a leap of faith to accept these figures. If we were expert enough we would know every debateable decision taken to create this computer image of the universe and persuade us that this is what we would have seen if our eyes could see so far. It is as if, as one scientist has put it, we stood on the steps of the US Capitol in Washington and could see the date on a 25-cent coin on the Washington monument. But in these 20th and 21st centuries, we have learned to live comfortably with this “as if” world of science. Our everyday living is filled with the 10s to the power of 12 and 9 and 6 of our teras and gigas and megas, and the 10s to the power of minus 3, minus 6, minus 9, minus 12 of our millis, micros, picos and nanos. We live in suspended understanding and vague realisation of the realities of the unexperiencable time and space of our 21st century. But there are others living with us who experience the Deep Time in their lives more immediately. This map of our land is our Hubble Ultra Field view of the deep time of our past. It is a map of our island-continent overlaid with a transparency of Aboriginality. The Aboriginality here is our First People’s languages. It is a sort of linguistic surface archaeology. There is no great sureness for the accuracy of the boundaries or in their permanence. It is a frozen moment in the 40,000 years and more in which this land has been suffused with language. 40,000 years ago the First People on this continent reached its southernmost tip of what we now call Tasmania – Nuennone Country. (I apologise to the Nuennone and the Tasmanians for not having their island on my map. Let me make amends with this painting of Bea Maddocks of their island imprinted doubly with language.) 40,000 years ago, maybe 60,000, maybe 100,000, in the creation myths of our First People, ancestral spirits breathed life into the Land. The First People then celebrated that life in name, story, song, dance, sand sculpture, ochre paint. Every rock, river, mountain, hill, camp, track and ritual spot from the northernmost to the southernmost point, from the easternmost to the westernmost point of the continent has had a name, many names. Language has filled the Land for millennia on millennia. Language brushes the land with metaphor. Language gives the most deserted place a history. The Land has been suffused – in Howard Morphy’s phrase – with a Fourth Dimension. It has been seen for millennia beyond the surface of things to its inner world. You and I experience this Deep Time in this way in a distant way in the science of our archaeology and linguistics. It is in a way for

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us the “as if” world of science of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field of space. But we live beside a First People who experience the Deep Time more immediately in their daily lives. We are bound together with a people who catch their identity in the aboriginality of that Deep Time. That Aboriginality is not a static thing. It is recognition of a continued identity in the discontinuities of living, an acceptance that the people can see themselves as metaphorically the same in different times and spaces. It is a realisation that the external forms of culture can change but identity remains the same. Aboriginality is a processual identity. Powerful forces in society and law want to deny that. They want Aboriginality to be frozen in time and place somewhere – in boomerangs, didjeridus and piccaninnies. Powerful forces, especially in law, want a layered, static notion of identity and culture. It is easier to dispossess people in that way. We who have the obligation to write the history of this boundtogether Land must be committed to the humanistic ideal that understanding requires some entry into other people’s metaphors about themselves. A history that begins and ends in polarity and exclusiveness is in Paul Carter’s insightful phrase “The Lie of the Land”. The Aboriginality our First People identify themselves with is always local in the first place. They are more Wanjuk (in Perth) or Tharawal (in Sydney) or Kaurna (in Adelaide) or Yuggera (in Brisbane) or Wurundjeri (in Melbourne) or Ngunawal (in Canberra) than “aboriginal”. Identity in their experience of their own Aboriginality is always local. The biggest wound of the “stolen generations” is always seen to have been the loss of local identity. But in the Diaspora of Redfern or Fitzroy or wherever, they weave a network of relationships that binds them all together through the whole continent in one aboriginality. Despite their loss of their local languages, they make words in translation – family, friendship, community, country – that reach into their Deep Time the whole Land across. We can only write their history when we are willing to see through the familiarity these words have for us to their otherness in them that our First People see. I suppose what I am saying is that we need a new sort of encounter history that moves beyond the polarities of the so-called “history wars”. I am in a privileged time of life. I am an adjunct professor. I don’t know what adjuncting is but I do it very conscientiously. It is a sort of academic grand parenting. The young who are writing a new sort of encounter history come to me for short terms. We enjoy one another, learn from one another, and go home. My real privilege is that I know that in ten years time this godawful debate we are having about the encounter between our First

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People and those who dispossessed them will be gone to the hell it deserves. The young are writing inclusive, multi-visioned histories. Mark McKenna has called this sort of history a “conversation of hope”. It is our responsibility to enter into our First People’s experience of Deep Time, not their responsibility to persuade us to its reality. The convenors of the XII David Nichol Smith Conference have honoured me by inviting four young indigenous scholars to perform their inclusive histories in the conference to follow. It will be all our privilege to see where the younger generations are taking us, to see how they pull on the lines of consciousness of the Deep Time that has shaped their lives. All my professional academic life I have lived in and with the Deep Time of a First People not so much on the Australian continent as in the islands of the Pacific. I would like to take you there now. I would like to tell you the story of what I think to be the most remarkable voyage of discovery and settlement in all human history. It is a voyage of 7,000 km across the Central Pacific 2,000 years ago, from Hava’iki – Samoa, Tonga and Fiji – to Fenua’enata, the Marquesas. It has taken me nearly fifty years to have the confidence to tell you the story the way I do. I tell it as part of a conversation of hope, in a tone of wonderment and admiration. The story needs to be told in this way. It belongs rightly to a people’s identity and pride. The “Blue Planet” we call it now that we can see our earth from space. The Great Ocean – Moana, the Pacific – covers a quarter of the globe’s surface and gives the planet its blueness. Two thousand years ago the greater part of the ocean was uninhabited. Its islands were without the vegetation that would make them comfortably habitable. For 40,000 years, 1,600 generations, peoples had penetrated the western edge of this ocean down a corridor of islands. “A Voyaging Corridor”, Geoffrey Irwin has called it. (And at this moment let me say I tell my story with the knowledge and inspiration these scholars have given me.) For 40,000 years peoples looked eastward into the sea. Later generations would look back and call this Ancient Homeland, Puloto. Then about 6,000 years ago a people reached out into that sea and made another Homeland. They would call it Hava’iki. I take the liberty of inventing a name for this people. I call them the “Sea People”. Such a name is not really mine to invent either by right of scholarly knowledge or by right of a historical past that is mine. Scholars with far more knowledge than I have other names for my Sea People – “Austronesians”, “Archaeo-Polynesians”. The

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islanders whose ancestors the Sea People are as yet have no name for them, though I ride a wave of their energy as they seek a name in the past that will give them identity in the present. They seek a name for the ocean habitat that is theirs. “Pacific”, “South Seas”, “Polynesia”, even “Oceania” are not theirs. “Sea of Islands” they are suggesting is a name that taps a mythic consciousness of themselves. Both the “Sea” and its “Islands” raise poetry, song, dance, story, history and politics in them. My story, with all the clumsiness with which I enter somebody else’s metaphor, is how a Sea People made a “Sea of Islands” out of a sea of islands. A Most Remarkable Voyage The Pleiades have risen. The Mataiki – “Little Eyes” – are into the second of their four-month stay in the sky. The season of plenty is in harvest. The west winds are reaching further into the east against the prevailing north- and south easterlies. The voyaging time has begun. They are well ready. One hundred and fifty generations ready. Three millennia ready. For three thousand years this Sea People make a Homeland of the sea enclosed by Samoa, Tonga and Fiji. The Sea People sail the circuit of the sea with confidence. They trade. They raid. They adventure. They are blue water sailors. Their bodies have responded to the sea’s demand on them. They are the largest humans on earth. They are survivors in wet and cold. They are at home on the sea, day and night and in all seasons. They have learned that with the horizon all around them and a vessel in motion, the old land order no longer prevails. A Sea People will need to have salt water coursing through their bodies like blood. Above all, the millennia have given this Sea People an artefact of cultural genius, their va’a, their canoe. (“Canoe” is a word that comes to us from Christopher Columbus and the Carribbean. Va’a is our Sea of Islands word.) Their va’a is a thing imprinted with millennia of experience as generations find the woods, the fibres, the resins that pull and strain, resist work fatigue and rotting, seal. Their va’a is a thing of very precise design – of curves that give strength, of asymmetric shapes that play wind and water against one another, of structured balances that avoid congestion of strain, of aerodynamics that free it to fly along the wind. It is the way of such artefacts of cultural genius that the real genius lies in simplicity. For the va’a three things made it unique in the inventiveness of humankind in mastering the sea environment. A lug. A triangular sail. An outrigger. The lug, a projection on the inside of the hull, perforated so that cordage could be pulled through, makes it possible to compress all parts of the va’a

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together. The triangular sail, without masts or stay, pivoting on its head, held high by a prop, creates a self-steering vessel without need of rudder or pulleys. These days we see the windsurfers exploit its simplicity and speed. The outrigger on the windward side, fitted to the hull by means of the lug, gives stability and manoeuvrability. The double va’a, va’a tauna, removed the need of the outrigger and by means of a platform over the two hulls, perhaps four metres wide and thirteen metres long, allows the vessel to carry fifty to eighty people, a shelter, a sand fire-pit and cargo of up to thirty thousand kilograms. With Mataiki’s rising come also Na Kao (Orion’s brightest star) and Muri (The Follower of Pleiades). All these stars beckon to the northeast. In the west on the opposite horizon Metau-o Maui (Scorpius) and Maitiki (Sagittarius) are setting. So there is an arc of light over the corridor of warm waters to the northeast. The sea experts among them know every step and stage of that arc, especially the stars that stand in zenith over their Homeland. The zenith stars would be like beacons beckoning them back. Through the millennia they had sailed eastward on exploring voyages for days, perhaps weeks, at a time, confident that the wind would bring them home. The southerly tack takes them to cooler waters, the northerly to warmer waters. The risks are less in the warm waters. When they make the decision to seek new lands to settle, they know that they will have to go farther than they had ever gone. That there is land out there to the east they are sure. Its signs are in the flotsam that comes to their shores. They are always confident that that they will make a landfall on that land to the east. The land-nesting birds and the myriad other birds will guide them, as will the phosphorescence beneath the surface in the lee of islands, lagoon reflections in the clouds – shadows of islands in the ocean swells. There is land to the east and they are confident that one day they will reach it. They know the annual monsoonal cycles that drive the west winds. There are other cycles, also, every four or seven years. The temperature of the sea drops. Fish change their habits. Birds change their migratory lines. In these cycles the west winds win out more easily over the east winds. Their tuhuna pu’e, sea experts, know that these are the seasons of discovery. We call them El Niño. Let us say that there are four families and two male servants on the va’a tauna – ten adults and three or four children. One of the males is a tuhuna pu’e, a sea expert. One is a toa, warrior. One or more is a fisherman. They know that they will only survive in their new land on fish till their crops take hold. On a trip so dangerous, all the males have the skills and capacity to work the va’a in company – steering, paddling, sailing, repairing, and bailing. The

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women bring their craft skills with them – bark-cloth making, weaving, food gathering and producing. They must cater for a voyage of three or four weeks. They must have food and water for these weeks, some extra materials – lashing, matting, stays for replacement, and the tools to manage breakages. They must have bailers and paddles. They must have their domestic utensils of wood, stone and shell for the trip itself and then for their settlement. They will want to bring what is precious for them – their ornaments, their sacred things, their tiki, maybe even their house-posts. They will need all the roots, seeds, cuttings for their new island home – tiare slips, gourd seeds, bamboo shoots, aue roots, aute twigs, temanu nuts and many other green shoots and tubers. We have a relic of this first voyage. It is perhaps the most remarkable archaeological find of the whole Pacific. It is a shard of reddish earthenware with characteristic geometric or dentate (toothed) design stamped into the wet clay before firing. Lapita, the pottery is called. Lapita pottery was an item of eager deep-sea trade in the Homeland, Hava’iki. It was a luxury trade in its early years, then a more ordinary, everyday trade. We know it was a deep-sea trade because minerals specific to particular islands – such as obsidian on the Lo islands of the Fijis – are to be found in pottery in Samoa and Tonga, as were other geological items – chert and metavolcanic stone. There is Fijian obsidian to be found in the shard of Lapita pottery found to where it was brought by this first va’a tauna to Fenua’enata. That shard is surely an icon of Pacific sea faring. It is a symbol of the Sea People’s mastery of their environment. Mei, the month of the va’a’s departure on the west winds, is the month of abundance, the fruiting and harvesting season of the breadfruit tree. The sea people had learned a lesson they would take with them to the far east of their ocean. They could bank, in a season of plenty, on the abundance of their breadfruit against seasons of paucity. They could preserve their breadfruit as ma, a fermented paste. It would last for decades in pits in the ground, for months in cakes. They collect those cakes with their supplies for their voyage. They could dry and salt fish. They could keep octopus alive. They could catch flying fish attracted to their candlenut torches at night. They could start a fire in a sandbox. They could hold their water in bamboo containers and catch the rain with their matting. There would be a shelter that they would erect on their platform. There was room in the hulls of their two va’a to stash their cargo. My story takes this settlement voyage on a northern loop to Fenua’enata, around the great island screen of the Tuamotus, and the central Tahitian islands that they screen. The northerly voyage

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is 7,000 kilometres. A southerly loop would be just as dramatic and just as long. As they set out, the crew must provide for the possibility that they will be thirty, maybe forty, nights at sea. Experience would have told them that the west winds aren’t constant. Wind direction will fluctuate in a days sailing. Inevitably for most of the time they will be sailing into or across the wind. They will be wet nearly all the time. They would have known that survival would mean maintaining their body heat, especially the women. Their body size will be their living capital. They will need daily to consume 1/50th of their weight to maintain their body heat. If they set their course on the rising of Na Kao (Betelgeuse in Orion), ‘Ana-Muri (Aldebran) and Mataiki (Pleaides), they move to the northeast. These will be the star settings for travel from Samoa to Pukapuka for the next two millennia. As they tack across the northeasterly trade wind that constantly returns, they inevitably move east-northeast. They are on a course that curves them to Fenua’enata. They get some small lift to the east on the equatorial counter-current. Their sea expert is on watch at dawn to see in the water shadows the overriding swell of the southern massive counter-clockwise circle of winds and currents that shapes the world’s weather. Then they catch the breaks in the swell made by a chain of islands they will come to call Fenua’enata. They land on the lee side of an island they will come to call Ua Huka. No doubt the myriad of sea birds on the islet near their landing finally attracts them there. It is a dry landscape that they see, but there is a stream and a beach to land on behind the rocky headlands. There is no reef. That will be their first surprise. They must become fishermen in ways they had never been before. The narrow valley behind the beach leads back to the heights of the island. In time they will fill the valley with their houses. But not now. Now they must stay near the beaches and the sea. Shellfish and sea greens are there in abundance. They can wade the waters of the bay and cast their nets. They have lines and hooks for fishing off the rocks. In these first days – months? years? – they are a gathering people over again. They will have disassembled their va’a tauna. It is their lifeline, in their minds a means of escape, if their island proves more dangerous than it seems on their arrival. The island must have seemed barren. The basic foliage and undergrowth would have been familiar. Sea, wind and birds had brought most of it from further west than they had come. Already through the millennia these plant and insect voyagers had begun to fill all the niches in the environment in new ways and to make new island species. The settlers must have looked closely at it to

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make their old life out of new things. Women looked for their oils and seeds and resins and barks that would heal, comfort, ornament and clothe themselves and their children. The tuhuna, the experts, among them would have scavenged the vegetation for the materials of their crafts. No doubt, in the way of every migrant that ever was, their images of Hava’iki, their Homeland, grew greener and richer. They build shelters, of course, round houses in imitation of what they had known at home. Their more squarish houses on stone floors, then stone platforms, would come later. They set the treasures they had brought with them in stores on the floors, walls and joists of their houses. Maybe the precious, prestigious Lapita pottery that had come so far was a shard already. It would stay where they put it for two thousand years, a sort of foundation stone for their new life. There must have been some anxiety to see if the seedlings and cuttings they had brought with them would strike. Their taro they plant in the wetlands by the stream, the yams on the drier slopes. It would be many years before they turn to their pigs, dogs and fowl for subsistence. Fenua, The Land, was not properly speaking a name. Enata, The People, had no collective name for their ten islands. Fenua meant rather the “earth”, something “native”. The word also meant “placenta”, the nourishing envelope out of which one was born. The whole universe, Enata believed, was born out of the Earth seeded by the Sky. The va’a tauna of this first remarkable voyage transports the founders of a new settlement. They hold in their heads and bodies the Deep Time of the millennia in Hava’iki and Pulotu. They are too a sort of cultural embryonic stem cell of the two millennia still to come of the Sea People in their Sea of Islands. Their very va’a tauna is a founder in itself. Very few of the woods that made it could survive a sea crossing by themselves to the far eastern edges of Moana. So it carries the nuts, the seeds, and the cuttings from which would eventually come all the voyaging canoes of the Sea of Islands. These Sea People are not in their Land more than two or three hundred years when they are restless for discovery. They follow the Golden Plover into the Northern Hemisphere and on to Hawai’i. We don’t know what takes them on to the loneliest island in the Great Ocean – Rapanui. They are there a thousand years before the Dutch give it the name of Easter Island. The spill of the wind takes their va’a to Tahiti. The annual procession of millions of yolla – the shearwater, the mutton-birds – takes them even further to Aotearoa (New Zealand).

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My lecture Living in and with Deep Time has been in two parts – living in and with the Deep Time of our Australian aboriginality and living in and with the Deep Time of the Sea People of the Sea of Islands. The two parts are joined in my mind as a conversation of hope as to how we might write the history of Deep time in our lives. The most momentous discovery in my personal intellectual life has been that discovery that the past belongs not so much to us who spend our lives trying to uncover it as to those on whom it impinges. That led in my mind to an exploration of what is called the poetics of history. The poetics of history are the study of the different ways histories are made. And of course we make histories in different ways – in a PhD, to the taxman, over the grave. But people dance their histories too, paint them, sing them, make myths of them, tattoo them, and carve them. Without losing all the great advantages of the strategies of knowledge-advancement that modernity has given us – perspective, exhaustive research, critical dialogue, disengagement as far as is humanly possible whatever filters that knowledge with prejudice and error – without losing all the advantages of modernity, we need to explore all these other ways of knowing and pull on all the lines by which the First People are joined to their Deep Time. I found one line of the Sea People’s consciousness to their Deep Time a long time ago. It was in 1958. I was reading Harold Gatty’s survival pamphlet for crashed airmen in World War II. It was full of the lore Gatty had learned from islanders about all the signposts they have at sea for their voyaging. It taught me to be trusting and admiring and patient in the search for understanding. “Way-finding” is the word that modern islanders use to describe their craft and the craft of their ancestors in piloting their voyaging canoes around the Great Ocean, the Pacific. They prefer to call themselves way-finders rather than navigators. Navigation is a more universal science of instruments and the application of systems of time and space as broad as the cosmos itself. Wayfinding is an interpretive craft closer to the signs the systems of the cosmos imprint on the environment. No navigator, certainly none of the pre-eminence of a James Cook let us say, would distance himself from the myriad of signs in sea and sky, in wind and water, that tell him where he is. But a navigator has the security that the system he applies in his voyaging has a life outside him – in a book, an instrument, and a map. For a way-finder no knowledge, no image is stilled either in time or in space. The temperature of the water, the movement of the waves, the seasons of the stars, the patterns of the winds, the habits of the birds are all

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in his head. And it is a knowledge that comes to him not through his own experience alone. It comes to him down through the ages of his line of masters and apprentices. A way-finder finds his way with style, as a surfboarder rides his wave with style. No voyage is ever the same. His way is always different, but always ruled by his confidence that he will find it. I prefer, I must confess, to be a way-finder than a navigator in all my voyaging through learning and knowledge. Metaphors are the trade winds of my mind. Models are the doldrums. For thirty years no the Sea People have pulled on their Deep Time consciousness and have been voyaging the Sea of Islands in reenactment of the voyages of the People of Old. They have sailed from Hawaii’s to Tahiti and back, from Tahiti to Samoa, Tonga, Aotearoa. Their most recent triumphs have been their voyages from Fenua’enata to Hawai’i. There are now six voyaging canoes in the Sea of Islands. These thirty years of this odyssey have had their pain and conflict, their tragedies and failures, their political machinations, their greed and their absurdities. But they also have been courageous overall triumphs, tapping a wellspring of cultural pride in a sense of a continuing voyaging tradition. These voyages have been the theatre of the Sea of Islands these Sea People have made. ***** My first experience of this National Library and of the Australian National University was 40 years ago in 1964 when I used to ride my bicycle from the set of Nissan huts that was the University to the set of Nissan huts that was the Library on the edge, not of a lake, but of a dry, empty wasteland. Libraries and universities have been my life. I meet all my Natives, I meet all my Strangers, I do all my sailing in the library. I find all my inspiration in the university among my colleagues and among the young. There is a Deep Time of learning, knowledge and wisdom that reaches into all our lives through libraries and universities. It humbles me beyond all measure that both this National Library and the University through its Humanities Research Centre should honour me. But I know that this honouring is a sign, not so much of my worth as of their commitment to what in this short moment I represent – compassionate understanding of our past, an embracing of our boundtogether present, and a hope that a never-ending engagement in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding will lead us to truths we can live by.

Index Alabama 25–55 Algeria, archive material 315–17; as settler colony 299; decolonization of 297–320; El Hack 309–10, 312, 313; European settlers 305; French reform policy 301–4; Jeune Algérien movement 309–14; language 306–7; mass meetings 308–9; Muslim Benevolent Society 309–12; Reformist movement 313–14; revolution 314–15; settler culture 306–8 Americas, Columbus Quincentenary 9, 16, 17, 23; violence and resistance 9–24 anthropology, and differentiation 285–7; as scientific field 274; refunctioning of 23 anthropomorphic discourses 202–32 anti–semitism 304 Australia, and aboriginality 324–5; and archaeology 321–2; First People 321–33; National Library 321, 333 Banda, Hastings 58 Barthes, Roland 68 Benjamin, Walter 20, 25, 27–33; Arcades Project 28, 29, 31, 42; Berlin Chronicle 28–9, 30–32, 49 Berbice see Colony of Berbice big band music 185 Bingham, Hiram 11 British Guiana, ethnicity 125–6; 137; views of Berbice slave rebellion 106–38 Bourdieu, P. 274, 287, 292 Camus, Albert 297, 315, 320 Canadas, the 1861 census 253–72; Board of Registration and Statistics 256, 257, 261, 263, 264, 265, 266, 271

Canadian beaver, and human society 207–8; beaver hats 208–13; development of symbol 202–3; fur trade 213–17; gender 206, 233–5; Hudson’s Bay Company 213–15; in advertising 215–17; on stamps 217; political caricatures 217–21; representational history 202–32; sexual imagery 221–7; social organization 204–8, 234 cardiopulmonary resuscitation 139–84; and sudden death 155–75; and the media 164–74; as last rites 177; bellows ventilation 144; chest compression 151–3; defibrillation 153–4; development of CPR139–40; external cardiac compression 149–53; manual ventilatory techniques 144–5; mouth–to–mouth ventilation 140–43, 145–9; Carlyle, Thomas 212 cartoons, Canadian beaver in 217–21 census, administration 257–61; categories 256–7; commissioners 258–61, 264–6; compilation process 266–7; constructivist argument 255–6; enumerators 259, 260, 261–4, 269, 269, 270; in the Canadas 253–72; interpretation 254–5; making 1861 census 256–61; review of compilers 267; technical problems 253–4; unreliability 268–9 census commissioners, appointment of 258; corrections by 264–6; instructions 260–61; selecting enumerators 258–9 census enumerators 259, 260, 267; damaged papers 261–3;

Twenty Years of the Journal of Historical Sociology: Challenging the Field Volume 2 Edited by Yoke-Sum Wong and Derek Sayer © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-17934-8

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instructions 261; preference for male responses 263; prejudices 263–4; selection 258–9 Chewa language 59 Chile, constitutional history 22 Cohn, Bernard S. 237, 239 Colony of Berbice, and Dutchman ghosts 115–25; interpretations of rebellion 130–36; pre–rebellion era 107–11; rebellion 111–15; spirits and stereotypes 125–30; Thanksgiving rituals 125–7; The Berbice Association 109–10, 114–15; views of slave rebellion 106–38 contextualization 16, 24 corruption 238–52; and electoral politics 239–42, 248–50; and public works 239, 240, 244–6 cotton 47–8 creolization 74–5

historical research, oral 56–83 Hudson’s Bay Company 213–15 Hutton, William 256, 257

deep time, and indigenous people 321–33; Hubble space telescope 323–4 Dreyfus affair 304–5 Duchamp, Marcel 35 Dutchman ghosts, absence from Thanksgiving rituals 127–30; characteristics 121–2; exorcism 119–20; origin 115–17; spiritual power 117–19; use of power 122–5 external cardiac compression, folk practice 149–50; vitalism theory 150–51

Machu Picchu 10–16, 17, 18, 19, 20 mainstream music 187 Malawi, Chilembwe Rising 66; drumming 72–3; embodied histories 68–73; gender bias 61; historiography 56–83; immigration 63; language 59; Mwale clan 65–8; oral tradition 57–65; slavery 73–8; “voices” 68–71; Zomba History Project 58–68 Maravi Empire 58–9, 62 Marx, Karl 41, 43–5, 47 Mauritius, Creole culture 76–9; multiculturalism 74–5 media, and cardiopulmonary resuscitation 164–74 Mexico, border area with United States 273–96; corruption in 237–52 migrant workers 278–80, 293 Mixtecs 273, 280, 282, 283–5, 289 modernism, and agrarian socialism 97–101; rural context 84–105; spaces 85

fashion, beaver hats 208–13 Foucault, Michel 19, 47, 85, 296, 287, 288 Free Trade Agreement 217 Freud, Sigmund 39–40 Frye, Northrop 217 gender, women and oral history 61 Guevara, Che 14–15 Hegel, G.W.F. 23 Hertz, Robert 19

indigenous people, in Australia 321–33 Jackson, Stonewall 37 jazz 185–201; British jazz 194–5 Kafka, Franz 32, 42–3, 49, 51, 53–4 Lalinde, Fabiola 20 Latin America, state terror in 19, 20–22; the disappeared 19–22 Le Courbusier 85, 90 Lee, Robert E. 37 London International Statistical Congress 257 long-playing records 185–201

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mouth-to-mouth ventilation, breath and life 148–9; contagion 147–8; development of 140–42; indelicacy 146–7; origins 142–3; restoration 159–64; suppression technique 145–9 Mulvaney, John 321–2

sudden death, and CPR techniques 139–54, 159–64; anger of the dead 157; guilt of the living 156–7; humanity of rescuer 162–3; identifying the dead 156; protocol and ritual 157–9; violence 155;

Namiquipa (Chihuahua), electoral politics 239–42; history 239–40; Municipal President 243–4, 246–7; peasant movements 247–8; sewer system 244–6 nation–-tates, colonial situation 274–6; transnational period 276–81 national borders 273–96 Neruda, Pablo 15; Alturas de Macchu Picchu 11, 14; Memoirs 14 Ngunawal people 321–33 Nugent, Daniel 237

Timmermans, Stefan 157–8 transnationalism, characteristics 278–81; meaning 276–7; Mexican border scenarios 277–8, 282–3; transnational peoples 281–5

O’Gorman, Edmundo 11 Pacific Islands, and “Sea People” 326–31 Perec, George 45 Poe, Edgar Allan 43–5 Proust, Marcel 25, 28, 29, 33, 42, 48–9, 51, 196 Schoffeleers, Matthew 57, 58, 65 Shelton, A.C. 35–54 slavery, Berbice rebellion 106–38; in Malawi 73–8; state, as modernizer 84–5; boundaries of state and self 273–96

United States, as colonial nation-state 274–6; border area with Mexico 273–96; disciplinary boundaries 285–91; immigration 279–80, 293; transnational peoples 281–5; transnational period 276–81 Vansina, Jan 60 Weber, Max 47 West India Company 107–8, 109 western Canada, co-operative farms 97–8; mechanization 96–7; mixed farming 94; pastoralism 92–6; rural schools 98–9; wheat farming 84–105 wheat farming, and modernism 84–105; business development 88; division of labour 87; machinery 86–7; mechanization 96–7; post–World War II 91–2; wheat pools 88–91