“Positively, my social philosophy may be said to be enshrined in three words: liberty, equality and fraternity. Let no one however say that I have borrowed my philosophy from the French Revolution. I have not. My philosophy has its roots in religion and not in political science. I have derived them from the teachings of my master, the Buddha.”
JC was the long-time collaborator of Christo. I’ll always associate my freshman year with their gates project in Central Park. Very fondly. Participatory public art.
From Prof. Jose Maria Sison, Chairman of the International League of Peoples’ Struggle:
“The global phenomenon of large-scale displacement of people, migrant workers and refugees is a recurrence, extension and magnification of the dispossession and displacement of people in the primitive accumulation of capital in the history of capitalism but this time without the possibility of the underdeveloped countries developing into industrialized ones.
“In previous decades, the earnings of the migrant workers have been used merely to cover trade deficits and support government and private consumption spending in the puppet states and fuel profit making by foreign and comprador corporations. In the current crisis, the migrant workers are worse off as they are being laid off, receive less real income, are further discriminated against and scapegoated for the crisis of the monopoly capitalist system and the rising unemployment and worsening conditions of the host people.”
The GFMD (Global Forum on Migration and Development) finished earlier this month. The IAMR, to my understanding, held a kind of parallel series of events. The full text of the solidarity statement can be found here.
This photograph appeared in the Public Culture article “Moscow for Flaneurs: Pedestrian Bridges, Europe Square, and Moskva.” More of Sabine I. Gölz’s work here.
I support this cover. In related news, Jade claims the light-blue cult-y pants from the video can be purchased in Mae Sot.
Correction: at Ginger on Nimman (supposedly: the Haem) in Chiang Mai.
Stillness is the Move (Dirty Projectors cover) - Solange Knowles
this is incredible on several levels.
yes.
Beach House: “Norway,” from the upcoming LP Teen Dream, which will be their Sub Pop debut (Jan. 26 release date). If the sound to come is more of this, I can live with the major-label step-up. Otherwise, I’ll definitely miss the first two records, two of my favorites for sure.
“British and French colonial administrators, justifying the novel tax burdens they were imposing on their subjects, often explained that taxes were the inevitable price one paid for living in a ‘civilized society.’ By this discursive legerdemain they neatly managed three tricks: they described their subjects as effectively ‘precivilized,’ they substituted imperials ideals for colonial reality, and above all, they confounded ‘civilization’ with what was, in fact, state-making.
The ‘just-so’ story of civilization always requires a wild untamed antagonist, usually just out of reach, to eventually be subdued and incorporated. The hypothetical civilization in question - whether French, Han, Burman, Kinh, British, or Siamese - is defined by this negation. This is largely why tribes and ethnicity begin, in practice, where sovereignty and taxes stop.
One can see in a flash why these just-so stories, concocted largely to improve the self-confidence and cohesion of the rulers, might be less than convincing at the frontiers of empire. Imagine, for example, an education in the Confucian classics - filial piety, observance of the rituals, the obligations of rule, benevolent care for the well-being of the subjects, honorable conduct, rectitude - in the context of, say, the mid-nineteenth-century frontier in Yunnan or Guizhou. How could one not be struck by the chasm by these imperial imaginings on the one hand and the realities of the Ming and Qing frontier on the other? The ‘lived’ frontier, as distinct from the discursive frontier, was rife with corrupt civil magistrates selling justice to the highest bidder, military adventurers and bandits, exiled officials and criminals, smugglers, and desperate Han settlers. Small wonder that the ideals of Han civilization had little traction on the ground. On the contrary, the contradiction between ideal and reality was sufficient reason both for local people and for reflective imperial officials to conclude that the civilizational discourse was mere humbug.
The Han and Theravada polities of China and Southeast Asia had somewhat different perceptions of the ideal, ‘civilized’ subject. In the Han case there was no religious test for civilization, although the patriarchal family, ancestral tablets, and knowledge of the characters presupposed ethnic assimilation. In the Burman or Thai case, Buddhism and the veneration of the sangha did constitute a religious test although, on the other hand, the manpower-starved states of mainland Southeast Asia could not afford to be ethnic snobs. The Indic-style classical kingdoms were hierarchical, like the Han, but ethnically quite inclusive.
All such states, however, were, for impelling fiscal and military reasons, padi states. In practice, therefore, the padi state did everything in its power to encourage densely concentrated settlement and the irrigated wet rice that fostered it. To the degree that its subjects grew the same grains in roughly the same way, in communities that were roughly homogeneous, the tasks of land valuation, taxation, and administration were that much easier. In the Han case, the codification of the patriarchal households as the basic unit of property and administration further facilitated social control. The ideal subject of the padi state also represented a vision of landscape and human settlement in which the cleared plains or irrigated rice fields and their human communities came to represent an ideal that was, at once, cultivated and cultured.
The padi state’s officials had, on the other hand, every incentive to discourage all forms of settlement, subsistence, and social organization that represented an inappropriable landscape. They discouraged and, when they could, prohibited dispersed settlement, foraging, swiddening, and migration away from the core. If the padi fields had come to mean civilized landscape of properly organized subjects and their production, then by extension those who lived in remote places, in the hills or in the forests, who shifted their fields and often shifted themselves, who formed and re-formed small egalitarian hamlets were uncivilized. What is most striking here, of course, is how closely the ideal of a civilized landscape and demography coincides with a landscape and demography most suitable for state-making and how closely a landscape unsuitable for state appropriation, as well as the people who inhabit it, is understood as uncivilized and barbaric. The effective coordinates, from this perspective, for figuring out who is civilized and who is not, turn out to be not much more than an agro-ecological code for state appropriation.
The tight correlation is unmistakable between life at the margins of the state on the one hand and primitiveness and backwardness on the other, in the view of valley elites. One has only to list the most salient characteristics of landscapes and peoples beyond the state’s easy grasp to produce, simultaneously, a catalogue of primitiveness. Dwelling in inaccessible forests and on hilltops codes as uncivilized. Foraging, forest collecting - even for commercial grain - and swiddening also code as backward. Scattered living and small settlements are, by definition, archaic. Physical mobility and transient, negotiable identities are both primitive and dangerous. Not following the great valley religions or not being the tax- and tithe-bearing subjects of monarchs and clergy places one outside the pale of civilization.
In the valley imagination, all these characteristics are earlier stages in a process of social evolution at the apex of which elites perch. Hill peoples are an earlier stage: they are ‘pre-’ just about everything: pre-padi cultivation, pre-towns, prereligion, preliterate, pre-valley subject. As we have seen at some length, however, the characteristics for which hill peoples are stigmatized are precisely those characteristics that a state-evading people would encourage and perfect in order to avoid surrendering autonomy. The valley imagination has its history wrong. Hill people are not pre- anything. In fact, they are better understood as post-irrigated rice, postsedentary, postsubject, and perhaps even postliterate. They represent, in the longue durée, a reactive and purposeful statelessness of peoples who have adapted to a world of states while remaining outside their firm grasp.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with the valley understanding of the agro-ecology, social organization, and mobility of the peoples who elude them. They’ve sorted them, as it were, into the right bins. In addition to radically misunderstanding the historical sequence, however, they have got their labels wrong. If they merely substituted ‘state-subject’ for ‘civilized’ and ‘not-state-subject’ for ‘uncivilized,’ they’d have it just about right.”
(Emphasis added.)
One of the truly brilliant minds of our time, of all time, has passed away.
Other runners up here, with the winner here.
Caption as given: “Tanta Flax and Oils Company strikers protesting in front of the Ministerial Cabinet HQ in Downtown Cairo.” Photograph by Hossam el-Hamalawy.
The GFMD (Global Forum on Migration and Development) begins tomorrow. CARAM Asia has released a response critique, excerpted here. The full statement should be on the CARAM site soon.
“While we acknowledge that the GFMD currently stands as the largest space for international dialogue on issues related to migration, this avenue has found itself corrupted by the drive for development that places developing countries in a hegemonic reliance on developed countries in the drive for remittances. Moreover, under its current guise, the GFMD remains a state driven, voluntary and non-binding platform that seeks to exist with minimal oversight by the United Nations. As a result of this, wider humanitarian issues including, forced and irregular migration, right to health, access to justice and the overall social cost related to migration remain largely sidelined in this process.”
Air France remixes Saint Etienne’s “Spring.”
“The new men of Empire are the ones who believe in fresh starts, new chapters, clean pages; I struggle on with the old story, hoping that before it is finished it will reveal to my why it was that I thought it worth the trouble.”
“Illegal, Temporary, and Precarious States of Being: Migration Exhibition and Seminar” will be held from February 15th through the 28th, 2010, at a gallery in Bangkok. Hosted and organized by MAP Foundation, Studio Xang, the Asian Institute of Technology, and the University of Leeds.
The show “will explore the impacts of the current global responses to migration through different art media forms. While the governments of the world find more and more ways to enforce temporary status on the very migrants who are sustaining their economies and their life-styles, space must be given to highlight the contradictions and allow new ideas and approaches to emerge. This exhibition hopes to be one such space.”
Submission/application deadline: November 20th, 2009.
More details here, including the actual call for artwork, although Conference of Birds is actually not yet fully confirmed, unlike this post suggests.
