As the attempted eviction of Travellers from Dale Farm seemed more likely, claims surfaced in the media that the Travellers themselves had left and that only “activists” were remaining at Dale Farm. Reporting for the Guardian from inside Dale Farm, John Bingham wrote “The girls are angered at suggestions in the media that there are no travellers inside, only activists. ‘We’re more than grateful, says one.’We’re all activists,’ adds another.”

This call for support was posted on the Dale Farm Travellers blog: “Today, we are witnessing the beginning of a new solidarity movement, with settled people standing up with Gypsies, Travellers and Roma to help fight for their rights.” The Travellers blog lists SMS alert system, a legal hotline, a twitter account, a link for donations and a “welcome pack” for activists available as a Microsoft Word Document, a PDF and the free and open source OpenDocument format. The welcome pack is a 16 page document covering the political and legal context, cultural sensitivity and other topics. The following background information is excerpted from the welcome pack:

“Romani Gypsies and Irish Travellers have been held to be ‘ethnic’ groups for the purpose of the Race Relations Act (RRA) 1976. In CRE v Dutton,1 the Court of Appeal found that Romani Gypsies were a minority with a long, shared history, a common geographical origin and a cultural tradition of their own. In O’Leary v Allied Domecq,2 HHJ Goldstein reached a similar decision in respect of Irish Travellers. Although a county court judgment, it should be noted that, in Northern Ireland, Irish Travellers are explicitly protected from discrimination under Race Relations (Northern Ireland) Order 1997 article 5…” (9)

“In 2004, Trevor Phillips, former Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) and now Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), compared the situation of Gypsies and Travellers living in Great Britain to that of black people living in the American Deep South in the 1950s.” (9)

“Romani Gypsies and Irish Travellers have been held to be ‘ethnic’ groups for the purpose of the Race Relations Act (RRA) 1976. In CRE v Dutton,1 the Court of Appeal found that Romani Gypsies were a minority with a long, shared history, a common geographical origin and a cultural tradition of their own. In O’Leary v Allied Domecq,2 HHJ Goldstein reached a similar decision in respect of Irish Travellers. Although a county court judgment, it should be noted that, in Northern Ireland, Irish Travellers are explicitly protected from discrimination under Race Relations (Northern Ireland) Order 1997 article 5…” (9)

Comments on The Guardian’s Live Blog posted during coverage of the Eviction event on September 19, 2011 reveal a range of reactions to both the legal question of whether the Travellers have a right to live on or build on the land, but more importantly uncover the range of racial/ethnic and cultural prejudice against them.

A reader using the name “today12” wrote:

“I grew up in Crays Hill and attended the local school, which now has the 2nd worst attendance record in the UK and the worst sats results. Out of the 110 pupils, 107 of them are ‘travellers’. Many of them too are also abusive, antisocial, messy and once set a car on fire and pelted the firemen when they arrived. There has been a shooting murder on the site because of traveller rivalry. I do wish their supporters would consider the lives of the local residents. Many Crays Hill residents are afraid to speak out because of retribution; not because they support the travellers. Also there are many more sites they can live on in the Basildon area, it’s on the council’s website, but they are just ungrateful and what to cause trouble.”

A reader using the name “Essexfella” wrote:

“As a local I can tell you all that the opinion of the majority in the area is that they should not be there. Local people have been fighting for this for 10 years. Yes they own the land but it has no permission to build.

If you want land in Essex that can be built on, you pay more for it. Why should any part of our community buy cheap land and then flout the planning laws?”

On the Dale Farm Traveller’s blog, racist comments include:

Posted by “Craig Compton”:

“by by pikies, by by scum.

by by pikies, your time has finally come.”

Posted by “Jennifer Cooper”:

“it will be a good day tomorrow when the whole lot of you scrounging pikeys are evicted.”

“i would be very happy to call any of these filthy low life pikeys and a few others things to their faces. enjoy your last evening, the bailiffs are coming to move you the gypos tomorrow. wish i could come a watch. just think this time tomorrow you will be enjoying your next squat spoiling the countryside somewhere else.”

Posted by “Zoey”:

“Muppet. Blame the government because a bunch of scroungers try and pass themselves off as Roma? maybe we should sue you for all the money the scroungers have siphoned off the taxpayer. Eh? How bout that??

Fire up those bulldozers soon Constant and co.”

One anonymous commenter repeatedly posted excerpts from an article appearing in The Daily Mail on September 17th, 2011 titled “Travellers’ real homes are back in Ireland and they will NOT be ‘homeless nomads’ if they are evicted.” The article  describes homes in Ireland owned by some of the applicants named in the petitions to allow residents to remain on Dale Farm. The article uses “evidence” of home ownership and financial resources to refute the claim that the residents of Dale Farm would have nowhere to go were they evicted.  The homes mentioned are in Rathkeale, Ireland.

The Telegraph reports, in a photo caption “The unofficial portion of Dale Farm is exclusively occupied by members of the Irish Traveller community, whose cultural roots are in the town of Rathkeale, County Limerick, Ireland.”

Several commenters on the Travellers blog referred to the case earlier in the month of forced laborers rescued from another Traveller site. One commenter, responding to a question about why 90% of Gypsy and Traveller land use planning applications are rejected asked “Do you condone slavery then?” implying that supporting the rights of the Travellers at Dale Farm meant supporting slavery and forced labor Police claim to have found at another Traveller site. Another anonymous commenter challenged the authenticity of the Travellers’ identity and the use of the discourse of ethnic cleansing: “The people at Dale farm are not real gypsies or romani. How can you compare the eviction to Ethnic cleansing?”

According to reporting by Alexandra Topping, John Baron, MP for Basildon and Billericay, supported  the decision to evict, stating: “I believe we have the moral high ground; everybody has to obey the rules . . . People talk about human rights for minorities, but what we shouldn’t forget is that the majority have human rights too and we are putting that into practice.”

On July 4th, 2011, decades of legal battles came to a head with an eviction order for around seven acres of land in the Dale Farm community, in Essex county England, UK. After the courts ruled that they had settled there illegally, around 400 nomadic Irish Travellers were ordered to leave by August 31, 2011 or face demolition of their homes and property. The part of the settlement in question is described by local authorities as “unauthorized” in contrast to the neighboring and contiguous portion of the farm that is considered “authorized.” The land is classified or zoned as “green belt” and development has occurred without “planning permission.” However, all land in question was owned by Traveller, Romani and Gypsy families, however the seven acres in question, the county claims, were not zoned for residential construction.

Travellers, activists and supporters of the residents have deployed the discourse of “ethnic cleansing” to refer to the eviction. Activists and NGOs are asking not only for housing for the Travellers, but “culturally appropriate” housing. The local government (Basildon Council) is estimated to be prepared to spend 18 million pounds (about 30 million dollars) to evict and demolish the property. In September, 2011 Security forces constructed a compound outside Dale Farm from which to plan and coordinate the eviction.

“…modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system” (Agamben 2005:2)

What’s happening here at the intersection of racism, prejudice and land zoning? How are zoning restrictions being used to enact exclusion of these nomadic people? How does international law speak to these issues? Are the travelers de facto stateless people, or UK citizens who also live in a legal grey area due to their nomadic tradition, lifestyle and reaction to those facts?

The former owner of the land, Ray Bocking, a scrapyard dealer sold the land to the travellers in 2001. He is interviewed, the video is available on YouTube. Prior to the Traveller residence, the land was mostly concrete and was used as a scrapyard. However, the Basildon council argues that they the land is “greenbelt.” Constant & Co. have been hired as the bailiffs in this matter. The following text appears on the Constant & Co. web site under “Enforcement Services,” in the submenu “Travellers & Squatters”:

Travellers

Constant & Company are employed nationally on a daily basis to recover possession of land from unwanted trespassers. We believe we are the most experienced, professional and busiest company in this type of work.

Court proceedings involve delay that can be extremely expensive. An occupation over several weeks at a trading site or shopping mall can result in a disastrous loss of business, but there is a fast alternative course of action that we utilise regularly and very successfully for many high-profile clients. Our bailiffs take legal possession of an occupied site usually within 24 to 48 hours of being instructed. Police are informed and called upon as necessary. We arrange attendance of tow trucks and cleansing contractors if needed.

Maybe your property has recently been occupied and has now been vacated. You may be thinking about clean-up services, temporary site security and/or concrete barriers quickly to prevent it happening again? We are your ‘one-stop shop’ and can provide a tailored, cost effective solution through our carefully selected partners.

A telephone call will initiate the process.

On August 5, 2011, Raquel Rolnik, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing said “Evictions constitute a grave breach of human rights if not carried out with full respect for international standards…We urge the UK authorities to halt the evictions process and to pursue negotiations with the residents until an acceptable agreement for relocation is reached in full conformity with international human rights obligations.”

UN-HABITAT responded to inquiries from the press on September 14, 2011 stating: “ We do not promote nor advocate forced evictions. We recognise and promote the progressive and full realization of the right to adequate housing as articulated in international instruments and the Habitat Agenda. We understand that resettlement may at times be an inevitable part of urban development.” However, in “cases where resettlement is inevitable as a result of all other alternatives and options having been exhausted” the statement calls on parties to “follow due process.” According to the statement, due process means: “a. timely information and sufficient communication to the affected population; b. participation and involvement of those affected; c. adequate compensation; d. alternative adequate housing; e. follow-up post-resettlement to ensure livelihood and economic development.”

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR) has offered to enter the negotiations however the offer was rejected by the UK government. Expressing concern for further consequences of the forced eviction, Jan Jarab, the European representative for UNHCR said “It is actually very symbolic, this is the largest Irish Traveller site in the UK and it sends the message across the UK and also across the European Union that the Government is putting its weight behind an eviction based approach.”

September 19th, just before evictions were about to proceed, at 4:46pm, The Guardian reported (via the Press Association) that residents were granted a “last-gasp injunction restraining Basildon council from clearing structures from the site pending a further hearing at London’s high court on Friday.” The Telegraph reported that Justice Edwards-Stuart of London High Court “directed that Basildon should serve a schedule on the residents by noon tomorrow specifying what enforcement measures were proposed on a plot-by-plot basis” and that “residents were to take reasonable steps to permit council officials onsite to discuss arrangements with individuals, to discourage any further student protest, and to procure the dismantling of barricades”

In response the Dale Farm Travellers blog posted: Dale Farm resident, Kathleen McCarthy said, ‘We still need somewhere to go, if we have to leave here. Today is a great victory, but we still need Basildon Council to approve a legal site for us.’

Alexandra Topping for the Guardian wrote: Asked if the council would keep moving the Dale Farm Travellers on, he said they would not be allowed to settle elsewhere in the area: ‘We will keep on moving them until they find a proper site.’

Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of exception. University of Chicago Press.

There are two kinds of offworld anthropology: Near Distance and Long Distance. With typical Earth-centrism, the “distance” is measured in light years from the Blue Marble. Try explaining to a Gorgolian that he’s “Long Distance” when you’re on his doorstep.

At least Gorgolians won’t spit in your face when you try to interview them about the meaning of bio-zeppelin design in their culture.  Read more…

(via Savage Minds)

The other genres are, for the most part, what have been historically called “World Religions.”  This category sometimes refers to the many “religions of the world” as in Huston Smith’s “The World’s Religions” but usually it mean something more like “religions of the majority.”  Tomoko Masuzawa (University of Michigan, and currently a scholar at the IAS School of Social Science) problematizes the construction of this category in her book “The Invention of World Religions: Or How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism.”  The book has been waiting on my shelf for a careful reading but I’ve had a quick look at the introduction in which she notes “everybody, in effect, seems to know what ‘world religions’ means, more or less.”  Discussing the role of the phrase in the academy, she observes that the list of  world religions “almost invariably include Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism, and also typically count among their number Confucianism, Taoism, and Shinto . . less typically but still very frequently included are Zoroastrianism, Jainism, and Sikhism.”

Masuzawa argues that the demarcation between “Eastern” and “Western” religions is “articulated from the point of view of the European West.”  An observation that while seeming initially quite obvious, has a profound consequence when you consider, say, a Buddhist in California talking about their practice in an “Eastern religion” from a geographic position in which Asia lies directly to their West.  Of course, they might practice in a line that considers itself rooted more in Colorado than India. But clearly “Eastern” means something else here. Masuzawa proposes this positioning is rooted in the nineteenth-century origins of early linguistic studies (philology), which identified the “Semitic”, “Aryan” and “Oriental” languages as matching up with contemporaneous ”racialized notions of ethnic difference.”  Amazingly, these divisions persist in religious studies departments (and publishing houses), without much attention to their  basis in colonial logic.

And so, returning to the “Indigenous” question: with this oddly positioned binary of religious categories in hand, the academy categorizes everything else – whatever doesn’t fit in East or West – into “Indigenous” or “Tribal” religion.  This includes the “animism,” shamanism,” and any other practice once called “primitive religion.”  What do we make of the essentialism and universalism of this category? Certainly it persists in part because of the continued centering of Mircea Eliade (and Émile Durkheim, and others) in religious studies curricula.

After all, Eliadean methodology attempts to locate “original,” “archaic,” and “primary” religion in historical or existent “primitive man” and extrapolate a broader understanding of all religious belief and practice from the resulting monolithic construction. Eliade names this monolith “archaic religion” and his dialectic places it in opposition to the “highly evolved” religions.  I’ve been working on a critique of the Eliadean Community of Practice from linguistic anthropology, especially considering Joseph Errington‘s notion of a “Colonial Linguistics.” Reviewing the literature, I’ve found a range of critiques of Eliade which I’ll include here.

Previous critiques of Eliadeʼs dialectic of binary oppositions include feminist (Christ 1991, King 2002), postcolonial (Kehoe 1996, Bilimoria 2000, Joy 2001), theories of religion (Smart 1978, Alles 1988, Segal and Wiebe 1989), postmodern (Olson 1999, King 2002), and methodological (Leach 1966, Strenski 1973, Allen 1978, Werblowsky 1989).

In a feminist critique, Christ points to Eliadeʼs practice of giving grandiose names to male gods but referring only to unspecified (and lower-case) “goddesses” (1991:84) and draws attention to Eliadeʼs valorization of the “Indo- European” conquest over “sedentary populations,” a conquest Eliade compares to “carnivores hunting” (1991:88). Christ uncovers gendered features of Eliadeʼs discourse, the particular (female) versus the universal (male), and Eliadeʼs claim that hierarchical relations of the sexes are an essential characteristic (1991:93). Christ (1991:93) and King (2002:373) both argue that Eliadeʼs history of religion is flawed by its dualism and universalization of male experience.

In a postcolonial critique, Kehoe accuses Eliade of cultural imperialism and labels his “new humanism” as a “very old primitivism” (1996:377). Kehoe takes issue with Eliadeʼs labeling of contemporary societies “archaic” and his misrepresentation of those peoples (1996:383,384). Eliadeʼs primitivism, in Kehoeʼs view, is a “yearning to shed bourgeois clothing and partake” of the “archaic ecstasy” (1996:388). In Kehoeʼs reading, Eliade may lead an “inauthentic [life] of spurious culture” (Sapir 1924) but by constructing the “primitive shaman” he can reassure himself that “archaic ecstasy” is still possible (1996:38). Bilimoria (2000:171,198) and Joy (2001:177) both critique Elaideʼs binaries (true/false, transcendental/totemic, belief/myth, sacred/profane).

In a theories of religion critique, Smart proposes a “grammar of religion” to replace Eliadeʼs sacred/profane polarity (1978:176). Alles sees Eliadeʼs dialectic as a totality, and calls on Saidʼs (et al.) critique that totality is “an instrument of Western colonial domination and cultural imperialism” (1988: 115,117). Segal and Wiebe critique Eliadeʼs claim to the sui generis character of religious phenomena (1989:600).

Olsonʼs postmodern critique draws from Foucault (1967:189) to dispute Eliadeʼs assertion that history is a “body of facts” arguing that there is no untainted “primal” historical material (Olson 1999:360). Olson contrasts Eliadeʼs linear, hierarchical hermeneutics with Deleuze and Guattariʼs de-centered rhizomatics (Olson 1999:366,383). King is critical of Eliadeʼs “transcendental pretense of modernity” which she says universalizes thinking and attempts to impose that system on others (2002:371).

Leachʼs critique of Eliadeʼs methodology points out the use of “exotic ethnography” in order to construct Eliadeʼs notion of “archaic religion” (1966:279). Strenski criticizes Eliade for searching for “higher,” “trans-historical,” “primary,” “original” “prehistoric” meanings (1973:303-306). Strenski argues that Eliadean methodology makes religion “independent of culture” (1973:310). Allen argues that Eliade seeks an “invariant core,” an “essential meaning” of symbols (1978:273). Werblowsky critiques Eliade for finding commonality disparate non- western, non-modern experiences (a “paleolithic hunter and the Buddhist monk” for example) (1989:297).

All references can be found in my Critical Reading of Eliade bibliography.

Oversoul, Alex Gray, 1997

In the Fall 2010 issue of Anthropology of Consciousness, Marc Blainey looks at the “discord in the West between viewing psychoactive substances as either ‘hallucinogens’ or ‘entheogens’,” and makes the case for renewed interest in ethnometaphysics. His article has me thinking more about anthropologists produced by a (mostly) entheophobic culture looking at practices and people who are more entheophilic and the ways in which those biases against certain states of consciousness affect the ethnography.

Synchronistically, I recently wrestled with this issue in my review of  Lee Gilmore’s new ethnography, Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man. While Gilmore’s book is a beautifully written portrait of her experiences as an insider at the festival, she elected to exclude entheogens from the volume.  In this section of the review, I address one of the reasons Gilmore chose to exclude entheogens, namely that she does not engage in the practice herself:

Gilmore explores areas of inquiry in this ethnography that once fell outside her personal experience, but does not explain why she was unwilling to become a participant observer in the area of ritual entheogen use as she did in other experience-far arenas. In the introduction to this volume, she cites James Clifford in support of her reflexive ethnographic strategy (p. 12). Clifford critiques the authoritative voice of the ethnographer in his analysis of experience as an “effective guarantee of ethnographic authority” (The Predicament of Culture, 1988 & Writing Culture, 1986) and cautions against smoothing over informants’ many voices with the ethnographers own “monophonic authority” as narrator and interpreter. Through much of the ethnography, Gilmore is careful to avoid this problem by regularly quoting festival participants. However, we do not hear from participants on the question of entheogen use, and are instead left only with Gilmore’s voice assuring us that the practice is not relevant. (Oman-Reagan, 2010)

Reading Blainey’s article, I wonder if her choice to exclude entheogens might arise partly from her ethnometaphysical positioning. Perhaps this kind of exclusion of certain practices (almost taboo practices for some in ‘this’ culture) marks the work as closer to the entheophobic side of our culture that perceives psychedelic use as hallucinatory rather than revelatory or entheogenic.  Here’s a relevant section from Blainey:

As an example of the utility of ethnometaphysical analysis, I point to the question of why the earnest ritual ingestion of entheogens (psychoactive plant and chemical substances used as spiritual sacraments [Forte 1997]) is so widespread amongst ideologies that have been categorized (albeit problematically) as “shamanistic”? Following R. Gordon Wasson’s (1980: xv; Winkelman 2000:3) partition of cultures according to their keenness for or aversion to mushrooms (mycophiles and mycophobes respectively), I will term cultures with a dedication to entheogens as entheophilic, while those (like our own) that largely disdain the effects, calling them “hallucinogens,” are classified as entheophobic.

Perhaps the most fruitful classificatory venture with respect to the ethnometaphysical distinctions underlying entheophilic and entheophobic worldviews is the neurophenomenological model, which designates Euroamerican culture as monophasic while recognizing most other cultures as polyphasic (see Laughlin et al. 1992; Winkelman 2000:3). Winkelman (2000:25) identifies the neurophenomenological approach as a “structural monist perspective,” accounting for both physical (matter) and spiritual (mind) extremes, as well as pondering the interaction between them. In identifying the deeply ingrained disinclination of the standard Western enculturation process to esteem atypical forms of consciousness, monophasic logic arguably stems from a foundational view of the observer as merely a passive window looking out unidirectionally on an external materiality. This echoes Charles D. Laughlin’s (1999) characterization of Euroamerican culture as “materialist,” in that it is “primarily concerned with tracking external events while in the waking state.” Such a portrayal is quite similar to Benjamin Whorf’s (1941) model of the Standard Average European (SAE) worldview where the reification of externality relegates internal consciousness to the epiphenomenal domain of the “imaginary.” Regardless of the label used, one need simply consider the legal and religious norms of Western society where the only sanctioned psychoactive substances are coffee, nicotine, alcohol, and painkillers (aimed at lessening both physical and mental discomfort without prompting deep existential reflection). For the average Euroamerican, any suggestion that the external world’s integrity is to some extent reliant on the observer’s observing of it (such as with some esoteric corollaries of quantum mechanics or as is commonly experienced in altered states of consciousness) presents a grave threat to ideological norms. Hence, the popular disapproval of entheogenic experiences as “hallucinatory” invokes accustomed ethnometaphysical beliefs that routinely become defensive whenever the primacy of external reality is questioned in our culture. (Blainey, 2010)

The ethnometaphysical approach, Blainey writes, “avoids partialities towards any one ontological system.”  This strikes me as an approach that can be readily applied productively to ideas of being and consciousness within “our own” culture.  For example, in rave and dance music culture, entheogenic spirituality movements, ayahuasca centered  neo-shamanism and so on.  The ethnometaphysical approach can help to address the bias of the entheophobic culture that Blainey describes so perfectly:

In contrast to the dominance of dualism and physicalist monism in the West, I suggest that what we are dealing with when we consider the various accounts of both Westerners and non-Westerners who claim to have had beneficial experiences with entheogenic intoxication is a fondness for a metaphysics of mystical monism. For instance, the traditional stance of Western science with regard to entheogens has been to identify them as “hallucinogens” and their effects as “hallucinations,”—characterizations that disclose the dualist/physicalist inclinations of Western thought in general. This is furthered by the “objective” portrayals found in pharmacological volumes where the ingestion of “hallucinogenic” mushrooms containing the active compound psilocybin are said to cause “disturbances in thinking, illusions… and impaired ego functioning” (Julien 2005:612 emphasis added). (Blainey, 2010)

References

Blainey, M., 2010, Special Section: The Future of a Discipline: Considering the Ontological/Methodological Future of the Anthropology of Consciousness, Part II. Anthropology of Consciousness, 21: 113–138.

Oman-Reagan, M.P., 2010, Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man. Lee Gilmore. Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review, Volume 1, Number 2, November 2010 , pp. 176-180

Will we see humanoid robots taking more active roles in hospitals, constructions sites and other work places outside Japan?  And will robots like the Paro therapy seal showing up more often in homes?  How far away is a robotic pet trade? The Pleo is a pretty astonishing toy and an example of what the future may hold in this regard:

This video does suggest an eagerness by these elderly Japanese Paro owners to accept their robotic companion, and even see it as superior to human and non-human animal companions.

]]> http://religionandtechnology.com/2010/09/14/robot-acceptance/feed/ 1 http://religionandtechnology.com/2010/08/25/notes-on-technology-cyberactivism-and-social-justice/ http://religionandtechnology.com/2010/08/25/notes-on-technology-cyberactivism-and-social-justice/#comments Wed, 25 Aug 2010 18:11:11 +0000 MOR http://religionandtechnology.com/?p=461 (Note: This post was originally published on an blog about Apple technology, based on a few requests I’m making it available here. -MOR)

Apple has been hard at work the last few years building their reputation as a ‘socially responsible’ company.  Like other greenwashing corporations (Whole Foods for example), this reputation is 9/10ths marketing and 1/10th wishful thinking from the cult of Mac.  Yes, Apple did change components in their products to reduce toxicity and increase ease of recycling, and they do ‘check out’ the factories where their products are manufactured, and wasn’t Kermit the Frog in  one of their ad campaigns along with Gandhi and the Dalai Lama?  But does coming out with a ‘new and better’ product every few months and holding back features to encourage upgrade purchases really help reduce waste?  And what are the standards they use to ‘check out’ those factories? Standards you would accept if you worked there?

So, we need to be asking Apple why workers at the Foxconn plant in China where they’ve been making the new iPhones, are committing suicide.  Or we could just ask the workers:

“Life is meaningless,” said Ah Wei, his fingernails stained black with the dust from the hundreds of mobile phones he has burnished over the course of a 12-hour overnight shift. “Everyday, I repeat the same thing I did yesterday. We get yelled at all the time. It’s very tough around here.”

Conversation on the production line is forbidden, bathroom breaks are kept to 10 minutes every two hours and constant noise from the factory washes past his ear plugs, damaging his hearing, Ah Wei said. The company has rejected three requests for a transfer and his monthly salary of 900 yuan ($132) is too meager to send home to his family, said the 21-year-old, who asked that his real name not be used because he is afraid of his managers.

So, do we boycott the products?  Maybe that’s a good idea, but then what do we do without access to that technology?  Because I wonder if losing the technology might limit our ability to change the conditions in factories like those.  However much I’d love to go all Walden, I’m not a Luddite and I believe technology can be a powerful tool for social justice.  Technophobes and skeptics often argue that we rely too much on unnecessary technology and that it’s contributing to the loss of something essential about our humanity – but in making that argument they forget that language is technology, writing is technology, human culture is technology.  The horrible conditions of production and labor and the class issues and related problems of globalized capitalism that brought about these suicides at the Foxconn plant are not because of ‘technology.’  But still, when you slide your finger across the iPhone screen are you ready to think “cool effect  - oh, and  the person who made this isn’t allowed to talk while working 12 hour shifts on a factory floor”?  We can’t just say, “too bad” and enjoy the technology, can we?  We have to do something.  But what?

As I’ve mentioned, my research interests lie at the intersection of technology and religion.  By religion I don’t necessarily mean gods or churches or dogma or any sort of ‘greater’ power.  I mean something more like the concern you felt for Ah Wei, the Foxconn worker, when you read about him above.  By religion, I mean your interest in issues of social justice, your ideals about the kind of world we should live in, and how we should treat one another.  So the question this story brought to my mind is: If my iPhone is made in a factory that enslaves Ah Wei  - can I buy that product and then turn around and use the same technology to free him of his chains?  Or are we caught in Möbius strip of production, consumption, power and oppression, a catch-22 of capitalism? I think there must be a way out, maybe not by working against technology, but through the technology, specifically through technologies of resistance. So, clearly the question at hand is a lot more than “should I buy the new iPhone 4?” which might be the expected question on a blog like this.  I’ve been looking at this issue of technology and social justice more recently, so I’ll share some of what I’ve found, and hopefully this will give us something to think about beyond the shiny ads from Apple about cool new apps we can download to make our iLife even iBetter…

iBed Peace?

Cyberactivism and The Courage to Be

Technologies of resistance are manifold. The mythologies and histories of resistance are transmitted between actors, tribes, nations and networks through mediums as diverse as writing, dancing and uploading. Such means of transmission, the information technologies, are foundational components of the cognitive spaces where we describe the indescribable, make the finite infinite and explore, share and build our imaginative universe. These cognitive spaces are dreamplaces, realms of imagination and psychic depth, where resistance is born from belief in social justice and faith in the possibility of a different, or even better, world. From the so-called ‘archaic’ to the ‘advanced’ – information technologies are, as Erik Davis (2004) describes them, “technocultural hybrids.” These hybrid technologies are part of the revelatory vision, the pictograph and petroglyph, the smoke signal and burnt offering, the alphabet, the printing press, the digital signal, the telephone, radio, television, fax, satellite and well, you get the idea.

Along with the rise of the new network communication technologies emerges a new depth and scope for our dreams of social justice, because of technology, we can imagine greater (as the Sci Fi channel reminds us). These technologies are not only new means of resisting power but also new spaces for institutional power because technology is always a trickster, the coyote of the network society. However, when used as a means to resist institutional power, information technologies can mediate the expression of what theologian Paul Tillich (1959) called “ultimate concern.” When information technologies are engaged to communicate Tillich’s (1959) “ultimate meaning” in answer to the “moral demands” of “ultimate concern,” technology mediated communication can become a religious act of cyberactivism; an expression our “courage to be.”

The parents and sister of a Foxconn worker who committed suicide carry his picture outside the factory

Ultimate Concern and Our Common Faith

Tillich understands the religious to be an aspect of the human spirit present in the depth of our spiritual lives. He calls this depth “ultimate concern” and proposes that it is manifest in “all creative functions of the human spirit.” He describes the manifestation of ultimate concern in the moral sphere as “the unconditional seriousness of the moral demand.” Ultimate concern manifests, he argues, in the aesthetic function of the human spirit as “the infinite desire to express ultimate meaning.” At the intersection of “the unconditional seriousness of the moral demand” and the “infinite desire to express ultimate meaning” a path is revealed from the spiritual depth of ultimate concern toward a desire to express ultimate meaning motivated by the seriousness of the moral demand. This is the route from ultimate concern to the desire for action and then on to the expression of ultimate meaning in response to moral demand; in other words, the path from simply having concern to taking action on behalf of social justice.

I like Tillich’s framework for investigating why we’re moved to act against injustice.  But, if Tillich’s position as a Christian theologian is uncomfortable for you, consider John Dewey’s similar take on the religious. In A Common Faith, Dewey (1934) sought to remove the religious aspect of experience from from the “historic encumbrances” of dogma and institutions.  He saw the religious as a “clear and intense conception of a union of ideal ends with actual conditions,” of “ideal possibilities unified through imaginative realization and reflection”.   Basically, he’s talking about imagination, our ability to imagine something better and work together to make it happen, bring about that reality.  So, when I write about Tillich, you can easily replace him with Dewey if you prefer.  Dewey made a wonderful case against closed, restricted and private truths (open source anyone?) and called on us to use the means in our power to make radical changes.  He asked that we work on “behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of conviction” of the “general and enduring value” of the ideal end.  I think this is very much like what Tillich later called “the courage to be” which he describes as “the ethical act in which man affirms his own being in spite of those elements of his existence which conflict with his essential self-affirmation.”

The Counterculture Revolution and the Hacker Ethic

The manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), The Port Huron Statement, asks “what is the perimeter of human possibility in this epoch?” and “what role have we ourselves to play as a social force?” (Hayden, 2005). The Port Huron Statement defines a path to social justice when they propose undertaking “the search for truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation with them.” This counterculture manifesto expresses optimism about the potential of humankind, “we regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom and love” and prescribes the specific goal of acting on this optimism:

The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic; a quality of mind not compulsively driven by a sense of powerlessness, nor one which unthinkingly adopts status values, nor one which represses all threats to its habits, but one which has full, spontaneous access to present and past experiences, one which easily unites the fragmented parts of personal history, one which openly faces problems which are troubling and unresolved; one with an intuitive awareness of possibilities, an active sense of curiosity, an ability and willingness to learn. (Hayden, 2005)

In specifying this “goal of society” The Port Huron Statement imagines not only changes in favor of social justice, but the establishment of an entirely new system:

As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation. (Hayden, 2005)

Especially relevant here is the “media for their common participation.” Perhaps the authors didn’t intend the words to be taken so literally, but in the 40 years since, that participatory media space might have manifest as the internet and the networked spaces that have emerged around it.

The ‘New’ SDS organizes using a facebook group.

Hacking in the Network Society

Manuel Castells regards the “new technological conditions emerging” in our time as “a specific form of social organization in which information generation, processing and transmission become the fundamental sources of productivity and power” (1996). He calls the organization of this process around networks the “network society” (1996). Castells argues that in this network society individuals experience an “increasing distance between globalization and identity, between the Net and the self” (1996). To express ultimate meaning in response to the moral demand of ultimate concern (i.e. to act for social justice), individuals must overcome this paradox of the self in the information society.

Cyberactivists and hacker activists, or hacktivists, lay claim to the disputed territory in the networks of the information society by overcoming this paradox of self and re-affirming their identity as individuals acting based on their ultimate concerns. They exhibit what Tillich (2000) calls “the courage to be” which again is “the ethical act in which man affirms his own being in spite of those elements of his existence which conflict with his essential self-affirmation.” This is the path from ultimate concern to action via the courage to be.

Delivering the 2007 Nathan W. Levin Lecture at the New School in New York City, Castells said “the hackers built the network – and they built it open.” Born out of the defense department ARPANET research project, the internet was a product of “both the ʻclosed worldʼ of the Cold War and the open and decentralized world of the antiwar movement and the counterculture” (Rosenzweig, 1998). As the internet moved from an open systems approach to an open markets approach, “activist and counterculturist hackers….tried to turn the closed-world discourse on its head and make the personal computer and community networks into supports for a discourse of freedom, decentralization, democracy and liberation” (Rosenzweig, 1998).

The Hacker Ethic calls for actively helping “those who have been left on the margins of survival” (Himanen, 2001). In addition, The Hacker Ethic proposes that hacktivists try to “crack the locks of the iron cage” of the economic system built on the protestant work ethic. These fundamental agreements in purpose link the The Hacker Ethic with The Port Huron Statement in a challenge to the institutional power of capitalist economic systems:

…the radical nature of general hackerism consists of its proposing an alternative spirit for the network society – a spirit that finally questions the dominant Protestant ethic. In this context we find the only sense in which all hackers are really crackers: they are trying to crack the locks of the iron cage. (Himanen, 2001)

The hacker ethic is described as a “general social challenge” (Himanen, 2001) and includes “the goal of getting everybody to participate in the network and to benefit from it, to feel responsible for longer term consequences of the network society, and to directly help those who have been left on the margins of survival” (Himanen, 2001).

This hacker call for social change is one route through which the revolutionary ideals of the 1960s SDS have continued into the struggle against institutional power in the new network society. Both The Port Huron Statement and The Hacker Ethic are cognizant of similar injustices and both seek to end them; specifically by democratizing. The Port Huron Statement sought to mobilize the poor, The Hacker Ethic seeks to bridge the digital divide, the class disparity in internet and technology access, and create open information systems accessible to all.

The creator-hackers who built and now fight for the open network are both hereditary and cultural products of the 1960s social revolution(aries). They participate in the counterculture that was born out of the revolutionary call of the Students for a Democratic Society, shaped by experiments with LSD and other psychedelic consciousness expansion, the fight for free speech, and the civil rights, feminist and queer liberation struggles. In the social revolution lexicon, open source and open access to internet mediated communication is the technological equivalent of the protest chant “the whole world is watching!”

…and they’re watching back.

Technology and Counter-Power

Network communication technologies offer expanded powers to amplify and transmit one voice to many. As Castells argues, “electronic media…have become the privileged space of politics…without it there is no chance of winning or exercising power” (1997). In one example, the story of Alex White Plume growing hemp on the Pine Ridge reservation to support his Lakota family has been transmitted far and wide through electronic communication technologies. On PBSʼs P.O.V. web site, users can view a trailer of a documentary film about the family, watch video updates on the case and learn more about the background story. Hyperlinking from this site can lead the visitor to participate in activism on behalf of the subjects of the documentary.

The geography of these relationships, the network of users, producers, media and participants, is a decentralized space and with the reduction of centralized control comes greater opportunity for the individual to express what Tillich calls “ultimate meaning” and “unconditional seriousness of the moral demand” and also, very simply, to find like-minded individuals.

But when they find each other, do they act? And what is “action” in cyberspace? And if they do act, is there an impact? It would seem so, and it is because these communication technologies have been so effectively used as counter-power that hegemonic powers perceive such open systems in cyberspace and even access to technology as a threat. Warf and Grimes (citing Mueller and Tan, 1997) provide the example of China:

Some governments have come to fear the Net for its emancipatory capabilities. The Chinese government, for example, was stung by students’ use of faxes and e-mail during the 1989 Tienanmen Square massacre. It was especially aggrieved at their use of a network – ChinaNet – based at Stanford University, so it began in early 1996 to limit access to Internet nodes. (Warf & Grimes, 1997)

Craig Howe, however, argues that the “pervasive universalism and individualism of the world wide web” is “antithetical to the particular localities, societies, moralities, and experiences that constitute tribalism” (Howe, 1998). In Howeʼs view, the decentralization of communication space removes a vital component of tribal identity. Howe makes a technological determinist argument that “if Indian communities wish to stake out a place in cyberspace, then they must understand that in so doing they are capitulating to the underlying philosophy of the Internet. Cyberspace is a fantastic technological achievement founded on the ideals of Western civilization” (Howe, 1998). Howe suggests that cyberspace lacks a spatial, social and spiritual dimension and is therefore a danger to tribalism. On the contrary, cyberspace has the same relationship to solidspace as the public temple, the sacred space, the dreamspaces and the place of visions. It could be read just as easily as a powerful numinous place where identity becomes fluid, where boundary areas electrify creative potential and where power is decentralized and democratized.

As Lucas (1996) writes, “new computing and telecommunications technologies offer exciting possibilities for indigenous people to preserve and develop their own cultures on their own terms.” Regarding the recording of oral traditions, he says:

The problem is not therefore one of recording knowledge that was not meant to be recorded, but of the custodians of oral lore being given the opportunity to develop protocols, customs and conventions for recording and disseminating oral knowledge in a way that is consistent with local traditions and community desires. (Lucas, 1996)

Lucas also suggests that new media technologies offer solutions to communication between native peoples spread across the vast continents of North America and Australia (1996). He proposes that this kind of communication networking makes it easier for native peoples to “compare and contrast their respective social, cultural and political situations” (Lucas, 1996).  In other words, let them use the technology how they want and it will do their work.

Technology and the self: cyborg adornment.

Counter-Power and Cyberactivism: Burma 2007

Under the headline “Burmese authorities target citizen journalists,” the Democratic Voice of Burma reported in October 2007:“government authorities are initiating a media campaign targeting citizen journalists who took footage of government brutality during the recent protests in Rangoon and distributed it to foreign media, according to journalists and reporters in Burmaʼs former capital.” That the brutal military dictatorship of Burma would target individuals who upload and transmit unedited footage, suggests they recognize the power afforded to the cause of the pro-democracy protesters by simple user/producer uploaded content.

Davis (2004) argues that by creating a new “interface between the self, the other, and the world beyond,” new media technologies become a foundation for “the social construction of reality.” The ʻrealityʼ of the situation in Burma is a socially constructed reality, built up over time by the battles for power and counter-power in media space as much as those in physical space. Cyberactivism opens this space by providing a means for those with less power to share information and to communicate outside the media networks controlled by institutional power structures. This information sharing affords counter-power to individuals and enables a participatory flow of information as Kreimer (2001) describes:

Finally, the Web makes it possible to establish two-way linkages with potential sympathizers. Unlike the unidirectional nature of most mass media, websites, bulletin boards, chatrooms, and email are potentially interactive. Information can flow toward movement organizers as well as away from them. Every sympathizer or movement member becomes a potential reporter; the capacity of insurgent movements to expose local abuses multiplies.

In the case of Burma, the power of internet mediated communication is in the depth and scope of storytelling. Through the internet, people around the world were able to see and read what was going on in Burma from the perspective of those experiencing the crackdown. The importance of internet connectivity to the pro-democracy protestors was re-iterated by a post to the Burma blog burmamyanmargenocide.blogspot.com requesting that the United Nations, United States and United Kingdom embassies in Rangoon, Burma create wireless internet networks extending outside their buildings which pro-democracy protesters could use to covertly upload news, images and other information to the world community:

29 Sep 07, 11:30 – MyoThant: A group of 88-generation activists are urging UN and US & UK embassies in Rangoon to open a 1-page web service via WIFI access to general public just to submit news photos (with user name: 2007, pw: 2007). Please write to them to request this.

This request for a wireless network became necessary as the military dictatorship of Burma cut off internet access to the outside world, as reported by Forbes.com:

As violence began in Myanmar on Wednesday, protesters sent a steady stream of images and videos of the protests – often recorded with cellphones – to the Western media through electronic mail and Web sites including Yahoo’s Flickr, and YouTube. Bloggers had also chronicled the recent political unrest at sites like ko-htike.blogspot.com and burmesedayze.blogspot.com. Within the past 24 hours, however, that stream of messages has slowed to a trickle, as the government cut off all digital ties to the outside world.

In an interview I conducted during a protest at the United Nations Dr. Mala Htun, Professor of Political Science at the New School for Social Research, reiterated the importance of the internet and mobile technology to the pro-democracy movement, saying at the time:

Weʼre extremely concerned now that the government has cut off the internet connection of Burma to the outside world, theyʼve cut off mobile phone connections. So the only way we were getting news, since Burma has banned foreign journalists, the only way weʼve been getting news from Burma is through text messages, is through phone calls, is through the internet posted by ordinary citizens.

After hearing from them about the situation in Burma, I agreed to assist the expatriate Burmese community here in New York by filming their protest as they confronted the Foreign Minister of Burma after his speech to the U.N. general assembly. I uploaded the essential scenes of the protesters as they confronted the Burmese Foreign Minister to YouTube. I expected that some who had attended the event might view the video, but the vastness of the media landscape and the seeming impenetrability of the institutional modes of mass communication made me skeptical that my single video could have an impact. However, after just one day on YouTube, the video had been viewed over 6,200 times and was the “#26 Most Viewed” of the day and the “#66 Top Favorites” of the day in the category “News & Politics”. As of December of that year the video had been viewed by 22,427 individuals. The Democratic Voice of Burma, a radio and satellite television station in Norway that delivers media to the resistance movement in Burma contacted me and requested the footage which they then transmitted by satellite into Burma. Warf & Grimes (1997) discuss such counter-power applications of communication technologies:

A powerful counterhegemonic use of the Internet is the ability to communicate intersubjective knowledge – as much an attribute of hypertext as innate in the Internet. People from different places, with radically variant experiences, are able to convey a notion of what it is like to be them, to live their lives, via the Net. For example, the production side of the commodity chain no longer is shielded when one reads an essay, written by a shoe-factory worker, that describes conditions where Nike shoes are made. In an ideal situation these texts are written by the individuals who are involved, not by experts or elites, and are unfiltered.

And what about the digital divide? How does this affect access to this unfiltered, primary source reporting? Quoting a Pew study, Kreimer (2001) notes:

“Penetration of the Internet has already achieved the levels associated with radio in 1930 and television in 1955,” and the access divide is rapidly narrowing. Already, the American gap in Internet access between women and men, and between urban and rural residents, has vanished, and the rates of Internet connection among Hispanic and African Americans are rising more rapidly than the rates among the racial majority.

In addition, the ʻold mediaʼ now pick up and re-broadcast internet communication so that it reaches audiences through television, print and radio. An individual is unlikely to have satellite dishes, broadcasting stations, or the ability to reach tens of thousands of people – internet communication technologies afford this ability to communicate and allow individuals to participate and distribute information on a much larger scale. As barriers to accessing the internet are reduced by the increasing penetration of mobile phones with the ability to access the internet, these information technology tools of counter-power are becoming not only more accessible but vital to resistance.

A flip cam for every monk?

Resisting Institutional Power

Discussing economic boycotts as a strategy against the U.S. wars of imperialism, Arundhati Roy (2004) writes:

…already the Internet is buzzing with elaborate lists of American and British government products and companies that should be boycotted. These lists are being honed and refined by activists across the world. They could become a practical guide that directs and channels the amorphous but growing fury in the world. Suddenly, the “inevitability” of the project of corporate globalization is beginning to seem more than a little evitable.

Roy describes the state of ʻold mediaʼ in the Network Society as an “old buffalo” surrounded by a swarm of bees; the New Media. “The old buffalo is the text, the bees are the hyperlinks that deconstruct it. Click a bee, get inside the story.”

Internet mediated communication technologies are these bees, they are technologies of resistance in the face of the Network Society and the ʻold mediaʼ power grab for new forms of institutional power. When Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr. of the Iraq Veterans Against the War was assaulted by Capitol Police as he waited in line to witness the testimony of Gen. David H. Petraeus on the occupation of Iraq, the attack was captured on video by a witness with a camera-equipped mobile phone. The video was uploaded to YouTube and became one of the most viewed clips, registering millions of views. Speaking to an Anti-War demonstration in front of the white house in 2007, Rev. Yearwood referenced the incident and its implications for participatory technology in the network society when he proclaimed “The revolution may not be televised but it will be uploaded!”

Cyberactivists answer this call when they report on injustice, communicate dreams for future social justice, and when they upload, post, and resist.

But what about Ah Wei, the foxconn factory worker?  He continues building the tools that cyberactivists will use to document and upload.  When protesters coordinate by SMS, videotape an arrest or live blog a call for solidarity, they’re doing it on one of the iPhones that stained his hands black in the factory.  So who is Ah Wei to them, who is he to you and I?  Is he collateral damage in the war against the greater threat of hegemonic powers and the continuing rise of global capitalism?  Is he an unwilling soldier in a mock battle, making high-tech toys for spoiled kids playing revolutionary?  Are he and his fallen brothers and sisters martyrs in a struggle for the soul of humanity?  Or is he just another guy trying to survive and support his family? As I think about whether to replace my iPhone with another, or with any number of other products made in factories like this, I’ll be thinking about these questions, and about that man or woman working for 12 hours to make the device, who isn’t permitted to speak to the others working next to him.

ACTION: You can join a campaign to hold Apple accountable for the conditions in their manufacturer’s factories here.

UPDATE: The most recent reports suggest Foxconn will be closing their mainland China operations, putting as many as 800,000 out of work.  Do they think this is going to decrease the number of suicides?  There’s also an invigorated consumer drive for fair trade phones.  Labor unions are protesting Apple and Foxconn at technology trade shows and worker protests in China appear to be spreading with the Financial Times reporting that “workers keep themselves up to date on strike action via mobile phones and QQ, an instant messaging tool.”

Partial Cyberactivism Bibliography

Castells, M., The Power of Identity. 1997, Cambridge, Mass ; Oxford: Blackwell. xv, 461 p.

Castells, M., The Rise of the Network Society. 1996, Cambridge, MA ; Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. xvii, 556 p.

Castells, M., The Internet Galaxy : Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. 2001, Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press. xi, 292 p.

Davis, E., Techgnosis : Myth, Magic + Mysticism in the Age of Information. Updated ed. 2004, London: Serpent’s Tail. x, 435 p.

Dewey, John. 1934. A common faith. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Froehling, O., The Cyberspace “War of Ink and Internet” In Chiapas, Mexico. Geographical Review, 1997. 87(2): p. 291-307.

Haraway, D.J., Simians, Cyborgs, and Women : The Reinvention of Nature. 1991, London: Free Association Books. 287 p., [11] p. of plates.

Harvey, D., The Condition of Postmodernity : An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. 1989, Oxford, UK ; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. ix, 378.

Harvey, D., Social Justice and the City. Johns Hopkins Studies in Urban Affairs. 1973, [Baltimore]: Johns Hopkins University Press. 336 p.

Hayden, T. and Students for a Democratic Society (U.S.), The Port Huron Statement : The Visionary Call of the 1960s Revolution. 2005, New York [Berkeley, Calif.]: Thunder’s Mouth Press ; Distributed by Publishers Group West. 171 p.

Himanen, P. The Hacker Ethic, and the Spirit of the Information Age. 2001 [cited; 1st:[xvii, 232 p.].

Horses, M.T., Gathering around the Electronic Fire: Persistence and Resistance in Electronic Formats. Wicazo Sa Review, 1998. 13(2): p. 29-43.

Howe, C., Cyberspace Is No Place for Tribalism. Wicazo Sa Review, 1998. 13(2): p. 19-28.

James, W., The Varieties of Religious Experience : A Study in Human Nature. 1994 Modern Library ed. 2002, New York: Modern Library. xxi, 582 p.

Kreimer, S.F., Technologies of Protest: Insurgent Social Movements and the First Amendment in the Era of the Internet. University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 2001. 150(1): p. 119-171.

Lucas, A., Indigenous People in Cyberspace. Leonardo, 1996. 29(2): p. 101-108.

Rodan, G., The Internet and Political Control in Singapore. Political Science Quarterly, 1998. 113(1): p. 63-89.

Rosenzweig, R., Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet. The American Historical Review, 1998. 103(5): p. 1530-1552.

Roy, A., An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. 2004, Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press. 156 p.

Starrs, P.F., The Sacred, the Regional, and the Digital. Geographical Review, 1997. 87(2): p. 193-218.

Stone, A.R., The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. 1995, Cambridge, Mass. ; London: MIT Press. x, 212 p.

Tillich, P., Theology of Culture. 1959, New York,: Oxford University Press. ix, 213 p.

Tillich, P., The Courage to Be. 2nd ed. Yale Nota Bene. 2000, New Haven, [Conn.]: Yale University Press. xxxiii, 197 p.

Turkle, S., The Second Self : Computers and the Human Spirit. 1984, New York: Simon and Schuster. 362 p.

Warf, B. and J. Grimes, Counterhegemonic Discourses and the Internet. Geographical Review, 1997. 87(2): p. 259-274.

He describes his project as:

“about two types of religions, fictional religions and fiction based religions. By ‘fictional religions’ I understand religions, spiritualities and magic systems which are embedded in works of fiction, be that literature, films or TV series. Such fictional religions are transformed into ‘fiction based religions’ when certain fans form religious groups based on the concepts and rituals of the fictional religions. Examples of fiction based religions include Jediism which is based on the Jedi religion in George Lucas’ Star Wars movies, Church of All Worlds which is based on the church of the same name in Robert Heinlein’s science fiction classic Stranger in a Strange Land and the Church of Satan and Chaos Magickians inventing rituals invoking the monstrous gods from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Fiction based religions range from divinity directed religion to self-spirituality and from stern belief over playful experimenting to sarcastic anti-religiousity. Some religious groups base themselves almost solely on a fictional model, others blend impulses from fiction with influences from more conventional forms of religion and spirituality.”

I wonder if the worldviews in Dune are influencing any practices today?  I would expect to find references to Dune in neopaganism, just as we find frequent references to much of the science fiction/fantasy canon.  Also it’s hard to ignore Scientology which was founded by a science fiction writer.  I have yet to read James Lewis’s volume on Scientology, and wonder if he addresses this.  It would also be interesting to look at the effect of William Gibson’s writing on belief in cyberculture.

“The forms of knowledge that technologies mediate is integral to both a society’s cultural information pool, and to the extramental reality in which they live. Technology itself constitutes an alteration of that relationship — especially as it intervenes in the experiential aspects of that relationship . . . Technologies are in a sense ‘artifacts of knowledge’ (Laughlin 1988b) — they are alterations in material reality that, accompanied by meaning in peoples’ minds, facilitate intentional acts. As such technologies become part of the extramental reality in which we are embedded and to which we must adapt.” (p. 158)

“We would suggest that a society’s technical knowledge is precisely that aspect of their information pool that facilitates an alteration of the relationship between experience and extramental reality through the mediation of techniques and artifacts. In other words, technologies combine information from the culture pool (as meaning) with material and energy in extramental reality that have been purposefully altered in order to afford novel intentional acts.” (p. 159)

The McDonald’s “Talking Filet-O-Fish” commercial opens with a wide shot of a garage. A heavy, bearded man sits with a McDonald’s bag and drink on the table in front of him. He seems comfortable, content, and average as he holds a sandwich in his hand. When he takes a bite of the sandwich the shot cuts to a close up of a taxidermy fish mounted on a wooden plaque on the wall. The fish bends in half, making an hyperbolic mechanical sound, and looks right at the camera as it begins to sing:

“Gimme back that Filet-O-Fish.
Gimme that fish!”

As the fish continues, the camera cuts to back to the man who is shown bobbing his head with the tune and chewing on the sandwich. He is sitting on a weight lifting bench next to a motorcycle. The fish continues singing:

“Gimme back that Filet-O-Fish.
Gimme me that fish!”

Another man walks into the garage carrying a drill – perhaps returning it to his friend. He stops and looks with astonishment at the fish and then at his friend sitting on the bench eating the sandwich. The fish continues to sing:

“What if it were you hanging up on this wall?
If it were you in that sandwich,
you wouldn’t be laughing at all!”

Just as the fish sings, “If it were you in that sandwich,” the camera cuts to the man chewing. He looks at his friend and shrugs his shoulders. The camera cuts to a close up of the sandwich, a very small, plain looking “bun” contains a fried brown rectangle, a small corner of shiny “cheese” peeks out from two places and a few blobs of “tartar sauce” from the other sides. A narrator offers the viewer a suggestion: “Why not get your own crispy, golden Filet-O-Fish, especially now when you can get one with medium fries and an ice cold soft-drink for just three-ninety-nine.” During the narration of this offer, we’re shown close-ups of hands pulling French fries out of a McDonald’s container and dark brown fizzy soda pouring over a cup full of ice.

Most of this ad doesn’t display the product, the sandwich, and instead makes the unexpected admission that if the situation were reversed and the man had been killed to make a sandwich (or a wall mount), he wouldn’t find it all so amusing. The ad is full of symbolic references to masculinity; the weight bench, the beard, drill and a garage set up as a workshop. The man is seated on a weight bench, next to a motorcycle, but he is overweight and eating a sandwich from McDonald’s; something that is likely to only increase his obesity. He is surrounded by the accouterment of masculinity, his power doesn’t come from these tools, but from his decision to reward himself by enjoying this sandwich. He laughs and shrugs his shoulders at the mechanical fish who asks him to consider the plight of the dead animal he is consuming and by doing so he asserts his dominance over every other creature on earth. In the end, the ad suggests, it is your privilege to forget and enjoy even if you know the truth about where a product comes from.

In an article on the cult status the advertisement has achieved via sharing on YouTube, a journalist writes “They also needed a fish that wouldn’t put people off. A Los Angeles taxidermist created a pollock with a remote control device to operate his mouth and tail. The sandwich is made with cod as well as pollock, but that fish looked too scary” (Howard 2009). The senior copy writer at the agency who produced the ad, Peter Harvey, explains “We said, ‘Let’s make it a little more toy-like so it won’t scare people completely’” (Howard 2009). The terror of coming face to face with the creature that is being consumed is buffered by employing a more toy-like fish. The ad serves to mystify the process of production that results in these millions of inexpensive “fish sandwiches” at McDonald’s branches across the world.

Fast food advertising traditionally attempts to divorce the food from the animal and factory farm source and make it seem as though it had grown on trees (quite literally in the case of past McDonald’s efforts which have included artificial trees with plastic hamburgers growing on them in children’s play areas). In this case, however, McDonald’s alludes to the true source of the sandwich, fishing (massive, destructive overfishing in fact), but then turns the idea into a dark comedy, asking the viewer to laugh off the absurdity of how a complex organism like a fish (in this case an intelligent, singing one) could have become the “delicious” friend brown rectangle they are pushing into their mouths.

Works Referenced

Howard, Theresa. 2009. McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish ad makes a big splash. USA Today. April 5, 2009. Retrieved on May 16, 2009 from: http://www.usatoday.com/money/advertising/adtrack/2009-04-05-mcdonalds-singing-fish-ad_N.htm

Buffy: So not stellar, huh?
Willow: Talk. All talk. Blah Blah Gaia. Blah Blah Moon…menstrual life force power thingy. You know, after a coupla sessions I was hoping we could get into something real but . . .
Buffy: No actual witches in your witch group?
Willow: No. Bunch of wanna-blessed-bes. You know, nowadays every girl with a henna tattoo and a spice rack thinks she’s a sister of the Dark Ones.

The effect of films like “The Craft,” “Practical Magic,” and the television series “Charmed” and “Buffy…” is far reaching. Social networks, retail suppliers and bloggers adopt a posture either in favor of or opposed to these depictions and construct identities in line with or opposed to them. There seems to be very little terrain online that hasn’t been touched by “slayage.”

The religious traditions of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia were born on the banks of rivers. How did this alluvial geography contribute to their notions of death and the afterlife? In what ways did the rivers, cycle of the sun and other environmental phenomena help construct these ancient cultures view of the journey into the next world? To begin exploring this topic, I will examine a few texts from both cultures regarding rivers, water and boat journeys and attempt to understand the ways in which these bodies of water became a metaphor for the journey into the afterlife. We start with Egypt.

The “utterances” and instructions of The Pyramid Texts(1) describe the journey of deceased royalty into the afterlife. In Utterance 2141, the ka of the dead prepares to ascend “up to the place” where his “father abides.”(1) The direction of travel is ambiguous and seems to be both up into the sky and toward the west. Utterance 2171 describes a journey with Re-Atum across the underworld “united in the darkness.”(1) After travelling through the underworld, they “rise on the horizon”(1) together, the resurrection of the deceased coinciding with the daily re-emergence of the Sun. In Utterance 3641 the deceased is commanded to “Stand up now!”(1), he has been placed in the Sarcophagus, “Nut has embraced [him] in her name of ‘Sarcophagus’”(1) and his mouth has been opened. He has been brought back to life; more precisely he is reborn. The resurrection is complete, the ‘deceased’ will now “live and travel every day”(1) with the solar barque, rising in the east, crossing over the Nile and setting in the west. This journey after death recounted by The Pyramid Texts(1) reflects the bisection of Egypt by the Nile. The deceased goes west like the setting Sun, crosses the underworld and is then resurrected, rising in the east like the dawn, crossing the sky over the Nile and setting in the west again ad infinitum. The journey of the dead is also described in the pyramid texts as crossing the “river of heaven.”(1) Utterance 4731 describes a ferry launching from the east, “The ferries of heaven have been launched…Pepi will go forth on the east side of heaven where the gods are born.”(1) This supernatural travel by ferry echoes daily life on the Nile; the Sun setting and rising, boats traversing the river and the waters flooding and receding. The cyclical patterns of the sun rising and setting are reflected in both the journey of the deceased and the direction of travel leading to resurrection.

Models of boats were often included in the tombs of the deceased. As David explains, their purpose was “to allow the owner to travel to Abydos, the burial place of…Osiris.”(2) Since Abydos was a temporal city on the western bank of the Nile, this practice would suggest the Egyptians believed the boats of the dead travelled on the same river as boats carrying the living. The Nile was a numinous river, a waterway where the divine and the temporal merged, a boundary place where the barrier between worlds was lifted.

Egyptian texts describe other numinous bodies of water as thresholds of death and places affecting the worlds of both gods and mortals. Osiris was killed by Seth on the bank of a river.(1) In The Tale of Two Brothers(1), Pre-Harakhti causes a “great (gulf of) water” to come between the brothers so that “one of them came to be on one side and the other on the other side.”(1) In The Contendings of Horus and Seth(1) Pre-Harakhti employs water as a barrier between Seth and Isis when he sends Seth, Horus and the Ennead to an island, “You shall ferry across to the Island in the Middle and decide.”(1) The life-sustaining Nile was believed to have a supernatural source, as Assmann explains “From the Egyptian point of view, the Nile did not come from terrestrial regions somewhere to the south of Egypt, but rather from the netherworld.”(3) This belief that the life-giving Nile originated from the netherworld, a place of death, seems to be an example of Egyptian cosmology reflecting the balance of forces in the universe, the balance of ma’at. It seems fitting that a river of life and death could be navigated only by a supernatural being. Mahaf, the pilot of the ferry that carries the dead into the underworld, travels both ways and his ability to do so is reflected in his having two faces; one looking forward and one back.(4) Again an example of bisection and balance (ma’at). The supernatural rivers appear in Egyptian text as both barriers and meeting places between people, between worlds and between life and death.

Water also divides the temporal and divine worlds in Mesopotamian texts. In his search for immortality, Gilgamesh arrives at the end of the world and discovers an ocean.(5) The tavern-keeper/goddess warns him, “The crossing is perilous…once you have crossed the ocean, when you reach the Waters of Death, what then will you do?”(5) In two fragmentary tablets reportedly from a city on the Euphrates, the tavern-keeper/goddess also suggests that only the Sun god can cross the waters, “Who [but Shamash] can travel [that journey?].”(5) As in the Egyptian pyramid texts, the Mesopotamian myth suggests the Sun or Sun god is able to travel where others cannot.

In the Sumerian poem Bilgamesh and the Netherworld(5) the god Enki “set sail for the Netherworld” in a boat. In the same story, Enki asks the Sun god to bring Enkidu back as he rises, “When…you make an opening in the Netherworld, bring his servant up to him.”(5) As in the Egyptian texts, Bilgamesh and the Netherworld(5) describes resurrection from the world of death facilitated by the Sun god and reflecting the path of the solar cycle. Escape from the underworld is, however, not routine. In the Mesopotamian texts, the path to the underworld is recurrently described as “the road whose journey has no return.” For both gods and mortals, entering the Mesopotamian underworld meant crossing a boundary that altered the individual. In the story When Ishtar Went to the Netherworld(6), the underworld is a “land of n[o return]…/…house which none leaves who enters.”(6) As Ishtar enters the netherworld, she gives up articles of clothing and the accoutrement of her deity, she “removed the great tiara of her head…and removed the earrings of her ears…and removed the loincloth of her body.”(6) Ishtar’s disrobing suggests that she cannot bring her complete self into the netherworld. The gatekeepers explain, “Thus the rules of the mistress of the netherworld.” Ishtar’s power is muted by the netherworld and the consequences alter the temporal realm, “After the lady Ishtar [went down] to the netherworld, / The bull would not mount the cow. / The [young man would not impregnate] the girl.”(6) While she does face ritual undressing, Ishtar does not encounter a river as she descends into the netherworld. Instead, water serves to re-animate her, “Sprinkle Ishtar with water of life”(6) commands Ereshkigal. In the poem How Nergal Became King of the Netherworld,(6) Gaga, Namtar, and Nergal all enter and leave the Netherworld by way of a “long staircase of heaven.”(6) It seems as though crossing the river Hubur(6) to reach the underworld was a boundary intended primarily for deceased Mesopotamian mortals.

In The Babylonian Theodicy(6) crossing the river into the underworld is inevitable, “Of course our fathers pay passage to go death’s way, / I too will cross the river of the dead, / as is commanded from of old.”(6) The river of the underworld is personified in the Enuma Elish(6) as the goddess “Mother Hubur, who can form everything.”(6) Foster notes that Mother Hubur is an epithet of Mummu-Tiamat(6), presumably a combination of creative power/intelligence and the ocean goddess. The Babylonian epic of creation (Enuma Elish(6)) suggests the gruesome genesis of the river Hubur when Marduk prepares to arrange/create the cosmos by trampling “upon the frame of Tiamat” and crushing her skull with his “merciless mace”.(6) Marduk forms the rivers and seas from the body of Tiamat, “From her eyes he undammed the Euphr[ates] and Tigris…/…he caused the oceans to surge within her.”(6) He then creates the netherworld, “He set [half of] her as a roof, he established the netherworld.”(6) The spatial location of this netherworld is unclear, it appears to be below the half of Tiamat which Marduk establishes “as a roof.”(6) Bottéro, on the other hand, describes an “Infernal River” located far to the west across which lies the “realm of the dead”.(7) Comparable to the depiction of the Egyptian afterlife as both to the west and above, the Mesopotamian netherworld seems to be both west and below.

Rivers appear in the Mesopotamian text as sources of life, boundaries, paths to the underworld and also forces of destruction. In the Story of the Flood(6) the Igigi gods create the life giving rivers, “[Canals they opened, the] life of the land. / [they] […dug the Ti]gris river, / [And the Euphrates there] after.”(6) However, life-giving waters become deadly during the deluge, “the flood [came forth], / Its power came upon the peoples [like a battle].”(6) The water of the deluge seems to bring the netherworld up to the surfaceg as the bodies of the dead fill the flood waters, “Like rafts they lie against the e[dg]e, / Like rafts capsized they lie against the bank.”(6) The rivers and seas of the ancient near east were, presumably, the best route for travelling to remote places. The farthest journeys of the ancient world were made by boat. The cosmologies of these river faring civilizations reflect their dependence on the rivers. The textual descriptions of how the dead travel to the afterlife, an otherwise distant and inaccessible place, also reflect the reality of river dwelling peoples.

In addition to the influence of rivers on conceptions of the journey to the afterlife, the solar cycle seems to have played a significant role in situating the destination of the deceased. The Sun is a luminous and blinding object to behold; as it crosses the sky it affords sight, warmth and energy. The daily birth and death of the Sun and its journey across rivers might have been among humankind’s first perceptions of a cycle. It is easy to imagine pre-historic people correlating the diurnal birth and death of the Sun with our own seemingly miraculous awakening during birth and the sudden and irreversible inevitability of our passage into death. As the Sun travelled above the rivers of the near east and reached its zenith, perhaps it would even have appeared to burn both in the sky and within the river. Along with the distance to the Sun, the rivers of the ancient near east must have seemed impenetrable barriers. As recounted in the Egyptian Song of the Harper(1), the afterlife is a mysterious place from which none return:

There is no one who returns from beyond
That he may tell of their state,
That he may tell of their lot,
That he may set our hearts at ease
Until we make our journey
To the place where they have gone.(1)

What better metaphor for crossing into the mysterious afterlife than joining the sun on a journey across the rivers to a distant unknowable place. Following the Sun’s path and reflecting their transportation technology and cosmology, both the Egyptian and Mesopotamian texts describe the journey after death as crossing a river. Whether traversing the river of the heavens, the Hubur, the “Infernal River”(7) or travelling the Nile to Abydos, death in the ancient near east was a supernatural journey to another shore.

Works Referenced

1. Simpson, W.K. and R.K. Ritner, The Literature of Ancient Egypt : An
Anthology of Stories, Instructions, Stelae, Autobiographies, and Poetry.
3rd ed. 2003, New Haven, Conn. London: Yale University Press. xiii, 598
p.

2. David, A.R., Religion and Magic in Ancient Egypt. 2002, London ; New
York: Penguin Books. xvii, 487 , [32] of plates.

3. Assmann, J., The Search for God in Ancient Egypt. 1st English-language
ed. 2001, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. xi, 275.

4. Griffith, R.D., Sailing to Elysium: Menelaus’ Afterlife (“Odyssey” 4.561-569)
and Egyptian Religion. The Phoenix, 2001. 55(3/4): p. 213-243.

5. George, A., The Epic of Gilgamesh : The Babylonian Epic Poem and
Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian. 2003, London: Penguin. liv, 228 p.

6. Foster, B.R., From Distant Days : Myths, Tales, and Poetry of Ancient
Mesopotamia. 1995, Bethesda, Md.: CDL Press. vi, 438 p.

7. Bottéro, J., Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia. 2004, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press. x, 246 p.

1. Contemporary anthropology of religion sympathizes with the “practicalities” (William James’s word) of religious experience: religion on the ground, in the populace, and the tensions felt there between official, institutional notions and the polytheistic, even inclusive atmosphere of majority religious life. This is partially a result of anthropology’s historical emphasis on “non-literate,” “primitive” religious life, i.e., religion that does not resemble Western European Christianity and/or Judaism in any apparent way. Anthropology of religion thus tends to emphasize the local particularities of religious life–spirit worship, saint cults, possession–as opposed to the idealizations of religious specialists, world renunciants, or sophisticated religious ethics and scholasticism

2. Contemporary anthropology of religion is methodologically and theoretically diverse. Because anthropological subdisciplines share common intellectual roots, there are as many ways of doing anthropology of religion as there are of doing any other sort. Followers of Durkheim, Weber, Marxists, Freudians, structuralists, structural-functionalists, and those influenced by more recent theorists, have found–and still find–their own ways of interpreting religion.

3. Contemporary anthropology of religion attempts to overcome the prejudicial, Western-biased understandings of religion found in flawed but still valuable works such as those by Evans-Pritchard, Malinowski, Tylor, and Levi-Strauss. In the sixties, their concrete and totalizing definitions of religion began to be replaced by more fluid, contingent working definitions. Clifford Geertz, for example, understand religion to be a system of symbols that are uniquely realistic to practitioners in various ways. Melford Spiro, on the other hand, as an answer to Durkheim specifically, convincingly reduced religion to those acts and experiences that involve dealings with the superhuman. Both of these have been under fire for some years, though both maintain their utility

4. Finally, and most anthropologically, I believe, contemporary anthropology of religion emphasizes place. Place is what, in fact, sets anthropology of religion apart from “religious studies” and is also, perhaps, the greatest contribution of the anthropology of religion to contemporary religious studies. Anthropologists of religion in anthropology and in religious studies have consistently articulated a deep knowledge of place as an antidote to the sometimes facile, superficial approach of “comparative religion.”

Practicing the comprehension of alternative imaginative universes is, therefore, the ultimate preparation for cultural anthropology. Enter speculative fiction, mythology, fantasy and role play.

It’s worth noting something about Geertz’s idea of religion:

“A system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”

(Kunin, Seth D. “Religion; the modern theories” University of Edinburgh 2003)