Tuesday, May 06, 2003

 
From the Pan-African News Wire, an interview with Assata Shakur:



In the United States there needs to be a complete and profound change in the system of so called
democracy. It's really a "dollarocracy." Which millionaire
is going to get elected? Can you imagine if you went to a
restaurant and the only thing on the menu was dried turd or
dead fungus. That's not appetizing. I feel the same way
about the political spectrum in the U.S. What exists now has
got to go.
posted by Open Mouth 1:07 AM

Monday, May 05, 2003

 
More than just Genet's experiences of Palestine, Prisoner of Love traces his lines of thinking:



1. "All the Palestinians' activities were like the Obon feast, where the only thing that was absent, that could not appear, was what the ceremony, however lacking in solemnity, was in aid of." (30)

2. In speaking of the theatricality of the Black Panthers movement, " 'Power may be at the end of a gun,' but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun." (98)


He claims that he didn't even bring pen and paper to take notes while in Palestine; he only went to look and learn. These memories, however, have impressed them upon him so much that he can recreate them twenty years ago. Will there ever be something that will touch me, scar me so deeply?
posted by Open Mouth 1:57 AM

Sunday, May 04, 2003

 
Robert P. Weller, “Living at the Edge: Religion, Capitalism, and the End of the Nation-State in Taiwan,” Public Culture (Durham: Duke UP, 2000) 12 (2): 477-498.



A "good" anthropologist, Weller describes and contextualizes sets of cultural phenomena in history and politics. Each of his paragraphs always draws towards an explanation, pinning down the "whys" of culture. Such questions seem to prefigure his text, as though the questions first approached him, being the point of departure for good anthropologists and good grant-writers.



Pursuing all cultural phenomena to answer the questions of "Why this? Why now?," Weller is the ultra-detective, giving good theoretical and historical explanations to mysterious or even mundane events. In calling up these theories of identity formation during times of uncertainty, Weller gives in to the myths of anthropology: "ghosts symbolize improper deaths" (482), "ghosts relish living at the edge...the sects react against it" (490), or even the localizing uniqueness of "the movements I have discussed are not simple continuations of earlier religious ideas, even though each one has direct precursors, etc" (496).



I wish to depart from that style. Something about it sickens me, as though one were trying to make all world phenomena similar but inflected differently in a local setting, unique but with parities.



Works Cited of Interest



Market Cultures: Society and Morality in the New Asian Capitalisms, 1998

The ther Taiwan: 1945 to the Present, 1994

Robert P. Weller, "Matricidal Magistrates and Gambling Gods: Weak States and Strong Spirits in China," Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 33 (1995): 107-124.

Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768, 1990

Jean and John L. Comaroff, "Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony," American Ethnologist 26 (1999): 279-301.
posted by Open Mouth 12:31 AM