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Mike Davis: slums and refusal
In Planet of Slums Mike Davis writes:
the future of human solidarity depends upon the militant refusal of the new urban poor to accept their marginality within global capitalism.
The book, an extension of Davis's earlier New Left Review article, documents the horrors of a world with over 900 million slum dwellers, the world wrought by neoliberalism. As I read it, the book also puts the so-called war in terror in sharp relief as a new global class war, one fought to protect the way of life of those who can afford cars, gas, movies, water, reasonably secure housing.
In this connection, the refusal takes on a rather different light than other versions we've recently discussed. Davis recognizes the mystification involved in trying to install in slum dwellers the perennial Marxist hope for historical agency. He considers it equally if not more plausible that slum dwellers will continue to eat each other alive in the Darwininan struggle for survival unleashed by the IMF, World Bank, and their structural adjustment policies. In fact, viewed from the perspective of the slums, refusal may well be a refusal of a whole variety of norms and ways of thinking associated with a particularly Western version of modernity--specific modes of reason and science. This rejection makes perfect sense, appearing, we might say, as "modernity for itself": the rejection of a way of thinking and being brought about by global neoliberal capitalism and its fundamental inequalities.
Davis writes:
This refusal may take atavistic as well as avant-garde forms: the repeal of modernity as well as attempts to recover its repressed promises. It should not be surprising that some poor youth on the outskirts of Istanbul, Cairo, Casablana, or Paris embrace the religious nihilism of al Salafia Jihadia and rejoice in the destrucdtion of an alien modernity's most overwheening symbols. Or that millions of others turn to the urban subsistence economies operated by street gangs, narcotraficantes, militias, and sectarian political organizations. The demonizing rhetorics of the various international 'wars' on terrorism, drugs, and crime are so much semantic apartheid: they construct epistemological walls around gecekondus, favelas, and chawls that disable any honest debate about the daily violence of economic exclusion.
By Jodi | March 29, 2006 in Neoliberalism | Permalink
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Comments
I've deeply appreciated Davis' other work, and I've been looking forward to this one, but having already read the book, do you agree with the reviewer at amazon who wrote
"There is virtually no firsthand observation in the entire text. I have no idea why this is. Surely as part of the research he visited some slums? As a result, slum dwellers almost never speak in the course of the book (I can think of two exceptions, one actually being a fictional character, the other drawn from someone else's ethnographic research)."
Usually when there is no agency in an academic text, it is because of a lack of research, rather than something lacking in people. What sources does he use?
Posted by: hollowentry | Mar 29, 2006 1:59:13 PM
The book is primarily a synthesis of academic research and research compiled in UN, World Bank, and NGO. Davis relies heavily on (and specifically mentions in the acknowledges) Jan Bremen's The Laboring Poor in India (Oxford 2003) amd Jeremy Seabrook (In the Cities of the South). He is very critical of the optimistic 'boot strap' vision of Hernando de Soto. So, a key component of Davis's approach is to demystify what some have interpreted as agency in slums. He is also highly critical of NGOs as they have bureaucratized and deradicalized urban social movements.
'First hand' reports appear in Davis's book only 'second hand'--that is, as cited from someone else's research.
In my view, the fact that slum dwellers don't speak in this book is not a problem. Why? Because the book is a broad synthesis designed to give an overview of a massive problem and to tell us the cause of this problem: neoliberalism. And this is an important contribution, bringing together in a readable form a large variety of studies, situating them within a larger history of urbanism, considering the environmental components, and showing how the US military is now planning to deal with urban slums--mnilitarily.
Posted by: Jodi | Mar 29, 2006 3:26:34 PM
This site might be of interest regarding this post.
Posted by: Keith | Mar 29, 2006 3:27:30 PM
semantic apartheid
That may be. But I still maintain that Bush's latest "philosophic" turn, taking obvious cues from Long Sunday, in which he speaks of "spreading more light"...though most ably summed up in the heart-felt slogan, "freedom is universal," -effectively means that anyone who champions Enlightenment, and however fresh, should be lined up as a neocon (or platitudinous liberal, they amount to much the same). It's just that simple, folks. The Enlightenment has recognized in Bush its final everlasting face, and it is breathtakingly stupid (even with it's Nietzschian umbrella of stupidity increasingly removed).
Posted by: Matt | Mar 29, 2006 3:29:55 PM
Matt--I have no idea what you are saying.
Posted by: Jodi | Mar 29, 2006 3:32:32 PM
I'm looking forward to reading it. Thanks for the information.
Posted by: hollowentry | Mar 29, 2006 3:34:32 PM
Jodi, forgive me for stooping to tired sarcasm. V. much liked this post.
Keith, that's a brilliant link there.
Posted by: Matt | Mar 29, 2006 3:40:02 PM
Can I clarify something?
So, there's "mystification involved in trying to install in slum dwellers the perennial Marxist hope for historical agency", but the problem is with "exclusion"?
Does this mean that slum dwellers should be included - in what? - so as to be able to assume this task of historical agency? Or is he/you arguing something else?
Casting the problem as one of exclusion sounds like the predominating NGO version of orthodox marxism - the lumpen being rather poor revolutionary agents by comparison to the 'included' proletarians, etc ...
Which is to say, isn't there some mystification involved in trying to install the perennial Marxist hope for historical agency in anyone? What's so particular about slum dwellers?
Posted by: s0metim3s | Mar 29, 2006 4:24:19 PM
Angela,
I'm not sure I follow your point. Davis isn't investing 'historical agency' in anybody. So, the point is not that they are somehow excluded from historical agency present elsewhere. Rather, the point is that neoliberalism is based on the radical and dramatic exclusion of the majority of the people in the world from the wealth or riches that this economic form generates. Additionally, this exclusion is manifest semantically (as semantic apartheid)as well as geographically in the brutal expulsion of poor people from cities (the dominant model everywhere but the US) as well as in the militarily defended enclaves (gated communities) of wealthy elites across the globe.
Posted by: Jodi | Mar 29, 2006 4:40:54 PM
It was the way that you phrased the introduction that I found confusing.
In this connection, the refusal takes on a rather different light than other versions we've recently discussed. Davis recognizes the mystification involved in trying to install in slum dwellers the perennial Marxist hope for historical agency.
But is there a kind of capitalism, other than neoliberalism, that would not result in the exclusion of the majority of the world's population from the wealth generated? I'm guessing Davis would say 'no', based on his previous work, but that's not apparent in what you've said, or maybe he's changed his mind. So, I'm wondering whether Davis actually gets around to dispensing with that, even as he obviously might be using the language of 'inclusion-exclusion' to talk to NGO types.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Mar 29, 2006 5:06:52 PM
Angela,
Davis's polemic is against neoliberalism in particular because of the particular harms it has wrought as the explicit policy of the World Bank and IMF and in the form of SAPs. The extremity of the devastation wrought by these policies is apparent in changes in conditions across the globe since the late 1970s. The horror story of Kinshasa, for example, can be linked explicitly to the interactions between lending, Mobuto, and the extraction of payment for the debt from the people of Congo-Zaire. Davis takes care to link the current devastation with the slum conditions of the Victorian period (particularly in London and Dublin). In that sense, the argument extends to earlier industrial capital. At the same time, this book is not an explicit condemnation of, say, Keynesian or the capitalism of the welfare state. Interesting in this regard is the way that Davis links the end of the Cold War to the problem: once the US was not competing with the USSR for the hearts and minds of people in the so-called third world, even the semblance of some kind of social concern withered away.
Posted by: Jodi | Mar 29, 2006 6:32:39 PM
Posted by: Keith | Mar 29, 2006 7:52:58 PM
Is this the new axis of class struggle??? Or, is the symbolic class inherently split??? Can the progressive part of the symbolic class form a coalition with the slum-dwellers??? Will the new forms of social awareness emerging from the slum collectives (?) be the seeds of the future??? Or do we prefer not to???
Lets get slumming people!! Ooh my symbolic class arrogance!!! How can you know what its like!?! God, I feel like Jack Nicolson in "Reds"!!!
Posted by: Amish Lovelock | Mar 29, 2006 8:45:10 PM
Or, is this the place where Zizek's ambiguity towards "the West" can now come full force against modernity itself? (a la Laclau's comments in the Contingency book)
Posted by: Amish Lovelock | Mar 29, 2006 8:48:37 PM
I don't know. I found this stuff not to have much of relation to reality.
First of all, to speak of 'slums' as having this or that, or failing to have this or that agency or integration is a bit like saying villages will do something or other in the next century. Well, yes they will. But it's a totally absurd unit of analysis. There are radically different things that get lumped togeter as slums.
Secondly, while this is not always true, places like the favela are often intensely organized. There are multiple competing projects of community in there, by this I mean people have different ideas of how to integrate the local community, how to relate to the state,etc... And the possibility that there will be no community at all is very real: and terrifying. In a well established favela like Rocinha in Rio, there used to be a strong three corned fight between Communidades de Base (community orgs proper), organized crime and the state, with unclera alliances. It's kind of besides the point to talk about 'oh,will it integrate into capitalism, and how?' - duh, these things are capitalist through and through, the impulse towards integration doesn't come from some NGO, it comes from people not wanting to get shot at all the time.
Thirdly, you might like to say that lumpens are just as worthy political agents as 'integrated' proles, but (a) there is as a rule quite a lot of class struture within the favela, so the lumpens get fucked by favela bosses and whoever else has food and security (b)there is a basic, physiological reality that you simply will not be able to do anything if you don't get your food. Favela lumpens operate at that level. They might have an enormouns amount of hatred for the situation and even an understanding of what should be done, but first, the must eat, and then they must eat: because they didn't eat the first time... Some of my family used to live in the Cidade de Deus think it is hard to describe, Angela, just how bad things can get. Not the violence, like in that bullshit film, but the crushing poverty. You don't walk over dead people in Melbourne.
Fourthly, while the IMF and WB are certainly responsible for making the situation worse, the real problem is the consensus of neoliberalism by third world elites. I think it is absurd to deny this consensus doesn't make things worse than they should be. True, we may want to have something entirely other than capitalism, but that's empty rhetoric; if you can make that into a real option, be my guest. I want to know how. I absolutely insist on hearing it before abandoning a commitment to weak, bullshit, but partially effective reforms. Essentially reformist, though antagonistic movements like the MSST - the 'roofless' worker movement, which squats entire city blocks in Brazil - and has links to the rural workers movement: these can actually alleviate the situation considerably. Same goes for the Communidades the Base and Associacoes de Moradores, or even some of the churches. Less commitment to fiscal austerity and less demented industrial development policy could make a huge difference, as can governments that are friendlier to such organizations. Drug reform is another obvious area of action.
Personally, I very much doubt that giving people Marxism will help. But this business of 'integration' isn't a joke. People get disciplined, ok, that's awful - but otherwise they die or get ground into the kind of human dirt I sincerely wish I had never seen. We can abhor this situation, but how to overcome it? Autarchical crime, in Sao Paulo and Rio can become so well developed that it becomes a shadow state, complete with a welfare net, de facto taxes, regularly looted shopping malls, harsh, abritrary 'justice' and so on. But, and here we should be good Marxists, it is totally parasitical system, devoid of production: it is centered on the distribution of drugs, violence and favour. Put basically, there is no way that can support itself. And that being so, integration is a moot point.
If you look at who organizes in such contexts and how, it (a) not lumpens, like I said, you just have no idea just how lumpen lumpen gets (b) not crime, which is busy running a mirror image of bourgeois society (c) not the formal state, which basically has little meaning, rather it is (d) annoying NGO types, christians, marxists, workers and other participants in the grey or formal economy (as distinct from crime). Basically, that's the reality of a place like Rio. Now, if you want to tell (d) to stop doing what they are doing, you better have an explanation of how (a) eats, (b) gets controlled and (c) stays the fuck out. Failing that, we're just posturing.
Posted by: tco | Mar 29, 2006 9:00:03 PM
Jodi,
While I've not read the book (so I don't know if it's Davis or your take) some things here strike me as really problematic.
I agree that neoliberalism is class war waged for the benefit of a few, but I pause at the invocation of "those who can afford cars, gas, movies, water, reasonably secure housing." Who do you have in mind? Do you mean this as 'superprofits extracted via imperialism used to buy off Western workers'? If, so I stridently disagree. If not, what do you mean?
I think phrases like "refusal of a whole variety of norms and ways of thinking associated with a particularly Western version of modernity--specific modes of reason and science" sound distressingly close to a eurocentric account of reason and science, particularly when reason and science are linked in your post to capitalist globalization and neoliberalism and when the refusal thereof is linked to
people "eat[ing] each other alive in the Darwininan struggle for survival unleashed by the IMF, World Bank, and their structural adjustment policies." The cannibal metaphor also makes me nervous, as it has a long and storied legacy in racist discourse.
I don't think you mean that reason and science are the property of (derivative of) 'The West' or the capitalists, but it's hard not to read your post that way. What do you mean?
When you say "a key component of Davis's approach is to demystify what some have interpreted as agency in slums" does this mean certain phenomena that have been attributed political content (analogous to cultural studies and left theory claims that activty by TV sitcom viewers and philosophy lecture hall attendee are political contestation) aren't actually instances of agency, or does this mean that the slum is held to be a site incapable of agency?
To my mind, reading documents like you said Davis reads would require an interpretive approach wherein the neoliberals' talk about slumdwellers as not (potentially) agents in the process of acting upon slumdwellers in ways that seek to pre-empt their agency and attack existent forms thereof. One way to develop such a sensibility would be to do the type of research Hollowentry asks after, or to read written documents wherein some slumdwellers speak for themselves. There may be others too. Without something like that, though, I don't see how one could avoid repeating the lack of agency in responding to the situation.
Best regards,
Nate
Posted by: Nate | Mar 29, 2006 9:02:10 PM
Jodi,
Thanks for steering me to the Planet of Slums article in the New Left Review. I’ll have to read the book soon.
Davis uses the right methodology by reviewing sophisticated studies such as the U. N. Slums study. The arithmetic is startling and overwhelming. He nails the case against neoliberalism and what its policies have done to create the mega-slums.
I see the point of calling the slum inhabitants turn toward religion a refusal of capitalism and socialism. But it strains the meaning of refusal in the sense it has been discussed at Long Sunday. As Davis points out, the people in the mega-slums work, if at all, in an informal economy divorced from the formal economy. The goal of that economy is daily survival. The only thing they have left to refuse is life.
Any outside western attempt, for whatever cause or reason, to organize the inhabitants of the slums for political action is wasted and misguided energy. Those living in the wealthy west should spend that energy overthrowing the Washington Consensus—a positive start. The Washington Consensus is, after all, us. If we can’t do anything about neoliberalism, then maybe the only hope for the slums is that religious sects continue with their work alleviating as much suffering as they can.
I’m not saying this because I think you have staked out a position contrary to it.
Posted by: Lynn | Mar 29, 2006 11:30:04 PM
How did the question get reduced to "a commitment to weak, bullshit, but partially effective reforms" versus an all-or-nothing assault on capitalism?
The relation between the two can be widely vary in any given instance, but I think it's pretty clear the weakness of the former is contingent on the weakness of the latter, ie., assuming it's not gestural. The 'reform v revolution' thing is not something I have much time for, because it functions largely as a form of political blackmail, and from both sides of the declamation. Either one is 'getting on with the real work' or one is 'virtuously revolutionary'.
But my problem here wasn't about whether the NGOs are reformist. It's that a critique of neoliberalism, with the motif of inclusion-exclusion in tow, is either/both a homage to the nation-state contra capital (which falls apart on any historical, practical account), or some fantasy of a future in which everyone is universally included and/or its ostensible post-fordist loss.
It's indisputable that the scale of the devastation is mindblowingly awful in parts of the world. But that doesn't mean narratives of inclusion-exclusion come close to either explaining why or how this has occured, or indeed offering a way out.
But thanks Jodi, because I was prompting for something like this:
Interesting in this regard is the way that Davis links the end of the Cold War to the problem: once the US was not competing with the USSR for the hearts and minds of people in the so-called third world, even the semblance of some kind of social concern withered away.
Because if this, and the calling in of debts accumulated during the post-WWII period (among other things), shifts the material terms upon which 'inclusion' was conducted, then given those conditions don't prevail, calls for greater 'inclusion' of the 'marginalised', really are the empty gesture.
It's no coincidence that in a post-1989 climate there has been a turn, from Agamben to Barchiesi and in their different ways, to refuting the sense in which inclusion-exclusion might be thought of as polar opposites.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Mar 29, 2006 11:57:18 PM
"How did the question get reduced to "a commitment to weak, bullshit, but partially effective reforms" versus an all-or-nothing assault on capitalism?"
I though that was implicit in your previous post. No matter.
My point is that while NGOs demand inclusion and god knows what else, there are people in Favelas who also demand it. They demand it with vengeance, to put it exactly. For the linguistically flexible, http://br.news.yahoo.com/060329/11/137r6.html
So I feel this is a lot like the security vs flexibility debate - we're talking about nearly meaningless ideological categories. The real action is in the distribution of power. If 'inclusion' means people get fed and therefore have non-zero power, that's important, even if, say, the food comes from USAid. At least now people can stop to think about how fucked the situation is, instead of having smartarses think it for them. Really, that's the level we are talking about when glossing over 'lumpens' in Brazil or Africa, and it is the reason why, though it is despicable bullshit, Fome Zero or planet NGO is not to be written off entirely. It's no fun to be the homo sacer.
You know, I find the Cold War to be a completely meaningless term of reference for this debate, but then again, I am Brazilian, so what do I know. Nixon floating the dollar, yes; the Volcker shock, yep; Seattle 99, definitely; but the Berlin Wall... I think that was some kind of samba.
If you think about it, the classic dependentists - ironically enough, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the earlier Frank - were exactly theorists of exclusion-in-inclusion.
Posted by: tco | Mar 30, 2006 1:24:48 AM
Interesting conversations in here, may I make a few suggestions? You do not have to go to other countries to get the "slum experience," you can just waltz down to your local slum.
It is easy to throw stones at any writing, the act can be a type of catharsis to insulate yourself from harsh reality - or a defense mechanism to absolve yourself from any redemptive activity. Like I said, just go to your local slum, here you will find the abandonment of the priviledged ones. Go tell them to pull themselves up when they have no means, or to educate themselves in their woefully inadequate schools. Get a real time education.
If you have the means, go to other parts of the world and observe how global corporations have removed entire villages to suck dry resources. Try the Phillipines, where the timber has been stripped from rain forest areas so that the climate rapes the land.
Go to those make shift villages that have been raised by those driven from their ancestoral agricultural land, or sea front land. See how they are "gainfully employed," by the global corporations (sarcasm) - find out how they learned new forms of employment like prostitution, or drugs, or sexual slavery. Ask them where all the money that was made from these global corporations has been invested.
You could go to Puerto Rico, and try to take a dip in the water where the global refineries are - I hope you have a good health care plan! You can drop a badly tarnished penny in the water and about an hour later it comes out shiny and new looking. Go ask the people who pepper large areas with houses made from tin and cardboard how it is to have a nice corporate job in those refineries, they will look at you mistified - perhaps they will point to the other side of a fenced off area, where you will see lavish homes and they might say "go ask those people over there."
If you really have some extra cash go to the former Soviet Union, it won't take long to find those really run down areas. Ask them how they benefitted from Gorbachev's Galstnos. Maybe they will take the time to tell you how everything was privatized, and that after the selling off of assets the money was not reinvested, but spirited off to foreign bank accounts - and how they survive from day to day.
A while back, when I was a young boy, I lived in what you would term a slum area. One day an old man who was an immigrant from Africa told me a story. He pointed to a really tricked out truck, that had large chrome bumpers on it. He asked me, "do you know where that chrome came from?" I replied that I didn't know. So he began to tell me about those wonderful global mining companies, that would go to isolated villages. They would lure the young men to the mines talking about all the money they would make, how it would help their barely subsisting families. What happened after that was tragic - they would go to these mines, some of them would reach temperatures well over a hundred degrees. They would work, until there was the inevitable cave in that killed them (no worker safety - imagine that), or they would die from heat exhaustion as their empolyers/slave masters would work them to death - somehow the money never reached the widows and orphaned children. Than he said "there is the blood of men on those bumpers." I never forgot that, it made an impression on me from young childhood.
I think you are probably getting the drift of what I am talking about. In those other countries, the elite are smart enough to set up an aristocracy, so they do not have to bother with the pesky masses. Or, it could be like the States, where there is a shrinking middle class - so that when they are thrown crumbs it looks like cake to them.
You could take a trip to Washingtom DC, visit the Pentagon, and ask a ranking officer why we have over 700 bases all over the world. He might take you aside (like one did me), and blow smoke up your arse saying "why we defend democracy all over the world".
I think I have said enough, go get some "real time" experience.
Posted by: Virgil Johnson | Mar 30, 2006 1:28:43 AM
Wow, I must say. Just reading this comment in perfect isolation, I salute the author, and can't imagine to whom it could possibly be addressed.
Posted by: Matt | Mar 30, 2006 1:36:30 AM
In the same way that class is not about bellies hanging over blue jeans, pony tails and 6 packs, could we say that being a slum dweller is not about saying one used to live there?
Posted by: Amish Lovelock | Mar 30, 2006 8:17:04 AM
Nate--
1. evocation of 'cars, gas, movies' was not a diss at workers but a way of designating the 'our way of life' invoked by those who push the so-called war on terror.
2. refusal of norms of thinking associated with Western modes of reason and science was specific: Western modes as opposed to modes; so, yes, the Western modes are linked to neoliberalism and are part of what is being rejected.
3. Eating each other alive is the rejection of those who celebrate competition in the slums rather than seeing it for the horrible struggle to survive that it is. The cannibal metaphor was deliberate: an unnatural result of neoliberalism (like the emergence of the disease kuru in the wake of colonialism in Fiji (I think).
4. the bit on agency: again, part of rejection of de Soto and the overall bootstrapping entrepreneuralism discussion of slums. So, doesn't mean that there is no possible political agency or otherwise. Does mean that those who look at slums in terms of a bunch of worker bees are seriously wrong and underestimating the horrors there; also means (as I read it) that Davis is being sure not to introduce slum dwellers as some kind of utopian saviours as with some marxist or progressive fantasies.
TCO: Davis is clear on the diversity among slums as well as on the structures within slums, the way that some people within and without slums make money on slums, the emerging slums within slums, the difference between slums in places with old building and those built from refuse in swamps, etc.
He also emphasizes the way that elites in the so-called third world have signed on to neoliberalism, reap the benefits, and build for themselves gated communities that they protect with guards, electric fences, even explosives.
Also, Nate: Davis is critical of approaches to slums that emphasize economic agency there as if this solves the problem or is a sign of hope. He isn't criticizing neoliberalism on grounds that somehow it doesn't see agency where it should (as if this would be sensical). So, he sees tons of activity and struggles to survive, all sorts of players--criminal, religious, charitable, NGO, etc--milling around but these are not grappling at all with the larger structural problems.
Posted by: Jodi | Mar 30, 2006 8:25:19 AM
hi Jodi,
Thanks for clarifying and for your patience. No substantial disagreements on those issues now. One other question: does Davis propose any responses, whether directed in policy, toward nonpolicy actors outside slums, or toward folk in slums? If so, what are they? If no, what's your take on the role of agency in slums to responses to the problem? Put differently, in terms of an earlier comment of yours, would the formulation of responses be a process wherein slumdwellers should speak, should not speak, or it doesn't matter whether they speak?
best,
Nate
Posted by: Nate | Mar 30, 2006 9:59:51 PM
Nate,
Davis doesn't suggest any responses. You give then a list of other possibilities: should "the formulation of responses be a process wherein slumdwellers should speak, should not speak, or it doesn't matter whether they speak?" I think that activists and citizens in countries that influence the World Bank and IMF should oppose neoliberal market economics. I think that US citizens should oppose military aggression. Both of these structural matters have a heavy impact on the lives of many of the poorest people living in or migrating into urban environments with already depleted/incompacitated infrastructures.
One of the challenges of Davis's book is its exposure of so many disastrous results of 'reform' or do-gooderism. Such 'reforms' have tended to involve razing slums to make way for tourists. Other 'reforms' try to provide housing, but so far away from urban centers where people are employed that they are useless. I don't agree with a rights approach on this (why bother? there aren't useful/beneficial ways to enforce rights). Overall, I think that eliminating third world date, building and invigorating public sector provisions, trade restrictions that can move struggling economies away from production for export, might be ways to start. These are structural appproaches that address the conditions that have hastened the recent rapid urbanization.
On the ground: it's not a matter of should slumdwellers speak. They speak. They are speaking. And they speak in lots of different voices with lots of different interests: pentecostalists, criminals, families, many woman-headed household units. extended family units, many with TB or HIV, some who rent space to others at exorbitant prices but that's how they survive, elected heads of groups and areas, people connected with NGOs, etc. I don't think 900 million people are not speaking. Nor do I think they speak with the same or even necessarily similar voices. They have different needs and concerns--one example here, I recently read a report from research in a Tanzanian refugee camp. One anecdote spoke of improvements in the supply of fresh water and a new water pipe in one area of the camp that made it so women didn't have to walk several miles to pick up water. Interestingly, there was quite a bit of complaining from women afterwards: meeting at the well was a key moment of sociality and crucial to information flow in the camp (where, not surprisingly, no one trusted any 'official' information).
Posted by: Jodi | Mar 31, 2006 8:54:04 AM
"3. Eating each other alive is the rejection of those who celebrate competition in the slums rather than seeing it for the horrible struggle to survive that it is. The cannibal metaphor was deliberate: an unnatural result of neoliberalism (like the emergence of the disease kuru in the wake of colonialism in Fiji (I think)."
Actually, Kuru is a disease that was endemic in certain parts of New Guinea, not Fiji. It was first idenfied amongst the Fore people of the Easteren Highlands. There is some debate about whether or not the disease was transmitted by cannibalism, but the presencce of kuru before colonialism amongst the Fore is completely beyond doubt. The disease is similar to Bovine Spongiform Ecephalopathy, which has been shown to be transmitted by the consumption of infected meat. Rates dropped markedly after 'pacification' and the suppresion of anthropophagy. I would also say that the chances that cannibalism was not widespread in Melanesia (and elsewhere) in pre-colonial days is virtually zero.
I study the area in great detail. If someone suggested that there had been no cannibalism in Melanesia, I would demand the sort of evidence someone might demand of a person who suggested there had been no agriculture in Europe in 12th century.
It should probably be said, though, that 'eating oneself' is exactly what actually existing cannibalism was not, at least in Melanesia. Maybe this is different in other places, I don't know enough. But in Melanesia, eating oneself is a big no no. One anthropologist who cut his finger chopping some sugar cane and immediately sucked on it was met by a horrified crowd - they could not believe what he was doing. It was entirely disgusting. Similarly, one does not eat one's own pigs, and compensation payments must generally be distributed. So too with human flesh.
Otherwise, I agree with the suggestions that activists in the first world should pressure their governments on the IMF and WB, also on patents, privatization of services and trade protection. These things do immense, unecessary harm to third world countries. This is especially the case with respect to Africa and places like the Pacific, where the influence of the first world is decisive.
Posted by: tco | Mar 31, 2006 6:16:55 PM
TCO--thanks, right, New Guinea. I stand corrected. Thanks. But, really, I thought that the disease was not old or timeless but relatively new (couple of hundred years). I read one book on it--can't recall the title but it came out during the British BSE thing and I was considering working on mad cow (perhaps this was in 99?) Are there any writers who don't see the disease as part of a very long history?
I appreciate your intervention on another level as well-I am quite nervous about mentioning cannibalism. I have one anthology where a number of the authors emphasize that cannibalism is a kind of fantasy construct. (This book and the other are in my office and I'm on leave this year so can't check). Can one talk about cannibalism without relying on all sorts of unseemly methodologies and suppositions? Again, I ask this out of ignorance because I really am curious (when I was considering writing on BSE I took up a bit of the discussion on cannibalism and decided the matter was too complex and contentious for me to deal with given my area of political theory and my interest at the time in conspiracy thinking).
Posted by: Jodi | Apr 1, 2006 1:24:06 AM
hi Jodi,
Of course I agree with what you think folks where you and I live should do. But how is this not itself a variant of reformism or do-gooderism? Another reponse would be to get to know what different actors exist in slums and what other actors are involved in producing, and contesting the production of, slums. Then, based on one's take on those different actors one could make contact with folks, find out what they want and need in order to continue doing whatever work it is they're doing, and set about trying to help provide that in a way that feeds into the first world activist program. These are not incompatible, and this may also be either reform or do-gooderism or both, but with the difference of placing emphasis on getting folks to act for themselves, and to make sure that the activities are carried out in a productive fashion as defined by the people whom the programmatic activity aims to help.
best,
Nate
Posted by: Nate | Apr 1, 2006 4:31:39 AM
Well, the bottom line with the Fore is this. Until about 1930, no white person or for that matter no known non-highlanders had ever set foot in Fore territory. It's hard to convey just how hard it is to cross the kind of terrain around the Eastern Highlands area. The first patrols would sometimes take a week to cross 20 km. The place was really only 'pacified' and 'opened' for research in the 60s, I believe. I am not sure about the details of Fore history before 1930, but I do know that all this area underwent a massive demoraphic change roughly 450 years ago when sweet potato was introduced, ultimately from South America. Sweet potato grows better in poorer soils and at higher altitudes, and permits the developing of more intensive pig husbandry. That, in turn, eventually became the basis for the amazing network of exchanges often found in the region, like the Moka or Tee cycles, which were associated with massive political articulation and warfare. But places without these kinds of exchanges, that stuck with yams and taro were also very violent...
Well, the way I see it, of course we can talk about cannibalism without making a bunch of crazy assumptions like cannibals are apemen or inhuman, or talking like Columbus. It may not be easy to do it properly, it may involve approaching very unfamiliar and challenging lifeworlds and sifting through complicated evidence, but it is certainly possible. What is much harder is to avoid the moral panic westerners (and most other people these days) have about cannibalism.
My feeling is largely that it is far harder to avoid talking about cannibalism without making absurd ethnocentric assumptions. Take American Indians, who fiercely resist suggestions that their ancestors were cannibals. Now, the evidence for N. America is iffier than in other areas. But when they say "how dare you say my ancestors were inhuman people eaters!" they are reproducing exactly the idea that eating people is somehow not human, and that if they had eaten people, it would have been ok to take their lands. That's the underlying value which I think is deeply ethnocentric.
The denunciation of cannibalism actually takes some editing of western history as well. Until relatively recently, corpse products were added to western medicines surprisingly often. That's cannibalism. As for cannibalism being a fantasy construct - it actually takes privileging certain western constructs to pull something like that off, because the number one source of cannibalism stories are people who supposedly participated in it as either agents or potential dishes. You have to ignore these people and buy another tale entirely, which is that cannibalism is so horrible it could never happen.
None of which is to say that Columbus wasn't a raving liar, and that false allegations of cannibalism are often made, etc...
On a side note to this side note, I've always rather liked the Manifesto Antropofago, by Oswald de Andrade - in Portuguese or English .
Posted by: tco | Apr 1, 2006 5:02:59 AM
Nate,
I don't think confronting neoliberalism is do-gooderism. It seems to me more like a kind of class war.
And, of course it's the case that there are all sorts of folks working in various capacities in slums all over the world. Not surprisingly, there are conflicts and contestations and disagreements at every level. Davis relies on reports from this work in his book. To this end, his major criticism is with those who emphasize the entrepreneurial potential they find among the garbage pickers and rickshaw drivers.
Posted by: Jodi | Apr 2, 2006 7:19:25 PM
tco--I've long been extremely interested in the Pacific, Melanesia because my father was in a lot of it during WWII, Polynesia because it's part of my own endeavours, so I've been there twice rather recently. Also, knew Tobias Schneebaum in the 70's from Village parties, who died recently, and who lived with cannibals in New Guinea and ate human flesh with them (I don't know how many times, but the sex was more regular than what he'd enjoyed here, at least unless he apparently paid) in the 60's. I think 'Keep the River on Your Right' is about his sojourns in Peru, not New Guinea, but I couldn't get through it. He was rather a sad person, I thought. I never liked that he'd eaten human flesh, but then so what.
Anyway, my father was in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), especially Espiritu Santo, and the 1944 Pacific Islands Year Book (published in Sydney and then Fiji until a few years ago) he brought back does speak of 'Malekula, where inter-tribal warfare and cannibalism continue, on occasion.' These are the Big Nambas. David Stanley's Moon Travel Handbook to the South Pacific says that the last recorded case of cannibalism, which was 'frequently practised' among the hereditary chiefs, was in 1969. TMy father did see the penis sheaths worn in the New Hebrides, although I don't know if these were the red ones which supposedly distinguished the Big Nambas (who are still there, but relocated somewhat).
I am very interested in your facts about New Guinea, my father having been in New Britain, Finschafen and Sansapore as well.
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