Loomnie

I’d been waiting for the first major newspaper columnist to write something about this. Here it is, from Evans-Pritchard of The Telegraph:

Robert P. Crease, author of World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement, writes in the NYT:

In one kind of measuring, we find how big or small a thing is using a scale, beginning point and unit. Something is x feet long, weighs y pounds or takes z seconds. We can call this “ontic” measuring, after the word philosophers apply to existing objects or properties.

But there’s another way of measuring that does not involve placing something alongside a stick or on a scale. This is the kind of measurement that Plato described as “fitting.” This involves less an act than an experience: we sense that things don’t “measure up” to what they could be. This is the kind of measuring that good examples invite. Aristotle, for instance, called the truly moral person a “measure,” because our encounters with such a person show us our shortcomings. We might call this “ontological” measuring, after the word philosophers use to describe how something exists.

The distinction between the two ways of measuring is often overlooked, sometimes with disastrous results. In his book “The Mismeasure of Man,” Stephen Jay Gould recounted the costs, both to society and to human knowledge, of the misguided attempt to measure human intelligence with a single quantity like I.Q. or brain size. Intelligence is fundamentally misapprehended when seen as an isolatable entity rather than a complex ideal. So too is teaching ability when measured solely by student test scores.

Here.

From a WSJ review of Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy:

Mr. Neuwirth introduces us to a woman named Jandira who for a decade has peddled coffee and homemade cakes to the unlicensed vendors at São Paulo’s early-morning wholesale market for pirated movies. Her street-corner business, she proudly tells him, has enabled her to buy two cars and a house and to pay her children’s fees at private school. Another of Mr. Neuwirth’s sources, Chinese handbag designer Ethan Zhang, prefers to stay illegal. For him it’s a matter of costs and benefits: “If I want to get a license, then I will need a bank account and an office in an office building.” These are not people who lack the skills to survive through legal employment; they just see no good reason to join the legal economy.

System D is full of surprises. From Linda Chen, who trades counterfeit auto parts, we learn that China has a hierarchy of fake merchandise: The manufacturers of high-quality fakes offer guarantees and take back defective products, but with low-quality fakes it’s caveat emptor. Ogun Dairo buys woodchips from a sawmill and uses them to smoke fish, for sale by street vendors; her unlicensed grill is in an illegal squatter settlement in Lagos, but she buys fish that have been imported from Europe. At the euphemistically named Guangzhou Dashatou Second Hand Trade Center, where Arthur Okafor obtains the pirated mobile phones that he later smuggles into Nigeria, the cash turnover is so high that almost every (unlicensed) kiosk has a battery-powered currency counter.

The review reminds me of a chapter in my dissertation, in which I follow a container of secondhand clothing from the Cotonou port to the used clothes market in the Beninese city, and from the market to the Seme border and then into Nigeria. I show the different regulatory regimes under which batches of the imported used clothing fall – when taxes get paid on them and when not, and how the final retailer in Lagos sometimes actually pay some form of tax on the goods he has in his small stall on Lagos Island – even when secondhand clothing is not legally supposed to be imported or sold in the country (there is a ban on the importation of secondhand clothing into Nigeria). It also reminds me of the importance of ethnography for understanding microeconomic interactions that eventually feed into macroeconomic figures of a country. (Try understanding why Benin would always have a balance of trade deficit without knowing that almost all consumer goods it imports ends up being smuggled into Nigeria.) Of course, the whole idea of the informal economy itself arose from Keith Hart’s ethnographic study of urban slums in Ghana in the 1960s.

Read the review here. H/T to Bunmi Oloruntoba on Twitter.

Thanks to reader Anton for the link.

On naked capitalism:

My first take on the question came when The Guardian asked me to write an oped on Occupy Wall Street a few days later. At the time I was inspired mainly by what Marisa Holmes, another brilliant organizer of the original occupation, had discovered in her work as a video documentarian, doing one-on-one interviews of fellow campers during the first two nights at Zucotti Square. Over and over she heard the same story: “I did everything I was supposed to! I worked hard, studied hard, got into college. Now I’m unemployed, with no prospects, and $50 to $80,000.00 in debt.” These were kids who played by the rules, and were rewarded by a future of constant harassment, of being told they were worthless deadbeats by agents of those very financial institutions who—after having spectacularly failed to play by the rules, and crashing the world economy as a result, were saved and coddled by the government in all the ways that ordinary Americans such as themselves, equally spectacularly, were not.

“We are watching,” I wrote, “the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt.” Three weeks later, after watching more and more elements of mainstream America clamber on board, I think this is still true. In a way, the demographic base of OWS is about as far as one can get from that of the Tea Party—with which it is so often, and so confusingly, compared. The popular base of the Tea Party was always middle aged suburban white Republicans, most of middling economic means, anti-intellectual, terrified of social change—above all, for fear that what they saw as their one remaining buffer of privilege (basically, their whiteness) might finally be stripped away. OWS, by contrast, is at core forwards-looking youth movement, just a group of forward-looking people who have been stopped dead in their tracks; of mixed class backgrounds but with a significant element of working class origins; their one strongest common feature being a remarkably high level of education. It’s no coincidence that the epicenter of the Wall Street Occupation, and so many others, is an impromptu library: a library being not only a model of an alternative economy, where lending is from a communal pool, at 0% interest, and the currency being leant is knowledge, and the means to understanding.

In a way, this is nothing new. Revolutionary coalitions have always tended to consist of a kind of alliance between children of the professional classes who reject their parents’ values, and talented children of the popular classes who managed to win themselves a bourgeois education, only to discover that acquiring a bourgeois education does not actually mean one gets to become a member of the bourgeoisie. You see the pattern repeated over and over, in country after country: Chou Enlai meets Mao Tse Tung, or Che Guevara meets Fidel Castro. Even US counter-insurgency experts have long known the surest harbingers of revolutionary ferment in any country is the growth of a population of unemployed and impoverished college graduates: that is, young people bursting with energy, with plenty of time on their hands, every reason to be angry, and access to the entire history of radical thought. In the US, the depredations of the student loan system simply ensures such budding revolutionaries cannot fail to identify banks as their primary enemy, or to understand the role of the Federal Government—which maintains the student loan program, and ensures that their loans will be held over their heads forever, even in the event of bankruptcy—in maintaining the banking system’s ultimate control over every aspect of their future lives.

Read it here.

I have sadly never visited the Oktoberfest, and it seems that the longer I stay in Germany the more difficult it is to find any of my Berliner friends who thinks it is worth visiting. Something about it being too touristy and the beer being ridiculously overpriced. Plus there is some distance between Munich and Berlin.

Anyway, in case you wonder what it is like to be a waiter at the Oktoberfest:

To be a waiter is probably the most arduous job at the Oktoberfest. A typical day starts at 8 in the morning and ends at midnight – a sixteen-hour shift. One person has to be able to stem around 10 steins (traditional beer mugs) on average at once, which is equivalent to over 20 kilos of beer. Nevertheless, Harry Maas, a waiter in one of the 35 tents, finds a joy in serving people. “I have always loved working at the Oktoberfest. I work as a waiter full-time so I love to serve people and especially the atmosphere here is exceptional. You meet all different kinds of people which is the most enjoyable part about it.” However, Mr. Maas is quick to address the myth evolving around his wage. Rumors that waiters at the festival earn more than 10,000 Euros at the Oktoberfest are patently false and way too overdrawn. “One would never be able to earn that much”, he says. The money earned would at best suffice for two months, but there is no chance that people are able to live off of their earnings from the Oktoberfest alone. As Mr. Maas points out, it is not the money that he works for but the special experience. For him, there is nothing better than his current job and the anticipation of working another five years at the Oktoberfest.

That is one of the less serious pieces on Fair Observer, a new commentary and analysis site that ‘seeks to bring clarity to the complex and dynamic world we live in,’ and aims ‘to provide a platform for voices from different disciplines, various philosophies and many parts of the world’. They’re actually still in beta mode, but they’re doing a nice job already. You should check them out.

This is a synopsis:

Elder’s Corner is musical journey through pivotal moments in the colorful history of Nigeria as told through the lives and careers of the nations foremost music legends. It is a story about the eroding effects of colonialism, bitter ethnic clashes, politics, oil, power, money and their combined effects on a nation that recently celebrated its 50th year of self rule.

Click here to support the project.

A couple of weekends ago we hosted a friend who had just returned from Nigeria. She mentioned that penises were currently being ‘disappeared’ in the country. We smiled, we laughed, and I told the story of how I first learnt about disappearing penises. Like a good, self-respecting, PhD-holding anthropologist, I concluded by insisting that I really couldn’t say much else until someone did an ethnographic study of the topic.

I hadn’t thought about it since then until this evening when Teju Cole, during one of the times he breaks character as a writer of Small Fates, tweeted a link to the closest thing to an ethnographic study of disappearing penis – a Frank Bures article titled A mind dismembered: In search of the magical penis thieves. It is a well nuanced piece whose quality does not derive only from the fact that it wounds my Nigerian pride by showing that  we are neither the originators of, nor the exclusive owners of the rights to, disappearing membrum virile.

Much like how a very quick look in the literature, as I was thinking of starting a research project on the study of internet fraud, showed that we cannot claim to have founded – or even be the greatest practioners of – the confidence trick, even though it is now known almost exclusively by its Nigerian name, 419. Bummer.

From the Bures article:

Nigeria was not the first site of mysterious genital disappearance. As with so many other things, its invention can be claimed by the Chinese. The first known reports of “genital retraction” date to around 300 B.C., when the mortal dangers of suo-yang, or “shrinking penis,” were briefly sketched in the Nei Ching, the Yellow Emperor’s Classic Text of Internal Medicine. Also in China, the first full description of the condition was recorded in 1835, in Pao Siaw-Ow’s collection of medical remedies, which describes suo-yang as a “ying type of fever” (meaning it arises from too much cold) and recommends that the patient get a little “heaty” yang for balance.

Fears of magical penis loss were not limited to the Orient. The Malleus Maleficarum, medieval Europeans’ primary guidebook to witches and their ways, warned that witches could cause one’s membrum virile to vanish, and indeed several chapters were dedicated to this topic. Likewise the Compendium Maleficarum warned that witches had many ways to affect one’s potency, the seventh of which included “a retraction, hiding or actual removal of the male genitals.” (This could be either a temporary or a permanent condition.) Even in the 1960s, there were reports of Italian migrant workers in Switzerland panicking over a loss of virility caused by witchcraft.

Read it all here.

Mao Kaci on NigeriansTalk:

Any time I recall scenes from that video showing security officers of the Nigerian state ferret men, young and old, able and disabled, from behind closed doors in their homes and efficiently shoot them to death in the streets of Maiduguri in 2009, I find myself thinking: If that had been a nightmare, and not an event in actual history, it would still have had the power of occasioning some form of insanity. I ask myself: What manner of people would view such scenes of cold mass murder, executed by agents of the state in the country whose citizens they are, and still carry on as though there were something like human society in Nigeria? But apparently we all did carry on that way—and yes, there is human society in Nigeria; maybe not quite humane, or maybe just humane and inhumane by turns. We all watched that video and expressed our shock—I still feel the bile in my mouth when I think of that old man in crutches, escorted out of his house, made to lie face-down in the street, and finished off with a bullet. We all spat out our shock or held our mouths open in disbelief, and afterwards we carried on as if nothing strange, nothing disturbing, had happened. Perhaps nothing strange, nothing disturbing, indeed, had happened. There had been Ogoni, Odi, Zaki Biam, etc., etc., before Maiduguri. The Nigerian state does not only underwrite our citizenship, it also has the right and power to overrule our life and issue us with death, even on a large scale. That, for you, is the Nigerian state under which we organize what may be taken as Nigerian society.

In 2009, there was genocide in Maiduguri. I am not being sensational in making that claim. I am not even being as ‘sensitive’ as Wole Soyinka or as ‘insensitive’ as OBJ. I am only stating the fact as I saw it captured in that video. I do not recall that the dead in the Maiduguri genocide were ever memorialized in a public ceremony or even much remarked in the media and public discourse. For us, sensitive and insensitive Nigerians alike, life went on. We reduced it all, at most, to the extra-judicial killing of one man—Muhammed Yusuf, the leader—or as I believe—the front or fall guy of the Boko Haram.

Part of the tragedy of the matter is that we were not the only ones to forget the dead in the Maiduguri. They were also forgotten by the Boko Haram, the terrorist group whose attacks on the police and the populace provided the pretext for that murderous police action. The people have never mattered to the Boko Haram. Their wellbeing was never the issue; otherwise such a moneyed and globally networked group like the Boko Haram would have used its resources to establish a socio-economic enclave, an alternative to the Nigerian ‘shitstem’, wherein the people may feel a sense of ownership of and participation in governance. Rather the people themselves are the hostages and victims of the Boko Haram, their human shield and cannon fodder, their pawns and counters in the enterprise and gamble of violence. The Boko Haram have never included the dead in the Maiduguri genocide in their bill of grievances. Rather, they supplanted the massacre of people with the murder of their figurehead, making the latter the only issue that requires reckoning on the part of the police force.

Here.

It’s a man’s world by Joy Denalane, Bilal, Tweet, Dwele – and the Dresden Soul Symphony. Enjoy!