Summer Reading I: Culture & Imperialism, Edward Said

I solicited summer reading suggestions from select few people, and promptly ignored all of them. My apologies for this. The problem, as always, was too little time at the bookstore prior to departure. So far i've been left to the peculiar selection at Ladakhi bookstores, which are full of Osho and the Dalai Lama and, strangely enough, Edward Said.

Culture and Imperialism (1993) was his effort to broaden the spatial and conceptual range of his basic critique in Orientalism (1978): the power within Western "culture" negatively colors our view of the colonial and post-colonial world (virtually everywhere), and without this cultural justification, colonial expansion could not have occurred. He argues that, even today, elements of our "culture": the news media, television, Glenn Beck, et al., act as knowing or unknowing agents of a new type of imperialism: the expansion and maintenance of broadly Western interests abroad.

Reading Said in India is a hoot. He offers that no one was really fooled by T.E. Lawrence romping around Arabia in native garb, and it was only the implicit threat of British power that allowed him this luxury. Similarly, Rudyard Kipling's Kim realized a fantasy of westerners to travel as natives in a foreign country, sufficiently engrossed while at the same time protected by their status as sahib. Too many people in Ladakh have taken this fantasy as reality, and this attitude triply manifests itself as affectation (clothes, jewelry etc), an inflated sense of grandiosity, and a despicably condescending attitude towards the "natives" whom they encounter.

More than anything Said is troubling. He wrote this 16 years ago and all his outlined problems still stand. Today's New York Times holds a column by Thomas Friedman, incidentally about Greg Mortenson. I always considered Friedman well-intentioned, if a bit farcical and prone to emotional appeals. I'd never really considered him dangerous ante-Said, but read:

Indeed, Mortenson’s efforts remind us what the essence of the “war on terrorism” is about. It’s about the war of ideas within Islam — a war between religious zealots who glorify martyrdom and want to keep Islam untouched by modernity and isolated from other faiths, with its women disempowered, and those who want to embrace modernity, open Islam to new ideas and empower Muslim women as much as men. America’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were, in part, an effort to create the space for the Muslim progressives to fight and win so that the real engine of change, something that takes nine months and 21 years to produce — a new generation — can be educated and raised differently.

And now Said:

...such writing as this is symptomatic of the intellectual will to please power in public, to tell it what it wants to hear, to say to it that it could go ahead and kill, bomb, and destroy, since what would be being attacked was really negligible, brittle, with no relationship to books, ideas, cultures, and no relation either, it gently suggests, to real people (360).

or

It's author [The Republic of Fear, Kanan Makiya] later became a celebrity not because his book makes a scholarly contribution...but because its obsessive and monochromatic 'portrait' of Iraq perfectly suits the need for dehumanized, ahistorical, and demonological representation of a country as the embodiment of an Arab Hitler (367).

In both cases Said is referring to justifications for the first Gulf War, but from what Friedman leaves out of his column, Said's passages apply just as evenly. We are allowed that Mortenson's school is built in the Panjshir Valley in the northeast, but we are given no indication of the ethnicity served: whether Pashtun, Uzbek, Tajik, or Hazara; whether the school's clients are Shi'a or Sunni, and Friedman assumes (or maybe elides) the knowledge that this region of Afghanistan was never controlled by the Taliban. From the way Friedman describes it, the Panjshir Valley may as well be a moonscape void of people or history. I mean this literally:

Imagine if someone put a new, one-story school on the moon, and you’ll appreciate the rocky desolateness of this landscape.

These are Friedman's words, and from the way he describes the locals, perhaps it would have been better for Mortenson to build in the Sea of Tranquility:

But there, out front, was Mortenson, dressed in traditional Afghan garb. He was surrounded by bearded village elders and scores of young Afghan boys and girls, who were agog at the helicopter, and not quite believing that America’s "warrior chief" [Adm. Mike Mullen]...was coming to open the new school.

Friedman is, unfortunately, what passes for an American intellectual today. For many he's America's key emissary of globalization. Which is terrifying. When an "intellectual" as influential as Friedman fails to escape crude stereotypes of the backwards, ahistorical native in a land without a past, his self-proclaimed dream of a world as a level playing field sounds flaccid, cynical, and--dare i say it--imperialist. Read More......

Q: If a hipster dies in the Tour, does anyone care?

Thought of the day: do hipsters follow the Tour de France?

Although i'm definitely not what you would call an avid cyclist, i've been following the Tour somewhat obsessively in India. I blame my father, who is definitely an avid cyclist. Come the latter parts of July he could reliably found watching the Tour far past his bedtime, and i have fond memories of coming home to work to a darkened family room illuminated only by sprinters and the Peloton.

And i was thinking: it would be so very, very hipster to follow the Tour. Cycling, obscure sports, foreign things: it all clicks! And that's not necessarily something i want to be a part of. All my life i grew up around cycling and the Tour and now those damn hipsters are invading.

So let me know--there are no hipsters in India. So far. Read More......

Something should now be said about the stupefyingly alienating experience of being an American minority abroad. I'm speaking generally but i would like to focus on Korean adoptees, because it seems we have a penchant for going abroad. You have Christina in Uganda, Martin in China, Ashley in Ireland, and yours truly in India.

Your average Indian or Ladakhi in Ladakh doesn't really grasp the concept that one third of the population of the United States are not white, in the classic sense. This says a little about Indian education and a lot about the type of Americans that travel to India (read: Lily-white). And aside from said Lily-white Americans, absolutely no one correctly guesses my country of origin. Instead, what i get are Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and once (inexplicably) Thailand. Your stereotypical Asian tourists--herds, cameras, broken English--are here in force. Despite the fact that i'm travelling alone and speak pretty damn good English, i'm inevitably lumped in with the real Asians.

In some ways i feel as though this works to my advantage. The behavior of Asian tourists abroad often defies reason to the outside observer, so i feel as though i can get away with a lot of things--breaking rocks and collecting dirt--that might otherwise induce undue scrutiny from the locals and the law. I also feel relatively free of the Sahib mentality and Raj-era white man's guilt, but more on that in another post. On the other hand, it definitely means you have to make much more of an effort to engage people in conversation, since they tend to assume your grasp of English is pretty tenuous. You also get the novel experience of people approaching you and spitting out a mass of Korean.

It's certainly not as bad as Martin "Wo shi hanbuguo" Fisher's experience in China. He was taught how to say "I am a hamburger" in Mandarin to dissuade native Chinese from assuming he was the white folks' translator. Chronic misunderstanding is something you ultimately get the best of before it gets the best of you. On the other hand, briefly explaining exactly what you are, as a Korean-American adoptee, is a task that i might never resolve to my satisfaction. Read More......

Scenes from a Recession?

A typical Old Manali scene. In the foreground are cables with harnesses strung across the river. When a tourist was halfway across the operators would start jiggling the cables to dip their feet and sometimes more, usually over vocal protests from the person stranded on the wire.

Yesterday i mentioned that the tourist season in the hills is better than ever, due in no small part to the unseasonably hot weather in the Punjab and Gangetic plain. Although i take it for granted now, when i arrived in country i was intensely interested in the effect of the "global" recession on the Indian economy. Focusing, obviously, on the tourist sector.

In brief: It's not here.

Talking to Naveen in Delhi, he emphasized the "internal" nature of India's economy. Despite massive overhauls to India's economy since the decades of state planning (see Hindu rate of growth), much of India's economy remains domestic. This makes good sense, given a market of 1.1 billion people not going anywhere fast. At a very basic level, it's this lack of intimate international connections that spared India from feeling our own financial disaster.

India's insulation from severe recession was reflected in the throngs of domestic tourists in Manali. "Obviously," Vijay said, "business is booming." I was curious to hear Dorje's side of the story in Leh, where a much larger proportion of tourists typically come from Western nations. But if Dorje was suffering businesswise (unlikely, judging by the hours he keeps), he didn't make it known to me. Like always, he said, he experienced a little bit more growth this year, and rattled off a list of groups he was organizing--most Indian.

See, there are fewer Western tourists in Leh this summer. Talking with some of the guides confirmed this--they're really hurting, as only Westerners find recreational appeal in walking around with 40 lb loads three miles above sea level. The "middle men," though, are doing a brisk business, as the tardy monsoon drives more and more domestic tourists even further north, to Ladakh. They're easy to spot--pressed pants, collared shirts, sunscreen, rockin' the fanny pack. The quintessential middle class tourist changes very little with longitude. Read More......

High and much drier

Sorry for the lack of updates; this just means i've been doing a lot of working and sleeping. There's a lot to talk about, but let's start with the weather.

This year has been unseasonably dry in all of Ladakh; indeed, most of India has been "suffering." More on the suffering later. The primary cause of the drought in Ladakh is the weak and late winter. The Indus Valley proper receives almost no rainfall year round. Instead, most of the water in the entire region comes ultimately from snow and glacier melt. This year snowfall was unusually light, what snow did fall came very late, and Dorje adds that there is a "problem" at altitude, where snow is not melting properly. Irrigation ditches that usually run daily are dry for weeks here. Entire crops are seriously behind schedule, if not abandoned outright.

The second cause of the drought is the late monsoon. This is primarily an affliction of the rest of India, where the monsoon not only brings water but also a relief from +100°F heat. Many districts in the north delayed the beginning of the summer school year, Uttar Pradesh is/was in the midst of a power crisis from so much AC, Mumbai was contemplating water rationing, you get the idea.

This has been a major problem for all of northern India with the exception of the hill states. There has been a "mad rush" of domestic tourists flocking to the cooler higher-altitude regions, which is nothing if not great for business. Surely the delayed monsoon also has something to do with the influx of domestic tourists in Leh, which has somewhat helped the region buck the global recession. More on that next time. Read More......

Happy Fourth.

Read More......