The Empire of Necessity Slavery Freedom & Deception

[American Dream]

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SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 04, 2018
Reasons for becoming obsessed by the Banks Islands



I regularly bother my friends with my obsessions. I sent this e mail to Paul Janman recently.

Hi Paul,

let me just take up an aspect of our phone conversation and explain - as brusquely as possible, since you are busy and I am engulfed by kids - why I am fascinated by the Banks Islands.

For obvious reasons, we tend, in New Zealand, to contrast European and Polynesian culture. There was, after all, a confrontation between these cultures in the 19th century, a confrontation which has shaped our society, a confrontation that in many ways continues today. And, to be sure, there are real and significant differences between the cultures of Britain and other northern European countries on the one hand and Aotearoa and Tonga and Samoa and other Polynesian societies on the other: differences in the ownership of land, in attitudes toward history and the environment, in the balance of power between the individual and the collective, and so on.

But I think that if we turn our eyes to Melanesia (a region which I'll define here as extending from the northern half of Vanuatu through the Solomons, Bougainville and Papua New Guinea, sans their Polynesian outliers, and continuing into West Papua, Maluku and the eastern fringes of Timor-Leste), then we can get a new perspective on the European-Polynesian dichotomy. We can see that, despite all their differences, there are seminal similarities between the European and Polynesian civilisations.

Consider, for example, the extraordinary ability of both the Polynesian and the British to spread over vast areas of the world and plant and reproduce their culture there. Consider the homogenity of Polynesian civilisation, despite its vast reach: the fact that the language of Rapa Nui in the far east is so closely linked to that of Hawai'i in the far north, Aotearoa in the far south, and Nukuoro in the extreme west. Consider the gods and culture heroes - Maui, Tangaloa, and the rest - who have planted themselves on island after island. Consider the durability of the institution of hereditary chieftainship, in virtually every Polynesian possession. Consider the success of Polynesians in bringing their culture to the southern islands of Vanuatu, to Fiji, and to Kiribati in the last thousand years, despite the different cultures that the peoples of these places once practiced.

Patrick Vinton Kirch argues, of course, that the similarities between the various Polynesian societies can be explained by the fact that those societies had their origins in a single 'ancestral Polynesian culture', which was practiced by a discrete and very finite group of voyagers. And it is true that the Lapita ancestors of Polynesians only arrived in Tonga and Samoa and the other old parts of the civilisation three and a half thousand years ago. Polynesia doesn't, then, have the time depth of, say, Aboriginal Australian civilisation, or most Papuan societies.



But let us consider for a moment the fact that the complicated series of archipelagos we call Vanuatu were only settled three and a half years ago by the same Lapita people who became Polynesians. Where the Polynesians established what is essentially the same culture across their vast domain, the ni-Vanuatu speak, even today, one hundred and thirty mutually incomprehensible languages, and maintain at least as many cultures. In the Banks Islands, in the far north of Vanuatu, this diversity is at its most extreme: ten thousand people speak seventeen languages. In the 19th century they spoke at least thirty-five tongues.

The Lapita culture seems to have been relatively hierarchical, and to have been administered, like its Polynesian descendants, by hereditary chiefs. But in the Banks Islands and in other parts of northern Vanuatu, hereditary chiefs are hard to find, and societies often tend to be acephalous, headless. The hereditary chiefs who dominate southern Vanuatu are the result of Polynesian influence over the last thousand years.

Why have the descendants of the same monolithic Lapita culture developed in such different ways in northern Vanuatu and in Polynesia? What can explain the incredible diversity of the Banks Islands? The linguist Alexandre Francois, who has spent his career documenting the languages of the Banks, argues that there exists in the group a 'powerful social bias towards differentiation and egalitarianism'.

None of the teeming societies of the Banks has been able or willing to impose itself on another; the average islander has been obliged to speak half a dozen tongues. The linguistic and cultural innovations - idiosyncratic pronunciations of words, neologisms, iconoclasms in dance and design - that might be suppressed in other societies are praised in the Banks.

Let's talk about this later!

S

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2018 ... banks.html

[American Dream]

https://minagahet.blogspot.com/2018/03/ ... antes.html

Circumnavigations #7: Guma'Cervantes



While in Valladolid, on a chilly afternoon, I walked through a house with cramped staircases and low hanging doorways. There were small beds in darkened corners. Aged chairs and paintings. Iron pots and kitchen implements. No doubt much of what was in there, had been placed for effect, but you could still feel the age. This house is known as Case de Cervantes, it was a home where the writer Miguel Cervantes stayed in the early 17th century. Today it is a small museum that features small bits of information about the writer's life. You will also find similar Case de Cervantes in other parts of Spain.

Miguel Cervantes is best known for his book Don Quixote, and called the greatest writer in the Spanish language and the first modern novelist. Historians of nationalism are always quick to remind us that the political history of a place doesn't have as much of a role in creating national identity as historians usually imply. Arts and culture, can play a much more profound role in being shared sources of enjoyment, things that all people who are on a common national journey, can refer to and draw their identity from.

While I was leaning against against the wall at Casa de Cervantes, taking in the place around me, my mind began to wander. Different languages were floating past me, English, Spanish, Chinese, German as different tourists walked through the halls. It dawned on me then that I hadn't really spoken Chamoru for several days. Even though I had typed it quite a bit, and I use it when I'm talking to myself, I hadn't spoken to anyone else in Chamoru for about a week. That made me wonder, had these walls ever heard the Chamoru language before? Had a Chamoru ever visited this museum? Or even more intriguing, had a Chamoru visited a house like this in the time of Cervantes? Had a Chamoru made it all the way to the center of the Occident during the 16th or 17th centuries?

In truth, most definitely.

At the time of Cervantes, Guam had been incorporated into the Spanish empire formally through the claim of Legaspi, but it had not yet been colonized. San Vitores and his mission to bring Christianity to the savages of the Ladrone Islands was still decades away. Magellan had stopped in Guam, and other ships that followed also made landfall in Guam, but none of them initiated prolonged contact or colonization. The Ladrones, which later became known as the Marianas, had been determined to have no gold, no spices or anything else of tremendous value in the age, and so when ships stopped they did so to get supplies such as food and water, but also Chamorus.

From the earliest examples of European contact, Chamorus were already being snatched away, usually against their will. We have accounts of some being taken to work as assistants to priests or on ships, some being taken as slaves to work in the bowels of the ship or as servants for travelers. Chamoru women most likely were also taken to be sexual slaves or forced wives for sailors. Europeans interpreted the nakedness of the savages they met to mean they were highly sexualized and could be used with impunity. I have seen accounts of this from the Philippines and the Americas, but never from Guam, but I am certain such horrific takings did take place.

We know that through these takings Chamorus made their way to the Philippines and Mexico, which represented the two ends of the Spanish empire in the Pacific. It is possible that some would have made it across to the Spanish Lake of the Caribbean, and if they had proven themselves to be good sailors or servants, perhaps been able to cross the Atlantic, and visit the Iberian capitol of their future colonizer.

Given the ways in which Pacific Islanders have been known for centuries to undergo such fascinating and bewildering voyages, it would not surprise me.

And so for an afternoon I thought about a unique meeting between Cervantes and a well-traveled man from Guam. I imagined that Chamoru man, with an interesting flavor to his Spanish, would tell stories of a giant fish threatening to eat his island, that is only defeated when the women cut their hair and tie it together. Or perhaps he would have regaled him with tales of the mighty Gådao or the tricky Ukudu. They would sit near a fire, the man from Guam, never quite getting accustomed to the cold or the dying seasons of this strange new world, and tell jokes, about what Europeans believe of others and their savagery and remark on how ridiculous the world can be sometimes.

I think I will reread Don Quixote and see if I can pick up any Pacific Island traces in it.

[American Dream]

https://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/201 ... -book.html

But enough about my book



The son of indentured labourers, he grows up in the sweet labyrinths of sugarcane fields. At the end of the day, when he bows before Hanuman, beads of sticky sweat fall from his brow onto the unflinching monkey god.

Sometimes his father lets him into the men's hut, lets him listen to a visiting sadhu, a man whose ribs remind him of his teacher's rattan cane, chant verses from the Ramayana. The holy man's Sanskrit floats above the boy, like the clouds of ganja smoke his father exhales. The other men talk about a lost homeland, a place of elephants and temples and dust and riots.

Outside his village and its school, the boy says little.

To the Melanesians and sahibs of the island, Telugu and Hindi are secrets, sets of code and passwords that aliens use to set prices at their shops, or plot insurrection in their fields.

The boy studies. His exercise book is a plantation; he cultivates the white pages, until his pencil reopens the blisters that a machete handle made in the canefield. He wins a scholarship to India, to a university. He imagines he is flying back in time, to meet his young father, to stop the adolescent fool before he steps onto the boat, before he steams into slavery.

The plane lands in Madras. The young man wants to sprint through customs. In the queue by the taxi rank, in the monsoonal rain, he greets a stranger, a tall man with a sodden felt hat.

The stranger scowls, then takes pity on the young man. He explains:

You are speaking Hindi; we don't speak Hindi in Tamil Nadu. Hindi is an alien language. Even in the north they would not like your Hindi. It sounds very strange, very wrong.

'I am from Fiji' the young man replies. 'I have come home.' But he knows now that he will never get home.

In my excitement, I have been fusing, confusing, several stories in Stolen Worlds, a collection of Fijiindian memoirs edited by Kavita Nandan and published in 2005.

Stories of exile, of fever-dreams of a homeland, of impossible attempts to return 'home': Pakeha should understand.

[American Dream]

The Return of Ezekiel

Scott Hamilton – 9 October, 2018

What connection is there between landlocked, frigid Tibet and the balmy islands of Tonga? But a sinister parallel between Tibet and Tonga soon comes to mind. Both are dominated by China, the twenty-first century's ascendant imperial power. Tonga, which was the only indigenous Pacific society to avoid colonisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is terminally indebted to China. It is becoming, Ezekiel seems to be saying, a Tibet with coconut palms.

Read more: http://eyecontactsite.com/2018/10/the-r ... f-ezekiel#

[American Dream]

Three myths about North Sentinel Island

Scott Hamilton | Guest writer

The recent killing of an American by a North Sentinel tribe has put the isolated island on the map. But there are three myths about the North Sentinelese that have been regurgitated in media. Scott Hamilton sheds some light.

It was a story from another century. A young man landed on a small island, with a Bible in his hand. Men emerged from trees at the edge of the beach. Their skin was dark, unclothed. The missionary greeted them in English; they replied with arrows. Twice the missionary retreated to a ship beyond the island’s reef. His third visit to the island was his last. The heathens buried him in the beach where he had hailed them.

The recent death of John Chau has made North Sentinel Island famous. Journalists and commentators around the world have been busy explaining that the island is part of the Andamans archipelago, that its inhabitants are hostile to all interlopers, and that the Indian government, which has administered the Andamans since the British departed in 1947, has forbidden all contact with them.

But there are three myths about the North Sentinelese that have been regurgitated, in article after article. Here in the South Pacific, we’re in a good position to lance these myths. After all, the same sort of misconceptions were once aimed at the indigenous peoples of our region. Contemporary Pacific scholars can help us see the North Sentinelese in a clearer light.

The myth of unprovoked hostility

Many journalists and commentators have interpreted the slaying of Chau as the work of an aggressive and xenophobic culture. But the Sentinelese have good reason to distrust outsiders.

In 1880, the British colonial administrator Maurice Portman led an armed expedition to North Sentinel. Portman was a paedophile and a pederast who was obsessed by the bodies of young Andamanese men. By 1880, he’d already led raids on several islands in the archipelago, and taken away children and adolescents to photograph and molest. Some of Portman’s pornography survives: his photos show black bodies decorated by jewellery the colonist had imported from Europe. The Sentinelese fled before Portman’s force, but he was able to capture and remove to Port Blair four children and two elderly islanders. The pair of old people died quickly, but the children endured weeks in Portman’s ‘care’ before being returned to North Sentinel.

It’s unsurprising that after the raid of 1880, the Sentinelese resisted visitors to their island. In 1896, a convict escaped from the prison at Port Blair, and was washed ashore at North Sentinel. A search party found him on the beach with his throat cut. An anthropologist who came calling in 1974 got an arrow in his leg.

Indian authorities have declared an exclusion zone around North Sentinel, but fishermen-poachers persist in entering that zone. When Sentinelese shout protests from their beach, or approach in canoes, the fishermen often shoot. In 2006, two drunken Indian poachers fell asleep off North Sentinel Island. Their anchor broke; their boat drifted ashore. The Sentinelese strangled and buried them.

John Chau may have had peaceful intentions when he approached North Sentinel Island, but his mere presence on the island could’ve been devastating. When he climbed into a kayak and paddled through North Sentinel’s reef, Chau made his craft into a rocket, and himself into its warhead. Chau was a healthy young man, but like anyone from the West, he was loaded with pathogens that could swiftly kill the Sentinelese who lack our immunity to a slew of diseases. When they killed Chau, the Islanders were neutralising a biological weapon.

A look at the modern history of the other indigenous peoples of the Andamans suggests that the Sentinelese have been wise to isolate themselves.

Anthropologists believe there were at least 5,000 Andamanese when the British arrived in 1789. Today, there are less than 700. The Great Andamanese, who were once the archipelago’s most populous people, today number about 30 and live on a small reservation island in concrete houses. They no longer speak their language fluently but instead, communicate in an Andamanese-Hindu pidgin. Most of them are alcoholics; many also suffer from diabetes. The Onge people live in another, larger reservation and number about 100.

Continues: https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/04-12- ... el-island/

[American Dream]

Honest Government Ad | Visit West Papua!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjU8R8oj328