France, women and Islamic clothing

France is known for having an unhealthy relationship with its Muslim population. The 2004 act which banned signs of religious affiliation in schools can be seen as a law which asks Muslims to dress in a manner unacceptable to many of them, while leaving the Christian majority unscathed (crucifixes can be worn under school uniform by those who consider them important). Despite knowing about this long-standing tension in French society, I was nonetheless shocked and astonished to read an article by Angelique Chrisafis in the Guardian in June, which documents overt discrimination against ‘modestly’ dressed women in France: Veiled threats: row over Islamic dress opens bitter divisions in France (26th June 2009).   Fully grown adults wearing nothing more remarkable than a hijab (the basic headscarf) have been refused permission to withdraw cash from their own bank accounts, spat at, banned from their own registry office weddings and refused access to polling booths. Many French people would claim that they are not discriminating against Muslims, but are attempting to liberate Muslim women from an old-fashioned patriarchal tradition which subjugates them. If one left aside these infringements of basic rights, this may sound like a liberal, feminist standpoint, but having lived in France, I find it hard not to feel anger towards this arrogant hangover from colonial times. France is a society where the objectification of women is rife. The feminist in me was fully awakened when, walking down a French street, I encountered a billboard advertising a man’s watch. This featured a man (wearing said watch) with his thumb in the knickers of an otherwise naked woman… Here is another French advert for a watch:

…. and here’s an advert for yoghurt (a product which sees a lot of this kind of advertising in France):

It is beyond me how a state that permits marketing which deems it acceptable to use the image of a (generally unclothed) woman to sell anything and everything can at the same time consider itself knowlegable enough about women’s rights to pass laws (supposedly in favour of women) that dictate acceptable female dress codes. Reading the Guardian article, I was hardly surprised to discover that many women wearing the niqab (face veil) were French converts to Islam. These girls will have grown up with adverts like the ones above all around them. It’s understandable that they would rather keep their hair and bodies for themselves and their partners than dress in a more relaxed (or less covered) way in an environment where it seems that everyone will be judging how perfect or otherwise your body is.

The central piece of ‘news’ in the Guardian article was that France is considering an outright ban on the niqab. I decided to see if I could find out more about the niqab in France on IBSS. I tried searching for ‘niqab’ and ‘France’ but it seems that this is too new a topic to have generated academic papers. I expect IBSS will be full of such information by next year once papers have been peer reviewed and published, this being such a controversial topic. I amended my search to ‘hijab’ and ‘France’ and this uncovered a lot of relelvant articles discussing the central themes (basic rights, women, religion and state, clothing…). I will leave aside articles relating to the hijab ban in schools, as this is a vast topic in itself, and will discuss points raised by papers focusing on French society at large. It is, anyway, more controversial that the dress of grown adults is thought to be fair game for state sanction or otherwise.

In ‘Unveiling the veil: gendered discourses and the (in)visibility of the female body in France’ (2004), Michela Ardizzoni talks about why Islamic head coverings provoke such strong reactions. She argues that colonial art and Orientalist discourse eroticised veiled women, while simuntaneously focusing on ‘her eyes as a site of mystery/danger’. According to Ardizzoni, veiled women were de-eroticised with decolonization and postcolonialism, but the perception of threat continued, and immigrants or converts to Islam covering their hair maintain this sense of otherness, of ambiguous cultural identity confusing non-Muslims with an unfamiliar ’sexual femininity’. Ardizzoni argues that France has trouble accepting hybridity and allowing cultural change to become a legitimate part of French national identity. Gabriele vom Bruck (2008) argues along similar lines, and talks about the media’s role in affirming negative perceptions of female Muslims: ‘Western media have sketched a picture of the covered woman as a potentially subversive vanguard; her body is made to appear as a vehicle for the cultural colonialisation of Europe.’ Her next point is particularly interesting: why does Islamic clothing provoke more reaction than other clothing which marks identity? ‘This phenomenon raises important questions as to why this marker of difference—a specific style of hair covering—arouses much greater passion than, say, class-related difference as manifested in clothes (e.g., see Bourdieu 1979)’. This feeling is mirrored in a recent Telegraph article by Ed West:  France’s immigration minister is wrong to want to ban the burka and niqab (September 15th 2009): ‘Personally on a late night I’d rather see a gaggle of women in niqabs than some morons dressed in hoodies, but I don’t ask that American ghetto-wear is banned because it’s worn by criminals and people who want to look like criminals’. Admittedly it sounds like West has his own axe to grind, but this is an interesting point. If anyone else was surprised at the apparent liberal slant of this article, his conclusion is that niqab-wearing can be controlled by tightening up French immigration policy…

West has overlooked the fact that not all Muslim women who cover are immigrants. Afsaneh Najmabadi’s (2006) ‘ Gender and secularism of modernity: how can a Muslim woman be French?’ provides an interesting exploration of how personal, gender, national, transnational and religious identity sit together. It is historically, geographically and thematically broad in scope, and would provide an excellent introduction for anyone wanting to know more about the issues at stake in the French debate.

IBSS also helped me to find an article which talks about the effect of negative attitudes towards the hijab on Muslim women’s everyday life. Katell Berthou’s ‘The issue of the veil in the workplace in France: unveiling discrimination’ (2005) looks at how French law treats the wearing of hijabs at work. It is quite surprising that antipathy for Islamic headcoverings has meant that the issue  has made it into courts, but this is the case. The issue is discussed from a legal perspective, Berthou arguing that French courts fail to respect national anti-discrimination provisions and EU law’ and that French law ‘lacks a fundamental understanding of the concept of discrimination and negates the concept of difference.’

I wondered if the use of women in French advertising was discussed in IBSS, as I really consider it hypocritical for French legislators and policy makers to suggest that they want to liberate Muslim women while allowing women’s sexual appeal to be used as a marketing tool. I did a last search for ‘women’, ‘advertising’ and ‘France’ and found a very interesting article which highlights the bizarre attitude towards the use of women in adverts which prevails in France. In ‘Courbert, advertising and femininity’ Kate E. Tunstall discusses an advert for a cosmetic cream which provoked outrage in France. The advert places a slim, smooth-skinned French woman next to a less slim, less smooth-skinned woman from Courbet’s painting Les baigneuses, who is shown on the left in the original painting below.

Astonishingly, what outraged people and provoked them to ask for the advert to be removed from display was the body of Courbet’s woman. ‘Women are appalled by the shape of Courbet’s woman; they think her ugly, the phrase ‘c’est affreux’ echoed in their statements, and they would rather not be shown her’. This seems pretty remarkable to me, given that the woman in the painting is really no monster. In 2001 (when the article was published) France was by no means immune to obesity, so to take this attitude towards a woman which an M&S advert would deem ‘normal’ is surprising. The advert does not produce outrage by ‘the use of women’s bodies to sell a product, since here (for once!), the women’s bodies are actually relevant to the product being sold’. Tunstall points out that images of slim women ‘abound in French advertising’, and few ‘if any’ complaints  are ever made about them, regardless of relevance.

That slim bodies become the only acceptable norm in France because of the prevalence of such adverts is a real shame. That women’s bodies are used in such a way is wrong. And that many French women have converted to Islam and prefer to wear Islamic dress and prevent their bodies from being objectified in such a way is not surprising. And that is to say nothing of people’s right to dress how they like in what is supposedly an enlightened country. It is almost too hackneyed to mention Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, but I will: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité??

Swimming and swimming pools

I recently learnt about an exciting outdoor swimming pool I can try out in London. Not only is the London Fields Lido heated, but, at 50 metres, it is Olympic sized! With a bit of investigation, I learnt that the 1930s lido was closed for over 20 years before reopening in 2006, thanks to pressure from the community. Another impressive London pool is the 100 year old Kentish Town Baths which I joined a petition to save back in 2005, and is now thankfully undergoing renovation, not destruction. The London Pools Campaign lists 25 pools which are either closed or at risk of closure in London, and of course this is an issue which extends far beyond the capital. Swimming is a form of exercise that is excellent for burning calories, strengthening muscles and, being low impact, is ideal for people such as pregnant women and those with injuries. The government is clamouring to tackle obesity and get more people more active more often, so why are so many pools at risk of closure?

My local pub, The Swimmer at the Grafton Arms, is something of a shrine to the aesthetics of swimming, with a fine collection of images of old swimming pools (such as a floating pool on the River Thames!), a diagram of about 15 strokes which predate the invention of the front crawl, and photos of bathing suit-clad men, and women in fancy swimming hats. I wonder if swimming has made it into academic literature, as a topic which crosses the disciplines of social history, the sociology of leisure and policy studies?

I searched for ’swimming’ in IBSS and got a surprising 120 hits. I quickly realised that the search was picking up on the metaphorical use of the word ’swimming’ in the title field, generating results like ‘Swimming with sharks: technology ventures, defense mechanisms, and corporate relationships’. Amending my search to ’swimming pools’ got me 17 bona fide results, and searching for ’swimming’ but limiting this to the Subject field gave me 23 records which had been tagged with the keyword ’swimming’ by IBSS’s team of indexer/editors. This seems to be a good number of results, showing that swimming has at least a minor presence in the academic world.

I found lots of really interesting articles on the development of swimming by Christopher Love, who is clearly the main academic working on this topic. Swimming also seems to be a pet topic of The International Journal of the History of Sport.  In ‘An overview of the development of swimming in England, c.1750-1918′ Love (2007) asserts that the activity can be dated back to the mid-18th century when public school boys splashed around in “swimming holes”. By the late 19th century, swimming had become a more common recreational pursuit. In ‘Local aquatic empires: the municipal provision of swimming pools in England, 1828-1918′ , I learnt that the first municipal swimming pool was the St George’s Baths, Liverpool, built in 1828. This was followed by many pools nationally, and swimming came to be seen as something that local authorities should encourage because of its benefits to health and hygiene. In fact, an image at my local pub corroborates the link between cleanliness and swimming: the Hornsey Road Baths was also a laundry!

My search on IBSS shows me that swimming has sparked academic interest on both sides of the Atlantic. From grimy, utilitarian municipal pools to glamorous photographs of swimmers in days gone by, the idea of swimming seems to provoke a reaction in many. Three books about swimming in the Americas catch my eye. Kossuth (2005) looks at the development of municipal pools in Canada in the Victorian age. Van Leuven’s (1999) The springboard in the pond: an intimate history of the swimming pool discusses American swimming pools from the perspective of modernism, and also links swimming to an American ‘obsession’ with recreation and health. Wiltse’s (2007) Contested waters: a social history of swimming pools in America takes a class, race and body angle. The race perspective is shown in the book’s cover which is adapted from an advert for swimming classes in New York from the 1940s.

In ‘The future of swimming’, a chapter in Statistical Thinking in Sports (2007), Ray Stefani discusses swimming from a competitive athletics perspective. It seems likely that the 2012 Olympics will have some impact in boosting the protection of swimming in London. The new Aquatics Centre will have two 50 metre and one 25 metre pools. A look at the architecture of the Kentish Town Baths shows how grand swimming pools once were: . I hope that new pools are treated the same level of respect in future, and that planners start to see the beauty and historical value of old pools.

The incest taboo

Josef Fritzl is currently on trial in Austria over the imprisonment and rape of his daughter. The case is grotesque, and because of this, I venture, also morbidly fascinating. It also brought back to The Times ‘most read’ section an article I was intrigued by over the summer – ‘I had sex with my brother but I don’t feel guilty’ – in which the author puts across the other side of the story: a relationship that was clearly consensual, and a positive experience for both.

I decided to search IBSS to look for articles on incest. There are c. 500 records dealing with the subject, and many are from the ‘abuse’ perspective, looking at how to identify and prevent cases of abuse, and how to help victims deal with their trauma. Pertinent to the Fritzl case, perhaps, is ‘Decisions to offend in men who sexually abuse their daughters’ (in the Journal of Sexual Aggression, 2007); or ‘Acting out the Oedipal wish’: father-daughter incest and the sexuality of adolescent girls in the United States, 1941-1965’, R. Devlin (2005), which takes a psychoanalytic approach. Though rarer, there is also a literature on mothers as abusers, for example ‘Speaking about the unspeakable: exploring the impact of mother-daughter sexual abuse’, Tracey Peter, (2008).

Many articles, however, take a cultural look at the subject rather than a psycho-social, and look at different attitudes to incest across diverse societies. Among them: ‘Incest between adults and children in the Medieval world’ (a chapter in the book ‘Children and sexuality: from the Greeks to the Great War’, Palgrave:2007); ‘Close relationships – incest and inbreeding in classical Arabic literature’, Gelder (2007); ‘Le bain mystérieux de la Tu’i Tonga Fefine. Germanité, inceste et mariage sacré en Polynésie’, F. Douaire-Marsaudon (2002) which looks at kinship, incest and sacred marriage in Polynesia); ‘Full brother-sister marriage in Roman Egypt: another look’, S. Parker (1996); and ‘Rudras Geburt: systematische Untersuchungen zum Inzest in der Mythologie des Brahmanas’, J. Deppert (1977) – a look at incest in Brahman mythology. I could go on – there is really a fascinating range.

Given the widely different cultural approaches to incest over time and place, an interesting question is whether the aversion most people have to incest is cultural or biological. Two sides of the coin are represented by ‘Il tabu dell’incesto: un problema culturale’ (The incest taboo – a cultural problem), G. Marucci (1975) on the one hand; and on the other ‘The biological foundations of the incest taboo’, N. Bischoff (1972). Around 20 articles look at the Westermarck thesis, which I presume, therefore, is influential: ‘Westermarck proposed that humans have an incest avoidance instinct, triggered by frequent intimate contact with family members during the first several years of life. Westermarck reasons that (1) familial incest will tend to produce less fit offspring, (2) those humans without instinctive incest avoidance would hence have tended to die off and those with the avoidance instinct would have produced more viable offspring, and hence (3) familial incest would be, as indeed it is, universally and instinctively avoided.’ (quoted from ‘Instinctive incest avoidance: a paradigm case for evolutionary psychology evaporates’, J. Leiber, 2006). However this evolutionary approach does not seem to be as popular a field of research as that of the ‘cultural taboo’ surrounding incest. Among the more off-the-wall papers dealing with this subject is ‘Crossing the final taboo: family, sexuality, and incest in Buffyverse fan fiction’, K.Busse (2002) – a reference to the issue in Buffy the Vampire Slayer!

Some articles suggest that Western culture overplays the taboo, and that the line between familial love and sexual love is a rather finer one than we like to think. In her article ‘’I could eat my baby to bits’; passion and desire in lesbian mother-children love’, Jacqi Gabb (2004), asserts that ‘The legal-moral boundaries that are invoked prohibit intergenerational desire, upholding the incest taboos that dominate Western culture. However the construction of these boundaries neither stop adult-child ‘border skirmishes’ nor quash children’s ‘natural’ exploration of their sexuality. I explore how bodies and bodily boundaries are used to manage sexuality and desire in families.’ The author of the Times piece mentioned above might well agree.

Milk

Having really enjoyed Gus Van Sant’s Milk, and being a big fan of San Francisco, I’m keen to see what IBSS can tell me about the history of the gay rights movement in California.

The film Milk stars Sean Penn as America’s first openly homosexual politician in public office, Harvey Milk. For the last eight years of his life Milk was a gay activist in San Francisco, and was assassinated one year after being elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. Milk is based on true events and shows many issues faced by the gay community in the ‘70s, rather than focussing exclusively on Harvey Milk’s rise to political prominence. I thought it would be interesting to see how I could supplement what I’d learnt from the film with academic research in the social sciences.

I decide to focus more on the historical events covered in the film than on Harvey Milk himself, so I search for ‘homosexuality’, ‘history’ and ‘San Francisco’. This is really successful, uncovering papers on several issues which the activists in Milk focussed their efforts on. The most shocking of these, and an issue which brought Harvey Milk into direct conflict with his eventual assassin Dan White, is Proposition 6, or the Briggs Initiative, which attempted to ban homosexuals and even supporters of gay rights from teaching in California’s public schools. In ‘Butterflies, whistles, and fists: gay safe street patrols and the ‘new gay ghetto’, 1976-1981’ C. Hanhardt (2008) discusses the Butterfly Brigade in Castro, San Francisco’s gay district, and their role in the protest against the Briggs Initiative. Their role in the Coors beer boycott, another event covered in the film, is also explored. I learn that the Butterfly Brigade was established to respond to the police’s ineffectiveness in dealing with violent homophobia. Operating from a bakery delivery truck in Castro, members of the brigade recorded homophobic acts and were police informants.

An insight into the police’s relationship with the gay rights movement is provided by C. Agee’s ‘Gayola: police professionalization and the politics of San Francisco’s gay bars, 1950-1968’ (2006). This is very interesting as Milk has many scenes in gay bars. Agee’s paper is a case study of John Mindermann’s work as a police officer in San Francisco in the 1960s. Mindermann gives a first hand account of police crackdowns on gay bars, and the relationship between the San Francisco Police Department and homosexuals. Agee explores the idea that police crackdowns were key to making the gay rights movement better organized and more effective. This theme is developed in ‘Wide-open town: a history of queer San Francisco to 1965’, N.A. Boyd (2005). Boyd suggests that communities in gay bars had a strongly politicised identity which developed in response to contemporary policing. The book looks fascinating in its variety of sources: it uses police and court records, oral histories, tourist literature, and manuscript collections from local and state archives. I think the book would be complemented nicely by S. Stryker and J. van Buskirk’s (1997) ‘Gay by the bay: a history of queer culture in the San Francisco Bay Area’, which has over 200 photos of the gay rights movement.

Searching for ‘Social movements’ and ‘San Francisco’, I discovered E. Armstrong’s 2005 paper ‘From struggle to settlement: the crystallization of a field of lesbian/gay organizations in San Francisco, 1969-1973’, which discusses how the social movement changed over time. Armstrong argues that “In 1968 gay liberation displayed a contradictory mix of civil rights, identity, and revolutionary political ideologies. By 1972 the movement had stabilized around building gay identity and pursuing civil rights.” She suggests that the collapse of the New Left movement in 1970 allowed activists to unite around central themes, and made their aims less fragmented. In ‘Movements and memory: the making of the Stonewall myth’ (2006), E. Armstrong and S. Crage compare the effect of the Stonewall riot and 4 other gay activists riots in the 1960s (including ones in Los Angeles and San Francisco) on collective memory in the gay rights movement.

I’m impressed by the number of records in IBSS which are specific to the history of gay activism in San Francisco. Much of the research taps into first hand accounts of the events covered in Milk. I end with a straight search for Harvey Milk, and one particular hit corroborates the film’s description of Harvey Milk as “Icon. Inspiration. Hero.”: a Harvey Milk Institute has been established in San Francisco for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender studies.

For Halloween

I once inadvertently mentioned Halloween to a fervent Christian friend and provoked horrified reactions that it was a celebration of the dead and all things Satanic. Since we don’t traditionally go in for Halloween in England, and being an atheist, I’ve never had strong opinions about it, but knowing that IBSS indexes material on folklore, I was interested to see if I could learn more from searching the database.

Could I uncover evidence of unchristian devil worship? Do people believe in ghosts, demons and hobgoblins anyway? I jumped straight in and searched for ‘ghost beliefs’, getting 46 hits. I found articles about ghosts in the USA and England: ‘Five ghost tales from Boyle country, Kentucky’, Owens, E. (1958) and ‘‘Sensible proof of spirits’: ghost belief during the later seventeenth century‘, Bath, Jo (2006). I then came to the amazingly Halloweeny ‘Jeszcze raz o upiorze (wampirze) i strzygoni (strzydze) [On lamias and vampires once again] ‘, Kolczynski, Jaroslaw (2003). Kolczynski gives an ethnohistorical account of beliefs in Poland in the 19th century. Lamias (which I’ve not heard of before) are defined as the living dead. This evokes Halloween’s blurring of the world the living and the dead: the night before All Saint’s Day is considered the only time the dead can walk amongst the living.  Indeed, the abstract’s description of the lamias’ physical forms reads almost like a list of Halloween costumes! A living ghost with no skeleton was believed to become embodied by witches or magicians, whereas walking skeletons were considered to have escaped their journey to the world of the dead. The sinister connotations of some birds are also explained: “The demonic soul was believed to be able to leave the human body and to occupy that of a bird which, in turn became a dangerous demon”. All of these vampires/lamias were thought to strangle victims and drink their blood.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that folklorists have explored historical beliefs such as the above, but has much academic attention been given to modern day Halloween rituals? There are 16 such articles in the IBSS database.  ‘Halloween from Pagan ritual to party night’, Rogers, Nicholas (2005-2006) looks like it would give an interesting background for geeks like me who are more interested in history than fancy dress! In ‘Tricks of festival: children, enculturation, and American Halloween‘, Cindy Dell Clark (2005) explores children’s experiences of fancy dress through participant observation. Her conclusion that “children gain ascendance through costumed trick-or-treating” seems a little far-fetched (surely terrorising the neighbours would be more likely to make children feel empowered) but I concede that it’s a novel piece of fieldwork.

I’ll never know how many people actually believe they might encounter the dead on Halloween, but I did discover a surprising piece of research on the attitudes of scientists. In ‘Probing scientists’ beliefs: how open-minded are modern scientists?’, Coll and Taylor (2004) used interviews and questionnaires to establish the attitudes of science teachers in the UK and New Zealand. According to the study, while scientists dismissed superstitions as being socially grounded, they were less ready to write off belief in ghosts. “There is a strong socio-cultural aspect to other beliefs and personal experiences, and strongly held personal beliefs are influential, resulting in the scientists keeping an open mind about contentious beliefs like alien life and the existence of ghosts.” It’s a shame that the abstract doesn’t offer any quantitative analysis to elaborate on this, but I suppose it can be hard to pin down what you really think. I myself am in the odd position of simultaneously not believing in ghosts and occassionally feeling a chill when dwelling on the topic for too long!

Could Slow Food improve the aftertaste of the credit munch?

Over the past few months the roof terrace where I live has been transformed into a herb haven. Bit by bit we have added new plants and attempted to grow our own food. So far the only real winners have been our cherry tomatoes and radishes. Most every meal these past few months has had garden fresh flavour added to it. I find cooking quite therapeutic in itself but adding your own herbs to any dish is all the more satisfying. My parents, having much greener fingers than I, and a real garden to boot, have outshone all efforts I have made. Their home-grown potatoes are the best I’ve tasted and helping my dad to pick them right before they were cooked was such a wonderful feeling, as nauseating as that may sound. All this thought of home grown goods got me thinking about the phenomenon that is Slow Food. I have heard of the term for many years but have never really known what it stood for. Is it simply a forum for anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist and anti-globalization debate?

With its mission being to promote “good, clean and fair food” (slowfood.com) I find it hard to understand why it has not achieved a greater level or popularity since it was founded almost 20 years ago. Running a quick search in IBSS for “slow food” I got a selection of 17 results (10 of which had abstracts). I can fully understand why Slow Food (hereafter referred to as SF) endeavours to broaden the appeal of typical local produce (“The practical aesthetics of traditional cuisines: slow food in Tuscany”. Miele, Mara and Murdoch, Jonathan. Sociologia ruralis, 42:4, 2002). I sometimes find it depressing to see giant flavourless strawberries and the likes on supermarket shelves all year round. At the same time I would mourn the loss of choice available to us at present. We need to find a happy medium.

I wholly agree that it is important to make an effort to buy local seasonal products but the reality is that most of us still need to buy discount supermarket goods in order to survive the credit crunch. I am passionate about food, with a chef for a father, my family tend to be somewhat food obsessed. The idea of SF really strikes a chord with me (“Out of time: fast subjects and slow living”. Parkins, Wendy, Time & Society, 13:2-3, 2004) but at £35 annual membership I do not feel I can justify becoming a member.

As for eating out, I love the idea of dining in a restaurant that ethically sources its menu ingredients. My father once ran a restaurant in the 1970s in which he used only fresh, local produce. Absolutely nothing from a tin! It makes my mouth water at the thought of it. Sadly, it proved too costly and as a result not financially viable. The SF restaurant, while a clever marketing angle, is simply a modern luxury I cannot afford (Reverse psychology marketing: the death of traditional marketing and the rise of the new ‘pull’ game. Sinha, Indrajit and Foscht, Thomas, Palgrave MacMillan, 2007). It ranks up there with organic food markets as a way of life I long for, but know I cannot be a part of (“Sensing Cittàslow: slow living and the constitution of the sensory city”. Pink, Sarah, Senses and Society, 2:1, 2007).

An article in Food, Culture & Society (8:2, 2005) rang all too true stating that, ‘Slow Food’s efforts to develop an ethics of taste are, to some extent, undermined by its failure to adequately challenge its own elitism and privilege’ (“The pleasure of diversity in slow food’s ethics of taste”. Donati, Kelly). Sadly, as with many farmers’ markets, it feels as though the SF community is out of my price range. For now, at least, I shall have to make do with my terrace herb garden. I would far rather be a part of an independent SF movement, the one in my own home, a.k.a. the credit munch.

Cannibalism and the experience of survival

Last June, a plane crashed in a remote, inaccessible area of the Chilean Andes. Nine survivors were eventually rescued after four days without food and temperatures below zero degrees. What did they eat? They survived thanks to grass, milk powder and biscuits from the plane. The day before they were rescued, they were completely exhausted and without any strength to carry on living. A question came to my mind when comparing this episode with the one that happened in 1972, where another airplane crashed into the Andes (the real-life plane crash that inspired the book and movie entitled ‘Alive’). In this case, the survivors were exposed to the extreme cold of the night air and by the tenth day in the Andes, their food supplies had run out. Their only means of survival then became to eat the human flesh of their fallen friends. Cannibalism saved them in their fight for life.

The question I asked myself when thinking about this issue was the following one. In which societies, or in which ‘life or death’ scenarios, does cannibalism become perceived as a socially accepted practice? According to research, there is little evidence that cannibalism has ever been practiced as a routine source of nutrition. It is generally agreed that the custom usually carried a special meaning, often related to social rituals, for its practitioners, or else it has occasionally been necessary for survival in extreme cases, like that of the 1972 plane crash. Cannibalism has been associated with famine and has been occasionally practiced as a last resort by people suffering from starvation. There are some allegations that cannibalism was widespread during the famine of Ukraine in the 1930s and also during World War II, when Japanese troops are said to have practiced cannibalism in the Pacific theatre.

I wondered if I could find some more information on IBSS specifically about ‘survival’, cannibalism and famine, so I searched using the keywords of ‘cannibalism’, ‘nutrition’ and ‘food’ and came across a comment for the article ‘The limited nutritional value of Cannibalism’ (1971) by Mark E. Randal, which exposes the nutritional value of human flesh and the human body as a nutrient source based on pure biological criteria, stating that cannibalism is valid only as an emergency supply of protein and not as a regular source. Interestingly enough, however, I also found on IBSS an anthropological article, ‘Feasting on people: eating animals and humans in Amazonia’ (2007) by Carlos Fausto, which emphasised the lack of distinctions made between humans and animals in some Amazonian societies. If people are animals, how can one distinguish between everyday eating and cannibalism? So humans are treated like animals and their flesh is consumed as part of their diet. In this case, obviously, the nutritional value of cannibalism takes on the same significance as that of any other protein source.

On the other hand a third article, “Consommation d’aliments immondes et cannibalisme de survie dans l’Occident du Haut Moyen Age” (1984) by Pierre Bonassie, seems to suggest that the consumption of human flesh is separated from that of other animals by concerns of both ethics and taste (the title promotes this implicit judgement of cannibalism as wrong and distasteful by linking it to other “aliments immondes” – vile, hideous, almost ‘immoral’ foodstuffs). According to Bonassie, there is evidence that cannibalism has been practiced throughout history in Western societies as a means of surviving famine and starvation, yet this repeated cannibalism has not resulted in a relaxing of the taboos surrounding the consumption of human flesh, which remains one of the ‘aliments immondes’ described by the writer. However, like other major social taboos, cannibalism has been projected upon and used to define the savage ‘Other’. For example during the colonisation of the Caribbean islands in the fifteen and sixteenth centuries, the linguistic coincidence between ‘Canib’ and ‘Carib’ led the Spanish to portray the indigenous peoples as savage ‘man-eaters’ and ‘cannibals’.

In another search, this time using ‘cannibalism’ and ‘survival’ as keywords, I came across an interesting mixture of anthropological and sociological articles on examples of how the discourse on ’savage cannibalism could turn inward in the right situations. To give an example, the article “Man-eating and menace on Richard Hore’s expedition to America” (2005) by Philip Levy describes how Richard Hore’s 1536 New World expedition brought a group of sailors and thirty five wealthy ‘tourists’ to the Labrador coast, where near-starvation allegedly drove them to cannibalism. Also the article, “Alfred Packer’s world: risk, responsibility, and the place of experience in mountain culture 1873-1907″ (2006) by Diana Stefano, tells the story of Alfred Packer, a prospector and mountain guide who appeared at the Los Pinos Indian Agency in South West Colorado. He declared that all his comrades had died, and near starvation had forced him to eat their flesh.

In conclusion, the articles that my searches brought up seem to suggest that the practice of anthropophagy, or the consumption of human flesh for sustenance, has been common in many societies throughout history. Discourses surrounding this subject have however been distorted by accusations of ‘savage cannibalism’ against other societies and questions of taboo and immorality that continue to make this a controversial, but very interesting, area of research.

Evolutionary ideation or the same old thing re-packaged? Memetic struggles.

Among the many paradigms which appear to be undergoing a profound shift is the one concerned with the theory of knowledge and cultural transmission. Epistemology has now gone evolutionary, just as sociology has disowned Social Darwinism. I refer, of course, to the study of memetics. That this field of study is so new and unbounded is evidenced by the fact that my word-processing software has marked the word incorrectly spelled! I’m sure we’ve all heard about memes, even if we might not have encountered the word itself, but do we know exactly what this new branch of knowledge entails?

When in doubt as to how to proceed, it is often best to fall back on a time-worn tradition: that of referring to established authority and proceeding thence, either in opposition, in exposition or in explication. To wit, I refer to the Oxford English Dictionary which defines a meme thus: ‘A cultural element or behavioural trait whose transmission and consequent persistence in a population, although occurring by non-genetic means (esp. imitation), is considered as analogous to the inheritance of a gene..’ First expounded by Dawkins in 1976 in his book, The Selfish Gene, it adumbrated the present frenzy over all things cultural, going even beyond Gramsci’s reworking of the classical Marxist analysis of culture, and emphasizing the active and dynamic role which culture itself exhibits. In choosing the term meme, Dawkins managed a coup de theatre in ensuring that a neologism became instantly recognizable, conveying both the meaning of mimesis or imitation, and combining it with the succinctness as well as the functionality of the analogous term, gene. To elucidate, in speaking of the transmission of culture and ideas, it is best perhaps if we view this as occurring, not in the matter of classical genetic inheritance (vertical), but rather as viral (horizontal as well as vertical), because a meme is spread within the same generation as well as inter-generationally.

Initially all seems quite clear. A meme can be classified as a cultural element which spreads like a virus, replicating itself by infecting and effecting profound changes in those it affects. But in examining more minutely the idea of memes, three questions come to mind. First of all, what are the limits of a meme and secondly, what is the specificity of a gene, and thirdly what is the usefulness of the concept of a meme? In order to help me more clearly understand, I turned to the IBSS database. Using memetics as my main search term, I only managed to unearth 9 records, all written within the span of the past 10 years. The sequence started out with the first two articles written four years apart, but then the frequency increased to three written in 2006. This illustrates a key concept common to virology and memetics: initial infection may take a while but if the virus or meme is particularly virulent, it’s spread then leaves the arithmetic progression to shoot into exponential growth. Not being satisfied with being limited to 9 results, I typed in the term ‘memetic*’ which then yielded 14 results. Then I decided to expand my search terms and typed in the terms, ‘cultural’ and ‘transfer’. This time I came up with a more gratifying 297 results. Changing the final search term from ‘transfer’ to ‘diffusion’ was even more satisfying, giving me 398 results. But trawling through these results yielded surprisingly little on the topic at hand. So I changed the last search term from ‘diffusion’ to ‘transmission’, giving 403 results, and this time the majority of the articles were much more in line with the subject, though sadly lacking in the use of the particular terms of meme and memetics. I then typed in ‘selfish’ and ‘gene’ in keeping with the spirit of the original article and came up with 18 very pertinent results, among them the most useful being, ‘The selfish meme: a critical reassessment’, Kate Distin (2005). Clicking on this link led me to the citation which included a plethora of relevant subject terms. Among the more useful ones were: social change, cultural evolutionism, and evolutionary anthropology. ‘Cultural evolutionism’ being the term which met the closest goodness of fit, I clicked on it and came up with 21 results. From this, I found, ‘Social evolutionism: a critical history,’ Stephen Sanderson (1994) and clicked on it, yielding the citation with the all-important search term, ‘sociobiology’ which yielded 831 results.

Scanning through the results of this latest and best search, I found that every result was connected with the larger idea around memetics: that ideas change in an evolutionary manner, and are transmitted successfully according to the competitive advantage that they offer to their bearer. Thus using a broadened number of search terms which are related to memetics, and clicking on the easy-to-use links and subject terms which the IBSS database offers, I developed a more lucid and holistic view of the issue, than if I had just stuck with my single original search term of memetics.

However, the initial questions still remain – none of my searching elucidated the limits of a meme, most likely because the meme has yet to be delimited, although the most recent article in my first search of the database, ‘The diffusion of management innovations: the possibilities and limitations of memetics,’ Joseph O’Mahoney (2007) seems to call for a closer examination of the concept and study of memetics. Still, just how large or small does a ‘cultural element or behavioural trait’ have to be in order qualify as a meme? By this I mean to ask, just what are the basic differences between a cultural package and a cultural element or behavioural trait, or are there differences at all? For example, is the concept of agriculture a meme? Or are the various behaviours associated in the concept of agriculture the memes themselves, such as the use of a plough in comparison with stick-planting?

Another related problem is the specificity of a meme. Is a meme still the same meme if it changes meaning, for instance when it jumps cultures? An obvious example which springs to mind, if we accept that it is a meme, is the concept of democracy. To the societies often classified as Western, democracy is often equated with liberalism (meme!!!), whereas in those classified as the Rest, it may be a one-election phenomenon. This goes right to a fundamental question: is democracy still democracy if it can only be exercised once, and that to set up a system which does away any future possibility of experiencing it? Would we dare say that Singaporean democracy is any less successful for being more authoritarian than what we are accustomed to?

The third, final question concerns the usefulness of mimetics. The concept in itself posits an evolutionary and infectious (therefore, personal) spread of information. Two articles from my first search appear to deal with this question in a utilitarian way. The first, ‘Evolutionary psychology, memes and the origin of war,’ H. Keith Henson (2006), hypothesizes that behavioural changes are activated by a resource crisis, which subsequently result in a build-up of memes, ultimately leading to coordinated attacks on neighbours. But if memes are learned behaviours, then memetics alone cannot explain the origin of war. A final, finishing leap must be made from aggression to warfare, and it is perhaps too much to expect something so simplistic as a theory involving merely a ‘build-up’ and ‘critical threshold’ to explain the origin of war. In the second article, ‘Memetics and voting: how nature may make us public-spirited,’ J.P. Conley, A. Toossi, and M. Wooders, (2006), the authors appear to have confused nature with nurture. They suggest that evolutionary dynamics give a competitive advantage to public-spirited groups, seeming to regard the evolution of ideas as merely due to ‘nature.’ This flies in the face of the concept of mimetics, which hypothesizes the spread of an idea because it is more advantageous that what is natural, the status quo. Furthermore, an article from my third search, ‘Critical social learning: a solution to Roger’s paradox of nonadaptive culture,’ by Magnus Enquist, Kimmo Eriksson, and Stefano Ghirlanda, American anthropologist 2007 (12), v.109 (no. 4), further examines this particular problem from a quasi-mimetic standpoint, without using the term itself.

Mimetics, then, is such a relatively new concept that it is only now that social scientists are beginning to adopt the specific terminology and outlook that accompany its study. We can say, therefore, that it appears to be quite a useful tool in the study of mass phenomena, i.e. the spread of religious ideas and popular myth, but appears to falter somewhat when examining post-conquest or state-promulgated cultural change or assimilation. Clearly in these instances, culture doesn’t spread via memesis but rather via decree and compulsion. Another, related, point to consider is the value of memetics in analysing tightly-controlled and rigid societies. Is a degree of openness and receptivity necessary for memes to spread, or do some people, cultures and societies hang on to their own received ideas for one reason or another? The answers are still out there waiting.

Anglo-Saxon death and burial

Did anyone see ‘Feud Glorious Feud’, the first episode of Tony Robinson’s new Crime and Punishment series? It’s great how Tony Robinson ekes out what really went on for your non-noble ‘average’ individual in history. He always manages to unearth some quirk or another: this time I was fascinated by the stuff that was brought up on human remains. He was investigating how Saxons punished people in the so-called Dark Ages (an inaccurate and Eurocentric reading of history, but that’s another matter!) and spoke to an archaeologist who was excavating human remains. They discussed the remains of two individuals who had come to a grizzly end after being accused (without trial) of committing some crime or other. The first body was truncated: the guy had his head cut off before burial. Fascinatingly, the second individual was buried face down as a preventative measure which highlights how feared the criminal was: if he came alive after burial he would only be able to dig downwards and so could not come back to terrorize the community!

IBSS indexes lots of archaeology journals so I thought I’d indulge my blood-thirsty side and have a look for more Anglo-Saxon era punishment practices. This reminds me of an essay I wrote on Death and Dying in the French Revolution- I wonder if IBSS could have helped me out on that… A search for Funerary Archaeology and Anglo-Saxon brought up a very relevant article entitled ‘An Anglo-Saxon Execution Cemetery at Walkington Wold, Yorkshire’ (Buckberry, J.L. and Hadley D.M., 2007). The authors were revising theories about an excavation of a cemetery at Walkington Wold which took place 30 years ago. ‘The cemetery is characterized by careless burial on diverse alignments, and by the fact that most of the skeletons did not have associated crania. The cemetery has been variously described as being the result of an early post-Roman massacre, as providing evidence for a ‘Celtic’ head cult or as an Anglo-Saxon execution cemetery. In order to resolve the matter, radiocarbon dates were acquired and a re-examination of the skeletal remains was undertaken. It was confirmed that the cemetery was an Anglo-Saxon execution cemetery, the only known example from northern England, and the site is set into its wider context in the paper’. Very interesting that these human remains were decapitated like the indivudual shown on Tony Robinson’s programme. I’d like to read the whole article and see if the authors have touched upon the causes for these people’s death. I suppose if it was a mass burial it is more likely to be a case of genocide than punishment for crime but you never know.

I’d like to learn more about this face-down burial, so I see what I can find on mortuary customs in the past. A search for Ancient Mortuary Customs and United Kingdom gives me 6 results. There’s a very useful looking article by Bristow, P.H.W. (2001) called ‘Behaviour and Belief in Mortuary Ritual: Attitudes to the Disposal of the Dead in Southern Britain 3500BC-AD43′. The record turns out to be an internet resource which lists and analyses over 1700 funerary archaeological sites in southern Britain from the Neolithic to the Romano-British period. Unfortunately the abstract doesn’t tell me anything about the beliefs, but this is a source that would definitely be worth exploring if I was writing an essay on the subject. Another article I would definitely investigate would be ‘The Archaeology of Death and Burial’ by Parker, M.P. (2001).

I’ve still not found anything concrete on beliefs, so I search for Death, Beliefs and United Kingdom. I discover that there’s an extremely useful looking book called Dying and Death in Later Anglo-Saxon England (Thompson, V., 2006). I’m able to access a summary of the book online through the London School of Economics and Political Science electronic library. The book discusses the cross-over between lay folkloric and Christian burial practices. It sounds really pertinent to Tony Robinson’s investigation of punishment: ‘the ultimate dread was of body and soul condemned on earth as well as in heaven: exclusion from a ‘clean’ churchyard grave, and banishment to a site of ‘heathen burials’, seems to have been perceived [...] not just as a symbol but as an actual instrument of damnation’. I’m pretty sure I could learn more about that face-down burial if I get my hands on a copy of the book. I wonder if Tony Robinson’s read it?

Food, sex and gender

I was surprised by the findings of a study by the Universities of Exeter and Oxford which claimed that women who ate high energy foods – especially breakfast cereals and bananas – while trying to conceive were more likely to have a boy. The study investigated the eating habits of 740 women who were pregnant for the first time, and found that ‘56% of women with the highest energy intake around the time of conception had boys, compared to just 45% among women with the lowest energy intake’. The report struck me as a little preposterous, so I thought I’d investigate it further and see what international perspectives IBSS would uncover on beliefs surrounding food, sex and gender.

My slight unease with the implied existence of ‘manly’ foods was corroborated by an article (Ehrhardt, Julia C., 2006) which highlights the relationship between attitudes to food and gender ideology. ‘[F]ood practices and beliefs reinforce and resist heterosexual gender ideologies’. An insight into beliefs surrounding perhaps the most stereotypically gendered foodstuff – chocolate – was found in ‘Chocolate, Family, and Disorderly Women in Late-Seventeenth- and Early-Eighteenth-Century Guatemala’ (Few, Martha, 2005). The article highlights beliefs in the ability of chocolate to be put to ritual use by women both in sexual witchcraft practice and in casting supernatural illness. Surprisingly, although work on food and gender was prevalent, I did not find specific material on beliefs about how food consumption could influence the sex of foetuses.

It occured to me that the Exeter and Oxford study could have rather worrying implications for population dynamics if people use its results to try to influence the sex of their offspring. I searched IBSS for attitudes to the sex of offspring and found an article entitled ‘Son Preference and its Consequences (a Review)’ (Shah, Mussawar, 2005) which outlines socioeconomic and cultural reasons for the prevalence of son preference in South Asia. In Bangladesh, Pakistan and India the dowry system means that sons are less costly for a family to marry off than daughters. In Hindu tradition, sons are desirable because of the important ritual functions which they perform in rites of passage: ‘only sons could pray for and release the souls of their dead parents and only males could perform, death and marriage rituals’. With some cultures arguably having reasons for wanting to determine a child’s sex beyond the whimsical, will the study affect food consumption patterns during pregnancy or does global food distribution mean that the potential for such dubious practice is the sole reserve of people in overfed developed nations?