What are we looking for this year?
Assuming that Margaret Thatcher's assertion that
there's no such thing as society is false, what
is it
and how do we find out about it?
A/the point of this year is to see something of
the world. Just over a month and a half in if you've been reading these diaries
you may sense that I'm not totally sure what this means, or how to do it. Our
destinations have been very different from home and I'm trying to figure out the
appropriate language for describing and remembering the differences. Put
another way, as we travel from place to place how should we look at each of
them?
First and easiest, is a photo-descriptive account: writing and taking snaps of the things that we see such as animals, buildings and places. I'm quite pleased with how this is going. Last week I ordered a photo album of over 90 pages recording our first month, and I expect I'll probably have six or seven of these by the end of the year (or twelve slimmer ones). Also, we're all keeping journals (mine being primarily these diaries), and these should give us a written record of what we did and saw.
Beyond this, we can look at the places that we're visiting geo-economically. On the blog entry that I wrote just before we left entitled Eve of Departure I listed a pile of questions that we could ask about each place and they were mainly of this nature. Although we've run through some of these informally we haven't systematically gone through each destination producing Fact Sheets or comparative charts; I was thinking that we might do this when we're in the US and we have advanced-nation internet access; I've recently ordered The Economist's little World in Figures book, which I hope also covers this ground. I'm looking forward to addressing this for the satisfaction of agreed facts simply presented.
Beyond this, there are observations that we can make of a socio-political nature. Some differences are right in your face. You can't, for example, be shown round Robben Island by an ex-con (guess I should clarify that I mean former political prisoner) without being aware that their society is recovering from a very long, very problematic period. Nor can you sit in a cafe in the medina here in Fes without realising that women here and in the West have dramatically different perspectives on decorum, presumably founded on different views on gender relations. (There really are lots of women here who expose only a narrow aperture between their veil and their headscarf. Apart from anything else, this seems impractical on these irregular streets and we did see one unlucky such lady take a tumble the other day.) On Tuesday we're going, insha' llah, to hear Fatima Sidiqi speak on the role of women in Morocco and I hope to learn something.
There are correlated differences, of course, in the political practices and power structures from place to place. Morocco, as you probably know, has both an elected government and a king with real political teeth who can trace his ancestry back to The Prophet. The countries we visited in southern Africa all, I think, have some sort of democratic government, though some are more recent and fragile than others. And some of the countries we've visited have, if not currently at least within recent memory, incarcerated sizeable populations of political prisoners.
All of the above is amenable to relatively simple and uncontroversial fact-finding, and I intend that we'll have a fair stab at it. What's harder to address are the existential or phenomenological questions. The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a short paper (I can give anyone who is interested a copy, although you may have to wait a year) entitled, What is it like to be a bat? This is (approximately) about whether you can say anything meaningful about someone else's mental experience. What I keep wanting to ask now is, What is it like to be a Moroccan/Zambian/etc? It seems very different. For example, there is the God thing. Virtually everyone here fasts during Ramadan and, as far as I can tell, most people pray five times a day. Our Arabic teacher, Abdul-ghani, can't get to the mosque at lunchtime because he's teaching us so he makes up for it by praying afterwards. And the calls from the muethin, as Abdul-ghani (contrary to the Lonely Planet glossary) advises me to write it, ring out through loudspeakers (did I mention this?) all over the medina five times a day and sound like nothing that you've ever heard in English. Apparently, the one that blares out at "dawn" (last nights was from 3:10 to 3:30) includes the advice that "it's better to pray than to sleep".
Another indication of the omnipresence of God is found in common speech; for example, the sample dialogue, which really is typical, at the front of our Arabic text book has an interlocution of nine short lines and five of these make clear mention of Allah. In England approximately none of the population attends church regularly. What I want to understand is how the God thing and the woman thing and all of these other cultural differences change the human experience. Abdul-ghani's view (I asked him) is that people are the same everywhere and just have different habits. I mentioned this to David over dinner last night and he strongly disagrees, or at least he chooses to answer the question in a different way. David points to his managerial experience: when he criticises the work that his staff do here, for example, it is taken much more personally here than in the US.
But how can we inquire about these differences in human experiences? Discounting neurological approaches (I don't have fMRI gear), one way is to ask people who have moved from one type society to another. If you have, please let me know; you may be getting an email from me. As a side note, I should point out that Abdul-ghani's view of Western society is not as complete as it might be because the UK authorities denied him access to visit his friends in Leeds; no reason was given.
Perhaps such existential questions don't make sense. It may be, for example, that "societies" are simply too heterogeneous to permit sensible generalisations (which is like the Thatcher line); but it seems to me that being in a Sinde village in Zambia or living in the medina here or living on a farm in Somerset really are very different in a way that you ought to be able to describe. Or it may be that there is a contamination effect leading to blending of cultures and experiences. For example, if I go up on the roof and look across the medina I see a whole pile of aerials and satellite dishes:
(Notice also the Godspeaker.) Hafid tells me that these are picking up primarily Al Jazeera and Al Araberia news, movies from Egypt, music channels (but not MTV, which has inappropriate images of women) and Al Jazeera sport, which is a staple of the cafes. Abdul-ghani, however, tells me that US and Indian films dubbed into French are also quite widely watched.
Or finally it may be that even if there is something different about the human experience it's just not possible to articulate it ("Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent", as Wittgenstein said at the end of Tractatus Logico-philosophicus).
But if you were travelling around for a year, you'd want to try and catch the local spirit, wouldn't you?!
Another question that's on my mind concerns whether, if we can talk sensibly about different types of society, there are transitions between them, or trajectories that you can observe or predict from the past to the future. This is what I was asking in earlier blogs when I commented on the apparent Maui-isation of parts of Africa, questioned whether we all end up being seen as incomplete Americans, and noted that Kojeve argues that the USA is the culmination of the Marxist ideal for society. The same question is with me now in Morocco: is the country destined to proceed on a path of "reform" that makes it just the same as everywhere else? The view, implicit or explicit, that this is an inevitable trend is essentially the same as the view that inspired colonial forays into Africa at the end of the nineteenth century: that the continent needed the "Three C's" of Commerce, Christianity and Civilisation, which seems to be the current US foreign policy as far as I can tell. As you know, I'm well into a fat book about this and may write more later. But for now, it's enough to question whether this is a sufficiently nuanced and sensitive view of these other cultures.
I can ask some more specific questions along these lines. First, I wonder what distinctive signature of these places will still remain in twenty years time other than recipes and heritage-protected buildings. I also would like to know how these cultures do and could enrich us, other than through decorative artefacts and (again) cuisine. And if Morocco and Zambia and all these other countries become like US states, what might they lose? For example, it may be that affluence tends to generate human isolation, partly because of the raw architectural fact that nuclear families become isolated from the everyday non-workplace interaction with wider kith and kin groups, and partly because communities splinter as people move to follow work (or to locate in geographically attractive areas). Don't know if this is truth or cliche but it does seem that people are closer outside of work in some of the places we've been so far.
Does this all seem meaningful to you? And if you were here how would you be getting your kids to write about it?
First and easiest, is a photo-descriptive account: writing and taking snaps of the things that we see such as animals, buildings and places. I'm quite pleased with how this is going. Last week I ordered a photo album of over 90 pages recording our first month, and I expect I'll probably have six or seven of these by the end of the year (or twelve slimmer ones). Also, we're all keeping journals (mine being primarily these diaries), and these should give us a written record of what we did and saw.
Beyond this, we can look at the places that we're visiting geo-economically. On the blog entry that I wrote just before we left entitled Eve of Departure I listed a pile of questions that we could ask about each place and they were mainly of this nature. Although we've run through some of these informally we haven't systematically gone through each destination producing Fact Sheets or comparative charts; I was thinking that we might do this when we're in the US and we have advanced-nation internet access; I've recently ordered The Economist's little World in Figures book, which I hope also covers this ground. I'm looking forward to addressing this for the satisfaction of agreed facts simply presented.
Beyond this, there are observations that we can make of a socio-political nature. Some differences are right in your face. You can't, for example, be shown round Robben Island by an ex-con (guess I should clarify that I mean former political prisoner) without being aware that their society is recovering from a very long, very problematic period. Nor can you sit in a cafe in the medina here in Fes without realising that women here and in the West have dramatically different perspectives on decorum, presumably founded on different views on gender relations. (There really are lots of women here who expose only a narrow aperture between their veil and their headscarf. Apart from anything else, this seems impractical on these irregular streets and we did see one unlucky such lady take a tumble the other day.) On Tuesday we're going, insha' llah, to hear Fatima Sidiqi speak on the role of women in Morocco and I hope to learn something.
There are correlated differences, of course, in the political practices and power structures from place to place. Morocco, as you probably know, has both an elected government and a king with real political teeth who can trace his ancestry back to The Prophet. The countries we visited in southern Africa all, I think, have some sort of democratic government, though some are more recent and fragile than others. And some of the countries we've visited have, if not currently at least within recent memory, incarcerated sizeable populations of political prisoners.
All of the above is amenable to relatively simple and uncontroversial fact-finding, and I intend that we'll have a fair stab at it. What's harder to address are the existential or phenomenological questions. The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a short paper (I can give anyone who is interested a copy, although you may have to wait a year) entitled, What is it like to be a bat? This is (approximately) about whether you can say anything meaningful about someone else's mental experience. What I keep wanting to ask now is, What is it like to be a Moroccan/Zambian/etc? It seems very different. For example, there is the God thing. Virtually everyone here fasts during Ramadan and, as far as I can tell, most people pray five times a day. Our Arabic teacher, Abdul-ghani, can't get to the mosque at lunchtime because he's teaching us so he makes up for it by praying afterwards. And the calls from the muethin, as Abdul-ghani (contrary to the Lonely Planet glossary) advises me to write it, ring out through loudspeakers (did I mention this?) all over the medina five times a day and sound like nothing that you've ever heard in English. Apparently, the one that blares out at "dawn" (last nights was from 3:10 to 3:30) includes the advice that "it's better to pray than to sleep".
Another indication of the omnipresence of God is found in common speech; for example, the sample dialogue, which really is typical, at the front of our Arabic text book has an interlocution of nine short lines and five of these make clear mention of Allah. In England approximately none of the population attends church regularly. What I want to understand is how the God thing and the woman thing and all of these other cultural differences change the human experience. Abdul-ghani's view (I asked him) is that people are the same everywhere and just have different habits. I mentioned this to David over dinner last night and he strongly disagrees, or at least he chooses to answer the question in a different way. David points to his managerial experience: when he criticises the work that his staff do here, for example, it is taken much more personally here than in the US.
But how can we inquire about these differences in human experiences? Discounting neurological approaches (I don't have fMRI gear), one way is to ask people who have moved from one type society to another. If you have, please let me know; you may be getting an email from me. As a side note, I should point out that Abdul-ghani's view of Western society is not as complete as it might be because the UK authorities denied him access to visit his friends in Leeds; no reason was given.
Perhaps such existential questions don't make sense. It may be, for example, that "societies" are simply too heterogeneous to permit sensible generalisations (which is like the Thatcher line); but it seems to me that being in a Sinde village in Zambia or living in the medina here or living on a farm in Somerset really are very different in a way that you ought to be able to describe. Or it may be that there is a contamination effect leading to blending of cultures and experiences. For example, if I go up on the roof and look across the medina I see a whole pile of aerials and satellite dishes:
(Notice also the Godspeaker.) Hafid tells me that these are picking up primarily Al Jazeera and Al Araberia news, movies from Egypt, music channels (but not MTV, which has inappropriate images of women) and Al Jazeera sport, which is a staple of the cafes. Abdul-ghani, however, tells me that US and Indian films dubbed into French are also quite widely watched.
Or finally it may be that even if there is something different about the human experience it's just not possible to articulate it ("Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent", as Wittgenstein said at the end of Tractatus Logico-philosophicus).
But if you were travelling around for a year, you'd want to try and catch the local spirit, wouldn't you?!
Another question that's on my mind concerns whether, if we can talk sensibly about different types of society, there are transitions between them, or trajectories that you can observe or predict from the past to the future. This is what I was asking in earlier blogs when I commented on the apparent Maui-isation of parts of Africa, questioned whether we all end up being seen as incomplete Americans, and noted that Kojeve argues that the USA is the culmination of the Marxist ideal for society. The same question is with me now in Morocco: is the country destined to proceed on a path of "reform" that makes it just the same as everywhere else? The view, implicit or explicit, that this is an inevitable trend is essentially the same as the view that inspired colonial forays into Africa at the end of the nineteenth century: that the continent needed the "Three C's" of Commerce, Christianity and Civilisation, which seems to be the current US foreign policy as far as I can tell. As you know, I'm well into a fat book about this and may write more later. But for now, it's enough to question whether this is a sufficiently nuanced and sensitive view of these other cultures.
I can ask some more specific questions along these lines. First, I wonder what distinctive signature of these places will still remain in twenty years time other than recipes and heritage-protected buildings. I also would like to know how these cultures do and could enrich us, other than through decorative artefacts and (again) cuisine. And if Morocco and Zambia and all these other countries become like US states, what might they lose? For example, it may be that affluence tends to generate human isolation, partly because of the raw architectural fact that nuclear families become isolated from the everyday non-workplace interaction with wider kith and kin groups, and partly because communities splinter as people move to follow work (or to locate in geographically attractive areas). Don't know if this is truth or cliche but it does seem that people are closer outside of work in some of the places we've been so far.
Does this all seem meaningful to you? And if you were here how would you be getting your kids to write about it?
Posted: Thu - May 19, 2005 at 05:38 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM