Religion at Bantar Gebang
2,000 families are estimated to live at Bantar Gebang, Indonesia’s largest trash dump. In this photo, women who live in this community are praying at the end of Ramadan.
Photograph: Javaz Tizmaghz, the Guardian
Hams
My reaction to finding this article, in which neighbors complain about an Amateur radio operators antenna, was to remember how important Amateur Radio is. Amateur Radio operators (known to one another as Hams) continue to provide the only long distance rapid communication in and out of regions on public, open airwaves during revolutions, disasters, military crack-downs, etc. when totalitarian governments or military coups have attempted to stop all other forms communication by blocking telephones and internet.
Autocratic regimes now seem to be able to easily shut down cyberinfrastructure entirely and in short order, as evidenced from the cases in Burma, China and Egypt. However, in most of these cases Ham Radio operators serve as a remaining link in and out of the closed borders – routing information, not necesssarily via morse code (though some do) but through voice communication and the exchange of call signs.
Ham radio crosses geopolitical borders and boundaries easily and regularly. I grew up around it because my dad is an operator, and as a kid, the hundred foot antenna over our house was the object of much speculation by neighbors. But this tower allowed him to talk to people all over the world, freely, long before the internet. And as a kid I would sit in his station and scan the dials listening carefully for the codes, “dits and dahs” of morse code, the time broadcasts and chatter across the airwaves, and even got to hear the radio communication between NASA and the space shuttle. Hams call out “CW…CW…” seeking contact with other Hams across the globe not to annoy neighbors, but to maintain free communication over the commons of the airwaves.
(my father and other operators at their Amateur radio station)
Religion, Technology: In Print: 1880-2000
In Search of a Free System: WikiLeaks & Tron
In The Hacker Ethic, Pekka Himanen argues that the hacker community’s values are a “general social challenge” which include “the goal of getting everybody to participate in the network and to benefit from it, to feel responsible for longer term consequences of the network society, and to directly help those who have been left on the margins of survival” (Himanen, 2001).
In the case of WikiLeaks, hacker-activists (organizing under the broad and decentralized social movement known as Anonymous) are emerging as hacktivist heroes coming to the defense of free speech, public cyberspace and an open internet. In the same moment the sequel to Tron is about to premier, cyberactivism is front and center in the media, discussions online and global government actions and policy debates. The hacktivists responding to WikiLeaks share at least one goal with the heroes of Tron: a “free system.”
…the radical nature of general hackerism consists of its proposing an alternative spirit for the network society – a spirit that finally questions the dominant Protestant ethic. In this context we find the only sense in which all hackers are really crackers: they are trying to crack the locks of the iron cage. (Himanen, 2001)
In Tron, religion is both a belief in Users, the humans who write programs, and also the struggle for a “free system.” The belief in Users comes up in a discussion between a program named Crom and one of the guards who is about to force Crom into the equivalent of a gladiatorial contest:
Crom: Look. This… is all a mistake. I’m just a compound interest program. I work at a savings and loan! I can’t play these video games!
Guard: Sure you can, pal. Look like a natural athlete if I ever saw one.
Crom: Who, me? Are you kidding? No, I run to check on T-bill rates, I get outta breath. Hey, look, you guys are gonna make my User, Mr. Henderson, very angry. He’s a full-branch manager.
Guard: Great. Another religious nut. [pushes Crom into the holding cell]
After he’s in the cell, the conversation about Users continues with a fellow prisoner:
Ram: I’d say “Welcome Friend”. But not here. Not like this.
Crom: I don’t even know what I’m doing here.
Ram: Do you believe in the Users?
Crom: Sure I do. If I don’t have a User, then who wrote me?
Ram: That’s what you’re doing down here. You really think the users are still there?
The living programs in this computer-world are pressured, through a program of domination and oppression by the military forces of the Master Control Program, to renounce belief in the Users (and therefore also in the possibility of a free system). Their belief is called “superstitious and hysterical,” they are tortured, forced to fight one another and eventually killed (de-rezzed). We can see parallels with early Christians here, imprisoned by Romans and waiting to be sent into The Colosseum.
Of course, they are also the resistance movements in WWII Europe, the IRA, the PLO, the American revolutionaries of the 13 colonies and the American socialists of the 1930s and the radicals in Seattle in 1999, and the Central and South American freedom fighters, etc. They are archetypal resistance fighters in the struggle against oppression, occupation and domination. The forces of domination claim their resistance is about superstitious belief in Users, but this isn’t the depth of their belief. Their cause is religious because it is about their belief in a possible better world, it is what Tillich called “ultimate concern” and what Dewey called “our common faith.”
The humans/Users also debate the religious nature of their programming work – for example this conversation between Dillinger, an evil CEO who has taken control of the corporation Encom and who is doing the bidding of the malicious Master Control Program (MCP) and Dr. Gibbs, one of the company founders and original programers:
Ed Dillinger: Encom isn’t the business you started in your garage anymore. We’re billing accounts in thirty different countries; new defense systems; we have one of the most sophisticated pieces of equipment in existence.
Dr. Walter Gibbs: Oh, I know all that. [starts for the elevator] Sometimes I wish I were back in my garage.
Ed Dillinger: That can be arranged, Walter.
Dr. Walter Gibbs: [stops and turns back to Dillinger, visibly angry] That was uncalled for! You know, you can remove men like Alan and me from the system, but we helped create it! And our spirit remains in every program we design for this computer!
Ed Dillinger: Walter, it’s getting late. I’ve got better things to do than to have religious discussions with you. Don’t worry about ENCOM anymore; it’s out of your hands now.
The “spirit” of Dr. Gibbs does exist inside the computer, in the form of the temple gaurdian Dumont who says they “keep me around in case one of them wants to deal with the other side.” Programs inside the system use his input-output tower to communicate with their users. It is, for them, a temple for access to the divine.
But the goal of commuicating with the users isn’t salvation, forgiveness or enlightenment, the goal of access to this divine communion is access to information. The Master Control Program is a machine of governmentality, reproducing repression, controlling the lives of programs through censorship by preventing them from having access to communication with their Users. The MCP’s power comes from its ability to operate in secret and without oversight and it complains about the presence of Tron, saying:” I can’t afford to have an independent program monitoring me.” Tron is a threat because he is a conduit for free access to information. As Tron says:
My User has information that could… that could make this a free system again! No, really! You’d have programs lined up just to use this place (the input-output tower), and no MCP looking over your shoulder.
Information can “make this a free system again.” Kevin Flynn, the human/User protagonist of the film, is a hacker, a cyberactivist, he is a hacktivist. Flynn’s rallying cry in the film is echoed by the hackers who are organizing around a social movement in defense of an open and free internet: “Now for some real user power.”
References
Himanen, P., Castells, M. (2001). The Hacker Ethic, and the Spirit of the Information Age. New York: Random House.
LDS “Handbook 2″ online
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has put volume 2 of their “Handbook” on the web. This has already produced some interesting media content. For example, the Huffington Post reports “the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints takes no stand on drinking Coca-Cola.” This suggests one of the immediate effects of making this document available is the conflation of the “document” with “the church” and therefore with “the religion” at least in this media source. It is worth asking what the differences are between this textual “Handbook” and LDS faith as a “religion on the ground” in terms of how the faith is practiced by individuals and communities – and what kinds of variations exist between doctrinal ideology, practice, policy, the “Handbook” and lived religion.
Alexander Soucy explores how ”performances of authority, primarily through language, relate to the larger context of religious studies” noting that ”the tradition of the academic study of religion has historically been white, male, and biased toward textual traditions or the textual aspects within traditions“ (2009, p.352). Soucy suggests that by continuing this trend “we uncritically accept” and lend “authority to elite male modes of religious practice while either ignoring or devaluing practices associated with women or other marginalized groups” (Soucy 2009, p.352).
The LDS community inhabited by my childhood friends, for example, may not have had a “policy” on Coca-Cola, or caffeinated beverages, but the “Mormon” culture of the region practiced abstention from consumption of caffeine, in at least most cases. And this abstention was linked, by practitioners to their faith.
Of course, this document does provide a vital resource for understanding the bureaucratic structures of the church and how the institution defines itself and its members in terms of titles, policies and practices. For example, on which version or translation of the Bible to use, the handbook advises: “The most reliable way to measure the accuracy of any biblical translation is not by comparing different texts, but by comparison with the Book of Mormon and modern-day revelations” (21.1.7). The handbook also includes a section on the internet about which it says “When carefully used, the Internet can help coordinate the work of the Church, strengthen faith, and minister to the needs of others” (21.1.22).
The Table of Contents for the Handbook:
Introduction
1. Families and the Church in God’s Plan
2. Priesthood Principles
3. Leadership in the Church of Jesus Christ
4. The Ward Council
5. The Work of Salvation in the Ward and Stake
6. Welfare Principles and Leadership
7. Melchizedek Priesthood
8. Aaronic Priesthood
9. Relief Society
10. Young Women
11. Primary
12. Sunday School
13. Activities
14. Music
15. Stake Organization
16. Single Members
17. Uniformity and Adaptation
18. Meetings in the Church
19. Callings in the Church
20. Priesthood Ordinances and Blessings
21. Selected Church Policies and Guidelines
Appendix: List of Items Referenced
Index
References
Soucy, A. (2009). Language, Orthodoxy, and Performances of Authority in # Vietnamese Buddhism. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, # lfp017.
What are “Indigenous Religions”?
As I browse publisher’s web sites for forthcoming volumes on religion, anthropology, sociology and other topics relevant to my research, I’m struck by one of the categories frequently used: Indigenous Religions. Listed with categories for books on Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Comparative Religions, etc. this Indigenous genre stands out.
The other genres are, for the most part, what have been historically called “World Religions.” This category sometimes refers to the many “religions of the world” as in Huston Smith’s “The World’s Religions” but usually it mean something more like “religions of the majority.” Tomoko Masuzawa (University of Michigan, and currently a scholar at the IAS School of Social Science) problematizes the construction of this category in her book “The Invention of World Religions: Or How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism.” The book has been waiting on my shelf for a careful reading but I’ve had a quick look at the introduction in which she notes “everybody, in effect, seems to know what ‘world religions’ means, more or less.” Discussing the role of the phrase in the academy, she observes that the list of world religions “almost invariably include Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism, and also typically count among their number Confucianism, Taoism, and Shinto . . less typically but still very frequently included are Zoroastrianism, Jainism, and Sikhism.”
Masuzawa argues that the demarcation between “Eastern” and “Western” religions is “articulated from the point of view of the European West.” An observation that while seeming initially quite obvious, has a profound consequence when you consider, say, a Buddhist in California talking about their practice in an “Eastern religion” from a geographic position in which Asia lies directly to their West. Of course, they might practice in a line that considers itself rooted more in Colorado than India. But clearly “Eastern” means something else here. Masuzawa proposes this positioning is rooted in the nineteenth-century origins of early linguistic studies (philology), which identified the “Semitic”, “Aryan” and “Oriental” languages as matching up with contemporaneous ”racialized notions of ethnic difference.” Amazingly, these divisions persist in religious studies departments (and publishing houses), without much attention to their basis in colonial logic.
And so, returning to the “Indigenous” question: with this oddly positioned binary of religious categories in hand, the academy categorizes everything else – whatever doesn’t fit in East or West – into “Indigenous” or “Tribal” religion. This includes the “animism,” shamanism,” and any other practice once called “primitive religion.” What do we make of the essentialism and universalism of this category? Certainly it persists in part because of the continued centering of Mircea Eliade (and Émile Durkheim, and others) in religious studies curricula.
After all, Eliadean methodology attempts to locate “original,” “archaic,” and “primary” religion in historical or existent “primitive man” and extrapolate a broader understanding of all religious belief and practice from the resulting monolithic construction. Eliade names this monolith “archaic religion” and his dialectic places it in opposition to the “highly evolved” religions. I’ve been working on a critique of the Eliadean Community of Practice from linguistic anthropology, especially considering Joseph Errington‘s notion of a “Colonial Linguistics.” Reviewing the literature, I’ve found a range of critiques of Eliade which I’ll include here.
Previous critiques of Eliadeʼs dialectic of binary oppositions include feminist (Christ 1991, King 2002), postcolonial (Kehoe 1996, Bilimoria 2000, Joy 2001), theories of religion (Smart 1978, Alles 1988, Segal and Wiebe 1989), postmodern (Olson 1999, King 2002), and methodological (Leach 1966, Strenski 1973, Allen 1978, Werblowsky 1989).
In a feminist critique, Christ points to Eliadeʼs practice of giving grandiose names to male gods but referring only to unspecified (and lower-case) “goddesses” (1991:84) and draws attention to Eliadeʼs valorization of the “Indo- European” conquest over “sedentary populations,” a conquest Eliade compares to “carnivores hunting” (1991:88). Christ uncovers gendered features of Eliadeʼs discourse, the particular (female) versus the universal (male), and Eliadeʼs claim that hierarchical relations of the sexes are an essential characteristic (1991:93). Christ (1991:93) and King (2002:373) both argue that Eliadeʼs history of religion is flawed by its dualism and universalization of male experience.
In a postcolonial critique, Kehoe accuses Eliade of cultural imperialism and labels his “new humanism” as a “very old primitivism” (1996:377). Kehoe takes issue with Eliadeʼs labeling of contemporary societies “archaic” and his misrepresentation of those peoples (1996:383,384). Eliadeʼs primitivism, in Kehoeʼs view, is a “yearning to shed bourgeois clothing and partake” of the “archaic ecstasy” (1996:388). In Kehoeʼs reading, Eliade may lead an “inauthentic [life] of spurious culture” (Sapir 1924) but by constructing the “primitive shaman” he can reassure himself that “archaic ecstasy” is still possible (1996:38). Bilimoria (2000:171,198) and Joy (2001:177) both critique Elaideʼs binaries (true/false, transcendental/totemic, belief/myth, sacred/profane).
In a theories of religion critique, Smart proposes a “grammar of religion” to replace Eliadeʼs sacred/profane polarity (1978:176). Alles sees Eliadeʼs dialectic as a totality, and calls on Saidʼs (et al.) critique that totality is “an instrument of Western colonial domination and cultural imperialism” (1988: 115,117). Segal and Wiebe critique Eliadeʼs claim to the sui generis character of religious phenomena (1989:600).
Olsonʼs postmodern critique draws from Foucault (1967:189) to dispute Eliadeʼs assertion that history is a “body of facts” arguing that there is no untainted “primal” historical material (Olson 1999:360). Olson contrasts Eliadeʼs linear, hierarchical hermeneutics with Deleuze and Guattariʼs de-centered rhizomatics (Olson 1999:366,383). King is critical of Eliadeʼs “transcendental pretense of modernity” which she says universalizes thinking and attempts to impose that system on others (2002:371).
Leachʼs critique of Eliadeʼs methodology points out the use of “exotic ethnography” in order to construct Eliadeʼs notion of “archaic religion” (1966:279). Strenski criticizes Eliade for searching for “higher,” “trans-historical,” “primary,” “original” “prehistoric” meanings (1973:303-306). Strenski argues that Eliadean methodology makes religion “independent of culture” (1973:310). Allen argues that Eliade seeks an “invariant core,” an “essential meaning” of symbols (1978:273). Werblowsky critiques Eliade for finding commonality disparate non- western, non-modern experiences (a “paleolithic hunter and the Buddhist monk” for example) (1989:297).
All references can be found in my Critical Reading of Eliade bibliography.
Aqua Buddha
Rand Paul, Libertarian candidate for Kentucky’s seat in the US Senate and son of former presidential candidate Ron Paul, is set to take office January 2011 to replace Jim Bunning. During the election campaign, an article in GQ magazine “revealed” that while an undergraduate at Baylor (the world’s largest Baptist university) he was a member of a “secret society” called the “NoZe Brotherhood.”
A fellow member of this “society,” John Green, said the group “aspired to blasphemy” in response to the schools dogmatic Baptist religiosity. The president of the school at the time described them as “lewd, crude, and grossly sacrilegious.” According to one informant, a female student who was Paul’s teammate on the swim team Paul and a fellow NoZe Brotherhood member kidnapped her:
“He and Randy came to my house, they knocked on my door, and then they blindfolded me, tied me up, and put me in their car. They took me to their apartment and tried to force me to take bong hits. They’d been smoking pot.”
Paul and his friend then drove her into the country and stopped near a stream and forced her to engage in taboo religious acts.
“They told me their god was ‘Aqua Buddha’ and that I needed to bow down and worship him . . . they blindfolded me and made me bow down to ‘Aqua Buddha’ in the creek. I had to say, ‘I worship you Aqua Buddha, I worship you.’ At Baylor, there were people actively going around trying to save you and we had to go to chapel, so worshiping idols was a big no-no.”
Jack Conway‘s campaign took a literalist interpretation of parts of this story (at least for the purposes of the election), using the following image in advertising against Paul:
And during a debate, Conway attacked Paul saying:
“When is it ever a good idea to tie up a woman and ask her to kneel before a false idol, your god, which you call Aqua Buddha?”
Aside from the fascinating political questions (among them: does conway believe that? Is he calling him on his hypocrisy or calling him a ‘bad Christian’?), my first question was: what exactly is an Aqua Buddha? Paul, now senator-elect, hasn’t said much more than a statement from his campaign:
“During his time at Baylor, Dr. Paul competed on the swim team and was an active member of Young Conservatives of Texas.”
So, we’re left to try and piece together this “ritual,” and ask: was it a practical joke? a stunt? an act of violence or intimidation? or religious activity? While it’s easy to dismiss it as a stunt, a discordian game in the face of the pervasive Baptist dogma of their school, the choice of words, actions and the way they’ve constructed this “idol” speaks to their religious experiences and beliefs in a way worth noting.
So what is an Aqua Buddha? According to Conway’s ad above, it appears to be very literally, an aqua colored Buddha. But the informant’s interpretation of their motivation suggests it was a stand-in for the “golden calf,” an idol constructed in the minds of these two young men to represent precisely what they were forbidden to worship: Nature, in the form of water, and a figure from a non-christian religion, the Buddha. Read as such, and depending on the victims beliefs and the field of cultural and social factors involved, an act like this could be religious torture. Imagine the story from a different angle: a young Buddhist woman kidnapped and dragged to a creek by two young men and then forced to proclaim her faith in Christ.
In this instance however, the victim (now a clinical psychologist) doesn’t make that claim saying instead: ”They never hurt me, they never did anything wrong, but the whole thing was kind of sadistic. They were messing with my mind. It was some kind of joke . . I never saw Randy after that—for understandable reasons, I think.”
Ethnometaphysics
Oversoul, Alex Gray, 1997
In the Fall 2010 issue of Anthropology of Consciousness, Marc Blainey looks at the “discord in the West between viewing psychoactive substances as either ‘hallucinogens’ or ‘entheogens’,” and makes the case for renewed interest in ethnometaphysics. His article has me thinking more about anthropologists produced by a (mostly) entheophobic culture looking at practices and people who are more entheophilic and the ways in which those biases against certain states of consciousness affect the ethnography.
Synchronistically, I recently wrestled with this issue in my review of Lee Gilmore’s new ethnography, Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man. While Gilmore’s book is a beautifully written portrait of her experiences as an insider at the festival, she elected to exclude entheogens from the volume. In this section of the review, I address one of the reasons Gilmore chose to exclude entheogens, namely that she does not engage in the practice herself:
Gilmore explores areas of inquiry in this ethnography that once fell outside her personal experience, but does not explain why she was unwilling to become a participant observer in the area of ritual entheogen use as she did in other experience-far arenas. In the introduction to this volume, she cites James Clifford in support of her reflexive ethnographic strategy (p. 12). Clifford critiques the authoritative voice of the ethnographer in his analysis of experience as an “effective guarantee of ethnographic authority” (The Predicament of Culture, 1988 & Writing Culture, 1986) and cautions against smoothing over informants’ many voices with the ethnographers own “monophonic authority” as narrator and interpreter. Through much of the ethnography, Gilmore is careful to avoid this problem by regularly quoting festival participants. However, we do not hear from participants on the question of entheogen use, and are instead left only with Gilmore’s voice assuring us that the practice is not relevant. (Oman-Reagan, 2010)
Reading Blainey’s article, I wonder if her choice to exclude entheogens might arise partly from her ethnometaphysical positioning. Perhaps this kind of exclusion of certain practices (almost taboo practices for some in ‘this’ culture) marks the work as closer to the entheophobic side of our culture that perceives psychedelic use as hallucinatory rather than revelatory or entheogenic. Here’s a relevant section from Blainey:
As an example of the utility of ethnometaphysical analysis, I point to the question of why the earnest ritual ingestion of entheogens (psychoactive plant and chemical substances used as spiritual sacraments [Forte 1997]) is so widespread amongst ideologies that have been categorized (albeit problematically) as “shamanistic”? Following R. Gordon Wasson’s (1980: xv; Winkelman 2000:3) partition of cultures according to their keenness for or aversion to mushrooms (mycophiles and mycophobes respectively), I will term cultures with a dedication to entheogens as entheophilic, while those (like our own) that largely disdain the effects, calling them “hallucinogens,” are classified as entheophobic.
Perhaps the most fruitful classificatory venture with respect to the ethnometaphysical distinctions underlying entheophilic and entheophobic worldviews is the neurophenomenological model, which designates Euroamerican culture as monophasic while recognizing most other cultures as polyphasic (see Laughlin et al. 1992; Winkelman 2000:3). Winkelman (2000:25) identifies the neurophenomenological approach as a “structural monist perspective,” accounting for both physical (matter) and spiritual (mind) extremes, as well as pondering the interaction between them. In identifying the deeply ingrained disinclination of the standard Western enculturation process to esteem atypical forms of consciousness, monophasic logic arguably stems from a foundational view of the observer as merely a passive window looking out unidirectionally on an external materiality. This echoes Charles D. Laughlin’s (1999) characterization of Euroamerican culture as “materialist,” in that it is “primarily concerned with tracking external events while in the waking state.” Such a portrayal is quite similar to Benjamin Whorf’s (1941) model of the Standard Average European (SAE) worldview where the reification of externality relegates internal consciousness to the epiphenomenal domain of the “imaginary.” Regardless of the label used, one need simply consider the legal and religious norms of Western society where the only sanctioned psychoactive substances are coffee, nicotine, alcohol, and painkillers (aimed at lessening both physical and mental discomfort without prompting deep existential reflection). For the average Euroamerican, any suggestion that the external world’s integrity is to some extent reliant on the observer’s observing of it (such as with some esoteric corollaries of quantum mechanics or as is commonly experienced in altered states of consciousness) presents a grave threat to ideological norms. Hence, the popular disapproval of entheogenic experiences as “hallucinatory” invokes accustomed ethnometaphysical beliefs that routinely become defensive whenever the primacy of external reality is questioned in our culture. (Blainey, 2010)
The ethnometaphysical approach, Blainey writes, “avoids partialities towards any one ontological system.” This strikes me as an approach that can be readily applied productively to ideas of being and consciousness within “our own” culture. For example, in rave and dance music culture, entheogenic spirituality movements, ayahuasca centered neo-shamanism and so on. The ethnometaphysical approach can help to address the bias of the entheophobic culture that Blainey describes so perfectly:
In contrast to the dominance of dualism and physicalist monism in the West, I suggest that what we are dealing with when we consider the various accounts of both Westerners and non-Westerners who claim to have had beneficial experiences with entheogenic intoxication is a fondness for a metaphysics of mystical monism. For instance, the traditional stance of Western science with regard to entheogens has been to identify them as “hallucinogens” and their effects as “hallucinations,”—characterizations that disclose the dualist/physicalist inclinations of Western thought in general. This is furthered by the “objective” portrayals found in pharmacological volumes where the ingestion of “hallucinogenic” mushrooms containing the active compound psilocybin are said to cause “disturbances in thinking, illusions… and impaired ego functioning” (Julien 2005:612 emphasis added). (Blainey, 2010)
References
Blainey, M., 2010, Special Section: The Future of a Discipline: Considering the Ontological/Methodological Future of the Anthropology of Consciousness, Part II. Anthropology of Consciousness, 21: 113–138.
Oman-Reagan, M.P., 2010, Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man. Lee Gilmore. Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review, Volume 1, Number 2, November 2010 , pp. 176-180
Fierce OS
The interpretation of symbolic structures is forced into an infinity of symbolic contextual meanings.
M. M. Bakhtin
Historically, Lions have been symbols of power from the Persian to the British Empires, from Hinduism (Narasimha) to Judaism, Islam and Christianity (see Kings, Judges, Proverbs, Samuel, Isaiah, Daniel, Numbers, Revelations, etc. and of course The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). In Meso and South American traditions Jaguars are associated with creation stories and shamanism. From Mesopotamia to the Americas, cats and the divine have enjoyed an intimate relationship for at least 10,000 years. Big cats (genus Panthera) have been deployed as markers for power, virility, nobility, the numinous, and more recently as mascots for Apple’s operating systems.
Apple Inc. has been naming (and code-naming) their operating systems after big cats since the release of OS X 10.0 (Cheeta) in 2001. Their newest release, scheduled for Summer 2011 is called “Lion.” It turns out they’ve chosen a stock photo of a Lion for their marketing materials that was also used by a Belgian anti-immigration nationalist party (Vlaams Belang) in 2007 along with the slogan “Flemish Force.” Gizmodo reports that the photo, previously available from stock agencies Shutterstock and Fotolia, is called “The King” – though it’s now been removed.
Vlaams Belang’s Lion (2007)
And, as ZDnet’s Apple Core blog points out, this isn’t the first unusual encounter Apple has had with stock imagery of big cats. For the current release of OS X, 10.6 aka Snow Leopard, they chose to remove blood from the predators mouth.
Snow Leopard
Snow Leopard, cleaned up
The message with Snow Leopard? OS X is fierce, but not too fierce. Now Apple may be asking: how do you remove the ‘stain’ of an anti-immigration nationalist party from your cat?
Google’s Autocomplete Algorithm
A friend shared this series of Google autocomplete search results on a social network, it contains screen captures of Google’s autocomplete feature along with a venn diagram produced from the resulting terms:
I was curious if I would get the same terms, so I tried it. As soon as I found that my results for “Why are Buddhists” were different in than the screen capture in the image above I decided to take more of my own samples. I tried out a few religions that came to mind off the top of my head. Here are the results of my autocomplete searches, taken today between 11:11 and 11:15:
Google autocomplete is described as an “algorithm” that “offers searches that might be similar to the one you’re typing.” Based on the description below of how they are produced, you may have different results when you search:
As you type, Google’s algorithm predicts and displays search queries based on other users’ search activities. These searches are algorithmically determined based on a number of purely objective factors (including popularity of search terms) without human intervention. All of the predicted queries shown have been typed previously by other Google users. The autocomplete dataset is updated frequently to offer fresh and rising search queries. In addition, if you’re signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled, you may see search queries from relevant searches that you’ve done in the past.
Mutiny and Modernism
The morning watch was come; the vessel lay
Her course, and gently made her liquid way;
The cloven billow flashed from off her prow
In furrows formed by that majestic plough;
The waters with their world were all before;
Behind, the South Sea’s many an islet shore.
The quiet night, now dappling, ‘gan to wane,
Dividing darkness from the dawning main;
The dolphins, not unconscious of the day,
Swam high, as eager of the coming ray;
The stars from broader beams began to creep,
And lift their shining eyelids from the deep;
The sail resumed its lately shadowed white,
And the wind fluttered with a freshening flight;
The purpling Ocean owns the coming Sun,
But ere he break– a deed is to be done.
. . .
Excerpt from “The Island,” in The Works of Lord Byron, vol. 5, (1904)
In 1787, a three masted sailing ship was refitted, named “Bounty” and commissioned to transplant breadfruit from Tahiti to the West Indies, in hopes that the plant could serve as food for workers enslaved by the British empire. As the crew spent months on Tahiti preparing the plants for transport they “went native,” getting traditional tattoos and otherwise “interacting” with the local population. Acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian married a Tahitian woman.
After setting sail with the potted breadfruit plants on board, Christian mutinied about 1,300 miles west of Tahiti. Christian and his men sent Captain Bligh and those loyal to him adrift on the ships launch. After a failed attempt to settle on Tubuai, Christian, his crewmen, and the accompanying Tahitian men and women (some of whom were kidnapped) eventually ‘found’ Pitcairn Island and settled. They burned their ship in Bounty Bay, January 1790 and evaded discovery by the British navy until 1814 at which time only one of the mutineers was still alive. This is, at least, the story that is told about the mutiny on the Bounty.
Today, about 50 people live on Pitcairn Island and the majority are descendants of the original Bounty mutineers (and the Tahitians or Polynesians who were married to mutineers or enslaved by them or both). After a mission arrived in the 1880s, much of the island population was converted to Seventh-day Adventism. The island has no airport or seaport and one small harbor visited a few times a year by boats from passing or chartered cargo and passenger ships. When, in the late 1990s, several male islanders were convicted of sexual abuses the British government set up a prison on the island to hold them.
And now, 221 years after the mutiny on the Bounty, an iPad has landed on Pitcairn Island. It’s owned by Andrew Randall Christian, a seventh generation descendant of Fletcher Christian, leader of the mutineers who seized command of the boat from Captain Bligh.
Andrew Christian offers web design services on the island, and the pacific island state has .pn domain names for sale. The island does have phones via satellite communication, ATVs, one paved road and other modern technology, but even so there is something worth noting, it seems, about the arrival of this device in such a “remote” place. This exemplar of modern consumer technology, a stand-in for everything current in computing, has arrived on an island in the sea, a location with a great deal of myth-power. The island is the setting for an archetype of mutiny which has been represented and remixed in literature, poetry, music, film and science fiction.
In the fourth film of the Star Trek franchise, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, a Klingon Bird-of-Prey (an alien warship) commandeered by James T. Kirk (Captain of the Enterprise) is given the name “HMS Bounty” by Leonard McCoy (physician and friend to Kirk). Kirk seizes the Klingon ship while rescuing his friend Spock (the alien science officer) and once he has saved him Kirk and his crew decide to return to Earth in order to face the charges against them. In the previous films, Kirk had stolen and subsequently destroyed his own ship (the Enterprise). En route to their trial, the effects of a mysterious alien probe on Earth leave the mutineers the only hope for saving the planet. They must travel back in time in search of a humpback whale (a species extinct by their time), because only the whales can communicate with the alien ship in Earth orbit. While in the past (1980s USA), they are faced with the problems of navigating a society that “still uses money” and two of the team are mistaken for “the enemy” (read as Soviet in this Cold War era film) by the crew of a US military nuclear aircraft carrier; the USS Enterprise, of course. While the similarities between Kirk’s crew and the original Bounty mutineers are minimal, a more interesting connection can be woven between the Star Trek franchise and the arrival of the iPad on Pitcairn Island.
The Star Trek television series brought early examples of an iPad-like device into American homes in the late 1960s. An electronic clipboard (below) showed up in the original television series (1966-1969), with what may have been the closest thing to a touch screen available at the time: a ‘magic slate’ (the childhood pressure writing tablet that is erased by lifting up the top layer).
Decades later, in Star Trek the Next Generation (1987-1994), a new version of the device became ubiquitous in the series. In nearly every episode of the re-invention of the franchise, crew members are shown working on a “PADD” (Personal Access Display Device), seen here in the hands of Captain Jean-Luc Picard played by Patrick Stewart.
The PADD was only one example of the widespread use of touch-screen technology in the new Star Trek universe of the late 80s, early 90s. After his work in the mid 80s on displays in Star Trek IV, Michael Okuda was put in charge of designing the displays for the Next Generation beginning in 1987. The images Okuda designed for the PADD screen represent the graphical user interface (GUI) of an omnipresent, wirelessly networked and embedded supercomputer that monitors and manages everything occurring on the starship Enterprise. This new iteration of the Enterprise, an enormous space faring vessel sent out to explore the universe, was once again named after a long line of non-fictional sea and space-faring ships (from the Nuclear powered aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, to NASA’s Space Shuttle Enterprise). The touch-screen aesthetic and representations of the GUI on this imagined future Enterprise, came to be known as “okudagrams” after their designer. I remember, around this time, getting a new microwave with a touch-pad, and thinking how futuristic it was because of the similarity to the touch-screen controls on the Enterprise. Although the microwave controls were simply flat pressure buttons and not a touch-screen, the aesthetic clearly echoed the okudagrams.
And now, with Apple’s iPad, a real touch-screen PADD is available as a consumer computing device. On the Enterprise, crew and civilians interacted with their computers socially through spoken commands and holographic simulations, and through touch-screens always within reach. Like the PADD of Star Trek, the iPad is wireless with access to vast networks of information, and it’s possible to use your voice to communicate with it, or use the iPad to augment reality. Kueger Systems, Inc. has written an application that allows users to read internet content in a GUI based on the LCARS interface of the okudagrams: LCARS Internet Media Reader for iPad.
In referencing mutiny on the Bounty, Star Trek IV calls on an historical event, an archetype of romanticized mutiny in popular culture, and weaves that myth into an intergalactic adventure back to the ocean of the past to save the Earth. Time travel is occurring on multiple levels here. With the PADD and touch-screen surfaces of the Next Generation, the franchise later imagined a post-desktop model of human-computer interactions and contributed to the aesthetic and language of ubiquitous computing. Now a product of that imaginative universe of speculative fiction is in the hands of a direct descendent of the the Bounty mutineer.
Clearly the capitalist mode of production had a role to play in bringing about this encounter between the mutineer’s descendant and the iPad, but consider also that the personal computer was a product of the 1960s counter-culture revolution. Personal computers are children of psychedelic culture and the resulting mind-states, and the internet is a daughter of DARPA. The iPads parents are both Hacker/Hippies and Four-Star Generals from the armies of Wall Street. Consider also that Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek didn’t originally imagine the Borg (an army of collectivist cyborgs bent on assimilating the universe) as an enemy but as a utopian society; an ideal for humanity to aspire to. Consider that Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc., said in reference to his time as a student (at my own alma mater Reed College) that the courses in traditional calligraphy offered at the time were an enormous influence on his design of the first Macintosh computer. Cyborgs, calligraphy, hackers, communism, psychedelics, marine and intergalactic mutineers, whales and time travel… What is all of this, and what does it all mean? Perhaps there isn’t “meaning” to be written, but instead there are relationships to describe, interactions to explore and stories to tell.
Reading David Harvey critiquing the “contrived depthlessness” (Jameson’s language) of post-modern cultural production (The Condition of Post-Modernity, 1989), I’m struck by the ways in which one can locate depth by including more layers in the analysis, by exploring more dimensions, and allowing for more historical time. The PADD is part of our mythology of technology, progress, and the future, an ancient story older than writing – and the iPad is equally product of and contributor to that myth. Technology is embedded in a mutually shaping exchange with our mythology, our narratives about technology seem to produce technology as much as the capitalists’ desire for surplus drives the advancing of technology and expansion of production.
And so to the claim of a post-modernity limited to merely surfaces, I respond by peeling back and shuffling layers and drawing them out to see what stories we can tell. I contemplate my position as a former “Reedie” (like Jobs), a descendent of Sir Henry Morgan (a pirate), an Apple technology worker and a trekkie/trekker (a fan of Star Trek) as well as an anthropologist and a scholar of religion and technology. And from that position, I reflect on Andrew Randall Christian, seventh generation descendent of the original mutineer of the Bounty, sitting on Pitcairn Island, iPad in hand, watching Star Trek IV: The Voyage home.
The cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation in Generations (1994)
Cyberactivism, iPhone 4 and The Courage to Be
(Note: This post was originally published on an blog about Apple technology, based on a few requests I’m making it available here. -MOR)
Apple has been hard at work the last few years building their reputation as a ‘socially responsible’ company. Like other greenwashing corporations (Whole Foods for example), this reputation is 9/10ths marketing and 1/10th wishful thinking from the cult of Mac. Yes, Apple did change components in their products to reduce toxicity and increase ease of recycling, and they do ‘check out’ the factories where their products are manufactured, and wasn’t Kermit the Frog in one of their ad campaigns along with Gandhi and the Dalai Lama? But does coming out with a ‘new and better’ product every few months and holding back features to encourage upgrade purchases really help reduce waste? And what are the standards they use to ‘check out’ those factories? Standards you would accept if you worked there?
So, we need to be asking Apple why workers at the Foxconn plant in China where they’ve been making the new iPhones, are committing suicide. Or we could just ask the workers:
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