An Interesting Piece on Race in Barbados

I just encountered an interesting discussion of “Race/Colour in Barbados” on the blog What Crazy Looks Like.

The epigraphic quotation from Rihanna, “I was bullied at school for being white…Now I’m in a much bigger world,” was fascinating to me largely in clearly illustrating a fundamental difference in the social organization of race in the U.S. and in the Caribbean, for “being white” is one of the last things Rihanna would be likely taken to be in the U.S.

At the same time, the following quotation from the blog post is a useful set of statements about race anywhere in the Americas, even while the particular details that are relevant in any given place will vary:

“Even when we remind ourselves of just how fluid and contested race is we fail to reveal that race is in itself a fiction.
When we refuse to see the difference between historical racial privilege and racial slurs we foreclose on any opportunity to dismantle the fiction of race.
And when we recognise race as constructed we refuse to see its construction does not make it any less ‘real’.”

Some Good News on Species Preservation

The Association of Zoos and Aquariums (an organization mostly in the news at the moment in relation to the Christmas tragedy at the San Francisco Zoo) has released its “Top Ten Wildlife Conservation Success Stories in 2007.”

Two of the stories were of particular interest to me. One caught my attention as an anthropologist, as it involves attempts to save a primate species, the black and white ruffed lemur, while a second was of special interest to me as it involved a species inhabiting in the wild only a single barrier island off Pensacola where I live and teach, the Perdido Key Beach Mouse.

The following paragraphs are from the AZA press release:

Black-and-white ruffed lemurs born in zoos are getting a feel for their new home at the Betampona Natural Reserve in eastern Madagascar. The Madagascar Fauna Group (MFG), and the Duke Lemur Center coordinated the plan to reintroduce zoo-bred lemurs to the wild, with the help of other MFG partners and institutions, including Salt Lake City's Hogle Zoo, the Los Angeles Zoo and the Santa Ana Zoo. The released individuals are being monitored and have fared well so far, with four offspring born from three reintroduced lemurs.

This summer, Santa Fe Community College Teaching Zoo, in Gainesville, Florida, began housing 52 Perdido Key beach mice to protect the species from extinction. The mice originated from the University of South Carolina, but needed to be relocated after damage from Hurricane Ivan. The Brevard Zoo, Florida Aquarium, and Palm Beach Zoo have since shared in the responsibility of caring for and studying the mice. There are only a few hundred individuals left in the wild, inhabiting just one barrier island off the coast of Pensacola. Researchers fear that a hurricane could be disastrous to the beach mice, potentially causing the species to become extinct in the wild. Breeding studies have commenced to safeguard their numbers.

Russia, China, and a New "Great Game"

The term “Great Game” usually refers to the 19th century contest for influence in Central Asia between Russia and the British Empire. A recent article, “New ‘Great Game’ for Central Asia Riches,” provides a good overview of the current contest for influence in Central Asia by outside powers.

As the article makes clear, after September 11, 2001, the U.S. became heavily invested in the region, though has now been relegated to a more marginal player. This is partly due to waning interest on the part of the U.S. government, and partly because of the heavy initiative and investment in the region shown by China and Russia, now the two main outside influences in the region.

China in particular has substantially increased its investment in the region, with this also helping fuel the economic development of western China, with the China-Kazakhstan border coming to resemble the U.S.-Mexico border as one of the few international borders where one much more developed country shares a long border with another much poorer and less developed country, and with investment from the richer country fueling asymmetrical but cross-border development.

Food and Biofuels

The world is currently experiencing tremendous inflation in food prices. As a report in a recent issue of The Economist (December 8, pp. 81 – 83) argues, there are two major causes of this global food inflation (not to deny the potential for other factors as well – and see my note below on the contribution of oil prices to food inflation).

One of these contributing factors is actually a side effect of a positive development. The level of affluence has risen dramatically in China and India and some other developing nations in recent years. As in already developed countries, affluence has some negative consequences, e.g. greater environmental impact from higher per capita energy consumption. Higher affluence has also led to a boom in meat eating in China and India – The Economist reports that meat-eating in China went from 20 kg of meat per capita per year in 1985 to more than 50 kg per capita per year now. More meat equals more grain grown for feed equals (unless tremendous, even stupendous, quantities of land were put into grain production – causing a whole new set of ecological problems) higher prices for grain.

The second major cause of current global food inflation is the diversion of enormous amounts of grain, especially maize, to subsidized biofuel production in places like the U.S. This has resulted in an increase in maize prices, which alone contributes to food inflation, but with the further result that many farmers have switched from cultivating other grains to maize, much for biofuel purposes, further contributing to food inflation.

An article, “Biofuels: Danger or New Opportunity for Africa?,” makes clear that the problem (to the extent that food inflation is a problem – The Economist report argues that with increased food prices, some farmers, including some in the developing world, will benefit, depending on how food inflation is managed by governments) is not the use of biofuels per se.

The “Biofuels” news article reports on a conference on biofuel and food held in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, where a number of perspectives on biofuels were presented. Many voices call for cautious development of biofuel production in Burkina Faso and other African nations.

Within this framework of caution, some individuals expressed hope for biofuel development in Africa for a variety of reasons. (1) In non-oil-producing countries, like Burkina Faso, biofuels could potentially provide a lower price source of fuel than oil imports, given the current astronomical price of oil. (It seems clear to me, and I was surprised that the report in The Economist didn’t deal with this, that global oil prices are a major contributor to food inflation in two ways: [a] increased transportation cost due to higher oil prices adds to the cost of all commodities; [b] the high price of oil is the main spur for biofuel development.) (2) Biofuel and food aren’t mutually exclusive. For example, biofuel byproducts can still be used for feed for livestock or for fertilizer. Further, biofuel need not be produced strictly from edible grains. Brazil’s sugar cane (edible, but not a grain) provides a far more efficient source for biofuel production than North America’s maize, and for countries like Burkina Faso, biofuel might be best produced from non-edible plants grown on land less well suited for direct food production purposes. (3) Biofuels don’t have to fuel everything in order to be useful – they can be used strategically. For example, in poor countries, diverting small proportions of crops to biofuel production specifically to fuel tractors and other agricultural equipment could be a way to simultaneously increase the scale of production and have agricultural production fuel itself.

Again, the problem isn’t biofuels per se, but the diversion of large portions of the world’s food supply (especially North American maize) into fuel production in a context of trade and other policies that stymies more efficient and sensible biofuel production.

Opera in America

I’ve just encountered an engaging article on “America’s Opera Boom” by Jonathan Leaf. For anyone interested in opera or the arts generally, there’s a lot of interesting information in Leaf’s article, and also some encouraging news about opera in America.

Concerning the growth of opera companies and a surprisingly healthy audience size, Leaf writes:

“The U.S. now has 125 professional opera companies, 60 percent of them launched since 1970, according to the trade group OPERA America. The U.S. has more opera companies than Germany and nearly twice as many as Italy. In the most comprehensive recent study, the National Endowment for the Arts found that between 1982 and 2002, total attendance at live opera performances grew 46 percent.
“Annual admissions are now estimated at 20 million, roughly the same attendance as NFL football games (22 million, including playoffs, in 2006–07). In part, this reflects a shift toward seeing opera domestically. “Foreign opera destinations like Salzburg and Glyndebourne are more expensive, and more Americans are staying home—and probably feeling safer for it,” says Richard Gaddes, general director of the Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico.”

Obviously this is not to suggest that opera rivals professional sports in popularity in the U.S., for if you include television viewing, the NFL’s audience dwarfs that of opera, but nonetheless, I was pleasantly surprised to see just how many people do attend live opera. Leaf does point out elsewhere in the article that this doesn’t mean opera makes big money – it doesn’t – but most opera companies in the U.S. are able to find donors (who are mostly passionate about opera) to make ends meet despite relatively meager state support in most U.S. contexts.

In some of the more interesting discussion in the essay, Leaf points out that it’s not just opera in general that’s popular but new opera, and that the cultivation of new opera in America is happening largely outside of New York. Here is Leaf:

“On the morning I meet them, Smith and Johnson are on a high, savoring a recent rave review from the Los Angeles Times for their production of a new opera by Ricky Ian Gordon based on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The Minnesota Opera’s successful introduction of new works is characteristic of a wider pattern. Almost all of the most acclaimed recent operas have been introduced outside New York. John Adams’s Nixon in China was first presented by the Houston Grand Opera, Tobias Picker’s Emmeline by Santa Fe, Kirke Mechem’s Tartuffe by San Francisco. The last, a gorgeous, touching, and amusing opera, has had over 300 productions in six countries since its premiere in 1980.
“Stefania de Kenessey, a highly regarded new composer working on an opera based on Tom Wolfe’s novel about Wall Street, Bonfire of the Vanities—with Wolfe’s enthusiastic encouragement—says that companies outside New York can be easier to work with. “The regional companies usually plan out their schedules three to four years in advance, while the Met plans out about eight years ahead. That means the regionals can be more flexible in picking new works and can more easily spot and take advantage of musical trends.”

From a later portion of the text:

“This trend toward doing new works appears to be broadening. According to Santa Fe’s Gaddes, 'The repertory of opera companies has changed [since] 10 or 15 years ago. It’s become more adventurous and more contemporary.' In many cases, the premieres of new or unfamiliar productions are selling better than the repertory staples like Verdi’s La Traviata. The Minnesota Opera notes that it sold more than 98 percent of the tickets for The Grapes of Wrath, and St. Louis is proud of its sellout of an opera by David Carlson based on Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. This summer’s Santa Fe program includes the American premiere of Chinese contemporary composer Tan Dun’s Tea: Mirror of the Soul, sung in English, and three other new productions.”

Leaf also has an interesting discussion of what makes New York’s Met unique, where this uniqueness is in some ways advantageous, in some ways disadvantageous, to opera in New York:

“The Met deserves its reputation, with the world’s best singers, a superb orchestra, and lavish spectacle. Last year, the Met, under its new general manager, Peter Gelb, inaugurated high-definition video presentations of several of its operas in movie theaters around the U.S., Canada, Japan, and Europe. But in other respects, the Met is ill-suited to assume a tutelary role. Few of today’s top singers first made their names on its stage, and the Met’s immense size works against both dramatic effect and subtle and refined singing.
“The Met is designed to hold an audience of nearly 4,000 in a structure with five ascending tiers and broad rows of seats. By contrast, La Scala in Milan has 2,000 seats; the Vienna State Opera, 1,700; and the State Opera in Berlin, 1,300. These more conventional operatic theaters, which can feel almost like drawing rooms, have an intimacy that the Met cannot come close to matching.
“Into the Met’s vast space, singers must project—without amplification—across a stage extending 80 feet back, 103 feet across, and 110 feet up to the rigging. The result is a preference in New York for singers with gargantuan, if sometimes metallic, voices. Not only can the hall’s scale dwarf the singers and the story, but it can damage young voices.”

Revolution, Peaceful Resistance, Guerrilla Warfare, Part I

I’ve been reading a classic book in the sociology of revolution, Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution, first published in the 1930s and updated in the early 1960s. In it, Brinton compares the contexts and events of four European or Euro-American revolutions, ranging from the early modern English through the Enlightenment Era American and French to the industrial era Russian.

While clearly cognizant of the many distinctive features (including awareness of the American Revolution as the most atypical of the bunch, given its status as anti-colonial national struggle as much as social or political revolution), Brinton’s emphasis is on uniformities the four revolutions share in common. He smartly refrains from universalizing, making no claims that these four are typical of all revolutions – in fact he makes many explicit claims to the contrary – but he also makes a significant contribution to comparative history in that if there are important uniformities across these four quite different contexts, then there’s a good chance that this tells us something about many revolutionary, including failed revolutionary, contexts in general, even if not about all such settings.

One uniformity he discusses has to do with early stages of armed struggle in the revolutionary setting. In each case, the revolutionary factions are successful in armed struggle initially – there will be some setbacks later in some cases, but initially there is some degree of armed success, perhaps beyond that expected by either side. Keeping in mind that the cases under consideration were ultimately successful revolutions (not successful in achieving all, or even most, revolutionary goals, nor in putting off forever some form of conservative reaction, but successful in effecting a political transition), this is perhaps a statement of the obvious – armed revolutionary movements that don’t achieve at least a modicum of initial success in their armed forays are squashed before the revolution really even begins – Castro is a seeming exception with his spectacularly failed attack on the Moncada barracks, but that attack was the initial and last foray by a failed movement, leaving Castro and other Cuban revolutionaries to start anew once out of prison. (Early in the text, Brinton points out that much of his analysis will be to state the obvious, something which I agree is sometimes important in that sometimes simply stating the obvious allows for greater clarity of insight than would have been apparent without doing so.)

So, in one way or another Parliamentarians, Sons of Liberty, Jacobins, or anti-czarists (by no means mostly Bolsheviks in early 1917) gained the military upper hand over the officially constituted military. Charles’ fairly well organized and constituted army was overcome by a better one raised by Parliament. The British military establishment that could have overwhelmed the colonial militias (and very nearly ultimately did) was not much garrisoned in the North American colonies, allowing the colonists, well armed for civilians and with some militia training, to gain some early success.

It is the case of the Russian Revolution I am most interested in here. As the one industrial era revolution Brinton discusses, it is the one that perhaps speaks most closely to 20th and 21st century realities. The critical factor was that most units of the official military either refused to engage the revolutionaries or actually joined their side. In other words, the revolutionaries won largely without having to fight the military. (One major reason for the military’s refusal to engage had to do with a crisis in the Russian state, such that there was massive opposition to the state from nearly all social sectors, and along with this, failure to properly provision the military, partly because of the war context and partly due to structural failings and incomplete and partial industrialization.)

As Brinton points out, the Russian Revolution is an important counter to frequently made claims that in the industrial era, where modern states have militaries characterized by mechanized transportation, industrially produced modern weapons with ever increasing levels of sophistication, and the provisioning of large standing militaries, it is impossible for civilians to stand up against militaries and potentially gain anything. (There are other contexts refuting such claims as well, ranging from Mexico to Cuba to Iran to Zimbabwe.)

I think what’s more interesting here is that the Russian Revolution’s early successes tell us something significant about the ways in which it is possible to engage in movements for massive social transformation or revolution in the 20th century. Even in the weakened state of the Russian state, had the bulk of the Russian military acted to squash the revolutionaries, that’s almost certainly what would have happened.

In any modern state that is remotely functional (and the Russian state in 1917 was perhaps remotely, but only remotely, functional) and where the military supports the state (a critical factor not holding in 1917 Russia), civilians cannot any longer hope to enact revolutionary transition through direct armed struggle.

This has led to a change in how transformative struggle tends to work, with the growth over the past half century of movements utilizing non-violent public resistance or guerrilla warfare. This is something not much discussed by Brinton, as even for the updated edition of the book, most instances were occurring as he wrote or occurred after. Both strategies have been associated with successful social transformation and/or revolution (the civil rights movement, the 1989 transitions away from communism, the “People’s Power” ouster of Milosevic in Serbia, revolutions utilizing guerrilla warfare in Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Zimbabwe) and with failures (Tiananmen Square, most guerrilla warfare). In a follow-up post, I will address the potentials and limitations of each strategy in the recent past and contemporary era in effecting change.