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James Lasdun reviews The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, in The Guardian:

The janissaries of the Ottoman empire were captured Christian boys trained to fight against their own people, which they did with singular ferocity. This interesting class of warrior is described during a business lunch to Changez, the young hero of Mohsin Hamid’s second novel, at a moment of crisis over his own identity. Born in Pakistan, educated at Princeton and currently the hottest new employee at a New York firm specialising in ruthless appraisals of ailing companies being targeted for takeover, Changez recognises himself in the description. “I was a modern-day janissary,” he observes, “a servant of the American empire at a time when it was invading a country with a kinship to mine …”

The recognition completes a process of inward transformation that began when he realised he was half-gladdened by the World Trade Center attacks, and it now prompts him to sabotage his own high-flying career, to give up his pursuit of the beautiful, troubled Wasp princess Erica and go back to Lahore. There, bearded and generally reacculturated, he meets an American in a restaurant in the Old Anarkali district, and buttonholes him with his life story. The novel is his monologue: a quietly told, cleverly constructed fable of infatuation and disenchantment with America, set on the treacherous faultlines of current east/west relations, and finely tuned to the ironies of mutual - but especially American - prejudice and misrepresentation.

More here.

From Nature:

Do you spend your free time sweating away in the gym? Ever wonder whether all that energy might be put to better use? Well fear not, because you might soon find yourself converting those calories to light, and helping the club out with its electricity bill. The California Fitness club in Hong Kong is among the first to jump on the green energy treadmill — stairmaster and cross-training machines at the gym have been wired up to the building’s lighting system. If other gyms follow suit, it could kick off a new motivational craze, in which sweat equals glow.

The idea of gaining light from pedal power is not exactly new — kids have been riding bikes with dynamo-powered lights for years, and you can buy watches that never stop working as long as you remember to move your arm. But the Hong Kong scheme is one of a new wave of ‘energy recapture’ ideas aimed at harnessing the surplus power of casual activities, to generate electrical power that would otherwise come from the national grid.

Other recapture ideas include using the energy of footfalls to light up pedestrian tunnels, and military backpacks that use the wearer’s movements to refrigerate the medical supplies inside. And a Dutch nightclub has even installed a dance floor that lights up when tiny ‘piezoelectric’ crystals inside it are deformed by the dancers’ feet.

More here.

In the Chicago Reader:

After basic training he [Tony Lagouranis]was sent to Fort Huachuca in Arizona for interrogation school, where the curriculum was largely based on conventional warfare. Lagouranis learned a great deal, for instance, about Soviet weapons systems. “We did like one day on approaches, the method you use to break down the prisoner, to break his psychological defenses. They told us in training that 90 percent of prisoners will break on the direct approach, which is simply asking a direct question—you don’t have to run an approach. They said if a prisoner doesn’t break you usually have enough detainees that you can just ignore that person and talk to someone else.”

Lagouranis believes this thinking was based on the experience of the gulf war, when captured Iraqi prisoners were often willing to cooperate. “Their questions were totally different than what we would ask in Iraq. They were asking like, ‘How many T72 tanks does this unit have? Where are you getting spare parts? How well are your trucks maintained?’—things that we would never ask to break an insurgency.”

Lagouranis also studied the Geneva Conventions for the treatment of prisoners. “We were told, ‘You can’t use any coercive tactics. There can be no negative repercussions for a prisoner who isn’t cooperating with you.’”

After interrogator’s school, Lagouranis spent 15 months learning Arabic at the Defense Language Institute in Monterrey, California. In the summer of 2003, about four months after the invasion of Iraq, he was sent to Fort Gordon, Georgia, where he joined the 513th Military Intelligence Brigade, which contained soldiers who’d already served in Afghanistan and Iraq. He got more training there, this time with more realistic scenarios, and he also began hearing stories from the veterans of more abusive approaches—though he figured some were boastful exaggeration.

“They were talking about using sexual humiliation on these guys, or certain stress positions they had used, or in Afghanistan they would make the guy sit in the snow naked for long periods of time. They said that the detainees that they had were not covered by the Geneva Conventions, which I continued to hear in Iraq too.”

(Via the Daily Dish.)

Hayley Harding at Axis:

German artists Wolfgang Winter and Berthold Horbelt have worked together since 1992, creating art landmarks for public spaces all over the world. The artists work to reclaim lost public spaces and open people’s eyes to the fact that art is an important vehicle to increase the quality of life - not only to make the city more splendid. Winter/Horbelt’s light filled cratehouses use recycled, everyday objects to build functional spaces for shelter, meeting and entertainment.

The artists developed ‘Cratehouse for Castleford’ after visiting the town, meeting with local residents and learning about the culture and history of the place. The shipping containers reflect the industrial heritage of Castleford over many centuries and especially its important location on the confluence of the rivers Aire and Calder, meaning that it was central to the waterway transport system of England.

It was important to Winter/Horbelt that their becomes part of the life of a place and its people:

‘During our visits we saw the metal shipping containers that people of Castleford use as meeting points, something like small clubhouses. One of our first ideas was to change a little this kind of architecture, to create maybe a functional pavilion with sculptural and architectural qualities as a semi-public space where people can stay together in a pleasant way and have fun together. In Germany we call those places Vereinsheim (clubhouse)’. (Wolfgang Winter and Berthold Horbelt, May 2004)

Through their sculpture, Winter/Horbelt challenge the increasing global uniformity of public spaces that suppress individual town spirit. They have a talent for creating original objects outside of traditional art environments and it is fundamental to their work that they share their creativity with wider, non-gallery audiences and encourage engagement with creative practice. Winter/Horbelt are inspired by the identity of the town and the pride of its people and in return have offered the town a sculpture that encourages those who see it to consider the work, their town and their relationship to both.

Using available mass-produced materials, Winter/Horbelt work with familiar objects whose contribution to contemporary life is significant but taken for granted. The artwork is made from two shipping containers and 720 recycled bottle crates. When the sculpture is taken down the crates will go back into circulation.

More here.

Robin Marantz Henig in The New York Times Magazine, a look at evolutionary explanations of religious belief.

Some cognitive scientists think of brain functioning in terms of modules, a series of interconnected machines, each one responsible for a particular mental trick. They do not tend to talk about a God module per se; they usually consider belief in God a consequence of other mental modules.

Religion, in this view, is “a family of cognitive phenomena that involves the extraordinary use of everyday cognitive processes,” Atran wrote in “In Gods We Trust.” “Religions do not exist apart from the individual minds that constitute them and the environments that constrain them, any more than biological species and varieties exist independently of the individual organisms that compose them and the environments that conform them.”

At around the time “In Gods We Trust” appeared five years ago, a handful of other scientists — Pascal Boyer, now at Washington University; Justin Barrett, now at Oxford; Paul Bloom at Yale — were addressing these same questions. In synchrony they were moving toward the byproduct theory.

Darwinians who study physical evolution distinguish between traits that are themselves adaptive, like having blood cells that can transport oxygen, and traits that are byproducts of adaptations, like the redness of blood. There is no survival advantage to blood’s being red instead of turquoise; it is just a byproduct of the trait that is adaptive, having blood that contains hemoglobin.

Something similar explains aspects of brain evolution, too, say the byproduct theorists. Which brings us to the idea of the spandrel.

Stephen Jay Gould, the famed evolutionary biologist at Harvard who died in 2002, and his colleague Richard Lewontin proposed “spandrel” to describe a trait that has no adaptive value of its own. They borrowed the term from architecture, where it originally referred to the V-shaped structure formed between two rounded arches. The structure is not there for any purpose; it is there because that is what happens when arches align.

In architecture, a spandrel can be neutral or it can be made functional. Building a staircase, for instance, creates a space underneath that is innocuous, just a blank sort of triangle. But if you put a closet there, the under-stairs space takes on a function, unrelated to the staircase’s but useful nonetheless. Either way, functional or nonfunctional, the space under the stairs is a spandrel, an unintended byproduct.

“Natural selection made the human brain big,” Gould wrote, “but most of our mental properties and potentials may be spandrels — that is, nonadaptive side consequences of building a device with such structural complexity.”

An interesting idea at the end of the article:

What can be made of atheists, then? If the evolutionary view of religion is true, they have to work hard at being atheists, to resist slipping into intrinsic habits of mind that make it easier to believe than not to believe. Atran says he faces an emotional and intellectual struggle to live without God in a nonatheist world, and he suspects that is where his little superstitions come from, his passing thought about crossing his fingers during turbulence or knocking on wood just in case. It is like an atavistic theism erupting when his guard is down. The comforts and consolations of belief are alluring even to him, he says, and probably will become more so as he gets closer to the end of his life.

Adam Lebor reviews 5 new books on genocide, in The Nation:

[Michael] Mann [author of The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing] is wrong, however, to argue that ethnic cleansing is “essentially modern.” It is true that cheap and effective weaponry–none more so than the AK-47 assault rifle–has increased the number of victims and the frequency of conflict. But ethnic cleansing and genocide are arguably merely modern terms for one of humanity’s oldest–and cruelest–pastimes. As long as humans have sought control over resources such as land, water and food supplies, they have been prepared to kill and lay waste to defend their assets. As Mark Levene writes: “The path to genocide is in part, deeply embedded in the human record and…facets of it are actually very evident in ancient, classical, as well as more recent, pre-modern times.” Consider God’s instruction to the twelve tribes when they arrived in what would become the land of Israel, as recorded in Deuteronomy 7:1 and 7:2:

When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them.

Not only should the indigenous people be “utterly destroyed”; it was also forbidden to marry either their sons or their daughters. King Saul was commanded to wipe out the Amalekites, “man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” The Israelites–if these accounts are accurate–were hardly unique in their enthusiasm for smiting their enemies. As Levene notes: “This was clearly an ancient Near Eastern norm.” Levene, who teaches history at the University of Southampton in Britain, has published the first two volumes of an ambitious four-volume study, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State. This is a discursive rather than a chronological or episodic work. Levene argues that the centrality of the Holocaust has warped scholarly priorities by obscuring the linkage between the extermination of the Jews and earlier genocides. The Holocaust was unique in its industrialization of mass murder but was also part of a grim historical continuum. Hitler himself was well aware of the extermination of the Armenians. In his secret speech to Wehrmacht commanders in August 1939, Hitler lauded Genghis Khan’s killing machine before asking, “Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?”

Levene suggests that the terror of the Jacobin era in Revolutionary France may be a prototype of later genocides. The thud of the guillotine was a necessary precursor of a sense of “nation-state one-ness,” in which all citizens enjoyed equal rights in a “new secular order” where disobedience, or exclusion, would be answered with death. This echoes Mann’s arguments about the importance of communal identity, whether class or nation-based. But whatever the criteria for membership of the modern body politic, the wretched inhabitants of European colonies were not included.

Justin E. H. Smith    

Among Aral-Ultaic linguists, it is widely presumed that no single English word, or any word of any other known language, can adequately translate the Yuktun word nâk.  It may denote, depending on context, reindeer lichen (Cladina rangiferina), an Arctic hare (Lepus arcticus), an adult Yuktun woman, a Russian, something resembling poetic justice, and, of most interest to many, the life force that runs through every tundra-dwelling creature, through the sky, through the great sea to the North, and, during the short Summer, through the top ten centimeters or so of the ground.

In contrast with Chinese, Yuktun is not a tonal language, and so differences of meaning cannot be extracted from differences in the semimusical ways in which the various forms of nâk are pronounced, for it’s always pronounced in exactly the same way.  Nor is Yuktun a highly inflected language like Russian.  There are no noun cases, no genders, not even any endings to distinguish singular from plural, nothing at all that might give one occurrence of nâk away as involving the sort of nâk it does.  Nothing except context.  So, for example, in the sentence

Ba nâk kuntân-te nûq pœrtyttun
With a nâk trade you always both-eyes-open
(When trading with a nâk, always keep both eyes open)

we can be sure that nâk refers to Russians, since no trade is conducted with lichen or with hares or poetic justice or life forces, let alone with women.  On the other hand, in the sentence

Nâkkantaq nar tôgyœn bir nâk grâgttyan
The reindeer in the valley on nâk graze
(The reindeer in the valley graze on nâk)

there can be no doubt but that the nâk in question is lichen, since no other sort of nâk may be grazed upon.

A semi-legendary position has been carved out in Yuktun society for Narda, an elder Yuktun, said by some (evidently conscious of their exaggeration), to have been alive even in mythological time.  She is, to be sure, old, 105 by the best estimates.  But nobody knows how old exactly, for nobody else was alive when she was born.  The Yuktun simply take her word for it when she says that she was seven when the Russian soldiers came through in 1905, en route, so they said, to fight the Japanese.  Must have been lost, she laughed, exposing the blackened stubs she still used as teeth when the BBC came through filming a documentary in the early glasnost years on “Russia’s Wild Frontier.”

The mid-1930s were difficult years, following the 1933 report to the Central Committee of the Communist Party on “Shamanistic Practices and Historical Progress among the Siberian Tribes.”  There, it is reported that “the shaman is usually picked from the most unproductive, most nearly criminal element within Yuktun society, from among those who, in a more advanced stage of history would find themselves members of the Lumpenproletariat.  They are positively hostile to labor, often grand mal epileptics, and prone to the sort of deceitfulness and evasiveness that in a socialist society can only be described as counterrevolutionary.  They practice their art by convincing other tribe members that they are in contact with spirits from the ‘underworld’.  They speak in tongues and beat on drums to invoke these spirits, and their fellow tribesmen watch, spellbound.  It is a magic show and a stunt, all craftily organized by the shaman to gain the maximum respect possible, and, we dare mention, the maximum remuneration in the form of gifts.”   

The report tells of a crafty woman, evidently in her thirties but already hunched over, wrinkled and grey like a tribal elder, who had perfected the black art of shamanistic fraud.  According to the report, she had conned the delegates from Moscow into participating in a ceremony where, by skillful use of smoke, intoxicating herbs, and disorienting glossolalia, she managed, as the report maintained by way of an uncharacteristic colloquialism, to make asses out of all of them. 

Narda had been told that she was to stop her shamanistic performances and to confess, before the delegation of party members, to her own charlatanism.  But she insisted to the members of her tribe that she was no charlatan, but a real shaman, and that she would demonstrate as much to the party delegates.  When they arrived, she invited them all into her yurt.  She began by dancing, beating on a drum and calling to her spirit helpers.  Gradually, she worked herself into a trance.  She called forth a flood, and at once her yurt was filled with water, up to the ankles of all of the spectators.  Next, she called forth a serpent from the underworld, and caught it in her hands, holding it close to the faces of the stunned delegates.  Finally she commanded the men in her yurt to drop their pants and to hold their penises with both hands.  She returned from her trance and commanded them to return as well.  And there they were, standing to their ankles in water, pants down, holding their members like onanistic fools.  They begged her forgiveness, rushed out of the yurt, back to Moscow, and made a concerted effort, in writing up the report, not to look each other in the eyes. 

Narda also appears in Butenko and Vainshtain’s groundbreaking 1938 study, Naknost’ i tavtologiia v predstavlenii prirody u iuktunskogo naroda [Nâk-hood and Tautology in the Conception of Nature among the Yuktun],  There, Narda relates the beginning of the Yuktun creation myth: “In the beginning there was only nâk, but one day the nâk got it into its head to take all the nâk for itself, which naturally made the nâk upset and brought down a harsh nâk to teach the nâk a lesson.”  She broke off, Butenko and Vainshtain report, upon seeing the displeasure the ethnologists exhibited as she told the tale.  The authors report that, when asked to specify which sort of nâk she had in mind in each instance, Narda protested combatively that there is only one sort of nâk .  “Nâk is nâk,” she is reported to have said. “Nâk is always just nâk.”

The authors proceed to observe: “However hard it may be for us to imagine a world-view [mirovozzrenie] in which this could be the case, it may be that in the primitive communism of the Yuktun all the sundry things denoted by the term nâk are seen as bearing certain strong affinities with one another, so strong indeed that, from their point of view, no terminological differentiation between them is needed.  Just as for us noga denotes both the actual foot of an animal, as well as anything that serves an analogous function for an inanimate entity such as a table (though, to be sure, by a much more complicated path of conceptual associations), so too in the case of nâk.” 

The authors conclude that, like the medieval philosophers who appealed to the formal virtues of things, explaining, to use Molière’s famous example, the power of opium to put people to sleep by the fact that it possesses a virtus dormitiva, the appeal to the naknost’ (‘nâk-hood’) of something in nature in the effort to make sense of it is equally vacuous, yet, for the Yuktun, equally satisfying.  In the case of the Yuktun, however, the explanatory power of naknost’, is all the more difficult to comprehend, in view of the fact that it is seen as a virtus of a wide range of entities, characters, and phenomena that would seem to have no obvious connection to one another, unlike the soporific quality that opium clearly shares with anything else said to posses the virtus dormitiva.”

In an unpublished footnote, Butenko and Vainshtain speculate: “It is worth reflecting on our own concept of partiinost’ [‘party-ness,’ i.e., suitability or appropriateness from the point of view of the Communist Party].  Imagine, if you will, a Yuktun struggling to determine what it is that a symphony, the wheat yield at a collective farm, and the knot in a Young Pioneer’s neckerchief have in common.  We tell him that what all these things share is partiinost’, and he looks back at us perplexed.  We are likewise perplexed when confronted with the idea of naknost’.  But we mustn’t assume it does not make sense to him, unless we are equally ready to abandon partiinost’ as meaningless.” 

Sergei Vasil’evich Butenko disappeared in 1938.  The last that was heard of him, he was sent to a camp not far from Noril’sk, in the Taimyr okrug, relatively close, but still a few time zones away from the Yuktun to whom he had devoted his life.  His longtime research partner, Lev’ Abramovich Vainshtain, a physician who practiced ethnology not as a vocation but as an avocation, made it all the way to 1951 before embarking on his first involuntary trip to Siberia. 

On a recent trip to Moscow, I found Vainshtain’s daughter, Tatyana L’vovna, now in her early sixties, a physician herself, a chain-smoker of cigarettes whose packages evoke the American West, and a self-described ‘true communist’, in a dreary grey concrete-block apartment somewhere at the far end of Prospekt Vernadskogo.  She is an avowedly obsessive documenter of her father’s life, and she graciously allowed me to peruse the notebooks pertaining to his work among the Yuktun.  It was there that I found the unpublished draft of the famous article, complete with the speculative footnote about partiinost’ and naknost’. I also found there a curious scrap of paper, on which Dr. Vainshtain had, evidently, sketched out a version of Narda’s abortive creation myth, but in full, and with the appropriate denotandum of nâk substituted in the appropriate place.  If it stands up to expert scrutiny, I believe this scrap may make an invaluable contribution in the field of Aral-Ultaic ethnography, and perhaps even to the study, if I may speak so grandly, of the human mind.  For it shows, as no other study has, that apparently arbitrary ways of carving up the world can, from an internal point of view, make perfect sense. 

Here is what I read on the scrap of paper (translated with the kind assistance of T. L. Vainshtain):

“In the beginning there was only Lichen, soft greyish-green Lichen, extending across the tundra in all directions.  A seven-day journey would not bring you to the end of the Lichen-covered tundra. 

“But the Hare became greedy and got it into his mind that he should steal the Lichen. He placed the Lichen in his ear and darted off.  And he ran for eight days, until he came to the edge of the world, where the land meets the frozen sea in the North.  On the long journey, the Lichen had penetrated into the very depths of his body, and wrapped itself around his leg-bones.  And at the shore of the Northern sea the mother of the Yuktun was born from the Hare’s right shoulder.  She became the Hare’s wife, and from them the generations of Yuktun were born, right down to our own day.      

“One day long ago, in the time before the time we know, a Yuktun Woman came upon a Hare in a trap.  The Hare pleaded with her, saying: ‘Do not kill me, for you are my daughter and my wife.’ But the Woman only laughed and replied: ‘I am the daughter of Nâgvak, and the wife of Sik.  Sik is hunting with the others, and Nâgvak is long dead.’  She slit the Hare’s throat, skinned it, and threw it in the pot.   

“Just then, a Man came along, toward the village.  He was pale as the snow, with a yellow beard as thick and rough as the hair on a Yuktun’s head.  ‘What’s that you’ve got in the pot there?’ the Man called out, but the Woman was afraid, and did not speak.  ‘I said, What’s that you’ve got in the pot there?’  ‘A Hare,’ the Woman muttered.  ‘I say,’ the Man bellowed.  ‘There’s nothing I like better than a stewed Hare.’ 

“‘Where is your husband?’ the Man asked as he devoured his big bowl of stew, but the Woman was afraid, and again did not answer.  ‘I said, Where is your husband?’  ‘My husband is Sik, the Woman replied softly, ‘and he will be back soon with many more hares, and many ermine, from which I will make him a warm and handsome sark.’  But the Man simply laughed, for he had ambushed the husband and his men as they slept by the frozen banks of the Yob, and sliced off their heads, and taken their tools and necklaces of the smoothest antler.  He took her as his own wife, and that is how the time we know began.

“But Justice makes all things right, and neither the Hare, nor the Woman, nor the pale Russian can escape it.   For the generations that issued from this union would suffer mightily, streaming in from the West and the South, weary and beaten down, some the prisoners of others.  They would build up their heavy grey homes on ground that in its depths never thaws, laying tracks from the great City in the West to the great Sea in the East, frozen limbs amputated unceremoniously by their comrades, up high enough to get rid of the dead mass, which can only mean high enough to cut away living flesh as well; half-starved boys lying down in the snow for a little rest and never rising again, broken men without number, fighting, always fighting against one another and against the permafrost, itself so great, so massive and indifferent, that it never even noticed it had an opponent. 

“But still there is the the Life Force, which sees to it that Justice does not go on unchecked, and for a few months every year softens up the very top level of the ground.  And at least a few varieties of flowers bloom, and it is always day, for these few months, and the tundra is covered, at least in patches, with soft, grey-green Lichen.” 

*

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com