Monthly Archives: February 2023

Arts, Books, Culture, History

Book Review: On Savage Shores

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: How indigenous Americans discovered Europe

IN 1528, Hernan Cortes, the Spanish conquistador, returned home from his travels in South America with “a large group of Nahua nobles”, along with entertainers, tumblers, dwarves, jaguars and an armadillo.

He also brought a team of about a dozen men who played a game of ullamaliztli, “the traditional Mesoamerican ball game”. They were brought home for the entertainment of the King of Spain. In the words of one Spanish observer, the ball itself was “made from the sap of certain trees and other mixtures, which made the ball bounce greatly”.

Caroline Dodds Pennock’s utterly original new book, On Savage Shores, is full of such remarkable stories.

Her aim is to show us a kind of mirror-image of our familiar history: not of Western travellers in the New World, but of the remarkable number of native Americans who also made it over here. There were far more of them than most of us realised, and among other things, they may have introduced us to the joys of the bouncing rubber ball.

But in this great and often tragic clash of cultures, there are inevitably sadder stories of people lost, uprooted, or stricken with strange new diseases.

In 1576, the English explorer, Martin Frobisher, lost five of his crewmen, perhaps murdered, off the coast of Baffin Island, northern Canada. A year later he returned, still hoping to find his lost men – along with the legendary North West Passage to the Indies.

TOUCHING FRAGMENTS

AS a kind of bargaining chip, he seized a native man, woman and her baby, and brought them back to Bristol in October 1577. The Inuits’ names were Kalicho, Arnaq and Nutaaq, the baby’s name meaning, “Someone New”.

Pennock says Kalicho quickly became a local celebrity. Portraying the image of an Inuit hunter in Elizabethan Bristol, she writes: “Paddling up and down the river Avon at high tide in his canoe, and hunting ducks with bow and harpoon.”

Their lives were not long ones, however – nor were Elizabethan lives generally. Kalicho fell ill, tended by one Dr Edward Dodding, and died singing hymns “like the swan who foresees what good there is in death”. He was buried in St Stephen’s, Bristol, along with Arnaq, who probably died of measles.

Little Nutaaq was sent to London but had probably contracted measles as well. He was buried after only eight days in the churchyard of St Olave’s, in the City of London.

It is a touching fragment. But, as with so many stories uncovered here, it offers only a glimpse. Of the inner thoughts and lives of our New World visitors, we know nothing. Did they even want to go back? It’s unclear.

The author claims they were marginalised, silenced or even “erased” by their European hosts. A much more likely explanation is that they didn’t record such things in writing. Incidentally, we know barely anything of Shakespeare’s views and opinions, either.

Closer to us in time is the superbly sardonic account written by a Chippewa chieftain, Maungwudaus, who was part of a travelling show in the 19th century.

He was distinctly unimpressed by the apparent fragility of English gentlewomen: “English women cannot walk alone; they must always be assisted by the men.”

They are brought to the tea table “like sick women”, where they hold their knives and forks with two forefingers and thumb, the other two fingers of each hand “sticking out like fish-spears”.

Priceless. But the gentlemen fare little better, their luxuriant Victorian moustaches making them appear “as if they had black squirrels’ tails sticking out on each side of their mouths”.

The thorough-going bias of the book is tiresome. Pennock rightly criticises the old habit of calling native Americans “savages”, and then in the title applies it herself – to Europe!

An even-handed account would have been much better, with all those centuries of misunderstandings and conflicts, followed by treaties and other trade agreements.

One might prefer the account of Sir Walter Raleigh and his devoted native manservant, Harry, for an example of how people can transcend their narrow views and prejudices and become simply friends.

When Raleigh fell from grace in 1603 and was confined to the Tower, an indigenous man known only as Harry stayed with him for two years as his manservant. Later, it seems, Harry was given his freedom and returned home to the Americas.

When Raleigh was finally freed in 1616, he sailed again, “in one last search for gold and glory”.

Arriving at the mouth of the Cayenne River, “I sent my barge ashore to enquire for my servant Harry the Indien [sic]”.

Harry duly arrived with enough provisions for the English for at least a week. Raleigh, somewhat sick from the exhausting voyage, was carried kindly ashore and rested in a tent, eating pineapples, roasted peccary and armadillo.

He records his deep gratitude at “being fedd and assisted by the Indyans of my ould acquaintance with a greate deal of love and respect [sic]”.

As such anecdotes show, history is multi-faceted, and people are complicated.

Sometimes European colonists cruelly chained and enslaved native Americans; sometimes they actually rescued them, as the author hurriedly admits, from being sacrificed and even eaten by their own people.

Retrospective finger-wagging, or dividing the historical past into Goodies and Baddies, is just daft. Still, if you can put up with the authorial one-sidedness, there is much to learn and enjoy in this unusual history of a forgotten corner of our past.

– On Savage Shores by Caroline Dodds Pennock is published by Weidenfeld, 320pp

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Aid, Arts, Government, Society, United Nations

It is the poor who bear the brunt when calamities strike

SYRIA-TURKEY EARTHQUAKES

Intro: Far too often, “recovery efforts” and international aid do not reach those who need it most

THE massive earthquakes which struck southern Turkey and northern Syria on February 6 inflicted ghastly damage across a geographic region that has already borne a great deal of earthly devastation in recent decades. The ongoing war in Syria has produced millions of refugees, many of whom find themselves victims of seismic activity in the Turkish south.

The death toll from this week’s quakes quickly jumped into the thousands and will no doubt soar to far more. An untold number of people remain buried beneath the rubble. Traumatised survivors contend with frigid temperatures and the aftershocks, and refugees contend with the loss of any semblance of refuge.

The natural disaster has served once again to underscore what should hardly by earth-shattering news: that life for the global poor is extremely precarious and plagued by multiple, simultaneous crises from which recovery is often futile.

The dwellings inhabited by the have-nots are structurally less reliable and potentially more vulnerable to tectonic tumult – as was seen, for example, in the Peruvian earthquake of 2007, when homes collapsed across impoverished neighbourhoods in the province of Ica. But in a world structured upon capitalist foundations, precarity goes much deeper than shoddy construction materials or a blatant disregard for building codes.

For a start, capitalism’s insistence on acute inequality and the tyranny of an elite minority means there are major global fault lines between rich and poor – ones that are becoming ever more pronounced in the era of climate change and ecological calamity. And while aid pledges and donations inevitably pour in after high profile disasters, they often only exasperate the divide by lining the pockets of the aid industry rather than benefiting the disaster-stricken areas themselves.

There is also the stark realisation that, for much of the world’s precarious population, life constitutes more-or-less a continuous disaster, but one that generates no attention. In June last year, The New Humanitarian news agency noted gross disparities in disaster relief, with almost half of all emergency funding for 2022 “going to only five protracted – and largely conflict-driven – crises”. Citing a recent United Nations estimate that the number of annual disasters will increase to 560 by the year 2030, the agency described how victims of under-the-radar disasters are often forced to remain in unsafe locations – thereby setting the scene for new crises.

Let’s take the case of Afghanistan, where an ongoing dependence on aid has done nothing to make the country safe. Last August, floods killed more than 180 people, just two months after an earthquake had killed more than 1,000. Save the Children, an NGO, reported that the country was suffering its “worst hunger crisis on record”, with nearly 50 per cent of the population going hungry on account of a raging drought and continuing economic breakdown.

Such are the toxic legacies of more than two decades of a US-led “war on terror” that devastated the lives, livelihoods and futures of millions of Afghans and sucked in billions of dollars of “recovery funds”.

For a further illustration of how politics, greed and mismanagement overlap with and compound environmental catastrophe, we need look no further than the Caribbean nation of Haiti, where in 2021 a devastating 7.2 magnitude earthquake was followed by a deadly storm and landslides. More than 2,200 people were killed and some 130,000 homes destroyed, in addition to a number of schools and hospitals.

This came just over a decade after a 2010 earthquake killed 220,000 people and rendered 1.5 million homeless. Only a smidgen of the billions of dollars that flowed in to rescue Haiti actually reached poor Haitian earthquake victims. The bulk of the aid went to aid organisations, security forces, and other supposedly competent bodies – like the UN peacekeepers who promptly unleashed a cholera epidemic upon the nation.

During the ensuing years, US support for official corruption in Haiti has made the terrain extra fertile for political crisis, while further eroding the country’s ability to respond to natural disasters.

Things are getting more precarious by the minute, as capitalism breaks new ground in the field of obliterating all aspirations toward a common humanity or planetary wellbeing – and the “disaster relief” industry concerns itself with maintaining its own viability while poor communities lurch from one disaster to the next.

While the rich insulate themselves from the fallout, the poor bear the brunt of military conflict, economic upheaval, climate-related havoc, and the coronavirus pandemic. It has left the have-nots on even shakier ground.

As with all other present earthly afflictions, this week’s quakes in Turkey and Syria will hit the poor the hardest. A total seismic shift in a world where profit for the few means precarity for the many is urgently needed.

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Arts, Psychology, Research, Science

Memory and the functioning of our minds

HUMAN MEMORY

EVERYDAY functioning of our minds or how we make sense of the world is central to Psychology. Memory research, an area that has been explored since 1885, started when Hermann Ebbinghaus published Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. His was a lab-based approach where he set out to study our ability to memorise pure information, screening out the kinds of facts that people might already know would influence the experimental outcome. He designed trigrams, made-up syllables built from three letters – a consonant, a vowel, and a consonant – that had no meaning but looked like words. Ebbinghaus and an assistant carried out these experiments on themselves, learning the trigrams from flashcards, and varying the experiments to see what factors affected their capacity to remember.

This could be called a purely cognitive approach to memory – examining the way information is processed, memorised, and recalled. The work of George A. Miller forms part of this tradition, looking at how much random information we can remember in the short term, and how we can boost our ability to remember. The problem with this kind of approach is that in real life, as we all know, we don’t deal with meaningless information and there is a difference in what we remember when reading a book, tying our shoelaces, or recognising someone we know across the street.

Frederic Bartlett, another pioneer of research into memory, took a markedly different approach. Working in the 1930s, he became interested in how we organise our memories to fit in with things that we already know. Bartlett discovered that we adjust the material we hear so that it makes sense, deciding what to leave in and what to omit. His approach was more about how memory is adjusted in the light of human experience. There are parallels with this approach which can be seen in Freud’s theories about repression and the unconscious, and also in the research carried out by Elizabeth Loftus on eyewitness testimony.

Stubborn beliefs

Perception and cognition relate to what we take in from the world around us and what we make of it. While memory can seem a surprisingly slippery concept, so are the beliefs we hold – or think we hold. Faced with beliefs that clash – known as “cognitive dissonance” – we can end up unconsciously tweaking our beliefs, as if to restore order. There is a stubborn aspect to our belief systems, too. The concept of “confirmation bias” looks at how resistant we can be to information that conflicts with our most firmly held beliefs, and how this is even more marked when we are part of a like-minded group. And while we may claim to try to understand other people’s points of view, our default position, as Lee Ross’s “Fundamental Attribution Error” demonstrates, appears to be that we do no such thing. For example, look at some of the entrenched, anachronistic and insulting views held by some Protestant groups. Or certain factions that exist on social media.

The power of emotion

Understanding emotion, too, is also important: in particular, where it comes from. A century ago, the belief was that physiological changes in the body (like a surge in adrenaline) triggered our emotions. Now it is seen as being about how we interpret the situation in front of us, which is in part to do with the society to which we belong. This begs the question of whether emotions, and how we express them, are universal, or specific to certain cultures. Such questions recur throughout psychology.  

Over many decades of the last century, much of psychology was developed at Western universities, with experiments largely carried out on Western students, leading many to ask if this is a broad enough sample from which to develop universal truths about humankind.

Emotions also drives how we make decisions. Pure rationality would get us nowhere, because in every aspect of our lives we could find ourselves processing an infinite amount of information, but sadly lacking the processing speed of a computer. We need an emotional element to help us to rule out a whole bunch of options – helping us to make decisions based on gut feeling so as to be able to get on with our lives. And all this decision making can take a mental and emotional toll on our resources. As Roy Baumeister’s experiments appeared to show, it is possible simply to run out of the capacity to decide.

(Podcast ends)

A Short Biography of George A. Miller (1920–2012)

MILLER studied at Alabama, and gained his Ph.D. at Harvard. He began his research there in the 1940s, looking at speech production and perception, and his Language and Communication (1951) helped to establish the new science of psycholinguistics.

Building on existing mathematical theories of communication, he published a paper on short-term memory capacity, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.” It captured the public imagination and even encouraged lively debates on the optimal length of telephone numbers.

He continued to work on the psychology of speech, testing some of Noam Chomsky’s theories, and in 1960 founded (with Jerome Bruner) the Harvard Centre for Cognitive Studies. He is regarded (with Chomsky and Bruner) as one of the founding fathers of cognitive psychology, the study of thought processes – a dramatic departure from behavioural psychology, which stated that since mental processes were not observable, they were not suitable for scientific study.

After a period at New York’s Rockfeller University, working on language acquisition, Miller moved to Princeton where he helped establish both the Princeton Cognitive Science Laboratory and WordNet, a word database that has applications in present-day search engines and artificial intelligence (AI).

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