MORALIZING MONSTERS As every teller of scary stories knows, fear is an effective teaching device. It works on children and adults alike, keeping us in our beds at night, alerting us to the ambiguity of boundaries, and preparing us for what awaits beyond our territory. When humans explore, they find monsters of all kinds: hybrid beasts, witches, the one-legged, or dog-headed, or one-eyed tribes, and, of course, cannibals. When we stay close to home, the monsters come to us in the form of thieves, night creatures, ghosts, strangers with diseases or dangerous ideas, invading armies. Although monsters tend to flourish on the frontier, their moralizing power is central to social life. As two of our contributors show, the monsters we invent (then confront or evade) do important work. They hold elaborate global hierarchies in place, and they function as narrative archives, creating a historical record that no other language can convey.
Nicolas Argenti explores the monstrous fringe of the Cameroon Grassfields, where Oku children create, with minimal adult participation, a world of folktales, rhymes, and songs designed to instill fear of the woods, distant garden plots, and the man-eating creatures, witches, and kidnappers who lurk there. Children tell stories of abduction in which parents fail to care for or protect their sons and daughters. The motifs are often quite old. Argenti relates contemporary tales to ancestral ones in which the slave trade figures prominently. Memories of slavery are preserved in these tales and updated to address the anxiety children feel about another form of human trafficking: namely, fosterage, a practice that sends Oka children to live and work in other families, often in faraway cities and towns. Argenti reproduces several children's tales, showing how narrative struggles against sorcerers, neglectful parents, and serpents help young people contend with the anxieties, and accept the economic benefits, that are part of the culture of fosterage.
Tracey Banivanua-Mar explores the symbolic power of another monstrous creature: the cannibal. The man-eating native was a common fixture of the European colonial imagination, and he thrived in remote places, especially tropical jungles and Pacific Islands. Banivanua-Mar is particularly interested in the role cannibalism played in justifying the European takeover of Fiji, an island paradise that, alas, was consistently portrayed as home to a ferocious breed of man-eaters. Whether Fijians actually engaged in cannibalism or not (Banivanua-Mar does not take a clear stand), the links between cannibalism and presumed resistance to civilization, rule of law, and Christianity tightened throughout the nineteenth century, fostering colonization policies that led to British annexation of the islands in 1874. Banivanua-Mar follows cannibal motifs as they developed across Fijian-European contact zones, showing how cannibalism was used to stigmatize Fijians, a project that gave redemptive power to European cultural, religious, and political forms. This colonial worldview still holds sway over Fiji today, where the gap between civilized present and cannibal past has, in the medium of tourist kitsch and Christian conversion narratives, become part of Fijian popular culture.
LEVIATHAN'S SHADOW The centralized state, whether conceived as the keeper of a nation, an empire, or a bill of rights, is not as strong as it used to be. In the world of political theory and neoliberal policy, the territorial state has been downsized, outsourced, and fractionated, its assets sold off, its jurisdictions parceled out across transnational space. But is Leviathan weakened by this apparent redistribution of sovereign power? Are “state effects” thinned out or intensified when they operate beyond the monopolistic control of official institutions and governmental agencies? As a political project that escapes its own institutional frames, does the state cast a larger shadow, or a paler one? Two of our authors engage these issues at close range, analyzing modes of statecraft, power sharing, and resource concentration in political formations of very different kinds.
Steffen Hertog explores the Arab Gulf, where states are saturated with wealth derived from oil revenues. In classic rentier-state fashion, countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have a vast surplus of state resources, but the capacity to distribute these resources is comparatively underdeveloped, as is the ability of the state's citizens to organize to gain collective access to these resources and put them to use. Under these conditions, Hertog argues, brokers who manage the flow of resources between state and society emerge as key figures in the political and economic life of the Gulf. Hertog introduces us to several types of brokers, ranging from well-placed royals, to their family servants and retainers, to low-level bureaucrats and high-level business agents. Even ordinary citizens can become brokers between state and society by renting their status as citizens to foreigners who work and run businesses in the Gulf. The financial and political capital tied up in brokerage is vast, and the Gulf states could not function without this institution. Although strong and wealthy, the Arab Gulf states have been compelled, by their historical reliance on brokerage, to import and outsource most of the goods, skills, and social institutions that are taken as proof of “development” in modern state formations.
Christopher Krupa shifts our focus to Ecuador, an oil-producing state whose socioeconomic profile is quite different from that of the Arab Gulf states. In fact, throughout its rural hinterlands, the Ecuadoran state is weak compared to the civilian and business interests it nominally protects, and local elites create privatized, state-like bodies that replicate key government functions. In the northern Andes, where the cut-flower industry has generated great wealth for a new generation of hacienda owners, indigenous workers live as citizens of new agricultural empires. Flower companies provide services and protections to their workers that rival (and often exceed) those provided by the Ecuadoran state. Krupa argues that the rural agricultural elites are engaged in the creation of proxy states in which workers/subjects give their loyalty to flower bosses in exchange for the promise of lifetime employment, schools, local police forces, soccer stadiums, and annual harvest festivals. Statecraft is shared, and contested, among indigenous communities, the central state, and rich planters whose grip on the local economy is determined by their ability to claim state-like powers. The hacienda owners, whose families have played historically central roles in Ecuadoran state formation, have emerged yet again as masters of this game.
NEW MEDIA AND BUREAUCRATIC CONTROL The essentially codependent relationship between mass media and modern governance is seen whenever new media, or new modes of governance, emerge. The arrival of a new political regime will reorient media networks, or possibly destroy them, and the advent of new media (printed books, newspapers, radio, cinema, the Internet) routinely triggers fits of government regulation, patronage, or suppression. The ideological modernity of this process is evident in the firm belief that new media will eliminate more traditional ones. Print capitalism supposedly killed oral tradition and storytelling (yet radio and film brought them back), and email has supposedly reduced face-to-face interaction, letter writing, and long distance phone calling (whereas social networking technologies have partially reclaimed them). Related to these notions of progress is the belief that social actors who are minoritized or assumed to be “backward” will be vulnerable to manipulation by new forms of mass media, a belief that has made new media central to liberation movements and attempts to control them.
Morgan Clarke explores the effects of digital and scanning technologies on the development of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) among leading Shi`ah clerics. In contrast to Messick's claim that the modern state, with its rational bureaucratic regimes and reliance on standardized printing, brought an end to the reign of calligraphy and the personalized authority of individual religious scholars, Clarke argues that the field of shari`ah interpretation has remained open, and that new computer technologies allow leading Shi`ah authorities to pursue “neo-calligraphy,” a novel blend of personalized authority (visible in scans of their handwritten fatwas) and mass media presence (visible on their professionally managed websites). Comparing the careers of two prominent “sources of emulation,” Ayatollah Fadlallah and Ayatollah Sistani, Clarke shows how these men have used new media to develop vast religious followings that do not resemble, and cannot be effectively controlled by, the bureaucratic states of Lebanon (home to Fadlallah) or Iraq (home to Sistani). Even the demands of mass mediation, which have cast both men as celebrities and political influentials, have failed to produce a uniform result. Whereas Fadlallah is a veritable fiqh machine, producing a sea of legal opinion and commentary, Sistani, a scholar of even higher rank, rarely produces proclamations for public consumption, despite urgent pleadings by Iraqi and American interests for him to do so. Neo-calligraphy, Clarke argues, has a tempo and grammar quite unlike that of the bureaucratic state.
Rebecca P. Scales considers older versions of new media. In the 1930s, French colonial authorities heard troubling reports that Algerian Arabs were listening to Italian and German radio propaganda broadcasts. Fearing political revolt, the French began to monitor local Arab usage of radios, cracking down on coffeehouses where anti-French broadcasts were played. During their investigations, the colonial government discovered that phonograph recordings were more popular than radio programs (few of which were broadcast in Algerian Arabic or Berber), and that the market in Arabic language records was ripe for political agitation. Scales traces French attempts to stem the flow of nationalist and Islamist recording into Algeria, and compensatory efforts to develop Arabic programming suitable for native audiences. At almost every turn, French policy produced unintended consequences. Apolitical radio programs led to demands for more Arabic content, and proliferation of radios led to more exposure to German and Italian propaganda. Meanwhile, French authorities discovered hundreds of pro-Islamist records that had been falsely labeled as “piano solos.” Scales concludes that colonial media policy in interwar Algeria created new venues for resistance, as Arabs listened to contraband records on new gramophones and sampled forbidden political speech on coffeehouse radios.
LOST AND FOUND IN TRANSLATION The good translator realizes that a language is not simply recoded, but in fact disappears and is reborn in the work of translation. Meaning can emerge from this miraculous process because words and grammars are translated as elements of entire worlds that are shared (or not yet shared) in and across language. It follows that much will be added and taken away in translation, a predicament that lends complexity and considerable risk to the translation of the Bible. The meeting ground of shared worlds has not inevitably been understood by missionaries, or their converts, as hallowed ground. The secular frame of human interaction, apart from which linguistic translation is impossible, is not the transcendent frame of divine revelation. Or is it? As our final essays suggest, the translation of key Christian texts can sometimes be inconsistent and confused, eventuating nonetheless in a living Christian world. In other cases, translation can be carefully drawn and dialogically precise, but no speakers remain to bring the text to life.
John Taylor discusses the transformation of Tagaro into God, and God into Tagaro, a shift that is now virtually complete, but which has left disturbing traces of misfit between these two deities who are now (almost) one Creator. When Anglican missionaries arrived in the northern islands of what is today Vanuatu, they began the work of merging their own cosmology with indigenous terms and ideas that seemed to carry similar meanings, a process that led to the early designation of Tagaro, a local “creator-god,” as the Christian God. Taylor tells of his discovery, in early fieldwork, of lingering dissatisfaction with this equation. For some older specialists in local kastom, Tagaro was still a brutal stranger who brought destruction, not to be confused with the English God. Yet the English God and Tagaro had already accomplished what Taylor calls a “crossing,” a historical movement in which the complex and morally “undifferentiated” Tagaro, an unpredictable mix of light and dark powers, had become the God of Vanuatu's indigenized Anglican Church. Taylor unpacks this history, in which Tagaro, for some, carries traces of his pre-Christian past, while for others he has always been the Christian God, even before the Anglicans realized his true identity.
Hilary M. Carey considers a translation project in which almost everything is lost, in which a peculiar merger of English and “Awabakal,” an Australian Aboriginal language that had no living speakers by 1850, survives in unfinished versions of the Gospels of Mark and Luke created by Lancelot Threlkeld, a Congregationalist minister, and Biraban, his native informant. This translation project was rare. Few attempts to render the Bible in Aboriginal languages were made in nineteenth-century Australia, a pattern that suggests the terms, linguistic and political, on which indigenous Australians would enter the Christian world. Carey charts the careers of Threlkeld and Biraban, one a missionary and humanitarian, the other a translator, chief, and colonial scout. As the last speakers of Awabakal succumbed around them—to disease, starvation, and murder—Biraban and Threlkeld worked patiently on a Bible that no community of believers would ever read. Even Biraban, who died illiterate and unconverted, would not read it. Yet the Awabakal Gospels have since entered the arena of Australian heritage, being first publicly displayed in 1851, as evidence of the merits of British colonial linguistics, then at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, as evidence of Aboriginal culture, and again in 1997, when a copy of the Gospels was given by white Australian Christians to descendents of the speakers of Awabakal, as evidence of cultural reconciliation. Still open to interpretation, the joint creations of Threlkeld and Biraban stand today for all that is lost and found in translation.
