Seeing on Behalf of a State

The quasi-Anarchist anthropologist James C. Scott died on Friday. Something which has been missing from lots of people's tributes over the last couple of days is this information, from Todd Holmes' oral history interviews with Scott published a few years ago:

So I had also, not knowing what to do, I applied to join the CIA. I had applied to Harvard Law School and had been accepted, and on a kind of flash of daring, I applied for a Rotary Fellowship to Burma, and I got the Rotary Fellowship to Burma. I thought to myself, I can postpone Harvard Law School, I can always go to law school, but when am I going to get a chance to go to Burma? And so, I decided to go to Burma and spent a year there, and in the meantime—this is not in a lot of my stuff—the CIA people asked me to write reports on Burmese student politics and so on, which I did. Then they arranged through the National Student Association to have me go to Paris for a year and be an overseas representative for the National Student Association. I went to the Congo; I went to Ghana; I went to, oh, Scotland. I spoke at the French National Student Union meeting. I went to the Polish—first American to go to the Polish National Student meeting, et cetera. It was quite an experience.

A few pages later we get this:

I went to Jakarta and Bandung, so I had a little Indonesian experience, and then I went to what was then East Pakistan, Dhaka, and I went to Singapore. In Singapore, I got to know the Socialist student union people, the sort of so-called Dunham Road Hostel, many of whom became very important politicians later on, and personal friends in some cases. So at the end of my Burma year, I saw, if you like, student politics in three or four different places, and including—we're talking '60, and so I met the sort of Communist leaders of the CGMI, which was the Communist student union in Indonesia, most of whom were killed after '65, and so on.

It just seems like the kind of thing that needs to be in the little potted biographies, in order to give a fuller picture. 

It's not particularly a surprise that anthropologists and archaeologists get recruited as assets by intelligence services, although it tends not to be remarked upon much from inside the profession other than by David Price, and as he's remarked, doing so "is not thought to be a good 'career builder'."

The Last Stone Age Man

History records that Ishi, a.k.a. the Last Yahi, the Stone Age Ishi Between Two Worlds, was captured by northern Californians in 1911 and dutifully turned over to anthropologists. He spent the rest of his life in a museum in San Francisco. (And you think your life is boring.)

They said Ishi was the last North American Indian untouched by civilization. I don’t know about that, but it’s clear he was really country and seriously out of touch with recent developments. We’re talking major hayseed.

His keepers turned down all vaudeville, circus, and theatrical offers for the living caveman, but they weren’t above a little cheap amusement themselves. One day they took Ishi on a field trip to Golden Gate Park. An early aviator named Harry Fowler was attempting a cross-country flight. You can imagine the delicious anticipation of the anthropologists. The Ishi Man versus the Flying Machine. What would he make of this miracle, this impossible vision, this technological triumph? The aeroplane roared off into the heavens and circled back over the park. The men of science turned to the Indian, expectantly. Would he quake? Tremble? Would they hear his death song? Ishi looked up at the plane overhead. He spoke in a tone his biographers would describe as one of “mild interest.” “White man up there?”

– Paul Chaat Smith, Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong (2009)

The Letterboxd Years

So a year ago I posted my Letterboxd stats on what years the films I watched were made in and said that I was going to try and watch more films from before the 80s. Here's the updated chart including the films I've watched over the last year: 

Still a big spike in the 80s, but I've successfully pushed back into earlier decades a bit. Maybe one day I'll have watched a film from every year?

Revelations

 

On Pirates

There's a fragment of Cicero's Republic from around 51 BC that recounts the story of a captured pirate captain who was brought before Alexander the Great. Alexander has one main question for the pirate, and the anecdote finishes like this:

 . . . for when he was asked what wickedness drove him to harass the sea with his one pirate galley, he replied, "The same wickedness that drives you to harass the whole world."

– Cicero, Republic 3.14 (translation by C.W. Keyes)

Burned Cities

Thanks to my sister, I've been lucky enough over the last year or so to go to a couple of performances of the immersive production The Burnt City. It takes place in a Troy which is simultaneously Schliemann's excavation, the ancient city, and a Blade Runner-type Art Deco dystopia. As their own website says, "As night falls, Gods, mortals, dreamers and lovers come alive – one last time."

So I was interested recently when I came across this passage from Arthur Evans' excavation report on Knossos, The Palace of Minos III (1930):

The Grand Staircase as thus re-compacted stands alone among ancient architectural remains. With its charred columns solidly restored in their pristine hues, surrounding in tiers its central well, its balustrades rising, practically intact, one above the other, with its imposing fresco of the great Minoan shields on the back walls of its middle gallery, now replaced in replica, and its still well-preserved gypsum steps ascending to four landings, it revives, as no other part of the building, the remote past. It was, indeed, my own lot to experience its strange power of imaginative suggestion, even at a time when the work of reconstitution had not attained its present completeness. During an attack of fever, having found, for the sake of better air, a temporary lodging in the room below the inspection tower that has been erected on the neighbouring edge of the Central Court, and tempted in the warm moonlight to look down the staircase-well, the whole place seemed to awake awhile to life and movement. Such was the force of the illusion that the Priest-King with his plumed lily crown, great ladies, tightly girdled, flounced and corseted, long-stoled priests, and, after them, a retinue of elegant but sinewy youths—as if the Cup-bearer and his fellows had stepped down from the walls—passed and repassed on the flights below.

Big Gaps Before the 80s

One of the things Letterboxd lets you do is see what films you've watched by release year. Here's what my efforts so far look like.

1988 seems to be the year I home in on, but I could do with watching more films from before the 80s in general.