A Night at the Ballet

There is not nearly enough modern dance and ballet outside of London. Here in the Midlands, we have the Birmingham Royal Ballet and then various touring companies that may come to Malvern, Wolverhampton, the Hippodrome in Birmingham or elsewhere. Unless you are on the various mailing lists or know where to look it is very easy to miss some significant events.

It was therefore very disappointing to go to see the Birmingham Royal Ballet at the Hippodrome, for their triple bill and find it all very tired and somewhat half hearted. We have seen Still Life at the Penguin Café at least twice before, and Apollo at least once, but we had enjoyed them and decided that it was worth going again. Knowing the work, however, illustrated just how lacklustre and lacking in vitality and crispness this performance was. In previous performances certain animals, or rather the dancers performing as the various animals in the Penguin Café, held the stage and projected energy and life. Something of that was missing for this performance. Having said that, however, the more recent piece, Interlinked, was excellent and very well danced.

It was a real pleasure, therefore, over the last weekend to go to Wolverhampton Grand Theatre to see BRB2, Carlos Acosta’s Classical Selection. This was a touring show that Acosta and the BRB had brought together featuring new, or newish, young dancers from the company in classic works, par de deux’s, solos and an ensemble work called Majisimo, with a decidedly Spanish feel. The dancers were brilliant, and the various short works allowed them to shine, showing off both their skills as dancers and their artistry and presence. It was all too short, of course, but an excellent showcase for the younger soloists within the company.

The dance that has stuck in my own memory, however, was a new work created by Acosta around the classic choreography of Michel Fokine’s Dying Swan. This was originally created, according to the programme, in 1907 for Anna Pavlova and was danced to the Swan from Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals (the company had brought a pianist and a cellist to provide some live music among other recorded accompaniments, which I thought was a great move). The original harks back to Swan Lake, of course, and also references Tennyson’s poem Le Cygne, and it is a very classic solo for a single female dancer in tutu and performed, as the programme tells me, ‘almost entirely of pas de bourées, a smooth running step performed entirely en pointe’. Around this, however, Acosta had woven a new dance, this time for a male dancer in white tights. The programme says nothing about this, apart from saying ‘for this performance Carlos Acosta has reimagined this iconic solo as a duet’. This second dance, however, in a very modern idiom, was also a death and the dancer moved across the stage in various stages of agony as he interacted with the dying swan, without ever touching her. The piece opened with the sound of wind blowing across the water and only gradually did the Saint-Saens emerge from the background noise. It was an incredibly powerful work and an example, that you see often in art galleries these days, but rarely in dance or other medium, of a classic work in dialogue with a brilliant modern choreographer creating something that is considerably more than the original.

I am not sure what this show would have cost to produce. A very significant amount I am sure, but also very significantly less than a full production with sets and full orchestra. It did, however, give the dancers a chance to get out, and for the company to reach a much wider audience.

The audience at the main event, the triple bill, was what I would I expect for Birmingham Royal Ballet at the Hippodrome, of a certain age and well healed. They were also loyal followers and whooped with pleasure at the end of each piece, including the Penguin Café which remains a crowd pleaser, even when it is not performed as perfectly and with as much pernach as it might be. The audience at the BRB2 show in Wolverhampton was, however, slightly different. It was still of a certain age (at 61 – this was my birthday treat – I still felt to be one of the youngest there) but it was more local, not quite as well healed as the crowd that went to Birmingham. They also loved it, and were generous in their applause and appreciation for the wonderful dancing on offer. The theatre was full (although the top tear, the Gods, was closed off) and I assume that the company played to full houses in other venues on the tour.

It is difficult to manage a ballet company, of course it is, and it is very expensive to stage and to tour, but the audiences are out there if the quality is high enough and the programme is well chosen. There should be more of it outside London, but we probably all know that already.

AI and Surprise in Research

I feel that I need to have some position on AI, but I also feel out of my depth in approaching it. I am not a user of social media and can see no personal use for generative AI. Hence, I would never claim to understand it as a technology, or how it works. I am, however, fascinated by the impact it might have on education and on society, while recognising that it is more likely to be the unintended consequences that are important, rather than anything we might predict. However, here are some initial thoughts based on a couple of recent comments.

A recent edition of The Times Higher Education had two articles on AI that spoke to me. There has been a great deal on the recent advances in generative AI and ChatGPT, about whether it will be dangerous or beneficial to teaching and/or research within the university, with some more marginal work on its potential contribution to marketing, student support and other areas of university life.

The first article was by Nick Jennings, the Vice Chancellor of Loughborough, who has a background in AI, who argued for the benefits of generative AI, without neglecting the dangers. This is something that is coming, whether we like it or not. It does have significant advantages and many potential uses across the institution, including in teaching and research. We must not be blind to the dangers, but we must, essentially, go with the flow, work with this new technology and, above all, make the technology work for us. There will be some inevitable changes in practice, and in work patterns, as well as in the way we approach learning and teaching, but that could be no bad thing.

The second article was somewhat different. This was essentially about the role of ‘awe’ in research. The author, Andy Tix, a psychologist, highlighted the sense of awe, the childlike sense of wonder, that is often associated with research, especially at moments of breakthrough and the development of new and original results or applications. This sense of awe, the author suggests, is core to the research process and is something that AI, as such, cannot replicate. We can have a sense of awe at what generative AI might produce, but the AI system itself cannot replicate that sense of awe for itself. It is simply not built that way, at least for now. Generative AI can develop originality, and based on probability and comparison with existing models, it can identify when something is original. This is true in research as it is in art, poetry or any other field. Originality is simply the process of doing something different, doing something that has never been done before, and that can be measured, processed and hence identified by the machine.

What it cannot do, so easily, is to say whether that original thing is of any value or not. If there is a mechanical way of measuring beauty, a formula to be followed, then it might be able to predict whether the original artwork would be considered ‘beautiful’, but it can never be sure. Likewise in research, it might be possible to predict that an original outcome is interesting or useful, but it can never be sure. What it cannot, perhaps, do is to feel awe, that sense of ‘wow’ that real breakthroughs inevitably produce.

When I am teaching research methods, and particularly ethnographic methods, to PhD students one of the factors that I always put forward as essential to ethnography is the idea of ‘surprise’. Ethnography, done properly, when resources allow, is a long-term project, an immersion in another society or social group over many weeks, months, or even years. The question is often asked as to what this kind of long-term immersion can achieve that surveys, observation and a more superficial engagement with the society, through for example short term case studies or even investigative journalism, cannot also see. If we are relatively familiar with the society, or do a significant amount of background reading, then it sometimes does feel as though there is little left to learn. However, I would always maintain that there comes a point in ethnographic research where the immersion in the society or culture is such that the researcher suddenly becomes surprised; they discover something that they were not expecting. That is the point of revelation, perhaps the point of awe. That is the point, I would suggest, when we can begin to take knowledge forward and propose a new, and original, approach that does say something significant, and occasionally something ground-breaking that changes the way we see society (or ritual, or religion, or whatever the topic in question might be) in an entirely new way.

If generative AI has difficulty with awe, it cannot, I would suggest, be surprised, particularly in the way that I suggesting in relation to ethnographic research. Again, as with originality, it can note and identify something that has not emerged in the data before. It is more difficult for it to identify that thing as significant and its implications as ground-breaking. That process of noting, being captured by, sitting in awe of, that surprising piece of data, and of being able to see within it, or beyond it, the possibility of an entirely new way of thinking, is something that, for now, is entirely human.

Andy Tix, in the THE paper, told of a time when, as a young biology student, he was taken on fieldwork and discovered in that experience a sense of awe at what was around him. He argued that this was the core feature of learning and should sit at the heart of our education system. I couldn’t agree more, and that perhaps takes us back to the other paper, by Nick Jennings. Much of our education is still very routine, about getting across the facts, or how to interpret the facts, or about learning skills and how to apply them. All that can be done by generative AI, much faster and generally much better, than we could ever achieve. If, however, we genuinely design our programmes around learning as awe, or as surprise, and teach our students what to do next, in order to move from the raw sense of awe to the possibility of a new way of thinking (we may perhaps have to work on this) then that would radically change the way we teach, and would continue to place us one step ahead of generative AI, at least for now.

Africa, A Cry from the Heart

I am always very reluctant to treat Africa as a single space. There are too many differences and subtleties across the continent, even in so-called sub-Saharan Africa, for any generalisation to make sense. I am also very reluctant to present Africa, or Africans, as victims, or as living hard or difficulty lives. I would not want to present the whole continent as subject to oppression and suffering. There is so much joy, so much to celebrate, so many good news stories from across the continent for pain and suffering to be the single image.

Three stories, however, in the news over recent days and weeks have led me to reflect on just how much suffering does still remain across the continent, and by implication, how much of that can be blamed on European colonialism, Western neo-colonialism and international neglect over many years (not to mention slavery in earlier centuries).

The war in Sudan is the latest example, and one of many wars that are currently being waged in different countries and with different levels of intensity. Just before the Sudan crisis filled our screens, however, there were two other stories that might have gone unnoticed. There was a story from South West Tanzania, a region rich in gold deposits, where unofficial miners are turning to what the report called ‘shamans’ who, in turn are telling them to acquire the blood of virgins, leading to a rash of rapes and murders of young girls in the region. And then, in Kenya, a story of a cult that was encouraging their members to starve themselves to death and the discovery of a significant number of graves, of men, women and children.

It is easy to dismiss all these events as being ‘of Africa’. We retain the imagery and narrative of the ‘dark continent’ and we have heard so much about the wars, the violence, the rape, AIDS, famine etc. etc. from the continent that we have almost come to think of this as just being the way Africa is. The way the news is presented often suggests that there is nothing but unremitting pain and suffering across Africa, and that this is what Africa is. Africa is presented as the product of the nineteenth century, but the product, not of colonialism, but of the savagery and fever that the colonial rulers presented as the image of Africa at the time, and that remains as the fundamental image of Africa today.

All three stories, however, have their roots in the colonial encounter and the damage that was done by the Western (primarily British) powers through the nineteenth century and on into the beginning of the twentieth. Appiah argued in the 1990s that colonialism, at least in Ghana did not really affect the ordinary villager. They continued to live and work much as they had always done, and to relate to the local powers in the same way as pre-Colonial times. This may be true of some areas of the continent. The lasting impact of colonialism, however, has often only become known in some of the horrors at the end of the twentieth century, long after the colonial powers had official left and new independent governments were in charge.

The war in Sudan can be tracked back to the activities of the colonial power (in this case the UK) even if the power at the time was shared with Egypt. The tensions, and the creation and emphasis on tribalism and ethnicity that was exacerbated by colonial governments across the continent, can be seen as the direct root of the current conflict. Likewise, in Tanzania (formally German, but also a British protectorate), the breakdown of society, of social norms and the cultures collected and celebrated by anthropologists, once again has its roots in colonialism. Finally, in Kenya (again British), we see the impact of the missionaries who accompanied the colonial regime. The missions are not directly responsible for contemporary cults, but the initial introduction of Christianity and the multiplication of denominations, churches or, more recently, cults once again has it roots in the colonial period.

The European powers (and their American allies) did nothing at independence to support or enable these countries. Once again, the people of Africa were let down as the continent, under neo-colonialism, was used simply as a source of raw materials. Local economies, built on manufacturing or other industries that added value, were never allowed to emerge. Particular ideologies of international development, and support for dictators (against those who were supported by the Soviet Regime), meant that Africa had little chance to develop. The internal ethnic and personal battles often erupted into coups and/or civil wars. What is happening in Sudan is just the latest in a very long list of such conflicts. The stripping of resources, such as gold, and increasingly with the electronics industry other rare minerals, was also a deliberate policy of the neo-colonial governments, in league with the multi-national mining and extraction companies. There was no real interest in development and no concern for the break down in society that followed. And, in religion, the American pentecostalist and other multi-national churches spread new Gospels that formed the basis for cults such as the one in Kenya with its misplaced responses to the expectation of the final days.

With this horrific history we are now no longer able to do good in any shape or form. Our credibility, as nations, has been lost and no African government, or at least very few, is prepared to trust Western intervention. The continent has turned to China, which continues to be interested only in raw materials and is systematically stripping the continent of its wealth but does not come with the same colonial baggage and continues to offer the grand structural investment that the nations of the continent desire. More recently it is Russians, in the form of the Wagner Group, that national leaders are turning to as they are seen to be more effective at maintaining order, often through brutal means, where the old colonial powers are seen to be too squeamish.

What can we do? I do not have an answer to this, I can only cry. We have made such a mess that the people no longer trust us, or turn to us, and we can see why. There is little we can do, even while we watch China and Russia prevent any further growth. Why is Africa not like the tiger economies of East Asia? There is no good reason, no reason that is inherent in the people, the climate or the available resources. It is their colonial heritage, the damage we in the West have done, even after independence, that accounts for this disparity and this unfairness. It feels as if there is nothing we can do but cry from the heart…

NSS and Student Engagement: What I Learnt from Swansea University

As I continue to write new blogs for this site, I have also been reviewing some of the blogs that I wrote in my seven years as Pro-Vice Chancellor and I have chosen to rewrite them as an occasional series of what I have learnt from my time at Swansea University.

Over the last seven years Swansea continued to do very well in the National Student Survey, especially in terms of the student’s overall satisfaction, which remained consistently one of the best in the UK throughout my time at the University. Now NSS is undergoing some significant changes and the sector is asking whether it continues to be fit for purpose. In the light of that, I have gone back over some of my reflections during my time at Swansea and distilled what I believe we learnt about doing well in NSS.

Swansea University can undoubtedly be very proud of their consistent record on the overall satisfaction score, but we were always aware that there were issues in other parts of the survey that we needed to address. What I thought might be useful in this blog, therefore, is to offer a few more general comments on the NSS and what it does, and does not measure, and to outline one or two of the things that we undertook to address the concerns that such surveys raised.

The first thing to note, and to constantly keep in mind, is that the NSS is a ‘satisfaction survey’ and that what it measures is ‘student satisfaction’. We may question exactly what this is, or how this is interpreted by students. We may want to raise issues with the methodology, or the statistical questions that underlie such a survey. Others have done this over many years, and on the whole, while we know there are issues and concerns, the NSS has become established and it does measure something – student satisfaction, a sense of belonging, the commitment of students to the university or their course, levels of frustration at things going wrong – and that the regular reporting of the results to the same questions over a number of years provided a good test of how our students saw the University and various elements of their learning experience. While we must not be fixated with absolute numbers, trends up or down were certainly worth noting.

One thing that became very clear from our experience across the University is that when things go wrong, and when students become frustrated at failures of the system (at whatever level) this can have a significant effect on the scores. Such frustrations can be avoided by careful planning, although not all systems are under the control of local programme teams and mistakes can occur at all levels. We have discovered, however, that it is often the speed of our response, the reassurance that we can give to students that issues are being sorted out, and the strong message that we are listening and responding to concerns, that can go a long way to mitigate against unforeseen events. We learnt that we had to do all that we could to avoid anything that might seriously frustrate students in the first place and be quick to respond and sort problems out when they occur.

Beyond this basic level of professionalism, competence and engagement I think that we were generally very clear about what works, at least in a broad sense, and what does not; what it is that raised levels of satisfaction across the various categories of the survey. I have watched programmes and departments within the University turn themselves around and we have all learnt a great deal from what they have done. Not everything will work in every programme, but we can, I think, identify a few basic principles that, when applied within any particular programme, could significantly improve the scores.

That was the thinking behind STEP4Excellence that was initiated as a programme when I first arrived at Swansea. We used the first year to engage with students and staff across the University, to learn from our own experiences and to explore what was happening in other institutions, and to develop various strategies that could begin to be implemented through the following years. It is not, however, the specific details of STEP4Excellence that I want to develop in this blog, it is more the principles that lie behind it and what we have seen working in different parts of the University.

Student engagement is key. Having both formal and informal mechanisms by which students can express their concerns, know that these concerns are being listened to, see that something is happening, and recognise the changes that have been made as a consequence. Where this has worked particularly well is where informal mechanisms – fortnightly gatherings, drop in sessions, etc. – have supplemented the formal processes. Not every student concern is appropriate, or can be addressed immediately, but it is the fact that there is some line of communication, that the students are given an honest answer, and that those concerns that can be addressed easily are addressed, that makes all the difference. What is more, if such spaces exist and lines of communication and trust are opened then students feel involved in their learning, can often make suggestions that are well worth taking on board, and the sense of community within the programme can be enhanced.

The second area is student support. There were far too many written responses over the years from the Student Experience Survey (our internal survey that mirrored NSS and was delivered to first- and second-year students) that expressed a sense of isolation and loneliness. Students have to feel that they can approach staff across the university and that they will be listened to. We could not all deal with the issues that may be raised, and we had specialist services to pick these up. We did, however, try to make it easier for all members of the university to know where to turn, to know how to contact those who can offer support, and to look out for signs of stress and concern among those who turned to us. We introduced Academic Mentoring and a Student Life Network to provide the kind of support that a University like Swansea should be providing. This was not, however, an unmitigated success and we have, more recently, had to revert to a more traditional personal tutoring system because resources were not available to support the Student Life Network in a way that met the increasing demands of students.

Finally, teaching and learning. The NSS does not measure teaching quality per se. It asks questions about how good staff are at explaining things, whether staff make the subject interesting, levels of enthusiasm and whether the course is intellectually stimulating. Students know when they are learning well and when staff take the time to enable their learning in effective ways. NSS is not a beauty contest rewarding the staff that resort to showmanship or dumbing down. Students know what they are at university for and can recognise shallow teaching engagement when they see it. What the NSS questions reward is teaching that engages with the students, includes them in their own learning and enables them to see clearly what it is that they are gaining from the experience. This is, of course, much easier in small groups than in large lecture theatres and we were all aware of the challenges that growing numbers of students offer in this area. We aimed to work together, therefore, as a community, to explore new and innovative ways, as well as building on what we already knew worked well, to engage with our students and to support them in their learning. That, however, is the subject of a different blog.

Atheism and Photography

Atheism has been around for many centuries. The early Christians were accused of being ‘atheists’ because they did not believe in the gods of the Greek and Roman world. Atheism as we know it today, however, as a rejection of all that is supernatural or non-empirical, is largely a product of the nineteenth century (with roots going back into the age of enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century). It is often associated with the development of science as an empirical discipline and the growth of rationalism as a way of thinking. Many of the main theorists of religion and culture in the mid-nineteenth century – Comte, Frazer, Tylor, Weber, even Marx – associate the decline of religion with the growth of rationalism and many of them link atheism proper (a rejection of God) with a wider rejection of anything that might be considered superstitious, irrational, non-empirical or supernatural. In their terms this is a rejection of all that is not ‘real’.

I am currently reading a recent text on the place of photography in the museums and scholarship related to ethnography in France from 1930-1950. This may not seem an obvious starting point for a discussion of atheism in the nineteenth century, but the introductory remarks within the book, about the development of photography and its impact on ethnography at the turn of the twentieth century led me to ask whether there might, in fact, have been a relationship between the growth of photography in the nineteenth century and the particular form that atheism took among the intellectual elite of that time. It was largely those who were writing on religion and culture, and those they associated with, who were at the forefront of the development of photography. Could there, therefore, be some kind of link.

Others will know this field much better than me, but there is surely some relationship between the growth of a medium that was seen to capture, in a mechanical form, only that which was in front of it, and an understanding of what might be considered ‘real’ and what might not. Before the photograph it was never possible to say that a person who had seen a ghost, or met fairies at the bottom of their garden, or the forces of evil, or whatever, was lying. We might not have seen such things, we might not be able to see such things, but could we ever convincingly say that they were not there, and not visible to those who can see them? When we recognise that many people across the world still live within a world that is populated by spirits and other creatures that cannot normally be seen (but which are clearly visible in certain contexts to certain people) then the oddness of our own position, which largely claims that such things simply do not exist, becomes particularly stark.

However, if we have a machine, a mechanism that allows us to see what is ‘really’ there, then that is evidence that cannot be ignored. The impact of technologies of seeing and of observation are very important to science, but they have also had a significant impact on the daily lives of the people who have come to accept, and to live, with such technologies. A camera is defined, in some ways, as a technology for capturing the visual, that which is physically in front of it. This is not true of any form of painting or printing, and it is the lack of human intervention that made this possible, or at least made the reality/validity of the image apparent to those who were observing the process.

It is no surprise that there were attempts, largely towards to end of the nineteenth century, to photograph the spiritual, or the non-empirical. The images were believed, people wanted to see them as a photograph, that is as a real representation of what was in front of the camera, and they circulated very widely throughout society. The Cottesloe Fairies are a classic example, as are the various images of plasma and other phenomena associated with seances. Arthur Conan-Doyle was a great advocate of such images and saw them as proof of the existence of what it was that they purported to show. Over time, however, such images were dismissed as fakes and eventually the mechanism of their creation was uncovered. At the same time the range of phenomena that could be captured by the camera became fixed and, more importantly, that which could not was dismissed as unreal, as simply not existing.

It is this wider sense of the radically empirical, as espoused by many of the great thinkers of the nineteenth century, that I would suggest was a product of the camera, and other technologies of seeing. If it cannot be photographed, then it cannot be real, and if it cannot be real then it does not exist, end of story. So, the question raised by so many of these early thinkers about religion and culture is how is it that so many people from across the world claim to believe in, and claim to see and engage with, that which is so patently unreal (because it cannot be captured on camera)? I have struggled to find a term for what it is that these theorists reject, and yet is still claimed by a very large majority of the human population. ‘Non-empirical’, my chosen term, is far from satisfactory, but I am not sure that ‘non-photographable’ is any better, although it may be more accurate for what I am talking about.

Deep fakes and other forms of digital manipulation of images may well have challenged some of a certainty about the truth of the image, when that is created mechanically or in certain forms of the digital, but it has not fundamentally changed what has become common across Western society: that what is not photographable does not, and cannot, exist. I am not sure about this, and we should, perhaps ‘must’, change some of our assumptions, but it is very difficult to change our perception of reality, and that, I fear, has been changed irretrievably by the camera and the images it produces.

Saying and Not Saying

A recent email request has got me thinking this week. This was from a site that monitors published articles, and they wrote to ask if I had written the paper ‘Listening to the Language, Listening to the Words and Listening to the Spaces between the Words, Rhetoric and Pragmatics in the Performance of Christian-Muslim Relations’ (not one of my shortest titles). This paper analysed the rhetoric at work in an interreligious conference I attended in Iran almost ten years ago. In my opening speech, transmitted live on Iranian television, I had to speak to numerous audiences simultaneously and, in the light of the recent controversy over the cartoons of the Prophet, I had to tread a very careful path if we were not to be arrested on the spot. That paper made the point that it was not what was said that was most significant. Rather, it was what was not said, what was implied, the spaces between the words, that were just as important as what was said.

Some months ago, another web site asked to interview me about my work as a PVC. At the end of the interview, they asked a few general questions, including ‘what book has been most influential?’ I think my answer surprised the interviewer as I immediately said Michael Taussig’s Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. Ever since Taussig came to speak to the anthropology department at Manchester when I was doing my PhD, way back in the mid 1980s, and I began to read his work, this book has lived with me, informed almost everything that I have written and continues to haunt me today.

The immediate use I made of the book related to the second half of the text where Taussig develops the Brechtian understanding of montage to understand and engage with drug induced healing rites in Columbia. Taussig draws particular attention to the way in which montage breaks up reality and allows us to look into the spaces between the parts and to recreate new perspectives. There are other elements within this second half, including the different ways in which the narrative structure of the dreams/visions of different racial groups play out in their lives, and this is something I will explore further in my current book on myth.

However, it is the first half of the book that I was particularly thinking of when I answered that question. This begins with the horrors inflicted by the British subjects who owned rubber plantations along the Putumayo River in Columbia. The way in which the native peoples were treated was truly horrific and one of the most shameful episodes of British colonial history. The point Taussig draws out, however, is the way in which different commentators at the time related this horror to the people of England. Roger Casement, a civil servant, wrote a government report, with a coldly factual account of the numbers killed, and the methods of torture used. Joseph Conrad wrote a novella. Each had impact, but each used a different kind of rhetoric to make their point, and for Taussig it was Casement’s cold factuality that was the most devastating and ultimately led to a change in policy.

Interestingly, I have also been reading Dan Hicks’ The Brutish Museums, a work about the restitution of African art, and particularly the Benin bronzes, written by a senior curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. The book has some very interesting and important things to say, but it is not the content that I wish to pick up at this point (I will no doubt come back to that in other blogs), but the tone of the book, or rather the choice of rhetoric that is used. Hicks is just so angry. He makes a point of expressing his outrage and offence at the horrors that, in his view, the museums of the West are still perpetrating on the people of Nigeria by exhibiting the looted items from the sack of Benin. This is a choice. He is clearly angry and that is an appropriate response. He chooses, however, to use an excessive rhetoric of anger and outrage in his book, and to pile that language on top of itself in long purple passages, creating and manipulating words, not to say anything in particular, but rather to get across to the reader just how angry he is and just how outraged and offended he has become (the second half of the book does, however, set out the facts in a very clear and factual manner, that is particularly helpful).

Hicks’ opening rhetoric is part of a common approach used in social media, and in society more generally, where the language of offense, and the taking of offense is used to make an emotional point that almost negates the need to argue a case. It is well attested in so many areas, not least those that certain sections of society call ‘woke’. We constantly live with this heightened, excessive use of language that simply closes down any response and all reasonable conversation. At one level, such language appears to demand a response, but the only response that is acceptable, at least to the speaker, is to share the offence. To disagree is to put yourself into the world that is being condemned, the world of the colonial, the racist, the capitalist, whatever the particular bug bear actually is.

Of course, as with rubber plantation owners referenced by Taussig, there was real violence and horror in the way in which the British expeditionary force planned, sacked, and looted the royal palace at Benin, with the death of many local people (a number that is never recorded) and the destruction of a culture. However, what Taussig is asking and what I am asking in my paper, is what rhetorical response to such horror generates the most favourable response, and how best to express that in written (or oral) texts.

Hicks follows neither Casement or Conrad. He simply choses to shout and to express his outrage and his offence. My first response, on reading the first few pages of Hicks’ book, was that this was a perfect example of what some have called ‘cultural appropriation’. What right does Hicks, a white, western educated, curator of a British museum have to be outraged and offended to such a heightened level? That offence belongs, if that is the right word, to the people of Nigeria. The response of the western academic should, perhaps, be one of humble apology, remorse, the seeking of forgiveness. By taking offense Hicks effectively distances himself from those of his predecessors who perpetrated the crime. However, one of his points is that the crime continues to be perpetrated just as long as these items are displayed, and he is implicated in that as much as any of his predecessors, however much he chooses to express his outrage and offence.

However, to come back to my own article, and to the interview and the choice of a book that has been so influential for me. It is the attention to language, to what is said, and to what is not said, to how we say what we choose to say, and the tone and attitudes we adopt as we say it, particularly in the written text, that still says important things to me. This is particularly important in relation to the difficulties we face as Universities in the culture wars and the concerns over free speech. It is suggesting that the written text is also a performance, just as much as the speech I gave at the opening of the Iranian conference. Of course, it is a performance, and we can always choose how we perform the text through the words we choose and the tone we set in our writing. We can choose to perform ‘offence’ or ‘outrage’, we can choose to perform the objective setting out of the horrors we witness or experience, or we can choose to perform the horror through other voices, playing out through fiction, through narrative structures, and the appealing to emotions, seeking empathy as opposed to expressing offence or outrage. These are all choices, and they are all part of what free speech actually means in practice.

Self, Myself, and I

I had the honour recently of attending a roundtable conference hosted by an ex-PhD student at the Buddahpadipa temple in Wimbledon in recognition of his recent appointment as Abbot. It was a very inspiring event in which monks alongside lay members and visitors to the temple were all asked to reflect on four questions that had been prepared in advance. There was no sense of experts, or those with more important things to say, and all those who wished were able to contribute their own thoughts on each of the questions under consideration. There was clearly a Buddhist flavour to the whole event, but participants brought contributions from their own reading of Buddhist scriptures, stories and reflections from their own experience, and reflections from their worlds of work as therapists, teachers, students or whatever.

It was not even that the monks were given a privileged position. All participants were given due respect. Even a four year old boy who told us that he thought the temple was beautiful outside, that the temple was beautiful inside and that he liked the people who gathered at the temple. The more informed, or well read, members of the community were listened to, but so were those who were new to Buddhism, or had simply accompanied another person and had not intended to contribute at all. I was asked to add my own thoughts and reflections, but as one who had supported the Abbot in his studies, not as a particular expert, and my own Catholic position was respected alongside that of all the others in the room. This was an unusual, and very special, event with an openness that is difficult to find in today’s world.

The questions ranged around responding to criticism, forgiveness, justice, detachment and the purity of mind, but it was the conversations and contributions that followed that were more interesting than the questions themselves. However, across all the contributions the theme of the self, of the I, and of the relationship of the self to others and to the world were a constant thread. One of the statements that remained with me throughout the session was the observation that it is not selfish to manage the self, to find inner purity, before reaching out to help others.

I have always lived by a position, inherited from my Grandfather, a priest of the Church of England, that every individual is unique and we should respond to each with respect and love, whoever they are, or whatever they bring. This is linked in my own thinking to the statement Margaret Thatcher made to the Methodist Conference back in the 1980s where she said that there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families. I am not in full agreement with that principle, but I am sure that we often underplay the importance of the uniqueness of the individual, or of the self. However, I would always claim that the self that matters in not myself, but the self of the other. This I would link to a deep Christian tradition of selflessness and a reaching out to the other that sees its roots in the actions and words of Jesus in the Gospels.

To suggest, therefore, that we should concentrate on our own self first, even if this is as part of preparing us to reach out to others, is something that I initially found difficult. However, the statement does make sense, and does reflect very clearly what I have always done, even if it is not expressed in the values that I say that I live by. In inter-religious dialogue it is well accepted that we cannot reach out to those of other religious traditions unless we are confident in our own position, however open we might be to change. There is something of common sense in this proposition, but it did get me thinking more broadly around the questions of self, myself and, what the Buddhists present suggested was something subtly different, I.

The first question we addressed had to do with responding to the opinions of others, especially when they were offensive, and hence about forgiveness. The standard answer to this was to stress the importance of detachment and to recognise the criticism of others, especially offensive criticism, as a problem in the other, rather than the self, not to take offence and effectively to rise above it. The responses were more subtle and complex than this, but that was the essence. In the light of this, however, and in reflecting on the question of the self, the I, and the other that I have already addressed, I could not help thinking, as I drove home, what all this has to say to contemporary identity politics and the ease with which so many in our society give, and take, offence, especially in the wake of social media.

Identity politics is essentially about taking pride in our identity when others discriminate against us. It inevitably places the self first, but also latches on to specific elements of the self that can be categorised and treated as a social type. Even if we acknowledge the importance of intersectionality, to claim the importance of our identities, and to expect others to recognise that as a social, or even human, right, places the self in a very difficult position, especially in traditions that ask us to deny our ‘selves’. By highlighting, celebrating and fighting for my right to be ‘gay’, ‘dyslexic’ or whatever, then it is possible to argue that I am standing alongside all those others who claim that identity and I am not doing this for ‘myself’ but for all those who are oppressed, discriminated against or abused because they are ‘gay’, ‘dyslexic’ or whatever. To claim the identity, however, as the most significant fact about myself is, I would suggest, placing self above the other, and going beyond the position that I would want to hold for myself.

Does the suggestion, however, that we need to be selfish about sorting out our own self, and being comfortable in that self, before we can help others, make any difference to this initial position? There is certainly some potential here. It is important to be comfortable in one’s own skin and confident of one’s own ‘self’ before being of any real use to others. But that is only half the story. If I take what I heard to be the distinction between the ‘self’ and the ‘I’ that was being proposed, then the self is that which is eternal, fundamental, and travels from life to life towards enlightenment. The ’I’ is the current being, the impermanent, the transitory, perhaps even the illusory, and it is the ‘I’ that is ‘gay’, ‘dyslexic’ or whatever. In this view, one’s identity (as defined by identity politics) is part of that which we need to become detached from, not something to celebrate for itself. Only in this way can we rise above the offence that is inherent in the culture wars and other discourses on identity.

Perhaps, or perhaps not?!? I am not sure that I am really making very much sense of this, and inevitably, any such reflection leads to masses of further questions, to contradictions and to intellectual dead ends, as well as to moments of enlightenment. It is this, for me at least, that makes events such as this roundtable conference so inspiring and why I would always say that we do not have nearly enough of these events, events at which people can simply share their thoughts and reflections on the bigger issues without any fear of offence and with the knowledge that their views, however unusual, will be respected.

Reflection on Some Waves of African Scholarship

I have been reading three books recently, all of which have reminded me of something I knew perfectly well, but like so many others, had actually forgotten. Alongside the independence movement across Africa there was a flourishing of confident African writing, both literature and scholarship that began to have a significant impact well beyond Africa itself. When we talk about the decolonisation of our teaching then we often forget that this is a process that has been going on since the 1950s, 60s and 70s. The fact that we do have to continue to talk about decolonisation, however, shows just how little lasting impact this particular wave of African scholarship appears to have had.

The most obvious book that picks this up, from the three that I have been reading, is Kwame Anthony Appiah’s In My Father’s House. This work is from a subsequent wave of African scholarship that began in the 1990s and Appiah, like so many African scholars writing at this time, was in a university in the States (others were in Europe, a few established in African universities). I turned to the book in part because Appiah was rooted in the life and culture of Kumasi in Ghana, where we travelled last autumn. Appiah’s father was a key figure in the independence movement and the early years of the independent government, and Appiah himself was a teenager at the time of independence. He is discussing the possibility of a pan-African position and, by implication, questioning the literature and scholarship produced at independence, where Ghanaian scholars were at the forefront of Pan-Africanism. Interestingly Appiah notes that colonialism had a marginal effect on many rural Africans, particularly in British controlled areas, and questions the Western expectation that all Africans should feel humiliated and scarred by colonialism. However, it is the diversity of African writing, and African approaches, rooted, as I say, in a very specific time and place, that forms the basis for his position.

The book that drew my attention more specifically to the confidence and visibility of African scholarship in the 1960s and 70s, and, incidentally, provided the most convincing argument for why we still have to talk about decolonisation, was Bénédicte Savoy’s Africa’s Struggle for Its Art. This is a very detailed account of the debates around restitution and the return of African art that developed following independence. We sometimes think (if we bother to think about it at all) that the restitution debate, and the demand for African art to be returned to its country of origin, is a recent phenomenon, associated with identity politics and Black Lives Matter. This is far from the case, and, as Savoy shows so very clearly, the call for the return of art, and other cultural artefacts, was one of the first acts of many independent African nations. For some, like Nigeria, this was led by the museums and was seen as ‘cultural’. For others, and Ghana is a very good example, it was a request for the regalia of kings and chiefs that had been taken as spoils of war.

Savoy is particularly interested in the European response to this request and looks at it primarily through a German lens, not least because the archives and records in Germany are so much more complete than in France or the UK. What Savoy demonstrates is not that the European museums constructed strong and convincing arguments against restitution. They struggled to come up with anything remotely convincing. Essentially what happened was that despite all the requests from Africa, and the subsequent debates and setting up of committees at UNESCO, the European museums simply stalled. They did nothing and, on the whole, refused to engage in the debate. Where they did engage, particularly once the press began to pick up the African nation’s cause, they deliberately misrepresented the request (only ever a request for a small number of key items) as the request for the total return of all items, from everywhere, and the emptying of the European museums. It was this stalling, and refusal to engage, demonstrating a level of arrogance if nothing else, that eventually led the African nations, and most others involved in the debate to give up in despair of ever seeing the results they were seeking. The debate simply fizzled out in the mid-1980s and was forgotten to such an extent that we think this is something new in the 2020s.

As with the debate about the restitution of art, I would suggest, so with much of the work in other areas of African scholarship, and the development of African culture (writing, art, music). The third book that I have read is Ekow Eshun’s catalogue for his exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, In the Black Fantastic. I was very sorry that I was not able to get down to London to see this exhibition, but the catalogue is a fascinating document in its own right. What this reminded me was that the growth of what is now known as Afrofuturism, which I have heard discussed in many different contexts recently, was a movement that emerged in the 1990s. Once again, however, we can see a pattern of movements, intellectual and artistic, that are referenced in Eshun’s text. There was a flourishing in the 1920s and 30s (mainly in Paris, partly in New York, and this is the work I am most familiar with), a resurgence in the 1960s and 70s (that Appiah is discussing), a further wave in the 1990s (including Appiah and his colleagues and Afrofuturism) and then we might perhaps be seeing another significant flourishing in the 2020s. In each case (we cannot talk about the last just now) the emergence of black scholarship, or art, or literature, is feted at the time and treated as something ‘exotic’ and new. However, as with the debate about restitution, the response from the European and American mainstream was muted to say the least, and often simply ignored, or failed to give any real space, to this black scholarship and so it dies out and is largely forgotten (apart from those in the know).

One of the things that struck me on reading Appiah’s work was that while he focused on the role of intellectuals and novelists, he largely ignored the place of artists and musicians. Eshun rebalances this to some extent in his emphasis on the visual arts, and he also recognises the importance of some popular musicians, such as Sun Ra, in the development of the arts, and includes many album covers as examples of the Black Fantastic in art. There is also a brief reference to film in both Appiah’s and especially in Eshun’s accounts and this is something I know very little about. In the capitals of Africa, however, and other major cities, there was through this period, and especially since the 1960s, a flourishing on popular music. This addressed many of the issues of the intellectuals and the artists, novelists etc., even if the medium was very different. This body of work also reached a much wider audience within Africa, and perhaps among black populations beyond Africa, than the academic or literary work ever managed. I think it would be important to include this in any reflection on the development of African thinking and expression in the 1960s/70s, the 1990s or in the contemporary world.

Shostakovich, Leningrad and Ukraine

I first heard Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony at about the age of twelve, played by the Halle orchestra on one of their seasons of concerts in Sheffield City Hall. I was absolutely bowled over, particularly by the first movement and when visiting Bedales, the public school attended by Princess Margaret’s children, as part of a school exchange with our radical comprehensive in South Yorkshire, I rather shocked some upper-class youths who asked me what my favourite music was, only to be told Shostakovich number seven. I was immediately whisked off to the music suite to listen to some LP played at top volume on what must have been state of the art hi fi! It was amazing.

For reasons that I cannot quite identify I have always wanted to sketch out a ballet to the music of the seventh symphony. It is not dance music in any sense, although the core theme of the first movement, repeated bolero like with increasing power and violence, does demand some kind of martial dance, however demonic. It was only on listening to the symphony in the light of the first anniversary of the war in Ukraine that the full nature of the ballet hit me. It was reflecting on the current plight of Ukraine and the link, across time and across enemy lines, as it were, that the link between Leningrad in the 1940s and Kyiv in the 2020s became obvious and the ideas really came together.

If I don’t really stand a chance of ever writing an opera, the possibility of choreographing a ballet is absolutely beyond me. The steps, the actual movement, is not something I could ever articulate, although I can see much of it in my mind’s eye. This is a fantasy, but something that I think would give a real twist to the symphony, and its original meaning. There is some irony in the music of a Russian classic being used to commemorate and highlight the suffering of a people invaded by Russia. However, I have no doubt that Shostakovich would approve, he would be no friend of Putin.

The version I was listening to was that of Bernard Haitink, as part of a boxed set of all the symphonies (I loved his rendering of number four!). It was all a little too slow, especially the first movement, but this is not a critique of the performance which I could listen to repeatedly. This is the outline of a ballet, very corny, as much grand ballet has to be, but it does sum up my current response and thinking around Ukraine, and, in my view, fits the music perfectly…

 The look of the ballet, or at least the dancers and their costume, is inspired by Soviet poster art of about the period of Shostakovich’s symphony, the 1950s or thereabouts. This is set, however, against a series of images, mostly projected onto a screen, or screens, at the back of the stage, of the destruction of Ukraine. The blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag dominates the colour scheme of the set. I like the idea of archetypally Soviet Russian elements, Shostakovich, Leningrad, the communist poster aesthetic, being used to critique the contemporary Russian regime.

First Movement: The City. Opens with the full corps de ballet, some in military uniform, some as peasants or city dwellers, dancing together to the opening chords. This disperses and there is an idyllic scene, a picnic, people going about their business, older citizens walking across the set etc. Within this a boy is playing with kite. As the central theme emerges the stage is overtaken by soldiers dancing and driving the civilians out, bombs explode and as the theme grows the film takes over from the dancers (who are silhouetted in extreme forms of the martial dance and of death) with the destruction of apartment buildings etc. The movement ends with the ruins smoking on the screen, a few old people emerge to search for food, and the boy with the kite returns, now looking lost against the destruction that sits behind him.

Second Movement: The Negotiations. The screen shows the inside of the negotiating or signing room in Istanbul. The movement opens with cleaners and flunkies preparing the space, as one watches for the dignitaries to arrive. The middle section is a parody of negotiation and signing, dancers in suits, dancing past each other, each self-absorbed and focused on their own image, leading to a botched signing after which the dignitaries leave, and the cleaners and flunkies dismantle the set and clean everything up.

Third Movement: Support for the Nation. The set is more rural, the agricultural fields of Ukraine coloured in gold and blue like the flag, perhaps with a map of the country coming in and out of focus, with the progress of the war over the first year. The dancing starts with one male dancer representing Ukraine, alone and exhausted, he is moved between other dancers with costumes reminiscent of the flags of Europe and the US etc. The dancer is supported and helped, offered gifts (weapons) and slowly grows in confidence. The middle section is a rallying of the troops led by Ukraine and drawing others to him, slowly bringing coherence out of the chaos. The final section of the movement represents, in dance, a speech by the president, in his trademark uniform, and perhaps with words from his speeches emerging from the screen behind. It is largely a solo, but he also dances with Ukraine and with the other nations as appropriate.

Fourth Movement: Premonition of Victory. There are the ruined apartment blocks at the back again, as at the end of the first movement, but the colour is changing, the sun is slowly emerging, and they take on a certain beauty as the movement progresses. The dance begins with soldiers waiting for orders, playing games, and perhaps joking with each other at the edge of the stage and still confined by barricades. As the music progresses into the open expansive middle section, civilians come in ones or twos, to join the soldiers, they all emerge out of trenches and cellars into the open, entering into a joyous victory celebration, waiving the flag and all moving as one. As they disperse, towards the end of the movement, we are left with a single boy, against a sunset and the ruins, following a kite, in the colours of the Ukrainian flag, alone and in rapture as the symphony and the ballet ends.

Walking Across London

There is something wonderful about walking through a city. Don’t get me wrong, I love walking, full stop, rural or urban. However, there is something about walking in a city that is unique. There is also something extra special about walking in London, I am not sure what it is, but the intellectual heritage of Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau and others as urban wanderers, albeit in Paris, Berlin and wherever else, is part of my own academic background. It is the surprise, the variety and the ever changing street scape that always appeals to me.

The other week I was in London at the time of the rail strikes. I had travelled down by bus, certainly an experience in itself as I have not travelled on inter-city buses in this country for many many years. However, it also meant that a number of my appointments were also cancelled as others had not been able to get into London. I therefore found myself with most of a day to kill. I was staying not far from Liverpool Street Station, almost totally unrecognisable amidst all the new building. The bus was leaving from Victoria, and there were a few places that I wanted to visit, a gallery just north of the Barbican, my favourite French restaurant for lunch in Seven Dials, a coffee shop in Soho, and somewhere to buy some new shirts. It made sense, therefore, to spend the day, simply strolling, from east to west, across the city.

I began heading a little further east, to the Whitechapel Gallery, that did not open till half an hour or so after I arrived. I walked down Brick Lane and pas Spitalfields Church to the market. Just beside the church I passed a street of old Huguenot houses. It was the first time I had seen these streets, and had no memory of even seeing them on screen. They were amazing in their solidity, elegance, and uniformity. A beautiful surprise, which is exactly what walking through the city is all about.

The market was a good place for coffee and a chance to look at the craft stalls etc. And then heading West, across Finsbury Square and out to find the gallery. This was another part of the city that I had not known, a collection of streets north of the Barbican and south of Old Street. Here I met the first of a number of street food markets that I was to discover as I walked across the city.

The gallery was amazing, and more of that in a future post. The area around it, however, the Golden Lane Estate, was also interesting. Mostly old East End warehouses and more recent flats that still had a bohemian feel (murals adorned the walls alongside the street food stalls) and interspersed with typical East End pubs and small shops, miniature village communities tucked into the city. From here it was down Old Street, through Farringdon, on to Clerkenwell Road and Theobalds Street. It was an easy enough walk, and some parts (St John’s Gate and Hatton Gardens for example) were well known. Others, particularly Grey’s Inn, were new to me. From Bloomsbury, through Seven Dials, Soho, Piccadilly, and on down to Victoria were all familiar ground for me.

One of the things that always thrills me on a walk of this kind is the subtle transformations. There are some points where the change is dramatic and immediate. There are always buildings and/or other features that stand out, that shock and that demand attention. For much of the journey, however, given the pace of walking, the change is gradual and the transformations only apparent when you find yourself suddenly immersed in a new part of town, and new series of shop fronts or building forms. The walk is slow and while the change over longer distances is always dramatic, especially in London, the experience is surprisingly restful.

Another feature that always appeals to me, and is as true of walking in rural landscapes as it is in urban contexts, is the layering of the landscapes. In rural walks it is often the long view, the vista that is conjured up by the landscape as a whole, that allows you to reflect on the layering and how the past has influence and moulded the present. When walking through a city, or at least one with limited hills, as central London, then the long view, the wide vista, is rarely seen (although looking back at the buildings bordering the train line as I crossed just north of Farringdon station, or looking south across Hyde Park towards the skyline of Victoria are both significant long views with incredible points of interest). It is primarily the immediate, and the transition from building to building, the layering that is both horizontal and vertical (always lookup when traversing the city, many of the more interesting features are above the shop fronts) and that speak of histories, of the many different forms that this city has taken. I love the work of Peter Ackroyd, and that always speaks to this layered nature of the city, with the older cities, the lower levels, always pushing to break through into the present and the current vision.

One thing that I did miss on this walk, however, were the people. Even in the more crowded areas around Soho or Piccadilly, the people did not impose themselves as much as they might. Perhaps I had already phased them out, had entered into my own head, and I was meditating as I viewed the architecture and the streetscapes through which I was travelling. One point where people did interrupt the walk, in a very surprising way, was a series of photographs in the window of Grimshaw Architects. These were by a Nigerian photographer and showed ordinary people in their domestic spaces in either London or Lagos. Amazingly powerful images! But that is what walking across a city is all about, the unexpected, the original and the emotionally powerful. Highly recommended.