So, something I've been curious about is the state of modern profanity. If you think about it, the really horrible words of yesteryear seem tame nowadays. They're still "bad," but they are increasingly common in polite conversation. Coming from the hinterlands, I still remember when tame words like "damn it" and "damnation" were substituted in cursing with "dagnabbit" and "'tarnation." I'm not sure about oversees, but I know that here, the British curse "bloody" is more humorous than vile. When I was 9, my mom tried to punish me for saying "sucks". Apparently, when she was growing up, that was a pretty bad word. She gave up when she found out that that word was ubiquitous on the elementary playground.
The origin of profanity, seems to me, to be wrapped up in religion and superstition. Notice that the two words we use to describe profanity in the vernacular are "cursing" (or "cussin'") and "swearing". Some mainstream media web article off of a site like MSN, an article that I have long since lost the link to, correctly elucidated the difference between the two categories: "Cursing" is attacking something, e.g. "Damn you!", or "Fuck off and die"; "Swearing" is an exclamation showing the severity of the circumstance, e.g. "by Jove!" or "Jesus Christ". In earlier times, it was believed that words had power to make things happen, and so cursing someone was expected (or hoped to) to actually produce results - so when somebody told you to "fuck off and die", the literally wished you dead, at least in the heat of the moment. So, it's somewhat excuseable that they'd fight you right back. Likewise, when somebody said "Jesus Christ, you'd forget head if it wasn't attached!" - or the equivalent god/spirit/natural force of the era - it was expected that you were actually trying to call the attention of the power in question to attend to the matter, which is generally very unlucky, as 1)omnipotent powers are in the position to hurt you and everyone around you, and 2) omnipotent powers don't like being summoned to deal with mundane shit. Obviously, with the increasing rationality and the decreasing commonness of animistic/paganistic/anthropomorphic-monotheistic thought, these intents are no longer at the forefront of the offensive party, but I find it fascinating how these two divisions still color the way people curse and swear.
Excepting ancient religious beliefs, you can still tell a lot about a society by how it swears. You can notice that Anglo culture was obsessed by anatomy by the fact that so many of the words we are supposed to use refer to bodily functions or even body parts themselves. You can also tell how obsessed England used to be by the fact that "bastard" was a fightin' word. Nowadays, the actual meaning of bastard feels so obscure as to not be noteworthy. When I was a kid and first found out what the "bastard" actually meant, the first thing a friend and I did was bond over the fact that we were both "bastards," since our fathers both left our mothers before we were born (though, I guess technically I wasn't illegitimate, 'cause my parents were still married at the time. Just barely). We didn't see it as a mark of shame so much as a fact of life, like one being born with brown eyes instead of blue. A blasé "Oh, sucks to be a bastard, what to do..." and then move on.
French swearing, particularly Quebecois swearing, really gives me a kick. Since this is an English article, I don't have any compunctions about writing French swear words down - it's not likely that I'll be taken to task by Google for that. I asked a coworker how to swear in Quebecois, and this is what he says: "Tabernac colis hostie cris de merde. It's like a combo system [in fighting games], you just keep adding words to build power." "Tabernac" is the Holy Tabernacle in the Bible, "colis" is the Holy Chalice (Grail), "hostie" I think is the Holy Ghost (Spirit), and "cris" is Christ. "Merde" just means "shit", and that's just there to finish the combo. It's a completely Catholic swearing system, a complete perversion of everything that is deemed holy. English has some of the same religious swearing tradition, but the fomerly powerful (especially in the country) words of "Jesus Christ!" "Christ's Sake!" "Hell" "Damn it!" are now relegated to meekness.
Russians apparently had elevated swearing to an artform, at least that's what I hear. Not speaking Russian myself, I have to go by what other people say, but from what I hear those people say, I really wish I did speak Russian. Some Russian general-turned-author during the Crimean War (Tolstoy?) was recorded as saying that it was essential for a Russian officer to know how to swear properly. From asking around with Russian friends, the art of swearing has really gone down hill since the the 19th century, but it's still quite elegant and refined compared to American English:
(From the website: http://www.youswear.com/index.asp?language=Russian)
"Ne ssi v kompot, tam povor nogi moet"
Lit: "Don't piss in the bowl of punch, the cook is washing his legs in it." Meaning, "Don't chicken out."
"Smekh smekhom, a pizda kverkhu mekhom."
Lit. "You may laugh until you cry, but your pussy is topped with fur", Meaning "That's not fucking funny!"
"Mne vsyo ostopeezdelo."
Lit. "I feel like I've fucked 100 Cunts", Meaning "I'm sick of it all."
"Paltsem delanniy"
Lit. "Conceived by a finger" Meaning "Moron"
---
So, with profanity being heard with increasing abandon on all of the media sources, does this mean that American Culture is become more crude and vile? Possibly. But, personally, I just think that those words are becoming less meaningful. In a modern society where sodomy (or to our more colorful British friends, "buggery") is seen less as sin against god and more of just an experimental phase in college; where a woman is encouraged to come to terms with her vagina; and where shit is as compost or manure and no longer as liquid evil (amorphous solid?), the power of anatomical terms to shock and offend seems to be waning. Nowadays, when somebody shouts "Cocksucker!", a reply of "Yeah, did it last night. What of it?" is not unconceivable. When a shock word becomes irrelevant, it becomes dead.
Plus, there is the power of "Euphemistic Drift," where words on the border of comfortability will gradually shift meaning over time, with normal words becoming dirty, and dirty words becoming tame. The word "whore" originally meant "beloved" - it is cognate (i.e. formed from the same original word) is also in English as the word "care." At somepoint in Anglo-German linguistic history, the word meaning harlot* became too racy, and people started subistuting the word for "love" instead. This came to us as "whore", which in all likelihood packs the same punch as the Germanic original that it replaced, so that now if you wish to talk about a "whore" in polite society, you use the word "prostitute" that replaced whore in the 17th century, which comes from a Latin construction meaning "to show your wares." Except in modern society, we don't use the word "prostitute" when talking to one, that's still too raw - we use the word "escort." Eventually, "escort" will become too racy, and a substitute will be invented.
(* Harlot has an interesting history itself - originally meaning vagabond, dictionary.com gives evidence that makes me think that it was originally applied to women through effeminate circus-jesters and jugglers; since then, it lost all association with men and transience, although it kept its low-born aspect)
The same principle works backwards, with swear words being overused and replaced with new words that are more powerfull. This suggests, is that if you want to find the heart of modern profanity, look for the words that still hurt, the words that pack a punch so heavy that people will fight, even kill over them. Look for the words that deal with the controversial, raw topics that modern society is obsessed about.
This was a topic that I was curious about for a couple of years - "What will be the new swear words when the current crop wears out?" - when I heard and interview of Russell Simmons by Howard Stern. That conversation opened my eyes because Russell Simmons correctly identified the "n-word" as a swear word (notice that I am actually scared to use it, as opposed to "shit" which makes its third appearance in this article). This conversation opened my eyes because the modern swear words (nigger, honkie, spic, chink, etc - wow, that gave me the chills just writing them) deal with race relations, or they deal with sexual orientation (faggot, dyke). So that tells us what modern America is currently obsessed about - Racism and Homosexuality. And in a way, this makes sense, because both of these issues are modern. It's only recently that discrimination has been deemed a bad thing, and so now the terms that are inherited that deal with denigrating and dehumaniztion other people have a special fire to them, because they are recognized as words that shouldn't be used anymore.
I postulate (and in my bid for immortality, this shall be called the "Gonzales Postulate" :Þ) that the words that a culture uses to swear, curse, or otherwise be profane, are the words that tell exactly how a recognizes and is grapples with its contemporary issues; These words show how that culture will progress and mature, given time for it process and come to terms with these issues.
J.K. Rowling really knew her shit when she made the most devasting swear word in her Harry Potter series be "Mudblood."
Saturday, September 29, 2007
How "black" was Tut Ankh Amen?
Or: History Can be Really Complex
Finally Finished
I have my clock-radio set to wake me up with NPR in the morning at 7 O'Clock, which is when Morning Edition does their BBC and the US headlines. One of the mornings many weeks ago (I haven't posted recently because I've been ... distracted, yeah, that's right). There is/was a big Egyptian exhibit in Pennsylvania, and outside of it, several pillars of the African-American/Black (you choose) community were holding a demonstration complaining that the musuem was de-emphasizing the African-ness of Egypt and painting Pharoah Tut Ankh Amen with Caucasian/White (you choose) or Arab features. Well, King Tut certainly ain't White, and as Egypt pre-dates the Arabs, he ain't Arab either (though their Semite ancestors were definitely kicking it around this time period, and this may be before or not to long after they split from the group that would become the Hebrews). But the question of just how black he was is fraught with a bit more complexity than that.
(Click here for a newsclipping of that demonstration)
Unfortunately, Africa is really complicated, to the point where I can't call what polite US society would term "African-Americans" that for the rest of this article without being confusing. And when one talks about Egypt (or Khemet) being "African", one has to figure out in what sense one means that before the conversation can continue.
Image from Wikipedia, using its Common License
The image above is a break down of African continent into language groups, which are related to ethnic distributions, but of course not equivalent to them. That would make things too easy, and Africa is anything by easy. Anyway, the Red, Orange and Yellow sections roughly correspond to three families what we would consider "African" - i.e. "Black African." The Green corresponds to the distribution of what would consider "Pygmy Africans"; and the Blue corresponds to what is termed "Afro-Asiatics"; I would term them "Semitic Africans" but that is my own (and somewhat loose & incorrect) phrase. The population along the Mediterranean coast west of Egypt are better known as the Berbers. In politically un-correct terms, these people are "Non-Black Africans". The Purple guys just there to make things even harder, and are speaking something related to Indonesian - that's another long story in itself. Anyway, notice Somalia & Ethopia are in the blue zone - but we know from news-footage and whatnot that a good chunk of those people are "black", so what gives?
This further underlines the complixities of what one has to deal with when discussing Africa. What we have here, to once again put it somewhat loosely, is a population of Blacks speaking a non-Black language. Which in today's world, with all of the colonization in the recent past and the globalization going on now, isn't that uncommon - after all, Blacks in the US are speaking a Non-Black language (English), and I'm speaking a .. well, North American history is complicated as well, but a non-Amerindian* language (aka "Red" - or "the Other" - "Indian").
*I grew up thinking of my ancestors on my Dad's side of my family as "Indian", and then I started to work in the tech sector with "real live" Indians from -golly- India, and now identifying myself as "Indian" has proven to be really confusing. But I still prefer it to Native American ("Native" is meaningless) or First American (increasing evidence is pointing to the "First" being incorrect - or at least, more complicated). The way I figure it, George Carlin's skit about how extra syllables drain the life & meaning from English hits close to home here, which is why I am uncomfortable calling "blacks" "African Americans". I'll take the shortest descriptor that isn't openly perjorative.
What this means is that sometime in the past, these blacks learned a semitic-family language. This can simplitistically happen in two ways: 1) the blacks moved into a population of Semitic speakers and became linguistically assimilated, then their population outgrew the culture that they assimilated into; or 2) the Semitic speakers moved in and dominated the blacks long enough for their language to take root, and then were enthically assimilated by the population they moved into. This can get into a heavy discussion about the "status" perceived by one class about another class's or their own language; but there are readily available examples of both.
The easiest example of #2 is India, where the British moved in, taught everyone English, and then were forced out. An example of #1 is trickier, but example of that is Finland. Finland is strange in Scandinavian because though they (largely) look like the other Scandinavians, they speak an language that is wholly different. Current theory on how this happened was that Finland was previously occupied by Finnish speaking Uralic types (I have no idea what to call the previous inhabitants of Finnland beyond "the previous inhabitants of Finnland") when some Scandinavians moved across one of the waters in a small enough group to be linguistically assimilated. Then, over time, the Scandinavian Finns outbred the "Other" Finns until they dominated the gene-pool, though long after they had stopped speaking their ancestral language.
So, in Ethiopia, which was it? Since it's Africa, and most of the Arab world is to the northeast, one my think that it was it was populated by black Ethiopians first and then conquered by Arabs. Historically, this is pretty accurate to what happened in the Sahara, which is why Arabic is the current popular language of Egypt. But there are some other facts that point to the fact Ethiopia was first inhabited by (possibly proto-) Semitics, who then expanded out into the Arabian Peninsula, the Maghreb (Mediterranean Coast of Africa) and the Levant; and then came back, a'conquering to establish the Muslim Caliphate Empire of the first millenium AD/CE.
There is a constant truth in linguistics that whenever you have time or distance, languages will tend to fragment into many dialects. Notice I say "or", and not "time and distance" - this is important. If you look at England, there are many, many dialects for a small island half the size of California. There is not a lot of distance here, and yet we have two dialects as different from each other as Scotch and Surrey. To further ram home the importance of time, a city the size of London, which is big as cities go but not as large as the entire island itself, is fragmented into many, many dialects spoken by a variety of economic classes and neighborhoods (which, if one remembers, is the basis of the plot of My Fair Lady (^_^)).
What this means is that the place where a language family is resident the longest will have the greatest number of dialects & sub-languages; and, conversely, if you want to find a "homeland" for a language group, look for where there is the most variety of a language family found in a small area. A modern analogy is that European languages are spoken all over the world, and just based on size territory, one would expect that the the Europeans would've originated in the Americas - two whole continents that speak French, English, Spanish & Portuguese. But if one looks for the area of the most variety of dialects, one one find that the English homeland is in Northern Europe (many kinds of German, Danish, Norwegian, many kids of Dutch, Norweigian, Swedish) and that the French, Spanish and Portuguese homeland is in Southwest Europe (with Italian, Catalan, Corsican, Provencal, etc). This leads us to reason that Europe is the homeland of the major political languages spoken in the New World (I say political because many Amerindian languages are still extent in the Americas, particular South America, but these most of these countries don't share their Amerindian languages - another example of high language diversity in a small space - and so they have to use Spanish to communicate amongst themselves).
So, in the area Ethiopia, there is much higher density of (Coptic, Amharic )Semitic languages than elsewhere, which points to Ethiopia being the homeland of the Semitic languages. In that link, look at the diversity of Afro-Asiatic languages ("Arab") versus the Nilo-Saharan languages ("Black").
Now where was I.. I got on this linguistic rant for a reason. That's right, the reason was to establish that once upon a time, there was a large population of "non-blacks" in Africa as far south as Ethiopia, in order to combat the claim that, just because Egypt was in Africa, the Egyptian pharoah Tut Ankh Amen "had to be" black. I'm not saying the Egypt didn't have black people in, or that Egypt was never black. I'm just saying that the actual situation is really complicated, much more complicated that the protestors would have one to think. Now to give credit, they claim that Tut Ankh Amen is Nubian (Nilo-Saharan), which would definitely make him black if he were. But I obviously haven't been reading the same sources as they have, 'cause I haven't seen that claim myself. To be honest, though, I have seen other cases where Nubians would control the Pharaonic Throne for some number of dynasties - which plays into my whole over-arching point: it's really complicated. But the Egyptians spoke a Semitic language, as demostrated by surviving offshoot, Coptic, and they spoke the language when the Semites were still based in Africa. This points to fact that even if Tut was genetically black, culturally, Egypt was something much more murky than a simple "black or not" question.
And so what really goads me about the protestors - and why I wrote this in the first place - is that their demand is for the museum to "Document and display the research and accomplishments of the renowned African scholar Cheikh Anta Diop in scientifically proving that Kemet [Egypt] was an African civilization" [My emphasis]. This is complete balderdash - there is no way that history as field can be "scientific", much less "scientifically proven". Science is based on the cycle of hypothesis, test, observe, repeat, until you have theory that is water-tight enough that it can deal with all of the evidence so far. All that hub-bub I wrote above was to offer evidence in contradiction to the theory that Egypt was was a (Black) African civilization; but there is no way that we can ever know for certain or scientifically, one way or the other or more likely shade of grey inbetween, because we can't go there ourselves to find out. All we can do is speculate, and that is not "scientific". All we have is second-hand or third-hand accounts passed down the generations by people who had a vested interest in doctoring the documents for their own needs, or maybe if we are lucky, some first-hand accounts by somebody on the ground who was limited by the biases and prejudices of his time, location, class, and station in life, and whose writings were similarly doctored. DNA might give evidence that Tut the individual was black or not (most likely mixed race, in my own opinion), but it can't show whether or not the larger society was African or not.
(Click here for a newsclipping of that demonstration)
Unfortunately, Africa is really complicated, to the point where I can't call what polite US society would term "African-Americans" that for the rest of this article without being confusing. And when one talks about Egypt (or Khemet) being "African", one has to figure out in what sense one means that before the conversation can continue.
Image from Wikipedia, using its Common License
The image above is a break down of African continent into language groups, which are related to ethnic distributions, but of course not equivalent to them. That would make things too easy, and Africa is anything by easy. Anyway, the Red, Orange and Yellow sections roughly correspond to three families what we would consider "African" - i.e. "Black African." The Green corresponds to the distribution of what would consider "Pygmy Africans"; and the Blue corresponds to what is termed "Afro-Asiatics"; I would term them "Semitic Africans" but that is my own (and somewhat loose & incorrect) phrase. The population along the Mediterranean coast west of Egypt are better known as the Berbers. In politically un-correct terms, these people are "Non-Black Africans". The Purple guys just there to make things even harder, and are speaking something related to Indonesian - that's another long story in itself. Anyway, notice Somalia & Ethopia are in the blue zone - but we know from news-footage and whatnot that a good chunk of those people are "black", so what gives?
This further underlines the complixities of what one has to deal with when discussing Africa. What we have here, to once again put it somewhat loosely, is a population of Blacks speaking a non-Black language. Which in today's world, with all of the colonization in the recent past and the globalization going on now, isn't that uncommon - after all, Blacks in the US are speaking a Non-Black language (English), and I'm speaking a .. well, North American history is complicated as well, but a non-Amerindian* language (aka "Red" - or "the Other" - "Indian").
*I grew up thinking of my ancestors on my Dad's side of my family as "Indian", and then I started to work in the tech sector with "real live" Indians from -golly- India, and now identifying myself as "Indian" has proven to be really confusing. But I still prefer it to Native American ("Native" is meaningless) or First American (increasing evidence is pointing to the "First" being incorrect - or at least, more complicated). The way I figure it, George Carlin's skit about how extra syllables drain the life & meaning from English hits close to home here, which is why I am uncomfortable calling "blacks" "African Americans". I'll take the shortest descriptor that isn't openly perjorative.
What this means is that sometime in the past, these blacks learned a semitic-family language. This can simplitistically happen in two ways: 1) the blacks moved into a population of Semitic speakers and became linguistically assimilated, then their population outgrew the culture that they assimilated into; or 2) the Semitic speakers moved in and dominated the blacks long enough for their language to take root, and then were enthically assimilated by the population they moved into. This can get into a heavy discussion about the "status" perceived by one class about another class's or their own language; but there are readily available examples of both.
The easiest example of #2 is India, where the British moved in, taught everyone English, and then were forced out. An example of #1 is trickier, but example of that is Finland. Finland is strange in Scandinavian because though they (largely) look like the other Scandinavians, they speak an language that is wholly different. Current theory on how this happened was that Finland was previously occupied by Finnish speaking Uralic types (I have no idea what to call the previous inhabitants of Finnland beyond "the previous inhabitants of Finnland") when some Scandinavians moved across one of the waters in a small enough group to be linguistically assimilated. Then, over time, the Scandinavian Finns outbred the "Other" Finns until they dominated the gene-pool, though long after they had stopped speaking their ancestral language.
So, in Ethiopia, which was it? Since it's Africa, and most of the Arab world is to the northeast, one my think that it was it was populated by black Ethiopians first and then conquered by Arabs. Historically, this is pretty accurate to what happened in the Sahara, which is why Arabic is the current popular language of Egypt. But there are some other facts that point to the fact Ethiopia was first inhabited by (possibly proto-) Semitics, who then expanded out into the Arabian Peninsula, the Maghreb (Mediterranean Coast of Africa) and the Levant; and then came back, a'conquering to establish the Muslim Caliphate Empire of the first millenium AD/CE.
There is a constant truth in linguistics that whenever you have time or distance, languages will tend to fragment into many dialects. Notice I say "or", and not "time and distance" - this is important. If you look at England, there are many, many dialects for a small island half the size of California. There is not a lot of distance here, and yet we have two dialects as different from each other as Scotch and Surrey. To further ram home the importance of time, a city the size of London, which is big as cities go but not as large as the entire island itself, is fragmented into many, many dialects spoken by a variety of economic classes and neighborhoods (which, if one remembers, is the basis of the plot of My Fair Lady (^_^)).
What this means is that the place where a language family is resident the longest will have the greatest number of dialects & sub-languages; and, conversely, if you want to find a "homeland" for a language group, look for where there is the most variety of a language family found in a small area. A modern analogy is that European languages are spoken all over the world, and just based on size territory, one would expect that the the Europeans would've originated in the Americas - two whole continents that speak French, English, Spanish & Portuguese. But if one looks for the area of the most variety of dialects, one one find that the English homeland is in Northern Europe (many kinds of German, Danish, Norwegian, many kids of Dutch, Norweigian, Swedish) and that the French, Spanish and Portuguese homeland is in Southwest Europe (with Italian, Catalan, Corsican, Provencal, etc). This leads us to reason that Europe is the homeland of the major political languages spoken in the New World (I say political because many Amerindian languages are still extent in the Americas, particular South America, but these most of these countries don't share their Amerindian languages - another example of high language diversity in a small space - and so they have to use Spanish to communicate amongst themselves).
So, in the area Ethiopia, there is much higher density of (Coptic, Amharic )Semitic languages than elsewhere, which points to Ethiopia being the homeland of the Semitic languages. In that link, look at the diversity of Afro-Asiatic languages ("Arab") versus the Nilo-Saharan languages ("Black").
Now where was I.. I got on this linguistic rant for a reason. That's right, the reason was to establish that once upon a time, there was a large population of "non-blacks" in Africa as far south as Ethiopia, in order to combat the claim that, just because Egypt was in Africa, the Egyptian pharoah Tut Ankh Amen "had to be" black. I'm not saying the Egypt didn't have black people in, or that Egypt was never black. I'm just saying that the actual situation is really complicated, much more complicated that the protestors would have one to think. Now to give credit, they claim that Tut Ankh Amen is Nubian (Nilo-Saharan), which would definitely make him black if he were. But I obviously haven't been reading the same sources as they have, 'cause I haven't seen that claim myself. To be honest, though, I have seen other cases where Nubians would control the Pharaonic Throne for some number of dynasties - which plays into my whole over-arching point: it's really complicated. But the Egyptians spoke a Semitic language, as demostrated by surviving offshoot, Coptic, and they spoke the language when the Semites were still based in Africa. This points to fact that even if Tut was genetically black, culturally, Egypt was something much more murky than a simple "black or not" question.
And so what really goads me about the protestors - and why I wrote this in the first place - is that their demand is for the museum to "Document and display the research and accomplishments of the renowned African scholar Cheikh Anta Diop in scientifically proving that Kemet [Egypt] was an African civilization" [My emphasis]. This is complete balderdash - there is no way that history as field can be "scientific", much less "scientifically proven". Science is based on the cycle of hypothesis, test, observe, repeat, until you have theory that is water-tight enough that it can deal with all of the evidence so far. All that hub-bub I wrote above was to offer evidence in contradiction to the theory that Egypt was was a (Black) African civilization; but there is no way that we can ever know for certain or scientifically, one way or the other or more likely shade of grey inbetween, because we can't go there ourselves to find out. All we can do is speculate, and that is not "scientific". All we have is second-hand or third-hand accounts passed down the generations by people who had a vested interest in doctoring the documents for their own needs, or maybe if we are lucky, some first-hand accounts by somebody on the ground who was limited by the biases and prejudices of his time, location, class, and station in life, and whose writings were similarly doctored. DNA might give evidence that Tut the individual was black or not (most likely mixed race, in my own opinion), but it can't show whether or not the larger society was African or not.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Senator Larry Craig Really Wants You to Know that He's not Gay
I woke up this morning to radio broadcast of a snippet of a press conference held by Senator Craig, the guy who found himself in a Denver(?) Airport scandal so saucy that it took several days of ambiguous reporting for me to figure out what had happened. Of course the media can't say that he was arrested for trying to pick up guys in the bathroom. No, they have to be family-friendly and oblique about it. I thought he'd been arrested for jacking off, Pee Wee Herman style.
Anyway, back to the press conference: There's nothing like waking up in the morning to repeated cries of an conservative family-values politician saying "I'm not gay!" to make what is an otherwise dreary morning interesting.
Apparently this isn't the first time he's had this problem either.
To which my first thought is:
(Note: the previous video got pulled from YouTube - Sucks to be me - so this one will have to do)
Though honestly, I kinda understand where he's coming from. I grew up in that neck of the woods (rural Pacific Northwest), and it's quite homophobic in the hinterlands up there. And this is even with the liberalizing (or civilizing, depending on who you ask) element of radical Wilammette Valley, Oregon, nearby my town. Out in the even crazier hinterlands where Craig is from, it can get really backwards. And I don't mean to offend Idahoans by claiming their state is backwards, but sometime remind me to tell you the story of my friend who got chased out of the state by the local Aryan Nation.
It wasn't until I moved to the big city to go to school until I met people who were not only gay, not only admitted it, but practiced it in the open. It was surprisingly schocking to my innocently provincial mind to see two men romantically cuddling each other during a rock concert for the first time.
And since then, I've moved to San Francisco, where practically anything goes. The minute it gets sunny in Dolores Park, the whole south-west side of the park is covered by men in various conditions of scantily-cladness. And in a reminder of my provincial smalltown roots, it was thoroughly intimidating the first time I walked through the Castro District when I got kinda lost exploring my neighborhood.
I guess the one thing that makes Craig's press conference silly and childish is the realization since I've moved to the city that steamy man-on-man sex doesn't necessarily make one gay. Just like the stories that circulate about women who sometimes feel the need to experiment (a large part of them probably apocryphal), it seems likely that the same is true of men. To repurpose a line from Kevin Smith, sometimes straight men "just need a deep dicking.*"
*At least, I think that's what Kevin Smith wrote - my memory is bit hazy.
So, Senator Craig, if you were gay, it'd be ok.
Anyway, back to the press conference: There's nothing like waking up in the morning to repeated cries of an conservative family-values politician saying "I'm not gay!" to make what is an otherwise dreary morning interesting.
Apparently this isn't the first time he's had this problem either.
To which my first thought is:
(Note: the previous video got pulled from YouTube - Sucks to be me - so this one will have to do)
Though honestly, I kinda understand where he's coming from. I grew up in that neck of the woods (rural Pacific Northwest), and it's quite homophobic in the hinterlands up there. And this is even with the liberalizing (or civilizing, depending on who you ask) element of radical Wilammette Valley, Oregon, nearby my town. Out in the even crazier hinterlands where Craig is from, it can get really backwards. And I don't mean to offend Idahoans by claiming their state is backwards, but sometime remind me to tell you the story of my friend who got chased out of the state by the local Aryan Nation.
It wasn't until I moved to the big city to go to school until I met people who were not only gay, not only admitted it, but practiced it in the open. It was surprisingly schocking to my innocently provincial mind to see two men romantically cuddling each other during a rock concert for the first time.
And since then, I've moved to San Francisco, where practically anything goes. The minute it gets sunny in Dolores Park, the whole south-west side of the park is covered by men in various conditions of scantily-cladness. And in a reminder of my provincial smalltown roots, it was thoroughly intimidating the first time I walked through the Castro District when I got kinda lost exploring my neighborhood.
I guess the one thing that makes Craig's press conference silly and childish is the realization since I've moved to the city that steamy man-on-man sex doesn't necessarily make one gay. Just like the stories that circulate about women who sometimes feel the need to experiment (a large part of them probably apocryphal), it seems likely that the same is true of men. To repurpose a line from Kevin Smith, sometimes straight men "just need a deep dicking.*"
*At least, I think that's what Kevin Smith wrote - my memory is bit hazy.
So, Senator Craig, if you were gay, it'd be ok.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Early San Francisco's Vicious Gang of Australians
The following writing is an article that I'm submitting to http://www.damninteresting.com/. They are on the look for new writers, and I thought it might a fun diversion (^_^).
----
The small Mexican village of Yerba Buena was a sleepy place to live, farm and ranch. This all changed when gold was discovered in relatively nearby Sutter's Mill in 1849, shortly after the territory of California was taken over by American settlers and soldiers following Presdient James K. Polk's War of 1848.
A map of that shows the approximate coastlines of early San Francisco super-imposed on modern day San Francisco. The black line is the coastline of Yerba Buena in the 1840s; the blue line is the filled in coastline from 1852. The green square is the early central plaza of Portsmouth Square, where so many of the Vigilance Committees actions were held. The red is the approximate location of the Barbary Coast.
NOTE: due to some server error, the image above is not displaying. Click this text to see a large version.
When the news of gold was spread around the world, the first to respond were immigrants from the western portion of the world - first Chile, then Australian and China. Immigrants from the east coast cities of the US soon followed, and San Francisco sprung from nothingness (and Yerba Buena) into a highly multicultural city, like Athena springing fully formed and armed from Zeus's head.
Any sudden growth like that seen in San Francisco, where the population grew from 400 to 25,000 in just a few months, is sure to bear with it some problems. Especially if it is compounded by the fact that less than 3% of the population were women. Men in the sole company of other men tend towards the rambunctious, and San Francisco fast became the proto-typical wild west town where ranchers, farmers, prospectors, gamblers, prostitutes, thieves, robbers and vigilantes all mixed together
It was on to this scene that a group of Australian immigrants arrived. When the British monarchy lost Georgia as a penal colony in the American Revolution, they turned to newly found Australia as a place to deport their undesireables. Thus many of the Australians that immigrated to San Francisco were actually British felons and convicts once removed. They quickly established their own place in this forming metropolis - the neighborhood where they gathered was called Sydney Town; and the cackling laughter as they went about their business earned them the name of the "Sydney Ducks."
Moving into the area north of Market Street after a gang of former US soldier Know-Nothings (known as the Hounds) were expelled, the Ducks quickly set about making themselves at home. They founded many pubs with distinctly British names such as "The Boar's Head", "The Noggin of Ale" and "The Bird-in-Hand." These bugs soon became the wellspring from which drunkenness, gambling, prostitution, violence and all manner of other vice issued. Such was the rough atmosphere of this coastal neighborhood that it was likened to the Barbary Coast of northern Africa, from where Berber Pirates terrorized the Mediterranaen and at where the fledgling U.S. Marines saw their first action on foreign soil. The name stuck, and from the 1850s until a decade after the great earthquake and fire of 1906, this neighborhood was known as the Barbary Coast. It is now located in the San Francisco neighborhood of North Beach.
Particular to San Francisco, of all the wild-west towns, was the practice of "shanghai'ing" - so called because the victim of shanghai'ing was a sailor that would find himself bound to an undesireable long journey to ports such as Shanghai, with no recourse but to see the sailing through. While this practice continued for many decades in San Francisco, it was of particular usefulness in the early 1850s during the peak of the gold rush years. Captains that set port in San Francisco during this time found themselves on an abandoned ship as crew after crew fled north east to make it rich in area around Sacramento. The harbor of San Francisco was cluttered with hundreds of abandoned ships rotting away with no crew to sail them. Many of these abandoned ships gave up all hope of sailing away, and were beached to become hotels, stores, even jailhouses.
It was rough for all of the ship captains, but thoses captains with a particularly bad reputation found themselves unable to hire crews to sail their ships. Having their reputations for a reason, tehese ship captains would then unscrupulously contract with "crimpers" who would raid the Barbary Coast saloons for sailors to shanghai. The saloon operators were often complicit with such acts, if not active crimpers themselves. A sailor would find themselves in the charming companionship of a barmaid who would pass them a shot of whiskey spiked with laudanum or other drugs. If that failed to work, then a billy club was often sufficient to render them unconscious. The Bar's job done, the crimper would then load them on to a ship to nurse a nasty hangover while they discovered where they were headed when they woke up the next day.
Another phenomenon of early San Francisco were routine fires that would raze the city of timber houses to the ground. Originally thought to be the handy work of the Sydney Ducks, recent writers are of the opinion that these firse were set by merchants wishing to cash out on insurance policies held on warehoused good that the volatile market forces had rendered impossible to sell for a profit.
Regardless of who set these fires that burned the town to the ground six times in as little as two years, they tended to be set when prevailing winds would be blowing out of the east or north, away from Sydney Town. The Sydney Ducks were not above reproach, either, as the would use the incendiary chaos to loot the burning houses and cart the goods back to Sydney Town, earning the emnity of the rest of the town.
The city government during this era was under-staffed, under-equipped, and under-motivated. With most of the eligible populuous out in the fields trying to strike it rich, the police and city government appeared to be more concerned with using their public powers to make themselves rich. This, combined with the fact that police work in an era of solo beat patrols before the advent of radio communication and immediate back-up made police work particularly dangerous. Especially since many policeman were denied the use of guns unless they supplied them themselves. And if the suspects were apprehended, they were housed on the scuttled brig Euphemia, which was bought and turned into a jailhouse, and from which escapes were routine as inmates dug out of their cells while the wardens failed to watch. It was little surprised that the inhabitants of early San Francisco felt that the local wheels of justice incapable to do the work necessary.
Then, in June of 1851, during the reconstruction after a particularly nasty fire blamed on the Ducks, self-styled civic leader Samuel Brannan, himself an interesting character, and a couple hundred of other San Franciscan citizens formed the first Committee of Vigiliance, dedicated to cleaning out the city of the criminals that infested it. Just days after the committee was formed, they were given cause to act by the theft of one John Jenkins, known even to his fellow theives as "the Miscreant." Following his theft of a safe from a local merchant, which the Miscreant threw into bay while rowing away from a throng of citizens chasing him, Vigilance Commitee took steps to immediately apprehend the thief before the police could be roused. They took him to immediate trial, found him guilty as charged, and then sentenced him to be hung from the central plaza at Portsmouth Square. Lacking a gallows, they threw a rope over a beam that projected out from an adobe building there, and ran with the other end of the rope until John Jenkins was lifted off of the ground. All two hundred members of the committee took turns holding him aloft so that they would all be "equally to blame" for his death if legal action followed. They then published their entire roster of members to openly declare what they had done.
The next step of the Vigilance Committee was to let all the of the criminal elements of the Barbary Coast know that they had five days to leave the city, or they would be lynched or thrown out of the city, whichever was felt to be expedient at the time. There was a mass exodus of many of the lesser criminal elements, but the serious elements of the Ducks stayed put, somewhat ironically putting faith in the machinery of city government to protect them from these vigilantes. Another fire, said to set in Revenge when the winds were blowing away from Sydney Town, burned the city down again soon after.
Then next action of the Vigilance Committee took place when English Jim, a particularly nasty Duck, a sort of leader among the rabble of Sydney Town, returned to San Francisco and tried to rob the Captain of an English ship while he slept in its cabin. English Jim had as earlier notable exploits, killed a Sheriff in nearby Marysville in a burglary, and escaped from jail a few days after, gone to San Francisco, where he robbed Jansen Bonds and hightailed out of there with $2000. In an interesting twist, one Thomas Berdue, who was so physically similar to English Jim as to share the same scar and missing finger, was literally sent up the river to the interior to hang for English Jim's crimes, narrowly escaping a mob lynching himself in the process.
As English Jim tried to rob the Captain's cabin, he was held fast by the Captain's wife while she called for help from the other sailors on the ship. Thus caught in the act, English Jim was taken to summary trial by the Vigilance Committe and almost immediately confessed to the crimes for which Berdue was sent to hang. English Jim was sentenced to hang for the multiple robberies and the murder of the Sheriff, and they paraded out into the street with him in tow. English Jim seemed to believe that he'd be rescued by his fellow Australian cronies before he'd make it to the gallows, but the sheer mass of the entire city gathered to watch rendered any escape impossible. English Jim had to be carried the last few steps to the hastily erected gallows at the head of Market Street, where he was hung. Riders were dispatched to the interior to exonerate Thomas Berdue now that the real English Jim had been hung, and Thomas was given some thousands of dollars to compensate him for their mistake. He quickly left town, and it is unknown where he went to.
Two more Sydney Ducks were soon apprehended by the vigilantes and sentenced to be hung. This time, though, the police stepped in to prevent mob justice from being executed. The sheriff arrived with a large contigent of police force and an order from the governor of California to demand that the two Ducks be turned over to him for a legal trial. Most of the Vigilance Committee being elsewhere at the time, the scant few guarding their makeshift prison assented. Two days later the Vigilance Committee in full force raided the police jailhouse and took the two Sydney Ducks out for an immediate hanging. Samuel Brannan then announced to the gathered crowd that the citizens Vigilance Committee would not be swayed from exacting justice regardless of what the police, city government or state goverment said contrariwise, and that every felon that valued his life should immediately depart from San Francisco. Sydney Town was quickly depopulated, with only a few bars, pubs and brothels remaining in operation, and this rambunctious town was quiet for a spell. Some of the Ducks would later return, but by and large their power was broken, though in time they would be followed by a next in a long series of thugs - including the now eponymous hoodlums - that would continue to ravage wild-west era San Francisco.
----Information comes from:
History of the Barbary Coast - An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld - Herbert Asbury. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, 1933.
{Out of print, text found online at http://www.sfgenealogy.com/sf/history/hbtbcidx.htm}
The Strongest Gang in Town - Kevin J. Mullen. Noir Publications, Novato, CA, 2005.
Walking the Barbary Coast Trail - Daniel Bacon. Quicksilver Press, 1997.
----
The small Mexican village of Yerba Buena was a sleepy place to live, farm and ranch. This all changed when gold was discovered in relatively nearby Sutter's Mill in 1849, shortly after the territory of California was taken over by American settlers and soldiers following Presdient James K. Polk's War of 1848.
A map of that shows the approximate coastlines of early San Francisco super-imposed on modern day San Francisco. The black line is the coastline of Yerba Buena in the 1840s; the blue line is the filled in coastline from 1852. The green square is the early central plaza of Portsmouth Square, where so many of the Vigilance Committees actions were held. The red is the approximate location of the Barbary Coast.
NOTE: due to some server error, the image above is not displaying. Click this text to see a large version.
When the news of gold was spread around the world, the first to respond were immigrants from the western portion of the world - first Chile, then Australian and China. Immigrants from the east coast cities of the US soon followed, and San Francisco sprung from nothingness (and Yerba Buena) into a highly multicultural city, like Athena springing fully formed and armed from Zeus's head.
Any sudden growth like that seen in San Francisco, where the population grew from 400 to 25,000 in just a few months, is sure to bear with it some problems. Especially if it is compounded by the fact that less than 3% of the population were women. Men in the sole company of other men tend towards the rambunctious, and San Francisco fast became the proto-typical wild west town where ranchers, farmers, prospectors, gamblers, prostitutes, thieves, robbers and vigilantes all mixed together
It was on to this scene that a group of Australian immigrants arrived. When the British monarchy lost Georgia as a penal colony in the American Revolution, they turned to newly found Australia as a place to deport their undesireables. Thus many of the Australians that immigrated to San Francisco were actually British felons and convicts once removed. They quickly established their own place in this forming metropolis - the neighborhood where they gathered was called Sydney Town; and the cackling laughter as they went about their business earned them the name of the "Sydney Ducks."
Moving into the area north of Market Street after a gang of former US soldier Know-Nothings (known as the Hounds) were expelled, the Ducks quickly set about making themselves at home. They founded many pubs with distinctly British names such as "The Boar's Head", "The Noggin of Ale" and "The Bird-in-Hand." These bugs soon became the wellspring from which drunkenness, gambling, prostitution, violence and all manner of other vice issued. Such was the rough atmosphere of this coastal neighborhood that it was likened to the Barbary Coast of northern Africa, from where Berber Pirates terrorized the Mediterranaen and at where the fledgling U.S. Marines saw their first action on foreign soil. The name stuck, and from the 1850s until a decade after the great earthquake and fire of 1906, this neighborhood was known as the Barbary Coast. It is now located in the San Francisco neighborhood of North Beach.
Particular to San Francisco, of all the wild-west towns, was the practice of "shanghai'ing" - so called because the victim of shanghai'ing was a sailor that would find himself bound to an undesireable long journey to ports such as Shanghai, with no recourse but to see the sailing through. While this practice continued for many decades in San Francisco, it was of particular usefulness in the early 1850s during the peak of the gold rush years. Captains that set port in San Francisco during this time found themselves on an abandoned ship as crew after crew fled north east to make it rich in area around Sacramento. The harbor of San Francisco was cluttered with hundreds of abandoned ships rotting away with no crew to sail them. Many of these abandoned ships gave up all hope of sailing away, and were beached to become hotels, stores, even jailhouses.
It was rough for all of the ship captains, but thoses captains with a particularly bad reputation found themselves unable to hire crews to sail their ships. Having their reputations for a reason, tehese ship captains would then unscrupulously contract with "crimpers" who would raid the Barbary Coast saloons for sailors to shanghai. The saloon operators were often complicit with such acts, if not active crimpers themselves. A sailor would find themselves in the charming companionship of a barmaid who would pass them a shot of whiskey spiked with laudanum or other drugs. If that failed to work, then a billy club was often sufficient to render them unconscious. The Bar's job done, the crimper would then load them on to a ship to nurse a nasty hangover while they discovered where they were headed when they woke up the next day.
Another phenomenon of early San Francisco were routine fires that would raze the city of timber houses to the ground. Originally thought to be the handy work of the Sydney Ducks, recent writers are of the opinion that these firse were set by merchants wishing to cash out on insurance policies held on warehoused good that the volatile market forces had rendered impossible to sell for a profit.
Regardless of who set these fires that burned the town to the ground six times in as little as two years, they tended to be set when prevailing winds would be blowing out of the east or north, away from Sydney Town. The Sydney Ducks were not above reproach, either, as the would use the incendiary chaos to loot the burning houses and cart the goods back to Sydney Town, earning the emnity of the rest of the town.
The city government during this era was under-staffed, under-equipped, and under-motivated. With most of the eligible populuous out in the fields trying to strike it rich, the police and city government appeared to be more concerned with using their public powers to make themselves rich. This, combined with the fact that police work in an era of solo beat patrols before the advent of radio communication and immediate back-up made police work particularly dangerous. Especially since many policeman were denied the use of guns unless they supplied them themselves. And if the suspects were apprehended, they were housed on the scuttled brig Euphemia, which was bought and turned into a jailhouse, and from which escapes were routine as inmates dug out of their cells while the wardens failed to watch. It was little surprised that the inhabitants of early San Francisco felt that the local wheels of justice incapable to do the work necessary.
Then, in June of 1851, during the reconstruction after a particularly nasty fire blamed on the Ducks, self-styled civic leader Samuel Brannan, himself an interesting character, and a couple hundred of other San Franciscan citizens formed the first Committee of Vigiliance, dedicated to cleaning out the city of the criminals that infested it. Just days after the committee was formed, they were given cause to act by the theft of one John Jenkins, known even to his fellow theives as "the Miscreant." Following his theft of a safe from a local merchant, which the Miscreant threw into bay while rowing away from a throng of citizens chasing him, Vigilance Commitee took steps to immediately apprehend the thief before the police could be roused. They took him to immediate trial, found him guilty as charged, and then sentenced him to be hung from the central plaza at Portsmouth Square. Lacking a gallows, they threw a rope over a beam that projected out from an adobe building there, and ran with the other end of the rope until John Jenkins was lifted off of the ground. All two hundred members of the committee took turns holding him aloft so that they would all be "equally to blame" for his death if legal action followed. They then published their entire roster of members to openly declare what they had done.
The next step of the Vigilance Committee was to let all the of the criminal elements of the Barbary Coast know that they had five days to leave the city, or they would be lynched or thrown out of the city, whichever was felt to be expedient at the time. There was a mass exodus of many of the lesser criminal elements, but the serious elements of the Ducks stayed put, somewhat ironically putting faith in the machinery of city government to protect them from these vigilantes. Another fire, said to set in Revenge when the winds were blowing away from Sydney Town, burned the city down again soon after.
Then next action of the Vigilance Committee took place when English Jim, a particularly nasty Duck, a sort of leader among the rabble of Sydney Town, returned to San Francisco and tried to rob the Captain of an English ship while he slept in its cabin. English Jim had as earlier notable exploits, killed a Sheriff in nearby Marysville in a burglary, and escaped from jail a few days after, gone to San Francisco, where he robbed Jansen Bonds and hightailed out of there with $2000. In an interesting twist, one Thomas Berdue, who was so physically similar to English Jim as to share the same scar and missing finger, was literally sent up the river to the interior to hang for English Jim's crimes, narrowly escaping a mob lynching himself in the process.
As English Jim tried to rob the Captain's cabin, he was held fast by the Captain's wife while she called for help from the other sailors on the ship. Thus caught in the act, English Jim was taken to summary trial by the Vigilance Committe and almost immediately confessed to the crimes for which Berdue was sent to hang. English Jim was sentenced to hang for the multiple robberies and the murder of the Sheriff, and they paraded out into the street with him in tow. English Jim seemed to believe that he'd be rescued by his fellow Australian cronies before he'd make it to the gallows, but the sheer mass of the entire city gathered to watch rendered any escape impossible. English Jim had to be carried the last few steps to the hastily erected gallows at the head of Market Street, where he was hung. Riders were dispatched to the interior to exonerate Thomas Berdue now that the real English Jim had been hung, and Thomas was given some thousands of dollars to compensate him for their mistake. He quickly left town, and it is unknown where he went to.
Two more Sydney Ducks were soon apprehended by the vigilantes and sentenced to be hung. This time, though, the police stepped in to prevent mob justice from being executed. The sheriff arrived with a large contigent of police force and an order from the governor of California to demand that the two Ducks be turned over to him for a legal trial. Most of the Vigilance Committee being elsewhere at the time, the scant few guarding their makeshift prison assented. Two days later the Vigilance Committee in full force raided the police jailhouse and took the two Sydney Ducks out for an immediate hanging. Samuel Brannan then announced to the gathered crowd that the citizens Vigilance Committee would not be swayed from exacting justice regardless of what the police, city government or state goverment said contrariwise, and that every felon that valued his life should immediately depart from San Francisco. Sydney Town was quickly depopulated, with only a few bars, pubs and brothels remaining in operation, and this rambunctious town was quiet for a spell. Some of the Ducks would later return, but by and large their power was broken, though in time they would be followed by a next in a long series of thugs - including the now eponymous hoodlums - that would continue to ravage wild-west era San Francisco.
----Information comes from:
History of the Barbary Coast - An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld - Herbert Asbury. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, 1933.
{Out of print, text found online at http://www.sfgenealogy.com/sf/history/hbtbcidx.htm}
The Strongest Gang in Town - Kevin J. Mullen. Noir Publications, Novato, CA, 2005.
Walking the Barbary Coast Trail - Daniel Bacon. Quicksilver Press, 1997.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Thoughts about Stockholm Syndrome
The other day, I was reading up on the grand adventures of Ms. Hearst, and there's a link there to the counter-intuitive phenomenon of Stockholm Syndrome.
In a nutshell, Stockholm Syndrome is where, if you kidnap somebody, cut off all their contact with their friends and family ("their group"), treat them like crap for a long period of time, and then gradually ease off on them until they are treated like one of your family or group, they will transfer their loyalties away from their old group to yours.
From a historical perspective, this phenomenon isn't actually all that new. Humans have known about it, at least implicitly & experientially. Raiding for wives & slavery-manumission cycles are quite attested for, everywhere in the world. I have heard one somewhat tenuous interpretation that the honey-moon was originally a kidnapping-elopment that lasted one month before they returned to the husband's group as a couple. It's probably not that factually true, but it makes an entertaining anecdote. Come to think about it, the use of one month is probably to guarantee impregnation so that the kidnapped wife would feel bound to the husband to support her imminent and-as-yet unborn child.
From my own studies in Amerindian history, capturing of warriors for one's own tribe was pretty common. Though, anti-capturing of warriors (steal the women, kill all the men) was common as well. A journal entry of those that first met Chief Seattle (Sealth) of the Duwamish* was told the story of how some number of years before that a raiding party was sent against the Duwamish. The raiders were ambushed in creek-shed and captured. Among the people that the writer met were some of the people captured - when released, they refused to return to their tribe of origin, "Because of Chief Seattle's Great Magnanimity."
* Insert Mini-Rant Here: While I was living in Seattle, I heard word that the Federal Government (*ahem* Bush) had refused to grant tribal status to the Duwamish Nation because of a 5-year lapse of enrollment in the 1920s. Gee, thanks - take a tribe that is struggling to maintain its identity after 150 years - to whom you ower the land greatest port in the US Pacific Northwest - and then refuse to let them have their identity because they struggled to maintain it the the past.
The numerous anecdotes of Puritan & European settlers that would refuse to return to the colonies after their capture by Iroquois/Abenaki/Potowatomi (sp?) may be a reflection of those tribes' great valuation of personal liberty & value in comparison to monarchical Europe; but it might also be a sign of these captives identification with their new group.
But on the face of it, it seems odd that something that essentially a crushing & manipulation individual will would be so widespread and forceful to a person. One would naively think that a person in such circumstances would cling to the memory of what they had ever so much more, since that is all that they have in such a hostile situation. Such a counter-intiutive development makes me wonder if, biologically, the wife & warrior capturing behaviors are something that people have been practicing for millions of years. If they are a biologically beneficial, if individually detrimental, behavior. After all, humans often operate on the social level, and a person that is flexible enough to adapt to their new environment rather than fight it to their death, is probably more likely to survive to have kids.
In a nutshell, Stockholm Syndrome is where, if you kidnap somebody, cut off all their contact with their friends and family ("their group"), treat them like crap for a long period of time, and then gradually ease off on them until they are treated like one of your family or group, they will transfer their loyalties away from their old group to yours.
From a historical perspective, this phenomenon isn't actually all that new. Humans have known about it, at least implicitly & experientially. Raiding for wives & slavery-manumission cycles are quite attested for, everywhere in the world. I have heard one somewhat tenuous interpretation that the honey-moon was originally a kidnapping-elopment that lasted one month before they returned to the husband's group as a couple. It's probably not that factually true, but it makes an entertaining anecdote. Come to think about it, the use of one month is probably to guarantee impregnation so that the kidnapped wife would feel bound to the husband to support her imminent and-as-yet unborn child.
From my own studies in Amerindian history, capturing of warriors for one's own tribe was pretty common. Though, anti-capturing of warriors (steal the women, kill all the men) was common as well. A journal entry of those that first met Chief Seattle (Sealth) of the Duwamish* was told the story of how some number of years before that a raiding party was sent against the Duwamish. The raiders were ambushed in creek-shed and captured. Among the people that the writer met were some of the people captured - when released, they refused to return to their tribe of origin, "Because of Chief Seattle's Great Magnanimity."
* Insert Mini-Rant Here: While I was living in Seattle, I heard word that the Federal Government (*ahem* Bush) had refused to grant tribal status to the Duwamish Nation because of a 5-year lapse of enrollment in the 1920s. Gee, thanks - take a tribe that is struggling to maintain its identity after 150 years - to whom you ower the land greatest port in the US Pacific Northwest - and then refuse to let them have their identity because they struggled to maintain it the the past.
The numerous anecdotes of Puritan & European settlers that would refuse to return to the colonies after their capture by Iroquois/Abenaki/Potowatomi (sp?) may be a reflection of those tribes' great valuation of personal liberty & value in comparison to monarchical Europe; but it might also be a sign of these captives identification with their new group.
But on the face of it, it seems odd that something that essentially a crushing & manipulation individual will would be so widespread and forceful to a person. One would naively think that a person in such circumstances would cling to the memory of what they had ever so much more, since that is all that they have in such a hostile situation. Such a counter-intiutive development makes me wonder if, biologically, the wife & warrior capturing behaviors are something that people have been practicing for millions of years. If they are a biologically beneficial, if individually detrimental, behavior. After all, humans often operate on the social level, and a person that is flexible enough to adapt to their new environment rather than fight it to their death, is probably more likely to survive to have kids.
The Zen of Public Transport
Eh, what the hell, first night, I'm still excited; figure I'd copy and paste an entry from one of my old blogs, made a year & 4 months ago. It's just like free content (^_^).
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%I have not touched the steering wheel of a car since I was fifteen. At one point, I got my permit, took driver's ed, learned to drive, and then was given a choice: I could have a car, or live in Japan as a foreign exchange student for a year.
I've never looked back.
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