Posts Tagged ‘tribalism’
The Kit Kat Club
Google Announces New/Old Name for its Operating System
———————————————by William Carter————————————————————–
Every city has its seamy side. More so, perhaps, ancient Mediterranean ports long accustomed to serving a variety of visitors — from circulating sailors, to Saudi sheiks, to sun-seekers, to sidewalk speculators.
When Google announced “KitKat” as the name for the latest version of its Android operating system, I thought both of the Nestlé candy bar and of a formerly well-known Beirut strip joint. That bustling city has always attracted a large supply of entertainers — featuring European blondes — to work at every level, from the posh Casino du Liban, on down.
The Kit Kat Club was on the waterfront not far from where I lived from 1964 to 1966. I photographed dancers there, and later in their apartments, as part of a wider magazine story — “Women of Beirut” — a multi-leveled portrait of this tribal/sophisticated city which I never got around to finishing.
The bottom image. below, shows a larger, seamier section of town which appeared to feature brunettes.
A year later came the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, followed by Lebanon’s long, brutal internal conflicts — but by then I was gone.
Fast forwarding 47 years, on November 6, 2013 I was heartened to note this passage by Walter Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal: “While the primary goal of KitKat was to run in a much smaller amount of memory, it has a few notable new features. The phone app now places recent and frequent callers first in its favorite call list and de-emphasizes the full list of contacts…”
photographs © William Carter 1966
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Yemen: Then as Now? Part 4
Photos and Text © William CarterMany Yemenis are short, and their donkeys more soProtecting himself from the sun with a vestige of British colonial timesThe hot, humid valleys north of Sanaa are rich in agriculture — and malaria
Yemen’s indigenous architecture long contributed to its reputation as a quasi-mythical land
In 1963 the Brits still hung on
Late in the day a colonial officer reviews a dwindling number of troops
Street life in Aden survived longer than the politicians on the walls
Building for an uncertain future — then as now
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Yemen: Then As Now? Part 2
Photographs by William Carter © 1964
Tribal representatives pleading with Egyptian “anti-colonial” troops
Heading north, where Egyptian-backed revolutionaries were fighting Saudi-backed royalists
View from a British helicopter
Outpost in South Yemen: note man in prayer on wall
Traders in the southern port of Aden
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Portrait Of…?
Content is in the eye of the beholder
by William Carter
Every picture carries meanings behind the surface — beyond the literal. Our yearning for such meanings makes us human. This enduring, endearing need for meaning appears in many guises.
Photographs carry values. Across much of Europe and the U.S., many of the old churches are empty. But the museums are full. People hunger for something beyond the commercial — even as some monuments of high culture seem to have become palaces of mass entertainment.
Every photograph is a slice through space, and a slice of time. Different slices mean differently to different persons.
The Karmapa, above, is looking at you, even as you are looking at him. What part of you is he looking at? How do you see him? If you are looking at him while he is looking at you, are you in effect looking at yourself?
And what about the shot below, of the Duchess and Duke of Windsor (the abdicated British king), and their driver: what do you — and the onlookers beyond the window — bring to this picture?
And what, then of pictures of your relatives, or your children? I took the photo below of Jobi, my wife’s grandson, on his 17th birthday. Different people see it differently. I don’t notice the hair, for example; I just see the eyes as spiritual; reminds me of an Italian Renaissance painting.
In the same way, my published photographs elicit a wide variety of responses. In my recent book, Causes and Spirits, my shot of an older woman carrying a watering can up the steps of her Minnesota bungalow in 1973 elicited an e-mail from a man who speculated on the market value of the house, then and now, 39 years later.
For decades (actually, centuries) artists in various media have preoccupied themselves with issues of their own identity. Contemporary educators and tastemakers have supported this kind of questioning, often as a critique of modern society. Since the 1970s some have even called it the “culture of complaint.” Sculptures such as this were evidently meant to shock visitors to the Jerusalem’s Israel Museum in 1993:
My response was to look elsewhere for things closer to my own heart. I found them in a nearby orphanage, and in a refugee camp:
In the Middle East, as I mentioned in earlier blogs, perception of identity and reality hinges crucially on tribal affiliation. My self-assignment as a photographer has long been to try to see past such tags, to the underlying humanity. Does this slot me with 19th century romanticism and impressionism, as opposed to modernism or postmodernism or what else is currently hip? Who cares? This image from Hungary in 1964 belies the fact that Russian tanks were parked just over the hill:
Or this one, in Yemen, at a time when the Egyptians and the Saudis were fighting a proxy war there, with the subtle involvement of the Americans and the Soviets (sound familiar?):
As a kind of summing up, here’s one from my book, Preservation Hall. It’s of Emanuel Sales singing in New Orleans. One of his fellow jazzmen told me, “You got to have soul, man, to do this work.”
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Them vs. Us, and Beyond
The upper photograph of mine, below, is featured on the cover of the March 2012 issue of The Sun magazine, which, according to its website, “is an independent, ad-free monthly magazine that for more than 30 years has used words and photographs to invoke the splendor and heartache of being human.” You can sample over 50 of my photographs which have appeared on Sun covers and inside the magazine on my website here. Below the magazine cover is another photograph I took of two Yemeni children.
In 1964, when I first arrived in Beirut (where I would be based for two years as a photojournalist), I met Dana Schmidt, the New York Times Middle East bureau chief, who asked me to accompany him on a journey to Cairo, Yemen, and Aden. From Sana’a, Yemen, we traveled north toward a tribal civil war then raging between the Royalists (backed by the Saudis) and the Republicans (backed by the Egyptians). The country was extremely undeveloped in those days. We met this man on the road north. He wore his curved dagger as a traditional emblem of manly power. Stuck in his headband was a sprig of khat, a mild narcotic plant chewed by most Yemeni men in the afternoons to induce a state of semi-stupor. The photo is reproduced in my book, Causes and Spirits. The full un-cropped print, made in my darkroom, includes the long-abandoned ruins of a castle on the hill behind the man.
In the 48 years since taking these pictures along with hundreds of others across the region, I have often reflected how long it is taking the Americans (and the British before them) to begin to comprehend the intricacies and staying power of tribal relationships throughout the Middle East and Asia — and to understand the near-futility of trying to transform these insular societies, in our lifetimes, into Western-style democracies.
Tribalism is an innate human survival mechanism. The impulse to cluster together in small bands must have embedded itself in the human brain over thousands of years of evolution. Straying beyond boundaries meant getting eaten by animals or killed by competing tribes. So, those with strong in-group affinities were selected to survive. That is my view and that of the neo-Darwinian “evolutionary psychology” movement.
Equally crucial, among these societies, I experienced traditional patterns of human relationship and economic cooperation. Mate selection, child rearing, home management, land management, animal husbandry, trading networks and handed-down occupations are elaborately codified in language, ritual, and religion to form a tightly woven fabric deeply resistant to change from within or without. Since the dawn of recorded civilization, the peoples across this vast stretch of territory, stretching from the Nile Valley across the Fertile Crescent and over to the Indus Valley, have developed complex strategies of thriving internally while resisting external threats. Layers of cohesiveness bind in-groups together in a quilt-like diversity of languages, faiths, pride and identity. Like many another outsider, I was greeted with extraordinary warmth, underwritten by strong customs of sharing and hospitality. The poorest among my hosts were often the most generous. However, ostracism — or worse — faced one of their own whose attitude or behavior might undermine in-group cohesion.
We westerners have all experienced schoolyard cliques, ethnic slights, religious and social superiorities/inferiorities, countless other in-group/out-group expressions overt and subtle, right down to the class warfare sometimes implicit in the Presidential debates. Nationalism is a way of belonging, as is the nuclear family. But now there are strong forces, worldwide, working working to dissolve all forms of group affinity. These include major trends such as the spreading demands for personal equality and religious liberty, the toppling of dictators, and the globalization of commerce and travel. Digital transmission may enable tribal chatter, but it also seeds the rapid dissolution of all sorts of boundaries worldwide. Deeply rooted instincts are now confronted by commercial facts on the ground, and seamless communications in the air. The pictures of conflict I took in the Middle East, armed with Leicas and press credentials, are now being supplanted by gritty videos shot by ordinary citizens wielding their i-Phones.
Like it or not, appropriate or inappropriate, this is how the world is going. I welcome your comments.
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Much More on the Kurds Part 6
northern Iraq 1965
photographs and text © William Carter
They defended their birthright as a people.
Copyright statement: William Carter papers, © Stanford University Libraries. Click here for a detailed usage guide.
Much More on the Kurds Part 5
northern Iraq 1965
photographs and text © William Carter
Copyright statement: William Carter papers, © Stanford University Libraries. Click here for a detailed usage guide.
Iraqi Kurdistan: More Surprises (Part 3)
Many of us learned in school that Mesopotamia’s Tigris-Euphrates Valley cradled the world’s earliest civilization. Unending waves of conquest would sweep over this well-watered land, obliterating much — but not all — of its history. Recent violence in northern Iraq spotlights once-isolated ethnic groups, such as the Yazidis and the Chaldean Christians; Aramaic-speaking villagers as well as remote members of the Muslim Kadri sect. Some of these far-flung peoples and languages date back thousands of years.
And, archeologists have long suspected there were important artifacts from ancient Mesopotamia still awaiting discovery in caves in Kurdistan. I learned this after a journalistic trek on foot and by donkey through the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan “recently” — only fifty years ago.
Welcomed by the, as yet, little-known Kurdish peshmerga guerrilla fighters, I was doing a photo story on their long-running struggle for autonomy within Iraq and Turkey. At one point my hosts showed me broken, thick stone rock carvings a local sheik had had dragged out of a cave. Evidently he wanted to sell them to me, but I was not in that business. It would have taken an expedition to move them. I took pictures of them, with their hieroglyphic writing. The next year, in London, I showed the photographs to the British Museum. The experts became quite interested, and wanted lots of details, including the exact location, which I was unable to provide other than “oh, we just happen to stop there for tea last June on the march from point A to point B, somewhere north of Sulaimaniya.” Nonetheless the British Museum reproduced my pictures in a scholarly publication.
Given the destruction of the once wonderful Baghdad Museum occasioned by the Bush-era invasion, I sometimes wonder if that stele, and others (?) like it, are not safer staying in their caves. During Saddam Hussein’s ruthless bombings and gassings of isolated ethnic villages — as under the current Isis marauders — some of these thousand-year survivors have themselves reverted to living in caves. Again, I photographed one group all too briefly before hurrying on to rejoin the peshmergas’ march. I always wanted to go back and explore these other ethnicities of Kurdistan, but that was not to be. This year, 2014, the Kurds invited me to fly into Erbil, now a modern city built on oil revenues. We would have loved to, but pushing 80, I hesitated — luckily, just before a new wave of gunmen surrounded the city.
Iraqi Kurdistan 1965 photographs © William Carter
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Crossing Party Lines: a Follow-Up
Thanks to all those who responded positively to my last blog, “Crossing Party Lines — Creatively.” Several of you complimented us on our wedding pictures! Which made me realize, to my chagrin, that I had neglected to thank and credit our good photographer-friend, who graciously gave us those lovely prints 28+ years ago: Esme Gibson! The event was in San Marino, California, and was one photo opportunity I couldn’t handle myself.
I regret I have no such light to shed on the current Syrian tragedy. But you can see my earlier blogs on the reported damages to that nation’s ancient monuments and peoples: “Contested Stones Redux” and “Plight of Syria’s Kurds Breaks into the News.”
Plus, here are four more photographs, semi-related to current events in the Middle East.
The first, done on assignment from the US Information Agency, shows the Baghdad Museum, its ancient Mesopotamian treasures still intact, in 1965 — long before the destruction occasioned by the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
The second photograph is of unemployed men in Aleppo, Syria in 1993.
The third is from Gaza in 1993.
The fourth is in an orphanage in Jerusalem, 1993.
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Crossing Party Lines – Creatively
When angry goons with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders banged on the door, the man who later married us opened with a big grin and invited them in for tea.
Such was the spirit — and cross-cultural savvy — of John Markarian, the founding President of the Armenian-American College of Beirut, a post in which he served for three decades. The date was October 26, 1975 — in the depths of the terrible civil wars that destroyed Lebanon’s old image as the Switzerland of the Middle East.
John’s invitation to the goons was the first of several similar incidents in which he effectively saved the college. A devout Presbyterian minister with a Ph.D. from Princeton, he knew Muslim society almost as well as he knew the Bible. His actions at the college door — and later the title of his autobiography — came to him from the Book of Proverbs, and Paul’s Letters to the Romans: “When your enemy is thirsty, give him a drink.”
Leaving their weapons near the door, the would-be assailants happily sat down and sipped Arab-style cups of tea with John and his wife Inge — then departed, leaving the college alone.
Not that a similar strategy would necessarily work in Cairo today. Still, it’s worth remembering that fixed positions often lead to fixed bayonets.
I am glad the U.S. State Department is no longer led by Condoleezza Rice. In Cairo, near the beginning of her term, she announced very publicly to Hosni Mubarak and the listening Arab world that the U.S. was about to confer democracy on the Middle East.
I did work out of Beirut as a photojournalist in the 1960s. For many more years I have worked as a fine-art photographer, and for even more years I’ve been a semi-professional jazz clarinetist.
But some of my richest experiences were as a devotee of spiritual master Baba Muktananda in India. The rules in his traditional Hindu ashram were strict. More broadly, that experience freed me to more fully appreciate, later, the achievements of many other deep masters, such the Dalai Lama.
Now pushing 80, I have been assembling my jazz pictures and memories spanning six decades. Crossing – or not crossing – party lines can have consequences in this field as well. Originally a fierce traditional-jazz purist, I gradually modified that position. For one thing, I noticed that the jazz masters were less often purists than many of their fans. They played as they played — and were cordial with their colleagues across the aisles of nightclubs and recording studios.
Twenty-five years ago, in Mendota, Minnesota, I had dinner with famous bassist Milt Hinton before working a gig with him. Showing me layouts of his new photo book, Milt told me how he had transitioned through every style of jazz, from the 1920s, through years on the road with swing bands, to studio gigs in the “golden age” of modernism and after.
Later, I met other major musicians of today, like Dick Hyman, Shelly Berg, and Arturo Sandoval — all of whom continue to cross over, easily, among jazz styles.
As for me, I still just play funky New Orleans clarinet from the earliest period of jazz. The other night we played a Lindy Hop swing dance with Clint Baker’s band: not even a bandstand, and the light I could see in the dancers’ eyes and feet had no name or form.
And Egypt?
The politics appear far from hopeful for the foreseeable future.
That wonderful land, with its vast plurality of peoples, has a long habit of being governed by pharaohs.
We can only hope Egypt, with its sophisticated depth, soon finds its way back to a sense of unity in diversity — a vision of its own stillness at the core.
Above: Pastor John Markarian officiating at Ulla’s and Bill’s wedding, March 23, 1985.
Below: Dick Hyman at Filoli, near San Francisco: the fleet, versatile jazz pianist is known for his expertise across the “party lines” of many styles and periods, from ragtime to swing to contemporary.
Photograph of Dick Hyman © William Carter 2010
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Needed: World-Class Vision
The Current Candidates Can’t Cut It
In view of the gravity of the job he wants us to give him, Romney is a cardboard cutout, a talking puppet. He panders to a sentimental view of a 1950s USA, replete with a triumphalist foreign policy, go-it-alone economics, and class warfare. He shows zero sensitivity to the broad heart and soul of America at home. He displays zero understanding of the global realities of today’s business and politics. No major entrepreneur of the 21st century could survive if he followed Romney’s reductionist view of capitalism, or his isolationist outlook on a complex world.
Both candidates, in fact, project a sentimental ’50s vision of an America in isolation. Obama’s knee-jerk reversion to the populist rhetoric of class warfare is worse than Romney’s. Rather than floating nice emotional balloons about a mythologized middle class, as they did in their conventions, both candidates should be showing us world maps with trading routes and population numbers. One of the best articles I’ve read recently is the front page of one of the sections of today’s Wall Street Journal by Robert Kaplan. Simple geography goes a long way toward casting things like the Iran question way beyond the narrow focus of Israel and Hormuz. Both candidates could start by pointing out the geostrategic fact that, for better or worse, the US recently took out both of Iran’s worst long-term enemies — Iraq and Afghanistan — both of which are (of course) already reverting to their eternal tribalism.
As we are to ours.
By default, Romney appears not to disagree with Secretary Clinton’s foreign policy activities, for example in respect to the South China Sea. If he does disagree, let’s hear his alternative plan, relationship by relationship across that vast archipelago of islands, moderate religious affiliations, tight trade corridors and natural resources, starting with the differing views and interests of places like Pakistan and China and Australia.
Sorry, but I don’t give a damn about what either candidate’s mother fed them for breakfast. We need big-souled, broad-gauged, wide-view leadership. If the world’s most powerful man is going to have an opinion on appropriate capitols for Israel and Palestine (as he should), he needs to demonstrate a balanced understanding of the millennial conflicts over these eternally contested areas.
I agree with Romney when he attacks over-regulation of US business. But we need far more fact and detail on this: exactly which regulations he would change or keep, and why. Instead of treating us to cartoonish mom-and-pop mythologies, please posit a long-term reliable playing field on which managers and investors can plan their domestic and international strategies and risks. Take Wall Street: I happen to think the big banks brought regulation on themselves by the excesses that caused the 2008 collapse — requiring rescue with your and my taxpayer money. Obama lacks the sense, feel, experience of running a business, and business is the foundation of the economy; but Romney lacks the sense and feel of the globalized community his decisions would affect. Nobody wants to mention Fiat’s key role in rescuing Chrysler: okay, Obama’s boys worked hard on the auto debacle, but for all that only a foreign company was willing to step up and do it. Are we Americans, in the 21st century, too poorly educated to grasp such plain facts? Or to be told it is beyond any nation’s power to just call up jobs?
Any candidate who slashed the slogans and started with a simplified world map, overlaid with trade and population data, and interwoven with a modicum of historical perspective, and could abbreviate all this to under an hour — he or she would attract my vote. I’m less interested in specific policy predictions than in the demonstration of world class thinking. Such a speech could be given in, say, Long Beach, California, against the backdrop of all the container ships arriving from every point on earth. It should include a graph of trade dollars and deficits flowing in all directions, and what all this means for the future of humanity and the planet.
No candidate is worth his salt if he is afraid to stand up and say, “This is no longer the world of your fathers. There is no sentimental return to the 1950s. We are living in a world as highly integrated as its trade, as its broader economies, as its micro and macro political relationships, as its climate zones and as its languages and peoples. How many hot wars have you won since 1945? Get used to it, my friends, and live appropriately.”
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Plight of Syria’s Kurds Breaks into the News
In the Western press, the story of Syria’s beleaguered Kurdish population has been overshadowed by coverage of their immediate cousins, the U.S.-friendly Kurds of northern Iraq and those of Turkey. Michael Kennedy’s story on page A6 in the New York Times of April 18 changes that. In a deeply sourced and widely researched report, Kennedy quotes longtime Washington Post correspondent and author Jonathan C. Randal and other experts on the Syrian Kurds’ long and heartrending struggle for independence against the long-running hereditary regimes of strongman Syrian Presidents Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez al-Assad.
An old personal friend of my wife and myself, Randal always had a reputation among his colleagues of daring to go where no one else would asking the provocative questions no one else dared ask. Following on the pioneering 1960s book on the Kurds by another friend, New York Times’ Dana Adams Schmidt, Randal’s updated and highly detailed book on the Kurds’ struggle landed him with a subpoena from a Turkish court which he, characteristically, flew from France to Istanbul to answer in order to assert freedom of the press in some of the more dangerous corridors within a strife-torn nation wishing to qualify for membership in the European Union.
Kennedy’s fine piece in this week’s New York Times alerts modern readers to the seemingly eternal reality of tribalism as a stumbling block to national identity everywhere in the Middle East and south Asia — the fundamental resistance to political “modernization” as earnestly attempted under the evolving value systems and political motivations, in the course of their histories, by Britain, Russia, and now the U.S. Good luck. Or maybe Godspeed would be the more appropriate term, given the religious undercurrents always involved.
Another fine photographer who covered the Kurds extensively is Susan Meiselas. Visit her website www.akakurdistan.com, “a safe and anonymous space on the web to share some of the complexities of Kurdish history.”
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