Around the suburbs of Rangoon small scraggly bushes now occupy plots of land that once were used for growing vegetables or beans. They look miserable. Unattended among weeds and debris, they show no signs of growth and bear few leaves. Some are used for hanging laundry. Others catch plastic bags in the breeze.

They are also a flagship state project. The order to grow these physic nut plants, which belong to the same family as castor oil, is said to have come directly from Burma's military supremo, Senior General Than Shwe. His supposed idea is to alleviate the country's fuel shortages through biodiesel, although some speculate that the order may have had as much to do with astrology as the economy.

People all around the country have been given seeds and pressed into planting them [or, the Myanmar Times suggests, "at the government's request"] along roads, football fields, schoolyards and government compounds. Some bear the signboards of government departments, police stations and military units. Television broadcasts reassure viewers that the bushes will soon bear a great bounty, and demonstrate how simple it is to extract their oil and use it for fuel.

Reality suggests otherwise. The saplings are almost universally neglected. Without regular care, plants grown years ago still bear no fruit; no fruit, no biodiesel.

In some places villagers have also been obliged to work on commercial physic nut ventures. In late 2006, for instance, U Tin Kyi was called to work on the acreage adjacent to his farm that had been planted by a company under ownership of an army general's son. He pointed out that all the plants had died and that he should be able to go back and work his own crops. The local officials did not take kindly to his stating the obvious and had him jailed for four months.

Ill-conceived and mismanaged schemes can be found the world over. But while in an open society they can be challenged and halted, under autocratic rulers of the sort that exist in Burma they are both far more prevalent and dangerous.

Social scientist James C. Scott identifies why. He suggests that some of the biggest man-made disasters of the last century have four key elements: one, the administrative reordering of society and nature; two, overconfidence in modernity as a measure of progress; three, coercive government, and four, weakened civil society. In these circumstances, when mistakes are made lessons are covered up, not learned; people are pushed too far, and tragedy follows.

This is what happened in China when in the 1950s the rural populace was forced into collectives. Agricultural output plummeted. Regional officials fell to giving increasingly ludicrous figures on grain produced and stored, while locals were in some instances compelled to uproot healthy paddy and plant seedlings alongside roads that Mao and his entourage would travel so that the "great helmsman" might see emerald-green vistas. Millions died in the famine that followed.

Similar patterns have been seen in Burma during recent years, although they have not so far pushed the country over the precipice. Farmers in some areas have been forced to uproot beans and peanuts in order to grow second or third crops of rice on land with inadequate water. Others have had to purchase seeds for summer crops, which once planted have grown at different speeds and to different heights. Many have struggled without fertilizer or outside assistance.

The physic nut plants are unlikely of their own accord to precipitate the sort of hunger in Than Shwe's Burma that occurred in Mao's China, but while officials at every level continue to conceal the truth in order to please their superiors, as they must, these bushes continue to place a needless burden on people who are already struggling for one square meal a day. They may not spell ruin but they are a waste of precious time, land and water.

The pointlessness of dotting the landscape with plants in which no one has any special interest may be missed by the people at the top who give the orders, but it is understood by everyone else. To the extent that Burma prevails it is not because of bureaucratic meddling but despite it. While the physic nuts are on display along the roads and thoroughfares where more senior officers are expected to travel, on the backstreets, in small gardens and on the banks of waterways, vegetables continue to be sown.

Source: Burma's pointless plants a needless burden

Further reading: Myanmar's nutty scheme to solve energy crisis, by Ed Cropley (Reuters)

Of kyay-zu and kyet-su: the military in 2006, by Mary Callahan (ANU Press)

Gimme Three: 3 reasons why I blog

1. I got hooked: This site started off as an electronic noticeboard pointing to interesting articles and related events for students in a Master of International Relations program I taught in from 2004. In migrating the blog from blogger to wordpress I deleted most of the program-specific posts from that time but kept the intent to blog on political issues. Why? I think I was hooked. It was great to be able to marshall several new emerging technologies and to keep all one's articles of interest, writing and favourite links in one handy space on the web, accessible anywhere. Feeds, for example, were emerging as an excellent way to keep track of new articles on various media, and social bookmarking and sharing sites have also proliferated. Its an excellent way to keep abreast of the new technologies and get your information, news and analysis fix. There are some sites I would not join (Murdoch-owned MySpace, and I recently withdrew from Facebook in large part for these reasons), but the breadth of web tools and technologies is simply amazing, as well as the chance to effectively Be the Media.

2. Being able to contribute a node in a network of media multiplicity that influences public opinion. A. J. Liebling once said that 'Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.' The freedom of the press is also circumscribed by those who have access to a computer (let's remember that up to half the world has not yet used a telephone, let alone a computer modem), but its potential and promise for greater democratisation and pluralism is enormous. More voices can be heard and read. A greater breadth and depth of perspectives can be represented. Here we are into the Web 2.0 age, with proliferating wireless networks and communal access points that allow even remote villages to bridge the digital divide. The web is today what the printing presses were for modernity. We are inhabiting a global public digital sphere previously colonised only by a few media giants. Blogs do have a significant and growing influence in this medium, perhaps even analogous in some cases to the great political pamphlets of the age of modern revolutions.

3. Ideas and people. The opportunity for the free exchange of ideas, dialogue, debate, sympathy, solidarity, humour has been immensely enriching. The people I've encountered, laughed with, argued with and learnt from has been a gift, truly. We really are a community here in the blogosphere, facilitated by burgeoning technological forms. Aside from friends who I knew when I started the blog, I have since met one friend who sent me one of his articles to publish, and intend to meet many more. I have been invited to share in other online enterprises, such as group blogs, and am on the threshold of launching a new site with a dear friend whom I also 'met' via this blog, with details to be announced next month. I really do value and appreciate the solidarity, good humour, and intelligence of our community, and our collective role and potential in enacting social change.

Thanks Dave, for this opportunity to reflect. As an Australian blogger focusing upon mostly international issues, I think sitting at the Edge of Empire does afford one a good look-out point, or at least I hope so. As an undergraduate, I was a political theory and Australian and international political junkie, but tended to shut out Middle East politics, despite my own Lebanese heritage. Now its my primary (blog) focus, and the 2006 July War had a lot to do with it, though my sense of justice and views on Israel were already in place well before that with my avid interest in the axial Israel-Palestine conflict. My views on a lot of things have changed and evolved enormously even just in the last few years, let alone the past ten or fifteen. Subversive ideas (to the propagated mainstream consensus) out there on the web have had a large influence on this autodidactic process, with the web effectively functioning as a 'hidden transcript', to use James C. Scott's phrase in describing infrapolitical activities. (See his Domination and the Arts of Resistance, an excellent read).

Aaaah, one can Meme

So what's my meme? It has occurred to me a few times, since I've Skyped with a few blog friends, that it would be intriguing to hear some of your voices -- literally. In tandem with this, I'd like to live up to the reminders in the quotes I feature in my left hand side column about the soul's need for poetry and not simply 'news'. So here's what I propose. If you are in a possession of an .mp3 player or a mobile phone or digital camera that has voice recording, I'd love to hear your voice via a recital of your favourite verse. Actually, any poem you desire: it can be funny, soulful, political, rousing, contemplative, one of your own, one from the greats, any poetry you so desire.

I nominate Dave, The Poetry Man and Monte for this mission, should they choose to accept it, but it doesn't preclude other blog friends from joining in: please do!! I and our fellow bloggers would be tickled to hear your voices. It adds an extra dimension to "knowing you" in print. I'll join in this aural jamboree.

Here's how it can happen:

• Recite your verse into your mobile/ cell phone, .mp3 player or any electronic gadget you may have that has a voice recorder
• Transfer your voice recording to your computer as you would your photos
• If you have an audio-posting capability, post your poem as recited by you (in wordpress, upload the file and then link to it with the following command, removing the spaces: [ a u d i o = y o u r u p l o a d e d f i l e a d d r e s s h e r e ] ) OR feel free to send it to me and I will post it if you choose. You can also upload it to a free file sharing site such as Odeo (they also let you record if you have headphones with a mike), which you can in turn link to or embed in most blogging platforms, including blogger and wordpress.

In time, we might get a number of us contributing to this poetry jam: who knows? ;)

1. Intentions and acts are in constant dialogue.
2. Intentions and acts are not tied in the same way as material culture and behavior. We must look at how resistors interpret their behavior.

Much of the literature (especially Marxist literature) assumes that peasants adopt values of the rulling class but ignores the part they actually object (41). [The experience and consciousness of human agents] Scott places human actions at the center of his analysis arguing that we can only understand things like class-struggle via the way people experience them. Peasants do not experience monopoly capitalism, but "... ... ..." (43-4). The social scientist's aim is to augment the agents' description, not replace it.

From: Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott is a great book. Scott is deeply interested in the interaction between people and places and what it is that makes people and places work well, play well, and live well together. He argues, convincingly, that an imposition of a simplifying top-down order stifles otherwise well-functioning assemblages of people, places and things. These top-down simplifying orders as imposed by the State in an effort to make a deeply heterogeneous system legible. However, Scott argues, this imposition of a simplified order for legibility's sake often results in a diminution or destruction of the properties that make a heterogeneous system function.

If Seeing Like a State has a flaw its that, like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, the argument is set out in the first chapter; subsequent chapters do not really build new layers of complexity in the initial argument. The subsequent chapters are all well worth reading, being interesting accounts of the often arrogant and always foolish imposition of order on otherwise smoothly functioning systems or on the creation of seemingly perfect but overly simplified systems that could not function because of their beautiful simplicity.

Scott says that top-down-order is often (always?) imposed in order to make a complicated situation more manageable and "visible" to those who want to control it. Obviously, sometimes this imposition of order is necessary, but at other times it is heavy-handed and the imposition of order obscures previously rich situations.

Regarding the complexity of cities, Scott says:

A village, city or language is the jointly created, partly unintended product of many, many hands. To the degree that authorities insist on replacing this ineffably complex web of activity with formal rules and regulations, they are certain to disrupt the web in ways which they cannot possibly foresee. (p256)

And given the jointly created complexity of cities, creating new cities, for example Brasilia, or Canberra, by the imposition of rules and formal order is misguided at best.

It is possible, of course, to build a new city or a new village, but it will be a "thin" or "shallow" city, and its residents will have to begin (perhaps from known repertoires) to make it work in spite of the rules. (p256, again)

Scott spends a lot of time dissecting many different, and disastrous, impositions of order, or what he calls, with no small amount of disdain, "high modernism". The individual cases are interesting and absorbing and each is dealt with in great detail, encompassing the political situation, the geographical context and the resultant disaster.

In the penultimate chapter, Scott seems to take a ninety-degree turn and begins to discuss the concept of mētis which, briefly, relates to the idea that some activities are only able to be understood through participation.

One powerful indication that they all require mētis is that they are exceptionally difficult to teach apart from engaging in the activity itself. (p313)

Scott's argument is that all of the richness of living in a city, or the management of a forest, cannot be distilled into algorithmic, simplified, rules but must be experienced.

The necessarily implicit, experiential nature of mētis seems central. (p315)

This is an argument that is familiar to me, through amazing books like Gary Klein's awesome but little-known Sources of Power and Malcolm Gladwell's good (but not outstanding) Blink. Scott even gets in the apparently obligatory Red Adair story about expertise acquired in the field on p314 (Klein and Gladwell also mention Adair).

For our purposes, however it [i.e. the concept of mētis] illustrates a rudimentary kind of knowledge that can be acquired only by practice and that all but defies being communicated in written or oral form apart from actual practice. (p315)

Scott says is fond of experientially-learned rules. "Rules of thumb", in other words.

Knowing how and when to apply the rules of thumb in a concrete situation is the essence of mētis. (p316)

Anticipating accusations of favouring a return to folk ways as a rejection of top-down order, Scott explains that mētis is essential in the modern world.

Such terms as "indigenous technical knowledge" and "folk wisdom" seem to me to confine this knowledge to "traditional" and "backward" peoples, whereas I want to emphasise how these skills are implicit in the most modern of activities, whether on the factory floor or in a research laboratory. "Local knowledge" and "practical knowledge" are better, but both terms seem too circumscribed and static to capture the constantly changing, dynamic aspect of mētis. (p424, note 8 )

Now, if you've been paying attention, you might be thinking that Scott possibly has "libertarian" tendencies. Being against the imposition of "some schemes to improve the human condition" would certainly lead you to believe he was generally in favour of unfettered laissez-faire arrangements. Not so:

Proponents of this view (the logic of the market) forget or ignore, I think, the fact the in order to do its work, the market requires its own vast simplifications in treating land (nature) and labour (people) as factors of production (commodities). This, in turn, can and has been profoundly destructive of human communities and of nature. In a sense, the simplification of the scientific forest compounds the simplification of scientific measurement and the simplification made possible by the commercial market for wood. (p412, note 112)

In the early parts of Seeing Like a State Scott acknowledges that he seems to have more than one point to make and is taking more than one road to get there. Perhaps that is true. However, I found it interesting to see the threads on the same general argument that Klein, Gladwell, and even Winograd and Flores, Lucy Suchman and others have made, all on different topics and all with their grounding in different fields of study.

The argument is that human experience of, and human experiences with technologies, be they tangible like photocopiers, evanescent like cities or ephemeral like ideas about management are so rich and so nuanced by virtue of being human experiences that their complexity cannot be fully captured in rules. And, because of this impossibility of complete description in formal rules, any attempt to create formal rules about rich human experiences almost inevitably leads to impoverished and undesirable technologies.

The main shortcoming of Imperialism is that it declares the marginal rabbis irrelevant for the functioning of the system as a whole. This is partly because of the method Schwartz chooses: structural functionalism (in his own words: "a tendency (...) which assumes that there are such things as societies as usually complex, organism-like systems that can be understood by analyzing the relations of their component parts"). He falls into the trap he himself recognizes as one of the main criticisms of the model, namely that it "misleadingly ignore[s] agency, the complex ways in which people constantly negotiate with each other and with normative ideologies (...)".

The 2nd and 3rd Century rabbis didn't have much formal power (if any!). Thus, when describing the relations between the component parts of the organism, Schwartz comes to the conclusion that they were not representative for the Jewish population as a whole. Again cum Schwartz: "most Jews seem to have lived mainly as pagans and looked primarily to the Roman state and the city councils as their legal authorities and cultural ideal." He sketches an uneven scale, of which the rabbis' (and their followers') end was marginal.

It is just possible that Schwartz' model and the nature of the archaeological evidence (read this post for a very basic characterization) conspire to distort the picture. The telescopic, component-based perspective pays hardly any regard to social complexities, and the archaeological evidence (mainly coins, larger buildings, inscriptions) only represents the top layer of society (to make this argument convincing, I probably shouldn't mention all the attention Schwartz gives to the nature of the objects of daily use...). This leads to a ruling culture/class focused analysis of "Jewish" Society.

Here I would like to bring in another social theory, namely James C. Scott's theory of Hidden Transcripts (Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Hidden Transcripts). Scott says that (I paraphrase) the public transcript, i.e. the open interaction between subordinates (in our case the population of Syria Palaestina) and those who dominant (the Roman Empire and its magistrates), is unlikely to tell the whole story about power relations - can even be positively misleading! And it is exactly this public transcript which Schwartz sees when he looks at city coins, bathhouses, inscriptions! Such images represent what the powerful want to believe - or what the weak think they want to believe. Like the IUDEA CAPTA coins, which were distributed somewhat prematurely as it took seventy more years, lots of troubles and the smashing of a violent revolt to really subdue Judaea, the 2nd and 3rd century public transcript probably show a much too rosy picture. Rosy from the Roman point of view, of course.

Following Scott, if we wish to get an impression of the impact of domination (or imperialism?), we should assess the discrepancy between the public transcript and the hidden transcript - the "discourse that takes place 'offstage,' beyond direct observation by powerholders." Schwartz doesn't do this, and thus misses the opportunity to fathom the subordinate side of society. Namely, as Daniel Boyarin recognized (Dying for God), "the talmudic discourse (...) gives us direct access to the 'hidden transcript' " (he doesn't develop this beyond its consequences for the discourse of martyrdom - still, I am highly indebted to him for the observation).

The hypothesis that rabbinic literature reflects the hidden transcript of at least part of Jewish Society, and therefore can tell us something not only about power relations in the Roman Province of Judae Palestina, but also about the role that the 'vestigial identity' of Judaism still played in those, will be the guiding force of my thesis research.

You don't agree? Great! Please comment! I am going to need a lot of feedback, positive and negative, to get this argument anywhere!

When I presented the rough outlines of my plans for MA Thesis on social (and/or cultural) interaction between Rome and Jews in 2nd and 3rd Century Syria Palaestina at my department's 'Thesis Seminar', both teachers and pupils tried to lure me into extending the project: I got proposals ranging from "what about the Diaspora?" via "of course the Essenes will be of interest for your research" and "you should take the Christian Empire into the equation" up to "I believe under Antioch IV the Jews fought against a statue of a god in the temple in Jerusalem." All very interesting indeed, and the thought of investigating all those landscapes of interaction is extremely alluring to me. But I am warned by the tercet preceding Goethe's famous quote:

So ist's mit aller Bildung auch beschaffen:
Vergebens werden ungebundne Geister
Nach der Vollendung reiner Hoehe streben.

(source: Goethe, "Das Sonnett", as quoted by the Humanist Discussion Group)

Having seen quite some fellow students stumble over much to extensive thesis plans, I will try to bind my Geist. Here I will propose some boundaries.

First of all, I will confine my research to a very small geographical area: the Roman province of Syria Palaestina, and within this province I will concentrate mostly on the rural backwaters of Galilee, and the poleis in and surrounding that province, such as Joppa, Sephoris and Caesarea. In effect the base of the rabbinic movement. The geographical boundary is fluid, however, as I will present the region as the scenery for the interaction I intend to investigate. Where archaeological, epigraphical and numismatical evidence from this area doesn't suffice to provide that scenery, I might use evidence from other, comparable(?) regions in the Roman Empire. But no, I won't take the Jews of the Alexandrian or Asian diaspora communities into consideration.

Another important boundary will be that of Time. Both my time and their time is limited: I plan to complete a first draft in May or June, and I will only consider the interaction of Jews and Romans from after the Bar Kokhba Revolt - excluding the revolt itself, but including the transmission and recension of the revolt's legend in later centuries - until the Christianization of the Empire's government in the East, thus roughly from 135 to 323 A.C. As such, I will exclude both early sources like Josephus and the New Testament, and the complications of the rabbi's attitude towards the Empire becoming muddled with their attitude towards that suddenly all-important sect, Christianity. These two centuries form politically a very silent age in Palestine, after the Roman reaction to Bar Kokhba's revolt subsides we see neither uprisings nor persecutions.

But socially and culturally it is a very interesting period. If we look casually, we see Syria Palaestine fully integrating into the structure and culture of the Roman Empire like all other former client kingdoms in the East in this period. As Fergus Millar (1993) and Seth Schwartz (2001) convincingly show, for this period the archaeological record presents a very 'normal' Roman province. Poleis promoted their alliance with the empire, artifacts of daily life are decorated with standard pagan themes. Schwartz concludes that "for most Jews, Judaism may have been little more than a vestigial identity, bits and pieces of which they were happy to incorporate into a religious and cultural system that was essentially Greco-Roman and pagan." However, this same age and region features the birth of a very idiosyncratic literary tradition - the rabbinical writings, most well-known of which are the Mishnah and the Talmud. Not only are they written not in Greek, but in local languages (Hebrew and Aramaic), they also present a very different Weltanschauung. The paradox of this seemingly integrated society producing such literature intrigues me.

The rabbinical literature (together with the above-mentioned archaeological and epigraphical data) will be the primary source of my investigation. This in itself raises some major methodological issues, not in the least by the volume of the literature. The Babylonian Talmud alone would take seven years to read if one would read a page a day... But I will consider the problems of using this literature for historical research in a future post. Here I will only state that I believe that the rabbinical literature, although highly idiosyncratic and probably written by a marginal movement, can give us insight in 2nd and 3rd century provincial society if carefully studied.

I will not be the first to write about the rabbis' attitude towards Roman government or pagan society. However, most studies have been compilations of sayings and legends, without much historical analysis. Moreover, most such writings don't look beyond the rabbis to the wider society of Syria Palaestina (or superimpose the Talmudic social utopia on that society). I hope to step beyond a mere compilation, and steer free from generalizing rabbinic ideas, by applying social theory to the data. To be more specific, I hope that James C. Scott's theory of public and hidden transcripts will shed some light on the nature of the interaction between Rome and Palaestinian society.

That's all for now, next week I hope to sketch a rough outline of my thesis. Dear reader, I might as well warn you: this blog will move beyond mere escapism, to serious academics... ;-)