PhilPaine.com

Ténéré daféo nikchan .… yes, I’m back there again. The smells, the sounds, the wind. This col­lec­tion of arti­cles, writ­ten over a decade by a lead­ing author­i­ty on the pol­i­tics of Saha­ran nomads, was an absolute delight for me to read. It deals with the very peo­ple (not just the same eth­nic group, but the par­tic­u­lar seg­ment of them, the kel-Aïr of Niger) who first awak­ened me to the nature of pro­to-demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions. I read these arti­cles with a tremen­dous wave of nos­tal­gia. When as a naive toubab, I came to that part of Africa, many years ago, I had been led by the small amount of lit­er­a­ture avail­able on the sub­ject to believe that the Tuareg rep­re­sent­ed a strict­ly strat­i­fied soci­ety, rigid and tra­di­tion­al — the last place to look for any kind of pro­to-demo­c­ra­t­ic ele­ments. But what I saw con­fused me, and ulti­mate­ly enlight­ened me: a maze of con­cil­iar insti­tu­tions, both for­mal and infor­mal, embody­ing all the ele­ments from which demo­c­ra­t­ic the­o­ry evolved in less exot­ic places. Good and bad things, but the same stew-pot of good and bad from which our best insti­tu­tions ulti­mate­ly evolved. I also saw that much that had been writ­ten or assumed was blind to this, shaped by pre­sump­tions that desert nomads where either chaot­ic beings with­out “com­plex” polit­i­cal insti­tu­tions, or a rigid, change­less hier­ar­chy in which dis­cus­sion, rep­re­sen­ta­tion, and equal­i­ty played no part. My eyes told me that nei­ther pre­sump­tion was valid. It was this expe­ri­ence that got me inter­est­ed in the issue of the uni­ver­sal roots of demo­c­ra­t­ic prac­tice, and trig­gered decades of read­ing. Sad­ly, when Steve Muhlberg­er and I began our first work on the sub­ject, there was no pub­lished work on the Tuareg usable for our pur­pose. This book, had it exist­ed then, would have been a cen­ter­piece of our dis­cus­sion. Read more »

(Peter Bakker, et al.) Basque Pid­gins in Ice­land and Cana­da:
. . . . [——] (Gidor Bil­bao) Glos­saria Vas­co-Islandi­ca-ren aurkezpen gisakoa [pref­ace]
. . . . 16445. (Jose Igna­cio Hualde) Fore­word to Glos­saria duo Vas­co-Islandi­ca [pref­ace]
. . . . [——] (Nico­laas G. H. Deen) Glos­saria duo Vas­co-Islandi­ca [text in Basque] [arti­cle]
. . . . 16446. (Jose Igna­cio Hualde) Ice­landic Basque Pid­gin [arti­cle]
. . . . 16447. (Peter Bakker) “Las lengua de las tribus costeras es medio vas­ca” ― Un pid­gin
. . . . . . . . . vas­co y amerindio uti­liza­do por europeos y nativos amer­i­canos en Norteaméri­ca,
. . . . . . . . . h. 1540‑h. 1640. [text in Span­ish] [arti­cle] Read more »

I would hap­pily take George Wood­cock as a mod­el for trav­el writ­ing. He him­self out­lines the sources of his style: eigh­teenth cen­tury Eng­lish mod­els of clar­ity and pre­ci­sion, the writ­ings of ear­ly nat­u­ral­ists and sci­en­tists, and the direct influ­ence of his close friend, George Orwell. Wood­cock is best known as a his­to­rian of anar­chist the­ory, and in Cana­da as a cham­pion of Cana­dian lit­er­a­ture (espe­cially that of the west­ern provinces), but for decades he put bread on the table by trav­el­ing to remote cor­ners of the Earth and writ­ing about it in his crisp, evoca­tive prose. A fine descrip­tion of Sal­ish spir­it dance, for which he only had to trav­el a few miles from his doorstep, and a keen­ly obser­vant tour of the Cana­dian arc­tic show that he didn’t have to leave the coun­try to cre­ate the sense of won­der. But the strongest stuff is when he writ­ing about India, espe­cially the Tibetan Exile com­mu­ni­ties that he him­self helped fund and orga­nize, and in the jun­gle tem­ples of Cam­bo­dia. Read more »