The Boston Bombings: the failure of a Marriage and a Migratory Project

In the aftermath of the Boston bombing, there is a tremendous amount of speculation regarding the motives of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who appears to Americans as a walking contradiction in terms; being on the one hand a well integrated American immigrant boxer, living in wealthy Boston suburbs with an all-American wife and daughter and appearing on the other as a fundamentalist Muslim terrorist engaged in a punitive jihad against the United States. The difficulty Americans seem to have with merging the two images is very telling as to how far apart these two "characters" are in the social drama projected by the media to white middle class America. Equally telling is the puzzlement about his racial origins. Despite being a prototypical Caucasian, he was described as "dark skinned" in the initial media reports; betraying a pressing desire to conflate the categories of non-white foreigner, Muslim and terrorist. And the attempt to find an outside agent who taught Tamerlan radical Islam shows how difficult it is to accept that violent terror can develop from within American society, rather than stemming from some form of external contamination.

Tamerlan's parents. His father is to the left, while his mother, bearing a passing
resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor, is in the centre holding the baby Tamerlan.

I think an alternative interpretation of Tamerlan's motives is possible, which would focus on his family's status as migrants eager to live the American dream and integrate fully within US society. As their upwardly mobile social aspirations were blocked, it seems that the modern ambitious fashionably dressed young lawyer-couple who were Tamerlan's parents (pictured above) grew increasingly disillusioned about their own prospects within the society. In fact his father had to adopt a manual job as a mechanic and his mother was reduced to administering cosmetic facials at home to make ends meet. It seems that they responded in different ways to their predicament, with the mother turning to fundamentalist Islam in an understandable attempt to draw upon her roots to fashion an alternative Muslim subjectivity which could preserve her dignity in the face of the modern "Western" civilization, which increasingly rejected her. By contrast the father took an alternative route: continuing to maintain an agnostic secular modern identity, while simultaneously growing increasingly distant from his wife and his elder son. 

The internal tensions between the couple exploded when the Tamerlan's  parents' marriage broke up and his father returned to Dagestan. Against this background, his mother's arrest for shop-lifting a year after her husband left is revealing, particularly because one of the charges was for wanton damage to women's clothing. Bearing in mind that she was trained in cosmetics and how concerned she was to dress fashionably in a Western style when she entered the United States, the shop-lifting episode reads like an unconscious revenge against the system of aesthetic values which initially attracted her and represents the nadir of her migratory journey. Not only was this ideal of beauty, which she had once successfully sought to internalise and now regarded as un-Islamic, emblematic of a society which ultimately rejected her and her family. It also stood between her and her husband as indicated by her response to her husband's criticism of her decision to wear the hijab: "This is what Muslim men are supposed to want." Thus the division between Tamerlan's parents reflects different and radically opposed solutions to the failure of their migratory project:

The couple now: Tamerlan's father somewhat resembles Brad Pitt,
while his mother seems to have walked out of a medieval Persian manuscript.

   

Maltese and Arab Soundscapes

I must admit I really enjoyed this politically incorrect comedy clip by Harry Enfield; if for no other reason that  he takes the mickey out of both British and Arab ways of expressing emotion:

Actually celebratory gunfire is not a uniquely Arab ritual. It seems North Americans are also particularly fond of this practice, judging by the Wikipedia page dedicated to it, which is dominated by accounts from the Middle East and the USA. Trawling through the internet revealed this gem of a question, which also indicates an affinity between the way some North Americans and Arabs think: "Muslims shoot guns i the air to celebrate .why cant we?


So what is it all about? Perhaps we in Malta may be in a good position to understand it if we compare Arab forms of celebratory gunfire to Maltese festa fireworks:  

This goes to show how festa celebrations are at least partly about triumphing over the enemies of your village or faction and that a feasting/warfare model is a better analytical framework for thinking about festas than religion/ritual as such. By linking Maltese village feasts to warfare, we are in a better position to build on Jeremy Boissevain's path-breaking work in this field back in the Sixties:

At the same time, the close and ambiguous relationship between feasting and warfare is the subject of this classic ethnographic film:

I tried to address this subject in a lecture I gave to some Australian students a while back. I'm reproducing the abstract here:

"This lecture will seek to explain the uncomfortable status of religious feasts (or festas) as a tourist attraction by advancing a theoretical explanation of these events which places the social dynamics of rivalry between equals at their heart. Inspiration will be sought from Rene Girard and Simon Harrison, to compare festas to feuds and to argue that they are a kind of symbolic warfare which requires transformation of self in order to achieve victory, which is identified with a temporary reconfiguration of patterns of dominance within the community. It is against the backdrop of this symbolic warfare that the statue of the saint acquires totemic presence, both as representing the unity of the group and as a sacrificial figure which can unite the warring doubles."

Finally here is a Spanish Flamenco dancer. I seem to hear the same explosive tense rhythms in her dance as I do in the fireworks and the gunfire:

Two Italian Women Who Lost Faith

This shot is taken from Pietro Germi's classic: Seduced and Abandoned 

In the first case, here is the sixties' musical goddess Mina, warning her faithless lover that the woman he is chasing after does not really love him:

And here is a Neapolitan maid from the eighties film "Cosi Parlo' Bellavista", whose had it up to here with her washing machine:

Are their postures that different? Mina is of course much more poised and self-assured. But both of them are confronting directly the person/object that is letting them down. Mina's graceful controlled gestures suggest a much more volcanic emotion bubbling up beneath, which the maid makes explicit by directly "man"- handling the offending machine. All of this adds content to Anthropologist Jill Dubisch's claim that there is a poetics of womanhood in the Mediterranean, that complements her colleague Michael Herzfeld's Poetics of Manhood. Dubisch writes:

"My landlady’s litany of complaint illustrates one way that a woman might perform “being good at being a woman,” in this case by showing the suffering she undergoes in fulfilling all her duties. Women are responsible for the physical and spiritual well-being of their families, and the women who crawl on their knees up to the church with infants on their backs dramatically illustrate the suffering they are willing to undergo to fulfill these obligations, in this case offering prayers and vows for the well-being of a child, vows that they have now come to fulfill. Such obligations don’t necessarily entail suffering, of course, but they may be expressed in other public ways. On more than one occasion, for example, I have seen Greek women pursue young offspring with food. In one case, I saw a mother at the beach follow her child into the water in order to feed him his lunch. Here is another example of maternal-ness performed in a public context."

How to Release Your Inner Native

         

After an exhausting day at work, nothing could be more refreshing than a dose of energetic folk-dancing, courtesy of Youtube. The two clips shown here come from very distant traditions. Bhangra is traditional Punjabi dancing, while Stavros Flatley & son are fusing Irish and Greek dance forms. But what they have in common is the humour, energy and sheer comic intensity of the performance.

What also connects these links is that the dancers are in each case subverting a very proper and restrained British set of bodily dispositions. Living, as I do, in a in a postcolony, I really appreciate how the Bhangra dancers start off by reproducing a typically British upper-class colonial conversation on the verandah about some exotic ritual one of them claimed to have observed; only to gleefully let rip by erupting into a very energetic folk-dance after a minute or two. In this way they allow their "inner native" to break through the facade of colonial civility and celebrate their freedom from the dominance of British manners and the imperial power plays they allow. 

I notice very similar patterns of behaviour in Malta, where a rough car mechanic dressed in a grimy sweater and jeans would obsequiously address an upper-class male client in English, saying: "do you understand, dear?" while delivering a complicated technical monologue in Maltese, which he knows is quite unintelligible to his client. Having symbolically feminized the client and eliminated the power/status gap between his working class dress and language and the other's neatly tailored suit, he then feels free to over-charge him on the basis that the client clearly belongs to a superior class and thus, while he could afford to pay for a good service, he could not possibly have the time to waste discussing the technical innards of a car. 

The 'Garaxx': Still the true inner sanctum of the Maltese male

Instead of being a simple expression of cultural goodwill, I see this as the skillful appropriation and reversing of imperialist nostalgia by the subaltern, who seeks to subdue and dominate his former master. By comparison, Stavros is an economic migrant in the colonial metropolis. By emphasizing the comic aspect of the dance, he is practically compelling the British audience to laugh at his ability to enact and transcend their stereotypes about hirsute, passionate and tactile Greek men. Yet showing how well he can understand and live up to their stereotypes also indicates that he cannot be confined by them. He thus makes his audience laugh in surprised acknowledgement of their own casual stereotyping and also gains the upper hand in the situation:

Scapegoaters Scapegoated: the hidden link between Thatcher, Gaddafi and Mintoff

The death of Margaret Thatcher has provoked intense and polarized reactions. Some on the left have been openly celebrating her death, while others have argued that the nil nisi bonum rule should apply even in this case. I find it really interesting that some of the most dedicated supporters of her policies have openly allowed/encouraged her opponents to celebrate her death. An example would be the supporters who urged the BBC to play the so-called Thatcher "death song", echoed locally by Daphne Caruana Galizia. While I am not questioning the commitment of these supporters to freedom or democracy, I suspect that other factors may also have played a role in shaping their apparently quixotic stances. This has to do with what could be called, following the French anthropologist Rene Girard, the politics of scapegoating and Margaret Thatcher's own role in making such politics popular. I would argue that Thatcherism mainly evolved through a series of scapegoating rituals, starting off from the war against Argentina, the attack on the Belgrano, continuing with the needless closure of the mines and the concomitant demonisation of Arthur Scargill (and with him the entire Northern working Classes), the labelling of her own moderate mps as "Wets" and culminating in the attack on the Universities and what used to be called, before her time, the intelligentsia. 

According to Girard an interesting aspect of the political sorcery involved in such scapegoating is that the victim rapidly acquires mythic properties, eventually turning into a Monster and with time may even eventually be remembered as a God (due to the social unity and reconciliation which occurred through his sacrifice, whether voluntary or not). Thus we should not be surprised that Thatcher's own devices are now being employed against her. This is part of the process by which she is becoming a god. 

Apotheosis of Claudius:
A Previous Ruler of the British who was raised to Divine status

Meanwhile her supporters, who are precisely those persons who were most willing to support her political scapegoating of others, are naturally unable to find good reasons to oppose the process, even when turned against their political idol. Moreover they sense obscurely that the scapegoating of Thatcher's memory by her opponents will  only increase her mythic stature and with it the pervasiveness of scapegoating and the conservative politics it underwrites.

Something similar happened with the deaths of Gaddafi and Mintoff, simultaneously mourned, reviled and celebrated as heroes, criminals, demi-gods and monsters, as this article by anthropologist Mark Anspach makes clear:

LYNCHING QADDAFI

The Libyans didn’t get it.

With everyone agreeing Qaddafi was a monster, the outcry over the way he died caught the rebels by surprise. A member of the National Transitional Council shrugged off criticism. “They beat him very harshly and then they killed him,” he said. “This is a war.”¹

When videos showed rebels brutalizing their dazed and bloody prey, Libya’s new rulers bowed to demands for an investigation, but the impression remained that they didn’t really grasp what all the fuss was about.

Call it a cultural misunderstanding. Is it the Libyans’ fault if they don’t see what’s wrong with an old-fashioned lynching? Maybe we should turn the question around and ask why the images of Qaddafi’s final moments makeus so uneasy.

Read the rest of this article here