Asian delicacies

Chives and minced pork steamed buns, Japanese utane sweet bread (a special baking technique makes it extra soft), Taiwanese aloe vera yogurt, two kinds of soju (rice liquor), one strong (from North Korea), the other smoother (from South Korea), amazing sockeye salmon sushi, warm sake, Japanese multi-layered milk cake, special octopus balls made with squid and kimchi (spicy Korean cabbage), veggie teriyaki pancakes, homemade Cantonese rice with chicken, baby bamboo shoots, crunchy pork ear, and the best black sesame ice-cream ever. All this food was enjoyed in the same weekend, and amounted to a delightful culinary trip to the four corners of the Far Eastern world. Eatable bliss.

Photo: Cantonese dishes, 2009 © Loudsoul

It´s Afghanistan, stupid!

Following what President Obama stated during his campaign, the new American administration has started shifting its foreign policy efforts away from Irak to focus on Afghanistan. Along with a deployment of additional troops, however, comes the news that the administration is seriously considering displacing Afghan President Karzai from government, in favor of some new and apparently more reliable and potentially effective candidates.

Despite the corruption cases in Karzai´s government, and the presence of warlords both in the national and local administration, the US should not involve itself in the daily political management of the country. On the one hand, it comes as no surprise corruption is thriving in one of the poorer countries on earth; on the other hand President Karzai had to co-opt certain warlords as the only way to mantain peace and keep some provinces (more or less) under Kabul´s rule. Politics in Afghanistan is a chaotic and undemocratic business but, what were we in the Western world expecting after a 30 years war in a country that always remained stuck in a sort of economic and social Middle Ages? What do we expect after failing to live up to our promises to assist them with substantial economic and financial help and the deployment of enough troops to guarantee peace in the country? We are helping them, somehow, though this is far from enough, and also far from what we committed ourselves to do, but nevertheless our patience is running out with countries such as Afghanistan, which do not democratize at the pace we want them to become Jeffersonian democracies.

After the tragic failure of the ill-conceived experiment in Irak, it should be clear for everyone that Afghanistan is the primary token if the West is to be trusted in its claims to be working to bring democracy and prosperity to countries that still enjoy no political freedom. If we are to succeed here, both in our terms -international security and democratic principles- and in theirs -Afghans are asking for our help to build a peaceful, viable State-, we should devote our efforts not to the realm of micro-politics but to building capacities, that is, infraestructure, roads, hospitals, schools, telecommunications, police, internal safety, law enforcement, market development, criminal justice, women´s health, education and protection… All this implies devoting money and personnel, and lots of it, but also trusting locals and working with them in identifiying their own needs, as opposed to imposing our goals. Only as a consecuence of a long term economic and social transformation could this place start its journey towards a viable, sustainable and fair democracy. We cannot change overnight what has remained like this for ages. We cannot allow ourselves to be inpatient. We should be ready to commit ourselves for a long time. It is worth it, and not only for Afghanistan itself and their inhabitants, but also as an example of what we are willing to do to help other countries and even as a proof of the coherence between our beliefs and our democracy promotion efforts.

Photo: ‘Kabul, Afghanistan’, 2009 © Lyndsey Addario, The New York Times

Love and novelty

What do we fall in love with? Personality? A face? A body? Can we isolate these parts of us from each other? And what is it that we consider self? ‘I cannot recognize the person I fell in love with. She changed so much’. Does this make any sense? May our personalities change so much that we become ‘other’ person? And what if we remain the same person but physically change so much others do not recognize us? Are we the same individual or not?

How does the process of growing tired of someone work? We constantly get tired of objects and covet new ones. Are individuals like objects? But, isn´t it that we may fall in love with each other because we are not objects? If we are not objects, how can we get tired of seeing the same face every morning, by our side, when we wake up? Where do we set up the tipping point, by which the feeling of happiness aroused by the presence of the loved one turns into fatigue? And, beyond this point, are we really able to go back in time, towards the moment it all started? ‘I love you more each day’. Can this really go on forever? Isn´t the contrary more likely, though?

What would we be willing to do to make our loved one to keep those feelings alive, as if in the very beginning? Up to which point could we change so he / she experienced it as a fresh start, a whole new story but with the same characters? Could we be willing to change phisically? Is this too much? Actually, we see this around us on a daily basis, and for the same reasons (many people voluntarily undergo painful physical transformations in an attempt to retain his / her love).

Why couldn´t desire for the same body stay with us forever? ‘I´ll love you forever’, we say. Why not ‘I´ll desire you forever’?

Find these captivating and disturbing questions in the astounding South Korean movie Shi-Gan (Time), directed by Kim Ki-Duk in 2006.

Photo: Hyeon-a Seong in Shi-Gan © Flixter.com

Destruction / redefinition

If there is nowadays a country on earth capable of totally redesigning itself, it is China. Its current process of physical ruination and swift recreation is not a simple one, since it seems to embody Schumpeter´s old principle of creative destruction, albeit particularly in the urban lanscape in the Chinese case.

“Dans New York, c’est bien quand on est jeune, mais c’est trop prévisible. Votre avenir est écrit. Tandis qu’en Chine, le développement urbain est tellement chaotique que rien n’est prévisible. Tout est possible”.

Zhang Ke*

“J’ai essayé de répondre à la question : quel est le message de l’architecture et de l’art contemporain chinois? C’est une énorme question qui se pose à nous. La plupart des gens ont encore en eux la culture traditionnelle chinoise, mais tout a changé. Il faut trouver le moyen de réunir ces deux cultures, Chine et modernité”.

Wang Hui*

[*] Young Chinese architects, in Le Monde, August 5, 2008.

Photo: ‘Misty’, Pudong District, Shanghai, 2006 © Matteroffact

Puppet minorities

‘If we collaborate with the army, the terrorists try to kill us. If we collaborate with the terrorists, he will kill us’. Thus speaks to a foreign journalist the inhabitant of a Kurdish village in South-Eastern Turkey.[1] The terrorists are the PKK, the guerrilla of the Turkish kurds, while he is the officer of the Turkish military police who shadows the journalist everywhere he goes in the area.

We tend to think of minorities in certain regions torn by war, poverty and terror as inevitably repressed in every possible realm by the government of the country they are settled in, and perhaps by the majoritarian social group as well. While this is generally the case, especially if the minority belongs to a different ethnic group than the majority, or possesses a distinct culture, language or religion, or supported the wrong side in a recent armed conflict involving the country, we risk overlooking another important fact which also prevents peace and social tolerance from being accomplished. Quite often, minorities are manipulated by the leaders of neighbouring Nation-States in which the ethno-cultural group of the minority in question constitutes the social majority and/or enjoys significant political or military power. In other words, some governments and armed groups tend to manipulate minorities settled in nearby countries when both belong to the same ethno-cultural family, and they do so out of sheer geopolitical interests. Thus, sometimes minorities are not only victims of their oppressors, but also of their unwillingness to integration and adaptation to the new circumstances, a reluctance which reaches tragic proportions when the prospects for democratization are real.

While this phenomenon has been somehow present in many armed conflicts throughout history -let us remember, for instance, Italy´s manipulation of Italian communities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire territories, and the role these Irredenta claims played during World War I-, it is perhaps in the contemporary world where it has shown the real measure of its disruptive capabilities.

In the aforementioned example of the Kurdish communities of Eastern Turkey, both the PKK guerrillas and some Iraqi Kurdish leaders have influenced the Turkish kurds into not making compatible their belonging to the Turkish State with their maintaining their Kurdish cultural ties. In the India-administered part of Kashmir -Jammu and Kashmir-, Pakistan-sponsored groups have been pressuring muslim population not to comply with Indian legislation nor obeying Indian authorities. Obviously, Turkish and local Indian repression -particularly in the former case-, respectively, has not made things easy for those minorities.

Examples abound, but perhaps two of the most salient in global affairs are those of Kosovo´s serbs and Palestinian refugees. The Serb residents of Mitrovica, in northern Kosovo, are just pawns in the regional game the government of Serbia is playing against the international community not to acknowledge the former Serb province´s independence. While they affirm to be defending the interest of that community, it is obvious they detached themselves from it a long time ago.[2] The life of that Kosovan minority would improve substantially if it accepted the new institutions, though the EU and the UN will have to be vigilant and force the Kosovan government to live up to its democratic constitution.

In the same manner, during more than half a century, Palestinian refugees have been equally manipulated by Arab leaders, who, claiming to be backing up their quest for returning to the Palestinian lands they left -forced by the Israeli army or voluntarily-, kept them in refugee camps and prevented them from integrating in their host countries, where many of them -or their descendants-, after 50 or 60 years, still do not have a full citizenship status, and are among the poorest inhabitants in their respective host countries.[3] They have also been pawns in a greater game, the one being played in the Middle Eastern power politics.

As in every conflict, often attributions of pure good and evil are difficult to make. Reality is much more complex than what defenders of different sides want us to believe.

References:

[1] Michael Ignatieff, Blood and belonging. Journeys into the new nationalism, London, Vintage, 1994.

[2] Michael Ignatieff, Empire lite, London, Vintage, 2003.

[3] Joan B. Culla, Israel, el somni I la tragèdia. Del sionisme al conflicte de Palestina, Barcelona, Edicions La campana, 2005.

Photo: Erbil refugee camp, Iraqi Kurdistan, 2007 © Emmanuel Smague

Unaffected crackdown

Are Chinese authorities worried because the eyes of the world are on them now Olympics are approaching? Do they recently initiated conversations with the Tibetan leaders in exile really acknowledging the status quo in the region must change? Apparently, the answer to both questions is ‘No’. Though they claim to have realeased hundreds of prisoners in the last weeks, actually they keep more than one thousand Tibetan protesters in prison. According to Amnesty International, many of those detainees are kept in dire conditions, without enough food and frequently beaten, and some of them have been judged and ’sentenced after questionable trials”. Meanwhile, Chinese journalists continue working amidst the extreme censorship stablished around their job when the riots began, and foreign ones are simply blocked from entering Tibet.

Isn´t it high time we ceased to reward the Chinese dictatorship with international events -such as the Olympics- for free? Shouldn´t the international community be exerting a stronger pressure on the Chinese government on behalf of human rights and the rule of law?

Read Amnesty´s report here.

Photo: Police, Lhasa, Tibet, 2007 © culturalvisions

Shadows (textures 3)

Do shadows have any volume? Can we touch them? If we approach them, do we hear any noise coming from the obscurity? Do we realize how they play with the afternoon light in distant corners of the house?

“Me maravilla comprobar hasta qué punto los japoneses han sabido dilucidar los misterios de la sombra y con cuánto ingenio han sabido utilizar los juegos de sombra y luz. Y todo eso sin buscar particularmente ningún efecto determinado. En una palabra, sin más medios que la simple madera y las paredes desnudas, se ha dispuesto un espacio recoleto donde los rayos luminosos que consiguen penetrar hasta allí, engendran aquí y allá recovecos vagamente oscuros. Sin embargo, al contemplar las tinieblas ocultas tras la viga superior, en torno a un jarrón de flores, bajo un anaquel, y aún sabiendo que sólo son sombras insignificantes, experimentamos el sentimiento de que el aire en esos lugares encierra una espesura de silencio, que en esa oscuridad reina una serenidad eternamente inalterable.”

Junichiro Tanizaki, Elogio de las sombras, Madrid, Siruela, 2007.

Photo: Tea house silhouette, Kyoto, 2007 © Tavallai

Taste (textures 2)

Does food taste differently depending on the material the plates we serve it in is made of? Can you distinguish between soup presented in regular porcelain and the same soup served in Japanese lacquered bowls? According to Tanizaki, there is a remarkable difference, not to speak of the visual and the heat-preserving qualities of the Japanese lacquerware itself, its sonic properties, the feeling of its surface in the palm of one´s hand, and its evocative power.

“Una vajilla de cerámica no es nada desdeñable, es cierto, pero a las cerámicas les faltan las cualidades de sombra y de profundidad de las lacas. Son pesadas y frías al tacto; permeables al calor, no sirven para los alimentos calientes; además, el menor golpe les saca un ruido seco, mientras que las lacas, suaves y ligeras al tacto, no lastiman el oído. Cuando sostengo en el hueco de mi mano un cuenco de sopa, nada me resulta más agradable que la sensación de pesadez líquida, de vívida tibieza que experimenta mi palma. Es una impresión análoga a la que produce al tacto la carne elástica de un recién nacido.

Todas éstas buenas razones para explicar por qué se sigue sirviendo hoy en día la sopa en un cuenco de laca, pues un recipiente de cerámica está muy lejos de dar satisfacciones comparables. Y sobre todo porque, en cuanto levantas la tapa el líquido encerrado en cerámica te revela inmediatamente su cuerpo y color. En cambio, desde que destapas un cuenco de laca hasta que te lo llevas a la boca, experimentas el placer de contemplar en sus profundidades oscuras un líquido cuyo color apenas se distingue del color del continente y que se estanca, silencioso, en el fondo. Imposible discernir la naturaleza de lo que hay en las tinieblas del cuenco, pero tu mano percibe una oscilación fluida, una ligera exudación que cubre los bordes del cuenco y que dice que hay un vapor y el perfume que exhala dicho vapor ofrece un sutil anticipo del sabor del líquido antes de que te llene la boca.”

Junichiro Tanizaki, Elogio de las sombras, Madrid, Siruela, 2007.

Photo: Yakan=kettle, Nakakoma, Japan, 2007 © nam2_7676

Touch (textures 1)

The surface of Chinese or Japanese paper… caress it with your fingertips, touch it smoothly. Then squeeze it, listen to it. Get it close to your ear… It is crunchy and moist at the same time… This is the first of a three-post series on textures, an issue the Japanese author Junichiro Tanizaki reflects on in his essay In Praise of Shadows (In´ei Raisan, 1953), here in an excerpt from the Spanish edition.

“Dicen que el papel es un invento de los chinos; sin embargo, lo único que nos inspira el papel de Occidente es la impresión de estar ante un material estrictamente utilitario, mientras que sólo hay que ver la textura de un papel de China o de Japón para sentir un calorcillo que nos reconforta el corazón. A igual blancura, la de un papel de Occidente difiere por naturaleza de la de un hosho o un papel blanco de China. Los rayos luminosos parecen rebotar en la superficie del papel occidental, mientras que la del hosho o del papel de China, similar a la aterciopelada superficie de la primera nieve, los absorbe blandamente. Además, nuestros papeles, agradables al tacto, se pliegan y se arrugan sin ruido. Su contacto es suave y ligeramente húmedo como el de la hoja de un árbol.”

Junichiro Tanizaki, Elogio de las sombras, Madrid, Siruela, 2007.

Photo: Silver Japanese paper, 2007 © Karaku

Post-colonial hypocrisy

In the EU-Africa summit that took place in Lisbon this past weekend, the Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi declared Europeans ought to compensate Africans for their past colonialism. He said a billion euros would be a suitable figure to start with. Notwithstanding how ill-managed most foreign financial help has been in the hands of corrupt and incompetent African governments, and the fact that such a sum would never reach ordinary Africans, Qadhafi shows an endless capacity for hypocrisy. Like many others, he is merely banging the drum for the idea that African backwardness is the direct consecuence of colonialism. Of course, this kind of language suits well the Western illiberal, antiglobalization ideologues and their supporters, but historical facts point otherwise. That evidence should not lead us to deny, for instance, the pernicious colonial policies of the British Empire in late ninetieth and early twentieth-centuries in Southern Africa, which destroyed a whole functioning social order and replaced it with a great deal of disarray and suffering. However, this is not equivalent to stating that without Western intervention in the continent, it would now be composed of peaceful and developed nations. Most probably it would have not, since African problems are rooted both in the past and in modern times.

In any case, being a former colony does not necessarily amount to dealing with a corrupt government and a backward and caothic economy. Many former colonies are now success stories, challenging the partial and biased claims of dogmatic populists and nostalgic collectivists. Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea are good examples of ex-colonies which made policy choices that, in turn, eventually prompted a ‘virtuous circle’ in terms of development and modernization.

Singapore was a British crown colony from 1867 until 1957, when it became a self-governing nation, though it was only in 1971 when the British withdrew their military presence. After the first and second Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1856-60), China was forced to put Hong Kong in British hands. Then, the Convention of 1898 stated that Hong Kong would be leased to Britain for 99 years (it returned to Chinese hands in 1997, though keeping a special status). Korea was a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945, and then suffered a war from 1950 to 1953 -between its Northern and Southern parts- that cost four million lives. Nowadays -data are for 2006- Singapore enjoys a per capita income of US$29,473, the equivalent figures for Hong Kong and South Korea being, respectively, US$27,342 and US$18,220.

The complex array of reasons behind present African developmental and political difficulties lays not in its colonial past but somewhere else, and it deals more with the lack of respect for human rights, the non-existence of the rule of law and the aversion towards free markets and their necessary institutional frames (independent judiciary, democratic checks and balances, a stable economic-legal system). Some African leaders should stop looking so often for those reasons abroad and take a closer look at themselves and the policies they are pursuing.

Photo: Seme Beach, Southwest Province, Cameroon, 2005 © phil h