Knowledge Exchange and Far-Flung Facts

What is knowledge? Where does it exist? It seems almost inevitable that we who use computers all the time think of knowledge as existing between people—between nodes on a network. Indeed, Old Ken recently had a fascinating conversation with a Greek psychiatrist who outlined the coming of a major paradigm shift in psychoanalysis. By his account, Freud had understood the mind through a series of analogies to flows and exchanges of energy, which were dominant sciences of his time. (Now, for those of us interested in finding apt visualizations of such a nineteenth century mind, check out the decidedly old-school conceit of the gears running this brain in the stock image above.) However, with the explosion of recent research in neuroscience and brain imaging, the dominant models of the presenty suggest that the brain is constantly rewiring and remapping its neural networks. And this poses—or is soon to pose—some major problems for psychoanalysts who want to take Freud's ideas on the functioning of the mind seriously.

With these thoughts on the exchange, prospects for growth and reformation of knowledge in our minds, I want to share with you an enlightening book review transmitted to Old Ken by our Mexico City correspondent, the Famous Anthropologist. Here is his contribution, interspersed with a few illustrations:



"Julie Berger Hochstrasser’s 2007 'Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age' presents a lavishly-illustrated review of secondary-source materials about the global extent of the Dutch economy in the 17th century. The four main chapters of Part 1 each discuss a different zone of this economy: from the Netherlands (butter, cheese, beer), to Europe (wine, oranges, grain) to Asia (spices, porcelain), to the Americas (tobacco, sugar, slaves). The three chapters and conclusion which make up part 2, all 12 pages or less, attempt to add some theoretical discussion to this economic history; they need not detain us here.

"However, Hochstrasser herself says that she wants to write more than an illustrated history of food and drink. What she hopes to do in her book is address, as she puts it, one key 'postmodernist' moral challenge: how to redress the long history of European exploitation of the globe? Now, all of this may seem quite far from the sensitive analysis of images—more on this to come.



"In order to contribute to this 'postmodern' call to conscience, Hochstrasser opens her book with a famous quote from Marx on the commodity as the coagulation of labor. Presumably, then, this will be a book focused on a sensitive analysis the different types of labor that went into the production of the various goods, both foreign and domestic, that appear in still life paintings. Presumably this book will also consider what images—protoethnographic or protoscientific or in any case less sumptuous and skilled in their execution than still life paintings—can be brought to bear on our understanding of these types of labor. But, in fact, Hochstrasser doesn’t really do this. We do have a long discussion, illustrated, of the perils involved in Dutch herring-fishing, it is true. And we do have a long, and illustrated, account of the role of black slaves in sugar production (but given the ubiquitousness of the discussion of this back-breaking production in the secondary literature, we can’t give Hochstrasser too much credit for talking about it). Yet these are but two commodities out of the dozens she mentions whose process of labor, and the role of working people in producing those commodities, are actually talked about. In most cases, Hochstrasser leaves the reader in the dark about working people.



"Her long discussion of the spice trade, for example, focuses on the, yes, horrific Dutch practices of deportation and slaughter on islands in Indonesia. She also talks about the large number of images from the East Indies which show natives being forced to hold parasols over Dutch merchants (a tradition they inherited from the Portuguese—though the surely important fact that parasols and parasol holders were a tradition first developed by Asian elites should be talked about more than the one-line reference it gets). But she never addresses HOW SPICES WERE GROWN. Plantations? Forest gathering? Who did the gathering? How was this harvest organized? How did local political orders get coopted, if at all, by the Dutch to ensure their access to spices? Not discussed. Nor are these kinds of issues raised in regards to the tea trade, although here at least Hochstrasser includes an image of a tea plantation (which, of course, is left undiscussed). Discussion of Chinese ceramic production does get a brief mention, but it is clear that Hochstrasser is too-quickly summarizing a Dutch account that could have provided the reader with a much better picture of the Chinese people involved in making the clay, making the pots, painting them, and firing them. (She specifically dismisses, in her too-brief rehash of a traveler's account of ceramic production, the details he offers on kilns, by saying something like 'after a detailed discussion of porcelain kilns…'). Turning to the Atlantic salt trade, Hochstrasser has a brief reference to the 'workers' who died on the salt flats of the Cape Verde Islands, which are illustrated above. But who were these workers? Europeans? Africans? A fascinating illustration of this harvest is included—but, again, its imagery is not discussed . Nor is there any discussion of the raising of tobacco in the Americas. Again: did this happen on plantations? Was some sort of tribute extracted from Native American populations? How did this relate to traditions of tobacco-raising that pre-existed the arrival of the Dutch? We are told nothing.

"Hochstrasser’s erasure of the labor of non-Europeans thus does exactly what she accuses still-live paintings of doing: not detailing the 'human costs', as she is fond of saying, involved behind the objects in these images of 'snob appeal' another favorite term. But there is an even more sinister aspect to Hochstrasser’s ultimately condescending lack of interest in non-Europeans. Since she wants to take part in the retrospective 'postmodern' condemnation of Europe’s evils in the past, she can only imagine non-Europeans as poor helpless lumps, abused by the Almighty Might of European Hegemony. Thus even when her secondary sources reveal that, in fact, non-Europeans were not so passive, she passes over such cases with minimal comment. They have no place in her assumptions about the past. Thus an Indonesian epic poem of 1670, Entji
Amin’s 'Rhymed Chronicle of the Macassar War' (which runs several thousand lines and has been given a number of analyses for its scathing critiques of Dutch colonization) is mentioned only in passing (106). Hochstrasser references the end of Dutch presence on the island of Formosa (Taiwan) by saying 'Formosa fell and was lost to the VOC.' What does this mean, 'Formosa fell'? It means that a Chinese warrior came in with his army and kicked the Dutch out. But rather than tell the reader this,
Hochstrasser prefers to use the subjectless 'Formosa fell.' As one final example, turning to the Americas, Hochstrasser discusses the, yes, horrifying aspects of the slave trade and slave plantations in northern Brazil. She mentions that 'so harsh was their lot that slaves risked inconceivable tortures to flee from the plantations to the surrounding jungles, despite routine hunts to recapture them.' (221) But where did they flee to? It is surely important that the northern coast of Brazil saw rise to long-lived independent kingdoms of escaped slaves, organized along the lines of political orders inherited from Africa. These were complex, hierarchically ordered states. These Maroon civilizations have been discussed at length by Richard and Sally Price, so are hardly unknown cases whose histories are unpublished in English. But, again, since Hochstrasser can only see a story of All-Powerful Europeans crushing poor innocent non-Europeans underfoot, this kind of history has no place in her study.



"This is not to say that we should overlook, or underestimate, the power of capitalism or European expansion—as Talal Asad’s introduction to his 1993 'Genealogies of Religion' makes clear. But underestimating the power of capitalism or colonialism is one thing. Totally ignoring the ways these orders have been challenged or critiqued or resisted by people, say, in European colonies is something different. Hochstrasser opens her account by referencing Dipesh Chakrabarty’s idea of 'provincializing
Europe.' That is, given that so much of academic historical production (whether about Europe or about the rest of the world) uses Euro-American history (and Euro-American theories developed to understand that history) as a baseline, how might one 'decenter' Europe? Unfortunately, by telling a story of Powerful Europeans and Passive Non-Europeans, and by only considering European visual culture (with the exception of maybe 5 photos of Chinese porcelains) Hochstrasser keeps European Might—aptly visualized above—at the center of her narrative. Her story makes non-Europeans into passive objects, as passive as the oranges and cheeses that fill the still life paintings so gorgeously printed (in Singapore, no doubt under all sorts of awful labor conditions) in Yale University Press’ book."