The anthropology chronicles

Take a look at this picture. Do you know who it is?

Most people haven’t heard of him.

But you should have. When you see his face or hear his name you should get as sick in your stomach as when you read about Mussolini or Hitler or see one of their pictures. You see, he killed over 10 million people in the Congo.

His name is King Leopold II of Belgium.

He “owned” the Congo during his reign as the constitutional monarch of Belgium. After several failed colonial attempts in Asia and Africa, he settled on the Congo. He “bought” it and enslaved its people, turning the entire country into his own personal slave plantation. He disguised his business transactions as “philanthropic” and “scientific” efforts under the banner of the International African Society. He used their enslaved labor to extract Congolese resources and services. His reign was enforced through work camps, body mutilations, executions, torture, and his private army.

Most of us – I don’t yet know an approximate percentage but I fear its extremely high – aren’t taught about him in school. We don’t hear about him in the media. He’s not part of the widely repeated narrative of oppression (which includes things like the Holocaust during World War II). He’s part of a long history of colonialism, imperialism, slavery and genocide in Africa that would clash with the social construction of the white supremacist narrative in our schools. It doesn’t fit neatly into a capitalist curriculum. Making overtly racist remarks is (sometimes) frowned upon in polite society, but it’s quite fine not to talk about genocides in Africa perpetrated by European capitalist monarchs.

Mark Twain wrote a satire about Leopold called “King Leopold’s soliloquy; a defense of his Congo rule“, where he mocked the King’s defense of his reign of terror, largely through Leopold’s own words. It’s 49 pages long. Mark Twain is a popular author for American public schools. But like most political authors, we will often read some of their least political writings or read them without learning why the author wrote them (Orwell’s Animal Farm for example serves to re-inforce American anti-Socialist propaganda, but Orwell was an anti-capitalist revolutionary of a different kind – this is never pointed out). We can read about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, but King Leopold’s Soliloquy isn’t on the reading list. This isn’t by accident. Reading lists are created by boards of education in order to prepare students to follow orders and endure boredom well. From the point of view of the Education Department, Africans have no history.

When we learn about Africa, we learn about a caricaturized Egypt, about the HIV epidemic (but never its causes), about the surface level effects of the slave trade, and maybe about South African Apartheid (which of course now is long, long over). We also see lots of pictures of starving children on Christian Ministry commercials, we see safaris on animal shows, and we see pictures of deserts in films and movies. But we don’t learn about the Great African War or Leopold’s Reign of Terror during the Congolese Genocide. Nor do we learn about what the United States has done in Iraq and Afghanistan, potentially killing in upwards of 5-7 million people from bombs, sanctions, disease and starvation. Body counts are important. And we don’t count Afghans, Iraqis, or Congolese.

There’s a Wikipedia page called “Genocides in History”. The Congolese Genocide isn’t included. The Congo is mentioned though. What’s now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo is listed in reference to the Second Congo War (also called Africa’s World War and the Great War of Africa), where both sides of the multinational conflict hunted down Bambenga and ate them. Cannibalism and slavery are horrendous evils which must be entered into history and talked about for sure, but I couldn’t help thinking whose interests were served when the only mention of the Congo on the page was in reference to multi-national incidents where a tiny minority of people were  eating each other (completely devoid of the conditions which created the conflict no less). Stories which support the white supremacist narrative about the subhumanness of people in Africa are allowed to be entered into the records of history. The white guy who turned the Congo into his own personal part-plantation, part-concentration camp, part-Christian ministry and killed 10 to 15 million Conglese people in the process doesn’t make the cut.

You see, when you kill ten million Africans, you aren’t called ‘Hitler’. That is, your name doesn’t come to symbolize the living incarnation of evil. Your name and your picture don’t produce fear, hatred, and sorrow. Your victims aren’t talked about and your name isn’t remembered.

Leopold was just one part of thousands of things that helped construct white supremacy as both an ideological narrative and material reality. Of course I don’t want to pretend that in the Congo he was the source of all evil. He had generals, and foot soldiers, and managers who did his bidding and enforced his laws. It was a system. But that doesn’t negate the need to talk about the individuals who are symbolic of the system. But we don’t even get that. And since it isn’t talked about, what capitalism did to Africa, all the privileges that rich white people gained from the Congolese genocide are hidden. The victims of imperialism are made, like they usually are, invisible.

What kinds of stories are important for you to tell?

16 oz of honey requires 1152 bees to travel 112,000 miles and visit 4.5 million flowers.

Most of the honey we get at supermarkets and stores don’t come from natural hives. 

Honey is an animal product, produced when bees digest nectar they have collected and then regurgitate it. It is an animal product, just like an egg or milk. Yes, a bee is an insect and not technically considered an animal by many people, but a bee’s body changes the composition of what it ingests, just like other animals.However, there is another reason vegans won’t eat honey, and that is because it is harmful to another living creature. According to Daniel Hammer, bees do experience pain and suffering while they are being exploited for their products (not just honey but also beeswax, royal jelly, and more). There is simply no way beekeepers, humane or otherwise, can avoid harming or killing bees while they are extracting the bees’ products. Many vegans choose their lifestyle because they wish to avoid harming any other creature, and so they choose not to eat honey.

Check out this couple of articles that are pretty complete about everything around this topic :) 

Why Honey is Not Vegan?

As a vegan, you depend upon beekeeping. It doesn’t matter if you never use beeswax or eat honey. You still depend on beekeeping. It is absolutely impossible not to. 

Because here’s the secret; you know all those delicious fruits and vegetables you eat? You wouldn’t have them if it wasn’t for bees, and here’s another secret; those bees were probably either kept by the farmer who grew them for the purpose of pollinating his/her crops, or moved to the farm during pollination season by a beekeeper. 

If you’ve ever eaten a cherry, almond, blueberry, tomato, melon, squash, raspberry, strawberry…hell, most fruits or veggies…you’ve benefited from beekeeping. There is simply no way to avoid it. If you leave it up to whatever pollinators happen to stop in from the surrounding area, your yields will suffer dramatically, which means less produce and less money for the farmer. Therefore, the easy and universally preferred method is to plop a few hives on the property. The girls will make sure that just about every last almond/cherry/blueberry flower is pollinated (They’re VERY good at what they do) and you can happily harvest a bumper crop. This is a universally used practice among food producers. 

And do you know the best way to help make sure the bees survive?

Keep them. Organically, without using any chemicals. And here’s a secret about beekeeping; you inspect the hives whether or not you take honey, to make sure the bees are healthy and doing well. (There are mites and diseases that can severely harm bees, and even as an organic beekeeper who doesn’t use chemicals on her girls there are methods I use to prevent/treat things like varroa mite infestation that can kill an otherwise healthy hive).

And yes, when you open a hive to inspect it, you might crush one or two bees. But tell me, honestly, that you’ve never killed an insect. Bees themselves will kill sick/non productive members of the hive to ensure the health of the hive as a whole; I don’t see how my accidentally squishing one to ensure the health of the other 50,000 is any different. 

And this is what all beekeepers do. And if you, as before mentioned, ever eat anything that isn’t grain-based, this is what took place to put that food on your plate. 

I would also like to point out that bees will store as much honey as they possibly can…which usually ends up being waaaaay more than they actually can use. To survive a log Iowa winter, my bees need about 100 lbs of honey per hive. Well, last year one hive had TWICE that. (I took 50 pounds, leaving them MORE than enough to get through the winter. I just checked on them today; they’re alive and healthy). 

You are NOT hurting them by taking a little honey for yourself, no more than you already are by looking in on them every two or three weeks to make sure they’re healthy. 

And again, if you ever eat any fruits or veggies, SOMEONE IS ALREADY KEEPING BEES TO POLLINATE THEM AND INSPECTING THEM TO MAKE SURE THEY’RE HAPPY AND HEALTHY. 

KEEPING BEES IS NOT WHAT IS KILLING BEES IT IS WHAT IS SAVING BEES. 

WITHOUT BEES YOUR VEGAN DIET IS IMPOSSIBLE.

WITHOUT THAT “EVIL” EXPLOITATION OF BEES YOUR VEGAN DIET IS IMPOSSIBLE. 

AGAIN, BEEKEEPING IS WHAT IS SAVING BEES NOT KILLING THEM. 

SO IF YOU EAT A LITTLE HONEY IT IS HONESTLY NO WORSE THAN EATING SOME ALMONDS AND FRUIT SALAD. 

Yes. You can keep bees without taking honey from them. But, as I said before, you’re ALREADY in the hive checking for diseases and pests. That, if anything, is what causes bees stress, not you taking a frame or two of honey (each frame of honey can hold 15 pounds!). 

Also, there’s a REASON you take honey from bees, not just because you want to eat it. 

See, like I said before, bees will store as much honey as they can. It’s instinctive. However, there’s only so much room in a hive to put stuff, and honey isn’t the only thing in a hive. They also need room to raise brood, store pollen, ect. Now, if they run out of room, they’ll start feeling overcrowded, which will trigger swarming activity. You can, of course, add more supers (boxes) to the hive, but there’s a limit on how many workers one queen can produce, and you don’t want more supers than they can police, even if all of them are stuffed full of honey. That way lies pests and raiding. So, what we want to do is make sure that they don’t feel overcrowded, while making sure that they don’t have more room than they can take care of. 

When bees feel overcrowded, they swarm. When they swarm, they raise a new queen. The old queen and half the bees will then leave to try and find someplace to start a new hive. 90% of swarms die. As a beekeeper, you don’t want this. 

You can, of course, purposefully let them start raising a new queen and then split a new hive off of the old one if you want to. I’ve done this myself. But this is not always desirable, for many reasons (no more room for more hives, can’t take care of more, don’t have a spare hive body on hand, ect.) There’s also the fact that a recently swarmed hive is susceptible to raiding by wasps/skunks (skunks LOVE to raid hives, the little bastards) or mice, as half the bees that would have defended it before are now gone. You don’t want this either; raiding can kill a hive as quick as disease or pests. (This is why I keep a VERY close eye on any hives that I’ve recently split, and have taken potshots at skunks in the backyard with a slingshot before. Not to kill them, just to scare them off.)

If you don’t want them to swarm, the easiest way to keep them from feeling cramped and give them a little new breathing room is to pull a few surplus honey frames they’ve filled up and replace them with empty frames. The girls will then happily go back to work filling the new empty frames with honey or brood or whatever they decide needs to go in all that new space. They don’t feel crowded any longer, the hive doesn’t swarm and stays strong, everyone’s happy. 

And what, then, am I supposed to do with these three frames of honey I pulled? Throw them away? Hell no. That’s 30-40 pounds of delicious, right there. 

Humans and bees have what’s called a symbiotic relationship. We both benefit from the arrangement. Don’t diss things if you don’t understand how they work. 

And, one more time…keeping bees is necessary for your vegan diet to remain viable. A beekeeper is going to inspect all of those hives anyway, which is the most stressful part of beekeeping for the bees. You are, with your eating habits, (and by that I mean ‘really just eating’, because there’s NO diet that doesn’t rely on beekeeping) reliant on this practice. Taking a frame or two of honey is the LEAST stressful part of inspecting a hive for the bees. 

people, i understand saying ‘save the bees’ but there is no ‘freeing the bees’. we (as beekeepers, i am one myself, have done bee research and have a masters in entomology) are not killing the bees, nor are we abusing them.

european honey bees, Apis mellifera, are literally only in the US and thriving because we brought them here. there are no wild european honey bees, only feral. they area  FULLY DOMESTICATED species, and yes, are symbiotically linked to humans, though it is a facultative relationship. beekeepers care for bees and really, honey harvesting is about one of the least stressful things to happen to bees. the few crushed during inspections? not even noticed by the hive at large because beehives are what we call a superorganism. crushing a single bee is the equivalent of killing a single cell in our bodies.

Many times I have written about the increasing prominence of women in skateboarding, and I have also written on a few occasions about the popularity of middle aged skateboarders. Today I present a video that brings these two developments together. Mums who skate over 50 which is a nice contrast to the Facebook groups skateboarders over 50 which seems to also be very male dominated.

This video comes from the AARP which is a non-profs organisation, the ‘American Association of Retired Persons’. The short video advocates the positive benefits of skateboarding as one of the women highlights that skateboarding is simply ‘about fun’. They underline the fact that you are never to old to learn skateboarding and benefit from the exhilarating and liberating experience. Of further interest is the fact that one of the women is actually Lizzie Armanto’s mother who seems to have been influenced by her own daughter’s passion for skateboarding.

Why Are Some Languages Killed Off?

Many linguists believe that in 8,000 BC there were more than 20,000 languages in existence throughout the world. But where have all of those languages gone? Are they lost forever?

Sources:

The World’d Languages in Crisis

UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger

What Is An Endangered Language?

Over the centuries, the empire’s grass bridges gradually gave way, and were replaced with more conventional works of modern engineering. The most famous Incan bridge—the 148-footer immortalized by Thornton Wilder in The Bridge of San Luis Rey—lasted until the 19th century, but it too eventually collapsed. Today, there is just one Incan grass bridge left, the keshwa chaca, a sagging 90-foot span that stretches between two sides of a steep gorge, near Huinchiri, Peru. According to locals, it has been there for at least 500 years.

Source

Richard Feynman, theoretical physicist, d. 1988 (via whats-out-there)

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Context:

“You ask me if an ordinary person could ever get to be able to imagine these things like I imagine them. Of course! I was an ordinary person who studied hard. There are no miracle people. It happens they get interested in this thing and they learn all this stuff, but they’re just people. There’s no talent, no special ability to understand quantum mechanics, or to imagine electromagnetic fields, that comes without practice and reading and learning and study. I was not born understanding quantum mechanics – I still don’t understand quantum mechanics! I was born not knowing things were made out of atoms, and not being able to visualize, therefore, when I saw the bottle of milk that I was sucking, that it was a dynamic bunch of balls bouncing around. I had to learn that just like anybody else. So if you take an ordinary person who is willing to devote a great deal of time and work and thinking and mathematics, then he’s become a scientist!”

••••••

True of art, as well.

High heels were worn by men for exactly the same reason they’re worn by women today: to display one’s legs to best effect. Until quite recently, shapely, well-toned calves and thighs were regarded as an absolute prerequisite for male attractiveness. That’s why you see so many paintings of famous men framed to show off their legs - like this one of George Washington displaying his fantastic calves:

… or this one of Louis XIV of France rocking a fabulous pair of red platform heels (check out those thighs!):

… or even this one of Charles I of England showing off his high-heeled riding boots - note, again, the visual emphasis on his well-formed calves:

If I Die In Police Custody…

In 2k15 America, Black people now have to proactively and publicly declare for the record that we, like anyone else, would neither lynch ourselves nor commit suicide while in police custody. 

This is (apparently) necessary now because if we are caught being human and - even once - state that we were even momentarily sad or depressed, that single statement alone can and will be used against us by corporate media and the police to blame us for our own murders…at the hands of the police.

#SandraBland  #SayHerName #BlackLivesMatter #JusticeForSandra 

BREAKING: All Officers Involved In Freddie Gray Case Indicted