Village And Its Discontents, The: Meaning And Criticism In Late Modernity

Meaning and Criticism in Late Modernity

Antonio L Rappa

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9789813140080
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología urbana

The Village and Its Discontents: Meaning and Criticism in Late Modernity is a hopeful collection of essays about villages in Southeast Asia and across the world. The "village" is an idea, a construct, and a way of organising society. Villages constitute the basic unit of analyses in the arts, humanities and the social sciences, and these issues are presented through the collection of essays featured in this book. The contributors hope to generate interest in studying villages, to understand the meanings that attach themselves to the concept of the village, and to gain greater insights into multidisciplinary knowledge and analyses in today's highly developed global society.

Contents:

• Abstract
• Preface (Antonio L Rappa)
• Foreword (Tommy Koh)
• Village Structure and Social Organisation (Antonio L Rappa)
• The Village as a Domain in Language Policy (Lionel Wee)
• Kampong Lorong Buangkok: The Last Village in Singapore (Caitlin Pan)
• Politics and Social Transformation: The Ancient-Modern Village of Cambodia (Alvin Lim and Benny Widyono)
• An African Village in Perspective: Life on the Edge of the Boko Haram (Alvin Lim)
• Rice Rhapsody: Food and Sexuality in the Singapore Village (Regina Lee)
• The Urbanisation of Rural Villages in China (Guan Chong, Ding Ding, and Yu Yinghui)
• From Muban to Changwat and the Structure of Thai Politics (Antonio L Rappa)
• Pepatah Melayu and Adat Berkampung: Values, Rights and Responsibilities in a Kampong as Depicted in Malay Sayings (Lim Beng Soon)
• Contributors

Readership: Undergraduate and graduate students in political science, sociology, cultural studies.

Chapter One

VILLAGE STRUCTURE AND ORGANISATION

Antonio L Rappa

The village is a site of contention. It remains as the basic vestibule to human civilisation, an entrance to understanding what makes us different. The village was chosen as the centrepiece of this book because the villages’ variegated structure and organisation naturally lends us a place for criticism, nostalgia, and reflection; the village is a means to nourish our propensity for creativity. Yet if scholars continue to neglect the importance of the village in modernity, it will fall to ruin and perdition. Villages are important because they are an expression of human civilisation. Village life can raise and uplift the human spirit and humanity itself. Our presence and place in the universe affords us a powerful means of controlling our environment. Like our consciousness, villages differentiate us from the other species. We rely on consciousness as animals depend on instinct. Two American dogs (for example) cannot discuss their drunken frivolity at Greenwich Village in Lower Manhattan over a beer. Human beings on the other hand can plan for the next party, and even develop surreal ones.

Surreal villages are born out of a whorish desire for profit and a hypocritical pretence of “arts for arts sake”. The Spaghetti Western is the supreme example of the pre-eminently surreal village, one where life hangs by the thread of probability and chance; where no one — not the Natives, the Foreigners, the Americans, the Mexicans, the Bar Flies, the men, the women, the midgets, the law, the pastors, or the Undertakers can be trusted with anything. Popularised by many including Clint Eastwood, the Western was designed as a low budget, cheap snapshot of Western modernity designed to entertain the popular American masses, as well as a means of escape. The Western is the conspicuous metaphor for modernity; the epitaph of democratic life as we know it today. The Western represents a genre that captures the heart of 19th century American gothic; the “frontier culture” is a communion of a dark and immensely inconceivable power: where all men are evil, all women are whores, and all life revolves round violence, immorality, corruption, and wanton lust; where young lives are marked by early death; where the sickly sweet stench of cemetery flowers that blossom in the night rot by the afternoon sun. If anything, the gratuitousness of the Spaghetti Western was itself a harbinger of the violence, rape, murder, and devastation that was to befall America in World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, Vietnam War, the Gulf Wars, and the Middle East “peace” process. And the next one coming soon to a village theatre near you. The Western connects its audiences with a one-way ticket on the railway line to death.

On the other hand, villages also connect us with one another in the present and with others we have lost in the past. It is part of the human tradition to live or work or die in a village at some point in our lives. The traditional village leaves an impression in our minds and hearts even if we relocate to other areas. A pastiche of a traditional village seems to exist in our minds eye. This book is about the village in the world and the world in the village. We ask if there is aesthetics of the village, and if such a form exists, what structures contribute toward its existence. The architectonic imagery of any village in Asia or Africa must be constructed out of factual accuracy, from the oral tradition, economic experiences, political phenomena, anecdotes, and narratives. These come together to form village norms and traditions. Fact, anecdotes and narratives are all necessary but insufficient conditions for the emergence and evolution of villages. And then there is the imagery.

An architectonic imagery that is based on fact but without anecdotes or narratives lacks insight; one devoid of fact lacks grounding in reality. Some years ago in a real anthropological foray into northern Thailand, Delmos Jones discovered that some hill tribe villagers, the Black Mons, have a “self-image” problem. While their customs and traditions provide security, their cultural strategy for survival involves subordination to power by denigrating themselves.

Most villages are therefore stymied when it comes to redevelopment because they are held back by something, some power, some culture, or some language. The village domain represents a place of solitude and security, a place to return for nostalgia and comfort. A village, like the Portuguese Settlement in Ayutthaya (1600s) or the one in Malacca (1933) or the fake Medan Portugis built by Mahathir Mohammad in 1985 as if to mock the local Eurasian fishermen represent custodial spaces where communities can meet and have conversations about nothing or anything.

Does the presence of a village in late modernity with a bunch of people called villagers imply the existence of a culture and ethnicity? Perhaps only when foreign anthropologists and Occidentalist scholars through their vast network of fact and recollection decide, yes this is truly worth publishing. Otherwise, many more people have to die to prove the existence of their custom and culture. This has been the case of the northern Thai people as well as those from Nigerian villages bordering the merciless edges of the Boko Haram.¹

But whether we ethno-photograph the Black Lahu, the Dark Lisu, the White Horse Whiskey drinkers, Haig Road Kampong Serani, or Malay Rock Boys Club at Katong Village, the fact remains that politicising social spaces where individuals inhabit to form groups do not make ethnicity rights or customary wrongs. So this is why it is sometimes better to open with literary investigations into the genuine architectonics of the village. Perhaps one of the most prodigious writers on ethnicity and cultures on the edge was Albert Chinualumogu Achebe.

The African Village

Albert Chinualumogu Achebe is perhaps one of the most celebrated of all novelists who impacted the literary world with Things Fall Apart (1958). That book alone could become the predictor of an African future as it was apt at being the descriptor of an African past. All Achebe’s novels from No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987) are grim idiomatic reminders of atypical villages in Africa, and an Africa that was torn apart by pre-colonial tribal wars; dismembered and denigrated by colonial geopolitical racism; and debauched by postcolonial hatred, rendered worthless by White colonial materialist extraction. In Things Fall Apart, an Igbo yam farmer named Okonkwo lives in a cluster of nine villages in colonised, Lower Nigeria, called Umuofia. Most writers of village life focus on rural poverty, scarcity, and blight but not Achebe. His protagonist is Okonkwo son of Unoka. Amid his scores of yams, he strikes a grave contrast against Unoka, the effeminate, lazy, and indolent father who dies deep in debt but gay with delight at the notion that his progeny will continue his heritage, his name, and the name of the village successfully. Okonkwo is smart, diligent, and ambitious but without inheritance. He has a big barn of yams, two tribal titles, and three (rather portly) wives; his wealth is derived from a positive work ethic. If he were not an animist, he would probably be a Protestant with a Weberian work ethic. Each Igbo wife of Okonkwo has her own obi (hut) and all the wives obis are protected by a larger red wall of the family compound with each family compound forming the Igbo village. The wives live peacefully together as the village seems outwardly calm. But it is a different kind of calm from the one portrayed by Milala Kalab’s “Life in a Cambodian Village”, Mao’s Chinese peasant villages, or S. Rajaratnam’s Global Village. Okonkwo represents the village, his family, and accoutrements symbolised by the family compounds and the village walls. We follow him to understand what happens to the traditional village in the face of modernisation that is brought upon the Igbo by the White Man. The Men of the village supply a range of character traits that map the human condition: where the White Man is greedy; Unoka lazy; Okonkwo diligent; Ikemefuna illegitimate and Nwoye lost. Okonkwo Village is in silent decay. Okonkwo is dying slowly. His anxiety about death anxiety leads him to beat his youngest wife, Ojiugo, during the Week of Peace because she neglects to cook him his afternoon meal. It is inauspicious for a man to beat his wife during the Week of Peace. But he does, and that causes the audience to shake their heads in disappointment. The Village dies from human sacrifice, immoral plots, gender brutality, political violence, and physical abuse. The traditional Village dies as the White Man descends on the Umuofia and the tribe is destroyed for good. In the end, Okonkwo commits suicide in an act that is abhorred and disallowed by his clan. But he does it as a sacrifice for the greater good of the village. Okonkwo is the village. We see him being made redundant as the White Man displaces his values with foreign ones making him irrelevant and unequal as Achebe’s themes of mythical agadi-nwayi, personal gods, locusts and fire. All three themes dominate village life inasmuch as masculinity and authoritarianism dominate the African village. All three themes plus the death metaphor and the funeral imagery are also found in Kalab’s village, Mao’s ideology, and Rajaratnam’s loaded dice. Within those dice that God uses and Raja abuses were an ethics as well as an aesthetics that could only be circumvented with the simplicity of the common word. That was the word of R. K. Narayan.

The ‘Indian’ Village

I tire of having to explain to myself why I am afraid to use the word Indian because it seems so fully loaded. To express or label a person or thing as Indian is to cast aspersion where no ill intention existed. When James Cook embarked on his great voyages through the vast Pacific to try and discover a northeast passage to the Atlantic, he wrote how he had encountered many Natives, many Indians.² The colonial experience across the world, in the East Indies (modern Indonesia) and the West Indies (the modern Caribbean) all constitute different fragments of what had been perceived as Natives and Indians. Indians and Natives were often used interchangeably.

The more it seems that people insist on that being called an Indian, the more people think that it actually represents a person, ethnicity, race, and gender. Ethics and aesthetics are important functions in the making of political reality, even if the beauty itself is not real. This is captured by the Indian village. The novels of Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayan including the Bachelor of the Arts (1939), The English Teacher (1945), Malgudi Days, and The Guide (1958) were explicit constructions of Indian village that centred on the fictional village of Malgudi. Narayan’s work does not typify an Indian village or its villagers. Rather, his achievements and strengths are in his characterisation as well as his depiction of the nominal human foibles and peccadilloes.

Narayan did not write about India but about the human condition. In The Guide, Narayan reveals to us the irascible nature of a railway guide named Raju who pretends to be an “ascetic” after his imprisonment. He misleads the villagers into thinking that he is fasting to end the famine that is destroying the village. In his escaping the past, Raju ironically discovers himself. His illicit love for another man’s woman, his forgery and imprisonment, his trickery and deceit all vanish when he tells the villagers that he can feel the water rising in the hills that will end the famine. Narayan’s narratives dissect all social classes within the village and society and his protagonists always have some serious weakness as the Greek Argonauts and the heroes of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Modernisation is represented by capitalist goods and foreign norms; these invade the simple fictions that govern quotidian village life of Narayan’s characters. Given the praise that was levelled on Narayan by Graham Greene, E. M. Forster and his litany of awards for his novels, most western critics believe that Narayan was responsible for bringing the Indian novel to the West. Indeed, Narayan was critical in making use of the novel as the vehicle for refreshing the pessimistic postcolonial English world. And at the centre of that world was the aesthetics of the village.

There remains something remarkably reassuring about village life and its romantic attractions. But how does the aesthetics of the village work?

Aesthetics are operationalised through standard village functions: family homes and households, extended family houses, private religious schools, wedding halls, national festivals, regional and local celebrations, religious merit-making ceremonies, crematoria, columbaria, and perhaps and unfortunately with increasing importance, village aesthetics made real through capitalist production. The search for enlightenment remains a profoundly dominant and elusive theme in the Indian village and Narayan was the first leading light to find the path and a way.

The Japanese Village

If authoritarianism dominated the African village and elusive aesthetics the Indian one, then sauvage simplicity and minimalism dominate Japanese villages. Akira Kurosawa’s Rushomon (1950) stands out with his Shichinin no Samurai (1954) as one of two of his early works that possess a rustic theme as if it were an addendum to a village. In both films, Kurosawa depicts characters that are larger than the village: where the whole is smaller than the individual parts. Kurasawa’s Rushomon has two antecedents In a Grove (1922) and Rashoumon (1915) by Ry

nosuke Akutagawa. But no one knows him and almost all scholarly work on film either celebrate or criticise Kurosawa.

During 12th century Japan, on the outskirts of an abandoned Japanese village called “Rushomon Gate”, four characters are seen to take shelter from a tropical thunderstorm. There are only natural sounds for the first 12 minutes of the film. There are 12 different dimensions across 72 minutes, six main characters, three main themes: honour, heroism, and shame; and a ruined city gate. The Rushomon Gate is one of the city gates of the old capital city Kyoto. This is the power of the Japanese village. Even one that is abandoned, ruined and wet. There is nothing more thought-evoking and stimulating than the gate of a ruined wet Japanese village.

The woodcutter is one his characters. He says that he discovered the corpse of a samurai in the wood near the Gate. A Shinto monk reveals that he saw a samurai travelling with his wife. Both the woodcutter and the monk are called to Court where a third character, a bandit called Tajōmaru claims to have raped the samurai’s wife and murdered the samurai through trickery and deceit. However, the samurai’s wife claims that Tajōmaru the bandit had run away after he raped her.

The samurai’s wife says that she fainted while waiting for her husband to forgive her. Then a spirit-medium tells the story of the dead samurai. According to the medium’s interpretation, the samurai’s wife did not wish to take both her husband and the bandit as her lovers and hence have to serve two men sexually; thus she asked Tajōmaru the bandit to kill her husband to free her from her own moral crime and sexual guilt. The bandit was shocked and repulsed by her request and asked the samurai if he wished him to kill his wife or let her off. But the samurai’s wife ran away and Tajōmaru the bandit failed to recapture her and set the samurai free. The samurai then committed hara-kiri as he had been dishonoured.

But the woodcutter claims that the bandit, the samurai, and the medium’s tales were lies. All lies. Such is the human condition. The woodcutter saw the rape and the murder. Tajōmaru the bandit and the only one with a name in the film begged the samurai’s wife to marry him. She refused. But since she had already been raped, her husband refused to fight for her. The wife then urged both men to fight one another to prove their love for her but regretted her request when they began their duel. Neither are skilled combatants and Tajōmaru the bandit only wins by brutal default, not design. The samurai’s wife flees but cannot escape her shame. In fact, it was the woodcutter who stole the expensive dagger. But at the end, the monk’s lost faith in humanity is regained through another simpl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Abstract
• Contents
• Preface
• Foreword
• Chapter One Village Structure and Social Organisation
• Chapter Two The Village as a Domain in Language Policy
• Chapter Three Kampong Lorong Buangkok: The Last Village in Singapore
• Chapter Four Politics and Social Transformation: The Ancient-Modern Village of Cambodia
• Chapter Five An African Village in Perspective: Life on the Edge of the Boko Haram
• Chapter Six Rice Rhapsody: Food and Sexuality in the Singapore Village
• Chapter Seven The Urbanisation of Rural Villages in China
• Chapter Eight From muban to Changwat and the Structure of Thai Politics
• Chapter Nine Pepatah Melayu and Adat Berkampung: Values, Rights and Responsibilities in a Kampong as depicted in Malay Sayings
• Contributors