Blockchain Papers

Michael M. J. Fischer

Bock, Stephen. 2018. Translations of urban regulation in relations between Kigali (Rwanda) and Singapore. xiii + 338 pp., figs, tables. Zurich: LIT Verlag, 2018. Hudani, Shakira E. 2024. Master plans and minor acts: repairing the city in post-genocide Rwanda. 258 pp., figs. Chicago: University Press, 2024. $32.50 (paper). Shearer, Samuel. The Kigali model: making a 21st century metropolis. Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 2017. Three recent ethnographies of Kigali's urban planning and development provide a welcome addition to a long tradition of such ethnographies, including Lisa Redfield Peattie's famous fieldwork in the planning of Ciudad Guayana (1968; 1987), Grace Goodell's ethnographic account of the disjunction between planning offices in Tehran and the urban settlements (sharaks) of the Khuzistan Development Project modelled on the Tennessee Vally Authority (1986), and Gökce Günel's ethnographic analysis of the disjunction between plans for, and implementation of, Mazdar City and Mazdar Institute in Abu Dhabi (2019). Kigali, often dubbed ‘the African Singapore’, provides a model for thinking about new urban formations in Africa and elsewhere (see Pype, Adunbe & Fischer 2025), the circulation of planning consultancies, and the key social issues of dealing with informal settlements, overcrowding, and rights to the city. Having worked in Singapore for the past decade or so, I was long interested in the claim of the Singapore consultancy, and town planning agency within Singapore (Surbana), to have provided the planning for Kigali as well as a number of other cities in Africa. It was one of several initiatives to sell Singapore's expertise (industrial parks in China; port management in Turkey). A two-week intensive visit to Rwanda, including to its new district hospital and University of Global Health Equity in Butaro, a poor region of the north – both initiatives of the anthropologist Paul Farmer and Partners in Health – in the company of Dr. Aalyia Sadruddin (a long-time ethnographer in Rwanda whose network gave access to several of Rwanda's strategists), enhanced my desire to further ‘read for the ethnography’. ‘Reading for the ethnography’ is my slogan for creating a detailed empirical basis for theory building, evaluation of ethnographic writing, cultural critique, and the transnational circuitry of post-globalization. Reading for the ethnography is the ‘ground-truthing’, or finer grained precision, of claims of theory, just as aerial photography requires on-the-ground verification and often alternative understandings: What is the evidence? How well does the text demonstrate linguistic and cultural competence in eliciting emic accounts? Are there other accounts in the literature, other histories of the specific places, or alternative explanations? In the present comparison of three ethnographies of the same city and administrative structures, I pay attention to the ethnographic facts that each adduces that I can use to create a mosaic understanding of different parts of the city, different local histories of settlement and redevelopment, and different evolving plans versus local resistance or counter-movements of residents, and how the interlocutors and informants evaluate, complain, or take advantage of changing effects of city planners, global financing, and of organic incremental growth and ad hoc solutions. The three ethnographies are not quite like the elephant and the three blind men, but they present remarkably different accountings of how, where, and when things happened, even if at some points they draw upon similar generalizing language about financial and administrative logics and forces. I am interested in the way their empirical ethnographic materials complement each other to create a baseline for further inquiry – on Kigali, but also for comparative work across cities that face similar (but locally different) problems. I emphasize the ethnographic history of Singapore itself to counter the cliches, again looking for the precise ethnographic and historical evolutions in its experience, and the role of the Surbana town planning consultancy in Singapore and as it attempts to sell its experiences and expertise elsewhere. Writing about Kigali in transition must negotiate visionary ambitions and promissory publicity together with ‘ground truthing’, tracking emergent forms of social organization and struggles for rights to the city, along with gender relations, and visions of the good life. The three ethnographies proved to be quite different in focus and evidentiary basis. Stephan Bock embedded himself in the urban planning ministries of Rwanda, and at the Surbana consultancy offices in Singapore, to examine the role of Surbana's master plans and building regulations for Kigali. Samuel Shearer embedded himself in the street vendor markets and informal settlements looking to how their residents try ‘to defend their collective resources against the liquidating processes of speculative urbanism’ (p. 5). Shakira Hudani focuses on three types of resettlement areas to which people evicted from informal settlements are moved. As the terms ‘master plans’ and ‘speculative urbanism’ indicate, the forces are not merely local or contained within nation-states, but are imaginaries and financial forces circulating the globe. Kigali, Shearer suggests, has joined Singapore to be ‘on the forefront in a revolution of how cities are managed, lived, and imagined everywhere’ (p. 5). But Shearer is also an excellent guide to resistance and pushback from the people being managed. He takes a critical view of the master plan process ‘written by consultants in Singapore, funded by multinational investment corporations, to be exported from Kigali’ (p. 5). The ‘world class city’ for him does not actually produce the built environment it promises, but, ‘by activating global networks of capital and expertise with a compelling visual narrative about a city's future potential’, subverts the tactics available for use by the less advantaged city residents to have a stake in the city (p. 5). He claims the ‘international team of managers and consultants have “liberated” planning from the political and economic relations that paralyze planners in other cities’ (p. 5). His own excellent ethnography shows otherwise, or at least that it is not the whole story. Following Michael Goldman (2011), he asserts that the goals of ‘speculative urbanism’ are to create real estate investment opportunities. But, as Bock points out, money is required to build a city, and money-strapped Rwanda needed private-public investment to generate urban budgets but also ways to extract money from, and give ownership to, its own population. As Beng-Huat Chua, Singapore's leading sociologist and loyal critic, demonstrates, the housing mechanism in Singapore built the state through forced savings that the state could then leverage (Chua 2024). Rwanda, too, has a state mechanism to shape investment and growth: the national pension program (eligibility is paid contributions for fifteen years). Construction, in large part, is financed by three state-connected funds (Goodfellow & Smith 2013). Rwanda's political-administrative structure of districts, sectors, cells, imidugudu (the smallest formal unit of a hundred or so households) and an informal nyumbacumi (person overseeing ten households) is analogous to the organization of Singapore's People's Action Party's voluntary organizations and community centres built into housing estates (though not down to the same formal degree of ten households). Goodfellow and Smith provide an overview of the struggle to organize the city of Kigali between 1994 and 2000, and to prevent the race riots that Singapore experienced in its early days of independence and government consolidation. What is often called the ‘Singapore model’ is just one element of planning and design in a complex process of ‘from third world to first in one generation’ (in Lee Kuan Yew's famous tag line for ‘the Singapore Story’) or from low-income to middle-income country (in Paul Kagame's). Shearer, while criticizing aspects of Singapore's consultancy in Kigali notes that the whole idea was that the plan should pay for itself by attracting foreign capital. Furthermore, ‘what is called the Singapore model’ is ‘not because it follows that city's transformation, but because it conjures an idea of what global “city-ness” should look like, with Singapore as a reference’ (p. 131). The conjuring, he says, is ‘what Surbana sells’. It has sold ninety master plan projects in thirty countries mainly in Asia and Africa. These are promissory visions, and become integrated as one layer in cascades of implementation, with all the contingencies, blockages, and redesign involved. ‘Participatory planning’ is a buzz-word component (one that Lisa Redfield Peattie championed) but that Shearer points out in Rwanda today is often really participatory expropriation, letting coops and associations ‘purchase their own property and take out loans to develop that property’, often against the will (or lack of choice) of the participants (p. 139); a harsher version of the ‘forced savings’ that Beng-Huat Chua describes for Singapore. So how did this process get started? Here Bock is helpful. Pundits, Bock says, regularly give Rwanda good marks for economic development and bad marks for authoritarianism and human rights violations. But such binaries, he argues ‘do not help to disentangle the complexity of relations and interactions’. He calls for multi-locale and multi-scalar ethnographic approaches. He watched Kigali develop from 2006 when there were only a few hotels and government buildings taller than a single storey, no traffic lights, and only mini-buses for public transportation. By 2011 there were cleared areas waiting for redevelopment, traffic lights, and larger buses. In the immediate post-genocide years, emergency attention had to be given to the city, of the and and of and is an to the early of Singapore, both urban that the and were and people were into Kigali had and and City a as well as city master plan for a master plan with some from the and The first Kigali Master was by the consultancy in Singapore's Surbana was in to a master and in The dubbed Kigali Kigali as Bock and with a street of and of Shearer is for the he and Bock with real the focus with residents, and building a that had to work there were no real or have had in the in 1994 and the of the a of urban out from a public and into and with community and to on the informal settlement the markets as to be and paid and the settlements needed and use But a master plan is not just a it is a to a new city did some detailed planning for and building In an of of Kigali's But how to Bock to Singapore and in were to Singapore, and In Surbana the for detailed planning of Kigali's and A Surbana was within the Kigali planning (the Surbana of Kigali in to it to the plans and to the an to on as and a way for to from their to their be in the master were about the in the of housing needed and that into or housing than Beng-Huat Chua, in ‘Singapore as model’ (2011), that the model be only can The Singapore government of the and could and with a good Singapore could in the to or in the financial this to Surbana as claims to have planning projects in thirty countries (in and and In Singapore it has create of a In Rwanda, the structure of the political was from the in which the were given of with the to be and and work were not the and in the state to the city was not people their were Bock were in to by were to produce and But in the and early global and and a provides an that in the and from to for the of and the development of this the with and with and Bock a government a country such as the only is that of a that can and the economic some from the and the key was as of the was today in the so, a key focus was to use consultants for and but Singapore, with an that had to become participants in the planning not just of Paul in had a of to plan the development of the country from to middle-income by in 2000, a team to to about of A was to Rwanda for from the which also from countries to create a The Rwanda Development the of the Development of was to as a for Rwanda's in the global of the for The Rwanda The Development and for on to and to focus on urban use and master Hudani argues that the planning of a state is to a of social issues of rights to the city, and incremental of and social argues that one Rwanda as a of urban the was the in when the in a of and again today with the of and in and claims upon of three different and types of development Shearer that three urban are each and the urban of the built and social have the of urban and visual to and housing of are on to with on-the-ground with the people could help such in with in all three ethnographies, but to the Singapore are accounts of to as of a national to human capital. 2000, Singapore funded for and at and the of the or their own have to a number of for and have funded to and and along with multinational Rwanda is to The new and University of Global Health Equity in with and the is to provide for and across the African like the of and of the University of Rwanda in Kigali, were built with local and attention to the Kigali's economic the for (one of the of the against to an and development to provide for countries in the African the first such on the African 2024). also – of the of but to the focus on the urban planning – are of Singapore, this the on and parks on and in was an economic an plan by of & Rwanda, it the from through and the it has through the ethnographies to emergent forms of social and struggles for rights to the city, a of historical relations are a and history that further account of street and of and also of an African of that and forms of are the Rwanda has the of in than other as well as a number of government Shearer, a with a of by a local at and were to prevent from a by a street to pay a to local or community are to and but, in this not only was the but the the city's master which and the for The not only the but called a as the were the the work community the of the is a of produce and sell of produce that they have or on from or and on the in the world in and are locally and sold as in are then or by and as than as or are called is in this is than which there is also a or of into and of and and The street have their own so each or to use the to pay down are single with each and often of making a and by the that pay less than or for and in the some for were to the Shearer says, narrative of Kigali as an state with a that the and of is (p. The the the and The to down for a for a few and then the city, street informal settlements, and are a and and Shearer, the that stake for urban residents in the century is how to defend collective resources against the liquidating processes of speculative urbanism’ (p. Shearer provides and of informal settlements in of were and by the and The had to but only for the not the which it to the the and work people to to what they The residents also their own to the were just and to a new housing by the pension ethnographic is of the or of Kigali are called by their but by of other famous informal settlements (or or are or things and in in the (in poor Shearer is for the and which he by the had become he the development state of was for of the the and could well from the and with foreign and and a of and and In the In the Rwanda from The were by It Shearer says, the of the and for and from the city to out the some to the as a to use against the (p. Shearer the of the street and but he is no that their tactics of and are a real alternative He describes the in of the built in and of other such in an to into new in from their and for than In a ethnographic he describes the of the to provide to informal settlements such as on Kigali. by a (the by the to the Rwanda the residents the for the state the and the also further residents have to to the and for The of capital for that can provide no is not to Rwanda. Shearer at one in that urban development in Kigali about social and about a by a (p. and that this has political and financial resources (in their transnational network of managers and to to their speculative (p. he how could a city be and built within the of Hudani provides of three types of to people from informal settlements to way for new to a new housing complex an urban attracting investment at the of or informal settlement and model a of and shows the of and needed for urban and as with for and and the of and districts, and on a that the master plans residents of were to or their which they had built from of then with and then with as they for the state to and resettlement to to a built housing estate or a settlement to, of their and was really The new were and the unit was the could not get terms from the Rwanda by the because it not as or about to be housing not with they were being housing in for first with people that provided that be in the was for a development by a investment A of property hundred in for a settlement the new to down their own in a of that also in the when the state to organize into settlement and new building such as of The residents of the of urban in as by the the same that the against is from the and to from the As Hudani ‘the political that Kigali's is by the use of the state of to give an of is that the of of urban and to the than informal settlements with and as in and in other cities in which and informal building to political for and into the city, Hudani says, the master plan the informal settlement for investment by transnational capital. Hudani describes as to the street at the and the when there were and and and some provided a social of collective life. As built to leading to The urban of just the and the the of Kigali, and of the 1994 were It has become a new of In the the from the and elsewhere to and to get to work as the for settlement of the (in and and were are Hudani that the of the in in 1994 the large number of from elsewhere. is an urban a of new by a new in financed by with a of by as well as a new and (in a government with and the a and a The and other new are by the of the Singapore Authority The on the way to the is being by it will in A and in other model all and administrative can be has to this also help create between districts, and countries to the of cities in investment and Rwanda is to be the to The was to districts, and were to and on provided and Hudani there are paid by and by the national as well as local are by to on with – to and Hudani called and by the is by cities to Hudani the urban poor are from to in of and with new building and are the poor whose is and for or for and are in new housing and The third of is the model was in as of a Development at first in of a and built of with by the program to the of such were to be built by 2024. is the that and foreign are to Hudani calls it a the is not the is to from they or for their and to was a resettlement for It was as being a of by and modelled on or in in the in the and and had similar as did development state In Hudani or was to Rwanda and other African The was to in and of people from different In that between and a people households) were to imidugudu to the into and to the social organizations of Hudani to the but which also could resistance to state Hudani that experienced forced and were to their own and to imidugudu settlement building materials in The the complexity of claims to and in by people or into imidugudu is not but it the model is an to the and to three it is also not how the goals of are Hudani Rwanda a by from The of the is claims that in of the in and were The of Bock, Shearer, and fieldwork as and a of and processes in urban as well as political or economic Singapore's Surbana was to Kigali, and Singapore an in in of urban in in attracting foreign and in use of of and into not only but also to or both as a and as a while to from or or into and such as and provide into local and as such as account of resistance to and of local points in to informal of Singapore, and can the of and at The the and of the Kigali in a poor projects demonstrate Rwanda's and they can be about He also the as a model for a to Bock shows how that investment can be and to prevent capital from are not only the of housing in social or and Singapore, but also the of social for in 2024). are – and – through private-public or incremental from to as in in and in The is in the struggle and was given the to versus the that try to the rights to the city and the of that provide an urban economic the Singapore but not its social The three ethnographies of Bock, Shearer, and Hudani provide three different the and city’ to about the circulation of and consultancies, as well as struggles to rights to the city, a not only of social but of cultural and social and Michael Fischer is in the and of and and at the Institute of as well as a in Global Health and at He is of ten including on between and to between and and in the on theory as with of and the and in the on Singapore and of and the of and and and on and cities in Africa. He a at Duke University so He has a of on and in and and an with and an anthropologist of Rwanda on as

Akash Sajikumar

This article is an interview conducted by the author with Anwesh Sahoo who is a visual designer, technical and non-fungible token (NFT) artist, the first Indian recipient of the Troy Perry Medal of Pride for compassionate activism, the youngest winner of Mr Gay World India and the creator of The Effeminare. Through their conversation, the article touches upon a range of aspects of queer fashion, including cyber fashion, digital drag, representation of masculinity and femininity, and its varied significances within the cultural context of India.

Donald C. Weber

For Jews of a certain age who grew up in New York during the tail end of its Jewish gastronomic heyday—in my experience, the late 1950s through the ’70s—and who dream of sizzling potato pirogen and the aroma of gorgeous cheese blintzes surrounded by generous dollops of pillow-smooth sour cream, the graphic artist Ben Katchor’s deeply personal, exhaustively researched cultural history, The Dairy Restaurant, is required reading and viewing.Fans of Katchor’s brilliant graphic archive (his achievement was recognized by a MacArthur “genius” award in 2000) have been hungering for The Dairy Restaurant to appear since the volume was announced about fifteen years ago. Katchor’s was among the first titles listed in the inaugural Nextbook Jewish Encounters Series, guided by Jonathan Rosen, a publishing venture devoted to re-thinking the range of Jewish cultural history by inviting well-known scholars and artists to explore a particular area or historical figure of their own choosing. After years of Katchor’s rummaging the archives and ruminating over the rich history of the dairy restaurant, his Jewish Encounters volume has, at last, arrived. In the words of fellow cartoonist Mark Newgarden, The Dairy Restaurant amounts to “a bountiful steam-table of history, myth, religion, biography [and autobiography], sociology, linguistics, hard data, speculation, obsession, digression, confession, eyewitness recollection and imagination” (Katchor 2020b).A Brooklyn-born walker in the city, Katchor’s Jewish soul vibrates in solidarity with New York’s early and mid-twentieth-century luftmenschen, its tribe of traveling Jews who somehow survived on the margins, doing business. Above all, Katchor is obsessed with the residues, the remnants of urban life on the threshold of vanishing. “I’m fascinated,” he explained in a 2004 interview, “by watching people disappear from the scene” (2004).A Katchor strip is immediately recognizable. Drawn in various shades of grey wash, it captures the surreal edges of the city, revealing fantastic liminal spaces inhabited by forlorn, unmoored Jewish souls, barely hanging on. Like his most famous graphic invention, the real estate photographer Julius Knipl, Katchor peers into every shadowy crevice, his eye tracking the ephemeral, quirky zones of city life, absorbing what he terms “the pleasures of urban decay.” The critic Anthony Grafton observes, Katchor “teach[es] us to see with new eyes the fragments of an older New York” (2001). “Most of New York is in my memory,” Katchor has acknowledged. Resisting the pull of nostalgia, Katchor confesses that he “has no yearning to live in the past”; he has no desire to return to a sepia-toned New York saturated with the sounds and smells of early twentieth-century East European immigrant Jews because, he claims, “The layers of history I see walking the streets of Manhattan are deep enough” (2004). Katchor’s subject, his structure of feeling, is thus the city’s subterranean history. Jewish memory flows through him; his assignment is to channel New York’s Jewish spirit, to convey, in words and drawings, its yiddishe tam: its taste, its flavors.To understand the largest cultural meanings encoded in the dairy restaurant’s genealogy, Katchor begins in the beginning (so to speak), in the “vegetarian-based,” pastoral Garden of Eden, “a defunct eating place that one can only know from memory” (25). Katchor mavens will no doubt recall his wry allusions to the paradisaical origins of a dairy world drawn in previous strips. For example, walking the city, Knipl comes upon the “Garden of Eden Cafeteria.” This ur-dairy emporium should not be confused with the legendary Garden Cafeteria (closed 1983) on the corner of Rutgers Street and East Broadway, where I. B. Singer always ordered the rice pudding (65 cents, according to the menu Katchor reproduces) and whose iconic sign is now embedded within the interior walls of the Eldridge Street Synagogue. An ad for “Golden Calf Brand Pot Cheese” appears in another panel.1 Perhaps it’s a potential (if hilariously ironic) menu item for one of the future milkhedike (milk-based) eateries along Second Avenue; or, possibly, it is Katchor’s sly prophecy to fleyshik (meat)-inclined, backsliding meat worshippers: a rebuke to those unchosen Jews who will never be able to order “pot cheese with sour cream” for 40 cents at Steinberg’s Dairy Restaurant (2270 Broadway, between 81st and 82nd street; closed 1969) in the future Promised Land of New York City, the Zion of dairy cuisine.The Dairy Restaurant thus performs a loving act of ethnic-gastronomic-institutional recuperation, the fulfillment of Katchor’s long-nourished, decades-long project to mine the layers of Jewish history sedimented in the story of this uniquely Jewish American eatery. Katchor traces the advent of dairy from its pastoral origins in Eden to the peripatetic world of traveling Jews, precursors of Knipl, who worried, while on the road, whether their meals were prepared by observant landsmen according to the rules of kashruth. “Who’s in charge of the food?” (74) was, perhaps, the most urgent question when a Jew arrived at a place to eat and rest for the night. Was the Mosaic prohibition concerning the mixing of milk and meat being observed? What could a traveling Jew safely eat without transgressing the taboo, “Do Not Seethe a Kid in Its Mother’s Milk”? (43). As it turns out, the various options (with daily specials) would eventually be inscribed on the packed vertical columns of milkhedike-based restaurant menus, huge tablets, like the ones Katchor reprints from emporiums like Rapoport’s (91–93 Second Ave.; then moved to Forest Hills; closed 1970) and Ratner’s (various locations along Second Ave.; moved to Delancey St.; closed 2002) listing “the endless possibilities of dairy eating” (143).An avid collector of New York arcana, Katchor possesses a comprehensive knowledge of the various intersecting histories relating to the dairy restaurant; his aim is to animate, through hundreds of drawings, its long-disappeared sites of memory. Katchor’s breadth of knowledge dazzles. At times, however, the sheer amount of information in this thick description can be overwhelming, its various narrative threads hard to untangle; his turns in perspective (restaurant genealogies, culinary traditions, historical actors) can induce reader whiplash.Yet we can only marvel at Katchor’s (over)flowing catalogue of anecdotes, startling factoids, and cultural contexts. In this respect Katchor’s mode of analysis recalls a famous passage in Saul Bellow—who loved the blintzes served at New York’s dairy cafés, and who makes a brief appearance in The Dairy Restaurant—from his 1956 comic novel, Seize the Day. Reflecting on the challenge of discussing mundane things with the self-styled philosophers of the Upper West Side, with whom “you had to translate and translate, explain and explain,” Bellow’s narrator observes: “If you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and earth; the apple; Abraham; Moses and Jesus; the Middle Ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to Newton; up to Einstein; then war and Lenin and Hitler. After reviewing this and getting it all straight again you could proceed to talk about a glass of water” ([1956] 1976, 79).For Katchor, in order to talk about the dairy restaurant, he needs to explain a lot. Here’s a partial list, culled from the almost five hundred packed pages of The Dairy Restaurant: that Abraham, an early example of Jewish hospitality, ran the first dairy restaurant, which was blessed with a good corner location; the emergence of the restaurant in eighteenth-century France; the rise of milk spas, “Milchhallen,” and the milk cure in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the 1908 “sour milk craze” in New York; a list of 29 dairy-related Jewish establishments located on the Jewish streets of Warsaw, as listed in the 1929 Business Directory of Poland (129); that Tolstoy was a visionary vegetarian who inspired Jewish radical sympathies as a “figure of the ideal ethical intellectual” (206); how “milk was covertly delivered to the Warsaw Ghetto by a pipeline” (193) and that the Emanuel Ringelblum Archives, which preserved the history of the Ghetto, were miraculously hidden in large milk cans; that many famous Yiddish actors and writers of the early twentieth century—like the modernist poets of the Di Yunge group, who frequented the Levin & Goodman Milkhiger Restaurant on East Broadway—made dairy cafés their convivial salon of choice; the Kosher Meat Wars of the early twentieth century; that scenes from Martin Ritt’s The Front (1976) were shot at Steinberg’s Dairy, and that members of the cast and crew, many of whom, like Zero Mostel and Herschel Bernardi, were blacklisted in the 1950s, convened there regularly; the differences and variations among East European cuisines and their respective restaurant locations on the Lower East Side; that the original Ratner’s on 103 Second Avenue stood next to the famed rock ‘n roll music venue the Fillmore East, where in 1969 Leonard Bernstein and Frank Zappa dined after a concert; Zappa, we’re told, sampled gefilte fish for the first time, which he apparently enjoyed.Perhaps most poignantly, at its core The Dairy Restaurant offers a topology (or perhaps a midrash, ultimately, alas, a threnody) filled with hundreds of remarkable backstories in blessed memory of long-vanished dairy restaurants, famous and obscure, organized by geographical region, by borough, and for Manhattan, by neighborhood—a granular mapping of virtually every dairy eating possibility in New York.2 For many, proof of their existence can be documented only by the ephemeral remains of matchbook covers (in this regard Katchor is grateful for “the tenacity of matchbook advertisement salesmen of that era” [232]); or extant sugar cube wrappers, modest but still material evidence of a restaurant’s existence; or via ads for restaurants buried in old Yiddish newspapers—like the one for “EatMor Dairy Restaurant” appearing in the Yidishes Tageblat in June 1919, announcing its opening on “84 Nassau St. bet. Fulton and John St. For the convenience of those who have their business or work in the neighborhood” (362). “EatMor Dairy”: a name as well as an injunction, it’s a phrase that sounds like one Katchor might have invented decades later; it may be, however, that the dairy restaurant invented Katchor.The most interesting speculative theme in The Dairy Restaurant, especially for students of Jewish American literature like myself, is Katchor’s idea about “a specifically milkhedike personality” (169), a figure who “expressed the qualities of the dairy culture” (169). Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Milkman is its avatar, a character who “lives in an eternal present” (177), bespeaking “modesty and humility” (86) before his Maker, yet not hesitant to argue with God’s indecipherable ways. Above all, Tevye’s hallmark, the defining quality of his “milkhedike” self, is his “ruminative” nature: modest, reflective, embodying a “milky”-ness akin to the nourishing, life-sustaining foods made from his cows. Later, in the character of Menachim Mendl, Sholem Aleichem would situate his journalist-alter ego in the popular dairy café—a “mleczarnia” in Polish—a recreated pastoral world, in Katchor’s estimate, “a paradise of pure rumination” (193).By contrast, Katchor speaks—critically—of an “appetive” self, associating this personality with meat-eating. In one telling drawing Katchor depicts a man (Katchor tends to sketch men) bent over a table in a restaurant devouring a large plate of meat. Eating strenuously, beads of sweat flying off the sides of his head, he seems driven in an act of mindless consumption, a non-stop fresser surrounded by truncated waiters’ arms pushing plates loaded with various meats at him (271). Discussing his unsavory experience of delicatessens, Katchor recalls, “The walls and windows dripped with sweat and condensation. The floors were thick with fat. . . . To counter the atmosphere of murder and death, some diners accompanied their meal with a celery-tonic soda” (426).In another drawing, Katchor shows two men, animal-like, mouths open wide, scarfing down large hot dogs at a stand advertising “100% Grade A Pure Beef/25 c large hamburger” (298–99). In the same scene we observe “A Vegetarian on Pitkin Ave” passing by. With hands clasped tightly together at his waist, he moves, anxiously, down the street, his body angling forward, his eyes focused ahead, fixed, ignoring the surrounding advertisements for “Kishke King” (“kishke” is stuffed animal intestines, a Jewish delicacy), “Hot Dogs,” “Fresh Killed,” “Blood Bank,” and “Ex-Lax Stool Softener” (298–99). We are meant, it seems clear, to interpret this tiny stretch of Brooklyn as a threatening fleyshik hell of temptation and chaos, a dairy anti-world overflowing with dark, putrid fluids.3Katchor does not investigate what might be termed the “fleyshik”-masculine character in Jewish cultural history; but the recent film Uncut Gems would be a good place to start; its opening night celebration took place, fittingly, at Katz’s Delicatessen, the temple of pastrami and corned beef worship. Applying Katchor’s theory, “fleyshik”-identified Jews act before they think; they’re tough; they eat ravenously; they are ravenous. Katchor, it appears, can’t tolerate their aggressive style, or the indigestion-producing foods they love to eat. Yet Katz’s still stands, a shrine to fleyshik power. Was the milkhedike promise of Jewish New York overcome by carnivores? Dairy, it appears, had no future in the city.4As it turns out, scenes—in effect, discourses—involving dairy foodways, nostalgia, table manners, and the rituals of Americanization abound in early Jewish American writing, especially in various Anzia Yezierska stories and in her under-read novel, Arrogant Beggar in with The Dairy Restaurant, her Katchor’s that their eating by a in the a or a of new world is Arrogant largest the with who her Lower East to the old to open a that the sounds and smells of the A about her this is this . . . This place makes of the where my to to dairy and an milkhedike structure in is always to a of and all the history of his previous back in the is of his in the new world by the For a however, his As a of served with by his he in is what I he the on the I was a In a of the of the into a of from his as a a milk on the Lower East For his memory his with history; was one of the the narrator observes, had of his In his popular Jewish foodways, in Yiddish about “a and you can A . . The was by popular The The and among his own memory of dairy when he in a Lower East for the name of his street, to return In an a of his milkhedike meals he with his as a of his of his of and As he with we a of what a dream of to to on a dairy how a milkhedike character to revealing the the of Katchor’s dairy as a mode of being with its the the end of a to his from the in the city’s the his to overcome the of his and by the with the ultimately, remains his will to the and he be in a his a and the on has been by an from the city’s then some milk and a like . . . then to and it . . . in and dream of his In dairy foods nourishing, In this respect his Jewish as another of Katchor’s the of The Dairy Restaurant the of New dairy history my of dairy deeply about this project over the decades was the appearance and atmosphere of dairy restaurants that in of Dairy Katchor offers brief but of dairy restaurants, their and some of whom he was able to while they were still We for example, about who at Steinberg’s as a in the late in he in we are told, for to of his in in a in the West of the was a figure in took his to the and a to of Steinberg’s biography the of a Jewish American story of East European origins and does Katchor on life the of Steinberg’s in 1969 with the that same of their it seems clear, has power. Katchor not his to the restaurant and in never took him to eat at For perhaps, this is an but it’s that the American the end of the dairy the of my own dairy Dairy Restaurant between and closed In the most of a dairy we the history of and from who their in the old world and the and and opening they in a in after the then for in in they the most restaurant, at in my memory. In a revealing from age how prepared the at the same to the you could through and every not the daily of sour and the of sour “The sour in would be to know The was We made own sour a of sour with the it and it makes sour about the of the beginning they served but as it they it from the Katchor the the restaurant their not to into the business. we it for but they to work as hard as we restaurant work is a hard Jewish in the of the Katchor the of gastronomic there can be no return to a pastoral of dairy Jews have what he terms “The Second the he “the dairy restaurant had to be an eternal in the restaurant of New York it was the end of its The remarkable of their . . was for that threshold in New York history, in a famous of I. B. Singer and the world of the Garden Cafeteria he the photographer that in the of the of urban are deeply but their to an in the man before his roll and of that recalls the a to the Yiddish story by I. out, from the a and his and then the of her with of with the of Jewish history, a of her before The Garden Cafeteria a a place where can on to The Dairy Restaurant Ben Katchor us to explore a rich of intersecting cultural a remarkable historical narrative and graphic took the milkhedike he at the end of this mapping of an overflowing dairy over the for many grateful that Katchor took for the of his decades-long rummaging Yet Katchor his are still in “the history of the dairy he to be hard to to perhaps, to Katchor’s confession, the ones I never I.

Mary E. Hicks

Between 1500 and 1840, ships under Portuguese colors embarked more than 5 million enslaved men, women and children from the coasts of Africa. Despite its position as the preeminent slave trading empire in the Atlantic World, no studies have systematically traced the evolution in maritime investment practices in Portugal and its American colonies which propelled this massive forced transportation of captive Africans. Beginning with Portuguese merchants’ earliest forays into Atlantic trade, on the West African island of Cabo Verde in the fifteenth century, maritime cargoes were collectively owned through the distribution of small shares. Drawing on medieval Mediterranean precedents, these collective, legally constructed partnerships opened early transoceanic trading opportunities to a diverse group of traders, colonists, and mariners, creating a decentralized mercantile trade which diffused profits throughout slave trading communities. Slaving merchants in Salvador da Bahia adopted this collectivist model of investment by the early eighteenth century, converting commercial disadvantages into a prosperous and durable trade which wove together the economic interests of a heterogeneous cross-section of Salvador’s inhabitants—including merchants, their families and slaves, and mariners—within the business of slaving. This article traces the persistence of this financial strategy, and argues that it enabled the longevity of the transatlantic slave trade in Salvador.

S. J. Tambiah

Previous article FreeThe galactic polity in Southeast AsiaStanley Jeyaraja TAMBIAHStanley Jeyaraja TAMBIAHHarvard University Search for more articles by this author Harvard UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull TextEPUBMOBI Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreI have coined the label galactic polity to represent the design of traditional Southeast Asian kingdoms, a design that coded in a composite way cosmological, topographical, and politico-economic features. The label itself is derived from the concept of mandala, which according to a common Indo-Tibetan tradition is composed of two elements—a core (manda) and a container or enclosing element (la). Mandala designs, both simple and complex of satellites arranged around a center, occur with such insistence at various levels of Hindu-Buddhist thought and practice that one is invited to probe their representational efficacy.Mandala as cosmological topographyCosmological schemes of various sorts in Tantric Hinduism and Buddhism have been referred to as mandala—for example, the cosmos as constituted of Mount Meru in the center surrounded by oceans and mountain ranges. At a philosophical and doctrinal level, the Buddhist Sarvastivadin school represented the relation between consciousness (citta) and its associated mental phenomena (caitta) in terms of the law of satellites, wherein consciousness placed in the center is surrounded by ten caitta, each of which again is surrounded by four laksana, or satellites (Stcherbatsky 1923; Conze 1970). The design and arrangement of the magnificent architectural monuments like Borobodur and Angkor Vat have been called mandala (Mus 1935, 1936).At quite a different level, Kautilya in his Arthashastra used mandala as a geopolitical concept to discuss the spatial configuration of friendly and enemy states from the perspective of a particular kingdom (Shamasastry 1960). The human body is likened to a mandala (Tucci 1971), a description that finds its resonances in ritual and medical practices. Finally, mandala designs are printed on textiles or are reproduced in the transitory designs drawn with powdered colors on numerous occasions.My primary interest in this paper is the traditional Southeast Asian kingdoms that are described as conforming to the mandala scheme in their arrangement at various levels. Mandala as geometrical, topographical, cosmological, and societal blueprints are not a distinctive feature of complex kingdoms and polities only. The evidence is quite clear that simpler mandala designs appear in tribal lineage-based segmentary societies practicing slash-and-burn agriculture, and that the most elaborate designs are manifest in the more complex centralized polities of valley-based sedentary rice cultivators (for example, see Mus 1935; Heine-Geldern 1942; de Jong 1952; Schrieke 1955; Shorto 1963; Moertono 1968; Wheatley 1971). But this is a simplification. There are indeed expressions both simple and complex found in phenomena standing between these poles—at the level of tribal polities and local communities. An excellent case in point are the Atoni of Timor. They have named patrilineal descent groups, live in villages, grow maize and rice by shifting agriculture on mountainous terrain, and at the same time belong to princedoms. Their village houses are made to a complex center-oriented design wherein con-cepts of inner and outer, right and left, four major mother posts, twelve peripheral chicken posts, and so on build up a scheme that simultaneously has cosmological, ritual, sexual, and practical ramifications (Cunningham 1973). And, as may be expected, the wider encompassing polity as such is constituted according to an ela-borate design of center and satellites and of successive bipartitions of various kinds (Nordholt 1971).Examples of the elementary geometric designs are the five-unit (quinary) and nine-unit samples. The first consists of four units deployed around a central one, and the second is composed of a center, four places in the major cardinal positions, and four more placed in between at the lesser cardinal points (Figures 1 and 2). In Indonesia, for example, the quinary formula called mantjapat ("five-four") had various usages: it denoted the arrangement of four village tracts around a fifth cen-tral one; it represented the rotational location of village markets in a five-day cycle; it made its appearance in the settlement of Minangkabau land-ownership disputes in that the unanimous testimony of the heads of families owning the four surrounding plots was required (de Jong 1952); it described the headman's council at the village level (in the same sense as that of the panchayat in village India); and it appears (Schrieke 1955) to have been the underlying pattern of the Mataram king-dom during the second quarter of the eighteenth century, arrived at by successive bipartitions (Figure 1, upper right).Similarly, the nine-unit design appears in stereotyped accounts of the king and his ministers arranged in two concentric circles. It also appears in the territorial design of the traditional Negrisembilan polity (Figure 2), with the domain of Sri Menanti in the center, immediately surrounded by four "verandah" (serambi tracts and these again being flanked by four major districts (de Jong 1952). Figure 1: Upper left: The mantjapat. Upper right: The Mataram state—a five-unit system through successive bipartitions (after Schrieke 1955) Lower left: Nine-unit system, showing a radical pattern. Lower right: The king's council, showing two concentric circles.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointHere is the first problem posed by these facts: because these geometrical and radial constructs, traditionally conceived as cosmological designs, occur in slash-and-burn and wet-rice economies, occur at the level of local community and the widest conception of polity, and occur in simpler and more complex societies, there are no prima facie grounds for explaining their manifestation as immediate and direct projections of ecological considerations or the logistical constraints of sociopolitical organization. The logic of their use cannot be reduced to a simple causal explanation. It is clear that if we approached these center-oriented constructs or models as a form of classification, we could start with an initial pentadic or quinary system and progressively build up an expanding series of mandala circles comprising seventeen, thirty-three, and still larger clusters of units.Perhaps the most famous of these complex schemes was realized in the Hindu-Buddhist polities of Southeast Asia that employed the thirty-three-unit scheme to express and organize cosmogonies and pantheons as well as religio-political groupings. In this scheme the king as wielder of dharma (the moral law), as the chakra-vartin (universal emperor) and bodhisattva (buddha-to-be), was seen as the pivot of the polity and as the mediating link between the upper regions of the cosmos, composed of the gods and their heavens, and the lower plane of humans and lesser beings.1Figure 2: Negrisembilan (after de Jong 1952). Bottom: Schematic design of the Negrisembilan polity as a nine-unit system.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointThe best expression of this scheme is the thirty-two myos of the medieval Mon kingdom and the thirty-seven nats of the subsequent Burmese pantheon so well elucidated for us by Heine-Geldern (1942) and Shorto (1963); both these schemes derive from the paradigmatic heavenly scheme of the god Indra, flanked by the four guardians of the world (lokapala) and twenty-eight lesser devatas as retinue. For example, Thaton, the Mon kingdom overrun by Anawrahta in 1057, had thirty-two myos or provinces, each the seat of a subordinate prince, ringing the capital. All these political and territorial units were further linked together by the Buddhist cetiya cult of relic pagodas, also thirty-three in number. Similarly, the kingdom of Pegu in 1650 and the Mon kingdom of Rammanadesa of Lower Burma had their own permutations and variations of these schemes (Shorto 1963).All these Buddhist courts also provided prolix examples of such mandala schemes as the king surrounded by thirty-three queens and thirty-three lineages into which they married, and the like.Following is the second problem of interpretation. The classical descriptions of these Southeast Asian polities arranged in center-oriented galactic schemes were and are accompanied by a certain interpretation of their raison d'etre, which I shall label as the cosmological mode. It is best exemplified by the writings of Eliade and Heine-Geldern (among others), and repeated by Shorto and Wheatley; surprisingly, it is also espoused by Riggs (1967) in his characterization of the traditional Siamese polity. Even Geertz's (1973) trinitarian formulation of the traditional Javanese and Balinese polities in terms of the doctrines of exemplary center, graded spirituality, and theater state resonates with a "cosmological" ontology, which provides the impulsion for the politics in these traditional kingdoms to be the enactment of ritual.The doyen of contemporary cosmological interpreters is Eliade, who for instance in his Cosmos and history: The myth of the eternal return (1959) argues that Archaic Man, as opposed to Modern Man, constantly enacted archetypes or exemplary models in his rituals (as well as other activities), of which the symbolism of the center as the axis mundi is the most celebrated. For Eliade, these center-oriented cosmologies are enacted and implemented by the archaic mentality, not because of any rational or practical considerations but because they constitute a prior ontology and therefore an absolute reality for the actors. in other words, the "sacred" orientation provides the impulsions and guidelines for the "profane" activities of traditional man. Thus, in Eliade's vision, archaic man's "reality is a function of the imitation of a celestial archetype [and this] reality is conferred through participation in the 'symbolism of the center': cities, temples, houses become real by the fact of being assimilated to the 'centre of the world.'"Again, more recently, Wheatley, the author of a large work, The pivot of the four quarters (1971), repeats in his inaugural lecture the same interpretive perspective: "in these religions which held that human order was brought into being at the creation of the world there was a pervasive tendency to dramatize the cosmogony by constructing on earth a reduced version of the cosmos, usually in the form of a state capital. in other words, Reality was achieved through the imitation of a celestial archetype by giving material expression to that parallelism between macrocosmos and microcosmos without which there could be no prosperity in the world of men" (1969: 10).Let me be clear about what i am questioning in the received wisdom so persuasively purveyed by these eminent scholars. My own stand is far from a vulgar utilitarianism or pragmatism in terms of which the schemes in question ought to be explained. one must grant the validity of the galactic model as a collective representation. But what i question is seeing the rationale for this model in a cosmo-logical mode of thought as an ontological priority, which is so interpreted as to constitute a sociological anteriority as well, such that for the imputed "traditional" or "archaic" mentality a notion of the "sacred" is alleged to engulf the "secular" and to serve as the ground of reality.Apart from the limitation that such a cosmological mode of explanation is static and cannot account for either variations between the schemes employed by societies or polities or dynamic changes in the schemes over time, there is the major objection that in these examples of traditional thought and practice, the sacred as such cannot be persuasively distinguished from a profane domain, and that the cosmological, religious, political, economic dimensions cannot be disaggregated. What the Western analytical tradition separates and identifies as religion, economy, politics may have either been combined differently, or more likely constituted a single interpenetrating totality. If, as I believe, these entities under scrutiny were total social phenomena in the Maussian sense, then one has to employ a different analytical strategy from those already cited so as to recover something of their con-tours and relations.My approach, which I shall call "totalization," aims to give an integrated account that is, as far as possible, a true representation of the traditional Southeast Asian kingdoms as extant actualities. But the task is not easy, least of all the problem of translation of indigenous concepts and their elucidation in terms of the analyst's concepts and vocabulary.My thesis is that the kingdoms in question were arranged according to a galactic scheme, and that this scheme was conceptualized and actualized in ways that are best elucidated in terms of certain key indigenous concepts. The most central of these concepts is mandala (Thai: monthon), standing for an arrangement of a center and its surrounding satellites and employed in multiple contexts to describe, for example: the structure of a pantheon of gods; the deployment spatially of a capital region and its provinces; the arrangement socially of a ruler, princes, nobles, and their respective retinues; and the devolution of graduated power on a scale of decreasing autonomies. Other key concepts in the Thai language (which have th eir counterpar ts in other Southeast Asian languages as well) are: muang, which in a politico-territorial sense signifies kingdom/principality in terms of center-oriented space, and of central and satellite domains; and krom, which represents the radial mapping of an administrative system of departments and their subdivisions, as well as the constitution of successively expanding circles of leaders and followers or factions.The range of meanings of these and other concepts will emerge in due course. Here I shall note certain features integral to the notion of totalization. First, there is a semantic overlap and a certain amount of redundancy in the meanings attributable to the Thai concepts cited, although they are not identical and do not occupy equal semantic space. Second, these (and other similar) concepts are polyvalent, and if their meanings are mapped onto a Western conceptual grid of "levels," they are revealed to be, in varying degrees of overlap, at once cosmological, territorial, politico-economic, administrative, and so on.Thus, from the standpoint of the integrity of these traditional polities, it would be a mistake to disaggregate them into the above-mentioned Western conceptual levels and to treat them as analytically adequate and exegetically sufficient. Although not committing this error, I, as translator and analyst, can only give some idea of the totality by showing that the key concepts do resonate with the polyvalent implications that we attribute to these levels. Therefore, I shall adopt the descriptive strategy of showing that the galactic scheme was characterized by certain structured relations, which were reflected at various levels that I disaggregate or deal with in succession only so that later I can reconstitute the totality.My descriptive strategy has two implications, which are paradoxically the two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, because the levels—cosmological, territorial, politico-economic, and so on—have no true analytical validity, it follows as a corollary that we cannot assign a deterministic and privileged role to any of them. on the other hand, because the key polyvalent concepts are totalistic and simultaneously carry those significances which we descriptively disaggregate (as cosmo-logical, political, economic), we have to see the galactic scheme as encoding all the impulsions that we customarily attribute to each level. Thus, in requiring us not to assign priority to any one level or to ignore its impulsion—cosmological or logis-tical—the approach makes it possible to integrate the claims of a cosmological imperative with other imperatives without contradiction. Finally, the approach also makes it possible to relate the model of the galactic polity to certain parameters that define the outer limits of its existence and explain processual oscillations within those limits.From cosmology to political processThe so-called cosmological schemes can be seen dynamically as serving as frames for political processes and outcomes of a pulsating kind. Furthermore, and this is i hope a novel argument, the cosmological idiom together with its grandeur and imagery, if read correctly, can be shown to be a realistic reflection of the political pulls and pushes of these center-oriented but centrifugally fragmenting polities. in this instance myth and reality are closer than we think.Before I enumerate its salient political and economic features, let me provide some factual illustrations of the galactic polity.The kingdom of SukhothaiThe kingdom of Sukhothai, which historically marked the first political emergence and realization of a Thai polity in the thirteenth century (in what is now Thailand), bore the unmistakable marks of a galactic polity (principal sources here are Wales 1934; Griswold 1967).The concept of muang (the Mon parallel is dun) had a range of meanings signifying kingdom, country, province, town, capital, and The most for that concept is that it referred to or as opposed to space, and for a capital, town, or settlement with the surrounding over which it At the widest it was the case that the of a kingdom was with the of the capital The Javanese was that of a with its with decreasing the power of the center the range of its conception of as a space, over which as power from a center, is integral to the characterization of the traditional polity as a mandala composed of concentric usually in number. concentric system, the relations, was in the center was the king's capital and the region of its direct which was surrounded by a of by or by the and these again were surrounded by polities more or that the capital itself was an architectural representation of a Thus, the capital had in the inner core of the the king's and the major and standing by this center was surrounded by circles of with four at the cardinal points is cited by Wales as giving this description of the territorial and administrative of Sukhothai, it had itself from and had in and within a of two its At the center was the capital or by the muang or this domain, the king was in his capital and within it again in his At the four cardinal points were the muang, each by a of the king (and their in by the as kingdoms, were as the of with to the capital province, as by the expression muang The were received from the king and on the same as the capital, the being to with the for and on of of a of units that one in that they of finds expression also those units as the of the structure of a muang, capital or of these are the of the village at the level, the the of the of The outer the concentric the four provinces, was the region of kingdoms, brought under were in a is, in a relation of than direct political as of his kingdom various polities of the and the kingdom of Sri in the and the kingdom of Pegu to the was at best this give evidence of the social of the (and are of the Mon concepts cited the nobles, of the the of the the for the who was also called of the who were lesser to the capital muang and who as of the body of which the of his capital and the immediately the king in of up other examples of the galactic polity, I shall a the constitution of the central or capital region of the king and its provinces, and the between them. On the one hand, there is a on a reduced scale of the center in its on the the satellites the of and in of we constantly in the expanding and of the political under we can the central reality that although the political units in each lesser was a and imitation of the What is a galactic of a central surrounded by satellites, which are more or entities held in and within the of of the we at the other central and their satellites, we shall be to the logic of a system that as a of central points is to the of and of is clear that the of the and with to territorial Although of his of Thai who a a that was on the of had first to for his and then to as of the states as The problem of territorial was to the of of the of was the kingdom of further to the was in the was to the and far to the The under and under were example, and between and in the of the Furthermore, the of and and the of the polities that the capital of the its Thai a of around first to from there to and for up in and there for to Thus, a of ought to us that we must the of the capital as the exemplary center with the fact of a center of and of the king on the or on the of was and to or with the of The of was reduced to a of in and by the were and into the kingdom of polity have in a a description of the design of the kingdom of and the pattern of its political and administrative at certain points in its Here I shall give a of the polity around the quarter of the century so as to the point that although more the underlying of territorial and administrative to the scheme of the galactic polity. Figure Schematic representation of the polity The represents the domain of 1 by of the by of the up the Large ImageDownload is at this time with the of his The pattern was as follows Figure the capital of and its core region or domain, which was into later called lesser were in by to the ministers in the In these were the by the king's of of the of of a later they were called of The that this description were in fact the muang that composed the major of the now kingdoms of and of the same as muang but with a of local and of more or were the of in the in the and most famous of in the provide the best evidence of the and in the capital All and of and their own 1 and were the muang by the of the by of the second these were the central domain from the large At the were the polities, such as the kingdoms of and and the states of and all these in a to there were the and Burmese the the were of enemy and of galactic in their own still more complex mandala model the design of the kingdom was in the century in time were now into four there were two of the first of the second of the and of the under the of the capital. The and also had subordinate to them than to the capital. It was this that was into the and the of and of which was reproduced in the law by I in It is most to note of this in the were to a of and those of the capital, and had the same of but positions, and all of these were by the the from the capital. The such local and in were by the in the capital, with for terms reality from the but that us into the political of the galactic center-oriented concentric of the polity was pervasive in Southeast The Javanese called which various features of the kingdom in the century, most evidence thesis of the galactic polity An of the read in

Garth Myers

The urban-planning strategy of the revolutionary government for the Ng'ambo neighborhoods of Zanzibar City was dominated by a grand vision. Ng'ambo, which literally means Other Side, was slated to become the physical embodiment of the revolution's social experiment. However, the socialist grand vision fared no better in Zanzibar than did its weaker version on the Tanzanian mainland in creating an egalitarian urbanism. Specifically, I examine the attempted reconstruction of Ng'ambo as a vast public-housing project, which was the principal urban program and most enduring legacy of the revolutionary era (1964 to 1977). I contend that this program was not so much a means of bettering Ng'ambo for its residents as it was a way for revolutionary elites to define the area in their new ideological framework of understanding. Denied participation in official planning channels, Ng'ambo residents utilized their own customs and practices to remake the area as best they could, albeit under a set of authoritarian constraints. This study of the Zanzibari socialist experiment in its urban-geographical dimension contributes to the expanding literature on the political and ideological content of cultural landscapes (Western 1985; Constantin 1987; Roweis 1988; Duncan 1990). My interpretation of the Zanzibar cityscape differs from that in several previous studies (Martin 1978; Clayton 1981; Sheriff and Ferguson 1991). The premise is that it is necessary both to understand how the state has utilized space in tactics and strategies deployed through implantations, distributions, demarcations, control of territories and organization of domains (Foucault 1980, 77) and to examine how the residents of Ng'ambo used urban space in political and cultural expression. SOCIALIST URBAN PLANNING IN ZANZIBAR A practical question is whether the program of urban development for Zanzibar between 1964 and 1977 was really socialist. A socialist development program should have five characteristics: state ownership of means of production, absence of a free market for land and real estate, a centrally planned economy, effective one-party rule, and socialist goals prominent in public and state documents (Forbes and Thrift 1987, 2). The stress on common socialist goals in urban policy should involve both a redistribution of goods and services to create egalitarian cities and a decentralization of urbanization to prevent primate-city dominance of the urban hierarchy and to promote regional, rather than specific urban, growth. Socialist goals in the city have obviously varied somewhat according to regime, but the five listed above have broad application. According to these characteristics Tanzania was a marginal example of third-world socialism, because of the steep rise in overall urbanization and the tremendous growth of Dar es Salaam, the primate city of the country. This categorization of Tanzanian socialist experimentation dovetails with other, more detailed critiques (Hill 1975; Shivji 1976; Samoff 1979, 1982; Saul 1979; Coulson 1982). Under ujamaa, the collective term for Tanzanian socialist policies, urban policy called for the establishment of eight regional-growth centers to redistribute and balance development between urban and rural areas (Freund 1989). At best ujamaa was wishful thinking, and at worst a co-optation of socialism as a strategy through which the bureaucratic party elite controlled the economy for their own benefit (Shivji 1976; Mueller 1980). However, these critiques may not be relevant to Zanzibar. The mixture of autonomously derived policies that Abeid Amani Karume, the first president of Zanzibar, adopted seemingly hewed much more closely to the mainstream of socialist planning than was the case on the mainland. Centralized planning and proclamation of socialist goals were accomplished within a year of his taking power. The first postcolonial master plan for Zanzibar City was written by a planning team from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1968; the second was produced by a team from the People's Republic of China. …