Women warriors I grew up with

Philis de la Charce from the public
park in my home town, via Wikimedia
Commons.

JOAN OF ARC and PHILIS DE LA CHARCE

If you grew up in France in the 70s, you grew up with Joan of Arc. Actually, every single image of my first history textbook is imprinted on my mind, but especially the ones in which Joan is hearing voices, meeting the young king dressed in her suit of armor and getting burned at the stake. What's also imprinted on my mind is every kid in the class turning round to stare at me when the teacher said the English burned Joan at the stake. I kind of knew I was supposed to be connected with the English in some way but I didn't really have much consciousness of being anything other than French at the time. I can vouch for the effectiveness of all that 'our ancestors the Gauls' stuff! Joan was my heroine, just like she was everyone else's.

Now I realise I know little more about her than I did then. I learned the Victorian British had a bit of a cult of her for a while though I don't really know why. I heard her story didn't really happen the way they told us at school. I discovered that as French women warriors go, she's hardly unique. My home town of Grenoble sports a nice statue to Philis de la Charce (French link), a woman warrior whose semi-legendary exploits took place in the late 17th Century. Meanwhile, I guess I missed out on Boudica.

Martha and the dragon via Wikimedia Commons.

MARTHA

Martha was my real heroine when I was growing up. Yes, that's Martha, sister of Mary, from the New Testament, the one who was leading an active life. According to the legends of southern France, Martha, Mary and their brother Lazarus escaped Roman pursuit in their homeland and came to the area of France around the Rhone delta. You can still visit a cave in which Mary supposedly retreated to continue being contemplative.

Martha also stayed true to character. She went to the town of Tarascon, close to where I grew up. The people there were being terrorised by a monster known as the Tarasque. Rather than slaying it a la St George, Martha tamed it and led it back to the town, impressing everyone so much they dropped their previous gods and converted to Christianity on the spot. Or so the story goes... Maybe Martha isn't quite a warrior but when I was six of seven I admired her utterly anyway.

Because of the context I grew up in, both the women warriors of my childhood were French and Christian even though I was neither at the time (I became French later). What about yours?

See also:
Girl geniuses I grew up with 
One Who Walks with the Stars, a Lakota woman warrior 
Review of Lucy, the film about a woman who unlocks the full potential of her brain
We have always reclaimed our stories on Anfenwick.

Confronting colonialism: why Brett Bailey's Human Zoo exhibition is a bad idea

Exhibit B - The Human Zoo by artist Brett Bailey consists of a series of caged black actors dressed up as exhibits of the human zoos which toured Europe and America in the 19th-early 20th centuries. It's already been shown in various places including Edinburgh and is due to arrive at the Barbican in London in late September. 

The Barbican says the exhibition is intended to 'confront[s] colonial atrocities committed in Africa, European notions of racial supremacy and the plight of immigrants today' and aims to 'empower and educate rather than exploit'. This post is about why I don't think the exhibit can work as stated and more generally, why it's a bad idea.

The Human Zoo is more re-enactment than representation

We all know re-enactment societies, right? Adults dressing up a medieval knights and fighting tournaments, that sort of thing. But would you re-enact the Holocaust? A witch-burning? Do you think it would be acceptable to form a 'Deep South Slave Plantation Re-enactment Society?' With racially profiled roles? That's essentially what we're being invited to participate in here, with 'us', the spectators, paying to occupy the role of colonial audience while paid actors play the role of our exploited victims.

The visual nature of the exibit and the stage directions to the actors limit the experience to pure display

I think it is perfectly acceptable to study and make culture about even the worst atrocities of history, but I expect such work to steer clear of voyeurism and acknowledge the humanity of those involved. This becomes possible when exploited people are given voices, agencies, backstories... It's difficult to convey those things in a purely visual medium but Exhibit B - The Human Zoo isn't even trying. Perhaps if the actors could interact freely with the audience, tell the stories and feelings of their characters, confront spectators about their viewing, we would be having the kind of experience promised by the Barbican's publicity. But I gather that goes against the stage directions.

The role of 'spectator' is divorced from the original colonial context and constitutes an act of neo-colonialism

While the actors re-enact the role of specific victims of colonialism, the spectators aren't particularly invited to think of themselves as spectators of the same period. It's probably just as well because we're inherently anachronistic. Assuming the exhibition is directed at London in general, quite a large proportion of the potential audience is directly descended from the colonised. I'm not surprised to find many of them actively rejecting the role of colonial exploiters.

And what about the rest of us? I'm might be descended from people who formed the target audience for the original human zoos, but nevertheless...  I'm not a barely literate mill girl who's rarely seen anyone from more than a few miles outside her birth community. I'm a highly educated member of an incredibly globalised middle class. I can imagine why my great-grandmother might have the curiosity to attend a human zoo and the ignorance not to realise what was wrong with the idea. Perhaps I would get something out of a sensitively made representation of the interaction between people like her and people like the victims of human zoos. What I can't imagine is why I would pay 20 quid to go and gawp at a racially profiled subset of my fellow citizens dressed up as supremely exploited historical figures. In fact, I have no intention at all of doing so. Far from being educational and empowering I see it as a mutually degrading experience with no up side.

Why I think this is external to issues of censorship in the arts

As you've probably realised by now, there is a protest against this exhibition and I support it. I hope the Barbican, artist and actors reconsider lending themselves to it. It's true that contemporary art has traditionally been granted the widest latitude to include material many of us find offensive or disgusting and many people feel that is an important role. Lots could be said about the rights or wrongs of art censorship but in this case I have reasons for thinking that debate is irrelevant.

Because of the nature of contemporary art and the particular status of this artwork as a re-enactment, protesting, boycotting or preventing its exhibition isn't censorship, it's a style of participation which would mean that in London Exhibit B - The Human Zoo played out in a particular way. As I said above, we've been offered the role of neo-colonialist spectators but unlike the actors we haven't been given any guidance on how to perform or what meanings to derive from the experience. Given the person I am, I can't imagine appearing in this re-enactment as anything other than a protester and boy-cotter. That's a role which strikes me as potentially educational, empowering and a suitable confrontation with colonialism.

I urge everyone else to consider doing the same. Apart from this post, my further participation is going to be hampered by absence from London, but if the exhibition goes ahead, I urge everyone, protesters, spectators and actors alike to participate by undermining it in the (peaceful) anti-colonialist method of your choice. Peacefully (and artistically) busting the actors out of there and taking them down the pub instead would have been my first choice.

Change.org petition against the exhibition 
Thanks to Yemisi Ilesanmi for alerting me to this exhibition

Lucy (film review)

"Lucy (2014 film) poster"
by via Wikipedia.

It's very obvious that Luc Besson draws his influences from Franco-Belgian comic strips and Japanese manga/anime. Just yesterday afternoon, I was watching an anime which used the 'person morphing into weird black tubes' trope. The question is, can Besson's totally fantastical plots stand the transition to real people and settings?

It helps that his actors are larger than life. Their personalities and presence exceeded the weight of the story. Scarlett Johanssen looked as cool as a cucumber lifting baddies to the ceiling with a wave of her hand. I have a real soft spot for Amr Waked as the French cop. Morgan Freeman also has a tendency to turn up in films I like. In this case, he sounded as if he couldn't quite believe what he was saying, which was a good call on his part. If I could have reduced my brain capacity by about 90% maybe I would have been impressed by the 'premise' of Lucy. As it was, it contained so much random pseudo-scientific bullshit, it's hard to single out just one strand, and poor old Freeman bore the weight of imparting it to us. Lucy herself just had the acid trip of a lifetime. It must be hard to display genius beyond the reach of ordinary human understanding, such that we ordinary humans can grasp it. Yeah...

Was there anything buried here for the skeptical magician to get her teeth into? Well, it is quite impressive how we humans have such an intense awareness of the quantity and shape of our ignorance. In a way, it's as interesting as animal self-consciousness, but less well researched as far as I know. Can a dolphin discern the existence of unexplored land masses and wonder what they're like? Can a symbol using chimpanzee note our use of symbols it doesn't understand? Does it realise that another chimpanzee knows things it doesn't? I have no idea, but we can do all those things and more. No wonder we have a perpetual sense of limitation when we see beyond our limits all the time. And no wonder we're able to imagine the limits being lifted.

How to exorcise a ghost

Please note: this post assumes you have already found a ghost.

The purpose of exorcising a ghost is to get rid of it. Finished, gone, no more ghost. Magic for Skeptics firmly believes that proving the non-existence of said ghost is the most suitable technique for use by skeptics. However, before we get started, you may be interested in hearing how the superstitious go about things.

"Hammersmith Ghost". Via Wikipedia.

Actually, it's common for ghosts to be treated with great compassion and offers of help. Many traditions believe the ghost is only seeking closure on unfinished business. Perhaps it suffered an injustice or committed one, or was improperly buried. If descendants are responsible for its ongoing well-being in death they may have failed to meet its needs.

Alternatively, something may have 'gone wrong' in the transition between life and death. The ghost refuses to let go of life, has become trapped, or it is lost or excluded from the the proper places of the dead. In all these cases, ghost-believers will first attempt to fix the problem, dealing with the ghost as they would a living human.

One form of ghost belief that's hard to approach in this way is the idea that a ghost is not a person but a kind of imprint or recording, usually caused by a trauma. In this case, there might be no moral issues involved in erasing it, but doing so is a tricky technical problem because we have no understanding of or access to the presumed recording medium.

Standard exorcism procedures require access to a higher spiritual power, in whose name and authority the ghost is banished from a place, using words, holy water or other substances or symbols. Similar techniques are used to bless a space in the name of the higher power, preventing the ghost from re-entering.

'THERE'S NOTHING THERE!' or EXORCISING GHOSTS THE SKEPTIC WAY

When it comes to skeptical exorcism, ghosts still come in a variety of types:

The UFP (Unidentified Floating Person)

The UFP doesn't have to be shaped like a person, it just has to convince its observers of its ghostly nature. In reality, they've misinterpreted some other phenomenon or, in a few cases, become the victim of a hoax. Nothing is more satisfying than uncovering a good solid hoax, just like in Scooby Doo. Unfortunately, the skeptical ghostbuster more often finds him or herself oiling creaking doors, pruning over-enthusiastic trees and explaining that Jennifer isn't actually a ghost, she was just wearing a white dress and feeling unwell.

Maybe you think I'm exaggerating about that last one? Take another look at Mister Scary of Hammersmith, London, illustrated at the top of the post. He'd been scaring the locals for a while, but early in 1804 vigilante Francis Smith killed an innocent plasterer, Thomas Milkwood, having mistaken him for the ghost. I don't suppose Milkwood was wearing robes and waving his arms above his head as he struggled home from work, but the fact that he was caked in plaster dust was enough for his murderer.

Tracking down UFPs isn't always easy as picking up poor Milkwood's corpse. It relies on things like reproduceability, recordability, and miscellaneous detective work. And not all ghosts are unidentified physical phenomena. Some of them are definitely in the 'machine'.

Sounds and Shadows

Let's take a quick break to think about what's implied by the belief that ghosts are in the world. We would need to assume the existence of what we'll loosely call a 'soul', separable from the physical nature of human beings. In most cases, we'd require the existence of a kind of 'spiritual ether' in which complex psychic information could manifest and transmit itself to the senses or minds of some or all humans. Worst of all, we'd need an explanation of how these things can be matters of common experience AND resistant to systematic observation and investigation. Even worse than that, we'd need to explain why no reliable model of the universe requires or even allows for such a thing. There are no gaps left big enough for sounds and shadows. Absence of proof isn't absolute proof of absence, although an absence of suitable gaps comes pretty close. Either way, it tends to turn us towards a 'mind of the beholder' hypothesis.

"Brown lady" from Wikipedia.

Phantom Loved Ones and Unseen Presences

There is rich ghost-hunting ground in the believer's mind, although it must be admitted that attempts to demonstrate or reproduce ghost-like experiences in the mind have also failed so far. At least in this field we know much lies beyond our current grasp.

I suspect ghosts manifest because our minds contain models of people. People we know, fictional characters, sometimes spirits and deities. Sometimes, the models take over and run themselves, especially when they concern people we know well or think about a lot. Most people have experienced vivid dreams involving people they know well. We're also familiar with the extreme difficulty we face in 'ending' our model of another person after bereavement. Like a phantom limb, our model of the loved person continues reacting, experiencing and remembering in an overpowering and uncontrollable way. These kinds of experiences quite naturally transfer into a belief in spiritual existences - that's what they feel like.

We also very certainly have 'modes' of being which we use to regulate our own behaviour based on whether we're alone, with intimates, acquaintances or strangers, whether we expect to be under close, friendly or hostile observation. Most of us have also experienced the false activation of one of those modes. We can't reliably sense the presence of a hidden observer, but fiction constantly stimulates our awareness of the possibility. Lots of it depends on our vicarious identification with someone we know to be the victim of voyeurism. Like the phantom loved one, it's an emotionally intense experience and no wonder it's sometimes mis-activated.

I suspect all that's required to bring a ghost to life is to create and/or run one of these modes or models on the basis of a very slight stimulus or even spontaneously. Once a place or event starts triggering a ghost-experience, it will very likely establish itself for that person and spread to others very easily through a process of 'social validation'.

There are probably all kinds of ways to exorcise this kind of ghost but the question for skeptics is the same as that faced by the superstitious: should you do so? In the sense of researching and popularizing explanations of ghost phenomena, certainly yes, but what if we could prevent the occurrence through therapy of one kind or another? Maybe the answer is that the phenomenon is part of being human and should be left alone until or unless it proves overly disruptive or traumatizing to the person who experiences it.

A Doctor for Who?

I watched Doctor Who last night for the first time in... decades? I gave up on the series ages ago, after they tried to go all flash to reel us in. In fact I've practically given up on television. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind a bit of flash when it's part of the way a real person decides to express themselves in the world. I just hate plastic flash, the kind that's created by marketing divisions to try to persuade us they're IT. Any fool can tell the difference.

I was expecting Peter Capaldi to be an improvement over recent installments of the Doctor. His face has personality. I haven't quite got to grips with the rest of him yet but when he gets over his disorientation he might settle down into something watchable. Maybe.

Sadly, my well-tuned sense of the shenanigans of marketing departments is blaring like a bull-horn and telling me he's a Doctor made for the American market. He hits 'Britishness' buttons all over the place in a way never seen on any actual British person, but which seems to correspond to how many Americans see the British. And I mean come on, the first episode was Downton Abbey with a steampunk edge! You can just smell what they're doing. The consequence is that it's inevitably going to be content- and personality-free vanilla candy-floss with no teeth. Nothing else will span the trans-Atlantic cultural divide. And it is looking that way already. The character's opened and shut their mouths and noise came out.

I can't blame the BBC for aiming at a big market but it's been worrying me for some time that what we're doing in film and television has been taken over by a trend towards marketing 'Britishness' abroad. When a culture become 'museummified' in this way, it's basically dead on the branch. A postcard for tourists... with love from the marketing department of UK Incorporated! I might give the new Doctor a chance but I have serious misgivings. It's quite probable that I'll invest my time and energy elsewhere.

Grammar fiends: I'm aware of the fact that the title of this post should be 'A Doctor for Whom?'

Weekly roundup

This week I...

• Moved most of my Loncon 3 posts from Magic for Skeptics to Anfenwick and added a couple of new ones over there. I still have two or three more things to write, then I'm going to lighten up I promise, because it's all a bit intense.
• Discovered that maybe people come to Magic for Skeptics thinking they're going to learn to use dreamcatchers. Oh well, it's a big wide world out there. Coming up next week: How to exorcise a ghost, Women warriors I grew up with and Magical objects and morality in ancient Britain. And maybe Kate Bush...
• Had fun moving in project-related stuff at Anfenwick. Still have to finish.

• Learned to use Twitter. I know... Anyway, okay, what I did is registered with a Twitter account then bribed my teenage daughter to register as well so I would have someone to tweet at. I didn't really learn to use Twitter yet.
• Tried to explain to my family that if we wanted a 'less expensive' and exciting Icelandic/American adventure built around Sasquan next year, it wasn't too early to start planning.
• Weeded the garden and made a chocolate tart. Refrained from trying to write in a four-day window between Loncon and the arrival of house guests.

Cat Out of Hell by Lynne Truss: not so much a review as an investigation into its sources

Content warning for cat lovers: Don't read this. Just don't. You won't enjoy it.

I just finished reading Cat Out Of Hell by Lynne Truss and I liked it... well, I liked it OK, to be perfectly honest. It's not very long, it is quite interesting, and although I kept thinking I knew where it was going, by the time it got there I could never remember whether I was right or not...

But that's not the point. The point is that I instinctively sensed a nugget of historical data buried in the story. Not wanting to include any spoilers, I'll only say there are references to British occultism which I thought must come from somewhere. I Googled various names and drew a blank. Then... (I should point out I was following the same procedure as the characters in the book)... so then, I Googled 'aleister crowley cats' to see what would happen. Google suggested I might be looking for 'aleister crowley cat torture' and it was right. For those who don't know, Aleister Crowley was one of Britain's most renowned occultists. In his 'The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography', (I didn't make that up), he shares this little story from his misspent youth, c.1890.

I must premise that I have always being exceptionally tenderhearted, except to tyrants, for whom I think no tortures bad enough. In particular, I am uniformly kind to animals; no question of cruelty or sadism arises in the incident which I am about to narrate.

I had been told 'A cat has nine lives.' I deduced it must be practically impossible to kill a cat. As usual, I became full of ambition to perform the feat. (Observe that I took my information unquestioningly au pied de la lettre.) Perhaps through some analogy with the story of Hercules and the hydra, I got it into my head that the nine lives of the cat must be taken more or less simultaneously. I therefore caught a cat, and having administered a large dose of arsenic I chloroformed it, hanged it above the gas jet, stabbed it, cut its throat, smashed its skull and, when it had been pretty thoroughly burnt, drowned it and threw it out of the window that the fall might remove the ninth life. In fact, the operation was successful; I had killed the cat. I remember that all the time I was genuinely sorry for the animal; I simply forced myself to carry out the experiment in the name of science.

And there it is, my dear Watsons - Lynne Truss's original source material for her short novel, I'm almost certain of it. It's... I don't even know what to say about it... but at least I still have my hand in.