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20201003

If a gun is power and I have a gun, I have power. But the power is not mine, it is the gun. It is my gun and I can yield it. With it I become the police and can assume control over others. I make them suspects. If a suspect takes my gun, they won’t become the police. This wont reverse the power dynamic of our relationship, it will only make my gun more powerful. You cannot kill me with my gun, you would only make my gun more powerful. For others to use the gun they would have to reset its memory but this would destroy the gun. This is what the personalized palm print sensor which controls access to Judge Dredd’s gun “the Lawgiver” signifies.

How did I get the gun? It cannot be given to me because to use it I’d have to reset its memory. The only way to get a gun is to make it. All tools for making are of the same lineage. The first tool made the second. And all the tools we now have have been touched by tool before it. But because guns cannot be used for making, and they cannot be given, this would mean that all guns are replicas of the first gun. #ॐ

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20200929

From giving orders to engaging in dialogue: Military norms being challenged at the Swedish riding school (2018) Gabriella Thorell, Susanna Hedenborg, Owe Stråhlman & Karin Morgan. The article refers to past research on riding school activities “[which] has emphasised that young girls develop leadership skills, initiative and a sense of responsibility by being active in the stable environment and taking care of horses”. The role of riding instructors is not researched, even though they are vital in the process and teach practitioners of the animals temperament and behavior. Citing multiple sources the authors underline that “[t]his separates equestrian sports from many other sports; in addition to being knowledgeable about how children and young people learn to ride, the riding instructors must also have knowledge about how to train and care for horses […] Therefore, horse riding can be seen as a complex activity based on interspecies communication. […] The goal of riding is to create a relationship with the horse based on contact and collaboration.”

It was discovered that the riding instructors, due to an economic recession, feel that the institutional arrangements of the riding schools have become governed by the economy. The riding instructors thus feel impelled to change and adapt to new teaching styles – from instruction characterised by giving orders to teaching characterised by dialogue.

Teachers pass on a particular “stable culture” which in Sweden is said to be rooted on military horse handling traditions and animal usage (referencing Riding Instructors, Gender, Militarism, and Stable Culture in Sweden: Continuity and Change in the Twentieth Century, 2015). The authors refer to earlier studies which have argued that military traditions prevail as costs in introducing new models are deemed too high for altering “dominant frameworks”. The international equine industry has become “compartmentalised and entrepreneurial, with a strong focus on competitions”. As riding for leisure has become a notable segment of the industry, teaching practitioners ways to expand their “dyadic relationship” with the horse is expected to become an important part of the equestrian teaching system. This change calls for the development of new pedagogical tools and teaching should possibly rely on a coaching rather then providing “one-way instructions”.

The authors turned to Grounded theory to analyze how ten riding instructors experience these pressures and changes. They offer a detailed description of their interview arrangements and methods, referring to Kathy Charmaz (2009) & Mary O’Connor (2008), among others, as sources for a style of GT which deploys a social constructivist approach.

The constructivist focus of GT is based on the notion that researchers produce knowledge through their interpretations of the informants’ actions and behaviour […] The ambition is to enter the informant’s world and be part of the meaning of the world that is studied through the empirical data collected. Therefore, the result can be seen as an interpreted portrait of the studied world, rather than a precise image of it.

Although their analysis of the interviews feels smart and is very useful for mapping the different pressures which presently effect the equestrian educational culture, I’m not fully convicted by their approach. They’ve interviewed a mass of people in order to formulated a generalized view of their interest. I understand that the volume of interviewees is important for generating an more “objective” view but I think their method produced as much (or more) information on “professionalism” as it does on the subject they are focusing to. I think they were interviewing a professionalism (which in itself is an interesting topic). Learning of the futures, which the present knowledges of the professionals propose, would in my opinion require a durational reading of the professionals work.

They interviewed a teacher called Johanna who underwent her training in the 80ties. Based on the interview the authors explain that “[…] she was initially shaped by her military-style education, but that today she functions more like a coach, being more flexible and expressive in her teaching approach” but I wonder if this change towards coaching is taking place parallel in the military complex too? We are moving from the control of bodies towards the control of desires on all fronts simultaneously. Also the cartoonish top-down sergeant popularized by Apocalypse Now (1979) was never the pinnacle of bodily control techniques the army deployed. In my short experience soldiers are controlled much more efficiently with promises of camaraderie, vague sexual tensions and gossips.

The instructors highlighted parts of the military heritage of horse riding as significant. Punctuality, responsibility and discipline were seen as prerequisite for being able to manage and take care of the horses. Orderliness was also frequently stressed as an important skill, and something the instructors claimed to have learnt themselves during their training at SNECS. In this way, the instructors’ statements indicated that they were ‘affected by strong traditions’.

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20200928

Back in 2018 I noticed that Facebook had autogenerated a “Community Page” in my name (it had 21 likes). It showed my face which they had sourced from a Wikipedia article and they had categorized me as a “local business”. I wanted them to remove it (21 likes felt like a burn) but soon learned that there is apparently no way to contact fb directly, I then ended up chatting with an array of service bots who designated me with the complaint number 244899592919672 and after writing a few candid messages to an AI higher in the ranks of the corporate ladder the page in my name was removed.

A few months ago I noticed that it had reappeared and the old links for contacting fb were not working. I contacted the Office of the Data Protection in Finland, who advised me to send my complaint to dpo(ät)fb.com. They removed the page within a week. The reply fb gave reads:

We reviewed the content you reported. Since it violated our Community Standards on image privacy, we have removed it.

Which is weird as the image on the page is licensed CC BY 2.0.

Are They Human? (2016) Eyal Weizman links climate change to racism. Serres backs this idea too and I think also Mbembe can be read this way: Climate change is a deliberate process, the planet has been made a gas chamber.

Seen from the point of view of eighteenth century colonial history, however, climate change is an intentional project: colonial administrators did not only seek to take control of and tame the physical reality of newly discovered lands, but to engineer and change the environments, including their cyclical climate patterns. […] The term “climate change” was born not with the recent discovery of the devastating effects of global warming but in the late eighteenth century as a potentially positive consequence of the human husbandry of nature.

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20200921

The Horse and Slave trade between the Wester Sahara and Senegambia (1993) James L.A. Webb Jr. argues “that the horse and slave trades fed upon one another and reinforced the cycle of political violence.” and that this process had a strong effect “throughout the eighteenth century and into the second half of the nineteenth century.” He details that horses were imported from northern Africa and western Sahara to Senegambia because breeds in the latter were smaller and less efficient. These breeds were not as resistant to local environmental conditions and were crossbreed with local stock. Webb offers a really detailed description on how people were captured as slaves using horses. The text has a bad stench.

Their greater weight [of bigger horse breeds] meant that they were capable of carrying greater burdens over longer distances. Their larger overall size projected more fearsome power. All were important for the smaller cavalry-based states of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For the slave- raiding of entire villages, mounted warriors typically surrounded a settlement, then burned it, and during the attack ran down on horseback those who sought to escape.

Horse were traded for humans and “[…] the link between imported horses and exported slaves was direct.” The import horses were used for warfare, which produced prisoners who were sold into the slave markets and for “predatory pillaging”. Webb explains that the “The indigenous Senegambian pony was small, between 0-95 meter […]” and that “the indigenous pony was established long before the introduction of the Arabian and Barbary horses […]”.

In the Malian savanna the terms for horse have local language roots perhaps suggesting a longer-established pattern of horse imports, perhaps before the establishment of Arabo-Berber influence in the Adrar.

The article goes into detail of the effects of buildup of the Jolof cavalry. “It transformed the political geography of the western savanna; other polities struggling against the dominance of the center were obliged to follow suit.” This processes lead to the adaptation of the Arab stirrup both in Western Sahara and Senegambia & Mali.

[Arab stirrup] allowed the warrior to manipulate weaponry such as pikes and spears with greater force, using leg and upper torso strength more efficiently than a bareback rider. With the adoption of the stirrup the horse came to be more fully exploited as an animal of war and predation. It allowed for the elite of sedentary states to exercise the same kind of dominance over agricultural communities in the savanna and at the forestedge that horse- or camelriding nomads could exercise at the desert edge.

The River Horse breed in defined as a “spin-off of the desert horse trade known as the cheval du fleuve.” This breed was referred by desert hearers as “haratin” meaning “freed slaves” which I think signifies horses which had successfully escaped human captivity. These breeds were also used by colonial French forces who needed resilient breeds for operations in French Sudan (~1880). If the account of an eighteenth-century traveler Francis Moore is to be believed horse trade with colonial forces was a site of biopolitical combat. He observed that the Wolof only sold studs, the meres were kept and the maneuver allowed them to control the prices and supply of the animal. The Portuguese horses yielded a lower price because their life expectancy was lower not because of the import volume.

At least by the 1670s, the military use of horses along the desert frontier of the western Sahara was well-established. A fragment of Trarza oral data relates that at the time of the jihad of Nasir al-Din ‘every man had a horse’.

Horses were traded for slaves and different breed yielded different prices (Webb cities to testimonies of a price ratio of as high as 1 for 25). Interestingly this means that the current genetic makeup of horse populations in the area of Senegambia could be read as a sort of “receipt” which testifies to the volumes of slave trade geopolitical superpowers were engaged in. The genetic makeup of present day horses in Senegambia region is influenced by slave trade between forces from north (Barb horse), east (Arab horses), trough the ports which Portuguese build and the different kingdoms in the region. Breeds are a historical document.

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20200918

Reading The Horse in the Fifteenth-Century Senegambia (1991) Ivana Elbl. During the period the Jolof empire begun to disintegrate and Elbl is trying to identify the extent of impacts horses had in the process or more specifically “the modalities of access to horses” and horse trade facilitated the Portuguese impacted the process. Horses were present in Senegambia before the arrival of the Portuguese and Arab sources mention in horses as “important status symbols in ancient Ghana”. The word “horse” in Wolof and other major Senegalese languages is derived from an Arabic root (Wolof: Fars, Arabic: Faras).

The local breeds were small and the build-up of cavalry in Mali has been pinned to the import of horses. Elbl underlines that there were important breeds such as Sahel (as referred to by al-Bakrī in 1068), the River Horse of Senegal, the Foutanké and Bélédougou already in the region. These smaller breed (which Western scholars cited in the article define as “inferior”) were used extensively by Mossi raiders. Interestingly al-ʿUmarī (c.1337-1338) in “Masalik al-absar”mentions that Mali cavalry troops (10,000 of a 100,000 strong force) rode Arab saddles but mounted their horses with the right foot. This has an odd link to a question concerning posthumanist performativity asked earlier: What will happen if we mount the animal from the right? Are we mounting a horse or an other beast?

Access to horses could have played a major socio-political role if a rise can be documented in the importance of horses in the social or military sphere, if this rise was directly related to major historical processes of the time, and if the supply of horses was unevenly distributed.

She brings forth research and oral histories which highlight the influence horses have had in West African social and political processes. “[…] both as an instrument of mobility for troops and as symbols of political and military power”. In short supply of horses the Portuguese had access to had made them powerful. Local communities could not breed horses easily due to harsh environmental conditions (tse-tse fly). Which made horse trade important.

Contacts with both Mauritania and Mali would suggest that military applications of horsemanship were known in Senegambia well before the opening of the Atlantic trade. Yet it seems that in Senegal […] horses were rather symbols of power and prestige then effective implements of warfare. […] The ceremonial and prestige-enhancing functions of horses was documented already in ancient Ghana by al-Bakrī (c.1068). […] Horses were an integer feature of ceremonies at the court of Mali.

Offering horses as gifts was a tradition which strengthened social ties and distinguished guests could also be provided temporary mounts. Horse tails were kept in houses and presented for guests as evidence of past horse ownership. Among the “Nyancho” elites in some Senegambian states “horsemanship constituted an integral part of the concept of keya (manliness) and a prerequisite for political and military leadership.” But due to scarcity, horses were not frequently used in warfare, this led early Portuguese observers to assume that horse use was uncommon.

The political and social process that , according to [Jack] Goody, were determined by control over the “means of destruction” (in this case horses) appear to have been in operation […] well before the arrival of the Portuguese.

Elbl believes that horses were used in events she calls “hit-and-run slave raids, which represented both a major source of income and favorite dry-season activity of Senegambian nobility”. A gruesome account is that the price of a horse in Fuuta Tooro was 14 to 15 slaves and by 1460 Portuguese horse trade dropped the price to 6-8. These numbers have a weird link to the Mounted Police forces in Finland who have specified that in crowd control situations a horse equals to 10 ground troops in efficiency. The Portuguese traders were in a competition with the Sanhaja, who imported well-rested and seasoned horses from Mauritania. The Spanish horses brought from Europe were “poor specimens” and often damaged by the sea journey.

“The volume of the Portuguese horse trade is often strongly exaggerated.” Elbl explains that European sources have credited the volume of cavalry units in Senegambia to the supply they provided but the numbers don’t add up. Portuguese ships seldom carried more then seven to ten horses and the documented 8000 Jolof horses would have required a much larger volume of slaves to be traded then documents show. Also, horses imported to the Gulf of Guinea had a low life expectancy.

Elbl argues that “The geographical distribution of the Portuguese horse supply thus could not have been a force affecting fundamental political developments in Senegambia, or more specifically, the downfall of Jolof.” She is clear that cavalry units were a vital factor and that trade made horse use more common. But he credits the decline of the Jolof to to internal problems and the general negative influence of the Portuguese.

The rise of Fuuta and Kaabu, the tho events primarily responsible for the redrawing of the political map of Senegambia and the decline of Jolof in the sixteenth century, had its ultimate roots in the changing situation within the western Sudan, marked by the rivalry between the weakening Mali and the waxing power of Songhay. Factors such as these can hardly be connected with the presence of the Europeans off the coast, or to the European horse supply. In the final measure, however, they were responsible vor the changes in the role of horse in Senegambia from mostly a status symbol to an important instrument of war.