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This past month marked my first adventure into online education. This is my fifth spring teaching university prep courses, but with the pandemic, the decision was made to switch to distance education, specifically Zoom. Teaching online is in some ways easier, obviously: you can do it from the comfort of your own home. But in several ways it's much harder than being there in person. I feel that the main issue is the lack of human contact: I spent the vast majority of my time talking to a screen showing my own slides and a picture of myself. Even as a lecturer, you get so much feedback and energy from the audience that it's really draining to teach without any of that. Another issue I find is that students seem to be less engaged with the class at a distance: this year a lot less people did their homework assignments, which showed in the mock exam. Some people didn't even do that! Distance learning may be the future, but it's not here yet. Even in adult education, it takes away so many of our tools as teachers that I am not very enthusiastic about doing more of it. To say nothing of the way in which it magnifies all pre-existing inequalities.
The entrance exam book they chose for the degree program on social change or whatever the faculty of social sciences officially calls yhteiskunnallinen muutos in English was Dr. Paige West's book From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: the Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea. It's a really good book and was a delight to teach.
Tuomas Tammisto of the University of Helsinki reviewed the book (PDF), and identified a key unresolved tension in it, so to speak:
West gives a very powerful critique of neoliberalism and especially of certification schemes, which seek to solve problems created by neoliberal practices by adhering to the very same practices that brought the problems in the first place. However Harvey’s theories of accumulation by dispossession could have been problematized more in the light of West’s own rich material, as the Gimi are – as she herself notes (p. 246) – owners of their own land and means of production and incorporate commodities into their own moral economy that does not follow a capitalist logic.
I think the same is true for several other sections of the book as well: there's a very well-argued theoretical case and really good ethnographic material, but the two don't always meet like you'd expect them to. I was slightly puzzled by the seventh chapter, where the author interviews several Western coffee marketers, who sell Papuan coffee with fantasy images of primitive Papuans. Several of them explain this away by saying that they have to do this, that this is just how things are now.
Dr. West takes this as confirmation that the advent of neoliberalism changed the way coffee is marketed, and I think she's right; but I can't help but think that there's a real missed opportunity here. Personally, as a social scientist, whenever someone says they "have to" do something a certain way, that there's no choice, I know I've found something interesting that needs looking into. In the earlier chapters, and indeed later in the same chapter, the book talks extensively about virtualism: how coffee marketers produce consumers. This angle is entirely absent in the interviews with the marketers; suddenly instead of consumers being produced, the marketers are simply responding to the dictates of the marketplace. I at least was left with an uncomfortable uncertainty as to whether we were meant to be reading this ironically, or whether the author was momentarily abandoning virtualism to hammer home a point about neoliberalism. Either way, there was a an opportunity there for an interesting analysis, which was not taken.
In her account of the pacification of the Papua-New Guinea highlands, Dr. West drops a reference to James Scott. Now, I'm a big Scott fan; discovering his work made a huge difference to my master's thesis back in the day. I had several thoughts about possible intersections of Papua-New Guinea and his work, but the biggest one is that I think the role of the state in coffee in Papua ends up being somewhat neglected in the book. We hear quite a bit about the Australian state's activities during the colonial period when they were in charge of Papua-New Guinea, but after independence, the focus of the book shifts to neoliberalism and global capitalism, which is certainly necessary, but the state drops out of the picture.
In one of the chapters, we had a look at the economic programs envisioned for an independent Papua-New Guinea, that stressed development on national terms. What happened to all that, and how did the state then end up running an economy driven so strongly by mining in Bougainville that the rebellion there apparently crashed it altogether? We then get the all-too-familiar story of the various international financial instìtutions stepping in with their structural adjustment programs, miring the country in permanent recession. But where was the Papuan state in all this? In general, the "development state", the idea that the state's job is to ensure economic development, is a thread that runs through the history of coffee in PNG. I think the overall argument of the book would have been made even stronger by highlighting that the British-Australian colonial state, the independent Papuan state and the structural development programs are a continuity of Scottian "schemes to improve the human condition" forced on the people of Papua-New Guinea. In a sense, isn't that what coffee certification is as well?
This is part of my fundamental disagreement with the various Marxist-derived world system analyses: they generally tend to neglect the state. Obviously for Marx himself, the state was simply a tool of class interests, and this carried over into the work of his followers. As a military historian, it's quite difficult to accept a worldview in which the state is elided from politics and the economy. I think we can see the influence of this in the way that we treat climate change as a global, corporate and individual problem, but seem to really struggle with treating it as something fundamentally driven by the development state.
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In addition to the prep course, I will say I've got a bunch of painting done! I finally finished painting Star Wars: Rebellion, a project I started in the summer of 2018 and that got me back into all this nonsense in the first place. I also finished a Renegades and Heretics detachment and some Custodians, all of which were a lot of fun. I've referred back to my new year's resolution to actually finish projects several times, but I feel like it's made a difference, and it's made me feel better about my hobbying.
We also got the news that there's going to be a new edition of Warhammer 40,000 again, amd to be honest, I really don't care. We've played eighth edition a couple of times, it's been fun; I'm sticking with it. So far, I've played 2nd, 3rd and 8th edition; maybe that means I'll eventually cave, play 9th ed and then get back to this in what, 15th edition?
We also started playing Here I Stand by email, which has been very interesting. As I write this, we're in the middle of the second turn; a report on the first turn is here. We're currently almost managing a turn a month, so unless the game ends surprisingly early, we may be at it for quite a while...
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Anyway that's it from us for April and May. I have a whole bunch of lecture courses arranged for next fall; it'll be interesting to see if we can actually make them happen, or if I'll be doing more Zooming. Again, I hope everyone's staying safe and healthy.
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