Author Archives: B Merritt

Working elderly in India

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This post was contributed by Dr Penny Vera-Sanso, Lecturer in Development Studies in Birkbeck’s Department of Geography, Environment and Development Studies and  V. Suresh of the Centre for Law, Policy, and Human Rights Studies, Chennai, India

In just three weeks the Photo Competition on the ‘Working Elderly’ became a people’s research project, revealing the widespread and diverse nature of older people’s work. With nearly 3,000 pictures up-loaded it is a permanent on-line record of older people’s work from across India’s mountains, plains, deserts, coasts, villages, towns and cities – an irrefutable documentation of what older people do and how they contribute to the economy, both locally and nationally.

Breaking coal for brick kiln Credit: Penny Vera Sanso and CLPHRS, Chennai

Breaking coal for brick kiln
Credit: Penny Vera Sanso and CLPHRS, Chennai

So far these pictures have drawn over 25,000 votes from thousands of visitors to the website and provide no hiding place for so many stereotypes of old age. Casual reference to ‘old age dependency’, ‘old age burden’, ‘people of working age’ as aged 15-59 years and the unthinking denigration of older people’s work as ‘passing time’, ‘helping out’ or ‘just…’ are now revealed to be more fiction than fact.

The photos show a huge range of work and could even be used as lessons in ‘how things are made’. The old woman picking cotton buds or cutting cane for brooms, the old cobbler sewing seals for large drains, the old rickshaw puller moving two-wheeler tyres from the manufacturer to the mechanic, the old man breaking and clearing ground for construction, the old gang-men who ensure that one of the world’s largest employers, India Railway, operates safely. The list is endless. And the conditions of work are diverse – too diverse to describe here.

Female basket weaver Credit: Penny Vera Sanso and CLPHRS, Chennai

Female basket weaver
Credit: Penny Vera Sanso and CLPHRS, Chennai

Yet despite the diversity depicted this isn’t the whole story. Most pictures have been taken of people as they work in public view and during the hours of the day the general population are awake.

However, our research (2007-10, 2012-3) reveals that in the middle of the night the elderly are working. To our surprise we found that long before younger hawkers arrive on the first bus elderly wholesalers, porters, hawkers and rickshaw pullers are working these markets in order that everyday necessities are available in every neighbourhood at the start of the day. We also found that the elderly sell tea and hot food to late night workers and suspect that older people are working at many other things while the nation sleeps.

Our research also revealed that many elderly people work in hospitals, schools, banks, factories, restaurants and offices as cleaners, porters, security, peons, ayyas, gardeners and in many other roles, yet they have not appeared in the photo entries so far.

What are the policy implications of such widespread working of elderly people? First, that the working elderly are doing vital work for the country and family. This work needs to be recognised for what it is and fostered. Second, the vast majority of elderly workers clearly live precarious lives in or on the edge of extreme poverty and many are doing work that eats into body and soul. What elderly workers need is a meaningful pension that will enable them to choose whether and how much to work and will empower them to refuse the most onerous and demeaning work.

Taking kids to school Credit: Penny Vera Sanso and CLPHRS, Chennai

Taking kids to school
Credit: Penny Vera Sanso and CLPHRS, Chennai

Photos can be seen at www.thehindushutterbug.com. Voting closes 28 July.

Touching the Book

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This post was contributed by Dr Heather Tilley, Exhibition Curator of the Touching the Book exhibition which launches today (18 July 2013) and runs until 31 October 2013 in the Peltz Gallery in Birkbeck’s School of Arts. Dr Tilley will be blogging at blogs.bbk.ac.uk/touchingthebook throughout the exhibition.

Front cover to James Gall’s ‘The First Class Book for the Blind’, 1840. Credit: RNIB

Front cover to James Gall’s ‘The First Class Book for the Blind’, 1840. Credit: RNIB

I first started working on nineteenth-century embossed books for blind people about six years ago, as part of my PhD research into the relationship between blindness and writing in the nineteenth century. It is a research process that has been underpinned by two, overlapping, concerns: firstly, the question of academic ownership and secondly, the relationship between touch and sight. These books, as the exhibition draws attention to, were initially produced within the realm of the visual: often produced by people with sight, and designed to be read simultaneously by people with sight.

As a sighted researcher, I was conscious of the fact that much of the discourse around these books – the guides, codes, statements and reports that detailed their production and use – was in printed text, difficult to access by blind people (the sources have largely not been digitised in a meaningful way). The embossed alphabet systems themselves – many of them long obsolete – might have little tactual meaning to a blind person in the twenty-first century. The content of much of the early embossed literature also raises a further set of problems as it belongs very much to mid-nineteenth century evangelical culture, with an emphasis on biblical texts and spiritual guides. To what extent is it helpful or desirable to transcribe the content of these embossed books into other formats (for example braille)? As my researches unfolded, the question of form and media became more central to my analysis than content (although there are correlations between all three), as the point at which the important issue of blind peoples’ reading experiences began to emerge.

First page of the St John’s Gospel embossed in Frere type, 1843. Credit: RNIB

First page of the St John’s Gospel embossed in Frere type, 1843. Credit: RNIB

What then, do we do with these books? How do we read them, and what histories can we draw from them? We need, first of all, a critical practice that more clearly attends to the experience of touch, and its relationship to vision in this period. As my post on James Gall’s first book details, and the exhibition explores, touch was frequently theorised as a useful but often inferior tool for cognitive understanding in early discourses on embossed reading practices. This is where the history of embossed literature intersects with the history of the senses, as shifting ideas of both touch (as well as the literary sign) open up the way for experiments and innovations in this area. We might also explore how these experiments in turn affected wider cultural understanding of both blindness and the sense of touch (interest in the hypothetical blind man restored to sight, a key figure in Enlightenment philosophy, shifts to the tactile intelligence of the feeling blind person in texts such as Alexander Bain’s The Senses and the Intellect, 1855). These are the questions that underpin the exhibition, and that I, and other colleagues – not least the exciting work being done by Vanessa Warne and Jan-Eric Olsén – are exploring in other research forums.

Most significantly, what was it like for blind and partially-sighted people to touch and handle these books? How successful and enriching was their reading experience, from both a perceptual and educational/entertainment point of view? Archives recording traces of reading experiences by blind people are notoriously scanty, as it is mainly institutional perspectives (such as correspondence between institution directors and teachers) that were deemed worthy of recording for posterity.

Unknown photographer, Ann Whiting, ambrotype, c. 1850-60s. Private Collection

Unknown photographer, Ann Whiting, ambrotype, c. 1850-60s. Private Collection

It’s my point here that we can learn something about reading experiences from the form of the books themselves. These books invite an affective reading, impressing traces of previous readers in the dirt of the pages, and the worn surfaces of some of the embossed letters. There is a sense, then, of these books as things which have been used and handled. Indeed some books, such as the copy of St John’s Gospel in Lucas type on display in the exhibition that belonged to Harriet Curry, can be attributed to particular owners and readers. It is this that led to the development of an exhibition proposal that would explore the physical and material qualities of the books themselves and invite reflection on the relationship between these books and their readers. Whilst the fragility of the books means that they will be presented in cases in the exhibition, relief images of some of the central alphabets and texts will allow visitors to get a sense of how these books felt to the touch.

Beyond the exhibition and in the UK, the Royal National Institute for Blind People (RNIB) is based nearby and has a rich collection of embossed literature available to consult. And part of the scope of the exhibition blog is to help build up a sense of where other materials are located, and to share information and knowledge about this history. Over the coming months, a series of guest contributors will post about other objects, materials, and collections relating to this history. There is a rise of interest in the history of visual disability. It’s my hope that this rise entails the recovery of more narratives and records about the people who read these books, beyond the hyperbolic – and silencing – accounts we often find in official discourses.

References

Alexander Bain, The Senses and the Intellect (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1855), pp. 346-47.

Public health in post-war Germany

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The Perils of Peace The Public Health Crisis in Occupied GermanyThis blog post was contributed by Dr Jessica Reinisch, Senior Lecturer in European History in Birkbeck’s Department of History, Classics and Archaeology. Her new book, The Perils of Peace: The public health Crisis in Germany under Allied Occupation is published today.

The Anglo-American occupation of Germany is today often held up as the example of how to occupy a defeated country and has featured in debates about the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. At the time, however, the Allies’ attempts to run Germany hardly seemed to be a cause for celebration or self-congratulation. Much of the hygiene infrastructure had been destroyed and the population was in a state of disintegration, exhaustion and uncertainty. The country was divided into four occupation zones, one for each of the four powers of Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union and France, who pursued different policies and different objectives – soon to be at odds with each other. It was at the centre of the new Cold War division.

During the war German public health was a secondary consideration, an unaffordable and undeserved luxury. Once fighting ceased and occupation duties began, however, panics about epidemics turned ‘public health’ into a principal concern. It was became an indispensable part of their attempts to create order and keep the population governable. Later on, public health work provided a means (sometimes intentional, sometimes not) to return former Nazis into positions of influence. Public health was the crucible for decisions on how the defeated population should be treated, whether and how Nazism could be eradicated, and who should, and who could be, sought out among the Germans as collaborators and helpers.

On World Refugee Day (launched by the UN in 2000 to raise awareness of refugees and their plight across the globe) I want to consider the place of refugees as an important sub-plot in the story of the Allied occupation: a persistent, unavoidable and weighty one. Why? By the time the occupiers moved into their zones of Germany, the continent was already in the grip of one of the biggest (in the aggregate) population movements of the century. By some estimates over 60 million Europeans were moved involuntarily from their homes during the war and its aftermath. They included many different types of ‘refugee’: former slave labourers, concentration camp survivors, survivors of pogroms, evacuees, deportees, prisoners of war, expellees, as well as growing numbers of people fleeing from territories under Red Army control.

Germany was geographically and politically central to this movement. To the occupiers refugees represented multiple threats:

  • As obstacles on the roads and transport arteries they threatened to impede the movement of troops, military supplies and, later, occupation forces going into and out of the battlefields.
  • As potential disease carriers they threatened to carry infectious diseases to every corner of the globe. Memories of the influenza, cholera and typhus epidemics after the First World War provoked a real panic. In hindsight this proved to be largely unfounded. But the mass of displaced and dislocated people did contribute to two other health concerns: malnutrition and starvation; and rocketing rates of venereal diseases.
  • Anxieties about the refugees’ threat of civil unrest were also partly born out. In Germany, liberated slave labourers (who soon received the label ‘DP’, for Displaced Person) were known to seek revenge on their former masters, or to try to get ‘compensation in kind’ by stealing livestock, food and belongings. The occupation armies increasingly saw the DPs as a menace and tended to side with the local German population. Around 8 million of these DPs had to be repatriated to their home countries, which brought its own problems, as a significant number refused to go home to countries now under Soviet control. Some were sent home against their will, while others benefitted from the new Cold War divisions and found refuge in Western European countries or the United States.

Perhaps an even bigger headache for the occupiers was presented by the roughly 15 million ethnic Germans, whose expulsion from their homes in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Russia was often accompanied by outbursts of revenge and violence; possibly as many as 2 million may have died en route to Germany. (These numbers are still fiercely contested). Many of the others arrived in poor physical states and with no means of support.

In 1945, the treatment of these different kinds of refugees was determined above all by whether they were Axis or Allied nationals, and in which post-war and (and, soon, Cold War) sphere of influence they resided. German and non-German refugees were entitled to different levels and kinds of international protection. Inside Germany each occupier also had differing resources, policies and methods of dealing with them.

Out of this chaos came the universalising ambition of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (passed in 1951 and coming into force in 1954). It set out who was a ‘refugee’ (and who could not be, such as war criminals), as well as their rights, and the responsibilities of signatory states concerning their protection. It enshrined the principle of ‘non-refoulement’, that is, it prescribed that no refugees should be returned to any country where they faced a real risk of persecution.

It was a document based primarily on the experiences of Europeans, just at a time when Europe no longer was the main source of refugees. In practice the Convention has been applied to the rest of the world, particularly once the addition of the 1967 Protocol removed geographical and temporal restrictions, attempting to make it truly universal. However, today – 68 years since the end of the last world war, and 62 years since the Refugee Convention – the premise of universalism is being eroded. Earlier this year, Australia, a founding signatory, removed itself from the migration zone to deter asylum seekers arriving by boat; other countries have faced significant internal political pressure to do so. At the very least this is a sad reminder that international mechanisms are only effective as long as its members choose to abide by them.

Dr Jessica Reinisch was a recipient of the Wellcome Trust’s New Investigator Awards. Her new project, entitled ‘Reluctant Internationalists: A History of Public Health and International Organisations, Movements and Experts in Twentieth Century Europe’, will begin in September 2013.

[Homepage slider image credit: Deutsche Fotothek. “Muttertagsfeier im Unrralager”]

Mothers, murderers and mistresses: the empresses of ancient Rome

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Professor Catharine EdwardsProfessor Catharine Edwards, Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, will be presenting Mothers, murderers and mistresses: the empresses of ancient Rome, on BBC4 from Wednesday 29 May, 9pm.

Female members of the imperial family, the wives, daughters – and particularly mothers – of Roman emperors are some of the most colourful characters in Tacitus’ and Suetonius’ accounts of Rome in the early imperial age.  Livia, wife of Rome’s first emperor Augustus, and mother of its second – Tiberius, emerges as the lynch-pin of the family – charming, politically adept, devious – and prepared to stop at nothing – including murder – to secure her son’s succession to the imperial throne. Agrippina, sister of the emperor Caligula, wife of Claudius and mother of Nero, outdoes even Livia in her outrageous plotting. She seduces the emperor Claudius, who happens to be her uncle, becomes his wife, then later murders him as soon as her son Nero is old enough to take over. Agrippina, it seems, longs to rule the empire herself. Nero cannot bear his mother’s domineering and eventually has her killed.

Other women, most strikingly Augustus’ only daughter, Julia, and Claudius’ first wife, Messalina, attract attention for their flagrant sexual excesses. One ancient writer describes Julia entertaining her lovers in public in the Roman forum, while Messalina is said to have taken part in a competition with Rome’s leading prostitute and won, satisfying 25 clients in 24 hours – if, that is, we are to believe the scandalized reports of Roman commentators.

Gender and Power in Ancient Rome

I’ve always been interested in the interrelationship between gender and power in ancient Rome. This was a key concern in my first book, The politics of immorality in ancient Rome (Cambridge 1993). It’s also something that drew me to publish a translation of Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars (Oxford World’s Classics 2000), while Tacitus’ characterization of Agrippina features particularly in my more recent Death in ancient Rome (Yale 2007). When I was approached by Tom Webber of Hotsauce TV to research and present a three-part series on Roman imperial women I jumped at the chance.

Piecing together the stories of women

The stories of these women, though gripping, are often lost sight of, even when we focus on individual Roman emperors – let alone in studies of military or administrative history. Can we ever hope to recover something of their point of view? Tantalisingly, Agrippina herself wrote an account of her family’s history, which is now lost, though Tacitus drew on it in writing his Annals. What kind of a view of Roman history did this offer? Would it have given us a flavour of what it felt like to be almost at the pinnacle of Roman power, yet always ultimately dependent on the continuing favour of an erratic and perhaps not very bright young man obsessed with music and sex? Agrippina was probably fully justified if she thought she could do a much better job of running the empire than her teenage son.

Another question our series sets out to explore is how much influence these women really had. Fleeting references in ancient literature, as well as texts inscribed on stone, are pieced together to reveal Livia, for instance, getting involved in the affairs of subject communities in the eastern Roman empire, interceding with Augustus on behalf of the islanders of Samos or advising Salome, sister of Herod the Great, on whom she should marry.

Envy or admiration?

Agrippina and Nero

Agrippina and Nero

The ancient evidence relating to these women is often highly contradictory.  One particular challenge we face is explaining the striking mismatch between literary accounts, which so often highlight these women’s shocking excesses, whether of ambition, avarice or sexual desire and, on the other hand, the coins and works of sculpture (such as the relief shown above, in which Agrippina places a wreath on Nero’s head) which seem to recognize their position and influence as completely legitimate. Did Romans  – and the inhabitants of the empire more generally – resent these imperial women or admire them – or is the picture more complex? Venerated, envied, viewed with suspicion, feared and sometimes hated they certainly provoked strong emotions.

Above all we need to be cautious about taking ancient accounts of their scandalous misbehavior, all those stories of adultery and poisoning, at face value. The Romans often prided themselves on their rugged masculinity; political power in Roman antiquity is characterized as something that is – or ought to be – a masculine preserve. The advent of the principate (as ancient historians term the monarchical regime which succeeded the Roman republic) brought significant political change. In a system where power was transmitted through the family, female members of that family came to have enormous importance. Many of the traditional Roman ruling class, the senatorial elite, resented the rule of one family and focused their resentment on the influence of its women. And what better way to undermine the authority of an emperor than to ridicule him for being under a woman’s thumb, whether scheming wife or domineering mother?

Watch a trailer for the documentary, starting on 29 May 2013, 9pm, BBC4: