Self-Organization: Fractals in the Heart of Africa

I'll bet there are a couple of readers out there wondering if I really am an anthropologist given all the stuff about technology and professional development I've been posting lately.  I haven't forgotten, I've just been a bit side-tracked.

 

Royal palace, Logone-Birni, Cameroon (Musee de l'Homme, Paris)

This morning I received an interesting email that brought together a few subjects near and dear to me - Africa, indigenous knowledge, and fractals.  "Fractals?" you say.  Yes.  Fractals.  They are everywhere in nature, art, architecture, and even, as I will discuss, African society.

 

Queen Anne's Lace - Daucus carota - More images at WebEcoist

The email came from a listserve for folks interested in indigenous knowledge that is based at Penn State - ICIK.  It seems that in June 2007, Dr. Ron Eglash, an ethnomathematician gave a TED talk and someone in the forum found it, sent it to the co-director of ICIK, and she (Dr. Audrey Marezki) posted it round to the listserv.

Eglash's talk started out with some background about the history of fractal math in Europe and what exactly fractals are.  "Pathological curves" are one definition used by mathematicians, but really they are self-organizing systems/patterns.  Each part looks like the greater whole - a property of self-similarity, where recursion continues into infinity.  He then went on to talk about African architecture, art, and social organization.  His work, beginning with a Fulbright to explore why African villages and towns, used fractal math to organize, shows that while some of the use is unconscious, much of the use of fractal mathematics in Africa is deliberate.  And the village layout patterns are repeated in the clustering of houses and organization of rooms within homes.  Fractal algorithms even appear in the seasonal cycles of religious ceremonies, funeral ceremonies, and spirit/ancestral houses.

“When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganized and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn’t even discovered yet.”  - Eglash, Designers 421

Eglash then moved on to discuss fractal math used in the game Mancala, wind screens made in West Africa for desert winds, and the origin of binary code in Bamana Sand Divination.  Yes, even the humble code that allows me to produce this blog finds its origins in Africa.  According to the talk, explorers carried the Bamana Sand Divination to Moorish Spain where it was picked up by alchemists and incorporated into their geomancy divination practices.  Later, Leibonitz derived binary code from geomancy.  If you watch the video I've posted below, you will see that Eglash makes the story far more interesting with inclusion of giving out gold to 7 lepers and sleeping with a kola nut.

Dr. Eglash ends with a discussion of how this knowledge is being applied in American classrooms - encouraging black students to connect to their mathematical roots - and how the robust, self-organizing algorithms found in indigenous knowledge could be applied to finding solutions to many of the African continents' problems.



More links:

Eglash, R.  2008.  Bamana sand divination: recursion in ethnomathematics.  American Anthropologist 99(1): 112-122.

Eglash, R. 1999.  African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design.  Rutgers University Press.

TED Profile on Ron Eglash with the link to the original video talk.

Ron Eglash's African Fractals homepage.

• Link to CDST page with teaching applets (cultural design and math).

 

From the Electronic Visualization Laboratory UIC

Great Ideas: Fridays in an African Classroom

I read other blogs to get ideas. One of my favorite Science Fiction blogs, Topless Robot, likes to post really bad fanfic on Fridays (be wary, this stuff will make you really worry about the future of humanity). Now, I'm not going to do that here. However, the idea of regularly posting on the same theme one day a week I thought was a great idea. Since I am an anthropologist who works in Africa I thought perhaps maybe posts about Africa, Africans, and African culture - materials that could be used in the classroom - might be a good theme for Friday blog posts. And as a secondary factor, it helps me save material in one spot that I might use in the future to teach about Africa, Africans, and African culture (which is not some monolithic country BTW, there are some people that think this sadly).

Today I start with one of my favorite videos - Binta y la Gran Idea (Binta and the Great Idea). I used it spring term 2009 in my Introductory Anthropology class as it speaks to rural life in contemporary Senegal. Themes of gender roles, education, modernization, sustainability, love, kin, and what it means to be human are explored through the eyes of a little girl named Binta. The great idea, referred to in the title, comes from her father.

The 31 minute long movie is dubbed, as the actors speak French and Diola. Spanish director Javier Fesser shot this movie in cooperation with UNICEF and the Senegalese in 2004. The film is boxed with 12 other short films and 100% of the profits from the sales go to UNICEF in perpetuity. I have linked to the video and trailer below - both with English and Spanish subtitles. More information about the film and the numerous awards it has won are on the Short Film Central database.

Two stories interweave in Binta's narrative. The first story is that of her cousin Soda. Soda desperately wants to attend school, but her father believes girls don't need an education. Binta and her classmates produce a play for the entire community that shows the benefits of education for both boys and girls. I don't want to give away what happens, but this story does end happily.

The second story follows Binta's father, a fisherman. The movie opens with him talking to a friend about European fishing and efficiency. Binta's father is alarmed at the loss of community and their unsustainable resource use practices. He develops an idea that takes him from the local district government all the way to the governor's office. Again, I don't want to give away the ending, however, it is a surprising twist on the normal cultural exchange between industrialized and non-industrialized cultures. Let's just say that Binta's father proposes a wonderful way to school children from industrialized countries so that they can grow up to be good people. :) My intro anthropology students loved it.

Here is a link to the wiki on Binta y la Gran Idea if you want to know the ending.

English Subtitles:


Spanish Subtitles:
Part 1

Part 2

Part 3


Trailer (Spanish subtitles only):

The Price of Bread - Part 2

"One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise."
- Aldo Leopold, Round River

I’ve had 2 comments in the past couple of days over my bread blog. Both my friends brought up ethanol and biofuels. Originally, I had another paragraph in my blog about the affects of bread increases on local biofuel use, but I confess I had not thought the commodity chain through to the other end.

Here is the original article that appeared in AIM online:

Bakers Put Up Price Of Bread

Damien, an Australian living in rural Indonesia, commented on how people are expressing similar fears where he is living. Food prices will rise as farmers switch from food crops to crops that can be used for food, animal feed, and most importantly, biofuels like ethanol. My friend James, back home in Athens, wrote me a couple of long, darkly humorous emails on ethanol and the price of bread. He never posts this stuff as a comment (hint hint) so I cut and paste his emails here.

“Sadly, the price of bread and most other foods made from grain is going to increase sharply over the next few years now that cars are competing with people for food. Stupid ethanol. Unfortunately, the whole corn ethanol situation isn't very funny.... it just seems like a big scam to me. The positive energy balance for corn ethanol isn't very high, and some scientists say that under certain conditions it's actually negative. Ethanol from sugarcane is a lot more efficient but it's hardly problem free and it still removes valuable agricultural lands from production. As governments increase ethanol subsidies and as the demand for ethanol grows we are going to see major changes in the global food economy..... farmers are going to switch from wheat to corn when possible..... animal feed is going to become more expensive so milk and meat prices will also rise... the US might even get to the point where we stops exporting corn because we can sell it internally at higher profits for use as ethanol. Of course, once the oceans start dying we can turn them into giant algae farms and get our ethanol that way. :)”

One of the points I left out of my bread blog concerns local effects on the environment from bread price increases. Bakeries make bread at a central location for a lot of people (economy of scale). When people start cooking more at home because they can't afford bread, they need energy to do so. Here in Mozambique, that means firewood and charcoal. More people will need to harvest wood, more trees will be cut, and more biodiversity (species, habitat, ecosystem services, etc.) will be damaged. Additionally, since most of the people that will switch to wood/charcoal live in the city, they don’t see the daily affects of their actions which makes it all the easier to live with.

To me, this argues for an increased focus on agroforestry (sustainable biofuel and food production), local production of foods and services (cut down on fuel use, provide work, and ensure some sort of stable food supply adapted to local conditions), and vegetarianism (eliminate animal consumption of crops, this isn’t going to happen but I can dream). Food security, in Mozambique and elsewhere, is not going to get easier under our current and predicted environmental problems. We know the many problems associated with oil consumption, and it seems that ethanol has its own set of accompanying issues. Electricity, while cleaner, also creates problems as the electricity has to come from somewhere. Lots of electricity in the US comes from coal-fired power plants, diesel, hydroelectric dams, and nuclear. Solar, wind, and tidal may be good alternatives - but the scale of their use needs to be increased. Biofuels from crop waste (stalks) or poop could be useful. So where do we go from here? How soon do we get it? And how do we transfer these new technologies quicker to places like Mozambique?

Africa/Afrika - video test

I wanted to test out the video posting capability of my blog. Occasionally, I find video clips of Mozambique (and may be making small ones with my camera) I'd like to post, but there always seem to be glitches.

Sometimes the covers are way better than the original. I really enjoy Tukuleur's cover Afrika (Toto sang the original). Tukuleur are 2 brothers from Senegal who rap in French. The song is on their album Njibinaami (2000).



I hope you enjoy this cover too. It is a little different. The guitarist is good IMHO.

Do you have children?

"Do you have children?"

Inevitably, this question comes up in every extended conversation I have with native Africans of all nationalities, genders, ages, and cultures. To say that children are very important to Africans is an understatement. Children represent so many things - future, fertility, wealth, adulthood...

So how do I respond? I am sorely tempted to lie. People, especially older women, always give me these pitying looks like I might as well be dead because I have certainly proven my uselessness as a woman. There is also a slightly scornful cast to their pity, because without children I am not a grown woman. But I don't lie. "No, no children yet." I always add that yet part, because if I don't they will ask why. This is just as bad as the pitying scorn. The why is so very complicated. And who knows? The women in my family often have children late. I have some time.

Today, I explained a little bit of my complicated personal reasons to the anthropology student who asked. "If you are a woman and want to be a scientist in the United States and to advance, it is pretty difficult to do so and have children." Linda started nodding. "Yes, it is the same here. Women are seen as just factories for making children."

The situation is more complicated in Mozambique, but Linda and I didn't really need to get into the unstated understood. For instance, more than 70% of agriculture, especially subsistence agriculture, is done by Mozambicanas. So women are food factories too. Mozambique is also ranked first in the world for Female Economic Activity (82.8%). The US ranks 58th, with 58.8% in case you were wondering. Let's just say that Mozambicanas have a pretty difficult life.



I'm not sure how many Americans would publicly state or agree with the baby factory comment. However, the sentiment that a woman's role is to take care of children still permeates US culture. Obviously, not everyone believes this. I've met single dads, stay-at-home dads, and dads that share childcare equally with their spouses.

I've also experienced the pitying looks and "You'll regret not having children later" type comments in the United States. Again, mainly from other women. I don't know; maybe I will and maybe I won't. I do know for certain that I am tired of having people, sometimes complete strangers, constantly harp on my lack of children to me. Why am I so much more patient about answering this question when someone outside my own culture asks?

Do men even get asked these kind of questions?

Long Shadows

I've been reading The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence by Martin Meredith over the past couple of weeks. It's been taking a while, not because it is dense or long (which it is), but because it is for the most part depressing.

Independence is supposed to be a good thing - democracy, peoples' right to govern themselves, citizens shaping their national future, etc. However, Martin's work chronicles 50 years of African leaders exploiting, murdering, enslaving, authorizing genocide, and in general destroying African peoples and landscapes. Some of the most disgusting and depressing parts of the book chronicle how my own country supported some of the worst leaders like Charles Taylor in Liberia or Mobutu in the Congo. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, the US government also supported Pol Pot in Cambodia. Then there are all the fuck ups the US participated in politically, economically, or militarily (or are those really all the same thing?) in various countries throughout the African continent in the name of globalization and the Cold War against communism.

Anyway, each chapter chronicles one big man (and his cronies) after another bleeding the life out of the people and the land. Recent news stories about Zimbabwe demostrate that the phenomena continues. Mugabe is being sternly warned by other presidents of southern African nations, as well as his own party, to step down and not run for re-election next year. Will he? Even if he does, Zimbabwe will be suffering from the shadow of his rule for a long time.

My biggest critique is the dearth of information about Mozambique. It seems to be Africa's forgotten country - both in the popular and scientific literature. There are a few pages (out of 752 total) that discuss the war for independence from Portugal and a couple more on the RENAMO-FRELIMO conflict but not much else. Is it because Mozambique is a Lusophone country (Angola has a chapter, but it also has oil reserves and diamonds)? Is it because Mozambique is overshadowed by its neighbors, South Africa and Zimbabwe (Swaziland, Lesotho, Madagascar, and Botswana don't get much mention either)? Or something else that I am just not seeing?