Taking journalism seriously, but not literally

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

The present form of the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Genesis dates back to at least 2,000 years, and broadly closer to 3,000 years. There are fragments and sections which are likely older and allude to widely known folktales whose familiarity has long faded to us, and so seem obscure and opaque. But let us stipulate as a thought experiment that something within the Bible is animated by a God, a supernatural being.* That is, the Bible is the true revelation from on high.

What does “true” mean? The earliest portions of Genesis are peculiar in light of what we know about the true genesis of the cosmos and stellar evolution through astrophysics. Water is H₂O. Was there water before there as light, photons, which are emitted by energy? Water is not even an element, but a compound. And how was “heaven” (space?) created from these waters?

There are some, whom we call “Fundamentalists”, who take the Bible literally in a very plain and straightforward manner. They construct models such as “water canopy theory”, which preserve straightforward interpretations of these translations.

Critics of these attempts would state that the Bible is not a cosmological textbook. Rather, the Bible is about people, and those people did not have the cultural or cognitive tools to elucidate and elaborate on cosmology in a manner that is as powerful and predictive as today. Instead, they made recourse to the cultural and mythological furniture in their environment and repurposed it. As it happens, water is central to Mesopotamian Creation stories (for some obvious geographical reasons). It is not difficult to understand how the ancient Hebrews may have come out of the same milieu, or even “borrowed” these motifs.

This came to mind when I read two stories in The New York Times (to which I subscribe): Thomas Monson, President of the Mormon Church, Dies at 90 and Left Behind by Migrant Husbands, Women Break the Rules and Go to Work: Wives are shocking their traditional West African villages by earning money and running large households while their husbands are in Europe seeking jobs.

The first article came via a Tanner Greer blog post, Do Not Trust Journalists (A Mormon Example). His point is pretty simple: the obituary in The New York Times reduces a very long life to a few controversies of particular interest to the liberal coastal subscriber base of The New York Times. In other words, from the long-view of history journalism is just pandering to the preoccupations of contemporary readers.

But let’s be honest. A typical journalist at The New York Times is as capable of writing fairly and in an informed manner about a Mormon eminence as an ancient Hebrew scribe could fairly render the practices of their Edomite rivals and enemies. In other words, one would be naive to take journalism about cultural enemies, which to be frank Mormons are to the main subscriber base of The New York Times, as anything more than a reflection of the preoccupations of those constructing the narrative.

The second piece is richer and more difficult to grasp. The key issue for me is that agriculture in much of West Africa has long been matrifocal, with a large role given over to female primary production. It is not surprising at all to me that women in Senegal step up to fill the economic void left by men migrating in search of cash remuneration. The New York Times presents a patrifocal and male-dominated economy as the eternal customary practice in this region of the world…when the reality is that women have long been independent economic actors in Africa, and to be fair in much of the world. Though I don’t want to reduce it to a single cultural artifact, much of the difference can be schematized as plow vs. hoe agriculture. There is a certain type of highly intensive agriculture that began in the river valleys of Eurasia which seems to lead to a hyper-patriarchal society, where the role of women in primary production through direct labor diminishes, and the role of men, and in particular groups of men, increases.

These societies serve as the archetypes of traditional patriarchal villages where “women’s work” is driven into the home, and women in fact are isolated, atomized, and eventually totally controlled by patrilineal kinship groups. But, there are other forms of traditional village life where women retain a greater role as primary producers, farmers in their own right, who control and disburse their economic productivity as they see fit. These societies are not peaceful matriarchies. In fact, often they are quite patriarchal in their own way, with men whose primary activity is to engage in activities that supplement the productivity of their womenfolk through foraging, hunting, or war. Whereas the traditional patriarchal model of plow based intensive agriculture often is characterized by groups of men vertically controlling every level of economic activity and political power, which women becoming extensions of patrilineal clans, more extensive hoe based agriculture leads to more balance in economic power, and men and women occupying different domains.

In other words, the latter is rather like what is described in the article about Senegal today!

Does this mean that the writer was totally deceived? I suspect the reality is more complex. Though interior West African elites have long been Muslim, the populace has been Islamicized much more recently, within the last century (European transportation improvements actually spread Islam much more deeply into the rural areas). As such, “world-normative” Muslim family and economic arrangements have been introduced through the scaffold of Islamic family law. But, these arrangments are not always suitable for local conditions. Islam is fundamentally an urban religion, and its gender norms, in particular, seem to emerge out of the Late Antique Near Eastern and Eastern Mediterranean consensus of respectability, where aristocratic women were secluded from public gaze and were entirely private figures (this has deep roots, see ancient Athens).

There was an alternative tradition in the Near East. And that is of the desert nomads. Because of the nature of mobile pastoralism, it was not uncommon for womenfolk to be independent economic actors while their men were tending to their flocks. In fact, a form of polyandry seemed to have been in existence in pre-Islamic Arabia. In the Sahara, this ancient tradition continued with the Taureg, whose women traditionally were rather independent, and who even had some degree of sexual freedom before marriage (though note Salafism has been spreading among the Taureg, and these traditions are disappearing).

As devout Muslims, no doubt many Senagalese now accept the idea of total male domination of the economic sphere. But until quite recently this was not normative, and it would not be shocking if the old folkways had persisted in various ways down to the present.

What I think The New York Times piece reflects is a readership that has certain prior beliefs about “traditional” societies. As urbanites, they’re not familiar with the diversity of social and economic arrangments amongst village peoples and lack any feel for the variance in agricultural techniques, and how that might redound to gender relations. Additionally, like most humans, they think dichotomously, and imagine a society is either patriarchal or not, and that the two categories define a host of bundled characteristics. As it is, the reality is that many notionally patriarchal societies exhibited a huge range of freedom and power for women.

Consider this passage:

In Magali, Ida Traoré, 32, became pregnant with twins while her husband was living in France.

Her father-in-law called France to tell his son, Abdoulaye Diarsso, that his wife was having an affair. Mr. Diarsso immediately phoned her, to apologize. He had been away 13 years, after all.

“She has sexual urges,” Mr. Diarsso said during his first visit with his wife since he’d left. “It’s difficult to accept, but if I ignore this, I’m not being honest.”

This may seem liberated, but it reminds me of the controversy over the paternity of Genghis Khan’s eldest son, Jochi. His mother, Bortai, had been kidnapped by a rival tribe when he was likely conceived. In some extremely patriarchal societies, Jochi would have been shunned or even killed. The rape of Bortai would have been a dishonor, and she herself may have been killed. As it is, Genghis Khan treated Jochi has his son, and Bortai regained her place within Genghis Khan’s household. This reflects the reality that though the Mongols were very patriarchal, women in their pastoralist society were not simply chattel, but important political and economic actors. When the fathers and older brothers were away, it was the women and youngest brothers who managed the flocks in the home territories.

When I read long-form narrative journalism about other societies that are gripping and “speaks to me”, frankly I am suspicious. What I think is happening is that these people in other societies are being drafted into our own preoccupations. An American and Western, discussion and debate about gender relations have been smuggled into a very Senagalese story. Taking this sort of journalism literally is wrong-headed fundamentalism. Just as the Bible is not a science textbook, these sorts of narrative features are usually poor reflections of the societies they describe. Rather, they tell us more about what the writer knows and believes, and what the reader finds compelling and noteworthy.

In other words, read these long-form features like you read the Bible: to give you a sense of the outlook of the people writing the stories, not the details of what the stories are about (which is secondary).

* I do not personally believe this, as I am an atheist.