'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Ghosh on prisons and social control

I've had a (strongly critical) interest in punishment theory for some years now. Many months ago I rashly agreed to write an article on mass incarcerations and political control for a friend of mine, who graciously reminded me a couple of weeks ago that the deadline was either highly imminent or actually overdue... That's part of the reason I've been reading Caroline Elkins' detailed study of the exact and complex dynamics of the mass punishment of Mau Mau suspects in British-controlled Kenya.

Today, I read this excellent article by the (subcontinent) Indian-American anthropologist Amitav Ghosh, who draws a direct line between British carcereal practices in colonial India and the practices of the US GI's in Abu Ghraib. (The piece was written to mark, roughly, the anniversary of the Abu Ghraib revelations.)

Here are some of the similarities he identified:

some of the Abu Ghraib images are eerily reminiscent of photographs taken by British prison officials in Asia in the late nineteenth century. In these too, the prisoners are naked, men and women, and they stand with an arm outstretched and their genitals facing the camera; although their clothes have been removed, many wear fetters and chains. The difference is that these pictures were taken for officially sanctioned projects of documentation, and the jailors were absent from the frames...

Another continuity lies in the marriage of incarceration and cultural theory. The methods employed in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay are said to have been informed by the ideas of anthropologists like Raphael Patai, who, in his notorious 1973 work The Arab Mind, wrote at length about Arab conceptions of sexuality, honor and masculinity. British prison officials in India were also careful to target what they thought were deep-rooted fears and taboos. They believed, for instance, that Indians dreaded sea voyages more than death itself: This was, in their eyes, one of the great advantages of island prisons.

But it is in his conclusions that Ghosh is most far-reaching, and most perceptive:

The war in Iraq has often been described in the language of the classroom: It is said to be intended to provide lessons in democracy and to teach the ways of freedom and so on. The meaning of the photographs is also framed by this pedagogical context: It is as if they were made to illustrate, for the benefit of Third Worlders, the reality of the unspoken relationship between prisons and parliaments. This is where their horror lies: not just in the acts performed before the camera but in the fact that they are communicative acts, evidently intended to educate, to train. That is probably why the soldiers felt no hesitation in taking and distributing the pictures; they too were sure, no doubt, that the purity of their ends was a validation of the means they had chosen.

If there is any useful lesson to be drawn from this, it is that now, as ever, means cannot be separated from ends: They are the same thing. In the Clinton years there were many liberal interventionists who believed that the nobility of their ends somehow justified the use of any means at hand (unilateralism, the flouting of international law and so on). Today the tune has changed, and some liberal interventionists have begun to speak of the dangers of a foreign policy that is overly moralistic. This is to misplace the blame for everything that has gone wrong. Addressing the question of human betterment was never the problem: The problem began with the privileging of ends over means. It is because of this that the liberal interventionists have been so neatly tied into a knot by the neoconservatives: Having failed to address the question of the appropriate means, they have been unable to contest the appropriation of their ends. By way of contrast, this is also one of the reasons why such figures as Richard Falk and Noam Chomsky are so remarkable: because of their insistence on scrutinizing means as well as ends.

The anniversary of Abu Ghraib should serve as a reminder of what happens when the declared ends of a project are utterly incommensurate with the means: The means become the end, enacted over and over again.

Ghosh touches here on the heart of something at the heart of Quaker belief. Quakers say, "There is no way to peace; peace is the way." Whether seeking for peace or for other forms of human wellbeing, ends and means cannot be separated.