Science Fiction Film Avatar and the Crisis of Humanity

I wrote this for a film and religious studies class in 2011, at Claremont McKenna College. The course was taught by Prof. Gastón Espinosa and he selected this film as the last one we watched. I am posting it now because I am researching for my paper on the history of disability in America and I find that there are still not many engagements with this subject.

Ramadan 2019: Day 8-9

Day 8, Monday

We spent the morning browsing at potential domestic appliances for our future house, such as blenders. Walid knows the bougie knowledge of making $10 acai bowls and I am quite intrigued.

picture from allevents.in

Browsing consumer goods is a very nice nesting activity. Walid is very careful when it comes to such matters, whereas I am more impulsive. He also wanted to engage in sketches of the future, possibly because of the rather disappointing present. He lives with four other roommates and they have formed their social circle already. They share a rice cooker. Walid pondered whether the Chinese landowner owned the cooker, which would mean that he could also use it. I reasoned that the rice cooker is jointly owned by the roommates since the landlord could not possibly anticipate what the ("ethnic") dietary needs of his future tenants would be. Walid concurred, yet he still wanted to use the cooker. I said it is much easier if he would just buy his own. (But these are just theories since our information is not very complete.)

He also thought about the possible redundant microwave. I reasoned that the microwave might be useful when we babysit for other future friends. While such concerns of the future have yet to materialize in real life, the theme of diets and health enter again and again in our food-conscious world. My further interest is also whether intercaste "pollutions" also apply to microwaved food... (Because if a lower caste prepares a certain food and the upper caste eats, some upper castes consider that food to be polluting.... but I learned about the version that presumes an India without a microwave. So I wonder what if a lower caste prepared food with the microwave? This is also theorizing because I also know upper caste men who eat at any outside eatery.)

At this juncture, American Islamic discourse is also keen on pivoting Ramadan as a diet-conscious regimen. "It is healthy to fast," so the talking points go. I complained to Ahmad the other day that I found such blatantly market-oriented packaging quite contrary to the point. He agreed with me. A future academic paper can write on this subject.

After meditation, I realized we ran low on time. I scanned some noted pages from my books. We proceeded hurriedly to my school for book returns. We carried around 15 books and dumped them unceremoniously. I haven't finished the extraction of information (on Arab modernism) from these books. Still, I was relieved to hide them from my sight until I am ready to revisit them again. I sat lackluster at the 1000-piece puzzle station while the last remaining finals warriors slaved entered the library to finish their work. I joked that I could destroy the puzzle with end-of-semester rage. Graduating students posed next to the blossoming flowers and benches that no one sat on usually. I jibed that no wonder those benches were built...

We both went to Assembly for my second spa session. The concept of aging has formally entered my mind, perhaps exacerbated by the (ableist) academic timeline. Afterward, the rain began to fall. Walid left for iftar at the neighborhood mosque. This evening, the imam led a curing session for a young boy, possibly suffering from the manifestation of a physical/mental illness. The rest of the (all-male) congregation read surahs from the Holy Quran, since the jinn could leave from the boy's body and enter anyone else's.

In the evening, I chatted briefly with my friend Subhash, who has arrived in China for the first time. He posted some beautiful pictures of his yoga practice in the heart of Shenzhen. Still, he seems to be experiencing culture shock and seeks to alleviate it by talking with me. I am myself suffering from culture shock and the dizzying effects of racial animosity in Boston in my second year, and I have very little to offer him in terms of how to ground oneself in a foreign land.

I also chatted with Amina over Wechat about my recent interest in the Chinese classic Rulin Waizhuan and how it related to current politics. Amina was more keen on sharing her new thoughts based on her romantic encounter with a person from the past. She feels very nostalgic yet tends to over-rationalize her romantic decisions. I, on the other hand, feel no compulsion to rationalize unless I have to explain to often undeserving interlocuters curious about my life.


Day 9, Tuesday, Walid's birthday

Walid's friend Ahmed drove him around the Boston area for jobs. An owner of a pizzeria worried if Walid would learn all the techniques and leave. I joked that a lot of Egyptian food, which Walid has experience in making, requires more techniques than a mere pizza. The making of fateer, for example, requires much more intricate handling. Walid's job interviewers also tested his religiosity by offering him food. After finding out that Walid is fasting, the would wish him Ramadan kareem.

We met up at Wellington and headed to C0stco for the first time. Walid's progress in Hindustani is improving, as he watched more language videos provided by a hijabi Youtube teacher. He enjoyed the prospect of sharing our expenses since it signals a move toward a shared household. I also felt excited over this trip for the whole day. I asked if he wanted to pose next to the C0stco flowers for his birthday. He just took a selfie with me and said that I am more beautiful than the flowers.

On the way back, our Lyft driver played beautiful Nigerian music. I shared some in my music group as well. I ate a bowl of the instant shrimp wonton and added some capers. Walid snapped a photo of me and sent it to my mom, joking about himself about how he can only watch me eat.

English version of the translation

Walid went to break his fast at the Malden Islamic center while I read a book by Qiu Miaojin (邱妙津) from the Public Library. She was the first lesbian author who committed suicide when she was 26, which is also my current age. I enjoyed seeing her handwriting of Chinese characters printed in between the chapters. She suffered from studying abroad and a lot of her ideas of art come from Western forms and definitions. Unfortunately, in my opinion, she did not have the chance to truly experience art forms without a large degree of Western influences, which impeded her ability to create art according to her high expectations. Western definitions of what is "political" also haunt her own identity--she denies that the word "homosexual" has meaning beyond a political identity. Yet does that mean that queer politics did not exist before the arrival of Western science? (which sought to define the homosexual as a medical subject...) Her writings are interesting yet reveal her age and obsessions with the western novel as well, often too vaguely masculinist and dependent on the reader's proper aesthetic engagement, without a clear ethical grounding.

french version of the translation

While I read the book at Dunkin Donuts, a white female "customer" was trying to pick a fight with the Nepali cashiers. Luckily they were very strong and did not heed to the "customer's" aggressive baiting. "I'm going to call customer service and report this Dunkin Donuts!" I focused on the warmth of my small coffee. Soon the tension abated. I joked with Walid on the way back that this is what I got for choosing the "community" coffee spot as opposed to the nearby Chinese coffee establishments, which would have much less commotion. I also told Walid that he can also make great art--the kind that Miaojin aspired to create--and that he just needed more courage and time. He also mused on this subject. On that note, I also shared that Ahmad sent me an Arabic poem recently, and we planned to read it together.

We cooked at home, ate Tiramisu, sang the birthday song in Arabic. During midnight, we watched The Avengers: Infinity war, which caused some unwanted nightmares again...

Methods and Religious Studies

More than two years ago, I presented a paper on the medicine Buddha in pre-Republican era China at my liberal arts college. Without the adequate tools, I could not present the significance of the combination of ritual and medicine beyond the realm of superstition. I read this following passage and had an a-ha moment about religious studies--

A second approach to the question of cultural difference starts from a different assumption, namely, that “real,” substantive, and “immiscible” cultural differences constitute an actually existing dimension of human experience that needs to be dealt with in our analyses. While some analysts have argued that rendering “untranslatable” cultural practices transparent within the hegemonic languages of Western academia amounts to an act of “epistemological violence,” others have argued for the ethical necessity of doing just that. While keenly sensitive to processes of historical transformation in the constitution of modern subjectivities, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, for one, is unwilling to dismiss the existence of (and constitutive role played by) radically different life-worlds within modernity. Self-critically reflecting on his own previous research into the history of factory labor in Bengal, where laborers commonly invoked the agency of Hindu gods to facilitate a range of tasks at hand, Chakrabarty writes that “a secular subject like history faces certain problems in handling practices in which gods, spirits or the supernatural have agency in the world.” Chakrabarty’s solution to these problems is not to cease and desist from writing history, however; nor is it to abandon altogether the task of “rough translation” required to make differences intelligible in academic writing. The latter choice Chakrabarty refuses largely on ethical grounds: “It may be legitimately argued that the administration of justice by modern institutions requires us to imagine the world through the languages of the social sciences,” he reasons, since “one cannot argue with modern bureaucracies and other instruments of governmentality without recourse to the secular time and narratives of history and sociology” (72, 86). At the same time, Chakrabarty urges historians to acknowledge both the “finitude” of history’s secular outlook and the “scandalous” nature of “rough translations” required to render radical forms of cultural difference intelligible in social-scientific discourse (90).

This theoretical analysis by William Glover from Making Lahore Modern’s Introduction (p xvi-xvii) explains precisely the difficulty I faced when writing about Buddhism and medicinal practices in history. It is very difficult to comprehend the development of medicine (and technology) other than a road of teleological progress. Without a broader understanding of medicinal practices at large at the period I was looking at, one can only compare to then-Buddhist practices of medicine and now. This would undermine the credibility of Buddhist tradition of that particular time. If a doctoral and above level work in social science can only amount to “rough translation,” I had an even coarser translation at the time. Is writing religious studies academic papers from a historical viewpoint at the liberal arts level ever possible? (This question is a reflection of my frustration towards historical methods at present; I do not want to question the wonderful aptitudes that religious studies introduced to me two years ago.)

Another question, If one uses history and historicizes religion, how can religion occupy a distinct theoretical space than from culture? I had a conversation with a Buddhist monk recently at JNU. He has completed his MPhil and will start his doctorate soon. He has read extensively and is well-learned in Sanskrit; he plans to tackle Tibetan next. His English conversation skills were limited and we talked in Mandarin. He was easygoing but still assumed more authority in the conversation. We talked about Buddhism both as an academic subject as well as a subject that carries inherent truth that we accept while others may not accept (I am a Buddhist, but for length-sake I will not get into whether or not we should call it a “religion” in this post). I tread lightly when we started historicizing Buddhism, since it was my first time meeting him and he was senior to me--I had no idea if he would at one point abruptly object to the secular social science assumptions which I might impose on the discussion. He never did, but the testing-waters feeling of having social science discussions with people of a religious identity remained.

tomb of Jahangir in Lahore

Another similar challenge that faced Islamic historical writing in the 19th century, also presented by William Glover (p187-188)--

One of the earliest was Sayyid Ahmed Khan’s Asar-us-Sanadid (Manifestations of the Noblemen), an account of the city of Delhi composed in the Urdu language. Sayyid Khan first published his history in 1846, illustrating the book’s six hundred pages of text with more than a hundred lithograph prints. The book described Delhi’s historical palaces, shrines, and religious buildings and included a 250-page account of “cultural life” in the city that described the city’s fairs and festivals, bazaars, and places for community gathering. Shortly after the book’s initial publication, Sayyid Khan presented a copy to A. A. Roberts, Delhi’s district magistrate and collector. Roberts, in turn, presented the book to the Royal Asiatic Society in London. On the suggestion of a member of the society, Roberts undertook an English translation of the book that for unknown reasons was never completed. In the preface to a later edition, however, Sayyid Khan claimed that the process of translating the work into English brought out “defects” in the original.

...

Put another way, the broader significance of the details recorded by Sayyid Khan—a significance that his British readership found missing— needed little elaboration for an Indian readership, since the mode of description he used established the context automatically. That context drew on an earlier tradition of IndoIslamic historical writing, in particular a mode Christopher Bayly has described as “genealogical.” This historiographic tradition assumed that certain known families and individuals embodied innate moral and spiritual qualities and that these qualities could be invoked for a reader simply by reciting lines of descent. More importantly, perhaps, the qualities did not need to be specified: Listing the names was enough to invoke them.