text:
Collisional effects on coherent structures of zonal flows and turbulent transport
K. Itoh, K. Hallatschek, S. Toda, S. I. Itoh, P. H. Diamond, M. Yagi, H. Sanuki
Division of Nuclear Fusion Dynamics
The collisional effects on nonlinear coherent structures of zonal flows in a toroidal plasma are investigated. They weaken the flows and enhance turbulent transport. Expressions for the zonal flow velocity, scale length and the turbulent transport coefficients are obtained. In the limit of small collisional flow damping, the turbulent transport coefficient remains finite. A phase diagram is obtained, which shows the parameter domain where the zonal flow has finite amplitude.
A335-A340
Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion
5 SUPPL. A
https://doi.org/10.1088/0741-3335/46/5A/037
10.1088/0741-3335/46/5A/037
Fingerprint Dive into the research topics of 'Collisional effects on coherent structures of zonal flows and turbulent transport'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.
Phase diagrams Engineering & Materials Science
Flow velocity Engineering & Materials Science
Plasmas Engineering & Materials Science
Damping Engineering & Materials Science
transport properties Physics & Astronomy
toroidal plasmas Physics & Astronomy
flow velocity Physics & Astronomy
damping Physics & Astronomy
Itoh, K., Hallatschek, K., Toda, S., Itoh, S. I., Diamond, P. H., Yagi, M., & Sanuki, H. (2004). Collisional effects on coherent structures of zonal flows and turbulent transport. Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, 46(5 SUPPL. A), A335-A340. https://doi.org/10.1088/0741-3335/46/5A/037
Collisional effects on coherent structures of zonal flows and turbulent transport. / Itoh, K.; Hallatschek, K.; Toda, S.; Itoh, S. I.; Diamond, P. H.; Yagi, M.; Sanuki, H.
In: Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, Vol. 46, No. 5 SUPPL. A, 05.2004, p. A335-A340.
Itoh, K, Hallatschek, K, Toda, S, Itoh, SI, Diamond, PH, Yagi, M & Sanuki, H 2004, 'Collisional effects on coherent structures of zonal flows and turbulent transport', Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, vol. 46, no. 5 SUPPL. A, pp. A335-A340. https://doi.org/10.1088/0741-3335/46/5A/037
Itoh K, Hallatschek K, Toda S, Itoh SI, Diamond PH, Yagi M et al. Collisional effects on coherent structures of zonal flows and turbulent transport. Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion. 2004 May;46(5 SUPPL. A):A335-A340. https://doi.org/10.1088/0741-3335/46/5A/037
Itoh, K. ; Hallatschek, K. ; Toda, S. ; Itoh, S. I. ; Diamond, P. H. ; Yagi, M. ; Sanuki, H. / Collisional effects on coherent structures of zonal flows and turbulent transport. In: Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion. 2004 ; Vol. 46, No. 5 SUPPL. A. pp. A335-A340.
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author = "K. Itoh and K. Hallatschek and S. Toda and Itoh, {S. I.} and Diamond, {P. H.} and M. Yagi and H. Sanuki",
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AB - The collisional effects on nonlinear coherent structures of zonal flows in a toroidal plasma are investigated. They weaken the flows and enhance turbulent transport. Expressions for the zonal flow velocity, scale length and the turbulent transport coefficients are obtained. In the limit of small collisional flow damping, the turbulent transport coefficient remains finite. A phase diagram is obtained, which shows the parameter domain where the zonal flow has finite amplitude.
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text:
Michael Owen's World League Soccer '99
a game by Silicon Dreams Studio
User Rating: 10.0/10 - 1 vote
See also: Soccer Games
Regular perusers of game shops may have already seen this game clogging up the shelves, The Boy Owen's faux-sullen pose lurking amid the pre-Christmas detritus. So why are we so late in reviewing it? Because we didn't receive a copy until a couple of days before its release, traditionally a ploy by worried software companies to provide damage limitation on titles they consider suspect. They've clearly got it wrong though, as Michael Owen's WLS '99 is a decent game, building on the moderate success ot its predecessor and correcting many of the flaws that rendered it so niggly.
If anything, the enhancements have made the game harder, as this is certainly no instant goal feast, and requires days of practice before any kind of proficiency is achieved. Manual dexterity is pushed to the limit, and attempting to play the game with anything less than a Microsoft Sidewinder pad would be folly, and even with this de facto controller it can still prove difficult to pull off every move.
Elaborate combinations are the order of the day, and even remembering them all may be beyond the Ken of all but drooling beat 'em up fans, which in some ways makes the game more suited to the PlayStation. It's still a decent turn on the PC though, and graphically is up to scratch, although a 3Dfx card is pretty much a prerequisite. Detailed stadiums, varying weather effects, player shadows and so forth are thrown into the mix, and it all looks very pretty. The players have been tenuously modelled on their real-lite counterparts with varying degrees of success, including a number of glaring ommissions - such as a moustacheless David Seaman. The players' individual physical attributes have also been taken into consideration - with a fair amount of exaggeration. For instance, both Chelsea's Dennis Wise and Spurs' Jose Dominguez sport the build of wiry 14-year-olds, whereas most of the goalkeepers wouldn't look out of place in a gorilla pound. The universal flat-tops of the previous game have been dispensed with, and a number of more frisky hairstyles are on display, as well as the occasional bit of facial hair experimentation. However, the bottom line is that even the most knowledgable of football fans would be hard-pushed to recognise any of the players, with the pre-match line-ups often resembling a multiracial version of The Krypton Factor's identity parade.
Its In The Name
As far as gameplay is concerned though, having cloned players doesn't really make a great deal of difference, and in fairness they do actually have their names on their shirts, and even hovering above their heads if desired. And unlike World League Soccer '98, Eidos have bitten the bullet and opted for real player names. This is a good thing - nobody is interested in fielding a forward line of Shoarrer and Kowen; football fans want the real deal. To the average prole, this may seem a trivial worry restricted solely to the type of people who store football programmes in laminated folders. A fair point. But if you're going to do it, do it right. Apparently the law states that as long as no unlicensed individual is being used to sell the game, then there Is no valid gripe. Other developers take note: we never ever want to see another bastardised name in a game.
Anyway, Michael Owen is no bastard, and his first major foray into the hateful world of game endorsement seems largely to have paid off. MOWLS '99 is a compulsive game, and narrow defeats leave you seething and gagging for another match.
But as the hapless Graham Taylor maintained, there's no such thing as an easy game at international level these days, and the slightest lapse in front of goal is often ruthlessly punished. Concentration is paramount, and losing possession can be fatal. Sticking the ball into the back of the onion bag is no mean feat either, and cheeky one-twos and shimmies all have to be employed to even get within shooting distance. Also, no longer can you rely on simply crossing the ball into the box and despatching a bullet header, as the marking seems to be a lot tighter, apart from at free kicks where it is nonexistent. It's also possible to score free kicks from ludicrous distances, evoking memories of erstwhile Nottingham Forest slaphead Jonny Metgod.
A choice of tackles is offered: the perrenial slide, or a hook; the lack of a soft tackle inevitably leads to a flurry of free kicks. It's all too easy for the game to become bogged down in the middle of the park, and it can often prove to be a stop-start affair. Skilful play is rewarded though, and goals have to be earned, which makes them all the more satisfying to score.
As for the commentary, it's again provided by Ray Wilkins and Peter Brackley, who make desperate stabs at comedy, an onerous task when attempted by two straightmen.
So, despite some sloppiness - the first ten games in a league season are away from home, for instance - Michael Owen's WLS 99 is a quality game. It's certainly not perfect, but by the time they get around to Joe Cole's WLS '01 they might have got it right.
Download Michael Owen's World League Soccer '99
Regular readers will recall Eidos swooping on the player who will forever be known as The Young Michael Owen. They're pretty chuffed with the deal, Eidos chairman and erstwhile goblin writer Ian Livingstone boasting: "I am perhaps the envy of every football manager in the world, having signed Michael Owen, the best footballer in the world, undoubtedly. We're delighted that Michael has chosen World League Soccer to endorse."
But what of Owen himself? Apart from the obvious reason, why did he choose to work with Eidos? "I think there were a number of companies that could have picked, but I'idwas tile must appealing." he "They wanted to make the game as real as possible as well as have me influence what the game comes out like, so that was really the main reason. It's great to be able to put your name towards computer games; it's something I wanted to do and something I'm glad to have done." Owen obviously knows more than a little about football, but can a mere video game ever compare to the real thing? "Every computer game is trying to be as realistic as possible, trying to bridge the gap between playing a computer game and playing a real-life game of football. I think Eidos will come closest to that and it should be a good game to play."
Owen is certainly no games virgin, and actually bought a copy of WLS '98, having played games for years. "I started when I was reasonably young. Obviously I can't really spend as much time out of the house now (Oh, the price of fame - Ed) so recently I've been using the computer a bit more. Hopefully with this new game I'll be stuck to it."
Clearly, Owen will be picking himself in the England side, but his choice of striking partner also causes no surprises. "I think Robbie Fowler would be a good one to pick because he's back from injury now. It's nice to have Robbie back training again, and I think he'd be my ideal partner."
Owing Owen
Michael Owen's World League Soccer '99 is being developed by Silicon Dreams, as was WLS '98. Robert Palfreman, senior producer of the game, describes his experience of working with Owen: "Michael was very professional, very focused, and it became clear during the times he visited us that he was here to do a job. It really was like working with an 'old head on young shoulders', and I think that this is reflected in the mood of his interviews when he's on TV. Once we had broken the back of the job, and he became more familiar with the environment, he did lighten up - even to the extent where he had his photo taken with every member of the SD staff. All in all, a top bloke."
Very nice, but will putting his mug on the box really make it a better game? "WLS '99 is a great game. As you may have noticed from WLS "98, it's really aimed at the hard-core gamer, as opposed to someone who wants a bit of fun. Michael's endorsement will give the product a much greater shelf appeal and inevitably provide a greater challenge to a larger audience."
So what are the major improvements from WLS '98? "Even greater emphasis has been placed on the player skinning technology. This prevents any breaking up of the player polygons and gives the gameplay a much slicker look, which obviously adds even greater realism. All the correct players names have been included, and all the kits have been updated throughout the domestic and international leagues, along with the introduction of new stadia. We've also included new animations for the players who have been fouled, as well as those who are lying or rolling on the ground in a German fashion.
"Time has been taken to improve both the outfield players' AI as well as the keepers'. For the more skilled games player we've now incorporated extra skill moves. This enables the player to use any one of the 23 combination moves to outstrip and outplay his/her opponent. And there's been a revamp on the commentary, as well as an enhancement to the crowd animations. Would you like me to go on?"
Er, no. Will WLS '99 feature a new game engine, or has it merely been tweaked? "No, the WLS engine hasn't really been tweaked, it's gone through a complete overhaul. It has been optimised to run in higher resolution, and the G-shading and skinning technology now give the product a highly polished finish."
World Cup Willy
As far as we at ZONE are concerned, the most recent office favourite footie game is World Cup '98. The Silicon Dreams team have also had a dabble, but weren't that impressed.
"Yes, all members of the team have played all the versions of FIFA. This was for two reasons: obviously for research purposes, but also due to the face that the team itself consists of hardened footie fans. This is now the sixth soccer product from the Silicon Dreams stable. As a team, and personally, we prefer a football game to provide us with a far greater challenge than that of FIFA."
So what do you think is the definitive football game across all platforms, and why?
"Sensible Soccer on the Amiga, just for sheer playability." Correct. But are there too many footie games available at the moment?
"No, you can never get enough of football. After all, in the words of Sir Bobby Charlton, it's God's game."
It certainly is. And if some pundits are to be believed, Michael Owen is God's footballer. Let's hope his game is equally good.
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text:
[Paleopsych] Nicholas Hudson: 'Hottentots' and the evolution of	European racism
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Nicholas Hudson: 'Hottentots' and the evolution of European racism
Journal of European Studies 34(4): 308-332
http://jes.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/34/4/308, converted by me to ASCII
Summary from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.10:
In 1497, when Europeans first encountered the Khoikhoi people,
popularly known as "Hottentots," of present-day South Africa, an
important chapter in the cultural history of racism began, says
Nicholas Hudson, a professor of English at the University of
British Columbia.
European explorers initially were repulsed by the Hottentots,
who had very different ideas about how to dress, cook, and
conduct courtships than were current in Europe. The Hottentots,
early reports indicated, smeared their light skin with dirt and
oil to appear darker, preferred barely cooked tripe to animal
muscle, and looped greasy cow intestines about their beloveds'
shoulders to celebrate engagements.
By the 18th century, "Hottentot" was a common insult in Europe
for an ill-mannered, filthy, or otherwise uncivilized person.
The Hottentots also became a popular subject for parodies of
European customs. They "provided a classic example that beauty
was in the eye of the beholder and that all fashions could seem
preposterous from a different cultural perspective," Mr. Hudson
writes.
But thinking of customs and values as relative made many
Europeans uncomfortable, and a "racial science" developed to
combat that world-view. "From this ideological root," he says,
"grew the distinctive language of modern racism."
By attributing differences between themselves and other peoples
to intrinsic characteristics rather than to cultural variations,
he says, Europeans were able to retain their sense of
superiority and to justify colonizing people they saw as
inferiors in need of control and indoctrination.
The article, "'Hottentots' and the Evolution of European
Racism," is online for a limited time at
http://jes.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/34/4/308
Springing from the argument in recent scholarship that 'race' is a
doctrine that emerged only in the post-Enlightenment, this essay
develops a theory concerning the ideological history of 'racism',
understood in its modern Western sense. While it is impossible to
examine all forms of Western racism, the author focuses on evolving
reactions in European travel accounts, belles-lettres and anthropology
to the Khoikhoi, popularly known as 'Hottentots', a people that became
proverbial as the most wretched and degraded of all 'savages'. The
question posed is why the Khoikhoi, a relatively peripheral and
cooperative people, attracted this virulent hatred.
Challenging the assumption of the small body of modern scholarship on
the Khoikhoi, I maintain that this spite derived not simply from a sense
of the Hottentots' 'Otherness', but more accurately from the awareness
that this people upset models of ethnicity that supported the Western
vision of the non-European world. Europeans needed to neutralize the
ideological threat represented by the Khoikhoi, a programme that
culminated in the development of the modern science of 'race'. 'Race',
and its corresponding ideology of 'racism', I conclude, involves not
merely the exclusion, but an approximation and appropriation of the
'Other' into Western systems of thought: the ultimate and fatal destiny
of this highly distinct and independent culture.
Keywords: Hottentot, Khoi, race, racism
Before the rise of racial science, with the work of Buffon, Kant and
Blumenbach in the late eighteenth century, Western hostility to
non-European cultures necessarily took a different and less structured
form. Indeed, 'racism' seems a deceptive term to describe prejudices
that lacked justification in the theory that the human species is
divided into five or six more or less static sub-groups, or that these
'races' can be ranked according to physical differences and innate
capacities.1 This is not to deny that hatred of foreign groups existed
before the invention of race. Yet racism, in a modern sense, is a more
historically specific phenomenon than we are apt to imagine, for
distrust or loathing of the Other has taken different forms in different
eras in accordance with transforming philosophies, world-views and
economic priorities. Racism, that is, has a cultural history. And in
guarding against its insidious influence on human thinking and affairs,
we have some reason to reflect on how that history has unfolded.
We cannot, of course, examine every instance of Western hatred of the
Other throughout history. But our investigation can begin to shed light
on the evolution of racism by focusing on the development of attitudes
towards a particular group that became, quite arguably, the most reviled
people in European thought of the early modern era. These were the
Khoikhoi, popularly known as 'Hottentots', a herding society that lived
near the Cape of Good Hope when Vasco da Gama first touched there in
1497, and that developed a long and troubled cultural and economic
relationship with Europeans over the next four hundred years. By the
eighteenth century Hottentots had become proverbial as the most savage
of all savage peoples, occupying a rung, according to many, elevated
just above the beast. As Sir Joseph Banks commented after his visit to
the Cape on Cook's Endeavour in 1771, Hottentots 'are generally
represented as the outcasts of the human species, a race whose
intellectual faculties are so little superior to those of beasts, that
some have been inclined to suppose them more nearly related to baboons
than to men' (Banks, 1896: 439).2 The very term 'Hottentot' became a
familiar insult exchanged among Europeans themselves for any behaviour
deemed uncivilized, filthy or ill-mannered. The question this hatred
raises is 'why?' Why were the Khoikhoi, a relatively peripheral and
cooperative people in colonial expansion, singled out from all other
non-European peoples for this abuse?
Relatively simple answers spring quickly to mind, such as those
presented in Linda Merians' recent Envisioning the Worst:
Representations of 'Hottentots' in Early Modern England. Focusing almost
exclusively on accounts by English writers, Merians argues that the
English needed to denigrate another people to prove their own
superiority, suggesting later that they wished to 'vent their
frustrations and inscribe their own nightmares' (Merians, 2001: 19-21
and 244). But these answers beg the question of why the distant Khoikhoi
became the special target for this ideological exploitation. In
presenting my own explanation of why the Khoikhoi were so despised, I
will maintain what might appear, at first, a paradoxical position: the
evolution of European attitudes towards the Khoikhoi from contact to the
rise of nineteenth-century raciology is characterized not by increasing
belief in their Otherness or beastliness but rather by the increasing
insistence on the Hottentot's humanness and cultural banality. In the
first phase of contact between this people and Portuguese, Spanish,
French, English and Dutch travellers, reactions to the Khoikhoi
generally reflect the fear and bewilderment of Europeans who, armed only
with their insufficient paradigms of Eden, 'wild men' and monsters,
found their conceptions about the human universe profoundly shaken.
During the Enlightenment, similarly, it was the absolute Otherness of
Hottentots that seemed most to preoccupy authors, although increasingly
the Khoikhoi came to represent the relativity of all human values and to
demonstrate the comparable absurdity of European claims to absolute
truth. In the final phase of this evolving relationship, however, the
Khoikhoi became increasingly encompassed and 'normalized' in the
paradigms developed by Europeans to fit all peoples in their globalizing
theory of 'human nature' - including, finally, the theory of race. The
scientific notion of race involved a peculiar economy of Otherness and
sameness, for the racial type was simultaneously accepted as 'human'
while also subdivided as inherently (as opposed to culturally) peculiar.
In short, contrary to the assumption embedded in much post-colonial
scholarship about colonization and race, an intellectually respectable
and systematic racism became possible only through a process of
approximating the foreign Other to the European self. While this process
can seem superficially sympathetic to peoples like the Khoikhoi, and
often debunked earlier perceptions of monstrous difference or beastly
estrangement, it was in fact perfectly compatible with the aims and
practices of European racism and imperialism in the nineteenth century
and afterwards.
The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century adventurers who first came to the
Cape of Good Hope carried with them a range of ethnological
preconceptions which heavily informed their experience of foreign
peoples. The medieval myth of the wild man portrayed the uncivilized
Other as a hairy, beast-like creature with little or no language, an
unquenchable sexual drive and, very often, an appetite for human flesh
(see Bartra, 1994). While the Khoikhoi lacked the hirsute appearance of
the wild man, their virtual nakedness, feral lifestyle and unusual
language, whose unique vocal 'clicks' sounded to European ears like
'turkeys clucking' or 'farting with their tongues',3 all seemed to
conform roughly to the wild-man stereotype. It was easy to leap to
judgements that lacked empirical evidence - for example, that this
'wild' people 'would not scruple' to 'eate mans fleshe', as one
frightened English traveller recorded in 1608.4 This traveller's
unsupported suspicion of Khoikhoi cannibalism derived, first, from the
undoubted fearsomeness of the Hottentots when the Europeans offended
them: fifty to sixty-five Spaniards were slaughtered during the voyage
of Francisco d'Almeida in 1510, and thereafter pockets of Europeans were
sometimes killed, often for reasons not easy to determine (see
Raven-Hart, 1967: 9-11).5 Nor is there any reason to doubt that the
almost universal astonishment of Europeans at the dietary habits of the
Khoikhoi - they seemed to prefer tripe to animal muscle, making
apparently minimal effort to clean and cook their food - had some
foundation in real observations, however distant and imperfect. For
Europeans, these habits confirmed the 'beastlike' nature of the
Hottentots, especially at a time when cleanliness and strong dietary
values had become the mark of 'civilized' life in the European middle
ranks (see Vigarello, 1988).
These 'wild men' also bore some resemblance to the strange visions of
foreign peoples, especially in Africa, propagated in works such as the
Travels ascribed to Sir John Mandeville, a name probably as fictional as
his fantastical tales. Amidst his menagerie of humanoids who have eyes
on each shoulder or who hiss like snakes, this mysterious
fourteenth-century writer tells us of people in the Andaman Islands
whose 'ears are so big that they hang down to their knees', and of other
'people who have feet like horses, and run so swiftly on them that they
overtake wild beasts and kill them' (Mandeville, 1983: 137). Both these
tales find echoes in early accounts of the Khoikhoi, though notably
among travellers who seem to be relying mostly on hearsay.6
Nevertheless, even for those able to observe the Khoikhoi more closely,
there seemed plenty in their aspect and lifestyle to support
Mandeville's vision of the vast and sometimes monstrous variety of
human-like beings. As Gijsbert Heeck exclaimed in 1655, the Khoikhoi
were 'quite unbelievable' (Raven-Hart, 1971: 1, 38). Here was a people,
it was insisted, who wore the raw and rotting guts of cattle as
ornamentation; though white at birth, they smeared their bodies with
darkened grease to
Fig. 1. From Raven-Hart (1971). By permission of A. A. Balkema Press.
make themselves look blacker; they used foul odours as perfumes; the men
had one testicle removed at birth, which at least one traveller
testified was actually a miniature crystal ball (Anon., 1732: 4, 774);
the women possessed an extra membrane or 'apron' over their pudenda, as
well as breasts so pendulous that they could feed children over their
shoulders (another story recounted in Mandeville's Travels). Among the
most copiously illustrated peoples of the seventeenth century, the
Hottentots were inevitably portrayed in ways that highlighted their
alleged strangeness. In the accompanying illustrations, for example (see
Figures 1 and 2), they are displayed in their grotesque finery or
fighting over a tangle of guts.7
Even such strangeness, however, would not be so disruptive to European
preconceptions if the Khoikhoi did not display traits that Europeans
recognized as undeniably human. Prolonged observation convinced many
Europeans that these people, however bizarre or repellent to Western
ideas, belonged to the same Adamic lineage as themselves. Even in the
earliest accounts of the Khoikhoi, a significant minority of sympathetic
observers exerted an important, and often underrated, tug on the
evolution of Western attitudes. During Thomas Best's voyage of 1612, the
crew recorded a variety of perspectives, from the most violent
repugnance to the more sensitive portrait given by the ship's chaplain,
Patrick Copeland: 'The people are loving, afraid at first, by reason of
the unkindnesse of the Dutch, who came there to make traine Oyle, who
killed and stole their Cattell; and at our returning more kind: of
middle size, well limmed, very nimble and active' (Raven-Hart, 1967:
59). Copeland's blaming the Dutch for injustice against the Khoikhoi
reflects, in fact, a very widespread tendency of European nations to
claim that the dirt of colonial adventurism covered only the hands of
other nations, a belief that demonstrated, at least, a European desire
for clean hands: hence the self-justifying tone of the anonymous account
that we have from the Dutch ship Remonstratie in 1649. In a curiously
modern gesture, this writer brushed aside all previous accounts of the
Khoikhoi as 'a sailor's yarn', arguing that any violence by Hottentots
represented their reaction to European oppression, and promising that a
new generation of Khoikhoi, under a 'good commander', would deal fairly
and gladly speak Dutch (Raven-Hart, 1967: 177-8). Beneath their
insalubrious appearance, that is, these people had many moral virtues.
Though 'very dirty and stinking', as F.-T. De Choisy observed, 'they are
good folk' (Raven-Hart, 1971: 2, 269). Early conventional assumptions
that the Hottentots, like all 'savages', were sexually promiscuous gave
way to the very widespread acknowledgement that husbands and wives were
faithful to each other and that they even punished adultery with death.8
While the Khoikhoi are frequently accused of theft in the very earliest
accounts (among the most conventional features of colonial narratives
around the world), Dutch settlers seemed satisfied with their extensive
business dealings with the Khoikhoi, trusting them around their goods
and property. Similarly, if the Khoikhoi looked like the 'nasty,
brutish' savages imagined by Hobbes, they were evidently not in a
Hobbesian state of war. As François Leguat observed, 'their Humanity
towards one another, yields in nothing to that of the Chineses'
(Raven-Hart, 1971: 2, 436). Early assumptions that they had no
government or 'polity' gave way to abundant evidence of social cohesion
and cooperation; the belief that they were a nation of 'atheists',
though it remained part of traditional lore concerning the Hottentot,
was in fact questioned very early on by travellers who observed their
moonlit worship and rituals.
In summary, for reasonably fair and thoughtful Europeans, prolonged
relations with the Khoikhoi threw into doubt many of the assumptions
that had informed European ethnography since Herodotus. How could one
explain a people who seemed so 'brutish' in their dirt and squalor, yet
who clearly possessed qualities of benevolence, honesty and chastity?
Europeans were even willing to admire certain features of Hottentot
culture, such as their sharp blades, herbal remedies and skill with
cattle. The ready explanation for savage degeneracy was environmental,
the hardness and isolation of life outside Europe usually being blamed
for both darkened skin and degraded manners.9 Yet even the environmental
explanation seemed problematic, given that the Cape region seemed
virtually Edenic in the mildness of its climate, its fertility and its
natural beauty. Surely such a paradise, as J. M. Coetzee remarks in
White Writing, should contain beings of Adamic innocence and beauty -
but instead it contained Hottentots, springing alarming puzzles about
the very myth of an innocent garden (Coetzee, 1988: 2-3). Was it, in
fact, even possible that living in the Garden of Eden presented inherent
challenges to the purity prized by Europeans? As one traveller mused,
perhaps the very luxury of this garden had precipitated the supposed
sloth and dirtiness of its inhabitants, who (not unreasonably) laughed
at the Dutch for working hard to obtain what was so easily gathered in
this land of abundance.10 Another explanation was even more challenging
and would set the agenda for discussion of the Hottentots during the
Enlightenment: perhaps the Khoikhoi in fact embodied an alternative to
European values and attitudes, showing the diversity and power of the
'custom' which ruled over all peoples, in Europe as well as elsewhere.
Very early, travellers revealed their nervous amusement that Khoikhoi
customs were, in fact, analogous to European customs, though strangely
inverted. Though born 'white', it was said, they apparently preferred
black, and painted themselves appropriately. Their filthiness and foul
smell, thought travellers, arose not merely from an impoverished life,
but was actually sought and cultivated as a beauty or dignity. It was
the richest Khoikhoi, not the poorest, who were smeared most fulsomely
with fat and dirt, a sign that they had cattle to spare for this
decoration. Even the Khoikhoi taste for precious metals seemed a bizarre
deviation from European ideas: the Khoikhoi valued not gold, but copper,
which they purchased from the colonists at great expense of cattle and
fashioned into elaborate ornamentation. Such details could hardly be
related without drawing detailed comparisons between European and
Hottentot culture, and early descriptions repeatedly portray Hottentots
as a kind of parody of Europeans. Consider, for example, Georg Meister's
observations in 1677 on the 'wonderful ceremonies' surrounding Hottentot
courtship and marriage, which consistently draw from European customs as
their frame of reference. 'The friends of the bridegroom come together',
he tells us, 'and then [the groom] throws a thick, greasy cow-gut around
the neck of his sweetheart instead of lovely pearls and golden chains,
and this is the true bond of love, which is worn until it falls off of
itself' (Raven-Hart, 1971: 1, 349). Elsewhere Meister paints a ludicrous
picture of Hottentot men rising from a meal of barely cooked guts,
bowing 'most humbly' to their hosts, and going off 'two-by-two in their
leather coats like the merchants of the Exchange in Amsterdam or Hamburg
in their silken ones' (Raven-Hart, 1971: 1, 203).
Such descriptions were presumably intended to make the Khoikhoi seem
laughable. Yet parody is a dangerously two-edged sword, threatening to
suggest that the differences between Hottentot and European manners were
not absolute at all, but merely relative. For what, indeed, made gold
better than copper? Were not the richest European men also the ones with
the most fat, though theirs was inside? Did not European women also
smear their faces with grease and dangle shiny objects on their bodies?
The fact that Europeans repeatedly suspected that they glimpsed their
own visage in the unflattering mirror of Khoikhoi life helps to explain
why this people so commonly served as currency of abuse among Europeans
of the eighteenth century. To call someone a 'Hottentot' because they
were ill-mannered or dirty or ignorant or atheistical was, implicitly,
to acknowledge that inhabitants of England, France or Germany could act
very like the natives of the Cape. This reaction, loosely speaking,
represents a kind of 'racism' - but a racism unsupported by scientific
theories of neatly boxed human varieties and innate degeneracy. The
particular viciousness and obsessiveness of the European denigration of
the Hottentots reveals something more complicated than a desire to feel
superior; it suggests an awareness that the loathsome strangeness of
Khoikhoi manners in fact derived from the common absurdity of all human
beings. And it was precisely this anxiety that made the Khoikhoi a
particularly tempting source of satiric commentary on European life and
manners among leading satirists of the age. In 1711, for example, the
English Tory controversist Charles Leslie portrayed his arch-adversary,
the Whig bishop Benjamin Hoadly, losing an argument with a Hottentot
'chief' over the virtues of the new commercial England that the Whigs
were in the process of building (see Leslie, 1711). As the chief
demanded of his befuddled English adversary, was the Hottentot love of
shiny metal or their vicious territorial wars really any more
contemptible than English luxury or imperialism? Here were questions, as
noted by a recent scholar, that may have inspired the Tory satirist
Jonathan Swift in his creation of the Yahoos, a bestial yet disturbingly
humanoid race that piles up shiny stones, has crude hierarchies and
cruel wars, finally plunging Gulliver into a nightmare of self-loathing
(see Eilon, 1983). Similarly, the Dutch-English social philosopher and
satirist Bernard Mandeville wondered in The Fable of the Bees whether
Hottentot 'Pride be more Savage than ours' (Mandeville, 1924: 1, 127).
Perhaps the fullest use of Hottentots as a commentary on European life
was an essay appearing in 1754 in the journal The Connoisseur, raising
laughter of various kinds - self-indulgent, nervous, knowing
- throughout Europe, especially Germany, where it became a locus
classicus of relativist aesthetics. Probably composed by this journal's
chief editor, Lord Chesterfield (the same who once called Samuel Johnson
a 'respectable Hottentot'),11 this essay portrays the courtship of two
Hottentot lovers with unpronounceable names, Tquassouw and Knonmquaiha.
The strangeness of these names, like the clumps of consonants that
abound in Swift's Gulliver's Travels, typifies eighteenth-century
representations of Hottentots, underscoring, of course, their cultural
alienation from Europe. At the same time, however, both the possession
of language and the essay's theme of courtship confirm the Hottentots'
basic humanity, and it is this interplay between alienation and
proximity that generates this essay's unsettling ironies. For a literary
critic, these ironies are marked by the essay's generic instability.
Should we call this piece a racist and self-satisfied polemic against
the Hottentots, an 'oriental tale', a parody of European culture, or
even a work of serious anthropology? A superficial reading, apparently
like that of Lessing in his Laocoön, noticed only the ludicrous satire
of the Hottentots: 'We know how the Hottentots are and how many things
that awaken disgust and loathing in us are beautiful, comely, and sacred
to them', wrote Lessing; 'think of all this expressed in the noble
language of sincerity and admiration, and try to keep from laughing'
(Lessing, 1989: 132-3). But a more careful reading found less
justification in assuming that the joke was entirely on the side of
Europeans. At one point, for example, we see how a Dutchman looks
through the eyes of the Hottentots:
Upon his skin the sun darted his scorching rays in vain, and the colour
of it was as pale and wan as the watery beams of the moon. His hair,
which he could put on and take off at pleasure, was white as the
blossoms of the almond tree, and bushy as the fleece of the ram ... His
lips and cheeks resembled the red oker, and his nose was sharpened like
the beak of an eagle. His language, which was rough and inarticulate,
was as the language of beasts; nor could TQUASSOUW discover his meaning,
till an Hottentot ... interpreted between them. This interpreter
informed the prince, that the stranger was sent from his countrymen to
treat about the enlargement of their territories, and that he was
called, among them, MYNHEER VAN SNICKERSNEE (The Connoisseur, 1754: 1,
165-6).
For a line of German commentators - including Friedrich Riedel,
Christoph Wieland and Marcus Herz - the Connoisseur essay pointed to the
absence of any rational measure of beauty, a view that militated against
the universalizing aesthetics of the Aufklärung, as formulated by
Lessing and Mendelssohn (see Mielke, 1988). In Britain, similarly, the
Hottentots provided a classic example that beauty was in the eye of the
beholder and that all fashions could seem preposterous from a different
cultural perspective. Lovably cantankerous spokesmen of the British
middle orders, like Mr Wildgoose in Robert Graves' popular novel The
Spiritual Quixote, found Hottentots a useful metaphor for the inanities
of polite fashion: 'if an inhabitant of the Cape of Good Hope were to
behold the stiff horse-hair buckles, or the tied wigs, of our Lawyers,
Physicians, Tradesmen, or Divines, they would appear as barbarous and
extraordinary to them, as sheep tripes and chitterlins about the neck of
a Hottentot do for us' (Graves, 1773: 242).
Thus, whereas early explorers to the Cape reacted variously with fear
and loathing in the face of the Hottentots' apparent alienation from all
that was called 'civilized' or even 'human', eighteenth-century authors
became more willing to acknowledge their humanness, making possible the
often self-reflective proposition that 'Otherness' lies mostly in
cultural difference not in 'nature'. And this change made possible as
well the foundation of a genuinely anthropological approach to the
Khoikhoi, as pioneered by the German scientist, Peter Kolb. Kolb's Reise
nach dem Vorgebürge der guten Hoffnung (1727), was quickly translated
into several languages, including Guido Medley's abridged English
translation of 1731, The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope. For
some modern historians, such as Mary Louise Pratt in her well-known
Imperial Eyes, Kolb had produced a quintessentially high-Enlightenment
exercise in the subjection of an alien people to the restrictive
categories of Western anthropology (Pratt, 1992: 41-9). Kolb, originally
an astronomer who had come to the Cape to study the southern
constellations, attempted to assess the Khoikhoi with the cold
objectivity of a star-gazer, surveying their culture through the
rational lens of religion, government, law, manners and so forth. While
this method, as argued by Pratt, may well represent the conceptual
colonization of a non-Western society by means of Western cultural
categories, it also led Kolb to reject, again and again, the governing
assumptions of the first travellers to the Cape - particularly their
assumption that the dirt and squalor of the Hottentots represented a
degeneration of humans to the level of 'beasts'. Rather, Kolb discerned
complex patterns of social organization (see Figure 3): his Hottentots
possessed a developed idea of government, sophisticated religious
beliefs, and a deep veneration for ritual and tradition in every facet
of their culture. Kolb even claimed
Fig. 3. Hottentot trades. From Kolb (1731).
that these traditional exemplars of grossness and filth actually
possessed a real, though non-European, idea of manners and cleanliness,
wrinkling their noses at Dutchmen who passed wind or alluded openly to
fornication (see Kolb, 1731: 1, 163).
There is, indeed, plenty of ludicrous mockery of Hottentots in Kolb's
book. Nevertheless, as in some of the earlier travellers' accounts, this
mockery is seldom far removed from the satire of Europeans. If Reise
nach dem Vorgebürge der guten Hoffnung is a work of the Enlightenment in
its attempt at rational objectivity, it also strongly anticipated and
influenced later works that stressed the relativity of all social
conventions and fashions, European and non-European. In their alien
notions of beauty or propriety, exemplified by their penchant for grease
and filth, the Hottentots showed Kolb 'the Force, the Witchcraft of
Custom' (Kolb, 1731: 1, 316). For Europeans who wished to maintain their
superiority or a belief in absolute standards, this was a threatening
thesis. As the English Methodist leader John Wesley observed of the
Hottentots in a sermon on 'The Imperfection of Human Knowledge', 'A late
writer has taken much pains to represent them as a respectable people:
But from what motive it is not easy to say' (Wesley, 1829: 6, 345). In
Wesley's mind, there was no question of the essential degradation and
immorality of the Hottentots: the very exemplification of what happens
to people ignorant of the Bible and abandoned to original sin by God.
Such was the attitude of many Europeans who continued to use the term
'Hottentot' as an epithet of ridicule or debasement.
But there was another, more subtle way of rejecting Kolb's book and the
cultural relativism it implied. And this rejection corresponded with the
rise of racial science and the emergence of a genuinely modern form of
'racism'. It is an initially surprising, yet finally logical,
characteristic of this phase in the evolution of European racism that it
was bent, in important respects, on the normalization of colonized
peoples. Although Kolb had insisted strongly on the need to subject all
stories about the Khoikhoi to first-hand scrutiny, a procedure that led
him to dismiss many legends as 'Excesses of the Imagination' (Kolb,
1731: 1, 37), he also confirmed many reports that marked their profound
cultural and even physical difference from Europeans: he testified, for
example, to witnessing the 'Hottentot apron', the excision of one
testicle from the men, and the practice of spreading darkened grease
over their bodies. Later travellers rejected even these claims, accusing
Kolb of precisely that reliance on hearsay that he professed to disdain.
In the words of François Le Vaillant, writing in 1790, 'It is ... not to
be questioned, but that after ten years residence ... [Kolb] thought it
easier to associate with the good fellows of the colony, who, while they
drunk his wine, laughed in their sleeves, and vied with each other in
recounting those ridiculous anecdotes which compose the bulk of his
memoirs' (Le Vaillant, 1790: 109).12 Taking his lead from Rousseau, who
had grouped Hottentots with other noble savages (Rousseau, 1986: 147),
Le Vaillant inveighed sentimentally against the supposed abuse of this
people by Kolb and previous travellers: 'Worthy injured people! ...
Peaceful Hottentots! behold with disdain those harsh invaders who first
reduced to slavery, then basely traduced and placed ye on a level with
the brutes' (Le Vaillant, 1790: 160-1). In sharp contrast with the
depiction of Hottentots as haughtily independent, alone and proud in
their alien customs, Le Vaillant portrayed 'Klaas', a noble-hearted
guide who selflessly defends the French traveller from the hoofs of a
charging elephant. 'Klaas pupil of nature!' exclaims Le Vaillant,
'artless soul, uncorrupted by the false tinsel of superficial
politeness, continue to cherish the remembrance of that friendship to
whom thy idea must ever be dear!' (Le Vaillant, 1790: 249-50).
What high-mindedness, we might like to echo, to rescue the Khoikhoi from
the guts and grease that filled previous accounts. Yet behind Le
Vaillant's much more palatable and conventional portrait of the
Hottentots may indeed lie the crushing of this people's unique culture
under prolonged European influence. For the Khoikhoi were dying a slow
cultural death. Its population thinned drastically by smallpox, its
binding forms of social order mocked and humiliated, this nation of
wandering herdsmen increasingly abandoned its traditional ways, donned
Western livery, and entered European houses as domestics or guides. When
Joseph Banks arrived in the Endeavour in 1771, he heard only rumours
that Hottentots existed in an aboriginal state far beyond Table
Mountain.13 The Khoikhoi he witnessed, as they tied his horse or brought
his food, seemed so banal that he wondered why anyone thought they were
extraordinary or particularly disgusting. Eager to witness cultural
difference, he ordered Hottentots to dance for him. What he saw
convinced him of the total falsehood of stories describing a people
that, covered with grease, streaming in copper, and loosely clothed in
animal skins, wildly danced as they shouted what Dutch witnesses heard
as 'Hottentot! Hottentot!', the apparent origin of their European name.
Instead, he watched dances 'as dull and spiritless as can be imagined',
consisting 'entirely of beating the earth with one foot and then with
the other' (Banks, 1896: 440).
What Banks interpreted as the visible demonstration that the dance of
Hottentot culture was unremarkable, and always had been, we might well
reinterpret as a dance of cultural death. Others of this time, such as
the popular travel writer William MacIntosh, similarly praised the
Khoikhoi as a people of 'mild and tractable disposition' who had been
'very much misrepresented in Europe' (MacIntosh, 1782: 1, 217-18). But
this praise came with a proviso aimed at Khoikhoi who insisting on
remaining on the outskirts of European acculturation. Such 'wild
Hottentots', as MacIntosh went on to insist, 'are untameable and
unmanageable by any means that have yet been tried'. Indeed, MacIntosh's
assertion that these uncooperative Khoikhoi 'scarcely deserve to be
ranked among the human species' (1782: 1, 220) is, arguably, chilling in
a way that the earlier accounts of Hottentot beastliness are not. For
exclusion from the human race now meant, as never before, an
unwillingness to submit to European authority, imposing a simultaneously
geographical and ideological boundary between 'in' and 'out', 'human'
and 'non-human'. In insidious ways, the ideological boundary has been
reaffirmed even in the most 'politically correct' commentary on the
Khoikhoi to the present day. Linda Merians, for example, congratulates
the many commentators on the Khoikhoi in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries who make Hottentots 'full members of the human
family', praise that reflects her approval that these authors
'unambiguously articulate their awareness that the long-standing
tradition of negative description of Hottentots was misleading or
inaccurate' (Merians, 2001: 199 and 208). In fact, these late visitors
to the Cape had no real basis to judge whether the previous accounts
were accurate or not. And what Merians calls 'negative description'
often indicates resistance to customs and forms of behaviour that merely
differed from what Europeans considered meet, palatable and salubrious
according to a certain evolving code of middle-class mores.
To wash away all that had made Hottentots fearful and threatening to
European values became, indeed, the preoccupying aim of accounts of this
people in the late eighteenth century. Moreover, this tendency
corresponded in significant ways with the inauguration of a science of
race during precisely the same era. Buffon, who was instrumental in
introducing the term 'race' into scientific discourse, acknowledged that
the Hottentots were 'fort extraordinaires', but he dismissed most of the
stories about these people as apocryphal, denying, for example, the
existence of 'le tablier Hottentot', and insisting that 'ce peuple n'est
pas si excessivement laid que la plupart des voyageurs veulent le faire
croire' (Buffon, 1854: 4, 600-1). His departures from Kolb tended
instead to make the Khoikhoi seem more like conventional 'savages' whose
lives were brutal, nasty and short: they beat their wives, crawled in
the dirt, and seldom lived past forty years old. In a different way, the
goal of reintegrating Hottentots within the reigning paradigms of
European thought was sought by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the most
influential figure in the theorizing of race in the late eighteenth
century. Blumenbach introduced the practice of bunching the Hottentots
with all the neighbouring peoples of southern Africa (including,
prominently, the 'Bushmen' and 'Caffres'), whom he classified together
as 'woolly-haired African nations' differing in their somewhat lighter
skin colour from the 'Negroes' further north (Blumenbach, 1865: 306 and
351-2). It was the light skin, predictably, that presented the greatest
threat to the direct relation between skin colour and racial capacity
that became a typical thesis of nineteenth-century ethnography.14 In
innumerable works of anthropology from the nineteenth to the twentieth
centuries, therefore, the Hottentots were interpreted as a hybrid of
so-called 'Negro' and other racial traits, an anomalous touching of one
stem on others to produce an errant, southward-pointing twig. In the
words of A. L. Kroeber in a popular anthropological textbook first
published in 1928, the Hottentots were a 'very specialized race' with
some 'Caucasian or Mongoloid' features modifying their basic 'Negroid'
stem (Kroeber, 1948: 769).15
Kroeber's relatively modern definition (similar, for example, to the
definition of 'Hottentot' in the most recent edition of the Oxford
English Dictionary)16 reveals the effort not to excise but to reattach
Hottentots to the branching network of human development. Such efforts,
however, needed to explain all that allegedly made Hottentots non-human
and alien, such as the 'Hottentot apron' and the pendulous breasts noted
by early travellers to the Cape. While these anomalies were not totally
denied, nineteenth-century anthropologists tended increasingly to
question their authenticity and to find natural explanations for what
had previously seemed inexplicable and prodigious. Such was the
self-consciously rational orientation of Sir William Lawrence's Lectures
on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man (1822).
Lawrence's presentation of the Cape 'tribes' before the Royal Society of
Physicians was based heavily on the study of the Hottentot Venus, dubbed
Saartje Baartman, whose naked body, minutely measured by teams of
scientists, was carefully dissected, catalogued and displayed once she
was dead. The stripping and bodily inspection of Baartman are strongly
indicative of the new methodology of race science, for what was stripped
away - the clothes and customs so fascinating to previous authors like
Kolb - meant little to nineteenth-century professors except as showing
the deficient mental capacities of 'savages'. Contrary to what might be
thought, moreover, this scrutiny of Baartman's body was intended to
diminish rather than intensify the sense of difference between the
Hottentots and other peoples. Relying on scientific reports on the
Hottentot Venus in the Mémoires du Musée d'Histoire Naturelle, Lawrence
pondered one by one each of the supposed physical monstrosities of 'the
tribes in the south of Africa', drawing each within the ambit of
observed phenomena in natural history. The 'Hottentot apron' was in fact
only elongated nymphae or labiae minorae, present not only in certain
Hottentot individuals but in 'Negroes, Moors, and Copts', as well as
some European women. Reports of the pendulous breasts of Hottentot women
bore 'an evident air of exaggeration' and were, in any event, common to
many savage peoples. The protuberant buttocks of Hottentot women -
steatopygia, a characteristic almost never reported before the
nineteenth century - was only the kind of variation equally observed in
'fatbuttocked sheep'. Indeed, as Lawrence summarized, 'the development
of the nymphae, and the other varieties enumerated in this chapter, are
merely analogous to the variations observed in corresponding points
among many domestic animals'. The repeated analogies between savages and
animals, along with that peculiarly nineteenth-century fascination with
the details of female genitalia and buttocks, should indeed alert us to
a significant constellation of racist and sexist ideologies
characteristic of Western raciology. Yet Lawrence was also being
consciously high-minded, reflecting paternally on the need to rebut
suggestions of the 'monstrous' difference between Hottentots and the
rest of the human species: 'In proportion as distant regions become well
known', he concluded, 'such monstrosities disappear, and the progress of
natural knowledge will gradually consign all these marvellous tales to
oblivion' (Lawrence, 1822: 360-72).
In an insightful essay on monstrosity in eighteenth-century thought,
Andrew Curran and Patrick Graille describe how the 'monster' loomed
threateningly over efforts in the Enlightenment to build a coherent and
all-inclusive grid of taxonomies (see Curran and Graille, 1997). Yet it
was really in the nineteenth century that efforts to drive the monster
from the precincts of natural history became the single-minded
preoccupation of science. As we have seen, the Enlightenment
anthropology of Kolb and those he influenced accepted and even endorsed
many of the observations of previous travellers to the Cape with regard
to the stark alterity of Khoikhoi culture. They ratified these stories
even at the expense of destabilizing assurance in the universality of
European norms, the 'enlightened' (and partly satirical) goal being to
expose the tyrannical reign of arbitrary 'custom'. The racial science
being developed from Buffon to Lawrence was designed precisely to halt
this slide into relativity and self-mockery. And from this ideological
root grew the distinctive language of modern racism.
The library of a Victorian gentleman with an interest in raciology might
well, for example, have contained J. S. Wood's heavy and
Fig. 4. Nineteenth-century depiction of Hottentots. From Wood (1878).
lavishly illustrated volume, The Uncivilized Races of the World (1878).
In a substantial section on the Hottentots, Wood cited Le Vaillant's
authority in dismissing Kolb as 'utterly unworthy of belief' (Wood,
1878: 218), following the French explorer in the intention of sanitizing
the Khoikhoi into picturesquely banal 'savages', as reflected by the
illustrations that accompany his description (Figure 4). Sans grease,
sans guts, Wood's amused portrait of the Hottentots relies heavily on a
more recent work, Francis Galton's Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical
South Africa. This is significant, for Galton is remembered by us now as
the scientist who coined the term 'eugenics' and did much to popularize
the idea of controlling inheritance for the supposed good of humanity,
the vision so infamously pursued by the Nazis. The anthropological
thinking that led Galton to these theories began when he was a young man
exploring the Cape region in 1851, employing and occasionally
'thrashing' Hottentot servants and guides. Like racial scientists whose
views clearly oriented his observations, he disregarded previous stories
of the supposed physical and cultural idiosyncrasies of the Hottentots
and the neighbouring peoples of this area, whom he grouped together as a
single biological group characterized by their particular shade of
'olive' skin colour and low state of social development. Since
Hottentots and Bushmen, Namaqua or Oerlam, were all the same race, he
when I say Oerlam, Hottentot, or Bushman, the identical same yellow,
flat-nosed, woolly-haired, clicking individual must be conjured up
before the mind of my kind reader, but differing in dirt, squalor, and
nakedness, according to the actual term employed; the highest point of
the scale being a creature who has means of dressing himself respectably
on Sundays and gala-days, and who knows something of reading and
writing; the lowest point, a regular savage (Galton, 1889: 42).
Galton thus banalized the famously exotic dirtiness of Cape people into
a mere sign of poverty and 'regular' savagery. And in other respects, as
well, he viewed all south African 'tribes' through well-worn cultural
stereotypes that relate solely to their degree of cooperation with or
resistance to European occupation. On the one hand, there is the
faithful noble savage, like 'Barmen', 'a respectable old gentleman, who
spoke Dutch perfectly, and every now and then earned something by doing
odd jobs for the missionaries' (1889: 50). At the other extreme is
'Jonker', the impudent and barbaric despot whom Galton variously
flatters and cajoles into allowing him access to his territories. As
suggested by the Europeanized names given to all these Khoikhoi -
Jonker, Barmen, Captain Frederick, Johannis - Galton's aim is to absorb
these people back into a universe that can be easily articulated by
European tongues and minds. His Hottentots all behave in perfectly
understandable but 'savage' ways, the point being that they are human
beings of a sort familiar to Europeans, though of a lower 'scale', to
borrow Galton's expression in the quote above.
Galton's book, that is, develops a verbal adjustment between distance
and approximation, a linguistic habit given literal and spatial form in
his account's most famous episode. Galton shared the Victorian male's
peculiar fetish for the 'Hottentot Venus', a fascination with enlarged
buttocks barely disguised beneath shows of gentlemanly modesty and cold
scientific calculation. Inflamed by a Cape woman whom he describes as 'a
Venus among Hottentots', but too discreet to fulfil his desire of
measuring her steatopygia with a pocket-ruler, Galton stands at a
distance with his sextant, measuring her curves and then calculating
their width and breadth by means of trigonometry (1889: 53-4). This
episode makes obvious the tendency of nineteenth-century anthropologists
to reduce non-European peoples to specimens for their strangely
interrelated scientific and sexual projects. But Galton's lust also
points explicitly to his recognition of this woman's conformity with
European ideas of female beauty. As he writes, 'I gazed at ... that gift
of bounteous nature to this favoured race, which no mantua-maker, with
all her crinoline and stuffing, can do otherwise than humbly imitate'.
This reference to the clothing fashions of women in Victorian England
leads to other comparisons between Caucasian ladies and his Hottentot
Venus, who 'was turning herself about to all points of the compass, as
ladies who wish to be admired usually do' (1889: 54).
Francis Galton thought that Hottentots were racially inferior, but he
also wished to copulate with Hottentot women. This reaction surely marks
an important difference between Europeans of the seventeenth and
nineteenth centuries, for the sexual proclivities of these travellers
themselves form a revealing social history. The sailors who first came
to the Cape admitted, in the style of naughty boys, to paying Hottentot
women with brandy and trinkets to obtain a fleeting, and dramatically
repulsed, glimpse of the 'Hottentot apron'.17 Galton, on the contrary,
portrays himself extending his sextant in the direction of a flirtatious
Hottentot Venus in a winking display of colonial lust. The fact that
Galton does not deny the humanity of a people he wished to colonize and
abuse essentially underprops the logical economy of nineteenth-century
imperialism and its supporting racist ideology. In an essay entitled 'Of
Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse', Homi Bhabha
observes that what the imperialist mentality really desired was 'a
reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is
almost the same, but not quite' (Bhabha, 1994: 86). That is, the very
logic of imperialism, with its paternalistic attitude towards occupied
peoples, required that Sambo or Gunga be perfectly 'human' in all their
dark-eyed and dependent childishness, for it was that humanity which
made them appropriate subjects of colonial control and indoctrination.
Hence, the most notorious racists of the imperial era openly admitted,
like Gobineau in The Inequality of Human Races (1853-4), that 'even the
lowest tribes are not absolutely stupid'. It meant nothing at all, he
insisted, that a particular Hottentot might be a 'good servant'. Indeed,
I actually go further than my opponents, as I have no doubt that
a fair number of negro chiefs are superior, in the wealth of their
ideas, the synthetic power of their minds, and the strength of their
capacity for actions, to the level usually reached by our
peasants, or even by the average specimens of our half-educated
middle classes (Gobineau, 1967: 180).
Such an admission not only cost Gobineau nothing, it even contributed to
his pose of 'scientific' accuracy and his dual goals of imperialism
abroad and aristocratic hegemony at home.
This history of evolving attitudes helps to answer the questions that
opened this essay: why then did the Khoikhoi become so singularly
notorious as a degraded or obnoxious people? And what does this
reputation reveal about the nature of European racism? At an early
stage, as we have considered, the Khoikhoi came closer than most peoples
to materializing a European vision of humanoid strangeness at the
borders of the world. Ultimately, however, it was how much the
Hottentots were like Europeans that caused the deepest anxiety, along
with a loathing that was simultaneously projected onto 'Hottentots' and
reflected back onto Europeans themselves. It is important to keep in
mind that the Khoikhoi were a highly sophisticated people of a form that
Europeans soon recognized. Fiercely independent and self-sufficient,
unsympathetic and even mocking towards Europeans, militarily formidable,
culturally rich and complex, sharp though honest traders who drove a
hard bargain for products the Europeans needed, Hottentots challenged at
its roots European confidence in being the natural guardians of
universal truth. At the same time, however, Europeans genuinely found
the Khoikhoi deeply distressing, and to deny this fact of ethnographic
history is simply to refuse to consider the evidence. Early travellers'
accounts reflect a degree of disgust with the dress, customs and manners
of the Khoikhoi that corresponds in no logical way with the needs of
European egotism or colonialism. The disgust appears, indeed, to have
been more or less mutual, revealing the extent to which Khoikhoi and
European cultures had developed in conflicting ways. For Europeans, at
least, the Khoikhoi presented a problem of categorization. They confused
a European vision of the world and humanity, forcing the painful process
of readjustment that lies behind virtually all the commentary -
repulsed, satiric or scientific - that we have considered.
At the end of this rather dismal rainbow lay the scientific concept of
'race', a powerful and lasting paradigm because it achieved the goal of
both amalgamating and subordinating other cultures so efficiently.
Backed by the authority of most of the eminent cultural leaders of the
nineteenth century, racial science gave an apparent coherence and
intellectual legitimacy to the scattered prejudices and fears that had
existed before, creating what can be called a genuine modern racism.
This racism, as I have maintained, involves a crucial approximation of
the Other; its psychological seduction derives from its apparent ability
to explain and to make what seems physically or culturally strange a
'normal' category in an overarching global outlook. The moral lesson of
this ethnographic history may not be what we expect, for thwarting
racism evidently involves more subtle guards than avoiding or condemning
expressions of dislike or discomfort with respect to another group
(which may in fact represent an ineluctable and even 'healthy' phase of
cultural interaction). Racism may, in fact, find its most nourishing
psychological sources in the consciously high-minded effort to reduce or
erase the sense of difference. To be alarmed by the difference of
cultural Others represents something close to a human norm; to deny the
legitimacy of this cultural difference has been the peculiarly poisonous
inclination of modern European ideology.
Many thanks to Titi Adepitan, Andrew Curran, Daniel O'Leary and Claude
Rawson for their sensitive and learned comments on previous versions of
this essay.
1. On the evolution of 'race', see Hudson (1996), Stocking (1968),
Popkin (1973), Banton (1977 and 1987), Honegger (1991), Todorov (1993)
and Smedley (1993: 36-40).
2. Hottentots were widely believed to occupy a position between humans
and apes in the Great Chain of Being. See Voltaire (1877-85: 22, 210),
Long (1774: 2, 364), Smith (1788: 144). Linneaus (1758: 14) placed the
Hottentots in the class 'homo monstrosus'. But 'homo monstrosus'
differed from 'homo sapiens' by artificially induced rather than natural
deformity.
3. Johan Jacob Saar (1662) and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1649), cited in
Raven-Hart (1971: 1, 63 and 67).
4. John Jourdain (1608), cited in Raven-Hart (1967: 42).
5. See also the 1670 voyage of William Hore (Raven-Hart, 1967). The
Icelandic traveller Jón Olofson assumed, without evidence, that these
were cannibalistic attacks (Raven-Hart , 1967: 111).
6. See the 1610 account of Pyrard de Laval (1610), who relied entirely
on hearsay, cited in Raven-Hart (1967: 47).
7. To what extent do these early accounts provide accurate information
on the cultural practices of the Khoikhoi during this period? This
question seems virtually unanswerable, as this culture is now extinct
and later accounts portray them in a highly Europeanized form. Richard
Elphick claims that many of the stories, like the wearing of guts, were
at least partially accurate (1985: 194). He also maintains, however,
that the Hottentots were found by the Europeans already in a state of
severe cultural decline (1985: xvii).
8. See, for example, the account of Frederick Andersen Bolling (1670),
in Raven-Hart, (1971: 1, 147).
9. On environmental theories of human modification, see Glacken (1967).
10. See, for example, the comments of Johann Wilhelm Vogel (1679) and
Guy Tachard (1685) in Raven-Hart (1971: 1, 218 and 289).
11. See Chesterfield (1892: 1, 407), letter 160 (28 February 1751, OS).
The editor of James Boswell's Life of Johnson, G. B. Hill, maintained
that Chesterfield was actually referring to Lord Lyttleton, though the
description seems far more applicable to the famously uncouth and
uncleanly Johnson. See Boswell (1934-50: 1, 266-7).
12. Le Vaillant was not alone in romanticizing the Khoikhoi during the
late eighteenth century. See also Raynal (1783: 309).
13. The virtual disappearance of 'wild' Hottentots in the vicinity of
European settlement is widely confirmed by other travellers. See De Mist
(1954: 28) and Barrow (1806: 98-100).
14. In 1813, for example, Pritchard (1973: 44) made a direct correlation
between skin colour and level of civilization, yet felt obliged to admit
that the Hottentots were both light-skinned and racially regressive.
15. Kroeber reviews the similar arguments of previous anthropologists
(1948: 155 and 215).
16. Hottentots are defined as a people 'of mixed Bushman-Hamite descent,
with some Bantu admixture'.
17.	See, for example, the accounts of Wouter Shouter (1665), Georg
Meister (1677) and David Tapen (1682) in Raven-Hart (1971: 1, 85, 204,
and 238), respectively.
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Burr.
Nicholas Hudson is Professor of English at the University of British
Columbia. Address: Department of English, University of British
Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z1, Canada [email:
nhudson at interchange.ubc.ca]


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text:
Coral reefs highlight the key role of existing biodiversity for climate change adaptation
Categories: Top News
New research on coral reefs led by the University of Southampton suggests that existing biodiversity will be essential for the successful adaptation of ecosystems to climate change.
About 25% of all marine biodiversity depends on coral reefs, the three-dimensional calcareous framework laid down by the coral animals together with their algal symbionts. Climate change, in particular increasing seawater temperatures, threatens to disrupt the functionality of this productive association with potentially devastating knock-on effects to ecosystem services that are provided by coral reefs including food supply, coastal protection, attraction of tourists and access to biopharmaceuticals.
Investigations of the symbiotic partnership between the coral host and their algal symbiont in the world's hottest coral reef environments — the Persian/Arabian Gulf (PAG) and nearby seas — lead an international consortium of scientists to conclude that natural selection of existing biodiversity is key to facilitating rapid adaptation of coral reef ecosystems to climate change.
The novel findings by the University of Southampton (UK), KAUST (Saudi Arabia), NYUAD (UAE) and Tel Aviv University /IUI (Israel) are published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Professor Jörg Wiedenmann, head of the University of Southampton's Coral Reef Laboratory and principal investigator of the project explains: "Corals of the PAG can survive exceptionally high salinity levels and temperatures of up to 35 degrees Celsius — conditions that would kill corals elsewhere. However, the historic climate change that created this extreme environment, left coral communities in the Middle Eastern region only less than 6000 years to adjust to the drastic changes. Therefore, these coral ecosystems are ideal model systems to understand how reefs may respond to present-day climate change."
Dr Benjamin Hume, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Southampton and lead author of the paper, elaborates: "Using advanced molecular biological approaches, we recently discovered that corals of the Southern PAG host almost exclusively a species of symbiotic algae, Symbiodinium thermophilum, that was new to science. This finding suggested that this algal species was essential for the survival of the PAG corals and the question arose whether Symbiodinium thermophilum was the product of rapid evolution catalysed by the challenging conditions of the PAG, or whether this symbiont originated elsewhere."
To answer this question, the scientific team analysed close to a thousand corals along 5000 km of coastline in the PAG and adjacent seas.
Professor Voolstra from the Red Sea Research Center at KAUST adds: "Next-generation sequencing technologies allowed us to analyse the DNA of the coral symbionts in unprecedented depth, a prerequisite to screen large numbers of samples for the genetic signature of Symbiodinium thermophilum."
While the unusual symbiont was prevalent within the PAG, it was also found in the Gulf of Oman and Red Sea, however, only at barely detectable levels. Analysing a suite of molecular markers, the researchers discovered a surprising genetic diversity among S. thermophilum from outside the PAG.
Dr Hume explains: "Our data suggest that this diversity resulted from a genetic radiation aged at approximately 13 million years ago. This is far earlier than the formation of the PAG that only occurred about 15 k years ago as a result of rising sea levels after the last ice age."
He adds: "Out of this diverse group only one genetic type dominates the PAG, suggesting that selection by the extreme conditions has favoured an existing variant that was best suited to promote coral growth in this environment."
Professor Wiedenmann continues: "Our example of the heat tolerant coral symbiont suggests that the genetic diversity that exists among populations can be key to survival if species are facing a rapid change in environmental conditions. These pre-adapted forms might exist only in low numbers among abundant, but more vulnerable individuals. Any loss of genetic material from coral reefs caused by habitat destruction, overfishing, nutrient enrichment and pollution could therefore reduce the capacity of species to adjust to a changing environment."
He concludes: "To save coral reefs for the future, we need to fight the rising levels of greenhouse gases which cause climate change. At the same time, we need to protect present-day biodiversity to facilitate adaptation to changing environmental conditions. This applies not only to coral reefs but to ecosystems in general."


God has ONE purpose in His church. One. Not two, three, or ten. But ONE. Indeed, the purpose of God for His church is really the purpose of God for this entire world. And what IS that purpose? Christ. That's right. The purpose of God is a PERSON.
Now, of course, that sounds a bit impractical. It sounds almost like an abstract idea that is just hanging out there. What do I mean when I say that God's purpose is Christ? Let's look at a few passages that talk about this.
Those are just a few passages that talk about God's overall purpose – and we might add to them John, chapter 14 through 16, where Jesus tells us what the Holy Spirit would do when He came on Pentecost. Obviously, whatever the Holy Spirit is doing IS the purpose of God, because the Holy Spirit is God. And everyone of those things promised by Jesus centers directly on Himself – the Holy Spirit came to glorify Him, teach us all things about Him, and to guide us into all the Truth about Him. Again, it is all about Jesus Christ – knowing Him.
Once we realize that Christianity is CHRIST IN US, then this purpose become clear. God's purpose is for Jesus Christ – who is IN US -- to be known by His people, and then, because of that, to grow to manifest Him. In short, God wants us to become witnesses unto Christ – not just by talking about Him – but He wants us to be living epistles of what happens when Christ has His way with people.
So God's purpose is Christ. He wants us to contribute to the measure of Christ. But notice what this means for us: It means that if we are caught up into God's purpose of Christ in our lives, that everything else is going to have to be adjusted TO that purpose. In other words, everything else that is going on in our lives, internally and externally, must be made subject to this one purpose of God.
This is not bad news, but good news. God is simply telling us that He will never be part of any intention on our part to subvert HIS purpose with our own. No. Rather, God knows and cares about everything that is going on in our lives, and cares about our needs and wants. But these things will only be provided as they serve HIS purpose of Christ. Why would we want it any other way?
Jesus said, "Seek you first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added." (Matt. 6:33) This is exactly the same thought. God is seeking first His kingdom, and if we want to be caught up into His purpose, then we must likewise seek first His kingdom. But if we do, we will not live in the kingdom to the exclusion to our wants and needs. No. Indeed, what will come with the package of God's kingdom and purpose are, "all these things." But they will come in God's way, and in God's time. They will come as they SERVE God's purpose of Christ in us.
Have we ever considered that God's purpose for us might not agree with our purpose for us? This is possible. But if we yield to God and seek Him first, by the time God is done with us, we will be changed – and His purpose will be ours. This is part of what it means for God's goal to be Christ – if we yield, we will become one with the will of Christ for us.
God surely has a specific purpose for each life. But in the end, each of those specific purposes equal some filling up of the measure of Christ. That is what God wants – for each of us to contribute to the measure of Christ. If we do that then God has gotten His purpose in our lives.
Our problem is that when we speak of, "God's purpose for our lives," we often think in terms of a job, career, a marriage, or some other function – maybe like ministry. But these are not God's purpose. They are TOOLS unto God's purpose. God can use a job or a relationship to give us the means to contribute to the fullness of Christ. This is done as we seek His glory in each of these issues. As I bring each of these issues in my life through to God's glory, and seek His kingdom or rule over them, then the fullness of Christ may be realized in me. But can we see that it is Christ in me that is God's fulfilled purpose, and not whether I made a good career move?
Our failure to realize what God is doing can cause great confusion, and often, cause us to stray out of God's purpose. We might, for example, think that the greatest purpose God could ever have for us is a successful ministry. So we make that our goal. But God never works towards that end. He wants US – He wants the fullness of Christ IN US – and might use a ministry as a tool unto that end. And once He gets a measure of Christ in us, He might use us to minister to others. But the ministry itself is only a tool. Christ is the goal. The danger is for us to make the ministry our goal and never recognize that God's goal has been Christ.
Other Christians make a job or a marriage their goal. God cares about these things. But will affirm them only to the extent that He knows they will serve His purpose of Christ in our personal lives. If they won't serve His purpose, He isn't going to give them to us. And it isn't going to matter how much we want them. Why? Because it is our natural man wanting them – and they may even be good and legitimate wants. Not sinful ones. But God simply knows better – He knows what such things will do in our lives. So He remains faithful to us to the disregard of our protests. It is something for which we will eventually be thankful to Him.
So what we are seeing is this: God has a purpose, and despite the unique details of accomplishing it in each life, that purpose is the fullness of Christ IN US. Therefore, Christians need to STOP trying to get God to affirm their purpose, and begin yielding to God's purpose. If we would do that, we would have all things necessary added to us, and much more. But if we won't do that, we will, at best, get things we want some other way, but won't realize God's purpose.
It is only natural to think that surrender to God is a negative thing. Usually surrender will involve us relinquishing control over an issue, or perhaps suffering some loss. And THAT is often what occupies our thinking and emotions. Thus, surrender to God sometimes seems like nothing more than a resignation to a state of being deprived. This is how we usually think – that if I surrender to God it is going to mean that I will lose what I want in life.
Temporarily, this may actually be the case. I may lose what meant most to me. After all, didn't Jesus say we had to LOSE our lives in order to FIND them? Sure. But note that there IS another side to this – there is a FIND side to LOSING. There is a resurrection side to death. It's just that at the time of surrender, this is easy to forget.
What Jesus promises is amazing. He is saying that if we LOSE into His hands our life – which would include what means most to us in life – then what we will FIND is – what? Well, the first thing we will find is HIM -- in a deeper way. We must see this. The reward for losing yourself to Christ is that you FIND CHRIST. I'm not talking about salvation. I'm talking about coming to know Him.
When Paul suffered the loss of all things, He WON Christ, and found Him – or better yet said, was FOUND IN HIM. Isn't that what Christians want? Well, it is supposed to be what we want. It certainly is what God wants?
But things do not end there. If you LOSE your life, you will FIND Christ – you will come to a greater fullness of CHRIST IN YOU. But then – because you are established in God's purpose – God can be free to add everything to you that serves this purpose. He can add jobs, relationships, money, etc. You can now be trusted with it.
You see, this is not a game. God did not sit down one day up in heaven and say, "Let's see. I don't want to make Christianity easy. So I will refuse to bless people unless they first pay Me off by surrendering." No. That is not what is going on here. What is going on is that God is restoring us back to Himself through Christ. He is trying to establish us back upon His basis, and in His purpose. And as mentioned, there is only ONE purpose: Christ. And because we begin in a place that is completely off God's purpose, indeed, often contrary to it, we must first surrender ourselves to Him.
We must see that God's purpose cannot be accomplished in us as long as we are in control. It cannot. It cannot be accomplished as long as we are living this life for ourselves. All of that is contrary to Christ. God's purpose can be accomplished only if Jesus is Lord. And this will require surrender.
Many Christians have forgotten that God is God. We have forgotten that God has rights. This is His creation and Jesus died to redeem it. God is working a purpose for His glory and for the restoration of His name. We don't have any business dictating to Him. But He has ever right to command us.
This is true in the overall. But it is just as true specifically in our individual lives. You and I do not have the right to tell God what we want to be, how our lives ought to be, or what He needs to do for us. Rather, we are supposed to seek HIM, and HIS will, and HIS glory. We are to get on HIS page. If we do, we will end up with HIS WILL – and benefit from that more than we could imagine.
Even such privileges as the right to ask God for something in prayer are made subject to God's will and purpose. We are told to pray only, "according to His will." We are told that we are to pray, "in the name of Jesus," which means to pray only for what Jesus would pray for – i.e., the will of God. We are told directly to pray, "Thy kingdom come, and Thy will be done." Indeed, even when we are told to, "ask what you will," we are told that we are supposed to will only what God wills! What? Do you think we are supposed to will what God does NOT will?
Christians, according to the Bible, don't even belong to themselves. We aren't supposed to live for ourselves. It is only because we don't know God, or know His purposes, that we think this means we will be deprived. No. It is the key to all that God has for us – both spiritually and materially. But make no question, when the Bible says these things, God is dead serious. And we need to begin to realize it.
The bottom line is this: We belong to God. God does not belong to us. We are called to glorify God and be caught up into HIS purpose. God has not put Himself at our disposal to serve OUR purposes. But again – this is all good news. Have we come to the place yet where we see that maybe God knows a bit more about our lives, and His purpose, than we know? If we would only get on God's page, we would find our lives in Christ.
If we knew God we would realize that He is incapable of doing us wrong. The fact that He will sacrifice anything for His purpose in Christ is simply faithfulness on His part – even though we might not be faithful. God has a purpose and will not deviate from it. The question is whether we are going to get on board God's purpose.
Now, today it is becoming more and more popular to teach people ways to get God on board OUR purpose. This is being done everywhere. Lost in all of this is the absolute fact that we have no right to decide what we want in life to begin with. God must decide. And it will always be good. Surrender means we allow God to decide. We enter into HIS purpose and we fully give ourselves to Him for it.
Think about this: What if everything that we want in life is based on a façade – is based on fears, and wants, and a preoccupation with that which God wants to alter or eliminate from our hearts? What if, for example, my desire for a ministry is based on my desire to draw attention to myself – and I am blind to the fact that it is? Do I think that all the faith in the world that God will bring my ministry to pass is going to matter? No. God will want to deal with my motives. And by the time He is done dealing with them, I may no longer want what I wanted so much before.
So many Christians have plans, hopes, and dreams – a life they desire. They have been taught that God wants to make all of that happen -- and all we need to do is believe and obey. But this is misleading. The real Truth is that God has a plan that He wants to accomplish for His glory and our benefit. THAT is what we are to seek – even if it costs us everything that we would have wanted otherwise.
God is not here to, "service our lives." He is not here to do our bidding. Indeed, if we really understood it, we are to have absolutely NOTHING to say about our lives. Nothing. God is to have EVERYTHING to say. What else do we think the Bible means, as we read above, when it says that, "we are not our own?" We aren't. We belong to God. And what else do we think Jesus meant when He said, "He that loses his life for My sake will find it." These aren't just a nice clichés. They mean exactly what they say.
But again -- this might seem scary to some Christians. It might seem to some that such a thing would DEPRIVE us of what we want in life. However, we need to come to terms with the Truth here. Is it possible to surrender ourselves to God and LOSE OUT? No. It is not possible. For if you surrender to God YOU GET GOD – and everything that is part of His will for you.
The fact is, it is not possible to come under the full Lordship of Jesus Christ and end up regretting it. Sure, there will be loss. You will lose YOUR lordship over your life. You will NO longer be in charge. You will also have to undergo quite an internal change. There will be suffering. But if you seek Christ with all your heart, what you get IS Christ.
We don't believe this because we don't KNOW HIM. We don't TRUST HIM. Rather, many are afraid of God; afraid that He will violate their trust. Well, God will put us through situations that are intended to BUILD FAITH in us, and that may, for a season, make it seem as if God has forsaken us. But in the end, if we fully give ourselves into the hands of God, what we will get IS GOD, and everything that He wants us to have in life. It may not be what we would have expected or wanted. But it will be what HE wants – and therefore, it will be the best for us.
God's glory is the manifestation of Himself. It is His nature, character, and personhood being made known in Spirit and in Truth. Of course, God's glory was fully seen in His Son, and is being accomplished in Christ.
When God's glory is accomplished, everyone experiences God. Thus, for God to glorify Himself isn't a matter of God being selfish. It is a matter of God being able to give Himself to all.
God wants to glorify Himself in each life. He does this by edifying us in Christ – so that Christ might become preeminent in each of us. However, this means that He must dismantle our purposes. And yet, in the end, if we yield to Him, we will be caught up in HIS purpose, and not hindered by our own.