Hansen, Henny. "Investigations in a Shia'a Village in Bahrain"

Henny Harald Hansen was a Danish ethnographer looking into the lives and costumes of Islamic communities in the Middle East. I was very surprised to have discovered her book Investigations in a Shia’a Village in Bahrain (in reference to Sar) at the British Museum’s Anthropology Center. The book, a monograph published by the National Museum of Denmark, was written in 1960 and gives a very interesting account of a place that has by now changed drastically. The Sar she describes has no electricity and is made up of compound-structured homes housing extended polygamous families. But before going into her descriptions of the material culture of the people of Sar, she delves into some history, even briefly going into the explanation of life pre-pearls.

Thousands of years ago:

Henny goes back into the civilizations of Dilmun and Tylos. In the retrospective lineage, she identifies three natural sources of wealth that in Bahrain: fresh water, pearls and then oil. However it is as far back as around 2000BC that an Assyrian inscription about Dilmun mentions “fish eyes” which some people have interpreted to be pearls. Henny also found accounts from Planius and, years later, the great traveler Muhammed al-Idrisi both speaking of pearls in their descriptions Bahrain. By the time Henny was writing her ethnography, people were pearl diving in much the same way as it had been described in Ibn Batutta’s account 600 years before that. In its hey-day, pearls were mainly sold to Baghdad, Syria and Turkey with most of it heading to India.

But by the 1920’s two major external forces lead to the demise of Bahrain’s pearl trade. The Japanese introduced cultured pearls to the market, making them more widely and easily available – though clearly not with the same luster that Bahrain’s combination salt and fresh water produced – making the cost value drop considerably. By the same time the commercial world was about to step into the Great Depression, a time of very little purchase power and thus a low demand for commodity goods like pearls. Serendipitously, the discovery of oil put Bahrain back in the trade. By 1934 BAPCO opened as a full subsidiary of Standard Oil Company and a member of CALTEX.

The discovery of oil made Bahrain more valuable to outsiders. Its position on the silk route to India was very significant to the British. Having protected the country from invaders of the Persian Empire, the British had appointed Charles Belgrave as political advisor to the ruling family representing Britain. By 1946, the British transferred their residency to Bahrain, the city of pearl merchants and commercial center of the Gulf Arabian shores. By then, the Al Khalifa seat was also moved from Muharraq to Riffaa, just north of Awali where the oil business headquarters were active.

Town life in Sar, 1960:

But coming back to the core topic of the monograph, Henny writes very clearly about life in Sar. According to the 1959 consensus, the population of Bahrain was 142,213; by 1960 there were about 450 people living in Sar, which, as according to Henny, is the oldest village in Bahrain.

She describes the architecture of the time being a cross between Arab and Persian structures. The wind towers that worked like a modern day air condition (trapping air and creating a breeze) were an influence from the eastern neighbors in Iran. But the houses were not singular structures. They were bundles of homes grouped together by a single gate or wall. The homes, each consisting of one room, would each go to one of the wives of the man of the house (if he had more than one), she would have a padlock and key to her own door and live there with her children while the man would interchangeably sleep with his various wives. In the case that the husband would die, each woman would then have an allocated home for herself and her children. There would also be the room of the ‘majlis’, where the men would gather in evenings for discussion, tea and backgammon. This room would also be allocated as the eldest unmarried son’s room.

There was no market in Sar at that time, no shops and no suqs. But ‘peddlers’ would come into the village every now and then on donkey-back selling items like kerosene, fish, pots, bowls, incense burners. They would also trade items like sweets, shampoos, soap, rose water, needle and thread. But the most frequent dealers were those who had women’s garments and fabrics.

her page in the National Museum of Denmark site.

One reviewer from University of Pennsylvania thought the monograph 'fell way below professional standards'.

World Toilet Day - Q2P

Today, I turn on the ‘twitter’ to find the words ‘World Toilet’ trending under the global category. Subsequently, I find out that it is World Toilet Day. I click to see what people are ‘tweeting’ about it, and find that most people think that it sounds funny – which I guess it does. If I had not been to the summit on The Meaning of Water, I would have thought this was a joke too. But this, in fact, is no joke at all. Today, as a tip towards World Toilet Day, I feel compelled to share a short(-ish) write up about Q2P, a film looking at the anthropology of toilets in parts of India.

click them to enlarge

An issue that is largely taken for granted, lack of sanitation kills 1.8 million people a year. A staggering 2.6 billion live without it. This leads to all kinds of diseases and infections that are, by far, bigger killers than HIV/AIDS.

The World Toilet Organization focuses on ‘toilets’, rather than water, in order to bring that to light. A sort of taboo subject, where humans ‘go’ and their waste ends up has become a huge problem that, if eradicated, can improve millions of lives.

With the world going deeper into urbanization, the issue of sanitation is one that is carrying through into the newly built, modern developments in various parts of the world.

It can be said that most, not all, of these billions of people without sanitation are in both rural and urban parts of South Asia. Q2P is a film that explores the availability, access, importance and trickling effects of gender and class based relations to the toilet in large cities in India. 700 million people in India have no toilets and must ‘go’ outside. Focusing on Bombay and New Delhi, filmmaker Paromita Vohra interviews municipality officers and workers, city architects, public school teachers, and people on the streets. The audience is left with an illustration of the direness of the situation the lack of and the almost exclusive access to toilets and waters these cities present.

Including a humorous anecdote told by the curator of a toilet museum, Vohra shows the irony of the British evolution of the toilet and the historical context of the toilet coming from Europe to the sub-continent dating back in colonial India. Going on, the curator explains that once upon a time, it was only the rich who had toilets, and people from the ‘untouchables’ class would be hired to clean them and dispose of the waste far from the home. But more than humour, this anecdote illustrates the age-old idea of differences in toilets’ accessibility that still goes on today. Untouchables are still those hired to clean public restrooms and public places, and it is in the slums that having a bathroom is an idea only recently starting to become a scarce reality.

Drawing in on New Delhi and Bombay’s aspiration to become cities of the future, more irony is laid out by the lack of planning in India’s urban public spaces that include toilets. Homes in the slums build ‘illegal’, simple toilets by local engineers who address the point that bathrooms are a source of envy when looking at ‘organized’ modern flats that have allocated spaces for the kitchen, bedroom and bathroom.

Public schools are examples whereby makeshift bathrooms are created for students that remain unclean due to lack of manpower available to clean them. Lack of infrastructure is yet another problem that disallows transport of water to the areas of public schools. As a result many children keep from drinking water to avoid the need to go to the bathroom. As the girls get older, issues of cleanliness develop with the menstruation cycles.

Gender being among the issues within the planning process is yet another source of problematic shortages. In questioning municipal officers about the imbalance between men and women’s public toilets, a debate between the amount of women using the toilet, the amount of time women use in a toilet and the amount of space a woman needs (sitting down as opposed to standing up) creates a dialogue that shows better access for men to use toilets than women is simply a result of poverty and convenient planning. Showing the depth of the aspect of space in this problem, inserted along this debate is an animated ‘how-to’ clip for a tool created for women that resembles a pipe, allowing them to pee standing up; something of a funny, yet shocking, insert that illustrates how serious the issue is.

Q2P is a film that shows the complexities and relationships of urban design, natural bodily functions, basic hygiene and funding in an over-crowded and growing urban environment.

Looking through all the websites about World Toilet Organization, I am seeing quite a bit of initiative and information about the problem. But I guess among the biggest thing the Organization is trying to do is break the stigma of talking about waste and sanitation, as beyond being an issue of cleanliness versus disease, it is also a matter of human dignity. In this era of “if it’s yellow, let it mellow” debates on water access, shortage and the like, today, on World Toilet Day, I guess the point is that those who have it should not take for granted the luxury of tipping that flush. And that, once again, is no joke.

Q2P Opening from Ajay Noronha on Vimeo.

some links:

World Toilet Organization

World Toilet Day

Q2P