Podcast #9: August 10th 2005 (Download MP3)
Topics:
Issue #1. Bush, The Pope, and Evolution – again!
Issue #5. Science and Hollywood
Issue #1. Bush, The Pope, and Evolution – again!
Issue #2. Science or Fiction
Issue #3. Atlantis
Issue #4. Modern Witch hunts
From Superstition to Savagery
Women Accused of Witchcraft Face Violence in Rural India
By Rama Lakshmi
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, August 8, 2005; A12
PALANI, India -- At sundown, Pusanidevi Manjhi recalled, nine village men stormed into her house shouting, "Witch, witch!" and dragged her out by her hair as her six small children watched helplessly.
"This woman is a witch!" the men announced to the villagers, said Manjhi, 36. She said they tied her ankles together and locked her in a dark room.
"They beat me with bamboo sticks and metal rods and tried to pull my nails out. 'You are a witch, admit it,' they screamed at me again and again," Manjhi said, tearfully recalling her four days of captivity in June.
"They accused me of casting an evil spell on their paddy crop that was destroyed in a fire. I begged them and told them I was not a witch," she said, showing wounds on her legs, thighs, hips and shoulders one recent morning in this village in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand.
After a police investigation, the men who attacked Manjhi were arrested. An official said that the attack was spurred by a powerful landowner who owned rice paddies in the village and used local superstition to mask his attempts to maintain control.
Threats and charges of witchcraft occur in a number of Indian states that have large tribal populations with traditional beliefs about witches. Indian newspapers periodically publish reports about women who, after being accused of being witches, have been beaten, had their heads shaved or had strings of shoes hung around their necks. Some have been killed.
In a tribal society steeped in superstition, the spells of witches often are blamed for stubborn illnesses, a stroke of bad luck, the drying up of wells, crop failure or the inability to give birth to a son. But social analysts and officials said that superstition and faith in witchcraft often are a ploy for carrying out violence against women.
"Superstition is only an excuse. Often a woman is branded a witch so that you can throw her out of the village and grab her land, or to settle scores, family rivalry, or because powerful men want to punish her for spurning their sexual advances. Sometimes it is used to punish women who question social norms," said Pooja Singhal Purwar, an official at the Jharkhand social welfare department.
"Women from well-to-do homes in the village are never branded witches," Purwar said. "It is always the socially and economically vulnerable women who are targeted and boycotted."
Purwar said she sees an average of five women a month being denounced as witches and tortured in rural Jharkhand. Her department has drawn up a public information project to oppose the practice, providing information at village fairs and conducting street performances and puppet shows. Police at the local level have been alerted to track the cases of women who are attacked, she said.
While Manjhi was imprisoned by her captors, her husband, a farmhand, sought help from the village elders, who called a meeting to determine if Manjhi was a witch and summoned a witch doctor for verification. But by then, word spread and the police arrived.
The nine men were charged under a Jharkhand state law that forbids accusing people of being witches. One of them was Gahan Lal, the man whose paddy had caught fire. Lal later confessed to torturing Manjhi.
"Gahan Lal was a powerful landlord. There were fights all the time in the village over land and wages," said Jayant Tirkey, the police officer investigating the case. "When his paddy caught fire, he blamed [Manjhi] for casting an evil spell. But that is merely an excuse. His real motive is to instill fear among the poor."
Tirkey said he thinks that village witch doctors are to blame for superstitious practices, but added that witch doctors are not arrested and tried because they are not directly involved in the violence.
"I never name a witch. I only give villagers some clues to find her," said Leena Oraon, who is known as a witch doctor in Aragate village and who says she studies rice grains to ascertain the presence of a witch in the village. "Today's doctors cannot cure ailments that are caused by a witch's curse. That is why people come to me."
In a case three years ago in Lalganj village, an elderly woman, Baili Kashyap, was branded a witch for supposedly causing sickness in the family of a relative. The relatives, who allegedly were engaged in a land dispute with her, tied her to a tree and slit her throat with a sickle while others in the village watched. Six men are in prison for the murder.
"My mother-in-law was not a witch. They were after our land. But the entire village just stood and watched the murder," said Kashyap's daughter-in-law, Reena, 28. "They believed she was a witch and deserved to die."
According to a study by the Free Legal Aid Committee, an advocacy group that works against witch-hunting, only 2 percent of people charged with witch-hunting are convicted in court.
"People go scot-free because witnesses are hard to come by. Villagers often approve of the torture meted out to these women," said Girija Shankar Jaiswal, a lawyer who heads the organization. "They think witch-hunting is a heroic act and that it will clean the society of evil."
Only two Indian states, Jharkhand and Bihar, have outlawed witch-hunting. Last year, one of India's northeastern states, Tripura, conducted a discussion in the legislative assembly about the need to ban the practice of witch-hunting. After a day-long debate, the assembly unanimously decided that killing of people for practicing witchcraft should be prevented.
However, members failed to reach a consensus on whether witchcraft was a science or superstition.
Congo's child victims of superstition
By Angus Crawford
BBC, DR Congo
Poverty, civil war and a widely held belief in witchcraft means children in the Democratic Republic of Congo can be extremely vulnerable. Angus Crawford hears the stories of some of the young victims in the capital, Kinshasa.
When Maria starts to cry, she does not make a sound. She sits rigid and silent, staring straight ahead.
She allows just a trickle of tears from each eye. She does not even blink.
She has good reason to be sad.
Three years ago, she lived in London and went to primary school. She still has photographs of the friends she made there.
But her stepmother made a discovery - she decided Maria was possessed, that she had what the Congolese call "kindoki" - witchcraft.
Abandoned
Her father bought a single ticket and within days Maria was getting off a plane in Kinshasa.
Poverty, ignorance and a twisting of traditional beliefs mean Maria is now a pariah
She spoke little French and almost none of the local language, Lingalla. She was told it was just a holiday.
When I track her down, three years later, she is living in a two-room house in one of the poorest areas of the city. She shares it with 29 members of her extended family.
She has braided hair and a shy smile, and is fashion-conscious like only girls desperate to be teenagers can be.
She is dressed in shocking lime green from head to toe.
The tears only start when I ask her what she remembers of the night she arrived back in the city.
It is the terror of that chaotic airport, with its bribe-taking officials, its guards and their guns, the choking heat, the pungent smells.
A seven-year-old girl abandoned and lost. You can read it all on her face.
Street children
Maria, at least, has a roof over her head.
Christian, like 20,000 other street children here, sleeps anywhere he can.
He is tiny. He looks about five or six but tells me he is nine.
He is filthy and his clothes are in tatters.
When he speaks I can barely hear him. Because I am an adult - and so command respect - he calls me "Papa".
I ask him why his family threw him out. Again that word "kindoki" - witchcraft.
Objects of fear
His grandmother says he tried to eat another relative. He tells me that all he hopes for in life now is for the bad spirits to leave him.
I asked pastors how they knew a child was a witch - the answer was almost always that God had shown them
It seems extraordinary but aid agencies believe the vast majority of street children are there for the same reason, as are countless others in orphanages.
It is almost as though this country is in the grip of a collective paranoia, where children have become objects of fear.
It is not that the Congolese do not love their children. Of course they do, they are still the heart of community life.
But the belief in a second, invisible world where witchcraft thrives is widely held.
Combine that with a country in economic freefall, where the extended family is collapsing under the weight of Aids and poverty.
Remember, too, that the foot soldiers of the armies which deposed former dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, were children.
Social cleansing
The image of pre-pubescent boys with machine-guns striding into Kinshasa is etched onto people's memories. They call them the "Kadogos", which very roughly translates as, the "little ones".
Add to that an explosion of evangelical Christian churches which advocate muscular - sometimes violent - exorcism, and you have a gigantic exercise in social cleansing.
And often it is the children who become the scapegoats for all society's ills.
For salvation from these so called "witch children", many families turn to people like Mama Gena.
She is obviously powerful.
It is not just her three mobile phones or even her two designer handbags. Her diamond encrusted watch is impressive too, almost as impressive as the picture of her in police uniform hanging above her desk.
Exorcisms for a fee
But her real power comes from the fact that she is a self-appointed prophetess, who will both identify your child as a witch and then perform an exorcism - for a fee, of course.
And business appears to be good.
Congolese friends tell me her ceremonies are mild. She only starves her charges for five days.
Other pastors burn, hit and sexually abuse the children. Some are killed.
Again and again, I asked pastors how they could tell that a child was a witch. The answer was almost always that God showed them.
The head of one non-governmental organisation put it more bluntly. If you are too fat or too thin, too quiet or too noisy, if you wet the bed or you are disabled as a child you are at risk.
Even more so if you are not a blood relation of the person pointing the finger. It is no surprise that stepmothers frequently appear as the chief accusers.
If they are not yours and you cannot feed them, they are possessed.
So Maria really has good reason to weep.
Poverty, ignorance and a twisting of traditional beliefs mean she is now a pariah.
She knows her old life in London with her school friends is over. Her new life in Kinshasa is one of poverty, fear and the threat of disease.
And so she cries because, she says, she wants to go home.
Issue #5. Science and Hollywood
August 4, 2005
Pentagon's New Goal: Put Science Into Scripts
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 3 - Tucked away in the Hollywood hills, an elite group of scientists from across the country and from a grab bag of disciplines - rocket science, nanotechnology, genetics, even veterinary medicine - has gathered this week to plot a solution to what officials call one of the nation's most vexing long-term national security problems.
Their work is being financed by the Air Force and the Army, but the Manhattan Project it ain't: the 15 scientists are being taught how to write and sell screenplays.
At a cost of roughly $25,000 in Pentagon research grants, the American Film Institute is cramming this eclectic group of midcareer researchers, engineers, chemists and physicists full of pointers on how to find their way in a world that can be a lot lonelier than the loneliest laboratory: the wilderness of story arcs, plot points, pitching and the special circle of hell better known as development.
And no primer on Hollywood would be complete without at least three hours on "Agents & Managers."
Exactly how the national defense could be bolstered by setting a few more people loose in Los Angeles with screenplays to peddle may be a bit of a brainteaser. But officials at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research spell out a straightforward syllogism:
Fewer and fewer students are pursuing science and engineering. While immigrants are taking up the slack in many areas, defense laboratories and industries generally require American citizenship or permanent residency. So a crisis is looming, unless careers in science and engineering suddenly become hugely popular, said Robert J. Barker, an Air Force program manager who approved the grant. And what better way to get a lot of young people interested in science than by producing movies and television shows that depict scientists in flattering ways?
Teaching screenwriting to scientists was the brainstorm of Martin Gundersen, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California and sometime Hollywood technical adviser, whose biggest brush with stardom was bringing a little verisimilitude to Val Kilmer's lasers in the 1985 comedy "Real Genius."
More recently, he was asked to review screenplays by the Sloan Foundation, which awards prizes for scientific accuracy, and found most to be "pretty dismal," as he put it.
"My thought was, since scientists have to write so much, for technical journals and papers, why not consider them as a creative source?" Dr. Gundersen said.
He already had contacts at the American Film Institute, and he quickly persuaded Dr. Barker, who oversees several of his other grants, to endorse what began as a weekend seminar last summer and was expanded to five days this year. The Air Force is providing $100,000 annually for three years; the Army Research Office has added $50,000 this year.
Much of that money will pay for other like-minded efforts: Dr. Gundersen is also starting a workshop for high school students at the film institute, and he plans to get entertainment industry people to lead seminars at scientific conferences and to give seminars to up-and-coming screenwriters on how to reach out to scientists for help with accuracy.
For now, though, the hopes of the Pentagon for a science-friendly cinema seem to be riding on the shoulders of people like Bogdan Marcu, an engineer for Boeing's rocket propulsion division who is nursing an idea for a spy thriller, and Sam Mandegaran, a Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology who says he wants to become a director of science-friendly movies for young people because "adults are a lost cause."
Around a table at the institute's campus, they and their colleagues, chosen from some 50 applicants, listened this week as Syd Field, author of some of the most popular how-to books on screenwriting, steeped them in the ABC's of three-act structure.
They wrestled with how to reconcile the cinematic suspension of disbelief with the scientific method and with their basic purpose of bringing accuracy to the screen.
And they got feedback for their own script ideas. A disaster movie set at the Olympics, where athletes get a virus that makes them smarter? (Problem: the main character was the virus.) A biopic on the inventor of the Ferris wheel, who died a sad and lonely alcoholic? ("Do I have to like the character?" asked its author, Jeffrey Hoch. Hardly - think "Raging Bull," he was told by Alex Singer, a veteran television director.)
Mr. Hoch was full of searching questions. "When I'm writing for a scientist, I write for my peers," he said. "Who are we writing for? The viewer? The director? The money people?"
"Tell your story for you," Mr. Field urged him. "Then, go back and rewrite it."
Dr. Gundersen chimed in: "It's different from writing for a science journal. That has to be right; you'd better not make a mistake, because people will beat the hell out of you. In a movie, I wouldn't want to say it doesn't have to be right, but it's different."
Added Mr. Singer: "They will not forgive you for being bored. They'll forgive you for anything else."
Later, over meatloaf, the workshop participants batted around their favorite depictions of science and scientists (the television show "Numbers" and the films "Starman" and "Deep Impact," among others) and what they considered the most odious ("The Day After Tomorrow," hands down).
And then there was one they could not agree on: "Falling Down," the 1993 film starring Michael Douglas as a downsized defense-industry engineer who has a violent breakdown in Los Angeles. "Why'd they have to make him look like that?" said Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, a physics professor at the University of Nebraska, of Mr. Douglas's crew cut, black-rimmed glasses and pocket protector. "He's a good-looking guy. None of my friends look like that."
But Mr. Marcu, who works at a defense-industry plant, begged to differ. "I hate to say it, but people inside those defense plants look like that," he said. "You should see the people at my company."
Where this week's efforts may lead is, at the very least, uphill: out of an estimated 75,000 scripts floating around Hollywood, only 500 or so films are made a year, Mr. Field warned the scientists. But while Dr. Gundersen and Dr. Barker conceded that the odds were stacked against any of their protégés, they are clearly holding out hope.
"I really believe we will be able to point to something that will emerge, maybe 5 or 10 years from now, and say, Gee, that name of that screenwriter is familiar, with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering or something," Dr. Barker said.
Dr. Gundersen, meanwhile, offered Valerie Weiss, a participant in the 2004 workshop, as a potential success story. A film buff at Harvard while she was getting her Ph.D. in biophysics, Ms. Weiss switched careers to film four years ago and is now trying to sell a comedy built around a Bridget Jones-like biochemist who applies the scientific method to her hunt for a mate.
She said she hoped her background would give her film the kind of personal touch that Nia Vardalos brought to "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" as a Greek-American. "To write a film that is going to have impact like that, it needs to be from somebody that has direct experience," she said.
Ms. Weiss said Dr. Gundersen's notion that scientists could make good screenwriters stood the test of reason.
"They're inherently creative, and willing to take more risks than other people," she said. "They're searching for the unknown, they're compensated very minimally, they're going on blind faith that what they're searching for is going to pay off. And filmmaking is exactly the same way."