The West Australian and South Australian education departments have made lists of appropriate and inappropriate words to describe Aboriginal people and culture, The Australian reports.

- Dreamtime is no longer an acceptable term to describe the collection of Aboriginal creation stories, and should be referred to as The Dreaming or The Dreamings.

- The structure of traditional Aboriginal society should not be described as primitive - but as complex and diverse

- The term native should be replaced by indigenous groups or language groups.

- Instead of saying myths and legends, teachers should say Dreaming stories, teaching from The Dreaming or creation stories.

- Aborigine should not be replaced by the term Aboriginal person.

- Rituals should be called ceremonies

- religion should be avoided in favour of spirituality

- tribal should be shunned for traditional.

- tribe should be replaced by Aboriginal people,

- horde should be replaced by language groups

- instead of clan the term family groups should be used

The list of terms was developed with input from a wide variety of sources, including departmental staff, Aboriginal organisations and academics.

>> read the whole story in The Australian

>> Download “Aboriginal Education for all Learners in South Australia” including the section on sensitive terms and issues (pdf)

SEE ALSO:

Anthropologists condemn the use of terms of “stone age” and “primitive”

What is the state of anthropology at African universities? African anthropology is interdisciplinary and focuses on solving problems like poverty, diseases and violence, Paul Nchoji Nkwi writes in the book World Anthropologies (download the book):

The West invented anthropology to study the “Other” and it defined the canons. But in developing economies, where resources are scarce, science has to be either useful or be gone.

In his very interesting text that is available online (Word-document), he describes the recent developments of our discipline in Africa and calls for a better cooperation between anthropologists in Africa with anthropologists in other parts of the world:

The European and American traditions of the discipline are distinct and the discipline surely deserves an African twist as well. It is time for the social sciences, including anthropology, across Africa to regroup and to face the challenges that confront us as a continent and as part of the human family: Disease, hunger, HIV/AIDS, ethnic wars, poverty … We need to look for answers to these scourges. It will be salutary for Africans to bring their own particular perspectives to all the social sciences, including anthropology

It is the applied option that dominates anthropology in Africa. Applied anthropology as the focus of academic work rehabilitated the discipline that has been discredited in post-colonial Africa because of its history as the handmaiden of colonialism:

African anthropologists grew up in societies that were either colonized or recently decolonized. Westerners initially controlled the production of anthropological knowledge and the result was functionalist studies. These studies were explicitly ahistorical and often myopic about colonialism. After the colonial period, the new nations of Africa dismissed anthropology both as a cultivation of primitivism and as an apologetic for colonialism.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s African and Africanist anthropologists found it difficult to practice their profession openly, Paul Nchoji Nkwi writes. Anthropology took cover within African Studies programs, or anthropology institutes disappeared into sociology departments.

Some African anthropologists like Kwesi Prah (papers), Godwin Nukunya, Harris Memel-Fotê and Théophile Obenga, remained in Africa, while others like Adam Kuper, John Comaroff and Brian du Toit, Archie Mafeje, and Maxwell Owusu, left their countries “in search of more conducive environments".

But by the 1980s, there was more and more demand for anthropological knowledge - mainly regarding development projects. Many projects had failed due to their top-down approach. A perspective from below was needed - an anthropological perspective. Also, a shift from hospital-centered to people-centered health care gave medical anthropologists a window of opportunity.

In 1987, the Pan African Anthropological Association (PAAA) was established. This was another event in the late 1980s and early 1990s that helped integrate anthropology into the discourse of development in Africa.

Anthropology, Paul Nchoji Nkwi writes, had to rediscover itself as a discipline that could help to solve problems:

During the first PAAA conference in 1989, many participants argued that addressing important human issues, such as the need for health care, the spread of famine, rapid population growth, environmental degradation, discrimination and violence against women, poverty, and ethnic violence would enhance the discipline’s tarnished image.
(…)
Since 1989, the PAAA has organized twelve annual conferences and a series of training workshops for junior anthropologists. The association has also worked hard to bring the discipline closer to other social sciences. The future of anthropology depends, we feel, on how well the discipline integrates with the other social sciences. For anthropology to attract funds it must take on, and bring a unique perspective to, research problems that are common to other social sciences.
(…)
Over the years, African anthropologists have worked closely with environmental biologists, organic chemists, economists, demographers, health providers, and others. This experience showed that multi-disciplinary work is mutually enriching since each discipline draws on its unique insights to attain a common goal.

At the University of Yaoundé, there were 525 students majoring in anthropology in the 2002-2003 academic year, the same number of students took it as their minor. Paul Nchoji Nkwi witnessed an “increased involvement of the social sciences in health, agriculture, animal, environmental, and population research programs funded by the government":

Targeting critical areas such as general health, reproductive health, population growth, the environment, and agricultural development led to the design of courses in medical anthropology, development anthropology, and environmental impact assessment. Today, the University of Yaoundé-I has one of the most active and dynamic departments of anthropology in Central Africa, attracting students from the entire region.

African anthropologists want opportunities to work and earn their way - in partnership with their colleagues all over the world, he stresses:

To bring this about requires a series of small but doable changes in the formal academic training programs, grant administration procedures, and grant requirements to promote better partnership arrangements.
(…)
Strengthening the ability of Africans to organize and develop their own professional associations is a way to address all of these issues at once. Truly professional associations will link Northern and African anthropologists in a single intellectual, publishing, and teaching endeavor on a more equal footing.

>> read the whole text “Anthropology in a Post-Colonial Africa - The Survival Debate” by Paul Nchoji Nkwi (Word-document)

SOME LINKS RELATED TO AFRICAN ANTHROPOLOGY:

Pan African Anthropological Association (PAAA) (no updates since 2005!)

African Anthropologist (Journal of the Pan African Anthropological Association)

Etho-Net Africa (the new website of this network is no longer available)

African e-Journals Project

Nordic Journal of African Studies

African Studies Quarterly

African Journal on Conflict Resolution

JENdA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies

Afrikanistik online

Africa Writes

SEE ALSO:

How can we create a more plural anthropological community?

Book and papers online: Working towards a global community of anthropologists

I’m off to Germany on a short holiday (by train). I’ll resume blogging again after the 14.5.08

In his post Not only freedom: the dark ethnic side of the Tibetan Buddhist revolt, anthropologist Gabriele Marranci challenges mainstream images of Tibetans as peaceful and writes about Tibetan racism, ethno-nationalistic dreams, and attacks against muslims in Tibet.

Both the mass media, academics, and even anthropologists specialised in Tibetan Buddhism, have hidden what Marranci calls the ‘dark ethnic side’ of the revolt.

The Muslims in Tibet have been the target of Buddhist Tibetan violence for some time now, especially since 9/11. During the recent protests in Tibet there were anti-muslim attacks:

The mosque in Lhasa was burnt and destroyed, shops and the possessions of Muslim Tibetans smashed, a family burned alive in their own shop, terror and terrorism have affected this community because of a pernicious form of ethnic (Buddhist) nationalism

Marranci points to the paper Close Encounters of an Inner Asian Kind: Tibetan-Muslim co-existence and conflict in Tibet past and present by Andrew Fischer. According to Fischer, the tensions are primarily the cause of ‘economic’ differences and opportunities:

During the 1990s Ethnic Tibetan Buddhist started to fear that the economic success of Muslim Tibetans (particularly their restaurants and shops), would have undermined the economic, and so social, status of the Buddhist Tibetans. The Buddhist monks began a campaign against the economic activities of Tibetan Muslims, which epitomised in the 2003 boycott of Muslims’ businesses and saw also violent actions against innocent Muslim Hui families

Marranci writes:

Since the beginning of the revolt in March, demonstrations against China are held in all those countries through which the Olympic torch is passing. From the politicians, to the public, from Hollywood to Bollywood, from the scholars (with few exceptions) to the students, from the Trade Unions to the Industrial associations: all show indignation against the ‘oppression of the Chinese government’. Yet they ignore the dark side of this ‘revolt’ which is not so different from that in 2003.
(…)
Meanwhile monks and lamas are just stoking the fire in the hope of not just a free Tibet but also an ethnically clean one!

>> read the whole post on Marranci’s blog

SEE ALSO:

The special thing about the Tibet protests

Articles on Biometrics, US Refugee policy, children’s migration, transnational students, challenges of multi-sited ethnography and more can be found in the most recent issue of Anthropology News May, a publication by the American Anthropological Association (AAA).

16 articles can be downloaded!

Additionally, we find a photo essay and a photo gallery (Anthropology News is on flickr!)

>> visit Anthropology News

UPDATE: See also Maximilian Forte’s comments on the article about multisited ethnography

Why did religions evolve? According to anthropologist Maurice Bloch, there is nothing special with religion. It’s just a product of human imagination - in the same way as nations are, Bloch writes in an article to be published in June, the New Scientist informs.

The development of religion is dependent on the development of imagination. We had to evolve the necessary brain architecture to imagine things and beings that don’t physically exist, and the possibility that people somehow live on after they’ve died, Bloch argues according to New Scientist:

Once we’d done that, we had access to a form of social interaction unavailable to any other creatures on the planet. Uniquely, humans could use what Bloch calls the “transcendental social” to unify with groups, such as nations and clans, or even with imaginary groups such as the dead. The transcendental social also allows humans to follow the idealised codes of conduct associated with religion.

“What the transcendental social requires is the ability to live very largely in the imagination,” Bloch writes.

“One can be a member of a transcendental group, or a nation, even though one never comes in contact with the other members of it,” says Bloch. Moreover, the composition of such groups, “whether they are clans or nations, may equally include the living and the dead.”

(…)

“Once we realise this omnipresence of the imaginary in the everyday, nothing special is left to explain concerning religion,” he says.

>> read the whole story in the New Scientist

Bloch has recently been interviewed in Vikerkaar / Eurozine and was presented as an anti-anthropologist: “It may well be that anthropology departments disappear, and that wouldn’t bother me very much", he said.

UPDATE Maximilian Forte has written a summary of the interview with Bloch, see Maurice Bloch: “Reluctant Anthropologist” or “Anti-Anthropologist”?

See also the tutorial Anthropology and Religion

Anthropologist Martin Høyem has launched the e-zine “American Ethnography”, an “internet glossy on the study of cultures":

We cover ethnography that relates to anything we would call America. We aim to present the tradition and practice of ethnography to people who didn’t know they could be intrigued by ethnography. The goal is to help increase the interest in how we all try to understand unfamiliar cultures. This, we think, could do the world good.

As he writes to me in an email, “it’s pretty new, so there isn’t a lot of material there yet, and most of what is there is old public domain texts (previously not freely available to the general public).” Most of the texts were previously published in the journal American Anthropologist.

Around twelve articles are online already, including portraits of some famous anthropologists and texts about the peyote-cult - a cactus that was eaten in rituals of native Indians. The most recent issue contains articles about race and tambourine juggling. Looks interesting!

>> visit American Ethnography

Høyem has previously written a thesis about American Lowrider Culture called I want my car to look like a whore. Lowriding and poetics of outlaw aesthetics, see also my post about the thesis: When Norwegians do business in Brazil, Lowrider Culture and 9 more anthropology theses.

Høyem is currently working at Pacific Ethnography - anthropology and design

UPDATE: The discussion about American Ethnography and copyright issues is continuing over at Savage Minds, see American Ethnography, the AAA, and the Public Domain

Our fellow anthro-blogger Martijn de Koning was awarded his doctorate at the Free University of Amsterdam last week.

In his Ph.D. thesis he shows how Islam has become the most important frame of reference for Moroccan-Dutch youth to reflect upon who they are and what they want to be.

In the late 1990s, the general perception was that young muslims were turning away from their religion. But things went differently, he says in an interview with Radio Netherlands. Young Dutch Moroccans are increasingly turning to their religion.

According to Martijn de Koning this is a direct result of the current polarisation of the debate on Islam:

Even before 9/11 there was already an increase in interest for religion among young Moroccans. But once the debate on Islam flared up, their interest increased enormously. They were continually asked about their Muslim identity; not just by the media, but also by school mates and teachers and by people at their sports club. They started looking into Islam so that they could answer these questions.

These group of young Muslims searched for an identity with which they could distinguish themselves from Dutch society as well as from their parents:

They wanted a pure Islam, without compromise. Not an Islam that had been watered down because they happened to live in the Netherlands. Nor did they want an Islam peppered with Moroccan traditions.

The Islam they found was not the traditional type from Morocco. They found their answers on the Internet in the conservative, Saudi-Arabian version called Salafism, the anthropologist says:

It is a form of Islam with clear rules, which makes a clear distinction between good and evil. An Islam which is stricter and more orthodox than that of the older generation, but nevertheless seemed to provide better answers to their complicated lives in modern Dutch society.

>> read the whole story in Radio Netherlands

>> visit his blog (in both Dutch and English)

Interestingly, researchers in Norway came to similar conclusions, for example anthropologist Christine M. Jacobsen - see Doctoral thesis: Towards a transnational Islam and the culture historian Liv Bjørnhaug Johansen - see Moving toward a Cultureless Islam