While studying an ancient language now spoken by only a few hundred people in a remote corner of Siberia, linguist Edward Vajda has found the first-ever linguistic link between the Old World and any First Nation in Canada, the Ottawa Citizen reports. “This is a big breakthrough to be able to link these", anthropologist Jack Ives said on Wednesday.

Vajda found that the speakers of the Ket language in Russia’s Yenisei River region, and the Athapaskan-speaking native people in Canada and the U.S. (including the Dene, Gwich’in, Navaho and Apache) use almost identical words for canoe and such component parts as prow and cross-piece.

Mr. Vajda’s claim of a Dene-Yeniseic-connection was endorsed last month at an conference in Alaska attended by linguists and anthropologists. Vajdas discovery is being compared with the 18th-century “Indo-European” revolution that ultimately classified English, French and other modern languages with ancient Sanskrit.

>> read the whole story in The Ottawa Citizen

For more information see a posts on this issue over at anthropology.net: More on Vajda’s Siberian-Na-Dene Language Link where also points of controversy are discussed.

SEE ALSO:

New website helps save Kenai Peoples language (Alaska)

Book review: Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

How can anthropology contribute to understanding and fighting inequality? The new issue of Anthropology Matters brings together articles from the first British postgraduate MA in Applied Anthropology and Community and Youth Work. Most of the students are experienced youth workers, working with underprivileged, marginalised youth in the UK.

As Alpa Shah writes in her editorial:

All the papers are in some form interested in the lessons from and for anthropological theory and analysis in its engagement with applied action. The articles focus on youth, encourage youth workers to be critically aware of the policy discourses with which they operate, the structural inequalities which they veil, and promote a more reflexive praxis of working with youth in order to create spaces of critical thinking between them.

One example is Saffron Burley’s analysis of the growing trend among young people in urban areas in the UK to own fighting dog breeds such as bull terriers, and the resultant “moral panic” that this has caused among dominant groups. Burley employed participant observation by taking a young Pit Bull Terrier called “Biscuit” out for walks in the area, in order to understand these young people better.

The result, Alpa Shah writes, is “an insightful ethnographic account which explores the subtle potentials that exist in the union of the young person and the dog":

Burley’s work not only contributes to our understanding of inequality, marginalisation and animal-human relations, but concludes with some lessons for community and youth workers - rather than seeing the dogs as “problems", as external to the young person, the dog needs to be drawn into the centre of understandings of the dilemmas and tensions faced by youth.

The issue is dedicated to an engaging anthropologist and participant of the MA course at Goldsmith who was killed in a bicycle accident in January: Paul Hendrich. In his phd-project on “Charting a new course for Deptford Town Hall”, Hendrich examines his own institutional context at Goldsmiths College and the debates surrounding the history of the racism of the British slave trade that is embedded in Deptford’s former Town Hall:

As I was putting the finishing touches to this editorial, Paul Hendrich’s wife, Sasha, called with the devastating news that Paul had been run over on his bicycle by a lorry. Paul was 36 years old and had a one year old daughter, Agatha. His death is a deep loss to all of us. Paul was a very special person with some extremely rare qualities. His life was committed to engaging an everyday struggle against racism. He held a passion and belief that anthropology could and should be used for and rethought through this struggle against racism and it is this that guided his engagement with academia.

>> read the whole editorial

>> read Charting a new course for Deptford Town Hall by Paul Hendrich

>> overview over all articles in Anthropology Matters Journal, 2008, Vol 10 (1) Engaging Anthropology

Many assignments go no farther than between the student completing it and the professor grading it. But assignments in Michael Wesch’s anthropology classes at Kansas State University have been seen around the world and by as many as 1.5 million other people, we read in a press release.

We all know Wesch’ video The Machine is Us/ing Us that was viewed more than five million times. He is no one hit wonder. He has created several popular videos together with his anthropology students.

The spring 2007 intro to cultural anthropology class created the video “A Vision of Students Today”, which has been viewed more than 1.5 million times and prompted others to respond with their own videos. The video is up for a YouTube award for most inspirational video of 2007. It features Wesch’s class describing what it’s like for them to be college students today.

Wesch’s students and their video projects also have drawn attention of media from NBC to BBC. Yet the students’ work makes its way around the world without marketing, Wesch says:

That gets at the complexity of today’s media environment. The students don’t advertise. They get the videos out on blogs, people start linking to them, and other people find them.

>> read the whole press release (includes links to the videos)

>> Digital Ethnography blog by Wesch and others

SEE ALSO:

Interview with Michael Wesch: How collaborative technologies change scholarship

Oil is vital to our growth economy. Yet, our need for continued access to fossil fuels drives many of today’s conflicts. And we are in the last days of cheap oil and need alternatives. In his guest editorial in the new issue of Anthropology Today (subscription required unfortunately), Thomas Love encourages anthropologists to examine the complex relationship between our lives and fossil fuels.

What are the consequenes of rising oil prices? Rising energy prices may prolong availability for those who can afford it, but will will cause uneven economic development and contribute to the deterioration of labour conditions in sweatshop economies, he writes.

A quick search reveals following news: Rwanda: High Oil Prices Make Essential Commodities Costly (allAfrica 28.3.08), Higher petrol costs ‘act like a tax on consumption’ (CNN, 7.8.06) Food prices are rising worldwide. Weather, oil costs among factors (Boston Globe 30.3.08), Oil prices hit hard on Asia’s poor. UNDP report ranks countries according to a new Oil Price Vulnerability Index (UNDP 25.10.07), and “What about the poor?”, askes the Energy report (1.8.07).

Thomas Love proposes following research questions:

How does this crisis resemble previous ones? What metaphors and symbols do people use to make sense of it all? To what discursive structures will people turn to make sense of the potential unravelling of their worlds? (…) How has the fossil-fuelled growth system already affected the lives of people in producing areas?
(…)
We need cross-cultural perspectives and commitment to ethnography to understand how such large-scale forces play out on the ground in the everyday lives of ordinary people. Detailed grasp of the non-fossil-fuelled ways of living of pre- and non-industrial peoples will convey to interested publics and policy-makers alternative ways of organizing human society. We can help understand how humans might manage to power down without precipitating collapse.

SEE ALSO:

What anthropologists can do about the decline in world food supply

Malaysia: Penan people threatened by demand for “green” bio-fuels

Dissertation: Survival in the Rainforest

Arctic refuge saved from oil drillers - Inuit divided

Indigenous Russians Unite Against Oil and Gas Development

Long battle between Argentine oil company and Ecuadorian indigenous community

A Solar power equipped school as gift to the Maasai: Good or bad?

Indigenous communities have embraced the internet from early on. The website of the Oneida Indian Nation was set up before the website for the White House. Anthropologist Maximilian C. Forte has developped several websites in collaboration with indigenous organisations. Website development is a mode of action research, he explains in an interesting paper that is based on a recent presentation.

In his research on Caribbean indigenous resurgence, he began offline and later moved online, he writes. It started after he has signed a reciprocity agreement with the leader of the Carib Community in Arima. In return for access to the community, Forte would assist them with whatever technological, graphic, and writing knowledge he had.

Website development is no purely technical process:

The websites that were created represented, to a large extent, collaborative writing exercises, emerging from meetings, conversations, and interviews. Viewers would not have known that the launching of some of the websites were also occasions for parties in my apartment, with photographs, drinking, music, drinking, laughter, and much more drinking.
(…)
The result of these early experiences led to my creating various online fora with a wider embrace, such as the Caribbean Amerindian Centrelink - part directory, part listserv, part message board, part online publishing centre - and then one of the earliest and still existing open access, peer reviewed journals in anthropology and history, that being KACIKE.

Together with his indigenous partners (informants) he created the field. In contrast to traditional fieldwork, the researcher and his informants predate the site, they don’t arrive at it.

Web-based and Web-oriented ethnographic research, Forte explains, leads to “a series of moves from participant observation to creative observation, from field entry to field creation, and from research with informants to research with correspondents and partners":

The Internet permits the co-construction of cultural representations and documentary knowledge, especially where the resource that is produced is the result of collaboration between those we traditionally sorted out as the researchers and the researched.
(…)
Those who were traditionally “the researched about” in offline settings, now have access to the works of researchers, can argue back (as they often do), and produce alternative materials in their own right. No longer is there a simple one-sided determination by the researcher over what research should be about, how it should be done, how it should be written or shown, and what its results should be-researchers are often called to account.

Among the persons and communities that have had access to the technology there has been considerable enthusiasm for the internet from early on. “The Internet may be for marginalized indigenous minorities what the printing press was for European nationalism", Forte writes. “We are not extinct” has become the leitmotif of online self representations by Caribbean indigenous persons and a basis for online activism, especially among Taínos.

These online struggles have produced some noteworthy successes in gaining recognition and some degree of validation from the usual authorities according to the anthropologist.

>> read the whole paper by Maximilian Forte on his own blog “Open Anthropology”

SEE ALSO:

Interview with Michael Wesch: How collaborative technologies change scholarship

Open Source Fieldwork! Show how you work!

“We have a huge responsibility to give back to the places we study from”

Collaborative Ethnography: Luke Eric Lassiter Receives Margaret Mead Anthropology Award

Play as research method - new Anthropology Matters is out

Going native - part of the darker arts of fieldworkers’ repertoir?

How to save Tibetan folk songs? Put them online!

The Birth of a Cyberethnographer: The MU5 is to Blame

He’s not an aboriginal Australian. Nevertheless he has to learn the local indigenous language. He and many other children say it’s fun. Teachers, parents and linguists say it is improving self-esteem, literacy and school attendance, rescuing indigenous languages from near oblivion and bringing communities closer together, according to a story in the Sydney Morning Herald.

“Putting Aboriginal languages on the curriculum in Walgett has improved ‘race’ relations", the newspaper informs.

Sharon Cooke, an Aboriginal education consultant says:

“"It’s the white kids and the black kids. They all learn together and sing together, it’s really quite beautiful, it’s quite emotional when you see it … and not just for the Aboriginal kids. You’ll see the pride on the faces of non-Aboriginal kids as well, that they’re learning this language.”

Aunty Fay Green, a local elder, says:

“I can speak for a lot of our elders who feel the same as I do, and I look at it this way, it’s reconciliation. It brings two cultures together instead of pulling away from one another, which we used to do. They’re together now, they are. You can see that in the school, they stand by one another.”

Indigenous languages are being taught throughout Australia. But New South Wales remains the only state with an indigenous languages policy. 41 state schools in New South Wales were teaching Aboriginal languages to some degree by 2006 - but only a few of them offer it as their mandatory.

>> read the whole story in the Sydney Moring Herald

For more recent related news see entries on the blog Culture Matters: ‘White flight’ in Australian schools and Group removed from hostel for being Aboriginal and Marcia Langton on the parliament’s apology to the Stolen Generation

SEE ALSO:

New website helps save Kenai Peoples language (Alaska)

“A new approach to the collection of traditional Aboriginal music”

“I’m not the indigenous person people want me to be": Anita Heiss is anthropologist and aboriginee.

For an Anthropology of Cosmopolitanism

Six months after the protests for democracy in Burma, we see similar things happen in Tibet. That’s of course not the first time but according to anthropologist Carole McGranahan, China has for the first time acknowledged that there is something like protests in Tibet. And that the protests are widespreead, committed by Tibetans from all backgrounds (monks, laypeople, and students, and by men and women, young and old) and not only by a few extremists.

“Knowing about it privately as they have for decades is one thing, but to acknowledge it publicly signals a turning point", Carole McGranahan writes in her blog post at SavageMinds. For five decades, China has done everything they can to give the impression that resistance in Tibet is a rare and unwise exception to their benevolent rule.

>> read her whole post at Savage Minds

Savage Minds has collected more ressources on the situation in Tibet, see On Tibet. See also the Guardian special on Tibet and the overview by Global Voices

Additionally, Al Jazeera has a story about Xinjiang: China’s ‘other Tibet’

SEE ALSO:

Wear red shirts on friday - Anthropologists on the protests in Burma?

David Graeber: There never was a West! Democracy as Interstitial Cosmopolitanism

Do anthropologists have anything relevant to say about human rights?

The Association of Student Anthropologists (NASA) would like to have submissions from anthropology students worldwide for their new e-journal. The NASA will launch its first online publication under the banner of the 2008 American Anthropological Association conference theme: “Inclusion, Collaboration, and Engagement", as Marc Hebert (University of South Florida) informs me in an email.

They seek scholarly submissions from undergraduate and graduate students worldwide about the application of anthropological theories and methods outside of academia or across disciplines for the purpose of exploring, problematizing, or addressing social problems.

The NASA also welcomes “innovative commentary submissions” that “express the next generation of anthropologists’ ideas, goals and beliefs of the direction our discipline should head, be it locally, nationally or globally.”

>> read the whole Call for Papers in the antropologi.info forum