A post on "This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics" about "self-trained anthropologists" who claim to be experts in ethnographic research led to an interesting debate:
"There are lots of people claiming to do ethnography who are, um, “self trained.” There are of no barriers to entry and no one licensing ethnographers. And the term “ethnography” is now so sought after in certain circles that there is plenty of demand." >> continue
Interesting post on Black Looks by African feminist Sokari on Live Aid that remembers on the debates on the African Village in the zoo of Augsburg. In both cases, it's our images of Africa that are questionable.
She writes:
"Do They Know Its Christmas" has just been re-recorded - remember the lyrics?
"underneath a burning sun.............where nothing ever grows" "no rain nor river flows"
This is the vision of Africa being sold to millions of young people all over the West - an African stereotype described by Gerald Caplan as "helpless, dependent, passive victims, and we westerners as decent, selfless, compassionate, resourceful missionaries".
These simplistic and reductionist views of Africa are not just unhelpful they actually add to the problems Africa faces as it reduces them to "natural causes - bad luck".
She quotes Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie who suggests that it is not only Africa that is in receipt of Aid, the West also needs to be weaned off the Aid it receives from Africa and lists 5 areas where that aid comes from. >> continue
UPDATE:
Globalvoices Roundup: Africans on Live 8
Globalvoices: More Africans - and Afrophiles - on Live8
Academics live in another world. In this world, time does not exist. Researchers arrive late in seminars. People kept opening the door and entering the room even 10-15 minutes after Richard Jenkins had started with his keynote speech at Childhoods 2005 in Oslo. Jenkins: "It's like holding a lecture in a bus station."
"Oh, I don't know about time", the next speaker says, surprised over the fact that 13 of her 15 minutes already have passed while she is still struggeling with her introduction. She was not the only one.
Bangkok Post
"We fishermen have knowledge about the Mekong based on our time-tested experiences," said Oon Thammawong, 57, of Ban Had Bai in Chiang Rai's Chiang Khong district. "But policy-makers dismiss us as simple folk so that they can dismiss our voices and impose their policies, which only benefit businessmen but destroy our way of life."
Over the past five years, in the wake of the building of dams and the blasting of rapids in China, the condition of the Mekong as it flows through Chiang Khong has drastically deteriorated. Like other communities, the Bangkok-oriented education and political systems have robbed the locals of their historical roots and pride in their culture.
Local pride swelled, however, when a group of residents took on the role of researchers to profile Chiang Khong's ethnographic history and document changes in their hometown. "Reconnecting with one's past and understanding what has shaped one's present is always an empowering process," explained veteran anthropologist Srisakara Vallibhotama, director of the project, which is supported by the Thailand Research Fund. >> continue
SEE ALSO:
Local taboos could save the seas
Interesting interview by Scott McLemee with anthropologist Deborah Reed-Danahay on her recent book Locating Bourdieu in the magazine "Inside Higher Education". The book is according to Scott McLemee "a very good place for the new reader of Bourdieu to start".
Reed-Danahay summarizes one of Bourdieu's main points and compares France to the USA:
"Bourdieu believed that we are all constrained by our internalized dispositions (our habitus), deriving from the milieu in which we are socialized, which influence our world view, values, expectations for the future, and tastes. These attributes are part of the symbolic or cultural capital of a social group.
In a stratified society, a higher value is associated with the symbolic capital of members of the dominant sectors versus the less dominant and “controlled” sectors of society. So that people who go to museums and like abstract art, for instance, are expressing a form of symbolic capital that is more highly valued than that of someone who either rarely goes to museums or who doesn’t like abstract art.
The person feels that this is “just” a matter of taste, but this can have important consequences for children at school who have not been exposed to various forms of symbolic capital by their families."
"His work on academia provided us with a method of inquiry to look at the symbolic capital associated with academic advancement and, although the specific register of this will be different in different national contexts, the process may be similar. Just as Bourdieu did in France, for example, one could study how it is that elite universities here “select” students and professors."
Quite regularily, newspapers report about so called "primitive peoples". The newest example is the Reuters-story "Hunter-gatherers face extinction on Andaman island" where we read "how primitive tribesmen came out of the jungle armed with bows, arrows and spears, raided a village in the Middle Andaman island and looted tools, food, clothes, cash and jewellery" and the reporter asks if this is an "indication that the Jarawa hunter-gatherers remain untamed primitives -- or a cry for help from man's earliest ancestors, their forests and their lifestyle, their existence under threat as never before?".
I've always wondered why Westerners are so obsessed with this notion of the primitive, with the notion of linear evolution where the so-called so called enlightened West reigns on the top. From an anthropological point of view one could explain this phenomenon like this: These so-called primitives are used by the West in order to construct a positive image of itself - the "primitives" play the same role as the so-called "Orient" - as shown by Edward Said in his classic "Orientalism".
Or as Adam Kuper wrote in his book The Invention of Primitive Society: "Primitive society was the mirror image of modern society - or rather, primitive society as they imagined it inverted the characteristics of modern society as they saw it."
This also applies to anthropologists as we know. Kuper writes:
"The anthropologists took this primitive society as their special subject, but in practice primitive society proved to be their own society (as they understood it) seen in a distorting mirror. For them modern society was defined above all by the territorial state, the monogamous family and private property. Primitive society therefor must have been nomadic, promiscuos and communist. (...) Primitive man was illogical and given to magic."
SEE ALSO:
"Stone Age Tribes", tsunami and racist evolutionism"
UPDATE: See also Evamaria's ramblings: As an anthropologist, Cameron Diaz' travel show on MTV is pretty offensive to my sensibilities. 'The life of the Massai has remained the same for the last 600 years.' Ugh, that kind of remark makes my skin crawl! >> continue
Der Spiegel
Long a bastion of Catholicism, southern Mexico is quickly turning into a battleground for soul-savers. Islam, too, is gaining a foothold and the indigenous Mayans are converting by the hundreds. "In Islam, race plays no role," Anastasio Gomez, a Tzotzil Mayan from Mexico, says joyously. His enthusiasm is understandable. After all, in his home state of Chiapas, Mexico's poorest, the indigenous people are viewed as second class humans, and whites and Mestizos treat the Indian majority as if they weren't there.
"They see themselves as restorers of Islam," says the anthropologist Gaspar Morquecho, author of a study of the Muslims of Chiapas. "Their defiance of capitalism is similar in many respects to the critique of globalization espoused by many left-wingers."
"In Islam, the Indians rediscover their original values," claims Esteban Lopez, the Spanish secretary general of the Muslim community. "The Christians destroyed their culture." >> continue
SEE ALSO:
Red Alert: Zapatistas - War in Chiapas likely to resume (Indymedia San Francisco Bay Area) / see also comment by Subcomandante Marcos on ZMag and Blogosphere Reacts to Zapatista Communique on Global Voices Online
An anthropologist inside a Community in Resistance in Chiapas (University of Kent at Canterbury)
Book review: Zapata Lives! Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico (American Ethnologist)
Subcommander Marcos: Chiapas - The Southeast in Two Winds A Storm and a Prophecy (Latinamerikagruppene i Norge / Latin American Groups in Norway)
The Japan Times Online
Anthropologist Satsuki Kawano in her study of various ritual practices in the city of Kamakura wishes to see religious rites as being both culturally constructed and socially generated. Kawano prefers to demonstrate that partaking in religious rituals does not necessarily involve "belief" in its ordinary sense. Rather "ritual life is not so much about individual faith as it is about securing the well-being of families and communities." >> continue
Recent comments