The African Village at the zoo in Augsburg, Germany is still debated in the international media.

"An African culture festival creates a storm in Germany. Critics say it's like shows in colonial times that degraded Africans. The flap has sparked a broader discussion about racism in Germany, and what it's like to be both dark-skinned and a native German", the National Public Radio (NPR) summarizes the debate around the african village in the zoo in Augsburg. >> listen to the radio report by NPR

On L'express and several other news sites comment the African Village like this: "Germans and Japanese are less sensitive about race in general and about Africa in particular than, say, people in France or the United States, where a significant minority of the population is of African descent >> continue

SEE ALSO:
In Detroit and London: More African Villages in the Zoo
African village in the Zoo: Protest against racist exhibition

Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research

Dutch-sponsored researcher Farsijana Adeney-Risakotta analysed the dynamics of the conflict between Muslims and Christians in the Molucca Islands. The anthropologist proposes that rituals play an important role in this. Ritual was found to unite and mobilise people in a confrontation with real or supposed outsiders, but it also helped them to reach an agreement after the confrontation. >> continue

SEE ALSO:
Rituals and conflict solution: Fetsawa Umamane - a wedding ceremony in support of durable solutions in West Timor. By anthropologist Ingvild Solvang

(via Fieldnotes): Ethnomusicologist Aaron Fox has set up a website and blog as an "extension of the book": "I'm not going to republish the book on the site, but the book deals so much with sound that I had to make it possible for people to hear the music", he explains and adds: "I also really wanted to be able to interact with readers -- as we are doing now! Seems to me this is just the most under-used capacity of the web as an adjunct to traditional publishing. It's not like academic books sell in the tens of thousands, so it seems perfectly reasonable and possible to enter into a real dialogue with serious readers."

Anthropologist Tad McIlwraith on Fieldnotes comments: "I think about this in the context of my work with First Nations people and wonder if I could convince them to allow their actual voices to be found in files on my website. I think my work would be enhanced if they’d agree to that."

Aaron Fox' book is called Real County: Music and Language in Working Class Culture and is according to Tad McIlwraith "a fantastic ethnography".

There's been much discussion about the African Village in the Augsburg Zoo that took place last weekend. At the same time, the Detroit Zoo has arranged an African American Festival: "It will feature storyteller Ivory D. Williams, arts and crafts, authentic style food, hip-hop lessons, dance groups and an African American Community Resource area." They plan even more festivals like the Middle Eastern Festival, Caribbean Festival and the Native American Festival. No Bavarian or European festival, though. >> read the press release

The African Village in the Augsburg zoo wasn't actually a village. Visitors and journalists told about the usual stands with rings, arts and food that one finds on every festival. As Zeyneb Kaengo, 39, an African who was cooking at an African food stand, told the press: "I do not understand why people are protesting. Maybe they thought we were going to be put in cages, but that's not true," she said.

Nevertheless, the question remains "why Europe is suddenly obsessed with this exotic fascination for Africa, which only the zoo can provide" as the Guardian (Nigeria) asks in an interesting article. They write about forthcoming "African nights" in the London Zoo.

On the zoo's homepage we read:

"In addition to the unique opportunity to experience the animals settling in for the evening, visitors will be able to soak up the African culture with themed animal shows, live African performances, licensed bars and African food on offer throughout the evening. For the children there will be the opportunity to learn how to make Maasai masks, listen to traditional African stories and have their faces painted like tribal warriors!"

>> continue

As anthropologist Nina Glick Schiller commented, the city of Seattle, USA, put Africans in a Zoo in May 2001, see article in the Seattle Post

SEE ALSO:

BBC: Row over German zoo's Africa show

Radio interview on African Village/ "Germans & Japanese less sensitive about race"

African village in the Zoo: Protest against racist exhibition

Anthropologist Christopher Davis, The Guardian

Tony Blair's Commission for Africa has left me bewildered. As an anthropologist interested in "traditional" medicine, I was delighted to see its report's attempt to take an Africa-centred point of view. Reading a sentence stating that "history shows African cultures to have been tremendously adaptive, absorbing a wide range of outside influences" is a relief to those of us who have tried for years to make this point.

But I was frustrated by what seems to be our incapacity to escape our own mental traditions - the casts of mind that always seem to come into play when we imagine Africa. Nowhere were these more in evidence than in the report's discussion of the role of religion in African social life. The risk is of the return of the 19th-century idea of "primitive mentality": the idea that "they" are less rational than "we" are. >> continue

>> see comments by Kerim Friedman /Savage Minds

American Ethnologist and The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology are some of the best places to stay informed about new anthropology books. A few days ago they published their newest reviews, among others:

The Making of English National Identity. By Krishan Kumar.
Krishan Kumar’s The Making of English National Identity (2003) is exactly the kind of scholarly work promised, but seldom delivered, by the most vocal proponents of interdisciplinary research. >> continue

A Place on the Corner. By Elijah Anderson
This work utilizes an ethnographic framework to examine the social order of African-American men on the South Side of Chicago in the early 1970s. In particular, Anderson studies the men who hang out at Jelly’s, a liquor store/bar. In examining these men, he finds that there is a lot more going on beneath the surface than the average person would expect. >> continue

Islam, Law and Equality in Indonesia: An Anthropology of Public Reasoning. By John R. Bowen.
Islam, Law, and Equality in Indonesia is a definitive study of lived “value-pluralism” in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation. Bowen shows anthropologists and others how legal anthropology in Muslim context may be rendered as an anthropology of “normative pluralism” >> continue

Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives. By Jane K. Cowan, Marie-Bénédicte Dembour and Richard A. Wilson (eds).
So often collections of essays are just that: agglomerations of papers loosely focused around a theme. Here, however, the theme is important (and unrecognized) enough that its elaboration gives rise to a wealth of examples, all of which build on a central dilemma: that the concept of “unity in diversity” is only unproblematic when difference is similar—when “culture” does not violate “universal rights,” when the discourse on universal rights does not challenge existing cultural practices. >> continue

Not by Bread Alone: Social Support in the New Russia. By Melissa L. Caldwell.
Melissa L. Caldwell’s study of the Christian Church of Moscow (CCM) soup kitchen may seem an odd ethnographic choice, but the author cogently illustrates the ambiguous and sometimes paradoxical world of poverty and social support in Moscow in the late 1990s. Caldwell suggests that a transnational community emerges from the economic marginalization brought on by the transition to capitalism. >> continue

The Marketing Era: From Professional Practice to Global Provisioning. Kalman Applbaum
This book is about marketing and self-representation of marketers. Kalman Applbaum can lay claim to being an insider in two academic professions—anthropology and marketing. The intellectual and practical benefits of this dualism become immediately apparent to the reader as the argument unfolds. >> continue

Gustavo González, ZNet/ IPS News

The "war on terror", identified in Amnesty International's annual report as a new source of human rights abuses, is threatening to expand to Latin America, targeting indigenous movements that are demanding autonomy and protesting free-market policies and "neo-liberal" globalisation. In the United States "there is a perception of indigenous activists as destabilising elements and terrorists," and their demands and activism have begun to be cast in a criminal light, lawyer José Aylwin, with the Institute of Indigenous Studies, told IPS.

In the view of anthropologist Pedro Ciciliano at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the NIC report (National Intelligence Council) is "exaggerated and fraught with errors typical of U.S. intelligence based on biased information." >> continue

Savage Minds has recently pointed to the blog by the Anthropology librarian Cynthia Tysick, University at Buffalo, New York. She seems to be surfing alot and lists a lot of useful links. Some of her recent entries are Introduction to Indigenous Peoples and How can blogging help my research?