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What the life of a pair of flip-flops can teach us about migration, inequality and studying up

Published on November 11, 2014 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology in the news, Asia, fieldwork / methods, globalisation, migration

Photo: Cíntia Regina, flickr

During the recent (nearly) two years, I’ve been interviewing researchers that are part of the research project Overheating. The three crises of globalisation: An anthropological history of the early 21st century at the University of Oslo, starting with Thomas Hylland Eriksen: Anthropologists to study humanity’s biggest crises.

I also interviewed most of the researchers that were invited to hold seminars. One of the texts that for me was most fun to write was about the research by sociologist Caroline Knowles. For seven years, she has been following a pair of flip-flops around the world. This flip-flops taught her a lot about the biggest migration streams in history, inequality and the difficulties of “studying up”.

The text starts like this:

The woman, who is sinking up to her knees in rubbish in the middle of the huge landfill in the outskirts of Addis Ababa, is not one of the hundreds of scavengers who are searching for things they can use or eat like old airline food and plastic bottles.

The woman is a sociologist.

She has travelled all the way from London to this giant, murky, grey-brown raised area of partially decomposed rubbish. For her, it is the end of a long journey that started several years ago in the world’s second largest oil field in Kuwait.

>> read the whole interview

>> all interviews

Photo: Cíntia Regina, flickr

During the recent (nearly) two years, I've been interviewing researchers that are part of the research project Overheating. The three crises of globalisation: An anthropological history of the early 21st century at the University of Oslo, starting…

The misconceptions of slum life

Published on September 2, 2011 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology in the news, Middle East, politics, poverty, Us and Them

More and more people are living in slums. What can be done about it?

A few weeks ago I blogged about Safaa Marafi’s thesis about neoliberal policies, urban segregation and the Egyptian revolution. Now she has published a newspaper article that is a good example of public anthropology: Living in Slums … A Historic Dilemma that Needs to be Resolved!.

Here she explains one of the most important anthropological insights. If you work with people, you need to understand their point of view. In order to solve the problems of slum life one needs to listen to the voices of the people who live there.

Efforts to develop Egypt’s slums have been going on for several years, yet without tangible change. The key aspect that is missing in these projects is getting close to these people, understanding their priorities and way of life and meeting their expectations, she writes:

Understanding their culture, needs and way of life is essential to help provide them with the necessary resources they need, whether proper education, job, medical assistance. Moreover, do they need small shops, kiosks, or commercial areas?

From this stand point, I stress on the need to conduct serious research by social scientists to understand the culture of these people through one-to-one interviews and giving them the chance to express their needs and voice their concerns. Thus, this will assist in tackling the slumization phenomenon from its grass-roots.

>> read the whole article in Al-Masry Al-Youm

Anthropologists have stressed the importance of the “native’s point of view” in development projects for many years. Nevertheless, not only in Egypt, but also in Europe, people living in poorer neighborhoods are often stigmatized. Politicians and mainstream media tend to portray them as lazy and often criminal people that have to be “civilized”. So therefore, the poor are in policymakers’ view not worth to be listened to?

Marafi’s piece reminded me of some articles about slum life that have been published recently. All of them attack these misrepresentations.

One of them is the fascinating but sad story The life and death of Khanoufa: A personal account of Cairo’s “most dangerous thug”, written by Mohamed Elmeshad.

Egyptian police claim to have captured a man they called “Cairo’s most dangerous criminal”. Elmeshad questions these and gives us the perspective from his neighborhood where some of them see him as a victim of the system he was born into. A system where being associated with a slum area limits your opportunities in life.

“He turned out how he did because the police left him no other path in life,” Khaled, one of Khanoufa’s neighbors, said. At the age of 14, after participating in a neighborhood brawl, Khanoufa spent the first of a series of six-month stints in juvenile hall for youth misdemeanors. He became “marked” by police as someone they could pin crimes on or extort for money with the threat of imprisonment.

When his father, Abdel Shakour, passed away, Khanoufa’s family could no longer afford to pay-off the police, and he began spending more and more desperate nights in prison.

“That is when he turned to a life of crime. When he realized that he would be treated as a criminal for the rest of his life, no matter what. He reached a level of despair and said, ‘They’d take me in and put me in prison, regardless,’” Khaled said. He ended up spending half of his life in prison, from his teenage years until his death.

Mohamed Elmeshad has written another article from the same neighborhood (Ezbet Abu Qarn): Cairo’s poorest residents help the less fortunate in Somalia – a powerful story about cosmopolitanism from below.

A group of young men were moved by the images they saw in the media, and decided that the famine in Somalia must become a priority during Ramadan. Within four days, they were able to gather a large sum money among the poor people to the relief effort in Somalia.

“There are old widows who rely solely on charity to stay alive, who donated what I know is a really large amount for them,” said Sayed Kamal, one of the organizers.

“We don’t have people dying from hunger in our parts, but we do know poverty better than anyone else in Egypt, and we know about the fear of going hungry,” said Gamal Abdel Maqsood, a scrap metal dealer.

People in poor areas are no passive victims but do fight for their rights. In her story Popular committees bring true spirit of democracy to the streets, political scientist Rana Khazbak describes a campaign in another poor area in Cairo, Imbaba. Ehab Ali, a member in the popular committee in Imbaba, sounds like an anthropologist when he explains their campaign:

“We wanted to do field work in the streets among people. The piece of bread we eat every day is politics, the traffic congestion is politics, and the garbage in the streets is politics. That’s why in order to solve these problems and for Egypt to become a better place, we have to start from the bottom at the grassroots level.”

The popular committees were formed during the Januar revolution to protect neighborhoods when police withdrew from the streets in the midst of nationwide protests that toppled former President Mubarak.

Alia Mossallam, PhD student at the London School of Economics, explains in her article Popular committees continue the revolution:

Born out of a moment of chaos and fear, [the popular committes] proved themselves to be capable of self-organization in the days that followed. But most importantly, they proved to people that the end of “government” did not mean the end of the world.
(…)
In this surge of grassroots activism lie potential forms for popular governance. The committees not only teach us about the specific issues facing each neighborhood, but together they can teach us something about how political representation, accountability and local governance work on the ground.

Finally, just one week ago, Amnesty International has released a report about Egypt’s slums: ‘We are not dirt’: Forced evictions in Egypt’s informal settlements.

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Urban anthropologist: "Recognize that people want to come to the big cities"

Owen Sichone: Poor African migrants no less cosmopolitan than anthropologists

Why social scientists failed to see the Egyptian revolution coming

Thesis: Neoliberal policies, urban segregation and the Egyptian revolution

More and more people are living in slums. What can be done about it?

A few weeks ago I blogged about Safaa Marafi’s thesis about neoliberal policies, urban segregation and the Egyptian revolution. Now she has published a newspaper article that…

Anthropologists and stereotypes about Libya and Japan

Published on March 24, 2011 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Asia, Us and Them

Two friends, same culture: Berlusconi and Gaddafi. Photo: Derek Visser, flickr

(draft) Have you tried googling “Japan” “earthquake” and “no looting”? Or “Libya” and “tribes”? It’s no big surprise to see stereotypical representations of other people in the news, but the ongoing historical developments in Libya and Japan might provide especially interesting examples.

Libya is for many journalists and experts a “tribal” country.

“Many Americans pride themselves on God and country. In Libya, it’s God, tribe, then country”, explains CNN and quotes anthropologist Philip Carl Salzman who says “Libyans have a strong loyalty to tribe. A tribe provides welfare in times of need,” he said. “They have a collective responsibility.”

In the article In Libya the revolution will be tribalized (The Globe and Mail), Khalil Ali Al-Musmari, a retired professor of anthropology and sociology, said the foreign media have often crudely misrepresented the nature of “tribal power” in the country, by talking about tribal leaders as though they still commanded the same obedience they did in ancient times. Educated Libyans in coastal cities, he says, make their own political decisions and do not feel obligated to follow their tribal elders. Talk of tribal divisions in the country is dangerous.

Check also The Egyptian revolution Orientalist essay contest

Japan is for journalists and experts a calm and spirutal country. Most meanstream papers around the world run stories like “Why is there no looting in Japan in earthquake aftermath?”

A lack of looting in Japan?

“The layer of human turmoil – looting and scuffles for food or services – that often comes in the wake of disaster seems noticeably absent in Japan”, claims CNN and several experts give culturalist explanations. Among them Merry White, an anthropology professor at Boston University who studies Japanese culture. “Violence, and taking what belongs to others, are simply not culturally approved or supported”, she says.

A great deal of culturalism can be found in the article Japan Earthquake Feature: Japanese stoicism part of the culture in the National Post.

The paper writes about “the extraordinary sense of calm on the Japanese archipelago amid conditions which in perhaps any other place would have led to chaos”.

“The Japanese culture encourages a heightened sense of individual responsibility, but also a very powerful sense of solidarity, and that is a very powerful combination”, says sociologist Frank Furedi.

“In Japanese culture, there’s a sort of nobility in suffering with a stiff upper lip, in mustering the spiritual, psychological resources internally,” explains anthropologist John Nelson.

“Quake response showcases Japan’s resilient spirit” is the title of Associated Press story:

Theories abound as to what makes the Japanese so resilient and willing to cooperate. Some cite the centuries-old need to work together to grow rice on a crowded archipelago prone to natural disasters. Others point to the hierarchical nature of human relations and a keen fear of shaming oneself before others.

“It strikes me as a Buddhist attitude,” Glenda Roberts, an anthropology professor at Tokyo’s Waseda University, said. “Westerners might tend to see it as passivity, but it’s not that. It takes a lot of strength to stay calm in the face of terror.”

There are even stories about the lack of a Japanese word for looting, as the bloggers at Language Log have observed. “As usual, the attempt to diagnose and explain culture cheaply in lexical terms is empirically as well as conceptually weak”, Mark Liberman comments. Further down in the comment field, Chris Kern deconstructs the notion of the non-looting Japanese:

Looking at Japanese news articles on the disasters is the easiest way to disprove this. There’s one article that discusses the American news media’s wonder over the lack of looting with the following headline:
「なぜ略奪ないの？」＝被災地の秩序、驚きと称賛－米
“ryakudatsu” is used as the translation of “looting” there.

But there are other articles that talk about looting that actually has been occurring in Japan in the wake of the disasters, and they use “ryakudatsu” and “goudatsu”

But there has been looting, and these stories don’t seem to be translated into English or reported on English language news sites as the BBC explains.

What are the consequences of this kind of reporting?

These news stories that contrast peaceful Japan with violent Haiti have often triggered racist discourses in the comment fields.

Comments like this here were made quite often:

Japan is one of the least “diverse” countries in the world. This gives them solidarity and sense of nationhood that “multicultural” societies don’t have, it allows them to pull together for the common good in times of adversity. Contrast that with “multicultural” New Orleans response to a natural disaster. It seems like unity is a strength and “diversity” is a weakness.

Johann Hari challenges these stereotypes in her comment The myth of the panicking disaster victim. The evidence gathered over centuries of disasters, natural and man-made, is overwhelming, she writes:

The vast majority of people, when a disaster hits, behave in the aftermath as altruists. They organise spontaneously to save their fellow human beings, to share what they have, and to show kindness. They reveal themselves to be better people than they ever expected.

But what about the violence in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina?

Remember the gangs “marauding” through New Orleans, raping and even cannibalising people in the Super-Dome after Hurricane Katrina? It turns out they didn’t exist. Years of journalistic investigations showed them to be racist rumours with no factual basis. Yes, there was some “looting” – which consisted of starving people breaking into closed and abandoned shops for food. Of course human beings can behave atrociously – but the aftermath of a disaster seems to be the time when it is least likely.

“The cultural explanation for looting just doesn’t cut it, and at its worst it shows signs of racism”, David A. Love explains in his piece From Haiti to Japan: Is looting economic or cultural?:

As an African-American who lived with a Japanese family as a high school exchange student, majored in Japanese studies in college, and later rode the Tokyo subway every day to work in a Japanese corporation, I have some thoughts. I say it is economic, but it isn’t quite that simple, because other circumstances are at play.

How racist is American anthropology?

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The Culture Struggle: How cultures are instruments of social power

Thesis: That’s why there is peace

When applied anthropology becomes aid – A disaster anthropologist’s thoughts

Two friends, same culture: Berlusconi and Gaddafi. Photo: Derek Visser, flickr

(draft) Have you tried googling "Japan" "earthquake" and "no looting"? Or "Libya" and "tribes"? It's no big surprise to see stereotypical representations of other people in the news, but the…

Saba Mahmood: Democracy is not enough – Anthropologists on the Arab revolution part II

Published on February 22, 2011 by lorenz Posted in aboriginees, Africa, anthropology in the news, internet, Middle East, politics

Voice of Freedom / Sout Al Horeya by Amir Eid ft. Hany Adel

(post in progress) While the revolutions in Northern Africa and the Middle East are spreading and the Libyan people ~~managed~~ are trying to get rid of another dictator, anthropologists continue to comment the recent events. Here is a short overview.

Much has been said about who or what is going to replace Mubarak after he had to step down two weeks ago. In her article The Architects of the Egyptian Revolution in The Nation, anthropologist Saba Mahmood directs our attention to a rather neclected topic: The economic unjustice in Egypt and its connections to “American driven reforms”. For since the 1970s, she writes, the Egyptian economy has been increasingly subject to neoliberal economic reforms by the World Bank, the IMF and USAID at the behest of the United States government. Egyptian elites have been beneficiaries of, and partners in, these American-driven reforms:

While there is no doubt that the new order in Egypt cannot do without the civil and political liberties characteristic of a liberal democracy, what is equally at issue in a country like Egypt is an economic system that serves only the rich of the country at the expense of the poor and the lower and middle classes.

The vast majority of public institutions and services in Egypt have been allowed to fall into a dismal state of disrepair. Countless Egyptians die in public hospitals for lack of medical care and staff; Egypt’s universities are no longer capable of delivering the education of which they once boasted. Lack of housing, jobs and basic social services make everyday life impossible to bear for most Egyptians, as do declines in real wages and escalating inflation.

It is these conditions that prompted the workers—from the industrial and service sector—to stage strikes and sit-ins over the past ten years. These workers were an integral part of the demonstrations over the past two weeks in Egypt; various unions formally joined the protests in the days immediately preceding Mubarak’s resignation, prompting some to suggest that this was a turning point in the evolution of the protest.

The role the US government plays will be “enormously consequential”:

While the Obama administration has reluctantly yielded to the demands for democratic reform, it is highly doubtful that this administration will tolerate any restructuring of US economic interests in Egypt and in the region more generally.

Egypt was governed as a private estate, explains political scientist Salwa Ismail in the Guardian. Under sweeping privatisation policies, Mubarak and the clique surrounding him appropriated profitable public enterprises and vast areas of state-owned lands.

“Egypt’s protests were a denunciation of neo-liberalism and the political suppression required to impose it”, concludes filmmaker Philip Rizk in Al-Jazeera. He has recently completed a documentary on the food price crisis in Egypt and blogs at tabulagaza.blogspot.com.

Protests were according to him the culmination of a wave of much smaller and more localised strikes and demonstrations that had been taking place across the country since 2006.

Saba Mahmood agrees. She goes in her account back to 2004. In The road to Tahir, another prominent anthropologist, Charles Hirschkind, gives us a comprehensive introduction in the history of the Egyptian revolution, starting with the Kifaya movement, that “brought together Islamists, Muslim Brothers, communists, liberals, and secular-leftists, joined on the basis of a common demand for an end to the Mubarak regime and a rejection of Gamal Mubarak’s succession of his father as president”. Many of the bloggers who helped promote the Kifaya movement have played key roles in the events of the past two weeks, he writes. (A longer version is available in the Open Access journal Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares.)

Political scientist Moataz A. Fattah lists in the Christian Science Monitor five reasons why Arab regimes are falling. Major societal and demographic factors are at play that in his view won’t go away with a new government, he argues.

Egypt: Rise to Freedom by Basha Beats and Natacha Atlas ناتاشا اطلس

Rise to Freedom by Basha Beats and Natacha Atlas

One of the best sources about the current Arab revolutions is the blog Closer. Anthropologist Martijn de Koning is regularily posting round-ups and recruites guest writers as for example Samuli Schielke, anthropologist at Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin.

“If this revolution has taught me one thing is that the people of Egypt do not need to look up to Europe or America to imagine a better future”, he writes in his post “Now, it’s gonna be a long one” – some first conclusions from the Egyptian revolution:

“Compared to our governments with their lip service to democracy and appeasement of dictators, Egyptians have given the world an example in freedom and courage which we all should look up to as an example. This sense of admiration and respect is what has drawn so many foreigners to Tahrir Square in the past days, including myself.”

Samuli Schielke has maintained a diary of the protests at Tahrir Square at http://samuliegypt.blogspot.com/ . On his website, we find both photography (among others from Egypt) and several papers, among others Second thoughts about the anthropology of Islam, or how to make sense of grand schemes in everyday life, Ambivalent Commitments: Troubles of Morality, Religiosity and Aspiration among Young Egyptians and Boredom and despair in rural Egypt (what a title!).

The most recent post at Closer is Tunisia: from paradise to hell and back?, a personal account by Miriam Gazzah. She is currently working within the research project Islamic cultural practices and performances: The emergence of new youth cultures in Europe.

Riz Khan - Mother of the revolution

Several anthropologists commented on the rape story where CBS correspondent Lara Logan had been sexually assaulted while covering the Egyptian protests. “Two disturbing lines of commentary have emerged: one that cites irrelevant details about Logan’s beauty or her past sexual history, the other blaming Muslims or Egyptian culture for the assault”, anthropologist Racel Newcomb comments in the Huffington Post:

Rather than blaming religion, we should work to end underdevelopment, poverty, and a lack of education, problems whose eradication is crucial to a prosperous and healthy society anywhere, whether in Egypt or here at home.

In Empire and the Liberation of Veiled Women, anthropologist Maximilian Forte deconstructs the popular narrative of the West bringing freedom to the women of the non-West.

UPDATE: Fascinating developments. Egypt is inspring US protesters. Check From Cairo to Madison: Hope and Solidarity are Alive. Medea Benjamin writes:

Photo credit: Muhammad Saladin Nusair via Derek Blackadder, flickr

Local protesters were elated by the photo of an Egyptian engineer named Muhammad Saladin Nusair holding a sign in Tahrir Square saying “Egypt Supports Wisconsin Workers—One World, One Pain.” The signs by protesters in Madison include “Welcome to Wiscairo”, “From Egypt to Wisconsin: We Rise Up”, and “Government Walker: Our Mubarak.” The banner I brought directly from Tahrir Square saying “Solidarity with Egyptian Workers” has been hanging from the balcony of the Capitol alongside solidarity messages from around the country.

She quotes Muhammad Saladin Nusair who wrote these wonderful lines:

“If a human being doesn’t feel the pain of his fellow human beings, then everything we’ve created and established since the very beginning of existence is in great danger. We shouldn’t let borders and differences separate us. We were made different to complete each other, to integrate and live together. One world, one pain, one humanity, one hope.”

More texts:

John Postill: Egypt’s uprising: different media ensembles at different stages

Asef Bayat: Egypt, and the post-Islamist middle east: Why the portrayal of Egypt’s uprising in terms of its potential capture by Islamists is doubly misleading

Keith Hart: CLR James and the idea of an African revolution

Sami Hermez: Sacrifice and the Ripple Effect of Tunisian Self-immolation

Slavoj Žižek: For Egypt, this is the miracle of Tahrir Square

Gabriele Marranci: The Libyan massacre: or rather protesters killed for Italian and European interests?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CojujCER5Vw
Voice of Freedom / Sout Al Horeya by Amir Eid ft. Hany Adel

(post in progress) While the revolutions in Northern Africa and the Middle East are spreading and the Libyan people managed are trying to get rid of another dictator,…

Protests against Human Zoo i Houston: Africans on display together with chimpanzees?

Published on May 8, 2010 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology in the news, indigenous people / minorities, journal articles / papers, Northern America, Us and Them

Five years ago people from all over the world protested against the “African Village” in the zoo in Augsburg, Germany. Now, a new campaign is being planned against “The African Forest“, a $50 million project in the Houston Zoo, where “African culture” is on display together with chimpanzees and giraffes.

The 6.5-acre exhibit is designed “to give patrons the illusion they are strolling through an open landscape populated with chimpanzees, giraffes and other equatorial animals”. “Through presentations and artifacts, human cultures of the equatorial forests will be included in the exhibit” , landscape architect Jim Brighton told the Houston Chronicle. “Houses fashioned from tree leaves — a form of temporary housing — will be constructed for children’s activities.”.

“This is indeed like the African village in Augsburg – except this is a project that costs tens of millions of dollars and will be permanent – and some of the same anthropologists who protested that human zoo are onboard to protest this one such as Nina Glick Schiller and Data Dea”, explains Shannon Joyce Prince, Dartmouth Lombard Fellow and citizen of Houston, in an email to me.

The Zoo is according to Prince “only showing aspects of Africa that fit Western stereotypes of cultural anachronism and primitivism. It “falls neatly into the contemptible tradition of its human zoo predecessors, replicating a non-white village, a place where non-white humans live, in a zoo among the habitats where animals live”.

“The African Forest is about exhibiting and teaching inaccurate Western conceptions of African indigenous cultures in a place designed to exhibit and teach about animals. The African Forest is also about making and keeping African indigenous peoples conservation refugees. The African Forest and the practices it promotes are neither about respecting Africans nor protecting animals. They’re about claiming authority over African land, wildlife, and human lives”, Shannon Joyce Prince writes in a paper.

In the Zoo’s view, Africans are in conflict with wildlife, she writes. Therefore, African Forest plans to promote ecotourism as a way to “help” Africans and African wildlife. But the consequences of such conservation activities are often devasting specifically for central Africans and pygmies. For in Africa it’s common for conservationists to create refuges to conserve wildlife by simply kicking Africans out. The Zoo is funded by corporations like Exxon, Chevron, Shell that have are involved in this business:

Basically, among the corporations that fund the Houston Zoo are some of the most human and wildlife rights abusing corporations in existence. These same businesses try to clean up their images by creating wildlife refuges – but they create those refuges by forcing indigenous people off their land. Then the Zoo, which receives funding from those corporations, claims that the indigenous people who are getting kicked off their land are the ones who harm wildlife and promotes conservation and conservation refuges.

>> Shannon Joyce Prince: Human Zoos, Conservation Refugees, and the Houston Zoo’s The African Forest (pdf, short versjon)

>> Human Zoos, Conservation Refugees, and the Houston Zoo’s The African Forest (long version)

Shannon Joyce Prince sent a letter to the Houston Zoo several weeks ago which has not received a response.

She asks for “opposing The African Forest, human zoos, and the creation/perpetuation of the conservation refugee crisis in one or more of the following ways”:

1. Tell the Houston Zoo you are against The African Forest human zoo and the creation of conservation refugees as well as the continuation of the conservation refugee crisis by contacting the Houston Zoo here: http://houstonzoo.com/contact/. Tell the Houston Zoo that you will boycott zoos that host human zoos and/or make/keep Africans conservation refugees. Please mention your affiliations. Be sure to send a copy of your message to nohumanzoo (AT) yahoo.com so that we have a record of your letter in case the Zoo doesn‚t respond and to prevent the Zoo from deciding to claim that no one is protesting.

2. Send your name and affiliation to nohumanzoo (AT) yahoo.com if you want to be put on a petition stating, „We, the undersigned, do not support The African Forest human zoo, the creation of conservation refugees, or the continuation of the conservation refugee crisis.”

3. Raise awareness about The African Forest through your blog and encourage others to write the Zoo and sign the petition.

Please be aware that, naturally, the letter you send or your signature on the petition may be made public.

“The racialization processes facilitated by the Augsburg zoo and other zoos are not benign because they can lay the ground work for discrimination, barriers to social mobility, persecution, and repression”, anthropologists Nina Glick Schiller, Data Dea and Markus Höhne wrote in their report African African Culture and the Zoo in the 21st Century: The “African Village” in the Augsburg Zoo and Its Wider Implications (pdf)

Such “ethnological exhibitions” or “Völkerschauen” have a long history, linked to colonialism. For more than half a century – from the beginning of the 1870s to the end of the 1930s – the exposition of so-called exotic peoples in zoological gardens** and international expositions attracted a huge public.

UPDATE: Interesting debate and round-up at ZooChat: Cultural Zoo Exhibits = Racist? » Houston Zoo

In Detroit and London: More African Villages in the Zoo

Thesis: Conservation for Whom? Telling Good Lies in the Development of Central Kalahari

In Norwegian TV: Indian tribe paid to go naked to appear more primitive

Is this anthropology? African pygmies observe Britains in TV-show

Geldof’s Live8 and Western myths about Africa

Five years ago people from all over the world protested against the "African Village" in the zoo in Augsburg, Germany. Now, a new campaign is being planned against "The African Forest", a $50 million project in the…