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AfricaWrites – Videos from rural Africa

Published on October 28, 2007 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology in the news, culture traditions, Visual Anthropology, websites

Patrick Gorham, editor of AfricaWrites: Heroes, Rituals & Legends writes to me. He created AfricaWrites several years ago “with the intent and goals of research, exploration, preservation and documentation of traditional African culture”. On the website you can watch several videos from rural Africa.

>> visit AfricaWrites.com

>> Ugotrade.com with more info on AfricaWrites

Patrick Gorham, editor of AfricaWrites: Heroes, Rituals & Legends writes to me. He created AfricaWrites several years ago "with the intent and goals of research, exploration, preservation and documentation of traditional African culture". On the website you can watch several…

Doctoral Thesis: Is Islam Compatible with Secularism?

Published on October 18, 2007 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology in the news, journal articles / papers, religion cosmology

Secularisation is often seen as a process that is associated with the “West” and modernisation, as a process that is opposed to islamisation. In his doctoral dissertation, anthropologist Sindre Bangstad shows that processes of secularisation also emerge from within Muslim communities.

Bangstads dissertation ‘Global Flows, Local Appropriations: Facets of Secularisation and re-Islamization Among Contemporary Cape Muslims’, is based on 15 months of fieldwork in Cape Town, South Africa between 2003 and 2005.

Bangstad stresses that processes of secularisation and re-Islamization are not opposed to each other. They must be seen as implicated in, and interlinked with, one another:

For instance, I demonstrate that prison ‘ulama’ in Cape Town have been able to draw on human rights notions and precepts enshrined in the Constitution in arguing for an expansion of religious rights for Muslim inmates. They have done so, in spite of the fact that the mainstream Cape ‘ulama’ are for all practical purposes opposed to many of the secular and liberal principles of the same Constitution, and many of the legislative and societal changes that they have resulted in.

(…)

It is difficult to understand the discrepancies between the normative models of the predominantly middle-class mainstream Cape ‘ulama’, and the actual practices of Cape Muslims in underprivileged townships and informal settlements, without reference to prior processes of secularisation understood as a decrease in the regulatory capacities of religious authorities.

In his dissertation, Bangstad present findings from his ethnographic research on black African conversion to Islam in the black African townships and informal settlements, on Muslim women in polygynous marriages in underprivileged communities, on Muslims living with HIV/AIDS, on the status of religious rights for Muslim inmates in a prison, as well as on public deliberations between reformists and Sufis on the appropriateness of certain Sufi rituals.

Muslims in South Africa represent a small minority, with a mere 1,46 percent of the total population in 2001. However, Muslims in Cape Town, the historical heartland of Islam in South Africa, represent approximately 10 percent of the population.

>> download the dissertation

Extremism: “Authorities -and not Imams – can make the situation worse”

Akbar Ahmed’s anthropological excursion into Islam

New blog: Islam, Muslims, and an Anthropologist

Muslims in Calcutta: Towards a middle-class & moderation

What does it mean to be Muslim in a secular society? Anthropologist thinks ahead

Book review: Mahmood Mamdani: “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim”

Islam in Europe: Mainstream society as the provider of conditions

Islam Is Gaining a Foothold in Chiapas

How Islamic cassette sermons challenge the moral and political landscape of the Middle East

Secularisation is often seen as a process that is associated with the "West" and modernisation, as a process that is opposed to islamisation. In his doctoral dissertation, anthropologist Sindre Bangstad shows that processes of secularisation also emerge from within…

Obituary: Anthropologist Priscilla Reining Broke Ground on AIDS

Published on August 1, 2007 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology in the news, medical anthropology / ethnobothany, persons and theories

Anthropologist Reining died July 19 at the age of 84. “Anthropologist Broke Ground on AIDS, Satellite Mapping”, writes the Washington Post in an orbituary.

Last winter I wrote about anthropological studies that showed that male circumcision reduces the risk of HIV infection. But Reining had researched this topic already 18 years ago:

In a 1989 study published in Current Science with three co-authors, Reining spelled out the unmistakable correlation: Uncircumcised African men were 86 percent more likely to get the AIDS virus than those who had been circumcised. Her findings held true across different regions, ethnic groups and religious faiths in Africa.

At first, her study was ignored or dismissed. Some African peoples had taboos against circumcision, and many scientists couldn’t believe that such a simple procedure could produce such startling results.

(…)

Yet study after study — there have now been more than 60 — supported Reining’s initial findings. She was interviewed for a BBC documentary in 2000, and one-time skeptics were convinced by years of mounting evidence that she had been right all along.

>> read the whole article in the Washington Post

SEE ALSO:

Male circumcision prevents AIDS?

“There’s no AIDS here because men and women are equal”

AIDS:”Traditional healers are an untapped resource of great potential”

Cultural values and the spreading of AIDS in Africa

AIDS and Anthropology – Papers by the AIDS and Anthropology Working Group

Anthropologist Reining died July 19 at the age of 84. "Anthropologist Broke Ground on AIDS, Satellite Mapping", writes the Washington Post in an orbituary.

Last winter I wrote about anthropological studies that showed that male circumcision reduces the risk of…

Airport lamps light only option for studious Guinea kids

Published on August 1, 2007 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology in the news, development empowerment, politics, poverty, youth

When the sun has set in Guinea, one of the world’s poorest nations, and the floodlights come on at Gbessia International Airport, the parking lot begins to fill with children. It is among the only places where they can count on finding the lights on. The long stretch of pavement has the feel of a hushed library, according to ap-writer Rukmini Callimachi in an fascinating article in USA Today:

Groups of elementary and high school students begin heading to the airport at dusk, hoping to reserve a coveted spot under the oval light cast by one of a dozen lampposts in the parking lot. Some come from over an hour’s walk away.

“I used to study by candlelight at home but that hurt my eyes. So I prefer to come here. We’re used to it,” says 18-year-old Mohamed Sharif, who sat under the fluorescent beam memorizing notes on the terrain of Mongolia for the geography portion of his college entrance test.

Eighteen-year-old Ousman Conde admits that sitting on the concrete piling is not comfortable, but says passing his upcoming exam could open doors. “It hurts,” he says, looking up from his notes on Karl Marx for the politics portion of the test. “But we prefer this hurt to the hurt of not doing well in our exams.”

Only about a fifth of Guinea’s 10 million people have access to electricity and even those that do experience frequent power cuts. With few families able to afford generators, students long ago discovered the airport.

The lack of electricity is “a geological scandal,” says Michael McGovern, a political anthropologist at Yale University, quoting a phrase first used by a colonial administrator to describe Guinea’s untapped natural wealth. Guinea has rivers which if properly harnessed could electrify the region, McGovern says. It has gold, diamonds, iron and half the world’s reserves of bauxite, the raw material used to make aluminum.

>> read the whole story in USA Today

“Although Guinea’s mineral wealth makes it potentially one of Africa’s richest countries, its people are among the poorest in West Africa” >> more information on Guinea in the BBC country guide

Michael (Mike) McGovern is / was the West Africa project director for the International Crisis Group. He has appeared quite often in the media on Guinea related issue as a google search reveals

When the sun has set in Guinea, one of the world's poorest nations, and the floodlights come on at Gbessia International Airport, the parking lot begins to fill with children. It is among the only places where they can count…

“Help the Hadza!” – Why focus on culture and not on human rights?

Published on June 12, 2007 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology in the news, indigenous people / minorities, Us and Them

Help out the Hadza, urges anthropology.net. A United Arab Emirates royal family is trying to use the land of the Hadza as a “personal safari playground”. After a helicopter tour, they have worked out an arrangement with the Tanzanian government to lease the land without consulting the Hadza.

Philip Marmo, a Tanzanian official, said that a nearby hunting area the royal family shared with relatives had become “too crowded” and that a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family “indicated that it was inconvenient” and requested his own parcel.

Marmo called the Hadzabe “backwards” and said they would benefit from the school, roads and other projects the UAE company has offered as compensation, according to the Washington Post. “We want them to go to school,” said Marmo. “We want them to wear clothes. We want them to be decent.”

Marmo is by the way Tanzania’s minister for good governance!

A similar agreement with another company resulted in dozens of Hadzabe men being arrested for hunting on their own land. Three of the men died of illness in the prison, three others died soon after being released.

>> read the whole story in the Washington Post

>> Comment by anthropologist Christopher O’Brien

Reading these stories and comments I am wondering why the focus is on “saving culture” and not on human rights or class?

The Washington Post starts the article with well known evolutionism:

One of the last remaining tribes of hunter-gatherers on the planet is on the verge of vanishing into the modern world.

And the journalist continues describing them as “backward” people. They “still make fire with sticks”, they “still hunt and gather as a way of life” and “avoid confrontation by fleeing into the bush”.

And of course they call them a “tribe”.

Maybe even worse: We find the same ethnocentric evolutionism among anthropologists. In the first post on this issue at anthropology.net Tim writes:

I wrote previously about mankind’s attempts to resurrect some faunal components of the Pleistocene, but here’s a story about mankind’s attempts to obliterate one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer societies that has survived (just about) to the present day.
(…)
We might expect the government of Tanzania to have some interest in preserving their cultural past. (….) There are various projects which seek to protect wildlife in Africa – for example there is a big, if not completely effective, anti-poaching drive to protect elephants from ivory hunters and traders – so why can we not protect human hunters and gatherers?

UPDATE (13.6.07): The Guardian (Tanzania) reports about earlier “violations of human rights against the Hadzabe ethnic group committed by social researchers, tour firms, filmmakers and some non-governmental organizations”:

There are claims that some of these groups have been inspecting the Hadzabe people`s private organs to determine their size for unknown reasons. They reportedly use a variety of strategies to convince the Hadzabe to undress for the purpose of having sexual intercourse, in attempt to photograph them while naked. (…) There are claims that tour operators are ferrying visitors to see the Bushmen`s primitive way of life and their environment, hence generate money while the Hadzabe themselves get nothing.

And according afrol.com international protests against the land-grab is growing. The case has now been presented to the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous Peoples, Rodolfo Stavenhagen.

Our obsession with the notion of the primitive society

Primitive Racism: Reuters about “the world’s most primitive tribes”

“Stone Age Tribes”, tsunami and racist evolutionism

“Good story about cannibals. Pity it’s not even close to the truth”

Ancient People: We are All Modern Now – Debate on Savage Minds

Do anthropologists have anything relevant to say about human rights?