Africa | antropologi.info

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

Published on May 10, 2006 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology in the news, culture traditions, development empowerment, indigenous people / minorities

Journalists often draw strict lines between “us” – the modern – and “them” – living in the stone age – although, as anthropologist Kerim Friedman put it we’re all modern now.

According to a recent story by Knight Ridder Newspapers, a gift to Maasai people in Kenya “adds fuel to debate on tribe’s future”. The article starts like this:

For centuries, the Masai people of Kenya have lived in huts without power or running water, used plants and minerals to heal themselves, and survived on a diet of cow milk, meat and blood.

So when Patrick O’Sullivan, a visitor from Silicon Valley entered one of their villages and left behind a school equipped with solar power, laptops and a projector, he sparked an old debate about the tribe’s desire to preserve its culture while surviving in a modern world encroaching on its way of life.

What follows is a typical debate that might have taken place in so called modern socities when Internet was introduced: The elder people are rejecting changes:

But with the light came questions for the entire village. Elders – who had spent much of their lives resisting assimilation into the modern world, fighting British colonizers, and lobbying the Kenyan government for the tribe’s right to self-sufficiency – felt their work was being lost in the tide of support from parents and teachers for O’Sullivan’s school.

“Mostly elder people don’t absolutely want the change. They want people to be as they were before,” David Ole Koshal, leader of Oloolaimutia village, said on O’Sullivan’s video footage.

What is so special about it? Why focus on the resistance by the elder people? As we read, most people embrace the changes:

Most Masai parents and teachers were delighted with the new tools for their children. The school’s enrollment doubled from roughly 200 to 410, partly because children tending cattle during the day were able to attend classes at night thanks to solar-powered lights.

But as anthropology professor Lea B. Pellett said:

The more information and knowledge the better, but the Masai will have to take ownership of the change and preserve what is most important to them from their culture.

>> read the whole story in the Central Daily

Cultural lag, a lethal drag

Women in Cameroon:Information technology as a way out of the cultural cul-de-sac

“Aboriginal knowledge is science”

Journalists often draw strict lines between "us" - the modern - and "them" - living in the stone age - although, as anthropologist Kerim Friedman put it we're all modern now.

According to a recent story by Knight Ridder Newspapers,…

More Global Apartheid?

Published on April 30, 2006 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology in the news, globalisation, migration, Us and Them

(LINKS UPDATED 6.4.2020) In my previous post, I’ve quoted anthropologist Owen Sichone about the concept of “Global apartheid”:

Whatever the advantages of apartness are (more economic than cultural), the South African system came to an end just as the rest of the world was reinventing it in new forms. Global apartheid policed by the regime of visas and passports in a manner that African migrant workers (…) would easily recognize as colonial still does the job of keeping wealth and poverty apart.

The French government is planning a new immigration law, furthering these developments towards more global apartheid, according to anthropologist Cicilie Fagerlid who writes:

According to this new law, immigration to France should be “chosen” (immigration choisie) rather than “suffered from” or “undergone” (subie). In practice, this means that people who are useful to the French economy are invited in, while the law will be more restrictive on the others – the asylum-seekers, the family reunions and the unregistered sans-papiers.

On yesterdays’ demonstration against the law, she writes, “quite a few demonstrators today had come to the conclusion that the interior minister obviously doesn’t love France as she is, so they suggested that he packs his bags and leave.”

>> read her whole post

Salih Booker and William Minter define Global Apartheid this way:

Global apartheid, stated briefly, is an international system of minority rule whose attributes include: differential access to basic human rights; wealth and power structured by race and place; structural racism, embedded in global economic processes, political institutions and cultural assumptions; and the international practice of double standards that assume inferior rights to be appropriate for certain “others,” defined by location, origin, race or gender.

>> read their whole article in The Nation

UPDATE (8.5.06):

Anthony Katombe from GlobalVoices reviews francophone blogs on African immigrants’ latest tribulations in France and Belgium. Blogger Le Pangolin belies Sarkozy’s assertions that France wants to start “choosing its immigrants” through new, tighter policies:

France has always chosen its immigrants. Remember the Senegalese janitors whom France imported from Senegal and Mali, the Renault and Peugeot auto factory workers they went to fetch in Maghreb to break the communist party and the CGT union’s strong influence between 1950 and 1970.

Le Pangolin ridicules a French government drowning under youth unemployment protests attempting desperately to redirect public attention towards a scapegoat, the African immigrant

>> read the whole post on GlobalVoices

Charles Mutasa: Global Apartheid Continues to Haunt Global Democracy

Owen Sichone on Global Apartheid: Poor African migrants no less cosmopolitan than anthropologists

Proclaiming the birth of a new civil rights movement – demonstration against a tougher immigration policy in the US

Racism and The Five Major Challenges for Anthropology

(LINKS UPDATED 6.4.2020) In my previous post, I've quoted anthropologist Owen Sichone about the concept of "Global apartheid":

Whatever the advantages of apartness are (more economic than cultural), the South African system came to an end just as the…

The emerging research field of medical ethnomusicology: How music fights AIDS

Published on January 25, 2006 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, books, interdisciplinary, medical anthropology / ethnobothany, music

In a new book, Gregory F. Barz, professor of ethnomusicology at Vanderbilt University documents the effective role music and the arts are playing in the fight against AIDS in Uganda. It’s according to the official press release the first book of an emerging research field – medical ethnomusicology – that seeks to combine efforts of anthropologists, music specialists, public health policy makers and doctors and other health care workers to fight disease.

The book is called Singing for Life: HIV/AIDS and Music in Uganda. It collects lyrics to songs and performances inspired by the HIV/AIDS pandemic in that country, and includes a CD sampler of Ugandan music.

Barz says:

“Music and medicine, when they’re coupled together, bring about the greatest effect in many parts of the world in combating disease. While Americans tend to think of music as entertainment, people in countries like Uganda consider it as being life itself.”

According to the press release, HIV infection rates have fallen from 30 percent to 5 percent in Uganda in the past decade, and Barz argues that efforts to convey good information by storytellers, dancers, musicians and other artisans have played a prominent role. The typical mass media options don’t work in a country where many people have no access. “Music is often education in Africa, passing along information. I call it ‘dancing the disease’”, Barz says.

>> read the whole story

In an article in the Vanderbilt Register, we read that Barz originally went to Uganda to document native drumming patterns. But:

“The more I listened to songs and observed dances, I began hearing that people were making meaning out of the disease and out of the virus through music and dramas and dancing. They were singing about social problems caused by AIDS – children not having parents, a missing generation – about the sickness that was everywhere.

When I came back, I decided I could no longer close my ears and turn off my fancy recording equipment to these voices anymore. I don’t want to just document the exotic and the local and the indigenous. There has to be some kind of intervention.”

>> read the whole story in The Vanderbilt Register

medical anthropology news archive

Nomads help anthropologists get their PhD’s but dont’ get any feedback

Published on December 18, 2005 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology in the news, ethics, fieldwork / methods, Us and Them

New York Times writes about the Ariaal society in northern Kenya and some bad behaving anthropologists. The Ariaal answer all their strange questions. But anthropologists don’t give something back. A local chief, Stephen Lesseren, said he wished their work would lead to more benefits for his people:

“We don’t mind helping people get their Ph.D.’s. But once they get their Ph.D.’s, many of them go away. They don’t send us their reports. What have we achieved from the plucking of our hair? We want feedback. We want development.”

“I thought I was being bewitched,” Koitaton Garawale, a weathered cattleman, said of the time a researcher plucked a few hairs from atop his head. “I was afraid. I’d never seen such a thing before.”

>> read the whole story

New York Times writes about the Ariaal society in northern Kenya and some bad behaving anthropologists. The Ariaal answer all their strange questions. But anthropologists don't give something back. A local chief, Stephen Lesseren, said he wished their work would…

Fieldblogging from Namibia

Published on December 18, 2005 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology in the news, fieldwork / methods, websites

Josué Tomasini Castro has started blogging impressions from his fieldwork among the Herero in Namibia. He is mainly interested in their culture and cosmology. Right now, he is establishing contacts and trying to learn the local language Otjiherero.

>> continue to Josué Tomasini Castro’s blog AnthroBoundaries

>>…