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Indigenousness and the Politics of Spirituality

Published on April 6, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, culture traditions, indigenous people / minorities, Native American, religion cosmology, Us and Them

Sabina Magliocco, Anthropology News April 2005, American Anthropological Association

The commodification of indigenous spirituality is based on Romanticism’s construction of indigenes as more authentic, closer to nature and the sacred than Westerners; but it grew out of popular fascination with indigenous spirituality, fueled partly by ethnography and its imitators. By the 1980s a growing popular literature on New Age mysticism was emerging, drawing many concepts from Romantic notions of indigenous spirituality.

The commodification of spirituality led to outrage on the part of many indigenous peoples that white “wannabees” were playing at being Indian and appropriating their spiritual traditions. Some Native American groups decreed that only members of their own tribes would be permitted to practice certain traditions. Another possibility that appealed to some indigenous groups was to copyright their spiritual practices through the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

The idea that the right to spiritual practice is determined by blood violates everything we know about the constructed nature of race, ethnicity and culture. As anthropologists, we cannot turn our backs on our most fundamental assumptions, even to protect indigenous groups whose spiritual traditions have been fetishized. Taken to its logical extreme, it leads directly to essentialization and racism. >> continue

Sabina Magliocco, Anthropology News April 2005, American Anthropological Association

Book review: Reindeer People – Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia

Published on March 28, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Asia, books, culture traditions, indigenous people / minorities

Ronald Hutton, Times Online

Piers Vitebsky is one of a tiny number of British experts on the region and an internationally renowned anthropologist. This book “REINDEER PEOPLE: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia” is the record of successive visits that he has made over the past 17 years to live with members of a native people called the Eveny in the Verkhoyansk Mountains in the far north-east. Like his earlier work, it shows him to be both an excellent scholar and a gifted writer, with a feeling for landscape and character and a knack for metaphor and allusion. >> continue

SEE ALSO:
Piers Vitebsky: What is a shaman? – Worlds of the Shaman (Natural History, March 1997 / findarticles.com)
Peoples of the Russian North and Far East (Arctic Circle)

Ronald Hutton, Times Online

Piers Vitebsky is one of a tiny number of British experts on the region and an internationally renowned anthropologist. This book "REINDEER PEOPLE: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia" is the record of successive visits that…

Modern American family: Strained and losing intimacy

Published on March 20, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, culture traditions, Northern America, Us and Them

The intimate moments that once were the glue of American family life are disappearing amid job demands and nonstop activities. Scientists at UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families have spent the past four years observing 32 Los Angeles families in a study of how working America somehow gets it done. Day after day. “We’ve scheduled and outsourced a lot of our relationships,” says the study’s director, Elinor Ochs, a linguistic anthropologist. “There isn’t much room for the flow of life, those little moments when things happen spontaneously.

For Ochs, the most worrisome trend is how indifferently people treat each other, especially when they reunite at day’s end. In her view, the chilly exchanges repeated in so many of the study’s households suggests something has gone awry. >> continue

Collision of cultures? Somali immigrants share New England’s small-town values

Published on March 13, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, culture traditions, migration, Northern America, Us and Them

St.Petersburg Times

As almost 1,400 Somali refugees poured in this nearly all-white New England town, the natives weren’t quite sure what to make of them. Here were people who looked different, spoke little English and had little money. And expected this city of 35,000 to find them jobs and places to live.

But these Muslims from Africa, it turned out, shared many of Lewiston’s small-town values. The Somalis wanted to raise their kids in a safe, quiet community where faith was important. As both groups discovered, things as simple as potluck dinners and henna hand painting can go a long way toward bridging a vast cultural divide.

Heather Lindkvist, an anthropologist at Bates College, has studied the local Somali migration to Lewiston, Maine.
>> continue

St.Petersburg Times

As almost 1,400 Somali refugees poured in this nearly all-white New England town, the natives weren't quite sure what to make of them. Here were people who looked different, spoke little English and had little money. And expected this…

In Egypt: Economy and perceptions of modernity change religious festival

Published on March 11, 2005 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology in the news, culture traditions, religion cosmology

Cairo Magazine

Moulids are multi-faceted festivals held in honor of holy people. The surrounding area is transformed into a festive space that, in the case of large moulids, may engulf an entire neighborhood. Anthropologist Farouk Ahmed Mostafa says, “Moulids have played a large role in invigorating the economic life of the society in which the saint is located.” Moulids also provide an opportunity for reestablishing social contacts with out-of-town friends, he explains.

Times are changing for Egypt’s moulids. Yet the reasons for change are more subtle and complex than the government’s dislike of street merchants or anxiety about crowds. While state policies certainly shape these temporary transformations of public space, shifting shades of religiosity, the economy and perceptions of modernity also contribute to the changing form and character of Egypt’s moulids. >> continue (link updated)

Cairo Magazine