globalisation | antropologi.info

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…

Owen Sichone: Poor African migrants no less cosmopolitan than anthropologists

Published on April 25, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, cosmopolitanism, globalisation, journal articles / papers, migration, Us and Them

Anthropologists are citizens of the world because they are able to manoeuvre in and out of different cultures. African migrants display similar competencies when they are away from home. But you can even be cosmopolitan without ever having left your home, anthropologist Owen B. Sichone told at the conference Cosmopolitanism and Anthropology:

If we want to understand the cosmopolitanism of global justice we may find the answer not in liberal constitutions or UN conventions but in the real lives of the world’s a dollar a day multitudes.

(…)

In my view we would do better to look to remote Africa villages and congested urban slums to find the woman who greets the stranger with a tray of food and this woman who has never left home lives her cosmopolitanism by welcoming the world. One does not need to be well travelled to be a polyglot, polymath or cosmopolitan if one is plays host to the world as the women of Cape Town have done since the Mother City was constructed.

European capitalism on the other hand is uncosmopolitan:

In today’s globalising world the political philosophers have defined cosmopolitanism in various ways. Whether we see it as based on liberal notions of human dignity, (Appiah, 2005 ch6), ‘obligations of justice to non-nationals’ or merely being ‘marked by diverse cultural influences’ (Sypnowich: 56) the European capitalist who has long offered himself as the ideal type fails the test. It is not just failure to protect strangers in Europe but the whole imperial episode of colonial oppression, i.e uncosmopolitan cosmopolitanism.

Sichone points to tougher immigration laws, that are limiting the mobility of the less affluent people outside the rich countries. Modernisation has in his opinion meant sedentarisation rather than increasing mobility for most Africans. :

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.

(…)

It is ironical that East Africans seem to have enjoyed greater freedom of movement during the colonial days than they do today. There was no real border at the time as East Africa was all-British territory, the same could be said for other parts of the continent.

Certain migrants, the sort that travel without passports or visas, challenge the system of global apartheid and make it possible for others who belong to the immobile 97 per cent of the global population that never leaves home, to connect with the world in ways that facilitate the transfer of resources between centres and peripheries. They sometimes impact upon the host population in dramatic and unpredictable ways that belies their small numbers, Sichone writes.

On the other hand, Cape Town (where his paper focuses on) is a quite xenophobic society. This may be the result of imperialism, colonialism and apartheid. Sichone found striking gender differences. Women are much more friendly to strangers than men. For the South African more strangers means less resources for everyone:

Xenophobia (…) is most pronounced in the world of the retrenched worker, the men who must blame their unemployability on foreigners and who see themselves in a zero sum battle for survival.
(…)
Many migrants in Cape Town would probably agree with the Congolese refugee who said, if it were not for the women, we would not make it. (…) My Tanzanian contact, Pascal referred to some of them as the ‘Xhosa mama’ who provide new arrivals with accommodation and counter the ill-treatment that makwerekwere suffer at the hands of South African men. The ‘Xhosa mama’ treats foreigners, strangers, aliens etc as fellow human beings from the beginning just as the xenophobic men are hostile to strangers even before they encounter them.

He concludes:

What we seek to do is not necessarily to denounce elite models of cosmopolitanism exemplified by the work of international scholars, global social movements or human rights activists but rather to demonstrate that for the dollar a day multitudes ultimate security lies in ubuntu.

His paper was for me one of the highlights of the conference. So I am glad that Owen Sichone gave me the permission to post his paper on antropologi.info. He welcomes comments. His email address: osichone AT humanities.uct.ac.za

>> read Xenophobia and xenophilia in South Africa. Africans migrants in Cape Town by Owen B. Sichone (90kb, pdf)

EARLIER POSTS ABOUT THE CONFERENCE:

What’s the point of anthropology conferences? (general summary)

David Graeber: There never was a West! Democracy as Interstitial Cosmopolitanism

Thomas Hylland Eriksen: Cosmopolitanism is like respecting the ban on smoking in the public

For an Anthropology of Cosmopolitanism

David Graeber: There never was a West! Democracy as Interstitial Cosmopolitanism

Published on April 21, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, cosmopolitanism, globalisation, journal articles / papers, politics, Us and Them

(LINKS UPDATED 20.8.2020) Recently, the terms “Western civilisation” or “Western values” have been used in opposition to regimes mainly in the Middle East. But how fruitful is this notion of “the West”? In his keynote speech at the conference Cosmopolitanism and Anthropology, David Graeber showed that this idea is a kind of Othering: It makes artificial gaps between people that have more in common than supposed.

His deconstruction of the West resembels earlier deconstructions of the National (what traditionally has been considered as “typical Norwegian” is rather the result of migration and influences from other countries).

In his paper that he presented on the conference, Graeber writes:

If you examine these terms more closely, however, it becomes obvious that all these “Western” objects are the products of endless entanglements. “Western science” was patched together out of discoveries made on many continents, and is now largely produced by non- Westerners. “Western consumer goods” were always drawn from materials taken from all over the world, many explicitly imitated Asian products, and nowadays, most are produced in China.
(…)
As European states expanded and the Atlantic system came to encompass the world, all sorts of global influences appear to have coalesced in European capitals, and to have been reabsorbed within the tradition that eventually came to be known as “Western”.
(…)
Can we say the same of “Western freedoms”? The reader can probably guess what my answer is likely to be.

The idea of a superior “Western civilisation” is a product of colonialism. But as he says:

Opposition to European expansion in much of the world, even quite early on, appears to have been carried out in the name of “Western values” that the Europeans in question did not yet even have.

Graeber mainly used the notion of democracy as a Western concept as an example:

Almost everyone who writes on the subject assumes “democracy” is a “Western” concept begins its history in ancient Athens, and that what 18th and 19th century politicians began reviving in Western Europe and North America was essentially the same thing.

(…)

Democratic practices-processes of egalitarian decision-making-however occur pretty much anywhere, and are not peculiar to any one given
“civilization”, culture, or tradition.

We should according to Graeber treat the history of “democracy” as more than just the history of the word “democracy”:

If democracy is simply a matter of communities managing their own affairs through an open and relatively egalitarian process of public discussion, there is no reason why egalitarian forms of decision-making in rural communities in Africa or Brazil should not be at least as worthy of the name as the constitutional systems that govern most nation-states today-and in many cases, probably a good deal more so.

(…)

Rather than seeing Indian, or Malagasy, or Tswana, or Maya claims to being part of an inherently democratic tradition as an attempt to ape the West, it seems to me, we are looking at different aspects of the same planetary process: a crystallization of longstanding democratic practices in the formation of a global system, in which ideas were flying back and forth in all directions, and the gradual, usually grudging adoption of some by ruling elites.

Yet why have these procedures not been considered as “democratic.” The main reason in Graebers view: In these assemblies, things never actually came to a vote! Rather, they preferred “the apparently much more difficult task” of coming to decisions “that no one finds so violently objectionable that they are not willing at least assent”. It is this form of participatory democracy that social movements around the world are trying to revive!

Graeber also discusses the “coercive nature of the state” and the contradictions that democratic constitutions are founded on. He refers to Walter Benjamin (1978) who pointed out “that any legal order that claims a monopoly of the use of violence has to be founded by some power other than itself, which inevitably means, by acts that were illegal according to whatever system of law came before it”.

And about Ancient Greece and democracy:

It is of obvious relevance that Ancient Greece was one of the most competitive societies known to history. It was a society that tended to make everything into a public contest, from athletics to philosophy or tragic drama or just about anything else. So it might not seem entirely surprising they made political decision-making into a public contest as well. Even more crucial though was the fact that decisions were made by a populace in arms.

UPDATE: The whole text is now available in The Anarchist Library: There Never Was a West Or, Democracy Emerges From the Spaces In Between

SEE ALSO:

Amartya Sen: Democracy Isn’t ‘Western’ this text was also debated on Savage Minds

Amartya Sen: Democracy as a Universal Value (pdf) (Journal of Democracy 10.3 (1999) 3-17)

David Graeber: Reinventing Democracy

Review of Graeber’s book: Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

Cosmopolitanism and Anthropology – What’s the point of anthropology conferences?

(LINKS UPDATED 20.8.2020) Recently, the terms "Western civilisation" or "Western values" have been used in opposition to regimes mainly in the Middle East. But how fruitful is this notion of "the West"? In his keynote speech at the conference Cosmopolitanism…

New Ethnography: The Deaf People – A Forgotten Cultural Minority

Published on April 2, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, culture traditions, globalisation, indigenous people / minorities, language, technology, Us and Them

It is insufficient to understand deaf people as disabled. Most deaf people rather see themselves as members of a cultural and linguistic minority. They are proud of their culture. And they face identity obstacles similar to those faced by many other minority members. Therefore is it important to change the attitudes from the medical definitions and into an understanding of the deaf as a linguistic cultural group. These are some of the main findings in a new book by Norwegian anthropologist Jan-Kåre Breivik called Deaf Identities in the Making. Local Lives, Transnational Connections.

As deaf-activist Asbjørn puts it:

“Why fix healthy deaf children through CI surgery? We do not need that. What we need are more hearing people that want to play on our team – as we are – as Deaf people. we need more people willing to use the key to our culture – the sign language.”

See among others this quote by one of Breiviks informants – it might have been told by Native Indians, black people, Saami people etc:

“I did not accept myself as deaf. My family and the local environment did not give me the means to appreciate that side of my self. I was the only local deaf person and what I head about deaf persons was almost exclusively negative. The “deaf and dumb” stereotype was around me and became part of my own experience. I was constantly trying to be part of my hearing environment, but of course I couldn’t pass as a hearing person. I was constantly frustrated, never getting access to what the others were speaking about.
(…)
At the age of eighteen, (…) I stated to visit the deaf club. Here I also found a new friend. I began to accept my deafness, and gradually I aquired a sense of pride for being deaf.
(…)
I felt as if I had been given a new life, when I began accepting myself as deaf. I got more out of life and the companionship with other deaf persons. We shared the same identity, the same culture, that we were facing the same problems of communication and language in society.

Deaf people’s identity politics also resemble those of other minority groups. To create a collective identity, borders have to be drawn. But where? This is of course an widely debated issue. There is some kind of hierarchy: Some people are regarded as “more deaf” than others according to Breivik:

Within the Deaf signing community, deafened people are often viewed as suspect figures. This is because they are not accepted as being really deaf, and they are often accused of being too willing to pass as hearing people.

An informant says:

“In the United States, there are extremely deaf conscious, and where you must be second- or third-generation deaf to be counted as a real deaf person.”

Many informants fear for sharper boundaries between the deaf and the hearing world. One of them says:

“Deaf Power can be compared to being proud to be from Norway, and be extremely conscious of that. Such self-consciousness can turn into nationalism. This scares me, and I experience this constantly. At each youth camp, there are always some extreme types. Their messages do not differ from other extreme nationalists. It is always us vs. them.”

Many deaf people live transnational lives: They travel a lot in order to meet other deaf people. In contrast to many hearing people, deaf people don’t link equality and sameness, Breivik found out:

One of the key lessons I have learned, as a hearing person who has been immersed in deaf life through my anthropological research, is that the phrase “being at home among strangers” (Schein 1989) goes to the heart of the identity question. This is about deaf people’s frequent departure from biological roots and the hearing, settled world, and their search for “equals” in distant places.

Their language – the sign language is of great help. It is much more suitable for transnational lives than spoken languages. It’s quite easy to learn foreign sign languages. Albertine from Norway tells about her time in the USA:

“I was present one month before school started up, and by that time I was able to make myself understood and I could capture most of what they told me. After three months, I was almost fluent in American Sign Language.”

Japanese, she tells, is totally incomprehensible. Nevertheless she’s convinced that she would have managed Japanese “after a few weeks.”

Deaf people embrace the new communication technologies like internet and email. For many of them, the Net is a window toward the world, several informants met their husbands/wives there. On the internet, they are able to communicate with strangers freely without any consideration of hearing status.

I’m halfway-through the book that actually qualifies to become one of my favorite anthropology books. It describes a – for hearing people – totally unknown world and turns some of our assumptions upside down. The book is also an example for good anthropological writing!

>> more information on the book by the publisher

>> read the first chapter of the book

‘I hoped our baby would be deaf’ Most parents would be distressed to learn that their child had been born unable to hear. But for Paula Garfield and Tomato Lichy, it means daughter Molly can share their special culture (The Guardian, 21.3.06)

UPDATE:

Anthropologist Karen Nakamura is going to publish a new book called Deaf in Japan. It will be out in August 2006.

Grace Keyes: “Hearing has been neglected in studies of enculturation and personality development”

Chronicles Women’s Social Movements in India

Published on March 26, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Asia, development empowerment, gender, globalisation

The small groups of rural women in India fighting for change is something the rest of the world needs to take note of, says Mangala Subramaniam, an assistant professor of sociology and women’s studies. Since the late 1990s, Subramaniam has studied social movements in India, particularly the women’s movement in India and the dalit – poor, rural low-caste women in India – as they organized in their small villages.

Her book The Power of Women’s Organizing: Gender, Caste and Class in India will be published this month.

In a press release she says:

“Unfortunately, many people in America and Europe are not aware of or know about the vibrancy of women’s movements in Asian countries, such as India. And many people especially do not think about rural women in India organizing to fight for rights such as educational opportunities as well as to challenge discrimination based on social inequities of class, caste and gender. Studies of women’s social movements outside of the west – America and Europe – are necessary in this increasingly globalizing world.”

>> read the whole story at OneWorld.net

>> Review of The Power of Women’s Informal Networks: Lessons in Social Change from South Asia and West Africa. Bandana Purkayastha and Mangala Subramaniam

>> Information about her dissertation: Translating participation in informal organizations into empowerment: Women in rural India
Mangala Subramaniam

The World Social Forum is a place where social movements meet. Two years ago, it was held in Mumbai, India. I’ve written a summary: Inspiration from India: Hindus and Muslims eat breakfast together; Christian nuns join Tibetan monks in a chant. See also “Just like apartheid”: The dalits are engaged in a fierce struggle to stop the ancient discrimination.