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Discovered the first-ever linguistic link between Siberia and Canada

Published on April 4, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Arctic / Northern Regions, history, inuit, language, Native American

While studying an ancient language now spoken by only a few hundred people in a remote corner of Siberia, linguist Edward Vajda has found the first-ever linguistic link between the Old World and any First Nation in Canada, the Ottawa Citizen reports. “This is a big breakthrough to be able to link these”, anthropologist Jack Ives said on Wednesday.

Vajda found that the speakers of the Ket language in Russia’s Yenisei River region, and the Athapaskan-speaking native people in Canada and the U.S. (including the Dene, Gwich’in, Navaho and Apache) use almost identical words for canoe and such component parts as prow and cross-piece.

Mr. Vajda’s claim of a Dene-Yeniseic-connection was endorsed last month at an conference in Alaska attended by linguists and anthropologists. Vajdas discovery is being compared with the 18th-century “Indo-European” revolution that ultimately classified English, French and other modern languages with ancient Sanskrit.

>> read the whole story in The Ottawa Citizen

For more information see a posts on this issue over at anthropology.net: More on Vajda’s Siberian-Na-Dene Language Link where also points of controversy are discussed.

Book review: Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

Sheds light on the collaboration between science and colonial administration in Naga ethnography

Published on February 17, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Asia, books, history, indigenous people / minorities, Us and Them

Paul Pimomo reviews in The Morung Express a book that might not only be interesting for area specialists. The History of Naga Anthropology is, he writes, “a valuable contribution to the broad area of postcolonial studies“.

In History of Naga Anthropology (1832-1947), Abraham Lotha sheds light into a darker part of the history of our discipline. Among other things, he documents the “intimate collaboration between science and colonial administration in the development of Naga ethnography”. The book is based on research for the master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology at Columbia University in New York:

Like other postcolonial studies of history, Abraham Lotha’s book places the first hundred years of writings about Nagas in the category of “colonial anthropology,” that is to say, ethnography by colonial administrators and others enabled by them in ways that directly or indirectly served the colonial functions of the powers that be.
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British writing on Nagas up to 1866 portrayed them as ignorant, stubborn, and hostile to British interests. Several monographs came out of the military expeditions into Naga territory at this time, and shorter individual soldiers’ accounts of their experiences were published in the Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal. These early articles, mostly in the manner of descriptive reports, sold the Nagas as exotic, wild, and savage tribes to their scholarly readers in India and in England.

The projects of the colonial administration and Christian missionaries resulted in that the Nagas were socialized into the ideology of colonial subordination and, after they left the Naga Hills, into the position of second-class citizens in postcolonial India, he writes.

>> read the whole review in The Morung Express

An exhibition and a movie: The French, colonialism and the construction of “the other”

On Savage Minds: Debate on the Construction of Indigenous Culture by Anthropologists

Anthropology and Colonial Violence in West Papua

Rethinking Nordic Colonialism – Website Sheds Light Over Forgotten Past

“No wonder that anthropology is banished from universities in the ‘decolonized’ world”

Paul Pimomo reviews in The Morung Express a book that might not only be interesting for area specialists. The History of Naga Anthropology is, he writes, "a valuable contribution to the broad area of postcolonial studies".

In History of Naga…

Book review: An Anthropological history of the Adivasis of Bastar

Published on July 2, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Asia, books, history, indigenous people / minorities, Us and Them

adivasi-cover According to Hindu-reviewer Jyotirmaya Sharma, anthropologist and sociologist Nandini Sundar has written an interesting book about the Adivasi in India. The book Subalterns and Sovereigns — An Anthropological History of Bastar (1854-2006) “tells a very complex and nuanced story of the ‘adivasis’ of Bastar being displaced by centralised models of “development”, losing, in turn, their rights over land, water and forests”:

The book is a very skilful coming together of anthropology and history. It exhaustively chronicles the story of Bastar from the time colonial administrative structures sought to impose “order” and “civilisation” on the ‘adivasis’ by imposing colonial prejudices and stereotypes to the present time when state-sponsored private vigilantism in the name of countering the Maoist movement threatens to wreck an entire way of life. It also details the way in which the ‘adivasis’ have resisted the colonial state in the past and a repressive state now.

But Sundar’s study is not an attempt to romanticise either the ‘adivasis’ or their history as one of “undiluted innocence or even heroism.”

>> read the whole review in The Hindu

On her own website, the anthropologist writes about her book:

Anthropologists are often accused of wanting to keep tribals or indigenous people as museum pieces. Subalterns and Sovereigns shows how misplaced this charge is, arguing that forested and hill areas like Bastar have never been outside the ‘mainstream’ of history, and that the flattening out of local politics to create the appearance of isolation and homogeneity is essentially a product of colonialism and post-colonialism. The choice today, as in the past, has never been one between ‘tradition’ and ‘modern civilisation’ or between ‘development’ and ‘backwardness’, but over alternative visions of democracy.

By exploring the expansion of the state in Bastar over the past century and a half, and resistance to the particular forms it has taken, this book has been part of redefining the way in which history and anthropology are thinking of tribal India.

For more info about the Adivasi see Wikipedia and Kerim Friedman’s posts about Adivasi and Adivasi Rebels

According to Hindu-reviewer Jyotirmaya Sharma, anthropologist and sociologist Nandini Sundar has written an interesting book about the Adivasi in India. The book Subalterns and Sovereigns — An Anthropological History of Bastar (1854-2006) "tells a very complex and nuanced story of…

Rethinking Nordic Colonialism – Website Sheds Light Over Forgotten Past

Published on December 4, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Arctic / Northern Regions, history, indigenous people / minorities, inuit, Saami, Us and Them, websites

56 artists, theorists, politicians, and grassroots activists from all over the world participated in the project that took place in Iceland, The Faroe Islands, Sapmi, Norway, Sweden and Finland. They exchanged colonial and postcolonial experiences and strategies, examined why this past has been forgotten and how it continues to reproduce itself as waves of intolerance, xenophobia, and nationalism.

A week ago the (impressive!) website of this project (which has also been published on DVD) has been launched in Oslo. You can spend hours and days, reading the papers, watching videos and movies, looking at exhibitions, listening to presentations.

In the introduction Frederikke Hansen and Tone Olaf Nielsen explain:

The colonial history of the Nordic region is a dark chapter that seems to have slipped the memory of many of the Nordic populations. Although it continues to make itself very much felt in the region’s former colonies, this history is alarmingly absent in the collective memory of the once-colonizing Nordic countries.

With Rethinking Nordic Colonialism: A Postcolonial Exhibition Project in Five Acts, we aim to shed light over this history. Not only do we hope to explain why this past has been forgotten in some parts of the region. We also want to show how this history continues to structure the Nordic societies today, and how our contemporary problems of intolerance, xenophobia, and nationalism have their roots in this past.

I’ll come back with more blog posts about this website

>> visit Rethinking Nordic Colonialism

Anthropology and Colonial Violence in West Papua

“A postcolonial urban apartheid”: Two anthropologists on the riots in France

The Five Major Challenges for Anthropology

An exhibition and a movie: The French, colonialism and the construction of “the other”

Published on October 9, 2006 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology in the news, Europe, history, migration, Us and Them

The first temporary exhibition at Paris’s Quai Branly museum takes an ambitious look at how the West constructs its ‘other’, Mary Stevens writes in her research blog about the reconfiguration of national identity in French museums:

In the permanent exhibition it is the aesthetic qualities of the objects on display that are foregrounded; what is missing is a critical reflection on how the western aesthetic criteria which visitors are encouraged to apply have developed over time. What makes us see something as art, and why do we now judge as art objects that in the past might have been seen either as silent witnesses to social customs or indeed as curiosities? These are the questions that D’un regard l’Autre sets out to explore.

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[H]airy savages carved in wood bear witness to Renaissance man’s desire to position his superior self firmly on the side of culture against nature. However, it is interesting to be reminded that in this period real-live people from other cultures were sufficiently rare in Western Europe to command wonder and a degree of respect. A life-size portrait of an Inuit couple, painted during their visit to the Danish court in the late seventeenth century provides a subtle reminder: the names of these two travellers – Pock and Kieperoch – were carefully noted by the artist. It was only in the nineteenth century that their successors would become ‘types’, documented and classified for the new sciences of anthropology and phrenology and displayed for public instruction in the new museums.

>> read the whole review of the exhibition

See also earlier on antropologi.info: Indigenous? Non-Western? Primitive? The Paris Museum Controversy

Mary Stevens has blogged a lot about multiculturalism and nationalism in France. One of the interesting recent posts is about the integration of foreign students: What image of France is presented in the introductory courses about French society?

(…) Day 2: the gastronomic map of France (lots of camembert and choucroute – not a lot of couscous and brik) place names (all Greek, Roman, Celtic or religious), family names (every single one of them belonging to the Français de souche, whoever they might be) and – to top it all – “languages, ethnic groups and cultures”. Aside from the fact that I thought ‘ethnic’ was a taboo word in French, only regional minorities get a mention and we are told authoritatively that cultural diversity has been in decline since the Revolution, or at least until a ‘recent’ upsurge in regional movements (e.g. Coriscan, Breton, Basque).

So here we have it: ‘le mythe national’ condensed into two short days. Above all the course seeks to inculcate a closed, exclusive definition of national identity that fails to take into account any of the demographic developments of the last 200 years and indeed before.

If anyone was ever in any doubt that there is still work to be done in France in rethinking the ‘collective memory’ – or what I prefer to call the collective or social ‘imaginary’ (the latter after the philosopher Charles Taylor) – then here (with apologies for the poor quality) is the proof.

>> read the whole post: Integrating the elite: peddling national mythology

Related topics are touched in the French movie Indigènes. Mary Stevens explains:

The film tells the story of a group of North African soldiers, fighting on French soil for the liberation of France from 1943. It is explicitly geared toward the re-evaluation of national collective memory; its aim is to address the way these soldiers, who played a major role in the Liberation have been written out of (the Gaullist account) of history. And it looks set to have a major impact.

>> read the whole post: The « Indigènes » effect ?

Anthropologist Cicilie Fagerlid is back in Paris and has also seen the film:

Indigene is the shameful juridical assignation used for Muslims in French North Africa. Muslims, being indigenes and not citizens like the Christians and Jews, didn’t enjoy equal rights until 1945. It’s incredible, isn’t it, in the country priding itself with the slogan libérté, égalité, fraternité?

>> read the whole review

In the permanent exhibition…