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Engaged anthropologists beaten by the Mexican police

Published on May 16, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Latin- and Central America, politics

There has been a lot of focus on anthropologists and human rights recently. But being engaged is easier said than done. Police Beat and Gas Students at the National School of Anthropology and History is the headline of a story on Narco News. They were part of a demonstration against rights abuses by the Mexican police:

Students from the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH), of the School for Science and Humanities (CCH) South and the National Pedagogic University (UPN), among other adherents to the Other Campaign, were blocking the “Periférico Avenue” highway near the ENAH when they were attacked with pepper gas and clubs by members of the Mexico City police.

“It was a day of energy and rebellion for the students. This could be the genesis of a real movement coming out of the solidarity of the classroom”, NarcoNews writer Juan Trujillo concludes.

Valentina Palma Novoa is one of the victims of police violence. She’s originally from Chile and student at the National School of Anthropology and History, and tells us about the background of the demonstration some days ago:

On Wednesday, May 3, after seeing the news on television and learning of the death of a 14-year-old boy, I was moved by the death of this small child and, as an anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, decided to go to San Salvador Atenco.

The day after:

It must have been about 6am when the church bells of San Salvador Atenco began to ring – bong, bong, bong, over and over again – while a voice shouted over the loudspeaker that the police were surrounding the town. Bicycles hurried past in every direction.

(…)
I zoomed in with my camera. I saw that there were many of them and that, covered by their shields, they were advancing with small and nearly imperceptible steps. I was afraid. There were many of them, heavily armed, while the farmers were few and unarmed. In the screen of my camera I saw one of the police point and shoot a projectile towards us; when it landed next to me, I could smell and feel that it was tear gas.

(…)

I was panicked and didn’t want to come down from the roof; then a police officer yelled up to me, “Come down here, bitch. Come down here now.” I came down from the roof slowly, terrorized by the sight of the boys being beaten in the head. Two police officers took hold of me and pulled me forward while others beat me on the chest, back and legs with their clubs.

She was then arrested and expelled from the country.

>> read her whole account on NarcoNews

UPDATE (23.5.06)

Global Voices author David Sasaki has made an impressive research on this topic – read >> Mexico: Violence and Backlash in San Salvador Atenco

MORE INFO:

Foreign women photographers beaten and abused by Mexico City police (Reporters Without Borders)

Police Attack Mexico City Students Protesting the Violence in Atenco

Students Maintain Blockade Despite Repression. Police Beat and Gas Students at the National School of Anthropology and History (Narco News)

Police raid in Mexico exposes deep rift (Mercury News)

Protesters choke Mexico City (Washington Post)

London says ‘We are all Atenco!’ (Indymedia UK)

Subcommandante Marcos: Either Release All Prisoners from Atenco, Or We All Go to Jail” (Narco News)

From Stone Age to 21st century – More “fun” with savages

Published on May 11, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, indigenous people / minorities, Latin- and Central America, Us and Them

Read this (we’ve had many stories like this before, but this one here is extremly “funny” – or let’s rather say ethnocentric. The people are escaping from the Colombian drugs war, but this article reads more like an explorers account 200 years ago):

SAN JOSE DEL GUAVIARE, Colombia — Since time immemorial, the Nukak-Maku have lived a Stone Age life, roaming across hundreds of miles of isolated and pristine Amazon jungle, killing monkeys with blowguns and scouring the forest floor for berries.

But recently, and rather mysteriously, a group of nearly 80 wandered out of the wilderness, half-naked, a gaggle of children and pet monkeys in tow, and declared themselves ready to join the modern world.

(…)

The Nukak have no concept of money, of property, of the role of government, or even of the existence of a country called Colombia. They ask whether the planes that fly overhead are moving on some sort of invisible road.

(…)

Perhaps as many as 250 now live in settlements around the town, about as many as anthropologists suspect are still alive in the wilderness.

The journalists start approaching them, asking “What do you like most?”

“Pots, pants, shoes, caps,” said Mau-ro, a young man who went to a shelter to speak to two visitors.

Ma-be added, “Rice, sugar, oil, flour.”

Others said they loved skillets. Also high on the list were eggs and onions, matches and soap and certain other of life’s necessities.

“I like the women very much,” Pia-pe said, to raucous laughs.

>> read the whole story in the Times Argues

In an earlier article in The Scotsman with the headline Jungle tribesmen flee Marxist killers, we get this additional info:

The locals, embarrassed by the natives’ nakedness, have given them clothes and a television set that they look at with a mixture of fear and bewilderment.

An article in Cultural Survival Quarterly (December 1988) by By Leslie Wirspa and Hector Mondragon shows that there has been contact between the Nukak and “the outer world” also before 1988.

More info on the Mukak and the Colombian drug war by
Survival International:

(…) their lands have been occupied by coca growers, left-wing paramilitaries and the Colombian army, with the Indians caught in the middle.

On Survial International’s website, there are even videoclips about the hunt, building and moving the house.

SEE ALSO:

Ancient People: We are All Modern Now

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

Our obsession with the notion of the primitive society

Ten Little Niggers: Tsunami, tribal circus and racism

Read this (we've had many stories like this before, but this one here is extremly "funny" - or let's rather say ethnocentric. The people are escaping from the Colombian drugs war, but this article reads more like an explorers account…

INTEL-ethnographers challenge our assumptions of the digital divide

Published on October 27, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Asia, corporate & business anthropology, development empowerment, internet, Latin- and Central America, technology

(via Bits and Bytes Interesting story by INTEL-etnographers Tony Salvador and John Sherry (one of them – Sherry – is actually an anthropologist!) on their work in India, Peru and Hungary. They summarize some of their findings after four years circling the world to find out how computers are being used by typical people in different cultures.

One of their main points:

The split between those with and those without access to digital technologies is referred to as the digital divide. But that phrase hides the complexity of the problem, because it focuses on the “having” and the “not having” of technology. Instead, what really matters is the ability to benefit from technology, whether or not that technology is personally owned.

They go on with various examples, among others they show how even the computer illiterate reap the advantages of the Web, made possible by public Internet facilities. The ethnographers remind us of that only about 10 percent of the people on the planet are familiar with the Internet and what it can do.

>> read the whole story in Spectrum Online

UPDATE Kerim Friedman comments:

I believe we can better understand the impact of new communications technologies if we emphasize the similarities, rather than just the differences, with older technologies.

>> read his post on Savage Minds

SEE ALSO

Internet and development in India

“How Media and Digital Technology Empower Indigenous Survival

Intel is using locally hired anthropologists in new development centers

More and more blogging anthropologists – but the digital divide persists

(via Bits and Bytes Interesting story by INTEL-etnographers Tony Salvador and John Sherry (one of them - Sherry - is actually an anthropologist!) on their work in India, Peru and Hungary. They summarize some of their findings after four years…

Ethnic hybridity within identity politics: Thesis on Being A Nobel Savage in Brazil

Published on September 29, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, fieldwork / methods, indigenous people / minorities, journal articles / papers, Latin- and Central America, Native American, poverty

Interesting thesis in social anthropology by Knut Olav Krohn Lakså. The thesis has recently been published in the Digital Library at the University of Oslo

Knut Olav Krohn Lakså conducted fieldwork among the Pataxó Indians in Brazil. He wanted to see how indigenous groups use their ethnic identity as a political resource. He found many paradoxes: In order to be acknowledged as an Indian with certain rights, it is necessary to adapt to an enchanted romanticism of themselves as The Other in which they are portrayed as The Noble Savage, he writes:

For instance, at every meeting with IBAMA or FUNAI officials, the Pataxó were always careful to wear feathers, painting or other traditional outfits such as loincloth.

This performance hasn’t much with the Indians’ needs in common, he shows:

The Pataxó’s main problems are that they are poor, unemployed and stigmatized. (…) The Pataxó themselves are mainly concerned with everyday challenges. They want to feed their families. They want their children to grow up. They want a school and they want money. In short, they want to change their social position to achieve material goods — something quite the opposite of what the Western World wants from the Noble Savage.

>> download the whole thesis “Ethnic Hybridity Within Identity Politics. Being Indian and the Struggle for Land and Acknowledgement among the Pataxó in Bahia, Brazil (pdf, 3,4MB )

PS: A good illustration for “acting Nobel Savage” might be this website by Aboriginal Planet

Interesting thesis in social anthropology by Knut Olav Krohn Lakså. The thesis has recently been published in the Digital Library at the University of Oslo

Knut Olav Krohn Lakså conducted fieldwork among the Pataxó Indians in Brazil. He wanted to see…

American Ethnologist – New book reviews on Indian Resurgence in Brazil, Anthropology of Britain, Race and Transnationalism

Published on September 11, 2005 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, books, Europe, indigenous people / minorities, Latin- and Central America, migration, music, Native American, Northern America, Us and Them

The August reviews of the journal American Ethnologist are now online.

Among them we’ll find:

Mapping Yoruba Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities. By: Kamari Maxine Clarke
Kamari Clarke is an Afro-Canadian who joins several African American anthropologists in examining how Africa and African heritage are understood by contemporary African American communities. Clarke exemplifies the best of 21st-century anthropology as she offers an insider’s sympathy without romanticism, step-back objectivity without arrogance. Clarke presents multisited research among “Yoruba” and Yoruba in South Carolina and Nigeria. >> continue

British Subjects: An Anthropology of Britain. Edited by Nigel Rapport
The articles address a wide range of topics, including the royal family (Anne Rowbottom), the London ballet (Helena Wulff), the postindustrial landscape of a former mining village (Andrew Dawson), British Quakers (Peter Collins), and Rapport’s own literarily inflected work on the worldview from a British village. The collection reflects a view of Britain as largely white, tranquil, and middle class >> continue

Racial Revolutions: Antiracism and Indian Resurgence in Brazil. By Jonathan W. Warren
Jonathan Warren examines the shift in which people who might once have claimed mixed-race status instead reconstruct themselves as “post-traditional” Indians. Simply because Warren explores qualitatively Brazil’s contemporary indigenous resurgence, Racial Revolutions is a must read. >> continue

Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship. By Nicholas De Genova and Anna Y. Ramos-Zayas
This book represents a unique collaboration between two anthropologists who did fieldwork separately in Chicago during the 1990s. >> continue

Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race. By Maureen Mahon
Right to Rock focuses on the Black Rock Coalition (BRC), founded in 1985 as a network of African American musicians “sick and tired of being sick and tired” from the frustration of racial segregation within the music industry. >> continue

>> all August 2005 book reviews

The August reviews of the journal American Ethnologist are now online.

Among them we'll find:

Mapping Yoruba Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities. By: Kamari Maxine Clarke
Kamari Clarke is an Afro-Canadian who joins several African American anthropologists in…