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Islam Is Gaining a Foothold in Chiapas / Red Alert in Chiapas

Published on June 21, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, indigenous people / minorities, Latin- and Central America, Native American, politics, religion cosmology

Der Spiegel

Long a bastion of Catholicism, southern Mexico is quickly turning into a battleground for soul-savers. Islam, too, is gaining a foothold and the indigenous Mayans are converting by the hundreds. “In Islam, race plays no role,” Anastasio Gomez, a Tzotzil Mayan from Mexico, says joyously. His enthusiasm is understandable. After all, in his home state of Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest, the indigenous people are viewed as second class humans, and whites and Mestizos treat the Indian majority as if they weren’t there.

“They see themselves as restorers of Islam,” says the anthropologist Gaspar Morquecho, author of a study of the Muslims of Chiapas. “Their defiance of capitalism is similar in many respects to the critique of globalization espoused by many left-wingers.”

“In Islam, the Indians rediscover their original values,” claims Esteban Lopez, the Spanish secretary general of the Muslim community. “The Christians destroyed their culture.” >> continue

Another Anthro-Blog: FieldNotes – Occasional Musings on Anthropological Topics

Published on May 12, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, indigenous people / minorities, Native American, websites

(via my site statistics) FieldNotes is a brand new anthropology blog, the first entry was written only two weeks ago by its author Thomas ‘Tad’ McIlwraith, PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, NM, USA. Seems to focus on Native Northern America / First Nations. Good to know that there are anthropology-bloggers who are not mainly interested in media and technology stuff. There are many links to other bloggers with related interests to explore. This is good news! >> continue to “Field Notes”

(via my site statistics) FieldNotes is a brand new anthropology blog, the first entry was written only two weeks ago by its author Thomas ‘Tad’ McIlwraith, PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, in…

Gene Study Puts Indians on Guard

Published on April 28, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, ethics, indigenous people / minorities, Native American, Us and Them

IPS News

Scientists involved in the Genographic Project will go in search of the genes of indigenous communities worldwide in a bid to decipher the puzzle of how ancient peoples were disseminated around the planet. Negative experiences in the past, cultural resistance and the influence of global activism against ”biopiracy” have triggered suspicion among the Indians, who worry about their role in DNA studies, according to Latin American indigenous leaders consulted by Tierramérica.

But the bigger storm cloud, according to U.S. rights activists, is the controversial Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP), dating to 1991. The initiative aimed to study human genetic variations to help design new medical treatments, among other purposes. Angry anthropologists, activists and Indians described the project as ”racist” and prevented it from taking place in its original form. >> continue

IPS News

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

Disney-Film depicts indigenous people as involved in cannibalism

Published on March 2, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, indigenous people / minorities, Latin- and Central America, media, Native American, persons and theories, Us and Them

IPS

The producers of “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” are eagerly gearing up to film the sequels. But the project, due to be released on Jul. 7, 2006, is already proving to be a problem, as the descendants of the Caribs, historians and others are objecting to scenes depicting these indigenous people as involved in cannibalism.

Brinsley Samaroo, head of the history department of the St. Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI), dismisses the claim of cannibalism as a “European myth”. He told IPS that it was nothing but “manufactured history” by the Europeans who came across the Caniba, a tribe found in North and South America. “The Caniba tribe was very hostile and resisting the Europeans very stoutly and in order to warn other Europeans about this, the early explorers spread the myth that the Caniba tribe eat people,” he said.

The St. Vincent and the Grenadines Historical and Archaeological Society has called on movie-goers to boycott the sequel unless the “grossly offensive” scenes depicting the Caribs as cannibals are removed from the script. >> continue

In the IPS-article, there’s also an link to a Brief history of cannibal controversies

SEE ALSO:
We do not eat people (Trinidad News)

UPDATE: More news on this controversy at warauduati, among others Boycott Disney, Pirates of the Caribbean and Racist Stereotypes in Pirates of the Caribbean

IPS

The producers of "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" are eagerly gearing up to film the sequels. But the project, due to be released on Jul. 7, 2006, is already proving to be a problem, as…