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Paternalistic anthropology

Published on July 10, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, indigenous people / minorities, Pacific Oceania, Us and Them

Quote from an article about tourism in Papua New Guinea (reads more like advertising, though):

Tourism is good for PNG,” asserts Dr Nancy Sullivan, a Madang-based anthropologist with an abiding affection for Papua New Guineans. “It brings much-needed funds to these remote communities, encourages them to maintain a traditional lifestyle and prevents the young men, in particular, from having to seek work in the cities where they are subject to many dangerous influences.”

Paternalistic anthropology?

Nancy Sullivan owns an anthropology consulting company based in Madang, Papua New Guinea:

Nancy Sullivan Ltd. provides Ecotourism Consulting, Leadership Training Consulting and Social Science Consulting. We also prepare Participatory Rural Appraisals (PRAs) and Rapid Rural Appraisals (RRAs) tailored to a client’s needs, including economic, social, legal and project-specific investigations.

>> visit Nancy Sullivan Ltd’s website (lots of articles, reports and pictures)

[links updated 11.6.2015)

Anthropologists condemn the use of terms of “stone age” and “primitive”

“Good story about cannibals. Pity it’s not even close to the truth”

Fieldwork in Papua New Guinea: Who are the exotic others?

Quote from an article about tourism in Papua New Guinea (reads more like advertising, though):

Tourism is good for PNG," asserts Dr Nancy Sullivan, a Madang-based anthropologist with an abiding affection for Papua New Guineans. "It brings much-needed funds to…

“The Maori ethnopolitical movement threatens democracy”

Published on November 5, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, maori, Pacific Oceania, politics, Us and Them

“The ethnopolitical Maori-Pakeha movement in New Zealand is subverting democracy, erecting ethnic boundaries between Maori and non-Maori and promoting a cultural elite within Maoridom”, Elizabeth Rata claims. She has just published her second book, “Public Policy and Ethnicity, the Politics of Ethnic Boundary Making”. The book is written with 13 other academics, including anthropologists Jonathan Friedman and Alain Babadzan.

Her PhD was in the philosophy of education, her thesis was an investigation of Maori revival and retribalisation. In an interview with New Zealand Herald, she says:

My research threw up the opposite of what I thought I’d find – that retribalisation would serve the interests of social justice – so disproving my original argument.
(…)
Many New Zealanders originally supported Maori retribalism because they saw it as a means to much greater social justice – and my argument is that, in fact the opposite has happened – that group of poor marginalised Maori is in the same position now.

Rata discovered the emergence of “neotribal capitalism”: Once Maori people were given back assets, they behaved just like white New Zealanders. The aggressive and adventurous grabbed the spoils, she claims, while the rest remained as poor as ever. Although it might have been an unintended consequence, the Maori movement led according to her to an ethnification of politics and society. It led to the belief that ethnicity was our primary identity – more basic than any other identity we could choose. People were classified ethnically within mental health, education. Ethnicity was institutionalised at all levels.

But the biggest problem, says Rata, is that no one will talk about what is happening.

>> read the whole article in The New Zealand Herald

Rata has received lots of criticism for her views. In a Call for papers for the Journal of Indigenous Nations Studies we read:

Rata’s rhetoric bears a resemblance to global right wing conservative messages that promote the notion that when “traditional fundamentalists” succeed in intervening into western power structures they contaminate and weaken western democracy.
(…)
Through what amounts to unchecked media access, writers around the globe use their privileged positions to promote western bias and dogma, deepen colonial trauma, and undermine futures of Indigenous Peoples.

And the International Research Institute For Maori And Indigenous Education (Iri) And Te Aratiatia (Maori Education, The University Of Auckland states:

The recent attack by Elizabeth Rata on Kaupapa Maori developments highlights a disturbing trend of racism being disguised as public debate. Director of the International Research Institue for Maori and Indigenous Education, Dr Leonie Pihama, states that the comments by Elizabeth Rata where couched within an “almost unintelligible academic language” do in fact merely reflect the Don Brash position that Maori language and culture have little significance in this country.

I suppose one example of these racist attacks can be found in this article Gene linked to Maori violence

I’ve neglected Maori issues in this blog. For current news, see Waatea News Update by journalist Adam Gifford and for more links Wikipedia: Maori.

Stephen Webster: Maori hapuu and their history (Australian Journal of Anthropology, Dec 1997)

Judith Simon: Anthropology, ‘native schooling’ and Maori: The politics of ‘cultural adaptation’ policies (Oceania, Sep 1998)

Jeffrey Sissons: Anthropology, Maori tradition and colonial process
(Oceania Sep 1998)

"The ethnopolitical Maori-Pakeha movement in New Zealand is subverting democracy, erecting ethnic boundaries between Maori and non-Maori and promoting a cultural elite within Maoridom", Elizabeth Rata claims. She has just published her second book, "Public Policy and Ethnicity, the Politics…

“Good story about cannibals. Pity it’s not even close to the truth”

Published on September 22, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, culture traditions, indigenous people / minorities, Pacific Oceania, Us and Them

Great commentary (and a good example of engaged anthropology) by anthropologist Sarah Hewat about a recent TV story on Wa Wa, a Korowai boy in Papua, who should be “rescued” from “cannibals”. Hewat says, the journalists should have read some work by anthropologist Rupert Stasch before talking about cannibalism. Stasch did his doctoral research on the Korowai of West Papua in the mid-1990s:

If they did, they would learn that as a Korowai, Wa-Wa does not live as a member of a lost tribe, tyrannised by tradition. (…)
The Korowai may live in the forest, but that does not exclude them from having a certain style of modern life. Korowai may fly in planes, go to church, attend school, have meetings with government officials, or sell produce at the market — or gaharu (agarwood) to black-market traders. Even in the peripheries of Korowai territory, where Wa-Wa lives, people no longer kill and eat witches. Times have changed, and in any case, they fear the barbaric repercussions of the Indonesian police.

Part of the story is Paul Raffaele, who brought the TV-team to Wa-Wa. Raffaele has written this doubtful article I’ve mentioned two weeks ago “They still eat their fellow tribesmen”. Hewat writes about Raffaele:

His work does not enhance understanding of the KorowaI but panders to a Western public hungry to consume the primitive.

The Korowai, like other tribal groups portrayed by Raffaele, are presented by him through a series of either/ors: either they are bright-eyed upholders of a fragile Eden, or else they are darkly menacing, horrifying us with their cruel customs.

But if we pay attention to who they are rather than what we want them to be, then we will find ordinary people trying to come to terms with their place in the world. The Korowai, like other ethnic peoples in their position, are simply struggling to engage state and global forces in their own way.

In her view, the journalists should have rather talked with her and other people who have lived in Papua for years, about “the cannibalistic nature of the tourism industry” there. “Primitiveness” is, she writes, after natural resources, a prize commodity in Papua. Tour operators have perfected the art of selling “first contact tours”. She continues:

I have known locals who have been paid a measly sum to take off their clothes, brandish spears and speak of a barbaric past to satisfy the voyeurism of white tourists, journalists or filmmakers seeking a close encounter with our ancestral past. The cash-strapped locals who stage such performances are, unfortunately, adjuncts to people who get paid much more to bring Westerners to them.

(…)

Our debates about human rights should focus on real issues: supporting the growth of democracy and the rule of law in Papua, building a strong education system that extends to the villages, and, not least, interrogating the exploitative relations between the West and the “primitive other” in the international tourist industry.

>> read the whole story in The Age

PS: Thanks to Peter Keough for alterting me to this article and sorry for not having posted more often recently

UPDATE (24.9.06): I’ve just found an Sydney Morning Herald article where Raffaele conceded he did not know Stasch’s research, doesn’t speak Indonesian or any Papuan language and had spent less than six weeks of his life in the restive province. And Wa-Wa is apparently not Korowai after all. Anthropologist Chris Ballard says, says that Raffaele, two television networks and millions of viewers were misled: The Korowai depend on the tourism trade and have learnt to say what rich foreigners want to hear. “Most of these groups have 10 years’ experience in feeding this [cannibal] stuff to tourists,” Ballard said.

MORE ABOUT THIS ISSUE:

Savage Minds: Breaking News: Intrepid Explorer’s First Contact with a Vanishing Race of Noble Savages

Australian networks clash over cannibal boy (afp, 15.9.06)

Spears fly over ‘cannibal’ expedition (The Age, 15.9.06)

Experts decry cannibalism claims (The Age, 15.9.06)

“They still eat their fellow tribesmen”

Brief history of cannibal controversies

Our obsession with the notion of the primitive society

Ancient People: We are All Modern Now

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

Great commentary (and a good example of engaged anthropology) by anthropologist Sarah Hewat about a recent TV story on Wa Wa, a Korowai boy in Papua, who should be "rescued" from "cannibals". Hewat says, the journalists should have read…

“They still eat their fellow tribesmen”

Published on August 30, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, culture traditions, indigenous people / minorities, Pacific Oceania, Us and Them

(via del.icio.us) If you miss “good old-style” stories about cannibals in far away places like Papua or New Guinea, read this story by Paul Raffaele in the Smithsonian Mag. It starts like this:

For days I’ve been slogging through a rain-soaked jungle in Indonesian New Guinea, on a quest to visit members of the Korowai tribe, among the last people on earth to practice cannibalism.

And about cannibalism: A local guide with “dark eyes” explains:

It’s because of the khakhua, which comes disguised as a relative or friend of a person he wants to kill. “The khakhua eats the victim’s insides while he sleeps,” Boas explains, “replacing them with fireplace ash so the victim does not know he’s being eaten. The khakhua finally kills the person by shooting a magical arrow into his heart.” When a clan member dies, his or her male relatives and friends seize and kill the khakhua. “Usually, the [dying] victim whispers to his relatives the name of the man he knows is the khakhua,” Boas says. “He may be from the same or another treehouse.”

I ask Boas whether the Korowai eat people for any other reason or eat the bodies of enemies they’ve killed in battle. “Of course not,” he replies, giving me a funny look. “We don’t eat humans, we only eat khakhua.”

The killing and eating of khakhua has reportedly declined among tribespeople in and near the settlements. Rupert Stasch, an anthropologist at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, who has lived among the Korowai for 16 months and studied their culture, writes in the journal Oceania that Korowai say they have “given up” killing witches partly because they were growing ambivalent about the practice and partly in reaction to several incidents with police.

(…)

Still, the eating of khakhua persists, according to my guide, Kembaren. “Many khakhua are murdered and eaten each year,” he says, citing information he says he has gained from talking to Korowai who still live in treehouses.

The travel writer even meets “true cannibals”:

Two men approach through the gloom, one in shorts, the other naked save for a necklace of prized pigs’ teeth and a leaf wrapped about the tip of his penis. “That’s Kilikili,” Kembaren whispers, “the most notorious khakhua killer.” Kilikili carries a bow and barbed arrows. His eyes are empty of expression, his lips are drawn in a grimace and he walks as soundlessly as a shadow.

The other man, who turns out to be Kilikili’s brother Bailom, pulls a human skull from a bag. A jagged hole mars the forehead. “It’s Bunop, the most recent khakhua he killed,” Kembaren says of the skull.

The story ends like this:

Three years earlier I had visited the Korubo, an isolated indigenous tribe in the Amazon, together with Sydney Possuelo, then director of Brazil’s Department for Isolated Indians [SMITHSONIAN, April 2005]. This question of what to do with such peoples—whether to yank them into the present or leave them untouched in their jungles and traditions—had troubled Possuelo for decades. “I believe we should let them live in their own special worlds,” he told me, “because once they go downriver to the settlements and see what is to them the wonders and magic of our lives, they never go back to live in a traditional way.”

So it is with the Korowai. They have at most a generation left in their traditional culture—one that includes practices that admittedly strike us as abhorrent.

>> read the whole story in The Smithsonian

>> BBC about the Kombai (Korowai)

>> Rupert Stasch: Giving up homicide: Korowai experience of witches and police (West Papua) (Oceania, Sep 2001)

On Papua Adventures we read:

Due to this very recent exposure to outside influences, the Korowai tribes are not as open and welcoming to tourists as the Yali, Dani and Lani for example. They remain on guard and suspicious of ways different to their own. This does of course make for an exciting and truly adventurous visit flying in by chartered Cessna from Jayapura to Yaniruma and trekking into Korowai country by foot and canoe.

UPDATE: Anthropologist Sarah Hewat comments: “Good story about cannibals. Pity it’s not even close to the truth”

Inuit cannibalism?

Brief history of cannibal controversies

Our obsession with the notion of the primitive society

Is this anthropology? African pygmies observe Britains in TV-show

Ancient People: We are All Modern Now

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

(via del.icio.us) If you miss "good old-style" stories about cannibals in far away places like Papua or New Guinea, read this story by Paul Raffaele in the Smithsonian Mag. It starts like this:

For days I've been slogging through a rain-soaked…

The spectacle and entertainment value of living Indians in the museum

Published on August 14, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, history, indigenous people / minorities, Northern America, Pacific Oceania, Us and Them

Last year we had debates about racism and neo-colonialism when the Zoo at Augsburg exhibited an “African village”. The same is happening right now in Kolmårdens djurpark – the largest zoo in Scandinavia: They have engaged Massai people who “dance, sing and jump” in the zoo (more in Norwegian).

Last Thursday, anthropologist Dustin Wax has reminded us in a paper of the long history of displaying indigenous people in the museums and zoos – living people, not dead people. Even famous anthropologists as Franz Boas and Alfred Kroeber have been involved in organizing “ethnographic zoos”.

How are indigenous people represented? As it was the case in the zoo in Augsburg and Kolmården, the exhibitions in museums focused on the (timeless) past. Not much seems to have changed:

The focus on the enactment of the past, coupled with the insistence that Indian culture was only “authentic” insofar as it was free from the “taint” of Western civilization, had the effect of presenting Indian culture as something static, unchanging, and doomed to disappear. There was no room in either the dominant evolutionary paradigm of the day or the germinal cultural relativism just beginning to take shape for Indian cultures that continued to exist and to adapt to the changing world around them.

Most organizers of these ethnographic shows had an evolutionary view of the world – in the sense that indigenous people are “less advanced” than “us”. They are “stone age people” and can be used to “illustrate the advancement of evolution of man”:

In the United States (…), the Indian became a symbol of the American land brought to heel by the expansion and dominance of the “civilized” Anglo-Americans—a symbolism brought to life and enacted for a self-congratulatory American public in virtually all of the world fairs and expositions hosted by American cities.

But these “Stone age tribes” are in reality no less modern than middle class Americans. So, anthropologists were horrified when they realised that people from Samoan cut their hair and adopt American garb during their lengthy cross-Pacific journey on their way to the zoo:

They were greeted with horror by the manager in charge of their exhibit at the Exposition, who quickly “put a halt to the ‘civilizing process’” (Rydell 1984: 67) and within a short while it was reported that “the Samoans [were] making a heroic and laudable effort to resume their natural state of barbarism” (Daily Inter Ocean, 14 June 1893, in Rydell 1984: 67).

Likewise, Boas’ Kwakiutl were performing rituals that at home were no longer practiced, and which had never been intended for the kind of display expected at the Exposition. Curtis Hinsley writes that “They were aiding Boas in his effort to recapture a presumed pristine, pre-Columbian condition” (350), a state of affairs that sat well both with Boas’ scientific predilection—later realized in his advocacy of “salvage ethnography”

>> read the whole paper: Representations of Indians in American Natural History Museums by Dustin Wax

Just a few days earlier, Kevin Friedman wrote about Ota Benga – a Kongolese was put on display in the monkey house at New York’s Bronx Zoo. He quotes from an New York Times article:

Visitors to the Monkey House that second day got an even better show. Ota Benga and an orangutan frolicked together, hugging and wrestling and playing tricks on each other. The crowd loved it. To enhance the jungle effect, a parrot was put in the cage and bones had been strewn around it.

>> read the whole post

Anthropological Days at the Olympic Games: An homage to imperialism, the exhibit of conquered peoples was designed to show how America would bring progress to savage peoples

In Detroit and London: More African Villages in the Zoo

Our obsession with the notion of the primitive society

Geldof’s Live8 and Western myths about Africa

Kurt Jonassohn, On A Neglected Aspect Of Western Racism: From the beginning of the 1870s to the end of the 1930s – the exposition of so-called exotic peoples in zoological gardens attracted a huge public

Last year we had debates about racism and neo-colonialism when the Zoo at Augsburg exhibited an "African village". The same is happening right now in Kolmårdens djurpark - the largest zoo in Scandinavia: They have engaged Massai people who "dance,…