Pacific Oceania | antropologi.info

A link between food resources and social hierarchies?

Published on July 13, 2006 by lorenz Posted in aboriginees, anthropology in the news, books, culture traditions, ecology nature, Pacific Oceania, persons and theories

In a portrait on the website of The National University of Australia, anthropologist Ian Keen, tells about his research among Aboriginees in Australia. Among other things, he wanted to find out why pre-colonial Aboriginal societies tended to be more egalitarian than some of their counterparts elsewhere in the world:

In a paper published in the journal Current Anthropology, Keen argues that for any society to develop lasting social hierarchies, it must have access to plentiful, localised resources that could be defended. In this event, some people can assume authority over others. On the northwest coast of North America, for example, recent hunter-gatherers enjoyed a stable climate and concentrated, defendable resources, especially plentiful salmon. As a consequence, these societies developed such enduring inequalities as inherited chiefly office and marked social classes, while some even kept slaves.

In contrast, Aboriginal societies did not develop such enduring inequalities. (…) Keen argues this relative egalitarianism was the result of constraints arising from variable food resources and an unstable climate, meaning there was limited scope for people to assume dominion over others by asserting exclusive access to territory and resources.

Keen explains:

“It’s not exactly an environmental determinist argument, but it is suggesting that those conditions imposed restraints. I make the assumption that wherever they can, some humans will take the opportunities given to them to establish some kind of dominion over others. So my paper argues that even if people knew how to dominate one another, and wanted to do so, the opportunities were not there.

>> read the whole article

Brian Hayden, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, is not convinced and criiticizes that Keen does not put enough weight on the ecological and economic aspects of complexity that develop among some hunter-gatherers in Australia.

Keen is the author of the book Aboriginal Economy and Society. The website of the book is quite informative. If you click on Supplementary Materials you’ll find several cases studies and several pages about aboriginal technologies. In the paper Variation in Indigenous Economy and Society at the Threshold of Colonisation, Keen tells about more about his book:

Just how similar and how distinct were Aboriginal societies in different parts of the continent at the time of British colonisation of Australia? The book I am currently writing attempts to answer this and related questions by comparing the economy and society of seven very varied regions of the continent as they were at the threshold of colonisation.

(…)

Such a comparative study is long overdue. There have been no recent systematic comparisons of Aboriginal ways of life in different parts of Australia, comparable to, for example, Marshall Sahlins on Polynesia or Rubel and Rosman on New Guinea.

>> download the paper (pdf)

Aboriginees in Australia: Why talking about culture?

Published on June 6, 2006 by lorenz Posted in aboriginees, anthropology in the news, culture traditions, indigenous people / minorities, Pacific Oceania, Us and Them

In the Australian magazine On Line Opinion, Anthropologist John Morton criticizes public views of Aboriginess in Australia and argues for avoiding the term culture:

Ever since Europeans first came to Australia, public views of Aborigines have veered between two extremes. Aborigines have been promoted either as disgusting savages or as admired paragons, uncivilised riff-raff or as noble bearers of their culture – bad or good, but never ordinary.

As we now enter a new phase of Aboriginal affairs, Indigenous Australians once again enter the public mind as radically different types of people. On the one hand, we are bombarded with material about dysfunctional communities plagued by drug and alcohol abuse, rampant violence, uncontrolled children and chronic sickness. On the other hand, we routinely hear about “the oldest living culture in the world”, Aboriginal people caring, sharing and looking after country, and the profound qualities of Aboriginal art.

In these circumstances, it’s hard to know what “the oldest living culture in the world” might be. Indeed, it’s hard to know what people are talking about at all when they refer to “culture”.

(…)

We’ve heard a lot of arguments about the “true” nature of Aboriginal culture in recent weeks. Some say Aboriginal culture fosters violence against women and children. Others gainsay this and suggest that violence is cultural breakdown stemming from neglect and marginalisation by mainstream Australian culture. There are many more axes to grind in relation to employment, health and education, but always with a view to promoting a good or bad image of Aboriginal people, not to mention a good or bad image of the “mainstream culture” which provides Aboriginal services.

(…)

This blame game doesn’t give us “the truth” about Aboriginal or any other culture. It simply reduces the extremely complicated relationship between Aboriginal communities and all the arms of the state (governments, bureaucracies, the police, land councils, schools, health centres, etc.) with which they engage. Recourse to “culture” always seems to deliver imagined parodies of real life, transforming it into something inordinately valuable or completely worthless.

British cultural critic Raymond Williams once remarked that “culture” is “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language”. (…) In fact, it’s an empty word: you can fill it with pretty much anything you like. That’s why it functions so well in slogans.

In the meantime, there are many people both inside and outside Aboriginal communities who recognise that there are big problems in Aboriginal affairs. It’d be good if they could all be allowed to get on with the job of finding appropriate solutions to those problems without “culture” getting in the way.

>> read the whole article in On Line Opinion

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

Ancient People: We are All Modern Now

Our obsession with the notion of the primitive society

The Culture Struggle: How cultures are instruments of social power

“Quit using the word ‘culture’ wherever possible”

In the Australian magazine On Line Opinion, Anthropologist John Morton criticizes public views of Aboriginess in Australia and argues for avoiding the term culture:

Ever since Europeans first came to Australia, public views of Aborigines have veered between two extremes. Aborigines…

How to survive in a desert? On Aboriginals’ knowledge of the groundwater system

Published on March 15, 2006 by lorenz Posted in aboriginees, anthropology in the news, ecology nature, indigenous people / minorities, Pacific Oceania, technology

Indigenous Australians dug underground water reservoirs that helped them live on one of the world’s driest continents for tens of thousands of years, new research by hydrogeologist Brad Moggridge shows, according to ABC News. The study indicates Aboriginal people had extensive knowledge of the groundwater system. European settlers owed their subsequent knowledge of groundwater to the indigenous Australians, and even much of Australia’s modern road system is based on water sources identified by the original inhabitants.

Moggridge based his work on oral histories, Dreamtime stories, rock art, artefacts and ceremonial body painting as well as written accounts by white missionaries, surveyors, settlers, anthropologists and explorers.

>> read the whole story at ABC: Aboriginal people built water tunnels

In the article, there’s an interestring link to the research network Desert Knowledge that is “linking Indigenous and local knowledge with science and education to improve desert livelihoods”. (Link updated 3.9.2022)

SEE ALSO:

“Aboriginal knowledge is science”

Approaches to Indigenous Knowledge – conference papers in fulltext

Indigenous Australians dug underground water reservoirs that helped them live on one of the world's driest continents for tens of thousands of years, new research by hydrogeologist Brad Moggridge shows, according to ABC News. The study indicates Aboriginal people…

Available for download: Alex Golubs dissertation on mining and indigenous people

Published on February 24, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, development empowerment, globalisation, indigenous people / minorities, Pacific Oceania, persons and theories

In his dissertation (published on his blog yesterday), anthropologist Alex Golub challenges popular notions on indigenous peoples, mining and globalisation. He has done research in a region that has gone through major transformations and fulfills every stereotype going “from the stone age to the jet age”. Now, the third largest gold mine in the world resides in the once remote valley. Golubs dissertation is about the relationship between the Porgera gold mine and the Ipili-speaking people on whose land the mine is located.

His findings are very interesting and challenge stereotypes among both the general public, political activists and anthropologists. For example, indigenous people are not always “victims of economic globalisation”:

While many would expect the intersection of a world-class gold mine and a relatively naïve indigenous people to result in a ‘fatal impact’ (Moorehead 1966), in fact the Ipili have been very successful at
extracting concessions from the mine and government.
(…)

[P]reconceptions of the Ipili as ecologically noble savages (Buege 1996) trampled on and degraded by global capitalism do not capture the complexity of Porgera’s politics.

(…)

[The Ipili] have actually became “one of the most active and successful fourth world people in the world today in terms of pressing claims against the state and transnational capitalism.

Another interesting point: Golub thinks that Papua New Guineans are much further along the road to understanding how “globalization” works than most anthropologists and that anthropologists have more to learn from them than they from us:

Where we see a dizzying flow of transnational entities and fractal, hybrid postmodern geographies, they see ‘Harry.’ Could it be we have something to learn from them rather than the other way around? ‘Landowners’ ability to sniff out the small knot of people behind stories of globalization is an incisive analytic move from which anthropologists who study “globalization” could learn.

Alex Golub goes an writing that studying globalization would require a very particular kind of academic discipline:

A discipline which delivers a richly detailed account of the lifeways of a small network of people as it is actually lived. A discipline attentive to the stories these people tell of themselves without uncritically accepting them as true. A discipline willing to recognize its entanglement in their lives without lapsing into either epistemological paralysis or the easy lie of a comfortable objectivity. In a world where our discipline is beset with doubts about its relevance, ethics, and epistemology, it may be that an anthropology which seeks to make itself feasible may have more to learn from Papua New Guineans than the other way around.

>> download the dissertation “Making the Ipili feasible: Imagining local and global actors at the Porgera Gold Mine, Enga Province, Papua New Guinea” (pdf, 1,5MB )

PS: I have just started reading the 436 pages

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

Published on November 6, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, ecology nature, fieldwork / methods, indigenous people / minorities, Pacific Oceania

A recent post by Alex Golub on Savage Minds is interesting for several reasons: Even a scientific project on a very narrow topic might suddenly be relevant for a wider audience. Golub has studied the relationship between indigenous people in Papua New Guinea and the white senior management of a gold mine. He writes:

I’ve been really amazed to see the New York Times’s series on the impact of gold mining that has been running recently—suddenly my area of expertise is literally news.

Furthermore, Golub reminds us that – when doing fieldwork, it’s not always clear who “the exotic other” actually is. In Golub’s case it’s not the indigenous people, but the white mining employees, although, as he writes “mine management were supposedly ‘from my culture.’”:

Learning to like and respect these men (they were almost entirely men) was one of the hardest parts of my fieldwork. They were mostly Australian and Canadian, and had the usual Commonwealth suspicion of Yankees. I was an artist and an intellectual, and over-educated to boot. And they were MEN in a way that I was not—they talked about rugby and worked with their hands and had pictures of naked (or nearly naked) women on their walls, in there calendars, on their screen savers. And, of course, in the struggle between landowners and company, I was sympathetic to my indigenous hosts.

Golub also draws our attention to the consequences of our consumption of metals:

It is commonplace these days for people who drive cars to lament the way they are destroying the environment. Very few people realize what the set of silverware in their kitchen cupboard makes then an accessory to. (…) Look up from your computer screen for a moment and look around the room—how much metal do you see? Imagine the copper wires and metal pipes and lines of nails that stretch around you for thousands of miles. Where did they come from?

>> read the whole post on Savage Minds