indigenous people / minorities

Book review: Who owns native culture – A book with an excellent website

Published on September 2, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, culture traditions, indigenous people / minorities, journal articles / papers, Native American, Northern America

Very interesting review by David Trigger in the August-edition of The Australian Journal of Anthropology. Michael F. Brown’s book “Who Owns Native Culture?” discusses Indigenous assertions of ownership of cultural information. These can be in tension with the claims of non-Indigenous people who may wish to access particular sites and land areas, discuss certain areas of Indigenous knowledge without being censored etc. According to David Trigger, Michael Brown seeks a balance between ‘the interests of indigenous groups and the requirements of liberal democracy’.

Michael Brown shows how this conflict is more complex than it might seem at first glance. Early in the book, he asks why the incorporation of native cultural forms should be defined as theft, when native peoples themselves (as with all societies) have selectively appropriated Christian and other symbols and religious practices. How does the ownership claim over usage of Indigenous cultural ideas and designs sit with the creative mixing of cultures often termed ‘hybridity’ or ‘creolisation’ by scholars? Are New Age adherents, for example, really guilty of ‘blasphemy and cultural aggression’, when embracing their own versions of such rituals as sweat-lodges (derived from certain North American Indian cultures)?

>> continue (Link updated with copy)

The book has its own website with lots of news, articles, reviews and links related to the book! Excellent!!!!!!!!!

READ ALSO Indigenousness and the Politics of Spirituality where anthropologist Sabina Magliocco argues against cultural ownership: “Taken to its logical extreme, it leads directly to essentialization and racism”

Very interesting review by David Trigger in the August-edition of The Australian Journal of Anthropology. Michael F. Brown's book "Who Owns Native Culture?" discusses Indigenous assertions of ownership of cultural information. These can be in tension with the claims…

Indigenous Peoples’ Day: New Universities for a Multicultural Mexico

Published on August 10, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, development empowerment, indigenous people / minorities, Latin- and Central America, Native American

IPS

– Seven intercultural universities in Mexico are going a long way towards preserving the historical and cultural roots of the country’s indigenous community, which comprises more than 10 percent of the country’s 106 million people. The universities are dedicated to promoting alternatives for the development and integration of Mexico’s 62 native ethnic groups. One is the new intercultural university in the impoverished southern state of Chiapas, where the Zapatista guerrillas staged an uprising in January 1994. >> continue

IPS

- Seven intercultural universities in Mexico are going a long way towards preserving the historical and cultural roots of the country's indigenous community, which comprises more than 10 percent of the country's 106 million people. The universities are dedicated to…

How Media and Digital Technology Empower Indigenous Survival

Published on August 6, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, development empowerment, indigenous people / minorities, internet, journal articles / papers, media, Regions, technology

(via Putting People First) Worldchanging has “tracked projects that use new technologies to empower indigenous cultural survival — from digital applications using Inuktitut, the Inuit native language, to the Aboriginal Mapping Project, which harnesses the power of GIS to help indigenous peoples manage their lands and resources, to the networked reindeer tracking of Saami Networked Connectivity Project”. Additionally, they point to the latest volume of Cultural Survival Quarterly. It is devoted to Indigenous Peoples Bridging the Digital Divide. Much to read! >> continue to Worldchanging

PS: Worldchanging is a blog devoted to “Models, Tools, and Ideas for Building a Bright Green Future” and Dina Mehta (Conversations with Dina) is one of the contributers

Modern technology revives traditional languages

Internet and development in India

(via Putting People First) Worldchanging has "tracked projects that use new technologies to empower indigenous cultural survival -- from digital applications using Inuktitut, the Inuit native language, to the Aboriginal Mapping Project, which harnesses the power of GIS to help…

Our obsession with the notion of the primitive society

Published on June 24, 2005 by lorenz Posted in Andaman & Nicobar societies, anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, indigenous people / minorities, persons and theories, Us and Them

Quite regularily, newspapers report about so called “primitive peoples”. The newest example is the Reuters-story “Hunter-gatherers face extinction on Andaman island” where we read “how primitive tribesmen came out of the jungle armed with bows, arrows and spears, raided a village in the Middle Andaman island and looted tools, food, clothes, cash and jewellery” and the reporter asks if this is an “indication that the Jarawa hunter-gatherers remain untamed primitives — or a cry for help from man’s earliest ancestors, their forests and their lifestyle, their existence under threat as never before?”.

I’ve always wondered why Westerners are so obsessed with this notion of the primitive, with the notion of linear evolution where the so-called so called enlightened West reigns on the top. From an anthropological point of view one could explain this phenomenon like this: These so-called primitives are used by the West in order to construct a positive image of itself – the “primitives” play the same role as the so-called “Orient” – as shown by Edward Said in his classic “Orientalism”.

Or as Adam Kuper wrote in his book The Invention of Primitive Society: “Primitive society was the mirror image of modern society – or rather, primitive society as they imagined it inverted the characteristics of modern society as they saw it.”

This also applies to anthropologists as we know. Kuper writes:

“The anthropologists took this primitive society as their special subject, but in practice primitive society proved to be their own society (as they understood it) seen in a distorting mirror. For them modern society was defined above all by the territorial state, the monogamous family and private property. Primitive society therefor must have been nomadic, promiscuos and communist. (…) Primitive man was illogical and given to magic.”

UPDATE: See also Evamaria’s ramblings: As an anthropologist, Cameron Diaz’ travel show on MTV is pretty offensive to my sensibilities. ‘The life of the Massai has remained the same for the last 600 years.’ Ugh, that kind of remark makes my skin crawl! >> continue

Quite regularily, newspapers report about so called "primitive peoples". The newest example is the Reuters-story "Hunter-gatherers face extinction on Andaman island" where we read "how primitive tribesmen came out of the jungle armed with bows, arrows and spears, raided a…

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