indigenous people / minorities

Bolivia: More and more indigenous influence on politics

Published on August 27, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, indigenous people / minorities, Latin- and Central America, Native American, politics

President Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous head of state, is holding up indigenous values of common ownership and consensus decision-making as a model for his country, the Miami Herald / Latin American Post reports. Morales frequently spells out what he sees as the differences between indigenous and traditional governments:

“For the leaders of the indigenous communities, their democracy is of consensus,” he said during a speech in Sucre, the country’s traditional capital. `”There are no majorities and minorities. Majorities and minorities are a democracy imposed on our country.”

(…)

His speeches are full of phrases from the Aymara and Quechua languages, which more than 34 percent of Bolivians speak. He’s refused to wear a suit and tie at official functions, opting for a casual brown jacket adorned with indigenous designs.

Even the playing of the national anthem at ceremonies has been revamped. At the opening of a constituent assembly earlier this month at which delegates are to rewrite the country’s constitution, thousands waited in the blazing sun while a choir sang the anthem in Spanish, Aymara, Quechua and Guaraní, another Indian language.

>> read the whole story in the Latin American Post

MORE ON EVO MORALES AND BOLIVIA:

Evo! (Savage Minds, 19.12.05)

Morales Predicts 500 Years of Indigenous Rule (IPS, 23.1.06)

BOLIVIA: Indigenous President Chalks Up Impressive Early Results (IPS, 31.7.06)

BOLIVIA: Indigenous woman to lead new assembly (Green Left Australia, 9.8.06)

Bolivia Begins to Rewrite Constitution (Washington Post, 6.8.06)

An indigenous revolution brings hope to Bolivia (rabble.ca)

Coca, Land and a Farmers’ Market Provide Hope, Not Long-Term Solutions in Chulumani, Bolivia (Upsidedownworld.org, 22.8.06)

Current news from Bolivia (Globalvoices)

President Evo Morales, Bolivia's first indigenous head of state, is holding up indigenous values of common ownership and consensus decision-making as a model for his country, the Miami Herald / Latin American Post reports. Morales frequently spells out what he…

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

Published on August 26, 2006 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology in the news, indigenous people / minorities, media, Us and Them

TV-shows about people from remote places (the producers use the term “tribes”) seem to have become quite popular. In a German TV-show, German families are sent into the African bush to live with “African tribes”. Now, in Britain a new TV-show called “Reverse Anthropology” is in the making according to the BBC:

Reverse Anthropology aims to turn the traditional formula – where a UK film-maker experiences life with distant tribes – on its head. Members of a tribe of pygmies will take part in a British hunting expedition and report back on their experiences. Channel 4 deputy head of documentaries Simon Dickson said: “It’s about time we turned the mirror on ourselves.”

“While we’re often baffled and amused by the customs of communities on the other side of the globe, this series will show that some of our rituals – the gym, queuing, getting drunk on a Friday night, golf, showing a lack of respect to our elders – look pretty peculiar to outsiders too,” he added.

C21 MediaNet even writes: “Channel 4 flips with anthropology”.

We may wonder: What has this to do with anthropology? And does it remind us on something? But as commentators on the Livejournal Anthropologist Community write:

On the one hand, this seems like another terrible and exploitative stunt in a long line of such TV programs. However, on the other hand, it presents a very interesting exercise in viewing our world through the eyes of those whom we usually study. (…) And, considering how connected the world is today, will they really be that shocked by what they see?

(…)

I think it might be the best damn cure for ethnocentrism the unwashed masses may ever recieve. And a highly amusing foreign vacation for the islanders, which is not to be sneezed at.

(…)

I initially had a knee-jerk reaction that this was exploitive, but then I considered that if it is done tastefully, it might be alirght.

Maybe Channel 4 is more tasteful than the private German TV channel SAT1? Their show is called “Like the savages” (!) (Wie die Wilden) and on their website you can click on “the families” and “the tribes”, and these texts are quite revealing. The message is: “These tribes do consist of real savages!” Each presentation has chapters on hygiene, rituals, men and women.

We learn these details about the Mentawai (Indonesia):

armed with bow and arrow, they are representatives of a lost past
they have sex in the hen-house
you’re not allowed to fart inside the house
they eat what their dogs have peed on

We learn about the Himas (Namibia, former German colony):

Women aren’t allowed to wash themselves
Their toothbrushes consist of a chewed off branchlet

We are not provided such details about hygiene and sexual life when you click on “the families”.

At the German excellent blog Riemer-o-rama there is a link to an interesting related article called Talking about “Tribe”. Moving from Stereotypes to Analysis:

For most people in Western countries, Africa immediately calls up the word “tribe.” The idea of tribe is ingrained, powerful, and expected. Few readers question a news story describing an African individual as a tribesman or tribeswoman, or the depiction of an African’s motives as tribal.

(…)

Yet today most scholars who study African states and societies–both African and non-African–agree that the idea of tribe promotes misleading stereotypes. The term “tribe” has no consistent meaning. It carries misleading historical and cultural assumptions. It blocks accurate views of African realities. At best, any interpretation of African events that relies on the idea of tribe contributes no understanding of specific issues in specific countries. At worst, it perpetuates the idea that African identities and conflicts are in some way more “primitive” than those in other parts of the world. Such misunderstanding may lead to disastrously inappropriate policies.

In this paper we argue that anyone concerned with truth and accuracy should avoid the term “tribe” in characterizing African ethnic groups or cultures.

In this paper, they argue that:

Tribe has no coherent meaning.
Tribe promotes a myth of primitive African timelessness, obscuring history and change.
In the modern West, tribe often implies primitive savagery.
Images of timelessness and savagery hide the modern character of African ethnicity, including ethnic conflict.
Tribe reflects once widespread but outdated 19th century social theory
Tribe became a cornerstone idea for European colonial rule in Africa.

In the US, the TV show Survivors plans to divide teams based on “race”. James Pritchett, professor of anthropology said: “This program is drumming up every old stereotype, and I don’t think it is going to be useful at all. What next, a show pitting Jews and Muslims and Christians against each other?”

In Detroit and London: More African Villages in the Zoo

Our obsession with the notion of the primitive society

Ancient People: We are All Modern Now

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

TV-shows about people from remote places (the producers use the term "tribes") seem to have become quite popular. In a German TV-show, German families are sent into the African bush to live with "African tribes". Now, in Britain a new…

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,…

"There’s no AIDS here because men and women are equal"

Published on August 13, 2006 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, indigenous people / minorities, medical anthropology / ethnobothany, San-bushmen

Along the northern border between Botswana and Namibia, in a region of Africa that is raging with AIDS, a small society of some 3,000 souls, the Ju/’hoansi (or !Kung) is living virtually free of HIV infection. According to research by anthropologist Richard Lee, the reason is gender equality, the Toronto Star reports.

Lee is going to present his findings tomorrow, Monday, at the International AIDS Conference AIDS 2006 in Toronto. He says the high status of women in the Ju/’hoansi society gives them significant autonomy in choosing their sexual and marriage partners:

In the other societies around the region, the young men will say, `Oh no, a girl has to obey me if I want to have sex with her, and if I don’t want to use a condom, that’s it,’. With the Ju/’hoansi, their high status in the community gives women plenty of leverage in sexual negotiations.

Before the age of AIDS the Ju/’hoansi were famous in anthropology for being among the last hunting and gathering people in the world. Hunter-gatherers typically granted women significant respect and status, he says.

>> read the whole story in the Toronto Star
(link updated with copy)

Cultural values and the spreading of AIDS in Africa

Along the northern border between Botswana and Namibia, in a region of Africa that is raging with AIDS, a small society of some 3,000 souls, the Ju/'hoansi (or !Kung) is living virtually free of HIV infection. According to research by…

Interview with Arjun Appadurai: "An increasing and irrational fear of the minorities"

Published on August 9, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Asia, books, cosmopolitanism, indigenous people / minorities, migration, persons and theories, Us and Them

Fear of Small Numbers, the new book by Mumbai-born anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has received attention across America. He discusses why, in the age of globalisation, opening of markets, free flow of capital and liberal ideas, minorities in many countriesare facing greater hostilities than ever before.

In an interview with Rediff, he argues for “moving away from national loyalties towards urban and metropolitan loyalties, which put a premium on active tolerance and deliberate cosmopolitanism”.

He explains:

One of the basic arguments of the book is that the idea of a majority can create uncertainty about the primary identity of a nation. In the book, I call this the anxiety of incompleteness.

What I mean is that in every nation State without exception, somewhere beneath the surface is the idea that a nation is composed of a single ethnic substance, some kind of ethnic purity — and the idea of ethnic purity leads to the feeling that only people belonging to that ethnicity should be full citizens in that State.

And in a society like India, this is a huge problem because a certain group, in this case the Hindus, can view themselves as almost completely defining India but not totally. The problem — the incompleteness — is due to the presence of other groups, whether you call them minorities or strangers or guests or visitors.

Every Hindu Indian recognises that the land is not completely Hindu. In the book, I argue that this sense of incomplete purity does not necessarily lead to an effort to obliterate the minorities. But in many circumstances, it can lead to that. And we have seen increasing efforts in some parts of India, Gujarat in particular, to obliterate the minorities.

Thinking in the categories minority and majority is something new according to the anthropologist:

I have been interested in census statistics, how populations are actually enumerated. Apart from the question of being weak or subordinate, official enumeration is one of the ways minorities are created in the modern world.

The point here is that the idea of minority and majority was not always a part of human society. Human societies always had different groups; some were larger and some smaller; but the twin categories of minority and majority are modern phenomena.

For him as an anthropologist, he says, it is “painfully obvious that it has become culturally respectable to run down and suspect the Muslim community.”

The fear of the minorities is in his opinion “irrational”:

I believe that the radical, terrorist voices one hears in the Muslim communities in India are few and small. The average Muslim in India today has this request to the majority community: Give us the room to survive. Muslims in rural and urban India are not thinking of taking over India, but are asking whether they can live there at all.

>> read part 1 of the interview with Arjun Appadurai: The average Indian Muslim wants room to survive

>> part 2 of the interview: Indian society is still interdependent

>> review by Jeremy Ballenger: “A considered, fascinating and somewhat disturbing look at the ‘other side’ of globalisation”

SEE ALSO:

For an Anthropology of Cosmopolitanism

Interview with Benedict Anderson: “I like nationalism’s utopian elements”

“Anthropologists Should Participate in the Current Immigration Debate”