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“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…

Qualitative Migration Research in Europe: New issue of “Forum Qualitative Social Research”

Published on September 11, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Europe, fieldwork / methods, interdisciplinary, journal articles / papers, migration, Us and Them

How to do research on migration? Lots of interesting papers in the recent issue of the multilingual and interdisciplinary Open Access journal Forum: Qualitative Social Research.

“Qualitative Migration Research in Contemporary Europe” is the topic of the recent issue, and most papers deal with methodolocial questions

Maren Borkert and Carla De Tona for example write about “Issues Faced by Young European Researchers in Migration and Ethnic Studies” , especially when rearching abroad as “academic migrants”:

The term academic migrant refers to European academics, like the authors of this paper, who become more and more transnational while researching migration in Europe. As migrant European researchers we move to and settle in third-countries, often having to speak a new language, and learning to adjust to new social and cultural normativities, feeling the migration’s uprooting and re-grounding and, in short, becoming “foreigners” as the people who participate to our researches (who may or may not be from our home country). Although we may not call ourselves migrants, we end up experiencing migration in similar ways to the participants of our research.

The emerging issue for us is how does this particular transnational aspect of our positionality (of researching migrants as academic migrants) influence us as researchers, the dynamics we establish with our participants and the ultimate shape of our research?

>> read the whole paper

There are also case studies about Somali migrants in Finland, Greek musicians in Germany, cultural capital during migration and Reflecting Upon Interculturality in Ethnographic Filmmaking where Laura Catalán Eraso claims that ethnographic film is still very much an under-utilised research technique. Films may illuminate the “intercultural” dynamics between minority (participant) and majority (researcher) and challenge the traditional power relations between the researcher and his/her “subjects”:

[T]he filmmaker(s) will loose authority in the film and that authority will tend to get decentralised and shared among subjects. Ways of doing this include allowing subjects to: manage the camera; choose the shots that are used: and, give feedback on the end results. These techniques, not dissimilar to those advocated in other forms of qualitative enquiry, will hopefully create new possibilities for ethnographic film by allowing space for greater equality between, and more reflection by, researchers and participants.

In the introduction, the editors remind us of that…

migration is not a new phenomenon: human beings have always been moving to other places, other regions and other countries. What is “new” is the relatively recent invention and creation of national borders and the “imagining” of nation-states (ANDERSON, 1983, pp.5-7). These ideological processes make migration “international” and thus problematise the natural behaviour of people attempting to improve their everyday lives.

>> overview over all articles in Forum: Qualitative Social Research on Qualitative Migration Research in Europe

How to do research on migration? Lots of interesting papers in the recent issue of the multilingual and interdisciplinary Open Access journal Forum: Qualitative Social Research.

"Qualitative Migration Research in Contemporary Europe" is the topic of the recent issue, and…

"Hearing has been neglected in studies of enculturation and personality development"

Published on September 4, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, culture traditions, journal articles / papers, persons and theories, Us and Them

In one the recent additions in the anthropology journal AnthroGlobe, Grace Keyes examines “how hearing loss impacts an individual’s enculturation”. Enculturation, she explains, is in anthropology textbooks defined as “process by which people acquire their culture (the social norms, symbols, customs, cultural knowledge, meanings, etc.)”.

So what happens when a person cannot hear? Researchers, however, have largely neglected to take into account how biological factors such as hearing may affect enculturation, she writes:

It is generally assumed that language is a major vehicle of enculturation and that most people experience the process in much the same way if they belong to the same culture or society. The role of hearing in language acquisition and enculturation is taken for granted. Thus, works that examine the role of hearing in the enculturation process are non-existent in the anthropological literature. In fact, there exits very little literature on enculturation itself in anthropology.

>> read the whole paper “Incomplete Enculturation: The Role of Hearing” by Grace Keyes

In one the recent additions in the anthropology journal AnthroGlobe, Grace Keyes examines "how hearing loss impacts an individual’s enculturation". Enculturation, she explains, is in anthropology textbooks defined as "process by which people acquire their culture (the social norms,…

“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…

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…