Our obsession with the notion of the primitive society
15:03:00 - 24.06.2005 - (post in progress)
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."
SEE ALSO:
"Stone Age Tribes", tsunami and racist evolutionism"
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
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Islam Is Gaining a Foothold in Chiapas / Red Alert in Chiapas
01:24:00 - 22.06.2005 - 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
SEE ALSO:
Red Alert: Zapatistas - War in Chiapas likely to resume (Indymedia San Francisco Bay Area) / see also comment by Subcomandante Marcos on ZMag and Blogosphere Reacts to Zapatista Communique on Global Voices Online
An anthropologist inside a Community in Resistance in Chiapas (University of Kent at Canterbury)
Book review: Zapata Lives! Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico (American Ethnologist)
Subcommander Marcos: Chiapas - The Southeast in Two Winds A Storm and a Prophecy (Latinamerikagruppene i Norge / Latin American Groups in Norway)
Chiapas - Wikipedia
Chiapas - pictures at flickr
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Book review: Ritual praxis in modern Japan
17:18:00 - 20.06.2005 - The Japan Times Online
Anthropologist Satsuki Kawano in her study of various ritual practices in the city of Kamakura wishes to see religious rites as being both culturally constructed and socially generated. Kawano prefers to demonstrate that partaking in religious rituals does not necessarily involve "belief" in its ordinary sense. Rather "ritual life is not so much about individual faith as it is about securing the well-being of families and communities." >> continue
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Radio interview on African Village/ "Germans&Japanese less sensitive about race"
14:35:00 - 20.06.2005 - The African Village at the zoo in Augsburg, Germany is still debated in the international media.
"An African culture festival creates a storm in Germany. Critics say it's like shows in colonial times that degraded Africans. The flap has sparked a broader discussion about racism in Germany, and what it's like to be both dark-skinned and a native German", the National Public Radio (NPR) summarizes the debate around the african village in the zoo in Augsburg. >> listen to the radio report by NPR
On L'express and several other news sites comment the African Village like this: "Germans and Japanese are less sensitive about race in general and about Africa in particular than, say, people in France or the United States, where a significant minority of the population is of African descent >> continue
SEE ALSO:
In Detroit and London: More African Villages in the Zoo
African village in the Zoo: Protest against racist exhibition
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Rituals - mechanisms for both creating solidarity and for increasing conflict
14:10:00 - 20.06.2005 - Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research
Dutch-sponsored researcher Farsijana Adeney-Risakotta analysed the dynamics of the conflict between Muslims and Christians in the Molucca Islands. The anthropologist proposes that rituals play an important role in this. Ritual was found to unite and mobilise people in a confrontation with real or supposed outsiders, but it also helped them to reach an agreement after the confrontation. >> continue
SEE ALSO:
Rituals and conflict solution: Fetsawa Umamane - a wedding ceremony in support of durable solutions in West Timor. By anthropologist Ingvild Solvang
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Ethnomusicologist uses website as an extension of the book
00:43:00 - 15.06.2005 - (via Fieldnotes): Ethnomusicologist Aaron Fox has set up a website and blog as an "extension of the book": "I'm not going to republish the book on the site, but the book deals so much with sound that I had to make it possible for people to hear the music", he explains and adds: "I also really wanted to be able to interact with readers -- as we are doing now! Seems to me this is just the most under-used capacity of the web as an adjunct to traditional publishing. It's not like academic books sell in the tens of thousands, so it seems perfectly reasonable and possible to enter into a real dialogue with serious readers."
Anthropologist Tad McIlwraith on Fieldnotes comments: "I think about this in the context of my work with First Nations people and wonder if I could convince them to allow their actual voices to be found in files on my website. I think my work would be enhanced if they’d agree to that."
Aaron Fox' book is called Real County: Music and Language in Working Class Culture and is according to Tad McIlwraith "a fantastic ethnography".
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In Detroit and London: More African Villages in the Zoo
23:10:00 - 13.06.2005 - There's been much discussion about the African Village in the Augsburg Zoo that took place last weekend. At the same time, the Detroit Zoo has arranged an African American Festival: "It will feature storyteller Ivory D. Williams, arts and crafts, authentic style food, hip-hop lessons, dance groups and an African American Community Resource area." They plan even more festivals like the Middle Eastern Festival, Caribbean Festival and the Native American Festival. No Bavarian or European festival, though. >> read the press release
The African Village in the Augsburg zoo wasn't actually a village. Visitors and journalists told about the usual stands with rings, arts and food that one finds on every festival. As Zeyneb Kaengo, 39, an African who was cooking at an African food stand, told to the press: "I do not understand why people are protesting. Maybe they thought we were going to be put in cages, but that's not true," she said. ( >> see some pictures or a slideshow - by the local newspaper Augsburger Allgemeine)
Nevertheless, the question remains "why Europe is suddenly obsessed with this exotic fascination for Africa, which only the zoo can provide" as the Guardian (Nigeria) asks in an interesting article. They write about forthcoming "African nights" in the London Zoo.
On the zoo's homepage we read:
"In addition to the unique opportunity to experience the animals settling in for the evening, visitors will be able to soak up the African culture with themed animal shows, live African performances, licensed bars and African food on offer throughout the evening. For the children there will be the opportunity to learn how to make Maasai masks, listen to traditional African stories and have their faces painted like tribal warriors!" >> continue
As anthropologist Nina Glick Schiller commented, the city of Seattle, USA, put Africans in a Zoo in May 2001, see article in the Seattle Post
SEE ALSO:
BBC: Row over German zoo's Africa show
Radio interview on African Village/ "Germans & Japanese less sensitive about race"
African village in the Zoo: Protest against racist exhibition
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Seeing Africa as exceptional underestimates common experience of globalisation
14:49:00 - 13.06.2005 - Anthropologist Christopher Davis, The Guardian
Tony Blair's Commission for Africa has left me bewildered. As an anthropologist interested in "traditional" medicine, I was delighted to see its report's attempt to take an Africa-centred point of view. Reading a sentence stating that "history shows African cultures to have been tremendously adaptive, absorbing a wide range of outside influences" is a relief to those of us who have tried for years to make this point.
But I was frustrated by what seems to be our incapacity to escape our own mental traditions - the casts of mind that always seem to come into play when we imagine Africa. Nowhere were these more in evidence than in the report's discussion of the role of religion in African social life. The risk is of the return of the 19th-century idea of "primitive mentality": the idea that "they" are less rational than "we" are. >> continue
>> see comments by Kerim Friedman /Savage Minds
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