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Journalists often draw strict lines between "us" - the modern - and "them" - living in the stone age - although, as anthropologist Kerim Friedman put it we're all modern now.

According to a recent story by Knight Ridder Newspapers, a gift to Maasai people in Kenya "adds fuel to debate on tribe's future". The article starts like this:

For centuries, the Masai people of Kenya have lived in huts without power or running water, used plants and minerals to heal themselves, and survived on a diet of cow milk, meat and blood.

So when Patrick O'Sullivan, a visitor from Silicon Valley entered one of their villages and left behind a school equipped with solar power, laptops and a projector, he sparked an old debate about the tribe's desire to preserve its culture while surviving in a modern world encroaching on its way of life.

What follows is a typical debate that might have taken place in so called modern socities when Internet was introduced: The elder people are rejecting changes:

But with the light came questions for the entire village. Elders - who had spent much of their lives resisting assimilation into the modern world, fighting British colonizers, and lobbying the Kenyan government for the tribe's right to self-sufficiency - felt their work was being lost in the tide of support from parents and teachers for O'Sullivan's school.

"Mostly elder people don't absolutely want the change. They want people to be as they were before," David Ole Koshal, leader of Oloolaimutia village, said on O'Sullivan's video footage.

What is so special about it? Why focus on the resistance by the elder people? As we read, most people embrace the changes:

Most Masai parents and teachers were delighted with the new tools for their children. The school's enrollment doubled from roughly 200 to 410, partly because children tending cattle during the day were able to attend classes at night thanks to solar-powered lights.

But as anthropology professor Lea B. Pellett said:

The more information and knowledge the better, but the Masai will have to take ownership of the change and preserve what is most important to them from their culture.

>> read the whole story in the Central Daily

SEE ALSO:

What Is An "Ancient People"? - We are All Modern Now!

Cultural lag, a lethal drag

Women in Cameroon:Information technology as a way out of the cultural cul-de-sac

"Aboriginal knowledge is science"

Antropython is the name of a blog by a student of anthropology at the University of Oslo. She has started to blog in English (previously only in Polish), so here is an excerpt from an interesting post by her on the power of medicine and how medicine changes our conceptions of the healthy body. Antropyton reviews the article "What do we mean by health?" by anthropologist Veena Das:

My reading of Das is that the emergence of discipline of geriatrics has brought about new definition of a healthy and “normal” body and has caused confusion between individual and social identities. It has also created a new category of sick people – the older ones. New definition of health has caused that aging has been reconceptualized as a disease and the ideology of the perfectly ordered body, which can be achieve through medicaments, as a sign of normalcy dominates the image of life cycle. Behaviour and health conditions, once normal and even noble (Kawagley, Turnbull), have been transformed to disability and this one to sickness that requires medical treatment.

>> read the whole post "Body redefinition & new social statuses"

Interesting reading also her thoughts before going on her first fieldwork

SEE ALSO:

Veena Das: Stigma, Contagion, Defect: Issues in the Anthropology of Public Health

"Ethnographic perspectives needed in discussion on public health care system"

Poverty and health policies: Listening to the poor in Bangladesh

medical anthropology - news archive

In my previous post, I've quoted anthropologist Owen Sichone about the concept of "Global apartheid":

Whatever the advantages of apartness are (more economic than cultural), the South African system came to an end just as the rest of the world was reinventing it in new forms. Global apartheid policed by the regime of visas and passports in a manner that African migrant workers (...) would easily recognize as colonial still does the job of keeping wealth and poverty apart.

The French government is planning a new immigration law, furthering these developments towards more global apartheid, according to anthropologist Cicilie Fagerlid who writes:

According to this new law, immigration to France should be “chosen” (immigration choisie) rather than “suffered from” or “undergone” (subie). In practice, this means that people who are useful to the French economy are invited in, while the law will be more restrictive on the others – the asylum-seekers, the family reunions and the unregistered sans-papiers.

On yesterdays' demonstration against the law, she writes, "quite a few demonstrators today had come to the conclusion that the interior minister obviously doesn’t love France as she is, so they suggested that he packs his bags and leave."

>> read her whole post

Salih Booker and William Minter define Global Apartheid this way:

Global apartheid, stated briefly, is an international system of minority rule whose attributes include: differential access to basic human rights; wealth and power structured by race and place; structural racism, embedded in global economic processes, political institutions and cultural assumptions; and the international practice of double standards that assume inferior rights to be appropriate for certain "others," defined by location, origin, race or gender.

>> read their whole article in The Nation

UPDATE (8.5.06):

Anthony Katombe from GlobalVoices reviews francophone blogs on African immigrants’ latest tribulations in France and Belgium. Blogger Le Pangolin belies Sarkozy’s assertions that France wants to start “choosing its immigrants” through new, tighter policies:

France has always chosen its immigrants. Remember the Senegalese janitors whom France imported from Senegal and Mali, the Renault and Peugeot auto factory workers they went to fetch in Maghreb to break the communist party and the CGT union’s strong influence between 1950 and 1970.

Le Pangolin ridicules a French government drowning under youth unemployment protests attempting desperately to redirect public attention towards a scapegoat, the African immigrant

>> read the whole post on GlobalVoices

SEE ALSO:

Charles Mutasa: Global Apartheid Continues to Haunt Global Democracy

Patrick Bond: Expect more global apartheid in 2006

Reviews of two books by Patrick Bond: Against Global Apartheid: South Africa Meets the World Bank, IMF and International Finance and South Africa and Global Apartheid: Continental and International Policies and Politics.

Owen Sichone on Global Apartheid: Poor African migrants no less cosmopolitan than anthropologists

Proclaiming the birth of a new civil rights movement - demonstration against a tougher immigration policy in the US

Racism and The Five Major Challenges for Anthropology

Anthropologists are citizens of the world because they are able to manoeuvre in and out of different cultures. African migrants display similar competencies when they are away from home. But you can even be cosmopolitan without ever having left your home, anthropologist Owen B. Sichone (University of Cape Town) told at the conference Cosmopolitanism and Anthropology:

If we want to understand the cosmopolitanism of global justice we may find the answer not in liberal constitutions or UN conventions but in the real lives of the world’s a dollar a day multitudes.

(...)

In my view we would do better to look to remote Africa villages and congested urban slums to find the woman who greets the stranger with a tray of food and this woman who has never left home lives her cosmopolitanism by welcoming the world. One does not need to be well travelled to be a polyglot, polymath or cosmopolitan if one is plays host to the world as the women of Cape Town have done since the Mother City was constructed.

European capitalism on the other hand is uncosmopolitan:

In today’s globalising world the political philosophers have defined cosmopolitanism in various ways. Whether we see it as based on liberal notions of human dignity, (Appiah, 2005 ch6), ‘obligations of justice to non-nationals’ or merely being ‘marked by diverse cultural influences’ (Sypnowich: 56) the European capitalist who has long offered himself as the ideal type fails the test. It is not just failure to protect strangers in Europe but the whole imperial episode of colonial oppression, i.e uncosmopolitan cosmopolitanism.

Sichone points to tougher immigration laws, that are limiting the mobility of the less affluent people outside the rich countries. Modernisation has in his opinion meant sedentarisation rather than increasing mobility for most Africans. :

Whatever the advantages of apartness are (more economic than cultural), the South African system came to an end just as the rest of the world was reinventing it in new forms. Global apartheid policed by the regime of visas and passports in a manner that African migrant workers (...) would easily recognize as colonial still does the job of keeping wealth and poverty apart.

(...)

It is ironical that East Africans seem to have enjoyed greater freedom of movement during the colonial days than they do today. There was no real border at the time as East Africa was all-British territory, the same could be said for other parts of the continent.

Certain migrants, the sort that travel without passports or visas, challenge the system of global apartheid and make it possible for others who belong to the immobile 97 per cent of the global population that never leaves home, to connect with the world in ways that facilitate the transfer of resources between centres and peripheries. They sometimes impact upon the host population in dramatic and unpredictable ways that belies their small numbers, Sichone writes.

On the other hand, Cape Town (where his paper focuses on) is a quite xenophobic society. This may be the result of imperialism, colonialism and apartheid. Sichone found striking gender differences. Women are much more friendly to strangers than men. For the South African more strangers means less resources for everyone:

Xenophobia (...) is most pronounced in the world of the retrenched worker, the men who must blame their unemployability on foreigners and who see themselves in a zero sum battle for survival.
(...)
Many migrants in Cape Town would probably agree with the Congolese refugee who said, if it were not for the women, we would not make it. (...) My Tanzanian contact, Pascal referred to some of them as the ‘Xhosa mama’ who provide new arrivals with accommodation and counter the ill-treatment that makwerekwere suffer at the hands of South African men. The ‘Xhosa mama’ treats foreigners, strangers, aliens etc as fellow human beings from the beginning just as the xenophobic men are hostile to strangers even before they encounter them.

He concludes:

What we seek to do is not necessarily to denounce elite models of cosmopolitanism exemplified by the work of international scholars, global social movements or human rights activists but rather to demonstrate that for the dollar a day multitudes ultimate security lies in ubuntu.

His paper was for me one of the highlights of the conference. So I am glad that Owen Sichone gave me the permission to post his paper on antropologi.info. He welcomes comments. His email address: osichone AT humanities.uct.ac.za

>> read Xenophobia and xenophilia in South Africa. Africans migrants in Cape Town by Owen B. Sichone (90kb, pdf)

EARLIER POSTS ABOUT THE CONFERENCE:

What's the point of anthropology conferences? (general summary)

David Graeber: There never was a West! Democracy as Interstitial Cosmopolitanism

Thomas Hylland Eriksen: Cosmopolitanism is like respecting the ban on smoking in the public

For an Anthropology of Cosmopolitanism

The second issue of the peer reviewed Open Access journal Ecological and Environmental Anthropology is quite unusual. The papers have titles like

"The Importance of Integrative Anthropology: A Preliminary Investigation Employing Primatological and Cultural Anthropological Data Collection Methods in Assessing Human-Monkey Co-existence in Bali, Indonesia"

or

"A Preliminary Review of Neotropical Primates in the Subsistence and Symbolism of Indigenous Lowland South American Peoples".

The new issue even includes two videos!

Concerning their interdisciplinary approach, the editors explain:

In this issue, we highlight interdisciplinary work from primatologists who combine cultural anthropology and primatology approaches to gain unique perspectives about the species that they study. From the discovery of a new species in Tanzania, to cultural primate symbolism and subsistence in Amazonia, and to the interactions of rural communities with local populations of monkeys in Bali and Sulawesi, Indonesia, ethnoprimatologists in our second issue demonstrate the value of interdisciplinary methods for primate conservation on three continents.

>> Frontpage of the journal "Ecological and Environmental Anthropology"

Security has come to be the overriding issue in every debate about development and immigration issues - and it's part of a worldwide trend which in fact does the complete opposite and helps to create insecurity. That's according to anthropologist Rema Hammami, a US national with Palestinian roots, working at Birzeit University. (At a seminar in Oslo on security we came to the same conclusions) Last week, she gave her inaugural address in The Hague (Netherlands) on accepting the Prince Claus Chair in Development and Equity, reports Radio Netherlands:

Hammami claims that a quarter of the Palestinians have lost their jobs as a result of Israel's security regime, adding that growing poverty leads to frustration and ultimately to an insecure situation. She says that the recent past in this part of the world demonstrates that too much emphasis on security issues achieves exactly the opposite:
"During the interim period of the Peace Process, what you had was an ongoing policy by the various Israeli governments that kept making everything secondary to Israeli security. For Palestinians this meant a checkpoint everywhere they turned, inability to get into East Jerusalem […] Ultimately all of those Israeli security policies led to the outbreak of the uprising. People found the situation unbearable."

She criticizes the immigration policy in Europe and the United States: Migrants are seen as enemies until proved otherwise, and this reflects the increasingly sharp division in the world:

"It [this dominance of security policy] becomes blind to seeing that all human beings need some basic, similar types of things. Instead what it does is say that 'There is us and there is you, and what we have and what we need and want to preserve, is different from what you want, and just the fact that you want to be part of this is a threat to us.' While, in fact, people the world over basically just want the same thing."

>> read the whole story at Radio Netherlands

Rema Hammami is a truly engaged anthropologist and has published extensively on these issues, among others in the Middle East Report. See also her texts Waiting for Godot at Qalandya: Reflections on Queues and Inequality and On Suicide Bombings. A longer text, published in the Jerusalem Quarterly: On the Importance of Thugs. The moral economy of a checkpoint

The first issue of "Practicing Anthropology", the journal of the Society for Applied Anthropology Goes Palestinian deal with the topic THE COMMITMENT TO SOCIAL ACTION IN PALESTINE: PROGRAMS AND PRACTICE. But of cource, none of the articles are available online, not even to subscribers.

SEE ALSO:

Ethnographic Research: Gated Communities Don’t Lead to Security

Book review: Ethnography in Unstable Places: Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change

Tabsir - Blog on the Middle East

PS: One of my favorite journalists on Palestinian issues is Mohammed Omer. He got known with his website Rafah Today. Now, his articles are published in the Norwegian weekly Morgenbladet. There's also a a blog about Omer and Rafah where most of his articles are published.

Recently, the terms "Western civilisation" or "Western values" have been used in opposition to regimes mainly in the Middle East. But how fruitful is this notion of "the West"? In his keynote speech at the conference Cosmopolitanism and Anthropology, David Graeber showed that this idea is a kind of Othering: It makes artificial gaps between people that have more in common than supposed.

His deconstruction of the West resembels earlier deconstructions of the National (what traditionally has been considered as "typical Norwegian" is rather the result of migration and influences from other countries).

In his paper that he presented on the conference, Graeber writes:

If you examine these terms more closely, however, it becomes obvious that all these “Western” objects are the products of endless entanglements. “Western science” was patched together out of discoveries made on many continents, and is now largely produced by non- Westerners. “Western consumer goods” were always drawn from materials taken from all over the world, many explicitly imitated Asian products, and nowadays, most are produced in China.
(...)
As European states expanded and the Atlantic system came to encompass the world, all sorts of global influences appear to have coalesced in European capitals, and to have been reabsorbed within the tradition that eventually came to be known as “Western”.
(...)
Can we say the same of “Western freedoms”? The reader can probably guess what my answer is likely to be.

The idea of a superior "Western civilisation" is a product of colonialism. But as he says:

Opposition to European expansion in much of the world, even quite early on, appears to have been carried out in the name of “Western values” that the Europeans in question did not yet even have.

Graeber mainly used the notion of democracy as a Western concept as an example:

Almost everyone who writes on the subject assumes “democracy” is a "Western" concept begins its history in ancient Athens, and that what 18th and 19th century politicians began reviving in Western Europe and North America was essentially the same thing.

(...)

Democratic practices-processes of egalitarian decision-making-however occur pretty much anywhere, and are not peculiar to any one given
"civilization", culture, or tradition.

We should according to Graeber treat the history of “democracy” as more than just the history of the word “democracy”:

If democracy is simply a matter of communities managing their own affairs through an open and relatively egalitarian process of public discussion, there is no reason why egalitarian forms of decision-making in rural communities in Africa or Brazil should not be at least as worthy of the name as the constitutional systems that govern most nation-states today-and in many cases, probably a good deal more so.

(...)

Rather than seeing Indian, or Malagasy, or Tswana, or Maya claims to being part of an inherently democratic tradition as an attempt to ape the West, it seems to me, we are looking at different aspects of the same planetary process: a crystallization of longstanding democratic practices in the formation of a global system, in which ideas were flying back and forth in all directions, and the gradual, usually grudging adoption of some by ruling elites.

Yet why have these procedures not been considered as "democratic." The main reason in Graebers view: In these assemblies, things never actually came to a vote! Rather, they preferred "the apparently much more difficult task" of coming to decisions "that no one finds so violently objectionable that they are not willing at least assent". It is this form of participatory democracy that social movements around the world are trying to revive!

Graeber also discusses the "coercive nature of the state" and the contradictions that democratic constitutions are founded on. He refers to Walter Benjamin (1978) who pointed out "that any legal order that claims a monopoly of the use of violence has to be founded by some power other than itself, which inevitably means, by acts that were illegal according to whatever system of law came before it".

And about Ancient Greece and democracy:

It is of obvious relevance that Ancient Greece was one of the most competitive societies known to history. It was a society that tended to make everything into a public contest, from athletics to philosophy or tragic drama or just about anything else. So it might not seem entirely surprising they made political decision-making into a public contest as well. Even more crucial though was the fact that decisions were made by a populace in arms.

SEE ALSO:

Amartya Sen: Democracy Isn't 'Western' this text was also debated on Savage Minds

Amartya Sen: Democracy as a Universal Value (Journal of Democracy 10.3 (1999) 3-17)

David Graeber: Reinventing Democracy

Review of Graeber's book: Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology / download the whole book

Cosmopolitanism and Anthropology - What's the point of anthropology conferences?

Is there life after a PhD? and Internet Nicknames – what’s in a name? are the titles of the first entries in a new anthropology blog by Denise Carter.

She has recently completed her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Hull, UK. Many might know her as frequent poster in anthropology email-lists. She's particularily interested in internet and its effect on our daily lives. Her doctoral research is an ethnographic account of my three years living and working in a virtual community.

>> continue to Denise Carter's blog

Her blog is included in the overviews over anthropology blogs http://www.antropologi.info/blog/ and http://www.antropologi.info/feeds/anthropology