This is a video shot in Wedza communal lands, Zimbabwe, which are south of the Nyanga district that Moore writes about. Wedza is at a lower elevation than Nyanga. The video is narrated by two charming children, Colm and Nora Hand, who have relatives in Wedza. There is great footage of agricultural practices (the milling of maize, the tilling of fields), and I think the video beautifully captures the conviviality of home and hearth. It therefore complements some of the scenes that Moore writes about.
Tag Archives: Africa
Ota Benga Revisted
In a case of history repeating itself (this time as farce?), a Congolese zoo played host to a troop of “Pygmy” musicians (I’m assuming Mbuti). But it’s ok, it’s not discrimination. Really:
“It’s not a case of discrimination,” said Yvette Lebondzo, the director of arts and culture for the Republic of Congo. “We lodged them in the park near running water and a forest simply because that will remind them of their usual surroundings — which is the forest.”
I suppose they work just as hard to find culturally appropriate housing for other visiting world musicians — coke dens for American boy bands, teepees for American Indians, yurts for Himalayan techno groups, etc.
[Via BoingBoing]
More Rouch on YouTube
When I read (on NewTeeVee) how Google Video had changed to become a search engine rather than just a place for Google to host its own video content, I thought of Strong’s post about Les Maîtres Fous and did a search for “Jean Rouch.” I was amazed at how much I discovered!
There is his famous “cinetrance” Les tambours d’avant Tourou et Bitti, as well as Hippopotamus Hunt : Battle on the Great River and Graveyards in the cliff. There are also some scenes from Petit à petit, and various interviews and discussions as well. Some of these are subtitled some are not. Who knows how long all this will be up there, so watch them while you can!
There are also a bunch of documentaries about Rouch (mostly from DER), like Rouch’s Gang which can be viewed for a small fee.
UPDATE: DER has a Jean Rouch tribute website.
(Disclaimer: DER also distributes a film I made.)
Les Maîtres Fous
Jean Rouch’s legendary documentary “Les Maîtres Fous” (The Mad Masters) has been uploaded to YouTube. Below I embed Part 1 of 3. (You can view the other two parts by clicking through to them.) Paul Stoller has written extensively on Rouch. Access an online tribute by Stoller here. Stoller writes:
In all of his films, Rouch collaborated significantly with African friends and colleagues. Through this active collaboration, which involved all aspects of shooting and production, Jean Rouch used the camera to participate fully in the lives of the people he filmed as well as to provoke them and, eventually, the viewers into experiencing new dimensions of sociocultural experience. Many of the films of this period cut to the flesh and blood of European colonialism, compelling us to reflect on our latent racism, our repressed sexuality, and the taken-for-granted assumptions of our intellectual heritage. They also highlight the significance of substantive collaboration, a research tactic that Rouch called ‘anthropologie partagée,’ in the construction of scholarly knowledge. Through these provocatively complex films, Jean Rouch unveiled how relations of power shape our dreams, thoughts and actions.
The film invites the (putatively European) viewer to understand ostensibly ‘savage’ rituals as psychically ameliorative. At the same time, it records a remarkable practice of resignification of colonial powers — impersonation in the genre of ‘madness’. {In Papua New Guinea today, under very different cultural and historical circumstances than those recorded here, popular forms of dance [singsing] include so-called ‘police bands,’ in which young men (or women) dress up in colonial costume, including sometimes white-face, and enact military order as a way to impress audiences at festivals of various sorts, especially school fetes.} Anyway, there is much to discuss in a ‘text’ like this. I would just add that YouTube continues to grow into a stunning cultural archive.
Clans in the News (Again); Plus, When Informants Embrace Research
William Finnegan’s ‘Letter from Maine’ on ‘the Somalis of Lewiston’ (The New Yorker, December 11, 2006 — sorry I can’t find it online), revisits the issue of the contemporary relevance of both anthropology in general and of the anthropology of kinship (or perhaps I should say the anthropology of clans) in particular. He writes:
People [Somali immigrants] are loath to talk, at least to outsiders, about the clan system in Somalia, whose rivalries have helped fuel the civil war there. But it survives in the diaspora, and it continues to divide expatriate communities, where different groups scramble for access to resources. (A young Somali social worker told me that he’d stopped going to the Lewiston mosque, because it was dominated by members of the Ogaden clan. ‘I refuse to pray next to someone who sees me first as an Isaaq, nost as a Muslim,’ he said.)
The article pictures not a monolithic block of refugees composed of a phantom ‘nationality,’ but rather a set of people from diverse backgrounds, with different interests, histories of conflict and movement, experiences of oppression. The article focuses mainly on Somali Bantus, and their position vis-a-vis other Somalis both in Lewiston and back home. The article also features the work of Colby College anthropologist Catherine Besteman, work that has been important for Bantus in recovering and remembering their past(s). At a panel discussion on refugees in Lewiston, Besteman was amazed to meet some of her very own informants — they had been children when she first met them in the field. Besteman subsequently organized a slide show (with photos taken by her husband Jorge Acero). In the New Yorker, Besteman recalls the scene:
Most of those who made it over here [to the U.S.] were babies then. They never knew their parents. People in the audience were seeing their moms and dads for the first time. It was very, very moving. There were a lot of stories being shouted out about the people in the slides… Even the pictures of the fields, they were just incredibly excited to see. People went crazy over [a chart of census data]. They could account for everyone on the chart. This guy was shot in his field by a Somali. This guy was hacked with machetes and died of infected wounds. This woman was taken by militiamen from a fleeing group, right near the Kenyan border, never seen again.
The incredible trauma noted here and the lingering wounds of war notwithstanding, I find stories like these heartening. I think they demonstrate the continuing relevance and importance of anthropological research (in a way quite different, and in some sense, complementary to a relevance that would attach ‘local knowledge’ to the ‘security’ apparatuses of states that wage war but make the victims of their violence invisible). Who else but an anthropologist is going to spend two years recording lifeways, taking census data, learning stories of people in an out-of-the-way place? Sure, journalists will helicopter in for a few days, a few weeks, even months. But who is going to do the patient work of sitting on the flatbed truck and chatting with folks about their kin, about their hopes and fears?
Also, stories like these I think make a compelling case for a truly public anthropology. For the data that we anthropologists collect (whether we are from the U.S., Brazil, Finland, or Papua New Guiena) has value and meaning — above all for those people with whom we work.
Got Lactose Intolerance?
The New York Times has a nice, short, editorial about the complex dynamic between culture and evolution. The piece emphasizes a point in Monday’s story about a recent article in Nature analyzing lactose intolerance in Africans.
A team of scientists has now discovered that an important human genetic trait — a tolerance in adults for the milk sugar called lactose — might have developed in several East African ethnic groups 2,700 to 6,800 years ago. That is astonishingly recent.
It may also be the first genetic example of what researchers call convergent evolution in humans. In other words, lactose tolerance among African raisers of livestock arose independently of the same adaptive trait in northern European pastoralists. But there is something still more surprising about this discovery. The genetic change came about because of cultural change. The shift to cattle raising some 9,000 years ago gave an immediate survival advantage to adults who could digest milk, an ability infants usually lost as they aged.
We are used to the idea that species evolve because of changes in their natural environment. But part of the natural environment of humans is culture itself, and it is striking to think that genetic adaptation in humans has been driven, at least in part, by how humans have chosen to live.
Bushmen Allowed to Return Home
I’m happy to report some good news regarding a post from over a year ago, when I noted that the Bushmen were being expelled from the Kalahari Game Reserve. This week the Botswana High Court ruled that they could go home. Unfortunately, the government is being very obstinate in its implementation of the ruling:
In a statement Thursday, however, Attorney General Athaliah Molokomme laid down conditions for the government’s implementation of the court order.
“The Central Kalahari Game Reserve remains state land,” Molokomme’s statement said. “It is owned by the state and subject to the laws of the republic.”
Only 189 people who filed the lawsuit would be given automatic right of return with their children, Molokomme said, far short of the 2,000 bushmen who say they want to go home. Anyone else would have to apply for permits.
Returning bushmen may take building materials into the reserve but only “for constructing non-permanent structures,” the statement said.
Those returning can use enough water for “subsistence needs,” Molokomme said. However, park authorities can restrict the amount of water to what is “reasonably required.”
This is likely to be a major obstacle to settlers because the government shut the main well in 2002, and water is scarce in the Kalahari.
Under the government’s rules the bushmen cannot bring domestic animals into the park. Anyone who wants to hunt — a central activity in hunter-gatherer societies — must apply for permits.
Looks like their struggle isn’t over. Via MetaFilter I discovered a site dedicated to their struggle. (Unfortunately it doesn’t yet work with Firefox.)
Is the Magic Fading?
The recent debate around FGC on Savage Minds raised some important questions about the political implications of how we choose to perceive social practice. It also raised the issue of agency in our selection of the analytic positions through which we situate practices relationally, and hence within particular political frames of argument. The key point here is not what the issue is, so much as with what other issues is it represented as being articulated in various ways. This articulation may be represented either within a particular social context, as in for example the relation between forms of practice and social outcomes, for which in the recent example read gender. Or, adopting the kind of argument put forward by Marilyn Strathern in her Partial Connections, it may be about how the issue is related through ethnography to what are represented as equivalent examples of social practice across social contexts, that is within anthropological theory or social theory more generally.
The ways in which issues become relationally articulated within anthropology is fundamental to establishing the legitimacy of what become accepted, or acceptable, responses to social phenomena within the discipline, some of which, despite anthropology’s claims to reflexivity and to the consistent examination of constructivist positions, seem remarkably persistent. The disciplinary representation of witchcraft is a case in point. Not only is witchcraft represented persistently as a problem of knowledge, rather than a problem of power, terror, inequality and violence manifested differently at different times and places. It is commonly represented as related to Zande practices of the late 1920’s as somehow paradigmatic, if not in terms modalities of divination then in terms of the essential logic and systematicity of Zande witchcraft cosmology.
Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic provides an account of the place of witchcraft in Zande society and the interrelationship between the persistence of witchcraft beliefs and oracular authority as mediated by princely rulers themselves subjected to Anglo- Egyptian colonial power. This book, a classic of functionalist ethnography and one which posits as its centre the question of the rationality of belief, continues to be a staple of anthropology reading lists, certainly in the UK. It also remains widely cited within the anthropology of religion, science studies and philosophy. This strikes me as somewhat surprising. What Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic actually describes is not so much the rationality of belief in witchcraft, as a political system in which the powerless are liable to be accused of involuntary murder and then forced to pay compensation for the deaths of alleged victims. To suggest that the comparative value of Evans Pritchard’s text lies in the power play of witchcraft as a weapon of violence working in conjunction with regimes of power is not to underplay the salience of ideas and world views in effecting social practice, merely to question why certain interpretations become established. Some of this has to do with what they are brought into relation to. Can disestablishment follow on then from new juxtapositions and new relations?
First Peoples of Africa?
Now that I teach in a department of “Indigenous Cultures” I have become increasingly concerned with how people come to be defined as “indigenous” and what that means. Most recently, I took a quick look at the question of whether or not people in Africa have effectively claimed the status of “First Peoples” as indigenous peoples elsewhere have done. After all, most Africans are indigenous to the continent, even if there have been internal migrations.
The web site of IPACC, the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Committee has this to say:
Today, groups claiming to be ‘indigenous’ in Africa are mostly those who have been living by hunting and gathering or by transhumant (migratory nomadic) pastoralism. These are different peoples who have followed particular trajectories of cultural and economic evolution in specific environmental conditions such as the equatorial rainforests, the Atlas, Hoggar and Tibesti mountain ranges, the Rift Valley and the deserts of the Sahara and the Kalahari.
Some Africans may be offended by the idea that one ethnic group should be called ‘indigenous’ and others not. IPACC recognises that all Africans should enjoy equal rights and respect. All of Africa’s diversity is to be valued. Particular communities, due to historical and environmental circumstances, have found themselves outside the state-system and underrepresented in governance. These ‘first-peoples’ or ‘autochthonous peoples’ have associated themselves with the United Nations’ standards on the rights of indigenous peoples. This is not to deny other Africans their status; it is to emphasise that affirmative recognition is necessary for hunter-gatherers and herding peoples to ensure their survival.
This is clearly a fairly defensive position for what must be a rather controversial topic, yet it seems intuitively obvious that the people who fall within this category do share certain characteristics with other indigenous communities around the world.
However, looking in AnthroSource I found two articles which address these issues, both from a special American Anthropologist issue on Indigenous Rights Movements from 2002:
- “‘Land, Water, and Truth’: San Identity and Global Indigenism”
- “Precarious Alliances: The Cultural Politics and Structural Predicaments of the Indigenous Rights Movement in Tanzania”
These articles were much more sanguine about the utility of indigenous identities in the African context. The first article, by Renée Sylvain, highlights one of the problem of place-based rights movements. Those San1 who continue to live in remote segregated homelands share many features with other indigenous communities, but those who have integrated into urban society face a very different set of issues. The author also expresses concern over the essentialized notions of culture that come with identification as an “indigenous” people. The second article, by Dorothy L. Hodgson, looks at hunter-gatherer and pastoralists who find themselves caught between the competing discourses of state sponsors and those of international indigenous rights activist groups, contradictions which were seen by activists as ultimately undermining their political effectiveness.
If anyone has direct experience working with these issues in the African context I’d love to know more.
1 I know, I know, some say that term is now out of favor – but as far as I can tell it is still being used in the South African literature.
Stone-aged and primitive are what you call people when you want their land
Last week, Baroness Lady Tonge of Kew brought up the bushmen of the Kalahari in the British House of Lords:
She suggested they were trying to “stay in the stone age”, described their technology as “primitive” and accused them of “holding the government of Botswana to ransom” by resisting eviction from their ancestral lands. How did she know? In 2002 she had spent half a day as part of a parliamentary delegation visiting one of the resettlement camps into which the bushmen have been forced. Her guides were officials in the Botswanan government.
Interestingly, the trip was funded by a company which owns “the rights to mine diamonds in the bushmen’s land in the Kalahari”!
The linked Guardian article by George Monbiot points out some other examples of people being called “stone-aged” when their land looked attractive.
John F Kennedy approved the annexation of West Papua by the Indonesian government with the words: “Those Papuans of yours are some seven hundred thousand and living in the stone age.” Stone-aged and primitive are what you call people when you want their land.
The animal theme comes up quite often too. “How can you have a stone-age creature continue to exist in the age of computers?” asked the man who is now Botswana’s president, Festus Mogae. “If the bushmen want to survive, they must change, otherwise, like the dodo, they will perish.” The minister for local government, Margaret Nasha, was more specific. “You know the issue of Basarwa [the bushmen]?” she asked in 2002. “Sometimes I equate it to the elephants. We once had the same problem when we wanted to cull the elephants and people said no.”
Wild Thoughts: Gender Edition
Welcome to the third installment of Wild Thoughts, your sporadic round-up of whatever I haven’t found time to flesh out into a full post. I haven’t been as active as I’d like the last month or so, not least because I’ve been preparing a new class (at a new school) in Women’s Studies. Entitled “Gender, Race, and Class”, the course meets two separate general ed. requirements, so it is quite popular across the spectrum of students. In preparing for the class, I’ve been collecting quite a few stories that deal with gender (as well as race and class, of course, but those will have to wait — or you can just follow Karen Brodkin’s assertion that race, class, and gender are always imbrecated and consider that these links necessarily deal with race and class because they deal with gender). In the interest of clearing my Firefox tabs, and as a follow-up of sorts to Kerim’s recent post, I present the Gender Edition:
- The Deputy Prime Minister of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, has proposed legalizing polygamy (he means polygyny), a suggestion that has been endorsed by the Deputy Speaker of the Russian Duma, who plans to introduce legislation to legalize multiple marriages across Russia. The reasoning behind these suggestions should be familiar to anthropologists: the ongoing conflict in Chechnya has decimated the male population and left millions of women widowed or unmarried, with no available, unmarried men to take on the job of supporting these “surplus” women — a textbook case, really. Left unquestioned, of course, are the various factors that leave unmarried women without adequate resources to survive — for example, the dismantling of the Soviet-era system that, whatever its faults, integrated men and women somewhat equally into the labor force, affording unmarried women some degree of autonomy. At work, too, may be a kind of population panic, as increasing numbers of women flee Russia for work — often sex work — in Western Europe or North America.
A Thanksgiving Tale
Here’s a real Thanksgiving tale to warm your cockles: Thanksgiving Coffee, a California-based distributor of organic and fair trade coffees, is offering Mirembe Kawomera coffee, produced by a Ugandan cooperative composed of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian coffee growers.
The story of Mirembe Kamowere — which means “delicious peace” — is amazing. In 1999, as world coffee prices plummeted due to a glut of Brazilian and Vietnamese coffees, Jewish Ugandan J.J. Keki went door-to-door through his community encouraging his fellow farmers — mostly Muslim and Christian — to band together in an effort to create a stronger bargaining position. The effort was successful, allowing alliance-members to clear 20 to 40 cents a pound more than for conventionally-traded coffee, meaning Ugandan coffee growers can earn a dependable living somewhat buffered from the vagaries of the world market system.
Bushmen expelled from Homeland
Anyone whose been through an introductory anthropology course over the past thirty years is likely to have come across at least a passing mention to the Bushmen of the Kalahari. Well, according to today’s Washington Post there are no more Bushmen in Botswana’s Kalahari Game Reserve.
All but a few of the Bushmen living in Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve have been forcibly removed from their homes in recent days in what spokesmen for the affected communities said is a final push by the government to end human habitation there after tens of thousands of years.
The First People of the Kalahari, an activist group in Botswana, said that Bushmen villages had been cut off from their main sources of food and water and that outsiders had been prohibited from entering to provide relief for the past six weeks.
The group said a heavy contingent of police, military and park rangers trucked out about 40 people — most of the remaining residents — at gunpoint on Friday and Saturday. The stragglers face constant harassment, it said.
Before forced removals started in the late 90s, there were over 2,000 Bushmen living there.
More from Mother Jones from earlier this year.
UPDATE: Another story from the Washington Post.
Saving the Great Apes
I have a soft spot for non-human primates, especially gorillas, as they got me interested in primatology and physical anthropology back in high school. This eventually got me to take a college-level anthro course and led me to adopting cultural anthropology as a career. So I’m pleased to see that 20 governments are getting together to try to “save the great apes”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4232174.stm from extinction.
I’d be curious to know if there are actual primatologists on board with the “Great Apes Survival Project”:http://www.unep.org/grasp/, the organism that organised the conference during which the declaration to save the great apes was signed. I would think that they do but I was unable to find the information on GRASP’s website.
Of course, non-human primates co-exist with human primates and GRASP seems to have grasped (I couldn’t resist) the idea that the activities of local populations need to be taken into account. As is indicated in the BBC news article, the agreement proposes that:
The agencies should ‘make it a priority to develop and implement policies which promote ecologically sustainable livelihoods for local and indigenous communities’
I think that this reflects an acknowledgement that government agreement or no government agreement, ultimately it is essential to obtain the cooperation of people who live in areas near our non-human cousins. This cooperation requires that the people in question have the resources that they need to live without having to resort to poaching. I’m hoping that they have at least consulted cultural anthropologists in that area to assess effective ways of carrying out this project while taking local realities into account.
Malaria in Africa and Asia
Even if Jared Diamond is relatively restrained in his book about how far he wishes to push his argument into the present, he is less so on T.V. Last night I watched the third and final episode of the PBS series on Guns, Germs, and Steel, and it ends with an explicit discussion of how his theory applies to the present.
Jared Diamond: I’m now in the centre of the African tropics, and I’m in Zambia, one of the poorest countries in Africa and really in the whole world. The average annual income here is a few hundred dollars, and the lifespan, average lifespan of a Zambian is 35 years, so I myself have now lived nearly two average Zambian lifetimes. What goes through my mind here is, what can history and geography and guns, germs and steel tell us that would help us understand the plight of Zambia today? In modern Zambia I see few signs around me of the great native civilizations that once flourished in tropical Africa. What I see instead is a country shaped by colonization. I see towns and cities that grew up next to the mines and railroads established by Europeans, and built on the European model. What about the great forces that originally shaped this continent and its people? The forces behind its conquest by Europeans. Where are guns, germs and steel in modern Africa?
There is actually no discussion of guns and steel, but instead the discussion focuses on germs. Specifically, malaria.
Professor Nick White, Centre for Tropical Medicine, Oxford University: It’s been estimated by eminent economists that the 1% negative growth each year in Africa over the last half a century can be attributed entirely to malaria.
Voiceover: The immunities and antibodies that Africans had developed over thousands of years to protect them from malaria no longer provide sufficient protection. The strains of the disease are mutating, and standard drugs are becoming less effective. In the high malaria season, up to seven children a day die in this hospital.
But the Africans aren’t simply poor because of their germs, we are told. They are poor because they are ignorant!
Voiceover: Malaysia and Singapore are among the richest and most dynamic economies in the world. Like Africa, they are tropical countries, with the same problems of geography and health, the same endemic malaria. But both transformed themselves by understanding their environment. Fifty years ago, these countries realized the burden that geography and germs could be. Through concerted effort, they managed to almost entirely eradicate malaria from their land, transforming their economies and way of life.
The story of Malaysia and Singapore shows what an understanding of geography and history can do.
Jared Diamond: Explanations give you power, they give you the power to change.
They tell us what happened in the past and why, and we can use that knowledge to make different things happen in the future.
It seems to me that people don’t need a lot of explanations to learn that people are dying of malaria. Nor are the solutions to fighting Malaria that complicated. Sure, we can develop new vaccines, but relatively inexpensive campaigns focused on treated bed nets and public health can do wonders:
Insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) are a low-cost and highly effective way of reducing the incidence of malaria in people who sleep under them, and they have been conclusively shown in a series of trials to substantially reduce child mortality in malaria-endemic areas of Africa.
The problem is that even such “low cost” solutions are unaffordable for most affected families! Something else is going on here. I won’t denigrate such complex question with a simplistic answer, but as I suggested in my earlier post on Yali’s question, I think the extraction of resources from these countries by their own elite is part of the issue. A new book by Matthew Lockwood, makes an interesting comparison between development and corruption in African and Asian countries:
The problem is not an inefficient civil service or lack of local government. Nor is it just about corruption. The governing class in Asia was often corrupt too. But they ploughed back their money into their own countries. In Africa, an estimated 40 per cent of privately owned wealth—about half the value of Africa’s debt stock—is held outside the continent.
Nor will I discuss the problems I have with Diamond seeing contemporary developing countries as nothing more than a failed copy of Europe … I think Fred and Deborah are doing a good job on that front.