Is there hope for the Niger Delta?

A new report from the United Nations Environment Programme reveals the extent of environmental devastation in Nigeria’s Niger Delta due to extractive oil and petroleum industries. Although the study was partially funded by Shell, it appears that it has some bite. Perhaps a sign of hope.

Meanwhile, an African king is suing Shell, and Niger Delta villagers are going to the Hague to take on Shell. Perhaps further signs of hope.

Oil-related problems in the Niger Delta are not new. They are old, enduring and stain the future of Nigeria. They have to do with powerful corporate and state interests, corruption, global oil and petroleum demand, and the unrelentingly harsh cruelty of capitalist profiteering at the expense of local people and their environment and livelihoods. Nigeria is a major provider of petroleum to the United States.

The Niger Delta region has been exploited with impunity by outside powers for many years. During the British colonial era, Nigeria provided wealth for the Crown through the export of palm oil (Osha 2006). In the postcolonial era of globalization, a different kind of oil dominates the country’s economy: petroleum. Starting in the 1950s, with the discovery of vast petroleum reserves in Nigeria’s Delta region, several European and American companies have explored for, drilled for and exported crude oil to the extent that Nigeria occupies an important position in the world economy.

Most local people in the delta, however, have gained few economic benefits from the petroleum industry. Instead, most have reaped major losses in their agricultural and fishing livelihoods due to environmental pollution. They are poorer now than they were in the 1960s. In addition to economic suffering, they have lost personal security. Many have become victims of the violence that has increased in the region since the 1990s through state and corporate repression of a local resistance movement.
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On the politics of exile

Guest post by Majid Razvi

If “monk-politician” strikes you as somewhat of a contradiction… well, you might be right. Meet Samdhong Rinpoche, Prime Minister of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile. His title contains within it a sad reminder of the current plight of the Tibetans.

On July 14, the Culture in Global Affairs Research and Policy Program of the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University hosted Samdhong Rinpoche as a speaker in the CIGA Seminar Series.

Rinpoche began with an apology for his English skills, which proved to be better than many native speakers. He then declared that he was “not comfortable” with politics. (I am reminded of Plato’s hypothetical philosopher-kings, who would likely be not at all interested in the political position. Perhaps reluctance should be a prerequisite for public office!)

His lecture delved into the history of Tibet and its people. What struck me most, however, was Rinpoche’s constant reiteration of His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s longstanding position: what is important is not political autonomy, but cultural and religious freedom.

“We are not concerned with who is ruling Tibet,” said Rinpoche, “but how they are ruling Tibet.”

During the Q&A session, a reporter asked how Samdhong Rinpoche felt about President Obama’s failure to meet with the Dalai Lama. With that blend of rigorous logic and holistic wisdom that so-perfectly characterizes Buddhism, Rinpoche pointed out that ascribing such a “failure” to the President before His Holiness had left the country was premature.

Two days later, at the White House:

His Holiness the Dalai Lama and President Barack Obama — His Holiness the Dalai Lama with President Barack Obama, July 16 2011. Flickr, Creative Commons

Majid Razvi received his B.A. in 2011 from Virginia Commonwealth University where he majored in Philosophy and Religious Studies. He has a strong interest in Tibetan epistemology, logic, and argumentation. He intends to pursue graduate study in philosophy.

Upcoming conference on Chagos

On May 19, a conference on Chagos will be held at the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington, England. It is organized by best-selling novelist, Philippa Gregory, and conservationist and adventurer, Ben Fogle.

Cultural anthropology participants include David Vine of American University, who will present in the morning, and Sean Carey of Roehampton University, and Laura Jeffery of Edinburgh University, who will co-present a session on the size of the extended Chagos population (the original inhabitants of the archipelago and their descendants), its distribution (Mauritius, Seychelles, the U.K. and other European countries including France, Belgium and Switzerland) and how Chagossians see their future in Chagos.

Jeffery holds an ESRC research fellowship, titled “Sustainable Resettlement and Environmental Conservation: A Collaborative Approach to the Right of Return to the Chagos Archipelago.”

Among others participating are marine scientists Mark Spalding of Cambridge University and John Turner of Bangor University, as well as John Howell, a former director of the U.K.’s Overseas Development Institute.

The science editor from the Daily Telegraph (U.K.) contacted Sean Carey, and they have published a balanced article.

Summer Institute in Cultural Resource Management

June 20-26, 2011

The Summer Institute in Cultural Resource Management offers an excellent and unique opportunity for graduate and undergraduate students to explore a career in cultural resource management, and to obtain real-world experiences that can be applied to future jobs in CRM. The Introduction to CRM course provides a week-long intensive training in the skills, knowledge, and abilities needed for a successful career in CRM. A team of nationally-recognized, practicing CRM professionals will serve as instructors for the course, including Lynne Sebastian, Ph. D., RPA and Terry Klein, M.A., RPA.

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A smile so sweet

Could it be Chevron? Suzana Sawyer, professor of cultural anthropology at the University of California-Davis, breaks down Chevron’s multi-million dollar “Human Energy” PR campaign that was launched in 2007.

Chevron is the second largest oil company in the United States and fourth largest in the world. Its ad campaign, which includes television commercials and print ads in magazines and billboards, pitches Chevron as one of us, or better: men and women of vision, people who care about the environment. “I will use less energy,” says an earnest, professional-looking white man while a smiling young African American woman vows to “leave the car at home.”

Sawyer points out that the campaign is probably more focused on investors—on protecting the value of its stock—than persuading individual drivers to stop and buy gas at a Chevron station instead of some other station. In either case, however, the goal is to convince people that Chevron is a positive force in the world and allay consumption guilt.

One group that hasn’t bought the message is Amazon Watch. In 2009, they launched a counter-campaign of “subvertisements” about the “InHuman Energy Campaign.” On their billboards, an Amazonian woman says, “I will ignore the toxic waste pits in my village.” An Ecuadorian woman says,”I will try not to have a miscarriage.”

Shareholder activists are raising their voices, questioning corporate practices from the inside and pushing for greater accountability. Sawyer tartly comments: “This is the power of human energy that Chevron never bargained for.”

Image: “Chevron Shareholder Meeting in Houston,” from flickr user Rainforest Action Network, licensed Creative Commons.

From ecological disaster to constitutional crisis

Guest post by Terence Turner

“Debating Belo Monte Hydroelectric Complex on the Xingu River,” creative commons licensed content by Flickr user International Rivers. March 14, 2007.

UPDATED: Once again, the indigenous peoples of the Xingú valley in the Brazilian Amazon are planning to make the long journey to the town of Altamira*, where the Trans-Amazonica highway crosses the Xingú. Their ultimate destination will be the island of Pimental a short distance downriver from the town, where the Brazilian government plans to build a huge hydroelectric dam they call Belo Monte after the nearest Brazilian village. The Indians’ bold plan, is to prevent the construction of the dam by building a new village directly on top of the proposed dam site and maintaining their occupation until the government abandons its plans for the dam. The planning for the encampment is being led by the Kayapo, the largest and most politically organized of the indigenous nations of the region, but other indigenous groups are also participating.

The Indians, in a bold attempt to prevent the construction of the project, are building a new village directly on top of the proposed dam site, They have vowed to maintain their occupation until the government abandons its plans for the dam. The construction of the encampment is being led by the Kayapo, the largest and most politically organized of the indigenous nations of the region, but other indigenous groups are also participating.

The Kayapo, however, are not waiting for the discussion of the plan for the encampment among the 23 indigenous groups of the Xingú Valley to reach consensus. They have already seized the ferry that carries Brazil Route 80, an important link in the Trans-Amazonica highway system, across the Xingú River at the Kayapo village of Piaraçú. The ferry and the river crossing are now under guard by armed Kayapo warriors, who have announced that they will continue their blockade until the government negotiates with them about their plans for the Belo Monte dam.

This will not be the first indigenous encampment organized by the Kayapo in their effort to stop the building of dams on the Xingú. In 1989, when the government first set out to implement its plan for a giant hydroelectric complex on the Xingú, with financial support from the World Bank, the Kayapo led a great rally of 40 indigenous nations at Altamira against the scheme, setting up an encampment of several hundred Indians at a Catholic retreat center just outside the town. The five-day rally was extensively covered by national and international media, and succeeded in persuading the World Bank to withdraw its planned loan for the construction of the dams.

* See the video, “The Kayapo: Out of the Forest” in the Disappearing World Series, Terence Turner, anthropological consultant, 52 minutes. This video covers the 1989 Altamira meeting and campaign against the Xingu dams. Available from the Royal Anthropological Institute(RAI)
here.

After the 1989 Altamira meeting, the Xingú dam scheme remained dormant, but not dead, for two decades. Two years ago it was revived as the centerpiece of the Lula government’s Project for Accelerated Development. As a Brazilian activist remarked at the time, “These big dams are like vampires: you pound a stake through their hearts but they rise again from the grave and you have to do it all over again.”

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All we like sheep

Spring is a perilous time for sheep. Lambs are born in the spring, and often capricious weather can spell their doom. In the spring, many one year-old lambs are slaughtered to provide meat for a feast. It is the time of the sacrifice of the lambs.

Sheep are one of the earliest domesticated animals, and they still figure largely in the economies of pastoralist cultures from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe with China currently having the most sheep of any country in the world. Images of sheep appear in ancient rock art. Their wool provided one of the first textiles for humanity. Artisanal cheese from sheep’s milk is now a highly sought-after product. And don’t forget haggis.

What do cultural anthropologists have to say about this important animal? Compared to the amount of published sources by archaeologists: not much. In my search of AnthropologyPlus and AnthroSource, using the search words “sheep” or ‘lamb,” I found fewer than 30 articles published since 1995. I then looked in Google Scholar, using the search terms “culture sheep” and “culture lamb” and found a few more sources scattered among the many non-anthropological studies.

Several sources in the following list have to do with herding practices. Another prominent theme is the importance of sheep as items of exchange and sacrifice. Others look at sheep in mythology, symbolism, and healing. The most famous individual sheep in the world, Dolly, attracted some recent attention in terms of bioscience and ethics.

Cultural anthropologists have not written much about the animals in our lives, period. So sheep are not any more neglected than are dogs, horses, pigs, and other animals wild or domesticated. Cultural anthropologists have probably written more books with the word “car” than “sheep” in the title. Perhaps these gentle, low-demand, high-yield animals deserve more of us.

The following sources are the result of a few hours’ research and, with apologies again, they are not open-source:

Abu-Rabia, Aref. 1999. Some Notes on Livestock Production among Negev Bedouin Tribes. Nomadic Peoples 3(1):22-30.

Ayantunde, Augustine A., Timothy O. Williams, Henk M. J. Udo, Salvador Fernández-Rivera, and Pierre Hiernaux. 2000. Herders’ Perceptions, Practice, and Problems of Night Grazing in the Sahel: Case Studies from Niger. Human Ecology 28(1):109-140.

Bolin, Inge. 1998. Rituals of Respect: The Secret of Survival in the High Peruvian Andes. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Maggie. 2005. Quartering Sheep at Carnival in Sud Lípez, Bolivia. In Wendy James and David Mills, eds., The Qualities of Time: Anthropological Approaches. Pp. 187-202. New York: Berg Publishers.

Brower, Barbara. 2000. Sheep Grazing in National Forest Wilderness: A New Look at an Old Fight. Mountain Research and Development 20(2):126-129.

Dám, Laszlo. 2001. Buildings of Animal Husbandry on Peasants’ Farms in Hungary. Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 46(3/4):177-227.

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Accountability lost

by Barbara Miller

A category of local conflict in Peru is called conflictos mineros, mining conflicts. The existence of this specific term reflects the frequency of such conflicts in Peru following neoliberal economic reforms in the early 1990s. Fabiana Li, now a Newton International Fellow based at the University of Manchester, conducted research for her doctoral dissertation in anthropology at the University of California at Davis on mining accountability and conflicts in Cajamarca, Peru. In an article in PoLAR, she shows how the EIA (Environmental Impact Assessment) documents and its approval process skew the outcome in favor of the mining companies.

Public mechanisms of evaluation and record-keeping are supposed to hold corporations accountable to local people. Li describes and analyzes the proceedings of a public workshop and a public hearing about the expansion of the country’s largest gold mine. The EIA is intended to serve as an instrument through which risks are made visible to the public. The risks that are shared with the public, however, are those that engineers can manage with mitigation plans. Furthermore, the EIA entrusts companies to carry out background studies on the landscape and the “social component,” to establish the “baseline” characteristics of the site, and to conduct monitoring as the project progresses.

Such company-sponsored studies, not surprisingly, provide a carefully constructed partial picture, erasing or framing out problematic issues. In spite of its claims to public accountability and transparency, the EIA works in non-transparent ways to serve the interests of the mining companies and the neo-liberal state.

Popular participation is emphasized as part of the process. Company representatives listen to the people who appear at the meetings. They take notes for hours on end. A critique of such participation is that it is in fact disempowering because it provides the appearance of public approval. As Li notes, contesting the approval of an EIA is difficult, and only one mining project has ever been halted at the EIA stage.

Nonetheless, many people in Cajamarca and elsewhere in Peru are pursuing creative forms of activism including seeking other scientific opinions to produce “counter-information.” The playing field in terms of scientific expertise, however, is extremely uneven. EIAs, including baseline studies and environmental monitoring, “increasingly rely on the language and tools of large-scale, capital-intensive science.” The need for scientific counter-arguments places a heavy financial burden on NGOs and campesino groups.

The EIA documents and so-called “popular participation” transform “participants” into unwitting or unwilling collaborators who had their chance to speak up during the EIA process. The companies are protecting their interests, using legalized, scientific, and performative means. But even such encircling power doesn’t mean there will never be another Bougainville.

Photo, “Yanacocha Gold Mine”, from Flickr, Creative Commons.

Tramp down Babylon

by Barbara Miller

Babylon has had its ups and downs over many hundreds of years. It is currently in a down phase thanks to the US war and occupation.

Located on the Euphrates River, about an hour’s drive south of Baghdad, it was the world’s largest city at its height with a population of over 200,000. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Sacked and rebuilt and sacked again over the centuries, Babylon is now a sad monument to the power of global politics.

The most significant remains of Babylon’s glory are not in Babylon. The Pergamon Museum in Berlin, for example, houses the famous Ishtar Gate, thanks to the European colonialist hunger for Near Eastern treasures during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and, specifically, the excavations (and extractions) carried out by archaeologist Robert Koldewey.

What is left of Babylon itself? Not much above ground: a tell (mound) and some buildings that were “reconstructed” under Saddam Hussein. After Saddam, came the US occupation.

In 2003, the US army established “Camp Alpha” on top of the remains of the ancient city. According to a CNN.com/world report, a US military spokesperson said that occupation of the site was meant to protect it from looting. A recent United Nations report documents, to the contrary, that the US occupation caused major damage to Babylon.

The United States is supposed to pay $800,000 to repair damages from its occupation of the site. $800,000? Shameful.

No one could argue that Babylon, throughout its history, was a humanitarian state. Social inequality was extreme with slaves building the impressive monuments of early times, leaders were ruthless, heads rolled. On a brighter note, however, the first king of the Babylonian empire, Hammurabi (c 1728-1686 BCE) compiled one of the first written legal compendiums: the Code of Hammurabi.

While images of Hammurabi are found throughout the Western world as a tribute to his contribution, his home is in ruins.

One question: Why did the US military treat Babylon, and many other important sites in Iraq, so disrespectfully? Possible answer: the US military presence in Iraq under Bush had no respect for or interest in any aspect of cultural heritage in the Middle East that is not Christian. Nonetheless, according to a recent New York Times article, the ancient city of Ur was protected from the ravages of war and looting because an airbase was built around it.

A second question: Why is Babylon, along with so many important sites in present-day Iraq, not listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site which would provide some protection? UNESCO has recognized only three World Heritage Sites in Iraq putting it in league with Armenia, Bangladesh, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Turkmenistan, and Uganda. Given its importance in human history, Iraq should be peppered with World Heritage Sites, more along the lines of Italy and Spain, both with more than 40 sites.

Babylon deserves much more than a paltry $800,000 from the US. And I don’t mean just the US government. US contractors and other business interests have reaped outrageously huge profits, in the billions of dollars, from the war and the occupation. These modern-day carpetbaggers should pay back. No one would trust the likes of Halliburton to reconstruct Babylon given their narrow monetary interests and limited skills (laying down asphalt is a big one). But their money would be most welcome to support Iraqi-managed reconstruction of sites damaged by the US presence.

And the Cradle of Civilization deserves far more from UNESCO than three designated sites.

Photo, “Ishtar Gate”, from Flickr via Creative Commons.