The aim of this open-access lecture series is to summarize the evidence on Indigenous wellbeing, with a particular focus being an examination of the variation in measures of wellbeing across the life course. The series will suit students and policy makers working on or researching Indigenous issues, as well as academics with an interest in indigenous people’s wellbeing.
Each lecture is available on as a PDF document with presentation slides and embedded audio, along with an accompanying short formal paper addressing the lecture’s subject.
The series was created by Dr. Nicholas Biddle, a Fellow at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR) at the Australian National University (ANU). He has a Bachelor of Economics (Hons.) from the University of Sydney, a Master of Education degree from Monash University, and a Ph.D. in Public Policy from the ANU where he wrote his thesis on the benefits of and participation in education of Indigenous Australians.
Columbia University announces its Indigenous Studies Summer Program on Indigenous People’s Rights and Policy at Columbia University. The program runs from June 3-14, 2013. The Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER) is now accepting applications from researchers, professionals, practitioners, and advanced students who wish to participate in an intensive two-week summer immersion program at Columbia University on indigenous peoples’ rights and policy.
The program provides an overview and analysis of the major questions in indigenous affairs today, as they have emerged globally in the last decades. The program has an interdisciplinary approach and incorporates lectures and workshops on the most recent and innovative academic research and policy debates on indigenous peoples’ issues. It is complemented by visits and lectures at the United Nations and state and indigenous peoples’ institutions.
Mellon Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor, City University of New York Graduate Center
When: Thu, Apr 12 | 5:30pm – 6:30pm Where: 5th floor Seminar Room, Suite 501
1957 E St, NW
Elliott School of International Affairs
Eben Kirksey first went to West Papua in 1998 as an exchange student. During his later study of West Papua’s resistance to Indonesian occupiers and the forces of globalization, he discovered that collaboration, rather than resistance, was the primary strategy of this dynamic social movement. The revolutionaries have a knack for getting inside institutions of power and building coalitions with unlikely allies, including many Indonesians.
This event is free and open to the public. RSVP here.
Read Kirksey’s past guest post on anthropologyworks here.
Sponsored by the Culture in Global Affairs (CIGA) Program which is part of the Elliott School’s Institute for Global and International Studies
The case concerning the right of return of the Chagos Islanders, who were forcibly removed from their homeland by the British authorities between 1968 and 1973 to make way for the U.S. base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, is before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. In the near future, the judges will rule whether the case falls within the court’s jurisdiction. If it does, a verdict is expected by July or August.
Diego Garcia Atoll, Chagos Islands, British Indian Ocean Territory. WikiCommons
In the meantime, a petition to the Obama Administration is calling for the Chagossian exiles to be able to return to the outer islands of the Chagos Archipelago like Peros Banhos and Salomon, along with financial compensation and targeted employment programs. The petition has just been launched by the SPEAK Human Rights and Environmental Initiative. The organization was founded in 2010 by a small group of Mauritian lawyers, and is working with the Port Louis-based Chagos Refugees Group led by Olivier Bancoult.
The aim of the petition is to collect at least 25,000 signatures by April 4. A successful number of signatories on the “We the People” website will oblige White House staff to review the issue, seek expert opinion and provide an official response. Details can be found here.
Mention the Maldives to many Europeans and most of them will think of a string of paradise islands. Along with other countries in the Indian Ocean like Mauritius and the Seychelles, the Maldives is renowned as a honeymoon destination replete with 5-star hotels and luxury spas. In fact, like Mauritius and the Seychelles the country derives most of its foreign currency from tourism.
Unlike secular Mauritius and the Seychelles, however, Islam is the official religion of the Maldives and public practice of other religions is forbidden. In order to exercise social and cultural control over relationships between the indigenous population and foreign visitors, authorities in the Maldives permit the development of tourist resorts on unpopulated parts of the territory, which consists of 1192 islands stretching 230 miles from south-west India. So far, this strategy has worked very well.
View of the Maldives. Flickr/nicadlr
After 30 years of autocratic rule, the Republic of Maldives became a multi-party democracy in 2008, headed by President Mohamed Nasheed. The newly-elected leader has been praised by other members of the international community for his achievements, especially in creatively publicising the effects of climate change and rising sea levels on low-lying island states in the Indian Ocean and elsewhere. He has also indicated that he intends to open up the inhabited islands of the Maldives to tourists in order to attract more visitors from the new growth economies of China and elsewhere. “We’ve segregated ourselves in these little islands for too long,” President Nasheed told foreign journalists last year. “The tourists don’t get to see the real Maldives and Maldivian culture. In the past there was a desire to segregate the Maldives from certain influences, but it also kept us from ideas and knowledge. Maldivians are Muslims but modern. The time has come to end the segregation from the outside world.”
Now comes the news that Reporters Without Borders new press freedom index 2011-2012 ranks the country at 73 compared with its previous position of 51 in 2010. The reason for the drop? The NGO claims that the “rising climate of religious intolerance” in the country has had a significant impact on freedom of expression.
Like many other relatively closed Islamic societies that are opening up, the Maldives government, which is attempting to steer a middle course and maintain community cohesion, has found it hard to come to terms both with moderate and fundamentalist Islamic critics. Last September, in an attempt to wrong-foot opposition groups the Government issued new “religious unity” regulations, which prevents the media from producing programmes or disseminating unlicensed information that might be designed to “humiliate Allah or his prophets or the holy Quran or the Sunnah of the Prophet (Mohamed) or the Islamic faith.”
While this policy is relatively easy to enforce with traditional media like television, radio and newspapers the Maldives, like all governments, has found new media platforms much harder to control. Nevertheless, in November, the Islamic Ministry ordered that the website of Ismail “Hilath” Rasheed, a moderate Sufi Muslim, was being blocked on the grounds that it was a threat to the “Maldives’ young democracy.” On December 14, Rasheed was arrested and detained before being released on January 6 without charge after his involvement in a “silent protest” in the capital Male when he called for religious tolerance. The protest designed to coincide with Human Rights Day on December 10 was deemed by the country’s police as “unconstitutional,” although Amnesty International was quick to make Rasheed a “prisoner of conscience.”
On January 20, the Maldives police arrested Sheik Imran, a prominent Muslim cleric and leader of the opposition conservative Adhaalath Party (Justice Party). He had accused President Nasheed of encouraging “anti-Islamic waves” and to the “shores” of the Maldives called for the implementation of full Shari’a law. Interestingly, two days previously, the Maldives government issued a statement and warned foreign embassies that it was extremely concerned that “Islamic fundamentalism” could threaten the social fabric of the Sunni-dominated society, as well as the visitor economy, which contributes around 30 per cent or $1.5 billion to GDP.
On the page devoted to “culture” on the Maldives Tourism Board website –- the country’s tagline is “Always Natural” — the final paragraph reads: “Maldivians are quite open to adaptation and are generally welcoming to outside inspiration. The culture has always continued to evolve with the times… Most Maldivians still want to believe in upholding unity and oneness in faith, but recent waves of reform in the country have created a whole new culture of new ideas and attitudes. The effects of the modern world are now embraced, while still striving to uphold the people’s identity, traditions and beliefs.”
The Maldives, like many societies organized on the basis of kinship and religious faith, is attempting to solve the conundrum of how to allow measured social and cultural change that maintains community cohesion and generates economic growth when many of the drivers for those changes — secular and religious ideologies — lie outside its borders and therefore beyond its control.
One of the great success stories of the travel sector in recent decades has been the development and growth in ecotourism, which is currently estimated to be worth around $60 billion annually. Companies, which operate in diverse environments, including cities, villages, religious sites and wildlife sanctuaries, have realized that to be perceived by consumers as “eco-friendly” bestows considerable status, especially where it has become the dominant benchmark of the new visitor economies in countries like Costa Rica, Ecuador, Kenya, Madagascar and Nepal. In these nations ecotourism contributes a significant amount to GDP, at the same time as it brings in much-needed foreign currency.
However, ecotourism is not always a progressive force. For example, the sector has sometimes been accused of profiteering at the expense of environmental degradation and hiding its sins behind “greenwashing.” Ecotourism has also been accused of the violation of human rights by colluding with the displacement of indigenous peoples — the shocking fate of the Maasai when the Masai Mara National Reserve in south-west Kenya was established in 1948 being a prime example.
The Developing World’s 10 Best Ethical Destinations. Source: Ethical Traveler
Some cultural anthropologists have added to the criticisms. For example, Carrier and Macleod claim that the distinction between ecotourism and mass tourism is difficult to sustain when “the destinations and experiences sold to tourists are abstracted from their contexts, thus inducing a distorted image of them and of ecotourism itself” (p. 315).
So, the purity of the “ecotourism” brand image has been damaged to some extent: it is no longer self-explanatory (and self-justifying), and many consumers are now uncertain about whether to trust the claims being made. Is there now a gap in the marketplace? The people behind Ethical Traveler, a small, non-profit organization that is part of the San Francisco-based Earth Island Institute, certainly think so. It has the tagline “Empowering Travelers to Change the World.”
Ethical Traveler has just issued its fifth annual “top ten” list of the developing world’s best ethical destinations for 2012. They are Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Latvia, Serbia and Uruguay and four island states, Bahamas, Dominica, Mauritius and Palau. All except the Bahamas, Mauritius and Serbia appeared on the 2011 list.
Using data from institutions like Freedom House, Millennium Challenge Corporation and the World Bank, three initial criteria — “environmental protection”, “social welfare” and “human rights” –- were used to draw up a shortlist of 30 countries. Then a more in-depth study was carried out to identify the actions of governments over the previous 12 months, in particular to find out whether policies implemented have improved or degraded the welfare of the population and the environment. This makes the Ethical Traveler list of approved ethical destinations broader in scope than many mainstream eco-tourism locations, which tend to have a much narrower remit focused on environmentalism.
This special issue invites papers from a diversity of international perspectives and country contexts, and from a variety of education disciplines, to address the theme of migration, religion, and education. Education should be considered broadly to include all stages / levels of formal education, as well as non-formal and informal education.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
* religion and identity among migrant students
* the “problematization” of religious minority students in host society schools
* representation of migrant’s religions in school curricula
* religious literacy among education policy makers
* religious awareness among teachers and administrators
* religion as a form of cultural capital among migrant students
* religion and migrant teachers
* court decisions bearing on the religious identities and practices of migrant students
Please send abstracts to Bruce Collet colleba@bgsu.edu by February 15, 2012. Responses to submitted abstracts will be sent by April 2012. Full article submissions from invited papers will be due July 1, 2012. Papers invited for the special issue will undergo blind review procedures.
This is not news to cultural anthropologists. What is news is that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has adopted this “innovative” approach. That’s very good news. Gates Foundation
It is always been a major challenge to get those in power, with money, at the top, to adopt a more grassroots, local approach. Now let’s see if big money can actually lead to big changes in people’s well being by listening to the people (and the people who study people first hand).
It is essential for the Gates Foundation to also support adequate funding for long-term monitoring and evaluation of social impact, not just recording stats on micro-outputs. We need to be able to see what various innovations accomplish five, ten, twenty years out. We need baseline studies now and follow-up studies on into the future. Local people could be trained to collect basic social data and enter it into a computerized database each week, week after week. In this way, development monitoring and evaluation becomes participatory and sustainable. It’s development for local people, with local people, and monitored by local people.
Sounds like the Gates Foundation may be on an important learning and listening curve. Stay tuned.
As research manager of the Goldfields Land and Sea Council (GLSC), I was involved in your discussion of Aboriginal genome research (Nature 477, 522–523; 2011) and would like to make it clear that the decision to allow analysis of the 90-year-old hair sample was made by the duly mandated people.
It is good that scientists are learning of the importance of indigenous, “traditional,” or “local” knowledge. It is good that funding agencies are beginning to realize the value of documenting indigenous knowledge.
I very much hope that the “value” scientists are finding in indigenous knowledge is not good only for the scientists’ resumes. I hope that all such research projects are truly collaborative and have direct benefits for indigenous peoples of Arctic regions. In the quotation in paragraph one, the verb “using” indigenous knowledge is a bit alarming.
The aim of this open-access lecture series is to summarize the evidence on Indigenous wellbeing, with a particular focus being an examination of the variation in measures of wellbeing across the life course. The series will suit students and policy makers working on or researching Indigenous issues, as well as academics with an interest in indigenous people’s wellbeing.
anthropologyworks 