Containers of Nourimanba organized for storage at newly opened Nourimanba Production Facility in Haiti. Photo: Jon Lascher/Partners In Health
• Peanuts! For health and prosperity
ABC News reported on the opening in Haiti of a new plant in Haiti’s Central Plateau that is making Nourimanba, a peanut-based food used to treat children for severe malnutrition. The peanuts are grown by Haitian farmers, and the project was launched by Paul Farmer’s non-profit, Partners In Health. The first shipments produced at the facility have been distributed to clinics run by Partners In Health. A pilot program will provide support for about 300 farmers to improve the quality and quantity of the peanut supply. The project will improve child health and increase farmers’ incomes.
“If I hadn’t had superior health insurance, I would have died many years ago — a life cut short by a lack of access to health care. It makes me angry that millions of Americans cannot not share my good fortune. For any number of reasons — a work-related accident, a sudden debilitating illness, an unexpected job loss — a hardworking person can be rapidly thrown into poverty, which usually means living without health insurance.”
The Rohingya, a Muslim minority in Burma, have long considered among the world’s most persecuted peoples.Denied citizenship and rendered stateless by the Burmese government, the 800,000 Rohingya lack basic rights, including the right to work, marry, and travel freely, and routinely suffer severe abuse.
Following violent attacks in 2012 that destroyed numerous Rohingya communities, more than 100,000 are now confined to displacement camps and segregated areas, where they continue to be subjected to violence including crimes against humanity.
When: November 4th, 6:30 p.m.
Where: Rubinstein Auditorium
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW
Washington, DC
Featuring: Greg Constantine, Photographer
Holly Atkinson, MD, Director of the Human Rights Program
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Past President, Physicians for Human Rights
Maung Tun Khin, President, Burmese Rohingya Organization UK (BROUK)
The speakers will discuss the photographs and the stories of individuals whose lives have been affected by violence against the Rohingya and Muslims elsewhere in Burma.
Images of the Rohingya displaced in Burma and in exile taken by prize-winning photographer Greg Constantine will be projected each evening from November 4th to 8th on the Museum’s exterior walls on 15th Street SW (Raoul Wallenberg Place). This exhibition is free and open to the public.
The Georgetown University Conflict Resolution Program is calling for student papers, art, and videography for their conference, “Managing Diversity in Divided Societies.” Submissions should address the following questions:
What tools and mechanisms best promote diversity? How is diversity best approached in conflict societies? How can the arts be used to engage diversity and enhance societal well being?
Cash prizes will be awared to the top three finalists in the categories of diversity, conflict, and peace-building. Submissions are open to third and fourth year undergraduate students and graduate students.
Abstracts will be accepted until October 15th. Submissions are due on December 1st. The conference will be held on January 30-31st.
The Globe and Mail (Canada) carried an article based on a lunch conversation with Jim Yong Kim, medical doctor, medical anthropologist, and former university president, marking the end of his first year as president of the World Bank. The article discusses the pros and cons of targets. Targets, even wildly improbable ones, can inspire action and achieve change, even if the target is not achieved. Or they can create embarrassment when failure is seen as the outcome.
The World Bank in Washington, D.C. on April 16, 2013. Flickr: Simone D. McCourte/World Bank
Kim explains his dedication to a new World Bank target of eliminating extreme poverty worldwide by 2030. He is quoted as saying, “What would be really frightening to me is if people like me, people like the World Bank staff, were so concerned about their own lives that they would not grab the opportunity to set a bold target … It took a very long time to convince people that we should have this target, but now that we do, I just see it as a huge gift…”
[Blogger’s note: no one would argue that eliminating poverty, especially extreme poverty, is not a laudable goal. The question arises, though, of the chosen policy pathways toward the goal. Unfortunately for many small scale communities in developing countries, Kim plans to promote large dam construction and hydroelectric development which will destroy such people’s livelihoods].
• World Bank in Africa on the decline?
The New York Times published an op-ed on the declining importance of World Bank loans to Africa in spite of new World Bank efforts, especially in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The authors argue that: “The World Bank has done important work in promoting good governance and evaluating reform efforts. But its latest pledge of aid to the Democratic Republic of the Congo sends a very mixed message, coming at a time when the International Monetary Fund has been cutting its loan programs to the country because of concerns about poor governance.”
World Bank Pres. Kim and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon laugh in Kinshasa. But the Bank's loan programs in Africa are declining. Flickr/World Bank Photo Collection
World Bank Director Jim Yong Kim is quoted as saying: “There are always going to be problems and downsides with the governance of places that are fragile [but he adds that through investment and aid]…we can both reduce the conflict and improve governance.” The authors point out that Kim’s argument assumes that more World Bank spending means better government. Despite the billions in aid the D.R.C. has already received, however, “Kinshasa has not felt compelled to improve. It’s not clear why the bank’s new effort will be different.”
The University of South Florida News carried an article about ongoing research into the consequences of new Latino immigrants, African Americans and working class Whites coming face to face at work in the U.S. South and how to better bridge differences. The project is led by cultural anthropologist Angela Stuesse, an assistant professor at the University of South Florida. Here are some excerpts, with some paraphrasing, from the article:
Angela Stuesse accompanied leaders from a Guatemalan Mam immigrant community on a political education tour in Mississippi. Photo by Angela Stuesse
Recent immigrants and people descended from earlier immigrants – whether voluntary or forced – often eye each other warily, sometimes finding themselves at odds. Making a connection can be as simple as knowing how to start a conversation – one that can become the basis for working together – rather than a fight. But as Stuesse has found, such conversations often don’t just happen. And if they do, they can be touchy. “Across cultures, knowing what not to say can be as important as knowing what to say and how to say it,” points out, and “Immigrants, too, may hold racial and other biases toward those they come into contact with. There’s a need to help groups understand each other. Ideally, they can work together and develop mutual respect.”
Stuesse’s research has produced her forthcoming book, Globalization ‘Southern Style, which describes the transformation of small-town Mississippi when Latino immigrants begin working and organizing alongside African Americans in the area’s chicken processing plants.
While working in Mississippi, Stuesse was a founding collaborator of the poultry worker center, MPOWER, where she drew upon her research to help facilitate structured dialogue and spaces for political education and cultural sharing among immigrant and U.S.-born poultry worker leaders.
She has also developed Intergroup Resources, a comprehensive new online resource center that is becoming a national network. The user-friendly Intergroup Resources website built and designed by Stuesse’s research team offers curricula, dialogue guides, educational materials and descriptions of the efforts of various groups.
Around 2 million people in the U.K. — roughly 3 percent of the total population — come from “mixed race” backgrounds. The big surprise is that the estimate is twice the number recorded in official statistics. This finding comes from a study by Dr. Alita Nandi at the University of Essex’s Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) using data from the U.K. Household Longitudinal Study for BBC 2’s Newsnight program.
If this figure is accurate then there are more people of “mixed race” than any single, traditional ethnic minority – for example, “Black Caribbean”, “Black African”, “Indian”, “Pakistani”, “Bangladeshi” or “Chinese.” The “mixed race” group has its fair share of celebrities: Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton, Surrey cricketer and 2006 Strictly Come Dancing winner Mark Ramprakash, Manchester United soccer players Ryan Giggs and Rio Ferdinand, pop singer Leona Lewis, and double Olympic champion Dame Kelly Holmes. But now, according to BBC News home editor Mark Easton, “in multiracial Britain, ethnicity is increasingly not the point. Mixed race is mainstream.”
Mark Ramprakash & Kristina Rihanoff. Flickr/The Tarletons
The mixed race news story hasn’t come out of nowhere. In fact, BBC 2 television is currently running a Mixed Race Season so Dr. Nandi’s statistics produced for Newsnight were part of a high profile PR campaign. The first offering on 27 September, Shirley, was a critically acclaimed biopic of Welsh singer, Shirley Bassey, who is of Nigerian and English descent and born in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay. Bassey, famous for singing the theme to three James Bond movies, was brilliantly played by the young, upcoming actor, Ruth Negga, who is of Ethiopian and white Irish heritage.
Last week’s program was the first of a new three-part series, Mixed Britannica, presented by George Alagiah, Sri Lankan–born BBC 1 television news anchor who is of Tamil descent and married to Frances, a white British woman. The couple have two “mixed race” sons. So Alagiah declared a personal interest in the subject.
The Mixed Britannica series explores the history of relationships of people from different ethnic backgrounds in the U.K. Not surprisingly, the first program broadcast covered the port areas which have been home to seafarers from around the world since the mid- and late-19th century – Yemenis in South Shields, Chinese in Liverpool and the Limehouse area of London’s East End, and Black Caribbeans and West Africans, Somalis, and Yemenis in Tiger Bay.
Dame Kelly Holmes. Flickr/conservativeparty
One of those interviewed was Connie Ho, who was born in Limehouse in 1921 to a Chinese father and a white, English mother. Ho told Alagiah how she and other children of mixed ethnicities were taken to a room above a local restaurant to have their facial characteristics measured and eye colour recorded by eugenicists. This was at the same time that scientists in Germany were about to embark on a series of gruesome experiments with people from Jewish and other despised minority groups. It was only after the Second World War when the full horror of the Holocaust was revealed that British scientists realised the possible impact of their pseudo-scientific studies and pulled back from any further research that might stigmatise and threaten the lives of particular groups of people.
The documentary used archival film footage and still photographs to good effect. The Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking, Surrey, which was opened in 1869 by orientalist Dr Gottleib Wilhelm Leitner, to provide visiting Muslim students with a place of worship was featured. It is the oldest purpose-built mosque in the UK (mentioned in an earlier post) and is an immense source of pride for the 10,000-strong Muslim (predominantly Pakistani) community that now lives in the Woking area. It was highlighted because it was the place where 22nd Sultan of Johor, reputed to be one of the world’s richest men, married a Glasgow-born white woman, Helen Bartholomew Wilson, the former wife of his physician, in 1930.
It’s August and a time when professors try to clear out accumulated reprints, notes and other collected items. Tonight, I spent a while attacking some stacks in my home office. In a cluster of materials relating to social conflict and violence, I found a clipping that I had saved from the Washington Post, dated March 8, 2008.
It’s not really an article, so much as a series of graphic displays that caught my attention three years ago and now, again. A bar graph shows the rise in number of hate groups in the U.S. since the year 2000. A series of maps show the numbers of particular hate groups by states.
Good news: membership in the Ku Klux Klan declined dramatically since its founding in 1865. Bad news: the size of other hate groups has surged “especially along the border in Arizona, California and Texas.”
These figures are the result of dedicated work by the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. I urge you to visit the website. Explore a map of the United States and the links to currently active hate groups by state. Beware: you may not be able to sleep well after this excursion into the darkness of hate.
On a brighter note, another page offers you an opportunity to take a stand against hate and create a non-hate space on the U.S. map.
It was only a matter of hours between the blast in central Oslo and my most extensive and exhausting engagement with international media since I started out as an anthropologist in the 1980s. Between Friday night and Wednesday, I spoke on radio, on television (via a mobile phone), to newspapers and magazines from China to Chile, and wrote articles for nearly a dozen publications in five countries.
My priorities shifted in a matter of hours. Our holiday house was turned into a makeshift media centre, and the computer was online almost 24/7.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen in Cuba, 2007. Courtesy of the author. My engagement with the terrorist attack on Norway is easy to explain. First, although rightwing extremism is not my field of research, cultural diversity in Europe and Norway is, as well as nationalism and ethnicity. Second, I have first-hand experience of the new, Islamophobic kind of nationalism, having been on the receiving end of relatively unpleasant attacks from these quarters for several years.
Actually, I am the only contemporary intellectual mentioned by the terrorist in his writings and YouTube video – a symbol of everything that went wrong with Norway. I have asked YouTube to remove the video.
A few words about the articles: The earliest piece, for OpenDemocracy, was an initial attempt to make sense of the catastrophe and to begin reflecting on the consequences for Norwegian society. It overlaps substantially with articles in Sydsvenska Dagbladet and Information, which, respectively, cover southern Sweden including Lund and Malmö, and a smallish, but select left-leaning audience in Denmark. The title of these Scandinavian-published articles, “Men who hate social democrats,” plays on the Scandinavian title of the first novel in Stieg Larsson’s trilogy (Men Who Hate Women). Continue reading “22 July, 2011. Oslo”→
Around 20 years ago, I paid a visit to the Mahatma Gandhi Institute (MGI) in Mauritius to consult the records of Indians who were brought from the subcontinent to work as indentured labourers in the sugar plantations after slavery was abolished in 1835.
Before examining any documents, I was invited to meet one of the island’s leading experts on Indo-Mauritian culture. During our conversation, I raised the subject of caste and its contemporary significance among different groups of Hindus in Mauritius. “It doesn’t exist any more,” the scholar said. “Even in the village where I come from caste is not important — people marry who they like.” The scholar paused before declaring: “The only people who use caste are the politicians at election time.”
A group of Brahmins from the Parbu Caste in Bombay in the 1870s. Flickr/Museum of Photographic Arts
I was doubly surprised at these remarks. First, because among my fellow academics there is an ethic of not hiding sensitive or embarrassing facts. Second, on the basis of having made several trips to the Indian Ocean island, I was convinced that caste among the Hindu population is an important principle of social and cultural organization. Indeed, the big questions from an anthropological perspective were: how important and what were the variations, say, between towns and villages?
• The trauma of war and rape
In the first of a two-part story, CNN highlights the work of cultural anthropologist Victoria Sanford, whose research has involved listening to victim narratives of Maya women in Guatemala since her doctoral studies at Stanford University in the early 1990s. A Spanish speaker who had worked with Central American refugees, she befriended the few Maya in the area. “I was moved by their stories, but even more so because they were intent on someone hearing them,” she said, “And no one was listening.” She joined the nonprofit Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology investigative team and went to Guatemala. Sanford talked to the women, who told other women about her, and soon she was recording their stories. Over time, and after hearing many stories, Sanford suffered from a kind of “secondary trauma” including paralysis.
• Conflict in Uganda and a possible love complication
The New York Times quoted Mahmood Mamdani, professor anthropology and government at Columbia university, in an article about an ongoing bitter personal rivalry in Uganda that involves President Musaveni and his rival and former friend, Kizza Besigye. Things may be complicated, the article suggests, by a woman, Winnie Byanyima, who is married to the president’s rival but who may have had a romantic involvement earlier with the president. Other matters are likely part of the story as well. Mamdani comments that the government is “clueless” about how to deal with Besigye’s opposition movement. He didn’t comment on the love factor.
• Culture and asthma
Cultural context and behavior shape the diagnosis and treatment of asthma according to David Van Sickle, medical anthropologist and asthma epidemiologist of Reciprocal Labs in Madison, Wisc. Van Sickle’s fieldwork in India revealed that physicians were hesitant to diagnose patients with asthma because of social stigma.
• Treating autism: two cases in Croatia Drug Week covered findings from a study conducted in Osijek, Croatia, which discusses the treatment of autism in a boy and a girl with risperidone. K. Dodigcurkovic and colleagues published their study in Collegium Antropologicum.
• Profile of a forensic anthropologist
The Gainesville Sun carried a profile of Michael Warren, an associate professor of anthropology and director of the C.A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florida. He has conducted hundreds of forensic skeletal examinations for the state’s medical examiners and has participated in the identification of victims of mass disasters and ethnic cleansing, including the attacks on the World Trade Center, Hurricane Katrina and the recovery and identification of the victims found within the mass graves of the Balkans. He recently testified in the Casey Anthony murder trial.
• Medieval persecution
The remains of 17 bodies found at the bottom of a medieval well in England could have been victims of persecution, new evidence suggests. DNA analysis indicates that the victims were Jewish. They were likely murdered or forced to commit suicide. The skeletons date to the 12th-13th centuries, a time of persecution of Jewish people in Europe. Professor Sue Black leads the research team. She is a forensic anthropologist in the University of Dundee’s Centre for Anthropology and Human Identification. Continue reading “Anthro in the news 6/27/2011”→
anthropologyworks 