This event is hosted by the Departments of Botany and Anthropology of the National Museum of Natural History in collaboration with the United States Botanic Garden and supported by the Cuatrecasas Family Foundation.
The Ninth Annual Smithsonian Botanical Symposium
September 24-25, 2010, Washington, DC
Continue reading “Food For Thought: 21st Century Perspectives on Ethnobotany”
Guest post by Sean Carey
Mark Twain famously quoted a local person in his 1897 travelogue, Following the Equator: “You gather the idea that Mauritius was made first, and then heaven; and that heaven was copied after Mauritius.”
Anyone lucky enough to fly to the Indian Ocean island will understand something of why this sentiment was recorded. The view as the plane starts its descent to the airport is stunning — the central mountain range looks as if it has been cut from some dark grey and green material with some very sharp scissors. Towns and small villages dot the landscape. As the plane comes into land at Plaisance on the south-east coast you see a patchwork of green sugar fields, which contrasts with the azure water gently rippling within the coral lagoon.
Little wonder, then, that with these physical attributes the Mauritius tourist sector, which started in a small way in the early 1970s, has expanded greatly. Even with the current global economic downturn around 915,000 visitors are expected in 2010. In fact, the country’s tourist sector often referred to as one the “pillars of the economy” — the others are sugar, textiles, ICT, offshore banking and luxury property — contributed 7.4 percent of the $10 billion economy in 2009. Significantly, it remains the island’s main source of foreign exchange.
Screensaver worthy: a view of Mauritius. Credit: Tim Parkinson, creative commons licensed on Flickr.
It is nearly 40 years since Indo-Trinidadian writer, V.S. Naipaul, referred to Mauritius as an “overcrowded barracoon” and a “half-made society,” and predicted economic collapse and social mayhem. He was wrong and has since apologized. (In fact, a much better guide to the history and social make up of Mauritius is provided by Norwegian anthropologist, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, in Common Denominators, a brilliant analysis of the island’s polyethnicity, identity politics and nationalism.)
But there can be little doubt that contemporary travel writers love to visit Mauritius, because it produces such good copy. In the last few years I have yet to see a bad review in the mainstream press. Mauritius is often referred to as a “paradise island” which is easy enough to conclude if you are paid to stay in some of the big five-star hotels that punctuate the coastline — Trou aux Biches, Le Touessrok and the Royal Palm are good examples — and are waited on hand and foot. For example, a recent article by Erin O’Dwyer in the Sydney Morning Herald is fairly typical of its kind:
“If what people want most in a holiday is good food, great beaches and a glimpse of local culture, then Mauritius has it all… Golf and snorkelling are island mainstays, though most resorts have a hectic schedule of activities — from archery and bocce to yoga and tai chi — and the spa is never far away, either.”
Continue reading “Cruise ships to heaven: Mauritius expands tourist sector”
• If Clef were president
Louis Herns Marcelin, a Haitian-born cultural anthropology professor at the University of Miami is paraphrased in the Seattle Times as saying that people with money and influence in Haiti are more likely to fear outsiders.
• About the mosque (you know which one)
An article in the Huffington Post discussed how Muslims around the world are watching the US debate about the proposed mosque and community center at Park 51 in New York City near the location of the former World Trade Center towers. It included commentary from Zubair Ali, a retired Pakistani professor of anthropology who has lived in the US and who is presumably Muslim. He said that any decision to stop the mosque will empower those who say the US is waging a war against Islam. The New York Times included this statement from Muntasir Sattar, an anthropology student at Columbia University: “It’s been nine years, but it feels like we haven’t moved an inch since then to come to terms with the issues.”
• Take your cruise ship and…
Mauritius is pumping up efforts to promote cruise ship tourism. According to cultural anthropologist Sean Carey of the Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism at Roehampton University, the Vanilla Island should tell the cruise ships to shove off since little evidence indicates any long term positive effects for the destination while much evidence suggests negative environmental and social effects.
• Dilemma about book on nuclear testing resolved
Cultural anthropologist Hugh Gusterson of George Mason University is relieved to know that nuclear testing will not start again. That means he can carry on with his current book plans.
• Rural Thais no longer provincial
William Klausner, one of the “most senior and best known observers of rural Thailand,” has urged Thailand to address its urban-rural divide and city people’s disdain toward rural people: “The villagers are no longer uneducated and they’re no longer provincial…today they have mobile phones, televisions, satellite dishes and ‘even the odd computer in the village’.” Hope might instead lie in the maintenance of a healthy disdain of the “provincial” people toward the city dwellers.
• Get out of my genes
Don’t freshmen have enough to worry about? A plan to offer free genome scans to incoming freshmen at the University of California at Berkeley has been modified under protest from many students. Cultural anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes supported the state’s decision to back off from the tests. The Dean of Biological Sciences was not pleased.
• What can you do with a degree in anthropology?
Much appreciation to the Guardian for posing this question and offering some insights. Readers of this blog know that with a BA in anthropology you can, for example, become a top chef (Rick Bayless), a hip hop star (Ndeka), a novelist (Camilla Gibb), leading financial journalist (Gillian Tett), or documentary-maker and author (Sebastian Junger). Go for it, anthros.
• Speaking of which, a great job for anthros: film producer
Michael Lieber, a former cultural anthropologist, is producing a new political action thriller in which an anthropologist goes to West Africa to clear the name of a friend who is implicated in a terrorist attack. James Bond screen writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade are involved. This could be good! Can you imagine swapping out the anthropologist in the lead part for….an economist?
• Last slave ship to the US
Just as there was a first one, there had to be a last one and thank goodness for that. Neil Norman, anthropology professor at the College of William and Mary in Virginia is excavating sites in north Mobile county, Alabama, to learn about the lives of slaves who arrived from Benin on the Clotilde in 1860.
• Students excavate Civil War POW camp in Georgia
Mary Craft, a graduate from Gainesville State College, discovered the camp and is now working with others to excavate the site and develop the exhibit about it.
• Addicted to archaeology
The Frederick NewsPost carried a story about student excavators working at an African American slave site in Maryland. It highlights the dedication of Shayla Monroe, a senior archaeology major at Howard University.
An interview by Maggie Ronkin with Fayyaz Baqir, Director of the Akhter Hameed Khan Resource Center, Islamabad, Pakistan
MR: What regions of Pakistan and sectors of the population are affected most by the tragic flooding?
FB: Vast swathes of land in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (previously the Northwest Frontier Province), Southern Punjab (the Siraiki region of the Punjab), Sindh, and Balochistan have been devastated by the recent floods. These floods are considered to be the worst in the entire world during the past hundred years. It is not an exaggeration that fifteen million families have been rendered homeless, and hundreds of thousands of homes have been wiped off the face of the earth. Hundreds of villages are no more. Standing crops over thousands of acres, cattle, infrastructure, and productive assets of millions of families have been lost due to flooding. A woman from a very well off and respected family of a rural district contacted by phone said “Everything is gone. We are beggars”. Scores of women from small farm and landless families burst into tears when asked about their plight. “There is no food, no water, no medicine, no help” most of them narrated. If they do not receive assistance soon, they may reach the point where they think that there is “no hope”. Such a situation will add another dimension to the crisis because desperate minds are fertile ground for militants. This is a great humanitarian crisis to which the world’s conscience needs to respond. The scale of this tragedy is so enormous that the country’s entire population is reeling in shock.
MR: What does the devastation in Pakistan look like to you on the ground?
FB: Thousands of human settlements are under ten or fifteen-foot deep water. Dead cattle can be found everywhere. Innumerable people are stranded in areas surrounded by water. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, children, and elderly people who managed to move out of their houses leaving behind their assets accumulated over a life time have squatted along the roads. Tents are in extremely short supply, so the homeless sit under the burning sun without any shade to cover their heads. They often seem overwhelmed and unable to decide what to do. There are shortages of food, safe drinking water, and medicine. Whenever food arrives, scrambling for it leads to scuffles, and inevitably, the poor, weak, and households headed by women are hurt the most. There is no organized, visible, and dependable government assistance available.
Via WAPA we recently received this request for contributions from Carol J. Ellick and Joe Watkins:
Joe Watkins and I are in the process of revising a manuscript for Left Coast Press and we need your help to broaden the perspective. “The AnthropologyGraduate’s Guide: From Student to Career” is intended to provide practical steps that will assist students with the transition from student to a career in anthropology. The stories, scenarios, and activities presented in the book assist the reader in learning how to plan for the next five years, write a letter of introduction, construct a resume and a CV, and how to best present the knowledge, skills, and abilities learned in class to prospective employers. The products created through reading the book and completing the exercises are curated in a portfolio which at the completion of the book is ready for application to most any job.
The book is based on a class we taught at University of New Mexico. Students in “Avenues to Professionalism” felt that this class was the most practical and useful of their educational career. Our goal through the publication of this book is to bring that same benefit to other anthropology students, but we need your help in providing stories of others in how they obtained their career that utilizes their anthropology degree. In class, we simply invited guest speakers in. For the book, we would like to invite other practicing professionals to tell their stories. We are both archaeologists. We need the voice from the other disciplines/sub-fields.
Basically we need two things.
1) We need stories that describe how you transitioned from student to your career. These stories should describe what you thought you would do, the types of jobs you held, and what you currently do. It’s important to list the different employers you’ve had as you progressed through your career. The description should be written in a conversational tone, as if you were talking to a student about your career path.
2) We need quotable quotes that we can use in various chapters. They should say something about why you chose a career in an applied context, what you found to be the most useful from your anthropology degree, or words of advice to students interested in doing what you do.
In every case, it would be most useful to quote you directly so please include your name, the level of degree you obtained (BA, MA, PhD) and the sub-field you studied, your current title, and who you work for. We will contact you prior to using your story or quote.
Please send your stories and quotes as soon as possible. We realize that this is a short time frame, but we only need a couple of paragraphs, maximum. We received the manuscript and comments back yesterday and the goal is to complete the revision by August 31. IF we can do this, the book will be published and on the table at the AAA meetings, November 17-21, 2010, in New Orleans. We will also make sure it is on the table at the SfAA meeting in Seattle!
Submissions or questions should be sent to Carol off-list: cjellick@sbcglobal.net. To see the book promo, go to the “What’s New” section on the Left Coast Press and select “Anthropology” link.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Joe & Carol
Carol J. Ellick holds a B.A. in anthropology from The Evergreen State College and an M.A. in education, with a specialization in curriculum and instruction, from Chapman University. Joe Watkins is currently the Director of the Native American Studies Program at the University of Oklahoma, as well as an Adjunct Associate Professor in the University’s Department of Anthropology.
Blogger’s note: I depend largely on my Google reader system to feed me the anthropology news every week for my weekly round-up of “Anthro in the news.” But a lot that is anthropological goes on under the covers, so to speak: it is just not named “anthropology.”
Out of curiosity, I went to Google news yesterday and typed in “Paul Farmer.” Farmer is probably the most famous living anthropologist who is not known primarily as an anthropologist. That’s why news items about him don’t pop up in my Google reader.
Here’s the catch of the past few days from Google news about Paul Farmer, cultural anthropologist, doctor, and humanitarian activist.
• Book review in JAMA
Partners in Health: The Paul Farmer Reader has been published by the University of California Press. It is what it says it is: a collection of Farmer’s writings. It was just reviewed in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Not many anthropology books get reviewed in JAMA.
• On cancer
The Times of India carried an article about a recent pronouncement by medical specialists in the United States that cancer is a global health issue of high priority. The article quotes Paul Farmer, via the Lancet, as saying “There are clearly effective interventions that can prevent or ease suffering due to many malignancies, and that is surely our duty as physicians or policy makers or health advocates.”
• On why care about Pakistan
An essay in the Huffington Post salutes Paul Farmer in a paragraph pointing to “troubling contrasts” between the amount of aid pledged and given to Haiti after the January earthquake compared to the “averting of eyes” from Pakistan’s tragedy. The author says: “Dr. Paul Farmer sums it up pithily in the title of his book, The Uses of Haiti. The uses of Pakistan are different. We need to move beyond the uses of both our countries and toward understanding them accurately and respectfully in their own terms. Our understanding of Haiti should be more political and of Pakistan less so, or differently so.”
• Pay back time
An open letter to French president Nicolas Sarkozy from 90 academics, authors, journalists, and human rights activists around the world urged the French government to repay the 90 million gold francs that Haiti was forced to pay for its independence. Paul Farmer says “there are powerful arguments in favour of the restitution of the French debt.”
• Staying alive is more than medical
Fonkoze, an NGO that provides micro-credit loans in Haiti, realized that its programs miss the most needy. Fonkoze talked with Paul Farmer who said that his organization, Partners in Health, would create Fonkoze branches at all their hospitals. This partnership sounds promising and could help with the following comment from Farmer: “I’m really tired of taking these people who are close to death and making them better again, and then I have to watch them starve to death because they have no way to make a living.”
Image: “Paul Farmer speaks at IDEO,” from flickr user GlobalX, licensed with Creative Commons.
Guest post by Morgan Keay
This post is an analytical literature review, with bibliography, of recent sources that use anthropological methods to explore threats to indigenous peoples, the implications of the threats/factors, and the responses of indigenous groups. It was originally prepared for a graduate seminar at George Washington University on “Culture, Risk and Security” in spring 2009.
A broad range of factors — including those alleged to threaten land, identity, rights, reputation — and a broad geographic scope — ranging from Siberia to Papua New Guinea — are featured in this essay. This breadth illustrates the diversity of threats faced by indigenous peoples and how indigenous people perceive and respond to these threats in widely divergent contexts. Trends and themes will be discussed with regard to who assesses or identifies threat, the nature of the threat, and the subsequent threat-response strategy of indigenous communities.
Who Assesses Threat?
With regard to factors that affect indigenous peoples, what is perceived as threatening by one party may be benign to another. Non indigenous actors such as indigenous rights activists, NGOs, or anthropologists may be quick to raise alarms over the very same factor indigenous peoples actively seek out (Donahoe 2008, Errington and Gewertz 1996). Anthropologists, for example, may assess the practice of neo-shamanism by Anglo Americans and Europeans as a form of cultural appropriation and thus a threat to the cultural integrity of shamanist indigenous groups (Wallis 1999), while an indigenous shaman may assess the phenomenon as neutral or even beneficial for the visibility of their traditions. Vice versa, unconcerned outsiders or those with a different stake in an issue may not recognize the risks associated with a given factor, while indigenous peoples see it as a clear threat (Collaredo-Mansfield 2002). Even among indigenous peoples, a single factor may be assessed differently, as is the case with ethnic policy and identity-based land/resource legislation in Siberia (Donahoe 2008), or the arrival of an extractive industry in indigenous territory in Brazilian Amazonia (Turner 1995), which are perceived as threats by some indigenous groups and individuals and as opportunity by others.
The factors explored in this essay may be understood by evaluating them in terms of themes about who assesses them as threatening, and the level of ambiguity or consolidation of that assessment. A factor that is perceived as a threat uniformly by all members of an indigenous group, and by a variety of distinct outside agents might be classified as a “clear threat,” whereas a factor that is ambiguously assessed among indigenous groups and individuals or among outside entities may be a “potential threat” or “threat-opportunity.” Environmental degradation, for example, might fall under the former, while at the same time, mining activities may fall under the latter (Turner 1995). The term “projected threat” may be appropriate for factors assessed as being threatening by an outsider but benign or even attractive to an indigenous group. This is the case with commercialization of ritual associated with “modernity” for the Chambri in Papua New Guinea (Errington and Gewertz 1996).
Continue reading “What lurks at the margin for indigenous peoples”
• Put out the fire
Experts are debating how to stop the fires in Russia which are now spreading under the surface and how to deal with the smoke and fumes. Lisa Curran, professor of environment and anthropology at Stanford University, studies peat fires. The Wall Street Journal quotes her on their health effects: “There are a lot of really nasty things that are given off when peat is burned–carbon monoxide, sulfates, nitrous oxide…They cause respiratory problems and burning eyes when smoke is in the air.”
• Many meanings of the Muslim headscarf
An article in the New York Times about multiple and shifting meanings of Muslim women’s headscarves quoted Hanan Sabea, an anthropology professor at the American University of Cairo. She explained that in Egypt, no clear consensus exists about the headscarf’s meaning in a time when the majority of women have adopted the practice–whether it’s about religiosity or simple conformity to public rules: “it’s an incredible moment..still very mushy and uncertain.” A small percentage of young Egyptian women are now starting to wear the niqab.
• Salvage anthropology in the Arctic
Linguistic anthropologist Stephen Pax Leonard of Cambridge University will spend a year living with the Inughuit people of north-west Greenland to document their unwritten language. He told the Guardian that “Climate change means they have around 10 or 15 years left” to live where they are. Once they move, their entire culture and language will be lost. The Inughuit are the world’s most northern people.
• Ancient meat eaters
The hottest news item of the week, by far, was the pushing back by 800,000 years of the date of earliest tool-using, animal butchering and likely meat-eating to 3.4 million years ago, the era of Lucy and our small-brained early human ancestors. The evidence is cut-marks on an animal bone from Dikika, Ethiopia. Leader of the research, Ethiopian paleoanthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged who is with the California Academy of Sciences, is quoted in the New York Times as saying: “Our future work will be to find those stone tools that have shifted the framework for such an important transition in the behavior of our ancestors.” The findings are published in Nature.
• Ancient people eaters
Not just as an occasional snack, feast item or famine food, Homo antecessor inhabitants of the Atapuerca cave complex in Spain practiced “continuous cannibalism” as indicated by thousands of bones with cut marks. USA Today covered the story, and the findings are published in Current Anthropology.
Guest post by Barbara Rose Johnston
I received last week copies of two very different publications reporting on outcomes from the scientific assessment of life in a nuclear warzone. These studies consider, first, the health experience of resident populations living in areas contaminated by nuclear weapons fallout, and, second, the health of people as affected by the low-level radiation that accompanies modern warfare.
The first is a set of eight papers published in the August 2010 issue of the journal Health Physics and reflects conclusions from US-government sponsored science about radiation and cancer risks.
The second, a study conducted by an international and independent team of scientists published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, is about the health effects of war on the local population of Fallujah, Iraq.
Appropriate reading, since much news in the past few days has focused on the ceremonies surrounding the 65th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the human suffering associated with nuclear war.
Nuclear worries and concerns have been a major feature in world news for years, but especially so in this first decade of a new century.
A review of today’s global headlines finds reports of fear and accusations over the development of a nuclear weapon in Iran, as well as fears of nuclear war on the Korean peninsula and in Kashmir, the Himalayan territory that lies between Pakistan and India. Fidel Castro’s first address in four years to the Cuban Parliament warns of an imminent nuclear war if the US follows through on its threat of retaliation against Iran for not abiding nuclear-arms sanctions.
There are also hopeful reports on political promises and the potential progress in the struggle to further abolish nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, there are also reports on the lack of progress – for example, the news that the US Senate has again delayed its hearing on a new START Treaty.
The nuclear news also includes “peaceful uses” of atomic energy. The US is reportedly finalizing a nuclear cooperation agreement with Vietnam that would allow enrichment. There are reports of numerous proposals or approved plans for new nuclear power plants in Germany, Egypt, the US, Canada, the Philippines, India, Serbia, Bulgaria, and the UK.
Continue reading “Nuclear news, nuclear fears and the role of science”
• Life in the camps is a daily struggle
The latest information from Haiti is that 1.7 million displaced people are living in 1370 registered camps. Mark Schuller is there with eight student assistants doing research on a sample of the 861 officially registered camps for displaced people in the Port au Prince area. His article in the Huffington Post offers a preliminary look at the findings, and they are not pretty. One of the major roadblocks to providing safe housing for the displaced people is the government’s lack of commitment to providing land for new housing. Schuller comments that it comes down to a question of “…whose rights matter more, the 1.7 million homeless or the hundreds of private landowners?” Schuller is professor of African American studies and cultural anthropology at York College of the City University of New York.
• Stop stop stop
Several anthropologists are among the 57 signers of a letter to the Guardian supporting an end to US coca fumigations in Colombia. They cite environmental pollution affecting thousands of people as a result of the fumigations.
• Returning U.S. troops are strangers in a strange land
Zoe Wool, an anthropology doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto, is writing her dissertation on how U.S. soldiers injured in the Iraq war adjust to civilian life when they come home. She says that returning soldiers face the huge divide between “warriors” and civilians who are not involved in the process of war and have little understanding of its effects on soldiers. She says that the soldiers “…are a small group of people carrying a huge burden on behalf of everyone else.” Blogger’s note: Sebastian Junger’s book War, and his film with Tim Hetherington, Restrepo, also highlight the difficult situation of soldiers coming home and rejoining civilian life. We could benefit from studies of soldiers who do manage, against tough odds, to readjust and become civilians whose lives are free of violence. If our society must have soldiers then it must have ways to bring them back to a life that is safe for them and their loved ones. If our society fails to do this, and so far the record is not looking too good, then we don’t compare all that well to the Romans who watched gladiators fight and die.
• Witness to extinction with a dash of hope
The Australian weekend edition carried a review of Singing Saltwater Country, a book by cultural anthropologist John Bradley with Yanyuwa Families. The book documents the songline traditions of the coastal Yanyuwa people of the Northern Territory of Australia. As Bradley compiled and studied their songs, he learned of their importance for the older generation as a way of transferring their heritage to the younger generation. Right now there are only 11 fully competent speakers of the language. The elders lament that the “children…are standing in ignorance, they know nothing. We are talking to them, but they do not listen.” So where’s the hope? The elders feel that if the youth gain even some understanding of their heritage, then they will want to know more, and eventually they will express their heritage in creative, new ways.
• Toward pharmacovigilance
Drug Week picked up on a publication by medical anthropologist Sylvie Fainzang and her colleagues on prescription drug use in France, doctor-patient communication, and pharmaceutical industry discourse. The authors juxtapose an ethics of care with an ethics of information. Fainzang works in the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) in France.
• Nneka in NYC
Hip-hop musical phenomenon Nneka performed in New York City on August 2. Born in Nigeria, she moved to Germany at the age of nineteen and since then has become a star. In the meantime, she also earned a degree in anthropology in Germany.
anthropologyworks 