Digital mapping empowering for indigenous peoples or exploitation?

From the Argus Leader:

Google is inviting indigenous people across the world to take time Friday to add local geographic and commercial features to its online maps. The company, in partnership with the National Congress of American Indians, is making Friday its first ever Indigenous Mapping Day.

Google Map Maker
Google Map Maker. Source: Argus Leader

Participants must have a Google account to edit or add to maps represented on the popular Google Maps and Google Earth. Participants also must be affiliated with the tribe whose community they plan to map.

Many U.S. tribal communities lack accurate mapping of roads, buildings and other services available to tribal members or general public, said Sarah Beccio, a spokeswoman for the National Congress of American Indians.

“Basically, you can improve driving directions, enhance public safety, or put tribal businesses on the map,” she said. “Also, you can identify areas that maybe shouldn’t be on a map; for instance, a store in the wrong place.”

Edits to Google maps can be made anytime, but Google chose Friday in honor of the U.N. International Day of the World’s Indigenous People.

The United States has more than 550 federally recognized tribes, some with reservations and some without tribal land. There are nine Sioux tribes in South Dakota, each with its own land.

Denise Mesteth, director of the Oglala Sioux Tribe Land Office on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, said better digital maps for her tribe’s land might help local businesses.

“We want our businesses to get noticed,” she said. “Being able to find places to eat while on the road with an iPhone, and this is an opportunity for the tribe to get that advertising.”

But a Rosebud Sioux tribal official is uncomfortable with the effort. Paula Antoine, Sicangu Oyate Land Office coordinator for the Rosebud Sioux, said Google Earth, which shows archived photos of just about anywhere in the world, has images of Rosebud’s sacred sites, including where ceremonies are held.

“There’s a lot of things that shouldn’t be on there,” she said. “To me, it’s violating our space, our rights.”

To explore some caves, one needs to dial the technology down

Lascaux Field Museum
Replica Lascaux caves at “Scenes from the Stone Age”/photo Jean Lachat, Field Museum

In many ways, an exhibit at Chicago’s Field Museum which seeks to replicate the Stone Age paintings of bulls and other animals at the French cave Lascaux, is a design and architectural feat. The cave, which is closed to the public in order to protect its treasures, fell to disrepair following excessive foot traffic and less-than-ideal conservation guidelines after it was accidentally discovered by four teenagers in the 1940s. Lascaux the replica, then, offers viewers what they can no longer appreciate in the original. Or at least that’s the premise of the exhibit.

But, Menachem Wecker argues in Canadian Art magazine, the replica is not only imperfect, but it also distorts the experience of the cave, despite its digital prowess. In the exhibit’s quest to cast sunlight on the cave’s mysteries, it may have settled for the cartoony and the stylized rather than actually convincing viewers, as its promotional materials suggest, that they are standing in the original caves.

Word choices, word choices

I rarely blog about my personal peeves. I try to keep it all professional. So excuse me if I rant a little bit here. It’s about words that annoy me. I am sure you have your favorites, too.

More than a decade ago, the word “issue” moved from teen talk (“You got an issue with that?”) to my academic world. I first noticed it when called to serve on an ad hoc committee about an “issue” between a department chair and a faculty member. They had a problem, a big problem. But we all referred to it as an “issue.”

I have seen issue take over, since then. We, at least in my academic world, rarely talk about problems. Only issues. A student has an issue with her grade. A student has a health issue. In our curriculum, we teach about issues. Interpreting the meaning, and impact if any, of this circumlocution is outside my area of expertise. I have noted its existence for many years and, may I say, its robustness.

Ballistic Missile Lockheed Martin
Trident II D5 Fleet ballistic missile (FBM). Source: Lockheed Martin

So let’s talk about the word “robust.” This word seems to have had a surge a few years ago, in my experience at least, as related to annual reporting on such matters as my blog readership and twitter following: robust. Robust is still with us; it conveys muscularity, strength, and growth, everything capitalism loves.

Well, I want my social media impact to continue to grow in numbers and quality, don’t I? So, I want my social media numbers to be robust. Indeed, I want my textbook sales to be more robust. But “robust” has a limited use, for me. … I want my teaching to be engaging, not robust … and in terms of my own body weight, something less robust would be welcome (but that’s another issue).

And now, we have “boost,” as in “boost phase” which comes from rocketry and refers to a particular stage of a ballistic missile, a missile that carries a warhead. I am no rocket scientist so I could be wrong on this — I just checked Wikipedia on “boost phase.” Boost phase may also apply to non-weapon bearing rockets. And, more benignly, having been around little kids, I do know about “booster chairs” which allow small children to enjoy adult company at the dining table.

Nor am I a linguist, but note the similarity between robust and boost … consonant “b” followed by a vowel or vowels, then ending with “st.” Perhaps that combination in English conveys a sense of positive force, strength, growth, and optimism — all dearly held values of capitalist culture (and maybe that’s why “sustainability” has proved to be so robust in the language of green approaches to our future).

Wires at the Hotel
Wires, including Internet, at a Beirut hotel. Flickr/Markus Hündgen

This essay is prompted by my seeing, this morning, the use of “boost” in a World Bank statement about a new project in Lebanon. The report begins with this description: “A new World Bank Group project will boost Lebanon’s mobile Internet systems and create quality jobs for a high-skilled labor force to help reverse the spiraling trend of unemployment especially among youth and women.”

On a positive note, I end this commentary by arguing that the phrase “to boost” is preferable, in spite of its likely origins in the world of war, to the extremely awkward phrase “to grow” — prevalent during the Clinton era when “to grow the economy” was a sacred mantra. If “to grow” replaced “to boost” in the World Bank statement, it would read:

“A new World Bank Group project will grow Lebanon’s mobile Internet systems and create quality jobs for a high-skilled labor force to help reverse the spiraling trend of unemployment especially among youth and women.”

Things could always be worse.

Anthro in the news 8/5/13

• When prayer becomes addiction

Intense prayer among some Christians can become an addiction, as described by Tanya Luhrmann, professor of cultural anthropology at Stanford University, in an op-ed for The New York Times.

Praying Hands, Durer, Wikipedia
'Praying Hands' by Dürer/Wikipedia

She has learned that when people use prayer to enhance their real-world selves, they feel good. But when it disconnects them from the everyday, they feel bad. Luhrmann points to an anthropological study of the popular Internet game World of Warcraft for insights about when the supportive use of communicating with a different world veers into something less healthy.

The anthropologist Jeffrey G. Snodgrass and his colleagues found that some people were relaxed and soothed by their play: “Sometimes I just log on late at night and go out by myself and listen to the soothing music.” Others felt addicted: “Once I start playing it’s hard to tell whether or not I’ll have the willpower to stop.”

What made the difference was whether people found their primary sense of self inside the game or in the world. When play seemed more important than the real world did, they felt addicted; when it enhanced their experience of reality outside the game, they felt soothed. Prayer, Luhrmann suggests, works in similar ways. When people use prayer to enhance their real-word selves, they feel good. When it disconnects them from the everyday, as it did for the student, they feel bad.

• Our pills, our selves

Viagra
Viagra. Source:Men-Health

Salon magazine published an excerpt from Cracked: The Unhappy Truth about Psychiatry by cultural/medical anthropologist James Davies.

He explores big pharma’s rebranding practices, suggesting that it constitutes deliberate deception. The piece mentions the work of Daniel Moerman, emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

Moerman has written about the placebo effect of medical practices and drugs, including how the very shape and color of a pill can change its effectiveness.

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 8/5/13” →

UAES Conference August 5-10 in Manchester

The 17th World Congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences has the overall theme “Evolving Humanity, Emerging Worlds.”

The congress will be hosted by the University of Manchester with the support of Manchester City Council. This is the first world congress to be held in Britain since the initial meeting of the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in London in 1934. The Congress Agenda is being planned by a UK Organizing Committee which includes anthropologists working in all sub-fields of the discipline. The conference program is available online.

Anthro in the news 7/29/13

• Female genital cutting: a practice in decline

Several mainstream media sources discussed the findings of a comprehensive new assessment led by UNICEF about the practice of female genital cutting in Africa and the Middle East. The data indicate a gradual but significant decline in many countries.

Female genital mutilation Economist
Source: Economist

Teenage girls are now less likely to have been cut than older women in more than half of the 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East where the practice is concentrated. In Egypt, for example, where more women have been cut than in any other nation, survey data showed that 81 percent of 15- to 19-year-olds had undergone the practice, compared with 96 percent of women in their late 40s.

Generational change appears to be playing an important role in the decline with the difference in Egypt especially marked: only a third of teenage girls who were surveyed thought it should continue, compared with almost two-thirds of older women.

Researchers say the progress in Kenya makes sense, given efforts there to stop female genital cutting starting in the early 1900s. But they were at a loss to explain why the rate has plunged in the Central African Republic, to 24 percent in 2010 from 43 percent in the mid-1990s. Concerning the findings about the Central African Republic, The New York Times quotes Bettina Shell-Duncan, a cultural anthropology professor at the University of Washington who was a consultant on the report: “We have no idea, not even a guess, noting that researchers need to study the causes of the decline there.

Blogger’s note: for a list of related readings, see the global∙gender∙current blog post.

• Indigenous people’s knowledge and climate change

An article on the importance of indigenous knowledge in addressing climate change in The Democratic Daily cites the work of Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, Brazilian cultural anthropologist and emeritus professor of the Department of Anthropology at Chicago University and the University of São Paulo.

She says indigenous people have an important contribution to make to knowledge about climate change, and scientists should listen to them because they are very well informed about their local climate as well as the natural world. Their knowledge, she says, is not a “treasure” of data to be stored and used when wanted by others, but a living and evolving process: “It is important to understand that traditional wisdom is not something simply transmitted from generation to generation. It is alive, and traditional and indigenous peoples are continually producing new knowledge.”

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 7/29/13” →

UNICEF report on female genital mutilation/ cutting

Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: A statistical overview and exploration of the dynamics of change is a new UNICEF report, released July 22, 2013. It offers a statistical overview of female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) in the 29 countries where the practice is concentrated.

UNICEF report cover
UNICEF report cover

As described in the report’s introduction: “This report draws on data from more than 70 nationally representative surveys over a 20-year period and presents the most comprehensive compilation to date of statistics and analyses on FGM/C… It reviews all available DHS and MICS data, along with other nationally representative datasets with information on FGM/C, and examines differentials in prevalence according to social, economic, demographic and other characteristics.”
The report covers all 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East where FGM/C is concentrated and includes, for the first time, statistics from countries where representative survey data were lacking. It is also the first
publication to include new data collected on girls under 15 years of age, providing insights on the most recent dynamics surrounding the practice.

Importantly, as noted in the report’s introduction: “An innovative aspect of the analysis is the addition of a social norms perspective.” [Blogger’s note: This “innovative aspect’ may be at least partially thanks to cultural anthropologist, Bettina Shell-Duncan, who played a key role in the analysis and writing of the report].

Click here to read more.

Religion and development: bridging the gap

A special issue of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue canadienne d’études du développement offers several articles addressing the connections between religion and development. In the introductory essay, Charmain Levy, department of social sciences, Université du Qubec en Outaouais, writes:

Canadian Journal of Development Studies
Journal cover
“For many years, social sciences and development studies have adhered to a sociological view that holds that as societies modernise, religious institutions and beliefs will wane in their influence. Following the example of industrialised countries, it was assumed that societies in the developing world would follow the same path and that this would be a positive development. Until recently, development theories and practices were based upon the premise of rational, secular institutions and individuals; and the implications and contributions of religious actors were consequently either downplayed or completely ignored. In many developing countries, however, despite the secularisation of the state, religion remains to this day embedded in society; religious actors occupy an important place in civil society.

“All of the authors who have contributed to this special issue of the CJDS agree that different development theories have largely ignored the role played by faith-based NGOs in donor countries within international cooperation. This oversight is clearly represented by the gap in International Development Studies (IDS), both in Canada and elsewhere. In the past 10 years, however, several research teams and development organisations, based primarily in Europe, have recognised and documented the presence and importance of religious actors within development policy and practice in both donor and beneficiary countries.

“Several of these organisations have published research showing the importance of religion and faith in development and contributing to increased understanding of how they influence development policies and practice. However … until very recently, there have been few forums for Canadian scholars who are interested in issues related to religion in Development Studies.

“The articles in this special issue build upon existing research in order to simultaneously tackle unaddressed issues and raise the debate to another level with regard to identifying religious actors, assessing their importance and understanding how they influence development studies, practices and processes in both donor and beneficiary countries.”