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.
This international conference is open to anyone and explores the relevance and contribution of anthropology outside academia to fields such as development, health, education, law, media and business.
The event offers:
an interface between scholarship, applied anthropology and the wider workplace
a platform for public engagement with the discipline
a forum for social scientists, professionals, organisations and students to share their visions, experiences and expertise
an opportunity to network with publishers, businesses and NGOs
a selection of ethnographic films, photographic exhibitions and displays.
Anthropology in the World provides an opportunity to take part in workshops, panels and discussions on key debates addressing the impact of social science on issues such as land claims, cultural heritage, sustainable development, public health and forensic research.
• On school shootings Katherine Newman is the James B. Knapp Dean of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University and a cultural anthropologist by training. In a special report for CNN, she writes about how and why the “quiet kid” whom no one really notices erupts into murderous violence. She brings to this question findings from team research on the rash of school shootings in the U.S. in the late 1990s which she suggests may be useful in understanding what happened at Chardon High School: Initial reports suggest the shooter was a “loner” but were quickly followed by claims that he had friends. The community was taken by surprise, but we learn the shooter texted at least one person about his intentions. These contradictions are consistent with the findings in our book, Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings. Further, Newman says that high school shooters are rarely loners but instead are “failed joiners.” Their daily social experience is of rejection and frustration, not isolation.
• Accordian and solo households revealed The New York Times Book Review section carried a double review of Katherine Newman’s The Accordian Family: Boomerang Kids, Anxious Parents, and the Private Toll of Global Competition, and Eric Klinenberg’s Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone. Both books focus on changing households forms, mainly in the U.S., but with attention to global changes as a wider context. Newman holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley, but is known more as a sociologist and academic administrator. Her book addresses the high and rising rates of adult children living with parents. Klinenberg holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley, but his doctoral dissertation committee included doyenne cultural anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and he clearly has an anthropological heart. [Blogger’s note: I have read only the NYT review, not the books themselves, but it seems apparent that both Newman and Klinenberg use cultural anthropology methods including qualitative, in-depth interviews to provide a more fine-grained perspective to complement and enrich the wider global, political, and economic frame in which such household changes are occurring.]
• Paul Farmer, the Global Fund and CCMs
All Africa carried an opinion piece arguing that the funding model employed by the Global Fund is not working for grassroots organizations: “The Global Fund and other international donors need to think from the margins, not just the centre, to find new ways to get funds into the hands of people on the front lines of the epidemic.” The author argues that the Global Fund should consider other approaches: “In his recent New York Times op-ed, Paul Farmer called for increased funding for the Global Fund. He is right. But to really put muscle into the fight against HIV/AIDS, the Global Fund needs to change its top-down approach and find new ways to get funding to grassroots groups. As Farmer points out, the Global Fund has succeeded in getting antiretroviral medicines to millions of people, thus saving many lives. It did this by leveraging multilateral funding to strengthen health ministries and medical services for people living with HIV/AIDS, and insisting that civil society be part of the process of grant management. Yet civil society continues to be marginalised in many countries…”.
• Tracking U.S. corporate abuse of workers in China
Hanqing Chen, a reporter for Asia Blog, is studying journalism and anthropology at New York University. The Atlantic picked up on her article about corporate practices toward labor in China. She interviews corporate social responsibility expert Richard Brubaker, founder of Shanghai-based Collective Responsibility. He points out that abuses are particular to Apple products.
Rehearsing the State: The Governance Practices of the Tibetan Government in Exile
by Dr Fiona McConnell, Junior Research Fellow, Trinity College, University of Cambridge
When: Friday, March 2 | 12:00 – 1:30 pm Where: The Elliott School of International Affairs, Suite 501 Conference Room
1957 E St, NW
Fiona McConnell’s research engages with political geography around issues of sovereignty, state practices and the (re)pluralising of political space, with a particular interest in how communities officially excluded from formal state politics are nevertheless engaging with aspects of statecraft. Her doctoral research focused on the sovereign practices of the exile Tibetan government based in India and she has ongoing interests around issues of legitimacy, diplomacy and geographies of peace.
“I hope you have a good rest,” I said to a friend, who works as an administrator at London University, a few days before her departure for a week’s holiday in Portugal last summer. She had been working hard on a project using an online survey to monitor the health and welfare of undergraduate students.
“So do I,” she replied. “But I’ll do bit of work while I’m at the hotel as the project needs to be finished on time.” She paused and added: “I’m taking my laptop.”
A young lady on the beach with a laptop. Flickr/IQ computer services
I was horrified on two counts. First, I could see that my friend was not going to get the peace and quiet she so obviously needed. Secondly, she was contributing to the steady erosion of the concept of “taking a holiday.” Put simply, an electronic form of communication — the Internet — was infiltrating and squeezing the life out of a traditional and highly valued leisure form.
Most social scientists agree that the post-industrial world is significantly different from anything that has gone before it. The big questions are: how different, and in what ways? Spanish sociologist and urbanist Manuel Castells, for example, thinks that the move towards information processing — economic activity based on the manipulation of signs, symbols, metaphors and metonyms in the service sector — is in many ways equivalent to the jump from an agrarian mode of production to the industrial one in 18th and 19th century Europe and North America.
Castells refers to the type of economic activity on display in the advanced economies as the “informational mode of production.” Unlike some of his colleagues, however, he prefers the term “Network Society” (PDF) to “Information Society” or “Post-industrial Society.”
Why? Castells reckons that the concept of Network Society captures the reality of the way the modern world is increasingly organized around “electronically processed information networks,” where individuals are connected to one another in novel and innovative ways. He thinks (and recommends) that citizens now have the capacity to challenge the power of the state as well as the inequalities generated by global capitalism.
Whatever label you choose, it is clear that electronic communications are changing the way people perceive and experience time — and not always for the better. As Oslo-based social anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen pointed out in his 2001 book Tyranny of the Moment:
The last couple of decades have witnessed a formidable growth of various time-saving technologies, ranging from advanced multi-level time managers to e-mail, voice mail, mobile telephones and word processors; and yet millions of us have never had so little time to spare as now. It may seem as if we are unwittingly being enslaved by the very technology that promised liberation. (2001:vii)
• Possible cholera spike in Haiti Paul Farmer of the Boston-based group Partners in Health says that Haiti could see a spike like the one that occurred last year. The number of cholera cases nearly tripled from almost 19,000 last April to more than 50,000 two months later. Partners in Health will launch a vaccination campaign in the coming weeks to stem the spread of the waterborne disease. Haiti has the highest cholera infection rate in the world. Health officials say more than 7,000 people have died and another 522,000 have fallen ill since the disease surfaced in Haiti months after the January 2010 earthquake.
Manipur, India
• Tracing Kuki origins in Manipur, India
A team of the Kuki Research Forum has carried out an expedition to three cave sites in the Sajik Tampak area of Chandel district, Manipur state, India. Speaking to The Sangai Express, vice chairman of the Forum, anthropologist Helkhomang Touthang said that the cave expedition was conducted to understand the history and activities of the early Kuki people.
• Very old Mexican gameboard
The board, used in ancient times to play a game known as patolli. Credit: Herbert Ortega/INAH
Archaeologists carrying out restoration at the Dzibilnocac site in the southeastern state of Campeche discovered a Mayan game board dating from more than 1,000 years ago, Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History said. A member of the team that found the artifact, Heber Ojeda, estimates the board was used between the 7th and 10th centuries during the Late Classic period of Dzibilnocac. Etched into the surface of the board are 58 rectangles of varying sizes and players would have used beans as game tokens. A member of the team that found the artifact, Heber Ojeda, estimates the board was used between the 7th and 10th centuries during the Late Classic period of Dzibilnocac. Judith Gallegos Gomora is quoted as saying that the board was designed for patolli, a game of chance described in Mayan codices and colonial Spanish chronicles.
• Neanderthals taking an exit
New findings from an international team of researchers show that most Neanderthals in Europe died off around 50,000 years ago. The previously held view of a Europe populated by a stable Neanderthal population for hundreds of thousands of years up until modern humans arrived is therefore thrown into question. This perspective comes from a study of ancient DNA published in Molecular Biology and Evolution. The results indicate that most Neanderthals in Europe died off as early as 50,000 years ago. After that, a small group of Neanderthals recolonised central and western Europe, where they survived for another 10,000 years before modern humans entered the picture. The study is the result of an international project led by Swedish and Spanish researchers in Uppsala, Stockholm and Madrid. “The fact that Neanderthals in Europe were nearly extinct, but then recovered, and that all this took place long before they came into contact with modern humans came as a complete surprise to us. This indicates that the Neanderthals may have been more sensitive to the dramatic climate changes that took place in the last Ice Age than was previously thought,” says Love Dalén, associate professor at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm
• Two-part interview with David Graeber
The Boston review carried an extensive interview with cultural anthropologist David Graeber, author of the recent book entitled Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Among other topics, Graeber discusses student debt.
• Aboriginal treasures found in a basement
ABC news Australia reports that anthropologists at Perth’s Berndt Museum have discovered treasures in a basement that could change the lives of Aboriginal people. They will become part of an exhibition. This link will take you to a six-minute video.
• Double major in cultural anthropology for sports star
CSB Sports carried an article describing how a college sports star decided to double major in anthropology through inspiration from international travel. Mason Plumlee took a class on China last spring to help him prepare for his team’s trip to China in August. Plumlee enjoyed the class and trip so much that he decided to major in cultural anthropology in addition to his first major in psychology.
• Finding gender in fingerprints
Research conducted by Kewal Krishan of the anthropology department of Panjab University, India, along with his student Chitrabala, shows fingerprints found at a crime scene can help in determining a person’s gender. The research has been accepted by the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFC) and will be presented in the 64th annual conference to be held in Atlanta. The study is based on the hypothesis that female fingerprints have finer ridges than male’s and a greater ridge density within a given area.
• Aztec findings in Mexico City
A total of 23 pre-Columbian stone plaques dating to 550 years ago were discovered by archaeologists in front of the Great Temple of Tinochtitlan in downtown Mexico City, according to the National Anthropology and History Institute (INAH). Archaeologist Raul Barrera said the remains are of great archaeological value because they are the first such pieces to have been found within the sacred grounds of Tenochtitlan.
It’s that time of the year again with articles and blog posts popping up all over, addressing various romantic topics as we approach Valentine’s Day. For starts, an article in the U.K.’s Independent is titled “Pucker Up” (it goes on from there). No surprise: the subject is kissing. Among other tidbits dropped into the piece is a nod to the vast cultural variation in what makes sex exciting and fulfilling: “In 1929, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski visited the Trobriand Islands and discovered that lovers there would go through several phases of sucking and nibbling during intercourse before biting off each other’s eyelashes at the point of orgasm.” And, to keep everyone happy, also a nod to biological determinism: “According to Rutgers University Anthropologist Helen Fisher, kissing evolved to facilitate three essential needs: sex drive, romantic need and attachment. Each is a component of human reproduction and kissing bolsters all three. In this theory, kissing helps people find a partner, commit to them and stay with them long enough to have a child.” [Blogger’s note: more research needed on the function of kissing in keeping a partner committed?]
• Republicans and Democrats in the bedroom: so close but so far apart?
Helen Fisher is cited again in a Washington Times article describing new research from the University of Binghamton’s Institute for Evolutionary Studies. A survey conducted in conjunction with match.com includes over 5,000 adults in the United States. Respondents were asked 135 questions about their romantic attitudes and lives as well as their political party. Fisher, a consultant on the study, comments: Liberals and conservatives are looking for entirely different things…their attitudes toward romance and how they court are really dramatically different. There’s almost no overlap.” [Blogger’s note: Just thinking…there may be some overlap that the study has missed? In any case, the political culture of lovemaking is another topic that requires more research].
• The science of love
An article in London’s Sunday Times on changing patterns of emotional relationships mentions new research by Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary anthropology at Oxford University. His new book, The Science of Love and Betrayal, will be coming out in April. In it, he defines five key criteria for emotional closeness: having the same sense of humor, the same interests and moral values, a similar level of intelligence, and having grown up in the same area. [Blogger’s note: it’s not clear from the article what Dunbar’s source of data is. So you may have to buy the book].
• U.S. family law a rude shock to some immigrant men
The Daily Nation (Kenya) carried an article about Kenyan immigrants living in the United States and marital struggles taking place in a new legal culture: “Kenyan women quickly discover that the US takes violations of women’s rights very seriously…” Kenyan men pointed to state laws that require a man to continue paying child support for a child even if he discovers later that he is not the biological father. The article mentions a 2006 study published by Current Anthropology reporting that two per cent of married men who thought that the child they were bringing up was theirs in fact were not biological parents after paternity tests were conducted. [Blogger’s note: I am trying to trace this publication; in the meantime, just be happy knowing that The Daily Nation had heard about our flagship journal].
Like the populations of many African countries, Mauritians are football mad. The game played in stadiums and streets all over the palm-fringed Indian Ocean island is a legacy of 19th century British colonialism — administrators, missionaries, soldiers and sailors introduced the game to locals — whereas in other African nations it was popularized by the Portuguese and French.
Mauritius football players. Flickr/llee_wu
Traditionally, Mauritius split into two more or less equal groups — those who supported Liverpool and those who supported Manchester United. Now, because of increased television coverage and the easy availability of football merchandise, especially branded t-shirts, other UK Premier League teams like Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City are gaining support as younger people choose different football clubs as vehicles for sporting and other identities appropriate to their age sets.
But Mauritians from all of the country’s diverse ethnic groups — Hindu, Muslim, Creole, Chinese and French — know that a Frenchman of Mauritian descent — in fact, of Hindu Telugu heritage — Vikash Dhorasoo, a member of the French team at the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany, was one of the most gifted midfielders in modern times.
The former AC Milan, Lyon and Paris St Germain player is also the most prominent footballer of South Asian descent in the history of the game, and very well known for his views on the importance of combating racism, homophobia and gender discrimination in sport. The regret among Mauritian football fans is that Dhorasoo never played for a Premier League team before his retirement in January 2008. However, he did visit Mauritius in May 2009 to promote FIFA’s Grassroots programme, which was inaugurated on the island.
The Mauritius football team did not make it to the current African Cup of Nations, the finals of which are being co-hosted by Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. But the country is following the championship closely through local and international TV channels and local press coverage.
Significantly, Mauritius along with Zimbabwe, another former British colony, has been part of the FIFA Medical Assessment and Research Centre’s research into “11 for Health”, a football-based health education programme for young and teenage children. It had previously been piloted in a smaller study in Khayelitsha township in South Africa in 2009.
Vikash Dhorasoo playing with school girls from Birmingham, Flickr/Housing and Sport Network
In Mauritius, 389 schoolchildren, boys and girls, aged 12-15 years, at 11 secondary schools took part in eleven 90 minute sessions which combined learning or refining a football skill with linked information about 10 health issues – for example, heading a football and avoiding HIV infection, defending well and washing one’s hands, shooting for goal and vaccination for self and family, building fitness and eating a varied diet, and good teamwork and fair play. The study was conducted between February and June 2010.
Questionnaires assessed participants’ pre and post-intervention health knowledge as well as views about the “11 for Health” programme. The results carried out in co-operation with the Mauritius Football Association and the Mauritius Ministries of Heath and Quality of Life, Education, Culture and Human Resources, and Youth and Sport were extremely positive. The results among a similar group of children in an out-of-school setting In Zimbabwe were also excellent. Continue reading “Football drives health education among schoolchildren in Mauritius and other African nations”→
• Honor killing or femicide: the label is important
The term “honor killing” creates false distancing of a crime that is in fact murder of females according to Homa Hoodfar, professor of anthropology at Concordia University, Montreal. She co-authored an article in the Montreal Gazette examining the media coverage of the Shafia trial in which Mohammad Shafia, his son Hamed Shafia and his wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya, were found guilty of participating in what the judge called “cold-blooded, shameful murders” of their three daughters and Shafia’s first wife. The three accused were sentenced to life in prison. The article critiques the media’s labeling of the murders as honor killings and the association of honor killings with particular cultures. It also raises the question of how so-called honor killings are different from other murders of family members/intimate partners. If the label is changed and honor killings are combined with other cases of gender-based murder, then so-called “honor killings” do not stand out as highly unusual: “It does not take a genius to see that comparing 12 or 13 [honor killings] against the hundreds of women and children who were victims of familial violence serves only to frame ‘honour killing’ as peculiar, when in reality it is part of a larger pattern of violence against women.”
• Let’s get down to bases David Vine, assistant professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C., co-authored an article in Defense News describing the intriguing example of cross-party consensus in the U.S. on the issue of closing overseas military bases. The unusual coalition includes Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and Democratic Senator Jon Tester, Republican presidential candidate Representative Ron Paul and outgoing House Democrat Barney Frank.
• Breaking up and social media
A radio interview with cultural anthropologist Illana Gershon describes her research on how U.S. college students handle romantic relationships, especially break-ups, via social media. She talked with many Indiana University students as part of her research on social media and relationships. For example, she posed this question to one of her classes: “If you and your sweetie are “Facebook official,” what happens when the relationship ends? Whose job is it to change the relationship status: the person who got dumped or the person who did the dumping?” She found student habits and values to be unpredictable on this and other questions: “In every interview I’d have a moment where I’d want to say, you do what?!” she says. The results of her research are presented in her book, The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media .Comments on the radio interview are invited.
• Messing around back then New genetic analyses indicate that modern humans had reproductive relationships [Blogger’s note: that’s my euphemism of choice versus “they mated”…] with at least two groups of ancient humans in relatively recent times: the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia, dying out roughly 30,000 years ago, and a less-known group called the Denisovans, who lived in Asia and most likely vanished around the same time. The New York Times quotes Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist and research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London: “In a sense, we are a hybrid species.”
• Altai homeland
More findings from DNA studies about human origins were highlighted in the media this past week. Archaeologists have long thought that American Indians came from Asia, migrating to Alaska during a time of lower sea levels, making it possible to walk over the Bering Strait. New findings based on genetic profiling tie American Indians to a group of people living in a small region of Russia called the Altai, near the borders of Mongolia, China, and Kazakhstan. The results are published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
anthropologyworks 