A recent BBC Radio 4 broadcast, a programme on coral reefs, included misleading information about the Chagos Archipelago, also known as the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). The gist is that the amazing health of the reefs in the Chagos region can be attributed to the absence of human habitation.
The subliminal message is that repatriating the Chagossian Islanders, who were evicted from their homeland by the British authorities to make way for the U.S. military base on Diego Garcia, will endanger the reefs.
Is this genuine marine science or sheer politics masquerading as marine biology?
Because the right of return of the islanders is now before the European Court of Human Rights, many supporters felt that this naive environmentalism could not left unchallenged.
A letter was drafted and several amendments were made to it before a copy was finalised and sent to BBC complaints.
Anthropologists Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Sean Carey signed the letter, along with many others including several luminaries including broadcaster, Ben Fogle; bestselling historical novelist, Philippa Gregory; environmental campaigner and botanist, David Bellamy; and former leader of the UK Liberal Party, Lord Steel.
Sean Carey then sent the letter on to the Mauritius Times so that it would gain the attention of a wider public.
“Although I wrote the introductory paragraphs, my name shouldn’t have been put at the top as I am just one part of a ‘galaxy,’ but too late now.”
Note from the blogger: Sean, you are too modest by far.
• Staying calm when the unthinkable happens Theories abound as to what makes Japanese people so cooperative, patient, and resilient. “It strikes me as a Buddhist attitude,” says Glenda Roberts, an anthropology professor at Tokyo’s Waseda University. “Westerners might tend to see it as passivity, but it’s not that. It takes a lot of strength to stay calm in the face of terror.”
• Fire it up
Up for debate is the question of the use of controlled fire by our ancestors. A review of data from over 100 European sites indicates hearths dating to 300-400,000 years ago. Others (notably Richard Wrangham of Harvard University) claim much earlier use of controlled fire by hominins in Africa 1.9 million years ago. A big question is: what is convincing evidence of “controlled use of fire”?
• In memoriam Donny George, prominent Iraqi archaeologist, died at the age of 60 years following a heart attack. He was director of research for the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage when the United States and its allies invaded Iraq. He replaced a cousin of Saddam Hussein as head of the Iraq National Museum and helped to rebuild the museum, recover stolen objects, and protect Iraq’s many archaeological sites from destruction and looting.
Safety. Flickr/Jonathan Warner.Barbara Rose Johnston, an environmental anthropologist at the Center for Political Ecology at the University of California in Santa Cruz, prompts us to consider what we mean by “safe” when it comes to radiation and the nuclear industry.
She says:
As the world’s nations reassess nuclear power operations and refine energy development plans, now — more than ever — we need to aggressively tackle this question: How do we define the word “safe”?
Think of a South African herb, and the chances are that Hoodia gordonii will come to mind. The much-publicized succulent, which has been traditionally used by the San to ward off hunger and thirst on hunting trips, was the focus of 15 years of research and development by UK-based company, Phytopham — first with pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer, and then with international conglomerate, Unilever, which planned to use the herb in its Slim Fast range of weight-loss products.
Traditional preparation of Sceletium by a Nama goatherd. Courtesy: Nigel Gericke. Unfortunately for Unilever, which invested around £20 million in R&D, double blind and other trials using P57, an extract of Hoodia, indicated that there were a number of adverse effects including a rise in blood pressure and digestive disturbances amongst some subjects. The result was that last November, Phytopharm returned the commercialisation rights of P57 to South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). CSIR now plans to review the data from 14 clinical trials and decide whether it is worth pursuing further projects.
This development was undoubtedly extremely disappointing for the San, who after a dispute about intellectual property rights had successfully secured an agreement in 2003 to receive a share of the royalties from sales of the appetite-suppressant.
However, there is much better news about another South African ground-covering succulent, Sceletium tortuosum, more familiarly known as kagoued (in Afrikaans meaning “something to chew”) or kanna, another herb traditionally used by the San as an analgesic, antispasmodic, sedative, tonic and mood elevator. The herb, which can also be consumed as a tea or taken as a snuff, has been the subject of intensive research by HGH Pharmaceuticals, a company set up in 2007 by South African-born medical practitioner and ethnobotanist, Nigel Gericke. Continue reading “Herbal answer to Prozac will promote San culture”→
Mayumi Sakamoto on left, New Orleans, La., March 3, 2011. Credit: FEMA.
Guest post by Mayumi Sakamoto
As of March 18, the situation is very serious in Fukushima prefecture due to the nuclear power plant problem. The complex after-effects of the tsunami are disturbing the entire S&R (search and rescue) efforts and related disaster response activities, as well as creating problems for economic activity, agriculture, the environment and people’s lives.
DRI brochure for children.
In Fukushima, many people are making amazing efforts, in spite of clear health risks to themselves, in order to prevent the situation from worsening.
The DRI dispatched our expert team on Monday to Miyagi prefecture to support the local government. We will continue our operation for the next several weeks.
So far, the recovery of infrastructures is just amazing. After one week, electricity, water-supply, roads and the banking system are recovering. In terms of resilience of infrastructure I would say we are very resilient.
On the other hand, the many evacuated people are in a severe condition, and these displaced people will face many long-term challenges.
The disaster-affected area in Japan is one of the most well prepared area for tsunami. But planning was based on reasonable estimates which, in this case, nature has exceeded. So how can one be prepared for such massive destruction?
The DRI believes we have to pay keen attention to social impact of the disaster and find a way to establish some framework to analyze it. I am collecting information regarding to this disaster in national level and also trying to establish archives for this disaster. I am also interested in learning about relevant experiences from other post-earthquake/disaster situations to learn about how to address the social impact including many displaced persons.
Mayumi Sakamoto, who holds a Ph.D. from Kyoto University, specializes in disaster recovery assistance (particularly in Aceh during the 2004 tsunami) and international cooperation at Japan’s Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution.
Aerial of damage to Wakuya, Japan. Flickr/U.S. Navy.
The three-way hit from the major earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown has created a situation beyond what even the most prepared country could manage. Entire villages were swept into the massive wave. Hundreds of bodies are now washing back to the shore. Nuclear plants are melting down. People are evacauting their home areas by the thousands to avoid radiation exposure.
Three questions for anthropologists:
What do anthropologists have to say about the massive loss of lives from so-called natural disaster? The most obvious recent example is Haiti after the earthquake of January 2010. Readers, please share references and insights.
What do anthropologists know about life in a nuclear melt-down zone? Read this: Adriana Petryna‘s amazing study, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Her study of the making of “biological citizens” has much relevance to northern Japan. Can readers please offer other sources of knowledge?
What do anthropologists know about people’s perceptions of risk and security around the world? Many anthropologists are addressing these important questions. The course syllabus for a graduate seminar I taught in spring 2009 on Culture, Risk and Security (embedded below) includes some ideas for reading and further thought.
This university-based blogger sends her heartfelt wishes to everyone in Japan and to those in any way related to people in the affected regions.
What the Taj Mahal is to India, the Eiffel Tower is to Paris, and the Brandenburg Gate is to Berlin, the dhow is to the Indian Ocean. The dhow is the iconic image that photographers, film makers, and writers use to evoke a sense of the Indian Ocean as a place. Now, they are celebrated as heritage, representing a region — the Indian Ocean — that until recently was more of a scholarly construct than a popular one.
A jahazi leaving Zanzibar en route to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. In East Africa, sailing dhows still function, unlike in the Persian Gulf, where they mostly live in museums.
I started working on Indian Ocean history in 1994 when I was doing my dissertation research in Zanzibar. At the time there was a pretty well-established notion of the Indian Ocean as a historical place. Auguste Tousainte and then K.N. Chaudhuri had written books that took broad looks at the ocean as place of cultural and commercial exchange. Chaudhuri, using Braudel’s treatment of the Mediterranean as his model, had restricted his work to the period between the rise of Islam and 1750. After 1750, he argued, structural change in the form of steamships and imperialism brought to a close the unity of the Indian Ocean. I thought I was being rather clever and innovative by looking at events in the 19th and 20th centuries in East Africa in the context of a surviving Indian Ocean economy.
As it turns out the time was ripe for such an idea, and a bunch of other people had the same idea at the same time. What none of us had really bothered to think about was whether the people whose lives we had declared to be part of the Indian Ocean world perceived themselves as inhabitants or participants in that world.
Was there in fact an Indian Ocean identity? And if so, who saw themselves in this light? When and why did this identity emerge?
I first started thinking in these terms after a short visit to Oman in 2005. I had gone there with the idea of looking at connections between the Zanzibari exile community in Muscat and their relatives in Zanzibar. But that line inquiry sort of fizzled. What caught my attention during that visit was the constant presence of the traditional sailing ship of the western Indian Ocean: the dhow. In Muscat there was a reconstruction of an 11th century dhow in one of the traffic circles. It was in pool of water with nozzles that sprayed the hull to make it appear to be in motion. In Muscat’s various museums large and meticulously detailed models of dhow were abundant, often with plaques indicating that they were donations from wealthy patrons. The yacht club had several pleasure boats done in the dhow style. The sultan’s yacht was a sort of fiberglass mock up of a dhow. Later I saw another royal yacht under construction in the port of Sur, this one much more traditional, entirely built of wood, and covered with hand-carved decoration. Also in Sur there was a public park that had a couple of big seagoing dhows on display.
The Omanis had clearly embraced the dhow as a symbol of national heritage.
A reconstruction of a medieval dhow that sailed from Muscat to China in an effort to replicate the voyages of Sindbad. It now resides in a traffic circle in Muscat, Oman.
From Oman I went to Zanzibar and saw something similar at work. A major new museum had been built in the decade since I was last there and its centerpiece was a reconstruction of an mtepe, which is a type of dhow unique to the East African coast that more or less disappeared in the early 20th century. In the same museum there were dhow models similar to the ones I had seen in Muscat, complete with the little plaques indicating that they had been donated by Gulf Arabs. In addition to the museum’s interest in dhows, there was also a film festival that took as its logo the dhow. The Zanzibar International Film Festival, which has been presented each year since 1998, is dedicated to showcasing the cultures of the western Indian Ocean, which it defines as the “Dhow Countries”.
Dhow imagery had been present when I was in Zanzibar in 1994, but that presence was largely limited to the tourism industry. There were dhow restaurants and a Dhow Palace Hotel, but the government and its supporters had been pretty ambivalent about dhows. Zanzibar’s government came to power in 1964 in the wake of an anti-Arab revolution. For the revolutionary government, dhows were a symbol of the Arabs and the economic and political system they had revolted against. One of the new government’s first acts was to ban most seagoing dhows from calling at Zanzibar. Over the next 35 years the government of Zanzibar turned its back on the sea and instead embraced an African nationalist identity.
Likewise, Gulf Arabs had been less enthusiastic about dhows in the 1960s and 70s. At that time dhows had been a sign of a backwards, technologically underdeveloped economy and a reminder of the poverty that characterized the region before the oil boom. The less said about them, the better was the consensus.
The public use of dhow symbols to represent a regional identity and a heritage to be valued rather than vilified, struck me as very interesting. In Oman, it was less surprising than in Zanzibar. Oman’s rulers are the descendants of 19th century merchant princes whose power and wealth came from controlling trade in East Africa and their participation in the western Indian Ocean economy. For Zanzibar it came as a bit more of a surprise. For many Zanzibaris, dhows were associated with the slave trade, Arab rule, and other things that many people would rather not celebrate. But even in Zanzibar dhows were in the process of being rehabilitated and the notion of a regional, oceanic identity seemed to be gaining ground.
An old cargo ship, now on display in a public park in Sur, Oman. Sur was once a major trading port, and Suri ships routinely sailed to East Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. Now Sur depends on tourism and the oil industry.
I am not sure whether anyone in the Indian Ocean ports of Calicut or Aden or Kilwa in 1450 would have thought of themselves as part of Chaudhuri’s Indian Ocean world. But it does seem, at least among elites, that the idea of a commonality among the people of “Dhow Countries” is gaining traction. In places like Zanzibar, which has never been that comfortable with its place in the nation of Tanzania, and the Gulf States, where hereditary monarchs rule very new nations whose citizens are often greatly outnumbered by immigrants, supranational identities that hark back to the time of an imagined regional unity and prosperity have an appeal. Dhows have come to represent this new use of the past.
I will be watching to see if this new conception of identity takes hold. If it does, it will offer an alternative to national or religious ideas about identity. In the Gulf, where virtually the entire population is coastal and much of the immigrant population comes from the Indian Ocean rim, the regional identity that the dhow symbolizes may strengthen national cohesiveness. In East Africa where coastal people already have fractious relationships with their national governments, a shift toward an oceanic identity could exacerbate tensions between coast and interior.
American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting November 16-20, 2011 Montreal, Canada
Co-chairs: Fayana Richards, Michigan State University; Julie Armin, University of Arizona
With the recent passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in the United States comes a variety of strategies for bringing marginalized groups into to the public-private health care system. The act will expand health care coverage to an additional 32 million uninsured people with claims of reducing health disparities and increasing the quality of health care. Scheduled to be implemented over the next three years with a projected completion date in 2014, patients, providers, and policy makers have already begun to experience the law’s effects. For this panel, they welcome papers that explore what it means to “reform” health care in the United States. They hope to examine historical efforts to reform health care, discursively analyze reform policies and their ideological underpinnings, and explore the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ethnographically.
We seek to address:
1. patients, providers and policy makers’ understandings of health care reform and the effects of newly implemented policies;
2. historical efforts at reform, such as the implementation of public programs or the increased application of managed care in health care settings;
3. how the intersection of policies shape reform efforts (e.g. public funding of abortions and the expansion of publicly funded insurance); and
4. neoliberal efforts to privatize state programs, including discussions of the “individual mandate” and the Affordable Care Act’s effects on private industry growth.
Please send your abstract (250 word maximum), as a Word attachment, to Julie Armin (jarmin@email.arizona.edu) and Fayana Richards (richa749@msu.edu) by March 20, 2011.
• Bedouin warriors not motley
Not just a “motley army of poorly armed civilian volunteers,” most of the Libyan opposition fighters are descendants of a long line of warriors. Philip Carl Salzman, professor of cultural anthropology at McGill University, makes this point in a letter to Canada’s National Post: “In the current uprising against the Gaddafi regime, we see a resurgence of the tribes and the reactivation of traditional Bedouin mobilization and martial values.”
• Rethinking tribal power in Libya
Another view, from Khalil Ali Al-Musmari, a retired professor of anthropology, says that foreign media have misrepresented tribal power in Libya. Educated, urban Libyans make their own decisions. In the desert outposts, however, tribes play an important role as villagers decide whom to fight.
• Another big drug from the San
Cultural anthropologist Sean Carey of Roehampton University published an article in the March issue of African Business about an anti-depressant herb known to the San people of southern Africa. The San prozac herb could be more financially successful than diet drug made from hoodia. Follow the money and hope the San get major financial rights and do a good job using the money for their own welfare.
• Last Neanderthals in Greece
Two sites in the Pindos Mountains, dated to between 50,000-35,000 years ago, contain hundreds of stone tools that may have been used by the last Neanderthals in Greece and perhaps Europe.
• Our southern African roots
An extensive genetic study of foraging populations of southern Africa supports the view that modern human origins lie in southern Africa. BBC news cites a co-author of the new study, Brenna Henn of Stanford University and Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London (not involved in the study). The paper appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
• Basques in Boise, Idaho
A DNA study published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology reports on the loss of genetic diversity among Basques in Boise due to the founder effect (being descended from a small number of individuals).
• Bonobos: give peace a chance
More on our hippie relatives from Brian Hare of Duke University and Vanessa Woods. Hare and Woods report on our peaceful ancestors who now, sadly, live in the war-torn Congo. We humans should give them a chance.
• Darwin on the hand
Charles Darwin’s assertion that the human hand evolved as a result of tool is supported by experimental research. Stephen Lycett, senior lecturer in human evolution at Kent University, and Alastair Key, of the department of anthropology at Kent University, published their findings in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
• In memoriam
Mahmoud Rouh Alamini, a leading figure in establishing cultural anthropology in Iran, died on March 8 at the age of 82 years. He is the author of several books including Old Rites and Fests in Today Iran, Quest with a Lamp, Roots of Culture Studies, On Culture and Swear by Your Shakhe Nabat. He received a B.A. in social sciences in 1960 from the University of Tehran. He received a Ph.D. degree in 1968 from Sorbonne University.
A letter was drafted and several amendments were made to it before a copy was finalised and sent to BBC complaints.
anthropologyworks 