Muslim refugees and culture talk
The Independent (Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada) carried an article about Canada’s failure to help with the current Middle East refugee crisis, drawing on the fact that Alan Kurdi, the child refugee found dead on a Turkish beach, had an aunt in British Columbia, who had appealed without success to the Immigration Minister to help get the family to Canada. This episode highlights the erosion of government support for refugees with the odds of being granted asylum have declined since 2006, when the Conservatives took power. The article mentions the writings of two Columbia University cultural anthropologists, Lila Abu-Lughod and Mahmood Mamdani. Abu-Lughod argued in a 1991 essay that policy narratives used the “plight of Muslim women” to justify making war after 9/11 at the expense of analyzing the historical development of those contexts in which “Islamic extremism” flourished. Mamdani diagnosed “culture talk” as a central feature in post-9/11 attempts to find links between Islam and terrorism. Cultural explanations tend to erase history he said: “By equating political tendencies with entire communities … such explanations encourage collective discipline and punishment – a practice characteristic of colonial encounters. They also imply that people’s “identities are shaped entirely by the supposedly unchanging culture into which they are born.” The Conservatives in Canada insist they are not targeting Muslims as such. Rather, they claim to be speaking for “Canadian values,” including those of “the overwhelming majority of Muslims who are moderate Muslims.” As Mamdani says, they are pitting “good Muslims” against “bad Muslims,” placing the burden on individual Muslims to prove that they are on the right side.
Welcome to the neighborhood
BBC News carried an article by Irish anthropologist Martina Tyrrell of the University of Exeter has studied the relationship between humans and animals in Arviat, an Inuit community on the west coast of Hudson Bay for fifteen years. The townspeople are increasingly having to cope with polar bears in town. In the past it was rare for bears to enter the town, but now in the summer and autumn, it’s becoming a part of everyday life. Encounters with bears are common, but harm to either humans or bears is rare.
anthropologyworks 