Richard J. Chacon and Rubén G. Mendoza (eds), The Ethics of Anthropology and Amerindian Research: Reporting on Environmental Degradation and Warfare (Springer, 2012).
The decision to publish scholarly findings bearing on the question of Amerindian environmental degradation, warfare, and/or violence is one that weighs heavily on anthropologists. This burden stems from the fact that documentation of this may render indigenous communities vulnerable to a host of predatory agendas and hostile modern forces.
Consequently, some anthropologists and community advocates alike argue that such culturally and socially sensitive, and thereby, politically volatile information regarding Amerindian-induced environmental degradation and warfare should not be reported. This admonition presents a conundrum for anthropologists and other social scientists employed in the academy or who work at the behest of tribal entities.
This work documents the various ethical dilemmas that confront anthropologists, and researchers in general, when investigating Amerindian communities. The contributions to this volume explore the ramifications of reporting–and, specfically,–of non-reporting instances of environmental degradation and warfare among Amerindians.
Collectively, the contributions in this volume, which extend across the disciplines of archaeology, anthropology, ethnohistory, ethnic studies, philosophy, and medicine, argue that the non-reporting of environmental mismanagement and violence in Amerindian communities generally harms not only the field of anthropology but the Amerindian populations themselves.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
Theodore Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
This book examines the ways in which imperial agendas informed the writing of history in nineteenth-century Britain and how historical writing transformed imperial agendas. Using the published writings and personal papers of Walter Scott, J. A. Froude, James Mill, Rammohun Roy, T. B. Macaulay, E. A. Freeman, W. E. Gladstone, and J. R. Seeley among others, Theodore Koditschek sheds new light on the role of the historical imagination in the establishment and legitimation of liberal imperialism. He shows how both imperialists and the imperialized were drawn to reflect back on Empire’s past as a result of the need to construct a modern, multi-national British imperial identity for a more economically expansive and enlightened present. By tracing the imperial lives and historical works of these pivotal figures, Theodore Koditschek illuminates the ways in which discourse altered practice, and vice versa, as well as how the history of Empire was continuously written and re-written.
Filed under: Empire, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Suburbia, Settler Colonialism and the World Turned Inside Out’, Housing, Theory and Society 1 (2011).
While its primary aim is to explore possibilities for new research, this article contends that suburban and settler colonial imaginaries are related. It suggests that an awareness of the settler colonial “situation” and its dynamics can help an original approach to the interpretation of suburban forms (and vice versa). References to the suburban “frontier” have been frequent in both public discourse and scholarly debate, and suburban phenomena characterize in one way or another all settler societies. This connection, however, has not been the subject of sustained investigation. Thus, this article focuses on shared traditions of anti-urban perception and on a determination to pre-emptively secede from the metropole/metropolis in the presence of growing tensions and contradictions. Similarly, while settler colonial projects constitute separate political entities via an “outward” movement towards various “frontiers of settlement”, independent suburbs are also established via an “outward” movement and in an attempt to maintain local control over local affairs. In both instances displacement is a response/the only response to crisis.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
colonial film database
This website holds detailed information on over 6000 films showing images of life in the British colonies. Over 150 films are available for viewing online. You can search or browse for films by country, date, topic, or keyword. Over 350 of the most important films in the catalogue are presented with extensive critical notes written by our academic research team.
The Colonial Film project united universities (Birkbeck and University College London) and archives (British Film Institute, Imperial War Museum and the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum) to create a new catalogue of films relating to the British Empire. The ambition of this website is to allow both colonizers and colonized to understand better the truths of Empire.
Filed under: Empire, media, Scholarship and insights, Website | Closed
In the 1960s “internal colonialism” became an important theory advanced to explain the historical development of ethnic and racial inequality in the modern world. By the 1980s the theory had been dismissed as inadequate. Nonetheless, its influence persisted as more global colonial theories evolved. This article argues that internal colonialism continues effectively to explain the historic subordination of indigenous peoples within larger states dominated by other groups. Furthermore, internal colonialism is applicable globally to dynastic and national states, as well as contiguous empires, from antiquity to the present-a breadth that attests to this theory’s continuing significance.
Filed under: Latin America, Scholarship and insights | Closed
why pioneers bred like rabbits; or, how genetic scientists discursively erase prior inhabitants
The notion that pioneers tend to have more babies is consistent with the behavior of other species. Expose a bare patch of land, and the first plants to colonize it will most likely be species that grow quickly, reproduce early, and create many offspring. But these early colonizers eventually cede space to other plants that are slower growing but more efficient at using resources such as water, nutrients and space. Shrubs and trees, for instance, grow slowly and produce fewer offspring, but invest enough energy and resources in those offspring to make them highly competitive in the long run.
Humans are generally more like shrubs and trees: slow growing (children take more than a decade to reach adulthood) and efficient consumers of resources. (Quick-breeding rabbits and mice, by contrast, are the weeds of the mammal world.) But a change in environment can turn a slow grower into a weed. That is what happened, Harpending says, when North American settlers found themselves on the fringes of civilization.
Sarah Fecht of Scientific American. My emphases.
Hat-tip, Rob A.
Filed under: Canada, Scholarship and insights, Science, United States | Closed
Ndahinda, Felix. ‘Contrasted Perspectives on Recognition and Implementation of Indigenous Rights’.
Swepston, Lee. ‘Discrimination, Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, and Social Indicators’
Courtis, Christian. ‘Notes on the Implementation by Latin American Courts of the ILO Convention 169 on Indigenous Peoples’
He, Baogang. ‘The Contested Politics of Asian Responses to Indigenous Rights’
Ndahinda, Felix Mukwiza. ‘Marginality, Disempowerment and Contested Discourses on Indigenousness in Africa’
Sing’Oei, Korir. ‘Engaging the Leviathan: National Development, Corporate Globalisation and the Endorois’ Quest to Recover their Herding Grounds’
Suksi, Marku. ‘Asymmetric Autonomy and the Settlement of Ethnic Conflicts’
Odello, Marco. ‘On Cultural Rights: The Equality of Nations and the Minority Legal Tradition’
Filed under: Human Rights, law, Political developments, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Book Review’, Ethnic and Racial Studies (2011).
The Two Faces of American Freedom outlines the rise and fall of the US ‘experiment’ in settler constitutionalism. It is an ultimately convincing outline of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American history as the history of a settler colonial project. While this project and the conception of freedom that underpinned it had emerged victorious with independence, they were terminated sometime between the defeat of Populism and the establishment of the New Deal order. To frame this narrative, Rana understands the settler order as fundamentally characterized by a political theory that was at once internally inclusive and premised on exclusion and expansion. On the one hand, it constituted an ostensibly egalitarian political community that allowed its members, including its most recently arrived members, northern European ‘co-ethnics’ who were immediately allowed to access republican freedoms, an enhanced degree of meaningful participation. On the other hand, this egalitarianism was most decidedly not universal, and these freedoms necessitated an ongoing expansionary project of conquest. The two elements of this equation, Rana emphasizes, were predicated on each other and could not be separated; hence the two faces referred to in the title.[…]It is the notion that we are no longer in the presence of a settler colonial political regime that allows Rana to propose a return to the openness and inclusiveness of a settler colonial project. However, I wonder whether a ‘settler-freedoms-for-all’ proposition is tenable. If the two faces of American freedom could not be separated then how can one think of separating them now? On the one hand, Rana’s prescription ultimately clashes with his original recognition that a settler project is necessarily premised on the subjection of others and on ongoing expansion. On the other, there is slippage, and that the co-ethnics were never outsiders should be emphasized. Most importantly, was the settler colonial project terminated in its entirety? Many Native Americans would beg to differ (indeed, it is significant that indigenous people are entirely absent from Rana’s account). Thinking it is, is like assuming that a party must be over because the bouncers are no longer letting anyone in the private area of a trendy club.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
This essay articulates the ways in which the Indigenous People’s Movement leading to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples (2007) succeeds in what postcolonial theory has conventionally set out to emancipate, but has failed to do. Postcolonial theory challenges all eurocentric and liberal humanist discourses on rights which place the Western subject as the ideal subject figure of all histories and societies, and appeals for a language that would articulate other ways of being human and humanist. Yet recent trends in postcolonial theory have come to embrace the language of cosmopolitanism and humanism as viable alternatives for a postcolonial future. Drawing upon the principle thematic of the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples, the article suggests that the Declaration provides an alternative to postcolonial theory’s revisionist humanism—the re-cognition of difference. As part of the international legal discourse, the Declaration is particularly noted for its political victory in the legitimisation of collective rights in postcolonial societies. Furthermore, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) remains an integral part of the collective rights of the Indigenous Peoples, the article suggests that the Indigenous People’s Movement succeeds in negotiating a language that would legitimise other ways of being human without being adversarial or antithetical to euro-humanism.
Filed under: postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Ruth Hall provides a sound critical appraisal of this report in Another Countryside:
The new Green Paper on Land Reform offers little policy direction for the important but controversial work of land reform. It was the culmination of a long, hotly debated policy process which started with government’s acknowledgement at the National Land Summit in 2005 that land reform was not on track, and a commitment to review its ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ policy.
This about-turn was given added impetus at the ANC’s National Conference at Polokwane in 2007, where its resolutions provided a clear and progressive mandate for a pro-poor land reform, to expand the ‘role and productivity of modern small-holder farming’ while ‘maintaining a vibrant and competitive agricultural sector’. After the 2009 elections, Zuma’s government declared that reinvigorating rural development and land reform would be one of its top five priorities, and promised to unveil a new policy to replace the 1997 White Paper on South African Land Policy. That was two and a half years ago.
This wait has proved to be in vain. Those concerned about the future of rural South Africa have been dumbfounded at the vacuous Green Paper unveiled by Minister Gugile Nkwinti. Consisting of a mere eleven pages of rhetoric and vague proposals, it fudges all the most pressing questions facing the programme and falls far short of being the new policy framework that has been promised over the past six years.
Few documents provide a more disheartening illustration of the degree to which our national discourse has been re-racialised than the recently published Green Paper on Land Reform.
The Green Paper’s ideological fountainhead is the ANC’s National Democratic Revolution – which, believe it or not, still views South Africa through the prism of a continuing liberation struggle against whites. The ideology is reflected in the Green Paper’s assertion that “all anti-colonial struggles are, at the core, about two things: repossession of land lost through force or deceit; and, restoring the centrality of indigenous culture.” The authors are actually saying that seventeen years after 1994 the anti-colonialist struggle is not over; whites are colonialists; the struggle is against them; and only the indigenous culture should be central.
According to the Green Paper, “…the debate about agrarian change, land reform and rural development” should begin with national sovereignty – since national sovereignty is defined in terms of land. The implication is that national sovereignty will not be restored until a sufficient amount of land has been repossessed by black South Africans. In the Green paper’s view this ‘fundamental assumption’ should supersede all other considerations, including “talk of effective land reform and food sovereignty and security.”
But how can this be? Is this ‘fundamental assumption’ really more important than the nation’s food security? Is the United States any less sovereign because all its agricultural land is owned by less than 3% of the population? And how does ownership of land by white citizens detract from national sovereignty?
Filed under: Political developments, Southern Africa | Closed
