OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY

Here at Manoa we are in the process of setting up an open access repository for anthropology (please see the call for submissions below). I’m very excited about this project and I think it would really make a strong statement for Pacific anthropologists to be involved early and have their work featured. Please email me if you would like your work hosted by the repository or have any further questions about the project.

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It is with great pleasure that I request submissions for MANAO — an Open Access repository for anthropology sponsored by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. In Hawai’ian “mana’o” means thoughts, ideas, knowledge, or opinions — when making decisions together people in Hawai’i often ask for each other’s mana’o. The Mana’o project combines anthropology’s commitment with the ideal of open access with open source software’s focus on free technology. The goal is to provide tools that allow scholars to better communicate with each other and with the world.

Manao will soft-launch in late-November 2007 during the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington D.C. We are currently inviting early adopters to submit work that will be featured in this launch. At the moment we are specifically interested in:

BA Theses
MA Theses
Ph.D. Theses
Articles in peer-reviewed journals
Papers given at academic conferences
Digitized books

If you would like to deposit your work with us, simply email it to submissions@manaoproject.org and our staff will process it and deposit it in Mana’o. If you already have your publications online, simply send us the URL and we will process the material ourselves.

Please note that we can only deposit documents that are in the public domain, documents for which you clearly hold the copyright, or documents for which the copyright owner (typically, the publisher) permits authors to deposit their work in a repository such as this. Unfortunately, this does not include PDFs of your dissertation created by UMI (unless you have used the UMI Open Access publishing option). We can, however, accept the electronic documents that you submitted to UMI when you deposited your dissertation with your university library. If you are unsure who owns the copyright to the work you wish to submit, we can work with you to determine your rights.

Anthropologists have long been concerned with making their world available to the public, including the communities with whom they have lived and conducted fieldwork. Mana’o represents an important step forward in creating concrete open access solutions for anthropology. I hope that you will be part of our initial program, and I look forward
to receiving your submission!

Please circulate this call for submissions as widely as possible. If you are interested in volunteering for the project, please do not hesitate to contact me at golub@hawaii.edu.

Thank you,
Alex Golub, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Hawai’i at Manoa

Alex Golub, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Hawai’i at Manoa
Honolulu HI 96822-2223

The Caribbean is often treated in commonly cited literature as a zone of aboriginal extinction, a place where indigenous peoples are absent except as a memory or in the form of a museum piece. Just as often, what is ignored is the history of unequal power relations that allow some, a ruling colonial minority, to pronounce the death of others, to proclaim them to be gone. This process, unfortunately, was never limited to the Caribbean alone. There also are zones of “extinction” in places such as Canada. Extinction, however, isn’t what it used to be. In the article below, from CBC Canada, an allegedly extinct First Nation has come forward to reclaim the remains of ancestors.

CBC News: ‘Extinct’ First Nation gets ancestral bones back

In the Spirit of the Ancestors:
Reconciling Post Tribal Stress Disorder

by Patrisia Gonzales

Column of the Americas

© May 1, 2006

[reprinted in The CAC Review by kind permission of the author]
[the original article, and many others like it, can be found at: http://hometown.aol.com/xcolumn/myhomepage/]

I once heard an Ojibwa woman tell a group of Chicanos working on indigenous liberation that our ancestors did what they had to, to survive.

Our indigenous ancestors survived by passing as Mexicans or mestizos, or being defined away as mestizos by governments. And many married mestizos. As a result, the Mexican community is a pan indigenous community comprised of native peoples of both Mexico and North America. Indigeneity became private and individualized in families. They survived by hiding the indigenous knowledge so deeply that some of us could no longer recognize it. Some were taught to forget and to fear and disconnect from our place in the natural world and the power of nature within our own hands. There was no need for the Inquisition once forced conversion could be regulated by the community itself. Choctaw scholar Karina Walters says that part of historical trauma was established through forced conversion and separating people away from their original instructions, the ancestral agreements and covenants about how to treat each other and how to honor their responsibilities to the natural world.

I believe that among those defined as mestizos many suffer from PTSD or Post Tribal Stress Disorder. I use this term to refer to the suffering and afflictions that result from de-Indianization. Invariably, there is someone who remembers in their family that they are Indian. Or they will recount how one of their grandparents told them to never forget, “we are Indian.” But like historical trauma, not all suffer the soul wound of de-Indianization.

Part of their historical trauma is the void where there should be remembrance of the names of our ancestors and nations. They are the other “disappeared” of the Americas, by the processes of social control. Some argue that mestizos are like a brown clay pot, emptied of a native spirit that was claimed by impositions. Others argue mestizos indigenized Spanish culture and that it is, in fact, only a shallow topsoil that covers indigenous Mexico, which is indigenous in the spaces also claimed as mestizo or urban. We are another kind of Indian that does not fit into the current boxes on identity.

Many scholars concur that Mesoamerica’s indigenous legacy remains in traditional agriculture and Mexican traditional medicine - and protective factors against disconnection. Zapata asserted that the land belongs to those who work it — Mexicans still work the land and have relationships with this natural world. But many are taught to deny their Indianness, to even hate it. A Kickapoo elder once recounted to me how a group of Mexican kids in Coahuilla, Mexico, got mad when he proclaimed to them, “you’re Indian.”

Those people identified as mestizo, Hispanic, or Latino suffer from a particular kind of historical trauma. They are told that they are both the oppressed and the oppressor. Many Mexicans are largely Indian by heritage and do not descend from Spanish colonialists, and when they do, it may be through rape or forced marriage, such as with one of my Kickapoo grandmothers. It is hard to determine who is the “we/they,” who of the relatives were/are the mestizos who benefited from controlling “the Indian.” The Mexican (read Bolivian, Ecuadorian etc.) community has been in a constant process of de-Indianization and each family has its own particular relationship to that process.

In my work, I identify some symptoms of PTSD:

1. Anehlos — a feeling of longing and that something is missing.

2. Cracked mirror — a feeling that something wants to break through, or break open and that your sight is refracted from cracks in perception, with some parts distorted and others clear.

3. Rejection — feeling rejected by Latinos and mestizos as being too Indian and by some Native Americans as almost or maybe Indian, but then again not really (while others welcome you as cousins, brothers or sisters.)

4. Loss – mourning the loss of ancestors, nations and the spiritual teachings that were wrested away and in which you had no say or control.

Fortunately, there are numerous native elders working with, or in, these communities as people resist de-Indianization, particularly the more recent indigenous migrants from the southern hemisphere. Some people argue that mestizos and Latinos should accept their historical conditions, that they have no right to renew or strengthen their indigeneity. Yet, that goes against the spirit of self-determination. If we could hear them speak in the spirit world, would they not ask for their children to return? to fight? to renew knowledge in the spirit of their ancestors? To do otherwise, is to accept colonization, something no community, native or not, can justify as an acceptable human condition. To proclaim their Indianness, someone once said, is the biggest paradigm shift since the Spanish debated whether Indians had souls.

© 2006 Column of the Americas

XColumn@gmail.com

- 608-238-3161 or
Column of the Americas, PO BOX 5093 Madison WI 53705.

Our bilingual columns are posted at: http://hometown.aol.com/xcolumn/myhomepage/

As some readers already know, I am a fan of a Trinidadian blog that is titled, “Guanaguanare-The Laughing Gull.” I recently received an email from that blog, with the following post:

….I have chosen to focus on one aspect of Trinidadian society and culture – the aboriginal presence. I will take the opportunity to think about the amnesia surrrounding aboriginality, whether deliberately induced or happily adopted, as the betrayal of man’s true nature. It is not my intention to write factual accounts about aboriginal peoples in Trinidad and Tobago. I’d be simply repeating what others have written. What I will try to do is to retreat into the cave, the Guacara, to try to remember-by-dreaming what it means to me.To say that I have aboriginal ancestry is to proclaim that I belong to the human race. Every single one of us is descended from an aboriginal. On the physical level, DNA markers are obsessive recorders and guardians of our genetic roots and meanderings. If, for my survival, due to the introduction of competition or threat, I must lay claim to a particular geographic location or cultural identity, I must also admit to myself that this aboriginality as location is also temporary, not written in stone, not bequeathed for eternity.Most of us originally came from elsewhere. If the centre of human genesis as we know it thus far, was located in Africa, then according to our logic, African peoples who still occupy their lands are the only genuine aboriginals. Even so, the connection to land, although a source of real comfort and rootedness, does not lock us into infinitely attaching ourselves to one location. There are many original peoples who have over time made voluntary and epic migrations from their “aboriginal” lands. We tend to think of diaspora in terms of specific ethnicities and geographic points. More interesting to me is the psychic diaspora which is part of man’s experience over time and for many is remembered only as a bridge irreparably burnt.

“For a long time — at least six decades — photographs have laid down the tracks of how important conflicts are judged and remembered. The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one”–Susan Sontag

When a conservative British daily such as The Telegraph can feature a commentary (”Execution gives Saddam a martyr’s crown“) condemning the execution of Saddam Hussein, with such strong statements as: “grotesquely botched execution,” that Saddam Hussein was “shown dying with dignity and no little courage at the hands of hooded thugs,” and thus, “the martyr’s crown surely beckons,” then one can just begin to guess what the reactions would be in the colonized world. In fact, it’s not so much a matter of guessing, when there have been protests in several nations, not just in the Middle East, plus countless caustic newspaper editorials from Malaysia to North Africa–and not because Saddam Hussein had a large and adoring following. Everything about the pursuit of Saddam Hussein has shown tremendous blood lust, fierce jingoism, and most of all, a desire to humiliate the vanquished.

Huge numbers of Americans hated Saddam Hussein without really knowing anything about this man who never attacked their nation, who never invaded their soil, and who at one time was the darling of their own elites and their many wealthy business partners who dominate the Gulf states. In North America we have been told countless times that we live in “the civilized world,” by political leaders such as George W. Bush. These words should ring as loudly as they ring hollow, for they necessarily imply an other half: the uncivilized world. A war against the uncivilized world then, by force of history and custom, can easily be translated into a colonial war against “savages.”

Is there anyone left who will still protest that the world of 2007 is fundamentally different from the world of 1492, or the imperial “scramble for Africa” of the late 1800s? Would anyone still like to argue that the act of putting conquered natives on display, as part of a gory freak show, is something of the distant past? Does any scholar still use the term “post-colonial” as if it actually meant something?

Not in my lifetime have I seen the overthrow of a leader of a foreign nation resemble, in such a macabre manner, a vulgar Mafia “hit” (killing his family, blowing up his home). What I dreaded and expected from the beginning, knowing the extent to which Western culture lionizes imagery, not to mention electronic images, was for the humiliation to be televised. The act of “embedding” journalists with invading forces mandated this outcome from the outset. We were, once again, to be given a front row seat in the conquest of another nation, and this was presumably being done for our benefit. As in recent times, where spectators could see a bombing, from the point of view of the bomb, audiences would be socialized and trained to identify with the conqueror, and damn it, they were to enjoy it.

When, in the early weeks of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Iraqis broadcast video segments on television of four American soldiers who had been taken prisoner, the American forces howled about “the Geneva Convention,” which they had, to their convenience, suddenly rediscovered. Was their response more humane, more civilized?

1. Claiming to show “thousands” of Iraqi soldiers being held as prisoners in southern Iraq, Western media outlets sprayed their front pages with gigantic images of the captives in the early weeks of the invasion, being marched with their hands on their heads.

2. Saddam Hussein’s two sons were photographed, dead, after they had fallen to American gunfire, and these images were published worldwide.

3. Saddam Hussein’s “spider hole” (terminology meant to add to the dehumanization) was photographed, as was his medical examination by American captors, like a wild animal caught by White big game hunters, as if undergoing delousing before being put on public display.

4. Saddam Hussein’s days in what was indisputably a Kangaroo Court, televised, also gave many pleasure, to see this man made to fight when the outcome had been predetermined, to allow him an appeal when his sentence was already made certain, and to watch his furor grow at the lynching that was inevitably in store for him; all of this would give some the same perverse joy that wicked children show in pulling the wings off of a fly or burning a caterpillar under a magnifying lens.

5. Saddam Hussein’s execution, on government television no less, with complete footage released by two government officials who were permitted to openly record the proceedings with their cell phones, to the accompaniment of sectarian insults, and distributed across the Internet.

6. And, I do not need to remind anyone of the countless Abu Ghraib photographs.

[I would like to refer readers to Susan Sontag's critique, "Regarding the Torture of Others," which appeared in The New York Times on May 23, 2004.]

Is all of this just an accident? Obviously not, it is done by design. So what is the design?

Whether it is Pirates of the Caribbean 2 or Apocalypto or the murder of Saddam Hussein, we are being treated to a ghoulish feast of images of the supposed barbarity of others, yet displaying our own in greater abundance. In an effort to stem the tide of photographs and videos which show the extreme vulnerability of coalition forces in Iraq (whether it is the famed series of “Juba the Sniper” videos showing an Iraqi sniper at work against US troops, filmed from the perspective of the barrel of his rifle, or the collage of roadside bomb clips where the trajectories of American bodies up through the tank and into the air is traced by an illuminated red circle added by a video editor–my, how the uncivilized learn the arts of civilization so quickly), clearly the “civilizers” have done no better than the “uncivilized.” That is also not an accident, not a stumbling into a situation of contradiction.

What I find most disturbing (as if all of this was not disturbing enough) is that these images are shown to us…as if we were expected to enjoy them. And that, I think, is the answer to what appears, superficially, to be a contradiction we enjoy (the civilized gawking at the uncivilized in what is after all a very uncivilized manner). When our political leadership and the media establishment treat us to these spectacles, they expect us to gaze at these pictures of conquest without seeing ourselves at work in the gazing. To put it bluntly, the one who takes pleasure at the sight of the conquest of the other avoids seeing himself as the demented, drooling savage he claims to abhor. These photos and films permit viewers to watch, themselves unseen, but even worse than that: barring them from seeing themselves in the act of looking. This is what the deliberate, studied, and regulated display of these images is meant to accomplish: our own colonization as we are emotionally and unconsciously recruited into celebrating the oppressor. The fact that this does not work nearly so well, so smoothly, in reality is something that gives one some hope.

[Thanks to Dr. Gillian Cowlishaw for circulating this statement]Professor Gillian Cowlishaw,
President, AAS.
University of Technology, Sydney
Humanities & Social Sciences,
PO Box 123
Broadway, NSW, 2007
Ph. 61 2 9514 2743