Category: Anthropology & Archaeology
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The Battle for Niyamgiri
The “Avatar style” battle between the big bad British corporation Vedanta Resources and Dongria Kondh, an endangered Primitive Tribal Group in Orissa, India, has attracted the attention of Bianca Jagger.For generations, the Kondh of Orissa, in India, have lived on a fertile mountain which they revere as a god. But since the arrival in 2008 of a British aluminium refinery, their land has been poisoned and the villagers imprisoned. Now, the tribes people are making what could be their last stand.
Also check out this interesting video story on the Kondh’s plight that I found on Survival International.
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The Blight of Hindustan
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)
An egalitarian ethos has not been a prominent feature of Indian civilization for at least a thousand years, when Buddhism began losing ground in South Asia. The dominant Hindu sensibility has long held that all men are created unequal, constituting not one but many moral communities, and possess varying natural rights and duties. The anthropologist Louis Dumont saw hierarchy as so central to Indian lives, whether in the family, the workplace, or the community, that he titled his 1966 treatise on Indian society, Homo Hierarchicus. Indeed, a host of hierarchical relationships—framed by traditional norms of deference, authority, and obligation—shape most Indians throughout their lives. In the Indian social realm, the primary institution of hierarchy is caste, or jati, of which thousands exist today. But where does caste, a blight of modern India, come from?The Origins of Caste
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Thapar on the Indo-Aryan Migrations
Here is a transcript of a 1999 lecture by Romila Thapar. She examines quite well the substantive evidence for the Indo-Aryan migrations into the Subcontinent in the second millennium BCE. Definitely worth a read for anyone interested in the topic (transcript has a few typos). Also see my earlier post, which I hope to turn into a more polished article, incorporating all that I have learned since about the topic.
Let me begin by saying the obvious, that the Aryan question is probably the most complex, complicated question in Indian history. And it requires very considerable expertise in handling both the sources and the questions that arise. The expertise consists of knowing something about at least four different fields, first of all archaeology, because a lot of the remains, of almost all the cultures, come to us from excavations and there is the continual attempt to try and identify such cultures with the Aryans…. I mean that it is not enough simply to say that you pick up a list of items from excavated sites and say that the Rigveda has some items, therefore … they are identical cultures. When I talk about archaeology I am also talking about the way in which the total society functions and how these elements are integrated.The second area of expertise is linguistics and here I would like to emphasize, very strongly, that it is not enough merely to know Sanskrit to be able to say that you can handle the questions that come up in the interpretation of the Vedic texts. There is now, since the last thirty years, there has developed a huge body of information which comes from a discipline called linguistics. Those in this discipline do comparative studies of different language structures…
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On Being Exiled From Nature
The vast majority of readers of this blog do not live in close proximity to nature but in urbanscapes of steel and concrete, as I do as well. Sure, now and then we go out camping or hike on a forest trail, but isn’t that as far as we go? Perhaps we go out because, as Thoreau said, “We need the tonic of wildness—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe, to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest.” Or perhaps deep down we feel, as John Muir did, that going out is really going in.
Our distant human ancestors lived in intimate contact with plants and animals, but in recent millennia, technologically advancing societies have been erecting barriers between us and nature, hoping to be shielded from its harshness, dangers, and unpredictability. Who among us would wholly dismiss that urge? By any yardstick, this process—which accelerated with the industrial revolution—has come a long way, and it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that a hallmark of our modernity is a near total loss of first-hand biological knowledge and personal experience of nature’s beats and rhythms. Our “objective” classroom knowledge now tends to be bookish, theoretical, and detached.
Childhood development was once shaped by the direct experience of plants and animals, their cycle and drama of birth, decay, and death, with folkbiology furnishing the taxonomy, teleology, and the interrelationships of the living world, including the attitude and knowledge needed for survival in a given ecological zone. A great many children now develop amidst apartment blocks, public parks, and city streets, where the context of local ecology, its delicate dependencies, and the sense of its inherent limits is less visible than ever before.
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An Ethnography of Wall Street
Mention the word ‘ethnography’ and a tribe in a faraway place comes to mind. But couldn’t it just as well apply to us moderns, with our own myths, rituals, assumptions, customs, and oddball ideas of the world? Here is Scott McLemee on anthropologist Karen Ho’s ethnography of bankers, traders and analysts, the tribe of elites who shape our world in the image of ‘Wall Street’s bulimic culture of expediency’.
Each social group has its particular mixture of small-scale habits, large-scale rationalisations and everyday assumptions about the how the world really works. Like a good journalist, the ethnographer will find and describe telling details about what goes on within a subculture. But the ethnographer takes an additional few steps by trying to understand how even the most taken-for-granted aspects of behaviour within a group reflect a set of powerful but largely implicit rules and beliefs. Daily experience tends to reinforce the subculture’s shared outlook in ways that make it seem inarguable.It’s one thing to do this with, say, Albanian shepherds – and something else to attempt it with those financial titans who Tom Wolfe once satirically called the Masters of the Universe. But the same general principles apply. The ethnographer has to spend time observing what the Albanian shepherd expects from the sheep, and from himself – and also figuring out how either may be different from what a Greek shepherd expects. A significant part of Wall Street’s outlook is available in documents, of course, unlike with a rustic subculture; but the really interesting dimension of Liquidated comes from its account of how the financial sector’s members understand their own daily experience.
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Wade Davis on the Human Imagination
In this beautiful TED talk, Wade Davis, anthropologist, ethnobotanist, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, author, documentarian, and photographer takes us on a tour through the wild ranges of the human imagination as manifested in the breadth of human mythology and cultural life. As members of the same human family we all share the same raw human genius and imagination, he reminds us, and while some have chosen to apply that to developing technologies, others have applied it to other mysteries of existence. Different ways of life and mythological systems are not failed attempts at being modern—at being us—but merely different human responses to the essential human questions: what does it mean to be human and alive.“All peoples are simply cultural options, different visions of life, itself…. making for completely different possibilities of existence,” he says. And as such, the breadth of human cultural variation is a treasure trove of imaginative insights and knowledge. If we discard our human diversity, we lose a hundred thousand years of accumulated knowledge and wisdom about ourselves and our planet. Modern western culture is hardly 300 years old, he cautions, and it’s folly to imagine that in those 300 years we’ve learned as much as we need to face the challenges of living.
By way of example, he tells us about—and treats us to some stunning photography of—several completely different indigenous cultures from around the globe, including the following:
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On Conservative Values
With battle lines clearly drawn in the US, Jonathan Haidt explains what, deep down, separates the Democrats from the Republicans:
…the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats “just don’t get it,” this is the “it” to which they refer. Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn the label “elitist.” But how can Democrats learn to see—let alone respect—a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb?
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Indigenous Aryans?
Two years ago on a train in South India, I struck a conversation with a middle-aged Indian from New Jersey, traveling to visit his parents. He worked as a researcher at Colgate-Palmolive and held an advanced degree in science. Early in our conversation, after I told him about my extended travel in India, he professed a deep interest in Indian history. He even taught it as a hobby to the kids of middle-class Indian immigrants like himself, “keen on taking pride—some self-respect and dignity—in the culture and traditions of their original homeland.” *
Among the things he taught was the truth about the ancient Aryans in India. Aryans are a big lie, he said; they never came. Instead, there was a migration out of India to West Asia. The people of the Indus Valley Civilization—who spoke a proto-Sanskrit—were the sole precursors of those who later wrote the Vedas in Sanskrit, which has been shown to be the mother of all Indo-European languages. By this time, we were engaged in a vigorous debate. He marshaled “evidence” for his claims: no archaeological dig has revealed signs of an Aryan invasion; population genetics has not revealed the presence of foreign traits; Indus valley seals show the early worship of Shiva; fire rituals existed in Indus Valley culture. He recited names of people who had confirmed such findings and dismissed linguistic and philological data as contradictory and unscientific.Not only was he terribly mixed up on dates, he also evinced a strong tendency to regard Hindu scriptures as vessels of literal history. When I pushed him, he claimed that Lord Rama lived 1,725,000 years ago, when he also built the Ram Setu to Lanka (click to read what an Indian software engineer in the US has to say about it—he represents an outlook shared by a fair percentage in this demographic). He even tried to prove the historicity of Lord Krishna, citing the submerged ruins of an Indus Valley settlement discovered off the coast of Gujarat in the 80s, which he claimed was Krishna’s kingdom of Dwarka.
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Scheper-Hughes on Liberty
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, professor of social anthropology, wonders if it is natural for human beings to want personal liberty. Or is it a peculiarly Western concern?
Imagine a small clearing in the Ituri forest of Zaire. A band of Mbuti pygmies are returning from a hunt. The women have run ahead of the game nets carried by the men to beat the ground and the bushes, terrifying small animals so that they rush blindly and headlong into the traps. The game, collectively caught, is carefully redistributed at the base camp. But one of the hunters, wily Cephu, has cheated. Running ahead of the group he captured some of the game before they ran into the nets, and Cephu and his wife enjoyed the advantage of an early meal. Found out, Cephu is punished, told that if he does not wish to behave like a human being, that is, like a Mbuti – he is free to go his own way…alone. In other words, Cephu is banished.
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Haidt on Moral Foundations
Jonathan Haidt, professor of psychology, on the difference between liberals and conservatives:
Abstract: Researchers in moral psychology and social justice have agreed that morality is about matters of harm, rights, and justice. On this definition of morality, conservative opposition to social justice programs appears to be immoral, and has been explained as a product of various non-moral processes such as system justification or social dominance orientation [or selfishness, existential fear, blind prejudice, etc.]. In this article we argue that, from an anthropological perspective, the moral domain is usually much broader, encompassing many more aspects of social life and valuing institutions as much or more than individuals. We present theoretical and empirical reasons for believing that there are five psychological systems that provide the foundations for the world’s many moralities. The five foundations are psychological preparations for detecting and reacting emotionally to issues related to harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. Political liberals have moral intuitions primarily based upon the first two foundations, and therefore misunderstand the moral motivations of political conservatives, who generally rely upon all five foundations.More here.
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The Na of China
Here is a remarkable account of a highly unusual kinship system of a Tibeto-Burmese Buddhist people:
Among the Na, a tribal people hidden away in the Yongning hills of Yunnan province in southern China and the subject of the French-trained Chinese anthropologist Cai Hua’s provocative new monograph, there is no marriage, in fact or word. Mothers exist, as do children, but there are no dads. Sexual intercourse takes place between casual, opportunistic lovers, who develop no broader, more enduring relations to one another. The man “visits,” usually furtively, the woman at her home in the middle of the night as impulse and opportunity appear, which they do with great regularity. Almost everyone of either sex has multiple partners, serially or simultaneously; simultaneously usually two or three, serially as many as a hundred or two. There are no nuclear families, no in-laws, no stepchildren. Brothers and sisters, usually several of each, reside together, along with perhaps a half-dozen of their nearer maternal relatives, from birth to death under one roof—making a living, keeping a household, and raising the sisters’ children.
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