RAI FELLOWSHIPS AWARDED

The first Royal Anthropological Institute Fellowship in Urgent Anthropology was awarded in December 1994 to Dr. Roxanne P. Hakim, of Bombay, India, and King's College, Cambridge. She has continued her research on the Vasavas, of Gujarat, India. The Vasavas form a community of subsistence farmers who supplement their agriculture by forest hunting and gathering and also raising some cattle. Their language has not been recorded. Recently the community has been resettled because of the Sardar Sarovar Dam project. Dr. Hakim has been working on completing a dictionary of the Vasavas language and pursuing her collection of Vasavas myths, stories, and songs.

In addition, she planned to spend time with two less isolated groups, the Tadvis and Rathwas, who are also being resettled as part of the same project.

The second annual fellowship was awarded in December 1995 to Dr. Stuart Kirsch, of the University of Michigan, who has conducted extensive research in Papua New Guinea since 1987.

Dr. Kirsch has been studying the resistance of the Yonggom of Papua New Guinea to an open-cut copper and gold mine which is polluting their river system. The project is intended to contribute to anthropological knowledge about an indigenous people's effort to maintain autonomy within the global system by defending their natural environment.

The third RAI Fellowship in Urgent Anthropology (June 1997 to December 1998) was awarded to Dr. Hua Cai for fieldwork to document the shamanic knowledge among the few remaining shaman of the Na, an ethnic minority group in the Yunnan Province, PRC, rapidly facing assimilation. The Fund and the RAI have also provided a video camera for Dr. Hua Cai to use to video tape shaman performances. This research is an extension of the original research that Dr. Hua Cai did for his Ph.D. (1995) from the l'Université de Paris X-Nanterre on the kinship system of the Na. Dr. Hua Cai's dissertation was published as Les Na de Chine: Une Société, Sans Père, Presses Universitaires de France, in which he reports the absence of the institution of marriage and family.

Dr. Hua Cai has recently completed a video of a Na shamanistic performance with the help of Dr. Paul Henley, Chair of the RAI Film Committee. This video is available from the Royal Anthropological Institute and includes a fifty page Study Guide.

The 1998 RAI Fellowship was awarded to Dr. Barthlomew Dean (University of Kansas) to continue research in Peru on Urarina social organization, cosmology, and shamanism. He also worked with Urarina leaders and local organizations to develop an intercultural school curriculum that will revalorize the Urarina language and contribute to cultural survival, including the preservation of Urarina knowledge.

This work will also contribute to the protection of Urarina land tenure and their natural resource management.  

The fifth RAI Fellowship was awarded in 1999 to Veronica Strang (D.Phil. in Museum Ethnography from Oxford), lecturer and deputy head of a new department of anthropology at the University of Wales, Lampeter. Her project is on the maintenance of aboriginality in far north Queensland, where she has extensive field experience since 1982. She will examine the efforts of an ex-mission community, Kowanyama, to preserve a traditional Aboriginal environmental relationship while grappling with issues of land rights, tourism, mining, etc. The younger generation is very keen to acquire their elders' traditional knowledge. She will use the technique of "cultural mapping" and the recording of language and other data, with special reference to the internal debates and tensions within the community. She writes that there is a close coincidence between the aims of the project and the current urgent needs of the community.