Anthropology Today

CONTENTS 2009– vol 25

June – vol 25 – issue 3

Front and back cover caption: HERITAGE PROTECTION — Created in the aftermath of World War II, UNESCO was mandated to engage in a worldwide educational campaign aimed at establishing the conditions for lasting peace. This involved working out and disseminating a new world view based on a revised conception of human diversity. The founders of UNESCO argued that prejudice relating to human diversity is the main cause of war, and hoped that a radical modification of the existing vision of that diversity would help to guarantee of peace.

Over the 60 years of its history UNESCO’s doctrine has been subject to numerous modifications. Initially, cultural diversity was often described in terms of unequal economic progress and presented as an obstacle to be overcome. But in the 1960s ‘progress’, and the resulting cultural homogenization, began to be considered a major threat to human diversity, particularly diversity of culture. Co-ordinated by UNESCO, the international salvage of the Abu Simbel temples, threatened with submersion in Lake Nasser, became a symbol of a new moral obligation, incumbent upon all humans, to safeguard a common ‘world heritage’ (exemplified in the images on the back and front covers of this issue).

Over the last decade, the notion of common heritage of humanity has been extended to all expressions of cultural traditions, thought to be endangered by the deleterious effects of globalization. UNESCO has chosen to put its support behind local identities and the right of the minorities to conserve their traditional differences. Alongside the principle of the equality of individuals, UNESCO now also upholds the equality of cultures, suggesting that the charter of human rights needs to be supplemented by a charter of cultural rights.

The major challenge to UNESCO’s current ideology is the compatibility of universal human rights with particular cultural rights. If all traditions deserve to be protected, should this privilege be bestowed equally on masterpieces of the past as on traditional practices. Wearing the burqa need not be controversial, but what about practices like genital mutilation or ‘honour killings’? As Wiktor Stoczkowski argues in his article, such issues are intensely anthropological challenges deserving our attention.

The front and back covers by artist Sean Weisgerber.

CONTENTS

Sophie Day 1
Renewing the war on prostitution: The spectres of ‘trafficking’ and ‘slavery’
John Sharp and Rehana Vally 3
Unequal ‘cultures’? Racial integration at a South African university
Wiktor Stoczkowski 7
UNESCO’s doctrine of human diversity: A secular soteriology?
Agustín Fuentes 12
A new synthesis: Resituating approaches to the evolution of human behaviour
Max Carocci 18
Written out of history: Contemporary Native American narratives of enslavement
Karen Valentin and Lotte Meinert 23
The adult North and the young South: Reflections on the civilizing mission of children’s rights

CONFERENCES
Nayanika Mookherjee 29
The ethics of apology: Open meeting at the joint international conference of the ASA, the ASAANZ and the AAS, Auckland, 9 December 2008

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April – vol 25 – issue 2

Front and back cover caption: ETHNICITY, RACE AND THE LIMITS OF HUMAN IDENTITY — The front and back covers show artist Sean Weisgerber's interpretation of the theme of this issue, the problem of classifying human identity in a world of fusion and change. Articles address biometric security, the use of the concept of ‘tribe' in US army counter-insurgency programmes, and human identity as constituted in and through debate among Afghani refugees recently returned from northern Pakistan to Afghanistan .

The difficulty of fitting human diversity into strictly defined categories is most acutely evident in questions asked on census forms. In this issue, Peter Aspinall considers the broad range of terms proposed and debated for the ‘mixed race' population. Many have complex histories and have been used to subsume individuals of varied and sometimes disparate ethnic and racial origins.

Dissatisfaction with the widely used term ‘mixed race', contested by anthropologists and sociologists among others on the grounds that it references the now discredited concept of ‘race', has led to the search for an alternative. In 1994 the Royal Anthropological Institute advanced ‘mixed origins', although such advocacy has gained little momentum.

‘Mixed race' now competes with terms such as ‘mixed heritage', ‘dual heritage' and ‘mixed parentage' amongst data users, and UK government usage also reflects this diversity in terminology. However, research indicates that the term of choice of most respondents in general and student samples of this population is ‘mixed race'. Terms invoking just two groups – such as ‘mixed parentage', ‘dual heritage', and ‘biracial' – are preferred by few.

While ‘mixed origins' is likely to have a continuing niche role in professional practice, such as legal usage and assessment of health risks, it is premature to argue that the umbrella term ‘mixed race' should be replaced by candidates that are not self-descriptors.

Bruno Latour's editorial places such questions in a broader context as he draws attention to a lively debate on the biggest question of all, the essence of nature itself. In the context of an emergent multi-naturalism, has anthropological theory itself been ‘decolonizing enough'?

CONTENTS

Bruno Latour 1
Perspectivism: ‘Type’ or ‘bomb’?
Peter J. Aspinall 3
‘Mixed race’, ‘mixed origins’ or what? Generic terminology for the multiple racial/ethnic group population
Mark Maguire 9
The birth of biometric security
Roberto J. González 15
Going ‘tribal’: Notes on pacification in the 21st century
Magnus Marsden 20
Talking the talk: Debating debate in northern Afghanistan

COMMENT
Gustav Peebles 25
Hoarding, storing value and the credit crunch: A comment on Hart/Ortiz and Gudeman (AT 24[6])
Stephen Gudeman 25
Hoarding wealth: When virtue becomes vice: A response to Elyachar/Maurer, Applbaum and Peebles (AT 25[1] and in this issue)
Fabian Muniesa 26
The description of financial objects: A comment on Hart/Ortiz (AT 24[6])

CONFERENCES
Caitlin Fouratt, Janny Li, Taylor Nelms 27
AAA encounters: Challenging boundaries and rethinking ethics, American Anthropological Association 107th Annual Meeting

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February – vol 25 – issue 1

Front cover caption: A boy shows off on his horse at the annual festival of racing, games and music in Barsko'on, Kyrgyzstan in October 2007. The festival includes endurance races of up to 36 kilometres over steep, rocky mountain paths and streams, a far cry from the bowling-green surfaces of Churchill Downs and Newmarket.

Abdildechan, an expert in horse games in Kyzyl Suu, explained that horse games and competitions such as these derive from the importance of horses to the nomadic and warrior traditions of the Kyrgyz people. Horses enable people to move away from danger, he explained, and are also essential for work and food. Cars are becoming increasingly common in Kyrgyzstan, but many people believe that they will never completely replace horses in this mountainous region. 'Young people may have cars', says shepherd Jakshylyck Orgochor, 'but where there is a Kyrgyz person there is always a horse: a horse is a man's wings'.

In this issue, Rebecca Cassidy scrutinizes claims about the distinctiveness of the Kyrgyz horse and considers the political consequences of evaluating domesticated animals on the basis of contested categories including 'breed' and 'type'.

Back cover caption: HUMAN-ANIMAL RELATIONS — Ros Coard, lecturer in archaeology and specialist in archaeozoology and forensic taphonomy in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Wales Lampeter, examines forensic evidence taken from the scene of a suspected big cat kill in West Wales, UK.

The skulls in the foreground belong to an array of known big cat species, and Coard compared tooth pit data from these skulls with those found in sheep and horses killed in unusual circumstances. These data have been used to provide evidence for the existence of at least one large predatory felid in West Wales.

However, even without this scientific corroboration, many people around the UK report sightings of non-endemic ‘alien’ big cats (ABCs) on a regular basis, attributing to them an almost mythical status, and this makes them an interesting phenomenon to be considered from an anthropological perspective.

Coard has been working collaboratively with Samantha Hurn, an anthropologist who has been documenting narratives relating to big cat sightings in West Wales. In this issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Hurn outlines the data collected so far. She argues that ABCs do, indeed, exist in West Wales, and discusses how and why her informants from the local Welsh farming community regard these predators in positive terms. Many see ABCs as both important keystone species performing the valuable function of keeping other problematic predators (notably foxes) in check, and highly politicized animals who symbolize their own marginalized position within contemporary UK society.

As Lévi-Strauss put it long ago, animal-human relations are, indeed, good to think with.

CONTENTS

Antonius C.G.M. Robben 1
Anthropology and the Iraq war: An uncomfortable engagement
Marshall Sahlins 3
The teach-ins: Anti-war protest in the Old Stoned Age
Samantha Hurn 6
Here be dragons? No, big cats! Predator symbolism in rural West Wales
Rebecca Cassidy 12
The horse, the Kyrgyz horse and the ‘Kyrgyz horse’
Helen Lambert 16
Evidentiary truths? The evidence of anthropology through the anthropology of medical evidence
Petra Rethmann 21
Post-communist ironies in an East German hotel

COMMENT
Laura Jeffery 24
Chagossians refused right to return home: A sequel to Vine (AT 24[4])
Kalman Applbaum 26
Free markets and the unfettered imagination of value: A response to Hart/Ortiz and Gudeman (AT24[6])
Julia Elyachar and Bill Maurer 27
Retooling anthropology: A response to Hart/Ortiz and Gudeman (AT24[6])
Roberto J. González 27
Springing a leak: A comment on the Human Terrain Team handbook

LETTERS
Gillian Hansford 28
Topical AT

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