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Institute
Canada’s geographic centre lies in the Territory Nunavut. From here the distance to the geographic North Pole is as far as to the US border. Nunavut takes up about 1/5 of the Canadian land mass but has by far the smallest population with currently about 38,000 residents. 85% of its population are Inuit whose culture dramatically changed within the last 70 years.
As a result, the territory is dealing with several generations of Inuit that are traumatized or at least severely affected by cultural and economic changes that started after World War 2 with the resettlement from the land into permanent communities. No matter if we are talking about the actual elders, mid-age adults or pre-teenagers, each of this generation experienced and still experiences various personal and cultural challenges of identity, financial and housing insecurity, food insecurity, substance abuse education, change of social values ranging from inter-generational and gender relationships to the introduction of a foreign political and legal system.
On the other side, a lot of the traditional societal values are still being practiced in Inuit families. Despite all the tragedies that several generations of Inuit have experienced by now, the society keeps generating the strength and cultural pride that allows many Inuit both, as individuals and as a collective under the umbrella of either Inuit Land Claims or not for profit organizations to advocate on behalf of Inuit culture, to fight for more acknowledgement of Inuit culture and to enhance pride in the historic and present day cultural achievements of Nunavut’s indigenous population.
The social issues, inter- and intra-cultural processes described in my thesis are not exclusive to the situation in Nunavut or to Inuit. Studies from other regions, in Canada or from around the world (LaPrairie 1987; Jensen 1986; Nunatsiaq News 6/30/2010) reveal similar challenges.
Though many structural similarities can be identified by comparing these studies with each other, e.g. marginalization of the indigenous local population, colonization, paternalism and resulting issues like personal and cultural identity loss, it is important to have a more in depth look into the single cases to determine which individual events and developments causes and maybe still cause such a devastating social situation as it is found among many indigenous peoples across the world. From my perspective effective improvements of the situation of a group, a respective community or region can only happen when particularities of socialization, communication and philosophy in the single cultural entities are being considered.
That is why my thesis will exclusively focus on developments in Nunavut and use various case studies of communities. The case studies shall help to identify local differences in historic and recent developments and thus provide starting points for explanations of different developments in different Nunavut communities.
The thesis is looking at both, historic and recent root causes for the many issues in Nunavut.
The data that my my thesis is based on are a combination of literature and about 60 formal and informal interviews that I conducted in three Nunavut communities (Iqaluit, Whale Cove, Kugluktuk) during my 18 months of field work between October 2008 and March 2010. Many more spontaneous unstructured conversations between me and community members added to the pool of first-hand information that I gathered.
Since my field work is limited to those three communities it has a very strong qualitative character. The quantitative side, which allows me to confidently apply my research analyses to entire Nunavut, comes from literature research as well as many informal conversations and a few formal interviews that I conducted with people who had some experience in other communities than Iqaluit, Kugluktuk and Whale Cove.
Furthermore, while I was living at the old residence of the Nunavut Arctic College in Iqaluit, I spend time with college students from across Nunavut. Through them, I obtained „case studies “from following communities: Iqaluit, Qikiqtarjuaq, Kimmirut, Pangnirtung, Clyde River, Pond Inlet, Igloolik, Repulse Bay, Cape Dorset, Chesterfield Inlet, Baker Lake, Rankin Inlet, Whale Cove, Arviat, Taloyoak, Kugluktuk.
My general categorization of “early contact period”, “contact”, “1st generation” and “2nd generation” is very similar to Damas’ terms of “early contact phase”, “contact – traditional”, “resettlement” that he uses to create a timeline that describes the major phases of impact for Inuit society (Damas 2002: 7, 17).
Chapters 2 is meant to provide an inventory of the key aspects of current social issues in Nunavut. In this context I am looking at the four major aspects that in my opinion shape Nunavut’s society:
1) violence and other forms of social dysfunctions
2) the associated services and delivering agencies that try to address those matters
3) Education
4) Inuit cultural particularities in communication and socialization
Those four areas are forming the foundation for the rest of my work. The following chapters will guide the reader through the historic transformation process of Inuit pre-colonial semi-nomadic society to a society that is living in permanent settlements, strongly influenced if not in many ways dominated by Euro-Canadian culture. Each of those chapters will be referring to the social and cultural changes that happened in the different time periods that I labeled with “Pre-settlement, First, Second, and Third Generation”. The relevance of violence and other social dysfunctions, their context and strategies how each generation dealt with those matters will be analyzed while I will be also referring to the impacts that non-Inuit, primarily Euro-Canadians and Euro-Americans had and have on Inuit society.
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Memoirs by women (from the Global North) who have employed a gestational host (from the Global South) to become mothers are situated in a force field of intersecting discourses about gender, race and class. The article sheds light on the characteristic dynamics of this special sub-genre of ‘mommy lit’ (Hewett), labelled ‘IP memoirs,’ with a special emphasis on memoirs featuring transnational cross-racial gestational surrogacy arrangements in India. These texts do not only present narratives of painful infertility experiences, autopathographic self-blame, and scriptotherapeutic quests towards happiness, i.e. (a) child(ren), but also speak back to knotty issues such as potential exploitation, commodification, colonisation and disenfranchisement, as well as genetic essentialism in the context of systemic inequities.
By most Western Europeans Cyprus is probably perceived as a tourist resort rather than a technologically highly developed country. Interested German visitors are informed by the travel brochure published by the Republic of Cyprus' tourist office that "in the villages old customs and traditions still exist" (Zypern. 9000 Jahre Geschichte und Kultur 1997, 11). Pictures of places of antiquity, churches, monasteries, fortresses, archaic villages and of people engaged in agricultural work and crafts convey the image of a traditional Mediterranean society. However, the Republic of Cyprus is a rapidly modernising country. It has developed recently "from a poor agrarian into a high-income service economy" (Christodoulou 1995, 11) and "radical transformation processes" are observed (cf. ibid., 18). The forthcoming accession to the European Union additionally accelerates the pace of these transformation processes. Due to its position on the extreme rim of Europe in the Eastern Mediterranean region at the crossroads of three continents, the island is perceived both as marginal (cf. Pace 1999) and as a link between Europe and the Asian and African continents (cf. Kasoulides 1999). Cyprus is conceptualised for the future as a centre and intersection: as regional hub of the modern capital market, as communications and trade centre in the Eastern Mediterranean, as "telecommunications hub for the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East region", as "international services centre". The Republic of Cyprus has a highly developed telecommunications infrastructure, which is the basic prerequisite for the conversion into such a centre and is one of the most important factors for the economic competitiveness of Cyprus. The global nature of communication platforms today, especially the Internet, is regarded as the key to the integration of Cyprus into the world economy. By implementing information technologies and promoting necessary expertise, economic progress and modernisation of the country as well as its global competitiveness is assumed to be guaranteed. Investments in the information technology infrastructure are regarded as essential for the development of Cyprus, fostering the implementation of the information society. This aim and the necessary implementation measures feature increasingly on the agendas of scientific and economic conferences and symposia in Cyprus.
The present article explores perceptions and cultural constructions of the terms capitalism or capitalistic West among ex-Soviet, highly qualified Jewish migrants from Russia and Ukraine after their emigration to Germany between 1990 and 1996. It seems that migration offers a unique opportunity to migrants to realise knowledge that is normally taken for granted, behaviour schemes and values, and to reflect on them. How do they acquire such presumed capitalist knowledge of the new society and new social world, how do they create it, and with what concrete contents do they connect the illusion about monolithic cultural, economic and political capital, the illusion which contributes to group formation and which serves as action orientation? As my research shows, immigrants try to disparage much of what appeared to them in the Soviet Union as normative, right and appropriate; now they often act by way of categories, which were defined in the previous context as "capitalist" and were interpreted as immoral. Without exact ideas or knowledge about behaviour codes, unspoken norms and silent values from the new society, many immigrants orient themselves towards the opposite of what was counted as morally proper in the origin society. Simultaneously they revive old system through the establishing and development of a Russian language enclave. Nevertheless this enclave is not located in a vacuum of "dusty" memories from the past, but build transnational cross-border space connected and corresponding to the processes of to-day's CIS and with the life of those relatives and friends who still live there, und with whom the emigrants share intensive social networks.
Traditional land rights in Dagara and Sisala societies in Burkina Faso and Ghana which were stateless in pre-colonial times are closely connected with the concept of earth-shrine parishes under the protection of a local land god and ideally under the control of the “first-comers” to the area. The earth priests perform regular sacrifices at the shrine and allocate land to later immigrants as well as the right to build houses and to bury their dead, often in exchange for gifts. The international border between Ghana and Burkina Faso, which was drawn up in 1898 and runs along the 11th parallel, often cuts across earth-shrine parishes. Particularly since the border demarcation exercise in the 1970s, the spatial separation of the Sisala earth priests on one side of the border from the Dagara immigrants on the other side has given rise to intricate conflicts over land rights. The paper will present the history of one such conflict and look at the various landrelated discourses – traditionalist, nationalist, and Christian – which the adversaries put forward in order to substantiate their claims.
This article departs from the hypothesis that Alexander von Humboldt used ‘Big Data’ in order to bring new scientific evidence into the open. His method of measuring and combining temperature, humidity, altitude and magnetism in a geographical environment must be regarded as innovative, indeed, as the foundation of modern science. Although Humboldt lived in an analogue world and used the instruments of his time, his way of assembling information was not so different from what we are seeing in today's digitalised world. Information has no value unless it is shared. It does not say anything unless it is linked with other data. It cannot remain isolated but must be compared and interpreted. The generation of ʻBig Dataʼ was a pathway to Humboldt's concept of ʻKosmosʼ in much the same way as ʻBig Dataʼ today is the pathway to a virtual world. In this sense, Humboldt not only laid the foundation of modern science but anticipated the existence of a world where data and information are the source of everything when it comes to understanding the interconnectivity of the physical and the virtual world.
A version of this paper was originally written for a plenary session about "The Futures of Ethnography" at the 1998 EASA conference in Frankfurt/Main. In the preparation of the paper, I sent out some questions to my former fellow researchers by e-mail. I thank Douglas Anthony, Jan-Patrick Heiß, Alaine Hutson, Matthias Krings, and Brian Larkin for their answers.
Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam is a multicultural province within a multicultural state. Hence, its political leaders not only face the need to integrate ethnic and cultural diversity into a regional framework, but also have to define Aceh’s role within the Indonesian nation. During its violent past which was characterized by exploitation and military oppression, there were good reasons to emphasize sameness over diversity and to build up the consciousness of a unified Acehnese identity. From both an emic and an etic perspective, it is today widely accepted that there is such a thing as a homogeneous Acehnese culture which is rooted in a glorious, though troublesome, history of repression and rebellion and shaped by a strong Islamic piety. Even if it is true that Acehnese history has created a strong regional identity, it must not be forgotten that people living in this area belong to various ethnic and cultural groups and that they represent a rich variety of different cultures rather than simply a single homogeneous culture. As a matter of fact, the practises and discourses of Islam here also vary depending on the cultural background of the people. As elsewhere in Indonesia and beyond, world religions have to adapt to local customs, have to be appropriated by the local people, and have to be indigenized. This is the reason why adat still continues to play a role in every local context, even if it has been treated with suspicion in many parts of Indonesia since the Dutch colonial administration began using it as a counterforce against Islam in order to implement their divide-and-rule strategy. With this article, I wish to shed some light on the complexities of Acehnese culture, as it encompasses numerous very distinct local cultures and this reflects on the general significance of culture for the construction and reconstruction of post-tsunami Aceh.
The area around the Lake Chad is characterized as an example for a region where ethnic changes abundantly took place and still do. For example some Kanuri districts, or the leaders of those districts, are (unofficially) named after other ethnic names (e.g. Margi, Shuwa) or Kanuri clan names are identical with ethnic names of other groups, eg. Tera, Bade. Both people speak a Chadic language and live in the south and west of the Kanuri respectively. These are indications that the Kanuri formerly absorbed and integrated these peoples. These processes are not only a phenomenon of the past. In the case of the neighbouring Gamergu people an ongoing process of ethnic change towards a Kanuri identity is observed until present. The research projects1 have revealed that the concept of "ethnic units" is far from being static which the term may suggest. This especially applies to the German Stamm, which implies a static concept of ethnicity. However, in Borno the dynamics of ethnic and linguistic change are prevailing. Therefore Ronald Cohen rejected the term "ethnic unit", or even "tribe" for the Kanuri and preferred "nation" instead. Umara Bulakarima argued along the same line but used "ethnic group" for Kanuri subunits, e.g. Manga, Mowar, Suwurti. There is no doubt that the Kanuri played a dominant part in the history of the Lake Chad area during the past centuries. Therefore the "Kanurization" process may not surprise. However, in the following it will be revealed that the processes of contact and resulting adaptations and delimitations are not necessarily unidirectional from Kanuri to other groups. At least in some cases they may go into the opposite direction, e.g. from Gamergu to Kanuri.
Spacially dispersed transnational professional communities can be perceived of as cultural formations living in a global frame of reference, transgressing existing political and cultural boundaries. In their capacity as members of local technical and knowledgebased elites, they take part in circulating and connecting cultural meanings that are both locally produced, and continuously re-working non- local flows. I argue that those elites can be described as actors at cultural interfaces, taking part in shaping and mediating social change. The aim is twofold: one, to point to mutually opposed tendencies, and ambivalences in the framework of a „culture of change“, and two, to look into the question how such situations and groups can be methodologically approached.