INVITED
POSTER SESSION, SOCIETY FOR HUMANISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY, CHICAGO '03
Thursday, November 20th, 10:15-12:00
Room: TBA
Community Vision: The Construction of Identity, Image and
Resistance in a Century of Change
The struggle to survive amidst imposed models of development
and modernization is a phenomenon that spans more than a century of change. The
colonial experiences of the late 19th century are less complex
predecessors of the current global experience, as the imposed logic of
differing educational, economic, religious and political systems worked to
reshape indigenous society. Often that imposed identity was then exported as
the “traditional” culture, constructions that ultimately shaped attitudes
toward a specific group of people. In the 21st century, a continued
process of imposed change is occurring, though today it meets with more
articulate and structured resistance as communities attempt to create their own
visions of a viable future and their own construction of cultural
identity. This poster session provides a
perspective on modernization and change that spans the century and the globe.
Text and images illustrate research and analyses concerning development,
education, tourism and identity in Puerto Rico,
Nepal, the Gambia,
Chiapas, Ecuador
and Nigeria.
Posters:
Anthropology
and the Popular Press in The Gambia, West Africa
Bill Roberts (St. Mary’s College
of Maryland)
The Gambia
is a tiny West African country that takes great pride in promoting its
international image as a place whose friendly people embrace the twin values of
peace and hospitality. Its government
has placed great value on educating the Gambian people, and since 1995 has
constructed numerous primary (lower basic), middle (upper basic) and high
(senior secondary) schools. A newly
created University of The
Gambia will graduate its first cohort of students
with baccalaureate degrees in 2004. This
poster visually summarizes two parallel streams of work I conducted with the
four major Gambian newspapers (Observer,
Independent, Point and Foroyaa)
between January and July, 2003.
Qualitative analysis of all published newspaper articles for this period
reveals Gambian concepts of the causes and strategies they reportedly use to
mediate conflict at family, community and national levels. Articles published in the Gambian papers based
on mini-research assignments completed by students in my Social Research
Methods course helped raise the public visibility of the new university and
promote positive attitudes towards the value of social research.
Contradiction in Cultural Tourism.
Folmar, Steven (Wake
Forest) and Morgan Edwards (George
Washington)
Nepalis embrace opposite positions
comfortably in one world view, reveling in contradiction whereas Westerners
strive to logically reconcile contradiction through accepting one position and
rejecting its opposite. These
contrasting philosophical frameworks, Western vs. Hindu/Buddhist, confront one
another in a cultural tourism program offered by the Gurungs
of Sirubari, Nepal. Locals deal with a number of social
contradictions not recognized by the casual tourist. The tourist-host interface includes logical
inconsistencies in programming centered on “traditions” that rely on lifestyle
amenities that are not traditional and the promotion of a “totally unspoiled Gurung settlement” that is dependent on the entertainment
of other Dalit castes, marketed as “Gurung.” Internal
administration of the program grapples with the rhetoric of hierarchy vs.
equality and fatalism vs. self-determination, contradictions that are prevalent
among Nepalese cultures. We conducted
fieldwork for 4 weeks during the summer of 2002, using observation,
semi-structured interviews, demographic and economic surveys, still
photography, audio-recording and videography to
record information pertaining to the inner workings of the program. This poster session will present our results
through the use of qualitative and quantitative data analysis in the forms of
written text and a brief video. The analysis will suggest that the logically
consistent tourist perception of Gurung culture is
dependent on 1) the tourist passively selecting logically consistent images of
local culture and 2) the community’s active manipulation of these images to
distill contradictory elements of the local worldview into ones that lack such
inconsistencies and are more intellectually comfortable for foreign tourists.
The Globalization of Hope:
Development, Resistance and Solidarity in Zapatista
Communities in Chiapas, Mexico
Jeanne Simonelli (Wake
Forest University)
Almost ten years have passed since the chilly New Year’s
dawn when the world awakened to find an indigenous rebellion underway in
Chiapas--
Mexico’s southernmost
state. In the midst of the unnegotiated 'peace' in
Chiapas,
Zapatista communities in resistance struggle to develop using their own models
for change and their own definitions of prosperity. What went on in Chiapas
during the long Zapatista silence, broken after 21 months on Jan.1, 2003? What
is it like to try to live out revolutionary ideals in a militarized
countryside, as the agricultural economy collapses? What does it mean to
develop from the roots in the face of international megadevelopment
schemes? How do representatives of these
resistance communities construct and teach their vision of self-sufficiency to
students and others who work with, and for them in an autonomous municipality
in Chiapas? This poster session illustrates the shared
experience of communities and the visitors who accompany them as they work to
survive in a globalizing world.
Resistance communities provide an interesting case study because their
refusal to participate in government programs demands that they be flexible and
attentive to alternative systems of production, development and marketing,
producing an economic model that is efficient and ‘irrational’ at the same
time.
Reconstructing
Identity: U.S. Colonial Educational Policies in Turn of the 20th Century Puerto Rico
Vilma Santiago-Irizarry (Cornell
University)
Education has been among the paradigmatic institutional
means for the local [re]construction of colonial peoples. This poster
presentation, based on ethnohistorical research,
documents the institutionalization of educational ideologies and practices in Puerto
Rico at the turn of the 20th century, when the United
States took over the island from Spain.
These
efforts were inscribed in a struggle over contending definitions of education,
its place in processes of modernity, and its role in a colonial society that
was being transformed into a transnational enclave for U.S.
capitalism. Local youth were exported to the United
States to be trained in U.S.
pedagogical ideologies and practices, and new technologies of instruction were
imported into a colonial society whose educational system had drawn from
European models that were similarly rooted in modernity. Yet the new
initiatives were inflected through a racializing
colonial logic that reconstituted rather than liberated the colonial subjects
whose "democratization" they allegedly pursued.
Tourist Images of Puerto Rico: Representing Cultural Identity in a
Colonial Context
Frederic W. Gleach
(Cornell University)
Long before the term
"cultural tourism" had been coined, people traveled to experience
cultural difference. In colonial
situations difference is inflected by hegemony, bound up in constructed needs
and capacities for "civilization": education, conversion,
modernization, etc. Colonizers and
colonized alike participate in the processes of representation, in a dialectic
of cultural identities enacted in many realms.
Drawn
from a larger project considering almost two centuries of American tourism to Puerto Rico,
this presentation will focus on the period 1895-1925 -- well before most
studies of tourism on the island begin.
I will examine the construction and communication of Puerto Rican
identity primarily through tourism and souvenir postcards, which became popular
contemporary with the imposition of US control at the end of the nineteenth
century. These images, widely circulated
by mail, were produced and sold both on the island and in the US. Studied along with
other sources, they capture the range of constructions that shaped American
attitudes towards the island and its people.
Intag
At The Ecological/Development Crossroads
D’AMICO, Linda (Winona)
Intag, a remote cloud forest region
on the steep northwest slopes of the Ecuadorian Andes, is inhabited by
approximately 20,000 mestizo, black and indigenous
people who live in small towns, scattered hamlets and farms. Largely absent
from the national imagination and politics until the 1990s, Intag,
now identified as an international ‘hotspot’ for conservation, is at the
intersection of competing and conflicting global forces. Recent neoliberal policies in Ecuador
have promoted foreign investment, and development has entered into Intag with mining as the centerpiece. In sharp contrast to
the transnational mining development program, burgeoning forces of global
conservation have taken root with the local population, and the meaning of the
cloud forest is being reconfigured within an agenda for ecological/biological
diversity. As a result, Intag presently finds itself
at the center of a maelstrom of contrasting and powerful interests. In response
to globalizing and local forces, the Ecological Ordinance, a first of its kind
in Latin America, was approved in September 2000 by the
Municipal Government of Cotacachi under the
leadership of the indigenous Mayor Auki Tituañi. This ordinance outlines a community vision that
integrates biodiversity protection with sustainable development to improve the
economic circumstances. My poster presentation will document local Inteños’ understanding of the ecological ordinance and
interpretation of nature, and some of their responses to the
to the changing social/political conditions. I will include a local individual’s
poetry, and other writings and photographs concerned with this unique corner of
our planet.
Nigerian Popular Poster
Calendars
Christey Carwile-Routon
(Southern Illinois U) and John C. McCall (Southern
Illinois U)
Common in restaurants, palm wine houses and homes, large
colorful poster calendars were an integral part of popular culture in Nigeria.
These calendars graphically present imagery from urban folklore, political
events and controversies, religious doctrine (both Christian and Muslim), and
other arenas of popular interest. The posters that make up this presentation
were collected in Nigeria in 2000. They represent the last generation of
Nigerian poster calendars. The pressing demand for posters from the new
Nigerian video movie industry has forced Nigerian printers to abandon the
poster calendars in favor of more profitable movie poster contracts. The
visually
striking and often sensationalistic
calendars are rich with folkloric imagination, political commentary, religious
directives, and inspirational messages. Our analysis of the posters explores
their utility as icons of a distinctive West African modernity. They express,
disseminate, and participate in the creation of a Nigerian popular imagination
that is shared across the diverse ethnic and linguistic regions of the country.
In doing so they provide a unique glimpse of a growing cultural matrix no
longer linked to particular “traditional” ethnic or tribal identities
but indicative, rather, of an
emergent national popular culture in Nigeria.
Hermanas
Unidas; Hermanas Solitas: Religion, Politics and Cooperation in Chiapas
Liz Story (Wake
Forest
U)
Based on fieldwork in two different Maya communities in
Chiapas, Mexico, this paper explores women’s work in the context of the larger
communal structure and the factors contributing to that community’s cohesion or
individuality. By looking at specific
cases from southern Chiapas communities, Cerro Verde and Ojo
de Agua, this paper is able to cite examples of the
different levels of cooperation affecting women’s
work. Important factors that contribute
to the varying degrees of cooperation are the religious beliefs/practices and
the political views/positions of a particular community. Not only will contemporary issues be
discussed, but also a brief history of the past religious and political
associations of these communities. It is
important to have an understanding of a certain community’s sociopolitical
identity in order to understand how women organize themselves within the community. Learning about women’s work is therefore
crucially related to understanding the political and religious atmosphere in
which they live. This poster
presentation illustrates that based religious and political affiliation,
a community will support varying degrees of cooperative effort among women.