#native populations

[indizombie]

The expansion of US empire through the unlimited funding of its military-industrial complex has boomeranged back home, arming local police forces with the same equipment that the US has deployed in its endless wars overseas. If the protests in the United States are to give rise to a new sense of solidarity among its citizens, then it must extend to all populations that have suffered US imperial aggression and sustained occupation — especially those native populations on whose dispossession the nation itself was founded.

Noam Chomsky, 'Solidarity means dismantling the system everywhere', openDemocracy

[wolvensnothere]

"Funded Master’s Degree Position to Study Gender and Change in Arctic Alaska at the University of Alaska Fairbanks" "We are seeking to recruit a graduate student interested in pursuing a Master’s (or Ph.D.) degree at the University of Alaska Fairbanks with a research focus on gender and change in Arctic Alaska. Student funding is provided by a research grant from the National Science Foundation. Successful applicants will be offered two years of funding, including a stipend of approximately $28,000/year, field research, tuition, benefits, and research expenses.   "The graduate student will assist an NSF-funded ethnographic study of the ways in which Alaska Native communities are responding to global challenges while at the same time retaining and practicing their core indigenous values in the face of many uncertainties. Previous research has identified indigenous groups and women as some of the most vulnerable populations affected by pronounced political, economic, and environmental shifts. In this study we seek to examine gendered responses to the processes of globalization and significant social-environmental change and the shifting roles of women in the midst of such changes. This research will provide an in-depth study of the gendered, multigenerational responses to specific contemporary changes in Barrow, Alaska, an Iñupiat subsistence-based community and economic and administrative hub of the Arctic Slope region.   "We are particularly interested in students with backgrounds in the human dimensions of environmental systems or environmental anthropology.   "Selected students will start their graduate programs in the summer or fall of 2014. Awards are contingent on students being accepted for a graduate program of study by the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Students could complete degrees either in anthropology or fisheries. Field research will be conducted in Barrow, Alaska.   "If you are interested, please submit a CV, a copy of your transcript(s), a writing sample, the names and contact information of three references, and a short cover letter expressing your interest in the position to Courtney Carothers (clcarothers [AT] alaska [DOT] edu) by *January 15, 2014*."

[mandoir]

The transformation of the Khumbu culture is certainly not all for the best, but I didn't hear many Sherpas bemoaning the changes. Hard currency from trekkers and climbers, as well as grants from international relief organizations supported by trekkers and climbers, have funded schools and medical clinics, reduced infant mortality, built footbridges, and brought hydroelectric power to Namche and other villages. It seems more than a little patronizing for Westerners to lament the loss of the good old days when life in the Khumbu was so much simpler and more picturesque. Most of the people who live in this rugged country seem to have no desire to be severed from the modern world or the untidy flow of human progress. The last thing the Sherpas want is to be preserved as specimens in an anthropological museum.

Jon Krakauer, "Into Thin Air"

[litorality-blog]

Oh, Bother.

I'm just going to make a list here of bothersome things in the first 100 pages of McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy, then, after that, I can talk about the non-bothersome things. I hope my list isn't too bothersome to you... kind of.

"Since the object of the present book is to discern the origins and modes of the Gutenberg configuration of events, it will be well to consider the effects of the alphabet on native populations today. For as they are in relation to the phonetic alphabet, so we once were" (21). 

"the westerner appears to people of ear culture to be a very cold fish indeed" (22)

"Carothers feels that the early Greek intelligentsia not only had the stimulus of sudden access to the acquired wisdom of other peoples, but, having none of its own, there were no vested interests in acquired knowledge to frustrate the immediate acceptance and development of the new. It is this very situation which today puts the western world at such a disadvantage against the "backward" countries" (31)

"...thus only phonetic writing has the power to translate man from the tribal to the civilized sphere" (31)

The whole section on educating people on how to watch film. pages 44 and thereabouts. 

"Education has become largely a matter of reading and writing, and it is possible for all" (55)

"Innis also explained why print causes nationalism and not tribalism and why print causes price systems and markets such as cannot exist without print" (56)

and, borrowing from a classmate, the Marshall/McLuhan conversation: "The trouble with the nonliterate is not that he isn't logical, but that he applies logic too often, many times on the  basis of insufficient premises. He generally assumes that evens which are associated together are causally connected" (87)

I like it when he answers himself, don't you?

Continuing with the bothers:

"On the other hand, the suppression of the visual sense in favour of the audile-tactile complex, produces the distortions of tribal society, and of the configuration of jaz and primitive art imitations which broke upon us with radio..." (61).

"'Entirely abstract' means the non-visual resonating interplay of the audile-tactile by which electricity and radio especially were to regenerate what Conrad called 'the Africa within' the Western experience" (62).

"which is as unnoticed by the sophisticated world, and quite as little affected by it, as is the culture of some dwindling aboriginal tribe living out its helpless existence in the hinterland of a native reserve" (Opie qtd in McLuhan 104)

Is anyone else bothered by any of this???