Posts tagged Ethnography
Preserving a culture in wild honey
Mar 23rd
“What is heritage?” sounds like the kind of essay question a lecturer might set when they run out of inspiration. It depends where you ask it. In some places it’s a question that carries a sting for the unwary. In the UK it’s almost always old buildings. Sometimes it’s very old buildings, but we build our heritage around the things we build. Sometimes a place can have a historical potency, like a medieval battlefield, but usually we insist that something leaves a mark before we acknowledge its historicity. It’s not surprising. The UK is an industrial society. It’s a settled society. So is the rest of industrialised world. So how to you even start to examine the heritage of a non-industrial society? Is the very concept of heritage loaded in a way that disempowers some peoples? Mick Morrison, Darlene McNaughton and Justin Shiner have a paper
UFOs versus the Rainbow Serpents
Jan 28th
One of the advantages of tripping to other libraries is that you get to browse journals you’d otherwise miss. One example is the Journal of the Royal Institute for Anthropology, which I wouldn’t see at Leicester. That is a pity because I’m missing some stuff like Close encounters: UFO beliefs in a remote Australian Aboriginal community by Eirik Saethre.
The community Saethre looked at is well qualified for the term ‘remote’. He was conducting research with the Warlpiri, an aboriginal people who live around 300 miles or 500 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs in the Tanami Desert. The community he was in was created specifically to provide work for Aboriginals far from Alice Springs. However there is little work there to do, which leads to high unemployment and plenty of time for watching television like the X-Files. At night in this community it’s not uncommon to see UFOs. Saethre reports that he and other kardiya, non-aboriginals, were warned not to drive on their own at night or else they were risking alien abduction.
Saethre says he never saw anything he would regard as a UFO, but most of the people in the settlement were quite adamant about their existence. The age range of More >
