Death by Monoculture

in: Therrien, Michele: Arctic societies and research: Dynamics and shifting perspectives. Proceedings of the First International Ph.D. School for Studies of Arctic Societies Seminar (IPSSAS), Nuuk May-June 2002, Nuuk: Publikationsfond for Ilisimatusarfik, S. 37-47, 2004

There was always the notion of 'exoticness' when talking about the Greenlandic culture or identity. The shift this paper likes to suggest is to reject all attempts of defining culture and collective identity as obligatory standards of a postcolonial society. Through processes of globalisation there are increasingly more contacts between cultures and the perception of the concept of culture is changing. We do not understand local people and their situation through fixing their practices as part of their culture or their single identity. In my opinion people in Greenland are aware of belonging to more than one culture and possessing more than one identity. On the contrary the articulation of culture through Greenlanders themselves reflects not a given fact but a marginal position in the global world system.

Polar Record, 2016

‘Speaking’ and ‘belonging’ have a particular salience as indices of intimacy in a remote corner of northwest Greenland where connectedness is constantly reinforced through a distinct commonality of expression and certain social practices, such as very frequent visiting of one another, story-telling, recycling of names and a shared monistic philosophy. The Inugguit define themselves by a repertoire of communicative and behavioural strategies which are used to ensure that one is accepted in a supportive kin group: the perennial social and personal imperative for each member of the group. This article shows how despite social and climatic upheaval, these practices remain, but that the hunters’ ‘symbiotic’ relationship with nature is eroding as the loss of sea ice means they can no longer live like the animals they hunt.

2015

Choice Reviews Online, 2014

Labrador is the northeasternmost part of mainland Canada-a stretch of rocky and rough land along the north Atlantic coast. It has long been the homeland of two Native peoples, the Inuit and the Innu, who are a branch of the Cree Indian peoples. Starting in the late 1960s and intensifying relentlessly since then, both Native peoples have been experiencing interwoven epidemics of substance abuse-mostly gasoline sniffing and alcohol-plus youth suicide, domestic violence, and high rates of children born damaged because their mothers drank alcohol while pregnant. During the fall semester of 2001 I was living with my family in St. John's, Newfoundland, doing research on the declining Newfoundland fishery. Labrador is part of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador, and the Newfoundland media were then full of reports both about these epidemics and about the mostly ineffective measures that Newfoundland and Canada, who had shared responsibility, were taking in their attempts to help. By 2001 I had been working on the historical anthropology of Newfoundland fishing villages for three decades. As a great many fishers from northern Newfoundland had been going, seasonally, to fish from the Labrador coasts, and had been doing this for over 150 years, I knew a bit about the history of Labrador. What caught my attention in 2001 was the fact that the media were reporting a widespread consensus-among government officials, academics, consultants, and media pundits-that the epidemics of communal self-and collective destruction were provoked by the forced relocation of Native peoxiv preface story always tells two stories.. .. Each of the two stories is told in a different manner. Working with two stories means working with two different systems of causality. The same events enter simultaneously into two antagonistic. .. logics. The essential elements of the story. .. are employed in different ways in each of the two stories. The points where they intersect are the foundations of the story's construction. (2011, 63) This may be a complicated way of making several useful points. What is happening can center on, or emerge from, the surprises, and it can help to focus on what the surprises may reveal. Further, it is helpful to not impose one logic, one perspective, one unified interpretation on the multiplicity of events that are happening, for what may be most important are the ruptures and the breaks, the way things do not fit together. John Berger made a similar point very simply and very powerfully when he said, "If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories" ([1983] 2011). And in what follows the nameless-both for us and for the Native peoples-is often crucial. What I have learned from Berger and Piglia turned into a bigger issue for this book than it might at first appear to be. It has led me to put aside, or to minimize, many of the central concepts of anthropology, including culture, social organization, and social structure. All of these concepts both suggest and seek to point toward a supposed wholeness or unity of social life, as when we say "a culture," or "a social organization" or, even more out of touch, we say "the Inuit" or "the Cherokee," and so forth. We could scarcely go very far if we started our discussion with, say, "the New Yorkers. " What makes us think we could go much further starting from "the Inuit"? Or to press the point, "Inuit culture" as an abstraction from peoples spread from Alaska to Greenland, living from the coast or more from inland resources, or both, some now near mining camps or military bases and some more distant? This last point, putting aside such abstract and unifying concepts as culture and social organization, will likely make some readers uncomfortable, or even angry, for it rubs against the familiar. Wait until the book is read to see how this perspective unfolds. I also put aside most of the standard methods of anthropological research. Almost all the data for what follows comes from public documents accessible to anyone at libraries and archives. I went to Labrador several times, partly to work in libraries in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, the administrative center of Labrador, and partly just to see several of the Native communities I was writpreface xv ing about. Seeing these communities meant just that-I mostly only walked around them, looking, bought food and some clothes at local stores. When I did talk to people, for some people approached me, I asked no questions whatsoever other than those that make social conversation, such as "Do you think it will rain today?" To ask a research question, which anthropologists usually do, is to assume that you know what is important to ask about. I took my first graduate anthropology course in the spring of 1957, and for decades afterward I lived with the assumption that I knew what questions to ask and that I could almost fully explain the answers I heard. I now find both these assumptions more like obstacles than aids. Graduate students may still need to work that usual way, as Professor Linda Green has insisted, at least until they develop some practice at doing anthropology, but then it might well end. So in my work in the field I just look and listen. Mostly what I listen for, as will be explained in detail in the book, are the silences, and I try, based on a long-term familiarity with the primary historical sources, to see the surprises. This is, in sum, a different kind of anthropology. It has been a struggle to learn to work in this way, focusing not just on the silences and the surprises but also on the ways that the diversity of social life both does and does not fit together well, if it fits together at all. At best this perspective, which I will argue replicates how many people themselves see and seek to grasp their worlds, will lead to only partial explanations and incomplete understandings, both among the peoples this book is about and for us. I am deeply grateful for all the people who have helped me learn to start working in this way. A note on the index: One of the major analytical and political-strategic points of this work is to confront the uncertain boundaries between the usual categories and thus to expose, in useful ways, the chaos that domination inescapably imposes upon the everyday lives of vulnerable peoples. From this perspective, the very idea of an index-specific topics with specific page numbers-often, but not always, works against the formation of effective struggle, which must emerge from that chaos and uncertainty. I have tried to work against that-for example, by listing the mining company's pronouncements about "respecting" elders' ecological advice under the category "elder abuse," for much of it is well-paid mockery. So use the index lightly: read the book, and determine for yourselves what points you find helpful. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I had the privilege, the pleasure, the pressure, and the special productivity of working, for a month or two almost every summer for twenty years, with the working group on the history of everyday life at the Max Planck Institute for History, in Goettingen, Germany. The two central members of this group, Alf Luedtke and Hans Medick, have shaped my sense both of the larger significance of everyday lives and methodological and theoretical ways of studying it. Two other very special German historians, Adelheid von Saldern and Ursula Nienhaus, have been crucial to my work. As I brought what I learned back, several of my doctoral students at the City University of New York, with their relentlessly quizzical engagement with my perspectives, helped shape my understanding of productive ways to work. I specially want to thank

The indigenous agriculture system of India is not only one of the oldest but also the most advanced forms of sustainable food production systems in the world. 1 India was the reservoir of up to 200,000 of indigenous paddy varieties and 1000 varieties of indigenous mango varieties. The rich bio-geographic diversity of the sub-continent and the need for sustainable use and management of the resultant landraces diversity requires sophisticated knowledge and robust management system. The rich agro-geographic-diversity has contributed to the evolution of robust indigenous agro-ecology management systems which have been embedded in the rich and vibrant indigenous socio-cultural fabric of the sub-continent. Much of the information is passed down the generations' orally through folksongs and folklore but not enshrined in the scripts or written documents. For that matter many indigenous languages of the Indian sub-continent do not have a script. The indigenous folklore and folksongs are a rich source of knowledge and information. They are rich with references not only to the indigenous agro-biodiversity but also management and conservation of the agro-ecosystems. However, this is not captured or understood in their entirety nether by the conventional agriculture education or by larger society. The valuable indigenous agriculture folksongs and folklore of the sub-continent are now at the verge of extinction. The pervasive market-based, modern industrial agricultural practices backed by the Western science and indiscriminate promotion of cultivation of high yielding monocultures in India since 1960s through the Green Revolution has decimated not only the priceless indigenous crop and livestock diversity but also caused irreparable damage to the rich indigenous socio-cultural-traditional systems. The loss of indigenous agro-biodiversity due to aggressive promotion of monocultures could lead to acculturation and extinction of indigenous agriculture folksongs and folklore, thereby causing irreparable damage to the indigenous socio-cultural-traditional systems. Furthermore, the lack of documented evidence of the indigenous agro-biodiversity could make it easy for the predatory multinational corporations to resort of bio-piracy through patents and international treaties such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), International Union for the Protection of New Plant Varieties (IUPOV) and Enabling the Business of Agriculture (EAB). 2 In the above context the present study assumes significance and open doors for documentation, interpretation, and conservation of the indigenous agro-ecology folklore and folksongs through introduction in the conventional and non-conventional agriculture curriculum.

Communicare: Journal for Communication Studies in Africa

Advocates of cultural imperialism theory have continued to argue that indigenous cultures,especially of African societies, are daily eroded in the age of globalisation. Their argument isbased on Schiller’s debatable notion that a society is brought into a modern world system when itsdominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, cajoled and sometimes bribed into acceptingits traditional system and values as inferior, outdated and mundane; and shaping such systemand values to correspond to, or even promote, the values and structures of the dominating centreof the system. This paper submits that this argument is no longer tenable in the age of globalisation. This isbecause the major arguments of the cultural imperialism theory now strike a discordant note withglobal-village and media-convergence tunes. Second, the theory - as suggested - builds on masssocietyand magic-bullet perspectives that have long been discredited both in media practice andin scholarship because they do not ...

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