The point of departure for my contribution is a reflection over Appadurai’s approach to hope in relation to the contradictions between the politics and moralities of recognition versus redistribution and the ascription of individualising or structural explanations for the predicament of poor people. The will to give recognition is perspectivised in relation to contemporary developmental ideologies that make grassroots’ connections a moral value. However, an emphasis on hope as a basically individual characteristic or a cultural trait is also problematized in relation to the arguments of traditional ‘theories of ascription’. The explanation of other people’s actions tends to stress their own characteristics rather than the situational conditions under which they act. This may be a constraint for how even well intended academic discourse is received, transforming cultural or individual explanations into static models of the “blame-the-victim” type.
During the last decades, development discourse has taken a neo-liberal turn. Parallel to this, the discourse of social science has become more oriented to matters of individual agency. Within the sociological and anthropological literature on development, this emphasis on individual agency is often expressed in terms of an explicit statement taken by the author that s/he wishes to correct an earlier (ethically inferior) emphasis on structure that is assumed to imply that the concerned people are passive victims. Problematising this ethics of scientific writing, this paper will look at various discourses in which the concept of victimhood is used, seeing claims and disclaimers of victimhood as themselves being expressions of agency in a contestation over accountability, responsibility, recognition and possible indemnification or blame.
The Oromo people are one of the most numerous in Africa. Census data are not reliable but there are probably twenty million people whose first language is Oromo and who recognize themselves as Oromo. In the older literature they are often called Galla. Except for a relatively small number of arid land pastoralists who live in Kenya, all homelands lie in Ethiopia, where they probably make up around 40 percent of the total population. Geographically their territories, though they are not always contiguous, extend from the highlands of Ethiopia in the north, to the Ogaden and Somalia in the east, to the Sudan border in the west, and across the Kenyan border to the Tana River in the south.Though different Oromo groups vary considerably in their modes of subsistence and in their local organizations, they share similar cultures and ways of thought.
Howthe Beja, largely apolitical nomadic pastoralists of northeastern Sudan, perceived their profound misfortunes during the drought of the 1 980s is examined. The famine of 1984-1986 was considered neither to have resulted from their own actions nor to be amenable to alleviation by them-both being functions of God, perhaps acting through the central government. Those Beja who were forced by the famine to abandon their traditional ways appear to be ripe for politicization.
In post-war Sweden, overt demonstrations of political nationalism have been considered bad taste. In middle-class culture, the construction and emotional charging of Swedishness have instead taken place in terms of an idiom of love for nature. Conceptions of freedom and equality are by this idiom tied up with symbolic references to childhood and to the flora of forests and meadows. The Swedish 'Every Man's Law' regulating access to flowers and berries and mobility in the natural landscape in this context comes to stand as a central national symbol.
Tehran, Delhi, Salvador
The present volume emanates from three studies of youngsters and young adults in three urban contexts in the world: in Tehran in Iran, Delhi in India, and Salvador in Brazil. To them, global as well as local ideas about modernization, traditionalism and authenticity provide frames for interpreting the development of society and evaluating one’s own life.
The young people that this volume is concerned with were all born in the 1980s. Today they are adults. They all relate to a globalized market of recognition, but also one of potential resources such as attractive commodities, international jobs, local jobs with an international touch, or international support for local activities through the NGO world. Their rod of reference for judging their own life is global. Their sense of time and progress is related to the important developments of their own countries - internally and in relation to the global context - during their own lifespan and possibly that of their parents. Yet, cultural identity is in all the three cases also marked by a relation to ideas about tradition. Becoming modern may also entail redescribing, reinventing and reviving pasts in which the parents’ generation saw little value. The volume as a whole endeavours to give a contribution to the ethnography of varying cultural conceptualisations of modernity.
The Beja, or Bedawiye, people speaking the Northern Cushitic language called “Bedawiet”, have literally since “time immemorial” occupied the Eastern deserts of Sudan, Egypt and possibly Eritrea. They today consist of the subgroups Ababda, Bishariin, Atmaan/Amar´ar, Hadendowa and sections of the Beni Amer. These subgroups are relatively loosely integrated confederations of endogamous lineages based on assumptions of shared descent and cohabitation in an ancestral territory. In this hot and arid land, where there is little evidence of large-scale climatic change the last 2500 years, they have eked out a livelihood presumably originally as hunters of wild game and gatherers of wild grain, later as herders of small stock in the drier areas and of cattle in the delta lands, combining pastoralism with some take-a-chance cultivation. Some centuries after Christ they also acquired camels and became mounted brigands, guides and sycesin relation to the caravan trade. The present paper is an attempt to trace what can be said about the way larger context of empires, trade routes and security impinged on their lives in pre-colonial times.
This special issue of Global Networks is devoted to the work of Ulf Hannerz, whose research in urban anthropology, media anthropology, and transnational cultural processes has established his international reputation.1 Over the years, this reputationhas earned him many distinctions – he is, for example, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, former Chair of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, and anthropology editor for the new International Enyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Such honours, however, never led to complacence. There has been a steady stream of publications and a continuous series of research projects. Most recently, Hannerz not only completed a study of the work of news media foreign correspondents, which included field research that took him to four continents, he has already started a new research project about the cultural and political dimensions of cosmopolitanism. All this attests to some measure of curiosity and resolve.