Robert Goldwater Library blog

Rare uncontacted tribe photographed in Amazon

via BBC News, May 30, 2008:

Isolated tribe spotted in Brazil
One of South America's few remaining uncontacted indigenous tribes has been spotted and photographed on the border between Brazil and Peru.

The Brazilian government says it took the images to prove the tribe exists and help protect its land.

The pictures, taken from an aeroplane, show red-painted tribe members brandishing bows and arrows.

More than half the world's 100 uncontacted tribes live in Brazil or Peru, Survival International says.

Stephen Corry, the director of the group - which supports tribal people around the world - said such tribes would "soon be made extinct" if their land was not protected.

'Monumental crime'

Survival International says that although this particular group is increasing in number, others in the area are at risk from illegal logging.

The photos were taken during several flights over one of the most remote parts of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil's Acre region.

They show tribe members outside thatched huts, surrounded by the dense jungle, pointing bows and arrows up at the camera.

"We did the overflight to show their houses, to show they are there, to show they exist," the group quoted Jose Carlos dos Reis Meirelles Junior, an official in the Brazilian government's Indian affairs department, as saying.

"This is very important because there are some who doubt their existence."

He described the threats to such tribes and their land as "a monumental crime against the natural world" and "further testimony to the complete irrationality with which we, the 'civilised' ones, treat the world".

Disease is also a risk, as members of tribal groups that have been contacted in the past have died of illnesses that they have no defence against, ranging from chicken pox to the common cold.

more via Reuters, May 29, 2008:

Rare uncontacted tribe photographed in Amazon

[...] One of the pictures, which can be seen on Survival International's Web site (http://www.survival-international.org), shows two Indian men covered in bright red pigment poised to fire arrows at the aircraft while another Indian looks on.

Another photo shows about 15 Indians near thatched huts, some of them also preparing to fire arrows at the aircraft.

"The world needs to wake up to this, and ensure that their territory is protected in accordance with international law. Otherwise, they will soon be made extinct," said Stephen Corry, the director of Survival International, which supports tribal people around the world.

Of more than 100 uncontacted tribes worldwide, more than half live in either Brazil or Peru, Survival International says. It says all are in grave danger of being forced off their land, killed and ravaged by new diseases.

(Reporting by Stuart Grudgings; editing by Sandra Maler)

Tips on web tools for anthropology

Rex at Savage Minds has re-posted a very helpful (if unattributed) blog post with suggestions on "how to use commonly available and completely free tools on the Internet in order to keep up to date with the latest literature in anthropology." He offers to updated it regularly if there is sufficient interest from the readership.

The focus of the original post is Pacific Islands research, and the choices may reflect that. Here's what's covered:

• Table of Contents Alerting
• Get an email account
• Subscribe to American Anthropologist and other American Anthropological Society journals
• Subscribe to the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
• Subscribe to new book alerts at University of California Press
• Sign up to your other favorite publishers

Even if you already do all this, you might want to skip down to the "Final Thoughts" entry, where the unintended consequences of Total Information Awareness are addressed.

The intersection of art and anthropology museums

The most recent issue (no. 52, autumn 2007) of Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics is dedicated to the theme "Museums -- Crossing Boundaries." The articles were originally presented at a conference held at Harvard University in April 2006, hosted by the Harvard University Art Museums (HUAM) and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

•  Find RES in WATSONLINE (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

In the opening editorial Ivan Gaskell and Jeffrey Quilter set up the questions that the papers propose to answer:

We consider the things people make -- artifacts -- according to various disciplinary conventions, including those of anthropology, archaeology, art history, history, philosophy, and sociology. What are the relationships among these disciplines in respect of museums, the scholarly institutions that research and present artifacts? The various types of museums -- of art, anthropology, history, natural history, and science -- have largely operated in separate spheres. Increasingly, the rationale for their institutional boundaries is coming under conceptual pressure. In particular, changing ideas about class, race, ethnicity, and culture, in part generated within museums themselves, challenge the boundary between art and anthropology museums. How might art and anthropology museums, while sustaining their disciplinary commitments, find ways of sharing not only ideas but their collections?

CONTENTS:

Editorial / Ivan Gaskell and Jeffrey Quilter

The Museum of Art-thropology: Twenty-first Century Imbroglios / Ruth Phillips

The Common Path: Possible Futures for Art and Anthropology Museums / Thomas Lentz

Boundaries Crossed: The Interplay of Anthropology, Art, and Textual Studies at Harvard's Peabody Museum / William Fash

Whose Muse? Searching for Roles for Contemporary Museums / Jeffrey Quilter

Fusion Museums: On the Importance of Preserving an Embarrassing Genealogy / Michael Herzfeld

Art Matters in Museums: Whence Objects and for Whom? / Suzanne Blier

Museums are Good to Think / Anne D'Alleva

Crossing Cultures: Redefining a University Museum / Henry Kim

Zeitgeist and Early Ethnographic Collecting in Berlin: Implications and Perspectives for the Future / Viola König

Sharing, Crossing, and Subsuming Museum Boundaries: Current Directions / Richard Kurin

Working from Objects: Andean Studies, Museums, and Research / Natalia Majluf

Art and Artifact: Challenging Categories / Mary Malloy

Museums, Modernity, and Mythology: A Semioptic Review / Moyo Okediji

Wendy Seltzer on Mukurtu Contextual Archiving

My earlier post on this development sparked a lively discussion on the icommons list. Here is a great post on the topic by Wendy Seltzer :

reblogged via WendySeltzer.org, 1/11/08:

Mukurtu Contextual Archiving: digital "restrictions" done right

Filed under: culture, commons — wseltzer @ 10:37 am

I'm accustomed to thinking of digital restrictions in the U.S. intellectual property context. We’re told that DRM use restrictions are trade-offs for getting material in digital form, but generally, the trade is a bad one for the public.

The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari archive Kimberly Christen helped the Australian Warumungu community in Tennant Creek to construct puts digital restrictions in a very different light. 

As Kim described when I met her at a conference over the summer, the Warumungu have a set of protocols around objects and representations of people that restrict access to physical objects and photographs. Only elders may see or authorize viewing of sacred objects; other objects may be restricted by family or gender. Images of the deceased shouldn't be viewed, and photographs are often physically effaced. When the Warumungu archive objects or images, they want to implement the same sort of restrictions.

They wanted an archive that was built around Warumungu protocols for accessing and distributing materials (in many forms). One of the first mandates was that everyone had to have a password so that they could only see materials that they were meant to see based on their family/country/community status.

Kim's response was to help construct a digital archive with access controls — ACLs based not on copyright but on the various elements of a person's community status. Your identity sets your view-port into the archive; the computer will show only items you have permission to see. The community can thus give objects context in the online archive similar to that which situates them offline. As an object’s status changes, the database can be updated to reflect new rights or restrictions.

Yet the Mukurtu's form of "DRM" is fragile.  Users are encouraged to print images or burn CDs, which have no controls built-in.

People can also print images or burn CDs and thus allow the images to circulate more widely to others who live on outstations or in other areas. In fact, one of the top priorities in Mukurtu's development was that it needed to allow people to take things with them, printing and burning were necessary to ensure circulation of the materials.

Unlike copyright-DRM systems, which fall back to the most restrictive state when exporting or communicating with "unsigned" devices (such as blocking all copying and breaking or lowering playback resolution on high-definition monitors), this one defaults to granting access.  It's up to the people using the system to determine how new and unknown situations should be handled.

Because the Murkurtu protocol-restrictions support community norms, rather than oppose them, the system can trust its users to take objects with them. If a member of the community chooses to show a picture to someone the machine would not have, his or her interpretation prevails — the machine doesn’t presume to capture or trump the nuance of the social protocol. Social protocols can be reviewed or broken, and so the human choice to comply gives them strength as community ties.

One of the lessons of the recording industry lawsuits and growing shift from DRM'd music is that community norms don't support current copyright law. Rather than fight copyright norms with bad code, we should learn from the Warumungu and build code (and law) to support social practice.

Further good news: Kim says she and Craig Dietrich will be releasing the archive's code as Free Software.

Aboriginal archive's new DRM: Cultural Solution?

via BBC News,  Tuesday, 29 January 2008 (thanks Nicole!):

Aboriginal archive offers new DRM

A new method of digital rights management (DRM) which relies on a user's profile has been pioneered by Aboriginal Australians.

The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive has been developed by a community based in Australia's Northern Territory.

It asks every person who logs in for their name, age, sex and standing within their community.

This information then restricts what they can search for in the archive, offering a new take on DRM

Dr Kimberly Christian, who helped to develop the archive, told BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme that the need to create these profiles came from community traditions over what can and cannot be seen.

"It grew out of the Warumungu community people themselves, who were really interested in repatriating a lot of images and things that had been taken from the community," she said.

"You find this a lot in indigenous communities, not just in Australia but around the world... this really big push in these communities to get this information back and let people start looking at it and narrating it themselves."     Where to look

Dr Christian, who is an assistant professor based at Washington State University, stumbled across the idea of the archive by chance after meeting a group of missionaries who had digitally archived photos of the Warumungu community since the 1930s.

After loading them onto her laptop, she took them back to Tennant Creek and set up a slideshow - where she noticed that people turned away when certain images came up on screen.

For example, men cannot view women's rituals, and people from one community cannot view material from another without first seeking permission. Meanwhile images of the deceased cannot be viewed by their families.
   

Offline website

"The way people were looking at the photos was embedded in the social system that already existed in the community," she said.

"People would come in and out of the area of the screen to look when they could look."

This threw up issues surrounding how the material could be archived, as it was not only about preserving the information into a database in a traditional sense, but also how people would access it depending on their gender, their relationship to other people and where they were situated.

Dr Christen and her team of software developers came up with what is described as "a website that's not online", containing photos, digital video clips, audio files, digital reproductions of cultural artefacts and documents.

The system has also been designed with a "two-click mantra" in mind, making the content easy to access for those with low computer literacy skills.

Images are arranged in their own categories, with content tagged with restrictions.

The project believes it has established a cultural solution as well as an opportunity for Aboriginals to collate much of what was once lost. The hope of the project's designers is that as culture and traditions change, history can be rewritten and changed by people themselves.

Pacific Islanders’ Ancestry Emerges...

Fig.1: Populations Included in This Study

(A) HGDP-CEPH population locations. The two Pacific groups are boxed.

(B) Pacific population locations. Our population samples are blue; the 2 HGDP-CEPH Melanesian “Oceanic” groups are red.

via NYTimes:

Pacific Islanders’ Ancestry Emerges in Genetic Study
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: January 18, 2008

The ancestral relationships of people living in the widely scattered islands of the Pacific Ocean, long a puzzle to anthropologists, may have been solved by a new genetic study, researchers reported Thursday.

In an analysis of the DNA of 1,000 individuals from 41 Pacific populations, an international team of scientists found strong evidence showing that Polynesians and Micronesians in the central and eastern islands had almost no genetic relationship to Melanesians, in the western islands like Papua New Guinea and the Bismarck and Solomons archipelagos.

The researchers also concluded that the genetic data showed that the Polynesians and Micronesians were most closely related to Taiwan Aborigines and East Asians. They said this supported the view that these migrating seafarers originated in Taiwan and coastal China at least 3,500 years ago.

The findings were described in the online journal Public Library of Science Genetics (www.plosgenetics.org) by researchers led by Jonathan S. Friedlaender, professor emeritus of biological anthropology at Temple University. He was assisted in the data analysis by his wife, Françoise R. Friedlaender, an independent researcher. Other participants included scientists in the islands and at the Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation in Marshfield, Wis.

“Our analysis,” the scientists wrote, “indicates the ancestors of Polynesians moved through Melanesia relatively rapidly and only intermixed to a very modest degree with the indigenous populations there.”

Dr. Friedlaender of Temple said in an interview that the evidence was “substantial” and “solves a number of issues about the migration and settlement of Pacific people.”

In particular, he and other anthropologists not involved in the study said, the genetic research supported the “fast train” hypothesis. Increasing archaeological and linguistic evidence in recent years has suggested that ancestors of Micronesians and Polynesians had moved through Indonesia and Melanesia without having any significant contact there, culturally or genetically.

An alternative argument, the “slow boat” hypothesis, which had some support from male Y chromosome studies, raised the possibility that Polynesians were primarily Melanesians who had ventured on in their outrigger canoes. And a few anthropologists despaired of ever solving the mystery. Theirs was the “entangled bank” hypothesis.

The new genetic research, said Patrick V. Kirch, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who is an authority on Pacific cultures, was “overwhelming biological evidence for a clear population movement out of Southeast Asia and Taiwan to Polynesia.”

Dr. Kirch, who did not participate in the genetic study, said that it reinforced research showing that Polynesian speech patterns were unrelated to Melanesian languages, suggesting — along with discoveries of the distinctive Lapita pottery across the Pacific — links to Taiwan and China, not Melanesia. “The combination of evidence shows we really can read this history,” he said.

As Dr. Friedlaender said, “If it wasn’t exactly an express train, it was pretty fast, and very few passengers climbed aboard or got off along the way.”

In the research, scientists examined more than 800 genetic markers known to be useful in distinguishing the ancestry of people. These involved mitochondrial DNA, passed down through females, and the Y chromosomes in males. Previous investigations along these lines had been conducted on a much smaller scale, Dr. Friedlaender said.

The new test results were repeatedly analyzed with a software program recently developed to classify genetic similarities and variations among different populations.

Primary support for the study was provided by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation of Anthropological Research, the National Geographic Society and the National Institutes of Health.

Further research to confirm the history of the Pacific diaspora, Dr. Friedlaender said, would require an expansion of genetic tests among people in the Philippines and Indonesia, regions that the migrants presumably passed through after leaving Taiwan more than 3,500 years ago, ultimately reaching as far as Hawaii and Easter Island. The Melanesians, on the other hand, probably arrived on their islands about 35,000 years ago, sometime later than the Aborigines reached Australia.

Years ago, a reporter who visited the Marshall Islands asked an aging Micronesian chief where his people came from long, long ago. “We have always been here,” he replied. Now, if it matters to them, his descendants have been given a more scientific answer.

Aluka 2.0

via Aluka Blog:

Flickr, Facebook, and 2.0: Aluka Takes the Plunge
November 29th, 2007 by Michael Gallagher, User Support

Aluka now has a presence on both Flickr and Facebook!

Aluka has uploaded images to Flickr from both the African Plants, Cultural Heritage and Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa content areas. From African Plants, we have a collection of specimens, drawings, and photographs that will be sure to entice any botanist or lover of plants.

For Cultural Heritage, we have amazing images taken by Dr. Heinz Ruther from such World Heritage Sites as Lalibela, Kilwa Kisiwani, Elmina Castle, Great Zimbabwe, and Timbuktu. The image included in this post is Bet Giorgis at Lalibela.

For Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa, we have  covers from some important texts from and about the countries in the region, including Angola, Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa.

Come and take a look; feel free to add us as a Contact as well so we can build a network! To view Aluka’s Flickr slideshow, simply go to http://flickr.com/photos/15721258@N06/.

On Facebook (www.facebook.com), we have created a group called Aluka (catchy, isn't it?). To join our group, search in Facebook for Aluka and click Join Group. We have information about Aluka, contact information, and some representative images from the digital library. Please come and join, ask a few questions, maybe even make some comments; it goes a long way towards developing the Aluka community!

Guggenheim fellow to study Karawari cave art

From Anthropology News, Dec. 2007:

GRANT RECIPIENTS
Cave Arts of the Upper Karawari in Papua New Guinea

Nancy Lynn Sullivan, independent researcher, received a Guggenheim fellowship for her project: The cave arts of the upper Karawari in Papua New Guinea. The cave arts project is a research endeavor and an exploration through the foothills of the Karawari River region of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea, where the Inyai, Ewa and Yimas people lived until recently, and continue to hunt and gather. The mortuary carvings from these caves have long been part of the blue chip Oceania art market, and some efforts have been made to establish the caves as national cultural property. But at present, these are some of the most remote people of PNG, lacking access to services. Meanwhile, their northern neighbors from Enga province have begun to encroach on the traditional land, panning for gold and inviting Asian logging agents to set up camp. Sullivan's work involved recording the migtration and origin stories of the Yimas and their neighbors, with local PNG ethnographers, as well as the exploration and recording of the caves for possible national cultural property designation. Sullivan will be working with archaeologists, ethobotanists and biologists to create a comprehensive history of the region for publication.

The Grant Recipients column in Anthropology News is directed by Jona Pounds.