Tag: anthropology

South-South connections: Brazilian Pentecostalism in Mozambique and ‘cultural distancing’

Published September 24, 2011

By Linda van de Kamp In 2007, Madam Gracelina (45 years old) was going to open a business with her husband in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. She had managed to rent a nice building for their company at a central location in the city centre and had bought all the necessary equipment. There were also some possible future customers Dona Gracelina was in contact with and she was all ready to start. However, after having dealt with the right government department in Maputo for several months, government officials would not hand over the required licence. She suspected that the officials were waiting for her to pay them an additional sum of money to proceed, but she refused. In the Brazilian Pentecostal God is Love Church that she frequented, she handed over the project file with the company plans and copies of all the papers she had to arrange for the licence to a Brazilian pastor. He would take it with him on his travels until he was back in Brazil where the church’s founder was going to pray for her. During the service it was revealed that an evil spirit stood behind Dona Gracelina and this was following her wherever she went. The pastor expelled the spirit and proposed a programme of prayer, offerings and fasting to defeat the demon.

Studies on religious transnationalism have addressed the role of religion for migrants in maintaining the link between the home and host society. A central question is how transnational religion plays a role in preserving a sense of cultural continuity or in encouraging cultural change in contact between migrants and the new society in which migrants are subjected to a forceful public agenda that usually emphasizes integration. In this context, it has been argued that transnational Pentecostalism encourages stability in situations of mobility and provides for cultural continuity by offering migrants a ‘home away from home’.

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Chinese workers in Libya

Published June 16, 2011

By Pal Nyiri Acccording to a feature in Nandu Zhoukan, 36 thousand Chinese workers have been evacuated from Libya with an efficiency that, the paper claims, astounded the world. The largest operation belonged to China State Construction Engineering (CSCE, ??????????, which alone employed 10 thousand Chinese workers. The paper interviewed an engineer working at a smaller operation, China Transport Construction Group (????????), which employed a total of 5,000 workers in Libya. This engineer, from Henan Province, worked on the real estate project near Benghazi that comprised the construction of 5,000 houses.

At the end of February, armed Libyan rebels assembled in front of the work site and commandeered two trucks. The Chinese workers assembled into units armed with crowbars and bricks; they barricaded the entrance with more trucks and threw stones over the wall. The attackers retreated, but the offices at another, unguarded work site were looted. The article refers to these Libyans as thugs and provides no political context, but the engineer is quoted as saying that Chinese workers have encountered hostility and have even been thrown stones at before. He attributes this to causing a rise in the price of consumer goods such as cigarettes: the price of Rothmans has doubled since Chinese visitors have been buying them up. The article quotes a Chinese researcher, Liu Zhirong, as saying that the Chinese media’s portrayal of African friendliness towards Chinese is skewed. The reality, it suggests, is more mixed, just as Chinese see Africa in a mixed light (they like that cars let pedestrians cross the road).

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Boeklancering ‘Eviction from the Chagos Islands’

Published May 26, 2011

Boeklancering Op 31 mei zal het nieuwe boek van Sandra Evers en Marry Kooy (redactie) ten doop worden gehouden. Dat zal gebeuren in zaal Z 009 van het Metropolitangebouw, om 13.45. Iedereen is van harte uitgenodigd! Meld je komst even op chagossians@hotmail.com.

Over het boek (dat vervolgens overal – onder meer in de VU-boekhandel– te koop zal zijn), het volgende:

“To make way for a strategic U.S. military base, the Chagossians were evicted from Diego Garcia and other islands of the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean in the 1970s. The U.K. made the islands available to the U.S. and the population was secretly evicted to Mauritius and the Seychelles, about 2000 kilometres away, where many have experienced poverty and difficult life situations. They are not allowed to go back home, only some short trips have been organised since 2006. Recently, the rich marine environment and coral reefs of the Chagos archipelago inspired the U.K. government to transform the status of the Chagos region into the world’s largest Marine Protected Area. But what about the Chagossians, who are locked in a political and legal battle for the right to return to the islands and recognition as a people to live in diaspora? After several law suits against the British government, the Chagossians have vested their hope on the European Court of Human Rights which will rule shortly.”

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An Iraqi view on the Netherlands

Published May 24, 2011

By Ali Taher, visiting researcher from Iraq at the SCA-department of the VU To begin with: It gives me a strange feeling when I see how the people in the Netherlands openly express their emotions. As a visitor from Iraq it is really interesting for me to see “lovers” and “couples” walking together in the center of Amsterdam, embracing each other, and nothing preventing them to interchange very hot kisses amidst the noise of a busy market !

Every day walking in the beautiful city streets, I continue thinking about all the differences between Iraqi and Dutch society. One of the differences is the kind of everyday embarrassing feeling I have at lunch time. You cannot imagine how shocked I was when I saw one of the girls in VU University choose only one apple as her lunch, although we had been together from early morning… It was unbelievable to see one of the professors who behaved no better than the girl, when he chose some soup with only three pieces of biscuit! I really don’t know how the people here stay alive when they eat almost nothing! It is embarrassing for me to realize I need to eat three times more than what they eat (at least), to feel saturated! Also the taste of the food here is far removed from the taste in Iraq, which is known for its fatty and salty food.

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Where and how can unrecognized refugees from Burma in Thailand be themselves?

Published May 23, 2011

By Ursula Cats and Allegra Palmer January this year, a concrete wall collapsed in Pathum Thani, Thailand, severely injuring Charlie Tiyu, a man from Burma who lives in Thailand as an undocumented migrant worker. He broke his left hip and suffered internal injuries, including a crushed large intestine and a bruised bladder. And yet, his injuries were not the biggest of his concerns.

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promotie: “The New Way” in Vietnam

Published May 11, 2011

Promotie Tam Ngo: 24 mei, 09.45, Aula

The New Way: becoming protestant Hmong in contemporary Vietnam, dat is de titel van de dissertatie die SCA-AIO Tam Ngo gaat verdedigen op 24 mei aanstaande, om 09.45, in de aula van de VU. De tesis gaat over de Hmong, een etnische minderheid in Vietnam, die zich, mede onder invloed van nauwe connecties met verwanten in de USA, in groten getale tot het protestantse Christendom bekeerde. De verdediging is open voor publiek, iedereen is welkom.

De samenvatting van het betoog van Tam Ngo luidt als volgt: De bekering van ongeveer een derde van de Hmong bevolking in Vietnam tot het Protestantisme gedurende de laatste twee decennia heeft nationaal en internationaal aandacht getrokken. Voor het midden van de jaren tachtig van de vorige eeuw hadden de meeste Hmong (een groep van rond een miljoen mensen) niets met Protestantse bekering te maken gehad. Aan het eind van de tachtiger jaren vingen Hmong in Vietnam bij toeval evangelische uitzendingen van de in de Philippijnen gevestigde Far East Broadcasting Company op. Dit leidde eerst tot millenaristische bewegingen, maar al snel begrepen de Hmong dat zij zich tot het Christendom moesten bekeren. Het Protestantse Christendom wordt in Hmong De Nieuwe Weg genoemd.

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Potosí, Bolivia and Syncopation

Published April 19, 2011

By Diana Iftodi Developing a taste for syncopation: contradicting takes on Potosí protests of August 2010 and their aftermath

Whenever I revealed the purpose of my coming to Bolivia and my interest in social movements I would get the same reaction more or less: “you’ve come to the right place”. The social dynamics in Bolivia are up high and in your face although they do not lack their fair share of intricacy.

Bolivia is a landlocked country in South America, recently added to the continent’s “new left” front. This turn of events was the only road to take in order to achieve some kind of stability at the turn of the century after the hatred people amassed for foreign interests in their country, neoliberalism and a clientelist government, specifically that of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. The desiderate of stability on the one hand however difficults the people’s ownership of the change on the other. Either way, Bolivia’s discontent led to nationwide protests, the ousting of Sánchez de Lozada and eventually to the rise of Evo Morales to power, an indigenous president elected in 2005 and representing not a conventional party but a front of social movements (MAS).

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De kleuren van een zondag in Hong Kong

Published March 28, 2011

Door Charlotte Kemmeren Het collectivisme dat kenmerkend is voor de Chinese manier van samenleven is in Hong Kong niet altijd zichtbaar. Het is hier vooral hard werken, lange dagen maken en veel geld verdienen dat de klok slaat. Stromen mensen die zich zo snel mogelijk van A naar B verplaatsen en tijdens lunchtijd ergens alleen een kom noedels naar binnen slurpen zijn bepalend voor het alledaagse beeld van deze snelle, drukke stad.

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Rebiya Kadeer at the VU, or the anthropologist’s dilemma

Published April 1, 2010

By Pál Nyiri When I lecture on China and democracy, I show students excerpts from Carma Hinton and Geremie Barme’s 1992 film, The Gate of Heavenly Peace. In the film, one of the leaders of the Tiananmen Square student movement, referring to exaggerated stories of the 1989 massacre, asks: “Must we use lies to stand up to our lying enemy,” i.e. the Chinese Communist Party?

The same question arose in me on 30 March as I listened to Rebiya Kadeer, the “leader of the Uyghur people” according to the president of the Turkish Academic Student Association (TASA), which organised her appearance at the VU. He had asked me, as a “China scholar,” to speak at this event, which he called a “symposium”, on the situation of the Uyghur people in China.

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