Entries tagged as ‘Pal Nyiri’
Pál Nyíri
By Pál Nyiri I have recently received an email from the Onderwijscentrum VU (also known as the Centre for Educational Training, Assessment and Research, or CETAR) announcing a training called ‘intercultureel werken in het onderwijs’ (Working interculturally in education). In Seeing Culture Everywhere, Joana Breidenbach and I painted a critical, perhaps even somewhat unkind, picture of the intercultural communication (IC) business, arguing that it often amounts to little more than ethnic stereotyping couched in pseudo-scientific terms like Geert Hofstede’s “cultural dimensions”. At the same time, we acknowledge that there is a useful kind of IC training, which focuses on making participants reflect on the inherent cultural biases of their own practices they might see as universal. (meer…)
Categorieën: De Lage Landen · English posts · Multicultureel & Migratie
getagged: IC, intercultural communication, interculturele communicatie, Pal Nyiri, Vrije Universiteit, VU
Gypsies performing (photo: stevenimmons)
By Pál Nyiri I watch with a certain envy how my colleagues take part in discussions of and protests against the PVV’s growing strength and its position on immigration. After a year in the Netherlands, I do not yet feel confident enough to participate in these debates myself, and there may be no need for it: anthropologists are perhaps represented with enough voices.
For the time being, I feel more closely connected, and more responsible, for what is happening in Hungarian politics, my country of birth, although I am growing increasingly alienated from it because I feel that the space in which any reasoned discussion of immigration is possible has shrunk to naught with the rapid shift of public discourse to higher and higher levels of nationalism and xenophobia. (meer…)
Categorieën: De Lage Landen · Discriminatie & Man/vrouw · English posts · Identiteit & Religie · Multicultureel & Migratie · Politiek & Burgerschap · Regio Europa
getagged: integratie, Wilders, nationalisme, Pal Nyiri, Hungary, nationalism, Gypsies, immigration, xenophobia, immigratie, xenofobie, Menedek, Andras Kovats, integration
By Pál Nyiri On the website of RNW (Radio Netherlands Worldwide), Sigrid Deters writes that Chinese media in the Netherlands, except the Chinese website of the RNW itself, are “not free from censorship.” She sees avoiding the coverage of political issues such as the Dalai Lama’s visit or the riots in Xinjiang, or reporting on them one-sidedly, as evidence of censorship, although she does not explain who does the censoring and why. Editors of the Chinese papers and TV stations she interviewed denied censorship and said instead that their outlets reflected the opinions of the “community” or that it was better to stay away from controversy. An interesting exception was GogoDutch.nl (荷乐网), a popular website that has registered in China in order to avoid being blocked, and therefore, as its founder said, had to comply with Chinese regulations about content filtering.
The shift in overseas Chinese media toward a single discourse of China is a trend I have also noticed, but I am not sure if “censorship” is the right explanation for what is happening. (meer…)
Categorieën: De Lage Landen · Identiteit & Religie · Multicultureel & Migratie · Muziek/Kunst & Media · Regio Azie
getagged: China, Chinese nationalism, Chinese Students and Scholars, Dalai Lama, Pal Nyiri, Radio Netherlands Worldwide, RNW, Sigrid Deters
Photo: European Parliament. Rebiya Kadeer
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. (meer…)
Categorieën: Antropologie & Wetenschap · Discriminatie & Man/vrouw · English posts · Identiteit & Religie · Politiek & Burgerschap · Regio Azie
getagged: activism, anthropology, China, human rights, Pal Nyiri, Rebiya Kadeer, TASA, Uyghur, Uyghurs, Xinjiang
Earlier this week Pal Nyiri wrote a post on his talk about the evolution of consumer boycotts in China at the AAA. Both of his new books – Cultural Mobility and Seeing Culture Everywhere - made their debut at this AAA – the latter even sold out! Here a little foretaste about ‘Seeing Culture Everywhere’.
By Pál Nyiri
Joana Breidenbach and I wrote this book as a response to Ulf Hannerz’s lament about the inability of anthropologists – the professional students of human cultures – to respond adequately to “one-big-thing” books such as Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations by presenting alternative visions that were clear and accessible. “Leaving an intellectual vacuum behind is not much of a public service,” Hannerz wrote in Foreign News.
(meer…)
Categorieën: Antropologie & Wetenschap · English posts · Identiteit & Religie
getagged: anthropology, culture, Pal Nyiri
Photo from Tianya (a Chinese online forum) taken during the Olympic torch relay, Paris 2008
By Pál Nyiri
After my inaugural lecture – in which I suggested that anthropology should study the re-emergence of shared forms of sovereignty like China’s concessions in Africa – I gave a similar talk at the British Inter-University China Centre’s conference in Manchester and then headed to the American Anthropological Association (AAA), which this year took place in Philadelphia. Our department was well represented, with five or so VU anthropologists in attendance. The AAA tends to be overwhelming, but every five years or so it’s worth making the pilgrimage, just to see what’s “in”. (meer…)
Categorieën: English posts · Globalisering & Ontwikkeling · Identiteit & Religie · Regio Azie
getagged: AAA, boycotts, Chinese nationalism, Pal Nyiri, youth
Prof. dr Pal Nyiri
Thursday, November 19th, Prof. dr. Pal Nyiri hold his inaugural lecture called ‘Foreign concessions: the past and future of a form of shared sovereignty.’
How are China’s experience of Western colonialism and today’s Chinese projects in Southeast Asia and Africa related to each other? What are the similarities between the 19th century foreign control over customs and security in treaty ports on Chinese territory and contemporary concessions on for instance palm oil plantations in Congo-Kinshasa? And why do we need both anthropology and history to understand these connections? (meer…)
Categorieën: Antropologie & Wetenschap · English posts · Globalisering & Ontwikkeling · Regio Azie
getagged: anthropology, China, History, Pal Nyiri, Sovereignty.
Pál Nyiri wrote a short post on the Roman Polanski affair on the Culture Matters’ weblog, examining the use of cultural relativist arguments in court cases:
I was intrigued to find out from today’s New York Times (Michael Cieply, “In Polanski case, a time warp”) that a report by two probation officers who, in 1977, made a recommendation against a longer gaol term (as compared to the 48 days he got) in Polanski’s case of unlawful sex with a 13-year-old, they made the argument that while foreign filmmakers “enrich[ed] the community with their presence, they have brought with them the manners and mores of their native lands, which in rare instances have been at variance with those of their adoptive land.” Implicitly, they were making a cultural argument in favour of a lenient sentence. (meer…)
Categorieën: English posts · Regio Amerika's · Regio Europa
getagged: cultural argument, cultural defense, Pal Nyiri, Polanski, sex crime
2nd century BC statue of a Scythian youth (picture by Covilha)
‘Hungarian Party campaigns for recognition of Scythian heritage’, Pál Nyiri recently wrote on the Culture Matters blog. Here we reproduce his post, which raises many interesting points about the politics of ethnic identity and the relationship between nationalism and academic writing.
According to Hungarian newspapers, the xenophobic, anti-Semitic party Jobbik (“The Righter”), which has three seats in the European Parliament, has launched a campaign to expunge from textbooks the accepted theory according to which Hungarians are a Finno-Ugric people, and replace it with one according to which they are related to the Huns, Avars and Scythians, Indo-Iranian nomads that inhabited large parts of the Eurasian steppe in the first half of the first millennium C.E.
(meer…)
Categorieën: English posts · Identiteit & Religie · Politiek & Burgerschap · Regio Europa
getagged: anthropology, Avars, Hungary, Huns, islam, Jobbik, nationalism, Orientalism, Pal Nyiri, Scythians
