http://www.flickr.com/photos/mplemmon/1314495959/sizes/o/in/photostream/

By Pal Nyiri Kenya’s Sunday Nation reports that a Chinese government delegation “led by State [Administration] for Religious Affairs minister Wang Zuoan is in Kenya to ‘copy good practices’ that could help it grow Christianity.”

“Religion is good for development,” the minister reportedly said at Bishop’s Gardens in Nairobi, at a meeting with Kenya’s Anglican archbishop. He also said that “he was happy with the localisation of Anglican Church in Kenya after independence, so that all its bishops are locals.”

Well. Where to begin?

China has used religion, including exchanges of clerical delegations and references to religion in official meetings, in its diplomacy before, notably Buddhism (especially in relation to Thailand) and Islam (with the Middle East and Indonesia). In fact, in the Indonesian case — as documented by Johanes Herlijanto –the image of China as a country that protects Islam and has even propagated it in the past, in the person of the famous Admiral Zheng He, has contributed to a surprisingly widespread view of China as a reliable developmental patron in the context of increasing Chinese investment in Indonesian infrastructure. Something similar is clearly going on in Kenya.

The link to this article reached me via the weekly news bulletin of Peking University’s Centre for African Studies, directed by Li Anshan, a researcher of overseas Chinese who rose at an opportune moment to become the main voice of China’s official Africa research. In Chinese, the link is entitled 中国向肯尼亚学习处于里宗教事务的经验 （China learns from Kenya’s experience of dealing with religion), a very different message that de-emphasizes the somewhat risque suggestion that China actually wants to promote the growth of Christianity, and stresses instead that China is learning from Kenya. This is in keeping with the official line — untiringly represented by Li — that Chinese exchanges with Africa take place on a basis of equality.

Still, I think Wang’s statement is more than mere diplomatic posturing. That a Chinese minister says he wants to promote Christianity, or religion in general, and that this declaration is picked up by a research centre that positions itself as very close to the government’s ears, suggests an increasingly clear trend in China, namely that the government, or at least parts of it, really does promote religion, as long as it is hierarchically organised under government control. One of the reasons is the government’s concern with social morality; another is that the religious hierarchy provides an additional channel of ensuring Chinese people’s identification with the official discourse of nationhood and weeding out subversives. A third is the reason Wang suggests: the religious subject, and perhaps the Christian subject more than any other, in many ways fits the description of the self-disciplined, community-oriented Chinese citizen desired by the state. The prosperity gospel (the idea that getting rich is a sign of the Lord’s blessing), embraced by many African politicians and churches, is influential in China (see Cao Nanlai’s ethnography of Wenzhou “boss Christians:” Constructing China’s Jerusalem: Christians, Power, and Place in Contemporary Wenzhou).

Pál Nyiri is Professor of Global History from an Anthropological Perspective at the VU University. See his earlier posts on Standplaats Wereld. He also writes regularly for the Culture Matters and China Can’t Stop Saying No weblogs.

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).

The engineer featured in the article makes $1,700 a month, or 3-4 times what he made in China, plus a “substantial” living allowance, and has almost no expenses since accommodation, meals, and transportation are provided by the company. In less than a year in Libya, he has saved over 100 thousand yuan, while his total savings before he left China were just 5,000 yuan. An ordinary construction worker makes 4-5 thousand yuan a month, while a skilled carpenter makes around 10 thousand, or over $1,500.

Workers have 2 days off in a month. At these times, the company sometimes organised a barbecue at a nearby restaurant, a shopping trip to Benghazi, or a trip to the sea. They are not allowed to leave the site on their own — to avoid incidents such as a mass fight between Chinese workers and Algerians in Algiers in 2009. (Another article says that at a work site in Mali,  there is also a sign saying ”It is not allowed to become too close to local women.”)

It is not clear if the reporters, Zhou Peng and Wu Guixia, actualy visited  Africa, or if the article is based on interviews. The fact that Lome, the capital of Togo, is described as being on the Mediterranean coast raises suspicions of the latter.

In the most recent quality assessment, the Master’s programme was judged to be the best anthropology programme in the Netherlands by the Accreditation Organisation of the Netherlands and Flanders. The programme is challenging, tightly organized, and enjoys a high success rate.

For more information visit: www.vu.nl/sca

See also our series in which Master’s students write on their fieldwork: Fieldwork 2010 and Fieldwork 2011.

Gijs Verbossen has written here previously on his fieldwork in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. His research focuses on the experience of young Palestinian refugees under the Israeli occupation.

Erella Grassiani is a PhD in Anthropology from the VU, and has also contributed several pieces regarding her activism in Israel and her research on morality among Israeli soldiers.

Pal Nyiri is Professor of Global History from an Anthropological Perspective at the VU University. Read his previous blog posts here.

VU University (photo by Andrew Black)

By Pál Nyíri I have received a nicely designed and expensively printed booklet in the mail. It contains a synopsis written by Nicolien Zuijdgeest. This is based on a much more extensive research report by Lucy Kortram and published by the VU’s Onderwijscentrum, entitled Multiculturele competenties. Since “diversity is our business” — to borrow a chapter title from Ulf Hannerz’s latest book – I think we in the departments of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Communication, Organisation and Management, and History should take time to read this report and comment on it. I hope this post will elicit responses from colleagues who work in this particular field.

The report seems to fit in a recent effort by the VU to address the diversity of its student population in a more explicit way, and perhaps also in its hesitant efforts to “internationalize.” It summarizes a series of interviews with “autochthonous” (“native”), “allochthonous” (“non-native”) Dutch and “international” faculty and students on the way non-native students and cultural difference are treated in teaching and on the broader university environment. It indicates a number of problems and offers some recommendations.

The students whose nationality is indicated in the text are of Moroccan, Turkish, or Surinamese origin, probably reflecting the largest “allochthonous” groups at the VU (and the Netherlands). They make some interesting comments. Some complain about prejudiced staff – you have to work harder to prove yourself as a non-white –  and believe that some lecturers tend to judge a non-white student who is late or misses a class more harshly. Other students want a less Eurocentric philosophy curriculum or more space for the role of the Netherlands in colonial history, which is generally treated as something other nations did. (My colleague Susan Legene will surely agree with this.) A number of “allocthonous” students feel irked by allegations that they are “not engaged” or “not participating;” while they admit being part of different life-worlds at home and at the university, they report being interested in and making efforts to participate in student life. Here, of course, there is a range of responses, but self-isolation seems the exception rather than the norm.

In contrast, staff responses reveal a generally defensive attitude to the idea of reflecting on one’s cultural biases (“I think that’s for political scientists” or “science is science”). At the same time, a number of staff report feeling intimidated by the behaviour of “allochthonous” (specifically Dutch-Moroccan) youth, or else unsure about the reasons for unsatisfactory performance or disruptive behaviour and unwilling to engage with it for fear of being accused of discrimination. All of this suggests that the VU does, as an institution, have issues to address here.

My overall evaluation of the report is positive. The author remains in the background and largely limits herself to summarizing the views of staff and students. Generally speaking, she takes care to avoid reifying cultural difference. Granted, she does not question the “allochthonous” category, often treats it as a single whole, and sometimes allows the quotes from staff to conflate it with Muslims without drawing attention to this problem. Some of the quotes from staff essentialise particular forms of behaviour – such as unwillingness to shake hands with a person of the opposite sex – as “a custom within the religion” that “lecturers must know” (p. 17).

But the report also stresses that it is hard for lecturers to judge when cultural norms are presented in a manipulative way to achieve mundane interests. One group of Indonesian students is reported to have asked for Fridays off, only to be dismissed by an Indonesian professor. (This is presented as a case of cultural manipulation nipped in the bud, although the case does not seem so obvious to me.) Interestingly, Jewish students are described in one quote as particularly prone to religiously justified class avoidance. The report notes that lecturers should feel confident and capable of “drawing boundaries” of acceptable behaviour, and that the more they are aware of their own norms and biases the better they will be able to do so.

The report concludes by identifying eight “core multicultural competencies,” and despite my unease with this term, I think most are useful as goals to strive for. Here they are: a questioning attitude (towards statements about culture); ability to tell when generalisations about a group can and when they cannot be made; awareness of own norms, values and biases; understanding of norms and values of the “other” while being aware that these are dynamic and that student behaviour cannot be assumed to be culturally determined; avoiding stereotyping language and examples; creating a safe learning environment for everyone; awareness of language barriers; and ability to deal with conflicting emotions.

Pál Nyiri is Professor of Global History from an Anthropological Perspective at VU University. He recently published Seeing Culture Everywhere. On Standplaats Wereld he earlier wrote about ‘interculturalism at the VU’. See also his other posts. In addition, Pál writes regularly for the Culture Matters and China Can’t Stop Saying No weblogs.

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.

The VU is generally seen as the Dutch university with the most ethnically diverse student body, yet the students – despite certain tentative attempts at “internationalization” – are overwhelmingly from the Netherlands and most use Dutch as their first language. It follows that the tasks of “intercultural learning” will be different from the usual framework, which has been developed to deal with the learning habits of students from other countries who are non-native speakers of the language of instruction.

It is far from clear to what extent the ethnic background of the students’ families — as opposed to, for example, their class background or place of residence — will be the most important determinant of their learning habits. Yet the email from the Onderwijscentrum identifies “learning to stimulate the learning of students from diverse ethnic groups” as the objective of the training.

On the other hand, the elements of the training — making a videorecording of one’s own classroom teaching and then analysing it — are in the self-reflexive mode that we find useful.

It would be good if colleagues in anthropology followed this training and offered their views on its usefulness.

Pál Nyiri is Professor of Global History from an Anthropological Perspective at the VU University. See his earlier posts on Standplaats Wereld. He also writes regularly for the Culture Matters and China Can’t Stop Saying No weblogs.

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.

Andras Kovats, a sociologist of migration who is the director of Menedek, an organisation for migrants of which I am a member, has recently given an interview to a news site. He talked about immigration, “integration,” and the responsibility of the host society, taking what can be described a moderate left-liberal position (for Dutch readers: something along the lines of D66). Immigrants are only 2% of Hungary’s population, and most of those are ethnic Hungarians (who come from neighbouring areas that used to belong to Hungary before 1919), so that immigration is not a major political issue.

What is a major issue is the position of the Gypsies, some 6% of the population, largely living in extreme poverty and suffering severe discrimination. The party Jobbik gained almost 20% of the votes in a recent election after a campaign focusing on  ”Gypsy crime.” This is the party that Wilders refused to sit in the same faction with in the European Parliament, because it is also anti-Semitic and homophobic. Its anti-Semitism does not prevent it from being anti-Arab when it comes to “keeping Europe white.”

The idea that Gypsies are to Eastern Europe what Arabs are to Western Europe is remarkably popular with Hungarian commentators of all political hues, whether they see them as a cultural threat or as an ethnicized, excluded underclass. Andras, too, invoked this parallel in his interview — a parallel that I believe has only limited validity (in many ways, a parallel with Aboriginal Australians is more accurate).

Andras invited us to comment, but when I looked at the comments of earlier readers I realised that there would be no point. These comments ranged from “damned Gypsy-whitewashers” to “there should just not be any Arabs or blacks in the German football team.” It is fascinating how the issue of immigration can serve as a proxy for the airing of racist views in a country with almost no immigration at all, but, clearly, this was not the place to engage in such elevated discussions. I envy my Dutch colleagues the discursive space they have. Clearly, however bad Wilders is, this is a far cry from what is happening in Hungary.

Pál Nyiri is Professor of Global History from an Anthropological Perspective at VU University Amsterdam. He earlier wrote about the ethnic politics of Jobbik in Hungary. See also his other posts.

By Pál Nyiri

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. Of course, the market-state-media nexus does have some impact; I can imagine that Chinese entrepreneurs who seek to maintain good standing with the embassy would not be keen to advertise in “rebellious” newspapers.

But I suspect that the state-endorsed discourse of Chineseness does enjoy popular support. Deters quotes the editor-in-chief of the Netherlands-based Chinese Radio and TV as saying, ”If you’re too critical you lose the Chinese public – the target group you’re aiming at.” To what extent is this target group now defined by new migrants from the mainland, such as those students and graduates who are members of the embassy-created Association of Chinese Students and Scholars, according to whose charter the first duty of every member is to “ardently love the Fatherland, protect the Fatherland’s honour and national dignity” (热爱祖国，维护祖国荣誉和民族尊严)? To what extent does it continue to be shaped by an older generation of migrants largely active in catering, who may well feel proud about the new, assertive discourse of global Chineseness? How do second-generation Dutch Chinese relate to this discursive hegemony?

Pal Nyiri is Professor of Global History from an Anthropological Perspective at the VU University. In earlier contributions for this blog, he answered a few questions about his freshly published book on Chinese migration,  and wrote about Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer’s lecture at the VU, about two more books of his hand, on Cultural Mobility and Seeing Culture Everywhere, about his inaugural lecture on China’s foreign concessions, about the AAA, and about the uses of cultural defense in court. The current article also appeared on his weblog.

Pál Nyíri

“Our” Pál Nyíri recently published a book called Mobility and cultural authority in contemporary China. Daan Beekers asked him a few questions about this new book.

DB: When it comes to the topic of China and migration, we tend to think of the many Chinese who have migrated to places all over the world. But your book is about the policy on migration in China itself. What makes this an important issue?

PN: Actually, my book talks about all sorts of mobility, including internal and international migration and tourism. Of these, internal migration understandably has by far the largest scale: an estimated 150 million people within China are migrants. What makes this an important issue is that China maintains a household registration system that separates rural and urban dwellers and endows the two groups with different rights, so that rural migrants in the cities can be “illegal”.

DB: In your book you show that China has been loosening its migration policy and appropriating migration as a symbol of a new and modern China. Yet you argue that this somewhat progressive policy is ‘compensated’ by the imposition of cultural control over migration and by restriction of movement. What do you mean by that?

PN: An example of a differentiated control of movement is that cities in China increasingly compete for skilled workers but try to limit the influx of the rural so-called “peasant workers”. An example of cultural control is how, simultaneously with the rapid development of tourism, tourist sites in China are semiotically overdetermined by the narratives that place them within a particular national discourse, narratives that every tourists encounters an endless number of times in shows, guides’ talks, in media, and on signs.

DB: Migration has become a major policy issue in the Netherlands as well. How do these developments in China compare to the Dutch situation?

PN: The easiest comparison is probably between China’s internal migration policies and those of the Netherlands and other European countries towards international migration. Meanwhile, China is also experiencing increasing immigration, and the way it will shape its immigration policy in the years to come will be interesting to watch. There are indications that it may go down a more pragmatic and permissive path than Europe (or such Asian countries as Japan or Singapore), but also one that grants no welfare rights to migrants.

DB: Finally, what does your anthropological perspective bring to the study of these issues?

PN: Migration is most often discussed as a policy issue, and it is seen quite separately from tourism. My focus in the book is not on policies but on how mobility of all sorts has come to stand for modernity, has come to symbolize a particular kind of personhood, which many mobile citizens gladly identify with.

Pal Nyiri is Professor of Global History from an Anthropological Perspective at the VU University. Some of his earlier posts on this blog relate to Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer’s lecture at the VU, to two more books of his hand, on Cultural Mobility and Seeing Culture Everywhere, to his inaugural lecture on China’s foreign concessions, to the AAA, and to the uses of cultural defense in court.

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.

I was in a dilemma. On the one hand, I suspected that the event would not really be a symposium, but rather an occasion to garner political support for the cause of Uyghur independence, as championed by the exiled Rebiya Kadeer. This was not a cause I necessarily wished to lend my “academic credibility” to, nor did I want to be put in the role of the opponent of what was likely to be one-sided views at an event designed to bolster for those very views.

In the end, I decided to take the (admittedly minor) risk of being refused my next Chinese visa and attend the meeting, but not to give a speech. The news that the Chinese embassy demanded a meeting with the VU’s board of directors to protest the holding of the event strengthened my resolve to attend.

The role of the China expert was eventually accepted by Andrew Martin Fisher, a well-respected researcher at the ISS, and I am very curious to know how he dealt with it. (I left in the intermission and did not hear him.) But I was almost sorry to have rejected the role and lost the opportunity to ask Rebiya some questions. Already the trappings of the event made me uneasy: TASA’s president, who chaired the session, asked the — mostly Turkish — audience for silence and then applause as he introduced Rebiya and the other speakers, then declared that everyone must refrain from “cynicism and provocation.” After a short film made by Amnesty International, Rebiya spoke for about 40 minutes. It was this speech that made me think of the student leader in the film.

Photo: shapeshift. Rebiya Kadeer and other activists

Yes, Uyghurs do not receive much attention from the West compared to Tibetans — and, we should add, this is because they are Muslims and because the Chinese government successfully tars Uyghur separatism with the “terrorist” brush. Yes, China’s ownership of Xinjiang is recent. Yes, there are many Uyghur political prisoners, and the crackdown after the rioting last year has been particularly severe. Yes, the rioting was triggered by the lynching of two Uyghur men in Eastern China. Yes, there is massive Han Chinese immigration to Xinjiang, it is encouraged by the government in the name of economic development, and Han Chinese probably get better jobs because they are more educated, more politically trustworthy, and perhaps (being migrants) more docile and hard-working from the Chinese companies’ point of view.

Yes, the oil and gas riches of Xinjiang benefit the rulers of China. Yes, Muslim religious activities are severely curtailed and unauthorized ones often punished by imprisonment. Yes, local authorities promote economic growth by encouraging the outmigration of young workers to the factories of Eastern China. Yes, Chinese government propaganda denies or downplays all of that. Yes, cultural traditions are eroded as lifestyles change and the share of the Han population grows. And I am willing to believe that, as Rebiya claims, “the Chinese government” is bulldozing the old city of Kashgar this very moment.

But the Qing Dynasty gained control of Xinjiang in the mid-17th century, not in 1887 (that’s just when its civil administration was incorporated into China’s). There was an independent Xinjiang in the 1920s and ’30s, but it was led by a Han Chinese under Soviet protection. There are far more Han Chinese who are in prison for criticizing or resisting government action than Uyghurs. All religious activity in China is monitored and, if it proves uncontrollable, suppressed. The lynching of the two Uyghurs was linked to accusations of them raping a Han woman — not that this mitigates the murders, but it does put into perspective Rebiya’s argument that the sending of Uyghur girls to Chinese factories violates cultural norms.

The riots cost scores of Han Chinese lives, a fact Rebiya cursorily acknowledged but dismissed it as a ploy by the Chinese government to create an excuse for the crackdown. Labour export is encouraged in many rural areas, and those resisting are labeled recalcitrant — but Rebiya’s accusations of four hundred thousand young girls being “forcibly transported” to “sweatshops” in East China and then “hunted down like animals in Chinese streets” are fantastic and unbelievable.

As for each Han migrant receiving the equivalent of 5000 euro and free land for moving to Xinjiang, well, if that were true, the whole country would be moving there. A cousin of my wife’s went to Xinjiang to plant cotton and made the equivalent of 60 euros a month — not much but better than being unemployed in her home village. The next year, she went to Canton instead. (Far more Chinese workers and traders migrate within “China proper” than to Xinjiang or Tibet, and many Han Chinese migrate out of Xinjiang if they can.) And cultural traditons are eroding and old cities are being bulldozed everywhere in China to make way for real estate and tourism projects.

These are not, per se, ethnic issues. And standards of living have been rising in Xinjiang as elsewhere. Some Uyghurs, like Rebiya Kadeer who was once touted as one of the five richest people in China, have succeeded in business. Some of them, like Rebiya at the time, have been coopted by the Chinese government; she held various official positions in the 1990s. Uyghurs have not been subjected to family planning policies that Chinese are forced to accept; Rebiya herself has eleven children.

But economic inequality is growing, and ethnic minorities tend to be overrepresented among the losers. Restless, unemployed Uyghur youth is far more likely to translate this into ethnic and religious oppression than their no less restless Chinese-speaking brethren.

Is this “cultural genocide” of an ancient sovereign nation? If enough people believe so, then perhaps it is. But whether or not most Uyghurs feel exploited or want to be independent, speeches like Rebiya’s are no more objective representations of reality than reports of the Chinese government. And yet, once again — can an anthropologist be so squeamish when it comes to lending his voice to a legitimate, even if severely skewed, critique of an overwhelming political and military power? Or should he opt for what has been called “salvage orientalism” and go along with the nationalism of the weak against the nationalism of the strong?

Pál Nyiri is Professor of Global History from an Anthropological Perspective at VU University Amsterdam. His earlier posts include Hungarian nationalists claim Eastern origins and Anthropology and Iraq.

See also other posts (in Dutch) on activism.

Earlier this week Pal

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.

In a recent debate on the subject, anthropologists Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson wrote that “we need vigorous translation work” from the language of anthropology into a publicly accessible one “to explain that Islam is malleable and diverse, that Egyptian peasants are part of a globalized economy, and that ethnicity is always in historical flux.”

The idea probably sounds less novel to anthropologists in continental Europe, who are often already engaged in such “translation work” (my colleague Thijl Sunier’s recent inaugural lecture is a good example), than to those in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Nonetheless, we think Seeing Culture Everywhere is novel in that it attempts to show the effects of all-pervasive “culturalism” – i.e. the recent, rather caricaturistic public attention to culture as a group trait – right across the range of public debates and decision making, from international relations to interpersonal mediation.

The book is written for non-anthropologists: it is a plea to take culture seriously, but to be critical towards the simplifying claims about culture offered by a range of actors, from politicians and political commentators such as Huntington to intercultural trainers. It also offers an explanation for why the “culture fever” is so pervasive today.

Pal Nyiri is Professor of Global History from an Anthropological Perspective at the VU University.

He wrote earlier about the AAA and the uses of cultural defense in court.