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Category: Discriminatie & racisme

Unity in diversity, een fabel of een feit?

Door Jorien Janssen ‘Is there a game going on?’ vraagt de taxichauffeur aan  ons, nadat ik hem verteld heb dat de bestemming van onze rit het Athlone stadion is. Vandaag, 21 maart, is het Human Rights Day, en een van de georganiseerde activiteiten is een bijeenkomst in het stadion, waar president Zuma zal spreken. De reactie van onze taxichauffeur bevestigt nogmaals wat ons al bij eerder rondvragen duidelijk werd, deze event is bij weinig mensen bekend, of slechts bij een zeer selectief publiek. Maar, zo verzekert hij ons, het zal een interessante dag voor ons worden, want in het Athlone stadion zullen we omringd zijn door de echte Cape Flat bewoners  (met de Cape Flats wordt de hele uitgestrekte vlakte ten Zuidoosten van het centrum van Kaapstad bedoeld, die voornamelijk bestaat uit townships en huisvesting biedt aan de zwarte en gekleurde bevolking).

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Barbaric Others

 

By Scott Dalby Europe is changing. Political debate and policy initiatives have become fixated on issues like immigration and Islam in particular and more generally on excluding outsiders, whether they are Black youth in Paris suburbs, Roma immigrants, or Eastern European workers. There has been a clear shift towards the political Right, and the popularization of conservative discourses and “solutions.”

This seems to have exposed a crisis within Left politics, its authenticity and potential for offering an alternative argument to the growing Right-wing discourses currently running amok in Europe. I write this blog as an anthropologist and as a person who knows that these ongoing changes affect us all. And it seems to me that these are bad times for Europe; for minorities especially but also the rest. But why has this happened and what are the consequences?

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Free Free Aung San Suu Kyi, for real?

“I can see a light at the end of the tunnel” – Women lighting candles at a temple in Chiang Mai

By Ursula Cats How many times have the people from Burma used the slogan: “Free Free Aung San Suu Kyi”? And now she is “really” free, the regime has released her, without constraints, from her fifteen years’ house arrest. In Burma people are very happy, but also around the world there is great relief. A young female student from Yangon told me today: “When Aung San Suu Kyi was released I cried. Before the future looked like a dark tunnel, but now there is a light. I think we all feel more alive again.” When I talk to the women I work with, their excitement is palpable. Aung San Suu Kyi spreads hope; she stands for unity among the people of Burma. She is seen as a strong leader who loves her people. Throughout the years her voice was silenced, but they’ve build their own ideas on the core stances of her visions. Many people are ready to work alongside Aung San Suu Kyi and are prepared to carry on, even if she would be cut off from her people again. This is in line with her wish: “I cannot do it alone. I think we all have to work together. We will have to find a way of helping each other” she said, while calling for the release of more than 2100 political prisoners still in jail (The Age, 15 November). The fact that so many political prisoners remain behind bars is one of the many reminders to the world that despite Aung San Suu Kyi’s release, the people in Burma are not really free.

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Multicultural Competencies: A New VU Publication

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.

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‘De PVV moet helemaal niks!’

Geert Wilders (foto door Roel 1943)

Door Daan Beekers ‘De PVV moet helemaal niks!’ Dat twitterde Wilders afgelopen woensdag nadat waarnemend CDA partijvoorzitter Bleker op TV had gezegd dat het aankomende kabinet samenbindend moet zijn, niet splijtend. Maar de PVV moet helemaal niks. Het is typerend voor de politieke opstelling van die partij. Sterker nog, de PVV ontleent haar bestaansrecht aan dat ‘niks moeten’.

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Diversity out of the closet

Photo taken by Jamison Wieser

By guest author Merijn Hattink In the Netherlands we live in an environment where being openly gay or lesbian is a well established right. The gay and lesbian lobby has never been as powerful as today. They open up their  guns -read voices- in the public sphere whenever this human right is under fire.  This emancipation is a tremendous achievement in itself. But whose victory is it, and does it count for all gays and lesbians in the culturally diverse society of the Netherlands?

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Putting Wilders in perspective

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.

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Henk en Ingrid continued: de Nederlandse identiteit

Door Maarten Deprez Keesjemaduraatje reageerde op zijn blog op het bericht Henk en Ingrid ontmaskerd van Jethro Alons. Hij citeert een passage waarin Jethro “Henk en Ingrid” omschrijft als een “symbool voor de doorsnee Nederlander” en besluit daaruit dat het beeld van de PVV-stemmer is verbreed. Henk en Ingrid hebben echter nooit symbool gestaan voor de PVV-stemmer, maar wel voor de veel grotere pool van zogenaamd “autochtone” Nederlanders waaruit de PVV haar electoraat probeert te vissen.

Ik schrijf “zogenaamd autochtoon”, omdat er geen objectieve scheidingslijn bestaat. We zijn allemaal vroeger of later ingeweken. Geen enkele familie is “altijd al” Nederlands geweest. Identiteitsvorming is dus nooit op een rotsvaste waarheid, maar wel op een subjectieve, en dus veranderlijke, werkelijkheid gebaseerd.

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Fieldwork 2010: Chechens in Moscow

In this part of the series, Laura finally reveals her research topic.

You have all been waiting. Now is the time. I did research among the CHECHENS!!! Or the Noxchi, which is the name they use to refer to themselves. You might have guessed it… that’s where the ‘N’ referred to in my mysterious posts. Why were they mysterious, Laura? Well…

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