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 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.
Leave a CommentBy 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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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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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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Yesterday, members of our department and Thomas H. Eriksen (Oslo University) presented their new book A World of Insecurity. This collection of essays is the result of years of fruitful cooperation and debate in the context of the department’s research programme, Constructing Human Security in a Globalizing World (CONSEC), and it provides a captivating sample of the research carried out by our staff.
The concept of Human Security was introduced by the UN Development Programme in 1994, in order to expand the scope of development work and research. Human Security was defined as ‘freedom from want and freedom from fear’. This books draws on a different approach that includes subjective and existential dimensions in an area which has been dominated by quantitative and ‘objective’ measurements of well-being.
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In part 3 of the Fieldwork 2010 series Master’s student Katie Rabar tells us about her first impressions as a researcher of asylum seekers in Holland.
One of the biggest challenges I’ve found in finding a research site is that I only speak one language fluently. For me that’s English, and I chose to conduct my research here in the Netherlands, in Noord Holland, looking at how asylum seekers experience and construct ‘home’. I speak only a tiny bit of Dutch and I’ve sat through hours of classes at my fieldsite where every language was being spoken but English. This means putting into practice all the language skills I have acquired growing up, and I am able to understand a variety of languages with some proficiency but responding… well, not so easy.
Doing anthropological fieldwork is not always easy. That’s what Kamiel Arents found out last year when he did his Master’s in social and cultural anthropology at the VU. He made a short film about his fieldwork, giving an informative and funny impression of what it can be like to do anthropology. Kamiel had decided to go to London to study athletes training for the Olympic Games in 2012. He soon realized that there were quite a few hurdles he had to face himself to make his project work.
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By Maarten Deprez
Now that the Christmas and New Year fuss and feasting are over, yet the events still lie fresh in our memory, it is a good time to look back and reflect. One fun and rewarding, though at times somewhat unsettling way to do so, is to take a look at what other people do and then I mean not merely your neighbour (unless he or she had a really interesting party), but people at a greater cultural distance. For maximal effect, I propose to go far beyond the usual “What did you do for Christmas/New Year?” question to friends and colleagues, to read a classical account from anthropologist Richard Borshay Lee, on how he celebrated Christmas with Kalahari Bushmen.
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