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Tag: identity

“The Netherlands Meat Land” campaign: Towards an ethnography of meat

By Irene Stengs – On 1 September 2022, the Dutch Central Organisation for the Meat Industry (COV, Centrale Organisatie voor de Vleessector), a partnership consisting of organizations involved in the production and processing of meat…

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Diet as a New Identity

gaya-nikolsky-artikel
Photo by Gaya Nikolsky

By Gaya Nikolsky       Who are you? No, let me rephrase that to avoid a complicated philosophical debate. What is your identity? Okay, although this question is also quite complex, as an anthropologist I do have more grip on it. Your social identity is who and what you are to other people. Often, at least when regarding identity as a more superficial construction, it would involve different labels that will tell the outside world something about you… Or so it seems. Let’s leave it at that for now: your social identity is what you are to other people and it usually involves aspects such as your gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, career, hobbies etc.

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A refugee camp in the Netherlands as a public sphere

Bron: RTL Nieuws
Bron: RTL Nieuws

By Nynke van Dijck     Some weeks ago there was a big storm in the Netherlands. ‘Code Orange’ was issued to tell people to be careful while going on the road or making use of public transport. In the south of the Netherlands, in a city called Nijmegen, a new refugee camp was built which was supposed to host around 800 people from countries like Syria, Afghanistan and Eritrea. When the weather got worse, the tents in the camp were shaking, water was leaking through the roof and a loud alarm was going off the whole night. No one in the camp could sleep and the shelter administration (COA) was not reachable.

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Het boerenbloed kruipt waar het niet gaan kan

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Door Ellen de Lange. Een boerderij op het Nederlandse platteland. De geur van mest, kuilvoer en verse melk. Het geblèr van de potlammeren die trek hebben in melk, de boer die ‘kom op’ roept tegen de koeien, en het feit dat het geluid van de voordeurbel vreemd is; die deur wordt namelijk “al meer dan acht jaar niet gebruikt”, je gaat gewoon achterom.

Wellicht een wat ongebruikelijke plek voor een MSc student antropologie. Ik heb tenslotte meer dieren dan mensen mogen zien de afgelopen drie maanden. En daarnaast, het eelt op mijn handen is niet uitsluitend van het aantekeningen maken. Met nog een kleine week veldwerk voor de boeg, een kort verslag over mijn ervaringen.

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A Pakistani Mela in Amsterdam

Pakistani Mela in AmsterdamBy Mohammed Amer Morgahi. In the month of June it was an unusual rainy day in Amsterdam, however a large number of enthusiast Pakistanis assembled at the ‘Pakistan Mela’. Unusual was also a significant participation of women, young and old, and children in the event. People had come not only from different parts of the Netherlands but also from the neighboring Germany and Belgium. In the gray and damp Sloterpark the smell of Pakistani food and music was covering the whole park, as were the colorful umbrellas of the participants. The word ‘Mela’ or ‘gathering’ or ‘festival’, is a Sanskrit word and it deals with the festivities or gatherings around the Sufi shrine and Hindu temples in South Asian villages. With urbanization it also got more secular usage, and among the South Asian diaspora communities it turns out to be an important cultural import. Thus you have Indian, Nepalese, Sikh and Pakistani versions in major cities of the UK and North America, and so the Pakistani Mela in Amsterdam als took shape in the last couple of years.

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