An Anthropological Toolbox

(Alternative Title) Interesting Stuff to Keep in Mind*

I'm back! And I'm here to make you think about stuff!

Over the course of the term in my Anthropology class ('Colonialism and Its Legacies'), I learned a bucketload of ideas that are really useful in understanding the postcolonial world, i.e. pretty much any society and culture today. Being a reasonably privileged person, I initially had some trouble putting the pieces together, but gradually I got the hang of what was going on. I think the best outcome of the class isn't the variety of perspectives I gained but rather the tough questions I'm still left to scratch my head about.

To pat myself on the back for all my hard work (thinking is hard for me) and to give a taste of the class to anyone interested, I've compiled what I consider to be a theoretical toolbox. Using some of the ideas below, anyone (even people who don't think they're anthropologists!) can break down stereotypes and common misconceptions in order to approach the world in new ways. I can guarantee you (or your money back!) that you already understand most anthropological theory; it's just that you might not have applied it before. If nothing else, the concepts raise a lot of tricky questions that are useful to think about.

The list below is certainly non-comprehensive, since it's a bit eclectic. In fact, some might argue that they're a bunch of buzzwords. If you put all that aside, I think that they can be a springboard for critical thinking among anyone who hasn't heard of the concepts before.

Enough of the explanations. Let's get to the goodies!

Last note: they're categorized not as they were in class but rather as I seem them grouped now. And they're not definitions so much as cool stuff to think about.

Postcolonial History and Politics

neo-Europes - term coined by Alfred Crosby to describe nations populated mainly (i.e. dominated) by Europeans, who colonized lands occupied by their native people in search of temperate climates and natural resources (for a more expansive, arguably 'scientific' approach to the circumstances allowing the creation of neo-Europes, see Jared Diamond's modern classic)

Third World - label applied to countries aligned neither with NATO nor with the Communist bloc during the Cold War, with the extreme poverty stereotype applied later due to most of the countries having only been recently decolonized (i.e. arguably over-exploited rather than 'under-developed')

tricontinentalism - a political movement born in response to postcolonial oppression in the 1960s, among peoples of Africa, Asia, and South America; associated with communist and socialist ideals as a means of resistance to capitalist imperialism (e.g. these guys here)

development - kickstarted during the reconstruction era following the end of World War II (and inspired by the Marshall Plan's success in Europe), the process of attempting to improve quality of life in Third World countries, usually through top-down international policies; though embraced by the UN, this ideology has frequently faced criticism

modernity - one of the end goals of development, the standard of living counted as acceptable or even ideal by Western nations (including Western traditions of thought); tied but not inherently linked to industrialization

globalization - the process of cultural and economic presence spreading from a dominant culture/nation to interact with other cultures (e.g. TOURISM...to be discussed later)

postmodernism - the skeptical response to aspects of modernity/'modernism', including critical reevaluations of the commonly-accepted views of culture, economics, and philosophy; often involves lots and lots of deconstruction
(usually a bit dry to read about, but sometimes weird and fun to apply) (also duck)

One of the first images to appear in a Google search for 'postmodern.'

Memory and Tradition

memory - private or shared, an act of recollection that can manifest in a number of ways including the following (which aren't mutually exclusive):

• textual - contained within a written work, e.g. a memoir; permanent but sometimes lacking in expressiveness or impersonal
• embodied - experienced through the body, usually via one of the five senses; less predictable than other kinds of memory but often much more visceral
• locative - tied to a specific place or setting, particularly if one has lived there or otherwise 'absorbed' the location without necessarily engaging it actively; not accessible everywhere but often the kind of memory linked to nostalgia
• performative - evoked by organized, perhaps ritualized action, including social bonds; shared between people and accessible even to non-participants
• counter-memory - recollections that run counter to typical narratives and often aren't immediately accepted into mainstream discourse/educational practices
• I remember reading somewhere about how it can be restrictive to think of 'memory' as a fixed noun rather than as a verb, but that's getting into some Whorfian-level sh*t.

forgetting - the loss of memory over time, whether tacit or accidental; can be either beneficial or harmful depending on context, the people who forget, and the people who remember

• Anthropologist Paul Connerton outlines seven types of forgetting in The Spirit of Mourning as follows (again: not mutually exclusive)
1. prescriptive (publicly acknowledged, in everyone's interest) 
2. used to create a new identity (e.g. after a tragedy)
3. annulment (induced by an information overload that 'allows' people to let go of certain things)
4. repressive erasure (enacted via force, despite disagreement)
5. structural (only remembering things directly connected to oneself or directly passed down, and forgetting all the extra stuff)
6. planned obsolescence (the rapid rebranding and redesigning of consumer goods in capitalist society, intended to keep consumers buying stuff)
7. humiliation (a collective failure to acknowledge painful realities)

tradition - surprisingly, not something that stays perfectly preserved as it's passed down, but rather a collective act that adapts to new circumstances (e.g. cultural, geographical) from generation to generation; often equated with authenticity (coming up next)
(obligatory "Fiddler on the Roof" reference)

Sometimes change is good. 

Representations and Commodification

authenticity - the extent to which a culture or people is truly (not falsely) unique in the eyes of observers; doesn't always correspond to the people's self-perceptions

essentialism - any act that simplifies the complexities of a culture to fixed (sometimes 'undesirable') traits that are 'essential' to that culture (and strategic essentialism)

• strategic essentialism - a group strategy of putting aside internal differences within the group to present a unified identity to outside observers sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't
• Orientalism - the long Western tradition of exotifying various non-European peoples and their cultures
• auto-Orientalism - the equally (?) long non-Western tradition of people deciding for themselves how they wanted to appear 'exotic' and using that label to their advantage

disembedding - the act of cognitively removing an event, tradition, physical object, concept (etc.) from its original cultural context with the intention of reanalysis under a different mental framework; the removed thing can also be more firmly re-embedded in another context

• commodification - transforming a formerly non-capital cultural object or practice into a commodity that can be used or exchanged even among those unfamiliar with the culture
• cultural capitalism - the practice of buying and selling goods in a way that allows the producer and consumer to engage with the apparent ethics of capitalist practices; if you click on no other link, click here to watch a charming video on cultural capitalism
• tourism - often involves cultural performances of one kind or another, implying a kind of commodification on behalf of the tourists

the Other - a dominant group's perception of a non-dominant group as something to be alienated rather than treated as equals

• second contact - a reaction of the 'Other' toward the group that originally did the Othering...thus resulting in an alienation of the dominant group

Second contact? Or self-deprecation?

Nature and Land

virtualism - people imposing their view of the world (sometimes idealized) onto reality itself

sedimentation - the physical and cultural layering imposed onto a space by multiple groups of people who use the space in succession...or sometimes all at once

possession of land - basically it means different things to different people, depending on how it is used and incorporated into local culture

Fourth World - a label applied to groups without fixed or recognized borders, partially due to modern ideas of sovereignty being tied to land

Virtualism at its finest.

Identity

indigenous - the self-determined status of a people seeking to regain authority and ownership of what was systematically deprived of them through colonialism; often refers to people inhabiting a location immediately prior to its colonization by outsiders

self-determination - the capability of an individual or group to define their own identity, even if it conflicts with others' perceptions (and belonging)

contact zone - the social space (geographical or conceptual) of overlap between different cultures, often disputed by all parties involved, sometimes in an asymmetrical power balance; frequently results in polarization or...

• hybridization - probably the coolest thing ever: the collision and subsequent mixing of multiple cultures, often catalyzed by youth
• liminality - occupying a space between cultures, despite pressures to choose one side or the other (let me know if you want to talk about liminality and Māori gangs - it was the topic of my final paper)

reflexivity - the ability to reflect consciously on one's position and life experiences, and how these shape one's perspective of the world

auto-ethnography - any anthropological study conducted on a group of people by a member of that group, which connects the writer's personal experiences to those of the larger community/culture; this seems to be where a lot of anthropology is headed right now, in opposition to the "pith-helmet anthropologist"-type ethnographic work

Good riddance, old-school explorers!

After all is said and done, keep in mind that these concepts tie into one another and butt heads with one another all the time, and they are hardly fixed over time. One man's virtualism is another man's commodification! If I had more patience and time, I would provide a much fuller list for your indoctrination enjoyment, but if you want to know more there's always Wikipedia (or my course's syllabus if you really want)!

To tie all these anthropological concepts together, I invite my marvelously patient readers to watch this talk by Chimamanda Adichie about stories, memory, and cultural (mis)representation. It's really cool.

With that essay, my awkward adventures in Aotearoa come to a close. I know I'll be back someday, but for the time being I return to my American mindset with all its limitations and biases. If there's anything I'll take away, it'll be to keep looking at the world through a skeptical lens. That's not to say that everything is problematic, just that some things deserved to be scrutinized a bit more than you might think.

Finally, all this knowledge is courtesy of my professor, Jim Igoe. He's on sabbatical for the next year but if you ever want to take an Anthro class in the future, take a class with him! He knows a lot about African NGOs, and more importantly he knows how to make theory interesting.

*My 10th-grade English teacher might have titled it 'Habits of Mind,' which were these frustratingly unanswerable questions we would have to tackle after reading any play/book/poem. Thanks, Mrs. Benedetto.

Travels in Te Wai Pounamu

IT'S OVER!!!

Well, almost. I'm currently waiting in a quiet hallway in LAX for my flight to Boston, chugging hot chocolate to fend off the jetlag. Thanks to the magic of the timezones, I'm watching the sun set on March 14th for the second time. Pi Day squared… A = πr²? Nah.

To answer your next burning question, yes Mitchell and I survived our adventure of driving/camping across the South Island (a.k.a. Te Wai Pounamu 'The Greenstone Water', due to abundance of greenstone in the area). Mother Nature was quite kind to us with the weather (apart from the cold nights), and we saw a variety of scenery that can be described only as 'choice'. I'll give you some pictures right now so you can ooh and ahh until you forget to inhale and then pass out.

Surprisingly, more cow farms than sheep farms

Our approximate itinerary from March 5 to 14 was as follows, described à la flux de conscience. There's a map, lovingly modified in Paint by Mitchell, so you can follow along! Check out his more florid post here.

Use the colors to decode the map! It's like a Paint by Numbers puzzle, except
not at all.

March 5: Queenstown (early flight, pick up rental car, name her Shmabel, walk through the city and the gardens, checking into a hostel unannounced, burger dinner = YUM, filling out the New Zealand census [required by law], then writing the Ling paper ugh)

Lake Wakatipu, Queenstown

"Cockadoodle Oink" = chicken + bacon + tasty sauces

Where the sunlight pours down the mountains

The path just keeps going...onto private property >:-(

March 6: Queenstown (a brief hike up a hill, being in awe of Queenstown's gorgeous surroundings, so much paper writing 'cause we're good/cranky students, and 'freedom camping' in a 'scientific nature reserve' outside the township of…)

View of the lake from atop the hill

Mitchell surrounded by cairn invaders

March 7: Te Anau (long hike along the lake, seeing cool birds, cooking an ersatz curry noodle stirfry dish for writing inspiration, and being up most of the night in a hostel FINISHING the paper, while being distracted by American TV shows)

I know why the caged kea sings...and squawks

Probably a deadly mushroom

Where the mountains blend with clouds

March 8: Milford Sound (getting up early to submit the paper, rejoice in actually being done with the FSP, long drive to the Sound via a scenic highway, walk along the beach at low tide, getting misty-eyed looking at the misty mountains, swatting bugs, heading back to visit a gaping chasm and stare into some Mirror Lakes, strollin' on a river, then legit camping...still in the car)

Those are waterfalls of unknown (to me) origin

The Sound is rather soundless but still mind-blowing

Clever signage

[insert 'Fields of Gold' lyrics here]

March 9: travel (sleeping in a bit, then leaving camp early to fuel up, get groceries, and drive all day through Queenstown and Wanaka, stopping only once at Fantail Waterfalls, ending up slightly past Haast, freedom camp on Lake Moeraki)

Winding mountain roads

Mitchell modelling this season's half-shorts half-pants look

Lake Moeraki's mysterious black swans? They made weird noises

March 10: Fox and Franz Josef Glaciers (in Māori, Te Moeka o Tuawe and Kā Roimata o Hinehukatere) (another early start to hit the trails at Fox Glacier with the tourist crowd, curse the expensive tours that let you actually walk onto the glacier, more meandering at and around Franz Josef, looping back to explore the usually-reflective Lake Matheson with all the other Chinese and German tourists, and crashing at the legit campground-cum-parking lot off of a beach on the Tasman Sea)

People scrambling around on Fox Glacier

Franz Josef looks like an elephant head

All the meltwater from the glacier

Some of the cows around Lake Matheson that were
especially loud in the morning

March 11: Greymouth and Pancake Rocks (super early wakeup call to see Matheson Lake at sunrise, yes it was beautiful and reflective and no I don't have pictures, heading toward Greymouth, stopping first at a cute tourist trap to look at socks and used books, then at a lovely little town called Karoro ['seagull'] for beachcombing and lunching in the cemetery, heading further north to Punakaiki to witness the power of time and tide at the Pancake Rocks [made of limestone], discovering a mysterious cavern that led nowhere, rambling down a long rocky beach toward a rock shaped like a shoe, eventually return to Greymouth for gas and food to head toward Christchurch, finally freedom camping near a bridge halfway to 'Chch')

Lake Matheson (Mitchell has better photos,
I'll steal from him later)

Deceptive sock store; they were too expensive

Pancakes minus syrup and butter and flavor

Scrambling through the slippery, echoey cave

There was an old lady who lived in a shoe

Mitchell, rejoicing at relocating his prodigal jandals

March 12: Christchurch (sleeping in a little before warming up and hitting the road again, maneuvering through the city's construction-riddled streets [some call it an 'urban dystopia' due to post-earthquake rebuilding], poking around the shipping-container mall, exploring the botanical gardens and all their quirks, crashing briefly at the rather homey hostel to recharge before meeting a bunch of friends, who had been hiking, at their hostel for pizza and beer dinner, story-sharing, FSP-reminiscing, and fond avowals of 'I'm gonna miss you' and 'Have a safe trip home')

Shipping containers work pretty well as stores

So many roses

'World Peace Bell' that this one kid wouldn't stop ringing

Black and white ducks...yin and yang?

One of the many traffic-causing construction projects

March 13: travel (morning at the local library to check email and figure out directions/campsites, last-minute duct tape run, then an approximately six-hour drive from Christchurch back to Queenstown, through such hopping urban centers as Geraldine and Ealing, only hitting one bird, weaving through Beautiful Valley and past Lake Tekapo to arrive back at Queenstown for some wonderful ice creams and settling in at the most legit campsite yet, just before nightfall)

the aptly-named Beautiful Valley

The road goes ever on and on

'Mascarole cheese and forest fruits' plus 'Fig and pistachio' equals
mind-numbing pleasure

Twelve-Mile Delta was the filmsite of the scene in one of the LotR
movies where they're camping at Ithilien! Thanks for that tidbit, Mitchell
(who still hasn't seen the movies or read the books)

Goodnight, sweet Shmabel

March 14: departures (packing up in an empty church parking lot, devouring most of our remaining food supplies so as not to waste space packing them, returning the rental car [goodbye, Shmabel], getting my peanut butter and condensed milk confiscated, flying first to Auckland then, after doing all the baggage necessities, one last lunch at KFC and Tank before heading to the international terminal and parting for real [it still hasn't sunk in yet] as Mitchell goes to China and I return to Amurrica)

You might wonder what we were eating to sustain ourselves throughout all this. Being savvy/crunchy/hungry hikers, we opted for such nonperishable foods as hummus, carrots, broccoli, mushrooms, capsicum, muesli, apples, kiwis, apricots, dried mangoes, dried bananas, beef jerky, trail mix, peanut butter, regular crackers, salt-and-vinegar rice crackers, lemon biscuits, and chocolate (for dessert and breakfast only, due to daytime melting). This ensured high caloric intake, a decent array of flavors, and very minimal preparation.

In addition to the experiences we had on the beaten path, there were quite a few enjoyable moments in-between events, like keeping track of the ridiculous names of the streams we passed over (Mimi Creek = 'Pee' Creek), eavesdropping on tourists in different languages (a grumpy old man clearly not enjoying the Pancake Rocks: 'just more rocks and water'), and running through fields of gold just because no one was there to tell us otherwise. I should have some deep insight to offer about these off-the-record experiences, but I feel increasingly like @NotTildaSwinton, as my departure time draws near and I prepare to head home for the last time.

To sum up: it's been real, it's been fun, and it's been real fun, South Island. I hope to come back someday to explore the many places I've yet to visit: Dunedin, Nelson, Akaroa, and Stewart Island (Scottish heritage FTW). Lots more wildlife yet to see, including mini-dolphins, seals, and of course kiwis of all kinds. Should I ever find myself in New Zealand for a conference or something, I'll have to find a way to get back on the open road again. I'll post the rest of my pictures on FB once I have few spare hours to caption.

I might post again soon with more post-trip reflections, but in case I don't here's my big thanks to everyone who helped make this FSP possible, and to those who made it as amazing as it was. I don't even know where to start, so I'll just end by saying one more time, kia ora tātou.

And we're off!

After a terrific weekend staying at a marae in Leigh, snorkeling and kayaking like a bunch of crazy tourists, and one last hoorah together last night...the program is over. Time has really gone way too quickly these past few weeks, and I have a feeling the last week is going to be just as fast.

Mitchell and I are heading to the South Island for a week of driving about the countryside, hitting up various places like Queenstown and the Fiordland. No guarantees on updates, given our uncertain Internet situation along the way, but we'll be back in Auckland on the 14th to part ways. I'll be posting more once I get home (pictures, musings, etc.), but for now wish us luck

Far-flung Cousins: Māori and Tongan

GIF WARNING! Also if you're not a language nerd, you will probably fall asleep reading this post, so you might wanna wait for my next one about the Chinese Lantern Festival and/or the Polynesian market.

So...I survived my Māori final exam last Wednesday. Despite having studied for the past few weeks, I was worried it would go a little like this:

Upon first seeing the test

Attempting to remember all the grammar patterns we learned...
plus a few we never explicitly learned

Reflecting on the test afterward.

There was a little of the panda-regret on my part, due to dumb vocabulary mistakes (waewae = 'foot, leg') and more than a few translation mishaps. But otherwise I think all the studying paid off, and I'm happy to be done with direct treatment of Māori for a while. So, the aftermath ended up being more like this:

For now, though, our Field Methods class has started off with a bang: we're working with two recent college grads who are native speakers of Tongan, which is a thriving language spoken by upwards of 200,000 people. This is a stark difference from Māori, which is still struggling to rebuild its native speaker population after so many years of linguistic/cultural oppression. One more fun fact: for some reason the king of Tonga currently lives in Auckland, but we have yet to invite him to join our field work sessions. We would probably have to pay him extra for the hassle.

King Tupou VI, in all his glory. Maybe he can be the next Pope,
with the way he's rocking that hat.

Onto the class itself! Starting from basic word elicitation ('what's the word for man?'), we quickly discovered the similarities between the Māori and Tongan sound systems (they both use h, p, t, k, f, m, n, ng, and the same vowels), which include the following general patterns of correspondance (lots of exceptions to the rules; deal with it):

Māori r = Tongan l (toru = tolu = 'three')
Māori w = Tongan v or u (wai = vai = 'water', waea = uaea = 'wire')

As a sidenote, some of the exceptions are pretty cool (rima = nima = 'five/hand', since hands have five fingers). But I digress, as usual.

One thing we're still getting used to is the Tongan sound ', which represents a glottal stop...difficult for English speakers to pronounce word-initially. Try saying the word 'butter' a few times with the cheesiest Cockney accent you can muster, and feel what your throat muscles are doing in the middle of that word. Now try putting that glottal stop at the beginning of a word like ʻanga ('shark'). It's not easy!


So yeah, we're still struggling to pronounce things. But fortunately from the grammar perspective, a lot of the same building blocks we picked up in Māori 101 tend to fall right into place where we expect them in Tongan. This was a big help when we've had to struggle our way through a transcription of 'The Pear Story', which is basically a wordless video meant to encourage storytelling.
But then again...we still haven't fully figured out why the focus particle ko, rather easy to define and use in Māori, is more fluid and resistant to grammatical categorization in Tongan. Or why some sentences include multiple references to the subject pronoun. Or why some verbs mark transitivity with the suffix 'i (e.g. maumau'i = 'to break something', derived from maumau = 'to break) while others use the prefix faka (faka'osi = 'to finish something', 'osi = 'to be finished')...while others employ another strategy entirely. If we had another month or so, we might be able to pin down the details, but for now we're doing the best we can by cobbling together ideas from our knowledge of Māori grammar and our professor's often erroneous guesses (he didn't take Māori with us, leading to some amusing information gaps).

One more cool thing about Tongan before I sign off to be "productive": the definitive accent! In English and Māori, to distinguish between a noun that is definite and one that's indefinite, you just use different articles:

he wahine = 'a woman'
te wahine = 'the woman'

Simple, right? In Tongan, you still stick on an article...but you also change the pronunciation of the word itself! Check this out:

ha ika = 'a fish'
he iká = 'the fish'

In the first word ika, the stress (as it usually does) falls on the second-to-last syllable. In the second word iká, the stress ends up on the last syllable, thus lengthening the vowel and confusing us when we were still struggling to differentiate long vowels from short ones. Anyhow, this might seem pretty dull to you, but I think it's pretty crazy. Hence why I'm writing my final paper on the topic. Yet as I learn more about it, I can't help but think:

Oh well. One more (short) week of elicitation with our ever-patient consultants, then we'll be in the home stretch. Wish us luck!