An Interview with Juan Jose García, President of Ojo de Agua Comunicación

This is an interview with Zapotec video maker Juan Jose Garcia, president of the award-winning media organization Ojo de Agua Comunicacion, in Oaxaca, Mexico. He presents a brief history of native video in Mexico and discusses issues such as indigenous video production and circulation, thematic content, communal practices, relation to indigenous communities, funding, and current projects of his group.     

Using multiple markers to elucidate the ancient,historical and modern relationships among North American Arctic dog breeds

Throughout most of the Americas, post-colonial dogs largely erased the genetic signatures of pre-historical dogs. However, the North American Arctic harbors dogs that are potentially descended from pre-historical ancestors, as well as those affected by post-colonial translocations and admixtures. In particular, Inuit dogs from Canada and Greenland are thought to descend from dogs associated with Thule peoples, who relied on them for transportation ca. 1000 years ago. Whether Thule dogs reflected an earlier colonization by Paleoeskimo dogs ca. 4500 years ago is unknown. During the Alaskan Gold Rush, additional sled dogs, possibly of post-colonial derivation, the Alaskan Husky, Malamute and Siberian Husky, were used in the Arctic. The genealogical relationships among and origins of these breeds are unknown. Here we use autosomal, paternal and maternal DNA markers to (1) test the hypothesis that Inuit dogs have retained their indigenous ancestry, (2) characterize their relationship to one another and to other Arctic breeds, and (3) estimate the age of North American indigenous matrilines and patrilines. On the basis of the agreement of all three markers we determined that Inuit dogs have maintained their indigenous nature, and that they likely derive from Thule dogs. In addition, we provide support for previous research that the Inuit dogs from Canada and Greenland dog should not be distinguished as two breeds. The Alaskan Husky displayed evidence of European introgression, in contrast to the Malamute and Siberian Husky, which appear to have maintained most of their ancient Siberian ancestry.     

Pangnirtung Inuit and the Greenland Shark: Co-producing Knowledge of a Little Discussed Species

When faced with a species that is seldom encountered or discussed, can local or indigenous people piece together their accumulated experience to make inferences about the ecology of that species? In this paper the Greenland shark acts as a model to study how the Inuit of southern Baffin Island are able to produce ecological knowledge. We examine experiential information, reflections, variations in knowledge, and sense-making related to the Greenland Shark, and present a knowledge co-production process based on heuristic reasoning. The process of knowledge co-production has similarities to fuzzy logic, and highlights the adaptability and versatility of indigenous knowledge systems to generate new understandings about the species and its role in the Arctic marine environment. Interactions between the Inuit and researchers can provide a forum to facilitate knowledge co-production, and can be used as a strategy to engage the Indigenous and traditional peoples in resource management and conservation.     

Chronic granulomatous otitis media in bottle-fed Inuit children.

Otitis media in Inuit children is a problem of relatively recent origin and unknown cause. The prevalence of otitis media in 238 Inuit and 47 Caucasian children in Nain, a small community in Labrador, was determined by examination, and the history of breast-feeding or bottle-feeding was obtained. The prevalence of otitis media was found to be inversely related to the age at which bottle-feeding was started. Clinical observations suggest that otitis media in Inuit children is part of a process leading to chronic foreign body granuloma of the middle ear, and that the granuloma is formed from milk introduced into the relatively short and straight eustachian tubes of Inuit infants by the high negative intraoral pressure necessary for bottle-feeding.     

Climate Change,Water Practices and Relational Worlds in the Andes

Climate change translates into insecure water provision and produces new uncertainties for farmers and politicians in Colca Valley, Southern Peru. Anthropological studies of climate change have mainly focused on adaptation, resilience and so-called indigenous traditional knowledge. This article argues that a stronger ethnographic focus on material practices – including knowledge practices – can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of climate change effects, responses and forms of water management. The author aims to see responses to climate change as more than cultural representations, and therefore focuses on water practices and the realities that these practices make, as well as the relational webs of humans, environment, infrastructure and other-than-human beings. The article explores different practices that enact multiple versions of water, and multiple – yet related and entangled – water worlds. The author suggests that this has implications for how we understand politics of climate and water: as tensions between singularizing practices and multiplicity.     

Without Restriction? Inuit Tattooing and the Dr. Wyn Rhys-Jones Photograph Collection at the NWT Archives

This article considers the implications of research conducted on cross-cultural representations of Inuit tattooing at the Northwest Territories Archives in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada. The results however were fraught from the outset due to my interest in a group of eleven photographs from the Dr. Wyn Rhys-Jones collection, nine of which depict partially nude, tattooed Inuit women. Here I reflect on and analyze my research experience with regard to these photos, and contextualize the images alongside similar post-contact Western representations of tattooed Inuit women. In doing so I analyze archival policies, practices and responses, focusing on issues of accessibility.     

Shamans versus Pirates in the Amazonian Treasure Chest

This article explores how the recent rise of shamans as political representatives in Brazil addresses tensions and contradictions associated with the internationalization of indigenous rights movements. Identity politics and transnational organizational alliances concerning issues of environmentalism and human rights have greatly expanded the political leverage and influence of indigenous activism. However, some transnational environmentalist discourses collide with Brazilian discourses of national sovereignty, and the 1990s witnessed a nationalist backlash against Indians, whom politicians, military leaders, and media commentators have frequently portrayed as pawns of foreign imperialists. Opponents of indigenous rights also seized on apparent contradictions between rhetoric and action to discredit indigenous claims to environmental resources. The analysis examines how the shift to redefine knowledge as the core of indigenous identity circumvents some of these liabilities by shifting the basis for indigenous rights claims from environmental practices to environmental knowledge. As shamans mobilize and speak out against the threat of biopiracy, they blunt the nationalist backlash, repositioning indigenous peoples as defenders of the national patrimony and solid citizens of the Brazilian nationstate. [Keywords: Brazil, indigenous peoples, identity politics, shamans, biopiracy]     

Natives and Newcomers: Gaining Access to Literacy in a Classroom for Deaf Children

This article describes a residential school classroom for deaf third-graders. A critical school skill, the ability to engage in literacy activities, grows from the ability to exploit American Sign Language-based (ASL) literacy practices. These practices are indigenous to the culture of signing Deaf people and are critical for literacy learning when ASL is the medium of instruction.     

Rethinking Reductionism,or, the Transformative Work of Making the Same

Plant-based drug discovery has long served as an iconic instance of both the power and the folly of scientific reductionism: this is a project, after all, that seeks to turn complex indigenous therapeutic practices into isolated molecules, to be scaled-up, and set into mass circulation. This arena has, for good reason, served as an example of the economic and epistemological violences enacted in forms of ‘recognition’ or ‘translation’ that treat scientific idioms and industrial value as the arbiters of truth and value. But here, I ask whether we are giving too much away, in analytic terms, when we take reductionism for granted. In this essay, I draw on my ethnographic research in Mexico, as well as broader philosophical debates, to suggest critical resources that might allow us to do something other than restage the familiar, infelicitous encounter between ‘embedded’, relational indigenous knowledges and isolating, abstracting, reductionist science. Here, I consider pharmaceutical research and development as a process that works less by reducing than by proliferating materials: in particular, by producing and recontextualising chemical compounds as simultaneously the same, and not the same. This formula has a strong place in pharmaceutical chemistry, and it resonates somewhat surprisingly in domains ranging from transnational drug regulation, to marketing strategies for generic drugs in Mexico, to debates within the philosophy of chemistry about the nature of chemical entities themselves. These conversations offer conceptual resources for rethinking reduction(ism), itself one of the key operators in charged projects of recognising and translating knowledge.     

Wage labor, housing policy, and the nucleation of Inuit households

Public policy practices in the Canadian North, particularly those connected to housing and employment, are encouraging a reorganization of Inuit social organization to more closely resemble the insular and independent nuclear family household idealized by Eurocanadians. This has wide-ranging implications for the social stability of northern communities without sufficient employment opportunities. The paper examines the symbolic and structural effects of housing policies and employment on culturally valued social practices such as sharing in Holman, a community in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region of the Northwest Territories of Canada.     

Postcolonial Suicide Among Inuit in Arctic Canada

Indigenous youth suicide incidence is high globally, and mostly involves young males. However, the Inuit of Arctic Canada have a suicide rate that is among the highest in the world (and ten times that for the rest of Canada). The author suggests that suicide increase has emerged because of changes stemming in part from the Canadian government era in the Arctic in the 1950s and 1960s. The effects of government intervention dramatically affected kin relations, roles, and responsibilities, and affinal/romantic relationships. Suicide is embedded in these relationships. The author also discusses the polarization between psychiatric and indigenous/community methods of healing, demonstrating that government-based intervention approaches to mental health are not working well, and traditional cultural healing practices often take place outside of the mainstream clinics in these communities. The main questions of the paper are: Who should control suicide prevention? What is the best knowledge base for suicide prevention?     

Adapting to the Impacts of Climate Change on Food Security among Inuit in the Western Canadian Arctic

This study examined critical impacts of climate change on Inuit diet and nutritional health in four Inuit communities in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region, Western Arctic, Canada. The first objective was to combine data from community observation studies and dietary interview studies to determine potential climate change impacts on nutritional quality. The second objective was to address the scale of data collection and/or availability to compare local versus regional trends, and identify implications for adaptation planning. Information was compiled from 5 reports (4 community reports and 1 synthesis report) of climate change observations, impacts and adaptations in 12 Inuit communities (2005–2006), and from a dietary report of food use from 18 Inuit communities (1997–2000). Changing access to, availability of, quality of, and ability to use traditional food resources has implications for quality of diet. Nutritional implications of lower traditional food use include likely reductions in iron, zinc, protein, vitamin D, and omega-3 fatty acids, among others. The vulnerability of each community to changing food security is differentially influenced by a range of factors, including current harvesting trends, levels of reliance on individual species, opportunities for access to other traditional food species, and exposure to climate change hazards. Understanding linkages between climate change and traditional food security provides a basis for strengthening adaptive capacity and determining effective adaptation options to respond to future change.     

Ambiguating Agency: The Case of Malinowski's Ghost

Agency is useful to people not so much for controlling a site of authorship or authority as for ambiguating social relationships and authority. Both indigenous and anthropological practices of ambiguation are critical sites of discourse that allow the gaps and ruptures between epistemologies the possibility of positive value.     

Displayed Objects, Indigenous Identities, and Public Pedagogy

In this article, I describe how one group of student examines indigenous identity formation as dynamic and open to reinterpretation. Drawing on field observations and interviews with students in a 16-month ethnographic study, I examine how one group of students worked toward understanding how indigenous identity was determined by curatorial authority and historically defined museum practices. I argue that students can question the traditional pedagogical conceptions of indigenous culture that ought to be reconsidered within the public museum, and that working to historicize such conceptions makes more explicit student knowledge production of identity.     

Market Incorporation, Agricultural Change, and Sustainability Among the Machiguenga Indians of the Peruvian Amazon

By marshaling empirical data from five Machiguenga communities studied over 20 years, this paper disputes two common assumptions about the behavior of indigenous peoples in the face of increasing commercialization. First, many Amazonian researchers suggest that the social and ecological deterioration confronting native populations results from externally-imposed political, legal and market structures that compel local groups to pursue short-term, unstable economic strategies. Second, these structural explanations are combined with the increasing recognition that indigenous peoples possess a substantial agroecological knowledge to suggest that, if indigenous people receive control of adequate land and resources, they will implement their traditional knowledge in conservative resource management practices. In contrast to these assumptions, this analysis shows that the Machiguenga are not compelled by external forces (such as land tenure, migration policies or economic trends), but instead are active enthusiastic participants seeking to engage the market in order to acquire western goods. Further, despite highly adaptive traditional subsistence patterns and a vast agroecological knowledge, households and communities facing increasing degrees of market integration are progressively altering their traditional cropping strategies, planting practices, labor allocation and land use patterns toward a greater emphasis on commodity crop production and domesticated animal breeding. This increasing concentration on income generating activities subverts the environmentally-friendly nature of traditional productive practices and creates a socially, economically, and ecologically unsustainable system.     

Ethnic differences in the expression of Epstein-Barr virus latent membrane protein-1 mutations in nasopharyngeal carcinoma

The latent membrane protein-1 (LMP1) of Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is a viral oncoprotein implicated in several EBV-associated pathologies. Many studies have characterized carboxy-terminal mutations within LMP1, errors in this area are critical since this portion contains sequences responsible for LMP1 targeting, half-life and association with host cell proteins. Although, data suggests that mutations in this area extend LMP1 half-life and increase its oncogenesis, some studies have not shown this to be true for all EBV-associated tumors. In order to evaluate 3'-end LMP1-DNA mutations in three different ethnic populations with nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), we examined EBV-DNA in 34 patients of various origins (Caucasian, Chinese and Inuit). While 68% of the total group expressed EBV-antigens, only 56% of Caucasians but 86% of Inuit expressed this viral protein. Over 67% of Inuit NPC tissue contained the characteristic 30 bp deletion that was observed in only 20% of Caucasians and 33% of Chinese samples. DNA sequencing revealed that the Inuit population showed the most frequent DNA mutations and corresponding amino acid alterations in LMP1. Our results suggest that EBV-associated NPC-DNA mutations in LMP1 do not occur at equal rates in different racial groups and are more common at distinct sites in NPC tissue from Chinese and Inuit sources.     

Precarious Alliances: The Cultural Politics and Structural Predicaments of the Indigenous Rights Movement in Tanzania

Since 1990, over one hundred indigenous nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) have emerged in predominantly Maasai areas in Tanzania, attempting to organize people around diverse claims of a common "indigenous" identity based on ethnicity, mode of production, and a long history of political and economic disenfranchisement. Despite attempts to foster unity and promote common political agendas, the indigenous rights movement has been fractured by sometimes quite hostile disagreements over priorities, competition over resources, and tensions over membership and representation. This article explores the complicated causes and consequences of these tensions by focusing on the discussions, disagreements, and silences that occurred during a recent attempt to reconcile indigenous groups in Tanzania. The workshop offers a unique window on the cultural, political, and historical dynamics of the indigenous rights movement in northern Tanzania, the principles and practices of inclusion and exclusion that have defined and shaped the movement, and the internal and external stresses that have made alliances within and among the INGOs, donors, and the government precarious, at best. [Keywords: indigenous peoples, social movements, cultural politics, Maasai, Tanzania]     

An evolutionary theory of cuisine

The evolution of human diet is the product of both biological and cultural adaptations to various plants and animals in the environment. This paper develops a new theory for the evolution of cuisine practices which attempts to account for how food processing provided a critical link in enhancing the nutrient balance of major domesticated plants. Dr. Katz is a Professor of Anthropology and Director of the W. M. Krogman Center for Research in Child Growth and Development at the University of Pennsylvania. He first became interested in food and cuisine research as a result of his work with minerals in the diets of Inuit (Eskimo) peoples of the Alaskan Arctic and then with maize in the diets of the Lacandon Maya Indians in the early 1970s. Since then he has published numerous books and papers on developing the theory of cuisine presented in this paper.     

Type A and type B botulism in the North: first reported cases due to toxin other than type E in Alaskan Inuit.

Botulism outbreaks shown to be due to type A and type B toxin occurred in Alaska, a region previously known for only type E botulism. The outbreak due to type A toxin involved three people, two of whom died. The outbreak due to type B toxin involved nine people, none of whom died. Both outbreaks were in Inuit villages, and native foods were incriminated. The occurrence of these outbreaks strongly suggests that Clostridium botulinum, types A and B are indigenous to Alaska. The outbreaks underscore the need for initial treatment of patients with antitoxin that is trivalent (ABE), even in Arctic regions.     

Elder knowledge and sustainable livelihoods in post-Soviet Russia: finding dialogue across the generations

Russia's indigenous peoples have been struggling with economic, environmental, and socio-cultural dislocation since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. In northern rural areas, the end of the Soviet Union most often meant the end of agro-industrial state farm operations that employed and fed surrounding rural populations. Most communities adapted to this loss by reinstating some form of pre-Soviet household-level food production based on hunting, fishing, and/or herding. However, mass media, globalization, and modernity challenge the intergenerational knowledge exchange that grounds subsistence practices. Parts of the circumpolar north have been relatively successful in valuing and integrating elder knowledge within their communities. This has not been the case in Russia. This article presents results of an elder knowledge project in northeast Siberia, Russia that shows how rural communities can both document and use elder knowledge to bolster local definitions of sustainability and, at the same time, initiate new modes of communication between village youth and elders.