Blog It - For October 5 - Taboo and the Levitical Code

Our discussion of taboo, making use of the example of the Levitical proscriptions in diet and sexual behavior, should bring up some important topics for us:
--that laws and customs are "readable" as myths and legends are, and that deciphering and interpreting them offer opportunities for critical questions
--that customs and observances communicate worldview and defend societies against threats identified with the savage or barbaric (or witchcraft, or other evils)
--that the historical and cultural context of traditional and ancient texts, and inspection of problems of interpretation, may help us to develop new perspectives on even contentious contemporary issues.

For next week's discussion on taboo, purity, and the threat of disorder, please respond to the readings with a focused comment: 
Have the readings offered you any new ways of thinking about what is forbidden and allowed in contemporary American society, and how people argue in public discourse about what is forbidden and allowed?

One focused paragraph should be sufficient. Please respond by 9 am October 5 so everyone has a chance to look at your comment before class. 

The Wild Man in Myth and Folklore

Many of our discussions this semester will aim to cover three kinds of knowledge at once:

First, the actual content of the works we encounter, which are organized according to major themes in the history of Western ideas about indigenous peoples - for example, the contrast of nature and the wild, or of moral and restricted behavior vs. ungoverned, immoral or amoral lawlessness. This should allow us to analyze and interpret material in relation to critical themes in culture.

Second, the historical context, such as the ancient Hebrew world that gave rise to the Hebrew Bible. This helps us understand the historical and cultural institutions of the productions of culture--for example, the relation of European colonialism to The Tempest or Heart of Darkness.

Third, the critical and interpretive methods we use to understand texts, artworks, customs, etc.--whether they survive from cultures of the past, exist in other parts of the world, or are characteristic of the society in which we live. In other words, we may use the same methods to study Greek mythology as the Harry Potter books--the differences depend largely on our relative knowledge of the language, cultural allusions, and belief systems we need to know to understand each example. This reminds us to consider the differences between cultural systems--between myths and law codes, philosophy and literature, plays and novels, and so on, as we form hypotheses about their interpretation. It also encourages us to aim for interpretations that are both illuminating and well-grounded in logic and fair-mindedness.


This week we'll discuss three works that may be called folklore or perhaps myth. Although they appear in literary forms, each represents a story that has been told in many, many other versions. A large part of the interest in myth and folklore is in exploring why a story is so widely told. How did it achieve the cultural authority it has? Why did this story survive the centuries?

Our study involves the three dimensions stated above:
1. What do these Wild Man stories tell us about some of the themes in popular Western depictions of "savage" peoples? What are the most important actions and characteristics attributed to savages?
2. What do we know about the Greek culture that gave rise to Homer, the Sumerian civilization that fostered the heroic myth of Gilgamesh, and the cultural world of fairy tales?
3. What do we need to know about myth and folklore as a mode of narration to understand stories like these? What does the consideration of narrative tell us about how cultures communicate ideas, and even settle issues of power and authority?

Bolivian police break up Amazon road protest march

You may want to look at this story from the BBC, which includes video and links to further background on Amazon deforestation. (There is a lot online about this topic.)

Native Americans get the cheapest cupcakes and college tuitions?

There is no mention of why the Native Americans pay the least amount in today's news.  Also, this is not the first time that someone has done something like this to stimulate race conversation:


SMU halts race-based bake sale
Anti-affirmative action group used ethnicity, gender to set prices
08:51 PM CDT on Wednesday, September 24, 2003
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/988931/posts

Bucknell Race-Based Bake Sale National News

by LA SHAWN BARBER on 06/23/2009

In April, Bucknell University deans shut down a racial preferences bake sale that a conservative student group hosted to illustrate the unfair and demeaning nature of lowered admissions standards based on race. 

http://www.acri.org/blog/2009/06/23/bucknell-race-based-bake-sale-national-news/

Berkeley College Bakesale Incites Debate Over Racism

A group of students are planning an "Increase Diversity" bake sale in Berkley, Calif. in which the price of baked goods will depend on the buyer's gender and race. (ABC News)

By OLIVIA KATRANDJIAN  Sept. 24, 2011

An "Increase Diversity" bake sale planned by a group of students in Berkley, Calif., in which the price of baked goods will depend on the buyer's gender and race is drawing cries of racism, which is just what the organizers say they wanted.

The bake sale, run by the Berkeley College Republicans, was created in reaction to SB 185, a bill currently being considered by Gov. Jerry Brown, which would authorize California public universities to consider race, gender, ethnicity, and national/geographic origin in the admissions process.

"The Berkeley College Republicans firmly believe measuring any admit's merit based on race is intrinsically racist," reads the description of the event on its Facebook page. "Our bake sale will be at the same time and location of a phone bank which will be making calls to urge Gov. Brown to sign the bill…The pricing structure of the baked goods is meant to be satirical, while urging students to think more critically about the implications of this policy."

The price of a baked good is $2 for white people, $1.50 if you're Asian, $1 for Latinos, 75 cents for African-Americans and 25 cents for Native Americans, the original Facebook event read. Women of all races get a discount of 25 cents.

According to the original event page, the pricing structure was put in place "to ensure the fairest distribution, and make sure that there are a DIVERSE population of races of students getting BCR's delicious baked goods."

"Hope to see you all there! If you don't come, you're a racist!" the original event page read.  The page has since been taken down and replaced with less controversial text.  Shawn Lewis, the president of the Berkeley College Republicans, planned the bake sale.

"The pricing structure is there to bring attention, to cause people to get a little upset," Lewis told ABC station KGO-TV in San Francisco. "But it's really there to cause people to think more critically about what this kind of policy would do in university admissions."

Lewis said several members who created the event on Facebook have been threatened or received nasty comments.

"It certainly is stirring emotions, and that's what we want," Lewis told KGO-TV. "But we certainly don't want people to think that we're making fun of racial issues or laughing at them because that's not the message of the bake sale."

But Campus Democrats president Anais LaVoie has asked for an apology.

"The way they made the statement, the words that they used, the fact that they humorized and mocked the struggles of people of color on this campus is very disgusting to me," LaVoie said.

One student looked at the situation more humorously.

"Being black, this whole event is even irritating for me because now everyone wants me to buy them cupcakes at a discount," Raymond Stone wrote on the Facebook event page.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/berkeley-college-bakesale-incites-debate-racism/story?id=14597584

National Museum of the American Indian

In advance of our visit to the NMAI Wednesday, September 21 at 3 pm, here are the questions I suggested you consider during the visit and in writing about the museum afterwards.

• What messages are sent about indigenous peoples of the Americas, their history, cultures, and present ways of life?
• How are these messages communicated?
• What objects and media are presented, and why?
• What particular exhibits, images, objects or presentations strike you as especially important and meaningful in understanding the museum and indigenous peoples?
• What’s the point of view in the exhibits?
• Who is the intended audience?
• What’s the point of the exhibits? What are they aiming to do?
• What topics, themes, categories or ideas are emphasized here? How is indigenous experience conceptualized?
• How are the tribes differentiated from non-indigenous society?
• What’s your stake in this? Is there any way it’s especially meaningful to you?

 As time allows, I'd also like to ask you what you thought of the reading from Brown on Cultural Property--during our visit and in the following week's session.

Key Concepts for Understanding Indigenous Issues

By popular demand: The PowerPoint notes from today's class:

Blog It - For September 14: Indigenous Peoples in the World Today

NUMA Group Logo – Native-owned IT firm

Wednesday's conversation in class demonstrated that people have varied interests in the lives of indigenous peoples. The readings from Ken Coates' A Global History of Indigenous Peoples should help establish some key defining points and issues: How are indigenous peoples distinguished from others? What political, social, and economic attributes and challenges do they share?

During the course of the semester, we'll also explore the question: How has modern mainstream culture built on its relation to the indigenous?

This will be most interesting if you take the opportunity to explore examples you've chosen according to your own interests. To get started, I've asked you to think about this question:

How do indigenous peoples represent themselves and their key interests to the rest of the contemporary world, particularly through Internet communications?

For September 14, please find, share, and briefly explain on this blog at least one website that represents an indigenous people anywhere on earth, or an organization, association or publication devoted to indigenous people’s issues.  Along with the title and URL of the website, offer a brief explanation of what resources may be found there or what may be learned from the site. State why the issue or perspective offered is important.

To the extent possible, select something actually generated and controlled by indigenous peoples and their representatives--not a study or commentary from outside. If you're in any doubt about the operating definition of "indigenous," refer to Coates' Introduction for guidance. 

(Try casting a wide net at first: Check out a lot of sites before selecting one to share. Try searching indigenous along with a topic you're especially curious about: natural resources, art, tattooing, religion, subsistence, politics . . . )

Please post by 9 am on Wednesday, September 14, so that everyone has a chance to read it before class. There is no need to bring a copy to class--we'll use these blog entries to start our in-class workshop. It will be helpful if you bring a laptop computer to class with you on that date.

The blogger posting format makes it easy for you to share links, images, and videos. If you have accepted the invitation to become an author at the blog, you can create new posts however and whenever you wish. If you encounter any problems, please contact me: bwelt@corcoran.org

Tobias Schneebaum - New York Times obituary September 2005

As a brief introduction to Tobias Schneebaum, the subject of the documentary Keep the River on Your Right, here is his obituary from the New York Times six years ago:

Tobias Schneebaum, Chronicler and Dining Partner of Cannibals, Dies
by Margalit Fox (NYT) September 25, 2005

 
Tobias Schneebaum, a New York writer, artist and explorer who in the 1950's lived among cannibals in the remote Amazon jungle and, by his own account, sampled their traditional cuisine, died on Tuesday in Great Neck, N.Y. He was in his mid-80's and a longtime resident of Greenwich Village.
The cause was complications of Parkinson's disease, his nephew Jeff Schneebaum said. The elder Mr. Schneebaum, who had several nieces and nephews, leaves no immediate survivors.
In 2000, Mr. Schneebaum was the subject of a well-received documentary film, ''Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale,'' which follows his return to the Amazon, and to Indonesian New Guinea, where he also lived.
Mr. Schneebaum came to prominence in 1969 with the publication of his memoir, also titled ''Keep the River on Your Right'' (Grove Press). The book, which became a cult classic, described how a mild-mannered gay New York artist wound up living, and ardently loving, for several months among the Arakmbut, an indigenous cannibalistic people in the rainforest of Peru.
Publishers Weekly called the memoir ''authentic, deeply moving, sensuously written and incredibly haunting.'' Other critics dismissed it as romantic, solipsistic and undoubtedly exaggerated.
In either case, Mr. Schneebaum's work raises tantalizing questions about the role of the anthropologist, the responsibilities of the memoirist, and cultural attitudes toward sexuality and taboo. It also offers a look at the persistence of an 18th-century idea -- the Western fantasy of the noble savage -- well into the 20th century.
In 1955, Mr. Schneebaum, then a painter, won a Fulbright fellowship to study art in Peru. There, he vanished into the jungle and was presumed dead. Seven months later, he emerged, naked and covered in body paint. The experience had transformed him, he would later say, but in a way he could scarcely have imagined.
Theodore Schneebaum was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, most likely on March 25, 1922 (some sources say 1921), and reared in Brooklyn. Visiting Coney Island as a boy, he was captivated by the Wild Man of Borneo, a sideshow attraction famed for its brute exoticism.
Mr. Schneebaum, who disliked the name Theodore and eventually changed it to Tobias, attended the City College of New York. In 1977, he received a master's in cultural anthropology from Goddard College in Vermont.
As a young man, Mr. Schneebaum was part of New York's flourishing bohemian scene. He studied at the Brooklyn Museum School of Art with the renowned Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo and was gaining recognition for his abstract paintings, shown in New York galleries.
But as a gay man and a Jew in 1950's America, Mr. Schneebaum felt, he often wrote afterward, that there was nowhere he truly belonged. Craving community, he began to travel, and lived for several years in an artists' colony in Mexico.
In 1955, Mr. Schneebaum accepted the fellowship to Peru, hitchhiking there from New York. At a Roman Catholic mission on the edge of the rain forest, he heard about the Arakmbut. (The tribe, whose name is also spelled Harakumbut, was previously known as the Amarakaire. In his memoir, Mr. Schneebaum calls it by a pseudonym, the Akaramas.)
The Arakmbut, whose home was several days' journey into the jungle, hunted with bows, arrows and stone axes. No outsider, it was said, had ever returned from a trip there.
Mr. Schneebaum was not inclined to boldness. In New York, he had once called a neighbor to dispatch a mouse from his apartment. (The neighbor, Norman Mailer, bravely obliged.) But when he heard about the Arakmbut, he set out on foot, alone, without a compass.
''I knew that out there in the forest were other peoples more primitive, other jungles wilder, other worlds that existed that needed my eyes to look at them,'' he wrote in ''Keep the River on Your Right.'' ''My first thought was: I'm going; the second thought: I'll stay there.''
To his relief, the Arakmbut welcomed him congenially. To his delight, homosexuality was not stigmatized there: Arakmbut men routinely had lovers of both sexes. Mr. Schneebaum spent the next several months living with the tribe in a state of unalloyed happiness.
One day, he accompanied a group of Arakmbut men on what he thought was an ordinary hunting trip. The walked until they reached another village. As Mr. Schneebaum watched, his friends massacred all the men there. In the ensuing victory celebration, parts of the victims were roasted and eaten. Offered a bit of flesh, Mr. Schneebaum partook; later that evening, he wrote, he ate part of a heart. It was an experience, he later said, that would haunt him for years. He left the Arakmbut shortly afterward.
''Keep the River on Your Right'' caused a sensation when it was published. Anthropologists were aghast: ethnographers were not supposed to sleep with their subjects, much less eat them. Interviewers were titillated. (''How did it taste?'' a fellow guest asked Mr. Schneebaum on ''The Mike Douglas Show.'' ''A little bit like pork,'' he replied.)
Some critics doubted Mr. Schneebaum's story, though he maintained it till the end of his life. From the documentary film, it is clear that he did live among the Arakmbut. The filmmakers travel with Mr. Schneebaum to Peru and to New Guinea, where he lived for years with the Asmat, a tribe of headhunters and occasional cannibals.
In both places, tribal elders, some of them his former lovers, recognize Mr. Schneebaum and greet him warmly. Neither community is willing to talk about cannibalism. The filmmakers, the brother-and-sister team of David and Laurie Gwen Shapiro, leave the issue deliberately unresolved.
Mr. Schneebaum's other memoirs include ''Wild Man'' (Viking, 1979) and ''Where the Spirits Dwell'' (Grove, 1988). His most recent, ''Secret Places: My Life in New York and New Guinea'' (University of Wisconsin, 2000) moves between the communities he loved: Asmat, now ravaged by globalization, and his friends in Greenwich Village, ravaged by AIDS.
An authority on Asmat art and culture, Mr. Schneebaum was formerly assistant to the curator of the Asmat Museum of Culture and Progress in Agats, Irian Jaya, Indonesia. He was also the author of ''Embodied Spirits: Ritual Carvings of the Asmat.''

Peru's president approves indigenous consultation law

 

Here's a story from BBC News online service that indicates what kind of news you might be interested in posting here:

Peruvian President Ollanta Humala has approved a law giving indigenous communities the right to be consulted about development on their lands.

Mr Humala enacted the law in Bagua, an Amazon region where more than 30 people were killed in 2009 during protests against oil and mining projects. He said it would ensure indigenous Peruvians were treated as full citizens.
A similar law was blocked by the previous President, Alan Garcia.
Hundreds of indigenous tribesmen gathered in Bagua to see Mr Humala sign the consultation law.
Wearing an indigenous headdress, he said it was "an important step towards building a republic that respects all its nationalities".