Peaceful Societies

A group of Malaysian university students recently spent a couple days in a Semai village in Pahang State in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the indigenous society. The Star, a prominent newspaper in Malaysia, published a brief news story about the adventure.

The Semai village of Kampung Pos Buntu, in the Raub District of Pahang, hosted 23 students from the Sungai Long campus of the Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR). Pos Buntu, in Malay, means deadlocked post or stalemated post, according to Google Translate—essentially, a village at the end of the line.

The chair of the organizing committee at the university, Chuah Hui Ru, a 21-year old student, told the paper that they had planned indoor and outdoor activities with the Semai young people they would be visiting. They expected to make animal masks, draw, and demonstrate simple scientific experiments with the children. They also were prepared for some dancing around a campfire in the evening.

The visit, sponsored by the 1Malaysia Community Alliance Foundation, was intended to inspire participants to become more engaged with the Orang Asli minority in the country. The visitors needed to learn more about the challenges faced by the indigenous people, which differ from the difficulties handled by urban Malaysians.

Not too many decades ago, the more remote Semai held a particular dread for strangers; their xenophobic feelings were closely associated with their beliefs in nonviolence. Robarchek (1979b) provided a good explanation of the reasons.

A thunderstorm in Malaysia photographed by Christian Haugen, who wrote in Flickr, “This is from the first day that we arrived in Kuala Lumpur. I have never in my life seen such fierce [lightning] and thunder! The torrent of rain was almost [unbelievable]!” (Creative Commons license)

The Semai, he wrote, taught their children to fear from the time they were infants. They particularly focused their fears on thunderstorms and strangers. Violent tropical thunderstorms were (and still are) a feature of Malaysia that are endured regularly by the Semai. The Semai viewed them as potential disasters provoked by human transgressions of their social and moral values, such as their firm controls on actions that might provoke violence.

The people believed that such transgressions might anger Ngku, the thunder spirit, who could summon his wife Nanggaa, a horned dragon who lives under the earth, to come up and release landslides or other disasters on their villages. When a violent thunderstorm approached, adults would act panicked in front of the children. They would shout at Ngku that they were not guilty, go outside into the rain and pound on the ground, scream directives at one another—do whatever it took to appease Nanggaa, who must be angry at one of their (perhaps unwitting) transgressions. They would try to drive the spirit back down where she belonged.

An Orang Asli child, probably Semai, in the Cameron Highlands of Pahang state (Photo by Phalinn Ooi on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

These intense emotions, Robarchek argued, were unconditioned stimuli imparted to infants. They elicited the unconditioned responses of distress and arousal—fears of the unpredictable world. When the infants were only slightly older, parents would begin a comparable process of imparting their fear of strangers to them, turning away and repeating their word for ‘afraid’ whenever a stranger appeared in the village. This fear was supported by the belief that bogeymen were about. The Semai placed no value in bravery.

The cultural beliefs about storms and strangers and the ways they should respond defined the behavior of adults, which conditioned that of the children. Belief and affect interacted to push the Semai into ever greater fearfulness—and nonviolence as a result. The article in The Star implied that a brief period of cultural immersion would be a good thing for the Malaysian university students, but it did not delve into the question as to how the Semai might react to strangers in their midst.

Last year a Hutterite colony in Manitoba decided to sponsor a Syrian refugee family and they have been rewarded with a warm friendship that has rapidly grown stronger. A news report published last week on the website of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) told the engaging story of the new Muslin family in the community and their friends, the Hutterites.

The countryside around Wawanesa, Manitoba (Photo by Jd. 101 in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

The sponsoring colony was not named by the two journalists who wrote the article, but another source identified it as the Green Acres Colony near Wawanesa, a small community 20 miles southeast of the city of Brandon, Manitoba, and about four miles north of the international border with the U.S. The idea of sponsoring a refugee family came to Paul Waldner, an educator at Green Acres after a visit from a German teacher who urged him to consider helping refugees from Syria.

Mr. Waldner gained the support of his father, the President of the colony, who gave his approval and told him, “Our ancestors were refugees long ago—people were always there to help them.” Waldner also got support from his wife Wanda, from another member of the colony, Elaine Hofer, and from a refugee couple from Bosnia who had resettled in Wawanesa about 15 years ago, Enes and Fata Muheljić. When the Bosnian couple looked over the papers about the proposed Syrian family, they were convinced they were right for Wawanesa. They saw themselves in the Syrians.

The Syrian family, Najwa and Reyad Al Hamoud, had originally come from the city of Hama, Syria. Najwa had taught in an elementary school and her husband, Reyad, had done construction work. They had fled their home for Lebanon only 10 days before it was destroyed by a bomb. They had endured, with their two children, three years as refugees in Lebanon and were about to try the escape route across the Mediterranean when they learned that their application for resettlement in Canada had been approved.

The Hutterites took a van to the Winnipeg airport to meet their refugee family. Elaine Hofer, a member of the greeting party, said, “When [the Al Hamoud family] came down the escalator [at the airport], I started to jump I was so excited.” Najwa was excited too—and nervous about how they would fit in with their new country. She knew that the Hutterites continued to speak their German and that Canada encouraged people to preserve and cherish their own traditions.

Hutterite women wear modest dresses in the light of a South Dakota sunset — Hutterite women wear distinctive dresses and headscarves in the light of a South Dakota sunset (Photo by Rainer Mueller in Wikipedia, Creative Commons license)

She continues to wear her hijab, so when she saw that the Hutterite women were wearing distinctive dresses and headscarves—“preserving their heritage and their origins,” as she saw it—she felt reassured and happy. “A country doesn’t change anyone,” she told the reporters. “If one changes, it’s from the inside.”

Paul Waldner’s daughter Kayla was one of the colony members who was reserved about the whole idea of assuming sponsorship of a refugee family. It might harm their family life, she had thought. The Syrians had arrived in February of 2016 but the bleak winter soon gave way to the growth of spring. They began sharing garden produce. The Hutterites and the Syrian family kept visiting and helping one another and grew closer as friends. When Kayla gave a graduation speech a few months later, she told her audience she was amazed at how the Syrians could have “snuggle[d] their way into my heart” so effectively.

The Syrian family then moved to Brandon to be closer to jobs and schools but they continued to visit their friends at the colony, only a half-hour drive away. The Hutterites kept up the visiting as well. When a third child was born to Najwa in a Brandon hospital, the colony responded immediately to her text message that the baby girl had just been born and flocked to be with her. She told her Hutterite friends that she and her husband had named the girl Janna. It was the Arabic word for “paradise.” It fit their feelings about the section of Manitoba where they had found refuge. Elaine was amazed that the baby’s name could so capture both the Arab world and the Canadian prairie.

A video posted on YouTube on September 2, 2016, by the Mennonite Central Committee tells the same story about the Green Acres Colony and their sponsorship of the Al Hamoud family, though without, yet, the birth of the baby girl. The spirit of Paul Waldner’s father—that we all were refugees at one time so we need to help them out—comes through in the video as well as it does in the news report. Paul Waldner commented in the video that the Syrians looked scared as they came down the escalator at the airport last February—“and I actually felt the same way,” he admitted honestly. The Hutterites were welcoming total strangers after all.

If this story about the Hutterite colony welcoming refugees should reach supporters of the new (as of tomorrow) president of the United States, it might help moderate the xenophobia toward immigrant groups that has grown in the U.S. and other countries over the past few years.

Charles Ariitetoa Rochette, a 54-year old Tahitian man, became an orero, a public speaker, so he could help preserve and transmit the culture of his society. La Dépêche de Tahiti, a prominent daily newspaper in French Polynesia, published a story about him last Wednesday.

The mountainous interior of Tahiti Iti (Photo by Alexander Rudy on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Mr. Rochette gained his knowledge and aptitude for transmitting Tahitian legends and stories from his father, who was also an orero in several communities of Tahiti Iti, the smaller southeastern section of the island. According to one website, the position of orero used to be reserved only for a small number of hereditary initiates, but the tradition is experiencing a resurgence of popularity. The orero—a public speaker or orator—popularizes social and cultural activities through his speaking and performing.

The newspaper article last week gave numerous examples of the kinds of things the orero does. He regularly performs at local events, particularly those that include students and children; he participates in the opening ceremonies of sporting events; he welcomes students visiting a book fair and introduces them to his art; he tries to preserve the oral histories, legends, and folk songs of Tahitian communities through his work. Mr. Rochette represents a living memory of Tahitian history and culture.

But in addition to his preservation of oral histories, he follows the examples of his father and before him his grandfather by writing legends into a book. He told the reporter that simply telling and retelling the old stories is not enough—the orero must write them down. His grandfather wrote a book of legends and passed it along to his dad, who also wrote his book to pass along to Charles. His father urged him to someday write a book too, which he is now doing in order to preserve Tahitian traditions. A publishing house has expressed interest.

Tahitian performers at the Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawaii (Photo by Daniel Ramirez on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Whether performing, telling stories, or writing, an orero such as Mr. Rochette plays a vital role in preserving the cultural traditions, histories, genealogies, and geographies of communities. His own 12-year old son has already warned him that one day he will take up the family torch. Mr. Rochette hopes that a fourth volume of ancestral legends will someday be written.

The article in La Dépêche de Tahiti included a retelling of one of Mr. Rochette’s favorite legends, a myth about the community of Teahupo’o, located on the southwest coast of Tahiti Iti where he launched his career as an orero. Teahupo’o is famous among surfers for its spectacular waves. One day, according to the story, the twins Hinapu’u and Maraeono, the first men to surf the waves at Teahupo’o, organized a sporting competition. The initial events included hurling javelins and throwing stones with slings.

Kitesurfing the waves of Teahupo’o (Photo by Tim Mckenna in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

The third competition consisted of confronting the monster wave, named “Taravao-nui-i-te-vaha-‘oro’oro.” Everyone gathered near the shore at a spot that today is called Fare Mahora Point to watch the surfers compete. The winner then became a hero. Everyone praised the twins for instituting the surfing competition, but they called out warnings to be careful of the dangers. The giant wave does not discriminate—she can destroy anyone who challenges her. Only tenacity and strength will overcome her. Or at least, that’s the story that Charles Ariitetoa Rochette tells.

An illegal firecracker manufacturing facility in the outskirts of the Indian city of Nellore exploded on the last day of 2016, killing three Yanadi workers and seriously injuring numerous others. The explosion occurred in Porlukatta, a suburb of Nellore, according to a police official.

Nellore City in Andhra Pradesh, India (Photo by Indian7893 in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

Early news reports indicated that at least eight people sustained burns over 60 percent of their bodies and more than 15 people were injured. All of the inured persons were taken to hospitals in Nellore, which is the capital of the Nellore District of Andhra Pradesh. Various officials rushed to the scene to order an inquiry and to supervise relief efforts.

The news stories that followed on succeeding days provided additional details. One report indicated that Porlukatta is a center for the illegal manufacture of firecrackers, and that the majority of the workers are Yanadis. Many of them prepare the firecrackers in their own huts, though the article suggested they may not be fully aware of how dangerous the chemicals are. Apparently on Saturday the 31st at about 10:00 AM, a fire started that spread until it ignited a mass of fireworks in a storage building, causing the explosion. Six of the injured people were minors. The Collector, the chief executive of the district government, indicated that he had ordered teams to clamp down on illegal fireworks facilities throughout the district.

The defensive reactions by various officials prompts the skeptical observer to search back through the recent history. The Hindu, a major Indian newspaper, reported in September 2004 that an explosion at a fireworks facility in Porlukatta had killed three people and injured numerous others. Firms that manufacture fireworks in Nellore, according to that reporter, obtained supplies in Chennai, a major Indian metropolis about 100 miles to the south.

Fireworks for the Diwali Festival in Chennai — Fireworks during the Diwali Festival in Chennai (Photo by Sriram Jagannathan in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

The manufacturing firms are supposed to obtain permits from various agencies, such as the police, fire, and labor departments, The Hindu reported, but the regulations are not enforced. Fireworks are used at popular festivities such as Diwali, also called Deepavali, the Indian festival of lights, and for other celebrations.

The Hindu provided additional details about the current tragedy throughout the week. On Sunday the paper identified all of the victims as being from the sub-tribe called the “Challa” Yanadi. The Yanadi workers receive daily wages starting at INR250 (US$3.68). Officials told the paper that the probable reasons for the explosion were that the explosive materials, most likely powered magnesium and phosphorous, may have been ignited by the slight heat from a drilling machine or from someone smoking nearby.

On January 2, the paper indicated that the death toll had risen to four people and many others were still in critical condition in the hospital. The government had decided to give the local families of deceased workers checks for INR500,000 (US$7,368). The paper quoted officials who blamed other officials for the negligence that had allowed the tragedy to happen. By the next day, January 3, the death toll had risen to six.

Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy (Photo by Jagan and released into the public domain)

A prominent politician in the state of Andhra Pradesh, Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy, who is often just referred to as Jagan, visited the blast site and the injured Yanadi in the hospital on Tuesday. He decried the fact that the state government—he is the leader of an opposition party—had not adopted any precautionary measures , despite the fact that similar accidents had occurred in the district in the past. “This negligence resulted in another explosion here, which claimed the lives of six persons,” he said. He also visited the slum where the Challa Yanadi workers and their families live. On January 5, The Hindu reported that two more victims of the blast had died, bringing, as of Thursday morning, the death toll up to eight, with nine others still in serious condition in the hospital. The same paper reported on January 9 that the death toll had risen to 15.

In addition to their focus on the facts regarding the tragedy, many of the news stories implied that the Challa Yanadi live in deplorable slum conditions and that they are exploited by powerful interests in the business communities and government agencies. The published literature provides some help in understanding their situation.

Raghaviah (1962) divided the Yanadi into two distinct subdivisions: the Manchi, the superior or better Yanadi, and the Challa, or inferior Yanadi, people who are so poor that they eat food discarded by others. According to an earlier writer, Thurston (1909), “Challa” meant one who eats discarded foods. Raghaviah pointed out that the Challas are treated as untouchable by the Manchi Yanadi. They drink water from separate wells; the Challas are not even allowed to touch the cooking pots or plates of the Manchi. They maintain separate social relationships and inter-group marriages are completely prohibited. Those caste barriers of untouchability were strictly maintained, at least in Raghaviah’s time.

Some Yanadi kids (Photo by Only the Best on NationMaster.com and copyrighted, but released for all uses without reservation)

Raghaviah described the Yanadi lower caste with distaste. “It is true that the Challas eat the leavings of the plate. One has to bend down one’s head in shame when groups of Yanadis of [the] Challa sub-caste swarm like flies around a house of a festive or marriage occasion for a snatch at the thrown-out leaf-plates containing the remnants of cast-away food (p.127).” He wrote that the practice was based on custom as well as poverty, though he felt that the practice of eating discarded foods was fading away.

A more recent book by Stanley Jaya Kumar (1995) indicated that the Yanadi were still generally subdivided into the Manchi and the Challa subgroups, and it is clear from the news stories last week that the disparaging term is still used.

A brief, but quite interesting YouTube video published on Sept. 2, 2016, effectively portrays the current plight of the Yanadi in Nellore. With subtitles in English, the video, titled “We the SubALTERNS,” depicts the ways upper-caste people exploit the Challa Yanadi. While it does not mention their work in dangerous manufacturing jobs, it does review the discrimination they have to endure on the fringes of Nellore society. However, the composure of the Yanadi man being interviewed during the 3:44 minute video substantiates the portrayal by Raghaviah more than 50 years ago of a dignified, peaceful group of people living in southeastern India who were much abused then and still are today.

The increasingly strident demand by younger Nubians for fair and equal treatment by the government of Egypt has become a major development among the peaceful societies over the past year. A recent scholarly analysis of the reasons for the protests is thus quite timely. The point of the article by Maja Janmyr, a post-doctoral researcher in the Faculty of Law at the University of Bergen, Norway, was to describe why the Egyptian Nubians have become more outspoken in their demands for improvements in their situation.

A view of Lake Nasser from the site of the Abu Simbel temples (Photo by HamYoyo in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

By way of background, Janmyr wrote, the Nubians lost their homeland, usually referred to as “Old Nubia,” in the 1960s when the Aswan High Dam was completed and Lake Nasser drowned their villages, forcing them to resettle elsewhere. They were dispersed into large cities and small villages across Egypt and abroad.

For the first 40 years or so, the exiled Nubians tended to accept their fate. But several factors were disturbing their sense of acceptance. For one thing, Egypt defines itself as an Arab nation, and its people as being Arabs. That attempt to focus the national identity on “Arabism” ignores the fact that some of their citizens, such as the Nubians, are not Arabs. In 1994, for instance, the Egyptian representative at the United Nations explained how “Egypt is a homogeneous society and that its people only speak one language (p.131),” a statement that was palpably false.

A Coptic monk in the Monastery of Saint Bishoy, Egypt (Photo by Mark Fischer on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Oddly, however, Egypt has for a long time fully accepted the fact that it is a religiously plural society since minorities, such as the Coptic Christians, have been accepted for the most part. Egyptian nationalism and citizenship is based on their supposed Arab identity. In that spirit of nationalism, many Nubians in the 1960s supported the flooding of their homeland by Lake Nasser since it was promoted as being for the greater good of the developing Egyptian nation, which seemed more important than mere Nubian interests.

As part of the Arab nationalism spirit in Egypt, the Nubians and their culture have been marginalized. The Arab language has been privileged and other cultures and languages have been stigmatized as backward. Nubian activists describe the process as one of “de-Nubianization.” While Egyptian authorities deny that discrimination exists, Janmyr describes patterns of state repression that many Nubians are all too aware of. Many report that they used to refrain from activism precisely because of a fear of the state.

A Nubian elder (Photo by Barthwo on Pixabay, Creative Commons license)

The Nubian community has been hesitant to become active in their own interests because they are, themselves, fragmented. Nubian youth today are angry at their elders because they accepted the exile from Old Nubia without much protest. Older Nubians believed that their lack of promised housing, or their lack of employment, were primarily Egyptian problems rather than just Nubian issues. To perceive them as caused by their Nubian identity would be a betrayal of Egypt, they felt. Younger Nubians have come to strongly disagree with their elders.

Janmyr provides an effective history of Nubian protests over the past 12 years. Beginning in 2005, they started questioning the attitudes of their seniors. They began to reject the idea that it was best to maintain the status quo and they started challenging the system. The Egyptian Nubian Association for Lawyers (ENAL), formed in 2007 by the Nubian lawyer Mounir Bashir, began filing law suits arguing for the right to return to ancestral Nubian lands or for a just compensation for their confiscated homes. Those law suits were still pending as of early 2016.

A man carrying a tray of bread from a bakery during the bread crisis of 2008 (Photo by Nasser Nouri on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The so-called “Bread Crisis” of 2008 was a massive general strike called to protest the falling wages and rising costs of food in Egypt. This protest movement relied heavily on the social media, which helped the activists organize. The Bread Crisis prompted Nubians to seize the momentum of the moment—it inspired them to demand their own rights. Although many of the younger ones may have had little contact with Old Nubia, those events of 2008 prompted them to become more politically engaged and more vocal in demanding justice.

In 2010, Manal el-Tibi, head of the Egyptian Center for Housing Rights (ECHR), petitioned the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to recognize the Nubians of Egypt as an indigenous people. This bold, and risky, step resulted in charges that Ms. El-Tibi, herself of Nubian ancestry, was advocating secession. She and other Nubian leaders were subjected to intimidation because of their increasing levels of activism but the domestic political situation was changing and they were willing to run risks in order to take advantage of the ripening opportunities.

The Aswan government building, torched by Nubian demonstrators, September 2011 (Photo on the Egyptian Chronicles blog, Creative Commons license)

The January 24, 2011, revolution that toppled the Mubarak regime marked an important turning point for Nubian activism. It was the beginning of their willingness to take their cause to the streets. They recognized the danger of demonstrating for their rights, but change was in the air and they felt that they had to act. A massive protest by Nubian youth in Aswan in September 2011 resulted in the burning of a government building.

But Nubian petitions and draft laws presented to the new parliament early in 2012 went nowhere. During the administration of Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, June 2012 – July 2013, Nubian grievances were mostly ignored. The revolution was a failure, they felt. One of the groups that formed to agitate for Nubian rights during this period, the so-called Katala (brave warriors), announced in November 2012 that they would resort to violence if Nubian rights were not respected. Most of the other Nubian activists disagreed with their threats, however.

The military intervened in July 2013 and overthrew the government of President Morsi as well as the 2012 constitution, offering another chance to the Nubians. In the person of Haggag Oddoul, the famous Nubian writer, they were invited to participate formally in drafting the new constitution. Oddoul had been viewed as a voice for radicalism a decade earlier, but by 2013 he was more of a unifying force among the fragmented Nubians. He included in his team many activists. Though all were disappointed when the constitutional committee of 50 members showed little interest in Nubian issues, the resulting constitution actually mentioned them—a significant advance.

The future of the Nubians in Aswan (Photo by Eve Fouché in Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Article 236 of the 2014 constitution, a milestone in recognizing Nubian rights, was in fact based on the argument of the right to development rather than on any right of return to Old Nubia. Some activists were not thrilled with it since it framed the right of return only as an economic issue rather than in terms of the future of the Nubian people. A committee charged with drafting a law to implement Article 236 has so far been unable to move its drafts forward into laws.

Furthermore, the apparent gains by the Nubians may not translate into real gains on the ground, the author concluded. Under the military rule of President el-Sisi, civil society as a whole in Egypt is being rolled back. Presidential decree 444 of November 2014 undermines some of the achievements of Nubian activists by declaring large areas of southern Egypt, lands they claim for 16 different Nubian villages, as military zones. Nubians have appealed the decree based on its lack of constitutionality, but as the author was completing her scholarly, hard-hitting article in early 2016, the matter had still not been resolved. More Nubians joined protests in November 2016, which they promise to continue until the Egyptian government treats them fairly.

Janmyr, Maja. 2016. “Nubians in Contemporary Egypt: Mobilizing Return to Ancestral Lands.” Middle East Critique 25(2): 127-146. This is an open access journal article at the website of Taylor and Francis Online.

Some Amish entrepreneurs in Lancaster County have started businesses that erect temporary buildings for Amish weddings, which are often held at this time of year. On December 25, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story explaining the ways the Amish handle their large wedding parties.

Amish outdoors in a Pennsylvania winter landscape (Photo by Joel Galbraith on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

With much of the farm work concluded, late fall and early winter are ideal times in southeastern Pennsylvania for Amish families to organize weddings. The difficulty is that 300 or more family members and friends might want to come, yet large facilities adequate for hosting such crowds are scarce in farm country. Their horse and buggy culture militates against everyone going into larger towns or cities to use commercial wedding venues.

Companies have formed to help solve the problem. The temporary facilities these companies provide consist of buildings fabricated in sections that can quickly be erected and bolted together, much like prefabricated houses. They can then be easily taken apart after the wedding day and moved on to the next location. They are often set up in the yard of the parents of the bride. The business will supply a small crew, which is usually supplemented by men recruited by the host family. A typical temporary wedding structure can be erected in a few hours.

Intercourse is five miles northeast of Strasburg, in Lancaster County (Photo by Derek Ramsey in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

The journalist writing for The Inquirer, Jennifer Kopf, watched an Amish family preparing for a wedding in the Strasburg area of Lancaster County. In that case they did not use the services of a temporary building company but did all the work themselves. The father in the family, a carpenter, had taken a greenhouse apart and saved many parts from it, such as wooden studs and plywood from the walls.

A floor had been salvaged from a construction site while windows and doors had been salvaged from other buildings. The men erected the framework for the temporary structure, fitted in the doors and windows that were on hand, added plywood around the bases of the walls to strengthen the building, put in a temporary sink, and brought in a heater to set in a corner. After they stretched sheet plastic over the outside, they had a temporary building in which the daughter of the family could be married.

Lancaster County Amish (Photo by Ted Knudsen on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Before they finished, the Amish men erected another temporary building to connect the main wedding structure to the back porch of the house. The connector building was used for the preparation of foods. The family rented ovens and stoves for the use of wedding guests who brought dishes that needed to be heated before sharing with others. The family had arranged for three wagon-loads of portable benches to be brought for the occasion. They were designed to be quickly converted after the wedding ceremony into tables on which to serve the meal.

A few days later, when the journalist visited again, the benches were gone, the carpeting had been rolled up, and the father of the bride was removing the floorboards from their support beams. Once the weather improved, he planned to remove the plastic sheeting and dismantle the rest of the structure, all of which would be saved and reused for other projects around the homestead.

Ladakhi adolescents are often left in limbo between desires for modernity and tensions about their traditional moral values. Many desire sexual freedom but they are also torn by loyalty to their society and their culture. A journal article by Jennifer Aengst explores the tensions handled by young Ladakhis as they seek to modernize in a conservative society.

Young Ladakhi Muslim women in the town of Kargil (Photo by Steve Evans in Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Adult Ladakhis focus much of their concern for the future of their society on the young people, Aengst writes. A special concern is that many of them migrate, at least temporarily, to big cities in India to get an education, which is leading them to become alienated from their cultural values. That migration, some adults feel, is particularly harmful to Ladakhi girls.

Furthermore, the lives of Ladakhi adolescents are shaped by their access to motor vehicles, which mark the owners as modern individuals. Motorcycles and cars allow young people to go outside the city of Leh at night in order to attend secret parties, and, more generally, to attain the privacy they desire. Youths can meet in forests in private or they can go to the homes of people when they know that the parents are not going to be there. Sometimes they meet in restaurants when they are sure that no one will see them.

A Poor Ladakhi girl begging in the streets (Photo by Steve Evans on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Electronic technologies such as cell phones, the Internet, text messaging, and blogs also foster communication among young people. Text messages in particular promote the exchange of flirting messages, allow parties to be arranged and encourage dating. But access to these technologies differs—young people from urban middle and upper class families have cell phones, cars, and motorcycles but the poor do not.

Upper and middle class girls, particularly the ones from Buddhist families, have gained increased mobility and freedom. They can congregate in public places, stay out later at night, and socialize openly with boys. Couples will occasionally walk together in Leh openly holding hands, though such public displays of affection are rare. But these practices by the young people—cars, texting, dating—do underscore a growing resistance by the youth to the traditional authority structures in Ladakh. A young couple holding hands in public is a not-so-subtle act of rebellion, of challenge to prevailing norms.

Traditional Ladakhi dress (Photo by Christopher Michel in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

As another sign of rebellion, urban girls are wearing more revealing clothing such as jeans rather than the traditional Ladakhi neck-to-ankle heavy woolen dresses worn by older women. Ladakhi parents traditionally arranged marriages for their young people but adolescents are now expressing their desires for marriages based on love relationships. They have more accepting views of public displays of affection and premarital sex.

Their dating is generally not open, however—it is done in a somewhat more subtle fashion, of boys visiting girls in ways that won’t be seen or noticed by anyone. Dating is considered by Buddhist women as “dirty” and it reflects poorly on the young people doing it; it will give them a bad reputation and it will also affect the reputations of their families. Dating is more possible in summer when the presence of tourists can mask the activities of couples and it is easier to meet in outdoor locations.

Ladakhi girls in Chalunka, a remote village in the Nubra Valley (Photo by Prabhu B Doss on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

In the more remote villages, people condemn the youth when they intentionally walk about in order to see and be seen. Girls who openly do so, called “roaming,” are assumed to be sexually active. A Muslim village girl explained to the author that “it’s not okay to roam with boys even during the day.” If a girl gets a bad reputation, it will have an impact on her potential for a good marriage.

Despite the increasingly normal practice of dating, arranged marriages are still common. In some cases, girls may reject potential suitors that don’t please them, and they may be able to manipulate the situation so that their parents will arrange a meeting with someone they are already secretly dating. If those alternatives don’t work out, the couple can elope—or they can orchestrate a faked kidnapping marriage.

Intermarriages between Buddhists and Muslims have become increasingly controversial—the intermarrying couple usually needs to elope and to try fleeing from Ladakh. Leaders in the two religious communities will spring into action when a couple has eloped, asking the army and the police to close roads, to help track down the couple and to bring them back. If they are caught, they are forcefully returned to their families and compelled to marry someone of the proper religion. If they escape successfully, they will normally flee to one of the big cities in India where they can more successfully avoid being captured.

A traditional family in Anmu village, the Zanskar Valley of Ladakh (Photo by sandeepachetan.com on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

As part of this conservative backlash, some Buddhist young people see a need to protect the traditional family values of Ladakh. They are starting to police the behaviors of other young Ladakhis with a movement spearheaded by young men called the Youth Wing of the Ladakh Buddhist Association. Members of the Youth Wing close bars, intervene with inter-religious couples, punish people involved in prostitution, and try to prevent extramarital affairs. They attempt to protect children from getting into drugs, try to settle disputes, and in general police what they view as the proper morals of the Buddhist community.

The author quotes a Buddhist woman speaking approvingly of the Youth Wing. With help from the police, it broke up a flirting relationship between a girl and a boy. “It was the right thing to do,” she said (p.641). The Youth Wing is maintaining the moral standards of Ladakh, people feel, protecting the region from corrupting outside forces and preserving Ladakhi culture in the process. For their part, many young people, particularly the ones who have lived outside Ladakh, resent having to hide their dating—but they are realistic enough to try and conceal activities that are so normal elsewhere.

Muslim girls in Ladakh reciting lessons from the Quran with a mullah (Photo by nevil zaveri on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The author concludes that the youth culture in Ladakh is becoming increasingly visible—dating is occurring. The adolescents ascribe a lot of their new-found values to their experiences in New Delhi and other major Indian cities, where they can be part of a much more relaxed youth culture. There they can go to discos, organize picnics, and dance. They can have a lot more fun in the big city that they can in remote Ladakh.

But the Ladakhi young people are troubled. Activities that mark them as modern—using electronic devices, wearing fashionable clothing, and dating—appear to conflict with the traditional culture, to which they also feel they should be loyal. There are no easy solutions.

Aengst, Jennifer. 2014. “Adolescent Movements: Dating, Elopements, and Youth Policing in Ladakh, India.” Ethnos 79 (5): 630-649.

Eight Birhor families live in deplorable, hardship conditions in a village of eastern India and the various welfare schemes of the state and federal governments are not helping. The Times of India published a brief exposé by reporter Pravin Kumar Mishra about the situation that described the village of Piyarkoli, in the Gawan Block of the Giridih District, India’s Jharkhand State.

A Birhor family near their huts (Both screen captures from “Birhor Community Becoming Extinct at Lohadanda, Koderma, Jainagar, Jharkhand,” a video on YouTube from Video Volunteers, Creative Commons license)

According to the reporter, the families live in huts composed of tree leaves and, more seriously, they are on the verge of starvation. For over a year, the Birhor families have not had access to the foods that the state government does make available. They have also been denied the welfare benefits that Indian government agencies normally provide.

Moni Kumari, the Block Development Officer for the Gawan Block, spoke to the TOI about the situation. The chief executive of the local government said, “After the matter came to our notice, we visited the village and took stock of the situation.” She directed another official to prepare a report describing the needs of the villagers. When she gets that report, she’ll make sure the Birhor get all of the benefits to which they are entitled.

Mr. Mishra, the reporter, wrote that three of the Birhor families received their Antyodaya cards, which should have entitled them to receive 35 kilograms of food per month. They visited the appropriate government offices to receive the food grains several times but each time they were denied any. They were unaware of other government welfare schemes that are supposedly available to them.

Birhor woman being interviewed about the polluted drinking water in their Jharkhand village (screen capture)

A local official named Anurupa Devi told the reporter that the government cannot build houses for the Birhor families since they won’t stay in one area. “Unless they stay in [a] particular area, how can we construct houses for them,” she complained. But a 62-year old woman named Mangri Birhor responded that for several years they have been living in the same huts. They manage to secure some food, she said, from local agricultural surpluses.

Lakhan Birhor added that despite having the necessary documents and ration cards, they have not been able to secure any food grain since January of 2016.

About 25 miles southwest of the Gawan Block of Giridih District, another Birhor village located in the Jainagar Block, Koderma District of the same state, has been suffering from similar travails. The story of the Birhor of that village, Lohadanda, was captured by a team of visitors from the Video Volunteers, an international human rights NGO. The three-minute video the team posted to YouTube in August 2015 includes interviews with Birhor people who had very similar problems securing food and services from their government agencies as the people at Piyarkoli. The video has English subtitles.

Bettina Cruz Velázquez, a fearless leader of the Zapotec land rights movement in Oaxaca State, spoke in Seattle in early October about the struggle against giant energy companies. Her description of the campaign to protect indigenous people from exploitation by the developers of huge wind plants on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec was described last week by Patti Kilpatrick in a news release published by The Seattle Globalist.

Bettina Cruz Velásquez (Screenshot from a video “Betina [sic] Cruz Velásquez, exige la libertad de Ildefonso Zamora” on YouTube, Creative Commons license)

Ms. Cruz has often made the news. A report dated November 1, 2012, indicated that a group of wind plant supporters in Mexico had marched the previous month making noisy death threats against her for her strong opposition to the ever expanding wind plants on the Isthmus. “Human rights groups in Mexico have formally asked the governor of Oaxaca, Gabino Cué Monteagudo, to guarantee her safety,” the reporter wrote.

A news story a year later in lapress.org quoted Ms. Cruz directly. “The companies divided up our land, like the Spanish when they came to America,” she said. “I recognize there is worldwide concern about climate change, but what is motivating the companies is turning our air into money. Green energy is a business that profits from cheating the communities; they destroy our way of life and menace our food sovereignty, forcing us into displacement.” Her direct, fiery style is clear from her words.

A large wind plant on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (Photo by Presidencia de la Republica Mexicana in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

According to the news report last week, in her Seattle speech she again lambasted the wind energy companies, which are supported by the local and state governments in southern Mexico as well as the federal government, for taking lands owned by the indigenous people. She explained that the wind plants in Oaxaca produce 77 percent of Mexico’s wind energy. It is used by the mining concessions in the mountainous regions of the state and is sold to large corporations such as Walmart.

But the group that she heads, called APOYO (Original People of the Oaxacan Isthmus in Defense of Territories) is not opposed to the development of clean wind energy. Ms. Cruz stated that the indigenous people wish to live on their traditional lands in a clean environment. However, she told her Seattle audience, “we are opposed to the way in which wind turbines are being installed here without any free, prior and informed consultation of our indigenous communities, as per Mexican and international law.”

Some Zapotec women of Tehuantepec assemble for a palm dance (Photo by Avi Dolgin on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

She pointed out that the wind plant developers have not included the indigenous people of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in meaningful land use decisions and that there have been no environmental assessments by neutral evaluators. The wind plants that have already been built are having a negative impact on people’s health, on farm animals, on fisheries, on the economy, and perhaps most significantly, on the culture of the indigenous people. Her words would resonate with those who have been following the opposition by the Native Americans at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation to a different energy project, the Dakota Access Pipeline. Both projects suggest an arrogance by energy companies toward indigenous societies whose lands are in the way of their developments.

The companies have conducted meetings in Spanish, despite the fact that many of the people are only fluent in one of the Zapotec languages. They have made false promises to the people, she charged, which they later ignored. As a result, they have deprived the people of their lands and their livelihoods. Because of her vocal opposition to the developers, she was put in jail under trumped up charges in 2012 related to a demonstration that she did not even attend. The charges were finally dropped three years later. She received a threat just a week before her trip to Seattle.

Future Zapotec leaders on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (Photo by Avi Dolgin on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Ms. Kilpatrick, the Seattle reporter, quoted a lengthy statement by Ms. Cruz as to why she has gotten into confronting the energy industry. She clearly speaks for the future of the indigenous people who otherwise would not have a voice and who are intimidated by hired goons. She charged that the companies bribe local officials, trick the indigenous landowners, violate contracts, and present invalid studies.

Ms. Cruz added that the state and federal governments do not advocate effective consultations with the indigenous communities. The governments have recently designated the Isthmus of Tehuantepec as a “special economic zone” where subsidies will be offered to the energy companies. The federal government is going to offer additional land to promote more wind farms in the area. The Zapotec and the other indigenous people of the Isthmus are more concerned than ever.

While many Ju/’hoansi children in the Nyae Nyae Conservancy attend primary schools in their villages, most drop out rather than continue with higher level schooling in Tsumkwe, the central town in the region. According to a news report on December 14 in The Namibian, about 122 out of 153 children from throughout the conservancy dropped out this year after they completed the third grade.

Some Ju/’hoansi kids in the Makuri Village, Nyae Nyae Conservancy (Photo by Gil Eilam on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The journalist, Charmaine Ngatjiheue, quoted figures provided by anthropologist Jennifer Hays. Ms. Hays said that one of the reasons for the high drop-out rate is the fact that the children must live at the school in Tsumkwe rather than at their remote villages in the Conservancy. Ms. Hays partly blamed the drop-out rate on deplorable conditions in the hostel where the children have to live. Another factor, she indicated, is that there is a language barrier between the teachers and the students.

Hays, who wrote an article titled, according to The Namibian, “Nyae Nyae Village Schools over 25 Years,” told the reporter, “Education is important, but their skills are just as important. The ministry of education needs to find ways to make it easier for these children to transition into the Tsumkwe school.” Despite the fact that 8,396 children in the Conservancy attended primary schools in 2012, only 840 went on to higher levels of schooling. The point, she emphasized, is that the authorities need to acknowledge the culture of the Ju/’hoansi and find ways to preserve it if they want the children to get additional education.

A traditional San village in northern Namibia (Screenshot from the video “Bushmen Village Namibia” by Alan Kuehner on YouTube, Creative Commons license)

The reporter contacted Sanet Steenkamp, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Education for Namibia, who said that the ministry is developing an action plan to address the high rate of Ju/’hoansi students dropping out of school. Ms. Steenkamp indicated that it was up to the regional leaders in Nyae Nyae to handle the extension of the curriculum into more relevant subjects for their community. The plan the ministry is preparing will provide for new school buildings in the villages and it will ensure that needed services are given to the members of the communities.

Steenkamp added that the ministry is committed to the plan, which will restructure the education program so it will improve the schooling of the Ju/’hoan children. “In terms of the mother tongue issue, we have a draft policy that makes provision for [the] mother tongue to be taught at schools,” she said. She visited the school in Tsumkwe and observed teachers who spoke Ju/’hoan but who were teaching in English. She said she was investigating why they are not using the local language.

According to a news report in June 2015, the Chief of the Ju/’hoansi Traditional Authority, Bobo Tsamkxao #Oma, also blamed the school authorities and the teachers for the failures of the Ju/’hoansi kids in their schools. He spoke up at a public meeting at the time, decrying the fact that the teachers didn’t motivate the children to do their work in school. According to that report, only 4 out of 87 twelfth grade students managed to pass in 2014. It sounds as if nothing much has changed in the past year and a half: the failure rate remains high, the leaders in the community are blaming the educators, who are blaming the community authorities.

Adult Ju/’hoansi teaching children one of their traditional cultural practices, making beads our of ostrich egg shells — Adult Ju/’hoansi teaching children one of their traditional skills: making beads our of ostrich egg shells (Photo by Gil Eilam in Flickr, Creative Commons license)

That June 2015 news report in The Namibian was more hard hitting than the one last week: Mr. #Oma clearly did not pull any punches last year. He told his audience that the teachers were going out drinking with the students in Tsumkwe. The adults in the town were also at fault since many were quite insensitive to the traditional village social and cultural conditions that the kids came from. A news story from July 2011 was similarly discouraging about the lack of successes in the Ju/’hoansi schools.

In their monumental book about the Ju/’hoansi of Nyae Nyae, Biesele and Hitchcock (2013) were much more upbeat about the education of the children, at least when comparing the contemporary schooling of the San kids and the conditions in the 1980s. For instance, they quoted the anger Mr. #Oma expressed in 1987 about the unreasonable punishments and beatings that the teachers meted out on the students, often for no reason at all.

The children in a small San community in Namibia (Photo by Nicolas M. Perrault in Wikipedia, Creative Commons license)

“When I look in the future,” Chief #Oma said, “to see what [my children] will see, one thing I see is that my children have come to fear schooling. They fear it because they fear being beaten. So they’ve all separated, left school, and gone off in all directions… All that the children see is pain. And that’s why they go about avoiding school these days. They don’t want to be there (p. 233).”

The stern corporal punishment was contrary to the spirit of the normally peaceful Ju/’hoan society, though it appears from the recent news reports that beatings, at least, are no longer part of the problem. In fact, Biesele and Hitchcock write, the schools started by the Ju/’hoan people themselves as part of their Village Schools Project have been well-supported by the communities and have been, on the whole, successful. The Ju/’hoansi now need to figure out how to improve their higher level schooling in Tsumkwe.

Peaceful Societies

Peaceful Societies

Visitors to a Semai Village

The Friendship of Hutterites and Syrians

Tahitian Storytelling

The Plight of the Challa Yanadi

Nubians Demand their Rights [journal article review]

Amish Weddings

Young Ladakhis Try to Modernize [journal article review]

Birhor Families Endure Poverty

Energy Development versus the Zapotec

Ju/’hoansi School Drop-outs

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