Culture and Society

Otsaila, inauterien hilabetea #7 / February, the month of masquerades #7

Joaldunak, characters of the traditional masquerade of Ituren & Zubieta.

Joaldunak carry two big cowbells on their back, making it sound while marching from Zubieta to Ituren - the first day - and from Ituren to Zubieta - the second.

This loud sound is thought to be made to wake earth up from its winter sleep and announce that spring is coming.

Described as the world’s most persecuted people, 1.1 million Rohingya people live in Myanmar. They live predominately in Rakhine state, where they have co-existed uneasily alongside Buddhists for decades.

Rohingya people say they are descendants of Muslims, perhaps Persian and Arab traders, who came to Myanmar generations ago. Unlike the Buddhist community, they speak a language similar to the Bengali dialect of Chittagong in Bangladesh.

The Rohingya are reviled by many in Myanmar as illegal immigrants and they suffer from systematic discrimination. The Myanmar government treats them as stateless people, denying them citizenship. Stringent restrictions have been placed on Rohingya people’s freedom of movement, access to medical assistance, education and other basic services.

Violence broke out in northern Rakhine state on 25 August when militants attacked government forces. In response, security forces supported by Buddhist militia launched a “clearance operation”.

Refugees have spoken of massacres in villages, where they say soldiers raided and burned their homes. The government claims the Rohingya have burned their own homes and killed Buddhists and Hindus, a claim repeated by some residents.

Aid agencies have warned of a growing humanitarian crisis in overstretched border camps and of the dangers facing Rohingya people trapped in conflict zones.

The military has reported that 400 people have been killed in the violence. The UN says 123,000 people have fled to Bangladesh. Those who have made it to the border have walked for days, hiding in jungles and crossing mountains and rivers. Many are sick and some have bullet wounds.

More than 30,000 Rohingya are estimated to have sought shelter in the refugee camps of Kutupalong and Nayapara in Bangladesh, which are now believed to be full. Many others are living in makeshift sites and local villages. An unknown number could still be stranded in a narrow strip of no man’s land that separates the two countries, where access to aid is limited. Around 400,000 stateless Rohingya people are thought to be trapped in conflict zones.

Protest on September 11 (national day of Catalonia), 1977, demanding the amnesty for political prisoners and a Statute of Autonomy for Catalonia under the motto “llibertat, amnistia, estatut d’autonomia!” (liberty, amnesty, statue of autonomy!” in Catalan).

A Frenchwoman, an artist without a position: that’s what I am. However, Legislators, what might be the object of my despair instead fills my soul with purest joy. Unable to make pecuniary sacrifices to aid my Fatherland, which you have declared in danger, I come to pay it homage with my person.

THE FEMINISTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION [CLAIRE LACOMBE] - In Paris during the insurrection of 10 August 1792, Claire Lacombe fought with the rebels during the storming of the Tuileries. She was shot through the arm but kept fighting on, earning herself the lifelong sobriquet, “Heroine of August Tenth.” For her bravery, she was awarded a civic crown by the victorious fédérés.

Lacombe became a frequent attendee at meetings of the Cordeliers Club through which she became involved with the most radical elements of the Revolution. In February, 1793, Lacombe and another female revolutionary, Pauline Léon, founded the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women. Composed chiefly of working-class women, the Society associated with the most militant sans-culottes and enragés. They functioned partly as a fighting force among the market women of Paris, and employed violent tactics to root out anti-revolutionaries.

Under the Reign of Terror, the enragés were suppressed along with most other extremist groups, including the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women. Lacombe’s group had been so notorious that the National Convention specifically banned women’s organizations (30 October 1793).

The Siege of Leningrad, also known as the Leningrad Blockade was a prolonged military blockade undertaken mainly by the German Army Group North against Leningrad, historically and currently known as Saint Petersburg, in the Eastern Front theatre of World War II. The siege started on 8 September 1941, when the last road to the city was severed. Although the Soviets managed to open a narrow land corridor to the city on 18 January 1943, the siege was only lifted on 27 January 1944, 872 days after it began. It was one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history.

8 September 1941 – 27 January 1944. 2 years, 4 months, 2 weeks and 5 days.

A victim of starvation in besieged Leningrad suffering from dystrophy.

The diary of Tanya Savicheva, a girl of 11, her notes about starvation and deaths of her sister, then grandmother, then brother, then uncle, then another uncle, then mother. The last three notes say “Savichevs died”, “Everyone died” and “Only Tanya is left.” She died of progressive dystrophy shortly after the siege. Her diary was shown at the Nuremberg trials.

Three men burying victims of Leningrad’s siege in 1942

Sign on the wall says: Citizens! This side of the street is the most dangerous during the artillery barrage.

Oymyakon is a rural locality (a selo) in Oymyakonsky District of the Sakha Republic, Russia, located along the Indigirka River, 30 kilometers (19 mi) northwest of Tomtor on the Kolyma Highway. Oymyakon is one of the coldest permanently inhabited locales on Earth.

On February 6, 1933, a temperature of −67.7 °C (−89.9 °F) was recorded at Oymyakon’s weather station. This was the coldest officially recorded temperature in the Northern Hemisphere. Only Antarctica has recorded lower official temperatures (the lowest being −89.2 °C (−128.6 °F), recorded at Vostok Station on 21 July 1983.)

Sometimes the temperature drops below 0 °C (32 °F) in late September and may remain below freezing until mid-May. In Oymyakon sometimes the average minimum temperature for January, February and December remains below −50 °C (−58 °F). Sometimes summer months can also be quite cold, but June and July are the only months where temperature has never dropped below −10 °C (14 °F). Oymyakon and Verkhoyansk are the only two permanently inhabited places in the world that have recorded temperatures below −60.0 °C (−76 °F) for every day in January.

The Yakutian horse, sometimes called the Yakut horse, Yakut pony or simply the Yakut, is a rare native horse breed from the Siberian Sakha Republic (Yakutia) region. It is noted for its adaptation to the extreme cold climate of Yakutia, including the ability to locate and graze on vegetation that is under deep snow cover, and to survive without shelter in temperatures that reach −70 °C (−94 °F).

British Museum helps return stolen artefact to Uzbekistan 17 July 2017: The British Museum has helped to recover an important medieval Islamic artefact that surfaced in a London gallery after it was stolen from a monument in Uzbekistan.

The enormous calligraphic glazed tile – half a metre in height – had disappeared in 2014. Thieves left a gaping hole after they removed it from the magnificent entrance facade of a 12th-century monument, just over 12 miles (20km) from Bukhara, the Unesco world heritage site on the ancient Silk Road route.

Part of a high-relief turquoise glazed inscription, the tile was thought to have been lost forever until it surfaced in a Mayfair gallery, where it was being offered for sale.

The theft was not officially reported, but an Oxford scholar who had recently returned from the historic site spotted it in a catalogue published by the Simon Ray gallery.

Ray, who had bought it in good faith, immediately contacted the British Museum, which describes the tile’s recovery as “dramatic”.

Thanks for the blog love!

It’s funny that you should ask about this. I was recently out with a group of anthropologists that I went to university with and we were actually lamenting the lack of cultural anthropology writings that are accessible to the general public.  This discussion was started by a journal article that was complaining about the same thing. Except the journal article was written in such technical language, that even the anthropology professor in our group was having a hard time following the article! None of us were really aware of anything that was really targeted to non-anthropologists.  (Maybe my followers know of some and can make some suggestions??!!)

All of my  “beginner’s guide to anthropology” books are actually text books, which can be quite expensive. My intro to cultural anthropology text was “Cultural Anthropology” by Barbara D. Miller and Penny Van Esterik.  The current version of this book is about $140 (Canadian) but I see some older versions are much cheaper (around $15 Canadian for a used one). I found this to be a good foundation for the terminology and general concepts related to cultural anthropology. 

Looking at my book shelf, everything else seems to get very specific. I have a lot on the First Nations and a whole mess of archaeology books.  

I did find a general listing of books that I made some time ago: LINK.  @anthrocentric added several good ones to that list and maybe they have more to add to this post as well.

His description and analysis of both events and approaches help clarify what ethnography and theory are, and how the role models for the field put these elements together. It also describes essential historical events that shape the development of the academic discipline and its relationship with the rest of the world.