ANTH_100_LECTURE_14_PART_2_SPRING_2023_

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ANTH 100 - LECTURE #14, PART 2 (SPRING, 2023).mp4 Speaker 1 [00:00:03] More than of them all over the north with all that oil and you deal with it knowing about the need to leave the home in the north end. But I guess we'll just jump right into it. Yeah. I hope everyone's days going well so far. Okay, let's let's jump into this idea. We were talking about race last class. We'll talk about Colourism. And there's an ethnographic example provided the textbook example being based in Nicaragua by Lancasters or by way of Lancaster is research. So the textbook was explaining that colourism is a form of racism. And rather than being, you know, sort of divided up into, you know, constructed in sharply defined categories, it's based on one continuum. And I know this happens in Brazil as well. And I used the similar article in my Social Determinants of Health Class about Colourism and its effects on health, which is actually very, very. Jarring two to read about in the Brazilian context. But here Colourism is this idea that identity and all of the associations symbolically that come with it fall along a continuum of color from black through brown to white, and in any combination in terms of which direction that sort of racism is going or aimed at. And so. In the nineties. And again, these are quite, quite old ethnographic examples. But Lancaster Head, you guessed it, found that in his ethnographic context whiteness was seen as a desired quality, which then opened the doors for racism, which is ridiculous. And I think this is sort of. An idea, an issue, a reality that I still am. Struggling to get my head around all of these. Ideas associated with whiteness, you know. On why people who are part of this. Oh, my gosh. Range of colors on one side of the spectrum. Think that for some reason, owing to a difference in color, they're somehow better than anyone else is still. I mean, we know why and we know that people are idiots. But still, at the end of the day, I scratch my head and think, wow, it's it's beyond me sometimes. So it's interesting because there's there's a relativity in terms of what's considered whiteness, right. In the Nicaraguan context and also the Brazilian context as well. And there are always groups and individuals vying for whiteness and all the supposedly symbolic associations and benefits that come with it. And so it's always in a relative context to. Right. And this, again, can justify claims, moral claims, which are inherently racist in contexts like this, where someone can be in receipt of more benefits or somehow is better than someone of a darker skin shade. And what this does as well is it opens the gates to or opens the door, rather, to issues in claims and all of the the complicated dynamics of ethnicity, which is an interesting concept in and of itself. And this usually deals with larger groups who have been ascribed or accorded some sort of identity. And it's always in opposition to other groups. And, you know, whether again, self-described or other ascribed it, which will define in a moment. And it's always based on, you know, criteria, criteria of inclusion and exclusion and how certain groups might benefit from lumping groups together, as we've seen in the full context of in Africa. So. Ethnicity is a process. It's procession, processional, and it develops out of the negotiation of political, social, economic and sometimes religious struggles. Between insiders ability to maintain and define their own identity and all of the associations that come with it, as well as other description, which is a little bit of a clumsy term, which is. I guess, a suite of processes associated with outsiders, efforts to define the identities or identity of other groups, which almost always leads to a series of impositions, Right. Which may or may not be accepted by the group who is being oriented in defined. Right. But what happens when in a lot of cases and this is sort of this is a statement from textbook and it's coming from the Comoros, Jean and John Connor of some ethnographic research in Africa. But what can happen is that ethnic groups might become classes or classed as subordinate groups socioeconomically. So they might this is going to sound clumsy but be classed as a certain class on a lower rung of a socioeconomic hierarchy. And because of that, in terms of struggles between marks is always about inherent struggles between classes. This is really looking at ethnicity through a marxist lens. But what might happen is that if there is a

hierarchy constructed in one group is, you know, whether it be by persuasion, by force, you know, gaslighting, etc., or a combination of all of these things will be subordinated and would lose control of the means of production. Right. Those knowledge is the tools, you know, the physical spaces of production. And really, in a lot of ways, this is what capitalism does, right? If you think about it in Asian and Southeast Asian contexts as an exploitative venture, capitalism is an inherently racist socioeconomic system because it seeks in a use this word on purpose. It seeks to ferret out opportunities based on racist descriptions and notions of groups. And so, you know, whether it be American corporations or European corporations predominantly, which are I think it's probably safe to assume that the board of governors, the CEOs, you know, the panel of operations, people who control these corporations are white for the most part anyways. They seek out opportunities of exploitation to find. Okay, let's find a new a new site for a factory. But of course, if we opened up a factory for, let's say, shoe production in the US A or in Canada, workers there would expect a high rate of pay, right. And wouldn't want to do work for a few cents or a dollar a day or whatever. And so this is where capitalism, if you ask me, in terms of its inner workings in all of those cogs and gears that make it work is inherently racist because it won't ever consider opening, you know, the means or developing the means of production for a lot of corporations in corporate endeavors, you know, in the countries of origin. And so one example, right, as a skateboarder, you know, what I often do sometimes is I'll watch a really great YouTube channel called The Nine Club, which features it's skateboarders, interviewing skateboarders. And I'm not really interested in contemporary skateboarders. I'm more interested in the skateboarders that I grew up with in the mid to late eighties and early early nineties. And so there are a lot of interviews, and I was watching an interview just recently with a skateboarder named Danny Wei, who's a year older than me, and he's gone through a whole series of pretty drastic and serious injuries, but he's still skateboarding and he owns or co-owns the company DC. And so maybe many of you have had a pair or have a pair of DC shoes or has seen a shirt with the DC logo or a hat. It's a really successful company. It stands for sort of two things. Drawers, clothing coming out of an older company called Drawers, which I had a few shirts and jeans, but it also stands for Danny and Colin because it's a company that was developed by Danny Way and Colin Mackay. Anyway, so he was Danny Way was talking in this interview about how at one point they were really looking to push in the early 1990s 94 shoe production of this company and that they had to fly to China and visit a series of factories to find out, you know, to almost shop for factories to see, you know, could they keep the costs of production low? You know, could they keep the wages locked in low for for the workers who work in these factories? And so, unfortunately, this is where, you know, a lot of groups traditionally who might have had control in a more very traditional sense of the means of production, capitalism comes in and steamrolls everything homogenized is everything and renders everything into a wage sort of labor context. And people see these factories as places of opportunity. Whereas really, when you think about it, at the end of the day, they're places of of raw exploitation where people literally are getting paid cents every hour or even, you know, per day, they might be allowed one washroom break and any more that time will be taken off, you know, will compromise their wages. I keep plugging this by because it's sort of a useless plug. But again, in my social determinants of health class, I showed a pretty shocking video called Made in Mardi Gras. And it's about this process of making beads for Americans to wear during Mardi Gras. But these beads are all made in China and people are literally put in very dangerous situations and scenarios where there are around very toxic dyes. They can get hands and fingers cut off because of machines and presses. They have to work very long days, face an endless, you know, series of exploitations there, you know, minimal bathroom breaks. They have to live in compounds at the factory site. They're split by gender. And if they interact with those of the opposite gender or if there is any sort of romantic engagement between anyone,

regardless of where they sit on the gender spectrum, they'll be punished for it and their wages will be docked. And it's actually really disgusting and made me oh my gosh, really sort of question. So even some of the clothes I wear, which we need to the labels Vietnam, Bangladesh, China. So anyways, what does capitalism do? Well, when ethnicity is involved and hierarchies are created or even rearranged, sometimes the exploiters take the exploited and basically drain them for all they're worth. And this is something that it's so difficult because capitalism is such an all encompassing closed circuit system. If if you follow me there, where it's really hard to break the circuit and get out of it. Because literally everything we do, unless we choose to live off the grid, Walt Whitman style, it's just really hard. Or unless we have the skills, you know, to make our own houses and make our own dwellings like some. Depending on what order of midnight we're talking about. But in, well here in Waterloo and Saint Jacobs at Elmira. But even depending on what which order they are in terms of being Mennonite, you know, some use cell phones, some use cars, some shop at Wal-Mart, you know, some have to buy fabric in order to make their own clothes. So this it's a really difficult system because it is literally so pervasive in the everyday lives of many people. Um, kind of taking it back to our talk about ethnicity. It's always. A form of identity making. It's a process that's oppositional. So one group in opposition to another group and here are the attributes of this group, here are the attributes of our group. And these attributes are always based on cultural features. Language, religion, dress in the list is an exhaustive. But. Yeah. And so what ends up happening is that because it's an oppositional identity, sort of forging or making process, it's always based on this notion of difference, which is always culturally constructed. And so usually, oops, Oh, no, oops, I got to go back of run. It's an historical process that, you know, and I think a really great example given by a textbook. You've got the farmer offs and their their discussion, but it's also the full bay. Um, in your. Yeah, in glitter, if I'm pronouncing that right, in northern Cameroon. But one what ends up happening is there are conditions of inequality. And in this context, in this African or Cameroonian context, you have colonial forces that come in and they seek out consultations of some, you know, selectively chosen local groups and then the colonial forces base their interpretations of ideas of ethnicity based on the further interpretations of these local groups. The for me being one of them and, you know, I don't want to say it's interesting because that sounds like I'm sort of trivializing or rendering it under this distant, objective academic gaze, because many people were really affected quite harshly by these hierarchical processes. But it's in this context specifically, this is all done under the impress and the heavy weight of that impressive inequality, and that was born from colonialism and colonization and minimized by video box here. Um, yeah. And it's interesting because identity struggles in these oppositional processes can create new groups that didn't really exist before in a given geopolitical context. And our textbook gives this idea or the example of Quebec, the right of which my my grandmother and her family were, were probably well, they moved out of Quebec when my grandmother was fairly well in her teens, but I think they would have considered themselves nowadays anyways. Quebec, LA But obviously this group of French immigrants didn't understand themselves as this, you know, as Quebec at all. They were just immigrants to that territory, negotiating relationships, access to land and resources with the First Nations and intergroup in that region into it as well when you go further north. And then it was only in opposition after the battle on the plains of Abraham, I suppose, where the British had sort of displaced the seat of control and had become more dominant in in British North America, where the French, you know, decades and decades and decades, decades later started to realize, well, we're actually quite distinct from the English speaking majority, and we have things that are so distinct. And because it's relative to the rest of Canada and North America, for that matter, under threat. Now, we're going to, because of this imperative political create and ethnicity in that being Quebec, what we've learned. Through some examples in the textbook, too, that ethnicity can be malleable. It

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can be plastic. You can sort of shape it and bend it, you know, and depending on the situation, it can be played up or played down. And it's interesting. And so when I did my fieldwork or started to anyways in Arctic Norway and I, you know, I didn't really talk much about this just because it's really complicated. But when I started my PhD, I had written my first set of comprehensive examinations on the Sami. So the indigenous peoples of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and it was really great timing. Alexis This is going back to 2007 2008, but Alexis had been awarded a guest researcher position at the University of Bergen. And so we we flew over there for an entire spring and summer, quite a long time in 2008. And so she was working at the University of Bergen. I was trying to learn Norwegian, and I was also building on relationships. I had, you know, started to develop about a year before that in Arctic Norway, in a city called Tromso, more specifically with an academic there at the University of Toronto. And so I had the opportunity sort of to fly up there on my own, and it was very, very complicated. Anyways, what went from what was supposed to be a two week visit in a Saami village and meeting different Saami administrators and academics and trying to develop a project there ended up turning into a three day visit, which was incredibly stressful. And then I got ditched by my academic contact and. On a couple of occasions. Not what I thought it was going to be. I got really upset and was a bit like, Are all academics this flaky? I hope not. It wasn't a it was not a good situation. And I felt really, really let down. But I did, you know. I went to the airport, this academic picked me up and then I met with him for an hour and he was like, Oh, actually I've already scheduled a meeting with a Russian student, so I'm going to take you to the canteen or the cafeteria and leave you there for a few hours. Why do these meetings? Then I'll come back and get you. And I'm like, What? Well, I flew here specifically to see you in the dry. Oh, my God. What are you doing anyways? So I got to talking to a me student, and then this academic came back, and, you know, out of all of this, he told me a really interesting story, which was he knew of two saw me do well, I guess it's perspective or perspective, but two brothers living in the north of Norway who had saw my grandparents but who were raised as Norwegians and spoke Norwegian, you know, didn't really regard much of their Saami culture at all. And so these two brothers got into their late teens and one of them had decided, Oh, I have some heritage, my family has some heritage. We have two grandparents who fluently spoke Sami. They were reindeer herders. You know, I think at this point they might have passed away the grandparents. And so this one brother started to re shape his identity based on this idea of Sami ethnicity, part of this Sami group, part of Sami culture. This mind you, I will say that these were inland Sami, so they were reindeer herders. But what's interesting is the other brother was 100% against this and said, What are you doing? You're not Sami at all. Yes, our grandparents were Sami, but they never spoke Sami to us. We don't know the language. We're Norwegians through and through. We were raised Norwegians. We have no idea about Sami culture. We did not raise and heard reindeer. So again, his rejoinder, which is a negatively tinged response, was, What the hell are you doing? And so it ended up in a struggle within a single family over identity based on this imagined sense of ethnicity, where apparently, according to this academic that I met, the two brothers ended up really despising each other and could not see eye to eye in terms of who they thought they were and what ethnic group they thought they were part of. And so this is where it can be really malleable and you can shape it. But, you know, something must have have really lit a spark in the one brother. And I think it's a great thing because the grandparents probably, you know, having to go through internal Norwegian colonialism would not want to see, you know, their world view that was afforded to them by Sami culture and language come to an end just because they were getting swallowed up by the dominant Norwegian culture. So if you ask me, I think it was a brave thing and a really laudable, respectable thing to look at the past, be like, hold on, hold up a second. Here's something that might possibly be in a moribund state, which is a state, you know, at death's door about to die. I'm not going to let that happen. Right. Where it's maybe sad.

However, whatever emotion you want to impute to it that the other brother, you know, decided to fold his arms to be like, that's lame. What are you doing? But again, it's perspectival. It's a matter of perspective. So it can be voluntarily embraced or successfully successfully ignored in different situations. You know, in depending on the context, ambitious individuals can, you know, choose to play up ethnicity and use it as a resource. So using another Sami example, this one much more recent based on my research in 2020, you know, you have sort of in Norway anyways too, and it gets really hard to even see this. And so for all intents and purposes, I'm kind of I'm just really generalizing here, Wolf. But you've got the inland Sami on the one hand, who are the more dominant Sami group, and then you have the coastal Sami who in terms of their actual numbers are much smaller and it's. Fortunate because their saw ministers constantly questioned. Because owing to the dynamics of World War two and the effects of. The dastardly Germans and their scorched earth policy. They were forced to give up their their culture and their language much earlier than the Inland saw me. That's a whole other sort of story there. But, you know, depending on the situation, the inland Saami can sort of stand with the coastal Sami. If storminess in general is being questioned, let's say, by the Norwegian nation state, if you have, you know, mining companies coming in wanting to make use of sovereign land or territory, you've got, let's say, Norwegian commercial fishing fleets, you know, who are wanting to use Sami seascapes and basically steal all of the fish, leaving the Sami very little using more traditional methods of using nets, etc.. Depending on the situation, the Sami can either come together or they can sort of split. And I know that there are a lot of tensions that have been happening for quite some time, especially with within the Soviet Parliament, between who is more Sami, who is seen as more Sami and who is seen as less Sami in all of their rights, the cultural rights. And we'll be getting into that a little bit in a few slides that that come with it. And it gets incredibly complex and incredibly ugly and in some sense can result in mental health struggles in this case, particularly for the coastal for me, because there are fewer in numbers. Of course, you can see and in certain situations, depending on the context, people can play up or play down, like I said, different aspects of their ethnic identity. And the textbook uses nested identities. I, I don't know. I don't really like it because it doesn't really go on to define what that is. I prefer a more simpler term situation. All identities, depending on the situation, you're going to adjust what you want to play up or play down in terms of your ethnicity. So. Yeah. And again. You know, dominant groups will always win by rhetorical sleight of hand, subterfuge or what have you. Up played their superiority culturally, whether by ideological means, which we've been learning about or through force. If more subordinate groups are sort of challenging them and their dominance. One way to do this is to bring in this this ridiculous and horrible process of racialization where certain groups can stigmatize others based on skin color or language or whatever inherent value and or quality or attribute that seen as inherent and unchanging. So, you know, if you think about white Europeans, you know, my my heritage is is white European. And it's so dominant, there's no pride whatsoever. My dad was a genealogist, spent 30 years really looking into our past and that of my my maternal grandmothers as well. And, you know, there are some interesting sort of trajectories taken there. But, you know, as a part of this more dominant group of white Europeans, it's a little bit embarrassing to see what some people who have a similar in society have done, which is ridiculous. But think about, you know, post-World War two and even let's see before that immigration trends. Right. So you had in North America lots of people coming from the Eastern bloc in Europe. So Russia, Poland, you know, not so much Latvia and Lithuania, but in other areas to in Europe, it's so, so confusing sometimes, you know, Ireland and as well, my paternal maternal grandfather's line came from Ireland in the early 19th century or before anyways. And so white Europeans would stigmatize these groups, particularly Russians and those from Poland and from Ireland and, you know, attribute negative and stigmatizing associations to these groups. And I

know that particularly for the Polish, it was, you know, not necessarily phenotypic because, you know, you have light skin, oftentimes blue eyes, the object or the target, rather, of this sort of racialization and stigma was language and names, which were different than northern Europeans, you know, longer difficult to pronounce. And therefore, following this ridiculous and stupid line of thinking, what you don't understand, you got to hate it. Got it So stupid anyways. So, you know, you had a lot of this sort of stigmatization that happened because of these what were understood to be inherent differences. What's interesting in the textbook is this can be reversed or has been reversed in some cases. And so the Irish, you know, were heavily stigmatized, you know, not necessarily well, not only because of accent, but also associations of poverty, etc., which were thought to be in a social Darwinian sort of context or situation, you know, inherent to this group. Right. Because of their ethnicity. But you can see that racialization in some circumstances can be reversed. Two ethnicities, Asian and the Irish were were used as an example where they were a stigmatized group in North America, but then after a while were able to just associate themselves de associate or disassociate themselves from being Irish and associate themselves with being American or Canadian and being swallowed up by this. Diverse group. It can't really. Ethnicity is that group. Oh, who's that? It's probably an Amazon delivery or something like that. Um. It's either the dogs not barking. He's doing much better. I give him a haircut so he can see. But he he's been really sluggish. But he was running around and asking people while not asking but wanting people to pet him, which was really good to see yesterday. Okay. Let's move along here because they don't want to want this to go to too long human rights. So we're going from issues of ethnicity and we're moving along, sort of maintaining this theme of recognition. Right. So whether it's in opposition or looking at similarity, but it's still recognition of differences and similarities. And so we've had these, you know, really complicated processes of of globalization which have really amped up ideas about in on in discussion of human rights, particularly of human rights violations, of which there are many that happen every day. And it's just inexcusable. But this idea of human rights, what is it? You know, it's this notion that by virtue of of our shared humanness, right, that we have certain biological needs, we need to sleep, we need to eat, we need to have shelter. You know, we endure pain. My gosh, we have emotions. We love. We we, you know, have various complex needs because of all of these shared attributes. We should all be entitled to, certain to being recognized as such, and with recognition should become the privileges and access to resources. This is a little bit of a rhetorical question here. Are human rights universal? Well, hell yeah, they should be. But sadly, they are not. And we'll talk about that. What ended up really sort of fueling this idea of of human rights discourse came out of multiculturalism. And this is when you get it's this is a term that's common sense. A textbook defines it. But, you know, you get people from different backgrounds, races. Well, we know that the race doesn't really exist, but different backgrounds anyways. Cultures and creeds all coming to live together in Canada is a great example of that. And so you have people living together from different backgrounds. Just to make it simple. The challenge is to understand, you know, which story practices and beliefs, which backgrounds should be accorded respect and should be recognized, and they all should in an idealistic sense. But this is this is not what we get. And it's interesting because, you know, under sort of a colonial context or post-colonial context, there are still problems of recognition for indigenous peoples the world over. But in this context, in Canada, you know, and that that is I talked about this last week about boil alerts and having access to clean potable water. And it's still an ongoing issue where it's based on the recognition of difference. You know, and yes, the human rights do play a role here. And the Declaration of Human Rights was created and written quite a long time ago, just on the heels of World War Two, and was followed by a series of declarations against violence against women and. The heck is that? Sorry. There's a whole series of them. And what these declarations are to do in theory anyways, particularly the

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Declaration of Human Rights, is to legally bind governments who sign in to recognize what these rights are, to abide by them, and to implement changes that will make sure that these rights are not violated. Right. And so. We can see that there has been a social evolution in terms of what counts as human rights over time. And our textbook makes mention of a French medical anthropologist. He's also a doctor. He's also a physician. So he's got an M.D. and a Ph.D.. And has he talked about this sort of shift in human rights and humanitarianism? But there is a culture of human rights, and it is associated with an tethered quite closely to this cultural of globalization and ideas of global trends and global understandings of social justice. But this has also created some issues and some problems because it's so complicated and it or can be. And so two major arguments that have kind of been come out of this idea of the culture of human rights and the recognition of social justice by way of globalization. Number one, it seems that in some contexts human rights are pitted against culture, conceptual needs. And we'll talk about this. Also, the right to culture is understood as a human right. And, you know, this gets or can be really complicated and it is 100% perspectival. And there's that word. Again, it's just a fancy term for it's a matter of perspective, right? These are arguments anyways. One. Human rights are opposed to culture, to the right to culture as a human right. Assume that culture is. And this is where we need to have anthropologists working in. There are, for the U.N., the UN and other sort of international agencies. But. Some of these these discourses are quite simplistic and understood that cultures are bounded, unchanging sets of morals, more beliefs and ideas, and are quite because of that, quite homogenous and unchanging and static. And further out of this idea, if we if we push this logic or line of reasoning, it understands that each society has one culture in its in which its members must follow. If we're to recognize a right to culture and how that shouldn't be taken away from people. And this is where it gets complicated, because then any kind of international interference and usually this is, you know, a northern European conceptualization of human rights can if it's imposed in, let's say, an indigenous context or a non-Western context, it can be seen to violate human rights, which in itself can be a human rights violation. And well, this is where it gets really complicated. But. And politicized. Right. But if we understand culture to work this way, then culture should be left alone and allow the individuals who are part of these cultures which are in this simplistic be understood to be bounded, homogenous and unchanging, static should be left to enjoy. Protection from any interference. And so we can see that from a moral perspective. We're we're really, how can I say, put in a difficult situation here, especially if you think as just one little example and it's a little bit of an extreme one. But again, female genital cutting, right? When certain individuals, not all but certain individuals, are questioning this practice within the cultures in which this practice is is, you know. Part of everyday life and has been historically. What happens. Right. And again, it's it's political and can be very messy that way and pushes cultural relativism to. To its limit. And you can see here that you've got this sort of almost pitting together of ethnocentrism and cultural relativism. And yeah, in any answer a textbook, they're easy definitions to to riff off. But when it comes to everyday life. Oh, my gosh. You know, in certain contexts they get taken out of pages of textbooks and put into play, and they're not so easily negotiated and. Yeah. So. From this sort of. What you could understand to be a cultural perspective. And in my medical anthropology class, I talk about the implications of cultural Schism Anthro 347 Cultural ism in health. Obviously we can't do that here, but the arguments stem from this perspective that you know all people. Have this this unquestioned human right to maintain their own distinct cultures. Yes. And so from this line of reasoning, and according to our textbook, it understands that human, universal human rights do exist after all, and they're simply amended to include the right to one's culture. And again, there's a whole host of complexities here. One of them being that, you know, people can't enjoy their cultures and the human rights associated with their cultures until they're freed from all constraints of local cultures. And that in itself is complicated. You

know it, especially in colonial contexts, where in some senses, this idea of culture rooted in history has been disrupted in interrupted by colonialism and sometimes entire cultural traditions. Like in certain First Nations contexts, the idea of shamanism and healers has been completely. How can I say almost erased. Not all, but some. And, you know, to enjoy one's local culture and to respect it, there are gaps in that that have been introduced in the interruptions that have been introduced by colonialism and colonization. And so sometimes those don't even exist. So it's a kind of a different constraint. There are some instances there are certain Ojibwe. Communities that have had to bring in, let's say, shaming from Ecuador to construct some sort of pan indigenous idea of a cultural practice which sometimes can be very problematic. My gosh. So these these you know, sometimes what the textbook drops is like a sentence or two or half a paragraph, or when you open it up, it's very complicated. But sticking in line with our reading so as not to make things too complicated here for now or too lengthy, you know, we can all handle this in terms of the social complexities. But one aspect that really adds to this is human rights are largely understood in terms of legislation in from a legal perspective, perspective as individual rights. And here's that Western European influence where, you know, people are atomized, fragmented and seen as individuals and not parts of groups. And there are a lot of issues with here comes this idea of recognition again, you know, culturally, ethnically, etc., because from a legalistic or a legal perspective and a legislative perspective, if individuals are only seen as being the bearers of rights, then what happens when you have people claiming that group rights have been violated? Then we come up against a limit there. So in this case, you know, our textbook explains that citizens have to push their governments to really try and enforce and recognize individual rights and explain that these are recognized or should be theoretically in international documents. And then also group rights, too. But, shucks, I mean, governments are strange, you know, administrative, bureaucratic entities that are very complex and not well-oiled machines by any stretch of the imagination. And so that that is easier said than done. And yes, you know, these cases have been taken to court and have been successful in a number of contexts. But you know, what is understood as admissible in court as a human rights violation is also subject to the interpretive dynamics or the interpretation of governments themselves and more local sociocultural political and economic contexts. Right. So we could say that homelessness is, you know, a human rights violation. Shouldn't everyone have access to shelter in a home? Well, yes, they should. But what happens when you have homeless encampments like in downtown Kitchener, that is a group who share a commonality of not having access to a permanent shelter and all of the benefits and the comforts and the safety that come with that shelter. But for some reason, that's not really recognized. You know, it's recognized as an individual issue. It's an individualized issue in North America and pretty much the world over where it's up to the person in default. They're there themselves to get themselves out of that situation. So maybe we'll see new and novel approaches to bringing these issues in terms of group rights to, let's say, the Supreme Court of Canada. But I'm not sure if that would be understood as admissible. Right. Yeah. And again, most international treaties or declarations, again, coming from a dominant European perspective, Western European perspective only recognizes individual rights. Yeah. And we've seen in the textbooks here that, you know, groups will sort of finagle or modify their situations to try and fit the legal contexts in which they're they're pleading or arguing their cases. In this idea of strategic essentialism is when you up play certain aspects of a culture that are understood as unchanging, constant, homogenous and enduring. You know, and I think we're given what was the Hawaiian sovereignty context here, you know, where the indigenous individuals, you know, in courts, where is it here, will play up certain aspects of their situations. But then in everyday understanding, yeah, here it is, the Hawaiian Sovereignty movement. Um, so they're making claims based on this idea of a traditional culture that seen as unchanging. It's associated with aspects of

authenticity in those who are part of this have their authenticity questioned. But then when they're outside the courtroom, they understand culture more from an anthropological perspective that being unbounded, heterogeneous and open to change and interpretive shift. And so just as as. Kind of an example, but not really. You know, in one of my classes, my indigenous issues in Canada class, I signed an article about the Innu peoples of Davis Inlet. And now she asked you and that's what she. In Newfoundland and Labrador. And so they as a group have constantly come under fire and they're indigenous and has been questioned and they're sort of in some situations, damned if they do, damned if they don't, because, you know, if they emphasize their indigenous ity from a euro Canadian perspective, they're seen as cultural laggards who are stuck in the past and who aren't able to adapt to modern neoliberal capitalist times and survive if they're seen differently. As availing themselves of technology. Let's see, using snow machines or snowmobiles and, you know, boat motors and using non indigenous nontraditional aspects to or tools and technologies to hunt, then they're seen as cultural sellouts in some situations. And this is a harsh reality. They're seen as whitewashed. You know, first nations who have sold out their cultures and now are just living like white people. And so these arguments are so difficult sometimes to in uncomfortable to to wade through, Wade through rather. And, you know, that's why sometimes being an anthropologist is can be very, very political and very difficult. Looking at DGA percent or. Humanitarianism acknowledges is a mode of governmentality according to acknowledges the sense of universal humanity. And this now for many governments, is an idea that's central to human rights and human rights approaches. And really, it's what it should be. But what also happens is that with recognition and the knowledge of this singular humanness. There is an accompanying accompanying obligation to provide care ultimately for a large, you know, sort of group of individual coming from different trajectories or different contexts. Refugees, asylum seekers, individuals suffering from political violence or direct violence, various injustices, any kind of structural violence, whether it be be direct, you know, or, you know, a little bit more terms of political oriented or oriented divisive violence. I can't speak to that being kind of religious exclusion or persecution, you know, which can be fatal in some cases, or it can result in in prejudice rate. So, you know, you've got a list here, the effects of structural violence, whether it be distant or close, torture, rape, poverty, hunger, famine, Infectious Diseases Act. And it makes it difficult for governments to suss out who deserves what and how to address this. And this is what first had spent a large majority of as research looking into. And in fact, you know, I talked about this again. Oh my gosh, I'm always referencing these other classes, but it's all connected with me anyway. It's a case of lead poisoning in in the French context from the 1980s through the 1990s and the 2004. There had been looking at this as a human rights issue and looking at how lead poisoning in terms of its measurement and its understanding as a disease had undergone a shift, you know, by way of French medical science and epidemiology and the thresholds for what was considered lead poisoning in terms of parts per million of lead in the blood was lowered. And so this increased the amount of individuals understood to suffer from lead poisoning. Those making use of of cultural list sort of arguments tried to blame it on African immigrants because it was the. The vast majority of individuals suffering from lead poisoning. And this was the objective of this paper were the children of African immigrants and lots of academics. Sociologists were trying to say, well, you know, what's happening here is because you're getting a lot of these. You know, immigrants coming in, they're moving to apartments and becomes a practice in West Africa is to eat dirt. You know, you're getting this cultural practice passed on to children who are now eating paint that supposedly has lead in it. And now they're becoming poisoned. And so. Proponents of this argument tried to blame it on the immigrants themselves when in actual fact and I'm really cutting the cheese here. It was inequality and poverty. And so what had happened was that landlords were sort of turning a blind eye to a lot of African immigrants and raising

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rents and a lot of immigrants who had been part of the formal economy in the seventies and eighties now found themselves sort of blocked. And a lot of businesses and restaurants weren't hiring as many African immigrants at all and were excluding them. And so this fairly sizable group was now left to find housing on their own. And because, you know, they were on social assistance and didn't have access to a lot of funds, the quality of housing they had access to was actually quite low and they were living in unsafe and unregulated apartments that, for the most part, had lead paint all over the walls. And the owners of these apartments were refusing because, you know, why would I bother renovating? They're just, you know, it's a racist approach, but they're poor people. So what's the point? I'm just going to leave it as it is and just keep charging the same money. So first ends approach here was that as a human rights issue, this was based thoroughly on inequality and poverty, not culture itself. And so, you know, it was a very difficult process to get the French government to recognize this. And they recognized this suffering on humanitarian grounds and, you know, slowly tried to change the situation by by. Trying to change the legislation in terms of how rental apartments are listed, you know, if they're safe or not, and if they have to go through requisite renovations to get rid of lead paint. But it was quite the process at all levels. So from a medical perspective, an epidemiological perspective, socioeconomic perspective and political. So this is not, you know, I mean, maybe some of you you know, and I hope not, because I don't really like the term bird course, but you're all I wanted to take Anthro 100 because I heard it was a bird. Course. It's really easy. And I mean, yeah, in terms of the technical dynamics of the course itself, you're reading textbooks, you listen to the lectures fill out, you know, you complete some multiple choice quizzes and quizzes and exams and that's it. But when it comes down to the process and the everyday sort of tasks and requirements of being an anthropologist, it's very, very difficult. Some of the directions political, you get pulled into. And when you're writing papers, what do you leave out? What do you leave in? You don't want to get somewhat upset. And I had gone through this very situation myself when I started to do fieldwork in Reykjavik. That's the other in Arctic Canada, where I essentially was told not to do fieldwork there by an Inuit woman who said, you know. Things are really complicated. We have just established our own self-government. However, funding is still coming from St John's, which is the seat of the government provincially foreseen for Newfoundland and Labrador. And she said, you know, depending on what you write for your dissertation, which my dissertation was supposed to be based on that after I, I'd quit doing stuff inside me because, or in some minor way because there are no opportunities there. So I switched to this other project and she said, you know, if you write in your dissertation something that someone in Saint John's doesn't like a politician say, someone here could end up having their job or their livelihood or their position politically compromised. And that would be because of you writing something that people outside of the community have access to, and that being under your microscope makes not only me, but several councilors incredibly uncomfortable. And it's funny because, you know, in an ironic sense, the opposite state of affairs, because I was I was crushed at that time because I realized I can't from a moral perspective and an ethical one, I can't if this councilor is telling me this, I cannot, you know, with a clean conscience, pursue doing research here. But at the same time, I felt relief because I thought anthropology, sometimes it's complicated, right? Very complicated. It's a little bit of a digression there. So nationalism, we're only given like half a page, essentially, of the dangers of nationalism. And I think we all know what this is following it blindly can be pretty, you know, it's just not a good thing to do. People should always question everything. But as we've seen historically and even now in certain contexts, you've got some nation states in their governments that push these homogenizing narratives to either maintain or enforce a constructed sense of national identity. But what this can do, you know, whether it be in China with Muslim, their Muslim minority, it can lead to ethno side. It can be even here in Canada or even in Norway with

these colonial dynamics, which came to a head with industrial schools and residential schools, which lead to ethno site, which is destroying an entire language first, and then obviously culture and language are tied together. We'll learn about this next week and. You know, it can lead to genocide as well, which is. And there have been many examples throughout history to wipe out entire peoples because they're seen to not fit a constructed national narrative in Nazi Germany with the dynamics of Nazi colonialism, internal colonization in a more modern context. We've seen this where. You know, you have this idea set forth by Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and many other members of the Nazi Party of of Germany to try and push this biologist, you know, sense of unity. Right. This Aryan race of having blond hair and blue eyes and all of the constructed bullshit that comes with that, this sense of superiority and strength and purity. It's all ridiculous. And that providing the grounds to act on this socio biologies narrative of homogeneity and then to bring within this Nazi orbit of the Third Reich those who can fit, but then to eject those who don't fit, you know, Jewish people, Romanians, you know, Polish people, people who just don't fit within this. Like I said, for lack of a better term, really, this sociobiology, these narrative which led to both the fight and genocide. It's just it's unspeakable is what it is. You can even affix a label to it. And so what ends up happening is, you know. These policies that sanction and legitimize and render ecocide and genocide common sense, create new groups of people, migrants and refugees who are in a liminal sort of an in-between social status and who are anomalous and also ambiguous in terms of where they sit. Who are they? What rights do they have? Now, if human rights truly were universal again by way of their very humanity and their humanness, they should be given safety, etc. But governments are always coming up with various excuses and various criteria for accepting and rejecting people. Politics as usual. Sort of a serious note to end on. Right. Um, but I think, you know, when we get into language, we will see that it's less political. Um, you know, so we'll, we'll be talking about this next week.