:: One People, Many Cultures ::



::Living Together in Respect and Friendship::

The book isn’t due out for months, but the controversy has already begun. I’ve heard that members of the Bhutanese community are unhappy about the book as described on Amazon. As the first book to portray Bhutan as more than a simple Shangri-La, I expect some backlash from officials, but I don’t wish to upset my Bhutanese friends or the general population. Unfortunately, it took this news to make me put aside my excitement about having my book on Amazon, and when I looked properly, I realised that the description provided was purely negative.

Let me take this chance to humbly apologise to the Bhutanese community for the description and promise that it will be updated to better reflect the balanced nature of the book.

I wanted an example of a good thesis as I prepare to undertake my first in anthropology and was advised to read ‘Melting Snowflakes – Are Labia the Great Equaliser’ by Lindy McDougall. While it has nothing to do with my focus and I find it suffers from the repetitive tendency of all anthropological work, it’s an engaging work that makes its point clearly.

While Westerners condemn Female Genital Cutting (FGC – an umbrella term that covers a number of alterations) in African and other societies, there is a growing trend in Australia (and more so in the US) for women to choose Female Genital Cosmetic Surgery (FGCS). FGC, according to those that have undergone it, makes a woman feel better about herself, socially more acceptable and enjoy sex more. FGCS is generally presented as empowering women by giving them a ‘clean slit’ which somehow makes them feel better about themselves, improves their chance of catching a man and enhances their sexual satisfaction. Lindy’s point is that FGC and FGCS are essentially the same operations performed for essentially the same reasons, so how can we condemn one and condone the other?

Among the arguments and quotations she put forward for each case, Lindy quotes men as saying that every woman is different and some of the mystique is taken away if they’re all made to the same ‘clean slit’ specifications. I wonder that she never discussed the connection with pedophilia. To me, a ‘clean slit’ has as little erotic value as a pre-pubescent girl. Aren’t we a hypocritical society if we condemn pedophilia while encouraging women to imitate children in the effort to catch a man? Or is the lust for children so innate that women feel the need to sacrifice themselves to assuage men’s appetites?

Australia is preparing for the federal election this weekend, but I feel as lost as ever. It’s always seemed to me that democracy is just a step in the path to something better. It’s never been the answer to all problems in the developing world as the US, UN and most Western leaders would have us believe.

While reading Alexandra Adornetto’s article on how youth are being left out (I’m twice her age, but it rings true for me too) I started to think about what the next step might be for us.

I think my major problem is that I’m voting for a person or a group who represent a package of policies. I’m not voting for the policies themselves. What if I like the environmental policy of one party, but the internet policy of another? Surely technology is now at the level to enable us to vote for individual policies rather than parties. We could have a government of people working together to educate and implement the will of the people rather than tossing accusations at each other.

I know that each policy requires money and labour and resources to implement and policies must be packaged together, but we could at least vote on what was most important and let the government handle the details of putting the pieces together.

I don’t know how it would be done, but with the strength and reach of social networking technologies, we can’t be too far off something better than current democracy.

In every anthropology subject I’ve done, the students take turns presenting a topic for each week. I volunteered to start this semester because I’m not sure what demands the book will put on me later on. This week, the topic was around what the term ‘hunters and gatherers’ really means. Can we say that Aborigines that live in suburbia but still prefer to hunt their food than buy it at a shop are H&Gs? What about nomads that move around but take livestock with them? Probably not in either case, but then even the Aborigines whose culture is least tainted by colonisation make huts and stay put until the food runs out. As everything in anthropology, the point is that there’s no strict definition and no line demarcating the boundary.

With only a brief time to present, I couldn’t cover the topic completely, so I decided to focus on the concept of affluence, inspired by a chapter of Marshall Sahlins’ book ‘Stone Age Economics’ called ‘The Original Affluent Society’. My point was that the dictionary defines affluence / wealth in terms of money and possessions, that’s a very modern view, though I even want to question the term ‘modern’. To these, I add health, leisure and happiness. In Western civilisations, these are definitely interrelated, but do they need to be? Sahlins pointed out that there are two paths to affluence: produce much or desire little.

The studies that we used suggest that Aborigines and other H&G societies live by the latter. Since animals and plants take time to replenish themselves, these bands suffer from the law of diminishing returns. As time goes on, food becomes scarce and more effort is required to generate the same amount of food. The solution is to up and move camp, taking what they need with them. Since they don’t have carts or pack animals, they must carry everything with them. Possessions then become a burden rather than a measure of wealth – as anyone who’s moved house recently will understand. So possessions are often shared among the community so that only 1 or 2 of any item need be carried.

But to control movement and to avoid having too many people hunting from the same stock at the same time, Aborigines have territories. These aren’t territories in the way that we think of them, still belonging to communities rather than individuals, and perhaps to multiple communities. These communities are all networked so that each knows where its neighbours are and what they’re doing. Young men in particular may travel through neighbouring territory and beyond, extending their network of ‘own countrymen’, but to travel beyond where he is known means that the man is less likely to be trusted and may not be given permission to hunt or move through it.

Such rights are granted by the elders who know the stories of the sacred sites and the land. Since these aren’t shared lightly, I can only presume that many of these stories contain knowledge of the dangers of the land and of food stocks and migration patterns that allow them to live comfortably. While everything else is shared on demand, these stories appear to be a stronghold of wealth for those who’ve earned it by demonstrating a caring for the land. I believe that in the case of the Aborigines, knowledge is the true wealth and I see this being true for the new world too.

I love the idea of the minimalist movement I’ve seen on the net recently. I’ve never liked clutter and I’ve always loved being able to move around easily, so it’s great to see more people taking on this approach to life, but extending it to making a smaller drain on the environment. I’d like to think that these people, including myself, consider wealth in terms of knowledge, leisure, happiness, relationships or whatever – as long as it’s sustainable and contagious. If you haven’t yet, check out Everett Bogue’s and Sheila Chandra’s blogs to learn more about the modern hunters and gatherers.

I’ve just started my final coursework subject for my Masters in Applied Anthropology. It’s on Indigenous Interests and Identity and I think I’m in for a fascinating semester. The lecturer has focused his studies on Aboriginal music and media so we’ll be spending a lot of time looking at the traditional owners of this land. We’ll be reading about, and discussing, the Stolen Generation and the NT Intervention among others. I hope to have time to share some of the insights I find.

The first article (Always Ask by Fred Myers, 1982) I’ve had to read considers the notion of linking people to land and finds that it’s not a 1 to 1 relationship. Without going into the whole discussion, I was most interested to learn that the right to control land comes from knowledge of the land, primarily through the stories of the history of the land and the things on it. The owners can then choose who to pass ownership to by sharing stories with kin and those who show sincerity in their desire to care for the land.

In an earlier subject, I learned of the outcry by Aboriginal people on finding that Telstra had built a replica of Uluru in Second Life. I now wonder if a large part of the issue Aborigines have over facsimiles (models and photographs) of sacred sites is due to the knowledge they can impart to those without rights to ownership.

I’ve just heard that Blacksmith Books has secured a distributor for Australia and NZ. This means that my book will be available in local bookshops later this year! Well done, Pete.

I’d already decided this would be my last week of snowboarding before the accident. I probably didn’t enjoy it as much as I had in the past because of the lack of snow cover and the flat light that removed all definition from the snow and blended it perfectly with the mist. There was also the fact that in Queenstown the lodges were at least half an hour drive away so you couldn’t just go back to your room for a break.

The mist rose on the afternoon of my fourth day on the slopes (a new place today) and I found myself at the top of a black run with good fresh snow, but just one hill before the lift. I made the most of it, swooshing down it and off piste a bit to where it was less compacted. I was almost at the bottom when a rock appeared. I tried to dodge it, which was a mistake. There was another rock below it, so rather than just scratching my board, I landed on my back on the top rock, then bounced down the ones below. Crunch. Breath… gone… pain… instead.

The effort of forcing my breath out through the pain brought an accompanying agonised moan. And again. It was a good half minute before I could draw air in. By the time Dave joined me, I was breathing, but couldn’t talk. He followed me down the hill and up the lift, by which time I’d caught my breath. Another run and a hot drink later, I decided that I should go to medical centre and at least try to get a heat pack. Secretly, I wanted confirmation that I’d broken a rib. ‘I broke a rib and skied back to base’ doesn’t sound half so good with a ‘think’ at the front of the sentence.

The pretty, Canadian doctor looked at me without expression and spoke compassionately. ‘We’ve found blood in your urine so we’re going to send you back to Queenstown by ambulance to have your kidneys scanned, just to be sure.’

My first thought, after the humiliation, was of money. The chart on the wall said $25 for an accident checkup or $85 for a standard consultation. Fair enough, my ski pass was paying for some of that. An ambulance was a different matter.

‘It won’t cost you anything. Australians are our friends.’ Apparently they’d tried charging Aussies for medical care, but the administrative costs of chasing payments up wasn’t worth it.

Health Care has been a major issue in Obama’s campaign, but I’m not for it. Without any empirical evidence, I feel that making it too easy for people to get health care stops them taking responsibility for themselves. I actively do things that make me healthy and (generally) avoid doing things that will injure me or make me unhealthy. I also save most of my money so that I have enough to cover me if something like this does happen. Even if I did have to pay for the ambulance, it wouldn’t have cost as much as I’ve saved on health insurance throughout my life. Perhaps it’s easiest to say that I believe in health Assurance rather than health Insurance.

I would still have refused the ambulance, but I wanted that x-ray and there was no other way I was going to get it. So under the circumstances, I was glad for the free health care in NZ.

In the end, I’m fine. My kidneys were undamaged and torn muscles are not broken ribs. I never got the x-ray because the hospital doctor thought that anyone stupid enough to refuse pain killers for a broken rib clearly doesn’t have a broken rib.

I didn’t get much of an impression of Queenstown until I took a day off from snowboarding. The town is full of tourist shops (lots of jetboating, bungy, trekking and snow stores as well as restaurants etc) and even more full of tourists, so I set off along the hill above town and saw that it butted right up against Lake Wakatipu in a way reminiscent of Geneva, though I recall more breathing room between the buildings and the water in Switzerland. The surrounding mountains also matched that part of Europe, though the mottled hillsides closer in were more like those of Scotland.

When I started taking more notice of the houses, I was struck by the chalet-style of most. Even walking away from town for 20 minutes, the buildings were predominantly cute, closed-in, A-frames with small balconies, but a closer look revealed that they were also mostly hotels. Where do the locals live? Perhaps closer to the airport at Frankton.

Calling all amateur photographers. Do you have high quality photos of Bhutan?

My publisher is an independent and, while the production quality of the book is great, he doesn’t have the funds to pay a professional photographer for the cover. I’ve got some great shots in my collection, but most of them were taken by others and I haven’t got approval to use them. The designer has then used stock photos and I’m not really happy with the result – garbage in, garbage out.

If you have photos of the local people or area that shows off a significant cultural aspect that you think would be suitable, please leave a short description as a comment. I’ll get back to you by email.

I overheard two suits talking on the morning train last week. You’d expect these dapper, corporate types to be talking about deals they’ve clinched, chicks they scored with over the weekend or at least the World Cup. No, they were swapping tips for getting dishes clean. What’s happened to the Aussie macho these days?

I’m still trying to get a handle on the term ‘metrosexual‘ – a man demonstrating some of the traits normally ascribed to homosexuals (eg well-groomed), but is actually heterosexual – but I didn’t get the impression that it applied to these men. It just seems to be part of the new gender equality and sharing of housework that is life in modern Australia.

I must admit to keeping half an ear on the conversation to see if they started bitching about what kind of trash Lindsay Lohan was.