- African Indigenous Citizenship
- In the article, authors Tamarkin and Giraudo (2014), argues that indigeniety is a wide encompassing concept that can be understood on the context of transnational and national citizenship, discourses, and experiences. This is particularly true for African indigenous. The authors explain that African indigeneity does not fit the popular notion of indigeneity; and thus requires redefinition of citizenship.
- This article is important because it enables the readers to have a deeper understanding of the concept of indigeniety and how it varies depending on the discourse and experience. In other words, the article reframes who and what is meant by indigenous citizens. The article is similarly important because it includes discussions not just about rights and recognition but also issues surrounding marginality.
- This article fit the week’s course lesson because it puts into context how citizenship is defined. More specifically, this article suggests that the idea of indigeneity and citizenship is not a narrow concept but wide ranging status that is impacted by politics, culture, spatiality, and sociality.
- “We thus define ‘indigenous citizenship’ as claims to rights and recognition in transnational and national contexts, social movements invoking such rights and recognitions, and the politics of belonging and exclusion experienced by those who have been identified, or who have sought to identify themselves, as indigenous peoples. In this sense, the politics of indigeneity is always also a politics of citizenship” (Tamarkin and Giraudo, 2014, p.2).
- In my perspective, I find the article both interesting and appealing because it provides a more detailed definition of indigenous citizenship. It reframes the readers’ common conception of citizenship which is, more often than not, limited and, in some cases, even unrelatable.
- Land filled with Flies: The Evolution of Illusion
- In this reading Wilsem (1997) underlines and critiques the biasness that is closely associated with Eurocentric perspective during the 19th and 20th Here, the author used various notions that are usually attributed to the San-speaking group of southern African. He asserts that these “attributes” are a product of biasness and Eurocentric point of view which often results in a falsified view that is often “imagined” by past anthropologists. The author argues that there is a “false dichotomy” and that it is used to categorize people in terms of their behavior and actions related to survival or how they live as part of nature.
- The arguments of the author in this article is important because it shows the readers that the information they get are but a result of an exclusive Euro-American scholarly discourse and that the characteristics that they attribute to San-speaking people are limited and tailored to give credence to Euro-America’s construction of their history.
- This article fits into the course’s lesson because it raises contested aspects or areas of anthropology. In this case, the reading critiques the accounts and historical process of groups that have been merely prescribed by scholars with a limited Euro-centric perspective. It therefore prompts the students to rethink how marginal and minority groups are neglected and boxed to conform to a particular narrative.
- “Ethnography and historiography, thus segregated from each other, are linked with fictin in perpetuating a conceptual isolation of San-speakers, a conceptualization that tautologically justifies its own fictitious state” (Wilsem, 1997, p.205).
- I find this article interesting because the author encourages the readers to rethink and reframe the information and answers given to them by the field of anthropology. It prompts the student to think more critically and assess discrepancies in this field of study.
- Foragers, Genuine, or Spurious: Situating the Kalahari San in History
- In this article, authors Solway and Lee (1992) presents two case studies of the Western Kweneng San and Dobi San in Botswana. The authors argue that contact with the Bantu-speaking neighbours or dominant societies can occur in other autonomous forms instead of abandonment of foraging and dependency. This argument opposes the revisionist idea that hunter-gatherers were absorbed in regional economic networks and have ceased to be an independent society despite the fact that they have continued to exhibit traits of hunter-gatherer.
- This article is important because it educates the readers how groups adapt to their changing environment and that groups such as the Kweneng San and the Dobi San are both flexible social groups. For example, the Sans only resulted to dependency due to the inability of the land to support foraging. More importantly, this article is valuable because it provides a discussion on how revisionism trivializes the history of these two groups.
- This reading relates to our lessons in terms of the history of hunters-gatherers. In this case, the Sans are prime examples of groups that exhibit pattern of hunting and gathering. In addition to this, the article relates to the course lesson because it discusses the internal organization of indigenous groups such as the Sans.
- “The fact that foragers have coexisted with farmers for so long is a testimony to the resilience of their way of life. The position adopted here is that 20th-century foragers are neither pristine nor totally degraded and encapsulated. The historical status of African foraging people must be seen as the complex product of the dynamics of the foraging mode of production itself, of long interaction between foragers, farmers, and herders, and finally of dynamics growing out of their linkages with world capitalism” (Solway and Lee, 1992, p. 220).
- I find this article informative and interesting because it provides a more detailed and accurate discussion about the history of these groups. More specifically, this article prompts them to critique and question information given to them.
