ronald Niezen - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by ronald Niezen
A World Beyond Difference
A World Beyond Difference
A World Beyond Difference
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2018
This paper considers the contradiction between two strategies toward regional autonomy by Tuaregs... more This paper considers the contradiction between two strategies toward regional autonomy by Tuaregs in the central Sahara. Tuareg representatives have been active participants in African peoples’ involvement in indigenous human rights forums starting in the mid-1990s. At the same time, the occupation of northern Mali in 2012 and 2013 by a loose coalition of Tuareg groups pursuing regional autonomy through the Mouvement National pour la Libération de Azawad (MNLA), whose efforts were associated with elements of Al-Qaida au Maghreb Islamique (AQMI), presented to the world a very different strategy toward recognition of rights and regional autonomy, one readily associated with violence, strident intolerance, and, with the pillaging of the famous libraries of Timbuktu, with wanton destruction of world heritage. This situation raises a number of questions: How is the implementation of human rights possible where those rights have little, or inconsistent, currency among the potential rights claimants? Further to this, how, in morally complex struggles for justice, are some states able to exploit the apathy of publics in ways that systematically, and at times egregiously, violate international justice standards?
International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2017
Abstract This paper discusses the politics of the material commemoration of mass crime, with a fo... more Abstract This paper discusses the politics of the material commemoration of mass crime, with a focus on the Ovaherero and Nama descendants of the victims of a 1904–1908 mass ethnic killing in German Southwest Africa. My approach to monuments emphasises their place as artefacts that mark changes of regime after war or revolution, and as focal points of resistance to state regimes of commemoration. Tracing the material forms of memorialisation in Germany reveals the significance of both a ‘remembrance culture’ of the Holocaust and, at the same time, resistance to recognition of the Ovaherero/Nama genocide. In Namibia, the success of the Ovaherero/Nama activist campaign in Germany prompted the government to shift positions and take up the cause of genocide remembrance, asking Germany to officially recognise that its actions constituted genocide, to issue a formal apology and to pay reparations. By framing the mass violence of imperial Germany in terms of its enduring legacy in heritage, Ovaherero and Nama activists and their supporters were able to cross into different geographies of commemoration and bring distant wrongs, without living witnesses, into the present.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2009
community. I had initially intended to do a long-term study of the community's campaign, then in ... more community. I had initially intended to do a long-term study of the community's campaign, then in its early stages, to redress grievances following from the construction of a large-scale hydroelectric project in the early 1970s and from the failure of a compensation treaty, the Northern Flood Agreement, signed in 1977. The strategy of implementing the Northern Flood Agreement, mainly through petty claims of compensation for broken boat propellers caused by floating debris or snowmobiles lost or damaged in weakened ice conditions, was clearly not meeting anyone's aspirations for the treaty's promises of employment and community development. A commitment to public transparency in a new political process was the principal reason for the community's review of my curriculum vitae in a public meeting and their subsequent request that my family and I live with them for two years to witness and report on the conditions of their lives and on their campaign to change these conditions through defining new relationships with the federal and provincial governments and with the Crown corporation Manitoba Hydro. It was in this context that I began my work as an ethnographic researcher, concentrating most of my attention on the complex, shifting political dynamics brought about by a new strategy of legal pressure and public lobbying. But when, in 1999, three suicide-related deaths and a spate of suicide attempts occurred in close succession, my attention and involvement in events went in quite another direction. It was clear that locally staffed institutionsthe Pimicikamak Cree Nation Health Services and the Awasis Child and Family Agency-were already overwhelmed by the extent of their responsibilities, having inherited a clientele that had a high frequency of addictions, mental illness, and family crises. Consequently, they were wholly unprepared for the occurrence of several suicides and numerous suicide attempts in close succession. A hastily prepared application by the Health Authority to the federal government for funding of an intervention program was categorically rejected, without any offer of assistance to clarify the application format and procedures. It took several months for the Health Authority to submit a new application, for the proposal to be negotiated with federal officials, and for an intervention program-reduced in scope to a telephone crisis line-to be implemented. Meanwhile, the nursing station, on the front line of response to the crisis, faced even greater constraints, with staff shortages so severe that during several weeks in 1999 it became necessary to close the building and accept only emergency cases, with a hand-lettered sign on the inside window of the locked main entrance calling for patients to self-triage in accordance with very basic criteria: "Life or death situations, e.g., heart attack; uncontrolled bleeding; choking."1 Community leaders, faced with what they
A World Beyond Difference
The Origins of IndigenismHuman Rights and the Politics of Identity, 2003
Transcultural psychiatry, 2013
As a tool of instant information dissemination and social networking, the Internet has made possi... more As a tool of instant information dissemination and social networking, the Internet has made possible the formation and affirmation of public identities based on personality traits that are usually characterized by clinicians as pathological. The wide variety of online communities of affirmation reveals new conditions for permissiveness and inclusiveness in expressions of these socially marginal and clinically pathologized identities. Much the same kind of discourse common to these online communities is evident in some suicide forums. Web sites with suicide as their central raison d'être, taken together, encompass a wide range of ideas and commitments, including many that provide collective affirmation outside of (and often with hostility toward) professional intervention. The paradox of a potentially life-affirming effect of such forums runs counter to a stark dualism between online therapy versus "prochoice" forums and, by extension, to simple models of the influence ...
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2000
... 2) The dismantling of European colonies raised global awareness of political hegemo-ny and th... more ... 2) The dismantling of European colonies raised global awareness of political hegemo-ny and the ... The pur-suit of human rights protections at the United Nations was in part an ... formal education as a means of eliminating tribal cultures and integrating indigenous peoples into ...
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2005
Inventions have their greatest impact when they go beyond their possible practical applications a... more Inventions have their greatest impact when they go beyond their possible practical applications and act upon the imagination. When Martin Behaim invented the first globe in 1490, a functionally useless object consisting mostly of terra incognita, he was widely ridiculed; but somehow the ideas that his globe represented stuck, and within a few decades the basic validity of his construction was confirmed by the voyages of Columbus, Cabot, Vasco de Gama, Magellan, and others. Today, with efforts to situate the rapid growth of information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially the Internet, in the context of globalization, there is a similar division between those who dismiss it as being of no importance and those who see in it a looming (for good or ill) global revolution. But, as with Behaim's globe, the imaginary possibilities of these innovations are important in determining how and to what extent human existence is to be transformed by them.
Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, 1993
Cet article est une première réponse à un appel visant à attirer l'attention sur les conséque... more Cet article est une première réponse à un appel visant à attirer l'attention sur les conséquences sociales pour les Cris de la Baie James de l'aménagement de complexes hydroélectriques sur le territoire qu'ils habitent. L'article donne une brève description des deux principaux modes de vie qui caractérisent la société crie, soit le mode de vie des chasseurs‐pěcheurs‐trappeurs, qui repose sur la coopération entre familles vivant en étroite relation avec le milieu naturel, et le mode de vie des villageois, dans lequel les personnes comptent davantage sur les institutions formelles pour la satisfaction de leurs besoins sociaux et matériels. Les deux modes de vie se chevauchent et dépendent l'un de l'autre. Des données provenant des dossiers des services sociaux indiquent qu'en raison de la centralisation rapide des Cris de la Baie James dans des villages structurés qui a accompagné les projets d'aménagement de grande envergure, la proportion des Cris qui...
Africa, 1990
Opening ParagraphIn recent decades a scripturalist, anti-Sufi interpretation of Islam has made st... more Opening ParagraphIn recent decades a scripturalist, anti-Sufi interpretation of Islam has made steady gains in several parts of sub-Saharan Africa. For non-reformers who are confronted with this phenomenon it is easy to consider all active reformers as emerging from the same mould, as turning for inspiration and guidance to the same religious sources, differing only in the intensity of their fervour or commitment. The task of a more scholarly approach to ‘puritan’ Islamic reform, however, is to consider how it is integrated into different social contexts, how it can be used to change or reinforce the social arrangements and institutions of particular groups. This is the general aim of the present article, which considers the social background of factionalism in the emergence of a reform movement among the Songhay of Gao.
Public Justice and the Anthropology of Law, 2010
Today the civilizational dialogue of the international public sphere promotes the ideas of peace... more Today the civilizational dialogue of the international public sphere
promotes the ideas of peace and progress within distinct hemispheric
realms. Tomorrow, there may be a new source of intellectual/diplomatic
urgency with cosmopolitan intent – or none at all. Even though the
UN’s civilization initiatives may change beyond recognition or fall into
oblivion, there is a central lesson to be found in them: the conceptual
germs of legal ideas about social belonging, properly cultivated in the
language of rights, have a remarkable capacity to come to life.
Public Justice and the Anthropology of Law
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019
A shift has taken place over the past several decades in the dominant model of testimonial practi... more A shift has taken place over the past several decades in the dominant model of testimonial practice in public inquiries and truth and reconciliation commissions in many parts of the world, from an evidence-based “Nuremburg” model that seeks to establish the culpability of perpetrators through material evidence to a “victim-centric” model oriented toward truth-sharing, empowerment, and healing of those who experienced (and often continue to experience) the traumatic consequences of the crimes of the state. This paper considers the variety of forms that this latter model has taken, beginning with the formative TRC in South Africa and including material from recent or ongoing truth commissions and public inquiries in Columbia, Timor-Leste, and elsewhere. The bulk of the data for this paper is drawn from a long-term study of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools (2010-2016) in which survivor experience was widely recognized as being accompanied by the immediate risk of “triggering” through exposure to information on government-sponsored web sites and participation in TRC-sponsored events. The long-term healing benefits of survivor-affirmative testimonial practice are often touted but little known, and appear to vary considerably, influenced by both the meaning attributed to traumatic events and to the cultural and political values attributed to testimonial practice.
A World Beyond Difference
A World Beyond Difference
A World Beyond Difference
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2018
This paper considers the contradiction between two strategies toward regional autonomy by Tuaregs... more This paper considers the contradiction between two strategies toward regional autonomy by Tuaregs in the central Sahara. Tuareg representatives have been active participants in African peoples’ involvement in indigenous human rights forums starting in the mid-1990s. At the same time, the occupation of northern Mali in 2012 and 2013 by a loose coalition of Tuareg groups pursuing regional autonomy through the Mouvement National pour la Libération de Azawad (MNLA), whose efforts were associated with elements of Al-Qaida au Maghreb Islamique (AQMI), presented to the world a very different strategy toward recognition of rights and regional autonomy, one readily associated with violence, strident intolerance, and, with the pillaging of the famous libraries of Timbuktu, with wanton destruction of world heritage. This situation raises a number of questions: How is the implementation of human rights possible where those rights have little, or inconsistent, currency among the potential rights claimants? Further to this, how, in morally complex struggles for justice, are some states able to exploit the apathy of publics in ways that systematically, and at times egregiously, violate international justice standards?
International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2017
Abstract This paper discusses the politics of the material commemoration of mass crime, with a fo... more Abstract This paper discusses the politics of the material commemoration of mass crime, with a focus on the Ovaherero and Nama descendants of the victims of a 1904–1908 mass ethnic killing in German Southwest Africa. My approach to monuments emphasises their place as artefacts that mark changes of regime after war or revolution, and as focal points of resistance to state regimes of commemoration. Tracing the material forms of memorialisation in Germany reveals the significance of both a ‘remembrance culture’ of the Holocaust and, at the same time, resistance to recognition of the Ovaherero/Nama genocide. In Namibia, the success of the Ovaherero/Nama activist campaign in Germany prompted the government to shift positions and take up the cause of genocide remembrance, asking Germany to officially recognise that its actions constituted genocide, to issue a formal apology and to pay reparations. By framing the mass violence of imperial Germany in terms of its enduring legacy in heritage, Ovaherero and Nama activists and their supporters were able to cross into different geographies of commemoration and bring distant wrongs, without living witnesses, into the present.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2009
community. I had initially intended to do a long-term study of the community's campaign, then in ... more community. I had initially intended to do a long-term study of the community's campaign, then in its early stages, to redress grievances following from the construction of a large-scale hydroelectric project in the early 1970s and from the failure of a compensation treaty, the Northern Flood Agreement, signed in 1977. The strategy of implementing the Northern Flood Agreement, mainly through petty claims of compensation for broken boat propellers caused by floating debris or snowmobiles lost or damaged in weakened ice conditions, was clearly not meeting anyone's aspirations for the treaty's promises of employment and community development. A commitment to public transparency in a new political process was the principal reason for the community's review of my curriculum vitae in a public meeting and their subsequent request that my family and I live with them for two years to witness and report on the conditions of their lives and on their campaign to change these conditions through defining new relationships with the federal and provincial governments and with the Crown corporation Manitoba Hydro. It was in this context that I began my work as an ethnographic researcher, concentrating most of my attention on the complex, shifting political dynamics brought about by a new strategy of legal pressure and public lobbying. But when, in 1999, three suicide-related deaths and a spate of suicide attempts occurred in close succession, my attention and involvement in events went in quite another direction. It was clear that locally staffed institutionsthe Pimicikamak Cree Nation Health Services and the Awasis Child and Family Agency-were already overwhelmed by the extent of their responsibilities, having inherited a clientele that had a high frequency of addictions, mental illness, and family crises. Consequently, they were wholly unprepared for the occurrence of several suicides and numerous suicide attempts in close succession. A hastily prepared application by the Health Authority to the federal government for funding of an intervention program was categorically rejected, without any offer of assistance to clarify the application format and procedures. It took several months for the Health Authority to submit a new application, for the proposal to be negotiated with federal officials, and for an intervention program-reduced in scope to a telephone crisis line-to be implemented. Meanwhile, the nursing station, on the front line of response to the crisis, faced even greater constraints, with staff shortages so severe that during several weeks in 1999 it became necessary to close the building and accept only emergency cases, with a hand-lettered sign on the inside window of the locked main entrance calling for patients to self-triage in accordance with very basic criteria: "Life or death situations, e.g., heart attack; uncontrolled bleeding; choking."1 Community leaders, faced with what they
A World Beyond Difference
The Origins of IndigenismHuman Rights and the Politics of Identity, 2003
Transcultural psychiatry, 2013
As a tool of instant information dissemination and social networking, the Internet has made possi... more As a tool of instant information dissemination and social networking, the Internet has made possible the formation and affirmation of public identities based on personality traits that are usually characterized by clinicians as pathological. The wide variety of online communities of affirmation reveals new conditions for permissiveness and inclusiveness in expressions of these socially marginal and clinically pathologized identities. Much the same kind of discourse common to these online communities is evident in some suicide forums. Web sites with suicide as their central raison d'être, taken together, encompass a wide range of ideas and commitments, including many that provide collective affirmation outside of (and often with hostility toward) professional intervention. The paradox of a potentially life-affirming effect of such forums runs counter to a stark dualism between online therapy versus "prochoice" forums and, by extension, to simple models of the influence ...
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2000
... 2) The dismantling of European colonies raised global awareness of political hegemo-ny and th... more ... 2) The dismantling of European colonies raised global awareness of political hegemo-ny and the ... The pur-suit of human rights protections at the United Nations was in part an ... formal education as a means of eliminating tribal cultures and integrating indigenous peoples into ...
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2005
Inventions have their greatest impact when they go beyond their possible practical applications a... more Inventions have their greatest impact when they go beyond their possible practical applications and act upon the imagination. When Martin Behaim invented the first globe in 1490, a functionally useless object consisting mostly of terra incognita, he was widely ridiculed; but somehow the ideas that his globe represented stuck, and within a few decades the basic validity of his construction was confirmed by the voyages of Columbus, Cabot, Vasco de Gama, Magellan, and others. Today, with efforts to situate the rapid growth of information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially the Internet, in the context of globalization, there is a similar division between those who dismiss it as being of no importance and those who see in it a looming (for good or ill) global revolution. But, as with Behaim's globe, the imaginary possibilities of these innovations are important in determining how and to what extent human existence is to be transformed by them.
Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, 1993
Cet article est une première réponse à un appel visant à attirer l'attention sur les conséque... more Cet article est une première réponse à un appel visant à attirer l'attention sur les conséquences sociales pour les Cris de la Baie James de l'aménagement de complexes hydroélectriques sur le territoire qu'ils habitent. L'article donne une brève description des deux principaux modes de vie qui caractérisent la société crie, soit le mode de vie des chasseurs‐pěcheurs‐trappeurs, qui repose sur la coopération entre familles vivant en étroite relation avec le milieu naturel, et le mode de vie des villageois, dans lequel les personnes comptent davantage sur les institutions formelles pour la satisfaction de leurs besoins sociaux et matériels. Les deux modes de vie se chevauchent et dépendent l'un de l'autre. Des données provenant des dossiers des services sociaux indiquent qu'en raison de la centralisation rapide des Cris de la Baie James dans des villages structurés qui a accompagné les projets d'aménagement de grande envergure, la proportion des Cris qui...
Africa, 1990
Opening ParagraphIn recent decades a scripturalist, anti-Sufi interpretation of Islam has made st... more Opening ParagraphIn recent decades a scripturalist, anti-Sufi interpretation of Islam has made steady gains in several parts of sub-Saharan Africa. For non-reformers who are confronted with this phenomenon it is easy to consider all active reformers as emerging from the same mould, as turning for inspiration and guidance to the same religious sources, differing only in the intensity of their fervour or commitment. The task of a more scholarly approach to ‘puritan’ Islamic reform, however, is to consider how it is integrated into different social contexts, how it can be used to change or reinforce the social arrangements and institutions of particular groups. This is the general aim of the present article, which considers the social background of factionalism in the emergence of a reform movement among the Songhay of Gao.
Public Justice and the Anthropology of Law, 2010
Today the civilizational dialogue of the international public sphere promotes the ideas of peace... more Today the civilizational dialogue of the international public sphere
promotes the ideas of peace and progress within distinct hemispheric
realms. Tomorrow, there may be a new source of intellectual/diplomatic
urgency with cosmopolitan intent – or none at all. Even though the
UN’s civilization initiatives may change beyond recognition or fall into
oblivion, there is a central lesson to be found in them: the conceptual
germs of legal ideas about social belonging, properly cultivated in the
language of rights, have a remarkable capacity to come to life.
Public Justice and the Anthropology of Law
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019
A shift has taken place over the past several decades in the dominant model of testimonial practi... more A shift has taken place over the past several decades in the dominant model of testimonial practice in public inquiries and truth and reconciliation commissions in many parts of the world, from an evidence-based “Nuremburg” model that seeks to establish the culpability of perpetrators through material evidence to a “victim-centric” model oriented toward truth-sharing, empowerment, and healing of those who experienced (and often continue to experience) the traumatic consequences of the crimes of the state. This paper considers the variety of forms that this latter model has taken, beginning with the formative TRC in South Africa and including material from recent or ongoing truth commissions and public inquiries in Columbia, Timor-Leste, and elsewhere. The bulk of the data for this paper is drawn from a long-term study of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools (2010-2016) in which survivor experience was widely recognized as being accompanied by the immediate risk of “triggering” through exposure to information on government-sponsored web sites and participation in TRC-sponsored events. The long-term healing benefits of survivor-affirmative testimonial practice are often touted but little known, and appear to vary considerably, influenced by both the meaning attributed to traumatic events and to the cultural and political values attributed to testimonial practice.