Ronald Niezen

Digital Identity: The Construction of Virtual Selfhood in the Indigenous Peoples' Movement

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 Behaims globe, the imaginary possibilities of these innovations are important in determining how and to what extent human existence is to be transformed by them.

Culture and the Judiciary: The Meaning of the Culture Concept as a Source of Aboriginal Rights in Canada.

The author examines the current Canadian approach to the recognition of the rights of Aboriginal peoples. The discussion focuses especially on the conceptual and legal problems at the centre of the Supreme Courts cultural discourse. The Courts approach to culture, “cultural distinctiveness” and “cultural rights” does not concord with current anthropological or historical conceptions of culture. With this approach Aboriginal cultural rights tend to appear “frozen in time”. The Courts cultural ideas are based in part on expert testimony (from the perspective of Aboriginal peoples, amongst others), on human rights and on public opinion, but they also have their own inherent logic. They are essentially oriented toward political questions surrounding the sovereignty of the Crown and the claims of indigenous peoples to self-determination. The cultural discourse of the Court is inseparable from the tension between the liberal politics of equality and the specific rights and claims of distinct peoples.

Internet suicide: Communities of affirmation and the lethality of communication

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 of ideas on the lethality of suicide. Different forums either intensify or mitigate self-destructive tendencies in ways that are significant for understanding the place of communication in the occurrence of suicide and for therapeutic practice.

Healing and conversion : Medical evangelism in James Bay Cree society

Certain parallels can be drawn between evangelical religion and biomedicine, including the conviction of each that it provides access to vital knowledge, the perceived need to change human behavior without regard to race or culture, and a tendency toward cultural intolerance. These parallels are illustrated in the history of missionary and medical activity among the Cree of the James Bay region in northern Quebec. Three distinct phases of medical evangelism, defined by the activities of missions, the federal government, and an autonomous Cree health board, show a movement toward the redefinition of local healing practices and greater medical pluralism.

Gabriel Tarde’s publics

The recent revival of Gabriel Tarde’s distinctive approach to the study of human interaction raises the issue of the possible reasons for his fall into oblivion, particularly given his prominence during his lifetime as an intellectual competitor of equal standing with the pioneering sociologist Émile Durkheim in the first years of the 20th century. This problem calls for an exploration of those central ideas and qualities of Tarde’s work that may once have compromised his legacy and that now provide some explanation of his revival. Consistent with Tarde’s ideas about human interaction, or ‘inter-subjectivity’, the reception of his legacy has been shaped by the forces of imitation and opinion, acting on a changeable, persuadable public.

The Durkheim-Tarde debate and the social study of aboriginal youth suicide

A debate that took place in France in the early 20th century still has much to tell us about the interpretation and strategies of intervention of suicide, particularly the “cohort effect” of aboriginal youth suicide. The act of suicide, for Durkheim, was inseparable from the problem of social cohesion, with extremes in solidarity and regulation predictably reflected in high rates of suicide. For Gabriel Tarde, by contrast, suicide was seen as an outcome of changeable ideas found in processes of innovation and imitation among creatively receptive individuals. This latter approach remains overlooked in favor of a growing reliance on conceptions of historical trauma and conditions of social disintegration. Recognizing the idea of suicide itself as a potential locus of solidarity opens up other possibilities for responding to and intervening in suicide crises or “clusters.”

Templates and exclusions: victim centrism in Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools

In this article I use an ethnographic approach to consider the causes and consequences of a focus on ‘survivor’ experience in Canadas Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Indian residential schools. In this Truth Commission, the interconnected concepts of ‘survivor’, ‘cultural genocide’, ‘trauma’, and ‘healing’ became reference points for much of the testimony that was presented and the ways the schools were represented. Canadas Truth Commission thus offers an example of the consequences of ‘victim centrism’, including the ways that ‘truth-telling’ can be influenced by the affirmation of particular survivor experiences and the wider goal of reforming the dominant historical narrative of the state through public education. Canadas TRC was limited by its mandate to a particular kind of institution and scope of collective harm. It was at the same time active in its creation of narrative templates, which guided the expression of traumatic personal experience and affirmed the category of residential school ‘survivor’ as the focal point for understanding policy-driven loss of language, tradition, and political integrity.

Postcolonialism and the Utopian Imagination

There is probably no better example of disjuncture between expressed scholarly intention and wider result than that which has arisen, almost unwittingly nurtured, in postcolonial theory. The central founding text of postcolonialism, Edward Said’s Orientalism, has encouraged two kinds of secondary distortion in cultural theory, one tending toward cultural essentialism and nationalism and another expressing a kind of nostalgic futurism, with more distant resonances of influence from cultural romanticism and the Western utopian tradition. Latent nationalism is the more apparent of these distortions. One of the great ironies of Edward Said’s legacy is the startling difference between his professedly antinationalist humanism—‘exilic, extraterritorial, and unhoused’, rooted in the ‘diaspora’ status of the exemplary scholar— and the decidedly non-humanist cultural essentialism that follows from his starting point, the identification and uncompromising critique of Orientalism, extended to include a wider spectrum of cultural imperialist relations between the West and the colonial (and postcolonial) world. The idea of a diasporic or self-exiled intelligentsia possessing the only legitimate way to transcend the imperialist power interests in social knowledge is not an attractive solution to many of those who see themselves as oppressed colonial subjects. To them, knowledge must have more than the blunt edges of detached humanist contemplation; it must be a source of self-discovery and liberation. Said himself was not immune to the attractions of nationalist identification and commitment. It is possible to see the tension between the ideal discomforts of exile and the politically tangible consolations of nationalism manifested in Said’s own engagement in the struggle for Palestinian freedom, in which he emphasized only the self-affirmation that emerges from oppression, while overlooking the violent realities of their political struggle—all the while extolling the virtues of cosmopolitan self-criticism. There is a sense in which he was

Speaking for the dead: the memorial politics of genocide in Namibia and Germany

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.