“Other Modernities”: Art, Visual Culture and Patrimony Outside the West. An Introduction

The notion of modernity as a tabula rasa phenomenon that destroys the present in order to build the future is particularly complicated in the case of non-Western settings, where modernization was often understood as erasing local culture in favor of a template borrowed from the West. Historiographies of non-Western arts have mostly followed such a model, viewing fine arts, associated with modernity, as opposed to “traditional” arts, often commodified in the production of nostalgia or marketed for tourists. This article discusses the complexity of art production in non-Western contexts, beyond such reductive classifications

High overlap between traditional ecological knowledge and forest conservation found in the Bolivian Amazon

Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu MdM-2015-0552Altres ajuts: FBBVA research grant (BIOCON_06_106-07)It has been suggested that traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) may play a key role in forest conservation. However, empirical studies assessing to what extent TEK is associated with forest conservation compared with other variables are rare. Furthermore, to our knowledge, the spatial overlap of TEK and forest conservation has not been evaluated at fine scales. In this paper, we address both issues through a case study with Tsimane' Amerindians in the Bolivian Amazon. We sampled 624 households across 59 villages to estimate TEK and used remote sensing data to assess forest conservation. We ran statistical and spatial analyses to evaluate whether TEK was associated and spatially overlapped with forest conservation at the village level. We find that Tsimane' TEK is significantly and positively associated with forest conservation although acculturation variables bear stronger and negative associations with forest conservation. We also find a very significant spatial overlap between levels of Tsimane' TEK and forest conservation. We discuss the potential reasons underpinning our results, which provide insights that may be useful for informing policies in the realms of development, conservation, and climate. We posit that the protection of indigenous cultural systems is vital and urgent to create more effective policies in such realms

Governing reproduction in post-revolutionary Tunisia: contraception, abortion and infertility

Following a neo-Malthusian rationality, the Tunisian independent state has promoted biomedical contraception and legalized abortion to lower the national fertility rate. Whereas for 40 years non-reproduction has been the objective of official demographic policies, IVF private clinics are a flourishing industry. In this article, I explore the contradictory effects of (non-)reproductive biomedical technologies by showing how they contribute to the non-reproduction of certain categories of citizens and force others to reproduce

Nascita e sviluppo dell’antropologia nei paesi arabi. Un sapere controverso e marginalizzato?

L’antropologia culturale si è interessata tardi al mondo arabo perché le popolazioni che lo abitavano erano considerate troppo complesse per essere oggetto della disciplina. Malgrado l’esistenza di una letteratura scritta da amministratori e missionari europei mirante a recensire usi e costumi dei colonizzati, gli studi antropologici sono nati nella maggior parte dei paesi arabi nel periodo postcoloniale, talora dopo anni di opposizione da parte di governi e intellettuali locali che consideravano l’antropologia un sapere coloniale. Questo capitolo intende tracciare le grandi linee della nascita degli studi antropologici nei paesi arabi sottolineando le relazioni complesse con il periodo coloniale e le dinamiche politiche che ne hanno influenzato lo sviluppo dopo l’indipendenza

Abortion in Tunisia after the Revolution : bringing a new morality into the old order

The emergence of Islamist movements and religious symbolic repertoires in the aftermath of the Tunisian revolution has elicited the political, moral and practical contestation of women’s right to abortion. While, after several heated debates, the law was eventually not modified, several practitioners working in government family planning clinics have changed their behaviour preventing women getting abortions. Pre-existing state and medical logics, political uncertainties, new religious and moralising discourses have determined abortion practices in the government health care facilities generating unequal treatments according to women’s marital status, class and education. This paper will investigate the multiple logics affecting abortion practices in post-revolutionary Tunisia, focusing on the dissonant logics mobilised by health care professionals as well as structural socio-economic factors

The Creation of Jordanian National Identity. A Short Museographic Story of a Complex Process

L’article analyse la façon dont les politiques culturelles de muséographie ont participé à la création d’un sentiment d’allégeance à la monarchie hachémite et à l’État jordanien. Les pratiques liées au patrimoine culturel ont profondément affecté ce qu’Irene Maffi nomme « les politiques de la mémoire  » et ont contribué à la production d’une nouvelle identité qui devait devenir l’identité nationale jordanienne (Maffi 2004). L’auteur rappelle que ce processus de construction identitaire a évolué tout au long du xxe siècle du fait des guerres israélo-arabes qui ont entraîné les vagues de réfugiés palestiniens et le changement des frontières nationales. Elle montre que la quarantaine de musées créés en Jordanie depuis 1951 tendent à faire coïncider l’histoire nationale avec la narration dynastique hachémite, l’histoire de la Jordanie devenant ainsi l’histoire hachémite. En conséquence, les récits locaux des tribus et des familles citadines ne sont présents qu’intégrés dans la version officielle du passé qui est avant tout hachémite. Aussi est-il particulièrement intéressant d’étudier l’apparition de musées privés et leurs relations dialogiques avec l’État comme autant d’outils d’expression démocratique (Maffi 2006, Daher 2007). La muséographie jordanienne est ainsi pleinement le miroir de l’évolution sociopolitique de la sociétés locale et exprime les ambiguïtés de la construction nationale jordanienne