Ronald Niezen
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 90648 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Ronald Niezen |
| NOMBRES | Ronald |
| APELLIDO | Niezen |
| FIRMA | NIEZEN R |
| AFILIACIONES | McGill University |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 44 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 141 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 42 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1990 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2022 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Perpetration, impunity, and irreconciliation in Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools
The influence of institutional mandates on knowledge can be seen particularly clearly in the preferences and absences of truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) proceedings. A recent trend in TRCs involves a shift away from the exercise of judicial powers and the quest for justice and towards more concern with affirming the experience of victims or 'Survivors'. Canada's TRC on Indian Residential Schools illustrates the consequences of the shift…
The Origins of Indigenism
"International indigenism" may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it is indeed a global phenomenon and a growing form of activism. In his fluent and accessible narrative, Ronald Niezen examines the ways the relatively recent emergence of an internationally recognized identity—"indigenous peoples"—intersects with another relatively recent international movement—the development of universal human rights laws and principles. This movement make…
Power, Anthropological Approaches to
Anthropology differs from other disciplines in the extent to which it emphasizes the indirect and concealed manifestations of power, understood in its simplest terms as the ability to influence the decisions and behavior of others. Power is also commonly understood as influence that is generative of dominant ideas and institutional structures rather than narrowly repressive. A sharp break from ethnographies that were concerned with sources of pow…
Speaking for the dead
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 re…
Palaces of Hope
This volume assembles in one place the work of scholars who are making key contributions to a new approach to the United Nations, and to global organizations and international law more generally. Anthropology has in recent years taken on global organizations as a legitimate source of its subject matter. The research that is being done in this field gives a human face to these world-reforming institutions. Palaces of Hope demonstrates that these i…
Palaces of Hope
Templates and exclusions
In this article I use an ethnographic approach to consider the causes and consequences of a focus on 'survivor' experience in Canada's 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. Canada's Truth C…
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 …
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 20 th century. This problem calls for an exploration of those central ideas and qualities of Tarde’s work that ma…
Témoignage et histoire dans la Commission de vérité et de réconciliation du Canada
La Commission de vérité et de réconciliation (CVR) du Canada relative aux pensionnats autochtones nous offre l’opportunité d’observer les processus par le biais desquels les victimes reconsidèrent leur place au sein de l’histoire de l’État. Les témoignages livrés dans ce contexte mettent en relief souffrance et souvenirs d’agression et de torture d’enfants, au détriment d’une vue d’ensemble plus complète et variée des origines, des modes d’opérat…
Internet suicide
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 sam…
The Social Study of Human Rights. A Review Essay
It is noteworthy—and at the same time a bit disappointing in a what-took-so-long sort of way—that a recent innovation in the study of human rights should involve a focus on the lives of the people directly affected by them. To explain this delay of the obvious would probably call for a review of the persistent influence of Kantian transcendentalism, the quasi-utopian search for ideal justice, and the inherently abstract nature of law in its quest…
Public Justice and the Anthropology of Law
In this powerful, timely study Ronald Niezen examines the processes by which cultural concepts are conceived and collective rights are defended in international law. Niezen argues that cultivating support on behalf of those experiencing human rights violations often calls for strategic representations of injustice and suffering to distant audiences. The positive impulse behind public responses to political abuse can be found in the satisfaction o…
Public justice and the anthropology of law
In this powerful, timely study Ronald Niezen examines the processes by which cultural concepts are conceived and collective rights are defended in international law. Niezen argues that cultivating support on behalf of those experiencing human rights violations often calls for strategic representations of injustice and suffering to distant audiences. The positive impulse behind public responses to political abuse can be found in the satisfaction o…
Reverse anthropology
The Aufklärung ’s Human Discipline
Postcolonialism and the Utopian Imagination
Marcel Mauss
Marcel Mauss
Marcel Mauss:. Biography. Marcel Fournier. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 442 pp
Digital Identity
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 …
A World Beyond Difference
The Origins of IndigenismHuman Rights and the Politics of Identity
“International indigenism” may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it is indeed a global phenomenon and a growing form of activism. This book examines the ways the relatively recent emergence of an internationally recognized identity—”indigenous peoples”—intersects with another relatively recent international movement—the development of universal human rights laws and principles. This movement makes use of human rights instruments and the in…
Culture and the Judiciary
L'auteur examine la démarche canadienne à l'égard de la reconnaissance des droits des peuples autochtones. La discussion porte surtout sur les problèmes, autant conceptuels que juridiques, au centre du discours culturel de la Cour suprême du Canada. L'approche de la Cour envers la culture, la “spécificité culturelle” et les “droits culturels” ne concorde pas avec les conceptions anthropologiques ou historique contemporaines de la culture. En part…
The Origins of Indigenism
Spirit Wars
Spirit Wars is an exploration of the ways in which the destruction of spiritual practices and beliefs of native peoples in North America has led to conditions of collective suffering--a process sometimes referred to as cultural genocide. Ronald Niezen approaches this topic through wide-ranging case studies involving different colonial powers and state governments: the seventeenth-century Spanish occupation of the Southwest, the colonization of th…
Marcel Mauss
Marcel Mauss:. Biography. Marcel Fournier. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 442 pp
Recognizing Indigenism
It is rare that circumstances in world history are favorable to the creation of a new kind of global political entity. Nationalism and the nation-state were novelties in the nineteenth century, as E. J. Hobsbawm (1990) convincingly demonstrates, but their connection with modernity was concealed by nationalist identifications with natural ties, permanent homelands, archaic cultures, and timeless bonds of common history. A similar global movement, …
A World Beyond Difference
Power and dignity
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 relatio…
Templates and exclusions
In this article I use an ethnographic approach to consider the causes and consequences of a focus on 'survivor' experience in Canada's 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. Canada's Truth C…
The 'Community of Helpers of the Sunna
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 app…
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 20 th century. This problem calls for an exploration of those central ideas and qualities of Tarde’s work that ma…
Digital Identity
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 …
Speaking for the dead
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 re…
Internet suicide
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 sam…
Culture and the Judiciary
L'auteur examine la démarche canadienne à l'égard de la reconnaissance des droits des peuples autochtones. La discussion porte surtout sur les problèmes, autant conceptuels que juridiques, au centre du discours culturel de la Cour suprême du Canada. L'approche de la Cour envers la culture, la “spécificité culturelle” et les “droits culturels” ne concorde pas avec les conceptions anthropologiques ou historique contemporaines de la culture. En part…
Power, Anthropological Approaches to
Anthropology differs from other disciplines in the extent to which it emphasizes the indirect and concealed manifestations of power, understood in its simplest terms as the ability to influence the decisions and behavior of others. Power is also commonly understood as influence that is generative of dominant ideas and institutional structures rather than narrowly repressive. A sharp break from ethnographies that were concerned with sources of pow…
Healing and Conversion
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…
Surviving as Indians
Hot Literacy in Cold Societies
The argument that the presence or absence of widespread literacy constitutes the central criterion to distinguish 'savage' from 'domesticated' society, presented by Goody in a number of works (1968, 1977, 1986, 1987), makes close associations between alphabetic literacy and the growth of knowledge and between restricted literacy and traditional societies. In this essay, I will challenge these associations by presenting material from medieval Euro…
Perpetration, impunity, and irreconciliation in Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools
The influence of institutional mandates on knowledge can be seen particularly clearly in the preferences and absences of truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) proceedings. A recent trend in TRCs involves a shift away from the exercise of judicial powers and the quest for justice and towards more concern with affirming the experience of victims or 'Survivors'. Canada's TRC on Indian Residential Schools illustrates the consequences of the shift…
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 …
The Social Study of Human Rights. A Review Essay
It is noteworthy—and at the same time a bit disappointing in a what-took-so-long sort of way—that a recent innovation in the study of human rights should involve a focus on the lives of the people directly affected by them. To explain this delay of the obvious would probably call for a review of the persistent influence of Kantian transcendentalism, the quasi-utopian search for ideal justice, and the inherently abstract nature of law in its quest…
The Aufklärung ’s Human Discipline
The 'Community of Helpers of the Sunna
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 app…
Hot Literacy in Cold Societies
The argument that the presence or absence of widespread literacy constitutes the central criterion to distinguish 'savage' from 'domesticated' society, presented by Goody in a number of works (1968, 1977, 1986, 1987), makes close associations between alphabetic literacy and the growth of knowledge and between restricted literacy and traditional societies. In this essay, I will challenge these associations by presenting material from medieval Euro…
Scribe, Griot, and Novelist
Power and dignity
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 relatio…
Amerindian Rebirth
Native Canadian Anthropology and History
Islamic Society and State Power In Senegal
Indians in Prison
Midwinter Rites of the Cayuga Long House. FRANK G. SPECK
Surviving as Indians
The Dream Seekers
Neither Wolf nor Dog
Women of the Jama'a Ansar al-Sunna
(1995). Women of the Jama'a Ansar al-Sunna: Female Participation in a West African Islamic Reform Movement. Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines: Vol. 29, No. 3, pp. 403-428
The King of the World in the Land of the Pygmies
Grateful Prey
Healing and Conversion
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…
Traditional Beluga Drives of the lñupiat of Kotzebue Sound, Alaska
Traditional Beluga Drives of the lñupiat of Kotzebue Sound, Alaska. CHARLES V. LUCIER and JAMES W. VANSTONE. Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1995. Fieldiana, 25. Illustrations, references
The Heartland Chronicles
The Heartland Chronicles. DOUGLAS E. FOLEY. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. x + 228 pp., illustrations, references, index
Recognizing Indigenism
It is rare that circumstances in world history are favorable to the creation of a new kind of global political entity. Nationalism and the nation-state were novelties in the nineteenth century, as E. J. Hobsbawm (1990) convincingly demonstrates, but their connection with modernity was concealed by nationalist identifications with natural ties, permanent homelands, archaic cultures, and timeless bonds of common history. A similar global movement, …
Spirit Wars
Spirit Wars is an exploration of the ways in which the destruction of spiritual practices and beliefs of native peoples in North America has led to conditions of collective suffering--a process sometimes referred to as cultural genocide. Ronald Niezen approaches this topic through wide-ranging case studies involving different colonial powers and state governments: the seventeenth-century Spanish occupation of the Southwest, the colonization of th…
The Origins of IndigenismHuman Rights and the Politics of Identity
“International indigenism” may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it is indeed a global phenomenon and a growing form of activism. This book examines the ways the relatively recent emergence of an internationally recognized identity—”indigenous peoples”—intersects with another relatively recent international movement—the development of universal human rights laws and principles. This movement makes use of human rights instruments and the in…
Culture and the Judiciary
L'auteur examine la démarche canadienne à l'égard de la reconnaissance des droits des peuples autochtones. La discussion porte surtout sur les problèmes, autant conceptuels que juridiques, au centre du discours culturel de la Cour suprême du Canada. L'approche de la Cour envers la culture, la “spécificité culturelle” et les “droits culturels” ne concorde pas avec les conceptions anthropologiques ou historique contemporaines de la culture. En part…
The Origins of Indigenism
A World Beyond Difference
Digital Identity
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 …
Sociology (27 obras) · Political science (25 obras) · Law (22 obras) · History (20 obras) · Philosophy (15 obras) · History (13 obras) · Law (12 obras) · Philosophy (12 obras) · Computer Science (10 obras) · Politics (10 obras)