Skin lightening products, including by Nivea and Vaseline, target women through magazines filled with images of fair-skinned Asian pop icons. The campaigns say, “Show off your aura” and “Get to know the miracle of white skin”.
Continue reading Colonialism and Skin Lightening ProductsBy Zuleyka Zevallos
This story is engrossing: Maud Allan was a Canada-born dancer who found fame in Germany in the early 1900s. She performed in the Oscar Wilde play, Vision of Salome, famous for “the dance of the seven veils.” When Allan was in her 20s, her brother was executed for killing two girls. She changed her name to escape this notoriety but later found herself the subject of infamy, drawn into a litigation case defending her name against charges of “sexual perversion.” Allan’s artistic sensuality and the fact that she was a lesbian were weaved into a conspiracy plot involving the highest office of British parliament. The Daily Mail recently reported on Allan’s life as a new play is being produced in San Francisco which is based on this salacious court case.
Allan’s story makes an excellent historical case study of the criminalisation of femininity and homosexuality in Britain at the end of World War I. I discuss the contradictory meanings of Allan’s dancing and her embodiment of the character Salome, a figure that has come to represent the dangerous qualities of female heterosexuality. The cultural significance of Allan’s dancing and her court case takes on multiple meanings in light of Allan’s reality as a lesbian woman in the 1920s.
I use Allan’s story to examine the history of the clitoris and its cultural mystique in relation to cis-women’s* bodily experiences of pleasure in connection to dancing and sex. Continue reading The “Cult of the Clitoris”: Policing Women’s Sexuality in England During WWI
Peru’s Señor de Choquekillca Festival is held in Ollantaytambo, near Cuzco (the ancient Incan city of Machu Picchu). The festival commemorates a local saint and it also represents the Inca’s mocking of the conquistadors who invaded and almost obliterated the Indigenous Quechua culture.
Writing for the Huffpost, Andrew Burmon muses that the festival comes across as a “strange” multicultural event that doesn’t match Western ideas of multiculturalism. The festival simultaneously represents an embrace of certain elements of Catholicism which are blended with Indigenous spirituality, as well as a rejection of Spanish colonialism.
In Western nations, multiculturalism takes on many contested forms, but it is usually about tolerance of cultural and religious difference as a means of social integration of minority groups. This festival in Ollantaytambo subverts this notion by recreating the history of colonialism as an act of cultural and religious rebellion. The town honours its tradition by staging people drinking outside a church as well as by having a cross procession.
The people dress up in beautifully ornate costumes as well as grotesque masks in a celebration, condemnation and reconciliation of the past.
Senor de Choquekillca is a strange sort of festival. A religious celebration in honor of a small town boy made saint that has morphed into an occasion for trans-generational venting, Choquekillca provides the citizens of the small town of Ollantaytambo with an occasion to dress up in white face and mock the conquistadors who destroyed the Inca civilization flourishing in this part of the Peruvian Andes…
That is what is great about the party: Like history itself, it doesn’t really make sense.
Peru’s Christian faith is a spoil of war, but no less genuine for being coerced. Likewise, the Incan culture is mourned despite being obviously extant. Unlike westerners, who more often than not see multiculturalism as the amalgamation of different peoples, the people of the Sacred Valley – inundated though they are by Machu Picchu-bound travelers – are multicultural on the inside, contradictions be damned.
It is hard not to love a people not only capable of holding contradictory ideas in their heads, but willing to celebrate them in concert.
Photos via: Huffington Post.
By Zuleyka Zevallos
Last year, I read about anthropologist Jeremy Narby’s participant observation field research with the Ashaninca, an indigenous group living in the Peruvian Amazon. His research is detailed in the book, The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, as well as the follow up, Intelligence in Nature. I’ve thought a lot about this research since. Narby’s research focuses on the way Western science constructs medical knowledge in ways that do not accommodate mystical experiences from Other cultures. Western medicine has come to adopt the Ashaninca’s knowledge of rare plants, as they have been proven to positively affect health. Nevertheless, Western scientists refuse to take into consideration how the Ashaninca gain this knowledge because it is derived through drug-induced hallucinations. This is in spite of the fact that these hallucinations come from the same plant ecosystem that Western science is eager to plunder. How do we reconcile this knowledge divide? Narby argues that the Ashaninca’s understanding of plants and ‘alternative medicine’ must be understood in concert with their pathways to this knowledge. This includes the hallucinations which are used to commune with nature.
Continue reading Ashaninca Hallucinations: Challenging Western Concepts of Medicinal Knowledge
By Zuleyka Zevallos
“No one can take away who we are. No one can take away our identity”. Prominent Australian writer and intellectual Anita Heiss recently made this comment on the program Living Black. She was speaking about her lawsuit win over Andrew Bolt, who was found guilty of racial vilification. In 2004, Bolt engaged in a series of racist comments attacking high-profile Indigenous Australians, essentially arguing they weren’t “black enough”, as Heiss puts it in her latest book. The Living Black video (below), recounts some of Bolt’s insidious comments, such as “Meet the white face of a new black race. The Political Aborigine… I certainly don’t accuse them of opportunism, even if full-blood Aborigines may wonder how such fair people can claim to be one of them and in some cases take black jobs”.
Bolt is a conservative commentator and notorious bigot who tries his hardest to single-handedly dismantle multicultural harmony via his newspaper column and TV appearances. Bolt glowers over Indigenous Australian leaders, patronising his readership about how he images Indigenous Australians might feel about “light-skinned” Aboriginals, without awareness of his white male privilege and the ongoing history of racist paternalism which dominate Indigenous affairs at the national level. Bolt casually makes reference to “full-blood Aborigines”, which is a socially constructed colonial concept used to institutionalise racist practices. The categorisation of “half-caste”, “full-blood” and other variations, has been used since European settlement to deny Indigenous Australians access to their human rights, social welfare and land ownership. As Heiss’ book argues, her court case win over Bolt was a symbolic triumph. The court rule in favour of racial vilification took away the power of identity labelling from white Westerners who impose racial categories upon Indigenous Australians. While this is only one case involving one infamous media personality, Heiss says that the future implications of this court case are likely to be profound: Continue reading Reframing “Black” Identity Politics in Australia
By Zuleyka Zevallos
I wanted to do a follow up on my post from a couple of months a go, on Hollywood racism. I analysed George Lucas’ claim that big Hollywood studios were reticent to back his film Red Tails because there were no white leading actors in the script. I used the idea of the Magical Negro Trope to explain how mainstream Hollywood films stereotype African-Americans as either thugs or benevolent, self-sacrificing figures who exist only to teach the white character a life-affirming lesson. I showed that this trope extends to other minorities who are people of colour, through the Noble Savage Trope. Today I want to focus on the sexualisation of Noble Savage trope. The Noble Savage is a term describing the over-simplified stereotype of Indigenous people on film. I will focus on gender and sexuality issues in big-budget Hollywood films depicting Indigenous and minority cultures during early colonial and “frontier” times.
Today I will draw a comparison between Avatar and other Hollywood films that depict Indigenous and minority women as savage conquests. Women in general are rarely cast in complex roles in big-budget Hollywood releases. They are usually romantic or sexual diversions to help portray the male lead in a sympathetic light. Minority women are even more simplified, especially in stories involving Indigenous cultures. Indigenous and women of colour exist largely as Magical Pixie Conquests: they are painted as feisty, though ultimately submissive, pawns that help white male characters to dominate the “native tribe”. The fictionalised version of the “Pocahontas” story epitomises how Hollywood both fetishes Indigenous cultures and perpetuates patronising postcolonial fantasies.
Continue reading Noble Savages and Magical Pixie Conquests: Colonial Fantasies in Film
By Zuleyka Zevallos
Adam Serwer reports in Mother Jones that George Lucas’ latest film, Red Tails had trouble getting made, partly because the “studios weren’t willing to finance a film without a white protagonist as an anchor”. Lucas’ claim can be put into wider historical context by examining the entrenched racist practices of big Hollywood studios. In particular, the idea of the “magical negro trope” puts things into perspective. This term refers to the way valiant Black characters in movies exist only as a narrative device to teach the white protagonist how to be a better person. This post explores variations of the “magical negro” and the gendered dimensions of these characters.
A common misconception about anime cartoons amongst uninitiated audiences in majority-English-speaking countries is that anime characters are drawn to look ‘white’ rather than ‘Asian’. These terms are not factual nor are they fixed categories – they are social constructions. That is, the meaning attached to race, whether ‘white’, ‘Black’, ‘Asian’ and so on, and the groups classified under these labels, change from one society to another, depending upon culture, time and place.
Continue reading Anime and the Social Construction of Race
The island nation of Samoa wants to improve its trade relations with Australia, New Zealand and China. As such, it is getting set to lose a day in order to align its time zone with its trade partners. Tomorrow, on what should have been Friday the 30th of December in Samoa, time on this island will jump ahead to Saturday the 31st of December.
I want to explore this shift in time in Samoa through the broader lens of the sociology of time. The theory of social construction states that the things that we take for granted as ordinary, mundane or commonsense are actually social ideas shaped by culture. The idea of temporal time is measured through our watches, calendars and other scientific instruments and technologies. As such, the passing of time is perceived as an unremarkable fact of life. The social meaning of time in different cultures varies. The idea of time as a fixed entity is actually a social illusion. I will show how history, social forces and life situations shape our ideas about time. I include a case study of ‘island time’ to show the variability of how time is understood and valued in island nations such as Samoa and Gabriola Island in British Columbia, Canada. I use the impending time change in Samoa to introduce the idea of ‘social time’, which is a useful way to understand how people in different cultures organise and think about time.
Much of the world’s media was focused on the horrific disaster that followed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station meltdowns that began on the 11th of March, 2011. An estimated 130,000 people were initially evacuated and 70,000 people presently remain displaced from their homes due to radiation.
In today’s post, I look at the social policy conditions that exacerbated the effects of the disaster. I focus on the ongoing sociological impact on Japan’s ‘nuclear refugees’. This includes social stigma faced by survivors, and increased risk of suicide among those have stayed near the ‘nuclear zone.’ I discuss how sociology might contribute towards sustainable planning.
Continue reading The Social Costs of Japan’s Nuclear Disaster
The Other Sociologist 