PCW+Week+4

Interesting article in The Guardian (which also has good coverage and analysis on Egypt) by a linguistic anthropologist on Greenland, global warming, and the accelerating loss of indigenous culture as it is opened up to more and more "development":

I have been using this dark period to work intensively with the elders, documenting what I can of the local language and culture. One elderly informant told me on our first meeting and in a matter-of-fact manner: "In the old days, there was not much need for language." They lived in an experiential world where language was used to communicate basic facts and intentions, but she insists that nothing was ever discussed and that abstraction was alien. Whispering implausible palindromes over black coffee in my hut, she tells me that her strongest recollection of her childhood is the silence. Hunters would have been away for days or weeks at a time, living a short, semi-nomadic life and having relatively little contact with their children. Until the early 1950s, life expectancy for Greenlanders was no more than 35 and to this day a child's six-month birthday is still cause for a major celebration in the town. According to my informants, it was only with the subsequent introduction of the radio and schooling that people learned to discuss and debate things. ... The drilling for oil off the west coast of Greenland and the potential environmental hazards were much discussed last summer, but now large-scale [|mining] projects dotted around the rocky coastline are being considered for iron, gold, nickel, platinum and diamonds, to name but a few. With a relatively uneducated and tiny workforce, it is inevitable that Greenland will require thousands of foreign workers to explore and mine these resources – a prospect that concerns many people here in the north because they think their previously "closed" country, with a population of just over 50,000, will be rapidly overwhelmed by people from different cultures.

--Il Professore

I found this video that went a little more in depth about the actual export of fish by people who sell them individually as opposed to the big factories selling them. Many woman who are now widows with families to support, do so by selling sex for fish. This practice is known as Jaboya and is one of the leading factors in the growing AIDS epidemic. This spreading of AIDS is causing more woman to be widowed and children to be orphaned, which in turn causes the number of women who practice Jaboya to grow.

-- Claudia Anzini

I was looking up more about the Nile Perch and when they were introduced to Lake Victoria and I found this website : []. The site says that they “may have been introduced deliberately” in the 1950s. It goes on and tells about the amount of money is involved in the Nile Perch trade for Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. The site brings up future problems dealing with overfishing and unacceptable levels of bacteriological contamination found in these fish.

-nico