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SEMINAR: ANTHROPOLOGY / SOCIOLOGY SEMINAR SERIES, SEMESTER 1, 2017

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Today's date is Friday, March 29, 2024
ANTHROPOLOGY / SOCIOLOGY SEMINAR SERIES, SEMESTER 1, 2017 : The Flesh Eaters: Anthropology and the Pygmies of Central Africa Other events...
The pygmies of Africa were long believed by Europeans to be imaginary, no more real than the dwarfs of Lilliput. Now and then reports by Portuguese and French sailors told of dwarfs with long monkey-like tails sighted along the West African coastline, but few believed them. In 1699 final proof of the mythical nature of these descriptions seemed provided when Edward Tyson described the dissection of a “pygmy” and showed that it was ape rather than human. It was only in the late 1860s that the pygmies were moved formally from the imaginary to the real. Explorers in the great forests of central Africa encountered them, photographed them and even brought some back to display in Europe and America. This paper concerns the people “discovered” by those explorers and the story of how their descendants have found themselves living amongst tribes of anthropologists for more than a century. I follow the social construction and then deconstruction of African pygmyness; I highlight the horrible impacts of academic ethnocide and argue that we need to reconsider anthropological practice.

Speaker(s) Benjamin Smith, UWA
Location Social Sciences Building Room 2204
Contact Farida Fozdar <[email protected]>
Start Fri, 27 Oct 2017 14:30
End Fri, 27 Oct 2017 15:30
Submitted by Karen Eichorn <[email protected]>
Last Updated Mon, 23 Oct 2017 11:41
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