Re-imagining Ourselves: Odyssey and Anthropology in the southwest Indian Ocean Islands

Boswell, Rosabelle

Title: Re-imagining Ourselves: Odyssey and Anthropology in the southwest Indian Ocean Islands
Creator: Boswell, Rosabelle
Date Issued: 2013-07-24
Date: 2013-07-24
Type: Text
Identifier: vital:570
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004363
Description: How is identity reconstructed in places where oppression still lingers? This question has intrigued me for the past 15 years and I have sought to answer it by undertaking a voyage back to the Southwest Indian Ocean region, the place of my birth and space of incredible diversity and early globalisations. My proposed lecture discusses the politics of identity, as well as the influence of contemporary social phenomena on the islands, specifically international tourism and heritage management. I argue that the islanders are keen to re-imagine self and community so as to produce alternative identities, networks and sources of power in a still oppressive context – and that this process is vital to care, solidarity and the pursuit of social justice. Doing research in Mauritius, Madagascar, Seychelles and Zanzibar also revealed to me that anthropology is perplexing and rewarding, since it involves difficult ‘returns’, learning with others and seeing power where the apparently powerless reside. I conclude that being in the Indian Ocean region positively changed the way I perceive and experience fieldwork, and that my findings thus far, underscore the relevance of anthropology to contemporary Africans and their ‘cousins’ in the African Diaspora.
Format: 17 pages
Format: pdf
Publisher: Rhodes University
Language: English
Rights: Boswell, Rosabelle
Rights: CC BY-NC-SA : Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

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