Digital Commons Network^™

“Purús Song”: Nationalization And Tribalization In Southwestern Amazonia, Peter Gow

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

Starting from a statement about knowledge and power by a Piaroa informant of Joanna Overing, the article analyses two descriptions of a meal on the Purús river in the early twentieth century: a Piro song and a short essay by Euclides da Cunha. Contrasting these two pieces in the context of how the ancestors of the Piro people of today came to meet the famous Brazilian writer, I propose the concepts of “nationalization” and “tribalization” as modes of symbolic action. Nationalization takes local events and escalates them into the space-time of the nation state, while tribalization deactivates the dangerous ramifications …

Islam Vs. Liberalism In Europe, Peter O'Brien

Political Science Faculty Research

In the West, Muslims are regarded with anxiety, mistrust, and fear. Many of us choose not to travel to Muslim countries for fear of becoming victims of terrorism. Most westerners worry about the Muslims' firm grip on the spigot of the world's oil reserves. And in 1991 we convinced ourselves that Saddam Hussein represented a threat on par with Hitler.¹

But Muslims cannot really scare us. After all, it took but a few weeks to vanquish fully the "Butcher of Baghdad," who had up until that time the world's fourth largest army. We united in a stalwart international coalition …