'..the original novel is an immense epic by 19th century novelist Takizawa Bakin published over many years, but eventually reaching one-hundred and sixty volumes.
The Satomi clan is being attacked and its lord offers his daughter Princess Fuse to the warrior that will bring him the head of the enemy. It is his loyal dog that kills and beheads the enemy and, saying that her father must not go back on his word, Princess Fuse goes with the dog.
Nevertheless, the Satomi clan is defeated and one of its loyal retainers goes to rescue Princess Fuse, shooting the dog, but unfortunately shooting Princess Fuse as well. The eight crystal beads of her rosary, each engraved with the Chinese characters of one of the Confucian virtues, goes flying through the air.
Miraculously, each will be found with a newborn baby. These eight children, all of whom have the character inu for 'dog' in their names, eventually meet and join together to restore the Satomi clan. The play features all the stars of the company and follows the adventures of the eight dog warriors as they meet and gradually join together, leading to a climactic fight on the roof of a dizzyingly high tower.'[source]
Demonstration in Sevilla. Photo: No Border Network, flickr
(Draft) 'All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.' These noble words in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights might be true in some distant part on this planet, but certainly not in Europe.
Here, peoples' rights are dependent on their nationality. While I, with my German EU passport may travel and live nearly everywhere I want, people from countries like Egypt, Syria or Pakistan cannot. Europe has put much effort in building different kind of walls to prevent certain categories of people from entering. While wealthier peoples' migration is celebrated, poorer peoples' migration is criminalized. Anthropologist Owen Sichone calls this policy 'Global apartheid'.
Two weeks ago, eight Norwegian police men arrested 25 year old Maria Amelie, an award winning book author, blogger and former anthropology student, born in North Ossetia. She had just finished her lecture at the Nansen Academy – the Norwegian Humanistic Academy about being paperless, undocumented, 'illegal' migrant. This happened just three months after she had published her bok 'Ulovlig norsk' (Illegally Norwegian), and one month after she was named 'Norwegian of the Year' by Norway's only cosmopolitan-minded magazine, Ny Tid.
Maria Amelie (her real name is Madina Salamova) is one of those 18 000 illegalized migrants in Norway who live here without any rights at all. No access to healthcare, education or work. They cannot open an bank account, they don't get an ID-number, they actually don't exist officially. Even helping them is forbidden.
Here is a video from Russia Today about Maria Amelie and a demonstration i Oslo for better rights for undocumented migrants. See related news story
Yesterday, despite lots of demonstrations and media attention, she was thrown out of Norway, where she has lived since she was 16, and deported to Russia. For Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and his red-green government, it was important to make clear that they don't tolerate people like her. The Norwegian government is responsible for the deportation of hundreds of individuals and families - usually in the middle of the night without any prior notice. Media in Norway has done a good job in highlighting the plight of these people who all have a unique story to tell.
Read more:
Norway Expels Migrant Celebrity (Moscow Times, 25.1.2011)
Human rights court slams EU asylum policy as inhumane (Deutsche Wele, 21.1.2011)
‘No One Is Illegal’ Campaign aims to protect Norway’s ‘paperless’ refugees (Women News Network 8.12.2010)
SEE ALSO:
The 'illegal' anthropologist: Shahram Khosravi's Auto-Ethnography of Borders
'Human smugglers fight global apartheid'
'Anthropologists Should Participate in the Current Immigration Debate'
No more conferences in Arizona: Anthropologists condemn Immigration Law
How to challenge Us-and-Them thinking? Interview with Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Why borders don't help - An engaged anthropology of the US-Mexican border
David Graeber: There never was a West! Democracy as Interstitial Cosmopolitanism
For an Anthropology of Cosmopolitanism
Interview with Sámi musician Mari Boine: Dreams about a world without borders
More than one million Egyptians protesting for democracy. Photo: Al Jazeera, flickr
(in progress) “The government would come down hard on even the smallest protest, and everyone would be arrested. Now, it’s as if the people are saying, ‘We’re not going to be afraid anymore.’ “I am very, very happy for the Egyptian people. I really am. It’s a wonderful development for the Egyptian people.”
That’s how anthropologist Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban comments the recent protests in Egypt. She has spent six years since 1970 living and conducting research in the Sudan, Egypt and Tunisia and is currently teaching “Arab-Islamic Culture and the West”.
In contrast to Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Norwegian anthropologist Unni Wikan is worried.
In an Op-Ed in yesterday’s Aftenposten, Wikan defended Mubarak and attacked the protesters.
She claims that “Mubarak is no despot". He is “considered a very honorable man". Mubarak “did well / prove worthy of the situation in not giving in to the peoples’ voices on the streets". People - especially the poor ones she has studied for decades - don’t care for democracy. They want stability! Without Mubarak, the “criminal mob on the streets” would lead the country into chaos. Even today, when more than a million people protested in Cairo and other places in Egypt, she insisted that Mubarak has the peoples’ support.
Of course, her article “traveled", among others to the Lebanese-American professor of political science As’ad AbuKhalil at at California State University, who posted a Google translation of her article and comments: “I suspect that you will both laugh and cry while reading this piece of rubbish".
As you might have noticed, Wikan is argueing along siminar lines as the Western political elite who is about to lose an important ally in the Middle East. For them, “stability” is more important than people power, as Maximilian Forte and his co-bloggers on Zero Anthropology explain in several blog posts, among others The Fall of the American Wall: Tunisia, Egypt, and Beyond and Encircling Empire: Report #11, Focus on Egypt and The Song of the Nonaligned Nile (by Eliza Jane Darling).
Forte quotes Hillary Clinton who said that ”our assessment is that the Egyptian Government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.”
“Let’s be really clear about what is happening in Tunisia, Egypt, perhaps soon Israel/Palestine, and now Lebanon and Yemen", he states. “A wall of U.S. supported dictatorships and clients is collapsing.”
Meanwhile, over 150 academics have signed an Open letter to President Barack Obama, calling on Obama to support Egypt’s democratic movement. (You see the irony here of course… Western leaders fearing for a democratic Middle East.. “The hypocrisy of western liberals is breathtaking: they publicly supported democracy, and now, when the people revolt against the tyrants on behalf of secular freedom and justice, not on behalf of religion, they are all deeply concerned", writes Slavoj žižek in the Guardian).
The keys to understanding what has driven millions of citizens to the streets are the tragic circumstances surrounding the deaths of two young men, writes anthropologist Linda Herrera in her text Two Faces of the Revolution at the blog Closer.
She tells the story of Mohammed Bouazizi in Tunesia who “overwhelmed by the burden of fines, debts, the humiliation of being serially harassed and beaten by police officers, and the indifference of government authorities", set himself on fire” and the Egyptian Khaled Said who was brutally murdered by Police.
She stresses that “contrary to a number of commentators in news outlets in North America and parts of Europe the two revolutions overtaking North Africa are not motivated by Islamism.” “These are inclusive freedom movements for civic, political, and economic rights” as this video below shows as well and is described in Robert Fisk’s report in the Independent: Secular and devout. Rich and poor. They marched together with one goal
Historian Mark LeVine has conducted a great interview with the Egyptian journalist and blogger Hossam el-Hamalawy.
He gives us the bigger picture, conntects the local with the global:
Revolutions don’t happen out of the blue. It’s not because of Tunisia yesterday that we have one in Egypt mechanically the next day. You can’t isolate these protests from the last four years of labour strikes in Egypt, or from international events such as the al-Aqsa intifada and the US invasion of Iraq.
Anthropologist Daniel Martin Varisco wrote two comments All Eyes on Egypt and Yemen is not Tunisia or Egypt. Another anthropologist, William O. Beeman, explains why an Islamic Government in Egypt Might Not Be So Terrible.
When looking for scientific publications, I made the same experience as Barbara Miller at anthopologyworks. Most articles deal with the (very distant) past. Miller concludes:
Clearly, you will have a better chance of finding out about early cat domestication, prehistoric ships, vessel residue analysis and even infant weaning during Roman times than you will have of learning about the social dimensions of today’s street protests.
(…)
I used the single search term “Egypt,” and I chose the publication dates of 2000-2010. Nearly 400 articles popped up. In scanning through them, I found that only 10 percent were related to contemporary social life. The other 90 percent of the references are dominated by archaeology with a sprinkling of biological anthropology as well as some non-anthro sources.
The sociology/anthropology repository of the American University of Cairo hosts several relevant publications, but is currently down (Mubarak shut down the internet a few days ago)
Mats Ivarsson from the University in Lund (Sweden) has written a paper that sounds interesting: Impact of authoritarian pressure on the political blogosphere in Egypt. He “proposes the hypothesis that an authoritarian state actually will strengthen the quality of the information disseminated in the blogosphere” (pdf)
Then I stumpled upon the thesis Youth and internet in Egyptian party politics : balancing authoritarianism with agency in a condition of negative peace by Tone-Rita Henriksen from the University of Tromsø, Norway (pdf).
For more round-ups see posts by anthro-blogger Erkan Saka who has been active as usual, se among others Registering a revolution. Hail to the brave people of Egypt. A roundup.
My favorite news souces are Al-Jazeera (especially their live stream) and - as usual - Global Voices.
There, Gina Cardenas highlights women’s role in her post Egypt: Protesting Women Celebrated Online, a topic that has not been given enough media attention.
Very interesting also Egypt: A Voice in the Blackout, Thanks to Google and Twitter, showcasing the power of Egyptian peoples’ transnational ties and new technology.
I close this post with Global Voices video collection Egypt: Solidarity Pours in from Around the World
Original post blogged on antropologi.info.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve written several blog posts on ASP.NET Routing where I provided various extensions to routing. Typically such blog posts included a zip download of the binaries and source code to allow readers to easily try out the code.
But that’s always been a real pain and most people don’t bother. But now, there’s a better way to share such code. Moving forward, I’ll be using NuGet packages as a means of sharing my code samples.
In the case of my routing extensions, I’ve compiled them into a solution I call RouteMagic (source is available on CodePlex). This solution includes two packages, RouteMagic.Mvc (extensions specific to ASP.NET MVC Routing) and RouteMagic (more general ASP.NET Routing extensions). The RouteMagic.Mvc package depends on the RouteMagic package.
These packages are available in the NuGet feed!
After installing the RouteMagic.Mvc package, you’ll have the following features available to you.
The source code for the solution contains the following projects:
This is just a pet project I put together based on various blog posts I’ve written. I’d love to see some of these ideas eventually make it into the Framework. But until then, you’ll probably see these things make it into Subtext for sure!
The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Sustained Engineering (SE) team released Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Update Rollup 15 on Thursday, January 13, 2011.
The links below will take you to the necessary information about Update Rollup 15.
General details about Update Rollup 15
Update Rollup 15 is cumulative. However, the Update Rollup 15 CRM Client and Data Migration Client packages require Update Rollup 7 to be installed. For all other CRM components, you do not need to install any previous Update Rollups prior to Update Rollup 15.
The Update Rollup 15 download contains updates for the 40 supported Language Packs. Prior to installing the Update Rollup 15 Language Pack, you must install the original Language Pack. If you have Language Packs installed, you should:
1. Download the Update Rollup 15 Language Pack
2. Install the Update Rollup 15 Language Pack
3. De-provision the Language Pack
4. Re-provision the Language Pack
How to get support for Update Rollup 15
For support, please contact Microsoft Product Support. For a complete list of Microsoft Product Support Services telephone numbers and information about support costs, visit the following Microsoft Web site: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;[LN];CNTACTMS.
Note: In special cases, charges ordinarily incurred for support calls may be canceled if a Microsoft Support Professional determines that a specific update will resolve your problem. The usual support costs will apply to additional support questions and issues that do not qualify for the specific update in question.
Cheers,
