Lloyd Warner's book 'A Black Civilization' is a comprehensive ethnography of the Murngin (Yolngu) people of northern Australia. Published in 1937, it's one of the v few detailed accounts of Aboriginal warfare amongst other topics. A thread:
He opens with a stark declaration that the Murngin couldn't exist without warfare, that it is essential to the structure of their society.
One of the primary reasons for this is the polygynous basis of sex relations. Each married man has an average of three and a half wives, leaving a reservoir of unattached young men. These guys are the fodder for social violence and are the primary victims and aggressors.
This brutal imbalance is often theorised to be a evolutionary mechanism behind sex relations, but it's rare to see it so clearly demonstrated.
"warfare, then, is one of the mechanisms on which polygyny is based"
Causes of warfare are pinned down to four major reasons - blood revenge, theft of a woman, black magic and improperly gazing upon the clan totem.
"the idea underlying most Murngin warfare is that the same injury should be inflicted upon the enemy group that one's own group has suffered"
A socially accepted form of death was for women who spied upon sacred male rituals or who polluted the production of emblems and totemic objects with their presence. Noone objected to such offences being punished lethally, even across clan lines.
The six kinds of Murngin warfare - a camp fight, secret murder, night raid, open fight, pitched battle and ceremonial fight. Also a kind of 'women's combat' which apparently isn't one of the main six.
The arms and weapons of the Murngin.
The camp fight or Nirimaoi, usually a result of adultery or cuckolding. Sounds like a classic bar scrap, lots of bravado and posturing and rarely ends in death.
The secret murder, the 'Narrup', is usually a surprise attack on a sleeping person. Despite one person doing the slaying, the whole clan is held responsible and an older man assumed to be the 'pusher' or agitator.
The 'Maringo' or 'death adder' night raid is a lethal extra-clan attack, intended to avenge a death. A ritual procedure involving the dead man's relics is performed at camp before the men use a 'snake' formation to attack their enemy.
The 'Milwerangel' or general fight has no great ceremonial basis, but rather a quick skirmish.
The 'Gaingar' is a more serious and organised form of pitched battle. These occur after a hysteria of emotion has been reached after tit for tat killings and a resolution is needed to prevent further deaths.
Finally, the 'Makarata', or ceremonial peace making fight is a blend of highly controlled ritual, dance and machismo, but directed towards placating emotions with minimal bloodshed.
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The last person tried under a British Witchcraft Act was in 1944, but not for the reasons you might expect
Helen Duncan, a Scottish medium, spent much of her time doing battle with scientists and sceptics over her supposed abilities to vomit up 'ectoplasm' during seances, as well as her photography showing 'spirits' over her shoulder as she communed with the dead
Most of this stuff was amusingly ridiculous, she would regurgitate cheesecloth covered in egg and claim it to be ectoplasm. Her critics made her swallow methylene blue tablets or tried to use X-rays to show up her fraudulence to the public.
Afrocentrism is probably unique amongst ethnocentric ideologies for its claims that basically every nation and people everywhere on earth were originally black. A thread:
At this point most people are familiar with this line - that the first Europeans were black.
But this goes all the way. The Anglo-Saxons were black, as were many royals and important figures in English history.
Before there was a Small Boats Crisis in the English Channel there was a Small Boats Crisis in Australia, and before that crisis started there was the Tampa Affair - that time when a Norwegian freight ship carrying Hazara Afghan migrants was boarded by Australian special forces..
On August 24th 2001 the rickety fishing boat, the Palapa, was disintegrating somewhere around 150km north of Christmas Island. Over 400 souls were aboard, mostly Hazara Afghans, with some women and children. They had been battered by storms and now faced sinking into the sea.
The closest vessel was the container ship, the MV Tampa. Responding to an SOS, Australian authorities guided the Tampa to the Palapa using a plane. The migrants were dehydrated, some unconscious and some had dysentery. Captain Arne Rinnan set a course for Indonesia.
Skin whitening cosmetics are an $8 billion a year industry, and going up. Bought predominantly by women, as many as 75% of respondents to surveys admitted to trying to whiten their skin using commercial or DIY products.
Most major companies sell some version of these lotions and creams around the world, with huge customer bases in southeast Asia, Africa, India, and Latin America. Terms like 'glowing', 'brightness' and 'natural fairness' are used along with 'whitening' to market the products.
Adverts point out that fairer skinned women have more successes in life, in their careers, love lives and social mobility. Many are quite blatant about the connection between whiter skin and opportunity.
Some extracts from Edgerton's book Sick Societies concerning the status of women in certain forager and pastoralist cultures.
Edgerton's main point in this book is to question the idea that all traditions and customs are necessarily healthy or adaptive - for instance the widespread habit in many cultures of denying women, even pregnant women, equal access to high quality foods.
There are many rationalisations for making women carry the heavy stuff, but ultimately men don't want to do it.
One of the benefits of multiculturalism is that the NHS has finally woken up to the problem of jinns and the evil eye, a topic they have been neglecting for decades. Here we see an NHS workshop correcting this oversight, helpfully delivered only in Bengali.
Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and other 'Asian Muslims' actually suffer worse mental health outcomes compared to other ethnicities - exacerbated no doubt by our ethnocentric blind spot over black magic and jinn affliction.
Jinn do indeed have like their own children and stuff, which is why we need to break the stigma of visiting a wise man when your mental health is not ok.