| Africa, Sudan, United Nations, climate change, drought, environment, human rights, indigenous peoples, intellectual property, law, legal, social justice, traditional knowledge, |
Drylands cover 40% of the earth’s terrestrial surface and are home to over 2 billion people, the majority of whom belong to the poorest people in the world (MA 2005b). Most of the ‘poorest’ people living in drylands are pastoralists, hunter-gatherers and other traditional communities that can be considered as indigenous peoples according to international standards (ILO Convention No.169 Article 1). Dryland ecosystems are characterized by the limited availability of water and consequently a more...
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Noting that there seemed to be relatively few young painters emerging in the region, in January 2003 the Ethnic Arts Foundation established a free Mithila Art Institute (MIA) in Madhubani, Bihar - to encourage and help train a new generation of Mithila painters. In March 2003, twenty-five students from the surrounding region were selected in a blind competition – from over 100 applicants – for a year-long course of study with the MIA Director, Santosh Kumar Das, one of the major contemporar more...
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Although ritual wall painting by women goes back hundreds of years in the historic Mithila region, painting on paper for sale only began in 1967. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the paintings and several painters, especially Ganga Devi and Sita Devi, gained great popularity in India and internationally. However, in 1977, while conducting research in the Mithila, anthropologist Raymond Owens observed that commercial dealers were offering only minimal prices for rapidly executed, mass produced p more...
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In general, Mithili women take charge of the ritual life of the families, and provide the wall and floor paintings that accompany the household’s daily, annual, and life cycle rituals. In painting the marriage chamber in their home, the khobar-ghar, the oldest women of the family whose husband is still alive and who has living children will begin the painting with a red dot at the center-point of to east wall. Then the best available artist in the extended family draws in the major figures and more...
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Citizen artists successfully rebuild the social infrastructure in six communities devastated by war, repression and dislocation. Author William Cleveland tells remarkable stories from Northern Ireland, Cambodia, South Africa, United States (Watts, Los Angeles), aboriginal Australia, and Serbia, about artists who resolve conflict, heal unspeakable trauma, give voice to the forgotten and disappeared, and restitch the cultural fabric of their communities.
Art can be a powerful agent of personal, more...
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For centuries the Ngobe people have lived by the rivers in the remote hills of western Panama, but now the government of Panama sees profit in those rivers, and they have given concessions to subsidiaries of the American company AES to build a series of large hydroelectric dams. The dams would flood the Ngobe's traditional territory, destroy their homes and fields, and break apart communities and families. To clear the way for the dams, the AES subsidiary and the Panamanian government are pressu more...
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Fortified Armenian monasteries in Iran were added to the new sites inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List on 6 July. The Armenian Monastic Ensembles in Iran, in the north-west of the country, consists of three monastic ensembles of the Armenian Christian faith: St Thaddeus and St Stepanos and the Chapel of Dzordzor. These edifices - the oldest of which, St Thaddeus, dates back to the 7th century – are examples of outstanding universal value of the Armenian architectural and decorative tra more...
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