Author Archives: Kenan Malik

SCIENCE, MYTH AND HISTORY

December 21, 2012 by Kenan Malik

This is the third in a series of extracts that I have been running from my book Strange Fruit. The extracts tell the story of ‘Kennewick Man’ and explore what the debate around a 9000-year old skeleton reveals about current ideas of culture and race. The first extract looked at questions cultural ownership, the second at the issue of race. This third extract links the two in a discussion of the relationship between science, myth and history, and the way […]

Categories: Science & Technology • Tags: anthropology, clovis, creation myths, human origins, indigenous culture, jonathan marks, kennewick man, native americans, paul martin, racial science, racism, romanticism, vine deloria

ANCIENT RACE WARS AND MODERN RACE SCIENCE

December 18, 2012 by Kenan Malik

I published last week an extract from my book Strange Fruit which looked at the ‘Kennewick Man’ controversy and at what that controversy told us about contemporary ideas about cultural identity and cultural ownership. The Kennewick Man debate gets also to the heart of another major contemporary controversy: that over the meaning of ‘race’. In this extract from Strange Fruit, I look at how discussions about a 9000-year old skeleton laid bare our understanding (and misunderstanding) of race. My own […]

Categories: Race & Immigration, Science & Technology • Tags: anthropology, craniometry, earnest hooton. ainu, human origins, kennewick man, native americans, race, racial categories, racial science

THE BATTLE OF THE BONES

December 15, 2012 by Kenan Malik

I published recently a transcript of a radio documentary I had made that explored the question of ‘Who owns culture?’. Perhaps the most fractious of recent debates around this question has been over ‘Kennewick Man’, an ancient skeleton found on the banks of the Columbia River in America’s Washington State. The 9000-year old skeleton became the focus for two major controversies: What is race? And who owns history? I tell the story of Kennewick Man in my book Strange Fruit: […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Science & Technology • Tags: anthropology, creation myths, cultural ownership, cultural repatriation, culture, david hurst thomas, human origins, human remains, indigenous culture, kennewick man, nagpra, native americans, unesco, vine deloria

WHO OWNS CULTURE?

December 11, 2012 by Kenan Malik

I mentioned in my last post the attempts by the UN, UNESCO and WIPO to give certain groups, particularly indigenous groups, control over traditional culture, and of the dangers inherent in such an approach. I am publishing here the transcript of a BBC Radio 4 Analysis programme that I wrote and presented in 2004 which explored the issue of ‘Who owns culture?’. You can listen to an audio of the programme, too. ‘Who owns culture?’, Analysis, BBC Radio 4, 29 July […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: anthropology, british museum, broadcasts, cultural ownership, cultural policy, cultural repatriation, culture, human remains, indigenous culture, museum of london, museums, neil Macgregor, unesco

THE FIRST AMENDMENT VIEW VS THE HUMAN RIGHTS APPROACH

December 8, 2012 by Kenan Malik

I took part in a meeting in Geneva last week convened by the UN to help advise the Special Rapporteur for Cultural Rights on a report she is presenting next year on artistic freedom of expression. The UN’s record on free speech has, particularly in recent years, been abysmal, so it was a useful and fascinating discussion, illuminating many of the contemporary faultlines of free speech. All the participants, activists from around the world, were free speech advocates. The issues that […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: cultural policy, culture, free speech, hate speech, human rights, unesco, united nations

THE WRONG SOLUTION TO THE WRONG PROBLEM

December 1, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Everybody believes in press freedom. But what is it to have a free press? And how do we protect it? These are the questions raised by the publication of the Leveson report into the ‘culture practice and ethics’ of the British press and the debate that has both preceded and followed it. In his report, Lord Justice Leveson talks of his ‘outrage’ at the ‘havoc wreaked on the lives of innocent people’ by the unethical and criminal behaviour of sections of the British […]

Categories: Britain, Free Speech • Tags: first amendment, free speech, journalism, leveson inquiry, liberalism, liberties, murdoch

AS BEWITCHING TO THE EYE AS TO THE EAR

November 25, 2012 by Kenan Malik

There are few musical instruments that are, to my mind, as beguiling or as sensuous as the cello. And not just to the ear. The cello is equally bewitching to the eye. I have for many years been trying to learn the instrument. I suspect, though, that these photos may be a better tribute to the cello than my playing ever will be.

Categories: Photos

IN DEFENCE OF DEMOCRACY

November 21, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Jacques Berlinerblau has responded to my review of his book How to Be Secular. He thinks that, unlike his conservative Christian critics, I have not ‘take[n] the time to understand what [his] arguments actually are’ and have made instead a series of ‘misleading claims’ about them. I disagree with most of Berlinerblau’s list of what he regards as my misleading claims. I don’t want to go line by line through that list refuting each and every claim. I do, however, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Culture & Books, Politics • Tags: democracy, jacques berlinerblau, locke, religion, secularism

IN DEFENCE OF THE BBC. SORT OF.

November 15, 2012 by Kenan Malik

The BBC, everyone seems to agree, is in crisis. Its Director General has resigned after less than 8 weeks in the job, its most distinguished current affairs programme may be shut down in shame, and there is talk of the BBC itself being slimmed down, even broken up. But of what exactly does the crisis consist? And what is to be done about it? At the heart of the current debate about the BBC are three issues that constantly get conflated. […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: bbc, child abuse, conspiracy theories, journalism, lord reith, public service broadcasting

REACHING FOR A MORAL HIGH GROUND LONG SINCE CROWDED

November 11, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Today’s Premiership clash between Chelsea and Liverpool provides a good opportunity for me to write about something about which I have been thinking for a long time – the controversy over racism in English football. Chelsea and Liverpool are the two clubs at the heart of that controversy. Earlier this year, Luis Suarez, Liverpool’s Uruguayan forward, was banned for eight matches for calling Manchester United’s Patrice Evra a ‘negrito’. Suarez insisted that this was colloquial Spanish for ‘mate’. An FA disciplinary […]

Categories: Free Speech, Race & Immigration, Sport • Tags: anti-racism, football, hate speech, racism

HUMANISM, ANTIHUMANISM AND THE RADICAL TRADITION

November 6, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Back in September, I wrote an essay about Judith Butler and the controversy over her winning the Adorno Prize. It touched off a debate in Pandaemonium, less because of my defence of Butler’s right to win the prize than my criticism of her work and, in particular, of her poststructuralism. I noted then that I have written little directly on Butler’s main theme, gender, but much, in the context of the debate about race, on poststructuralist / postmodernist conceptions of […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: anti-imperialism, antihumanism, claude levi-strauss, enlightenment, frantz fanon, freedom struggles, holocaust, humanism, imperialism, liberalism, lukacs, marx, marxism, nazism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, race, sartre, theodor adorno, tzvetan todorov, universalism, zygmunt bauman

A FOX DOES NOT MAKE A GOOD PROTECTOR OF THE HEN COOP

November 2, 2012 by Kenan Malik

The Canadian government is in the process of setting up an Office of Religious Freedom. Religious freedom is about the right of people to hold certain beliefs, and to act upon them, so long as in so doing they do not harm others or discriminate against them in the public sphere. It is the right to be free from interference from other faiths and from the state. For a government to set up an official body to oversee religious freedom […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: canada, identity politics, multiculturalism, religion, religious freedom, secularism

HOW TO BE SECULAR [PART 2]

October 29, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Jacques Berlinerblau, whoses book How to be Secular I reviewed in my last post, took umbrage on Twitter at my characterisation of his argument as anti-democratic. Twitter is not the best medium to have nuanced debate on these kinds of issues, but it was an interesting discussion (the heart of which was a debate not so much about secularism as about democracy) so I have curated the tweets via Storify (slightly reordered to make better sense of the discussion), with some comments thrown in. I hope, however that Jacques […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: atheism, democracy, religion, religious freedom, secularism

HOW TO BE SECULAR? PERHAPS NOT

October 27, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Back at the beginning of the US Presidential campaign Mitt Romney accused Barack Obama of launching ‘a war on religion’ and of wanting ‘to establish a religion in America known as secularism’. The irony is that Obama himself, even before entering the White House, had made clear his own disdain for secularism. In his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama had chided fellow Democrats for equating ‘tolerance with secularism’. In embracing secularism, he wrote, Democrats ‘forfeit the moral language that […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: atheism, locke, new atheism, religion, religious freedom, secularism

LONDON CALLING

October 19, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Last month I posted my collection of favourite songs about New York. Now it’s London’s turn. Like the previous list, this one is personal, eclectic, even eccentric. Some great tracks (from Madness, Bowie, T Rex, the Jam, Blur, Ian Dury, etc) are missing – I had room only for 20. Despite the title of the post (and the image) London Calling is not on the list. I don’t much like it. (White Man) in Hammersmith Palais is, on the other hand, […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: london, music