Marlous van den Akker, a PhD student from the department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (Leiden University), started in 2010 with a research project on the Mount Kenya UNESCO World Heritage Site. This site, which entangles many groups such as conservation NGOs, farmers cultivating Mount Kenya’s slopes, tourism and safari industry employees and the Kenya Wildlife Service responsible for management of the site, was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1997 as an outstanding example of natural heritage.

Within this research, UNESCO interventions are taken as point of departure to examine the ways in which different groups experience UNESCO’s heritage claim on the territory. The site’s conservation processes have become a catalyst, absorbing not only displaced or disenfranchised people, but also urban professionals and local elites. Mount Kenya is therefore approached as constituting a particular heritage scene in which the area’s landscape is understood as a temporal and multivocal construction. Arguing that the separation of cultural heritage sites from natural heritage sites (a division which not only prevails in UNESCO policy and practices but equally in the majority of heritage studies) can be questioned, this research problematizes notions of authenticity, ownership and agency.

Dorrit van Dalen will undertake a research entitled: Muslim views of tobacco in central sudanic Africa (17th to 19th century). There exists, within the Muslim world, an image of African Islam as backward and of African muslims as relatively isolated from the rest of the umma, the global community of the prophet. But almost as soon as Islam reached central Sudanic Africa (roughly the region around Lake Chad), before the tenth century A.D., it’s elite was interested in intellectual exchange with the heartlands of the world religion. They invited learned Muslims from Egypt and the Maghreb and wrote to them for advice. They travelled as pilgrims to the Holy Cities and on their way they spent time in Cairo to follow the lectures of famous scholars there. Societies from west to east Africa adopted Arabic as the language in which they developed their own scholarship.

Especially in the 17th century African scholars participated in the heated debate among jurists in the Middle East and North Africa about the acceptibility of tobacco, which had been introduced there around 1600. Soon, muslims in the central sudanic towns and villages developed their own point of view. The attitude and arguments in both layers of society diverged significantly from those that prevailed in the centers of orthodox Islam.

This research is based on Arabic manuscripts from the region, on scholarly as well as popular texts. The aim of the study is, on the one hand, to draw conclusions about the place of central sudanic muslim scholars in the wider muslim world, and on the other hand, to shed more light on the social changes that took place in the region in a time when Islam ‘emancipated’ from the religion of an urban elite into a popular culture. One of the hypotheses is that the foreign commodity tobacco, together with concepts from Islam, provided the tools to mark new boundaries in a changing society.

Dorrit van Dalen is an anthropologist and arabist.

One of the most continuous and intense forms of cultural interaction may be observed in Middle America where the Spanish conquest (1519/21) has led to a complex “hybridization” between the indigenous cultures and Europe during almost 500 years. The research of Ilona Heijnen will concentrate on a yet enigmatic process and result of interaction that was not forced by the (well-studied) efforts of conversion to Christianity; the introduction and use of symbols of European astrology. The pre-colonial Mesoamerican prophetic calendar and its divinatory system met a European system, both expressions of the perception and interpretation of time, and its social implications (e.g. cultural memory and identity). A tangible result of the interaction of these two divinatory systems in the colonial period is the translated Spanish astrological almanac (reportorio) into Nahuatl.

This project will proceed the study of such a key document from the Tropenmuseum Amsterdam (ms 3523-2) as well as researching European astrological elements in divinations in present Nahua communities. By combining philological, historical and anthropological research stretching from colonial times to the present, light will be shed on the dynamics of cultural interaction, specifically of time-related concepts and practices as well as the employment of foreign symbols introduced into a new cultural environment with emphasize on diviners as active agent enabling this process.

After Aniek Smit obtained her (research-) Masters degree in Social History at Leiden University (2009), she was selected as a PhD candidate focusing on western and non-western expats in the cities of The Hague and Jakarta during the last century. The movement of expats around the world is often considered to be a new phenomenon, studied in the context of current globalization. Nevertheless, there are many historical examples to think of, such as diplomats, merchants, bureaucrats, military officers, technicians, scholars and missionaries. To what extent can these new and old elites be considered as one category in Migration Theory? What settlement process did they experience, and when did these career migrants start to form expat-communities?

Focusing on differences in ethnic-, professional-, class-, religious- and gender-background this study aims to historicize the expat-phenomenon and conclude on the role of expats in shaping the character of these cities and the networks along the lines of which they moved. The archives of sending institutions, migrant-organizations and local newspapers will form the main resource for this study. The persisting image of the expat as predominantly western, footloose, and living within an expat-bubble will be challenged, by focusing on the role of career migrants in forging global links and interactions.