Hugh Brody is an anthropologist and writer, whose books include Inishkillane - change and decline in the west of Ireland, Maps and Dreams, Living Arctic, Indians on Skid Row, The Peoples’ Land, Means of Escape, and The Other Side of Eden. He has made a number of TV documentaries and co-wrote and directed the movie nineteen-nineteen. He was a member of the Morse Commission, the independent review of the Sardar Sarovar projects in India’s Narmada Valley.

Recent articles

The catastrophic HIV/Aids pandemic in southern Africa threatens even its most vigorous economy, Botswana. But it is displacement and dispossession that create the greatest vulnerability to HIV. And it may be that rights to land and a people's level of confidence in their own identity are a central means of protection against ravaging illness. Is this what we can learn from the Botswana margins?

Even in remote areas of Namibia and Botswana, and in the Inuit region of Nunavut in Canada, the distant Iraq war enters social discourse and everyday encounters. War is both near and far. Hugh Brody journeys to a landscape where territory, history and mind all meet, to ask: are the world’s indigenous people ancestors or contemporaries of the rest of mankind?

The history of Australia is often told as a story of how settlers made productive use of an empty land, thus saving Aboriginal peoples from destitution. Modern Aboriginal land campaigns are based on different rememberings, finds Hugh Brody. They ‘reclaim’ the past as well as ‘claim’ the present, and in the process weave a unique tapestry of memory, ownership – and opportunity for a future.

In southern Africa, there is intense debate about how ‘real’ is the claim of Bushmen/San people in the southern Kalahari area to their land and even their identity. The challenge to them often questions their lack of ‘purity’. At its core, says Hugh Brody, is an assertion of power that seeks to entrap. In response, we need to observe what is actually happening in San lives today, where the creative and the impure are finding modern expression.

A century-old woman died two months ago near the South Africa–Namibia border. Her knowledge of N|u, a rare language of the southern Kalahari, was a key element in the campaign by the Bushmen/San people to recover their ancestral lands. In paying her warm tribute in his first From the edge column, Hugh Brody sees her life as a window on to key contemporary questions of identity, history, and belonging.