I must apologize again to readers as there is again not enough time this week to produce the normal length column. I have just returned to Eivissa after some time away in Barcelona, where I stayed at the headquarters of the Society of Applied Ethnopshycology and Cognitive Studies. Now I must urgently finish the rather detailed text on elongated and overmodelled skulls that I mentioned two issues ago as the complete text must be emailed to the University of Minnesota by next Monday at the latest - on Tuesday, the co-ordinating professor there of the publication leaves for St Petersburg in Russia to look at skulls in the collection of the museum there.

One must admit that it is sometimes rather good to get off the island for a while, it clears the head and sometimes sets things in perspective. Barcelona is certainly a wonderful city and in the old days an Ibicencan peasant going there on a rare visit sometimes felt afterwards that there was nothing really more left to do in life, one had 'done it', 'seen the world', so to speak. Peasant trips to Mallorca were slightly more frequent, but still rare. Numerous hilarious stories abound amongst Ibicencan peasants about how one of their relatives or ancestors visited Mallorca (very much a different world from Eivissa) and managed to get the best of the Mallorcans. Mallorcans are traditionally regarded as arrogant and unappreciative of Ibicencan culture, an attitude that unfortunately persists to a large extent to the present day. Mallorcans traditionally looked upon Ibicencan peasants almost as illiterate savages (and this attitude persisted well into the 20^th century, to put it mildly) and a sort of condition of mutual antagonism, if not outright hostility, was a common feature of relations between the two islands. Ibicencos, however, often feel much more sympathy towards, and empathy with, the peoples of the island of Minorca. Ibicenco peasants would often class Mallorcans and people from Barcelona as 'forasters' (‘foreigners’), and they were. I just noticed a rather large graffiti in San Antonio this morning: “Si som Eivissencs, no som Catalans!”(‘Yes we are Eivissencs, we are not Catalans!”). And this is true, Ibicencos are a rather special people with a special history of their own and I fear very much for the future of their real identity. The process of 'Catalanization' is proceeding apace, the form of Catalan being taught in the schools here is not the ancient form traditionally spoken on the islands, with its own more ancient additives. Everyone is being fooled by the sort of 'Catalan media' that, for its own political ends is trying to create the idea of a Greater Catalunya, but without really respecting the special identities of particular enclaves in this part of the world. I fear that unless real Ibicencos make a strong stand against being fooled by this process, their special place in the world will be gone and almost forgotten within the next couple of generations.

But we are all fooled by the media. Here I am talking about the international press, TV, magazines and so on. The general public is not really given the full story of what is going on in the world, and are often given a rather biased view at that. 'Corruption', for example, is sort of blindly assumed to be something that is really only part of the 'Developing World', whilst media readers and viewers are not really made aware that 'corruption' (of maybe a less blatant kind, but involving much larger sums of money, or whatever) is very much part and parcel of modern western European society (I refer readers to this week's edition of 'Newsweek' magazine, which only scratches the surface) and also aspects of it are very much part of the capitalist system. Here I refer particularly to the US, where uncontrolled capitalism has bred a type of culture that some respected American sociologists have even classed as 'crimogenic', a type of competitive culture that, because of its nature, actually promotes what might actually be classed as certain types of criminal activities. It is rather sad, one must say, to see that business, politics and the media seem to tend to be promoting this type of culture around the world. The public really now need to be taught how to sift through the media and be able to discern what is important, what is relevant, what is true, what is false, what is 'disinformation' and what is just 'sugary gloss'. Some respected journalists are so concerned that the real messages of what is really happening in the world now are not reaching the public that they are beginning to produce their own news reports outside of the system. An excellent example of this is available, free of charge, on your own computer if you are linked to Internet. Log on to http://www.MediaLens.org and take it from there.

Good reading!