• One very expensive lady
Front-page articles in many newspapers and other outlets, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, heralded the long-awaited publication of research findings about “Ardi,” a 4.4 million year old hominin fossil discovered in Aramis, Ethiopia in 1992-1993 and preliminarily described in 1994. Tim White, paleontologist and Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, discovered the first fossil evidence of Ardipithecus ramidus and has headed a comprehensive research project in the area since then to accumulate more fossil and contextual evidence. He is the lead author or a contributing author of 11 papers about Ardi published in a special issue of Science. The impressive scope of the articles, from botany and other aspects of the habitat to discussion of her (the researchers seem confident of Ardi’s gender) skull, teeth, forelimbs, and locomotion, may help explain the very long time that it took for these reports to appear. The “public” in the US may be little aware that their tax dollars funded most of the research (8 grants from the National Science Foundation), and they likely have not been waiting with baited breath for the findings, though many paleoanthropologists have been. I hope the public will appreciate the importance of the studies and do not fall into the trap of believing wacko headlines on the Internet about how Ardi “proves that man is not descended from apes.” White et al. owe it to the public to get the message out widely and soon.
• Banking on ethnography
An ethnography of Wall Street banking is touted as required reading for business students by the capital markets editor of the Financial Times, Gillian Tett. Tett, who earned a PhD in social anthropology before becoming a journalist, reviewed Karen Ho’s book, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street in the FT. Tett admits to being embarrassed when bankers asked her about her academic past because they considered anthropology to be “hippy” and lacking the status of economics and other “hard” sciences. “Not anymore” she says, since the economic crisis, which has shaken bankers’ faith in their economic models and demonstrated the need for a grasp of “cultural dynamics” in understanding how finance works. I hope she’s right. I haven’t witnessed much shaken faith on this side of the Atlantic. Turning to Liquidated: the author, Karen Ho teaches in the Anthropology Department at the University of Minnesota. Before becoming an anthropology professor, she was a banker with a Wall Street giant. Her fieldwork reveals the “habitus” (from Pierre Bourdieu) of bankers and shows how bankers’ rhetoric of “shareholder values” and “free market capitalism” appears to them as “truth” but is actually part of a system full of contradictions and, overall, delusion. Tett closes her review by saying, “I, for one, would vote that Ho’s account becomes mandatory reading on any MBA (or investment banking course).”
• Cooking is hot
Possibly the most reviewed anthropology book of 2009 is Richard Wrangham’s popular account of the role of cooking in human evolution, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. by Richard Wrangham. In the latest of a spate of reviews, FT writer Harry Eyres tells how he is totally won over by the book, joining the ranks of other writers in the “mainstream media” who all seem to love the book. Wrangham, who is professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University, has found a hot topic and produced a readable account of it for nonspecialists. As a strong non-fan of Wrangham’s earlier popular book (with Dale Peterson), Demonic Males, I am, however, trying to read Catching Fire with an open mind. So far, I am finding his evidence for the role of cooking in making us human more convincing than his evidence for a shared heritage with chimpanzees in explaining male violence.
• Anthropology of footwear
An essay in the Wall Street Journal’s livemit.com cites a 2008 study by Erik Trinkaus, professor of physical anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, about the first “supportive footwear.” Anatomical evidence from the middle Upper Paleolithic in Europe indicates that the bones of little toes became much less strongly built during that period. This change suggests that human ancestors of the time were wearing some kind of supportive footwear. This research throws into question the claim that running barefoot is the most adaptive way for go, as is argued in Christopher McDougall’s controversial bestseller, Born to Run (see a related posting earlier in this blog).
[For more information, see Erik Trinkaus, Anatomical Evidence for Antiquity of Human Footwear Use” Journal of Archaeological Science 32: 1515-1526, 2005.]
anthropologyworks 