• Tristes tropes for a “towering” anthropologist
The French anthropologist who established the theory of “structuralism” outlived most other prominent anthropologists of his era. Claude Lévi-Strauss died over the weekend in Paris at the age of one hundred years. He left an impressive legacy in cultural anthropology and beyond. Reflecting his fame, his obituary appeared in media sources worldwide.
A founding father of the line of symbolic and interpretive anthropologists, Lévi-Strauss wrote books and articles showing how myths and practices should be understood as based on an underlying code of meaning based on dualities (culture and nature, male and female, raw and cooked). Such codes help people move through life by reducing the complexity of reality to something more manageable.
Richard Shweder, cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago, provides a summary of Lévi-Strauss’ approach that was picked up in several obituaries:
Logically deduce all the possible ways in which people can behave. Then, observe which behaviors are actually exhibited in the real world. Finally, try to explain the reason why some behaviors exist and why other logically possible behaviors are never seen. These reasons form a grammar, a structure, upon which all cultures are based.
Lévi-Strauss analyzed kinship systems, myths, food practices, and more. While the anthropological study of kinship and myths is on the wane in anthropology today, research in and beyond anthropology on food and cooking and cuisine is a hot item. It would be wonderful to hear what L-S would have to say about food studies now.
On another front, Lévi-Strauss argued that so-called “primitives” are not really different from modern people in thinking and behavior. And so he was an early champion of cultural relativism. My favorite Lévi-Strauss quotation comes from this area of his work, in his early book Tristes Tropiques: “No society is perfect.”
• The poor of rural Oregon in a “double bind”
Oregon has one of the highest rates of income inequality in the United States. In the past three decades, the wealthiest 1 percent tripled its income while that of the poorest remained flat. Joan Gross and Nancy Rosenberger, both cultural anthropologists at Oregon State University, conducted in-depth interviews with members of 76 low-income households in two rural communities of Benton County. Results indicate that people know what kinds of foods they should be eating, but that when money is short they cut back on food expenditures in favor of paying the mortgage, power costs, health care expenses, and material goods for their children such as decent clothing and computers so that they don’t face stigma in school. The people in the study, however, are reluctant to accept government assistance. One woman said: “My husband wouldn’t use food stamps. He’s got pride.” Hence the double bind. NewsRx Health covered this study which will appear in the December issue of the journal Food, Culture, and Society.
• Fewer androgens, more cooperation and sociality
Science News highlighted findings about primate sociality by Emma Nelson, the School of Archaeology at the University of Liverpool and Susanne Schultz, the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Among primates, exposure in the womb to higher levels of androgen is correlated with longer fourth fingers compared to index fingers. Nelson and Schultz have looked at finger length in several primate species and found a relationship between shorter fourth fingers and greater male-male cooperation and sociality. The coverage in Science News is a little hard to follow since the article states that digit ratio indicates lower levels of androgen exposure in orangutans and other Great Apes, thus explaining why these primates show high levels of cooperation and tolerance. Not the orangutans I’ve read about: aren’t they loners? Readers should consult the original article published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
• Newborns cry in code
BBC covered a comparative study of 60 healthy French and German babies found that French newborns cry with a rising accent while German babies’ cries have a falling tone, reflecting dominant patterns in French and German. This finding, from a study led by Kathleen Wermke of the University of Wurzberg and published in Current Biology, confirms earlier research indicating that fetuses learn sounds in the last three months of pregnancy. Wermke comments that neonates have learned “melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language” and that newborns are likely “highly motivated to imitate their mother’s behaviour in order to attract her and hence to foster bonding.” Isn’t it also likely that they can only reproduce melodies to which they have been consistently exposed? Or, if there’s a little Mozart in the womb, perhaps Mozart the neonate will compose innovative cry melodies? …lot’s to learn in this area.
• The changing culture of philanthropy in New Delhi
Erica Bornstein of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, conducted ethnographic research in New Delhi with Hindu philanthropists who have made large donations for temple construction or NGOs and with people who give small donations (dan) on a daily basis. Her findings are published in Cultural Anthropology and attracted the attention of Science Letter. Bornstein examines the interface between traditional giving practices and motivations, especially that of the most meritorious form which is anonymous (gupt dan) and emerging ideas of social responsibility and argues that new forms of philanthropy are emerging.
• From foot to head: biological anthropologists and archaeologists in PBS series on human evolution
Along with articles about archival works of Beethoven and creating headliners at The Onion, the art section in the New York Times last Tuesday included a “Television Review” piece about the three-part Nova series, “On Becoming Human.” It praises Dan Lieberman, biological anthropologist at Harvard University, for a “nicely accessible account” of why bipedalism evolved. Rick Potts, paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution in DC, is mentioned for his theory that the human brain increased in size as a way of coping with the climate instability that occurred about 2 million years ago. So, given global warming and instability in our times, the Potts theory predicts that humans brains will keep expanding. And our heads will get every larger.
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