• Publication of Ann Dunham’s revised dissertation
Working with the American Anthropological Association, Duke University Press has published “Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia,” a revision of Ann Dunham’s doctoral dissertation in anthropology. President Obama’s mother was trained as an economic anthropologist at the University of Hawai’i and worked in Indonesia as a development consultant. Duke is publishing the book as part of its list of books that critique conventional foreign aid and offer ways to rethink it. Dunham’s dissertation, completed in the early 1990s, prefigures much of today’s discussion in development circles of small-scale entrepreneurship, self-help, and micro-credit financing. The book includes rare photographs of Dunham in Indonesia and a foreword by Maya Soetoro-Ng, Dunham’s daughter and President Obama’s half-sister. I hope the Press comps the White House and that it receives a prominent place there.
• Following one’s nose to a good mate?
Several news sources picked up on an article published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology about mate selection among mandrills, the world’s largest monkey. A team of researchers followed 200 mandrills living in the tropical rainforest of Gabon in central Africa observing their behavior and collecting DNA samples. They found that female mandrills choose mates with different genes from their own. They are apparently guided to genetically dissimilar mates by their acute sense of smell. The adaptive outcome is that they have healthy babies with strong immune systems. Dr. Joanna Setchell of the University of Durham led the study and comments that mandrills are much like humans so the findings have relevance to human mate selection and the potential power of smell as an underlying factor. One important complication is that the study was done on a relatively closed population of mandrills, so it may have more relevance, Setchell and her colleagues suggest in their paper, to closed and isolated human populations with minimal migration to introduce new genes. I wonder if the team is aware of the many groups of people, from the Middle East to South India, that practice close-cousin or uncle-niece marriages which involve spouses with very similar genetic structures. Why are these many thousands of people not behaving like mandrills? Is their sense of smell perhaps damaged by life outside the rainforest and no longer effective in sniffing out a genetically different spouse? Or is the problem that, in these cultures, a woman doesn’t choose her husband and thus is unable to follow her nose? Or are humans, with all their culturally variable baggage, really not so similar to mandrills after all?
• Knowledge in cultural anthropology for war…and more
Wired Magazine offers a brief portrait of Montgomery McFate, a cultural anthropologist and prominent proponent of the US military using anthropological methods and approaches. She is currently Senior Social Science Advisor at Army Human Terrain System. Starting with the war in Iraq and impetus provided by General Petraeus, the US military has increasingly incorporated anthropologists and other social scientists in operations. The Wired piece points out that HT involvement of anthropologists “might be the start of something bigger” beyond the battlefield including more attention to training military personnel in cultural awareness, more effective intelligence gathering by “hanging around with regular folks” (not okay for anthropologists if done under cover or with any possibility of causing harm to those regular folks) and strategically addressing an array of global issues such as the rising China, a soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Iran, and a resurgent Russia. McFate is quoted as saying that “We can’t have effective strategy without cultural knowledge…” and, maybe we can figure out “how to engage Iran to get the outcome we want without going to war.” That would be a good thing, and a goal to which many anthropologists would willingly contribute–if they can do so within the bounds of anthropological ethics.
• Culinary anthropology
Journalist and culinary ethnographer Kayla Wexelberg discusses the cultural importance of food consumption choices, time allocation for food preparation, and sociality in a brief article in The Durango Herald.
anthropologyworks 