• Tell it to the Marines
NPR aired an interview with cultural anthropologist Paula Holmes-Eber who teaches “operational culture” at Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia. Classes include discussion of cultural sensitivity and the cultural/social consequences of military presence and military actions, such as blowing up a bridge.
• Nacirema craziness goes global
In an article called “The Americanization of Mental Illness” in The New York Times Magazine, Ethan Watters (blog) describes how Western, especially American, globalization includes the spread of Western/American understandings of mental health and illness. He points to some of the negative consequences of this trend.
In discussing why people diagnosed with schizophrenia in developing countries fare better than those in industrialized countries, he draws on the work of medical anthropologist Juli McGruder of the University of Puget Sound. McGruder’s research in Zanzibar shows how Swahili spiritual beliefs and healing practices help the ill person by avoiding stigma and keeping social and family ties intact. Note: Nacirema is “American” spelled backwards.
• Guardians of the nameless dead
The bodies of hundreds of victims of political violence in Colombia are often disposed of by being thrown into rivers. Sometimes the bodies wash up on the river bank. WIS News describes the work of one local civil servant, Maria Ines Mejia, who spends time recovering bodies from the Cauca River and thereby helping authorities record the deaths and chronicle the killings.
Maria Victoria Uribe, an anthropologist with Colombia’s National Commission of Reconciliation and Reparation, names people like Mejia as “unknown heroes.” Michelle Hamilton, an expert in body composition who directs the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State University, notes that “…you can imagine trying to grab onto a water-logged body with the skin slipping off. It can come off in your hands.”
• Celebration and warning
Survival International’s “weighty coffee-table book,” We Are One: A Celebration of Tribal Peoples, is reviewed in the Ecologist. The unity and diversity of indigenous peoples around the world is celebrated in beautiful photographs and through the words of tribal and non-tribal people. Given that Survival International commissioned the book, it also expectedly contains a message of deep concern about the dangers to survival that so many indigenous/tribal cultures face.
• Who rules?
Janine Wedel is a cultural anthropologist and professor of public policy at George Mason University. Her book, The Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market, was reviewed in the Financial Times and by Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post. Wedel has appeared at several book launches in D.C.
• The new India has no room for the old, or does it?
An article about the “aging crisis” in India quotes Sarah Lamb, professor of anthropology at Brandeis University and expert on old age in India. Referring to the still relatively high fertility rate in India compared to Japan and Italy, Lamb comments that “Times are changing but there is still not a shortage of family members to look after the elderly… There’s really only been a modest increase of elderly living alone.”
• All we like sheep
Sweetgrass is a 101-minute long documentary about the dying practice of sheepherding in Montana. It is the creation of a husband-wife team of anthropologists: Ilisa Barash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. A reviewer, in Boxoffice, points out that the film is also “a formal treatise on our growing distance from the practices that sustain us…”
• Groups matter
Research conducted by Oxford University’s Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology indicates that that people who exercise in groups benefit from it more than people who exercise alone. Comparisons were made between two sets of members of the crew team. Those who exercised on rowing machines together released more endorphins than the solo exercisers. The findings will be published in Biology Letters. (Here‘s one source among several.)
• Hominids at sea
Science News reports on discoveries by Thomas Strasser, an archaeologist and professor of art history at Providence College, Rhode Island, of double-edged cutting implements in southwestern Crete dating to 130,000 years ago.
In presenting his findings at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Archaeology, Strasser said: We’re just going to have to accept that, as soon as hominids left Africa, they were long-distance sea-farers and rapidly spread all over the place.” Large numbers of hand axes at several sites suggest a fairly substantial population. The oldest known settlements on Crete, previous to Strasser’s work, are dated to 9,000 years ago.
• The message is in the monkey
A Scientific American podcast tells how macaques in Nepal who live in close proximity to humans may be “sentinels” for lead exposure. Preliminary findings show high lead content in the macaques, especially the juveniles. Further research is needed to demonstrate whether high levels of lead in the macaques are predictive of lead poisoning in humans. The study is published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
• Neanderthal jewelry
Archaeologist João Zilhão of the University of Bristol and colleagues have found 50,000-year-old jewelry at Neanderthal sites in southeastern Spain, dating from more than 10,000 years before modern humans arrived in Europe.
The finds include some shells intentionally painted with orange pigment with holes of a similar size likely used for hanging. The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Zilhão interprets the shells as statements of identity that “tell other people who you are.” Further, he notes that these objects are similar to those found in early modern human contexts in Africa, suggesting behavioral and mental similarities between Neanderthals and modern humans.
anthropologyworks 