Anthro in the news 2/8/10

• Son of an anthropologist, President Obama also a yuppie
According to an article in the New Republic, one factor contributing to President Barack Obama’s inability to connect with the working class is that he comes from a family of professionals, including his mother who was a cultural anthropologist. So is the Bush family one of the working or unemployed poor?

• Death in the Andamans
Boa Sr, who was around 85 years old, died last week in the Andaman Islands, India. Many media sources have noted her death. She was one of the few remaining members of the so-called “Great Andaman” tribes, or those groups of foragers who occupied the island of Great Andaman at the time of the British colonial occupation. Due to the British presence, the Great Andamanese were decimated and only a few dozen descendants remain today. They are sequestered on a reservation. CNN World has a video clip showing Boa Sr when she was still alive. The CNN site also offers a string of mostly insulting commentary from over 700 people. In a BBC piece, Anvita Abbi, professor of linguistics at Jawaharlal University in New Delhi, says that India has lost an irreplaceable part of its heritage because one of the world’s oldest languages, called Bo, has come to an end.

This blogger raises three points: the Andaman Islands belong to India as an accident of British imperialist history and so Bo is not really part of “India’s heritage”; India has done little to protect the remaining indigenous islanders but instead allows rampant “development” including the ongoing take-over of traditional territory of the foragers and road construction; a language with only one speaker is not a language at all–the death bell tolled for the Bo language around the time when anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown was on Great Andaman doing “salvage anthropology” in the early 20th century. The story of Boa Sr’s death, like that of so many other indigenous peoples whose livelihoods have been destroyed by rapacious outsiders, is more than just about the end of the Bo language. It’s about a whole way of life that is gone. The only remaining Andaman peoples with any hope for cultural survival are those who live on North Sentinel Island. They are protected, to some degree, by rough waters that make it difficult to land, and to their practice of shooting arrows with high accuracy at anyone who tries to land. The Indian government should cease efforts to “contact” the so-called Sentinelese by boat and lure them with “gifts” sent ashore, and should stop flying over the island for surveillance as such actions undoubtedly cause stress to the people. Let them be. Their undisturbed survival would be a true triumph for Andamanese “heritage.” See an upcoming post on this blog for a profile on the people of the Andamans.

• Death and restless spirits in Haiti
The death toll from the January earthquake is said to be around 200,000. About 150,000 bodies have been found and buried, many in mass graves around Port-au-Prince. USA Today quotes Karen Richman, professor of anthropology at Notre Dame University, as saying that the spiritual and psychological effects of these graves will linger given the cultural importance that Haitians attach to a proper funeral: In Haiti, “You need to communicate with the ancestors to reach these spirits…You need to know they have been respected.” If they are not respected the spirits will return to trouble the living. Mass graves are disrepectful. Richman predicts, however, that Haitians will find “creative, adaptive new rituals in a drive to make meaning” even if just by constructing a monument over a mass grave.

• The taming of the turkey
DNA analysis of turkey bones and coprolites reveal that turkeys were domesticated in two areas: Mesoamerica and the Southwestern United States. Both strains are now extinct and turkeys eaten today are descended from the Mesoamerican domesticates via Europe thanks to Spanish conquerors and then back to North America. Archaeologist Jonathan C. Driver of Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada, comments that the findings “have really helped clarify some of the questions archaeologists have been wondering about for a long time.” For details see the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

• We have found a shrubbery
A detailed archaeological survey of the Stonehenge landscape reveals the presence about 4,000 years ago of two circular hedges surrounding the monument. Of course, no one knows why the hedges might have been constructed but that doesn’t prevent guesswork: to serve as screens to prevent the crowds from elite ceremonies.