• 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.

• LSE anthropologist wins Victor Turner Award

Dr. Matthew Engelke, a senior lecturer (professor) in the Department of Anthropology of the London School of Economics, has won the 2009 Victor Turner Prize for his book, A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church, an historical ethnography based on research in Zimbabwe. The Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing was established in 2001 by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. Dr. Engelke will receive the prize and read from his book at the American Anthropological Association meetings in Philadelphia on December 4.

• Increase in flatheadedness in the US

A study conducted for an undergraduate honors project by an anthropology major at Arizona State University, Jessica Joganic, has developed into a major research project on head shape of more than 20,000 children in the United States. The rate of “flatheadness,” or deformational plagiocephaly, has increased since 1992, and boys are twice as likely to be flatheaded than girls. Sleep position, specifically head position, was the best predictor of flatheadedness. The increase in flatheadedness coincides with the launch of the “Back to Sleep” education campaign by the American Academy of Pediatrics recommending that parents place their infants on their backs to sleep to reduce the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Joganic, now a doctoral student in physical anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, is the lead author of an article reporting the findings that will appear in the December issue of Pediatrics.

Note: This blogger did a little Internet research on the consequences of deformational plagiocephaly  but couldn’t find any evidence of developmental problems related to cognition or speech, for example, but mention only of “cosmetic” issues. The aesthetics of head shape in Western culture connects  with prehistoric cranial deformation including widespread practice among the Incas.

• Hobbits are us

Statistical analysis of a well-preserved female skeleton, “Flo” or LB1,  carried out by researchers at Stony Brook University, New York, indicates that Homo floresiensis is a distinct human species and not a descendant of a genetically flawed version of modern humans. Details appear in the December issue of Significance.

• Expensive pig roast but for a good cause?

Under funding from a $300,000 grant from the National Institute of Justice, faculty and students from Mercyhurst College are analyzing the remains of a house in Washington County, Pennsylvania, that was intentionally burned down along with two euthanized pigs, knives, guns, and shell casings that were placed inside it. Ten students in the Forensic and Biological Anthropology MA program are gathering evidence from the rubble as part of their training and to test how archaeological methods can improve arson investigations. Three such mock investigations have been completed, and seven more are planned. The National Institute of Justice will use the findings to develop standards for investigating devastating fires involving human remains.

• Dell Hymes, linguistic anthropologist and giant in his field

Dell Hymes passed away at age 82. Dr. Hymes grew up in Portland, Oregon, where he attended Reed College. He conducted his first field research at Warm Springs reservation in Oregon and established a lifelong relationship with the Wasco and other tribes in the Pacific Northwest.  His doctorate, in linguistics from Indiana University, was on the language of the Kathlamet Chinook. He taught at Harvard University, the University of California Berkeley, and then joined the University of Pennsylvania in 1965 as professor of anthropology. During the 1960s he helped establish sociologinguistics, the study of how social class affects language. Hymes was committed to social justice and the relevance of anthropology to addressing social inequality. Along with other Penn professors, he protested the Vietnam War. In 1987, he left Penn to become professor of anthropology and English at the University of Virginia, teaching there until his retirement in 1998. His books include In Vain I Tried to Tell You : Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics, and Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, calls Hymes a “giant” in both anthropology and linguistics. A memorial gathering for him will be held at the upcoming meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Philadelphia, on Saturday, December 5, from 7:30-9:30pm in the ballroom of the Courtyard Marriott, 21 N. Juniper Street.

• More on Lévi-Strauss

Tributes to Claude Lévi-Strauss continued to appear in mainstream media worldwide such as the Times of India and the Economist, extolling his contribution to the discipline of anthropology. In my comments last week, I joined the chorus of positive notes. I do quibble, however, with those who call him the “father of modern anthropology” as going too far…unless we agree that contemporary anthropology is the product of multiple fathers. And several mothers as well. Speaking of fathers of the French variety, I would wager that contemporary cultural anthropologists cite Bourdieu and Foucault far more often than  Lévi-Strauss. Perhaps Lévi-Strauss is better typified as a grandfatherly figure in the field–important in his time, but a bit quaint now.

Continuing with the kinship metaphor, I cannot recall any historic female anthropologist ever being referred to as the “mother of modern anthropology.” Margaret Mead would be my nomination for this accolade, odd-sounding as it is.

• Michael Kearney: pioneer of migration studies in anthropology and activist

Michael Kearney, professor of anthropology at UC Riverside died at the age of 71 years. He received his PhD in 1968 from the University of California at Berkeley. A founding figure in the anthropological study of migration, he carried out long term fieldwork with Mixtex-speaking Indians in Oaxaca, Mexico starting in the mid-1960s and returning frequently to maintain ties with members of the community and document changes taking place. He also studied Oaxacan migrants in the United States and how they maintained ties with their communities of origin. In addition to his scholarly work, he was an activist for civil rights and human rights. Tom Patterson, chair of the UCR anthropology department, comments that “Michael was protective of the Mixtex communities…He was fearless in confronting oppressive authorities on both the Mexican and American sides of the border.”

• Jane Goodall on endangered species

Primatologist and animal rights activist Jane Goodall provides inspiring examples of efforts to save animal species nearing extinction in her new book, Hope for Animals and Their World: How Endangered Species Are Being Rescued from the Brink.  It was reviewed in Sunday’s Washington Post, earning nearly three-fourths of the page and commanding attention with four large color photographs of species that have been rescued from extinction.

Meanwhile, Sunday’s New York Times carried an article conveying little to no hope for the cultural survival of the Ogiek, Kenya’s last “forest people.” They are in grave danger of being booted out of their traditional lands in the Mau Forest due to a purported conservation effort of the government.

• 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.