Death (sticks) & taxes

Local governments in the Republic of Korea that earn the most local revenue from the tobacco consumption tax (TCT) are less likely to participate in the central government’s anti-smoking campaign. Statistical analysis of data on 163 municipalities revealed a clear policy conflict and points to the need to reduce local governments’ dependence on TCT revenue by supporting alternative sources of revenue.

The authors mention the need for further research to investigate local policy environments and changing social and regional patterns of smoking, and comparative studies of tobacco tax policy.

Let’s not leave out attention to advertising campaigns sponsored by tobacco companies and who they are targeting as well as public health education programs that need to target the same groups as the tobacco companies in order to counteract the lure of the ads.

The world needs more anthro-doctors

by Barbara Miller

Dr. Lewis Wall is dedicating his life to repairing obstetric fistulas of women in Africa. Nicholas Kristof, who has been writing about fistulas since 2002, lauds him for his work, as we all should.

Dr. Wall is an ob-gyn at Washington University. When not in St. Louis, he has done many fistula repairs for women in Africa: “You take a human being who has been in the abyss of despair and –boom! — you have a transformed woman. She has her life back.”

A fistula is a hole. An obstetric fistula is a hole due to the birthing process either between the vagina and the rectum or between the between the vagina and the bladder. Because of the fistula, the woman becomes incontinent, with either urine or faeces coming out of her vagina. She is typically abandoned by her husband and becomes a social outcast.

Obstetric fistulas are common throughout much of the developing world for a variety of reasons: childbirth of very young and/or malnourished women, poverty, female genital cutting and infibulation, lack of access to prenatal and delivery care and to emergency obstetric services. Related to many of these factors is a culture of patriarchy which devalues and disempowers women and girls, offering them little say in when and how to bear a child and whether or not they can access medical care when a problem arises.

Kristof has been writing about fistulas and the heroic efforts of many to repair them, including Dr. Catherine Simpson. He is delighted that Dr. Wall will also be opening a fistula hospital soon in Niger.

Kristof tells us that Dr. Wall started out as an anthropologist working in West Africa where he learned to speak Hausa. “But he concluded that the world needed doctors more than it needed anthropologists.” So he went to medical school at age 27.

Sorry, but the world doesn’t need just “more doctors.” Starting with the great tradition launched by anthropologist/psychiatrist Arthur Kleinman, medical anthropologists have for long pointed out the limitations of western biomedicine including what its scope allows it to treat and the related narrow training of doctors. In treatment and training, technology rules. Medical students are systematically sleep deprived and distanced from their patients. Melvin Konner’s book Becoming a Doctor convincingly recounts these processes. Konner is a biocultural anthropologist with field experience among foragers of the Kalahari desert. He decided to attend medical school, and then wrote about it as a dehumanizing rite of passage. He does not practice medicine but continues to teach anthropology and comment in the public media from time to time about how to reform medical school in the U.S.

If Dr. Wall had gone straight to medical school, chances are slim to nonexistent that he would have repaired a single obstetric fistula in Africa. Instead, being first an anthropologist first afforded Dr. Wall the contextual awareness and humanitarian spirit that medical school training totally bypasses.

The anthro-doc combo has become an increasingly valued option by many young people in the U.S. (if my students are a good sample, and I believe they are), popularized especially by Paul Farmer. Farmer is the only anthropologist I know who has inspired a documentary book while still living: Tracy Kidder’s Mountain beyond Mountain. Many of my students have read this book and want to become some version of Paul Farmer, combining anthropology with a profession that helps people who are resource-poor and ill. Our classes in medical anthropology and global health are always oversubscribed. I call it the “Farmer effect.”

So Dr. Wall was only partially correct. The world doesn’t need more doctors. The world needs more anthro-doctors. As well as people who combine anthropology with other healing/health-related professions such as public health, nursing, midwifery, and more. As Dr. Wall might admit: you do need to know something about “the people.”

Anthro in the news 11/2/09

• The recession and polygyny: lessons from Inner Asia?

In Russia, there are 9 million fewer men than women. The “man shortage” is created by war, alcoholism and economic migration. The Guardian highlighted research on this topic by cultural anthropologist Caroline Humphrey, Sigrid Rausing professor of collaborative anthropology at Cambridge University, and the New York Times gave it a shoutout in its Sunday “Week in Review” section. For details see the upcoming post on this blog.

• Walking the walk on Wall Street

Economix gave a nod to Karen Ho, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, for her ethnography of Wall Street which exposes Wall Street culture’s transience, constant turnover, uncertainty and risk-taking. Ho argues that these characteristics helped precipitate the current crisis.

• Ur: human sacrifice upside the head

The New York Times covered findings by archaeologists at the University of Pennsylvania that shows that palace attendants who were killed to accompany a royal burial in Ur, Iraq, likely suffered a grisly end. The usual explanation of the many deaths of warriors, handmaidens, and others, is that they were marched down into the burial chambers where they drank poison and then died. Their bodies were arranged with elaborate headdresses for the women and weapons by the side of the warriors.

But one thing was missing: their skulls. Most had been smashed flat from the weight of the earth over the centuries (these burials are from a 4,500 year-old cemetery).

Janet Monge, biological anthropologist at Penn, has led a team of researchers who apply forensic analysis to determine probable cause of death. The first CT scans of two skulls reveal that a sharp instrument, such as a pike, was driven through their heads leaving a round hole in the cranium (one hole in the female cranium and two in the male cranium), with cracks radiating from it. Death would have been almost immediate.

So why choose a career as handmaiden or soldier? Monge replies that these positions held great honor and meant a good life at court. And “the movement into the next world was not for them necessarily something to fear.”

• Religious syncretism in Venezuela

Wade Glenn, doctoral student in the Anthropology Department at Tulane University, is quoted in a New York Times article on Venezuelan religious practices that blend elements from indigenous beliefs, Catholicism, West African religions, and other elements such as Nordic myths. As many as 30 percent of Venezuela’s population take part in rituals that involve purifications in a river, drumming, fire dancing, trance, and possession. Glenn’s doctoral research is on this topic.

• Economic inequality, explained

Science Daily reported on an article in Science by anthropologist Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, professor of anthropology at UC Davis and co-author economist Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute. They led a team of 24 researchers who analyzed cross-cultural data on economic inequality and inherited wealth in societies around the world. They divide wealth into three categories: material, embodied and relational. Their findings suggest that intergenerational transmission of wealth and wealth inequality is substantial in agricultural and pastoralist societies but not in foraging and horticultural societies. They posit that differences in livelihood technology, institutions, and economic norms account for the difference.

Cultural anthropologists need to unpack and critique these highly generalized findings. Some of the conclusions don’t merit attention (“the four ethnographic systems…differ in the importance if the three classes of wealth”) but others do. Cultural anthropologists have long known, and taught our students, in a form of intergenerational transfer, that the four modes of livelihood differ in key respects, and we also include attention to a fifth: industrialism/informatics.

Borgerhoff Mulder et al. have done a service in drawing attention to intergenerational transfer of “wealth.” But they are missing some key factors such as the importance of private property versus communal property and use rights (which are also passed down) and cultural knowledge of the environment including the weather, plants and animals, and the spiritual world.

• Feeling the burn

Go to NPR for a discussion of running research including Dan Lieberman, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University.

• Leadership in the genes

Science Daily picked up an article published in Current Biology on “The Origins and Evolution of Leadership.” The argument is that factors such as age, sex, height, and weight played a major role in the choice of leaders in our evolutionary past and therefore continue to do so today. The underlying hypothesis appears to be that war was a dominating factor in human evolution and that war favors mature males who are tall and solid. This blogger believes that the war factor is overrated for the human evolutionary past by a long shot.

• Neanderthals and modern humans had sex?

It must be the word “sex” that helped move into the mainstream media a claim by evolutionary anthropologist Svante Pääbo that sex occurred between the Neanderthal and modern humans. He shared his conviction, at a conference in Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, near New York City, that Neanderthals and modern humans had sex. But he is not sure how “productive” it was.

CIGA Event Tomorrow at GW

As part of the continuing Culture in Global Affairs program at the Elliott School, please join us for a talk tomorrow with Dr. Frances Norwood of the Inclusion Research Institute.

Euthanasia, Social Death and U.S. Health Care Reform: Policy Lessons from The Netherlands

Friday, October 30, 12 pm – 1:30 pm
1957 E Street NW, Room 505

Frances Norwood, Director of Research, Inclusion Research Institute

Dr. Norwood is a medical anthropologist. Her talk is based on extensive fieldwork in The Netherlands which led to a book called The Maintenance of Life: Preventing Social Death through Euthanasia Talk and End-of-Life Care–Lessons from The Netherlands (Carolina Academic Press, 2009). Dr. Norwood will discuss her findings about end-of-life care in The Netherlands and implications for U.S. health care reform.

Please send RSVP to: Graham Hough-Cornwell at ghcornwell@gmail.com

Empowering women in India: just a flush away?

by Barbara Miller

A loud and hopeful buzz on twitter about toilets and women’s empower in India has followed the publication of an article in the Washington Post on October 12 that has been picked up by CNN and other mainstream media. “No toilet no bride” is the slogan of a growing number of families when seeking to arrange the marriage of a daughter.

In rural areas, less than 30 percent of the population has access to latrines. And those latrines are not necessarily located so that women and girls can get to them safely. They may not be covered. They may be filthy. In low-income neighborhoods in cities, the situation is not much better.

Throughout India, it’s easier and safer for men and boys to defecate and urinate publicly than it is for women and girls. A week’s visit to India will afford the viewer plenty of opportunities to see open defecation of men and boys. Women and girls have to wait until it’s dark to try to find a semi-private field away from the village. Any they may run into trouble from some male hasslers on the way.

The right to a safe toilet is on many people’s list of human rights in India.

It is a good thing that more Indian women will have access to a safe place for these everyday biological necessities—those who can find a husband whose family can provide one for the new couple. But I have problems with the implication that Indian women are finding new bargaining power in marriage arrangements through the “no toilet, no bride” mantra. I hate to throw cold water on all the enthusiasm, but that’s not likely to be how things will work out in northwestern India in the short run, at least.

Yes, women may get toilets: the good news. But the bad news is that toilet-possessing grooms will be even more highly sought after, and that will spike up the dowries that the bride’s family has to give to get a top-notch groom. In the end, the bride’s family will pay for the toilet.

Here’s how northern Indian (Hindu) marriage arrangements tend to work (with the inevitable exceptions of course of some who opt for love marriage and no dowry payment at all). Among northern Indian Hindus, a system of hypergyny has long existed. It means that the bride has to “marry up,” within her general birth group (jati, or subcaste): the groom should be more educated than she is, as well as taller and older. These criteria establish a demographic squeeze, from the start, on potential brides because they knock out many men from being preferred. Even with the many thousands of “missing” girls and women due to female-selective abortion and direct and indirect infanticide, which are particularly endemic in northern India, there is still a shortage of the “best” potential grooms. Hypergyny drives a system that makes the parents of daughters always on a lower par, having to provide huge dowries to attract the “best” grooms.

For decades, families with highly educated sons and families with property and wealth can and do “demand” the largest dowries from the bride’s families. The dowry amount and contents are discussed up front before a marriage is finally negotiated, and much of the value of the dowry goes to the groom’s parents rather than to the newly married couple. I call this a “fly-over dowry” since it flies right over the heads of the bride and groom. Having a son in northern India, come time for his marriage, is a windfall.

In terms of the groom, educated, wealthy, tall, and handsome men are most sought after. Now those desirable potential grooms whose families can guarantee that the new bride will have “a room of her own” will have even more leverage in demanding a large dowry. But in the end, it’s the bride’s family that’s buying the toilet.

Photo from Flickr via Creative Commons.

Tramp down Babylon

by Barbara Miller

Babylon has had its ups and downs over many hundreds of years. It is currently in a down phase thanks to the US war and occupation.

Located on the Euphrates River, about an hour’s drive south of Baghdad, it was the world’s largest city at its height with a population of over 200,000. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Sacked and rebuilt and sacked again over the centuries, Babylon is now a sad monument to the power of global politics.

The most significant remains of Babylon’s glory are not in Babylon. The Pergamon Museum in Berlin, for example, houses the famous Ishtar Gate, thanks to the European colonialist hunger for Near Eastern treasures during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and, specifically, the excavations (and extractions) carried out by archaeologist Robert Koldewey.

What is left of Babylon itself? Not much above ground: a tell (mound) and some buildings that were “reconstructed” under Saddam Hussein. After Saddam, came the US occupation.

In 2003, the US army established “Camp Alpha” on top of the remains of the ancient city. According to a CNN.com/world report, a US military spokesperson said that occupation of the site was meant to protect it from looting. A recent United Nations report documents, to the contrary, that the US occupation caused major damage to Babylon.

The United States is supposed to pay $800,000 to repair damages from its occupation of the site. $800,000? Shameful.

No one could argue that Babylon, throughout its history, was a humanitarian state. Social inequality was extreme with slaves building the impressive monuments of early times, leaders were ruthless, heads rolled. On a brighter note, however, the first king of the Babylonian empire, Hammurabi (c 1728-1686 BCE) compiled one of the first written legal compendiums: the Code of Hammurabi.

While images of Hammurabi are found throughout the Western world as a tribute to his contribution, his home is in ruins.

One question: Why did the US military treat Babylon, and many other important sites in Iraq, so disrespectfully? Possible answer: the US military presence in Iraq under Bush had no respect for or interest in any aspect of cultural heritage in the Middle East that is not Christian. Nonetheless, according to a recent New York Times article, the ancient city of Ur was protected from the ravages of war and looting because an airbase was built around it.

A second question: Why is Babylon, along with so many important sites in present-day Iraq, not listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site which would provide some protection? UNESCO has recognized only three World Heritage Sites in Iraq putting it in league with Armenia, Bangladesh, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Turkmenistan, and Uganda. Given its importance in human history, Iraq should be peppered with World Heritage Sites, more along the lines of Italy and Spain, both with more than 40 sites.

Babylon deserves much more than a paltry $800,000 from the US. And I don’t mean just the US government. US contractors and other business interests have reaped outrageously huge profits, in the billions of dollars, from the war and the occupation. These modern-day carpetbaggers should pay back. No one would trust the likes of Halliburton to reconstruct Babylon given their narrow monetary interests and limited skills (laying down asphalt is a big one). But their money would be most welcome to support Iraqi-managed reconstruction of sites damaged by the US presence.

And the Cradle of Civilization deserves far more from UNESCO than three designated sites.

Photo, “Ishtar Gate”, from Flickr via Creative Commons.

Anthro in the news 10/26/09

• Missing link media star fades

The much-hyped fossil nicknamed “Ida,” discovered in May 2009 was the subject of a rapidly produced book and television show about her place in prehistory as a “missing link” in the human-primate line. More recent detailed analysis questions that claim, saying Ida is an ancient primate but part of a line that did not lead to humans. Oops. But some would say, hey: that’s science. Scientists look at the data and formulate findings; then other scientists look at the data and substantiate, reverse, or reformulate earlier findings. So no oops: just science at work. In this case it appears to be somewhat premature science aligned with the voracious media and, apparently, a public audience hungry for the sexy fossil bits of both.

• Give us back our queen

Egypt’s chief archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, is leading an effort by Egypt to get Germany to return a 3,500 year-old image of Queen Nefertiti. Hawass claims that the image (referred to in the media as “bust”) was taken illegally from Egypt nearly a century ago. If Germany can prove that the work was not stolen, then okay. But Hawass is convinced it was stolen. Queen Nefertiti’s bust is one of many other contested artifacts that were removed from their original sites during the many decades of European and US colonialism.

• Stone Age sex

Svante Pääbo, an expert on the Neanderthals, asserted at a conference at the Cold Springs Laboratory in New York, that the Neanderthals and modern humans certainly had sex. But whether sex led to offspring is less clear. He is, however, confident that the Neanderthal genome sequence he is working on will provide an answer. His findings will be published soon. Neanderthals existed until about 30,000 years ago and inhabited a vast range from Europe to the Middle East and Siberia. They overlapped with modern humans for about 10,000-12,000 years.

•Anthropologist named one of the “Brilliant Ten” young scientists

Popular Science annually shines its gaze on 10 men and women under the age of forty whose work “will change the future.” One of this year’s winners is Nate Dominy, associate professor of anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. Dominy ‘s research in human evolution focuses on the acquisition and consumption of food of the human ancestors who lived around 2 million years ago. He combines approaches of anthropology, ecology, and genetics to understand what drove the evolution of bipedalism and big brains. Currently, Dominy is in Uganda, launching a multiple-continent investigation of pygmy populations to learn about the biomechanics and metabolic costs of locomotion.

Must read: Coca-Globalization by Robert Foster

This is the start of a new regular feature here at AnthroWorks, Must read, which will highlight the most interesting books we’re reading right now.

by Barbara Miller

Media commentary was flying fast and thick in September 2009 about soft drinks and their relationship to high rates of obesity in the United States, and whether or not raising taxes on soft drinks would help reduce consumption, improve health and reduce health care costs. Welcome to a debate as fraught with economic interests as that of tobacco or hard drink. Like tobacco and hard drink, soft drinks (notably American products such as Coca-cola and Pepsi-cola) have been pushing hard for several decades to create and sustain markets around the world, from the Asian giants of China and India to smaller but still promising targets such as Papua New Guinea.

Cultural anthropologists, since the groundbreaking book by Sidney Mintz on sugar, have been researching and writing about particular commodities within a political economy framework. They ask questions such as: whose interests are served? who wins? who loses? The genius of cultural anthropology in providing a rich context for a seemingly small, single commodity is revealed in many recent studies which have examined cars, coffee, chocolate, and more.

Robert Foster takes on soft drinks in his latest book, Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea. This is a great book. It is definitely worth incorporating in your teaching if you are a professor, and in your thinking if you are a human being who cares about people and our environment. Foster pulls together many strands of cultural anthropology to create a compelling story about how soft drink corporations are attempting to take over the world not just in terms of sales but also in terms of government and citizenship.

Foster argues for the importance of the twin notions of corporate governmentality and consumer citizenship. Concerning corporate governmentality, he provides compelling examples showing how corporations such as Coca-cola co-opt the powers of the state in South Korea and India to assume the role of guaranteeing that citizens have access to clean water for drinking and water supply for irrigating their crops. He argues that international corporations like Coca Cola, along with many NGOs and other international agencies, serve as a new mode of “deterritorialized” governmentality. So, when it appears that countries in Africa, for example, have weak governments in the traditional sense, Foster says: look further and you will see the power of governmentality as exerted through commodity networks. A strong government force is in play: but it’s profit-oriented and global rather than service-oriented and local.

Consumer citizenship is the flip side of corporate citizenship. In it, consumers lobby corporations rather than governments. This new mode of political consumerism makes sense since corporations are increasingly taking the role of providing goods and services.

In his closing chapters, Foster brings the discussion back to the US. He discusses “pouring rights,” specifically how Coca-Cola and Pepsi bottlers in the early 1990s acquired exclusive rights to vend in public schools. School principles in poor districts especially welcomed the revenue. As if this all weren’t bad enough in terms of ugly economic interests, Foster weaves the reader back to Mintz’ landmark commodity: sugar. So much seems to come back to sugar. Sugar is oil’s sweet sister in terms of commodities that rule our lives.

Foster doesn’t explicitly pitch his book as “critical anthropology” or “activist anthropology” but it is both, and it is a powerful example of both. He reveals the underlying power structures in soft drink promotion and sales locally and globally. In his last sections he discusses “the morality of products” and points to the power of consumer politics as being able to speak against exploitative corporations and their products that slowly kill consumers while making corporate owners rich.

My thanks to Robert Foster for his convincing connections between global corporate interests and social justice through the lens of a Coke bottle.

Anthro in the news 10/19/09

• Social networking vs. social class in England?

People who do not embrace the web will be increasingly cut off from its professional and financial benefits, warns David Zeitlyn, a social (cultural) anthropologist at the University of Kent, England, thus leading to an ever larger digital divide in England. The country’s poorer North East is the region with the highest percentage of people who are not engaging with the internet. Nearly one-third of the people in the North East are reluctant to use the internet for more than sending email and occasional browsing. London and the North West are leading England’s digital revolution with only 19 percent of the population defining themselves as technophobes.

Zeitlyn’s findings are based on his analysis of the “Digital Anthropology” poll of 2,000 web users. He sees class structure as fast-changing in England with a digital elite emerging and thriving and social networking overtaking traditional social class indicators (parents’ social and economic status and education) in shaping a person’s life status.

• Anthropologist is interim Prime Minister of Madagascar

Madagascar’s four main political groups agreed to a power-sharing deal and the appointment of Eugène Mangalaza, an anthropology professor, as Prime Minister of the interim government. Mangalaza has taught anthropology and philosophy at the University of Toamasina. As someone fairly unknown in political circles, he was a surprise choice. Elections will be held in the next six months.

• British economist puts anthropology in its place

Noted British economist and Financial Times columnist John Kay has this to say about the relationship between economics and other disciplines: “Economics is not so much the queen of the social sciences but the servant, and needs to base itself on anthropology, psychology, and the sociology of ideas. The future of investing–and economics–lies in that more eclectic vision.”

• Gusterson skeptical of the Minerva Initiative awards

The Chronicle for Higher Education carried an article entitled “New Pentagon-NSF Grants Draw Criticism from Social Scientists” in which it cited Hugh Gusterson as “one of the most prominent skeptics” of the Minerva Initiative. The Pentagon has funded, so far, 17 projects that were solicited and reviewed by the National Science Foundation under a “special agreement” with the Pentagon that has provided, so far, $7.6 million. Awardees include 13 political scientists, five economists, three sociologists, two psychologists, two computer scientists, one linguist, and one communications scholar (several of the 17 awards have more than one principle investigator). Craig Calhoun, president of the US Social Science Research Council expressed concern about the narrowness of the projects in terms of their focus on “quasi-universal models” and reliance on techniques that are ungrounded in terms of particular country or region. He pointed to the lack of knowledge based on anthropology and fieldwork. Hugh Gusterson agrees: “The people one could think of who might really be able to give Pentagon thinking a jolt and explain how things look from the point of view of disaffected people in the Middle East–I just don’t see them here.”

Pills against poverty: Easterly speaks power to Farmer

by Barbara Miller

Paul Farmer walks on water for a lot of people around the world, from Haitian villagers he has treated in his clinic to my GW students who he has inspired with his writings. So what to think when one of my favorite economists, Bill Easterly, zaps him in an opinion piece in The Financial Times for promoting programs that have helped the middle and upper classes and bypassed the poor?

Answer: Easterly has a point. International “health rights” cannot only be about providing ARDs (anti-retroviral drugs). Especially if, as Easterly claims, international aid-supported programs are giving access to these life-saving and costly drugs differentially to better-off people in Africa.

This is an ugly thought but one worth pondering. It would not be the first time in international aid that benefits bypassed the poor and landed with the better-off.

If you read Farmer’s books, and I do every year since I assign his writings in my undergraduate and graduate medical anthropology classes, you will see the interplay between Farmer the anthropologist and Farmer the doctor. The doctor wins. Farmer the doctor is interested in treating, not preventing, illness. Treatment, through drugs, wins out over more anthropological concerns about social inequality, causes of poverty, and “solutions” such as empowerment, employment and other ways to reduce inequality.

Farmer has walked the walk in the hard scrabble hills of Haiti (to get a sense of Farmer the humanitarian healer, read Tracy Kidder’s docu-ography of him, Mountain Beyond Mountain). He has seen countless AIDS victims living in extreme poverty. He has been in Russian prisons and seen the ravages of XMDRTB. He has seen the work of structural violence. His medical political activism: He prescribes ARDs and lobbies in Washington for more funding for ARDs.

Pills alleviate pain and suffering and can extend life. A health rights position says that access to such pills should be equal for all. But in the end, pills don’t cure the diseases called poverty and inequality. Easterly offers a corrective view.

Photo, “Pills & Container (Landscape)”, from Flickr via Creative Commons.