The Washington Post carried an opinion piece by cultural anthropologist Hugh Gusterson, professor at George Mason University.
Gifts, but do they come with strings attached? Flickr/FutUndBeidl
Gusterson asks: what is the difference between a gift and a bribe, and provides some cultural anthropology insights: “Gifts are given in all cultures, and to remarkably similar effect … gifts by their nature create social ties and a sense of reciprocal obligation. To give a gift is to expect something in return, though it undermines the power and mystique of the gift to spell out too clearly what that something is … The failure to give something in response can end a friendship … Anthropologists have found that gifts create two kinds of relationships: those between equals and those that establish subordination.”
Gusterson goes on to discuss whether a federal grand jury will indict Virginia Governor Robert F. McDonnell: “…we know that McDonnell and his family accepted gifts including a $6,500 Rolex watch, a $10,000 engagement gift, $15,000 in wedding catering and a $15,000 Bergdorf Goodman shopping spree, not to mention $120,000 in loans, from Jonnie R. Williams Sr., chief executive of the Henrico-based company Star Scientific. If prosecutors determine that McDonnell made specific promises to promote Star Scientific’s dietary supplement Anatabloc in exchange for these favors, the governor could soon be spending a lot of time in court … For prosecutors, the key question is whether there was a clearly articulated ‘quid pro quo.’ If so, the gifts were bribes. If not, they were gifts. To me, as an anthropologist, this largely misses the point.”
[Blogger’s note: assuming I am on target here — a gift requires a return, unless it falls into the extremely rare and hard-to-document category of a “pure gift” for which the giver has absolutely no thought whatsoever of any kind of return].
• Benefits of postpartum placentaphagy to moms?
According to reporting in the Monterey Herald, a survey of 189 women who had consumed their babies’ placentas — raw, cooked or in capsule form — revealed that 95 percent reported their experience was either positive or very positive, and 98 percent said they would repeat the experience.
Placenta capsules. Flickr/latisha
The article quotes Daniel Benyshek, co-author of the study and associate professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas: “Of course, we don’t know if those are placebo effects and their positive results are based on their expectations.”
The survey results were published in the journal, Ecology of Food and Nutrition. The report disclosed that the first author, Jodi Selander, is the founder of Placenta Benefits, an online information source that also offers training for placenta encapsulators. Benyshek is planning a double-blind pilot study that would compare the effects of placenta capsules and a placebo on women’s postpartum experiences.
A supporter of deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi on Aug. 12, 2013. VOA/Reuters
Early this week, Voice of America reported that supporters of ousted Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi were defiantly remaining at their protest camps in Cairo, despite days of warnings that the government would soon move on the sites. The article quoted Saba Mahmood, associate professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, who told VOA the interim government has not broken up the camps because the resulting bloodshed would be a “very serious political cost.”
But she says Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood is facing bigger stakes than getting him back in office: “So there is that issue that if indeed they back down, they’re going to not just simply lose Morsi, but they’re going to lose even the basis — the political, social basis — they have built over the last 40 years.”
[Blogger’s note: since then, much blood has been shed and are yet to see what the political costs for the military government will be].
• A probable first in history of anthro: U.S. President fist-bumps anthropologist
While on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, according to the Boston Globe, U.S. President Obama played golf with World Bank President Jim Kim.
[Blogger’s note: Jim Kim, as most aw readers know, is not only the president of the World Bank but also a medical anthropologist, doctor, health advocate, and former university president].
President Barack Obama and World Bank President Jim Kim playing golf on Aug. 14, 2013. Darlene Superville/Associated Press
Bloomberg news reported on World Bank president Jim Young Kim’s dream: ending poverty. Or, ending extreme poverty. And by a certain date. A wonderful dream.
Carabayllo Peru. Flickr/Gaia Saviotti
The article zooms in on Kim, who:
once slept in his office and drove dusty roads to help his patients in a slum near Lima. When he returned to Carabayllo in Peru two decades later as World Bank president, a motorcade whisked him from a luxury hotel past welcome signs on banners and brick walls. The reunion in June, a year after the Harvard-trained physician took over the bank, was as much about the future for Kim as it was the past. In the 1990s, his Partners in Health organization helped Carabayllo patients suffering from drug-resistant tuberculosis. The project, relying on community health workers for the treatment, got a better cure rate than U.S. hospitals, was expanded in Peru and influenced other countries.
According to the article, there has been progress in the hills of Carabayllo; Kim can use 4G Internet and his mobile phone in areas where he once waited in line to make calls. But what motivated him in 1993 has not changed: “If we can show that even in these poor communities we can deliver, we could have a much, much broader impact … There’s no question that’s still what I am here to do.”
• Big mining and indigenous people in Australia
Marcia Langton/University of Melbourne
According to an article in The Guardian, Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, chairman of the mining giant Fortescue Metals Group, says that he has delivered more $1 billion in contracts to indigenous companies and so now the government must provide training for Aboriginal workers to thrive in the newly created jobs.
At a company event with guests including the MP Ken Wyatt, indigenous academic and anthropologist Marcia Langton, and indigenous leader Noel Pearson, Forrest announced that the program had “smashed” its target six months ahead of schedule, and with most companies being above 50 percent Aboriginal ownership.
• Black is black, especially for adoptive dogs
In the U.S., at least, black dogs have a slimmer chance of adoption than lighter-colored dogs. And the same may be true for cats.
An article in the San Francisco Chronicle on color-based adoption practices in Bay Area animal shelters mentions the research of Amanda Leonard, who heads the Black Dog Research Studio in Maryland and whose anthropological study is perhaps the only — or one of the very few — scholarly works on the subject.
“Black dogs are usually portrayed as mean, threatening dogs,” says Leonard who earned a master’s in anthropology from George Washington University, with a thesis about the “black dog syndrome” in the U.S. based on her work in an animal shelter. She is attempting through her research to legitimize what shelter workers have long said is true and plans to earn a doctorate on the subject. “It’s a totally ingrained and significant part of our culture that we associate black with negative,” Leonard said in a phone interview.
[Blogger’s note: I am very pleased to see Amanda Leonard’s M.A. work get deserved recognition. She published a summary of her M.A. thesis findings in the Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers].
Several mainstream media sources discussed the findings of a comprehensive new assessment led by UNICEF about the practice of female genital cutting in Africa and the Middle East. The data indicate a gradual but significant decline in many countries.
Source: Economist
Teenage girls are now less likely to have been cut than older women in more than half of the 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East where the practice is concentrated. In Egypt, for example, where more women have been cut than in any other nation, survey data showed that 81 percent of 15- to 19-year-olds had undergone the practice, compared with 96 percent of women in their late 40s.
Generational change appears to be playing an important role in the decline with the difference in Egypt especially marked: only a third of teenage girls who were surveyed thought it should continue, compared with almost two-thirds of older women.
Researchers say the progress in Kenya makes sense, given efforts there to stop female genital cutting starting in the early 1900s. But they were at a loss to explain why the rate has plunged in the Central African Republic, to 24 percent in 2010 from 43 percent in the mid-1990s. Concerning the findings about the Central African Republic, The New York Times quotes Bettina Shell-Duncan, a cultural anthropology professor at the University of Washington who was a consultant on the report: “We have no idea, not even a guess, noting that researchers need to study the causes of the decline there.
• Indigenous people’s knowledge and climate change
An article on the importance of indigenous knowledge in addressing climate change in The Democratic Daily cites the work of Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, Brazilian cultural anthropologist and emeritus professor of the Department of Anthropology at Chicago University and the University of São Paulo.
She says indigenous people have an important contribution to make to knowledge about climate change, and scientists should listen to them because they are very well informed about their local climate as well as the natural world. Their knowledge, she says, is not a “treasure” of data to be stored and used when wanted by others, but a living and evolving process: “It is important to understand that traditional wisdom is not something simply transmitted from generation to generation. It is alive, and traditional and indigenous peoples are continually producing new knowledge.”
“Since 2009, anthropologist Jason De León has led groups of students from across the U.S. and Canada through the Sonoran Desert to study unauthorized migration using archaeological and anthropological methods. The project has collected and cataloged more than 10,000 artifacts left along the way by those trekking the desert,” reports the Arizona Daily Star‘s Perla Trevizo. “He can usually tell how old the site is or how far the migrants walked by the objects found. For instance, black shoe polish tells him it’s an older site from a time when migrants painted their water bottles to attract less attention. Now, they buy them already black.”
Jason De León examines a bottle of pond water left behind by migrants after a Border Patrol apprehension. Kelly Presnell/Arizona Daily Star
De León, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, started the Undocumented Migration Project to record history and get a fuller picture of what’s happening: “Undocumented migration is a complex phenomenon…I want to provide reliable information to help the public see behind the curtain.”
Half of the research is done by walking the same trails migrants use. The other half is spent talking to border crossers staying in the migrant shelters in Nogales, Sonora, or getting ready for their journey in the town of Altar, Sonora.
Medical anthropologist and UC Berkeley assistant professor of health and social behavior, Seth Holmes, has just published Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States. The book chronicles Homes’ in-depth study of the lives of indigenous Triqui farmworkers who travel from Oaxaca, Mexico to the western states of the United States and back, and how these farmworkers experience unfair treatment, inadequate healthcare and horrible living conditions.
Holmes lived and worked with a group of Triqui farmworkers for over one and a half years, traveling with them during an illegal cross of the Arizona-Mexico border, then on to picking berries in Washington state, pruning vineyards in California (along with a week of homelessness living in cars), and harvesting corn in Oaxaca, Mexico, the home state of the Triquis.
Discrimination against Triqui farmworkers, Holmes said, can be seen starting with the jobs they are given on farms: “The Triquis were given the hardest jobs, picking strawberries in Washington state for instance … This work involved putting their bodies into repetitive positions, crouched and picking, under stress and all weather, seven days a week, exposed to pesticides and insects that made them get sick more often.” Continue reading “Anthro in the news 7/22/13”→
Mark Schuller, assistant professor of anthropology and NGO development leadership at Northern Illinois University, contributed an article in The Haitian Times in response to the question: What’s going on in Haiti? How is the progress, after three and a half years and billions of dollars?
One thing going on in Haiti: rendering of Port-Au-Prince Marriott, scheduled to open in 2014/NY Times
After a recent trip there, he comments that it’s particularly difficult to respond: “…when you get off the plane, there are signs of progress. The airport has been renovated. The roads around Port-au-Prince are being repaired. For those in bright t-shirts on their way to the provinces, travel times have been considerably reduced. Stopping en route in a guarded, air conditioned restaurant or supermarket offers the appearance of relative affluence with customers stopping to inspect shelves full of packaged imported food. If one has the funds, a private vehicle and the inclination to go to a night club or restaurant in the affluent Pétion-ville, the trip home is safer…”
Schuller considers the president of Haiti, Michel Martelly, who as a popular musical performer was known as “Sweet Micky,” and says that “…as head of state, he is performing progress (as noted anthropologist and artist Gina Athena Ulysse puts it)”..and: “The performance appears to be working..” given positive reviews from development agencies, NGOS, foreign governments, and some members of Haiti’s poor majority who have gotten jobs.
An unidentified Ixil Mayan in a mass grave. Photo/AP, Daily Mail
The Ixil came under the spotlight after a Guatemalan court found former dictator Efrain Rios Montt guilty of genocide on May 10 for the scorched-earth policies used against them during his rule in the 1980s. The conviction was annulled 10 days later following a trial that did nothing to change their lives of the Ixil people.
Byron Garcia, a social anthropologist who has worked in the area for a decade and who now lives in the Guatemalan capital, said Ixil Maya live in the same poverty as always: “People have been relegated to less productive places, places where you can’t grow food, to the mountains made of stone…The young people who can, sow plots of land. And when they can’t, they migrate.”
And, further, he said that victims feel a need to tell their stories, to be heard, to be indemnified, to find the bodies of their loved ones and be able to bury them. [Blogger’s note: the Daily Mail article includes some amazing photographs]. Continue reading “Anthro in the news 7/8/13”→
The Los Angeles Times published an article by Rosemary Joyce, professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. She is quoted as saying: “One doesn’t have to go far afield to question the idea that marriage has always been defined the same way.”
The Huffington Post published an essay by Tom Boellstorff, professor of anthropology at the University of California at Irvine. He offers four points, the first of which echoes Joyce’s:
January 10, 2009 Chicago protest of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Flickr/Kevin Zolkiewicz
social scientists and historians have shown that many forms of marriage and kinship exist, and have existed, around the world, and heterosexual marriage itself takes many forms;
the victory is bittersweet given the Supreme Court’s finding of a key element of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional;
both the DOMA and Proposition 8 decisions were 5-4 rulings and this split represents divisions in society and suggests that heterosexism and homophobia will not disappear with these court rulings;
finally, it is important to anticipate questions about what is “normal.”
A distribution of the Tsetse fly./ Wikimedia Commons.
The Boston Globe highlights the research of an economist/doctor on the role of the tsetse fly in African poverty and illness and mentions the influence of medical anthropologist Paul Farmer on her work. Marcella Alsan, who recently completed her Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University, may have solved a puzzle that has long challenged scholars, development specialists, and policy makers: Why is the land-abundant, resource-rich continent of Africa so poor? The answer comes out of Alsan’s graduate research on the tsetse fly’s effect on poverty in Africa. Using geospatial mapping software to mine data gathered by missionaries and anthropologists in the 1800s, Alsan found that the fly, which exists only in Africa and is lethal to livestock, drove precolonial Africans to use slaves instead of domesticated animals for farming, limiting crop yields and ability to transport goods.
• Jim Kim on climate change
Jim Kim, anthropologist and president of the World Bank, wrote that global policy makers must confront climate change, in an article in The Huffington Post:
“To help our clients prepare for the risks of a warming planet, we asked the scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytic in Germany to examine the impacts of climate change on three tropical regions: Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and South East Asia. Yesterday, we published the results of that study.
Modeling a scenario of 4°C warming, the study reconfirms a climate picture we know well: extreme storms, prolonged heat waves, critical food and water shortages and widespread social and economic disruption. These impacts will interact to generate powerful climatic events, such as a significant sea-level rise and intense cyclones, which will cause intense and widespread damage. This is a future of enormous suffering.”
The article includes a video. A link to the World Bank study is here.
• Occupy movement update
David Graeber/ Wikimedia Commons, David Graeber.
The New Statesman carried an article on the “democracy project”/Occupy movement, noting cultural anthropologist David Graeber‘s key role. A memorable quotation in the article: “The sole piece of evidence we had at the time that the Occupy movement was important was the clear determination of various world governments and much of the mainstream press to erase it from existence. It was not enough for the camps to be torn down and the protesters evicted, not enough that thousands of people, most of whom had done nothing more egregious than dare to question austerity in public, were beaten and gassed and arrested and imprisoned.”
• “New” language “discovered”
A “new” language has been discovered in a remote indigenous community in northern Australia according to Science Daily. The new language, called Light Walpiri, has developed from a combination of elements from other languages. It is documented by University of Michigan linguist Carmel O’Shannessy and reported on in the journal Language (not open access). Light Walpiri speakers are found in one community called Lajamanu where speakers readily switch between languages — from Warlpiri to English and Kriol (an English-based creole). In the 1970s and 1980s, children internalized this switching as a separate linguistic system, and began to speak it as their primary code, one with verb structure from English and Kriol, and noun structure from Warlpiri as well as new structures that can be traced to Warlpiri, English and Kriol, but are no longer the same as in those source languages. As these children grew up they taught the new language to their own children, and it is now the primary code of children and young adults in the community.
• Unexpected result in Iran’s presidential election
Presidential Election Map of Iran/Wikimedia Commons, Nima Farid.
For New America Media, William Beeman, professor of cultural and linguistic anthropology at the University of Minnesota, commented on the recent presidential election in Iran: “Much of what transpired in Iran during the presidential election on Friday, June 14 (Flag Day in the U.S.), won by Hassan Rowhani should be familiar to American citizens: A candidate replacing a term-limited president contrasting himself with a former conservative government, campaigning on social and human rights issues along with a promise for an improved economy, combined with a split vote for his opposition that assured his victory by less than a one per-cent margin. Echoes of the American election in 2012 and many earlier elections are clearly present in Iran in 2013. Apparently Iranian and American voters are more alike than either group realizes.”
• Paradoxical consequences of elections in Malaysia
In The Malaysia Chronicle, Clive Kessler analyzes the how, paradoxically, the election of a reduced Barisan Nasional presence and increased opposition numbers in parliament has amplified, not diminished, the power of the UMNO (United Malays National Organisation), specifically its power within the nation’s government and over the formation of national policy. He also examines the election campaign that yielded this paradoxical outcome. Kessler is emeritus professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of New South Wales.
• Studying abroad at home
Paula Hirschoff, two-time U.S. Peace Corps volunteer and M.A. in anthropology, published an article in The Chronicle for Higher Education on the value of student exchange programs within a country. She describes her positive experiences in a program which placed her in a traditionally black college in the U.S.
• Investigation of unmarked graves in Florida delayed
DNA testing begins to further unravel the mystery of the unmarked graves at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys./ Tampa Bay News
According to several sources, including The Tampa Bay News, a request to dig up remains at the controversial Dozier School For Boys in Marianna, Florida, has been put on hold. Researchers at the University of South Florida requested an archaeological permit from the state at the end of May to excavate. Through ground penetrating radar, researchers earlier discovered the remains of close to 50 boys buried in unmarked graves there. The State Archaeologist sent a letter to USF researchers asking for more information before making a decision on granting the permit. Families of those believed to be buried there are frustrated by the delay. Despite the permit delay, forensic experts from the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s office proceeded with the next step for families, taking DNA samples of three relatives. Researchers are hoping to match the DNA with the remains at the reform school. USF Archaeologist Erin Kimmerle said they will review the questions from the state archaeologist next week. Once the answers are received, it will be at least another two weeks before a decision about the permit is made. Continue reading “Anthro in the news 6/17/13”→
National Geographic news covered the ongoing debate in Britain about the badger situation and whether or not to cull. The article quotes AW’s Sean Carey, a research fellow at the University of Roehampton’s Department of Social Science, said that the debate has some quintessentially British aspects to it. “To some extent, it’s a rerun of the fox-hunting debate, a split between town and country. The townie has a romanticized version of the badger, which has a privileged place in English literature. Mr. Badger in The Wind in the Willows is an outsider but has heroic qualities. The country farmer, on the other hand, prides himself on realism. It’s a case of ‘let’s get rid of the sentiment and get practical,'” he said. In the House of Commons, the Labour Party demand that badger culls be abandoned was rejected by a vote of 299 to 250.
Kathy Jefferson Bancroft, tribal historic preservation officer / Louis Sahagun, LA Times
• Paiute massacre site source of new disputes
According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, Indian oral histories and U.S. Cavalry records offer insights into a horrific massacre in 1863 when thirty-five Paiute Indians were chased into Owens Lake by settlers and soldiers to drown or be gunned down. California DPW (Department of Water and Power) archaeologists discovered the site a year ago, but its existence was not revealed to prevent vandalism. A dispute has arisen between the DWP and air pollution authorities is forcing it into the open. The site is on a section of the lake bed that state air pollution authorities say contributes to dust storms that create a public health hazard. The site also involves Indian heritage protection. Kathy Jefferson Bancroft, tribal historic preservation officer for the Lone Pine Paiute-Shoshone Reservation is quoted as saying: “Just over there, 150 years ago, our people ran into the water and then were picked off…We take this personally — my grandmother told me about this massacre and she knew the people it happened to…This ground, and the artifacts in it, is who we are.” She wants the land to be left undisturbed.
• Very old canoes
Ancient Britons made hundreds of thousands of dugout canoes, archaeologists now believe. Analysis of a key long-buried ancient river channel in Cambridgeshire suggests that canoes, made of tree trunks, were the basic transport in prehistoric times. Archaeologists and conservators are attempting to save eight of canoes in a specially designed cold store conservation facility at a Bronze Age site and museum at Flag Fen near Peterborough. The boats date from 1600 to 1000 BCE.
• Early immigrants to Bronze Age Britain
According to a report in The Telegraph, archaeologists analyzing findings from burial pits in Suffolk have found that immigrants were settling in Britain as far back as 3,000 years ago. Immigrants at that time came from Scandinavia, the western Mediterranean, and North Africa. Findings are published in British Archaeology. Mike Pitts, the editor, said: “This is the first burial site of its type that we’ve found and it reveals that Britain was always part of a bigger landscape that includes most of Europe.”
• Lost and found: Sunken city in the Mediterranean
The Australian, among other mainstream media outlets, carried an article about an Egyptian city, swallowed by sand and sea more than 1,200 years ago. Elsbeth van der Wilt, a University of Oxford archaeologist working at the site, said the port played an important role in the network of long-distance trade in the Eastern Mediterranean and would have been among the first stops for foreign merchants arriving in Egypt: “Excavations in the harbour basins yielded an interesting group of lead weights, likely to have been used by both temple officials and merchants in the payment of taxes and the purchasing of goods. Among these are an important group of Athenian weights. It is the first time that weights like these have been identified during excavations in Egypt.” The article includes a video.
Scientists have raised concern about the health effects of the smoke released from burning wood. / Wikimedia Commons
• First case of very old case of cancer
The finding of a cancerous tumor in the rib of a Neanderthal specimen predates previous evidence of such a tumor over 100,000 years. Prior to this research, the earliest known bone cancers occurred in samples approximately 1,000-4,000 years old. The cancerous rib, recovered from Krapina in Croatia, is an incomplete specimen, and thus the researchers were unable to comment on the overall health effects the tumor may have had on this individual. Findings are published in PLoS One by David Frayer from the University of Kansas and co-researchers. Science Daily quotes Frayer as saying that “Evidence for cancer is extremely rare in the human fossil record. This case shows that Neandertals, living in an unpolluted environment, were susceptible to the same kind of cancer as living humans.” However, in an interview with CBS news, he clarifies that Neanderthals did not always live in a completely clean air environment: “They didn’t have pesticides, but they probably were sleeping in caves with burning fires…They were probably inhaling a lot of smoke from the caves. So the air was not completely free of pollutants — but certainly, these Neanderthals weren’t smoking cigarettes.”
• Let them eat grass
The Republic and Science Daily discussed a new study showing a major change in the diet of African hominids about 3.5 million years ago when some ancestors added grasses or sedges to their menus. Tests on tooth enamel indicate that prior to about 4 million years ago, Africa’s hominids had a chimpanzee diet that included fruits and some leaves. According to CU-Boulder anthropology professor Matt Sponheimer, lead study author, despite the availability of grasses and sedges, the hominids seem to have ignored them for an extended period: “We don’t know exactly what happened…But we do know that after about 3.5 million years ago, some of these hominids started to eat things that they did not eat before, and it is quite possible that these changes in diet were an important step in becoming human.” Findings are published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences along with three related papers.
anthropologyworks 