• Is egg freezing a good solution for professional women’s work-life challenges?

CNN carried commentary from cultural anthropologist Marcia Inhorn, the William K. Lanman Jr. professor of anthropology and international affairs at Yale University. Inhorn says, “Trying to balance career and family is difficult for many professional women. I am one of those educated career-driven women who completed my Ph.D., found a good husband and landed my first tenure-track job at a major public university by 35.” Egg freezing is the newest reproductive technology: a recently perfected form of flash-freezing that allows human eggs to be successfully stored in egg banks. Commercially available in American IVF clinics only since October 2012, egg freezing is being heralded as a “revolution in the way women age,” a “reproductive backstop,” a “fertility insurance policy,” an “egg savings account” and in particular, a way for ambitious career women to postpone motherhood until they are ready. With egg freezing, women can use their own banked eggs later in life to effectively rewind their biological clock, becoming mothers in their 40s, 50s and beyond. It’s a technological game changer that just might allow women to defy the notion that they can’t have it all.

Inhorn’s statements drew criticism from two other medical anthropologists, Lynn M. Morgan, Mary E. Woolley Professor of Anthropology at Mount Holyoke College, and Janelle S. Taylor, associate professor and chair of anthropology at the University of Washington. In The Feminist Wire, they write that Inhorn’s CNN advice  to women, “consider freezing your eggs” is right about one thing: “Trying to balance career and family is difficult for many professional women.” Yet the solution to the problem of balancing career and family for women – egg freezing – is entirely wrong. They point out that egg freezing is a new addition to the repertoire of assisted reproductive technologies, so of course people are intrigued. But egg freezing is also invasive, dangerous, unregulated, and very expensive. Worse, it is not a social solution, so it cannot address the social causes that make it so difficult for professional women to balance career and family.

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 4/22/13” →

• Bringing up babies

Slate carried an article about parenting around the world with a focus on the work of Sara Harkness, a professor of human development at the University of Connecticut, who has spent decades compiling and analyzing parents’ views about parenting around the world:  “To read her work and the work of her colleague and husband, Charles Super, is to be disabused of a lot of certainties about child rearing…It’s not a shock that child care varies across cultures, of course. But it is still hard to comprehend just how many ways there are of looking at a baby. I have been reading various ethnographic work on child rearing for years now, and yet, when I talked to Harkness last week, I started by asking her what child-rearing practices vary most among cultures. This is a worthless question. All child-rearing practices vary hugely among cultures.”

•Declining women divers of South Korea

The Korea Times, in its April 11 edition, published an article called “Daughters of the Sea,” describing the decline in the population of women free-divers of Jeju Island, South Korea [blogger’s note: with apologies, I cannot find a public link to the article, so, without apologies, I will quote from it at length here].

“The bold, female divers of Jeju known as ‘haenyeo‘ have long impressed the world by harvesting from the ocean with the simplest of tools. Their unique ways have become symbols of empowerment and community. As the aging divers approach their twilight years, society grapples with the potential collapse of their tradition…This wind is not good, says Kim In-sook, peering out of a seaside shelter as she untangles a traditional fishing basket. As the waters are choppy, she may not able to use her equipment this day, despite the early morning sun. Squatting, Kim assesses the weather, hoping to fill her basket with abalone, conch, octopus and sea urchin as she has since childhood, diving alongside other women from her village. ‘Let’s wait and see,’ Kim tells other divers as they file into the small space. They are among some 3,500 remaining ‘haenyeo,’ or women divers in Jeju, who free-dive without breathing equipment. At 66, Kim is a senior diver in this village on the island’s northeast coast. As murky as the water might be, so too is the future for the aging haenyeo. Their lifestyle, passed mother-to-daughter for generations, is endangered due to rapidly-dwindling numbers.Once looked down on as common laborers, society now reveres them as symbols of feminine strength. But their dwindling number poses questions about preserving their traditions; and what losing them would mean to Korean society. ‘We are the last generation,’ says Kim, heading outside…” Continue reading “Anthro in the news 4/15/13” →

• Our guns, our legislators

PressTV interviewed cultural anthropologist William Beeman of the University of Minnesota on the topic of gun control in the United States. Beeman, via Skype, commented that :  90 percent of Americans when polled want guns registered, but the rich gun lobby has politicians in their pocket so the public is not represented. The difficulty in the United States is that legislators are heavily supported by the National Rifle Association and the National Rifle Association is an outgrowth of the gun manufacturing industry. Therefore, the gun manufacturing industry has a very strong hold on legislators. If you were to put this to a public referendum the public, Beeman argues, they would vote overwhelmingly for greater gun controls, but legislators in Congress feel that they are not able to support that because they depend so heavily on the financial support of the gun lobby.

• It’s dirty work if you can get it

An article in The Atlantic describes how a cultural anthropologist became a New York City sanitation worker and went on to write an “eye-opening account of the mysterious and dangerous world of trash. ” In her book, Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City, New York University cultural anthropologist Robin Nagle “lets the uninitiated in on the vital, hidden, and arcane system that enables cities to function–from the logistics to the slang and jokes to the places most of us never see. To study the mini-society known as New York’s Department of Sanitation, not only did she follow the men in the garbage truck around through their day–something that took years of trust-winning on its own–she also trained and sat for exams to become a sanitation worker herself.”

• Religious belief and schismogenesis in the U.S.

Tanya Luhrmann, professor of anthropology at Stanford and the author of When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God, was a guest columnist in the Sunday New York Times. She described a recent experience on a talk show when she was grilled about her religious beliefs. The aggressive questioning, and her responses to it, reminded her of an anthropological term for the “racheting-up of opposition: schismogenesis.

Gregory Bateson developed the word to describe mirroring interactions, where every move by each side makes the other respond more negatively.” She goes on to say that  “I think that schismogenesis is responsible for the striking increase in the number of people who say that they are not affiliated with any religion. Since the early 1990s that number has more than doubled to 20 percent from less than 10 percent, and is close to a third for people under 30. We know that most of these people still believe in God or a higher power, whatever they mean by that. It’s just that they are no longer willing to describe themselves as associated with a religion. They’ve seen that line in the sand, and they’re not willing to step over it.” Her main message is the importance of maintaining a more measured kind of dialogue about religious beliefs in America in order to avoid schismogenesis.

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 4/8/13” →

• On the varieties of marriage

Amidst ongoing debates and discussion in the U.S. about same-sex marriage, Rosemary Joyce, a professor of archaeology at UC Berkeley, published an article in Psychology Today summarizing exchanges in the past week at the Supreme Court hearings on California’s Proposition 8. She provides insights from anthropology about the many varieties of marriage and family found cross-culturally and  quotes from a 2004 statement from  the American Anthropological Association: “The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies.”

• The social history of an Indianapolis neighborhood

Cultural anthropology students at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis recently participated in a research project to collect oral histories, photographs, and other memorabilia from what was once one of the most multi-ethnic neighborhoods in Indianapolis. They not only documented the area’s history, but they also brought former residents of the community back together. A book based on the project, The Neighborhood of Saturdays: Memories of a Multi-Ethnic Community on Indianapolis’ Southside, describes how African-Americans and Jews once lived together, sharing physical space and friendship. Their ties remained, despite the forces that scattered them including upward mobility in the postwar period and the construction of an interstate. For the last 38 years, 200 to 300 former residents of the community, with their families and friends, have gathered every year in August. The book covers the period from the 1920s to the early 1970s. The University has also established a digital collection of photographs in its library.

• If you don’t believe in fairies…how about termites?

But if you must cleave to science, then there are always termites to explain wondrous happenings such as thousands of circles, some smaller and some larger, thousands of them, found in a stretch of desert from Angola through Namibia into northern South Africa. According to an article in The New York Times, “To the Himba people who live in the region, however, there is nothing to explain. That’s just how it is, they tell anthropologists; the circles were made by their  ‘original ancestor, Mukuru.'” New research suggests that the fairy circles are engineered by a species of sand termites.  In an article in the journal Science, Norbert Juergens, a professor of ecology at the University of Hamburg, said these termites ”match the beaver with regard to intensity of environmental change, but surpass it with regard to the spatial dimension of their impact.” David P. Crandall, an anthropology professor at Brigham Young University in Utah who has studied the Himba people closely since 1990, said the fairy circles ”are a strange and interesting phenomenon” that is vital to their sparse population spread over an area about half the size of Arizona. Even though the people appear to have little curiosity about why the circles are there, they depend on the grasses around them to graze their cattle, goats and sheep. The Himba sometimes put the barren spots to new uses. Examining some Google maps, Juergens was puzzled by what appeared to be black margins to the circles in some pictures. Going to the sites, he found that the Himba had erected temporary wooden fences to hold cattle overnight.

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 4/1/13” →