• Anthropologists offer insights into the Uzbek situation
“There is no way but to bring them back,” says Sergei Abashin, senior researcher at the RAN (Russian Academy of Sciences) Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology in Moscow, referring to the refugees who recently fled to Uzbekistan. He told BBC that the Kyrgyz state has been either unwilling or unable to stop the conflict and that the world powers have also shown irresponsibility. Vladimir Zorn, deputy director of the Institute, points to economics and history as being underlying causes of the recent violence.

• Afghanistan: land of hope and sorrow
Marc Edelman, professor of cultural anthropology at City University of New York, points out in a letter to the New York Times, that recently published reports of huge mineral wealth in Afghanistan are not likely to bring prosperity to the country as a whole. Rather, as in similar contexts, wealth under the ground will probably bring more conflict on the ground.

• Sebastian Junger’s anthropological zeal
A review in the New Zealand Herald of Sebastian Junger’s latest book, War, which is based on 14 months in Afghanistan, says that Junger “…explores the nature of sexual deprivation, courage, boredom and the sheer excitement of war with an almost anthropological zeal.” What in the world is “anthropological zeal”? The next line says, “His meticulous, pared down prose is deliberately unemotional.” This blogger is a bit confused. Let it be noted for the record, however: Junger earned a BA in cultural anthropology from Wesleyan University in 1984. Whether or not that degree is responsible for his reputed anthropological zeal and/or his unemotional prose, who knows.

• Suckers for babies
The lead article in the New York Times science section on paternal behavior among nonhuman primates quotes Sarah Hrdy, biological anthropologist and professor emerita in the Anthropology Department of the University of California at Davis: “Lots of primates are suckers for babies.”

• A good gringo
Fluent in the Cofan language, Randy Borman, son of American missionaries, has helped the Cofan Indians acquire substantial territory in northern Ecuador. Michael Cepek, cultural anthropologist at the University of Texas at San Antonio comments about the Cofan in the Washington Post: “In the 1980s, some people thought they’ll disappear. They were small, monolingual; they didn’t have a strong political structure…Lo and behold, 20 years later, they are not just surviving, they are thriving.”

• The not-so-Human Terrain System
The Huffington Post quotes Hugh Gusterson in a piece on the Human Terrain System:  Gusterson says that the HTS is marketed as a way to build a more secure world, in fact it does the opposite in terms of supporting a “brutal war of occupation.”

• Not just any dame
Biological anthropologist and specialist in lemurs, Alison Richard was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire on Saturday during Queen Elizabeth II’s 2010 Birthday Honours. Congratulations, Dame Richard.

• Let’s go: gladiator cemetery
Category: best preserved gladiator cemetery. Current winner: York, England, with more than 80 Roman warriors in a just-discovered cemetery.  Fascinating details include a “high incidence of substantial arm asymmetry” in the skeletons and evidence of a “large carnivore bite…an injury which must have been sustained in an arena context.”  The discovery of the cemetery, according to Gillian Cruddas, chief executive of Visit York, says, “This is yet another great York story to add to the city’s exciting and colorful heritage.”

• A very old shoe
Category: oldest shoe. Current winner: a 5,500 year-old shoe found by archaeologists in a cave in Armenia. Lead researcher, Dr. Ron Pinhasi of University College Cork, Ireland, estimates that the shoe was European size 37, or US size 7. It’s up for grabs as to whether it was for him or for her.

• In recognition and memoriam
Shelton Davis, aged 67, died on May 27, in Falls Church, Virginia. He earned a PhD in anthropology from Harvard University, with a dissertation based on fieldwork among a Maya community in highland Guatemala. An activist anthropologist and indigenous rights advocate, he founded the Anthropology Resource Center, an early contribution to “public interest” anthropology. His 1978 book, Victims of the Miracle, is  a classic account of the social and environmental costs of development in the Brazilian Amazon in the 1970s. Blogger’s note: I read Victims when I was in college. It offers a vivid story. I recommend it to you.

Eugene I. Knez, aged 94, died in Honolulu. He worked at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History from 1959 to 1979 and launched its first permanent Asian exhibitions.  He earned his PhD in anthropology from Syracuse University in 1959.

Raymond Allchin, archaeologist and cultural historian of India, aged 86 years, died on June 4. Allchin was a leading force in promoting scholarly recognition of South Asian prehistory. He also sought to reach a wider audience by writing in an engaging way about everyday topics such as cow dung.

• Spilling our Gulf
The millions and millions of crude oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico will lead to “extreme human suffering as well as extreme property damage,” according to Gregory Button, professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Tennessee. He has done research on other oil-related disasters including the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 and the collapse of an oil storage tank during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Furthermore, he notes that the people most hurt by the Gulf-area hurricanes of 2005 are likely to suffer most from the oil spill: “They’ve already lost their homes, their livelihood, their income, and their communities.” Spill workers are at risk to their health from direct exposure. Other repercussions, similar to those following the Exxon Valdez disaster are likely: alcohol and substance abuse, divorce, suicide, and mental health problems.

• Follow the (BP) money
Three years ago, Laura Nader, cultural anthropology professor at UC Berkeley, argued that the university should not take money from BP to support research at its Energy Biosciences Institute because BP is a “criminal corporation,” as quoted in the Sacramento Bee. The funding, perhaps ironically, goes for research to find green fuels and reduce oil use. Critics say this is simply “greenwashing.” Scientists say it allows them to do important research. A post-doctoral student who works at the Institute is quoted as saying that she has to first run her findings past BP: “There have been a few things that they’ve asked me to be a little more vague about.”

• Maya were early materials scientists
Early Maya were the first polymer scientists according to MIT materials science researchers. Their study was prompted by a question from undergraduate student, Michael Tarkanian, in a freshman archaeology class: How did the Maya produce bouncy rubber balls? The research will be reported in the journal Latin American Antiquity.

• Big bird lives on in rock art
Arnhem Land, in Australia’s Northern Territory, contains the oldest known works of art in Australia. A recent discovery of a rock art depiction of what is likely a bird that went extinct 40,000 years ago is another example affirming Arnhem Land’s invaluable prehistoric art heritage.

• Ancient brain food
Archaeologists have found that early humans, around two million years ago, ate crocodiles, turtles and fish. This oldest evidence for a diet containing aquatic animals was discovered by researchers including Andy Herries of Australia’s University of New South Wales. The aquatic animals are rich in omega-3 fatty acids that are critical to human brain growth. Findings will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

• Neanderthals in the sceptred isle
A discovery in Kent (the part of England closest to the European mainland) by Dr. Francis Wenban-Smith, shows that Neanderthals were in residence around 100,000 years ago. The evidence is some flint hand tools. The Neanderthals apparently arrived from what is now France via a land bridge.

• Bonobo mojo
Vanessa Woods concludes her series of guest posts for Discover with a post about bonobo sex in which she responds to skeptics who say that reports of frequent sex among bonobos are inflated. Woods provides data to support her position, including a histogram of different bonobo sex positions. She refers to a supporting hormonal study. Blogger’s query: why is it so difficult for many people to free themselves from their chimp-based model? [Possible answer: because the chimp model validates human male violence and mercurial male sexual affect?].

• In recognition and memoriam
Professor Gilbert Kushner, founder of the first graduate program in applied anthropology in the United States, passed away this week. As a youth, in the 1950s, he was a beatnik, singing protest songs in Greenwich Village. After earning a doctorate in anthropology from the University of North Carolina, he joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Florida in 1970, was the department chair for many years and served as associate dean in USF’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. In the face of widespread objections to his idea of establishing of an MA degree in applied anthropology, from Margaret Mead among others, he pursued his vision. A passionate supporter of anthropology and social activism, he once wrote, “Anthropology (is) not only a scientific and humanistic discipline, but a way to contemplate humankind’s place on Earth.”

• Wouldn’t it be nice…
If their wife is “well paid,” 37 percent of men students surveyed by a campus newspaper at Yonsei University, Republic of Korea, said they are willing to be a househusband. Some 20 percent said they had no idea, and 43 percent said no. Kim Hyun-mi, professor of cultural anthropology at Yonsei University, commented that many young people value gender quality and individual freedom but also depend on their parents for financial support.

• Blood-sucking science
A forty-year blood war is apparently over (note this blogger’s use of the word “apparently”). Four American universities and the US National Cancer Institute are returning blood samples to the Yanomami Indians of the Amazon region of Venezuela. Biological anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, and other researchers, collected 2,000 samples in the 1960s. The Yanomami claim that they never thought their ancestors’ blood would be kept in freezers and used in ways that did not conform with their original agreement. When they get the blood back, they will release it into a river, “pouring the blood of our ancestors to the waters because our Creator, Omame, found his wife, our mother, in the river. Blogger’s note: Given the possibility that scientists have found ways to “bank” the data for research purposes without keeping the actual blood in storage, I hope that any and all derivative material/information are being returned along with the actual blood samples and that the Yanomami have clear rights concerning any possible follow-up studies based on the blood samples.

• What’s the news from Daly City?
“Why is it always foggy in Daly City? Because all the Filipinos turn on their rice cookers at the same time.” Daly City, CA, is the home of the largest Filipino (Pinoy) community in the United States. The New York Times carried an interview-based article about Benito Vergara, a Philippine-born anthropologist who just published a book based on his dissertation: Pinoy Capital: The Filipino Nation in Daly City. Formerly assistant professor of Asian-American Studies at San Francisco University, Vergara now works as a web editor for a financial services company and lives in the East Bay area.

• Deep voice
According to a report in ScienceDaily, men with deep voices sound more dominant to other men, regardless of the self-perceived dominance status of the listeners. These findings and others, reported by Sarah Wolff and David Puts of the Department of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University, US, come from two experimental studies in which nearly 200 native English-speaking, self-identified heterosexual undergraduate men were asked to rate male vocal recordings. The paper is published in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

• Will the real Ardi please stand up?
Ardi was hailed as the big science breakthrough of 2009. One of the major claims to fame about Ardi is that it became bipedal while living in dense forest rather than in open savannahs per the generally accepted model. Some scientists now contest that claim, saying that contextual data, in fact, indicate that Ardi did live in a savannah environment and thus Ardi substantiates the generally accepted model of how environment affected the emergence of bipedalism. Others are arguing about Ardi’s place on the evolutionary tree that led to us: is Ardi a hominid or not? What about its cranium and dentition? Since much of the research on Ardi has been funded by the National Science Foundation, keep asking: how is all this relevant to our world today?

• Archaeological prize for Tunisian-French team
The Tunisian-French team in charge of excavations of and research on the archeological Ammaedara-Haidra site, in the Governorate of Kasserine (also known for a major World War II battle), were recently awarded the World Archeology Prize by the Simone and Cino Del Duca Foundation’s Committee, a charitable foundation based in Paris, France. The team’s fifteen-year effort has involved studies of Byzantine churches, thermal baths, roads, Christian and pre-Christian epigraphs, and Roman and Muslim ceramics, mosaics, and sculptures. Blogger’s note: The Prize goes to the researchers. What about the local people who live near the site? I hope that, at least, tourism to the area generates new employment and educational opportunities for local people through collaborative rather than extractive research.

• Reality anthropology–who knew
Since this blog has existed (August 2009 start-up) the only time anything about cultural anthropology has made the front page of the New York Times, till now, was the death of Claude Lévi-Strauss. And, hey, this coverage is about live people. In California. With jobs and kids. What could be more exciting (maybe a famous French anthropologist’s death)? Well, it is exciting. Ironic, though, that micro-data about everyday life, the stock in trade of cultural anthropology, has gained sufficient traction to merit front page coverage in the NYT because it’s like reality television. Ouch, but beggars can’t be choosers about which door opens for them and who hands them a meal. What’s it all about? It’s about a research project conducted from 2002-2005 under the direction of Elinor Ochs, professor of anthropology at the University of California at Los Angeles and director of UCLA’s Center of Everyday Living of Families, a Sloan Center on Working Families. The project collected 1,540 hours of unscripted videotape from 32 middle-class, dual-earner, multiple-child families in the Los Angeles region. Ochs and her team are still working their way through this immense dataset. Professor Ochs is a renowned scholar who has used similarly fine-grained data to study mother-child interactions in Western Samoa and the United States, agoraphobia in the United States, and autism in the United States.

• Shadowing the shadow elite
In the Huffington Post, Janine Wedel reviews Gillian Tett’s book, Fool’s Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe. Wedel is a cultural anthropologist and Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and author of Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market. Wedel lauds Tett, also a social/cultural anthropologist by training now with the Financial Times, for focusing on banking culture, specifically the issue of derivatives, in relation to the global economic crisis that began in 2007.

• What took us so long?
A tour guide at Sterkfontein, South Africa, site of some of our earliest human ancestors, asked the visitors whether they had been there before. No hand went up. “What took you so long” he said. An article in the Travel section of the Washington Post describes a visit to Sterkfontein–the Cradle of Mankind World Heritage Site. Dr. Frances Thackeray, anthropologist and director of Witwatersrand University’s Institute for Human Evolution, accompanied the WP journalist. Thackeray (and yes, he’s related) avoided the term “missing link,” suggesting instead that the human family tree is complicated.

• Buried with jade and amber
Archaeologists from the University of Brigham Young in the United States and the Mexican National Institute of History and Anthropology announced the discovery of an ancient tomb inside a pyramid in Chiapas, southern Mexico, which could be 2,700 years old. If the date is confirmed, it would be the oldest burial in a pyramid in Mesoamerica. The richness of the burial goods indicate that the individual was of high status, a finding that affects theories about how, when, where and why social inequality emerged in Mesoamerica.

• A shot heard round the world
Yes, they did. Have sex. The news is out, and the media worldwide are buzzing about it. Svante Pääbo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, is the lead scientist of the 58-member international research team that decoded the Neanderthal genome using material extracted from some Croatian bones. Results indicate that Eurasian populations carry up to 4 percent of Neanderthal genes. As quoted by BBC, Pääbo says that Neanderthals…”are not totally extinct, in some of us they live on–a little bit.” During an NPR interview, Harvard geneticist and team member David Reich is asked if Neanderthals and modern humans did more than exchange trading cards and had sex. His brief but definitive reply: “That’s right.” So, they had sex, and more importantly it was really great sex: it led to reproductively viable offspring who in turn generated the modern-day populations of Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. Watch for major efforts at Neanderthal rebranding starting now!

• Precious Alaskan heritage: welcome home, for a while
Six hundred invaluable objects dating from 1850 to 1900, from the US National Museum of American History and the National Museum of the American Indian, will be on display in the new Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center at the Anchorage Museum starting May 22. According to the initial agreement, the objects can remain in Anchorage for seven years. Most have been in storage for decades and will be seen by the public for the first time. Smithsonian anthropologists, headed by Aron Crowell, director of the Arctic Studies Center, reviewed 30,000 items in Washington, DC, with assistance from 40 native elders. Hundreds of other Alaska natives contributed to the project. Many were videotaped telling stories about the objects and describing the memories they invoke. The videotapes will run continuously on large screens.

• The Big Five to make way for paleo-tourism?
Recent fossil discoveries in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site near Johannesburg, where several important fossils of early human ancestors have been found starting in 1947, promise to boost paleo-tourism to the region. Mark Tennant, one of Africa’s leading paleo-anthropological-tourism specialists, says that South Africa can become “one of the world’s premier heritage destinations.” While a long way from attracting the numbers of safari-focused tourists out to see the Big Five, paleo-tourism offers a growing niche for specialized tours.

• A lot of shaking going on
Videos of chimpanzees and bonobos made in six European zoos show several instances of “preventive headshaking.” Christel Schneider of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, made the discovery after studying the taped material.

It was a quiet week for anthropology in the mainstream media, and I have only four items to share. To whet your appetite, three are about food.

• Go ask Alice
The Economist, ever watchful for studies that have to do with…well, economics, picked up on a study of mushroom gathering in Tlaxcala, Mexico. Luis Pacheco-Cobos of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and colleagues followed mushroom gatherers from a village in Tlaxcala for two rainy seasons. Researchers recorded the weight of mushrooms collected, their location, and who collected them. Findings show that men and women collected the same weight of mushrooms, but men traveled farther, climbed higher, and used more energy. These findings connect to an ongoing discussion in many disciplines about the supposedly superior spatial skills of males. Results will be published in Evolution and Human Behavior. Blogger’s note: I applaud this new study’s inclusion of efficiency as measured through energy expended and other factors. Could males, who are reputedly “better” at spatial skills than females, also be better at wasting time and energy?

• What’s cooking?
Jody Adams is another anthro student turned chef, suggesting that there is more than something in the water. Adams is a James Beard Award-winning chef and the owner of the renowned restaurant Rialto in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She recently competed in Bravo’s “Top Chef Masters.” During an interview with the Huff Post, Adams says: “When I was studying anthropology at Brown I hadn’t a clue as to what I would be doing today. But I was cooking then and loving it and traveling as much as I could. I guess my path was already set, I just couldn’t see it.”

• Donner Party not gone to the dogs
The Los Angeles Times carried a riposte by Ethan Rarick, author of Desperate Passage: The Donner Party’s Perilous Journey West, to anthropologist Gwen Robbins’ findings that the Donners ate the family dog and not family members. Rarick raises two questions related to Robbins’ analysis of bone fragments from Alder Creek: (1) the tale of the 84 members of the Donner Party includes many more sites than just Alder Creek and (2) desperation cannibalism tends to involve flesh consumption and not processing that would show up on bones. So, Rarick contends, just because cannibalism may not have occurred at Alder Creek does not prove it did not occur at other points in the Donner Party journey. Furthermore, cannibalism would not necessarily show up in bones left along the way. Blogger’s notes: what does the contention about the Donners’ survival diet tell us about ourselves, especially in comparison to members of societies that do not forbid consumption of human bits and pieces?

• The grieving of the chimps
Two new studies of chimpanzees support the idea that chimpanzees, like us, mourn following the death of an individual close to them. Both studies are published in Current Biology.

• Will China’s one-child policy be history?
Last year the Chinese government commissioned studies to assess possible effects of eliminating its one-child-per-couple policy. Susan Greenhalgh, professor of cultural anthropology at the University of California at Irvine, is a leading expert on the one-child policy and author of Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China. She comments: “My view is that it will gradually be taken apart, piece by piece, over the next few years…”

• Blood rights and wrongs
The Havasupai Indians, who live deep in the Grand Canyon, issued a banishment order to keep Arizona State University researchers off their reservation. They also were awarded reparation of $700,000 from Arizona State University and granted the return of blood samples they donated for health-related research at ASU starting in 1990. The Havasupai accuse some biological anthropologists and geneticists at ASU of using the samples for research purposes beyond what the original permission agreement stated. The New York Times has produced an informative and moving video on this issue.

• Maasai en garde
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, is Africa’s third fastest growing city. And its crime rate is on the rise. Couple these facts with the situation in rural areas where Maasai pastoralists live: growing poverty, hunger, and loss of their herding livelihood related to loss of land because of the encroachment of farmers and the state’s creation of tourist parks. As explained by Ann May, professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, these forces constitute a strong push and pull effect: in order to earn money to provide for their families and their herds in Maasailand, proud Maasai herders migrate to Dar to work…as security guards. One Maasai guard in Dar said: “People have faith in Maasai because we work diligently, we don’t have greed for wealth, and we don’t steal. So we are trusted.” Another explained: “At least if we are in the city we don’t have to sell the cows back home…It’s not that we like this job but the hardness of life makes us do it. It’s dangerous. We want to be back home. But we have to find a way to look for money.”

• Better chance of finding your spouse online than in a bar
A survey commissioned by match.com reveals that 17 percent of US marriages in the past three years are based on meeting online compared to only 8 percent based on meeting in a bar or club. Still, the majority of marriages, sixty-seven percent, result from meeting through friends/family or work/schools. Susan Froelich, cultural anthropologist at the University of Manitoba who studies online dating, comments that “it’s become hyper-mainstream” in the last five years. Blogger’s note: The match.com survey goes back only three years. It would be great to have more longitudinal data and data disaggregated by age, class, ethnicity, and region.

• Organ donors wanted
In response to the shortage of organs in the United Kingdom, a “public consultation” is underway, run by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, a thinktank, and led by Dame Marilyn Strathern, professor of social anthropology at Cambridge University. While recognizing the large unmet demand for organs in the UK, she poses ethical questions about financial incentives such as cash payments, coverage of funeral costs, or priority for organs in the future: “Offering incentives may encourage people to take risks or go against their beliefs in a way they would not have done otherwise.”

• What do people understand about anti-malarials?
Large-scale use in Tanzania of the anti-malarial drug commonly known as ALu or dawa mseto prompted a study to assess mothers’ perceptions of its efficacy and side-effects. The research team, led by V.R. Kamat of the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, indicates that more and better communication between health care providers and mothers of sick children is needed to improve mothers’ understanding and adherence to the dosage recommendations.

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 4/26/10” →

The news from anthroland has thinned out a bit these days. Nonetheless we have some noteworthy items for you from tweets to eats. Read on!

• Be careful what you tweet
The US Library of Congress will permanently archive all public tweets starting with March 2006 when Twitter began. Several media have noted the vast opportunities for anthropological research in the Twitter archive in providing insights into people’s (read: tweeters’) perceptions of and reactions to events. Blogger’s note and query: In the wide world of cultural anthropology, tweeters are a tiny, tiny minority…how will analysts discern who are the tweeters and the non-tweeters in any given domain/discussion and what difference this makes in terms of the tweet content and intensity? LOC: great idea and a major challenge to researchers to figure out what to make of all the data.

• Donner family ate the family dog not the family
Those of us living in the DC area survived two snowstorms of unprecedented proportions this year. Some of my colleagues mentioned that they expected the Donner family to arrive at their door (it wasn’t that bad, really). A big news item this week was about new evidence that the Donner family ate their pet dog and did not practice “survival cannibalism.” Gwen Robbins, assistant professor of biological anthropology at Appalachian State University, is the lead investigator. She told MSNBC news that “there is no evidence for cannibalism.” She and her colleagues are writing a book to be published in 2011 by the University of Oklahoma Press.

• Cilantro hatred
An article in The New York Times examines why many people hate fresh cilantro, or coriander. Julia Child hated it. There is even a “I Hate Cilantro” Facebook page and blog. What’s this all about? Some experts argue that certain people may have a genetic disposition to cilantro, though systematic studies do not yet exist to support this claim. Cultural anthropologist Helen Leach of the University of Otago in New Zealand has traced negative comments about cilantro to English and French gardening books starting around 1600. Her research suggests that cilantro leaves and seeds, which were prominent ingredients in medieval cooking, were targeted by modernizing style snobs. The “new” European cuisine spurned cilantro in favor of new flavors. Could be. These things happen. Blogger’s note: taste/flavor implicates both culture and biology in complicated ways. On a personal note, I was a serious cilantro hater when I was younger–it made me nauseous, even when presented to me in succulent curries in India. Now, no problem, love it. Explain that.

• Anthropology vs. cooking throwdown: both sides win
Is there an emerging pattern here? Rick Bayless, leading edge chef of nouveau Mexican cuisine, studied anthropology at the University of Chicago as a doctoral student. Before completing his degree, he traded in his pen for a sauté pan and never looked back. Washington, DC now has Tim Miller, executive chef at Mie ‘N Yu restaurant in Georgetown. As an undergraduate archaeology student at the University of London, Miller “went on some really cool digs” in the British Virgin Islands. When a student, he supported himself by washing dishes in a local restaurant. By the time he was a senior, he was working 55 hours a week as kitchen manager. When it came time to choose between graduate school and a job, he chose the latter but with a twist. He entered the business world, working for a brokerage firm part-time while also pursuing a culinary degree. The latter led to a move from “the corporate world to kitchen freedom.” After working in two Marriotts in the US, he was hired at Mie ‘N Yu when it opened. The restaurant offers dishes from cultures along the Silk Road from Persia to India and China, so Miller does research on regional cultures and cuisine: “There’s never a dull moment…anthropology and the study of cultures fit into this job.”