Anthro in the news 1/11/10

• Tell it to the Marines
NPR aired an interview with cultural anthropologist Paula Holmes-Eber who teaches “operational culture” at Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia. Classes include discussion of cultural sensitivity and the cultural/social consequences of military presence and military actions, such as blowing up a bridge.

• Nacirema craziness goes global
In an article called “The Americanization of Mental Illness” in The New York Times Magazine, Ethan Watters (blog) describes how Western, especially American, globalization includes the spread of Western/American understandings of mental health and illness. He points to some of the negative consequences of this trend.

In discussing why people diagnosed with schizophrenia in developing countries fare better than those in industrialized countries, he draws on the work of medical anthropologist Juli McGruder of the University of Puget Sound. McGruder’s research in Zanzibar shows how Swahili spiritual beliefs and healing practices help the ill person by avoiding stigma and keeping social and family ties intact. Note: Nacirema is “American” spelled backwards.

• Guardians of the nameless dead
The bodies of hundreds of victims of political violence in Colombia are often disposed of by being thrown into rivers. Sometimes the bodies wash up on the river bank. WIS News describes the work of one local civil servant, Maria Ines Mejia, who spends time recovering bodies from the Cauca River and thereby helping authorities record the deaths and chronicle the killings.

Maria Victoria Uribe, an anthropologist with Colombia’s National Commission of Reconciliation and Reparation, names people like Mejia as “unknown heroes.” Michelle Hamilton, an expert in body composition who directs the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State University, notes that “…you can imagine trying to grab onto a water-logged body with the skin slipping off. It can come off in your hands.”

• Celebration and warning
Survival International’s “weighty coffee-table book,” We Are One: A Celebration of Tribal Peoples, is reviewed in the Ecologist. The unity and diversity of indigenous peoples around the world is celebrated in beautiful photographs and through the words of tribal and non-tribal people. Given that Survival International commissioned the book, it also expectedly contains a message of deep concern about the dangers to survival that so many indigenous/tribal cultures face.

• Who rules?
Janine Wedel is a cultural anthropologist and professor of public policy at George Mason University. Her book, The Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market, was reviewed in the Financial Times and by Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post. Wedel has appeared at several book launches in D.C.
Continue reading “Anthro in the news 1/11/10” →

Anthro in the news 1/4/10

• Muslim-Hindu punk rock and immigrant identity
“With this music I can express my confusion,” says Marwan Kamel, lead-guitarist in Chicago-based Al Thawra, one of the emerging punk rock groups composed of first generation immigrants of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent. A USA Today article about these groups quotes Alan Waters, anthropology professor at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, as saying that these bands are “a good opportunity for stereotype smashing.” Most band members have full time jobs and are not as religiously observant as their families would like. Musical style can combine hard-edged punk, ska and funk. Lyrics are sometimes humorous or more seriously satirical.

• San Francisco watch
An article in the San Francisco Chronicle describes Harry Nimmo’s long term observations of change in the Lower Haight neighborhood of San Francisco. Nimmo, a retired anthropology professor, has lived on Potomac Street for 35 years. He provides a portrait of urbanization over the period in his self-published book, Good and Bad Times in San Francisco. When he first moved into the neighborhood, it had the heaviest concentration of heroin pushers in the city. Since then he has seen the incoming waves of gays and then straight single white people when the neighborhood became hip. Then gentrification. Nimmo recalls that the neighborhood was, in some ways, more friendly 35 years ago than it is now.

• Forensic anthropology and the Sundance Kid
Was the famous robber, Harry Alonzo Longabaugh aka The Sundance Kid, buried in a cemetery in Duchesne, Utah, under the name of William Henry Long? The remains were unearthed a year ago but the question is still unanswered. Support for the claim comes from the work of University of Utah anthropology professor, John McCullough. He says there are matches in height, hair color, eye color, and a notch in the ear, a broken nose, and a cleft chin. Even more convincing is that death likely occurred from a .22-caliber bullet that entered his skull in a way that indicates someone shot him (the death certificate for Long states that he committed suicide).

• Hard times at FSU
An article in Science describes the effects of the economic downturn on Florida State University, especially in terms of cuts to science departments including tenured faculty. Anthropology is one of the hardest-hit departments. The Dean of Arts and Sciences says that “Sciences never pay for themselves.”

• Human evolutionary anthropologist comments on diet
The Washington Post Style Section carried a lead article about the recent trend in paleo dieting among some people in the US. It conveys comments sent in by email from Harvard University professor of human evolution, Richard Pilbeam: “I think it’s quite possible there have been at least some genetic changes since the Neolithic…that would modify digestive processes (enzymes, etc.) to adjust to what have been in many cases quite radically transformed diets.” He provides the example that most humans are able to digest milk.

• DNA from prehistoric modern human in Russia
BBC picked up on a new approach to distinguish ancient DNA from modern contamination developed by Svante Pääbo and colleagues of the Max Planck Institute, Leipzig. The technique was used on remains of a male buried in Kostenki, Russia, around 30,000 years ago. Findings are published in Current Biology.

• Bumper year of archaeological finds in Scotland and beyond
An article in The Scotsman dubs 2009 a “year of revelations.” The many finds include, in the Orkney islands, a “Venus,” a “Neolithic cathedral,” and a Neolithic structure that contains ritually deposited cattle skulls built into a wall. Other major finds are the “Stirling Hoard” of gold necklaces and, in England, the “Tamworth Hoard” of Anglo-Saxon gold currently on display in the British Museum.

• Newsweek’s list of memorable dead
Yet another list, this time from Newsweek, names 31 famous people who passed away in 2009. The list includes Claude Lévi-Strauss and describes him as the French intellectual who helped popularize the study of anthropology: “Whether tabulating a trove of native myths from the Americas or lecturing on motifs in the Ring cycle, he did it with a poetry–and an outreach to other disciplines–that eluded most academics.”

Anthro in the news 12/28/2009

• Mexican national award to U.S. anthropology professor

Antonio N. Zavaleta, professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College, received the Premio Otli Award. It is given by the Mexican government to non-Mexican citizens who work to improve the quality of life for Mexican citizens living abroad.

• Australian of the Year Award goes to legal anthropologist/law professor

The Australian of the Year Award goes to an Australian recognized for bettering the world and inspiring others to do so as well. Patricia Easteal, associate professor in the University of Canberra’s faculty of law, won the award for her efforts in advancing human rights and justice in Australia by highlighting equity issues in the law, courts, prisons and policing. She earned a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh and is a dual citizen of the United States and Australia. Her publications, including 13 books authored or co-edited and more than 100 journal articles, have had an impact on legal reform and public policy especially in the area of violence against women. “There is still a way to go,” she says.

• Liberté, égalité, sexualité

An article in The Independent describes how schools across France may be facing student revolts about the right to wear sexy clothes in school. Some schools forbid low-slung trousers (for males presumably), short garments (for females presumably) and piercings. A rumor at one school of a potential ban on all contact between couples prompted students to threaten a “day of kissing.” Sociologist Michel Fize of the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique says that he is not surprised at the increase in teenagers wanting to dress provocatively. He places the blame on television and a “hyper-erotic” society: “How can you say to a teenage girl that she is baring too much of her shoulder when those on television are doing exactly that?” In the meantime, isn’t this the same country that gets upset when Muslim girls want to cover their heads in school?

• A community of heroin addicts

WHYY Radio interviewed cultural anthropologist Philippe Bourgois, professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, about his 12 years of research with homeless heroin addicts and crack smokers in San Francisco. Bourgois and photographer Jeff Schonberg published their findings in a 2009 book, Righteous Dopefiend. An exhibit by the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia provided an “ethno-photographic” display during December.

• Chimpanzee cutlery

For the first time, chimpanzees have been seen using tools, specifically cleavers and anvils, to cut food into bite-sized bits, according to a report from BBC. In other words they are processing food with tools, a significant step beyond using tools to procure food as in ant-fishing and nut-cracking. The study of chimpanzees in the Nimba Mountains of Guinea was carried out by Ph.D. student Kathelijne Koops and William McGrew of the University of Cambridge and Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University.

• First foreign geisha or not?

Mainstream media picked up on the debut of cultural anthropologist Fiona Graham, an Australian by birth with a Ph.D. from Oxford, as Sayuki, a trained geisha who bills herself as the first foreign geisha. In the 1970s, however, American cultural anthropologist Liza Dalby, with a Ph.D. from Stanford, did long-term participant observation in a geisha community and trained to be a geisha, making her the more likely first foreign geisha. Dalby is the author of Geisha, among other books. Graham seems to be suggesting that Dalby didn’t go through all the necessary steps and dressed and acted as a geisha simply through the courtesy of her geisha friends.

• Modern human behavior = compartmentalized activity areas

One indicator of “modern humans” is the existence of defined living areas for different activities which is taken to indicate formalized conceptualization of living space and organizational skills. A new study by archaeologists at Hebrew University, published in Science, has pushed back the date for such behavior to as early as 750,000 years ago. Evidence comes from the site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in northern Israel. Excavations were carried out under the direction of Naama Goren-Inbar. Members of the international research team include Ella Werker, Nira Alperson-Afil, Gonen Sharon, Rivka Rabinovich, Shosh Ashkenazi, Irit Zohar and Rebecca Biton of the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology; Mordechai Kislev and Yoel Melamed of Bar Ilan University; Gideon Hartman of the Max Planck Institute; and Craig Feibel of Rutgers University. Archaeologist Alison S. Brooks, an anthropology professor at The George Washington University and not involved in the research, is quoted in The New York Times as saying: ”This is an extraordinary site,” and the evidence of hearths itself “implies some kind of spatial organization.” But what would Foucault say? Didn’t he write that the disciplinary use of space occurred in the late 18th century?

• Precolonial farming in Hawai’i

A multidisciplinary team including archaeologist Patrick Kirch, professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, has found evidence of extensive dryland farming systems dating from precolonial times that could have supported one million people. Ecologist Samuel Gon III, cultural advisor and senior scientist with the Nature Conservancy, is quoted in the Star Bulletin as saying that the findings suggest “we can wean our reliance on food from the outside.” The research is described in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

• Headless in Vanuatu

The oldest and largest skeleton find in the Pacific Ocean has been discovered in a coral reef in Vanuatu. The multidisciplinary research team is led by Stuart Bedford and Matthew Spriggs of Australian National University in collaboration with the Vanuatu Cultural Centre. So far, 71 individuals have been recorded. They are all headless and some have their limbs broken, perhaps so they could be stuffed into crevices in the reef. Mads Ravn, team member and head of research at the University of Stavanger’s Museum of Archaeology in Norway is quoted in Science Daily: “The way these people are buried bears witness of a body concept which is different from the whole-body concept in Europe…”

• Nazareth house dated to the time of Jesus

A dwelling in Nazareth appears to be dated to the time of Jesus and was probably one of about 50 houses in what was then a remote hamlet. The research is being carried out by a team of Israeli archaeologists led by Yardena Alexandre, excavations director at the Israel Antiquities Authority. Alexandre said, “There was a logical possibility that a young Jesus could have played around the house with his cousins and friends.”

• Tis the time for lists

Several news media have presented their list of notable deaths in 2009. Three English-language sources that I have seen — The Sunday Times (London), The Observer (England), and the Los Angeles Times — include French cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss on their lists. The Sunday Times has a modest list of four, so that’s quite a tribute. The Observer‘s list, organized chronologically by death date, is too long to count. Ditto for the list in the LA Times which organized individuals into categories such as “from the halls of power,” “big screen and small,” “cultural trailblazers,” “wordsmiths” and “LA legends.” Lévi-Strauss’ name appears in the “agents of change” group which also includes Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Norman Borlaug.

Stunned by the massive New York Times obituary coverage (starting on the front page with a photo and continuing with an interior full-page) following the death of American economist Paul Samuelson, this blogger feels that there may be some justice in the world after all since Professor Samuelson didn’t make it on any of the lists discussed here.

Anthro in the news 12/21/09

• Cultural anthropologist wins national award in Australia

A book critiquing public policy toward Australia’s aborigines over several decades has won the Manning Clark House Cultural Award 2009. The awardee is Peter Sutton, a cultural anthropologist and linguist and senior research fellow at the University of Adelaide and the South Australian Museum. His book, The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the End of the Liberal Consensus, challenges the way successive governments have dealt with indigenous issues. According to the Canberra Times, it has polarized many readers in both academic and mainstream circles. The author says he has been surprised at the depth of feeling: “I’m touched by the fact that so many people are relieved by the book… It’s given them a certain cathartic release from silences and from being unable to think where they were heading.” He has, however, been upset by the “more personal attacks.”

• Ardi wins as top scientific breakthrough

Science magazine anointed Ardipithecus ramidus (its long-awaited description, not the discovery of the fossils since they were found over a decade ago) as the Breakthrough of 2009, and the mainstream media eagerly picked up on the announcement. According to Bruce Alberts, editor-in-chief of Science, the Ardipithecus research “changes the way we think about early human evolution, and it represents the culmination of 15 years of painstaking, highly collaborative research by 47 scientists of diverse expertise from nine nations, who carefully analyzed 150,000 specimens of fossilized animals and plants” (source). A special issue of Science was devoted to articles by various team members on the fossils and their significance.

• Anthropologists honored by AAAS

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) announced its 531 new fellows. Seven are anthropologists: Susan M. Cachel, Rutgers University; Diane Zaino Chase, University of Central Florida; Katerina Harvati, Eberhard Karls University of Tübigen; Andrew Hill, Yale University; Gary D. James, Binghamton University; Ellen Messer, Brandeis University; Yolanda Moses, University. of California, Riverside; and Lynnette Leidy Sievert, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

• Nancy Scheper-Hughes releases interview about Israeli illegal organ harvesting

In 2000, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, conducted and taped an interview with Yehuda Hiss, former head of the Abu Kabir forensic institute near Tel Aviv. Hiss admitted that in the 1990s pathologists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from family members. Hiss was removed from his post in 2004 when details about the organ harvesting were first reported, but he still works at Abu Kabir. According to the Guardian, Israel’s health ministry says that all harvesting in Israel is now done with permission and in accordance with ethics and Jewish law. The article is not clear as to why Scheper-Hughes decided to release the interview now.

• Rice as life in Japan

A feature article in the double holiday edition of the Economist about the importance of rice in Japan draws heavily on the insights of cultural anthropologist Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, the William F. Vilas professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is an authority on Japanese culture and author of many prominent books including Rice As Self: Japanese Identity through Time. She notes that the origin myths of many cultures focus on the origin of the universe, whereas Japan’s is “…about the transformation of a wilderness into a land of abundant rice at the command of the Sun Goddess, whose descendants, the emperors, rule the country by officiating at rice rituals.” These rituals are closely tied to Shintoism, Japan’s indigenous religion, which emphasizes the importance of subordination of self-interest to the well-being of the group. Rice is a major component of national identity: to be Japanese is to eat rice, specifically rice grown in Japan. But modernity threatens the centrality of rice in the diet as young urbanites increasingly opt for meals featuring meat, potatoes and bread. A growing movement, however, seeks to preserve Japan’s rice heritage. One such development is the establishment of an upscale restaurant in Tokyo called Kokoromai (“Heart of Rice”) which has more than 10 varieties of rice on the menu.

• The silent epidemic of childhood hunger in the U.S.

An article in The Washington Post addresses the challenges of widespread and growing childhood hunger in the U.S. and quotes medical anthropologist Mariana Chilton of Drexel University. Commenting on how the problem of child hunger is complex and subtle and cannot be solved by providing food alone, she says “Most people who are hungry are not clinically manifesting what we consider hunger. It doesn’t even affect body weight.” The lack of nutritious food is just one of several pressures facing low-income families including housing and energy costs. Chilton is part of Children’s Health Watch, a network of pediatricians and public health researchers in Philadelphia and four other U.S. cities, and she is organizer of the “Witnesses to Hunger Project” which has provided video cameras to 40 mothers to document the challenges they face and their efforts to feed their children. The videos will be used to lobby the U.S. government.

•Anthropology puts the people in technology engineering

Intel Labs’ People and Practices Research group (PaPR) has a vision of a more human-centered technology future. The group applies principles from “forward-looking anthropology” along with sociology and psychology to predict what people will require in the future. Ken Anderson, an anthropologist with PaPR, says, “We are trying to understand what people actually do in order to better design technology.” For example, because people frequently task switch when using technology, Intel is working on a new turbo boost feature that will be delivered early in 2010.

• Anthropology puts the people in public policy

The Dominion Post carried an article about a one-day seminar in Wellington led by Christian Bason (LinkedIn), head of the Danish thinktank Mindlab. The purpose was to talk about how to redesign public policy processes to take into account the people they are trying to help: taxpayers. Mindlab was established in Denmark to improve service delivery through understanding what people need. One example of success was reducing turnaround time for work injury cases. Bason said that anthropology has become “hip” in government service in Denmark: “instead of studying tribes in South America they are using anthropology to study taxpayers.”

• Anthropology puts the culture in skin care products

Tramayne Butler earned a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan and is now founder and CEO of AnthroSpa Logic LLC, which produces natural skin care products. She started researching and developing her line while teaching part-time as an adjunct instructor and spending time at home with her two young children. Inspired by her fieldwork in Kenya and extensive world travels, she realized that skin care products could benefit from cross-cultural knowledge about medicinal and beauty practices and use of organic materials.

• Leprosy most old

The DNA of a 1st century CE man buried in a tomb in the Old City of Jerusalem reveals that he had leprosy, making him the oldest proven case of leprosy. The location of the tomb suggests that he may have been a priest or member of the social elite. The condition of his hair and the quality of the textile shroud he wore are further indications that he was not a social outcast, in spite of suffering from a disfiguring disease. Details of the research are published in PLoS ONE.

• Say it with flowers

Flowers placed near the head of a human buried during the Bronze Age is the first such evidence from that period. The grave is located south of Perth, Scotland. The findings are described by Kenneth Brophy of the University of Glasgow in the journal British Archaeology. BBC news quotes Brophy as saying that the discovery of the flowers brought home to him the human touch involved, that “actually these are people that you are dealing with.”

• Dancing to a different culture

Researchers in the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, confirm the diversity of human cultures and human cognition. They asked a group of German children and a group of Namibian children to learn a dance. The German children and the Namibian children, however, consistently used different hand movement directions. Daniel Haun comments, “The human mind varies more across cultures than we generally thought.” The findings are published in the journal Current Biology.

• More evidence of chimp smarts

Primatologist Jill Preutz of Iowa State University has observed a group of savanna chimpanzees in Senegal for over nine years. Her latest discovery is that the chimpanzees understand how wildfires behave and can predict the movement of wildfire well enough to avoid it calmly. She feels that this finding sheds light on how early human ancestors may have learned to control fire. A paper co-authored with Thomas LaDuke of East Stroudsburg University, is published online in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

• Stone age pantry

Archaeologist Julio Mercader of the University of Calgary, with colleagues from Mozambique’s University of Eduardo Mondiane, has found the earliest direct evidence of extensive consumption of wild cereals. Dozens of stone tools, excavated from deep within a cave near Lake Niassa in Mozambique, were used to grind wild sorghum by Homo sapiens more than 100,000 years ago. Mercader comments that “inclusion of cereals in our diet is considered an important step in human evolution because of the technical complexity and the culinary manipulation required.” The findings are published in Science.

• Tough teeth for tough times

A team of researchers, including biological anthropologists Paul Constantino and Peter Lucas of The George Washington University, have shown that natural selection in three ape species favors those with teeth that can handle “fallback foods” during times of scarcity. Gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees favor a fruit-based diet. But they all possess molars than can allow them to chew tough foods such as leaves and bark. The findings are published in Science.

• Development projects do not benefit India’s tribals

KIRTADS (Kerala Institute for Research, Training and Development Studies of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes) organized a national seminar to discuss tribal knowledge, biodiversity, intellectural property rights and the impact of modernity on livelihood sustainability. Vineetha Menon, professor and head of the anthropology department at Kannur University, says that modernity has disturbed the tribals’ livelihood systems and that poverty-eradication schemes have not helped them. K. N. K. Sharma, former director of KIRTADS, pointed to the negative effects of land alienation and expressed criticism of the government for not protecting tribal land rights.

• Nepali cultural anthropologist dies

Renowned cultural anthropologist Saubhagya Shah died as a consequence of a heart attack at the age of 45. Shah earned his doctorate in anthropology from Harvard University. He was a professor in Tribhuvan University’s sociology department and coordinator of its Conflict, Peace and Development Studies program. Shah’s interests focused on the state, democratization and development. In his chapter in the edited book, State of Nepal, he offers a critique of the burgeoning NGO sector in democratic Nepal and notes that both government and non-governmental sectors are competing for the same resources. In an essay titled “Democracy and the Ruse of Empire” (PDF file), Shah points out: “It is ironic that the more Nepal sinks into the abyss of violence and anarchy, the more it emerges as an attractive destination for all manners of gun runners, conflict managers, crisis entrepreneurs and democracy missionaries out to make a quick buck or a fast name.” We have lost a keenly insightful anthropologist and articulate champion of peace, human rights, and counter-imperialism.

• Still remembering L-S
British cultural anthropologist Adam Kuper has written a tribute to Claude Lévi-Strauss which received a full page in Nature (login required).

Anthro in the news 12/14/09

• Anthropologists to help the US military in war?
Two cultural anthropologists who have been critics of the Human Terrain System since its beginning hold firm to their conviction that anthropologists should not participate in war efforts. Furthermore, Hugh Gusterson, professor of anthropology at George Mason University, and David Price, professor of anthropology at St. Martin’s University, are unconvinced that HTS works. Gusterson comments: “I wish I could say I’ve seen something that made me feel better [about HTS], but I haven’t.” Price, in noting that it is impossible for anyone to objectively measure the merit of HTS, says “I want to see some external results here and they’re not doing it. It’s a boondoggle.” The article presenting their views mentions that social scientists working in the HTS provide anecdotal support for its success. In one case, the social scientists “spent nearly a week” talking with urban residents in preparation for US withdrawal from the area. Compared to the soldiers who typically have only very short conversations with the “locals,” the HTS social scientists spent 30 minutes to an hour speaking with an individual.

• Akwesasne Mohawk women’s health
SUNY Albany’s Center for the Elimination of Minority Health Disparities is working with tribal Health Services on a study that will monitor Akwesasne women’s reproductive health and the possible effects of PCBs and lead. Center director and biological anthropologist Lawrence Schell is directing the project under funding from the NIH. The study will monitor approximately 180 women between 20 and 35 years old for four years. The tribe is concerned that elevated levels of PCBs and lead in their environment may be affecting women’s reproductive health. This study will shed light on the issue. Mia Gallo, co-investigator and biological anthropologist, commented that “The study is very important to the community.”

• Microsoft’s Ethnographer
Danah Boyd is making waves with her pioneering research on social networking, especially how US teenagers engage with technology to enter and use the digital world: “The social world around them today has mediated technologies, thus in order to learn about the social world they’re learning about the mediated technologies. And they’re leveraging that to work out the shit that kids have always worked out: peer sociality, status, their first crush.” She has found that control–and who has it– is all-important. In social networking, control is related to attention–and who gets it. All of which connects to issues she has been researching for several years: the class and race divides that exist between users of MySpace and Facebook.

Here’s how she introduces herself, lowercasing her name, on her blog, apophenia:
“My name is danah boyd and I’m a researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society. I received my PhD from the School of Information at UC-Berkeley. I live in Boston, MA. Buzzwords in my world include: public/private, identity, context, youth culture, social network sites, social media.”

• Stress revealed in ancient hair
Stress has apparently been around a long time. A new study reports on the detection of the stress hormone cortisol in the hair of ancient Peruvians who lived between 550 and 1532 CE. Emily Webb, the lead author of the study, is a PhD candidate in Archaeological Science at the University of Western Ontario. The researchers selected hair samples from ten individuals from five different archaeological sites in Peru and analyzed them in segments to determine cortisol levels. Many of the individuals showed high stress levels right before death. A majority, however, experienced multiple levels of stress throughout the final years of their life, indicating that stress was prevalent in ancient Peruvians’ everyday lives.

Anthro in the news 12/7/09

• Bolivian anthropologist quoted on indigenous politics

In an article about the popularity of Evo Morales in Bolivia, the New York Times points to evidence of growing rivalries and dissatisfaction with him from other indigenous political leaders. Riccardo Calla, an anthropologist and the minister of indigenous affairs in a previous administration, comments that indigenous politicians span an ideological spectrum and are more varied than presented in the US media. Interestingly: the article later quotes an economist, Gonzalo Chávez, who says that even the IMF is happy with the Bolivian economy. Calla is identified as an “anthropologist.” Chávez is identified as a “Harvard-educated economist.” Obviously Calla earned his PhD somewhere. But apparently not from Harvard.

• Report on anthropology and the Human Terrain System unveiled at the AAA meetings

Several media sources mentioned the release of a report on the Human Terrain System at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Philadelphia. The report was prepared by a panel of anthropologists who were charged by the AAA in 2007 to review the HTS. The report is strongly critical of anthropological involvement in HTS on the grounds that anthropological ethics cannot be maintained in a situation of war “where coercion and offensive tactics are always potentially present.” An article in the Chronicle for Higher Education provides extensive commentary from Robert Albro, cultural anthropologist and assistant professor of international communication at American University, who led the 11-person committee. Albro notes that anthropologists might be able to productively cooperate with the military in other ways, but the human-terrain program is probably best kept at arm’s-length.

• Anthropology in HTS an “abomination”

In an article in the political newsletter counterpunch, cultural anthropologist David Price sends a strong message that ethics-abiding anthropologists should stay clear of involvement with the HTS: “HTS cannot claim the sort of neutrality claimed by groups like Doctors Without Borders, or the International Committee of the Red Cross…Pretending that the military is a humanitarian organization does not make it so, and pretending that HTS is anything other than an arm of the military engaging in a specific form of conquest is sheer dishonesty.”

• Catching Fire a “best book of 2009”

Biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human made it to the Economist’s list of best books of 2009. It is praised as a “startling and persuasive analysis of the evolutionary role of cookery…” It did not, however, appear on the New York Times Book Review list, nor did any other book by an anthropologist.

• Richard Antoun, cultural anthropologist of the Middle East

Professor Richard Antoun died at the age of 77, stabbed to death in his office at Binghamton University. A graduate student at the University, who was Antoun’s dissertation advisee, is being held without bail.

Anthro in the news 11/30/09

• Publication of Ann Dunham’s revised dissertation

Working with the American Anthropological Association, Duke University Press has published “Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia,” a revision of Ann Dunham’s doctoral dissertation in anthropology. President Obama’s mother was trained as an economic anthropologist at the University of Hawai’i and worked in Indonesia as a development consultant. Duke is publishing the book as part of its list of books that critique conventional foreign aid and offer ways to rethink it. Dunham’s dissertation, completed in the early 1990s, prefigures much of today’s discussion in development circles of small-scale entrepreneurship, self-help, and micro-credit financing. The book includes rare photographs of Dunham in Indonesia and a foreword by Maya Soetoro-Ng, Dunham’s daughter and President Obama’s half-sister. I hope the Press comps the White House and that it receives a prominent place there.

• Following one’s nose to a good mate?

Several news sources picked up on an article published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology about mate selection among mandrills, the world’s largest monkey. A team of researchers followed 200 mandrills living in the tropical rainforest of Gabon in central Africa observing their behavior and collecting DNA samples. They found that female mandrills choose mates with different genes from their own. They are apparently guided to genetically dissimilar mates by their acute sense of smell. The adaptive outcome is that they have healthy babies with strong immune systems. Dr. Joanna Setchell of the University of Durham led the study and comments that mandrills are much like humans so the findings have relevance to human mate selection and the potential power of smell as an underlying factor. One important complication is that the study was done on a relatively closed population of mandrills, so it may have more relevance, Setchell and her colleagues suggest in their paper, to closed and isolated human populations with minimal migration to introduce new genes. I wonder if the team is aware of the many groups of people, from the Middle East to South India, that practice close-cousin or uncle-niece marriages which involve spouses with very similar genetic structures. Why are these many thousands of people not behaving like mandrills? Is their sense of smell perhaps damaged by life outside the rainforest and no longer effective in sniffing out a genetically different spouse? Or is the problem that, in these cultures, a woman doesn’t choose her husband and thus is unable to follow her nose? Or are humans, with all their culturally variable baggage, really not so similar to mandrills after all?

• Knowledge in cultural anthropology for war…and more

Wired Magazine offers a brief portrait of Montgomery McFate, a cultural anthropologist and prominent proponent of the US military using anthropological methods and approaches. She is currently Senior Social Science Advisor at Army Human Terrain System. Starting with the war in Iraq and impetus provided by General Petraeus, the US military has increasingly incorporated anthropologists and other social scientists in operations. The Wired piece points out that HT involvement of anthropologists “might be the start of something bigger” beyond the battlefield including more attention to training military personnel in cultural awareness, more effective intelligence gathering by “hanging around with regular folks” (not okay for anthropologists if done under cover or with any possibility of causing harm to those regular folks) and strategically addressing an array of global issues such as the rising China, a soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Iran, and a resurgent Russia. McFate is quoted as saying that “We can’t have effective strategy without cultural knowledge…” and, maybe we can figure out “how to engage Iran to get the outcome we want without going to war.” That would be a good thing, and a goal to which many anthropologists would willingly contribute–if they can do so within the bounds of anthropological ethics.

• Culinary anthropology

Journalist and culinary ethnographer Kayla Wexelberg discusses the cultural importance of food consumption choices, time allocation for food preparation, and sociality in a brief article in The Durango Herald.

Anthro in the news 11/23/09

• LSE anthropologist wins Victor Turner Award

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

• Increase in flatheadedness in the US

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

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

• Hobbits are us

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

• Expensive pig roast but for a good cause?

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

• Dell Hymes, linguistic anthropologist and giant in his field

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

Anthro in the news 11/16/09

• More on Lévi-Strauss

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

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

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

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

• Jane Goodall on endangered species

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

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

Anthro in the news 11-09-09

• Tristes tropes for a “towering” anthropologist

The French anthropologist who established the theory of “structuralism” outlived most other prominent anthropologists of his era. Claude Lévi-Strauss died over the weekend in Paris at the age of one hundred years. He left an impressive legacy in cultural anthropology and beyond. Reflecting his fame, his obituary appeared in media sources worldwide.

A founding father of the line of symbolic and interpretive anthropologists, Lévi-Strauss wrote books and articles showing how myths and practices should be understood as based on an underlying code of meaning based on dualities (culture and nature, male and female, raw and cooked). Such codes help people move through life by reducing the complexity of reality to something more manageable.

Richard Shweder, cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago, provides a summary of Lévi-Strauss’ approach that was picked up in several obituaries:

Logically deduce all the possible ways in which people can behave. Then, observe which behaviors are actually exhibited in the real world. Finally, try to explain the reason why some behaviors exist and why other logically possible behaviors are never seen. These reasons form a grammar, a structure, upon which all cultures are based.

Lévi-Strauss analyzed kinship systems, myths, food practices, and more. While the anthropological study of kinship and myths is on the wane in anthropology today, research in and beyond anthropology on food and cooking and cuisine is a hot item. It would be wonderful to hear what L-S would have to say about food studies now.

On another front, Lévi-Strauss argued that so-called “primitives” are not really different from modern people in thinking and behavior. And so he was an early champion of cultural relativism. My favorite Lévi-Strauss quotation comes from this area of his work, in his early book Tristes Tropiques: “No society is perfect.”

• The poor of rural Oregon in a “double bind”

Oregon has one of the highest rates of income inequality in the United States. In the past three decades, the wealthiest 1 percent tripled its income while that of the poorest remained flat. Joan Gross and Nancy Rosenberger, both cultural anthropologists at Oregon State University, conducted in-depth interviews with members of 76 low-income households in two rural communities of Benton County. Results indicate that people know what kinds of foods they should be eating, but that when money is short they cut back on food expenditures in favor of paying the mortgage, power costs, health care expenses, and material goods for their children such as decent clothing and computers so that they don’t face stigma in school. The people in the study, however, are reluctant to accept government assistance. One woman said: “My husband wouldn’t use food stamps. He’s got pride.” Hence the double bind. NewsRx Health covered this study which will appear in the December issue of the journal Food, Culture, and Society.

• Fewer androgens, more cooperation and sociality

Science News highlighted findings about primate sociality by Emma Nelson, the School of Archaeology at the University of Liverpool and Susanne Schultz, the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Among primates, exposure in the womb to higher levels of androgen is correlated with longer fourth fingers compared to index fingers. Nelson and Schultz have looked at finger length in several primate species and found a relationship between shorter fourth fingers and greater male-male cooperation and sociality. The coverage in Science News is a little hard to follow since the article states that digit ratio indicates lower levels of androgen exposure in orangutans and other Great Apes, thus explaining why these primates show high levels of cooperation and tolerance. Not the orangutans I’ve read about: aren’t they loners? Readers should consult the original article published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

• Newborns cry in code

BBC covered a comparative study of 60 healthy French and German babies found that French newborns cry with a rising accent while German babies’ cries have a falling tone, reflecting dominant patterns in French and German. This finding, from a study led by Kathleen Wermke of the University of Wurzberg and published in Current Biology, confirms earlier research indicating that fetuses learn sounds in the last three months of pregnancy. Wermke comments that neonates have learned “melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language” and that newborns are likely “highly motivated to imitate their mother’s behaviour in order to attract her and hence to foster bonding.” Isn’t it also likely that they can only reproduce melodies to which they have been consistently exposed? Or, if there’s a little Mozart in the womb, perhaps Mozart the neonate will compose innovative cry melodies? …lot’s to learn in this area.

• The changing culture of philanthropy in New Delhi

Erica Bornstein of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, conducted ethnographic research in New Delhi with Hindu philanthropists who have made large donations for temple construction or NGOs and with people who give small donations (dan) on a daily basis. Her findings are published in Cultural Anthropology and attracted the attention of Science Letter. Bornstein examines the interface between traditional giving practices and motivations, especially that of the most meritorious form which is anonymous (gupt dan) and emerging ideas of social responsibility and argues that new forms of philanthropy are emerging.

• From foot to head: biological anthropologists and archaeologists in PBS series on human evolution

Along with articles about archival works of Beethoven and creating headliners at The Onion, the art section in the New York Times last Tuesday included a “Television Review” piece about the three-part Nova series, “On Becoming Human.” It praises Dan Lieberman, biological anthropologist at Harvard University, for a “nicely accessible account” of why bipedalism evolved. Rick Potts, paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution in DC, is mentioned for his theory that the human brain increased in size as a way of coping with the climate instability that occurred about 2 million years ago. So, given global warming and instability in our times, the Potts theory predicts that humans brains will keep expanding. And our heads will get every larger.