• The recession and polygyny: lessons from Inner Asia?
In Russia, there are 9 million fewer men than women. The “man shortage” is created by war, alcoholism and economic migration. The Guardian highlighted research on this topic by cultural anthropologist Caroline Humphrey, Sigrid Rausing professor of collaborative anthropology at Cambridge University, and the New York Times gave it a shoutout in its Sunday “Week in Review” section. For details see the upcoming post on this blog.
• Walking the walk on Wall Street
Economix gave a nod to Karen Ho, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, for her ethnography of Wall Street which exposes Wall Street culture’s transience, constant turnover, uncertainty and risk-taking. Ho argues that these characteristics helped precipitate the current crisis.
• Ur: human sacrifice upside the head
The New York Times covered findings by archaeologists at the University of Pennsylvania that shows that palace attendants who were killed to accompany a royal burial in Ur, Iraq, likely suffered a grisly end. The usual explanation of the many deaths of warriors, handmaidens, and others, is that they were marched down into the burial chambers where they drank poison and then died. Their bodies were arranged with elaborate headdresses for the women and weapons by the side of the warriors.
But one thing was missing: their skulls. Most had been smashed flat from the weight of the earth over the centuries (these burials are from a 4,500 year-old cemetery).
Janet Monge, biological anthropologist at Penn, has led a team of researchers who apply forensic analysis to determine probable cause of death. The first CT scans of two skulls reveal that a sharp instrument, such as a pike, was driven through their heads leaving a round hole in the cranium (one hole in the female cranium and two in the male cranium), with cracks radiating from it. Death would have been almost immediate.
So why choose a career as handmaiden or soldier? Monge replies that these positions held great honor and meant a good life at court. And “the movement into the next world was not for them necessarily something to fear.”
• Religious syncretism in Venezuela
Wade Glenn, doctoral student in the Anthropology Department at Tulane University, is quoted in a New York Times article on Venezuelan religious practices that blend elements from indigenous beliefs, Catholicism, West African religions, and other elements such as Nordic myths. As many as 30 percent of Venezuela’s population take part in rituals that involve purifications in a river, drumming, fire dancing, trance, and possession. Glenn’s doctoral research is on this topic.
• Economic inequality, explained
Science Daily reported on an article in Science by anthropologist Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, professor of anthropology at UC Davis and co-author economist Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute. They led a team of 24 researchers who analyzed cross-cultural data on economic inequality and inherited wealth in societies around the world. They divide wealth into three categories: material, embodied and relational. Their findings suggest that intergenerational transmission of wealth and wealth inequality is substantial in agricultural and pastoralist societies but not in foraging and horticultural societies. They posit that differences in livelihood technology, institutions, and economic norms account for the difference.
Cultural anthropologists need to unpack and critique these highly generalized findings. Some of the conclusions don’t merit attention (“the four ethnographic systems…differ in the importance if the three classes of wealth”) but others do. Cultural anthropologists have long known, and taught our students, in a form of intergenerational transfer, that the four modes of livelihood differ in key respects, and we also include attention to a fifth: industrialism/informatics.
Borgerhoff Mulder et al. have done a service in drawing attention to intergenerational transfer of “wealth.” But they are missing some key factors such as the importance of private property versus communal property and use rights (which are also passed down) and cultural knowledge of the environment including the weather, plants and animals, and the spiritual world.
• Feeling the burn
Go to NPR for a discussion of running research including Dan Lieberman, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University.
• Leadership in the genes
Science Daily picked up an article published in Current Biology on “The Origins and Evolution of Leadership.” The argument is that factors such as age, sex, height, and weight played a major role in the choice of leaders in our evolutionary past and therefore continue to do so today. The underlying hypothesis appears to be that war was a dominating factor in human evolution and that war favors mature males who are tall and solid. This blogger believes that the war factor is overrated for the human evolutionary past by a long shot.
• Neanderthals and modern humans had sex?
It must be the word “sex” that helped move into the mainstream media a claim by evolutionary anthropologist Svante Pääbo that sex occurred between the Neanderthal and modern humans. He shared his conviction, at a conference in Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, near New York City, that Neanderthals and modern humans had sex. But he is not sure how “productive” it was.
by Barbara Miller
If there were a Hall of Fame for the Most Cruel Colonizers of the World, Australia would have a prominent place. Early British settlers (“unsettlers” or displacers, more accurately) hunted the Tasmanians to near-extinction. None of the indigenous groups have been left unscathed. And today the cruelty continues in new, more “civilized” guises such as economic development.
anthropologyworks 