Anthro in the news 6/1/10

• 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.

Memorial Day: It’s okay to wear white shoes now

While out running errands this morning on Connecticut Avenue in the far northwest part of Washington, D.C., I was struck by how quiet it was — even compared to other Sundays — in terms of low traffic density. And quietness.

Then I heard it: the noise of several Harleys in unison moving south on the avenue.

Memorial Day in the United States was established to remember the service of Americans who died while serving in the military. It started after the Civil War. It is one of those “eggwhite” rituals, to use the term of British cultural anthropologist Tristram Riley-Smith, that pulls together many people in this diverse country. (See my “Must Read” review of his book, The Cracked Bell.)

“Whites.” Creative commons licensed photo from Flickr user Niklas Hellerstedt.

I emailed Riley-Smith this morning about Memorial Day, commenting to him that D.C. seems to be marked by a mass exodus of many people to the beach and in influx of Harley-riding bikers at the same time. Responding from Guernsey in the Channel Islands, where he has been launching his book, he sent me the following material which is similar to his writing about “Rolling Thunder ” in his book:

This is a nation all too often disappointed when those it seeks to liberate fail to show their appreciation, but with Vietnam the American people blamed returning draftees for the disastrous conduct of the war. They blamed draftees who had been sent into a battle they neither wanted nor approved of, all too often being pushed into the front line to protect the regulars.

The “Ride to the Wall” on Memorial Day, also known as Rolling Thunder, was initiated by these unhappy outcasts who felt the government wasn’t doing enough to recover the POWs and the remains of the dead abandoned in Indo-China. This protest has now been absorbed into the mainstream. On the Sunday before Memorial Day, the highways into D.C. become choked with convoys of Harley-Davidsons, with silencers removed, heading for the Mall and the Vietnam Memorial, where one is likely to encounter a huge, wild-eyed vet in grey pony-tail, studs, tattoos and leather biker’s gear being embraced by a young, uniformed, close-shaven Marine.

The Gold Star Mums are there to heal the wounds as well, “to give these poor outcasts the hugs they never had,” as one put it, “when they returned home.”

The Vietnam-American war (as it is called in Vietnam) took many, many lives, both American and Vietnamese. It irreparably damaged many more lives, here and there. Following the war, a new term appeared in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) that lists and classifies Western psychiatric diagnoses. The new term was Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

It also created deep rupture lines in anthropology; cultural anthropologists doing fieldwork in Southeast Asia often had knowledge of which villagers were sympathizers with the U.S. enemy. Some anthropologists took it as their duty, as American citizens supporting their country’s war efforts, to submit the names of such people to the U.S. military. Those people were killed.

Other anthropologists decried this complicity of anthropologists with the military and the abuse of people’s trust in someone who was supposedly a scholar seeking only to learn about their lives in order to write a book about it someday.

Out of this painful rupture grew the Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association, likely the first such code in any social science discipline anywhere that put as its first research commandment: do no harm. That means, among the people with whom you are doing research, do the very best you can to make sure that your research does not harm them, and if you have any concern that you might do them harm, stop doing your research immediately and find another topic or population to study. Do no harm to their lives or else get out of their lives.

Back to Memorial Day. Riley-Smith is right when he says, in his book, that more than Veterans Day, Memorial Day “is wired into America’s martial traditions” (p 195). It will likely be celebrated for a long time to come since we seem to keep waging war.

Riley-Smith also rightly notes the secular importance of the holiday: public swimming pools open, people go on picnics, and — something from my era — women can now wear white, especially as in shoes which you just couldn’t do before Memorial Day (The New York Times acknowledged the enduring nature of the white clothing rule in its style section today).

Under blue skies as brilliant as those on 9/11, here in Washington, we have a perfect day for a picnic, for remembering the pain of war and for a fervent wish for a rule that there can be no war after Memorial Day, or before it. Every year, on end.

Dead Birds now

I hope that some people reading this blog have seen the 1965 documentary, Dead Birds. If you haven’t, please try to do so. It’s a very long film, in black and white. I viewed it in a college class many years ago. For me, the big lesson was that the Dani people of highland New Guinea (their territory is now defined as lying within West Papua which belongs to Indonesia) had a relatively civilized way of doing war. The men would get all dressed up with feather and shell ornaments. Then they took up their bows and shields, lined up against their opponents and shot arrows at the opposing line of men until someone was wounded, or perhaps killed.

A modern day almost-dead bird in the Gulf of Mexico. “Dying Baby Egret,” creative commons licensed content from Flickr user MarilynWelch.

Then the war stopped. Right then.

That was my interpretation of a representation: both may be quite distorted. Nonetheless, you have to agree that so-called “tribal warfare,” before the arrival of guns, was not about massive killing, much less annihilation.

But I seem to be the odd duck out. Stuart Kirsch, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, argues (in “Ethnographic Representation and the Politics of Violence in West Papua,” Critique of Anthropology 30:3-22, 2010) convincingly that the general perception of outsiders is that the Dani and other West Papuans are frighteningly violent — by nature and by culture. War is the central value in their culture. They are simply all about war.

This image justified the Dutch colonial presence: West Papuans needed pacification.

It fosters a thriving industry of extreme tourism “in which Euro-Americans pay thousands of dollars to participate in staged encounters with lost tribes.”

Now there is a new kind of war going on.

The story today is about international mining. Colonialists of our time, the multinationals have made and continue to make huge profits from exploiting the riches of West Papua. These companies, if called into question, can hire top lawyers to protect their interests. They can curry favor with politicians. They can win support from the military.

But the West Papuans, now, have more than bows and arrows, though their arsenal is still small by comparison with that of the big companies. They are organizing and enlisting international political support against the depredations of the mining companies. They are using an indigenous concept, merdeka (freedom) to express their wish for both regional autonomy and social justice.

Starting with the intrusion of the Dutch and continuing to today’s Indonesian control, many West Papuans have suffered from a politics of violence that makes the ritual warfare of Dead Birds look like child’s play.

If one were to film a documentary of conflict in West Papua today, the line-up would be very different from that depicted in Dead Birds. The mining companies would have a star role. Their employees are dressed up nicely. But they don’t stop shooting after wounding just one person.

Anthro in the news 5/24/10

• 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.

Who you gonna call?

The major source of health information for South Asians in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area is not the family doctor: it’s the internet. In this respect, South Asians probably resemble most Americans. In other respects they do not.

The Washington, D.C., metropolitan area has the fifth largest South Asian population in the United States. To learn about their perceived health status, health needs and health-related practices, several faculty, students, and alumni of The George Washington University’s School of Public Health and Health Services collaborated on project SAHNA (South Asian Health Needs Assessment).

The SAHNA team conducted a survey on the web and by paper from which a total of 709 questionnaires was collected. The results are described in a report that was issued in May to mark Asian American month in the United States.

Selected findings: South Asians with higher incomes are more likely to have had a physical exam and to have seen a dentist in the past year. The same holds true for South Asians who speak English and those who are citizens. While the majority do not get much exercise, they also do not eat fast food regularly.

Project SAHNA has established a useful baseline for the Washington, D.C.-area’s South Asian population. It points the way to more qualitative follow-up research among the population. Even more importantly, it raises questions about what is distinct about the culture(s) of South Asian populations in the United States compared to that of other recently-arrived population and to longstanding residents.

Of the billions served at McDonald’s, not many of them are South Asians based in the District, according to a recent study. Image credit: Flickr user Road Side Pictures, creative commons licensed content.

I am intrigued by the 77 percent of the respondents who say that they never or rarely eat fast food. They are adults. What about their children?

When I did research with members of the North Indian immigrant community in Pittsburgh, Penn., in the early 1990s, food was sometimes a zone of contestation between parents and children. Parents wanted children to eat Indian food. A major compromise food was vegetarian pizza served at home. Children often lobbied for fast food from the major chains for special events like a birthday party or graduation. Concessions to children’s desires were made so that vegetarian pizza was served, for children, at communal meals following temple rituals.

According to the report’s findings, Jamie Oliver doesn’t need to do a site visit to South Asia, D.C. Not yet.

Hey there. Nice jaws.

A study published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior discusses the fact that, among humans, men have thicker jaws than women (noted in this week’s Anthro in the News). Professor David Puts of Penn State University suggests that men have thicker jaws than women as a result of an evolutionary process of selection, over many generations, in which men with thick jaws survived and outbred men with thin jaws. The survival advantage of having a thick jaw for men, he postulates, has to do with, he postulates, a male culture of brawling throughout human evolution.

If you are comfortable with that explanation, what do you make of this website about women with pronounced jaws ?

UPDATE: The author of the article under discussion, Professor David Puts of the Anthropology Department of Pennsylvania State University, emailed me and gently informed me that I had followed the lead of a tabloid-style media source and replicated its distorted view of his scholarly article.

Dr. Puts is right, and I apologize. I usually do consult the original source rather than bouncing off a media report. I got so carried away with the jaws intrigue that, in this case, I failed to do so.

I have since read his 20-page review article which discusses findings from nearly 300 sources. On one page (p. 162), he discusses “robust mandibles,” suggesting that they, along with many other features of male anatomy and behavior (such as men’s greater muscle mass, strength, and levels of same-sex aggression, deeper voices, and beards), appear better adapted to excluding sexual competitors by force or threat than to attracting a mate. On another page (p. 168), he summarizes his argument that robust mandibles may have evolved to lessen the risk of jaw fractures during fights.

The comments about men’s jaws constitute a small fraction of the total content of the article. It is intriguing that the media source picked up on that material. Apparently, in the contestations of the B-grade media world, jaw size, linked with violence, might be a winning combination. I fell for it.

His article is the subject of a piece in this week’s Economist.

Image: “The truth is always up there” from flickr user dhammza, licensed with Creative Commons.

Upcoming conference in the UK

Via the always fascinating Somatosphere blog, an announcement about an upcoming conference:

“Medical Anthropology in Europe: Shaping the Field”
June 1-2, Oxford, UK

“Medical anthropology has just as long a history in Europe as in North America. However, European medical anthropologists are often unknown in Britain. One reason is that they often do not write in English or only sporadically. Perhaps, precisely due to the different languages, different medical anthropological perspectives have had time to gain some maturity and develop into sometimes quite distinctive schools. After the first RAI conference on ‘Medical Anthropology in Britain Today’ in September 2007, this second RAI conference will invigorate our own medical anthropological teaching and research by getting to know and interacting with mostly, but not exclusively, European colleagues.”

Hosted by the Royal Anthropological Institute. Full program available here.

I can see clearly now…

Question: Who knew that marijuana can improve your night vision?

Answer: Many people around the world. For example, Jamaican fisherman who smoke cannabis or drink a tincture infused with it say that they can see better when they are out fishing at night. It helps them avoid dangerous reefs. But why believe what they and other cannabis users say?

Let’s hear from science which now offers a way to measure night vision: “Objective assessment of night vision has recently become possible with the development of a portable device, the LKC Technologies Scotopic Sensitivity Tester-1.” Hurray! If something can be scientifically measured, then it must be real. But let’s see what the Scotopic Sensitivity Tester-1 reveals.

Ethnobotanists (people who study the relationships between plants and peoples in particular contexts) took the technology to the Rift Mountain region of Morocco (a major cannabis producing area) and conducted a case study. They recruited three Moroccan men who were “kif-experienced” (kif is a cannabis product that is smoked). The men smoked kif and were then tested for vision.

Results: vision improved in each man after smoking kif.

In reporting their findings, the authors humbly comment that their case study is very small (true). Nonetheless, they say, further study is merited.

Any volunteers?

Image: “IMG_9576 copia” from flickr user realight, licensed via Creative Commons.

Anthro in the news 5/17/10

• Africa is not a big country
In a letter to the editor of The New York Times concerning an article on the global war on AIDS, Steve Black zings it for totalizing “Africa.” He writes, “Now just imagine what would happen to investment in the United States if articles did not distinguish between the United States and Colombia and discussed “American drug lords”?” Black spent a year in Durban, South Africa, while pursuing a Ph.D. in anthropology. See also this.

• The tragedy of trachoma
Infectious trachoma is widespread among the indigenous peoples of Australia. Some eye care specialists argue that services in remote areas to provide eye care should be increased. Peter Sutton, an anthropologist, responds that spending more on services is questionable when much of the burden of trachoma could be prevented by improved facial hygiene.

• Let’s face it
A French proposal to ban full face veils for women has prompted much media discussion. The Daily Star (Lebanon) quotes Abdelrhani Moundib, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco: “The West has the right to preserve its secularism … As a Moroccan Muslim, I am against the burqa. I see nothing in it that relates to Islam or chastity.”

• Talk to me
Just hearing your mother’s voice can raise levels of oxytocin, the “cuddle hormone,” according to an experimental study conducted by biological anthropologist Leslie Seltzer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

• Jaws are us (guys)
Human males have thicker jaw bones than human females. The interpretation of this difference, provided by biological anthropologist David Puts of Penn State University, is based in evolution. Physically superior males were more attractive to females as mates, and male jaw bones were part of the selective mix: “Males have thicker jawbones, which may have come from men hitting each other and the thickestboned men surviving,” he said. “Things are different for us now in many ways.” Blogger’s note: I hope he’s right about things being better now.

• Makerere University drops archaeology B.A. degree
Scrapped programs on the main campus of Makerere University, Uganda, include the B.A. in archaeology. In all, 20 programs were dropped including the bachelor’s degrees in dance, tourism and wildlife health and management, and the master’s program in ethics and public management.

One man’s Eden


One can hardly blame Kristof for admiring the beauty of Gabon, pictured here in a creative commons licensed Flickr image from carlosoliveirareis, but maybe he could have said more about the ugliness masked by the idyllic landscapes?

Nick Kristof‘s in love. It’s so great for him and for his readers, who grow weary with all the dreary news he reports. No fistula stories for a change. Instead a beautiful beach in Gabon where a few elephants gambol. Kristof is smitten with Gabon’s beauty and its hope to build a green Gabon.

Gabon could be the Costa Rica of Africa with huge swaths of rainforest protected from development. Perfect for tourists and for the preservation of lowland gorillas. Sounds great, for some people who can afford to enjoy these treasures.

But not so good for the former forest dwellers in Gabon such as the Babongo. They, like so many other indigenous peoples of Africa, can no longer pursue their traditional livelihood of foraging (hunting and gathering). Extruded from the forest because of conservation areas and other forms of development, they have been “resettled” and now perform wage labor for others.

No longer stewards of the forest, they are outcasts in modern Gabon. Lowland gorillas have it better than they do.

St. Nick is a champion of the rights of women and girls around the world. He also loves pristine beaches and elephants. How about a few words about the desperate plight of the many forcibly displaced indigenous peoples of Africa — and elsewhere worldwide — whose lives have been totally ruined by development?