Thanks for all the fish Douglas!

New research suggests that dolphins have specific whistles for individuals and will use them to identify those individuals. In other words, dolphins have their on way of naming and calling one another. This is just one more example of the intelligence of dolphins, which is fascinating for studies of the evolution of intelligence and communication. But it is also an interesting thought experiment for linguistic anthropologists. In human societies, names often indicate not just the individual but certain relational information about kinship, status, age, and other contextual data. In America, our last names indicate descent and kinship and personal titles such as Mr., Ms., and Mrs. indicate status and marriage. In other societies, slaves might be nameless or, as was the case in America, they were stripped of their given names and assigned new ones associated with their owners. In certain areas of China, men gain names as they attain statuses over their lives while women functionally lose their names when they marry. Yoruban names indicate a plethora of information about the child - parents, location and time of birth, and family history. In some societies like the Orokaiva, the dead do not have names. In short, around the world naming is a complex system of indicated vast amounts of information regarding an individual and their place in society. If you're interested in learning more, you can read a book of essays about it all here.

So returning to the original article, what might dolphin names indicate beyond just signifying a particular individual? What would be important in dolphin culture? Gender? Parenting? Coupling? What do you think?

The Antiquity of Human Creativity

Scientific American's recent article "The Origin of Human Creativity Was Surprisingly Complex" nicely summarizes archaeological findings suggesting that the use of symbols, complex tools, chemical compounds, and containers at least 77,000 years ago with some inventions happening before we even evolved into modern day humans. Of course, we've been making stone tools and fire long before we even evolved into homo sapien sapien around 100,000 years ago, but older studies suggested we plateaued for a long time and didn't begin this kind of complex creative thinking until about 40,000 years ago. It is an interesting and easy to read introduction to more recent studies on the issue. 

Anthropology and Advocacy

If you aren't already following the Anthropological Association of America's articles on Huffington Post, you should. After some of the claims made by people like Florida's governor Rick Scott that anthropology is a useless major, the AAA realized we as a discipline had an image problem. Too often people think of anthropology as just a discipline of naval gazing or experts on obscure rites and tiny villages. At most people think anthropology is interesting, but they don't see the relevance to our everyday lives or why they shouldn't sigh when their child decides to major in it. So the AAA began recruiting anthropologists to write straight forward accessible pieces about anthropology or about other topics from the perspective of anthropologists.

The most recent piece is about the role of anthropology and advocacy. Periodically, on blogs, forums, and in news articles the debate about whether anthropologists can be both scientific and advocates arises. It always struck me as an odd debate since there are advocates in many other disciplines that do not seem to draw the same kinds of questions to their legitimacy as scientists. Economists write books about how to fix the economy, biologists raise money and awareness for the protection of endangered species, and nutritionists give suggestions for how to fix school lunches. So why are anthropologists vilified when they also use their expertise to suggest improvements and changes? I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that anthropology is a hybrid discipline with no clear foot in any arena since in our quest to answer why humans do the things they do we have to draw upon almost every other discipline. That ambiguity leads to methods and arguments that do not always fall squarely in the obviously science realm. And I think our unfortunate past as advocates for racism and colonialism still haunts the discipline. If we stay safely tucked away inside the ivory tower no one can accuse us of slipping back into that.

However, as the piece points out, anthropologists have been advocates for a long time. A great example they use is that of race. Biological and cultural anthropologists have shown that race is not a biological reality but merely a cultural construct (but it is still a serious cultural reality). Realizing what a heated and problematic issue race still is in our society, the AAA has created some really great and accessible resources to teach the public about it. This doesn't lessen the scientific validity of work anthropologists do. Rather, using genetics, history, and great ethnographic examples they use science to prove a point. I think it powerfully reveals what anthropology is capable of as well. We do not approach issues from just one perspective, but instead employ a range of methods and viewpoints to get a holistic understanding. And if all those viewpoints - genetics, cross-cultural examples, and historical accounts - point to the same thing your argument is much stronger.

Evolution is a pain in your back

Photo from an article on DeSilva's work with the evolution of bipedality in Bostonia.

If you've dealt with back problems you aren't alone. But did you know that as a species we've had this problem since before we were human? Even poor Lucy suffered from a bad back. Professor Jeremy DeSilva from Boston University (Go Terriers!) was interviewed by CNN about how our bipedal evolution has led to our many back and foot problems. Since we started out as quadrupeds  our spines weren't made for walking upright. To adjust for issues of balance, our spine has a S shape but this causes further complications later in life. Likewise, the arches in our feet help us run and absorbs shock, but arch pain is a common reason for visiting a podiatrist. If engineers were to design the human spine, hips, and feet we'd probably look more like animals that have been bipedal much longer such as ostriches. But as Jeremy DeSilva said in the interview:

"We've known for a long time, since Darwin’s time, that humans have evolved, and that humans are not perfect, because evolution doesn't produce perfection," said Jeremy DeSilva, anthropologist at Boston University.

If you're interested in learning about this issue in more depth than a CNN article provides, check out DeSilva's lecture from Boston University's Unintelligent Design: The Scars of Human Evolution webcast. And you can read his statement from that presentation here and read more about his work on these issues here.

Ethnocentricity, Cultural Relativism, and the Search for Moral Truth

"I find that there is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country."

- Michel de Montaigne in Des Cannibales

This recent article in the New York Times entitled "Of Cannibals, Kings and Culture: The Problem of Ethnocentricity"is a good introduction to some of the issues surrounding ethnocentricity and cultural relativism in the discipline. Using Montaigne's essay Des Cannibales as a starting place, Etinson gives a nice overview of what ethnocentrism is and why the concept is important for anthropology. If you haven't read it, a seemingly decent English translation of the essay can be found here. To summarize, Montaigne uses the arrival of cannibals from Brazil to point out their perceptions of 16th century Europeans and to argue that despite the shocking practice of cannibalism, it is the Europeans who are more barbaric. Realizations that morality and concepts of justice are culturally constituted and make sense only within the worldviews that created them led to the approach of cultural relativism. Etinson points out that this is not a new anthropological concept - the idea of moral relativism (i.e. that moral truth is limited to the culture within which it exists) goes back to Plato. But it certainly became popularized during the height of the Post Modern movement in anthropology.

In anthropology we spend a lot of time trying to step into other cultural worldviews and understand their logics. This includes morals and ethics, which radiate out from certain culturally agreed upon givens. Often when we discuss particularly difficult topics in classes - female genital cutting or ritual fellatio among the Sambia, for example - we approach it through explaining those worldviews and how the practice makes sense within them. Yet, while understanding the logic and cultural purpose of practices helps students grasp their meaning and continuation, they are almost always left with one question. Is it wrong? This is an issue that Etinson grapples with. And it is not an easy one to ever answer. What happens with there are rifts in a society with one group taking advantage of the other? What if the disadvantaged is upset about it and does not buy into the cultural belief that they belong in their place? What if they do buy into it but we as anthropologists see they suffer because of it? What about practices that physically harm members of a society or shorten their lifespans? In short, are there moral truths that transcend cultural variations and worldviews?

Etinson argues from a philosophy standpoint that one of the great things about studying other cultures is that it allows us shine a light back on our own. Looking at our own practices from afar, we are able to reassess their reasoning and purpose and become less ethnocentric in our approach to both communities. As permanent insider-outsiders, anthropologists constantly straddle this line and this gives us that insight not only into our own cultures but the ones which we study as well. I'd argue that we are therefore in a unique position to pick up on the voices of those who are angry, in pain, and disenfranchised. After all, if we can recognize the cultural construction of morality then we can also recognize inequality and the face of anguish.When communities come to us as privileged academics with a Voice, we have a duty to listen. And in listening we may have the ability to empower groups and work with them to make their own changes. 

Becoming Yellow

Recently, on a popular forum someone asked about the racial classifications by skin type that created the White, Black, Red, and Yellow categories. They astutely pointed out that they've never met anyone who was yellow and so it seemed like a very odd choice. My first response was the point them to Carl Linnaeus, the 18th century scientist who in addition to setting up categories of kingdom, phylum, family, species, etc. also decided that human beings could be classified by these four racial types (with a monstrous category as a catchall for the leftovers.) You can read more about his racial classifications on the AAA's wonderful Understanding Race website.

But I wasn't quite satisfied with that answer. It explained why it became a popular designation of race over other competing theories and categories at the time. But it didn't address the main question the person originally asked - why yellow? So I did some further digging and found this fascinating book called
Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking by Michael Keevak. Keevak looks at the writings of travelers, missionaries, and explorers and the ways in which their descriptions and understandings of the people of East Asia change over time. The earliest 16th century travelers considered East Asian peoples to be white, in part because their technology and social complexity seemed on par with many Europeans. Paintings of Asian people at the time reflected this. But by the second half of the 18th century Europeans agreed that Asians were not white or at least not as white as Europeans. They refused to convert to Christianity and Europeans needed a cultural way to explain why they sought to dominate and colonize these peoples.Yet, scientists felt they didn't belong in the black/brown category either.

This inability to satisfactorily classify Asian peoples within a simple racial schema frustrated scientists during the Enlightenment and the skin color of Asians became a hot debate. The writings of Linneaus suggested that skin colors were a result of one of the four humors existing in excess. For Asians, this meant the yellow bile in large part because that was what was left over after assigning categories for everyone else. Meanwhile, Blumenbach argued they belonged in a category called Mongolian, which he described as having an olive or yellow tint to their skin. These two worked well together conceptually, and became the dominant way to discuss race of Asians. Anthropologists even employed a kind of spinning top near the limbs of Asian peoples to try and quantify their yellowness. For their part, Chinese peoples were not terribly upset about being called yellow because in Chinese the word huang is associated with high status, while the Japanese rejected it. Though some critics have rightly pointed out that Keevak glosses over the complexities of how Western categories were received and understood in the East.

Then in the late 19th century, Europeans and Americans became consumed with the fear that the immigration of Chinese and Japanese peoples threatened their way of life. Remember that in America, Chinese and Japanese workers were brought over in huge numbers to build railroads. First 10,000 Chinese were brought in and when Americans protested further immigration from China in the 1880s, Japanese workers were brought to finish the railroads. It was a tense time for racial politics in America and the Asian immigrants were often the butt of political cartoons and racial slurs. Yellow became a double meaning, drawing upon the cultural associations of the color with cowardliness.

This is an interesting albeit short little book about not only the history of yellow as a category but the complicated, political, and ultimately futile attempts of scientists to force humans into clearly defined racial categories. 

Addiction, Poverty, and Chemistry in New York City

Screenshot from a recent post on the White Noise Blog. 

The White Noise Blog from Scientific American offer an amazing look into the world of poverty and addiction in New York City. Some posts are written as tight narratives while others seem almost like drug addled poems and streams of consciousness. But it is all fascinating and it is easy to suddenly realize you've spent hours going through the posts. It explores everything from the chemical reasons for mixing crack cocaine and heroine (speedballing) to an urban anthropological look at the culture that perpetuates prostitution, drug use, crime, and poverty. There are interviews, photographs, stories, and videos that allow an insight into a world that is often discussed but rarely understood. I highly recommend spending an hour or two perusing the site. It would also make a great addition to any class using Philippe Bourgois's In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio.

The Origin of the Stereotype that Women are Bad Drivers

The bizarre one-eyed clipart I found searching for "woman driver" on Microsoft Office.

Check out this article from The Smithsonian Magazine's online site. They are undertaking an impressive analysis of every Jetson's episode, examining different cultural practices, standards, and attitudes that are revealed. In this article, they take on the issue of women as bad drivers. Utilizing Michael L. Berger's article “Women Drivers!: The Emergence of Folklore and Stereotypic Opinions Concerning Feminine Automotive Behavior”, the author argues that this stereotype doesn't appear until the 1920s, when middle class women suddenly began having access to cars. These jokes and stereotypes were social controls trying to ensure women stayed in their places and did not use this new found mobility to subvert social norms. Previously, women were either walking to places, which made them visible to the community, or had to hire drivers. With a car they were able to go where they wanted when they wanted and often without the rest of the community keeping tabs. Without being chaperoned as they left the domestic sphere for the public, they threatened concepts of a woman's proper place and left open the door to gossip about their actions. Jokes and stereotypes are powerful ways to reinforce hegemony.