Anthropology
gregladen | April 17, 2011There is no evidence that they did, but abundant evidence that they didn't. One example of this is found in how business in the US handle the inevitability of future rising costs of energy, and along with this collection of individual behaviors, the way the free market, the most intelligent and powerful of human activities, optimizes our economy.
It is interesting to see how often proof of the non-existence of anything like a Free Market (anywhere) and proof that humans should stop taking credit for being an "Intelligent Large Brained Hominid" come together. Over the last few weeks, we…
gregladen | April 13, 2011Today, I took out the trash. I may or may not have taken the trash out last week, but I can tell you that the last time I did take it out, whenever it was, I had to drag the trash barrel across ice. Yesterday I went to the gym without a coat or jacket. That made me have to decide if I wanted to go to the locker room to stow the contents of my pockets (car keys, etc.) or just keep those things in my pocket. The grass outside is green. We expect snow on Friday.
Where I grew up, in what is now known among gardeners and cooperative extension agents as Zone 5b (though a short drive from a…
gregladen | March 9, 2011I did not have a chance to write about the Anthropology fracas that erupted several weeks ago, and I probably won't for a while. But Jamie Jones did.
When I met him Jamie was a grad student in the Anthro department at the small eastern college I got my PhD at. He and I taught together and got along quite well, and we were both co-authors on what turned out the be in the top 20 as measured by citation frequency of papers ever published over the last century (or whatever) in the flagship journal of anthropology, which makes both of us pretty hot. Indeed, we are steeped in Ivy League…
gregladen | February 2, 2011Once you've killed the monkey, you need to carry it back to camp. Slit the tail, near the end, and poke the head through the slit, so the tail makes a handy strap.
Here's a detail:
gregladen | January 31, 2011An Efe (Pygmy) man making poison arrows for use in killing monkeys.
Ituri Forest, Zaire. Photograph Copyrighted 1986 Greg Laden
The arrows are thin darts of wood, often made of palm. Large marantacae leaves serve as a bowl and as a ladle. The poison includes a large number of ingredients, and the specific recipes vary a great deal (and are often guarded). This concoction included the juice pounded from a vine that contains strychnine. About seven arrows are fired at a monkey, up in the trees, per strike (on average) and it takes about two strikes to bring down a monkey. Several dozen…
stoat | January 30, 2011#4 in the series. Normally reserved for non-scientists, but WK wins a dishonourable mention. He is part of the stable of kooks that von S gathers round him at klimazwiebel, though as far as I can tell von S has carefully avoided becoming kooky himself.
You'd better go and read what Krauss has to say for himself before you come back to my rantings.
The strongest impression I get is that, as an anthropologist, he really has little interest in the science of climate change. Its all meat to the grinder as far as he is concerned, and reality is of no real importance. Hear him slavering:
For me as…
gregladen | January 26, 2011There are human universals. There, I said it. Now give me about a half hour to explain why this is both correct and a Falsehood. But first, some background and definition.
Most simply defined, a human universal is a trait, behavior or cultural feature that we find in all human societies. Men are always on average larger than women. All humans see the same exact range of colors because our eyes are the same. The range of emotions experienced by people is the same, and appears in facial expressions and other outward affect, in the same way across all humans.
The term "Human Universal"…
gregladen | January 24, 2011And most of them are boys with their toys
Yesterday a few miles northeast of here, two dudes had a head-on collision in their snow machines. The snow machines burst into flames, one of the drivers died and the other is apparently in critical condition. Elsewhere in the state a man died of CO poisoning in his fish house, and as is often the case in these situations, a rescuer had some trouble as well and needed to be treated. If you heat your ice house with something that burns, remember that it will put out deadly carbon monoxide (and use up your oxygen as well, but those are two distinct…
gregladen | January 1, 2011Almost Diamonds has two interesting posts on the Julian Assange sexual assault/rape accusation/charges. I want to make a comment on part of the second post, but this may not make a lot of sense to you until you read both of them. They are concise and compelling so you will not regret the time you spend on them:
Assange and the Presumption of InnocenceAssange and the Victim Conspiracy
The issue is that of jealousy or resentment. Some Assange defenders, for some reason, seem to feel the need to point out suspicious or negative aspects of the women, their actions, reactions, decisions, etc…
gregladen | December 17, 2010First, the video. Then, if you're good, I'll tell you an Alan Dershowitz story. It involves Stephen Jay Gould.
So, when I was a graduate student teaching human behavioral biology and stuff, there was a class taught by Alan Dershowitz, Stephen Jay Gould, and some other guy. This was a large Socratic "lecture-courses" and one of the sessions involved ethics and gender differences in the law, so it was customary among the E. O. Wilson and Irv DeVore Teaching Fellows to crash the class and watch.
Imma let you get back to worshiping Stephen Jay Gould and all when I'm done, but I gotta tell…
gregladen | December 13, 2010Fast, Cheap & Out of Control is part of my own personal enigma. I have shown it to people who don't know me, who don't know what I think about, who don't know much about what I study. Nineteen out of twenty such people react in this matter:
A cold stare with underlying anger for wasting their precious time.
I admit that most of this has happened to captive audiences in the classroom, but it has also happened with family members and colleagues.
Then, time goes by. Lectures. Conversations. Blog posts. And suddenly one day, seven out of the nineteen say something like:
Oh ... Aha…
gregladen | December 10, 2010It is probably true that every culture has child safety devices. It is also probably true that all of these devices are very limited in their effectiveness.
As an anthropologist living with the Efe Pygmies of the Ituri Forest, I often found myself observing some thing ... an object, a construction of some type, or a behavior ... that utterly baffled me. I learned to avoid asking about things as questions occurred to me; The very asking of a question, especially if you are roughly the equivalent of an alien visitor (an extraordinarily wealthy giant scary white being with highly advanced…
gregladen | November 26, 2010I was just glancing through the blog of Katheryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, a book about people who were wrong about stuff, often big stuff (for example, she talks about individuals who spent decades in jail owing to false convictions). Meantime, I'm working on posts related to the falsehoods and "Everything you know is wrong" series. And, as I do this, I'm thinking about a way in which people get things wrong that is often overlooked or, perhaps, not recognized as a specific category of irrational thinking.
This has to do with the idea of a fetish.…
gregladen | November 25, 2010The enemy has arrived, in force, outside your village. The men are armed and wearing the symbols of war, which is appropriate because your group and the group milling about outside your walled settlement are at war. One of the men, wearing war garb but adorned also with white flagging to indicate a peaceful intent attempts to enter your village but is stopped by guards. They converse briefly and the guards allow the man to crawl into your village through the only opening in the surrounding wall left following preparations for possible attack. The man walks into the center of the plaza and…
gregladen | November 19, 2010Video 1: Dan meets Alice, Alice pwns Dan.
Video 2: Dan meets Alice, gets her name wrong. Dan pwned again.
gregladen | November 8, 2010Ellen Lutz, former Executive Director for the Center for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution and for the last six years or so Executive Director of Cultural Survival, has died. I received this rom Cultural Survival:
We are deeply saddened to report that Cultural Survival's executive director, Ellen Lutz, died on Thursday, November 4, after a long battle with breast cancer, surrounded by her husband, Ted Macdonald, and her children, David and Julia. She was 55.
Ellen's contribution to Cultural Survival is beyond measure, and we all had enormous affection for her personally and respect for…
gregladen | October 12, 2010Or, when the hunting season is closed, watch teh game (the guys), or when there are no sales, admire each other's shoes (the gals)?
This is, of course, a parody of the sociobiological, or in modern parlance, the "evolutionary psychology" argument linking behaviors that evolved in our species during the long slog known as The Pleistocene with today's behavior in the modern predator-free food-rich world. And, it is a very sound argument. If, by "sound" you mean "sounds good unless you listen really hard."
I list this argument among the falsehoods, but really, this is a category of argument…
gregladen | October 7, 2010... of English:
The nomenclature for the US accents is wildly incorrect, but these are good renditions of something.