Anthropology
gregladen | October 25, 2009I first watched The Corporation when it was first shown around, at the Minneapolis Film Fest, with the producers and the director. The Corporation could be termed a forensic personality profile of the American Corporation, but I viewed it as an insightful ethnography of the most important tribe to emerge in human history. The most important, and the most dangerous tribe. In fact, I showed The Corporation as an ethnography in my anthropology classes a number of times.
Here is Part I:
ejohnson | October 21, 2009On October 1, 2009 paleontologists announced the discovery of the oldest known primitive hominid fossil, Ardipithecus ramidus dubbed "Ardi," after 17 years of quietly studying its significance. Nearly a month after its grand unveiling to the media, biologists, paleontologists, and evolutionary anthropologists are still atwitter as scores of articles continue to be published around Ardi. ScienceBloggers are no exception this week, beginning with Razib Khan's compelling conversation on Ardi with John Hawks on Bloggingheads.tv, as seen on Gene Expression. On The Primate Diaries, Eric Michael…
edyong | October 19, 2009
From a young age, children learn about the sounds that animals make. But even without teaching aides like Old Macdonald's farm, it turns out that very young babies have an intuitive understanding of the noises that humans, and even monkeys, ought to make. Athena Vouloumanos from New York University found that at just five months of age, infants match human speech to human faces and monkey calls to monkey faces. Amazingly, this wasn't a question of experience - the same infants failed to match quacks to duck faces, even though they had more experience with ducks than monkeys.
Voloumanos…
laelaps | October 19, 2009How our species appeared on this planet has traditionally been a touchy subject. For centuries different religions pushed their creation myths as the answer to the persistent question "How did we come to be here?", but as naturalists examined the world around them the less the "Book of Nature" fit with the classic stories. Now, through our understanding of evolution, we know that our species was not produced in some divine fiat but represents a lonely twig inextricably connected to all other life through our ancestry.
Despite what we have come to learn about the origin of our species, however…
emjohnson | October 18, 2009Grand evolutionary dramas about human origins capture our imagination and the stories provide context as to how we view ourselves. They are the scientific version of creation myths. However, unlike Adam and Eve being fashioned in the garden or humanity being vomited up by the giant Mbombo (as the Bakuba people of Congo believed), scientific origin stories are rigorously critiqued based on the best available evidence.
Friedrich Engels, a sociologist and future collaborator with Karl Marx, wrote one of the earliest scientific human origin tales in 1876. In his essay "The Part Played by…
emjohnson | October 18, 2009Classical literature has judged Helen of Troy harshly. Because she chose Paris after having children with Menelaus, her chroniclers condemn her for the destruction of a great society. In Homer's Odyssey the bard writes:
Helen would never have yielded herself to a man from a foreign country, if she had known that the sons of Achaeans would come after her and bring her back. Heaven put it in her heart to do wrong, and she gave no thought to that sin, which has been the source of all our sorrows.
This has been the tradition in Western society. An open female sexuality has been viewed as…
gregladen | October 15, 2009I have been to Uganda a number times, but only illegally or by accident, in which case I was in the remote bush, or in transit, stopping at Entebbe Airport, so I can't say that I know much, directly, about the culture there. However, I have spent months in Kenya and years in Zaire/Congo, and a little time in Tanzania and Rwanda, so I've kinda got Uganda surrounded. I can tell you that the political culture and government of Zaire/Congo, Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda are very, very different from one another. At the same time, all of these countries have certain commonalities that are relevant…
gregladen | October 15, 2009Constructivism. Determinism. It is all a bunch of hooey.
A recent paper published by PLoS (Culture Shapes How We Look at Faces) throws a sopping wet blanket on widely held deterministic models of human behavior. In addition, the work underscores the sometimes spooky cultural differences that can emerge in how people see things, even how people think.
A Repost
The following is from a PLoS press release:
Because face recognition is effortlessly achieved by people from all different cultures it was considered to be a basic mechanism universal among humans. However, by using analyses…
gregladen | October 14, 2009 A very good day of grunting worms. Credit: Ken Catania So-called Gene-Culture Co-Evolution can be very obvious and direct or it can be very subtle and complex. In almost all cases, the details defy the usual presumptions people make about the utility of culture, the nature of human-managed knowledge, race, and technology. I would like to examine two cases of gene-culture interaction: One of the earliest post-Darwinian Synthesis examples addressing malaria and sickle-cell disease, and the most recently published example, the worm-grunters of Florida, which it turns out is best explained…
gregladen | October 13, 2009Watch Humanist Views: Humanism and the Bible in Activism & Non-Profit | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com
razib | October 11, 2009Stature, Mortality, and Life History among Indigenous Populations of the Andaman Islands, 1871-1986:
Despite considerable interest in the evolution of small body size, there is little evidence for changes in body size within smallâbodied human populations. This study combines anthropometric data from a number of studies of the body size of Andaman Islanders from 1871 to 1986. The colonial history of the Andaman Islands is characterized by high rates of mortality among the indigenous populations. However, longâterm conflicts between tribal groups of the Andaman Islands and British and Indian…
laelaps | October 9, 2009Chucking stones at baboons; the first hominin passtime? From The Making of Man.For the Australian anatomist Raymond Dart, the fossilized bones scattered among the caves of South Africa were testimonies to the murderous nature of early humans. The recovered skulls of baboons and our australopithecine relatives often looked as if they had been bashed in, and Dart believed the bones, teeth, and horns of slain game animals were the weapons hominins used to slaughter their prey. (He gave this sort of tool use the cumbersome name "osteodontokeratic culture.") Our origins had not been peaceful; Homo…
gregladen | October 7, 2009
This is for all your nascent researchers about to head off to remote places to engage in your very first fieldwork, and for all you eco-tourists or educational travelers about to embark on a trip through strange lands afar.
A Repost
When I was preparing to start my graduate research in Africa, I was already very experienced in fieldwork, but all of it was in the United States, and although there is cultural variation across the land even in old New England and New York, the work I was planning was at a field site in Africa originally selected precisely because of its extreme remoteness.…
laelaps | October 6, 2009When I wrote about the public unveiling of Ardipithecus ramidus (or "Ardi" to the public) last week I contrasted the description of the hominin with the bombastic rollout given to the lemur-like fossil primate "Ida" (Darwinius masillae) this past May. In the latter case it was clear that a media production company rushed the scientific process and overhyped the conclusions presented to the public, but now there are questions about the relationship between the scientists who described "Ardi" and the Discovery Channel.
This coming Sunday the Discovery Channel will air a special called "…
emjohnson | October 6, 2009Aldous Huxley wrote in his Collected Essays that, "Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know." In Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World, Stanford historian Londa Schiebinger highlights the role that such intentional ignorance played in the dissemination of knowledge (and the lack thereof). Whether this ignorance is of local plants and languages--because of the early scientific tradition of naming species only after revered European naturalists--or whether it is of the abortifacients that women would use to terminate an…
laelaps | October 2, 2009Two restorations of "Ardi", a 45% complete skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus published in this week's issue of Science. Restorations (including the full skeletal restoration below) by artist Jay Matternes.The stories of "Ida" and "Ardi" could hardly be more different.
Ida was a lemur-like primate that lived 47 million years ago in an area that is now Messel, Germany. Ardi was much closer to us; she was one of the earliest hominins and lived 4.4 million years ago in what would become known as Ethiopia.
When the bones of Ida were discovered they were held in a private collection for years before…
laelaps | October 1, 2009It's Ardipithecus day! No, not that one, but the other one, Ardipithecus ramidus, which paleoanthropologists have been studying for the past 15 years. Over 45% of the skeleton of this hominin was found in the early 1990's, but outside of a brief initial description no further details about Ardipithecus ramidus had been published until today.
Later this afternoon Science will launch a webpage containing multiple print articles and online features chock-full of details about this early hominin. (Word has it that an entire University of California Press volume will be devoted to Ardipithecus…
emjohnson | September 30, 2009Over the years anthropologists have had a good deal to say about notions of power and inequality. For example, the late CUNY anthropologist Eric R. Wolf took his early experiences working with peasants in Puerto Rico to explore these larger questions in the global system. In the opening to his book Envisioning Power he wrote:
We stand at the end of a century marked by colonial expansion, world wars, revolutions, and conflicts over religion that have occasioned great social suffering and cost millions of lives. These upheavals have entailed massive plays and displays of power, but ideas…
gregladen | September 30, 2009The Roman Polanski story has certainly gotten interesting. Well, actually, the story is still only mildly interesting, but the discussion about it has developed in interesting ways. So, I thought I'd muddy the waters by throwing in a few thoughts.
This is one of those situations where people have started judging each other on their opinions. Don't even think about doing that with me. I have not actually formulated an opinion so you'd be wasting your time and mine. The LA authorities, Polanski's lawyers, none of those involved, have contacted me about my opinion, and I'm not influencing…