anthropology

When Ötzi the Iceman was alive 5300 years ago, eating ibex and deer and traipsing over the Alps, his veins pulsed with blood. But when Ötzi's frozen, mummified body was discovered in 1991, his vessels were empty; scientists assumed his blood had degraded over time. Now, a team of researchers has zoomed in on two spots on the Iceman's body: a shoulder wound found with an embedded arrowhead and a hand lesion resembling a stab wound. The scientists used atomic force microscopy, a visualization method with resolution of less than a nanometer, to scan the wounds for blood residue. They discovered red blood cells (inset)—the oldest in the world to be found intact—as well as fibrin, a protein needed for blood to clot, they report today in Journal of the Royal Society Interface. The presence of fibrin indicates that Ötzi didn't die immediately after being wounded. Next, the researchers plan to study the blood cells for changes in molecular structure due to dehydration and aging. Such analyses could help forensic experts pick up on more subtle changes that reveal the age of younger blood cells, such as those from crime scenes. _________________ References:

Williams, Sarah C.P. 2012. "ScienceShot: World's Oldest Blood Cells Found on Iceman". Science. Posted: May 1, 2012. Available online: http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/05/scienceshot-worlds-oldest-blood.html

Have you seen the RACE: Are We So Different Exhibit? The Exhibit is currently on location at the University of Northern Iowa Museums, located in Cedar Falls, IA.  The Exhibit will be on display until Saturday, June 9. Admission is free. Check the Museum website for hours and directions.

Not near Cedar Falls? Visit the RACE: Are We So Different virtual exhibit today!

Don’t forget to order your RACE t-shirt and educational dual disc set at the AAA online store. Special discounts are available for teachers and AAA members.

Filed under: RACE: Are We So Different?

Something called a “silo” kept cropping up in my field research with media reform broadcasters throughout 2012. At the National Conference of Media Reform in 2011 I attended a panel, “Getting Out of the Silo: Editing Video as a Community.” The organizer told me she was “looking to create an intersectional narrative of collaboration” with the panelists. “We are all living in our little silos,” said the general manager of a small television news network explaining how a possible partner rejected his overture for collaboration. Its “the silophication of the company,” said a vice president of a television news network of the process by which internet, television, and marketing divisions were not well-integrated while taking different approaches to the same product.

What is a Silo?

Silophication is most actively theorized by a person who straddles anthropology, global finance, and journalism: Dr. Gillian Tett, a Cambridge trained anthropologist and US managing editor of the Financial Times. Below I build theory through  categorizing Tett’s use of the term silophication in her financial journalism critical of how regulator’s and banker’s silophication led to an absence of information sharing and the presence of a global financial crisis.

Tett sees the “modern age” as epitomized by tensions between integration and fragmentation. “[W]hile technology is integrating the world in some senses, it is simultaneously creating fragmentation too. Moreover, as innovation speeds up, it keeps creating complex new activities that are only understood by technical ‘experts’ in a silo.” (Tett 2009). Tett provides reasons why silos exist (complexity and professional specification) and implores regulators and bankers to silo-bust through hiring holistic thinking anthropology-like personnel to cross silos and share information.

Tett refers to two mutually reinforcing silos, an intellectual silo epitomized by monological and non-holistic thinking supported by the second structural silo of employment departmental balkanization. She admits to this duality of silos describing “structural silos (ie: departments that do not talk)” and “mental silos (financiers with tunnel vision)” (Tett 2009).

Structural Silos

Tett states that financial regulators, the British Financial Services Authority (FSA), has “increasingly succumbed to a ‘silo’ mentality” (Tett 2008a). They “spend their time ticking boxes, within their allotted silos, rather than take a holistic view of risk” (Tett 2008a). Within these homogenized specialist silos, without “common sense and talk” (Tett 2008b) within or across specific fields, the chances of arriving at disasterous “solutions” increase exponentially. These structural silos are workers’ castes reinforced through “career silos” (Tett 2012a). Tett writes about “career silos” referring to how bankers or regulators remain in those castes, resulting in an absence of silo-transcending, information sharing, and empathy across silos (Tett 2012a).

Structural silos are results of the hierarchical organization of the firm, the spatial arrangement of offices within the firm, and the lack of collaboration within the firm. As Thomas Malaby, Andrew Ross, and other corporate ethnographers have recognized, companies can modify their office cultures and use social technologies to transcend structural silos. Business organization have been known to reject hierarchy in exchange for the semi-lateral flow of information across the firm that comes with heterarchy is analyzed by David Stark. This is often the case in new media firms. As Google, Facebook, and other Silicon Valley companies with their California ideologies have shown, it is possible to institutionalize through space, culture, and practice ways of addressing structural silos. This is de rigueur in new media firms but not so in the financial and federal sectors.

Intellectual Silos

In 2010 emails revealed the extent of the deception and greed within the culture of Goldman Sachs investment bankers and Standard and Poor’s credit raters. Tett refers to these leaked emails as primary documents in her analysis of the mental silos behind the global financial crisis of 2008. She writes, “Their world was also in a strange, geeky silo, into which few non-bankers ever peered” (Tett 2010a). By “geeky silo,” Tett refers to the mental or intellectual silophication that defends proprietary knowledge against boundary breakers.

In another example, Tett expanded her notion of the silo to apply outside of finance and its regulation to describe America and American media as polarizing and tribal (Tett 2011). Tett says that the internet is not helping Americans bridge their tribal silos: “social media, far from bridging these silos, is spawning a new form of cyber-tribalism of its own” (Tett 2011). She continues, “Now that Americans feel free to create their own identity online, they increasingly assume that information should be ‘customised’; and as media companies rush to offer these bespoke services, it becomes easier to retreat into an intellectual silo” (Tett 2011).

The phenomenon of the intellectual silo has been identified by a range of scholars, activists, and anthropologists. Going by the name the “filter bubble” which fosters the “myth of digital democracy,” intellectual silos appear to be reinforced by personalization algorithms and by the innate safety of sameness in risk prone fields of cultural production.

Why Silos?

Complexity and specialization, the result of growth in the knowledge management fields augmented by specific technological competencies, is the reason for the proliferation of task, department, intellectual, and field fragmentation today. Tett claims, “If you look around the world today, it is clear that almost every institution, from the army to the banks, is becoming increasingly complex. That, in turn, is creating a plethora of silos, where specialists beaver away, performing an activity that few outsiders understand. Yet the irony is that while these silos are springing up, we also live with systems that are increasingly interconnected; events on a trading desk or isolated battlefield can send ripples across the world” (Tett 2011b). As social complexity scales up, the silos proliferate and grow dangerously less communicative. In core intelligence industries of modernity, from the military to science, energy production, and finance, the silo curse impacts much of the world’s Western elites and by extension the rest of the world.

Tett explains the process: “This problem is not unique to finance. On the contrary, similar patterns can be found in numerous other areas of the modern world, ranging from science to medicine to energy and manufacturing. For as innovation speeds up in the 21st century, specialists are engaged in highly complex activities in numerous silos, that almost nobody outside that particular silo understands, or even knows about – even though the activity in that silos often has the ability to affect society as a whole. There is thus a bizarre paradox in the 21st century world: namely while the global system is becoming more interconnected in some senses, the level of mental and structural fragmentation remains very intense” (Tett 2010b: 129).

Craft specialization has long been our species’ reaction to increasing social complexity. For logical efficiency as well as the domination of worker’s biopower, hierarchically controlled professionalization has been one solution to the problem of knowledge containment. Employment casuality is one result of such efficiency logic on the human scale. But on the present global scale, and with the increasing dissociation of resources and publics through digital abstractions and its derivatives, unchallenged silos and the logics that support them, appear to be able to create global catastrophes.

Solving Silos?

Tett works for the Financial Times so she is a knowledge worker for financial elites willing to pay exorbitantly to access her pithy writing behind an expense paywall. She is also a social actor who doesn’t want to see her clients create another global financial crisis. For Tett this is the “silo curse” she wants to solve for her clients and because her client’s work impacts the wealth of millions of people, poor and rich (Tett 2009).

Tett provides some evidence that by 2009 certain sectors of finance and financial regulation were embarking on efforts to cure the “silo curse” impacting numerous sectors of modernity: “The problem that military and financial systems alike are grappling with, then, is how to combat tunnel vision; or, more accurately, how to persuade players to recognise how tempting – but also dangerous – it is to operate with a one-track mind” (Tett 2011b).

She applauds companies like Goldman Sachs who “try to ensure that different business silos have ways of watching what each other does” (Tell 2008b). Some regulators, for instance, are employing “macro-prudential surveillance (essentially, a posh word for active, holistic regulation). … [This stresses] the importance of joining up the dots” (Tett 2009). Meanwhile, “asset managers are trumpeting the importance of lateral thought and trying to understand what is happening in seemingly disconnected silos” (Tett 2009). To trump the silo curse, improve regulation, and reduce the prevalence of risking investment, Tett argues that bankers and regulators should “be forced to talk about their business with a wide pool of colleagues, including their immediate silo” (Tett 2008b).

Tett claims that “one of the essential investment challenges today [is to] understand the micro-details of modern silos, but [also] see how the macro-pieces interconnect, in a world that is both highly interconnected and tribal.” (Tett 2009). She looks back to her PhD training in anthropology for the penultimate solution. She proposes the development of “cultural translators”, who can explain what is happening in those silos to everyone else (Tett 2009). Tett is suggesting that anthropologist-like employees could help regulators and bankers translate insights from one department to another. For example, she champions “silo-busters” like Dr. Jim Yong Kim, also an anthropologist, as the president of the World Bank for showing the “power of breaking down the intellectual silos that mar much of the modern world” (Tett 2012b).

She concludes: “So, for my money, a better way to frame the debate is not to call for business leaders to be ethical, but to launch a fight against tunnel vision; call it, if you like, a focus on silo busting, both in terms of how companies organise themselves and how business people think” (Tett 2011b).

Conclusion

Tett identifies two iterations of silophication, one structural and another mental. Silos exist because of the complexities of today’s socio-technical world require professionalization and specialization. Silos need to be solved because they result in bad decisions that negatively impact millions of people. One way to solve the “silo curse” is to employ “cultural translators” who can inform specialized knowledge workers about the big picture of their work.

In my work with media reform broadcasters I identified silos: Inter-firm silos that are similar to structural silos in which departments fail to communicate; Inter-audience silos that are similar to intellectual silos in which television viewers balkanize into affinity groups; and intra-field silos, not addressed in Tett’s silo categorization, that refer to institutions within a single field of cultural production, a social movement for instance, who want to but fail to collaborate because of their silophication.

Financial journalists and media reform broadcasters are using the same opaque term, silophication, to describe similar processes. What is the significance of this shared emergent discourse? A methodological question remains. Tett is both a financial journalist and an anthropologist who is using a term used by the subjects of my research. Building theory requires a meta-language developed from records of an indigenous discourse. What to do when the ethnographic subjects and anthropological theorists share the same theoretical discourse?

Tett, Gillian 2008a The danger of letting ‘group think’ spin out of control. Financial Times, March 28. http://www.ft.com/intl/cmts/s/0/1925d542-fc6a-11dc-9229-000077b07658.html#axzz1u23EtNca

Tett, Gillian 2008b How talking can help cut the risk of a lemming fall, Financial Times May 16. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e040ef72-22df-11dd-93a9-000077b07658.html#axzz1u23EtNca

Tett, Gillian 2009 Waking up to the ‘silo curse’ is far from the end of the problem. Financial Time. October 9. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6d1de780-b469-11de-bec8-00144feab49a.html

Tett, Gillian 2010a E-mail howlers bring murky credit business out of shadows, Financial Times. March 25. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CFwQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2Fa9da1aa4-508b-11df-bc86-00144feab49a.html&ei=l7-yT4–FYTRiALn-4ySBA&usg=AFQjCNEWttbIb-CaTyM61YL6Fn9HMKhLEA&sig2=Nh82w8uZk9l8z5-rc8y5WQ

Tett, Gillian 2010b Silos and silences: Why so few people spotted the problems in complex credit and what that implies for the future. Banque de France • Financial Stability Review • No. 14 – Derivatives – Financial innovation and stability • July 2010 121. http://www.banque-france.fr/fileadmin/user_upload/banque_de_france/publications/Revue_de_la_stabilite_financiere/etude14_rsf_1007.pdf

Tett, Gillian 2011 US Tribes and Tribulations, Financial Times, August 5, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/9a0ed5ae-be37-11e0-bee9-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1uyNOEaac

Tett, Gillian 2011b The tunnel-vision thing, Financial Times, January 28. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/32637b44-28eb-11e0-aa18-00144feab49a.html

Tett, Gillian 2011c  ‘Preventing a repeat of the financial crisis isn’t about more business ethics, argues Gillian Tett; it’s about fewer silos’ Financial Management. April 19. http://www.fm-magazine.com/comment/our-guest/preventing-repeat-financial-crisis-isn%E2%80%99t-about-more-business-ethics-argues-gillian

Tett, Gillian 2012a Hildebrand affair a blow for Europe’s public bodies, Financial Times, January 12. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9c389df0-3d3b-11e1-8129-00144feabdc0.html

Tett, Gillian 2012b Right time for a World Bank renaissance man, Financial Times, March 30, 2012. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9eda0f8e-798c-11e1-8fad-00144feab49a.html

Have you read what AAA members are writing about on The Huffington Post? There are more than 40 AAA members who are contributing to the AAA Huffington Post blog throughout this year on a variety of anthropological topics.

Here’s a sample of what has already been written:

Filed under: Anthro in the Media, Commentary

It seems universities everywhere are looking to cut down the amount of time it takes to earn a graduate degree. A story in Inside Higher Ed reports on the latest effort:

[Russell Berman] and five other professors at the university have produced a paper that calls for a major rethinking at Stanford — a reduction in the time taken to graduate by Ph.D. candidates in the humanities, and preparing them for careers within and beyond the academy. The professors at Stanford aren’t just talking about shaving a year or so off doctoral education, but cutting it down to four or five years — roughly half the current time for many humanities students.

This includes getting an MA (they suggest a two year review to decide “which students will advance to candidacy, and which will receive a terminal M.A.”). Now I can’t remember where I read it, but I believe that the average time to Ph.D. in anthropology is roughly what they say it is in the humanities: about nine years. How feasible is it that this time could be cut in half?

Part of their plan involves making better use of the summers: “Unfunded summers impede progress.” I can see how this might have speeded things up for me, maybe shaving off a year or even two, since not only would I not have had to work summers, but funding would have made it possible to start my fieldwork sooner. Lets say students receive full funding and aren’t required to teach (as I was) and I think one could go from an average of 9 years to 7. Of course, the reality is that funding is getting cut these days so I remain skeptical that we’ll see many universities increasing funding even if it means getting students out sooner.

Can we get it below 7? At my four-field program I took three years of courses. The only way I can see that being cut down is if they eliminated the four-field approach. That would be unfortunate. While I resented it at the time, I’ve really come to appreciate my four-field training in subsequent years. Actually five fields because we also had a visual anthropology program with its own requirements. But even if we are talking about a straight cultural anthropology program anthropologists still need pretty broad training. Usually we need additional courses on the language, culture and history of the region we intend to study – often outside of our own department. Language study alone can take at least an extra year (or two). On top of that we might need to brush up on an area of study related to our research topic, such as immunology, second language education, environmental science, etc.

And then there is fieldwork. I’ve seen some recent Ph.D. thesis from universities which have instituted drastically reduced time-to-Ph.D. constraints and you could really see it in the mismatch between the theory and the ethnography. It might be possible to do fieldwork in a few months if you’ve already spent a year or two somewhere during grad school, but I don’t think it works for graduate research. And if you don’t get a chance to really “be there” as a graduate student when will you have that opportunity? As a professor trying to get tenure?

Three years of course work, a year of language study, a year in the field, plus at least a year or two for exam prep, proposal writing, etc. not to mention the dissertation… I just don’t see how anyone could do it in less then seven years unless they were doing the research in their own backyard, already spoke the language, and had already gotten more than enough specialized training in the culture and topics they are studying before starting an Anthropology degree. And remember, seven years is predicated upon 12 months of full funding for each of those seven years. Have to work summers and part-time to make ends meet and we get back up to the current average…

By contributor Sean Carey

I have a confession to make: I don’t have a Facebook page. A few years ago I was encouraged to sign up by friends and colleagues when Facebook was primarily used by university students and lecturers. I resisted on the grounds that I was busy enough. I also reckoned that I knew enough people. In any case, if I wanted new friends and acquaintances it was best to meet them face-to-face.

I now realize that I am in a very small minority. A few weeks ago I asked a group of undergraduate students, aged between 19 and 34, how many had Facebook accounts. All of them put their hands up. Then I enquired whether any of them had accounts which had lapsed. It turned out that all of them had live accounts. This led me to ask how many in the class had used Facebook that day. All the students reported that they had logged on at least once before attending the lecture, which began at 11 AM.

I was intrigued. Although the group of students, mainly from the Greater London area, are not representative of the age (or social class) cohort within the general U.K. population, the fact that around 20 students in the lecture room were committed Facebook users is indicative of an extraordinary social phenomenon – the recent emergence of diverse social media platforms in connecting individuals – sometimes friends sometimes strangers – with one another.

A few days later, I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that Facebook has 900 million users worldwide and made a profit of around $1 billion in 2011. Social media is definitely here to stay.

So what to make of the news that Facebook has just raised the price at which it will make an entry into the Nasdaq Stock Market on Friday from $28-$35 to $34–$38, which will value the company at over $100 billion?

Certainly, the growth in value of Facebook, which only launched in 2004, is extraordinary by historical standards, especially when compared to companies operating in the manufacturing sector. Furthermore, a high-tech brand that has managed to keep growing while other social media sites like Bebo and MySpace have fallen by the wayside must be doing something right.

So is it down to good luck or good management? The latter I would say, especially because in the development phase in 2003 when it was known as Facemash, the social networking site developed by Zuckerberg, while he was a student at Harvard, was in competition with very similar services that were being created by contemporaries at other universities in the U.S.

Personality too has played a part in the spread of the Facebook. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who turns 28 next Monday, comes across as a slightly nerdy brand ambassador. Nevertheless, this is a strong positive for a generation of young people hooked on social media, who greatly admire symbol–generating and transforming trailblazers, who are not obliged to resemble Olympic athletes or football stars.

There is a further point. Zuckerberg and his fellow executives, now located in Silicon Valley, have been quick to correct any obvious marketing mistakes made by the company, especially when resistance from users has been observed concerning the use of the platform for the promoting and advertising of other companies’ products.

And it goes without saying that the 2010 movie The Social Network, starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake, providing an account in 121 minutes of the origins of Facebook was a gift from the PR gods. Despite Zuckerberg’s protests that it contains many inaccuracies, for many people, the triple Oscar award-winning movie has created an unforgettable (and historically true) narrative of Facebook’s inception at the same time as it has generated demand for the product.

Nevertheless, the big question is: will Facebook continue to grow?

Evidently many investors think so otherwise there wouldn’t be upward pressure on the future share price. I see things differently from investors and analysts on Wall Street, however. Sure, Facebook will grow in the short term – perhaps even in the medium-term – not least because of the demand from youthful consumers in the emerging economies, but I am sceptical about the long-term prospects of the company.

Why? Cultural anthropologists know very well that all societies have age sets, which are building blocks for social organization. In modern, complex societies where the consumption of branded products, services and experiences is a central activity – consumption makes up just over two thirds of the economies of the U.K. and U.S., for example – targeting young consumers is critically important in generating a high level of demand in specific sectors like music, fashion and food production, though not houses, pensions and other forms of financial investment.

Facebook is an example of a new and incredibly successful branded service – Google is another and it should be noted with a much bigger constituency – that drives consumption in sectors that crucially places a very high value on novelty and innovation. Which raises a highly intriguing question: what is the lifespan of such products?

It’s not possible to give a precise answer not least because of the dynamic interplay between specific services and demand from subsets of consumers in the population is difficult to predict.

But what we do know is that computer science students and entrepreneurial types at U.S. universities including Stanford as well as in other parts of the globe, like the burgeoning high-tech cluster in Shoreditch in East London, look upon companies like Facebook and Google as old hat. It is, therefore, only a question of time before a new social networking experience is launched, which will not only be differentiated by content but more importantly will appeal to a younger but nevertheless economically powerful age set.

A final thought. When I asked my students who was certain that they would still be using Facebook in 20 years time, no one put a hand up.

I rest my case.

Dual language speakers better able to encode basic language sounds and patterns

A Northwestern University study that will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) provides the first biological evidence that bilinguals' rich experience with language in essence "fine-tunes" their auditory nervous system and helps them juggle linguistic input in ways that enhance attention and working memory.

Northwestern bilingualism expert Viorica Marian teamed up with auditory neuroscientist Nina Kraus to investigate how bilingualism affects the brain. In particular, they looked at subcortical auditory regions that are bathed with input from cognitive brain areas. In extensive research, Kraus has already shown that lifelong music training enhances language processing, and an examination of subcortical auditory regions helped to tell that tale.

"For our first collaborative study, we asked if bilingualism could also promote experience-dependent changes in the fundamental encoding of sound in the brainstem -- an evolutionarily ancient part of the brain," said Marian, professor of communication sciences in Northwestern's School of Communication. The answer, according to their study, is a resounding yes.

The researchers found that the experience of bilingualism changes how the nervous system responds to sound. "People do crossword puzzles and other activities to keep their minds sharp," Marian said. "But the advantages we've discovered in dual language speakers come automatically simply from knowing and using two languages. It seems that the benefits of bilingualism are particularly powerful and broad, and include attention, inhibition and encoding of sound."

Co-authored by Kraus, Marian and researchers Jennifer Krizman, Anthony Shook and Erika Skoe, "Bilingualism and the Brain: Subcortical Indices of Enhanced Executive Function" underscores the pervasive impact of bilingualism on brain development. The article will appear in the April 30 issue of PNAS.

"Bilingualism serves as enrichment for the brain and has real consequences when it comes to executive function, specifically attention and working memory," said Kraus, Hugh Knowles Professor at Northwestern. In future studies, she and Marian will investigate whether these results can be achieved by learning a language later in life.

In the study, the researchers recorded the brainstem responses to complex sounds (cABR) in 23 bilingual English-and-Spanish-speaking teenagers and 25 English-only-speaking teens as they heard speech sounds in two conditions.

Under a quiet condition, the groups responded similarly. But against a backdrop of background noise, the bilingual brains were significantly better at encoding the fundamental frequency of speech sounds known to underlie pitch perception and grouping of auditory objects. This enhancement was linked with advantages in auditory attention.

"Through experience-related tuning of attention, the bilingual auditory system becomes highly efficient in automatically processing sound," Kraus explained.

"Bilinguals are natural jugglers," said Marian. "The bilingual juggles linguistic input and, it appears, automatically pays greater attention to relevant versus irrelevant sounds. Rather than promoting linguistic confusion, bilingualism promotes improved 'inhibitory control,' or the ability to pick out relevant speech sounds and ignore others."

The study provides biological evidence for system-wide neural plasticity in auditory experts that facilitates a tight coupling of sensory and cognitive functions. "The bilingual's enhanced experience with sound results in an auditory system that is highly efficient, flexible and focused in its automatic sound processing, especially in challenging or novel listening conditions," Kraus added. ________________ References:

EurekAlert. 2012. "Bilingualism fine-tunes hearing, enhances attention". EurekAlert. Posted: April 30, 2012. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-04/nu-bfh042512.php

On behalf of the SLA Executive Committee, I invite you to participate in this year’s Society for Linguistic Anthropology student essay prize competition for the best undergraduate paper in linguistic anthropology. (PLEASE NOTE THAT THE DEADLINE FOR THE GRADUATE PAPER CONTEST WAS EARLIER THIS SPRING. THOSE INTERESTED IN THE GRADUATE PAPER CONTEST SHOULD WAIT UNTIL THE NEXT CONTEST CYCLE IN SPRING 2013) The deadline for the undergraduate contest is June 30. The SLA will award a cash prize of $500, as well as $300 in travel reimbursement for the prize winner, in order to help ensure that they’ll be able to attend the AAA conference and accept their prize in person. If you are a student who has written a paper that meets the contest guidelines (see below), please consider submitting it!  If you are a faculty member who has read a student paper that you feel is worthy of consideration, please encourage the author to submit it

Society for Linguistic Anthropology Annual Undergraduate Student Essay Competition

The Society for Linguistic Anthropology holds an annual student essay competition at both undergraduate and graduate levels. THIS IS THE UNDERGRADUATE SECTION OF THE CONTEST. In order to be eligible for this award, the entrant must have been an undergraduate student in a degree-granting program when the paper was written; must be the sole author of the paper; and must submit the paper no more than two years after it was written.

The paper must be an original work based on original research conducted by the author.  It will be evaluated on the basis of its clarity, significance to the field, engagement with relevant literatures, and if it makes an original contribution to linguistic anthropological knowledge. At the time of submission for this competition, the paper must not have been published or submitted for publication.

Submissions will be evaluated by a panel of judges.  A prize will be awarded in this category only if a submission of sufficiently high quality is received.  The winner or winners will be announced at the SLA business meeting, which is held during the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association.

Entries must be submitted electronically in either .pdf or .doc format.  They should be sent to Jillian Cavanaugh (SLA Executive Committee Member at Large and organizer of this year’s competition) at  jcavanaugh@brooklyn.cuny.edu by the deadline of June 30.  The cover sheet should include: the title of the paper; the author’s name; the author’s email address; the author’s college or university affiliation; the prize category (undergraduate or graduate) for which the paper is being submitted; and the name of the faculty member who served as the student’s advisor with respect to the writing of the paper.

 

I’m butterfly-reading in the flu-encrusted post-semester haze, a little of this and a little of that, currently including a discussion of Hayek on the welfare state at Crooked Timber and more of Jim Livingstone’s provocation Against Thrift.

It strikes me that one of the more important current miscommunications concerns the origin of human personhood (and no, I’m not going to drag out Taylor’s massive tome to do this right). Some folks think you’re born with it; other folks think you earn it through a process of elaboration. The latter is the more ‘traditional’ notion, consistent in distinct but overlapping ways with the heroic origin-myths of noble orders, Protestant self-discipline, body-mutilating rites of passage and kicking lazy teenagers out of the house.

Or you can get your teenager/’welfare queen’ a primo data plan and feed it snacks while it plays x-box. One nutshell of the current U.S. kulturkampf is the people who think personhood has to be earned worrying that they’ll end up doing all the work for everyone, that a shrinking minority of worker ant selves will be yoked to the lazy pseudo-selfhood of the grasshopper masses. This was clearly Hayek’s fear, and Ayn Rand’s.

Well, who can argue with the virtuous earning of important things? The cool move Jim Livingstone makes is to argue that this is now a false issue, because the modern economy has for at least a century made work, labor, elaboration an optional rather than essential human activity, and therefore an optional rather than essential foundation for human personhood. He asks us to think about a self that is more a matter of taste than necessity, and to consider consumer society as a kind of symbolic utopia, totemism unbound.

Filed under: conversations, default theories, discipline, entitlement, feverish misunderstanding propagation, vulgarities Tagged: human personhood, lazy teenagers, welfare queen

I’m butterfly-reading in the flu-encrusted post-semester haze, a little of this and a little of that, currently including a discussion of Hayek on the welfare state at Crooked Timber and more of Jim Livingstone’s provocation Against Thrift.

It strikes me that one of the more important current miscommunications concerns the origin of human personhood (and no, I’m not going to drag out Taylor’s massive tome to do this right). Some folks think you’re born with it; other folks think you earn it through a process of elaboration. The latter is the more ‘traditional’ notion, consistent in distinct but overlapping ways with the heroic origin-myths of noble orders, Protestant self-discipline, body-mutilating rites of passage and kicking lazy teenagers out of the house.

Or you can get your teenager/’welfare queen’ a primo data plan and feed it snacks while it facebooks and plays x-box. One nutshell of the current U.S. kulturkampf is the people who think personhood has to be earned worrying that they’ll end up doing all the work for everyone, that a shrinking minority of worker ant selves will be yoked to the lazy pseudo-selfhood of the grasshopper masses. This was clearly Hayek’s fear, and Ayn Rand’s.

Well, who can argue with the virtuous earning of important things? The cool move Jim Livingstone makes is to argue that this is now a false issue, because the modern economy has for at least a century made work, labor, elaboration an optional rather than essential human activity, and therefore an optional rather than essential foundation for human personhood. He asks us to think about a self that is more a matter of taste than necessity, and to consider consumer society as a kind of symbolic utopia, totemism unbound.

Filed under: conversations, default theories, discipline, entitlement, feverish misunderstanding propagation, vulgarities Tagged: human personhood, lazy teenagers, welfare queen

Small Grants For Developing Ethics Curricular Materials

Goals of the Program The AAA Small Grants Program seeks to foster the development and use of curricular materials for the teaching and communication of ethics and ethical practice across the discipline of anthropology. Administered by the AAA Committee on Ethics, this small grant program encourages the awareness of and innovation in ethics curricular materials used in introductory, undergraduate, and graduate classes. Proposals for the development of curricular materials in a variety of forms are welcome, including texts, films, blogs, websites, exhibits, and other innovative media forms.  The grant recipient(s) will have ten months to complete these new curricular materials, the results of which will be featured in the “Ethical Currents” column of the December issue of AN as well as on the AAA ethics blog, and highlighted at the Annual Meeting.

Eligibility All members of the American Anthropological Association are eligible to apply. Please visit www.aaanet.org for details on joining the Association, dues and benefits of membership.

Proposals may request from $200 to $1,000 and must address a clearly-defined curricular material development project.  Note, the total budget allocation for this grant program for is $1000, thus proposals that include matching funds are encouraged. The Committee On Ethics reserves the right to subdivide funds between worthy applications; your proposal, therefore, may be funded in part or in whole. Please provide budget justification with this in mind.

Conflict of Interest Statement All CoE award committees follow NSF guidelines regarding potential conflict of interest between applicants and reviewers.

Deadlines The deadline for proposals is November 2, 2012.  Please send proposals, acceptable in the following format only, and/or any questions about the program via email to simoncraddock.lee@utsouthwestern.edu in advance of the deadline.

Proposal Format 1. Application Cover Page should include the name, organization/department, address, phone number, and AAA membership number of the applicant, the title of the project, and the total amount in the requested budget.

2. Summary or Abstract (1/2 page). Present a brief summary of the entire proposal.

3. Project Description, including timeline (two pages). The project description should address the following questions: (a) What is the new curricular material to be developed? (Provide detail on form, content, and development strategies and intended audiences — including the potential involvement of undergraduate or graduate students and the broader public). (b) What is the curricular lacuna(e) that this new material will fill?  (c) How will this new material address the specificities of anthropological ethics?  (d) How will this new material be disseminated, beyond the write-up in AN and on the ethics blog?  (e) Provide a timeline for the production of this new material?

4. Summation of Applicant’s CV (2 pages maximum)

5. Budget Justification (approx. 1/2 page). Provide justification for the budget and any additional information to help the review committee understand how calculations were made. Explain any unusual line items in the budget. If the requested grant amount will not cover all project expenses, please indicate the other sources of funding. You may also identify other contributions in this section, such as your time, resources of your department, equipment and other materials.

Grant Timeline The successful applicant(s) will be notified in December 2012 and the grant awarded in January 2013.  The new curricular material must be completed by November 1, 2013.  A final report (1 page) is to be submitted to Committee on Ethics member, Simon Craddock Lee (simoncraddock.lee@utsouthwestern.edu) by December 1, 2013.

The successful applicant is also responsible for providing a write-up about the new curricular material for the “Ethical Currents” column of the December 2013 issue of AN as well as providing additional content and links for the AAA ethics blog.

Filed under: Association Business, Career/Funding/Awards, Ethics

Door Ton Salman Terwijl in Nederland en Europa “de crisis” universitaire staf en studenten noodzaakt zich te verzetten tegen draconische bezuinigingsmaatregelen vermengd met bedrijfsadministratief-geïnspireerde reorganisaties die de kern van het métier (goed onderzoek en goed en toegankelijk onderwijs) bedreigen, is in Chili sinds ruim een jaar een strijd van nog epischer omvang aan de gang. Het afgelopen academisch jaar (dat in Chili van maart tot en met december loopt) ging voor vele duizenden studenten geheel of grotendeels verloren, of werd uiteindelijk, zo goed en zo kwaad als het ging, afgesloten na intensieve inhaalcursussen en ‘nood-tentamens’ om zo tenminste toch enkele studiepunten te verwerven. De studenten staakten, en bezetten in veel gevallen universiteiten, gedurende het hele studiejaar. Voor zoveel zelf-benadeling moeten wel hele goede redenen bestaan.

Die zijn er. De structuur van het Chileense hogere en universitaire onderwijs stamt uit de tijd van de Pinochet-dictatuur. Dat regime koesterde het ongereguleerde privé-initiatief, en wantrouwde elke staatsbemoeienis met uitzondering van de controle op en zonodig vervolging van dissidente burgers. Ook in het onderwijs werd deze regel  tot gelding gebracht. Het beste wapen tegen de notoire rebellie die universiteiten immer kenmerkte, was het hoger onderwijs zoveel mogelijk in handen van ’s lands ondernemers te brengen. Niet alleen wisten zij beter dan wie ook aan welke expertise behoefte was, ook werd onderwijs op die manier een handelsartikel, een product met een prijs, en een uiteindelijke beloning of opbrengst. In het Chili van toen, en ook nog in de jaren na Pinochet, schoten de privé-universiteiten als paddestoelen uit de grond – en ze zijn er nog steeds. De aantallen en de hoogte van overheidsbeurzen werden drastisch teruggebracht, maar banken werden gestimuleerd een systeem van studieleningen te ontwikkelen, waarbij lucratieve rentes voor die banken ruimhartig werden toegestaan. Investeringen door ondernemers in privé-universiteiten werden, op een paar idealistische uitzonderingen na, louter ingegeven door kosten-baten-overwegingen. Studies als natuurkunde, medicijnen en tandheelkunde, die forse investeringen in laboratoria, apparatuur en practica-ruimtes vergden, lieten de ondernemers liever aan anderen over. Daarentegen wemelde en wemelt het in Chili van de studies Sociaal Werk, Journalistiek, Sociologie en Antropologie, Bedrijfsadministratie, Verpleging en Rechten. Belangrijke en pittige studies, zonder enige twijfel. Maar tot op de dag van vandaag zit er veel kaf onder het koren. Veel universiteiten investeren niet in onderzoek, en trekken docenten uitsluitend op contractbasis aan. Zoveel  lesuren, zoveel salaris. Voorbereidings- en corrigeertijd, laat staan onderzoekstijd, worden niet gehonoreerd. Om aan een fatsoenlijk salaris te komen, accepteerden docenten vaak meerdere parallelle cursussen of verkochten zij hun doceer-bevoegdheid aan meerdere universiteiten tegelijkertijd. De kwaliteit van hun onderwijs leed daar zeer onder.

Toegang tot de staatsuniversiteiten ( die meestal van een gagarandeerde minimumkwaliteit zijn) is afhankelijk van een universitaire toelatingstest. Voor kinderen uit lagergeschoolde milieu’s is die test vaak een struikelblok; in hun armere wijken of op het platteland was hun vooropleiding ook al onder het gemiddelde niveau, zéker als het staatsonderwijs was (in Chili is de minderheid-zonder-alternatief op staatsonderwijs aangewezen). Zij zijn dus aangewezen op de privé-universiteiten en op privé-leningen. Indien ze de uitdaging aangaan, worden ze na hun opleiding echter vaak geconfronteerd met banenperspectieven en –salarissen die het hen onmogelijk maken de lening af te lossen ( een recente kleine concessie van de regering was dat de leningen voortaan, tegen een iets lagere rente, aande overheid worden afgelost). Collegegelden in Chili zijn buitensporig hoog. Investeringen in hoger onderwijs en onderzoek zijn de laagste als BNP-percentage van de OECD-landen; staatsuniversiteiten financieren zichzelf slechts voor 20% met overheidsgeld en  voor iedere cent onderzoeksbudget moet in competitie gestreden worden, omdat dat goed zou zijn voor het rendement en de efficiëntie. Chili’s hoger onderwijs is het meest geprivatiseerde ter wereld. Zowel de studieleningen die de banken ter beschikking stellen, als het universitaire privé-onderwijs, zijn winstgevend. Hoger onderwijs is een lucratieve branche binnen de Chileense economie. Maar het is ook het onverbiddellijke sociaaleconomische reproductiemechanisme in een samenleving waarin het verschil tussen hogere en lagere inkomens (en opleidingsniveau’s) tot de meest schrijnende ter wereld behoort. Onderwijs is geen kans of springplank voor talenten; het is een apparaat dat garandeert dat dubbeltjes nooit kwartjes worden, omdat het handel is. En die is er voor de grote, en daarnáást voor de kleine beurs.

De Chileense studenten zijn goed georganiseerd in de CONFECH, de Confederación de Federaciones de Estudiantes Chilenos,en hebben de steun van het overgrote deel van de bevolking achter zich. Zij eisen iets eenvoudigs maar fundamenteels: een substantiële investering en bemoeienis van de overheid in onderwijs, om ervoor de zorgen dat (goed) onderwijs geen privilege, maar een recht is. Geen voorrecht voor reeds bevoorrechten, maar een gegarandeerd toegankelijk systeem voor wie de talenten en het doorzettingsvermogen heeft. Maar waar de centrumlinkse regeringen die op het vertrek van Pinochet volgden er niet in slaagden het onderwijssysteem te hervormen, is de huidige conservatieve president Piñera dat al helemáál niet van plan. En zo werd er een jaar lang gestaakt en actie gevoerd. Hoewel de studenten zich beijverden om ludieke actievormen te hanteren (de grote kiss-inn: duizenden zoenende studenten op het plein; je hebt als autoriteit toch een hart van prikkeldraad als je dan geen concessies doet?), en verscheidene flash mobs (de plotse massale bezetting van een publieke ruimte, aldaar klappend, springend, handen-wuivend – en dan weer in het niets oplossend), liepen de protesten toch regelmatig uit op traangasconfrontaties en massale arrestaties, en zijn er aanhoudende berichten over revanches van universitaire bestuurders tegen rebelse studenten en leiders.

Onderwijs is geen handeltje, roepen in dit nieuwe studiejaar de studenten opnieuw. Laten we het goed onthouden.

Ton Salman is universitair hoofddocent bij de afdeling Sociale en Culturele Antropologie (VU).  Hij houdt zich onder andere bezig met sociale bewegingen en burgerschap. Zijn regionale specialisatie is Latijns Amerika, waarover verschillende stukken op Standplaats Wereld zijn verschenen

A federal court judge in San Francisco granted a temporary restraining order Friday to prevent the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), from handing over 9000-year-old human bones to Native Americans, in the latest twist in an unusual custody battle for two human skeletons that are among the earliest found in the Americas. Three University of California professors filed a lawsuit last week to prevent UCSD from transferring the bones, which have been described as better preserved than those of the Kennewick Man, another ancient skeleton that has been the center of debate and lawsuits.

The restraining order will be in effect until Friday, 11 May, when Judge Richard Seeborg of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California will decide whether to extend it until the case is settled, according to Jim McManis, an attorney in San Jose, California, who represents the professors pro bono.

Meanwhile, in anticipation of the professors' lawsuit, members of the Kumeyaay tribes filed their own lawsuit in federal court in San Diego on 13 April demanding transfer of the skeletons. The bones were discovered in 1976 during an excavation at University House in La Jolla, which is the traditional home of the UCSD chancellor. The Kumeyaay, representing 12 federated tribes, have been seeking the remains for reburial, claiming that they were found on their traditional lands. Under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, museums and other institutions must repatriate remains and artifacts that can be traced to a tribe. A controversial rule concerning this law, issued in 2010 by the Department of the Interior, gives tribes a way to recover even remains that cannot be linked to specific groups. The new lawsuits may test that rule.

After years of legal dispute, UCSD officials were preparing to give the bones to representatives of the Kumeyaay, against the advice of a UCSD scientific advisory committee and a separate system-wide UC research committee that reviewed the claims. The professors, anthropologist Margaret Schoeninger of UCSD, paleoanthropologist Robert Bettinger of UC Davis, and paleoanthropologist Tim White of UC Berkeley, filed the lawsuit to block the repatriation, saying that there is no evidence that these bones are related to the Kumeyaay, and in fact, the evidence suggests otherwise. The scientific advisory committee found that the Kumeyaay language moved into the region 2000 years ago, and that the Kumeyaay traditionally cremated their dead rather than burying them. Moreover, Schoeninger's lab's analysis of stable isotopes from samples of the skeletons indicated that they ate a diet of marine mammals and offshore fish—a coastal adaptation that contrasts with the desert origins of the Kumeyaay. Anthropologists who study the bones and DNA of Paleoindians also agree that the remains are probably too old to have any affiliation, cultural or otherwise, with tribes living in southern California today.

Because of their great antiquity, the bones are important for exploring the mystery of the identity of the first people to migrate from the Old World to the New World. They also should be saved for future scientific analysis, the lawsuit argues, because new methods are being developed to extract and study ancient DNA and to analyze the diet and lifestyles of ancient people. _________________

References:

Gibbons, Ann. 2012. "Ancient American Skeletons Safe From Reburial, But Only for the Moment". Science. Posted: May 1, 2012. Available online: http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/05/ancient-american-skeletons-safe.html

Have you read From Labrador to Samoa: the Theory and Practice of Eleanor Burke Leacock?

Edited by Constance R. Sutton, this book is published by the Association for Feminist Anthropology/American Anthropological Association in collaboration with the International Women’s Anthropology Conference, ©1993.

Order your print copy today from the AAA online store at a special member price of $7.50.

Filed under: Publications

Rex’s last post reminds me that I’ve been meaning to write about one of the most fascinating science fiction worlds I’ve come across in a long time. I’m talking about The Culture novels of Iain M. Banks, which I want to compare with George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones [the TV show - I've not read the books].

I want to talk about the role of ethnic difference in narrative, but since Rex brought up the issue of bodies, let me first note that one of the interesting things about The Culture is that unlike the many other “highly advanced alien species” discussed by Rex in his post, bodies are very important to The Culture. In this post-singularity world people can back themselves up or choose to live entirely virtual lives, but most choose to have bodies anyway. These bodies are enhanced, to be sure: they have neural laces to tie them to the co-evolved artificial Minds which run their space ships, and they have extra glands which give them whatever drugs they might like at a mere thought, but they are still bodies. Over their long lifespans they can choose to be male or female at will, and many go through several changes over a lifetime. The Minds too can take on human avatars, and the nature of these avatars is an important reflection of their personalities, although we are frequently reminded that they are not human. For instance, they can eat and defecate, but they don’t have to and the food which is passed through their bodies is still edible since it hasn’t really been digested. We are even told that some humans like to eat avatar-digested food. But then who understands humans?

Getting back to ethnicity an narrative… let me start with Special Circumstances, an organization which figures prominently in The Culture novels. Here’s an explanation from Wikipedia:

Special Circumstances is part of a larger fictional Culture organization called Contact, which coordinates Culture interactions with (and in) other civilizations. SC exists to fulfill this role when circumstances exceed the moral capacity of Contact, or where the situation is highly complex and requires highly specialized skills… Special Circumstances also does the ‘dirty work’ of the Culture, a function made especially complicated by the normally very high ethical standards the Culture sets itself. SC acts in a way that has been compared with the democratizing intentions of real-world liberal intent on overcoming the world’s (and especially other nation’s) evils by benign interference.

One of the things that makes The Culture books so interesting is the deep ambivalence Banks has for his Special Circumstances heroes. While they have no material interest in delving into the affairs of other societies, it is clear that their motivations are not entirely selfless. They are driven in equal parts by a desire to “improve” these other cultures as well as their own boredom. Yes, they usually win in the end, for the betterment of all concerned. One could thus argue that SC is an argument for liberal interventionism. But I think it is much more about the need for good stories.

SC is important to The Culture novels because the world of The Culture is a rather boring utopia. There is no money, no discrimination, no real politics, etc. For this reason, for anything interesting to happen it must happen at the fringes of Culture, at the point of contact with other (usually less developed) civilizations. This interests me because it makes clear how important contact (or Contact) is for narrative. I also think it explains why people get so defensive when anthropologists point out the underlying racism implicit in various fictional worlds.

Take, for example, the Dothraki of Game of Thrones:

The Dothraki are dark, with long hair they wear in dreadlocks or in matted braids. They sport very little clothing, bedeck themselves in blue paint, and, as depicted in the premiere episode, their weddings are riotous affairs full of thumping drums, ululations, orgiastic public sex, passionate throat-slitting, and fly-ridden baskets full of delicious, bloody animal hearts. A man in a turban presents the new khaleesi with an inlaid box full of hissing snakes. After their nuptials, the immense Khal Drogo takes Daenerys to a seaside cliff at twilight and then, against her muted pleas, takes her doggie-style.

Now, I think a lot of the problem is that the Dorthraki are intentionally a “hodgepodge creation”:

George R.R. Martin has written , “I have tried to mix and match ethnic and cultural traits in creating my imaginary fantasy peoples, so there are no direct one-for-one correspodences [sic]. The Dothraki, for example, are based in part on the Mongols, the Alans, and the Huns, but their skin coloring is Amerindian.”

I think a lot of the problem is Martin’s reliance on the worst stereotypes about nomadic peoples rather than more historically accurate accounts. For instance, one popular history of Genghis Khan emphasizes the importance of the Mongols in the creation of the “modern world.”

But I don’t want to talk about what is wrong with Martin’s Dorthraki so much as why so many people get upset when scholars point out these problems. I think it is because of a feeling that good stories need good “others” and that without difference, including different levels of civilization, one can’t have a good narrative. The anthropologist in me wants to reply that recreating Tylor and Morgan’s stages of civilization in narrative form serves to reproduce the ideological foundations of racism is even if it isn’t directed at any particular ethnic group, but the fan of science fiction and fantasy novels in me understands that such is the stuff that (most) fantasy worlds are made of. Fictional others allow us to explore the limits of our own humanity. Still, I think The Culture novels show that we can do better, that we can ask more of our imagined worlds. But even Banks’ novels still rely upon a social darwinian view of galactic development, with each civilization necessarily going through the various stages of development, with only minimal interference by the more developed societies. I say this not so much to criticize Banks but to point out how hard it is to escape from such narrative frameworks, even in (or especially in?) stories that otherwise push the boundaries of what it means to be human.

Addendum: I posted it to Twitter, but I wanted to link again to a recent interview in Wired with anthropologist Kathryn Denning who “studies the very human way that scientists, engineers and members of the public think about space exploration and the search for alien life.” I think she has some really interesting things to say about our discourses about contact with alien life.

I was watching Star Trek the other day (Enterprise season 4) when the crew of the Enterprise met yet another highly advanced alien species. Not just ‘faster warp drives’ or ‘bigger weapons’ but a really, truly, highly advanced alien species. So advanced that, like others that have appeared on the show, they didn’t have bodies.

Take a second to think about it: why do we assume that the more advanced you get, the less body you will have?

Star Trek is a product of its time featuring all the teleological unilinear evolution you could shake a stick at — more Leslie White and Herbert Spencer than Julian Steward and Charles Darwin. I understand that it views all life-forms as being located on a Victorian continuum with Papua New Guinea on one end and NASA on the other. But even in a world obsessed with technological improvement, since when did the body become something that, technically, it would be better for us to get rid of? I really want to hammer home the incredibly non-obvious nature of this question in: what is technologically backwards about having a body?

The answer, of course, is that contemporary Eurochristian cultures have a long history of viewing the body as the dirty, uncontrolled, appetitive fleshvelope that our pure, divine souls have been crammed into. All of the Star Trek tropes of floating pools of light entering our bodies to possess our engineers and lieutenant commanders; their need to lower themselves by using physical speech to communicate; the promise that someday we might be able to comprehend the infinite majesty of the universe once we’ve joined them…. totally different from angels, amirite?

One of the oddities of anthropology is that once you’ve tuned into a cultural pattern, you see it everywhere — that’s how you know you’ve gotten your analysis right. But for most Americans, say, it takes quite a lot of exposure to American and British culture to see the big picture. Not just because you are too close (although that is a problem) but because you spend most of your life going to work, cooking dinner, etc. and not reading Sacvan Berkovitch and Perry Miller. Or for that matter Madame Blavatsky.

And yet it is a strange, very culturally specific idea that we are more truly ourselves when we are out of our bodies rather then when we are in them. Many people in other cultures think that they are their bodies — a very sensible proposition indeed given the available evidence. It takes analysis and comparison to understand this, even though the examples of the pattern occur regularly on Netflix. 

I smiled when I read the title of the article on the manilla folder. On the outside, in Meg’s rounded, near-cursive print: MEG’S COPY, PLEASE RETURN. I cracked the folder open and the faint gray type was only just legible, the edges of the book were still visible from when someone copied the original article, many many years ago. Since then the article has been copied over and over again, for the yearly iterations of our introduction to theory class, the class that gives us the indelible stamp of Berkeley archaeology: 229A. It’s also one of the few articles that has made me laugh out loud–Kent Flannery’s Golden Marshalltown. I removed the staple and programmed the copy machine: Flannery_1982, single-sided, output to pdf.

I’ve been back in Berkeley for just over two weeks now. I hit the ground running–I rented a place to live, moved in, and presented my dissertation research to my department in the matter of days, finished up an article with the inimitable Stu Eve, and now I’m holed up in the library. On occasion I’ve been helping Meg Conkey clean out her office after she retired, converting the stacks and stacks of archaeological ephemera she’s collected over the years into pdfs.

It’s a little humbling, looking at all the authors and article titles and fascinating research that I’ve never heard of–or that I have never heard of that particular iteration of. So much diversity in the literature that it feels like we might not actually have made much progress in archaeology, we might just be writing the same things over and over and over again. I get to watch the progression of archaeological publication–hand-written notes, to typed pages, dot-matrix, then laser printing! and finally, pdfs. Monographs of all sizes and colors (particularly annoying for the copier) and notes from lectures given decades ago. Nice notes at the top of the page, marginalia, and occasional backstage-passes to legendary moments in archaeology:

I find these moments so delightful and such an intimate view into a long archaeological career.

But I have to wonder how much I am duplicating efforts, just how many scans of Flannery_1982 we need in the world. I know there are other departments with treasure troves of scanned material and it seems absolutely ridiculous that we have to have our separate stashes, especially when all the state universities are technically owned by the public anyway. It’s frustrating, and I know it will change soonish…but it’s like using a mimeograph in the digital age. Can we have the academic literature Spotify yet?

• Remembering the mother of POTUS An op-ed in the Washington Post explores the relationship between President Barack Obama and his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, a cultural anthropologist. It concludes that she shaped his “essence” in many ways including multilayered, multiethnic experiences and empathy. [Blogger's note: on Mother's Day, one can only wish she had lived to see her son's presidency].

• What do the evangelicals want? Cultural anthropologist Tanya Lurhmann, professor of cultural anthropology at Stanford University, wrote an op-ed for The New York Times discussing views of evangelical Christians in the United States and how candidates in the upcoming U.S. presidential election might better communicate with them. Luhrmann is author, most recently, of When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God.

• Kinship studies revisited The Irish Times carried a review of a new book by cultural anthropologist Maurice Godelier, Directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in France. The review is written by Fiona Murphy, a cultural anthropologist and co-author of Integration in Ireland: The Everyday Lives of African Migrants. She says: “It is this constellation of world views and ways of being that we meet in Maurice Godelier’s powerful and often provocative new book, The Metamorphoses of Kinship. In this timely and challenging study, Godelier heralds the revival of kinship studies within the discipline of anthropology… The book argues that kinship, once the key focus of anthropology, is no longer visible on university course lists; not vanished or vanquished, he insists, however, but merely transformed.”

• Breast is best but for how long? USA Today joined the discussion in response to a Time magazine cover photo this week of a mother nursing her 3-year-old son. Noting that breast-feeding children older than one year is rare among mothers in the United States, and mentioning some online comments calling it “perverted” and “dangerous” to nurse a 3-year-old, it then turns to discussion of cross-cultural practices. The article quotes Katherine Dettwyler, professor of anthropology at the University of Delaware: “It’s normal for our species. It’s not perverted; it’s not sex; it’s not women doing it for some perverse need. It’s normal like a nine-month pregnancy is normal.” Her research on breast-feeding around the world shows that most children are breast-fed for three to five years or longer in sharp contrast with babies in the United States.

• Forensic anthropologist meets mystery writer The Independent carried a double interview with Sue Black, professor of anatomy and forensic anthropology at the University of Dundee, and mystery writer, Val McDermid. Black has led the way in human identification in conflict zones such as Kosovo and has appeared in the BBC2 factual series, History Cold Case. Black comments, “I don’t read crime novels – it’d be like a chef watching food programmes – so I didn’t know much about Val until I was asked to do a radio programme with her about death and dying, in the late 1990s. We were chatting away before we went on air when I made the mistake of saying, ‘If at any point in the future you need to ask me about anything, feel free.’ You make one offer and she’s in there.”

• What a dive The New York Times Science blog covered the work of Lisa J. Lucero, professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is studying ancient Maya underwater offerings in central Belize under the auspices of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, National Institute of Culture and History.

• Party time According to an article in the The Observer (England), the prehistoric basis for rave festivals was established during the neolithic in England: “They were the stone-age equivalent of Glastonbury festival. People gathered in their hundreds to drink, eat and party every summer at revelries lasting several days and nights. Young men met women from nearby communities and married them. Herds of cattle were slaughtered to provide food.” This picture of ancient British bacchanalia has been created by researchers led by Professor Alasdair Whittle of Cardiff University and Dr. Alex Bayliss of English Heritage. They have built up a detailed chronology of the first farmers’ arrival in Britain and have shown that agriculture spread with dramatic rapidity. In its wake, profound social changes gripped the country, culminating in the construction of causewayed enclosures where chieftains or priests held revelries to help establish their power bases. As a result of their successes, Whittle and Bayliss have won a £2m grant from the European Research Council to date neolithic sites across the continent. The aim is to show the technique’s power to create precise chronologies of ancient events, as it has for stone-age Britain.

• First documented case of female trafficking? According to a report in The Independent, a newly deciphered clay tablet lists 60 women who were probably prisoners-of-war or victims of an Assyrian forced population transfer program. Cambridge archaeologist Dr. John MacGinnis found, moreover, that 45 of the names bore no resemblance to Middle Eastern names already known to scholars. The unique nature of the tablet’s 45 mystery names is seen by scholars as evidence of a previously unknown language, perhaps that of people living in the Zagros Mountains of western Iran. According to the report, “The 60 women (including the 45 with evidence of the previously unattested language) were almost certainly being deployed by the palace authorities for some economic purpose (potentially a female-associated craft activity like weaving). Indeed the text mentions that some of them were being allocated to specific local villages.”

• Evidence of prehistoric Irish tsunami Archaeologists in the Burren in County Clare have unearthed one of the oldest records of human life ever found in Ireland and may also have found that they were wiped out by a tsunami. Radiocarbon dating of a shellfish cooking area or “midden” located on Fanore Beach have revealed it to be at least 6,000 years old – hundreds of years older than the nearby Poulnabrone dolmen. Excavation on the site has also revealed a mysterious black layer of organic material which archeologists believe may be the results of a Stone Age tsunami which bashed the West Clare coast. Field monument advisor for Co Clare Michael Lynch said: “It is possible this is the result of a major climatic event, a massive storm or possibly a tsunami, or some other major event of that sort which would have thrown up a large amount of debris all at the one time.”

• Nut cracking culture The Huffing Post carried an article about findings that chimpanzee groups have distinct “cultural” practices related to nut-cracking. “In humans, cultural differences are an essential part of what distinguishes neighboring groups that live in very similar environments,” study researcher Lydia Luncz, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, said in a statement. “For the first time, a very similar situation has been found in wild chimpanzees living in the Taï National Park, Côte d’Ivoire, demonstrating that they share with us the ability for fine-scale cultural differentiation.”

• Kudos Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, the Courtney Sale Ross University Professor of Globalization and Education at New York University, has been appointed dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, starting in September. Suárez-Orozco was educated in public schools in Argentina and at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received an A.B. in psychology, an M.A. in anthropology and a Ph.D. in anthropology. With a body of scholarly work focusing on mass migration, globalization and education within the arenas of cultural psychology and psychological anthropology, Suárez-Orozco will draw on a global perspective to inform his leadership.

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