anthropology

By Kelsey Hitchcock, Anna Pavlov, Ryan Shay, John Villecco and Sara Yusko

For several hours we talked about obesity with the resident doctors at the local family clinic. After covering the typical recommendations for losing weight, such as eating healthy and increasing exercise, Dr. B informed us of the most practical treatment method they use. “I usually ask the patient to complete a food journal.”

According to Dr. B and the other residents, a journal can provide concrete evidence of successes and areas in which adolescents could improve their diets. So we asked about the success of such an assignment. Dr. B chuckled and said, “I’ve never had a patient complete a food journal.”

As soon as he said this, two other doctors in the room added their own experiences. One echoed Dr. B’s statements, and the other told his one and only success story:

“The patient was fourteen years old. He didn’t like how big he was becoming and decided to play sports. After he started playing sports he lost thirty pounds.”

As we explored the issue of adolescent obesity within our community, we found that while the recommendations for losing weight may appear simple, successful results were not easily obtained. Our goal was to better understand the prevalence and treatment of adolescent obesity through patient observation and interviews with resident doctors in this mid-Western city.

During our semester-long research, we examined the three main influences related to adolescent obesity: familial, social, and environmental. The results below express how residents view the problem of obesity among adolescents who live in lower socioeconomic circumstances. We also examine how text messaging might be a better way to build a behavioral health intervention for these adolescents.

Family Influence

“It’s just not all that surprising when obese children have obese parents…”

Until they leave home, most adolescents are dependent on their parents for food and nutrition. Adolescents do not have much influence in what foods are provided and what meals are cooked. If the parents fail to provide healthy options on a consistent basis, an adolescent’s overall health will likely suffer, and his or her probability of becoming obese increases.

The residents we interviewed commented that the role a parent plays as a provider for their children is closely connected to the development of that child’s health. They developed this point by saying that it is difficult for parents with lower collective incomes to provide as many healthy choices as parents with higher incomes. This is due to the fact that processed foods and fast food items tend to be less expensive than healthy food options. This socioeconomic factor makes the family’s influence on adolescent obesity even more complex.

The probability of adolescents becoming obese is also influenced by the parents’ own habits. One resident said the “parents are key” – changing the behavior of parents will effect change in their children. Rather than the typical lecture to eat better, which residents called “do as I say, not as I do”, parents should model “do as I say AND as I do”. In other words, parents should tell their adolescents how to eat and exercise in a healthy way while also eating well and exercising themselves. It is important for adolescents to see the advice their parents give them put into action because they are more likely to learn through example.

Peer Influence

“There is a reason why heavier kids don’t go out for sports, such as the swim team… they care about how their peers view them.”

The doctors stated that peers are more influential than parents regarding behaviors affecting weight. While parents control home life, peers influence life outside the home through social groups, which is of significant importance during adolescence. In particular, peers influence the adolescent’s body image. The doctors believed that obese adolescents are particularly susceptible to developing a negative body image, which, they say, may lead to feelings of isolation and depression.

Doctors cited poor self-esteem as a causative factor and product of negative body image. Overweight and obese adolescents are often less outgoing because they do not want to draw attention to themselves. The doctors agreed that their overweight and obese patients were not in the “type” of crowd to play sports, which could aid in losing excess weight.

Isolation, depression, and low self-esteem can also lead to destructive behaviors, such as involvement in drugs, alcohol, smoking, and sexual activity. The doctors stated obesity takes a backseat to the more “immediate” issues of sex and drugs, as well as acute care problems like the flu. With these problems in the foreground, doctors often do not have the time to address weight issues.

Environmental Influence

“These kids just don’t have the same opportunities to go out and play as they should.”

Our community suffers through 6 months of cold, often bitter weather. Most outdoor activities are simply out of the question for half of the year. Even when the snow has disappeared, outdoor exercise is questionable. The city suffers from both a lack of sidewalks and crime, discouraging people from walking or running.

Dr. H also stressed that the lack of gym class in middle and high school significantly influences adolescents’ weight. As both students and faculty in schools often overlook health classes, the importance and effort needed for healthy lifestyles is neglected. Additionally, the lack of neighborhood youth programs prevents access to organized sports from even the most motivated kids. Given the adolescents’ socioeconomic backgrounds, a gym membership is something that the residents of the community often do not have the luxury to afford.

Intervention: Food Journals to Texting

The increasing prevalence of adolescent obesity is a problem faced by the entire country. The Surgeon General’s Call To Action To Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity (2001) reported that adolescent overweight and obesity has become a nationwide problem as the prevalence of overweight adolescents has increased from 5% in 1976-1980 to 17.4% in 2003-2004, corresponding to 12.5 million individuals ages 12-19.

As an adolescent increases in weight, he or she also increases health risks, such as asthma, cardiovascular problems, diabetes, sleep apnea, hypertension, early maturation, orthopedic problems, and the psychological effects of social stigmatization. These facts demonstrate the importance of preventing weight gain, treating overweight and obesity, and improving one’s quality of life. As behavioral and environmental factors are large contributors to overweight and obesity, they provide the greatest opportunity for intervention (Call To Action, 2001; see also the Center for Disease Control’s page on obesity).

According to Dr. K, 20-30% of his adolescent patients are overweight or obese. When he tries to help, the patients are either “noncompliant” or their lifestyles are not conducive to healthy changes for many of the reasons covered above.

One of the most common treatment methods doctors instruct overweight or obese adolescents to do is to keep a food journal because it is relatively easy and has been shown to work. For a period of four to seven days, the adolescent writes down everything he or she eats. After that week, the patient comes back in to the clinic for a follow-up visit to discuss his or her diet and nutrition.

Keeping a food journal has proven to be a mildly successful treatment method in our community, largely because patients either fail to make a follow-up appointment or don’t complete the food journal. However, we believe many of the ideas behind the food journal approach can be adapted to a medium that adolescents already use: text messaging.

The majority of adolescents in America have cell phones and use them constantly to text message. The idea we propose is for the patient to text everything he or she eats to a responsible party in the clinic, such as a dietician. The responsible party could keep track of the patient’s meals for him or her, so the only responsibility the patient has is to text in the meals and make a follow-up appointment. To reduce the risk of forgetting to text in a meal, an automated text messaging service could be implemented to send reminders to patients participating in this program.

Despite all the barriers and influences facing obese adolescents, we believe a relatively simple texting program can significantly increase the number of success stories in our community. T9, abc, or qwerty, adolescent obesity will be yesterday’s text.

The Call for Papers Site is now accepting submissions to participate in the 109^th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association.  Submissions are due by 5pm EST on April 1^st.  The meeting will be located in New Orleans, Louisiana November 17-21, 2010.  Follow or contribute to the discussion on Twitter using the #AAA2010 hashtag!

Filed under: Annual Meeting

Congrats to the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (SAFN) on the launch of the FoodAnthropology blog at foodanthro.wordpress.com. The launch was accompanied by a welcome message encouraging SAFN members to contribute news and research info by contacting David Beriss or Rachel Black at foodanth@gmail.com.

Sunday’s post “Moving beyond text: using video to share research on food insecurity” provides a glimpse of what blog readers can look forward to. You can also connect with SAFN on Twitter @foodanth and join their Facebook group.

Filed under: Resources

Check out this article from the Indigenous Language Institute:

Who are you if your identity is based on your language, and your language is dying?

It’s a question posed by teen participants in a digital-media workshop titled “Ancient Voices, Modern Tools,” at Santa Fe’s Indigenous Language Institute. The 13 students involved learned how to use film as an educational tool to promote the use of Native tongues. The three-day workshop culminated Thursday with an in-class screening (popcorn included) of the completed works, which ran 3 to 5 minutes — and packed a lot of story into that tight time frame.

Door Irene Stengs

Op 27 september 2004 reed een lijkwagen stapvoets een volle Amsterdam ArenA binnen. Hiermee begon het afscheid van levensliedzanger André Hazes. Het gratis afscheidsconcert André Bedankt vormde een eerbetoon van bevriende zangers en andere Bekende Nederlanders aan de onverwachts overleden Hazes. Het concert was ook nadrukkelijk bedoeld om zijn fans afscheid te kunnen laten nemen van hun idool: de kist met het lichaam van de zanger stond tijdens het concert op de middenstip. De stoet van lijkwagen en volgauto’s die van Hazes’ huis was vertrokken, was in niets te onderscheiden van een daadwerkelijke uitvaart. De bestemming, echter, was een voetbalstadion, en niet een begraafplaats.

Het afscheid van André Hazes laat zien hoe rituelen voortdurend veranderen — in onze samenleving vaak door het vervagen van grenzen tussen verschillende cultuurdomeinen met eigen gedragcodes. In dit geval: concert, uitvaart en voetbalwedstrijd. Zo ontstaan onverwachte, niet eenduidig te categoriseren, gebeurtenissen. Gejuich, applaus, waves en voetbalyells, bijvoorbeeld, zijn nauwelijks verenigbaar met het verdriet van Hazes’ nabestaanden.

Het ambigue karakter van André Bedankt is moeilijk verenigbaar met een opvatting van ritueel als een vormvaste opeenvolging van geformaliseerde handelingen. Rituelen verschijnen daarin als statische, repetitieve, gestructureerde onderbrekingen van het dagelijks leven, op vaste momenten en plaatsen, bij vaste gelegenheden, geworteld in traditie. Hedendaagse onderzoekers vatten ritueel minder statisch op. Hun interesse is meer gericht op processen van ‘ritualisering’: het verschijnsel dat bestaande rituele vormen en elementen op nieuwe manieren aan het menselijk handelen verbonden worden, waardoor bepaalde handelingen een nieuwe uitstraling en betekenis krijgen.

De Franse antropoloog en socioloog Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) verklaarde de behoefte aan rituelen vanuit hun functie: ritueel bevordert de sociale samenhang. Volgens Durkheim is het goddelijke in elke religie een representatie van de samenleving zelf. Religieuze rituelen, rituelen die op het eerste gezicht de gelovigen lijken te verbinden met het goddelijke, dienen dus eigenlijk om mensen sterker met hun eigen samenleving te verbinden. Durkheim maakte zich toentertijd al zorgen over individualisering en het wegvallen van oude vanzelfsprekendheden en verbanden. Hij benadrukte dat ook geseculariseerde samenlevingen rituelen nodig hebben. In dit perspectief zijn nationale feestdagen zoals onze Koninginnedag momenten waarop de samenleving zich als een eenheid beleeft.

Durkheim’s werk inspireert nog steeds, al interpreteren maar weinig onderzoekers ritueel nog zuiver functionalistisch. De interesse is verschoven naar handelingen: een ritueel is vooral iets wat mensen doen. Alledaagse handelingen als zingen, lopen, dansen, luisteren, eten en huilen krijgen binnen de collectieve en symbolische context een bijzondere betekenis, waardoor het ritueel de deelnemers cognitief, lichamelijk en emotioneel extra aanspreekt. Dit verklaart waarom rituelen een sterk gevoel van onderlinge verbondenheid kunnen oproepen, een ervaring die de Schotse antropoloog Victor Turner (1920-1983) communitas heeft genoemd.

Volgens Turner ontstaat communitas vooral tijdens de zogenaamde overgangsfase (limen) in rituelen die de overgang naar een nieuwe sociale status of levensfase begeleiden (rites de passage). In onze samenleving zijn dit bijvoorbeeld ontgroeningen en de naturalisatieceremonie waarin vreemdelingen Nederlanders worden. De gedeelde onzekerheid van de deelnemers tijdens de fase waarbij de oude maatschappelijke status al is achtergelaten, maar de nieuwe nog niet ontvangen, kan dan de basis vormen van communitas.

Achter het gezamenlijke ‘doen’ in een ritueel kunnen grote verschillen in motivatie, beleving en betekenisgeving schuilgaan. Dit geldt evenzeer voor het Hazes-afscheid als voor een kerstdiner. Ook al zit de familie samen aan tafel, voor de een is de maaltijd een jaarlijks hoogtepunt, voor de ander een benauwende verplichting. Het gezamenlijk handelen houdt zulke verschillen uit het zicht, zodat de deelnemers met hun ritueel toch één statement maken: ‘wij houden van André’, ‘wij zijn een hechte familie’. Omdat de buitenwereld meekijkt stellen rituelen mensen in staat hun identiteit vorm en inhoud te geven.

Hoewel rituelen in eerste instantie gedeelde identiteiten lijken te creëren en uit te dragen, worden tegelijkertijd verschillen uitvergroot. Naarmate het aspect van identiteit sterker meespeelt, worden rituelen controversiëler en neemt hun politieke lading toe. In dit perspectief verschijnt het afscheid van Hazes als een manifestatie die aan de ene kant verbazing en dédain opriep, maar aan de andere kant voor mensen die in het openbare leven nauwelijks aan bod komen een gelegenheid was om te laten zien dat ze er zijn en erbij horen. De hardcore Hazesfans, met hun zwarte hoeden en zonnebrillen, beleefden André Bedankt als een maatschappelijke erkenning van hun idool, hun muziek, en van henzelf.

Irene Stengs is onderzoeker bij het Meertens Instituut in Amsterdam. Eerder schreef ze over Theo van Gogh, Wilders en de media.

Congratulations to the Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges (SACC) on their first all-digital issue of SACC Notes, emailed to SACC members and subscribers today. This digital effort is a work-in-progress, and all reader feedback is welcome. If you are an SACC Notes reader and have comments to share, please contact editor Lloyd Miller at Lloyd.miller [at] mchsi.com. You can also bring your thoughts to the 2010 SACC Annual Conference, March 17-21, in San Francisco.

Filed under: Publications, Resources

American Anthropological Association Meeting, New Orleans, November 17th- 21st, 2010

Panel organizer: Chris Wingfield, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford / University of Birmingham - chris.wingfield@prm.ox.ac.uk

Deadline for title and abstract: Friday 19th March.

When things become museum objects, they can appear to be removed from the world of normal circulation. The process of collecting ethnographic objects has been described in terms of detachment and excision (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). Storage technologies in museums such as locked doors, alarm systems and glass cases all serve to restrict the movement of museum objects. Museum labeling and documentation can attempt to define museum objects as an immoveable and fixed part of a particular museum’s collection.

Nevertheless many museum objects continue to circulate within and between museums through exchanges and loans. Particularly charismatic objects can be regular travelers between exhibitions staged in different world cities.[1] In some ways it may be more sensible to think of museum objects as forming part of a particular sphere of exchange (Douglas and Isherwood 1979), rather than as being removed from circulation altogether. When museums are closed down, their collections may be transferred to other museum institutions, but can also be sold and returned to other arenas of circulation through the market. Repatriation has also seen museum objects enter new spheres of exchange in recent years.

As well as the circulation of the material objects themselves, museum objects circulate through indexical forms (Gell 1998). Casts and physical replicas of particularly iconic objects can form part of the way in which they circulate. Other indexes include photographs and drawings in museum publications, as well as scale models that may be sold in museum gift shops. For some museum objects, there is a relationship between their relative immovability and the number of indexes that circulate in the world.

This panel will seek to understand museums as institutions which on the one hand restrict and block the circulation of their objects, but on the other, channel their circulation in particular directions, and through particular spheres. By bringing some of the resources of anthropological exchange theory to the analysis of museums and their objects, it is hoped that museums may be understood in relation to the networks in which they operate, rather than as isolated monolithic institutions. In emulation of recent work on the anthropology of colonial archives, it is suggested that focusing on the circulation of museum objects may be a step towards an anthropology of museums that operates ‘along the grain’ (Stoler 2009).

References

Douglas, Mary, and Baron C. Isherwood (1979) The world of goods : towards an anthropology of consumption. Allen Lane, London.

Gell, Alfred (1998) Art and agency : an anthropological theory. Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (1998) Destination culture : tourism, museums, and heritage. University of California Press, Berkeley ; London.

Stoler, Ann Laura (2009) Along the archival grain : epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. ; Oxford.

[1] For an exploration of the idea of the charismatic museum object, see Wingfield, Christopher (2010) Touching the Buddha: encounters with a charismatic object. In Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations, edited by S. H. Dudley, pp. 53-70. Routledge, London & New York.

Ethnographic Field School in Highlan Guatemala

6 undergraduate credits in anthropology

May 25–July 8, 2010 (two days on-campus, six weeks abroad)

Maury Hutcheson, Ph.D. mhutcheson@vcu.edu

Program cost: $2,380 (includes roundtrip airfare) plus applicable VCU tuition[1]

Based in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, this six-week program will provide students with a comprehensive overview of Mayan indigenous life in Guatemala, past and present, including opportunities for individual and group research through participant observation, attendance at cultural events, lectures on selected topics, and excursions to museums and major archaeological sites, dating from the earliest days of the Olmec/Maya transition to the contact-era capitals that were toppled by the Spanish conquistadors. Highland Guatemala provides an ideal setting in which to explore different topics such as cultural pluralism, religious conservation and change, local responses to globalization and cultural revitalization movements. Students will gain practical experience in a variety of ethnographic research techniques as well as the ethical dimension of anthropological fieldwork while exploring historical continuities and transformations in Mayan culture and religious practice, especially in response to economic globalization and tourism. Students live with Guatemalan families. Course instruction is in English, but incorporates individualized one-on-one tutoring in Spanish. The program is well suited for students in anthropology, international studies, history, and religious studies. Interethnic relations between the Maya and their non-indigenous Ladino neighbors will be a special focus of this year’s program.

The international program fee of $2,380 includes the following:

• Roundtrip airfare
• All accommodations
• All meals while living with Guatemalan families
• Study visits and cultural excursions
• Ground transportation
• On-site program director support
• Application fee and deposit
• International Student Identification Card

Registration deadline: March 26, 2010

For more information, and to apply, visit the program website at:

http://www.international.vcu.edu/abroad/programs/vcu/programdetail/p48.aspx

[1] Out-of-state students who participate in faculty-led VCU Study Abroad programs are eligible for a 40 percent discount on the regular out-of-state tuition costs.

Basic plus one – top of the list, mind, anthropology, and addiction.

Top of the List

James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis, Cooperative Behavior Cascades in Human Networks New full-access PNAS paper on social networks and cascades of behavior. For good commentary, see The Frontal Cortex and Not Exactly Rocket Science

Maximilian Forte, Multiplying Human Terrain Dreams of Victory and Fortune Zero Anthropology examines the non-zero-sum game approach to expanding the use of social science for military ends

Ed Yong, An 60,000-year Old Artistic Movement Recorded in Ostrich Egg Shells Very cool. Decorative ostrich shells many, many generations ago. Art is old.

John Hawks, Fat Rats Lab rats come with starting conditions – they are not the representatives of “nature” that scientists have often assumed. In this case, studies on caloric restriction might be flawed because rats started from an unhealthy baseline, and thus any improvement extends their life

Nicholas Wade, Human Culture, An Evolutionary Force Nice summary of recent research on how culture, broadly conceived, shapes natural selection.

Michael Smith, Blogs Don’t Get No Respect Good rant about how American Anthropologist’s short piece on cultural anthropology blogs isn’t really all that

Mind

The Neurocritic, Depression’s Cognitive Downside A critical look at Jonah Lehrer’s recent piece that covered evolutionary proposals about the adaptive benefits of depression; here the impairments come to the fore

Jonah Lehrer, Critiques Lehrer also responds to email critiques over at his blog The Frontal Cortex. For more, see More Questions and More on Depression

Sandy Gautam, Chronic Stress, Neurogenesis and Depression Another way to view depression – a look at the actual biological mechanisms involved, and brain-environment interactions

Laura Miller, “The Genius In All Of Us” Salon review of the new book by David Shenk, “The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong”

Index Magazine, Music of the Hemispheres Music from patterns of brain activity – literally

Mo Costandi, The Ability to Recognize Faces Is Inherited We see faces everywhere – and to account for individual variation in that ability, new studies point to genetics

Martin Metzmacher, Dan Ariely Asks, Are We In Control of Our Decisions? TED talk with the behavioral economist

Greg Hickok, Lexical Effects in Speech Perception The motor system affects speech perception

Amanda Gardner, Scientists Unravel Mysteries of Intelligence It’s connections!

Anthropology

Jeremy Trombley, Writing for a Popular Audience Jeremy gives us his tips on getting mass appeal

Apostolos Doxiadis, Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna, Exclusive Levi-Strauss Cartoon Get his work in one graphical package!

Ryan Anderson, Anthropology/Economics Ethnografix on why the dismal science is pretty dismal in anthropological light

Adam Horn, Professor Rethinks Origins of Religion Marc Hauser has a crisis of faith, or morality comes first

James McCauley and Julia Ryan, Anthropology Professor’s Book Inspires Oscar-Nominated Film Harvard professor Kimberley Theidon’s book Entre Projimos inspired the Oscar-nominated documentary “The Milk of Sorrow”

Craig Mod, Books in the Age of iPad Provocative take on how electronic books will be better than regular old disposable books

Carnival of Evolution #21: The Superstar Edition From Darwin to Darwin

Peter Stromberg, The Birth of Cultural Relativism Amidst sex, drugs and boredom

Addiction

Piia Jallinoja et al., Negotiated Pleasures in Health-seeking Lifestyles of Participants of a Health Promoting Intervention Intriguing abstract that gets at the heart of many problems in public health approaches to “addictive” activities: “The article analyses the conflicts produced by pleasure-seeking and health enhancement… Due to the discrepancy between the pleasure-seeking and health enhancement, pleasure was constructed not simply as a spontaneous experience but often as a planned and disciplined event… The scarcity of pleasures from physical activity as well as from healthy foods is a challenge for health promoters. Instead of building more self-controlling and self-denying individuals, it could be fruitful to focus health promoters’ attention to the enhancement of the experiences of pleasure.”

Vaughan Bell, Cocaine, Surgery, and an Experiment Too Far Experimenting with cocaine as an anesthetic, getting hooked – the early science of drugs

Jeanna Bryner, Anti-Drinking Ads Induce More Drinking in Some People Bottoms up!

DrugMonkey, As Many Dependent on Cannabis as Have Tried Heroin? Animal models of adolescent drug taking, and implications around the question, Are adolescents more vulnerable to drug addiction than adults?

Peter B. Reiner, Sahakian on ‘Smart Drugs’ at the Royal Institution Barbara Sahakian points out that exercise, both physical and mental, can provide effects that are comparable to what these drugs can offer.

Nicole Plescher, 58 Warning Signs of a Shopping Addiction This article includes 27 ways to stop compulsive spending.

The New York Times, When Is It Sex Addiction? Several experts address the question of differentiating between bad behavior and sex addiction.

Dirk Hanson, A Seaside Story of Love and Junkies A powerful new documentary, which features a pair of young heroin addicts living in an economically ravaged city of South Wales.

Dave Munger, A Sober Assessment Over at Discover, examining the misperceptions about the social uses of alcohol.

With this post we inaugurate a new section in EthnoCuba, devoted to notes, pics and reports from that place we pompously call “the field”. I wanted to translate it into Spanish, but it sounds a  bit insulting if we are not talking about “el campo – campo” or “el puro campo”. Anything less than that should not be called “el campo”.  For now, we’ll leave it in English.

This post also -and hopefully- inaugurates the regular contribution to this young blog of our colleague Grete Viddal, PhD candidate at Harvard University’s Department of Anthropology, currently in Santiago. Grete just joined a private gym, popular with local people and very reasonably priced even by Cuban standards, where she has access to weight machines (all hand made) and aerobic classes. I nagged her to get some pictures to share with us. See images below  (all pictures by Grete Viddal).

Marcia Inhorn is the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs and Chair of the Council on Middle East Studies (CMES) in the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. She is the author of three books on infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in the Middle East: Local Babies, Global Science: Gender, Religion, and In Vitro Fertilization in Egypt (Routledge, 2003); Infertility and Patriarchy: The Cultural Politics of Gender and Family Life in Egypt (U Pennsylvania Press, 1996); and Quest for Conception: Gender, Infertility, and Egyptian Medical Traditions (U Pennsylvania Press, 1994). She is also a past president of the Society for Medical Anthropology. Last November, when she came to give a talk at McGill, Marcia agreed to sit down with me for an interview about her research, the state of medical anthropology and the recent SMA conference she organized at Yale. Eugene Raikhel (ER): To begin I wanted to ask about how you got started working on fertility in Egypt? What were the motivations for you? Marcia Inhorn (MI): When I went to graduate school at Berkeley, the motivating questions were stigma and suffering. This is a funny story, but on the first day – I wasn’t necessarily planning to work on the Middle East. I had been to the Middle East, I had travelled there with friends, but I thought maybe I was going to work in the States. When I got to the first day of the Anthro Seminar 203, and we had to introduce ourselves, every single person had some interesting field site – Albania, Rajasthan. So I said, OK, I’m going to make my commitment to the Middle East. I had been there, and I was interested in stigma and suffering, and it was just one of these fortuitous things.           There was a project at UCSF on blinding eye disease, trachoma. They had epidemiologists and doctors, but they had not been able to reduce the level of this problem. They realized that they needed some qualitative or anthropological research, and they invited a more advanced student from the UCSF-Berkeley program, and I was also invited. It was a multidisciplinary project, which was sort of the beginning of my multidisciplinary work. There were opthamologists, epidemiologists, and we lived in this very poor little community, with almost no resources. I realized – I had very little Arabic at that point – that when I asked women how many children they had, that there was a sort of silence when they didn’t have kids, and that it was very sensitive for women. I thought, that’s really interesting, infertility might be something really stigmatizing. So I went back, and I took a graduate seminar with Suad Joseph on women in the Middle East, I did a literature review, and there was nothing that had been published by anthropologists on infertility in the Middle East. But all the anecdotal evidence suggested it was a horrible thing for a woman, so that lit review led me to think that I should go back to Egypt and work on infertility. Then they actually opened a public infertility clinic in this poor public maternity hospital.           To be frank, there was no anthropological literature on infertility at that time. ER: Was that because most of the focus had been on overpopulation? MI: Yes, discourses of the third world being overpopulated, so all the attention was on contraception. But now, years later, we talk about the paradox of barrenness amidst plenty and we realize that you have the highest rates of infertility in high fertility areas. Because people get exposed to pregnancy but they end up having miscarriages, and so on. The WHO, to its credit, has always been a monitor of infertility rates and technologies, and has shown that sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rate of infertility in the world and that infection is the cause – they have been writing about that since the 1980s. So in the public health world there was a discourse around the idea that we should do something about that. Infertility has been a neglected issue, but in some sense now there are many of us. There are about 50 anthropologists working on infertility and assisted reproductive technologies around the world. We have a rich body of literature. It has been an incredibly productive area, moving into reproductive technologies. I have never left it. I still feel passionate about it because it continues to change in interesting ways. ER: What are you working on at the moment? MI: I have three projects, two of them are really in the middle, and one is a future project. I am trying to finish up a book called Re-conceiving Middle Eastern Manhood: Islam, Assisted Reproduction, and Emergent Masculinities. This came out of Egypt, working on IVF clinics in the late 1990s. I had always focused on women and infertility, and their gendered suffering. But once you get in these high-tech clinics, you immediately realize that the majority of cases are male-factor infertility. And though I wasn’t intending to interview men, I ended up talking to all of these men about infertility, and their own perceptions of it, and how they felt about it. So I decided I could interview men. So I switched countries and went to Lebanon, for interesting reasons, and did a large project on male-factor infertility, lasting from 2003-2005. I interviewed Lebanese, Syrian, Palestinian, and Yemeni men, and then I came back to Michigan, America’s largest Arabic population, and I interviewed Lebanese, Palestinian, and Iraqi men. So I had a huge sample of more than 250 men that I had interviewed about their experiences. I’m writing that up now, focusing on three issues: Trying to re-conceive manhood, the stereotypes of masculinity in the Middle East, in response to some of the popular discourses, feminist discourses, reframing the notion of hegemonic masculinity. And I’m looking at Islamic bioethics around assisted reproductive technologies, which don’t allow sperm donation, and thus really biologize the solutions. You have to use your own sperm, no adoption. And then I’m looking at the medicalization that goes on as a consequence. So that’s project one. ER: If I recall, the background to that was a new technology for male infertility? MI: Yes, everyone has an idea about IVF, but there’s a variant to it that was developed in Belgium in the 1990s, called Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection or ICSI. Not to glorify the technology, but it revolutionized the overcoming of male infertility, because it forces fertilization for men whose sperm are just not viable otherwise. And nobody knows about it. It’s never discussed. So I want this book to deal with the emergence of ICSI and what it’s done for manhood in the Middle East. So I have this book on male reproductive health that I want to finish up. We don’t have enough people working on men’s lives. Men are dealing with stresses and health problems. I give a huge amount of credit to all the women anthropologists who have worked on women’s lives, but we have really missed out on men’s lives in some ways.           The next project that I’ve been doing since 2007 is on reproductive tourism, which is the term for travel, the transnational quests for reproduction. I sited my project in the Arab Gulf, which is the hub of that kind of travel. I’ve got a project looking at why people move, their motivations, the flows in and out. What happens to Muslims when they are not allowed, for the most part, to use donor gametes, and what are the moral decisions they make?           And then I have sort of a biocultural project. The world’s most common reproductive endocrine disorder is called PCOS, Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. We have high rates of female infertility because of the global epidemic of overweight, diabetes and insulin resistance. In societies where women basically succumb to these problems, there is disruption to the ovaries, which is very difficult to fix, and is tied to these new problems of sedentary lifestyle. You see it in all over the Middle East—the Gulf has the second highest rate of diabetes in the world—and South Asians coming to the Gulf definitely have problems. So I want to look at women’s feelings about their bodies when they are told they are infertile because they need to lose weight. So that’s another project. But I’m going to stay with this problem of infertility, because it’s just kept me going, and the technologies themselves are rapidly changing. ER: What was the story behind your switch of fieldsites, from Egypt to Lebanon? MI: I had been working in Egypt from 1985 to 1996. I had always had Fulbrights, and you have to apply through the Fulbright Commission in Egypt to work there. And Egypt unfortunately has become extremely sensitive to human subject research fieldwork. They’re still allowing archival research, but they have become sensitive to people talking about topics that they don’t necessarily want to have revealed. So my project was called “Middle Eastern masculinities in the age of new reproductive technologies”, and I tried to get it through the Fulbright Commission. Little did I know that they not only have academics but also the Mukhabarat, who are like the secret police, on the board. And while the academics all accepted the project, the Mukhabarat did not, and it was turned back about four times, each time saying something like ‘nothing on men, masculinity, reproduction’, and the next time, ‘nothing on manhood, fertility, infertility’. The Fulbright Commission was trying to work with me, the project was increasingly shifting away from what I wanted it to be, and then my husband said, ‘Don’t you see the writing on the wall? They do not want your project.’ They were not going to let it go.           Meanwhile the Fulbright program in Lebanon had been closed down because of the civil war, but they had just reopened it to faculty, and they were very keen on the project. So I went. And then the war in Iraq started in 2003, and every single Fulbright program in the Middle East shut down except for the one in Lebanon. I was very lucky. I was going to do work in Syria as well, but its program was shut down, Jordan’s was shut down. These are the politics of trying to work in the Middle East right now. There are huge parts of the region about which we know next to nothing, because you can’t get in. Egypt used to be extremely open to Western research, but it has become increasingly restricted. ER: I really enjoyed your article in Social Science and Medicine a couple of years ago about privacy and fieldwork. Can you speak a bit about the challenges of conducting fieldwork in IVF clinics on these locally contentious issues? MI: I think about this a lot, because to get into very high-tech medicine, you have to enter these clinics, and do clinic-based ethnography, which takes us into this intersection of STS and medical anthropology. Increasingly my research has become very clinic-based. But to get into these clinics, you have to have permission. Now even in the Middle East they have opened up an IRB process, so you have to go through those channels. Putting it into Middle Eastern cultural terms, you have to have patronage: intermediaries who are willing to help you get sited. It’s always a challenge finding people willing to help you, but I have always found at least one person who was really keen on my project and I have made some very interesting alliances along the way. In Egypt, I had very close collegial relations with two physicians, I had published about one, and am publishing with another. Three Egyptian physicians decided I could work in their clinical sites, but one of them really acted as the powerful patron, and if I hadn’t had him to make those introductions, I don’t think I could have done the kind of study that I did in Egypt. It was the same situation in Lebanon: I found two physicians who were keen on me working in their clinics, and in the UAE I found a couple, though I ended up working mostly with one. These people have their own reasons, they have their own publishing agendas. In some cases they say, “We want to find out what we’re doing right and wrong,” –they want some feedback. So I have always ended up writing reports for the physician-directors. People have found that useful in some cases. They have ended up being really good colleagues. That said, I call it patronage – it is patronage. If you don’t make these alliances it is almost impossible to work in these settings.           The other problem in the world of IVF, especially ten years ago, but less so today, is that it’s very stigmatizing, (a) to be infertile, and (b) to be using these technologies, especially when there’s a moral taint, because people are very concerned that there’s mixing of gametes, and thus something immoral going on. People really did not want to give their names, they didn’t want to be known as having been in these places. Although lots of anthropologists reject the IRB process and informed consent as problematic, I ended up using IRB forms in clinical settings, translated into Arabic, to say that I would tell them about the project, and to ensure that it would be private and anonymous. People read these—these people are generally middle class to elite, so they can read—and I never had a woman not agree to be in a project. I did have men saying they wanted nothing to do with it. Though I still had 300 men agree, as long as I wasn’t tape-recording. It was a catharsis. A lot of men told me intimate things about their lives and sexuality. So I argued in that piece that we can use the whole IRB process to our advantage, if it makes people feel more comfortable. And in the Middle East people are increasingly familiar with signing off on things, it’s becoming an increasingly common process. ER: Could you speak a little bit about what, for you, have been significant ways of engaging with public health and with clinical medicine? MI: I am one of those anthropologists of the generation who witnessed the shift from international health to global health. I think I was really fortunate to be a member of the UCSF program, and to have some mentors who were engaged in the world of the WHO and international health. Fred Dunn was especially significant as a mentor in that regard. I was interested in getting some training in Public Health and I took a year’s leave of absence from my anthropology program and received an MPH in Epidemiology the UC-Berkeley School of Public Health. I’ve always found this epidemiological training to be very useful, and I still believe in things like detailed reproductive histories, and even asking people questions about things in their lives that might be risk factors for infertility. I still do that sort of work, and so I have increasingly become involved in the world of global health. Also, my first job was at the University of Arizona where Mark Nichter works, and he has been very much working at the intersection of public health and anthropology. So I have had some very good mentors who made me realize that this is a very important intersection where we should be working: global public health and anthropology.           Robert Hahn is another close colleague from my Emory days. He and I have just come out with a second edition of his book. He originally called it Anthropology In Public Health, this time we renamed it Anthropology and Public Health. The structure of the book looks at four ways anthropology intersects with the public health world. The first is just really good ethnographic understandings of public health issues, from alcoholism to my chapter on infertility, looking at doing what we do as ethnographers, understanding why things happen when and where they do. We have wonderful ethnographic work on HIV/AIDS that looks at the suffering that goes along with that. The second section of the book is on anthropological intervention, those medical anthropologists who are doing nuanced interventions based on ethnography, working on very good culturally tailored interventions. In that book I refer particularly to the work of Jeannine Coreil and Gladys Mayard in Haiti, who just did a wonderful intervention for women with lymphatic filariasis (Elephantiasis). They gave them a little bit of money to create social support groups – and these women just ran with it, they created these groups. They called it the indigenization of the social support group. The third section of the book is on evaluation. Anthropologists with our training have been very good at evaluating, and saying what worked and what didn’t. So we have a wonderful section with articles on things like PMTCT, preventing mother to child transmission: why the recommendations on a local level won’t work. The final section of the book is on critiques of global health policy. Anthropology brings the critical ethnographic lens, which is really important. I think anthropology has a role to play in all four of these domains, and different people will take on different roles.           I myself never do interventions, but I always produce policy recommendations. On topics like: Why don’t we promote family fostering as a solution to childlessness in Egyptian families? Shouldn’t we be focusing on reproductive tract infection as the leading cause of preventable infertility in women? I also try to publish, from time to time, in places where people in the medical world will read my work. They’re not going to read my ethnographies, but if I publish in public health journals, and in Fertility and Sterility—the leading journal in the area I work in—doctors do read my work and they write to me. So that’s the way I see this intersection, it’s very powerful I think. ER: Could you say a little bit about being a US scholar working on the Middle East at this critical time when issues surrounding this part of the world are so contentious—and particularly about the role that anthropology has to play here? MI: I have ended up, again not exactly by plan, devoting the last decade of my career to developing contemporary Middle East Studies at two major US universities, the University of Michigan and Yale, where we have national resource centers, supported by the US Department of Education Title VI program. It’s interesting because when they get to be senior, many anthropologists end up running these Title VI programs, on South Asia, Southeast Asia, China, and Eastern Europe. I end up thinking that the anthropological intervention could really help in terms of providing the kinds of courses that students really need in such a fraught world. We can really teach some local cultural sensitivity, that is different from political science and religious studies discourses. Also, I was convinced that we anthropologists have a very important role to play in helping to educate the next generation of Americans—who are going to come out with more understanding than the last generation. So I have ended up teaching these foundation courses called “Culture and Politics in the Middle East”, where graduate students read ethnographies of the region of the world that I work in. I love these courses. I have taught them in almost every university I have been in, to undergrads and graduate students. So in some ways I have become more of an advocate of the importance of area studies in our world today, than I ever imagined I would be. Nonetheless there are ways to critique area studies. Unfortunately a lot of the area studies programs got their footing during the Cold War, and the impetus really was to understand particular parts of the world in that geopolitical context. And now, similarly, they have been throwing money into area studies for what are, in some senses, the wrong reasons: you need to know about the terrorist threat. This is depressing to me as well. I just came from the Middle East Studies Association where there were very few anthropologists because that meeting always overlaps very closely with our AAA meeting. So a lot of anthropologists don’t show up at our area studies meeting, and the few of us in anthropology were talking about the depressing lack of good ethnography in the book exhibits. The books were all about Al-Qaeda, Hizbollah, Hamas, Islamism, and terrorism. Every other book seems to be on those subjects, often written by people who aren’t specialists on the region--pundits. Middle East Studies has the potential to be taken over by pundits, and that’s dangerous. So that’s why I do feel a certain responsibility to training young anthropologists to be really embedded in languages and places, so that they can reject some of this. ER: It seems that there is sometimes a tension between the kind of close study of regional dynamics and local milieu fostered by area studies and an emphasis on globalization--or at least the somewhat superficial way of conceptualizing globalization that is prevalent in popular discussion. MI: And that is the danger, especially the rhetoric that everything is global. If there is one thing the early anthropologists of globalization emphasized, it was that globalization does not homogenize the world, globalization ends up with a diverse set of responses on the local level. Someone still needs to be committed to the local, and I think that’s really the contribution of anthropology – the wonderful nuanced understandings we bring to local places. So that should be our role, in the midst of all this meta-discourse about globalization and terrorism and all of these issues. ER: I wanted to shift gears a bit and just talk to you a little bit about the recent SMA conference, and medical anthropology generally. The conference seems to have been a great success. What are your general thoughts? MI: Thank you. I have spent several weeks just floating on a cloud, because it had been such a long planning process. The discussion started probably in 2005, and had gone through several SMA boards: a long process. Moving to Yale was extremely fortuitous because as part of moving there, I said we really want to do this SMA Conference and we need resources. And Yale was in a position at the time to say, ‘This is great, and how can we help?’ And also they encouraged me to look for grant money, so I went to the NSF which came through with a big grant, then Yale was able to back that up. The funny thing about it was that at the first SMA Board meeting where we discussed the meeting, we had talked about how many medical anthropologists would show up to a conference. And the guesses ranged from 200 to a maximum of 500. We had done a survey and it seemed there was a lot of interest. And then lo and behold, the day before the abstracts were due, on April 15, about 150 people had registered, and we thought, maybe it’ll be 300. And then on April 15, the morning they were due, abstracts started flooding in, and we were up to 1000 when Yale Conference services said, ‘You have got to shut it down, we can’t accommodate, we’ve got one room on campus that accommodates more than 1000 people’. Had we been able to keep it open, another thousand might have come. So I felt sad for those who couldn’t come, but so happy to know we have this huge global discipline, and that half the people who did register were from outside North America. The European medical anthropologists: whole departments of medical anthropologists came over from Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Norway. People came from Europe and Latin America, and some from Asia.           It was interesting because you could see all the patterns of research. I think having the interdisciplinary thematics really helped because people got kind of inspired to show off their interdisciplinary work that they were doing. We had about 20 panels that had something to do with global health, numerous on genomics, STS panels on all those areas of intersection. Occupational science: every afternoon they had a whole session devoted to that. There are areas that are really coming up in medical anthropology that came up in the conference. I felt like it was this youth, energy, international colleagues brought together, that we should really try to do it again. And I actually think it should probably be held outside of North America if it is done again. And we’re going to publish the plenary papers in an edited volume that will hopefully be out in 2011. ER: Several years ago as part of your presidential address to the SMA, you gave a survey of medical anthropology that looked at intersections with various disciplines. That clearly formed the basis of the organization for the 2009 conference, but I’m curious about what you saw in terms of the papers actually presented: do you see any new emerging areas among younger scholars, or areas that are particularly strong? MI: I do. It was very interesting to me, the whole area of what used to be called psychiatric anthropology, mental health, ethnopsychiatry. That’s not my area so I hadn’t been following it. But we had Arthur Kleinman do the plenary and there were at least 20 sessions on some aspect of neuro-, psychological, psychiatric, including this entry into neuroscience, addiction – there were several panels on addiction. That shows us that the area is heading in new directions.           Something I think is definitely new is the anthropology of war, trauma, humanitarianism. I had given my presidential address a few years ago on medical anthropology against war, arguing that there had been little anthropology on the wars in the Middle East. That was two years ago, and now I can tell you all the work that is going into Iraqi refugees, trauma after the Lebanese war. All of a sudden there seems to be group of people working on refugees, forced migration, sexual violence, and I think this is in part because of Didier Fassin’s work. I think this is an area new to the last two to five years that you could see at the conference. I think that was really great.            The work on genetics and genomics is really going to boom as an STS topic I think – we’ve had some really great work which now I think is really coming into its own. Also the areas of disability and occupational science, able-bodiedness. That was interesting, focusing on disability rights in unlikely places.          Also medical anthropology and environmental issues, we don’t really have it yet, but I think that is going to be really important. We have a bit, Petryna’s work on Chernobyl, that seminal work on a major environmental disaster. You don’t yet really have that work, but I think it’s going to happen.           And the anthropology of reproductive health and women’s health is strong. There was a panel on men’s health and men’s lives. So I think there are some really interesting areas that have emerged. And STS is important. We had two plenary addresses, one on STS, and one on feminist technoscience. Because that, along with global health, is another very important intersection, researchers looking at high tech science, around the world.

….In the fall of 2007, the executive board of the American Anthropological Association issued an unusually strongly worded statement condemning the Human Terrain project: “The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association concludes (i) that the [Human Terrain System] program creates conditions which are likely to place anthropologists in positions in which their work will be in violation of the [the association's] Code of Ethics and (ii) that its use of anthropologists poses a danger to both other anthropologists and persons other anthropologists study. Thus the Executive Board expresses its disapproval of the HTS program [italics in original].” The executive board also appointed a special commission to investigate the project. The 10-member commission, which included two military anthropologists and another who works for Sandia National Laboratories, unanimously concluded in December 2009 that the Human Terrain project was inconsistent with anthropologists’ code of ethics and couldn’t “be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology.”

Since then a group called the Network of Concerned Anthropologists has launched a signature campaign petitioning Congress to pull the plug on this rogue exercise in anthropology. (Full disclosure: I am on the network’s steering committee.) So far 720 anthropologists have signed on to this word-of-mouth campaign. They include 6 former presidents of the American Anthropological Association, 37 distinguished professors, 40 department chairs, and 10 journal editors. The signatures, which fill up 20 densely packed pages, are, for this anthropologist, a wonder to behold. One finds there the signatures of crusty emeritus professors, mid-career academics, and job-hungry graduate students. The big names of anthropology at leading Ivy League departments lie side by side with those toiling away in community colleges. The signatures represent an extraordinary outpouring of opinion from anthropologists of all ages, from untenured beginners to the securely tenured alike, that the Human Terrain project is fundamentally incompatible with the professional ethics by which we anthropologists live.

Anthropologists condemn the Human Terrain project because it’s widely perceived as violating our ethics code in three regards. The first concern is that it contravenes what we might think of as the prime directive of anthropological ethics, an analogue to medicine’s Hippocratic Oath, stipulating that anthropologists shouldn’t do harm to those people and communities they study. Asking an anthropologist to gather intelligence that may lead to someone’s death or imprisonment, even if it’s supposedly to save the lives of others, is like asking an army doctor to kill a wounded insurgent, a therapist to turn over an addicted client to the police, or a priest to violate the sanctity of the confessional. Just as doctors are supposed to care for the wounded without asking which side they’re on, so too, anthropologists have a professional obligation toward those they study.

The anthropologists’ second concern, grounded in the Nuremberg Code’s insistence that all research be based upon free and informed consent, is that when Iraqis and Afghans are asked by men with guns if they would like to chat with an anthropologist, they’re not really free to say no.

The third concern is that anthropologists have an obligation not to do research that might endanger other anthropologists. Many anthropologists are concerned that if their discipline becomes perceived as the human relations branch of military occupation, the lives of genuinely civilian anthropologists working as academics or for development projects elsewhere in the Middle East will be endangered.

U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), the branch of the U.S. Army in charge of the Human Terrain project, is well aware of the anthropological community’s objections. It would be nice to report that faced with such protests military leaders had found other methods to achieve their goals. But, TRADOC hasn’t engaged the American Anthropological Association about its ethical objections. Instead it has intensified its attempts to recruit anthropologists, using contractors to approach individuals with job offers and is seeking expanded funding for the program and a permanent line for it in the defense budget. When Montgomery McFate, one of the architects of the project, spoke at George Mason University, where I teach, my department chair pointed out to her that the project risked undermining the efficacy and integrity of the entire field of anthropology. Her reply: “Do you think the interest of anthropologists doing research trumps national security?”

Construing the choice as one between anthropology and national security is wrong-headed, since there’s now plenty of evidence that the Human Terrain project isn’t only unethical, but also ineffective. Leaks from within the program suggest that on some teams relations between civilian anthropologists and soldiers are toxic; that the failure to recruit many anthropologists who are trained in Middle Eastern cultures is crippling; that the expensive information technology promised for the project hasn’t materialized, so that information gathered by some teams is inaccessible to others; and that embedded anthropologists are hampered from doing serious work by their own lack of language skills and suggestions that they talk to subjects for no longer than seven minutes to avoid getting shot by snipers. (I recommend this eye-opening account of the training of Human Terrain anthropologists from the point of view of a recruit who eventually resigned on principle.) It’s not just academics that find fault with the program: One civilian advisor to the British military recently told me that although a U.S. Human Terrain team had been offered to them they see the teams as more trouble than they’re worth and are trying to find a polite way to decline.

Some in the military also criticize the program. In an article in Military Review, U.S. Marine Maj. Ben Connable argues that the military would do better relying on the cultural knowledge of their own junior officers than on civilian anthropologists, who usually know more about academic theory than about the reality inside Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s also clear that the Human Terrain project has inflicted a kind of collateral damage on anthropology’s relationship with the military, making it harder for the military to enlist anthropologists for other less controversial work.

U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan will tell you they’re fighting for freedom and democracy. Yet just as we can fight terrorists without waterboarding and without downgrading our standards for fair trials (a case that has been made courageously by military interrogators and military lawyers who have refused to compromise their professional codes of honor), so we can press Al Qaeda and the Taliban without forcing anthropologists to eviscerate the ethics code they have built over more than a century. We don’t have to ask anthropologists to choose between their code of conduct and national security. This is like saying, “we had to destroy the village in order to save the village.” We can do better.

Read the complete article here.

Filed under: COLONIALISM/IMPERIALISM Tagged: ethics, HTS, Hugh Gusterson, Human Terrain System

Max Liboiron, PhD Candidate Department of Media, Culture and Communication New York University max.liboiron@nyu.edu www.maxliboiron.com

We are facing a garbage crisis. From nuclear waste with a ten-thousand year half-life, to the persistent organic pollutants found in the breast milk of women living in the Arctic, to the billions upon billions of tiny plastic bits in the Pacific gyre, “garbage”—the unwanted detritus of industrial production and consumption— has taken on an unwieldy form.

Yet we have been here before. At least two other moments in the past two centuries in the United States have faced a similar “crisis of containment,” where garbage not only seemed unimaginably foreign and dangerous to everyday sensibilities, but communicating these hazards and eliciting organized participation to prevent their spread also appeared impracticable. The first was in the late nineteenth century during the sanitation reform movement, and the other launched the popular environmental movement in the 1960s. In each case, the meanings and understandings (ontologies) of garbage were revolutionized, leading to practices and knowledge (epistemologies) unimaginable a decade earlier.

New York City street before and after George Waring, Commissioner for Street Cleaning (1895), revolutionized sanitation practices and accomplished what was thought to be an impossible task.

I argue that whatever instigates such transformations leaves its trace on subsequent reasoning concerning what “garbage” is, how it affects people and the environment, and what can and should be done about it. The historical meanings of “garbage” constrain, compel, and otherwise influence trash activism today. The first section of my dissertation will construct a Foucaultian “history of the present” to examine how a concrete object called “garbage” has congealed in particular ways at particular times. While some scholarship describes how certain objects have moved into or out of the category of trash, such as recyclables or antiques, and others have researched the municipal sanitation reform movement, I argue that the category of trash itself has not been stable or continuous over time, and that changes in the category of garbage result in profound changes in trash activism.

The first chapter of my dissertation looks at American eastern coastal cities between 1840 and 1880, from the publication of the first health survey in New York to the beginning of the sanitation reform movement. I hypothesize that the health surveys of the 1840s and 60s that located, mapped, and defined garbage and its effects, as well as other “accounting” measures developed in the period, allowed garbage to cohere into an entity that was functionally homogenous despite its acknowledged varied material make up. This allowed it to be identified and productively controlled–that is, contained— for the first time in history. While there were kitchen scraps and ashes, old shoes and horse manure littering the streets before this time, these objects all had different values, levels of “nuisance,” and destinations. I hypothesize that the health surveys and their classification methods organized the ontology of garbage into something that could be readily identified by the public, feared, and rhetorically evoked to rally public action, resulting in new epistemologies and regimes of management and control. In effect, I hypothesize that garbage as we know it today was “invented” in this period.

Title page for second sanitation/health survey of New York City, 1866.

My second chapter will investigate the “paradigm of pollution” that developed during the 1950s and 60s. In this case, a distrust of Big Industry and Big Science, the rhetoric of the Cold War, including nuclear weapon and waste protests, the publication of Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring, and a permanent, visible plethora of non-biodegradable “disposables” radically challenged what garbage was, how it polluted, and what could and ought to be done about it compared to how it was conceived of at the turn of the century. This was the second trash crisis of containment.

A crisis of containment is the result of garbage systematically exceeding, breaking down, or permeating not only material boundaries, but more importantly, social limits and control. The breech of social norms is what creates the impetus for change, even though the crisis focuses on material objects. In the nineteenth century, garbage newly signified both the threat of cholera and immigrant rebellion during a period of mass urbanization and immigration. In the 1950s and 60s, chemical modes of pollution and contamination were “discovered” as the globalization of industrial capitalism began to threaten ecosystems on unprecedented scales. Thus, by studying the time just before successful national trash activism, I am studying the conditions of possibility that allowed garbage to be diagnosed, located, categorized, and managed during previous crises of containment. My subject is the social stakes, communication strategies and cultural interpretations that launched these successful social movements.

Unquestionably, I am framing these garbage crises as social crises and not merely crises caused by an abundance of a certain type of material (garbage) and its attendant technical problems (how to get rid of it). During a crisis of containment, the management, dangers, and very character of everyday garbage are defamiliarized as threat, transformed into something new, and then naturalized as part of that crisis’ strategies and solution. I have chosen the sanitation reform movement and the birth of the popular environmental movement rather than, for example, the New York City garbage strike in 1917 or the national landfill crisis during the 1980s, because the latter were crises of accumulation and intensification; garbage itself was not ontologically or epistemologically challenged during these times, and as such were not crises of containment as I am using the term.

A crisis of containment is failing to take place today; the material transgressions of garbage are not matched by transgressions of social norms or limits. My dissertation is a historical genealogy that will investigate the conditions that redefined “garbage” during these two previous moments of revolutionary trash activism, and compare them to the problems faced and tactics used by trash activists in the twenty-first century.

What are the social, cultural, and material conditions that allow garbage to cohere into one type of object and threat during a particular moment in time? In other words, why are certain types of garbage and trash activism legible and possible at a given moment, and others not? Secondly, how does "the historical awareness of our present circumstance" affect what and how we know about garbage and how we deal with it today? How can we “update” ideas about garbage to create new forms and paradigms of trash activism?

** via medianthro list **

The next EASA Media Anthropology Network e-seminar will run from 20 April to 4 May 2010 on the Network’s mailing list.

Sun Sun Lim and Minu Thomas (National University of Singapore, NUS) will be presenting a working paper entitled “Migrant workers’ use of ICTs for interpersonal communication – The experience of female domestic workers in Singapore”. These seminars are free and open to anyone with a genuine interest in the anthropology of media. To participate please drop me a line explaining briefly your interest in this field.

Abstract

This paper explores ICT use by Indian and Filipino female migrant workers who are employed as live-in maids in Singapore through ethnographic interviews with twenty women. Their particular employment circumstances translate into a circumscribed and isolated living and working experience which makes their access and use of ICTs even more significant. Our findings show that these women employ a variety of technologies for everyday communication, including letters, the mobile phone and the Internet, with the mobile phone being the most crucial communication device for most of them. Mobile communications enable them to foster emotional links with their friends and family, grow their social networks and afford them greater autonomy in seeking better job opportunities and the management of their personal matters. The paper concludes by making three policy recommendations aimed at improving ICT access for migrant workers. First, upon arrival in their host countries, all migrant workers should be educated about the access, use and cost of different communication devices and services available to them. Second, contracts between employers and migrant workers should have clear provisions for the employees’ rights to communication and specifically, mobile communications. Third, governments, non-governmental organisations and the private sector should actively seek to narrow the technological divide between migrant workers’ home and host countries so that these workers’ communications with individuals and organisations in their home countries are not impeded.

The latest issue of Science as Culture focuses on a topic which has long been central to cultural anthropology, but remains relatively novel in science and technology studies (STS): first-person narrative and the relationship between scholars and their objects of study. As Benjamin R. Cohen and Wyatt Galusky, the guest editors of the special issue, write in their introduction:

"The purpose of this special issue is to explore how STS scholars embody their scholarship, with regard to living through the ideas, concepts, and complexities of STS knowledge within the world of lived experience. We capture this by threading together notions of theory and experience through the accounts of individuals who generate knowledge, but who also possess that knowledge and attempt to apply it in the world for their own lives. In keeping with the goals of a turn to participation, the voice of the essays is not one that tells others how to live but one that encounters and reveals the difficulties of living. The point pervading this set of essays is that the authors come to recognize the value of experience and deliberation within existing technoscientific systems. They find that constructing and seeking to then overcome a binary—between complicity and undermining, or acceptance and rejection, or empowerment and disempowerment—is not the ultimate point of their work. Just as STS scholars have undermined binary constructions of 'science' and 'society' in decades of empirical work, so too, we suggest, have these authors undermined strict binaries between living within and living without. Key to this conclusion is that in the space and demands for process and deliberation it provided, the essays' reflective forum made it possible for authors to acknowledge complicity as another variable individuals must confront in work that strives for positive change," (Cohen and Galusky 2010).

Here are the titles and abstracts of the articles: Wyatt Galusky, Playing Chicken: Technologies of Food, Domestication and Self

To engage the mediating and enabling aspects of food technology, I reflect in this essay on my (rueful) attempts at raising chickens. As an incompetent chicken-raising hobbyist and an STS-trained scholar, I came to view my chickens as technologies themselves—results of human interactions with nature, through the overarching frame of domestication. Viewing the chicken-human relationship as a technological one has allowed me to foreground several elements at once. First, the chicken and the systems that sustain it put in stark relief the process of defining nature very specifically. Certain aspects are coveted and augmented while others are disregarded or overcome. Thus, technology does not strictly demarcate artificial from natural, but rather restricts or accommodates fuller forms of nature. Second, these definitions of nature (the chicken in this case) stabilize and enable other technological forms that take the initial stability for granted (e.g. human social and geographic organizations premised on industrialized agriculture). Third, these systems of stabilities, premised on necessarily partial versions of nature, complicate normative decisions on proper human-chicken relationships. In creating a uniform animal, and a relatively cheap and stable source of protein, we have empowered identities that can think about food less as necessity, and more as choice. As a result, we as consumers become increasingly dependent on the systems of domesticated nature that make such choice possible. And when the chicken itself becomes a product of that lifestyle choice (expressed as an element of consumer behavior), its very skeletal structure becomes optional. 

Chikako Takeshita, The IUD in Me: On Embodying Feminist Technoscience Studies

This article traces my personal and academic journey through two 'IUDs in Me' interlacing personal encounters with the IUD with formal research findings from academic work. I demonstrate that reflecting on my own embodiment of the IUD while conducting academic research on the same technology helped me understand how social and historical conditions constructed my reproductive choice as an American consumer of the device and how such 'choice' is constrained by the scientific community's willingness to develop birth control methods, medical practices, and corporate profitability. Personally enjoying the IUD and benefiting from studying it academically, I was faced with a moral dilemma between my own empowerment and the disempowerment that many other women experienced in relationship to this technology. As a way to hold my personal body politics accountable towards feminist struggles for reproductive freedom, this essay scrutinizes my bodily experiences by reading them critically against socio-historical and political contexts. I contend that such reflexive embodied scholarship helped illuminate how 'differences' among women were implicitly calculated and actively configured by IUD developers, who constantly revamped the research and discourse around the device over the last several decades in response to changes in social interests, political stakes, and scientific findings. I argue that my reflexive and embodied feminist technoscience studies led to a fruitful theoretical investigation into how the creation of various 'ideal' users mirrors the transnational political economy of women's bodies. 

Saul Halfon, Encountering Birth: Negotiating Expertise, Networks, and My STS Self

The births of my two children—one in the hospital, one at home—provide a context for thinking about being an STS scholar and practitioner in our technological world. Birth has long served as a site for critical encounters with expertise, medical systems, and technology, and has inspired a great deal of the scholarship and activism that characterizes the women's health movement. Although well versed in that literature, I was unprepared, emotionally, socially, and technically, for birth in the clinic. This is a story, therefore, about learning what I already knew: that expertise is situational and social and cannot be wielded alone; that socio-technical networks are durable and powerful, requiring well-articulated material resources to challenge; that language is slippery, situational and historical and cannot be reliably carried from one point in time to another; that encounters with technology reach to our core emotions of love, fear, hope, and disappointment; and that our technological desires are culturally situated. Being an effective STS practitioner and scholar requires a daily engagement with the technoscientific networks that surround us through personal reflection. This paper thus explores personal narrative as a mode of analysis that recognizes that all theory is ultimately situational and begins with our own experiences of the world. It simultaneously theorizes the quandaries of being an STS scholar, giving birth in the twenty-first century, and theorizing from narrative.

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Martha McCaughey, Got Milk?: Breastfeeding as an ‘Incurably Informed’ Feminist STS Scholar

'Got Milk?' considers the author's own commitment to and experience of breastfeeding as a mother/intellectual, examining ways of theorizing embodiment and complex bio-social practices while also showing just how complicated living/embodying feminist STS theory can be. Many breastfeeding advocates are naive about nature, technology, and gender issues, and many feminist STS scholars focus on the pregnant body, rather than the lactating body, to discuss gender, technology, and embodiment. Pro-breastfeeding materials often represent breastfeeding as an organic practice free from the intervention of medical experts and technologies. The author's experiences of the physical difficulties of breastfeeding, the management of breastfeeding by medical experts, the lack of social support for the practice, and the lack of a non-essentialist feminist discourse about the importance of breastfeeding left her wondering on what grounds she could and should justify her commitment to breastfeed her children. Ultimately, recognizing that breastfeeding is an embodied practice that is not free from technological intervention or other social and political contexts can counteract the romanticized, essentialized representations of breastfeeding for a stronger, if more contingent, 'cyborg' breastfeeding advocacy.

Jody A. Roberts, Reflections of an Unrepentant Plastiphobe: Plasticity and the STS Life

My adventures with plastic have provided a personalized tour of many of the tools and concepts that STS scholars use to unpack the lives of others. This essay explores my efforts to figure out how to use those tools and concepts on my own life. Examining those efforts has required me to assess the tension between my academic investigations into the toxicity of the plastic materials of everyday life and the ways my own life's possibilities—and in particular the life of my daughter—are inextricably linked to those materials. Drawing on recent work in STS, particularly that of Donna Haraway, I suggest that these experiences are a form of 'becoming with' the world. In a larger sense, I argue that they offer an opportunity for a more politically engaged scholarship and hope in knowing that STS interventions can matter. This essay situates my work within current STS scholarship that examines concepts of risk, facts, and uncertainty. Ultimately, it aims to use the plasticity of my STS life as a way to demonstrate how our scholarly focus on the politics of risk might be incorporated into advocacy for a politics of concern.

By Jenny Heil, Brendan Durr, Jon Lopez, Mac Kenzie Nunez, Mark Flanagan

It’s 3:00 AM and you finally decide that it is safe to venture out to the 24-hour Wal-mart. Not totally safe, mind you, but at least almost no one will be there—less potential threats to worry about…

You get home, and sleep in your chair. Sleeping in the bed is too vulnerable…

You wake up, and hear a loud bang. Automatically, you know it’s a bomb, and grab the enemy by the throat…

Veterans may leave the war zone, but they can never escape the war. For those who return from war with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), they constantly live as though their minds and bodies are still at war.

Fear of crowds and intense anxiousness around others. An inability to feel safe while sleeping. Flashbacks and nightmares, often triggered by sudden or loud noises. Always feeling like even the people closest to you are the enemy, poised for attack.

Veterans are living in this reality. As many as one in four veterans will experience PTSD, according to Dr. Michael Sheehan, a psychologist specializing in PTSD. PTSD is a disorder that can happen as a result of many kinds of trauma, and is especially prevalent in veterans of war.

People with PTSD may constantly relive the trauma of war (through flashbacks and nightmares), may try to avoid places and events that would cause memories, and may be easily startled and constantly feel on edge.

While PTSD is often not recognized as the same as other battle wounds, the experience of veterans verifies that PTSD is real. We hope that the information that we provide here will help you understand the experience of PTSD.

If you recognize the symptoms of PTSD as ones you experience yourself, please consider seeking help by joining a support group for veterans or talking to a psychologist or physician.

Our Research

We are a group of five Notre Dame undergraduate students who, over the course of a semester, have interacted with a group of veterans with PTSD in an attempt to better understand the experience of PTSD.

Our research is based in anthropology, and because of that, we focused on people’s experiences and perceptions as our central data. The veterans that we worked with allowed us to attend their weekly support meetings, and graciously allowed us to interview them in group and one-on-one settings. Like previous student research on PTSD, the vets’ lived experiences form the basis for our information.

The interviews that we conducted showed us the reality of PTSD. After analyzing the data, four themes which are important to understanding PTSD emerged: getting help early, finding ways to escape the pain, the importance of friends and family, and the importance of feeling welcomed home.

1. Getting Help Early

“Heal it while fresh, like a cut” one veteran said. All the veterans we spoke to stressed the importance of new veterans seeking help for their PTSD as soon as possible when returning from war. Some veterans explained that when PTSD is diagnosed early, it is like healing a cut before it has scarred or become infected.

After returning from the war, “I just never felt normal,” another veteran told us. His mother told him that he was like another man in her son’s body; he felt like he was different but he did not know why. He, like other veterans, felt relief when he was diagnosed with PTSD. With the diagnosis of PTSD he was finally able to put a name to what he was feeling and realize that he was not alone in his experience.

Research and veterans agree: PTSD that is treated earlier has better outcomes. In addition, since PTSD tends to lead afflicted individuals into self-destructive behaviors such as alcoholism , drug abuse , and violent behavior that can lead to jail time, early detection of the disorder and learning how to cope with it can possibly prevent the occurrences of these destructive behaviors. “If I would have gotten help right away, I never would have gone to prison or ended up a drunk,” one veteran told us.

2. Escaping the pain

Dealing with PTSD can be a constant burden, from flashbacks to nightmares to constant anxiety. For this reason many veterans, especially those who don’t get help early, try to find means of escape.

“Alcohol allows me to go into a different world.” Vets may use a variety of ways to try to escape PTSD: alcoholism, seclusion, and suicide, to name three. Alcoholism is one way for veterans to temporarily escape symptoms of PTSD, including the haunting memories of war.

“I told her, ‘I don’t need you.’ I couldn’t have my wife stay. There was no way to make sure I didn’t hurt her,” said one veteran, Peter (a pseudonym). Veterans may hide their emotions and push their loved ones away from themselves, as a way to protect their loved ones and make their PTSD more manageable. For Peter and other vets, seclusion is one way to escape PTSD. Peter called his wife insulting names, forcing her from his life as a way to protect her.

“The most peaceful I ever felt was when I was drowning.” For some veterans, death is the only way that they can escape their PTSD. “The most peaceful I ever felt was when I was laying down in the back seat of my car, with the garage door down and the engine running.” PTSD is haunting and overwhelming. Veterans sometimes see suicide as the only way to end the nightmare. Many veterans revealed that just the idea of suicide brought a sense of peace. For them, suicide is a way to finally end their battle with PTSD when alcohol and seclusion are not enough.

3. Access to friends and family

We all know the feeling of being lonely or isolated but veterans with PTSD experience this feeling intensely. They have gone through a traumatic, life-changing event and struggle to find a way to deal with their resulting feelings.

Joel, a Vietnam veteran, told us, “You’re closest to your family, and you should have a sense of comfort when you spend time with them. If the families of the veterans are well-informed enough about PTSD to encourage them to seek treatment, they will help them to adjust back to civilian life and learn to live with their PTSD.”

Joel agrees with the many other veterans who admit that they first sought help for their PTSD because they were encouraged to do so by someone important in their lives, often a parent, spouse, or friend. Dr. Sheehan says that veterans with PTSD are able to cope better when they have supportive people in their lives willing to help them avoid triggers and understand their condition.

Veterans describe the experience of talking to a group of other veterans as “empowering” and “the first time they have felt understood” since the war. Sometimes, people in veteran’s lives want them to move on, adjust back or just stop talking about the war. Even when family and friends want to be fully supportive, it is hard for them to even imagine what the experience of the war was like. That is why veteran’s groups are such an important form of social support. Seeking help in a one-on-one setting with a setting with a psychologist can also help veterans understand their symptoms and learn how to cope.

4. Being welcomed home

“I just stood there and looked at freedom. Then I knelt and kissed the ground.” One Vietnam veteran George remembered that he was happy to be home at first. He got in a cab to go home, and, because he had a tan, the taxi driver asked him where he had been.

When he said that he had been in Vietnam, the whole attitude of the taxi driver changed. He pulled the car to the side of the road, and said, “Get out. I don’t want no baby killer in my cab.”

“I expected to be welcomed back and I wasn’t,” George recalls. While he was away at war, the entire attitude of the country had changed. His church, a place that he had always felt was important to him, did not welcome him back either, against his expectations.

The environment that the veterans return to makes an important difference on their mental health. It is important for them to know that their sacrifices and trauma are not ignored by the country.

Take Action

Understanding PTSD is the first step towards helping our veterans, but it must be followed by action. Veterans need to feel welcomed home, supported and encouraged to seek help as soon as possible.

If you know a veteran:

-Learn about PTSD. Educate yourself so you can educate the veteran that you know. (For starters, click here and here to learn more about the relationship between Traumatic Brain Injury and PTSD, or here to see more research on stories of veterans with PTSD).

-Be supportive. Provide a safe environment, like our veterans told us was so critical.

-Encourage the veteran to seek help. PTSD does not have to control the lives of our veterans.

-Provide a welcome home.

Even if you don’t know a veteran, there are still many things that you can do:

-Find out when soldiers are returning home and greet them at the airport.

-Send letters and cards to soldiers in war, to show your support.

-Spread the word about PTSD. Talk to your friends and family. Together, we can create a more supportive country.

We must continue to support our brave men and women in the armed forces because they deserve much more and certainly no less.

EASA2010: Crisis and imagination (24/08/2010 – 27/08/2010)

Media Anthropology Network workshop: The Rewards of Media

Paper Title: Mobile rewards: a critical review of the Mobiles for Development (M4D) literature

Francisco Osorio and John Postill Sheffield Hallam University

Abstract:

The extraordinary rate of diffusion and adoption of mobile phones across the global South over the past decade has given rise to a new interdisciplinary field known as Mobiles for Development (M4D). The key debate in the field is whether mobile phones are having any significant impact on the economic livelihoods of marginalised people living in regions such as Africa, Asia and Latin America. Positions range from those who argue that mobiles are finally enabling poor people to overcome the digital divide to those who suggest that mobiles are in fact exacerbating old inequalities, through a number of in-between positions, including that of scholars who argue that only some low-income people (e.g. micro-entrepreneurs) are reaping the economic rewards of mobile phones. This paper is a critical review of the multilingual, peer-reviewed M4D literature on this unresolved debate from 2001 to 2010. Drawing from the theory of practice, we search for novel ways of mapping the shifting rewards of mobile practices under conditions of rapid change. The two main working assumptions are that mobile phones have blurred the lines between lives and livelihoods (Donner 2009) and that the rewards of mobile practices in the global South are of many different kinds (financial, social, expressive, sensual, etc., Warde 2005) and not solely ‘for development’.

See full list of proposals here

In part 5 of the fieldwork 2010 series, Laura van Deventer post an update on her research in Moscow.

A few weeks ago I told you about my arrival, getting settled and first contacts with the ‘N’. Some of you have inquired about this mysterious group – who are they, what am I doing here? Although I can answer the second  question, and will try to do so in this post, I will not disclose what group it is I am doing research among. This is for security reasons. The ‘N’ have received some harsh treatment in the past and me mixing with them and gathering data about that, well, I’m just not quite sure if the authorities applaud that. Once I’m back in April, I’ll make it public, promised!

So I’ve been hanging out with some N – visiting in their homes, sometimes going out on the street, sharing stories, eating and drinking (I may have gained a pound or two… keeps me warmer ; ). I’m basically trying to find out what it is like for N to live here, for individuals, but also as a group. What problems they may encounter, and what ‘being N’ and ‘home’ means to them.

That life in Moscow can be dangerous is illustrated by what happened to a young, nice lady I’ll call Maria. In 2003, she was on an excursion in the city with her class. A skinhead spotted her, grabbed a bottle and tried to smash her face with it. She was able to protect it by holding her hands before it – leaving her hands wounded from the glass. As her clothes were stained from blood, not to mention the shock this assault must have caused, she went home. When her older brother heard what had happened, he went out to find the skinhead. He didn’t succeed, but he did spot a cute looking lady at the bus stop. Hearing that she spoke the N language, he made a move… They dated for a year and are now married!

Now is that what you call a bloody romance?

Maria suggested to her brother that he should thank the skinhead – but I don’t think he ever did…

Negative behaviour against N is not just something of the past. A few days ago, my N friend Sven and I went out on a mission to find the office of the embassy for N people in Moscow. As the address I had was not entirely clear, we asked some people for help. One security man pointed us to a building further up the street: ‘There are lots of N.’ Inside the place (probably a hotel), Sven asked the security guys if they could tell us where the office was. The moment he mentioned ‘N’… we were kicked out of the building! Not friendly asked to leave, simply kicked out. Thank you. [We never found the office – ended up at the Omnipresent Mc Donald’s instead.]

As a good anthropologist, I try to honour and respect the traditions of the people I’m staying with. When I visited a new family about two weeks ago, I figured I’d do as nearly all of their ladies do – wear a skirt (yes, with my snowboots). About 5 minutes after I arrived, the mother of the family inquired if I don’t own any jeans. It’s cold outside! Before leaving at the end of the evening, she again restated her concern: ‘Laura, you are our guest. Please, wear jeans next time!’ Well yes, I just thought… nevermind.

Now this ‘respecting their culture’ thing took a bit of a different turn in my conversation with Sven. He suggested ‘do your scarf like this. Over your hair. Yes, like that. That’s how our ladies wear it. It looks good…. Do you do lines on your eyes?’ Me: ‘You mean make up? Yes.’ He: ‘It would be better if you wouldn’t.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because then people look at you.’

So the next time I visited his family, I put on some extra eye-liner. Not only are there limits to adjusting to your research population, there is also a thing called the rebellious female anthropologist.

These stories give you some insight into my life as researcher. For those of you wondering – yes, there are also Miserable Moments in Moscow. Moments where I am fed up with the ‘here now – gone 5 seconds later’ internet connection in my room. Moments where I miss my friends and family; where I really really don’t want to spend many hours typing out conversations and observations; moments where I genuinely feel like Moscow is a boring city. I am still the only person that sings in the metro.

If more people would do that, this would be a better place.

• Religion and relief aid in Haiti BBC carried an article pointing to the low profile of voodoo in the aftermath of the earthquake. Some observers think that Christian organizations are dominating the scene and even denying benefits to Haitians who demonstrate adherence to voodoo (a blend of Christian and African beliefs and rituals) by wearing peasant clothing or a voodoo handkerchief. Although voodoo practitioners were included in the three days of prayer in February, voodoo leaders themselves have kept a low profile. Gerald Murray, professor of anthropology at the University of Florida, comments: “For a religion that’s supposedly the national religion of the Haitian people, it’s amazingly absent in the earthquake phenomena.” He points the role of theology. In the voodoo belief system, natural disasters are caused by bondye, a distant supreme being that cannot be influenced by humans. Humans can propitiate only loa, beings in charge of more everyday matters such as illness. Because the earthquake was not caused by loa, voodoo leaders are theologically framed out of the larger picture. They are, however, likely to be playing a major, if quiet, role helping people deal with the effects of the earthquake on their health and welfare.

•For her own good… In Cameroon, and perhaps elsewhere in West and Central Africa, many mothers “iron” the emerging breasts of their young daughters in order to protect them from male sexual interests and possible pregnancy. The process varies but seems typically to involve pressing a hot stone or piece of wood onto a girl’s breasts. An article in the Washington Post quotes Flavien Ndonko, an anthropologist with the German Agency for Technical Cooperation: “It’s body mutilation and against women’s rights.” He noted that some of the consequences are abscesses, infection, deformation, lactation problems, cysts, possible links to breast cancer, and emotional stress. A survey he helped to conduct revealed that one-fourth of girls had experienced breast ironing.

• Freakanomics beware: here comes anthropology! Robin Dunbar’s new book, How Many Friends Does One Person Need?, is reviewed in the Scotsman. Dunbar is a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Oxford University who thinks widely, poses big questions, and brings science to them. In this book he addresses such issues as how the symmetry in Barack Obama’s face helped him win the election, why women gossip and men brag, why laughter is good for you, why morning sickness is good for babies, and the social consequences of the unbalanced sex ratio in China.

• The lost have been found, again According to oral traditions of the Lemba tribe of Zimbabwe and South Africa, their ancestors were Jews who fled the Holy Land 2,500 years ago. Many of the customs of this population of around 80,000, are exact parallels with Jewish tradition. British researchers have now established a genetic link to a common ancestor who lived about 3,000 years ago in north Arabia. This discovery confirms a longstanding argument about such a link by Tudor Parfitt, a professor in the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Parfitt has been studying the Lembas’ cultural practices and language for over a decade.

• The unregistered millions The births of more than 45 million children worldwide are unregistered. Most of these are in South Asia and Africa. Many countries have not explained why it is important to have a birth certificate. Cultural and logistical constraints are also at play, as explained by Olungah Owuor, lecturer in anthropology at the University of Nairobi: “Birth certificates are a foreign concept to Africa, where celebrations and rituals were normally what would mark the birth of a child…The public must first be socialised to understand the importance of having the document before the Government issues ultimatums that would force people to get the certificate just for the sake of it.”

• She cooks for him Harvard University’s Richard Wrangham, professor of human evolutionary biology, published the popular book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, last year. It is the subject of a new documentary from BBC Horizons. In the Sun Herald, Simon Webster quotes Wrangham’s understanding of the links among cooking, gender roles, and marriage: Marriage is a “protection racket in which a woman is required to feed a man because of the threat of having her food taken by other men.” This blogger hasn’t seen the documentary and wonders if Wrangham actually says that…if so, it raises basic questions about science and whereof one can and cannot speak.

• Read my eggshell Lines etched into 60,000 year-old ostrich eggshells found in South Africa have the archaeologists debating whether they are evidence of the earliest art or the earliest written “language.” Excavations by archaeologist Pierre-Jean Texier of the University of Bordeaux and his colleagues have unearthed more than 270 fragments. The fragments span a period of over 5,000 years but show consistently similar designs. Long-term repetition is a hallmark of symbolic communication and modern human thinking. The eggshells were likely used as containers, and markings may have indicated the contents or the owner. Until recently, Texier says, Bushmen in the region carved geometric motifs on ostrich eggshells as a mark of ownership. Findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

• The flushing gene Around half of all people of Asian descent have a genetic trait that causes the face to redden when a person drinks alcoholic beverages. New research suggests that the genetic mutation for alcohol-induced facial flushing emerged 10,000 years ago in southern China. As quoted in Time.com, Bing Su, one of the researchers involved in the study from the China Academy of Sciences, says: “This is one of the few cases reported demonstrating the genetic adaptation of human populations to the dramatic changes in agriculture and diet in Neolithic times.” The argument is that the red-face gene evolved as an alarm system warning the person to drink less. Findings will be published in BMC Evolutionary Biology.

• More on culture shaping genes Related to the previous discussion of the flushing gene is Nicholas Wade’s article in the New York Times on lactose tolerance as the major example of cultural change affecting genetic change. The argument that culture and genes can co-evolve has been slow to catch on in mainstream science. According to Mark Stoneking, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, the selective pressure of culture is relatively recent, probably dating to 10,000-20,000 years ago.

This week, I was happy to find blogs that I hadn’t seen in the past (and no, I’m talking about the Economist online).  If I’m missing a blog (like your blog), email me, and I can include them in future weeks and put them on our blogroll.

So Over It: The Philosophers’ Magazine interviewed Alan Sokal, the physicist most remembered for publishing a fake deconstructionist article in Social Text and then announcing that it was a hoax.  In addition to lamenting that he will, in all likelihood, only be remembered for that incident, Sokal lamented the anti-philosophical ethos of the  younger generation of physicists.  Where could they have gotten that from?

If there’s an idea floating in different corners of the blogosphere, count on Daniel Lende at neuroanthopology to put it all together.  That’s just what he did for this post on 5 rules for anthropologists to reach broader audiences.

The Economist has a short piece on gendercide- the systematic abortion or infanticide of female children.  Almost more troubling that some areas of the world have a 120:100 male to female birthrate is the fact that neither poverty, education, rural/urban locality, or national policy alone can account for the rise of such cases.

Disciplined Struggle: Ryan Anderson of ethnografix posted on anthropology vs. economics–that intellectual cage match within the human sciences to explain social behavior.  Economics get more recognition, Anderson reasons, because its basic premises lends itself to models that are easy to pick up and apply to any number of situations.  But anthropologists’ attention ethnographic detail shouldn’t be a reason to fold our arms and say the world doesn’t understand us.  But, Anderson argues, anthropologists have arguments in their toolbox that can scale up too.

HTS To Go: Maximillian Forte at Zero Anthropology posted on the latest development in the anthropomilitary strategy–the continuation of Human Terrain principles in Afghanistan without Human Terrain Teams.  Forte shows that more and more of this knowledge production will be shifted to actual soldiers or military contractors.

A Nice Piece of History: Ethnocuba has a great piece about Edward Tylor’s little-known excursion to Cuba before he went to Mexico and collected information for his first book, Anahuac.

Biologists Get All Biosocial: Has the world turned right side up?  Nicolas Wade at the New York Times reports on new research that is getting biologists to recognize the role culture has played in recent human evolution.