• Survey: Favorite #Anthropology Blogs announces a top dozen /KF
• For Pinker, the two world wars are “horrifically unlucky samples from a statistical distribution” /KF
• In Memoriam of #AAA President Elizabeth Brumfiel /KF
• C of William and Mary had slaves. They harvested crops to raise scholarship money, among other things. //MT
• Wikileaks revealed US espionage of Indigenous People in US, Canada, Peru & elsewhere. /KF
• Andaman Islands tribe threatened by lure of mass tourism—brace yourself before you read. /KF
• Police Demographics Unit Casts Shadows From Past /KF
• Wallerstein: “2011 was a good year for the world left” //MT
• American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year award goes to (drum roll) “Occupy” //MT
• Color photographs from the Great Depression. From rural America to industrial landscapes. //MT
• Paul Stoller: “One way to confront the spread of corporate culture on our campuses is to organize” /KF
• Orin Starn describes use of online message boards in ethnographic methodology for new book on race and sports. //MT
• American Behavioral Scientist Special Issue on the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. /RM
• Interview with anthropologist Catherine Lutz on the costs of war. /KF
• Does the AAA Support or Oppose the Res Works Act? /KF
• New Pew research: “Mormons in America”. //MT
• On Mitt Romney’s Mexican heritage: one Chicano author wrestles with definitions of identity. //MT
• The long, slow sexual revolution (part 1)— in which @GregDowney1 takes on Evolutionary Psych /KF
• MotherJones: Roundup of our favorite “Shit [insert race, gender, sexual orientation] Say” videos /KF
• Johannes Fabian—Cultural Anthropology and the Question of Knowledge, 2011 Huxley Memorial Lecture (audio) /KF
• Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” removed from classrooms under AZ ethnic-studies ban. /KF
• Academic publishers have become the enemies of science /KF
• Specimens from Darwin’s voyage on the HMS Beagle rediscovered. //MT
• Sydel Silverman and Her Quest to Preserve Anthropological Records – The Atlantic /KF
• Susan Blum on China’s (postponed) plans to educate Tibetans in Mandarin instead of Tibetan /KF
• Harry Walker on anarchist anthropology in the latest Anthropology Of This Century is worth a read. /RM
• All statistical biases are pretty much irrelevant. They are all dwarfed by publication bias. /KF
• Massive student loan debt is like taxing people for not living up to their potential. //MT
• New UC tuition idea: 5% tax on your income for 20 years. //MT
• The Australian, non-suck solution to student loan debt /RM
• Society for Cultural Anthropology officially opposes the Research Works Act! Huzzah! /RM
• Ancient Popcorn Found—Made 2,000 Years Earlier Than Thought in Peru /KF
• No, @cshirky, @zephoria is not the first ‘native anthropologist’. Otherwise a nice enough @nytimes piece. /KF
• The obscene profits of commercial scholarly publishers /KF
• OUP treats authors as “work for hire” whereby copyright is theirs from the start!? /KF
• In the context of SOPA/ PIPA: it almost came to be that taping TV with a VCR was copyright infringement. //MT
• Language Log tackles the venerable history of “just sayin”. //MT
• On the high fertility of Republican Presidential candidates. //MT
• Anthroworks likes to read dissertation abstracts. Here’s 40 that caught their eye in 2011. //MT
• On the popularity of American Indian stereotypes and playing Indian in South Korea. //MT
• “I have tried to mix and match ethnic and cultural traits in creating my imaginary fantasy peoples”—George RR Martin /KF
• On seeing a book on your dissertation topic . . . by someone else. /KF
• The Exploiting Africa Academy Award nominations /KF
• Sacheen Littlefeather representing Marlon Brando when he won (and rejected) the Oscar for The Godfather /KF
• Citizen philosophers: a 2008 law mandates philosophy courses for high school students. //MT
• Let’s make teaching skeletal anatomy to elementary schoolers fun! //MT
• Gillian Tett “Anthropology is like salt with food… it is a powerful dynamic to bring to the table.” /KF
• Zotero 3.0 is here! Now runs outside of Firefox and integrates with Chrome and Safari. /KF
• Say hello to ZotPad, the first iPad client for Zotero. /KF
• Time to dust off the #aaafail hashtag: @AmericanAnthro opposes federal open access in public comment to White House /RA
• Superman’s underwear advertized as cure for impotence, STD’s in Malaysia. //MT
• American Anthropological Association Takes Public Stand against Open Access #aaafail /KF
• The Digital Return: Digital Repatriation & Indigenous Knowledge /KF

I tend to be very skeptical of such efforts, but I think anyone who sees the film will understand how important the library is to the community – and we wanted to have some kind of mechanism in place so that when the film cames out people could support the library. But we’ve also learned that it is important not to go too fast or try to do too much. For this reason, I really liked Timothy Burke’s piece on the 3 Cups scandal:

If I gave you an unlimited line of credit and carte blanche to run everything your way, do you think you could make a single secondary school work? I mean, really work so it was beyond reproach, was by almost any measure superior in outcomes and character and ethos to any alternative? Now what if I took away from you the choice of where your school was located and restricted you to pupils who lived within 30 miles of your school? Now what if I required you to obey all relevant national and local laws addressing education? Still confident? Now what if I made you operate within a budgetary limit that was generous by local and national standards but not unlimited? Getting harder yet? Now what if I put your school in a location with very little infrastructure and serious structural poverty?

The point here is that when one crucial task like that is hard enough, we should be deliriously happy to see a person dedicate their life and money and effort to make that task work. One. When we keep our checkbooks closed and our frowny-faces on because that’s not enough, not nearly enough, we create a situation where development messianism is inevitable. We invite not mission creep but mission gallop: make a hundred schools! change gender ideology! eliminate poverty! Under the circumstances, looking back, you have to ask how that was ever creditable, why anyone cheered and hoped and wrote checks.

But enough about saving the world. You’ve all waited patiently for some juicy postcolonial critique and I don’t intend to disappoint you. The best place to start is Aaron Bady’s excellent round up of online commentary on the subject.

One of the pieces listed there is Nosheen Ali’s article [PDF] (originally linked to by Carole McGranahan on Twitter) published in Third World Quarterly before the recent scandal broke. The article challenges the narrative of fear and danger which pervades the book:

The most troubling irony is that the focal region of Mortenson’s work—the Shia region of Baltistan with its Tibetan-Buddhist heritage—has nothing to do with the war on terror, yet is primarily viewed through this lens in TCT. While it has madrassas affiliated with different interpretations of Islam, the Northern Areas more generally is not a terrain teeming with fundamentalist madrassas and Taliban on the loose—the definitive image of the region in TCT, especially on its back cover, in its introduction and in its general publicity. Hence, despite the now characteristic token statements like ‘not every madrassa was a hotbed of extremism’, the subtext of TCT remains rooted in a narrative of fear and danger.

She also challenges the “taken-for-granted assumption that an American individual can casually talk about ‘changing the culture’ in places where culture and life itself has already been radically transformed through US support of the military and the militant.” Both important points to make.

A more subtle argument was also made by Manan Ahmed about the role of “expertise” in pursuing the War on Terror—an issue which touches on some of the debates we’ve had here about HTS:

In July 2010, The New York Times reported on the popularity of Greg Mortenson’s 2006 memoir Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace … One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations … One School at a Time among the US Military high-command. The report described General McChrystal and Admiral McMullen using the text as a guide to their civilian strategy in Pakistan. Mortenson’s book quickly became required reading in military academies (the report hinted at the role played by the wives of senior military brass in promoting the title) and Mortenson has since spoken to the US Congress and testified in front of committees. Mortenson himself, though a selfless worker for the most disenfranchised of Pakistan’s northwestern citizens, possesses no deep knowledge of the region’s past or present and is avowedly “non-political” in his local role. Still, his personal story, his experiences and the work of his charity are now widely considered to be a blueprint for US strategy in the Af-Pak region.

Both Stewart and Mortenson illustrate one particular configuration of the relationship between knowledge and the American empire – the “non-expert” insider who can traverse that unknown terrain and, hence, become an “expert”.

The HTS argument would be that what we need is simply better experts, ones who actually know something about the local culture (although from what I’ve read about HTS it seems that this is not always the case). Ahmed challenges the Niall Fergusonesque notion that we simply need to learn better ways of managing empire:

There is no better way to do empire. The condition of asserting political and military will over a distant population is one that cannot sustain itself in any modern, liberal society. The efforts to understand, will inevitably lead to the understanding that the people of Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq desire the power to make their own decisions – without the imposition of governments or militaries sanctioned and placed from afar.

I started by discussing how I liked the development model used by Room To Read. It involves treating local organizations as full partners in the development process. Just as thinking through power relationships is an essential part of effective anthropological collaboration, I think it is an equally essential part of development work. The problem with the approach taken by the US military and 3 Cups is that it wants us to think about culture without thinking about power, and I don’t think that can ever work.

General-ly speaking: This fall I’m teaching General Anthropology for the first time in like five years, so I’m on the lookout for new ideas to spice up a course that, in all likelihood, is the only exposure most undergraduates will have to the discipline. Interesting assignments like this project in web design about students’ international travel experiences could be one antidote to the standard issue essay assignment. In my intro classes I always forward a strong argument against race thinking, but I’m a little apprehensive about using Neanderthal genomics to debunk the idea of race. It sounds like an interesting idea but I’m a little unsure about it. Maybe someone in the comments section can speak to this? In place of race thinking, anthro textbooks trot out a short list of go-to examples of human variation as rooted in evolutionary adaption to environment. One of these classic examples is how populations that live in high altitudes are barrel chested and can make better use of the thin air. Anthropology.net pointed me to a May 13, 2010, publication in the journal Science that backs up these claims with genetic studies of Tibetans. Last but not least, the highs and lows of the new “nature” documentary Babies: The Film are well covered by Teaching Anthropology. The video preview reminded me somewhat of the beautiful Material World and Hungry Planet books (the latter I’ve used in my Food and Culture class) which also have their limitations but are still very thoughtful conversation starters.

There’s no accounting for Tastebook: Facebookers will remember that not long ago one could “become a fan” of this and that (I became a fan of Duke losing), but recently that has been replaced by the same “like” button used to comment on friend’s updates and photos. The International Culture and Cognition blog asks an interesting question, why make our preferences public? One answer, the blogger suggests, is that the user builds cultural capital by associating themselves with certain products or celebrities, but I’m not buying it. I’m going to pick Freud over Bourdieu in this instance and claim that clicking the “like” button is about the pleasure principle. People enjoy hitting “like” and that’s what motivates them to participate in its narrow evaluation of everything. But the bigger question may be: can social theory explain why there is no “dislike” button? (Or is it simply that that would make Facebook too much like Digg?)

Damn dams: Terry Turner reports, via the blog Anthropologyworks, that the Brazilian government has renewed efforts to dam major tributaries of the Amazon in the Xingu Valley. The article offers compelling reasons against progressing with the dam project in terms of the loss of indigenous land reserves and biodiversity, but its the local and national social movements that have coalesced around opposition to the dam that is really fascinating to the anthropological observer. This feature length story is briskly written. A good read.

Late(r) capitalism: Around the time of the Enron collapse questioning the ideology of free market capitalism gained some legitimacy outside of the anti-globalization social movements and academic left. Then in subsequent years that furor died down somewhat, Sarbanes-Oxely didn’t seem to have any teeth, and it was business as usual. Now the Great Recession, the Greek debt crisis, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill have brought some of those questions back to the popular imagination. Three links on this subject were forwarded to me all last week: an exerpt from the book Ill Fares the Land , a David Harvey for laypeople type essay in Salon , and a provocative graph showing increasing disparities in wealth distribution between Whites and Blacks. The theme here is that “the people” are sick of the Wall Street fatcats and want a return to American industrial prowess. You can color me skeptical. The recent victory of Rand Paul in the Republican primary for Senate in KY shows that free market fundamentalism is alive and well. This current crisis is a blip, its going to take more, much more, to force ideological change in the US.

Baseball Fandom: Baseball is one of those things I just don’t get. I mean I’ve been to a few minor league games – the Durham Bulls, back when I was at Chapel Hill – and its fun to drink beer in the sun with your friends, but I certainly don’t see the appeal of watching the sport on television. Regardless I enjoyed this insightful reflection on being a NY Mets fan. Why do people root for a team that consistantly dissappoints? Why do fans chose to identify with a team that keeps getting beat?

Maps of the Middle Ages: Here is a cool article in the Washington Post about a conference sponsored by the Library of Congress on portolan maps of the sixteenth century. What beautiful objects!

This week in the future: Anthropology. Science Fiction. Two great tastes that go great together? I give you African Cyberpunk. If you can’t make it to class, send your Anybot to deliver the lecture, but don’t blame me if your students send Anybots to take notes. Paging Lawnmower Man, we’re getting closer to immersive virtual reality (I hope the cognitive anthroblogs pick this up). Oh, and artificial life is now a possibility too. “Naturally I would use artificial life to clean up environmental pollution and cure diseases, but of course my first order of business would be creating a woman that looks like Kelly Le Brock in Weird Science.” Just be sure to watch out for those six-legged timber cutters, though I’ve heard they’re perfectly safe. At least until Skynet is up. Yep, the future’s going to be a pretty strange place. And its where we’ll be spending the rest of our lives.

Not Taking this Lying Down: Check out this collection of photo images of discarded mattresses. Hey! I’ve got some of those from my fieldwork too! Great minds think alike, eh?

Ahh… good times, good times.

Seen something around the web that you would like to share with the Savage Minds community? Email me at matthew.thompson {at} cnu(.)edu

At root, L:QftS is a Noah Wyle vehicle designed to help the cute-as-the-dickens actor keep from getting labeled a one-hit wonder for his role in ER. In practice, the made for TV movie is a sort of comedic hommage to Indiana Jones which is unapologetic about packing every cliché and gag into one package. On the face of it, the cast is incredible. In addition to Wyle and Sonya Walger (who is apparently famous for being in Lost?) it also feature Bob Newhart, Kyle MacLachlan, and Jane Curtin (Kelly Hu and Olympia Dukakis also have small roles). That’s right: Jane Curtin and Kyle MacLachlan.

The plot of the movie is pretty straightforward: perpetually-ABD archaeologist Wyle stumbles on to a job working at a library that houses All Magic Artifacts (think Night At The Museum crossed with the warehouse where they file away the ark at the end of Raiders) presided over by Curtin and Newhart. Something is stolen and sensitive-scholar Wyle and tough-chick bodyguard Walger head to Tibet, the Amazon, etc. in search of it and eventually defeat MacLachlan. At the end there is a catfight between Hu and Walger over who gets to keep Wyle.

The movie is worth watching — despite how much it made me groan I never turned it off. It might even be teachable as an example of things that drive anthropologists crazy. In the end it ends up in a strange double-bind: it clearly aspires to be a cheesily comedic Raiders remake. At the same time, Wyle doesn’t really seem to have too much in the way of comic chops and, let’s face it, its not that funny. As a result the film both succeeds in being a bad remake while also being a genuinely bad remake.

Apparently Quest For The Spear is only the start — they’ve made two more The Librarian:$VERB $CONJUNCTION $MACGUFFIN films that I haven’t seen (they’re in the queue tho). I’d recommend them if you are looking for an excuse to eat popcorn, become mildly outraged at the presentation of your discipline, and enjoy some mind candy at the same time.

China is on the lookout for protesters seeking to disrupt the Beijing Olympics in the name of Tibet, press freedom, or religious rights.

Now anthropologists and ethnologists, academics who study human development, appear to have been added to the list.

Without giving a specific explanation, Chinese organizers have pulled the plug on July’s world congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, the latest in a slew of events to be canceled or postponed ahead of the games in August.

“I’m not very happy with it,” Union Secretary-General Peter J.M. Nas said by telephone from his office at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. “And I hope still that they will listen to our arguments.”

Although distant from Beijing, Kunming is home to many minorities and, as the article says: “China is extremely sensitive to critiques of its policies toward minority ethnic groups and their languages, even more so since anti-government protests broke out in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa and spread to other Tibetan areas in March.”

UPDATE: A blog post from the Chronicle:

On Tuesday the association’s Chinese affiliate wrote to the group’s international executive committee, saying that it had “encountered complex difficulties hard to resolve in its preparation work recently, which makes it impossible for us to hold the congress at the time originally planned.”

The executive committee has rejected the idea of a postponement, but it has not yet received a reply from its Chinese colleagues. “We still have no concrete information about the results of our plea not to postpone the congress,” wrote the association’s president, Luis Alberto Vargas, a professor of physical anthropology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in an e-mail message to The Chronicle today.

Mr. Vargas and other members of the executive committee declined to comment further, citing the delicacy of the situation.

UPDATE: From an article in the Chronicle: “Ms. Harrison, who is a member of the association’s international executive board, said that the conference might be postponed for a full year.”

Yesterday, therefore, marked a major departure from this stance, perhaps for the first time ever. On Thursday, March 20, 2008, the PRC government acknowledged that Tibetan protest is widespread. That is, it is not just confined to Lhasa or to monks, but is spread throughout Tibetan areas of China and is being committed by Tibetans from all backgrounds—by monks, laypeople, and students, and by men and women, young and old.

Why does this matter?

As I see it, Chinese acknowledgement that there is widespread Tibetan dissent—or, at a minimum, widespread adherence to the Dalai Lama—signifies a major departure from their longstanding policy of publicly diminishing the importance, depth, and breadth of any anti-Chinese sentiment in Tibet. Knowing about it privately as they have for decades is one thing, but to acknowledge it publicly signals a turning point. However, turning to what I am not certain: to further castigating the Dalai Lama for (supposedly) inciting the protests? To cracking down harder on the protesters? Or perhaps to some sort of more reasoned responsiveness? A resuming of talks with the Dalai Lama? An independent or U.N. inquiry into the situation? I simply don’t know.

Let me share what I do know with you. My best sources of information have been through other scholars and my Tibetan friends, specifically, through anonymous reports from inside Tibet (that at least one of my colleagues outside Tibet has deemed reliable and circulates among fellow scholars). Who writes these reports, I don’t know. How they get them out, I don’t know. Who they are sent to, and who translates them from Chinese into English, I don’t know. What do the reports say? This:

1. Protests began on March 6 in eastern Tibet, not on March 10, the Tibetan Uprising Day;

2. Protesters have included monks and “ordinary” laypeople from the beginning;

3. Protest cries and signs have included the following:
a. Han Chinese Out of Tibet
b. Tibet Independence
c. Free Tibet
d. Long Life to the Dalai Lama
e. Hold Dialogue with the Dalai Lama
f. Allow Tibet to Enjoy High Degree of Autonomy;

4. Protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful (or at least peaceful until police or army engagement);

5. Protests have taken place in the Tibet Autonomous Region, in Tibetan areas of Gansu, Qinghai, and Sichuan, as well as in the Chinese cities of Beijing, Chengdu, and Lanzhou;

6. Protests have ranged in size from small groups to over 10,000 people;

7. Mass arrests have taken place. Reports suggest in the thousands;

8. Many people have been killed. No tally is given other than “many;”

9. Ganden, Sera, and Drepung Monasteries in the Lhasa area have had water and food cut off to them since March 10-11;

10. In many places, Tibetans have taken down the Chinese state flag and replaced it with the Tibetan flag or a Buddhist flag; and,

11. There has been a massive influx of Chinese military forces into Tibetan areas throughout the country.

If you’ve been following the protests online, the above goes well beyond anything you’ve probably read. Given what I know about Tibet and how information circulates in and out of Tibet under Chinese rule, I have no good reason to question the reports’ veracity. If anything, I fear that what we don’t know is more (and worse) than what we do know.

As for the Dalai Lama, the former head of the Tibetan state and current India-based head of the exile Tibetan community and government, he has lashed out at Chinese suggestions that he is behind the protests and that he is truly seeking independence rather than meaningful autonomy for Tibet. He has also accused China of being guilty of “cultural genocide” in Tibet, and has gone so far as to say that he will resign his exile political post if Tibetans reject his nonviolent struggle in favor of violence.

Lets be clear here: although they are a much romanticized group, Tibetans are not genetically nonviolent. They are a people with a complex, not monolithic society, religion, and history. Like people just about everywhere, Tibetans have long been fluent in both nonviolent and violent practices and philosophies.

Thus, although Tibetans may try to adhere to the Dalai Lama’s Middle-Way Approach, and to practice nonviolence over violence (as the most moral choice), or desire autonomy over independence (as the most practical option), ordinary Tibetans are not the Dalai Lama. They are not trained since a young age in Buddhist philosophy, meditation, and statecraft. They are not reincarnations of Chenrezig, the embodiment of wisdom and compassion. Tibetans are regular people trying to make their way through (this) life.

And right now, today, at this moment, Tibetans inside Tibet are raising their voices, and some their arms, against Chinese rule. They’re angry and sad and frustrated and they’re taking action in ways that we haven’t seen since the 1950s. Death of the resistance?

The resistance is dead! Long live the resistance!

I found a number of great articles she’s written about Tibet, which I’m sure she’d be willing to share with anyone who cannot access them.

On behalf of the elite Euro-American gatekeepers of Anthropology here at Savage Minds, I would like to thank Carole for agreeing to mix it up here on this subject.

We’re not sure what we’re going to call them — One Time Minds? The Mindful? Associate Pansies? Whatever the name the idea is pretty straightforward: to get smart, relevant posts from smart, relevant people who want to make an intervention shorter than the traditional ‘guest blog’. We plan to kick off with a piece by Jonathan Marks (Jonathan, consider this your notice that you have been nominated to serve in this regard :) ) and, as Chris says, commentary by people who are working in Tibet.

Soon we’ll be making some changes to our sidebar, and the occasional blogging will begin. Until then, though, any idea what we should call ‘em?

This is another one of those instances where anthropologists should have something informed to say on this. If anyone has pointers to intelligent analysis, meaningful ways to show solidarity or other ideas, please share.

I think this is an extremely interesting and valuable discussion to have and would like to share how I deal, at least partially, with this issue in my intro courses. When I started teaching, I had a hard time getting students to recognise their own ethnocentrism. They understood the concept intellectually, but would usually think that they were immune to it because they had gone to high school in Montreal with people from all over the world, or because they “just aren’t like that”. I felt that I had to find a way to get them to recognise that they were not immune to the effects of enculturation and all the assumptions that come along with growing up in a particular cultural framework.

I therefore developed an exercise in recognizing cultural assumptions in which I try to make students see the difference in their own reactions to things that fall along the spectrum of practices that is mentioned above: from mildly “different” but not morally challenging to highly morally challenging. Basically, I get them to experience ethnocentrism right there in the classroom so that we can work on examining their assumptions. I have a chart that I put on acetate. The first column has a list of three cultural practices or behaviours. I start with a description of the technology of a foraging society such as the Ju/’hoansi, then I discuss the Navajo Nadleeh. Finally, I tell them about Tibetan fraternal polyandry. In each case, I give a bit of background on the people in question, their way of life and so forth and then I describe the practice in question.

The second column has empty space to note their gut reactions. I tell them to be honest in telling me what their reactions are. What do they think of these people? The third column is for recording how they would feel if I transported them over them and left them there so that they had to live there.

Every time, the reactions go from fascination to mild disdain to extreme disgust. With Ju/’hoansi technology, they tend to say that the people in question are either primitive or that they’re very smart for being able to survive in their environment. Most of them would freak out a little bit if they were trapped there but mostly out of boredom (No cell phones?!? No cars?!?) In the case of the Nadleeh, I get some raised eyebrows, mildly homophobic comments (since a Nadleeh might marry someone of the same biological sex) but also some comments such as “well, they’re like us . . .we have transsexuals and stuff.” Reactions to being trapped there range from fascination to the resolve to avoid these particular individuals. Now, fraternal polyandry gets some interesting results. Once in a great while, I’ll have a sexually assertive female student who’ll grin and comment on how cool it would be to have sexual access to several men. But for the most part, both male and female students react with disgust and comments about how this practice is an affront to the value of love and marriage. Many are quite indignant and comment about the violation of human rights, particularly women’s rights and so forth.

When we’re done, we talk about cultural assumptions, where they’re from, how they’re shaped and why their reactions were so different from one case study to the next. This is when I bring up the idea that they are more outraged about things that call into question the moral values with which they’ve grown up. We talk about how many assumptions about what is right, natural and normal such as gender categories or marriage based on love between two people are never questioned unless we are confronted with something that challenges them.

In the end, this all leads to discussing the idea of ethnocentrism with the basis that the exercise has forced them to admit that they, like everyone, are ethnocentric. Having experienced ethnocentrism in a very real way helps them internalise the concept at a deeper level and allows them, in some cases at least, to see the purpose of learning to use cultural relativism in their approach to learning about cultural practices that differ from their own. I think this is very important because if they don’t see the value of learning something, they will either not learn it at all or they will only learn the definition. This, as we know, is not conducive to an adequate understanding of any of the anthropological material they will learn later nor is it conducive to them being able to catch themselves having judgemental attitudes toward people that they encounter in their daily lives or read about in the news. In my case, since I teach general social science students in a Cégep and very few of them will go on to student university-level anthropology, the latter factor is where I put most of my energy. If they graduate from my course being able to recognise how their own ethnocentrism can be a hindrance in their future careers or social lives, I’m happy.

Obviously I have nothing against biology or evolution, and in fact I’ve argued on SM in the past for “the value of a ‘four field’ approach”:http://savageminds.org/2005/05/16/four-sick-fields/. So I am not one of those dreaded ‘cultural studies postmodernists’ boogiemen that people habitually invoke to make humanists look bad. I don’t have an issue with evolutionary biology in principle, but I do have an issue with it when the analytic models it uses to make sense of human behavior are so blunt.

Let’s do a little ‘anthro 101′ on the assumptions about ‘human nature’ in this interview. For instance, when Pagel claims that “we really aren’t very different from other animals” because, like them, we “engage in warfare” and “forage for food.” We are, obviously animals, and I have no idea how one might want to define ‘warfare’ or what counts as ‘warfare’ in other species but it should only take a second to realize that the rest of this post could be about taking that assertion apart into very small pieces. Equally: ‘forage for food’? Has that been how human communities have supplied themselves with food for the past couple thousand years? Foraging happens, of course. But then again so does prancing around in antlers — and while we’re like deer in that respect, I wouldn’t say that this is defining feature of humans.

Ditto with “We choose mates on the basis of characteristics that we think will be related to our success in reproducing”: If by ‘mate’ you mean ‘marriage’ then in fact you might not be the one doing the choosing if your family has anything to say about it (imagine you are a woman in a culture where women lack agency). And of course the range of marriageable people is defined by culturally specific notions which animals really lack (baboons do not have to marry their cross-cousins). If by ‘mate’ you mean ‘sex’ then ‘choice’ implies a little more rationality than goes into the decision sometimes. If by ‘choose mates on the basis of their sucess in reproducing’ you mean ‘get laid’ then yes, you hit on the person who you think will go home with you (unless, of course, you have a biologically innate ‘fear of strangers’). Like I said, I don’t doubt that we’re animals. But the point is this: the more choices about ‘mates’ matter in terms of ‘resources’ (stable social relationships which channel money, power, calories, etc.) the more likely they are to be regulated by the ways of being human that are the least like the behavior of other animals.

I’m not even going to go into the claim that there is ‘more cultural diversity’ in the tropics because there is ‘more biomass’ and hence more ‘resources.’ As someone who studies a country widely touted as being the most culturally diverse place on the planet (Papua New Guinea), I assure you that it’s not the biomass that makes people speak 700 different languages. And for the record, just because there’s a _lot_ of biomass does not mean it’s all edible.

But what I find most annoying about the interview is the implicit model of ‘cultural groups’ or ‘human groups’ that Pagel uses. Here we have the familiar, but mistaken, idea that ‘cultures’ are internally homogenous and brightly bounded. Basically he appears to use the term ‘culture’ as synonymous with ‘nation state.’ Given the way this approach treats ‘cultures’ as discrete objects, it’s no wonder Pagel can imagine that “Human cultural groups have behaved as if they were different species.” And (of _course_) each of these externally bounded internally homogenous groups speaks exactly one language. So you can count up cultural diversity by counting the number of languages, right?

Wrong. Ernest Nagel’s analysis of the logic of structure functionalism (in, iirc, _The Structure of Science_) points out that it is really, _really_ hard to draw clear lines between ‘societies’ and their environment in the same way you can between an organism and its environment. Trying to define the ‘health’ (or ‘goal state’) of a ‘human group’ that it might be trying to improve or at least keep in equilibrium is also difficult. Referring, as Pagel does, to “human groups” such as “Britain, America, and China” is cripplingly problematic. What is ‘China’ again? Does it include Xinjiang? Tibet? People who are ethnically Han? But then what about China’s 56 officially recognized ethnic minorities (‘Han,’ like ‘white’ to most Americans, isn’t a ‘culture’ it’s ‘what normal people are’)? So then is the nation state of China one group or many? If you ‘one’ then you may have a ‘group’ but not a ‘cultural’ one. And at any rate how long has it been since Michael Mann pointed out that “human being are social, not societal”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/052131349X/qid=1117398924/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i2_xgl14/102-6229466-0987309?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 and that while networks of power might be empirically distinguishable, they certainly aren’t coterminous with the borders of a polity. Twenty years? And how long has it been since the Boasians demonstrated that culture traits flow across political, social, and economic boundaries so fluidly that I can read newspapers “printed in characters invented by ancient Semites on material invented in China by a process invented in Germany” and “thank a Hebrew deity in an Indo-European language” that I am “100% American”:http://www3.azwestern.edu/psy/dgershaw/lol/American.html? A century or so?

And speaking of 100% ‘American’, did any of the Canadians who read that last paragraph notice that according to Pagel they’re in the same ‘cultural group’ as citizens of the United States?

I don’t take issue with the project of understanding human evolution as a whole, but I do take issue with attempts to explain human behavior that don’t actually take into account what we know about it. I’m sure that if gave an interview in Discover Magazine about the genetic constitution of plants (one of Pagel’s specialities) based on my impressions of the flora in my fieldsite in Papua New Guinea, Pagel would be horrified at my pretensions to scientific expertise. Well you know what? The feeling is mutual. Interviews like Pagel’s (and I’m not making any claims about his work, because I haven’t read it) run roughshod over decades of research by social science and rely instead on their common-sense notions how humans behave. This is simply not good enough to build a rigorous theory of anything on.

If you’re interested in the relevance of the Boasian theories of cultural boundaries today, I highly reccomend Ira Bashkow’s excellent article “A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries”:http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/aa.2004.106.3.443?prevSearch=allfield%3A%28Bashkow%29 and the other papers in that issue of _American Anthropologist_. If you’d like a global history of human society with a more nuanced, authoritative, and complete account of the growth of human interconnection across the past 40,000 years, I’d suggest “The Human Web”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393925684/qid=1117400274/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-6229466-0987309.

Update: Having browsed quickly through some of Pagel’s work it’s clear to me that his published stuff is much more nuanced than this interview. Nonetheless, I wish he were more lucid when speaking to a popular audience.