Month: May 2008

David Brooks, Part One: The Cognitive Age

For those of you who believe the mind the center of all things, David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, has two editorials this week that point to wider transformations that are shaping the world in which we live. And thus our very minds.

In this post I’ll cover yesterday’s editorial The Cognitive Age, which starts with taking the over-hyping of globalization to task. “Globalization is real and important. It’s just not the central force driving economic change.” After all, globalization is an old process, kicked into high gear by the European nations in the 1500s, as Eric Wolf and Sidney Mintz have convincingly shown with their books, Europe and the People Without History and Sweetness and Power.

Brooks wants to make a different point about today’s global economy: “Global competition has accounted for a small share of job creation and destruction over the past few decades. Capital does indeed flow around the world. But as Pankaj Ghemawat of the Harvard Business School has observed, 90 percent of fixed investment around the world is domestic. Companies open plants overseas, but that’s mainly so their production facilities can be close to local markets.”

In other words, Brooks wants to side-step the pro vs. con debate about globalization and free markets, with Thomas Friedman and his The World Is Flat on the more-or-less optimist side and Joseph Stiglitz and his Globalizations and Its Discontents on the more-or-less pessimist side. (And for a critical take on all the pundits, see the collection edited by Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson, Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back.)

Brooks points to local change as a critical feature in our changing world, something that anthropologists have often discussed but in a much different fashion. For example, Carla Freeman in High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy: Women, Work and Pink-Collar Identities in the Caribbean shows how the arrival of global jobs in Barbados, in this case high-tech informatics jobs, reworked local gender relations and feminine identities. In a more drastic sense, Beatriz Manz shows with her book Paradise in Ashes how global politics and local elites mixed in terrible fashion to drive the harrowing destruction of the highland Maya in Guatemala. Global processes always work through local structures, whether we’re taking about globalization or about the brain.

Brooks’ piece comes down to two forces, technological change and skills, with an obvious auxiliary: the need for education. “The chief force reshaping manufacturing is technological change (hastened by competition with other companies in Canada, Germany or down the street). Thanks to innovation, manufacturing productivity has doubled over two decades. Employers now require fewer but more highly skilled workers. Technological change affects China just as it does the America… The central process driving this is not globalization. It’s the skills revolution.”

Continue reading “David Brooks, Part One: The Cognitive Age”

Anthropology.Net: Go for a Visit!

Anthropology.Net is one of the old, big anthro blogs, with archives going back to September 2005 and visits rapidly closing in on 500,000. They cover a wide range of materials, a lot of it related to biological anthropology, human evolution, and archaeology, but with cultural and linguistic anthropology thrown in at times.

Recently they posted two things which might prove quite useful to readers and researchers everywhere. First, they give a detailed account of “Applying Google Earth in paleontological and archaeological research.” While seemingly specific, the guidelines they develop are useful to any research involving a geographic component. They also outline the pros and cons of Google Earth. (For another review article on Google Earth, see this one from the Associated Press.)

Second, Anthropology.Net covers the World Atlas of Language Structures, which looks to be a new and terrific online resource for linguists and linguistic anthropologists everywhere. As they write, “It is an awesome resource, executed really well, and under a creative commons license.” (If you are interested in ethnographic data, you can also check out the Human Relations Area Files. These are comprehensive data bases on ethnographic descriptions of different anthropological groups dating back many decades now. However, HRAF requires a membership license, though the website does say you can get a 30-day trial shot.)

Finally, for general interest, Anthropology.Net has a recent piece on pragmatic language use by autistic individuals, news that Paranthropus boisei, hominids with super-teeth, were not necessarily the nut and fibrous plant eaters we long suspected, and some bipedal considerations about our cousins the Flores hobbits.

Stress and Addiction: The Vicious Cycle

By Jessica Peyton, Jen Hames, Rebecca Llontop, and Mike Many

Meeting deadlines. A family crisis. Juggling social obligations. We all have responsibilities that demand effort. Given all this, who isn’t stressed?

While most people are aware that stress can be a factor in how much and how often you choose to drink, the term “stress related drinking” remains ambiguous. Here we use it to discuss the consumption of alcohol or drugs in response to environmental stressors. For example, a college student is overwhelmed with needing to finish two papers by the end of the week, upcoming exams, and a fight she had with her roommate. Then her mother calls to let her know that her grandfather is sick. This student, extra anxious come Friday, might agree to go out with her friends to forget about her problems for a while. Once out, the alcohol flows – a temporary release from what feels like continual stress.

But what happens when someone habitually uses alcohol or drugs as a means of coping with stressful situations? Studies show that the substance abuse itself becomes a stressor, triggering a cycle of use that can ultimately result in the development of an addiction. As Enoch Gordis, M.S. states in his commentary Drinking and Stress, “Why people should engage in an activity that produces effects similar to those that they are trying to relieve is a paradox we do not yet understand.”

Today, new research offers some insights regarding the cyclical nature of stress and addiction. Returning to the example of a college student, stress related drinking is primarily social in origin. According to Wesley H. Perkins (1999) students are constantly bombarded by academic, social, and family stressors. Particularly at the nation’s top institutions, the student body is characterized by perfectionist personalities, people who are acutely aware of the expectations for them to be straight-A scholars, winning athletes, and socially popular. Substance use, particularly alcohol, is one potent option to relieve anxieties and forget disappointments. Moreover, you are also being social by getting out and commiserating with people experiencing the same stressors.

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Student Posts Coming

Starting tomorrow I will put up the posts that my students have been working on all semester for my class Alcohol and Drugs: The Anthropology of Substance Use and Abuse. They started with a group presentation to the class, then worked through several drafts as I gave them feedback. Now each group gets their chance to share something with the world, rather than simply turn in a final paper (but they get to do that too–I’ve got my bases covered).

The topics include stress, brain imaging, and denial, among others, and I will post one a day over the coming days (I’ll probably skip Sunday, though). While I do not necessarily agree with everything that they say, these are the arguments that they developed–their takes on the material. And they’ve got some good takes.

So look for their posts over the coming days!

Blaine breaks world record for breath-holding

Graphic by Viktor KoenI’ve been waiting to hear how David Blaine went in his attempt to break the world record. John Tierney reports in David Blaine Sets Breath-Holding Record on The New York Times website that, in fact, Blaine was successful. On Oprah Winfrey’s show, he held his breath for 17 minutes 4 seconds, a world record for the activity with the use of pure oxygen before making an attempt.

As Tierney reports, Blaine was successful in spite of the fact that he couldn’t control his heart beat like he had on previous breath holding:

After he filled his lungs with pure oxygen, his heart rate remained at 130 during the second minute of the breath-hold and then stayed above 100 for much of the time. It was 124 in the 15th minute. The higher the heart rate, the more quickly oxygen is consumed, and the more painful the carbon dioxide buildup. But apparently his CO2 tolerance training (repeated breath holds every morning) was just enough to compensate. In the last minute his heart rate became erratic and he got concerned enough to start rising from the bottom of the water-filled sphere, but he kept his head underwater more than a half minute longer than the old record of 16:32.

Tierney reports that during training, Blaine was able to keep his heart rate down into the range of 40 to 60 beats-per-minute, but being on television apparently made it difficult to keep his pulse down.

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Charlie Parker’s Anthropology

I went to see a student sing with Notre Dame’s jazz band on Tuesday. She did a great job! I was also reminded of this great tune by Charlie Parker, the jazz saxophonist and composer: “Anthropology.” I found this good clip by Czech saxophonist František Kop. Of course the anthropologist has to have Anthropology in a globalized setting… in this case, the jazz club U malého Glena (Little Glen) in Prague.

You can hear Parker himself on this online recording available at Imeem.

Charlie Parker would be a great person to dwell on for some neuroanthropology. Just not today. But Robert Philen, an anthropologist at West Florida, has a good riff on Parker and how biography informs our appreciation of artistry. And for a long bio, see Parker on Wikipedia. Cultural icon, brilliant musician, heroin addict, the Bird knew how to play.