Month: May 2008

The Kingdom of Indy, Skullduggery and All

Meditations before May 22nd: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

My wife recently picked up the first three Indiana Jones movies at a garage sale, and my boys have loved watching them, discovering the movies that I remember fondly from my years growing up. Of late, anything—a piece of rope, a broken bead necklace—has become an instant stand-in for Jones’ whip in our house.

In the first movie, I recall so well how Indy fought all the Arabs, punching and whipping his way free as he searched for the kidnapped Marion. Then that deadly swordsman appeared, twirling his blades madly. Oh, the humor and perfection in that moment when Indy pulled out his gun and shot the bad guy. Harrison Ford actually came up with the idea when, bored after too many takes, he did just that. One of those cherished moments from my childhood movie memories.

As a recent NPR piece on Indiana Jones and archaeology put it, Dr. Jones is “handsome, and he can beat up most anybody. He’s definitely a stud — with tenure.” But is he saving history or stealing it?

The Story on Archaeology

Archaeologist Winifred Creamer makes no bones about it: “You could say Indiana Jones is the worst thing to happen to archaeology, because Indiana Jones has no respect for anybody and anything. Indiana Jones walks a fine line between what’s an archaeologist and what’s a professional looter.”

But Creamer also confesses that students love Indiana Jones. As one student puts it, “I thought it was damn cool. I wanted to do that… (Indy) does everything that all archaeologists would like to do. Go on crazy adventures, fight bad people, not steal stuff but save it from being destroyed by the bad guys.”

That becomes a hook for Creamer: “They come in thinking that they are going to talk about pyramids and gold and serious cool stuff. Instead, people want to talk about tree-ring dating and radiocarbon dating and the atmosphere, so some are really turned off by it. Others are intrigued by puzzling out an answer and the problem-solving aspect of it, and some of them stick around.”

Creamer notes that a “true archaeologist is more interested in the context” of the whole tomb, rather than destroying it to get one artifact. The tomb can tell us about life in a past culture—that is our true treasure. And that treasure comes through the gathering of data, not pieces to show off. Rather than tomb raiding, it’s painstaking excavations. This type of good science, coupled with modern-day anthropological comparisons, tells us a lot more than solving the mystery of one covenant on film.

Indy and Science

Love vs. the worst thing, destruction vs. truth—obviously anthropologists are ambivalent about Indiana Jones. The archaeologist Cornelius Holtorf writes in The New Scientist that “Indiana Jones Is No Bad Thing For Science.” This charismatic hero gives the field popularity. What other fields have such a great figure to attract interest? And, besides, just as with sci-fi movies and real space travel, audiences can distinguish between fact and fiction.

But as Holtorf also notes:

What weighs far more seriously is the criticism that elements of the film scripts communicate highly objectionable values. The adventures of Indiana Jones are premised on an imperial world in which western archaeologists routinely travel to the far corners of the globe in order to retrieve precious artefacts and save the world from Evil, giving the impression that the world is dependent on intervention from the west. Moreover, the films draw on a long cinematic tradition of portraying archaeology as the domain of white, heterosexual, able-bodied and comprehensively talented men who live though action-packed adventures in foreign countries.

Continue reading “The Kingdom of Indy, Skullduggery and All”

The Legend of the Crystal Skull

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull comes out later this week; it’s expected to make more than $300 million dollars, or roughly the entire salary of the 6000 or so members of the American Anthropological Association this year. The archaeologists don’t know quite whether to lament or to cheer, for Indiana Jones brings a spotlight to antiquities at the same time Dr. Jones highlights grave robbing and a romanticized view of a very patient science.

Lucky I’m not an archaeologist! So I get to talk about the fun stuff, like the crystal skulls. Hopefully I can get to whips and fedoras later.

Do Those Crystal Skulls Actually Exist?

Yes! The magazine Archaeology gives us the low-down. The crystal skulls first appeared in the 19th century, with claims about their Mesoamerican origins. But as the archaeologist Jane MacLaren Walsh reports, not one skull has come from a documented excavation and their overall style has little to do with traditional meso-American skull motifs (think of the Mexican Day of the Dead, with skulls with a more rectangular style rather than the smooth, fairly accurate style of the crystal skulls).

Jane MacLaren Walsh does a stand-out job taking us through the social history of the crystal skulls, brought to some prominence by the Frenchman Eugene Boban, seller of antiquities first in Mexico, then Paris and finally New York.

But the legend really came to prominence with Mike Mitchell-Hedges, a British adventurer and author of Danger My Ally (that title says it all, doesn’t it?). As one Amazon reviewer puts it, “Take it for what it is—tall tales from an egomaniac.” The other one is more generous, obviously recognizing a kindred spirit: “Since childhood the kid showed signs of detesting the classroom and the office, he was obviously inclined to fulfill his life purpose through exploration of remote primeval places, as far as he could get from his native London, England.” Egomaniac or explorer, Mitchell-Hayes now has quite a fancy website to add to his legend.

The skull that Mitchell-Hedges allegedly found on one of his Central American adventures is one that generally gets people hot and bothered. As the Archaeology story relates, “Known as the Skull of Doom, the Skull of Love, or simply the Mitchell-Hedges Skull, it is said to emit blue lights from its eyes, and has reputedly crashed computer hard drives.”

The Local Connection

Mitchell-Hedges adopted daughter kept the Doom & Love Skull for sixty years, occasionally bringing it out for display. Being in northern Indiana, you don’t expect any tie-in to Indiana Jones and crystal skulls, but Anna, the daughter, passed away last year. Who ended up with the skull? Bill Homann, a man in Chesterton, Indiana, about an hour from where I live.

So, this infamous skull ends up, as the local television reporter puts it, “in Bill Homann’s living room in rural Chesterton.” Turns out, Bill and Anna knew each other: “She was my teacher and my best friend and we always had a great time; and she trusted me because she knows I believe what she believes.”

Homann of course believes the skull is the real deal, created between 17,000 and 50,000 years ago and used by the Mayans in ancient rituals (he might check those dates… not a lot of people in meso-America around that time). Its powers? “The crystal has a vibration and it does something to the human body.”

Are They Real?

Unfortunately for believers local and far away, the crystal skulls are fake. Studies done by Jane MacLaren Walsh, author of the Archaeology story, focused on the lapidary marks left over from skulls’ making. The grooves and perforations on the skull all indicate modern tools, for example, rotary tools to make the indent lines to mark the teeth. Still, I rather like how MacLaren Walsh’s adds some sound cultural reasoning on the topic, the Aztecs “displayed the skulls of sacrificial victims on racks.” It was about quantity, not quality—real victims, not crystal skulls.

World Music

NPR’s The World Cafe gets out “new and significant music and the artists who create it.” You can get livestreams and discover songs, as well as get recent sessions. The most recent is ‘Flowers’ for Kathleen Edwards.

BBC Music/World offers even greater range. DNA with DJ Edu is one of the most popular of all their World Shows.

National Geographic Music is also comprehensive, providing more information and background on particular countries and artists as well as the music. Here’s one from Sidestepper, a Colombian artist, who mixes cumbia, vallenato, and salsa.

Putumayo World Music provides collections of world music, often by themes. (Putumayo is, of course, located in Colombia.) They also have a weekly one-hour radio program.

Nikolas Rose, Neurosociology, and Neurochemical Selves

Nikolas Rose, a well-established sociologist at the London School of Economics, has become increasingly interested in how the brain sciences and sociology can constructively interact. Like many of us, his own intellectual history reflects this; originally trained as a biologist, he then switched to psychology before finally ending up in sociology. His older research centered on “social and political history of the human sciences, on the genealogy of subjectivity, on the history of empirical thought in sociology, and on changing rationalities and techniques of political power.”

Today, Rose has turned to “biological and genetic psychiatry and behavioural neuroscience, and its social, ethical, cultural and legal implications.” He has a recent book, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Here is one review describes it:

From tattoos to organ transplants, cosmetic surgery to circumcision, obsessive dieting to exercise, the practice of manipulating bodies is increasingly widespread. But have we passed into a new phase of manipulation evidenced by the prevalent use of medicine to adjust our moods, enhance sports performance, slow ageing or alter fetuses? Nikolas Rose . . . argues that a threshold has been crossed into a world of ‘biological citizenship’ in which humans view themselves at the molecular level, medicine is based on customization, and biology poses fewer and fewer limits on life.

On his site, Rose has several downloadable papers on topics such as biological citizenship and Foucault. But I’ll focus on one entitled “Becoming Neurochemical Selves.” As he opens the paper, Rose asks, “How did we come to think about our sadness as a condition called ‘depression’ caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain and amenable to treatment by drugs that would ‘rebalance’ these chemicals?” The chapter then presents an historical and sociological treatment of how we have gotten to this point, focused on pharmaceuticals. But as he notes, he could have just as easily started with brain imaging or genomics.

Continue reading “Nikolas Rose, Neurosociology, and Neurochemical Selves”

Fat Cells Die?

Gina Kolata, whose book Rethinking Thin prompted a series of posts on obesity earlier, had a recent article, Study Finds That Fat Cells Die and Are Replaced. Every year ten percent of your fat cells die; every year they are replaced. This research reinforces the emerging conclusion that “losing or gaining weight affects only the amount of fat stored in the cells, not the number of cells.” It also leads to more questions:

“What determines how many fat cells are in a person’s body? When is that number determined? Is there a way to intervene so people end up with fewer fat cells when they reach adulthood? And could obesity be treated by making fat cells die faster than they are born?”

As the lead researcher Kirsty Spalding puts it, “The million-dollar question now is, What regulates this process? And where can we intervene?”

Not all scientists are so sanguine. Lester Salans, an old-timer in this area, answers, “I suspect that the body’s regulation of weight is so complex that if you intervene at this site, something else is going to happen to neutralize this intervention.”

And the real interventions, the ones that happen everyday? High-calorie processed foods; fast food restaurants on street corners; an increasingly sedentary lifestyle? Well, there’s a reason I stuck that image of David up.