Author: dlende

The Problem of Post-Conventional Outlaws



By Peter Ninneman, Andy Scott, Amanda Clark, and Paul Roman

What do Ken Kesey, an icon in the 1960s American acid scene, and Richard Nixon, who declared the first War on Drugs, have in common? These two cultural figures show us that the real problem with government attempts to control drugs is our culture’s problem with self-control. Our culture appears to increasingly value making up one’s own mind, making punitive measures more and more ineffective.

Temptation and the Need for Legislation

In his article “Dependence and Society”, Robin Room suggests the subjective experience of loss of self control is a cultural phenomenon. In traditional Navajo populations, for instance, drinking problems are seen at face value. There is no conception of lost self control; the explanation lies in simply drinking too much. In other words, “habitual drunkenness does not become alcoholism without a specific pattern of general cultural beliefs and norms.”

Room goes on to argue that 19th century middle-class Americans were having trouble controlling their own desires in the face of increasing temptations. For example, because of economic factors at the time, America became flooded with coffee that was sold at cheaper and cheaper prices. Living in a free society that valued individualism also meant that responsibility had to be put on people to take care of themselves at an individual level.

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David Brooks, Part Two: Demography Is King

In his editorial Demography Is King, Brooks describes how in recent decades in the US, “some social divides, mostly involving ethnicity, have narrowed. But others, mostly involving education, have widened. Today there is a mass educated class. The college educated and non-college educated are likely to live in different towns. They have radically different divorce rates and starkly different ways of raising their children. The non-college educated not only earn less, they smoke more, grow more obese and die sooner.”

He relates how Barack Obama has won “densely populated, well-educated areas” while Hillary Clinton has carried “less-populated, less-educated areas.” “For example, Obama has won roughly 70 percent of the most-educated counties in the primary states. Clinton has won 90 percent of the least-educated counties… This social divide has overshadowed regional differences. Sixty-year-old, working-class Catholics vote the same, whether they live in Fresno, Scranton, Nashua or Orlando.”

His argument? “In this election, persuasion isn’t important. Social identity is everything. Demography is king.”

What makes the editorial interesting is how he bucks the trend of buying into popular explanations about social identity. “Over the years, different theories have emerged to describe the educated/less-educated divide. Conservatives have gravitated toward the culture war narrative, dividing the country between the wholesome masses and the decadent cultural elites. Some liberals believe income inequality drives everything. They wait for an uprising of economic populism. Other liberals divide the country morally, between the enlightened urbanites and the racist rednecks who will never vote for a black man.”

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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.”

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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!