Author: dlende

Moerman’s Placebo

I have been wanting to write a post about the placebo effect for some time, after finding a wonderful YouTube video about getting drunk without being drunk. And then today I saw a very different “placebo effect” that also drives home Dan Moerman’s point when he says that the placebo effect is better thought of as “the meaning response.” (Moerman is an anthropologist, of course.)

The video, How to Get Drunk Without Drinking, shows Derren Brown demonstrating “a method I used at university which allows people to recreate any drug state, adrenaline, alcohol, you name it, without actually taking the drug.” (If it doesn’t play, you can go directly to the YouTube version.) What is so striking about the video is Brown’s use of imagination, embodiment, practice, suggestion, and memory to accomplish the effect, and the ability of the brain to then switch between such different states so quickly. It’s also quite funny!

The other piece, The Cure by Sarah Manguso, is adapted from her forthcoming memoir The Two Kinds of Decay. Manguso writes of being twenty-one, her life in danger from an auto-immune disease, and her desire to make love to someone. Her own antibodies were attacking her body, as she wryly notes, “trying to destroy my nervous system — a misperception that caused me a lot of trouble.” She returned to college with a huge tube sticking out of her chest, a necessary part of the regular blood treatments she needed.

“My blood was removed and cleaned and put back more than 50 times. After that, my hematologist tried another treatment: massive gamma-globulin infusions. The second infusion kept me going for three months, and it was decided I wouldn’t have to have my plasma replaced again. My neurologist said I’d turned a corner, so after 11 1/2 months, my central line was pulled.”

“I believed, though, that I would stop secreting antibodies only after I had sexual intercourse. And though I looked worse than I ever had in my life, thanks to the steroids — I was fat and swollen, covered in acne, and had a gruesomely round face — I thought my legendarily promiscuous musician friend might still be interested.”

Continue reading “Moerman’s Placebo”

Open Access Anthropology

There are now a couple blogs on open access in anthropology that I wanted to point out:

Open Access Anthropology

Open Anthropology

Anthropology News also had a recent issue with articles covering open access in anthropology (can download pdfs).

Savage Mind’s Rex provides us some very useful guidelines on how to get the information we need about new articles and books through online alerting in his post, Total Information Awareness (for anthropologists). Especially useful for people not linked into mainstream academia or off doing fieldwork or just interested in staying up to date.

Rex also describes the Mana’o Project, an open access repository for anthropology, and actively encourages people to use it.

If you are interested in more from Savage Minds, they have a whole Open Access Open Source category. CKelty in particular has been posting on a regular basis recently in this area.

Perspectives on Colombia

For those of you interested in Colombia and free trade, I found it striking that such divergent newspapers as The Weekly Standard and The New York Times both came down recently in favor of a free trade pact between the US and Colombia. In The Weekly Standard, Duncan Currie wrote A Strong Case for Colombia. At the Times, it was the editorial board who wrote Time for the Colombian Trade Pact.

What impressed me about both pieces is that they actually addressed what is happening in Colombia. As someone who lived in Colombia for many years, it is rare to find US media that supplies accurate information about Colombia rather than playing to the images we are all familiar with. Going further, they also place this information in the context of the political debates happening in the US.

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Jan Chipchase

Yesterday in Cellphones Save The World I wrote about Jan Chipchase, who is featured in the New York Times piece by Sara Corbett, Can The Cellphone Help End Global Poverty. My piece summarized four themes that summarize changes we often do perceive but that are happening worldwide: people-driven processes, change for the rest of us, human-centered science, and emerging methods.

Chipchase has his own blog, Future Perfect, and a website at The Nokia Research Center. He also has a TED video presentation (I featured TED just a few days, see here), which is worth a look. I’d paste it in below, but WordPress limits us to big sites like YouTube, at least in my understanding.

ELearnSpace has a critical take on the Corbett article. I include an edited version here, because it is a different and equally valid perspective: “I don’t care for the general concept of this article—solving complex issues like poverty requires more than just a new technological tool… [T]he bigger issue for me relates to where the money flows and who will have control over the new infrastructure. As I was reminded by a participant in an online presentation I delivered this morning, technology cuts both ways. It opens and it closes. It frees and it imprisons. That’s why we [need] an ideological shift in how we interact with developing nations.”

So it’s not all cellphones. But Chipchase is not all about technology either. He puts technology in context. He speaks of “delegation in practice” in the TED talk, and how to tackle the problem of illiteracy, which is as much about social practices and social trust as it is about technology. So he is just speaking to a different ideological shift than most of us think about.

Check out his video if you’re interested, and also the post I did awhile back on Social Entrepreneurship, which addressed development and anthropology. And Antropologi has a fun piece too, Why The Head of IT Should Be An Anthropologist.

Cellphones Save The World

“Can The Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?” A provocative title to Sara Corbett’s New York Times Magazine article, which focuses on the work done by Jan Chipchase. And who is Jan Chipchase? Besides being a Brit and working for Nokia, he is a combo “human-behavior researcher” and “user-anthropologist.” Sounds almost as bad as neuroanthropology.

But what does he actually do? “His mission, broadly defined, is to peer into the lives of other people, accumulating as much knowledge as possible about human behavior so that he can feed helpful bits of information back to the company — to the squads of designers and technologists and marketing people who may never have set foot in a Vietnamese barbershop but who would appreciate it greatly if that barber someday were to buy a Nokia.”

Corbett’s article impressed me, so I am going to provide an annotated version below, coupled with some of my own interpretations and then sent out to all of you. But to basically summarize everything, our world is going to see a transformation through the convergence of four factors: people-driven processes, change for the rest of us, human-centered science, and emerging methods.

All four of these are age-old, but now, reformed and resurgent, they will help shape our world in years to come. Welcome to the new globalization. It lurks behind the bright lights, big city view peddled in academia and media alike.

People-Driven Processes

Chipchase engages in “on-the-ground intelligence-gathering” to help promote “human-centered design.” This “business-world niche that has become especially important to ultracompetitive high-tech companies trying to figure out how to write software, design laptops or build cellphones that people find useful and unintimidating and will thus spend money on.”

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Children and Childhood: Anthropology News Special Issue

The American Anthropological Association has some open-access content for its monthly Anthropology News around the theme of Children and Childhood.

Some highlights:

John Bock, Elizabeth Gaskins and David Lancy write on A Four-Field Anthropology of Childhood.

Robert LeVine, the dean of this area, speaks of Re-Visualizing Childhood in Cultural Context

Jill Korbin addresses Children and Families in Neighborhood Contexts

And Tom Weisner brings us his engaged and applied anthropology in Understanding New Hope