Author: dlende

Four Stone Hearth

Like Encephalon, Four Stone Hearth is a collection of the best and brightest of the recent blogosphere, but in this case anthropology. Anthropology is generally defined by four sub-fields: archaeology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology, united by a holistic approach. Hence the FOUR stones joined in a HEARTH…

We have a couple posts represented there this time around, and I definitely encourage people to check out everything else there. A collected cornucopia of creativity.

Long live the carnival!

Anthropology in the News

If you need to get your daily anthropology fix (besides here, of course!), two sites highlight anthropology topics appearing in the news. Besides mentioning them here, I’ve added both to the blogroll for future reference.

The first, literally Anthropology in the News, is run by the Texas A&M Department of Anthropology. You can even set up a RSS feed. It covers the four fields, with a slight tendency towards more biological and archaeology news, and simply provides the links to other articles. Here’s one interesting example, Cultural Biases May Influence Parenting Studies, Scientist Finds, which examines how country-of-origin of researchers impacts their interpretation and rating of parenting behaviors.

The second is Antropologi.Info, with the subtitle of Social and Cultural Anthropology in the News. So it provides a useful complement. It provides more in-depth coverage but not as many links. One example is the piece Examples of Engaging Anthropology – New Issue of “Anthropology Matters”.

So enjoy!

Dissonance of the Day

Two very different takes on cognitive dissonance today in the New York Times, one about rationalizing decisions, the other counter-factual and emotional.

John Tierney writes, And Behind Door No. 1, A Fatal Flaw. It covers the Monty Hall problem, and the statistical and methodological problems of cognitive dissonance experiments dating back to the 1950s. Basically the experiments have discounted the fact that one’s initial choice changes the odds. You shouldn’t stick with Door #1 if Door #3 gets opened. A 1/3 chance (the original choice) gets changed to a 2/3 chance of winning if you switch to Door #2. As always, Tierney provides an entertaining piece, and has some good links to online experiments.

Harriet Brown writes, My Daughters Are Fine, But I’ll Never Be The Same, covering her emotional and internal reactions to life-threatening illnesses in her children. Why fall apart when things are finally going well? She tells us of speaking with a friend who had gone through something similar:

“Other parents worry about the worst,” she told me, “but they don’t really believe it could happen. We know better.” We know better. That was it, exactly. We parents throw everything between our kids and danger: bike helmets, seat belts, vaccinations, tooth sealants, self-defense classes. We are creating the illusion of safety as much as anything else, weaving a kind of magic circle of protection. Like all illusions, once broken it can never be made whole again.

Anthropology, Tribal Politics, and Iraq

It’s rare to see anthropology used in debates about Iraq and the Middle East. Too often we’re reduced to the same marginalized position—for example, is participation by anthropologists in human terrain systems ethical or not? (For more on that, see Greg’s Culture Matters post here, Savage Mind’s summary, and Rick Shweder’s essay.) But today David Brooks has an essay in the New York Times entitled A Network of Truces. He builds off of Stanley Kurtz’s review essay, I and My Brother Against My Cousin, which analyzes Philip Salzman’s new book, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East.

Salzman basically calls attention to the vastly different sociopolitical organization that happens in Iraq, where tribal affiliation and segmentary politics make for a very different playing field than the liberal democracy, nation building Western stance.

David Brooks uses this approach to justify the surge and argue for a slow withdrawal (which many would take as meaning no withdrawal), not exactly the use of anthropology that many anthropologists would advocate. And Kutz is after even bigger fish, writing at the end, “We’ve taught ourselves a good deal about Islam over the past seven years. Yet tribalism is at least half the cultural battle in the Middle East, and the West knows little about it. Learning how to understand and critique the Islamic Near East through a tribal lens will open up a new and smarter strategy for change.” This stance recreates the good vs. evil, civilization vs. barbarians (tribes in this case) dichotomy that helped get us into the problem in the first place.

But for anthropologists who whine about not getting our ideas included in the public debate, here are two big publications bringing anthropology to the fore. I especially recommend the Kurtz review, since it provides a good overview of anthropological thinking about tribes, political organization, and the such before turning to its own political points.

So get in touch with the New York Times and the Weekly Standard to express yourself, and please feel free to debate this issue below.

A Crooked Science

Stanley Fish has an editorial today, Think Again-French Theory in America, which is a great reflection and historical contextualization of deconstructionism.  He builds much of the essay off the forthcoming book by Francois Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States.

 

The reason I like this piece by Fish is his ability to at one hand show the strengths and limits of a deconstructionist stance and on the other to show the polarization into the relativist versus absolutist “Culture Wars” in the US.

 

Continue reading “A Crooked Science”

Experiments and Effort

Gina Kolata describes an experiment by Ethan Sims in her book Rethinking Thin, where Sims put thin people on a forced-eating diet. Sims wanted to know whether people “would have a hard time gaining weight.” Kolata’s description of Sims’ and other similar experiments (such as putting people on starvation diets) plays a central role in establishing one of her main points—obesity is a biological problem.

In his first experiment with college students, Sims found that “these subjects found it all but impossible to gain much weight; no matter how much they tried to eat, they just could not become obese.” Sims reasoned that perhaps the students raised their activity levels and were burning off more calories. “He thought of the perfect subjects, people who really have no chance to cheat and burn off calories: prisoners.”

The study volunteers in prison did indeed gain weight. “But producing obesity turned out to be much harder than Sims had anticipated. The men increased their weight by 20 to 25 percent, but it took four to six months for them to do this, eating as much as they could every day. Some ended up eating 10,000 calorie a day, an amount so incredible that it would be hard to believe, were it not for the fact that the researcher study had attendants present at each meal who dutifully recorded everything the men ate.”

Continue reading “Experiments and Effort”