Most of you are probably aware of the weekly round up or “Spike Activity” appearing every Friday at Mind Hacks. But for those of you who don’t, today’s version was really a great one.
First up, no pun intended, is the study over at Cognitive Daily on condoms: “Cognitive Daily covers a sobering study on sex education that found ‘among sexually active teens, actual condom use bears no relationship to intention to use a condom or belief that using condoms is a good idea. The only factors in their study that correlate with using condoms are buying and carrying condoms’.”
Probably not a big suprise to most anthropologists, where the difference between what people say versus what people do is ground into aspiring ethnographers. It also reminded me of my work with teenage drug users – carrying drugs around was always a good indicator of a real problem, despite many teens’ assertions to the contrary.
PLoS Biology has an important article just out entitled “On Mice and Men, and Chandelier Neurons” (full text) aiming at what makes human brains different, with a focus on short-axon neurons in the frontal cortex.
John Ptak runs an interesting blog where he explores the “History of Ideas–unusual connections in the history of science and mathematics with the arts and social history.” His musings and reflections, his use of striking imagery, and his grounded historical approach make for some enjoyable online reading.
The journalist Lucia Newman and Al Jazeera English (yes, I was surpised too!) put together some good reporting on race and racism in Latin America. I used the two videos below in my Intro to Anthro class last week, the first on Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic and the second on Quechua Indians in Peru. There are two more that I saw in the same series, one on racial tensions in Brazil and another on linguistic equality in Paraguay.
Overall, I really enjoyed showing my students some examples from outside the US. One of my students was even from the town mentioned in the DR, and was able to tell everyone more about the discrimination and stereotypes that Haitians face there. Some great confirmation!
The 50th edition of the anthropology carnival is up at the Yann Klimentidis blog. If you dig Neanderthals, there is plenty for you this week! Yes, a lot, too much for me to link to…. Plus remote central on evolutionary processes and an abundance of archaeology. And more besides… I also found this photo which I hope captures the Four Stone Spirit.
Cognitive Daily, The Bloodier the Game, The More Hostile the Gamer
Mortal Kombat settings and a one-game study – the bloodier the game play, the more violent the resulting thoughts. So, are players after that arousal gap? And with the sword, are they looking for that bloody spray? And here context (in game only) helps shape resulting experience.
So, interesting results but various ways to interpret what players are doing and experiencing
Mental Health
Sarah Kershaw, Girl Talk Has Its Limits
Teenage girls and co-rumination – or wallowing in sorrows and anxieties together
Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them “lazy,” “violent,” responsible for their own troubles. The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 — about two and one-half percentage points… More than a third of all white Democrats and independents — voters Obama can’t win the White House without — agreed with at least one negative adjective about blacks, according to the survey, and they are significantly less likely to vote for Obama than those who don’t have such views.
In related coverage, Brent Staples writes a NY Times op-ed on Barack Obama, John McCain and the Language of Race. Staples highlights the parallels between “uppity” blacks and the recent use of “uppity” about Obama by a Georgia Republican. He concludes:
Mr. Obama seems to understand that he is always an utterance away from a statement — or a phrase — that could transform him in a campaign ad from the affable, rational and racially ambiguous candidate into the archetypical angry black man who scares off the white vote. His caution is evident from the way he sifts and searches the language as he speaks, stepping around words that might push him into the danger zone. These maneuvers are often painful to watch. The troubling part is that they are necessary.
Nicholas Kristof recently argued that the repeated questioning of Obama’s Christian faith (isn’t he a Muslim?) represent another way to “otherize” Obama:
What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian. The result is this campaign to “otherize” Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him.
As I argued recently in David Brooks and the Social Animal, the Republican party is about “one culture,” portraying itself as the most American, and avoiding the inherent complexity and even relativity that the anthropological notion of culture entails. A lot of that, historically, comes back to race, including the Southern strategy of the Republican party that has proven successful over the last three decades.
I also played the first part of this video to get them to think about how the black vs. white dichotomy doesn’t capture our variation today, and also to think more about the assumptions they make when they see someone. And while I think overall the lecture helped do that, still at the end there were statements being made like “those Asians” or “white kids,” showing just how powerful our “racial” categorization is here in the United States.
Neuroanthropology 