It’s not the best quality video ever, but it’s great to see Alvaro Fernandez – of SharpBrains fame – in action in this clip Amazing Findings in Neuroplasticity. Quite a good overview in five minutes.
The second in this occasional series, the featured artist today is the Congolese musician Sam Mangwana. He is one of the leaders of the Soukous genre, derived from the French “secouer” (to shake) and once known as the African rumba. That means it’s fun! I also find it fascinating how it mixes African and Latin rhythms and sound together.
This YouTube clip is just the music really, not much video, but it’s a great tune with Franco and TPOK Jazz.
If you like that, the best place I’ve found to listen to some of Sam Magwana’s music is over at Rhapsody.
In his early years, Mangwana formally studied music as a member of the Salvation Army Chorus. While in his mid-teens, Mangwana began his professional career. At age 17, he became the lead singer of the group ‘Tabu Ley Rocherau’s Africa Fiesta’, in addition to singing with the band for over 10 years, Mangwana appeared with other popular Soukous bands. In 1976, he formed his own band called the ‘African All Stars’, in 86′ their single “Maria Tebba,” became a huge soukous hit. He sings in seven different languages, both African and European and has toured extensively inside and outside Africa, justifying his tag as the ‘International Sam Mangwana’ and the ‘Pigeon Voyager’. Mangwana serves up a blend of Cuban and Congolese sounds, seamlessly fusing them together. Mangwana’s style is referred to as the Congolese Rumba because he deftly takes Cuban styles and puts any number of Congolese (or Mangwanese) twists to it.
Ian Kuijt, my colleague here at Notre Dame, is an archaeologist who has specialized in the origins of agriculture, food storage, and the emergence of social inequality. He appeared in the PBS series Guns, Germs and Steel, based on the best-selling book by Jared Diamond. So it is my pleasure to present that particular clip from the PBS documentary , where Ian discusses the emergence of food storage, agricultural practices, and changes in social complexity.
In the documentary, Diamond argues for an ecological approach to human history, where local ecology, microbes and geography make a large difference in which societies demonstrate “progress” or “civilization.” There is a Wikipedia site on Guns, Germs and Steel, where both Diamond’s basic argument and some relevant criticisms are presented.
I use this film in my Introduction to Anthropology class, it just has some extraordinary footage. Mike Richards, the cameraman, spent two years on this project! Here is one clip, where the chimps are filmed cooperatively hunting colobus monkeys. Wow.
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!
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 