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!

Discovery Channel on pushing the body’s limits

I’ve been enjoying the Discovery Channel’s series, The Human Body: Pushing The Limits, in dribs and drabs, watching the bits that are posted on You Tube. (Here’s the first part of the episode on Sensation, which is pretty good.) When I first read the description of the four-part series, I worried someone had already done a video version of the book I’m working on:

Human Body: Pushing the Limits takes you across continents and introduces you to people who have pushed their bodies to the max. Using CGI technology and hi-tech camera work, see their physical ordeals in vivid detail both externally and internally.

In fact, the series is not very deep, but the CGI graphics of throbbing nerves, eyes swiveling, sweat glands, and other anatomical marvels are pretty groovy. It’s well worth checking it out — there’s a whole lot of segments on You Tube. The four episodes were on Sight, Strength, Sensation, and Brain Power. I’ll probably try to get my hands on a DVD copy when it comes out and use it in my teaching.

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.

Emotional intelligence in training

Although I’m not a real big fan of some of the work on ’emotional intelligence,’ here’s an interesting short video of Daniel Goleman on Karma Tube (a positive, social change video site). As the page explains:

Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, asks why we aren’t more compassionate more of the time. Sharing the results of psychological experiments (and the story of the Santa Cruz Strangler), he explains how we are all born with the capacity for empathy — but we sometimes choose to ignore it.

I’m really not sure what we gain by putting ’emotional’ with ‘intelligence’ except that it does seem to increase the importance of empathy and perceptivity for those who undersell these human capacities. That is, I think the furor of ‘EI’ is in part simply that people who normally don’t get just how crucial interpersonal savvy is suddenly notice it.

Nevertheless, Goleman is a good big picture thinker, and in this piece he points out the malleability of human empathy, a crucial consideration for neuroanthropologists. It’s important to point out training effects on these abilities so that we’re not too prone to considering them permanent ‘personality’ traits.

The Buzz about Epigenetics: Genes, Behaviour and the Environment

Our contemporaries in Behavioural genomics and Neurobiology are suggesting that epigenetics may be the key to understanding how the environment interacts with genes to produce obesity, longevity, sterility, mental illness, and maybe even cancer. But what is epigenetics? And, why is it important to Neuroanthropology?

Epigenetic processes provide a way for environmental factors to affect gene activity. These processes involve the chemical modification of the genome resulting in an alteration of gene expression. While the underlying DNA sequence remains unchanged, the activity of particular genes can be turned on or off. Nutrition, exposure to toxins and other exogenetic mechanisms can all be potentially involved in epigenetic activity. These environmental influences can act upon RNA transcripts, cellular structures, DNA methylation/chromatin remodeling, and even prions. For example, smoking can effect your epigenome which is believed to result in some forms of cancer.

Human research into epigenetics can be fraught with ethical dilemmas, and can take a number of generations before sufficient data is produced. But, this is where anthropologists come in. Behavioural and environmental data coupled with social statistics from communities across the world can provide scientists with useful data for analyzing long-term mental and physical health in relation to the environment and corresponding socio-cultural behaviours. Such data is particularly useful when collected from communities exposed to biological disasters or specific nutritional limitations.

To study epigenetics inside the very cells of our body, where most anthropologists are not able to venture, there is another option. Now, for the first time in an insect species, epigenetic modification has been identified and functionally implicated. The recent sequencing of the honey bee genome in 2006 has allowed scientists to discover genes that mediate epigenetic effects.

Continue reading “The Buzz about Epigenetics: Genes, Behaviour and the Environment”