Anthropology

Just read this guest column in the Orlando Sentinel by Ty Matejowski and Beatriz M Reyes-Foster.  It was written a while back, but still worth a read.  Good on them for writing this piece.  It’s all about anthropology’s “branding problem”: Cultural anthropology’s branding problem is largely superficial. Anthropologists possess unique knowledge and skill sets that have real-world value. Anthropology helps us understand the world in a way that cannot be reduced to numbers or captured in surveys. The marketing industry is increasingly recognizing the value of anthropological methodologies. A recent Atlantic article highlights the way in which ethnography and participant-observation are used in market research. Moreover, the World Bank recently elected an anthropologist, Jim Yong Kim, as president. Anthropologists need to take better ownership of our brand. The complexity of anthropological concepts such as “culture,” “power” and the “global” should not dissuade anthropologists from engaging in meaningful public discourse. In short, the argument here is that anthropology suffers from a PR problem.  While this may be true at many levels, I think there’s quite a bit more to the story.  Sure, anthropologists should go about and promote their field and all of that.  Fine.  Great.  But the deeper issue here, in my view, is more about how we actually think about and practice anthropology rather than whether or not we are marketing ourselves well enough.  I think that once we deal with the former some of the PR issues will fall into place.  The short version of my argument: we don’t just need to promote ourselves, we need to change.  The “we need promotion” argument assumes that we are doing everything right, and we just need to get ourselves out there in the public view.  As if all is right in the house of anthropology, and we just need some good press on CNN.  I disagree.  I think we need to actually change how we do anthropology. Despite their overall argument about branding and promotion, Matejowski and Reyes-Foster hit the nail on the head when it comes to identifying the true problem that plagues cultural anthropology these days: our collective silence.*  And this silence isn’t some accident or fluke–it’s how we do things.  It is what we produce.  It’s really not all that hard to figure out why the vast majority of people outside of academia have no clue what contemporary cultural anthropology is all about.  For the most part, we really only talk to ourselves (although there are signs that this is changing, finally).  For example, over the course of the past year or so, cultural anthropology did find its way into the news fairly often, but usually for all the wrong reasons.  Still, as Matejowski and Reyes-Foster explain: Many cultural anthropologists have remained aloof amid this tumult. This remoteness is surely compounded by today’s academic environment. Public engagement counts little toward promotion and tenure and may even be viewed dismissively by fellow academics. We are stuck in our own little silos.  Often literally by design.  Look at graduate school training.  What does that training produce?  More academics, who are theoretically supposed to get university jobs, get their own students, and do more of the same.  It’s all about building of specifically academic credentials: going to conferences, getting internships, writing papers for awards, seeking grants.  It’s a big, and very insular, loop.  It’s a factory designed to produce people for tenure track academic positions that no longer exist (at least for the vast majority).  But the factory keeps working.  Everyone thinks they’re going to make it.  Everyone thinks they will be the one who bucks the trend–if they just work harder, write more, get one more grant, or impress that one person at a job talk.  But there’s n

arXiv:1306.4021 [q-bio.PE] Reconstructing Native American Migrations from Whole-genome and Whole-exome Data Simon Gravel et al. There is great scientific and popular interest in understanding the genetic history of populations in the Americas. We wish to understand when different regions of the continent were inhabited, where settlers came from, and how current inhabitants relate genetically to earlier populations. Recent studies unraveled parts of the genetic history of the continent using genotyping arrays and uniparental markers. The 1000 Genomes Project provides a unique opportunity for improving our understanding of population genetic history by providing over a hundred sequenced low coverage genomes and exomes from Colombian (CLM), Mexican-American (MXL), and Puerto Rican (PUR) populations. Here, we explore the genomic contributions of African, European, and especially Native American ancestry to these populations. Estimated Native American ancestry is 48% in MXL, 25% in CLM, and 13% in PUR. Native American ancestry in PUR appears most closely related to Equatorial-Tucanoan-speaking populations, supporting a Southern America ancestry of the Taino people of the Caribbean. We present new methods to estimate the allele frequencies in the Native American fraction of the populations, and model their distribution using a three-population demographic model. The ancestral populations to the three groups likely split in close succession: the most likely scenario, based on a peopling of the Americas 16 thousand years ago (kya), supports that the MXL Ancestors split 12.2kya, with a subsequent split of the ancestors to CLM and PUR 11.7kya. The model also features a Mexican population of 62,000, a Colombian population of 8,700, and a Puerto Rican population of 1,900. Modeling Identity-by-descent (IBD) and ancestry tract length, we show that post-contact populations also differ markedly in their effective sizes and migration patterns, with Puerto Rico showing the smallest size and the earlier migration from Europe. Link

Combining two of my favourite passions, mathematics and linguistics, in a fascinating social analysis of prescriptivism, national identity, and scientific vocabulary, is this video from the Numberphile Youtube channel, entitled, ‘Is it Math or Maths?’ Numberphile regularly features short, popular videos about interesting mathematical stuff, mostly at a layperson’s level.  This video features Dr Lynne Murphy, who teaches lexical semantics at the University of Sussex, and blogs about American/British English differences at Separated by a Common Language. For the record, as a Canadian, I say ‘math’ but I also say ‘zed’, because that’s the way we roll. Filed under: Linguistics

Organized by Sarah Willen and Elizabeth Carpenter-Song, the June issue of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry (vol. 37, issue 2) is a special issue entitled “Cultural Competence in Action: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Four Case Studies.”  Rather than engaging in the usual critique of medical “cultural competence” programs  (which aim to teach clinicians about culture, health disparities, and difference), this issue analyzes pedagogical strategies used in various clinical/educational settings, while illuminating the challenges these programs pose and the ways in which “cultural competence” takes local form. The issue features four original ethnographic papers, each of which is paired with a reflective companion essay written by a clinician-educator involved in the particular program (Antonio Bullon, Mansoor Malik, Roxana Llerena-Quinn, and Laurence Kirmayer). The programs include a course for psychiatry residents, a research/training collaborative that links a Historically Black University and an Ivy League University, a continuing medical education course, and a Canadian-based annual summer program for an international cohort of clinicians and researchers. The titles and abstracts of the ethnographic papers are pasted below. In addition, following the four paired papers are three commentaries by clinical educators and researchers: Michael Knipper, Robert Drake, and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good. Confronting a “Big Huge Gaping Wound”: Emotion and Anxiety in a Cultural Sensitivity Course for Psychiatry Residents (Sarah Willen)      Abstract: In his seminal volume From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences, George Devereux suggests that any therapeutic or scientific engagement with another human being inevitably will be shaped by one’s own expectations, assumptions, and reactions. If left unacknowledged, such unspoken and unconscious influences have the capacity to torpedo the interaction; if subjected to critical reflection, however, they can yield insights of great interpretive value and practical significance. Taking these reflections on counter-transference as point of departure, this article explores how a range of unacknowledged assumptions can torpedo good faith efforts to engender “cultural sensitivity” in a required course for American psychiatry residents. The course examined in this paper has been taught for seven successive years by a pair of attending psychiatrists at a longstanding New England residency training program. Despite the instructors’ good intentions and ongoing experimentation with content and format, the course has failed repeatedly to meet either residents’ expectations or, as the instructors bravely acknowledged, their own. The paper draws upon a year-long ethnographic study, conducted in the late 2000s during the most recent iteration of the course, which involved observation of course sessions, a series of interviews with course instructors, and pre- and post-course interviews with the majority of participating residents. By examining the dynamics of the course from the perspectives of both clinician-instructors and resident-students, the paper illuminates how classroom-based engagement with the clinical implications of culture and difference can run awry when the emotional potency of these issues is not adequately taken into account. Behind the Scenes of a Research and Training Collaboration: Power, Privilege, and the Hidden Transcript of Race (Elizabeth Carpenter-Song and Rob Whitley) Abstract: This paper examines a federally funded research and training collaboration between an Ivy League psychiatric research center and a historically Black university and medical center. This collaboration focuses on issues of psychiatric recovery and rehabilitation among African Americans. In addition, this multidisciplinary collaboration aims to build the research capacity at both institutions and to contribute to the tradition of research in culture and mental health within the medical social sciences and c

View from Devil's Path east of Indian Head Mountain in Catskill Mountains. | Image, CC by Miguel Vieira. Click for license and information. There’s a pretty neat series of maps featured in Business Insider making the rounds on various social channels. They tell us about ourselves, showing how Americans speak differently from each other. My favorite is slide 17 because I have only ever owned sneakers and was absolutely confused when someone recently suggested that my concept of sneakers was really a generalization of “athletic shoes.” (I still think they’re sneakers. All of them.) It’s a treasure trove of linguistic diversity revealing which everyday words in my lexicon vary (e.g., garage sale) and which seem fairly common (e.g., subway) to the overall American experience. The maps are the work of NC State Ph. D. student Joshua Katz, who drew on a linguistic survey on the ways Americans pronounce words—you can view the original set of maps here. Regional variations in language are well-studied. Every speaker can be identified by region, social class and gender. Accents are incredibly revealing, which is why some people take great pains to hide theirs even while others use it to weave an identity. These identities reach beyond personal definition to explicitly include regional and social histories and cultural nuances. However while accents can be hidden or faked, the sounds that we’re able to make may not be so readily manipulated. A recent study published in PLOS One shares evidence that geography may play a part in shaping these sounds. Anthropologist Caleb Everett analyzed 567 language locations and found a commonality that crossed dialectical boundaries and language families: languages with ejective phonemes tend to occur at higher elevations throughout the world. What are ejectives? They’re a basic unit of sound—a type of phoneme—which when combined with other phonemes create words. Ejectives are unusual in that they’re non-pulmonic. They’re produced by the closing of the vocal cords. It is the vibration of the vocal cords that allow us to meld phonemes together to generate words. These sounds are essentially voiceless. They’re hard to describe: it’s almost as though you’re trying to make the sound of a consonant while holding your breath. They’re really better understood when you can hear them for yourself: Fifteen percent of the habitable space in the world is at altitudes higher than 1500 m (approximately 1 mile) above sea level; these spaces are home to ten percent of the world’s population. Everett divided the 567 languages he tapped for his study into two groups: those having ejectives (92) and those without (475). Among those languages with ejective phonemes, sixty-two percent are found at higher altitudes. The remaining languages with ejective components are disbursed, but the greatest concentrations are seen within 500 km (approximately 300 miles) of these linguistic peaks. Figure 1. Plot of the locations of the languages in the sample. Dark circles represent languages with ejectives, clear circles represent those without ejectives. Clusters of languages with ejectives are highlighted with white rectangles. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0065275.g001 Everett believes the conditions at higher altitudes may encourage the production of ejective phonemes. These utterances require that the vocal cords are closed and raised. Everett holds that this is easier to accomplish at higher altitudes where atmospheric pressure is lower, which means that air pressure in the mouth and lungs is lower so it may be easier to force the vocal cords closed. Everett also proposes that the higher incidence of ejective phonemes at higher altitudes may represent a biological adaptation. With ever word uttered, we’re generally exhaling during some portion of the utterance. This exhalation also releases water vapor, which Everett info

Today the science news outlets are abuzz with the claim that a newly identified mixed language has been identified in Australia, Light Warlpiri, based on a press release from the Linguistic Society of America, which is reporting a new article by Carmel O’Shannessy entitled “The role of multiple sources in the formation of an innovative auxiliary category in Light Warlpiri, a new Australian mixed language”.   The article in the Examiner is the best of a mixed bunch, but you need to overlook the unfortunate header describing it as the ‘newest language on earth’, which isn’t even remotely true.  But as we’ll see, even the more modest claims in the press release and news articles are misleading. Warlpiri itself is a Pama-Nyungan language spoken in northern Australia by several thousand people, and is one of the better-known and less threatened (though still endangered) languages of Australia.    Light Warlpiri is spoken by about 300 Warlpiri people in one community, Lajamanu; it mixes English, Kriol, and Warlpiri, with an English verb structure and a Warlpiri and Kriol noun structure, and some elements all its own.   Mixed languages are not creoles (take note) – without going into a long digression, creoles emerge in situations where speakers do not have full access to one of the source languages.  Mixed languages are created in highly bilingual situations -  most speakers of Light Warlpiri also speak Warlpiri, Kriol, or English (in some combination).  Mixed languages can arise (which is what seems to have happened here) when code-switching (which happens in nearly every bilingual speech community) becomes formalized as a set of linguistic patterns. However, beware!  Light Warlpiri has had a Wikipedia page since 2008 , and Carmel O’Shannessy first identified it in an article ‘Light Warlpiri: A New Language‘, back in 2005 in the Australian Journal of Linguistics, and identified it as a mixed language. According to Google Scholar, it’s been cited 40 times to date.  This is hardly a new discovery.  I get why O’Shannessy is still calling it a ‘new mixed language’ in the article – it’s new-ish, in the sense that it’s only been around for roughly 40 years, and its discovery is new-ish, in that it’s only been known to linguists for fewer than 10 years.  I’m trying not to be pedantic here: it’s not like this has been known for decades, so in some sense it is ‘new’.  But reading the press on this, you’d think that no one had ever heard of Light Warlpiri until today, which is totally false. O’Shannessy’s new article, which is the one that the LSA press release is touting, is a fuller description of the grammar and history and identifies a new class of auxiliary verbs and some other features in Light Warlpiri that differ in structure from any of the source languages.  This is pretty neat, and is certainly a new discovery.  There may be some broader implications for understanding the development of certain features cross-linguistically, as the press release suggests.  But this is not a new language, nor is it newly discovered, nor newly identified as a mixed language: the article is not making these claims.  In this sense, the LSA press release is quite misleading, and the news articles that are based on it are spreading this misinformation. Filed under: Linguistics

Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology. 2013; 33: 1722-1727 Male-Specific Region of the Y Chromosome and Cardiovascular Risk Phylogenetic Analysis and Gene Expression Studies Lisa D.S. Bloomer et al. Abstract Objective—Haplogroup I of male-specific region of the human Y chromosome is associated with 50% increased risk of coronary artery disease. It is not clear to what extent conventional cardiovascular risk factors and genes of the male-specific region may explain this association. Approach and Results—A total of 1988 biologically unrelated men from 4 white European populations were genotyped using 11 Y chromosome single nucleotide polymorphisms and classified into 13 most common European haplogroups. Approximately 75% to 93% of the haplotypic variation of the Y chromosome in all cohorts was attributable to I, R1a, and R1b1b2 lineages. None of traditional cardiovascular risk factors, including body mass index, blood pressures, lipids, glucose, C-reactive protein, creatinine, and insulin resistance, was associated with haplogroup I of the Y chromosome in the joint inverse variance meta-analysis. Fourteen of 15 ubiquitous single-copy genes of the male-specific region were expressed in human macrophages. When compared with men with other haplogroups, carriers of haplogroup I had ?0.61- and 0.64-fold lower expression of ubiquitously transcribed tetratricopeptide repeat, Y-linked gene (UTY) and protein kinase, Y-linked, pseudogene (PRKY) in macrophages (P=0.0001 and P=0.002, respectively). Conclusions—Coronary artery disease predisposing haplogroup I of the Y chromosome is associated with downregulation of UTY and PRKY genes in macrophages but not with conventional cardiovascular risk factors. Link

In part six of this series I complained about how Taiwanese indigenous languages are being taught more like dead languages than living ones. This point was really hit home to me when I was discussing with another student that I would like to have better communicative competence. It took a long time for me to explain what I meant, and it slowly dawned on me that other students really had no expectation of being able to use the language in such a way. So I was very happy that the Hualien Tribal College and the College of Indigenous Studies at NDHU were able to arrange for two Maori language activists, Hana O’Regan [PDF] and Megan Grace, both affiliated with the center for M?ori and Pasifika studies at Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology, to come to Hualien and share their thoughts and experiences. Hana and Megan have a very different approach to language revitalization – one which emphasizes building a living language. For this reason the focus of their work is in homes, not (just) in the classroom. From the South Island iwi of Ng?i Tahu, the variety of Maori Hana and Megan speak was erroneously considered extinct in 1979. In fact, the last elder native-speaker of the language died just a few years ago. But it was true that the language was severely endangered. In Hana’s family there had been no native-speakers of Maori for five generations (113 years). But today Hana speaks Maori to her children and they speak Maori to each other. Doing so isn’t easy. Because everyone in the family is bilingual in English, it would often be easier for them to use English instead of Maori. Yet they remain ever vigilant. Her children came with her to Taiwan and I only ever saw them speak English when speaking to non-Maori. It has now been 13 years since they launched Kotahi Mano Kaika, Kotahi Mano Wawata. This translates to 1000 Homes, 1000 Dreams and refers to the vision of having 1000 Ngai Tahu homes speaking Maori by the year 2025. When she spoke, Hana admitted that they were overly ambitious when they first launched the program. They are still far from having 1000 homes. They made a mistake by thinking it would be enough to simply offer the resources for language learning and assume that there would be enough interest that the program would take off on its own. After a few years they switched focus to instead helping a few, highly dedicated, families start using Maori in the home. They provide materials and training to help these families learn the skills necessary to use the language in the home. (Hana, herself a Maori teacher, had found that the existing textbooks were of little use in the homes.) As a result of their efforts there are now about 50 children being raised as native-speakers of Southern Maori. Hana and Megan spoke about the kind of training and resources families needed to begin using Maori in the home, as well as some of the principles underlying their approach to language revitalization. I’ve tried to quickly summarize some of the key points: The language used in schools, between a teacher and a student, is not appropriate for the home. They needed to develop and model linguistic resources so that non-native-speakers could use Maori with their children. In doing so they focused on daily activities, such as bathing, nursing, cooking, or getting ready for bed. Young people also need language that they can use with other young people. This might include “cursing” (although they tried to create curses that “sound good” and respect traditional culture). They constantly need to coin new words. While traditionally many Maori had borrowed words using Maori pronunciations of foreign words, they worked hard to re-coin many of these loan words. For instance, “lightening-mind” for “computer.” (They even held workshops to coin new Maori idioms.) They worked hard to create fun activities for all the families and children engaged in the program

Interesting commentary by the author of a 1988 undergraduate thesis that revolved around re-measuring part of Morton's skulls and concluding (contra Gould) that Morton's measurements were accurate. I haven't read it fully (it is in four parts), but here is the concluding paragraph from part 4: In the final analysis, the Morton-Gould Affair, which has been popularized as a diagnostic example of the role of unconscious bias in science, is simply a case of two over-eager scholars jumping to conclusions based on a small amount of data. It is unfortunate that the discussion of Morton’s work has occupied so much energy over the past 30 years, when a more important issue is Gould’s historically inaccurate misrepresentation of Blumenbach’s work, which unlike Morton’s was a foundational element of modern physical anthropology and public policy regarding racial variation that still impacts us today. A proper representation of Blumenbach’s theories and an accurate translation of his major Latin publications into modern English and German are long overdue and would be of great benefit to science and society at large. Should be interesting reading for anyone fascinated by the history of ideas.

Just about three years ago, while teaching my undergraduate Language and Culture course, I ended up poking around the etymology of the word honk and turned up some neat things, leading to the germ of an idea for a student project that I ended up calling Lexiculture.    That term, I did a test run with my students, using the word ‘chairperson’ as a really interesting in-class exercise, and then got to work putting it together as a full class assignment in the fall of 2010.   This was considerably advanced about a month later at the Language, Culture, and History conference in Wyoming, organized by Leila Monaghan, and discussions I had with many of the participants there about how to think about the linguistic anthropology of English words: moving beyond lexicography and etymology towards a real integrated approach to language and culture using words. When I ran this in 2010, I introduced Lexiculture using an in-class exercise where we jointly researched the surprising history of the local term Michigan left.   I then put together a list of projects for them to choose from (or let them choose their own) and set them to work. I was working under a few impediments: I had never done this before, so I was sort of muddling along.  I didn’t give the students quite enough guidance to undertake research projects with good results.  At the time, I couldn’t find a good text to help the students conceptually or methodologically.  So it turned out to be OK, and we got some good results (I especially liked student papers written on the words wife-beater, bitchin’, and ketchup/catsup) but it wasn’t a complete success.    In 2011 I was on sabbatical so I didn’t teach that course, and in 2012 (my last year prior to submitting my tenure file, which is happening now), I decided to focus on some research projects (wisely, I think), and to make the course a bit more traditional. Well, now it’s 2013, and my tenure file will be set in stone by September, and instead of kicking up my feet and phoning in the last 30 years of my teaching career, I figure it’s time to dust off the notes and put Lexiculture back together.    I’ve had the great fortune to have found a wonderful short, inexpensive text: How to Read a Word by Elizabeth Knowles, which has some good, not-yet-outdated methodological suggestions but more importantly is conceptually critical to get the students thinking about how the history of words intersects with sociocultural change in the English-speaking world.   So using that text, and a revised set of topics, and a stronger methodological introduction to the subject, I’m at it again this fall. So here are a few of the words / topics on my list for this year: Information Superhighway: I want to know how this transformed from an index of the speaker’s technological knowhow in the early 1990s, to a sign of outmodedness a decade later. Stalemate: I want to know by what process this chess term became figuratively adopted for a situation where victory is impossible. Uppity: What is the metalinguistic discourse surrounding the use of this word in, by, and around African Americans, both in the 19th century and today? I have a longer list, but I need more, and here’s how you could help.  I’m looking for more English words or phrases  that students could research and that could help illuminate something of social significance.  Some basic requirements: - The topics need to relate to the last 200-300 years, with a heavy emphasis on post-1900 material. Prior to 1800, the full-text searchable databases / corpora that the students will need are relatively few and inaccessible. - While the papers will focus on single words or short phrases (i.e. the sort of things that can be researched readily without too much training), I’m not just interested in etymology, but rather, in words or phrases that have cultural significance or whose contextual importance has changed