At the beginning of the 20th century, a traveler in Central Africa made mention of some strange people that he had come across. He was traveling among regular, run-of-the-mill natives…probably Bantu-speaking people living in scattered villages and farming for their food. But along the way, strange people came out of the forest. These strange people had sloping foreheads; they were short of stature, bow-legged and otherwise misshapen. They also clearly were, in the eyes of the traveler, of subhuman intelligence. The traveler described these people as a separate, subhuman race that lived in the forest. As I read this, I began to think that perhaps he was speaking of so-called “Pygmies” who live in this region, and as I began to think that, I started to get mad at this writer because so-called “Pygmies” do not look or act as he described. …
Tag Archives: Anthropology
The loudness of coffee shops
The coffee shop was already loud. The walls, floor, and ceiling of the Caribou are all made of sound-bouncy materials. The equipment behind the counter is loud to begin with and is not muffled by any structure. The barista has developed the typical barista habit of banging shit on other shit as loud as he can and as often as he can.
Then in walked the big loud highly annoying Christians from the local seminary….
Continue reading The loudness of coffee shops
Stealing Genes and Hypergyny
This post was originally titled “Mail Order Brides and Hypergyny.” I was prompted to revisit the post because it received a a rather astonishing comment that I chose not to allow, but I did post it on my Facebook page where any attention it would receive would be from the thoughtful people that make up my Facebook community rather than just anybody out there on the Internet. Also, I recently received a complaint from a reader that Scienceblogs.com has been showing a lot of ads for “mail order brides,” and this post was originally partly a response to that.
I should also mention that in the years between 2009 and 2014 it is possible that the term “mail order brides” has been legitimately problematized. I don’t know that it has, it just seems like it must have been. For example, Wikipedia says “The term “mail-order bride” is both criticized by owners (and customers) of international marriage agencies and used by them as an easily recognizable term.[2] It has been pointed out that there is a discrepancy between how international adoptions are regarded (“saving a child”) and how international marriages are regarded (“buying a wife”).” citing Lilith, Ryiah (2000–2001), Buying a Wife but Saving a Child: A Deconstruction of Popular Rhetoric and Legal Analysis of Mail-Order Brides and Intercountry Adoptions 9, Buff. Women’s L.J., p. 225F Schaeffer-Grabiel (2005), When the mail-order bride industry shifted from using a magazine. If you have any comments on that please leave them below.
Original Post, Mail Order Brides and Hypergyny:
Seymour had a mail order bride and he was very proud. Seymour was a night watchman that I got to know because I was forever lurking around at night, passing through alarmed doors and making a nuisance of myself and, usually, keeping just one step ahead of Seymour, who’s main objective in life was to find a reason to throw me out of the building. The one time he actually had the drop on me, found me without ID, with no instructions that people would be working late in the lab, on a weekend that people were not supposed to be in the building because of work being done on the fire alarm system, he made his move and told me to get out or I’d be arrested.
I had no choice.
I engaged in a conversation with Seymour, which no one had ever done before, and after a half hour he went way forgetting that his main goal in life was to throw me out of the building. But in the mean time, I learned about his mail order bride. From Korea.
I’ve noticed that Scienceblogs.com has been running ads for hot Russian mail order brides. These ads are rather funny on the surface; They seem to be parodies of such things that they represent. But if you click on one (and I certainly did … expecting to end up at The Onion) one learns that this is the real thing. These are real ads for real Russian women who really want to marry you. If you are Seymour.
I’ve told you before that I mostly avoid commenting on the advertisers for Scienceblogs.com. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. One of the most evil corporations on the planet is one of our sponsors, and no one ever seems to notice or complain. My blog is editorially independent (as are all the other scienceblogs.com blogs) and I am free, if I choose, to blog against the big evil corporation, and in fact, have done so to a limited extent.
At first, I found it rather shocking that none of my fellow Sblings seem to be blogging about the mail order bride ads. Then I realized that they must all be using ad blockers.
For my part, as you may have noticed, almost everything I encounter lately seems to remind me of a story from the Congo. (I wonder why that is?) So I can tell you a little about hypergyny in the Congo.
Let’s get two things straight:
1) Mail order brides are participating in hypergyny. Hypergyny is where females (gynos) marry “up” (hyper).
2) You will see the term “hypergamy” used and that is simply incorrect. There can be no such thing as hypergamy as a practice because that means everybody marries up. How would that work? The term is “hypergyny.”1
Hypergyny can occur in a lot of different cultural systems, and in fact wherever there is a) differential wealth and b) males tend to control big hunks of that wealth and the associated power (and no, it is NOT all about power … wealth and power are historically interchangeable enough that we should be cautious about making such distinctions) there will be hypergyny because there will be women who either choose it or are forced into it. In this form, and exploiting the ongoing conversations about rape, hypergyny can be understood by reference to the sexual interactions between allied forces liberating Europe from the Nazis and the local women. In Italy, Allied men tended to rape the women. In France, the women seemed happy to sleep with the men. For food. The difference? Well, lots of things were different, but to oversimplify somewhat, there was a big difference in how much people were starving at that particular moment between Italy and France.
Hypergyny is sleeping with the man over a longer term. For food and everything.
The most benign form of hypergyny of which I am aware (not counting mail order brides …. I’m not sure where I want to put that phenomenon on any scale of severity) is that found among the Efe Pygmies (and other Pygmies) in Central Africa.
Here, there are two integrated but distinct cultural entities: Villagers and Foragers. The Villagers are not Efe. They may be Bantu or Central Sudanic speakers (where I worked, they were Central Sudanic Lese). Villagers are farmers who often hunt, Efe are both foragers and farm laborers. The fact that there are material overlaps between the cultures does not make these cultures overlapping in all ways, or hard to distinguish, or flexible in membership. They are as solidly different as any caste might be.
The rules: Any Villager man and woman can marry. Any Forager man and woman can marry. Any man may have more than one wife.
A Villager woman can never marry a Forager man, but a Forager woman may marry a Villager man.
Often, but by no means always, the Forager woman who marries a Villager man is a second (or maybe even third) wife of that man, in a polygynous marriage.
If a Forager woman marries a Villager man, they live in the village as villagers. The woman takes on the cultural trappings of the village much more than other Forager women do. The children are Villagers. If the woman leaves her husband and goes back to the forest, she can not take the children with her. They remain as villagers.
The women can decide to do this or not. Their decision is usually a matter of personal lifestyle preference. The forest means freedoms not available in the village and you get to go camping all the time, and there are rich cultural traditions that live mainly in the forest, and that is where your family is. In the villages, you get a roof that will hardly ever leak.
One of the effects of this system is that men among the Foragers marry on average quite late owing to the a shortage of women.
In this way, there is a slow and steady gene flow from Forager groups to Villager groups, which led me to propose some years ago the Gene Stealing hypothesis. The relationship I describe here occurs in many different places and times. It seems to occur more often in tropical regions, and it seems to occur virtually all the time where the indigenous group (in this case the Forager) is hypergynous to the invading group (in this case the Villagers, who moved into the area hundreds of years ago).
The invading group is not adapted to local disease to the extent that the indigenous group is. But they can ensure that among their children there will be an elevated rate of such adaptation, by coming up with this pattern. This works much better than just killing off the locals or driving them out. You take their genes but keep them distinct as a locally adapted specialist group.
Indeed, there is evidence that something like this may have happened in the middle east with the Natufian culture, and I’ve wondered about the relationship between Modern Humans and Neanderthals in this regard.
I know, I know, that is a long way from pictures of Hot Russian Babes that may or may not be in the right sidebar.
Or maybe not….
______________________-
1There is a way in which hypergamy, which is widely used much to my annoyance, makes sense: If you have hypergyny and hyperandry, then the two together could be hypergamy, much like polyandry and polygyny are polygamy. But that is not what is going on with these terms.
The Great White Missionary
It was a rare day that I was at the Ngodingodi research station at all … usually I was off in the forest with the Efe Pygmies, up the road excavating an archaeological site. It was also rare that Grinker, my cultural anthropologist colleague, was at the research station. He was spending most of his time in the villages learning language and waiting around for the other shoe to drop (he studied conflict, so on the average day … not much conflict).
But then an even rarer thing happened.
Continue reading The Great White Missionary
Forget the Maginot Line, What About the Beer Line?
Near the end of the earth there are lines one might not cross for fear of falling off.
OK, you won’t really fall off, but you will become scared and lost.
Continue reading Forget the Maginot Line, What About the Beer Line?
More Babbling
Through the filter of time … a repost that may still be interesting to you from two years ago.
Admit it. Once you discovered Alta Vista’s Babel software you did this: You entered a phrase to translate from your native language to some other language, then translated it back again to see what would happen. Or, you translated it through several different languages.
Continue reading More Babbling
Notes from Up North
The first time I ever caught a bowfin (Amia calva)I was shocked and amazed at this fish. It was green …. really green like beyond fresh water fish green …. with a fancy spot on the upper part of the back of its dorsal fin. And it had one impressive dorsal fin. It was whopping big and took a while to land.
Continue reading Notes from Up North
It’s bad enough that all men are rapists. Please don’t be stupid about it as well.
Last week, a very bad thing happened to me, a life changing experience, the kind of thing many people with blogs would tell everyone about, trolling for sympathy and making everyone feel bad. Well, I am certainly not above doing that, but strategically I’ve decided to tell only a few people what is going on, and everyone else … well, I’m going to leave you in a state of wondering. Which, of course, is my own narcissistic way of getting attention.
But really, in the end, my problems are minor compared to those of others. And that is true of everyone and everything I mention in this post, which is why I’ve posted illustrated links to important stories about the overarching topic of discussion. Lest we forget.
I mention all of this misery of my own for a reason: Staring on Monday or Tuesday, I began to slide more and more rapidly toward the edge of an abyss, and on Wednesday at 10:05 AM I was kicked straight into it. I have been floating on air since then. Floating on air like a person who is falling off a very very high cliff to his death. Or, floating on air like a person who is ecstatic and uplifted by his own happiness. I can’t tell yet. But one result of this whole floating thing is total distraction from what has been happening on the blogosphere, mostly in reaction to my initial discussion about rape, related issues, rape switches, and so on. Well, all of the sudden, with the help of my friend Stephanie and my friend Lou (at least, I hope he’s my friend!), I’ve caught up on this discussion and I am now ready to do the following to you depending on who you are:
1) issue you a sincere apology;
2) kick your ass into oblivion;
3) enlighten you about life; or
4) have violent sex with you. Figuratively.
I demand an apology!
First, I want to address a few blogospheric issues. One person whom I consider to be a friend, and another person whom I consider to be some troll who dropped out of nowhere, and a few others, have been waiting for me to apologize for one or both of the following statements:
That all soldiers at war are rapists even if they don’t rape anyone, and/or that Doms as in BSDM are rapists.
Regarding the first demand for an apology: This is a semantic issue and has been from the beginning. I happen to refer to men who’s theoretical rape switch went on as “rapists” even if they had not raped, much like a person who learns how to sweat pipe might be thought of as a “plumber” even if they have not yet … plumbed anything. Technically, what I just said might still be true, or it might not be. Who cares? Clearly, people are sensitive about this and those who have not actually committed rape should probably not be called rapists. I acquiesced to this point at the time, right when the first objection was made.
The rule I’m not following: The “Stand still while I continue to scream at you that you must apologize!” rule.
There are actually two fallacies in effect here: 1) That you (Rystefn, or whomever) have the right to pick a moment in time during an on-going thinking out loud conversation that happens to give you your trollish jollies and insist that this is the only thing that your trollee — your victim — has ever thought or said. No, you don’t get to do that. In fact, if you do that you will get spanked (see below for the spanking). 2) The fallacy of the universal. Both Rystefn and Lou are making this mistake, as are many others in this discussion. I’ll get to that in a moment.
You can’t have your apology, but I am sorry.
So no, guys, you can’t have your apology. We are talking about a serious issue here, and we are knocking around ideas. Nobody is accusing anyone of anything. We are just conversing. If you want to propose terminology or rhetoric, do so. If you want to propose alternative ideas, do so. But do not pick up pieces of mud and make love to them like they were the last piece of mud on the face of the earth. Do not huff and puff and blow my house down especially when it is also your house. In other words, stop acting like you were made entirely of your y-chromsome and nothing else. And, most importantly, begin to understand the fact that this discussion is not about you.
- Trolled
- U.S. Rape Statistics
- When Is a Rapist?
- Why So Silent?
- Words, Pride and Obligation: A Note to Rystefn and Lou
During this time I’ve only read a few of the comments and I entirely skipped reading two of her posts on Almost Diamonds. As I say in the very beginning, I was a bit distracted with my whole life falling apart and shit. So I have reasons for having let my friend down, but I still am very very sorry about that, and for that I apologize. The most important point Stephanie makes is probably that this whole discussion is not about the guys who are slogging around in this argument. I wonder, do any of them know what this is about?
Is there any wonder why most of my best friends are not heteronormative middle class white men?
Almost all of the people I’m close to in this world are women, and I think this is in part because you don’t really get close to men quite often. You get close to their ideas or, more likely, their ideals (such as they are). You share things (like proclivities and preferences) not thoughts and points of view. You do other stuff that guys do, whatever that is. As the present discussion progresses, I increasingly understand why. I compare the comments, both on the blogs and in private emails that are going back and forth, between the women and the men and I see an overwhelming difference, and this is not even counting Stephanie with whom I communicate a lot anyway. And, if we go back to Stephanie’s post on pay rates, and to my very recent quickie about how women are smarter than men, the problem becomes utterly obvious.
Most men have very small dicks and can’t handle it.
It is not the case that I’ve simply agreed with every woman who has voiced a thought in this discussion. In fact, I’m not sure at all that there is a gender bias in how much what I think may be similar to or different from what anyone else thinks. But there is a clear difference based almost entirely on gender in affect and style of effrontery.
(This is also not to say that women are nice and men are mean. If any sort of generalization would apply, that is not it. Perhaps women are smart and men are dumb. Most likely, though, I think most women are more thoughtful about what they are both saying and hearing than are men, who really don’t listen to what others say and who rarely think about what they are about to spew out as much as they should. On average.)
OK, back to some troll related commentary:
We cannot discuss anything substantive until everyone agrees on the meaning of the words we are using
This is the hobgoblin of an unthinking mind, and it is the sort of thing I have never heard a woman commenter or blogger say. I’ve only heard men say it. And no, it is not true. Well, I supposed it depends on what one means by ‘meaning’…
… As you can detect, I’m working off a bit of a laundry list here… and the next items have to to with the science that has been abused in some of this discussion.
Are human universals … universal?
The term Universal in this context is not a term one simply pulls out of one’s ass. It is a term that has been in use by scholars for some time, and there is quite a bit to say about it. What it does NOT mean is this: If there is a “universal” (like the tendency to run away when the tiger looks at you) it is simply not the case that every individual has that behavior or will effect that behavior under a given circumstance.
Deer. Headlight. You know the story. You shine a spotlight or headlights into a deer’s eyes and they freeze. If you have a firearm, and you shoot the deer this way, that is called “jacking” the deer. Easy hunting. (Note: This only works at night.)
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve shined the spotlight into the eye of the deer or the antelope — hundreds of times I’m sure — and I can tell you that sometimes the “universal” behavior happens, and sometimes it does not. I have it from a good source that on one particular reservation here in Minnesota, where the deer are “jacked” on a regular basis, very few of the deer stop in a light. Learning? Natural selection? We don’t know. But it is evidence that the “universal” may be labile.
So, please do not convert the hypothetical assertion that a particular thing like a rape switch is a human trait (which could be called a universal by some) to telling every man that he is a rapist. How stupid of you to think that. You must be a guy. I don’t even “believe” in universals, for fucks sake. And more importantly, learn what a “universal” is. And isn’t.
Proximate vs. Ultimate and Conscious vs Unconscious
People are messing up these concepts all over the place. I’ll be brief: The reason we have sex is to have babies. Period. The way we have sex has nothing to do with having babies. Obviously. Same with power relationships. Same with all of it. You have to separate ultimate explanations from proximate mechanisms if you are going to speak non-stoopidly of behavior.
Same goes for conscious vs. unconscious. In fact, just forget about that. The degree to which a behavior, tendency, switch, repression, all of it is known to the individual exhibiting the behavior is not relevant at all. I assure you that the belief that you know what is going on inside your own head is one of the greatest fallacies you will ever commit. Get over it.
Who put the “D” in BDSM?
This last bit is only for you Doms (as in BDSM). Everyone else kindly go away, because this is not going to be pretty.
I’ve already addressed the issue of whether I want to call Doms rapists. I’ve addressed it a half dozen times, but I’m sure I’ll have to say it again because some of you are just not that smart: I don’t need to call you a rapist. I don’t think that pretending to rape your girlfriend is the same thing as actually raping your girlfriend.
But Dom Rystefn himself (in between bouts of raping his girlfriend and beating his dog, I assume) pointed out that play-rape is to real rape what shooting skeets is to killing people. I love that analogy, and it is exactly what I have been thinking. It is what makes the D in BDSM interesting in the context of the rape conversation.
For myself, I can’t contribute much. I am not B,D,S, or M, and I am not an expert on this, and I’ve not read the literature. I would love to hear what people who do know what they are talking about have to say about this, other than total denial that there are things to learn.
Shooting skeets is a way of shooting pigeons that does not require the pigeon. This saves some trouble and money, and it also separates the shooter from pigeon-killing which may or may not be an issue. Pigeon-shooting is interesting, and has some recent anthropology done on it. The relationship between gun-owing cultures, right wingosity, The Klan and similar groups, pigeon shooting, and the construction of whiteness has been analyzed usefully by a colleague of mine. It is all very interesting.
Similarly, I can imagine that rape simulation can bear light on actual rape. What do I mean by this? What am I implying? Of what awful thing am I accusing you (you, the Doms who are allowed to read this)? Ha! Have you not been paying attention? Would you mind please putting down your dumbifying y-chromosome for a minute and think about how you LOOK when you are foaming at the mouth?
Which brings me to my last point. It suddenly dawned on me earlier today. I had been reading comments by Angry White Male (who is either a total parody or a total ass) and our friend Rystefn and some others, and I had been discussing this very post that you are reading with a friend. The friend said “Just leave out the stuff about the Doms… they won’t handle this well.” And it all came together.
You Dom’s are a bunch of whimp-ass babies. You want someone (who is what we call “willing”) to allow you to dominate them physically and psychologically, and this is how you get off. Or how they get off. But when the issue comes up that your behavior relates to violence you fall apart and get all teary eyed like you were just jumped by the bullies. You make the rules that say everyone else has to leave you alone and while that is happening one person should volunteer for you to pretend you are raping him or her, and when the core of the argument goes a bit over your head or turns out to be something that you didn’t think it was (egg on your face) you focus on spelling and word meaning and other stupid ass shit.
I have a little advice for you. Grow some balls and start paying attention to what you are presenting to the rest of us. Stop trying to control the conversation like you control your lover’s posture and position. Be a man for once. No, wait, don’t be a man! (What am I saying?) Be smarter, more interesting, less dogmatic, and braver.
Be a woman for once!
And remember. This conversation is not about you.
Classic News: The Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal
One fall afternoon … I was summoned to… a windowless room on an upper floor, where men dressed in crisp white garments instructed me to remove all of my clothes. … four-inch metal pins were affixed… to my vertebrae at regular intervals from my neck down. I was positioned against a wall; a floodlight illuminated my pin-spiked profile and a camera captured it. … I’d been told that this “posture photo” was … routine… Those whose pins described … erratic postural curve were required to attend remedial posture classes.
Is there a rape switch?
This question is shorthand for a larger and more nuanced set of questions that has emerged over the last 24 hours here and here as people engage in this very interesting and important discussion about rape, especially wartime rape and related post-apocalyptic rape cultures.
“The switch” is a term I first heard from a student, who wrote a term paper for me on this in 1993. The basic idea of a switch would be supported if more or less randomly (though age biased, likely) selected men, put into a certain situation, tended to commit rape on a much larger scale … or more exactly, a much larger percentage of the men rape under those circumstances … than would ever be predicted based on anything anyone knows about these men before or after the circumstances prevail.
In other words, when all the young men stay home, they are mostly not going to rape anyone. In contrast, when the same exact men go off to war, an alarming percentage of them rape. Switch off, switch on.
In the gentile society in which we imagine ourselves living (at least according to many of the comments on the above cited post) the switch is off, and stays off for most people’s lives. But there are circumstances in which most men’s switch is turned on. The switch being on does not mean that rape will happen. It simply means that the man (with the switch on) is now a rapist, whether he actually rapes or not (but he probably will), and when the switch is off, he is not (so he probably won’t). It is a bit of a metaphor, and a strained one (see comments by commenter Elizabeth) at that.
The evidence for what is often known as “wartime rape” (which the student would simply refer to as the conditions under which the switch is on) is both hard to adduce and overwhelmingly strong. There are a lot of reasons why it is difficult to enumerate rape in wartime. However, people have been thinking and writing about this for a long time, and even collecting some data, and those who are in the business of psychology, sociology, criminology, and behavioral biology who study such things as rape and homicide have largely come to the understanding that rape in wartime is often quite common, that American soldiers in Vietnam represent a middling case (which means it is shocking and disturbing) while Bosnia/Serbia represents a truly over the top example.
But there are many (see comments on the posts cited above) who simply refuse to accept this, mainly for the simple reason that it can’t be so, or if that does not work as the reason, because it is an affront to the men in the military to suggest this. I understand this second point quite well, and some of my best friends are men who were in Vietnam. For the moment, I simply choose to believe that none of the men I happen to know ever raped anybody. They are men that I know would never do that. But as a scientist I have come to accept that it is quite likely that men have something that can be described metaphorically as a rape switch, that those men whom I know are not special, and that while the switch has been off the whole time I’ve known them, it was probably on while they were serving in long term combat rolls in Vietnam. At the moment, I’m not asking any questions.
Would you like some evidence? The evidence is complex, abundant, and cited all over the place. If you are a person who simply does not want to believe this, then I can do little to help you. But if you are a person who wants to insist it is not true, please consider addressing the evidence. I can give you a starting place.
The following quote comes from Gottschall (2004). The sources cited by Gottschall are all included below.
While there are no reliable statistics on wartime rape due to the reporting biases of the opposing sides and the reluctance of victims to come forward, these increases can range from the calculated 300% to 400% increases over American civilian rape rates that accompanied American breakouts in France and Germany toward the end of World War II (Morris, 2000, p. 170) to rates of increase that likely reached into the thousands in the weeks after the Red Army first swept into Berlin and committed between 20,000 and 100,000 rapes (Brownmiller, 1975; Ryan, 1966; Siefert, 1994). Incidentally, these figures represent good examples of the mushiness of wartime rape statistics: The American figures are almost certainly underestimated because they are based solely on rapes reported to authorities, and estimates of the number of Red Army rapes in Berlin climb as high as 1,000,000 (Grossman, 1999, p. 164). A partial list of countries that have been identified as loci of mass rapes conducted by military or paramilitary forces just in the 20th century includes Belgium and Russia during World War I; Russia, Japan, Italy, Korea, China, the Philippines, and Germany during World War II; and in one or more conflicts, Afghanistan, Algeria, Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Burma, Bosnia, Cambodia, Congo, Croatia, Cyprus, East Timor, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Kuwait, Kosovo, Liberia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Peru, Pakistan, Rwanda, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Turkey, Uganda, Vietnam, Zaire, and Zimbabwe.1
1This list is drawn from the following sources: Amnesty International (1997, 1998, 2000); Barstow (2000, p. 3); Brownmiller (1975); Chelela (1998); Ghiglieri (2000, p. 90); Littlewood (1997); Menon (1998); Neier (1998, pp. 172-191); Oosterveld (1998, pp. 64-67); Swiss and Giller (1993); Tanaka (1999, pp. 174-176); Thomas and Regan (1994).
Sources:
Amnesty International. (1997, February 19). Rape, killings and other human rights violations by the security forces. Retrieved March 1, 2003, from http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/engAFR620061997
Amnesty International. (1998, November 23). Democratic Republic of Congo: War against unarmed civilians. Retrieved April 15, 2003, from http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/engAFR620361998
Amnesty International. (2000, June 30). Sierra Leone: Rape and other forms of sexual violence must be stopped. Retrieved April 20, 2003, from http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/2000/15104800.htm
Barstow, A. (2000). Introduction. In A. Barstow (Ed.), War’s dirty secret: Rape, prostitution, and other crimes against women (pp. 1-12). Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press.
Brownmiller, S. (1975). Against our will: Men, women, rape. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Brownmiller, S. (1993, January 4). Making female bodies the battlefield. Newsweek, 37.
Chelala, C. (1998). Algerian abortion controversy highlights rape of war victims. Lancet, 351, 1413-1414.
Ghiglieri, M. P. (2000). The dark side of man: Tracing the origins of male violence. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books.
Gottschall, Jonathan (2004). Explaining wartime rape Journal of sex research, May
Grossman, A. (1999). A question of silence: The rape of German women by Soviet occupation soldiers. In N. Dombrowski (Ed.), Women and war in the twentieth century (pp. 116-137). New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.
Littlewood, R. (1997). Military rape. Anthropology Today, 13, 7 17.
MacKinnon, C. A. (1994b). Turning rape into pornography: Postmodern genocide. In A. Stiglmayer (Ed.), Mass rape: The war against women in Bosnia-Herzegovina (pp. 73-81). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Menon, R. (1998). Borders and bodies: Recovering women in the national interest. In 1. L. Sajor (Ed.), Common grounds: Violence against women in war and armed conflict situations (pp. 301 338). Quezon City, Phillipines: Asian Center for Women’s Human Rights.
Morris, M. (2000). In war and peace: Rape, war, and military culture. In A. Barstow (Ed.), War’s dirty secret: Rape, prostitution, and other crimes against women (pp. 167-203). Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press.
Neier, A. (1998). War crimes: Brutality, genocide, terror, and the struggle for justice. New York: Random House.
Oosterveld, V. (1998). When women are the spoils of war. UNESCO Courier, 51, 64-67.
Ryan, C. (1966). The last battle. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Siefert, R. (1994). War and rape: A preliminary analysis. In A. Stiglmayer (Ed.), Mass rape: The war against women in Bosnia-Herzigovina (pp. 54-72). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Swiss, S., & Giller, J. (1993). Rape as a crime of war: A medical perspective. JAMA, 270, 612-615.
Tanaka, Y. (1999). Introduction. In M. R. Henson (Ed.), Comfort woman: A Filipina’s story of prostitution and slavery under the Japanese military (pp. vii-xxi). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Thomas, D., & Regan, R. (1994). Rape in war: Challenging the tradition of impunity. SAIS Review, 14, 81-99.
A rape in progress, Part II
Expanding on the discussion from here …
In the paper Anthropology’s “Fierce” Yanomami: Narratives of Sexual Politics in the Amazon, Sharon Tiffany and Kathleen Adams provide the following opening passage:
Imagine a society in which one woman in every three is raped, usually by a man she knows, consider the consequences of living in a society where one third of all women are beaten during pregnancy and 35 percent of women using emergency medical facilities are battered . Since wee are anthropologists, readers may mistakenly think that these appalling data were collected in an exotic society, an distant world where it is presumed that unpredictable and threatening behavior is commonplaces. Indeed, our friends and colleagues inevitably ask if it is safe for us to travel alone to remote and problematic places which presumably do not enjoy the law and order of civilization.
The statistics above come, of course, from American medical data.
The reason I bring this up at all, and leave you somewhat hanging (you should read the entire article) is because I am concerned that the reaction to the present discussion on rape, which focuses on Africa at the moment, will be to sit from a position of cultural and economic privilege and fail to see that this is a human problem, not a third world “Bungabungaland” problem. My comments about Vietnam, which come from Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape
War is a different place, a different landscape in every sense of the word.
I quickly note that this need not be the case. One can kill and pillage and not rape, as has been documented for certain armies in the past. I would not assume that the pattern seen in the jungles of Vietnam, the trenches of France in WW I, at Anzio or in Iraq are at all the same, and there is probably as much variation among western armies and occupation forces as there is among African, Asian or any other region, and there is certainly a great deal of variation across historical time as well.
We could train our armies to rape less. Or, we could seek non military solutions to our problems and avoid the whole problem to begin with. But we (Westerners) can’t do that alone. We need to change the way most of the world words economically, socially, and politically.
So get working on that, won’t you?
Tiffany, Sharon W., & Adams, Kathleen J. (1994). Anthropology’s ‘Fierce’ Yanomami: Narratives of Sexual Politics in the Amazon NWSA Journal, 6 (2)
Oldest Evidence of Leprosy Found in India
It is funny how people play with history. If we talk about an important “first” that is viewed in a positive light … the origin of beer for instance … the slightest evidence will be used by the people of a given region to claim primacy. Also, since Africa almost always gets the shaft in this regard, all else being equal, an early African occurrence of something good will be assumed as not definitive, but vague evidence of the non-African first occurrence will be taken more seriously. Seriously.
Now, we have an important finding with the opposite effect: Whence did Leprosy first come? For some time, the main contenders have been South Asia and East Africa for (although that is based on a fairly weak argument). Now there is evidence of the earliest Leprosy being form South Asia. That in and of itself is interesting and the paper just out moments ago in PLoS is important. But what I fund funny (not in the “ha ha” funny way exactly) is that despite the recent shoring up of the Asian Origin model for Leprosy, the concususion seems to be that all that is lacking to support the African Origin for this desease … being treated here as though it was a leper … is, well, actual evidence. And in the absence of evidence, we’ll just pick the African Origin.
But never mind that. I’ll jump back on my high horse regarding the Anti-African Bias later. For now, let’s look at the evidence being reported in this new paper.
Leprosy is caused by Mycobacterium leprae and is one of those diseases that paleopathologists really love because it produces traces visible on bone. Leprosy is found in armadillos and can be induced in some rodents and primates, and occurs naturally (or so it is thought) in Cercocebus atys, so there are reasonable animal models (for the bone traces) and it has been around long enough that it is probably safe to say that we more or less know it when we see it. (N.B.: The paper at hand does not recognize the Mangabey connection, which is either a lack on the part of the authors or on my part, so let’s leave this connection as subject to revision.) You know of leprosy because of its significant social stigma and all the cultural trappings that go a long with that unnecessary and ethically questionable approach to this disease. Likely, that social stigma relates to the appearance of leprosy in the written record, where previously it was well documented and accepted by historians back to about 2,600 years ago. The present find seems to allow the interpretation of writing in the Sanskrit Atharva Veda as being about leprosy instead of some other disease.
It had previously been reported that Mycobacterium originated in Africa during the Late Pleistocene and spreading elsewhere after 40,000 b.p. At the same time, it was suggested that the same genetic analysis evinced a Late Holocene origin of the disease in. The present paper reports the observation of leprosy in skeletal material from around 2000 B.C. in Rajasthan, India, at the site of Balathal. Balathal was a large agrarian settlement peripheral to the Harappan (Indus) Civilization.
From a press release for this paper:
The presence of leprosy in India toward the end of this period indicates that M. leprae existed in South Asia at least 4000 years ago. This suggests that there may be some validity to Pinhasi and colleagues hypothesis that the disease spread between Africa and Asia during a period of incipient urbanization, increasing population density, and regular inter-continental trade networks. Dr. Robbins is currently attempting to recover ancient DNA from the skeleton to determine if the strain of M. leprae infecting the individual from Balathal is similar to strains common in Africa, Asia and Europe today. If it is successful, this work could shed additional light on the origin and transmission routes of this disease.
The presence of leprosy at Balathal 4000 years ago also supports translations of the Eber’s papyrus in Egypt and a Sanskrit text in India (the Atharva Veda) that refer to the disease as early as 1550 B.C. The Atharva Veda is a set of Sanskrit hymns devoted to describing health problems, their causes and treatments available in ancient India. Translations of leprosy have been questioned because it is difficult to perform a differential diagnosis on descriptions in such ancient texts particularly since diagnosis was not why the conditions were being described. The evidence from Balathal indicates that it is possible that the authors were describing leprosy as the disease was present in the subcontinent in prehistoric times.
It is possible that there are alternative interpretations of the bone evidence used to infer leprosy, but future DNA study may rule those alternatives out. At the moment, however, it is a reasonable interpretation given the fairly blatant way in which leprosy is manifest in human bones.
Ida the Fossil Primate
You probably know that there is a new primate fossil, nicknamed “Ida,” and that there is quite a buzz about it.
Ida comes from fossil deposits in Germany, and was originally excavated in two different parts by private collectors, and only recently rejoined and recognized for the amazing fossil it is. This is considered to be a new genus, and is named Darwinius masillae
Ida is a 47 million year old adapid primate of outstanding, unprecedented state of preservation that seems to have some very interesting and possibly unexpected features that could shed light on the evolutionary relationships among the extinct primates. But before we get to that, we need to cover some background on primates, extinct and otherwise.
The first thing you need to know is that order of living primates can be divided into two groups: the suborders Strepsirrhini and the Haplorrhini.
Strepsirrhini includes the lemurs of Madagascar, and the lorises, pottos and galagos of Africa and Asia. In other words, Strepsirrhini are the Prosimians, more or less.
The Haplorrhini include the old world monkeys and the new world monkeys, and the apes, as well as this one strange group called the Tarsiers (which used to be in the Prosimians, which has caused some confusion.) The Haplorrhini are the “Anthropoid primates,” more or less.
Based on morphology and DNA and so on, it is believed that these two groups diverged from one another perhaps as far back as 80 million years ago (Murphy et al 2009). Subsequent to that time, the different smaller groups of primates (old world vs. new world monkeys, for instance) diversified.
Now, here is a basic problem that plagues primate evolutionary research. If you look at all the features that make a primate a primate (as opposed, say, to a tree shrew or some other mammal) using only living species, you get a workable set of features. If you take standard lemurs and, say, Old World Monkeys and you make a set of distinctions between those two groups, you get a reasonable set of criteria to distinguish among them. But, when you either add in Tarsiers (or some other primate groups) or start looking at fossils that are tens of millions of years old, it starts to get tricky. It becomes difficult to distinguish between convergence and common ancestry for certain traits. In other words, it is hard to tell if two traits are the same in two groups because the common ancestor of those groups had the trait and the specimens you are looking at both inherited this, or if the two lineages independently evolved the same trait.
“How likely is that to happen?” you may be asking yourself. Answer: Under some conditions, very very unlikely. Under other conditions, very likely. Let me explain.
Imagine we wanted to do a phylogeny of sedans. Once a line of car develops a square-back or pickup design, we eliminate it from our analysis. Sedans only. At the same time, some other research team is analyzing “powered vehicles” …. things that go with engines. This would include cars, trucks, boats, trains, and space ships. Even though both lineages may have been around for about the same amount of time, the sedan lineage would be much more prone to convergence because all sedans are almost exactly the same length, width, and height, have almost exactly the same number of seats, the same method for driving (like, auto vs. one stick) and so on, compared to the vehicles in the second study. The comparisons across vehicles that can carry nine tons of gravel, vehicles that can go under water, and vehicles that can fly are going to result in only the most trivial and easily exposed convergences.
Same with primates. At many important levels, all primates are the same. Compared to carnivores, all primates have almost the same pattern of teeth … there are very few variants on tooth pattern among all the primates that exist today, but many many variants for the carnivores. Even body size is fairly restricted for primates. Yes, there are a few whopping big ones, but compared to the elephants or the hyracoidea, not so much. With only a few exceptions, primates live in moist to wet heavily vegetated environments. Compare this to antelope, who have water-dependent and water-independent species. And so on.
Perhaps because of this limited range of variation, or perhaps causing this limiting range, is the simple fact that morpholgically all primates are primitive. So there is not some group of primates where the radius and ulna are fused, and a different group where they are not. All primates have unfused radius and ulna. There are not primates with vs. without some kind of grasping hand (I simplify slightly here). All primates have the same number of fingers and toes. In comparison, for instance, carnivores have varying numbers of toes and different patterns of bone fusions among them.
So that is the background. If you are going to look at ancient fossils, you’ve got a very conservative set of lineages so a) you’ll always recognize a primate, quite easily, when you see one and b) convergence will haunt you for your entire life if you are a paleo-primatologist.
For various reasons, especially the item noted above about the moist heavily vegetated habitats, but also the sparseness on the landscape and lightly built skeletons, primates make lousy fossils. There are very few places in the world where we have primate fossils, and they are much restricted in geographical space and time range. In short, the primate fossil record sucks. The primate fossil record is mostly teeth, and the teeth look all the same. All the work I’ve done in the primate fossil record has been in the Miocene, and that is not so bad. There are better conditions: You get some real fossils, even postcranial (body) bones, sometimes. But the pre-Miocene record is really scary.
Paleontologically, primates are anatomically ambiguous ghosts.
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Within the fossil record, there are probably four or five sets of fossils that represent groups different from living primates, but most “crown” fossils can be placed into two major groups: The adapids and the omomyids. If either of these two groups could be linked to later, living primates, this would have to be done using a number of physical characteristics of the bone … there is not much chance of finding ancient DNA in these very old fossils.
This part of the fossil primate record includes the Adapoidea, including the widespread Adapids and some other fossil groups, but no living forms, and the Tarsioidea, which includes the fossil Omomyids, some other fossil forms, and the living Tarsius. The Adapids and Omomyids date mainly to the Eocene about 55 to 34 million years ago. Note that this is well after the Haplorrhini-Strepsirrhini split. Over the years, various groups of primatologists have attempted to link either of these groups to the major living groups of primates.
One subgroup of the Adapoidea is the Cercamoniinae, identified in the 1970s by one of the present paper’s authors, Philip Gingerich. This group exhibits a few traits that seem to link it with the living Haplorrhini (monkeys and apes). For example modern monkeys often have a premolar that is shaped a certain way to “hone” the canine. This is a bit unusual, and is a marker for this kind of modern primate. Something that looks like such a tooth appears, more or less, among the Cercamoniinae. This sort of connection (and other factors) has led some (Gingerich included) to link the Adapoidea in general to the modern anthropoid primates (monkeys and apes). Others disagree.
The fossil being reported now, Ida, is grouped by the authors into the Cercamoniinae. If that phylogenetic conclusion ends up being verified by further study, this excellent, well preserved fossil will be an important touchstone in interpreting early anthropoid (non-lemur) primate evolution and behavioral ecology.
The phylogenetic argument that is being made in this paper is admittedly preliminary (more work is promised on this) but so far it is very tricky and is likely to remain tricky. The structure of the prior arguments that links either of the two main fossil groups to either of the two main living groups has always been tenuous. The reason for this, as I’ve alluded to above, is that those two fossil groups fall about half way in time between the present and the original split of these groups, and there are not enough fossils between 80 and 55 million years ago to understand the details of that early split. Then, there are not enough fossils from about 34 million years ago to recent times to understand this later period during which the modern forms arose. While more work will be done on the phylogenetic relationships, considering that the contemporary fossils …. the old fossils roughly of the same age as “Ida” … are mostly teeth, and tens of millions of years separates Ida from the modern forms, I do not expect much more in the way of a resolution until more fossils like Ida, but of different species, are found.
Getting away from phylogeny, let’s have a look at other aspects of this fossil. This is a remarkably well preserved specimen. The animal probably died from volcanic gas (like C02) and fell into the water, and was slowly buried in fine sediment. Once encapsulated, the body began to rot, and the slime layer that started out as the animals’ flesh, skin, and fur approximated the outer surface of the body and was preserved in the fine sediment as well. The sediments in which this fossil is preserved are compressed, so the entire skeleton is uniformly crushed, slightly, but everywhere, affecting every bone. In order to visualize and measure the specimen, fancy 3D imaging and image processing techniques were applied.
The animal was a juvenile female and weighted between 385 and 580 grams, and would have grown up to be about 660 grams by one estimate, or a whopping 1600 or 1700 grams by another estimate. Since the larger estimate is based on molar size, which in turn can be secondarily influenced by adaptations to diet, I’d go with the lower estimate. Indeed, using the brute force method of holding the fossil up to full scale pictures of living primates to find one that matches, the estimated adult body size is about 845 to 892 grams.
The contents of the digestive track were preserved (that is extraordinary) and include leaves and fruit. There are no insect remains in the gut.
You are going to hear more about this fossil, as more analysis is done. I have two meta-remarks to make about this finding. First, there was a lot of hype about how this fossil is a “missing link” and so on and so forth. That was overdone. But equally overdone is the reaction to the hype. Almost every blog post or other secondary report I’ve seen on this has talked almost as much … or more … about the hype than about the fossil. Second, please note that this find was reported in PLoS ONE, an open access on line journal. This means that you can see the report yourself, look at all the cool pictures, and try if you must to slog through the highly technical text. This is big for Open Access publishing.
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Franzen, J., Gingerich, P., Habersetzer, J., Hurum, J., von Koenigswald, W., & Smith, B. (2009). Complete Primate Skeleton from the Middle Eocene of Messel in Germany: Morphology and Paleobiology PLoS ONE, 4 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0005723
Murphy, W., Pringle, T., Crider, T., Springer, M., & Miller, W. (2007). Using genomic data to unravel the root of the placental mammal phylogeny Genome Research, 17 (4), 413-421 DOI: 10.1101/gr.5918807
There is a LOT of blogospheric and media coverage on this find. I was going to provide a list of links and then realized that there is only one good way to do this … I’m sending you here, to A Blog Around the Clock. Bora has every single link.
All of the images used above come from the original on line article.
Suburbs, Jesus and Teh Gay: Unliving the American Dream
Every place is different, and some places are more different than others.
… So we’re channel surfing and working at the same time … Amanda is working on her Transitive Phosphorescent Anisotopy or whatever the heck it is she’s working on, and I’m messing around with making networks work, and Super Nanny comes on. They’re in Boston and they’re bowling, and Amanda looks up and goes “What the f*ck kind of bowling is that?”
Continue reading Suburbs, Jesus and Teh Gay: Unliving the American Dream
Knowing More Languages = Good
American politicians, some parents, and a few others have previously expressed the concern that learning more than one language muddles the mind. This is, of course, absurd, and it is hard to believe why anyone really thought this. In fact, it could be said that having more than one language under your belt makes it easier to learn yet another language, a demand Americans often place on foreigners or immigrants to the US which is less often placed on the Americans (see this discussion).
Now, to support the idea that having more languages is good for the mind is being demonstrated at the Language Acquisition Lab at Cornell. According to Barbara Lust, “Cognitive advantages follow from becoming bilingual… These cognitive advantages can contribute to a child’s future academic success.”
There is a press report providing some of the lab’s results here.