Under the present circumstances, it is clear that I now have to tell my one Welsh Corgi story. This is about a corgi named Dillon.
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Tag Archives: Anthropology
How to get your Anthropology Thesis published in two steps
First, write a reasonably good thesis. Write a brilliant one if you can manage. Then….
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Ancient Documents On Line
The World Digital Library has released the first in a new set of ancient documents. I’m very excited that this includes quite a bit of Sumerian material, because that is what I’ve been reading lately.
How I learned to stop worrying and love the city. Three times.
This is a sister post to: The Black Forest Inn: Anarchists 2, Scientists 1
Lizzie had said in her email, “Let’s meet at the Black Forest Inn. I think you told me you’d never been there. It’s a place you might like.”
How nice of Lizzie to suggest a new place for me to enjoy. Of course, I had been there many times, most recently for the Science Blogs Millionth Comment Party–so it had been a while. But there was a time when I lived around the corner and came here much more often. So when I met up with Lizzie that night, and we were sitting at the bar in the Black Forest eating our hearty Germanic food, I reminisced a bit….
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When Do Immigrants Learn English? Likely, not when you think.
A timely repost, given the discussion going on here.
Almost every restaurant on Hanover street and the dozen side streets is like Luigi’s: owned by a family from a particular part of Italy or Sicily, with a local cuisine variant, and for the most part, run by the third generation in the family that originally immigrated to Boston’s North End.
I notice the door man take a quick glance up the street and subtly drop his smoke out of sight next to the stairs. He steps half way onto the sidewalk. Sure enough, Baronelli himself is coming down Hanover, walking his dog … a tiny frenetic brown thing … leash in one hand and an unlit cigar in the other. He’s actually wearing a white ascot to complement his thousand dollar Italian three-piece and light brown cape.
As Baronelli, the walking movie prop and Mafia chief, walks by, the door man address him in Italian, and Baronelli grunts back … but I think the grunt may have been in Italian as well.
This is 1981, and everybody in this neighborhood speaks Italian, because they are Italian. Second and third generation, yes, but Italian is the language of the home and the workplace. This is a neighborhood with zero unemployment, zero unorganized crime, and that serves the city in which it is ensconced as a major international tourist destination. And it is pretty much true that the Italian immigrants that moved to this neighborhood starting more than a century ago are still working on the English Only thing.
Continue reading When Do Immigrants Learn English? Likely, not when you think.
Music, the kinda universal langauge
One afternoon I was sitting by the hearth writing notes on the morning’s data collection, and a cassette player was running nearby. The Beatles White Album was on. Happiness is a Warm Gun was playing.
Lengotu, an Efe man I had been working with, who had made the claim to be a rain shaman (which in the case of the Rain Forest, meant someone who could stop the rain from being so severe) came over to me and said “You have to turn off that song.”
“Why?” I said. Then, right after I said that I took in the look on his face. He was clearly disturbed. Without saying another word, I walked over to the cassette player and hit the Stop button.
I never got an explanation that I could understand as to what was so disturbing about this music. The consensus was uniform among the Efe Pygmy men in the camp that day. This music was going to cause something bad to happen. In a society where most music arrives on the cultural scene in an act of ritual and magic, although it is enjoyed on a daily basis for is entertainment value as much as anything else, I was not surprised that some music would come along and have an unexpected impact. The music I had with me … not because I had brought it (I had brought none) but because other researchers more nervous about leaving behind their western ways had carted out there, consisted of Joan Armatrade, The Police, Dire Straits, and the Beatle’s White Album. It was the White Album that, apparently, had the extra mojo. And we didn’t hava to play it backwards to get that effect, which is the usual way in the United States.
Anyway, I was reminded of this event when I read this post by Dave Munger: Even isolated cultures understand emotions conveyed by Western music.
The Mafa people, who live in the far north of Cameroon in the Mandara mountains, are one of the most culturally isolated groups in the world. Since many of their settlements lack electricity, there are some individuals who have never been exposed to western movies, art, or music.
But the Mafa do have their own musical tradition….
The Mafa are not nearly as isolated as the Efe were at the time I was in the Ituri, and the musical tradition of the Efe is to the western ear even more non-western than the Mafa example Dave gives. But the instruments are similar, and my own guess is that most of the time similar emotions would be conveyed across these diverse cultures.
And then there is the occasional magic song.
Four Stone Hearth: The Blog Carnival …
… is here, at Quiche Moraine. Please go and visit this blog carnival, then visit all the sites pointed to by the blog carnival, read them, submit them all to social networking sites, enter them in blogspheric contests, and so on and so forth. Because that’s how we do things in The Blogosphere .
I’ll check back with you later.
Fieldwork And The Child
The other day Julia and I were driving somewhere (I had the con) and The Sphynx came up. The reason it came up is not important, but as we were talking, it occurred to ask me ask, “…hey, have you been to Egypt?”
“No,” she said. And after a moment, “Have you?”
I thought for moment and said “No.”
“Hmm,” she said, “I thought maybe you had. Maybe that was Ethiopia I was thinking of.”
“Not officially.” And we dropped it there.
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Palaeowomaen: Barbara Isaac, Women in The Field, and The Throwing Hypothesis
The question of diversity in science, and more specifically, success for women, is often discussed in relation to bench or lab oriented fields. If you read the blogs that cover this sort of topic, they are very often written by bench scientists, for bench scientists, and about bench scientists. Which makes sense because most scientists probably are bench scientists.
Here I want to do two separate but related things. I want to discuss certain aspects of the nature of fieldwork in my area in the 20th century that have had a strong effect on the way women have pursued their careers (or not). Although I characterize this as the situation of the 20th century, this does not mean that the situation has or has not changed substantially since then. Simply put, I’m not discussing the current career related situaton for women in field paleoanthropology here in this post.
The second thing I want to do is to talk about a successful female social scientist with a strong connection to fieldwork in palaeoanthropology, as well as theoretical and administrative contributions. This person is also someone who straddles the boundary between classic mid- to late-Twentieth Century patterns of professional activity (in these field sciences) and more recent patterns. I’m speaking here of Barbara Isaac.
The link between these two topics is a bit tenuous but it is also meaningful. There is nothing stereotypical about Barbara Isaac’s career, and there is nothing short of admirable about her as a person and a scholar. My intention here is to not make strong links between these two parallel topics.
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The Identification of the Two “Missing” Romanov Children Using DNA Analysis
I first became acquainted with the Romanovs (as historical figures, not the actual Romanovs) reading in middle school about Russian History. Later, someone turned me on to Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra
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Evolution of the Lexicon
I recently posted about the work by Pagel and colleagues regarding ancient lexicons. That work, recently revived in the press for whatever reasons such things happen, is the same project reported a while back in Nature. And, as I recall, I read that paper and promised to blog about it but did not get to it. Yet.
So here we go.
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Dawkins…. On Purpose
Dawkins gave a talk that could be criticized as not particularly new, in that his main idea is that human brains are too powerful and adaptable to continue to function primarily within an adaptive program serving as a proper adaptive organ. Instead, human brains think up all sorts of other, rather non-Darwinian things to do. This idea has been explored and talked about in many ways by many people. Kurt Vonegut Jr.’s character in Galapagos repeatedly, in a state of lament, quips “Thanks, Big Brain…” as evidence accumulates that our inevitable march towards extinction is primarily a function of that particular organ’s activities. People have talked about the brain as the outcome of runaway sexual selection. Evolutionary psychologists have talked about the evolution of strong preferences and desires, which in turn play out i a rather Frankensteinian fashion in a world where those desires can be met with ease instead of hard work and much time. Thus, we have evolved a yearning for rare nutrients such as salt and fat, and then we invented the ability to have unlimited access to salt and fat. So now, in a ‘civilized world’, it is the salt and fat that kills us incited of the predator or the con-specific competitor over access to some food or some sexual opportunity. (Thanks, Big Brain….)
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“Who you two? I five … “
And with this, a five year old catapulted back in time, say 10,000 years in West Asia or Southern Europe, encountering two people, would make perfectly intelligible sentence that wold be understood by all. Assuming all the people who were listening were at least reasonably savvy about language and a little patient. This is because a handful of words, including Who, You, Two, Five, Three and I exist across a range of languages as close cognates, and can be reconstructed as similar ancestral utterances in ancestral languages.
It’s like an elephant and a mammoth meeting up in the Twilight Zone. Close enough to know there is a similarity, yet different enough to be a bit freaky.
This is from the work of Mark Pagel, of Reading (England) and his team. And it isn’t quite as simple as I’ve characterized it above. As Pagel told me in a recent interview, “… when I say ‘I’ or ‘two’ are very old, I mean that they derive from cognate (homologous) sounds . Every speaker of every Indo European language uses a homologous form of ‘two’ such as ‘dos,’ ‘due,’ ‘dou,’ ‘do,’ etc. It is an amazing thought because there are billions of Indo European speakers and hundreds of thousands of ‘language-years’ of speaking across all the unique branches of the phylogeny of these languages. In all that time ‘two’ has remained cognate. Cognate does not mean identical … it is a bit like my hand being homologous but not identical to that of a gorilla.”
Pagel acknowledges that may linguists are ‘upset’ with the assertion that there are numerous cognates that share a common ancestor …. which is also a cognate … that must be over 10,000 years old. But he indicates that this dislike for the proposed reconstruction is more of a misunderstanding of this concept of homology than anything else.
Akiko’s Perfect Gift
Only one person on the crew spoke English, and this was the same person, a young woman named Akiko, who called herself a “production assistant,” with whom I’d been in communication to arrange this whole thing, over the last many months.
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Male vs. Female Brains
The male and female human brains are different. Some of the better documented differences are similar to differences seen in other mammals. They are hard to find, very small, and may or may not be of great significance. Obviously, some are very important because they probably relate to such things as the ability … or lack thereof … to bear offspring. But this is hardly ever considered in the parodies we see of these differences.
[Repost from Gregladen.com]
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