The Chicago Blog: Anthropology Archives

A Knight and Marshall, both: New honors for Sahlins

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Marshall Sahlins—globally renowned ethnographer, Polynesian historian, and the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology (Emeritus) at the University of Chicago—has had quite a series of weeks.

First came notice from the French Ministry of Culture, helmed by Frédéric Mitterand: Sahlins has been named a Chevalier des Arts et des Letters (Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters), an honorary position that commends artists, scholars, and others who have contributed "to the enrichment of French culture."

In addition, Sahlins is set to receive not one—but, two—honorary doctorates, from the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics.

In addition, the Sorbonne will host a daylong conference on Monday, November 14, 2011, in celebration of Sahlins and his work, featuring contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers from around the world.

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The author of numerous books (an assortment of which have been translated into French,
including The Western Illusion of Human Nature), Sahlins is also the executive publisher of Prickly Paradigm Press. Among those books of Sahlins published by the University of Chicago Press are Culture and Practical Reason, winner of the Gordon J. Laing Prize; How Natives "Think": About Captain Cook, For Example; Islands of History; Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa; and the two-volume Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii (coauthored with Patrick V. Kirch).

Sahlins personal ties to France are notable—in the late 1960s, he experienced the May 1968 student protests firsthand, while studying with anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss at his Laboratoire at the College de France. Later, Sahlins returned as the sole American participant in the ceremonies celebrating Lévi-Strauss's 100th birthday in 2009.

Quipped Sahlins in acknowledgement of the honors:

"I think I am the Jerry Lewis of French anthropology. The French love me, and the Americans can't understand why."

Photo by Alan Thomas

Archived in Anthropology | Awards | Books for the News
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Remembering Fernando Coronil

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Fernando Coronil, distinguished professor of anthropology and Latin American studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, passed away last week after a hard-fought battle with lung cancer. Numerous colleagues have remembered the committed internationalist and critic of globocentrism, noting his capacious intellect, incisive scholarship, and passion for teaching, while still others have mourned the passing of a beloved mentor and friend. We remember Coronil as the author of The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela, which examined key twentieth-century transformations in the nation's polity, culture, and economy, recasting theories of development and highlighting the relevance of these processes for other postcolonial nations. Below follows a more personal tribute from our own executive editor David Brent, who worked intimately with Coronil on The Magical State, and who offers a few good words on Coronil's remarkable life:

A Tribute to the late Fernando Coronil (1944-2011)
As anyone knows who has read Fernando Coronil's The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela, or even just the endorsements of it on the back cover of the paperback edition, it is an exceptionally significant work not only for Latin American studies or anthropology in general but for all the other social sciences. It has also been a highly successful book for the Press in terms of its critical reception and its sales. After nearly 15 years in print, it is still being adopted for many courses both in the United States and abroad.

Fernando was a wonderful but sometimes slightly frustrating author to work with. I first met him sometime in the early '80s when he was already a rather senior graduate student at the University of Chicago. I found him to be a most impressive, charismatic, and warm person; just shaking his hand made me feel special and alive. At the urging of several faculty members, we discussed the possibility of publishing a revised version of his 1987 doctoral thesis The Black El Dorado: Money Fetishism, Democracy, and Capitalism in Venezuela. After reviewing at least two redactions of the thesis, the Press offered him an advance contract for The Magical State in February 1991. The contractual delivery date for the final manuscript was originally March 1992 but when it became clear that that was unrealistic it was revised to what turned out to be the equally unrealistic date of September 1992.

Fernando and family were of course already ensconced at the University of Michigan and he had many new and exciting projects to work on (including building the History and Anthropology Program there), students to supervise, and numerous other publications. Each time we met in person—which was at least once a year at a conference or a party—Fernando would beg my patience and even forgiveness for his tardiness; I remained supportive and enthusiastic, not out of politeness, but because I sincerely wanted him to finish his book and to publish it! In retrospect, I must say that his excuses for repeatedly missing deadlines were never tiresome and even after over four years of waiting I never lost confidence in him or the book.

When one day in early 1996 Fernando showed up at my office in Chicago and handed me the final manuscript it was a bright day indeed. There were a few complications regarding permissions and illustrations, but as I recall we managed to solve them without great difficulty and the book was finally published in September 1997.

Fernando and I remained friends all these years and we warmly embraced every time we met for drinks or a meal. We also discussed many possible future book projects but it was discussing ideas with him and simply being in his presence that thrilled me the most. I will sorely miss this remarkable man and scholar.

David Brent, Chicago, 25 August 2011

Archived in Anthropology | Commentary
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Chungking Express at the Center of the World

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The tale told in Wong Kar-Wai's 1994 film Chungking Express isn't particularly straightforward. In between the stop-motion jumps and alternative shots, the flick tells two stories: a cop with a jones for a lost love buys tins of pineapple that are due to expire the same day as his affection, while another cop. . . . Well, there's some mirroring with postdated boarding passes and a girl named Faye and California, the restaurant and the place and that kind of Dreamin' from the Mamas and the Papas song, and . . . uh, flight attendants and cousins . . . and. . . . Suffice to say it's perfectly complicated. The title of the film in Chinese literally translates to "Chungking Jungle," which refers to both its dense urban landscape and the Chungking Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong, where much of the movie's first sequence is set. Like the film, the Chungking Mansions offer an idiosyncratic slice of life in our transnational capitalist society.

Curry shops, African record stands, clothing stalls, sari tailors, Nigerian exporters, Sub-Saharan internet cafes, Lahore Fast Food, barbershops, Bollywood video kiosks, guestrooms inhabited by 120 distinct nationalities (on any given day), porno stands, and even Indian whiskey distributors fight for turf among a 17-story tower block. But as a recent Wall Street Journal review of anthropologist Gordon Mathew's Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong points out, the notoriously shabby tenement is engaged in a culture as much about low-end globalism as it is about cheap sleep and squalid stories.

Visitors go to Chungking Mansions to buy consumer and trade goods that have been manufactured in mainland China, bringing them back to their home countries for resale at a higher price. The goods are bought from middlemen who work from one of the more than 100 tiny storefronts and stalls on the lower floors of the building. Some traders transport their goods home by pooling money and renting shipping containers, but many simply fill their luggage with wares.

In the production notes for Chungking Express, Kar-Wai speaks to his desire to use the Mansions as part of his set:

It is a legendary place where the relations between people are very complicated. It has always fascinated and intrigued me. It is also a permanent hotspot for the cops in Hong Kong because of the illegal traffic that takes place there. That mass-populated and hyperactive place is a great metaphor for the town herself.

The WSJ goes on to commend Ghetto at the Center of the World as "a first rate business book," and closes its review with a quote that further articulates the Mansions as a microcosm of capitalism's soft underbelly:

Mathews adds: "As a Pakistani said to me vis-à-vis Indians, 'I do not like them; they are not my friends. But I am here to make money, as they are here to make money. We cannot afford to fight.'"

Whither the West? You'll have to watch the movie to find out whether or not the cop(s) get(s) the girl(s).

Chimpanzees Do Not Make Good Pets

Most pets in the US either bark or meow—Americans own more than seventy-seven million dogs and ninety-three million cats. But how many chimpanzees are kept at home as pets? It's a question that, until now, had no easy answer. But thanks to the pioneering work of Lincoln Park Zoo scientist Steve Ross, we now have a figure: about 113. And, if Ross, has his way, that number will dwindle to zero.

Today's Chicago Tribune reports on Ross's mission to change the way people view these primates and their (un)suitability as pets. His organization, Project ChimpCARE, hopes "to locate every chimpanzee in North America and assess its level of care."

For Ross, the ChimpCARE project is about protecting chimps and people from a dangerous public misperception that chimps are safe, people-friendly animals, which makes him opposed in particular to using chimps as actors. Chimps seen on screen are babies or prepubescent youngsters, never adults, Ross said. When they reach puberty, they become dangerously unpredictable and aggressive, a tendency that resulted in tragedy last year when one retired chimp attacked and severely injured a woman in Connecticut.

And Ross should know a thing of two about chimpanzees. After all, he coedited our new volume, The Mind of the Chimpanzee: Ecological and Experimental Perspectives, which brings together scores of prominent scientists from around the world to share the most recent research into what goes on inside the mind of our closest living relative.

Read more about former entertainment industry chimpanzees he's placed in facilities better suited to their needs and nature. And check out how you can help find chimpanzees better homes.

Gina A. Ulysse on Human Rights, Haiti, and Wyclef

Since long before the devastating earthquake that shook Haitian civilization to its core and turned the world's attention toward the embattled nation, Wesleyan anthropoligist, author, and Haitian native, Gina A. Ulysse has been busy offering Western academics critical insight into the tragedies and triumphs of Caribbean culture and society.

In 2007 the Press published her Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica—a fascinating look inside the lives of entrepreneurial women who travel abroad to import and export consumer goods sold in the public markets of Kingston, Jamaica. Now, with Haiti still in ruins, and the upcoming elections the focus of yet more concern as the candidacies of several pop-stars—including Wyclef, formerly of Fugees fame—may threaten to make a travesty of what could be a rather important turning point for the country, Ulysse has continued to engage the issues in real-time with a number of articles for the Huffington Post, and blog posts for the Ms. Magazine blog.

Click through the links above to read some of her most recent articles, or find out more about her book.

Archived in Anthropology | Black Studies | Books for the News
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Climate change and human evolution

NPR's Morning Edition recently aired an interesting piece that investigates the next big trend amongst evolutionary scientists to explore how climate change has effected human evolution—a project recently endorsed by a panel of experts from National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.

In the piece reporter Christopher Joyce talks with several experts on the subject including Smithsonian Anthropologist Rick Potts, curator of a recent exhibit titled "What Does It Mean to Be Human?" The exhibit offers climate change as perhaps the most important factor influencing evolution, especially the evolution of the genus homo over the last 2.5 million years or so.

Anticipating this trend in the evolutionary sciences by nearly a decade, William H. Calvin's 2002 A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change offers one of the most thorough explorations of the topic, taking readers around the globe and back in time to demonstrate how climatic cycles of cool, crash, and burn, provided the impetus for enormous increases in the intelligence and complexity of human beings. And with the recent warnings of more climatic catastrophe to come, Calvin's book not only offers a look at our evolutionary past, but perhaps at our future as well.

Navigate to the NPR website to listen to the show, or read an excerpt from A Brain for All Seasons.

Archived in Anthropology | Biology | Books for the News
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A Haitian Anthropologist on Haiti

Gina Ulysse, author of Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica, has been quite busy in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti. Born in Pétionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince, since her hometown's recent tragedy, Ulysse has been inundated with calls asking for her insights—as both a former resident and current scholar of Haiti—on the quake, its aftermath, and what it means for the future of one of the poorest and most embattled countries in the Western hemisphere. She has done numerous interviews and op-eds for NPR, the Huffington Post, and PRI's The World radio program with more to come. Click on the links to navigate to the articles—we'll update the page as more of Ulysse's commentary becomes available. In the meantime find out more about Ulysse's fascinating study of entrepreneurial women in the Caribbean isle in Downtown Ladies.

Update: As promised here are a couple more links to some of Ulysse's recent writing and commentary on Haiti:

From the January 11 edition of the Huffington Post, an article titled ""Avatar," Voodoo and White Spiritual Redemption"

From Duke University's Social Text journal — "Dehumanization & Fracture: Trauma at Home & Abroad"

And listen to this interview with Ulysse and Kate Ramsey, historian of Haiti and the Caribbean from Wisconsin Public Radio's Here On Earth: Radio Without Borders.

Deciphering the secret languages of the jungle

The science section of today's New York Times is running an article about animal communication—more specifically, communication among some of our closest primate ancestors like chimpanzees, baboons, and monkeys—that sheds light on some of the recent research scientists have been conducting to decipher the meaning behind their grunts and yells.

In the hopes that this research will one day yield some insight into how the human faculty for language has evolved, as the article notes, scientists like Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth have dedicated their lives to studying primate societies in the field to help piece together a clearer evolutionary road map between monkeys, and us.

The NYT's Nicholas Wade cites the scientists' research published in several of their books, including their fascinating study of vervet monkeys in How Monkeys See the World: Inside the Mind of Another Species, and their more recent Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind, to demonstrate how their work has helped to reveal some primate species to possess a number of the essential faculties that also underlie human language.

"Yet," as Wade writes, "monkeys have been around for 30 million years without saying a single sentence. What is it that has kept all other primates locked in the prison of their own thoughts?"

In the article Cheney and Seyfarth, along with several other leading scientists in the field, offer some diverse hypotheses, but in the end it seems they all agree that the once blurry line between humans and our primate ancestors seems now to be coming into clearer focus.

Check out the science section of the NYT to read the article or read this excerpt from Baboon Metaphysics.

Archived in Anthropology | Biology | Books for the News
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Santa Claus vs Bigfoot

Joshua Blu Buhs, author of Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend has a written an article for the Washington Post's Short Stack blog that makes an unlikely, but nevertheless illuminating comparison between the mythical creature that is the subject of his book, and another mythical figure more appropriate to the season: Santa Claus. As Buhs argues, "though comparatively domesticated, his rough edges hidden behind a great white beard and cherubic cheeks," as with Bigfoot, the myth of S. Claus has volumes to tell us about ourselves and the culture we inhabit.

As Buhs writes, "We tell stories about Santa Claus not because we believe in him, but because those stories convey messages we want shared—about generosity and pure love and respect for others. And that's why we tell stories about Bigfoot. Not only to argue for and against the existence of the Big Guy, but because through those stories we come to understand more about ourselves, our neighbors, and our place in this world."

Navigate to Buh's article on the Short Stack blog for more, or see this excerpt from his book, this interview, or Buhs in dialogue with Sigrid Schmalzer, author of The People's Peking Man, about the cultural significance of Bigfoot in contrast with his oriental analogue, the "yeren."

The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion on WGN's Extension 720

WGN's Milton J. Rosenberg recently invited several guests on his radio talk show Extension 720 to discuss the press's recent publication of The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion—the definitive reference book for parents, social workers, researchers, educators, and others who work with children.

Listen in as editor-in-chief Richard A. Shweder, contributor Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon, and house editor Mary Laur, talk about their new book and field questions from callers on the WGN Extension 720 website.

Bringing together contemporary research on children and childhood from pediatrics, child psychology, childhood studies, education, sociology, history, law, anthropology, and other related areas, The Child contains more than 500 articles—all written by experts in their fields and overseen by a panel of distinguished editors led by anthropologist Richard A. Shweder—each providing a concise and accessible synopsis of the topic at hand. In addition to these topical essays, The Child also contains more than forty "Imagining Each Other" essays, which focus on the particular experiences of children in different cultures. Compiled by some of the most distinguished child development researchers in the world, The Child is an essential addition to the current knowledge on children and childhood.

To find out more navigate to this special website for the book featuring a full table of contents and several sample articles.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1908-2009

The weekend death of Claude Lévi-Strauss was announced in Paris this morning. He would have turned 101 later this month. One of the most influential anthropologists in the history of the discipline, Lévi-Strauss achieved international renown for his seminal works in structural anthropology which sought to understand human social relationships in terms of their most basic formal qualities. His La Pensée Sauvage or The Savage Mind, published in 1966, is considered the work that most firmly established his groundbreaking ideas in the social sciences, followed closely by his application of that theory in his four volume Mythologiques—a series of books that trace the structural similarities of a single myth originating in South America through its many variations and re-tellings in cultures throughout Central America and all the way to the Arctic Circle.

Born in Brussels, Strauss grew up in France and attended the Sorbonne in Paris where he agrégated in Philosophy in 1931. He briefly became a visiting professor at the University of São Paulo in Brazil where he also made one of his first forays into ethnographic fieldwork conducting research in the Matto Grosso and Amazon rainforest in 1935. His return to Paris roughly coincided with the beginning of WWII but because of his Jewish heritage and the installation of the Vichy regime in 1940, he emigrated to the United States where he spent the duration of the war teaching at New York's New School for Social Research. Lévi-Strauss returned to Paris in 1948, producing his first published work The Elementary Structures of Kinship the following year, and receiving his doctorate in Anthropology from the Sorbonne. Later in 1959 he would be named to a chair in Social Anthropology at the Collége de France.

Highly decorated for his work throughout his career, he was elected to the Académie Française in 1931 and received the Erasmus Prize for his notable contributions to the social sciences in 1973. In 2003 he received the Meister Eckhart Prize for philosophy and has received honorary doctorates from universities such as Oxford, Harvard, and Columbia. He is also a recipient of the Grand-croix de la Légion d'honneur, and is a Commandeur de l'ordre national du Mérite and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres.

In 2008 he became the first member of the Académie Française to reach the age of 100.

The University of Chicago Press was honored to publish editions in English of the following books by Claude Levi-Strauss:

The Savage Mind (1968)
The Raw and the Cooked (1969)
From Honey to Ashes (1973)
The Origin of Table Manners (1978)
The Naked Man (1981)
Structural Anthropology, Volume 2 (1983)
The View from Afar (1985)
The Jealous Potter (1988)
Conversations with Claude Levi-Strauss) (1991)
The Story of Lynx (1995)

Archived in Anthropology | Commentary
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Creating a public debate about 'Honor Killing'

As an article in the November London Review of Books points out, the term "honor killing" is relatively new to the western legal system, but in recent years it has increasingly come into play as cases of filicide in Middle Eastern immigrant communities—often motivated by inter-generational culture clashes over arranged marriages—become more common. To explore this topic the LRB article cites several recent books on the subject including Unni Wikan's In Honor of Fadime: Murder and Shame—the tragic tale of Kurdish emigre Fadime Sahindal, murdered in Uppsala, Sweden in 2002 by her father because of her relationship with a man outside of their community—a tragedy compunded by her efforts to avoid such a fate by bringing the issue to the public's attention. As Jacqueline Rose writes for the LRB:

Fadime is remarkable for the way she went public. She secured convictions against her father and brother for threatening to kill her, and then again against her brother for seriously assaulting her during a return visit to Uppsala: he was given a five-month prison sentence.…
Fadime's successes in court gave her every reason to believe that her boldness was paying off. A month before her father and brother were due to be sentenced, she appeared with Patrik on television; they talked about their love and the threats against them. Fadime sought publicity in the belief that it would save her life: 'Perhaps they won't dare to kill me now that so many people know who I am!' Two months before her death, in November 2001, she agreed, after first refusing, to address a seminar in the Swedish parliament organised by the Violence Against Women network. In front of an audience of 350, she described her turn to the mass media as her 'last chance'. She had hoped to create a public debate about the problems of girls from immigrant families. But she also recognised that what she called the 'media circus' had got out of control. Fadime had become a 'national celebrity'. For her sister Nebile, it was this that drove their father to violence, and made him sick (that he was sick would be the grounds for his defence).

There is… something contradictory in the idea that someone could 'go for celebrity status in an attempt to protect herself' (celebrity always contains a potential element of shame). But if this case is so powerful, and more than justifies the meticulous attention Wikan gives to it, it is because Fadime is also driven by another vision of social obligation. She is speaking for the invisible women of her community.… Each of these three books can be read as a form of devotion (Wikan's is literally written 'in honour' of her subject): they are at once tributes and campaigns. To write about honour killing is in the first instance simply to demand that these crimes be talked about and seen. Viewed in these terms, Fadime's self-exposure is a kind of sharing and an act of love: 'I gave voice, and lent face.'

For more read the complete article on the LRB website and read this excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Reviews
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Press Release: Graham, The Moon, Come to Earth

Though the telegram may be long gone, the allure of a dispatch from a foreign land remains strong. So when Philip Graham began chronicling his sojourn in Portugal at the popular McSweeney’s Web site, it didn’t take long for his dispatches to attract a following of readers eager to experience the faded glories and living mysteries of Lisbon.

Now Graham has expanded on those dispatches, and the resulting book, The Moon, Come to Earth, is travel writing at its lyrical, introspective best. Whether wandering Lisbon’s cobbled medieval streets or wrestling with complicated local customs on the subway, Graham brings an attentive eye and love of idiosyncrasy to scenes that epitomize the paradox of living in a foreign city: Neither a tourist nor a local, he is forever between cultures, fascinated and admiring, but at the same time separate and uncertain. Through his explorations, the culture of Portugal—its rich literary culture, inventive cuisine, and saudade-drenched music—comes vibrantly to life. The Moon, Come to Earth is both a love letter to Lisbon and a testament to the pleasures and discoveries of travel itself.

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt and see the author's website.

"South Asia Across the Disciplines" on the web

In January we announced the birth of the new series "South Asia Across the Disciplines"—a unique collaborative publication effort between Columbia University Press, the University of California Press, and the University of Chicago Press designed to increase publication opportunities for emerging scholars in the field. We recently unveiled a new website for the project offering more details, including a formal call for submissions and a list of forthcoming publications at www.saacrossdisciplines.org.

According to the SAAD website:

"South Asia Across the Disciplines" publishes work that aims to raise innovative questions in the field. These include the relationship between South Asian studies and the disciplines; the conversation between past and present in South Asia; the history and nature of modernity, especially in relation to cultural change, political transformation, secularism and religion, and globalization. Above all, the series showcases monographs that strive to open up new archives, especially in South Asian languages, and suggest new methods and approaches, while demonstrating that South Asian scholarship can be at once deep in expertise and broad in appeal. We invite manuscripts from art history, history, literary studies, philology or textual studies, philosophy, religion, and the interpretive social sciences, especially those that show an openness to disciplines other than their own.
As a collaboration among leading university presses, "South Asia Across the Disciplines" marks a new approach. Each book in the series is published under the imprint of one of the three presses, but all are promoted as part of the series, sharing in design, advertising, and publicity.

To find out more about this exciting new publication initiative from three of the academy's leading publishers, navigate to www.saacrossdisciplines.org.

A political scientist in the slaughterhouse

A recent article for the Chronicle of Higher Education begins with a description of the five and a half months that Timothy S. Pachirat, one of the contributors to Edward Schatz's new book Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power, spent working in a Midwest slaughterhouse—"hanging beef livers on hooks," and using electric prods to move cattle into the holding pens. Such work is not the norm for a PhD in political science. But as the Chronicle's David Glenn explains, a few intrepid individuals in political science (taking a cue from anthropologists) have abandoned reliance on statistics and polls, turning instead to ethnographic fieldwork in order to gain a better understanding of how public opinion is really shaped.

In Pachirat's case, Glenn writes, his fieldwork "allowed him to 'illuminate in tangible ways the political and ethical consequences of the delegation of dirty, dangerous, and demeaning work.' Only participant-observation, [Pachirat] says, can give a full picture of how workers, managers, and federal health inspectors experience power relations." "If nothing else," as Glenn quotes another of the book's contributors, Katherine Cramer Walsh, "such observation might give pollsters intelligent ideas about what questions to ask." (Walsh's own fieldwork on political beliefs can also be found in her books Talking about Race, and Talking About Politics.)

Political Ethnography, discussed at length in the CHE article, is one of the first to analyze the work that results from this new approach to research in political science, and concludes that political ethnography can and should play a central role in the field.

To find out more about this burgeoning trend in poli-sci read David Glenn's article on the Chronicle website or pick up a copy of Edward Shatz's Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power.

Also in the Chronicle recently, three UCP titles made the cut for their recent list of recommend titles in political ethnography:

David D. Laitin, Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change Among the Yoruba

Katherine Cramer Walsh, Talking About Politics: Informal Groups and Social Identity in American Life

And of course,

Edward Schatz, ed., Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events
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Debating end-of-life issues

Thanks to a certain former governor from Alaska, "death panels" (and the attendant fear that the Obama administration will somehow decide when and how Americans die) have gained increasing currency in the health-care reform debate. Despite repeated assurances from the administration that the bill calls for no such thing (and evidence from fact-checking organizations that dispute Palin's claim), a new poll shows that 41% of Americans believe that "senior citizens or seriously-ill patients would die because government panels would prevent them from getting the medical treatment they needed."

This week, Newsweek magazine devoted its cover to an article (not-so-subtly) titled "The Case for Killing Granny." The piece argues that "the need to spend less money on the elderly at the end of life is the elephant in the room in the health-reform debate" and that in order to rein in health care costs, we, as a nation, despite how uneasy it makes us, are going to need to confront this reality. As the article suggests, "Americans are afraid not just of dying, but of talking and thinking about death. Until Americans learn to contemplate death as more than a scientific challenge to be overcome, our health-care system will remain unfixable." With end-of-life issues at center stage in the health-care reform debate, it's an apt time to look closely at modern death, especially in American hospitals. Medical anthropologist Sharon R. Kaufman does just that in the award-winning And a Time to Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life.

Over the past thirty years, the way Americans experience death has been dramatically altered. The advent of medical technology capable of sustaining life without restoring health has changed where, when, and how we die. In this revelatory study, medical anthropologist Sharon R. Kaufman examines the powerful center of those changes: the hospital, where most Americans die today. She deftly links the experiences of patients and families, the work of hospital staff, and the ramifications of institutional bureaucracy to show the invisible power of the hospital system in shaping death and our individual experience of it. In doing so, Kaufman also speaks to the ways we understand what it means to be human and to be alive.

As Newsweek notes, "studies show that about 70 percent of people want to die at home—but that about half die in hospitals." Hospitals will continue to be central to the American way of death, and how we die, and who decides when, will be forever linked to the health-care reform debate of 2009, no matter what gets passed into law. Kaufman's book, which you can read an excerpt of here, shines light on the ethical quandaries at the heart of the issue.

The organization behind the Burning Man

Last weekend Nevada's Black Rock Desert once again played host to the annual alternative community / neo-pagan festival known as the Burning Man. And since 2005 Katherine K. Chen author of Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event has been there, helping to organize efforts to safely and successfully execute the festival—which can attract upwards of 40,000 people—and organize its participants into a temporary alternative community where (according to the official Burning Man website) "transactions of value take place without money, advertising, or hype…" and "care emerges in place of structural service."

In her book, she draws on her own first-hand experiences of the Burning Man event and its unique community, to offer some fascinating insights into how the event's organizers have managed to pull it off. And beginning this week, she will also be offering her insights on the event as a new guest blogger at orgtheory.net. In her first post she demonstrates how analysis of such "unusual" cases of civic organization such as the Burning Man can be used to understand larger phenomena.

Navigate over to orgtheory.net to read.

Also, visit the author's own Enabling Creative Chaos blog.

From the Earth to the Moon and back

Where were you on July 20, 1969? Newspapers all over the United States posed this question to readers over the past couple of days, generating hundreds of responses that explain how the moon landing, with its worldwide scale, also had countless much more personal dimensions.

"At that moment I had serious doubts about the relevance of our hard work and the ordering of my personal priorities," remembers a then-student archaeologist.

"We had the technology to put a man on the moon," a Vietnam veteran remembers thinking, "yet here I am, dirty and worn out, fighting like it was 1869."

At the National Review Online, John Derbyshire remembers being at work as a bartender in Liverpool when "in a fragile contraption hurled by a spasm of burning gases across a quarter million miles of empty space (and built, as it happens, less than ten miles from my present home), human beings set themselves down on the surface of another world, in an alien landscape."

Though the unfamiliar landscape he traverses is a bit closer to home, and though the moon he writes of is artificial, Phillip Graham's forthcoming The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon has more in common with the lunar landing than its title. In the dispatch from which the book takes its name, Graham remembers walking around the city with his daughter and finding

a huge sphere, like a moon, sitting in the corner of a recessed plaza, made of some sort of durable white canvas; it's lit from within like a giant light bulb, and across its surface are painted stretches of lunar craters and mountain ranges. More than a few of the people passing by stage goofy poses before it, casting themselves as temporary stars of their own remake of E.T.
Perking up, Hannah murmurs, "So pretty." The moon, it appears, has come to earth tonight, magically, just for her, and even if it has left the shifting clouds behind, Hannah radiates concentration and lines up her shots. I decide to give her all the time she needs, suspecting that my daughter must feel some kinship with this fallen moon. After all, they're fellow travelers, taken out of context and isolated. I lean back on a stone bench and marvel at just how private public art can be.

Echoing the wonder expressed by those who thrilled to fuzzy-screened TVs forty years ago, Graham illuminates the intensely personal quality of even our most broadly shared experiences, whether they involve a moon we can reach out and touch, or the one that—except in exceptional circumstances—we can only look up at.

A conversation about the looting of Iraq's cultural heritage

In April of 2003, in the wake of a violent counter-insurgency, thousands of priceless relics from ancient Mesopotamian civilization were stolen from Iraq's National Museum in Baghdad. Despite the presence of an American tank unit, the pillaging went unchecked, and more than 15,000 artifacts—some of the oldest evidence of human culture—disappeared into the shadowy worldwide market in illicit antiquities. Since then, the looting and vandalism of the world's cultural heritage in Iraq saw an increase as gangs continued to loot artifacts that had previously been unexcavated, and though on February 23, 2009 the museum was reopened by Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, many of its artifacts have yet to be restored. Recently Lawrence Rothfield, author of The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum, joined the Chronicle of Higher Education's David Glenn to discuss the reasons for the failure to protect Iraq's cultural heritage and what might be done to prevent it in the future. From the Chronicle:

Q. Why did the United States do such a bad job of protecting the museum in 2003?
Before the war, nobody except archaeologists was worried about civilians looting the archaeological sites and the museum. And that includes the Iraqi exiles who were advising the State Department's Future of Iraq Project, which was supposed to develop plans for the postwar period. They set up working groups on all sectors of society — but they forgot about culture.

Q. But would it have made a difference if the Future of Iraq Project had paid attention to culture?

No, it wouldn't have made any difference at all, given that the military threw all of their plans in the garbage can anyway.

Now, the military itself was very interested in doing its job in terms of protecting cultural sites and museums. But under international law, its job is defined as not destroying or looting cultural sites itself — not as preventing civilians from destroying sites.

So before the war, they reached out to archaeologists, and they did a perfect job of identifying sites to put on a no-strike list. None of those sites was destroyed in active combat operations.

Unfortunately, they ignored warnings from the same archaeologists they were working with that the museums and sites might be looted by Iraqis. The Pentagon should have known about that issue. Nine museums were looted after the 1991 Gulf War. The military did not learn its lesson from that experience.

Read the rest of the interview on the Chronicle website or on the author's blog, The Punching Bag. Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Politics and Current Events
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Press Release: Rothfield, The Rape of Mesopotamia

As President Obama begins the process of bringing America’s six-year occupation of Iraq to an end, it’s important that the public and the military alike learn from the mistakes that dogged the war from the start. Of all those errors, perhaps the most preventable—and irreparable—was the failure to protect Iraq’s unparalleled cultural heritage from the wholesale looting and destruction that followed the invasion and continues to this day.

With The Rape of Mesopotamia, Lawrence Rothfield offers a detailed, judicious account of the failures of planning, understanding, and initiative that led to the looting of the Iraq Museum and the incalculable loss to human culture that followed. Drawing on extensive interviews with soldiers, bureaucrats, war planners, archaeologists, and collectors, Rothfield reveals the breathtaking incompetence and inadequate planning—originating at the highest levels of the U.S. government—that left the troops on the ground unprepared for and unable to stop the looting they saw occurring all around them. At the same time, Rothfield shows, preservation advocates worldwide were insufficiently vocal about the risks the invasion posed to Iraq’s heritage, while the collectors who inhabit the shadowy worldwide market for illicit antiquities ensured the demand that the looters fulfilled.

Ultimately, Rothfield brings his story right to the present, arguing vehemently that the lessons of Iraq have largely been ignored—and that the same mistakes are liable to be repeated in future conflicts.

Read the press release.

Archived in Anthropology | Press Releases | Sociology
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The "rogue colony" of New Orleans

The December 10 edition of the Nation contains a fascinating article about the long and colorful history of New Orleans that enlists Shannon Lee Dawdy's new book Building the Devil's Empire: French Colonial New Orleans to help explain how New Orleans acquired it's "rogue character" and became the unique, multicultural city we know today. Joshua Jelly-Schapiro writes for the Nation:

Effectively abandoned by the French crown in 1731, the colony was governed from that time by local elites, its levee becoming a bustling free-for-all of traders peddling everything from Mississippi furs to Martinique sugar and Mexican ceramics and maize. New Orleans's reputation as a low swamp of race-mixing and sin was present from the start and—as Shannon Lee Dawdy shows in Building the Devil's Empire, her penetrating study of the colony's founding—cited frequently as the explanation for its "failure."
In French New Orleans, "smuggling not only helped fill the gaps of collapsed mercantilism," Dawdy writes, "it was the basis of the local political economy.…" Dawdy shows clearly how Nouvelle-Orléans—with its intra-American trade and tenuous ties to the metropole—became, by the 1740s, a self-consciously Creole place.… That Creole identity informed France's decision to let the estranged colony go, as Louis XV handed it off to his cousin Carlos III and Spain, who in 1768 encountered a Creole revolt—a sign that this "rogue colony" (Dawdy's phrase) would not be an easy rule.

Continue reading on the Nation's website.

"Who knew Camus had something to say about gardens?"

If you're living in the northern U.S. it is likely that your garden is presently covered under several inches of snow, but as a recent article in the New York Times demonstrates, through the long winter months many gardeners never cease thinking about them. Writing for yesterday's "Sunday Book Review" Dominique Browning offers a list of a few of her favorite gardening books for midwinter reading that includes Robert Pogue Harrison's new book, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Browning writes:

The year's most thought-provoking, original and weighty garden book (though the lightest in heft) is Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison. Here the author of Forests: The Shadow of Civilization and The Dominion of the Dead, a book about cemeteries and burial practices, turns his thoughts to the garden as "sanctuary of repose." Making a garden fulfills, as Harrison puts it, "a distinctly human need, as opposed to shelter, which is a distinctly animal need." Burrowing into a more refined issue than what makes a garden, he meditates on why we garden. It's impossible to summarize the answer, overflowing as his book is with eccentric connections and voracious readings, ranging over centuries and across continents. Part of what makes it exciting is the way Harrison sets up surprise encounters with unexpected writers, who spring up as though self-seeded among the perennials. Who knew Camus had something to say about gardens?…
Reading Harrison's book is like strolling down a path through a well cultivated, richly sown, light-dappled woodland. There's no point of arrival, though there may be resting places here and there. Just as in the making of a garden, there's no end to the wonder; the journey is everything. You don't have to be a gardener to love this book, but by the end you'll be asking yourself why on earth you aren't.

Read the rest of the review on the NYT website.

Also, read an excerpt.

The "coming home" of the black midle class

Julia Vitullo-Martin has an interesting review of Derek S. Hyra's new book, The New Urban Renewal: The Economic Transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville, in Sunday's New York Post. In his book Hyra looks at the nation's two most important historic, urban black neighborhoods—New York's Harlem and Chicago's Bronzeville—to explore the shifting dynamics of class and race as these two iconic black communities undergo an unprecedented period of gentrification. From the Post review:

Hyra's most fundamental concern: As these neighborhoods come back economically, what will happen to their poor residents? Hyra notes that both Bronzeville and Harlem are "revitalizing without drastic racial changeover." In the last 10 years, Central Harlem's white population increased to 2% from 1.5%, and the white proportion in Bronzeville increased to 4% from 2.5%.
Yet while Hyra is very worried about the displacement of the poor, he argues that class antagonism is actually important to the redevelopment of formerly impoverished communities. Black middle-class values translate into effective political activity and organizations, including block clubs, planning boards and religiously affiliated community development corporations. The problem, as he sees it, is that the "coming home" of the black middle class will produce a neighborhood in which poor blacks are no longer welcome.

Is he correct? Only time will tell. After all, the new, large, urban black middle class is itself a new phenomenon. How its development will affect the historic neighborhoods it treasures is an open question.

Read the rest of the article on the New York Post website.

Iran's nuclear capabilities have been exaggerated

William O. Beeman, whose book The Great Satan vs. the Mad Mullahs: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other was reprinted last year by the press, teamed up with nuclear scientist Dr. Behrad Nakhai to write an interesting commentary on Iran's nuclear activity posted yesterday to the New American Media website. In the article Beeman argues against rumors in the media about Iran's nuclear weapons capabilities, saying that while "Iran is engaged in peaceful nuclear research" it is still far from being able to produce a nuclear weapon, and suggests that claims to the contrary have been fabricated to bolster Israeli official's "requests for the Bush administration's blessing to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities."

Read the full article on the New American Media website or find out more about Beeman's book here.

The garden as a cultural institution

Last week in the June 16 New York Times cultural critic Edward Rothstein had an interesting commentary on the New York Botanical Garden drawing on Robert Pogue Harrison's new book, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, to help him place the concept of the garden in the wider context of western history and demonstrate its enduring cultural and historical importance. Rothstein writes:

From medieval cloisters, botanical gardens made their way into universities, beginning with the University of Pisa in 1544. Later the garden's terrain expanded with botanical expeditions, oceanic trade and imperial adventures. Victorian botanical gardens could be encyclopedic in scope, arranging their displays according to Latin classifications of species by the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus.
Now, in our humid, dry, cooled or heated greenhouses, we shun such systematic display. Instead we replicate ecological niches, miniature worlds that supposedly show nature at work: the desert, the rainforest, the tropical pool. But peel back the environmental stagecraft, and the scientific cultivation continues with even greater passion…

There is something moving about the entire enterprise. In a remarkable new book, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, Robert Pogue Harrison (who wrote similar meditations on cemeteries and on forests) elicits some of the meanings that have accumulated around the idea of a garden, from myths, in which the chosen few "can possess the gift of their bodies without paying the price for the body's passions," to places like Versailles, which reflect "an aesthetic drive to tame, and even humiliate, nature into submission." In those royal gardens Mr. Harrison also finds the urge to encompass and incorporate and comprehend: "the militant humanism of the age."

Our age's humanism is much more modest. We are self-effacing to a fault. We don't seem to be taming nature, but to be permitting its full range of expression. We allow it to express multiple perspectives. We don't permit any habitat to dominate, and we defer to the demands of each. We seem to submit to nature. Of course we are creating images of ourselves.

Read the rest of the article online at the NYT website.

Interview with Mary Pattillo on WNYC

Mary Pattillo, author of Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City was interviewed yesterday on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show to discuss the gentrification of urban African American communities.

Pattillo's book is an eye-opening sociological exploration of Chicago's North Kenwood–Oakland neighborhood and the community's embattled process of revitalization, where the often conflicting interests of the black middle-class, their less-fortunate neighbors, and the established centers of white economic and political power frame a dramatic tale of the transformation of black communities in the twenty-first century.

In the interview Pattillo touches on many of the issues discussed in her book and fields some interesting questions from WNYC listeners. Listen to the audio on the WNYC website.

Press Release: Harrison, Gardens

Nothing banishes winter's lethargy more quickly than that first sight of the green of spring, as trees bud and our gardens, once again, burst into glorious bloom. For Robert Pogue Harrison, it's not just the depths of winter that gardens help us escape: throughout human history, gardens—both real and imagined—have been essential places of refuge and comfort in the face of a harsh, often violent world.

Employing the richly learned and allusive approach that he brought to his classics, Forests and The Dominion of the Dead, Harrison explores here the central importance of the human urge to nurture and cultivate gardens. Beginning with ancient conceptions of the garden as a place for the quiet work of self-improvement that is crucial to serenity and enlightenment, Harrison then travels widely through the history of Western culture. Enlisting such varied thinkers and writers as Voltaire and Calvino, Boccaccio and Arendt, Harrison profoundly demonstrates the role the garden has long played as a necessary, humanizing check against the degradation and losses of history.

Read the press release.

An innovative blend of storytelling and scholarship

In a recent review posted to the Bookslut website, Barbara J. King praises anthropologist Richard Price's most recent book Travels with Tooy: History, Memory, and the African American Imagination for its unique ethnographic account of the author's encounter with the enigmatic subject of Tooy—a priest, philosopher, and healer living in a shantytown on the outskirts of Cayenne, French Guiana. Commending the book for drawing not only on Price's ethnographic and archival research, but also on Tooy's teachings, songs, and stories, King writes:

The book glows with knowledge, Tooy's as much as Rich's, as Rich is the first to say; he writes of Tooy with love, as a friend, but also with respect, calling him "a fellow intellectual.…"
The complexity of Rich's analysis sits side by side with the complexity of Tooy's time-and-space travel. As I close the book (and begin to listen to Tooy's voice at Rich's website ), I know that I grasp only a small fraction of what Tooy knows. It's a good feeling, in a peculiar way; after all, that's what inhabiting an unfamiliar reality will do for a person—teach her what she doesn't know, and how to learn something more.

Read the article at Bookslut. Also listen to a selection of archived sound files to accompany the book.

Tenure as a fact on the ground

We have previously noted the tenure battle over Nadia Abu El-Haj, at the center of which is the book we published in 2001, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society.

Abu El-Haj was granted tenure by Barnard last November. A sort of post-mortem on the whole affair appears in today's issue of the New Yorker. Jane Kramer reviews Abu El-Haj's academic career, the controversy over her tenure decision, and the continuing debate—at Columbia University and elsewhere—over fact and bias in Middle Eastern studies departments.

Throughout the swirl of rhetoric, the articles and editorials, speeches and screeds, petitions and counter-petitions Abu El-Haj remained silent, trying to avoid the distraction. She finally spoke to Kramer for the New Yorker article. "What happened last year—it wasn't about me. I was a cog in the big wheel of the Middle East and Israel."

Only an abstract of the article is online at the New Yorker website. But a pdf has been posted elsewhere. Also, Jane Kramer spoke with Jon Wiener on KPFK's On the Radio (starts about 21 minutes in).

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News
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A Runyonesque tale of schemers and suckers

An interesting piece on David Grazian's new book On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife is running as the cover story in the current edition of the independent Philadelphia weekly City Paper. A.D. Amorosi's article begins by comparing Grazian's sociological study of Philly's nightlife to Damon Grunyon's scabrous tales of prohibition era New York:

When David Grazian started working on his most recent book, he wanted to find the skin and bones of Philly's latest nightlife renaissance. Now that it's finished, On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife paints the scene like something out of a Damon Runyon novel, full of schemers and suckers born every minute.
Flirty waitresses, winking hostesses and grinning bouncers make appearances in On the Make. So do PR consultants, drinking wing men, snobby DJs, event planners and paid partiers—the mod equivalent of Runyon's bookies and mooches. (No one in On the Make is named "Nathan Detroit" or "Sky Masterson," but a name like "Nicole Cashman" does the trick.) You can't help but expect a chorus of "Luck Be a Lady" to come swinging through the text.

Both entertaining and illuminating On the Make offers a riveting look at the various gambles, hustles, and put-ons that drive Philadelphia's bustling nightlife scene.

Read an excerpt.

Larry McMurtry on Custerology

In the most famous defeat in American military history Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer lost his life along with most of the rest of his 7th Cavalry at the now famous Battle of Little Bighorn, also known as Custer's Last Stand.

In the ensuing years the defeat has become a powerful symbol of America's bloody past, with everyone from tourists and historians to Native American activists attempting to interpret and explain the battle in the context of the multicultural present. In the March 6 New York Review of Books, Larry McMurtry reviews Michael A. Elliott's new book Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer and explores the complicated question of why the battle retains such power for Americans today. McMurtry writes:

Even as the sun set for Custer, dawn broke for the Custerologists—as Michael Elliott calls them—whose numbers now darken the sky. If you don't believe me, write yourself some life insurance, then head up to Hardin, Montana, toward the end of June, and you'll be able to take in not one but two reenactments of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, one sponsored by the town of Hardin itself (admission $16) and one put on by the powerful Crow family called the Real Birds (admission $12).
The Crow were scouts for Custer, and fought along with him. I attended the Crow sundance once, which might as well have been held in Harvard Yard, so thick were the white ethnologists on the ground. It would probably have been warmer in Harvard Yard too.

No one should think that because 130 years have passed since the battle the passions between tribes and within tribes have abated. Much of Michael Elliott's book is devoted to explaining that people who might have been expected to calm down in that length of time in fact haven't calmed down at all.

Read the rest of the review on the New York review of Books website.

David Grazian on the BBC

Last Wednesday David Grazian, author of On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife was featured on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed with host Laurie Taylor. In the show Taylor and Grazian engage in a fascinating discussion about the various schemes and scams that the nightlife industry employs in order to separate customers from their money, as well as the scams perpetuated by the clientele themselves in their relentless search for sex, self-esteem, and status.

Listen to archived audio from the show on the BBC Radio 4 website.

Also, read an excerpt from the book.

Review: Akerman and Karrow, Maps

James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow Jr.'s Maps: Finding Our Place in the World has been given quite a positive review in this month's issue of the British science and technology magazine, BBC Focus. Praising the book for its thoughtful exploration of maps and the many divergent purposes they have served throughout human history, reviewer Nick Smith writes:

If you though maps were merely aerial drawings of places that help us get from point A to B, you will be astonished by the depth and breadth of this book.
The editors have cleverly set out the book's structure in terms of what function maps perform, instead of ranging from continent to continent as with traditional atlases. There is macro-mapping throughout the ages and maps portraying land use, as well as those concerned with commerce, art, advertising, entertainment and national identity. There is plant distribution, cartographic analysis of the geology of the US and even the "distribution of the slave population of the Southern States.…" Fascinating stuff.

See a collection of unusual maps from the book.

The fraud of nightlife

David Grazian's entertaining exploration of the bars of Philadelphia in On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife, continues to attract attention. Two new articles have recently been published featuring Grazian's new book—the first appeared in the January 18 Chronicle Review and includes some great praise for the book's revealing look at inner city nightlife:

Grazian's new book is, among other things, a long catalog of confidence games. Nightclub managers strain to persuade the world that their typical patrons are younger, less suburban, and more female than they actually are. For a secret payment of $500 per week, one Philadelphia publicist… will bring four attractive, well-connected friends to a club…
There are also the more-familiar kinds of interpersonal fraud: In bars like Tangerine, people sometimes lie about their ages, their names, their jobs, and their marital statuses. Women give out fake phone numbers to shake off obnoxious suitors. People feign a sexual interest in others in order to score free drinks, to make their lovers jealous, or simply to make the evening less boring.

"What's skillful about the book is that these are settings that people are familiar with, but often don't think very hard about," says Joshua Gamson, a professor of sociology at the University of San Francisco who specializes in commercial culture. "Grazian manages to make them seem new, without trying to oversell his analysis. The book has an appropriate level of seriousness and an appropriate amount of pleasure."

A lengthy review also appeared in the January 20 Toronto Star. Geoff Pevere writes for the Star:

Plunging into clubs, bars, strip-joints and restaurants, [Grazian] collects first-person testimonies from hustlers, horndogs, would-be makeout artists and dozens of variously candid members of Philadelphia's burgeoning night-life industry. While this serves the highly reader-friendly function of leavening his occasionally concrete prose with regular bursts of profane, party-down plain-spokenness, it also brings a welcome humanity to what might otherwise have been a clinical case study in the overall decline of contemporary civilization. And make no mistake: what happens in Philadelphia doesn't stay in Philadelphia. If there's one thing about the book which makes it resonate beyond those city limits, it's that the city he describes is any city where there's an "entertainment district" catering to the largely false promise of sex in the city.

Read an excerpt from the first chapter.

Monkey Politics

Today's New York Times is running an article titled "Political Animals," comparing the current presidential candidates election politics to the complex social dynamics found in other species like elephants, whales, and rhesus macaques—the latter of which are the subject of Dario Maestripieri's new book Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World. In the article, the NYT's Natalie Angier cites Maestripieri's book as she compares the political behavior of these prolific primates to our own:

As the candidates have shown us in the succulent telenovela that is the 2008 presidential race, there are many ways to parry for political power.… [And] just as there are myriad strategies open to the human political animal with White House ambitions, so there are a number of nonhuman animals that behave like textbook politicians.…
As Dr. Maestripieri sees it, rhesus monkeys embody the concept "Machiavellian" (and he accordingly named his recent popular book about the macaques Macachiavellian Intelligence).

"Individuals don't fight for food, space or resources," Dr. Maestripieri explained. "They fight for power." With power and status, he added, "they'll have control over everything else.…"

"Rhesus males are quintessential opportunists," Dr. Maestripieri said. "They pretend they're helping others, but they only help adults, not infants. They only help those who are higher in rank than they are, not lower. They intervene in fights where they know they're going to win anyway and where the risk of being injured is small."

We may not know whence humans are descended but as for politicians it's pretty clear, read the rest of the article here.

The fake thrills of urban nightlife

Sunday's Toronto Star ran an interesting article on sociologist David Grazian's revealing portrait of Philadelphia's thriving club scene in On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife. Summarizing the book the Star's Ryan Bigge writes:

Although Grazian discusses the sophisticated public relations matrix that helps bring in customers, he's more interested in exploring the paradox that club goers allow themselves to be willingly hustled. Making a comparison to movies filled with computer-generated effects, Grazian suggests, "People are willing to suspend their disbelief in order to enjoy a thrilling lie."
Which means the tens of thousands of club goers—the actual number is the subject of considerable contention, but even the lowest two-night estimate is 40,000—that cram Toronto's entertainment district on Friday and Saturday nights, spending millions of dollars per year on drinks, are marks of their own making. Of course, just because the game is rigged, doesn't mean you can't enjoy yourself, as the eternal popularity of Las Vegas demonstrates.

Read the rest of the article on the Toronto Star website or read this excerpt from the first chapter of the book. The press's website also features an interview with Grazian about his previous book on a similar topic, Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs.

Review: Collins, Rethinking Expertise

Harry Collins and Robert Evans' Rethinking Expertise was given an interesting review last Friday by Matthew Reisz writing in the December 7 Times Higher Education Supplement. Praising the book Reisz writes:

The book offers a rich and detailed "periodic table" of expertise, ranging from the kind of beer-mat knowledge useful only in pub quizzes to the levels of skill that enable people to make a contribution to cutting-edge science. It considers wine buffs and art connoisseurs, hoaxers, journalists, and pseudoscientists. It looks at deep philosophical issues of "embodiment"—whether you need to move around in the world to acquire language or the jargon of a specialist field—that have major implications for the field of artificial intelligence and computer learning. It is full of case studies, anecdotes and intriguing experiments. But at its heart are questions arising out of the authors' work in the sociology of science and the challenges of scientifically literate public decision making.

A deep exploration of what it means to be an expert and the role expertise plays in our society Rethinking Expertise is essential reading for scientists, scholars, and policy makers alike.

Archived in Anthropology | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Baboon Metaphysics on Fresh Air

Primatologists Dorothy Cheney and Richard Seyfarth, authors of the new book Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind were featured last week on NPR's Fresh Air to discuss their years of research in Botswana's Okavango Delta observing baboons and their social world. The results of their studies, available in their book, reveal the surprising complexities of baboon society and the fascinating intelligence that underlies it—and indeed may even give us some valuable insights into our own social behaviors. You can listen to archived audio of the interview online at the NPR website or read an excerpt from the book.

Press Release: Maestripieri, Macachiavellian Intelligence

Power. Sex. Status. That's pretty much what human life boils down to: a vicious, grasping struggle to get ahead and stay there. We look out for number one, claw for every advantage, and aren't above using—and even betraying—friends and family to get what we want. So just what is it that separates us from the higher primates? Dario Maestripieri would argue that it's less than you may think, and with Macachiavellian Intelligence he draws readers deep into the social life of the world's most common monkey, the rhesus macaque, to show just how much we can learn from them about human life.

Writing with a biting, sardonic wit, Maestripieri draws on primatology, evolutionary biology, economics, politics, and literature to present a wry, rational, and wholly surprising view of our humanity as seen through the monkey in the mirror.

Read the press release.

Press Release: Narayan, My Family and Other Saints

It's the late 1960s. You're nine years old, living in Bombay, and your family is a bit … complicated. Your mother was born in America, but she has fully adopted Indian dress, customs, and attitudes. Your Indian father, meanwhile, is cynical, worldly, and deeply suspicious of anything that smacks of mysticism or religion—which includes much of Indian culture. Then, out of the blue, your sixteen-year-old brother announces that he's leaving home to go live with a guru and become holy. How on earth are you supposed to go about the business of growing up in such a complicated family?

With My Family and Other Saints, Kirin Narayan shows us how. Her funny, touching memoir tells the story of her brother's quest and its effects, revealing a family full of love, yet always on the verge of disintegration. As their house becomes a waystation for the army of hippies, gurus, and charlatans flooding India, Narayan also brings late-60s Bombay to life, taking us back to a time and place when nearly everyone, it seemed, was embarked on some sort of spiritual quest and Western seekers were obsessed with all things Indian, from yoga to transcendental meditation. Deeply moving, yet frequently hilarious, My Family and Other Saints is a poignant reminder of both the power and the frailty of family bonds in turbulent times.

Read the press release. Also read an excerpt from the book.

Press Release: Akerman and Karrow, Maps

Maps are universal forms of communication, easily understood and appreciated regardless of culture or language. This truly magisterial book introduces readers to the widest range of maps ever considered in one volume. A companion to the most ambitious exhibition on the history of maps ever mounted in North America, Maps will challenge readers to stretch conventional thought about what constitutes a map and how many different ways we can understand graphically the environment in which we live. Collectors, historians, mapmakers and users, and anyone who has ever "gotten lost" in the lines and symbols of a map will find much to love and learn from in this book.

Read the press release. Also see a special website for the book.

My Family and Other Saints, a bicultural memoir

Kirin Narayan's new book My Family and Other Saints is the author's captivating memoir of growing up in a culturally diverse household in India. With an American mother eagerly attempting to adopt an Indian lifestyle and an Indian father who is skeptical of it, Narayan's memoir focuses on her family's attempt to find peace of mind even while torn between the often conflicting ideologies of east and west. Narayan's story revolves around her brother's decision to quit school and leave home to seek enlightenment with a guru. As a recent review in Shelf Awareness notes, Narayan "sees this event (which bemused rather than alarmed her family) as setting the entire family in a slow-forward motion along their own spiritual journeys."

The review continues:

She describes the next few years with fine impressionistic prose, weaving together her parent's disintegrating marriage, her father's descent into alcoholism and her brother's departure for the U.S. with visits to ashrams, friendhips with gurus and tales from her paternal grandmother, Ba, who was regularly visited by Hindu dieties.… Some of their stories end sadly or without resolution ("Who knows why I became a drunkard?" her father asks at the end of his life), but Narayan, a cultural anthropologist, finds the wonder and joy in her family's journey and presents it to us with insight and grace.

Read the rest of the review online or see an excerpt from the book.

Review: Zaloom, Out of the Pits

Caitlin Zaloom's Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London was recently given an interesting review in the November 1 London Review of Books. Writing for the LRB, Donald Mackenzie begins with a description of his own experiences on the trading floor of the Chicago Board of Trade in 2000—while they were still bustling with traders, runners, and clerks vying for bids:

At the Board of Trade, orders were still carried to the pits on pieces of paper by runners and clerks, and then shouted out by traders or 'flashed' to others in the pit using the hand signal language known as 'arb'—an abbreviation for arbitrage, the exploitation of discrepancies in prices.…

But as Mackenzie's article notes, at the turn of the millennium the digital age was already poised to radically transform the way that modern traders conduct business.

Chicago's open-outcry trading, a way of life stretching back to the grain futures pits of the 19th century, was on the brink of disappearing when I visited the Board of Trade in 1999 and 2000. There were already signs that technology was encroaching: headsets were increasingly used instead of runners to communicate between the pits and the booths where customer orders arrived, and a few traders carried hand-held computers. Since 2000, Chicago's pits have emptied, and those who still stand in them focus less on the people around them than they do on their computers, which are no longer an adjunct to trading but essential to it. Chicago remains central to the world's financial markets—its recent merger with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange has made the Board of Trade part of the world's largest exchange—but as the hub of electronic networks, not as a set of huge rooms crowded with bodies.
Despite the role it has played in shaping today's world, there are few observational studies of financial trading to compliment the thousands of econometric studies of price fluctuations. Zaloom's superb book is a double-site ethnography. She first worked as a runner on the Chicago Board of Trade, like any good anthropologist learning the local language — she's proficient in 'arb.' Then she moved to London, where open out-cry trading has now vanished, … and where she was trained in and then practiced the very different skills of an electronic trader.

A first-hand account of the changing face of the contemporary marketplace, Out of the Pits delivers an unprecedented exploration of how the digital age has transformed economic cultures and the craft of speculation.

Read an excerpt.

Festival of Maps exhibition opens tomorrow

Tomorrow, November 2, as part of the three month long Festival of Maps, the Field Museum will open the exhibit, Maps: Finding Our Place in the World. On display will be some of the most fascinating cartographic artifacts ever shown. And just in time for opening day, the Press has released a companion volume of the same name edited by exhibit curators James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow, Jr. Like the exhibit, the book surveys a huge range of cartographic sources to explore the many ways that maps have changed our lives and helped us understand the environment in which we live. From a review in Discover magazine:

From religious pilgrimages and vacation road trips to depictions of the ocean floor and the magical landscapes of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, maps chart both physical and imaginary worlds. As geographer Denis Cosgrove explains, "world' is a social concept … a flexible term, stretching from physical environment to the world of ideas, microbes, of sin. Arguably, all these worlds can be mapped." And they are in this compelling and very readable companion volume to the current exhibition at the Field Museum in Chicago.

To find out more about the book, see this special website where you can view a sampling of images organized by theme from just of few of the many fascinating maps in the book.

And if you're planning a day out tomorrow to go see some of these maps in person, you can check out the Field Museum's exhibition highlights online at their website which includes ticket sales, a list of special events, and a primer on what you can expect too see if you go.

In addition to the exhibit at the Field Museum many other Chicago institutions including the Newberry Library and the Chicago History Museum are participating in the Festival of Maps over its three month time span, making it one of the most ambitious celebrations of maps ever. For those looking for a more comprehensive rundown of the entire Festival, navigate to the Chicago Tribune's festival website which includes a guide to the Festival's various venues, video presentations by the Tribune's Patrick Reardon, and even a special blog with reviews and commentary on the Festival's many exhibits. The Tribune also links to the Festival's official website where you can find an indispensable map (of course) of the Festival of Maps and other online features.

Caitlin Zaloom and the global transition to electronic trading

Caitlin Zaloom's most recent book, Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London, has factored into several articles this week about the world-wide transition from open-outcry trading to electronic, computer based trading—a transformation that she argues promises a radical change in the culture of the global marketplace.

Niko Koppel's piece in the New York Times cites Zaloom's comparative account of what two very different financial exchanges—the trading floors of Chicago's commodities markets where open-outcry trading has been a tradition since the mid-nineteenth century, and a shiny new digital dealing room in the City of London—to describe how this transition is affecting the marketplace. Koppel writes for the NYT:

Ms. Zaloom observed that, though pit traders were once the first to see bids and offers, electronic trading has leveled the playing field.
"The screens are anonymous," she said, "and that's part of the idea of having a more pure market, one that doesn't have the complications of flesh and blood."

Equal access to the markets has made trading more challenging for pit traders. "We're trading against machines" all over the world, said Jeffrey Levant, 53, who has been at the [Chicago Mercantile] Exchange for 29 years, and recently left the Nasdaq pit to learn electronic trading. "Sometimes it feels like we're John Henry going up against the steam hammer."

Zaloom also recently factored into a similar piece in the London Review of Books. The online version is available to subscribers.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Review: Maestripieri, Macachiavellian Intelligence

The Times Higher Education Supplement recently ran a positive review of Dario Maestripieri's new book, Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World. A detailed examination of how rhesus macaques have come to claim the title of the world's most prolific primates (after homo-sapiens, of course) Macachiavellian Intelligence delivers an insightful exploration of macaque social organization—revealing relationships perpetually subject to the cruel laws of the markets and power struggles that would impress Machiavelli himself.

Alison Jolly's review for the THES begins:

If this review were written by a rhesus monkey, the author would get an O mouth threat and a clear chance of being bitten. Unless, of course, the author were dominant to the reviewer, in which case it would be a sycophantic fear grin in hopes of payoff—either promotion or sex. The only actual altruists in rhesus society are mothers, but The Times Higher doesn't ask authors' mothers to review books.…

The review continues:

Maestripieri tells [his] story with incisive prose, sharp wit and admirable brevity, and the book should appeal to a wide audience from cynical teenagers to economists who believe that the "invisible hand" of competition underlies all human society. He also has perfect timing. The idea that our human brains evolved largely to deal with the demands of society is very much in fashion.…
Rhesus range from India to China, through Himalayan snows, tropical swamps, temples, bazaars and railway stations. Humans, of course, range everywhere. The sweeter-natured primates… have more restricted ranges than nastier ones. Does this mean that there is a correlation between aggression and success in the world? Maestripieri thinks so. He compares rhesus society to the army—organized to conquer people and occupy lands.

N.B. See the press's translations of Machiavelli's works including Art of War and The Prince.

Press Release: Montgomery, The Shark God

When Charles Montgomery was ten years old, he stumbled upon the memoirs of his great-grandfather, a seafaring missionary in the South Pacific. Twenty years later and a century after that journey, entranced by the world of black magic and savagery the bishop described, Montgomery set out for Melanesia in search of the very spirits and myths his great-grandfather had sought to destroy. In The Shark God, he retraces his ancestor's path through the far-flung islands, exploring the bond between faith and magic, the eerie persistence of the spirit world, and the heavy footprints of the British Empire.

Read the press release.

Archived in Anthropology | Biography | Press Releases
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Baboon Aristocrats?

The lead article in the "Science Times" section of today's New York Times focuses on Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert Seyfarth's new book Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. The article features a photo gallery of the Moremi Game Reserve in Botswana's Okavango Delta where Cheney and Seyfarth have been making some extraordinary observations of baboons in their social world, and offers some fascinating insights into their research. Reporter Nicholas Wade notes that Cheney and Seyfarth have gone a step beyond the many studies that have sought to simply parse our primate ancestor's social organization, and instead approach their subjects with the goal of fully understanding the cognitive mechanisms that underlie their social behaviors—in the hopes of gaining a better understanding of our own. Wade writes:

Reading a baboon's mind affords an excellent grasp of the dynamics of baboon society. But more than that, it bears on the evolution of the human mind and the nature of human existence. As Darwin jotted down in a notebook of 1838, "He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke."
Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth have summed up their new cycle of research in a book titled, after Darwin's comment, Baboon Metaphysics. Their conclusion, based on many painstaking experiments, is that baboons' minds are specialized for social interaction, for understanding the structure of their complex society and for navigating their way within it.

"Monkey society is governed by the same two general rules that governed the behavior of women in so many 19th-century novels," Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth write. "Stay loyal to your relatives (though perhaps at a distance, if they are an impediment), but also try to ingratiate yourself with the members of high-ranking families.…"

Baboon society revolves around mother-daughter lines of descent. Eight or nine matrilines are in a troop, each with a rank order. This hierarchy can remain stable for generations… [because] rank among female baboons is hereditary, with a daughter assuming her mother's rank.

News of that fact gave great satisfaction to a member of the British royal family, Princess Michael of Kent. She visited Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth in Botswana, remarking to them, they report: "I always knew that when people who aren't like us claim that hereditary rank is not part of human nature, they must be wrong. Now you've given me evolutionary proof!"

Read an excerpt from the book.

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Festival of Maps

The Chicago Tribune is running an article today about the forthcoming Festival of Maps—a three month display of "rare and important" maps from around the world to be held at more than twenty participating venues throughout Chicagoland beginning later this fall. In conjunction with the exhibition the Press is set to release a companion volume in early November, Maps: Finding Our Place in the World edited by James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow, Jr. Delivering a comprehensive account of the diverse ways maps have been used throughout the ages and across cultures, Maps covers much of the material featured in the exhibition, from maps "tracing the rise of the American West" to those used to track and predict the weather. Read today's article in the Tribune or check out the exhibition's official website at www.festivalofmaps.com to find out more about the Festival, or learn more about the companion volume, Maps, on our website.

And the controversy continues...

The New York Times reported today about the controversy surrounding the work of Barnard professor of anthropology Nadia Abu El-Haj, whose 2001 Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society has sparked disputes in and out of academe since its publication.

El-Haj's work is an analysis of archaeological practice in Israel, attempting to explain the complicated interplay of politics and science in the Middle East and the ongoing role that archeology plays in defining the past, present, and future of Palestine and Israel.

El-Haj is currently up for tenure at Barnard, but due to the controversial nature of her work, she has some powerful opponents who claim that her own findings have been influenced by political interests. From the New York Times:

It is Dr. Abu El-Haj's book, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, that has made her a lightning rod, setting off warring petitions opposing and supporting her candidacy, and producing charges of shoddy scholarship and countercharges of an ideological witch hunt.…
The Middle East Studies Association, an organization of scholars who focus on the region, chose her book in 2002 as one of the year's two best books in English about the Middle East. The other was Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship, by Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled, published by Cambridge University Press.

Jere L. Bacharach, a historian at the University of Washington who presented the awards, said at the time that both books were "nuanced, nonpolemic works on subjects that too often lend themselves to political tirades and polemics."

Critics of Dr. Abu El-Haj's book, however, said her aim was to undermine Israel's right to exist, and challenged her methodology and findings.

Read the rest of the article on the New York Times website. Also read an excerpt from Facts on the Ground previously posted to this blog.

Professor or Baseball?

Would you rather chair your university department or manage an amateur softball team? Edwin Amenta, NYU professor of sociology and author of Professor Baseball: Searching for Redemption and the Perfect Lineup on the Softball Diamonds of Central Park, was pretty sure he'd enjoy the softball team a lot more. In an interesting piece of commentary for the careers section of the Chronicle of Higher Education Amenta relates how he was passed over for departmental chair but then was given the opportunity to spend the summer as manager of the Performing Arts Softball League. But as it turns out Amenta got a little more than he bargained for. Amenta writes:

Near the end of the season, I realized that not only was managing not that much fun, it was not greatly different from being a department chair.
Both jobs provide an undercurrent of excitement, with little crises to attend to all the time. Sometimes there are important general managerial decisions to make—like deciding which players or faculty members to recruit.

But the rest of the work is extensive and thankless. It takes great effort to get teammates and colleagues to do things they should volunteer for, like practicing or serving on committees. Teammates want always to play their favorite positions the way colleagues like to teach their favorite classes.

To improve the team or curriculum requires making a few people angry, while the majority who benefit will barely notice. Winning or success in hiring new faculty members—all that is to be expected and brings little praise. Losing or failing in hiring brings blame.

Navigate to the Chronicle's website to read the rest of Amenta's article or read an excerpt from the book.

Review: Cheney and Seyfarth, Baboon Metaphysics

The August 2 edition of Nature features a review of Dorothy L. Cheney and Richard Seyfarth's recent book Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. The review focuses on the author's detailed examination of Baboon's complex social behavior—the results of years of research in Botswana's Okavango Delta—and their trenchant exploration of the perennial question of nature vs. nurture. Asif A. Ghazanfar writes for Nature:

In Baboon Metaphysics, Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth explain that our social reflexes evolved from our group-living primate ancestors. They explore what sort of intelligence is required to navigate the intricate social landscape that baboons live in. Is it based on a complex calculation, a system of innate rules that are applied to specific contexts? Or is it based on simple, implicit rules governed solely by learned associations?… This tension pervades this wonderful book on the social intelligence of non-human primates and what they might tell us about the evolution of the human mind.…
[The author's] enthusiasm is obvious, and their knowledge is vast and expressed with great clarity. All this makes Baboon Metaphysics a captivating read. It will get you thinking—and maybe spur you to travel to Africa to see it all for yourself.

Read an excerpt.

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The South Side as Sociological Specimen

In a recent article for the Chicago Tribune staff reporter Ron Grossman delivers a fascinating account of the long legacy of sociological study that has used Chicago's South Side as its laboratory. Grossman begins his article by mentioning one of the latest additions to this legacy, Mary Pattillo's Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City. Her book, like those of the many other sociologists who have chosen to study the South Side's unique black urban communities, focuses on the sharp divides in race, class, and culture that can be found in the area's neighborhoods. But it also explores a growing phenomena in Chicago's South Side communities, the black urban middle class. Examining the social impact of the gentrification of neighborhoods that have for years been home to some of the city's poorest residents, Pattillo's book continues to break new ground in one of the most often studied urban neighborhoods in America.

You can read Grossman's article online at the Tribune website, or navigate to the press's site to find out more about Pattillo's fascinating new book, as well as read an excerpt.

Mary Pattillo on the future of Chicago's black urban communties

Mary Pattillo, author of the recently published Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City, penned a fascinating op-ed piece for Sunday's Chicago Tribune on the rapidly changing face of Chicago's black urban communities. Pattillo's article begins:

"No more blacks." That was the forecast of a resident of the Oakland community when asked about the future of her South Side neighborhood.
"No more blacks?" I responded, worried in no small part because my research is about black gentrification.

"[A] couple of blacks" would be left, the woman then allowed. "They got money.

This simple prediction is rich with meaning. For one thing, it helps establish the players in the widespread upscaling of Chicago: The little man. The middleman. And then, The Man.

The prediction also lays out what's at stake, not just in Oakland and North Kenwood on the South Side, but in various Chicago neighborhoods. In the process of "building, breaking, rebuilding" the City of the Big Shoulders, as Chicago's poet Carl Sandburg so eloquently put it, who is going to keep the little man from being left behind? Are Chicago's shoulders big enough to serve, include and celebrate everyone?

Pattillo's article seems to leave this question open ended, but makes a point that it is the rising black middle class who must ultimately shoulder the responsibility of brokering between the lower and upper classes if the future of some of the more underprivileged members of Chicago's black urban communities is to look any brighter.

Also, social historian Arnold Hirsch (Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960) reviewed Pattillo's new book in the July 14 edition of the Tribune. The online version is still up on their website.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Caitlin Zaloom on the CBOT/Merc Merger

jacket image Caitlin Zaloom, author of Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London, was featured yesterday on Chicago Public Radio's Eight Forty-Eight to discuss the merger of the Chicago Board of Trade with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange—a deal that many think is likely to secure Chicago's place as one of the world's most important centers for global derivatives trading. In her interview Zaloom goes beyond the numbers to discuss how the merger, and the revolution in the culture of trading it promises, will affect the world's financial markets and shape everyday life in the new global economy.

Listen to the archived audio on the Eight Forty-Eight website.

Read an excerpt from Zaloom's book.

Review: Amenta, Professor Baseball

John Sugden recently reviewed Edwin Amenta's memoir of amateur sport, Professor Baseball: Searching for Redemption and the Perfect Lineup on the Softball Diamonds of Central Park for the June 8 Times Higher Education Supplement. A British academic periodical might seem like an unlikely prospect for a book about a thoroughly American game, but Sugden swings for the fences:

One hot and humid summer when Professor Edwin Amenta should have been hard at work at home or in his office in the sociology department of New York University—finishing up his book on pensions organizations in Depression-era America—"Eddy" could be found roaming the recreational spaces of Central Park indulging in the very serious business of playing softball.…

At one level, Professor Baseball is a straightforward diary of Amenta's successes and failures over one summer season in the several teams on which he plays and the one of which he is player-manager. At another, the book is a narrative account of one person's lived-through obsession. It is a coming-of-middle-age tale of a fortysomething man, with fatherhood imminent, trying to come to terms with changing fortunes in his professional and personal life. Above all, it is about his forlorn and ultimately doomed quest for redemption.…

The academic community might have had to wait a little longer for Amenta's quantitative study of pension funds in depression-era America because of it, but I for one found Professor Baseball a more than worthwhile diversion.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Robert Seyfarth on Radio Times

Robert Seyfarth, co-author of Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind was recently featured on WHYY Philadelphia 's Radio Times with host Marty Moss-Coane. According to the Radio Times website, Seyfarth draws from his new book to discuss how "baboons relate to each other and understand their place in the world as well as what can we learn from them about human behavior." Archived audio of the radio show is available via the WHYY Radio Times website.

In Baboon Metaphysics Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert Seyfarth aim to fully comprehend the intelligence that underlies baboon's social organization. How do baboons actually conceive of the world and their place in it? Using innovative field experiments, the authors test whether baboons understand kinship relations, how they make use of vocal communication, and how they manage the stress and dangers of life in the wild. They learn that for baboons, just as for humans, family and friends hold the key to mitigating the ill effects of grief, stress, and anxiety.

Written with a scientist's precision and a nature-lover's eye, Baboon Metaphysics gives us an unprecedented and compelling glimpse into the mind of another species.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology
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Review: Cheney and Seyfarth, Baboon Metaphysics

Dorothy Cheney and Richard Seyfarth's new book, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind, has received several notable reviews over the past month. Writing in the May 19 issue of New Scientist primatologist Frans de Waal notes the the author's insightful study of baboons' social organization, and the implications of their research in gaining a better understanding of our own human society. Steven Poole also reviewed the book for the May 12 issue of the Guardian noting the book's entertaining study of the often dramatic social lives of these primates. Poole writes:

What have years of observing wild baboons in Botswana taught the authors about [baboon's] social thinking and learning abilities? The vivid narrative is like a bush detective story, as the authors conduct ingenious experiments, setting up loudspeakers to play back prerecorded baboon calls (the baboons recognize individual voices, and act surprised if a sequence indicates a violation of rank), or lament the loss of their favorites to lions and leopards. The detail of how baboons keep track of the, er, grunting order is almost novelistic, as we track social peaks and troughs in their lives, and the authors' conclusions have intriguing implications for the evolution of language in humans.

Read an excerpt from the book.

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Press Release: Cheney and Seyfarth, Baboon Metaphysics

Watching primates at zoos is so fascinating because they seem to relate to one another as individuals; we see in their actions and vocalizations signs of friendship, rivalry, and even love. But how much of what we see is just our anthropomorphizing? How do primates really understand their relationships and their place in the world? The fruit of fifteen years living with baboons in their native habitat, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind answers these questions and more, showing us how baboons understand themselves and their world. The drama of rank and kinship, the authors reveal, would be right at home in Jane Austen, as the baboons make and break alliances with friends, relatives, and rivals. Through unprecedented field experiments, Cheney and Seyfarth enable us to understand the intelligence underlying these bonds and the forms of communications baboons employ to manage their relationships—and the dangers and stress of living in the wild. Baboon Metaphysics gives us an unprecedented and compelling glimpse into the mind of this most fascinating species.

Read the press release. Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Biology | Press Releases
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Fulford on Khuri, An Invitation to Laughter

Robert Fulford wrote an article in Canada's National Post on Fuad I. Kuri and his posthumously published memoir An Invitation to Laughter: A Lebanese Anthropologist in the Arab World. A Christian Lebanese, Khuri offers in his unusual autobiography both an insider's and an outsider's perspective on life in Lebanon, often fraught with contradictions, and of course, laughter.

Khuri entertains and informs with clever insights into such issues as the mentality of Arabs toward women, eating habits of the Arab world, the impact of Islam on West Africa, and the extravagant lifestyles of wealthy Arabs as Fulford writes in the Post:

Laughter is not the first sound that comes to mind when someone mentions Arabia. As Khuri wrote, "In Arab culture, laughing loudly in public demeans one's character." … [But] Khuri was not an ordinary Arab, or an ordinary anthropologist. Laughter was frequently his response to the societies he studied. He investigated African villagers and other traditional subjects, but he loved studying prosperous societies.… Khuri, it's clear, loved to follow the rather over-assertive habits of rich Arabs who wanted to display their wealth. He mentions an Arab who asked that Harrods department store in London be closed so that his wife could shop in private. (Michael Jackson did him one better by closing Tokyo Disneyland for a day of fun with his entourage.) Khuri knew of Arabs using mink coats as bathrobes. When he took a ride on a private plane he discovered that even the toilet handle was gold.

A profound appreciation for humor in the study of cultures is a distinctive theme of An Invitation to Laughter, and one that makes this book a must read for anyone interested in the culture of the Middle East and the discipline of anthropology

Mary Patillo on Eight Forty-Eight

Author Mary Pattillo was featured Tuesday on Chicago Public Radio's daily news-radio talk show Eight Forty-Eight. Pattillo speaks with host Richard Steele about her new book Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City and the revitalization of Chicago's North Kenwood-Oakland neighborhood. Their conversation explores the problems facing this rapidly gentrifying black community to touch on broader issues of race and class in contemporary urban America. You can find archived audio of the show on the Chicago Public Radio website.

Pattillo will also be at 57th Street Books today at 7pm to read from her book. In the meantime, you can check out an excerpt on our website.

Review: Cheney, Baboon Metaphysics

The ALA's Booklist magazine recently ran a positive review of Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth's new book, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. The review notes that many recent book-length studies of primates have successfully documented primate social organization, but not until Cheney and Seyfarth's ground breaking new study has anyone attempted to document the intelligence that underlies it. Nancy Bent writes for Booklist:

Primatologists Cheney and Seyfarth have studied the same troop of chacma baboons since 1992, and here they demonstrate the importance of their social behavior. Living in a world of predators, baboons must rely on each other for safety, and the resulting large groups they live in are perfect hotbeds for complicated relationships. Matrilineal groups of females retain status by helping their own kin, whereas males act individually and for themselves. Females form short-term bonds with males for mating and long-term friendships with the same or other males for protection. But how do baboons view the world? How do they decide who to associate with, who to defer to, and who to dominate? Cheney and Seyfarth discuss these and other related questions in a style that both explains complex concepts and challenges the reader.

Written with a scientist's precision and a nature-lover's eye, Baboon Metaphysics gives us an unprecedented and compelling glimpse into the mind of another species.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Anthropology | Biology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Review: Cheney and Seyfarth, Baboon Metaphysics

Publishers Weekly recently ran a review of the latest from authors Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. Ever since Jane Goodall's groundbreaking work, there have been a plethora of books studying the social lives of primates, but the PW review notes that in Baboon Metaphysics Cheney and Seyfarth's deft combination of social drama and scientific study makes this book stand out. From PW:

Lovers' quarrels and murder, greed and social climbing: baboon society has all the features that make a mainstream novel a page-turner. The question Cheney and Seyfarth ask, however, is more demanding: how much of baboon behavior is instinctive, and how much comes from actual thought? Are baboons self-aware?… While describing important research about baboon cognition and social relations, this book charms as much as it informs.

Indeed, Baboon Metaphysics delivers an unprecedented and compelling glimpse into the mind of another species.

Archived in Anthropology | Biology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Press Release: Patillo, Black on the Block

Mary Pattillo is a Newsweek Woman of the 21st Century because of her critically acclaimed last book, Black Picket Fences, which changed forever the way many of us think about the black middleclass in America today. In Black on the Block, Pattillo returns to the South Side of Chicago to explore how class conflicts within the black community are dramatically changing the shape and terms of racial solidarity. Her focus is the work that more affluent members of the black community are doing to lift historically impoverished and dilapidated neighborhoods out of abject poverty—and the tensions that arise between poorer and middleclass blacks when they do so. Black on the Block explores the often heated battles between haves and have-nots, home owners and apartment dwellers, and newcomers and old timers as they clash over the political implications of gentrification and reaching out to white economic power bases.

Read the press release. We also have an excerpt from the book.

Caitlin Zaloom on "What Capital Markets Can Learn From Clifford Geertz"

In the March 23rd issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, author Caitlin Zaloom has penned an interesting piece about the late Clifford Geertz, one of the world's leading cultural anthropologists, and a man she calls her intellectual "grandfather." In her article, Zaloom cites Geertz's groundbreaking studies in books such as Peddlers and Princes and Agricultural Involution as the foundation for her own new book, Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London.

Out of the Pits is a fascinating exploration of how the recent trend of online trading is effecting the culture of the marketplace. Zaloom's article states, "even though their publication preceded today's global economy by decades, Clifford Geertz's works on culture and economy can still help us understand the cultural import of the online evolution in the world's marketplace."

Here's a few links to the UCP website where you can find out more about the works of both of these groundbreaking figures in the field of anthropology:

Clifford Geertz by His Colleagues
Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia
The Religion of Java
Kinship in Bali
Peddlers and Princes

We also have an excerpt from Out of the Pits.

Caitlin Zalooom on BBC Radio 4

Author Caitlin Zaloom was recently featured on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed discussing her new book Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London. Host Laurie Taylor talks with Zaloom about the stock market's gradual transition from face-to-face exchanges made on the trading room floor to internet based trading and how this move into the digital realm effects the culture and business of global trade markets. You can listen to archived audio of the discussion on the BBC's Thinking Allowed website.

We also have an excerpt from the book.

Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney on Letters from Iwo Jima

Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, author of the recent Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers, recently penned an interesting article for OpenDemocracy.org discussing Clint Eastwood's Oscar-winning film Letters from Iwo Jima. Eastwood's cinematic exploration of a pivotal battle of World War II, says Ohnuki-Tierney (and others), parallels the objective of her recent book in trying to "undo the demonization of Japanese soldiers that was propagated by the American mass media during and after the Pacific war of 1941-45." And in fact, Eastwood's film not only shares a common objective with Ohnuki-Tierney's book, but also the means of accomplishing that objective. Both the movie and the book focus on the writings of Japanese soldiers during the war as a vehicle through which to arrive at a deeper understanding of who these soldiers were. Ohnuki-Tierney writes:

Clint Eastwood's film Letters from Iwo Jima begins and ends sixty years after the end of the war it depicts. At the start, a team of Japanese investigators is searching for whatever may have been left by Japanese soldiers holed up on Iwo Jima, part of a group of Pacific islands around 1,000 kilometres south of Tokyo. The team finds a large sack buried where the soldiers had made their last headquarters. The closing scene of the film shows hundreds of letters and postcards the soldiers wrote to their families and friends but were never sent spilling out of this sack.
The letters symbolize the frail thread of humanity that these soldiers, facing imminent death and trapped in a war their country soon lost, managed to hold onto.

Likewise, Ohnuki-Tierney's own work focuses on a collection of diaries and letters by the tokkotai (kamikaze pilots) in order to confront the various myths and stereotypes surrounding these tragic figures, and seek out "the humanity behind the brutality of war." Taken in tandem, both of these new works prove to be indispensable corrections to the history of Japan and World War II. Read the preface to the book.

Review: Zaloom, Out of The Pits

In a recent review for Time Out Chicago Ruth Welte writes that Caitlin Zaloom's Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London "is half fascinating cultural portrait and half in-depth academic text.… but what emerges from the mix is a nuanced, bottom up picture of Chicago's economic importance in the world market, and how our city's working class swagger has shaped derivatives trading from the inception of the market."

But what is "working class swagger" really worth in the market of the new millennium where "floor traders are being phased out as online trading becomes the norm," and "the need to be seen" is no longer relevant? According to Welte, Zaloom's got the answer. Out of the Pits considers the implications of this sea change for everyone involved, from the traders and brokers on the floor of the former Chicago Board of Trade, to the market as a whole.

Documenting how Chicago is responding to the digital transition and how its traders are remaking themselves to compete in the contemporary marketplace, Out of the Pits is a must read for business buffs or anyone concerned about the future of the American marketplace.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Clifford Geertz, 1926-2006

jacket image Clifford Geertz, one of the most influential cultural anthropologists of the last four decades, died last Monday at the age of 80 of complications following heart surgery. As noted in his obituary in today's New York Times, Geertz differentiated himself from his intellectual forebears by rejecting the view of anthropology as "an experimental science in search of laws" in favor of "an interpretative one in search of meaning." Known for his extensive research in Indonesia and Morocco, Dr. Geertz' work helped to define and give character to an intellectual agenda of non-reductive, interpretive social science that continues to provoke much excitement and debate about the nature of human understanding.

The University of Chicago Press published a number of Dr. Geertz' works including The Religion of Java, Kinship in Bali, as well as a volume on Geertz, from the centennial session of the American Anthropological Association, Clifford Geertz by His Colleagues.

Archived in Anthropology
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Review: Pradelle, Market Day in Provence

Fresh, colorful fruits and vegetables, lingering smells of garden-grown herbs and spices, traveling merchants and farmers hawking their wares—these romanticized images of the local street market have helped it to retain its almost timeless appeal to consumers worldwide. Today, tourists flock to places like Carpentras, a city near Avignon in the south of France, to experience the provincial traditions of its outdoor market.

In Market Day in Provence Michèlle de La Pradelle explores the modern popularity of the market at Carpentras to deliver a revealing critique of the various fictions that have allowed it to survive in the midst of a modern economy. Sarah Howard explains in a recent review for the Times Literary Supplement:

According to de La Pradelle, although patrons understand the reality of the modern market, they are caught up in a theatre of illusions, a vast participatory dramatization or a "kind of method acting for the masses." … Gritty bunches of leeks and muddy potatoes convince them that products are fresher and more natural. Peasant-like sellers extolling the virtues of "their" pâté embody rural, artisanal images, while regional toponyms, such as "Sisteron" lamb and "Cavaillon" melons, allow patrons to connect with the terroir.

Yet, Howard notes, "the brilliance of Market Day in Provence lies precisely in the fact that however much Michèle de La Pradelle demystifies the object of her study, she remains loyal to its magic. Her evocative descriptions of this colorful theatre of fantasy will delight anyone who has ever wondered why the lettuces look crisper, the tomatoes redder, and the oranges more juicy at the market."

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Reviews | Sociology
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Press Release: Scientific American, Evolution

Drawing from the pages of Scientific American—one of the most respected science magazines in the world—Evolution contains more than thirty articles written by some of the world's most respected evolutionary scientists. An accessible and timely collection of the most exciting research and thinking on evolution in the past ten years, the book is organized into four sections—the universe, cells, dinosaurs, and humans—with articles, reproduced here in their entirety, that shed light on topics such as the search for life in our solar system and cybernetic cells to the evolution of feathers and the design of the human body and whether it was meant to last. In all, Evolution will be a reference for any reader curious about what's motivating the science of evolution at present—and where it's likely to go from here.

Read the press release.

Archived in Anthropology | Biology | Press Releases
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Review: Guthrie, The Nature of Paleolithic Art

Who created the cave art of the Paleolithic era? And why?

In some academic quarters, those questions are regarded as more or less settled, and so R. Dale Guthrie's book, The Nature of Paleolithic Art has been received about as warmly as the Ice Age. However, in her review of the book in the August 18 issue of the Times Higher Education Supplement, Nadia Durrani recognizes that the answers to those basic questions "remain unclear."

Durrani found Guthrie's book a "fascinating and compulsive read" even as she acknowledges that it is "a controversial book." (Readers of this blog will have noted our previous postings that have excerpted bits of Guthrie's book to convey some of the fascinating content of the book. Plus we have all of the preface available online.)

What is Guthrie's thesis? The hot button that has drawn attention—and fire— is that much of the surviving Paleolithic art was not created by shamans for religious purposes or done purely for art's sake, but was done by "testosterone-laden" young boys. Guthrie's evidence for so radical a theory? Durrani explains:

Guthrie's thesis draws its main impetus … from the surprisingly limited themes dealt with by the art. Although Palaeolithic art is a readily recognisable style, unified in its elasticity and freedom, it concerns a few subject matters only. It is dominated by large mammals, many bleeding and wounded, and complemented by images of voluptuous women, isolated vulva triangles and ochre hand prints. To Guthrie, the art smacks of themes of power relevant to a specific age and sex distortion, namely, adolescent boys akin to modern graffiti artists.

Guthrie's study of Paleolithic rock art, illustrated with more than 3,000 images, is controversial, to be sure. It brings a huge array of frequently novel evidence to bear on the fundamental questions of Paleolithic art. Here at the Press we believe that it is a landmark study that will change the shape of our understanding of these images.

Guthrie's techniques for understanding the many painted handprints among the examples of cave art are appreciated by Durrani in her review:

The "negative hand print" is [a] recurring image in the rock art. These prints were seemingly made by holding the hand on to the cave wall and spraying liquified pigment from a blow-pipe onto the hand. Many prints have missing fingers. They were left by poor folk who lost fingers in the bitter cold of the Ice Age and who, by leaving their tragic hand print on the wall, were asking for magical help or healing. Or so scholars have always tended to claim.
But in a stroke of pure genius Guthrie suggests that these ghoulish missing-finger prints were childish pranks. Or rather boys' pranks: Guthrie comissioned an analysis of 201 Palaeolithic hand prints, which concluded that 162 are male and only 39 are female or young male prints. Guthrie thus attempts to get at the essence of the artists and puts a human slant on the art, which draws us close to our forebears and "the possibility that adolescent giggles and snickers may have echoed in dark cave passages.…"

Previous blog posts: "Paleolithic handprints" and "Who made this handprint on the cave wall?".
Preface to the book.

Press release: Taussig, Walter Benjamin's Grave

Michael Taussig has emerged as one of our most daring intellectuals. His books, which blend rigorous anthropological theory with elements of memoir, literary theory, archival history, and even fiction, are of a genre all their own. As the New York Times commented, "his books read more like beatnik novels than somber analyses of other cultures." Walter Benjamin's Grave collects many of Taussig's best short essays which have been published over the past decade while adding a brand new one, providing readers with a fascinating and genuinely entertaining overview of this singular thinker and writer.

Read the press release. Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Literature | Press Releases
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Press release: Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze Diaries

The story of the kamizake or tokkōtai is among the most tragic and misunderstood in the history of World War II. Commonly remembered as suicide pilots who volunteered to die for their country, a significantly large number of these student soldiers were in fact gentle souls who were forced into their desperate mission. Fortunately, some of the kamizake also wrote diaries, and six of them are collected here in this heartbreaking but much needed corrective to their many caricatures.

Read the press release. Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | History | Press Releases
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Freeman J. Dyson on Kamikaze Diaries

While reviewing another book in the New York Review of Books, Freeman J. Dyson has some very interesting things to say about Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney's Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers:

Even after recognizing the great differences between the circumstances of 1945 and 2001, I believe that the kamikaze diaries give us our best insight into the state of mind of the young men who caused us such grievous harm in 2001. If we wish to understand the phenomenon of terrorism in the modern world, and if we wish to take effective measures to lessen its attraction to idealistic young people, the first and most necessary step is to understand our enemies. We must give respect to our enemies, as courageous and capable soldiers enlisted in an evil cause, before we can understand them. The kamikaze diaries give us a basis on which to build both respect and understanding.

Kamikaze Diaries presents diaries and correspondence left by members of the tokkotai and other Japanese student soldiers who perished during World War II. Read an excerpt.

Press release: Richerson, Not By Genes Alone

Not by Genes Alone offers a radical interpretation of human evolution. What makes us human, renowned scholars Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd demonstrate, lies in our psychology—more specifically, our unparalleled ability to adapt. Building their case with such fascinating examples as the Amish rumspringa and the gift exchange system of the !Kung San, Not by Genes Alone throws aside the conventional nature-versus-nurture debate and convincingly argues that culture and biology are inextricably linked. Read the press release.

Read an excerpt.

Katherine Dunham, 1909-2006

Katherine Dunham—dancer, choreographer, anthropologist, and activist—died on Sunday, May 21, 2006, at the age of 96. Dunham was born in suburban Chicago and studied anthropology at the University of Chicago. As a graduate student she did field work in the West Indies, an influence which she expressed in many forms, including her dance and her activism.

A dozen years ago we were pleased to reprint Island Possessed, her book about Haiti, as well as A Touch of Innocence, the searing story of her first eighteen years.

Archived in Anthropology | Biography
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Review: Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze Diaries

Library Journal recently reviewed Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney's Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers: "Poignant and heartbreaking…. Ohnuki-Tierney refutes simplistic stereotypes and offers readers the human face of what she defines as a 'colossal tragedy.' Well researched and written, this book is highly recommended for academic and larger public libraries."

Kamikaze Diaries presents diaries and correspondence left by members of the tokkotai and other Japanese student soldiers who perished during World War II. Outside of Japan, these kamikaze pilots were considered unbridled fanatics and chauvinists who willingly sacrificed their lives for the emperor. But the writings explored here by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney clearly and eloquently speak otherwise.

Read an excerpt.

Review: Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze Diaries

Publishers Weekly recently reviewed Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney's Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers. From the review: "Like Anne Frank's diary, this collection of kamikaze pilot diaries uses the eyes of those on the cusp of adulthood to bring to life the unfathomable daily realities of war.… The range of views encompassed illustrates these young men's varying convictions: the latent patriotism in one young idealist, Sasaki Hachiro ("We cannot succumb to the 'Red Hair and Blue Eyes'"), the influence of Thomas Mann on Hayashi Tadao ("Japan, why don't I love and respect you?"), the sentimentalism of Matasunaga Shigeo ("Those who, even then, love Japan are fortunate. / But, poor souls; it is the happiness of a wild goose. / It is the fake blue bird whose color fades away under light") and the resignation of Hayashi Ichizo ("I will do a splendid job sinking an enemy aircraft carrier. Do brag about me") together eerily illuminate the tragedy of war in a way no textbook could."

Kamikaze Diaries is a moving history that presents diaries and correspondence left by members of the tokkotai and other Japanese student soldiers who perished during the war. Outside of Japan, these kamikaze pilots were considered unbridled fanatics and chauvinists who willingly sacrificed their lives for the emperor. But the writings explored here by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney clearly and eloquently speak otherwise.

A Brain for All Seasons receives Walter P. Kistler Book Award

Walter H. Calvin has received the 2006 Walter P. Kistler Book Award for his book A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change. The award, presented by the Foundation For the Future, recognizes authors of science-based books that contribute to society's understanding of the factors that may impact the long-term future of humanity.

Mankind has recently come to the shocking realization that our ancestors survived hundreds of abrupt and severe changes to Earth's climate. In A Brain for All Seaons, William H. Calvin takes readers around the globe and back in time, showing how such cycles of cool, crash, and burn provided the impetus for enormous increases in the intelligence and complexity of human beings—and warning us of human activities that could trigger similarly massive shifts in the planet's climate.

On April 6, at 7:00 p.m., the University of Washington will host an award ceremony for Calvin. He will be interviewed, participate in a Q&A session, and sign books. The event is free and open to the public.

Read an excerpt.

Press release: Michele de La Pradelle, Market Day in Provence

An institution as old as time, the outdoor farmers' market has experienced a renaissance in recent decades as consumers have sought an alternative to chain supermarkets and pre-packaged goods. For patrons of these street markets, the tomatoes are always redder, the lettuce greener, the melons larger, and the meat and fish more fresh. But are they? In Market Day in Provence, the late Michèle de La Pradelle (1944-2004) lifts the curtain behind the traditional farmers' market once and for all in her award-winning study of the street market of Carpentras, France

One of the oldest and most celebrated markets, Carpentras is the model for its more modern cousins. But they are all alike, according to de La Pradelle, in that above all else, money rules. On any Friday, several hours before dawn, trucks file in along the cobblestone streets of the city bearing goods not brought in from farmers but from wholesalers—many of whom supply the superstore chains surrounding the city. The vast majority of produce, meats, dairy products, and fruit here is of the same quality and price as elsewhere in the city. But the products at the market appear different, even fresher—a tribute to the market's spectacle of theatre, and what the customer wants to believe.… Read the press release.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Review: Mark D. West, Law in Everyday Japan

The Japan Times recently praised Mark D. West's Law in Everyday Japan: Sex, Sumo, Suicide, and Statutes. In the review, Jeff Kingston writes: "This is a superb book that explores the interaction of law, society and culture over a range of intriguing topics. In seven captivating case studies, Mark West shows how law influences people's behavior and perceptions in everyday situations. Rather than trumping law, social norms are powerfully shaped by it. We learn that Japanese respond to incentives and penalties in ways very similar to people in other societies.… By choosing themes off the beaten track of legal analysis, West demonstrates that even the quirkiest phenomena can be analyzed. He 'examines the incentives created by law and legal institutions in everyday lives, the ways in which law intermingles with social norms, historically engrained ideas, cultural mores, and the phenomena that cannot easily be explained.' And he does so in a delightfully engaging manner."

Compiling case studies based on seven fascinating themes—karaoke-based noise complaints, sumo wrestling, love hotels, post-Kobe earthquake condominium reconstruction, lost-and-found outcomes, working hours, and debt-induced suicide—Law in Everyday Japan offers a vibrant portrait of the way law intermingles with social norms, historically ingrained ideas, and cultural mores in Japan.

Archived in Anthropology | Law | Reviews
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"Acting white"

"Go into any inner-city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach kids to learn. They know that parents have to parent, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white."
—Barack Obama, Keynote Address, Democratic National Convention, 2004

Ron Netsky, a writer for City (Rochester, NY), observed that the term "acting white" has been appearing in the media a lot lately (most recently in The Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times) . Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu popularized the term in a study published in Urban Review in 1986. Fordham is also the author of Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High, a book which explores academic achievement within the Black community and the price students pay for attaining it.

Earlier this month, Netsky interviewed Fordham about Black education issues and what it means to "act white."

City: In Blacked Out, you write that one of the things that seems to make the education process difficult is generational.
Fordham: After the Brown decision and the Civil Rights act—in the 1960s generally—black people were engrossed in acknowledging what they had achieved. Their children were the kids that I studied, and their parents were always baffled by why their kids wouldn't take advantage of what they saw as the wider opportunities available to them. And rightfully so. You fight for something so hard, why don't the kids do so much better? Because if we had those opportunities, we would have gone much further in life than we've actually gone.

But they don't get what is happening in culture systems, how they operate. These kids are fearful of the loss of identity. This is not something they would verbalize or even have the understanding to talk about if you asked them.

The rest of the interview and an essay by Signithia Fordham titled "Was Rosa Parks 'acting white'?" can be read here.

Visit our black studies catalog.

Ancient Graffiti

Contrary to popular belief, not all ancient cave art was created by senior male shamans. R. Dale Guthrie, author of The Nature of Paleolithic Art, reveals that many graphic scenes of sex and hunting were drawn by teenage male "graffiti artists." In an interview with LiveScience, Guthrie said, "Lots of the wild animals in the caves have spears in them and blood coming out of their mouths and everything that a hunter would be familiar with. These were the Ferraris and football games of their time. They painted what was on their minds." The LiveScience feature on Guthrie, which is accompanied by four cave images, can be read here.

You can also read more about Guthrie's discoveries in this excerpt from his book.

Review: Andrew Apter, The Pan-African Nation

Adekeye Adebajo recently reviewed Andrew Apter's The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria for the Times Literary Supplement: "Traditional studies of Nigerian foreign policy have often ignored the cultural dimensions of Nigeria's efforts to play a leadership role in Africa, although Nigeria has historically assigned itself the role—as the largest black nation on earth, comprising one in every five sub-Saharan Africans—of protecting black people globally. The country's diplomats have, therefore, tried to champion the rights and interests of black people not just in Africa, but, for example, also in Brazil. Andrew Apter fills a gap in the literature by focusing on the spectacular Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC), which was hosted by Nigeria in 1977."

Harry G. West discusses Kupilikula on BBC Radio Four

Harry G. West recently discussed his new book Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique on Laurie Taylor's BBC Radio Four program "Thinking Allowed." You can listen to an archive of the program by following the link on the Thinking Allowed Web site.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Events
Posted by at 09:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 25, 2011

A Knight and Marshall, both: New honors for Sahlins

August 25, 2011

Remembering Fernando Coronil

July 12, 2011

Chungking Express at the Center of the World

August 26, 2010

Chimpanzees Do Not Make Good Pets

August 12, 2010

Gina A. Ulysse on Human Rights, Haiti, and Wyclef

March 23, 2010

Climate change and human evolution

January 25, 2010

A Haitian Anthropologist on Haiti

January 12, 2010

Deciphering the secret languages of the jungle

December 21, 2009

Santa Claus vs Bigfoot

November 30, 2009

The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion on WGN's Extension 720

November 03, 2009

Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1908-2009

November 02, 2009

Creating a public debate about 'Honor Killing'

Press Release: Graham, The Moon, Come to Earth

October 27, 2009

"South Asia Across the Disciplines" on the web

October 01, 2009

A political scientist in the slaughterhouse

September 16, 2009

Debating end-of-life issues

September 09, 2009

The organization behind the Burning Man

July 21, 2009

From the Earth to the Moon and back

April 20, 2009

A conversation about the looting of Iraq's cultural heritage

March 31, 2009

Press Release: Rothfield, The Rape of Mesopotamia

December 12, 2008

The "rogue colony" of New Orleans

December 08, 2008

"Who knew Camus had something to say about gardens?"

September 08, 2008

The "coming home" of the black midle class

July 17, 2008

Iran's nuclear capabilities have been exaggerated

June 25, 2008

The garden as a cultural institution

June 17, 2008

Interview with Mary Pattillo on WNYC

June 02, 2008

Press Release: Harrison, Gardens

May 07, 2008

An innovative blend of storytelling and scholarship

April 14, 2008

Tenure as a fact on the ground

March 25, 2008

A Runyonesque tale of schemers and suckers

February 20, 2008

Larry McMurtry on Custerology

February 06, 2008

David Grazian on the BBC

January 29, 2008

Review: Akerman and Karrow, Maps

January 23, 2008

The fraud of nightlife

January 22, 2008

Monkey Politics

January 14, 2008

The fake thrills of urban nightlife

December 12, 2007

Review: Collins, Rethinking Expertise

December 10, 2007

Baboon Metaphysics on Fresh Air

November 29, 2007

Press Release: Maestripieri, Macachiavellian Intelligence

November 15, 2007

Press Release: Narayan, My Family and Other Saints

November 14, 2007