Anthro in the news 7/12/10
• One year after: return to repression in Honduras
Speaking from Honduras during a march of democracy protestors in the capital, professor Adrienne Pine, a cultural anthropologist at American University in Washington, DC, is quoted in the Huffington Post: “We’ve…returned to the 1980s, when death squads killed several hundred people…they’re using the same repressive strategies….Even the same people are in charge.” And what is the US position in terms of human rights?
• Not such a shura thing
Shura is the word for a meeting of village elders (men) in Afghanistan. NATO military frequently organize shuras to explain their intents and operations. The elders appear and make a case for their interests. Brief footage of shuras in the film Restrepo shows that people on the two sides totally speak past each other. An article in the Christian Science Monitor quotes cultural anthropologist Thomas Barfield: “Communications at any point is a good thing. [But] having them in the midst of combat operations is a bit like talking about fire safety when the fire engines have arrived — most attention on both sides is focused elsewhere.” If you’ve seen Restrepo, just think about the dead cow.
• Drug trials as a way of life
Phase I drug testing on prisoners was banned in the United States in the 1980s. Since then, financial incentives for participation by “volunteers” have produced a stream of participants as well as debate about the ethics of the system in terms of whether or not volunteers have sufficient information about potential risks. An article in the Chronicle for Higher Education profiles the research of cultural anthropologist Roberto Abadie on this topic and his new book, The Professional Guinea Pig: Big Pharma and the Risky World of Human Subjects. Abadie, now a visiting scholar in the health sciences program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, spent a year living in youth hostels and group hotels in Philadelphia to learn about why people volunteer for clinical trials and their experiences in and after the trials. One finding: volunteers underestimate their risks. Read the article for more.
• Making a difference
Dame Joan Metge is a Paheka, a white outsider living in New Zealand with many honors to her name including being an honorary member of the Te Rarawa. She is a also a cultural anthropologist and tireless advocate for the Maori people and for better relations between the Paheka and the Maori. The New Zealand Herald carried an article about her and her new book, Tuamaka: The Challenge of Difference in Aotearoa New Zealand.
• Real men don’t like shopping
An oped in the Times (London) gave a shoutout to cultural anthropologist Kate Fox and her book, Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behavior. She wrote that shopping, in England, is a female skill, and for men, being good at shopping lowers your manliness quota.
• Channelling Sir Herbert Risley
The 1901 Indian Census systematically attempted to count all “castes” throughout British India and record their population. This effort was led by Sir Herbert Risley, a British colonial anthropologist. His legacy lives on in a new report, “Caste in the United Kingdom”.
• Let’s go England: archaeo dates pushed back again
It was very cool in England then, even cold. But archaic humans made the trek out of Africa to… Norfolk. There they were with their flint tools, 800,000 years ago at Happisburgh (pronounced HAZE-bura). Supporters of this new date include researchers Simon Parfitt and Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum and Nick Ashton of the British Museum. A leading skeptic is Richard Klein of Stanford University, notorious for resisting date push back.
• Could we perhaps assume kindness
Selfishness and cruelty, in the Darwinian-informed world, need no explanation. They are rational and logical forms of behavior as individuals struggle to the top of whatever pyramid they have made for themselves. Frans de Waal, primatologist at Emory University, writes against the grain and is a good choice for the New York Times review of the new book, The Price of Altruism. He ends his review by saying, “This is a book for anyone interested in the question, first posed by Darwin himself, of how we ended up with so much kindness in a natural world customarily depicted as ‘red in tooth and claw.’
• Better than sex
Now that bonobos are becoming a bit more known, it’s time to correct their image as just all about sex. The New York Times provides an interview with Brian Hare, assistant professor at the Duke University Institute for Brain Sciences, and Vanessa Woods, research scientist in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University and author of Bonobo Handshake. So what’s better than sex? I’ve read the interview several times, and I am not sure whether the answer is sharing food, females sticking together in the face of male aggression, or refusing to “grow up” and becoming selfish. Could be a winning trifecta.
• LOL a long time ago
Who had the first laugh? Humor in human prehistory was addressed at the EuroScience Open Forum in Turin, Italy. Tom Flamson, who recently completed his PhD in anthropology at UCLA and is an adjunct professor at Santa Monica College, noted that humor is a human universal. Thus, according to evolutionary biology, there must be an adaptive reason for it. The imputed answer: joking ability is a sign of mental fitness and a factor in female selection of male mates (apologies if I have any of this wrong–I am working from the media coverage only, always a risk). And the data? According to the article in the Irish Times, brain-scan studies show that women react more positively to humor than men do. Blogger’s note: Sounds to me like we have a long way to go in terms of generating hard data on funny stuff. I hope my tax dollars don’t pay for it, though I would rather pay for humor studies than for one nail in one wing of a Drone.
• Appointments
David Shankland, reader in social anthropology in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at Bristol University has been appointed Director of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Brian Gilley, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Vermont, will be the first director of First Nations Educational and Cultural Center at Indiana University Bloomington.
[...] Anthropologyworks alerts us to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about medical anthropologist Roberto Abadie and his new ethnography on professional research subjects in clinical trials. As the article explains, “Since 1980, when Phase 1 drug tests on prisoners were banned in the United States, university medical schools and pharmaceutical companies have depended on volunteers… to test the safety of new drugs,” (Glenn 2010). While bioethicists have debated whether paying volunteers constitutes “‘undue inducement’ that might tempt them to take risks against their better judgment,” (Glenn 2010) little empirical work has been conducted on the people actually taking these risks. However: “But now an anthropologist has produced a study of several dozen medical volunteers…. Roberto L. Abadie, a visiting scholar in the health-sciences program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, spent a year living in youth hostels and group houses in Philadelphia, trying to get a sense of why volunteers do what they do and how they understand their risks. He offers his findings in The Professional Guinea Pig: Big Pharma and the Risky World of Human Subjects (Duke University Press, August). The book’s primary purpose is to offer a detailed description of medical volunteering and its contexts, not to weigh in on the ethics of clinical trials. But after his year in the field, Mr. Abadie does have opinions about policy: Volunteers underestimate their long-term risks, he says, and universities should do more to protect them….…Mr. Abadie spent time with anarchist activists who are attracted to guinea-pigging because of the flexibility it offers. Between 1996 and 2002, that milieu was documented in Guinea Pig Zero, a Philadelphia zine published by and for activist medical volunteers. But Mr. Abadie’s book also examines two other types of medical volunteer. First, he describes transient, economically struggling people who travel from place to place in search of lucrative trials. These volunteers are often less educated and more socially isolated than the anarchists. Second, Mr. Abadie spent months at an HIV clinic where patients were participating in long-term trials to determine the effectiveness of new drug combinations. That environment is very different from the Phase 1 trials described elsewhere in the book. At the clinic, the HIV patients knew they had a personal stake in the development of new drugs, and the financial compensation they received was much smaller. Even though they were taking risks by participating in the drug studies, Mr. Abadie says, those volunteers seemed to reap psychological gains,” (Glenn 2010). [...]