North American Dialects

Please take a look at the full scale North American dialects map.

Note that this will not be on the test, but is just for your own edification.

The Emic Side of Benny Lava

Please check out "Benny Lava" with the proper translation. Please think about how it makes you see the clip differently.

Also read up on Prabhu Deva, the actor who is dancing in the film clip.

Anthropologist Stanley Ann Dunham

For those of you who might be interested to learn more about Barack Obama's mother Stanley Ann Dunham, check out this recent interview from the Colbert Report with the author Janny Scott who has written a biography called "A Singular Woman" about her. In the interview she states that Stanley Ann was "Very open emotionally and intellectually," and that "The only label she ever embraced was anthropologist."

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

On the Mental Health of Primates in Captivity

Here is a sad article that discusses the mental health of chimpanzees in zoos.

The documented behaviors, which included self-mutilation, repetitive rocking, and consumption of feces, are symptoms of compromised mental health in humans, and are not seen in wild chimpanzees, the authors say. The study found that even chimps at very well regarded zoos displayed the disturbing behaviors.

"Absolutely abnormal behavior and possible mental health issues are most commonly associated with lab chimps," co-author Nicholas Newton-Fisher told Discovery News. "This is one of the reasons we were surprised to see the levels of abnormal behavior that we did -- in chimpanzees living in good zoos."

"We conclude that the chimpanzee mind might have difficulties dealing with captivity," added Newton-Fisher, a primate behavioral ecologist at the University of Kent's School of Anthropology & Conservation.

That last bit about "might have difficulties" sounds like an understatement to me. To read the whole thing CLICK.

An Ethnography of Outsourcing

Maybe some of you have seen the NBC comedy show Outsourced about a group of Indians who work at a call center for an American company peddling tchotchkes. As I mentioned in class, Anthropology insists on actually going to a place and experiencing it as the local people do before we reach any conclusions about the place or the people who live there. Though not an anthropologist, this is exactly what Andrew Marantz, a freelance journalist did when he went to Delhi and took a job in the BPO (business process outsourcing) industry. It turns out that what he found was not that funny.

Every month, thousands of Indians leave their Himalayan tribes and coastal fishing towns to seek work in business process outsourcing, which includes customer service, sales, and anything else foreign corporations hire Indians to do. The competition is fierce. No one keeps a reliable count, but each year there are possibly millions of applicants vying for BPO positions. A good many of them are bright recent college grads, but their knowledge of econometrics and Soviet history won't help them in interviews. Instead, they pore over flashcards and accent tapes, intoning the shibboleths of English pronunciation—"wherever" and "pleasure" and "socialization"—that recruiters use to distinguish the employable candidates from those still suffering from MTI, or "mother tongue influence."Monica Joshi, 22, kills some time before her graveyard shift at a Gurgaon call center.

In the end, most of the applicants will fail and return home deeper in debt. The lucky ones will secure Spartan lodgings and spend their nights (thanks to time differences) in air-conditioned white-collar sweatshops. They will earn as much as 20,000 rupees per month—around $2 per hour, or $5,000 per year if they last that long, which most will not. In a country where per-capita income is about $900 per year, a BPO salary qualifies as middle-class. Most call-center agents, however, will opt to sleep in threadbare hostels, eat like monks, and send their paychecks home. Taken together, the millions of calls they make and receive constitute one of the largest intercultural exchanges in history.

Indian BPOs work with firms from dozens of countries, but most call-center jobs involve talking to Americans. New hires must be fluent in English, but many have never spoken to a foreigner. So to earn their headsets, they must complete classroom training lasting from one week to three months. First comes voice training, an attempt to "neutralize" pronunciation and diction by eliminating the round vowels of Indian English. Speaking Hindi on company premises is often a fireable offense.

To read the entire article, CLICK HERE.

We will be talking about globalization and its impacts on and off throughout the session, but I thought that this observation was a really succinct way of explaining the phenomenon without ever calling it such.

Trainers aim to impart something they call "international culture"—which is, of course, no culture at all, but a garbled hybrid of Indian and Western signifiers designed to be recognizable to everyone and familiar to no one.

(PS Of course the producers of the show Outsourced could not resist the urge to include a cow in the photo above. This is not only part of a Western trope a signifier for "India" but almost interchangeable with the Indians who are all behind the prominently featured American manager, who is clearly confident and in charge. If I were really cynical, I might even say that there is more than a little ethnicentrism here - with the Westerner represented as the focus/ideal, the Indians somewhere behind him and hardly a step away from the cow/animals.)

Tiger Mothers and the Mommy Wars

We talked today about Amy Chua's piece, "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior", that ignited such a firestorm of debate when it appeared in the Wall Street Journal. While Chua tries in this piece to detach literal ethnicity from her parenting practices, she still manages to highlight some very important cultural differences in how we raise our children.

This piece touches on so many very, very sensitive issues in our ongoing debate about who we are as culture, where we're going, and with whom we compete. Some things to think about when reading this piece might be:

• The degree to which we invest our children with our own needs and goals for the future of our culture, as opposed to their own ideas;
• Our mythologies about childhood as a general concept;
• Our anxiety about the rise of powers other than the United States in the global marketplace;
• How we define achievement and success.

Multi-tasking and the Wired Generation

Here's a link to a fascinating look at the true efficacy (or lack thereof) of multitasking in today's digital world:

http://video.pbs.org/video/1402987791/

As I type this, I have four tabs open in my browser so that I can monitor my email, select a playlist that fits my mood from Pandora Radio, check the weather for my morning run tomorrow, and write this post. I also have my iPhone right next to the keyboard. Yet I don't consider myself to be multi-tasking right now. There are days when I might be running software analyzing ground penetrating radar data, checking my email, drafting a report, and listening to my iPod. That's a light day of multi-tasking for me.

I have to wonder how truly effective those days really are after watching this Frontline video. Thoughts?

Was Shakespeare a Stoner?

Apparently there is an anthropologist in South Africa who would like to know if Shakespeare was high on marijuana. This is a very different type of forensic anthropology than that discussed in the following article.

Francis Thackeray, the director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, has proposed to dig up Shakespeare's grave—along with the resting places of his family—to see if the skeleton could determine the cause of the bard's death. Hair and keratin from fingernails and toenails could also reveal a pattern of drug use, while a chemical analysis of teeth could expose the use of tobacco or marijuana.

Experts have long speculated whether drugs played a role in Shakespeare's genius; many have noted his references to a "noted weed" and "a journey in his head"—lines that appear in two different sonnets. For a study released in 2001, Thackeray discovered cannabis residue (along with cocaine) on clay pipe fragments found in Shakespeare's garden. Cannabis sativa, the plant from which marijuana is derived, was available in England during the Elizabethan era to make textiles, rope, paper, clothing and sails.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

Forensic Anthropology in the Military

Forensic Anthropology has recently become well known thanks largely to the hit TV show Bones. Here is an example of a real-life forensic anthropologist who works for the US military to help identify the remains of fallen soldiers.

As the military's only active duty forensic anthropologist, Regan unravels mysteries borne of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the most common cause of death is not a bullet but a homemade bomb. She uses DNA, fingerprints, tissue analysis and painstaking observation to make positive identifications. Part of her "noble mission," she says, is making sure the remains survivors receive belong to their loved ones — and no one else.

These are the first wars in which every American battlefield death is autopsied — and, since 2004, the first in which every set of American military remains undergoes a CT scan. In previous wars, autopsies on American combat casualties were rare and CT scans were never done.

Like a casualty notification officer, Regan encounters family members on the worst days of their lives — and delivers painful truths.

In Regan's hands, each case is much more than anonymous remains. It's a fellow service member whose grieving family is desperate for answers.

"I'm a service member, and these people have made the ultimate sacrifice," she said inside a chilly basement morgue of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner in Rockville, Md. "Everything we do is to honor them and make sure we have uncovered the truth."

To read the entire article, click HERE.

Mayan Tomb Uncovered

Archaeologists have used a microscopic camera to peer into an ancient Mayan tomb in Palenque, Mexico.

A Mayan tomb closed to the world for 1,500 years has finally revealed some of its secrets as scientists snaked a tiny camera into a red-and-black painted burial chamber.

The room, decorated with paintings of nine figures, also contains pottery, jade pieces and shell, archaeologists from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) reported Thursday (June 23).

The tomb is located in Palenque, an expansive set of stone ruins in the Mexican state of Chiapas. According to the INAH, the tomb was discovered in 1999 under a building called Temple XX. But the stonework and location prevented exploration.

To read the article. To see pictures of the site.

Exciting Discoveries in Dmanisi

Here is some tantalizing evidence that suggests both an earlier Out of Africa date (1.85 million vs. 1.7 mya) and a two way migration (Out of Africa to Asia and back again). Basically, this means that it is possible that our earliest ancestors developed in the Caucasus and then returned to Africa where they evolved into Homo sapiens. The evidence comes from the Dmanisi site in Georgia (the country, not the state) that has already revolutionized our ideas about Homo erectus and its march across Eurasia. From the article:

"The accumulating evidence from Eurasia is demonstrating increasingly old and primitive populations," said Reid Ferring of the University of North Texas. Dmanisi is located in the Republic of Georgia.

"The recently discovered data show that Dmanisi was occupied at the same time as, if not before, the first appearance of Homo erectus in east Africa," the team led by Ferring and David Lordkipanidze of the Georgia National Museum reported. They uncovered more than 100 stone artifacts in deep layers at the site. Previously, fossil bones from a later period had been found at the site.

The new discovery shows that the Caucasus region was inhabited by a sustained population, not just transitory colonists. "We do not know as yet what the first occupants looked like, but the implication is that they were similar to, or possibly even more primitive than, those represented by Dmanisi's fossils," Ferring explained.

The occupants of Dmanisi "are the first representatives of our own genus outside Africa, and they represent the most primitive population of the species Homo erectus known to date," added Lordkipanidze. The geographic origins of H. erectus are still unknown.

The early humans at Dmanisi "might be ancestral to all later H. erectus populations, which would suggest a Eurasian origin of H. erectus," said Lordkipanidze. However, there's another theory as well: H. erectus originated in Africa, and the Dmanisi group might represent its first migration out of Africa.

To read the article, click HERE.

The Earth is Full

The most read story in the New York Times today is by Thomas Friedman who discusses ecological footprints to make the case that we may be reaching a tipping point with regard to the environment.

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

“The only answer can be denial,” argues Paul Gilding, the veteran Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur, who described this moment in a new book called “The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.” “When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required.”

Gilding cites the work of the Global Footprint Network, an alliance of scientists, which calculates how many “planet Earths” we need to sustain our current growth rates. G.F.N. measures how much land and water area we need to produce the resources we consume and absorb our waste, using prevailing technology. On the whole, says G.F.N., we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth’s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. “Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem,” says Gilding.

Read the whole thing HERE.

For those who would like to explore this topic further, I would suggest looking into the debates surrounding Neo-Malthusianism and Cornucopianism.

Our Common Ancestor: Homo Heidelbergensis

We did not have a chance to talk about Homo heidelbergensis in our lectures, but it appears that there is a growing consensus that this hominid species was our common ancestor with the Neandertals. This species is believed to have been widespread in Africa and Asia in the middle Pleistocene period between 781,000 to 126,000 years ago. To read more about the latest study click HERE.

Senate Official: Wrong to Link Bin Laden, Geronimo

The news is currently dominated by stories of the capture and killing of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. But here is one story I never expected to hear: "After bin Laden was killed, the military sent a message back to the White House: "Geronimo EKIA" — enemy killed in action."

Once again, we have a case of negative stereotyping of Native Americans and an inappropriate use of their iconography. As Tuell, member of the Nez Perce tribe in Idaho states, "These inappropriate uses of Native American icons and cultures are prevalent throughout our society, and the impacts to Native and non-Native children are devastating".

The linking of Native American hero Geronimo and U.S. enemy Osama bin Laden is another example of the fact that although non-existent in the biological sense, "race" as a cultural construct, is alive and well, with strong impacts on society today.

To read more, see: Senate official: Wrong to link bin Laden, Geronimo

UPDATE: Apache tribe is requesting a formal apology from President Obama.

The leader of Apache warrior Geronimo’s tribe is asking President Obama for an apology for the government’s use of his name as a code name for Osama bin Laden.

In a letter to Obama, Fort Sill Apache Tribal Chairman Jeff Houser said equating Geronimo to a “mass murderer and cowardly terrorist” was painful and offensive to all Native Americans. “Right now Native American children all over this country are facing the reality of having one of their most revered figures being connected to a terrorist and murderer of thousands of innocent Americans,” he wrote

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011) NYT Critics' Pick

I can't wait to see director Herzog's new documentary, "Cave of Forgotten Dreams".

As Dana Stevens, critic at the Washing Post states, "If you are a member of the human race, you should see this movie."



And this is what Manohla Dargis, NYT reviewer, has to say:

"What a gift Werner Herzog offers with “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” an inside look at the astonishing Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc — and in 3-D too. In southern France, about 400 miles from Paris, the limestone cave contains a wealth of early paintings, perhaps from as long ago as 32,000 years. Here, amid gleaming stalactites and stalagmites and a carpet of animal bones, beautiful images of horses gallop on walls alongside bison and a ghostly menagerie of cave lions, cave bears and woolly mammoths. Multiple red palm prints of an early artist adorn one wall, as if to announce the birth of the first auteur."

One of the most amazing things about this new film is that it captures what almost no human eyes have seen for at least 20,000 years. As the washington Post review points out,

"Chauvet, the most recently discovered and by far the oldest of the great Paleolithic cave-painting sites of Western Europe, has been visited only by a small group of scholars since it was found by three spelunkers on a hike in 1994...Miraculously, Herzog was granted permission to film, and for a six-day period he and a skeleton crew of three descended into the cave with very limited equipment—three cold light panels and a custom-built 3D camera rig—to give the rest of the world what ma! y [sic.] be the closest look we will ever get at some of the world's earliest works of art."

Follow this link to read more about this amazing new film. To watch an interview with director Werner Herzog: NYT Herzog interview.
Lastly, if you still can't get enough, check out the Chauvet Caves Gallery.