Pakistani Culture and Identity

If you read Chapter 14, culture and identity are important anthropological concepts that will come up again and again in the class. In this vein, I would like to recommend a recent Wall Street Journal article by Aatish Taseer that he wrote about his slain father Salman Taseer. The article, which attempts something like a psychoanalysis of a country and its people is does an excellent job of explaining the differences between India and Pakistan and why, in his opinion, Pakistan has suffered an identity crisis since its founding. Here is an excerpt:

To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge—its hysteria—it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan. This is not merely an academic question. Pakistan's animus toward India is the cause of both its unwillingness to fight Islamic extremism and its active complicity in undermining the aims of its ostensible ally, the United States.

In the absence of a true national identity, Pakistan defined itself by its opposition to India. It turned its back on all that had been common between Muslims and non-Muslims in the era before partition. Everything came under suspicion, from dress to customs to festivals, marriage rituals and literature. The new country set itself the task of erasing its association with the subcontinent, an association that many came to view as a contamination. ...

Had this assertion of national identity meant the casting out of something alien or foreign in favor of an organic or homegrown identity, it might have had an empowering effect. What made it self-wounding, even nihilistic, was that Pakistan, by asserting a new Arabized Islamic identity, rejected its own local and regional culture. In trying to turn its back on its shared past with India, Pakistan turned its back on itself.

But there was one problem: India was just across the border, and it was still its composite, pluralistic self, a place where nearly as many Muslims lived as in Pakistan. It was a daily reminder of the past that Pakistan had tried to erase.

To read the whole article, click HERE.

Shunning and the Law

One of the ways in which cultures police themselves and enforce cultural norms of behavior is by defining who gets to live in a society, and who is not allowed to take part. Shunning people who fail to behave in culturally acceptable ways is known throughout the world and from all periods of history. Sometimes it's done as a means to enforce unwritten types of cultural conformity, and other times it's done to enforce written laws.

We don't tend to think of it as something that is done in any sort of formal way in our society, however. It might surprise many to know, then, that a form of shunning is currently being debated for its constitutionality in the state of Georgia. Although the Supreme Court of Georgia has ruled that banning criminals from the state is unconstitutional, it has upheld the right of judges to restrict criminals to specific counties, or forbid them from entering certain regions or counties. Currently, a case involving a mentally ill defendant is making its way through the appeals process and will probably be up for consideration by the Georgia State Supreme Court.

This is an interesting question, legally and anthropologically. At the heart of this debate, the rights of the defendant to live as s/he chooses is being counterpoised against the rights of our society to be free from criminal activity performed by the defendant. That's not a small question in our culture, because we tend to prefer to uphold the rights of the individual as an ideal, versus the rights of the State.

There are also pragmatic questions to be answered if the court upholds the practice: for example, what will be penalty be if a defendant is banned from a county, and s/he violates that ban? Also, does this practice address the problem of recidivism, or does it merely ship the problem elsewhere? And finally, because most of these bannings have restricted defendants to rural counties, what sort of long-term affects might there be on these rural counties who are receiving these people?

Endangered Languages and The Linguists Who Love Them

While the Whorfian hypothesis has been pretty thoroughly rejected as too simplistic, most cognitive anthropologists are comfortable with the idea that language, cognition, and culture are tied together in a feedback loop, each influencing the other. When one can conceptualize language this way, it is easy to see how each language that dies out takes a small but important piece of the human experience with it. It an increasingly globalized world, languages are dying at an every increasing rate; however, linguists aren't sitting idly by! Follow the link for a fascinating look at the work that linguists do to document endangered languages, and check out the trailer for the documentary below.

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.