The List Of Things Officially My Fault just got longer—I’m very pleased to announce that I have been selected to become a member of the AnthroSource Steering Committee.

We’ve talked about AnthroSource on Savage Minds before—in fact thanks to Kerim and Chris you can use it with CiteULike (huzzah!). While I have some competency thinking about technology and have managed various technology organizations before, I’ve never served on an Official AAA committee before and so I have no idea how it works or what specifically we will do—hopefully good stuff. However, by signing on to the AnthroSource Steering Committee it does become at least partially my responsibility. So if for some reason you have something to say about AnthroSource, feel free to say it to me by emailing me at golub at hawaii dot edu.

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Edmund Wilson has been much in the press lately, because of a new biography by Lewis M. Dabney. As it happens, I’ve been having an Edmund Wilson sort of summer. At the end of the spring semester I finally read To the Finland Station which was recommended to me years ago by my mom. I am ashamed to say I didn’t get around to reading it until I finally realized it was definitely not To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf, which did not sound at all like my cup of tea (nor my mom’s, which made the recommendation seem all the more dubious and improbable). Result? A boffo point in the mater column and a big zero in the alma mater column. Years of graduate training laden with discussion of Marx and Marxism and nary a mention of Wilson’s amazing book on the man and his milieu! It’s true that Wilson doesn’t quite get Marx the theorist. But so what? Discussions of Marx the theorist are easily come by. What Wilson offers instead (and hoorah for that) is a hugely learned account of the social history from which Marxism emerged (ie, not the intellectual history of Hegel begat…) and of life as Marx and Engels and their families, friends, and lovers lived it.

Anyway, since then (and further inspired by some of the reviews of the new biography) I’ve gone on to O Canada (has an earning-his-keep magazine work feel throughout, unfortunately—but still interesting if you are interested in Canada of the 50s and early 60s) and Axel’s Castle in which I found these lovely paired descriptions, which brings me round again to anthropology:

“Anatole France was a popular writer: he aimed to be persuasive and intelligible – he used frankly to remind his secretary … ‘Leave to your reader the easy victory of seeing further than you.’ His books were sold on all the bookstalls of France and known all over the civilized world. ...Whereas Paul Valéry disregards altogether the taste and intelligence of the ordinary reader: instead of allowing his reader the easy victory, he takes pride in outstripping him completely. And he is read chiefly by other writers or people with a special interest in literature… Paul Valéry has set himself … the task of reproducing by his very language all the complexities and confusions of our interacting sensations and ideas… When France turns away from literature, he occupies himself naturally with politics – he goes on the stump for Dreyfus, allies himself with the Socialist party, writes editorials for its paper, addresses meetings of working men and finally declares himself a Communist. But Valéry concerns himself little with politics… (1931: 88-89).

If a list of anthropologists scrolls through your mind at this juncture, you’ll probably be able to sort many of them into the “France” or the “Valéry” column. But not all of them, right?

Wilson sets up a compelling contrast between the two writers. You can feel that his sympathies are with France (and Wilson, who wrote widely and beautifully, is manifestly a writer of the France variety). But while Wilson condemns aspects of Valéry’s writing (and character), he also admires his artistic mission. It is clear, in fact, that Wilson thinks Valéry is the more important artist, even given that France and Valéry are very different kinds of writers. This is a small example of what is nice about Wilson’s writing—again and again, he takes apart a particular example in such a way that one is prompted to think about more general patterns. Isn’t this contrast between France and Valéry evocative of discussions we’ve had here about the public intellectual, the accessible writer, the spokesperson for anthropology versus the pointy-headed snoot, the abstruse theorizer, the politically ineffectual academic?

Wilson doesn’t say that one cannot choose between them—he suggests and in a way exemplifies that conclusion (thus giving the reader the “easy victory” of making the connection). While he writes as a France, he also generously acknowledges the accomplishments of Valéry, and thus makes room for both of their virtues. It’s a stance and a way of presenting that stance that is difficult to emulate, but always inspiring—in anthropology and outside of it.

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David Weinberger of Joho the Blog wrote a post several days ago that I’ve been sitting on while I mull it over. In the meantime, a couple of posts here have raised related isses, namely the comments on Perceptions of Asian Perception and Kerim’s Face-to-Face, so I figured I’d add Weinberger’s post to the mix for your consideration.

Weinberger is something of an Internet utopianist, so his post leans heavily on new technologies that have provided conduits for the wide transmission of ideas—as he says, you may not be IM’ing Chinese Communists or Jihadists, but the conversations others are having in out-of-the-way corners of the network are refracting through the whole. But I think his comments can be abstracted from the technology issue to encompass a way of looking at social communication in general. As noted here and elsewhere, the model of cultures as bounded entities is highly unsatisfactory as a way of looking at the modern world (and possibly of looking at human history at any point). For example, the colonial encounter cannot be productively conceptualized as the domination of a monolithic native culture by a monolithic colonial culture; instead, we have to recognize internal differentiation within both parties, including natives for whom the colonial regime offers new and unprecedented opportunities for fulfillment and colonialists for whom the colonial project is considered an atrocity and others who find greater fulfillment in the cultural world of the oppressed than in the colonial structure. Vicente Rafael’s Contracting Colonialism presents a good example of the multiple interconnections and communications that make up the colonial encounter, in this case among the Tagalogs of the Phillipines.

Against the relativistic conception of “cultures” with a small ‘c’ and a plural ’s’, Weinberger posits the conversation, a world in which differences are not isolated into bounded cultures but are instead constantly confronting and accomodating one another. There’s nothing particularly new about this idea - Volosinov’s 1929 Share This

Over the summer I started (but have not yet finished) James Leach’s slim but dense ethnography Creative Land: Place and Procreation on The Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea. I can see why this book is being so widely read by Melanesianists, since what I’ve read so far is very good, and will probably just get better. Very briefly, Leach argues that anthropologists focus on ‘kinship’ fail to understand the way that socializing people on the Rai coast (Yali land, for those who are keeping tack) works is not primarily through figuring out who they are related to by blood and then shunting them into a particular group. Rather he points out that an essential part of socialization involves the way that people become associated with particular places through living there, gardening there, engage in exchanges there, and so forth. His point—which sounds mundane when repeated at this level of generalization—is to reinforce trends in the rebirth of the kinship literature that’s been underway for a decade now. Following people like Marilyn Strathern, Janet Carsten, and (sort of) David Schneider, Leach says that if you are looking for a ‘kinship system’ or ‘groups’ on the Rai coast you could find them, but only by being very procrustean with the data. Putting place rather than biogenetic substance in the center of ‘relatedness’ in this area, he argues, makes more sense.

I find this argument—or what I’ve read of it so far—compelling, although there are certain idiosyncrasies to the British national style of anthropology these days that make my eyes tired. What I find most impressive about the book is how it demonstrates how something like ‘progress’ in anthropological theory happens. One question that I wondered about, though, was why you would want to say the book was about ‘kinship’ at all?

Then just a few days ago, I was putting the finishing touches on an article (i.e. desperately revising). In the course of doing so I leafed through a recently-acquired copy of Cultural Identity and Ethnicity in the Pacific, and particularly James Watson’s paper on ethnicity in Kainantu. The point of this volume is basically to take issue with a primordialist view of ethnicity and emphasize the way in which nurturance, sharing, eating together and so forth are central to identity formation in Pacific societies. The contributors thus contrast “Lamarkian” Pacific models with biogenetically obsessed “Darwinian” models of the west. In his paper, Watson talks about the creation of numerous ethnic identities in Kainantu, and how the key to understanding identity in the highlands is people’s relationship to place. I liked the argument, but I thought why call this ‘ethnicity’ at all…?

The idea of ‘The Pacific’ (which is often just code for ‘Polynesia’) versus ‘the west’ is one I just have to live with. But as far as I’m concerned if something is true for places as different as Aboriginal Australia, Pohnpei, New Zealand, and highlands Papua New Guinea then we might start wondering whether it isn’t true everywhere. In Porgera, where I work, I don’t think there’s such an emphasis on ‘place’ and ‘landscape’ as there is in Kainantu—people liked to move around a lot, there is a long history of multilocal residence, long-distance trade, and so forth. But man are they into consociation as the building block of identity, pace the fact that they express it in terms of consanguinity…

But that’s a different topic. My point is just that the contributors of the second volume—now 15 years old—were moving beyond ethnicity to a more general understanding of how people are related to one another, just as Leach is moving away from the concept of ‘kinship’ towards an account of ‘relatedness’. Letting go of kinship is hard for me, since I have a certain fondness for the topic. Letting go of ethnicity is easier since, as Weber pointed out long ago, it’s not a very useful analytic concept (unless it’s a folk concept for your research subjects, and maybe not even then). These accidentally juxtaposed readings pointed out to me—through serendipity—the way in which anthropologists really are moving away from theories derived from ‘their culture’ (or, in the case of ethnicity and kinship, from a certain appropriation of Greek and Latin categories) and towards a more robust, generalizable, and synthetic model of sociality—literally producing the ‘science of the lifeworld’ whose basic structure Alfred Schutz outlined lo these many years ago. Is this progress or just a shift in fashion? I’m hesitant to embrace the first term for fear of being deemed ‘scientistic’ and a deeply ingrained cynicism. Nonetheless, if I met a consilience-head in a bar who started telling me about how biochemistry renders the concept of culture obsolete, this is one of the areas where, as Silverstein put it in his recent essay in the volume Unwrapping The Sacred Bundle, “the century of development of theorizing in the specifically social and cultural” has “change[d] the terms of discourse for anyone who has been paying attention.”

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There’s the old joke about the guy looking for his keys under the lamplight because, even though that’s not where he lost his keys, the light’s better there. I feel that way about studies of I.Q.. When critics, like Howard Gardner, object that such measurements fail to capture important aspects of thought, psychometricians reply that concepts like Gardner’s “multiple intelligences” don’t produce the same kind of “stable” test results they get from I.Q. tests, so they need to keep using I.Q.! It strikes me that what we have here is a concept that has been perpetuated in order to legitimate the continued existence of a discipline, and of a testing regime, rather than because it tells us anything important about the mental abilities of those tested.

I’ve been looking at this issue because four of the top political bloggers (Atrios, De Long, Kevin Drum, and Matt Yglesias) have ganged up on Andrew Sullivan for his recent endorsement of the central tenants of The Bell Curve. As a result of all these posts we get a great list of online articles debunking the book, to which I’ve added a few more and grouped them all here for your reference. The critiques vary in whether or not they accept the notion of I.Q.. Some accept it, but claim it isn’t genetic, others accept a genetic component, but deny that this correlates with race, while others (like Howard Gardner and Stephen Jay Gould) are more critical of the very notions of intelligence that are supposedly being measured in the first place.

• Thomas Sowell’s American Spectator article, in which he discusses the “the work of James R. Flynn, who found substantial increases in mental test performances from one generation to the next in a number of countries around the world.” Findings which disprove any link between genetics and I.Q. (originally linked in this DeLong post, and metioned in Matt’s post as well.)
• Nicholas Lemann’s debunking in Slate: “What Herrnstein and Murray used to measure IQ is actually a measure of education as well as intelligence.” (also from Matt.)
• “Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns.” The report by the American Psychological Association which I make fun of above, but which is well worth reading – especially with regard to whether there is any link between intelligence and race. (via Kevin Drum.)
• Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis 2002 paper, “The Inheritance of Inequality” [PDF] which debunks the notion that social inequality is genetic. (via Brad DeLong, who has a summary of the findings.)
• Howard Gardner’s critique of The Bell Curve in The American Prospect, in which he elaborates on the limitations of I.Q.
• Two defenses of I.Q.: One by Linda S. Gottfredson in Scientific American, and another by Christopher F. Chabris in Commentary.
• Responses by Flynn, Gardner, and others to the article by Chabris.
• Wikipedia pages on The Bell Curve, Race and Intelligence, IQ, the Flynn Effect, Gould’s book, The Mismeasure of Man, and Howard Gardner’s concept of Multiple Intelligences.

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This is my second, and possibly last for now, post on queer issues resulting from post-Montreal Pride reflections. The first one was here.

One thing that struck me at this year’s Pride was the increasing presence of the Two-Spirit community at queer events. A corollary thought that occurred to me is the apparent disparity between how anthropologists define the Two-Spirit identity and how Two-Spirited people themselves define it.

First of all, Two-Spirit is increasingly being used as a replacement for the misleading and inappropriate berdache, which has negative connotations due to its linguistic roots. In fact, searching for berdache on Wikipedia automatically takes one to a page on Two-Spirit. However, many anthropology texts still refer to berdache. I guess old habits die hard.

Now, when anthropologists talk about berdache, they are often referring to male gender variants (please note that I have adopted Serena Nanda’s usage of this term from her book Gender Diversity: Crosscultural Variations – an excellent book) in Aboriginal North America. One frequently finds the disclaimer that the berdache does not necessarily marry or have sexual intercourse with other male-bodied persons and that the gender crossing is mainly at the occupational or vestimentary level. Ironically (I think it’s ironic because of the mainstream Western fascination with female-on-female sexuality) this disclaimer appears to be even more ardent when discussing the “occasional” female gender variants.

So from this older anthropological stance, which still permeates much current anthropological discussion on gender variance, gender identity is not so completely intertwined with sexual orientation (in the strict sense of who one has sex with) that one will adopt the prescribed orientation of the gender to which one adheres. In other words, a male bodied person who adopts a female gender will not necessarily adopt the “sleeping with men” that is supposedly included in this gender role.

What is contradictory, however, is that the standard rubric of homosexuality in many texts incorporates a discussion of the berdache and often fails to make the very distinction between sexuality and gender. The berdache is then used as an example of (usually) male homosexuality with the implication that it’s probably more about the gender role than an actual sexual preference. What remains unclear in these discussions is whether there ever existed men who slept with men or women who slept with women without changing gender roles.

What I love about Nanda’s book is that she shows the complexity of gender variance in North America. There is no one single way of being a gender variant and, yes, there are more female gender variants than some would let on, although perhaps not as many as male gender variants for reasons that Nanda briefly discusses. But I digress . . . according to Nanda, some gender variants engage in heterosexual relations, some engage in homosexual relations and some engage in (gasp!) both. Heck, some don’t even engage in sexual relations at all.

Now, with regards to the replacement of berdache by the term Two-Spirit there might still be problems. In light of the diversity that is characteristic of North American gender variance, can we assume that all gender variants are blessed with two spirits? From an anthropological standpoint does the term Two-Spirit reflect the many variations on the theme any more accurately than berdache? I’m not sure. However, one thing I am sure of after reading texts written by Two-Spirited folk and listening to them is that the term is held in higher regard by Aboriginals and that is enough for me to adopt its usage.

What is interesting about the Aboriginal usage of the term is that it includes pretty much all the varieties of queer that are summarised by the mainstream queer community by one of the brands of alphabet soup (LGBT, LGBTT2I and so forth). All lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, intersexed Aboriginal males and females may self-identify as Two-Spirit.* This is a far cry from the very specific denotation of berdache yet at the same time, it acknowledges the diversity that is a part of this identity.

What is also interesting is that Two-Spirit maintains the spiritual component of this identity unlike its predecessor which reduced the identity to one relating purely to sexuality. Coupled with the European tendency at the time of contact to associate all things sexual with icky, sinful things, the use of the term berdache imposed and propagated an ethnocentric view of gender variants and people who had sex with members of the same sex (MOSS). Two-Spirit, however, reminds us that Aboriginal conceptions of sexuality before the influence of Christianity were far different than those of Europeans.

Now, is Two-Spirit a term that could readily correspond to the local terms in all the linguistic groups across the continent? Probably not. Are the realities of present-day Aboriginals who have sex with MOSS or who adopt gender roles that differ from those usually assigned to their physical sex the same as those of pre-Euro North America? Probably not. Do all Aboriginal people who have sex with MOSS experience what psychologists would call gender dysphoria? Probably not.

Does the term Two-Spirit enable queer Aboriginals to feel solidarity in a society where they risk being ostracised by the dominant cultural groups, by their respective home communities and even by the rest of the queer community? Certainly. And it does this without denying the enormous range of diversity within the Two-Spirit community itself or the presence of some shared elements with non-Aboriginal queers. I’m all for it.

My suggestion for anthropologists, then, is not necessarily to refer to what used to be called berdache in the literature as Two-Spirit. I think that the term gender variant is quite adequate for that in a cross-cultural context and that local terms such as nadleeh, alyha or hwame are most appropriate when discussing specific case studies. However, I think it’s important that anthropologists recognise the self-identification of Two-Spirit individuals and to remember that they exist right here, right now and that they are dealing with realities that are much different than those that existed at the time Europeans encountered Aboriginals.

*As with the increasing use of the term “queer” rather than the terms for specific identities, this is what I would call extreme lumping in the taxonomy of alternate sexual orientations and gender/sexual identities. Our extreme splitters would be the ones who resort to the alphabet soup and keep adding on letters. Me? I’m a lumper. But I recognise the good intentions of both camps.

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Harpers reproduces the transcript of a 2002 wedding between a professor of critical theory and an artist:

ALLISON: “I do.”

JUDGE SILVERMAN: “And do you, Cary, take Allison to be your lawfully wedded wife?”

CARY: “I do.”

JUDGE SILVERMAN: As it turns out, it is enough, and the words just uttered by both Allison and Cary are sufficient—but not because of the words themselves.

First of all—according to Austin and according to the law—the words must be meant “seriously” and not self-referentially.

The problem with that, though, as Jonathan Culler has pointed out in his discussion of Jacques Derrida’s critique of Austin, is that the distinction between serious and nonserious is always uncertain, always subject to deconstruction, and any attempt to solve that problem by insisting on the “proper” context for a statement is bound to fail.

(via Ishbaddidle)

Addendum: I recently came to the conclusion that Harpers is one of the best journals for reading in the “euphemism.”

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• The Meskwaki adoption case has been resolved with the decision by the mother, after three months of living with her child, to keep the baby.


• The NCAA has backtracked somewhat on its recent decision to disallow most Indian mascots, logos, and team names from post-season games. The newly released appeals process would allow colleges to cite the support of the Indian groups being represented—e.g. the Seminoles in Florida State University’s case—to strengthen their cases.


• In related news, USA Today has a round-up of editorial opinion on the NCAA’s new mascot policy.


• Also related, despite the current visibility of the mascot issue, the town of Fox Lake, Ill., is considering reviving the Indian-head logo they abandoned some 50 years ago. Fox Lake was once home to a community of Meskwaki, before the government pushed the Meswkaki west of the Mississippi River to their current homes in Iowa and Kansas. Says Meskwaki tribal historian and perhaps-too-nice-guy Johnathan Buffalo:

  “We don’t want to berate this little town just because they want their Indian head back,” he said. “But they should remember us, that we used to live there and their houses might be built on our graves.”

  If the village reverts to the logo, it should be reworked to reflect a correct image of the Meskwaki, who never wore the headdress depicted on the old logo, he said.



• In White County Arkansas, meth use is linked with arrowhead hunting. The sherriff, the improbably-named Pat Garrett, hypothesizes that arrowhead hunting gives the hyperactive and hyper-alert methheads something to do while they are tweaking, but there’s an economic angle as well—good collections can be worth good money, which can come in handy given the kinds of legal problems that can accompany meth use.

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A recent AP news story (discovered thanks to Photoethnography.com) claims that “Asians and North Americans really do see the world differently.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time science has attempted to prove the uniqueness of the Asian mind. There was Swarthmore President Alfred Bloom’s 1981 book, The Linguistic Shaping of Thought which claimed:

that the lack of a subjunctive tense in Chinese made it extremely difficult for native speakers to explore “counterfactual” conceits (for example: if Gisele were fat, she wouldn’t be a supermodel).

When Mr. Bloom tested Chinese and American students on a series of counterfactuals, he found that the Chinese students were typically unable to distinguish between events that really happened and false hypotheticals. The implication, Mr. Bloom argued, is that Chinese is more concrete than English, and, as a consequence, Chinese speakers have more trouble with abstract thought than Americans.

However, his research methodology was seriously flawed. In fact, poor translation may have been the problem:

Terry Kit-Fong Au, a native Chinese speaker and psychologist at Harvard, did not take kindly to this linguistic slight of his presumed powers of reasoning. He repeated Bloom’s experiment with one crucial change: he asked Chinese bilinguals to translate an idiomatic Chinese version of the story into English. With this translation his results were in the reverse direction from Bloom’s. Only 60% of American high school students who read the nonidiomatic versions understood the counterfactual, whereas 97% of Au’s monolingual Chinese subjects who were given an idiomatic Chinese version grasped the significance of the counterfactual.

More recently, there have been claims that Japanese have unique brains as a result of their language.

A lot of these discussions invoke the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Unfortunately, they rarely have anything to do with what Sapir or Whorf actually said.

I can’t get online access to the original scientific article cited by the Associated Press story for another six months, so I can’t tell if what we have here is poor science or (more likely) simply poor reporting. But I have a big problem with the conceptual leap taken between the following two statements:

The researchers, led by Hannah-Faye Chua and Richard Nisbett, tracked the eye movements of the students—25 European Americans and 27 native Chinese—to determine where they were looking in a picture and how long they focused on a particular area.

“They literally are seeing the world differently,” said Nisbett, who believes the differences are cultural.

There is a big difference between how we see pictures and how we see the world. I am ready to accept that there are cultural differences (perhaps dependent upon our various traditions of visual representation) that affect how we “read” a picture, but I’m not sure that these translate into differences in how we see the world – or even what that might mean.

Paul Messaris’ 1994 book, Visual “Literacy”: Image, Mind, and Reality has a fairly good discussion of the state of scientific research on reading images at that time. He is primarily concerned with debunking the myth that people who have never seen a picture need to be taught how to understand visual representations. Accordingly, he recounts several studies which suggest that understanding two dimensional, black-and-white representations of the world, even abstract ones, is fairly intuitive. He highlights how such issues as the materials used and the nature of the images being portrayed can have a huge impact on reader’s ability to interpret an image.

A 1960 by William Hudson study found South African miners having difficulty interpreting smaller animals in the background as being further away; however, his study turned out to suffer from many of the same problems as Bloom’s study of Chinese counterfactuals:

The Africa depicted in these pictures—a loincloth-wearing, spear-carrying hunter in a landscape populated by big game—might still have been a reality in some parts of the continent when the research of Hudson and his successors was taking place, but it seems doubtful that the kinds of people who were actually studied in this research—South African mine laborers, Ugandan farmers—would have much direct contact at all with such situations. On the contrary, it is possible that, for many Africans, familiarity with that particular version of Africa may actually be more likely to occur secondhand – for example, through pictorial media.

Consequently, those subjects who were more experienced with pictures might also have had greater previous experience with the kind of hunting scene depicted in Hudson’s pictures, and this familiarity, rather than knowledge of pictorial codes, might account for their superior ability to form an integrated, three-dimensional percept. Data supportive of this possibility occurred in the Kilbride and Robbins study (1969), in which 10 percent of the rural residents accurately identified the picture of the elephant as that of a large animal but were apparently uncertain as to the exact nature of the animal, calling it a hippopotamus, a rhinoceros, and so on. This uncertainty is consistent with the fact that the only large animal likely to be found in their own immediate environment would be a cow.

So, when Japanese and American’s are asked to look at underwater scenes and Japanese spend more time describing the background, it may not be because of “differences in perception go back at least 2,000 years,” it may just be something simple – like the fact that Americans eat a lot less seafood and aren’t used to seeing pictures of fish. It may also be that differences which have been observed in eye movement when reading Chinese and English may account for different habits of visually scanning a printed page – whether text or image; but these differences might not necessarily reflect how we visually scan the real world around us.

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A couple of months ago, one of Kerim’s posts led to a mini-discussion in the comments section about the site Gene Expression. Within this discussion, the use of the term ethno-autism was brought up. As defined by Razib, the author of this post at Gene Expression, ethno-autism is an:

inability to conceive other peoples and cultures as fully fleshed out organisms who have their own creativity, histories and genius, and most importantly values congruent with those of modern Western civilization.

This wasn’t the first time that I had heard this type of analogy. In another time and place (my vagueness here is deliberate to respect the confidentiality of the people involved), I reacted to an analogy between autism and the incapacity to perceive that others may think differently than oneself. And at yet another time, I read an article (wish I could provide a reference but I lost it) that stipulated that autism was an extreme form of the “male brain”.

In any case, the usage of the term ethno-autism caused a bit of a reaction within the discussion following Kerim’s post (don’t worry, nothing violent) and, at the time, I felt unable to pursue the matter in depth, having an autie in my family and being close to the situation. However, Kathy (aka museum freak) from Livejournal had this to say about the term:

. . . gross misrepresentation of autism as a condition. The analogy they’re making is between the autistic’s supposed inability to understand other people’s thoughts and feelings and the, dare I say bigots?, referred to on the site failing to understand the humanity of other cultures.

I’m inclined to agree with Kathy here. I would add that, rather than make such an analogy to describe extreme ethnocentrism, which is what is actually being described in Razib’s post as far as I can tell, it would seem to be preferable to simply call it what it is. The analogy between extreme ethnocentrism and autism obscures the fact that most extreme ethnocentric people are not autistic and are actually perfectly capable of understanding that people from different cultural backgrounds as them might think and perceive the world differently than they do.

Now, I don’t think that Razib was intentionally trying to propagate a negative imagery of autism. He did admit that he hadn’t put much thought into it so I’m assuming that, like many, he’s working under the assumption that there is one single form of autism.

This leads me to my main point (well, one of them anyway): the term “autism” has been thrown around all over the media in the past . . .say . . .decade or so and yet there is still very little social awareness of the realities of this way of being (you’ll understand soon why I call it a way of being rather than a “condition” or “disorder”.) In North America, and possibly elsewhere, we live in a society where I would assume the majority of people have been sensitized to the needs of people with “physical handicaps” and who would acknowledge that holding a door open for a person in a wheelchair is the proper thing to do. However, when it comes to what many people would describe as “mental handicaps”, the mainstream attitude carries more of a tendency to judge and ridicule than to understand and help.

The mainstream view of autism and related modes of perception is highly negative: tragedy, dismay, trauma, difficulties are all words that are commonly associated with the life of an autie and her/his family. By no means am I saying that it’s easy and that everyone would be happier if they were autistic. However, I think that there are interesting alternatives in thinking about autism. The most interesting ways come from autistic people themselves.

For example, I’m highly interested in a recent discovery that I’ve made by following a series of links beginning with Kathy’s post: there exists an autistic culture consisting of auties, aspies, cousins and allies. The shared belief is that:

autism, as a unique way of being, should be embraced and appreciated, not shunned or cured

There is an Autistic Pride Day. There are people who seek recognition of neurodiversity. Heck, they’ve even got t-shirts! The similarities with queer pride movements are unmistakable and like with any other sub-culture, I’m certain that there is divergence within the group about various issues. In any case, I’m curious to see what kind of momentum this movement will take. I have a feeling that as people become more sensitised, Autistic Pride will become better known.

In the meantime, I’m also curious about how autism is dealt with cross-culturally. What do ethnographers have to say about the way people who would be diagnosed as autistic by North American or European psychologists are treated within their own societies? Are people ostracised? Accepted? Nurtured? Considered to be functional members of the cultural group? Have special status? Not considered as abnormal? What changes came about in various local conceptions of “autistic” people due to colonisation? What changes are coming about due to globalisation?

Perhaps there are obscure answers to these questions here and there in various ethnographies . . . but has there been cross-cultural research specifically aimed at finding out how various societies deal with what psychologists would label as autism and how the individuals themselves relate in their respective social contexts? Is there, perhaps, cross-cultural research that shows that in some cultural contexts, being autistic is not seen as a disadvantage but merely as another variation?

It would also be interesting to have an anthropological look at the above-mentioned autistic culture. As a social movement and as a self-identified culture (who, by the way, actually wrote a letter to the U.N. in an attempt to be recognised as a minority) with a core set of beliefs, they have gone beyond being “subjects” of psychological inquiry and have much to contribute to our understanding of culture and society. It would be even more interesting if the anthropologists who did the research were autistic themselves. After all, as Kathy pointed out in her post:

The experience of being an autistic is a lot like the experience of being an ethnographer—we’re in a culture we don’t understand, and forced to rely on our ability to observe to learn, get by, and adapt to the world.

On that note, I leave you with a passage from Jim Sinclair’s text Don’t Mourn For Us which is quite telling about the relationship between autism and differences of perception:

Yes, that (relating to an autistic person) takes more work than relating to a non-autistic person. But it can be done—unless non-autistic people are far more limited than we are in their capacity to relate. We spend our entire lives doing it. Each of us who does learn to talk to you, each of us who manages to function at all in your society, each of us who manages to reach out and make a connection with you, is operating in alien territory, making contact with alien beings. We spend our entire lives doing this. And then you tell us that we can’t relate.

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It’s that time of the year again and my thoughts, like those of Rex back a few weeks ago, turn to pedagogical issues. One things that has been haunting me for my entire teaching career (OK, OK . . . 2 ½ years!) is the viability of a four-field intro course. Semester after semester, I try to cram in the so-called “tip of the iceberg” of anthropology into 45 hours (minus tests, pre-test reviews, post-test revisions, assignment explanations, occasional cancellations, fire drills and so forth). And semester after semester, I try to decide ahead of time where I will wind up having to cut. Because I always wind up having to cut, despite my best intentions. I could fit it all in probably if all I did was lecture but about half of my class time is spent in learning activities. So . . .

This leads me to question how useful the four-field approach is in pedagogical terms (i.e. as a teaching tool). The more topics one tries to cover in one semester, the more each topic gets watered down. So what is important to us as teachers and professors of anthropology? To cram as much info into the brains of our students as possible for later regurgitation? Or to help them learn ways of thinking and analysing that are part of the “anthropological project”?

In any case, the nature of the course has been decided for me so I have to deal . . .and figure out where I will cut (if I have to, of course, which I probably will . . . ). Keeping in mind, of course, that 99.9% of my students will not go on to take university-level anthropology courses (this is Cégep we’re talking about which is a 2-year general studies programme between high school and university – a neat little Québécois idiosyncrasy) helps me determine what is important and what isn’t.

What will help them in their future careers as teachers, plumbers, lawyers, secretaries, nurses, police officers and so forth? What will whet their appetites enough to get them to take one of our 200 or 300 level courses such as Race and Racism, Community Studies, Archaeology, Human Evolution, Culture and Sexuality, etc? What will help them in their everyday lives as residents of multicultural Canada? These are the questions I need to ask when determining what stays and what goes . . . and this is what I’ve been forgetting to ask myself in the past 2 years as a newbie teacher.

So now I’m trying something new. I’m going to start backwards. Well, not completely. But rather than start with the usual physical evolution stuff, I will start with where we are now and meander through different topics with occasional flashbacks to pre-history. I’m not sure how I’ll be able to pull off the dream-style sequences when it’s time for a flashback but . . . I’ll figure something out.

Now excuse me while I go back to mixing a soundtrack for my course . . .

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Academic Commons is a new “online forum for investigating and defining the role that technology can play in liberal arts education.” Just looking at it (and the whuffie of the person who supplied me the link) I am not sure whether it is suck or not suck. However, it is heartening that they have an interview with Jerry Graff above the fold on their front page—the same guy whose book I recently whole heartedly endorsed.

I’m going to pull a Cory Doctorow on this one and post the link after having looked at it for mere femtoseconds. So you tell me—suck or not suck?

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Our comments have been updated and improved with a new comments policy, more informative information about what code can be used (including Textile), and a new live preview of your comments! Unfortunately, the live preview does not render Textile syntax – only HTML, but if you are hip enough to use Textile you probably don’t need no preview anyway.

Feel free to use this thread to test out the new features, give Textile a whirl, offer suggestions, or tell us what you like or don’t like about the new comments policy.

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Nomadic Thoughts is a blog with a mission: “to document the thoughts and experiences of a new graduate student.” And today Will is off on that journey:

The long-awaited weekend has finally arrived. After months of researching, planning, testing, applying, and accepting I’m finally off to graduate school in the morning. I feel now what I think I should have felt before I left for freshman year of undergraduate: anticipation for something bigger coupled with just enough nervousness to keep me excited about the whole thing.

I wish Will the best of luck, and I look forward to following his adventures through grad school. Although not so much the crushing disappointment part…

To be fair, Will seems quite well aware of the realities of post-graduate education. But still, the transition to grad school was tough for me, as it was for most of the people I know (although some now deny it), hopefully having some support from the blogsphere will help!

I’d also like to point out another new anthropology blog, Its All Just A Ride, by John, an anthro undergrad with an interest in “religion and political economy in East Asia” (as he told me by e-mail). John is starting his senior year. Maybe he’ll soon blogging about graduate school as well?

Is there anything you wish someone had told you when you started graduate school? Or when you began applying for graduate schools?

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A friend of mine keeps harping about The Golden Marshalltown: A Parable for the Archeology of the 1980s by Kent Flannery, so I’ve finally read it. The article describes a meeting between four archaeologists. The narrator is an archaeological Everyman, trying to find his way in the ebb and flow of theoretical fads, empiricism’s rising and falling esteem, and a changing academic landscape. Into his life come the Born-Again Phiolosopher, a poor fieldworker who discovered fame and fortune in the critique of others and the development of universal Laws; the Child of the Seventies, driven by blind ambition and making his career by repackaging (and sometimes stealing) the work of others; and the Old Timer, a down-in-the-dirt hands-on fieldworker (think Jack Palance in City Slickers
) recently forced into retirement by his department for his atavistic faith in culture as a unifying anthropological concept.

I’ll let you read the article—it’s quite amusing—but I want to highlight one of the Old Timer’s responses to the Child of the Seventies’ desire for some kind of relevance to the world outside of archaeology:

”...What does the world really want from archaeology?

“If I turn on a television, or walk through a paperback bookstore, I’ll tell you what I see. I see that what the world wants is for archeology to teach it something about humanity’s past. The world doesn’t want epistemology from us. They want to hear about Olduvai Gorge, and Stonehenge, and Macchu Picchu. People are gradually becoming aware that their first three million years took place before written history, and they look to archeology as the only science—the only one—with the power to uncover that past.”

I can’t endorse this wholeheartedly—I think there’s something to be said for epistemology, though it’s surely not the main gist of either archaeology or ethnology, and I think we should be wary about the desire for consumable romanticism among the public. That said, though, I think it’s a useful question when thinking about what a “public anthropology” might look like. What does the world really want from anthropology?

Here’s my tentative and necessarily incomplete stab at an answer:

• They want tales, descriptions, and souvenirs of the strange and exotic. Some people read anthropology like others read fantasy novels or romances—as a kind of escape from their everyday world. As noted, there’s a danger in this—few anthropologists want to be guilty of packaging exoticism for easy consumption by a bored or frustrated audience. But we may as well acknowledge that this is one thing that people want of us. Fortunately, I think they want more than that, too.


• They want understanding of people whose lifestyles and beliefs strike them as strange, exotic, and even threatening and wrong-headed. I don’t think this is merely wishful thinking on my part—people actually do want to understand. Maybe not all people, maybe not all the time, but at least some people want to understand the world that lays beyond their immediate experience.


• They want security. This follows from the above—if the strange and alien can be understood as rational and even normal, it follows that it becomes less threatening.


• They want solutions to the social problems around them, or at least the possibility of solutions. People want to know that the problems they see in their societies are not inevitable, that they are solvable and that someone is working to understand these problems and propose solutions.


• They want the satisfaction of knowing that they are not racists. This is a hard one—I think many people immerse themselves in anthropological and other social scientific writings to reassure themselves that they are not prejudiced, something like Ozma’s take on the reception of Guns, Germs, and Steel.


• They want to understand their place in the world. People want to know, in the words of the poet in Wings of Desire, “Why am I me, and not you? Why am I here and not there?’When did time begin and where does space end? Isn’t life under the sun nothing but a dream? Isn’t what I see, hear and smell just a vision of a world before the world? Does evil really exist and are there people who are really evil? How can it be that I, who is me, wasn’t there before I was? And that one day I, who is me, shall no longer be what I am now?”


• They want to know about the dinosaurs. Unfortunately, we have little to offer in this regard.

As I said, this is a tentative, off-the-top-of-my-head approach to the question, but I think it’s a question well worth asking as we as a discipline and as individuals consider what we have to offer to our society as a whole. Not all anthropology has to be public anthropology, of course—much of the internal debate, what the Old Timer refers to scorningly as “epistemology”, can certainly be carried out “behind closed doors”, as it were—but I don’t think most of us get involved in anthropology just to argue the ins and outs of logical positivism. I think we generally have a desire to make some sense out of our increasingly global society, and to share that sense with those beyond our disciplinary boundaries. If this is the case, then, asking ourselves what our would-be audience wants and expects of us is certainly warranted. I would like to know how others would answer the question—and maybe how (or whether) we can live up to those answers.

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