This is a bit of a scoop for Savage Minds. A student of a friend (who have not asked to be named here) doing archival work recently came across an extremely rare memoir by General Aylmer Haldane of his time as commander-in-chief of British forces in Iraq responsible for putting down the Iraqi insurrection against the British in 1920. He’s made “the entire book available”:http://www.dean.usma.edu/departments/history/web03/resources/resource%20pages/Mesopotamia/insurrection_mesopotamia.html in a series of public-domain PDFs. It is quite detailed ethnographically, and includes appendices with information on troop strengths, casualty figures, and so forth. This is not my area of specialty but I’m told is of genuine and important documentary value, and of course it’s relevant to our own situation today.
Tag Archives: Books and Articles
It’s All in His Head
Anthropologist Barbara King takes on Dean Hamer’s The God Gene at Bookslut. Hamer’s basic hypothesis is that there’s a gene that controls the chemical regulators in our brain and that people with one variant of this gene are more open to mystical experiences and other forms of “self-transcendence”. I had the unenviable position of defining the god gene for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Anthropology, in which I attempted to maintain some degree of balancedness, but if I hadn’t felt obligated to give Hamer a fair hearing, I might well have written along the lines King does:
Let’s deal with the title right away. Pretty unequivocal, no? The God Gene! Already on page 8, however, Hamer inserts a disclaimer: “There are probably many different genes involved, rather than just one. And environmental influences are just as important as genetics.” Hamer is nothing if not savvy: this measured estimation is too tepid by half for marketing a book (or making Time’s cover)….
Science writer and blogger Carl Zimmer is unsatisfied with Hamer’s page 8 retreat. He suggests a title that more accurately reflects the book’s contents: A Gene That Accounts for Less Than One Percent of the Variance Found in Scores on Psychological Questionnaires Designed to Measure a Factor Called Self-Transcendence, Which Can Signify Everything from Belonging to the Green Party to Believing in ESP, According to One Unpublished, Unreplicated Study.
Zimmer’s title pretty much sums up my definition, though I might have added “…on Psychological Questionnaires Administered Only to Americans and Some Aussies and Designed to…” .
The Sexual Life of a Polish Anthropologist
The Age reviews a new biography of Bronislaw Malinowski. Seems like a good read if you want to know all the intimate details of the great man (I’m not sure I do):
Young has painstakingly researched the fragmentary accounts of Malinowski’s illness-dominated childhood and family relations. An inveterate diarist from an early age, and a prodigious letter writer, Malinowski soon provided his biographer with an obsessively detailed account of his friendships, love life, travels with his mother, inner angst and what he referred to as the “rut and debauch” of his student life in bohemian Cracow.
Yale’s Monkey Brothel
Keith Chen, an economist at Yale who is researching whether monkeys can be trained to understand monetary transactions, never suspected that it would come to this:
Something else happened during that chaotic scene, something that convinced Chen of the monkeys’ true grasp of money. Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of money, after all, is its fungibility, the fact that it can be used to buy not just food but anything. During the chaos in the monkey cage, Chen saw something out of the corner of his eye that he would later try to play down but in his heart of hearts he knew to be true. What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.)
This is a sensitive subject. The capuchin lab at Yale has been built and maintained to make the monkeys as comfortable as possible, and especially to allow them to carry on in a natural state. The introduction of money was tricky enough; it wouldn’t reflect well on anyone involved if the money turned the lab into a brothel. To this end, Chen has taken steps to ensure that future monkey sex at Yale occurs as nature intended it.
But these facts remain: When taught to use money, a group of capuchin monkeys responded quite rationally to simple incentives; responded irrationally to risky gambles; failed to save; stole when they could; used money for food and, on occasion, sex. In other words, they behaved a good bit like the creature that most of Chen’s more traditional colleagues study: Homo sapiens.
Now that I’ve gotten your attention, I do want to comment seriously on one aspect of this research, which is that money is a form of symbolic communication. As such, it meets several of Charles Hockett’s design features for comparing animal and human communication: interchangeability, arbitrariness, discreteness, displacement, and learnability. If, indeed, the monkeys do understand money (and I’m inclined to believe that they do), then they are displaying remarkable cognitive abilities. I have long believed that humans place too much stake on language in evaluating the cognitive abilities of our fellow creatures, and I hope that experiments like these serve to broaden our understanding of the multiple intelligences required for linguistic communication.
Here are some video clips of the monkeys. And here is a story about monkeys praying at a Hindu temple in Orissa.
UPDATE: Mark Liberman thinks that “the silver disks” aren’t really relevant, and that its simply “a bit of a presentational trick.” Nonetheless, he concludes:
In my view, this is yet another interesting demonstration that non-human mammals have more of the basic abilities required for speech and language than one might have thought.
I thought that this is what I said. Maybe I’m lacking some of those basic abilities we supposedly share with non-human mammals.
The Most Dangerous Books
My “ASAO”:http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/asao/pacific/hawaiki.html homies and I have been pondering “Human Events”: listing of the “the ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th century”:http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=7591. Human Events is, as they put it, a weekly magazine that “is objective.. but [] not impartial. It looks at events through eyes that favor limited constitutional government, local self-government, private enterprise and individual freedom.” The list, as you might expect, is quite a doozy. Amazingly, the Communist Manifesto wins over Mein Kampf and both win over Chairman Mao’s little red book. I’m pretty much on the opposite end of the political spectrum from this website, but what is the criteria being used here? I think the Manifesto is supposed to stand for ‘Stalin and Lenin’ but what are the figures for the Cultural Revolution and the Long March again, in terms of Just Lots Of People Dead?
Even more amazing, John Dewey’s Democracy and Education wins out over The Wretched of the Earth, a book that advocates the therapeutic effects of violence. I’m not a Fanon hater (I have a post on Algeria up my sleeve in fact) but if I were a hardcore right winger it seems to me I’d be more upset at Fanon than Dewey! I long for the time when ‘conservative’ meant ‘people who read Burke and Oakeshott and Macintyre.’ And when did ‘conservatives’ stop reading the Great Books and focus exclusively on the Christian bible? Sigh.
At any rate — what would you put on this list?
Auto-horn-tooting
I promise I won’t do this very often, but I do quickly want to advertise two things I’m working on at the moment. First, over at Digital Genres I’ve got my “first post on semiotic technologies”:http://digitalgenres.org/?p=20 in a series which is meant to be (and may even turn out to be!) the first major thing I’ve thought since I finished my dissertation and will eventually be the ‘theoretical’ part of my next research project on massively multiplayer video games.
Speaking of that dissertation — I’m defending in a week! I’ve made a copy of the “precis”:http://alex.golub.name/diss/golub_diss_precis.pdf available on my website if you’re wondering what I do when I do anthropology instead of blog about it. After I defend and deposit, I’ll post the diss online as well.
Evolutionary Biographies
It is interesting to note that biographies of “Leslie White”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_White and “Julian Steward”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Steward have both recently appeared. William Peace’s “Leslie White: Evolution and Revolution in Anthropology”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0803236816/qid=1117164442/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-6229466-0987309?v=glance&s=books appeared just a bit ago, and now I see that “Scences from the High Desert: Julian Steward’s Life and Theory”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0252027906/102-6229466-0987309 is also out. For some reason — I’m not sure how — David Price has become the fairy godfather of SM, so readers might be interested in “his review of Peace’s book”:http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/aa.2005.107.2.302 (AnthroSource will download a 44 page PDF of the entire book review section, not just this review. While you’re there, why not check out Glenn Banks’s review of Saleem Ali’s book, or Peter Gow’s take on In Amazonia?).
I haven’t gotten my mits on the Julian Steward bio yet, but having written a pretty meaty research paper on the relation between evolutionary anthropology and political leftism in Michagan and Columbia in the 1950s, it’s clear to me that Peace’s book is scurpulously well researched — White is not an easy person to get sources on, and the level of detail that Peace provides is really to be congratulated. On the other hand, one worries whether White was really worth the trouble — and keep in mind I say that as his intellectual grandson! His later career was really quite underwhelming considering his earlier work.
Additionally, both Price and Peace argue that authors such as Handler and Stocking whitewash White’s career as a leftist, a charge that I think is a bit unfair. It is certainly true that Handler and Stocking are not as interested in White’s leftism as Price and Peace — who could be? — and so it is not in the center of their analysis. This is a fair point. At the same time, I feel Price and Peace’s interest in leftist anthropologists (and, in Price’s case, their persecution) lead them to jump on White’s leftism a bit too strongly. My feel for White, based on reading his work and interviewing people who knew him, is that his contrarian attitude and need to create controversy might explain his dalliance with Communism, rather than the other way around. I for one would be interested in a more nuanced analysis of his personality and personal history to explain the complex interlinkages between his political commitment on the one hand and his own complex and often troubles personal history rather than focusing on the ways he can be enlisted in a history of leftist anthropologists and government surveillance. Although, to be sure, that is obviously part of the story.
Steward, on the other hand, was a much austere personality. I was struck in the course of my research on him at how central to the discipline he was today both institutionally (in his numerous administrative appointment) and theoretically — here was a student of Kroeber and Lowie with impeccable Boasian credentials who returned to evolution and a kind of macro-theory that was alien to Boas. I’m not particularly impressed with the large group studies on modernization, or Steward’s musings on the subject, but it is worth noting that his brief stay at Columbia in the late 1940s and early 1950s produced more block-buster anthropologists than White’s entire teaching career. I mean, this is the guy who midwived Stanley Diamond, Sydney Mintz, Eric Wolf, and Robert Murphy — none of whom were buttoned-up Christian Scientists (depending on how you stretch you definitions, you could include Sahlins (student of Fried) and Harris (student of Wagley) to this list). Of course Steward can’t take credit for the incredibly rich moment of thought that that period was known for (and in fact he was in some cases downright unhelpful to female anthropologists like Eleanor Leacock despite her superb work), but all in all he seems to be articulated with anthropology’s timeline and institutions in a way that White wasn’t. It makes me very eager indeed to read Kerns’s book. Of course, there isn’t a copy on my island 🙁
Missing Women Found
In two recent posts I referenced the use of life expectancy statistics by economist Amartya Sen to highlight social inequality. So I feel compelled to report on a new paper which is critical of another set of data used by Sen: the gender gap in birth rates.
Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, the authors of Freakonomics, have an article in Slate on Emily Oster’s work (PDF) which establishes a link between hepatitis B and birth gender.
This is an important link because it goes a long way towards explaining the 100 million “missing women” Amartya Sen had noticed when examining statistics on childbirth in Asia. In fact, it seems to account for about half of them; although primarily in China, not India. Basically, pregnant women with hepatitis B are much less likely to give birth to boys than the general population. Hepatitis B can account for “roughly 75 percent of the missing women in China,” but “less than 20 percent of the boy-girl gap” in India.
The article is also worth reading for a nice coda regarding Emily Oster’s contribution to the study of child language acquisition.