News: Sensationalizing finance, female circumcision, Neandertals

Sensationalizing finance

May 11: Breathless reporting on “Galleon Chief’s Web of Friends Proved Crucial to Scheme” and “Wall Street, Held Accountable.” My comment at #11:

A fascinating drama, with wire-tapping, ethnic connections, sex, and a rolodex. But let’s put an end to these dramas. Raise the marginal tax rate on high incomes. Bring back 1950s tax rates. Make banking boring. Make it into a regular job again.

Sensationalizing female circumcision

May 11: “A Rite of Torture for Girls” by Nicholas Kristof. My comment at #146:

I’m not sure why Kristof is going through this rehearsal. It will inevitably bring cries of “barbarism” and condemnation of “primitive” peoples.

The most important part of Kristof’s article are these sentences: “it is clear that the most effective efforts against genital mutilation are grass-roots initiatives by local women working for change from within a culture. In Senegal, Ghana, Egypt and other countries, such efforts have made headway.”

For more perspective, try the book The Female Circumcision Controversy: An Anthropological Perspective by Ellen Gruenbaum (2000), or the article by Corinne Kratz, “Circumcision, Pluralism, and Dilemmas of Cultural Relativism“.

Many professors use the Corinne Kratz article for Anthropology 101 classes, but the Kristof comment stream filled up with outcry against barbarism. Another resource is a 2007 article by Mwenda Ntarangwi, “I have changed my mind now”: U.S. Students’ Responses to Female Genital Cutting in Africa in Africa Today.

Again, to be clear, anthropology is not condoning or defending female circumcision, but sensationalistic articles help no one–except make us feel better about our supposed advances and civilization. The comments are already–for the most part–full of condemnation and outcry. Kristof falls into a pattern of “white men saving brown women from brown men” as Lila Abu-Lughod put it in “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” (2002:784 and in Applying Anthropology).

Sensationalizing Neandertals

May 10: “So from the Neandertal point of view, I think this is largely a non-story,” says John Hawks about the research reported on May 9. Hawks parses the headlines and the research. “There remains substantial question about the pattern of appearance of the post-Neandertal population, as I’ve extensively discussed here,” Hawks concludes, but it is not the same as the issues reported by Nicholas Wade. As far as I can tell, this was an opportunity for Wade to get a flashy and incorrect headline, plus throw in that line about Africans, Europeans, and Asians.

May 9: “Neanderthals and Early Humans May Not Have Mingled Much” reports Nicholas Wade, with evidence of earlier disappearance of Neandertals from Europe. This would seem to reinforce the hypothesis of intermingling in the Near East about 100,000 years ago, as Wade discusses later in the article, although apparently the archaeological evidence is weak there. Wade of course has to get in the line about “Neanderthal genes are found in Europeans and Asians but not in Africans.” As discussed in the blog-post Denisovans, Neandertals, Anthropology 101 and the section on Denisovans and Neandertals as human races, there may be some truth to this statement, but it needs qualification for contemporary understandings.

Non-sensationalist headlines

May 10: “Michael as Bad Professor” by Rex at Savage Minds. Pedagogy from The Office.

May 9: David Brooks in “The Missing Fifth” returns to a silly approach to culture, saying unemployed males will “pick up habits that have a corrosive cultural influence on those around them.” The logic behind the previous critique of Brooks in the blog-post Culture Doesn’t Matter still applies here: Brooks is missing political economy and historical analysis.

May 8: Paul Krugman’s “The Unwisdom of Elites” is an important message, and related to the idea that anthropology must keep focus on contemporary political economy (see the blog-post Anthropological responsibilities on bin Laden celebrations).

May 8: Despite factual inaccuracies and overstating his case, “Whose Foreign Policy Is It?” by Ross Douthat merits reading, if only to check the moral compass. I have been critical about Libyan intervention, supporting the analysis at the Zero Anthropology blog, but it is worth considering Douthat’s comments:

The speed with which many once-dovish liberals rallied behind the Libyan war–at best a gamble, at worst a folly–was revealing and depressing. The absence of any sustained outcry over the White House’s willingness to assassinate American citizens without trial should be equally disquieting.

May 7: “When We Hated Mom” is good stuff from historian Stephanie Coontz.

May 7: In “Watery Grave, Murky Law” Leor Halevi examines the bin Laden burial.

Despite its best efforts, the United States government still has much to learn about the intricacies of Muslim funerary law. Its strictures are more nuanced, and perhaps also more flexible, than it imagined.

It’s a theme I’ve written about in the blog-post Doubling Down on Culture: the mistaken idea culture is a deterministic straitjacket which must always be respected.

May 5: “We’re paying a heavy price for Washington’s obsession with phantom menaces” says Paul Krugman in “Fears and Failure.”

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