Maybe. But first we better tell the incredibly diverse group of academics over at The Edge, who gathered to discuss Napoleon Chagnon: Blood is their Argument. After this whole new promotional opportunity for the Steven Pinker Empire, it’s been interesting to note a newly-launched empirical critique: see War, Peace, and Human Nature.

Scrolling through The Edge, I can’t help but think again about not being an anthropologist. As I said in Party Like It’s 1999, if you told me 20 years ago, back in 1993 when I was looking at graduate programs, that Napoleon Chagnon would be a big hit for the Academic Edge in 2013, I probably would have steered more toward programs in Latin American history.

You’ll forgive me for reminiscing back to fall 1993 classes with Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Emily Martin, Sidney W. Mintz, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and really believing that anthropology and academia had definitively changed. Of course not all for the better–and I was myself part of a re-whitening of an anthropology that in the 1990s grew less diverse than it had been in the 1970s–but it seemed that the kinds of ideas Chagnon had begun brandishing were becoming more and more anomalous.

Thank you to Kenan Malik for tweeting out my previous critique along with the new treasures. My other favorite responses so far:

• I rarely advise anyone to “read the comments” but for this Boing-Boing on Napoleon Chagnon, that’s where the fun starts. The original piece is basically a promotional link to The Edge, but most of the comments (so far) rip into the Dawkins gang.
• See Cris Campbell’s Ignoble Savages & Napoleon Chagnon for a response parallel to my own–we both gravitate toward Daniel Everett and Brian Ferguson. Although it was not my experience that Chagnon was required reading in graduate school, I generally agree that “while the older generation continues to play personal and political games, a younger generation makes four-field anthropology an altogether more vibrant and hospitable place.” However, I am a bit surprised at Campbell’s labeling as odd “that these scholars apparently operate on the mistaken assumption that the Yanomamo are ‘primitive’ exemplars of our evolutionary past.” This is hardly an oddity for that forum–it’s been their operating principle! I would additionally argue that it is precisely the men pictured on The Edge who are the “older generation” playing “personal and political games”–games that I do not find among most senior anthropologists today.
• Greg Downey: “Ugh, bunch of old guys & honorary old guy Pinker get together to fawn over Napoleon Chagnon at The Edge. I actually think Chagnon hard done-by, but I’m over the outrageous assertions of his supporters… I lost respect for all involved.”
• Jason De León: Richard Dawkins confirms he’s not an anthropologist by stating that Chagnon is “Arguably our greatest anthropologist”
• Jane Henrici: “Purple prose on anthropology, anthropologists, science.”
• oops ohno: “STEVEN PINKER convenes an event to worship NAPOLEON CHAGNON. Introduction by RICHARD DAWKINS. I just can’t even. This is the worst. I–. Ugh.”
• Andrew Badenoch: “Pinker’s line is classic: ‘it doesn’t matter whether they’re literally hunter-gatherers.’”

At the very end, however, is a quote from Daniel Everett, which goes quite nicely with UC Santa Barbara trained anthropologist Brian Haley’s comment, corresponds to the basic message of Anthropology and Human Nature, and would also fit with what Marshall Sahlins describes in The Western Illusion of Human Nature. Here’s Daniel Everett:

Theoretically I agree with Chagnon that, contrary to Marvin Harris’s work, culture is not simply the reflection of material environment. On the other hand, I find no evidence in Chagnon’s work for a notion that human nature either exists or that human cultures directly reflect human biology. The great leap forward of human beings has been their cognitive flexibility, not their rigidity.

Chagnon is controversial, but he ought not to be. The controversy doesn’t emerge from his descriptions but from our biases of how people ought to live and how western scientists should manage these peoples’ “image.” His descriptive work is first–rate, a sentiment also expressed by missionaries who have lived among the Yanomamö decades longer than Chagnon. Many of them think his descriptions are the best written on this people.

Yet I disagree that Chagnon has shown anything about either “human nature” or the evolution of our species. What he has shown us is valuable and important just the same–that there are a variety of human experiences and that in learning about this variety we learn more about our species. In fact, when I compare the descriptions of Amazonian and other communities around the world, including the community of social scientists, I reach the opposite conclusion–human nature is a fiction that some folks find convenient. When we finally liberate ourselves from this 19th century idea (going back to Adolph Bastian’s work on the “psychic unity of mankind”) we may begin to see the richness in human diversity. (Daniel Everett on Napoleon Chagnon at The Edge)

Or, as Marshall Sahlins might say: The National Academy of Sciences, The Edge, Human Nature, Goodbye to all that.

Daniel Everett has written a similar overview in The New York Daily News, Where nature and nurture clash: Pioneering a new theory of language:

We certainly are all cut from the same biological mode. But nature made us flexible not rigid. That is why the bold idea of Chomsky and the evolutionary psychologists simply cannot explain what we know about human diversity.

This shortcoming has lead to a new “nurture revolution” gathering steam around the world among primatologists, psychologists, philosophers, linguists, and evolutionary biologists. The basic idea of this nurture revolution is simple: Humans are not canned. We are flexible.

Meanwhile, from a helpful Kenan Malik tweet–one that really should be on The Edge–The Genome in Turmoil:

In part, this reluctance is a familiar story in every scientific field where new ideas challenge long-entrenched theories. But perhaps part of the initial aversion to epigenetics was motivated by something in our cultural consciousness. Epigenetics undermines age-old ideas of the organism, particularly the human being, as having a stable essence–whether it is a divine soul, a curled-up miniature being waiting to unfold into a fully formed adult, or a molecular program from which we can read off a biologically predestined future. The claim that “it’s in our DNA,” it seems, no longer offers the reassuring bedrock of certainty that we once thought it did. (Nessa Carey, author of The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance)

And then there’s Grandma’s Experiences Leave a Mark on Your Genes:

Like silt deposited on the cogs of a finely tuned machine after the seawater of a tsunami recedes, our experiences, and those of our forebears, are never gone, even if they have been forgotten. They become a part of us, a molecular residue holding fast to our genetic scaffolding. The DNA remains the same, but psychological and behavioral tendencies are inherited. You might have inherited not just your grandmother’s knobby knees, but also her predisposition toward depression caused by the neglect she suffered as a newborn.

Or not. If your grandmother was adopted by nurturing parents, you might be enjoying the boost she received thanks to their love and support. The mechanisms of behavioral epigenetics underlie not only deficits and weaknesses but strengths and resiliencies, too. And for those unlucky enough to descend from miserable or withholding grandparents, emerging drug treatments could reset not just mood, but the epigenetic changes themselves. Like grandmother’s vintage dress, you could wear it or have it altered. The genome has long been known as the blueprint of life, but the epigenome is life’s Etch A Sketch: Shake it hard enough, and you can wipe clean the family curse.

Thanks to biological anthropologist Patrick Clarkin for the link, who has written about such issues in How the World Gets Under Our Skin. Clarkin writes of plasticity and the process of development: “Through that process of development, multiple biological outcomes from the same genes are possible. Evolutionarily speaking, it makes sense that natural selection would favor genes that give an organism some plasticity to respond to environments that change within a single lifetime.”

Also of interest here, further musings from biological anthropologist Ken Weiss, Is genomic causation deterministic or probabilistic? Weiss is not so concerned with epigenetics but the heart of genomic causation ideas, and “deep problems in trying to understand the variation in life from a genomic causal point of view.”

At the same time, also on The Mermaid’s Tale, in Microbiomes R Us Anne Buchanan demonstrates how research on microbiomes can then be fed into yet another story of simplistic determinism. Epigenetics is potentially vulnerable to the same fate.

At the end of my talk on The Noble Savages Controversy: Napoleon Chagnon, Marshall Sahlins and Reintegrating Anthropology, two SUNY New Paltz psychologists needled me to take a stand on human nature. I hedged a bit–it’s difficult to say this coherently in front of a crowd–but tried to state that there really is no such thing:

Human capacities are not genetically specified but emerge within processes of ontogenetic development. Moreover the circumstances of development are continually shaped through human activity. There is consequently no human nature that has escaped the current of history. . . .

This does not mean, of course, that a human being can be anything you please. But it does mean that there is no way of describing what human beings are independently of the manifold historical and environmental circumstances in which they become–in which they grow up and live out their lives. (Tim Ingold, Against Human Nature, 2006:259,273)

As it turned out, the psychologists were quite helpful allies, admirers of Susan McKinnon and Developmental Systems Theory. Thank you again to Dr. Benjamin Junge and SUNY New Paltz Anthropology for inviting a speaker based only on a blog-post! [Comment clarification, a recommendation from anthropologist Christopher Lynn and a blog post.]

So, on the one hand perhaps epigenetics can rewrite the standard scripts on human nature and wake up academics on The Edge. On the other hand, the new genetics, including epigenetics, could be combined with ideas of culture as race-lite promoted by people like David Brooks. We should remember that one of the reasons for the revival of ideas like the Psychic Unity of Mankind was to counteract the post-Darwin stream of scientific racism. Because if epigenetics and genetics gets wired up with so-called cultural traits, we’re going to miss the days when all we had to worry about was Jared Diamond.

Brooks reports on studies based on the Google Books database. They are interesting studies, purporting a rise in the use of individualizing words, a decline in the use of community words. Taken with the proper dose of methodological caution, such searches can be good fodder for linguistic anthropology. Jane Hill’s (2005) Intertextuality as Source and Evidence for Indirect Indexical Meanings was a pioneering look at using a Google search on mañana to trace the meanings of Mock Spanish.

Over at the Language Log, Mark Liberman takes a closer look at this Ngram morality. Liberman chides Brooks for not citing or linking to the papers, “a form of journalistic malpractice,” and then how Brooks does not mention the “ideological and temporal inconsistency” in the sources. Moreover, at Language Hack, it seems pretty clear that the facts just don’t check out. Tom Hinkle convincingly demonstrates that phrases like “band together” have not been receding, while the phrase “family comes first” has been steadily rising.

But such annoying little inconsistencies like history and facts would be too devastating for the big-blurb-meme, that “gradual shifts in language use over the centuries reflect tectonic shifts in culture.” And then there’s the kicker:

Liberals sometimes argue that our main problems come from the top: a self-dealing elite, the oligarchic bankers. But the evidence suggests that individualism and demoralization are pervasive up and down society, and may be even more pervasive at the bottom. Liberals also sometimes talk as if our problems are fundamentally economic, and can be addressed politically, through redistribution. But maybe the root of the problem is also cultural. The social and moral trends swamp the proposed redistributive remedies.

First, the idea of “pervasive up and down society” is exactly the kind of methodological caution one would want to use with a Google Book analysis. Hello, this is a book search, and hello to Shirley Brice Heath’s long research on different forms of literacy.

But perhaps more importantly, the idea of a cultural problem immediately eviscerates economic and political alternatives. It’s a familiar theme for Brooks, who basically said that Haiti had a cultural problem which kept it from economic development. It’s also infinitely malleable. The fact that there is a large education gap between the rich and the middle class–surely a cultural problem with the middle class. That nearly one-in-three people in the U.S. are poor or nearly poor, and that poverty is increasingly located in the suburbs–must be a cultural problem with suburban America. That there is worsening wealth inequality by race: “White Americans have 22 times more wealth than blacks–a gap that nearly doubled during the Great Recession.” Well, that is surely a cultural problem with blacks (and we hear that claim again and again and again). As Michel-Rolph Trouillot said in Adieu, Culture: A New Duty Arises, the term culture is now thoroughly separated from power, inequality, economics, politics, and history. And that’s the real cultural problem.

Shirley Brice Heath in Words at Work and Play: Three Decades in Family and Community Life is much better. Heath “shows how families constantly rearrange their patterns of work, language, play and learning in response to economic pressures.”

Or as Robin Lakoff writes in What Our Words Don’t Tell Us, there is a huge dose of methodological caution that David Brooks should take:

It is hardly respectable scholarship to jump to the conclusion that changes in word frequency necessarily indicate changes in topics under discussion (new words may replace familiar ones but have similar meanings), and even if they do, it is very dubious–ethically questionable, you might say–to jump from there to the conclusion that these changes signify deep societal changes in the direction of moral decline, unless writers are prepared to make explicit and be prepared to defend their understanding of “morality” and “decline.” Social science is still, happily, distinguishable from theology.

Or see this comment from mancuroc:

Earth to Brooks: the economy strongly determines the culture. That is why we now talk of a culture of greed, the degree of which represents a tectonic shift in our culture and which has itself undermined community bonds.

Earth to Brooks indeed. But now it’s time to look at all those anthropology papers, where I hope I haven’t too badly played into Brooks’ game-plan by going on and on about culture.

Just remember:

Whenever you hear culture of poverty look for a culture of greed nearby.

Other links for David Brooks “What Our Words Tell Us”

• David Brooks’ Favorite New Theory of Language Is Wrong by John McWhorter:
  

  It’s hardly that the thesis that Americans think differently than they did a hundred years ago is mistaken–what would be unusual is if Americans did not. . . . However, the faddish attempt to apply the Big Data approach to social psychology via Google’s Ngram viewer tool will shed much less light on these matters than many expect. In any language, concepts are expressed by several words and phrases at any given time, all of which morph eternally with the passage of time.

• At the Marginal Revolution blog, economist Tyler Cowen just has to cut-and-paste a blockquote David Brooks on the words we use, write “interesting throughout” and up pop over 90 comments, thousands of views. How does he do it? See Black Swan Anthropology.
• How Does David Brooks’ Word Theory Apply to Oklahoma? This short piece, although provocative, completely misstates the point, as disasters are certainly special cases, not necessarily indicative of tectonic cultural shifts.
• We Join Professor David Brooks’ Humility Class Already In Progress… A rant, to be sure, but with some hilarious parts: “Which is why, to this very day, in column after column, you will find Our Mr. Brooks hewing fanatically to the strategy which bought him his mansion: making sure every single fucking hobbyhorse he mounts comes with a Centrist Trojan crouching inside…”
• David Brooks, “What Our Words Tell Us”: Are Books Still Being Read? Making the point that kids don’t read books anymore, not even Google books. Which might, if better argued, become a statement about who publishes what for whom. But basically it remains a rant that kids don’t read books anymore. Maybe that supports the decline of community argument. Maybe not. Maybe it’s true. Maybe not.
• The Week in Ethics: Words Conveying Empowering Values Falling Out of Use. A post that proves how David Brooks is like Jared Diamond–he gets read for how people want to read him. Brilliant.
• Paul Krugman wrote one of the better retorts to this sort of thinking in February 2012, Money and Morals, back when all the chattering classes (including David Brooks) were talking about Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010:
  

  The real winner in this controversy is the distinguished sociologist William Julius Wilson.

  Back in 1996 . . . Mr. Wilson published When Work Disappears : The World of the New Urban Poor in which he argued that much of the social disruption among African-Americans popularly attributed to collapsing values was actually caused by a lack of blue-collar jobs in urban areas. If he was right, you would expect something similar to happen if another social group–say, working-class whites–experienced a comparable loss of economic opportunity. And so it has.

  So we should reject the attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind. Traditional values aren’t as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe–and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America’s working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause.

That morning, I was notified of a link to my blog from a suspicious-looking page simply titled Assorted Links. It looked like spam–just seven link titles on a spare-themed blog called Marginal Revolution. Thousands of hits and a site-crash later, I discovered (should have known!) the reach of “one of the world’s most influential economics blogs.” It’s co-authored, but with many posts from prominent economist Tyler Cowen. I later e-mailed Cowen, who told me he got the link via a tweet from Charles C. Mann. Cowen graciously posted a follow-up link to The Yanomami Ax Fight, providing another round of hits.

The link was what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls a Black Swan:

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable. (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable 2007:xviii)

My brother handed me Taleb’s Black Swan during Christmas 2012 as part of an enduring conversation about whether stock-market success could be explained or predicted. A long plane-ride reading left me with a lot to think about. I had already noted when I surveyed my top posts for 2012 how many of them seemed serendipitous, and speculated similar serendipity for 2013.

Taleb’s Black Swan is fodder for thinking differently about anthropology blogging and how to tackle anthropology’s annus horribilis. Perhaps overlooked in the rush to pithy, simple, and short, there are other roads to high-impact anthropology: “maximize the serendipity around you” (2007:204).

Black Swan Luck to Explain Success

I was initially drawn to the Black Swan as a way of pondering whether success can be explained or predicted. Taleb stresses the role of plain luck:

Numerous studies of millionaires aimed at figuring out the skills required for hotshotness follow the following methodology. They take a population of hotshots, those with big titles and big jobs, and study their attributes. They look at what those big guns have in common: courage, risk taking, optimism, and so on, and infer that these traits, most notably risk taking, help you to become successful. You would also probably get the same impression if you read CEOs’ ghostwritten autobiographies or attended their presentations to fawning MBA students.

Now take a look at the cemetery. It is quite difficult to do so because people who fail do not seem to write memoirs, and if they did, those business publishers I know would not even consider giving them the courtesy of a returned phone call (as to returned e-mail, fuhgedit). Readers would not pay $26.95 for a story of failure, even if you convinced them that it had more tricks than a story of success. The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events. Now consider the cemetery. The graveyard of failed persons will be full of people who shared the following traits: courage, risk taking, optimism, etc. Just like the population of millionaires. There may be some differences in skills, but what truly separates the two is for the most part a single factor: luck. Plain luck. (2007:105-106)

From listening to my grandfather describe his business success–I got lucky–to my own work trying to understand economic development, Taleb’s account rings true. I’ve become increasingly suspicious of stories about success, especially considering the difficulties of accounting for differentials of individuals, neighborhoods, cities, regions, countries. Explanatory stories touting ideas like Culture Matters turn out to be tautological just-so stories. They are very similar to the kinds of Natural Selection stories Anne Buchanan critiques at The Mermaid’s Tale.

This perspective also helps understand academic and popular success. It’s a question I was recently asked, and sometimes ask myself, about Jared Diamond. Why Jared Diamond? Why is he on The Colbert Report? People point to his writing, or breadth of topic, or interdisciplinarity, but really none of those account for the success.

There are plenty of academics, even anthropologists, who are good writers, take on larger topics, and think interdisciplinarily. Diamond got lucky with the Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, and no one called him on how much he borrowed from Richard Lee. Follow that with a “big question” book like The Third Chimpanzee and Diamond was on his way. It’s easier to ask and write the big-question books once you are already known and praised for it: “What we call ‘talent’ generally comes from success, rather than its opposite. . . . Much of what we ascribe to skills is an after-the-fact attribution” (Taleb 2007:30-31; drawing on Hollywood Economics).

My clinching argument is the Jared Diamond book no one has ever heard about: Why Is Sex Fun? Published nearly at the same time as Guns, Germs, and Steel, any bettor would wager that a short book about sex would surely outsell a long book about agriculture. It’s got kissing on the cover! But apparently a book about fun sex is just not as sexy as a book about large domesticated animals traversing longitudinal trade routes.

Again, there were a lot of good writers and thinkers, but as Taleb tells us

do not compute odds from the vantage point of the winning gambler (or the lucky Casanova, or the endlessly bouncing back New York City, or the invincible Carthage), but from all those who started in the cohort. Consider once again the example of the gambler. If you look at the population of beginning gamblers taken as a whole, you can be close to certain that one of them (but you do not know in advance which one) will show stellar results just by luck. So, from the reference point of the beginning cohort, this is not a big deal. But from the reference point of the winner (and, who does not, and this is key, take the losers into account), a long string of wins will appear to be too extraordinary an occurrence to be explained by luck. Note that a “history” is just a series of numbers through time. The numbers can represent degrees of wealth, fitness, weight, anything. (2007:110)

What Jared Diamond, and in similar manner Steven Pinker, have been able to do is to take that luck and leverage it during a time when the rules of the game were changing–when academia, publishing, and life was following a winner-take-all trajectory.

Human Nature and Culture in the Black Swan Extremistan

One of Taleb’s recurring metaphors is that of the many ways we live in Extremistan, as opposed to Mediocristan. Perhaps not the best choice of metaphor, but he means to imply that Extremistan is where one player can dominate the field–sometimes by being better, but very often through luck. Mediocristan has its virtues. The allocation of winnings in Extremistan becomes like a tournament, a lottery. For academia, Taleb draws directly from Robert K. Merton:

Let’s say someone writes an academic paper quoting fifty people who have worked on the subject and provided background materials for his study; assume, for the sake of simplicity, that all fifty are of equal merit. Another researcher working on the exact same subject will randomly cite three of those fifty in his bibliography. Merton showed that many academics cite references without having read the original work; rather, they’ll read a paper and draw their own citations from among its sources. So a third researcher reading the second article selects three of the previously referenced authors for his citations. These three authors will receive cumulatively more and more attention as their names become associated more tightly with the subject at hand. The difference between the winning three and the other members of the original cohort is mostly luck: they were initially chosen not for their greater skill, but simply for the way their names appeared in the prior bibliography. Thanks to their reputations, these successful academics will go on writing papers and their work will be easily accepted for publication. Academic success is partly (but significantly) a lottery. (2007:217)

The genius of people like Jared Diamond and Steven Pinker is to parlay initial success in the academic lottery into trade book or popular success, while retaining the label of scientist. So at a time when book sales, talk shows, and now academic blogs have become winner-take-all enterprises, Diamond and Pinker concentrate on the talk-show circuit and the bestseller list. They are still seen as scientists, even as they spurn silly conventions like peer review. Diamond is notorious for flouting the conventions of academic review. Pinker sells Universal Grammar like it was 1957, as if researchers like Stephen Levinson had never challenged this account: Universal Grammar “ought to be as dead as a dodo.”

In some ways, I have been the beneficiary of similar arrangements, at least on a small scale. My posts on Jared Diamond led to a talk at Binghamton University, Blogging Violence, Jared Diamond, and the Ethnographic Record and a proposal for an Anthropology Now article (thanks to John Hawks for the support). My post on Napoleon Chagnon leads to a May talk at SUNY-New Paltz, The Noble Savages Controversy: Sahlins, Chagnon and Re-integrating Anthropology. But when I think about colleagues who have been really doing long-term, serious fieldwork on the anthropology of violence and the anthropology of war, I have to wonder if I should be the one doing this. Luck, White Male Privilege, and the new internet economy of Sharing Anthropology.

Black Swan Statistics, Postcolonial African Dance, Reading Ethnography

Taleb is harsh on college professors and academia in general, but he reserves special ire for economists and those statisticians who attempt to bring everything into the realm of bell curves and standard deviations. There’s a hidden critique here of The Bell Curve and the regression-to-mean Race/IQ number-crunchers, but that is for another day. Taleb’s advice on taking college courses is rather fascinating:

If you ever took a (dull) statistics class in college, did not understand much of what the professor was excited about, and wondered what “standard deviation” meant, there is nothing to worry about. The notion of standard deviation is meaningless outside of Mediocristan. Clearly it would have been more beneficial, and certainly more entertaining, to have taken classes in the neurobiology of aesthetics or postcolonial African dance, and this is easy to see empirically.

Standard deviations do not exist outside the Gaussian, or if they do exist they do not matter and do not explain much. But it gets worse. The Gaussian family (which includes various friends and relatives, such as the Poisson law) are the only class of distributions that the standard deviation (and the average) is sufficient to describe. You need nothing else. The bell curve satisfies the reductionism of the deluded. (2007:239)

And that, folks, is from a bona fide bond trader who made many more millions than Charles Murray and the rest. “The bell curve satisfies the reductionism of the deluded” (Taleb 2007:239). I was once dutifully recommending statistics classes to fluffhead anthropology majors. No more. It’s all postcolonial African dance and the neurobiology of aesthetics.

Taleb has a strong preference for engineering, evidence, and experiments, but he also is a strong advocate for reading history. As long as we are careful to read history in a non-causal mode, or with sufficient suspicion of causal analysis. Try substituting ethnography or anthropology for history:

Learn to read history, get all the knowledge you can, do not frown on the anecdote, but do not draw any causal links, do not try to reverse engineer too much–but if you do, do not make big scientific claims. . . . The more we try to turn history into anything other than an enumeration of accounts to be enjoyed with minimal theorizing, the more we get into trouble. (2007:199)

Taleb’s account here reads something like Talal Asad’s critique of Eric Wolf–to beware the transhistorical key, whether that be Marxism or the Market Mechanism. At a time when academia is increasingly reduced to statistics, analytics, and the most careerist of purposes, Taleb can be a breath of fresh air.

Small Steps Toward a Black Swan Anthropology

Interestingly, the Marginal Revolution blog subtitle is Small Steps Toward a Much Better World. But for me, a link from there was more like a Black Swan, an Exogenous Shock Toward Uncertain Outcome, if I were to re-title Taleb’s book as a blog.

To distill the potential lessons:

• Don’t be any longer, more complex, or more jargony than you must be. But if something needs to be long, complex, and involve a technical language, don’t fret too much. As anthropologist Josh Reno reminded me at the Binghamton University talk, David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years also became enormously popular, despite what might seem a long and meandering account.
• Don’t place too much stock in going viral, social media, or even search-engine optimization. Of course, don’t ignore such things, but in general: Pursue high-quality links. (A lesson I’ve also been learning from “Natural Link Building Expert” Eric Ward: Don’t write for “the public”–write for a vertically-integrated niche.)
• “Seize any opportunity, or anything that looks like an opportunity. They are rare, much rarer than you think. Remember that positive Black Swans have a necessary first step: you need to be exposed to them. Many people do not realize that they are getting a lucky break in life when they get it. If a big publisher (or a big art dealer or a movie executive or a hotshot banker or a big thinker) suggests an appointment, cancel anything you have planned: you may never see such a window open up again” (Taleb 2007:208-209).

Of course, some might legitimately wonder how to go from the person pursuing those big links to the person handing them out. For that, the lessons of a high-volume blog like Marginal Revolution may be different. Read voraciously. Post voraciously. Don’t get involved in comments. It is, of course, nice to be a prominent economist, and the economics blogosphere is already enormously populated. But more than that, it is difficult for most anthropology bloggers to pull off that kind of frequency and volume. The closest that come to mind–and they may in some ways be benefiting from the tournament-style dividends of the internet economy–are John Hawks and Greg Laden.

I’ve tried unsuccessfully to turn Anthropology Report into that kind of hub. Inspired by all this, I may start doing a very spare but very frequent Assorted Anthropology Links there. Look out world–it’s Black Swan Supergiant Anthropology:

Plenty of people have called me to discuss the idea of the long tail, which seems to be the exact opposite of the concentration implied by scalability. The long tail implies that the small guys, collectively, should control a large segment of culture and commerce, thanks to the niches and subspecialties that can now survive thanks to the Internet. But, strangely, it can also imply a large measure of inequality: a large base of small guys and a very small number of supergiants, together representing a share of the world’s culture–with some of the small guys, on occasion, rising to knock out the winners. (Taleb 2007:224)

Or maybe just time for Antifragile Anthropology–which I haven’t read yet. One of the downsides to this Black Swan anthropology blogging is trying to figure out which are really the “seize any opportunity” moments, and what is just a whole lot of work with uncertain payoff. Or as Max Weber knew a century ago: Academic life is a mad hazard.

My take from 6 February 2013:

Brian Ferguson already did a complete empirical revision on the Yanomami evidence 20 years ago. After that work, no reputable scholar should be uncritically citing Napoleon Chagnon for empirical evidence. That this even must be done over again is a farce. Diamond cites only Napoleon Chagnon on the Yanomami. He does not mention Ferguson in his book, nor do we ever hear that there may have been a debate about Yanomami warfare. Somewhat ironically, Ferguson and others cleared this up in the scientific journals years ago, but Diamond gets the scientist label without paying attention to science.

At that point I had no idea that Napoleon Chagnon was poised to re-take the scene with Noble Savages. And although I am not the only one who thinks Napoleon Chagnon cannot ever be discussed absent Brian Ferguson, it has become apparent that this is not a universal sentiment. So I’ve now had to rewind to the 1990s, check out some real books from a real library, and review the evidence.

Here’s what I find:

1. Brian Ferguson had indeed delivered a significant empirical challenge to Napoleon Chagnon, especially with the 1995 publication of Yanomami Warfare and the co-edited volume War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare (with Neil Whitehead, 1992).
2. By the 1990s it was also more than obvious that horticulturists in the Amazon told us little about the lives of hunter-gatherers in the African evolutionary past. Among others, Marshall Sahlins developed this methodological critique in Stone Age Economics as early as 1972.
3. Eric Wolf’s interpretation of the world as fundamentally formed through interconnection, not isolation, developed in the 1982 Europe and the People Without History had become the dominant theoretical paradigm for understanding anthropology and history.

Which is all to say that by the 1990s, the empirical, methodological, and theoretical challenges to Napoleon Chagnon had made him an outlier for anthropology. There were still skirmishes, to be sure, but they were side issues, not of major import for developing better ways to understand humanity. Napoleon Chagnon remained popular, but was irrelevant for anthropology.

4. But already in the 1990s, Napoleon Chagnon was responding to anonymous, malicious criticisms, and beginning to lump those together with the civil critiques of Ferguson, Sahlins, and Wolf, casting all critique as “politically correct” and opposed to science.
5. Fast-forward to 2013 and the empirical, methodological, and theoretical critiques are just as unknown to the public as in the 1990s. The response to Patrick Tierney’s Darkness in El Dorado (2000) erases this history from public and anthropological memory, and ironically rescues Napoleon Chagnon.

[Update June 2013: See Peter Baker's Fight Clubs: On Napoleon Chagnon in The Nation for a very similar reading. For the latest from the Chagnon fanatics, see Epigenetics on The Edge of Human Nature, Goodbye to all that and for an empirical critique of Steven Pinker see War, Peace, and Human Nature.]

The soundtrack is Prince’s 1999. The album was released in 1982, the same year as Europe and the People Without History. Eric Wolf passed away in 1999. Throwing a party is perhaps our best response to anthropology’s apocalypse (although see Black Swan Anthropology Lessons for thoughts on anthropology links).

Because if Michel-Rolph Trouillot is correct that “anthropology’s future depends largely on its ability to contest the Savage slot and the thématique that constructs this slot” (Global Transformations 2003:9), then we’re off to a pretty miserable start in 2013.

I was dreaming when I wrote this / Forgive me if it goes astray
But when I woke up this morning / Could’ve sworn it was judgment day
The sky was all purple / There were people running everywhere
Trying to run from my destruction / You know I didn’t even care

Brian Ferguson’s Empirical Challenge to Napoleon Chagnon

Ferguson’s Yanomami Warfare is subtitled A Political History, which is the major subject of the book: to locate these Amazonian peoples in the current of history. Signaling that this was about the Yanomami and not strictly the Yanomamö was part of Ferguson’s attempt to describe the linguistic and historical variability of these peoples. Although they may have become relatively isolated by the 1960s, they had been intermittently but sometimes quite intensively connected to the wider world, through trade, slave raiding, rubber tapping, and missionization. This contact was not always direct, but it often had spin-off effects leading to fights and warfare over access to goods. This had occurred long before Napoleon Chagnon arrived:

I believe I have been able to establish quite firmly that Yanomami warfare is tightly connected to changing circumstances of Western contact. The connection is both temporal and spatial. Not every single case of war, but the great majority of cases occur shortly after a major change in the Western presence and involve those who have better access to Western goods fighting those who were more removed from Western sources. (1995:275)

Ferguson’s work has been caricatured as blaming all violence and warfare directly on Western contact. He does not. Nevertheless, he uncovers a mostly untold and historical story of exchange, trade, and interaction over hundreds of years. Ferguson’s perspective has also been caricatured as positing placid peace prior to interaction. This is also false–Ferguson is setting up neither a baseline of inherent peacefulness nor inherent warfare, but instead explaining these as a product of historical circumstances.

A final caricature is that Ferguson’s book is all about blaming Napoleon Chagnon for causing conflict. Not true! Napoleon Chagnon does not even show up on the scene until p.277, and Ferguson makes it very clear that although Chagnon is obviously associated with these pre-existing trajectories of contact, trade, and conflict, he is a new entrant in a long history:

Fortunately for this analysis, Chagnon has been extraordinarily forthcoming and candid about his personal dealings with the Yanomamo. In the following discussions, I will interpret the political and military patterns he describes as being manifestations of an ongoing process of Western contact. Chagnon himself was one agent of that contact, and his presence and actions had a major impact on the course of events. This point is made not to criticize the fieldworker but to explain the warfare. Indeed, I do not know that Chagnon did anything different from any other fieldworkers, except to tell us about it. But in the complicated political context into which he unknowingly stepped, his presence became a factor that cannot be ignored if one wishes to understand the patterning of violence. (1995:284-285)

Indeed, at the end of this section, Ferguson writes that there are others who may have been focal points as well, but they did not write about their activities, and that an empty mission may have been just as significant as actual contact with Napoleon Chagnon: “I should emphasize here that the presence of the empty mission was itself probably as or more significant than Chagnon’s presence in affecting the course of events” (1995:306).

Ferguson’s book also outlined his critique of Napoleon Chagnon’s 1988 article in Science regarding reproductive success resulting from aggressive behavior. Ferguson raises three points, and

the third problem is the most serious. For reasons Chagnon does not explain, his data on reproductive success do not include “living children whose fathers are dead.” I question the impact of participation in a killing on the likelihood of being killed: Does the average unokai live and breed longer than the average non-unokai? After compiling the case material presented in this book, I emphasize this question even more. . . .
Chagnon states that he now has the data to address this question, collected during fieldwork that he carried out after completing the Science article, and “as my schedule permits, I will publish them.” He reassures us that “while I have not completed the analysis of these new data, my impressions of how they are shaping up give me little reason to believe that my initial suspicions [that unokai are not at greater risk of violent death] are wrong.” At the time of this writing, over four years have passed and the new data have not yet appeared in any publication with which I am familiar. When they do, it may be possible to begin to answer the question of whether killing another person has the effect of increasing the lifetime reproductive success of Yanomami men. That question cannot be addressed with the information provided so far. At present, there simply are no data that substantiate the claim that aggressive behavior is associated with reproductive success among the Yanomami. (1995:361-2)

In short, by the 1990s, Ferguson’s empirical challenge was solid, with no rebuttal forthcoming. Ferguson had done an extended case study of what he and Neil Whitehead had outlined in the 1992 War in the Tribal Zone and as they re-analyzed in their 1999 preface:

A tribal zone is that physical and conceptual space that radiates out from the borders of the intrusive state system. This zone beyond the state’s immediate control has a dynamic effect on developments within the colonial enclave and profoundly influences the social and cultural life of the independent peoples within its scope. . . .
Material circumstances, patterned social interactions, and structured ways of thinking are in countless ways disrupted and recast by this process of culture contact. In most cases, the direct and indirect result of this was to worsen levels of collective violence among indigenous peoples. Whereas imperialists have long justified their mission as bringing peace to bloody savages, prior to any pacification the expansionist impact was quite the opposite, and the heightened violence the encounter produced has distorted the image of tribal peoples for centuries. Contrary to the straw man position a few critics set up to attack, we never suggested that war among nonstate peoples was nonexistent or benign until the arrival of the state–or of Western states in particular–but rather proposed that indigenous warfare was generally transformed, frequently intensified, and sometimes generated in the cauldron of contact. (1999:xii)
[Interestingly for contemporary debates, Steven Pinker makes an appearance here, "dismissing the idea that war was intensified by Western contact as 'romantic nonsense'" in his 1997 book How the Mind Works (1999:xiii)]

Horticulture not Hunting-and-Gathering: Methodological Challenge to Napoleon Chagnon

Although there was initially some confusion about whether peoples in this Amazonian region were hunters and gatherers, it was Napoleon Chagnon’s research which suggested they were quite clearly practicing slash-and-burn horticulture, and that this was a well-established pattern, not a recent import. However, this raised a methodological challenge to claims about how representative they were for human evolutionary history–by the 1990s it was very clear that if there were an ancestral human evolutionary pattern, it was hunting-and-gathering in Africa, not horticulture in the Amazon, and so it would be unwise to claim that the Yanomami may have something significant to tell us about human evolution.

There were a number of people investigating these issues, but for fun let’s just talk about Marshall Sahlins and Stone Age Economics (1972). Perhaps the most famous essay in Stone Age Economics is “The Original Affluent Society.” Sahlins originally presented this essay for the 1968 book (and conference) on Man the Hunter.

It must immediately be said that the Man the Hunter title for this conference and book is perhaps an even worse misnomer than The Fierce People. It was here that Richard Lee would emphasize the importance of gathering as the caloric mainstay for most hunters-and-gatherers, leading to a re-orientation of research on the role of women and gathering. Similarly, although the affluence title has been caricatured as promoting the idea of lazy hunters, Sahlins was instead playing with the terms and stereotypes of the times: “There is also a Zen road to affluence, departing from premises somewhat different from our own: that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate” (1972:2).

Sahlins was not trying to romanticize hunters-and-gatherers, but to explain some of these more repugnant practices–infanticide and “senilicide”–not as inherent, not as a reaction to scarcity, but as a result of mobility: “The people eliminated, as hunters sometimes sadly tell, are precisely those who cannot effectively transport themselves, who would hinder the movement of family and camp” (1972:34). Interestingly, a 2013 article by Bruce Bower, Ancient people and Neandertals were extreme travelers provides a kind of confirmation: “Clues come from exceptionally robust leg bones, a dearth of older individuals in fossil samples suggesting that life spans were limited due to the rigors of constant travel, and an absence of skeletal injuries in excavated fossils that would have prevented vigorous movement.”

The larger point is that by the 1990s it was clear that relatively sedentary slash-and-burn horticulturists in the Amazon really did not provide a model for the evolutionary past. Jared Diamond had published his first breakthrough non-ornithology article on these matters in 1987, Diamond’s Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. By then, Diamond was either plagiarizing from Richard Lee about the abundance of mongongo nuts, or the material had so seeped into the general consciousness that no citation was necessary.

Eric Wolf’s Theoretical Challenge: A World of Interconnection

Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History, conceived in the late 1960s, researched and written through the 1970s, and then finally published in 1982, represented a rethinking of world history. The idea of societal interconnection and interchange was hardly new, but many had fallen into a habit of picturing the world as a series of discrete and isolated societies, only recently brought into contact. But for Wolf, the world was built from interaction and interconnection, from long before the period of European expansion. This was Eric Wolf’s summary of the world in 1400, prior to European expansion:

Groups that defined themselves as culturally distinct were linked by kinship or ceremonial allegiance; states expanded, incorporating other peoples into more encompassing political structures; elite groups succeeded one another, seizing control of agricultural populations and establishing new political and symbolic orders. Trade formed networks from East Asia to the Levant, across the Sahara, from East Africa through the Indian Ocean to the Southeast Asian archipelago. Conquest, incorporation, recombination, and commerce also marked the New World. In both hemispheres populations impinged upon other populations through permeable social boundaries, creating intergrading, interwoven social and cultural entities. If there were any isolated societies these were but temporary phenomena–a group pushed to the edge of a zone of interaction and left to itself for a brief moment in time. Thus, the social scientist’s model of distinct and separate systems, and of a timeless “precontact” ethnographic present, does not adequately depict the situation before European expansion; much less can it comprehend the worldwide system of links that would be created by that expansion. (1982:71)

It is a common misconception that Wolf was portraying a world of fewer and fewer “uncontaminated” societies. Instead, Wolf posited that all societies had been forged through interaction. Isolated societies were anomalies to be explained, not the last laboratories to be discovered.

Wolf’s revisionary thinking had become quite entrenched in anthropology by the 1990s. I remember an ethnographic methods seminar in 1993 with Professor Eytan Bercovitch who began a very funny riff about his idea to think about what would be the wrong fieldwork project. Bercovitch’s first wrong idea was the proposal of being helicoptered in to some remote and isolated place, with no previous contact, and he imagined the grant reviewers shaking their heads with a knowing look about how wrong that idea would be. Somewhat ironically, Bercovitch had perhaps come closest to this kind of project with fieldwork in New Guinea–see The Agent in the Gift: Hidden Exchange in Inner New Guinea.

Again, this is not because all such peoples had disappeared (another misconception), but because as Wolf tells us, they never existed. Isolation was a temporary condition to be explained, not pursued.

Anthropology Graduate School in the 1990s: Did we ever talk about Napoleon Chagnon?

As far as I can remember, I never heard Napoleon Chagnon’s name mentioned during anthropology graduate school in the 1990s. It wasn’t opposition or negativity–he was just not mentioned. It wasn’t political correctness or postmodernism or Writing Culture. If anything, mentors like Sidney Mintz and the late Michel-Rolph Trouillot were as likely as anyone to inveigh against political correctness and postmodernism.

Admittedly my graduate program was very oriented to political economy and history, but I do wonder if my experience was unusual. My take–given the empirical challenge, the methodological challenge, and the theoretical challenge–is that Napopleon Chagnon had faded from mainstream anthropological relevance by the 1990s.

And if you told me 20 years ago, back in 1993 when I was looking at graduate programs, when Prince became The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, that Napoleon Chagnon would be a big popular media hit in 2013, I probably would have steered more toward programs in Latin American history.

I was dreaming when I wrote this / So sue me if I go too fast
But life is just a party, and parties weren’t meant to last
War is all around us, my mind says prepare to fight
So if I gotta die I’m gonna listen to my body tonight

Darkness on the Edge of Town: Napoleon Chagnon in the 1990s

By the 1990s, Napoleon Chagnon was dealing with intense criticism of a different nature, from anonymous sources and dossiers. Eric Wolf noted this at the 1993 AAA meetings and wrote Demonization of Anthropologists in the Amazon in the Anthropology Newsletter. Wolf condemns anonymous criticisms while reserving space for critique:

Such a package was mailed to me on November 12, 1993. Part of its agenda appears to be to impugn the standing of Napoleon Chagnon within the scientific community of anthropologists, to serve political purposes of the moment. . . .
Anthropologists need to arm themselves professionally and ethically against such dubious practices of anonymous character assassination, directed in this case against an anthropologist who has built up an exemplary body of data through long-term and often difficult fieldwork. Even those among Chagnon’s colleagues who might disagree with his Neo-Darwinian premises (and these include the present writer) acknowledge his extraordinary devotion to anthropology as a science, which has provided us also with the information that allows us to debate his interpretations and suggest possible alternatives. This was recognized most recently in a meeting devoted to Chagnon’s work at the New York Academy of Sciences on September 27, 1993.
[Thanks to Alice Dreger Darkness’s Descent for the reference, and to Douglas W. Hume for his amazing Anthropological Niche of documentation.]

However, whereas Wolf denounced these anonymous criticisms while leaving room for cordial critique, Chagnon began lumping any critique with the anonymous criticisms. In a very strange 1996 review of Brian Ferguson’s Yanomami Warfare, Chagnon caricatures the argument and insists:

Ferguson comes uncomfortably close to claiming that my presence among the Yanomamö, especially between 1964 and 1970, “caused” the wars I described, a politically correct and increasingly popular theme in some of the anonymous hate mail denouncing me that has been put into circulation since 1993 and is occasionally claimed in print by some writers. (1996:670)

Unlike Wolf, Chagnon lumps critique with criticism, denouncing Ferguson because Ferguson’s work had been cited by the anonymous packets. Chagnon writes that it is impossible to provide “a comprehensive overview of a book this long and detailed” but he does have space for an extended analogy:

Imagine a gigantic, dark cave within which hundreds of thousands of bats sleep at night. Let us equate that to Yanomamöland and the wars that are going on at any given point in time. An anthropologist stumbles into the cave with a flashlight and casts a beam into one part of the cave, and a few score of beady eyes are reflected back. He reports what he sees. His colleague, Ferguson, concludes that these are the only bats in that cave, that is, the ethnographic descriptions that have come to the attention of the anthropological community. (1996:671)

It’s a strange analogy for a book that was precisely attempting to fill in the gaps and histories of what had been untold in the Amazon basin. But it was an analogy that would be the basis for Chagnon’s final blasts:

On a recent trip to the Brazilian Yanomamö area (September 1995) an “anonymous dossier” was provided to the press and FUNAI officials claiming that I “caused” the military overthrow of the Venezuelan government in 1991, the malaria epidemics that are decimating the Yanomamö, the murders of several of my Yanomamö friends, and the wars among the Yanomamö that I described in my publications. The dossier’s authority on the latter claim is Ferguson’s book.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that much of contemporary cultural anthropology, even the kind of “scientific” anthropology that Ferguson claims he is doing, is an enterprise that promotes politically correct fairy tales intended to repudiate and denigrate colleagues while solemnly claiming that it is good academic behavior. These activities are now preventing anthropologists from doing fieldwork in many places, including the Yanomamö region. When the ethnographic lights go out, what will people like Ferguson do then? Purchase a flashlight? (1996:672)

Again, where Wolf and Ferguson separate careful and collegial critique from the anonymous criticism, Chagnon lumps critique with criticism–a mischaracterization of Ferguson’s book is sufficient to damn the book itself, caricatures of caricatures. The demons are all aligned, several years before Darkness, as Chagnon distances his no-quote scientific anthropology from scare-quote “scientific” anthropology. Interestingly, Chagnon claims that it is anthropologists like Ferguson who are the reason fieldworkers were being rebuffed, when in fact it was the extractive-data-at-any-cost approach that had earned anthropological fieldwork a hostile reception.

Darkness in El Dorado – PT

Although Darkness in El Dorado did not come out until 2000, Chagnon was already confronting all of the charges by the mid-1990s. Chagnon had met Patrick Tierney in 1995 and as Alice Dreger makes clear, Chagnon suspected Tierney of being the author of this anonymous dossier. Chagnon also had been working on a counterattack: blast “much of contemporary culturally anthropology” as promoting “politically correct fairy tales.” I don’t know what sort of effect these broad-stroke blasts had on people like Eric Wolf, who defended Chagnon while maintaining room for critique, but it can’t have been helpful for rallying support.

Too much has been written about Darkness in El Dorado, and I’ll confine my comments to a couple surprises when I checked the hardcover book out of the library. First surprise was the cover. Underneath whatever book-jacket had once been there, the library hardcover now only displays the initials PT. Strange. But as is certainly clear by now, Darkness was always all about Patrick Tierney, PT, as the true hero of this tale.

Second surprise, the subtitle: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. Really?! Colonial era slave-raids, rubber tappers, missionaries, mining, cattle, petroleum. I mean, sure, there probably were some scientists and journalists around, but seriously. Tierney’s Part I, “Guns, Germs, and Anthropologists, 1964-1972″ starts at the same point Brian Ferguson’s Yanomami Warfare reaches on p.283.

Tierney’s observations are not all wrong–after all, many are drawn from Chagnon’s own writings and critiques from anthropologists. But Tierney was definitely all about over-reaching, as Brian Ferguson reported to Dreger:

I was sent the prepublication copy of the New Yorker article. They called me to fact-check and everything was fine except one passage where Tierney has me saying something to the effect of “missions could be disruptive but according to Ferguson they are less so than Chagnon was,” downplaying the impact of the missions. I said, no I didn’t say that, and I don’t believe that to be true. I think [the missions] were very disruptive in the period I’m talking about. . . . I said that’s not what I said. And I got a call from Patrick Tierney and he got quite angry about it and said that I was backing down and that I was making a political move here and that he had me on tape saying what he said I said. And I said you’d better get that tape ready, because that’s not what I said. . . .
The missions have had a very destabilizing effect on the Yanomami and the missions seem to be unconscious of how much they’ve encouraged conflict among Yanomami groups. That’s a big thing in my book. But it’s not a big thing in Darkness in El Dorado. The missionaries are pretty much uniformly critical of Chagnon. So if you’re against Chagnon, Tierney is going to put you in there in a positive light, and that’s what Tierney does. (Ferguson 2009 in Dreger 2011)

Of the many things that have been written and said about Tierney’s book, it is interesting that Marshall Sahlin’s review in the Washington Post, Jungle Fever (December 2000) still gets cited. In part, this may be because Sahlins uses Chagnon himself more than he reviews Tierney, and really the Sahlins’s review is an essay on the contemporary United States. The final paragraph is a prescient indictment of the U.S. scientific establishment, the state of higher education (how true in the new land of MOOCs!), and the U.S. fixation on violence:

Yet in America, the scientific doctors accord the sociobiological gases emanating from this same technology the highest esteem, worthy of hours and hours of inhalation in the rooms of the New York Academy of Sciences. On college campuses across the country, Chagnon’s name is a dormitory word. His textbooks have sold in the millions. In the huge undergraduate courses that pass for education in major universities, his prize-winning films are able to hold late adolescents spellbound by primitivizing, hence, eternalizing, their own fascination with drugs, sex and violence. America.

Similarly prescient is Ferguson and Whitehead’s 1999 preface to War in the Tribal Zone. As the Newtown school massacre strangely coincides with memoirs from Jared Diamond and Napoleon Chagnon:

The criminalization of internal violence, be it derived from ideologically motivated terrorism or the political and economic alienation of survivalists, militiamen, or school shooters, thus feeds off and is used to picture the external violence of the “savages,” “tribal” peoples, “cannibals,” and “butchers” at the political and economic margins of Western capitalist interests. (1999:xxvii-xxviii)

Terrorism, survivalists, school shooters, as splayed against and displaced onto the external violence of savages and traditional societies. Difficult to believe that was published in 1999.

Yeah, everybody’s got a bomb / We could all die any day
But before I’ll let that happen / I’ll dance my life away
Oh, they say two thousand-zero-zero party over / We’re running out of time
So tonight we gonna party like it’s 1999
[Just as I was about to hit the publish button, found the Neil Lancelot Whitehead (1956-2012) Obituary by R. Brian Ferguson.]

Napoleon Chagnon Fadeaway–And Then He’s Back!

Subtitled as Scientists and Journalists, Patrick Tierney’s book was really only about PT and one anthropologist, Napoleon Chagnon, who appears on the first and almost every page. There were the furious times around 2000, but then Chagnon began to fade out again. He retired from UCSB. Robert Borofsky’s 2005 Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It suggested there were teachable lessons here, ways of reflecting on anthropological practice. However, not much had changed in the empirical, methodological, or theoretical landscape, and some people who had tried to teach about El Dorado decided it was as irrelevant as it had been in the 1990s. Anthropologist Brian Haley, who studied at UCSB, provides interesting reflections on the recent New York Times coverage:

When I saw the headline for this article, my first thought was “Oh, not this again.” After reading it and the comments, that thought persists. When the “Darkness in El Dorado” scandal broke, I felt it necessary to read all the documentation that appeared, because as a product of the department Chagnon taught in, I was going to be asked a lot of questions. At first, I felt it a duty to teach the controversy to our students. After several years, I dropped it entirely. I was not trying to cover up a controversy; I talk about it freely if asked. I had simply concluded that there were no real lessons here about anthropology or the Yanomami/o. One cannot get an accurate feel for the field of anthropology from this controversy. I concluded that the controversy is destined to sustain profound misunderstandings of anthropology, anthropologists, and the people among whom we conduct research. (Example: How could I, a socialist who finds sociobiology unattractive and whose own work has been called post-modern, not only get along with Chagnon but also respect his work? Sorry, it’s true.) I have little optimism that a new book will change this dynamic, although I can appreciate Nap Chagnon’s reasons for writing it. Nevertheless, there is comforting news: One can still teach and write what anthropology is really all about, including the evolutionary, Marxian, and humanistic perspectives, and the everyday lives of indigenes, corporate bankers, and just plain folks the world over.
[See Brian Haley's comment below for an elaboration and explanation.]

It’s still rather a mystery how Napoleon Chagnon reappears in 2013. There weren’t any new papers in Science, no new data, no theoretical insights. It wasn’t Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature, which contains only a couple minor Chagnon references, including one in which Pinker reports how an anthropologist colleague wrote in the margins “Are the babies fierce?” (2011:57). Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday makes much more extensive and uncritical use, which no one seemed to notice until Survival International’s Stephen Corry said it was Completely Wrong. After that Pinker tweeted support, and then of course Napoleon Chagnon himself appears on the scene.

Prince too vowed in 1999 never to play 1999, but it then reappears in the setlist.

Marshall Sahlins’s decision to resign from the National Academy of Sciences prolonged the coverage. While some people question why it took Sahlins ten whole months to resign after Napoleon Chagnon was elected, such questions overstate Chagnon’s relevance. Do they really think Sahlins was sitting around watching the membership register–Hey, there’s Napoleon Chagnon, I’m gone! Most anthropologists didn’t even know Chagnon had been elected to the NAS until the February 2013 coverage. I haven’t found any announcement of Chagnon’s 2012 election in the New York Times, for example. In that case, it had not been a news event inside or outside of anthropology.

Update: See A Thousand Kinds of Life: Culture, Nature, and Anthropology in Dissent; apparently Sahlins attempted to resign from the NAS twice before, once in May 2012 after Napoleon Chagnon was elected and once in October to protest military-oriented projects. Marshall Sahlins confirms this account in a guest editorial for Anthropology Today, The National Academy of Sciences: Goodbye to all that (April 2013).

From the 1990s: What Happened to the Empirical Critique?

Revisiting the empirical, methodological, and theoretical issues from the 1990s, it’s pretty clear there has been almost no movement, at least in terms of how anthropology is represented in the media. Napoleon Chagnon appears as vindicated. The rejection of Darkness in El Dorado strangely becomes Chagnon’s validation. Anthropology may even be faring worse in the media and popular representations than it was in the 1990s.

In the present media storm, Brian Ferguson’s empirical critique has mostly disappeared. Chagnon’s Noble Savages mentions Ferguson by name in exactly one short endnote. Nicholas Wade, prior to a correction, allowed Napoleon Chagnon to claim that no revision to his 1988 Science findings had appeared in a peer-reviewed journal. Whereas biological anthropologist Daniel Lende remarks that Chagnon’s 1988 article should not have made it through peer review, for the media it stands as unrefuted, or even unmodified, with the claim of killers having three times as many offspring.

From a within biological anthropology stance of should not have passed peer review all the way to a popular claim of three times the offspring: that’s quite a disjuncture. Gordon Ramsey’s interesting assessment at Embodied Knowledges is that an anthropology more tuned to science and evolutionary theory would have cleared up the empirical challenge long ago–however, I am not so certain, since so many people do feel it was cleared up, with little need for a repeat barring additional data. [Update: In his editorial The National Academy of Sciences: Goodbye to all that, Marshall Sahlins references Miklikowska and Fry 2012, "Natural born non-killers" in Nonkilling Psychology as the "definitive refutation."]

Meanwhile, Chagnon writes a letter to the New York Times objecting to final vowels:

I object to the notion that whether the tribe I studied is called “Yanomamö” or “Yanomami” is merely a matter of preference. It is a matter of linguistics. The final vowel /ö/ in Yanomamö is important; some people don’t hear it and therefore cannot pronounce the name that the Yanomamö use for themselves. If the name is rendered “Yanomami,” people pronounce it “Yanoma-meee.” This mispronunciation can be traced to members of the Catholic missions in Venezuela and Brazil who came from countries where Romance languages are spoken and had trouble hearing the final vowel /ö/. The rendition of the tribal name as “Yanomami” gives me an uncomfortable feeling that I am subscribing to and endorsing a 500-year legacy of Spanish, Portuguese and French colonialism among Native Americans in the New World. I hope outsiders will take this into consideration when they adopt a spelling for the tribal name.

Of course, Ferguson and others were seeking to point out that there was not necessarily one stable group over time, but a historical and shifting collection with linguistic variation. After all these years being told that it was of no consequence to label them The Fierce People, apparently a final vowel change might endorse the 500-year colonial legacy.

From the 1990s: What Happened to the Methodological Critique?

The critique that horticulture in the Amazon is not a good projection onto hunting and gathering in Africa has also been lost. Nicholas Wade famously and erroneously states that “in the 1960s, when Dr. Chagnon first visited them, the Yanomamö were probably as close as could be to people living in a state of nature.” Just two sentences later, Wade will talk about them cultivating plantains, a high-starch, high-fat, high-calorie agricultural crop brought from Africa by Europeans. State of Nature!

But don’t blame Nicholas Wade, he’s just reporting Napoleon Chagnon’s account. “During most of my fieldwork the Yanomamö lived as close to the ‘state of nature’ as one could in the twentieth century” (2013:8).

Interestingly, one of the most incisive critiques of Napoleon Chagnon on this point comes from Discover blogger Razib Khan:

Chagnon refers to the Yanomami as a pristine and primitive people who can serve as models for man before the state. In short, they’re real life examples of the sort of societies described in War Before Civilization. But the history of humans extends for at least tens of thousands of years before civilization (you could argue millions). That history can be stylized into a monochromatic hunter-gatherer past, but I suspect that misses real diversity. Additionally, the modern hunter-gatherers we have are likely not a typical sample, because they exist in marginal territories where agricultural lifestyles are not viable. But most importantly the Yanomamö are slash and burn agriculturalists, for whom Old World crops are central to their subsistence and production. Chagnon does not hide this at all, but he seems to feel that it is of no consequence. He highlights that by elaborating how by material culture alone the Yanomami might actually be analogized to hunter-gatherers. Therefore, the focus on inter-personal relationships and reproductive output. But overall I find this attempt at recasting them as human archetypes unpersuasive.

After that, Khan delivers this keeper on Marvin Harris:

I feel the same about Marvin Harris, whose work I’ve read and appreciated. Harris was not a fan of sociobiological models, but I understood what his disagreements were, and what ours would be. In fact I probably have a bias toward economic and cultural materialism to a much greater extent than Chagnon. Though I’m obviously not a Marxist in a deep sense, on occasion I can sound like one because of the importance of production as the ‘environment of evolutionary adaptedness.’

Razib Khan is not a Marxist in a deep sense. Got it. In any case, Khan says Chagnon has the “wrong results” but gives him two points. First for having the “right method,” which certainly goes with Khan’s endorsement of DNA-data extraction–see Native Americans are not special snowflakes. Second, Napoleon Chagnon has the “right enemies,” because whatever he gets wrong about Yanomami as pristine and primitive, Chagnon surely is correct about the [redacted] cultural anthropologists.

From the 1990s: What Happened to the Theoretical Critique?

With all this State of Nature talk still afoot in 2013, forget the idea that peoples emerge from interconnection, not isolation. That’s why it was somewhat surprising that Napoleon Chagnon mentioned Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History in an interview with Frank Miele:

It’s entirely possible, as Eric Wolf pointed out in his book Europe and the People Without History, that all human societies have been “contaminated” by contact with more complex societies. That’s the nature of human existence. After the first hunter gatherers began to cultivate a few tiny little crops that they managed to control, the entire world was changed. No society is pristine and absolutely pure.

My position, as stated many times in my publications, is that at the time I visited them, the Yanomamö were merely the best approximation anthropologists could have to examine the life of a people living completely free and ignorant of the cultures that surround them. . . .

The point is that the Yanomamö are completely unaware, or at least they were in 1964 in the villages I studied, of countries called Brazil and Venezuela. . . . The Yanomamö were quite innocent and naïve about the external world they lived in. As far as they were concerned, they were the only people on the planet.

At first I thought this was might be an instance of Napoleon Chagnon being, as John Horgan put it, a “more subtle theorist of human nature than Tierney and other critics have suggested.” Horgan describes Chagnon as lamenting sociobiology’s overreach and seeking common ground with Stephen Jay Gould: “Steve Gould and I probably agree on a lot of things,” Chagnon said.

But look carefully at the above quote. Wolf wasn’t talking about contamination, he was talking about co-production. And if the Yanomamö were unaware of countries and thought they were the only people on the planet, then their condition was an anomalous one to be explained, not the best approximation for what human life was ever like.

Eric Wolf gets one mention in Noble Savages, in a list of Napoleon Chagnon’s professors, as one of the architects of what Chagnon depicts as anthropological orthodoxy: “The standard, almost solemn, epistemological position in cultural anthropology when I was in graduate school was that humans have only a cultural nature. . . . The biological properties of humans, as my professors taught me, have to be factored out of any anthropological explanation of what we do” (2013:29).

Chagnon does not mention Wolf’s letter of support, nor Wolf’s position in that letter: “How biology and culture intersect remains a fruitful area of research” (1994).

For Napoleon Chagnon, and his already-enormous cadre of Amazon book reviewers, he’s the only anthropologist who did real fieldwork. It’s an accusation that, ironically enough, was lodged against Sidney Mintz when he did his fieldwork in Puerto Rico:

Houses constructed of old Coca-Cola signs, a cuisine littered with canned corned beef and imported Spanish olives, ritual shot through with the cross and the palm leaf . . . all observed within the reach of radio and television–these are not the things anthropologists’ dreams are made of. (Afro-American Anthropology 1970:14)

But these ideas of purity, pristine, degrees of closeness to a state of nature–all of that was a projection of Western power, of a Savage slot anthropology inherited as an academic discipline. Somehow, we’ve seen the Savage slot re-built and amplified in 2013, and it will take more than good empirical fieldwork to contest anthropology’s present position.

Lende’s e-mail reminded me of how news of Jared Diamond’s then forthcoming book, The World Until Yesterday coincided with the horrifying scenes from Newtown. Somehow Jared Diamond seemed to be telling us that really the violence in Papua New Guinea was much worse than what we were grieving in Newtown. My own review of Diamond turned to his shoddy use of the ethnographic record, particularly the uncritical use of Napoleon Chagnon, which would then of course get redoubled with the release of Chagnon’s Noble Savages memoir. But in other ways this all does feed into reflections on gun violence and gun control in the U.S., a binging on shoddy anthropology that underpins current debates.

Shoddy Anthropology, Gun Control, Human Nature

Arguments against gun control often turn on a shoddy anthropology of ahistorical ideas about human nature. In this story, humans have been killing each other since time immemorial. If it’s not sticks, it’s stones, then it’s slings, then bows & arrows, spears, leading up to swords and muskets. Violence is primordial to human nature. Gun control can’t control evil–it will just make it easier for bad human nature to manifest.

Before writing about Jared Diamond on Napoleon Chagnon, I had not realized how pervasively resuscitated this mythology had become, mostly via Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature (2011). But as angry comment streams everywhere indicate, the Pinker-Diamond-Chagnon triangle is now firmly entrenched. The forthcoming War, Peace, & Human Nature: Convergence of Evolution & Culture is an empirical and theoretical corrective, but I fear this will be too little, too late, and too oriented to library collections. Even though anthropology has a much different perspective, plus the empirical evidence and science on our side, this battle seems basically lost. Douglas P. Fry’s previous work, Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace–it just sounds too hippy.

Closely linked to this view is another argument against gun control which posits there are good and evil individuals in the world, and that the people who are going to do evil will find a way to do evil, whether that be from drunk driving or making bombs out of fertilizer. In this view, any legislation is simply an ineffective overlay on top of a society composed of rugged autonomous individuals. Individuals can be changed from within, but they are never changed through legislation.

These ideas about the relationship between human nature, cultural patterning, individuals, law, and society, were effectively demolished in the first founding statements of anthropology, by Franz Boas and very importantly Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, from the 1930s and before. These are the founding ideas of anthropology, far different from present caricatures which portray Napoleon Chagnon as the natural scientist battling the 1970s rise of Marxists, feminists, and post-modernists.

Shoddy Anthropology, Gun Control, Culture

When the argument against gun control turns away from human nature, it often focuses on ideas of culture, particularly on a “culture of violence.” It’s a very curious turn. This so-called culture of violence, when it does not simply correspond to older caricatures of a “culture of poverty,” usually talks a lot about video games, Hollywood, and The Media, all of which glorify violence. It seems to be both a very symbolic use of the word culture, but also a very deterministic vision–somehow these video games are leading to violent episodes, despite repeated rebuttals that the same video games in Japan don’t seem to be doing anything.

This is a deterministic version of culture shorn of power and political economy. Curiously, there is usually no mention of the gun advertising which liberals highlight. But there is also no mention of what Charles Blow called Gun Culture. Defending Blow’s use of the term gun culture was one of the big reasons I became involved in writing about gun control, as I felt this was a non-deterministic use of culture which did not do what so many other uses of culture terminology did–become a shortcut to evade explanations of power, political economy, and history.

Shoddy Anthropology, Gun Control, History

Finally, and very briefly because it has been done much better elsewhere, arguments against gun control often depend on shoddy history, a history that assumes statements about militias and muskets in the 18th century are to be read as a guiding package of inalienable rights to massive firepower in the 21st century.

While I have not expected the American Anthropological Association to be able to issue a unified statement about gun control, it is nevertheless the case that many gun control arguments depend on assumptions about human nature, culture, and history that have long been demolished by anthropology since its beginnings a century ago. I am pleased that the AAA did issue a January 2013 Statement on Gun Violence:

We call upon the Congress and the Administration to rescind measures that obstruct the development of empirical knowledge about guns and public safety. Further, we call on the Congress and the Administration to make additional federal funds available, as an urgent national priority, for rigorous peer-reviewed research by experts from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to investigate ways of reducing the tragic loss of life in incidents involving guns.

Anne Storey and colleagues in Canada have reported that prolactin levels in men who were living with pregnant women went up toward the end of the pregnancy. But the most significant finding was a 30 percent drop in testosterone in men right after the birth. (Some endocrinologically literate wags have proposed that this drop in testosterone levels is due to sleep deprivation, but this would probably not explain the parallel testosterone drop in marmoset males housed with parturient females.) Hormonal changes during pregnancy and lactation are, of course, indisputably more pronounced in mothers than in the men consorting with them, and no one is suggesting that male consorts are equivalent to mothers. But both sexes are surprisingly susceptible to infant signals–explaining why fathers, adoptive parents, wet nurses, and day-care workers can become deeply involved with the infants they care for. (2012:41)

In 2011 anthropologist Lee Gettler and colleagues delivered the longitudinal data from studies conducted in the Philippines. It isn’t sleep deprivation, damn the endocrinologically literate wags–fatherhood really does lead to a testosterone drop. Garnering a nice bump in the press, the New York Times heralded a new era for testosterone anthropology: Fatherhood Leads to Drop in Testosterone.

The New York Times article features extended quotes from several anthropologists who make regular appearances in introductory anthropology textbooks and readers. It’s a great way to emphasize anthropological holism and to show how anthropologists push beyond culture-biology dichotomies. Lee Gettler and colleagues at Northwestern University have been developing this holistic biocultural approach, and get a nice bit of recognition for their work. This research also pairs nicely with Meredith Small, Our Babies, Ourselves. Another great tie-in to Small’s article is Gettler’s subsequent work on Does Cosleeping Contribute to Lower Testosterone Levels in Fathers? Evidence from the Philippines (2012), co-authored with frequently-cited co-sleeping advocate James McKenna.

Notably, baseline testosterone levels do not predict paternal involvement or co-sleeping, but the larger testosterone drop is found with the practice of co-sleeping and greater paternal involvement.

Testosterone Anthropology as great biocultural anthropology

Among the prominent anthropologists, in order of appearance in the New York Times:

Carol Worthman was not an author on the study but does get featured in the article. Worthman is a primary contributor to Slumber’s Unexplored Landscape which was in the 9th edition of the Applying Anthropology reader, but has unfortunately been dropped from the 10th edition (Bruce Bower’s Slumber’s Unexplored Landscape is freely available, and I miss using it as an introduction to anthropology). Worthman here comments: “What’s great about this study is it lays it on the table that more is not always better. Faster, bigger, stronger–no, not always.”

Christopher W. Kuzawa is a co-author of the official study, Longitudinal evidence that fatherhood decreases testosterone in human males. Kuzawa is also a co-author for the 2012 co-sleeping study. Kuzawa’s work on maternal environment has been a crucial link in pushing beyond culture-nature divides–see Developmental Origins of Adult Function and Health (Kuzawa and Quinn 2009) and the discussion at the end of the blog-section on Human Nature and Anthropology. Kuzawa was also a key source for how Clarence Gravlee discusses the inter-generational transmission of racial inequalities through health outcomes–see Gravlee’s How race becomes biology: Embodiment of social inequality (2009) and the discussion in the blog section on Race Becomes Biology, Inequality Embodied.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy does not appear until the end of the New York Times article. I was initially puzzled Hrdy did not show up earlier, since this was something Hrdy alerted us to a long time ago. In this article, Hrdy poses an insightful question: “Are only biological fathers affected, or would similar results occur ‘if you have an uncle or brother or stepfather living in the household and they care for the baby?’”

Testosterone Anthropology, Concern #1–The new testosterone determinism?

My first concern with these kind of studies is a possible lack of appreciation for how much hormones, testosterone especially, are now becoming our new version of biological-genetic determinism. Just do a search on “testosterone anthropology,” or open your e-mail, or probably look at the Google ads just to the right of this article–there is a huge market for testosterone supplements, playing on the common perception that testosterone is such a key ingredient to masculinity.

In fact, the first line of the New York Times article is a kind of taunt: “This is probably not the news most fathers want to hear.”

I would like to see more emphasis on the social factors surrounding constructions of male and female sexuality, as well as expectations of parenthood roles. This relates to something I commented on in June 2011, back when there was yet another wave of philandering male politicians:

In Those Manly Men of Yore Sara Lipton makes the interesting point that contemporary notions of male sexuality (with reference to Weiner et al.) are relatively new, and that in medieval thought “far from seeming ‘manly,’ aggressive sexuality was associated with women.” I am much more persuaded by Lipton’s historical analysis than I am by the article Ambition + Desire = Trouble, which features a quote from anthropologist Helen Fisher: “Most people who get as far as he’s gotten are high-testosterone people.” As I wrote in Anthropological responsibilities on bin Laden celebrations and Anthropology is Necessary, I am disturbed by explanations of contemporary political-economy in terms of evolutionary mechanisms or, in this case, testosterone levels.

For the most part the anthropologists in the current testosterone article do try to fight against testosterone causality and other possible misintepretations. From Lee Gettler, study co-author: “It could almost be demonized, like, ‘Oh my God, fathers, don’t take care of your kids because your testosterone will drop way down,’ . . . But this should be viewed as, ‘Oh it’s great, women aren’t the only ones biologically adapted to be parents.’” Also Carol Worthman gets a word in at the end: “If guys are worried about basically, ‘Am I going to remain a guy?’ . . . we’re not talking about changes that are going to take testosterone outside the range of having hairy chests, deep voices and big muscles and sperm counts. These are more subtle effects.”

For an anthropological blog-post that did take on these possibly deterministic tones, see Daniel Segal’s TESTOSTERONE & CULTURE: A Comment on Another Adaptationist Fable. The post includes a back-and-forth in which Kuzawa clarifies the research. Also, anthropologist Kate Clancy posted some great extended comments on this research, Parenting is not just for the ladies: on testosterone, fatherhood, and why lower hormones are good for you. Of particular relevance to the taunt of “not the news most fathers want to hear,” Clancy makes this trenchant observation: “What I have noticed missing from the stories about the most recent paper on testosterone and fatherhood is the fact that, from a survival perspective, testosterone is bad for you!” So, in fact, this is news most fathers should want to hear.

At Neuroanthropology, Daniel Lende has a great Interview with Lee Gettler. In general, the co-authors seem savvy to these concerns and media portrayals. However, I do worry that testosterone stereotypes are simply too strong to be overcome.

Testosterone Anthropology, Concern #2–Is a biocultural result from the Philippines generalizable?

Long before Jared Diamond popularized the idea of caution when extending results from WEIRD (Western Educated Industrial Rich Democracies) societies to the rest of the human species–see Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture–anthropologists have been hammering the theme that it can be very misleading to assume that results from any one group extend to all humanity. In this case, I do think we need some caution before we extend a study from the Philippines onto human fatherhood throughout time and space.

Of particular interest here is the follow-up study on co-sleeping, where we learn that fully 92% of the Filipino fathers are “same surface co-sleepers” (not just roomsharers, which was a separate category). Now, I know a lot more co-sleeping goes on in the U.S. than is generally reported, but wow: 92% as same surface co-sleepers! In other words, it certainly makes me wonder how much a fatherhood testosterone decline can be extracted from the co-sleeping testosterone decline, and how much either applies in places that do not normally practice so much same surface co-sleeping.

Despite these concerns–basically a plea to make sure we keep culture, power, and history in the mix as we work toward biocultural synthesis–this is some great work and a good media splash to demonstrate anthropology’s ongoing relevance.

I was sad to see a thirty-year-old Evolution-Creation Controversy article leading off the new edition of Applying Anthropology. Yes, I know that attitudes have hardly budged in the last thirty years. As the Wikipedia Evolution-Creation Controversy page makes clear:

A 2012 Gallup survey reports, “Forty-six percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years. The prevalence of this creationist view of the origin of humans is essentially unchanged from 30 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question. About a third of Americans believe that humans evolved, but with God’s guidance; 15% say humans evolved, but that God had no part in the process.”

And no, I am not averse to teaching the classics–after all, I begin the class with Miner’s 1956 Body Ritual among the Nacirema. What bothers me is a lack of reflection on how it may be precisely the persistence of articles like this–still emphasizing a simplistic, outmoded, and as a result somewhat arrogant view of evolution and science–which may have something to do with the persistence of the evolution-creation controversy.

I began by trying to take the temperature of the class, first talking about my own experience growing up Pentecostal in Montana and then asking in my scary-funny voice: What do you think about EV-O-LU-TION? Maybe they told me what I wanted to hear, but about 90% of the class did not seem to have any problem, and the rest did not seem opposed or threatened by the idea. Which all leads me to wonder if there’s a bit of a dead-horse to this evolution-creation controversy, at least in the college classrooms of Introduction to Anthropology. I know, as was recently posted on the wonderful BioAnthropology News Facebook page that there is Oklahoma legislation in the works: Insist That People Coexisted With Dinosaurs… and Get an A in Science Class! And I know that we should be ever-vigilant about science and teaching evolution. Still, the tone of articles like this can smack of Yankee smugness with regard to the benighted religious South.

My presentation is relatively straightforward, beginning with the difference between a scientific theory and the colloquial “I have a theory,” which has almost become the opposite, a kind of announcement of crackpot idea to follow.

After the straightforward presentation, I go through my quibbles. First, by using a 30-year-old article, we don’t get a sense for the genetic evidence and the kinds of information gleaned from putting computer power to work. However, there are several examples of outmoded thinking with regard to evolutionary selection, with Root-Bernstein and McEachron talking about the fittest and best adapted without mentioning that this is within a specific and ever-changing environment. It also seems curious that while glorifying science, their best example is of evolving pests! Indeed, the issues of pesticide overuse and antibiotic resistance are points that make people skeptical about the long-term benefits of scientific meddling.

I also find their separation of religion and science into completely separate domains to be a bit too tidy. Do we really want to say that what happens in the classroom has no effect outside of it? Or, put differently, this may work fine for religious denominations that have already accepted this division of labor, but for the true creationists, this is unlikely to be a very effective argument. Finally, although Root-Bernstein and McEachron end with the wonderful idea that science makes us “humbly aware” (2012:13), some of their simplistic examples may make them seem arrogrant. Of course, the arrogance undertones are hardly at the polarizing level of Richard Dawkins, but I still wonder.

I then move on to Benjamin Freed’s Re-Reading with respect to the next phase of the evolution-creation controversy, Intelligent Design. I begin by noting what a brilliant branding victory Intelligent Design represents, an idea I took from William Safire’s Neo-Creo (2005):

The marketing genius within the phrase–and the reason it now drives many scientists and educators up the walls of academe–is in its use of the adjective intelligent, which intrinsically refutes the longstanding accusation of anti-intellectualism. Although the intelligent agent referred to is Divine with a capital D, the word’s meaning also rubs off on the proponent or believer.

My take–and I can’t remember where I read this–is that Intelligent Design plays off the understanding of a true scientific debate by taking the colloquial meaning of “let’s have a debate.” Which means that they benefit from just being on stage with a scientist–even if they have not a lick of evidence, they can nevertheless claim to be involved in a true debate.

My final slide from Freed emphasizes the idea that this is not really about believing in evolution:

It’s not a question of whether or not students and teachers believe in evolution. Scientists don’t believe in it; they accept this overarching scientific theory. (2012:19)

I then turn to some slides from my preferred Introduction to Anthropology textbook, Lavenda and Schultz’s Anthropology: What Does It Mean to Be Human? Module 1, “Anthropology, Science, and Storytelling,” essentially covers similar material to the evolution-creation controversy articles. It is a bit more sophisticated, however, and I sometimes wonder if it becomes too clever to really emphasize the point.

Lavenda and Schultz begin not with the familiar creationist story, but with a Desana (Tukano) creation story, complete with a picture of a man playing panpipes. Juxtaposing that with modern physics, they contend that both are myths, in the anthropological sense of myth. They will then go on to say that only certain stories can count as scientific stories, but by then there can be some confusion about what they are saying!

Rather than God, Lavenda and Schultz then employ the device of the “Interplanetary Aliens Hypothesis,” and that while such an idea may not ever be definitively disproved, but without evidence it “holds no scientific interest” (2012:24).

I do really like their quote from Philip Kitcher:

We may be able to move, as philosopher of science Philip Kitcher urges, “beyond the simple opposition of proof and faith. . . . Between these extremes lies the vast field of cases in which we believe something on the basis of good—even excellent—but inconclusive evidence” (1982, 34). (2012:26)

Interestingly, however, this quote is also 1982, and is taken from the provocatively titled Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism.

So, perhaps all my anthropology textbooks–and my own presentation–would benefit from checking out Philip Kitcher’s more recent Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith (2009). The book blurb seems like it deals with many of the issues I’ve raised above:

Charles Darwin has been at the center of white-hot public debate for more than a century. In Living With Darwin, Philip Kitcher stokes the flames swirling around Darwin’s theory, sifting through the scientific evidence for evolution, Creation Science, and Intelligent Design, and revealing why evolution has been the object of such vehement attack. Kitcher first provides valuable perspective on the present controversy, describing the many puzzles that blocked evolution’s acceptance in the early years, and explaining how scientific research eventually found the answers to these conundrums. Interestingly, Kitcher shows that many of these early questions have been resurrected in recent years by proponents of Intelligent Design. In fact, Darwin himself considered the issue of intelligent design, and amassed a mountain of evidence that effectively refuted the idea. Kitcher argues that the problem with Intelligent Design isn’t that it’s “not science,” as many critics say, but that it’s “dead science,” raising questions long resolved by scientists. But Kitcher points out that it is also important to recognize the cost of Darwin’s success–the price of “life with Darwin.” Darwinism has a profound effect on our understanding of our place in the universe, on our religious beliefs and aspirations. It is in truth the focal point of a larger clash between religious faith and modern science. Unless we can resolve this larger issue, the war over evolution will go on.

The article is a very short version of Meredith Small’s book by the same name, Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent. Small has also recently begun blogging, at www.ourbabiesourselves.com.

The most obvious first lesson, which follows naturally from Horace Miner’s Nacirema article, is about how many different ways there are to raise children. Everyone is a little bit ethnocentric about babies. The Gusii mothers are appalled at our babycare behavior, just as we might wonder about their baby-raising. As Jared Diamond recently asks, What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? Certainly one lesson is about closeness and quick attention to crying. Diamond concludes, “the prompt responses of hunter-gatherer parents to infants crying do not consistently lead to children who end up conspicuously lacking in autonomy and self-reliance and other virtues.” Diamond in fact lauds what he glimpses as a greater autonomy and self-reliance.

Alex Golub recommends Meredith Small as a favorable alternative to Jared Diamond on these matters. I agree. One reason I prefer Meredith Small is that she also highlights variation within industrialized countries–one of her featured examples is from Dutch parenting, revealing that the differences are not limited to far-away others.

The part of Meredith Small I really want to emphasize is in her discussion of humans born as “neurologically unfinished” (2012:218). The idea here is to introduce culture, history, and learned behavior as essential in the development process, crucially present during the natural wiring up of the brain. This is essentially a first approximation of understanding what anthropologists mean by holism and biocultural understandings. I segue to a passage from the introductory textbook:

Most anthropologists reject explanations of human behavior that force them to choose either biology or culture as the unique cause. Instead, they emphasize that human beings are biocultural organisms. . . .
Human biology makes culture possible; human culture makes human biological survival possible. (Anthropology: What Does It Mean to Be Human? 2012:6-7)

It’s an attempt to gently introduce the ideas of Anthropology and Human Nature–that there is no such thing as a human nature outside of particular histories and circumstances. That there is not–as at least some people want–a universal prescription or universal baseline of babycare. I also sometimes use this as a way of introducing what Franz Boas found in the immigrant head form studies–and as the comment stream for Jonathan Marks’ Diamonds and Clubs reveals, these issues are still very much alive.

What I perhaps could have pointed out, especially since we will soon be reading the article version of Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, is that what does seem to be a universally true baseline is that humans are cooperative breeders: infant care is always social, always intensely close. Nevertheless, what falters are attempts to delineate universal or baseline techniques.

My one quibble with Meredith Small’s article is that it sometimes glosses as cultural difference what might actually be issues of power and choices made under difficult circumstances. This is a lesson indelibly impressed from any reading of Nancy Scheper-Hughes Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, when parents leave infants with young siblings not out of choice or culture, but because that is what they must do to survive.

This emerges in the passages Meredith Small uses by Edward Z. Tronick:

I know I have helped residents broaden their views when their lectures on good mothering are replaced by such comments as ‘What a gorgeous baby! I can’t imagine how you manage both work and three others at home! (2012:218)

Indeed, let us all spare our lectures and good mother sermonizing. However, how is this woman managing work and three at home? Is older-sibling care really what she would choose? Is that culture? Or is it power and inequality? Put differently, when Jared Diamond shows us a picture of a “Pume Indian baby playing with a large sharp knife” is this really (as he labels it) “traditional child autonomy”? Or is it a lack of resources to provide toys and supervision?

Most potently, the lesson here is not what we can learn from distant others, but rather about how politically-charged and impossible it has been to get parental-leave policies and childcare in the U.S.

Childcare–who gets it, and at what quality–is incredibly political. In the wake of President Obama’s State of the Union proposals for universal pre-school, columnist Gail Collins traces the story back to the 1970s and former vice president Walter Mondale:

In 1971, when he was a senator, Mondale led the Congressional drive to make quality preschool education available to every family in the United States that wanted it. Everybody. The federal government would set standards and provide backup services like meals and medical and dental checkups. Tuition would depend on the family’s ability to pay.

And it passed! Then Richard Nixon vetoed it, claiming Congress was proposing “communal approaches to child rearing.” Now, 42 years later, working parents of every economic level scramble madly to find quality programs for their preschoolers, while the waiting lines for poor families looking for subsidized programs stretch on into infinity.

In other words, the bill was blocked for precisely recommending what anthropologists like Meredith Small and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy say is most necessary and species-appropriate for raising children: communal approaches to child rearing.

People, think about this for a minute. We have no bigger crisis as a nation than the class barrier. We’re near the bottom of the industrialized world when it comes to upward mobility. A child born to poor parents has a pathetic chance of growing up to be anything but poor. This isn’t the way things were supposed to be in the United States. But here we are.

Would it be different if all the children born over the last 40 years had been given access to top-quality early education–programs that not only kept them safe while their parents worked, but gave them the language and reasoning skills that wealthy families pass on as a matter of course?

We’ll never know.

Horace Miner’s classic “Body Ritual among the Nacirema” endures as a first-day favorite for Introduction to Anthropology courses on bizarre Nacirema Rituals. I am now using the 2012 version re-printed in the 10th edition of Applying Anthropology: An Introductory Reader. I’ve updated a Nacirema Rituals PowerPoint based on this reading–please feel free to use, modify, and share.

I use Nacirema Rituals as a way to introduce anthropology, ideas of human similarity and difference, ethnocentrism, and cultural relativism. It corresponds to the material in the section on Human Nature and Anthropology. I’ve recently been rediscovering just how current these issues continue to be. Accounts of human beings as inherently warlike, only tamed by modern states and modern moral codes, have become newly popular and quite entrenched. See War, Peace, & Human Nature: Convergence of Evolution & Culture for a new book that will hopefully provide a counter-narrative.

The presentation preserves the “surprise” of the Nacirema, revealing their identity on slide 5. I use this article on the first day of class, giving students 20 minutes to read and report back. I always wonder how much I should preserve this surprise. It seems especially strange in 2013 as a simple search on Nacirema Rituals reveals a Wikipedia Nacirema that gives it all away. There are also several videos on YouTube–Who are the Nacirema? seems like one of the better ones, capturing how my classes often proceed.

With a bit of tweaking, I probably could have preserved the sadistic surprise, but decided to preempt it quickly this year. I then emphasize how Miner’s article is in some ways prophetic and has enduring relevance.

I also incorporate two slides that could critique how Nacirema Rituals are usually introduced. First, from Renato Rosaldo’s Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis:

In retrospect, one wonders why Miner’s article was taken simply as a good-natured joke rather than as a scathing critique of ethnographic discourse. Who could continue to feel comfortable describing other people in terms that sound ludicrous when applied to ourselves? (1989:52)

I use this to underscore how we need to be careful when reading overgeneralizing ethnographic accounts.

Second, from Michaela di Leonardo, Exotics at Home, on how Miner’s language

effaces the colonial encounter through which we have developed notions of “witch doctors” and “exotic rituals.” Miner’s whimsical frame also denies stratification and power dynamics on the American end. (1998:61)

I’ve always felt Miner’s account of Nacirema Rituals is misleading on the power dynamics of various ethnocentrisms–the sections from di Leonardo emphasize this aspect.

Still, Miner’s article remains an ideal way to introduce anthropology. If nothing else, students should attain the cultural capital to be able to follow anthropological insider talk, like Kerim Friedman’s wonderful Political Ritual among the Nacirema analyzing our etabed.

I wonder if teaching Nacirema Rituals will be at all influenced by the March 2013 release of Papoose’s long delayed Nacirema Dream. As far as I can tell, Papoose has not read Horace Miner. But, Nacirema Dream, what a title!

Editor Douglas P. Fry assembles a very interesting cross-section of highly qualified researchers–see the table of contents at Oxford University Press. When I wrote the review of Diamond, I concentrated mainly on what immediately came to mind from how anthropologists examine the ethnographic record. I was not enough aware of how these issues have become entangled with evolutionary psychology, Steven Pinker, and return to the long-running theme of Human Nature and Anthropology.

There has been a recent circulation and recycling of stories emphasizing an inner core of human violence and cooperation to wage war. In this story, those core human tendencies are only subdued by modern states and modern moral codes. The classic anthropological lesson of insisting on studying humans as inextricable from history and culture is lost.

Brian Ferguson contributes two crucial chapters, “Pinker’s List: Exaggerating Prehistoric War Mortality” and “The Prehistory of War and Peace in Europe and the Near East.” Ferguson has posted both chapters to his Rutgers website–very helpful since the current hardcover price is limited mostly to library purchases. However, with the posted Ferguson pdfs, the Amazon book preview, and the Google Books preview, can get a pretty good sense of the content.

In the chapter Pinker’s List: Exaggerating Prehistoric War Mortality, Ferguson discusses how extrapolations from a graph in Keeley’s (1996) War Before Civilization have become recycled and foundational for many of these works.

Ferguson’s review is clear:

By considering the total archaeological record of prehistoric populations of Europe and the Near East up to the Bronze Age, evidence clearly demonstrates that war began sporadically out of warless condition, and can be seen, in varying trajectories in different areas, to develop over time as societies become larger, more sedentary, more complex, more bounded, more hierarchical, and in one critically important region, impacted by an expanding state.

Is [Pinker's] sample representative of war death rates among prehistoric populations? Hardly. It is a selective compilation of highly unusual cases, grossly distorting war’s antiquity and lethality. The elaborate castle of evolutionary and other theorizing that rises on this sample is built upon sand. Is there an alternative way of assessing the presence of war in prehistory, and of evaluating whether making war is the expectable expression of evolved tendencies to kill? Yes. Is there archaeological evidence indicating war was absent in entire prehistoric regions and for millennia? Yes. The alternative and representative way to assess prehistoric war mortality is demonstrated in chapter 11 ["The Prehistory of War and Peace in Europe and the Near East"], which surveys all Europe and the Near East, considering whole archaeological records, not selected violent cases. When that is done, with careful attention to types and vagaries of evidence, an entirely different story unfolds. War does not go forever backwards in time. It had a beginning. We are not hard-wired for war. We learn it. (2013:126)

Following this debunking chapter, Ferguson proceeds to The Prehistory of War and Peace in Europe and the Near East, a thorough review of the archaeological record:

This chapter challenges the repeated refrain of “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” War does leave behind recoverable evidence. True, in some cases, war could be present but for some reason not leave traces. However, comparison of many, many cases, from all different regions, shows some clear patterns. In the earliest remains, other than occasional cannibalism, there is no evidence of war, and barely any of interpersonal violence. In Europe’s Mesolithic, war is scattered and episodic, and in the comparable Epipaleolithic of the Near East, it is absent. Neolithic records vary, but all except one begin with at least a half a millennium of peace, then war appears in some places, and over time war becomes the norm. War does not extend forever backwards. It has identifiable beginnings. (2013:191)

My suggestion is that as archaeologists search for signs of war, they also consider the possibility that humans are capable of systematically dealing with conflict in peaceful ways. . . . Across all of Europe and the Near East, war has been known from 3000 BC, or millennia earlier, present during all of written history. No wonder we think of it as “natural.” But the prevalent notion that war is “just human nature” is empirically unsupportable. The same types of evidence that document the antiquity of war refute the idea of war forever backwards. War sprang out of a warless world. Humankind has suffered infinite misery because systems of war conquered our social existence. Better understanding of what makes war, and what makes peace, is an important step toward bringing peace back. (2013:229)

Interestingly, as Paul Heikkila pointed out in comments on the Facebook page, although Jared Diamond does not mention Brian Ferguson in the book version of The World Until Yesterday, Diamond does list Ferguson’s work in the web version of further reading. For me, this only complicates the issue, for if Diamond has actually read Ferguson, or Ferguson and Whitehead’s War in the Tribal Zone, it certainly seems to have had little impact on his discussion of non-state peoples as more prone to violence and war.

Instead, this seems to be an ongoing issue of listing additional readings without apparently considering their arguments, as was discussed by at least two authors in Questioning Collapse: Norman Yoffee says Diamond misinterpreted his book as well as Joseph Tainter’s work, the first two sources cited in the “Further Readings” section of Collapse (Yoffee 2009:177). Drexel Woodson “wonders how discerningly Diamond read the five books on Haiti” (2009:278).

In any case, I certainly hope the War, Peace, and Human Nature volume can be a useful intervention. Before wading into this issue around Diamond’s book, I had not realized how much the idea of a warlike human nature had become a near religious dictum. And I must again note the irony that Jared Diamond’s 1987 breakout article Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race pinned warfare not on non-state societies, but on agriculture: “Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.”