anthropology

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HBA/AAPA Portland, OR 2012

Next week is the annual joint conference for the Human Biology Association and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, which I’ve attended fairly regularly since graduate school. This year the conference will be held in Portland, Oregon. My talk is scheduled for the afternoon of Apr 12th, though I’ll be around from the 10th to 13th. Looking forward to seeing old friends, meeting new colleagues, learning, and sightseeing. My abstract:

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“Toward a human biology of war.” Clarkin PF. Department of Anthropology,University of Massachusetts, Boston, Massachusetts.

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Over a decade ago, Leatherman and Goodman (1998) proposed that biological anthropologists and human biologists increase research efforts toward better understanding what they termed the ‘biology of poverty.’ Similarly, we now may be poised toward studying the human biology of war. Historical records demonstrate that war consistently creates an array of physiologically taxing stressors that extend beyond competing military forces into nearby civilian populations. Exposure to such stressors (infection, malnutrition, psychological stress, etc.) may vary in duration, but they result in predictable, though variable, biological outcomes contingent on local circumstances.

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This paper reviews some of the epidemiological and biology literature related to the various ways that war-related experiences become embedded within human bodies. Additionally, it suggests future potential areas of research, and delineates possible approaches and pitfalls. Epidemiologists and humanitarian organizations have led the way in studying health outcomes in refugees and other groups affected by war. However, human biologists and biological anthropologists – with their intellectual traditions rooted in evolution, variation, and plasticity – may add substantively to the understanding of such patterns that extend beyond physical trauma and mortality into more subtle aspects of biology.

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Furthermore, such a research agenda seems relevant in applying human biology toward understanding ‘real life’ problems. Rather than viewing examples such as the Dutch Hunger Winter or the Biafra famine as ‘natural experiments’ and opportunities for testing given hypotheses, it seems necessary to maintain a complex perspective which views war as an interaction of human agency and shifting ecological conditions that impact health.

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Anthropology & the Art of War

“When the elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers.” 

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Last week, the American Anthropological Association held its annual meeting, this year in the beautiful city of Montreal (for a couple of summaries of the conference, see here and here). Rahul Oka, from the University of Notre Dame, asked if I would like to be one of two discussants for his session (co-chaired with Nerina Weiss) “Traces of Violence and Legacies of Conflict,” and I agreed. The session was full of very erudite presenters who spoke on a range of topics related to the anthropology of conflict and violence.

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But in preparation for the session, I have to admit to some trepidation because nearly all of the presenters were  ethnographers or archaeologists. And as a biological anthropologist, I felt out of my element.  The presentations were also quite diverse in geography, time period, theoretical perspective, and outcome variable, ranging from structural violence and undocumented border crossings from Mexico into the United States, to skeletal trauma in Neolithic Europe, to Kurdish survivors of torture. I found it hard to discuss the various papers with much sophistication and detail while also finding commonalities among them (and all in fifteen minutes, no less). I tried, but finally concluded that it probably wasn’t going to happen. Therefore, I decided to do a rather broad analysis of the papers, which I read ahead of time. But there was always the risk of zooming out too far, thereby making any analysis overly simplistic and virtually meaningless.

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Inequality, Health Disparities, & Obesity

An October poll of 1,000 likely voters found that Americans are increasingly concerned about income inequality. When asked: “How Big a Problem is Income Inequality in the US?,” the majority (74%) replied that it was either a big problem or somewhat of a problem. Predictably, there were differences in opinion by political ideology, but a majority of liberals (94%), moderates (81%), and conservatives (55%) answered that inequality was at least somewhat problematic. However, as is true of many polls, it was not specified exactly what people found unsettling about it. I suppose there are many reasons that people might find increasing inequality (and climbing rates of poverty) to be troubling, but I wanted to focus here on inequality and health, particularly on obesity.

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First, what do we mean by poverty? I remember watching an interview on PBS with the economist Jeffrey Sachs years ago (transcript here – thank you, Google), where he distinguished between two types of poverty. The first was an extreme form, which he called the type of “poverty that kills.” The other type was more of a poverty of inconvenience or jealousy. I don’t want to over-interpret Sachs’ meaning. It was a passing phrase in an interview from ten years ago, and his primary focus was on alleviating the extreme poverty faced by more than a billion people in the world living on $1 per day (see Sachs 2005). Elsewhere, Sachs has lamented that the media have ignored poverty in the United States at a time when “the U.S. has the greatest income inequality, highest per capita prison population and worst health conditions of all high-income countries.” His credentials in fighting poverty are unassailable. But I cite the old interview here because I think his descriptions (‘poverty that kills’ vs. ‘poverty of jealousy’) might resonate with many people today, and not necessarily in a good way.

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Extreme poverty: scavenging at a garbage dump in Phnom Penh (abcnews)

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Hmong Conference in Wisconsin

I’ve not posted anything on this blog in a while, as I’ve been tied up with teaching, writing, grading, and committee work, on top of balancing that with a home life.

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Yesterday, I arrived in Madison, Wisconsin for a small conference on Hmong studies. There are interesting people here, Hmong and non-Hmong scholars alike, from all different fields: sociology, anthropology, history, social work, Asian American studies, education, human development, psychology, etc.

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Though the conference officially begins today, most people arrived yesterday and began the conversation. The hope is that we can assist each other with our current work and make connections for potential future research. I’m optimistic that will be the case.

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By the way, my first impression is that Madison looks like a very pleasant place. The campus is also very attractive.

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Anthropology: Reflections on the Field

Several great pieces on the nature of anthropology appeared this weekend on the  Anthropologies Project website, reflecting on the purpose of anthropology, its strengths and weaknesses, and its future. I recommend the whole series of essays, but two in particular caught my eye early, in part because they are written by biological/biocultural anthropologists with whom I’ve had at least some interaction in the past.

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The Logic of War: Iraq, Afghanistan, & Pakistan

A team of researchers, co-directed by Brown University anthropologist Catherine Lutz, released a report this summer which sought to estimate the full scale of the direct and indirect costs of ten years of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The report concluded that the financial and human costs of the war have been vastly underestimated (the Executive Summary of the report can be found here).

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Among the study’s findings:

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Perspective

Carl Sagan on our humble origins and our hopeful future:

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“For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.”

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Conference Schedule

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I’m prepping for the the coming academic year, and going on tour for academic conferences (this must be how Bono feels). I’ve been to Montreal many times, and always enjoyed the beauty of that city. Madison and Portland are new, and I’m looking forward to seeing them for the first time.

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• October 22-23, 2011: Hmong Diaspora Studies Institute (Madison, Wisconsin)

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Part 5. Humans are (Blank) -ogamous: Pair-Bonding and Romantic Love

This is the fifth part on the evolution of human mating behavior, comparing evidence for promiscuity and pair-bonding in our species. Please see the introduction here.

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“One of these days I will wake up – which I think I have done already – and realize to myself that I really do love. I find it very difficult to allow my whole life to rest on the existence of another creature. I find it equally difficult, because of my innate arrogance, to believe in the idea of love. There is no such thing, I say to myself. There is lust, of course, and usage, and jealousy, and desire and spent powers, but no such thing as the idiocy of love. Who invented that concept? I have wracked my shabby brains and can find no answer.” (Letter from Richard Burton to Elizabeth Taylor)

“Emotions and motivations (are) hierarchically ordered in the brain. Fear can overcome joy, for example. Jealousy can stifle tenderness…But in this pecking order of basic and complex emotions, background feelings and powerful drives, romantic love holds a special place: close to the zenith, the pinnacle, the top. Romantic love can dominate the drive to eat and sleep. It can stifle fear, anger, or disgust. It can override one’s sense of duty to family or friends. It can even triumph over the will to live. As Keats said, ‘I could die for you.’ ” (Helen Fisher 2004: 97-8)

“Only love can leave such a mark / But only love can heal such a scar.” (Paul Hewson)

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Attempting to summarize the evolution of romantic love and pair-bonding in humans is an enormous task. This is exacerbated by many complications: the literature on these topics is vast; the term ‘pair-bond’ has been used in different ways by different primatologists in the past and is often erroneously confused with ‘monogamy’; the neurobiology of romantic love – which is not a prerequisite of pair-bonding – is complex; the question of when/if humans became pair-bonded in our evolutionary history is highly speculative; and then there is the complicating factor of culture. Furthermore, parts two through four in this series addressed ten biological traits indicating that humans have promiscuity built into us to some degree, and that monogamy, or at least lifelong monogamy, does not come easily.

Gibbons (Hylobates lar). From Wikipedia.

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Part 4. Humans are (Blank) -ogamous: Promiscuity & Physiology

This is the fourth part on the evolution of human mating behavior, comparing evidence for promiscuity and pair-bonding in our species. Please see the introduction here.

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We left off with a list of eight traits in humans suggesting promiscuity in humans. Admittedly, the previous post was a little thick, as it dealt with imprinted genes and population genetics. The current one concerns human reproductive physiological and anatomical traits consistent with a multiple-partner mating structure, building on a couple of points addressed by Ryan and Jethá in their book. If you’re paying attention, that’s three posts concerning promiscuity and one (yet-to-be-written) on pair-bonding. Perhaps it seems I’m stacking the deck, but please reserve judgment. One reason more space is needed to make the case for the evolution of promiscuity is that the biology is less well known, and more effort is needed to bring it into the light. That single post on pair-bonding will be an important one, and quality matters just as much as quantity.

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Continuing on with our list of traits hinting at promiscuity…

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9. Sexual dimorphism in body size. This point remains somewhat contentious. In the majority of anthropoid species (monkeys, apes, and humans), males are the larger sex, with the degree of dimorphism ranging from slight to extreme (Plavcan 2001). This pattern correlates strongly with mating structure and male-male competition (Plavcan and van Schaik 1997). For monogamous species like gibbons, males and females tend to be roughly the same size. In species where females prefer larger males or where males compete for access to females, bigger males will leave behind more descendants. This is true for polygynous gorillas and dispersed, territorial orangutans, where males are physically about twice as large as females. A good non-primate example is elephant seals. On the other hand are horseshoe crabs, where smaller males cling to the backs of larger females and wait for the release of her eggs. This ‘reverse dimorphism’ is found in a few primates, but is slight and only in some prosimians such as lorises and lemurs.

Former sumo wrestler Konishiki and his wife Chie Iijima, an obviously cherry-picked example of extreme dimorphism. (From smh.com.au).

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