Anthropology.net

Rex of Savage Minds shares with us sobering news that famous cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz has passed away. There was some skepticism that it maybe a bad joke, but unfortunately Dr. Geertz’s death has been officially anounced by Institute for Advanced Study. Here’s an excerpt from the post,

“Clifford Geertz, an eminent scholar in the field of cultural anthropology known for his extensive research in Indonesia and Morocco, died at the age of 80 early yesterday morning of complications following heart surgery at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Geertz was Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he has served on the Faculty since 1970. Dr. Geertz’s appointment thirty-six years ago was significant not only for the distinguished leadership it would bring to the Institute, but also because it marked the initiation of the School of Social Science, which in 1973 formally became the fourth School at the Institute.

Dr. Geertz’s landmark contributions to social and cultural theory have been influential not only among anthropologists, but also among geographers, ecologists, political scientists, humanists, and historians. He worked on religion, especially Islam; on bazaar trade; on economic development; on traditional political structures; and on village and family life. A prolific author since the 1950s, Dr. Geertz’s many books include The Religion of Java (1960); Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (1968); The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (1973, 2000); Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali (1980); and The Politics of Culture, Asian Identities in a Splintered World (2002). At the time of his death, Dr. Geertz was working on the general question of ethnic diversity and its implications in the modern world.”

I share Peter Goddard’s words that, “Cliff will be greatly missed, and we extend our deep sympathy to his wife, Dr. Karen Blu, and to his children, Erika and Benjamin.” Rest in peace Dr. Geertz.

Thanks to Paul Wren’s post which he submitted to our first blog carnival, I’ve kept my eye out for PLoS Medicine publications on medical anthropology. It hasn’t been even a week, and my patience has paid off.

I haven’t had much time to read each abstract, let alone each paper but they seem very strong and relate to one another. Each seem to build on how cultures a strong role in how we all conduct medicine, from a patient’s perspective to the health care provider. The ethnographic research article overviews race, working conditions, living conditions, and health of migrant workers and each of the essays write about how medicine is overemphasizing biotechnology and missing out on the social context. Here are the three:

The first is an essay titled, “Anthropology in the Clinic: The Problem of Cultural Competency and How to Fix It,” and a little teaser:

“Cultural competency has become a fashionable term for clinicians and researchers. Yet no one can define this term precisely enough to operationalize it in clinical training and best practices.It is clear that culture does matter in the clinic. Cultural factors are crucial to diagnosis, treatment, and care. They shape health-related beliefs, behaviors, and values. But the large claims about the value of cultural competence for the art of professional care-giving around the world are simply not supported by robust evaluation research showing that systematic attention to culture really improves clinical services. This lack of evidence is a failure of outcome research to take culture seriously enough to routinely assess the cost-effectiveness of culturally informed therapeutic practices, not a lack of effort to introduce culturally informed strategies into clinical settings.”

Another essay titled, “Health Is Still Social: Contemporary Examples in the Age of the Genome“

“In 1999, Leon Eisenberg wrote an essay entitled, ‘Does social medicine still matter in an era of molecular medicine?’ Anticipating the scientific discussion that would accompany the complete mapping of the human genome, followed by hubristic predictions of an end to disease through the introduction of gene-based therapy, Eisenberg reminded his readers of the inherent social basis of disease causation. ‘The developments in molecular biology highlight the salience of the social environment and underscore the urgency to rectify inequity and injustice. All medicine is inescapably social,’ he wrote.In this Essay, we revisit those concerns and expand them to discuss the current state of scholarship on the social causes of, experiences of, and responses to disease. We contend that social medicine is as important now as it has ever been. The field of social medicine includes various social and cultural studies of health and medicine, and in this article, we will focus on one domain of these studies—the social roots of disease—to illustrate the contemporary importance of social medicine.”

And last, but not least, a research article, “An Ethnographic Study of the Social Context of Migrant Health in the United States“

“Structural racism and anti-immigrant practices determine the poor working conditions, living conditions, and health of migrant workers. Subtle racism serves to reduce awareness of this social context for all involved, including clinicians. The paper concludes with strategies toward improving migrant health in four areas: health disparities research, clinical interactions with migrant laborers, medical education, and policy making.”

I’m glad to see such a high profile journal is integrating social issues into medical research and publications.

Six human bones found in 1952 from the Pestera Muierii cave in Romania have been reassessed to be 30,000 years old. This comes by way of BBC News, reporting about a PNAS publication that I can’t find! Here’s what has been published in the news article,

“Only a handful of modern human remains older than 28,000 years old are known from Europe.

Erik Trinkaus from Washington University in St Louis and colleagues obtained radiocarbon dates directly from the fossils and analysed their anatomical form.

The results showed that the fossils were 30,000 years old and had the diagnostic features of modern humans (Homo sapiens).

But Professor Trinkaus and his colleagues argue, controversially, that the bones also display features that were characteristic of our evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis).”

I’ll be keeping an eye out for the paper, but I’ve checked the October 31st 2006 issue and its not listed there either…. strange.

UPDATE 5:46pm Nature News posted a similar review article to BBC’s, “Did Neanderthals and modern humans get it together?” As of right now the DOI link to the article does not resolve, meaning to me that it is not published yet.

In my ignorance, I eagerly advocated Lucy’s travels over here to the States, earlier this week. I did so because I thought it would be important to see, even despite the ulterior motives of the tour.

Several institutes are rallying up and agreeing that Lucy should actually not travel. This because the fossils are too fragile and could be potentially damaged and fully ruined in transit.

From the “Washington Post“

“Rick Potts, the director of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program and an influential paleoanthropologist, said he and many other scientists agree that Lucy is too fragile to travel. He said the Ethiopian artifacts would not come to the Smithsonian.The International Association for the Study of Human Paleontology, a group affiliated with UNESCO, passed a resolution in 1998 saying such fossils shouldn’t be moved outside the country of origin. The resolution, unanimously approved by representatives of 20 countries, including Ethiopia and the United States, said replicas should be used for public display.

Potts, who has led major excavations in East Africa for more than 25 years, said fossils should be moved from their vaults “only under the most compelling scientific reasons.” (He keeps a cast of Lucy in his laboratory at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.)

A spokesman for the American Museum of Natural History in New York also said that museum would not accept the 3.2-million-year-old fossilized remains.”

There is no doubt that the slots won’t be filled but I now have second doubts about the move. Is it that important to see these fossils in real life with the risks that it maybe damaged?

Today, October 25th, 2006 is the one-year anniversary of Anthropology.net. For those of you reading this site regularly, I thank you for doing so. This is the longest running project that I have ever led, and I wouldn rsquo;t be keeping this running if I didn rsquo;t see the growth in traffic, comments, and interaction in general.

Anthropology, as you may know, is an important discipline. It accomplishes a lot by helping us understand all aspects of our past and present, from our bodies to our families and societies. This site tries to bring this level of understanding out of the college classrooms and scientific journals, and into our living rooms and collective minds hellip; and I think we have done an excellent job at that so far.

See, in the course of 365 days we have generated well over 1,200 pages of content in the form of blogs, forum posts, and wiki pages. We have around 2,300 comments as well. That makes an average of 3 posts and 6 comments a day. We also now have around 900 registered users, and on any given day we get from 2,000 to 6,000 unique visitors. As of right now we are ranked #20 for the search query lsquo;anthropology rsquo; under Google. It has taken some institutions a decade to get to where we are on that ranking scale. That is phenomenal, for a grassroot project like this.

We are a very diverse group of people, and generate a lot of international traffic. While the site tracks various demographic statistics, I think the most important and valuable one for an academic site like this is the educational background of our user base. Here rsquo;s some basic stats on us:

• Around 10% of us have completed a PhD
• About 15% of us have finished Master rsquo;s degree
• There are ~8% of us who are currently in graduate school or have done some graduate coursework.
• Around 30% of us have at least a Bachelor rsquo;s degree.

In total, 63% of us have some form of higher education. That speaks volumes to who we are and where we are going. I wonder if these stats will remain the same next year?

You should note that most of us are not professional science writers or sit-at-home nerds. Lots of us are actively working in the field, going to class or teach classes, or conducting research. We may run our own personal blogs, but we turn what free time we have, to build this community. And for that, I rsquo;m humbled.

But that rsquo;s not to say we don rsquo;t value the other 37% of us who either did not indicate their level of education or did not pursue higher education. I say that because, we run this site because we want to bring anthropology to everyone. For this reason alone, I feel that this site has become so successful and so full of potential.

Of course, only time will tell, how much of an impact we make hellip; but I am hopeful. I have seen an exponential increase in registered users, comments, and forum posts in the course of this year. It has motivated me to continue to work on developing content as well as trying (as hard as it maybe) to streamline the site to make it work better. Sure there are bugs here and there, but we are all working on it.

In the future, you can expect to see the same growth, if not more. I am working on creating a news feature, where users can submit news and the community can vote it up or down, to get it featured on our front page. This will create a more dynamic page, hopefully making it easier for news and content to get disseminated. Keep your eyes out for another new feature, I plan to start up a podcast within the next two or three months. So far, the podcast will be formatted as a phone interview with various anthropologists from around the world but I would like something more than that. Anyone have any suggestions or things they rsquo;d like to see from an anthropology podcast? I rsquo;m open to any suggestions.

Again, I thank you, very much. I will cut this message here, because I have to work on our first ever anthropology blog carnival, but I appreciate the commitment everyone has shown. Keep it up!

Kambiz

Again, from Afarensis (he is on fire this week), there is outstanding news that beginning in September 2007, Lucy will enjoy top billing among 200 other Ethiopian exhibits that will tour museums in 10 US cities for four years.

If you don’t know about Lucy, she is an australopithecine found by paleoanthropologists Donald Johanson and Tom Gray in 1974. They found her sweet fossil in Ethiopia’s northern Afar region, near where Dikika was recently found. She was named after the Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

The lucky people of Houston will get to see Lucy for the first time (although she once came to the U.S. for the analysis) at the premiere exhibition hosted by the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences. This was all announced by Ethiopian officials, like Gezahgen Kebede, Ethiopia’s honorary consul in Houston in the US state of Texas. He remarked,

“Lucy has been in Ethiopia over the last 30 years… It is time for us to share her with the whole world because she is [part of] the origin of mankind.”

The intentions of this is not primarily aimed to promote an better understanding of human evolution, but rather alter the image of the Horn of Africa nation, which is perhaps better known to the outside world for famine, floods and other human suffering than science.

All that aside, I hope some more announcements of rest of her tour come out. I’d like to see her remains in real life, I’ve seen nothing but casts. This all comes from this source article, “Famed Hominid ‘Lucy’ to Leave Ethiopia for First Exhibit Abroad.”

Although the dust has settled in regards to my post about the quality of research done on the now famous Dikika fossil, I feel vindicated to some degree to have read that Desmond Morris has some words of reason about this matter. I found about this news article, which features Morris, along with an exclusive interview with Zeresenay Alemseged, who discovered the oldest child in the world, from this blog post.

Here’s what Morris has had to say,

If they were, then the most popular theory of why humans stood up is challenged, says Desmond Morris, the zoologist who studies human behavior. This theory says they did it because they had learned to use their hands for making tools and weapons but still needed to get around. “If Selam is significant and not an oddity, that means bipedalism came first. So there must have been a different reason for it.”But he warns against drawing too many conclusions. “People end up basing their idea of an entire species on a little girl’s skeleton. There’s a man in the Guinness World Records who is eight feet tall. If you found him, and only him, in three million years’ time what would you think we had been?”

This is one of the many problems with fossil record. Should Dikika’s scapula be really gorilla-like can we validate this one observation as a species trait? Remember that the individual was not yet even mature, at which point the skeleton would restructure too.