Anthropology.net

By Jay Fancher

Oil transformed Dubai in the 1970s. The city now boasts the world's tallest building, giant malls, and some two million residents, who depend on desalinated seawater and air-conditioning—and thus on cheap energy—to live in the Arabian desert. (Credit: Jens Neumann/Edgar Rodtmann/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC)

To paraphrase Carl Sagan, science has a way of deflating human conceits.  Anthropology reveals that humans are special – just not for many of the reasons proposed throughout our history.  Thanks to biology, astronomy, and geology, we now know that:

• Modern humans are one species among many, not the pinnacle of all creation.

• We’re not the center of the universe; our planet orbits a fairly average star.

• We haven’t been around since the beginning of time – far from it.

On a 4.5-billion-year-old planet, with a 3.5-billion-year history of life, anatomically-modern Homo sapiens only go back about 200,000 years.  We’re brand new, a tiny blip on the geologic time scale!  Despite this, a new National Geographic article explores the possibility that the “Anthropocene” may have already begun.  Here is a brief excerpt:

Enter the Anthropocene—Age of Man It’s a new name for a new geologic epoch—one defined by our own massive impact on the planet. That mark will endure in the geologic record long after our cities have crumbled…Probably the most obvious way humans are altering the planet is by building cities, which are essentially vast stretches of man-made materials—steel, glass, concrete, and brick. But it turns out most cities are not good candidates for long-term preservation, for the simple reason that they’re built on land, and on land the forces of erosion tend to win out over those of sedimentation.

The author of the article, Elizabeth Kolbert, graciously agreed to an interview with Anthropology.net.  The text of our discussion, conducted via e-mail, follows:

Fancher: The greatest strength of anthropology is its all-encompassing view of humanity.  We’re proud of this breadth, frequently describing our work as the study of all people, in all times, and all places.  But, as you state in your article, stratigraphers take an extremely long view – the entire 4.5-billion-year history of Earth.  How can students of the human past benefit from this geological perspective?

Kolbert: I’m not sure I have a good answer for this.  As all anthropologists know, we are a young species.  So human history doesn’t tell us much about earth history.  What is particularly alarming about a lot of recent discoveries in geology is that you have to go way, way back – i.e., tens of millions of years – to find analogues for some of the things we are doing today, like, for example, acidifying the oceans.

Fancher: I was surprised to read that our proudest technological achievements might not be easy to recognize in the geological record.  It’s humbling to think that urban centers will ultimately be as fleeting in the geological record as short-term hunter-gatherer camp sites are in the archaeological record.  Despite our human desire to leave huge, everlasting monuments, is it better not to be noticed in the geological record?

Kolbert: Well, it’s not clear that we will be noticed, because it’s not clear there’s going to be anything around to notice us.  But we will be noticeable.  And certainly from the standpoint of the other organisms on earth, it would be a lot better if our impact were not so obvious.

Fancher: Some issues of scientific classification appear to have little practical relevance.  For example, the debate over whether Pluto qualifies as a planet or not.  In your article, Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen concludes that the value of the Anthropocene classification goes far beyond textbook revisions.  Can you elaborate on the meaning of the Anthropocene?

Kolbert: Officially, we live in the Holocene, or “wholly recent” epoch.  The Anthropocene translates basically as the man-made epoch.  It’s an acknowledgment that humans, rather than what are sometimes quaintly called “the great forces of nature,” have become the driving force on the planet.

Fancher: How might recognition of a geological epoch called the Anthropocene influence human behavior?

Kolbert: I end the piece with a quote from Paul Crutzen, the Nobelist who coined the term.  Crutzen says, “What I hope is that the term ‘Anthropocene’ will be a warning to the world.”  I think what he means by that is: we are now in the driver’s seat.  Unfortunately, we don’t really know how to operate the vehicle.  So we’d better think about what we’re doing very carefully.

Many thanks to Elizabeth Kolbert for writing such a thought-provoking article, and for agreeing to this interview.  Enter the Anthropocene – Age of Man is part of National Geographic magazine’s year-long coverage of the global human population reaching 7 billion.

What do you think about the possibility of a geological epoch called the Anthropocene?

A quick bit of linguistic anthropology to round off your Wednesday afternoon. Greek linguist, Ioanna Sitaridou, located a population of people in Northeastern Turkish villages, near the Black Sea (or Pontus), speaking the Romeyka dialect of ancient Greek. Ancient Greek has not been in use for thousands of years, so a finding like this can give us a bit of insight into how the language sounded. The reason the language has survived is a bit confusing to me, she explains it is due to religion,

The Romeyka speakers are devout Muslims and were therefore exempt from the large-scale population exchange between Greece and Turkey that took place in 1923, she said.

She’s been mapping the grammatical structures and variations in use as well as recording audio and video of the villagers telling stories. The ultimate aim of the research is to explain how Pontic Greek evolved. According to this source, she gave a talk last year about here research. Did anyone attend? What was it like? Like most of the world’s dialects, they are at risk of extinction especially due to emigration from Trabzon and the Turkish majority.

Hat tip to Stephen Chrisomalis, who blogged about this on Glossographia. You can read more about this language re-discovery at the Independent…

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is a strange organization. I often wonder how it operates, but then I realize I don’t even wanna know because there’s often no real logic to their madness. Take into consideration these cases:

Case 1: About 4 years ago the AAA decided to close access to almost all their journals, directly against the Federal Research Publication Access Act. This spurned a lot of discussion regarding ownership of publication, author’s rights and the AAA’s motivation behind it. Most of us wondered how could the AAA, who didn’t fund the research, produce the data, and write up the analysis, close off the information to the world? Here was a bit of my outcry over the matter, archived by afarensis in June of 2006,

“The hypocrisy that surrounds the AAA when it begged for anthropologists to protest to the US government to not cut funding but their recent resiliency to not give back is outstanding in this matter. I don’t get why the AAA won’t open their eyes and see that this form of publishing helps to ensure long-term access to scholarly articles. Unlike articles that are licensed in traditional article databases, like their closed AnthroSource, public libraries and institutions of the people (like universities) can create local copies and repositories of these resources. People, by working together to make repositories of open access literature, can ensure continued access to these scholarly publications into the distant future.”

From this idiocy, a nice project spun off but hasn’t in my opinion been a viable alternative. Unfortunate.

Case 2: Once upon a time the AAA was an organization that scoffed at social media and Web 2.0, specifically blogs. It’s hard to dig up exact references since many links have died… But I do distinctly remember them issuing a statement saying blogs are useless forms of communication, with a little wink wink nod nod to this said blog.

When they redesigned their homepage a couple of years ago, they deployed several blogs. They even sent me emails asking for link exchange. Sure people are allowed to change their minds, but I wondered what’s with the change in heart? Suffice to say, I didn’t add them back.

Case 3: The AAA just had their annual meeting and yes, everyone’s reporting that decided to do away with science. It’s true, Peter Wood of the Chronicle, writes on them actively deciding to nix science out of the Mission Statement. I’ve copied and pasted the presumed edits to the mission statement he provided below the read more link.  Another related decision made is defining the role of AAA, away from ethnography and scientific experiments and observations to anecdotal and subjective journalism… Again without ethnology and ethnography — what is cultural anthropology?

Alice Dreger of Fetishes I Don’t Get, writes on some of the anger she experienced from other scientific anthropologists,

“The primatologist Sarah Hrdy (a member of the National Academy of Sciences) wrote, “My reaction is one of dismay-actually, even more visceral and stronger than that-albeit not surprise.” The scientists I talked to want to know (as I do) exactly what is the AAA Executive Board’s justification for all this. They are confused about whether they should bother to fight, or just give up and depart the AAA already.”

The Society for Anthropological Sciences, a division of the AAA, objected to these changes, I am sure most do. I don’t understand why this change is being done. In a time and age when we need to strive to objective data to make informed decisions, this organization is moving away from that, and consciously. Why?

Could it because anthropology is largely not considered a science outside of the discipline — so the AAA chooses embrace what most think of us?

Again it is hard to get into the minds of such a dysfunctional organization. They seem to never make the right decision. An analogy that works in my mind is the AAA is to anthropologists as the Clerical Theocracy of the Islamic Republic are to Iranian population. As many governments help make decisions to move forward and advance their society, both the AAA and the mullahs regress their organizations further back in time.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is a quick note to point readers in the direction of several posts that have appeared online in recent days, on the origins and spread of agriculture, and the part language may have played in the process,  in Europe, Asia and the Americas. Although I’ve recently concentrated on writing about our Palaeolithic origins, if there’s one behavioural trait that separates modern humanity from its archaic counterpart, the widespread adoption of agriculture over the past ten millennia has set us far apart from all that went before, and is more directly responsible for our urbanised civilisation and attendant corporate woes than anything else that presently comes to mind. Moreover, and beyond our city walls, the devastating impact of agriculture on rural landscapes worldwide is a problem that concerns us all, with for example, the clearance of the Amazon rain-forest for cattle a particular thorn in our side, whilst our growing appetite for bio-fuels looks set to have no less a deadly impact as we turn even more land over to the growing of necessary crops.

First up is this post at Gene Expression, European man perhaps a Middle Eastern farmer, in which Razib Khan discusses the findings of a recent paper at PLoS Biology, A Predominantly Neolithic Origin for European Paternal Lineages – for which this is the abstract:

The relative contributions to modern European populations of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farmers from the Near East have been intensely debated. Haplogroup R1b1b2 (R-M269) is the commonest European Y-chromosomal lineage, increasing in frequency from east to west, and carried by 110 million European men. Previous studies suggested a Paleolithic origin, but here we show that the geographical distribution of its microsatellite diversity is best explained by spread from a single source in the Near East via Anatolia during the Neolithic.

Taken with evidence on the origins of other haplogroups, this indicates that most European Y chromosomes originate in the Neolithic expansion. This reinterpretation makes Europe a prime example of how technological and cultural change is linked with the expansion of a Y-chromosomal lineage, and the contrast of this pattern with that shown by maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA suggests a unique role for males in the transition.

Razib offers some background to the ongoing debate…

For the past few decades there has been a long standing debate as to the origins of modern Europeans. The two alternative hypotheses are:

* Europeans are descended from Middle Eastern farmers, who brought their Neolithic cultural toolkit less than 10,000 years ago.

* Europeans are descended from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, who acculturated to the farming way of life through diffusion of ideas.

…and further notes:

In this unsettled landscape comes a new paper which turns some assumptions about Y chromosomal variation in Europe on its head. The focus is on a subclade of the R1b haplogroup, which has its highest frequencies in Western Europe, in particular along the Atlantic fringe. The pattern of variation has led many to infer that this lineage, in particular the R1b1b2 haplgroup, is a marker of the Paleolithic populations of Western Europe. The high frequency of this marker among the Basques in particular is seen as evidence of this, because this group speaks a language which is a pre-Indo-European isolate (the Basques are used as a Paleolithic reference group in many papers). But perhaps not…

…One issue to note is that it seems likely that if the model presented here is true, that R1b1b2 is newcomer from the Middle East which rapidly expanded in frequency across Western Europe, it’s going to be hard to getting the clarity you need from molecular clock based methods because the demographic processes occurred rather rapidly. We know from archaeology that agricultural societies could sprout up almost instantaneously, as if they simply transplanted their culture to new locales. Some of this likely occurred via sea, using the Mediterranean and the Atlantic fringe…

…The authors point out that in places like Japan and India there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence for agriculture resulting in the expansion of particular lineages, so the preponderance of acculturation in Europe as the mode of transmission seems atypical…

…One analog might be the emergence of mestizos in the New World, who have predominantly European male lineages and native female lineages. Finally, one question a friend brought up: if the higher frequency of R1b1b2 is a function of the wave of advance, why is it the same haplogroup all along the wave front? Standard population genetic theory tells us that fragmented small groups will tend to lose genetic diversity and fix particular alleles, but those alleles are not going to be the same. It seems that it is more plausible that there were serial bottlenecks through coastal migrations, and eventually these expanded inland once they stumbled onto the northwest European plain. But that’s just speculation.

For further discussion, please see Dieneke’s whileYann Klimentidis mentions both this paper and another, namely Genetic discontinuity between local hunter-gatherers and central Europe’s first farmers.

Next it’s over to Gambler’s House, and an article titled The Supposed Linguistic Evidence for the Spread of Agriculture, whose introductory notes state the following:

The prehistoric peoples of the American Southwest were agriculturalists.  Different societies may have calibrated their mix of farming, hunting, and gathering differently, but they all seem to have done all three eventually, and for most it’s quite apparent in the archaeological record that farming was the predominant method of subsistence.  The crops they grew were corn, beans, and squash, the classic triad of North American agriculture.  These plants are not native to the Southwest, however, so they must have been introduced at some point from Mesoamerica, where they originated.  The introduction of corn, in particular, must have also involved the introduction of agricultural techniques, since it can’t grow without help from humans.  All this is pretty uncontroversial among Southwestern archaeologists.

The nature of the introduction of agriculture, however, has been a point of more dispute.  The main arguments have to do with how long it took after the introduction of maize for the societies growing it to become totally dependent on it and thus become primarily agriculturalists rather than hunter-gatherers.  One view, espoused by Chip Wills at UNM, sees the introduction of corn as being gradual, perhaps filtering up from one hunter-gatherer group to another, and increasing dependence on it as taking place in the context of hunter-gatherer subsistence decisions and environmental fluctuations, with the total switch to a fully agricultural lifestyle not taking place until maybe as late as the Pueblo II period.  The other view, associated most strongly with R. G. Matson of the University of British Columbia, sees the introduction of maize as having been rapid and involving a totally different lifestyle from Archaic hunter-gatherers from the get-go.

There follows an in-depth discussion of the theories of Australian Professor of Archaeology, Peter Bellwood, who contends that…

… the enormous geographical extent of some language families by associating them with the spread of particular agricultural traditions.  This has been somewhat controversial, particularly in regard to Indo-European, as it produces a very specific answer (given Bellwood’s specific assumptions) to the vexing question of where a given language family originated, often called its Urheimat.  Since Bellwood argues that hunter-gatherers are unlikely to adopt agriculture, whether on their own or when exposed to it by contact with farming groups, his model predicts that the Urheimat of a given language family must be somewhere in the region where its agricultural tradition originated.  For Indo-European this means the Fertile Crescent rather than the Eurasian Steppe, which has been the preferred answer for many Indo-Europeanists on various grounds.  This has led to much controversy.

And continuing the language thread, we return to Gene Expression, where another article, Complex societies = simple languages, goes on to discuss a paper at PLoS ONE, Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure, for which this is the introduction:

Although the largest languages are spoken by millions of people spread over vast geographic areas, most languages are spoken by relatively few individuals over comparatively small areas. The median number of speakers for the 6,912 languages catalogued by the Ethnologue is only 7,000, compared to the mean of over 828,000 [1]. Similarly, for the 2,236 languages in our sample (Figure 1), the median area over which a language is spoken is about the size of Luxembourg or San Diego, California (948 km²). The mean area is about the size of Austria or the US state of Maryland (33,795 km²).

Languages also differ dramatically in the proportion of individuals who speak the language natively (L1 speakers) to those who learned it later in life (L2 speakers) (Table S1). Although there are numerous counter-examples (Text S1), languages spoken by millions of people have a greater likelihood of coming into contact with other languages and of having numerous nonnative speakers compared to languages spoken by only a few thousand people.

This is not surprising: a language spoken by more people is more likely to encompass a larger and more diverse area and include speakers from varying ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. Conversely, languages spoken by a thousand or even fewer individuals tend to be spoken in highly circumscribed locales (Text S2). Overall, languages with smaller speaker populations are more likely to be spoken by more socially cohesive groups [2] than languages that have millions of speakers.

And by a curious coincidence, news comes to today of the Evolang 2010 Conference due to take place in Utrecht, Netherlands, between this coming April, 14-17th.

To finish up, there’s a nice post over at PaleoFuture, The Victory of Chemistry over Agriculture, which begins by noting:

To many people of the year 2010 the 1953 book, The Road to Abundance, is a heretical, nightmarish vision of the future. Chemicals and factory farming are seen as the logical next step in the evolution of food production for mankind.  Jacob Rosin, co-writing with Max Eastman, describes the eventual “victory of chemistry over agriculture,” and mankind’s “bondage to the planet.”

The ultimate goal of Rosin’s ambition was to be “more efficient than nature.” In his advocacy of a completely synthetic diet Rosin called into question both the definition and the benefit of “natural foods.”

See also: Telegraph – Giant Cattle to be Bred back from Extinction – via John Hawks

This post in turn links to another, “Factory” Farms of the Future (1961) from which the image at top is taken.

References:

Balaresque P, Bowden GR, Adams SM, Leung H-Y, King TE, et al. (2010) A Predominantly Neolithic Origin for European Paternal Lineages. PLoS Biol 8(1): e1000285. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000285

Genetic discontinuity between local hunter-gatherers and central Europe’s first farmers.
Bramanti B, Thomas MG, Haak W, Unterlaender M, Jores P, Tambets K, Antanaitis-Jacobs I, Haidle MN, Jankauskas R, Kind CJ, Lueth F, Terberger T, Hiller J, Matsumura S, Forster P, Burger J.
Science 2009 Oct 2;326(5949):137-40.

Lupyan G, Dale R (2010) Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure. PLoS ONE 5(1): e8559. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0008559

Here’s a link to a brief article by Edmund Blair Bolles regarding the current research into FOXP2, from which this is the introduction:

A letter to the current issue of Nature has caused a stir among those interested in the evolution of language. It looks at the FOXP2 gene in more detail than any paper has ever done before. It also inspires at least as many questions as it answers, but now at least we have better questions. Also it has dealt yet another blow to the theory that language depends on distinct cognitive modules that permit internal thought and that later interface with motor modules (vocalizing or signing) for “externalizing” what you are thinking. If anything is becoming apparent from FOXP2, it is that language and motor activities are deeply entangled. It also provides more reason to doubt the original recent date ascribed to the gene’s mutations.

Be sure to check Babel’s Dawn at least once a week – it’s usually updated on a Monday if past experience is anything to go by.

The 72nd edition of the Four Stone Hearth anthropology blog carnival is due to appear this coming Wednesday, July 29th, and will be hosted by Carl over at A Hot Cup of Joe – so if you’ve recently written something of your own, or seen a post on another blog you deem worthy of consideration and inclusion, please send it along to the host in plenty of time.

A new paper in the open access journal PLoS Genetics reports on a comparison of genetic, geographic, and linguistic patterns of the diverse populations found on the major islands of the Bismarck Archipelago and Bougainville, Melanesia. The paper is titled, “Genetic and Linguistic Coevolution in Northern Island Melanesia.” I think that Simon Greenhill of HENRY may know a bit more about these populations, languages and region than I, but I’m gonna still try and summarize the paper and briefly discuss the results.

The earliest inhabitants of the area arrived around 40,000 years ago, but there was an additional migration into the region about 3,300 years ago. We know that primarily because of the linguistic diversity. The two major languages are Oceanic and Papuan. Oceanic, being a major branch of the widespread Austronesian language family, and the Paupuan languages, likely descendants of languages spoken by people who began arriving in the region more than 40,000 years ago. The rugged geography of the region has been a cause for a lot of the diversification. Despite their regional affinities, the two languages do not form a very coherent language family.

Genetic, Geographic & Linguistic Distances Of Melanesian Popultions

The study sampled 776 individuals from 33 linguistically based populations, which averages to about 23 individuals per population. Each individual was typed on 751 different autosomal microsatellites. The languages were compared on 108 different structural linguistic features. The authors applied two different tests to figure out if genetic and linguistic similarities were formed following early population splits and isolations or if the genetic and linguistic similarities were formed through continuing genetic and linguistic exchange between neighboring populations.

The authors were able to figure out that genes moved freely than languages between nearby populations, regardless of the language family (compare Figures B to D). Language exchanges, on the other hand, have been particularly limited between neighboring Oceanic and Papuan languages (check out Figure D & F). In certain regions, like the rugged interior of the largest island, New Britain, the authors found strong correlations between genetic, linguistic, and geographic distances when compared to their less restricted coastal neighboring populations. They are almost always distinctly different. While extremely restricted to several islands, this study shows us a scenario where language barriers do not particularly hinder genetic exchange, but geography still does.

Keith Hunley, Michael Dunn, Eva Lindström, Ger Reesink, Angela Terrill, Meghan E. Healy, George Koki, Françoise R. Friedlaender, Jonathan S. Friedlaender (2008). Genetic and Linguistic Coevolution in Northern Island Melanesia PLoS Genetics, 4 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1000239

As Ruth Frankenberg in her book The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters argues, our daily lives are affected by race whether we are aware of it or not. We all see the world through a racial lens that colors our world black, white, Asian, Mexican, minority, or “other”. How we are seen and how we see others affects various domains of our lives and the lives of others; from the types of jobs we have, the amount of money we make, the kind of friends we make, the places we live, the foods we eat, the schools we go to, etc… The entire social structure we inhabit is affected by at least one social construction, race. Interestingly, most people in the United States (which consist of people of color) are aware of this, but have not dismantled it. Why is that?

Often times the word social construct is thrown around in various theoretical and general works without ever being defined or discussed. However, understanding what is meant by race as a social construct is vital to understanding the capacity race has to intersect and affect other aspects and domains of life and society, as well as how to dismantle it.

To begin, a social construct is ontologically subjective, but epistemologically objective. It is ontologically subjective in that the construction and continued existence of social constructs are contingent on social groups and their collective agreement, imposition, and acceptance of such constructions (for more on the notion of social constructions see The Construction of Social Reality by John Searle). There is nothing absolute or real about social constructions in the same way as there is something absolute and real about rocks, rivers, mountains, and in general the objects examined by physics. For example, the existence of a mountain is not contingent on collective acceptance, imposition, or agreement. A mountain will exist regardless of people thinking, agreeing or accepting that it does exist. Unlike a mountain, the existence of race requires that people collectively agree and accept that it does exist. Franz Boas, a physicist by training, supports this view of race best in his work Race, Language, and Culture where he observes that there is nothing biologically real about race. There is nothing that we have identified as race that exists apart from our collective agreement, acceptance, and imposition of its existence.

Race, although it does not exist in the world in any ontologically objective way, it still is real in society (as opposed to nature). Race is a social construction that has real consequences and effects. These effects, consequences and the notion that race is ontologically subjective is epistemologically objective. We know that race is something that is real in society, and that it shapes the way we see ourselves and others. Many rightly claim that race is conceptually unstable. However, this should not lead us to skepticism about race, i.e. that we cannot have any objective knowledge about race. We can know what race is and how it works regardless of the various shifts in meaning that have occurred through history and occur geographically.

The notion of race as a social construct I am proposing is partially captured by various works. In Takaki’s work A Different Mirror: A history of Multicultural America, race is a social construct produced by the dominant group in society and their power to define. In other words, the dominant group in society imposed the boundaries of group membership by defining race in terms of biology. If you were black, then you were biologically inferior to a white person. Takaki explains that Africans in America were first brought to America as indentured servants. After completing the terms of their servitude they were freed, and had the status of free men. The color line at the time had not been drawn. Nonetheless, with the growing population of free Africans in America, fear of losing hegemonic control began to spread through the white population. Due to this, race as a biological concept was developed and used to justify the enslavement of a growing free black population early in U.S. history. This initial biological understanding of race helped draw the color line. The boundaries of group membership were marked by skin color. Till this day the primary race indicator is skin color.

Frankenberg in her work The Social Construction of Whiteness expands on what race indicators and hence race identify today. She simply explains that race is an indicator of difference, but an indicator of what kind of difference she does not say. As we have seen through Boas’s work, there are no biological differences between different “races”. Additionally, race does not identify differences in culture and is always loosely connected to biology. According to Frankenberg culture is unbounded. We cannot conclusively say on the basis of skin color that someone participates in white, or black cultural practices (although many people still do). This notion of unbounded cultural practices is exemplified in Gary Taylor’s piece White Noise: What Eminem Can Tell Us About White America, where he describes a white man (Eminem) in the hip-hop culture. George Lipsitz in his work Lean on Me: Beyond Identity Politics also discusses how Joe Clark, a black man, engages in a form of racism that perpetuates white privilege and supremacy.

Jan Nederveen Pieterse’s work White Negroes, suggests that the difference Frankenberg speaks of is one of status. The meaning of race developed so far with Takaki, Boas, Frankenberg and now Pieterse suggests that race is a marker of status that includes or excludes one from broader social constructs and enables or disables certain powers. Race typically works through race indicators which are used to indicate which race you are, and consequently what sort of status you have in society, e.g. in President Jefferson’s time race indicated a status of slave or slave master. Since race and race indicators are collectively imposed and defined by the dominant group, so is one’s status. Additionally, since race is a social construct and is ontologically subjective, it continues to work only in virtue of collective agreement and acceptance. Many people may object that they are not part of the collective agreement and acceptance I am describing. Nonetheless, as Frankenberg discusses and admits she herself is evidence of, white people are often blind to racism and do not see the privileges they have due to their skin color. Regardless of white people being anti-racist, they participate within a racialized society which privileges them. As Frantz Fanon described in his book Black Skin, White Masks, many individuals may claim they are not racist while tacitly accept the dominant racist ideology by way of reaping the benefits coffered to them.

Let us summarize what we have said about what race is so far. First, race is a social construct contingent on collective acceptance, agreement, and imposition. Second, race has always been defined by the dominant group in society. Third, race indicates differences in status. The status indicated by which race you are, either includes or excludes one from broader social constructs, and disables or enables certain powers. To illustrate how this sort of understanding of race works let us look at the United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind case of 1923 and the United States v. Takao Ozawa case of 1922.

Thind, an Indian American man, filed for citizenship in the U.S. in 1923, and was denied on the basis of his not being white. The U.S. Supreme court found that while Indians were anthropologically categorized as Caucasian, the “understanding of the common man”, wrote Justice George Sutherland, “knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences”. Hence, despite being Caucasian, what many in the past (and almost everyone today) believed to be white, Thind was denied his status as white. The effects of the Supreme Court’s ruling retroactively affected all Indians who had already been granted citizenship. In the Takao Ozawa case in 1922, Takao argued that based on scientific evidence, he was white. Nonetheless, Justice Sutherland argued that he was not Caucasian, and hence could not be white, and consequently denied his citizenship. The rulings denying Takao and Thind’s citizenship strengthened anti-Asian sentiment.

The above cases demonstrate a profound kind of contradiction. The cases demonstrate a contradiction that was overlooked regardless of how obvious it was. Thind was not granted citizenship because he was not white, regardless of being Caucasian, and Ozawa was denied citizenship for not being Caucasian, despite being white. What allowed for this contradictory position to be maintained was the Supreme Court’s dominant status. The power Takaki describes is evident in the courts ruling. The common “white” man, and his status as dominant, allowed him to define the parameters of race, despite contradictions. As a result, Thind and Ozawa were excluded. By being excluded, by way of being denied citizenship, all the various powers enabled by the status of U.S. Citizen were disabled. Such powers included the right to vote, run for political office, and various other legal powers. In addition, other powers that are not as codified or legal, such as access to work unions, certain academic institutions, and certain neighborhoods were also disabled. The effects of the Supreme Court’s ruling trickled down and strengthened racist immigration policies, e.g. the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924, as well as affecting the lives of people of color in general.

The above contradiction points out how racist thinking has little to do with skin color, and much to do with status, power and fear. Roediger’s work Working Towards Whiteness exemplifies this point by showing how new immigrants, initially identified as “not white” but with an in-between status (regardless of having white skin), gained a new status (of white) and consequently- power. As we can see from the above cases and analysis, race is consistently utilized to maintain and control power due to fear of losing power and the current dominant position. Oddly enough, the ideology of white supremacy is inspired and maintained due to fear.

W.E.B. Du Bois in his work The Souls of White Folk questioned what it is about whiteness, that enables white men to commit crimes and not be condemned. In other words, he questioned why in virtue of being white, does a person have certain powers. With the analysis we have developed so far, we can answer Du Bois’s question. The answer is there is nothing inherent or intrinsic about white skin that enables white men to commit crimes and not be condemned. What enables white men to do so, is the structure of society in which they live. As we have seen, there is nothing ontologically objective about race and intrinsic or inherent in white skin that makes white people dominant. If there was, race would not be as fluid and unstable, and Thind or Ozawa would have been granted citizenship. Race and status are defined by the dominant group in society politically, economically, socio-culturally, and historically. The process of defining is made possible due to collective acceptance, agreement, and imposition. Additionally, the definition produced by the dominant group in society is constituted by collective acceptance, agreement, and imposition.

Frantz Fanon and his notion of socio-therapy, as developed in Black Skin, White Masks, advises that in order for racism to cease, society must abandon the notion of race. Fanon believed that only after society had realized that race is not real, would it overcome racism. Fanon is logically correct in assuming that racism will end when we no longer see through a racial lens, yet he is wrong in assuming that race is not real and that removing the lens is possible. To illustrate how he is wrong, take for instance Russell Simmons’ position towards homophobia and sexism in hip-hop. Simmons’ position is similar to Fanons. Simmons believes that by eliminating the words “nigger”, “bitch”, and “hoe” from hip-hop, it will solve the problem of homophobia and sexism within hip-hop culture. This is obviously misdirected because it simply evades the root of the problem. Frankenberg’s notion of power-evasive racist discourse can directly critique both Simmons and Fanon.

Thus far, I have repeatedly said that social constructs are contingent on collective acceptance, agreement, and imposition. It seems only natural to suppose that race will disappear altogether, as Fanon had hoped, once society stops collectively agreeing, accepting, and continuously imposing the notion of race. Nonetheless, this is a naïve supposition. Racism is engrained not only in the minds of people, but in the structure of society itself. Our legal system, our prison system, our educational system, our housing system, and various other aspects of society are all racialized. Take for example, Roediger’s assessment of the housing market after the Federal Housing Act in the 1930’s. Roediger shows how even capitalism–a layer in the foundation of U.S. democracy–is racialized by showing that the value of neighborhoods decreased and increased according to how it was racially organized. The more black people lived in a neighborhood the more the value of homes in that neighborhood would decrease. Abandoning the notion of race is not the solution to racism and white privilege. No matter how much we may attempt to make our legal language and documents racially neutral, race will always remain in the minds of people. Frankenberg’s notion of race cognizance seems to be a more viable and productive option. At the least, we have to come to terms with race, not abandon it but be aware of it, and understand it. Nonetheless, the general idea expressed in Fanon’s notion of socio-therapy (change society to cure the patient) seems to be correct. However, the change is not the abandonment of race, but instead a paradigm shift, or a revolution in the way race and differences are understood.

Ivan Nasidze and Mark Stoneking, along with a half dozen or so other colleagues, have studied the mitochondrial and Y-chromosome diversity of the Talysh. They’ve published their analysis in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. The paper can be found under this title, “mtDNA and Y-chromosome variation in the Talysh of Iran and Azerbaijan.”

The Talysh are an ethnic Iranian group who speak a language that most Talysh identify as Tolish. Not surprisingly, Tolish is an Iranian language, which its origins can be traced back to Medean empire. Currently, the Talysh people can be found in northern Iran — in and around Gilan and Ardabil as well as southern Azerbaijan, i.e. the Lenkoran, Astaran, Lerik, and Massalin districts. Between these two physically separated populations, there exists a big linguistic rift. There’s some loose evidence that both the northern and southern dialects are a hodge-podge of other regional languages. Some, like Donald Stilo, have suggested the two dialects should be considered their own respective languages because they are so different.

Since linguistic differences often manifest along with genetic differences (check out the Spitton’s ‘Genes and Languages: Not So Strange Bedfellows?‘ post),  Nasidze et al. investigated the mtDNA and Y-chromosome of the Talish and compared their results to other groups in Iran and the Caucasus. 377 bp of the hypervariable 1 region of the mitochondrial genome was a target, as well as 10 SNPs on the Y-Chromosome from 50 Talysh from Iran and 78 Talysh from Azerbaijan, for sequencing. The sequences have been submitted to Genbank.

Compared to Gilaki, Mazandarani, Turkmen and people from the rest of the Iran and southern Caucasus regions, the mtDNA of both northern and southern Talysh are closely related to each other and neighboring groups. In other words, there’s high amounts of variation with these groups than between these groups for the mitochondrial analysis… which doesn’t support genetic differentiation of the two groups.

But, the variations in the Y-Chromosome of northern Talysh differ from neighboring groups. Southern Talysh Y-Chromosome are very similar to other Iranian groups. The northern Talysh group most closely with Turkmen. Could there have been men from Turkmenistan migrating and influencing the genetic and linguistic composition of the northern Talysh? Sure, about 1,000 years ago, Turkic-speakers, like the Oguz hauled over to the souther Caucasus bringing over Turkic language — now seen in Azeri and Turkish.

But since the Talysh retained an Iranian language, this is scenario may not have been reality. Remember, people, more often than not, reproduce within their linguistic groups…  especially in the past. Furthermore, the haplotypes associated with the Y-Chromosome SNPs M172 and M173 do not support a relationship between northern Talysh and Turkmen. Rather, the shared resemblances M172 and M173, are considered to be a by product of genetic drift, either from a founder effect with the initial migrations into Azerbaijan or because of reduced population sizes.

Since Nasidze et al. could not find any genetic evidence supporting the linguistic divergence between northern and sothern Talysh, they suggest that the differences between the two dialects are due to internal linguistic changes, such as contact with other languages. They recommend an in depth analysis/comparison of dialects to figure exactly why the two are so different. Aside from this conclusion, they do add to the history of the Talysh, one where there was most likely a male-limited bottleneck in the founding of the northern Talysh.

I’ve been trying to do some historical research to see if there’s any documented genocide or war in which Talysh populations have plumeted, something that would affect their genetic diversity. According to census from the Soviety Union, between 1926 and 1989, the population of Talysh speaking peoples in Azerbaijan dropped from 77,039 to 21,914. Could this be the drop that affected the genetic diversity of the Talysh? Anyone know the history of the Talysh a bit more?

Nasidze, I., Quinque, D., Rahmani, M., Alemohamad, S.A., Asadova, P., Zhukova, O., Stoneking, M. (2008). mtDNA and Y-chromosome variation in the Talysh of Iran and Azerbaijan. American Journal of Physical Anthropology DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.20903

About a week ago, I read and posted on a summary piece on cultural evolution research in PLoS Biology. The reviewer introduced me to Simon Kirby‘s work, which I found remarkable. Kirby and colleagues setup an experiment, one that observed the evolution of an artificial language from a set of random terms to an ordered, naturally adapting system in ways that assured its reproduction.

I didn’t know when Kirby was to publish his work, but lo and behold in this week’s issue of PNAS, I saw “Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language,” by Simon Kirby, Hannah Cornish, and Kenny Smith. The experiment involved showing subjects illustrations that were associated with nonsense words.

The subjects were asked to play a game of Memory, by trying to recall the terms with the illustrations. Regardless of the accuracy of their recollections, the associated terms were used as a foundation of the group’s subsequent language training. This was done over and over, and low and behold, detectable patterns began emerging. Terms began to be used to describe whether an illustration pictured horizontal movement or a bouncing object. The following graphs document the transmission error and measure of structure over each generation:

Transmission Error & Measure of Structure versus the Number of Generations

Clearly there’s some pattern forming. But, Kirby and team understood that these emerging languages were simplistic and limited. So the team switched it up a bit, and discarded duplicate words. This represented a sort of selection, which gave structure and allowed the language to be remembered. Throughout 10 generations, the grammar of laboratory language went from meaningless, ad-hoc bunch of words into an expressive mode of communication. The speakers didn’t change, it was the change in the meanings behind the terms. The following graphs document the transmission error and measure of structure over each generation with selection:

Transmission Error & Measure of Structure versus Number of Generations with Selection

So how did the subjects screen out their own linguistic predispositions? Most humans are exposed to at least one language, which would clearly bias them and affect their abilities to give structure to a set of gibberish. In other words, the ‘selection’ applied could have been favoring structures that matched existing languages.

Kirby said that’s not really a concern, because that languages that emerged in his experiments do not have much in common with the extant languages. And since the emerging languages resembled those from computer models, which did not have preexisting languages to muddle up the waters, then we’re not to worry. Kirby concludes that the,

“The best explanation for our results is the cultural system ‘discovering’ adaptations for all aspects of the transmission bottleneck rather than merely mirroring the native language of our participants.”

Kirby, S., Cornish, H., Smith, K. (2008). Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0707835105