Anthropology.net

My graduate applications–probably like many of yours– are almost completely submitted by now. I spent the fall traveling around the east coast and filling out the same information on similar looking websites for hours on end. I poured over my personal statement line by line until I could recite it by heart and my girlfriend almost stabbed me. I met with professors, teasing myself with ideas of where I might end up next year.

I’m approaching my last semester as an undergraduate at Binghamton University, and if you haven’t guessed it by the context of this blog already, my envelopes were addressed to graduate schools of anthropology.

Now that I have almost finished paying a small fortune in application fees to play a lottery, I have had the time to start to catch up on some reading. While prospective graduate students might feel pessimistic about waiting to hear back about acceptances, what I’ve been skimming has sobered me up a little bit from my fall daydreams of excavations in faraway places.

I found myself searching the web reminding myself how as an anthropologist you should never expect to ever really get hired by a university. Not to say that I learned anything new.

There aren’t a lot of tenure track positions. You’re just going to have a lot of debt. It will take you a literal lifetime to pay back your loans. You’re going to be an adjunct professor and be paid less than a graduate student on a fellowship. Just don’t expect to work in academia.

That is a lot of negativity, but everyone has heard something similar. The most positive remark I hear about careers in academia is that the job market just can’t get any worse.  Surely by the time I finish my graduate work in a decade things will have turned around some, right?

For some reason like many others I am not dissuaded or in the least bit fazed by the outlook, at least at this stage in my aspirations. It is important to note I recognize that I am still in my naïve undergraduate phase. I hear in the long years of graduate school it becomes easier to get disillusioned. For now I am content. Call it unrealistic, but I’ll work my hardest and keep my fingers crossed.

I feel like most of my peers too have their eyes on the prize of a tenure track position, some time down the road. They too probably brush off knowing that very specific job listings for such positions receive hundreds of applications.

Knowing the odds, I am very curious what percentage of individuals starting work on a PhD have the intention of working somewhere other than a university. Are there a lot of you out there?

How many of you have thought about other applications of highly specialized degrees? If in eight years I am an expert on Neandertal lithic industries in southwest Belarus—as a random example– what jobs are most likely for me? Cultural resource management? Museum work?

I suppose it is something I can start thinking about, assuming I get in somewhere. If I am accepted I will have a solid seven years to mull over future directions, which should be sufficient time. Right now I am looking forward to it.

By Matthew Magnani

On the lighter side of anthropology…  The Onion takes a satirical look at what outrageously pseudoscientific research into human origins might look like.  Their headline reads:

“Anthropologists Trace Human Origins Back To One Large Goat”
‘Wait, That Can’t Be Right,’ Scientists Say”

In addition to being funny, the article, by contrast, helps show the strict standards of evidence, interdisciplinary collaboration, and peer-review process of actual paleoanthropological research.  Also, our close relationship with other primates is highlighted when one fake Onion researcher observes that “…humans don’t look like goats.”  In other words, don’t expect any presentations on “goat people” at professional anthropological conferences anytime soon.  Enjoy!

- Jay Fancher

I love anthropology and, since you’re taking the time to read this, you probably don’t hate it.  When we love something, we want to share our enthusiasm for it with others.  Sharing my passion for the scientific study of humankind has been a driving goal for the past 15 years.  As a result, I ask everyone – anthropologists, students, teachers, writers – for their opinion about what makes good popular science writing.

A few years ago, I had an opportunity to ask that question of Jane Goodall, one of the most successful popularizers of anthropology and primatology ever (please see www.janegoodall.org for more about her life and work).  Dr. Goodall graciously offered three pieces of advice:

1. Get your facts straight.
2. Listen.  Present all sides, particularly of contentious issues.
3. Tell a good story.

The first point about getting your facts straight is obviously important in all forms of communication.  It’s especially critical when writing for the internet, where anyone can say anything.  Bloggers, in particular, are responsible for policing themselves, and each other.  Factual accuracy is the basis of trust.  If an author makes frequent errors, you have good reason to question their trustworthiness and conclusions.  On the other hand, an author with a record of straight facts has earned some level of trust.  I hope to gradually earn your trust with future posts here.  If I get a fact wrong, I know I’m going to hear about it in the comments section – that’s a strong incentive to get it right!

Regarding the second point, I can think of at least two practical reasons that writers should be good listeners:

1. Listening helps ensure fairness in addition to accuracy.
2. Understanding opposing viewpoints helps a writer construct stronger arguments.  Of course, not all contentious issues have equal and opposite sides (evolution vs. intelligent design, for example), but many do, and anthropological authors gain credibility by covering multiple perspectives.  This doesn’t mean that we can’t “tell it like it is,” we just have to show that we’ve evaluated other possibilities before forming conclusions.
3. The third point, telling a good story, requires a special kind of person able to bridge the gap between fact and narrative.  Scientific researchers are often not the best communicators of their own research.  We’re fascinated by our own sub-specialties and research questions, but intimidated by the task of translating it into something that anyone else might possibly want to read.  People like Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, Jared Diamond, and Jane Goodall excelled as both scholars and popularizers – which is why I was excited to ask Dr. Goodall for her advice, and so thankful for her answers.

These are just some ideas off the top of my head.  What about you?  What would you add to these three points?  Whether you’re a writer, a reader, or both, what do you look for in good popular anthropological (and general science) writing?

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.

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New analysis by a team led by Australian National University doctoral student Debbie Argue showed that Homo floresiensis, nicknamed hobbits, were early hominin and walked out of Africa to Flores. Their findings supports the argument that Homo floresiensis had a unique wrist anatomy that originated from a lineage that lived long before the common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.

With Mike Moorwood from University of Wollongong and Thomas Sutikna from Indonesian Center for Archaeology, Debbie Argue compared 60 skulls and skeletal features from two individual hobbits to those of hominins, chimpanzees and gorillas using cladistic analysis. The result shows that Homo floresiensis “probably took one of two evolutionary paths from Africa to Flores. One began 1.66 million years ago, the other 1.9 million years ago”.

Read more here: Hobbits Walked Out of Africa

Originally posted on The Prancing Papio.

I caught some obscure news of an upcoming conference in Los Angeles that’s packing panels with some big names in anthropology, such as Frans de Waal, Ian Tattersall, Craig Stanford, Donald Johanson, Marc Hauser, Christine Kenneally, and Bruce Lahn. They’ll all be discussing “What Makes Us Human?” which also happens to be the title of the conference.

I’m pretty sure this question has at least once been on almost every human’s mind, and I’m really interested to know what’s gonna be discussed. Unfortunately, the short notice and the awkward timing of the conference (starting the morning of Monday, April 28 and running through Tuesday, April 29) won’t work with my schedule. That’s unfortunate, but the press release does indicate the media will have the opportunity to interview six panelists, which hopefully will result in news pieces and what not. If any readers are gonna attend, please contact me and let me know what you think of the conference.

A related sidenote, earlier this year, one of the panelists, Marc Hauser discussed what he thinks are four factors that make human cognition unique at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I covered that news and a little discussed brewed about. You maybe interested in checking it out.

One last thing that caught my eye, the press release mentions,

“News of the recently discovered ancient European toothed hominin jawbone fragment, as reported in the March 27, 2008 scientific journal Nature, has raised more questions about human origins. This important find comes at a time when some of the world’s most respected thinkers and researchers… will have the opportunity to discuss its significance.”

I don’t think that the 1.2 million year old mandible from Atapeurca makes any significant waves in figuring out what makes us human. The mandible only tells us that first settlement of Western Europe could be related to a really early migration out of Africa.

The 36th edition of the Four Stone Hearth anthropology blog carnival is being hosted over at Afarensis, and as ever we are treated to a good and eclectic mix of what’s been catching the eyes of various anthro-bloggers this past week or two.

Next time round we’ll be nipping over to Hot Cup of Joe, who will be serving up the March 26th edition.

Afarensis is hosting the next edition of 4SH, the anthropology blog carnival, and there’s still a couple of days in which to send any contributions along – either to here: submit@fourstonehearth.net, or direct to the host himself.

Kerim over at Savage Minds as well as Lorenz of Anthropologi.info and Jason Baird Jackson of Museum Anthropology have all broke the news that the American Museum of Natural History has digitalized 100 years of anthropology papers and put them online. The best part of this news is that all the papers are open access! This is great news for anthropology and will be an excellent, easily accessible resource of top notch anthropology publications.

Hope on over to this link if you’re interested in seeing what they have in their repository.

Remember when I brought up the news that Stanford’s anthropology departments were merging back? It wasn’t too long ago, maybe two weeks or so? I bring this up because The Stanford Daily is running a juicy column on the tensions the merger has caused. Most of the complaints are coming from the bio-arch side, such as John Rick and James Fox. Here’s a rather scathing comment from John Rick,

“The administration has shown itself to be idiotic in the way they’ve approached the whole thing…”

The piece mentions how the faculty is still struggling to understand the motivation behind the merger of the two departments, and if you read the comments, so are some of the students. What’s really curious is how James Ferguson was chosen as the new chair of the Anthropology Department. Ever so outspoken Rick comments on it,

“In this case, there were no faculty consulted, and the chair was appointed for five years, which is an unusually long time.”

Well, I wish Stanford the best of luck. It seems like some people gotta just suck it up and deal with all the shuffling. I must say, I also don’t understand why there was such urgency to merge the two back together either. They were working great as separate entities.