Anthropology.net

Still playin’ catch-up with all the anthropology news. There’s an interesting paper that just got published in PLoS One that I’ll be focusing on, but I wanted to really briefly congratulate an anthropologist that I admire. I’ve mentioned him in the past, and I’m happy to announce that Nate Dominy from my alma mater, UC Santa Cruz, has received a prestigious Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering from The David and Lucile Packard Foundation. His fellowship is big time. About $625,000!

So expect more studies on diet and foraging behaviors of hominins. He really deserves it. He’s one of the few who still synthesizes and extends anthropology with other disciplines such as ecology and genetics.

You can read more about the grant and his research over here on this UCSC Press Release.

Have you caught Kate Riley’s piece in the opinions column of the Seattle Times? It is dramatically titled, Anthropology: the great divide as if there’s some big dilemma happening within anthropology.

If you haven’t yet read it you may want to hold off on clicking to link.

Kate discusses the events and anthropologists behind the Kennewick Man issue. The Kennewick Man issue has become a classic of sorts. In the last 11 years or so, the remains of this prehistoric man found on a bank of the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington have increased the bureaucracy with archeology and Native American tribes, with scientists and the law. But not to the point that Kate’s making it out to be.

See it all started with Richard Jantz a plea of help via email. Julie Stein did not like what she read because she felt the excavation and analysis of the Kennewick remains were done with ulterior motives. And so began the “great divide.”

What I’m not too clear about is Kate Riley’s quote on how Stanford’s Anthropology Department split apart, which is now being merged back, was because of the Kennewick controversy. Riley writes,

“At Stanford University, the chasm was so insurmountable the anthropology department split into two.”

Correct me if I’m wrong but Stanford’s Anthropological Sciences department split from the department of Cultural and Social Anthropology in 1998 because of resource issues and major intellectual differences.

I’m not privy to the exact intellectual differences, I’ll disclaim that. Alls I know was that on one side were the socio-cultural anthropologists, who deal with understanding human behaviors, cultures, etc. and on the other side were the more bio-physical ones who study human evolution, bodies, population genetics form and function, etc. And they couldn’t get along. That’s fine… it happens in many departments. Nothing new. And these sorts of divisions have some tangents to the Kennwick Man feud, but I highly doubt that Kennewick was the cause of the division.

Again, I might be wrong, and please let me know if I am… but I think Riley is a bit misleading with her association of Stanford’s Anthropology department and Kennewick. It is one thing to describe an academic debate but another to tie what happened at an institution to what seems like a unrelated debate.

Yann tells us that the 2007 Annual Reveiw of Anthropology is out, and all the content is open access to boot! He’s rounded up some interesting reviews. Here are mine,

Çatalhöyük in the Context of the Middle Eastern Neolithic
Ian Hodder

This review aims to show how the new results from Çatalhöyük in central Turkey contribute to wider theories about the Neolithic in Anatolia and the Middle East. I argue that many of the themes found in symbolism and daily practice at Çatalhöyük occur very early in the processes of village formation and the domestication of plants and animals throughout the region. These themes include a social focus on memory construction; a symbolic focus on wild animals, violence, and death; and a central dominant role for humans in relation to the animal world. These themes occur early enough throughout the region that we can claim they are integral to the development of settled life and the domestication of plants and animals. Particularly the focus on time depth in house sequences may have been part of the suite of conditions, along with environmental and ecological factors, that “selected for” sedentism and domestication.

The Archaeology of Sudan and Nubia
David N. Edwards

This review explores recent research within the territory of the modern Sudan and Nubia. One special interest of this region’s history and archaeology lies in its role as a zone of interaction between diverse cultural traditions linking sub-Saharan Africa, Egypt, the Mediterranean world, and beyond. The exceptionally early development of large-scale polities in the Middle Nile also offers remarkable opportunities for exploring the archaeology of the development of political power as well as for exploring research topics of a wide significance, both within and beyond African archaeology, such as the development of agriculture, urbanism, and metallurgy. The unique opportunities offered by the Nile corridor for trans-Saharan contacts have also ensured that the region’s archaeology provides an extraordinary scope for exploring the interplay and interaction of indigenous and external cultural traditions, often very obviously manifested in the material worlds of the region: from their encounters with Pharaonic Egypt to the incorporation of Nubian kingdoms into medieval Christendom and the creation of new Arab and Muslim identities in the postmedieval world.

Genomic Comparisons of Humans and Chimpanzees
Ajit Varki and ­David L. Nelson

The genome consists of the entire DNA present in the nucleus of the fertilized embryo, which is then duplicated in every cell in the body. A draft sequence of the chimpanzee genome is now available, providing opportunities to better understand genetic contributions to human evolution, development, and disease. Sequence differences from the human genome were confirmed to be 1% in areas that can be precisely aligned, representing 35 million single base-pair differences. Some 45 million nucleotides of insertions and deletions unique to each lineage were also discovered, making the actual difference between the two genomes 4%. We discuss the opportunities and challenges that arise from this information and the need for comparison with additional species, as well as population genetic studies. Finally, we present a few examples of interesting findings resulting from genome-wide analyses, candidate gene studies, and combined approaches, emphasizing the pros and cons of each approach.

The Genetic Reinscription of Race
Nadia Abu El-Haj

Critics have debated for the past decade or more whether race is dead or alive in “the new genetics”: Is genomics opening up novel terrains for social identities or is it reauthorizing race? I explore the relationship between race and the new genetics by considering whether this “race” is the same scientific object as that produced by race science and whether these race-making practices are animated by similar social and political logics. I consider the styles of reasoning characteristic of the scientific work together with the economic and political rationalities of neo-liberalism, including identity politics as it meets biological citizenship. I seek to understand why and how group-based diversity emerges as an object of value—something to be studied and specified, something to be fought for and embraced, and something that is profitable—in the networks that sustain the world of (post)genomics today.

I think Razib, and some of the contributors at Gene Expression, will be especially interested in the last one.