An article grabbed my attention last year but it took a while for me to realize why. The title, “Neanderthals Self-Medicated for Pain” examined research findings analyzing Neanderthal remains: "You know, we've got a guy self-medicating either because he's got a dental abscess, which was bad, or a nasty gastrointestinal parasite, which was also bad, either way he wasn't a happy guy. And, here he is eating aspirin and we're finding penicillin mould in him" – Dr. Alan Cooper Three things strike me about the way this finding was discussed and made into headlines across major media outlets around the world. To start, this project is inexcusably cool (so long as you’re okay with scientists poking and prodding at your dead ancestors–that is not a universally accepted … [Read more...]
Wizards, Vampires, Klingons, and Other Alternative Cultures
On the last day of my introduction to anthropology class, we watch scenes from the documentary Trekkies. Students grin at the sincere folks dressed as Starfleet officers and Borg members, raise their eyebrows at Klingon language camp, and outright laugh at the backyard celebration of Captain Kirk’s birthday, in which a member brags that “this year a girl came”. But they always sober up when people begin discussing why Star Trek is so important to them. One group of women talks about how different they are in their lives and politics, yet they feel most at home and accepted when they are spending time together at the Star Trek conventions. Others talk about how Star Trek inspired careers in astrophysics or medicine. Most powerfully, perhaps, one woman describes how her father was raised … [Read more...]
For the Love of Us All, No More Deplorables, Snowflakes, or Nasty Women
8 Labels I Never Want to Hear Again There are several words that have gained in popularity over the last few years that I don’t ever want to hear again: Deplorables, snowflakes, libtards, nasty women, fly-over states, urban elite, hillbilly, and liberal bubble, to name a few. These are not words we use to describe ourselves, they are words we stab at others like weapons. These are not words that explain our differences, they are words that reduce us to our differences. It is not difference that divides us, it is our contempt for difference. We can be connected to one another, despite (or because of) our differences, but the minute you start curling your lip at who someone is, the connection is over. Words like snowflakes and deplorables are labels that signal that we aren’t … [Read more...]
The Hidden Cultural Values of Massholes and Y’all Qaeda
Y’all Qaeda may be the newest sarcastic term for the Oregon militiamen, but embedded in the critique of militiamen as terrorists akin to Al Qaeda and ISIS (another favored term being Vanilla ISIS) is a regional slam. The use of “y’all” in the term is a signifier that these are country folk, with all the negative stereotypes that follow the category. And I’ll bet my daughter’s current college fund (don’t get excited, there’s like 3 dollars in there) that the term will spread well beyond the current militia-tastrophe. As a current resident of New England, I can tell you that the image behind the term is precisely how many northerners perceive almost all of the rest of the United States, from the South to the mountainous West: insincerely polite, “Y’all” and “ma’am” talking, racist, fascist, … [Read more...]
Your accent is we-ahd
I grew up a Navy brat, bouncing from coast to coast in the U.S. until the 11th grade, when I hunkered down in the South for more than a decade. Although I had visited family in New England, and my grandmother retained her New Hampshire accent through five decades of living in North Carolina, when I moved north after grad school I was unprepared for the radically unique accent, temperament, and driving style that is Boston. After I made the transition north in 2007, the learning curve was steep. Driving successfully required a transition from extreme patience, a trait required in North Carolina (where drivers will stop at a green light for 30 seconds to allow another driver to enter the road), to extreme efficiency in the Boston area (where drivers feel it is a moral imperative to honk … [Read more...]
So What Exactly is ANTHROPOLOGY?
I had no idea what anthropology was when I began college, I just knew I loved the course titles. “Language and Culture”. “Gender, Sex, and Sexuality”. “Religion and Modernity”. The cultural anthropology classes covered everything, everywhere, from race to medicine to law to food, from the Caribbean to Africa to Southeast Asia to Kansas. The archaeology classes covered history around the globe, from the birth of nation states to ancient trade routes to the way people made cloth, and everything in between. The biological anthropology classes examined the biology of humans and our ape cousins, and how we adapted over time to survive in amazingly diverse settings. The linguistic anthropology classes examined how we are physically designed for language to the innumerable forms that language … [Read more...]
