Tell me about your mother: how Jewish is she?

Interesting article at the NY Times about the legal battle brewing in the U.K. over determinations of "Jewishness" in school admission processes: "Who is a Jew?" is the central question. And the courts have tripped over the thorny issue of the inherent discrimination in the us/them reality of some religious faiths. When does religious faith become ethnic identification? For orthodox Jews ( at least those in decision-making positions at some schools): not when your mother has converted and not when she has converted Progressively. Ethnic discrimination foul, according to the British Courts.

Round 2: the attempted save of belief through practice didn't quite cut the mustard as “having a ham sandwich on the afternoon of Yom Kippur doesn’t make you less Jewish,” Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet, chairman of the Rabbinical Council of the United Synagogue, said recently. The school seems to have ditched that evaluative measure.

Round 3: still waiting for the towel down and water splash. Any guesses?

The Linguists: For Free

Well this Honors gig thing is really kicking my ass but I still feel more anthropologist than low-level abused administrator so I am back at my blog. I miss it.

I still feel a bit choked up about Levi-Strauss dying. Seems so stark to type that. I suppose we should celebrate the life and all that: 100 years of distinguished living but still its death and one can only spin that so far.

Anyway, I was in Washington D.C. this past week at the National Collegiate Honors Council meetings. It was useful for my new responsibilities but the best part (Ha! I am still full-time anthropologist) was the screening of The Linguists. It was awesome. It felt like slipping on a pair of comfortable jeans. We have all had fieldwork experiences like they depict. I skipped all the panels I was to attend and stayed all the way through the questions and answers. David Harrison was there and was a joy to listen to as he thoughtfully answered questions. The film maker (Ironbound films) announced that toward the end of the month copies priced for personal purchase will be available. They reached some licensing agreements which would allow for that. He, also, pointed out, that the video is streaming for free at Bablegum. He made it clear he had no intention to exercise any demands to pull it down. So, if you haven't seen it yet. Go enjoy it now. Here. But, hey, support their efforts and if you have the money--buy a copy. I plan on it.

The Meaning of Black Hair: Chris Rock, IMF Restructuring and Curly Kits

I notice Chris Rock (such a bummer that the You Tube of him on Leno from a previous post was pulled--trust me it was hilarious)is releasing a documentary entitled "Good Hair" exploring the meanings and issues associated with...well..."black hair". I didn't have to go very far to read lots of stories and reviews of it. Salon has three stories, specifically, on the documentary and ancillary links that pull up stories on Michelle Obama's hair and Tyra Banks' weaves. I haven't done a full Google on it but I was playing a little a game with myself betting that if it hasn't happened already, Stuff White People Love, will have a reference soon to black hair. If Salon is so obsessed with the issue isn't that a safe bet?

If you check out the commentary added to my last post you will find an interesting discussion about the ways that anthropologists walk the thin line of "relevance". I suppose the consensus is that we all use our cultural dialogues to begin the discussions but, in the end, we all want to move beyond to achieve the ultimate "relevance". I want to thank Barbara Miller for commenting and inviting us all to use the resources which support her textbook. Here is a link to her blog, Anthropology Works. It looks awesome.

So, reading about the Chris Rock documentary was fascinating in and of itself but it was more fascinating for me because it took me back to my original fieldwork days. I think I have mentioned before that I was in Tanzania during its initial IMF restructuring. I arrived on a pre-fieldwork 3 month visit in 1985 and then returned a few months later for a full year. During that time the deal was struck and the currency devaluation, government jobs layoffs, and deregulation of the economy slowly unfolded. I say slowly maybe because of the way I perceived it. I saw small signs of it before I left Dar es Salaam and headed up country and each time I returned to Dar I would see specific and dramatic changes. I remember standing on the street in shock staring at the bars of Kenyan Cadbury's chocolate spread out on a street vendors mat. This was a country I had come to know as lacking petrol, bread (no wheat flour)...oh heck, why bother to try to list. The country had nothing. I had to boil all my water and filter it because there was no bottled water at that time. At one time, surviving as an anthropologist was awkward beyond belief trying to figure the ethics of relying on a black market currency and then under currency de-regulation the constant re-assessment of the value of my grant clashing in my head with the local perspective of value that was taking over my daily thoughts--it was all too much disconnect.

But that was all terribly selfish reflection because in the midst of this the Tanzanian people were struggling with their new world. The borders were fully open and the markets de-regulated. Consumer goods were now available (even if few could ever afford them). And Tanzanians at all educational and class levels were debating the changes and the debates centered around "black hair", specifically "curly kits": those packages of chemicals and curlers which gave one the Billy Dee Williams-Jheri-Curl-kitted-look. Tanzanians at that time called them "curly kits" and they were the one object everyone wanted and everyone hated everyone else for wanting.

I suppose every anthropologist has stories about the things they were asked to obtain from the power of their whiteness, their otherness, their wealth and power; that thing that in the closed world of our grad student minds we forgot we had until thrust into the new role of connected outsider. They have a convenient label for it in Tanzania: mzungu, the Kiswahili word for "outsider". Literally? People who go around and around aimlessly. Nuff said. One of the first personal (not shouted out) requests I got was from the wife of one of my then-husband's contacts in Dodoma. She pulled me aside and asked me for birth control and a curly kit. (For those of you interested in the birth control issue. Tanzania, at that time, had only Soviet birth control pills available. The great ole' USA wouldn't supply anything other than the wing an a prayer rhythm method. It took HIV/AIDS to get the condoms in. Don't get me started on those policies and laws. Bastards.)

Next thing I knew the letters to the editor sections of the one English language and the two (that I recall) Kiswahili papers were full of righteous indignation about the issue. I devoured the letters, struggling valiantly with Swahili in its real--non-classroom--version. The debate was early Chris Rock. People warned of the dangers of losing natural African beauty (I always think of the late, great Miriam Makeba here). The arguments quickly moved into condemnation of a system which allowed scarce hard currency to be wasted pandering to individual vanity. The country needed so much. A generation of people raised in the beliefs of pulling together for the common good and then experiencing the disillusionment of its failure can have some powerfully interesting discussions about free market economics and choice. By the time I left, I saw a few glistening curly heads in Dar but never encountered one up country. Whatever politics and sense of identity might have been associated with sporting the Billy Dee look could be afforded by too few to count. But it made for a hell of a paper debate while it lasted.

BTW, you are damn right I walked away from that Fruit and Nut Bar in a wave of sanctimony. Then turned right around, came back, paid several dollars for it, devoured it on the spot in a non-Tanzanian wave of gluttony. I can't, honestly, say that it tasted all that good having been without for months. And, no, living in my own glass house, I don't dare toss a stone at those wanting perfectly curly, perfectly shiny hair. But Tanzania does need a lot more than that.

Making Anthropology "relevant": Do we really want to go there?

In my Real Life, I have been given a book proposal for a new intro to Cultural Anthropology to review. Its kind of bugging me as I make my way through the proposal because the unknown author seems to feels some compelling need to make Anthropology more "relevant" to students today. I suppose someone somewhere has some deep insight into what is relevant to students today but.....no, sorry. Don't think so. We all run around pretending to know our students and giving them that monolithic designation as if they are all the same. Maybe in some land of artificial, homogeneous people that would work. But, hello, we are talking about my Real Life, here, not a cyber-constructed reality.

So, what is the author really after? It seems like there are a lot more references made to American culture: American film, American internet experiences, American Second Life experiences. Did I miss something. Aren't we pretty much irrelevant these days? Dying on the vine. Throwing juvenile tantrums in our rapidly deteriorating playpens while we are ignored by the adults who really could care less about us--we aren't their children after all. Didn't I just read that we don't even control the internets anymore? How odd to argue we should be making Anthropology more relevant to the irrelevant.

And, since when do we really think education should consist of what they want to know? Do we really teach anthropology so they can understand themselves? Some of my best (funnest and well-received) lectures are completely irrelevant to the lives of students. Isn't that the point of Anthropology. How irrelevant we (Americans) and we (individuals) are?

I still have to read more. I hope things get better soon. Or I adopt another frame of mind--something more.....relevant?

Ooooo....teachable moment alert...teachable moment alert

Have we all seen the recent discussion of Michelle Obama's ancestry? The New York Times has extended discussion/blog/commentary up with views of noted scholars commenting. Even one by an Anthropologist (yeah team). Its got some nice bits on race. I need to go read the others. I, totally, paused to rush back and tell you. Follow me back over there--here.

Culture, Class, and um...it was "rape-rape"

While the New York Times is busy parsing out all the cultural meanings of the American versus French versus German interpretations of the Roman Polanski arrest (at least according to Americans). And The Guardian reminds us to throw class into the mix (Lovely how both papers are staying true to form in the interpretations of their columnists). I am relieved to find myself embracing my inner petit bourgeosie self (denial of my lumpenproletariat status is a game I play with myself....as do others) and sharing the WTF moment with Chris Rock:



And do I need to point your way to the succinct and some would even say (ME! ME!) correct interpretation by Kate Harding at Salon which is making its way across the internets and twitters when everyone else has a moment to spare from all those Ardipithecus tweets all pointing to the same Science article--yes, yes, yes. I don't need to be told yet again. Do not keep those cards, letters, and tweets coming. I know. Really.

Culture keeps us from going crazy and killing everybody

I just read that on an exam I am trying to grade. Hmmmmm.....I wish culture was working better for us. On second thought, given these exams, I wish it would stop working and someone would put me out of my misery.

Back at it.

De-evolution and Evolutionary Debate

Don't know about you but I am scheduled to cover Evolution in my General Anthropology (ANTH 2346) come this Tuesday. Not looking forward to it. 39% of Americans don't "believe" in it.

And this just in from the Daily Telegraph who is, once again, wallowing in their sense of British superiority about the rampant stupidity of their colonial backwaters. Seems the critically-acclaimed film about the life of Charles Darwin, Creation is "too controversial for religious America".

Here is the trailer:



Can't see the objection, it seems to have the proper degree of histrionics and angst. Perhaps if they ripped off some of those bodices, Americans would be more comfortable with the whole issue. *sigh*

Doing my part, as the new Honors Coordinator on campus, I have signed us up for the webcast lectures being billed as The Darwin 150 Project. Its easiest to get at them through their Facebook page. The first lecture in the series is almost sold out:

"The World Before Darwin" - Lecture 1 of "Origin of Species" 150th Anniversary Lecture Series - at Harvard University
Wednesday, September 16, 2009 from 8:00 PM - 9:30 PM (ET)

I am glad I am already signed up, fired up, and ready to go. Sign up here. If you still can.

Nat Geo has a blog up about the Facebook evopalooza. Heck, go to their Facebook page and look, I can't begin to link up all the coverage they are getting.


Has everyone seen the way-cool Evolution of Evolution extravaganza at the Nation Science Foundation? Check it out here.

Those Pyramid-Building Aliens

I was going to blog about the responses of our local school districts, here in the great state of Texas, to that powerful socialist force that is our President and his nefarious plan to hypnotize schoolchildren to do his bidding but it just makes me sick to my stomach.

Instead, I have been working on those pesky aliens. This semester I cried Uncle and dealt with it in a full, frontal assault.

First know thy enemy. This blog, Ancient Cosmonauts, is a lot of fun for exploring the "pyramid-building aliens" meme. This week in my Archy class, I pulled it right up in class and we had at it. A good number laughed at the pictures. They are the Stargate visualizations they grew up with, after all. Staying with the science of movies, the blog author includes this sentiment (I hesitate to call it an argument):

Do you really think this wonderful pyramid was built by the allegedly savages depicted in Apocalypto or is it more reasonable the line of Alien vs Predator?

Fun with bad archaeology time.

We played the embedded You Tube video and critiqued it, observing, for example, the legitimacy established by the "documentary narrator" voice.

Now, that was a fun one.... but here is the kind of thing you are really up against. A site with the name of Edutube with a .org address promoting this kind of stuff.

I guess most of us begin to critique this stuff from the whole Occam's Razor perspective:
As this site by the Chemical Heritage Foundation does. But I have grown to find that approach the tiniest of toe dips into the waters of where the corrective needs to go. You are, really, only using the parsimony perspective to get you to the Myths and Moundbuilders "it was the locals, stupid" meme. The Chemical Heritage Foundation link does it with the look at how cool those ancient, indigenous people were, they discovered the magical antibiotic properties of honey. Its a bit patronizing and simplistic but it is meant for school kids, after all.

Penn State's Donald Redford has a demystified explanation here which conforms, nicely, to the requirements of parsimony. It does, however, lack the sex appeal of aliens. Or if you just want some visual support without wasting the time for a whole documentary, some visualizations from the Nova documentary This Old Pyramid, are online courtesy of Creighton University here.

If you want to add greater complexity and sex appeal (if not, necessarily, undisputed accuracy), you can get into the whole ramp location debate (summarized in Archaeology magazine in 2007) in the context of Khufu and the, definitely, non-parsimonious work of Jean-Pierre Houdin for which there is a way cool 5 minute Nat Geo clip up at You Tube here.

These brief snippets aren't meant to be comprehensive. Feel free to add. Where is Bob? He could do a better job at this.

And, if all else fails, you can always give up and buy the t-shirt. Although, I prefer "Stonehenge was an inside job".

Guest Blogger, Bob Muckle, sent me the following by email. It was too long to fit on Twitter. I am going to post it up quick and since I am out late tomorrow, he won't catch me to take it down for awhile, in case he didn't intend to share. Bob is the slanty print-attach no meaning to that.

I don't routinely schedule a discussion on the pyramids, but sometimes it does come up. Like you I tackle it on a number of fronts. When I do tackle it, I usually use the framework of science to assess the explanations/hypothesis. I start with the ol' test of testablility. As in..."if you can't test it, throw it (the hypothesis/explanation) out." It is simply impossible to test for the fact that aliens built it. "How would you test for aliens?" I ask my students. They usually come up with a list of things, but I then remind them that just because you may find some previously unknown material or some such thing, one cannot make the claim that it is evidence of aliens.'

I also tackle it on the basis of compatability. That the Egyptians built the pyramids is compatabible with what we know of Egyptian civilization in general, and the evolution of funery monuments in particular. We can see the evolution in size, shape, and engineering of pryamide building.

I also use Occam's Razor.

And I remind students that it is bad science to accept one hypothesis by rejecting the others. This is what pyramidiots and others who use the "alien explanations" do all the time. Pretend to be scientific by generating a list of competing explanations and then ruling out Hypothesis #1, Hypotheses #2, Hypotheses #3, Hypothesis #4, and then concluding that it must have been aliens.

I don't use much on-line video on the pyramids, but on occasion I have pulled out "The Case of the Ancient Astronauts", a 1978 Nova production focussing on debunking the work of Erich von Daniken. It looks dated (hair cuts and cars, etc), but it is really quite good to show the alien vs. scientific/archaeological perspectives. It has a segment on the Egyptain pyramids that begins with von Daniken providing his explanation, and then it goes to critique. It also does this for the Nasca lines, statues of Easter Island, a Mayan sarcophagus lid at Panlenque, and some sites in South America. When I do show it, I provide an update (eg. von Daniken, while not so popular in North America is still writing books and going on lecture tours in Europe, and recently had a big theme park in Switzerland that I think went bankrupt). I also try to provide updates on current archaeological thinking about the pyramids, etc.

Of course there are many semi-scholarly/semi-scientific articles tacking the pyramadiots. Peter Kosso has a chapter called "The Epistimology of Archaeology" in the edited volume 'Archaeological Fanatasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public.' It is reproduced in 'Reading Archaeology' which I edited (Univ Toronto Press, 2008). A good portion of the chapter is devoted to considering explanations of the Egyptian pyramids.

Plugging In, Again: crumple, toss, next

The preliminary figures are in; our enrollments are up over ten percent, which puts us over 30,000 system-wide. Two weeks have gone by that I can't recall. Here seems to be a day:

8:30 arrive on Campus, pass College Democrats bulletin board on the way to office, pull down picture of Obama that looks like Heath Ledger as the Joker which has been hung by unknown idiot. Hmmmm, this one (in full color) seems to still be wet. High quality printer. Must be faculty. asshole.

8:30-10:00 answer endless emails. Sorry about your flat tire, get the notes, sorry about your grandmother there is a copy of your syllabus on Blackboard, get the notes, hmmm, free pizza this afternoon, jeez, how loud does psych prof have to scream in lecture...louder than crazy hippy-trippy philosophy dude, apparently; sorry about the loss of your last three days due to bipolar mood swing, get the notes; yes, its okay that there are 7 copies of your Discussion Board post, Blackboard does that, especially, when you click on it 7 times; yes, the deadline for Honors by Contract is September 18, yes, just like it says on the form, itself; training announcement: delete; training announcement: delete, WTF forward from fellow faculty whom I like. *snort*, a few more of those and I might make it through.

10:00-11:20 teach.....blah...blah...blah no, the pyramids were not built by aliens....blah...blah....blah..... no the pyramids were not built by aliens. blah...blah..blah

11:20-11:30 break...sorry to hear that you couldn't get parking for the last week and a half, get the notes....(need to get something to drink, need to pee) Yes, history dude, I did realize that they think the pyramids were built by aliens....shit....time to start again (need to get water, need to pee)

11:30-1:00 teach...which class is this?......blah....blah...blah

1:00...where was that free pizza?

1:00-1:01 pee (ahhh, thank god)

1:01-1:45 pester Academic Dean re:Honors Program....blah, blah, blah

1:45-2:00 panic about said Program

2:00-4:00 Honors Lounge: form updating, file processing....yes, honors student, Jim Morrison was God (note to self: NOT)....yes, Chair of English we are going to make it a goal that your Honors English Comp class will not, again, be cancelled in a record enrollment period with an enrollment of 4...here are my preliminary plans to get your class with its bitchy-ass professor to make: we are going to try the new innovative method of enrolling dead grandmothers and flat tires into all Honors classes. No, we are carefully screening to remove all students who face three day loses due to Bipolar disorder and ones who circle the parking lot for a week and a half looking for a space..Yes, I feel sure this will work, after all, the students assure me that the spirit of Jim Morrison is guiding the Honors Program as we move forward into a new blah....blah....blah....

4:00-4:01: Where was that free pizza? Need water.

4:01-6:00 Blackboard, grade, post, grade, post, grade, post....closing time...one last call for alcohol.......

6:00-6:01 remove still wet poster of Barack Obama as the Heath Ledger Joker from Democrats board......crumple, toss...next.