Ranthropologist

Tag: anthropology

  • (R)anthropology Class: Cultural (Mal)adaptation

    (R)anthropology Class: Cultural (Mal)adaptation

    There are about as many different definitions of culture as there are cultural anthropologists. Much ink has been spilled by people attempting to refine the concept to make it account for all the detail and nuance of the human experience. In my classes, though, I don’t have that kind of time, so we keep things simple: culture is the ideals, values, and standards of behavior shared by a group of people. I spend most of the semester explaining and illustrating how this simple definition can encompass everything from the most extraordinarily complex group behaviors at the macro level to the smallest, most (seemingly) insignificant behaviors at the individual level. There is a reason that cultural anthropologists choose a specialty; it is impossible to be an expert in the culture of everything.

    I could write pages and pages on this, but the point of this post is not to exhaustively analyze the concept of culture. Instead, I want to discuss the broad strokes of what defines a successful culture, and then talk about what happens when cultures start to break down – that is, when they become maladaptive. First, a few main points about the general defining characteristics of culture:

    • Culture is shared. This means that everybody within a particular cultural group has internalized the same ideals, values, and standards of behavior  The shared nature of culture also means, vitally, that we are able to predict what other members of our cultural group are likely to do in a given situation. It’s like driving – imagine how terrifying it would be if we had no idea what the person in the next lane was about to do as we whizzed past each other at 70+ miles per hour in our 3,000 pound glass, metal, plastic, and hot fluid-filled machines! But we drive with no fear most of the time because we can (usually) safely predict that the other drivers are going to follow the same rules that we follow. The rules of culture operate in much the same way.
    • Culture is learned. Through the process of enculturation, we are taught what the shared rules of our culture are by our parents, family members, teachers, peers – basically, by every person we encounter, whether intimately as a parent or fleetingly as a stranger. Obviously, as children, we don’t know all of the rules yet – which is why we chuckle with amusement when a toddler runs naked across a public beach, but gasp in shock when an adult does it. By the time we are young teens we have learned all the basic rules.
    • Culture is symbolic. This is best illustrated through the example of language, although almost every aspect of culture is symbolic. Language is a system of arbitrary sounds that, through learning and sharing, we all agree serve as stand-ins for particular concepts. There is nothing necessary or natural about the fact that the set of shared sounds we call English have to symbolize the things that they do; but English speakers have learned, collectively, what those sounds symbolize and can thus use them to communicate ideas about our world. Many other symbolic cultural systems – economic, religious, political, artistic – operate in the same way.
    • Culture is integrated. This means that all the parts of culture work together, like gears in a machine. No part is independent of the other parts. And if something changes in one of the parts, it can affect the rest of the machine. Sometimes these changes are small and have limited effect; sometimes they are enormous and have a tremendous effect throughout the machinery of culture. The recent recognition that gay marriage is legal is an example of a cultural change with far-reaching reverberations.
    • Culture is all-encompassing. This one is simple. It means that no aspect of human behavior is insignificant enough to not be a part of culture. Everything from the food we eat to the complexities of our economic system are a part of culture.
    • Finally, culture changes. This can happen through new inventions (how to use fire; agriculture; television; the internet) and it can happen through disagreements between members of the culture (again, gay marriage makes a good example). A lot of cultural change can be easily illustrated if you think in terms of generations. What kinds of things did you do as a teen or young adult that you thought were okay but that horrified your parents? I vividly remember my grandpa, who was born in 1920, bashing me on the head with an empty plastic soda bottle when he spied my first tattoo as I sat lounging by the pool. He was furious because to him, a woman with tattoos was a woman of loose morals. Today, tattoos are everywhere and are generally accepted. Remember, back in the Victorian era, a woman who showed her ankles (GASP!) was a woman of ill repute – a concept my grandpa would have laughed off but that his grandparents may well have taken seriously!

    These are the main characteristics of culture, but they don’t define whether or not a culture can be deemed successful. Fortunately, that definition is simple: a successful culture is one that meets the needs of most of its members in a satisfying way most of the time. Successful cultures meet every member’s need for water, food, shelter, and material resources. They develop strategies for the production, distribution, and consumption of resources. They provide guidelines for appropriate social interaction. They make sure that the members of the group are protected from threats and harm, from within and without. They have a system for making sure every person has a role to fill in the group’s maintenance, and for sanctioning members when they do not adequately fill their role. They are flexible in adapting to individual needs and find ways to accommodate difference. They find ways to comfort and soothe their members in the face of difficulty, tragedy, and doubt. They provide a story for how the culture came to be and where its members will go. They provide cohesion, organization, stability, and purpose. They ensure survival.

    A culture that is unable to secure these things for its members in a satisfying way most of the time is in danger. The danger of a maladapted culture can be acute; maladaptation can result in the extinction of the culture and its members. And that leads us to the problems of today. The adaptive strategies of culture have worked extraordinarily well for over 100,000 years – but they are strategies designed for small groups of people who know and depend upon one another. Cultures have certainly adapted to changes – bigger groups of people find ways to manage the larger population in a satisfactory way; hunter-gatherers who began to grow food and domesticate animals adapted to the new lifestyles of horticulture and pastoralism; even the larger populations that developed as intensive agriculture began to take hold still, mostly, managed to find ways to accommodate to change. But as history shows us, the larger and more technologically advanced human cultures have a frightening tendency to collapse as they become increasingly maladapted to the needs of the majority of the members.

    So the question is: is culture today – and now by culture I mean not just specific small groups or even countries, but global culture – adapting? Consider these symptoms of a maladapted culture:

    • crime and violence
    • mental illness
    • substance abuse
    • suicide
    • alienation
    • warfare
    • revolution

    Any of this sound familiar?

    I am convinced that our current culture is maladapted to the modern world. I am also convinced that this maladaptation is a driving force behind so much of the trouble we see today. Individuals are alienated. They don’t feel recognized or important. They see themselves as tiny gears in a vast, impersonal machine controlled by people who don’t care about them. Unlike in the small groups of prehistory or the close-knit small towns and villages of recent centuries, we have no possible way to know and recognize every single member of our group; it’s not uncommon for people to not even know their neighbors – I don’t know mine. We don’t have to depend upon each other as individuals any more, but we do have to depend on this enormous, teetering edifice that is struggling to fulfill the needs of nearly 7,500,000,000 – that’s 7.5 billion – people, and growing, with adaptations designed for populations that number in the hundreds. Is it any wonder that we have ISIS? Is it any wonder that we have global terrorism? Is it any wonder that we have refugees swarming all over the globe in the terrified hope that somewhere, they will find welcome and respite from hunger, hardship, and violence? It is any wonder that disaffected young men have formed online groups where they fantasize about exacting revenge on the women who ignore them? Is it any wonder that some people turn to guns and spray bullets at innocent people in public places? Is it any wonder that there are protests in our cities over systemic inequality, violence, oppression, and racism? Is it any wonder that there is a whole subculture of people who are preparing themselves for Armageddon? Is it any wonder that people turn to magical thinking and conspiracy theories? Is it any wonder that so many people are living in fear? I still believe most people are good. I still believe we can turn back from maladaptation and find a way. But it’s still not a wonder to me.

  • Daily Read: Liberal Triggers

    Daily Read: Liberal Triggers

    I am a liberal (shocking, I know). I am also a college professor. This combination causes distress for some people who argue that our universities are “liberal indoctrination centers” where the professors mock conservatives and teach students to be politically correct and overly sensitive victims of identity politics. So why is it that I keep coming across articles like today’s Daily Read, in which a self-identified liberal professor addresses his concerns about how liberal his students have become? Edward Schlosser discusses the new landscape of college teaching, in which professors have become fearful of engaging students on difficult topics such as racism, gender discrimination, sexuality, and violence. Schlosser is afraid that students have become so sensitive to the travails of their particular identities (race, gender, sexual, et al) that they will raise a hue and cry of discrimination if varying ideas about these identities are even discussed. Students have come to believe that they should always feel “safe,” and therefore should not ever be subjected to difficult content in a classroom, even if the content is discussed with respect and sensitivity.

    Many of Schlosser’s points resonated with me, even though I have not had any backlash in my nine years of teaching about sometimes extremely uncomfortable topics such as female genital mutilation, infanticide, violence against women, and racial violence (not to mention teaching evolution to students who frequently come from religious backgrounds). But I have become aware of the trend towards protecting students’ emotional equilibrium by including trigger warnings before difficult material or even professors avoiding topics entirely because of the fear that some students will protest.

    I agree with Schlosser that there may be a threat to free and open exchange of ideas on campus if we cater too much to the idea that students should never feel uncomfortable; however, I also believe that there may be an echo-chamber at work here as articles like this reinforce each other and make it seem as if this is a bigger problem than it actually is. It also relates to the topic of what debates should take place on campuses – e.g., there has been an uptick in students protesting the inclusion of controversial speakers such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali in campus events (or in the case of a debate between skeptic Michael Shermer* and Christian Frank Turek, a letter to the school paper from the Graduate Queer Alliance at Stony Brook University asking for the university to apologize for allowing Turek, who is opposed to gay marriage, to appear. Shermer and Turek co-authored a response that is worth reading. Also, let me make clear that I disagree with much of what Hirsi Ali has to say, but I think it’s still important to allow her a venue in which to say it).

    This is supposed to be a short post so I’m going to leave the topic for now, but there is much more to tackle regarding how to deal with sensitive topics on campus and the liberal response to ideas we find distasteful at best, and openly bigoted at worst. I support having an open, inclusive, and safe (in the traditional sense of the word) environment on campus; but I also believe we can’t truly teach our students how – and not what – to think if we don’t expose them to topics, concepts, and speakers that may sometimes make them feel both emotionally and intellectually uncomfortable.

    I’m a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me

    *Full disclosure: I am a member of the Skeptic Society, of which Shermer is president.

  • (R)anthropology Class: The Culture of Religion

    (R)anthropology Class: The Culture of Religion

    It is no secret to my students that I am an atheist. It usually comes up early in my classes when I have to talk about cultural universals like religion, or when I have to explain why I don’t teach intelligent design (the secret code name for Christian creationism). I am also quick to reassure them that I have no interest in turning them into atheists; however, I do nurture a secret hope that by helping them become better critical thinkers, they may come to embrace agnosticism, if not outright atheism, on their own. But, I do not want to browbeat them – dare I say convert them? – into atheism. When I give my lecture on religion, I’m trying to explain it to them from an anthropological perspective. Religion is a cultural universal – every culture has one – so my students need to know the basic outlines of what constitutes religion.

    I teach the concepts mostly from a functionalist perspective. Anthropologically, religion can be simply defined as beliefs or rituals that revolve around or involve supernatural beings or forces. What is the function of religion in society? First and foremost, it serves to answer unanswerable questions: WHY are we here? WHAT happens after we die? WHERE do we go? WHY do bad things happen to good people? WHY isn’t God a Charger fan? And so on. These questions cannot be answered by science. God/the supernatural, as encompassed in the myriad religious practices of the world, serve to help people answer the unanswerable, and explain the unexplainable. Of course, in the earliest religions, many of the unanswerable questions were things that science has now explained: why does the sun rise and set? What are stars? What makes a volcano erupt? Yet, as long as we have existential questions such as why are we here, then we will still have religion.

    Religion also provides comfort during anxious times. When a person has suffered a devastating loss, they can turn to their religious beliefs for solace. I think for many people, it is much easier to believe that God has a plan for them than it is to believe that bad things happen for no reason at all. It is terrible to imagine that, say, losing your child to cancer has no greater meaning. So, people pray, or talk about God’s plan, or say that little Junior is with the angels in Heaven. Of course, suffering great pain or loss can also make people question their faith, but that anxiety-reducing function of religion keeps people returning to their supernatural or spiritual beliefs. As an atheist, I am comfortable with the knowledge that there is no greater purpose to life; it doesn’t make my life any less meaningful, and in fact in some ways makes it more meaningful, because I’m convinced that this is the only chance I’ll get and I’m going to make the most of it (the multiple fallacies that people hold about atheists, such as the idea that people who don’t believe in God eat babies because without God you can’t be moral, is a subject for another post).

    Along with the comfort and anxiety reduction functions, religion has an important role to play in educating people about correct behavior and what the consequences will be if they step out of line. Having a religion that offers rewards or threatens punishment is a very useful tool for regulating individual and group behavior. It’s even better if people believe that God is always watching them; even if you are alone, God sees you masturbating! So you’ll follow the rules even when no one else is around. Religion also provides the rules themselves. For the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – yes, I tell my often surprised students, Yahweh, God, and Allah are all the same guy), those rules are codified in holy texts such as the Talmud, Torah, Bible, and Koran. All three of these religions share the Old Testament, but their theologies are differentiated in their independent holy books. The Bible is filled with rules of conduct and stories with examples of the consequences if you don’t comply – just look at Lot’s poor wife, who was turned into a pillar of salt because she disobeyed God by looking back as she and Lot fled Sodom and Gomorrah (aside – if I was Lot, I’d be thrilled that my wife got turned into a woman-sized salt block. Salt was extremely valuable in those days!).

    One of the things I find to be the most interesting about religion is that religions always reflect the cultures from which they are derived. This is an obvious statement, but it’s not one that is often scrutinized. Religion provides an orderly model of the universe in that it gives a supernatural origin story for why the world is the way it is. Where did we come from? God made us from clay and breathed life into us. Why do we suffer? Because first Eve, then Adam, disobeyed God by eating the apple. Why do we follow the rules we follow? Because God told Moses the rules and bade him share those teachings with his followers. Think about what this does for the people following the rules of their culture, as codified in their religion: it provides a supernatural mandate for doing things a certain way. It removes from groups and individuals the burden of being responsible and puts the burden on God. It allows people to say, “Hey, I didn’t make the rules. God did.”

    I have been using mostly Christian examples here for convenience, because it is the religion with which my readers will be the most familiar, but these ideas apply to all religions, from the simplest animatism to New Age spiritualism to the most complex polytheism to the mainstream, widespread Abrahamic religions and all their different denominations and sects. And every one of these religions is a proxy for the culture they come from.

    I have heard some people argue that religion is the root of all evil. I don’t entirely disagree, but I don’t think that’s really the problem. It makes sense to say that religion is the root cause of many of the world’s conflicts, both past and present; many people have gone to war in the name of their religion. Obviously a deeply fundamentalist interpretation of Islam drives groups like the Islamic State today, just as a particular interpretation of Christianity drove the Crusades. People fight and kill and destroy and die for their beliefs, so you could argue that if there were no religions there would be no war. But I think that is completely wrong. The fact that religion is a proxy for culture is the reason why I believe we will never be free of conflicts that people are willing to die for. Religion is just the supernatural explanation for culture. That’s why I can say I’m an atheist, yet I live by the largely Judeo-Christian morals of my culture. I don’t have to believe in God to be a good person; I’m a good person because my parents, my family, and my culture have taught me to be. If my way of life was threatened to the degree that I felt the need to take up arms to defend it, I would, but God would have nothing to do with it.

    The conflicts we are experiencing around the world may seem to be based on religion, but really, they’re based on ideology. Many people in the United States believe our way of life is the best way and the right way, and many US Christians will say it’s because we are a country based on the Bible (the fact that this is not historically accurate does not change the fact that our overall ethics and morality generally derive from Judeo-Christian principles). The terrorists of ISIS explicitly attribute their motivations to Islam, but they are also fighting for a way of life. The Sunni and Shiite conflicts that rage throughout the Middle East, or the Israel-Palestine division that seems impossible to bridge, or the Hindus in India fighting with Muslims in Pakistan; these are all fights for culture and ideology. Even if you took religion completely out of it and made all these people atheists, they would still believe that their way of life was the right way, and they would fight. Religion isn’t the root of all evil. People are.

  • Daily Reads: Color Blind

    Daily Reads: Color Blind

    This Daily Read relates directly to my last post about race, but focuses more on the social dimensions of racial categories and how people are perceived. Jenée Desmond-Harris of Vox reviews a study that shows that white people perceive lighter-skinned people of color to be more successful and intelligent than their darker-skinned peers. Even with everything else being equal – education, achievement, social class, etc. – darker-skinned people were still categorized as less intelligent and capable of success. This is exactly what I was talking about in my last post when I explained ascribed status. This is highly problematic for the way it categorizes people based on purely arbitrary physical characteristics. As the article says, “It’s reasonable to conclude that this type of thinking  — whether it’s conscious or the result of implicit bias — could taint decisions about everything from hiring and promotions, awards and internships, to mentorship and all of the other judgments that determine the trajectory of a person’s life.” I think it’s important to be aware of these unconscious biases so we can try to bring them into the realm of consciousness and hopefully be less likely to act on them.

    Study: lighter-skinned black and Hispanic people look smarter to white people

  • Daily Reads: The Barbie Vagina

    Daily Reads: The Barbie Vagina

    If the title of today’s Daily Read didn’t get your attention, then perhaps this will: “In 2013, the most recent year for which statistics are available, more than 5,000 labiaplasties were performed in the United States. That may not seem like a huge number, but it’s an astounding 44% increase over just one year prior, making labiaplasty the second fastest growing plastic surgery that year.” This fascinating statistic comes from an article on Alternet by Kali Holloway. Labiaplasty is a form of plastic surgery in which women have their inner labia – the inner lips of their vagina – cut and shaped to be more aesthetically appealing. The article attributes this to a rise in “perfect” genitalia being showcased in pornography. In recent years, both male and female porn actors have shaved and shaped their pubic areas to reveal more of their genitals, and with this trend has come an uptick in surgeries among women who perceive their vaginas as deviating from the porn standard, which values a smooth, hairless, and small-lipped vagina – the Barbie vagina. I find this fascinating for multiple reasons, not least of which is the fact that a smooth, “pure” vagina is one of the goals of female genital cutting (FGC), which is practiced in multiple places around the world. I teach about this practice in my cultural anthropology classes to help students learn about cultural relativity. Of course we find FGC to be horrifying – especially because it is associated with men’s control over women’s sexuality and behavior, and the young girls who are subjected to it are not given any choice. The cultural relativity part doesn’t mean we have to accept this practice; it just means that we need to try to understand it from the perspective of its practitioners rather than judging it from our own cultural standpoint (this is a complicated subject so I won’t go into it here; just suffice to say that exercising cultural relativity does not mean finding a practice acceptable). In any case, I’m sure I’m not the only one who sees an uncomfortable parallel with voluntary labiaplasty and FGC. In my classes, I typically juxtapose FGC with voluntary plastic surgeries such as breast implants. Now, I’ll be able to use labiaplasties as the example instead and ask my students why they are different from FGC. I’m sure it will generate some vigorous and thoughtful discussion.

    The Labiaplasty Boom: Why Are Women Desperate for the Perfect Vagina?

  • The Gift

    The Gift

    I have a very ambivalent relationship with Christmas, for several reasons. Being an atheist is part of it, but not the most important part, since most of the celebrations I attend are not religious (and I think the season has lost most of its overt religious overtones in any case). My ambivalence stems more from the orgy of materialism that happens this time of year. This is not a new story; many people lament the focus on gifting. But lately I have been lamenting it from a broader perspective. As I have done my gift shopping this year I have been more aware than ever before of the economic aspects of the Christmas season. In particular, I have been doing a great deal of thinking about the cheap seasonal items that litter the aisles of department stores from Neiman Marcus to Walmart. Of course the point is to get people to buy buy buy, but at what cost? Literally, that cost can be very low; for example, I saw a display of holiday-themed watches at Macy’s, bedecked with garish holiday motifs, selling for $9.99 and an additional 20% off on top.

    So, these cheap watches are retailing for around $8, which means they may have cost Macy’s $6, which means they were manufactured for perhaps $3… and they will probably last for maybe two holiday seasons before breaking or simply being tossed away. That, to me, is an environmental cost. In addition, there is a social cost in considering the wages paid to the overseas laborers who made the watch. To make and sell a watch that only retails for $8 probably means that the wages being paid the workers are vanishingly low. Is it worth all the associated costs to make it possible for us to buy this essentially disposable, unnecessary item?

    On the flip side of the cheap seasonal gifts is the focus on big-ticket items like gaming consoles, computers, phones, and the like. When did it becoming standard operating procedure for people of average income to buy gifts costing hundreds or even thousands of dollars? The newest iPad, for example, costs a minimum of $499 for the bare-bones version. A new iPhone can cost even more. The latest XBox is priced at around $550 – and that’s the holiday sale price for the unit with the fewest accessories. This level of gifting goes not just for adults but for children. My little cousin, who is not yet 10, asked for an iPod Touch and a Bose speaker to go with it. I don’t blame her for it; it’s what all the kids want, just like I wanted (and got!) the Barbie Dream Camper when I was around the same age. It just seems that the de rigueur toys are becoming more and more expensive, and people are more willing to go into hock to get them.

    Gifting has ancient cultural origins that are rooted in the concept of reciprocity. Generalized reciprocity is what happens when people who are very close do things for each other without expecting anything in return – things like household tasks, food procurement, and the like. It’s what people do to manage all that needs to be done in a small, tight-knit group and it has its modern-day equivalent in things like doing laundry, taking out the garbage, etc. Everyone contributes (or should) and no one expects payment. However, move outside the family group and reciprocity becomes more complicated. Balanced reciprocity requires that individuals provide mutual assistance – basically, if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Relationships can go sour quickly if one person doesn’t hold up their end by doing something for the other person in return. This is where things start to move from reciprocity to obligation. A person who has done many things for someone but hasn’t been paid back can gain power over that person, because favors owed are a form of currency. This is essentially the beginning of resource stratification and ultimately income inequality; those who owe are obligated to the person who gives, and those who owe eventually can become slaves (or, to put it in Marxist terms, proletariat). In his book Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches, Marvin Harris quotes an Inuit proverb that speaks to this idea: “Gifts make slaves just as whips make dogs.” I would argue that in many ways we are now slaves to an unbalanced system of reciprocity wherein we not only feel obligated to each other, but to an economic system that overwhelms us with messages convincing us we need things that in reality, we simply want. We are less in thrall to each other than we are to the entire capitalist ideology and the myriad hegemonic messages of status-seeking and vertical mobility that keep it firmly in place. And it is this system that compels us to spend $9.99 on a cheap watch to give to someone out of a sense of obligation more than a real desire to give them a gift. We’ve all had that feeling: “What am I going to get for great-aunt Martha? I know, here’s a cheap watch!” Is that really what we should be doing?

    All this may sound too complex to explain the simple idea of showing people we care about them by giving them a gift. That idea is still there, but I think the demonstration of it is what has gone awry. I believe just as much appreciation can be conveyed by a small but well-chosen token as by an extravagant gadget or bauble. And I think the joy of the season should be returned to appreciating things that we might not otherwise have. How can a thing be special when it is expected or demanded? When my grandfather was a boy growing up in the far northern reaches of Canada, he said he looked forward every December to the special and exotic gift to his family of a box of oranges delivered by plane. Just imagine being excited by such a thing today. Perhaps the thing to do is to remember the difference between want and need, both when giving and being asked what we would like to receive. I’m not suggesting that we should only ever give people socks and underwear, but simply that we remember what is really important: relationships, experiences, and the occasional meaningful gift instead of the orgy of expectations and obligations that characterize this time of year. We should remember that things do not make us who we are, and giving to or receiving things from people we barely know or see creates a web of reciprocal obligations that can spiral out of control and lead to cheap and pointless gifting and all its associated economic exploitation and environmental waste.

    In my final analysis, I’d like to see the whole idea of Christmas giving turned on its head by being happy with what we already have. As hokey and cliche as it sounds, let’s give of ourselves for the holidays. Let’s spend time together. Let’s enjoy something traditional that is symbolic instead of extravagant – like my grandpa’s box of oranges. Let’s stop giving things and give thanks instead.