This idea is simple: in the next seven days, for a few thousand words, somewhere public on the Internet, write about why you like anthropology.

That’s right, a love letter to our discipline. I wonder what Foucault would have said about that sentence? But anyway, I am moved by the proposal, and hereby promise to pull this blog out of the mothballs to respond. If anyone’s out there, keep an eye on this space, and hopefully I’ll put something worth reading in front of it soon.

Guns, Germs, Steel & Collapse
Spring 2010: INST 4990/5990, ANTH 4020/5005

Adam Henne, ahenne@uwyo.edu

This seminar will be a deep and critical reading of Jared Diamond’s influential work, beginning with his groundbreaking best-seller Guns Germs and Steel. Engaging with Diamond’s controversial ideas will lead us through archaeology, cultural anthropology, geography, ecology, history and post-colonial studies. We’ll explore major issues such as the birth of domestication and agriculture, the early state, colonialism and empire, and the political ecology of environmental destruction or conservation. Diamond’s personal example as an interdisciplinary thinker and popular writer will help us debate the role of academic disciplines and theories in the larger world.

TEXTS:
Diamond, J. 2005 [1997]. Guns, germs and steel: The fates of human societies. New York: Norton. [GG&S]
Diamond, J. 2005. Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. New York: Viking. [Collapse]
Errington, F. and D. Gewertz. 2004. Yali’s question: Sugar, culture and history. UChicago Press. [YQ]

January 11: Introduction

Who is Jared Diamond and why does he get a whole class devoted to him? We’ll do introductions, go over the syllabus, assignments and policies, take questions and etc. Please come to class with a ‘letter of introduction,‘ no more than 1 page, inc. name, major, preferred email, academic interests, and a photo – this helps me learn your name faster. And we’ll watch:
National Geographic 2005. “Episode One – Out of Eden.” Guns, Germs and Steel, Public Broadcast System (Lion Television).

January 18: MLK Day

No class on Martin Luther King Day: but please see the many interesting and relevant activities that make up the Days of Dialog [www.mlkdod.com/mlk2010/], including a highly recommended lecture by Philip Gourevitch, author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda [Wednesday 1/20, 5:00pm in the Wyoming Union Ballroom].

January 25: Explaining the world

GG&S: “Prologue – Yali’s Question” and “Part One – From Eden to Cajamarca” (pages 13-81).
YQ: “Introduction – On Avoiding a History of the Self-Evident and the Self-Interested” and “1 – What Do They (Should They) Want?” (pages 1-42).
Wolf, E. 1982. “Introduction” and “The World in 1400” in Europe and the People Without History. UCalifornia Press, pp. 3-72.

February 1: Agriculture & domestication

GG&S: Part 2 – pp. 83-191
Fowler & Mooney. 1990. “Origins of agriculture” and “Development of diversity” in Shattering: Food, Politics and the Loss of Genetic Diversity. University of Arizona Press, pp. 3-41.
Flannery, K. 1968. “Archaeological systems theory and early Mesoamerica,” in Anthropological Archaeology in the Americas, B Meggers ed. Anthropological Society of Washington, pp. 67-87.
Texts in orange: Required only for grad students – undergrads of course welcome to read them too.
Anderson 1998. Animal domestication in geographic perspective. Society and Animals 6(2): 119-135.
OR
Winterhalder & Kennett 2002. “Introduction,” in Human Behavioral Ecology and the Transition to Agriculture.

February 8: Population & the state

GG&S: Chapts. 15, 17-19
Lewellen, T. 2002. “Evolution of the state,” in Political Anthropology, pp.
Rapp, R. 1977. Gender and class: An archaeology of knowledge concerning the origin of the state. Dialectical Anthropology 2(1-4):309-16.
Clastres, P. 1979. excerpts from Society Against the State.
Guest TBA

February 15: Technology & germs

GG&S: Part Three – pp. 193-292
Inhorn & Brown 1990. The anthropology of infectious disease. Annual Review of Anthropology 19:89-117.
Headrick, D. 2010. “Horses, disease and the conquest of the Americas 1492-1849” in Power Over Peoples, pp. 95-132.
Guest: TBA

February 22: Why not China?

GG&S: Chap. 16, Epilogue pp. 405-417
Abu-Lughod, Janet. 1989. “Studying a System in Formation,” in Before European Hegemony. Oxford University Press, pp. 3-42
Pomerantz, K. 2001. “Chapter 4” in The Great Divergence (Princeton, pp. 166-208).
Guest: Michael Brose, History.

March 1: On proximate and ultimate causes

GG&S: “Epilogue – The Future of Human History as a Science,” pp. 403-425.
YQ: the rest of the book, pp. 43- 259. BUT! Concentrate primarily on Chap. 9 “Hewers of Wood and Drawers of Water” and “Conclusion: On Listening.”
Vayda, AP. 2009. “Causal explanation as a research goal: Dos and don’ts,” in Explaining Human Actions and Environmental Change, AltaMira pp. 1-48.
Fausto-Sterling, A. 1985. “Putting woman in her (evolutionary) place,” in Myths of Gender. Basic Books, pp. 156-204.
OR
Peet, R. 1985. The social origins of environmental determinism. Annals of the AAG 75(3): 309-33.

March 8: Ecology & culture — other kinds of agency

Geertz “The impact of the concept of culture on the concept of man, “ in The Interpretation of Cultures.
Bateson, G. 1972. excerpt from Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Ballantine, pp. 440-47.
West, P. 2005. Translation, value and space: Theorizing an ethnographic and engaged environmental anthropology. American Anthropologist 107(4): 632-42.
O’Connor 1997. Working at relationships: Another look at animal domestication. Antiquity 71: 149-56.
Castree & MacMillan 2001. “Dissolving dualisms,” in Social Nature, pp. 208-24.
OR
Ingold, T. 1990. An anthropologist looks at biology. Man 25(2):208-29.

March 15: Spring Break

Paper #1 due no later than 5:00pm on Friday, March 19^th.

March 22: “Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

Collapse: Prologue and Part One, pp. 1-75.
Tainter: 2006. Archaeology of overshoot and collapse. Annual Review of Anthropology 35:59-74.

March 29: Past Societies

Collapse: Part Two, pp. 77-308. and ONE of the following:
Rainbird, P. 2002. A message for our future? The Rapa Nui ecodisaster and Pacific Island environments. World Archaeology 33(3):436-51.
Dugmore et al. 2007. Norse Greenland settlement: Reflections on climate change, trade, and the contrasting fates of human settlements in the North Atlantic Islands. Arctic Anthropology 44(1):12-36.
Aimers, J. 2007. What Maya collapse? Terminal classic variation in the Maya lowlands. Journal of Archaeological Research 15(4): 329-77.

April 5: Modern Societies

Collapse: Part Three, pp. 309-416.
Brothers, T. 2002. Deforestation in the Dominican Republic: A village-level view. Environmental Conservation 24(3): 213-23.
Uvin, P. 2001. Reading the Rwandan Genocide. International Studies Review 3(3).
Guest: TBA

April 12: Practical Lessons

Collapse: Part 4, pp. 417-525, and “Further Readings” addendum pp. 555-560.
Diamond 2009. Op-ed: Will Big Business Save the Earth? The New York Times Dec. 5. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opinion/06diamond.html
Parker et al. 2008. The Little REDD Book. Oxford: Global Canopy Programme.
www.amazonconservation.org/pdf/redd_the_little_redd_book_dec_08.pdf
Winninghof 2004. Green capitalism. Salon Dec. 4. http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2004/12/08/sri/print.html
+ do some searching of the environmental blogosphere, i.e.:

• noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/
• www.treehugger.com/take_action/
• www.grist.org, etc.

April 19: Political ecology

Lansing et al 2007. “Rappaport’s rose: Structure, agency, and historical contingency in ecological anthropology,” in Reimagining Political Ecology, A. Biersack, ed. Duke University Press, pp. 325-57.
Le Billon, P. 2001. The political ecology of war: natural resources and armed conflicts. Political Geography 20: 561-84.
Robbins, P. 2004. excerpts from Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 3-40.
Biersack, A. 2008. “Introduction” from Reimagining Political Ecology. Duke University Press, pp. x-xx.

April 26: Disciplines, audiences and ethics

Diamond, J. 2008. Annals of anthropology: Vengeance is ours. The New Yorker April 21, p. 74.
Balter, M. 2009. Vengeance bites back at Jared Diamond. Science 324 (May 15).
and at least ONE of the essays on the ‘vengeance’ controversy linked on our website.

Rhonda Shearer, “Jared Diamond’s Factual Collapse“
Alex Golub, “Jared Diamond is Diluting my Brand“
Nancy Sullivan, “Light Elephants and Dark Revenge in the New Yorker“
Alex Golub, “Melanesian Vengeance, Western Vengeance, and Natural Vengeance“
Andrew Mack, “Big Conservation in Papua New Guinea“
Alan Bisbort, “Jared Diamond’s Tall Tale Gives Journalism a Bad Name“
Michael McManus, “Hello from Papua New Guinea… By the Way, We Read the New Yorker“
Douglas Edward Biber, “Did Daniel Wemp Really Say That?“
Paige West, “Hearing Stories, Telling Stories“
Valerie Alia, “Media, Misrepresentation, and Indigenous People“

Cronon, W. 1993. The uses of environmental history. Environmental History Review 17(3): 1-22.
Wilcox, M. 2009. “Marketing conquest and the vanishing Indian,” in Questioning Collapse, McAnany & Yoffee, eds. Cambidge, pp. 113-41.
Brosius, JP. 1999. Analyses and interventions: Anthropological engagements with environmentalism. Current Anthropology 40(3).

Finals week

Paper #2 due in my mailbox no later than 5:00pm on Friday May 7th.

Ken Musgrave at Fast Company design/business mag has made the argument for Why We Need a Globally-Recognized Unit of Green. He cites the complications involved with decisions about materials in the design process – i.e. is ‘virgin’ bamboo a better (more sustainable?) choice than, say, recycled paper. Well, growing bamboo is much less resource-intensive than growing wood for paper, while a recycled product uses less (or no) raw materials. Using recycled materials isn’t “free,” though, given the energy costs of recycling and other inputs that might be necessary to break down the fibers or what-have-you. The choice puts unrelated environmental issues up against each other, as we weigh deforestation versus energy consumption versus chemical inputs, not to mention the carbon footprint of shipping raw materials and finished products… It’s an absurd algorithm, and one you’d probably rather not wade through in the supermarket aisle.

Musgrave proposes a standardized unit that compiles all those factors into a single index. Somebody, presumably a third-party certifier of some sort, can measure each product’s impact in terms of all the aforementioned dimensions, weight them somehow, and generate a single composite measure: “We can even call the labels something catchy–like ‘Greenies.’” I’m picturing the equation of ramified green measures with compounding parenthetical statements:

Paper ((70% post-consumer recycled(recycled using X method(Xmethod requiring 80 tons of chemical Y(chemical Y treated via process A and securely stored in site Q(shipped by truck from Scranton(etc.))))))  –>

= 3 ‘greenies’. Ba-da bing.

In a certain sense this is the same logic as the labels on organic food, certified timber, and so on. I’ve described those things elsewhere as ‘labor-saving devices,’ that is, technologies designed to save us the consumers that difficult labor of making ethical decisions about our purchases. We don’t need to know which farm the tomato comes from, what kind of manure the farmer uses, or anything else about it – if it has the organic label, we have it on good authority that at least some bad agro-things weren’t done to it.

What’s different about the proposed ‘greenies’ is the potential incorporation of everything. Organic standards are (sort of) clearly defined, nowadays by federal statute, but really only in terms of some chemicals that won’t appear in the product. It’s good information, but certainly doesn’t tell you everything you need to know in order to decide exactly which product is really the most green. A bunch of grapes conventionally-grown in Virginia represents the consumption of some nasty chemicals, but how does that compare to the ridiculous carbon footprint of the organic grapes that must be flown in from Chile? Only ‘greenies’ can tell us.

Obviously, this is just a thought experiment, but the places where it runs aground are where it gets really interesting. An auditor looking to assign a ‘greenie’ number to those grapes needs to know how to weigh pesticides against carbon footprint, but that’s a value judgment that would necessarily vary enormously from one person to another. I’m quite inclined toward the idea that local-conventional might be a better net environmental choice than organic-transnational; but my partner has a lot of chemical sensitivities and weights the presence of pesticides quite a lot more  heavily than I would. For any set of tradeoffs that our hypothetical auditor would need to weigh, we could imagine a dozen competing perspectives.  And that’s just considering the consumers’ values – if we try to include those of producers, laborers, and innocent bystanders? It never ends.

I don’t know about the “nature” in this story, but the “culture” is too good to pass up. Remember Roxanne? Well, that’s Doctor Roxanne to you, and she got it the hard way. This is a warm-feeling kind of story, and not (just) from  the hip-hop nostalgia.

The Four Stone Hearth is a blog carnival that specializes in anthropology in the widest (American) sense of that word. Here, anthropology is the study of humankind, throughout all times and places, focussing primarily on four lines of research:

• archaeology
• socio-cultural anthropology
• bio-physical anthropology
• linguistic anthropology
  Each one of these subfields is a stone in our hearth.

So, check out the home site, and if you’re interested in joining up, please write to Martin Rundkvist.

So down to business. This will be a somewhat non-linear review of the latest from the anthropology blogosphere thematically; we’ll see how that goes. To begin with, let’s talk about anthropology and a couple of high profile busts. In particular, the big corruption roundup in New Jersey this summer that netted mayors and wealthy developers and all kinds of good things, was driven in part by anthropological research. Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ ongoing study of the global trade in human organs picked up on the tangled web of laundered money from the other end. Her detailed records on kidney ‘matchmaker’ Levy Rosenbaum helped the FBI catch and prosecute not just organ traders, but money-launderers throughout the network. I found this first via Lorenz, but there’s also a great interview on WNYC and a story on none other than FOX News. You can find some other links about it at the AAA Blog as well.

The other big bust news involves the trade in Native American artifacts. Starting back in June, the FBI began indicting residents of Blanding UT for looting on public lands. The same investigations have since spread well beyond Utah, and folks are starting to express concern about the way this bust was  conducted and what it will mean for the legitimate trade, for Native American craftspeople and tourism and etc. This one’s anthropologically fascinating, not just because it involves archaeological materials, but because it plays on some important tensions between public and private goods, the ownership of cultural heritage, and so on. Taking artifacts from private property, with permission, is legit; taking them from public lands is looting. Identifying the provenance of any particular item is exceedingly difficult, of course, and documenting and tracking permission is almost as bad. Teofilo, late of Chaco Canyon, has been following this story – maybe start with the latest and work back?

So another theme worth tracking is what I’m vaguely thinking of as the meta-story of anthropology online. Decasia offers a nice empirical map of anthropology’s place in the academic landscape. Material World has posts on digital archiving and on virtual heritage, a particularly interesting way to think about the visualizing of archaeological data. John Hawks comments on a Scientific American editorial about access to archaeological raw data; Neolithic Revolutions has a link to some initiatives on making ones data openly available.   Open Access Anthropology, as usual, is all over the idea; particularly interesting is a post on scholarly societies in the wake of Web 2.0. LL Wynn at Culture Matters is undertaking a new project about how we all experience ethics oversight (IRBs and whatnot) – do ethnographic research and human subjects issues look different to those of us who’ve always had IRB in the picture? There’s a survey, so click through and chip in. And Savage Minds, the meta-daddy of us all is covering reference-management software, what it means to browse as opposed to surf, and of course How Professors Think.  Now, why are we giving that information away?

While I’m speaking at this meta level, let me tell you that signing up for this blog carnival led to look at the new official AAA blog for the first time. And you know what? That thing is alright. After various website failures and the AnthroSource debacle, I certainly didn’t expect much, but it’s an attractive and useful feature with real content and I hereby endorse it! Particularly noteworthy is an announcement about new online annual meeting resources – little by little we’re catching up with the AAG. They’ve also announced that Walter Goldschmidt, AAA President (1975-6) and American Anthropologist editor (1956-59 yes you read that right) now has a blog. Now that’s eminent – go check it out, folks.

It’s a little bit inspiring that these meta-considerations about how we learn and research and surf are accompanied by original anthropological research developing on the ol’ blogs. Afarensis has some new thoughts on brucellosis in early hominins – better not tell the ranchers here in Wyoming. Greg at Neuroanthropology has an exploration on feet and compensatory adaptation, inspired by this awesome climber in India – he also wants some help tracking down sources, so click through and lend a hand, or foot. Naturally I’m led to think about this and this, but I don’t know from compensatory adaptation. Martin at Aardvarchaeology reports on a new PhD thesis “Breaking and Making Bodies and Pots,” which is a great title and looks like the document I may need to explain post-processual archaeology to my theory students. There’s a thorough consideration of settlement patterns and interglacial mobility in Upper Paleolithic Italy at Ad Hominin. Neolithic Revolutions has a report on Matt’s SAA paper, a nice examination of the diffusion of farm technologies in relation to language diversity. I might be missing the real point here, but it brings to mind the whole ‘biocultural diversity’ analogy between hotspots of linguistic and biological diversity. I guess I find that interesting because I like Matt’s mechanics of micro-diffusion better than the argument by co-incidence used in the Terralingua projects et. al.

A few odds and ends for the end:

1. They’re digging it up at my old school – of course, we were told that the anthro dep’t was built above a slave cemetary and the haunting possibilities are still ripe.
2. The anthropology of lucha libre.
3. Dr. Dove on Dr. Dunham Soetoro.
4. Wal-Mart tried to co-opt the Girl Scout cookie. Could an anthropologist have stopped their evil plan?
5. No shame in my game – LL Wynn [oops!] Jovan Maud considers the bejewelled penis enlarger. But no pictures?! I’ve had to hunt down one of my own.
   

Now that that’s been settled, I’d like to close (via AHCoJ) with the words of a close personal friend of mine:

But anyway, this post by D. Drezner on the Foreign Policy blog really gets down to the nitty-gritty. How would IR theory deal with a zombie invasion? And since I’m an anthropologist I’m forced to ask – could anthropology do better? I’ll add that I’m not apologizing for going off-topic here: considering a socio-political theory of zombies raises valuable questions about life and non-life, and hence is very nature/culturey. Really. So I encourage anyone reading to visit the original article (comments too) and come back here to propose a more anthropological/cultural take on the problem. Anxious potential victims await your guidance.

She Unnames Them
Ursula K. LeGuin [audio!]

MOST of them accepted namelessness with the perfect indifference with which they had so long accepted and ignored their names. Whales and dolphins, seals and sea otters consented with particular alacrity, sliding into anonymity as into their element. A faction of yaks, however, protested. They said that “yak” sounded right, and that almost everyone who knew they existed called them that. Unlike the ubiquitous creatures such as rats and fleas, who had been called by hundreds or thousands of different names since Babel, the yaks could truly say, they said, that they had a name. They discussed the matter all summer. The councils of elderly females finally agreed that though the name might be useful to others it was so redundant from the yak point of view that they never spoke it themselves and hence might as well dispense with it. After they presented the argument in this light to their bulls, a full consensus was delayed only by the onset of severe early blizzards. Soon after the beginning of the thaw, their agreement was reached and the designation “yak” was returned to the donor.

Among the domestic animals, few horses had cared what anybody called them since the failure of Dean Swift’s attempt to name them from their own vocabulary. Cattle, sheep, swine, asses, mules, and goats, along with chickens, geese, and turkeys, all agreed enthusiastically to give their names back to the people to whom—as they put it—they belonged.

A couple of problems did come up with pets. The cats, of course, steadfastly denied ever having had any name other than those self-given, unspoken, ineffably personal names which, as the poet named Eliot said, they spend long hours daily contemplating — though none of the contemplators has ever admitted that what they contemplate is their names and some onlookers have wondered if the object of that meditative gaze might not in fact be the Perfect, or Platonic, Mouse. In any case, it is a moot point now. It was with the dogs, and with some parrots, lovebirds, ravens, and mynahs, that the trouble arose. These verbally talented individuals insisted that their names were important to them, and flatly refused to part with them. But as soon as they understood that the issue was precisely one of individual choice, and that anybody who wanted to be called Rover, or Froufrou, or Polly, or even Birdie in the personal sense, was perfectly free to do so, not one of them had the least objection to parting with the lowercase (or, as regards German creatures, uppercase) generic appellations “poodle,” “parrot,” “dog,” or “bird,” and all the Linnaean qualifiers that had trailed along behind them for two hundred years like tin cans tied to a tail.

The insects parted with their names in vast clouds and swarms of ephemeral syllables buzzing and stinging and humming and flitting and crawling and tunnelling away.

As for the fish of the sea, their names dispersed from them in silence throughout the oceans like faint, dark blurs of cuttlefish ink, and drifted off on the currents without a trace.

NONE were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to feel or rub or caress one anotherís scales or skin or feathers or fur, taste one anotherís blood or flesh, keep one another warmóthat attraction was now all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food.

This was more or less the effect I had been after. It was somewhat more powerful thatn I had anticipated, but I could not now, in all conscience, make an exception for myself. I resolutely put anxiety away, went to Adam, and said, “You and your father lent me this—gave it to me, actually. It’s been really useful, but it doesn’t exactly seem to fit very well lately. But thanks very much! It’s really been very useful.”

It is hard to give back a gift without sounding peevish or ungrateful, and I did not want to leave him with that impression of me. He was not paying much attention, as it happened, and said only, “Put it down over there, O.K.?” and went on with what he was doing.

One of my reasons for doing what I did was that talk was getting us nowhere, but all the same I felt a little let down. I had been prepared to defend my decision. And I thought that perhaps when he did notice he might be upset and want to talk. I put some things away and fiddled around a little, but he continued to do what he was doing and to take no notice of anything else. At last I said, “Well, goodbye, dear. I hope the garden key turns up.”

He was fitting parts together, and said, without looking around, “O.K., fine, dear. When”s dinner?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. I’m going now. With the—” I hesitated, and finally said, “With them, you know,” and went on out. In fact, I had only just then realized how hard it would have been to explain myself. I could not chatter away as I used to do, taking it all for granted. My words must be as slow, as new, as single, as tentative as the steps I took going down the path away from the house, between the dark-branched, tall dancers motionless against the winter shining.

]]> http://adamhenne.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/unnaming/feed/ 0 Adam Henne http://adamhenne.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/geographers-speak-up/ http://adamhenne.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/geographers-speak-up/#comments Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:27:31 +0000 Adam Henne http://adamhenne.wordpress.com/?p=76 ]]> So a while back I wrote about Robert Kaplan’s article on old-fashioned geographies – now the heavy hitters of human geography are throwing in their $0.02 +. You can see an abstract of sorts at the Human Geography website, but I can’t get ahold of the actual article myself. The founders of this new radical journal are cranky leftists, god bless ‘em, so subscriptions are only available directly and not through the usual Sage/Springer/Wiley-Blackwell monopolies. The good news – subscriptions are only $40! Plain old fee-for-service to the rescue.