No place to escape from anthropologists. Not even in your own garden! Jane Nadel-Klein is researching the modern-day garden and its rubber-clogged inhabitants, according to the Indiapolis Star. The anthropologist says, that "an examination of the garden-club lady can help our understanding of humankind" because "the more we know about the history of a human practice, the more we know what we share." >> more in the Indiapolis Star.

SEE ALSO:

Jane Nadel-Klein. Fishing for Heritage: Modernity and Loss along the Scottish Coast (Book review, Australian Journal of Anthropology)

E-mail is so last millennium. Young people see it as a good way to reach an elder - a parent, teacher or a boss - or to receive an attached file. But email is increasingly losing favor to instant and text messaging, according to an ap-article:

Much like home postal boxes have become receptacles for junk mail, bills and the occasional greeting card, electronic mailboxes have become cluttered with spam. That makes them a pain to weed through, and the problem is only expected to worsen as some e-mail providers allow online marketers to bypass spam filters for a fee. Beyond that, e-mail has become most associated with school and work.

"It used to be just fun," says Danah Boyd, a doctoral candidate who studies social media at the University of California, Berkeley [and blogger]. "Now it's about parents and authority."

(...)

When immediacy is a factor - as it often is - most young people much prefer the telephone or instant messaging for everything from casual to heart-to-heart conversations, according to research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Boyd says, young people have developped skills for chatting with "a bazillion people at once". They understand how to negotiate the interruptions a lot better than adults.

Anne Kirah, design anthropologist at Microsoft, even thinks young people's brains work differently because they've grown up with IM, making them more adept at it.

Companies really need to respond to the way people work and communicate. The focus, she says, should be the outcome:

"Nine to 5 has been replaced with 'Give me a deadline and I will meet your deadline,'" Kirah says of young people's work habits. "They're saying 'I might work until 2 a.m. that night. But I will do it all on my terms.'"

>> read the whole story in the Washington Post

SEE ALSO:

Instant Messaging - Studying A New Form of Communication

Ethnographic Study on "Digital Kids"

An interview with Anne Kirah: Lead design anthropologist

Popular IT-anthropologists: Observe families until they go to bed

(via Livejournal Anthropologist Community) What? Germanic Y-chromosomes? What's that? And "Germanic genes"? Are racial theories alive and kicking?

The BBC writes about an "abundance of Germanic genes in England today":

There are a very high number of Germanic male-line ancestors in England's current population. Genetic research has revealed the country's gene pool contains between 50 and 100% Germanic Y-chromosomes.

Or what are "native British genes"?

"We believe that they [Anglo Saxons] also prevented the native British genes getting into the Anglo-Saxon population by restricting intermarriage in a system of apartheid that left the country culturally and genetically Germanised."

We don't get any explanations on how these genes are defined. Race - as we know - "doesn't exist biologically, but it does exist socially," as anthropologist Alan Goodman once said. "Human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups" (AAA-Statement on Race). But reading the articles in the BBC and New Scientist, it seems that race has become a biological reality.

UPDATE (20.7.06): Comment by Alex Golub at Savage Minds:

There are things that I find curious about the article—the assumption that ‘marriage’ and ‘reproduction’ are the same thing and that ethnic identity is always corelated with a genetic marker for instance—but there doesn’t seem to be very much to be ‘racial’ to me.

>> read the whole comment

SEE ALSO:

Race again: Anthropologist Kerim Friedman comments on controversial article

"It will take a long time for people to grasp the illusory nature of race"

Anthropology and Race - Discussions in the Classroom

Savage Minds: Recent Debates on Race and Class

Racism: The Five Major Challenges for Anthropology

American Anthropological Association Statement on "Race" and Race - A Scholars' Preview

In a portrait on the website of The National University of Australia, anthropologist Ian Keen, tells about his research among Aboriginees in Australia. Among other things, he wanted to find out why pre-colonial Aboriginal societies tended to be more egalitarian than some of their counterparts elsewhere in the world:

In a paper published in the journal Current Anthropology, Keen argues that for any society to develop lasting social hierarchies, it must have access to plentiful, localised resources that could be defended. In this event, some people can assume authority over others. On the northwest coast of North America, for example, recent hunter-gatherers enjoyed a stable climate and concentrated, defendable resources, especially plentiful salmon. As a consequence, these societies developed such enduring inequalities as inherited chiefly office and marked social classes, while some even kept slaves.

In contrast, Aboriginal societies did not develop such enduring inequalities. (...) Keen argues this relative egalitarianism was the result of constraints arising from variable food resources and an unstable climate, meaning there was limited scope for people to assume dominion over others by asserting exclusive access to territory and resources.

Keen explains:

"It’s not exactly an environmental determinist argument, but it is suggesting that those conditions imposed restraints. I make the assumption that wherever they can, some humans will take the opportunities given to them to establish some kind of dominion over others. So my paper argues that even if people knew how to dominate one another, and wanted to do so, the opportunities were not there.

>> read the whole article

Brian Hayden, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, is not convinced and criiticizes that Keen does not put enough weight on the ecological and economic aspects of complexity that develop among some hunter-gatherers in Australia.

Keen is the author of the book Aboriginal Economy and Society. The website of the book is quite informative. If you click on Supplementary Materials you'll find several cases studies and several pages about aboriginal technologies. In the paper Variation in Indigenous Economy and Society at the Threshold of Colonisation, Keen tells about more about his book:

Just how similar and how distinct were Aboriginal societies in different parts of the continent at the time of British colonisation of Australia? The book I am currently writing attempts to answer this and related questions by comparing the economy and society of seven very varied regions of the continent as they were at the threshold of colonisation.

(...)

Such a comparative study is long overdue. There have been no recent systematic comparisons of Aboriginal ways of life in different parts of Australia, comparable to, for example, Marshall Sahlins on Polynesia or Rubel and Rosman on New Guinea.

>> download the paper (pdf)

She's a young women from the Lake Lugu is the southwestern part of China and tells us in an article in The Standard (Hongkong):

"Mother thinks I'm being disrespectful to our heritage by having a steady boyfriend. She thinks I ought to follow the old ways, to take more than one lover. It's a big problem between us. Actually," she lowers her voice, "my boyfriend and I are thinking of leaving Lugu after the summer, and moving to Kunming [capital of Yunnan province]. We may get married."

Journalist Joshua Samuel Brown explains that Lake Lugu is the home of the Mosuo - a matriarchal and matrilineal society: Women make most major decisions, control household finances, and pass their surnames on to their children:

But what makes the Mosuo truly unique is one particularly juicy facet of their familial relationships, their practice of zuo hun, or "walking marriage." The Mosuo do not marry - rather, a woman chooses her lovers from among the men of the tribe, taking as many as she pleases over the course of her life. In Mosuo culture, having children with different men bears no social stigma. Children are raised more or less communally, and in most cases grow up in the mother's home, surrounded by any number of sisters, brothers and "uncles."

>> read the whole story in The Standard (Link updated 4.3.18)

MORE INFO:

Wikipedia: The Mosuo

Chinese men threaten 'lake of free love' where women rule (Telegraph, 25.3.01)

The Chinese region with women in charge (BBC, 18.9.05)

Lu Yuan: Land Of The Walking Marriage - Mosuo people of China (Natural History, 11/2000)

ON MATRILINEAL SOCIETIES SEE ALSO:

Eggi's Village. Life Among the Minangkabau of Indonesia (another matrilineal society)

A Society Without Husbands or Fathers

Contemporary matriarchal societies: The Nagovisi, Khasi, Garo, and Machiguenga

Matriarchy: history or reality?

Anthropologists: U.S. Marriage Model Is Not Universal Norm

Links updated 28.2.2022

(via Livejournal Anthropology Community) Jesse de Leon, Master’s student in Social Anthropology, has started blogging on his research on Filipino bloggers - a very interesting blog about migration, transnationalism, identity and internet research. In his second post he explains:

I’m what’s known as a 1.5 generation immigrant: someone who immigrated as a child old enough to remember the country they were born in. In my case, I immigrated to Canada from the Philippines when I was ten years old. I consider myself as having grown up in both countries. I know that if I had grown up entirely in the Philippines, I would be a different person than what I am today.

It’s therefore understandable that I’m interested in issues of migration, transnationalism, and identity. I’m particularly interested in what identity is like for other Filipinos who have migrated. Do they consider themselves as being completely Filipino? Or do they see themselves as being Canadians now (or American, or Australian, or so on)?

(...)

Now, this is all well and good, but lots of other people have examined these issues. What am I doing that’s new? Well, I’m investigating Filipino migration and identity, but I’m investigating them through blogs. Specifically, I’m looking at how Filipino bloggers talk about these issues. I’m also looking at how Filipino bloggers don’t talk about these issues.

>> visit Sarapen. Online anthropology on Filipino bloggers

His blog is hosted at edublogs.org - a free blog host that he recommends.

Kambiz Kamrani at anthropology.net has made a nice post about national fotballs: How do the different countries represent themselves? Sport is bringing the world closer together, in his opinion. His list of World Cup participants "shows us the color side of globalization in the form of socio-economic and cultural contributions of each country in the form of soccer balls" >> continue reading at anthropology.net

On the website Expatica, Editor-in-chief David Gordon Smith has written an interesting comment on the recent patriotism in Germany. As also noted critically by blogger Urmila Goel:

As also All of Germany is coloured in black-red-gold. Almost all. And all are very very happy. (...) I hardly find anybody who is so utterly disgusted by all this black-red-gold as I am. 'Nations' are based on exclusion. They are the basis for wars, not only with weapons. I do not like this structuring of the world, and I utterly dislike its national symbols. Especially the flags.

David Gordon Smith might be nearly as critical as Urmila Goel. As a migrant, he feels excluded (for some reason, he uses the term "expat" - but you should use it as a synonym for migrant):

It is a strange feeling to live here and be excluded from the collective hysteria: when newspaper editorials write about 'us' and 'our team', they are not talking about expats. For anyone who does not belong to, or identify with, mainstream Germany, ostentatious displays of patriotism can leave an uneasy feeling.(...) If anyone gets nervous at the sight of Germans waving flags, it is because Germany waged a terrible war within living memory.

He then goes on explaining why patriotism never can be healthy for a society:

Nationalism and war have always gone hand in hand, and probably patriotism is of most use to the nation state when it comes to armed conflict. Without feelings of intense patriotism, it would be hard for the nation state to get young men (and women) to die on its behalf. Patriotic emotions may not cause wars, but they make it easier for governments to wage wars--especially wars which can not be rationally justified. If it was not for patriotism, governments would have to be much more careful about engaging in military action.

But what sort of relationship should we have to our country of origin or residence?

I would argue that in the modern world the ideal relationship of an individual to a nation state (or supranational organisation) should be objective, critical and passionless. You might agree or disagree with certain things the state does, you might even be prepared to fight to defend it, but you do not feel the blind unquestioning loyalty that comes with patriotism. The fewer young men and women who are prepared to fight and die for an idea, whether that is a particular ideology or religion or the equally constructed notion of a nation state, the safer the world will be.

>> read the whole article at Expatica

I agree, but nevertheless I wonder: Are all flag waving people patriotic or nationalistic?

SEE ALSO:

German Politicians Hail New Patriotism

Cicilie Fagerlid: Will France be more tolerant and less discriminatory and racist due to its multicoloured team?

"Germans stick to the ethnic definition more than any other European nation"

World Cup Enthusiasm: "Need for a collective ritual, not nationalism"

Per Wirtén: Free the nation - cosmopolitanism now!

For an Anthropology of Cosmopolitanism

Interview with Benedict Anderson: "I like nationalism's utopian elements"

Flags and identity: Strong feelings, mystical rituals and equivocal messages

(Links updated 30.7.2020) Anthropologist Anne Irwin has spent years in dangerous places with front line troops to observe how soldiers construct their identities as warriors. She wears the same combat uniform and body armour as the troops when she's in the field. At the moment, she is researching how Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan bolster their identities by sharing their battlefield experiences through storytelling with their peers:

The storytelling not only helps forge the individual identity of each soldier, it builds interpersonal relationships that can have a bearing on how well the unit performs on the battlefield.