Ethnography
Category archives for Ethnography
Meat Eating in Human Prehistory
Posted by Greg Laden on April 20, 2013 
All human hunter-gatherer groups that have been studied incorporate meat in their diets. Studies have shown that the total dietary contribution of meat varies a great deal, and seems to increase with latitude so that foragers in subarctic and arctic regions eat a lot of meat while those living near the equator eat less. It…
The Feast (A Thanksgiving Day Story)
Posted by Greg Laden on November 22, 2012 Today is Thanksgiving in the US. Happy Thanksgiving. Let us being with a word of advice: TAKE THE TURKEY OUT OF THE FREEZER NAO!!! And now … a feast.
“Excuse me, there’s some food in my bugs!”
Posted by Greg Laden on August 22, 2011 Speaking of people eating insects … as we were … I do have this fun story from the Ituri Forest.
“We Live In Little Houses Made of Beans”
Posted by Greg Laden on August 19, 2011 I have written before of insects in the Ituri Forest. (Oh, and here too.) When it comes up that I’ve spent time there, certain questions often come up, and one of them is: “Did you eat bugs.”
The reason the Efe won’t normally kill an insect …
Posted by Greg Laden on August 18, 2011 that has wandered into their camp if they don’t know anything about it a priori is … according to what they told me when that happened once … is …
No place to sit down
Posted by Greg Laden on August 18, 2011 I knew a couple who had spent a lot of time in the Congo in the 1950s. He was doing primatology, and she was the wife of a primatologist. And when she spoke of the Congo or Uganda, where they spent most of the time, she always said two things that always put me off…
Among Cannibals
Posted by Greg Laden on August 7, 2011 I have lived among Cannibals, according to a lot of people who claim to know. The number of times that the “tribal” people of the Congo have been called cannibals is too great to be counted, most notably in great literature like The Heart of Darkness but most commonly, I suspect, from the pulpit or…
The Apocalypse really is happening and the Rapture went off without a hitch
Posted by Greg Laden on May 22, 2011 It’s all just a matter of calibration. Let me ‘splain.
How to carry your monkey home once you’ve killed it
Posted by Greg Laden on February 2, 2011 Once you’ve killed the monkey, you need to carry it back to camp. Slit the tail, near the end, and poke the head through the slit, so the tail makes a handy strap. Here’s a detail:
Falsehoods: Human Universals
Posted by Greg Laden on January 26, 2011 There are human universals. There, I said it. Now give me about a half hour to explain why this is both correct and a Falsehood. But first, some background and definition.
Social Networking is a wonderful new technology that will unleash human potential
Posted by Greg Laden on January 2, 2011 But that isn’t always how it goes. On today’s radio show, Steve Borsch was talking about the way in which social networking (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is playing out — as an extension of social interaction more than as a new form of shopping mall or marketing environment — and an observation I made a couple…
Elephant Tracks and Child Safety Devices
Posted by Greg Laden on December 10, 2010 It is probably true that every culture has child safety devices. It is also probably true that all of these devices are very limited in their effectiveness.
The Feast
Posted by Greg Laden on November 25, 2010 The enemy has arrived, in force, outside your village. The men are armed and wearing the symbols of war, which is appropriate because your group and the group milling about outside your walled settlement are at war. One of the men, wearing war garb but adorned also with white flagging to indicate a peaceful intent…
Why do women shop and men hunt?
Posted by Greg Laden on October 12, 2010 Or, when the hunting season is closed, watch teh game (the guys), or when there are no sales, admire each other’s shoes (the gals)? This is, of course, a parody of the sociobiological, or in modern parlance, the “evolutionary psychology” argument linking behaviors that evolved in our species during the long slog known as The…
Why did the Tasmanians Stop Eating Fish?
Posted by Greg Laden on August 8, 2010 Georges Bank is a very large shallow area in the North Atlantic, roughly the size of a New England state, that serves as a fishing ground and whaling area (these days for watching the whales, not harpooning them) for ports in New England, New York and Eastern Canada. Eighteen thousand years ago, sea levels were…
Skeptics and Atheists Should be Relatively Happy about Twilight and New Moon
Posted by Greg Laden on December 5, 2009 My review.
The Taming of the Shrewd: “Get her drunk then get her done”
Posted by Greg Laden on December 1, 2009 “Get her drunk then get her done.” So reads one of the decals on the F-150 pickup truck parked in my new neighbor’s driveway. Of all the objectionable aphorisms on that particular truck, that’s the mildest one. I wonder what my daughter will think of that when she notices it some time over the next…
Reading Human Nature
Posted by Greg Laden on July 26, 2009 “Human nature” is an interesting topic. People will argue over the definition of human nature, but regardless of what people think or say, it is reasonable to assume that all humans share a psychological and developmental framework to the extent that any two people raised in the same background will ‘turn out’ similar with respect…
Silence of the muffins.
Posted by Greg Laden on July 23, 2009 There is no red shirted man making deals on the phone as he paces back and forth. There is no group of large voiced church people being all holier than thou. And loud. Eight out of ten customers in this coffee shop are writers. I can tell because they come in and sit down and…
Emailing Habits And Diurnal Patterning
Posted by Greg Laden on May 12, 2009 Duncan Watts at Yahoo Research in New York City and a few pals studied the time of day at which around 3000 individuals at a European university sent emails over an 83-day period as well as the email habits of over 122,000 e-mailers at a US university over a 2-year period. They found two distinct…
Amazon Dot Com is a different kind of thing
Posted by Greg Laden on April 13, 2009 It is a ground breaking company, it is a bookstore that is mega mega like few other companies are. It is a bookstore that is a huge corporation. Think about that for a second. Think about bookstores in the old days then think about this thing, Amazon Dot Com. A bookstore that is leading the…
The Four Stone Hearth Blog Carnival: October 22nd edition.
Posted by Greg Laden on October 24, 2008 Welcome to the 22 October Edition of the Four Stone Hearth Anthropology Blog Carnival. The previous edition of this carnival was on Clashing Culture. The Home Page of Four Stone Hearth is here, and the next edition will be at Archaeoporn. And now, on with the show!
Cultural Evolution from Mosquitos to Worm Grunting
Posted by Greg Laden on October 13, 2008 A very good day of grunting worms. Credit: Ken Catania So-called Gene-Culture Co-Evolution can be very obvious and direct or it can be very subtle and complex. In almost all cases, the details defy the usual presumptions people make about the utility of culture, the nature of human-managed knowledge, race, and technology. I would like…
Hurricane Kyle Is Going Down East
Posted by Greg Laden on September 28, 2008 To go “down east” is to go “to Maine” … or if you are already in Maine, to go to the “real” Maine. As you drive down east on Route One, you can see the transition as clear as the gull shit on Schooner Head. This is to say, it is subtle and misleading. Geology,…
The Origins of the Evil Eye and Horticultural Fertility Cults?
Posted by Greg Laden on July 13, 2008 It has become axiomatic that the use of adornment by humans is some sort of symbolic act, and thus is linked to the human symbolic and linguistic mind. The human symbolic and linguistic mind is the trait that we axiomatically believe to be the derived human feature … the cladistic apomorphy that makes us human…
Why the Hobbits of Flores Were Probably Not Broken People
Posted by Greg Laden on March 6, 2008 There is a new paper out suggesting that the Flores hominids, known as Hobbits, were “human endemic cretins.” From the abstract of this paper: … We hypothesize that these individuals are myxoedematous endemic (ME) cretins, part of an inland population of (mostly unaffected) Homo sapiens. ME cretins are born without a functioning thyroid; their congenital…
The Potato and Human Evolution
Posted by Greg Laden on February 19, 2008 Fallback foods are the foods that an organism eats when it can’t find the good stuff. It has been suggested that adaptive changes in fallback food strategies can leave a more distinct mark on the morphology of an organism, including in the fossil record, than changes in preferred food strategies. This assertion is based on…
Life history trade-offs and human pygmies
Posted by Greg Laden on December 16, 2007 Every few years a paper comes out “explaining” short stature in one or more Pygmy groups. Most of the time the new work ads new information and new ideas but fails to be convincing. This is the case with the recent PNAS paper by Migliano et al. From the abstract:
Oral traditions effectively warn people about tsunamis and reduce mortality
Posted by Greg Laden on December 14, 2007 From a UC Santa Cruz Press Release: The infamous Indian Ocean tsunami that struck on December 26, 2004, caused tragically high mortality–from 10 to 90 percent of the population at various locations. Yet in 1930 a tsunami of similar size, generated by an earthquake near the Ninigo Islands, struck northern Papua New Guinea and killed…
The Bible as Ethnography ~ 05 ~ The Virgin Birth
Posted by Greg Laden on December 3, 2007 I have a cousin in law who tells this story: Her youngest child found out about sex. Then he made the connection that if he existed, his parents must have had sex. So he confronted the parents with this, and mom was forced to admit, yes, of course, this is how babies get “made” and…
, which is now available for the 
