Ethnography
gregladen | November 23, 2016What is Thanksgiving?
Thanksgiving is a feast. But what is a feast? Anthropology is all about examining ourselves through the lens of other cultures. Or, at least, that's what we used to do back in the good old days. Let's have a look at this great American holiday from this perspective and see what we see.
A traditional feast in Venezuela
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…
gregladen | April 20, 2013All 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 is probably true that tropical and subtropical foragers obtain more of their calories from plants than from meat over any reasonable amount of time. The meat consists primarily of mammals for most groups, but fish, birds, reptiles, and invertebrates can reach high…
gregladen | November 22, 2012Today 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.
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 attempts to enter your village but is stopped by guards. They converse briefly and the guards allow the man to crawl into…
gregladen | August 4, 2012It seems like everybody in the Old Testament is either married, about to get married, or was recently married but something went terribly wrong. This may be becasue the bible is about marriage. The Old Testament is a history, it is a set of laws, and it is an enthnography, and the themes themes that hold the whole thing together are warfare, resorces, marriage, and a heavy dose of odd cultish rule-making about food and blood. Marriage is a central theme of cultural life, so of course it plays an important role in a culture's own history and ethnography. But is the bible, as one example of…
gregladen | August 22, 2011Speaking of people eating insects ... as we were ... I do have this fun story from the Ituri Forest.
One day something funny happened. I was traveling in the most remote part of Central Africa, several days walk from any place you could possibly drive a car, visiting uncharted villages mainly occupied by people who had moved into the deep forest because they were in trouble with the "law" in some way (usually for perfectly good reasons in this lawless country). I was traveling with a Lese Villager and his sister, who was hired as our cook, and three Efe Pygmy men. We visited a village that…
gregladen | August 19, 2011I 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."
Every one has seen those National Geographic specials where some natives somewhere are eating insects, and of course, Westerners who think they generally don't eat insects are fascinated with the idea. Of course, Westerners eat a lot more insects than they think. You should really consider any processed food you eat that started out as a plant crop to be part insect. If what you are eating is made…
gregladen | August 18, 2011that 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 ...
Many, though certainly not all, insects are linked to important things in life. This is true of many things that are not insects as well. For instance, one does not walk to the right of a young male Canarium tree in the afternoon, because he who shall not be named could be sitting in the tree, and then you're screwed. Or, one should not handle the fetus of an antelope if any females in your family are planning on getting pregnant soon…
gregladen | August 18, 2011I 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 a little. First, she would Uganda and Congo as "Africa" (which is technically correct, but I've yet to hear of someone saying "I'll spend Spring Break in North America" on their way to Cancun) and she'd always say "The thing about Africa is that there's no place to sit down."
It turns out that there are plenty of chairs and…
gregladen | August 7, 2011I 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 soap box by those raising money to spread this or that word. Most Europeans and Americans don't know it, but many people who live in the Congo are quite convinced that the bazunga ... the white foreigners ... are cannibals. I've listened closely these assertions, made by many individuals, and I'…
gregladen | May 22, 2011It's all just a matter of calibration. Let me 'splain.
One day I was driving along a suburban street with the sun low on the horizon and the windows covered in rain drops from a sudden sun-shower moments earlier, insufficiently caffeinated and distracted by something. That's when I saw a large black dog transmogrify into a lawn mower. No, seriously, I really did see this. It reminded me of the time I saw a giant UFO over Boston Harbor (details here: The Night I Was Almost Abducted by Aliens in Boston).
What happened with the dog was this: The distraction was a set of children and other…
gregladen | February 2, 2011Once 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:
gregladen | January 26, 2011There 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.
Most simply defined, a human universal is a trait, behavior or cultural feature that we find in all human societies. Men are always on average larger than women. All humans see the same exact range of colors because our eyes are the same. The range of emotions experienced by people is the same, and appears in facial expressions and other outward affect, in the same way across all humans.
The term "Human Universal"…
gregladen | January 2, 2011But 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 of weeks ago during the Vikings game congealed like mucus in the back of your throat when you are getting over a cold (See Pandemonium Looms in Minneapolis). So, since I have a blog, I thought I'd hack it up for you.
Chris Kluwe is the beloved kicker for the Vikings. I don't really…
gregladen | December 10, 2010It 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.
As an anthropologist living with the Efe Pygmies of the Ituri Forest, I often found myself observing some thing ... an object, a construction of some type, or a behavior ... that utterly baffled me. I learned to avoid asking about things as questions occurred to me; The very asking of a question, especially if you are roughly the equivalent of an alien visitor (an extraordinarily wealthy giant scary white being with highly advanced…
gregladen | November 25, 2010The 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 attempts to enter your village but is stopped by guards. They converse briefly and the guards allow the man to crawl into your village through the only opening in the surrounding wall left following preparations for possible attack. The man walks into the center of the plaza and…
gregladen | October 12, 2010Or, 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 Pleistocene with today's behavior in the modern predator-free food-rich world. And, it is a very sound argument. If, by "sound" you mean "sounds good unless you listen really hard."
I list this argument among the falsehoods, but really, this is a category of argument…
gregladen | August 8, 2010Georges 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 globally at a very low point (with vast quantities of the Earth's water busy being ice), and at that time George's Bank would have been a highland region on the very edge of the North American continent, extending via a lower ridge to eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and…
gregladen | December 5, 2009My review.
The last movie of this genre I watched had Christopher Lee as the Werewolf Hunter. In this movie, the Werewolves engaged in a periodic orgy in which a newly converted nubile female would would be converted into a wolf-like form to have repeated dog-like copulations with a male vampire-wolf counterpart under the observation of the king and/or queen vampire and a dwarf. Or something like that. I came in during the middle of the movie and never quite got it. But it was obvious, and this is always true in traditional vampire and werewolf movies, that the Catholic Church is very…
gregladen | November 30, 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 few days, which she surely will.
There is a mud fight going on over at Ed Brayton's blog regarding his use of the word "shrew" in reference to Sarah Palin. The Kliqueons (rhymes with "Klingons") have called Ed out for being sexist. He says they should lay off and it is not OK to call him a…
gregladen | 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 to several behavioral traits or tendencies. Also, a pair of twins separated at birth and raised up in very different cultures are likely to exhibit more differences than similarities owing to the different cultures but perhaps some set of seemingly uncanny…