A short trip to Europe and an anthropological mystery

El Cabrero has not traveled widely in Europe. To be exact, my travels there consist of a few very cool Italian cities and a German airport. But I feel like I spent a couple days there without crossing the Atlantic in Montreal, a place I could get used to.

Many pictures were taken, some of which may wind up here. But first, I may have stumbled upon an anthropological mystery...could it be that French Canadians represent the Lost Tribe of West Virginia hillbillies?

How else could you explain this?

Either binary or not

Portrait of the anthropologist as a young man. Claude Levi-Strauss in the 1930s. Image by way of wikipedia.

A few years back, and for reasons that now escape me, I went on a reading jag of books about anthropology, semiotics (the study of signs), structuralism, and literary theory.

I think I must have been really bored.

It was kind of amusing as long as I didn't take it too seriously. The Spousal Unit was probably right when she said to pretend like it was science fiction.

One person whose work I grappled with was French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who recently died at the age of 100. Not that I read all the way through his major tomes--even El Cabrero has his limits--but I read some snippets and several secondary works.

I probably missed a lot, but it seems to me like he was right about one of his major ideas (assuming I'm getting this right). The human mind seems to kind of like a fishing tackle box and we seem to be hardwired to classify things and put them in different compartments. Each culture seems to have its own classification system but the urge to classify remains the same.

The systems themselves are kind of arbitrary from the outside, with each part only having a meaning in relation to others within it. To use an example from linguistics, there is nothing about the symbols c-a-t that necessarily refer to a feline; it only does so within the context of the system of modern English.

We seem to be especially disposed towards binary categories: us/them, good/bad, raw/cooked, etc. Even when we try to break away from our cultural conditioning, we seem to substitute a different binary system for the old one.

As someone once said, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who break things into two major categories and those who don't. Like it or lump it...

DYING FOR HEALTH CARE. A new study from Johns Hopkins Children's Center found that uninsured children were 60 percent more likely to die after entering a hospital than those with insurance. This is probably because the uninsured typically don't receive preventive care and wait to seek treatment until there is a crisis.

TV NATION. Young children who watch a lot of television may be more disposed to aggressive behavior.

STATE BUDGET. West Virginia may be looking at budget shortfalls in excess of $100 million, although it is doing better than many other states. This highlights the need to make maximum use of funds available from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Houses and sniffles

A Rhinovirus, courtesy of wikipedia. I think they magnified it a time or two.

There is a large and growing body of scientific research about how things like inequality, class and social status engrave themselves into our bodies. Generally speaking, people in higher social positions are less likely to develop conditions like heart disease or diabetes than those in lower positions. The same affect seems to apply to infectious diseases as well.

In a fascinating study, healthy adults first answered questions about their socio-economic status (SES) and that of their parents when they were growing up. They were then exposed to one of two forms of rhinovirus (aka common cold viruses) and kept in quarantine to monitor the symptoms.

Here's a surprising finding:

For both viruses, susceptibility to colds decreased with the number of childhood years during which their parents owned their home...This decreased risk was attributable to both lower risk of infection and lower risk of illness in infected subjects. Moreover, those whose parents did not own their home during their early life but did during adolescence were at the same increased risk as those whose parents never owned their home. These associations were independent of parent education level, adult education and home ownership, and personality characteristics.

The researchers concluded that "A marker of low income and wealth during early childhood is associated with decreased resistance to upper respiratory infections in adulthood. Higher risk is not ameliorated by higher SES during adolescence and is independent of adult SES."

In other words, poverty or relative deprivation during early childhood can have negative health affects throughout a lifetime. That's something to think about now, as the recession has driven more families on a downward economic spiral.

SIGN OF THE TIMES. Half of all US children and 90 percent of African American young people do or will receive food stamps, according to a new study.

THIS NEEDS FIXED. The House version of health care reform would phase out the Children's Health Insurance Program. Senator Rockefeller is not amused. Nor is El Cabrero. This needs to be fixed in conference.

A FAMOUS UNREADABLE (FOR ME ANYWAY) ANTHROPOLOGIST has died at the age of 100.

HOW SMART ARE DOGS anyway?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Men into pigs

Circe offers the cup in this painting by John William Waterhouse by way of wikipedia. Think before you drink!

The theme at Goat Rope lately is the Odyssey of Homer, along with links and comments about current events. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier posts.

After a serious losing streak of one disaster or danger after another, Odysseus and his men get a little bit of a break on the island Aeaea, home of the beautiful nymph Circe.

It gets off to a rocky start though, when she encounters a recon party sent from the ship. When they visit her house, she welcomes them and offers them a meal, while slipping them the proverbial Mickey:

She opened her gleaming doors at once and stepped forth,
inviting them all in, and in they went, all innocence...
She ushered them in to sit on high-backed chairs,
then she mixed them a potion--cheese, barley
and pale honey mulled in Pramnian wine--
but into the brew she stirred her wicked drugs
to wipe from their memories any thought of home.
Once they'd drained the bowls she filled, suddenly
she struck with her want, drove them into her pigsties,
all of them bristling into swine--with grunts,
snouts--even their bodies, yes, and only
the men's minds stayed steadfast as before.
So off they went to their pens, sobbing, squealing
as Circe flung them acorns, cornel nuts and mast,
common fodder for hogs that root and roll in mud.

No doubt many female readers of this story over the ages probably wouldn't consider this to be much of a feat...

One man, Eurylochus, escapes and warns Odysseus, who heads in with his sword. This time, he gets a little help. The god Hermes warns him to take the herb moly with him as an antidote to her spells. When she brandishes her wand, he is to threaten with his sword. When she offers to share her bed, he must make her swear by the River Styx--the sacred oath of the gods--that she will not hurt him and will turn his men back into humans.

That's pretty much the way it goes down. After that, she tells him,

'Royal son of Laertes, Odysseus, man of action,
no more tears now, calm these tides of sorrow.
Well I know what pains you bore on the swarming sea,
what punishment you endured from hostile men on land.
But come now, eat your food and drink your wine
till the same courage fills your chests, now as then,
when you first set sail from native land, from rocky Ithaca
Now you are burnt-out husks, your spirits haggard, sere,
always brooding over your wanderings long and hard,
your hearts never lifting with any joy--
you suffered far too much.'

So begins a year of R&R: great food and wine, comfort and baths, not to mention daily dalliance with a goddess. Not a bad gig, all things considered.

Holy male fantasy, Batman!

This part of the story can be interpreted lots of ways. Peter Meineck, who has produced some excellent lectures on the classics for The Modern Scholar, suggests that at this point Odysseus needs to get in touch with the feminine after years of male violence. Staying for a year also means getting grounded and connected again to the cycle of the seasons.

Another way of looking at it is to note that it doesn't take much for Odysseus to forget all about his homecoming and his wife and child who have been waiting about 11 years by now. As Jonathan Shay notes in Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, many of the veterans he worked with

went through periods during the first decade after returning form Vietnam when they apparently did seek the solace that Circe specifically offers in wine, good food, and great sex.

Often, however, fantasy and reality don't quite match and the result is disappointment and disillusionment:

A real-world woman, in America, meeting a haggard combat veteran, might have been as understanding as Circe, but unlike Circe had no staff of serving women, had to consider how to pay to keep up the household, had a life with her own family and friends apart from the veteran.

At any rate, it sure beats getting eaten by a cyclops...

SEVEN YEARS AGO. I don't know about you, Gentle Reader, but the anniversary of 9/11 reminds me of the victims but also makes me wonder where we'd be now if the US had pursued a wiser course in its wake.

JOBS VS ENVIRONMENT? Not really. Investing green technology and infrastructure could create 2 million jobs, according to a new report.

A NEW LOOK AT RELIGION. Here's an interesting take on religion based on a study by two anthropologists studying religious behavior and communication. Short version: it tends to promote social cooperation and childlike acceptance of validity claims.

STRESS. A Cambridge (UK) study found the West Virginians had the highest percentage of stressed out people in the nation.

DID YOU TAKE YOUR MORALITY PILL TODAY? A British psychiatrist has proposed the use of morality-enhancing medication.

DOGS AND CATS LIVING TOGETHER--MASS HYSTERIA. Israeli researchers have been studying how well cats and dogs get along when introduced in the same home. Each animal has a different set of body signals but some can learn to "read" the other's. I could have told y'all that.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

ARRIGATO!

Caption: "...how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child..." King Lear

The theme of this week's Goat Rope--yesterday's possum recipe excepted--is gratitude and ingratitude. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier posts.

It is El Cabrero's theory that the key to a sense of gratitude is a pessimistic streak. When you realize that things can be and often are really, really bad, it makes you appreciate it when they're not.

One of my pet peeves is the temperamental ingratitude of some activist types. These are the people who, when you work you @$$ off for some small victory, complain that it didn't go far enough.

An example that happened almost two years ago was our WV campaign to raise the minimum wage. After one hell of a fight, we finally did. There were all kinds of loopholes and it only covered a small fraction of minimum wage workers--maybe 2000 at first.

There were those who complained about it and were dismissive of it. (Usually these weren't the people who really worked hard on it.) It made me wonder whether perhaps they were spoiled brats as children who were used to getting anything they wanted.

I wasn't raised that way.

I was happy we could impact that many people. And that little win added momentum to the eventually successful effort to raise it at the national level.

El Cabrero has two rules of gratitude when it comes to working for social justice:

One, savor the small victories. They may be all you get. In Monday's post, I quoted one of Alice Walker's characters who said it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field and don't notice it. Little victories are part of the color purple.

Two, stop for a minute and think of all the nasty things that have happened all too frequently to people who challenged the status quo. If that's not happening right here and right now, then be grateful, dammit.

And by the way, you're welcome....

CAN I HAVE ONE? This came out a couple of days ago but the thought of an 8 foot sea scorpion is pretty cool.

A FRIEND IN THE WHITEHOUSE? It happened at least one once. Here's Bill Moyers on FDR.

ANTHROPOLOGY GOES TO WAR in more ways than one. Here's the latest in the ongoing controversy over the use of social sciences by the military in the Human Terrain System program.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

RENEGADES, HERETICS AND DISSENTERS

Caption: There's one of each.

Along with links and comments about current events, the theme of this week's Goat Rope is the sociology of conflict. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

Basically, this week El Cabrero has been strip-mining Lewis Coser's (1913-2003)sociological classic, The Functions of Social Conflict, which was published in 1956. It holds up pretty well after more than 50 years.

Coser had some interesting ideas about how different groups handle internal conflicts. Generally, open societies and loosely knit groups can handle lots of conflict without threatening the overall consensus:

In flexible social structures, multiple conflicts crisscross each other and thereby prevent basic cleavages along one axis. The multiple group affiliations of individuals makes them participate in various group conflicts so that their total personalities are not involved in any single one of them. Thus segmental participation in a multiplicity of conflicts constitutes a balancing mechanism within the structure.

In loosely structured groups and open societies, conflict, which aims at a resolution of tension between antagonists, is likely to have stabilizing and integrative functions for the relationship. By permitting immediate and direct expression of rival claims, such social systems are able to readjust their structures by eliminating the sources of dissatisfaction. The multiple conflicts which they experience may serve to eliminate the causes for dissociation and to re-establish unity. These systems avail themselves, through the toleration and institutionalisation of conflict, of an important stabilizing mechanism.

In totalitarian societies or sectarian groups (religious, political or otherwise), internal conflicts or antagonisms are often repressed. Often groups like this define themselves as being in conflict with other groups and need some kind of external enemy to function. If one isn't readily available, it will have to be invented. If internal conflict does break out, it is likely to be very intense and could threaten the group as a whole.

For example, if someone in such a group goes over to "the enemy," this threatens the boundaries of the in-group:

Therefore the group must fight the renegade with all its might since he threatens symbolically, if not in fact, its existence as an ongoing concern. In the religious sphere, for example, apostasy strikes at the very life of a church, hence the violence of denunciation of the apostate contained in the pronouncements of the early Church fathers or in rabbinical statements from the time of the Maccabees onward.

Even more threatening than the apostate is the heretic, i.e. someone who claims to uphold the values of the group in a different way. Heretics threaten to split the group. Hostility to heretics (religious, political or otherwise) is often even greater than hostility to renegades:

It is less dangerous for a group if the one who breaks with it goes over to the enemy than if, as a heretic, he forms his own rival group...

The contrast between open and closed groups is pretty stark in the case of handing dissent. In flexible groups and open societies, crisscrossing conflicts and different tendencies can actually help hold the group together.

In closed societies or sects, internal dissent is seen as dangerous and will be suppressed or repressed. Instead of allowing realistic conflicts to take place, they may engage in scapegoating or other kinds of unrealistic conflicts as a safety valve. If the conflict ever manages to surface, it's likely to be nasty and threaten the group's survival.

Given the choice, I prefer an open society...

SCREWED UP PRIORITIES DEPARTMENT. This item from Wired Science contrasts the costs of CHIP with that of two months of the Iraq war. I used some different numbers and came up with something slightly different: six weeks of war=$35 billion for CHIP but the point is the same.

CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? Just before vetoing the Children's Health Insurance Program, President Bush proclaimed Oct. 1 Child Health Day...

THE GOOD GUYS. Here's an op-ed from the Washington Post about the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a truly outstanding group that has done a great job of advocating for low income and working families. We are in the early stages of setting up an affiliated group in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia.

CREATIONISM IN EUROPE may be a non-starter according to Wired Science.

REASON #9763 why we need the Employee Free Choice Act...and a new NLRB.

JOHNNY, GET YOUR ETHNOLOGIST. Here's an item about the Human Terrain Team, which involves anthropologists working with U.S. military units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Whatever the politics and ethics involved may entail, El Cabrero is still reeling from the fact that anthropology has become a practical major.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

PROVERBS OF HELL

Caption: "The lust of the goat is the bounty of God."--Blake (Note: God was not available for comment.)

Welcome to William Blake Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier entries.

As mentioned yesterday, one of Blake's strongest and oddest works is The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

To put it mildly, Blake had a unique way of looking at the world. He saw Heaven as representing passivity and reason and hell as representing energy and activity. He thought we needed some of both.

Some of his oddest sayings from this work are called The Proverbs of Hell. Yesterday's post included a few of these. Here are some more:

The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

Expect poison from the standing water.

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

Listen to the fools reproach! it is a kingly title!

As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.

To create a little flower is the labour of ages.

Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of Genius.

Some of the rest are even odder than these. Check them out and enjoy!

And here's a parting shot:

One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression

ANTHROPOLOGY UPDATE. El Cabrero is still reeling from the fact that anthropology is actually a practical college major these days. Back in the Paleozoic era of my days at (we are) Marshall, being an anthropology major meant you weren't thinking too hard about a day job. Recently, as blogged here, social scientists and ethnologists have been recruited both by major corporations (from science to marketing) and by the military.

However, a new ad hoc group has formed called the Network of Concern Anthropologists. They have issues a statement urging fellow social scientists not to participate in the war in Iraq. Excerpt:

The War in Iraq has created a dangerous situation not only for the nation but also for the discipline of anthropology. The Department of Defense and allied agencies are mobilizing anthropologists for interventions in the Middle East and beyond. It is likely that larger, more permanent initiatives are in the works.

I think our so-called leaders might be a little less inclined to imperial hubris if they had a better understanding of other cultures and of social science generally, but I doubt that social scientists could play a critical role if they just another part of the system.

TENS OF THOUSANDS of people converged on Jena, Louisiana protesting the treatment of the "Jena 6" high school students by the criminal justice system after a series of racial conflicts was sparked after white students hung nooses from a tree.

IN CASE YOU EVER WONDERED how baby sea turtles spent their formative years, the answer is here.

SPEAKING OF THE IRAQ WAR, which was a really bad idea, the number of internal refugees there is now estimated at 2 million.

I KNOW THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE AN ECONOMIC JUSTICE BLOG, but remember those Indonesian "hobbit" bones found a few years back? Well, on the basis of more discoveries, they appear to have been a distinct species that branched off from our kin around 800,000 years ago and lived in caves 120,000 to 10,000 years ago.

SPEAKING OF GOAT ROPES, here's an article on WV's "revamped" Medicaid program.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

KANT DO IT

Welcome to Immanuel Kant Week at Goat Rope. All posts this week will relate somehow to the Prussian philosopher who lived between 1724 and 1804 (and will include snarky comments about current events). If this is your first visit, please click on yesterday's post.

Kant is probably best known for his works on the theory of knowledge and morality, but he had some fascinating things to say about other stuff too. This week, El Cabrero is particularly interested in his philosophy of history as outlined in the amazingly readable (for him) essay, Idea for a Universal History With a Cosmopolitan Purpose.

When you look back at the history of humanity and look out at current events, things can seem pretty bleak, especially if things keep rolling along their merry way. But Kant, child (and father) of the Enlightenment that he was, thought something else--and something better--was possible:

if we attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, we may be able to discern a regular movement in it, and what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment.

It's a lot harder to believe in historical progress in the 21st century than it was in the 18th, but Kant wasn't as naive as he seems. The basic idea behind the essay seems to be that nature or God or the Tao has so endowed the human race that our very nastiness will, over time, compel us to get our act together.

Individuals, and even whole peoples think little on this. Each, according to his own inclination, follows his own purpose, often in opposition to others; yet each individual and people, as if following some guiding thread, go toward a natural but to each of them an unknown goal; all work toward furthering it, even if they would set little store by it if they did know it.

Here's how his argument starts. While human lives considered individually are pretty short, the life of the human race is pretty long. At least it wasn't over at the time of this writing. The talents and gains made by individuals and groups accrue over time to humanity itself.

Nature has further constructed us in such a way that we are not perfectly adapted to the world but have to work at it:

Man...was not to be guided by instinct, not nurtured and instructed with ready-made knowledge; rather he should bring forth everything out of his own resources. Securing his food, shelter, safety and defense (for which Nature gave him neither the horns of the bull, nor the claws of the lion, nor the fangs of the dog, but hands only), all amusement which can make life pleasant, insight and intelligence, finally even goodness of heart--all this should be wholly his own work...it seems not to have concerned Nature that he should live well, but only that he should work himself upward so as to make himself, through his own actions, worthy of life and of well-being.

Next time: nastiness as the road to niceness...

COAL MINE SAFETY. J. Davitt McAteer, currently of Wheeling Jesuit University and former head of the federal mine safety agency MSHA as well as special advisor to Governor Manchin in the wake of the 2006 mine disasters in West Virginia, gave a speech this weekend at a gathering of the American Friends Service Committee in Charleston. Here's the transcript of the coverage by West Virginia Public Radio.

ANTHROPOLOGISTS ON THE MARCH. El Cabrero is still reeling from the fact that anthropology has become a practical college major. Now the military is a major customer. Here's the latest.

ARREST THAT SQUIRREL! No, I did not make this one up:

Bushy-tailed squirrels may look innocuous, but according to a report coming out of Iran, over a dozen of the furry critters were detained near the country's border on suspicion of espionage. That's right, the rodents are alleged to have have been rigged with high-tech spying equipment (or so say the news reports picking up on this story):...

I've noticed recently that squirrel activity has spiked at Goat Rope Farm. Hmmmm...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED