Anthropological Niche

An article at Neuroanthropology reviews a piece of research that, quite simply, failed.  The researchers pushed a survey onto an online community with no IRB oversight, faulty questions, etc...  As per the article:

Neuroscience researchers Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam have done a massive FAIL through bad research, failed ethics, and greed. They created an online survey targeted at slash fiction fans that was a debacle start to finish.

Slash fiction takes prominent characters from movies, television, and fiction and explores their relationships in unconventional ways. The founding example is Kirk/Spock, where the slash indicates a story about Kirk and Spock getting it on. The creators and consumers of slash fiction are generally women.

Earlier this year Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam signed a deal with Penguin for a popular book with the initial title “Rule 34: What Netporn Teaches Us about the Brain.” Rule 34 is simply that online “If it exists, there is porn on it. No exceptions.”

Slash fiction fans became one of their “netporn” targets. Ogas and Gaddam created and distributed their online survey that aimed to prove their basic premise (well, my take on it): “When in doubt, the brain causes everything. When that’s something we don’t really understand, then it must be the primitive parts of the brain.”

Biology has already debunked the myth that race is genetic, now they are tackling ethnicity.  Anthropologists have been arguing for over one hundred years that race and ethnicity are cultural categories, but it is going to take the biologists to provide genetic evidence.

In a new article (Evelyne Heyer, Patricia Balaresque, Mark A Jobling, Lluis Quintana-Murci, Raphaelle Chaix, Laure Segurel, Almaz Aldashev and Tanya Hegay. Genetic diversity and the emergence of ethnic groups in Central Asia. BMC Genetics, 2009) as reviewed by Science Daily:

Evelyne Heyer, from the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, France, led an international team of researchers who studied mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome data from several populations of two major language ethnic groups of Central Asia, the Turkic and Indo-Iranian groups.

She said: "Our results indicate that, for at least two of the Turkic groups in Central Asia, ethnicity is a constructed social system maintaining genetic boundaries with other groups, rather than being the outcome of common genetic ancestry."

The boundaries used by individuals to distinguish themselves from members of other ethnic groups are generally cultural, linguistic, economic, religious and political. Heyer and her colleagues confirm the absence of common ancestry in a specific ethnic group; there were on average more differences between members of the same ethnic group than there were between groups.

According to a Western Morning News article, anthropologist Mark Turin argues that all languages should be conserved, not just non-western tribal languages.  From the article:

Dr Mark Turin, a research associate in social anthropology, is heading up the World Oral Literature Project, which aims to create lasting records of traditional languages.

The project, in association with Cambridge University's Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, aims to capture the poetry, myths, stories and folk songs of ancient languages on a variety of media.

But although grants are being given to tribes and groups around the world, no money will be allocated to UK groups, although Dr Turin admits that along with Breton, Welsh and Gaelic, Cornish is a threatened language.

He said: "People often think it's often only tribal cultures that are under threat.

"But all over Europe there are pockets of traditional communities and speech forms that have become extinct.

"It is the domain of stronger nation states with better resources to look after their own indigenous tongues, through Welsh language TV and Breton literature.

"Given our small team, we are focusing on the indigenous people who do not have the funding to help themselves."

The value of having diagrams to explain data is dramatically increased when the diagram can explain more than, perhaps, a thousand words... (click on the image for larger samples)

There is a new program search feature on the American Anthropological Association web site that is useful for finding presentations, posters and even sessions that might be of interest to conference attendees.  There are still some bugs to work out and eventually, or so I'm told, author names will appear in the results.  It also will be continuosly updated as presentations are cancelled.  The best feature (I always used to just search the pdf version of the program...) is that you can create your own itenerary and view it on your moble phone!

Now I'll just shamelessly plug my own session!