Shunya's Notes

The Art of the Gonds

I had a pleasant exchange recently with Dr. Michael Yorke, British anthropologist, filmmaker, and Senior Tutor of Ethnographic Film, University College London. In the course of a discussion that began with my Kumbh Mela film, Michael pointed me to the Adivasi Arts Trust, "an organisation that promotes awareness of Indian tribal culture, and works with the tribes involving them in digital media projects to make their arts more widely accessible." AAT works with some of the nearly 400 Adivasi communities that survive in various parts of India.

Googling then led me to Michael's short film on the art of the Gond people of Central India and a workshop in Bhopal where "a group of Pardhan Gond artists worked with Leslie MacKenzie and Tara Douglas to create an animated cartoon of their own folkstory" (parts one, two). Read more about the remarkable Gond Animation Workshop, participating Gond artists, some Gond folktales, and samples of their music and dance. Other folk stories covered include those of the indigenous people of Nagaland and neighboring states.

'River of Faith' meets Amazon

Folks, it turns out that River of Faith has done well, amassing 27K views on YouTube in its first 3 weeks [and 75K at the end of 6 weeks]. Which means it has even bested a whole lot of cat videos! Furthermore, I've been persuaded to offer it on Amazon.com for those who like DVDs, including institutions. Check out the DVD cover below (sans barcode and DVD logo). This should be up on Amazon in early April and ready to ship within days (I'll announce when it is). Also, for the first time ever, a magazine introduced me last week as "a documentary filmmaker". Watch out, you documentary filmmakers! :)

Update (25 April, 2013): The DVD on Amazon is now shipping!

State of the Species

Charles C. Mann discusses how homo sapiens, from very humble beginnings devoid of language or symbol use, went from anatomically to behaviorally modern humans, becoming thereafter a highly successful species — so successful that it now risks wiping itself out, unless ...

Homo sapiens emerged on the planet about 200,000 years ago, researchers believe. From the beginning, our species looked much as it does today. If some of those long-ago people walked by us on the street now, we would think they looked and acted somewhat oddly, but not that they weren’t people. But those anatomically modern humans were not, as anthropologists say, behaviorally modern. Those first people had no language, no clothing, no art, no religion, nothing but the simplest, unspecialized tools. They were little more advanced, technologically speaking, than their predecessors—or, for that matter, modern chimpanzees. (The big exception was fire, but that was first controlled by Homo erectus, one of our ancestors, a million years ago or more.) Our species had so little capacity for innovation that archaeologists have found almost no evidence of cultural or social change during our first 100,000 years of existence. Equally important, for almost all that time these early humans were confined to a single, small area in the hot, dry savanna of East Africa (and possibly a second, still smaller area in southern Africa).

But now jump forward 50,000 years. East Africa looks much the same. So do the humans in it—but suddenly they are drawing and carving images, weaving ropes and baskets, shaping and wielding specialized tools, burying the dead in formal ceremonies, and perhaps worshipping supernatural beings. They are wearing clothes—lice-filled clothes, to be sure, but clothes nonetheless. Momentously, they are using language. And they are dramatically increasing their range. Homo sapiens is exploding across the planet.

What caused this remarkable change?

More here.

Robert Sapolsky: Are Humans Just Another Primate?

A thought-provoking lecture by Robert Sapolsky, professor of neurobiology and primatology at Stanford, in which he tries to discern, to the best of our knowledge, what it is that separates us from other animals. He narrates lots of fascinating experimental results from recent decades. This lecture, archived on Fora.tv, is one of several in a series called Being Human: Connecting to Our Ancient Ancestors.

Leslie Chang on China's Workers

In this TED talk, journalist Leslie T. Chang focuses on the migrant factory workers of China — mostly young women who make our shoes, handbags, computers, and cellphones — in the industrial city of Dongguan. The stories she tells are from their perspective: how do they see their own lives, what aspirations do they have, what do they complain about. If you like this talk, also check out this longer talk with many more absorbing stories followed by an audience Q&A. Chang is the author of Factory Girls, which covers this subject matter in more detail. 

How Culture Drove Human Evolution

In this engaging piece, Joseph Henrich argues that the rise of cumulative culture in our ancestral lineage contributed to our genetic evolution, starting as far back as 1.8 million years ago with the earliest of the Homo line, i.e., Homo habilis and Homo erectus. Henrich's approach differs from how most "people thinking about human evolution have approached this as a two-part puzzle, as if there was a long period of genetic evolution until either 10,000 years ago or 40,000 years ago, depending on who you're reading, and then only after that did culture matter, and often little or no consideration given to a long period of interaction between genes and culture."

The main questions I've been asking myself over the last couple years are broadly about how culture drove human evolution. Think back to when humans first got the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution—and by this I mean the ability for ideas to accumulate over generations, to get an increasingly complex tool starting from something simple. One generation adds a few things to it, the next generation adds a few more things, and the next generation, until it's so complex that no one in the first generation could have invented it. This was a really important line in human evolution, and we've begun to pursue this idea called the cultural brain hypothesis—this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information.

More here (via 3QD). You can either listen to a video of his talk or read its transcript. Also checkout a set of related papers.

God and the Ivory Tower

Scott Atran on how science should approach religion, esp. in an age where religious faith continues to grow around the world (hint: not how the so-called New Atheists do it). The excerpt below will surprise those who think religion is the leading cause of conflict in human history.

Moreover, the chief complaint against religion -- that it is history's prime instigator of intergroup conflict -- does not withstand scrutiny. Religious issues motivate only a small minority of recorded wars. The Encyclopedia of Wars surveyed 1,763 violent conflicts across history; only 123 (7 percent) were religious. A BBC-sponsored "God and War" audit, which evaluated major conflicts over 3,500 years and rated them on a 0-to-5 scale for religious motivation (Punic Wars = 0, Crusades = 5), found that more than 60 percent had no religious motivation. Less than 7 percent earned a rating greater than 3. There was little religious motivation for the internecine Russian and Chinese conflicts or the world wars responsible for history's most lethal century of international bloodshed.

Indeed, inclusive concepts such as "humanity" arguably emerged with the rise of universal religions. Sociologist Rodney Stark reveals that early Christianity became the Roman Empire's majority religion not through conquest, but through a social process grounded in trust. Repeated acts of altruism, such as caring for non-Christians during epidemics, facilitated the expansion of social networks that were invested in the religion. Likewise, studies by behavioral economist Joseph Henrich and colleagues on contemporary foragers, farmers, and herders show that professing a world religion is correlated with greater fairness toward passing strangers. This research helps explain what's going on in sub-Saharan Africa, where Islam is spreading rapidly. In Rwanda, for example, people began converting to Islam in droves after Muslims systematically risked their lives to protect Christians and animists from genocide when few others cared.

More here.

Grist and Mills: On the Cultural Origins of Cultural Learning

In this provocative paper, sure to annoy evolutionary psychologists, Cecilia Hayes argues that the "cognitive processes that comprise cultural learning are themselves culturally inherited; they are cultural adaptations [rather than genetic adaptations]. They are products as well as producers of cultural evolution." Here is the abstract (and my two recent related posts are here and here):

Cumulative cultural evolution is what ‘makes us odd’; our capacity to learn facts and techniques from others, and to refine them over generations, plays a major role in making human minds and lives radically different from those of other animals. In this article I discuss cognitive processes that are known collectively as ‘cultural learning’ because they enable cumulative cultural evolution. These cognitive processes include reading, social learning, imitation, teaching, social motivation, and theory of mind. Taking the first of these three types of cultural learning as examples, I ask whether and to what extent these cognitive processes have been adapted genetically or culturally to enable cumulative cultural evolution. I find that recent empirical work in comparative psychology, developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience provides surprisingly little evidence of genetic adaptation, and ample evidence of cultural adaptation. This raises the possibility that it is not only ‘grist’ but also ‘mills’ that are culturally inherited; through social interaction in the course of development, we not only acquire facts about the world and how to deal with it (grist), we also build the cognitive processes that make ‘fact inheritance’ possible (mills).

Humankind's Best Friend

Dogs may have been a better friend to humanity than we ever realized, according to an article by Dr. Pat Shipman in American Scientist. They may have played a crucial role in helping modern humans outcompete our Neanderthal cousins.

Many theories have been proposed for why Neanderthals couldn't seem to compete with the invaders, when modern humans arrived in Europe some 35-45,000 years ago, including climate change, the newcomers' better social organization, or their greater facility for language. But new lines of evidence are beginning to suggest another possibility: that it might have been the domesticated dog that gave H. sapiens sapiens the edge over Neanderthals (and, one must presume, Denisovans). There's now mounting evidence that modern humans were domesticating dogs by 35,000 years ago, during the same period when modern human populations began to increase and Neanderthal populations were in decline. Dogs were used for hunting and as pack animals, as they are used even into modern times by some groups. Studies reveal that dogs can significantly increase the success of a hunt and the amount of meat brought in to a community who uses them.

If the dogs carried the meat, humans would have saved a lot of energy, so each kill would have provided a greater net gain in food—even after feeding the dogs. Additional food generally has marked effects on the health of a group. Better-fed females can have more babies, can provide them with more milk and can have babies at shorter intervals. Before long, using pack dogs could have caused the human population to increase.

Dogs may also have contributed more directly to human hunting success. To discover how big a difference dogs could make, Vesa Ruusila and Mauri Pesonen of the Finnish Game and Fisheries Institute investigated what may be the closest easily studied analog to a mammoth hunt: the Finnish moose hunt. Finns use large dogs such as Norwegian elkhounds or Finnish spitzes to find moose and keep them in place by barking until humans can approach and shoot them. In hunting groups of fewer than 10 people, the average carcass weight per hunter without dogs was 8.4 kilograms per day. With dogs, the yield went up to 13.1 kilograms per hunter per day—an increase of 56 percent.

Shipman reminds us, too, that domestication is a two-way street: as dogs were selected to communicate better with humans, there might have been selective pressure making humans also better able to communicate with dogs. Interestingly, humans have a unique feature among living primates, which might have aided in our domestication of canids: the whites of our eyes.

The mutation causing white sclerae is universal in humans, but it turns up occasionally in apes, too. In decades of observations at Gombe National Park in Tanzania, Jane Goodall observed two chimps, probably brothers, who had white sclerae. A third, female chimp developed white sclerae as an adult. But the trait has not spread or reappeared in that population. The advantage of the white sclerae must be related to something that ancient humans did commonly and chimps don’t do or do rarely. Although chimps hunt small prey, often cooperatively, meat makes up less than 2 percent of their diet, whereas Paleolithic humans hunted much larger game that apparently provided a significant part of their diet. Obviously, silent communication among humans would be advantageous for hunting in groups. But there is another skilled gaze-reader: the domestic dog.

A dog will follow the gaze of a videotaped human if the human first attracts the dog’s attention by speaking to it and looking at it, according to results published by Ernõ Téglás, of the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and his colleagues. Indeed, dogs perform as well as human infants at following the gaze of a speaker in tests in which the speaker’s head is held still.

But why didn't Neanderthals domesticate dogs? We might wonder. Could it be that, like other extant primates, they also didn't have visible sclerae, putting them at a disadvantage with the wolves?

More here.

The Slow Explosion of Speech

In this review of James R. Hurford's The Origins of Grammar, Nick Enfield presents a significant viewpoint on how we humans, from a stage when our ancestors were without language, came to acquire language in all its modern complexity.

If you could travel back to a time around the dawn of humankind, and if you encountered a people there whose only form of language was a list of one-word interjections like Yuck, Wow, Oops, Hey!, No, and Huh?, would you say that these people were of a different species, not quite human? Would they be like today’s apes that simply don’t have it in them to fully acquire a modern human language? Or would they be the same as us only less well equipped for communication, like the eighteenth-century man who is every bit human but happens not to have been born in a world with telephones? If the latter were true, then language would be more technology than biology, more something we build than something that grows. It’s clear that the earliest humans did not possess language as we know it. The question is whether this was because language as we know it hadn’t yet been invented.

In James R. Hurford’s towering account of our species’ path from being once without language to now being emphatically with it, he proposes that just such a monophrase language of the Yuck/Wow variety was an important early human achievement. And, Hurford argues, while our earliest forms of language had no grammatical rules by which words were combined to form sentences, they were far from primitive call systems.

More here. Also see this 3QD thread for a discussion on language, syntax, and symbol use among animals, where I've weighed in too.

Is There a Universal Grammar?

Do humans have an innate universal grammar, i.e., are we all born with certain foundational rules of language "hard-wired" in our brain—and which we don't need to learn? The dominant theory in linguistics, long associated with Noam Chomsky, says yes. However, this is not entirely accepted in the field, and challengers have only increased. Many now lean away from innate universal rules, and towards innate capacities or instincts that are shaped by culture into rules. Here is an excellent article on the debate and the work of a leading challenger, Dan Everett.

A Christian missionary sets out to convert a remote Amazonian tribe. He lives with them for years in primitive conditions, learns their extremely difficult language, risks his life battling malaria, giant anacondas, and sometimes the tribe itself. In a plot twist, instead of converting them he loses his faith, morphing from an evangelist trying to translate the Bible into an academic determined to understand the people he's come to respect and love.

Along the way, the former missionary discovers that the language these people speak doesn't follow one of the fundamental tenets of linguistics, a finding that would seem to turn the field on its head, undermine basic assumptions about how children learn to communicate, and dethrone the discipline's long-reigning king, who also happens to be among the most well-known and influential intellectuals of the 20th century.

More here. Some discussion on this article, including by Everett, took place here. This builds upon a really good New Yorker essay from 2007, The Interpreter (which carried the photo above). Also check out The Myth of Language Universals, which argues that the "claims of Universal Grammar ... are either empirically false, unfalsifiable, or misleading in that they refer to tendencies rather than strict universals."

Cuevas del Pomier

The Pomier Caves are located within a ragged limestone quarry a few miles north of San Cristobal in the Dominican Republic. When we visited earlier this month, it took us some time to find them, since there is no signage indicating the way to these 55 protected caves, nor that they represent the largest collection of ancient rock art in the Caribbean. Inside the caves the 6,000 pictographs and petroglyphs—the oldest of which date to about 2,000 years ago—were created over a period of 1,500 years by the Taino, Carib, and Igneri peoples. They had inhabited Hispaniola and the other Caribbean islands beginning about 8,000 years ago until their cultures were destroyed by European colonization, starting in 1492.

We visited the first three caves, guided by the local ranger. Inside the air was fresh enough to breathe easily, though it was humid, and in some spaces we saw bats darting around. It was absolutely dark and we could not have made any progress without the aid of our guide and a few flashlights. The floor of the cave started out wide, smooth, and flat, but as we went deeper into the caves systems, passing from one into the next, the going often got more challenging, the way suddenly littered with jagged rocks. Here we had to scramble up a jumble of small boulders. There we had to slide down a dry wash. Around us, the beams of our flashlights revealed deep passageways and cavernous chambers. Great stalactites clinging to the ceiling and walls, stalagmites spiking up from the floor, gave the interiors a lushly organic irregularity, like the inside of a monster's gullet. And as we walked, the guide pointed out the drawings on the walls around us. We were allowed to photograph only a single group (photo above), using our flashlights for illumination; we were permitted to use the camera flash only if it was not aimed at the drawings.

   

The drawings are mostly monochromatic line art, in "ink" made from a mixture of charcoal and animal fat, although there are also a few low relief etchings in some of the caves. They depict birds, lizards, human figures, and abstract designs. Many of the human figures appear to be holding long wands or pipes to their faces. Little is known about what the images actually depict, why they were painted, what they mean, or what purpose they served, since the cultures that created them were destroyed hundreds of years before the caves were rediscovered in the mid-nineteenth century. However, based on apparent similarities with surviving tribes in Venezuela, archaeologists speculate that the figures of people holding long sticks to their faces might be representations of individuals snorting cahoba, a hallucinogenic substance that is inhaled through long pipes. Shamans may have drawn on the cave walls whatever was revealed to them during their cahoba ritual.

It was spine-tingling to be sitting there, mere inches from this neolithic graffiti. Amid the disorienting contours of the caves, the hot, wet breath of the darkness, we confronted the remnants of a culture, ancient and alien, their indecipherable message from across the ages. Such moments hold enough human familiarity and open mystery that it's almost possible to glimpse, from the corner of your eye, an unimagined range of the human experience.

(Want more pictures of Cuevas del Pomier, or the Dominican Republic?)

On Mothers and Others

Anthropologist Melvin Konner reviews Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who argues that "more than a million years ago, a line of apes began to rear their young differently than their Great Ape ancestors. From this new form of care came new ways of engaging and understanding each other. How such singular human capacities evolved, and how they have kept us alive for thousands of generations, is the mystery revealed in this bold and wide-ranging new vision of human emotional evolution."

It is possible to see Hrdy’s most recent book, Mothers and Others, as the third in a trilogy that began with The Woman That Never Evolved. It may be the most important. As she demolished, in the first, the idol of an evolved passive femininity, and in the second, the serene, always giving maternal goddess, in her third synthetic work she takes on another cultural and biological ideal: the mother who goes it alone. In our once male-dominated vision of evolution, we had the lone brave man, the hunter with his spear, and the lone enduring woman nurturing her young beneath the African sun; they made a deal, the first social contract, exchanging the services each was suited to by genetic destiny.

Hrdy has not been alone in challenging this myth. A conference and book edited by Richard Lee and Irven DeVore, although it was called Man the Hunter, showed that women brought in half or more of the food of hunter-gatherers by collecting vegetables, fruit, and nuts. This meant that, given the unpredictability of hunting success and the human need for plant foods, the primordial deal between the sexes was rather more complex than we thought. It also suggested that women had power in these societies; that men listened to them and decisions were made by consensus, not by male fiat as in more complex, hierarchical societies. ...

In Mothers and Others, [Hrdy] situates this pivotal mother-infant pair not in an empty expanse of savanna, waiting for a man to arrive with his killed game, but where it actually belongs, in the dense social setting of a hunter-gatherer or, before that, an ape or monkey group. Hrdy argues convincingly that social support was crucial to human success, that compared with other primates, humans are uniquely cooperative, and that it was precisely cooperation in child care that gave rise to this general bent.

More here.

Graeber on the Origins of Money

David Graeber, in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, explains how money came about in human societies and how different the facts are from conventional accounts of it in economic textbooks (that money arose as the natural next stage of the barter system).

Let me begin by filling in some background on the current state of scholarly debate on this question, explain my own position, and show what an actual debate might have been like. First, the history:

1) Adam Smith first proposed in ‘The Wealth of Nations’ that as soon as a division of labor appeared in human society, some specializing in hunting, for instance, others making arrowheads, people would begin swapping goods with one another (6 arrowheads for a beaver pelt, for instance.) This habit, though, would logically lead to a problem economists have since dubbed the ‘double coincidence of wants’ problem—for exchange to be possible, both sides have to have something the other is willing to accept in trade. This was assumed to eventually lead to the people stockpiling items deemed likely to be generally desirable, which would thus become ever more desirable for that reason, and eventually, become money. Barter thus gave birth to money, and money, eventually, to credit.

2) 19th century economists such as Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger [1] kept the basic framework of Smith’s argument, but developed hypothetical models of just how money might emerge from such a situation. All assumed that in all communities without money, economic life could only have taken the form of barter. Menger even spoke of members of such communities “taking their goods to market”—presuming marketplaces where a wide variety of products were available but they were simply swapped directly, in whatever way people felt advantageous.

3) Anthropologists gradually fanned out into the world and began directly observing how economies where money was not used (or anyway, not used for everyday transactions) actually worked. What they discovered was an at first bewildering variety of arrangements, ranging from competitive gift-giving to communal stockpiling to places where economic relations centered on neighbors trying to guess each other’s dreams. What they never found was any place, anywhere, where economic relations between members of community took the form economists predicted: “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow.” Hence in the definitive anthropological work on the subject, Cambridge anthropology professor Caroline Humphrey concludes, “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.”

More here. Read an interview with Graeber and his related article on the topic, and a review of the book.

Indians Abroad: A Story from Trinidad

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments. A shorter version appeared in Himal Southasian, Oct-Nov 2011.)

I’ve managed to write a long essay on Trinidad without mentioning cricket, rum, or the steelpan. Can I be forgiven for that?
_____________________

In April this year, I visited the Indian Caribbean museum near the town of Chaguanas in Trinidad. Set in a large hall, the museum had no other visitors at the time. Its curator, 69-year-old Saisbhan Jokhan, came out to greet me and quickly proved to be a trove of information. As I began taking notes, he asked if I was a journalist. I told him that I represented a venerable publication called 3 Quarks Daily, and intended to write about the Indo-Trinidadian experience. His eyes lit up and for the next ninety minutes, he accompanied me in the museum, explaining and answering my questions.

The museum commemorates the history of a million Indo-Caribbeans whose ancestors came as indentured laborers from India between 1838-1917. Graphic panels at the museum include details on immigrant ships, copies of girmits, or indenture agreements, and rare archival photos of life on sugarcane plantations. Evocative objects abound: an improvised sarangi, a pair of wood slippers, a rotary sugarcane press like the ones still used in mofussil India, even a lifesize model of an indentured worker’s hut. Other displays show milestones in the life of the community, such as a 1970 photo of the first Indo-Trini policewoman; a panel on Alice Jan, the first lady of Indo-Trini culture; and Indo-Trinis winning the right to build their own schools in 1952, allowing them to replace Christian teaching with Hindu teaching.

The museum is run by the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha, a conservative Hindu organization that also runs many temples. Talking to Jokhan it struck me that he lived with a clear sense of ‘his people’, what they have suffered, what challenges awaited them. His tone, and the museum’s singular focus, brought to mind a pastiche of Jewish museums I have seen over the years. This too felt like a museum designed to preserve the collective memory of a people’s suffering and struggles, and Jokhan seemed to me the right man for the job: proud of his identity, devoted to his community, slightly paranoid.

Jokhan’s historical memory is alien to people like me who have joined the Indian diaspora in recent decades. We have fostered the stereotype of Indians as a model minority, led by professionals and marked by diligence and enterprise in the pursuit of opportunities around the globe. But most of the Indian journeys in the colonial era were very different. They involved harsh unskilled labor on sugarcane estates, horrible living conditions, and severe discrimination. Trinidad, which I will look at here, is one chapter of that past; others include Guyana, Suriname, Jamaica, South Africa, Fiji, Mauritius, and Réunion. 

Göbekli Tepe

According to the dominant scholarly view of pre-history today, our human ancestors were once nomadic hunter-gatherers, with many recognizable religio-cultural practices like burying of their dead, wearing bone and stone jewelry, and even creating cave art and figurines. What followed, in more or less this order, was agriculture and domestication of animals, permanent settlements, pottery and metallurgy, the rise of cities, specialized crafts and trade guilds, social hierarchies, organized religion and monumental architecture, and eventually money, writing, and the alphabet.

However, at a site in Turkey called Göbekli Tepe, a monumental temple built ~11,600 years ago by hunter-gatherers suggests that at least here, organized religion preceded the rise of agriculture and many other aspects of civilization. In recent years, Göbekli Tepe has cast serious doubt on many established theories about our pre-history.

... the site is vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge, except that Göbekli Tepe was built much earlier and is made not from roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals—a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture—the first structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a hut. When these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable scale existed in the world.

At the time of Göbekli Tepe's construction much of the human race lived in small nomadic bands that survived by foraging for plants and hunting wild animals. Construction of the site would have required more people coming together in one place than had likely occurred before. Amazingly, the temple's builders were able to cut, shape, and transport 16-ton stones hundreds of feet despite having no wheels or beasts of burden. The pilgrims who came to Göbekli Tepe lived in a world without writing, metal, or pottery; to those approaching the temple from below, its pillars must have loomed overhead like rigid giants, the animals on the stones shivering in the firelight—emissaries from a spiritual world that the human mind may have only begun to envision....

 ... archaeologists studying the origins of civilization in the Fertile Crescent are [now] suspicious of any attempt to find a one-size-fits-all scenario, to single out one primary trigger. It is more as if the occupants of various archaeological sites were all playing with the building blocks of civilization, looking for combinations that worked. In one place agriculture may have been the foundation; in another, art and religion; and over there, population pressures or social organization and hierarchy. Eventually they all ended up in the same place. Perhaps there is no single path to civilization; instead it was arrived at by different means in different places.

More here. Watch a video of an artist's reconstruction of Gobekli Tepe, and a photo gallery.

The Tribes of the Deccan

Here is a documentary based on the footage gathered by Austrian anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf on the hill tribes of the Deccan in the 1940s (archive). This includes the tribes of the Chenchus, the Reddis, the Koyas, the Bondos, the Gadabas, and more. It may well be the only visual record of these groups from that period—their rituals, hunts, dances, foods, marriage ceremonies, material life, and more. It is revealing too of anthropology from another era, with notions and judgments that seem positively quaint and superficial by today's standards. Note, for instance, the force and frequency of words like "primitive" and "civilized", and the need to delineate borders between them. I don't know much more about Fürer-Haimendorf beyond what is on wikipedia, but this is nevertheless a valuable historical record. The film was made in the 1960s and narrated by a 30-something rising star at the BBC named David Attenborough.

How Language Shapes Thought

"Do the structure of particular languages affect the way we attend to, encode, represent, remember, and reason about the world?" I have featured this phenomenally interesting topic many times on this blog (see Enfield, Boroditsky, Knobe and Boroditsky, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o). The implications of this research are huge. I strongly recommend this brilliant, action-packed lecture by Lera Boroditsky (1:40 hrs), whose major experimental research findings, in her own words, can be summarized as follows:

1. People who speak different languages think differently.
2. Many aspects of language shape thinking: grammar, lexicon, orthography...
3. Language meddles in even low-level perceptual decisions.
4. Learning new languages can change the way you think.
5. Sometimes, people think differently when speaking different languages.
6. In bilinguals, both languages are at least somewhat active.
7. Learning a new language can change the way you speak your native language.
8. Each language provides its own cognitive toolkit, [and] encapsulates the knowledge and world view developed over thousands of years within a culture.

In short, "languages really shape how we construct reality". Wow, didn't Nagarjuna get it right (and so did Wittgenstein, from a different philosophical lineage nearly 1800 years later)!

(Thanks to Robin Varghese, 3QD. The video above may not show up in all feed readers. Another article here.)

The Rock Art of Djulirri

"In a remote corner of Arnhem Land in central northern Australia, the Aborigines left paintings chronicling 15,000 years of their history. One site in particular, Djulirri ... contains thousands of individual paintings in 20 discernable layers. In this video series [total ~15 mins], Paul S. C. Taçon, an archaeologist, cultural anthropologist, and rock art expert from Griffith University in Queensland, takes ARCHAEOLOGY on a tour of some of the most interesting and unusual paintings—depicting everything from cruise ships to dugong hunts to arrogant Europeans—from Djulirri's encyclopedic central panel." [—Samir S. Patel, senior editor, ARCHAEOLOGY.]

Becoming Human

In Nov 2009, NOVA aired a 3-part documentary series on human evolution, focusing on the last few million years of our story. It's a great primer for anyone interested in a thorough overview that incorporates some of the latest findings from various fields of anthropology. The series aired, however, before the latest and most surprising genetic findings came out, early in 2010, showing that non-African humans do carry some Neandertal DNA. Click below to see parts 1 through 3.

Aluna and the Future of the World

 The Kogi are relics of a pre-Columbian civilization, one of very few peoples who have remained separate from the European influences that have shaped the history of South America. They continue to live in austere traditional homes and wear only their homespun cotton clothes, as they have done for unknown generations. They follow their ancient belief system, in which Aluna is the mystical world in which reality is conceived. Their homeland, a great massif in coastal Columbia called Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, is rugged and remote enough to have preserved their isolation for hundreds of years.

This same geography is also responsible for providing the Kogi with a unique view of environmental degradation and climate change, since their mountains, which rise from the tropical waters of the Caribbean shoreline to over 18,000 feet (5,700 m), are home to nearly every type of ecological zone in the world. To the Kogi, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is the heart of the world, and their spiritual leaders, Mamos, have been entrusted with its care. But over these recent decades they have witnessed so much change and destruction that they—who call themselves Elder Brothers to the Younger Brother of the West—feel they must step forth and engage with the West in order to impart a message, a warning, a lesson: our way of life is destroying the world, and we must learn to see the earth in a new way.

They have decided that the best way to communicate may be through the West's medium of choice: film. And to this end, they have teamed with documentary filmmaker Alan Ereira to make a documentary in which the Kogi hope to show us the way they see the world. As it's described on the film's website:

In the face of the approaching apocalypse, they will take us on a perilous journey into the mysteries of their sacred places to change our understanding of reality. It is a journey encountering the dangers, the terrors, the power of the force that they perceive as driving reality, and which is now being torn apart and about to be released not as benevolent life, but as savage chaos. This is an epic tale in which the struggles of other-worldly heroes, invoked in fearsome masked and costumed rituals, are interwoven with the contemporary crisis. They intend to show that their work has visible and measurable results, that they really are taking care of the entire Earth.

They have even trained an indigenous film crew to work alongside the professionals, so that what the modern film crew cannot see may appear to the camera. The Mamos (spiritual leaders) understand that they have to do this because humanity is wantonly destroying sacred sites for profit. They want to show how and why the resulting eruption of chaotic cosmic energy causes climate change, epidemics of new diseases, geological instability and a relentless increase in murderous conflict.

The Kogi have warned us of climate change once before, in an earlier documentary initiated by Ereira for British television in 1990. Ereira's film, From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brothers' Warning, seems to have come before it's time, since, as the Kogi realized, we didn't listen to them the first time.

The Guardian interviews Jacinto Zarabata, the first Kogi to visit the UK, to find backing for their own film, Aluna:

What are Jacinto's first impressions of our society?

"The first thing that is noticeable to me is that this is still the world," he says. "What's visible is construction, what you have made. This is not something we, the Kogi, are used to seeing. You give precedence to the use of a thing rather than its source. That's the intellectual error. Ultimately, it's all nature." From Jacinto's viewpoint, when we glance at a car we might assess its cost and the status conferred on its driver. We don't recognise it as a clever piece of engineering of resources that once lay inside the earth.

The Kogi are witnessing some of this extraction first hand. Coal mining in the Sierra Nevada has boomed in recent decades (fuelled in part by the demand for cheap foreign coal in post-miners' strike Britain). Over centuries, they survived the wars waged on them by retreating further into the mountains, through dense rainforest and cloud forest dubbed "El Infierno" by settlers. There are still no roads to the Kogi's traditional settlements (Jacinto's home does not exist on official maps), but global capitalism is slowly conquering the Kogi's isolation.

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Why is little brother so greedy? Jacinto chuckles and rubs his gourd, a sign he is thinking. (The mushroom shaped cap on the gourd, which men carry to symbolise their connection with the womb, is a sign of his accumulated thought.) "Habit," he says, finally. "That ambition to have more doesn't have a framework. It's just a drive to accumulate. The habit is a competitive one. 'What everyone else has I must have too, otherwise everyone else has power over me.' The consequences are evident, but it doesn't seem obvious to you," Jacinto says. "You can go and live in space, that's fine, but you don't seem to be able to go back to the understanding of how to live harmoniously with the earth. That's something you've forgotten."

Yet the Kogi hope we can still reconnect, by seeing the value they place on thinking and their spiritual world. "When you understand that, you begin to understand yourself a bit more," Jacinto says. "Originally, the great mama brought us into being so we would be guardians of nature. You, the little brother, was given this knowledge of how to treat the earth and the water and the air. At some point there was divergence and you, the little brother, went on a different path.

"We, by example, don't live like you do. You come to the Sierra, there are no factories, there is no industrial agriculture. Now we really want you to look at the images of how we live."

The Minangkabau: Mixing Islam and Matriarchy

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

“In your marriage, who is the boss?” our driver, Arman, asked in a playfully provocative tone, like he was setting up the punchline of a joke.

My partner and I looked at each other, laughed, and shrugged. Arman belonged to the Minangkabau, the society recognized among anthropologists as the world’s largest and most stable surviving matriarchy* (though some prefer to call it a gylany, matrix, matrifocal or matricentric society, or something else to avoid conjuring images of mythical Amazons). Knowing this, I presumed his question was part of a routine entertainment for tourists.

“For us it is the woman who is boss,” he continued, predictably. “The woman has all the privileges; she owns everything. The men, we own nothing.”

I knew that the Minangkabau, like most Indonesians, are Muslims. In May 2009, one of the first things I noticed upon arriving in their homeland—a stretch of volcanic highlands running along the western coast of Sumatra—was that a higher percentage of women here wear the hijab (here called jilbab) than did further north, near Medan and around Lake Toba. In fact, well over half of the adult women covered their hair in public. But here, as elsewhere on Sumatra, the headscarf appears to be as much a fashion statement as a covering for modesty. It’s often brightly colored or festooned with beads, sequins, rhinestones, small brooches, lace, or shimmery ribbons. Many women sport styles with a dainty sun visor in the front. Pretty much anything you can do to a hat is done to the Sumatran jilbab.

These observations, and Arman’s good humor at his lack of patrimony, made me wonder how I should understand the Minangkabau matriarchaat (their word, borrowed from the Dutch). What truce had been struck between Islam and matriarchy?

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In the small villages surrounding Mount Marapi, which lies at the center of the Minangkabau creation myths, Arman lead us down tangled lanes lined with traditional Minangkabau homes. Many of these were great wooden structures, some as much as 300 years old, tattered or rotting in places, patched or expanded upon over the years. These traditional homes are long, each enclosing a broad rectangular hall over an empty ground floor, once used to house livestock. Their roofs are arched to suggest the horns of a buffalo. There were newer dwellings too, without the ground floor for livestock, with SUVs parked out front, satellite dishes growing like mushrooms of modernity from balconies and awnings.

The Battle for Niyamgiri

The "Avatar style" battle between the big bad British corporation Vedanta Resources and Dongria Kondh, an endangered Primitive Tribal Group in Orissa, India, has attracted the attention of Bianca Jagger.

For generations, the Kondh of Orissa, in India, have lived on a fertile mountain which they revere as a god. But since the arrival in 2008 of a British aluminium refinery, their land has been poisoned and the villagers imprisoned. Now, the tribes people are making what could be their last stand.

Also check out this interesting video story on the Kondh's plight that I found on Survival International. 

The Blight of Hindustan

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

An egalitarian ethos has not been a prominent feature of Indian civilization for at least a thousand years, when Buddhism began losing ground in South Asia. The dominant Hindu sensibility has long held that all men are created unequal, constituting not one but many moral communities, and possess varying natural rights and duties. The anthropologist Louis Dumont saw hierarchy as so central to Indian lives, whether in the family, the workplace, or the community, that he titled his 1966 treatise on Indian society, Homo Hierarchicus. Indeed, a host of hierarchical relationships—framed by traditional norms of deference, authority, and obligation—shape most Indians throughout their lives. In the Indian social realm, the primary institution of hierarchy is caste, or jati, of which thousands exist today. But where does caste, a blight of modern India, come from?

The Origins of Caste

How the institution of caste took root and spread is still a hotly debated question among scholars, but its story begins c. 1500 BCE with the arrival of the Indo-Aryans into what is now Pakistan. Data from disciplines like linguistics, philology, and archaeology strongly suggests that these bands of nomadic pastoralists came from further west. Upon arrival, they encountered long settled rural communities, which were perhaps divided into subgroups based on occupation, much like guilds—they were not hierarchical, hereditary, or endogamous. The Indo-Aryans, whose culture became dominant, introduced into the region their social pyramid with three classes, or varnas (‘color’): the Brahmins (priests and teachers), the Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), and the Vaishyas (traders and merchants). They added a fourth varna after their arrival: the Shudras (laborers and artisans). All four divisions appear in the earliest known Indo-Aryan text, the Rig Veda (but not the word ‘varna’), and were no doubt a feature of the emerging Vedic society. ‘According to the Mahabharata, the "colors" associated with the four [varnas] were white, red, yellow and black; they sound more like symbolic shades meted out by those category-conscious brahmanical minds than skin pigments.’[1]

As the settled indigenous communities became part of the early Vedic society, they also adopted its principle of hierarchy—interwoven as it was with its cosmology, gods, and rituals—turning their own occupational subgroups into castes, or jatis. The main organizing principle of this hierarchy, proposed Dumont, had to do with ritual ‘purity’ and ‘pollution’ that members of each occupational subgroup were assigned at birth. The highest ‘purity’ points went to those associated with religious, intellectual, and administrative pursuits, the lowest to workers associated with dead bodies, human waste, tanneries, butchery, street cleaning, and such—most of these were in fact deemed too low to be part of the varna system at all, i.e., they were considered outcastes. Stated differently, ‘purity’ became a means of codifying social power relations using Brahmanical ‘knowledge’.

As this new social order spread in the first millennium BCE, it encountered more settled peoples as well as forest dwelling clans. Whether by force, persuasion, or mutual advantage, more groups were brought into its fold. They too found themselves plugged into its hierarchy, perhaps loosely at first, and gradually gave up their more egalitarian ways. In doing so, they used the same principle of relative ‘purity’ to make jati and varna decisions for various units within their own societies, and by extension, to divide power and resources.[2] To sweeten the deal, the Vedic social order became flexible enough to absorb indigenous gods into its ever-growing pantheon—including perhaps even gods like Shiva and Krishna—giving rise to a syncretic religious culture. In some cases, a whole endogamous tribe could become one jati, often regarded as outcastes. The Laws of Manu, written about 2,000 years ago, mentions many such communities: the Medas, Andhras, Chunchus, and Madgus who live off ‘the slaughter of wild animals’, the Pukkasas by ‘catching and killing [animals] in holes’, etc. In time, new dietary regimes would get associated with each new jati. For instance, beef and alcohol would become taboo for those accorded a higher caste.

Many modern thinkers, including Tagore, have argued that while far from perfect, this was back then a practical way of bringing together highly diverse peoples, through which ‘men of different colors and creeds, different physical features and mental attitudes settled together side by side.’[3] In The Discovery of India, Nehru struck a stronger note of apologia: ‘Thus at a time when it was customary for the conquerors to exterminate or enslave the conquered races, caste enabled a more peaceful solution which fitted in with the growing specialization of functions.’ He saw caste as ‘necessary and desirable in its early forms, and meant to develop individuality and freedom’. Such thinkers argued that by assigning religious, political, and economic power to three different classes—the Brahmins, the Kshatriyas, and the Vaishyas—the system prevented their concentration in a single dominant racial or ethnic group, thereby creating a basis for cooperation and avoiding far greater friction, open slavery, and even genocidal wars. Historian John Keay, while calling this new social order ‘systematised oppression’, added that ‘it should also be seen as an ingenious schema for harnessing the loyalties of a more numerous and possibly more skilled indigenous population.’ In recent decades, many Hindu nationalists, keen to boost Hindu self-respect and pride, have whitewashed their social history and invented a rosier one. The four varnas, they claim, were wholly meritocratic in ancient times, based on personal choice, aptitude, and conduct—i.e., one’s varna depended on individual qualities, not on the accident of birth in a household. Some even go as far as saying that it was the invading Muslims and the British who perverted the varna system into the caste system that’s with us today.

Thapar on the Indo-Aryan Migrations

Here is a transcript of a 1999 lecture by Romila Thapar. She examines quite well the substantive evidence for the Indo-Aryan migrations into the Subcontinent in the second millennium BCE. Definitely worth a read for anyone interested in the topic (transcript has a few typos). Also see my earlier post, which I hope to turn into a more polished article, incorporating all that I have learned since about the topic.

Let me begin by saying the obvious, that the Aryan question is probably the most complex, complicated question in Indian history. And it requires very considerable expertise in handling both the sources and the questions that arise. The expertise consists of knowing something about at least four different fields, first of all archaeology, because a lot of the remains, of almost all the cultures, come to us from excavations and there is the continual attempt to try and identify such cultures with the Aryans.... I mean that it is not enough simply to say that you pick up a list of items from excavated sites and say that the Rigveda has some items, therefore … they are identical cultures. When I talk about archaeology I am also talking about the way in which the total society functions and how these elements are integrated.

The second area of expertise is linguistics and here I would like to emphasize, very strongly, that it is not enough merely to know Sanskrit to be able to say that you can handle the questions that come up in the interpretation of the Vedic texts. There is now, since the last thirty years, there has developed a huge body of information which comes from a discipline called linguistics. Those in this discipline do comparative studies of different language structures...

The historical context, this relates to a whole series of questions, how society is defined in the past — agro pastoral, agrarian, urban… What is the meaning of these terms? What is the interaction between ecological, social, economic, cultural, religious forms? These are all aspects of a historical problem and when you are studying a total problem like the so-called the Aryan question you have to go into the interaction of all these different aspects. Is there a difference between a cattle rearing society and a society which carries out overseas trade? And these are fundamental questions in historical analyses. You cannot avoid them. You cannot just say there is reference to cattle in the Rigveda and cattle are depicted on the Indus seals therefore there is a similarity. It is the function. The function, both the actual function, the ritual function, the role that cattle play in a particular society in terms of its economy, its rituals and so on.

And the fourth discipline which I think is important ... is social anthropology...