Congressman King's precursors

As reported here and elsewhere, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) recently claimed that we owe "civilization" to the Europeans; nobody else contributed significantly.  This idea is straight out of the playbook of the 19th-century evolutionists, who claimed that contemporary humans were stuck at different points on a unilineal evolutionary ladder leading from "savages" to "barbarians" and, finally, contemporary Western "civilization."  One of the leading purveyors of this notion was Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881), an early American anthropologist.

The paradigm of unilineal evolutionism was debunked for biology by Darwin himself, who imaged evolution as a tree with many branches rather than a straight ladder.  The debunking of the cultural myth was largely begun Franz Boas (1858-1942), another American anthropologist who stressed the importance of particular histories of cultures and societies over their ranking on some grand, ethnocentric scheme.

But the idea that societies and cultures could be ranked on a unified scale from "primitive" to "advanced" remained in the general folk model of many Americans and Europeans.  This is a slide I use in some of my classes to illustrate Theodore Roosevelt's investment in the idea.

And this idea is still alive and breathing.  Rep. King's thinking is in a direct line of descent from Morgan, and Roosevelt.  The maybe puzzling but definitely sad thing about this is that not only is King not alone, but somehow, with so little knowledge of human nature and history, he manages to maintain a high position in our government.  One would have thought that the demythologized view of humans ought to have become dominant by now.

We need anthropology, its knowledge and perspective, more than ever.

"The idea that every culture is equal is not objectively true"

Rep. Steve King (Iowa): "The idea that every culture is equal is not objectively true."

Well, yeah. There is a sense in which the ethnocentric Rep. King is right, but it's not the sense he was thinking of. Some years ago, in Exploring the Ways of Mankind (1960), anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt proposed some criteria for objectively evaluating cultures without being ethnocentric. He suggested that we look at how well a culture satisfies the physical and psychological needs of its members in terms of:

--Nutritional status
--General health (physical and mental)
--Crime, violence
--Domestic stability and tranquility
--Stability of relationship to resource base

On these measures, American culture is not doing so well. Don't tell King.

Who's surprised?

It's been a while.  So much has been going on, so much has happened, so much of it positively depressing and angering at the same time, that it has been hard if not impossible to focus the anger.
And frustration.  But what I wonder about is why anyone is even surprised that our country is descending into fascism.

There are a couple of different threads to this story, feeding into each other, reinforcing each other.  Perhaps the most immediate is our (US) national obsession with "business," and "businessmen" (face it, it's mostly men, and the women involved are honorary men).  Success in "business" is the Holy Quest of our land and has been pretty much since the beginning.  It almost seems not to matter whether the "business" succeeds or fails, the Quest is the thing.  And the people (mostly men) are the priest/leaders of this quest. They are the Holy Ones, successful or not, because they went on the Quest.  Trump is one.  Holy, untouchable, simply for having made the Pilgrimage.  Even as a failure most of the time, still able to command others to value his opinions, perverted and destructive as they might be for the rest of us.

There is another thread, and that has to do with the nature of "business" as it has developed over the last few centuries.  "Business" as we mostly know it grew out of the incomprehensibly vast profits created by the European imposition of predatory capitalism on both the New World and Africa beginning (roughly) in the 16th century.  West Africans were transported to the parts of the New World (the West Indies, Brazil and other parts of South America, parts of Middle America, and southern portions of North America) to labor without pay in the service of this predatory capitalism.  They worked mostly on plantations, growing and harvesting sugar cane (itself brought from the Old World) and processing it into sugar, rum, and molasses.  They grew other things too (tobacco, rice, indigo, cotton, etc.) but it was the immense wealth built by Sugar that fueled both the growth of global capitalism and the Industrial Revolution.

And as this happened, the plantation, and especially the slave-based plantations, among the earliest large-scale factories, became the working model for the "business corporation."  Power and authority flow from the top down, and all below serve the Masters.  Everything in the societies based on this system is subordinate to this essentially fascist structure, and many "third-world" problems remain in the places where it flourished.  The social structure of the southern US, the Old Confederacy, is still riddled with the rotting remnants of this system.

So, is it surprising, really, that a "businessman" who grew up comfortable with this type of predatory, fascist way of making a living would display the pro-fascist leanings our new president displays?  Couple this with his severe personality disorders, which apparently may include something called "malignant narcissism," and we are in trouble.  If there are any adults left in Washington I hope they can get rid of him very soon.

Culturally-induced psychopathy

Just a quick thought on our latest mass shooting:

This kind of thing is not going to go away until some of the basic features of our culture change.  Probably central to that would be a weakening of our cult of extreme individualism, which is reproduced every generation via the mode of socialization known as independence training.  Independence training reduces personal responsibility to the larger society, and also reduces empathy.  It helps us remain a nation suffering from culturally-induced psychopathy.

The strength of this cultural feature varies through time, as it does also across social and geographical space, but it's always there.  

The "Reagan Revolution," as well as Trump's "Make America Great Again," were/are revitalization movements for this cult.

One more thing making me cranky

It occurs to me that if you wanted to design a course on sociocultural dysfunctions, you could almost use nothing but Republican speeches for the readings.  The topics would include sexism, classism, ethnocentrism...

Strange...

Ok, so we're about halfway through the first week of classes, and I'm noticing more women students sporting tattoos.  Not the subtle little bees and butterflies, but big honking tattoos that cover arms and legs.  Makes me think of a song by David Holt, "Strange Woman Blues," see below.

Romney's anthropological confusion

On Tuesday presidential candidate Mitt Romney (hereafter "Willard") told a group of supporters in Utah "We want to help those in need, but we don’t believe that redistribution is the way to create a bright future."

The key concept here is redistribution.  This is a term used by anthropologists to label a type of economic activity in which a surplus of goods and services is aggregated and then given out in culturally prescribed ways.  Redistribution is different from reciprocity, another form of exchange, in that reciprocity is generally carried out between and among individuals: the meat brought in by successful Ju/'hoansi hunters, for example, is shared out among the members of their band, most of whom are kin. Reciprocity may be generalized, in that the givers give with no special expectation of immediate or equal return.  Reciprocity may also be balanced, i.e. trade in which givers expect an equal return from recipients.  Reciprocity may also be negative, in which givers get back less than they give; nobody wants that.  Reciprocity, or sharing, represents probably the oldest form of economic exchange devised by humans.  It is the most typical mode of exchange in foraging (hunting and gathering) societies.

Because of the nature of what they gather and hunt, foraging peoples are rarely able to maintain a surplus.  With the advent of food production some 10,000 or so years ago, however, people in some places began growing crops and keeping animals that allowed for the development of surpluses.  This permits larger and more settled communities: the distinction between bands (foragers) and tribes.  Under these conditions, a farmer or herder might be able to gather enough of something or other together, usually with the help of kin, so that they can stage a ritualized giveaway for everyone in the community and sometimes for people from other nearby communities as well.  In its most pristine version, the giveaway, or redistribution, is complete, so that the recipients end up with everything and the givers are left with nothing.  However, the givers do gain important prestige from their giveaway.  This type of redistribution is called egalitarian redistribution.

As food production becomes more, er, productive, societies become more dense and more elaborate systems of hierarchical ranking with a well-defined leader at the top develop.  These societies are what anthropologists call chiefdoms, and while there has always been some ranking based on factors such as age and sex, now people's place in the society tends to be determined by their degree of relatedness to the chief's family.  The chiefs have more power over their "subjects" than leaders of bands and tribes have. Chiefs can order their folks to bring in a prescribed share of their crops and animals.  Some of this surplus ends up on the chief's table; some can be held back and then given out in times of need, say when a family's crop fails and they need help.  This is stratified redistribution, and it evolves eventually into what we call our tax system.  It's a fairly small jump from chiefdoms to the entities we know of as state societies.

Now, because Willard does not understand human cultural evolution, when he says "we don't believe that redistribution is the way to create a bright future," he is interpreting redistribution as a recent thing that Karl Marx and the Communists dreamed up.  In this view, redistribution is a perversion of some prior, more pure means of moving food and other things around, probably involving money.  Redistribution happens when people who don't have stuff see the stuff other people have and pressure them into giving some of it up.  In reality, redistribution was a cultural adaptation to a certain mode of food production, an adaptation that helped humans survive into that "bright future" that they were even then probably hoping for.  Redistribution happened long before money happened.  It's a part of what made us human.

Culture being learned

We like to say that culture is learned and shared within a social group. Here's an example in a video from Cultural Equity.  Young folks on Carriacou, Grenada, are practicing a Nation or Big Drum song.



Traditionally, these songs were performed to encourage the participation and blessing of the Ancestors on important occasions such as launching a boat, moving into a new house, setting up a permanent tombstone, and so on.  The drumming patterns are associated with specific Aftrican Nations, such as Kromanti, Igbo, Kongo, etc.  The songs are mostly in French Creole, but sometimes in English Creole and also sometimes containing phrases that may be African in origin.

Cultural relativism

This is important. Not only for these young women, but also for a real understanding of the anthropological concept of cultural relativism. Contrary to its detractors, cultural relativism does NOT mean "anything goes." Especially not when some cultural practice is objectively harmful to those it is practiced upon.

Random thoughts about US individualism

I have mentioned before that we can explain much of US culture in terms of the distinction between two modes of enculturation: independence training (IT) and dependence training (DT). These concepts were used by Chinese-American anthropologist Francis L K Hsu to help understand differences between his native Chinese culture and US culture.  Briefly, Chinese enculturation fostered a willingness to value ties among people among people that included reciprocal rights and obligations, while in the US enculturation tends to stress the autonomy of individuals and their rights at the expense of the obligations.  The result, in the US, is a relative lack of a value of social responsibility, at least beyond the nuclear family.  It's hard, though, to pin down exactly why the US is like this, instead of like something else.  And as in most areas of the human enterprise, there probably isn't one simple answer.  So, some semi-random thoughts pulled from an email I wrote the other day in which I tried to get at the issue from several perspectives:

One reason the US has such strong IT compared to other cultures may be that we are still in our adolescent phase of becoming a society, we haven't figured out how to be mature in the world.  We are, to paraphrase (I believe) Shakespeare, wanton children swatting at flies.  Self-centered, complacent, even arrogant, in our willful ignorance.  And fully, religiously, certain that our lack of social responsibility toward our fellow humans is natural, the way things should be.  If this sounds a bit like the old national character studies of Benedict and others, ok, as long as we don't take it too far.

A little story, which I think I got from Pete Seeger (who in turn I believe got it from Woody Gurthrie): Way out in the lonely west somewhere, a farmer rests on his porch after a hard day's work.  A lone rider approaches, and says "Is this your farm?"  The farmer replies "Yes."  Stranger: "Where'd you get it from?"  Farmer:  "From my father."  Stranger:  "Where'd he get it from?"  Farmer:  "He took it from some Indians."  Stranger:  "Well, I'm taking it from you."

We can trace some of this back to when the Europeans encountered "America" and began their ethnocentrism-driven regime of raping and pillaging. Often, in those earliest days, it literally was one person, or a tiny group, with little or no support, who wandered off into the wilderness.  Other culture heroes: Andrew Jackson, killer and abuser of Native Americans; Teddy Roosevelt, advocate for clearing the land of indigenous peoples to make room for the "Germanic-speaking" bearers of civilization (Hitler approved of course).  How much have we outgrown this middle-school playground mentality, really?

The rise of capitalism of course also feeds into our original Individualistic Narrative: the "self-made man,"  the wealthy person who cobbles together a fortune somehow without any help whatsoever from anyone on the planet.  Capitalism has encouraged isolation, fragmentation, of workers and their families, and at the same time discouraged, often with violence, attempts by workers to reconstitute a social fabric.  This is an important part of our national mythology.  Think of one of our culture heroes, Ayn Rand, a vicious psychopath masquerading as a "philosopher" who happens to be the darling of the Tea Party movement.

And of course, over-population and crowding stress just further exacerbate the problem.  A lethal concoction:  IT and crowding stress, with few if any cultural mechanisms in place to lower the resulting pressure.

Something about IT that's important to remember is that it doesn't just apply to individual persons/organisms.  It applies at whatever level is appropriate.  It gives us corporations as "individual persons."  It sets the US, as a corporate entity, against the UN, the World Court, the Geneva Conventions, etc.  Because we are, still it seems, the adolescent bullies on the playground.

Distinction without a difference: “Foreign Culture” and Cultural Diversity”

Currently at the University of North Florida, we have courses that students can take to fulfill “cultural diversity” (CD) and  “foreign culture” (FC) requirements. The CD requirement applies across the university to students in their first two years, while the FC requirement applies to students in the College of Arts and Sciences and is satisfied by a number of junior and senior level courses.  Neither of these categories is tied to a specific department: CD and FC courses are located across a wide range of academic fields.

The rationale for these requirements is that students need to be taken out of the cultural context they are familiar with and exposed to “others.”  I agree with this, and as an anthropologist, I might go so far as to say that the students need to be taken out of their comfort zones and then brought home again, hopefully to understand in a new way their own cultures.  But I have a problem with the distinction, as it is now drawn, between CD and FC.  CD courses are about “cultural diversity” as it exists within the US.  FC courses are limited to “cultures” outside the US, hence the term “foreign culture.”

This distinction ignores the fact that there are “cultures” within the US that are just as “foreign” to most of our students as many of the cultures they might encounter outside the US.  Consider:  Cherokee, Hopi, Navaho, Inuit, Lakota, Mikasuki, Cree, Omaha, and many other Native American cultures. Or African American cultures, such as Gullah/Geechee and Afro-Seminole. Or the Amish and Mennonites.  Or isolated Appalachian communities.  What about the Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, and other Asian communities within the US?

And what about native Hawaiians?  Hawai’i is in the US, technically, but….  And where does Puerto Rico fall in this scheme? The people are US citizens by birth, but their first language is mostly Spanish, so do they represent “cultural diversity” or “foreign culture?”  What do we do with the Cuban and Haitian communities in South Florida?  Or American Samoa?  And to turn the question around, what might be wrong with considering the cultural diversity of a “foreign” place like China or India?  Does only the US exhibit “cultural diversity?”

Why does any of this matter?  It matters because CD and FC courses nearly always fully enroll, because they meet requirements that students have to fulfill.  Departments that are able to offer these courses can generate nice pots of tuition money for the university. And for faculty who teach them, especially in anthropology but likely some others as well, they represent the one chance we have to offer a course on our geographical foci (the Caribbean, West Africa, Mexico, etc.) without worrying that the course won’t attract enough students.

The problem is that the strict delineation between US-based CD and “foreign” FC means that any anthropologist who specializes within the US may have a tough time getting to teach their specialty. The Foreign Culture Committee, which bestows the label “foreign culture,” recently denied FC designation for an anthropology course on peoples and cultures of the Southwest on the grounds that “the southwest” is part of the US.  Such a course, as taught by our resident expert in this area, would give students beyond anthropology an entry to some pretty exotic cultures, including for example the Hopi, Apache, and Navaho, among others.  At the same time, the designation would ensure that the course is available for anthropology students.

My interim solution would be to keep CD courses as a designation for lower level (frosh and sophomore) courses that teach about “cultural diversity” within the United States, and then to expand FC to include upper level courses that examine the cultures of coherent communities within the United States that differ significantly from the mainstream, European-based, unmarked one that most of our students come from.

Any quest for change will face the inertia of a somewhat powerful College committee; but this is a fight worth having, I think.

William Rivers Pitt: "The Wrath of Fools"

Will Pitt is one of my favorite essayists; his writing appears on Truthout.org and his essays are often re-posted elsewhere.  His essay for Jan 10, 2011, titled The Wrath of Fools: An Open Letter to the Far Right, is particularly satisfying to me, as a linguist.  Pitt insists that we avoid the temptation to attribute the hideous shootings at the Safeway in Tucson on Friday to a lone, deranged person operating in a vacuum:

"Mainstream" news personalities like David Gergen and John King bent over backwards warning people not to blame Sarah Palin and her ilk for this calamity.  It was a sick man who did this, they said. Bollocks to that.  I hate to break this to the "mainstream" media know-betters, but words matter.  When people like Palin spray the airwaves with calls to violence and incantations of imminent doom, people like Loughner are listening, and prepared to act. The "mainstream" media lets it fly without any questions or rebuttal, because it's good for ratings, and here we are. Words matter. Play Russian Roulette long enough, and someone inevitably winds up dead.

And let's be clear: there is no moral equivalency between "right" and "left" here. There are no "liberals" calling for "Second Amendment remedies";  there are no "liberals" putting up maps with rifle cross-hairs marking key conservatives for elimination.  This is a Right Thing.  It's also a Race Thing, as Pitt points out:

I'm talking to you, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly, and Michael Savage, and Ann Coulter, and Laura Ingraham, and to every other right-wing tripe-spewing blowhard blogger and Fox News broadcaster. I hope you are proud of yourselves, because this is the day you get to reap what you have been relentlessly sowing since you were forced to encompass the unmitigated outrage of a Black man winning the office of President of the United States.

That's right, I said it. Anyone who thinks good old-fashioned American bigotry and racism are not the core motivation for a vast majority of these so-called "revolutionaries" should get their heads examined. You've heard of the "elephant in the middle of the room?" Well, this is the burning cross in the middle of the room, and no amount of spin will douse those flames.

The idea that this crime, and others like it, are the products of lone, deranged individuals, with little or no influence from the social and cultural context that they live in, is promoted by our culture's values of independence training and individualism.  Everything is done by, and to, individuals; society does not exist.  Remember the derision that followed Hillary Clinton's book It Takes a Village to Raise a Child?

We are doomed, unless we can change our culture.  If we can't change it, our culture will destroy us.

Amendment:  Perhaps I should end with "we are doomed, unless we can find our village."

"Culture" comes to the Naval Academy

From an article in today's Washington Post:

Last month, the Naval Academy department then known as Department of Language Studies quietly changed its name to Department of Language and Cultures.

It hardly registers as big news. But to Clementine Fujimura, the lone anthropology professor at the Annapolis campus, the change is "huge."

Why? "Because it's acknowledging that the Navy is accepting that we need to be teaching about culture," she said.

 Yeah, well, I'm not so sure that this is the "huge news" Dr. Fujimura thinks it is. But first, I have a question:

The Naval Academy only has one anthropologist on faculty???  WTF?!?

 Moving on. Here's why I think that this may not be something to celebrate. When academic departments outside of anthropology teach "culture," they generally have in mind a sort of dumbed-down, laundry-list approach to culture:  Look at the exotic foods these folks eat, or their clothing, or the gestures they use for "come here" and "good-bye."  They rarely, if ever, apply the insights that anthropology has developed into the nature and structure of culture as a human adaptation.

Perhaps Dr. Fujimura is happy with this, but she shouldn't be, unless she happens to count herself among the "postmodern" "interpretivist" cultural types who have participated in the trivialization of the culture concept over the last couple of decades.

Here at UNF, our World Languages department (a fine name, I think) has proposed a name change to the "Department of Language, Literature, and Culture." As a group, we in the anthropology program saw this as outlandishly over-reaching (wouldn't the English Department have to be absorbed?), as well as a usurpation of what is, traditionally, the academic domain of anthropology. Since we are now in the middle of summer, we don't know whether World Languages' quest for this name change will be picked up in the fall or not, but there will certainly be some opposition.
And by the way, toward the end of the full WaPo article there is this:

...anthropologists have ever been wary of the use to which their profession might be put by the military, whose purpose, of course, goes far beyond the passive study of other cultures.

Excuse me. Anthropologist have never really been "passive" in their study of cultures.  The central research method of cultural anthropology is not called participant observation for nothing. And E. B. Tylor (1832-1917) referred to anthropology as "essentially a reformer's science... active at once in aiding progress and in removing hindrance" (quoted in Marvin Harris, Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times (p. 62), Altamira Press 1999).

Are jobs more important than health?

Louisiana governor Booby Bobby Jindal published an op-ed piece in The Washington Post today.  Commenting on President Obama's moratorium on deep-water offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, he wrote:

This ill-advised and ill-considered moratorium, which a federal judge called "arbitrary" and "capricious," creates a second disaster for our economy, throwing thousands of hardworking folks out of their jobs and causing real damage to many families.

Uh, yeah: "arbitrary."  A decision to do something relatively timid, compared to what really ought to be done, to help ensure that the environmental and social disaster that just actually happened in the Gulf doesn't repeat itself is "arbitrary."

What Jindal's complaint reminds me of is the argument about tobacco and jobs. We know tobacco products kill people, and not just those who actually use them, by the way. But, we can't just stop growing them, because all those tobacco farmers would lose their "traditional way of making a living." Well, you know what: If your "traditional way of making a living" is bad for people and the planet, you should be told to find another way to make a living.

That applies to tobacco farmers, whose "traditional way of making a living" feeds an addiction that makes people sick and dead, and it also applies to people who "make a living" by drilling into deep water to extract oil to feed our other major addiction.

Of course, I'm not saying that either tobacco farmers or oil workers should simply be thrown on the landfill of history. Surely we, the richest country in the world, could simply pay all these folks to not grow tobacco or drill for oil.

Manatee interlude

This morning, I took our dog for a walk out on a pier that juts into the St. Johns River near our home. There is a little docking platform about halfway out, and when we got there we discovered a pod of half a dozen or more manatees (Trichechus manatus) churning up the water around the dock, nibbling algae off the pilings and otherwise feeding on the underwater plant life. Luckily, I had walked with my camera, and the critters practically dared me to take their pictures.

In these photos, you can see one of the things that make me want to opt out of being "American": the wounds on the manatees' backs caused by their being run over by morons in speedboats. People here like to put large boats with huge, overpowered engines in the rivers and creeks, and then blast through the water, caring nothing for what might be in the way. Manatees are especially vulnerable because they have to come to the surface for air now and again, and so, if they're lucky, they collect these scars; if not, they die.

Anthropology can explain this by evoking the American mode of enculturation called Independence Training (IT). IT begins at birth and produces a tendency for Americans, or at least "good" Americans, to see themselves as the center of the Universe, rejecting ties of reciprocal interdependence, decrying the value of social responsibility. How else to explain our lack of national health care, the difficulty we have with trade unions, our preference as a nation to "go it alone" (Iraq, Afghanistan, Grenada, Vietnam...), our fear of the very word "socialism," even our antipathy toward the United Nations and our refusal to obey the World Court.


But back to the manatees. I think that the reason their plight bothers me so much is that, as a Peace Corps Volunteer and later as an anthropologist in training, I lived in a small fishing and farming community in the Caribbean. There, people went to sea, you know, like the actual ocean, in tiny boats with lawn-mower size engines, to, like, fish. They did it to survive.


People here run around here in their megaboats for nothing, because they're assholes.

National Geographic: the Hadza "live without rules"

So, a couple days ago I picked up the current National Geographic Magazine at our nearby Publix. There’s an article on the Hadza that begins with this cranky-inducing banner: 

They grow no food, raise no livestock, and live without rules or calendars. They are living a hunter-gatherer existence that is little changed from 10,000 years ago. What do they know that we’ve forgotten?

No rules? Really? The world’s only true anarchy?  This is the kind of subtle ethnocentrism that you always have to watch out for in the National Geographic's dealings with humans. Don't get me wrong, when they're giving us information about cocoa, or gold, or dinosaurs, they can be very, very good. And, of course, their maps are terrific. But with people, well, things sometimes go awry.

The Hadza, of course, have "rules." All human cultures hang together by virtue of the fact their members know how to behave appropriately in which situations, what obligations they have toward others, what others can demand of them, who they can and cannot joke around with, marry, and so on. In small-scale societies like that of the Hadza, who are foragers living along the Great Rift Valley in Tanzania, the rules are acquired in the process of becoming an adult. They are carried in people's heads, not written down in legal codes as they are in large-scale societies like ours, but they exist none the less.

Furthermore, the rules Hadza people need to know involve, almost exclusively, rules about interpersonal behaviors. In our culture, there are rules like that, but there are also rules that have to do with correct and incorrect behavior with regard to the State, the distinction between what we call torts and crimes. In Hadza, there is no state: any violation of the rules is personal.

In September 1979, the National Geographic carried an article* about the Caribbean states of Grenada and St. Vincent. In the article, the author, Ethel Starbird, referred to the way of speaking of the inhabitants of these islands as English with "a certain free-form style." It so happens that I was just back from a summer of linguistic fieldwork on Carriacou, one of the Grenadine islands. I was collecting data for a description of the variety of Caribbean English Creole that Carriacou people speak.

It turned out that Carriacou people's speech was not "free-form" at all. Its speakers, like all speakers of the Human Language, carry in their heads linguistic rules for putting sounds together into words, words into phrases, phrases into sentences. These rules had not been investigated before, and existed in no "grammar" book; they form part of what Noam Chomsky calls their "knowledge of language." but like the "rules" the Hadza know about keeping their society running smoothly, they existed before anyone studied them and they continued to exist even after they had been inscribed in a descriptive grammar.

Young and foolish, I wrote to the National Geographic author and explained her mistake: nobody, anywhere, speaks a "free-form" language. The answer I received was essentially Thank You Very Much, and Bug Off; We Are The National Geographic.

(For an in-depth look at how National Geographic has over the years treated the subject of non-European peoples, check out Reading National Geographic by and Lutz and Collins.)

*Starbird, E. 1979. Taking it as it comes: St. Vincent, the Grenadines, and Grenada. National Geographic 156, 399-425.

CNN needs an anthropologist

All day yesterday, the news crawler on CNN included this item:

Kenyan offers livestock dowry for Chelsea Clinton

The story as reported on CNN's web site provides more details:

(CNN) -- What can 40 goats and 20 cows buy a Kenyan man? Chelsea Clinton's love, if you ask Godwin Kipkemoi Chepkurgor.

The Kenyan man first offered the dowry nine years ago to then-President Bill Clinton in asking for the hand of his only child. He renewed it Thursday after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked about the proposal at a Nairobi town hall session.

CNN's Fareed Zakaria, the session's moderator, commented that given the economic crisis at hand, Chepkurgor's dowry was "not a bad offer."

However, Clinton said her daughter was her own person.

"She's very independent," she said. "So I will convey this very kind offer."

Now, I don't know who introduced the term "dowry" into this context, but this is not an example of dowry as anthropologists understand it. Dowry is wealth transferred from the bride's family to the groom. Wealth transferred from the groom's family to the bride and her family is called bridewealth or sometimes bride price.

This is an important distinction, because it can be an index of the relative importance of females and males in different societies. In societies where females are highly valued, and where marriage means that a female family member's productive and reproductive output are lost to the groom and his family, bridewealth is more common. It's compensation for the loss of a female. This is the case for many traditional African cultures, including some in Kenya where the offer for Chelsea was made.

In some traditional European and Asian cultures, where females are not so highly valued, dowry serves to compensate the groom and his family for taking on the extra burden of a female. Of course, the iconic example of dowry and the problems related to it is in India, where brides whose families fail to hand over the negotiated dowry may be killed by the husband or his family. The European dowry tradition continues to be expressed in the custom of the bride's family paying for the wedding.

In small-scale societies that have little material wealth, like the Yanomama (Venezuela and Brazil) who subsist on horticulture and foraging, another way of compensating a family for loss of a valuable female is for the groom to perform bride service for his wife's family, perhaps by gathering firewood, hunting for them, or clearing the forest for their new garden. This is tricky in this case because Yanomama men are supposed to avoid their mother-in-laws at all cost.

For more on this, visit the Anthropology Tutorials web site at Palomar College.