End of the semester, part I

It's the last week of classes, and there's good news and bad news.

The good news:  Two linguistics students came by the office worried about being able to finish their papers on time.  Their problem: too much material.  The paper is a squib, defined as a usually relatively short exploration of a topic, often incomplete.  I had to talk them down, explaining that squibs are not term papers and that at a convenient point they needed to just stop and suggest where they might go next in the exploration of their topic.  But it is good to know that some students seem to be finding linguistics engaging and relevant.

The bad news: A student emails asking which chapters, in addition to 18 and 19, will be on the final test next week.  Our textbook only has 13 chapters.

Veterans Day

Mom and Dad were married during World War II, and they both did their part to help defeat fascism and genocide in Europe and Asia.  If they were still around, I would want them and all veterans to be honored for their service, and I would also want them to have what, really, everyone ought to have:  health care, education, and all the other things that only an entity like the state can provide for all its citizens.

What I would not want, necessarily, is the hyperbolic near-deification that we seem to want to bestow on our military folk, past and present, regardless of what they did or where they did it.

I'm willing to go the extra mile in giving props to the generation that beat Hitler and his ilk; I am less comfortable with the hero-worship of more recent veterans of places like Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and Afghanistan.  Did they do hard work in difficult places?  Of course.  But were they really fighting for "our freedom," as the speeches and declarations assert?  The evidence is not there.  None of these "enemies" were even close to being a threat to the United States.  None of them were in a position to attack and occupy the US, none could have subjected us to their will.

Virtually every military adventure undertaken by the US since WWII has been a "war of choice," nearly always for the purpose of shoring up some capitalism-friendly dictator (for a long list go here; for just a sample of the current ones, go here). Very often these people have committed egregious criminal acts against their own people. Very rarely have they been the kind of leaders we should be supporting: people with a sincere desire to improve the conditions in which their people live.

What we have really done, since World War II, is create a class of citizens who are, from some perspectives, unindicted war criminals.  Do I want them to be indicted?  No, I don't (some of our leaders who sent them into these situations should be, though).  But no, what I want is for them to be taken care of, to be given whatever they need to deal with the physical and mental injuries they have returned with, to be provided access to the education and training they need to rebuild their post-military lives.

And we should promise them that we will never again betray the folks who, for whatever reason, enter our military by sending them into these spuriously manufactured and often no-win conflicts that, objectively, have little or nothing to do with our own security, and everything to do with the feeding of our vast military-industrial complex.

As a culture, we are addicted to warfare and violence.  The first step in conquering addiction is to admit there's a problem.  The Veterans Day "celebrations," in their present form at least, do not help.

Just in time for Halloween!

Language(s) in schools

Hear ye, hear ye!  Children attending Irish-language primary schools outperformed their peers in English-only schools in mathematics and, wait for it...  English!  A lttle dated, but it's never really too late.

On "race" and ethnicity

On the Anthro-L email list someone asked:

For the uninitiated, could someone please tell me what distinction anthropologists make between race & ethnicity?

First have a look at a post on this blog some time back: "Paging Dr. Gupta: ethnic skin?!?"

Now then, briefly:

Both race and ethnicity are cultural categories used for sorting humans into groups.  The "race" category alleges that biological features can be used to do this, but it is not valid.  "Race" is equivalent to "subspecies," and it doesn't work even for non-human animals. For instance, the "Florida panther" is an alleged subspecies of mountain lion, Puma concolor coryii. It is a figment of people's imagination, although... the informal designation might be useful for conservation purposes: "the panthers that happen to live in Florida need to be protected."  The taxonomic label is simply invalid.

Ethnic group, as a category, alleges that people share language and culture, at least partly or mostly due to their having a common origin, coming from a place.  "African-American" comes to mind, of course. The Garifuna in Central America are an interesting example, because many of them appear to be of African descent, but they speak an Arawakan language: a nice example of the independent variability of biology and culture.

By the way, in the US at least, SAE (standard average European) is the unmarked ethnic category.  Other people belong to "ethnic groups," but not them (us?).  This is one facet of the trap Gupta fell into.  Of course, to be human is to belong to an ethnic group: without language and culture, we are not human.

J Philippe Rushton is dead

J. Philippe Rushton (1943-2012), one of the leading practitioners of what has come to be called "scientific racism," died last Tuesday from cancer.  A professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario, he was unapologetically consistent in his racist assertions about the meaning of the biological and cultural variation across the human species.  Among other things, he argued that:

• Humans can be divided into three distinct biological races, which he labeled Mongoloid, Caucasoid, and Negroid.
• These three races can be ranked on a scale of "intelligence," as measured by "IQ," with Mongoloids highest, Negroids lowest, and Caucasoids in between.
• Penis size is an index of intelligence: Negroids, the lowest in IQ, have the biggest penises; etc.
• The biological concept of r/K selection can be applied to the different human "races." Mongoloids, who are K-selected, have the fewest children and take the best care at raising them, while Negroids, being r-selected, have many children and are relatively careless with them.

There's a lot one could say about Rushton, but I'm not sure it's worth it.  His ideas were straight out of the 19th century tradition of explaining human variation, both biological and cultural, in essentialist, racist terms.  Although this paradigm has been thoroughly debunked by anthropologists since Boas, there remains a group of psychopaths who refuse to let go. Some are gone, like William Shockley and Glayde Whitney; others linger on, like Arthur Jensen, Richard Lynn, and other fans of the Pioneer Fund and Mankind Quarterly who worry that the "white race" is being "diluted" to the "degeneration" of humankind.

Rushton's misapplication of r/K-selection is typical.  This concept describes reproductive strategies that are generally present at the level of biological order or even higher, rather than at the level of species, and certainly not at the level of "races" (i.e. subspecies).  Among humans, having more or fewer children is a cultural adaptation, not a biological one.  Indeed, this particular cultural trait has changed over time even among "whites" who have moved from farming (which favors having more children) to industrial (favoring fewer children) lifeways.

I'll leave you with another of Rushton's bizarre ideas, one that I frequently share in my anthropology classes: that a nation's intelligence or "IQ" is somehow indexed to its gross domestic product (GDP).  Forget the history of colonialism, exploitation, and deliberate underdevelopment carried out by Europeans in much of the "low-IQ/low-GDP" world.  Instead, just smile at Rushton's "IQ of Nations":

What does a Native American look like?

In his debates with Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown claimed that he could look at Warren and tell that she isn't Native American.  My friend Anj Petto at the National Center for Science Education worked up a little exercise to test this hypothesis.  I have modified his work slightly and present my version here.

Test your ability to determine, by sight alone, who has Native American ancestry.  The answers are below the fold.