Ashes to ashes: an observance of Ash Wednesday. | Creative Commons |Photo by Matt Millard, click on image for license and information.

Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of the Lenten season for Western Christians—the 40 days (or 46 if you count weekends) leading up to Easter. Last year, I discussed the actions of a local homeless woman, who used the observance to help her connect with passersby: she would say “I went to church too” as she asked for help. While that post focused on the efforts undertaken by that woman to render herself visible, readers rightly commented that Ash Wednesday is also an exercise in visibility. Reader Will Hawkins specifically posed the following:

I would love to read more about the idea of wearing the ashes throughout the day. Since it is part of a religious ritual, there must be components of belonging and value.

How does it differ from other outward symbols of religiosity like the Yarmulke or the Hijab? Does it differ at all? If they are indeed similar, why has France banned one and not all three?

Religion is a slippery slope to climb in the public eye, but Will’s questions echoed a conversation S and I had following that post. While I am certainly not a religious scholar, we can investigate the power of symbols and the role of community in these types of observances.

The meanings inherent in rituals are informed by dialectic processes: designers, participants, the flow of the general social order figure in the ways rituals are conceived, executed, and understood:

Rituals reveal values at their deepest level … men express in ritual what moves them most, and since the form of expression is conventionalized and obligatory, it is the values of the group that are revealed (1).

Rituals thus come to reflect the particular sensibilities of communities—or rather, communitas, a term by Victor Turner used in The Ritual Process to represent the human bond (2). Communitas is distinct from the structured economic, political, and judicial systems that govern social life, and give us communities. It connects the unstructured elements of the social order: those dialectic processes where the social order negotiates itself—states of shifting, rebalancing, and reordering. In these moments before established structures assert themselves, actions, behaviors, and relationships are governed by communitas. This idea seems most closely represent the networks that we belong to because it groups us together in ways that are more intimate than the idea of a general community. If we use Turner’s concept of communitas, we have a means of understanding the connections within religious groups.

While the term ritual often brings to mind religious grandeur, we are immersed in rituals. That quick pass through your home before you leave—the one where you make sure the stove is off and the windows and back door are locked—is a ritual. How do you start your workday? Do you need a cup of coffee and a quick review of the day’s headlines before you get down to email? Do you have a place you retreat to when you’re having a rough day or week? Have you sung “Happy Birthday” to a friend or loved one? Buckled your seatbelt on a plane or in a car? These are rituals. I draw attention to these mundane activities not to detract from the sometimes pomp and circumstance that surrounds many religious rituals, but to remind us that rituals permeate daily life, in ways that we may not even think about.

Rituals are obligations. They are the means by which we perform and confirm our affiliation to social groups. Drinking a cup of coffee and reviewing the day’s headlines prepares us to participate in a culture of work. They signal our willingness to enter this phase of our day—that we’re workers—because they are done in specific ways at specific times. The are the means by which we confirm our participation in a particular activity—in this case, roughly eight hours of paid labor. The same is true of singing “Happy Birthday”: it signals our connection to the celebrant, indicating that we recognize him or her as a member of our network.

Religious rituals function in the same way. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent: the forty days leading up to Easter that are a reflection of the forty days Jesus spent in the desert, during which he fasted and was tempted by Satan. The Lenten season is a time of penance and mourning, and as a symbol of this penance and mourning, Christians wear an ashen sign of the cross on their foreheads. The practice of wearing ashes as signs of penitence is older than Christendom: dusting oneself in ashes brings one low, signifying humility and sorrow. There are also numerous mentions in various Biblical texts that discuss this practice in this context. While Ash Wednesday is not a Holy Day of Obligation within the Church—a day on which Christians are required to attend mass—many do participate, and the act renders Christians highly visible because they typically wear the ashes for the day until the mark fades.

Ash Wednesday becomes an important means of establishing communitas within Christiandom because it provides Christians with a visible signal of connection, laying bare the links of a larger network. It is this network that the homeless woman we discussed earlier hoped to tap into. Though she herself did not have ashes on her forehead, she sought to link herself to this signal of the network—to no avail because she didn’t possess the actual symbol that she was trying to leverage.

Rituals are most powerful and apparent during transitory states that precede our full participation in the social structures that govern daily life. When we’re having our coffee and reading the day’s headlines, we haven’t fully settled into our roles for the day. When we’re singing “Happy Birthday,” we’re in the midst of adjusting the network to account for the celebrant’s new status which is tied to age. Ash Wednesday places participants in a similarly liminal state: it separates participants from the main social order, highlighting their connection to a particular network in preparation for the coming Easter observance.

The use of ashes in this case helps the communitas manifest publicly, but the ritual itself remains powerful without the visible signal. Wearing of ashes is only meaningful if you believe in the ritual itself. That is to say, whether you get ashes at 8:00 am and wipe them off immediately or at 8:00 pm and could only wear them for a few minutes, if you accepted the meaning behind the ritual then your place within the network is confirmed. The visibility made possible by this sign is a byproduct of the event, but it is not the object of the performance. However, if this is completely true then the homeless woman’s lack of ashes should not have impaired her ability to obtain more assistance. I don’t think it necessarily did, but her personality is known in these quarters quite well and I think her statements may have been viewed as manipulative given the context.

There is solidarity in the performance, however, particularly for a group that does not normally have a visible signal of religious identity such as the Yarmulke or the Hijab. It becomes a reminder that the Christian network is comprised of a diverse membership—providing that membership has elected to get and wear ashes early and throughout in the day. But the purpose behind the Yarmulke and the Hijab is also not visibility, though visibility is a byproduct as well. The Yarmulke is worn because the Talmud requires Jewish men to cover their heads:

Cover your head in order that the fear of heaven may be upon you.

The Hijab is linked to modesty and morality in Islamic scholarship. Wearing ashes, a Yarmulke, or a Hijab is not done primarily as a means of identification. These actions are born out of obligations to the network. Furthermore, the Yarmulke and the Hijab don’t appear to fit our discussion about rituals. They aren’t elements of transition or preparation for participation in larger structural systems—they are embedded in structural systems themselves and as symbols, they take on completely different meanings and status in these contexts.

Ash Wednesday takes a group and places them on the edge of the social order, reminding them of their connection to a particular communitas as they prepare for a religious observance together. It functions where the economic, political, and social structures do not. The Yarmulke and the Hijab are facets of religious life. While they may separate participants from the social order, they are less about communitas than they are about community:

(C)ommunitas is made evident or accessible, so to speak, only through its juxtaposition to, or hybridization with, aspects of social structure. Just as in Gestalt psychology, figure and ground are mutually determinative, or, as some rare elements are never found in nature in their purity but only as components of chemical compounds, so communitas can be grasped only in some relation to structure. Just because the communitas component is elusive, hard to pin down, it is not unimportant. Here the story of Lao-tse’s chariot wheel may be apposite. The spokes of the wheel and the nave (i.e., the central block of the wheel holding the axle and spokes) to which they are attached would be useless, he said, but for the hole, the gap, the emptiness at the center. Communitas, with its unstructured character, representing the “quick” of human interrelatedness … might well be represented by the “emptiness at the center,” which is nevertheless indispensible to the functioning of the structure of the wheel (3).

If Christians were required to wear ash crosses on a daily basis, the ashes would become a part of the religious structure, and would be subject to the struggles that occur between social structures as they assert and establish themselves. This appears to be what is occurring with the Hijab, which as a symbol has come to represent more than its original purpose both to external social structures as well as those for whom the Hijab is an aspect of daily life. It has become a symbol for the conflict between political and economic and legal systems.

As it is, Christians wear their ashes for a day to remind them that they are entering a period of fasting, penitence, and mourning. Ash Wednesday is a day of liminality during which Christians are extracted from the general social order in preparation for the coming Easter holiday. Following Ash Wednesday, there are no visible markers that identify Christians as such—the communitas manifests and then dissolves back into the social order. This is not the case with the other religious symbols that were raised in comparison.

Your thoughts are welcome Readers—as I am no religious scholar—but I’d also like to remind you to please be respectful in your commentary.

Cited:
Turner, Victor. (1969) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company.

Notes:
1. Turner, Victor (1969). The Ritual Process: 6.
2. Turner: 97.
3. Turner: 127.

Quite a diverse collection this week:

• Can a specially designed Speedo help you match the speed of a shark? If you’re skeptical, you’re in good company. Elizabeth Preston of Inkfish explains why we come up short trying to duplicate the physical qualities of shark skin.

• Language can be quite telling about social norms. Ingrid Pillar of Language on the Move delves into some of the ways change is reflected in language in a Bavarian village.

• Are you a city person or a country person? At Per Square Mile, Tim DeChant explores why the suburbs continue to draw people from urban centers.

I’ll be back next week with more from anthropology, philosophy, and research.

The online social world is rapidly developing around us. And there is no longer a choice about participation—not if you hope to be heard. The social media tools that constitute this landscape are diverse and plentiful. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, however, by the number of services you can find yourself maintaining, easy to feel that it’s impossible to keep up, and easy to give up. But giving up carries a heavy weight. It means reduced connectivity and reduced access to information. And while some may insist that they can get along without these channels, data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project suggests otherwise:

• Four in five American adults (82%) own and carry a cell phone.

• Half of all adult cell owners (51%) have used their phones to get information they needed right away.

With the launch of digital government initiatives, like New York City’s @311NYC, email, and text alerts, people can get and share information on-the-go about traffic, school events, weather warnings, or crime. As we increasingly grow accustomed to processing data this way, we’re also beginning to increasingly use it as a means of communicating with each other:

65% of adult Internet users are on a social networking site, like MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn.

And we can’t overlook Twitter: there were 13.7 million Super Bowl-related tweets—a number that should give even the staunchest social media critic pause.

The return of Social Media Week for its fourth installation is another indicator that these measures can no longer be viewed as fleeting trends. Our methods of communication are changing, as are our methods of collecting and digesting information. In all areas. Don Tapscott, keynote speaker and author of Macrowikinomics, views social media as a new means of production. “It’s not a means of hooking up online,” he said. “It’s a platform to self organize; to get us out of the industrial age to a new age.” Indeed, social media has been at the root of revolutions and major instances of change. And this year’s theme, “Empowering Change through Collaboration,” captures this sweeping social spirit with an eye toward the future.

From February 13th through 17th, Social Media Week will be observed in 12 major cities around the world with panel discussions, networking events, and parties that are largely free to the public, though registration is requires in many instances. The open conference setting is important in overcoming one of the largest hurdles we face in the technical age—the double digital divide—by inviting everyone to join the conversation. Events are hosted throughout the City (there are more than 350 planned in New York City), and are organized around central themes including art and culture, advertising and marketing, business and innovation, global society, health and wellness, and social and environmental change. And while event coverage has always been readily available on Twitter, this year global partner Nokia launched a real time infographic tool that can offer targeted information about cities and panels. It’s pretty neat, and if you aren’t planning to attend, it might be worth a look because it hones users in to specific panels and events around the world. To help keep participants organized, there’s also an app they can download (though I have mixed feelings about conference apps, since they seem to lose their usefulness post-conference).

As a Social Media Week attendee who has watched this particular event grow successively bigger while retaining its definition and increasing its inclusiveness, it is heartening to see the new discussions that are beginning to happen. Last year, the science community put their toes in the water, and this year, health and wellness will have its own content hub hosted by Saatchi and Saatchi Wellness. There are many hurdles to social media participation in health and wellness, but there is also a need to communicate with people in ways that are accessible to them. Saatchi and Saatchi’s Ned Russell hopes that the Social Media Week collective can offer some guidance on how to go about incorporating these forms of media into the delivery of health and wellness services. He hopes that where the FDA has been vague, collaboration between so many different types of expertise can offer practical suggestions to put a plan into action.

Also new this year is an exercise in deploying online social networks. “Can Man Survive on Social Media Alone?” is a social experience that tracks two individuals—Daphne from Singapore (#CanManSG) and Martin from London (#CanManLondon)—as they trade cities and try to survive with little more than help from their networks. You can follow along on Facebook (facebook.com/CanManSG or facebook.com/CanManLondon) or the hashtags above on Twitter. The exercise is reminiscent of the ways travellers found help after being stranded following the Eyjafjallajokull eruption.

Registration is still open for SMW events, though I imagine they are filling fast. Can’t be there in person? Many events are streamed live. And you can always follow along on Twitter @socialmediaweek or #smw12. And if you see me, say hello—let’s connect offline for a few minutes.

–
For some of my additional reports on previous Social Media Week events, you may also want to review:

2010

• Remembering the Human Element in CSR Initiatives
• Social Graph Optimization and Network Saturation
• Digital Authenticity and the Leverage of Social Media in Sports

2011

• Blurring the Digital Line
• New York City Government Gets Social
• When Research Goes Social: Community and Engagement

This week:

• Neuroskeptic isn’t quite sold on a study suggesting that family history of neurological and psychiatric disorders may be a predictive factor in the major college students choose.
• Context is king. Katy Meyers demonstrates how skeletal information, burial context, grave goods, and ethnographic information combine to reveal details about lives long gone in the Bahamas.
• For more on using skeletal information, Michelle Ziegler traces evidence from a few types of sources to gain a better understanding of malaria in medieval England.
• Social cues are most influential from people we know and trust. A new blog calledThe Scorpion and the Frog by Sarah Jane Alger discusses a study on eye gazes between macaques, finding that the same appears to be true for them as well.

I’ll be back next week with more from anthropology, philosophy, and research.

Giants parade down the Canyon of Heroes after their victory in 2008. They will retrace their steps today. | Creative Commons, Photo by David Hodges. Click image for license and link.

Ed. Note: So the New York Giants won the super bowl, and there will be a parade not too far from my office today. I’m have no intention of leaving the office—parade or no parade, I’m not a Giants fan and my football wounds are still a bit raw, and the crowds are a little intense—but it seemed like a good time to revisit this post that I wrote following the parade for the New York Yankees in 2009. (I’m not a fan of them either, but the parade was a novelty at the time.) Wondering how a New Yorker be a fan of anything but a New York team? I address that here.

Whether you care or not, if you live in the United States, you undoubtedly know by now that the New York Yankees won their 27th World Series title. As part of the winning tradition, the players and relevant staff were honored with a ticker tape parade on Friday, Nov. 6th, down the Canyon of Heroes (also known as Broadway when it isn’t packed with screaming sports fans). The parade wound its way down to City Hall, where recently re-elected Mayor Bloomberg presented the team with the keys to the city.

A vendor sets up an impromtu stall on Nassau Street using a permanent sidewalk ornament. Photo by KDCosta, 2009.

Parades are held to mark a celebration. They’re a form of public festival that draws in the community, and actually work to reestablish social ties: The idea is that we are all gathered to celebrate the same accomplishment—we are united in our celebration. Parade-goers are linked by their sense of pride and camaraderie. In a larger sense, parades are also a spectacle. It’s a chance for a community to put on a show for their neighbors, to demonstrate their dominance. The accomplishment being celebrated connects the people present, but it also distinguishes them from others as well. And there is a great deal of preparation that goes into the show—from transit to safety to entrepreneurship to turning a blind eye when employees go missing for a few hours, everyone has a part to play. The spectacle is supported by the government because it provides a momentum that can be used. If buildings need to be built, laws need to be passed, or even wars need to be started, the momentum from such public celebrations can be mobilized. This sense of pride can carry forth many political agendas.

Ethnographers should always try to understand their biases, and their audiences should also have a sense of how the objectivity of information may be compromised. So before I go on, I need to confess that I considered calling this post “Infiltrating Enemy Territory.” I am not a Yankees fan, as some of you may have surmised. I root for that other New York team, whose name I will not mention in a post about a parade for their rivals. Parades have a huge cultural element to them: they can reveal a great deal about the character and personality of a people through the ways in which society responds to these occasions. Regardless of the cause, a parade is still a chance to think about and talk about crowd dynamics. So as a dedicated anthropologist (who works within the vicinity of the parade route), I elbowed my way into enemy camp on Friday morning, bore witness to the scene, and extricated myself when chants of “Boston Sucks!” began to rise in pitch and intensity (belatedly realizing that I was wearing a red jacket—the color associated with the Yankees’ arch rivals, the Boston Red Sox, and the team they beat for the championship, the Philadephia Phillies).

The day began early for many fans. A great many people called in late or played hooky entirely, and teachers may have noticed a few empty desks on Friday morning. My morning commute was slightly more hectic than usual, as I contended with the large number of fans boarding the LIRR and subway. (which operates in a system similar to the LIRR) shared his morning commute with a dog who alternated between wandering the aisle and hopping up on the seat much to the annoyance of the conductor. Food vendors selling breakfast staples were doing brisk business as I made my way to my office building, weaving between the droves of people trying to get to Broadway.The came from all directions, of different sizes, shapes, and colors, all sporting the navy blue of their team. And there to greet them were the opportunistic street vendors who saw an chance to make a quick and relatively easy profit: banners and hats were $5.00, t-shirts cost $10.00.

Fans find a good vantage point. Photo by KDCosta, 2009.

At about a quarter to eleven, I slipped into my jacket, grabbed my camera and hurried west on Wall Street. Several small groups—families with young children in tow—passed me, emitting triumphant whoops of joy. We all soon encountered a road block that could have ended all parade activities right then: Wall Street was closed at William Street, a good two blocks from Broadway. The police were blocking off street perpendicular to Broadway as they filled with people, and given the high profile of Wall Street itself, extra precautions were being taken to preserve the landmark. A cop advised us to walk north, so we walked a block to Pine Street, passing some more vendors, and turned west again to pack together as closely as we could to get a glimpse of the parade route. I ultimately wound up approximately half a block away from Broadway and still could only just see the events ahead of me. People got creative in searching for a good spot. Some climbed on the shoulders and backs of accommodating friends, boyfriends, and parents. Others climbed on top of city vehicles, though they were quickly chased off by watchful police. Some scaled buildings. Many buildings downtown have ledges about eight feet or so above the ground. They aren’t wide, but if you’re nimble, you can perch there to get above the crowd. And still others hung out of office windows.

The crowd seemed to feed off of the growing energy. Laughter would erupt, and in true Yankees fan form, chants of “Boston Sucks!” and “Phillies Suck!” and “Let’s Go Yankees!” and “Twen-ty Sev-en”—the hyphens emphasize the musical intonation of that particular chant—would swell periodically. It was definitely something to feel: a sea of people packed into side streets in shoulder to shoulder formation, speaking as one and thinking as one (except for the impostor in the red jacket). We were momentarily transported back to the stadium. The chants were something that everyone could participate in, including those who had not made it to a side street before the police began barricading those as well. But in truth, even those at the very end of the blocks and the people behind the barricades didn’t seem upset that they couldn’t see their beloved team. They were content to stand there, to be a part of the crowd, and take up their favorite war cries.

"Ticker tape" fills the sky. Photo by KDCosta, 2009.

“Ticker tape” (really just shredded paper), thrown from buildings, drifted through the clear blue sky. In no time at all, the ground was covered, and everyone standing in the vicinity had scraps of paper in their hair and on their jackets. Ticker tape parades are unique to urban settings. They originated (where else?) in New York City. The first parade of this kind occured in 1886, when ticker tape was thrown during the dedication of the Statue of Liberty. The tape came from the old stock ticker machines, and when they were replaced by their electronic cousins, the ticker tape that filled the sky for these parades came from shredded office waste paper and city-supplied confetti. Caught in the wind, the scraps drifted for miles, blanketing Wall Street and the neighborhood. Lumbering street sweeping vehicles were on standby to get things back to order once the ceremonies wrapped up.

So there I was, in my red jacket, standing amongst a throng of people who probably would have fed me to the lions in the Colosseum had they known of my true loyalties. A cheer began to grow from the right along Broadway, cameras were thrust into the air around me, and the band marched by. Not to be dissuaded, the crowd continued to roar, their cries growing louder as the official photographers made their way down the Canyon. And then finally,They came. The moment these people had been waiting for arrived, and the crowd erupted, extending to the peripheries. In fact, those were the folks who probably yelled the loudest. Children were hoisted into the air. Hats were waved. A woman began to cry.

Exuberant young fan tries to catch ticker tape. He did wind up snagging several large white sheets of copy paper. Photo by KDCosta, 2009

Remember when I said that athletes are our representatives on a public stage? We support teams because we believe in them—we trust them to protect our interests on the national stage. Well, the parade-goers turned out to say “Thank you.” That was the feeling that seemed to radiate through the crowd. Yes, there was a bit of arrogance, but a certain amount of swagger is to be expected from the victorious—particularly when it is cultivated, and believe me, New Yorkers cultivate their swagger. People were there to say thank you. The spectaclewas in the showing. The turnout was meant to send a clear message to rivals, and perhaps the strength of voices behind the cheers and the chants were meant to carry—I wonder if the hair on the backs of the necks of Bostonians and Philadelphians stood on end at that moment. Could the energy from this group have been so great as to travel that distance?

Once the team passed, people began to trickle away from Broadway. Some were going back to their offices, like me, and others were headed to City Hall for the final celebration, and still others were packing into bars and joining lines to buy hot dogs and chicken with rice from food vendors. The mood was jubilant. Vendors were still hawking their wares as I made my way back toward Wall Street, fighting the crowd heading in the direction of City Hall. But the day was not over for many. Those who did not have tickets to the City Hall ceremony seemed content to mill about and drink in the remaining atmosphere.

The effects of this public festival/spectacle will last well beyond the coming baseball season. The city’s spirit has been renewed by this gathering of fans—even though they don’t represent the complete spectrum of baseball supporters in New York. The festival/spectacle has permitted the assertion of a sense of social dominance and it will be something that all residents—whether you support this team or not—will carry with them in their travels. Our reputation, whether we want to share in it or not, has been bolstered. Once again, we are a city united, albeit some more reluctantly than others. The parade created a substantial expense for the city, which probably saw a tab in the range of $330,000.00—do the long term effects outweigh these costs?

Responde s'il vous plait. | Photo by Ewan, 2009. | Click image for CC license and information.

Much has been written about the decline of the RSVP. What is so hard about letting the host know whether you can attend? In many cases, the work has been done for you: virtual invitations require clicking the appropriate radio button, while paper invitations might contain a pre-stamped RSVP card or clear instructions on how to contact the host. And with the popularity of text messaging, you don’t even have to call! Yet, many hosts are often frustrated by a lack of responses. But perhaps there is something about the RSVP itself that lends itself to this sort of social silence.

In 2009, my sister-in-law got married. And I was in charge of her bridal shower. The gathering was limited to “immediate” family, which in a Bengali/Indian household can approximate anywhere in the range of 50 – 100 people as a result of reciprocal invite practices and whether the invited individuals have children or other family members staying with them at the time. Invitations are by default extended to all persons in the household. In this case, I was expecting approximately 75 people, coming from about 35 households. I put a lot of thought into the invitations and had them printed with matching envelopes and return labels. And I gave folks the option to RSVP by phone or email, thinking about my own busy schedule and wanting to give them different options for working me into their day. I mailed them with a little bit of anxiety because this would be the first event that I would host for the family. And I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

A few emails trickled in from non-family members and cousins who were close to my age. So I prepared for the rush of acceptances. Surely the phone would begin to ring. Surely my inbox would overflow.

And nothing happened.

I mentioned to S that I hadn’t heard from anyone but a handful of folks. I was worried. We were planning on catering the event and had no idea of a headcount. He asked if I had followed up the paper invitation with a phone call. I was taken aback. A phone call? You mean I needed to chase folks down to determine if they were coming? I was already up to my neck in party planning activities—where was I going to find the time to call all these people? The purpose of the invite was for them to call me. After all, I was the one doing all the work—all they needed to do was indicate whether they were coming or not (and show up close to on time).

But according to S, no one would come if I didn’t call. I was at a loss. “Then what was the purpose of the invitation?” I demanded to know. S shrugged. “If you don’t call, it means you don’t really want them to come.” Apparently, I came very close to alienating the guest list, which contained mostly family members, because of the way my invitation was delivered. I stewed on this for a day or so, and then began the process of tracking down the assorted telephone numbers needed. I felt foolish during my first few calls: “Hey, it’s Krystal. How are you? I just want to be sure you received the invitation and are planning on attending the shower.” I stumbled through the first calls. I was embarrassed. I felt as though I was begging people to attend.

And in truth, in many ways, I was. To be a host is a great honor. It means that you have the physical means of showing generosity to others. However, to be invited means that you will have to reciprocate in some way—this is the social expectation as outlined by Marcel Mauss in The Gift. (I talk about Mauss at length here.) So to be a guest, to be invited, is actually a bigger burden than it is to host, particularly if you have little means to reciprocate.

For my guests however, a personal invitation is embedded in their cultural practices. The importance of individual contact conveys importance both about the event and about the requested guest. Visiting becomes an important activity in this instance because it is common for Bengalis to deliver invitations to events during the course of a visit. Abu-Zahra (1974) writes in her discussion on the etiquette of visiting:

“The system of visiting, therefore, is the criterion according to which villagers are judged as to whether they have respect and are appreciated by the rest of the villagers or not. In order to attract visitors one should do favours to others and this is dependent on the amount of wealth which would enable one to have sufficient influence to help others. To achieve the same end one also should be kind and gentle to others. This will attract people who will praise one and thus, one will enjoy an ‘honourable reputation’” (122).

Sweeping changes to social norms are not common short of revolutions. The social order—as conceived of our other longtime friend, Durkeim—is a somewhat stable force. In Bangladesh, hosts often visit the homes of the invited as a means of delivering the invitation. To understand why, we need to understand the importance of reciprocal action to this society. There are “costs” associated with being invited that are both social and physical. Delivering the invitation during a visit, helps mitigate the “cost” to the guest because it allows him to preemptively fulfill his duties to reciprocate. When the time came to deliver the wedding invitations for my sister-in-law, only those guests who lived a considerable distance away received an invitation in the mail (although they did receive a very lengthy phone call preceding the receipt of the invite). All other guests received a personal visit from my in-laws, during which time their presence was requested at the wedding.

There is a great deal of prestige and reputation tied to visiting. There are rules that govern proper visiting etiquette (Abu-Zahra 1974:127):

• (W)hen one visits a person one makes qdar [esteem] for him, and if one had not been visited earlier by this person he is lowering his qdar (hat be-qadruh).

Abu-Zahra stresses the honor tied to a return visit—visiting someone who visits you (i.e., attending the event to which you were invited during a personal visit)—allows you to gain standing within the community because it is as though you have allowed your host to pay off a social debt, which was incurred when the host visited to deliver the invitation. Mauss noted that though gifts (and invitations) are supposed to be given freely and willingly, they in fact come with the obligation to give and an obligation to receive. The same is true for invitations—eventually, the invited is expected to reciprocate in some form.

• People should be either formally invited or should be paying back a visit, otherwise their uncalled-for visits are much despised.

Because there is so much social currency invested in visiting, these must be planned encounters lest the visitor place the host in a debt that he cannot or will not repay. That said, the practice of delivering the invitations is finely orchestrated. The host family calls ahead and makes arrangements to visit for tea or dinner on a particular day so that the future guests are prepared to receive the social debt. If the intended guests know that they will be unable to attend the event, during this planning period they indicate that they have other commitments, so that no debt is created unnecessarily.

• Correspondingly it is a mark of great honour and fame (saya) that a person makes few visits or none, yet is visited by everyone.

To be able to make few visits is a mark of wealth. If you are so wealthy as to host many gatherings, and need not to participate in return visits to offset costs (both material and social), then you attain a different status within the community. However, most folks fall in the reciprocal relationship.

In terms of my own event, a telephone call would have been sufficient because this was not a formal event, such as a wedding. The practice of visiting is reserved for truly important invitations. Unfortunately, I had overlooked this element of the invitation and was now faced with a group of people who were rather put out at my behavior. During my calls, an aunt said that her young daughter (approximately 4 years old at the time) had said upon receiving the invitation, “If Krystal doesn’t call, then I am not going!” I laughed good-naturedly and apologized for the delay in calling, but I was later struck by how patterned the process of inviting someone was in this case. For someone so young to know the etiquette indicates that it is being taught.

An Op-Ed in the New York Times suggested that the RSVP no longer fits with our lifestyle:

What’s clear is how hard the R.S.V.P. rubs against the grain of contemporary life. In requesting people to anchor a plan in the distant future of a month hence, you are demanding a kind of navigation that Americans increasingly do not practice. We prefer to remain flexy, solidifying our plans incrementally as the date approaches. Let’s talk tomorrow. I’ll call you when I’m on the road. Cellphones in hand, we microadjust our schedules as they unfold around us. We’re like the air traffic controllers of our own lives.

But perhaps it’s the manner in the way the invite is delivered. By sending an evite or mailing a paper invitation, perhaps the event loses some of its importance. We’re saying, “I’m too busy to formally invite you.” So perhaps it’s fair for the invited in this case to say, “I’m too busy to respond.”

Or perhaps, removed from the personal connection that is reinforced by individual contact, the event seems less real in the minds of recipients. It’s as though they haven’t actually been invited. Before we insist that increasing poor manners are to blame for the lack of responses, we should note that RSVPs are a relatively recent social construct. Bengalis are not alone in hand delivering invitations—it is a practice found in the long history of social visits. That said, perhaps some flexibility is needed from both the host and the invited. Most of my RSVPs came from people who were my age or younger, and seemed comfortably using email or text as a means of contacting me. No one called. Perhaps I should have called the older relatives as a sign of respect. From here on out, however, I think I’ll let S handle the guest list.

Reference:
Abu-Zahra, N. (1974). Material Power, Honour, Friendship, and the Etiquette of Visiting Anthropological Quarterly, 47 (1) DOI: 10.2307/3317030

Let’s get to it:

• You may have heard of Mitochondrial Eve, but have you heard of the Ancestral Mare? At Inkfish, Elizabeth Preston walks readers through the story of a recent common ancestor of horses.

• If you’re bad at music, you might also be bad at Chinese. A quick discussion at For the Ears explores why amusic people might have more difficulty with languages with small differences in pitch changes.

• Those of you with strong stomachs, an appetite for the gruesome, and a high respect for cultural differences might want to visit Body Horrors, where Rebecca Kreston has a delightfully squirmish post about a canine parasite in Northwest Kenya.

I’ll be back next week with more from anthropology, philosophy, and research.

It’s an experience not at all unfamiliar to many of us: the flush of a first meeting, a growing attraction, a desire to spend every waking moment together, to visit new places and explore a world previously unknown, to create new memories together. In this blissful period of initial attraction, when the bloom is still on the rose, there are no shortcomings; everything is perfect. Enamourment drives us to passionate defenses and the abrupt dismissal of those who would impugn the virtue of the object of our affections.

And then things change.

A broken promise. Mismatched expectations. Financial concerns. External stressors start to weigh heavily on interactions. Suddenly those long, romantic drives feel never-ending and leave you with more aches and pains than they seem worth. Bickering and stubbornness prevail. And the romance fades.

Autophobia* by Brian Ladd documents one such love affair, trying to pinpoint just where it is our unbridled passion for the auto industry went awry. It traces the misgivings of those in the fast lane to well before the rise of the horseless carriage when speedy wealthy citizens presented a threat to the poorer foot traveling populace. It seems that the concerns then were not so different from the concerns now: how to control the hulking menace created by speed, increase safety, and preserve the natural wonder of the landscape which must inevitably be altered to permit speedy travel.

I learned to drive in a little grey four door 1990 Mazda. It had been used—I mean really used—when my parents bought it, and by the time I got behind the wheel, it had to be nearing 100 on the speedometer. Perhaps fearing for my safety, my parents soon traded it in for a brand new champagne colored Kia Sephia. Kia was still new to the American market and no one I knew had heard of them, but I didn’t care. (Don’t laugh. One of my friends had a Ford Probe—a Probe. Can you even begin to imagine the jokes that surrounded that car?) That Sephia was my ticket to freedom. I imagined myself coolly cruising down the expressway, pulling into a parking space at school, smoothly sliding from behind the wheel, slamming the door and hitting the alarm as I walked into the building. It didn’t quite work that way. For one, it didn’t have a remote alarm, so there went that idea. But my driving dreams were also almost immediately curtailed: After much, much begging and pleading and proving myself to be a responsible driver by running endless Saturday morning errands for my dad (while he puttered around the house relishing the freedom of not having to go to the bank or the grocery store or the post office), I finally got the keys to the car with clearance to take it to school—and in that first week, on a local road, a much older man in a brown Lexus ran a light and nailed me. Well, he clipped the rear driver side pretty badly. And the ensuing scene involving insurance, the school, and my parents (!) was not pretty. I briefly entertained a life as a gypsy. Furious did not begin to describe my mother’s reaction. In hindsight, it’s somewhat miraculous she let me live so I could share this story with you.

That Sephia took the brunt of my parallel parking learning experiences, and while I remember it fondly today, I can’t say I was sorry to see it go. My driving experience (or lack thereof) aside, I don’t think either one of my parents took an easy breath when I was behind the wheel of that car. I had a feeling it had something of a curse on it—not at all like the used Grand Cherokee that replaced it, which I loved and still miss to this day. (The Cherokee also had a name—Kee—which might have made a difference in terms of how it treated me.)

Many car-owning Americans can probably tell a similar story. Well, not one where they get into an accident after getting the keys (though I’m sure those stories aren’t at all too uncommon either), but one where the ideas of freedom and mobility are tied to dreams of car ownership. Behind the wheel of a car, the paved world beckons. We are the master of our destinies, limited only by our sense of direction and the amount of gas in the tank. But the relationship soon sours when we find ourselves sitting in traffic or facing rising fuel costs or car repair costs. Then the appeal is minimized and the voices that denounce cars as the bain of civilization grow louder:

“They make us fat and lazy, unfeeling and selfish, prisoners in our steel cages. They poison the air and change the climate. Their voracious appetite for natural resources yokes us to the whims of distant dictators with oil wells” (2).

I could go on (and Ladd does), but well, you get the idea. Autophobia is actually the fear of oneself. But cars and lifestyles have become so intertwined, so definitive of each other, that Ladd feels justified in extending this definition to the relationship we have with them. “Fear of cars,” he says, “is tantamount to fear of being human in the automotive age” (11).

What is there to be afraid of? Concerns represent the thematic divisions within the book: health and safety issues, indebtedness to foreign entities, volatile gas prices, social isolation, and the sterilization of the natural landscape. Ladd explores these issues thoroughly. It is clear that they cannot be considered independently; they are bound by the importance we have assigned to mobility. The undercurrent of Autophobia asks readers to consider the ways this importance has taken on cultural significance—to ask why car ownership represents a social milestone. While statistics are neatly woven into the discussion, the more compelling analysis lies in the psychological and behavioral shifts that have developed as we have pursued a more mobile lifestyle.

Car ownership encourages us to think about the spaces we occupy and have access to differently:

Once you choose to buy a car, for example, you have a reason to live in a place where it is easy and cheap to park that car—even if you end up with no other way to get to work. You might start shopping at stores that were previously inaccessible. And as others make the same decisions, as our suburban home, office park, and shopping mall become organized entirely around automotive access, it becomes difficult, costly, and unappealing to reorganize our life (and your neighbors’) to eliminate or even reduce your driving” (9).

And just as suddenly nothing is far—or left to discover. With every place within our reach, we find ourselves desperately seeking the solitude of the natural world even as we refuse to relinquish the isolation we find within our vehicles.

Cars were once toys of the wealthy—and to a large degree, they still are. Looking beyond the showrooms of collectors and enthusiasts, owning a car requires collateral. For many people, even a used car is a considerable expense, and yet after WWII Americans owned 6% of all the cars in the world. Cars are a badge of prosperity and power. Ladd draws attention to the marketing language used to sell motor vehicles: cars are powerful machines, beasts with roaring engines, they devour the road and refine aggression. For example, Acura’s recent marketing campaign links athletes with automobiles, suggesting that performance can be harnessed (video below).

For people in the developing world, cars represent freedom but they also mean access to jobs (even while they provide employment for the enterprising driver), as well as access to education and health care. Cars make available possibilities that were previously unthinkable. So it is not surprising then that those without access will likely be the least supportive of restrictions on the automotive industry that might prevent them from gaining access or increase the price of access before they’ve had a chance to experience the open road. While much of Autophobia focuses on the nature of arguments against cars, Ladd astutely highlights the ways people who are still reaching for car ownership may feel differently:

“But those who are left on the outside are, understandably, less likely to demand that cars be taken away from the privileged than they are to want their own vehicles. And they may oppose restrictions on car use, knowing that these are likely to fall disproportionately on poorer and weaker motorists. Not only do the poor want to live like the rich, they must also negotiate cities built to accommodate the preferences of the rich—for example, with new freeways instead of sidewalks or transit systems. Prosperous Westerners who are tired of their cars often fail to understad how important personal mobility is for residents of poor countries, and how crucial the automobile is for that mobility” (178).

The psychology of car ownership seems an important consideration as we create regulations to reduce carbon emissions, manage petroleum dependencies, and encourage mass transit use. Ladd rightly notes that the perception by many is that mass transit is not a substitute for a personal vehicle, which is certainly a luxury but one that we continue to set our sights on. He highlights many of the concerns with public transportation including harassment—which I can testify is still an issue today—cleanliness, timeliness, and safety. These concerns echo through the ages with staunch reminders that the golden age of trolleys and streetcars were ripe with these issues and perhaps not so golden after all. That is not to say that public transportation is not a transportation solution but that these factors contribute to a particular perception of car ownership.

Autophobia is not brand spanking new off the printing press, but an interesting read in light of increased pedestrian traffic in urban spaces and the call for more green spaces. Mayor Bloomberg’s reclaiming of Broadway as a public pedestrian space for the City met with mixed reviews that seem pretty typical of these sorts of clashes. This suggests that the arguments for and against transportation and its uses are at once old and new in the sense that traffic and urban planners are constantly trying to play catch-up. The systems in place are always a step or two behind the unbridled growth of usage.

Ladd defines a car as a metal or rigid box powered by petroleum and mounted on four wheels that is capable of carrying multiple passengers at once over great distances in shorter times, and is limited only by objects in its path. It seems so simple a thing, really. How could it have gotten so out of hand? I don’t quite have the answer, but I think perhaps this evening I’ll roll down the windows, turn the radio up, and take the long way home.

*NB: This book was provided by the publisher free of charge. Bloggers sometimes receive and request review books with the understanding that they are not required to provide a review—and any resulting review does not have to be favorable.

Raise your cup. | Creative Commons. Photo by John W. Iwanski. Click on image for license and link.

Who here has not enjoyed a cold, refreshing drink from a red plastic cup? Alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages alike find themselves comfortably enclosed within the confines of the bright red vessel that has become a ubiquitous American staple at barbecues, picnics, parties, in dugouts and at minor league games, in food cars and at lunch trucks, and even as a last resort at dive bars—and, of course, college students’ dorms and apartments, where it also functions as a key component in Flip Cup and Beer Pong.

Your drinking vessel may indeed impact your imbibing experience, but the red plastic cup serves as the great equalizer in drinking activities—from the top shelf to the supermarket shelf, the red plastic cup captures and contributes to the spirit of the occasion. It helps make bitter alcohol a more pleasant experience. After all, how can it be distasteful if it’s delivered from the study depths of the cheerily colored vessel? Packaging matters! Drinking practices carry their own distinct rules and expectations relating to the age, gender, and status. The red plastic cup crosses many of these boundaries to figure prominently in American drinking customs.

The most famous of all the red plastic cups is produced by Solo, the long time producer of single use products that are sold almost everywhere. Founded in 1936, the “paper container” manufacturer produced a paper cone cup that typically went with water coolers. A wax-lined cup used in the 1950s for fountain sodas and takeaway drinks might be viewed as precursor to the signature red cup in terms of sturdiness and widespread adoption. The red plastic cup first appeared in the 1970s and worked its way into popular culture seamlessly—even spawning a silly, but fun ode by country singer Toby Keith (which we will get to soon enough). Solo’s simple design for the red cup has been easy for competitors to copy, but in recent years the company has implemented small but noticeable changes—such as a square bottom, indented grips, and Solo embossed on the side—to add further distinction for customers looking for the brand. Consumers can rest assured that the design changes have not impacted the functionality of the red cup—so flip away, or ahem, drink out of it without fear it will slip out of your hands.

Social drinking is a ritualized act. There are certain social codes of consumption that help define the experience by setting expectations and establishing appropriate or acceptable behaviors. Anthropologist William Donner documented social rules surrounding toddy drinking in Sikaiana, a small Polynesian atoll in the Solomon Islands. (Toddy seems a generic name for drinks made from fermented palm. In this case, toddy is made by fermenting the sap of coconut shoots.) Donner found that drinking reorganized the community, allowing boundaries to be renegotiated. Part of this stems from the ways in which drink is shared. In Sikaiana, toddy distribution follows a rather specific format which helps establish the community as a place of equality:

“Participants form a circle. They distributor pours a portion and passes it to one person in the group. This person drinks the cup until its is empty, usually in one drink. Then he returns the cup to the distributor and another serving of the exact same size is poured for the next person. This continues until everyone in the group has had a turn and then the distributor starts another round. If a person arrives late, the distributor may offer him a larger portion so that the latecomer can catch up with the people who are already drinking. In larger groups, several cups are passed out simultaneously, but always in a circular fashion so that everyone is given an equal amount to drink” (1994: 250).

Among the Xhosa, beer is also consumed in accordance with a social code. At a beer-drink (a public drinking event), the beer is kept in either cast-iron pots or plastic or wooden containers, and served in tin beakers (billy cans) of various sizes:

“When beer is allocated, the host section’s mast of ceremonies points out the size of the beaker because the receivers have certain expectations in this regard based on the current state of their beer-exchange relationship with the givers. So a can of beer given to a neighboring group may be announced with carefully chosen words, such as ‘This is your beaker, it is a full iqhwina [seven liters], as it should be when there is a full cask for men’ ” (McAllister 2003: 197).

The drinking vessel is central to this experience. It’s an equalizing factor and a measure of consistency for attendees. It also serves as the entry-point for the temporary social community that has gathered. Drinking from the cup confirms attendance at the event and authorizes participation in subsequent event activities—conversation, singing, dancing, joking and laughing, even confrontations are mediated by drink and cup possession.

Our red plastic cups work similarly. Cup in hand, we mingle. Liberated by the social permission granted by the red plastic cup, we catch up with old friends and make new ones. It becomes a factor that connects attendees at the event—we all have a red plastic cup, so we all belong. And we assert that these cups are ours by writing our name on them, which further making them a handy tool for socialization. This sort of possession also minimizes the burden on our hosts to have a bounty of cups available for guests. (In college and in grad school, we wrote our names on cups because we paid for them at parties and it was in our interest to keep track of our cups.) The practice also functions to manage our alcohol consumption. We get a cup at an event and we’re free to fill it with any of the available options. It holds roughly the same amount for everyone—or least it gives the illusion of equality with regard to the ratios in mixed drinks. Among the Sikaiana, the distributor/host determines how much is poured into the cup for each round and how long to wait between rounds:

“Serving large portions and not waiting between rounds will cause the participants to become drunk rapidly. On the other hand, after such a happy state of inebriation has been reached, the distributor may decide to slow the pace of drinking in order to control the level of intoxication and preserve the supply of toddy (Donner 1994: 250).

While we may not necessarily be served in the same way with our red plastic cups (that might be a downer of a party to attend), our named cups provide a way to monitor access to drinks. If you lose your cup, you might be out of luck. It can also be a signal that the cup-less should perhaps be cut-off, especially when it’s clear that the de-cupped has passed beyond happy, joyful drinking to disruptive behavior.

The red plastic cup may have a bit of a party-animal reputation. It’s hardly likely you’ll be drinking fine wine or quality spirits from a red plastic cup. Or that you’ll find a red plastic cup at a banquet or gala. The red plastic cup is a champion of the everyday and and the unpretentious. It suggests a relaxed, convival atmosphere and invites everyone to join the party. It won’t reveal the contents contained so whether it’s alcohol, tea, fruit juice, or water, everyone belongs and everyone can participate.

So whatever your preference, raise your red plastic cup.

–
References:
Bunimovitz, S., & Greenberg, R. (2004). Revealed in Their Cups: Syrian Drinking Customs in Intermediate Bronze Age Canaan Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (334) DOI: 10.2307/4150104

Donner, W. (1994). Alcohol, Community, and Modernity: The Social Organization of Toddy Drinking in a Polynesian Society Ethnology, 33 (3) DOI: 10.2307/3774009

McAllister, P. (2003). Culture, Practice, and the Semantics of Xhosa Beer-Drinking Ethnology, 42 (3) DOI: 10.2307/3773800

Sleepy Hollow Graveyard. Photo by KDCosta, December 2011.

Ed Note: Another flashback from the archives of AiP this Friday, though a sombre one at that. It’s rainy and dreary here in New York City, and my thoughts are a bit dark today.

How are social technologies changing the experience of death for those charged with remembering?

Death has been referred to as the great equalizer—it is the one fate we cannot escape. And cultures around the world have developed highly ritualized approaches to coping with death. For example, Alan Klima (2002) documents the funeral casino in Thailand where rites of exchange work to mediate the relationships between the living, and between the living and the deceased (7). In Thailand, Klima reports, wakes are transformed into impromptu casinos. He describes the wake scene of the death of a beloved father:

“Dealers came and set up roulette wheels. Or they came with a bowl of dice and a big betting rug, each one good for a crowd of ten or twenty gamblers to sit around and cast their lots. The house family let loose, on the crowds, quart-sized bottles of Mekong brand rice rum to navigate through the spaces between bodies, with mixer bottles of Coke, Pepsi, Singha soda, water, and tin buckets of ice in hot pursuit. Packs of slicing and dicing cousins and aunts were spinning out plates of fried meats, raw pork, and saucy vegetables from their encampment in the kitchen. Family members were send forth onto the casino floor, to extract from time to time a cut of the dealers’ profits. And the dealers were raking it in all over the place, starting from gambling operations set up right next to and under the coffin of the dead father, fanning out over the whole living room floor space, out onto the porch, and beyond that, spilling into the open air of the yard in the front … And they kept coming—mourners, gamblers, and dealers … Of course, no one would sit down to play without first bowing to the corpse—could you imagine that, placing your precious money at risk with a big coffin standing over you, to which you haven’t paid respects? (2002: 248).”

Ravina Aggarwal (2001) writes of a funeral feast she attended in the village of Achinathang:

“They had come for this last farewell, bringing gifts in memory of this expert weaver who had woven so many robes to clothe their bodies. There was so much beer that the keg was filled. A neighbor collected the offerings on the family’s behalf, announcing the house names of the donors. The joking and laughter of the men (who had taken up positions on the right hand side of the threshing ground) merged with the elegy of the widow and her chil- dren (seated on the left) and the incantations recited by the astrologer (who sat at the center). More and more people came (554).”

These are both acts of remembering, which are echoed in the rites and rituals of cultures around the world. The purpose for the gathering for the deceased, in whatever form it may take, is both for the benefit of the corpse and that of the family. Many cultures believe the deceased may be confused and requires company until the body can be interred or otherwise disposed of (Klima 2002; Dernbach 2005). And it’s a time the network to which the deceased was a member to gather and comfort each other. But wakes and other funeral rites also mark the beginning of a process of distancing. The deceased was fully integrated into a network, the “social and emotional lives of those left behind are intimately tied to the deceased person, and adjusting to this change and loss is a difficult and long- term process” (Dernbach 2005: 100). Conklin (2001) writes that through the grieving process, mourners are “transforming their perceived relationship to the dead person by going through a process in which they gradually confront their memories of the deceased one by one, accept the reality that their relationship to the deceased has ended, and let go emotionally of their attachments to the object of their loss” (171).

The process of memorial is also a process of forgetting. There is a mourning period for the community. For example, in the Jewish religion, the deceased are meant to be buried within 24 hours of death foregoing any extenuating circumstances. The family then sits shiva, or mourns for a week, or less depending on how observant they are of the religious practices. While private grief may continue long after the “prescribed” mourning period, there comes a point where the deceased’s public memory is reduced to a death anniversary. The deceased is removed from the network. But Web 2.0 is changing the experience of death—both for the deceased as well as the survivors. Web 2.0 is making death an interactive experience, providing mourners with an opportunity to access a community for support, while sharing their grief and preserving memories of the deceased.

The growing popularity of the memorial pages on Facebook suggests that grief and death have moved online. Of course, we had clear indications that this was the case as the Twitterverse responded to the deaths of celebrities like Michael Jackson in 2009. Memorial pages, however, allow mourners to collectively gather and share mementos with one another in a single place—sentiments, photos, videos, even music can all be stored in a single virtual location to be accessed whenever desired. It provides a digital address for the deceased where mourners can continually visit, whereas Twitter more provides an opportunity for an immediate response. And it’s not limited to those within the deceased’s network. Memorial pages prolong the process of distancing, but they also reinforce the connections that members of the network have with each other—even with the deceased gone. For example, a student who created a memorial page for a victim of the Virginia Tech tragedy felt that Facebook allowed the community to pull together: “We were all scattered around the country, but this was a way we could be together.” In this way, the social network is not ruptured or forced into reshaping itself to account for the loss of a member, as may be the case in off-line mourning. The process process for distancing is gradual in this model. Furthermore, the digital management of death appears gives people more control over how the deceased will be remembered in terms of what they choose to share and post about the deceased.

This does potentially raise some issues, however. For example, what if the family is not comfortable with the content of the memorial? Or wants the memorial removed? Does the digital community that participated in the memorial have any say? And should they even be considered in this decision? As grief and mourning become more public, these may be issues that have to be contended with. Of course, some feel that Twitter has handicapped our ability to mourn. What are your thoughts?

—-
References:
Aggarwal, R. (2001). At the Margins of Death: Ritual Space and the Politics of Location in an Indo-Himalayan Border Village American Ethnologist, 28 (3), 549-573 DOI: 10.1525/ae.2001.28.3.549

Conklin, B. (2001). Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society. Austin.

Dernbach, Katherine Boris. (2005). Spirits of the Hereafter: Death, Funerary Possession, and the Afterlife in Chuuk, Micronesia. Ethnology, 44 (2), 99-123

Klima, Alan. (2002). The Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand. Princeton: University Press.

Bloggers in the social sciences have been busy in the last week. You’ll find no shortage of interesting posts. There were some tough calls to make, but choose I must:

• The fall of one of the most powerful empires to have existed continues to fascinate us 1500 years after the fact. At Powered by Osteons, Kristina Killgrove investigates whether lead poisoning might have played a role in the Roman Empire’s undoing.

• One in ten people are on the spectrum for dyslexia. Dr. Stuart Farrimond makes a brief case for the genetic preservation of dyslexia, suggesting that it would have granted our evolutionary ancestors much needed benefits for survival in a world that was vastly different from out.

• Have you ever been in a situation where you just didn’t feel smart? Greg Laden explains that intelligence may be a socio-cultural signal that varies from context to context.

• What big teeth you have, A. bosei! At Lawn Chair Anthropology, Zachary Cofran tries to make sense of A. bosei‘s dentition, which does not seem suited for its diet.

I’ll be back next week with more from anthropology, philosophy, and research.

Even when the threats aren’t physical, the antagonism towards women has been nasty. I have been called a sexist, someone who plays victim, told I should be fired, and worse, personal things that I will not relay here. I have had my writing challenged by brash claims regarding my character or intent without any attempt to build a case with evidence.

And even though I can look at the evidence and my writing, at what I do and what I stand for, and know these claims are ridiculous, each one of these attacks shatters me.

Back at my old blog, these attacks would have had little effect on me. At my old blog my posse would have crowded them out, shrugged their way past them until the attackers were shouting uselessly at the periphery. My old blog was a warm, inviting space where I could take risks because people were willing to take them with me.

I could blame the loss of my posse on the commenting system or the more heavily-male readership here at Scientific American and throw up my hands. But I also know I have not been modeling the appropriate behavior to encourage you to get comfortable in my new place. I have left almost all attack comments up rather than delete them because I worried that getting rid of them would open me up to more attacks, or make it look as though I was silencing my opposition. And so I left them, and waited, hoping someone would come and back me up. Sometimes someone would.

Supporting a female blogger under attack in a comment thread is a very risky endeavor. If you are a male ally, you may be afraid of making things worse. If you are a woman, you may be afraid of drawing some of the attack on to you. The attack may also just feel like it’s not your business. It takes a very brave person who doesn’t mind sticking their nose in to put together a reasoned response and handle the blowback.

By letting the oppressive and rude behavior in my comment threads get out of control, I have put my posse in an impossible position. I have silenced potential commenters, and lost the most valuable part of my blogging.

AiP has also received its share of trollish comments and emails that also left me feeling raw and exposed. It is amazing what people will ask you—especially if you’re female. My response was to delete comments and emails and not respond. But sometimes it feels as though that’s the only response out there, and that can be disheartening. Kate is right: It will only stop when we—that’s you and me—take a hand in making it stop.

It has not been an entirely easy transition from the independent home of Anthropology in Practice to the Scientific American network. There, like Kate, I knew I had a steady group of readers who knew the tone and style of the space and could and would step in to help monitor and maintain the community. A few of you have followed me here, and I thank you for that. It delights me to see your names in the comment box. I also understand why the community has overall been slow to grow here—having to register can be prohibitive to commenting—but I am confident we will get there again, Readers. (We are working on changing the registration requirements, but that will take time. In truth, registration is a bit of a joke. You can register as a pseud or under your name and only I see your email address—whatever email address you choose to enter. Edit: I will always honor the displayed registration name in public communications.)

Kate has issued a new commenting policy for Context and Variation which goes a long way toward re/creating a constructive, supportive community where debate and discussion can occur intelligently and respectfully. I support her stand for her space, and in that spirit want to ask you, Readers, to rally with us: register, and let us know you’re there.

AiP’s commenting policy has always been an open one. In short, it read: “Readers are invited to leave a comment and join the discussion about breaking news, research ventures, and most importantly, everyday events. However, spam and abusive commentary will be deleted promptly.” But in this venue, in this space, it’s clear that this will not suffice. Here is AiP’s commenting policy—with summary by Dr. Seuss:

• “Not here not there not anywhere!” Be respectful: no personal attacks, no condescension, no snide insinuations. These comment(s) will be deleted promptly. Talk to me about the points of the post, alternative research, and your experiences—let’s have a discussion instead.

• “Everything stinks till it’s finished.” Finish the post. If something I’ve written bothers you or seems wrong, finish reading before you fire off that angry email. If there are comments, take a second and peruse them. Perhaps someone has said something similar and I’ve addressed those concerns. Perhaps something was said that might change your perception.

• “I do not like green eggs and ham.” That’s fine. You don’t have to like green eggs and ham—you also don’t have to agree with me or each other. But try to hear the argument out—be open to the discussion and willing to engage in dialogue. If you post a comment, chances are you’ll get a response—at the very least from me even if it might not be immediate. Trust me: I’m listening. Let’s try to understand each other.

• “Oh the thinks you can think up if only you try!” Think your response through—add something to the discussion that others can respond to. Use evidence instead of rocks to make your point. I’ll say it again: I’m listening.

I’ve tried to approach this with some lightness, but it is serious. AiP is my home on the web, but I’d like to share it with you. There’s an entire world out there to explore and examine through the ethnographic lens. Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a posse I have to go join.

Dial of the Prague astronomical clock. Creative commons. Click on image for license and information.

Ed Note: We have a guest today! AiP is pleased to host this post by Dr. Kevin Birth, who is a professor of anthropology at Queens College, CUNY and an expert on time. His forthcoming book, Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality (Palgrave Macmillan) discusses the hidden logics in clocks and calendars.

As a specialist in the study of time, I occasionally get asked about what I think of the so-called Mayan prophecy that the world will end in 2012. I guess people think that I’ll have some interesting insight into the cultural anthropology of time, and some special knowledge into the mysterious Mayan logics. Truthfully, it is not the Mayan logics that are mysterious, but our own. 2012 was almost a significant year in the cultural creation of time as we know it. Recently, those in charge of the global time system decided to defer to 2015 the ending of the time of Earth. Because of the timing of the debate over Earth’s time, it may come as a shock to those who expect some dismissive answer from an ivory-tower intellectual, but I think the Maya maybe were on to something.

The Mayan calendrical system consists of multiple cycles of different durations. Like a set of different-sized gears whirring together with gears completing their cycles at different times, it takes a long time for the Mayan system to return to a previous state. The Gregorian year 2012 marks a moment when this Mayan system will start over—the end of the old long count and the beginning of a new one. The Maya took such things very seriously, and as Professor Prudence Rice has demonstrated in her books, the ending of one cycle and beginning of a new one coincided with political transformations for the Maya.

The Maya are not alone in such a sensitivity. People in the European tradition are enamored of base-10 mathematics, so when the year 2000 approached, there was a great deal of hoopla over the number. Many saw it as the beginning of the new millennium, although, in truth, the millennium did not begin until 2001. Still, there seems to be magic in chronological numbers and their cycles.

But there is another thing going on in all these calendrical and chronological systems. Behind the curtain of these cycles are a set of logics that deal with some fundamental problems in time keeping. This is as true for us as it was for the Maya. First, the cycles of the moon, stars, and sun are not equivalent. Second, the revolution of the Earth around the sun is an awkward 365.242 days. Different cultures have come up with different solutions to this problem, and the Mayan calendar is just one of many such solutions. Our currently dominant calendar, implemented by Julius Caesar and tweaked by Pope Gregory the XIII, ignores sidereal and lunar cycles, and deals with the duration of the Earth’s orbit through leap years that add a day.

Whether it is ancient Maya or our contemporaries in 2012, most people have very little idea of how systems of time reckoning are created—we simply look at our clocks and calendars and believe them without recognizing the cabal of astronomers and/or priests that lurk behind the logics.   Through our objects of time, we rely on largely unknown experts to make sure that the trains and everything else run on a reliable time, and to ensure that we know when the airlines do not. All we need to know is how to read a clock and calendar, not how they work.

While almost everyone is familiar with the idea of the leap year, far fewer are aware that the Earth’s rotation is not uniform. It wobbles about with small deviations, and as a result, a international bureaucracy has been set up to keep our time system coordinated with the Earth’s foibles. In this bureaucracy, the International Earth Rotational Systems Service (IERS) has charted the Earth’s rotation and when necessary, made recommendations to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) to modify the international time keeping system by a second—a leap second. The BIPM receives time signals from atomic clocks distributed throughout the globe and then calculates what is called “coordinated time” based on these signals. This created, coordinated time is then set to the prime meridian, and sent back out to all those in the time signaling business as something called “Universal Coordinated Time” (UTC). It may be disconcerting to hear that time is created, but if one keeps in mind the theory of relativity, each point in space has its own unique time. From the perspective of relativity, a universal time is an illusion—but an illusion our society needs to function.

The BIPM creates time by following policies formulated by the Radiocommunications Sector of the International Telecommunications Union (the ITU-R). There are many technologies reliant on time, such as software and GPS, and these technologies do not work well with the Earth’s occasional hiccups and the irregular insertion or deletion of seconds from UTC. Since much software runs on a uniform time without leap seconds, to keep it coordinated with UTC requires software updates, and this gets expensive over time.

The recent consideration by the ITU-R to do away with leap seconds would have meant an end the time of Earth—in effect, the Earth’s cycles would no longer have a bearing on the time kept by clocks. In this culturally created system, the units of duration that define time for us are a choice of the ITU-R. A second is defined as 1/315,56,925.975 of the length of the tropical year for January 0, 1900 (in effect, December 31, 1899); a day as 86,400 of those seconds; a year as 365 or 366 (in a leap year) of those days. This decision would have meant our clocks are not tied to the Earth’s rotation, and our calendars are no longer associated with the Earth’s orbit—truly, the end of the time of Earth.

In an uncanny coincidence, this debate is unfolding at the end of the Mayan long count—the end of one time for the Maya and the beginning of a new one. A cataclysmic change that few will notice as global time ceases to refer to any single cycle but becomes entirely a cultural creation.

So maybe the time conscious Maya were right, but it is not the world that ends in 2012, only time as we knew it. However, since the decision has been delayed to 2015 it seems we have little to worry about, assuming we understand the Mayan calendar correctly (and that’s a big assumption).

Pets are popular family members. / iStock image.

Ed. Note: Another favorite this Friday about those furry members of our family—no, not your Grandpa Ed, but your pet. This post was selected as an Editor’s Selection on ResearchBlogging.org. It has been slightly modified from it’s original posting.

I’ll never forget the day S brought home a live chicken. When we lived in Queens, there were a number of fresh poultry and livestock suppliers that catered to the growing West Indian community so live poultry was readily available, but there were also a few backyard farmers in the neighborhood. S was at a gas station when he heard a cheeping noise. He knelt down to investigate and when he straightened up, found a chick sitting on the mat in the car. “What was I supposed to do?” he asked showing me the chick later that day. “It jumped in the car.”

His affinity with animals is nothing new. He trained goldfish. He has refused to kill mice, insisting on releasing them into the wild. At fifteen, he nursed a pigeon back to health after setting its broken wing. During a trip to Trinidad, he befriended a bull—despite being warned away by my uncles—by sitting in the mud with it for hours. And today, we are the proud parents of two cats (we did not keep Chicken Little) who can’t seem to get enough of him. I am definitely second fiddle in their feline minds—though handy to have around when they need to be fed.

S is not alone. Pat Shipman (2010) notes the significance of pets—and animals—in our lives:

In both the United States and Australia, 63% of households include pets, compared to 43% of British and 20% of Japanese households. In the United States, the proportion of households with pets is larger than those with children (522).

This relationship, dubbed the animal connection by Shipman, may have played an important role in human evolution, linking the traits that distinguish Homo sapiens from other mammals. How is it that some animals transitioned from food to friends, and what is the significance of this relationship?

The animal connection is the process by which pets or livestock become companions and/or partners, and are treated as members of the family. It refers to the close relationship between animals and humans starting 2.6 million years ago (mya), beginning with the use and study of animals by humans, and leading to regular social interactions. Today this is manifested in the adoption of animals and the care provided to them in the course of that relationship. The roots of this relationship may be found in the development of three often recognized traits of humans: making and using tools, symbolic behavior (including language, adornment, and rituals), and domestication of other species. Shipman views the animal connection as a fourth trait, tying the other three together and having an immense effect on human evolution, genetics, and behavior (2010: 522).

Homo erectus shown with tools. Photo taken at the American Museum of Natural History by KDCosta, 2010.

Though tool use has been documented in other nonhuman mammals, the manufacture and use of tools by humans is an extremely complex behavior. Modern chimpanzees are often recognized for their tool usage, but this usage varies whereas humans consistently use tools. Early humans used tools to process carcasses, and we have evidence of this from the marks left on the bones after contact with implements. Stone tools gave humans an advantage: they no longer needed to compete with scavengers. They could hunt game on their own and/or drive off those scavengers if needed. The increased meat in the human diet meant that humans occupied a predatory niche, and as such necessarily needed to disperse so that their localities could support their needs. While Shipman makes clear that the fossil record supports that expansion of geographic range about 2 mya, the more interesting point, in my opinion, is that in seeking out live game, humans needed to learn about their prey, which opened the door for a more meaningful relationship with animals.

Wild animals are certainly able to communicate with each other, but language has thus far largely been relegated to humans, who have a clearly identifiable syntax and grammar (520). Animals have alarm calls, but there are limits to what they can communicate. For instance, a chimp alerting his troupe about a snake cannot provide details about the snake: The chimp cannot say it is a brown snake. (Or maybe it can, and we just don’t know.) And while educated apes may have a vocabulary of about 400 words, they don’t apply syntax and grammar to those words (520). Language allows humans to share information, and we have developed delightfully complicated means of doing so:

Ritual, art, ochre, and personal adornment are used to transmit information about such concepts as beliefs, group membership, or style, leaving physical manifestations visible in the archaeological record. Nothing interpreted as art, ritual, the use of ochre, or personal adornment has been reported in nonhuman mammals in the wild (521).

Depiction of prehistoric art. Photo taken at the National Museum of Natural History by KDCosta.

As more sophisticated stone tools were developed, humans could pursue larger game. But this might often require collaboration, which encouraged language. Perhaps the strongest example of this is prehistoric art which depicts animals extensively, revealing morphology, coloring, behaviors, and sexual dimorphism (Shipman 2010: 524). It creates a record to be shared with others.

Domestication required humans to select for desirable behavioral traits and control the reproductive and genetic output over generations. They lived in close proximity to the animals, historically even bringing them into the home. Indeed, the physical closeness of humans to animals has allowed some infectious diseases to enter the human population from animal hosts, e.g., measles (dogs), mumps (poultry), tuberculosis (cattle), and the common cold (horses) (529). However, the benefits have outweighed the costs when it comes to keeping animals near—animals are much more than a food source:

The Goyet dog is at least 17,000 years older than the next oldest domesticate (also a dog) … animals were domesticated first because their treatment was an extension of tool making (Shipman 2010: 524).

Animals were domesticated as living tools. They expanded the reach of humans and made other resources more accessible. Animals could provide labor, milk, wool, and opportunities for the production of tools and clothing. And domestication was hedged on an understanding of biology, ecology, physiology, temperament and intelligence.

While much has been made of the monkey who appears to have adopted a cat, such cross-species alloparenting is rare. Humans are the exception. We routinely take in animals integrate them into our families, creating a beneficial relationship. Our connection to Fido may be deeply rooted in our evolutionary history.

–
Reference:
Shipman, P. (2010). The Animal Connection and Human Evolution Current Anthropology, 51 (4), 519-538 DOI: 10.1086/653816

This week on ResearchBlogging.org:

• Is Columbus and his crew to blame for the rise of syphilis in the Old World? The debate continues at Spirochetes Unwound.

• What’s working and what isn’t working in rural education in India? Aatish Bhatia at Empirical Zeal discusses the state of Indian rural education in 2011.

• How do you develop a typology within a typology? Evoanth has the details on archaeological classifications.

I’ll be back next week with more from anthropology, philosophy, and research.

Facebook kids. (Photos used with permission of proud moms.) Top Left: Olivia Hellman, 7.5 months. Top Right: Juli Gomes, 8 months. Bottom Left: Chickpea, 2 years. Bottom Right: Sophia Gomes, 2 years.

You know the old saying that parenting doesn’t come with a handbook? Well, maybe it doesn’t need one—there’s Facebook.

In many ways I feel as though I’m watching the children of some of my friends grow up on Facebook. I’ve been with them from their first status update (e.g., “Introducing Jane Smith at 7lbs, 6oz and 20 inches long!”) to first time sleeping through the night to first tooth to first step and first word to sentences, all the way to first days at preschool and beyond. It’s kind of exciting in its own way because I get to benefit from the experiences of my friends and their networks as they offer advice on croup or giving medicine or potty training or pacifier weaning.

Snow White has nothing on Chickpea and the Cookie.

According to some Facebook moms, these updates on Facebook are an extension of what goes between parents offline at play dates, while waiting for their kids after-school, at birthday parties, and wherever parents come together. In other words, this isn’t new—but the medium has changed. These Facebook updates raise the visibility of the socialness of parenting, re-imagining the proverb “It takes a village” with a virtual village comprised of people more invested in the parent and child than might be those folks who are connected via circumstance, such as the playgroup connection. But they also seem to “normalize” parenting. There are some extreme images of parenting that get popularized. On one side, there’s the idea of the perfectly behaved child and what life must be like in the household that produces such progeny: it’s a stark, controlled, sanitized image. And then there’s the acknowledgment that parenting is not easy and child-rearing can be chaotic. In this scenario, the house is a mess, the kids are running around unsupervised, and the parents are overwhelmed. These images seem to stand in opposition, representing two different parenting experiences, but often (as it typically is) the truth is a more muddled road. Social network parenting updates share the breadth of parenting experiences, including the good and the bad (insofar as people will share since we are particularly good at sharing the good and holding the bad close to our chests). They help create images of parenting that bypass media depictions and are more socially relevant within networks.

Emma Caster-Dudzick and big brother Charlie.

In what is symptomatic of a generation that has grown increasingly comfortable sharing their lives online, these updates are a sort of digital parenting class. They offer a peek at the curve balls that come with parenting and provide a forum for supportive feedback—because I’ve never seen anyone respond to an update with “You’re doing it wrong, you pitiful excuse for a parent!”—and I think as a result people are more willing to share the quirky things kids do. For example, in my feed, a two-year-old treated her mom to an explanation of feedback (her hands go in circular motions) and static (she shakes her hands frantically), another older child debated with her mom over whether tights are actually pants, and a mom talked about finally getting some time to herself while baby and dad were out for a little bit. Parents seem more likely to cast off the concern that they “aren’t doing it right” or worry less about being perceived as a particular kind of parent and share the meaningful and worrysome moments in their lives. When the baby has croup and mom or dad is up at 3 am worrying about the cough or sitting with the kid in the shower, there’s a handy community available almost immediately to offer support and advice—and it’s a community that is likely to be aligned with the same parental and generational values as peers navigate life stages within the same relative time frame. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t unsolicited advice, or advice or comments that run counter to the parents’ philosophies, but it’s easier to ignore those comments in the virtual world than it might be when Grandma is looming with her brandy remedy for sore gums.

Recently, a friend of mine preceded her update about her daughter with an apology for being “one of those obnoxious parents” who over-share about their kids. She got several comments in response encouraging her to share. And why shouldn’t she? Parenting is hard enough as it is. You shouldn’t have to feel alone or that you and your kid need to meet some imagined standard—not when there are others out there with equally quirky stories to share.

How do you decide when a stranger's need is real? Photo by Dimitri N, Creative Commons. Click on image for link and license.

I boarded my commuter train with all of five minutes to spare, so I knew my prospects for getting a seat were slim. That didn’t bother me too much since the vestibule was mostly empty—there was a man standing at the other door silently rocking out to whatever was playing on his headphones, so I took my place at the other door. (Having to stand in a crowded vestibule is much worse than having to stand at all.) A few other harried passengers slipped past me to try their luck with a seat, and I went about initiating my train-riding ritual, which basically entails detangling my headphones and making sure my ticket is within easy reach for when the collector arrives.

It was just about then that a man about my age burst into the vestibule waving a few dollars in his fist. He looked frantic. I had my headphones on, but it was clear he was looking for money to purchase a ticket. I couldn’t help him And my vestibule companion either couldn’t or wouldn’t help—he glanced at him and went back to staring out the window at the dark wall next to the train. Clearly frustrated, the man seeking assistance swore at us, shook his head, and swooped into the next car to try his luck.

I don’t know if he got the money he was looking for that night, but it did make me wonder how it is we choose to help those in need. I didn’t have cash on me, but if I had been truly moved to help, I could have gotten off the train and purchased a ticket for him. But that would have meant I’d have missed the train. And how did I know he really needed the money for a ticket anyway? How do we weigh the costs of helping?

Prosocial behavior—voluntary actions that contribute to the well-being of others—is not unique to human beings. Helping, sharing, donating, and cooperating have been found in many social species, including insects, birds, bats, cetaceans, small mammals, and primates (1, 2, 3). However, humans may be unique in the magnitude of help offered, displaying a tendency to routinely help others even at great cost to self. It’s possible that altruistic tendencies may have developed to help kin or to provide reciprocal aid to those who might later provide assistance (i.e., “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”) (4). In the former case, helping the people who share your genes means you’re also helping preserve those shared genes. In the latter, both parties stand to benefit even though there is no genetic impetus for lending assistance because you share resources as members of the same network.

While this might paint a rather jaded picture of altruism—we only help others when there’s something in it for us?—providing assistance is a nuanced decision. Helping someone in need doesn’t necessarily result in an instant repayment—these actions are banked and balanced in time if the network is a stable one. Primatologist Frans de Waal suggests that while altruism may have originally developed for specific evolutionary purposes (e.g., to protect and further one’s genetic line), over time motivation has been disconnected from evolutionary goals (4)—a bit like sex, which is meant to serve reproduction, but honestly, is reproduction what we’re thinking of when we’re trying to inspire an amorous encounter?

When it comes to helping someone, very often we don’t often consciously weigh the potential pay-offs. If someone slips, for example, we might immediately reach a hand to steady them. Or we’ll hold the door open for someone with their hands full. If someone is hurt, we ask what happened so we can offer comfort appropriately. We offer assistance because we’re able to recognize a need in others:

“In humans, the most commonly assumed motivation behind altruism is empathy. We identify with another in need, pain, or distress, which induces emotional arousal that may translate into sympathy and helping (4).

Our ability to recognize this need is likely strongest when it comes to people within our network whose social signals and cues we’ve become adept at reading. And that’s important because asking for help isn’t always easy—there are costs.

The higher the cost of assistance to the helper, the greater the debt incurred by the help seeker. And in addition to issues of social debt, there are additional concerns about asking for help:

If help is needed on a difficult task, it may be attributed to an external factor, task difficulty; while if help is needed on as easy task, it may be attributed to an internal factor, individual inadequacies. Help needed on a difficult task may then lead to less loss of esteem than help needed on an easy task, and help seeking should be more common on difficult tasks than easy tasks (5).

These social judgments regarding frequency of requests and task difficulty could alter perceptions about the help seeker, which makes being able to offset these debts is important. And this perhaps is one of the reasons why obtaining help from within your social network is easier than from a stranger—there are fewer opportunities to balance the debt with a stranger, with whom there is no history or likely future encounter. There is less certainty that a stranger will help if the costs are high, and this knowledge might generate anxiety about having to ask for help.

That doesn’t mean a stranger won’t offer or agree to assistance, however. As someone who isn’t entirely sure on her feet all the time, I’ve been on the receiving end of aid on a number of occasions from strangers who have tried to break my fall. Sociologists believe that a sense of responsibility may be an important in directing assistance, particularly in emergency situations when the parties involved may not necessarily have a relationship:

“(O)ne of the crucial steps preceding helping that is guided by feelings of moral obligation is that the potential helper feel some sense of responsibility to relieve the need of the victim” (6).

In as much as a person can help, if they are made to feel that they are responsible for the event in some way, they’ll provide assistance. However, if the person seeking help absolves onlookers by blaming himself or attributing the incident to chance, he reduces the sense of responsibility onlookers might feel and reduces the chances of receiving assistance.

Strangers are in the unique position of citing an inability to help without facing social repercussions—that is, they don’t necessarily have to prove they can’t help someone, while people closer to that individual might have to provide a reason for withholding help or they’ll face public criticism within their network. So if the cost is high, and the sense of responsibility is low, with a stranger there is less chance of offered or acquired help. Or help may be offered in a limited way. In the case of the man looking for money for a train ticket, giving him a dollar or two could have been a means of offering assistance without committing wholly to helping him. It is easier to turn to the wall, however, and not consider balancing these costs—although the question then becomes what happens if you’re the one in need of help and you’re beyond the comfortable boundary of your network?

References:
Bartal, I., Decety, J., & Mason, P. (2011). Empathy and Pro-Social Behavior in Rats Science, 334 (6061), 1427-1430 DOI: 10.1126/science.1210789

de Waal, F. (2007). With a Little Help from a Friend PLoS Biology, 5 (7) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0050190

Shapiro, E. (1980). Is Seeking Help from a Friend Like Seeking Help from a Stranger? Social Psychology Quarterly, 43 (2) DOI: 10.2307/3033629

Schwartz, S., & David, A. (1976). Responsibility and Helping in an Emergency: Effects of Blame, Ability and Denial of Responsibility Sociometry, 39 (4) DOI: 10.2307/3033505

Stevens, J. (2004). The selfish nature of generosity: harassment and food sharing in primates Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 271 (1538), 451-456 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2003.2625

Additional Reading:
Fehr, E., & Fischbacher, U. (2003). The nature of human altruism Nature, 425 (6960), 785-791 DOI: 10.1038/nature02043

Horner, V., Carter, J., Suchak, M., & de Waal, F. (2011). Spontaneous prosocial choice by chimpanzees Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108 (33), 13847-13851 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1111088108

Notes:
1. de Waal (2007) | 2. Stevens (2004) | 3. Bartal (2011) | 4. de Waal (2007): 1406 | 5. Shapiro (1980): 259 | 6. Schwartz and David (1976): 406

Can heels do more than raise your height? Creative Commons Image by wenzday01, 2008. Click image for license and link.

Cinderella got the prince and Dorothy was envied. Why? They well shod. What’s the deal with women’s relationship to their footwear?

Watch Me Walk Away

Click. Click. Click. Click.

With each measured step, my heels echoed with a finality that emphasized my leaving, which was important: I was angry and I wanted to be taken seriously. The sound of my three-inch heels striking the tiles spoke volumes—and did so much more eloquently than I would have been able to at the moment.

I had just had my first turn-on-your-heel-and-walk-away moment. A meeting with a senior vice president at a leading digital agency in New York City had gone horribly wrong: Her team had asked me to consult on a project they were considering, but within a few minutes it became clear that we would not be able to work together. She was rude to her staff and made two disparaging remarks about anthropologists. Annoyed, and believing that her behavior toward her staff spoke volumes about the sort of relationship we would have, I decided I had had enough. So I picked up my coat, turned on my heel, and walked out. It was empowering. It was a moment I’ll likely not forget soon. And it would not have been the same had I been wearing flats.

Many Western women make high-heels a part of their daily wardrobe. The relationship women have with their shoes often becomes the butt of jokes and a point of dismissal, often on the following points:

• Do women need to own so many shoes? Many men admit to have having 3-4 pairs of shoes: boots, sneakers, and a pair or two of dress shoes in black and brown. Women on the other hand can easily have 3-4 times as many.

• Do they need to be so high? Culturally, we’re primed to note the Buffy heel and the red sole of Louboutin, but it defies logic: High-heels can damage feet, which were not meant to be crammed into too tight quarters for eight hours a day (at least) or be balanced precariously on skinny supports.

• Is it really sensible to spend so much on shoes? Forbes reports that women spent $17 billion on footwear between Oct. 2004 and Oct. 2005. More recent data seems to suggest that women aren’t spending quite so much—though popular opinion disagrees (1,2).

I’ve been thinking about this moment with the SVP and my relationship with heels recently. And so it appears have others around me—been thinking about my relationship with my shoes, I mean. I’ve only recently joined the ranks of the well-heeled. I was actually schooled in the “sensible shoe” philosophy, and will admit to be being more at home in sneakers than in three-inch heels. But I’ve found that when you stand at 4’11” in flats, the world tends to overlook you—a point that a few friends have disagreed with, but then again, they’re all taller than 4’11”. Apparently, my rising heel has elicited some commentary between a subset of friends who are rather surprised that a smart, sensible woman such as myself would subject my feet to such a tortuous experience. But I am not alone: on the subway and on the street, on their way to the office or a night out, there appears to be any number of women for whom shoes are an important aspect of dress. While it’s true that an individual woman’s presence is so much more than the footwear she has chosen for the day, shoes can influence our interactions with others: they change how we walk, how we stand, and how others perceive us.

A Short History of the High-Heel

Our early ancestors didn’t concern themselves with stilettos or the spring collection of Manolos. In all likelihood, they went barefoot. Shoes in the form of sandals emerged around 9,000 years ago as a means of protecting bare feet from the elements (specifically, frostbite) (3). The Greeks viewed shoes as an indulgence—a means of increasing status, though it was a Greek, Aeschylus, who created the first high heel, calledkorthonos for theatrical purposes. His intent was to “add majesty to the heroes of his plays so that they would stand out from the lesser players and be more easily recognized” (4). Greek women adopted the trend, taking the wedge heel to new heights that the late Alexander McQueen would have likely applauded, although being unshod was the norm in Grecian culture. The adoption of shoes, and the heel, for Greeks appears to coincide with Roman influence, and ultimately Roman conquest. Roman fashion was viewed as a sign of power and status, and shoes represented a state of civilization.

Line drawing of chopines. Creative Commons. Click on image for license and information.

In Europe, it was common for women to use a patten to help keep their skirts and soft slipper shoes clean as the streets weren’t paved. Pattens were slightly elevated platforms that were worn over the slipper-type shoes that were common at the time. Heels served a functional purpose. However this begins to shift during the High Renaissance, when the Venetian courtesans began to wear chopines: extremely high platform shoes. Chopines could add 30(!) inches to a woman’s height, and were quickly adopted by the wealthy as a means of showing status—the higher one’s chopines, the higher one’s place in society. They were so difficult to walk in that women often needed a female servant to help keep them upright, and were ultimately banned for pregnant women as a number of women in Venice suffered miscarriages after falling (5). Chopines remained in vogue, however, because they proved effective at keeping clothes (and feet) clear of the muck that covered the streets.

The widespread popularity of the heel is credited to Catherine de Medici who wore heels to make her look taller. When she wore them to her wedding to Henry II of France, they became a status symbol for the wealthy. Commoners were banned from wearing them—though it’s doubtful that they would have been able to afford them anyway. Later, the French heel—predecessor to the narrow, tall heel of today—would be made popular by Marquise de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV. These shoes initially required women to use walking sticks to keep their balance until the height of the heel was reduced.

In the US, the French heel was popularized in the late 19th-century by a brothel, Madam Kathy’s, where the proprietor noted that business boomed after she employed a French woman who wore high-heels. So she ordered shoes for all of her girls—it seemed the “the leggy look and mobile torso derived from wearing high heels was of considerable interest to patrons,” who then ordered these French heeled shoes for their wives (6). Heel height would fall and rise again through the subsequent decades leading ultimately to the various options available today, As we turn our attention to the next section, it should not escape the Reader’s notice that heels have been linked to “professional” women as well as the aristocracy. Hold onto this thought, Readers, as we will come back to it.

Suffering for Fashion … and Sex Appeal?

Nine out of ten women wear shoes that are too tight for them. And eight out of ten women admit to wearing shoes that hurt. According to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, women are nine times more likely to develop a foot problem due to improperly fitting shoes when compared to men (7). These statistics are high because our feet weren’t intended to be slaves to fashion.

The human foot is one the most intricate structures in the body: it contains one-third of the bones in the body (26), has 35 joints, and more than 100 ligaments, tendons, and muscles. Our feet absorb at least 2.5 times our body weight when we walk, were designed to help keep us upright, and bear striking differences when compared with the feet of other primates (8):

• The big toe projects beyond other toes (generally, though the exception known as the Grecian toe is noted, where the second toe tends to be longer than the big toe), and is bound to the other toes (non-grasping), which has been linked to the development of the ball of the foot, and is connected to the human stride.

• The arch(es) of the foot supports weight, absorbs the shock of walking, and enhances balance.

• The heel of the foot is home to an enlarged muscle that helps lift the body up and forward, shifting weight to the ball of the foot, enabling us to walk and run.

High-heels place undue stress on feet, directing pressure to the toes instead of distributing it evenly between toe and heel, and the arch loses its ability to absorb the shock and help us balance. (Take some time and watch a woman walk in heels. While much attention is given to the sway of her hips, actually look at her feet—most women wobble just a little as their feet attempt to keep them stable.) Over time, these pressures can deform the foot creating major problems for women later in life. Some of the damage resulting from high-heels includes:

• fractures

• bunions

• lower back pain and posture change

• shortened Achilles tendon

• reduced mobility and heightened targeting in unsafe conditions

• and increased energy demands (heart rate and oxygen consumption increases with heel height (9).

The costs associated with high-heels have caused anthropologist E.O. Smith to further the argument that heel-height may be related to mate attraction—a case of sexual selection:

Based on comparative animal ecology and behavior one would predict that males should be advertising through the display of their assets (physical or otherwise). And while males do advertise in Western society, females also engage in equally conspicuous advertising and sexual signaling. Not only do we have male-male competition and female choice, but we also have female-female competition and make choice acting simultaneously (10).

Smith discusses the ways high-heels can alter the female silhouette into the shape touted by Western culture as sensual:

Increased heel height creates an optical illusion of ‘shortening’ the foot, slenderizes the ankle, contributes to the appearance of long legs, adds a sensuous look to the strike, and increases height to generate the sensation of power and status (11).

These ideas have been explored previously by numerous other researchers. For example, Rossi notes that high-heels alter the tilt of the pelvis, resulting in more prominence of the buttocks and displaying of the breasts, creating a “come-hither pose” also described by Rossi as the “pouter pigeon” pose, “with lots of breast and tail balanced precariously on a pair of stilts” (12). Smith concedes that we cannot definitely link the wearing of high-heels with sexually selected mating strategies in humans, but suggests that heels are a culturally derived and defined trait that helps women meet an ideal of beauty that may help them attract a mate.

Sign in a local shoe repair shop. Photo by KDCosta.

Blurring the Line Between Courtesan and Lady

To some degree, the popular opinion generally agrees with Smith. One of the comments made by a colleague about my tendency to sport heels with my wardrobe was that she was surprised by the heel height. For her it was a sign of shifting cultural norms as heels “that high” (three inches) were typically reserved for Saturday night or going out [in her day]—in other words, they were not “work” shoes. Another—a man—noted that my heels may be an attempt to “show oats” (not sow, but show, as in “show off and attract attention”). In these comments linger traces of those who helped popularize heels: the courtesans, the prostitutes, and those women otherwise involved in selling beauty and appeal.

But we can’t overlook the role of the aristocrats either, who wore heels to reflect an elevated status, hide defects, and distinguish themselves. There is something to be said for being able to look someone (as close as possible) in the eye. Louis XIV knew this: a notoriously short man, he had cork heels added to his shoes, raising them to almost four inches in height. (When his court followed suite, he lowered his heel to about an inch.) And yet no one is implying that he was attempting to increase his sexual fitness—as a monarch, I think he had that taken care of. Perhaps courtesans wore heels to enhance their sexuality, but perhaps it also helped them transact their business in a more serious manner. Perhaps they knew what the aristocracy discovered: meeting someone’s eye changes the way they interact with you—it shifts the power dynamic, and that certainly can be appealing.

Heels have gone up, and come down again reflect the culture and time, and needs of the population. Recently, author Elizabeth Semmalhack linked heel height in the US to periods of economic depression, suggesting that heels provided a sense of escapism in dire times (13). It is true that following the French Revolution, heels in France were lowered as the aristocrats sought to distance themselves from the power and status the higher heel represented.

Germaine Greer said:

Yet if a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got? If she never takes off her high-heeled shoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run?

I’m not denying that my heels don’t change the way I walk, or stand. But I am asserting that heels change the way others—men and women—interact with me. It may have to do with the fact that I seem to walk more authoritatively (as I attempt to keep my balance, each foot must come down surely), and my standing stance is a bit straighter (again, balance) but the added height definitely helps. But with Greer’s remarks in mind, I make sure I have a pair of flats with me for when I want and need to run.

–

References:
E.O. Smith (1999). High Heels and Evolution: Natural Selection, Sexual Selection, and High Heels Psychology, Evolution, and Gender, 1 (3), 245-277

Notes:
1. Forbes. Most Expensive Women’s Shoes
2. Fashion Bomb Daily. New Study Says Most Women Own About 17 Pairs of Shoes.
3. The earliest confirmed instance of footwear dates to approximately 9,000 year ago, and was found in Oregon. However, trace imprints of what may be sandals have been dated to 500,000 years ago.
4. Smith, E.O. (1999) High Heels and Evolution: 254
5. History of Footwear
6. Smith 1999: 255
7. AAOS. Tight Shoes and Foot Problems
8. Smith 1999: 251
9. Smith 1999: 265
10. Smith 1999: 268
11. Smith 1999: 269
12. Smith 1999: 269
13. Shine. Dangerous High Heels

This week on ResearchBlogging.org:

• Is there a relationship between language density and habitat diversity? Tim DeChant explores this question at Per Square Mile with respect to Italian dialects.
• A post at EvoAnth reports that four genes for skin tones have been discovered, shedding further light on this variable physical trait.
• At Greg Laden’s blog, readers are treated to a bit of botany related to tobacco and we learn that physical evidence has been found linking the Maya to tobacco use.
• Navajos don’t eat fish, according to teofilo at Gambler’s House—and the taboo may apparently be traced linguistically.
• At Body Horrors, Rebecca Kreston discusses the dangers of unsanitary shaving practices that mark an important Hajj ritual that may be leaving devotees susceptible to a blood-borne disease.

I’ll be back next week with more from anthropology, philosophy, and research.

How do you read? Photo by KDCosta, 2012.

I’m a bibliophile. And an avid bookworm. I bring books home the way some people do stray animals—I have a soft spot for books that have been thrown away, though I have been forced to learn some restraint in recent years as a result of space considerations. I’m always in need of more shelves. S is largely supportive of these tendencies—he has even “saved” a book or two left on the counter at work that was destined for the donation pile and brought it home to meet the rest of the strays. However, he has put a moratorium on the expansion of my collection until we’re permanently settled in our new place, and truthfully, I understand: moving boxes of books is no easy task. (But it hasn’t stemmed my growing impatience that my books are not on their shelves and are piled and boxed in helter skelter fashion.)

I have not been a fan of e-Readers. I did not own one. That changed on Christmas day.

S handed me a wrapped box a bit nervously. I thought it was unusual because he knows me well and typically hits the nail on its head when it comes to gifts. “Shake it,” he said. “What do you think it is?” Amused, I complied, wondering what could have caused his hesitation. I felt the edges of the box running through the possibilities. “Too small to be shoes, I think.” (I need a new pair of sneakers.) “And it doesn’t feel like a book.” (Last year he got me a new release that I had wanted badly but had put off buying because the hardcover edition was expensive.) “Should I open it?” He nodded.

I tore the wrapping off and laughed in surprise. I was holding a Kindle Fire. I know I looked puzzled. “I know you like your books,” he began. “But you’re also a tech person. Maybe it’s time you gave this a shot.”

He watched me anxiously. And truthfully, I was a little stunned. It was an expensive gamble. But he does know me well, and he knew that if presented with the opportunity, I wouldn’t shut it out.

“I don’t expect you to use it as a tablet, but it gives you a little more flexibility than the older e-Readers, so perhaps that will change your experience,” he continued. “I really got this for you to read books. The other stuff it can do is a bonus. It sort of complements the other things you do online, like social media and blogging. It just provides another outlet … if you can find WiFi.”

I thanked him—enthusiastically—and went about setting it up. But I was still a little confused about how I felt about the device.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with other people who use e-Readers. I do have a problem when they insist that my method of reading is flawed. And such a discussion resulted in a heated debate with a colleague, which I am teased about to this day. I understand what some of the benefits might be, but I prefer physical books. I have a hard time with audio books, though that’s the primary means by which a good friend of mine consumes literature. I like to print journal articles out and mark them with my own notes. But I’ll admit that it’s not always easy collecting and referencing those notes, or storing those journal articles (all that paper!), or carrying a few physical books around all day every day as I am wont to do.

I have started to do more of my journal reading online—cutting, pasting, and tagging have pretty much replaced by Post-Its and stickies. And one day in a desperate bid for reading material, I downloaded some free Classics to my iPhone and read them while I waited for my train. But having to focus on that small screen gave me a crick in my neck and that idea never really had any staying power for me anyway. It was a temporary thing—and I felt a bit like an addict scrambling for a fix and ready to take it in whatever form I could get it. And at the moment, I was grateful for a means of passing the time. Granted, reading on an iPhone is not the same as reading on a tablet or e-Reader, but e-reading seems a bit like having virtual sex: it fills a need without being satisfying. There’s something to be said for turning a physical page—feeling the texture of the paper between your fingers and anticipating the coming words. e-Reading is just not quite the same thing.

Anyway, I’ve read five books on my new Fire and here’s my take on it:

• Instant book gratification. A book, any time, any where. As many as I could possibly want. And it goes in my bag. Except for one, but I’ll happily buy that one in print to add it to the D’Costa Library.

• Typos. Why are there so many typos? Seriously, in every book I read there were several typos, and it was distracting as hell. These weren’t self-published books, but titles from best-selling authors whom I presume have access to copyeditors. A friend assured me that with his device he had not noticed this to be a problem. So is it a QA issue? And if it is, WHEN will it be fixed?

• A portable news stand? One of the ways I thought I’d really be able to put the Fire to use was with my subscriptions. I thought that if I moved them over to the digital format, it would accomplish a few things: fewer paper copies hanging around the house, less chance of my subscriptions going missing in the mail (which has been a slight problem in the past), and more flexibility in terms of which ones I have access to at any given moment. I previewed a National Geographic and I was really disappointed. Where were the photos that go along with the articles? They lend so much to the experience of NatGeo. Wired was a better experience. I understand how media adds to the size of the file and transfer speeds, but if it’s an integral part of the experience as it is in certain publications, it can be a major loss to the reader. It seems I might have to pick and choose in terms of transferring to digital subscriptions, which I can do—and maybe I’ll prune my subscriptions along the way.

• Close reading. I seem to be more inclined to skim in digital formats. This might be a habit I picked up from reading online overall. When holding a physical book or document, I read more closely. And I think this is a widespread phenomenon. Comment threads often reveal that there isn’t a lot of close reading happening online. Too many angry diatribes are based on a misreading that could be avoided if the person had read the preceding or following sentence or had fully digested what was being discussed.

• Distractions. The Fire is WiFi friendly. That means I can have my email sync-ed and I can browse online. That’s great, but those things are also the reason it sometimes takes all morning for me to read a blog post. They’re distractions. Fortunately, the slower browser and the frustratingly unintuitive keyboard create a bit of a barrier that I can use to my advantage—though it is nice to have the option. In many ways, I’ve just gotten used to doing many of those things on my smart phone, so it seems more likely that if I want to look something up quickly or Tweet something, I’ll grab my phone rather than go online with the Fire, presuming it’s connected to the Internet.

I’ve also noticed that I assess e-books differently than I do their physical counterparts. Online, I’m more inclined to read reviews. At the store, I can make these assessments myself—read a page or two, investigate artwork, etc. While I might go into a bookstore to find a specific book, when I’m browsing my impulse buys are based more on my own judgments. In the absence of those markers, I tend to rely on reviews.

The shape and feel have also taken some getting used to. It’s not due to design because the Fire is light and sleek. It’s just the nature of the thing: books will give a little in your hands. Devices in general don’t do that. The real test will come this weekend for my e-Reader, however: I have a new ethnography to read and I’ll likely want to take notes, so we’ll see how it delivers on that, especially when it comes time for me to find and reference those notes. It may very well be that my Post-Its and stickies get retired for good, which might be sort of exciting.

As I was downloading my first book (thinking, “Hm, instant access to reading material might not be a bad thing.”), S put a small envelope on the table next to me. It was a gift card. “You can still get physical books, too,” he assured me. “This isn’t meant to replace that.”

And it won’t. But it is handy. And anything that keeps reading material within the grasp of my fingers can’t be all bad, can it?

What would you have tattooed on your arm? Photo by Janine Carney. Used with permission. Click image for photo blog.

Are you inked?

I’m not, though I’ve thought about it seriously and have a pretty good idea of what I would get and where I would put it—if I could work up the nerve to get in the chair. I’ll tell you one thing: It most certainly is not a QR code like Fred Bosch, who designed his tattoo to link to something new every time it’s scanned. While the idea is intriguing and presents an interesting re-imagining of tattoos in the digital age, it seems to run counter to the nature of tattoos.

Tattoo As Talisman and Symbol

The word “tattoo” derives from the Tahitian word “tatau” (wound) and the the Polynesian root “ta” (drawing), which neatly summarizes the history of the practice (1). Humans have been inscribing their bodies (and the bodies of others) for thousands of years for self decoration, to display affiliation, and for punitive reasons. The oldest example of a tattooed individual is 5,200 year-old Ötzi the Iceman, who was found in 1991 in the area of the Italian-Austrian border. He had several tattoos on his back, right knee, and around his ankles, which researchers believe may have served medicinal purposes—possibly a form of acupuncture before acupuncture existed (2). Tattoos have also been found on Egyptian mummies dating to 2000 B.C. And sculpted artifacts and figurines marked by body art and piercings provide clues that tattooing was widely practiced from 500 B.C. to – 500 A.D. (3).

Tattoos have been used to signify occupation, patriotism, loyalty, and religious affiliation. For example, there is a rich maritime tradition of tattoos, including initials (both seamen’s own and those of significant others), anchors, mermaids, fish, ships, and religious symbols (4). It seems that most seafarers in the 18th and 19th centuries entered the ranks of the tattooed with initials—possibly for identification purposes—before adding different imagery (5), reflecting what was popular at the time: seafarers born after the American Declaration of Independence displayed more patriotic symbols (e.g., flags, eagles, stars, the words “Independence” and “Liberty,” and the year 1776 than those born prior). And there are also some interesting superstitions tied to them suggesting that tattooing has been an important means of exerting control over one’s situation (6):

• H-O-L-D-F-A-S-T, one letter on the back of each finger, next to the hand knuckle, will save a sailor whose life depends on holding a rope.

• A crucifix on the back will save the seaman from flogging because no boatswain’s mate would whip a cross, and if he did, the cross would alleviate the pain.

• A seaman who could stand to have a full rigged ship tattooed on his chest would automatically make a good topman.

• Crucifixes tattooed on each arm and leg would save a man who had fallen in the water and found himself among 775,000 hungry white sharks, who would not even bother smelling him.

That last point might be a bit of a fisherman’s tale (what if it’s 774,000 white sharks?), but it serves nicely to show how deeply enmeshed tattooing has been with certain occupations.

Early Christians got tattoos of religious symbols. Tattoos were purchased by pilgrims and Crusaders as proof that they had made it to Jerusalem, serving as a symbol of witness and identification. The Church largely did not approve even though there was biblical authorization for the practice: While there is evidence that “God’s word and work were passed on through generations through tattoos inscribed on the bodies of Saints, like the stigmata on St. Francis of Assisi,” the idea that the unmarked body is representative of God’s image and should not be altered was persistent (7).

The Mark of the Deviant

Tattoos have also been associated with savagery and deviance. Greeks, Romans, and Celts used tattoos to mark prisoners, servants, and slaves. Civilized Greeks viewed tattoos as degrading and used it as a way to mark criminals and slaves who were a flight risk—the mark was placed on their foreheads or faces and were meant to help easily identify the individual. This form of branding is repeated elsewhere throughout time:

“Before the Civil War, ads in North America for runaway slaves distinguished three kinds of body marking. A ‘Negro’ runaway, if born and previously marked in Africa, would be said to have ‘country marks,’ in addition to scars from diseases, accidents, or beatings, and brands showing the name of the owner” (8).

It should come as no surprise that the Greek word for the resulting mark was stigma, bearing the same negative connotation as it does today. Punitive markings were then a means of control, serving as a record of power and subjugation, as is most clearly evidenced by the Nazi branding of Jewish concentration camp prisoners (9). They stripped the individual of their personal identity and social connections, and imposed an artificial identity that established ownership—you belonged to the nation.  In late antiquity, punitive tattooing expanded to include soldiers and workers in military factories of the Byzantine Empire, who were marked for identification to inhibit desertion, but in an interesting twist, these marks also served as an indicator of rank and were also viewed as occupational insignias.

This association with deviance has been hard to shake. When colonial expansion brought Europeans in contact with people among whom tattoos were commonplace and adopted by both sexes, the idea of the tattoo as a savage symbol gained footing:

“The tattooed body is first widely observed, then, as an artefact of Europe’s encounter with its ‘new’ worlds, initially the Americas, then the South Pacific. Images, descriptions and eventually ‘specimens’ of tattooed people had been brought back acros the Atlantic since the 16th century; among other exotica imported to satisfy European fascination with this first new world, two tattooed ‘Indian princes’ toured English and European fairgrounds in the early 1720s” (10).

Though the exposure did much to broaden awareness of tattoos and introduce Pacific and Asian techniques and styles to a larger audience, tattoos remained on the fringes of European society:

“Within a few years some Europeans were also taking financial advantage of the public fascination with exotically decorated bodies. Typically these showmen equipped themselves with sensational stories of adventure, kidnap or captivity to accompany and explain the origin of the elaborate tattoos they displayed. Among the earliest were Joseph Cabri, the first European known to have tattoos across his whole body, and the English sailor John Rutherford, who toured Europe in the 1820s with a dramatic tale of capture and forcible tattooing and scarification by Maoris” (11).

The stories, for the record, were by and large false, but they drew a crowd. These exhibitions would give rise to the “Tattooed Lady,” and while tattoos were slowly gaining ground in Europe as a form of self decoration, the activity was largely a male one and it was further stigmatized as criminal investigators used the marks to identify persons of interest—cementing the idea that tattoos were the trademark of the outsider. This perspective overlooked the ways tattoos have been used as means of personal identification by non-Westerners, and minimized the meanings that can be gleaned from the intricate designs.

Toward A Personal Brand

Tattoos can craft a personal brand. Photo by Janine Carney. Used with permission. Click image for photo blog.

Tattoos create a “social skin” that reconcile the individual with society (12). In African societies, for example, tattoos established local identity as well as status and membership in different social groups. In the Edo Kingdom of Benin, no male citizen could claim his place as a member of palace society without a tattoo. Similarly, Igbo scarification denoted age, gender, and political affiliation. And Kayapo body modifications are a social initiation to the larger social group because they are tied to life-cycle events.

Contemporary attitudes are changing—though slowly. The “tattoo rennaisance” that began in the 1960s identified by art historian Arnold Rubin marked shifts in practice and experience, including the establishment of tattoo artists as professionals, increased access to tattoos, a shift in iconography to include full body art and Asian styles, and the broadening of clientele. By the 1990s, tattoos had become fairly pervasive among the middle-class, normalized by celebrity use but still plagued by hints of disapproval marked by judgments about the morality of tattooed individual.

Sociologist Katherine Irwin has documented the experience of this disapproval as being rooted in a fear of deviating from convention, losing status among peers and relatives, and having success compromised. The basis of this fear is ill defined but perhaps we can understand it in terms of the punitive administration of tattoos. If you bore a tattoo as punishment, you were stripped of free will, independence, and identity. To be marked by several tattoos for this reason put you on par with hardened criminals. These social consequences may have survived in perception. In this line of reasoning, to seek a tattoo voluntarily is an impulsive act that the individual will regret, which contributes to a sense of and fear of disapproval. There is a concern that deviant behavior will taint the network because behaviors reflect the skills (or apparent lack thereof) concerning connected parties like relatives and friends. Still, the nature of tattoos as that which highlight the boundaries between the individual and society and between experience and representation persists:

“For some men and women, becoming tattooed marked a passage from one life phase to another. Potential tattooees often saw this passage as representing movement out of an oppressive phase and entrance into a freer and more independent one. This passage included such activities as moving out of their parents’ houses, graduating from college, or ending unsavory relationships. Because they saw having tattoos as a violation of female beauty norms, many women used their tattoos to symbolically “take back their bodies” from their husbands’ or boyfriends’ control” (13).

When forced on a person, as in the case of punishment, tattoos may serve as a means of control and branding. However, following these experiences, they can also be a means of reclaiming self and (re)establishing oneself within a social order:

In Brazil, on the Indian subcontinent, in Russia, and elsewhere, convicts marked by the penal authorities are known to reclaim their bodies by writing over the inscriptions or by displaying them in new social situations as a sign of resistance. Penal and gang tattoos often represent a coalescence of socially imposed and voluntarily assumed marks, gaining some of their power from the fusion of subjection and resistance. Similarly, sex workers are said to reclaim their bodies through tattooing, using their tattoos to confront the fantasies that others project onto them (14).

Irwin describes a type of mediation that occurs where tattooees work to establish the act of getting a tattoo as a thoughtful process (14). They use tattoos to commemorate celebrations marked by conventional norms, show consideration in choosing and emphasizing a meaningful symbol, are careful to select a clean, reputable establishment, and often—particularly if it is a first tattoo—will choose a discrete location. Irwin maintains that these steps do much to assuage the concerns of a conventional perspective.

Tattoos aren’t necessarily a way to break from the social order—as has been the fear—but can be a way to establish a deeper connection to a social group, as they have been used elsewhere historically. They are a way of of publicly sharing one’s interests, and the artistic quality of tattoos today does much to dispel the notion that they are ugly, antisocial tools. That is not to say that some people don’t get tattoos to be different, but this act of public display (even if it is only a representative display typically covered by an article of clothing) is an act of sharing an element of self and creating a personal brand. Individuals with multiple tattoos are engaged in creating a rich symbology weaving together meaning and experience utterly unique to them that may grant them access to multiple social groups.

So, About That QR Code Tattoo?

If tattoos are a personal brand, the QR code tattoo could potentially be an excellent branding tool. It neatly does away with concerns about iconography and can be discretely placed. It seems to lend itself to convention. It also offers flexibility: Imagine not having to to remove your ex-lover’s name from your body, and instead, just changing the associated image with your QR code.  It might perhaps be a really interesting way to get ink that doesn’t get old—tattoos that can grow and change with you. On the other hand, it seems largely depersonalized, which runs counter to the idea of being inked, and of having some visible sign of something that’s important to you that can grant you access to the communities to which you belong.

Show and Tell

Tattoos are sometimes deeply personal, sometimes social, and are always meaningful. They reflect who we are and what’s important to us.

So what would I get if I ever took the plunge? The Eye of Horus—though I’ll spare you the explanation why until I actually get it done. What about you? Do you have one? Are you thinking about doing it? Would you do it?

By the way, I’d be remiss not to point you to Carl Zimmer’s collection of science-themed tattoos, Science Ink. The New York Times feature on the collection shares several of the fantastic tattoos people have had done.

–

References:
Caplan, J. (1997). ‘Speaking Scars’: The Tattoo in Popular Practice and Medico-Legal Debate in Nineteenth-Century Europe. History Workshop Journal: HWJ (44), 107-42 PMID: 11619699

Dye, I (1989). The tattoos of Early American Seafarers, 1796-1818. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 133 (4), 520-554

Irwin, K. (2001). Legitimating the First Tattoo: Moral Passage through Informal Interaction Symbolic Interaction, 24 (1), 49-73 DOI: 10.1525/si.2001.24.1.49

Schildkrout, E. (2004). Inscribing the Body Annual Review of Anthropology, 33 (1), 319-344 DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.143947

Notes:

(1) Caplan 1997:117.
(2) This article from the Smithsonian has more on the Iceman and Egyptian tattooing practices.
(3) Sculptures from the Jama-Coaque culture show piercing on the face and torso of men and women; Mayan figurines depict body art for royalty; and fourth-century Thracian vases show tattooed figures (Schildkrout 2004: 326).
(4) Dye 1989: 537.
(5) How did they get those tattoos? One potential method called for a thin trail of gunpowder to be laid out on the skin, or rubbed into cuts in the skin modeled after the design, and then ignited, leaving behind a black scar in the shape of the design. While researchers have dismissed this as a myth, it seems a likely means of getting tattooed given the availability of gunpowder on the ships (Dye 1989: 531).
(6) Dye 1989: 521.
(7) Dye 1989: 547.
(8) Schildkrout 2004: 323.
(9) An earlier version of this post omitted a reference to the tattooing of Jews in Nazi concentration camps. Following comments below, a small change was made to include this information
(10) Caplan 1997: 117.
(11) Caplan 1997: 119.
(12) Schildkrout 2004: 321.
(13) Irwin 2001: 56.
(14) Schildkrout 2004: 324 – 325.
(15) Irwin 2001: 60-64.

Happy New Year! Bloggers have started with a bang—there was much to choose from:

• At Genealogy of Religion, Cris Campbell probes how myths might help condition the collective, which is a question with no easy answer in sight. But Campbell treats readers to a neat mythology map showing thematic and geographic similarities.
• If you’ve ever injured your shoulder, then you have a sense for how important the joint really is. At Lawn Chair Anthropology, Zachary Cofran traces the evolution of the shoulder from A. africanus to present day.
• Over at Inkfish, Elizabeth Preston questions why we are a risk-averse species by pointing out that some of our closest genetic relatives will take the bigger reward even in the face of a bigger risk.
• Did you make a New Year’s resolution? Did you break it already? Dr. Stu discusses whether these types of commitments are designed to fail.
• And finally, at A Hippo on Campus, Andrew Watt attacks an old stereotype with neuroscience, and the hope that it will help girls face math with more confidence.

I’ll be back next week with more from anthropology, philosophy, and research.

The ranks of George Clooney, Denzel Washington, Clint Eastwood, Don LaFontaine, and Barry White includes a common factor: A lower pitched voice—considered a positive masculine feature associated with with older, heavier, taller, hairier, and more attractive men (1). Studies have demonstrated a female preference for men with deeper voices as short-term partners (and preference seems to vary across the menstrual cycle, peaking during the height of fertility) (2,3). And elsewhere, research finds that North American men with lower-pitched voices report higher numbers for sexual partners in comparison to men with higher-pitched voices (4); and that Hazda men with lower-pitched voices have more living offspring (pitch is not an indicator of fecundity, but mate suitability) (4). Sexual selection has been proposed as a reason for deeper voices—the timbre and pitch suggest an attractive, fertile encounter. But a December PLoS paper reports that men with deeper, attractive voices have lower sperm quality than men with less attractive voices. Is there a evolutionary basis for voice preference?

There is certainly a link between testosterone and voice pitch: when testosterone levels begin to rise during puberty, it triggers changes in the larynx and in the vocal cords resulting in lower pitched voices. So deeper voices become associated with other manifestations (like facial hair) of testosterone, and consequently, perceived sexual fitness. Women (and likely men) consistently make positive judgments about masculinity based on voice pitch that include both physiological and behavioral traits. In addition to the characteristics noted above, men with lower pitched voices are perceived as being physically larger (taller, heavier) and are believed to be better fighters and providers (4).

These assessments aren’t entirely made up. There is evidence that secondary sexual traits can predict health and fertility of a partner. Brilliant colors and showy displays have long been natural indicators of potential sexual fitness. For example, deer with bigger, more complex antlers also have larger testes and more motile sperm (5). Lower frequency sounds have been linked to larger body size across all primate species:

“The vocal tract is made up of hard tissue, its length being related to both
skull and skeletal size and the size of the tract determines the resonance frequencies of calls. The resonance frequencies, known as formant frequencies, are emphasized frequencies within vocalizations. [In] rhesus macaques, Macaca mulatta, the length of the vocal tract and the formant frequencies produced are both related to body size (6).”

Essentially, larger individuals have smaller differences between formant frequencies, which results in lower-pitched vocalizations. It is possible that at some point in our evolutionary history, vocal pitch may have been an important factor in mate determination, working in much the same way as other displays in the animal kingdom.

However, semen analysis reveals that men with deeper voices have lower scores on seven motility parameters (7)—even when the lifestyle and environmental factors are accounted for. While men with deeper voices may have more sexual partners, they seem less prepared to pass on their genes.* Researchers believe the lower sperm quality reflects a trade-off that comes with having to compete for mates:

“Animals have finite resources to partition amongst reproductive activities, and the theoretical models of sperm expenditure assume a basic trade-off between male investment in attracting mates and in gaining fertilizations. Recent studies of non-human animals are providing empirical evidence for this basic life-history trade-off. A number of studies have also reported short-term declines in semen quality associated with social dominance. In domestic fowl, Gallus gallus domesticus, and arctic charr, Salvelinus alpinus, for example, males becoming more dominant after a social challenge show a reduction in semen quality, while in cockroaches, Nauphoeta cinerea, both dominant and subordinate individuals suffer a reduction in ejaculate sperm counts resulting from the establishment of dominance hierarchies (4).

It appears then, that this secondary sexual trait which is linked to sexual maturity has become tied to social signs of maturity as well—taken to be economic and social stability. Which is a perception we find duplicated in popular culture:

“In movies and television larger men have deeper voices. This may reflect preconceptions, or may give rise to those preconceptions. Whichever is cause and which effect, it seems certain that larger men are expected to have deeper voices (8).

The broad-shouldered male hero has long stood as a symbol of status, meant to be respected and held to be an object of admiration. Male movie villains with deep voices are notable in that they appear powerful and inspire fear. Lest we fall into the trap of blaming everything on media, in the real world the perceived stability resulting from a long career and respect within a community may be tied to age and accomplishments, but seem to be viewed as general indicators of maturity, and as such are correlated with secondary sexual characteristics.

However, perhaps there’s a shift occurring: Male heroes aren’t always of the deep-voiced variety—and there has been a tendency to depict the deep-voiced, broad shouldered male hero as a bumbling idiot/arrogant fool/less intelligent companion (e.g., see such favorites as How To Train Your Dragon and Shrek (Prince Charming). In these instances, proof of ability outweighs assigned skills. That is, having a deeper voice doesn’t necessarily grant one status … though it might make for an delightful musical interlude.

*Clearly, not all men with deeper voices are infertile. They seem to do just fine generally. (Maybe those deeper voices help increase opportunities for them to pass on those genes—we just don’t know. But we can talk about it.) In any event, it bears noting that lower sperm quality is NOT the direct result of having a deeper voice. That is, once your voice deepens, your sperm count and motility don’t drop off. If that were the case, most men would be in serious trouble once their voices changed during puberty. It is interesting, however, to note that this perceived marker of sexual prowess (an extremely deep voice) may not actually reflect the whole picture. And may be quite telling about our own perceptions of masculinity. [Added  01/08/12 kd]

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Notes:
1. Collins. (2000): 778. | 2. Simmons (2011). | 3. Collins (2000) | 4. Simmons (2011): 4. | 5. Simmons (2011): 1 | 6. Collins (2000): 773. | 7. Average path velocity, straight line velocity, velocity along the sperm cells point-to-point track, lateral amplitude of sperm movement, frequency with which the sperm head crosses the average sperm path, the straightness of the sperm’s path, and the linearity of the sperm’s path. | 8. Collins (2000): 778.

Collins SA (2000). Men’s voices and women’s choices. Animal Behaviour, 60 (6), 773-780 PMID: 11124875

Feinberg, D., Jones, B., Little, A., Burt, D., & Perrett, D. (2005). Manipulations of fundamental and formant frequencies influence the attractiveness of human male voices Animal Behaviour, 69 (3), 561-568 DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2004.06.012