It’s that time of the month again – time for the celebration of all that is anthro blogging! More importantly, however, it is time for me to make up for the last time I hosted 4SH. In a way I failed the anthropology blogosphere last time around, and now I feel is my chance to make amends.

You see, as the host of such an amazing carnival it is my job to not only collect submissions, but to seek out entries on my own, the latter of which I did not concern myself with last time around. As a result we were left with a carnival made up almost entirely of bioanth and archaeology, representing only two of the four subdisciplines of anthropology. As far as submissions went this time around the story really wasn’t much different – almost all of the submissions were from these two subdisciplines. This, of course, got me to wondering.

If you know anything about academic anthropology you know that bioanth is drowned out by sociocultural anthropology when it comes to numbers, and yet with this carnival I see almost the exact opposite. Archaeology blogging seems to have a representative proportion to reality, and that goes for linguistic anthro as well (That is to say, non-existant, which is a shame). Looking over some of the other hosts I have began to wonder, however, if the submissions are not a function of what it is I blog about here: do individuals submit only that which they think I might be interested in?

Anyway, enough philosophizing. I have gone out into the wilderness that is the anthro blogosphere in an attempt to balance my past mistake. In the future, however, my hope is that each and every individual who has a post featured here will submit either work of their own, or work of a blogger they admire, for future editions so that we may avoid incestuous carnival editions such as my last. If no other past hosts have had this problem, then ignore my rant and go on being awesome. I’ll just try and catch up.

Let me start, however, with mentioning the recent “Best of Anthro Blogging 2008″ (Part2) over at Neuroanthropology. If you’re interested in seeing what is effectively “The Four Stone Hearth of 2008″ then I suggest you mosey on over there and bask in the goodness of all of the four subdisciplines of anthropology. Lende has done a superb job of bringing together some of the greatest the anthro blogosophere has to offer.

Now, without further ado…

Sociocultural Anthropology

I really enjoy discussion of anthropology as it applies to modern technology, specifically the ways in which sociocultural anthropology interfaces with the ways we use and view the internet as a medium of expression and experience. Thankfully, I’m not alone. If you take a trip on over to Another Anthro Blog, Owen takes a look at the various ways reader interaction has affected both the mainstream media and the blogosphere, particularly the difficulty of democratizing the inclusion of reader feedback in the production of media itself and the way feedback has affected his research:

This strategy of building relationships through online interactions has been my main research strategy. Blogging my research has not only worked to fact-check my interpretations through the generous contributions of collaborators, but it has also worked to develop a network of personal relationships.

Along a similar thread, Fran, a sociocultural anthropologist over at Ethblography, writes Don’t twitter on my Internet and call it lifestreaming. Deep in the trenches of Web 2.0, she writes here on Twitter, or the “McNuggetization” of thought.

Twitter gets under my skin in a most uncomfortable way. It doesn’t mean anything. It is genuinely uninformative, ego-centric and self-obsessed drivel. The audience is no one and everyone; the subject is nothing and everything. I don’t need to know when someone brushes their teeth or takes out the trash or picks their nose. I really don’t. Humanity is exceptionally ridiculous. We seek out freedom of expression as our one and only avenue to universal truth, then we turn it into a free-for-all reality televisionification of daily banality.

That being said, feel free to follow my “uninformative, ego-centric and self-obsessed drivel” anytime you like

But let me move on from the Web 2.0 to my roots, my very “I’m ashamed to be admitting this” roots. I played World of Warcraft (played) for about one year, and while I now recognize it as the crowning trough in the wave that is my life, I do look back on it and wonder about the seemingly infinite resource it offers to sociocultural anthropologists interested in virtual societies. Well, apparently Dr. Alex Golub, a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii, had similar thoughts and decided to make it the focus of his research. Over at WoW Insider he delves into his research on “American cultures of self-control, efficiency, masculinity and success amongst players of WoW.”

“There is a lot of research on WoW, actually, but most of is based either on crunching Armory data to produce statistical analysis of game play, or it is more ‘cultural studies’ where people play the game a little and then write something beautiful about it,” he explains to 15 Minutes of Fame. “My unique angle is that I am doing anthropological fieldwork in WoW, living and playing with a raiding guild and putting in 20+ hours a week keeping them healed and decursed.”

Tough work, but somebody’s gotta do it.

What really bugged me about WoW, though, was that refusal of Blizzard to implement the gassing of puppies. If you, like me, have come to grips with the fact that this dream will never be realized then I suggest you head on over to OpenAnthropology and Forte’s post Gassing Puppies, Burning Women, and Playing Tennis. Actually, there’s not really much about gassing puppies at all. It’s really much more interesting than all that. The author gives us an interesting analysis of the act and reaction of implementing social scientists in war efforts at the way they are utilized in light of the history and current of imperialism.

Also posting on topics related to current events in the Middle East, Pamthropologist at Teaching Anthropology discusses the role american anthropologists seem to lack in the production and maintenance of the ‘American dialogue’ and the ways in which a true anthropological perspective could alter situations such as that in Gaza currently.

And last but certainly not least, I wish to point you in the direction of The Memory Bank and Kieth Hart’s post Marxism and economic anthropology. If you don’t know much about Marx, anthropology, or economics then this is the post for you. It is detailed in a way 99% of blog posts aren’t, and definitely deserves a digg (Peer pressure!).

Marx’s anthropology is a special theory of industrial capitalism which conceives of the modern epoch as a turning point in world history. It is not a case study of western society. Rather industrial capitalism has set in train a series of events which must bring the rest of the world under its contradictory logic. It is not ethnocentric to deny non-western societies their autonomous evolution; history has already done that. For Marx then, economic anthropology is a set of analytical constructs of the capitalist mode of production, modified by awareness of the world that preceded and lies outside capitalism.

Linguistic Anthropology

Ah yes, the most underrepresented of the subdisciplines. Does that translate to the blogosphere? Well, it turns out it does. Anyway, after following a few links and doing a few searches I have stumbled upon a few posts related to linguistic anthropology that I think deserve a link. I mean, apart from sociocultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology probably has the most to say of the four subdisciplines when it comes to the internet. Hell, there might even be one analyzing my discourse right now (Scary…). Yet, for some odd reason they are either reclusive or non-existent…

Over at Digital Ethnography, Dr. Michael Wesch of Kansas State University discusses Participatory media literacy: Why it matters. In this article he outlines the difficulties encountered by both students and teachers utilizing the new participatory media, and the importance of the literacy of not only the media but of participation in it.

Ultimately, participatory media literacy is as much about a literacy of *participation* as it is a literacy of media.  For, as Howard says, “a participatory culture in which most of the population see themselves as creators as well as consumers of culture is far more likely to generate freedom and wealth for more people than one in which a small portion of the population produces culture that the majority passively consume.”

From there mosey on over to Disability Studies and their post on “The Voices of our Region” project. There is apparently a fascinating project being conducted on the history of disability in southwestern Pennsylvania. It specifically documents the oral history using photos, video clips and audio. Some of the excerpts are extremely touching…

I wrote about seven graduate schools with social work. I did tell them I was blind, wondered what their experience had been with blind people in the past, and requested information about scholarships. Some schools never replied. The University of Chicago sent me a classic letter that basically said to the effect that “The degree of your success will depend on the degree of your visual handicap. We have not had favorable experience with blind people in the past.” That was back in 63. (Joyce Driben)

And that about sums it up for linguistic anthropology. Seriously, throw me a fricken’ bone here.

For my own interest, if any of you reading this have some linguistic anthro blogs you would like to recommend please include them in a comment or shoot me an e-mail.

Archaeology

At Philobiblion, Natalie Bennet reviews the book Return to Chauvet Cave – Excavating the Birthplace of Art: The First Full Report by Jean Clottes, and what a review it is! Bennet, a London-based journalist gives us the low down on this wonderful text describing the now-closed Chauvet Cave in France and the art that lies within (Rather… on) its walls.

You get the feeling that every word in the text was carefully considered: take that “canid” – not “dog”, and not “wolf”, and that’s because “the morphology of the autopodia differs from the wolf’s in that the relative length of the middle digits is reduced”. But, the first proven evidence of a dog is 14,000 years ago, far after this print was made, although “genetics studies are putting forward a serious argument for the wolf transforming into the dog around 100,000 years ago”.

Aardvarchaeology also has a review for us, but instead of a wonderful book he chose a tragically awful movie: The Real Tomb Hunters.

Real Tomb Hunters, though not a very good documentary, is far better than Journey to 10,000 BC. This is because a) it doesn’t rely on cheezy computer animation, b) it aims much lower, intending only to be exciting, not to present any research results or debates. We get to follow a number of archaeologists through the history of the discipline who have done adventurous fieldwork in exotic locales. (A palaeontologist is also slipped in without special comment. I guess a fossil bed is a kind of tomb if you’re willing to stretch it…)

But, enough of the reviews! Here’s a taste of computer AI meets archaeology: Colleen Morgan over at Middle Savagery has given us her own perspective on Fake Dead People.

Fundamentally we are better off wearing Caesar’s crown for ourselves rather than asking a poor simulacrum about the weather in the Republic.  Thinking of Caesar as a non-player character in history is a stretch by any means.  But game developers (and digital archaeologists) will probably not stop populating virtual worlds with fake people.  These NPCs are nonhuman manifestations of a network of agents (polygons, “modern” humans, fiber-optics, and the dead person herself) and the relationships between these agents and as a result should be studied as such.

If you’re into dead people that aren’t fake, however, then I suggest you head on over to Testimony of a Spade and his post Cholera cemeteries; abandoned overgrown but remembered. In this detailed article Magnus gives us a great insight into the archaeology of cholera cemeteries in Sweden and even a bit of detail on the disease and various epidemics it has caused over the centuries:

The cemeteries are often quite small, 10-15 x 10-15 m, and the graves are normally not marked. But there is often a sepulchral monument in stone or Iron with a memorial text like “here lays those who died of Cholera 1853? and it’s not unusual that it is enclosed by a wall or a low fence. This sounds as if they’re easy to spot, well some of them are but most are uncared or cared very little for and nature has more or less taken over which makes them more or less invisible.

Invisible cemeteries!? Interesting…

Finally, I turn to Greg Laden for a nice narrative on life, archaeology and war in South Africa:

This story, which one would think to be of the same historical and socio-cultural import as, say, 9/11 to Americans, the bombing of London to the British, or Gallipoli to the Australians (to name a few blatantly Western examples) is not part of Kekana Ndebele culture history. They don’t tell the story. They don’t talk about this.

Please, take a few minutes out of your day and read this. It’s a great piece and a story that needs to be told and known.

Biological Anthropology

Oh, come on. I have to include at least some bioanth. After all, it’s the balanced thing to do.

I’m going to start off with directing you to a post by the always interesting John Hawks and hist post Cultural impedance, demographic growth, effective population size. In it Hawks discusses the interesting question of how culture may have influenced the low genetic diversity seen in modern humans, and the ways such a hypothesis can be tested. He goes over various models that have been discussed in relation to the genetic diversity of modern humans, and focuses particularly on a new article in PNAS by Premo and Hublin:

The inbreeding force is “culturally mediated migration” — the idea that cultural differences between populations tend to impede gene flow between them. If the global population were divided into relatively small herds, each possessing a distinct culture, then we might expect these herds to be inbred. Premo and Hublin performed simulations in which the effects of culture on migration rates were allowed to vary. If individuals demand to settle down in groups with nearly identical cultures to the group of their birth, the inbreeding within populations will be very high.

Also on a trip of hypothesis discussion, Bjørn over at Pleion discusses competing ideas surrounding the extinction of Neanderthals.

The authors mention two competing hypotheses, namely

1. the Neanderthals were unable to adapt to the changing environment, and
2. competitive exclusion by anatomically modern humans (AMH, aka Cro-Magnon, aka Homo sapiens) drove them to extinction.

I have, however, seen two or three other hypotheses before that deserves to be mentioned:

1. Neanderthals and AMH interbred and the distinction between them disappeared,
2. they perished because they didn’t publish weren’t able to evolve resistance to some pathogen or other, and of course
3. that they were wiped out by AMH in bloody feuds that so seem to define the winners to this day.

Using a variety of recently published articles the author gives us a bird eye view of the current state of the debate, and where it is these hypotheses have left us.

Apparently it’s “review where we are at in the debate over x” edition of Four Stone Hearth, because Jason over at Dental Anthropology joins John and Bjørn by providing a comprehensive review of six papers all on the topic of The Timing of the Peopling of the Americas.

In the end, what does this mean for our current consensus concerning the peopling of the Americas. Of course, there really is no real consensus or absolute truth, but here is the rundown.

If I included any more it would be giving everything away! Just click on the link.

And we’re done…

Well, that’s it for this edition of Four Stone Hearth. I hope all of you have found it a bit more well-balanced and anthropology-y than my last edition. Now would be the part where I link to the host of the next edition and let all of you know that if I don’t see you there you will probably die a very painful death within the next month, but since there isn’t a host yet I won’t do that. Instead, I urge you to head over to the Four Stone Hearth website and shoot Martin an e-mail letting him know you can host!

Cheers