Then, the writer totally surprised me by noting (I paraphrase) that “unlike the Pygmies, who live in these forests and are of perfectly proportioned shape and appearance, these subhuman creatures were rather grotesque.”

The traveler was a college-educated westerner with a late-Victorian attitude about Africans. The idea that all Africans are at least a little subhuman would have been a starting point for him. Throwing in a tribe here and there with especially cannibalistic or otherwise uncouth tendencies would be typical. Running into a group of individuals that looked to him almost like a separate species would be notable, and he did in fact make note of it, but this would be something he would take in stride.

Reading this made me wonder about two totally different and to some extent opposed lines of thought. On one hand, I thought, “How can people think such things are real…this guy was obviously seeing something he expected to see. Why? How does that work?” On the other hand, I thought, “What if his observations were essentially accurate, aside from the racial judgments he made. What if he really did encounter a bunch of people with bow legs and funny-looking bodies?”

Then, in the next paragraph of this monologue, a possible answer came. Shortly after the above mentioned description, the traveler mentions that one of these strange heathens, with the bow legs and the disproportioned body, traveled with him as a servant for a while. Then, at the end of that leg of the trip, after serving quite well for being such a subhuman and all, the traveler wanted to leave this misshapen wretch with some sort of extra payment for services. A tip. But the wretch had withdrawn to the forest never to be seen again (by the traveller), apparently uninterested in recompense.

Bingo.

Or at least, maybe bingo. I have an experience that may in fact match that of this ca. 1900-vintage traveler. Actually, a few such experiences. But as a post- (way post!) Victorian anthropologist, I have a slightly different take on the situation.

When I lived in the Ituri Forest, I often lived with the Pygmies for stretches of time. There were two modalities of living with them. In one mode, I would throw myself on their mercy and more or less live exactly as they lived, staying in the same kind of hut they lived in and doing whatever they did, or at least watching them do whatever they were doing, and trying to stay out of the way at the same time as observing and learning things about their lifeway. In the other modality, I stayed in a small dome tent (a cloth version of their hut) and was a bit more involved with the logistics of camp life, because during at least some of that time (several weeks over the course of many many months), it was more like they were living with me. I would hire a small number of Pygmy men, and maybe have one villager with us as well, and another anthropologist, and we’d be doing something like digging an archaeological site, measuring trees, counting monkeys, or whatever.

During some of these forays, especially in the first modality when it was only me (no other anthropologist) travelling with them, and I was living in their lifeway, more or less, I was assigned a wife. Sort of. This happened a couple of times, with different groups, and different individuals. In each case the person whom I eventually came to understand was serving the role of Mrs. Gregoiri (one of my Efe names was Gregoiri, which I admit is not too original) was a man with pretty severe polio.

These were men who could not carry out many of the activities in which the men normally engaged with respect to hunting and other forest activities. Even moving from camp to camp might be a challenge to someone whose legs were very shortened and deformed and who had, essentially, a kind of polio-induced dwarfism. For the most part, these men had outstanding manual skills. They could shoot an arrow as well as any (or better) and were outstanding at making things that the other men also made, but that the polio-afflicted men would make with utmost skill. What they lacked was stamina in the field.

Their condition meant that they would be unlikely to marry. It meant that they would be in camp with the women anywhere from now and then to almost always as the men went off to hunt. It meant that their social and economic gender was unique. And it meant that when someone had to be assigned to keep the big pasty white guy who was always tripping on tree roots and poking himself with sticks from harming himself, well, this person was the obvious choice.

I remembered, rather poignantly in fact, on reading the aforementioned traveler’s notice that the strange deformed subhuman left without any special recompense, that this is what happened to me as well. It was a bit of a privilege to hang out with the visitor, as would be the case in most cultures, and the visitor seemed to overlook the person’s affliction, which is something that many visitors may not have done.

The polio that came through the Ituri Forest of Zaire must have come through at roughly the same time because all the men who had it were about the same age…my age, actually. This population of forest dwelling people must have been very susceptible to it. And the Pygmies were notable for either refusing or just being bad at accepting long-term treatment or hospital stays, so even if there was some help available for them in those days, it may have ended up rather ineffective. Many must have died.

I need not mention that I never saw a subhuman deformed race. I did see some men who were being very good to me, keeping me from getting killed by the snakes, the elements, by getting poked to death or falling off a cliff into quicksand, or whatever one may think of as the dangers of the African Jungle. And they didn’t want any special pay for it.

Those marriages were short lived. But they were good marriages.

As usual, we have a great diversity of topics in this carnival, including archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and biological anthropology. Please visit those posts that are of interest, comment on them, submit them to social networking sites, and tell your friends and family about how great they are. Remember, we are all anthropologists, and we’ve got to stick together to promote our academic, societal and political endeavors!

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Quick, answer this question: What is art for? If, when I say “art,” you think of drawings and similar things, and you were a member of certain societies, your answer would be quick and easy: “Art is for magic. Don’t ask me any more questions; I’m not the shaman.” Or words to that effect. Or at least, this is somewhere between a reasonable assumption and an observation based on the available ethnographies. But how do we see shamanism in art in ancient, archaeological societies? How do we “know” that a particular element in ancient art signals shamanistic behavior? Kris Hirst has this covered: Shamans and Archaeology.

Typically, archaeologists have used the presence of a ritual-specific artifact or a rock art drawing of an anthropomorphic creature with animal characteristics to tentatively suggest the presence of a shaman within a given society. VanPool makes a cogent argument that by now anthropologists have identified a suite of cross-cultural traits that can be identified archaeologically and thus used to confidently argue for shamanism as a practice at an archaeological site or set of sites.

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Afarensis asks: Chimps, Dogs, Or Ants: Which is a Better Model For Human Sociality? For me, the answer is obvious. Birds. But never mind me, what does the ol’ hominin have to say about it?

The idea that dogs might serve as models of human behavior is not a new idea. Dogs, like humans are highly social animals that evolved from other highly social animals. For example, one line of research looks at the ability of dogs and wolves to perceive and act on cues provided by humans (turns out wolves don’t pay that much attention to cues provided by humans).

(Wolves have also been used as models for land use patterns among temperate or subarctic long distance logistical hunting peoples. Which might make more sense in some ways.)

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Is it a boy or a girl?

Sexing a pelvis is one of those things that takes practice. In fact, that’s one of the problems with it. There are very few things in a pelvis where you can just look at it and say, “that’s a male” without having a good deal of experience.

A primate of modern aspect addresses this ancient question: Quick and Dirty Pelvis Sexing.

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Check out this video of Oliver Sacks on Neuroanthropology, then read to see how Daniel thinks neuroanthropology has advanced since. What’s that you say? Sacks wasn’t a neuroanthropologist? Well, you’ll just have to read it, won’t you.

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I hate when this happens: Daycare Looters.

Not far from my home, in the woods down by the tracks, are the foundations of an abandoned railroad man’s homestead. Its name, Vinterbrinken (“Winter Slope”), survives in a nearby street name, though few know that anymore.

The house was built by the railroad company in the 1890s and was torn down, along with its barn, in the 1950s. The municipal archives have photographs of the buildings and the people who lived there, and they are all known by name…. Lately, the staff at a nearby daycare centre has been taking the kids down to the site and had them excavate parts of it,…

Teaching children about archaeology by engaging in criminal activity (looting) is not recommended by any archaeologist, including Martin at Aardvarchaeology.

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In a follow-up on some earlier work, Mark Dingemanse discusses the Siwu funeral dirge in a post called A cultural revival?

Last summer I wrote about the ideophone kanana. Here is a funeral dirge in which that ideophone, evoking a tranquil silence, plays a central role. It would normally be sung during the wakekeeping, in the middle of the night.

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This is very funny: Lego Archaeology. Go check it out.

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From SNPwatch at The Spittoon: Genetic Variation May Explain Why Young Women Are At Greater Risk For Melanoma Compared to Young Men:

Melanoma, a rare but potentially deadly form of skin cancer, is more common in women under 40 than in men in the same age group. After age 45, the tables are turned: men are more likely to be diagnosed with melanoma.

Between the ages of 40 and 50 happens to be when many women enter menopause or perimenopause, a time of declining estrogen levels. This has prompted some researchers to suggest that estrogen exposure may play a part in melanoma risk.

In a report published last week in Clinical Cancer Research, researchers show that a genetic variation previously associated with several other cancers may be the link between estrogen and melanoma in younger women. The riskier version of the variation increases the odds a woman will be diagnosed with melanoma before age 40 more than fourfold.

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“People are just animals.” If you say that word in Siwu, an African language, it sounds a certain way. A local bird “says” the same thing when making one of its natural calls. Which the Siwu speaking people find annoying, for obvious reasons. Please visit this multimedia post from The Ideophone to find out what the heck I’m talking about here.

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Consider this:

…a model of the brain as an information processing and memory retrieving machine that manipulates information suggests catching a fly ball is a calculation and comparison problem; calculating the path and recalling previous experience to compare the current situation with previous experiences of catching (or failing to catch). In contrast, an ecological psychology approach ‘argues that the fielder observes the flight path of the ball and can react using the angle monitoring system.’

So which is it? Read this post at Neuroanthropology to find out: Catching fly balls: taking a step forward.

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That’s it for this edition. Now you know what to do. Start clicking away!