Who speaks of "racial
stocks" anymore? After all, to do so would be to speak of something that many
scientists and scholars say does not exist. If modern anthropologists mention
the concept of race, it is invariably only to warn against and dismiss it.
Likewise many geneticists. "Race is social concept, not a scientific one,"
according to Dr. Craig Venter—and he should know, since he was first to
sequence the human genome.
Group items tagged
A Family Tree in Every Gene - 0 views
-
-
But now, perhaps, that is about to change
-
The dominance of the social construct theory can be traced to a 1972 article by Dr. Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist, who wrote that most human genetic variation can be found within any given "race." If one looked at genes rather than faces, he claimed, the difference between an African and a European would be scarcely greater than the difference between any two Europeans.
- ...2 more annotations...
-
"A Family Tree in Every Gene By Armand Marie Leroi Published on: Jun 07, 2006 Armand Marie Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist at Imperial College in London, is the author of Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body." This Article is a fairly sensible, nuanced, defense of the race concept based on recent genetic analyses of hundreds of genetic variables at a time.
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race - 5 views
-
With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.
-
revisionist interpretation
-
Just count our advantages
- ...26 more annotations...
Inuitinfo - Location, Environment, and Population - 0 views
-
The Inuit, otherwise known as Eskimo, are an aboriginal people who have made their home in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions of Siberia and North America, more specifically around Canada (Greenland); United States (Alaska); Aleutian Islands; Russia (Siberia). The word "Eskimo" was given upon resourceful hunters by their neighbors, the Algonquin Indians of eastern Canada. It means "eaters of raw meat." However, it has recently begun to be replaced by the Eskimos' own name for themselves, "Inuit," which means, "real people." The Inuit people descended from whale hunters who migrated from Alaska to Greenland and the Canadian Arctic around 1000 AD. Major changes in Inuit life and culture occurred during the Little Ice Age (1600-1850), when the climate in their homelands became even colder. European whalers who arrived in the latter part of the nineteenth century had a strong impact on the Inuit because they carried over infectious diseases that largely reduced the Inuit population. The Inuit people mainly live along the far northern seacoasts of Russia, the United States, Canada, and Greenland. There are more than 100,000 Inuit, most of whom live south of the Arctic Circle, and the majority, which is about 46,000, live in Greenland. There are approximately 30,000 on the Aleutian Islands and in Alaska, 25,000 in Canada, and 1,500 in Siberia. The Inuit homeland is one of the regions of the world least hospitable to human habitation because the majority of the land is flat, infertile tundra where only the top few inches of the frozen earth defrost during the summer months.
Food For Thought: Meat-Based Diet Made Us Smarter : NPR - 0 views
-
Our earliest ancestors ate their food raw — fruit, leaves, maybe some nuts. When they ventured down onto land, they added things like underground tubers, roots and berries.
-
"You can't have a large brain and big guts at the same time," explains Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist and director of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City, which funds research on evolution. Digestion, she says, was the energy-hog of our primate ancestor's body. The brain was the poor stepsister who got the leftovers.
-
"What we think is that this dietary change around 2.3 million years ago was one of the major significant factors in the evolution of our own species," Aiello says.
- ...7 more annotations...
-
Interesting audio piece on cooked food, meat, and the evolution of our big brains.
Imminent Anthropological Scandal - 0 views
-
The focus of the scandal is the long-term project for study of the Yanomami of Venezuela organized by James Neel, the human geneticist, in which Napoleon Chagnon, Timothy Asch, and numerous other anthropologists took part. The French anthropologist Jacques Lizot, who also works with the Yanomami but is not part of Neel- Chagnon project, also figures in a different scandalous capacity.
-
One of Tierney's more startling revelations is that the whole Yanomami project was an outgrowth and continuation of the Atomic Energy Comissions secret program of experiments on human subjects James Neel, the originator and director of the project, was part of the medical and genetic research team attached to the Atomic Energy Commission since the days of the Manhattan Project.
-
Tierney presents convincing evidence that Neel and Chagnon, on their trip to the Yanomami in 1968, greatly exacerbated, and probably started, the epidemic of measles that killed "hundreds, perhaps thousands" (Tierney's language-the exact figure will never be known) of Yanomami. The epidemic appears to have been caused, or at least worsened and more widely spread, by a campaign of vaccination carried out by the research team, which used a virulent vaccine (Edmonson B) that had been counter-indicated by medical experts for use on isolated populations with no prior exposure to measles exactly the Yanomami situation). Even among populations with prior contact and consequent partial genetic immunity to measles, the vaccine was supposed to be used only with supportive injections of gamma globulin.
-
"Ya"
Welcome - 0 views
-
To understand the genetic basis of human genetics and the limitations of race concepts describing that variation...I encourage you to read some of the essays attached to this page. If you find something of interest, highlight it and share it to our class page.
Marcel Mauss - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views
-
n his classic work The Gift, Mauss argued that gifts are never "free". Rather, human history is full of examples that gifts give rise to reciprocal exchange. The famous question that drove his inquiry into the anthropology of the gift was: "What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?" (1990:3). The answer is simple: the gift is a "total prestation", imbued with "spiritual mechanisms", engaging the honour of both giver and receiver (the term "total prestation" or "total social fact" (fait social total) was coined by his student Maurice Leenhardt after Durkheim's social fact).
-
The giver does not merely give an object but also part of himself, for the object is indissolubly tied to the giver: "the objects are never completely separated from the men who exchange them" (1990:31). Because of this bond between giver and gift, the act of giving creates a social bond with an obligation to reciprocate on part of the recipient. To not reciprocate means to lose honour and status, but the spiritual implications can be even worse: in Polynesia, failure to reciprocate means to lose mana, one's spiritual source of authority and wealth.
-
In a gift economy, however, the objects that are given are inalienated from the givers; they are "loaned rather than sold and ceded". It is the fact that the identity of the giver is invariably bound up with the object given that causes the gift to have a power which compels the recipient to reciprocate. Because gifts are inalienable they must be returned; the act of giving creates a gift-debt that has to be repaid
Code of Ethics - 0 views
-
Approved February 2009 I. Preamble Anthropological researchers, teachers and practitioners are members of many different communities, each with its own moral rules or codes of ethics. Anthropologists have moral obligations as members of other groups, such as the family, religion, and community, as well as the profession. They also have obligations to the scholarly discipline, to the wider society and culture, and to the human species, other species, and the environment. Furthermore, fieldworkers may develop close relationships with persons or animals with whom they work, generating an additional level of ethical considerations. In a field of such complex involvements and obligations, it is inevitable that misunderstandings, conflicts, and the need to make choices among apparently incompatible values will arise. Anthropologists are responsible for grappling with such difficulties and struggling to resolve them in ways compatible with the principles stated here. The purpose of this Code is to foster discussion and education. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) does not adjudicate claims for unethical behavior. The principles and guidelines in this Code provide the anthropologist with tools to engage in developing and maintaining an ethical framework for all anthropological work.
-
Download the Code of Ethics (PDF)
-
The AAA Code of Ethics provides a thought provoking and informative look into some of the responsibilities Anthropologists have to their research subjects, the community of anthropologists, and the wider public. The nature of anthropological fieldwork is particularly fraught with ethical conundrums.
Statement read by Professor William Irons - 0 views
-
We began this study assuming that, in Turner and Sponsel's words, we would be investigating 'an impending scandal' concerning flagrant wrongdoing by two celebrated scholars. Almost immediately, however, we discovered published evidence that the most serious allegations were false. Neel was not a eugenicist, did not cause the 1968 measles epidemic, and did not run nefarious experiments on unsuspecting human subjects. What he did was what any responsible physician would have done: vaccinate as many people as he could in a circle around the mission where the epidemic began. That these facts were available in the medical literature 30 years ago (Neel et al. 1970) made us wonder why Tierney had so badly distorted the facts. Perhaps it was because he had become an 'advocate,' to use his own words.
-
The first has to do with Tierney's use of an article by G. S. Wilson ("Measles as a Universal Disease," Amer. J of Diseases of Children 53: 219-23, 1962) to back up his claim that the Edmonston B measles vaccine is contraindicated. This is crucial to his broader argument that James Neel intentionally started a measles epidemic among the Yanomamo in 1968 by using this vaccine, and that he did this in order to observe its effect and test a eugenic theory.
-
Patrick Tierney's recent book Darkness in El Dorado makes very serious accusations of wrongdoing against Napoleon Chagnon, James Neel, and other scientists. Neel is accused of starting an epidemic among the Yanomamo in 1968 in order to observe its course as part of a secret experiment to test a eugenic theory. Chagnon is accused of aiding him, of fudging data, of staging events for his ethnographic films among other things, somehow causing the warfare that characterizes the Yanomamo.
1 - 11 of 11
Showing 20▼ items per page