anthro

Williams, Sarah C.P. 2012. "ScienceShot: World's Oldest Blood Cells Found on Iceman". Science. Posted: May 1, 2012. Available online: http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/05/scienceshot-worlds-oldest-blood.html

Hartwick College focused on The Human Question for its academic campus theme for 2011-2012. This brought periodic flares to the internal faculty e-mail listserv on a wide-ranging set of questions, mainly around the topic of possible machine consciousness. In May 2012, the discussion turned to sociobiology and evolution as related to questions of sex, gender, and sexuality. I initially assumed way too much ink had already been spilled on such questions, but there seem to be some definitional issues and conceptual difficulties entrenched in academia. I write this partly in response to those issues, partly as an outline for some anthropology sections on sex and gender that I hope to write, partly because I’ve just been teaching this stuff in Introduction-to-Anthropology, and partly as an example of academic blogging as a way to think through issues in a semi-public fashion, hopefully demonstrating the value of liberal arts approaches (I’m hosting a teaching table at Hartwick on academic blogs).

A first issue is of ongoing confusion around shorthand phrases like “gender is a social construction” or “race is a social construction.” I now tend to avoid such shorthands because they so quickly lead to an assumption that by “social construction” there is a denial of reality, or an implication that–as one biologist put it–people “generate their own truths based on their own experiences and imaginations.”

When social scientists use shorthand phrases like “gender is a social construction” they are 1) in no way denying that humans vary biologically in many different ways, or claiming that biology is irrelevant; and 2) not trying to say that these social effects are somehow not real or important; and 3) not saying that they are necessarily subject to extensive individual manipulation. Those shorthands simply indicate that many observed behavioral characteristics and life experiences are heavily influenced by social expectations, norms, and roles. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t real–they are quite real and can become biologically real as well.

The reality of social constructions is something anthropologist Jeremy Trombley succinctly tackled:

We have to get past the idea that things that are socially constructed are somehow not real. I encountered it again today in something I was reading. “X is socially constructed” or “X are social constructs” as if to say they are only or just social constructs–as if to say X is not real. But social constructs are real–that’s what makes them so powerful. Race, Class, Gender–these are all social constructs, but it is because they are socially constructed that they have tremendous effects on the lives of people who live in a particular society.

Trombley has also recommended a recently-published book The Reality of Social Construction. From the book-jacket:

‘Social construction’ is a central metaphor in contemporary social science, yet it is used and understood in widely divergent and indeed conflicting ways by different thinkers. Most commonly, it is seen as radically opposed to realist social theory. Dave Elder-Vass argues that social scientists should be both realists and social constructionists, and that coherent versions of these ways of thinking are entirely compatible with each other.

While I agree with Trombley on the need to emphasize the reality of social constructions, part of me feels like Elder-Vass’s book would never have needed to be written if the idea hadn’t been misinterpreted from the beginning. Social construction and realism never should have been opposed.

A related example: Money is obviously a social construction. We all choose to believe that pieces of paper with pictures of people on them (or electronic bits without any visible reality) have value and can be used to purchase real things in the world. We trust that when we exchange something for those bits of paper or computer bytes, it is because the next person in the chain will also accept that as real currency. (My economist colleague Karl Seeley, inspired by David Graeber, has written about the importance of belief and trust in a multi-part series on money for his blog Economics as if the physical world really existed.)

Or we could do an anthropological tour through different times and places and marvel at all the different kinds of objects pressed into the service of currency. We can readily agree that money is a social construction. But that doesn’t make it not real! It has a direct influence on life chances, experiences, ability to do things. It can have very real biological effects, like hunger and even starvation–the bodies and motor habits of the poor and rich can turn them into quite biologically different creatures. Moreover, simply imagining or believing that I have more money does not make it so. I may be able to use my imagination to do something to “make money,” but my efforts are far from guaranteed.

With that in mind, we can return to the issue of sex and gender. Initially, social scientists sought to distinguish sex from gender. As my introductory anthropology textbook defines sex: “observable physical characteristics that distinguish two kinds of humans, females and males, needed for biological reproduction” (Lavenda and Schultz 2012:365). As is clear in this definition, sex is mostly experienced as dimorphic, although the textbook does talk about various ways “genetic or hormonal factors produce ambiguous external genitalia.” So there are some ways biologically in which we might talk about a male-female continuum, or even contemplate other-sex categorizations. It is useful to recognize that the human primate seems to be something of an outlier in comparison to the standard measures of sexual dimorphism in non-human primates, and there is still a lot of evolutionary explanation needed for why human primates are unlike other primates in this way (see Adam Van Arsdale’s The complexity of human sexual dimorphism for an interesting contemporary take and also Greg Downey on The long, slow sexual revolution).

But understanding human sex difference would be frighteningly incomplete without considering gender, or “the cultural construction of beliefs and behaviors considered appropriate for each sex” (Lavenda and Schultz 2012:365). Social scientists introduced the term gender as a way of talking about all those expectations and beliefs we load onto people with certain physical characteristics. And we could do a tour through history and different cultures to find out how very different those expectations and beliefs can be, which is why we say they are “socially constructed.” However, that does not mean there is no biological variation, nor does it mean those beliefs and expectations don’t have very real effects, nor does it mean a particular individual can “generate their own truth” about gender. In fact, our beliefs and expectations can have quite dramatic biological effects, in terms of how boys and girls are differently fed and the spaces and activities they are assigned. And in some cases, most notably with eunuchs, there is the deliberate fashioning of a third-sex role (we are hardly the first or only society to engage in sex operations).

Gender roles and identity have often come as a duality, but there are a number of societies where “supernumerary gender roles developed that apparently had nothing to do with morphological sex anomalies” (Lavenda and Schultz 2012:368). Many of these cases are from the peoples indigenous to the Americas, which very often had a third-gender (or even fourth-gender) roles for “Two-Spirit Peoples” (which the French denigrated as berdache). These people typically took on tasks appropriate to the other gender; they often but did not always “cross-dress,” and many had special ceremonial roles in their communities. While some have glossed this as “homosexual,” it really does not correspond to such designation, and many contemporary Native Americans have rejected this gloss.

Of course given this biological sex variation and gender role variation, the question of sexual identity and sexual practices gets really tricky. We have typically thought of heterosexuality as both normal practice and identity. More recently there has been an idea that both homosexuality and heterosexuality are normal variants, and surely there are biologists searching for that “gene for homosexuality.” Others have talked about homosexuality and heterosexuality as a continuum. However, none of that gets at the even crazier range of human variation. For example, sex with a “Two-Spirit Person” would be considered neither strictly homosexual or heterosexual. There are also societies in which male homosexual practices are considered vital in order for men to later engage in heterosexual intercourse. Other societies gauge homosexual or heterosexual activity not by the biological sex of the partners but by their role in the sex act–a man can be perfectly “heterosexual” and have sex with other men, depending on the type of sexual practice involved. Hopefully we’ll soon be finding the genes to explain all that stuff…

As useful as it has been to think about the social aspects of gender and sexual identity as related to but potentially quite different from biology, there has been some frustration with these approaches. First, gender was almost immediately used as a euphemism for sex. After the 20-week ultrasound, many people ask “what is the gender of the baby?” I was tempted to joke: “The sex is female, but we haven’t decided on gender yet” (note however that parents play an important but only auxiliary role in fashioning gender expectations). Second, people immediately misinterpreted the “social construction” argument in the ways described above, as a denial of biological variation or difference. Many analysts therefore wanted to push the point further, showing how our gendered social expectations actually become embodied, incorporated into our developing motor habits, musculature, and bodies, so that it was not just gender that was socially constructed, but sex too. In other words, the bodies we see as male and female are in part due to social environments. For example, many societies actively discourage females from participating in sports or other activities that would build muscle mass, as this would be unfeminine. While there are some who believe such differential expectations have lessened or disappeared in the industrialized world, I note the irony that technologies like the ultrasound now enable people to frontload gender expectations in ways that would have been impossible in the past–many people have their nurseries appropriately decorated and buy gender-coded baby clothes months before the baby is born!

In the context of people who were already familiar with many of these assumptions, a philosopher colleague recommended a chapter from Georgia Warnke’s After Identity: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Gender. Warnke is precisely attempting to push some of these boundaries in order to critique assumptions that males are evolutionarily programmed to be bread-winning but promiscuous whereas females are similarly programmed to be at-home and choosy about mates. Warnke reviews much of the ethnographic and historical record I have referenced above–and is really drawing on a lot of anthropology–to conclude that these roles are hardly anchored in our genes or evolution, but are more a product of relatively recent gender expectations. What we see as science is influenced by what we already believe to be true about males and females.

When anthropology talks about human sex, gender, and sexuality, we insist that we must take account of what humans say, think, and believe about their activities. To do otherwise is arrogant, presumptuous, and a root cause for why people become suspicious of the people who call themselves scientists.

To say this is not to deny evolution, to deny science, to deny that humans are animals, or to claim some sort of ethereal special place for the non-material. It is simply to ask that a role for human activity and imagination be included as part of our understandings. And of all the products of the human imagination, the idea that organisms are ruled or determined by genes is surely one of the most bizarre–but apparently also one of the most far-reaching and pernicious.

My last sentence is borrowed from Tim Ingold’s The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, and takes us back to the heart of “The Human Question”:

And of all the historical products of the human imagination, perhaps the most decisive and far-reaching has been the idea that there exists such a thing as an “intelligence”, installed in the heads of each and every one of us, and that is ultimately responsible for our activities. (2000:419)

Anthropology on Sex, Gender, Sexuality – as Social Constructions Living Anthropologically

Something called a “silo” kept cropping up in my field research with media reform broadcasters throughout 2012. At the National Conference of Media Reform in 2011 I attended a panel, “Getting Out of the Silo: Editing Video as a Community.” The organizer told me she was “looking to create an intersectional narrative of collaboration” with the panelists. “We are all living in our little silos,” said the general manager of a small television news network explaining how a possible partner rejected his overture for collaboration. Its “the silophication of the company,” said a vice president of a television news network of the process by which internet, television, and marketing divisions were not well-integrated while taking different approaches to the same product.

What is a Silo?

Silophication is most actively theorized by a person who straddles anthropology, global finance, and journalism: Dr. Gillian Tett, a Cambridge trained anthropologist and US managing editor of the Financial Times. Below I build theory through  categorizing Tett’s use of the term silophication in her financial journalism critical of how regulator’s and banker’s silophication led to an absence of information sharing and the presence of a global financial crisis.

Tett sees the “modern age” as epitomized by tensions between integration and fragmentation. “[W]hile technology is integrating the world in some senses, it is simultaneously creating fragmentation too. Moreover, as innovation speeds up, it keeps creating complex new activities that are only understood by technical ‘experts’ in a silo.” (Tett 2009). Tett provides reasons why silos exist (complexity and professional specification) and implores regulators and bankers to silo-bust through hiring holistic thinking anthropology-like personnel to cross silos and share information.

Tett refers to two mutually reinforcing silos, an intellectual silo epitomized by monological and non-holistic thinking supported by the second structural silo of employment departmental balkanization. She admits to this duality of silos describing “structural silos (ie: departments that do not talk)” and “mental silos (financiers with tunnel vision)” (Tett 2009).

Structural Silos

Tett states that financial regulators, the British Financial Services Authority (FSA), has “increasingly succumbed to a ‘silo’ mentality” (Tett 2008a). They “spend their time ticking boxes, within their allotted silos, rather than take a holistic view of risk” (Tett 2008a). Within these homogenized specialist silos, without “common sense and talk” (Tett 2008b) within or across specific fields, the chances of arriving at disasterous “solutions” increase exponentially. These structural silos are workers’ castes reinforced through “career silos” (Tett 2012a). Tett writes about “career silos” referring to how bankers or regulators remain in those castes, resulting in an absence of silo-transcending, information sharing, and empathy across silos (Tett 2012a).

Structural silos are results of the hierarchical organization of the firm, the spatial arrangement of offices within the firm, and the lack of collaboration within the firm. As Thomas Malaby, Andrew Ross, and other corporate ethnographers have recognized, companies can modify their office cultures and use social technologies to transcend structural silos. Business organization have been known to reject hierarchy in exchange for the semi-lateral flow of information across the firm that comes with heterarchy is analyzed by David Stark. This is often the case in new media firms. As Google, Facebook, and other Silicon Valley companies with their California ideologies have shown, it is possible to institutionalize through space, culture, and practice ways of addressing structural silos. This is de rigueur in new media firms but not so in the financial and federal sectors.

Intellectual Silos

In 2010 emails revealed the extent of the deception and greed within the culture of Goldman Sachs investment bankers and Standard and Poor’s credit raters. Tett refers to these leaked emails as primary documents in her analysis of the mental silos behind the global financial crisis of 2008. She writes, “Their world was also in a strange, geeky silo, into which few non-bankers ever peered” (Tett 2010a). By “geeky silo,” Tett refers to the mental or intellectual silophication that defends proprietary knowledge against boundary breakers.

In another example, Tett expanded her notion of the silo to apply outside of finance and its regulation to describe America and American media as polarizing and tribal (Tett 2011). Tett says that the internet is not helping Americans bridge their tribal silos: “social media, far from bridging these silos, is spawning a new form of cyber-tribalism of its own” (Tett 2011). She continues, “Now that Americans feel free to create their own identity online, they increasingly assume that information should be ‘customised’; and as media companies rush to offer these bespoke services, it becomes easier to retreat into an intellectual silo” (Tett 2011).

The phenomenon of the intellectual silo has been identified by a range of scholars, activists, and anthropologists. Going by the name the “filter bubble” which fosters the “myth of digital democracy,” intellectual silos appear to be reinforced by personalization algorithms and by the innate safety of sameness in risk prone fields of cultural production.

Why Silos?

Complexity and specialization, the result of growth in the knowledge management fields augmented by specific technological competencies, is the reason for the proliferation of task, department, intellectual, and field fragmentation today. Tett claims, “If you look around the world today, it is clear that almost every institution, from the army to the banks, is becoming increasingly complex. That, in turn, is creating a plethora of silos, where specialists beaver away, performing an activity that few outsiders understand. Yet the irony is that while these silos are springing up, we also live with systems that are increasingly interconnected; events on a trading desk or isolated battlefield can send ripples across the world” (Tett 2011b). As social complexity scales up, the silos proliferate and grow dangerously less communicative. In core intelligence industries of modernity, from the military to science, energy production, and finance, the silo curse impacts much of the world’s Western elites and by extension the rest of the world.

Tett explains the process: “This problem is not unique to finance. On the contrary, similar patterns can be found in numerous other areas of the modern world, ranging from science to medicine to energy and manufacturing. For as innovation speeds up in the 21st century, specialists are engaged in highly complex activities in numerous silos, that almost nobody outside that particular silo understands, or even knows about – even though the activity in that silos often has the ability to affect society as a whole. There is thus a bizarre paradox in the 21st century world: namely while the global system is becoming more interconnected in some senses, the level of mental and structural fragmentation remains very intense” (Tett 2010b: 129).

Craft specialization has long been our species’ reaction to increasing social complexity. For logical efficiency as well as the domination of worker’s biopower, hierarchically controlled professionalization has been one solution to the problem of knowledge containment. Employment casuality is one result of such efficiency logic on the human scale. But on the present global scale, and with the increasing dissociation of resources and publics through digital abstractions and its derivatives, unchallenged silos and the logics that support them, appear to be able to create global catastrophes.

Solving Silos?

Tett works for the Financial Times so she is a knowledge worker for financial elites willing to pay exorbitantly to access her pithy writing behind an expense paywall. She is also a social actor who doesn’t want to see her clients create another global financial crisis. For Tett this is the “silo curse” she wants to solve for her clients and because her client’s work impacts the wealth of millions of people, poor and rich (Tett 2009).

Tett provides some evidence that by 2009 certain sectors of finance and financial regulation were embarking on efforts to cure the “silo curse” impacting numerous sectors of modernity: “The problem that military and financial systems alike are grappling with, then, is how to combat tunnel vision; or, more accurately, how to persuade players to recognise how tempting – but also dangerous – it is to operate with a one-track mind” (Tett 2011b).

She applauds companies like Goldman Sachs who “try to ensure that different business silos have ways of watching what each other does” (Tell 2008b). Some regulators, for instance, are employing “macro-prudential surveillance (essentially, a posh word for active, holistic regulation). … [This stresses] the importance of joining up the dots” (Tett 2009). Meanwhile, “asset managers are trumpeting the importance of lateral thought and trying to understand what is happening in seemingly disconnected silos” (Tett 2009). To trump the silo curse, improve regulation, and reduce the prevalence of risking investment, Tett argues that bankers and regulators should “be forced to talk about their business with a wide pool of colleagues, including their immediate silo” (Tett 2008b).

Tett claims that “one of the essential investment challenges today [is to] understand the micro-details of modern silos, but [also] see how the macro-pieces interconnect, in a world that is both highly interconnected and tribal.” (Tett 2009). She looks back to her PhD training in anthropology for the penultimate solution. She proposes the development of “cultural translators”, who can explain what is happening in those silos to everyone else (Tett 2009). Tett is suggesting that anthropologist-like employees could help regulators and bankers translate insights from one department to another. For example, she champions “silo-busters” like Dr. Jim Yong Kim, also an anthropologist, as the president of the World Bank for showing the “power of breaking down the intellectual silos that mar much of the modern world” (Tett 2012b).

She concludes: “So, for my money, a better way to frame the debate is not to call for business leaders to be ethical, but to launch a fight against tunnel vision; call it, if you like, a focus on silo busting, both in terms of how companies organise themselves and how business people think” (Tett 2011b).

Conclusion

Tett identifies two iterations of silophication, one structural and another mental. Silos exist because of the complexities of today’s socio-technical world require professionalization and specialization. Silos need to be solved because they result in bad decisions that negatively impact millions of people. One way to solve the “silo curse” is to employ “cultural translators” who can inform specialized knowledge workers about the big picture of their work.

In my work with media reform broadcasters I identified silos: Inter-firm silos that are similar to structural silos in which departments fail to communicate; Inter-audience silos that are similar to intellectual silos in which television viewers balkanize into affinity groups; and intra-field silos, not addressed in Tett’s silo categorization, that refer to institutions within a single field of cultural production, a social movement for instance, who want to but fail to collaborate because of their silophication.

Financial journalists and media reform broadcasters are using the same opaque term, silophication, to describe similar processes. What is the significance of this shared emergent discourse? A methodological question remains. Tett is both a financial journalist and an anthropologist who is using a term used by the subjects of my research. Building theory requires a meta-language developed from records of an indigenous discourse. What to do when the ethnographic subjects and anthropological theorists share the same theoretical discourse?

Tett, Gillian 2008a The danger of letting ‘group think’ spin out of control. Financial Times, March 28. http://www.ft.com/intl/cmts/s/0/1925d542-fc6a-11dc-9229-000077b07658.html#axzz1u23EtNca

Tett, Gillian 2008b How talking can help cut the risk of a lemming fall, Financial Times May 16. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e040ef72-22df-11dd-93a9-000077b07658.html#axzz1u23EtNca

Tett, Gillian 2009 Waking up to the ‘silo curse’ is far from the end of the problem. Financial Time. October 9. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6d1de780-b469-11de-bec8-00144feab49a.html

Tett, Gillian 2010a E-mail howlers bring murky credit business out of shadows, Financial Times. March 25. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CFwQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2Fa9da1aa4-508b-11df-bc86-00144feab49a.html&ei=l7-yT4–FYTRiALn-4ySBA&usg=AFQjCNEWttbIb-CaTyM61YL6Fn9HMKhLEA&sig2=Nh82w8uZk9l8z5-rc8y5WQ

Tett, Gillian 2010b Silos and silences: Why so few people spotted the problems in complex credit and what that implies for the future. Banque de France • Financial Stability Review • No. 14 – Derivatives – Financial innovation and stability • July 2010 121. http://www.banque-france.fr/fileadmin/user_upload/banque_de_france/publications/Revue_de_la_stabilite_financiere/etude14_rsf_1007.pdf

Tett, Gillian 2011 US Tribes and Tribulations, Financial Times, August 5, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/9a0ed5ae-be37-11e0-bee9-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1uyNOEaac

Tett, Gillian 2011b The tunnel-vision thing, Financial Times, January 28. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/32637b44-28eb-11e0-aa18-00144feab49a.html

Tett, Gillian 2011c  ‘Preventing a repeat of the financial crisis isn’t about more business ethics, argues Gillian Tett; it’s about fewer silos’ Financial Management. April 19. http://www.fm-magazine.com/comment/our-guest/preventing-repeat-financial-crisis-isn%E2%80%99t-about-more-business-ethics-argues-gillian

Tett, Gillian 2012a Hildebrand affair a blow for Europe’s public bodies, Financial Times, January 12. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9c389df0-3d3b-11e1-8129-00144feabdc0.html

Tett, Gillian 2012b Right time for a World Bank renaissance man, Financial Times, March 30, 2012. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9eda0f8e-798c-11e1-8fad-00144feab49a.html

Sometimes I feel ashamed to be close with my friends. “How come you’re so distant? Just come over here, it’s no problem, you know.” I’m not allowed to have a small heart.

Gusti Ayu Ketut Suartini, a young Balinese woman, shares how hard it is to be close to her new-found friends; they have to remind her that they are not afraid of her unusual movements, grunts, strange facial expressions and unexpected tics, the symptoms of her Tourette Syndrome. She remembers too well how the neighbours in her home village made fun of her awkward tics, calling her ‘bird dancer’ because her odd movements – so out of line with Balinese norms of placid, graceful comportment – resembled Manuk Rawa trance dancers, possessed by spirits. The neighbours even suggested she might be suffering a kind of permanent possession by the spirits who only temporarily inhabited the dancers.

We meet Gusti, and see how her life is shaped by the way other people interpret her tics, spitting, and uncontrollable movements, in Robert Lemelson’s movie, The Bird Dancer. The Bird Dancer doesn’t show us Tourette Syndrome (TS) as a disease, or discuss its neurological underpinnings. Instead, the movie is an exploration of Tourette as ‘illness’: local, meaningful, social, demoralizing, and driving Gusti and her family to despair.

Using video collected over more than a decade, Lemelson tracks Gusti’s life with illness, discusses the origin of her suffering, her attempts to find ‘healing,’ and her own understanding of her condition. Eventually we see how, even though her disease is not cured and her symptoms persist, her illness can be partially escaped, including through several subtle interventions that Lemelson makes in her life. The trailer of the movie is available for general viewing and embedded below; the whole film can be purchased from Documentary Educational Resources or ‘rented’ from Amazon (if you’re in the US).

The Bird Dancer trailer: http://vimeo.com/15539709

The Bird Dancer is one of six films in the series, Afflictions: Culture and Mental Illness in Indonesia. This post, however, focuses entirely on Tourette Syndrome and The Bird Dancer, both because the disorder is fascinating, but also because it’s Tourette Syndrome Awareness Month. TS is a source of fascination and amusement in the West, especially one of its rarest symptoms, coprolalia: inappropriate swearing or uttering of obscenities. But the condition is also a model disorder, both neurologically and neuroanthropologically.

Neurologically, TS arises from a complex interaction between developmental, neurobiological and behavioural mechanisms (see Jankovic 2001). Neuroanthropologically, TS is fascinating because, although it can cause minimal direct impairment to the sufferer in some cases, the condition requires the sufferer to manage an unruly nervous system and deal constantly with the social repercussions of the inability to abide by norms of personal conduct and bodily comportment. Tourette is, as neurologist and Tourettic Peter Hollenbeck (2003) writes, an ‘illness of the observer,’ afflicting carriers primarily through perception and interaction management problems by undermining the appearance of being ‘normal.’

In The Bird Dancer, we join local observers of Gusti’s condition. Rob has opted to keep the discussion in the video non-technical and minimally intrusive, leaving greater space for discussion, exploration and compassion for an individual trying to cope with TS in an inhospitable social environment; we gradually become accustomed to Gusti’s tics and see more clearly her desperation. The Bird Dancer shows us how Tourette symptoms collide with the interpersonal expectations of Balinese life, the social aspirations of one Balinese sufferer, and the resources of both traditional healers and biomedical practitioners.

Gusti is not alone in suffering from symptoms that are as much social as neurological; research on TS in the United States and elsewhere in the West highlight the challenge of living what Hollenbeck (2003) calls a ‘jangling’ life, managing a ‘constant problem of self-presentation’ posed by one’s own irrepressible gestures, trying to render these gestures semantically meaningless rather than stigmatizing, frightening, or even offensive (Buckser 2007: 256). Although the tics can be almost incapacitating in the most severe cases, many with TS have normal cognitive and psychological abilities (for an extreme example, see Guy D. Francis’ YouTube channel, including his ‘Tourette karaoke’, for firsthand discussion by a brave and very funny man living with severe TS and Asperger’s Syndrome).

Since 15 May to 15 June is Tourette Syndrome Awareness Month in the US, I thought that this post was particularly appropriate, especially as a bit of a come-back post for me (news on why I’ve been away sometime soon). Here in Australia, we’ve just gone through our Tourette Syndrome Awareness Week, which wrapped up on 12 May.

Rob Lemelson, Afflictions, & declaration of interest

Rob Lemelson is a psychological anthropologist and documentary filmmaker at the Department of Anthropology and the Semel Institute of Neurosciences of UCLA, as well as the founder of the Foundation for Psychocultural Research. Rob is also Director of Elemental Productions, which produces documentary film, and Vice President and Secretary of the Lemelson Foundation, established by inventor Jerome Lemelson to encourage creativity and innovation.

Lemelson said (in an interview with Ajay Singh) that he originally went to Bali as a psychological anthropologist to investigate claims that the prognosis for recovery from psychiatric conditions was better in the developing world than in wealthier countries (which I discussed in an earlier post at our old site):

My original project was looking at issues of outcome and recovery from severe mental illness, following the World Health Organization’s studies that people in the developing world have better recovery outcomes: If you develop schizophrenia in Bali, India or Nigeria, you’re more likely to return home and to work and have fewer hospitalizations.

Specifically, as the film guide for The Bird Dancer explains, Lemelson was investigating the Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders associated with Streptococcal Infections (PANDAS) hypothesis (Tucker 2011: 3). The PANDAS hypothesis is a controversial theory that children with a genetic vulnerability can have an autoimmune overreaction to streptococcus that attacks the nervous system leading to obsessive-compulsive disorder or tic disorders, like TS (for more on the controversy, see de Oliveira and Pelajo 2010; Robertson 2011; Singer et al. 2011).

The videos in the Afflictions series, instead, are a longer-term outcome of Lemelson’s research in Indonesia. Rather than focusing primarily on the question of prognosis or disease etiology, the series explores from an intimate perspective, up close and sometimes painfully personal, how individuals live with mental illness in Indonesia. Because of this long-term project, The Bird Dancer, like the other videos in the series, was difficult to put together. In a review of three of the Affliction videos, Karen Nakamura (2011: 656) recognizes the challenge, but also Lemelson’s achievement: ‘Because the films are a compilation of research footage as well as contemporary material, some of the editing is a bit choppy with temporal continuity sacrificed for the narrative arcs.’

Nakamura points out that Lemelson ‘appears in the film both visibly and through voiceovers that are more reflexive than didactic.’ I found Lemelson’s voiceover and presence on screen minimal and non-intrusive, helping to explain the narrative, but also a bit awkward, almost as if he would prefer not to have to be there. His discomfort, however, matches his subjects’ reticence, their difficulty talking openly about such private, embarrassing conditions, or about mental illnesses that are simply difficult to understand, and the likelihood that some of what they are saying is being voiced for the first time. Some of the awkwardness also arises because the people Lemelson interviews defy a Western audience’s expectations for self presentation, as the film guide provided for the movie cautions:

Some viewers of the film may be surprised to notice Gusti or her family members smiling as they speak about sad or stressful matters or when they are in uncomfortable situations. As a caveat, this demeanor should not be interpreted as her family not caring about her situation or as them actively laughing at her. Rather, it may be seen as the expression of a Balinese approach to emotion management. Balinese people generally strive to maintain a pleasing and bright appearance, even in situations where they may be internally experiencing sadness, strife, anger, or physical pain. Their attempts to appear cheerful include laughing and smiling during circumstances where other cultures might find it inappropriate or even rude to do so. (Tucker 2011: 8 )

The effect, overall, is poignant; smiling family members, at times suddenly choking back sobs or breaking into tears, in remarkably beautiful surrounds, discussing the wrenching problems thrown up by mental illness. Beautifully filmed, and with surprisingly good music, these are not slick, funny or easy-to-watch videos; they stick with the viewer, in part, because they are so raw emotionally, uncomfortable, and even jarring in these juxtapositions. As reviewer Nakamura adds, ‘Even jaded students are sure to be captivated by the intensity of the images and the skillful storytelling’ (2011: 656). I agree. The spare voiceover and pace of the video allow the viewer to live his or her way into a life that is doubly alien for most: both culturally and psychiatrically a world apart.

But before we go further, however, I have to declare that this is not a blind review; I have a vested interest in promoting Rob Lemelson’s work, not only because of what he has done for me and my colleagues, but also because of what he has done for psychological anthropology in general. Rob’s a driving force in psychological anthropology, as his list of affiliations above suggests, through his own research, writing, and editing, but also because he organizes and sponsors so many activities through the Lemelson Foundation, the Foundation for Psychocultural Research (FPR), and personally. When Daniel and I were trying to pull together our conference on neuroanthropology in 2009 (which resulted in a book that will be out later this year), we received support from Rob, the Lemelson Foundation, and the Society for Psychological Anthropology.

Right now, I’m already counting sleeps until I get to go to the 5^th FPR-UCLA Interdisciplinary Conference: Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Methods, Applications, in October (more on that as it gets close). Because of my home university’s new absurdist travel policy (file under ‘perverse incentives’), I would not be able to attend without Rob’s and the FPR’s support.

So I owe Rob. I don’t normally do video reviews. Hell, I don’t normally go to movies. But if every psychological anthropologist with a practical or intellectual debt of some sort to Rob refused to review his work, you’d be knocking out a fairly large chunk of the people who could discuss the Afflictions series.

Tourette Syndrome: An ‘illness of the observer’

Georges Gilles de la Tourette, who undertook advanced study at Jean-Martin Charcot’s clinic in the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris alongside Sigmund Freud, first described nine patients with the condition that would bear his name in 1885. He didn’t ‘discover’ the disorder; the Marquise de Dampierre, the first case, was described by Itard in 1825. The Marquise was especially noteworthy because her coprolalia was so incongruous with her noble birth. According to Wikipedia, her most common epithets were ‘merde’ and ‘foutu cochon’ (‘shit’ and ‘filthy pig’). The Marquie de Dampierre case established a pattern that the paradigmatic cases of TS had the most spectacular and exotic symptoms: uncontrollable barking of obscenities, violent gestures, self harm and odd behaviours like echolalia, or the tendency to repeat what others say.

In fact, coprolalia is quite rare; only 10-15% of all Tourette Syndrome sufferers in the United States have the symptom which so captivates public imagination. In Japan, only 4% of those with TS have coprolalia, although the frequency can go much higher in some contexts; some samples suggest rates as high as 60% (see Lemelson 2004: 51). Gusti has coprolalia, at least for a while, distressing her family by calling out ‘bastard dog’ and other obscenities at inappropriate times.

But, as neurobiologist Peter J. Hollenbeck, diagnosed with TS in adulthood, writes, the visible and audible tics are just the outward sign of the internal experience of Tourette urges. He suggests that these explosive tics and vocalizations provide the portrait of a disorder that is more complex to the person living it:

The most common neuropsychiatric illnesses command our attention and challenge our imagination so deeply that they inspire popular metaphors. There is the dismal gray cloud of depression, the debilitating fire-and-ice of bipolar disorder, the waking nightmare of psychosis. But off at the edge of public awareness, out in the satellite parking lot of clinical attention, sits my personal affliction, Gilles de la Tourette syndrome. If it requires its own metaphor, I suggest something like “the car alarm” of neuropsychiatric disorders.

The sounds of this alarm, the outward symptoms of Tourette, consist of abrupt, repetitive physical movements and the production of sounds that in rare cases rises to the blurting out of words. From the moment in childhood that these movements, called tics, arise, their nature, frequency, and intensity vary in a bewildering progression. The less apparent, internal symptoms involve the buildup of sensations and urges that precede and impel the tics. Tourette is odd enough that some writers have afforded it an idealized, vaguely romantic treatment; it is startling enough that stand-up comics and B movies present it in ribald caricature. This abrupt, twitchy, bone-rattling condition has been my constant companion for as long as I can remember.  (Hollenbeck 2003)

The chief symptom of Tourette Syndrome, according to the DSM-IV, is a persisting pattern of multiple motor and one or more verbal tics which occur in bouts, many times a day. The number, frequency and complexity of the tics change over time, and appear to respond both to situations like stress and to suggestibility, but must last longer than one year to meet the diagnostic criteria (Robertson 2000: 427). The nature of these tics can vary quite a bit. For some, the bouts of tics can be so rapid and severe that they are practically immobilized; but for others, the tics are subtle and those with TS become so adept at managing them that they can go undiagnosed for years, as Hollenbeck did. Buckser (2007: 259) details:

Physical tics range from simple muscular movements, like eye blinks and shoulder rotations, to complex movements of the face, body, and hands. Oral tics range from peeps, whistles, and throat clearing to the repetition of specific words or phrases. Individuals vary greatly in the number, kinds, and severity of their tics. Not only does each sufferer manifest a different combination of tics, the combinations shift and change over time, giving every individual a distinctive tic history. Tics also vary in their visibility. Most are relatively unobtrusive, and some may be completely imperceptible to an observer, such as clenching of the back muscles or the larynx, or oral tics involving the drawing in of breath. Others, however, involve large-scale physical gestures like darting the hands about, touching objects or people, and hitches or skips in the gait, all of which draw attention.

A tic, however, is not an unconscious or uncontrollable movement, like a seizure. In certain situations – tired, stressed, or exhausted from trying to conceal their peculiar movements – a Tourettic may find that the tics become more pronounced, frequent, and urgent. But under the right circumstances individuals with TS can seek to manage, stifle, redirect or mitigate their tics. Hollenbeck (2003) describes how, for an hour-long lecture before 400 students, he can focus intensely and go without tics. But when he finishes, he writes that he feels like he is holding back ‘God’s own sneeze.’ Hollenbeck must retreat to his office like a dolphin coming up to breathe (his metaphor), to tic freely until the intense urge subsides, like a ‘terrible itch.’

It may seem hard to believe that they are all involuntary: a blinking eye, rotating head, flailing arm, a sniff, a whistle, a phrase muttered under the breath, a halted stride, a little hop. But they are. Don’t ask me to stop ticcing right now. I am a disciplined person who can run 30 miles, shovel snow for hours in the bitter cold, or go without eating for a couple of days. But on a morning like this, I cannot halt my tics, at least not for long. (Hollenbeck 2003)

Anthropologist Andrew Buckser, based on field research with Tourettics in Indiana, offers this explanation of the combination of compulsion with partial control:

It is not movement itself that is uncontrollable in Tourette, but rather the urge to move, the feeling that a movement must be made. A Tourettic who experiences the need to, say, raise an arm, will not find the arm shooting up against his will. Rather, he will feel a powerful urge to move the arm, an urge that can be relieved only by making the movement. The best comparison, and one often made by people with TS, is with a sneeze. A person who needs to sneeze must do so, and sooner rather than later, but the action can be repressed, at least temporarily, and the actor will have control over its form. This degree of control means that a person with Tourette can often defer a tic until it will go unnoticed, or else combine it with another movement so that it looks less like a tic. (Buckser 2007: 262)

Gusti’s brother asks her, begs her to control her actions, but Gusti describes this urge as being like ‘ants under her skin’: maddening and unrelenting.

The problem with TS, as Hollenbeck describes, is not the urge to act or make noise; the disorder is not debilitating or progressive. In fact, many sufferers of TS find their compulsions waning with age and, unless they have another psychological condition (and many do, especially obsessive-compulsive disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), does not necessarily cause any cognitive or health problems. Rather, Hollenbeck (2003) tells us, ‘In large part, the discomfort, annoyance, and intervention of onlookers are what make me a Tourette sufferer. If I have a tic and there is no one there to mock me, is it a tic?’

Managing observers of Tourette Syndrome

Tourette does not shorten life, limit mobility, or impair cognitive or emotional function. It does, however, impose a constant problem of self-presentation, a need to manage the confusing and misleading impressions that tics make on other people. While the genesis of TS is neurological, its most important symptom is semantic, the ongoing need to attach meaning to what are quite literally empty gestures. (Buckser 2007: 256)

Both Hollenbeck’s and Buckser’s accounts suggest that those with TS have to adapt to the ways that other people respond to their tics as much as they have to learn to adopt to the bodily tics themselves. ‘The result is a constellation of social symptoms (misunderstanding, deception, suspicion, and occasional embarrassment) that are as diagnostic of the experience of Tourette as the tics and vocalizations themselves’ (ibid.: 265). Buckser describes this problem perceptively as a ‘semantic’ one; the bodies of those with TS constantly send unintended messages to onlookers, messages that may provoke fear, bring stigma, or cause offense because of the way that they are read or understood.

Most individuals with Tourette Syndrome become quite good at concealing that they have the condition, becoming adept at providing alternative meanings to their unusual gestures and vocaliations. Using a combination of strategies that Buckser (2008) label displacement, misattribution, and contextualization those with TS seek to manage away the possibility that their unruly actions or vocalizations will lead to stigma, embarrassment or conflict.

With displacement, Tourettics seek out times or places where their tics will not be noticed, sometimes even during face-to-face interaction by carefully observing when it is safe to ‘release’ a tic. Buckser (ibid.: 176), for example, interviewed a judge who presided over cases for years while concealing his TS, finding ways to avoid onlookers in court noticing his tics by carefully observing sight lines, people’s attention, and how he positioned himself. Other subjects talked about dropping school supplies when in grade school so that they could tic under cover of their desks, or finding safe, secluded spaces to release tics where they wouldn’t be noticed at work. Hollenbeck retreated to his office; Guy Francis has to stay home, sometimes amusing himself by making karaoke videos when his coprolalia and other tics are debilitating.

In contrast, misattribution as a management strategy involved the individual with TS convincing onlookers that a tic was really some other activity; a bout of blinking was the result of an awkward contact lens, facial tics were covered by pretending to blow the nose, a head jerk was passed off as dodging an insect or suddenly noticing something. One subject worked as a cashier in a grocery store and passed off his tendency to touch his equipment frequently as a result of having obsolete, finicky equipment rather than a tic (ibid.: 178). He turned down an upgrade in his equipment because the old check-out computer provided such a convenient explanation for his tapping and other gestures.

Finally, in contextualization strategies, a person with TS will explain their actions, often by suggesting that they have a ‘medical problem’ (ibid.: 180). One factory worker who had been the butt of cruel teasing explained his syndrome to a co-worker over lunch; shocked to learn that he had been teasing his co-worker for a ‘medical condition,’ his co-worker called the shift crew together and explained TS to the whole group, bringing an end to treatment so harsh that it nearly caused depression. Buckser points out, however, that contextualization strategies pose their own costs: the TS sufferer must be willing, not only to teach others repeatedly about his or her condition, but also to be redefined by the condition. Redefinition includes running risks associated with having a ‘medical condition’ or ‘mental illness,’ or being considered ‘disabled,’ when many people with Tourette do not feel they are impaired.

In fact, the majority of Tourettics are so successful that the condition is much more prevalent than most people realize. Tourette Syndrome affects approximately 1% of children aged 5 to 18 years of age across cultures, although most cases in the United States, for example, are ‘undiagnosed and mild, without distress, impairment or coprolalia’ (Robertson 2011: 101; see also Robertson 2000). Because of comedic portrayals in the media, the American public, for example, often expects Tourette to be spectacular, jarring, and dramatic. The irony is that, because those with TS become so adept at concealing their tics, and the public expects TS to lead to outrageous behaviour, Tourretics’ ability to adapt and misattribute tics

subtly shapes the way that the larger culture sees Tourette. It submerges the small gestures and sounds that constitute the great majority of the disease’s symptoms into other categories, leaving the illness to be defined by its more florid manifestations. It makes Tourette seem to be much rarer than it is, to be a disease that ordinary people very seldom see—because when they do see it, it almost always looks like something else. (Buckser 2008: 178)

Especially in young people, many of the less dramatic cases of TS-related tics are ‘wrongly attributed to hyperactivity, nervousness, habits, allergies, asthma, dermatitis, and other conditions’ (Jankovic 2001: 1184). Experts on the disorder say that they frequently spot individuals with TS ‘passing’ in everyday life, managing so that their symptoms escape notice by non-expert eyes.

Although TS was long (and wrongly) thought to be very rare, the unusual mannerisms, facial tics, and compulsions of the syndrome, at the same time, have become signature marks of madness in the West. As Buckser (2008: 187, note 16) points out, in movies like The Pink Panther Strikes Again and Matchstick Men, actors signal that they are mentally ill by adopting an eye twitch, hallmark of TS. In Blake Edwards’ Pink Panther series, for example, Inspector Clouseau’s nemesis, former Inspector Herbert Dreyfus (played by Herbert Lom), escapes from an asylum where he is confined after being driven mad by working alongside the bumbling Clouseau. Dreyfus is steadily reduced to greater and greater madness, and more and more emphatic twitching, by his inability to kill Clouseau, so that, at the end of the movie, he is simply a single twitching eye (the whole story involves a doomsday weapon, … look, the point is not that it’s a plausible scenario, only that it’s meaningful to the audience). Similarly, one of the most obvious portrayals of TS in a popular albeit painfully bad movie (at least according to online search) is ‘Ruth,’ a woman with TS and severe coprolalia, played by Amy Poehler, in Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo.

So TS symptoms are hallmarks of ‘madness’ in Western imagery at the same time that those with TS, far more common than the public realizes, are experts at concealing most of their symptoms, except in those situations where it is simply impossible (some school children with TS, for example, report that the stress and expectation of complete silence in exams make these settings a nightmare for self management). Because of the stigma attached to the most dramatic signs of Tourette, those who can ‘pass’ or conceal their condition do; society as a whole is left blinkered to just how widespread the condition is, and, at the same time, how well people with it are able to cope. For a neuroanthropologist, it’s a fascinating and utterly diabolical dynamic for those individuals with severe TS symptoms, as neurological peculiarity intersects and coping strategies intersect with public perception in ways devastating to some sufferers.

Having Tourette Syndrome in a Balinese village

When Gusti tells us that she is ‘not allowed to have a small heart’ near the end of The Bird Dancer, she speaks through a combination of tears and smile. We see her watch video of her own life – some of the same footage that we, too, have seen in the video– at a public screening, now from the position of a woman who has overcome much of the isolation, suffering and despair apparent in the early footage.

Gusti was born in a small rural village in Central Bali called Tengkulak, to a Kesatria, a high caste, family. In her own village, her Tourette Syndrome was inescapable, in large part because of the semantic confrontation between her symptoms and local undersandings:

Totally unfamiliar in rural Bali, Gusti’s Tourette symptoms elicited grave concern from herself and her family, significantly affecting both the daily and the long-term course of her life. Gusti has spent many years struggling to overcome the stigma and suffering that has resulted not primarily from her TS, but from the web of cultural significance spun around it in the context of Balinese values and belief, social and familial structure, and health care practices.

Over time it became clear to her family that these behaviors were out of Gusti’s control. This led to only more worry, however; Gusti’s jerky movements looked like those of trance dancers who are temporarily possessed by spirits in certain Balinese dances such as Manuk Rawa, or the Bird Dance. Neighbors started to openly mock her by calling her “the bird dancer,” and also began to worry aloud whether she had been permanently possessed and therefore was spiritually ill. Others in the village feared that her illness was contagious, and began to shun or avoid her. (Tucker n.d.: 1 & 2)

For Gusti, the semantic field in which her teeth clenching, jerky arm movements, spitting and cursing appeared – a rural village in Bali – made her burden especially heavy. Villagers did not know if she was acting up, making fun of them, crazy, possessed, contagious. Her siblings fluctuate between sympathy for their little sister and anger, because her condition stigmatizes all of them, makes it difficult for them to marry. Who wants to marry into the family, especially from an appropriate high caste, if one of the potential in-laws is so obviously and disturbingly impaired? Her family lashes out at her sometimes, her brother mimicking her uncontrollable movements, kicking her until she wets herself, she tells us.

In response, the family sought out traditional medical practitioners and healers (balians), some of whom diagnosed the cause of her condition as black magic, visited upon her because of her own goodness. Although the diagnosis may have offered some consolation, the treatments did little to stop the tics, the spitting, or the growing weight of stigma on Gusti. One healer that we see in The Bird Dancer finds ‘stones’ while painfully massaging her body; these stones are the traces of the witchcraft that have lodged in her body to produce her disorder like magical bullets. Like other healers – around a dozen we learn elsewhere in Lemelson’s (2004) writing – he promises relief, but Gusti isn’t confident; she’s seen too many healers by this time to hold out much hope.

The frustrating, seemingly futile search for a cure to a condition that threatens the entire family’s future produces tremendous stress, shame, and guilt, leading Gusti to contemplate suicide and exacerbating her TS:

Rather than her Tourette’s, Gusti was perhaps most troubled by her feelings of worthlessness within her family system and depression as a result of these ongoing feelings. In an interesting corollary note, there is a proven interaction between stress and tic behaviors; often tics will increase in frequency and severity when a person is under stress, and dissipate or even go into full remission when the person is relaxed or focused on a pleasurable activity. Therefore it is possible that the judgment and frustrating quest for a cure was actually exacerbating Gusti’s troubling symptoms. (Tucker n.d.: 13)

Mental illness and healing in Bali

During his field research, Lemelson examined the efficacy of indigenous healing traditions for mental illness, a topic important to psychological anthropology. Lemelson shares that that he even ‘went to the field with the subconscious assumption that the different forms of traditional healing should be efficacious’ (2004: 67). He discusses earlier theorists, like Wolfgang Jilek (1993), who argued that, because meaning and social support was so important to coping with psychiatric illness,

traditional healing is at least as effective and frequently more so than modern medical and psychiatric approaches for a variety of disorders, including various mood disorders, psychosomatic and somatoform syndromes, acute or reactive psychotic states, and alcohol and drug dependence. He [Jilek] notes further that traditionally healed patients’ experiences are restructured through a culturally validated system of symbols and meanings; the perceived etiological act, agent, or person is identified and a course of remedial or protective action taken. Jilek believes that this naming process has significant therapeutic aspects and often causes symptom remission by itself. (Lemelson 2004: 52-53)

Lemelson (ibid.: 67) affirms that there are ‘numerous times and contexts in which traditional healing appears to be the most efficacious form of treatment.’ He singles out acute psychosis, for example, reporting that traditional healing is used frequently and to great patient satisfaction (ibid.: 71).

But what Lemelson found was also the ‘striking’ pattern that, in cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and Tourette Syndrome, sufferers felt a ‘lack of efficacy of traditional healers and the powerlessness of traditional healing to relieve their suffering’ (ibid.: 67). Of forty cases of OCD and TS in Bali interviewed by Lemelson, twenty had visited traditional healers. Seven had gone more than five times; and several had gone more than ten times, Gusti among them. Only one of the patients perceived any improvement from a traditional healer, and this respite was only temporary (ibid.: 68). Lemelson reports that preliminary results from a survey on TS in Java showed a similar pattern: traditional healing didn’t relieve symptoms or suffering (ibid.: 69).

Lemelson explains that, probably due to the neurobiological basis of these disorders, traditional healing, just like psychoanalysis, cannot reach the ‘underlying neurophysiologic bedrock’ (ibid.: 70). In addition, I would argue, traditional healers cannot produce an effective change in the community interpretation of Gusti’s symptoms in the Balinese context, nor can they provide her with a suitable social role where her unusual behaviour would make sense. The ‘meanings’ that healers provide, as Lemelson discusses extensively, do nothing to alleviate either the physical symptoms or those social symptoms that Buckser highlights, like stigma and derision.

But one of the more subtle scenes in The Bird Dancer, however, also allows us to glimpse how biomedical approaches to TS run up against local obstacles and fail to provide relief in Bali. Gusti sought help from neurologists and psychiatrists, some of whom prescribed medications that, although they blunted the Tourette symptoms, also depleted her energy, caused nausea, and made it hard for her to function. She gave up on the psychiatrists even more quickly than she gives up on traditional healers, who at least offer a variety of strategies.

Patients with TS in Indonesia are likely prescribed a neuroleptic, a dopamine-receptor–blocking drug like haloperidol.  The side effects that Gusti describes, including lethargy and depression, are common enough that many patients in the West also choose not to be medicated. But in the developing world, the pharmaceutical treatment of Tourette is complicated still more, as the film’s study guide explains:

However, there is a significant structural limitation that may negate the biomedical treatment for psychiatric disorders. Throughout the developing world there is trafficking and sales of counterfeit medication. Indeed, upwards of 50% of medications sold openly in pharmacies in Indonesia may be counterfeit. This means that the active ingredients are either present in the wrong amounts, contaminated, replaced by similar acting substances, or entirely missing altogether. It is probable that some of Gusti’s negative reaction to her medication was caused by her ingesting these counterfeit medications. (Tucker n.d.: 11)

In other words, both biomedical and traditional techniques fail to heal Gusti. She is trapped by the inevitable clash between her unruly nervous system and the expectations of the social world around her. When a kind young man seeks her hand in marriage, the family reluctantly turns him down because he is of a lower caste. When Gusti’s despair grows intolerable, her family locks the young woman up to prevent her from running away with her inappropriate suitor.

Alleviating an illness without eradicating a disease

In this impossible situation, we learn that Gusti resorts to escape. She flees her small village to the city of Denpasar, gets a job as a maid, earns her own income, and cultivates a new circle of friends, who she tells us accept her disorder, even though she still holds back and fears what they will think. As anthropologist Nakamura (2011: 655) explains in a review of Affliction,

Freed from the tyranny of small-village life, she is considerably happier even though medically her symptoms haven’t changed much. Lemelson muses in a voiceover that when he first met Gusti, he was initially concerned about her neuropsychiatric disorder and its symptoms, but he now recognizes that her family and her social ostracism were the true causes of her distress.

We see Gusti spend her own income, awkwardly board an escalator, talk on a mobile phone, visit her family, and hold hands with one of her new friends, who do not flee from her condition fearing that she might be contagious or dangerous.

Although Gusti, herself, and her new circle of friends must get much of the credit for her new ‘prognosis,’ Lemelson himself and the video project about Gusti also appear to play important roles. First, in the meetings with the research team, we see both Lemelson and an Indonesian psychiatrist trying to explain Tourette Syndrome to the family, who were at first so baffled by Gusti’s behaviour.

Then, Lemelson introduces Gusti to Dayu, another woman with Tourettes, but also with a university degree, a job, and a devoted husband, in addition. Dayu’s tics are more pronounced than Gusti’s; even when she is not under stress, Dayu cannot control the expressions that seemingly ripple across and stretch her face constantly. Dayu and Gusti talk in the video and, though they sit awkwardly at either end of a couch, we can see the back and forth of recognition. Gusti is fascinated by Dayu, liberated to talk about her own condition; and Dayu, eventually, cries as she hears how Gusti is treated in her village, by neighbours and a family who do not understand her peculiarities.

Although he does not emphasize his own role, Lemelson demonstrates through his own interaction how alleviating Gusti’s condition involves social action as much as treatment of an individual’s nervous system, first, when he explains the disorder and introduces her to Dayu, and, later, when he screens the video about her life to her own community, a scene that made me cry when I first saw it.

A screening was arranged in her home village, and we see Gusti arriving, almost clinging to one of her new tall city friends for protection. Arriving like a returning celebrity, Gusti’s steps are punctuated by the flash photographs taken by the event photographer. It’s hard not to see this as a kind of ‘red carpet’ film opening with immense heart. Afterward, as the researchers take questions in front of the audience with Gusti and Dayu, a local businessman stands up and admits that he has a friend with Tourette. He thanks Gusti and the video crew, saying that he did not know he could treat the friend as, well, normal.

Lemelson tells us in the voice over, however, that, with all her success adapting and finding supportive friends, Gusti has not yet married or had children. The absence of a partner undermines her sense that her life is complete, showing us that her ‘healing’ is still in progress. Being unmarried ‘remains the primary cause of much of her distress in her adult life,’ Lemelson reports. Gusti tells us she’s searching for ‘a match. Someone who can understand me. I want to have a happy family, that’s all.’ Caste concerns still shape where she can look; ‘if it’s possible,’ she wants to marry in her caste. She laughs awkwardly as she talks about becoming grandparents with her husband, that ‘no one will be able to tear us apart.’

The Bird Dancer as film and resource: final thoughts

The Bird Dancer, overall, creeps up on you. Lemelson’s explanations are minimal, delivered dispassionately, and the subjects themselves fight to conceal their emotions as they describe their suffering and fear. Lemelson does not medicalize Gusti’s condition, nor does he make explicit the subtle ways that he and the research team have influenced Gusti’s life; the video project itself is a model of applying anthropological practice, not just a documentation of a life with Tourette Syndrome. As we return again and again to meet Gusti, we see her despair grow, but then, eventually, subside as she finds blams to the social correlates of her condition, in part through interacting with a world outside her village. Ironically, both traditional healing and medication prove inadequate to heal her; she tolerates the outrages of traditional healing techniques, but also rejects medication that comes at too high a price. Gusti chooses to endure her condition rather than sleep, but she eventually chooses to flee the social world where her symptoms impose an unnecessary burden.

If, like me, you teach psychological anthropology, The Bird Dancer, and the series of six videos of which it is part, deserve to be on your short list for consideration. Aesthetically, the videos work especially well. The length of each episode, at first daunting, gives the viewer time to digest the various layers of difference: the visual difference of Bali, the cultural variation in practices and issues like self presentation, and the sometimes disturbing disjunction of the lives of individuals with mental illness:

For ethnographic filmmakers, representing mental illness visually is very challenging. Individuals with various mental illnesses may appear normal, as much of what is going on is in the interior of their minds. As a result, it can be difficult to show through film what it personally means to live with a mental illness—or what it means to live with a family or community member who has a psychiatric disorder. (Nakamura 2011: 655)

One of the greatest achievements of the pacing, cinematography and score of The Bird Dancer is that the viewer comes so far both culturally and in terms of psychiatric distance, to really develop compassion for Gusti.

When Karen Nakamura wrote her review of three of the films in the series, no study guides were available, but as I write this, the website for the series has comprehensive study guides free to download available for four of the six videos (see individual video pages, like The Bird Dancer, to get the pdfs). The study guides add immeasurably to the value of the films, both as documentary projects and as teaching materials.

The Bird Dancer is an excellent opportunity, not only to see the social dimensions of mental illness, but also to shine a spotlight on Tourette Syndrome, especially given that this month is TS Awareness Month. The lack of greater understanding in the community, in the West as well as in a small village in Bali, makes too many of us a part of the affliction of an ‘observer’s illness.’

Links:

Documentary Educational Resources: The Bird Dancer Information, purchasing, and other resources.

NIH Pub Med Health information on Gilles de la Tourette syndrome Tourette Syndrome Association (USA, TSA)

Tourette Syndrome Association of Australia (TSAA)

Ajay Singh, 10 Questions for Robert Lemelson, UCLA Today

Inspirational Tourette’s Syndrome Sufferers 1: Kids with TS. Kids really make it clear how their Tourette-related problems are as much social and interactional as physiological and neurological in this video.

Living with Tourette’s Syndrome A video about Florida State University neuroscience student Michael Butler, who has TS, made by his roommate. (Sound’s not great in parts, but it’s really personal and down-to-earth.)

Congrats Samuel Comroe on Taking 1st Place in Soup or Bowl Finals! Samuel J. Comroe, comedian with Tourette Syndrome

Guy D. Francis’ YouTube channel: TheMainMeals Tourette’s / Autism Adventures Guy has both TS and Asperger’s Syndrome, and he has a whole series of videos, including videos of himself doing karaoke when his tics are really debilitating him. As he explains, ‘oh yes, I have Tourettes (full blown, you know, swearing and aggressive jerking…) and I have Asperger’s syndrome….Basically, I’m a dream come true.. no not really, that’s just silliness….’

He’s the father of three and, as he also puts it, deals with his neurological conditions ‘in a number of ways.  One of them is Karaoke.’

http://www.touretteskaraoke.com/

Credits:

Photos of Gusti and Rob Lemelson from Tucker, Annie. n.d. (2011?). The Bird Dancer: Film Guide. Gusti Ayu Suartini: Difference and Suffering in the Context of Culture. Robert Lemelson, ed. Design by Yee Ie. Pacific Palisades, CA: Elemental Productions.

Awareness poster about Tourette Syndrome from TheLadyKris, 2010, offered on a Creative Commons license at http://www.flickr.com/photos/theladykris/4697057476/in/photostream/.

References:

Afflictions: Culture and Mental Illness in Indonesia [The Bird Dancer, 40 min.] Robert Lemelson, dir. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources, 2010.

Buckser, A. (2006). The Empty Gesture: Tourette Syndrome and the Semantic Dimension of Illness Ethnology, 45 (4) DOI: 10.2307/20456601

Buckser A (2008). Before your very eyes: illness, agency, and the management of Tourette Syndrome. Medical anthropology quarterly, 22 (2), 167-92 PMID: 18717365

Hollenbeck, Peter J. (2003). A Jangling Journey: Life with Tourette Syndrome. Cerebrum 5(3): 47–60.

Jilek, Wolfgang G. (1993). Traditional Medicine Relevant to Psychiatry. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press.

Lemelson RB (2004). Traditional healing and its discontents: efficacy and traditional therapies of neuropsychiatric disorders in Bali. Medical anthropology quarterly, 18 (1), 48-76 PMID: 15098427

Nakamura, Karen. 2011. Review of Afflictions: Culture and Mental Illness in Indonesia. American Anthropologist 113(4): 655-656.

Oliveira, S., & Pelajo, C. (2010). Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infection (PANDAS): a Controversial Diagnosis Current Infectious Disease Reports, 12 (2), 103-109 DOI: 10.1007/s11908-010-0082-7

Singer, H., Gilbert, D., Wolf, D., Mink, J., & Kurlan, R. (2012). Moving from PANDAS to CANS The Journal of Pediatrics, 160 (5), 725-731 DOI: 10.1016/j.jpeds.2011.11.040

Robertson, M. (2000). Tourette syndrome, associated conditions and the complexities of treatment Brain, 123 (3), 425-462 DOI: 10.1093/brain/123.3.425

Robertson MM (2011). Gilles de la Tourette syndrome: the complexities of phenotype and treatment. British journal of hospital medicine (London, England : 2005), 72 (2), 100-7 PMID: 21378617

Tucker, Annie. n.d. (2011?). The Bird Dancer: Film Guide. Gusti Ayu Suartini: Difference and Suffering in the Context of Culture. Robert Lemelson, ed. Design by Yee Ie. Pacific Palisades, CA: Elemental Productions.

It seems universities everywhere are looking to cut down the amount of time it takes to earn a graduate degree. A story in Inside Higher Ed reports on the latest effort:

[Russell Berman] and five other professors at the university have produced a paper that calls for a major rethinking at Stanford — a reduction in the time taken to graduate by Ph.D. candidates in the humanities, and preparing them for careers within and beyond the academy. The professors at Stanford aren’t just talking about shaving a year or so off doctoral education, but cutting it down to four or five years — roughly half the current time for many humanities students.

This includes getting an MA (they suggest a two year review to decide “which students will advance to candidacy, and which will receive a terminal M.A.”). Now I can’t remember where I read it, but I believe that the average time to Ph.D. in anthropology is roughly what they say it is in the humanities: about nine years. How feasible is it that this time could be cut in half?

Part of their plan involves making better use of the summers: “Unfunded summers impede progress.” I can see how this might have speeded things up for me, maybe shaving off a year or even two, since not only would I not have had to work summers, but funding would have made it possible to start my fieldwork sooner. Lets say students receive full funding and aren’t required to teach (as I was) and I think one could go from an average of 9 years to 7. Of course, the reality is that funding is getting cut these days so I remain skeptical that we’ll see many universities increasing funding even if it means getting students out sooner.

Can we get it below 7? At my four-field program I took three years of courses. The only way I can see that being cut down is if they eliminated the four-field approach. That would be unfortunate. While I resented it at the time, I’ve really come to appreciate my four-field training in subsequent years. Actually five fields because we also had a visual anthropology program with its own requirements. But even if we are talking about a straight cultural anthropology program anthropologists still need pretty broad training. Usually we need additional courses on the language, culture and history of the region we intend to study – often outside of our own department. Language study alone can take at least an extra year (or two). On top of that we might need to brush up on an area of study related to our research topic, such as immunology, second language education, environmental science, etc.

And then there is fieldwork. I’ve seen some recent Ph.D. thesis from universities which have instituted drastically reduced time-to-Ph.D. constraints and you could really see it in the mismatch between the theory and the ethnography. It might be possible to do fieldwork in a few months if you’ve already spent a year or two somewhere during grad school, but I don’t think it works for graduate research. And if you don’t get a chance to really “be there” as a graduate student when will you have that opportunity? As a professor trying to get tenure?

Three years of course work, a year of language study, a year in the field, plus at least a year or two for exam prep, proposal writing, etc. not to mention the dissertation… I just don’t see how anyone could do it in less then seven years unless they were doing the research in their own backyard, already spoke the language, and had already gotten more than enough specialized training in the culture and topics they are studying before starting an Anthropology degree. And remember, seven years is predicated upon 12 months of full funding for each of those seven years. Have to work summers and part-time to make ends meet and we get back up to the current average…

By contributor Sean Carey

I have a confession to make: I don’t have a Facebook page. A few years ago I was encouraged to sign up by friends and colleagues when Facebook was primarily used by university students and lecturers. I resisted on the grounds that I was busy enough. I also reckoned that I knew enough people. In any case, if I wanted new friends and acquaintances it was best to meet them face-to-face.

Flickr/marcopako

I now realize that I am in a very small minority. A few weeks ago I asked a group of undergraduate students, aged between 19 and 34, how many had Facebook accounts. All of them put their hands up. Then I enquired whether any of them had accounts which had lapsed. It turned out that all of them had live accounts. This led me to ask how many in the class had used Facebook that day. All the students reported that they had logged on at least once before attending the lecture, which began at 11 AM.

I was intrigued. Although the group of students, mainly from the Greater London area, are not representative of the age (or social class) cohort within the general U.K. population, the fact that around 20 students in the lecture room were committed Facebook users is indicative of an extraordinary social phenomenon – the recent emergence of diverse social media platforms in connecting individuals – sometimes friends sometimes strangers – with one another.

A few days later, I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that Facebook has 900 million users worldwide and made a profit of around $1 billion in 2011. Social media is definitely here to stay.

So what to make of the news that Facebook has just raised the price at which it will make an entry into the Nasdaq Stock Market on Friday from $28-$35 to $34–$38, which will value the company at over $100 billion?

Certainly, the growth in value of Facebook, which only launched in 2004, is extraordinary by historical standards, especially when compared to companies operating in the manufacturing sector. Furthermore, a high-tech brand that has managed to keep growing while other social media sites like Bebo and MySpace have fallen by the wayside must be doing something right.

So is it down to good luck or good management? The latter I would say, especially because in the development phase in 2003 when it was known as Facemash, the social networking site developed by Zuckerberg, while he was a student at Harvard, was in competition with very similar services that were being created by contemporaries at other universities in the U.S.

Personality too has played a part in the spread of the Facebook. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who turns 28 next Monday, comes across as a slightly nerdy brand ambassador. Nevertheless, this is a strong positive for a generation of young people hooked on social media, who greatly admire symbol–generating and transforming trailblazers, who are not obliged to resemble Olympic athletes or football stars.

"Like" on Facebook. Flickr/Sean MacEntee

There is a further point. Zuckerberg and his fellow executives, now located in Silicon Valley, have been quick to correct any obvious marketing mistakes made by the company, especially when resistance from users has been observed concerning the use of the platform for the promoting and advertising of other companies’ products.

And it goes without saying that the 2010 movie The Social Network, starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake, providing an account in 121 minutes of the origins of Facebook was a gift from the PR gods. Despite Zuckerberg’s protests that it contains many inaccuracies, for many people, the triple Oscar award-winning movie has created an unforgettable (and historically true) narrative of Facebook’s inception at the same time as it has generated demand for the product.

Nevertheless, the big question is: will Facebook continue to grow?

Evidently many investors think so otherwise there wouldn’t be upward pressure on the future share price. I see things differently from investors and analysts on Wall Street, however. Sure, Facebook will grow in the short term – perhaps even in the medium-term – not least because of the demand from youthful consumers in the emerging economies, but I am sceptical about the long-term prospects of the company.

Why? Cultural anthropologists know very well that all societies have age sets, which are building blocks for social organization. In modern, complex societies where the consumption of branded products, services and experiences is a central activity – consumption makes up just over two thirds of the economies of the U.K. and U.S., for example – targeting young consumers is critically important in generating a high level of demand in specific sectors like music, fashion and food production, though not houses, pensions and other forms of financial investment.

Facebook is an example of a new and incredibly successful branded service – Google is another and it should be noted with a much bigger constituency – that drives consumption in sectors that crucially places a very high value on novelty and innovation. Which raises a highly intriguing question: what is the lifespan of such products?

It’s not possible to give a precise answer not least because of the dynamic interplay between specific services and demand from subsets of consumers in the population is difficult to predict.

But what we do know is that computer science students and entrepreneurial types at U.S. universities including Stanford as well as in other parts of the globe, like the burgeoning high-tech cluster in Shoreditch in East London, look upon companies like Facebook and Google as old hat. It is, therefore, only a question of time before a new social networking experience is launched, which will not only be differentiated by content but more importantly will appeal to a younger but nevertheless economically powerful age set.

A final thought. When I asked my students who was certain that they would still be using Facebook in 20 years time, no one put a hand up.

I rest my case.

A Northwestern University study that will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) provides the first biological evidence that bilinguals' rich experience with language in essence "fine-tunes" their auditory nervous system and helps them juggle linguistic input in ways that enhance attention and working memory.

Northwestern bilingualism expert Viorica Marian teamed up with auditory neuroscientist Nina Kraus to investigate how bilingualism affects the brain. In particular, they looked at subcortical auditory regions that are bathed with input from cognitive brain areas. In extensive research, Kraus has already shown that lifelong music training enhances language processing, and an examination of subcortical auditory regions helped to tell that tale.

"For our first collaborative study, we asked if bilingualism could also promote experience-dependent changes in the fundamental encoding of sound in the brainstem -- an evolutionarily ancient part of the brain," said Marian, professor of communication sciences in Northwestern's School of Communication. The answer, according to their study, is a resounding yes.

The researchers found that the experience of bilingualism changes how the nervous system responds to sound. "People do crossword puzzles and other activities to keep their minds sharp," Marian said. "But the advantages we've discovered in dual language speakers come automatically simply from knowing and using two languages. It seems that the benefits of bilingualism are particularly powerful and broad, and include attention, inhibition and encoding of sound."

Co-authored by Kraus, Marian and researchers Jennifer Krizman, Anthony Shook and Erika Skoe, "Bilingualism and the Brain: Subcortical Indices of Enhanced Executive Function" underscores the pervasive impact of bilingualism on brain development. The article will appear in the April 30 issue of PNAS.

"Bilingualism serves as enrichment for the brain and has real consequences when it comes to executive function, specifically attention and working memory," said Kraus, Hugh Knowles Professor at Northwestern. In future studies, she and Marian will investigate whether these results can be achieved by learning a language later in life.

In the study, the researchers recorded the brainstem responses to complex sounds (cABR) in 23 bilingual English-and-Spanish-speaking teenagers and 25 English-only-speaking teens as they heard speech sounds in two conditions.

Under a quiet condition, the groups responded similarly. But against a backdrop of background noise, the bilingual brains were significantly better at encoding the fundamental frequency of speech sounds known to underlie pitch perception and grouping of auditory objects. This enhancement was linked with advantages in auditory attention.

"Through experience-related tuning of attention, the bilingual auditory system becomes highly efficient in automatically processing sound," Kraus explained.

"Bilinguals are natural jugglers," said Marian. "The bilingual juggles linguistic input and, it appears, automatically pays greater attention to relevant versus irrelevant sounds. Rather than promoting linguistic confusion, bilingualism promotes improved 'inhibitory control,' or the ability to pick out relevant speech sounds and ignore others."

The study provides biological evidence for system-wide neural plasticity in auditory experts that facilitates a tight coupling of sensory and cognitive functions. "The bilingual's enhanced experience with sound results in an auditory system that is highly efficient, flexible and focused in its automatic sound processing, especially in challenging or novel listening conditions," Kraus added. ________________ References:

EurekAlert. 2012. "Bilingualism fine-tunes hearing, enhances attention". EurekAlert. Posted: April 30, 2012. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-04/nu-bfh042512.php

Last Thursday I attended a showing of a documentary on the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf. After the film, there was a concert where Ida Bach Jensen, who composed the score for the film, performed.

It was a magic 40 minutes, and it gave me time to digest some of the themes and thoughts of Ekelöfs poetry. The following is a sort of summary of my thoughts.

Ekelöf writes:

Seeking stable ground in life. Everything is fluid. Everything deceives us. Everything lures us into traps. To misunderstandings. Misconceptions. The only thing that does not waver is death. To think of death. To see life through death is to provide a pedal point to the dizzying uncertain melody we live.

Elsewhere he writes something along the lines of:

She staggers to stay upright

I find that intensely poetic. A condensation of a greater truth: That to be in balance you are always moving towards a disequilibrium. Always compensating to stay upright. Staggering back and forth. Like a tree in the wind. Like a child learning to ride a bicycle. Whether it is staying put or moving forward, maintaining balance requires constant work. To remain flexible.

In the same way, a major theme in Ekelöf’s work is how the good and the evil, the ugly and the beautiful are intertwined. They depend on the juxtaposition, the contradiction. They can exist only through each other.

Nothing can exist by itself. Nothing is pure and clean. Everything is raw, mixed and implacably honest. Like punk.

We may try to ignore it. Filter out the ugly and inconvenient. But it will only make us less flexible. Less in balance.

Instead, we have to see the ways in which the ugly highlights the beauty.

At the concert, the clean, clear almost crystalline spirituality of the music was deflated by the laughter, conversation and clinking of plates and cutlery from the café outside.

At first it annoyed me. But then I realized that it was the very dissonance of the ambient sounds of the café that gave the music its depth. And the ethereal spirituality of the music was underlined by the mundane chatter from which it sought to escape.

The beautiful and ugly complemented each other. It resulted in a calm sense of wholeness. Of balance.

It is the unpredictable, the unfinished, which creates the magic of the moment. We are never ready. We are always caught by surprise. It forces us to recalibrate. To stagger or fall.

On Saturday, I went to see a play that revolved around stories of the sea. As the play ended, they projected big photo of the wide open blue sea onto the stage.

I looked out at the sea. Exploring my newfound sensibility of the imperfect, I sought out the unexpected. The ugly. That which is set apart and breaks the harmony. The crack in the mirror. The matter out of place. That which is not in balance.

At first I couldn’t see it.

The sea is quiet, mirroring the sky in a plethora of blue nuance. So beautiful. So pure.

Then I realize that the thing that doesn’t belong is me. The man. The boat. The attempt at control.

A tiny speck of intent merely tolerated in this vast aimless flow.

On behalf of the SLA Executive Committee, I invite you to participate in this year’s Society for Linguistic Anthropology student essay prize competition for the best undergraduate paper in linguistic anthropology. (PLEASE NOTE THAT THE DEADLINE FOR THE GRADUATE PAPER CONTEST WAS EARLIER THIS SPRING. THOSE INTERESTED IN THE GRADUATE PAPER CONTEST SHOULD WAIT UNTIL THE NEXT CONTEST CYCLE IN SPRING 2013) The deadline for the undergraduate contest is June 30. The SLA will award a cash prize of $500, as well as $300 in travel reimbursement for the prize winner, in order to help ensure that they’ll be able to attend the AAA conference and accept their prize in person. If you are a student who has written a paper that meets the contest guidelines (see below), please consider submitting it!  If you are a faculty member who has read a student paper that you feel is worthy of consideration, please encourage the author to submit it

Society for Linguistic Anthropology Annual Undergraduate Student Essay Competition

The Society for Linguistic Anthropology holds an annual student essay competition at both undergraduate and graduate levels. THIS IS THE UNDERGRADUATE SECTION OF THE CONTEST. In order to be eligible for this award, the entrant must have been an undergraduate student in a degree-granting program when the paper was written; must be the sole author of the paper; and must submit the paper no more than two years after it was written.

The paper must be an original work based on original research conducted by the author.  It will be evaluated on the basis of its clarity, significance to the field, engagement with relevant literatures, and if it makes an original contribution to linguistic anthropological knowledge. At the time of submission for this competition, the paper must not have been published or submitted for publication.

Submissions will be evaluated by a panel of judges.  A prize will be awarded in this category only if a submission of sufficiently high quality is received.  The winner or winners will be announced at the SLA business meeting, which is held during the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association.

Entries must be submitted electronically in either .pdf or .doc format.  They should be sent to Jillian Cavanaugh (SLA Executive Committee Member at Large and organizer of this year’s competition) at  jcavanaugh@brooklyn.cuny.edu by the deadline of June 30.  The cover sheet should include: the title of the paper; the author’s name; the author’s email address; the author’s college or university affiliation; the prize category (undergraduate or graduate) for which the paper is being submitted; and the name of the faculty member who served as the student’s advisor with respect to the writing of the paper.

The restraining order will be in effect until Friday, 11 May, when Judge Richard Seeborg of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California will decide whether to extend it until the case is settled, according to Jim McManis, an attorney in San Jose, California, who represents the professors pro bono.

Meanwhile, in anticipation of the professors' lawsuit, members of the Kumeyaay tribes filed their own lawsuit in federal court in San Diego on 13 April demanding transfer of the skeletons. The bones were discovered in 1976 during an excavation at University House in La Jolla, which is the traditional home of the UCSD chancellor. The Kumeyaay, representing 12 federated tribes, have been seeking the remains for reburial, claiming that they were found on their traditional lands. Under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, museums and other institutions must repatriate remains and artifacts that can be traced to a tribe. A controversial rule concerning this law, issued in 2010 by the Department of the Interior, gives tribes a way to recover even remains that cannot be linked to specific groups. The new lawsuits may test that rule.

After years of legal dispute, UCSD officials were preparing to give the bones to representatives of the Kumeyaay, against the advice of a UCSD scientific advisory committee and a separate system-wide UC research committee that reviewed the claims. The professors, anthropologist Margaret Schoeninger of UCSD, paleoanthropologist Robert Bettinger of UC Davis, and paleoanthropologist Tim White of UC Berkeley, filed the lawsuit to block the repatriation, saying that there is no evidence that these bones are related to the Kumeyaay, and in fact, the evidence suggests otherwise. The scientific advisory committee found that the Kumeyaay language moved into the region 2000 years ago, and that the Kumeyaay traditionally cremated their dead rather than burying them. Moreover, Schoeninger's lab's analysis of stable isotopes from samples of the skeletons indicated that they ate a diet of marine mammals and offshore fish—a coastal adaptation that contrasts with the desert origins of the Kumeyaay. Anthropologists who study the bones and DNA of Paleoindians also agree that the remains are probably too old to have any affiliation, cultural or otherwise, with tribes living in southern California today.

Because of their great antiquity, the bones are important for exploring the mystery of the identity of the first people to migrate from the Old World to the New World. They also should be saved for future scientific analysis, the lawsuit argues, because new methods are being developed to extract and study ancient DNA and to analyze the diet and lifestyles of ancient people. _________________

References:

Gibbons, Ann. 2012. "Ancient American Skeletons Safe From Reburial, But Only for the Moment". Science. Posted: May 1, 2012. Available online: http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/05/ancient-american-skeletons-safe.html