Podcast: An Ecology of Mind

Thursday, January 05 10:27 am

The anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson believed that the major problems in this world are caused by the difference between how nature works and the way people think. In this podcast, Bateson’s daughter, filmmaker Nora Bateson, leads a discussion about her father’s practical approaches to this basic conflict after a screening of An Ecology of Mind, her documentary about Bateson’s work.

Curator Laurel Kendall, chair of the Museum’s Division of Anthropology, introduces the filmmaker. Joining the conversation are another daughter of Gregory Bateson, anthropologist and writer Mary Catherine Bateson; psychotherapist Mary Pipher; Lance Strate, president of the Media Ecology Association; Susan Oyama, professor of psychology at John Jay College; and Rex Weyler, co-founder of Greenpeace International.

This talk was recorded at the Museum on September 12, 2011.

Podcast: Download | RSS | iTunes ( 1 hour, 15 mins, 87 MB)

Follow the Thread: A Mandarin Coat

Friday, January 14 3:39 pm

Catalog no. 70/2280. Photo Credit: (c) AMNH/D. Finnin

In 1901, budding anthropologist Berthold Laufer sent a brilliant blue silk robe he had bought in Shanghai to the American Museum of Natural History with a simple note: “Coat of a mandarin, for the summer.”

Within a few years, fakes would flood the market, says Curator Laurel Kendall, chair of the Division of Anthropology, but the time and place of this purchase indicates that it is “the real thing,” a coat that could only have been worn by a scholar-advisor to the Imperial Court during the Qing dynasty, which lasted from 1644 to 1911.

Part of the Museum’s extensive collection of textiles, this coat exemplifies the rigidly defined rules of Imperial Court dress in which an elaborate system of colors and motifs telegraphed rank. The dragon, for example, is the ultimate “yang” or male symbol, and a sign of the Emperor’s power. The water represented at the bottom of the robe reflects the legendary role of dragons in East Asia’s traditional agrarian societies as denizens of lakes, rivers, and seas who once a year ascend to the heavens to bring on the rain. Overall, the decoration suggests a mandarin of the fourth to sixth rank.

Laufer, who would go on to become the premier Sinologist of his generation, was sent to China by Franz Boas, then director of the Museum’s Anthropology Division and the acknowledged father of the field in America. Boas had secured a grant of $18,000 (about $400,000 today) from New York banker Jacob H. Schiff to cover Laufer’s expenses for three years to gather “collections which illustrate the popular customs and beliefs of the Chinese, their industries, their mode of life.” Laufer set about buying the stuff of everyday life, completing what is still the most extensive ethnographic collection from pre-revolutionary China in North America.

“Nobody was doing that kind of work at that time,” says Kendall. “He gave us a picture of daily life…And that’s us! We’re all about the time capsule, the trunk in the attic, trying to imagine how people lived.”

Go behind the scenes of the Division of Anthropology’s ethnographic collections on February 24 on a Members-only tour.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Winter issue of Rotunda, the magazine for Museum Members.

Marking Franz Boas’s Birthday

Friday, July 23 4:25 pm

This month marks the 152nd anniversary of the birth of Franz Boas, a prominent Museum curator who is often called the father of American anthropology. During his 10-year tenure at the Museum and later as the first professor of anthropology at Columbia University, Boas established anthropology as a recognized branch of scientific inquiry and debunked prevailing beliefs about the superiority of Western civilization.

Supported by several museums, Boas led research expeditions along the North Pacific Coast of North America and trained a new generation of anthropologists, including future Museum Curator Margaret Mead.

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of Boas’s birth in 2008, Museum Curator Peter Whiteley – who studies the cultures and histories of Native North America from the 17th century to the present — commemorated this bold pioneer in apaper presented at a colloquium on Engaged and Public Anthropology at the Museum.

Check out a few excerpts below.

On Boas’s early interest in anthropology

“Boas’s attraction to what was to become “anthropology” emerged from a coalescence of interests in physics, mathematics and physical geography, as well
as a deep-rooted family background in social justice… In consequence, Boas’s take on the interpretation of culture was both rigorously
empirical, and assiduously attentive to the discourses and practices of his Native American interlocutors.”

On how Boas transformed anthropology

“Although a few scholars had used the term “culture” in the plural before, it was Boas who truly transformed scientific and, in time, popular understanding by his insistence on individual cultures as opposed to a great, monolithic plod of social evolution from lower to higher forms of culture.”

On Boas’s legacy

“…A paradigm shift in the understanding of human cultures that over time has transformed all global thought on the subject…an explicitly collaborative record of Native American cultural and linguistic forms that in its range and depth is almost incredible…a bottom line commitment to human rights enacted in his own life and practice…[and] a fierce defense of the sanctity of academic freedom to inquire and to speak out as a public intellectual…

Boas’s anthropology, as that of many of his students, notably Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ella Cara Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, went against the grain of conventional wisdom and conventional practice, to produce a truly liberating discourse celebrating the varieties of the human condition that has now spread to all corners of the globe and multiple forms of social discourse.”

After Darwin at AMNH: Ian Tattersall

Thursday, February 04 5:26 pm

Curator Ian Tattersall on Darwin’s Thoughts About the Fossil Evidence for Human Evolution

Scientists at the American Museum of Natural History continue to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species with a collection of vignettes describing expeditions and ideas with links to Darwin’s seminal work.

Below is an excerpt of a longer piece that Ian Tattersall wrote for Evolution: Education and Outreach in 2009.

Charles Darwin was curiously unforthcoming on the subject of human evolution as viewed through the fossil record, to the point of being virtually silent. He was, of course, most famously reticent on the matter in On the Origin of Species, … [and] this is true even of his 1871 book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex in which Darwin finally forced himself to confront the implications of his theory for the origin of humankind [but in which he barely managed even a passing reference to the Neanderthal fossil that by then was the subject of extensive scientific speculation.]

There were…many reasons why Darwin should have been disposed in The Descent of Man to shrink from any substantive discussion of whether extinct human relatives might actually be represented in fossil form. The fossil and antiquarian records were awash with fakes; any discussion of human ancestry was rife with social and political pitfalls; and anyway, by his own close colleague’s testimony, the record contained nothing that could have any relevance to ancient and now-extinct human precursors. Add to that Darwin’s innate suspicion of the distorting effects of incompleteness in the fossil record, and he may have felt that a large degree of discretion on the matter was mandatory.

The Feldhofer skullcap--the Neanderthal type specimen-- was discovered in a limestone cave in 1857 and is one of a handful of fossils that Darwin could have been aware of while writing The Origin of Species. The image includes an associated zygomaticomaxillary fragment that was discovered in the miners’ dump almost a century and a half later, in 1997. Credit: AMNH

None of this means, of course, that The Descent of Man has not exerted an immense influence on the sciences of human origins over the last century and a half. Just as it is easy for English speakers to forget how much they owe to William Shakespeare for the language they use daily, we tend to lose sight of the fact that much received wisdom in paleoanthropology has come down to us direct from Darwin. Darwin it was who proposed a mechanism for the structural continuity of human beings with the rest of the living world and who gave a detailed argument for human descent from an “ape-like progenitor.” It was Darwin who documented beyond doubt, in The Descent of Man, that all living humans belong to a unitary species with a single origin—which we now know, on the basis of evidence of which Darwin could never have dreamed, to have been around 200,000 years ago. He also had the inspired hunch that our species originated in the continent of Africa—and again, this guess has been amply substantiated by later science. Darwin’s perceptions on the behaviors of other primates and how they relate to the way humans behave were remarkably astute, particularly given the highly anecdotal nature of what was then known. Read more »

After Darwin at AMNH: David Hurst Thomas

Thursday, January 28 4:29 pm

Curator David Hurst Thomas Tests Darwin in Archaeological Sites

Scientists at the American Museum of Natural History continue to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species with a collection of vignettes describing expeditions and ideas with links to Darwin’s seminal work.

Part of the St. Catherines archaeology team shucking oysters to determine the amount of energy (in calories) that people can retrieve in relation to the amount of energy spent collecting and processing. Credit: Lorann S.A. Pendleton.

Deer, clams, oysters, alligators: if you walked the length of St. Catherines Island off of Georgia, what would you pop into your mouth? David Hurst Thomas, curator in the Division of Anthropology at the Museum, uses optimal foraging theory to interpret the remains of thousands of meals left behind in archaeological sites across the island.

Optimal foraging theory puts an evolutionary spin on what people chose to eat. The assumption that individuals decide what to consume in a way that maximizes the total energy return and minimizes the energy they must spend to search for, collect, and prepare food items in their environment. This approach is known as the “diet breadth model,” a series of testable hypotheses about what an efficient forager will pick (and not pick) from the array of available food.

“Darwinian evolutionary ecology allows us to frame some concrete expectations about what a forager should choose to gather,” says Thomas. “Suppose someone dropped a pot of coins. Some would be selective, picking up only silver dollars, and others would rush to pick up everything. The diet breadth model allows us to distinguish between these strategies in archaeological sites.”

Thomas and his team have spent more than 30 years excavating different archaeological sites throughout the island’s 14,000-plus acres. Recently, the team conducted a series of foraging experiments that, as Thomas puts it, “hook theory to dirt archaeology” by mapping the most efficient strategies for harvesting the available foodstuffs. They harvested oysters, dug up clams, butchered diamondback terrapins, and drank periwinkle soup. For each food type, the archaeologists recorded the length of time and amount of energy expended for collecting and processing. These data were then compared to the amount of available energy gained from food to answer a key question: if I invest one hour in foraging, what is the energetic return on that investment? The result, expressed as kilocalories per hour, allows researchers to compare different food types. Read more »