Michèle Hayeur Smith, an anthropological archaeologist at Brown University, has been at the forefront of efforts to glean insights from ancient cloth, scouring archaeological sites and museum collections for textiles that could illuminate the lives of women in early North Atlantic societies. Her work has shown that the Vikings never would have expanded their known world without the women’s work of weaving.
Archaeology has a representation problem. For most of the time that scholars have been probing the human past, they have focused mainly on the activities of men to the exclusion of women. There are a couple reasons for this bias. One is that the kinds of artifacts that tend to preserve well are made of inorganic materials such as stone or metal, and many are associated with behaviors stereotypically linked to men, such as hunting. Another reason is that early archaeologists were mostly men and more interested in men’s work than in women’s. As a result, our understanding of past cultures is woefully incomplete.
David Card and Alan Krueger published research almost two decades ago that disproved ‘established’ economic thinking about what would happen if minimum wage was increased. Economic theory had said that job losses would be the result of increasing the minimum wage as businesses would have less money / seek to maximise profit and employ less people. Except when they had the opportunity of a ‘natural experiment’ they found this well understood and widely believed theory to be false.
Apparently they received a lot of backlash from fellow economists but have just received a Nobel prize in recognition of the importance and contribution of their work. You can read up on it further here and here
Some of that backlash was fierce, and Card says in the first article linked above that it cost him some friendships. We need to get better at listening.
I came across this today which made me wonder what future product experiences will make the fact that a human is involved in the process a key part of the value proposition.
It is interesting that this is already being positioned as a service differentiator. Already it’s enough of a recognised frustration/pain point to customers that it’s neatly packaged in a short sentence. Perhaps a glimpse into (not so distant?) future service experiences.
I’m interested in how people and disciplines try to define what makes humans unique. In this article by Rosie Spinks ambition is identified as one of those traits unique to our species. Yet, it also suggests that we need to move away from it (not abandon completely though) and move towards adaptation.
Some key points (direct quotes from the article because I’m not feeling particularly ambitious writing this):
“Our career-focused ambition has allowed for a sense of removal from our actual survival and a denial of the humanity of a huge subset of people who help us stay alive.”
We need to face this disconnect head-on: “Our individualized, highly specialized career ambition is no longer a suitable match for the world we’re living in”
We need to move away from personal ambition, goals and achievements to community and climate action (“The pandemic and climate crises make working ourselves to the bone in service of our own ambition seem a little silly”)
“Embracing adaptation as an alternative is not saying that we can’t be creative or innovative or willing to work hard — on the contrary, we must be all those things. But it calls us to shift those skills elsewhere, beyond our personal interests and egos to communal and societal challenges that are collective. It also calls us to redefine what it means to live a “successful” life.
I’ve been thinking about human collaboration recently. Or lack of it. Or possibly a lack of broadcasting about it which makes us think it happens less often than it actually does. So I’m trying to share examples when I come across it, which I have today.
Authors, podcasters and journalists Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman created the phrase Shine Theory, which is explained in their best selling book Big Friendship: How We Keep Eachother Close.
According to Sow and Friedman Shine Theory is intentional, accountable and personal.
It is a practice of mutual investment in each other.
Shine Theory is an investment, over the long term, in helping someone be their best self—and relying on their help in return. It is a conscious decision to bring your full self to your friendships, and to not let insecurity or envy ravage them. Shine Theory is a commitment to asking, “Would we be better as collaborators than as competitors?” The answer is almost always yes.
I’m reading about multispecies ethnography at the moment. Anthropology is moving beyond the, or possibly more accurately reacquainting itself with, species other than humans. I say reacquainting because anthropology has a long history of animal studies. In 1868 Lewis Henry Morgan published The American Beaver and His Works which contained information about the engineering practices and knowledge sharing amongst beavers. But we became more enmeshed in writing about humans than the whole planet’s inhabitants over the decades. There has been a renewed sense of (re)discovering the interconnectedness of lifeforms and human impact on those species and communities – acknowledging the Anthropocene era and its impacts. Previously, in the 1970s Gregory Bateson wrote a cybernetic framework for human-animal relations, namely human-dolphin communication. More recently, Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet (2008) re-positioned our animal counterparts as “agents to live with” (not just, for example, to domesticate or hunt).
The idea of “living with” and stories from multispecies ethnographic studies reminds me of something I heard recently about extending Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” narrative to one of cooperation as a driving force behind species survival. But it seems that Darwin thought this all along, and was part of his theory of evolution – but has been forgotten. Unfortunately, embracing only part of the story has led to us thinking that human beings are superior, and that competition is normal and selfishness enables survival. But, as summarised in this Guardian article
“..contrary to received wisdom, it is in fact altruism, not cut-throat competition, that confers real evolutionary advantage… The conclusion that cooperative groups will flourish at the expense of more selfish ones, and that as a result moral instincts will gradually evolve, was at the heart of his evolutionary writings. In The Descent of Man (1871) Darwin wrote about loving and cooperative behaviours in dogs, elephants, baboons, pelicans, and other species. He thought that sympathetic and cooperative tribes and groups would flourish in comparison with communities made up of more selfish individuals, and that natural selection would thus favour cooperation”
Thinking of cooperation between species, helped by insights from multispecies ethnographies along with accepting Darwin’s ideas of altruism and cooperation in evolution may help to shift ingrained ideas about human-animal relationships and the default of domination/competition to mutual benefit between species.
This essay via Aeon on why our species creates artworks suggests that cave art could have been the first immersive theatre experience of our Paleolithic ancestors. The positioning of the drawings of animals venturing out from cracks in cave walls, flickering lighting from the fire and wax candles would provide smells, heat and movement to the pictures and overall sensory viewing experience. Evidence also suggests that these were created in theatre-like spaces suggesting that cave art was built for groups.
The diffuse, flickering light cast by the flames would have created an immersive experience for our Palaeolithic audience. Dancing light and shadows brought the art to life, evoking a sense of movement and dynamism – the closest thing to Ice Age cinema.
Izzy Wisher
Why have we created art across geography and time? Some art looks to be for storytelling at scale, while other art seems to be for viewing by the artist only; some is added to over thousands of years (handprints using red ochre in one cave were added to over a 40,000 year timespan) while others is more fleeting based on a moment in time; some is relaying important messages while others are more like playful sketches. Building relationships and bonds with ancestors, nature and one another is one suggestion put forward.
Although the themes embodied within these time capsules of human behaviour – storytelling, connection, play – might seem superficially trivial, they were crucial to the function of society and to survival within the harsh, unforgiving environment of the last Ice Age…the art becomes a cultural memory of vital information passed from generation to generation
The Applied Anthropologist 