The Life and Style section of the Sydney Morning Herald has a fascinating article by Sydney-based writer Emily Maguire about the way culture trains men and women to respond in particular ways to their “biological responses to beauty.” Here’s an excerpt:

…boys are not taught, as girls are, that their bodies could have a disruptive effect on people around them, that they should wear looser clothing so as not to distract their classmates. They’re not told that how they look could incite nasty rumours or prevent them advancing at work or cause them to get raped. They aren’t told that the sight of their flesh may cause grown women to turn into mindless brutes.

But the fact is male bodies can have the same effect on women as female bodies can have on men. That far fewer men than women are harassed or attacked by people claiming sexual provocation is not because women aren’t visually aroused, but because women have learnt that their biological responses to beauty are not an excuse to commit acts of violence or discrimination.

The context is a recent attempt by conservative MP Fred Nile (Parliamentary Leader of the Christian Democratic Party in New South Wales) to ban women’s topless bathing on Sydney beaches.  Here’s what Maguire has to say about that:

Women’s learnt ability to deal with inappropriate lust brings us back to those topless sunbathers. In supporting Nile’s proposal, the NSW Labor MP Paul Gibson revealed his deep discomfort with both women’s bodies and the language used to describe bits of them when he asked, “Do you want somebody with big knockers next to you when you’re [at the beach] with the kids?”

Plenty of beach-loving mums can relate: there you are, rubbing sunscreen into your toddler’s back when a delicious slab of man meat lays his towel down right beside you. What to do?

How about this – remember that the person lying there is a human being whose hotness does not negate their right to bake unmolested. If the kids ask awkward questions like, oh, “What are those?” You say, “Nipples, we’ve all got them. Cool, huh?” Then you stop being a creepy perve and concentrate on the sandcastles and surf.

In a culture which is fascinated by biological arguments about the differences between men and women, it is awfully refreshing to hear a wittily argued rejoinder that lust and reactions to naked bodies are shaped by culture.

–L.L. Wynn

Normally, I wouldn’t cross-post from the other anthropology site that I do, but my partner-in-blogging on Neuroanthropology, Daniel Lende, has been putting up some great posts that could just have easily been featured on Culture Matters because they’re about applying anthropology in all sorts of ways. I won’t reference them all, but I thought I’d flag a couple that might be of special interest to those involved with applied anthropology:

In Cellphones Save The World, Lende looks at an article in The New York Times on Jan Chipchase, a ‘human-behavior researcher’ and ‘user-anthropologist’ who works for Nokia. Daniel provides an extensive commentary on the original article in the NYT magazine, Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?; both would likely be of interest to Culture Matters readers. Lende follows up his original commentary with more information on Jan Chipchase here.

Another post explores an ongoing project, Digital Ethnography, at Kansas State University, with a couple of good video clips including A Vision of Students Today.

Finally, and I’m just sampling from a few of his April posts, there’s a series on obesity that looks at the ‘obesity epidemic’ from a holistic, anthropological perspective. There’s several posts, but the last (which have links to the earlier ones) are On the Causes of Obesity: Common Sense or Interacting Systems and Human Biology and Models for Obesity.

Like I said, normally, I wouldn’t shamelessly cross-plug posts on the two blogs, but since I’m not the one doing the postings, and I really do think that they’re great examples of applying anthropology to pressing practical issues like poverty or public health, I’m breaking my usual rule for self-restraint.

I’ve been a little less active on Culture Matters of late. Not only did I have a really rough end of the semester (nothing like two new units from scratch to set you back), but I’ve also been working on getting a new blog project up and running, so I thought I’d let all Culture Matters readers in on it.

Since around 2002, I’ve become extremely interested in the neurosciences and the implications of new research in the brain sciences for socio-cultural theory in anthropology. This isn’t the space to go into it all, but new findings on neural and phenotypic plasticity allows us to think much more seriously about how culture might shape development, allowing us to think seriously about a kind of deep enculturation of the brain, senses, endocrine system, and the like. Researchers in fields that specialize in these topics are increasingly aware of the degree to which developmental variables affect developmental outcomes, creating opportunities for anthropological research to influence a host of other fields.

This might allow us to think more seriously about the organic dimensions of embodiment, as Tim Ingold has recommended. The relevance for applied anthropology are many: from medical anthropology to the study of trauma, from a reinvigoration of anthropological studies of childhood to the potential to engage in the public sphere with biological scientists who advocate reductionist approaches, a robust neuroanthropology might really enrich what we do.

So we’ve started a blog, Neuroanthropology, and you’re welcome to surf on over, check it out, and even join up as a contributor if this is your sort of thing (just contact me either through the blog or at greg.downey@scmp.mq.edu.au). I may cross-post a few things, but you should especially look for Daniel Lende’s discussions of stress, addiction, and medical anthropology’s links to neurosciences. It’s our Holiday present to the blogosphere.

A U.K.-based company markets an early fetal gender detection test; they claim remarkable accuracy (“99%”) at only 6 weeks gestation. DNA Worldwide’s website describes the test as involving a “blood spot” obtained by doing a finger prick that the woman then mails in to their laboratory, and claims that results published in a Science article in 2005 proved the technique. (They don ‘t provide a link, but a search of the Science archives reveals this article as the one they seem to be refering to; the article does not “prove” their company’s technique and doubts their claims of accuracy.)

Another company, Urobiologics, claims to be able to detect fetal gender using a sample of the pregnant woman’s urine as early as one day after her first missed period. (See this Obstetrics and Gynecology article for an assessment of the science possibly behind the blood test; a search of the PubMed database revealed this review article that is very skeptical of the possibilities of finding extracellular fetal DNA in sufficient quantities to detect in maternal urine, and my cursory PubMed search suggests that no publishing scientists are currently experimenting with fetal gender detection based on testosterone levels in maternal urine.)

Let us set aside entertaining thoughts of a lucrative business scheme in which a private, proprietary (therefore unverified and not monitored by national regulatory bodies) lab test does not have to have any scientific merit whatsoever in order to produce 50% satisfied customers who will receive an apparently correct diagnosis. There remain a couple of interesting things to note here, from an anthropological perspective.

First, the ability of consumers to discover gender at such an early stage in pregnancy has provoked hand-wringing from anxious pundits who seek weighty opinions from certified bioethicists. DNA Worldwide, which manufactures the “Pink or Blue® Gender Test,” attempts to alleviate concerns about sex-selective abortion with reassurances that they are not selling the test “into China and India and some other areas” and that they are a company that “operates in the UK, a liberal society that does not prize babies of one sex over another.” Note the easy deferral of ethics problems to a vague, far away, Oriental Other. Anthropologist Sarah Pinto, in a personal e-mail exchange, articulated the matter well when she questioned

“this idea that gender detection, among other repro technologies, is rationally mediated and managed and used in the west – that there would be no dubious uses of it here because The Problem is in son preference (or whatever gloss is used to apply to a whole complex of issues…) which lives Elsewhere in The East (kind of like female genital cutting, which only lives in Africa and the Middle East, while things like routine episiotomies, re-virgining surgery (or whatever it’s called), genital cosmetic surgery etc etc are completely different things).”

The second interesting point arises from a little line in the homepage of the test website, which states that “It is important…that No Males are in the room during collection” (punctuation as in original document). Sarah brought this to my attention and I was fascinated. What trouble could arise from the mere physical presence of a man in the same room where the blood is drawn? Was it a contamination theory? Curious, I wrote to the company to ask this very question. David Nicholson wrote back to explain,

“ The reason is because our DNA test works by finding male DNA in the mothers blood. Therefore having a male in the room could cause contamination with the sample.”

OK, so contamination was indeed the theory, but how in the world did they imagine said contamination occuring? I wrote back asking for further clarification:

“what could lead to contamination? A flake of skin or hair from a male getting into the blood sample, for example? Or the breath or sweat of the male?”

I admit to being somewhat facetious with the “breath and sweat” remark, but after a few days I received the reply,

“The breath or sweat of the male could cause contamination! It is very sensitive indeed!”*

I am not certain how the breath of a male could lead to DNA contamination, and I suspect neither are most forensics experts (who presumably could make interesting use of this in crime investigations) or defense lawyers (who could use it to dispute crime scene forensics analysis). It seems to me that it might be more accurate to warn consumers of the dangers of letting the test blood or collection materials touch any foreign substance. Phrased in terms of mere male presence, and “breath or sweat,” it sounds like not a question of contamination but of a much more ephemeral contagion.

Gender contagion?

Finally, turning to Urobiologics, my favorite quote from the site came from the FAQ section on May 30th. In response to the question, “But my doctor says it is impossible to do it by urine,” the site stated, “Usually, the customers have the impression that their physician knows everything. This may not be true.” As of this writing, however, they had removed that answer — so satisfying to anyone who has ever questioned medical authority! — and replaced it with the blander: “Research has proven that fetus can be determined by measuring testosterone from urine between 6th to 10th week of pregnancy” and a translation of a 1974 (!) abstract from a German medical journal.

* The second e-mail response was not signed. My thanks to David and DNA Worldwide for their speedy and cordial responses to my e-mail questions.

L.L. Wynn

Here’s a summary piece on recent research suggesting that infants have a host of previously unexpected abilities, including a surprisingly facility to distinguish languages by lipreading (!), discern among different monkey faces (that adult humans can’t distinguish), and recognize rhythms. I have a personal soft spot for infant research, in part because I have overly-romanticized images about how this research would actually take place. When I read the reports, they summon images of cute babies in front of video screens or stacks of toys or listening to music, startling when researchers change the stimulus, leading a bunch of adults to excitedly write down notes…

but enough of that. Anyway, the research again points to the possibility that humans enter the world with a substantial amount of structure to the way that they perceive, and that much of early development is actually the foreclosing of potential developmental pathways in perceptual ability. For example, infants seem to recognize more speech sounds than do older children, leading scientists to suggest that unused ability to differentiate these sounds eventually atrophies and disappears: use it or lose it. The process seems entirely consistent with what Gerard Edelman calls ‘neural Darwinism’ (no relation to illegitimate step-sibling, ’social Darwinism’), a process of development in which an ‘over-wired’ neural system learns by eliminating unused connections.

Unfortunately, in anthropology, the people who have paid the closest attention to research findings like this have tended to use the research to argue for ‘innate’ ability, such as innate grammars or innate brain modules. The big story for me here though is not innateness, but the dynamics of development, working not from a ‘blank slate’ brain but instead from a promiscuously connected nervous system, one that is challenged to eliminate extraneous information and stimuli.

The presence of so much connectivity in the infant brain and nervous system does not serve the argument for ‘innate’ intelligence, like grammar, as much as proponents would like, in my opinion. In fact, it undermines one of their central arguments for suggesting innate, pre-programmed intelligence is intelligence: that, without it, the stimuli for producing something like grammar are too poor. That is, Chomsky’s approach to grammar is often argued for on the basis of poverty of stimulus; children learn grammar, and this allegedly can’t be explained by learning alone as the models they have to work from are too poor. Although language is a hard case (and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it as I don’t do any original research on language), this approach often gets extended to other areas of intelligence or human activity, like motor learning and perception (which I do work on).

If infants’ brains are already hot-wired with an excess of connections, however, it may make sense that they respond to all sorts of stimuli, eventually getting control of their phenomenal worlds by learning what to ignore, what to pay attention to, and developing significant abilities to disregard irrelevant stimuli. The late Esther Thelen, along with colleagues like Linda Smith, did some brilliant work on how children learn to do basic movements, like grasping objects, which suggested something similar. Infant learning trajectories differed significantly; some had to learn to control movements, others to overcome inertia. ‘Learning’ to grasp involved developing different abilities depending on what the child’s pre-existing movement tendencies and control abilities were. Of course, what is ‘extraneous’ movement, like the question of what is ‘irrelevant’ in perception, language, or cognition, may vary among cultures, between individuals, or with relation to the training they undergo. And ‘unlearned’ ability may not completely disappear, but may go dormant and be subject to reinforcement and re-emergence later.

The display of promiscuous infant perceptions, however, may overcome one of the central arguments for innate intelligence: the poverty of stimulus argument. In fact, environmental factors don’t have to explain completely the associations that the brain and perceptual systems can make. Many of them exist already. Rather, environment is, at least in part, pruning and reinforcing certain neural connections and abilities, not creating them from scratch.

Although it’s far too early in the research to make these sorts of blanket statements, I do think that our account of infant enculturation will wind up being far more baroque and interesting than current models, so tilted as they are to simplistic nature v. nurture or ‘percentages’ of each models of how culture shapes cognition, perception, experience, or emotion.