Migration, colonization, and the shifting narratives of ancient Andean origins

In the Quechua-speaking highlands where the Incas built their empire more than 500 years ago, farmers and herders used the concept of pacha—movement across space and time—to shape local identities. They believed that their ancestors emerged onto wild landscapes in the South American Andes when the universe was created, and that they wandered until they found places they could transform for human habitation and subsistence. The first Cañaris descended from a sacred mountain in the Ecuadorean highlands; the ancestral Chancas of southern Peru followed the water flowing out of a high mountain lake. Daily tasks drew people from the here-and-now of their villages, into an ancestral tableau in which noteworthy landscape features recalled those original migrations.

The Inca nobility traced its origins to a cave located to the south of Cuzco, the imperial capital. During the mid-sixteenth century, Inca men told Spaniards of an ancient journey in which their powerful male ancestors turned to stone to establish Inca dominion over their city and its valley. Their female ancestors conquered and displaced local populations and helped to build the Coricancha, the temple-palace where the last surviving male ancestor founded his imperial house. Most Spaniards considered these dynastic stories to be factual, because Inca nobles used knotted-cord devices, painted boards, praise songs, and other memory aids to preserve oral histories.

Spaniards expressed a very different attitude when it came to the stories of universal creation that set ancestral Andean migrations in motion—they described them as fables or superstitions that were at best laughably misguided, and at worst constituted demonic misinformation that blinded Andean peoples to their true origins. Any account of universal creation that diverged from the stories found in Genesis posed a challenge to Spanish efforts to convert and colonize Andean peoples. Some of the anxiety over repeating Indigenous creation stories came from the lack of clarity regarding the origin of the peoples that Spaniards had come to call “Indians.” European Christians used biblical accounts of the Deluge and the Tower of Babel to help explain the diversity of cultures and languages that they lumped under that racialized rubric, but a fundamental question nagged at them: how did these people get to the Americas before we did?

To displace Andean creation stories and fit Native peoples into their own apocalyptic project of transatlantic colonization, Spanish writers concocted an array of apocryphal speculations. Some said that the first Indians were Phoenician or Carthaginian voyagers, while others claimed that they descended from a lost tribe of Israel or somehow originated in the mysterious lands of the Tatars or the Poles. The royal cosmographer Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa wrote in 1572 that the first Indians descended from Noah’s grandson Tubal, who settled in Spain and whose offspring peopled the island of Atlantis before moving into the Americas. In effect, that account leveraged Plato’s philosophical writings to render Native Americans as long-lost Spaniards. (Not to be outdone, the English explorer Walter Raleigh justified his search for El Dorado on the basis that the Incas—or “Ingas” as he called them—came from “Inglatierra” and were thus his own erstwhile countrymen.)

Amidst this cacophony of unfounded speculation, the Jesuit Bernabé Cobo hit much closer to the mark in 1653, arguing that “Indians” first crossed into the Americas via a yet-undiscovered land bridge from Asia. Although this speculation has proved prescient, it was built on a racialized argument that no archaeologist today would accept. Cobo devoted several chapters to reducing the vast human diversity native to the Americas into a few general “Indian” features—reddish skin, dark eyes, straight black hair, and pronounced phlegmatic and sanguine humors—that he considered similar to populations in east Asia. Cobo did more than describe phenotypic similarities, however: he claimed that both populations possessed similarly undesirable personalities, being cowardly, unreliable, and easily led astray.

Cobo’s natural history remained unpublished until the late 1800s, but a similar mix of physical stereotyping, medieval humoralism, and ethnocentrism resurfaced in the eighteenth century in the work of Carolus Linnaeus, the father of binomial taxonomy. In his Systema Naturae, Linnaeus distinguished the supposed red skin of Homo americanus rubescens (Indians) from the brownish tone of Homo asiaticus fuscus (Asians), noting supposed differences in their humoral imbalances, which made them choleric and phlegmatic, respectively. Linnaeus characterized the Indian race as governed by “custom,” and Asians as governed by “opinion.” This pseudoscientific classification helped to inspire later writers, such as the German physiologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and the American physician Samuel Morton, to collect human skulls and measure human bodies to demonstrate racial differences. In the Andes, skull collection and other racialized metrics were entangled with the earliest archaeological research—for example, when Hiram Bingham mounted his second Peruvian expedition to return to the ruins of Machu Picchu in 1912, he brought along an anatomist to measure the bodies of living Quechua people, to determine whence they had originated, and how long their ancestors had lived in Peru.

Archaeologists today reject the racial judgments that run through such work, but they continue to collect evidence about ancient migrations. Researchers now use a battery of geochemical methods to identify the origins of different kinds of pottery and stone tools, and new studies of stable isotopes and DNA from ancient human remains are adding unprecedented new data about the ways that people moved throughout and settled in the Andes. As scientific methods have improved, research practices have become more sensitive to the rights and interests of descendant populations, who continue to make ancestral claims to their local landscapes as a way to maintain identity and defend what is theirs. The increasing commitment to community engagement in Andean archaeology reminds scholars of the enduring power of narratives of origin and migration, whether they come from an oral tradition or laboratory science.

_{Featured image by Adèle Beausoleil via Unsplash.}

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Rethinking migrations in late prehistoric Eurasia

People move. Whether at an individual or group level, migrations have been a constant and fundamental component of the human journey from its very beginnings to the present. To paraphrase the French scholar Jean-Paul Demoule, the story of humankind is one of three million years of emigration and immigration. While news about migrations have become a daily feature in the media, discussions concerning the regulation of the flow of people across countries and continents represent a key issue in current political discourse. Due to its time depth, archaeology is in an advantageous position to provide long-term insights on the topic. Thus, a deep history approach can counteract isolationist narratives, show the complexity of human mobility in the past and present, and illustrate the challenges and opportunities that can arise.

Over the last few decades, archaeologists have made enormous progress in the study of past migrations. This is largely due to the development of new, and the improvement of existing, biomolecular scientific methods that are revolutionising our knowledge of past mobility. Ancient DNA and stable isotope analyses are particularly important in this regard, although their results need to be interpreted in combination with theoretically-informed approaches and a good understanding of the archaeological record. This requires a truly interdisciplinary approach, incorporating the humanities, and social and natural sciences.

Humans have always been mobile. Even travelling to foreign lands in order to stay there for a long period of time (a more permanent migration) has been part of human existence over the millennia. However, the scales, rhythms, motivations, and characteristics of these migrations can take very different forms. Where bioarchaeological approaches have been applied, they have contributed to identifying previously unimagined scales of mobility, but sometimes also to uncovering subtle nuances at a local, even individual level. A good example is the study carried out by Philipp Stockhammer and Ken Massy in the Lech Valley (southern Germany). Their comprehensive bioarchaeological analysis of graves dating from the 3^rd and early 2^nd millennia BCE has allowed the identification of several female individuals of non-local origin, as well as the determining of the biological relatedness of the people buried in the cemeteries. While this represents an example of a very detailed study of a microregion, on the other end of the spectrum we have Volker Heyd’s contribution analysing several large-scale migratory processes of the 3^rd millennium BCE at a European scale. This was a period of significant population mobility, which the author compares with the historical Migration Period of the 4^th to 6^th centuries AD. Bioarchaeology does not only allow these sorts of prehistoric migrations to be traced, but can also shed light on other aspects such as marriage and motherhood, as Katharina Rebay-Salisbury explores.

When we move into the 1^st millennium BCE, the increasing availability of written sources allows fruitful comparisons between archaeology and texts. While this task is not without challenges, it can offer new perspectives on topics such as the ‘Celtic’ migrations to Italy. The latter are addressed by Peter Wells in a paper that also includes comparisons with later historical population movements, including the Early Medieval Anglo-Saxon migrations to Britain and the Early Modern migrations of Puritan English to New England. Demographic fluctuations and migratory processes could sometimes be the result of aggressive policies by expanding imperial powers, illustrated by Nico Roymans and Diederick Habermehl’s work on the impact of Rome on the Lower Rhine frontier region in the period from Caesar to Augustus.

The selection of examples mentioned above clearly demonstrate the potential of archaeology to contribute to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of past migrations. Although looking at the past, in itself, does not necessarily guarantee the right answers to current global challenges, it at least allows us to place debates into perspective, helping to counteract simplistic approaches and modern political misuses.

_{Featured image by Klearchos Kapoutsis via Flickr.}

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Cooperation and the history of life: is natural selection a team sport?

Cooperation is in our nature, for good and for ill, but there is still a nagging doubt that something biological in us compels us to be selfish—our genes. This is the paradox: genes are inexorably driven by self-replication, and yet cooperation continually rears its head. Not only are humans fundamentally team players, but all of nature has been teaming up since the dawn of life four billion years ago. The rules of cooperation that we encounter in our daily lives are fundamentally the same as those that apply to how our cells cooperate within the body, how the parts of the cell came to work together, and how selfish genes cooperate to make social beings. Though simple, these rules play out in complicated and fascinating ways that illuminate everything from the profound to the trivial.

Cooperation is defined as a social behaviour by one individual that benefits another at a cost to the cooperator. It evolves when the benefits to the cooperator exceed the cost of cooperation—a situation that might seem rare, but in fact is very common. Benefits can accrue to a cooperator in two ways, either directly or indirectly, through relatives. Benefits to relatives, or kin selection, explain why, for example, long-tailed tits will help their neighbours raise a brood when their own has been lost. Neighbours tend to be relatives. The cells of a multicellular organism cooperate for essentially the same reason: all are relatives. We don’t usually think of the cells of the body as being relatives of one another, but that is what they are, albeit genetically identical ones.

Uncovering the benefits as well as the costs to cooperation is key to understanding both its evolution and the situations in which it breaks down. Cooperative behaviour is conditional on there being a net benefit and it can disappear when the advantage is lost. Even an intimate symbiosis like a mycorrhizal association between a plant and a fungus will dissolve if the plant can obtain nutrients normally supplied by the fungus more easily from elsewhere.

I like to think of groups of cooperators as teams, because this idea is familiar and captures the essence of how cooperation produces benefits for individuals. Calling the plant and fungus in a mycorrhizal association a team may sound like a metaphor, but it is more than that because the individual benefits of cooperating in a team are the same, whether the game is football or natural selection.

Teaming up can produce direct benefits to team members in two distinct ways: through force of numbers and through division of labour. A team of 11 will beat a team of 2. This has to be how social insects with thousands of workers evolved. But force of numbers alone is not enough. The highest score that a team of 11 goalies can expect is nil-nil. A division of labour among the team, placing players in different positions according to their skills and the overall strategy, wins matches. Likewise, social insects have one or a very limited number of queens with the exclusive role of reproduction. Other castes such as workers assume different tasks, depending on their phenotype, age, and the size of the colony.

Individuals stick with the team so long as their interests are aligned with those of other team members, but this can never be taken for granted. Since cooperation involves costs as well as benefits, there is always the possibility that some individuals will try to take the benefits for free—or in other words—cheat. Tumour cells are cheats. Mutation breaks the alignment of interests that normally exists among the cells in a body, allowing a cancer cell to escape the many mechanisms that normally limit cell proliferation and to multiply at the expense of the host. The most dangerous and successful tumours recruit the assistance of normal cell types, acquiring a blood supply. Such cells cross the line from cooperation to parasitism.

Cheats may be found wherever there is cooperation, but cooperation thrives, nonetheless. Its most spectacular successes occur when members of a symbiotic team start to reproduce as a team, uniting their reproductive fates within a new kind of individual. This is what happened when the ancestor of the eukaryotic cell teamed up with the bacterial ancestor of the mitochondrion. The union of the two ancestral cell types produced a new kind of cell and a major transition in evolution.

Metaphors can help explain a difficult concept, but they can also mislead because at some point even good metaphors fail when taken literally. ‘Selfish gene’ is exactly such a metaphor. It has illuminated the science of social evolution for half a century since it was coined by Richard Dawkins, but it has also misled people into underestimating the importance of cooperation. Instead, let us think of natural selection as a team sport: on every level, from genes and cells to social beings, the team structure of life exists.

_{Featured image by Getty Images; CreativeJourney/ Shutterstock.com; Wikimedia Commons (Used with Permission).}

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Revenge of the hungry cockatoos? Spite and behavioural ecology

“How do I stop a cockatoo from attacking my property?” This is the title of a real, honest-to-goodness Australian government webpage and advice document on the New South Wales Department of Planning and Environment website. The webpage notes that flocks of cockatoos—sulphur-crested cockatoos especially—are known to “aggressively attack wood… decks, outdoor furniture, window sills, and houses” and that they particularly like the soft woods used in construction. The advice given ranges from making a scarecrow (or scarecockatoo, I suppose), to painting wood white, to spraying the birds with the hose (!), and it is recommended to persist in one’s chosen strategies until the birds leave, noting that this can take more than a week. 

Most curiously, the page carefully elides the important question of why cockatoos attack—it says simply “there are many theories why they do this.” Ask an Australian, though, and the answer will be quickly forthcoming: the cockatoos are acting out of spite. 

Most often, the supposed slight that caused the spite is the taking away of bird feeders. It may well be a case of confirmation bias, or simply of populations of hungry birds correlating within site of former bird feeders, but the story is usually told the same. “I normally put out bird seed in my garden, and all sorts of birds come and eat it, including the big cockatoos. One day, I forgot to put out the seed, and the cockatoos were clearly angry, and took it out on my house—they chewed right through my deck railing, and tore the weather stripping of my back windows!”

This superimposes a very human impulse onto the observed behaviour of the cockatoos: it looks and feels like revenge. 

The idea that cockatoos are capable of human-like spite is a common one in Australia, driven both by the house-destructive behaviours and by videos and news stories of sulphur-crested cockatoos tearing off and destroying (seemingly with glee) the anti-bird spikes affixed to buildings to keep them away. I once saw a video of an activist who campaigns for better care for pet parrots destroying a small birdcage in front of the cockatoo who had been inappropriately kept in it, as the cockatoo squawked and head-bobbed and fanned his crest in what could only be described as celebration of the act of destruction. As human observers, watching the behaviours of these big, bold, intelligent birds, who are unafraid of showing us their emotions, it is very hard not to project human emotion onto the cockatoos. 

But we have to be careful! Spite is a very controversial matter when it comes to evolutionary biology and animal behaviour—and not everything that strikes us as spite at first look should really be given that name. Take for example the anti-bird spikes. For a cockatoo that lives in a city, building ledges, street signs, and lamp posts are part of the bird’s (not-quite natural, but adopted) habitat. The bird has no concept of the purpose of the anti-bird spikes, because it has no concept of what is being prevented: property damage, cleaning costs, and public sanitation are not front-of-mind concerns for large parrots. The cockatoo does not see the spikes as an uncomfortable deterrent deliberately installed to keep it away, but merely as an environmental annoyance to be removed—like an ill-placed twig in a tree where it is trying to roost. So, like the twig, it destructively removes the spikes to make its environment more comfortable. The observing humans only see this as spiteful because we know what the bird does not—that the spikes were precisely designed and installed to make life less comfortable for the cockatoo. 

Even supposing the cockatoo knew why the spikes were there, it still would not be spite because it has a material benefit to the cockatoo. It makes adaptive sense for the cockatoo to remove the spikes because it creates more space so that the cockatoo can comfortably and safely roost. A bit like having a car towed that has been improperly parked in your driveway, there may be a gruesome little bit of satisfaction, but it also has straightforward material benefit—you can park your own car in its proper place. 

Animal behaviours that deal damage to other animals in exchange for benefit to the actor make evolutionary sense. Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but from the point of view of natural selection, dealing damage to obtain benefit is an easy calculation. From crippling parasites to territorial jostling to sexual competition, gaining a benefit at the expense of another animal is, unfortunately, how the natural world, and evolution, must often work. 

What twists up the minds of evolutionary biologists though is the question of true spite: dealing damage to someone else at no benefit to yourself—just to hurt them. The human impulse to revenge has driven a lot of bad decisions in our history but it doesn’t make much evolutionary sense. Any action an animal takes, particularly violent and destructive actions, have a cost. That cost can be the chance of injury, the risk of retaliation, or just the physical energy expended; whatever it is, a well-adapted behaviour should not involve wasting energy and cost where there is no possible benefit to the actor. The cockatoos tearing up weather stripping are more like true spite. If the popular interpretation is true, and the cockatoos are retaliating after the house’s owner has stopped feeding them, the house destruction is costly spite on behalf of the birds. Cockatoos cannot eat wood or weather stripping, and in taking the time to rip up the house, they are wasting time that could be spent foraging elsewhere and risking potentially harmful retaliation (remember that hose?). The effort undertaken to destroy the house is pure spite—harming another with no chance of benefit to the cockatoos. 

Even here, though, we have to be careful. Part of a cockatoo’s natural behaviour includes chomping through wood in search of grubs and other food sources. It is conceivable that, in finding the usual bird-seed tray empty, the birds have sought to conserve energy by seeking other food sources in the immediate vicinity before moving on—including by searching the deck’s balustrade for tasty wood-boring grubs. As with every animal behaviour, we have to carefully interrogate the total environmental context of any behaviour before we draw conclusions about what might be going through the animal’s mind. 

Spite, or revenge, is a very human idea. Our high level of intelligence and our highly social nature have resulted in our own species being all too capable of visiting non-adaptive, costly, damaging spite on our fellow humans—often harming ourselves in the pursuit of vengeance upon others. It is one of the uglier consequences of our remarkable brains. Whilst we have to be careful about projecting our own emotions onto the behaviours of animals, that intelligence and social lifestyle is something we share with birds, and especially with big, smart birds like cockatoos. Spite remains a controversial question in evolutionary biology—but it’s not surprising that one place we see truly spiteful behaviours that might just be real is in a bird that has so much in common with ourselves.

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The VSI podcast season three: ageing, Pakistan, slang, psychopathy, and more

The Very Short Introductions Podcast offers a concise and original introduction to a selection of our VSI titles from the authors themselves. From ageing to modern drama, Pakistan to creativity, listen to season three of the podcast and see where your curiosity takes you!

Ageing

In this episode, Nancy A. Pachana introduces ageing, an activity with which we are familiar from childhood, and the lifelong dynamic changes in biological, psychological, and social functioning associated with it.

Listen to “Ageing” (episode 43) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Pakistan

In this episode, Pippa Virdee introduces Pakistan, one of the two nation-states of the Indian sub-continent that emerged in 1947 but has a deep past covering 4,000 years.

Listen to “Pakistan” (episode 42) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Henry James

In this episode, Susan Mizruchi introduces American author Henry James, who created a unique body of fiction that includes Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Turn of the Screw.

Listen to “Henry James” (episode 41) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Secularism

In this episode, Andrew Copson introduces secularism, an increasingly hot topic in public, political, and religious debate across the globe that is more complex than simply “state versus religion.”

Listen to “Secularism” (episode 40) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Demography

In this episode, Sarah Harper introduces demography, the study of people, which addresses the size, distribution, composition, and density of populations, and considers the impact certain factors will have on both individual lives and the changing structure of human populations.

Listen to “Demography” (episode 39) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Psychopathy

In this episode, Essi Viding introduces psychopathy, a personality disorder that has long captured the public imagination. Despite the public fascination with psychopathy, there is often a very limited understanding of the condition, and several myths about psychopathy abound.

Listen to “Psychopathy” (episode 38) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Modern drama

In this episode, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr introduce modern drama, the tale of which is a story of extremes, testing both audiences and actors to their limits through hostility and contrarianism.

Listen to “Modern drama” (episode 37) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Slang

In this episode, Jonathon Green introduces slang. Slang has been recorded since at least 1500 AD, and today’s vocabulary, taken from every major English-speaking country, runs to over 125,000 slang words and phrases.

Listen to “Slang” (episode 36) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

Creativity

In this episode, Vlad Glăveanu introduces creativity, a term that emerged in the 19th century but only became popular around the mid-20th century despite creative expression existing for thousands of years.

Listen to “Creativity” (episode 35) via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.

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How research abstracts succeed and fail

The abstract of a research article has a simple remit: to faithfully summarize the reported research. After the title, it’s the most read section of the article. It’s freely available on the publisher’s website and in online databases. Crucially, it makes the case to the reader for reading the article in full. 

Alas, not all abstracts succeed. 

Some take the notion of abstraction to extremes. This example is from a physics article:

Unitarity and geometrical effects are discussed for photon-photon scattering.

It has just ten words. Fortunately, most abstracts say rather more, though it’s possible to say too much. The next example, from a geology article, has over 370 words. It starts:

Diagenesis of the Holocene-Pleistocene volcanogenic sediments of the Mexican Basin produced, in strata of gravel and sand, 1H₂O- and 2H₂O-smectite, kaolinite, R3-2H₂O-smectite (0.75)-kaolinite, R1-2H₂O-smectite (0.75)-kaolinite, R3-kaolinite (0.75)-2H₂O-smectite and R1-1H₂O-smectite (0.75)-kaolinite. Smectite platelets…

It continues in a similar vein for a further 350 words, accumulating more and more detail. The reason for the work is hinted at, but only becomes clear in the full article, at which point it’s too late.

Some abstracts introduce citations to previous research to provide background, contrary to the expectation that abstractions stand alone. In practice, citations can block the reader’s progress, as in this example from a remote-sensing article: 

The purpose of this paper is to extend the stationary stochastic model defined in [1] to a time evolving sea state and platform motion.

The reference pointed to by “[1]” isn’t attached to the abstract, and the source article is obviously elsewhere. Yet without it, the rest of the text is difficult to appreciate. Similar problems can occur with abbreviations explained only in the article.

Some abstracts confuse their remit by summarizing the paper rather than its content. The shift to meta-reporting can lead to uninformative boiler-plate text. This example is from a medical education article:

Implications of these results are discussed.

It’s uninformative because readers already know that most research articles contain a discussion section where, by definition, results and their implications are discussed.

Some abstracts expand their remit to include personal research plans. This example is from a clinical article:

We plan to investigate why general practitioners are not complying with the pathway.

It’s common to find research aspirations in internal reports and in research grant applications, where they have a specific function. But published in an abstract, they can present a reader working in the same area with a difficult choice.

Some abstracts expand their remit even further with a self-evaluation of the research. This example is from a finance article:

We believe this study will benefit academics, regulators, policymakers and investors.

The problem is that the reader may not see these pronouncements as truly impartial, with the result that the authority of the article is weakened, not strengthened.

Abstracts can of course fail in many other ways, for example, omitting caveats, adding new information, exaggerating certainty, or providing no more than an advertisement, a piece of puffery.

How to write a successful abstract

In the light of all this, what should go into a successful abstract? Some clinical journals settle the matter by imposing a structured format. But most journal and conference proceedings don’t and may offer little or no detailed guidance to the author, who may be left confused about what’s needed.

One starting point is to think of the abstract not as a condensed version of the paper that preserves the original structure and proportions, but as a mini- or micro-paper in its own right, with certain basic elements:

• the context or scope of the work
• the research question or other reason for the work, if relevant
• the approach or methods
• a key result or two
• a conclusion, if appropriate, or other implications of the work.

Naturally the weight given to each element depends on the research—whether it’s experimental, observational, or theoretical, and whether the expected audience is general or specialized. How much to write about each element is then a balance between including detail and retaining the reader’s interest. 

Within those constraints, it’s important to identify any critical assumptions, non-standard methods, and limitations on the findings so that the scope and potential application of the research is clear. The reader shouldn’t discover on reading the article that the abstract was misleading.

Here’s an example of a well-written abstract from a neuroscience article: 

An unresolved question in neuroscience and psychology is how the brain monitors performance to regulate behavior. It has been proposed that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), on the medial surface of the frontal lobe, contributes to performance monitoring by detecting errors. In this study, event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to examine ACC function. Results confirm that this region shows activity during erroneous responses. However, activity was also observed in the same region during correct responses under conditions of increased response competition. This suggests that the ACC detects conditions under which errors are likely to occur rather than errors themselves.

From C. S. Carter et al., Science 1998, 280, 747-749. Reprinted with permission from AAAS.

Successive sentences describe the context, the reason for the work, the methods, some results, and an implication. According to Elsevier’s Scopus database, the article has been cited over 2,500 times.

Encapsulating a body of research so effectively usually takes repeated rewriting. The timing, though, can be a challenge, since the abstract is often prepared last, when the main sections of the paper have found a settled form. It then risks being rushed while material is assembled for submission for publication. 

Despite these pressures, the abstract needs as much attention as any other section of the paper. After all, if it doesn’t do its job, the reader may turn to other abstracts that do. And the published article may languish unretrieved and unseen, waiting in vain for the recognition it deserves.

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Why depth interviewing is essential to understanding individuals and institutions

From scraping “big data” from the internet to the analyzing genomic information about individuals and social groups, today’s researchers have a dizzying array of new methods for studying the social world. One consequence of this explosion of options has been to obscure the value of tried-and-true ones. Depth interviewing is a case in point. Once assumed to be a core research tool, many of today’s researchers have cast a skeptical eye on it. While past debates centered around whether we could rely on insights drawn from a limited number of people, new concerns have arisen from those who advocate direct observation, whether in natural or experimental settings. These skeptics express doubt that social researchers can trust the information gleaned from self-reports, pointing especially to the ways that depth interviewing may elicit accounts that are internally inconsistent or that contradict what people actually do. Such doubters argue that since people are prone to express ideas, beliefs, or behaviors that contradict one another, their self-reports are neither credible nor useful.

These critiques reflect a fundamental misunderstanding about what depth interviews can accomplish and how, when designed and carried out well, they are uniquely suited to gathering crucial insights about the nature of human consciousness and the relationship between thought and action. One-on-one interviewing creates a setting in which the “unobservable” becomes visible. Life history interviews allow people to describe and reflect on how prior experiences have led them to their current circumstances and outlooks, including what key events propelled them to devise life strategies and make consequential life choices. Focusing on the present, depth interviews provide a safe space where people are invited to share their most private experiences, thoughts, and feelings. While it is not be possible to observe a wide range of intimate activities, from sexual encounters to all sorts of dyadic interactions, interviews allow participants to describe and reflect on such events. And whatever the topic, interviews allow people to explore the meanings they attach to their actions and beliefs and to reveal the processes by which their social contexts created experiences that prompted ensuing responses.

Indeed, a key contribution of depth interviewing lies in its ability to uncover the contradictions that people express. Rather than accepting such accounts at face value, our research (and that of many others) demonstrates that we ignore contradictory thoughts and actions at our peril. Contradictory accounts as well as inconsistencies between “saying” and “doing” are central to human thought and action. Depth interviews provide an opportunity to delve into the nature of such beliefs and behaviors and explore the reasons people hold inconsistent views or act in apparently inconsistent ways. In addition to unearthing the meanings people imbue to their contradictory thinking or behavior, interviews can also discover the social contexts that give rise to them. When people express inconsistent beliefs or reveal conflicts between their values and choices, they alert us to look for the social contexts and cultural formations that create conflicts for which there are no simple or straightforward ways to respond. 

Given the complexity of twenty-first-century life, it has become even more crucial to understand how people navigate the tensions created by conflicting institutional arrangements. In the context of a rapidly changing world, interviews shed light on the interplay between incompatible options and the evolving responses people craft to cope with them. Paying close attention to the different layers of meaning within each interview and carefully analyzing the patterns that emerge across all the interviewees enables depth interviewers to understand how social structures and cultural schemas shape human endeavors and how, in turn, social actors participate in constructing and potentially changing the world they inherit. By eliciting contradictory accounts and using them to delve into why people hold inconsistent beliefs or act in contradictory ways, depth interviews illuminate complex social patterns that would otherwise remain hidden.

Whether the goal is to chart how structure and action interact as individuals build their life paths, to learn about intimate experiences that cannot be observed, to uncover how people give meaning to their own and others’ practices and beliefs, or to understand how social arrangements prompt people to hold contradictory views and take inconsistent actions, depth interviews are the best, and possibly the only, method for learning about such core social dynamics. When interviewers ask probing questions, listen carefully to their participants’ answers, and analyze their findings with an eye firmly focused on discovering the patterns that emerge from the complex material they gather, interviewing enlightens us about the many dimensions of human experience that cannot be reduced to numbers, biological factors, or observable behavior. As we rightfully seek to expand the social science toolkit, it would be ironic if we lose sight of a method that offers unique access to the hidden dimensions of personal and social life. Instead, we must renew our commitment to a research technique that places human consciousness at the forefront.

^{Featured image by Christina@wocintechchat.com via Unsplash}

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SHAPE and societal recovery from crises

The SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy) initiative advocates for the value of the social sciences, humanities, and arts subject areas in helping us to understand the world in which we live and find solutions to global issues. As societies around the world respond to the immediate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, research from SHAPE disciplines has the potential to illuminate how societies process and recover from various social crises.

In recognition of the essential role these disciplines play for societal recovery, we have curated a hub of SHAPE research which looks back on how we have rebuilt from social crises in the past, how societies process living through extraordinary times, and considers the next steps societies can take on the road to recovery.

Lessons from the past

Throughout history, individuals and societies have encountered periods of crisis caused by factors including war, natural disasters, and health pandemics. Responses to these crises can provide a vital insight into how we respond to future global threats.

In a review of how societies respond to peril, Robert Wuthnow suggests that, “nothing, it appears, evokes discussion of moral responsibility quite as clearly as the prospect of impending doom.” Wuthnow examines how societies have responded to four major threats: nuclear holocaust, weapons of mass destruction, concern about a global pandemic, and the threat of global climate change, and finds that, “the picture of humanity that emerges in this literature is one of can-do problem solvers. Doing something, almost anything, affirms our humanity.”

Looking further back, the US Civil War also had a profound impact on many people and touched women’s lives in contradictory ways. Hannah Rosen’s chapter “Women, the Civil War, and Reconstruction” examines the wartime and postwar experiences primarily of black and white but also Native American women and provides insights into how we can reconstruct a fairer society following conflicts. Meanwhile, in Total War: An Emotional History, Claire Langhamer examines the role emotions played in the immediate aftermath of WWII, approaching our relationship to feeling through the lens of social, as well as cultural, history.

How we choose to commemorate the past is also a key question, explored by Joshua Gamson in an article published in Social Problems about the US National AIDS Memorial Grove.

Looking back on the economic implications of social crises, Mark Bailey discusses how the plague acted as a catalyst for the vast transformation of trading routes in North Sea economies. This economic shift has been reflected in the COVID-19 pandemic and, in response, authors from the Journal of Consumer Research have created a conceptual framework for understanding how consumers and markets have collectively responded over the short term and long term to threats that disrupt our routines, lives, and even the fabric of society.

Literature, classics, and the arts also provide an avenue to explore the effects of social crises. Laura E. Tanner’s blog post explores the works of author Marilynne Robinson. According to Tanner, these works provide us with tools for coping during lockdown by exploring the familiar, whilst her characters also navigate the threat of mortality and how trauma disrupts the comforts of the everyday.

In her chapter “Post-Ceasefire Antigones and Northern Ireland”, Isabelle Torrance traces the evocation of Antigone in the context of the Northern Irish conflict. In this way, literature provides a mirror to explore and process contemporary social crises.

Music history also provides a window into past responses to social traumas. In her chapter “Embodying Sonic Resonance as/after Trauma – Vibration, Music, and Medicine”, Jillian C. Rogers shows that interwar French musicians understood music making as a therapeutic, vibrational, bodily practice which offered antidotes to the unpredictable and harmful vibrations of warfare.

Living through extraordinary times

As the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects have spread across the globe, nations and individuals have adapted rapidly to dramatic shifts in how we experience the world.

Recent history can provide a fascinating insight into how communities have lived through extraordinary times in the past. In Pandemics, Publics, and Narrative, the authors explore how the general public experienced the 2009 swine flu pandemic by examining the stories of individuals, their reflections on news and expert advice given to them, and how they considered vaccination, social isolation, and other infection control measures.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, historians have considered how we will write the histories of 2020. In “Documenting COVID-19”, Kathleen Franz and Catherine Gudis explore people’s keen awareness of the “historic” moment in which we are living, and the questions it poses for historians: how do we ethically document our current social, public health, and economic crises, and in doing so help to dismantle structural inequalities?

In her article “Slow History”, published in The American Historical Review, Mary Lindemann asks whether the pandemic provides an opportunity to evaluate the “doing” of history and to isolate what really matters in research, writing, and instruction. Arguing that we should learn to value a slow, painstaking approach to our work, Lindemann argues that “historians are, after all, long-distance runners not sprinters.”

Among the many frontline workers enduring the COVID-19 pandemic are social workers, who continued to support people through a period of unprecedented change. A 2020 article from Social Work—“Voices from the Frontlines: Social Workers Confront the COVID-19 Pandemic”—explores how these key workers operated in the US, how they were coping with their own risks, and how social work as a profession anticipated the needs of vulnerable communities during the early stages of the US health crises. The pandemic has also presented specific challenges for social workers interacting with children; a paper from Children & Schools delves into nine ethical concerns facing school social workers when they must rely on electronic communication platforms.

A philosophical approach allows us to explore human emotions and ethics during major world threats. In their chapter on “Emotional resilience”, Ann Cooper Albright explores resilience in the face of threats—from natural disasters to school bullies—finding that emotional resilience provides the opportunity for lasting transformation: “often in returning and remembering, we find that we no longer want what we had before.“

The road to recovery

Living through these extraordinary times, the COVID-19 pandemic poses some important questions for the future. How do we rebuild from the economic, social, and emotional traumas of the past?

Charlotte Lyn Bright’s Social Work Research article considers the vital role social workers play in supporting society and individuals by looking at the unique skills they employ in their work during difficult times. Meanwhile, in her paper on “Community development in higher education”, Lesley Wood explores how academics can ensure their community-based research makes a difference by discussing the socio-structural inequalities that influence community participation.

In piece for the OUPblog, Nicole Hassoun calls for universal, legally enforced human rights access to essential medicines and healthcare, arguing that, “protecting human rights can help us increase our Global Health Impact.”

The study of the past provides a vital tool to help societies rebuild in the future. In “Making Progress: Disaster Narratives and the Art of Optimism in Modern America”, Kevin Rozario examines the role of disaster writings and “narrative imagination” in helping Americans to conceive of disasters as instruments of progress, arguing that this perspective has contributed greatly to the nation’s resilience in the face of natural disasters.

In this blog piece “Listen now before we choose to forget”, oral historian Mark Cave describes how memory is pliable; our recollections are continually reshaped by our own changing experiences and the influence of collective interpretations. In 2020, Cave writes, the Black Lives Matter protests, divisive partisan politics, and anger over extended lockdowns were all influencing our memories of the pandemic. Cave further explores an oral history project conducted among New Orleans residents following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which “filled a deep need within our community to reflect and make sense of the experience of the storm and its aftermath.” Cave’s research will be vital for future historians considering how to study and understand the COVID-19 pandemic “at a time when history is clearly ‘in the making’.”

Literature continues to provide our society with a tool to understand and process trauma. In her blog post “Why literature must be part of the language of recovery from crisis”, Carmen Bugan explores trauma and social recovery in poetry, and its pertinence during the COVID-19 crises.

Pandemic life has underscored how digital technology can foster intimate connections. Research from Nathan Rambukkana discusses how this influx of digital connection has fostered a mode of interaction know as “distant sociality,” and asks whether this is here to stay following life under lockdown.

Looking much further to the future, Pasi Heikkurinen discusses the end of the human-dominated geological epoch and the potential technological advances needed to make a non-human dominated planet sustainable. Heikkurinen’s chapter provides sustainability scholars and policymakers with an opportunity “to deliberate not only on the proper kind of technology or the amount of technology needed, but also to consider technology as a way to relate to the world, others, and oneself.”

The impact of COVID-19 on the global economy is profound, and yet economists must grapple with how this impact will shape the future. In their chapter “The Interactional Foundations of Economic Forecasting”, Werner Reichmann explores how economic forecasters produce legitimate and credible predictions of the economic future, despite most of the economy being transmutable and indeterminate. Meanwhile, in “Why we can be cautiously optimistic for the future of the retail industry”, Alan Treadgold explores the new retail landscape following the COVID-19 pandemic. Although there is unprecedented uncertainty for retail outlets, Treadgold argues “there are substantial opportunities for reinvention also.”

Music also has the power to enact social healing and transformation following crises. In their chapter “Unchained Melody: The Rise of Orality and Therapeutic Singing”, June Boyce-Tillman explores therapeutic approaches to singing, finding that “singing has the ability to strengthen people physically and emotionally,” which brings “individuals and communities together in order to provide healing at the deepest level.”

SHAPE research

SHAPE research is an essential component of all societies and will be critical for rebuilding from the global COVID-19 crisis. In “Humanities of transformation: From crisis and critique towards the emerging integrative humanities”, Sverker Sörlin evaluates the efforts to enhance and incentivize the humanities in the among Nordic countries in the last quarter century, finding a far richer and more complex image of quality in the humanities following structural education reform in 1990.

Meanwhile, Jack Spaapen and Gunnar Sivertsen assess the societal impact of SHAPE subjects, arguing that the social sciences and humanities have an obligation to assist the main challenges faced by people and governments.

As governments, universities, and research institutions consider where and how they focus their efforts as the world tentatively begins to explore the idea of recovery, the range of research that we’ve gathered here demonstrates that, while science and technology must play a crucial role, a recovery without SHAPE will be no recovery at all.

Featured image by Ryoji Iwata via Unsplash

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Archaeology, architecture, and “Romanizing” Athens

The question of whether Athens was a Greek or Roman city seems straightforward, but among scholars there is some debate. While initially, and still geographically, a Greek city, the influence of the Roman Empire on Athens’ architecture, beginning in the first century BC with Pompey the Great, has led some scholars to classify it, architecturally, as a Roman provincial city. Pompey’s donation of fifty talents in 62BC was said to have financed a “bazaar” to display goods in the Piraeus (the harbor and center of economic activity) and perhaps the 12-meter tall Tower of the Winds (now restored), which was a horologion (timepiece) and, arguably, the world’s first meteorological station. Julius Caesar gave another fifty talents, which saw work begin on the Roman Agora, a project finished in the Augustan era thanks to yet another monetary donation, this time from Augustus himself.

This Roman Agora was nowhere near as extensive as the Athenian one, but its ruins show it was impressive, with a monumental gateway at its entrance (still standing today). Augustus went further though. He commissioned a temple of the goddess Roma and himself in front of the Parthenon on the Acropolis, with statues of himself (and perhaps other members of the imperial family) as well as the goddess Roma, and most likely housing the imperial cult. Later emperors followed suit. Claudius likely funded a marble stairway to the Propylaea of the Acropolis, and in Nero’s reign the theater of Dionysus was rebuilt.

It was not only rulers who built in Athens. Agrippa (Augustus’ son-in-law and righthand man) added a massive Odeum (theater), able to seat one thousand people, in the old Athenian Agora, which dwarfed all the other buildings around it. At some point in Trajan’s reign a certain Titus Flavius Pantaenus built what is often called a library in the Athenian Agora, though it was a grander monument than just a library as it included outer Stoas and a peristyle (an open-colonnade area).

But it was Hadrian who embarked on the most ambitious building program, which outdid that of Augustus and even Pericles in the fifth century or Lycurgus in the fourth. Hadrian had made Athens the cultural center of the Roman Empire by creating a league of Greek cities of the east with Athens at its center, called the Panhellenion. He wanted to beautify the city as befitted its new status. Thanks to him the massive temple of Olympian Zeus was completed (whose giant columns today rear to the sky); a temple of Hera and Zeus Panhellenius was built; as was a splendid library (with 100 columns) that also included gardens and colonnades; a gymnasium; and an aqueduct, to name but a few.

The archaeological remains of these buildings testify to their size and design and add to the notion that Athens had been turned into a provincial city. The new agora, for example, had some Greek architectural designs, but there was no mistaking Roman influence, such as the enclosed large marble-paved square with shops and halls on all four sides, and the later addition of a statue of Lucius Caesar atop its gate effectively turned it into a Roman triumphal arch. Agrippa’s Odeum also had Greek architectural elements to it (a Corinthian façade and capitals), but it was based on a smaller theater at Pompeii. And Hadrian’s library was probably modeled on the temple of Peace at Rome, with its library, art gallery, and garden. Reflective of these physical changes—and surely supporting the notion of the Romanizing of Athens—is the famous Arch of Hadrian, which the Athenians erected to him as a thanks offering in AD 132 (and still standing). It bore two inscriptions, one of which seems to speak volumes: “This is the city of Hadrian, and not of Theseus” (the mythical founder of Athens).

There is no doubt Athens was physically changing. But that does not mean the city was being completely Romanized—the archaeological and architectural evidence is misleading and must be considered alongside the other anthropological knowledge available. Athens sprawled out quite a distance as it was the largest city in Greece, and it had monuments all over it—the vast majority stretching back to the classical era. Even the extensive building programs of Augustus and Hadrian did not suddenly transform the city skyline into a Roman one. The circular temple of the goddess Roma and Augustus on the Acropolis was only about eight meters in diameter and nine high, but, standing in front of the Parthenon as it did, it would have been dwarfed by that great temple to Athena. The sheer size of the Roman Odeum made its Roman presence impossible to miss, but it did not take up the entire Agora, nor did it put an end to people going there to do business, gather and talk about life and current affairs (as they had for centuries)—and appreciate all the Greek monuments there.

From the latter half of the first century BC increasing Roman involvement in Athens was evident in the numbers of Romans visiting, studying, and living there, and then the building activities. Rome impacted Athens for certain but did not cause the city to lose its “Greekness” and become a provincial one. The extent to which Roman architecture altered Athens has been exaggerated.

We should remember that the inscription “This is the city of Hadrian, and not of Theseus” on Hadrian’s Arch faces the direction of the temple of Olympian Zeus and reflects the focal point of Hadrian’s Panhellenion, headed by Athens. But there was also another inscription on that arch, this one facing what had been, and would always be, the citadel and sacred center of the city the Acropolis; this inscription (only a few feet from its “pro-Roman counterpart”) proudly proclaimed it to all: “This is Athens, the ancient city of Theseus.”

Featured image by Josiah Lewis via Pexels

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On SHAPE: a Q&A with Lucy Noakes, Eyal Poleg, Laura Wright & Mary Kelly

OUP have recently announced our support for the newly created SHAPE initiative—Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy. To further understand the crucial role these subjects play in our everyday lives, we have put three questions to four British Academy SHAPE authors and editors—social and cultural historian Lucy Noakes, historian of objects and faith Eyal Poleg, historical sociolinguist Laura Wright, and Lecturer in Contemporary Art History Mary Kelly—on what SHAPE means to them, and to their research.

SHAPE subjects are well-named—they help us shape the world we live in and the future we’re building. What distinctive potential and skills do you think Arts and Humanities and Social Science disciplines bring to the lives of those learning them, as well as to society?

Lucy Noakes: I think that these disciplines, though they vary widely in approaches and methods used, all have one essential element in common: they help our students to learn how to be effective, engaged, and critical citizens. For example, the pernicious nature of “fake news” today, from the wilder extremes of QANON fantasists to the advice circulating on social media suggesting that people can protect themselves from COVID-19 by inhaling steam or drinking hot water with lemon juice, can be harmful to both individuals and to wider societies. SHAPE students learn to be active and participatory readers and listeners. A student researching an essay topic will ask: who is arguing this? Why? What is their evidence? Where was it published? They also learn how to develop arguments based on evidence, not opinion—crucial skills in today’s world.

Eyal Poleg: Critical thinking and the ability to reflect on events, past and present, are vital for our existence as a dynamic and pluralistic society. Our students learn how to analyse sources, be they written accounts, artwork, mundane objects, or buildings. These skills are invaluable in becoming active and engaged citizens within modern society, especially in the face of empty rhetoric and fake news. Their ability to clearly communicate complex ideas is likewise instrumental in shaping the world we live in. History does not simply repeat itself, but, by learning about past societies, we gain a better understanding of the nature of our own, and of possible future directions.

Laura Wright: I’m a word-historian so I’ll give a specific answer with regard to my discipline: looking at how people used language in the past holds a mirror up to who we are now. For example, names Alice, Emma, Joan, John, Katherine, Margery, Peter, Richard, Robert, Thomas, William entered English via the Anglo-Norman language and knocked out the Old English namestock of Beowulf, Cyneheard, Ealdraed, Frithuswith, Ohthere. So, if you are called Alice or John you signal to the world at large that your parents were members of the Anglo-Norman family. But they might not have known it or thought of it that way: Alice or John might have just sounded suitable for a baby—traditional, not too outlandish. Society and its traditions shape us and the choices we make and studying SHAPE subjects causes us to question those assumptions—and in the case of historians, track them back to their source.

Mary Kelly: Students and scholars of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences open important questions about, for example, human difference and why people maintain certain belief systems over others. Students are encouraged to analyse, to be critical, to be diplomatic, to challenge when required, and to think creatively when locating solutions. The Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences exist in the service of human development, always enhancing our quality of life.

For example, in 2016, University College Cork became the first Irish-based university to formally integrate modern and contemporary art from the Middle East and North Africa into its History of Art curricula. The teaching philosophy, which underpins the building of my courses, is to create an awareness among students about the current decentred world as well as our responsibility to equip students (potential future leaders) with robust cross-cultural competencies through innovative practices in teaching and learning. Our students are gaining valuable skills and insights which will galvanise them to engage with challenging conversations relating to human difference. Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences disciplines are actively enhancing human diplomacy.

As a SHAPE researcher, how are your concerns and needs different from your colleagues in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)?

Lucy Noakes: There is perhaps more in common between STEM and SHAPE subjects than we might first think. The key, and most important, similarity would be that we all work with evidence; it is just as important that a historian build their analysis based on the evidence available as an engineer or a biochemist, even though the outcomes might be very different. I would also argue that the overwhelming majority of academic research, across all subjects, is shaped by the historical context, concerns, needs, and values of the time and place in which we work. But perhaps the biggest difference is that in SHAPE we have more space for the development of arguments and perspectives—while 2 + 2 will always equal 4 in mathematics, historians’ analyses of a subject like the Second World War are endlessly varied and ever-changing. For me, this is a huge part of SHAPE’s appeal.

Eyal Poleg: STEM colleagues often pursue innovation, looking for ever more advance technologies, for ways of improving our quality of life and of understanding the natural world. SHAPE disciplines, on the other hand, tend to be more reflective, taking into account past accomplishments, and thinking more clearly about why and how should progress be made. This being said, I do not think of our work in opposition. Much of my recent research has been in collaboration with scientists, employing cutting-edge technologies in the analysis of historical objects. The two perspectives complement one another, with SHAPE defining the historical questions and STEM providing new means of answering them. At best, such collaboration contributes to both disciplines, unearthing hitherto unknown information about historical objects and learning about the past, on the one hand, while finding new uses for innovative technologies, on the other.

Laura Wright: What I need is historical text, and I suppose STEM researchers don’t—but in terms of research questions, we’re probably not very different. As a historical linguist I study creative literary texts as well as other kinds, but so do clinicians and scientists concerned with the brain, because people spend a lot of time talking about imaginary states—what might happen, what could happen, as well as what does happen. Whatever humans do ends up expressed in language, one way or another, and much of my source material consists of historic STEM text—people inventing things, in particular.  For example, the term pickled salmon was correlated with the London poor in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries as it was what they ate, sold from street barrows. Then the tin can was invented in 1813, pickled salmon was replaced, and the poor turned to tins, with the term tinned salmon having connotations of “working-class” for a century or so.

Mary Kelly: SHAPE and STEM address major societal challenges, however in very different ways. In addition, SHAPE researchers’ empirical and analytical needs, as well as divergent and convergent thinking processes, differ greatly to those applied in STEM.

In order for us to truly maximise the impact of STEM ideas and technologies, public and private sectors must engage with the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences in order to understand how human groups and individuals are formed and how they behave, produce, evolve, and co-exist.

Right now, however, the most urgent need for the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences is the need for fair and adequate financial resources for SHAPE research and development. SHAPE research is undervalued by many in the public and private sectors: this is clearly evident from the limited funding and support which the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences receive from numerous funding bodies and in the education system.

SHAPE subjects are hugely diverse, but they do share a focus on understanding more about people and societies, and what it is to be human. How does your research go about investigating these concepts? How do you see your work contributing to and informing these broader discussions?

Lucy Noakes: My most recent work has been on death and grief in Second World War Britain, and on the insights that approaches to the past that are attuned to the emotional lives of those we study can bring to our understanding of what it might be like to live through and navigate crises and changes that feel out of our control. I have been struck again and again this year by how much our experiences of fear, loss, and changes to our day to day lives have shaped my students and my own understandings of the lives of those who experienced total war. I also have a new awareness of the changes that the crisis of war helped to bring about in Britain, particularly the creation of the Welfare State at the war’s end. If only we listen, history has a lot to teach us about not only how societies manage crises, but about how we can use these moments of rupture to rethink our priorities, and how we want to live.

Find out more about Lucy’s recently published title, Total War, edited alongside Claire Langhamer and Claudia Siebrecht.

Eyal Poleg: My earlier work has explored how people engaged with the Bible in the Middle Ages, demonstrating a reliance on mediated access, surprisingly similar to knowledge of people and events of the Bible among secular societies nowadays. More recently I have studied hundreds of manuscripts and early printed Bibles to trace continuity and change across three and a half centuries, reevaluating the impact of print and Reformation on English religion. This perspective enabled me to unearth the long and complex process of innovation and change. Some features familiar to us, such as chapter division, took centuries to implement, very gradually moving from the nascent universities, through nunneries and chapels, to be embraced by lay women and men. The parish Bible, an early modern innovation, was first met with confusion and uncertainty. Understanding the limits of innovation, and putting things we take for granted in new perspective, helps us better understand our own society, past, present and future.

Find out more about Eyal’s recently published title, A Material History of the Bible, England 1200-1553.

Laura Wright: Well I research things we tend to take for granted, and one of these is house-names.  Humans need shelter. Humans give things names. Numbering houses is modern—18th century—but house-names are old. The ubiquitous house-name “Sunnyside” started as a medieval Scottish legal term in dividing up farm land, and then became an 18th-century English house-name particularly used by Quakers—ceasing to be a legal term and becoming a cultural marker, insider-code for “a Quaker lives here.” Certain Quakers and Nonconformists became extremely rich and their Sunnysides were mansions, and American author Washington Irving, visiting Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford in the Borders borrowed the name of a nearby farm called Sunnyside and named his highly-influential New York mansion Sunnyside too. There’s more to the story, but who influences who linguistically shows how culture spreads, and all humans are shaped by their culture. It’s good to be aware of one’s prejudices.

Find out more about Laura’s recently published title, Sunnyside.

Mary Kelly: My current research project looks beyond the purely European canon of historical Orientalist art objects to explore contemporary artistic responses from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). I argue that this approach will further contextualise art objects as being an important part of an ongoing, reciprocal socio-cultural dialogue between the global north and south. Specifically, I work in the space between 19th- and 20th-century European Orientalism and 21st-century responses to Orientalism from women artists located in various Middle Eastern and North African countries. Many historical and contemporary women artists from across the globe address the conflicting experiences of female identities and—through their art—they are “speaking back” to local, national and international marginalising views which present stereotypical ideas of oppressed or powerless women. I engage with Transnational Feminism in my work because it is rooted in the local and translocal experiences of women—after which women’s narratives cross “borders” in order to create meaningful conversations and collaborations internationally. My work evokes themes such as Orientalism, gender, female agency, female oppression, religion, heritage, diaspora, and difference all for the purpose of:

1. bringing art made by women to the fore.
2. the decolonisation of the History of Art.
3. using art to galvanise meaningful cross-cultural and transnational discourse about women in various societies.

Art builds progressive and positive bridges between different people.

Find out more about Mary’s recently published title, Under the Skin, edited alongside Ceren Özpınar.

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What can neuroscience tell us about the mind of a serial killer?

Serial killers—people who repeatedly murder others—provoke revulsion but also a certain amount of fascination in the general public. But what can modern psychology and neuroscience tell us about what might be going on inside the head of such individuals?

Serial killers characteristically lack empathy for others, coupled with an apparent absence of guilt about their actions. At the same time, many can be superficially charming, allowing them to lure potential victims into their web of destruction. One explanation for such cognitive dissonance is that serial killers are individuals in whom two minds co-exist—one a rational self, able to successfully navigate the intricacies of acceptable social behaviour and even charm and seduce, the other a far more sinister self, capable of the most unspeakable and violent acts against others. This view has been a powerful stimulus in fictional portrayals ranging from Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, to Hitchcock’s Psycho, and a more recent film, Split. Yet there is little evidence that real-life serial killers suffer from dissociative identity disorder (DID), in which an individual has two or more personalities cohabiting in their mind, apparently unaware of each other.

Instead, DID is a condition more associated with victims, rather than perpetrators, of abuse, who adopt multiple personalities as a way of coming to terms with the horrors they have encountered. Of course a perpetrator of abuse may also be a victim, and many serial killers were abused as children, but in general they appear not to be split personalities, but rather people conscious of their acts. Despite this, there is surely a dichotomy in the minds of such individuals perhaps best personified by US killer Ted Bundy, who was a “charming, handsome, successful individual [yet also] a sadist, necrophile, rapist, and murderer with zero remorse who took pride in his ability to successfully kill and evade capture.”

One puzzling aspect of serial killers’ minds is the fact that they appear to lack—or can override—the emotional responses that in other people allows us to identify the pain and suffering of other humans as similar to our own, and empathise with that suffering. A possible explanation of this deficit was identified in a recent brain imaging study. This showed that criminal psychopaths had decreased connectivity between the amygdala—a brain region that processes negative stimuli and those that give rise to fearful reactions—and the prefrontal cortex, which interprets responses from the amygdala. When connectivity between these two regions is low, processing of negative stimuli in the amygdala does not translate into any strongly felt negative emotions. This may explain why criminal psychopaths do not feel guilty about their actions, or sad when their victims suffer.

Yet serial killers also seem to possess an enhanced emotional drive that leads to an urge to hurt and kill other human beings. This apparent contradiction in emotional responses still needs to be explained at a neurological level. At the same time, we should not ignore social influences as important factors in the development of such contradictory impulses. It seems possible that serial killers have somehow learned to view their victims as purely an object to be abused, or even an assembly of unconnected parts. This might explain why some killers have sex with dead victims, or even turn their bodies into objects of utility or decoration, but it does not explain why they seem so driven to hurt and kill their victims. One explanation for the latter phenomenon is that many serial killers are insecure individuals who feel compelled to kill due to a morbid fear of rejection. In many cases, the fear of rejection seems to result from having been abandoned or abused by a parent. Such fear may compel a fledgling serial killer to want to eliminate any objects of their affections. They may come to believe that by destroying the person they desire, they can eliminate the possibility of being abandoned, humiliated, or otherwise hurt, as they were in childhood.

Serial killers also appear to lack a sense of social conscience. Through our parents, siblings, teachers, peers, and other individuals who influence us as we grow up, we learn to distinguish right from wrong. It is this that inhibits us from engaging in anti-social behaviour. Yet serial killers seem to feel they are exempt from the most important social sanction of all—not taking another person’s life. For instance, Richard Ramirez, named the “Night Stalker” by the media, claimed at his trial that “you don’t understand me. You are not expected to. You are not capable of it. I am beyond your experience. I am beyond good and evil … I don’t believe in the hypocritical, moralistic dogma of this so-called civilized society.” 

It remains far from clear why a few people react to abuse or trauma at an earlier stage in their lives by later becoming a serial killer. But hopefully new insights into the psychological or neurological basis of their actions may in the future help us to identify potential future such killers and dissuade them from committing such horrendous crimes.

Featured image via Pixabay

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Margaret Mead by the numbers

The life of anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-1978) spanned decades, continents, and academic conversations. Fellow anthropologist Clifford Geertz compared the task of summarizing her to “trying to inscribe the Bible—or perhaps the Odyssey—on the head of a pin. She escapes most categories and mocks the rest.” One way to sketch the outlines of this big picture is to highlight a few numbers:

11

At the age of 11, Margaret Mead, against the wishes of her non-religious parents, chose to be baptized into the Episcopal Church. She called it “one of the happiest days of my life.”

23

Aged 23, Mead set out, alone, for Samoa, where she undertook her first field work. The book she published based on her study of adolescent girls, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), sold millions of copies and made her an immediate, and controversial, star in the nascent field of anthropology.

55

Fifty-five years after the publication of Coming of Age, another anthropologist, Derek Freeman, published a book purporting to expose Mead’s work as a myth. Freeman had borne a grudge against Mead for decades but waited until after her death to challenge her. His alleged debunking was subsequently debunked itself, but not before conservative culture warriors seized on the narrative that Mead was a fraud, therefore the sexual revolution that she helped set in motion should never have happened.

At least six

Mead had at least six significant romantic relationships over the course of her life. This includes her three marriages (to Luther Cressman, Reo Fortune, and Gregory Bateson); two long-term, same-sex partnerships (with Ruth Benedict and Rhoda Metraux); and one significant affair (with Edward Sapir). All of these partners were fellow anthropologists, except for her first husband, Cressman, an Episcopal priest who left the priesthood for a career in sociology.

One

One child born to Mead, Mary Catherine Bateson. In accordance with her father’s wishes (Gregory cabled from England “Do Not Christen”), Cathy was not baptized as an infant but was allowed, as her mother had been, to choose her own religion. She elected to join the Episcopal Church and become a social scientist. Mead and her daughter collaborated on liturgical renewal projects, including revisions to the rite of baptism for the 1979 US Book of Common Prayer.

Cathy was also the first “Spock baby.” Mead chose then-unknown Dr Benjamin Spock as Cathy’s pediatrician because he supported Mead’s desire to have a natural childbirth and feed her baby on demand. Spock’s landmark Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946) drew on observations of Mead’s parenting style, which in turn drew on her fieldwork in the South Pacific, as well as her ethical commitment to free individuals from suffocating cultural norms.

16

There are 16 theological essays in the book Twentieth Century Faith: Hope and Survival (1972), Mead’s volume in the Religious Perspectives series, edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen. Although volumes in the series written by other authors, including Karl Barth and Paul Tillich, became well-known classics, Mead’s book is almost entirely unknown. Her essays addressed such topics as Christian uses of technology, urban development, birth control, aging, and the right to die.

108

Mead, working with Rhoda Metraux, published 108 columns in Redbook magazine between 1962 and 1978. Most of the columns followed a Q&A format, and topics ranged from abortion to UFOs. As anthropologist Paul Shankman noted in the journal Current Anthropology, “No other anthropologist has had this kind of public forum or done so much with it.”

1,397

A total of 1,397 print publications listed in Margaret Mead: The Complete Bibliography, 1925-1975, edited by Joan Gordan. The bibliography is not, in fact, complete, as Mead kept writing until her death in 1978. The bibliography also lists 30 audio recordings (including A Rap on Race, Mead’s 1972 conversation with James Baldwin) and 13 video recordings (including the landmark 1952 documentary “Trance and Dance in Bali.”).

More than 530,000

There are more than 530,000 items in the Margaret Mead Papers and the South Pacific Ethnographic Archives, the largest collection in the Library of Congress. The finding aid alone runs to nearly 400 single-spaced pages.

Seven

Seven words on her tombstone, which reads, “To cherish the life of the world.” This was one of her signature phrases when she attempted to communicate the purpose of human existence on an interconnected planet. As she wrote in a 1960 essay that used the phrase in its title, “Only if we are able to love—in the sense of cherish and protect, although not agree with—those who are our enemies, while they are our enemies, can we hope to protect the lives of men and the life of the world.” A renowned expert on babies and parenting, as well as a committed, liberal Christian, she could conceive no higher ambition than to make the world safe for other people’s children.

Featured image via Wikimedia

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SHAPE today and tomorrow: Q&A with Sophie Goldsworthy and Julia Black (part two)

SHAPE (Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities for People and the Economy) research helps us to make sense of the past, to inform the present, and develop a vision for the future. Considering the last year alone in which the vital work of STEM researchers in developing vaccines and treating COVID-19 has been closely followed across the globe, it is also important to acknowledge that SHAPE research has played an important role in our response to the pandemic. From considering ethics to inform how vaccines should be allocated amongst the population, to looking back at the societal and economic impact of pandemics through history, SHAPE research has provided us with valuable insights across a vast spectrum of different areas.

This second part of our Q&A with Sophie Goldsworthy, Director of Content Strategy & Acquisitions at OUP, and Professor Julia Black CBE FCA, Strategic Director of Innovation and Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and President-elect of the British Academy, reflects on how SHAPE disciplines can help us to understand the impact of the events of the pandemic and look towards the future of SHAPE.

In part one of our Q&A with Sophie Goldsworthy and Professor Julia Black, they introduce SHAPE and what it means to them—if you missed it, you can read it here.

In the current context of the coronavirus pandemic, how can SHAPE subjects help us make sense of how the last year has impacted us and the world in which we live?

Sophie Goldsworthy: The last year has been testing in many ways. But we might turn to SHAPE subjects as we start to evaluate what life looks like after the pandemic, assessing the human impact, finding new ways to connect, and working out how to salvage the best of what we have been left with.

SHAPE subjects can help us start to understand where we are now and drive innovative solutions. We can draw on what these subjects tell us as we endeavour to improve on the inclusivity of our virtual networks; and to figure out how we retain balance in our ways of working and flexibility around our caring and other social responsibilities; and as we think again about how we might inhabit global city spaces and reimagine transport networks with sustainability and environmental impacts in mind. Scientists tell us that birdsong changed during the shutdowns, that wild animals moved quickly to inhabit the spaces we vacated, that air quality improved as transport ground to a halt. SHAPE subjects can help us to think about the ways in which we learn from and build on this enforced hiatus.

Julia Black: It’s difficult to think of a single area where SHAPE subjects don’t help us make sense of how COVID has impacted us and where they won’t be relevant in thinking about the future. The enforced lockdown of the world’s population has been a natural experiment of a scale no policy maker would never have volunteered to undertake, but our clearer skies, quieter roads, and noisier wildlife have made us all acutely aware of the impact our ways of living were having on our planet, and to the vulnerabilities to which we are thereby exposing ourselves as well.

We have turned to literature and, virtually at least, to the arts to provide us with solace, enrichment, entertainment, and sheer relief. We have turned to history for insights into how societies in the past have been fundamentally changed due to pandemics and to philosophy for reflections on how we want our societies to be. As we re-think how we will live, how we will travel, how we will work, insights from anthropology, geography, economics, psychology, politics, literature, design, architecture, and art, to name but a few, will all be essential.

We also face other challenges which COVID has revealed or exacerbated: to equality and inclusivity, to democracy and to human rights, to the shifting imbalances in power within societies and across nations. And meanwhile the need to address climate change and enhance biodiversity are becoming ever more pressing. Ultimately SHAPE subjects help us imagine and evaluate what kind of world we want to live in, and what kind of life we want to have.

The pandemic has undoubtedly had a profound impact on universities and the student experience. Why should prospective students choose to study a SHAPE subject, and what unique skills do you think SHAPE graduates bring to the workforce?

SG: SHAPE graduates are highly employable, bringing a wealth of skills to the workforce, and prospective students might be attracted to these subjects for the same reasons. They help us make sense of the human experience and develop our capacity for critical thinking and communication. They encourage problem solving, creativity, and curiosity, and help graduates approach a question from many angles, working collaboratively and with empathy. In a world beset by challenges, among them not only the pandemic, but climate change, structural inequalities, the rise of populism in some quarters and nationalism in others, SHAPE graduates are central to the development of the versatile, resilient workforce that will help us respond to these challenges, identify future opportunities, and nurture innovation.

JB: Studying SHAPE subjects provides both knowledge and skills which are valuable to all aspects of society, whether a person is working in a business or the public sector, or for a charity, or in the voluntary sector, or as a freelancer, or an entrepreneur. Some of the subjects have more direct application than others, such as law, finance, journalism, languages, education, design, or the arts, but in different ways all provide knowledge of how to analyse complex problems, interpret and integrate information and ideas, test the strength of competing arguments, see things from another’s point of view, create new inspirations and forms of expression, and understand how and why context matters.  Many of the skills of analysis, rigour, interpretation and creativity can be learned studying either SHAPE or STEM subjects, but it is their focus on the human world which helps those who study SHAPE understand people and the societies they live in, and the values they live by.

Where do you see SHAPE in the future? How do you think these fields of study might change?

SG: Just as we think about SHAPE and STEM as complementing each other, so we’re seeing an increasing move towards interdisciplinarity within SHAPE subjects, both in the academy—with university trends including the amalgamation of departments and interdisciplinary research programmes—and in our publishing programme, with multi-disciplinary content one of our fastest growing areas. Our disciplinary analysis shows a fascinating web of connections between subjects, showing how our existing content clusters and is used online, and we’re excited to explore this more at OUP, developing our acquisitions approach to reflect changing practices within the academy and encourage emerging spheres of research, as these subjects aggregate to redefine fields of study.

JB: I think the SHAPE subjects are changing in three ways. The first is a growing inter- or multi-disciplinary engagement across SHAPE disciplines and with those of STEM, often focused around particular challenges or themes, such as health, climate change, or conservation. The second is the awareness that the languages of mathematics and computer codes can be used to interrogate questions which preoccupy social scientists and humanities scholars, just as they can those of physicists or biologists. Digital humanities and computational social sciences combine knowledge from languages, history, media and communications, economics, information studies, graphic design, computer sciences, data analytics, machine learning, AI, and more to analyse texts, music, or data on a scale which was previously unimaginable, providing powerful new insights. Thirdly, both SHAPE and STEM disciplines are adopting critical stances towards the other in ways which are, or have the potential, to change the way in which each are conducted: the challenge to social sciences to produce results which are replicable, verifiable, and falsifiable, for example; and the challenge to science and technology to be conducted in ways which are ethical, non-discriminatory, and which take into account their impact on societies. The core disciplinary pillars within SHAPE and STEM subjects remain strong, but increasingly we are seeing them combined in new and exciting ways.

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Introducing SHAPE: Q&A with Sophie Goldsworthy and Julia Black (part one)

OUP is excited to support the newly created SHAPE initiative—Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy. SHAPE has been coined to enable us to clearly communicate the value that these disciplines bring to not only enriching the world in which we live, but also enhancing our understanding of it. The contributions that SHAPE subjects make are more important now than ever as they can help us to navigate how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the global economy, dramatically altered our quotidian routines, and changed the way we communicate with one another, against the backdrop of climate change and urgent calls to address structural injustice.

In the first instalment this two-part Q&A, we spoke to Sophie Goldsworthy, Director of Content Strategy & Acquisitions here at OUP, and Professor Julia Black CBE FCA, Strategic Director of Innovation and Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and President-elect of the British Academy, to find out more about SHAPE and what it means to them.

Firstly, could you tell us a little bit about your background and current position, and what SHAPE means to you?

Sophie Goldsworthy: I’ve worked in publishing for approaching 30 years, 25 of them at OUP. My first role at the Press was on the Literature list and I currently run our humanities, social sciences, and trade programmes in the UK, as well as directing Oxford’s content strategy more broadly across the research publishing business.

At a time when the content needs of the university sector are evolving, leading to shifts in research publishing, my role is about developing our focus and building data and evidence into our approach to content acquisition, more closely aligning commissioning with what librarians, researchers, and readers want, and working to maximise the reach, impact, and amplification of the scholarship we publish.

Oxford is the world’s largest university press, and SHAPE subjects sit at the very heart of our offering, giving us breadth which in turn underlines a complementary view of the subjects. SHAPE gives us a better way to articulate that mutual, porous relationship, helps us move past an arts/sciences dichotomy to a place where each enhances and supports the other.

Julia Black: My academic interests span social sciences and humanities. I focus on how governments and other organisations regulate behaviours, systems, and processes to address complex problems, such as environmental management, or financial stability, or AI, and what values guide, or should guide, those processes. Given that problems are multi-dimensional, trying to address them requires engaging with technical, scientific aspects of the issues as well as the social and ethical elements. As my principal research questions are always centred around people and organisations, social sciences and humanities dominate, but for me, it seems quite natural to engage with several disciplines, across SHAPE and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), in order to understand and address the multiple dimensions of a problem.

I’ve also always worked quite fluidly across the worlds of academia and public policy, and I’m constantly struck by the huge reliance which government places on social science and humanities in seeking guidance and evidence for its policies, and yet the contribution those disciplines can make, and are making, is often under-recognised and under-valued. And when I look beyond policy to the vibrancy of the arts, the richness of literature, the diversity of our society, and even to the structure and dynamics of our economy, SHAPE subjects are everywhere. So for me SHAPE is a way to celebrate the value of social sciences, humanities, and the arts, and to demonstrate their relevance and value to ourselves and to society. It’s also to encourage people to study them, and to build meaningful lives and contribute to society using the knowledge and skills they gain in doing so. For we need them now, more than ever.

What are the benefits in bringing together the arts, humanities, and social sciences disciplines under the SHAPE umbrella?

SG: How we describe a thing has the potential to accord or diminish its power. At its heart, SHAPE offers us the opportunity to begin to tell the story of a set of subjects which might seem at first glance to be disparate. It allows us to draw together the ways in which they contribute value to society, helping us make sense of the human experience, develop our understanding of global issues, and work to find solutions.

JB: SHAPE is offering social sciences, humanities, and the arts their own descriptor, providing a coherence to a heterogenous set of subjects in a way which celebrates their diversity but emphasises what connects them: a focus on the human world—on people and societies across time and space.

It’s important to emphasise that we are not “setting up” social sciences, humanities, and the arts in opposition to STEM. SHAPE subjects have their own value which is on a par with STEM, they are just differently focused: on the human world, rather than the natural or physical worlds. There are areas within each where they operate largely separately, but if we want to understand how humans interact with the natural and physical world, then we need the insights gained from connecting both sets of disciplines. There are also opportunities to use the knowledge and insights from each to inform the other.

How can SHAPE and STEM disciplines complement each other in our pursuit of knowledge?

SG: The pandemic has reinforced how essential STEM subjects are, as we look to medical and technical solutions: witness only the breath-taking speed at which vaccines have been developed. But SHAPE disciplines complement STEM in myriad ways—and conversely leaving them out of the mix can have troubling implications.

We might need to draw on behavioural economics and “nudge” theory to help influence how people act, changing the message around mask wearing from “protect yourself” to “protect others,” for example. Or to take a holistic approach to data interpretation to circumnavigate structural inequalities, where the price we otherwise pay is a high one. The past year has been full of stories about “one size fits all” PPE that leaves female health workers poorly protected, or remote education initiatives that overlook those children for whom a school lunch provides the only meal of the day.

At its most straightforward, learning the stories of past pandemics can enlighten us in the present. How and why do conspiracy theories and misinformation proliferate in an outbreak, for example, and what should we learn as we navigate precisely that set of circumstances all over again in the rollout of a new vaccination programme.

JB: SHAPE subjects can complement STEM, and STEM subjects can complement SHAPE. In some cases, one discipline may be more in the lead than the other, but the synergies still exist. Some SHAPE subjects are through their approaches closer to STEM, for example in their use of quantitative and statistical methodologies and data analytics, and some directly cross the boundaries, such as mental health and wellbeing. However, we could do more to illustrate how STEM and SHAPE subjects can together enhance our knowledge, and what we create from that knowledge.

Some have asked why we aren’t satisfied with the term STEAM to describe this interaction. The answer is that STEAM focuses only on the interaction of art and design with STEM subjects, in other words it only looks at the “A” in SHAPE, not the “S” and the ”H.” Whilst art and design are hugely valuable to the design of products developed by technology, or as ways to visualise the natural and physical worlds, for example, there are many more benefits to be gained from the interaction of STEM disciplines across the social sciences, humanities and the arts. Changes in an ecosystem are frequently rooted in human behaviour; managing pandemics requires knowledge of history, cultures and behaviours, as well as economics and logistics; the search engines we have become so reliant on use natural language programming based on linguistics; and for science and technology to be legitimate it is imperative that it is developed and used in ways which are aligned with our ethics and values.

But these examples are the tip of the iceberg; there are multiple instances where the insights of each enhances the other, and it is often when they are combined that truly transformative developments in our knowledge, understanding, innovation, and creativity can occur.

Read part two of our Q&A, in which Sophie Goldsworthy and Professor Julia Black discuss the importance of SHAPE today in light of the pandemic, and how consider how it may evolve in the future.

Featured image by Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

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Moving beyond toxic masculinity: a Q&A with Ronald Levant

In 2018, the American Psychological Association released its first ever Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men. At the time of the release, these guidelines were met with criticism by some who viewed them as pathologizing masculinity, but since the guidelines were released the discussion of “toxic masculinity” has spread to all areas of our society and culture. Ronald F. Levant has served as president of American Psychological Association as well as president of the association’s Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinities. Levant has been a leader in the research on the psychology of men. We spoke with him about how traditional masculinity ideology is conceptualized by psychologists, how it plays out in our society, and why it’s important from a psychological standpoint to move beyond the concept of toxic masculinity.

Sarah Butcher: You observe that the feminist movement opened up more options for girls and women to express their identity but that there was no corresponding movement for men. Why do you think that is?

Ronald Levant: In the 1960’s amid the civil rights and LGBTQ movements, women decided once again (think of the suffrage movement) to address their oppression.  The result is what is called second wave feminism. Over the 70s to the 90s many men felt defensive in the face of women’s newfound assertiveness, resulting in what was then called a masculinity crisis (think Bridges over Madison County). This led to several different types of movements. One that gained prominence was the mythopoetic movement (remember Robert Bly and Iron John?), which did help some men become more comfortable with their emotions but was also was suffused with misogyny. Others like the Promise Keepers and the Men’s Rights Organization were even more blatantly misogynistic. What we advocate is a movement that is inspired by the ideals of gender equality, one that would help men ditch the burdens of dominance, and teach men that they can be men without the trappings of masculinity.

SB: You coined the term Traditional Masculinity Ideology—how do you define it, and how do you see it playing out in the lives of men?

RL: The most current definition is the holistic set of beliefs about how boys and men should, and should not, think, feel and behave. As far as current research is concerned, we’re typically looking at seven sets of prescriptive and proscriptive norms–avoidance of femininity; negativity toward sexual minorities; self-reliance through mechanical skills, toughness, dominance, importance of sex, and restrictive emotionality.

SB: Do you see any biological component to masculinity, or is it entirely socially constructed?

RL: There may be a biological basis to masculinity, but I am not aware of any solid support for this proposition. More importantly, we are psychologists not biologists, and we study masculinity as a social and psychological phenomenon.

SB: In recent decades, men have begun shouldering more of the burden of domestic labor and childrearing (although far from an equal share). Why does that pose a challenge to traditional masculinity ideology?

RL: Good questions. It poses a challenge to traditional masculinity ideology because it violates the avoid all things feminine norm, because childcare (and nurturance in general) is considered feminine.

SB: Research has shown that men have a harder time expressing (and even naming) their emotions. Why is that and what are the consequences for themselves and others?

RL: Decades ago, I noticed this in my work in the Boston University Fatherhood Project, and curiosity drove me to study the emotion socialization research literature in developmental psychology. Boys start out life more emotionally expressive than girls as neonates and retain this advantage over the first year of life, but from ages two to six—due to the childhood socialization of emotions, in which boys are made to feel ashamed of themselves for expressing vulnerable and caring emotions—many lose this expressive ability. This study formed the base for my normative male alexithymia hypothesis. “Alexithymia” means no words for emotions. My hypothesis is that socialization guided by traditional masculinity ideology, and in particular the norm of restrictive emotionality, produces a mild form of alexithymia in men, who cannot give a good account of their inner lives. This has enormous implications for relationships, stress management, and mental health. I later developed a treatment for such men called Alexithymia Reduction Treatment.

SB: As you argue, most violence is committed by men, yet most men aren’t violent. What is it that leads a minority of men to engage in violent behavior, and what role does traditional masculinity ideology play?

RL: This is a good question. The short answer is that we don’t know why some men are violent and others are not. Various theories have been proposed, with social-situational factors having more weight than personality factors. What we do know is:

• The vast majority of boys and men are not violent.
• The vast majority of adult men do not endorse traditional masculinity ideology.
• There are literally 40 + years of research showing correlations between all of the masculinity scales and harmful outcomes, and many of these are related to violence.
• We think that the correlation is due to the boys and men who score at the very high end of these scales. Thus, high endorsement of or conformity to the norms of traditional masculinity is associated with rape myth acceptance, disdain for racial and sexual minorities, or aggression, for example.

SB: What role does traditional masculinity ideology play in sexual violence, ranging from sexual harassment to rape?

RL: Based on the avoid femininity norm, boys prefer playing with other boys rather than girls, and thus rarely get to know girls as persons. In puberty boys become very interested in girls, but as sex objects. Objectifying women is at the very foundation of sexual violence.

SB: You also examine different versions of masculinity ideology such as African American masculinity and Latinx masculinity. How can the theory of intersectionality help us understand these different masculinities?

RL: The theory of intersectionality says that our overall identity and sense of self is a composite of a number of specific identities that may relate to our race/ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, age cohort, etc. So, for example, African American men have to fulfil the requirements of the male role (e.g., providing for one’s family) impeded by racism, which has reduced educational and employment opportunities for black men.

SB: What is the role of traditional masculinity in mental and physical health?

RL: Traditional masculinity ideology emphasizes toughness, self-reliance and never revealing vulnerability. In the areas of physical and mental health this translates into taking health risks, not seeking professional help when needed, and relying on alcohol for stress reduction.

SB: Based on your clinical experience, what are some of the most effective techniques for men who want to escape the prison of traditional masculinity ideology?

RL: The most effective techniques I have found is helping men who are unable to verbalize their emotions to learn how to do that, to open up their hearts to their families. This often involves first dealing with their fears that this will somehow emasculate them, strip them of their ‘man card,’ and along the way dealing with their sense of shame resulting from violating the male code.

SB: What role do fathers play in the propagation of traditional masculinity ideology, and what are some tips for fathers wishing to model a more gender-neutral approach?

RL: The “essential father hypothesis” posits that the father’s essential role is to model masculinity and heterosexuality for his sons. Although this idea has been largely discredited in academia it is still very prominent among the public. A better alternative is the involved father role, in which dads share parenting duties equally with their female partners.

Featured image by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash.

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It’s time for the government to introduce food rationing

The current COVID-19 emergency has much to interest students of politics. Does it demonstrate that authoritarian regimes are able to tackle a pandemic rather more easily and efficiently than liberal democracies? Given the origin of the virus, what does it tell us about our relationship with non-human nature? Is the pandemic a product of globalization? What does it tell us about population size and density? What does it tell us about the nature of politics itself?

Perhaps the most significant factor for students of politics is the role of the state. Ironically, in the United Kingdom, the arrival of the virus has achieved, in terms of the state’s reach, more than even the most ardent Corbynite could have dreamt about. Not only has the state intervened to shore up the economy – by, most notably, agreeing to pay a significant part of the wages of those economically disadvantaged by the health emergency – it has also taken unparalleled measures to control our everyday movements.

Arguably, though, the state should do more.

One of the most pervasive images of the present COVID-19 emergency has been the panic buying and stockpiling of food and toiletries. Rather oddly, when state intervention and control has become the norm, the state has not sought to formally ration supermarket produce. Instead the accent has been on the moral dimension. Those who have stripped our supermarket shelves of food and toiletries have been described, amongst other things, as selfish, greedy, ignorant, and immoral. The government has sought to reassure people that there is more than enough to go around and has appealed to their better nature – be reasonable when you shop, think about what you are depriving others of.

In actual fact, stockpiling has nothing to do with moral character but has everything to do with a collective action problem identified by rational choice theory. Rational choice approaches to politics and social organisation have become an increasingly important branch of the social sciences. Following a deductive logic, the (reasonable) assumptions made are that human beings are essentially rational, utility maximisers who will follow the path of action most likely to benefit them (and their families). This approach has been used in game theory where individual behaviour is applied to particular situations. This reveals how difficult it can be for rational individuals to reach optimal outcomes. That is people might not cooperate even when it is in their best interests to do so.

This collective action problem can be illustrated by the classic rational choice instrument, the prisoner’s dilemma. In this scenario, two people suspected of being involved in a robbery are arrested and interviewed separately in a police station. There is insufficient evidence to convict the pair of robbery but there is enough evidence to convict them of a lesser charge, whatever that may be. The suspects have a choice put to them by the police, to either keep quiet or to betray the other with different penalties imposed depending on their choice. Three outcomes are possible.

The first outcome is that both suspects keep quiet. As a result, they each receive a sentence of one year in prison (on the lesser charge). The second is that both betray each other. As a result, they each receive a sentence of two years in prison. The third outcome is that one suspect betrays the other whereas the other suspect keeps quiet. As a result, the suspect who betrays gets set free whilst the suspect who keeps quiet gets three years in prison.

In this scenario, each prisoner gets a higher reward by betraying the other rather than cooperating (staying silent), even though the optimum solution would be to cooperate. So, one of the prisoners (Prisoner A) has a choice whether to stay silent and cooperate or betray his fellow prisoner. If he cooperates and stays silent his fellow prisoner should betray and therefore be set free. If Prisoner A betrays, his fellow prisoner should also betray because two years in prison is better than serving three years. In other words, the rational strategy is to betray rather than cooperate.

So, what has all this got to do with panic buying and stockpiling? Well, clearly the best outcome – supermarket shelves remaining stocked with more than enough for everyone shopping at any one time – can only be achieved by cooperation, by everyone taking only what they need. However, we are not in a position to consult with our fellow shoppers to discuss the matter, and even if we were, there is no guarantee that we will not be double-crossed by people who agree to cooperate and then betray us by over-buying. As a result, because we do not trust each other to cooperate (and we also do not trust the Government’s regular reassurances that there are more than enough products for everyone) the best strategy is to over-buy to ensure we are not left with nothing. That is the rational thing to do.

Can this problem be resolved? Well, one possibility, already widely practised, is for supermarkets to limit purchases to a certain number of each item. The problem with this, however, is that, even if we are restricted to buying only one of each item, it only prevents over-buying on one particular occasion. That is, it does not stop shoppers coming back repeatedly to buy the same things over and over again. And that is what is happening. That is why there are queues at supermarkets.

Another possibility is for supermarkets to ration purchases, to put a limit on what can be bought over a set period of time. However, this, of course, will have consequences for profit margins. In another prisoner’s dilemma-type scenario it would not be rational for one supermarket to limit its profits particularly when there is no guarantee that other supermarkets would be prepared to cooperate and do the same.

So, what is left? Well, the only genuine solution to stockpiling and panic buying is for the state to intervene and introduce a compulsory rationing scheme to which every supermarket and every shopper would have to adhere. The government’s virus discourse already has war-time parallels, albeit with an invisible enemy, and, in that sense, the introduction of rationing seems entirely appropriate.

Featured Image by CDC.

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Using math to understand inequity

What can math tell us about unfairness? Bias, discrimination, and inequity are phenomena that are deeply complex, context sensitive, personal, and intersectional. The mathematical modeling of social scenarios, on the other hand, is a practice that necessitates simplification. Using models to understand what happens in our social realm means representing the complex with something much less complex in order to study it.

Nonetheless, when used carefully models can help us learn about deep patterns related to inequity, including those that govern how unfair norms and patterns of behavior emerge in groups of people.   They are especially useful in highlighting spaces of possibility.   What might happen in the complex dynamics of the social realm?   Once we answer this question, we can use experiments and experimental studies to learn more about these possibilities.

In recent work by fellow modelers and myself, we’ve looked in particular at what minority status means for patterns of unfair behavior.   Suppose you are part of a company where people work together, but are still figuring out some of the social rules for how this is done.  Suppose further that men make up the majority of workers and women the minority.  And lastly suppose, as argued by Cecilia L. Ridgeway in Framed by Gender, that like most humans your coworkers notice gender, and use it to shape their interactions with others in ways that can be subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle).  In a case like this, even without gender biases coming into play, women can end up disadvantaged.

The basic mechanism for this disadvantage relates to the speed with which people learn to interact with others.  Say that men make up 90% of office workers, and women 10%.   This means that 90% of the time women will be interacting with their “out-group”, while men will be doing the same thing only 10% of the time.  We can reasonably expect that women figure out how to treat men in the office more quickly than the reverse.  This is a general observation about minority status, majority members are, on average, exposed to the other group less, and so learn about them less quickly.

Evolutionary biologists have shown that when it comes to mutualistic interactions between species, sometimes the species that evolves more quickly ends up at a disadvantage simply by dint of this quick evolution.   This is called The Red King Effect.   Surprisingly, starting with the work of Justin Bruner, it has become clear that a similar thing might happen in the cultural realm.  How?

When it comes to joint action – doing a project together, or forming a company, or running a household – a bargain of a sort is needed to figure out who does how much labor, and who gets what rewards.  The bargain need not be explicit, but somehow the issue must be settled.  In general, accommodating demands tend to be safe ones in bargains.  If you accommodate, usually your partner will be satisfied.  When individuals are quickly learning to bargain with another group, this means that in many cases they quickly move towards accommodation.  (Think, “don’t worry, I’ll finish the memo” or “I’ll stay to finish cleaning up”.)  Once this happens, the majority group can more slowly learn to take advantage of this accommodating behavior by demanding a lot of their partners.

Under other conditions, small groups can actually gain an advantage by learning quickly.  This depends on the details of the kind of interaction they are engaged it.   I’ve argued, though, that in many real-world cases we should expect conditions to hold that will disadvantage minority groups, including those with intersectional identities.

Of course, much discriminatory behavior is more nefarious than this.  It often involves racial, gender, or other biases against members of certain social groups.  Given what we’d found in our models, though, my collaborators and I began to wonder whether this simple mechanism – based only on group size and learning speed – could lead to disadvantage for real humans.

We asked experimental subjects to engage in bargaining interactions between two groups.  One group was smaller than the other, but otherwise the two groups were completely identical.  After having the groups learn to interact with each other, we checked to see how much money they had earned through their bargaining.  We found that, on average, the smaller groups earned significantly less, perhaps because of the very mechanism we had identified.  This study is not definitive.  It is relatively small, and involves restrictive lab conditions.  But it points to a general take-away about the use of simplified models to study complex social phenomena.

Without the models we developed to study inequality, we never would have guessed that just being in a small group might be a disadvantage.   There was no a priori reason to test such a hypothesis.  Once modeling work opened up this possibility, though, it gave us reason to experiment.  In general, models can point us to possibilities we might never have imagined without computational resources.  They can tell us what dynamical effects might plausibly occur in the social realm.  Of course, they can’t tell us for sure whether or not these effects are actually at play.  But they can direct us towards empirical work that we otherwise would never  have engage in.  When used carefully, and with the right back and forth with other methods, models are an important part of the social science toolbox, even for topics as complex as unfairness.

Featured Image Credit: Markus Spiske on Unsplash

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Natural disasters make people more religious

Philosophers once predicted that religion would die out as societies modernize. This has not happened. Today, more than four out of every five people on Earth believe in God. Religion seems to be serving a purpose that modernization does not replace.

New research finds that people become more religious when hit by natural disasters. They are more likely to rank themselves as a religious person, find comfort in God, and to state that God is important in their lives. This increase in average religiosity occurs on all continents, for people belonging to all major religions, income groups, and from all educational backgrounds.

Religiosity has increased nine times more in districts across the globe hit by earthquakes compared to those that were spared over the period 1991-2009. This is mainly because believers become more religious. It’s not that non-believers tend to take up religion in the aftermath of a natural disaster. They also generally do not go to church much more often. Rather, their existing personal beliefs intensify. Believers pass on some of this increased religious intensity through generations: Children of immigrants are more religious when their parents came from earthquake-prone areas.

Comparing religiosity across the globe is difficult. It’s difficult to compare the religiosity of a Muslim from Indonesia with the religiosity of an American Protestant. Instead, new research compares religiosity of the American Protestant only to other American Protestants and the Muslim Indonesian to other Muslim Indonesians. The main measures of religiosity used are based on surveys of more than 200,000 people across the globe. Sociologists have identified six particular questions that together span global religiosity: “How important is God in your life?”, “Are you a religious person?”, “How often do you attend religious services?”, “Do you find comfort in God?”, “Do you believe in God?”, and “Do you believe in life after death?”

The link between disasters and religiosity is also there for alternative measures of religiosity. In particular, google searches on religious terms, such as “God” or “Pray” increase with higher disaster risk. These measures may not be exact, which is not a problem for the methodology used. The methodology does not depend on exact measures of religiosity, but rather on a correct ranking of religiosity between societies.

The explanation for why religiosity increases in the face of disasters could be that people go to church for material aid, that people move in the face of disasters, or that disasters also affect development or other cultural values. However, it turns out that one main reason for the impact of disasters on religiosity is religious coping. The theory of religious coping states that people use religion as a means to cope with adversity and uncertainty. Empirical evidence suggests that people hit by various adverse life events, such as cancer, heart problems, death in close family, alcoholism, divorce, or injury are more religious than others.

Disasters provide a shock to adversity and uncertainty. Research shows that adversity and uncertainty can make people across the globe more religious. People do not necessarily think that God made the earth shake, but they might use their religion to deal with the situation. It is mainly Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Jews who use their religion to cope with the experiences after natural disasters. Buddhists seem to be less affected. There are not enough people from other religions or spiritual groups in the data to draw any conclusions for their particular experience with coping.

What types of disasters increase religious beliefs? According to the theory on religious coping, people mainly use religion to cope with large, negative, and unpredictable events. Using religion for coping is part of what is termed emotion-focused coping, in which people aim to reduce the emotional distress arising from a situation. When people face perceived negative, but predictable events, such as an approaching exam or a job interview, they are more likely to engage in problem-focused coping, where they aim to tackle directly the problem that is causing the stress. Likewise, religiosity increases more in response to unpredictable disasters, compared to predictable ones. Of the four main geophysical and meteorological disasters, earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions elevate peoples’ beliefs, while tropical storms do not. Indeed, meteorologists have a much easier time predicting storms than seismologists have in predicting earthquakes. Further, earthquakes in areas that are otherwise rarely hit increase religiosity more than earthquakes in areas that are often hit. In addition, larger earthquakes increase religiosity more than smaller earthquakes.

Other disasters, such as wars and conflict, may potentially have similar effects on religiosity as natural disasters. After the September 11 attack, nine out of ten Americans reported that they coped with their distress by turning to their religion. Further, research finds that people that have been more exposed to conflict are more likely to participate in religious groups.

Featured image credit: Praying Hands by Couleur. Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Understanding the Multi-functional Nature of the Countryside

It is tempting to see the countryside through a haze of a pink washed nostalgia as somewhere where life continues with a perceived simplicity in tandem with the seasons and inherited practises. However, just as urban areas change and evolve, so does the countryside. With this, comes a more complex wordscape that combines the traditional language of farming and the countryside with new and adapted terms. The country-dweller, or visitor, of history would still recognise the language and life of rural areas in many ways. A plough may still be used to cultivate the land, and this land may itself be scattered with the same veteran trees that were there hundreds of years ago. People still go about living and working in rural areas, some engaging in traditional crafts, like coppicing, whilst others might live in the buildings that were occupied by their forebears. These buildings, themselves, might now form part of the built heritage of the countryside, and may, perhaps, be protected by some form of planning designation.

However, the countryside does evolve, and technology has brought about an increasing and continuing change; the plough has evolved from a simple piece of equipment pulled by oxen or horses, to a more complex example of machine-driven engineering. The role of the horse has altered in many countries, from being a crucial source of power on the farm to an animal more often kept for recreation. New plant and animal breeding approaches have resulted in new varieties of crops being produced, alongside livestock with improved characteristics for food production. Technologies such as geographic information systems (GIS) are also increasingly being incorporated into agriculture and these sit alongside other, more controversial, developments such as genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

The evolution of the countryside does not happen in isolation from wider societal developments, global issues, and pressures. By its nature, the countryside is multi-functional and faces many potentially competing demands. Whilst it is tempting to think of rural areas as merely providing food and other resources such as timber or minerals, the role of the countryside has always been more complex than that, and arguably becomes ever more so. How the land is managed affects our water quality and availability, the biodiversity that co-exist in our rural areas, and the intrinsic beauty of our landscapes. The countryside provides spaces for recreation and tourism, jobs for people, and homes for them to live in. Many rural areas exist as centres of economic activity – not just traditional farming and forestry businesses – but increasingly with the development of technology, for a range of other forms of commerce, for example, internet-based homeworking, or as a location for distribution centres. Many farmers, themselves, are driving this broadening of economic activity through diversification of their own businesses into new areas such as renewable energy production, leisure and tourism, or equine enterprises. These developments are not, though, without their tensions; the need to balance the protection of landscapes, habitats, and high quality food-producing land is often not easily compatible with the provision of what may be much needed new infrastructure or affordable housing. Increasing world population numbers also make this an ever more difficult conundrum to solve. Efforts to try to encapsulate some of the broad range of services provided by rural areas have, in recent years, led to the development of a series of new terms, each with their own nuances. Such terms include ecosystem services which aim to describe those services provided to us by nature, for example water purification and carbon sequestration, through to other expressions which have a more economic focus to them, such as natural capital and public goods.

The countryside has long been subject to significant government interest. With government involvement comes specific terminology such as that evolving from the Common Agricultural Policy or the World Trade Organization. Arguably this involvement has, historically, been driven by the countryside’s vital role in producing food; however, in more modern times, it also reflects the complexity of demands that society makes of rural areas. Alongside this has come an increasing international awareness of issues like climate change, loss of biodiversity, and soil degradation and an enhanced focus on balancing environmental, economic, and social needs through the framework of sustainable development. This has translated into the mainstreaming of socially-, environmentally-, and conservation-conscious approaches into rural policies in many countries, thereby bringing with it a new language of mechanisms such as agri-environment schemes, and cross-compliance, and with some farmers adopting approaches such as integrated farm management (IFM) or organic farming. Against this background, concerns about the potentially negative environmental impacts that poor land management can generate are increasingly balanced by recognition that appropriate land management can also deliver positives such as carbon sequestration, natural resource protection, and flood alleviation.

The rural wordscape is therefore as complex, multi-faceted, and ever evolving, as the wider countryside. Just as our forebears may have recognised at first sight many of the physical characteristics of today’s countryside, they would also have understood much of its language. However, on looking, and listening, more carefully, they would soon have become aware that, just as the multi-functional nature of the countryside has built and evolved over time, so have the words used to describe and discuss it.

Photo by Federico Respini via Unsplash

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Ten facts about dentistry

You use it every day; it’s a facial feature that everybody sees; and one that enables almost all animals to survive. We’re talking, of course, about the mouth. Our mouths truly are amazing, and enable us to eat, breathe, and form words. Unfortunately, our mouths can cause us problems too, leaving many people with intense fears of “the dentist.” Nevertheless, dentistry is a truly fascinating subject, and covers an enormous range of topics. This list of ten facts will open your eyes to some of the lesser-known facts about dentistry, including where the myth of the tooth fairy comes from, how braces work, and what Aristotle had to say about the art of dentistry.

1. Trendy teeth

Most civilisations in the world have practiced intentional dental modification at some point. These modifications range from the ablation of teeth, as practiced by hunter-gatherers in Africa at least 15,000 years ago, to jewels being implanted into teeth among the ancient Mayan communities, and inhabitants of western Micronesia slicing grooves into their teeth.

2. Aristotle gets it wrong

Yes, you heard that right. The great Greek philosopher and scientist didn’t know absolutely everything. In this case, he wrongly believed that men and women have a different number of teeth. We actually have 32 each, with 1-16 located in the top row, and 17-32 in the bottom.

3. Aristotle gets it right

Admittedly, this is a much more common phrase, and Aristotle did in fact get a lot right about teeth. He astutely noted in around 350 BC that, “Teeth have one invariable office, namely the reduction of food.” The food that mammals eat and have eaten has a direct relation to how their teeth develop. Given that some mammals can take up to 10,000 bites a day, it’s important to have the right tools. An example of teeth being suited to the job are those of cats and dogs: cats have bigger, stronger canines for deep, prolonged killing bites while holding struggling prey, whereas dogs have relatively larger incisors used to inflict shallow, slashing wounds and to gather other foods.

4. It’s a knock-out

Dental surgery was one of the first uses for general anaesthesia in the 1840s, and it was in fact a dentist who provided the first public demonstration of anaesthesia being used in surgery. William Morton successfully demonstrated the use of ether for the removal of a tumour from a young man’s neck in Boston, Massachusetts. It was used widely across the world until the 1970s and 80s, when concern was raised over the number of healthy patients dying as a result of dental anaesthesia. As a result, general anaesthesia use for dental surgery was discouraged, and on 31 December 2001, the administration of general anaesthesia in dental surgeries in the UK was prohibited.

5. Charms and tooth-bones

In England, between the 15th and the 20th century, it was very important that a child’s tooth was disposed of as quickly as possible after it fell out. The traditional explanation was that if the tooth was simply discarded with other rubbish, a dog or pig might gnaw it, causing the child’s new tooth to be misshapen, like the animal’s.

A tried and tested method for disposing of teeth, which was used until the mid-20th century, involved the tooth being rubbed in salt and thrown onto a fire. It was quite popular to recite a charm while doing this:

“Fire, fire, burn a bone,

God send me another tooth again;

A straight one,

A white one,

And in the same place.”

This is slightly misleading, however, as teeth are not in fact bones. They are comprised of dentine, which is a calcified tissue, and enamel, which is formed of minerals and is harder than bone.

6. One Direction

You, or a fellow teenager during your school years, may well have had braces in order to straighten their teeth. For this, they would visit an orthodontist—“ortho” coming from the Greek word for “straight.”  Braces, or fixed appliances as they are professionally known, are attached to the teeth and give precise 3-D control of tooth movement. There are risks associated with fixed appliances however, including damage to the teeth and their supporting tissues.

7. Spit it out

Humans produce an average of 1.5 litres of saliva every day from 3 pairs of major glands. Why so very much though—what does it actually do? Firstly, it lubricates the mouth to ease the actions of chewing and swallowing. It also, helpfully, enables food to be dissolved, which is how we experience flavour. Saliva also helps to protect tissues in the mouth. It helps maintain the pH of the mouth, reduces the clotting time of wounds, accelerates wound contraction, reduces the growth and spread of bacteria, and has anti-fungal and anti-viral properties.

8. The Tooth Fairy

English and North American folklore dictates that when children lose their milk teeth, they are to put the tooth under the pillow for the tooth fairy to take and that she will reimburse them for it, usually with a coin. The origins of the tooth fairy are uncertain, although there have been several testimonies that the tradition was known in the 1800s. It may seem like a fairly random notion, but a 1600s poem, “Oberon’s Palace,” describes a grotto containing various small and useless objects from the human world, “brought hither by the elves,” including “childrens teeth late shed.” This is thought to be the earliest source linking fairies and teeth.

9. Missing something?

Permanent teeth that have been pulled out completely can be re-implanted straight away, although there are a few conditions to this. Firstly, it must be implanted within an hour of it coming out. If that isn’t possible, the tooth should be transported in either milk or the patient’s own saliva until it can be implanted. Secondly, you should never handle the tooth by its root. Thirdly, it must not be scrubbed, washed, or brushed.

10. Baby Teeth

While there is an expected time-frame for when babies begin the teething process, the timings can vary fairly widely, and for a number of reasons. English folklore had some rather less scientific reasons for the order in which babies cut their teeth, however. An 1849 comment reads, “If a child tooths first in the upper jaw, it is considered ominous of its dying in its infancy,” whilst a 1659 text reads that, “Soon todd [toothed], soon with God,” i.e. the baby would soon be dead and, expressed in a later proverb, “Soon teeth, soon toes,” which indicated that the mother would quickly be pregnant again. Further, it was believed by some that if a child was born with teeth that it would grow up to be vicious—Shakespeare states that this was the fate of Richard III in Henry VI.

Featured image credit: “Woman dentist with gloves showing on a jaw model how to clean the teeth with tooth brush properly and right” by Vadim Martynenko. Used under license from Shutterstock.com.

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Mexican Women’s Self-Expression through Dress – Episode 43 – The Oxford Comment

Our host for this episode is William Beezley, Professor of History at the University of Arizona and Editor in Chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. He moderates a roundtable discussion with historians Stephanie Wood and Susie Porter about Mexican women’s self-expression through textiles and dress throughout history to the present day.

Societal changes in post-revolutionary Mexico of the 1920s produced shifts in urban women’s activity and mobility that were reflected in their dress and appropriation of indigenous stylistic and symbolic traditions. Women today continue to use traditional forms, such as embroidered huipiles, as a means of expressing their identities and rights through fabric.

Featured image credit: Photo courtesy of  Stephanie Wood.

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How the intention to share photos can undermine enjoyment

Though people both take and share more photos than ever before, we know very little about how different reasons for taking photos impact people’s actual experiences. For instance, when touring a city, some people take photos to share with others (e.g., to post on Facebook), while others take photos for themselves (e.g., to remember an experience later on). Will those who take photos to share enjoy the experience more or less than those who take photos for themselves? How do people’s goals for taking photos impact their enjoyment of photographed experiences?

In 12 studies with over 2,800 participants, results show that in fact those who take photos to share with others, compared to those who take photos for themselves, enjoy the photographed experiences less.

In one study, tourists lined up to take a photo at the famous Rocky statue in Philadelphia were asked whether these photos were intended for themselves or to share. Then, after they took the photo, they were asked how much they enjoyed the experience. Based on their answers in conjunction with other studies it was found that those who take photos to share enjoy the experience less, and are less likely to recommend the experience to a friend, compared to those who take photos for themselves.

Similar effects were found when people were asked to take photos during their Christmas celebrations. Participants were tasked to take photos on 25 December for a photo album that was either just for themselves or to share on social media platforms, such as Facebook. Interestingly, the albums created for sharing differed from those created for personal usage. Albums created for sharing featured more photos where people were posed (as opposed to candid) and where people were smiling, suggesting that they wanted to present a positive impression to the viewers of the album. In addition, with shared albums, people were more likely to include photos that included items typical of the holiday (e.g., Christmas trees, stockings, etc.), suggesting that they felt the need to provide details about the context for those who were not there. Further, those that were told to take photos to share enjoyed the photo-taking experience less than those who took photos for themselves.

But why is that the case? Why would the reasons for taking photos affect one’s enjoyment of the experience? Findings suggest that this occurs because taking photos to share increases photographers’ concerns about how others will judge their photos. This intent to share with others increases feelings of anxiety to present oneself in a positive light, which in turn reduces enjoyment during the experience. In addition, these negative feelings extend to people’s interest in participating in similar future experiences, such that taking photos to share actually decreases their desire to repeat that experience again.

This is even the case when the person taking the photo is not personally in the photo, such as when sharing a photo of a sunset or, in the previous study, a Christmas tree. Some people experienced these negative effects of intending to share worse than others. Those who are high in self-consciousness (those who are highly concerned how they appear to others and what others think about them) show stronger effects; that is, when they take photos to share, they enjoy experience less not just compared to taking photos for themselves but also compared to those who do not worry so much about what others think of them.

Does it matter who sees the photos? It was investigated whether the audience with whom one shares matters. We reasoned that intending to share one’s photos with a broad group of acquaintances (e.g., all friends on Facebook) would reduce enjoyment, but taking photos to share only with close friends or for one’s own personal album would make the experience itself significantly more enjoyable. Indeed, that was the case, participants taking photos to share with people they did not know very well and who do not them well, led to feelings of anxiety and also reduced how engaged they felt in the experience. They worried about what others thought and hence were less present in their own experience, causing them to enjoy the experience less.

Moreover, our work also identifies a potential misstep among businesses — encouraging consumers to take photos to share during experiences may be counterproductive. For instance, many restaurants and hotels incorporate hashtags throughout their experiences to encourage consumers to take photos for sharing on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Such salient reminders might have unintended costs if they reduce the enjoyment people feel during the experience itself, with potentially harmful effects on remembered enjoyment. Moreover, these negative effects on consumers’ experiences may reduce their propensity to repeat experiences or recommend them to others.

Our experiences are vital to our well-being, and understanding what affects our enjoyment of experiences is important both to people seeking happiness and to companies creating and marketing such experiences. Experiences are also widely shared with others, not only through written and verbal communication, but increasingly through photos. More and more, photos are taken as experience unfold, and hundreds of millions of these photos are shared every day through social media and other channels. While consumers may enjoy sharing these photos later on, and find value in receiving “likes” and “comments” when they do, they may want to consider how taking photos to share can undermine their own enjoyment during the actual experience itself.

Image credit: “Leaf” by Maria Shanina. Public Domain via Unsplash.

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Modernization of mortuary practice and grief

Modern western mortuary practices are characterized by the professionalization of the management and presentation of the corpse. These practices serve as a stark contrast to those in traditional societies across the world and those throughout history. Changes to how we treat and dispose of the dead are such that industrialized societies have become outliers on the spectrum of the world’s cultures. Modernity has afforded us with a more efficient system for handling the dead, yet research suggests that these alterations may be negatively impacting long-term grief outcomes.

One way that modern practices influence grief is that they remove cues of death. Today, bereaved individuals in developed nations rarely participate in the ritualized preparation of the corpse, and, indeed, have minimal exposure to cues of death of any sort. Death specialists, such as mortuary cosmetologists and morticians, now wash, dress, and embalm the dead, amongst other invasive procedures. They have replaced many traditional rituals of handling of the dead person by family and other community members. As a result, most people do not have the opportunity to see or interact with their loved one in a natural state of death.

Human relationships require huge investments and generate massive benefits, and we are not willing to let go of them unless we have unequivocal evidence that the person is dead. This is one reason why it is common for bereaved individuals who have not seen their loved-one’s corpses, such as death through tragedy, to demand to see the body or evidence that the person died and why the World Health Organization recommend it. Conversely, any suggestions that the person may still be alive weighs heavy on our minds. We typically use cues of agency and appearances to determine if a person is alive, or dead. If the person moves, or if they look like a living person, then we assume that he or she is alive. Oftentimes people comment that the dead person looks as though he or she were simply sleeping.

Research from the evolutionary sciences suggests that this tendency to assume an agent is alive was once adaptive and is now instinctual. For instance, assuming that a predator was dead when it was in fact alive would have been detrimental to our survival, so as a general rule of thumb, people are more receptive to cues of life than cues of death. When this basic tendency is coupled with the motivation to want to continue the relationship with the dead person, it takes only minimal cues to convince us that the person is still around. Often there is a conflict between what the bereaved person consciously believes and how they reason momentarily, such as a widow thinking that the sound of footsteps on the stairs is her deceased husband.

Many people now opt for a closed casket for their loved-ones, and even if they do see the corpse, it most often follows complex professional preparation of the corpse aimed at minimizing cues of death. The “disneyfication of death” is common practice, where the deceased are artificially manipulated to resemble their appearance during life. Often photographs depicting the person when they were alive are placed on top of the casket or with a funerary order of service. With the rise of social media, such as in memorandum Facebook pages enable the community to endlessly revisit the person when he or she was alive with the click of a mouse.

In addition, researchers have shown that ritualization helps us to feel more in control of life events and they also provide us with an opportunity to receive social support from the community, which also has positive mental health benefits. Yet much of the ritualization involved in preparing the corpse for disposal has been given to professionals.

It is now generally accepted in the clinical literature that long-term outcomes are better for those who view the body of a loved one, as doing so is thought to help people come to terms with the death. Naturalistic data suggests that even in traumatic circumstances, viewing the body of a loved one may increase anxiety and distress in the short term, but is associated with less distress in the longer term. Conversely, not seeing the body is associated with more difficult, prolonged grief. Health care professionals often observe that spending time both viewing and touching the body of a deceased loved one is conducive to better outcomes. Grief is one of the most intensely stressful experiences faced by humans and modern practices may be retarding the process.

Featured image credit: Many modern Western corpses look more like sleeping beauty than a dead person. Woman, female, portrait and face HD by Alex Blăjan. CC0 public domain via Unsplash.

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Zhongguo and Tianxia: the central state and the Chinese world

China is playing an ever-increasing role on the world stage of international relations, and it is starting to bring its own vocabulary to the part. The terminology that comprises the core lexicon of international relations theory originates from Greek and Latin, and it was developed to describe and interpret the configurations of power that have been common in Western history, from ancient Athens to the British Empire. Chinese scholars are now actively mining the Chinese historical experience to develop new terms to apply both to their own past and to an ever-changing present.

Different histories call for different vocabularies. Over three millennia, China has developed a distinct vocabulary that is well-adapted to its own place at the center of the East Asian world-system. The Chinese word for China, Zhongguo, literally means ‘central state or states’ (there is no plural inflection in Chinese), giving rise to the poetic sobriquet “Middle Kingdom.” Thus, China is not the land of the Han or the empire of the Qin, but simply the country in the middle.

But in the middle of what? Again, the Chinese language has a distinctive term: tianxia, literally “sky beneath” but more idiomatically translated as “all under heaven.” Sometimes taken to mean “the world,” tianxia instead refers to “a world,” in the sense of a world-system. Ancient Chinese historians were aware of the existence of places far beyond the borders of China (like India, Persia, and even the Roman Empire) but they did not consider these places to be part of “their” world, the Chinese tianxia.

For the historian Wang Gungwu, tianxia depicts an enlightened realm that Confucian thinkers and mandarins raised to one of universal values that determined who was civilized and who was not.” Its nearest Western equivalent might be the Medieval concept of Christendom, a particular type of tianxia tied together not just by shared Christian belief but also by participation in shared rites. We might also speak of an ancient Greek tianxia in the Aegean Sea in the years before the Persian Wars, or of an ancient Indian tianxia centered on Brahmanic tradition.

The difference between China and these other tianxia candidates is that while the others were transitory, China’s tianxia seemed to be eternal—at least until the incorporation of China into the Modern World-System centered on Western Europe. From the beginning of history until the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644, China was the central state or states, the lower-case zhongguo, of the East Asian tianxia. Chinese culture was for two millennia the mother, and measure, of East Asian civilization. That pattern only ended with the dissolution of the previously isolated Chinese tianxia into the larger, globalizing world.

The Chinese tianxia thus differed from other historical examples in two ways: it was a permanent (not transient) configuration, and it had a universally acknowledged center. The Mongols may have conquered China in the thirteenth century, but they didn’t attempt to govern it from Mongolia. China was the center of their world, every bit as much as it was the center of Japan’s world, Korea’s world, and Vietnam’s world. These relationships were reflected in the tributary system, which sometimes reflected Chinese power to demand tribute and at other times China’s need to beg for support, but always placed China at the center of the system.

Then came the West. From the 1600s until the end of the twentieth century, international relations vocabulary flowed in only one direction: from that larger world into China. Western military power forced China to accommodate itself to Western notions of sovereignty, to redefine itself first as an empire (under the Manchu Qing dynasty) and then as a republic (under Sun Yat-sen and later Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong). Today Xi Jinping seems eager to redefine China once again, this time as a nation-state. All of these are Western terms suited to the modern world.

Drawing on pre-modern Chinese history and philosophy, the emerging Chinese School of international relations is, however, developing a new terminology of Confucian relationality. Philosopher Zhao Tingyang’s historically-inspired tianxia system sits at the center of this approach. Zhao sees the tianxia understanding of a unified world as the basis for a new form of globalism. I myself have incorporated Zhao’s ideas into an interpretation of the post-modern world-system as a new central state system focused on the United States, an American Tianxia based on a philosophy of liberal individualism.

The Chinese School of international relations is unlikely to supplant established international relations theory, but it’s certain to enrich it. The concepts of the central state or states (zhongguo) and of a world-system based on universal values (tianxia) are useful additions to our terminological toolkit for understanding the world. They may apply to historically-existing world-systems for which Western vocabulary is inadequate, or they may indeed apply to the new world-system form that is emerging from contemporary globalization.

China is certainly a key component of the twenty-first century world. Its philosophical heritage is indispensable for interpreting Chinese history to that world. It may also prove helpful for making today’s world meaningful to ourselves.

Featured image credit: Building water historical by danist07. Public domain via Unsplash.

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George Washington and eighteenth century masculinity

We want George Washington—the President of all Presidents, the Man of all Men—to be a certain way. We want him to be an unalloyed male outdoing, singlehandedly, all the other competitors. We want him strong and rude, rough and rugged, athletic and hypersexualized, a chiseled torso, a Teddy Roosevelt, a Tarzan, and a John Wayne: “a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.”

The notion that muscular and athletic bodies must define the perennial essence of masculinity has been debated, and increasingly so. Yes, Washington was hard, a real soldier. But we should not overlook that men in the past have lived by different standards. And that men in the future will live, hopefully, by different standards.

We are biased, at best: how many times have we heard Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee’s famous eulogy, “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen”? How many times have we interpreted this picture as a twentieth century celebration of man’s confrontational “instinct”?

And yet, eighteenth century practices of masculinity—especially white, higher classes masculinity—flirted with femininity and softness, or delicacy, in a way that Hollywoodian idols would deem inappropriate.

Let us start from the beginning. The real George Washington, in his prime, was immensely impressed by Lawrence, his elegant half-brother, a man who could have been easily mistaken for an aesthete. In many ways, George sought to emulate him. Lawrence was graceful and flaunted cosmopolitan habits. He had a soft face and round shoulders. He was slightly paunchy and did not look either muscular or particularly rugged.

In what he sought to embody, in his conscious body language, in his corporeal strategies, in the type of gracious man he eventually became, George was closer to Lawrence than it has been generally assumed: George Washington was this eighteenth century man, after all. Those who had met him, such as the Marquis de Barbe-Marbois, never failed to notice not only his “gentle urbanity,” but more importantly, his graciousness, “which seems to be the basis of his character. … He is masculine looking, without his features’ [sic] being less gentle on that account.”

George Washington had publicly avowed his goal, that he wanted to achieve “delicacy”: “I always wished [delicacy] should form a part of my character.” And this meant more than just paying lip service to politeness. Delicacy and gracefulness, for this particular man, were more than a manufactured show cut loose from inner morals. Washington’s graciousness, in fact, reinvigorated the link between inner virtue and outer manners: he was the gracious and delicate man he wanted to appear.

Stiff and distant, when exceptional circumstances dictated, he could effortlessly become approachable and maternal. Unannounced visitors at Mount Vernon marveled at the amount of time this busy man could spend with them talking and smiling—and at the fact that he could easily get quite merry over a few glasses of champagne. It was far from exceptional that guests could be lighted up to their bedroom by the General himself.

This is a savory episode: one guest, oppressed by a severe cold and excessive coughing, had retired to his room. “When some time had elapsed, the door of my room was gently opened, and on drawing my bed-curtains, to my utter astonishment, I beheld Washington himself, standing at my bedside, with a bowl of hot tea in his hand.”

Little acts of kindness, graciousness, and softness such as these show that there was much more in George Washington’s masculinity than hard power and an imposing physique. On this last score, most portraits of him give to his person burliness and size that real Washington did not possess. Certainly not slight, the analysis of his extant apparels, waistcoats, in particular, demonstrates that John Trumbull, in the equestrian portrait of 1790, got Washington better than many other painters.

Cockades, gilded buttons, and the rather narrow cut of the suit made him French and à la mode without turning him into a downright molly. Wary of excesses, Washington nonetheless spent an inordinate amount of time and energy (and certainly money!) to fashion up every aspect of his personal vêtements. In the 50s, as well as in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, the invoices he sent to tailors and purveyors abroad reveal that he cared for fancy, expensive, and tasty items.

The mythic brown inaugural wool broadcloth suit made in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1789, was an episode, as on that particular occasion he wanted to reenact the age of homespun. But in general, he made sure the supply of fashionable items “directly from France” could flow unhampered: superfine broadcloth, ribbons, silks, cambric, plain lawns, linens, flowered patterns, and printed goods had to reach him no matter what.

Of silk was made the “dress bag” that held the president’s queue on dress occasions. Silk stockings, marble colored silk hoses, silk breeches, and silk handkerchiefs adorned his persona. All in all, Washington’s masculinity was smooth and silky—softer than we may at first think.

Featured Image credit: “Washington at Verplanck’s Point” by John Trumbull, 1790, Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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