Ancient DNA solves 320-year-old mystery: Origins of now extinct Falkland Islands wolf

Researchers have found the answer to one of natural history's most intriguing puzzles -- the origins of the now extinct Falkland Islands wolf and how it came to be the only land-based mammal on the isolated islands -- 460 kilometers from the nearest land, Argentina.



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Human Y chromosome much older than previously thought

The discovery and UA analysis of an extremely rare African American Y chromosome push back the time of the most recent common ancestor for the Y chromosome lineage tree to 338,000 years ago. This time predates the age of the oldest known anatomically modern human fossils.



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Anthropologists at the All Scientists Meeting of the Long Term Ecological Research Network

Participants attend a working group session on anthropological sciences, ecology and environment during the 2012 LTER All Scientists Meeting in Estes Park, Colorado. Photo courtesy LTER Network Office

In September 2012, we participated in the 2012 All Scientists Meeting (ASM) of the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network in Estes Park, Colorado to make the case for integrating more anthropologists into the study of ecosystems. During the ASM’s initial plenary, the presence of embedded anthropologists was announced to all, and we were invited to stand and identify ourselves for the audience. From then on we spent several days immersing ourselves in the activities of the LTER network and engaging with its researchers, a group previously unknown to many of us. We worked to overcome apprehensions (“Why are anthropologists studying us?”), identify areas where our expertise might be useful (“What can anthropologists contribute to ecological research?”), and left with some experiences and ideas that we would like to share with fellow anthropologists who may be interested in pursuing the challenges and opportunities provided by the LTER network.

The LTER Network

The National Science Foundation (NSF) created the LTER Network in 1980 to support long-term research of ecosystems with the understanding that many ecosystem processes can only be studied through long-term research. Sites were selected to represent major ecosystem types or natural biomes across the US (there are now also a few international LTER sites). It is one of the most highly funded NSF programs. The LTER Network is a major component of the LTER program as it allows for integrative cross-site, and network-wide research. The ASM is another critical component of the network as it brings researchers, post-docs, graduate and undergraduate students together every three years to share results, discuss progress, and develop new collaborative research projects. The ASM consists of an intensive six-day program with workshops, keynote speakers, poster presentations (with free beer) and field trips, which all offer plenty of opportunities to strengthen and develop new connections and opportunities within the network.

Anthropologists at the ASM

Anthropologists (eg, Ted Gragson, Laura Ogden, Charles Redman) have been involved in research at a number of the LTER sites and have written about the integration of social science in the LTER network (Redman et al, Integrating Social Science into the Long-Term Ecological Research [LTER] Network, Ecosystems, 2004), but the theme of this year’s ASM meeting—the Anthropocene—offered a unique opportunity to make the case for greater involvement of anthropologists in LTER projects. And so with support of the cultural anthropology program at NSF, Steve Lansing gave a keynote lecture about his research on complex adaptive systems in Bali, while Michael Agar and Michael Paolisso organized two workshops to identify intellectual and programmatic bridges between ecological and environmental anthropology and LTER projects to strengthen research into ecological and human dimension interactions at multiple spatiotemporal scales. The workshops showcased our research, which represented a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches within ecological anthropology, but all underscored the relevance of anthropological approaches for study of complex social-ecological systems in the Anthropocene. In addition, we participated in workshops, visited the poster sessions, and made connections with LTER researchers. Most researchers at our session were already studying the human dimensions of ecosystems, which is indicative of some the challenges in integrating anthropology.

There is a growing recognition among ecologists that they need to grapple with the human impacts on ecosystems and that the old model of studying isolated and protected reserves to understand ecosystems is no longer valid. This is evidenced by the theme of this year’s ASM meeting and the increasing impact of climate change on ecosystems in the LTER sites. However, there are few ecological models that satisfactorily incorporate human complexity. Ecologists may study ecosystem processes at the micro-scale and then jump to the global macro-scale, eg, measuring the impact of global warming on these processes, thus skipping the local, regional, and national scales at which human activities more directly affect ecosystem processes in myriad ways. This offers opportunities for anthropologists who study complex social-ecological systems using a holistic approach and making linkages across these spatiotemporal scales. Moreover, anthropologists are no strangers to long-term research as many are involved in ethnographic research in one site over multiple decades. Thus, anthropologists can make significant conceptual contributions to LTER projects.

Opportunities

One attraction of research in LTER sites is that anthropologists living close to an LTER site could do research in their own backyard. There are currently 26 sites across the US so there are plenty of opportunities. In addition, it offers the possibility of funding sources other than the NSF Cultural Anthropology program. However, funding processes are complicated and opportunities may be more limited (than they should be). There are some funding restrictions within NSF that limit the integration of social and ecological research. There are no clear guidelines or processes for funding social science research within LTER projects. Senior anthropologists may have to find other sources of funding to support their research at LTER sites. However, we found that there may be many more opportunities for enterprising graduate students to join an LTER team. The advantage for graduate students is that LTER sites have extensive data and an established infrastructure, which relieves them of some of the challenges of finding a new field site and provides ample opportunity to collaborate with other graduate students, more effectively bridging interdisciplinary divides.

The research model of the LTER network—long-term projects, cross-site linkages, and consistent funding—also offers unique opportunities for anthropologists to rethink ways of doing research in unprecedented ways. Whereas long-term ethnographic research often depends on the commitment of individual researchers, research at LTER sites is institutionalized. We could ask, what comprehensive, long-term, high frequency data on social systems could be collected across multiple sites to advance our understanding of the dynamic processes in coupled human and natural systems? That is an exciting question to ponder.

Challenges

While there are social science activities at almost all LTER sites and the network has a long history of social science engagement, it is often on an ad hoc and inconsistent basis and contingent on funding availability. The greatest challenge in integrating anthropological research in LTER projects may be a general problem of interdisciplinary research. This is manifested in different ways, including the incongruence of conceptual models, theories, methods, scope, and units of analysis in ecology and anthropology. Anthropologists’ primary goal has been describing and explaining cross-cultural variation across all human societies and very long time periods, while LTER research is mainly conducted within the context of the US and over relatively short periods (even though it is long-term research). In addition, the iterative, recursive, abductive approaches of ethnographic research strategies, as described by Michael Agar, are not always understood by ecologists who use more standardized scientific protocols and can be seen as lacking value and validity. Of course, there are many ecologists and anthropologists that have successfully collaborated in interdisciplinary studies of complex social-ecological systems, for example the South Turkana Ecosystem Project, but the number of transdisciplinary studies in which research transcends the disciplines is less common.

Conclusion

Of course, being anthropologists, we could not help ourselves and studied the LTER participants at their ASM. If we want to make the case for integrating more anthropologists in the study of ecosystems, we should at least become familiar with what ecologists think of our research and us. The audience at our workshops consisted primarily of fellow anthropologists, ecology graduate students, and a few PIs of LTER sites, which indicates that among the higher organizational levels of the LTER network and the next generation of ecologists there is a growing interest in anthropological approaches to study anthromes in the Anthropocene. However, there still may be some resistance to the integration of social sciences in ecosystem research as well as stereotypes of anthropologists, and we overheard a senior ecologist describe anthropologists as being lousy scientists with physics envy and no quantitative skills who want a slice of the LTER cake. To be fair, Lansing’s keynote was well-received by the ecologists in the audience, who for the most part were excited to see how topics that interested them were interwoven with topics more familiar to anthropologists, including religion, social relations, economic development, and governance.

In the end, one keynote and two workshops are not sufficient to make the case for anthropology, but it is a necessary first step and we think that an ongoing engagement with LTER research is critical if we want to contribute to a discussion about Earth stewardship.

This essay was a collaboration of Mark Moritz (Ohio State U), Michael Paolisso (UMaryland), Courtney Carothers (U Alaska-Fairbanks), Sean Downey (U Maryland), Kathleen Galvin (Colorado State U), Drew Gerkey (National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center), J Stephen Lansing (U Arizona), Terrence McCabe (U Colorado), Amber Wutich (Arizona State U) and Rebecca Zarger (U South Florida).

via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/03/01/anthropologists-at-the-all-scientists-meeting-of-the-long-term-ecological-research-network/

AAA Executive Board Actions

Actions at 2012 AAA Annual Meeting

• Hired Ed Liebow as the new AAA executive director


• Adopted the 2013 AAA and Section operating budget


• Adopted the slate of candidates for the 2013 AAA Spring Ballot


• Created two ad hoc committees, one on UN-AAA NGO procedures and the other on anthropological consulting for security institutions


• Received reports from the Section Assembly, Association Operations Committee (AOC), Anthropology and Communications Committee (ACC), American Anthropologist (AA), the new journal Open Anthropology (OA), and the Subcommittee on Interdisciplinary Communication of the ACC


• Received the Committee on the Future of Print and Electronic Publishing (CFPEP) five-year report and added the AA editor as ex-officio member to the committee for as long as the AA remains the flagship journal of the association


• Revised Audit Committee charge to have terms of office of its members who sit on this committee by virtue of holding a seat on another body, correspond with the other committee’s term of office


• Selected Washington DC as the site for the 2017 AAA Annual Meeting


• Committed to hold an early consultation with professional associations of a host country before deciding to stage a meeting in that country in the interest of strengthening international collaboration


• Agreed to have the Rapid Response Task Force investigate reports of military intelligence agencies and their contractors approaching anthropologists and asking them to provide information of interest to the US national security agencies

Actions Taken between June and November 2012

• Adopted a process for considering third party content to AnthroSource

• Established a strategic fund for the future of publishing by allocating 10% (5% from AAA’s portion and 5% from the publishing sections’ portion) of the guaranteed revenues from Wiley-Blackwell each year through the life of the contract (2017). This fund will be used to support anticipatory strategies and activities for addressing the fast-changing publication field that may include but not be limited to staff time, financial impact modeling, technical assistance, collaborative workshops, and platform investments.

• Appointed Alisse Waterston as editor of the pilot open access journal, effective August 1, 2012. The editor’s term will continue through July 1, 2016.

• Approved the job description for the AAA executive director

• Accepted the 2012 AAA/SfAA Margaret Mead Award Committee report and approved the unanimous recommendation of the committee to award the 2012 AAA/SfAA Margaret Mead award to Erin P Finley

• Adopted changes proposed by the Biological Anthropology Section to the WW Howells Book Prize Guidelines

• Authorized the AAA president to undertake all negotiations with the candidate for executive director selected by the executive board, and execute the contract, to complete the hiring process

• Received the publication program analysis report by Raym Crow, including the CFPEP survey and results. Released these documents to the Section Assembly for distribution to section officers and editors for review and discussion, and made available to the general membership a week later.

• Agreed to submit to the AAA membership a recommendation that AAA approve a merger of the Society for Economic Anthropology (SEA) into the American Anthropological Association.

• Approved a request from the Society for Psychological Anthropology (SPA) to establish an endowment to provide funding that supports international scholars who are early in their professional careers to travel to the US to participate in conferences affiliated with the SPA

via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/03/01/aaa-executive-board-actions/

New Resource for Tenure, Promotion and Program Reviews

Anthropology as a discipline has become both vast and varied in recent decades. The number of people graduating with doctoral, masters and bachelor degrees in the discipline has continued to expand and flourish. These anthropologists are entering a myriad of careers in which they apply their anthropological knowledge and skills. Concomitantly, preparation for careers in the discipline has become much more complex. Increasingly anthropology programs, especially those with an explicit focus on applied and practice, are hiring faculty members who can contribute to both research and teaching agendas that involve students in community-based projects whether domestic or international. Evaluating the contributions of such faculty members and the departmental programs themselves can be a challenge. External evaluators with expertise in applied and practice anthropology are essential for the review process.

To help the departments meet this challenge, AAA has launched the AAA Resource Panel for External Tenure and Promotion Review and External Program Review. Developed by the Committee on Practicing, Applied, and Public Interest Anthropology (CoPAPIA) in conjunction with the Consortium of Practicing and Applied Anthropology Programs (COPAA), an independent organization, the AAA Resource Panel currently consists of 36 anthropologists from academia and practice who have substantial experience in and a commitment to applied and practicing anthropology. In short, they have the expertise to evaluate work in specific areas of research within applied and practicing anthropology.

The need for such a resource became evident when CoPAPIA and COPAA organized sessions to discuss the development of the 2011 AAA Guidelines for Evaluating Scholarship in the Realm of Practicing, Applied, and Public Interest Anthropology for Academic Promotion and Tenure (www.aaanet.org/resources/departments/upload/Final-T-P-Document-2011.pdf). We learned through those meetings and conversations that departments of anthropology often had limited knowledge about appropriate anthropologists to evaluate applied, practicing and public interest scholarship for the tenure and promotion of faculty. We were encouraged to develop this Resource Panel to aid departments in identifying potential external reviewers to evaluate a faculty member being considered for tenure and promotion. Similarly, the AAA regularly receives requests for suggestions of anthropologists for departmental external program reviews. Therefore we decided to encompass program reviews within the overall Resource Panel initiative.

The Resource Panel is now available on www.aaanet.org. You will find considerable information about each panelist: a short statement indicating the panelist’s professional expertise, a curriculum vita, a photo, and an indication of willingness to be invited for the Tenure and Promotion or the Program Review components of the Resource Panel. Each panelist has volunteered their services to the AAA and has the option to accept or decline a particular invitation to conduct a review.

The Resource Panel can be found on the AAA website at www.aaanet.org/profdev/AAA-Resource-Panel-for-External-Tenure-and-Promotion-Review-and-External-Program-Review.cfm.

This is a living entity and as such, membership will be updated biannually. We welcome nominations to serve on the Resource Panel and feedback about this initiative. Please direct such communications to Linda Bennett (lbennett@memphis.edu) or Keri Brondo (kbrondo@memphis.edu).

Linda A Bennett is professor of anthropology and associate dean at the University of Memphis. She has been actively involved in issues of tenure and promotion and external reviews of programs for many years and is past chair of CoPAPIA and COPAA.

Keri Brondo is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Memphis. In her roles in AAA leadership positions, she has emphasized improving the work climate for practicing anthropologists, as well as creating new spaces and places for practicing, applied, public interest and engaged anthropologists within the AAA.

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Screenshot of the new AAA Resource Panel for External Tenure and Promotion Review and External Program Review. Image courtesy AAA

via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/03/01/new-resource-for-tenure-promotion-and-program-reviews/

Why am I in Belize? Relationships, Identity, and Home in the Field

My 1988 Trooper (an old local taxi) brought me on some adventures in the bush, and it also influenced what people thought of me around town. Photo by douglas reeser.

“What made you come to Belize?”

“Why aren’t you working in your own country? I know there are problems there too!”

Some of the more common questions I have been asked while in the field have to do with why I, as a white man from the US, with no clear ties to Belize, have decided to work in a country other than my own. For me, answers to these queries have not always come easy, for there really is no simple explanation.

Anthropological fieldwork has long been associated with traveling to far-off locales and the study of “different” people. The discipline has evolved, however, as can be evidenced by increasing numbers of anthropologists working in their home-communities, whether in the US or abroad. Traveling to unknown locales is no longer “what anthropologists do” (and to be fair, it never was all that we did), and the questioning of intent reveals how issues of power remain embedded in our encounters and relationships with others.

Our motivations for entering certain field sites are likely examined before we engage in our research. My own research proposal for my latest work in Belize included a section on reflexivity and positionality, which forced me to examine why I wanted to work in Belize in the first place. If anything, such early reflection on our own fieldwork reminds us that we are intentionally inserting ourselves into other people’s lives, and that we need to be aware of the possible implications of what we are doing. And as evidenced by continual questions like those above, reflection can not stop once we get into the field.

In fact, once we engage with self examination, the complexities of our own lives become increasingly evident. Our background and experiences, our interests and desires, our mistakes and successes, have all played some role in the person that we are and the decisions we make. More importantly, in the field, these same things greatly influence how we present ourselves to community members with which we are trying to work. How we are perceived in the field is further affected by our ability to do such work in the first place. That we can move around and live with others who may be struggling to meet the demands of their day-to-day lives is evidence of certain privilege. Nevermind that we, too, face those same struggles; being able to do it away from home influences how people view and interact with us.

Our own self reflection, while aiding in the ability to honestly and openly engage with our research participants, does not necessarily allow us to meet all of the challenges we may face in the field. Those we engage with through our research also carry their own ideas about who we are and what we’re doing into our relationships. Over my time in the field, people have always attempted to make sense of my presence. I have most commonly been confused for a tourist, a missionary, a Peace Corps volunteer, and an NGO worker. There are good reasons for these misconceptions: I have done some “touristy” things, and I have spent some time with each of these categories of persons around town.

The confusion surrounding my identity may not seem like much, but it does influence how people choose to interact with me and whether they do so at all. For some, the fact that I’m not Belizean means I have little business doing anything there but visiting. For others, my ability to be in the field for a length of time implies to many that I must be wealthy, and so represent a potential resource to them. Comparatively, I have had access to more money than many in my research community, but my student debt threatens to ensure my status as a wage slave for much of the rest of my life. This fact is not always easy to communicate.

And so, the question of what I’m doing in Belize has been with me throughout my time in the field. Really, I haven’t been able to figure out how I ended up here. My relationship with this place began in 2007 when I first visited to conduct research for my Master’s degrees. I still don’t know what attracted me back then, but something captured my attention and imagination. I have continued to return, and now have a relationship with this place that is going on 6 years. This long-term work in the same community has served to reinforce connections and strengthen bonds between me, this place, and the people who call it home. In some ways, it is becoming a home to me as well.

Over time, my presence has begun to make more sense to more people, and I am less frequently forced into preconceived categories. My fieldwork has not only given me reason to travel and live in a foreign land, it has given me the opportunity know different people, and for them to know me. What’s novel about this opportunity in today’s world, is that these relationships no longer end when I leave the field. The internet specifically allows for daily and immediate communication from anywhere around the world. This global interconnectedness has helped in the realization that our lives and actions reach beyond where we live, that problems faced in Belize are really problems faced by all of us. We can no longer go about our daily lives ignorant of our effects on others. Just as our actions reach all corners of the globe, our home is no longer a concept confined to a specific locale. Our home is the earth, and we’re all in this together.

douglas carl reeser is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Florida, and is a contributing editor at Recycled Minds. He is currently working on his dissertation based on research in southern Belize, examining the intersection of State-provided health care with a number of ethnic-based traditional medicines. He also loves food and running with the wind.

via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/03/01/why-am-i-in-belize-relationships-identity-and-home-in-the-field/

SUNTA Best Graduate Prize 2012 Goes to Claudio Sopranzetti

The SUNTA Best Graduate Student Paper prize for 2012 was awarded to Claudio Sopranzetti for his paper “The Owners of the Map: Mobility and Mobilization among Motorcycle Taxi Drivers in Bangkok.” Here is a brief summary of his work.

On May 19 2010, the Royal Thai Army deployed tanks and war weapons to disperse thousands of protesters who had taken over and blocked the commercial center of Bangkok demanding democratic election and an end to political and economic double-standards. In the previous two months these protesters, known as “Red Shirts,” had effectively transformed a space of elite ultra-consumption and a nexus of economic, mediatic and physical mobility into a new national political arena, a space of face-to-face relations and intimacy. Key to these mobilization were motorcycle taxi drivers who, after weeks of occupying the streets and being the only form of transportation through them, had disappeared, taking advantage of their profound knowledge of shortcuts and backdoors to decamp before the military’s fist clenched down on the remaining protesters. On May 20, when the violence stopped, at least 92 dead bodies had accumulated. Seven-Eleven shops, bank branches, the Stock Exchange, as well as Central World, the biggest shopping mall in Thailand, were set on fire, filling the air with a pungent smell of burned plastic and stagnant water. A few days later, shops re-opened, traffic resumed and the usual urban circulation was back.

In this article, I discuss connections between spatial mobility and political mobilization among motorcycle taxi drivers. Through the study of their multiple roles, both as transport operators and as political mobilizers, I echo Anna Tsing’s reminder that “mobility means nothing without mobilization” (Tsing 2005: 215). Here, I propose to explore the nexus of these two phenomena—mobility and mobilization—and analyze motorcycle taxi drivers as central political actors in contemporary Thailand. In this sense, the article does not analyze the Red Shirts movement, to which they participate, for its demands, political structures or internal organization but focuses on investigating the historical emergence of “technique of mobilization” based on modulation and control over mobility. I focus on acts of disruption of movement along major infrastructures, defined as “institutionalized networks that facilitate the flow of goods in a wider cultural as well as physical sense,” (Larkin 2008: 5) as moments of time-space modulation as well as transformative strategies that set in motion alternative messages and configure new modalities of political mobilization. Focusing on such techniques, both in the 2010 Red Shirts protest and in other Thai political mobilizations, I explore the solidification of spaces of mobility as major political arenas for political struggles in contemporary Thailand.

Ethnographically, I focus on three aspects. Firstly the multiple roles of transportation operators, in this case motorcycle taxi drivers, as mediators of people, commodities, spaces, and social relationships who, by virtue of their labor and relations of exchange, find themselves in a particular position to develop a political consciousness and to act upon it. Secondly, I explore the reconfiguration of spaces of mobility as spaces of mobilization re-signified and re-spatialized into political arenas where distance stretch, time assumes a different pace, and alternative messages travel. Thirdly, I show the potential that spaces of transit offer, once blocked, to fill their networks with alternative images and political demands.

Conceptually, I theorize the emergence of new forms of political mobilization as disruption of capitalist flows, modulation of time-space, and establishment of alternative mobilities. From the Arab Spring to the ongoing Occupy Wall Street movement, late capitalism is seeing the unfolding of political conflicts in which mobility becomes mobilization and shapes its strategies and tactics. In Thailand, highways, airports, and shopping intersections rearranged the political landscape and are reshaped from spaces of flows to spaces of protest. Globally, social media, bridges, ports and financial nodes are figuring more prevalently in the global landscapes of mobilization, and changing its morphology.

In this sense, this article is first step toward exploring emerging modalities of political engagement, for which mobility, and its spaces, become a central locus and a pivotal technique of mobilization. Failing to acknowledge and explore these changes, I argue, not only poses a theoretical dilemma for anthropology, but also questions our political stance. At stake is not just the risk of leaving anthropology stuck in the “sedentarist metaphysics” that Lisa Malkki has described, but the more daunting danger of remaining cornered in a “praxis of political immobility” where we have often secluded ourselves in times of mass mobilizations.

Please send ideas for SUNTA column to Contributing Editor Susan Falls at sfalls@scad.edu.

via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/03/01/sunta-best-graduate-prize-2012-goes-to-claudio-sopranzetti/