NOTES for Week 5

NOTES for WEEK 5

CHANGING PATTERNS OF BIRTH AND DEATH pp 119-137 in TEXT

-A core idea in anthropology is that people have a long history and that culture has changed over time.

-A related idea is that environment has shaped culture.

-over time Sociocultural evolution has three aspects

more and more material culture and ideas accumulate
people use more and more energy
population size increases

..... thus

- These changes have altered human environments and thereby human health and disease. Automobile accidents have replaced hunting accidents.

- The changes in health and disease that accompany broad sociocultural development is called the epidemiological transition.

H/G foragers tend to have chronic, endemic infections.
With urbanization, epidemic 'crowd' diseases swept through human societies.
In mature industrial societies, the degenerative diseases of old age predominate. Accidents, heart disease, cancer, and depression become major health burdens.

-The TEXT mentions paleopathology; we treat that as a separate unit later on in the course.

.....

I. CULTURE AS ENVIRONMENT p 121

-Some environmental hazards seem universal; others are culture-specific.

-This becomes especially so as we alter our environments. As society becomes more complex, we encounter hazards heretofore previously unimagined. Chernobyl and nuclear fallout are a spectacular example.

-Earthquakes and storms are universal.

-A hazard for us is-inactivity in a mechanized 'busy'society (read that as no time to exercise).

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Sociocultural Evolution pp 122-123.

1. The rate of increase of artifacts and ideas increases with cultural complexity.

-We have more and more stuff. College kids have more 'stuff' than did their parents.

-Indian trails became highways; part of the Oregon Trail is now interstate 80.

-Herbs have become pharmaceuticals.

-We speak of the 'information age.' Things like CDs, cars, and DVDs are vastly more 'information intense' than anything I remember for the 40s and 50s. You can buy the entire National Geographic on CD and display issues on your computer.

Optional unit on theory (adapted from Garbarino Sociocultural Theory in Anthropology)

-Julian Steward said that subsistence systems are based on environmental resources. He acknowledges that a culture (also) shapes its environment. His approach placed special emphasis on the technology for producing food. (We freely admit that food getting predicts much about culture.) He compared developments in the 'cradles of civilization' in the Old and New World where cultivation led to urban development. He found regularities in the development from farming communities to conquest empires. Steward acknowledged that culture and environment continually interacted and evolved together. Thus, Steward proposed the study of cultural ecology-the interaction between the environment, people, and culture. He suggested focusing on the culture core-the institutions and techniques most closely associated with environmental exploitation and adaptation. He also advanced the idea of culture area by classifying culture types. Steward said that bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states each had their own means of integration: kinship, associations, economic activity, police force, and bureaucracy.

2. Use of energy increased with social complexity. Leslie White (Univ. Of Michigan) said that as cultures become more and more complex, they harness more and more energy.

-Persons in a society without machines or domesticated animals might consume 5000 kC a day.

- A person today can consume 230,000 kC per day thanks to automobiles, air conditioning, and everything else we take for granted.

-Therefore, we make a bigger impact on our environment. One hundred of us use vastly more resources than 100 Yanomamo in the rainforest.

Optional unit on theory: Leslie White observed that in cultural systems, increased concentrations of energy results in greater complexity, specialization, and more (functioning) parts. He perceived three cultural subsystems: technological, sociological, and ideological. The way society used its technology to sustain life influences the sociological and ideological systems. Technology and therefore cultures evolve as more energy is harnessed. In industrial societies, fossil fuels vastly expand the flow of energy through the system.

3. Population growth.

-The paragraph on p 123 describes the stunning increase in world population after reaching one billion in 1880.

-We are on the brink of six billion: an increase of one billion is just twelve years.

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II. THE POPULATION EQUATION pp 123-128

-Demography is the study of human populations; it involves collection of data and statistics. Why useful?

-The size and density of a human population are one of the most important factors that determines the patterns of disease. The three aspects of population size are fertility, mortality, and migration.

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(1) Fertility p 124.

-Fertility and natality refer to the actual number of live births. Fecundity is the person's biological capacity to reproduce. Thus, fertility is lower than fecundity. Learn terms in this unit.

-(My note: you might enjoy Jared Diamond's Why is Sex Fun? Some trivia: The record for number of children is held by a Moscow woman who specialized in triplets. She had 69. The record for a man is held by Ismail the Bloodthirsty who had 700 sons and probably an equal number of daughters. We say in anthropology that pregnancy is expensive and sperm is cheap.)

-Examine the chart of fertility on p 126. The figures are old; birthrates continue to decline. According to figures published 9/20/99, Spain has now replaced Italy with the lowest birthrate in the industrialized world. We have a unit on population week 15.

-Contraception is a factor in the birthrate: it is more than 70% in industrial countries, but closer to 38% in developing countries.

-Some cultures practice the postpartum taboo.

-The use of herbals as contraceptives and abortion agents reaches deep into the Neolithic. (You might enjoy Eve's Herbs. We have a unit on that, too.)

-Some cultures think that frequent sexual intercourse is dangerous or weakening for a man (New Guinea). It was macho amongst Plains Native American Indians to abstain from sexual intercourse as much as possible.

-Nutritional deprivation and disease are important causes of lower fertility in nonindustrial societies: malaria, TB, pelvic inflammatory disease, and pharaonic female genital mutilation.

-In a large majority of the world cultures, women normal give birth in an upright position-kneeling, squatting, or sitting. It takes advantage of gravity but is not convenient for the birth attendant.

(2) Mortality p 128

-The method of last resort is infanticide. Many societies forbid it. In the past it has been a way of spacing births, especially among foragers. Statistics are difficult to obtain.

(Infanticide is the killing of the newborn. It is often seen as primitive birth control. Among Eskimo, brutal conditions led to killing of female infants. In Polynesia were there were high population densities it was also done. Children have also been killed if born out of wedlock or were deformed. Some societies have done ti to ensure good health, good fortune, or fertility. Religious offering of the first born appears in the Bible as well as in Ancient Rome, Greece, and Egypt. Up to the 19^th century, first born sacrifice was done in Indian. It had diminished in modern societies. EB)

-The Profile pp 128-133 is about mortality in Papua New Guinea society. Until recently, one in ten was killed at birth. These people eat sago (prepared from the core of the palm tree). The post partum taboo was supposedly two years. If an older child was still breast fed, a new infant might be strangled with a vine. Males outnumber females, suggesting female infanticide. Infanticide especially affects population growth when females are targeted. Disease and birth spacing are also factors. Among these folks, when an infant dies, the post partum taboo is abandoned and the woman quickly becomes pregnant again.

.....

-Fertility and mortality are interdependent. In societies with a high child mortality, having lots of kids in the hope one makes maturity is sensible.

-The life expectancy in the US has increased largely through reduction of the childhood death rate.

-Disease took a steady toll of Native Americans until a turnaround in 1900.

-Take time to examine the population pyramid shown on page 136. Compare the one for a developing country with one for a 'mature' industrial country with a 'graying' population.

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(3) Migration pp 135-137

-Among food foragers, membership in any given bond is in a constant state of flux. Some groups can flourish. Others may die out.

-Migration from rural areas to Third World cities is a conspicuous trend toward urbanization-found world wide.

-Third World countries often have a major portion of their population concentrated in one mega-city. Examples are Bogata, Columbia; Cairo, Egypt; and Mexico City, Mexico. Providing adequate water, treatment of human waste, and transportation are ongoing challenges in these cities.

EVOLUTION, HEALTH, and MEDICINE

The first two selections in READER pp 20-37 present health and medicine in an evolutionary perspective. I suggest you skip the unit introduction on page 20 and proceed with the "Stone Agers in the Fast Lane" article.

As you read, be sure you understand the following ideas (and are able to articulate them on the first hour exam). I suggest you write them out, at least in the margins of the text. Take heed: read the article carefully:

Discordance hypothesis (be able to explain)
The difference between the rates of our biological evolution and cultural evolution.
Question: do you believe it?
Late Paleolithic lifestyle benefits:

-Lean game animals

-Ate more polyunsaturated fat

-raw simple sugars (Except for honey or tree sap, they had almost none. Americans consume about 100 lbs/year.)

-lots of fibre

-High K+, low NA+

-No dairy products

Question: if it was so idyllic, why such a short life expectancy?
No alcohol
Do you believe that? One of my professors, an avid wine connoisseur said the oldest domestic plants-were grapes!
Tobacco
Obesity
Diabetes (more specifically, type II adult onset diabetes)
Hypertension
Atherosclerosis (fatty deposits in coronary arteries; its widespread prevalence was a surprise discovery found in autopsies of Korean War veterans
Cancer

.....

When The Paleolithic Prescription came out, book reviewers in major weekly magazines poked fun at it unmercifully. The book is engaging reading. Here are some references if this topic interests you:

Resources

Eaton, Boyd, Shostak & Konner The Paleolithic Prescription New York: Harper and Row, 1988. (My note: this book is out of print but is in the IUN library.)

Eaton and Konner "Ancient Genes and Modern Health" in Applying Anthropology, Podolefsky and Brown, eds. Mountain View: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1993.

Konner, M. "The Stone-Age Diet: Cuisine Sauvage" The Sciences, Sept/Oct, 1985.

Monmaney, T. "Please Pass the Mastodon" Newsweek August 1st, 1988.

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DESPAIR AND EVOLUTION, A PSYCHOLOGICAL DISCORDANCE HYPOTHESIS (My own article; not in the READER)

In the "Stone Agers" article, the authors examined the perceived mismatch between our genes and our physical lifestyle. In this article we discuss an alleged discordance between our historic social environment and what we live in today. A new field of psychology examines the discrepancy between our genetic makeup and the modern world. They call it a search for our pervasive sense of discontent. They call their field evolutionary psychology. Critics call it nonsense. Draw your own conclusions.

I. THE PREMISE

The premise is this: The social and psychological problems of modern society occur because people have to live under conditions radically different from those under which humans evolved.

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II. THE ARGUMENT

The modern world, for all of its technological marvels can be an uncomfortable, unfulfilling place in which to live. It makes us behave in ways 'remote from the natural (primal) pattern of human behavior.' Sitting in classrooms is certainly a behavior unknown in our ancestral past. We at times get the feeling that modern life is not what we were designed for.

Freud's analysis in his Civilization and Its Discontents drawn from mythology is no longer acceptable. Evolutionary psychologists are seeking another approach. They are seeking to sketch the contours of the mind as designed by natural selection. Some call it a 'mismatch theory.' There is very much to study: suicide, depression, and anxiety disorders have been doubling in some industrial societies every ten years.

The social contexts that shaped the human mind over the last couple of a million years are speculation. The nearest approximations available are the aboriginal societies that still persist today. These include the venerable !Kung of Africa, the Ainu of Japan and the Ache of South America.

We idealistically want Rousseau's noble savage. What we get in reality are the Yanomamo of Brazil described by Chagnon as 'burly, naked, filthy men...' Few of us want a one way ticket to our primitive past Yanomamo style.

We need to learn from the past. Old Order Amish who don't use cars, electricity or alcohol suffers depression at a rate less than one-fifth of the people living in nearby Baltimore. Living with less, they seem to be more happy than mainstream Americans.

According to evolutionary psychology, unpleasant feelings such as disappointment, anger, and anxiety are with us because they conferred survival. The past usefulness of unpleasant feelings is (they say) the reason that periodic unhappiness is a natural condition. It is found in every culture and is impossible to escape.

What isn't natural is going crazy--for sadness to linger into debilitating depression, for anxiety to grow chronic and paralyzing. These are diseases of modernity. One thing that turns sadness or dejection into pathological depression is isolation.

Today, one-fourth of the American households consist of a single person. In contrast, hunter-gatherer societies, for all of their diversity feature intimacy and stability in social relations. Those people lived in close contact with kin and peers for life.

Social intimacy comes at the price of privacy. We are a culture that values privacy, but at what price? Battered children are a real problem in our society. In primitive societies, unwanted children were often killed at birth. Also, in ancestral environments, there was little mystery about what went on behind closed doors. There weren't any. Step fathers who acquire step children in a remarriage are much more prone to be abusive than biological fathers. The incest taboo is strongest with close family ties.

Suburban transience and residential isolation leave people feeling alone. The suburbs have been particularly hard on women with young children. A contemporary woman gets up each workday. Hands off her children to strangers for child care and heads off for employment in a remote workplace. By contrast, in a hunter-gatherer village, mothers can reconcile a home life with a work life gracefully and in a rich social context. Suburbs are a product of the automobile. Technology has eroded neighborly interdependence. When the average American watches 28 hours of TV a week, that means there is little socializing.

Television, furthermore, bombards us with images of people more beautiful, handsome, richer, and more successful than ourselves. We become more unsatisfied with ourselves and our lot. We can never have enough and we just don't measure up!

During the 1950s, various American cities saw theft rates jump when broadcast television was introduced.

Many of the impulses created by natural selection's self interest are not selfish in any straightforward way. Love, pity, generosity, remorse, friendly affection and enduring trust are part of our genetic heritage. These can be frustrated--or even work against us in modern society. In modern urbanized society, we often live in fear for our safety.

In one sense, we are 'under socialized' in contemporary urban life. I experience this when I deliver for Meals on Wheels once a week in Kankakee, Many seniors tell me I'm the only person that they will see during the day. I've heard that on Christmas Day deliveries, too.

On the other hand, we are over socialized. A good example is the information overload. Consider a Sunday edition of a newspaper such as the Chicago Sunday Tribune. A person just can't read it all.

The Internet is a marvel, but searches for information can be unnerving to us. The amount of stuff out there is staggering.

Residential planners now attempt to design neighborhoods that foster affiliation: large common recreation spaces, pedestrian thoroughfares, and parking spaces that make people walk. They are in effect, drive in hunter-gatherer villages. In spite of such amenities, most people are away, dawn to dusk in remote workplaces.

One reason the sinews of community are so hard to restore is that they are at odds with free markets. Industrial society not only spews out cars, TVs and other antisocial technologies; it also sorts people into little vocational boxes and scatters those boxes far and wide. Economic opportunity drew people into cities and has been fragmenting families ever since. We must follow the job market to survive.

Evolutionary psychology suggests that we are designed to compare our material well-being not so much with some absolute standard, but with that of our neighbors. Between 1957 and 1990, per capita income in America more than doubled in real terms. Yet, during that time, Americans who reported being 'very happy' remained at a constant one third. People spend their lives honestly believing that they never have quite enough of the things they want. Just a little bit more, just another automobile, and that will put them over the top to achieve lasting happiness. This, evolutionary psychologist Miller argues, is ingrained in our minds by natural selection. It is like the runaway arms race, but with money instead.

Miller argues that the instinctive but ultimately fruitless pursuit of MORE--the 60-hour work week, the hour a month spent perusing the Sharper Image catalog--keeps us from indulging in what Darwin called 'the social instincts'. The pursuit of MORE can keep us from better knowing our neighbors, better loving our kin--in general, from cultivating the warm, affiliative side of human nature whose root's science is now beginning to fathom.

What are your thoughts? Are we trapped and condemned to hopelessness in modern society? One of the purposes of this course is to introduce you to ideas. In these articles I hope to step beyond the usual education cycle of 'memorize it/regurgitate it' and give you new ideas to consider.

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III. PSYCHOLOGICAL HARDINESS

If we live in fast-paced times, how do we cope? Psychologists have offered an intriguing concept, that of psychological hardiness. It is a bit like the evangelist's injunction that--when times get tough, the tough gets going. What are the characteristics of psychological hardiness? How do we deal with the stress and not become distressed?

Those who stay healthy under stress have:

A sense of control and commitment to life.
They are deeply involved in their work and families and this commitment gives them a sense of meaning, direction, and excitement.
They have 'hardy' personalities that cope effectively.
Being connected in life seems to make a difference. (My note: we will encounter this issue in future units on support groups in coping with cancer and The Rosetto Effect.)

..... CJ'99

Resource

Bruess and Richardson Decisions for Health. Guilford: Brown and Benchmark, 1995.

Justice, B. Who Gets Sick New York: Tarcher/Putnam Book, 1988.

Wright, W. "The Evolution of Despair: Time August 28, 1995.

EVOLUTIONARY THINKING IN MEDICAL PRACTICE "Dr. Darwin" in READER pp 33-37.

This article is short and the ideas are straightforward.

As you read, be sure you understand the following ideas (and are able to articulate them on the first hour exam). I suggest you write them out, at least in the margins of the text. If you've become dependent on my notes-take heed and read carefully:

Darwinian theory can illuminate the origins our response to infectious disease.

-fever is a defense, not a symptom

-a lower iron count in the face of infection is a bodily defense

-menstruation is a way to get rid of infection

Sickle Cell Anemia is an evolved defense against malaria. Make sure you understand the selection in TEXT on 'polymorphisms.'
Cystic Fibrosis behaves according to the same logic as sickle cells (and Tay Sacks).
Morning sickness helps women avoid foods that might contain toxins damaging to the fetus during the first trimester.
Women in modern society are at greater risk for cancer because they have many more menstrual cycles than Stone Age women.
Question: what do you think of Eaton's radical treatment of hormone treatment to delay first menses and pseudopregnancy? Did you catch what Eaton's specialty is?

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