The Wenner-Gren Blog

The February issue of Current Anthropology is out now, and is already making waves with this CA Forum on Public Anthropology piece, “Is Poverty in Our Genes?” Read a preview below and then visit JSTOR to view the entire article for free.

The authors of a new Current Anthropology forum paper refute the findings of a forthcoming paper by Ashraf and Galor in the American Economic Review. In their study, Ashraf and Galor argue that there are strong links between population genetic diversity and the per-capita income of nation states, even after accounting for factors like geography and land productivity. They further contend that the United States, Europe, and Asia are affluent because they have optimal genetic diversity, while developing nations in Africa and the Americas are impoverished because they have either too much or too little genetic diversity.

Ashraf and Galor have attempted to use human genetic data to contend that the level of diversity present in a population as humans spread out and peopled the world has caused long-lasting effects on economic development. They claim that high genetic diversity (common in African populations) increases the incidence of distrust and conflict, which causes social instability and lower productivity. In addition, they argue that populations that are relatively genetically homogeneous (such as Native Americans) are at an economic disadvantage because genetic diversity increases competition and thus innovation. Ashraf and Galor arrive at the controversial conclusion that colonialism might have had a positive effect on development in Africa and the Americas by changing the genetic composition of the colonized territories.

The authors of the critique demonstrate that Ashraf and Galor’s analyses rely on flawed data and a naïve understanding of genetics, while also ignoring relevant findings in anthropology and related fields on the subject of human evolution, cooperation, and innovation.

In light of the fact that governments look to social science research to inform policy decisions, the authors of the critique call for social scientists in the emerging field of “genoeconomics” to adhere to a higher burden of evidence when making provocative assertions capable, among other possible consequences, of placing vulnerable populations at greater risk and reinforcing various forms of casual and institutionalized prejudice.

Current Anthropology, published by The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, is a transnational journal devoted to research on humankind, encompassing the full range of anthropological scholarship on human cultures and on the human and other primate species. Communicating across the subfields, the journal features papers in a wide variety of areas, including social, cultural, and physical anthropology as well as ethnology and ethnohistory, archaeology and prehistory, folklore, and linguistics.

Picture credit: Charmet, París

We are pleased to announce the publication of Human Biology and the Origins of Homo. This is the sixth in the open access Current Anthropology Supplementary Series on big questions in the field of anthropology – and the origin of Homo is currently one of the biggest questions in hominin paleontology.

This CA supplementary issue resulted from a Wenner-Gren Symposium organized by Susan C. Antón (New York University) and Leslie C. Aiello (Wenner-Gren Foundation) held March 4–11, 2011, at the Tivoli Palácio de Seteais in Sintra, Portugal.

Although Homo erectus has been known since the 1890s and Homo habilis was announced almost 50 years ago, new fossil discoveries in the last decade have complicated our understanding of early Homo and challenged our long-held assumptions about its similarities and differences to the australopiths as well as to later members of our genus. This necessarily influences our interpretations for the origin and evolution of Homo and also highlights the need for a new framework for interpretation of the hard evidence.

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The December issue of Current Anthropology is out now. Enjoy a sampling of this issue’s offerings with this special preview of “Alterity and the Particular Limits of Universalism: Comparing Jewish-Israeli Holocaust and Canadian-Cambodian Genocide Legacies.” (Current Anthropology 53:6) by Carol A. Kidron of the University of Haifa.

The experience of genocide as transmitted trauma may not be universal, according to new ethnographic research published in Current Anthropology.

In the fields of human rights and memory studies, giving testimony about one’s personal experience of genocide is believed to be both a moral duty and a psychological imperative for the wellbeing of the individual and the persecuted group to which she belongs. Accordingly, the coping strategies proposed to victims of genocide tend to be rather uniform: tell your story and do not let the violence you suffered be forgotten.

The author of this study offers two persuasive case studies that suggest that this universalizing approach to genocide is misguided. In her interviews with Jewish-Israeli children of Holocaust survivors and Cambodian-Canadians whose parents were persecuted at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, Carol Kidron found that virtually all subjects rejected the pathologizing construct of transmitted PTSD.

The author’s research reveals key differences in the genocidal legacies of Cambodian-Canadian and Jewish-Israeli trauma descendants. While the Jewish-Israeli subjects felt that they bore some emotional scars that were passed on by their parents, they opposed the idea that they have been afflicted by these inherited traces of the Holocaust. In fact, in the Jewish-Israeli cultural context, these markers of emotional difference may serve instead as an empowering way to carry on their parents’ memory. In great contrast, Cambodian-Canadians not only resist the stigma of trauma, but also insist that the genocide has not left them psycho-socially impaired in any way. Instead of remembering tragedy, the Cambodian-Canadian subjects appealed to Karma and subscribed to Buddhist forward-looking attitudes.

Despite their differences, both accounts defy the tropes of victimization and trauma that pervade scholarship on genocide and humanitarian practice. The author argues that religious worldviews and cultural values frame responses to trauma. Cultural paradigms may valorize or marginalize the importance of remembrance, and the author calls for scholars and humanitarian workers to take into account the diversity of cultural frameworks for remembrance when dealing with descendants of genocide victims.

Current Anthropology, published by The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, is a transnational journal devoted to research on humankind, encompassing the full range of anthropological scholarship on human cultures and on the human and other primate species. Communicating across the subfields, the journal features papers in a wide variety of areas, including social, cultural, and physical anthropology as well as ethnology and ethnohistory, archaeology and prehistory, folklore, and linguistics.