Should Animals Be Soldiers? by Jane Desmond

Should Animals Be Soldiers? By Jane Desmond

April 24, 2012, on Huffington Post for the American Anthropological Association

Steven Spielberg’s latest heroic film, War Horse, is ultimately a sentimental love story between a young English man and his horse — a magnificent chestnut thoroughbred named Joey. Both man and horse go off to battle in World War I, get separated and barely survive the horrors of trench warfare, only to be reunited in a miraculous scene of mutual recognition amid the chaos of war. It is hard to resist the lure of this heart-tugging film, but beneath the emotion lies a more fundamental question: Should animals be used to fight human wars?

Spielberg realistically portrays the central role that six million horses played in that deadly war, serving as mounts for cavalry units, pulling ambulances to rescue the wounded and laboring to draw heavy artillery across mud-drenched terrain. The losses of human and animal life were both staggering.

But, the use of animals in war goes much farther back than WWI, and much farther forward too, and spans more species and places than we would expect. Elephants, camels, dogs, dolphins, sea lions and carrier pigeons have been used (or are currently in use) on the battle front in various parts of the world. Right now, for instance, the U.S. Army is exploring the use of the African giant pouched rat to detect landmines, and the Navy uses dolphins as underwater defense sentries to guard against intruders in U.S. ports.

I have a personal connection to this issue. Before I was born, my father, Alton Desmond, served in the dog training unit of the U.S. Coast Guard in WWII. One of my treasured possessions is a large photograph of him, his buddies and their German Shepherds training on a base in New England. The men are impossibly young and happy in their white uniforms, and the dogs by their sides look eager and muscular, poised to detect enemy infiltration of our nation’s coasts.

Read this full article by Jane on Huffington Post’s blog for the American Anthropological Association.

Matti Bunzl Presents the 2012 Chicago Humanities Festival’s Focus on America

The Chicago Tribune

By Mark Caro, April 10, 2012

“The Chicago Humanities Festival will look for America this fall, and an eclectic array of speakers and performers will be joining the search.”

“The festival on Tuesday announced its 23rd annual theme, ‘America,’ as well as its first batch of presenters. It includes world-renowned Alinea and Next chef Grant Achatz, who will discuss his innovative work in the context of American and international cuisines; New York Times columnist David Brooks, who will deliver the annual Franke Lecture on Economics; baritone Nathan Gunn, who recently starred in the Lyric Opera’s ‘Show Boat’ and will sing and discuss selections from the Great American Songbook; New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, who will address what Americans can learn from French cuisine; Stanford University Vice Provost Harry Elam discussing playwright August Wilson’s contributions to American theater and culture; and presentations by Brown University Africana Studies professor Tricia Rose (who wrote the influential 1994 book ‘Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America’), architectural historian Gwendolyn Wright (who co-hosts PBS’ ‘History Detectives’) and historian Charles Mann (who wrote the acclaimed ’1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus’).”

“The main chunk of the festival runs Nov. 1-11, which means that Election Day, Nov. 6, falls smack in the middle of it. Humanities Festival artistic director Matti Bunzl said Tuesday that he viewed that elephant (or donkey) in the room as the jumping-off point for programming this year’s events.”

“’For me the selling point was, what should an election be?’ he said on the phone from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is an anthropology professor. ‘What it should be, to me, is a conversation about the past, present and future of the country, and that’s an intellectual, cultural and historical conversation. That’s what the festival will be. It will be the kind of conversation the election should be but can’t be because of the reality of politics.’”

Ripan Malhi will also participate in the Festival events, presenting insights from his work in genetics and our understanding of the peopling of the Americas.

Read the full Tribune article, and learn more from Matti’s overview on the Festival web site.

Interview with Jane Desmond on Studies of Animal-Human Bonds

Illinois Public Radio’s Focus program of “interviews on global affairs and daily life” offers a recorded interview with Jane Desmond. From WILL radio’s web site: “Animals have been an essential part of human culture for a very long time. We humans have defined ourselves by stressing the differences we saw between us and them. But in recent years, a growing number of scholars has begun to look more closely at what we have in common, with the same goal, helping us to think about what makes us human. Our topic will be the human-animal bond.”

Lisa Lucero Contributes to Task Force on Climate Change

Lisa Lucero, professor of anthropology, was appointed to the American Anthropological Association’s new Task Force on Climate Change. The task force was created to bring anthropology’s contributions to issues of environmental concern into the spotlight. Lucero will promote and develop anthropological contributions to climate change-related issues with eight other members of the task force.

Project, Conference Attuned to Changing Demographics in Colleges

At its Feb. 22 meeting, the University of Illinois Student Senate passed a resolution encouraging Facebook users to avoid posting racially insensitive material on a memes page associated with the school. The page administrators voluntarily removed the posts deemed offensive, but the debate continued in the Opinions section of the Daily Illini, a student newspaper. Few of the racially charged memes referred to African-Americans or Latinos; most referred to students of Asian heritage.

The memes controversy exemplifies the type of issues that are the focus of the American University Meets the Pacific Century Project – a social science research laboratory guided by U. of I. professors Nancy Abelmann (anthropology, Asian American studies, East Asian languages and cultures), Soo Ah Kwon (Asian American studies, human and community development), Tim F. Liao (sociology, statistics) and Adrienne Lo (anthropology). Started in the spring of 2010, the AUPC Project is hosting the first conference to address this topic on March 9-10 (Friday and Saturday), with speakers from colleges in the U.S. and Canada as well as Yonsei University, the oldest private university in South Korea.

The conference will focus on the fastest-growing segments of international students – Asian undergraduates – with presentations on topics ranging from the social conditions in China and South Korea that drive education migration to the ways these students are changing American colleges and universities.

Read full article in University News.

 

New Film on Industry and African-American Heritage in Edgefield, SC

Thanks to the South Carolina Humanities Council and National Endowment for the Humanities for grant support for two projects on Edgefield ceramics and archaeology. Congratulations to the Edgefield County Historical Society, as the sponsoring organization for these projects, and to George Calfas as Project Director and author of the grant proposals.

The first project consisted of a five-part speaker series convened in South Carolina in the Summer of 2011, entitled “Pottersville: 200 Years of Pottery Production in the Edgefield District.”

The second project is entitled “Pottersville: Home of Alkaline Glazed Stoneware,” and has the following description on the S.C. Humanities Council web site: “create a short documentary film of 8 to 10 minutes showcasing the alkaline-glazed stoneware tradition that is so important in Edgefield County. This film will be presented at the Joanne T. Rainsford Discovery Center in Edgefield, the McKissick Museum in Columbia, at regional historical society meetings, as well as on several websites, including SCETV’s KnowItAll.org, which reaches K-12 classrooms across the state” (http://schumanities.org/home).

Over the past few months Mr. Calfas and his colleagues have been working with Storyline Media to edit film footage with the goal of sharing the rich history of the pottery communities of Edgefield, the accomplishments of African-American and European-American artisans in those industries, and to document the 2011 Archaeological Fieldschool at Pottersville. The final product is a concise, 15 minute documentary now available online. In the coming month a DVD version will be added to the Anthropology department video library. If you would like a copy please let Mr. Calfas know, and please pass along this information to others who may be interested. Additional information about this multi-year, collaborative research and education project is also available online.

Alison Goebel and Chris Tan Recognized in Anthroworks Best 40 Dissertations in Cultural Anthropology 2011

Our PhD alumni Alison Goebel and Kok (Chris) Tan have been praised for authoring dissertations in the top 40 ranking by the Anthroworks web site. Congratulations to Alison and Chris!

Here are their dissertation titles and abstracts –

Small City Neighbors: Race, Space, and Class in Mansfield, Ohio, by Alison Goebel. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Advisors: Alejandro Lugo, Brenda Farnell, Ellen Moodie, David R. Roediger. This dissertation investigates social relations in a small deindustrializing city in the United States to analyze the specificities of class, “race relations,” and small city “cityness.” I conducted ethnographic research in Mansfield, Ohio, a multiracial, class-stratified city of about 50,000 residents. My work contributes to studies of whiteness and U.S. race relations by examining how whiteness hierarchically structures social relationships among neighbors. In analyzing how middle class white dominance responds to pressures that seek to undermine its privileges, my dissertation offers a small city view of U.S. race relations. My findings capture particularities of the field site as well as the consequences of global neoliberal capitalism and white racial privilege common throughout the United States.

Stand up for Singapore? Gay Men and the Cultural Politics of National Belonging in the Lion City, by Kok Tan. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Advisors: Martin Manalansan IV, F. K. Lehman, Janet D. Keller, Alejandro Lugo. This dissertation examines how Chinese-Singaporean gay men articulate their aspirations for national belonging within a recalcitrant state and its nation-building programs. These men expose the artificiality of the nation and its categories of belonging. Even as the state compels them to submit to its call for economic and biological (re)productivity, it also chastises them for their allegedly excessive individualism. In everyday life, they navigate a social landscape structured by the very real practices of an authoritarian state that criminalizes their sexuality. I argue that the illiberal state achieves its political legitimacy by convincing citizens that only it can secure Singapore’s continuous economic growth.

‘Animal Studies Cross Campus to Lecture Hall’

“Animal Studies Cross Campus to Lecture Hall,” By James Gorman, New York Times, January 2, 2012

Once, animals at the university were the province of science. Rats ran through mazes in the psychology lab, cows mooed in the veterinary barns, the monkeys of neuroscience chattered in their cages. And on the dissecting tables of undergraduates, preserved frogs kept a deathly silence.

On the other side of campus, in the seminar rooms and lecture halls of the liberal arts and social sciences, where monkey chow is never served and all the mazes are made of words, the attention of scholars was firmly fixed on humans.

No longer. . . .

Jane Desmond of the University of Illinois, a cultural anthropologist who organized a series of talks there about animals, says that what goes on in the public arena, beyond the university, has had a role in prompting new attention to animals. There are worries about the safety of the food chain, along with popular books about refusing to kill and eat animals.

Read full article here.

Cultural Anthropologist Paul Stoller Decries the “Culture of Expediency”

From: The Huffington Post

Paul Stoller

Professor of Anthropology, West Chester University; Author, ‘The Power of the Between’

Mitt Romney and the Culture of Expediency

Posted: 11/30/11

Mitt Romney’s duplicity is yet again in the news. This time the GOP Presidential hopeful’s flip-flopping is the subject of a new Democratic National Committee (DNC) web video, called “Mitt vs. Mitt.” The web video recounts Mitt’s “fight against himself”… “the story of two men trapped in one body.”

How can someone who has flip-flopped on so many issues still manage to garner political support in a political climate that seems to reward the aura of unshakable conviction?

Here’s my take on this contradiction.

We live today in a culture of expediency. On one side of the culture of expediency we are overwhelmed by the complexities and stressors of contemporary social life, we yearn for simple solutions to a complex set of personal, social and economic problems that barrage us with too much information, too many due dates, and too many obligations. People who present “easy-to-understand” solutions attract our attention and perhaps our political support. On the other side of the culture of expediency, the same set of contemporary stressors compels us to take short cuts.

Read the rest here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-stoller/mitt-vs-mitt_b_1118879.html

 

In Defense of Difference

SCIENTISTS OFFER NEW INSIGHT INTO WHAT TO PROTECT OF THE WORLD’S RAPIDLY VANISHING LANGUAGES, CULTURES, AND SPECIES.

FEATURE / BY MAYWA MONTENEGRO & TERRY GLAVIN /

 

SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

DECEMBER 2, 2011

As cultures and languages vanish, along with them go vast and ancient storehouses of accumulated knowledge. And as species disappear, along with them go not just valuable genetic resources, but critical links in complex ecological webs.

Experts have long recognized the perils of biological and cultural extinctions. But they’ve only just begun to see them as different facets of the same phenomenon, and to tease out the myriad ways in which social and natural systems interact.

Read more here: http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/in_defense_of_difference/P1/

 

 

 

 

 

[This article was originally published in the October 2008 print issue of Seed magazine.]