The evolution of egg shape in birds: selection during the incubation period

A recent broad comparative study suggested that factors during egg formation – in particular ‘flight efficiency’, which explained only 4% of the interspecific variation – are the main forces of selection on the evolution of egg shape in birds. As an alternative, we tested whether selection during the incubation period might also influence egg shape in two taxa with a wide range of egg shapes, the alcids (Alcidae) and the penguins (Spheniscidae). To do this, we analysed data from 30 species of these two distantly related but ecologically similar bird families with egg shapes ranging from nearly spherical to the most pyriform eggs found in birds. The shape of pyriform eggs, in particular, has previously proven difficult to quantify. Using three egg‐shape indices – pointedness, polar‐asymmetry and elongation – that accurately describe the shapes of all birds’ eggs, we examined the effects of egg size, chick developmental mode, clutch size and incubation site on egg shape. Linear models that include only these factors explained 70–85% of the variation in these egg‐shape indices, with incubation site consistently explaining > 60% of the variation in shape. The five species of alcids and penguins that produce the most pyriform eggs all incubate in an upright posture on flat or sloping substrates, whereas species that incubate in a cup nest have more spherical eggs. We suggest that breeding sites and incubation posture influence the ability of parents to manipulate egg position, and thus selection acting during incubation may influence egg‐shape variation across birds as a whole.     

Questions of kinship and inheritance in pediatric genetics: substance and responsibility

Pediatric genetics is growing in significance as a tool to explain childhood illness and disability. Within both medical sociology and anthropology writers have explored whether investigating genetic inheritance can overemphasize biological connection over other versions of kinship and can also lead to new forms of responsibility being imposed on parents for being “guilty” of sharing problematic “substance” with their offspring. Such considerations are complicated by the fact that a child's genetic variation is not necessarily something they inherited from their parents. This paper explores how questions of inheritance and responsibility are brought into play by pediatric genetics. It does so by drawing on ethnographic research of a genetics service in the UK. In particular we highlight how understandings of kinship can be unsettled by genetic scrutiny, but that once unsettled are not resolved by establishing whether a child has or has not inherited a genetic condition from their parents. Instead existing cultural kinship understandings of the moral substance of kinship responsibility towards producing and raising the right kinds of children are of equal (if not more) importance.     

Beyond the everyday: sustaining kinship in western Kenya

This article considers the efforts people in western Kenya have been making to uphold an ideology and practice of the natal home and kin group as morally authoritative, in a context where the very survival of many homes and families has been compromised by the devastating effects of AIDS‐related deaths and impoverishment. It traces how orphaned adults, who have little experience or memory of living among natal kin at natal homes, make concerted efforts to reconnect – often in necessarily improvised ways – with what survives of their natal kin and home. For women, in particular, such efforts seem less motivated by immediate material interests and more focused on demonstrating lineal solidarity as a means to affirming their moral personhood and value. The analysis addresses how people lacking shared everyday experiences of kinship and homes sustain the possibility of their kinship futures through a combination of imagination and ideological commitment.     

Bala wāsṭa: aspirant professionals,class-making,and moral narratives of social mobility in Lebanon

While there is a growing anthropological interest in professionals as experts and powerful actors, there is little ethnographic inquiry into invocations of professionalism by less privileged communities. This article examines how professionalism in Lebanon was increasingly appropriated by low-income communities in ways not referring to any particular profession or occupational domain. As a locally defined category, professionalism indexed an urban middle-class subjectivity of performing specific sets of symbolic capital, moral dispositions, and cross-sectarian relationalities. Lebanese civil society, led by middle-class cultural elites, promoted professionalism as a moral alternative to reliance on wāsṭa (intermediary connections through family or kinship), a practice associated with a corrupt sectarian political system. What I call aspirant professionals – young, low-income, university-educated Lebanese – increasingly participated in empowerment NGOs to learn professionalism in pursuit of social mobility and respectability. Aspirant professionals did not simply emulate the middle-class culture of professionalism; rather, their class-making process generated its own moralities, subjectivities, and practices. Through a critical examination of aspirant professional subjectivity, this article contributes to anthropological studies on professionalism, NGOs, and class.     

Sex,violence and nationalism

This article is a commentary on Joane Nagel’s “Masculinity and nationalism”, which discusses differing cultural conceptualizations of gender and masculinity, critically interrogating essentialist conceptualizations of maleness, and – in the most empirical and engaged section of the article – relates conceptualizations of maleness to war. This commentary elaborates on and develops Nagel’s analysis by introducing new empirical examples and through its emphasis on symbolism, metaphor and kinship imagery in portraying nations in a gendered manner. It is also pointed out that nations at peace project different gender relations to nations at war.     

Kinship and a counter-hegemonic social order: former revolutionaries in southern Oman

Critical reinterpretations of kinship studies questioned earlier ideas that kinship relations reflect and reproduce a dominant social order. ‘New’ kinship studies have nevertheless shown how even non-traditional family forms can reproduce traditional ideas about relatedness, values, and social hierarchies. Promising grounds for resisting ongoing tendencies to link kinship with conservative social reproduction arise from better understanding the circumstances under which kinship relations reproduce a counter-hegemonic social order. Kinship practices of former militants of a defeated revolutionary liberation movement in Dhufar, Oman, make visible veterans’ networks and relations which transgress dominant tribal, ethnic, racial, and gendered hierarchies. These practices show how, even in inauspicious circumstances of political defeat and marginalization, kinship relations can reproduce a counter-hegemonic social order – as well as a social afterlife of defeated revolution.     

Governing Muslims and Islam in Contemporary Germany: Race,Time, and the German Islam Conference

The construction of a swimming pool for the European personnel of one of the fifty or so colonial sugar factories still operating in Java in the mid-1930s was a symptom of the growing 'enclavement' of the Dutch colonial communities on the island during the final decades of the Netherlands India. An earlier phase of Dutch colonialism in the Indies had been characterized by hybrid, inclusivist social practices and cultural assumptions generally labelled indisch or Indo-European. By the inter-war decades of the twentieth century, totok – meaning expatriate – norms and values began to assert their hegemony at virtually all levels of colonial society. Yet ambiguity continues to surround this progress from incorporation to differentiation, as instanced by the inter-war history of the Europeans who lived in the residential compound which the pool was designed to service.     

Blood is not always thicker than water:The limited effect of kin selection on human kinship in the traditional Chinese family

To examine the importance of kin selection in shaping human societies, this study analyzed the kinship system practiced in traditional China for two millennia and teased apart its underlying genetic and other, presumably cultural, components.The results demonstrate that, in the traditional patrilineal Chinese family, both genetic relatedness and the cultural factor of generation were important in determining kinship status for male agnates (genetically related relatives). For female agnates, however, only genetic relatedness was important. Another surprising finding was that the influence of gender was not as important as genetic relatedness. The most interesting finding in this study, however, was that kin selection and culture (I.e., seniority in generation and age) played vastly different roles in different lineages in the Chinese family: for collateral (indirect) agnates, genetic relatedness was the most important factor in determining their kinship status, but for lineal (direct) agnates, its importance was overridden by seniority in generation and age, a cultural factor. Several other bio-cultural factors also explained a considerable amount of variance in kinship status. Since kinship profoundly affected, and was often the foundation of, the legal and social systems in dynastic China, kin selection, while its strength may differ remarkably between lineal and collateral relatives, could act as a selective force in Chinese families.     

Disciplined to diversity: learning the language of multiculturalism

This study shows that contemporary multiculturalism is a cultural referent used in the construction of modern and socially-acceptable selves. By analysing the practices of diversity training, I consider one of the ways in which multiculturalism moves from abstract philosophical idea and fodder for policy formation to adoption as a cultural and moral framework that individuals use in establishing their identities, discerning meaning and engaging others. Demonstrating that people must acquire competence in the use of a particular multicultural vocabulary and rules of interaction, I challenge the perspective that both bigotry and acceptance are organic to individuals. Properly multicultural selves are not merely the natural extension of interior individual qualities. Instead, people produce modern identities vis-à-vis diversity through the use of language and the negotiation of its meaning.     

In the shadow of industry: a study of culturization in Papua New Guinea

The activities of extractive industry have recently been framed by a language of corporate social responsibility that relies on a system of legibility and objectification. This process reifies ‘cultural units’, abstracting them from the rules of kinship, migration, and exchange that ensure social and economic security. I refer to this process and the ideology of ‘development’ that accompanies it as culturization and examine it in the context of oil extraction in Papua New Guinea's Kutubu region. Drawing on debates on the indigenization and politicization of ‘culture’, I present culturization as a process that relies on rules of inheritance and property to impose a structure of difference in contexts of extractive industry that ignores the intricacies of sociality that ultimately give life meaning. The aim of the paper is to both illustrate the consequences of this process and consider cognate ideas of ‘culture’ vis‐à‐vis ‘sociality’ to emphasize their mutual theoretical importance to contemporary anthropological inquiry.     

Kinship Between Judith Butler and Anthropology? A Review Essay

This essay critically evaluates Judith Butler's recent writings on kinship. In this work, Butler challenges the universalist assumptions of psychoanalysis, hoping to lay the analytical groundwork for imagining new forms of familial relationship. Butler examines the way that anthropology and psychoanalysis have constructed the incest taboo as necessitating heteronormative forms of kinship. Butler's critique of kinship, which draws on her theories of subjection, belies her own attachment to a vision of social life occupied primarily by normative institutions, in particular the state. I suggest that new forms of kinship must be understood on their own terms, whether or not they are accorded legitimacy in law or accepted by psychoanalysis. Anthropology's ethnographic practice can emendate an account of subjection and recognition that obsessively looks to institutions and norms even as it criticizes them.     

Kinship on the waterfront: logistics labour in a global port

This article examines how kinship forms a contested element of labour under capitalist distribution. The focus of the article is on a thriving Spanish container port where the dockworker collective has been steadily growing since the multinational companies first arrived in the 1970s. In the wake of containerization – a standardized system of freight transport based on the intermodal shipping container – dock work has been revalued and become attractive in an area otherwise characterized by high unemployment rates and below-average salaries. Drawing on ethnographic research, the article analyses how unionized dockworkers are met with stigmatization from the general public and criticized for their intergenerational access to ‘container capital’. The article contributes to current anthropological debates around the role of labour under global capitalism by tracing the links between kinship and labour in the making of a global port.     

Evolution of culture-dependent discriminate sociality: a gene-culture coevolutionary model

Animals behave cooperatively towards certain conspecifics while being indifferent or even hostile to others. The distinction is made primarily according to kinship as predicted by the kin selection theory. With regards to humans, however, this is not always the case; in particular, humans sometimes exhibit a discriminate sociality on the basis of culturally transmitted traits, such as personal ornaments, languages, rituals, etc. This paper explores the possibility that the human faculty of cultural transmission and resultant cultural variation among individuals may have facilitated the evolution of discriminate sociality in humans. To this end, a gene-culture coevolutionary model is developed focusing on competition over control of resource as a context in which discriminate sociality may have evolved. Specifically, two types of culture-dependent discriminate sociality are considered: ingroup favouritism, with ingroup and outgroup being distinguished by the presence or absence of a cultural trait; and prestige hierarchies, with the prestige being conferred on the bearer of a cultural trait. The model specifies the conditions under which emergence and evolutionary stability of the two types of discriminate sociality are promoted by the presence of cultural variation among individuals.     

Adoption and Kinship in Oceania

The frequency and form of adoption practices in Oceania recently have been cited as evidence that human behavior is inconsistent with predictions derived from sociobiological theory (Sahlins 1976). Ethnographic data reviewed here, however, suggest otherwise. In Oceania kinship is an important factor in the selection and treatment of adopted children as adoption occurs almost exclusively among close relatives. Natal children often ally against their adopted siblings over the division of their common parents' estate while adoptive parents themselves frequently apportion their land unequally among their natal and adopted children. These patterns and other data are consistent with predictions generated by a socio biological model of adoptive decisions. The model illustrates how kinship facilitates adoption as a means of modifying extreme family sizes, and how asymmetries in the degrees of relatedness between parents and their adopted and natal children provide the basis of differential treatment of them. Adoption in Oceania provides an example of a clearly cultural behavior which is consistent with socio biological predictions, and suggests that both culture and biology are relevant to an understanding of human behavior . [sociobiology, kinship, adoption, Oceania]     

A jumping spider that lays eggs like an insect

The South East Asian salticid, Asemonea tenuipes, lay its eggs like an insect: as individuated capsules in geometrically precise rows. The occurrence of this behaviour is described in a population from Thailand that lays eggs on the underside of mango tree (Mangifera indica) leaves. The rows were vertically arranged at a 90° angle that was parallel to, and varied in relation to the angle of the central leaf rib, indicating that the rib serves as the primary visual cue for orienting the row. Analysis of within-egg row symmetry found evidence that micro-topography – in particular, vertical ‘stepping’ produced by leaf sub-ribs – of the leaf surface plane was responsible for 97% of variability in the relative symmetry of egg placement. Three strategies were identified: (1) crossing the sub-rib and producing localized asymmetry in the egg row; (2) introducing a gap at the sub-rib to maintain symmetry; and (3) ‘compressing’ the egg row into the gap between sub-ribs. The incidence of asymmetry showed a highly significant linear relationship with egg load. It is hypothesized that the use of rows probably represents a solution to the problem of how to surveil temporally staggered clutches of eggs and newly hatched spiderlings simultaneously.     

Siberian exhibition

Anthropological work in South Asia has been dominated by cultural approaches which emphasise pan‐Indian cultural categories. Such cultural categories, particularly those pertaining to caste and kinship, it has been claimed, explain adequately the working and reproduction of caste society. Few anthropologists have considered agrarian and tenurial relationships and their representation or the economic processes which ensue from such relationships. An analysis of agricultural relations of production in a Himalayan community is presented here. It is suggested that although people present an idealised picture in which caste and economic position coincide, in reality ownership of means of production depends on control of the labour of others. Labour relations and processes of economic differentiation are shown to be crucial for the maintenance of caste hierarchy.     

What Do Abelam Images Want from Us?: Plato's Cave and Kwatbi's Belly

In this paper I compare two origin myths, one from the Abelam speaking area of the Sepik region, Papua New Guinea, the other, the allegory of Plato's Cave found in The Republic. I explore the effects which each of these different conceptions of iconography and aesthetics has on the other when they intersect. I argue that fieldwork itself can be looked at as a hybrid form in the sense that it brings into juxtaposition different systems of thought and contrasting cultural tropes. At the moment of intersection a new cultural form, a hybrid, is produced in that someone may ask a question which has never been asked before and respondents may think about something they have never consciously thought about before. I attempt to imaginatively reconstruct one such moment when Anthony Forge questioned Abelam painters in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea about their iconographic system. By comparing the two origin myths we can better comprehend why Forge received particular and, from his viewpoint, problematic answers to questions about the meaning of particular painting designs. The comparison reveals that the myths are inversions of one another and imply radically differing conceptions of space and iconography. The paper ends by demonstrating that Abelam painters in their turn have questions about systems of representation different from their own. This can be seen in their interrogation of the author about the labels on perfume bottles and their response to an art gallery in Sydney, Australia, which they visited with the author.     

Coming too Close,Going too Far: Theoretical and Cross‐cultural Approaches to Incest and its Prohibitions

Although interest in cultural explanations of topics like incest waned among Anglo anthropologists along with the abandonment of kinship theory in general, other paradigms provided a renewed interest in some older theories about the prohibition of incest. The approach presented in this paper gives due critical consideration to both evolutionary and ‘cultural’ explanations of incest and its prohibition suggesting their mutual involvement, but the necessity of a close analysis of the specificity of the cultural forms in which shared substance, connection, difference and nurture are expressed as reproductive ontology. Particular cases are discussed in the light of recent suggestions that the cross‐cultural incidence of incest and its prohibition is to be understood via theories of dissociative disorders in the West that allegedly illuminate a wide range of practices claimed to be linked to sexual abuse in childhood.