Article Type: Article

Interview

Karen Barkey: “Shared Sacred Sites”

Published September 6, 2016

Dr. Karen Barkey, a sociologist joining UC Berkeley in Fall 2016, directs the Shared Sacred Sites initiative, which uses digital humanities methods to present information about sacred sites that are shared by different religious communities.

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Every year on April 23, the monastery of Aya Yorgi (St. George)—on the island of Buyukada, in Istanbul—attracts thousands of pilgrims, who mix with vendors and artisans along the path to the church situated atop a hill. Inside, Greek Orthodox priests perform mass for the gathered congregation. But the congregants themselves are not, for the most part, Greek Orthodox. On that day, it is mostly Muslims and Christians of other denominations who crowd inside the church to hear mass, offer prayers, and light candles that honor St. George.

This annual ritual might appear surprising to a contemporary observer accustomed to defined devotional boundaries dividing religious communities, but the eastern Mediterranean is dotted with such sacred destinations that bring diverse groups together in common veneration. Dr. Karen Barkey, Distinguished Chair in Religious Diversity at the Haas Institute and a professor in Sociology, is studying these sites and telling their stories with her colleagues to inform both scholars and the general public on the dynamics of religious tolerance and interaction in the region.

Barkey arrived at the topic of religious tolerance through her research on the history of the Ottoman Empire and the strategies that its governments embraced to maintain authority. Her book Empire of Difference, published in 2008, examines how the religious toleration commonly associated with the Ottoman Empire emerged through the state’s efforts to gain legitimacy—and through religious communities’ own distinct practices of coexisting. This led Barkey and her colleagues to consider how that “toleration” manifested as “tolerance” in local social interactions among diverse religious groups and practitioners.

Perhaps no social practice better embodies those cultures of religious tolerance than the sharing of the same sacred spaces like churches, mosques, and shrines among devotees from different faiths. Together with colleagues, Barkey began analyzing places like the monastery of Aya Yorgi as a way of understanding that tolerance through the Shared Sacred Sites project, funded largely by the Henry Luce Foundation. The project has expanded into several related initiatives that connect fieldwork, analysis, and public engagement.

The multiple goals of the Shared Sacred Sites project converge in the Visual Hasluck initiative, a project that uses digital humanities methods to present fieldwork on sacred sites in an accessible and engaging way. Barkey and her colleagues wanted to draw more attention to one of the foundational works in the study of sacred sites in the Ottoman Empire, Frederick Hasluck’s Christianity and Islam under the Sultans, an archaeological analysis of religious interaction whose methods made the book far ahead of its time when it was published in 1929.

Barkey and her colleagues believe Hasluck’s methodology warrants renewed attention. “Instead of trying to trace clear-cut boundaries and categories, he explores sacred sites through a condition of mixing or ambiguity as his starting point,” explain Barkey and Dr. Dimitris Papadopoulos, who has conducted fieldwork and developed the site. Hasluck focused on interactions among groups and on the ambiguity of religious identity, eschewing the “fixed categories of religion, ethnicity and identity” that cloud any attempt to clearly understand shared devotional sites.

Barkey, Papadopoulos, and their colleagues turned to digital humanities methods to present the insights from Hasluck’s work to a new audience. They have exploited a range of possibilities that these methods offer, from computational text analysis to parse information from the book itself, to digital mapping and network analysis graphs to visualize the conclusions from Hasluck’s research.

They started with a digitized copy of Hasluck’s book in the form of a text file, and used free open-source digital tools like Unlock Text to automatically identify names of specific locations mentioned within. They used online dictionaries of historical location names to match Hasluck’s placenames with current names, and supplied information on the significance of the holy site at each location. With a database of that information and the coordinates of each location, the team developed detailed maps embedded with information on the groups and practices that render each site sacred.

The site also hosts interactive network visualizations, which graphically show the links between key terms in the text, such as names of saints or identities of groups, and those that follow or precede them in sentences. This can reveal, for example, how certain saints might be associated with certain blessings, or how particular sites are related to particular groups, in ways that may not easily be recognized through the book alone. As the project progresses, more recent ethnographic information can be incorporated into the datasets.

 The Visual Hasluck site invites any visitor to be challenged by the complexity of sites that do not fit neatly into received religious categories. In a series of “Micro Essays” hosted on the site, Barkey and her colleagues explain new connections that their tools have uncovered. Through their network visualizations, they were able to discern how Hasluck understood the relations among particular groups. They clarify, for example, how the Kizilbash people of rural Anatolia were considered a subgroup of a larger group, but were identified particularly by their relationship with the countryside, rather than by their beliefs or theology.

Barkey and her team are developing n exhibit on Shared Sacred Sites in the Mediterranean that they hope to showcase in international locations over the next few years to insure that general audiences are able to appreciate these spaces as testaments to tolerance—and as challenges to ideas of fixed religious identities. Indeed, beyond benefitting scholars, Barkey and Papadopoulos are confident that bringing Hasluck to modern audiences will help promote understanding about  religious identities and conflicts in Europe and the Middle East at a moment when they are taking center stage in global affairs and media coverage. “In light of current crises in Europe and the Middle East and dominant discourses of religion-based conflict and division,” they write, “it is critical to return to this text with a new set of eyes.”

Top image from Shared Sacred Sites.

Interview

Mazda Farias-Virgens: “Birdsong and Human Language”

Published May 23, 2016

UC Berkeley anthropology graduate student Madza Farias-Virgens draws upon research into birdsong and genome sequencing to address questions related to the evolution of human language.

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Your neighborhood songbird may have a story to tell about your evolutionary past.

The link between human beings and our primate relatives, such as chimpanzees and bonobos, has been noted for decades. Less well known, however, is the relationship between humans and songbirds, particularly at the level of language.

“The best analogy to human language that one can find is birdsong,” says Madza Farias-Virgens, a doctoral student in UC Berkeley’s Department of Anthropology, citing a comparison that researchers have been making since the publication of Darwin’s The Descent of Man.

This similarity has justified a new collaborative work in the Brain Evolution Laboratory at UC Berkeley, conducted under the auspices of Farias-Virgens and Dr. Terrence Deacon, in collaboration with faculty of RIKEN Brain Science Institute, UC San Francisco, UC Merced, and UCLA.

A native of Brazil, Farias-Virgens is a relative newcomer to the study of anthropology. In fact, it was not until her arrival at Berkeley to begin her doctoral studies that she even ventured outside of the biological sciences, her original field of study. “I always wanted to do evolutionary studies; it was always on my mind,” she says. “I was interested in studying…the evolution of the theory of mind.”

This interest led Farias-Virgens to her current project: examining how songbirds can relay clues about the evolution of human language. Researchers who are interested in human evolution, especially those who study behavioral and cognitive development, have proposed a concept termed the “self-domestication hypothesis” to explain much of what distinguishes modern humans from our primate and Neanderthal ancestors.

This hypothesis argues that, through many millennia, humans came to control their environment; consequently, more complex behaviors such as language, but also altruism, labor division, and even agricultural development, took hold in our species.

Crucially, the hypothesis states that traits that were at first intended for survival—for example, emotional responses and skills to help protect against predation and assist with food-gathering—eventually became mechanisms that could help adapt to social living. Through this process of “self-domestication,” humans were able to redeploy their innate skills and features via socialization, something we take for granted today.

Unsurprisingly, the evolutionary process of self-domestication is not unique to humans. In fact, it is upon comparison of domesticated and wild animal species that many of the current debates surrounding the hypothesis are based.

Alone in our Communication

While many species, such as songbirds and chimpanzees, have acquired auditory perception and other elements of vocal behavior, Farias-Virgens outlines why our communicative systems are still unique: “Even when you teach chimpanzees some type of communication system, they are really constrained in terms of which kind of complex syntax they can grab,” she explains. “There’s really debate about if they’re really doing syntax, if they have an order preference.”

Comparative research into the evolution of language requires animals that are vocal learners, or those that can produce sounds in a vocal organ, but birds are not the only species that fit the bill. Consider humpback whales, for example, or even elephants. Farias-Virgens spells out why these animals are less than ideal for research, however. “They are huge animals, but birds, they are small, so you can extract the brain,” she explains.

Other primates, such as the well-known chimpanzee, are also good candidates, but as Farias-Virgens notes, many of these species are protected. Researchers must await the animals’ natural passing before neurological research can begin, rendering them unpredictable test subjects for most projects.

But there are even stronger arguments in favor of using birds to study the evolution of human language. People have been working on birdsong and brains for a while now, so we have a solid understanding of how it works. This proves to be an advantage over semi-vocalizing animals, such as mice, since we know far less about the rodents’ brain activities. Furthermore, the similarities between birdsong and human language communication are irrefutable, even extending to functional organization of the brain.

“People have been arguing…for a strong analogy between brain areas, the way that the brain areas connect, in the human brain, [saying] that it is similar to the way the brain areas connect in birds,” says Farias-Virgens.

A Novel Approach to Studying the Self-Domestication Hypothesis

Creative methods are necessary for addressing Farias-Virgens’ core research questions because, unlike many other biological processes, language, cognition, and behavior do not leave traces. “While most of my colleagues, biological anthropologists can get a hold of bones and do things, language and any behavior doesn’t fossilize,” Farias-Virgens explains.

In the end, the best approaches to the evolution of language came from a comparison of two seemingly unrelated species of songbirds: the white-backed munia and the Bengalese finch. The link between the two species was first officially reported in the avicultural community by Taka-Tsukasa in 1917 and has provided crucial insight into how the domestication of a species can predict language complexity.

While the white-backed munia was, and remains, a species found in the wild, the Bengalese finch was domesticated in Japan in the 19th century. Today these birds can be distinguished by their coloring, but most notably by the domesticated Bengalese finch’s more elaborate, flexible birdsongs.

According to Farias-Virgens, all birdsong has a “phonological syntax”, meaning the birds have an explicit order of sounds that they must follow in the songs. Yet the syntax of the domesticated species is far more complex than that of its wild counterpart. Since the Bengalese finch descends from the white-backed munia, researchers can hypothesize with some confidence that any observed difference between the two variants of the species is due to domestication. As with humans who self-domesticated over many thousands of years, researchers predict that it was the domestication of the Bengalese finch that permitted the rise of more complex songs.

“Birdsong has what they call holistic meaning, so it’s about the state of the bird,” begins Farias-Virgens. For example, a female bird chooses a mate on the basis of the complexity of his song as this is indicative of his overall health. A more elaborate song is also correlated with body size of the bird.

How could a more flexible birdsong indicate the overall health of a bird? For one simple reason says Farias-Virgens: song is costly. The story plays out like this: in the wild, the white-backed munias have to cope with selective pressures such as foraging or predation. “This compromises the amount of energy that a bird can devote to singing,” explains Farias-Virgens.

Once domesticated, the Bengalese finch experienced a relaxation in selective pressures. In short, the bird had few concerns aside from mating, since food and protection were provided. This permitted a more complex song to arise in the domesticated species.

To determine the genetic underpinnings of these song differences, Farias-Virgens extracts the entire genome of a large sample of each bird type. Then, the active genes in the two variants of the species are compared to identify the effects of domestication, as well as which genes control each bird’s song. The research team is hopeful that they can apply their findings to human language evolution as well.

The goal of the research, explains Farias-Virgens and her colleague, Jessi Sosnovskaya, an undergraduate majoring in anthropology, on their fundraising website, is to use a new approach called “Exon-capture,” coupled with DNA next-generation sequencing technologies, and “generate a massive database of genetic information that can teach us about how the Bengalese finch song evolved. If our hypothesis is right, this would indicate that relaxation of selective pressures over vocal behavior could have led us to evolve language.”

To read more about Farias-Virgens’ research, see this article from Berkeley Science Review. You can also see a video about the project on this page on Experiment.com.

Interview

Katherine Zubovich: “A Towering Legacy”

Published May 10, 2016

In her dissertation, Katherine Zubovich, a Ph.D. candidate in Russian and Soviet History at UC Berkeley, examines the history of a 1950s skyscraper project in Moscow. 

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If you find yourself walking the streets of downtown Moscow and stop to make a 360 degree turn, chances are good that you will spot at least one tall, Gothic-style skyscraper at some point in the distance. A total of seven of these skyscrapers, known collectively as vysotki (a play on vysota, the Russian word for “height”), appeared on the Moscow cityscape between 1952 and 1959, making them the Soviet Union’s first modern skyscrapers. To this day, they remain the sites of some of the city’s most important political and cultural institutions, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Moscow State University. Clocking in at upwards of 787 feet in height, each vysotka stands distinctly apart from her neighbors, most of which struggle to register at twenty stories. Like Paris’s Eiffel Tower and New York’s Empire State Building, their size and distinct styles have earned them coveted spots on backlit renderings of the Moscow skyline, cementing their status as both iconic and ordinary fixtures within the capital city’s built environment.

Difficult as these buildings are to ignore in real life, they have managed to remain invisible within the scholarly literature. Historians of the Soviet Union and experts on socialist cities have paid scant attention to these structures, focusing instead on the experimental architecture of the 1920s Soviet avant-garde and the 1930s Stalinist neoclassical period.

“The buildings have been pretty much dismissed by history,” says Katherine Zubovich, a doctoral candidate in Russian and Soviet History at UC Berkeley. Zubovich’s dissertation, titled “Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life under High Stalinism,” seeks to fill this gap by chronicling the history of the skyscraper project and its impact on the city of Moscow. More than a blueprint-to-bricklaying story, Zubovich’s dissertation charts the skyscraper project’s political, economic, and social dimensions, as well. From the buildings’ origins in US-USSR architectural relations in the 1930s to their development in the hands of the Soviet Union’s most powerful state bureaucracies, not to mention their impact on the everyday lives of ordinary Muscovites, the vysotki, Zubovich argues, transformed Moscow from a provincial former Russian capital into the showcase socialist city.

So what explains the skyscrapers’ absence from the scholarly literature? The answer, Zubovich thinks, lies in their moment of creation. The first of the seven skyscrapers was completed in late 1952, during the final months of Joseph Stalin’s life. Over the next several years, one vysotka after another was completed, each popping up like an unlikely daisy in the middle of winter. Winters, however, thaw into spring. As Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, began to unroll a series of “de-Stalinization” policies meant to distinguish his regime from his predecessor’s, the skyscrapers came to be viewed not as shiny new additions to the Moscow cityscape, but as unwelcome, outdated reminders of a darker era.

In short order, the buildings’ architects came under attack by Stalin-era elites in search of scapegoats for Stalin’s (and their own) misdeeds. Khrushchev, himself a major beneficiary of Stalin’s patronage, joined the chorus of critics at a builder’s conference held in Moscow in December 1954. “Right as they were being realized, these buildings became villains on the Moscow cityscape,” Zubovich notes. The new regime tried to counteract the influence of these steely giants through large-scale, pre-fabricated public housing developments designed to represent a more humane and inclusive brand of socialist humanism.

Almost before they could open their doors, the buildings became not just politically but aesthetically problematic. Many condemned the buildings as unoriginal, copycats of American skyscrapers like Chicago’s Sears Tower and New York’s Empire State Building. The same criticism was leveled against the engineering technique used to build them. “There was a sense that these buildings were regressive in their time, that they weren’t technologically innovative, that they were just borrowing technology from abroad that was old technology,” Zubovich says. Like the White Sea Canal and the Dnieprostroi Dam, the skyscrapers were built in part using the labor of convicts paced at a breakneck speed, further cementing the project’s reputation as a Stalinist hallmark.

Contemporary audiences and scholars have in some ways perpetuated the buildings’ original reputations as Stalinist holdovers, so much so that many have branded the vysotki as mere examples of “totalitarian architecture,” on par with buildings like Albert Speer’s Zeppelinfeld stadium or the Mussolini-commissioned Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana. But Zubovich argues that their “totalitarian” label is somewhat misplaced. While she concedes that the buildings were supposed to, and did, restructure the city and re-orient the individual’s command of the urban space, the way the project unfolded does not adhere to the top-down, one-way trajectory that the “totalitarian” genre implies.

For example, Zubovich describes how the buildings were intended to be part of a monumental, totalizing plan for Moscow, dominated by what contemporaries termed the “socialist realist ensemble”: a trio consisting of a monumental skyscraper, connected to long, wide boulevards that in turn led to public parks and places of leisure. But what Zubovich’s research has uncovered is that a plan driven by the aesthetic ideal of ordering and controlling space came to be shaped more by the people who occupied it. Rehousing individuals living on the plots intended for skyscraper development, managing tenancy requests, and transporting workers from outside the city center to build the structures themselves were just some of the human aspects that the original plan failed to consider and ultimately had to accommodate. “I soon realized that [a project that] started as a very short decree in January 1947 unraveled into many, many subsequent decrees that had to be written to take into account so much of the fallout of this project,” Zubovich recalls. The project, in other words, was totalizing in scope rather than effect. Rather than dwarf or subordinate the individual, it incorporated and adjusted to human necessity.

Another reason why the vysotki’s “totalitarian” label warrants reconsideration rests in the project’s institutional origins. During her research, Zubovich followed a paper trail that linked the vysotki to similar projects in the United States and Europe, underscoring the fact that the initiative had closer ties to architectural movements in liberal western states than to fascist ones.

In the early 1930s, nearly two decades before the first vysotka opened its doors, the Central Committee of the Communist Party announced plans to build a new government headquarters that would also double as the world’s largest skyscraper. The commission for the “proletariat tower,” later rebranded as the “Palace of Soviets,” fell in the hands of architect Boris Iofan, whose first major work, the “House on the Embankment,” was home to the most powerful members of the Stalinist elite at the time. In 1934, early in the Palace’s planning stage, Iofan led a team of Soviet architects on an exploratory trip to the United States to conduct detailed technical studies of major American building projects. There he signed a contract with the celebrated, New York-based engineering firm Moran & Proctor to provide engineering consulting for the Palace of Soviets project, and he spent time surveying some of the United States’ most innovative skyscrapers. Buildings like Detroit’s Fisher, Union Trust, and General Motors Buildings, Chicago’s Tribune Tower, and New York’s Empire State, Woolworth, and Chrysler Buildings convinced Iofan that the world’s greatest building in the world’s greatest socialist city needed and deserved the best in technical expertise, even if it came from the heart of the capitalist west. Iofan would recycle this knowledge and embrace of western technological expertise after the Soviet government sidelined the Palace of Soviets project in the early 1950s, redirecting resources to developing what would become Moscow’s signature seven skyscrapers.

Yet despite its ties to American and European architectural know-how, the skyscraper project, according to Zubovich, can be best appreciated as a socialist enterprise, and a Soviet one at that. From their composition (steel, marble, iron) to their construction timeline (fast) and sponsors (the public sector), the skyscrapers bore the traits of a socialist economy forged under Joseph Stalin’s tutelage in particular. “The thing about building in a socialist context is that you can’t just flip through a catalog and figure out the materials you want to order from a certain company,” Zubovich points out. “You [the state] are the company.”

Absent a private sector, Soviet state bureaucrats had to manage (and in some cases create) a reliable supply chain capable of sustaining a decade’s worth of metropolis-building. From creating agreements with marble quarries far from the city center to building the transportation infrastructure necessary to transport raw materials to the construction sites, the demands that the project imposed on the agencies involved amounted to yet another source of stress for a government still recovering from the disaster of World War II. Building up, the project’s members realized, required first building across.

But build they did, and the final products—seven skyscrapers, each filled with residential, commercial, and professional occupants—testify to the power of the skyscraper as an idea to shape policy and space. It was an idea that many modern states, socialist and not, contemplated and pursued during the 19th and 20th centuries for practical and ideological purposes. When asked why city planners are attracted to extraordinarily large buildings, Zubovich stresses their symbolic value and ability “to make a statement.”

Harnessing the skyscraper—once the quintessential symbol of unruly, urban capitalism—and exporting it to capital cities like Riga and Warsaw offered a powerful way for Moscow to communicate a satellite country’s entry into the communist bloc during the early years of the Cold War. “I think there’s an ideological component to it, because these buildings are impressive,” Zubovich says, adding that the race to build the tallest building in New York in the early twentieth century was driven as much by prestige as real estate speculation.

Prestige as both a motive for and byproduct of large-scale building has proved to be both timeless and universal. Skyscraper construction continues to offer both local and national governments a way to showcase their modern sensibilities. One need look no further than the Arabian peninsula, where the skyscraper wars of the early 20th century are experiencing a most spectacular reduxe. At the time of writing, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa stands as the tallest building in the world, a title that Saudi Arabia promises to acquire once it unveils its kilometer-high Jeddah Tower.

Moscow’s own appetite for tall buildings remains strong. “Moskva City,” a patch of new and under-construction skyscrapers located in the city center, has, like Manhattan and San Francisco’s downtown neighborhoods, become the unofficial home of the capital’s international business sector. Incidentally, Muesler & Rutledge, the present-day embodiment of Moran & Proctor, the engineering firm that provided the foundation for Iofan’s unfinished Palace of Soviets, has offered its services to the Moskva City architects.

So what do today’s post-Soviet Muscovites think about the vysotki? Have the buildings suffered a similar blow to their reputation as they did in the immediate post-Stalin years, standing as they do today as reminders of Russia’s socialist century? “My sense is that people are quite fond of them,” says Zubovich, who has spent many years both studying and living in the capital. “In a city with a sort of eccentric, circular city plan,” she says, “these buildings serve to orient you. You can be walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood and you turn and see this building, and it’s beautiful. It just glows at night.”

Image Credits:

Top Photo: Bernt Rostad, Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Creative Commons License 2.0 via Flickr.

Inserted Photo: Marcus Kwan, Stalinskie Vysotki. Creative Commons License 2.0 via Flickr.

Inserted Photo: Aurel Cuvin, Stalinskie Vysotki. Creative Commons License 2.0 via Flickr.

Interview

John Ohala: “Vocal Fry and the “Frequency Code””

Published March 10, 2016

John J. Ohala, Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley, explores a plausible connection between lion manes and the creaky-voice phenomenon known as "vocal fry".

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You’ve heard it before. That low-pitched, raspy, croaking sound, normally found toward the end of a sentence and extended for longer than what seems normal. Commonly known as vocal fry, the sound also goes by “creaky voice,” “croak” or the less conversation-friendly “glottalization” and “laryngealisation.” It occurs when cartilages in the larynx draw together, causing the vocal cords to compress tightly and become compact, forming a large and irregularly vibrating mass within the larynx in the process. Air travelling through the larynx rattles and pops, emitting a low-frequency sound reminiscent of a slowly creaking door.

Anecdotal evidence has shown that many people find vocal fry, especially when produced by women, difficult to bear. More formal studies have traced the tangible effect that vocal fry’s unpopularity has on women. A study led by researchers at Duke University has shown that prospective employers view job candidates (and women in particular) who use vocal fry as being “less competent, less educated, less trustworthy, less attractive, and less hirable,” which the study claims hurts those women’s performance on the job market. Studies like these have given many people cause for concern, especially since other studies show that vocal fry is quickly becoming a part of the linguistic mainstream in the United States, and among young women in particular.

To uncover why someone might find something as seemingly innocuous as low-frequency vocal pitch irritating, we spoke with John Ohala, phonetician and Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley and a pioneer in the field of phonology. Ohala has studied the relationship between low-frequency vocal pitch and speech perception in humans from the perspective of ethology, or the study of human and non-human behavior. He emphasizes that, in order to understand pitch perception among women and men, we first need to think about what pitch and analogous vocal and visual cues accomplish in the animal world.

Take, for example, the image of an adult male lion, a beautiful mane wrapped around his head. As is well known, males of certain species—not just lions, but also peacocks and mallards and many others—develop elaborate aesthetic qualities like manes and intricately patterned feathers to attract the attention of (and compete for) female mates. These features are designed to give males a leg up in reproducing (and passing along their genes) through a force known as sexual selection.

Conflict minimization between members of the same (and different) species plays a similarly important role in ensuring a species’ survival. Although competition and the conflict that comes with are central to Darwin’s theory of evolution, too much of both can be harmful. Luckily, most animal species have developed innate mechanisms—both physical and behavioral—that help them distinguish unproductive conflicts from those that may result in a useful immediate or long-term outcome. Some of the most important mechanisms for doing so rely on projecting size and strength.

In the case of lions, not only does the mane demonstrate a male’s superior fitness for the purpose of mate selection, but it also artificially increases his size to signal to those around him that it would not be in their best interest to engage in combat with him. A lion’s large mane may deter a younger or smaller male lion from engaging in a sparring match with his larger counterpart, a fight that would likely result in the smaller male lion’s defeat (which would subsequently cause harm to the male lion’s family and pack). Gorilla “beards”, bison humps, and moose antlers accomplish a similar goal of minimizing conflict: by making animals appear larger, more mature, and therefore powerful, they encourage other animals to submit in what ethologists call “agonistic encounters,” or combative situations. Counterintuitive as it might be, large size—at least in the animal kingdom—could serve a pacifying purpose.

Sound, and vocal pitch in particular, plays an equally important role in settling conflicts in the animal kingdom by manipulating perceptions of size. In a seminal article published in 1977, the ethologist Eugene S. Morton argued that birds and mammals use sound to convey dominance and submission during agonistic encounters: in a potentially hostile situation, dominant animals resort to harsh, relatively low frequency (i.e., low-pitch) sounds, while less-dominant animals use higher-frequency (i.e. high-pitch) sounds designed to signify appeasement and friendliness. He argued that these behavioral tendencies are the result of natural selection and help the survival of species. Theoretically, an animal that hears a low-pitched voice, song, or noise would interpret that sound as coming from a large animal, and submit accordingly.

Take the familiar example of two dogs on the verge of fighting over a bowl of food. If one dog emits a low-pitched growl, the other normally responds with a high-pitched whimper, conceding defeat by backing away from the coveted food. The growling dog’s low-pitched voice alerts the whimpering dog to the fact that, because he is in the presence of what sounds like a larger animal, it would be in the best interest of both parties involved if he (the smaller dog) submits to his dominant opponent, rather than engage in a conflict that he would likely lose.

Ohala was intrigued by Morton’s study of the relationship between vocal pitch, size projection, and conflict resolution, and tried to uncover whether the same dynamic could be observed in humans. In 1984, he published an article in which he outlined what he described as the “frequency code,” an innately programmed system in humans that associates low frequency, low-pitch voices with larger size and dominance, and high frequency, high-pitch voices with smaller size and less dominance. In other words, like the dogs fighting over a food bowl, humans are evolutionarily prone to associate a lower pitch with aggressiveness and a higher pitch with weakness.

To see how the Frequency Code manifests itself in humans, consider two examples: the “Adam’s Apple,” and the smile.

As noted, vocal fry occurs when air travels through the larynx at the same time as vocal cords compress, producing a low-pitch, low-frequency sound; the larger the mass of the vocal cords, the lower the pitch. After puberty, boys develop anatomical traits that promote low-pitch vocal production, primarily through larynx and vocal cord growth. In young men, the larynx grows so much that it often forms a large protrusion on the front of the neck, the so-called “Adam’s Apple,” and vocal cords grow by as much as 50% in length and 100% in mass. Large larynxes and heavy vocal cords encourage low-pitch production, and when that low-pitched sound gets emitted, they signal to those around them—whether fellow mature males, less mature males, or women—that they are in the presence of a dominant, mature adult.

While larynx and vocal cord growth enable individuals to project dominance through low-pitch production, the smile, according to Ohala, does the opposite.

While larynx and vocal cord growth enable individuals to project dominance through low-pitch production, the smile, according to Ohala, does the opposite. While some researchers have interpreted the display of one’s teeth by way of the smile as an act of aggression, Ohala argues that smiles signal an individual’s smaller size by increasing the resonance of the sound emitted from the vocal cords. Resonance depends on several factors, but the length of the vocal tract is especially influential: generally speaking, short vocal tracts (typical of smaller animals) produce high-resonant sounds, while local vocal tracts produce low-resonant sounds (typical of larger animals).

Smiles allow animals to overcome the biological features that nature had bestowed upon them by artificially and temporarily shortening the length of the vocal tract, thereby producing a high-resonance sound to convey smaller size and goodwill. For example, a large male primate may choose to smile to appear less threatening during a quarrel with another primate. On the other hand, protruding the lips and constricting the mouth—the opposite of smiling—lowers vocal resonance and gives the impression of larger size and even aggression.

So what does the frequency code tell us about the documented disdain for the uptick in vocal fry use among American women? Ohala has not ventured into this territory, but some independent observations can be suggested. If a low-pitched voice is a sign of larger size and dominance, perhaps the increased use of vocal fry among women represents an attempt to lay claim to the power that has until recently been associated with mature males. Similarly, if smiles are designed to increase vocal resonance to demonstrate smaller size and good will, perhaps the emergence of campaigns to “stop telling women to smile” represents a parallel effort to assert strength. After all, in the animal kingdom, size—and the physical and communication mechanisms designed to express it—matter.

Image Credit: Lion, by Peter Harrison. Creative Commons 2.0, via Flickr.

Interview

P[art]icipatory Urbanisms: Arts of the Global City

Published March 1, 2016

An innovative collaboration by UC Berkeley graduate students explores the interplay between art and politics, with a focus on practitioners in New Delhi and São Paulo.

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Maps. Sculptures. Lecture halls. Art galleries. Ballet classes. Parades. Concrete blocks. Bodies splayed over stairs. Community gardens filled with tires. The genre of “p[art]icipatory urbanisms” describes a range of art forms, practices, and institutions that invite us to think creatively and critically about urban space, community building, activism, and artmaking in the contemporary city. Examples range from the Khirkee Hip-Hop Community Center in New Delhi, India, where youth find a creative outlet in art forms like breakdancing, to the Ciclistas Bonequeiros, or “puppeteer cyclists” of São Paulo, Brazil, who stage idiosyncratic performances with puppets made of recycled materials staged in diorama-style boxes mounted on bicycles.

Now anyone with internet access can engage with dozens of projects of this variety, thanks to P[art]icipatory Urbanisms, an innovative collaboration by UC Berkeley graduate students Kirsten Larson (from the Department of Architecture and City Planning) and Karin Shankar (from the Department of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies), whose work was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Global Urban Humanities Initiative.

Since debuting last fall, this project has received thousands of hits (more than 4000 in the first week alone), articles have been reblogged and reposted numerous times, and Larson and Shankar have heard from several academics saying that they will be using the anthology in their research and teaching. Larson and Shankar are also planning to curate an exhibition based on this work in São Paulo this fall.

The stylized, bracketed title of P[art]icipatory Urbanisms highlights the project’s interest in blurring the boundaries between aesthetics and politics, whether the subjects in question are performance collectives, educators, collectors of e-waste, or community journalists. “Given the multitude of arenas in which participatory urban activity has been proliferating in the past two decades—including within a range of public, private, civil society, and hybrid formations—participation itself, as mode of engagement, is a critical terrain of negotiation between state, society and market forces,” Larson and Shankar observe in a co-written introductory essay.

There are two parts to the project. The first is a collection of interviews conducted with urban practitioners and artists (broadly defined) in the cities of New Delhi, India, and São Paulo, Brazil. These cities were chosen both because of the project curators’ respective backgrounds in South Asian and Brazilian urbanisms, and, as noted on the project website, because of their similar sizes and “positions in global urban imaginations and political economy.”

The second part is a peer-reviewed anthology of articles divided into four sections: “Memory and the City-Body”; “Austerity Politics, Occupation, and Performance”; “Curating Publics”; and “Ruptures in Neoliberal Space.” The anthology takes readers to and through Port-au-Prince bidonvilles, or shantytowns, in Haiti; street protests in Madrid and Rome; art installations in the Black Sea port town of Batumi, in Georgia; and numerous other cities, including New York City, Shanghai, Guangzhou, San Francisco, and Zurich.

The interviews, collectively titled “Urbanismo Participativo/ Participatory Urbanisms,” are displayed online in a carefully designed diptych, a conceptual form used in visual art to extend canvases and draw parallels. Readers also have the option of downloading the interviews as a 143-page publication. This PDF version presents the interviews one at a time, but reproduces the effect of the diptych by offering Portuguese and English translations displayed side by side.

“We chose [the form of the diptych] so that readers and interviewees from the two cities could form unexpected connections,” Shankar said in an interview.

Such juxtapositions invite audiences to read between and across Komita Dhanda and Suddhanva Deshpande’s street plays of personal narratives of industrial workers, at IG Khan Memorial in Aligarh, India, on the one hand, and Brazilian graffiti muralists pioneering the practice of “Cartograffiti,” on the other. Each interview also includes a number of arresting photographs, such as the image of Mauro Neri da Silva reproducing the posture of a trash-bin sculpture of a man, chin raised to the sky in a posture of almost yogic supplication, on the edge of the Billings Reservoir, in the Grajaú region of São Paulo.

The interviews, Larson and Shankar note in a joint preface to their publication, “map the multiple and disjunctive ways in which ‘participation’ is enacted…. [They] trace how these urban actors create politico-aesthetic ruptures; experience and experiment with the material and affective force of participation; leverage its power to potentially reshape urban space; and contend with the limits of participatory working processes.”

This ambitious project statement is fulfilled by the scope and scale of the work itself. The interviewers, including both Larson and Shankar as well as a number of research assistants, elicit provocative, deeply thoughtful reflections on the intersections of time and space, the performance of collectivity, the fact of urban multiplicity, pedagogical practice, voice, mediation, and the relationship between individual city dwellers and city infrastructures. Interviewees reflect on challenging issues of urban informality and inequality—on the fact that, in the words of Ravi Vasudevan of the SARAI Collective, people live in these cities “despite not being allowed to have all sorts of things that they should be allowed to have.”

The emphasis in each interview is the concept of “praxis,” which Shankar defines as “a being, doing and knowing.” As she explains, “the artist collectives, waste worker collectives, graffiti muralists, and other groups that we have interviewed define, enact, and create knowledge about a multitude of ways in which to effectively ‘take part’ in the cities of New Delhi and São Paulo. In São Paulo, for instance, Coletivo Pi, a feminist dance collective, is thinking about how to create urban kindness through their movement and dance works…. Graffiti muralists from the collective Imargem, in the periphery of São Paulo, are thinking about how graffiti may provide an alternate itinerary through the city. In New Delhi, a media collective in a working class neighborhood thinks about urban citizenship as a sense of ‘belonging’; a dance collective is working towards creating a ‘dance ecosystem’ . . . These present different and generative ways of thinking, doing, and knowing about urban participation.”

Of course, not all of the interviewees agree on the key terms of the larger project—including “publics,” “counter-hegemony,” “agonism,” “memory,” “occupation,” “participation,” “infrastructure,” and “cooptation”—and that is half the fun of hearing their ranging perspectives. Shankar points out that at least two different views of “urban citizenship” emerge from interviews with a waste workers’ collective in New Delhi and a media collective in a working class neighborhood. For Bharati Chaturvedi in Chintan, New Delhi, urban citizenship is “when everybody has a basic standard of living, and can access the city, whether it’s the park, the metro station . . . urban citizenship is about how and where you are able to contribute to the city and whether the city administration facilitates . . . or allows you to contribute.” By contrast, for SARAI’s Vasudevan, questions of “rights and entitlements” lead to “a limited notion of citizenship.” Citizenship, he says, “is also about belonging; you are here in the city and so the city is yours. Now, that’s a different order proposition, and a much more interesting one.”

P[art]icipatory Urbanisms also includes a peer-reviewed, 156-page anthology of articles, which features both traditional journal articles and five formally experimental articles that perform urban scholarship in new ways, including a manifesto for “a liberatory black spatial politics”; a photo essay on a wrestling rink in Gurgaon, India; and a personal essay about the democratic politics of basketball played on a public court in Oakland, California.

In the instructive introductory essay to the edited volume, Larson and Shankar link this work to other contemporary movements, “from Occupy (2011) to Tahrir (2011) to São Paulo (2013) to Taksim (2013) to austerity protests in Southern Europe and Greece (2014-) to #BlackLivesMatter (2014-).” This genuinely global view of relational art practices, urbanisms, activism, politics, and aesthetics (as in its older meaning, they note, “as simply ‘perceptible to the senses’”) is matched by scale and scope of the articles themselves. For example, Kavita Kulkarni’s “Ruptures in Neoliberal Space” examines ‘Soul Summit,’ an open-air house music dance party that has been held since 2001 in the historically black, rapidly gentrified neighborhood of Fort Greene, in Brooklyn, New York. Larson and Shankar especially appreciate how this work “explores the political potential of the various assemblages (both ‘live’ and in social media) of open-air house music culture . . . and how, through various forms of participatory co-production, Soul Summit works to counteract ‘the spatiality of peripheralization’ and the ‘temporality of extinction’ imposed on black social life in the [United States].”

Shankar recalls being particularly moved by two of the articles in the “Austerity Politics, Performance, and Occupation” section, which emerged from participant ethnographic research in Athens and Madrids. She and Larson describe these essays thus: “[They] present urgent and vivid ethnographic accounts of the urban manifestations of radical democratic responses to Europe’s contemporary austerity regimes. Andreea Micu’s reading of the affective forms of protest around ongoing housing struggles in Rome and Madrid identifies ‘indignation’ as the prevailing affect in times of austerity…. Her article] explores how this affect is mobilized to powerful effect in street protests…. [Gigi Argyropoulou’s article] describes how emergent and collective participatory practices in the occupied [Embros theatre in Athens during the debt crisis] may have faced repeated failures, but succeeded in marking a paradigm shift, thereby opening up the space of possibles for alternate ‘instituent’ practices of politics and culture in times of austerity.”

Reading the essays from the anthology, I was struck not only by the quality of the interventions, luminosity of the prose, and genuine interdisciplinarity of the work as a whole, but also by all the ways in which the anthology—like the curated interviews—is itself a participatory, collaborative work of art, an artifact not only of scholarly research but citizenly and neighborly love. The artist Pâmella Cruz’s description of Brazil-based Coletivo PI might very well also apply to Larson, Shankar, and their scores of collaborators and co-creators as well: plainly, they “believe in the possibility of positive transformation”; of using scholarship to “establish affectionate relationships, relationships of real complicity, of getting to know and not being afraid of the other, the unknown, the faraway.”

The sheer plenitude of P[art]icipatory Urbanisms is worthy of celebration. That the project is also deeply critical yet hopeful, attuned to global urban inequalities yet redolent with possibility, and celebratory of the lives, aspirations, artworks, frustrations, and conceptualizations of men, women, and children from cities around the world, is worthy of wide dissemination, animated discussion, and the praxis of close reading.

Images: Courtesy of Karin Shankar. All rights reserved.

Top Image: Performance and theater collective, Companhia Antropofágica’s, walks with a Karroça (stage cart) performing street plays in the city, 2011.

Image 2: A Jana Natya Manch (People’s Theater Form) performance in Jhandapur, Delhi, 2013.

Image 3: Artist Amitabh Kumar paints a mural for a Khirkee shopfront, Khoj Artist Workshop, Delhi, 2012.

Image 4: Actors from the performance collective, Coletivo Pi, walk down São Paulo’s Avenida Paulista dressed as “petrified” executives, covered in clay and blindfolded, 2015.

Interview

Manisha Anantharaman: “It’s Not Easy Being Green”

Published August 15, 2015

For India’s growing middle class, recycling is as much about creating identity as being environmentally conscientious. 

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When Manisha Anantharaman, a former advanced doctoral student in UC Berkeley’s Environmental Science, Policy, and Management program, was a child in Bangalore, India in the late 1980s, her aunt would come to visit from the U.S. “We didn’t have this thing called hair conditioner,” recalls Anantharaman, who is now an assistant professor at Saint Mary’s College of California. “My aunt would bring this Herbal Essences product in a blue bottle. It was so exotic.”

Such products were about to become commonplace in India: by the time Anantharaman left to attend Oxford University, the city of Bangalore had changed dramatically. India had seen sharp increases in foreign investment during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and a new wave of middle-class, technology-oriented jobs were moving into call centers and offices. At the same time, foreign companies were starting to look at India as a major market for consumer products.

In cities like Bangalore, a new class of white-collar workers moved into new, exclusive apartment complexes “and bought many, many things,” Anantharaman says. With the consumption came many empty conditioner bottles, not to mention mounds of other waste. In these new, middle-class neighborhoods, the amount of trash rapidly became a problem, as it taxed the city’s infrastructure and planning. Some new housing complexes had been built without access to proper disposal sites, and residents paid trucks to haul their refuse out of the city. The administrators of the growing city followed suit, rarely asking where or how the refuse was handled.

Today, the metropolis of Bangalore—with a population of 8.5 million—produces nearly three thousand tons of trash per day, and overflowing garbage bins, trash-lined streets, and international headlines like “Garbage Everywhere” have threatened to undermine the image of Bangalore as India’s Silicon Valley. “The outskirts [of Bangalore] are riddled with dumps, many of which are built on farmland and leach toxic chemicals into rural water supplies,” Anantharaman says. In 2012, violent protests broke out at local dumps, where villagers were tired of losing their farmland and water to the city’s garbage.

For the mostly upper-caste middle class, Anantharaman explains, dealing with garbage has traditionally been considered beneath their status, and even touching garbage was considered to be the job of lower-caste house workers. In the light of the city’s garbage crisis, however, this perception is changing, as Bangalore’s well-to-do have started to treat the byproducts of their buying habits as a problem. Anantharaman credits international ideas about environmental citizenship and “green” living. “[Indians] visit the Bay Area for a few months at a time and pick [sustainable practices] up here, and then there’s the Internet,” she says.

In recent years, being “green”—by recycling glass, plastic, paper, and other household waste, and composting kitchen scraps—has become a marker of class for many in Bangalore. Since the values of sustainability are associated internationally and locally with prosperity and privilege, “using environmental discourses allows the middle classes to adopt and promote practices that are traditionally associated with poverty and deprivation, without conceding their social status,” Anantharaman says.  “This has less to do with overt care for the planet. It’s really a way of dealing with anxiety about privilege in India and living in a ‘world-class’ city.”

In an article published in 2014 in the Journal of Cleaner Production, Anantharaman details her fieldwork, for which she spent over a year in Bangalore, observing how communities make decisions about waste, conducting in-depth interviews, and using what she calls “netography”—participating and reading online discussion boards related to recycling. Her article highlights “how household behavior change is made possible by neighborhood-based coordination, involving multiple actors such as environmentally-conscious residents, domestic help, and hired waste workers.” Drawing on “ecological citizenship theory” (which frames “green” behavior as being carried out for the common good), she discusses “how waste management through recycling and composting is being implemented in Bangalore through networks of socio-economically privileged new middle class individuals.”

She looks at examples of local, decentralized efforts to promote recycling, including a residential waste management program operating in one of Bangalore’s large gated communities, where residents work with their paid housekeepers to separate waste, and to promote adoption by neighbors with the support of “champions” and pro-recycling stickers. From her research experience—tied to her own roots in the city—her research highlights the complexities of environmental movements around the world. “The concept of ecological citizenship,” she argues, “because of its focus on the citizenship practices of ecological debtors (the new middle classes) and limited treatment of the role of ecological creditors (paid labor from the working classes) fails to recognize the contributions of those actors, who through their livelihood practices, play a pivotal role in producing the systems that enable pro-environmental behaviors among the elite.”

She also reflects on the importance of social status and other drivers in motivating people to adopt more sustainable practices, as doing right by community norms is often as powerful a motivator as doing right for the planet. “Being green is never just about nature,” she says. “It also involves our class identification and political privilege.”

Photo Credit: Jay Galvin

Research Highlights

Hooked On A Feeling

Published July 1, 2015

How we control our feelings has a major impact on our mental health, according to research from UC Berkeley's Emotion and Emotion Regulation Laboratory.

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From “filled with happiness” to “boiling over with rage,” much of the language we use to describe emotions depicts them as internal forces, waiting to be unleashed.

Yet according to Iris Mauss, Associate Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley, our feelings are rarely (if ever) entirely internal; instead, they drive us toward external action, whether taking deep breaths to reduce stress or making a face. “Humans don’t usually just have an emotion and go with it,” Mauss says. “Rather, we almost always—and one might argue always—try to do something with that emotion. We may want to alter how we feel, we may want to alter how we act, or we may want to alter the physiological aspects of emotion.”

Mauss runs UC Berkeley’s Emotion and Emotion Regulation Lab, which is dedicated to studying how people try to shape emotions and their expression. This year, Mauss’s research on emotion earned her an award from the American Psychology Association for an early career contribution to psychology.

Even within psychology, emotions have long been considered “unscientific,” Mauss says. The study of emotion was pioneered in the 1960s by Paul Ekman, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco who is now on the editorial board of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. In a series of groundbreaking studies, Ekman traveled to remote places such as Papua New Guinea and showed the local residents photographs of facial expressions, to ascertain whether emotions are universally human and based in evolution and biology.

Ekman’s research was inspired in part by Charles Darwin, whose 1872 work The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals argued that different species and cultures use the same facial expressions to show similar internal experiences. Ekman found that his subjects recognized the emotions in the photographs at a rate that exceeded chance, and he concluded that emotion has at least some universal element. His work set off an ongoing controversy about the extent to which emotions are biologically or culturally constructed.

Ekman subsequently identified six basic emotions that he argued have discrete biological functions. The emotional expression of disgust, for example—which includes wrinkling the nose and curling the upper lip—is thought to be rooted in the biological need to expel something harmful from the body. Some psychologists argue that this biological system has been co-opted by social versions of the same emotion, so that we make the same face when experiencing moral disgust.

Subsequent researchers, including Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner, have built on Ekman’s research to suggest that other, more dynamic movements, such as posture, offer greater insight into emotion than a frozen facial expression alone. For example, Keltner has identified the act of tilting the head as part of the emotional response of embarrassment.

The field of “affective science” now spans a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, and history. Affective neuroscience focuses on the role of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin in producing emotion, whereas affective historians such as Barbara Rosenwein focus on how emotion has been culturally constructed over time. The view of emotions as pent-up forces stems in part from the ancient theory of humors, which identified four bodily fluids (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood) as the source of a person’s affective state.

Mauss’s lab measures emotion in a variety of ways: by gauging physiological variables such as heart rate, skin conductance, and blood pressure; asking participants to describe their feelings in questionnaires and diaries; and videotaping them to observe their facial expressions and body movements. In the latter case, the videos are rated by independent teams of coders who look for how intensely participants outwardly show emotion. For example, if the study seeks to measure amusement, the researchers code for everything from a blank face to hysterical laughter.

The lab has found that how people think about emotions has an impact on their well-being. For example, in “Desperately Seeking Happiness,” a 2014 paper published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology with graduate student Brett Ford and other researchers, Mauss found that people who place a high value on happiness actually tend to be more depressed. In the initial study, participants in remission from major depressive disorder were asked to respond to questions assessing how much they valued happiness (based on agreement with statements like “happiness is extremely important to me”). The degree to which they prized happiness correlated with increased depressive symptoms, even when controlling for a variety of factors, such as overall neuroticism, demographics, and relationship status.

One follow-up study found that a higher value placed on happiness was also a risk factor for developing depression, and another recent follow-up study found that the extreme valuing of happiness was also associated with (and even predicts) bipolar disorder. Such findings suggest that targeting emotional values — i.e. changing how people value happiness — might improve patients’ outcomes, Mauss says.

Mauss’s Lab also explores the relationship between the beliefs people hold about their emotions and what their bodies are doing. “It turns out that those beliefs and experiences are quite different from what’s actually going on [physically],” she says.

For example, Mauss conducted a study at Stanford in which participants were asked to give an impromptu speech in front of a camera. Some participants were highly socially anxious, others not at all. After the speech, they were asked to rate how anxious they had been on a ten-point scale; unsurprisingly, the highly anxious people listed numbers at the top of the scale, while the non-anxious people said they were at the bottom. Moreover, while the non-anxious group said they felt few physical symptoms, the highly anxious group reported that their hearts were racing uncontrollably, their palms were drenched in sweat, and their faces were blushing bright red—the classic signs of anxiety.

However, the lab had measured the participants’ actual physiological responses, and found that there was no difference between the two groups. Everyone showed the same increases in heart rate, skin conductance level, and facial blushing. “They were identical on every single measure,” Mauss says. “It seemed to us like the experience of those physiological symptoms was highly cognitively or socially constructed. It was driven by how anxious a person felt, and not how their bodies were actually behaving.”

For people with a high degree of social anxiety, the perception that they are blushing and sweating feeds into a “vicious cycle” of feeling socially inadequate. Simply knowing that everyone experiences the same physiological symptoms could help overcome the cycle, Mauss says.

Researchers in the Emotion Lab and Emotion Regulation Lab also study the degree to which emotional regulation is automatic. From infancy, societies train their members to control their emotions in a certain way; children who start to cry may be immediately hushed. This process continues in adulthood through cultural signals. “All those social interactions and practices shape these automatic types of emotion regulation that we engage in without us usually being aware of them,” Mauss says.

To overcome the implicit challenges of studying automatic emotion regulation in a laboratory setting, Mauss uses priming methods, such as having participants complete a word-unscramble task with words related to emotion and control, then brings the subjects into an “emotionally evocative” situation to see how they respond. In one study, Mauss posed as an “annoying researcher,” reprimanding participants for their behavior and loudly eating potato chips and crinkling the bag. The results showed that participants who were primed to use emotional control actually experienced less anger, and were not aware that they had been influenced to do so.

In general, research has found that people who are effective at regulating their emotions tend to be healthier and less depressed than those who aren’t. One method thought to be helpful in this regulatory process is known as “cognitive reappraisal,” or reframing one’s emotional experience in a more positive light.

However, emotional control isn’t always a good thing. In a recent study, Mauss —together with former students Allison Troy and Amanda Shallcross—found that reappraisal works best when “self-regulating or changing yourself is the only option you have.” The lab gauged participants’ ability to regulate their emotions through cognitive reappraisal and categorized the types of stressors they had recently experienced as “controllable” (e.g. when responding to a problem at work) or uncontrollable (e.g. reacting to the death of a close friend). When participants were faced with uncontrollable stressors, having a greater ability for reappraisal did indeed make them less depressed. For the group that experienced controllable stressors, however, the outcome flipped: being good at regulating emotion was not just ineffective, but actually increased the risk of depression.

In other words, the key to healthy emotion regulation is understanding which contexts are better suited to reframing our feelings, and which require confronting an external situation. “I don’t think we should all be unemotional as we walk through life,” Mauss says. “Sometimes negative emotions can be very useful.”

To learn more about the Emotion and Emotional Regulation Lab, please see http://eerlab.berkeley.edu.

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Research Highlights

Speech on the Brain

Published July 1, 2015

A UCSF neuroscientist and UC Berkeley linguist team up for leading-edge research that could one day help give speech back to stroke victims and people with paralyses.

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Several years ago, Keith Johnson, a Professor of Linguistics at UC Berkeley, was teaching his department’s introductory course in phonetics. Phonetics is the study of the sounds in human speech, everything from the physical placement of your tongue when you say “ch” or “sh” to the social meanings of different sound enunciations. After Johnson’s first lecture, a young man came up and introduced himself as Edward F. Chang. “He was literally a brain surgeon,” Johnson says, “and he told me, ‘I need to know everything you know.’”

Chang, now a faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine, is in fact a brain surgeon. And he needed to know about phonetics because his lab is trying to map how language functions in the human brain. At the heart of this challenge is a well-known but little understood phenomenon: when we listen to a language we understand, the sounds are meaningful, not just a series of vocalizations.

Since that phonetics course, Johnson has become a team member affiliated with the Chang Lab, which brings neurosurgeons, bioengineers, and linguists together to help address questions related to language and the brain. For the surgical part of the research, Chang placed a dense mesh of 264 electrodes on the brains of volunteers, all of whom were having brain surgery for severe epileptic seizures. “You open the skull and look in at part of the brain, and this is done awake,” says Chang.

The network of electrodes allows the research team to see is how the signals triggered by hearing words travels through the brain. “We’re starting at the bottom by looking at what parts of the brain light up with speaking and hearing,” says Johnson. “We are able to detect difference in sound at the millisecond range, so we can see how brain works in real time.”

It is in the nature of these sounds that Johnson adds his contribution. All languages are made up of a limited number of phonemes, the building-block sounds, like “b” or “a,” that are combined into words and meanings. Phonetic linguistics has a sophisticated vocabulary for the sounds that make up human speech, as well as an in-depth understanding of where sounds originate in our throats and mouths.

By using the Timit Database, a vast trove of recorded English language speech, patients “listened to sounds over and over. Then we could go back and classify what they were hearing based on acoustic properties, like ‘these were vowels made in the front of the mouth,’” says Johnson. By combining this with the real-time visualizations of auditory signals moving through the brain, “we could see the sequence of events, from a signal coming into the brain to the brain’s response of recognizing something. From outside the brain, this is mysterious, but getting into it, you can see the signal morph and change.”

The result of taking these two forms of expertise—linguistics and neuroscience—and combining them, Johnson says, is that Chang’s lab is learning how the signals generated in the  motor cortex make the lips, tongue, larynx and jaw move, Johnson explains. The paper he co-authored with Chang last year in Nature is the first to describe these neurological mechanisms for speech. “A lot of this sort of linguistics is not so high-powered on the neuroscience side, with behavioral linguistics people sort of dabbling, or there are neuroscientists who don’t know what the physical side is doing,” Chang says.

The ultimate goal of Chang’s lab is to learn enough about neural speech mechanisms that the lab can develop a computerized prosthetic that would give speech back to people with paralyses or victims of stroke. “The therapeutic application,” Johnson says, “is to be able to take the intention to speak, in your head, and turn it into actual sound,” even for people no longer physically able to use their mouths.

Johnson has found the interdisciplinary nature of the research fulfilling, and working with Chang’s lab has offered exposure to skills and expertise that no single researcher can access.  “I wasn’t going to go out and learn brain surgery,” Johnson says. “Some questions are really addressed best or can only be address by working together across disciplines.”

Photo Credit: aboutmodafinil.com

Research Highlights

Penelope Anthias: “Gas and Land Rights in Bolivia”

Published June 10, 2015

In Bolivia, conflicting interests have led to complicated internal struggles over rights, land, and money, says a postdoctoral fellow in UC Berkeley's Department of Geography.

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On October 12, 2014, Evo Morales was elected to a third term as president of Bolivia, a country that has seen a substantial drop in poverty since his first election in 2006. As part of his popular appeal, Morales, a former coca grower of indigenous descent, has promised to redistribute the country’s gas wealth, which now funds a range of social programs and infrastructure projects. He also campaigned as a champion of Bolivia’s large and diverse indigenous population, vowing to meet their longstanding demands for “territory and autonomy.”

But in practice, yet these two agendas are in many ways incompatbile, according to research by Penelope Anthias, the 2014-2015 Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in Berkeley’s Department of Geography. Anthias’ doctoral research examines the dynamics of indigenous territorial claims in Bolivia’s gas-rich Chaco region, where she completed two years of fieldwork. Anthias wanted to find out “how far the indigenous peoples have gotten in terms of achieving what they wanted.”

Her research shows just how complicated Bolivia’s internal struggles over rights, land, and money have become. Anthias first arrived in the Chaco in 2008, when Morales’ policies were gaining momentum. The Guaraní people of the Chaco had “mobilized around territory”, Anthias says, “but they still faced many challenges.” While they had gained state recognition of their collective land claims as communal lands of origin (tierras comunales de origen, or TCOs) during the 1990s, this turned out to be just the first step in a long and complex legal process.

In Itika Guasu, the TCO where Anthias completed her fieldwork, this process has been characteristically plagued with problems. Non-indigenous cattle ranchers—some of whom previously used unpaid Guaraní labour—claim private properties within the TCO, often on the most productive plots of land. Legally, such private rights are recognized, as long as the claimants can demonstrate productive land use. In practice, even absentee landlords have had their claims recognized, often through corrupt practices and influence within regional institutions.

In other words, even when indigenous rights are recognized in law, entrenched colonial power relations may prevent their implementation. In the Chaco, where indigenous people were until recently enslaved on private haciendas, inequalities persist. Today, TCO Itika Guasu remains fragmented and unfinished, with most land still in the hands of private, non-indigenous ranchers.

A Battle for Gas and Land Rights

Just as history has complicated the Guaraní claims, so have more current developments: TCO Itika Guasu sits on top of Bolivia’s largest natural gas field. During the 1990s, just as the land titling process was getting underway, the oil company Repsol began developing these gas reserves. Anthias explains that the company avoided consulting the Guaraní by making land-use contracts with private landowners, a process aided by the land reform agency’s “premature certification” of these private property rights.

“Around 2003, the Guaraní caught on to this,” Anthias says, “and started to campaign for their rights to consultation, compensation, and environmental impact assessments.” With Morales’ 2005 election, they had hoped for some support from their government. Instead, they found themselves accused of being an “obstacle to Bolivia’s energy development”.

This campaign became transnational when a group of Guaraní leaders travelled to Repsol’s headquarters in Spain and made contact with a group of international lawyers. In 2010, Repsol agreed to pay $14.8 million into an investment fund established for the Guaraní of Itika Guasu, as well as “formally recognising their rights to their territory”, Anthias says. Leaders in Itika Guasu now see such negotiations as an alternative route to maintaining their territory and autonomy, given the failure of the state land-titling process.

Yet these negotiations have left Guaraní leaders increasingly distant from their home communities, and local participation declined throughout the process. “The process of the negotiations was very legalistic,” Anthias says. “In 2009, there were lots of community assemblies, people giving input on the political process. In 2011 there were none.”

The result has been friction within villages like Tarairí, where Anthias spent six months. “Some people think the leaders are off getting rich while they have the same daily struggles,” she observes. “Written territorial recognition by an oil company does not solve their problems of accessing land and resources.”

Some community members are also keen to benefit from Morales’ “redistributive, extractive economy”, which recently saw the arrival of electricity to Tarairí’s thirteen small homes. Such projects have been held up by lengthy negotiations with the territory’s Guaraní leadership, who are now demanding prior consultation from state institutions and private companies alike. Others remain hopeful that the investment fund will one day deliver Guaraní-managed development projects.

What this story shows, Anthias says, is that, for efforts to decolonize indigenous regions through land reform—a model that has been used from Arctic Canada down into South America—state recognition of territorial claims and changes to official maps are just the beginning. “There is a gap between making new maps and where they really lead,” she says. “It gets very messy”.

Although the Chaco has its unique characteristics, nearly all indigenous peoples across the Americas face a similar core challenge: they share their territories with other local actors and/or face some form of extractive industry development.

“Global discourses of indigenous development often overlook these realities”, Anthias observes. “Indigenous peoples are forced to confront them”.

While many people expected that the election of an indigenous president would resolve indigenous land claims, the state is just one actor when it comes to struggles over territory, Anthias says. In some places, transnational or sub-national actors may play a greater role, challenging the idea that territory can simply be demanded from, and awarded by, the state—a lesson that Guaraní leaders in Itika Guasu seem to have absorbed.

Pulling on the Threads

For Anthias, piecing together this messy story of Bolivian past and present has required a wide range of social-science methods. Anthias conducted long, open-ended interviews with everyone from state officials to oil company workers and cattle ranchers. She spent time observing the work of local NGOs and indigenous assemblies, and she read through piles of official documents and legal reports. “A lot of this [kind of] research is about hanging around, taking opportunities, and building trust,” she says.

During her six months in Tarairí, Anthias spent time collecting palm and milling maize with local women in order to understand the “lived realities of land and territory”. She broke her leg playing football in the community, which has no hospital. “It took 24 hours to get to treatment,” she recalls. “I managed to get a lift from a truck to a village where I could get a bus.” Anthias spent a night waiting for the bus, and then had more than seven hours of transit time left. “That was interesting,” she says. When she returned to the community, she was on crutches for four months. “I volunteered at the school,” she says, “and just went house to house, drinking mate and asking questions about land.”

Now at Berkeley, Anthias is turning her years of fieldwork into a book manuscript, and trying to stay true to the complexities she saw in the Chaco. “There are a lot of threads in this story,” she says, and the Berkeley campus “is a great place to pull on them and see what happens.”

To learn more about Penelope Anthias’ research, see http://berkeley.academia.edu/PAnthias.

Photo Credit: World Bank Photo Collection “Bolivians listen to President Evo Morales speak at the Rural Alliance Fair in Cliza, Bolivia on July 6, 2013. Photo © Dominic Chavez/World Bank“

Research Highlights

Tribal Tongues

Published June 1, 2015

After nearing extinction, California Indian languages are gaining new speakers—and a digital presence—with the help of UC Berkeley’s Linguistics Department.

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Three centuries ago, the region now known as California was home to around 100 different indigenous languages, including Yurok and Karuk, Konkow and Ramaytush, Quechan and Kawaiisu. For its size, California was the most linguistically diverse area in North America.

As European settlement, disease, and violence decimated California’s native population, many tribes all but vanished—and so did their languages. Today, more than half of California Indian languages have no native speakers. Among these lost languages is Chochenyo, which was once spoken by around 2,000 people living along San Francisco’s East Bay.

UC Berkeley linguists have been documenting California’s vanishing languages for more than a century. Now, as tribes seek to educate new speakers in languages that were once thought to be lost, Berkeley’s Survey of California and Other Indian Languages (SCOIL) is digitizing thousands of field notes, manuscripts, and audio recordings in an online California Language Archive. Many of these languages have no published dictionary or grammar, which makes the archive an especially precious resource for learners.

“The material here is often unique,” says Andrew Garrett, the director of the SCOIL project.

As part of this effort, SCOIL is creating online tools for a number of specific languages. The Yurok Language Project, for example, offers a dictionary, recordings of tribal stories, and vocabulary and grammar exercises. Offline, SCOIL also hosts the biannual Breath of Life Workshop, a conference dedicated to sharing resources and knowledge related to California’s native languages.

Fertile Ground for Diverse Languages

When the Spanish arrived in the 1500s, several hundred thousand people were living in what is now California—about one-third of the Native American population of the continental United States. Tribes in close proximity to one another developed remarkably different languages. While the Konomihu language was predominant on some parts of the Salmon River, for example, New River Shasta was spoken on others.

California’s unique linguistic diversity was due to its rich microclimates, Garrett says, which allowed cultural and language communities to thrive in small areas with relatively few people. Unlike in the Great Plains, where people had to roam for resources, leading populations and languages to spread over wider territories, in California, “you could get what you wanted where you were,” Garrett explains.

Thanks to extensive trade and travel networks, however, there was still significant contact among tribes, and many native Californians spoke multiple languages. California Indian languages belong to a wide variety of families, including Athabaskan, which has speakers ranging from the Southwest to Canada and Alaska, and Yuman, centered in southern California and Western Arizona.

During the mid-nineteenth century, the Gold Rush brought some 300,000 settlers to California, igniting new hostilities and attempts at assimilation. Federal reservations set up boarding schools that forbade children from speaking their native languages. By 1900, many of these languages were near extinction.

Indian languages’ decline coincided with the rise of the new disciplines of anthropology and linguistics. In 1901, the famed anthropologist Alfred Kroeber established the Archeological and Ethnographic Survey of California at UC Berkeley. Kroeber is best known for his documentation of Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi tribe, who found national fame as “the last wild Indian.”

Garrett explains that Kroeber was focused on studying “pre-contact culture,” and he traveled from tribe to tribe, asking questions in English or Spanish with the help of an interpreter. In the following decades, linguists shifted to focusing more intensely on one language. The Survey of California Indian Languages was established at Berkeley in 1953.

In the late 1960s, tribes around the country began calling for cultural renewal, and focused on reviving languages that in many cases only had a few speakers remaining. In the 1980s, UC Berkeley linguist Leanne Hinton partnered with Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival (AICLS) to create a master-apprentice program that paired remaining first-language speakers with younger learners.

“People were concerned about the language surviving, and it became part of the consciousness of the tribe that we should do something about it,” says Kayla Rae Carpenter, a UC Berkeley graduate student who studies several languages, including Hupa, Yurok, and Wailaki.

Carpenter is a member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe, based seven hours north of San Francisco. The tribe has around 3,000 members, but only a few speak Hupa as their first language. Carpenter’s great-grandmother attended the government boarding school on the reservation in the 1920s, and was forced to scrub floors as punishment for speaking Hupa. Other students were locked in a dark room for hours or days. As a result, Carpenter’s grandparents grew up speaking only English.

Still, thanks to her mother, who participated in one of the master-apprentice programs, Carpenter grew up hearing Hupa. She is now a board member of AICLS and has served as a mentor for Breath of Life workshops, which bring tribe members whose languages have few or no remaining speakers to Berkeley to conduct research projects. (Berkeley’s Leanne Hinton, who is retired, now helps lead national Breath of Life workshops in Washington, D.C.)

Together with other graduate students and native consultants, Carpenter has helped create a Hupa language website with a searchable dictionary and audio recordings with transcriptions in Hupa and English. Verdena Parker, a tribal elder who was recorded by Berkeley graduate students several years ago, recounts the traumatic violence she experienced as a young woman and how she learned to ride a motorcycle, as well as traditional stories such as how the animals were created.

Like many Indian languages, Hupa contains most of the sentence’s information in the verb. For example, the English sentence “I pick it up” can be expressed in Hupa in a single verb, yawh’awh. For her dissertation, Carpenter is creating a comparative grammar of Hupa and Wailaki. Since the latter has no remaining speakers, those wishing to learn it often refer to Hupa, which has a basic dictionary and grammar created by Berkeley graduate student Victor Golla in the 1970s.

California Language Archive

The team at SCOIL created the California Language Archive (which went online in 2011) with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This archive unites archival material that is spread across the Linguistics Department, the Bancroft Library, the Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and the Berkeley Language Center. As of Summer 2014, the total archive catalog contained 13,611 items, of which 4,652 had online digital content; new materials are regularly added.

Searchable through keywords and interactive maps, the California Language Archive includes manuscripts, audio recordings, and hundreds of scanned notebooks with linguists’ notes translating words and phrases, such as “the house is by the road” or “the house is by the creek.” A 1951 recording features native consultant Florence Shaughnessy singing a haunting love song in Yurok.

Some tribe members have used the archive to research a specific question about their language, Garrett says, while others simply wish to hear the voice of a relative who was interviewed decades ago. Recent additions include materials on Washo (spoken around Lake Tahoe) and a number of other languages, resources gathered by Berkeley linguist William H. Jacobsen beginning in 1952.

According to Garrett, the archive’s recordings reveal how some Indian languages have changed over the past century: the pronunciation of certain vowels, for example, has become more similar to that of English. To describe new technology, most tribes create terms in the language rather than using English loan words; in Yurok, the word for computer translates to “smart box,” and in Hupa, computer is described as “it writes by itself.”

According to the most recent U.S. census, California is now home to more than 723,000 Native Americans, by far the largest population of any state. Today, Indian languages are commonly taught in public schools on reservations, although funding varies from tribe to tribe. Still, even if an adult finds time to attend community classes or conduct grammar exercises online, using the language in everyday life can be difficult. The biggest challenge, Carpenter says, is “providing further support outside the school system to keep progressing.”

Garrett says that there is “much more activity” in California language restoration than there was 10 or 20 years ago. In recent years, SCOIL has expanded to include languages spoken in Central and South America. Carpenter says that interest in the Hupa language is rising among tribe members; when she teaches at the local school, more and more students have traditional names. The tribe recently received a grant for a preschool immersion program, which will help a new generation learn the sounds of their ancestors.

Research Highlights

After the Maidan

Published May 12, 2015

UC Berkeley scholars present diverse viewpoints on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

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It began with what seemed like a diplomatic footnote: in November 2013, representatives from the European Union and Ukraine were scheduled to sign a trade agreement in Lithuania. Then, under pressure from Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych backed out.

For Ukrainians fed up with the corruption of their government—and seeking closer ties with Europe—it was a breaking point. Protests erupted in the Maidan, Kiev’s main square. Demonstrators huddled together against the cold for months.

In February 2014, Ukraine’s government crumbled. Yanukovych fled to Russia. Then in March, Russian forces seized control of the Crimea. In response to the invasion—the first forcible change to European borders since the end of World War II—the United States and the EU imposed sanctions on Russia.

In the ensuing months, Russian-backed separatists have continued to fight for autonomy in parts of Eastern Ukraine, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) moved troops into Baltic countries on Russia’s border.

“It’s a bit like a return to Cold War,” says Gerard Roland, a professor of comparative economics at UC Berkeley, one of a group of scholars from across the campus who have been engaged with events in the former Soviet Union since the Maidan.

Another is Edward Walker, a political scientist and director of UC Berkeley’s Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies (BPS), who agrees that the conflict is as much about symbolism as geography. “Ideology is deeply involved,” Walker says. “On the one hand you have the West, with their ideas about democracy and freedom and ‘civilization,’ spreading naturally everywhere,” he says. “On the other hand, Russia sees the world as becoming multi-polar. It’s not just the U.S. anymore, and Russia is one of the great powers.”

In this context, Russia’s invasion of Crimea marked an assertion of its sphere of influence, a response to the post-Soviet EU and NATO policy of expanding into countries on Russia’s borders. While some analysts ascribe blame for this aggressive stance to Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, others say the root causes run deeper. “A conflict between the Russia and the West has been building for a long time,” explains Berkeley political scientist and EU expert Beverly Crawford. “It’s not just Putin.”

“The EU was especially tone-deaf to Russia, to their view of the world of post-hard-power diplomacy,” agrees Walker. “I’m a huge supporter of the whole European project, but they were very naive about the repercussions.”

In a post on his blog, Eurasian Geopolitics, Walker describes how the U.S. policy of NATO expansion, in place since the fall Clinton administration, has been perceived in Russia as especially provocative, and as a result has become destabilizing to the entire region.

Roland points out that while the EU and Russia have been major players, the ultimate cause of the recent events stems from the desire for democracy from the people of Ukraine. “I don’t think [the protests and conflict] were triggered by the Europeans or Americans,” says Roland, who instead sees “a genuine aspiration toward democracy in the Ukraine. Putin wants Ukrainian political experiment—the democratic experiment—to fail.”

There is also an internal political logic to Putin’s actions, writes Berkeley political scientist M. Steven Fish. “By convincing Russians that the West is bent on undermining him because he is aggressively pursuing Russia’s interests in a manner that challenges the West,” Fish writes, Putin hopes to make Western critiques of Russia sound like meaningless propaganda.

Walker concurs that the internal logic of Russian politics is a large part of the picture. Russians, he says, feel vulnerable after the fall of the Soviet Union. In large part, this has to do with Putin’s highly controlled media and “increasing constraints on free public discourse,” Walker says. “If there was a more open debate, more people would be saying, ‘really, don’t we have the capability of blowing up the world?’ They wouldn’t be so worried about Ukraine, or Europe.”

Over the past year, UC Berkeley faculty have written editorials in newspapers from the Washington Post to the L.A. Times, and have engaged in public forums and lectures on topics from the wider Eurasian context to the role of the European Union to a discussion of the Ukrainian perspective, as one led by Berkeley macroeconomist and VoxUkraine blogger Yuriy Gorodnichenko.

Jeffery Pennington, the Executive Director of Berkeley’s Institute for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ISEEES), notes that there is “always a good amount of interest in events in Russia on this campus,” but the Ukraine situation has increased interest significantly. As a result, ISEEES has “been able to do more activities, more events that are focused” on the region.

It unlikely that Berkeley’s interdisciplinary scholars will turn away from Russia and the Ukraine anytime soon. Violence between pro-Russian separatists and the Ukrainian army continues to erupt in Ukraine’s Donbas region. Crimea is still under Russian control. Russia itself is in an economically precarious position. The pressure of international sanctions and falling oil prices has caused the ruble’s value to tumble. Russia is likely entering a full-blown recession.

Putin is not going to lose power. It would be delusional to think so.

What this means for internal Russian politics and foreign policy is not yet clear. Walker notes that the impact of the western sanctions would have been high “even if oil was at $100 a barrel,” as they cut Russia off from Western technology, as well as from large parts of the financial sector.

Following a period of low oil prices, “there is a huge loss of revenue for Russia,” Roland says, though he notes that “Putin will blame it on the sanctions… Tensions will stay high, but stable.”

What will this mean for the power structure in Russia? “Putin is not going to lose power,” Roland says. “It would be delusional to think so.”

“Putin’s brand of nationalism would whither if the economy fails,” says Crawford, who notes that she “can’t see the conflict ending in Ukraine.” Crawford is especially troubled by the way the conflict has stirred up ethnic tensions in the region. The West, she says, “needs to recognize Russia as a great power and reiterate that they won’t attack. But in Ukraine, we need to fund civil society.”

The stakes of ongoing tensions are high, in the Ukraine and between NATO and Russia, as Putin’s Russia funds far right parties from France to Hungary. “Putin’s interest is in destroying the EU—not militarily but economically, because Europe is a haven of freedom and democracy,” Crawford says. With the economic situation in Europe far worse than in the US, he’s concerned that these political movements will find more participants.

Either way, the new status quo does not bode well for the European Union’s goals of extending its political and economic influence toward the East, for example by bringing in new member states and extending trade agreements. “The new European order after 1989 is dead,” Crawford says.

What would change this situation? Crawford notes that Catherine Ashton, European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs, could call for “a change in engagement with Russia, and recognize Russia as a great power.”

Walker, meanwhile, is keeping an eye of on the military dimensions of the standoff. Russia not only feels threatened by the actions of the West, but it has “2000 operational nuclear tactical weapons and thousands more in storage and a huge military,” Walker notes. “Building up NATO’s deterrent capabilities objectively—because subjectively they’re already at threat—is important.”

“Strategically, this is something that neither the U.S. nor Europe was looking for.” Roland concludes. “But now you just have to live with it.”

“I don’t see a way out,” Walker concurs. “I don’t see a way to de-escalate.”

Photo Credit: Tandalov

Research Highlights

Battling Ebola

Published May 7, 2015

A UC Berkeley professor has been part of a network of researchers working to apply local anthropological knowledge in the fight to contain the most deadly Ebola outbreak in history. 

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In the summer of 2014, UC Berkeley Anthropology Professor Mariane Ferme began collaborating with fellow anthropologists researching in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the Republic of Guinea. Their goal was to understand how local communities were responding to international efforts to contain the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak in the region, which had come to the attention of local health authorities earlier in the year.

The efforts to contain the disease were not working, and some networks of anthropologists made the argument to the international community, as well as local non-governmental organizations, that they should leverage the untapped resource of anthropological expertise in the region to better understand how local populations perceive the emergency health interventions.

Melissa Leach, from the Institute of Development Studies, and James Fairhead, from the University of Sussex, enlisted Ferme for her knowledge about social life in rural Sierra Leone. As it turned out, the world’s worst EVD epidemic on record was exploding in the same area where she had been conducting extensive fieldwork since the 1980s.

Anthropological Interventions

Professor Ferme provided memos to the Ebola Response Anthropology Platform to be used in making actionable plans. She conveyed surprise that different emergency health intervention organizations, like the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) or Doctors Without Borders (MSF), did not understand the importance of proper greetings in rural Sierra Leone. She stressed in one of her earliest memos that it was important to give a token of money to paramount chiefs in greeting at organizational meetings, as they would have to travel to come see health workers and political leaders in the middle of the health crisis. The international community was strangely worried about the corrupting power of money, but if they were serious about gaining the respect of the paramount chiefs, health workers and organizers would have to acknowledge that real barriers exist to traveling without access to monetary means, as they were putting the burden on the chiefs to come to them for education about how EVD spreads and how to stop it. These tokens did not need to be very much – maybe 10,000 leones or US$2.50 – but it would be disrespectful not to offer them.

This was the moment that Professor Ferme realized just how few people actually conduct fieldwork in rural Sierra Leone and how little the international community understood how their own actions were perceived in the region. Understanding the local culture could not be abandoned because there was a crisis; the crisis was exactly the reason why understanding local culture was critical to the containment efforts’ success.

Understanding the local culture could not be abandoned because there was a crisis; the crisis was exactly the reason why understanding local culture was critical to the containment efforts’ success.

Ferme went on to collaborate with Njala University’s Paul Richards and other Dutch and Sierra Leonean colleagues on an article published by Public Library of Science’s Neglected Tropical Diseases division, emphasizing just how critical understanding local culture is to the success of the global health response to EVD. In the piece, “Social Pathways for Ebola Virus Disease in Rural Sierra Leone,” published in October 2014, Ferme and her colleagues focus on the fact that extended familial and exchange networks cross the borders of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea; that there is a history of violence in rural Sierra Leone that understandably has caused the local population to be suspicious of state authorities; and that more consideration should be put into understanding local practices of mourning.

Local funereal practices, particularly the practice of washing the dead, was identified early as a high-risk factor for infection, but Ferme and her colleagues emphasized that health authorities needed to explain very carefully to local populations that these practices have encouraged the spread of EVD, as people are often unwilling to give up their practices of mourning, particularly in an atmosphere of fear during a health crisis. And, the authors argued, the different organizations and health authorities should engage with the rural community members more effectively to better understand how their demands are perceived. For example, when health officials urged family members act to get their relatives to clinics for treatment from Ebola, they did not necessarily take into account that, for villagers living in rural Sierra Leone, the expenses of traveling to a distant health center were often out of reach, or could inhibit their ability to protect the rest of their family from possible infection.

It was in this rural region of northern Sierra Leone, a region characterized by intricate and cross-border familial and exchange relationships and lacking basic health infrastructure, that Ebola was able to spread, unnoticed by the health authorities, reigniting the outbreak that had been thought to be on the wane.

Delayed Reactions, Missteps, and Incomplete Infrastructure

The UN’s Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER) was set up on September 19, 2014, more than nine months after the death of a two-year-old boy in the village of Meliandou, in the Republic of Guinea—a case recognized as the single index case of the outbreak. The reasons for this extremely delayed declaration of emergency in West Africa are many, but as the New York Times carefully chronicled, the fact that the EVD outbreak (according to the World Health Organization’s March 25, 2015 situation report) has infected 24,907 people, killed a total of 10,326 people, and raged for nearly sixteen months is tied particularly to the actions (or mostly inactions) taken during the two month period between April and May 2014.

As the New York Times reported, it was during this period of laxness that individuals “with Ebola-like symptoms” made their way over the extremely porous border to Sierra Leone to the south. Neither the Guinean Health Ministry nor the World Health Organization tracked and followed up with these individuals, nor did they notify Sierra Leonean health authorities. As global health institutions watched cases dwindle in Guinea, with the memory of recent short-lived EVD outbreaks in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, they assumed that the worst was over. In May 2014, the outbreak was understood to be situated firmly in Guinea and cases of infection had been declining steadily for a month. By June 2014, however, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) declared that the epidemic “out of control.”

Whither Global Health?

Many have indicated that the West African EVD epidemic should be regarded as an alarm call to the international community to invest in strengthening health systems and infrastructure in areas like the Republic of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, which are three of the least developed countries in the world. Medical Anthropologist and Partners in Health (PIH) co-founder Paul Farmer has argued that what has always been needed in West Africa is “the capacity to safely deliver excellent supportive care.” Since surviving Ebola means having adequate care—requiring the replacement of the roughly 10 liters of liquid a day that is lost during infection—the West African epidemic has shone a bright light on West Africa’s lack of adequate health systems.

Similarly, Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) recently released a damning report on the slow global response to contain the epidemic. In the face of failing organizational and health infrastructure, MSF (who was the first on the scene of the unfolding epidemic) was forced to make compromises about which kinds of approaches it could undertake “between the competing priorities of patient care, surveillance, safe burials, and outreach activities.” Ebola has broken the already lacking health infrastructures in these three countries, and “restoring healthcare systems to pre-Ebola levels without addressing the underlying flaws and weaknesses is not enough.” As one MSF worker stated: “For the Ebola outbreak to spiral this far out of control required many institutions to fail. And they did, with tragic and avoidable consequences.”

Professor Ferme is in agreement with these critiques. In an era of global health development that focuses ever more on isolated interventions and “21st-century, tech-driven solutions,” the process by which the West African Ebola epidemic has unfolded shows how important it still is to pursue “20th-century public health interventions.” The West African Ebola outbreak represents strong evidence that basic health infrastructure should be a primary goal of international health development: as the local health infrastructure was overcome by the fight against Ebola, many populations avoided clinics for any other treatment, such as for malaria (which has many of the same symptoms as Ebola) or even to give birth, both out of fear of catching Ebola and also because they were turned away by health systems devoted solely to combatting one disease. As cases of infection and death decline in West Africa, but have not disappeared altogether, questions remain about what is to be done next, and how to move forward responsibly.

Top Photo Credit: European Commission DG Echo