Biological anthropology on mars? (or, skeleton of a syllabus) , New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. 2020. 219 pp. ISBN: 9781108476843. $64.00 /$79.99 (ebook/hardback).
As AJBA has recently celebrated its centennial, and David Bowie's album Hunky Dory its semicentennial, Evaluating Evidence in Biological Anthropology: The Strange and the Familiar appropriately manifests that record's most famous refrain: “Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes/Turn and face the strange.” Similarly, the next most famous song on the album asks, “Is there life on Mars?” Evaluating Evidence poses the same question about our subfield: are there other (“strange”) ways of doing biological anthropology, and what fruits await if we embrace the strange? The subfield is already beginning to make the strange more familiar, most recently electing to change our official name from “physical” to “biological” anthropology to better reflect the scope of the discipline today. This volume therefore provides timely introspection into how, why, and for whom we do our work.
The volume, edited by Drs. Cathy Willermet and Sang-Hee Lee, is the outcome of two sessions they organized at the American Anthropological Association conference in 2015 and 2016, whose respective themes were “Familiar/Strange” and “Evidence, Accident, Discovery.” This conference, predominated by cultural anthropology, provided an ideal setting for the type of introspection and reflexivity requested of the biological anthropologists contributing to the sessions (and this volume). Lee and Willermet (p. 1) explain that “making the familiar strange” has long been a common practice within cultural anthropology, while our subfield has historically taken for granted that our approaches are objective, and that our practice is Science with a capital “S.” But as Willermet and Lee (and many of the volume contributors) compellingly argue, “The steadfast obsession with the scientific approach … is in fact a response to mask the dark history surrounding” the origins of our subfield as essentially ‘race science’ (p. 202). In order to move beyond this legacy and this myopic framework, the volume urges biological anthropologists to take a step back and question fundamental assumptions and approaches that undergird research questions, assessment of data, and how we communicate. Willermet & Lee (p. 203) conclude, “‘making the familiar strange’ … can shake up one's thinking, giving room to new thoughts and ideas.” As I outline in the prompts at the end of this review, each contribution to this volume makes the familiar strange in its own way.
The book is divided into two sections, roughly corresponding to the two conference session themes. Part I includes comprehensive overviews, historical contexts, and critical reflections on familiar theoretical frameworks, while Part II focuses more on data and methods with applications to specific areas within biological anthropology. Topics covered in the book span most of the subfield, including human biology, paleoanthropology, bioarchaeology, paleopathology, and science communication. The unnumbered introductory chapter and concluding Chapter 11, written by the volume editors, are strong epistemological bookends to the creative and critical pages in between. It is beyond my expertise to critique all of the research in the volume, but I am reassured by knowing that the chapters underwent peer-review (I reviewed one myself).
Two research areas that are not strongly represented in the volume include genetics (though Glantz critically discusses ancient DNA in Chapter 2) and primatology (though Beasley & Schoeninger discuss chimpanzee habitat use in Chapter 10). This omission is not an oversight by the volume editors, but rather probably relates to their backgrounds as morphologists and to usual attendance at the AAA meetings. Another minor drawback to the book, especially for those hoping to use it for teaching, is that there are many places where more details or images could be useful (e.g., depictions of active vs. healed periosteal bone formation in Chapter 7). Given the great breadth of topics in the volume, the readership is likely to be diverse and so readers are bound to encounter at least some new material with which they are unfamiliar. But this is a rather trivial issue which probably reflects the limitations of the medium, and does not detract from the high quality of the book.
I think all biological anthropologists—from students to senior scholars—would benefit from reading the book, either in its entirety or focusing on chapters more relevant to one's own specialty. Both the general premise and individual chapters of the book provide great material for coursework at the graduate or advanced undergraduate levels. For one thing, many of the chapters directly address our field's colonial, racist, and sexist legacies, which are important for students to know. In addition, the volume is available in both hard-cover and ebook formats at a price lower than most (new) textbooks and comparable to other edited volumes. It could even be “freely” available to students if their institution's library has digital access to Cambridge University Press. Digital formats may be most useful for students, since individual chapters can be downloaded as PDF files, it is easy to search PDFs for terms or keywords, and many e-readers offer text-to-speech options which may increase accessibility.
Given the pedagogical value of the volume and necessary brevity of this review, below I provide an example of how each contribution (Chapters 1–10) could serve as a basis for class discussions or assignments, helping students see the value of flipping our fundamental ideas on their heads.
Chapter 1: “Women in Human Evolution Redux.” Following the methods of Khorasani & Lee (p. 20), conduct a Google image search of the keywords, “prehistoric humans.” Aside from ‘gender roles’ and ‘hunting’ (the chapter's foci), identify a theme common among the images—what “familiar” cultural biases or narratives might this reflect?
Chapter 2: “Hegemony and the Central Asian Paleolithic.” Glantz argues that we should question hegemonic narratives (like the Out of Africa model of modern human origins), not necessarily because they are wrong, but because strict adherence can create blinders and biases that prevent production of new knowledge, questions, and ideas. What is another ideological hegemony you have encountered in anthropology? What types of data and questions does it privilege, and how might it bias or influence interpretations of these data?
Chapter 3: “Anthropology Now.” Kissel critiques Steven Pinker's popular book Enlightenment Now as doing an academically poor, but publicly outsized, job of communicating anthropological information to broad audiences. Why do you think books like Pinker's are so popular, and what are specific things anthropologists can do to take back authorship of the human story?
Chapter 4: “The Strangeness of Not Eating Insects.” Lesnik shows that while eating insects may be strange in many American and European cultures, ‘entomophagy’ is a very familiar practice in other parts of the world. Following her lead, do an in-depth investigation of a species of edible insect, using Jongema's (2017) World List of Edible Insects: where is the species found geographically, how is it incorporated into people's diet, and how might you pitch it to an American audience?
Chapter 5: “Methods without Meaning.” Nelson makes a strong case that we must center the living humans studied in Human Biology research. What are the benefits of “allowing study participants to guide both research questions and methodological inquiry” (p. 95)? What are some practical challenges to doing this, and what are some possible strategies to overcome these challenges?
Chapter 6: “(Re)Discovering Paleopathology.” Stodder & Byrnes describe analytical frameworks for integrating bioarchaeology and paleopathology, discussing an impressive array of case studies. Using their bibliography, dig deeper into one of these studies: what is the “familiar” framework in this case, and how might a different framework lead to a different understanding of “impairment” vs. “disability”?
Chapter 7: “Parsing the Paradox.” DeWitte makes the strange familiar by showing that in a historical human cemetery sample, nuanced analysis of healed vs. active skeletal lesions reveals resilience rather than frailty. What are some other skeletal markers of stress which could similarly invert familiar and strange interpretations of health/frailty?
Chapter 8: “Seeing RED.” Willermet, Daniels, Edgar, and McKean propose a new statistical method to analyze discrete (non-metric) traits often used in forensic anthropology to assess population affinities of skeletal remains. Explain how their cluster analysis of dental traits relates to traditional notions of race. What are some reasons why the data fail to support racial categorization?
Chapter 9: “Paleoanthropology and Analytical Bias.” Van Arsdale shows that methodological advances in paleoanthropology tend to rely on relatively few complete fossils, meaning much of the vast, fragmentary fossil record is increasingly overlooked. Pick two cranial fossils listed in Table 9.1 (p. 176): one with a Fixation Index of 5 (well preserved) and the other with an FI of 1 (poorly preserved). Use the Scopus database to find articles using these fossils: Based on your search, what narratives of human evolution does the more complete fossil get to tell that the other one cannot, and why?
Chapter 10: “(Re)Discovering Ancient Hominin Environments.” Beasley & Schoeninger use Australopithecus anamensis as a case study to illustrate how integrating several types of data can help reconstruct not only hominin habitats, but also niches within these habitats. Select another hominin site for which a paleoenvironment reconstruction and isotope data from hominin tooth enamel are available. What habitat(s) have been reconstructed at the site, and how do the hominin isotope data suggest hominins may have utilized the habitat?
In summary, Evaluating Evidence is a great resource for biological anthropologists of all ranks, with many opportunities to reflect on the familiar and to engage with new ideas, methods, and approaches. To paraphrase another Hunky Dory refrain that Bowie may as well have written for the editors and contributors to this volume, “Oh, you pretty things, don't you know you're driving your [intellectual forebears] insane?”
