BLOOMSBURG
UNIVERSITY
Department of Anthropology

The Anthropology Newsletter
Vol. 20, No. 6
April-May 1996
Summer 1996: The Department of Anthropology will offer the following courses
during the Summer 1996 sessions:
46.101
46.102
46.200
46.220
46.301
46.390

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Introduction to Anthropology - Session 1 - Professor Reeder
Anthropology & World Problems - Session 3 - Dr. Minderhout
Principles of Cultural Anthropology - Session 3 - Dr. Minderhout
Human Origins - Session 2 - Professor Reeder
Field Archaeology - Session 1 - Dr. Wymer
Socialization of the Child - Session 4 - Dr. Dauria

46.102 fulfills the Values, Ethics & Responsible Decision-making requirement of
general education. 46.102, 46.200, and 46.390 can be used to meet the university's
diversity requirement. All of these courses meet the social science distribution
requirement for general education.
46.301, Field Archaeology, is the field school in archaeology. Students enrolled in
this course will survey and excavate an archaeological site in Columbia County, PA.
Students in 46.301 will also learn laboratory techniques used in archaeology to
catalog and describe artifacts. Students may enroll in 46.301 for either 3 or 6 credits.
For more details, please contact Dr. Wymer (X4858). Note: despite what the summer
scheduling booklet says, it is not necessary to fill out an internship application form to
sign up for 46.301.
46.390, Socialization of the Child, compares patterns of child rearing in different
cultures. 46.390 also looks at the impact of culture on the development of personality.
For more details, please contact Dr. Dauria (X4952).
Session 1 meets from May 28 to July 5. Session 2 meets from June 17 to July 26.
Session 3 meets from July 8 to August 16. And Session 4 meets from May 28 to June
14.

Looking Ahead: For Spring 1997, the Department of Anthropology will offer the

Old Science Hall, Bloomsburg University, Bloomsburg, PA 17815-1301 (717) 389-4860
A State System of Wgher Education University

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following upper level courses: 46.312, South American Archaeology (Aleto); 46.350,
Medical Anthropology (Minderhout); 46.360, Pseudoscience (Wymer); 46.385,
Anthropological Research & Writing (Minderhout); and 46.475, Field Methods in
Cultural Anthropology (Dauria). The new Anthropological Research & Writing course
will be required for anthropology majors; it will replace the current statistics
requirement.

Students and Faculty Represent Bloomsburg at the Eighth Annual
Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education Anthropology Research
Conference: by Dr. Dauria.
The Eighth Annual Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education
Anthropology Research Conference was hosted by California University of
Pennsylvania on March 22 and 23. Six Bloomsburg students attended the conference:
Stephanie Moyer, Sarah Puketza, Joanette Saba-Sturm, Kathy Parillo, Louise
Tokarsky, and .Karin Rebnegger. These students were accompanied by Dr. Susan
Dauria. All told, there were fifty students and faculty in attendance from various State
System schools including California, Bloomsburg, Indiana, Edinboro and Mansfield.
The conference commenced on Friday evening with a pizza party and general
introductions. We also had the opportunity to tour the lab facilities at California which
were very impressive. California has a graduate program in contract archaeology and
specializes in historic archaeology. Their collection of artifacts was extensive, and our
students asked a lot of questions.
On Saturday March 23 four Bloomsburg students, with other students and
faculty from all over the state, presented research papers. The day began with the
Bloomsburg group's presentations. These presentations were the final projects from
Dr. Dauria's class "Ethnic Identity in the United States, 11 from Fall 1995. The first paper
in this series was a review of the literature on Native American Ethnicity by Joanette
Saba-Sturm. Next was Kathy Parillo with her in-depth look at the survival of Amish
ethnicity. Sarah Puketza then explored the symbolic ethnicity among the Scottish in
her paper, "Piping in the Haggis".
After the midmorning break there were papers on the ethnography of bingo
(Mansfield) and ecotorism (IUP). In this group was another Bloomsburg student who
looked at Teotihuacan. Karin Rebnegger discussed an independent research project
that she is working on which attempts to understand the influence of Teotihuacan in
Southern Mesoamerica. Karin's paper generated a tremendous amount of discussion,
and she fielded questions like a professional.
Lunch was provided for on the campus of California University of Pennsylvania
along with a faculty tour of the campus. The day wrapped-up with a series of
archaeology papers. Students from IUP and California discussed their archaeological
projects including plant food analysis of the Northeastern U.S., catchment analysis of

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the Jones site, pottery dating, and sweatlodge experiences.
The individuals who participated in the conference did an excellent job. It is
invigorating to be part of a conference where Ideas are shared and contacts are made.
Bloomsburg, California, Mansfield and IUP students were able to talk and compare
notes about their experiences. These are the kind of situations that allow students and
faculty alike to expand their horizons both for research and teaching.

The Culture-Bound Syndrome In Modern Psychiatry: by Dr. Aleta. During the
1930's and 40's, the study of the relationship between culture and psychology was a
mainstay of cultural anthropology. Margaret Mead became internationally famous for
her work on the psychological development of adolescent girls in Samoa. Ruth
Benedict offered psychological sketches or personality profiles of Japanese and some
Native American cultures. But by the 1960's, this area of inquiry, sometimes called the
Culture & Personality School, had run Its course and had fallen out of favor within
anthropology.
However, many psychiatrists working in the United States In the 1990's are
revisiting this long-dormant field as they try to deal with the mental illnesses of an
increasingly culturally-diverse society. Among the anthropological ideas they have
found useful in treating their patients is the "culture-bound syndrome" or the "ethnic
psychosis." These terms refer to mental illnesses that are either culturally specific or
which manifest themselves with different symptoms within different cultural traditions.
For example, anorexia nervosa is a culture-bound syndrome specific to the United
States and other Western industrialized societies, Mental health workers in regions
with large immigrant populations are adding concepts like rn, taijin kyofusho, amok,
and kQrQ to their professional lexicon and are developing appropriate techniques to
treat the illnesses they describe.
One of the most widely understood ethnic psychoses in the United States is rn, a
malady which affects people of Latin American and Caribbean origin. Often translated
as ~'fright" or "soul loss," rn strikes people who experience a sudden emotional
shock, such as the unexpected death of a loved one or a traumatizing encounter with a
supernaturally-powerful animal like a snake. The victim exhibits the psychological
symptoms associated with clinical depression in traditional psychiatric terms.
However, because patients believe that their souls have left their bodies, traditional
treatment with anti-depressants does not always work. Until patients are assured that
their souls have stopped wandering _and have returned to their proper places within
the body, patients frequently do not recover. Achieving the return of the soul often
requires that the psychiatrist employ ritual curing techniques, like chanting or
drumming, which have meaning to the patient, but which might be viewed as quackery
by mainstream psychiatry.
The Japanese suffer from taijin kyofusho, an Illness which has no counterpart in
Western medicine. Loosely translated, it means "fear of people" and expresses itself

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as a morbid dread that the victim will do something to embarrass other people.
According to Dr. Arthur Kleinman, a medical anthropologist and psychiatrist, "The
syndrome revolves around social shame. The closest equivalent Western psychiatric
diagnosis is social phobia, but that is an anxiety disorder, a fear that people will
criticize you. It's not at all the same thing. Japanese clinicians say this psychological
problem simply has no parallel in our culture or diagnostic system - we don't think of
the fear of embarrassing other people as a psychological syndrome."
Other ethnic psychoses known to anthropologists, and which are becoming
increasingly familiar to psychiatrists, are two Malaysian illnesses, filil.Qk (the source of
"to run amok" in English) and koro. Amok Is characterized by brooding, followed by a
violent outburst precipitated by a slight or insult. KQJ:Q is the sudden intense anxiety
that the sexual organs will recede into the body and cause death; occasionally it
manifests itself in epidemics. West Africans suffer from brain fag. a mental and
physical reaction to the challenges of schooling, while Chinese experience shen-k'uel,
panic symptoms and anxiety attributed to the life-threatening loss of semen. Falling
out is a culture bound syndrome found in the southern United States, particularly
among African Americans. The victim collapses suddenly with eyes open, but is
unable to see and feels unable to move without losing the ability to hear.
In an attempt to deal with culture-bound syndromes more effectively, a number of
teaching hospitals are including training with different cultural groups as part of their
residency programs. And in 1995 the national guidelines for training psychiatry
residents specified for the first time that they be trained in assessing the relationship
between culture and the mental health of their patients.

The Amish: Every Pennsylvanian has heard of the Amish, and many, depending on
where they live, have seen or interacted with them. Yet, for most, there remains some
confusion and uncertainty about them. For instance, there is confusion in the minds of
many Pennsylvanians about the relationship between the Amish and the Mennonites;
many cannot distinguish between them. The Mennonites were founded by Menno
Sims ( 1492-1561) in the 16th century. Sims, who was Dutch, was a Catholic priest
who was disenchanted with his church, which he saw as corrupt and too involved in
worldly issues. He believed in a severe separation of church and state, in adult rather
than infant baptism, and in re·fusing to bear arms or to take oaths. In other words,
Menno Sims was one of many in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries who broke
with Roman Catholicism, creating the Protestant movement. It is interesting that his
followers came to be called Mennonites; most movements of this sort follow the last
name of their founder, e.g. Lutherans.
The Amish movement was subsequently named after Jacob Amman, a Swiss
follower of Menno Sims. Born in 1656, Amman was a Mennonite preacher who
believed in the strict interpretation of Sims' teachings. Sims had introduced the
practice of shunning to his new religion; shunning is a community reaction to a
Mennonite who is not practicing the faith as the community defines it. When a

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community shuns one of its members, it refuses to interact in any way with that person.
Even a shunned person's spouse, parents, or children will refuse to recognize the
existence of the one who has been shunned. Sims' clearly intended shunning as a
way of enforcing the standards of his new religion. By Jacob Amman's time, there had
been - In Amman's opinion - significant backsliding on the Issue of shunning. Amman
felt that the Mennonite community had become lax in enforcing its standards. People
were either no longer being shunned or those who had been shunned were still freely
interacting with members of the faith. Amman Insisted that shunning be used as a
severe weapon of the faith and that there be no commerce between shunned persons
and Mennonites. Others disagreed, feeling that Amman's standards were too harsh.
Thus, the split occurred between the Mennonites and the Amish; by 1700, the division
in the community was recognized by members of other faiths.
The Amish apparently were in this country by the early 18th century. William Penn,
the founder of Pennsylvania, actively recruited migrants to his new territory from what
is now western Germany; Mennonites, Amish, and other Anabaptist faiths were well
represented in this region. This area had been torn by war and famine in the second
half of the 17th century, and Penn found many people willing to listen to his message
of plentiful farm land and religious freedom in the New World; by 1683, people from
western Germany began arriving In Pennsylvania. The first acknowledgement of the
Amish in Pennsylvania dates from 1737. Predominately farmers, these early settlers
chose to avoid the Philadelphia area with its English Inhabitants, choosing instead to
settle in southeastern Pennsylvania. As the United States grew in subsequent years,
many Amish migrated westward. Today, there are sizeable Amish communities in 20
states other than Pennsyvanla and in Canada, as well; Ohio and Indiana have as
many Amish, in fact, as Pennsylvania. However, there are no surviving Amish
communities in Europe.
A central tenet in Amish belief is that the mortal world is an evil place of sin. The
Amish fervently believe that they are only temporary visitors here and that their primary
duty in this life is to prepare for eternity. They do not see themselves as destined to
change or improve this world; it is best to stay aloof from worldly things. The Amish
believe in a literal translation of the Bible and rely heavily on a passage from 1 Peter
(2:9): "But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar
people." This passage reinforces their belief that they should separate themselves
from other faiths and groups. At the same time, the Amish do not proselytize or attempt
to recruit outsiders into their faith. It is possible to convert to being Amish, but the vast
majority of Amish are born to the faith, which is also part of their vision of themselves
as a peculiar, chosen people. (And it is estimated that only 6% of people born to Amish
households leave the faith.)
The Amish (and some Mennonites) are known to the outside world as "plain"
people. The Amish believe that they should not call attention to themselves; boasting
is considered a terrible offense in an Amish community. Also, by not adopting modern
dress or technology, they continue to emphasize their separation from surrounding

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populations and the sinful world. The Amish also believe that the natural world (as
separate from the sin-ridden world of humans) is God's creation and that it should be
treated with respect. Thus, historically they have rejected innovations, such as
gasoline-powered farm machinery, on the grounds that they polluted the earth.
However, there is variation from one Amish community to another in the
interpretation of what is plain and what is acceptable innovation. There is no Amish
church, in the sense of a Catholic or Methodist church. That is, there is no single
overseeing body that legislates practices for all Amish. Each Amish community sets its
own standards, guided by their fundamentalist view of the Bible and Jacob Amman's
teachings and enforced by shunning. Services are held in people's homes, and
distinguished male members of the community act as clergy. A senior group of male
elders interprets the faith for the local community and hears appeals from community
members who wish to adopt new behaviors or technologies. The result is that what
one Amish community may banish, another might sanction as perfectly acceptable
Amish behavior.
The Amish have also become considerably more flexible in the second half of the
twentieth century. The Amish are not as isolated as they once were. The remote farm
country that once separated them from the outside world is now sprouting with housing
developments and shopping malls. Quiet back country lanes on which Amish buggies
could travel without fear of traffic are now busy paved roads. The Amish are also a
rapidly growing population - they have the highest birth rate of any recognized
American ethnic group. The result is more contact with non-Amish, severe population
pressure on farm land, and rising property values and taxes for Amish farmers. Many
Amish have had to leave their traditional areas to find farms in areas where none of
their neighbors may be Amish; others have had to get out of farming altogether to find
other ways of making a living. In the process, the Amish have become more
accomodating. Most Amish communities will still prohibit their members from owning a
car or having television sets. But many Amish are allowed to ride in cars owned by
their non-Amish neighbors or to watch tv at their homes. Similarly, most Amish are still
forbidden to drive tractors on their farms, but some communities allow Amish farmers
to own tractors and run other equipment off from them.
As a result, the Amish are thriving today. At the beginning of the 20th century, the
survival of the Amish did not seem assured. Legislation in Pennsylvania and other
states where the Amish lived required Amish children to attend public schools and .
required the Amish to speak English. Anti-German backlash during World War I
affected the Amish as well as other Americans of German descent. The Amish refusal
to join the military or to involve themselves in the larger community made them figures
of suspicion and sometimes victims of other Americans who did not share their views.
The fact that the Amish did not vote or run for public office also left them without any
effective political representation. However, eventually the Amish chose to fight back,
using the U.S. court system to their advantage. The key issue was the right to maintain
their own schools (in which subjects are taught in German and which only go through

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the 8th grade). State and federal courts eventually supported the Amish right to
maintain their own schools, on the grounds of the constitutional separation of church
and state, though states are allowed some rights to inspect school buildings and to test
Amish teachers. At the same time, states like Pennsylvania became aware of the
tourist appeal of the Amish and began to promote their distinctiveness (without Amish
approval, of course) as a way of increasing revenues. And as many Americans
became more environmentally conscious and interested in traditional lifestyles, the
Amish began to take on public appeal as one of the original "back-to-the-earth"
movements. Thus, while there were fewer than 5000 Amish in the United States in
1900, there is thought to be around 150,000 Amish today.
As one final point, the Amish are one group Included in the phrase, "the
Pennsylvania Dutch," another label that leads to misunderstandings. The Amish, and
most other Pennsylvania groups, called uDutch" were not, in fact, from the Netherlands.
Rather, as they disembarked from the ships bringing them to this country, they were
asked their nationalities, to which they responded "Deutsch" (German). This became
Anglicized into "Dutch" - and thus the continuing misperception of Pennsylvania
Germans as Dutch in the minds of most people still today.

New Genetc Evidence for the Origin of Modern Humans: by Dr. Aleto.
The question of when, where, and how modern humans evolved from their premodern ancestors has become one of the most hotly debated and contentious issues
in physical anthropology. Over the past 15 years, two mutually exclusive hypotheses
have been proposed to explain the origin of anatomically modern Homo sapiens
(AMHS) from its Homo erectus antecedent. Both hypotheses agree that AMHS and
Homo erectus were separated by Intermediate forms of humans called archaic Homo
sapiens, but conflict in their explanation of the timing, location, and mechanism of
transformation. A new study published In Science by Sarah Tishkoff and her
colleagues at Yale University makes it increasingly likely that one of the hypotheses is
about to eclipse the other as the more probable explanation.
Tishkoff's research focuses on the genetic variability in modern human populations
around the world. Her analysis of DNA from 1600 people representing 42 geographic
populations strongly suggests that all human populations outside of Sub-Saharan
Africa are descended from a small group of AMHS which migrated from Africa
approximately 100,000 BP (before present). The genetic variability of Sub-Saharan
Africans identifies them as a separate population which has been undergoing genetic
differentiation for a much longer period of time than non-Africans.
The data lend a great deal of support to the theory of human origins known as the
Single Origin or Eve Hypothesis first proposed by Rebecca Cann. On the basis of
genetic data, Cann has argued that all modern humans are descended from a single
Sub-Saharan African female who lived approximately 200,000 BP. Based on the
fossil evidence, this woman would have belonged to a population of archaic Homo
sapiens. Cann believes that the descendants of this woman evolved into AMHS

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sometime before 100,000 BP and that these African moderns spread throughout the
world, outcompeting and replacing the archaic Homo sapiens living there. This
scenario is supported by the present fossil record, which places the earliest known
AMHS in Africa before 100,000 BP and the oldest AMHS outside of Africa in Israel at
approximately 93,000 BP. Tishkoff's data on genetic variability are consistent with this
interpretation, since it places the first AMHS in Africa before 100,000 BP and its
migration out of Africa at 100,000 BP.
At the same time, it undermines the other leading explanation, the Multiple Origins
or the Multi-Regional Hypothesis. Championed by Milford Wolpoff, this view holds that
modern humans evolved simultaneously in many parts of the world along parallel
developmental trajectories. According to Wolpoff, modern Africans evolved from
African archaics, modern Asians from Asian archaics, modern Europeans from
European archaics (colloquially known as Neanderthals), and so on. The
considerable gene flow between these r_egional populations during their evolutionary
histories has resulted in a single species of modern Homo sapiens. In order for this
hypothesis to be true, the common ancestor for all modern humans must have lived
approximately 1 million years BP, before the Homo erectus ancestor of the regional
archaics left Africa. The new data presented by Tishkoff's Yale team makes this
scenario less plausible.
Given the emotional tenor of the debate about human origins, it is unlikely that
Wolpoff and the other Multi-Regionalists will concede the point any time soon. Given
the limited nature of the direct evidence of human evolution (the fossil record) and the
inherent limitations of the indirect evidence (the genetic record), this debate is likely to
play itself out for some time to come.

Anthropology Club News:
- new officers will be elected at our last anthropology club meeting April 25 at
5:00 pm.
- There will be a presentation by Dr. Aleto on April 16th. He will speak about his
recent visit to the Mayan site of Copan in Honduras.
-Remember: anthropology club T-shirts are still available.
- please take the opportunity to look at the photos from our State System of
Higher Education Anthropology Conference (March 22 - 23).
- students have signed-up for a classroom decoration party to be held April 25
at 5:00. It is the plan to do some painting and general sprucing up of the
anthropology classroom.
- our anthropology end of the semester cook-out will be May 3rd at 5:00 at the

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Bloomsburg Town Park. Please sign up for the picnic with Nick Caputo.

Teaching Evolution In Tennessee: The following letter by Jerome Cragle of
Mifflinville appeared in the Bloomsburg Press-Enterprise:
Once again the state of Tennessee has made an ass of itself by considering a law
that would allow public school districts to fire or ask teachers to quit if they present
evolution as an explanation of the origin and development of life superior to the
Biblical story of creation in the book of Genesis. This was reported in the,March 5
edition of your paper. This moronic bill is not, despite Its proponents' assertions to the
contrary, really to instill 1'balance" In the classroom but to intimidate teachers into
dropping the subject like a hot potato. It Is essentially a gag law - like the old
Tennessee law that banned the teaching of evolution outright. Of course that law
precipitated the famous 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in which the state was held up to
nationwide ridicule as a bastion of ignorance and narrow-mindedness. Yet despite
the passage of 71 years and great advances in science and technology, it is evident
that the Dark Ages have not quite ended in Tennessee and many other parts of the
country.
This proposed legislation is reminiscent of Cardinal Robert Bellarmine warning
Galileo to treat his astronomical discoveries that support [the] Copernican hypothesis
that the earth and other planets revolve around the sun as theoretical, not factual.
Galileo refused and was hauled before the Inquisition. He was given a guided tour of
the instruments of torture that were to be used on him unless Galileo recanted his
support for the Copernican theory. Eventually he did. Despite the Church's efforts to
suppress it, the truth won out.
Basically the same medieval mindset is at work behind this latest effort by religious
zealots to undermine science education and academic freedom in America. The
modern day equivalents of the medieval Church and its thought police reside in the
school boards, state legislatures, and pulpits in not just Tennessee, but all across the
country. Spearheading the drive to get this loathsome law passed and enacted are
fundamentalist churches, the mountebanks who call themselves creation "scientists,"
and extreme right special interest groups such as Eagle Forum. Evolution is a fact
because there is an overwhelming body of evidence in support of it from fields as
diverse as comparative anatomy, genetics, embryology, blogeography, and
paleontology. The proposition that evolution occurred and Is occurring is as settled as
any in science.
The debate in the scientific community conerns NOT whether or not evolution
happened, but on HOW it happened. The creation "scientists" know this and attempted
to misrepresent this debate as a sign that mainstream scientists are having second
thoughts about the validity of evolution. The "scientific research" of creationists
involves very little laboratory or field work.

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The bulk of this supposed research consists of rummaging through the mainstream
scientific literature in a search for any alleged inconsistencies with the evolutionary
paradigm. To present creationism or creation "science" - a mishmash of distortion,
obfuscation, and plain sophistry .. on the same level as evolution is to fall into the trap
that all ideas are equal.
By the same token teach the round earth on the same footing as the flat earth; or
give equal tirne to the stork in the unit of a health class that deals with human
reproduction. The end result is a science curriculum turned into mental mush with no
way to decide which idea is correct. Since creationism invokes supernatural rather
than natural causes to explain nature, that is sufficient to disqualify it as a science.
Since creationism is inherently religious, it has no place in a public school science
classroom. Since this odious piece of legislation is a blatant attempt by politicians
who know next to nothing about science to dictate what is proper science according to
religious criteria, it ought to be thrown out by the courts as unconstitutional. To protest
how crazy and intellectually dishonest this law is, teachers in Tennessee ought to
teach the round earth and sun-centered solar system not as well-confirmed scientific
findings, but as mere speculations.

BU Anthropology News: Congratuations to anthropology majors Nick Caputo,
Schanna Huyck, Stephanie Moyer, Karin Rebnegger, and Heather Richardson, who
are planning to graduate in May, and to Joe Fogel and Sarah Puketza, who will
graduate in August.
Kelly Wiggett has submitted a proposal for a summer research grant to do an
ethnographic study of rural farm worker culture. She will work with Dr. Dauria, and the
culmination of the project is to provide a basis for a needs assessment for a migrant
workers community project at Bloomsburg University. In the future students will be able
to do research on the local migrant populations in the area as part of the migrant
community project.
Melissa Kovalick will be doing a summer internship in Hazelton. Melissa will be
working with a Latino population in the area under the direction of Dr. Dauria. Her goal
is to produce workshops for the St. Gabrielle parish. The internship will be paid by
federal money.
Dr. Minderhout gave a presentation at the Multicultural Forum, sponsored by the
Social Studies Association, on March 21, 1996. He spoke about the anthropological
concept of culture and how it differs from the everyday use of the word.