Department of Anthropology

The Anthropology Newsletter
Vol. 22, No. 3
Nov-Dec 1997
A Matter of Health: In the November 1997 issue of Natural History. Leslie Nielsen,
a nurse and former Peace Corps worker, writes about revisiting the town in the African
country of Niger where she carried out her Peace Corps duties in the early 1990's. In
her article, she writes about her feelings of dismay as she became reacquainted with
people she had first met only a few years before. As a Peace Corps volunteer, she
had promoted nutrition education out of a poorly equipped clinic which served
approximately 33,000 people near the town of Safo. Things had been bad then, but
now they were worse. People who had been healthy five years before were thin and
complaining of sickness and hunger. When she circulated pictures she had taken
earlier, she learned that about 25% of the people in them had died. Bad health was
the norm; "Adults and children often died of conditions that are preventable or curable:
measles, malaria, meningitis, malnutrition, polio, postpartum infection, tuberculosis."
Throughout her article, Nielsen comments that to the people of Safo, she was fat. (The
photographs of Nielsen that accompany the article show her to be - for an American of average size.) "In Niger, fat connotes health and wealth, while skinniness is ugly
and speaks of poverty and misery. Women have long conversations about my size.
She might not have a husband, they say, but look, what great fat arms she has."
None of these circumstances is surprising to an anthropologist who has worked in
the Third World, and especially in SubSaharan Africa, the poorest of the world's major
geographical areas. The good health that Americans take for granted is extraordinary
in many places in the Third World where disease, malnutrition, and unsanitary living
conditions are rampant. The circumstances for Niger are not unusual, especially for
Africa. Niger is a poor country with few prospects. Land-locked and largely desert,
Niger's economy has been in decline for over 15 years. The people of Niger are not
the source of many of its ills, but rather are the victims of colonialism, bad
management, a degraded environment, and the uncertainties of the global economy.
Niger was at one time a French colony, part of the huge territory designated on
world maps of the 1950's as French West Africa. ·French West Africa was about the
size of the continental United States. The French clearly viewed their enormous
colony as a source of labor and raw materials for the French economy. Originally
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drawn to the area by the promise of gold, the French developed a number of schemes
in French West Africa to generate wealth for themselves. These included vast cotton
plantations, cattle ranching, minerals development, and local trade for French
merchants. During both World War I and 11, thousands of French West African soldiers
fought for their colonial masters in Europe and North Africa, and during periods of
economic expansion in France, Africans migrated there to be cheap migrant labor in
French cities. Few of these efforts directly benefited West Africans. The relationship
between colonizer and colonized was extractive; French West Africa existed to
produce wealth for the French. In turn, the French invested in a bare minimum of
services for their colonies in order to facilitate extracting what they could - a few roads
to get cotton to market or enough schools to train a few West African clerks to help
record transactions in French-run businesses.
Independence came suddenly to French West Africa in the early 1960's. Be$et by
the expenses of rebuilding from World War II and trying to maintain a colonial empire
in Algeria and Indochina by military force, the French found their huge West African
colony a luxury they could no longer afford. French West Africa became divided into
the nations now seen on a world map - Senegal, Mali, Burkino Faso, Chad, and Niger.
None of these new nations had the infrastructure on which to build a new nation - only
a bare minimum of roads, ports, communications, energy sources, and schooling.
Niger and Chad were especially underdeveloped. Land-locked and largely desert,
they had received the least investment during the French colonial era.
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Faced with the absence both of infrastructure and resources, Niger followed the
path of many new nations in the Third World in the second half of the 20th century borrowing heavily from industrialized nations, private banks in Europe and the United
States, and multilateral lending institutions such as the World Bank. The needs were
great, and up until the mid-1980's, money was generally available - as loans to be
repaid with interest. Like many Third World nations, Niger had a single resource on
which to generate income to repay its loans, the mining of uranium. Colonizers often
promoted the development of single resource economies in their colonies, such as
sugar in Jamaica or cocoa in Ghana, to increase the efficiency of the extraction of
wealth. If a colony produced only one resource, then only one form of raw processing,
storage, and transportation was needed to get that product to a market in an
industrialized country. A colony that produced multiple resources complicated costs
for the colonizer. Being dependent on a single resource is like putting all of one's
eggs into one basket for a Third World nation. When the demand for a resource is
high in the global marketplace, the economy of a nation can soar, but if demand drops,
then a country may have little to fall back on. This is what has happened to Niger.
World demand for uranium underwrote its international loans in the 1960's and
1970's, but when the demand for uranium fell in the 1980's, Niger's economy went into
a decline from which it has never recovered. Now, like many African nations, Niger
spends two-thirds of its annual budget on debt repayment.
Rapid independence, few resources, rising expectations, and limited resources

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have often produced political instability in Africa since the 1960's. Niger is no
exception. Niger is currently ruled by a military government that came into power in
January 1996 after overthrowing its predecessor. This is not the first sudden turnover
of power in Niger's history. The current regime, uneasy in its power, is wary of its
critics and is accused of human rights violations in the international community. As a
result, international aid is not as available to Niger as it once was; all U.S. funding has
been cut off since the coup in 1996. In the 1990's, Third World nations are urged by
economists and international development experts to move away from loans and
international aid to the creation of capitalist markets: the 1990's salvation for the Third
World is supposed to be corporate investment. But investors are wary of a country with
as few prospects as Niger, and few industries would want to relocate there because of
the absence of ports from which to move manufactured products.
As a result, Niger and its people are desperately poor. The average citizen makes
about $1 a day - far too little to afford a nutritious diet, clean drinking water and
sanitation, or medical care when it is needed. The numbers on government resources
are equally grim. The total budget for public health in Niger works out to an
expenditure of less than a dollar per person. Public health must compete with a host
of other needs for the one-third of Niger's budget that doesn't go for debt repayment.
As a result, medical facilities are few and far between, and the handful of doctors in the
country are concentrated in the capital city of Niamey. When Nielsen visited the clinic
in which she worked in Safo, she found an overworked nurse doing interviews and
paperwork on the hundreds of patients lined up for care, while a janitor administered
vaccines and penicillin (donated by an international organization) with syringes that
were blunt from reuse. There was no running water in the clinic, nor much else either
other than a few pieces of furniture and the donated medicines. Given that penicillin
was all they had, every ailment - most of which were tied to malnutrition - was treated
with the antibiotic.
What few efforts are available for preventitive medicine or critical care are blunted
by the extreme poverty of the people. Nielsen recalls sitting in on a talk given by a
public health worker on preventitive steps to prevent malaria, a disease spread by
mosquitos. The audience listened attentively as they were advised to use mosquito
netting around their beds at night; the mosquitos that carry malaria are most active
after dark. Nielsen notes that for these people, mosquito netting was an impossible
expense. It is an axiom of modern health care that preventitive health is cheaper than
critical care, but in Niger, even as simple a measure as boiling water is near to
impossible given the scarcity of firewood and the effort involved in boiling water over
an open fire.
Hospital care is available in Niger, but only in a few locations that require rural
people to travel great distances to obtain it. And a hospital in the Third World bears
little resemblance to what Americans expect. Here is Nielsen's description of the
facility that served her area: "The hospital - typical for rural Africa - is made up of tiny
cement-block rooms with unscreened, unglazed windows, no ceiling fans or lights.

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Flies are everywhere; dirty bandages and used gloves are on the floor. Patients sit
outside on straw mats because the rooms are too hot. When people go to the hospital,
a family member must stay with them. Nurses give medicine and treatments, but not
physical care and feeding. It's difficult to spare a working member of the family to
accompany the sick, so people from the villages rarely go there." Indeed, one of the
people Nielsen interviewed in Sofa was a man racked with what she felt was
tuberculosis. He wanted to go to the hospital, and his treatment there would be at
government expense, but his wife and mother were reluctant to send him. "They can't
spare a healthy person to sit with him there, they say, especially with the rainy season
coming and fieldwork to do."
(Students in introductory anthropology classes often ask BU anthropology faculty
what anthropologists do to protect their own health in field situations in the Third
World. Remember that cultural anthropologists practice participant observation, w,hich
is built on the idea that the anthropologist lives, eats, and socializes with the people
being studied. The idea in participant observation is to minimize the distance between
the anthropologist and the people being studied. So, the anthropologist eats local
foods, drinks the local water, and sits and talks to people with a host of diseases
because fieldwork requires that kind of intimacy. Nielsen writes of her own
experience: "I was reckless yesterday and drank some of the unfiltered, untreated
village water and was really sick all night: vomiting and diarrhea: What the hell is in the
water?" Cultural anthropologists get a full range of vaccinations before they enter the
field; their-general ·guod trealth antll"tutritio·n helpstnem weather dis.eifses that . - debilitate or kill Third World people; and they can afford medical care in the Third
World when they become sick. But cultural anthropologists in field situations in the
Third World are sick often; usually anthropologists get to know all of the local health
care providers on a first name basis.)
Given the constant reality of disease, the extreme poverty of much of the Third
World, and the absence of either good preventitive health measures or critical care
facilities, increasingly community development efforts in the Third World, such as those
provided by the Peace Corps, are focusing on health. At any moment, there are
literally thousands of programs going on in the Third World to try and alleviate the
problems of the poor; most of these are funded and staffed by people from the
industrialized world. While many of these programs historically tried to raise the
incomes of the poor - through the introduction of new crops or new agricultural
technques, new ways of making a living, or literacy programs - many development
programs now focus on health issues. It may seem strange to an American to tackle
poverty by trying to improve health, but in reality it makes a great deal of sense. The
bad health of the Third World poor undermines their ability to cope with their problems.
Poor health takes away work days or lowers productivity; it also undermines morale.
In addition, the expenses in time and money to obtain whatever health care is
available cut into already lean family budgets. (One program in Pakistan which
provided the poor with sanitary latrines found health expenses dropped 85% with
even the simplest sanitation; previously peoples used buckets or the streets for

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wastes.)
It is also the case that development workers find that health care is one area where
they can make a real difference. The economic conditions of Third World nations will
not change overnight, and there is little a single rural development effort in one village
can do about national debt repayment or the absence of national resources. Nor can
development workers change the governments of the Third World to make them more
stable, more democratic, or more open to the needs of the poor. Many wellintentioned development programs end up failing because there is no road or
transportation to take a new product to market or no local expertise or replacement
parts to support a new technology. But some simple health measures can usually be
introduced without too much trouble. An example is Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT),
a program designed to cope with infant diarrhea and mortality in the Third World.
Already ill or poorly nourished infants die from dehydration from diarrhea; this is a
constant fact of life in the Third World. But ORT, a small packet of salts and sugar,
costing 2 to 3 cents apiece, when added to water and given to an infant prevents
dehydration. Because of efforts by the United Nations, ORT is routinely available in
most areas in the Third World. It is easy to use, and it undercuts the high infant
mortality rate. It can be a small success in the lives of the poor.
Not unexpectedly, anthropologists are often involved in putting together health care
programs for the poor. Anthropologists give advice to development agencies on how
best to approach a community's health problems or how to overcome reluctance on
the part of a community. A group of people may balk at a health program because it
interferes with some local practice or belief. For example, one development program
in Central Africa found that people refused to cut down brush near a waterway that
hosted tsetse flies and other animals that serve as vectors for disease. Research by
an anthropologist found that people believed that the spirits of their ancestors lived in
that same brush and they would be angered by losing their homes. Knowing this
information, a compromise solution could be worked out. Anthropologists can often
increase compliance with a new health initiative by making the initiative more
compatible with the local culture.

Culture Contact in Mesoamerica: Prehistoric and traditional cultures did not live
in splendid isolation, ignorant of everyone around them. Rather, most engaged in
some degree of trade with their neighbors. In some cases, archaeologists find
evidence of far-flung trade networks. Work in North America occasionally finds
abalone shell from the Pacific coast, raw copper from the Upper Peninsula of
Michigan, or obsidian from Mexico hundreds or thousands of miles away from its place
of origin. In many cases, this was small-scale, person-to-person trade, but in some
areas, such as Mes,oamerica, trade was often in the hands of merchants who
sometimes traveled great distances to bring goods from one community to another.
In the November/December 1997 issue of Archaeology. Patricia Rieff Anawalt
examines evidence for long distance trade 1500 years ago between what is now

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western Mexico and coastal Ecuador. A distance of 2400 miles separates the two
areas by sea (distances by land would be even greater), yet archaeological evidence
from western Mexico suggest a number of Ecuadorian influences. Anawalt looks at
similarities in dress, ceramic design and technique, tomb architecture and mortuary
offerings, and the distribution of the Mexican hairless dog as evidence of trade contact.
Anawalt notes that the preColumbian people of West Mexico dressed in a fashion
distinctly different from other Mexican cultures. Using the Tarascans as an example,
she writes "Whereas other Mesoamerican men wore rectangular capes and long,
wraparound loincloths, Tarascan men wore short breeches and tunic-like shirts, often
decorated with checked patterns. Most Mesoamerican women wore long wraparound
skirts and enveloping tunics known as huipils. or modest shoulder-shawls called
guechguemitl, while Tarascan women dressed in tight, short, checkered skirts worn
with or without a tiny mantle over the shoulders." She notes that the Tarascans live in
a mountainous terrain at 6800 to 8700 feet which is quite cold; their clothing seems
inappropriate to the weather., but is shared with other cultures in West Mexico.
Anawalt points out that ceramic figurines from the Manabi Province of Ecuador are
depicted in very similar costumes, right down to the patterning on the material.
Those ceramic figurines come from mortuary deposits from several sites in western
Ecuador. The figures are large hollow depictions of both men and women, and they
are characteristically found at the bottom of deep shaft tombs found in both Ecuador
and--PertJ.- The-same kinds where the tombs in particular have been regarded in Mexican archaeology as
anomalies. (Another article by Robert Pickering about the shaft tombs of West Mexico
is in the same issue of the magazine.) The presence of the Mexican hairless dog, a
creature with a very distinctive appearance that was bred as a food animal, in both
areas is also very interesting and suggests again some degree of contact between the
two areas.
When the Spanish arrived on the western coasts of Meso- and South America, they
found Ecuadorian merchants sailing the coastline in balsawood craft made with
movable centerboards and rigged sails and trading woven cloth for exotic shells.
Shells may seem an unusual trade item, but Andean cultures, such as the Inca, placed
great significance on shells as ceremonial items, especially those of the spiny oyster,
Spondyls princeps. These are distinctive shells with spiky, scarlet exteriors and
porcelain-white interiors. In Andean cultures, important religious and/or political
leaders wore spondylus shells when living and were buried with them when they died. Powdered spondylus shells were sprinkled in the path where the ruler was to walk, a
literal red carpet. Unfortunately for Andean cultures, the spiny oyster does not live in
the cold, coastal waters of Peru; rather it is found in warmer water to the north,
including the coasts of western Mexico. Anawalt believes that what the Spanish saw
in the 16th century was going on in earlier centuries as well: Ecuadorian traders using
their sea-worthy craft to move and up down the coast of western America, trading cloth
for goods.

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She additionally believes that the reason the people of West Mexico adopted a
style of dress that seems inappropriate for their climate also has to do with that trade.
In preColumbian times, cloth in Mexico was made primarily from the fibers of plants
such as yucca, palms, and cotton. Ecuadorian traders presumably could have offered
cloth woven from the hair of Andean camelids, such as llamas or alpacas. These
woolen garments not only would have had the allure of the exotic, but also dyes take
better and last longer on them. And as anyone who has ever had an alpaca sweater
can testify, these fabrics are both soft and warm. Thus, trade over 2400 miles would
have been desirable for all concerned.

Anthropology Club News: In November, the Anthropology Club has sponsored
talks by two different anthropologists, one an archaeologist, and the other a specialist
in biocultural anthropology. On November 11, Professor Brian Peasnall spoke to the
group about an archaeological site he has worked on in southeastern Turkey called
Hallan Cerni. Professor Peasnall is replacing Dr. Wymer this semester while she is on
sabbatical. The Hallan Cerni site has the potential for completely changing the way
archaeologists look at the history of agriculture in the Middle East. Before the work in
Turkey, archaeologists were convinced that agriculture developed slowly in the Fertile
Crescent area of the Middle East as hunter-gatherers first began to focus more on
collecting wild grains as food and then settled down to cultivate wheat; sheep and
goats were thought to be the first domestic animals. But at Hallan Cerni, a permanent
village dating back to 10,500 years ago, people settled down before they developed
grain agriculture. Theirs was a complex mixed economy based on collecting wild
plant foods - and domesticating pigs. Thus, here is a site out of the Fertile Crescent
without grain agriculture in its early sedentary stages with an emphasis on the pig as
the first domesticated animal - a stunning three part counterpoint to earlier theories.
Professor Peasnall presented slides of the site and talked about its significance. He
also talked about the difficulties of conducting research in an area without any modern
facilities - and in a war zone, to boot. Indeed, archaeological research at Hallan Cerni
has stopped because of the on-going civil war between the Turkish government and
Kurd separatists in that region. Work at Hallan Cerni is also frustrated by the fact that
the Turkish government plans to build a dam which will flood the site. But other sites in
southeastern Turkey are also plentiful - if they are safe to work. Professor Peasnall,
who is using his work in Turkey towards his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, is
quoted in a New York Times article about archaeology and Hallan Cerni as saying,
"There's a lot of monotony and drudgery. But each :shovelful is part of the missing link.
That's where the romance is .. in uncovering something that has not been seen in
10,000 years. That's the part I love about it."
On November 18, Dr. Sunil Khanna of Oregon State University will present a
lecture on his research on female infanticide and gender discrimination in India. Dr.
Khanna is a research associate of Professor Warner's, who taught at OSU before
coming to Bloomsburg. In fact, he will be in the area to work with Professor Warner on
a joint presentation on child anthropometry and gender discrimination that they will

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make at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in
Washington, D.C., Nov. 19-23. Professor Warner collected anthropometric data on
children in the refugee camp in which she worked in southern Mexico, and she will
integrate her data with Dr. Khanna's from India. (Anthropometry is the taking of body
measurements for comparative purposes across populations.)
The Anthropology Club is also preparing to host the induction ceremonies for
Lambda Alpha, the nationary honorary in anthropology, on December 6. Contact Kelly
Wiggett o(Professor Warner for details.

The Jane G:dddall Institute: Jane Goodall is famous for her research on
chimpanzees in the Gombe River Reserve in the East African nation of Tanzania.
Beginning in 1960, Goodall and her associates have recorded reams of data about the
Gombe chimps, including the first-ever recorded sightings of chimpanzee tool use and
of chimpanzee hunting and sharing meat. Through her many books and talks, Goodall
has become a well-known global figure; some of her subjects, such as the chimp, Fifi,
are almost as well known. For the last several years, Goodall has been focusing her
time on promoting chimp conservation through the Jane Goodall Institute, a non-profit
organization intended to promote research, fund conservation efforts, and, through its
Roots & Shoots children's program, produce new generations of environmentally
conscious and responsible people.
One of the main purposes of the Institute is to provide funding for a number of
chimpanzee refuge centers in central and eastern Africa. As noted in an article in
ANTHROPOS last January, chimpanzees are routinely hunted in Africa either as food
or to sell to zoos or for pets. In either case, hunters kill adult females with infants. The
infants are often kept alive as pets or in the hopes of selling them. The young chimps
languish in human care, poorly nourished and poorly cared for. Many die, but those
who live become unruly as they grow older. If they are not killed then, they are placed
in cages with little care or they are abandoned. The Institute has dedicated itself to
rescuing these chimp babies and caring for them properly. Generally, this means
lifetime care, since the babies do not have the skills to provide for themselves in the
wild. Institute refuge centers are now bursting with abandoned or rescued chimps,
and the lnstitut~ needs money to maintain them.
Students may join the Institute for a donation of $25. In return, the Institute provides
a quarterly journal and opportunities to get involved in Institute activities. The most
recent issue of the journal has a tribute to Fifi by Goodall and reports on -poaching in
the Gombe reserve by refugees from the civil wars in Rwanda and the Congo. Dr.
Minderhout is a member of the Institute; see him for further details.

BU Anthropologist News: Both Dr. Sue Dauria and Professor Faith Warner will be
making presentations at the national meetings of the American Anthropological
Association in Washington, D.C. from November 19-23. As noted, Professor Warner

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will be co-presenting her research on child anthropometry with Dr. Khanna, while Dr.
Dauria will be presenting her research on architecture and social history in a New
York deindustrializing city in an invited poster session sponsored by the Society for
Urban Anthropology. A number of BU anthropology majors will also be attending the
conference.
Professor Warner has been notified that a book for which she has submitted a
chapter will be published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. The book will be titled
Power. Ethics & Human Rights and will be edited by Ruth M. Krulfield and Jeffrey L.
MacDonald.
Dr. Wymer made a presentation on the Streater Site to the local chapter of the
Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology in Williamsport on November 11.