Latest / Q & A, Hosted by Jay Nordlinger / Anthropologist and Writer

Transcript

Anthropologist and Writer · Q & A, Hosted by Jay Nordlinger

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SPEAKER_00: Hello everyone and welcome to Q&A I'm Jay Nordlinger
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SPEAKER_00: and our guest today is Conrad Kotak one of the leading anthropologists in
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SPEAKER_00: the world he is a cultural anthropologist rather than an archaeologist say or
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SPEAKER_00: a primatologist but he has his fingers in many pies he's a professor emeritus at
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SPEAKER_00: the University of Michigan where he has taught since 1968 I myself had the privilege
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SPEAKER_00: of taking one of his classes
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SPEAKER_00: He has done extensive fieldwork in Madagascar and Brazil.
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SPEAKER_00: He's the author of several textbooks in wide use.
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SPEAKER_00: Professor Kotak is also a substacker and an excellent one.
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SPEAKER_00: Find him at the Anthropocene Anthropologist Reflections on Bizarro Land.
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SPEAKER_00: Well, hello, Professor.
0:54
SPEAKER_00: Great to see you.
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SPEAKER_01: Hello, Jay.
0:57
SPEAKER_01: Good to see you.
0:58
SPEAKER_00: You're a damn good writer and a damn good columnist.
1:03
SPEAKER_00: I hope it has helped with textbook sales,
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SPEAKER_00: this ability of yours to, you're a social scientist and a writer both.
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SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think it did.
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SPEAKER_01: You know, I've been writing all my life.
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SPEAKER_01: When I was a little boy, I wrote like kind of comic magazines and things like that.
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SPEAKER_01: I've always wanted to be a writer.
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SPEAKER_01: and, you know, anthropology came after writing for me.
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SPEAKER_01: So I continue writing and I continue anthropology,
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SPEAKER_01: writing about anthropology, but I'm no longer doing fieldwork.
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SPEAKER_01: I have students who are continuing some of my research projects,
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SPEAKER_01: but I'm retired except for sub-stacking and revising my textbook.
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SPEAKER_01: One of my textbooks would be in its 20th edition except that they changed
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SPEAKER_01: from calling them editions to calling them releases so now it's called
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SPEAKER_01: the 2025 release or the 2026 release rather than a new edition
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SPEAKER_01: but it is substantially changed Let me ask you,
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SPEAKER_00: what anthropologists of the past have been especially good writers?
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SPEAKER_00: Do one or two stand out to you?
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SPEAKER_01: Well, my mentor, my advisor, Marvin Harris, was a very good writer.
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SPEAKER_01: And my father-in-law, Charles Wagley, who was an anthropologist, was a very good writer.
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SPEAKER_01: And Margaret Mead,
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SPEAKER_01: who was one of my teachers,
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SPEAKER_01: was a well-known writer who could address a broad public.
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SPEAKER_00: Yes, indeed.
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SPEAKER_00: She wrote for publications like Red Book.
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SPEAKER_01: Exactly,
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SPEAKER_01: exactly She did that for many years And she also went on TV
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SPEAKER_01: And really answered audience questions I still remember one
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SPEAKER_01: of my favorite episodes Is when somebody in the audience asked her Dr.
2:57
SPEAKER_01: Mead, how do I know whether or not I want a baby?
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SPEAKER_01: And so she said, borrow one
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SPEAKER_01: Get one of your friends to give you a baby And take care of it for a
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SPEAKER_01: while Let it sleep overnight Change it,
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SPEAKER_01: do all the things you do with babies See how you like
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SPEAKER_01: that Very practical Very practical She was very practical I've long been interested
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SPEAKER_00: in your name Which I think I first heard in Ann Arbor In the early 1980s Kotak
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SPEAKER_00: And you're alliterative with Conrad Kotak Tell me about your last name
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SPEAKER_00: And its derivations
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SPEAKER_01: Well, apparently it was anglicized from a German name, Gottag, G-O-T-T-A-G.
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SPEAKER_00: Sounds like God's day.
3:48
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
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SPEAKER_01: And my father's family,
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SPEAKER_01: my mother and father actually got divorced before I was born,
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SPEAKER_01: so I barely knew my father.
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SPEAKER_01: I think I only saw him about twice in my life.
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SPEAKER_01: But he lived in Kentucky and we lived in Atlanta.
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SPEAKER_01: But they were German speakers from the Danube region They were known
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SPEAKER_01: as Donarschrauben as far as I know And they came to Ellis Highland He came in 1907
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SPEAKER_01: with his mother and his father And a cousin who was 12 years old He was
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SPEAKER_01: a baby He was born in 1906
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SPEAKER_01: And so I remember going to Hungary because I thought that the town that they came
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SPEAKER_01: from was in Hungary.
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SPEAKER_01: I'd always heard it was in Hungary.
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SPEAKER_01: So we went all over various towns in Hungary.
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SPEAKER_01: I got an anthropologist there to help me out and guide me around.
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SPEAKER_01: And we couldn't find anything that might have been the town that they came from.
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SPEAKER_01: And I later discovered that it's now in Serbia.
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SPEAKER_01: It was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
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SPEAKER_00: And how about your mother's family?
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SPEAKER_01: My mother's family is like daughters of the American Revolution, Sons of the Revolution.
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SPEAKER_01: They were Southerners.
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SPEAKER_01: They came from England and from Scotland and Ireland.
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SPEAKER_01: And they settled throughout the South, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia.
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SPEAKER_01: And that's my mother's mother's family, then my mother's father's family.
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SPEAKER_01: were pretty much English.
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SPEAKER_01: Their name was Horn.
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SPEAKER_01: And her mother's family was named McEwen.
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SPEAKER_00: And did you grow up in Atlanta?
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SPEAKER_01: I did.
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SPEAKER_01: I lived in Atlanta from the time I was born until I was 12 years old, at which point
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SPEAKER_01: My mother went to Columbia in New York to get a degree in social work,
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SPEAKER_01: a master's degree in social work.
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SPEAKER_01: So I went with her to New York and I lived there for two and a half years.
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SPEAKER_01: Then we came back to Atlanta for a year and a half and then I went to college
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SPEAKER_01: in Columbia back in New York.
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SPEAKER_00: Columbia is a home of anthropology.
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SPEAKER_00: I think of it as one of the two great homes along with Chicago.
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SPEAKER_00: I think your generation made Michigan awfully good.
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SPEAKER_00: But I think of Columbia and Chicago as the homes of anthropology.
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SPEAKER_00: And I thought when we talked today that I would ask you,
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SPEAKER_00: did you discover anthropology at Columbia College or did you have an interest in it
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SPEAKER_00: before you got there?
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SPEAKER_01: Well, I had a fourth grade teacher who did a unit on South American Indians
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SPEAKER_01: that I thought was pretty interesting.
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SPEAKER_01: It fascinated me as a little boy, you know, as a 10-year-old or whatever I was.
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SPEAKER_01: But that lay in advance for quite a while until I got to college.
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SPEAKER_01: And then I took anthropology because I knew of me and I knew something about the field.
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SPEAKER_01: And I took a course,
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SPEAKER_01: a full-year course in anthropology, and I decided I really liked the breadth of it.
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SPEAKER_01: And so I would go into it.
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SPEAKER_01: also took a course in art history which was a required course that
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SPEAKER_01: and I was very interested in that too but I decided to major in anthropology
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SPEAKER_01: because it was just broader and I didn't feel like spending my life just combating
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SPEAKER_01: on art so I figured that now I can approach art from an anthropological perspective
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SPEAKER_01: or cultural perspective and it's a fuller way to appreciate art while also
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SPEAKER_01: you know doing my anthropological analysis of various other things too sure
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SPEAKER_01: so margaret mead was there was ruth benedict there she died i believe i'm not sure i
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SPEAKER_01: think she i never i never met her my uh father-in-law was a professor at columbia
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SPEAKER_01: and he was trained by
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SPEAKER_01: Boas' students.
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SPEAKER_01: And he knew Boas.
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SPEAKER_01: And he was a good friend of Meade.
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SPEAKER_00: Let's just say for our audience,
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SPEAKER_00: this is Franz Boas, who's often considered the father of anthropology, I think.
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SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
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SPEAKER_01: And he founded the Columbia Department of Anthropology and trained Meade
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SPEAKER_01: and Benedict and just a host of the golden oldies among the anthropologists.
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SPEAKER_01: You know, the
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SPEAKER_01: the second generation,
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SPEAKER_01: or the first Boaz train generation,
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SPEAKER_01: and it had a huge impact on the field of anthropology.
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SPEAKER_01: In fact,
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SPEAKER_01: for those who are interested,
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SPEAKER_01: I have one of my sub-stack pieces about Boaz, and I compare him to Monet.
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SPEAKER_00: I will look that up.
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SPEAKER_00: Mead is a controversial figure.
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SPEAKER_00: There was a famous or infamous book about her declaring her work fraudulent.
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SPEAKER_00: Are you by and large a defender of Mead?
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SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know,
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SPEAKER_01: the critique of Mead by Derek Freeman is based on an analysis of Samoan society
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SPEAKER_01: that occurred several years after Mead's fieldwork.
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SPEAKER_01: So, you know,
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SPEAKER_01: she said the Samoans were this way and she had a tendency to stereotype people
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SPEAKER_01: and she would give a stereotype that the Samoans are this way,
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SPEAKER_01: kind of like free and easy sexually.
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SPEAKER_01: But there's plenty of information in her book
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SPEAKER_01: Coming of Asian Samoa,
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SPEAKER_01: if you read it carefully,
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SPEAKER_01: that indicates that there are all kinds of exceptions to that particular stereotype.
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SPEAKER_01: So her ethnography is actually more detailed when you get into it than the stereotype.
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SPEAKER_01: And then Freeman came along maybe 20 years later and studied Samoa.
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SPEAKER_01: I'm not even sure if it was the same village, the same area, but whatever.
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SPEAKER_01: It was 20 years later.
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SPEAKER_01: And so it was like,
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SPEAKER_01: considering the village I've been studying in Brazil,
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SPEAKER_01: a village called Adambete,
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SPEAKER_01: since 1962,
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SPEAKER_01: it's as though I went back 20 years later and said, oh,
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SPEAKER_01: what Conrad said about the village in 1964 or 1965 is all wrong because,
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SPEAKER_01: you know, he said it's an egalitarian community.
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SPEAKER_01: There are no social classes.
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SPEAKER_01: but there are because they had developed over that 20-year period and
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SPEAKER_01: then there's no paved highway well there was because that had happened in
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SPEAKER_01: the meantime so I mean they're comparing Samoa at two different times
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SPEAKER_01: and perhaps even in two totally different places so I think it was pretty unfair
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SPEAKER_01: to her and it's no accident that his book came out after she died
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SPEAKER_01: because she would have had no trouble defending herself
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SPEAKER_01: if it had come out during her lifetime very interesting Conrad we had as a guest
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SPEAKER_00: on this program not long ago a diplomat a foreign policy hand
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SPEAKER_00: and politician named Tom Malinowski born in Poland and I asked him any relation
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SPEAKER_00: to Bronislaw Malinowski the great anthropologist he said yes
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SPEAKER_00: in fact he was my great great uncle
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SPEAKER_00: And I wanted to ask you,
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SPEAKER_00: do you have a personal pantheon of anthropologists,
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SPEAKER_00: sort of a lineup, people who are special to you?
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SPEAKER_01: Well, Malinowski would be one of them.
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SPEAKER_01: And I remember seeing Malinowski, I believe he was a congressman from New Jersey.
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SPEAKER_00: Yes.
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SPEAKER_01: And I remember seeing his name and wondering the same thing that you wondered and you asked him.
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SPEAKER_01: So I'm glad to know that you've answered my question for me.
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SPEAKER_00: He said two things.
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SPEAKER_00: The way I framed it was, are you in a relation or is Malinowski a common name in Poland?
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SPEAKER_00: He said it is a common name, but I am related.
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SPEAKER_00: Yes.
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SPEAKER_01: It's interesting that it's a common name.
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SPEAKER_01: People call Malinowski because of his
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SPEAKER_01: Writing,
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SPEAKER_01: which could be in this book Argonauts of the Western Pacific,
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SPEAKER_01: rather lush and sometimes turgid.
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SPEAKER_01: People refer to him, some people refer to him as the Conrad of Anthropology.
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SPEAKER_01: And that always indicates me because I'm the Conrad of Anthropology.
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SPEAKER_00: Yes, you are.
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SPEAKER_00: Good one, good one.
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SPEAKER_00: So Malinowski, and who else would be in your pantheon?
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SPEAKER_01: Well, when I received Collegiate Chair at Michigan,
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SPEAKER_01: I was asked to name it for someone who had taught in the Department of Anthropology
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SPEAKER_01: at Michigan.
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SPEAKER_01: And I named it for Julian Stewart, who was always one of my heroes.
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SPEAKER_01: He was a professor at Columbia who did a very important project in Puerto Rico.
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SPEAKER_01: called Peoples of Puerto Rico
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SPEAKER_01: and he trained various famous anthropologists including Eric Wolf and Sidney Metz,
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SPEAKER_01: Robert Manners and others and I always really admired his work and he wrote
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SPEAKER_01: a book called Theory of Culture Change which was basically
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SPEAKER_01: about how societies evolve and how you can compare them based on what he called
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SPEAKER_01: a culture core which is the basic institutions related to subsistence,
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SPEAKER_01: environment, ecology
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SPEAKER_01: and so i named my collegiate professorship i became
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SPEAKER_01: the julian h stewart collegiate professor of anthropology at michigan and
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SPEAKER_01: so he would be in my pantheon and and me would be there
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SPEAKER_00: and harris would be there my advisor i was thinking about your two countries or two
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SPEAKER_00: of them brazil and madagascar and they seem
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SPEAKER_00: to me this is probably your verboten word in anthropology but i'm
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SPEAKER_00: so politically incorrect it's
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SPEAKER_00: It's not funny, but I want to use the word exotic.
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SPEAKER_00: And I wonder whether you felt,
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SPEAKER_00: by the way, one of the quickest ways to kill romance is to visit a place.
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SPEAKER_00: You might have a romantic view of something and you visit and all
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SPEAKER_00: the romanticization goes out the window.
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SPEAKER_00: But was there, to your younger self, was there an allure surrounding those places?
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SPEAKER_01: When I first went to Brazil,
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SPEAKER_01: I went on a program at Columbia,
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SPEAKER_01: a multi-university program,
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SPEAKER_01: sending undergraduates to do fieldwork in various countries.
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SPEAKER_01: It was called the Columbia,
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SPEAKER_01: Cornell, Harvard, Illinois, Summer Field Studies Program in Anthropology.
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SPEAKER_01: And you can choose to go to Brazil, Mexico, Peru, or I think Ecuadorian.
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SPEAKER_01: I chose Brazil.
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SPEAKER_01: I think one of the reasons is because of that fourth grade class about Brazilian India.
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SPEAKER_01: And I'd always been fascinated by Brazil.
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SPEAKER_01: I remember Carmen Miranda.
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SPEAKER_01: Sure.
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SPEAKER_01: I don't really remember any Peruvian figure who attracted my attention.
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SPEAKER_01: So I went and I was 19 years old.
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SPEAKER_01: And I have to say that it was just incredibly,
15:47
SPEAKER_01: I went to the northeast to Bahia,
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SPEAKER_01: to the state of Bahia,
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SPEAKER_01: the city of Salvador, which today may be the third largest city in the country.
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SPEAKER_01: It's huge now.
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SPEAKER_01: And it was beautiful.
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SPEAKER_01: I mean, the ocean was a kind of, that you could see the bay.
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SPEAKER_01: of Bahia was a kind of blue I had never seen before.
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SPEAKER_01: There was sand, there were coconut trees.
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SPEAKER_01: It was incredibly romantic.
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SPEAKER_01: That is where I met my wife and we fell in love.
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SPEAKER_01: It was conducive to romance.
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SPEAKER_01: We got married a year later.
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SPEAKER_01: Both of us were 20 years old.
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SPEAKER_01: Later on, that was in 1963 that we were married.
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SPEAKER_01: In 1966,
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SPEAKER_01: We went to Madagascar And the reason we did that Is not because there's any kind
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SPEAKER_01: of connection Between Brazil and Madagascar There is none Is because I had
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SPEAKER_01: a professor Whose name was George Condominas A French guy Who came to be
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SPEAKER_01: a visiting professor At Columbia and Yale At the same time I guess one semester
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SPEAKER_01: at one place One semester at the other place So I took two classes with him One of
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SPEAKER_01: which was a class on Madagascar
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SPEAKER_01: In Which There Were Only Two People Me And The Son Of A Missionary Who Had Served
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SPEAKER_01: In Madagascar And Since I Was The Anthropologist And The Other Guy Was Didn't Plan
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SPEAKER_01: To Do Anthropological Fill Work Condemnance Focused On Me
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SPEAKER_01: And He Said Why Don't You Do Research In Madagascar And So What I Had To Do
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SPEAKER_01: Then Was My Wife And I Both Went To Paris For Six Months To Learn French
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SPEAKER_01: Because I Didn't Know Any French And She Had Studied It But
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SPEAKER_01: So we went to Allianz Francaise and we took French classes and then we got on a boat
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SPEAKER_01: and went to Madagascar and stayed there for about 14 months and we lived in
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SPEAKER_01: a village which was a village of rice cultivating people and we shared the village
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SPEAKER_01: with them we shared the outhouse with the entire village we shared we happened
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SPEAKER_01: to live in a reasonably nice house because the
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SPEAKER_01: One of the sons of the village had become a postmaster general of the country.
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SPEAKER_01: So he had some money and some clout.
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SPEAKER_01: So he invited us to stay in this house.
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SPEAKER_01: It had running water, which was good.
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SPEAKER_01: But so we stayed there and it seemed that when we got there,
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SPEAKER_01: it was like the most remote place you could possibly imagine.
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SPEAKER_01: Way more so than Brazil We were in Brazil in 1964,
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SPEAKER_01: for example,
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SPEAKER_01: the second time I was there I believe it was either 1962 or 1964 was the World Cup
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SPEAKER_01: The whole world was there in Brazil It wasn't anything like Madagascar
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SPEAKER_01: In Madagascar, I felt like I'm cut off from everything
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SPEAKER_01: and I remember going for Christmas dinner to a missionary's house and he gave us
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SPEAKER_01: a bunch of books and I would bring the books back and we would read the books in
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SPEAKER_01: the evening and we also sent a truck full of various supplies there
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SPEAKER_01: to Madagascar including some books
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SPEAKER_01: so what we did was we would read we didn't have electricity so we'd read
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SPEAKER_01: by candlelight we'd read by whatever light you know lanterns whatever we could
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SPEAKER_01: whatever we could find but it was so different from Brazil and Brazil you're part of
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SPEAKER_01: the world there you felt like at that time you're just you know yeah were you amused
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SPEAKER_00: when a hit movie came out called Madagascar I can tell you the people
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SPEAKER_01: in Madagascar were not amused they very much resented it and they also resent
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SPEAKER_01: the fact that that
19:45
SPEAKER_01: The International Community Is Much More Focused On Saving Wildlife
19:51
SPEAKER_01: In Madagascar Including Lemurs Than It Is In Helping Solve Human Problems There
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SPEAKER_01: Because The Population Has Grown From 6 Million When We Were There In 66 To I Think
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SPEAKER_01: About 22 23 Million Today And I Joked
20:09
SPEAKER_01: When I first got to the University of Michigan and saw the football stadium
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SPEAKER_01: in Ann Arbor,
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SPEAKER_01: which accommodated 100,000 people,
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SPEAKER_01: it accommodates more now,
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SPEAKER_01: but the population of Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar,
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SPEAKER_01: was about 100,000.
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SPEAKER_01: So I said the entire population of Antananariva,
20:28
SPEAKER_01: the capital of Madagascar, will fit into the Michigan Stadium.
20:31
SPEAKER_01: That's pretty impressive.
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SPEAKER_01: Well, the population of the capital is now maybe three,
20:35
SPEAKER_01: four million,
20:36
SPEAKER_01: so the stadium is not going to be able to accommodate that many people.
20:39
SPEAKER_01: The stadium hasn't grown that much.
20:42
SPEAKER_01: But it's just amazing how the population of Madagascar has quadrupled in a period
20:47
SPEAKER_01: of time, in a period of, since 1966, in a period of, you know, what,
20:54
SPEAKER_01: 50 years, 60 years.
20:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
20:57
SPEAKER_00: Well, I'd like to try out on you a point of view for you to knock down or agree with.
21:06
SPEAKER_00: But this is a point of view having to do with anthropology.
21:10
SPEAKER_00: You mentioned art history before.
21:12
SPEAKER_00: There was a time when some of the best and brightest were attracted to art history.
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SPEAKER_00: Some of the great Central European Jewish refugees, the United Kingdom, for example.
21:23
SPEAKER_00: and some of the best and brightest young people were attracted to anthropology
21:29
SPEAKER_00: for some generations.
21:32
SPEAKER_00: According to this point of view, both fields got flaky, got politicized, changed.
21:44
SPEAKER_00: And I wonder, I'd like you to address that, and I also wonder,
21:49
SPEAKER_00: Is proper ethnography possible today or is it viewed as sort
21:55
SPEAKER_00: of othering condescending colonialist blah blah blah you've heard these issues
22:01
SPEAKER_00: for decades and as my old friend and boss Bill Buckley would say say
22:07
SPEAKER_00: the appropriate things well
22:14
SPEAKER_01: In Fact I'm Working I Just Finished One Of My Newest Substack Essay And It's
22:20
SPEAKER_01: About AI And One Of The Things That I Explore Is That AI Is Only As Useful As
22:28
SPEAKER_01: The Quality Of Data That It's Drawing On And There Has Been Within Anthropology
22:38
SPEAKER_01: A Movement Among Some Not Among All But Among Some
22:43
SPEAKER_01: and perhaps,
22:43
SPEAKER_01: I always say among too many,
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SPEAKER_01: a movement away from the empirical toward the questioning of Western viewpoints,
22:53
SPEAKER_01: the questioning of even reality.
22:56
SPEAKER_01: And simultaneously,
22:58
SPEAKER_01: the Trump administration is waging an attack on science and has promoted the idea
23:08
SPEAKER_01: of alternative facts.
23:11
SPEAKER_01: And it's taking people like the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and replacing
23:16
SPEAKER_01: that person with someone else,
23:17
SPEAKER_01: and it's making all kinds of changes that involve politicizing positions that used
23:23
SPEAKER_01: to be less politicized, if not totally unpoliticized.
23:27
SPEAKER_01: And so there's been a convergent evolution in the social sciences
23:32
SPEAKER_01: toward backed rejection that parallels what's been going on in this administration.
23:38
SPEAKER_01: I find that really interesting and ironic because the people who
23:45
SPEAKER_01: have espoused that point of view in anthropology,
23:48
SPEAKER_01: the rejection of facts,
23:52
SPEAKER_01: are exactly the kind of people who are most vocal against the Trump administration.
23:57
SPEAKER_01: So there's a bitter irony there.
24:02
SPEAKER_00: As the old saying goes, they should get a room.
24:08
SPEAKER_01: Strange bedfellows.
24:10
SPEAKER_01: Perfect.
24:12
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, follow up.
24:14
SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure I totally answered your question or knocked it down.
24:17
SPEAKER_00: Keep going.
24:18
SPEAKER_00: Well, here's a follow up.
24:21
SPEAKER_00: I looked up a famous,
24:23
SPEAKER_00: you probably know the statement by heart, what Robin Fox said about kinship.
24:29
SPEAKER_00: Kinship is to anthropology, what logic is to philosophy, or the nude is to art.
24:36
SPEAKER_00: It is the basic discipline of the subject.
24:39
SPEAKER_00: Is kinship still taught
24:41
SPEAKER_00: to young people in anthropology?
24:44
SPEAKER_01: That's a really interesting question because considerably less so.
24:50
SPEAKER_01: And the reason is, I'll just give you an example in my textbook.
24:55
SPEAKER_01: When I first wrote it, I had a very long, I had a separate chapter on kinship terminology.
25:01
SPEAKER_01: I no longer do.
25:02
SPEAKER_01: I have a chapter on kinship and I have a chapter on marriage.
25:07
SPEAKER_01: but no longer kinship terminology and I would go over
25:10
SPEAKER_01: the kinship terminological systems of various sorts that would like
25:16
SPEAKER_01: the they have names the Hawaiian system the Eskimo system the Crow system
25:22
SPEAKER_01: the Omaha system the Iroquois system etc and I would teach all that but now probably
25:31
SPEAKER_01: in the world
25:33
SPEAKER_01: Fewer People Are Using Those Systems Because Of Social Change
25:40
SPEAKER_01: And Students Aren't Interested And Anthropologists Are Not Really Interested In That
25:46
SPEAKER_01: So A Lot Of The Kin Groups That We Used To Focus On Have Been Disrupted
25:55
SPEAKER_01: And I Don't Know Whether You Know The Extent To Which There Are Functioning Clans
26:01
SPEAKER_01: and some lineages in the world.
26:03
SPEAKER_01: What I do know is that the kinship terminology in Madagascar,
26:07
SPEAKER_01: which they still use, is different from our own kinship terminology.
26:13
SPEAKER_01: It is a variety of, yes, on the parental generation, it's what would be Hawaiian,
26:19
SPEAKER_01: in which there is only one term for the males and one term for the females.
26:23
SPEAKER_01: So, if you are a father,
26:24
SPEAKER_01: a father's brother,
26:25
SPEAKER_01: or a mother's brother,
26:26
SPEAKER_01: you are r-a-y,
26:29
SPEAKER_01: and if you are a mother, mother-sister, or father-sister, you are reyri.
26:35
SPEAKER_01: They still use that system, but
26:43
SPEAKER_01: What Robin Fox said was true at a time I loved kinship when I first went
26:48
SPEAKER_01: into anthropology I mean it was the heart and soul of anthropology I would say at
26:53
SPEAKER_01: that time but nowadays I mean I have a subject essay about basically about kinship
27:02
SPEAKER_01: which is about it's called what the well it's not
27:07
SPEAKER_01: It's about love, law,
27:08
SPEAKER_01: and kinship or something And one of the things I talk about is what
27:11
SPEAKER_01: the Supreme Court could learn from an anthropologist about the definition
27:15
SPEAKER_01: of marriage And it turned out that when John Roberts made his dissent known in
27:22
SPEAKER_01: the case that legalized same-sex marriage That he quoted some societies
27:28
SPEAKER_01: as illustrating basically nuclear family for life Or marriage and family for life
27:34
SPEAKER_01: And none of them actually do
27:36
SPEAKER_01: So from an anthropological point of view,
27:39
SPEAKER_01: if you'd known anthropology better,
27:41
SPEAKER_01: and then I talk about how anthropology can contribute to various kinds
27:45
SPEAKER_01: of legal cases involving kinship,
27:47
SPEAKER_01: like the case in Alabama about the embryos that were declared to be
27:53
SPEAKER_01: Living People so that you know just it led to I guess a lot
27:59
SPEAKER_01: of fertility clinics closing down and then there was the Trump travel ban
28:03
SPEAKER_01: that initially included grandparents excluded grandparents from close kin and
28:09
SPEAKER_01: of course any grandparent like I am would immediately resist the idea and resist
28:16
SPEAKER_01: the idea that grandparents are not close kin
28:20
SPEAKER_01: I like applying our knowledge of kinship to contemporary issues and I think
28:26
SPEAKER_01: that that's the way most anthropologists are treating it now in the context
28:31
SPEAKER_01: of what happens when I watched a speaker I think the valedictorian of
28:39
SPEAKER_01: the Harvard graduating class the other day and he was saying he starts off with
28:45
SPEAKER_01: a story he said a Jew a Muslim
28:49
SPEAKER_01: and a Christian walked into a bar.
28:52
SPEAKER_01: At the end he comes back and says,
28:54
SPEAKER_01: I know it sounds like the start of the joke,
28:56
SPEAKER_01: but then he comes back and says,
28:58
SPEAKER_01: the Muslim was one of my grandfathers,
29:01
SPEAKER_01: the Jew was one of my grandfathers,
29:03
SPEAKER_01: and the Christian was one of my grandmothers, and here I am today.
29:06
SPEAKER_01: So kinship has become really complicated in the complex of multi-ethnic families.
29:15
SPEAKER_01: Anthropologists are looking at things like that.
29:22
SPEAKER_01: What happens when one has a parent who is Muslim and the Muslim parent is the father
29:31
SPEAKER_01: or the mother?
29:32
SPEAKER_01: Is the kid,
29:33
SPEAKER_01: whether male or female,
29:34
SPEAKER_01: more likely to be Muslim if they are the same sex as the father or the mother?
29:41
SPEAKER_01: So there are really interesting questions that can emerge about kinship from things
29:44
SPEAKER_01: that are going on in the world today.
29:46
SPEAKER_01: So it's no longer just who do you call this, that, and the other.
29:49
SPEAKER_01: It's just the complexity of the kind of interchange that's going on in the world system today.
30:00
SPEAKER_00: You have spent a fair amount of time on television and the impact of television
30:06
SPEAKER_00: on culture or what television can tell us about culture.
30:11
SPEAKER_00: and I think kids in your classes would sing the Brady Bunch theme song.
30:19
SPEAKER_00: Television has mattered a great deal, hasn't it?
30:22
SPEAKER_00: Although I'm not sure what television is today with everyone looking at a phone
30:27
SPEAKER_00: and watching his own stuff.
30:30
SPEAKER_00: And you've written about this,
30:31
SPEAKER_00: including recently about the possible,
30:34
SPEAKER_00: not possible, but the loss to some degree of a common culture.
30:42
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know,
30:43
SPEAKER_01: I was thinking about that again today when they were talking about 60 Minutes,
30:48
SPEAKER_01: which has been on the air for 59 years,
30:52
SPEAKER_01: and how people really have formed bonds with the commentators,
30:58
SPEAKER_01: with the people who appear regularly.
31:00
SPEAKER_01: And I mean, I remember growing up with Mike Wallace and a fellow Michigan graduate.
31:05
SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes.
31:07
SPEAKER_00: Poorly safer, yeah.
31:08
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and Andy Rooney, you know.
31:11
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
31:12
SPEAKER_01: Mr.
31:12
SPEAKER_01: Ever Notice.
31:15
SPEAKER_01: I mean, apparently there's still strong thoughts between people.
31:19
SPEAKER_01: I don't watch 60 Minutes anymore.
31:21
SPEAKER_01: I gave it up a long time ago.
31:23
SPEAKER_01: I don't know why.
31:24
SPEAKER_01: I have other things to do on Sunday evening.
31:27
SPEAKER_01: But I guess people have ties with Anderson Cooper and Scott Pelley and Leslie Stahl,
31:35
SPEAKER_01: certainly, and some of the other people who have been around for a long time.
31:41
SPEAKER_00: You spoke recently of the ties many have had with Alex Trebek of Jeopardy.
31:48
SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes.
31:50
SPEAKER_00: Familiar guest in homes, a familiar voice.
31:53
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely, absolutely.
31:55
SPEAKER_01: And I would say that the...
31:58
SPEAKER_01: I never did research on this nor have I seen any research on this
32:01
SPEAKER_01: but I would suspect that there were plenty of people in the country
32:05
SPEAKER_01: who like me have watched Jeopardy for years I mean I watched it in
32:10
SPEAKER_01: the Art Fleming days and I watched it with my children and grandchildren
32:14
SPEAKER_01: and you know it was a regular nightly routine that we went through and when he died
32:21
SPEAKER_01: and when
32:24
SPEAKER_01: they had a succession of guest hosts you know I would just sit there
32:28
SPEAKER_01: and think oh my god you know why don't they just give it to Ken Jennings
32:32
SPEAKER_01: because he belongs to Jeopardy you know he's the only one who's a true son
32:37
SPEAKER_01: a true child of Jeopardy and they eventually did they followed my advice not
32:43
SPEAKER_01: that they knew what my advice was but did you ever think of being a contestant
32:49
SPEAKER_01: I have thought about being a contestant in my day when I was younger and when
32:56
SPEAKER_01: the questions were more geared toward that age, I was very good at it.
33:04
SPEAKER_01: But today they ask questions about modern popular music.
33:12
SPEAKER_00: We'd be clueless.
33:16
SPEAKER_00: We could have done a little damage earlier.
33:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
33:19
SPEAKER_01: I mean, if it had been about music of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, then I would have been fine.
33:25
SPEAKER_01: But, you know, anything after that.
33:26
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I know you write about music, but you write mainly about classical music.
33:31
SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes, that's right.
33:33
SPEAKER_01: And I did want to say that you had in your column on Substack one
33:40
SPEAKER_01: of your favorite lines from a play,
33:43
SPEAKER_01: which was the same as mine, which was in Manhattan,
33:48
SPEAKER_01: you know put put put that in your pipe yes I like I'll take the island I like
33:56
SPEAKER_00: the island Manhattan smoke on your pipe and put that in yes yes from
34:02
SPEAKER_00: the song America West Side Story marvelous rhyme that's always been what I'm it's
34:08
SPEAKER_01: a great great rhyme yeah I thought Stephen Sondheim said that going back over
34:11
SPEAKER_01: when he was
34:16
SPEAKER_01: when he was working on the Steven Spielberg version of West Side Story,
34:21
SPEAKER_01: he said,
34:22
SPEAKER_01: going back over the original lyrics,
34:24
SPEAKER_01: that the only thing he really disliked and regretted was an I feel pretty.
34:29
SPEAKER_01: And Maria says, I feel pretty and witty and bright.
34:33
SPEAKER_01: No Puerto Rican girl would say witty.
34:37
SPEAKER_01: And so he changed it to she was working at a department store and there's a sign
34:41
SPEAKER_01: behind her that says witty.
34:44
SPEAKER_01: And so she's looking at the sign and so she picks up the word from the side.
34:50
SPEAKER_00: And I feel this.
34:52
SPEAKER_00: And so I feel so pretty that Miss America should just resign.
34:58
SPEAKER_00: That's a wonderful line.
35:00
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
35:02
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
35:03
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
35:04
SPEAKER_01: Well, a great show.
35:06
SPEAKER_01: But we can get back to that.
35:09
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry to interrupt you the flow of thought.
35:11
SPEAKER_00: No, not at all.
35:12
SPEAKER_00: That's part of the flow.
35:16
SPEAKER_00: We're talking about culture.
35:17
SPEAKER_00: And the study of man is, I'm so old fashioned Conrad, I still say man, meaning everybody.
35:26
SPEAKER_00: Misha Tatiya wrote a textbook called The Science of Man.
35:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, meant everybody.
35:33
SPEAKER_00: is just such a great field of study.
35:35
SPEAKER_00: It's so great.
35:37
SPEAKER_00: And here,
35:37
SPEAKER_00: toward the end,
35:38
SPEAKER_00: I wanted to ask you,
35:41
SPEAKER_00: what's more interesting, differences between peoples or similarities?
35:49
SPEAKER_00: Or both, maybe?
35:51
SPEAKER_01: I would say both.
35:54
SPEAKER_01: One of my definitions that I got from Marvin Harris is that anthropology is
35:58
SPEAKER_01: the science of similarities and differences among people.
36:03
SPEAKER_01: Among Cultures Among Biological Similarities
36:06
SPEAKER_01: And Differences I Mean We Are Theoretically I Mean I Think I've Seem To Figure
36:11
SPEAKER_01: That All Humans Share About 99.4% Of Their DNA So There's Very Little Variation
36:18
SPEAKER_01: Among Humans But The Variation That Exists Is Pretty Interesting
36:22
SPEAKER_01: And It's Worth Studying But Yet
36:23
SPEAKER_01: The Similarities Are Worth Studying Too Like You Know We're All Bipedal
36:31
SPEAKER_01: That's significant When we become less bipedal When our knees begin
36:37
SPEAKER_01: to hurt Something I know about from personal experience It's a problem
36:41
SPEAKER_01: for all humans We go through the same traumas We go through some of the same traumas
36:47
SPEAKER_01: And then culturally
36:50
SPEAKER_01: There are cultural universals,
36:52
SPEAKER_01: although the cultural universals are manifest in different ways
36:55
SPEAKER_01: in different societies.
36:57
SPEAKER_01: There is marriage in every society,
36:58
SPEAKER_01: I suppose,
37:00
SPEAKER_01: but there are some exceptions,
37:03
SPEAKER_01: like the Naya or the famous case in India,
37:06
SPEAKER_01: where there's a ritual that you go through,
37:09
SPEAKER_01: but it's not anything like the marriage relationships that exist in most parts of
37:15
SPEAKER_01: the world.
37:16
SPEAKER_01: There's polygyny,
37:18
SPEAKER_01: polyandry,
37:22
SPEAKER_01: all kinds of variations of the kind of marriage,
37:27
SPEAKER_01: same-sex marriage,
37:28
SPEAKER_01: woman marriage to a woman,
37:30
SPEAKER_01: male marriage to a third gender,
37:33
SPEAKER_01: female marriage to a fourth gender, but marriage in some form or other
37:40
SPEAKER_01: exist.
37:41
SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, men and women have to live together and get along together.
37:44
SPEAKER_01: And that's the problem that all societies have to address.
37:46
SPEAKER_01: And old people and young people have to live together and get along.
37:49
SPEAKER_01: And that's a problem all societies have to deal with.
37:53
SPEAKER_01: But they do it in their individual ways.
37:56
SPEAKER_01: So similarities and differences are important.
38:01
SPEAKER_00: Many years ago, there was some survey, some study, but it resulted in a list of
38:06
SPEAKER_00: of things that all people have in common,
38:08
SPEAKER_00: wherever they live, in remotest Papua New Guinea, Des Moines, Iowa, everywhere.
38:15
SPEAKER_00: And I can only remember, I think I only heard about two items from the list, just two.
38:22
SPEAKER_00: One was love of gossip,
38:25
SPEAKER_00: and the other was dislike of moving,
38:28
SPEAKER_00: of changing one's residence, having to move, that all people find that difficult.
38:36
SPEAKER_00: I wonder whether we can add to it.
38:39
SPEAKER_01: Well, one thing that I would say about,
38:42
SPEAKER_01: you know,
38:43
SPEAKER_01: not wanting to move is that there are societies in which people do move on
38:47
SPEAKER_01: a regular basis, but they follow.
38:49
SPEAKER_01: I mean, there are societies in which the nature of life, nomadic life is movement.
38:56
SPEAKER_01: But they're following a track that recurs annually So they do
39:01
SPEAKER_01: the same thing annually And then they're hunting and gathering societies
39:04
SPEAKER_01: Where people are not really tied to the land But they have to follow the animals
39:08
SPEAKER_01: And they can go and stay in their mother's village Or their father's village And
39:12
SPEAKER_01: the kind of living accommodations are so simple in many cases
39:16
SPEAKER_01: That it doesn't really matter where they are You don't have to worry about your bed
39:20
SPEAKER_01: Because
39:21
SPEAKER_01: The sleeping arrangements are pretty available and comparable wherever you happen
39:25
SPEAKER_01: to go and you don't have to worry about food because you've got to hunt and gather
39:29
SPEAKER_01: the food anyway but in general I certainly have a dislike the older I get
39:37
SPEAKER_01: of moving around but earlier in my life I enjoy moving around because I'm
39:43
SPEAKER_01: an anthropologist
39:47
SPEAKER_01: But adding to the list,
39:48
SPEAKER_01: a lot of people would say some form of religion is culturally universal.
39:56
SPEAKER_01: Some way of expressing issues in child rearing that you have to deal with,
40:02
SPEAKER_01: like nursing, weaning, taking care of children, roles of grandparents in child care.
40:10
SPEAKER_01: Margaret Mead wrote about and did films about
40:15
SPEAKER_01: washing babies in different cultures.
40:18
SPEAKER_01: Every culture washes babies, but they wash babies in different ways.
40:23
SPEAKER_01: When they wash the baby,
40:26
SPEAKER_01: some do it gently and some do it more aggressively and some do it very truly.
40:33
SPEAKER_01: There's a whole range of ways of washing babies in different cultures.
40:41
SPEAKER_00: Aren't you glad you went into this field, the study of people?
40:44
SPEAKER_00: I am.
40:46
SPEAKER_00: Isn't it a great and rich field?
40:49
SPEAKER_01: It is a great and rich field.
40:50
SPEAKER_01: I remember a historian saying to me once that one of the great things
40:53
SPEAKER_01: about history is that your subject matter continues to grow.
40:59
SPEAKER_01: And in some ways, you could say that's true of anthropology, too, because it just changes the
41:08
SPEAKER_01: The kind of people that we grew up studying are fewer and farther between.
41:13
SPEAKER_01: They have televisions now.
41:16
SPEAKER_01: They have the internet now.
41:19
SPEAKER_01: I have Facebook friends from the village in Brazil that I've been studying since 1962.
41:27
SPEAKER_01: I can FaceTime them.
41:28
SPEAKER_01: I can call them on the phone.
41:32
SPEAKER_01: We're tied together in ways that no one imagined.
41:35
SPEAKER_00: What language do you speak with them?
41:38
SPEAKER_01: I speak Portuguese.
41:39
SPEAKER_01: Uh-huh.
41:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, it's not an Indian village.
41:42
SPEAKER_01: It's actually a Brazilian Portuguese-speaking village right on the coast,
41:46
SPEAKER_01: and it was formed mainly by descendants of enslaved people who were freed and then
41:53
SPEAKER_01: who migrated to this village and began fishing.
41:59
SPEAKER_00: Well, ladies and gentlemen,
42:00
SPEAKER_00: you will find Professor Conrad Kotak again at the Anthropocene Anthropologist,
42:06
SPEAKER_00: colon, Reflections on Bizarro Land.
42:11
SPEAKER_00: what a pleasure to speak with you and what a pleasure to know you and I look forward
42:16
SPEAKER_01: to your next column and to our next talk well thank you very much I enjoyed this
42:21
SPEAKER_01: and it's good to see you again and it makes me so happy when I see one
42:27
SPEAKER_01: of my former students who has done so well and congratulations I don't know about
42:32
SPEAKER_00: that but it's wonderful to be connected or reconnected with you well
42:37
SPEAKER_01: the feeling is mutual
42:38
SPEAKER_00: Well thanks so much ladies and gentlemen And until next time Bye bye