On the Supposed Fatness of Spaniards

I have just remembered that blogging involves reading the Guardian.

Thisarticle says that Mediterraneans are the fattest people in Europe, naming Spain specifically. I find this very odd, because I don’t know where all these fat people are.

Not only do I live in the south of Spain, but I interact daily with large numbers of teenagers and young people (I was very bad in a previous life, I suspect) and very few of them are fat. Casting an eye over the groups I was teaching this morning, sizing them up as it were, I don’t think one in ten, one in twenty, could even be described as slightly fat, let alone obese. Chatting breezily with colleagues, the number of children we might refer to as ‘that fat one’, is very small indeed. In the street, also, by way of experiment, I tried applying the first adjective that came to mind to those I passed, and ‘fat’ crossed my mind very rarely.

I also know that, to my students, eating fruit is a natural and enjoyable thing, we have conversations about which are their favourites, which is hard to imagine with English children, and most of them play some kind of spot regularly, again, it is a natural thing to do.

On the other hand, I visit England most summers and I am always struck by how big people (and dogs) are. Bulging thighs and upper arms, flabby stomachs and wobbly jowls seem to be everywhere you look.

South Americans and gypsies tend to be big and flabby around the backside and the midriff, but there have always been gypsies here, and I doubt if the recent increase in South Americans is large enough to skew the figures that much.

So I declare myself non-plussed, but I offer these observations from the theatre of action anyway. Perhaps someone can shed some light.

The Guardian on Anthropology

In the Guardian today there is an article about the Yanomami, and how one of the greatest experts on them, Napoleon Chagnon, iscriticised for describing some of the more violent aspects of their society. Some of the criticisms are from anthropologists who have also worked with them, and who dispute some of his descriptions, but the majority seems to be from people who complain thathe  is not playing the proper progressive role of the social anthropolgist, which apparently is to ignore the observed facts and describe them within the terms of the required narrative, as exploited by modern capitalism, living in harmony with nature,  having a great deal to teach, and a moral right to exclusive ownership of the land they live on, etc. The truth does not appear to matter much and this is a great shame.

The early ethnographers of the 19th and 20th centuries were concerned with learning about the societies they studied. They lived within them, not beside them, learning the language and the way they saw the world, to better understand not only what they did but why they did it. These observatiuons were framed within a number of reference paradigms, rather than being indiscriminately assessed in terms of the ethnographers own culture. The purpose of this was the purpose of all science, to allow the truth about a particular society to be discovered. One of my heroes, Bronislaw Malinowski, in the introduction to 'Argonauts of the Western Pacific', sets it out very clearly.

In the article, Chagnon is quoted as saying the following:

"In the past 20 or so years the field of cultural anthropology in the United States has come precipitously close to abandoning the very notion of science,"

"Those departments of anthropology whose members adhere to the scientific method will endure and again come to be the 'standard approach' to the study of Homo sapiens, while those that are non-scientific will become less and less numerous or eventually be absorbed into disciplines that are non-anthropological, like comparative literature, gender studies, philosophy and others,"

I shoul d say that the article is surprisingly good, and even the comments are, on the whole, worth looking at, if only to get a feel for the terms of the argument. This one, for example, describes what was once the goal of anthropology quite well.

A few months ago Anthropoly.net, a blog that I used to read regularly (when it was updated regularly) published this article lamenting the fact that Anthropology is the lowest paid and least prestigious of sciences in the US. The comments demonstrated perfectly why this is so. I left the following comment which is very similar to the Chagnon quote above:

The fact that you think anthropology can prove the superiority of big government probably goes a long way towards explaining why it is so little respected. What was once (and in part still is, I imagine) a rigorous observational science has become, to the public eye, and apparently to the academic one too, conflated with sociology, cultural studies, lit crit and generalized hokum.

I suspect that is largely the fault of those who have been doing anthropology over the last decades. They have made the public face of anthropology political rather than scientific.

Quote of the Day (Now This is What I Call a Rationalist Funeral)

From a Guardian comment thread here:

"I want a physicist to speak at my funeral to comfort my family by reading and commenting on the Lesson from the Book of Entropy- He is not Gone; he has merely become less ordered."

Things we Learn from the Guardian

An article I was struck by is this one, about how tourists are getting tribeswomen in the Andaman islands to dance for the cameras in exchange for food, in collusion with the local police/military. At first glance it appears to be a lot of fuss about nothing. A group of people have discovered that exhibition of their normal behaviour is worth something to others and so they sell it. There is a lot of nonsense about them being half-naked, which they are, but because that's how they dress- they haven't been forced to strip or anything like that. The dance is clearly a simplified version of some ceremonial moves, and nothing they wouldn't be doing anyway. On the other hand, the Indian press has made a lot of this too, as though the girls were being exploited. Presumably they have a better understanding of the cultural relations involved than the Guardian, or me.

This one is about a possible change in the marking of GCSE's to include an assessment of the candidate's spelling and 'grammar', which I hope means the ability to form in the mind of the reader the idea that they had formed in their own mind, to communicate successful through written language, though I suspect it will literally be a count of misspelt words and broken rules, because it's much easier to get a number that way. The headline suggests that marking on spelling and grammar will penalize those who don't know how to do it, which is not only obvious but is rather the point of the exercise. The rest of the article is a bit more intelligent, fortunately. The comments aren't, but I don't expect much from the Guardian commenters. The comments on the first article are also spectacularly crass and ignorant, in the main.

And one from the Independent (which I sometimes believe is the best paper in Britain, perhaps with the exception of the FT, not that there is much competition. I tend to get my news from agencies and specialized sources who actually know what they're talking about).
The writer of the article has been told to rehash something which is very old news and which he quite clearly has not understood. To hide his ignorance he tries to copy directly as much of the press release as he thinks can get away with, but he still makes a complete mess of it, producing a barely coherent and sometimes contradictory piece that tells the reader precisely nothing. It is 'not even wrong.' Fortunatelysome of the commenters are on the ball, and one provides a very useful link for those who want to understand more of the subject.

From the Guardian, an article about the things that dying people regret. In summary:

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
"This was the most common regret of all."
2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
"This came from every male patient that I nursed."
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
"Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others"
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
"This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice"

 It amazes me how unaware most people are of what they will feel at the end of their lives. Much of what I do is done in the knowledge that life is short, there is only one of it, and most of the things we choose to think are important, do not in fact matter in the slightest. It is easy enough, it shouldn't require a greater than average imagination or intelligence, to use how you will look back on it as a criterion for making choices, but very few people do it, and so they reach the end of their lives with a sense of disappointment and waste.

Perhaps I shall also feel that sense of waste, perhaps I have not made the right decisions, despite thinking about them this way, perhaps I am wrong. I certainly haven't always done, and don't always succeed in doing,  what I decide I should do. But I do know that 'because it's Thursday', is a bad reason for polishing the floor, that work is for paying for life, that you are never as tired as you think you are, and that what other people think you should do is part of them, and means nothing to you.

There is much we have little choice in, even we lucky ones, but getting the rest of it wrong, through laziness, cowardice or lack of imagination, will cause us to suffer at the end of our lives. It can be avoided. I think.