Anthropology Matters!

That was the theme last week at the annual American Anthropological Association meetings in Washington, DC. Natalia Reagan and I co-organized an executive session based on this theme, called “Biological Anthropology and the Public”. Our session featured pre-recorded videos of six anthropologists speaking about their experiences communicating biological anthropology science to the public, and why that experience matters. The format allowed speakers to use props, costumes, and videoclips to enhance their presentations. We filmed the videos in the Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

You can watch the videos from the session on YouTube (there are six total). They feature Susan Guise Sheridan (topic: BioAnthropology News), Julie Lesnik (topic: speaking to scientists and kids about insect eating), Becca Peixotto (topic: engaging the public while doing science from the Rising Star Cave), Kate Clancy (topic: using the dialogue model in her podcast Period), Natalia Reagan (topic: using comedy to bring people to science), and Briana Pobiner (topic: engaging the public through museum programming).

You can also view the Facebook Live recording of the session — the discussion starts at ~1:17:00. Here is a summary of the questions asked on Saturday:

• Why are the speakers all women? (1:20:00)
• How can we engage the public when our knowledge (especially in paleoanthropology) is rapidly changing? (1:26:00)
• How do we get people to science but also how does science come to people of different identities? (1:28:00) (In her response, Kate Clancy mentions a misplaced slide in her video; that slide is correctly placed on the YouTube version)
• Positive feedback comment (1:35:00)
• How does this session apply to other subfields of anthropology? (1:36:00)
• Biological anthropology includes topics that are considered controversial in the U.S. and there are a lot of “wackos” out there — have any of you experienced anything like death threats as the result of your outreach? (1:39:00) (Spoiler: The answer was yes)
• What are your thoughts on engaging the public as a graduate student/encouraging graduate students who are not yet experts to speak with the public? (1:46:00)

Finally, many of the audience-members (and the presenters) tweeted about the session using the hashtag #bioanthpub.

We wanted to do something different with this session, something that would reach a broader audience than the few friends you can usually convince to show up to a Saturday morning conference session. The topics covered in our session include a mixture of light, entertaining fare and serious topics that anthropologists are particularly well-equipped to address. We are happy to see that this session has already sparked conversations that have continued online after the session ended. These videos demonstrate what we already believed, that biological anthropology matters, especially to the public.

Special thanks: James McKenna, Agustín Fuentes, the Smithsonian Institute, the BOAS Network, Bryn Mawr College, Natalia Reagan, Briana Pobiner, Susan Guise Sheridan, Julie Lesnik, Kate Clancy, and Becca Peixotto. Also a shout-out to Adam van Arsdale who convinced me this was an idea worth pursuing!

While drinking my morning coffee, I stumbled on an article “There’s a Reason Some Men Take Up So Much Space When They Sit: In defense of manspreading”. I nearly did a spit-take while reading it. The article’s author, Lou Schuler, suggests after interviewing emeritus kinesiology professor Stu McGill, that men’s legs naturally spread apart when sitting, which is why they take up more space when sitting on public transportation (a phenomenon known as “manspreading”). The idea presented is that biological differences between a male and female pelvis explain these differences in sitting positions.

Hello, I am an expert on pelvic sexual dimorphism. I wrote a dissertation on the topic as it applies to Neandertals. In my research, I regularly estimate sex from fossil and more recent human skeletons based on the sex differences mentioned in the article.

I also think that the claim about pelvis shape affecting sitting position is bullshit.

Manspreading is something that we don’t see cross-culturally (here’s a scholarly article from the 1950s that shows that even back then, knees-together sitting occurred at different frequencies in different cultures). Only a certain type of dudebro or man-man manspreads. Schuler even admitted that after being told that his natural sitting position is knees apart, he still avoids manspreading on the subway because he knows it’s rude.

This means that manspreading is a cultural phenomenon because regardless of one’s anatomy, one can choose not to practice it.

But let’s look at the biology. McGill (in the interview and in the YouTube video linked in the interview) claims that narrow hips cause the ball-and-socket joint of the hip to pinch when sitting with knees together. Side note from me: narrow hips are typically associated with male bodies. McGill notes that the shape of the hip joint varies in humans, and points out that there are (in his words) “genetic” differences between, for example, Polish weight lifters and Asian martial artists, that determine which kinds of movements each will be good at doing (i.e., weight lifting squats versus various martial arts).

Quick aside: As an anthropologist, I was disturbed by the language McGill used because it is similar to that used by people who believe humans can be split into discrete racial categories based on their biology (whether we’re talking genes or pelvis shape). I’m not sure McGill meant to sound like this, but long story short: They can’t. For more on this, here’s a blogpost with some great resources. Now back to manspreading.

If Schuler’s article is right, then it would seem that men, or at least certain men, might struggle to keep their knees together when sitting down because of their bony anatomy, risking manspreading and needing to take up extra space on a subway.

As an anthropologist, I luckily know that biology is not quite so simple as “have this skeleton = do this behavior”. The article suggests that a person’s biology determines the behaviors they are capable of doing (for example, martial arts, dancing, weightlifting, or manspreading). Instead there is good evidence that repeated behaviors (which could include martial arts, dancing, weightlifting, or manspreading) train muscles and remodel bone to accommodate those behaviors.

There’s even a term for the effect on bone: Wolff’s Law. Julius Wolff proposed the idea that bones change in response to repeated behaviors in 1892. We’ve been collecting data to support this law ever since.

A classic example of Wolff’s Law is the comparison between the two arms of tennis players (such as those shown below). The genetics are the same because the arms belong to the same person, but the dominant arm will have thicker bone than the non-dominant arm. This is because the bone changes in response to regular activity, such as swinging a racquet at a tennis ball.

Why isn’t the difference in the figure more pronounced? Because the tennis player also uses (and probably strength-trains) their non-dominant arm. Both arms have some bone-thickening remodeling happening compared to non-athletes, but it happens more in the dominant arm.

What does this mean for pinched hip joints causing men to take up more space than they are allotted on the subway? It means that you can change your muscle flexibility (think of people who take up yoga and are able to bend in new ways) and bony structures (think of the tennis player’s humerus) in response to regular activities by practicing those activities.

So if you get in the habit of practicing martial arts, dancing, weightlifting, or manspreading, your body will adjust accordingly. If you STOP doing one of those behaviors (*cough* such as taking up too much room on the subway *cough*), your body will adjust again. It isn’t immediate, it takes time, but it happens. If you have a narrow pelvis (whether or not you are male) and you regularly sit with your knees together, you will train your muscles and eventually your bones to be able to do so comfortably.

Which means that on both cultural and biological grounds, dudebros and man-mans who manspread on the subway are just being rude.

Postscript: Another article mentioning the McGill interview suggests that sex differences in pelvic shape/manspreading are because men evolved to walk/run/hunt while women evolved to have and hold babies. Hi, paleoanthropologist here, evolution is my jam. And let me tell you, if you think prehistoric humans of any sex were bad at walking, you really don’t understand what our pre-agriculture ancestors did all day. Misunderstanding evolution is no excuse for manspreading.

Update August 9, 2017:

Prof. McGill contacted me and would like me to clarify:

“If you read carefully you will see that I did not comment on male-female differences. Any gender connection came from the context that Lou provided. I commented on hip anatomy and function and disease incidence.”

He’s right — all the parts of the article about sex differences came from the author, Lou Schuler, not from McGill’s quotes.

In any case, my comments still apply to anyone who tries to claim that the sex differences in the human bony pelvis mean men HAVE to sit with their legs spread out into other people’s space, giving them a pass on social etiquette. (And yes, such people have come out of the woodwork since I first posted this). I hope readers enjoyed learning about the plasticity (fancy way of saying ability-to-change) of the human skeleton!

Today is World Anthropology Day, “a day for anthropologists to celebrate and participate in their discipline with the public around them”. On this day, I’m thinking about what it means for me to identify as an anthropologist as well as a biological anthropologist. I’m particularly thinking about this in light of an incident that occurred last week. You see, last week I saw this photo on Facebook:

According to this poster, sent out by the American Anthropological Association (AAA), “Physical Anthropology… Studies animal origins and the biologically determined nature of humankind”. WHAT?

Not surprisingly, my biological anthropology colleagues on social media were quick to condemn the poster. Biological anthropologists, even when they go by the traditional title of physical anthropologists, study human and primate origins and regularly argue against biological determinist thinking! The chair of the Biological Anthropology Section (BAS) reported that she communicated with the AAA public relations department, who apologized and promised to change the poster (which may have been created with very little oversight from anyone identifying as an anthropologist). The same wording was found on the AAA website and was similarly removed. Some biological anthropologists who made their displeasure known received an email informing them of new wording, that is less theoretically problematic (at least it doesn’t paint us as biological determinists) but is still a poor definition for defining our subdiscipline.

As distressed as I was by this inaccurate portrayal of my subdiscipline, I was further distressed by the reaction of my colleagues. For about a day, my social media feeds were filled with biological anthropologists condemning the AAA and explaining to each other why they don’t associate with the flagship association of our discipline. Many brought up the 2010 incident where the AAA voted to remove the word “science” from their long term goals (a move rationalized by the fact that many anthropologists outside of the biological subdiscipline do not consider what they do to be science, so saying that the entire association aspires to do science is as inaccurate as saying my future goals include supporting biological determinism). The sentiment I felt from reading my colleagues’ comments was that the AAA doesn’t care about or support biological anthropology, and this is just the latest “proof” of their long-standing attitude.

I can understand the emotional reaction. The poster’s description of us is insultingly inaccurate. But I question the idea that incidents like this somehow justify biological anthropologists avoiding participating in the largest four-field (and then some) anthropology organization. Aren’t we part of anthropology?

Culture shock

Listening to my colleagues discuss their experiences with the AAA, I was reminded of my first time attending the AAA annual meeting. I could sympathize with some of my colleagues’ experiences because I had them myself.

The AAA is a very large association. It has over 10,000 members who are organized into 40 sections based on topics of interest. As of 2015, all meetings of the AAA are required to occur in a conference center because the membership is too large to be accommodated in a hotel — in contrast, the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) meetings always take place in hotels. The AAA program is looooong and no one expects anyone to be familiar with everything happening at the meetings — there is too much going on!

Being such a large, complex, and variable group makes the AAA meetings experience different than the AAPA meetings experience. At the AAA meeting, it is very easy to wander around the conference venue and not run into anyone you recognize, which can be isolating. So many different methods and theories being used and described in the conference talks that if you wander into rooms at random, it is likely you will feel like you don’t know what is being talked about because the speaker’s jargon and expertise differ so much from your own. Many rooms will have very small audiences because the overlap in expertise in such a broad field as anthropology is sometimes small. In some sections it is expected that the speaker will read a manuscript they’ve written aloud instead of using PowerPoint slides in a presentation. This is presumably because the speaker wants feedback on the wording of their paper, and is not interested in spending their time changing their manuscript into image-heavy slides. In many ways, the AAA meetings do not resemble the AAPA meetings, and an anthropologist expecting them to will be disappointed.

Two of the 40 sections of the AAA are dedicated to biological anthropology topics: the Evolutionary Anthropology Society (EAS) and the Biological Anthropology Section (BAS) (full disclosure: I am a member of the latter). Although I can not find evidence of this online, I know from attending the 2015 BAS business meeting that both sections are suffering from a decrease in their already small membership. The way AAA schedules sessions at the annual meeting is by having each section host a certain number of sessions, determined based on their membership size. This means the size of a section determines how many talks-of-interest-to-its-members it can organize. Despite both being small sections, EAS and BAS members did manage to organize a variety of cool sessions at last year’s meetings (full disclosure: I was a co-organizer for one of these sessions, and yes I thought it and the other EAS and BAS sessions I attended were all very interesting). But these groups are limited in their ability to provide more programming of interest to biological anthropologists because not many biological anthropologists are members of the AAA.

Moving forward

I am a biological anthropologist and a member of the AAA (and of BAS). I was trained as an anthropologist first who later specialized in biological anthropology and then in paleoanthropology. My work is influenced by my understanding of archaeology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. I recognize that the AAA is the flagship association of my discipline, and that means it represents me as long as I call myself an anthropologist. If you Google “What is anthropology?” the AAA website is among the first sites to pop up in the search results, which means the public views me as responsible for the actions of the AAA whether or not I’m a dues-paying member (though at the moment I am). This is true for all biological anthropologists. This is our association whether we own it or not. If we want to have a voice, we need to be in the room. World Anthropology Day is about all anthropologists, and I want to make sure that continues to include biological anthropologists like myself.

Interested in joining the AAA? Here’s how, and don’t forget to join the EAS and BAS as well!