Anthropreneur

A cup of civet cat coffee costs some $100 at the Peter Jones department store in London. These mislabeled Southeast Asian felines (in reality a species close to the mangoose) serve as wild connoisseurs. They sniff those rare berries out, eat them and then discharge unprocessed beans for human coffee-lovers to prey on. One could argue that defecation here is only a necessary evil and has no cultural value in its own right.

But look at another example. Nomadic and cattle-breeding peoples use/used dry cow dung (pasture patty, wilson pie, country pancake) and buffalo dung (bufalo chip, meadow muffin, niknik) as fuel, as fertilizer and as a component in adobe bricks. It’s noteworthy that so many verbal metaphors and visual resemblances relate dung to bakery products and fast food.

But my most favorite example comes from the world of scientific discoveries. A team of archaeologists working in South-central Oregon has recently found coprolites (fossilized poop) dated at 12,300 BP (see Gilbert et al. DNA from pre-Clovis Human Coprolites in Oregon, North America, Scientific Express, April 3, 2008). It’s of human origin and contained two different mtDNA genetic sequences identical with some of the modern Native Americans. It’s the major discovery in North American archaeology since Clovis and Folsom projectile points were unearthed by a lucky cowboy in 1926. For decades, archaeologists have waged a war regarding the timing of the settlement of the Americans. Since no securely dated and unmistakably human artifacts and bones were found beyond the 11,500 YPB threshold, many respectable archaeologists have developed a profound scepticism for any claims for the greater antiquity of human presence in the Americas. The old paradigm is now being overturned by the most unlikely find - a piece of old poop. Scholars will continue to debate the reasons as to why there’re so few lithic tools in the earliest American assemblages as well as why fairly complete skeletons continue to emerge in the African Paleolithic but not in the Americas, but it seems to be clear that a holistic approach to life in and out of the marketplace and in and out of the human species, in which nothing is left out or biased against, contains a tremedous potential to move cultures forward.

For the coverage of this piece of news on The Onion see here. I was amazed at how accurate one of their “interviewees” reflects the way Clovis proponents dismiss any pre-Clovis finds: “How can we be sure that some ancient nerd didn’t just carry an already thousand-year-old petrified turd with him when he crossed over the land bridge from Asia?”

Blaine Harden of Washington Post Foreign Service writes on Japan’s use of robots as a cure against a demographic crisis. A rapidly aging society with an intolerance for immigrants adopts robots as a labor force in order to avoid an economic collapse (the number of citizens using pensions and healthcare may soon exceed the number of active workers). Japan’s romance with humanlike robots is well-known: it seems that the Japanese do not have a Western sense of monolithic, singular and indivisible self. Humanity is spread unevenly across a wide range of entities, including the human species, monkeys and robots. Japanese biologists are quick to report that chimpanzees are superior to humans in short-term memory. (The deep structures of Christian consciousness continue to create hurdles between “us” and “lower animals” on all the stages of the evolution of Darwinism.) Toyota manufactures a humanoid robot that plays “Pomp and Circumstance.” The forgotten European character, the wooden boy Pinnochio, now flourishes in Japan through multiple adaptations. (An old article in my archive also reports on the adaptation of Pinnochio by the Nazis as a perfect symbol of Aryan sensibilities.) Foreigners (especially fellow Asians) there are not fully human since they lack the essential component of humanity, namely “Japaneseness.” Japanese teenagers eagerly engage in collective suicide and the mass murder of fellow classmates in such movies as Suicide Club (2002) and Battle Royal (2000). In the U.S. [at this point I dozed off only to be woken up by Dan Ng's link to an earlier Economist article on the same topic] the fear of robots permeates popular culture and the movies (the robot among humans is a sign of an impeding Judgment Day). Alternatively the U.S. is constantly seeking out cheap labor (especially in the service sector) among fellow humans (in Japan “One Day Without a Mexican” would probably be adapted as “One Day Without a Robot,” while “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” would be more like “ASIMO’s Cabin”), while at the same time creating a class of celebrities whose compensation is of cosmic proportions. Other economic systems heavily rely on such artificially created populations as labor camp workers (Stalin’s Soviet Union), Jewish ghettos (medieval and early modern Europe), cattle (the pastoral Maasai) or macaw birds (Amazonian Indians using their feathers for ceremonial purposes), whose status vis-a-vis humans is always characteristically ambiguous. They are at will exploited and lamented, endowed with human qualities and deprived of human rights, made members of families and sent to orphanages. The scientific production of knowledge also resorts to surrogates that propel its growth. Darwin used pigeon breeding as a model of natural selection. Although if taken at face value, this transposition seems far-fetched, his theory has received universal acceptance in the scientific world probably because it was respectful and reflective of the dominant Western economic principles. Alternatively when an Australian lab published results demonstrating that megabats are relatives of monkeys (see Science, 1986, Vol 231, Issue 4743, 1304-1306 for the “flying primate” theory), the scholars were scorned and ostracized by the scientific community because they openly challenged the existing mental surrogates. There’s an intuitive kinship between all these phenomena and one is left to wonder if it’s possible to implement a mode of production (material and ideological) that do not rely on manipulated ethical values and demographic crutches.

See another Economist article on the same topic here. Via Cubemate.

This theme just won’t stop running. NYT reports of a first interface between a monkey brain and a Japanese robot. The monkey’s thoughts has actually made the robot move.