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Education
"High school sucked," declares Dr. Carol Worthman, obviously relishing a sentiment often echoed by scientists of her caliber. "Four years of wasted time- I still haven't gotten over that. (laughs) It primed me for college, though- 'At least I won't be bored anymore, and intellectually insulted.'
"[In college] I was a bio and botany major- that is, all science, headed straight for M.D. / Ph.D. and my senior year I had to take, for a distribution requirement, one last social-science class. So I took anthropology and I said 'Wow- the number of interesting questions is huge, and the ratio of people working on the questions to the number of questions was far lower than in what I was going to go into- which was evolution of disease, cancer-research kind of stuff. So it's the difference between 500 people who want to work on one problem versus 500 problems with one person who was maybe thinking about them. So from my point of view there's lots of talent going into medicine, but not a lot going here, so here's where you could make a big intellectual difference and have fun.
"I went to Ponoma College [in Claremont, CA] as an undergrad- that was great. The undergrads were a little provincial, but the faculty were great and it was really stimulating and there was lots of cool stuff you could do. And then you go to Harvard, which is very much a star system, very unsupportive, very do-it-or-die, and given my temperament, which is kind of cooperative and non-aggressive, and low-competitive, it was hard. I survived, obviously, but it was sort of a Darwinian education. So in some respects, by the time you're done with that, you can do anything- you're really sort of a road-warrior. So maybe there's something about it, learning how to be competitive in the real world, but maximize your potential, not spending all your time looking over your shoulder at what other people are doing."
Teaching
"My work is my life. I have an identity that's not entirely congruent with what I do, yet everything I think about goes into what I do. For instance, I was seriously trained in music, and the way I think about how I teach is grounded in my training in performance. It's quite different, lecturing and performing on piano- I learned that the hard way. But you use everything you know- that's what makes this really cool work, is that you can use all of it.
"I trained and played [piano] intensively for 13 years, and then I discovered science... I stopped competing when I finished high school. Teaching is a very different form of performance. And making that switch between music and teaching-performance was a big one for me. Because when you perform music it's from your gut, it's not an academic exercise. But the way I was trained to teach was very academic. And then what I've had to do is learn that good teaching is also from the gut. But it has to bring your head on-line in a different way, so I'm only getting that worked out now, my teaching-performance. It's one thing to have a philosophy of teaching, and it's another thing to enact that.
Teaching has performative aspects, but teaching, for me, is mostly about providing tools for people to learn on their own in the future. Some of this is basic grunt-work of learning vocabulary. I think of teaching science as doing French language and literature simultaneously- because you have to learn the vocabulary, otherwise you can't do it- you have to learn about that world and the objects of that world, so there's a lot of conceptual stuff and that's all bound up in words- but that's only interesting if it's tied-in. I mean, who cares about the words- what you care about are the constructs of knowledge, which are not about the words, they're about relationships, about dynamics, about how things work.
So teaching is really about, frankly, motivation. How you motivate. The manifest structure is vocabulary and knowledge, quote unquote. But to make the transfer requires motivation on the part of students and you can turn people off and you can turn them on and so how to do that effectively, and at the same time, how to allow for students to become critical consumers of knowledge -because obviously if you manipulate motivation perfectly no one is ever going to ask, 'well, what's wrong with this?' So one issue is how to build in the possibility of resistance. And this is very hard in science...
So models and knowledge come and go- paradigms crash, and our understanding of, say, what cytokines do, changes. So what's important with that manifest structure is actually the underlying structure- which is how you acquire and process information. So as far as I'm concerned, that's what education is about- I mean, you've got to have something to think with, that's the manifest thing, but the latent thing is, 40 years later, whatever you're doing, running a McDonald's, I don't know, is this critical acquisition and use of knowledge. I see that as fundamental.
There are lots of ways to think- so the different disciplines offer different tool-boxes. So I think of it more as a tool-kit- and the undergraduates get different tools, and they use them and combine them in their own creative ways, which we don't have control over, I hope.
Research
The first part of my stint there was on an NIMH post-doc kind of thing, so I was doing work on adolescents, and in brief, a lot of what I do is cross-population research to prove how our models of how the body works may be ethnocentric, that is, conditioned by the contexts in which the people live whom we study, i.e. North Americans in the late twentieth century.
And yeah, we're representative of society, in so far as everyone has a liver and a pancreas, etc., but beneath those gross similarities are fine differences that are products of the context in which we live, but also have significant implications for differential well-being, and differential issues in health and vulnerabilities. So it's a way to question our models.
It was the first time anyone had gone and studied the endocrinology of puberty in a non-western setting. For instance, Westerners mature much earlier than their ancestors, and in contrast to many populations around the globe today. So if you look at it in that perspective we're kind of weird in that we're early. The other thing I was doing was that this is a population that has a lot of rituals over adolescence. And the other thing that neither anthropology nor psychology had asked was, 'How is the sociality of growing up related to the biology of growing up?' So, how do people in societies that, say, have circumcision for boys in adolescence, why then- why this boy, this year. And again, in societies in which boys get moved out of the natal home and into the boys' house at some stage- well, how do you know when to do that? That sort of stuff.
Then I went on to work with the World Health Organization human reproduction program, to help set up their program in East Africa.
What did you learn from all that?
I would say that the biggest effect on me was a greater understanding of the international politics of science and policy. So I came to have a great appreciation for the privilege of having a great library, which I had at Harvard. I used to wonder, before I went to the field, what I would miss. That's what Anthropologists have stories about, like 'I missed peanut butter.' But in my case I missed the library. I missed the all-night book store.
So, it's very different science when the roaches eat the insulation off the wires of your gamma counter and you have to wait for someone to come out from the UK to fix it. So you learn to fix the machines yourself, you learn to bootstrap better, and you learn to understand why it's easy to look good if you're in Cambridge when you're doing science.
Also, I still think that science should make a difference in people's lives, and I had this great idea that I would do this with the W.H.O., and probably one can do that but it's a tough row to hoe. It's difficult to do that with W.H.O. if you're a Ph.D. and not an M.D., and I had purposely not done the M.D. thing. So I don't want to pan the W.H.O., but I came to the conclusion that I could probably make a bigger difference by going and doing the science and changing people's ideas, preconceptions about things.
But, indeed, my dissertation work had a profound effect upon international policies about breastfeeding, and that was very heady. My dissertation was on the !Kung San, and it was the first time that behavioral biology and endocrine work had been done in a non-western setting. And there were several dimensions that I was looking at, in terms of men in terms of the endocrinology and how that related to our ideas about human evolution and our background as hunters and the idea that had made men aggressive innately, and the answer is: 'wrong, hunters don't hunt for a living because it's hard work.'
And I did stuff on women with my mentor, Mel Konner, showing that intensive breast feeding -which we don't think about, because in this culture we don't really do it- is a major suppressor of ovarian function, and is the single major contributor to birth-spacing in the world.
So what we learned is that if you do things to erode breastfeeding, population growth increases. So if you introduce formula, and women get jobs, and people get the idea that breastfeeding is yucky and retro and they bottle feed- it's a problem.
That was exciting because it had a big effect and it galvanized a lot of research and W.H.O. instituted a policy to promote breast-feeding. And, then, what it also meant, and what I could observe subsequently, is that it can become an excuse not to provide contraceptive services, because it's like: 'Hey, we told you to breastfeed, and that should be good enough.' And breastfeeding works on a population level, but it doesn't provide security for a particular woman who says 'I don't want a child for another three years.'
The other thing is that this breastfeeding effect is potentiated in hard-working marginally-nourished populations. Well, if you get women into the position where you'd like them, where they're not busting their buns all the time, and they're not marginally-nourished, it has a much-reduced effect. So just promoting breastfeeding is not a substitute- even though it's a good thing to do for a whole lot of reasons.
So that's an example of how I feel like I can have more of an effect by just going around and doing the science.
Tell us about your research on the ethnographic bias of some of the anthropological (and medical, etc.) data that researchers gather.
If you think of epigenesis, i.e. that for big complicated systems, like humans, that are planning on living a long time and are into all kinds of hairy stuff, socially, stuff that's put on all kinds of evolutionary demands, particularly on our neurobiology, wiring up such a system is really hairy to do. So what we've learned over the last 15 years that's really cool, in developmental biology in general, but especially in neuroscience, is how organisms are designed to use expectable environments of rearing to capture the information they need to self-organize. Well, this is cool and great, but it also means then that it shows you from a fundamental level how the organism is environment-expectant, and environment-dependent.
So, everywhere in the world people achieve this, except in really bad conditions. So we're all recognizably human, and we can all talk to each other, more or less, if we're not shooting at each other, but that process means that the biology is actually going to embody the differences in environment.
So it's unsurprising therefore that we would see these kinds of differences. [between the biology of westerners and non-westerners, or between any two groups of people, given that both groups grew up in different environments and given the concept of epigenesis - the interaction of genes and environment during development- which asserts, in short, that these biological differences came about because of the different environments of rearing, which have life-long effects on the organism, modulating, predicating, and informing the espression of genes.]
Some of the differences may be trivial. So then, once you've identified a difference, the next question is, what differences make a difference, and that's the old battle over [skin] color. People tend to reify it, and you can say 57 times 'it's not a difference that matters,' but in so far as it becomes a social reality it matters.
The same may be true with something like sleep. Well, that's just the way we do it, and it might not make a huge difference between cultures- but we've based our whole notion of sleep research, how we think sleep works, the chronobiology of sleep, circadian rhythms and everything- it's all based on populations that grew up doing weird sleep things, like making babies sleep separate from everybody else, which in many populations is viewed as a form of child abuse. They can't believe we do this.
Whereas we think that that's how babies get their own space, and parents are proud to be able to offer that- it's one of the nesting things that parents talk about, how they do the baby's room. So the very thing that is viewed as weird in another place is OK here.
In a deeply moral way, that's how we think children become independent. But this may have profound effects- for instance, we have very high rates of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. And this has been linked to how babies sleep, specifically, the big one being that we put babies down on their faces, and they should be on their backs. And that's a simple one- that's a cultural practice, so who thinks about it?, and that's just how we do it. So it may or may not make a difference, but we found out that it does, so they launched this campaign, Back to Sleep. (link in here) Put the kid on its back.
I think that's the bottom line, is that the kind of work we do is trying to show how cultural practices have biological impacts which can have consequences for physical and mental health. And we might say that we don't care, that's just a consequence of how people live, or in some cases we might say, 'oh, let's change what we do.'
So recently you have been doing research on sleep...
Westerners sleep on heavily-padded substrates: the western bed is an amazing machine. If you think of the bed, the double box-spring, the mattress pad, the mattress cover, the sheet, another sheet on top of that, the blanket, the duvet, one or two pillows, then it's no surprise that we have dust-mites, and that this contributes to allergies and asthma.
That's one thing. Another is the social context of sleep- it's incredibly sensorily-deprived. We live in solid-walled structures where we create dark spaces, silent, and climate-controlled. Yet most settings that we anthropologists know about, there are dogs, kids, other people, the climate-control is provided by you, like you've got to get up and stoke the fire at night, or if you're out in the bush or in a flimsy structure you're worried about predators, so you're trying to maintain arousal, and there are designated people to watch out for that. People get up to pee, babies cry, somebody wakes up, gets bored, starts playing a thumb-piano, starts singing, somebody else wakes up and moves around, somebody else wakes up and starts telling you a story, everybody else starts waking up... So for westerners, with sleep, we have this lie-down-and-die model of sleep, it's like you're either awake or asleep, it's very bi-modal. And we consolidate it in one big block, and if we don't do that we think we have a sleeping disorder.
Yet other places, people nap. So there's this tedious meeting- the elders are droning on and you pull your garment over you and zone out for a while. Or, for instance, Balinese people, who do all their rituals at night, with the great puppet-theaters that will go on hours and days and weeks, all at night- some of the performers as well as the audience, will sit down and go asleep. You're sitting there on-stage and you just go asleep.
So the question is, what does that mean for very fundamental stuff about how the lower brain-stem works and state-regulation and increasing problems that we're seeing with our elderly population with sleep disorders and sleep apnea- is it related to these very strange forms of sleep?
On collaboration in the sciences...
There are egos out there, but there are egos anywhere. I would say that- I mean, I'm sure it's partly self-selecting in terms of who I collaborate with- but in the long run, being a good guy pays off. Reciprocity pays. Because in science, what goes around comes around. I mean, I write grants and they get reviewed- and let's say I'm a real ass, I can be as smart as I want to be but somehow my priority score won't be as high.
There's a lot in science about reciprocity, and about sharing limited resources. And one strategy is to be selfish and try to grab as much as you can get, but that tends to be, for instance, in some of that computer-based evolutionary adaptive modeling, it's been demonstrated that in the long run it doesn't work. I strongly suspect that my success is linked to the fact that I try to be decent and cooperative and recognize the merits of others and try to give credit where credit is due, and that's a good thing, and I actually try to re-enforce that. I try to promote people who are cooperative and I'm not too supportive of those who are not.
What's the most interesting thing you're currently working on?
We're just starting up a long-term project on the effects of abuse and neglect and poverty. Effects in a large sense, but in the local sense, it's sort of a new approach because we're trying to show how these experiences actually affect the neurobiology of cognition and attention and arousal, which affect how you are in the world. So what happens to you affects your future ability to cope. So we're unpacking this whole thing in terms of how people in everyday life do it- we constantly study people in the real world instead of bringing them into the laboratory.
So that involves constantly making new methods to go out there and do this. So both physiologic- that includes endocrine and autonomic, as well as psychobehavioral measures of arousal and attention-regulating systems.
This is so cool, because anthropology is into differential but experiential worlds: Our great question is 'we're both human beings, but especially if we're in different cultures, we can be in entirely different spaces.' And that's just so amazing. And what I'm seeing through this project, and through other projects, are ways to use the body as a kind of lens onto how this happens.
All the research we do isn't just theory-driven. We do it not for sheer knowledge but because there is some reason.
What was it like being female and being a researcher in a field in which women were and perhaps still are underrepresented?
The early effect was almost the opposite- it was sort-of insulting, but people would say: "Oh- you can do this and you're a female,' and they sounded shocked. So in a way I felt like I had an advantage- my male friends, who were just as competent as me, people wouldn't be as impressed by them. It was a little condescending, but I would say that I have not had a problem with this. On the other side, I would say that I have to be twice as competent to be successful, and that's not a problem, but that's just how it is.
I guess what I would say is that I haven't experienced it, but I have noticed that, say to get a job, if you're male, the competence gradient is a little less steep than if you're a female.
The other thing is that, vis-a-vi undergrads, sometimes I wish that I could get a Y chromosome for a day, and have a beard, and be three inches taller and have my voice change, and I wonder how it would be, because sometimes when I get up in front of an undergraduate class and say: "Now this is going to be a really hard class," and I can see them thinking 'yeah, right,' because one it's anthropology, and two it's like I'm a fluffy female and I'm saying 'Oh, it's going to be hard.' It's not a big deal to me- but I've been curious about it sometimes, as to how gender works, particularly in science, where, as I'm sure you know- students have to be driven pretty hard in order to work as hard as you do to get through the material. And I think it's harder sometimes for them to take this from a female, than from a male who is more of an authority / power figure. But again, you just learn how to manage it.
So all this information that anthropologists gather, how can we get it out to the general public?
I spend a lot of time on that. For instance, I was part of a committee on culture, health, and human development, what is called the social-science research council, which is in New York and it's dedicated to pushing the cutting-edge of what people should be thinking about. But in that context I put together a working group on ethnopediatrics, where I got money to bring in a science writer, as well.
So there's a book called Our Babies, Ourselves, which was a hot seller last year, and which put together a lot of stuff about what we know about child development in infancy in a format that a lot of parents read. So I'm very proud of that, even though I didn't write it.
I also go to a lot of meetings, for instance, here's one (grabs paper off desk): Institute of Medicine, board on children use and families, two different ones: one on early precursors of anti-social behavior, and another one on sleeping practices, in the fall. I worked for the department of Health and Human Development for a few days to put together the next ten years' policy on what kind of research and policy do we need for promoting physical and mental health on adolescence in America.
I also work with film crews; radio and TV types, on programs on human sexuality, programs on violence and children. So I would say those are the main ways.
Science Writing, by the way, is a really cool thing- I don't have a gift for it but I think it's an important conduit these days, because a lot of Americans consume an amazing amount of science in that form.
My goals seem to be an infinitely receding horizon, there's no end. My next goal is world mental health- I'm hot on that, also in relation to trauma, refugeeism, and displacement, internal and transnational, and the intersections of trauma with physical vulnerability. So stress, for instance, compromises immune function. So in populations that are already immunocompromised, it's no surprise that a gazillion Hutu refugees died of cholera- because they were immunocompromised and stressed out of their blooming minds.
So how to change international policy with respect to refugeeism, where we don't only supply clean water and food and shelter, but try to identify minimal ways to diminish stress, psychological distress, because of the immediate and long-term consequences. You can save people's bodies, but can you save their lives.
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