Time to Breathe, Time to Visit Paris

The semester is over. What a relief! I submitted my term paper on Thursday night about 11:15pm. No more drives to Tucson, I can now take a little time to breathe.

Not too long, however... this Wednesday, my wife and I are leaving for Europe! We'll be spending 8 days in Paris. I've created a separate blog to document our adventures... I'm treating it like a notebook for my ethnographic observations of Parisians. I'll do my best to keep it up to date nightly and post as many interesting photos as I can.

More ethnographic work: Dog Show

I went back into the field again last weekend, spending three days among members of the AKC (American Kennel Club). My wife has gotten pretty deeply involved in showing our 9-month old Dalmatian Charlie, and this time I went along.

As with most special interest groups, they are a quirky bunch who take what they are doing very seriously. I've seen similar patterns in a taekwondo community, a Star Trek fan club, an astronomy club, and an amateur archaeology club.

Some observations:

LANGUAGE
As in any culture, there are unique shared ideas and values. These are most readily identified by the special terms they use when speaking to one another. There are the official terms and phrases (e.g. major, best of opposite, reserve), and those that have evolved informally (e.g. stack, bait).

RULES: WRITTEN VERSUS PRACTICED
There are standards and rules, but it all comes down to the various judge's highly subjective decisions. It is clear that participants believe that winners are not chosen solely on the basis of the dogs' characteristics, but that the reputation of the breeder or the handler (or whether the judge knows them personally) plays a significant part. It is also believed that judges from different regions of the country have significantly different standards by which they judge the dogs. Something besides the documented standards is certainly at work here... in each day of the three-day event there was a different judge, and there were different winners each day. A specific example: On the final day, a judge declared that she would award NO winner among the winners of the previous round since none of them were worthy... and one of these dogs had won a "major" only the day before with a different judge.

SOCIAL INEQUALITY AND SEGMENTATION
There is a high level of segmentation within the dog show culture. The divisions are naturally drawn along breed lines-- I saw very little interaction across breed groups. There are several coexisting hierarchies:

1. The official stratification of the show itself. This is structured with the show officials at the top, then the judges, and the breeders and handlers at the bottom.
2. I thought I also observed an informal hierarchy or pecking order, with dog owners (who do NOT show their own dogs) at the top. They are followed by the professional handlers (hired by these owners), breeders who show their own, and dog owners who show their own dogs at the bottom.

COMPETITION
Unlike other groups I've observed, the dog show culture's competitive nature results in a broad range of emotions and strained relations between the members. There are, by definition, a lot more losers than winners, and the highly subjective manner in which the winners are chosen leads to continual controversy. In general, I saw a lot of unhappy people. I spoke with more than one individual who questioned whether they wanted to continue their participation.



Note: The photo above shows four pups from the same litter. Charlie is the dog on the far left, and that's Teri (my wife) handling him.

Us and Them

I attended Monday Night Football in person Monday night, and experienced life in the upper deck of a sold-out pro football stadium.

It was an interesting experience from several angles. Television has spoiled me... I miss having the TV announcers and decent replays, and I frown at paying $6 for a cold, chewy order of french fries. Being in the upper deck meant the field was a good distance away, but the game was entirely watchable from there.

The most interesting part was the crowd around us. I've been to quite a few professional baseball games (I'm a fan of the Arizona Diamondbacks), and I can tell you this was NOTHING like that. Here are a few quick observations, in no particular order:

1. Nearly everyone was wearing a football jersey (myself excluded).
2. A majority of the people around me consumed multiple large cups of beer during the game.
3. A lot of the people around me yelled at each other as much as they did at the teams or the referees.
4. It appeared that a disproportionate number of people in the crowd were significantly overweight.

When I titled this post, I was not referring to myself or "my group." I wanted to draw attention to the way people so easily form into two factions (from their point of view): "Us" and "Them." Even when so many of these people clearly have a lot in common, the fact that some were fans of the Cardinals and others were San Francisco supporters meant it was okay to draw the line. People who did not know each other had no trouble yelling unkind things back and forth over a short distance, and did so for most of the night.

I can understand this kind of thing if you are contending for limited resources (e.g. food, water), but this was conflict for the sake of conflict. Is this the remnant of a survival adaptation? I doubt it is a genetic adaptation to hate people who are different, but I suspect it might be a social adaptation passed on through societal beliefs and behaviors (culture).

More thoughts on this later.

Elephants join an exclusive club

I read with great interest this news item from Science Magazine's website: Jumbo Reflections.

It seems that researchers have run some experiments where they put a full-length mirror (which in this case is pretty darned big) in the elephant pen at the Bronx Zoo, and led three female Asian elephants up to it.

All of them seemed to recognize themselves, but one more than the other: After seeing her reflection, she reached the tip of her trunk up to her own face and touched a white mark the researchers had placed there... in a spot she could not have seen it otherwise. Until now, only humans, apes, and dolphins have demonstrated self-recognition.

The researchers propose that self-awareness is a necessary prerequisite for empathy and altruism, behaviors possibly seen in elephants.

The most startling idea in the new article for me was this:

If the findings can be replicated in other elephants, it would be a striking example of convergent evolution, Gallup¹ says. "In evolutionary terms, primates and elephants separated an awfully long time ago," he says, but social intelligence evolved in both lineages.

The complete report is published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

See a movie of Happy looking at herself in the mirror (the camera is behind the mirror).

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1. Gordon Gallup, Jr. is an evolutionary psychologist at the SUNY Albany, and previously published a paper on self-recognition in Chimpanzees.