Repost: A Skunk and Potatoes Man

Repost from the old site.

When I was working as an anthropologist for a local Indian tribe, I had to go through all of the anthropological literature about the tribe. This took quite some time. There was quite a bit of hostility from the Indians towards the anthropologists, which is stupid, sad, and mostly just ignorant.

The legend had grown up among many of the Indians that the anthropologists who had come through were the “enemies of the Indian people.” I researched the folks who had come through and it didn’t seem to fit.

We are talking some of the biggest names of all like Alfred Kroeber. Kroeber and his wife loved the Indians in a time at the turn of the century when Indians were not so popular. The legend continued that the crafty Indians, in order to fool the wicked White men, had concocted lies to tell the anthropologist.
Anthropological field work is hard enough without having to deal with this kind of crap, but it does come up at times.

Fieldwork manuals will tell you, first of all, that you need to develop a strong sense of cultural relativity if you are going to do fieldwork.

You have to decide that whatever it is these folks do in terms of their culture and values, no matter how weird, stupid, horrible, or noxious, it’s ok. You aren’t going to make any judgments about it.

You want to chop off little girls’ clits? Ok, no big.

You put grandpa on an ice floe when he gets old? Understandable, I’d do the same with my own Dad.

You treat your women like shit? Hey, I can understand, in dating countless women over a lifetime, I’ve built up a nice boiling witches brew of hatreds and grievances myself. Keep them ball-breaking bitches down! You go, guys! Show them cunts who’s in charge! Damn right they better put out or else! They owe us! We rule!

I think you get the picture.

This sort of thing may prove difficult for many folks.

In fieldwork, you need to do this to get along properly with your subjects. If you don’t accept their lifestyle with “unconditional positive regard,” it’s probably not going to work very well. You get subjects lying to you like they did with Margaret Mead and all sorts of stuff.

I actually spent a lot of time on this agonizing question, and I called up famous anthropologists all over the country in trying to solve this empirical question. Had the evil White anthropologists really been had by these crafty noble savages, fresh out of Paleolithic?

Turns out they probably had not. Further, I uncovered a lot of data that suggested that all of the anthros had a good relationship with their informants.

Another thing you can do is go through all of the old data and see how well it all lines up. Turns out that all of the data I had from 1873 through 1970 lined up very well.

There were times when I spotted some lying. Indians said that wild horses and buffalo used live in Central California, and they used to hunt them. The last wild horses lived here 10,000 years ago, and buffalo never did. The anthro himself wrote in his field notes that he thought they were lying to him.

There are several ways to test this. One thing you can do is to interview informants over a period of time, say weeks or months. You can work with a single informant any number of times over that period. You can ask the same question over and over a few times and see if the answers vary.

Another thing you can do is go around to different informants and ask the same question. If only one informant says, yeah, we ate vultures for breakfast, and the others say, “Hell no, we did not, he’s lying,” then vulture-eater is probably lying.

You can interview informants alone and with others, changing the others around, and see if their stories change when they are with various others compared to what they say when they are alone. You can shoot questionable material to others and see if they back it up. In fact, you need to try to back up all of your data. One informant is pretty shaky.

It all rests on the sort of relationship you have with your informants. Bad relationship = possibility of poor data. Good relationship portends good data.

I decided that there was some tragic reason why the Indians harbored this hatred for the anthros. Obviously, the anthros just represented Whitey.

Plus many of them had this crazy idea that all the anthros had used the Indians, gone back to Berkeley or wherever and used this illustrious knowledge to write famous books about the Indians and got rich. The anthros got rich, and the Indians never saw a dime. It’s not true, but it felt good to them.

There was a sadder aspect to this anger. All of the great stuff on these Indians had been written by White people. Everything on the language, the culture, everything.

Why couldn’t the Indians write down about their language and culture themselves? The suggestion is that they are too stupid to do that, so they have to have the Smart White Man come and do it for them, and that’s totally humiliating. A reaction to humiliation is rage.

I went through Sylvia Broadbent’s Grammar of Southern Sierra Miwok as part of my work. One informant, who worked as some sort of “House Indian” in Yosemite National Park, was well-known for being a showman, liar, and teller of tales. He also knew a lot of language, but he threw in lots of other words that other informants had never heard before. She ended up rejecting a lot of his data as spurious.

As you can see, this is not exactly hard science. Where do you think “physics envy” comes from? It gets hard to get mathematical proofs of much of anything in the social sciences, which is why the physicists sneer that our sciences are “soft sciences”.

So much of our judgments in these tough cases in fieldwork is play it by ear, seat of the pants, I know it when I see it intuitive stuff.

Unfortunately my project floundered over some of the Indians’ rage at the anthropologists. I had gathered this data and was set to write it up, and the whole thing got shot down.
Because elders said that the Indians had lied to the anthros, every word of the notes was up for grabs. There were known knowns, known unknowns, and worst of all, unknown unknowns, the last category being what the otherwise non-empirical Indians deemed the notes.

I was on a salary anyway, so it really didn’t matter. One of the amusing things was the sort of things that they disputed. They were livid about the notes that reported that these Indians tole the anthros that they used to eat skunks, rattlesnakes, and gopher snakes.

Their rejection of this food, of which the rattlesnakes at least are proven to taste precisely like chicken (of course), is based on a primitive but common mode of thinking. Rattlesnakes are poisonous, so they are evil, so they should not be eaten. The suggestion is that the meat is poison too. Only an idiot would eat poison meat.

Skunks smell horrible when you piss them off, so obviously their meat must taste like their horrid odor. Someone else opined that their meat is “probably pretty oily.”

Turns out, according to the New York Times in 1913, skunk is one of the delicacies of the woods, right up there with possum, deer, and bear. The main obstacle in the way of proper enjoyment are the speed bumps of human psychology. As long as you associate the meat with skunk-stink, it might taste pretty bad. Convince yourself it’s really fillet mignon and you can dig in for a hearty meal.

Tender eating, skunk meat tastes like either chicken (obviously), goose, duck, or rabbit, depending on your powers of dissociation. You really need to figure out how to dress skunk meat properly in order to keep the stink away from the choice cuts. Baked skunk recipe here.

As I feel I’ve been figuratively eating skunk most of my life anyway, I may as well take the plunge some day. If it’s really as good as they say it is, I assume it will be coming to Chez Panisse or Spago anytime now.

The gopher snake was also rejected as food, but I have often wondered what they tasted like. A while back, I was catching them by the side of the road a lot. If they were near dead, I’d bring them home and throw them on the lawn for my cats to play with, or drag them around on the lawn and let the cats chase them.

Of course I washed the snake blood off my hands and my car. People who saw me doing that still think I’m a really weird person.

After the gopher snake died, I brought it inside and seriously thought about figuring how to cook the sucker. I finally gave up and threw it out in the woods in back. One cool thing about living in the woods is any small dead animal you toss into the woods will always vanish within 1-2 days max. Carrion doesn’t stick around long in nature; it’s the feral equivalent of dumpster-diving.

I later asked some people how to slice up and cook a gopher snake, and everyone thought it was one of the most outrageous things they had ever heard. I guess they still think I’m weird too.

Anyway, the Indians insisted that they never ate gopher snake. “Ugh!” One Indian said, “They taste like dirt. It lives in the ground!” He curled up his nose.

I’m told this is more erroneous thinking, and the guy’s probably never chowed down one anyway. This cognitive error states that a thing tastes like what it lives in. Gopher snakes spent a lot of time in subterranean mode pushing up daisies but living to tell about it, so therefore, they must taste like dirt. It lives in dirt; it tastes like dirt. Probably not. By this logic, pork tenderloin ought to taste like mud, and it doesn’t.

Of course, inquiring minds the world over (Well, at least me anyway) are dying to know the ins and outs of how to hunt, kill, and skin skunks. Forget the kitchen for now. Procurement and dressing are tough enough.

Try here. Turns out skunks may be trapped, shot, killed by bow and arrow, drowned, or asphyxiated with car exhaust. Clearly the trick is to kill em without getting sprayed. This ends up being quite the challenge. Skunk dressing is so involved that colleges ought to offer six-month courses for certificates in it. The first story here is quite amusing. It’s pretty much skunk-skinning gone wrong about every way it could. I got a kick.

Boys Who Kill Animals: A Hierarchy of Animal Victims















Human Races and Subspecies

Repost from the old site.
A question that comes up all the time in race realist circles is whether or not the various races of man, however defined, can be considered to be subspecies. No reputable scientist considers the major human races to be separate subspecies of Homo Sapiens. At any rate, Homo sapiens himself is already a subspecies called Homo sapiens sapiens. There was H.s. neanderthalis , H.s. idaltu, probably H.s. rhodesiensis and finally, Homo sapiens sapiens.
So a human subspecies would be look more like a Neandertal, with dramatic differences between them and modern humans. Even Khoisans and Pygmies are much closer to the rest of us than Neandertal or Idaltu Man was.
This area is still quite controversial, but the only scientists and theorists who are suggesting that the differences between the races are great enough to constitute subspecies are racialists, many of whom are explicit racists. Almost all are associated with White nationalism and usually with Nordicism. Nordicists are best seen as Nazis.
You must understand the differences between races and subspecies. For instance there is the California kingsnake . There are no subspecies of the California kingsnake. However, there are numerous races, many of which look radically different from the California kingsnake norm. They are simply called races of the California kingsnake.
So races of humans and other animals are really a level even below that of the subspecies. They are not protected by the Endangered Species Act, and I’m not sure anyone cares about them all that much. They’re better seen as regional variants.
Subspecies are a variant of a species that only occurs in one limited geographical area in which no other subspecies of that animal reside. Hence, each subspecies is geographically isolated from the others such that interbreeding is rare to nonexistent. At some point, subspecies’ territories may start overlapping. They begin to interbreed a lot, since subspecies of a type are readily capable of interbreeding. Once their territories overlap and interbreeding begins, we often stop calling two types separate subspecies and wrap them into a single entity.
Subspecies were differentiated in the past based on a significant degree of anatomical difference. Nowadays, genetics is much more popular. The combination of significant anatomical and behavioral differences combined with significant genetic difference at some point is deemed great enough to warrant a subspecies split. These discussions are carried on very civilly in academic journals and after a bit of back and forth, a consensus of some sort is arrived at regarding whether or not two variants of a species differ enough to be called subspecies. At that point, the discussion typically dies.
In addition, new genetic discoveries now show that some subspecies are so far apart genetically that a good case can be made that they are actually full species and not subspecies. This argument is also written up carefully in a journal, and usually seems to be accepted if the argument is well thought-out. In addition to splitting, there is lumping.
Some variants of a species have in the past been divided into various subspecies. Some new analyses have shown that all of these subspecies definitions were in error, and in fact, the species is fairly uniform, with few to no subspecies instead of the 10-15 they had in the past. This argument also gets written up in a journal and passed around. Usually the new designation is accepted if the argument is well-crafted.
The species/subspecies question is not as wildly controversial among scientists as laypeople think. Designations change back and forth, all are based on good, solid science, and science simply coalesces around the paradigmatic view of a species as it may change over time. Science, after all, is always a work in progress.
The reasons that the California kingsnake races were not split into subspecies is because apparently the genetic differences were too small to warrant a split into subspecies. It is also possible that these races are widely distributed over the kingsnake’s territory, with no particular race holding sway in any certain locale. So probably all of these kingsnake races can not only interbreed like subspecies but they probably are actively interbreeding as they are probably not geographically segregated.
At some point, it is discovered that two animals, previously thought to be separate species, have interlapping territories and the two species are observed readily interbreeding. Since separate species cannot interbreed, once two species start interbreeding easily, science often decides that they are not separate species after all and instead that they are subspecies of a single species
At some level X, two living things are split into species. At some lesser level of genetic differentiation Y, a species is further split into subspecies. At some lesser level of differentiation Z, we can start talking about races. I believe that all of the various breeds of dogs and cats are races.
“Race” and “subspecies” are two terms often conflated in speech, even by biologists, but strictly speaking, they do have different meanings. I do not know any reputable biologist who thinks that any of the various extant human races or subraces, however defined, need to be preserved on solely anthropological grounds in order to preserve their phenotype.
The various human races have been changing all through time continuously.
North Africans were once pure African, now they are mostly Caucasian.
Northeast Asians looked like Aborigines until 9,000 YBP (years before present).
South Indians looked like Aborigines until 8,000 YBP.
Southeast Asians looked like Negritos and Melanesians until about 5,000 YBP.
Over 10,000 years ago, Amerindians looked like Aborigines. Between 7,000-9,000 years ago, they looked something like the Ainu or Polynesians.
Europeans looked like Arabs 10,000 YBP, like Northwestern US Amerindians 23,000 YBP and 30-40,000 YBP, they looked very strange, possibly resembling a Khoisan more than anything else. White skin only shows up 9,000 YBP in Europe.
Polynesians and Micronesians only show up in the past 2,000 years.
So all of the modern human races and subraces, however defined, have been continuously changing down through time. The notion that they are some kind of unique subspecies in need of conservation like Northern Spotted Owls is completely mistaken and has little basis in modern science.

The Validity of Race as a Biological Construct

Repost from the old site. There is a lot of nonsense going around these days about the races of man, and how race is not a valid concept in humans. Sure it is. It can be seen as analogous to subspecies in animals and plants. A counterargument is that subspecies are limited to certain geographic areas, hence they do not interbreed. Indeed, but when their ranges do overlap, you do get hybrids.
Even full species can interbreed sometimes, and, as a fanatical birdwatcher, I have seen hybrid species of birds before.  In general, nowadays, genetic distance is used as a parameter to delimit species, subspecies and even geographic segments of species. Where none of those will do, we can use the term “race”, as you see below with California kingsnakes.
The average differences between some of the major human races may even be greater than the distance between some full species – this notion is controversial though. At any rate, race is clearly a biological reality in more ways than mere skin color.
It’s clear that race in humans is a warranted concept. The fear of it is only a fear that acknowledgment of the existence of race = racism. The project is to lie and deny that race exists for the greater good of a game called, “If you deny that race exists, racism will vanish.”
That this project with noble intentions is doomed is probable. We are what we are, and that is cavemen and cavewomen with suits and matching outfits.
Anyway, strictly biologically speaking, race is a valid concept.
Let us take for example a snake. I am a snake-o-phile, or whatever they are called. I love snakes.
Here in California there is a critter called the California kingsnake.
What is interesting about the CA kingsnake is that it lacks subspecies. Now, most snakes and many mammals and birds have subspecies.
But the CA kingsnake has things called “races” that are even below the level of the subspecies. They can look dramatically different from a regular kingsnake, but there is apparently not enough genetic variation there to cut them into subspecies, so they are just called races.
The notion of whether or not human races divide sufficiently to be called subspecies is not yet sorted out, with White Nationalists coming down on the side that the races really are subspecies, and everyone else not even wanting to touch the subject.
At any rate, to call the races races, below the level of subspecies, in a California kingsnake kind of way, is hardly going to be the end of the world. It’s not even a radical concept. Biologically speaking, it’s utterly banal.
Amazing that careers are destroyed over this stuff. How dumb can you get?