The Montreal massacre. Part II

In debating the causes of the Montreal Massacre, we must confront the psychological similarities between Marc Lépine and his father. Both seem to have had low thresholds for ideation and expression of violence. Was this quick temper passed down from father to son? Or are the similarities only fortuitous?

If these psychological characteristics had passed down from father to son, they could have done so in only one of two ways. The preferred explanation is some kind of role-model conditioning, i.e., Marc Lépine looked to his father as a model for future behavior. But this seems unlikely. Marc hated his father. He repeatedly said so and reproached his mother for not doing enough to protect him from his father’s rage. Nor did he try to renew contact with his father after his parents broke up.

We’re thus left with some kind of unconscious conditioning that occurred before the age of 7 (when his parents broke up) and then began to express itself after puberty. But this too seems unlikely. For one thing, it implies a kind of infancy determinism that is no longer widely accepted in child psychology (Harris, 1998; Kagan, 1996; Kagan, 1998). As Jerome Kagan (1996) points out:

If orphans who spent their first years in a Nazi concentration camp can become productive adults (Moskovitz, 1983) and if young children made homeless by war can learn adaptive strategies after being adopted by nurturing families (Rathbun, DeVirgilio, & Waldfogel, 1958; Winick, Meyer, & Harris, 1975), then one can question the belief that the majority of insecurely attached l-year-olds are at high risk for later psychological problems. Even the behavioral differences among animals in laboratory settings are not very stable from infancy to reproductive maturity: "The findings offer meager support for the idea that significant features of social interactions at maturity are fixed by experiences in early development" (Cairns & Hood, 1983, p. 353). This conclusion affirms a discovery, now more than 20 years old, that even the stereotyped, bizarre social behaviors of 6-month-old isolated macaques can be altered by placing them with younger female monkeys over a 26-week period (Suomi & Harlow, 1972). These facts are also in accord with data on humans. Werner and Smith (1982), who followed a large sample of children from infancy to early childhood, concluded, "As we watched these children grow from babyhood to adulthood, we could not help but respect the self-righting tendencies within them that produced normal development under all but the most persistently
adverse circumstances" (p. 159).

For another thing, children behaviorally resemble their parents even if removed from parental influence shortly after birth. When adopted children are compared with their biological parents, we see moderate to high heritability in transmission of male aggressiveness (Baker et al., 2007; Barker et al., 2009; Rhee and Waldman, 2002). Furthermore, the non-genetic factors seem largely unrelated to parental influence, being either peer pressure outside the home or developmental accidents before and after birth (Harris, 1998).

Thus, to explain the psychological similarities between Marc Lépine and his father, the likeliest cause is genetic transmission. Either that or the similarities are just fortuitous.

The latter possibility should not be ruled out. When Monique Lépine sued for divorce, Rachid Gharbi strenuously denied her claims that he had abused their son. So perhaps we’re hearing just one side of the story. Remember, these proceedings happened before the liberalization of Canada’s divorce laws. Monique had to provide evidence of abuse to get her divorce.

To find out Rachid Gharbi’s side of the story, I turned to an article by an Algerian author on the “Impact of parental upbringing on child development.” The author’s first point is that Algerian upbringing is sex-specific. In boys, violent behavior is accepted and even encouraged:

In Algerian society for example, children are raised according to their sex. A boy usually receives an authoritarian and severe type of upbringing that will prepare him to become aware of the responsibilities that await him in adulthood, notably responsibility for his family and for the elderly. This is why a mother will allow her son to fight in the street and will scarcely be alarmed if the boy has a fall or if she sees a bruise. The boy of an Algerian family is accustomed from an early age to being hit hard without whimpering too much. People orient him more toward combat sports and group games in order to arm him with courage and endurance—virtues deemed to be manly. (Assous, 2005)

The purpose of this upbringing is not to suppress male aggressiveness but rather to channel it in the right direction: loyalty to the family and to tradition:

It is true that, in Arab and Muslim culture, parents are encouraged to discipline a child and to teach him obedience and submission by first using methods of communication and patience, but in the case of rebellion and especially of non-respect of Islamic laws it is recommended to use corporal punishment (e.g., a child who does not practice prayer is reprimanded as early as 10 years of age). (Assous, 2005)

Parental control is especially problematic after puberty:

Thus, during adolescence for example, the child will become more and more difficult to control. This behavioral disorder evidently pushes the parents to display more ill treatment in their authority and the schoolteachers to be more severe. (Assous, 2005)

The author presents an analysis of this corporal punishment, on the basis of cases brought to the notice of hospital authorities:

- it is directed much more at boys than at girls, by a ratio of almost 3 to 1

- it is inflicted (in order of importance) by schoolteachers, parents, neighbors, and other relatives

- it usually involves the use of blunt, non-cutting objects: a belt, a pipe, or a wire

- it is directed (in order of importance) at the head, arms or legs, belly, and chest

- the injuries (in order of importance) are multiple fractures, bruises, burns, scratches, and bites

The author goes on to note:

In Algerian society, even today, the absolute authority of parents over their children is seldom called into question by adults if it is exercised judiciously and without apparent adverse effects, and even though it often happens that more or less serious incidents cannot be avoided by parents in the grip of an intense anger that they cannot manage to control. (Assous, 2005)

Clearly, Rachid Gharbi and Monique Lépine had different notions of how young boys should be brought up. Monique came from a cultural background where corporal punishment is a last resort and usually takes the form of spanking. The preferred form of punishment is shaming: the boy is made to realize that he has done something wrong. At that point, his sense of shame will do the rest. If the boy has no sense of shame, he is considered to be abnormal, if not mentally ill.

In contrast, Algerian parents use shaming mainly to control girls. For boys, it seems to be at best a secondary or even tertiary means of control, the main ones being the threat and use of corporal punishment.

Why is child discipline so different in Algeria? The reason seems to be that violence is much more omnipresent. The average Algerian male is more ready and willing to use violence preemptively or in self-defense. Social peace is maintained largely by an implicit balance of terror: violence is deterred by the threat of retaliation—if not by the victim, then by a male relative. Evidently, the balance cannot always be maintained...

This aspect of Algerian life is described by Frantz Fanon in Les damnés de la terre:

It’s a fact, the magistrates will tell you, that four fifths of the cases heard involve assault and battery. The crime rate in Algeria is one of the highest in the world, they claim. There are no petty delinquents. When the Algerian, and this applies to all North Africans, puts himself on the wrong side of the law, he always goes to extremes (Fanon, 2004, p. 222)

The act of violence itself shows less restraint and the precipitating causes seem banal:

Autopsies undeniably establish this fact: the killer gives the impression he wanted to kill an incalculable number of times given the equal deadliness of the wounds inflicted.

… Very often the magistrates and police officers are stunned by the motives for the murder: a gesture, an allusion, an ambiguous remark, a quarrel over the ownership of an olive tree or an animal that has strayed a few feet. The search for the cause, which is expected to justify and pin down the murder, in some cases a double or triple murder, turns up a hopelessly trivial motive. Hence the frequent impression that the community is hiding the real motives. (Fanon, 2004, p. 222)

The reason for this state of affairs ultimately goes back to the recentness of central authority in Algeria. Before the French conquest in the 19th century, each family depended on its male members to defend its interests. There were law courts, but they had no power to enforce their rulings. It was up to the aggrieved party to do the enforcement.

This situation was not unique. In fact, it was typical of all human societies and remains so in many parts of the world today. It changed only with the rise of central authority and its monopoly on the use of violence. With this change, the State put an end to the worst sort of tyranny: the daily fear of being assaulted or even killed, not by a foreign invader but by someone in your own town or village. The violent male went from hero to zero.

Initially, people complied with the new order by changing their behavior within the limits of phenotypic plasticity. The result was a more peaceful society where violent males were less often imitated, celebrated, and accommodated. This shift in the mean phenotype then contributed to a slower but similar shift in the mean genotype, by creating an environment that favored the reproduction of certain individuals at the expense of others. There was thus Baldwinian selection for individuals less predisposed to violence and more predisposed to submissiveness.

This process is described by the historical economist Gregory Clark with respect to England. Once central authority had become established, male homicide fell steadily from the twelfth century to the early nineteenth. Meanwhile, there was a parallel decline in blood sports and other forms of exhibitionist violence (cock fighting, bear and bull baiting, public executions) that nonetheless remained legal throughout this period. Clark ascribes this behavioral change to the reproductive success of upper- and middle-class individuals who differed statistically in their predispositions from the much larger lower class, including predispositions to violence. Although initially a small minority in medieval England, such individuals grew in number and their descendants gradually replaced the lower class through downward mobility. By the nineteenth century, their lineages accounted for most of the English population (Clark, 2007, pp. 124-129, 182-183; Clark, 2009).

Reference

Assous, A. (2005). L’impact de l’éducation parentale sur le développement de l’enfant, Hawwa, 3(3), 354-369.

Baker, L.A., K.C. Jacobson, A. Raine, D.I. Lozano, and S. Bezdjian. (2007). Genetic and environmental bases of childhood antisocial behavior: a multi-informant twin study, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 116, 219-235.

Barker, E.D., H. Larson, E. Viding, B. Maughan, F. Rijsdijk, N. Fontaine, and R. Plomin. (2009). Common genetic but specific environmental influences for aggressive and deceitful behaviors in preadolescent males, Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 31, 299-308.

Clark, G. (2009). The indicted and the wealthy: surnames, reproductive success, genetic selection and social class in pre-industrial England, http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/Farewell%20to%20Alms/Clark%20-Surnames.pdf

Clark, G. (2007). A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford.

Fanon, F. (2004). The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press.

Harris, J. R. (1998). The nurture assumption: Why children turn out the way they do, Free Press.

Kagan, J. (1998). Three Seductive Ideas, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

Kagan, J. (1996). Three pleasing ideas, American Psychologist, 51, 901-908.

Rhee, S.H., and I.D. Waldman. (2002). Genetic and environmental influences on antisocial behavior: A meta-analysis of twin and adoption studies, Psychological Bulletin, 128, 490-529.

The Montreal massacre ... 20 years later

On December 6, 1989, a 25-year-old man walked into Montreal’s École polytechnique and murdered fourteen women. The event is still being debated … twenty years later.

We know the immediate cause. The murderer, Marc Lépine, felt that places like the École polytechnique were training women to take jobs that had been mainly held by men like himself. In April 1989 he had met with a university admissions officer and complained about how women were taking over the job market. Earlier still, he had spoken out to men about his dislike of feminists, career women, and women in traditionally male occupations such as the police, saying that women should remain at home and care for their families. This resentment may have been exacerbated by his inability to find a girlfriend. He was generally ill at ease around women, tending to boss them around and showing off his knowledge in front of them

For many people, the debate stops there. Marc Lépine resented women, especially ‘feminists’, and this resentment led to the Montreal massacre. For others, such resentment does not in itself explain what happened. Lépine’s personal history points to a longstanding tendency toward asociality, short-temperedness, and ideation of violent behavior, particularly after he reached puberty in the late 1970s:

Late 1970s – When his sister made fun of him for not having a girlfriend, he fantasized about her death and made a mock grave for her.

September 1981 – He applied to join the Canadian Armed Forces as an officer cadet but was rejected during the interview process because he seemed antisocial and unable to accept authority.

1982-84 – At junior college, colleagues saw him as being nervous, hyperactive, and immature.

1987 – He lost his job at a hospital because of aggressive behavior, disrespect of superiors, and carelessness in his work. He was enraged at his dismissal, and at the time described a plan to go on a murderous rampage and then commit suicide. His friends said he was unpredictable and would fly into rages when frustrated.

Some people trace this behavioral pattern to his early childhood, specifically as the son of a Catholic French-Canadian mother, Monique Lépine, and a Muslim Algerian father, Rachid Liass Gharbi. The latter’s psychological profile looks very similar to Marc Lépine’s:

Gharbi was an authoritarian, possessive and jealous man, frequently violent towards his wife and his children. Gharbi had contempt for women and believed that they were only intended to serve men. He required his wife to act as his personal secretary, slapping her if she made any errors in typing, and forcing her retype documents in spite of the cries of their toddler. He was also neglectful and abusive towards his children, particularly his son, and discouraged any tenderness, as he considered it spoiling. In 1970, following an incident in which Gharbi struck his son so hard that the marks on his face were visible a week later, his mother decided to leave. (Marc Lépine - Wikipedia)

His mother had divorced his father over the issue of abuse, which had extended to the children. Beaten by his father, Rachid Liass Gharbi, for such minor problems as singing too loudly or failing to greet him in the morning, Lépine had learned to fear him.

"He was a brutal man," Monique Lépine told the court, "who did not seem to have any control over his emotions... It was always a physical gesture, a violent gesture, and always right in the face." Monique's sister confirmed these details to the judge, although Gharbi protested that they were not true. Nevertheless, the judge awarded custody to Monique. Still, young Gamil was not free of the man until he was 7 years old, and the exposure for that long to Gharbi's temper and beliefs had a strong influence. The boy so hated him that when he was 13, he changed his name to Marc Lépine. (Ramsland, 2004)

The hypothesis here is that Gharbi exerted a profound influence on his son’s future psychological development. Some rightwing bloggers go so far as to suggest that Marc Lépine himself became a Muslim, as evidenced by the beard he grew as a young man. This is unlikely for several reasons:

– He was baptized a Roman Catholic and received no religious instruction. His mother describes him as "a confirmed atheist all his life."

– He had no contact with his father past the age of 7.

– At the age of 14, he legally changed his name from Gamil Rodrigue Liass Gharbi to Marc Lépine. This was motivated partly by hatred of his father and partly by a desire to avoid being treated as an Arab at school.

– His suicide note contains no Islamic references. In fact, his use of several Latin expressions (Ad Patres, Casus Belli, Alea Jacta Est) suggests he still felt some connection with Roman Catholicism.

– As for his beard, he grew it to cover up his acne.

O.K., so Marc Lépine was not a crypto-Muslim. But maybe he unconsciously imitated his father’s behavior. We often hear this kind of argument at trials where a violent offender is shown to have had an equally violent father. The offender should thus be judged more leniently, given his poor role-model.

In Marc Lépine’s case, this kind of argument is at the limit of credibility. Remember, Gharbi was a hated parental figure who had left Lépine’s life at the age of 7. More to the point, we see the same psychological similarity between parents and their children even when the children are taken away shortly after birth and put up for adoption:

… compared to genetic children, American adoptees have a higher overall risk of contact with mental health professionals, specifically for eating disorders, learning disabilities, personality disorders and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder … They also have lower achievement and more problems in school, abuse drugs and alcohol more, and fight with or lie to parents more than genetic children …

… Adoptees may be genetically predisposed to negative outcomes at higher rates than the general population. Genetic factors clearly contribute to alcohol and drug addiction, as well as to some mental disorders like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and schizophrenia …. An association between nonviolent criminality has been found between European adoptees and their genetic parents … Furthermore, research with Swedish adoptees suggests 55-60% of their educational performance is explained by genetic factors, and that the number of years of school adoptees complete is significantly related to how many years their genetic mothers completed
... (Gibson, 2009).

On the specific issue of male aggressiveness, we see moderate to high heritability when adopted children are compared with their biological parents. A heritability of 40% is suggested by a meta-analysis of 51 twin and adoption studies (Rhee & Waldman, 2002). A later twin study indicates a heritability of 96%, the subjects being 9-10 year-olds from diverse ethnic backgrounds (Baker et al., 2007). This higher figure is due to the closer ages of the subjects and the use of a panel of evaluators to rate each of them. According to the latest twin study, heritability is 40% when the twins have different evaluators and 69% when they have the same evaluator (Barker et al., 2009).

This is not to say that the Montreal massacre was genetically inevitable. If Lépine had found a girlfriend, who would have put up with him, he would have probably become a man like his father but nothing more serious. The tragedy on December 6, 1989 resulted from three interacting factors: 1) a latent predisposition to violence, probably in the form of low thresholds for ideation and expression of violent behavior; 2) lack of close friends, especially female friends; and 3) an enabling ideology.

References

Baker, L.A., K.C. Jacobson, A. Raine, D.I. Lozano, and S. Bezdjian. (2007). Genetic and environmental bases of childhood antisocial behavior: a multi-informant twin study, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 116, 219-235.

Barker, E.D., H. Larson, E. Viding, B. Maughan, F. Rijsdijk, N. Fontaine, and R. Plomin. (2009). Common genetic but specific environmental influences for aggressive and deceitful behaviors in preadolescent males, Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, early view.

Gibson, K. (2009). Differential parental investment in families with both adopted and genetic children, Evolution and Human Behavior, 30, 184-189.

Lépine, Monique & H. Gagné. (2008). Aftermath, Viking.

Lépine, Marc. (1989). Lettre de Marc Lépine,
http://www.philo5.com/Feminisme-Masculisme/890612%20Lettre%20de%20Marc%20Lepine.htm

Marc Lépine - Wikipedia

Ramsland, K. (2004), Gendercide – The Montreal Massacre.
http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/mass/marc_lepine/10.html

Report of Coroner’s Investigation http://www.diarmani.com/Montreal_Coroners_Report.pdf

Rhee, S.H., and I.D. Waldman. (2002). Genetic and environmental influences on antisocial behavior: A meta-analysis of twin and adoption studies, Psychological Bulletin, 128, 490-529.

Recent evolution of complex behavior

I once knew an African student who told me that his language had no words for “good” or “evil”. When the missionaries translated their materials into his language, they had to write “Jesus is beautiful” instead of “Jesus is good.”

This sort of semantic evolution has occurred in all human languages. People have expressed new concepts by recycling older ones. Typically, these older concepts refer to primary sensations that are largely hardwired, i.e., ‘beautiful’, ‘cold’, ‘hot’, and so on.

Interestingly, it looks as if some of this hardwiring is being reused when we imagine evolutionarily recent concepts. For instance, when we recognize someone as friendly, we use neural pathways that are associated with the recognition of warmth.

During the autumn of 2006, a series of volunteers arrived at Yale University's psychology building. Each was greeted in the lobby by a researcher, who accompanied them up to the fourth floor. In the elevator, the researcher casually asked the volunteer to hold the drink she was carrying while she noted down their name. The subjects did not know it, but the experiment began the moment they took the cup.Once in the lab, the 40 or so volunteers read a description of a fictitious person and then answered questions about the character. Those who had held an iced coffee, rather than a hot one, rated the imaginary figure as less warm and friendly, even though eachvolunteer had read the same description. Answers to other questions about the figure, such as whether the character appeared honest, were unaffected by the type of drink. (Williams & Bargh, 2008).

Similarly, we have developed the ability to form moral judgments by building upon a mental algorithm that serves to judge cleanliness:

In one recent study, Simone Schnall at the University of Plymouth, UK, and colleagues showed half their volunteers a neutral film and the other half the toilet scene from the film Trainspotting. (The uninitiated need only use their imagination here: the clip features what is described as the "worst toilet in Scotland".) Those who viewed the Trainspotting clip subsequently made more severe judgements about unethical acts such as cannibalism than volunteers who had viewed the neutral scene. Exposing subjects to a fart smell and placing them in a filthy room had a similar effect (Schnall et al., 2008).

Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto in Canada and Katie Liljenquist, now at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, asked volunteers to read a first-person account of either an ethical act or an act of sabotage. They then had to rate the desirability of various household objects, including soap, toothpaste, CD cases and chocolate bars. Those who had read the sabotage story showed a greater preference for the cleaning products than those who had not.

A self-perception of physical cleanliness thus seems linked to one of moral cleanliness. Moreover, like Pontius Pilate, the mere act of washing your hands reduces feelings of moral responsibility.

… In another part of their study, Zhong's team asked volunteers to recall an unethical deed from their past. Under the guise of a health and safety precaution, he then gave half the subjects antiseptic wipes to clean their hands. The participants were then asked if they would take part in another experiment, this time to help out a desperate graduate student. Only 40 per cent of the subjects who had cleaned their hands volunteered, compared with almost three-quarters of those who hadn't. (Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006)

These studies suggest an answer to a question that has bothered me. How is that complex and relatively recent social behaviors often have moderate to high heritabilities? Surely such hardwiring would have taken an impossibly long time to evolve? Just think of all the genes involved…

Well, the answer is surprisingly simple. Natural selection has simply altered a hardwired algorithm that already exists. There’s no need to build it all from scratch. You just jerry-rig what you already have.


Update

Mangan’s Miscellany is back!! In fact, he's back at his old address (www.mangans.blogspot.com) and at a new one (www.mangans.typepad.com/mangans).


References

Giles, J. (2009). Icy stares and dirty minds: Hitch-hiking emotions, New Scientist 2725:http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327252.200-icy-stares-and-dirty-minds-hitchhiking-emotions.html* 15 September 2009

Schnall, S., J. Haidt, G.L. Clore, A.H. Jordan. (2008). Disgust as embodied moral judgment, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 1096-1109.

Williams, L.E. & J.A. Bargh. (2008). Experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth, Science, 322, 606-607

Zhong, C.B. & K. Liljenquist, K. (2006). Washing away your sins: Threatened moralityand physical cleansing, Science, 313, 1451-1452.

Does civilization select against intelligence?

We know the brain has been evolving in human populations quite recently," said paleoanthropologist John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Surprisingly, based on skull measurements, the human brain appears to have been shrinking over the last 5,000 or so years.

"When it comes to recent evolutionary changes, we currently maybe have the least specific details with regard the brain, but we do know from archaeological data that pretty much everywhere we can measure - Europe, China, South Africa, Australia - that brains have shrunk about 150 cubic centimeters, off a mean of about 1,350. That's roughly 10 percent," Hawks said.

"As to why is it shrinking, perhaps in big societies, as opposed to hunter-gatherer lifestyles, we can rely on other people for more things, can specialize our behavior to a greater extent, and maybe not need our brains as much," he added. (source)

It’s usually assumed that humans have steadily increased in intellectual capacity. But what if this trend reversed with the advent of civilization? As societies grow more complex, perhaps the average human has not had to know so much. He or she can ‘delegate’ tasks (not that such delegation is always voluntary). Perhaps civilization has made us dumber, not smarter.

Yes, the ‘great civilizations’ have made major contributions to the arts and sciences, typically through upper-class patronage of creative individuals—who otherwise would have to worry about their next meal. The down side, however, is that this emancipation of creativity requires a much larger number of helots. The latter also specialize in their own way—in doing the grunt work that others consider beneath them.

In the ancient world, intellectual life—the debating, pondering, and creating of new ideas—was confined to a small powerless minority, too few in number to generate the critical mass that makes intellectual ferment possible. There were no conferences, no academic journals, and no scientific associations. For the most part, there were only isolated individuals who felt estranged from the world around them. The more renowned ones had disciples in their entourage. But that was it.

This situation contrasts with that of Western Europe and then North America from the 17th century to the 20th. That intellectual ferment was broad-based. It took place within a large swath of the population that could understand the ideas being generated, and that could argue the pros and cons. It was this democratization of intellectual activity that made the West so exceptional.

I’m increasingly convinced that extreme social stratification—i.e., the creation of a small class of intellectuals and a much larger helot class—is inimical to true scientific progress. The intellectuals are too few in number, and too dependent on the system, to make any real contribution.

Skin bleaching

Since the mid-20th century, ‘skin bleaching’ has become more and more common among dark-skinned populations. It involves lightening skin color by means of topical preparations that contain hydroquinone, cortisone, or mercury. These products are effective, but prolonged use may damage the skin by making the epidermis thinner and by breaking down collagen fibers. Despite being condemned by the medical profession and increasingly restricted by governments, they can easily be obtained in various places: hair-stylist salons, subway stations, African public markets, etc.

Skin bleachers seem to be used the most in South Asia and its diaspora. Next come sub-Saharan Africa and its diaspora (West Indies, Brazil, United States, Western Europe, etc.), the Philippines and elsewhere in Asia. The market is mainly young and female. Thus, rate of use is 61.4% among Surinamese women of Indian origin less than 26 years old, as compared to 13.1% among young Surinamese of other origins (Javanese, African, etc.) (Menke, 2002).

In Africa, rate of use is 25% in Bamako, Mali, up to 52% in Dakar, Senegal, up to 35% in Pretoria, South Africa, and up to 77% in Lagos, Nigeria (Ntambwe, 2004). The practice has become so widespread that it has been nicknamed maquillage – ‘make-up’ (Ondongo, 1984). According to one African specialist, men encourage it by considering light-skinned women to be more attractive, intelligent, moral, desirable, and chaste. In contrast, dark-skinned women are said to look mean, evil, stupid, and untrustworthy (Ntambwe, 2004). This opinion is consistent with the results of a survey among Ghanaian women. Most of the respondents thought that men prefer light skin in a woman: “Sometimes if you really want to marry a particular man, you have to bleach” (Fokuo, 2009)

In Jamaica, users do not seem motivated by shame of their Black identity. Surveys show them having as much racial self-esteem as non-users. The motivation is more to make one’s face ‘cool’, to imitate one’s peers, to look pretty and attract a partner, and to feel good about oneself. There is also the influence of popular culture, such as Eurocentric beauty contests and singers who glorify women with light brown skin. In the dance-hall song Browning, Buju Banton says he loves his light-skinned girlfriend, his ‘browning’, more than his car, his motorbike, and his money. In Bleach On, Captain Barkey tells girls to keep on bleaching their skin (Charles, 2009).

Strangely, these products have become increasingly popular among South Asians, Africans, and West Indians for the past half-century, yet the same period has also seen these peoples regain much of their cultural independence. In advertising, magazines, or TV serials, one sees many more women from the local population than there were before.

Actually, it’s not so strange. Back when the local media recycled images of women from Western sources, the female audience had trouble identifying with them; there was a gap between the two. Because these images are now adapted to the local reality, they project a stronger normative influence on local women, who are keener to imitate them. These women, however, are still darker-skinned than the somatic norm being projected. This is especially so with Indian ‘Bollywood’ films but is also the case with serial dramas in Latin America and the Arab world.

References

Charles, C.A.D. (2009). Skin bleachers’ representations of skin color in Jamaica, Journal of Black Studies, 40, 153-170.

Charles, C.A.D. (2003). Skin bleaching, self-hate, and Black identity in Jamaica, Journal of Black Studies, 33, 711-728.

Fokuo, J. Konadu. (2009). The lighter side of marriage: Skin bleaching in post-colonial Ghana, Research Review NS, 25(1), 47-66.

Menke, J. (2002). Skin bleaching in multi-ethnic and multicolored societies. The case of Suriname, paper presented to the CSA Conference, Nassau, Bahamas, May 27 – June 1, 2002, Coping with Challenges, Contending with Change.
http://www.colorfoundation.org/pdf/skin%20bleach%20Sur%20CSA%20220502.doc

Ntambwe, M. (2004), 'Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the FAIREST of them all?' Science in Africa, March. http://www.scienceinafrica.co.za/2004/march/skinlightening.htm

Ondongo, J. (1984), Noir ou blanc ? Le vécu du double dans la pratique du « maquillage » chez les Noirs, Nouvelle Revue d’Ethnopsychiatrie, 2, 37-65.

Lévi-Strauss and gene-culture co-evolution

With the recent death of Claude Lévi-Strauss, there has been an outpouring of praise for his contributions to anthropology, notably the struggle for a more politically conscious anthropology and the shift from biological determinism to cultural determinism. This praise tells us more about the praisers than about Lévi-Strauss himself. In truth, he scarcely resembled the image presented in most of his obituaries, having denounced in his book Tristes tropiques the intrusion of a “utopian spirit” into his field.

With a shelter of legalistic and formalistic rationalism, we similarly build an image of the world and society where all problems can be settled by a courtroom approach whose logic is artful maneuvering, and we do not realize that the universe is no longer composed of what we are talking about.

Nor was he a complete cultural determinist. Like many thinkers of his generation, he felt that culture has contributed just as much as biology to differences among human populations. This is not, however, the same as believing that biology has created only skin-deep differences. He made this clear in a speech at our university in 1979:

… I would not feel truly anthropologist or structuralist if I did not accept that all questions should be discussed, and the question of the respective share of nature and nurture in human culture seems to me one of the most important ones we can and ought to ask ourselves. This issue has been made sterile for years and years by the false categorizations of physical anthropology related to the belief in the existence of human races.

However, we must not forget that, as anthropologists, the aspects of the question that will always appeal to us will be much less the genetic determination of culture or cultures than the cultural determination of genetics. By this I mean that a culture always will be made much less by its members’ gene pool than it will contribute to shaping and altering this gene pool.

The selection pressure of culture—the fact that it favors certain types of individuals rather than others through its forms of organization, its ideas of morality, and its aesthetic values—can do infinitely more to alter a gene pool than the gene pool can do to shape a culture, all the more so because a culture’s rate of change can certainly be much faster than the phenomena of genetic drift. (Lévi-Strauss, 1979, p. 24-25)

He is clearly referring here to the concept of gene-culture co-evolution. But just what are these genetic traits that cultures have shaped differently in different human populations? He doesn’t seem to mean minor physiological processes, like an improved ability to digest milk or carbohydrates. In fact, he seems to be referring to mental and behavioral traits, especially when he mentions ‘ideas of morality’. Is he saying that there has been selection for differences in moral capacity among human populations?

And if cultures have shaped different gene pools differently wouldn’t these gene pools be ‘races’? Did Lévi-Strauss think through this line of thought? Perhaps in denying the race concept he was simply making the kind of ritual denunciation that most anthropologists make … and only half-believe.

It is probably too late to find out what he really meant. This is not a line of thought that he seems to have pursued in his other publications, at least none I am aware of.

References

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1985). Claude Lévi-Strauss à l’université Laval, Québec (septembre 1979), prepared by Yvan Simonis, Documents de recherche no. 4, Laboratoire de recherches anthropologiques, Département d’anthropologie, Faculté des Sciences sociales, Université Laval.

Lévi-Strauss, C., (1955). Tristes tropiques, Paris.

Was Roman Britain multiracial?

Historians often assume that the Romans changed Britain politically but not demographically. The indigenous elites adopted Roman culture while the mass of the population remained Celtic. When the Anglo-Saxons arrived in the fifth century, much of this population fled to Wales and Cornwall, where they would retain their language and traditions. Meanwhile, those who remained behind were obliterated through a process of ethnic cleansing and coerced assimilation.

This historical account may be false. First, the Roman occupation seems to have brought profound demographic change. This has been suspected for some time on the basis of unusual burial objects and epigraphic inscriptions that record the presence of individuals from throughout the Roman Empire. Now, after analyzing remains from two burial grounds near Roman York, a research team has concluded that the buried individuals had diverse geographic origins (Leach et al., 2009). In particular, the craniometric data revealed many of sub-Saharan or Egyptian origin. At the ‘Trentholme Drive’ burial ground, 66% clustered most closely with Europeans, 23% with sub-Saharan Africans, and 11% with Egyptians. At the ‘Railway’ burial ground, the proportions were 53% European, 32% sub-Saharan, and 15% Egyptian.

York was a legionary fortress, so these individuals may have been legionnaires. There are, in fact, epigraphic references to African soldiers and even a written account about one in a history of the Emperor Septimius Severus (146-211 AD) (Scriptores Historiae Augustae, p. 425).

On another occasion, when he was returning to his nearest quarters from an inspection of the wall at Luguvallium (Carlisle) in Britain, at a time when he had not only proved victorious but had concluded a perpetual peace, just as he was wondering what omen would present itself, an Ethiopian soldier, who was famous among buffoons and always a notable jester, met him with a garland of cypress-boughs. And when Severus in a rage ordered that the man be removed from his sight, the Ethiopian by way of jest cried, it is said, “You have been all things, now, O conqueror, be a god.”

Why were these Africans so far from home? In the case of the Egyptians, Rome thought it unwise to station soldiers among people of the same ethnic background. The temptation would be strong to side with the locals if a rebellion occurred. In the case of the sub-Saharan Africans, they were recruited into the army for the same reason that Germanic barbarians were recruited: Rome could not meet its manpower requirements solely from within its empire. There was also a perception that the Romans had become soft and that barbarians made better soldiers.

Finally, Rome, like many multi-national empires, had a policy of moving people around in order to promote a common identity and to eliminate ethnic distinctiveness. The Assyrians had perfected this policy, e.g., the deportation of the Jews to Babylon and their replacement by other peoples. The Roman authorities used their army to this end. They wished to create an atomized society where regionalism or ethnicity could not mobilize resistance to imperial rule.

It is likely that these legionnaires had a major demographic impact wherever they were stationed, especially if we include the many officials, petty functionaries, traders, and others who came in their wake. Much of Roman Britain thus seems to have been Romanized in culture and multiethnic in origin.

This, in turn, calls for a few other reinterpretations. Wales and Cornwall are not Celtic-speaking today because they took in Romano-British refugees fleeing Anglo-Saxon invaders. They were simply those parts of Britain that had remained Celtic in language, culture, and population. The rest—present-day England—had long become heavily Romanized and cosmopolitan.

Nor do we have to postulate a process of ethnic cleansing and coerced assimilation to explain the extinction of Roman Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries. As Seccombe (1992) points out, the Roman Empire suffered from negative population growth. Not enough people married and had children to offset relatively high mortality among infants and young adults. In breaking down local collective identities, whether ethnic or regional, the Empire had created an atomized and increasingly anonymous society without the carrots and sticks that tightly knit societies use to push individuals down the path of family formation.

Once Rome had pulled its troops out of Britain in the early 5th century, there was no longer an inflow of people to offset the demographic deficit. The local population fell into decline, and the decline accelerated in the 6th century when plagues killed three out of every ten people. The Romano-British needed no help from the Anglo-Saxons to die out. They did it largely on their own.

References

Leach, S., M. Lewis, C. Chenery, G. Müldner, & H. Eckardt. (2009). Migration and diversity in Roman Britain: A multidisciplinary approach to the identification of immigrants in Roman York, England, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 140, 546-561.

Scriptores Historiae Augustae – Septimius Severus 22:4-6, transl. D. Magie (1922-1932) Vol 1, London: Heinemann.

Seccombe, W. (1992). A Millennium of Family Change. London: Verso.