In her path-breaking book, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart, Ruth Behar encouraged anthropologists to consider questions of representation, authorship, subjectivity, emotion, and genre. Her work dovetailed with scholarship by Faye Harrison that encouraged us to seriously consider how anthropologists might decolonize a discipline that was once routinely reinscribed disparate power relations between observer and observed. In the twenty plus years since the publication of these key texts, anthropologists have pushed the boundaries of representation, rethinking how we observe and witness changing cultures and, perhaps more importantly how we participate and how we are affected by the communities in which we study. The papers in this panel explore what it means to vulnerable observers in this historical moment where anti-Latinx sentiment has reached a fever pitch. Rhetoric deployed by former President Trump launched policies and vigilantism that has further marginalized and subjugated migrant and racialized Latinx communities in the United States. As anthropologists who have been bearing witness to the violence of this moment, the papers in this panel seek new ways to both represent Latinx communities to stand alongside our interlocutors.

We are Already Hated: Social Death and Broken Hearts Among Latino Paparazzi Photographers of Los Angeles

Colonial and imperial regimes designed legal systems of exclusion, racialized violence, and material exploitation that continue to structure and influence institutional and governmental policies today. Meanwhile, civil society and state organizations frequently hold national institutions of power responsible for righting historical wrongs. Demands for reparation, repatriation, and other claims to material and moral redress at once utilize and challenge dominant policy landscapes in both the domestic and international arena. Ethnographers are in a position to witness, take account of, and critique the socio-legal relationships between human actors and the policies, data, documents, and materials that regulate processes of potential redress. This panel focuses on historical and contemporary bureaucracies that regulate responsibility for injury, injustice, and unethical behavior, and interrogates how ethnographers and the field of anthropology are implicated in the embrace and disavowal of these processes. This panel asks: How can ethnographers and researchers better document the scales of responsibility embedded in the law? Of what utility is the “slow (in)justice” of the law to persons, communities, and ‘post-colonial’ nation-states seeking immediate redress? What clarifications around ongoing forms of injustice does the investigation of policy give rise to? The panel, then, discusses how legal and administrative processes are negotiated, refused, and included in advocacy and justice work at “justice sites,” including museums and state organizations, and in contexts structured by hierarchies of power.

Archipelagic Policy: Small Island Displacement, Historic Compensation, and Diasporic Lives

"From Being Marginalized to Being the Margin of Victory": Becoming (Asian) American Through Legislation and Policy

Paperwork before Policy: Ancestrality as a Legal Artefact in Guyana

Policy Ethnography: Bureaucracies of Redress?

Reformism and Its Foreclosures: Futures of U.S. Policing

Silicosis, Suffering and Legitimacy: From Worker's Compensation to Welfarism?

Despite advances in the study of non-human animal tool behaviour, the sources of tool-use behaviours are still debated. Often, different social and individual learning variants are assumed to play a role in behaviour acquisition. However, without the use of experimental controls, it is impossible to pinpoint which type of learning is responsible for the behaviour in question. We argue that this issue should be addressed with recourse to experimental approaches rooted in classic ethology. Building on the pioneering work by the founders of Ethology (e.g., Nikolaas Tinberg and Konrad Lorenz), we suggest that baseline experiments must be carried out before conclusions can be drawn on the role of any type of learning mechanism in the acquisition of behaviours. For example, we carried out a baseline study on the mechanisms behind nut-cracking in orangutans. We tested 12 naïve, captive, unenculturated orangutans, across two testing institutions (Leipzig: Pongo abelii; Mage=20.3; age range=10-34; 4F; Zürich: 6 Pongo abelii and two Pongo pygmaeus; Mage=14; age range =2-30; 5F). The subjects were provided with the materials necessary for nut-cracking, and no demonstrations and/or training beforehand. Out of the twelve orangutans, at least four individuals, one from Leipzig and three from Zürich, spontaneously expressed nut-cracking with a wooden hammer in the baseline. These results suggest that the behavioural form of nut-cracking can emerge in orangutans through individual learning and non-copying social learning mechanisms.

What would classic Ethologists do? Examining the source of nut-cracking with naïve, unenculturated orangutans (Pongo abelii & Pongo pygmaeus)

Customary tool use by wild tufted capuchin monkeys seems to constitute behavioral traditions, i.e., to be individually acquired by socially biased learning. Social influences apparently involve attentional/motivational effects (“stimulus enhancement”), rather than imitative learning. Persistent manipulation increases opportunities for trial-and-error learning. This process can take a long time, but once proficiently successful in a given context, the use of a type of tool can be quickly generalized to new problems. The use of percussive stone tools is common in savanna populations of tufted capuchins, and where tool material is abundant, as in Serra da Capivara, can be quite diversified. This is also the only wild population where customary use of probe tools has been observed. When exposed to molasses-filled problem-boxes, after brief (unsuccessful) attempts to break them with stone “hammers”, several males quickly succeeded in using twig probes to access the molasses through the top holes. Almost three years later, when exposed to a different Plexiglas problem-box, they promptly brought some twigs. In an experiment on the innovation and diffusion of probe tools’ use in a semi-free group, after the slow and partial diffusion of probing a molasses’ problem-box, the successful individuals quickly succeeded in extracting seeds from another box, even though the probing technique involved was different (pushing). Afterwards, a distinct sort of problem-box also elicited probing attempts. Tool use generalization can facilitate the establishing of behavioral traditions not only by increasing direct individual rewards, but also by enhancing the opportunities for socially biased learning by naïve, tolerated observers.

Tool use generalization and behavioral traditions in tufted capuchin monkeys (Sapajus sp)

The patriarchal system is hegemonic in the contemporary world. In this study we aimed at understanding the causes of this prevalence, investigating the evolutionary origins of patriarchy. Our question was whether the masculine philopatry is related to the maintenance of the patriarchal structure. We conducted an integrative bibliographic review of the ethological literature, emphasizing the development of feminist concepts about patriarchy and the parental preferences on species evolutionarily close to humans. In addition, we analysed matrilineal communities such as Minangkabau, located at Indonesia, Asia; Mosuo, at China, Asia; and Umoja, at Quenia, Africa; and also two Brazilian social groups with traces of matriarchy, denominated Noiva do Cordeiro and Quebradeiras de Coco, for current alternatives that have dissociated from the prevailing patriarchy. In particular, Umoja and Noiva do Cordeiro were created in response to the preponderant sexism and violence suffered by its founders and other women, who came together to remodel their future actively. The ethological analysis allowed understanding the emergence of patriarchy, showing some socio-cultural contexts, such as sedentarism, language and parental preference, in certain cultures, as promoting its formation. Throughout this research, it was also noticeable that the number of scientific and academic studies on non-patriarchal societies, mainly in the scope of ethology, is quite little. Overall, the present study reveals a contrast between the patriarchy and distinct contemporary social configurations which have detached from feminine subordination, evincing that it is possible for our social systems to change and that we can carry out such transformation, as we understand and reflect about these processes.

Patriarchal hegemony from an ethological perspective and other social systems

A feedback loop between human self-domestication and dog domestication contributing to language evolution?

In this study, we used three years of house finch (Haemorhous mexicanus) song recordings spanning four decades in the introduced eastern range to assess how individual-level cultural transmission mechanisms drive population-level changes in birdsong. First, we developed an agent-based model (available as a new R package called TransmissionBias) that simulates the cultural transmission of house finch song given different parameters related to transmission biases, or biases in social learning that modify the probability of adoption of particular cultural variants. Next, we used approximate Bayesian computation and machine learning to estimate what parameter values likely generated the temporal changes in diversity in our observed data. We found evidence that strong content bias, likely targeted towards syllable complexity, plays a central role in the cultural evolution of house finch song in western Long Island. Frequency and demonstrator biases appear to be neutral or absent. Additionally, we estimated that house finch song is transmitted with extremely high fidelity. Future studies should use our simulation framework to better understand how cultural transmission and population declines influence song diversity in wild populations.

Underline digital video library

We are Already Hated: Social Death and Broken Hearts Among Latino Paparazzi Photographers of Los Angeles

Archipelagic Policy: Small Island Displacement, Historic Compensation, and Diasporic Lives

"From Being Marginalized to Being the Margin of Victory": Becoming (Asian) American Through Legislation and Policy

Paperwork before Policy: Ancestrality as a Legal Artefact in Guyana

Policy Ethnography: Bureaucracies of Redress?

Reformism and Its Foreclosures: Futures of U.S. Policing

Silicosis, Suffering and Legitimacy: From Worker's Compensation to Welfarism?

What would classic Ethologists do? Examining the source of nut-cracking with naïve, unenculturated orangutans (Pongo abelii & Pongo pygmaeus)

Tool use generalization and behavioral traditions in tufted capuchin monkeys (Sapajus sp)

Patriarchal hegemony from an ethological perspective and other social systems

A feedback loop between human self-domestication and dog domestication contributing to language evolution?

Content bias in the cultural evolution of house finch song

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