Some articles...
Dec. 23rd, 2005 12:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One on some apparently gay mummies in Egypt...
A Mystery, Locked in Timeless Embrace
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
When Egyptologists entered the tomb for the first time more than four decades ago, they expected to be surprised. Explorers of newly exposed tombs always expect that, and this time they were not disappointed - they were confounded.
It was back in 1964, outside Cairo, near the famous Step Pyramid in the necropolis of Saqqara and a short drive from the Sphinx and the breathtaking pyramids at Giza. The newfound tomb yielded no royal mummies or dazzling jewels. But the explorers stopped in their tracks when the light of their kerosene lamp shined on the wall art in the most sacred chamber.
There, carved in stone, were the images of two men embracing. Their names were inscribed above: Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep. Though not of the nobility, they were highly esteemed in the palace as the chief manicurists of the king, sometime from 2380 to 2320 B.C., in the time known as the fifth dynasty of the Old Kingdom. Grooming the king was an honored occupation.
Archaeologists were taken aback. It was extremely rare in ancient Egypt for an elite tomb to be shared by two men of apparently equal standing. The usual practice was for such mortuary temples to be the resting place of one prominent man, his wife and children.
And it was most unusual for a couple of the same sex to be depicted locked in an embrace. In other scenes, they are also shown holding hands and nose-kissing, the favored form of kissing in ancient Egypt. What were scholars to make of their intimate relationship?
Over the years, the tomb's wall art has been subjected to learned analysis, inspiring considerable speculation. One interpretation is that the two men are brothers, probably identical twins, and this may be the earliest known depiction of twins. Another is that the men had a homosexual relationship, a more recent view that has gained support among gay advocates.
Now, an Egyptologist at New York University has stepped into the debate with a third interpretation. He has marshaled circumstantial evidence that the two menmay have been conjoined twins, popularly known as Siamese twins. The expert, David O'Connor, a professor of ancient Egyptian art at the N.Y.U. Institute of Fine Arts, said: "My suggestion is that Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were indeed twins, but of a very special sort. They were conjoined twins, and it was this physical peculiarity that prompted the many depictions of them hand-holding or embracing in their tomb-chapel."
Dr. O'Connor elaborated on his hypothesis in a recent lecture and in an interview in New York. He is describing and defending the idea before scholarly peers at a conference, "Sex and Gender in Ancient Egypt," this week at the University of Wales in Swansea.
Opposition to his proposal promises to be spirited. Most Egyptologists accept the normal-twins interpretation advanced most prominently by John Baines, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford in England.
"It's a very persuasive case Baines makes," Dr. O'Connor acknowledged.
And he noted that the gay-couple hypothesis had become the popular idea in the last decade. A leading proponent is Greg Reeder, an independent scholar in San Francisco and a contributing editor of KMT, a magazine of Egyptian art and history. The most Google references to the tomb, archaeologists say, concern the homosexual idea.
The gay argument leans on the analogy with depictions of married heterosexual couples in Egyptian art, which was first suggested by Nadine Cherpion, a French archaeologist.
Because the embraces of heterosexual couples in the tomb art convey an implicit erotic and sexual relationship, and perhaps the belief of its continuation in the afterlife, Mr. Reeder and his allies contend that similar scenes involving the two men have the same significance, that they presumably are gay partners.
Calling attention to the most intimate scene of the two embracing men, Mr. Reeder said: "They are so close together here that not only are they face to face and nose to nose, but so close that the knots on their belts are touching, linking their lower torsos. If this scene were composed of a male-female couple instead of the same-sex couple we have here, there would be little question concerning what it is we are seeing."
In an interview last week, Mr. Reeder said Dr. O'Connor's new interpretation was fascinating, but added, "It's the most extreme and unnecessary theory."
Dr. Baines, in an e-mail message from Oxford, said that he "would stick with my own interpretation, because it seems to me to require the smallest amount of 'exceptionalism' and to fit reasonably well with other patterns."
As for the sexual implications of the embracing poses, Dr. Baines has suggested that they could signify the "socially and emotionally linked roles" of two men who probably were twins.
Or they could symbolize "protection or close identification and reciprocity" between the two.
Ancient Egyptian art, experts say, is not meant always to be taken literally.
James Allen, an Egyptologist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art who is not involved in the research, called the twins hypothesis probable and the conjoined-twins idea "an interesting wrinkle." The least likely, he said, was the homosexual-relationship proposal.
Dr. Baines said, "The gay-couple idea is essentially derived from imposing modern preoccupations on ancient materials and not attending to the cultural context."
If Dr. O'Connor is correct, the tomb holds a rare example of documented conjoined twins that early in history, he said, and thus an insight into ancient Egyptian attitudes toward disabilities. He cited other records, and art of the dwarf Seneb, who in a somewhat later court was "overseer of dwarfs in charge of dressing" the king and a tutor of the royal sons, both positions of elite status. Egyptians appear to have viewed such people as auspicious figures, not freaks.
"The creator gods had made everything, dwarfs, two-headed calves and conjoined twins," Dr. O'Connor said. "A king felt more elevated for having these singular creatures to serve him as manicurists."
Like most elite tombs, this one was built of stone masonry and had several chambers, the most sacred the chapel or cult room. Here, survivors of the deceased brought offerings and paid homage. Beneath the room was the burial chamber. The remains of the two men were not found.
Egyptian tombs typically represent the lives of the departed in art and script. Images of the two men and hieroglyphic inscriptions about them and their families are everywhere, in corridors and in the chapel. The two men had wives who are named and represented in the art. Yet there are no scenes of them embracing their wives.
Their apparently close relationship and equal standing are illustrated not only in images of them together, either holding hands or embracing. In other instances, Dr. O'Connor said, one man appears alone on a wall face, and the other on the opposing wall. Their stature and pose are identical, and they are performing similar acts. While one fishes in the marshes, for example, the other hunts birds in the same setting.
These scenes and the ones of intimate embraces led to the speculation, initially by Mounir Basta, the Egyptian archaeologist who first explored the tomb, that Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were brothers, probably twins. Dr. Baines developed the idea in a seminal study in the 1980's, and others took up the gay-couple idea.
When Dr. O'Connor looked into the matter, he was struck by a comparison of the images of the two men with pictures of Chang and Eng, the famous conjoined twins born in 1811 in Siam. They were seen close together, arm in arm. They and a number of documented conjoined twins also had wives and children and engaged in strenuous activities, much like the hunting and fishing of the two Egyptians.
Their names, Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep suggest another clue, Dr. O'Connor said. Both names refer to the god Khnum, the deity who fashions the form of a child in the womb. Though not an uncommon part of Egyptian names, in this case it might be a play on words to signify their paired lives.
David Silverman, an Egyptologist at the University of Pennsylvania, and his student Joshua Robinson pointed out to Dr. O'Connor that the name Khnum was also similar to the ancient Egyptian word khenem, which means "to unite" or "be united."
One problem, however, is that none of the tomb art shows a physical link between the two men, as in some pictures of Chang and Eng.
Egyptian mortuary art, Dr. O'Connor said, "operates in terms of idealized types, not actual figures."
"It's not photographic art," he added.
Dr. Allen of the Metropolitan Museum agreed, saying, "Egyptian art was symbolic, and it is doubtful the Egyptians would have tried to represent realistically the join between these twins."
Whether the two men were normal twins, conjoined twins or a gay couple, the speculation highlights a problem and an opportunity for scholars.
"We don't have a lot of information about how twins were viewed in ancient Egypt or how gay life was perceived," Dr. Allen said.
Few accounts refer to twins of any kind in the civilization, and an honored role for conjoined twins, if that is what they were, would be even stronger evidence of Egyptian attitudes toward people with physical disabilities.
"Such attributes were often seen as fabulous rather than monstrous, and positive rather than negative," Dr. O'Connor said. "They attested the creator god's ability, if he wished, to bring wondrous changes upon the norms he himself had established."
Besides, Dr. O'Connor pointed out, "The fact that they could have worked simultaneously on the grooming of the king's two hands might have been seen as especially appropriate and desirable."
Homosexuality was only occasionally referred to in Egyptian documents, sometimes in myths of certain gods, implying that it was not considered a normal relationship. The prevailing attitude, scholars say, was not antigay, though probably negative, and certainly not as accepting of homosexual activity it was in classical Greece.
If the tomb of the two men was indeed a public profession of their emotional and sexual attachment, scholars say, it could inspire a reassessment of the place of homosexuals in Egyptian culture.
Defending his interpretation, Mr. Reeder said the similarity of the embracing scenes with those of husbands and wives should not be dismissed. He further noted, in his lecture in Wales, new evidence that he said suggested that one of the men died well before the other. Khnumhotep was described in one place as being honored by a great god, possibly meaning he had by then entered the afterlife, while in a corresponding scene Niankhkhnum had only official titles of his career in life.
If, then, Niankhkhnum was the one who finished decorating the tomb, Mr. Reeder said, it was unlikely that they were conjoined twins. "They would have had to be surgically separated," he said in an interview. "The Egyptians had surgical knowledge. But separating such twins would be expecting too much."
The fact that the two men had families is not seen as contradicting the gay hypothesis, Egyptologists said. Like others of the time, the two men would presumably have sired children to carry on after them and maintain the cult dedicated to their well-being through eternity.
Mr. Reeder said his hypothesis "resonates in the gay community because it shows two historical men being intimate with each other, and this was something that could be shown in an ancient culture."
Dr. O'Connor acknowledged the interpretation's appeal. "Gays and lesbians still experience a great deal of prejudice and discrimination, and these two ancient Egyptians are yet further proof that homosexuality goes far back in history," he said.
"The semipublic nature of their tomb chapel," he added, "suggests their gay relationship was accepted as normative by the elite of a particularly famous and illustrious civilization."
Finally, Dr. O'Connor conceded that the conjoined-twins hypothesis, like the other two, is not "fully supported by conclusive evidence."
On mama squid
Scientists' Discovery in the Deep Casts Some Squid Mothers in a Brighter Light
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
With their slimy tentacles and big, unblinking eyes, squids have, over the centuries, acquired a bad reputation.
Jules Verne's squid attacked a submarine. Peter Benchley's dined on children.
The squid has fared little better in the world of science, with researchers concluding that, unlike octopuses and some fish, squids are inattentive parents, depositing eggs on the seabed and letting them grow or die on their own.
But a team of ocean scientists exploring the inky depths of the Monterey Canyon off California has discovered that at least one squid species cares for its young with loving attention, the mother cradling the eggs in her arms for months, waving her tentacles to bathe the eggs in fresh seawater. The scientists suspect that other species are doting parents, too, and that misperceptions about squid behavior have arisen because the deep is so poorly explored.
"Our finding is unexpected because this behavior differs from the reproductive habits of all other known squid species," the scientists wrote in the Dec. 15 issue of Nature, the weekly science journal. "We expect it to be found in other squids."
Brad A. Seibel, a biologist at the University of Rhode Island and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, who led the research, said in an interview that the insight began in 1995. Then a graduate student, he pulled up a trawl bucket from the dark midwaters of the Monterey Canyon, which is as deep as two miles, and found a mass of squid eggs. Nearby in the bucket lay a female of the species Gonatus onyx, which grows to a length of about 10 inches.
The next year, the same thing happened again, except this time the young were hatchlings, just emerging from their eggs.
Recalling his previous catch, Dr. Seibel theorized that he had stumbled upon something that amounted to heresy. It seemed that the females had been brooding their eggs. In 2000, he proposed the idea in print, prompting skeptical rejoinders.
The breakthrough came in 2001, when Dr. Seibel and his colleagues at Monterey sent a car-size robot into the depths of the canyon. There, more than a mile down, the robot's lights and camera spied the heresy in action - a female brooding her eggs.
"I was delighted," Dr. Seibel recalled, and "surprised that we found them."
Since then, he and teammates exploring the canyon's deep waters have discovered five female squids holding their eggs, gently protecting and nourishing them. The attentive females extend their arms every 30 to 40 seconds, moving water through the masses of 2,000 to 3,000 eggs.
This action, the scientists wrote in Nature, probably serves to aerate the eggs in the canyon's oxygen-poor waters. The scientists estimate that the squid, in the class of animals known as cephalopods, which also includes the octopus and the cuttlefish, broods its eggs for as long as nine months.
The other researchers are Bruce H. Robison and Steven H. D. Haddock of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, in Moss Landing, Calif.
The attention and nurturing, Dr. Seibel said, surely promotes survival. "It's very successful," he noted, Gonatus onyx being one of the most abundant cephalopods in the Pacific Ocean.
On the Ariaal tribe in Africa, and how studied they are.
Remote and Poked, Anthropology's Dream Tribe
By MARC LACEY
Correction Appended
LEWOGOSO LUKUMAI, Kenya - The rugged souls living in this remote desert enclave have been poked, pinched and plucked, all in the name of science. It is not always easy, they say, to be the subject of a human experiment.
"I thought I was being bewitched," Koitaton Garawale, a weathered cattleman, said of the time a researcher plucked a few hairs from atop his head. "I was afraid. I'd never seen such a thing before."
Another member of the tiny and reclusive Ariaal tribe, Leketon Lenarendile, scanned a handful of pictures laid before him by a researcher whose unstated goal was to gauge whether his body image had been influenced by outside media. "The girls like the ones like this," he said, repeating the exercise later and pointing to a rather slender man much like himself. "I don't know why they were asking me that," he said.
Anthropologists and other researchers have long searched the globe for people isolated from the modern world. The Ariaal, a nomadic community of about 10,000 people in northern Kenya, have been seized on by researchers since the 1970's, after one - an anthropologist, Elliot Fratkin - stumbled upon them and began publishing his accounts of their lives in academic journals.
Other researchers have done studies on everything from their cultural practices to their testosterone levels. National Geographic focused on the Ariaal in 1999, in an article on vanishing cultures.
But over the years, more and more Ariaal - like the Masai and the Turkana in Kenya and the Tuaregs and Bedouins elsewhere in Africa - are settling down. Many have migrated closer to Marsabit, the nearest town, which has cellphone reception and even sporadic Internet access.
The scientists continue to arrive in Ariaal country, with their notebooks, tents and bizarre queries, but now they document a semi-isolated people straddling modern life and more traditional ways.
"The era of finding isolated tribal groups is probably over," said Dr. Fratkin, a professor at Smith College who has lived with the Ariaal for long stretches and is regarded by some of them as a member of the tribe.
For Benjamin C. Campbell, a biological anthropologist at Boston University who was introduced to the Ariaal by Dr. Fratkin, their way of life, diet and cultural practices make them worthy of study.
Other academics agree. Local residents say they have been asked over the years how many livestock they own (many), how many times they have had diarrhea in the last month (often) and what they ate the day before yesterday (usually meat, milk or blood).
Ariaal women have been asked about the work they do, which seems to exceed that of the men, and about local marriage customs, which compel their prospective husbands to hand over livestock to their parents before the ceremony can take place.
The wedding day is one of pain as well as joy since Ariaal women - girls, really - have their genitals cut just before they marry and delay sex until they recuperate. They consider their breasts important body parts, but nothing to be covered up.
The researchers may not know this, but the Ariaal have been studying them all these years as well.
The Ariaal note that foreigners slather white liquid on their very white skin to protect them from the sun, and that many favor short pants that show off their legs and the clunky boots on their feet. Foreigners often partake of the local food but drink water out of bottles and munch on strange food in wrappers between meals, the Ariaal observe.
The scientists leave tracks as well as memories behind. For instance, it is not uncommon to see nomads in T-shirts bearing university logos, gifts from departing academics.
In Lewogoso Lukumai, a circle of makeshift huts near the Ndoto Mountains, nomads rushed up to a visitor and asked excitedly in the Samburu language, "Where's Elliot?"
They meant Dr. Fratkin, who describes in his book "Ariaal Pastoralists of Kenya" how in 1974 he stumbled upon the Ariaal, who had been little known until then. With money from the University of London and the Smithsonian Institution, he was traveling north from Nairobi in search of isolated agro-pastoralist groups in Ethiopia. But a coup toppled Haile Selassie, then the emperor, and the border between the countries was closed.
So as he sat in a bar in Marsabit, a boy approached and, mistaking him for a tourist, asked if he wanted to see the elephants in a nearby forest. When the aspiring anthropologist declined, the boy asked if he wanted to see a traditional ceremony at a local village instead. That was Dr. Fratkin's introduction to the Ariaal, who share cultural traits with the Samburu and Rendille tribes of Kenya.
Soon after, he was living with the Ariaal, learning their language and customs while fighting off mosquitoes and fleas in his hut of sticks covered with grass.
The Ariaal wear sandals made from old tires and many still rely on their cows, camels and goats to survive. Drought is a regular feature of their world, coming in regular intervals and testing their durability.
"I was young when Elliot first arrived," recalled an Ariaal elder known as Lenampere in Lewogoso Lukumai, a settlement that moves from time to time to a new patch of sand. "He came here and lived with us. He drank milk and blood with us. After him, so many others came."
Over the years, the Ariaal have had hairs pulled not just from their heads, but also chins and chests. They have spat into vials to provide saliva samples. They have been quizzed about how often they urinate. Sometimes the questioning has become even more intimate.
Mr. Garawale recalls a visiting anthropologist measuring his arms, back and stomach with an odd contraption and then asking him how often he got erections and whether his sex life was satisfactory. "It was so embarrassing," recalled the father of three, breaking out in giggles even years later.
Not all African tribes are as welcoming to researchers, even those with the necessary permits from government bureaucrats. But the Ariaal have a reputation for cooperating - in exchange, that is, for pocket money.
"They think I'm stupid for asking dumb questions," said Daniel Lemoille, headmaster of the school in Songa, a village outside of Marsabit for Ariaal nomads who have settled down, and a frequent research assistant for visiting professors. "You have to try to explain that these same questions are asked to people all over the world and that their answers will help advance science."
The researchers arriving in Africa by the droves, probing every imaginable issue, every now and then leave controversy in their wake. In 2004, for instance, a Kenyan virologist sued researchers from Britain for taking blood samples out of the country that he said had been obtained from a Nairobi orphanage for H.I.V.-positive children without government permission.
The Ariaal have no major gripes about the studies, although the local chief in Songa, Stephen Lesseren, who wore a Boston University T-shirt the other day, said he wished their work would lead to more tangible benefits for his people.
"We don't mind helping people get their Ph.D.'s," he said. "But once they get their Ph.D.'s, many of them go away. They don't send us their reports. What have we achieved from the plucking of our hair? We want feedback. We want development."
Even when conflicts break out in the area, as happened this year as members of rival tribes slaughtered each other, victimizing the Ariaal, the research does not cease. With tensions still high, John G. Galaty, an anthropologist at McGill University in Toronto who studies ethnic conflicts, arrived in northern Kenya to question them.
In a study in The International Journal of Impotence Research, Dr. Campbell also found that Ariaal men with many wives showed less erectile dysfunction than did men of the same age with fewer spouses.
Dr. Campbell's body image study, published in The Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology this year, also found that Ariaal men are much more consistent than men in other parts of the world in their views of the average man's body and what they think women want.
Dr. Campbell came across no billboards or international magazines in Ariaal country and only one television in a local restaurant that played CNN, leading him to contend that Ariaal men's views of their bodies were less affected by media images of burly male models with six-pack stomachs and rippling chests.
To test his theories, a nonresearcher without a Ph.D. showed a group of Ariaal men a copy of Men's Health magazine full of pictures of impossibly well-sculpted men and women. The men looked on with rapt attention and admired the chiseled forms.
"That one, I like," said one nomad who was up in his years, pointing at a photo of a curvy woman who was clearly a regular at the gym.
Another old-timer gazed at the bulging pectoral muscles of a male bodybuilder in the magazine and posed a question that got everybody talking. Was it a man, he asked, or a very, very strong woman?
On the invention of headphones
An Unlikely Trendsetter Made Earphones a Way of Life
By LARRY ROHTER
SÃO PAULO, Brazil
IN the late 1960's, Andreas Pavel and his friends gathered regularly at his house here to listen to records, from Bach to Janis Joplin, and talk politics and philosophy. In their flights of fancy, they wondered why it should not be possible to take their music with them wherever they went.
Inspired by those discussions, Mr. Pavel invented the device known today as the Walkman. But it took more than 25 years of battling the Sony Corporation and others in courts and patent offices around the world before he finally won the right to say it: Andreas Pavel invented the portable personal stereo player.
"I filed my first patent a complete innocent, thinking it would be a simple matter, 12 months or so, to establish my ownership and begin production," he said at the house where he first conceived of the device. "I never imagined that it would end up consuming so much time and taking me away from my real interests in life."
In person, Mr. Pavel seems an unlikely protagonist in such an epic struggle. He is an intellectual with a gentle, enthusiastic, earnest demeanor, more interested in ideas and the arts than in commerce, cosmopolitan by nature and upbringing.
Born in Germany, Mr. Pavel came to Brazil at age 6, when his father was recruited to work for the Matarazzo industrial group, at the time the most important one here. His mother, Ninca Bordano, an artist, had a house built for the family with a studio for her and an open-air salon with high-end audio equipment, meant for literary and musical gatherings.
Except for a period in the mid-1960's when he studied philosophy at a German university, Mr. Pavel, now 59, spent his childhood and early adulthood here in South America's largest city, "to my great advantage," he said. It was a time of creative and intellectual ferment, culminating in the Tropicalist movement, and he was delighted to be part of it.
When TV Cultura, a Brazilian station, was licensed to go on the air, Mr. Pavel was hired to be its director of educational programming. After he was forced to leave because of what he says was political pressure, he edited a "Great Thinkers" book series for Brazil's leading publishing house in another effort to "counterbalance the censorship and lack of information" then prevailing.
In the end, what drove Mr. Pavel back to Europe was his discontent with the military dictatorship then in power in Brazil. By that time, though, he had already invented the device he initially called the stereobelt, which he saw more as a means to "add a soundtrack to real life" than an item to be mass marketed.
"Oh, it was purely aesthetic," he said when asked his motivation in creating a portable personal stereo player. "It took years to discover that I had made a discovery and that I could file a patent."
MR. PAVEL still remembers when and where he was the first time he tested his invention and which piece of music he chose for his experiment.
It was February 1972, he was in Switzerland with his girlfriend, and the cassette they heard playing on their headphones was "Push Push," a collaboration between the jazz flutist Herbie Mann and the blues-rock guitarist Duane Allman.
"I was in the woods in St. Moritz, in the mountains," he recalled. "The snow was falling down. I pressed the button, and suddenly we were floating. It was an incredible feeling, to realize that I now had the means to multiply the aesthetic potential of any situation."
Over the next few years, he took his invention to one audio company after another - Grundig, Philips, Yamaha and ITT among them - to see if there was interest in manufacturing his device. But everywhere he went, he said, he met with rejection or ridicule.
"They all said they didn't think people would be so crazy as to run around with headphones, that this is just a gadget, a useless gadget of a crazy nut," he said.
In New York, where he moved in 1974, and then in Milan, where he relocated in 1976, "people would look at me sometimes on a bus, and you could see they were asking themselves, why is this crazy man running around with headphones?"
Ignoring the doors slammed in his face, Mr. Pavel filed a patent in March 1977 in Milan. Over the next year and a half, he took the same step in the United States, Germany, England and Japan.
Sony started selling the Walkman in 1979, and in 1980 began negotiating with Mr. Pavel, who was seeking a royalty fee. The company agreed in 1986 to a limited fee arrangement covering sales only in Germany, and then for only a few models.
So in 1989 he began new proceedings, this time in British courts, that dragged on and on, eating up his limited financial resources.
At one point, Mr. Pavel said, he owed his lawyer hundreds of thousands of dollars and was being followed by private detectives and countersued by Sony. "They had frozen all my assets, I couldn't use checks or credit cards," and the outlook for him was grim.
In 1996, the case was dismissed, leaving Mr. Pavel with more than $3 million in court costs to pay.
But he persisted, warning Sony that he would file new suits in every country where he had patented his invention, and in 2003, after another round of negotiations, the company agreed to settle out of court.
Mr. Pavel declined to say how much Sony was obliged to pay him, citing a confidentiality clause. But European press accounts said Mr. Pavel had received a cash settlement for damages in the low eight figures and was now also receiving royalties on some Walkman sales.
THESE days, Mr. Pavel divides his time between Italy and Brazil, and once again considers himself primarily a philosopher. But he is also using some of his money to develop an invention he calls a dreamkit, which he describes as a "hand-held, personal, multimedia, sense-extension device," and to indulge his unflagging interest in music.
Recently, he has been promoting the career of Altamiro Carrilho, a flutist whom he regards as the greatest living Brazilian musician. He is also financing a project that he describes as the complete discography of every record ever released in Brazil.
Some of his friends have suggested he might have a case against the manufacturers of MP3 players, reasoning that those devices are a direct descendant of the Walkman. Mr. Pavel said that while he saw a kinship, he was not eager to take on another long legal battle.
"I have known other inventors in similar predicaments and most of them become that story, which is the most tragic, sad and melancholic thing that can happen," he said. "Somebody becomes a lawsuit, he loses all interest in other things and deals only with the lawsuit. Nobody ever said I was obsessed. I kept my other interests alive, in philosophy and music and literature."
"I didn't have time to pursue them, but now I have reconquered my time," he continued. "So, no, I'm not interested anymore in patents or legal fights or anything like that. I don't want to be reduced to the label of being the inventor of the Walkman."
On homosexuality and Christianity in Africa
Nigerian Anglicans Seeing Gay Challenge to Orthodoxy
By LYDIA POLGREEN
ABUJA, Nigeria - At one end of town on a fall Saturday morning, in a soaring cathedral nestled in a tidy suburb, dozens of Nigeria's most powerful citizens gathered, their Mercedes, Porsche and Range Rover sport utility vehicles gleaming in a packed parking lot. The well-heeled crowd was there to celebrate the Eucharist with the leader of Nigeria's Anglican Church, Archbishop Peter J. Akinola.
At the other end of town, in a small clubhouse behind a cultural center, a decidedly more downscale and secretive gathering of Anglicans got under way: the first national meeting of a group called Changing Attitudes Nigeria. Its unassuming name, and the secrecy accompanying its meeting - the location was given to a visitor only after many assurances that it would not be revealed to anyone else - underscored the radical nature of the group's mission: to fight for acceptance of homosexuals in the Anglican Church in Nigeria.
"We want to tell the bishop that it is our church, too," said Davis Mac-Iyalla, a 33-year-old former teacher who founded the group, which claims to have hundreds of members. "They do not own the word of Jesus. It belongs to all of us."
The worldwide Anglican communion of 77 million people faces a serious possibility of schism over the issue of homosexuality. Anglican leaders from the developing world, led in large part by Archbishop Akinola, have objected bitterly to the 2003 ordination of an openly gay bishop by the Episcopal Church of the United States of America, and to the Anglican Church's blessing of same-sex marriages in Canada. Many church leaders from Africa, Asia and Latin America think that tolerance of gays is a repudiation of biblical orthodoxy, seeing it in light of a series of disputes with the Western arms of their faith over the last 35 years, notably the ordination of women.
National churches in Africa, Asia and Latin America have severely limited contact and cooperation with their North American counterparts. Archbishop Akinola argues that the churches of the "global south," as the Christian population of the developing world is often called, are standing up for orthodoxy in the face of increasing liberalism in the West, where homosexuality is less taboo. "It cannot be supported by scripture, it is against reason," Archbishop Akinola said. "It is against nature. So we in the global south stand against it."
The Anglican debate has largely played out as one between traditional African values and what many people call the decadence of the West. As one Anglican, Chimae Ikegwuru of Port Harcourt, put it: "Homosexuality is a Western thing. In Nigeria we don't condone it, we don't tolerate it."
Nigeria's gay men and lesbians regularly face harassment and arrest, gay activists here say. The criminal code bans acts "against the order of nature," and imposes sentences of up to 14 years for those convicted. In practice, gay men are often arrested and jailed until they can bribe their jailers to let them go. In areas of Nigeria that adhere to Islamic law, Shariah, the sentence for homosexual acts is death.
Yet homosexuality is relatively common, particularly in the military, which dominated the country's politics for decades, said Dare Odumuye, founder of Nigeria's first gay rights organization, Alliance Rights Nigeria. "It has always been in our culture in Nigeria," he said.
Still, in a country riven by corruption and strife, and perpetually perched on the edge of chaos, deeply conservative religious beliefs and literal readings of not only the Bible but also the Koran offer certainty and stability otherwise unavailable.
"The Bible and the creeds don't lend themselves to any variation over time," said Oluranti Odubogun, general secretary of the Anglican Church of Nigeria. "They don't subject themselves to cultural changes. They are guidance given for human existence from age to age." But that desire for certainty and absolutism has run up against another powerful force, the wider struggle for self-determination, particularly among young people in Africa.
"There is a growth in identity-based movements, and there is an impact of the global gay identity where people throughout the world are seeing themselves as part of a larger global movement," said Cary Alan Johnson, senior specialist for Africa at the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. "But the movement is embattled. The more people say, 'This is who we are,' the more governments have a tendency to want to crack down."
Indeed, in October, Mr. Mac-Iyalla and several other members of Changing Attitudes Nigeria were arrested after their first meeting, which drew several dozen people, after police officers found literature for the meeting in their car. Mr. Mac-Iyalla said he was kicked in the head by one of the officers, and he spent several days in jail without being charged or taken before a judge, although that is not unusual for people arrested in Nigeria. "There was no reason to arrest us other than that we were openly gay," he said.
Mr. Mac-Iyalla said he started the group after being fired from his job as a teacher at an Anglican school when the principal learned he was gay. "I have loved the Anglican Church all my life," Mr. Mac-Iyalla said. "The church leaders can try to claim that we don't exist, but we gay Anglicans of Nigeria will stand up to say we are here."
With the exception of South Africa, whose Constitution provides protections for gay men and lesbians and whose courts recently ruled that gays must be permitted to marry, gay people in many African countries are forced underground by social taboos and laws. Many African countries have laws against sex between people of the same sex. In Cameroon, 11 men have been in jail for seven months on sodomy charges and may be forced to undergo a medical examination to determine whether they engaged in anal sex. Human rights groups say such exams are humiliating and inhumane.
On interracial relationships
In-Laws in the Age of the Outsider
By BENEDICT CAREY
SHE was in the kitchen trying to bond with her boyfriend's mother and help prepare the food when the older woman made a remark that effectively shut the conversation down.
"I asked to try one of the chicken wings she was cooking, and she says, 'Oh, these might be a little too spicy for what you're used to,' " said Serene Hammond, 25, of Washington, recalling a cookout she attended five years ago.
Ms. Hammond said she felt odd at the time, and later, insulted. Her father is Haitian, her mother Irish, and she is fair-skinned. The boyfriend's family is black.
"The way I took that comment was, 'Well, this is too hot for what y'all white people eat,' " said Ms. Hammond, who since founded a group called the National Advocacy for the Multiethnic, a clearinghouse for multiracial education. "I said, 'No, I'm from Louisiana.' " She added, "I think a lot of white women who date black men get some of that treatment."
Whether innocent or intentional, even a casual remark or gesture can turn a rainbow holiday feast into a version of "Meet the Parents" or "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" - without the laughs and tearful hugs.
According to Census data, the number of mixed families and couples is increasing each year, from 4.4 percent of all marriages in 1990 to 6.7 percent in 2000. Fully a third of marriages involving Hispanics are interracial, ditto for Asian marriages, and the rate among black Americans is now about 13 percent, and among whites 7 percent, Dr. William Frey of the Brookings Institution concluded from a further analysis of the data.
Many families are delighted or unfazed by having an outsider join them. But many others know another reality: the imminent arrival of a new spouse or girlfriend who is a cultural foreigner almost always amplifies the anxiety they already feel as they try to live up to the holiday-card photos they send out with everyone hugging the Irish setter, or gathered around the tree, psychologists say. It is hard not to resent having to play ambassador when routine domestic relations themselves are tense, when it's hard enough to keep dad and junior from coming to blows at Thanksgiving, say, or to ease the awkwardness between sisters who are not speaking.
Artful entertaining, psychologists say, requires some understanding of both the traps inherent in hosting a cultural outsider and the opportunities.
Most obviously, the new person can buffer or distract from simmering family problems by acting as an outside witness of the family's behavior and an obligatory conversation partner, family therapists say. When a new person enters any closed group, whether in business, sports or in a family, sociologists have found, there is a tacit agreement that the newcomer initially take a place on the margin: often literally, by sitting against the wall, say, a few chairs away from the insiders. Typically, in a family gathering, people take turns approaching the new arrival and opening communication, which can divert attention away from the usual jealousies and grudges that are inflamed in the family's usual rituals.
"Particularly if this person is interesting, he or she can become an attraction," said Dr. Calvin Morrill, a sociologist at the University of California at Irvine who studies group interaction.
A guest who has suffered personal hardship, as an immigrant for instance, might also serve to shrink, at least temporarily, the more petty claims of unfairness that swirl around the table at any family gathering.
Psychologists who study interracial marriages have found that two things are particularly divisive and troublesome to these couples. One concerns children. In-laws almost by definition have strong opinions about their grandchildren or future grandchildren - about how they should be raised and where, and how they might be treated by peers. This topic is best left for another time.
"This issue may be most volatile when the husband is black and the wife is white - white wives' parents sometimes reject the offspring and reject the black husband simultaneously," said Dr. Stanley Gaines, a senior lecturer in psychology at Brunel University in England, in an e-mail.
The second problem is the tendency of people to resort to racial stereotypes - when conflict arises, "even if the conflict initially had nothing to do with race per se," Dr. Gaines added.
The bottom line, psychologists say, is that holiday gatherings are perhaps the worst time to try to settle longstanding disputes. Racial stereotyping does not go down well with gravy, no matter how justified the underlying conflicts.
Smaller misunderstandings are almost unavoidable, therapists say. "I think you have to expect that there's going to be some discomfort, some awkwardness when you're entertaining this new person, and to prepare for that" and weather it, said Dr. Constance Ahrons, a psychologist in San Diego and author of the book, "We're Still Family."
When possible, she said, prepare other family members beforehand as well, by informing cousins, aunts and uncles as much about the new spouse or boyfriend as possible. "You may find that some family members decide not to come at all, because they're uncomfortable with the situation," she said. If one of those people came, it might be asking for worse trouble, she said.
Entertaining a guest of a different race or religion can also provide an excuse for one of the most effective strategies to soothe and preempt family discord: structured activities.
In a study of how family reunions affect personal relationships, Dr. Laurence Basirico, dean of international programs at Elon University in Elon, N.C., interviewed 566 readers of Reunions Magazine, a journal for planning reunions of all kinds. Those surveyed included families across the country who attended large gatherings. In his analysis, Dr. Basirico found that the most satisfying reunions were those that were highly planned, with scheduled events each day that were mostly optional.
If the new visitor is a fundamentalist Christian who objects to watching a Harry Potter film, or a Muslim who would rather skip the late-night drinking, they are warned and have an out.
"They simply take a pass, and there are no conflicts over these small decisions about what we should do and when, which can turn into big arguments, especially if you don't know what some of the underlying cultural differences may be," Dr. Basirico said in an interview.
Keep in mind, too, that it is not only the hosts who are worried and plotting. Dr. Ahrons recently had as clients a gay couple, one black and the other white, who, she said, spent weeks preparing for a visit to the white man's family, who was very uncomfortable with the relationship. The pair role-played a bit, and did some of their own scheduling. And they had their own plan for defusing trouble.
"One thing they planned was simply to get out of the house regularly," she said. "They would just excuse themselves at a certain time and off they went to get a drink."
A Mystery, Locked in Timeless Embrace
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
When Egyptologists entered the tomb for the first time more than four decades ago, they expected to be surprised. Explorers of newly exposed tombs always expect that, and this time they were not disappointed - they were confounded.
It was back in 1964, outside Cairo, near the famous Step Pyramid in the necropolis of Saqqara and a short drive from the Sphinx and the breathtaking pyramids at Giza. The newfound tomb yielded no royal mummies or dazzling jewels. But the explorers stopped in their tracks when the light of their kerosene lamp shined on the wall art in the most sacred chamber.
There, carved in stone, were the images of two men embracing. Their names were inscribed above: Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep. Though not of the nobility, they were highly esteemed in the palace as the chief manicurists of the king, sometime from 2380 to 2320 B.C., in the time known as the fifth dynasty of the Old Kingdom. Grooming the king was an honored occupation.
Archaeologists were taken aback. It was extremely rare in ancient Egypt for an elite tomb to be shared by two men of apparently equal standing. The usual practice was for such mortuary temples to be the resting place of one prominent man, his wife and children.
And it was most unusual for a couple of the same sex to be depicted locked in an embrace. In other scenes, they are also shown holding hands and nose-kissing, the favored form of kissing in ancient Egypt. What were scholars to make of their intimate relationship?
Over the years, the tomb's wall art has been subjected to learned analysis, inspiring considerable speculation. One interpretation is that the two men are brothers, probably identical twins, and this may be the earliest known depiction of twins. Another is that the men had a homosexual relationship, a more recent view that has gained support among gay advocates.
Now, an Egyptologist at New York University has stepped into the debate with a third interpretation. He has marshaled circumstantial evidence that the two menmay have been conjoined twins, popularly known as Siamese twins. The expert, David O'Connor, a professor of ancient Egyptian art at the N.Y.U. Institute of Fine Arts, said: "My suggestion is that Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were indeed twins, but of a very special sort. They were conjoined twins, and it was this physical peculiarity that prompted the many depictions of them hand-holding or embracing in their tomb-chapel."
Dr. O'Connor elaborated on his hypothesis in a recent lecture and in an interview in New York. He is describing and defending the idea before scholarly peers at a conference, "Sex and Gender in Ancient Egypt," this week at the University of Wales in Swansea.
Opposition to his proposal promises to be spirited. Most Egyptologists accept the normal-twins interpretation advanced most prominently by John Baines, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford in England.
"It's a very persuasive case Baines makes," Dr. O'Connor acknowledged.
And he noted that the gay-couple hypothesis had become the popular idea in the last decade. A leading proponent is Greg Reeder, an independent scholar in San Francisco and a contributing editor of KMT, a magazine of Egyptian art and history. The most Google references to the tomb, archaeologists say, concern the homosexual idea.
The gay argument leans on the analogy with depictions of married heterosexual couples in Egyptian art, which was first suggested by Nadine Cherpion, a French archaeologist.
Because the embraces of heterosexual couples in the tomb art convey an implicit erotic and sexual relationship, and perhaps the belief of its continuation in the afterlife, Mr. Reeder and his allies contend that similar scenes involving the two men have the same significance, that they presumably are gay partners.
Calling attention to the most intimate scene of the two embracing men, Mr. Reeder said: "They are so close together here that not only are they face to face and nose to nose, but so close that the knots on their belts are touching, linking their lower torsos. If this scene were composed of a male-female couple instead of the same-sex couple we have here, there would be little question concerning what it is we are seeing."
In an interview last week, Mr. Reeder said Dr. O'Connor's new interpretation was fascinating, but added, "It's the most extreme and unnecessary theory."
Dr. Baines, in an e-mail message from Oxford, said that he "would stick with my own interpretation, because it seems to me to require the smallest amount of 'exceptionalism' and to fit reasonably well with other patterns."
As for the sexual implications of the embracing poses, Dr. Baines has suggested that they could signify the "socially and emotionally linked roles" of two men who probably were twins.
Or they could symbolize "protection or close identification and reciprocity" between the two.
Ancient Egyptian art, experts say, is not meant always to be taken literally.
James Allen, an Egyptologist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art who is not involved in the research, called the twins hypothesis probable and the conjoined-twins idea "an interesting wrinkle." The least likely, he said, was the homosexual-relationship proposal.
Dr. Baines said, "The gay-couple idea is essentially derived from imposing modern preoccupations on ancient materials and not attending to the cultural context."
If Dr. O'Connor is correct, the tomb holds a rare example of documented conjoined twins that early in history, he said, and thus an insight into ancient Egyptian attitudes toward disabilities. He cited other records, and art of the dwarf Seneb, who in a somewhat later court was "overseer of dwarfs in charge of dressing" the king and a tutor of the royal sons, both positions of elite status. Egyptians appear to have viewed such people as auspicious figures, not freaks.
"The creator gods had made everything, dwarfs, two-headed calves and conjoined twins," Dr. O'Connor said. "A king felt more elevated for having these singular creatures to serve him as manicurists."
Like most elite tombs, this one was built of stone masonry and had several chambers, the most sacred the chapel or cult room. Here, survivors of the deceased brought offerings and paid homage. Beneath the room was the burial chamber. The remains of the two men were not found.
Egyptian tombs typically represent the lives of the departed in art and script. Images of the two men and hieroglyphic inscriptions about them and their families are everywhere, in corridors and in the chapel. The two men had wives who are named and represented in the art. Yet there are no scenes of them embracing their wives.
Their apparently close relationship and equal standing are illustrated not only in images of them together, either holding hands or embracing. In other instances, Dr. O'Connor said, one man appears alone on a wall face, and the other on the opposing wall. Their stature and pose are identical, and they are performing similar acts. While one fishes in the marshes, for example, the other hunts birds in the same setting.
These scenes and the ones of intimate embraces led to the speculation, initially by Mounir Basta, the Egyptian archaeologist who first explored the tomb, that Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were brothers, probably twins. Dr. Baines developed the idea in a seminal study in the 1980's, and others took up the gay-couple idea.
When Dr. O'Connor looked into the matter, he was struck by a comparison of the images of the two men with pictures of Chang and Eng, the famous conjoined twins born in 1811 in Siam. They were seen close together, arm in arm. They and a number of documented conjoined twins also had wives and children and engaged in strenuous activities, much like the hunting and fishing of the two Egyptians.
Their names, Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep suggest another clue, Dr. O'Connor said. Both names refer to the god Khnum, the deity who fashions the form of a child in the womb. Though not an uncommon part of Egyptian names, in this case it might be a play on words to signify their paired lives.
David Silverman, an Egyptologist at the University of Pennsylvania, and his student Joshua Robinson pointed out to Dr. O'Connor that the name Khnum was also similar to the ancient Egyptian word khenem, which means "to unite" or "be united."
One problem, however, is that none of the tomb art shows a physical link between the two men, as in some pictures of Chang and Eng.
Egyptian mortuary art, Dr. O'Connor said, "operates in terms of idealized types, not actual figures."
"It's not photographic art," he added.
Dr. Allen of the Metropolitan Museum agreed, saying, "Egyptian art was symbolic, and it is doubtful the Egyptians would have tried to represent realistically the join between these twins."
Whether the two men were normal twins, conjoined twins or a gay couple, the speculation highlights a problem and an opportunity for scholars.
"We don't have a lot of information about how twins were viewed in ancient Egypt or how gay life was perceived," Dr. Allen said.
Few accounts refer to twins of any kind in the civilization, and an honored role for conjoined twins, if that is what they were, would be even stronger evidence of Egyptian attitudes toward people with physical disabilities.
"Such attributes were often seen as fabulous rather than monstrous, and positive rather than negative," Dr. O'Connor said. "They attested the creator god's ability, if he wished, to bring wondrous changes upon the norms he himself had established."
Besides, Dr. O'Connor pointed out, "The fact that they could have worked simultaneously on the grooming of the king's two hands might have been seen as especially appropriate and desirable."
Homosexuality was only occasionally referred to in Egyptian documents, sometimes in myths of certain gods, implying that it was not considered a normal relationship. The prevailing attitude, scholars say, was not antigay, though probably negative, and certainly not as accepting of homosexual activity it was in classical Greece.
If the tomb of the two men was indeed a public profession of their emotional and sexual attachment, scholars say, it could inspire a reassessment of the place of homosexuals in Egyptian culture.
Defending his interpretation, Mr. Reeder said the similarity of the embracing scenes with those of husbands and wives should not be dismissed. He further noted, in his lecture in Wales, new evidence that he said suggested that one of the men died well before the other. Khnumhotep was described in one place as being honored by a great god, possibly meaning he had by then entered the afterlife, while in a corresponding scene Niankhkhnum had only official titles of his career in life.
If, then, Niankhkhnum was the one who finished decorating the tomb, Mr. Reeder said, it was unlikely that they were conjoined twins. "They would have had to be surgically separated," he said in an interview. "The Egyptians had surgical knowledge. But separating such twins would be expecting too much."
The fact that the two men had families is not seen as contradicting the gay hypothesis, Egyptologists said. Like others of the time, the two men would presumably have sired children to carry on after them and maintain the cult dedicated to their well-being through eternity.
Mr. Reeder said his hypothesis "resonates in the gay community because it shows two historical men being intimate with each other, and this was something that could be shown in an ancient culture."
Dr. O'Connor acknowledged the interpretation's appeal. "Gays and lesbians still experience a great deal of prejudice and discrimination, and these two ancient Egyptians are yet further proof that homosexuality goes far back in history," he said.
"The semipublic nature of their tomb chapel," he added, "suggests their gay relationship was accepted as normative by the elite of a particularly famous and illustrious civilization."
Finally, Dr. O'Connor conceded that the conjoined-twins hypothesis, like the other two, is not "fully supported by conclusive evidence."
On mama squid
Scientists' Discovery in the Deep Casts Some Squid Mothers in a Brighter Light
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
With their slimy tentacles and big, unblinking eyes, squids have, over the centuries, acquired a bad reputation.
Jules Verne's squid attacked a submarine. Peter Benchley's dined on children.
The squid has fared little better in the world of science, with researchers concluding that, unlike octopuses and some fish, squids are inattentive parents, depositing eggs on the seabed and letting them grow or die on their own.
But a team of ocean scientists exploring the inky depths of the Monterey Canyon off California has discovered that at least one squid species cares for its young with loving attention, the mother cradling the eggs in her arms for months, waving her tentacles to bathe the eggs in fresh seawater. The scientists suspect that other species are doting parents, too, and that misperceptions about squid behavior have arisen because the deep is so poorly explored.
"Our finding is unexpected because this behavior differs from the reproductive habits of all other known squid species," the scientists wrote in the Dec. 15 issue of Nature, the weekly science journal. "We expect it to be found in other squids."
Brad A. Seibel, a biologist at the University of Rhode Island and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, who led the research, said in an interview that the insight began in 1995. Then a graduate student, he pulled up a trawl bucket from the dark midwaters of the Monterey Canyon, which is as deep as two miles, and found a mass of squid eggs. Nearby in the bucket lay a female of the species Gonatus onyx, which grows to a length of about 10 inches.
The next year, the same thing happened again, except this time the young were hatchlings, just emerging from their eggs.
Recalling his previous catch, Dr. Seibel theorized that he had stumbled upon something that amounted to heresy. It seemed that the females had been brooding their eggs. In 2000, he proposed the idea in print, prompting skeptical rejoinders.
The breakthrough came in 2001, when Dr. Seibel and his colleagues at Monterey sent a car-size robot into the depths of the canyon. There, more than a mile down, the robot's lights and camera spied the heresy in action - a female brooding her eggs.
"I was delighted," Dr. Seibel recalled, and "surprised that we found them."
Since then, he and teammates exploring the canyon's deep waters have discovered five female squids holding their eggs, gently protecting and nourishing them. The attentive females extend their arms every 30 to 40 seconds, moving water through the masses of 2,000 to 3,000 eggs.
This action, the scientists wrote in Nature, probably serves to aerate the eggs in the canyon's oxygen-poor waters. The scientists estimate that the squid, in the class of animals known as cephalopods, which also includes the octopus and the cuttlefish, broods its eggs for as long as nine months.
The other researchers are Bruce H. Robison and Steven H. D. Haddock of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, in Moss Landing, Calif.
The attention and nurturing, Dr. Seibel said, surely promotes survival. "It's very successful," he noted, Gonatus onyx being one of the most abundant cephalopods in the Pacific Ocean.
On the Ariaal tribe in Africa, and how studied they are.
Remote and Poked, Anthropology's Dream Tribe
By MARC LACEY
Correction Appended
LEWOGOSO LUKUMAI, Kenya - The rugged souls living in this remote desert enclave have been poked, pinched and plucked, all in the name of science. It is not always easy, they say, to be the subject of a human experiment.
"I thought I was being bewitched," Koitaton Garawale, a weathered cattleman, said of the time a researcher plucked a few hairs from atop his head. "I was afraid. I'd never seen such a thing before."
Another member of the tiny and reclusive Ariaal tribe, Leketon Lenarendile, scanned a handful of pictures laid before him by a researcher whose unstated goal was to gauge whether his body image had been influenced by outside media. "The girls like the ones like this," he said, repeating the exercise later and pointing to a rather slender man much like himself. "I don't know why they were asking me that," he said.
Anthropologists and other researchers have long searched the globe for people isolated from the modern world. The Ariaal, a nomadic community of about 10,000 people in northern Kenya, have been seized on by researchers since the 1970's, after one - an anthropologist, Elliot Fratkin - stumbled upon them and began publishing his accounts of their lives in academic journals.
Other researchers have done studies on everything from their cultural practices to their testosterone levels. National Geographic focused on the Ariaal in 1999, in an article on vanishing cultures.
But over the years, more and more Ariaal - like the Masai and the Turkana in Kenya and the Tuaregs and Bedouins elsewhere in Africa - are settling down. Many have migrated closer to Marsabit, the nearest town, which has cellphone reception and even sporadic Internet access.
The scientists continue to arrive in Ariaal country, with their notebooks, tents and bizarre queries, but now they document a semi-isolated people straddling modern life and more traditional ways.
"The era of finding isolated tribal groups is probably over," said Dr. Fratkin, a professor at Smith College who has lived with the Ariaal for long stretches and is regarded by some of them as a member of the tribe.
For Benjamin C. Campbell, a biological anthropologist at Boston University who was introduced to the Ariaal by Dr. Fratkin, their way of life, diet and cultural practices make them worthy of study.
Other academics agree. Local residents say they have been asked over the years how many livestock they own (many), how many times they have had diarrhea in the last month (often) and what they ate the day before yesterday (usually meat, milk or blood).
Ariaal women have been asked about the work they do, which seems to exceed that of the men, and about local marriage customs, which compel their prospective husbands to hand over livestock to their parents before the ceremony can take place.
The wedding day is one of pain as well as joy since Ariaal women - girls, really - have their genitals cut just before they marry and delay sex until they recuperate. They consider their breasts important body parts, but nothing to be covered up.
The researchers may not know this, but the Ariaal have been studying them all these years as well.
The Ariaal note that foreigners slather white liquid on their very white skin to protect them from the sun, and that many favor short pants that show off their legs and the clunky boots on their feet. Foreigners often partake of the local food but drink water out of bottles and munch on strange food in wrappers between meals, the Ariaal observe.
The scientists leave tracks as well as memories behind. For instance, it is not uncommon to see nomads in T-shirts bearing university logos, gifts from departing academics.
In Lewogoso Lukumai, a circle of makeshift huts near the Ndoto Mountains, nomads rushed up to a visitor and asked excitedly in the Samburu language, "Where's Elliot?"
They meant Dr. Fratkin, who describes in his book "Ariaal Pastoralists of Kenya" how in 1974 he stumbled upon the Ariaal, who had been little known until then. With money from the University of London and the Smithsonian Institution, he was traveling north from Nairobi in search of isolated agro-pastoralist groups in Ethiopia. But a coup toppled Haile Selassie, then the emperor, and the border between the countries was closed.
So as he sat in a bar in Marsabit, a boy approached and, mistaking him for a tourist, asked if he wanted to see the elephants in a nearby forest. When the aspiring anthropologist declined, the boy asked if he wanted to see a traditional ceremony at a local village instead. That was Dr. Fratkin's introduction to the Ariaal, who share cultural traits with the Samburu and Rendille tribes of Kenya.
Soon after, he was living with the Ariaal, learning their language and customs while fighting off mosquitoes and fleas in his hut of sticks covered with grass.
The Ariaal wear sandals made from old tires and many still rely on their cows, camels and goats to survive. Drought is a regular feature of their world, coming in regular intervals and testing their durability.
"I was young when Elliot first arrived," recalled an Ariaal elder known as Lenampere in Lewogoso Lukumai, a settlement that moves from time to time to a new patch of sand. "He came here and lived with us. He drank milk and blood with us. After him, so many others came."
Over the years, the Ariaal have had hairs pulled not just from their heads, but also chins and chests. They have spat into vials to provide saliva samples. They have been quizzed about how often they urinate. Sometimes the questioning has become even more intimate.
Mr. Garawale recalls a visiting anthropologist measuring his arms, back and stomach with an odd contraption and then asking him how often he got erections and whether his sex life was satisfactory. "It was so embarrassing," recalled the father of three, breaking out in giggles even years later.
Not all African tribes are as welcoming to researchers, even those with the necessary permits from government bureaucrats. But the Ariaal have a reputation for cooperating - in exchange, that is, for pocket money.
"They think I'm stupid for asking dumb questions," said Daniel Lemoille, headmaster of the school in Songa, a village outside of Marsabit for Ariaal nomads who have settled down, and a frequent research assistant for visiting professors. "You have to try to explain that these same questions are asked to people all over the world and that their answers will help advance science."
The researchers arriving in Africa by the droves, probing every imaginable issue, every now and then leave controversy in their wake. In 2004, for instance, a Kenyan virologist sued researchers from Britain for taking blood samples out of the country that he said had been obtained from a Nairobi orphanage for H.I.V.-positive children without government permission.
The Ariaal have no major gripes about the studies, although the local chief in Songa, Stephen Lesseren, who wore a Boston University T-shirt the other day, said he wished their work would lead to more tangible benefits for his people.
"We don't mind helping people get their Ph.D.'s," he said. "But once they get their Ph.D.'s, many of them go away. They don't send us their reports. What have we achieved from the plucking of our hair? We want feedback. We want development."
Even when conflicts break out in the area, as happened this year as members of rival tribes slaughtered each other, victimizing the Ariaal, the research does not cease. With tensions still high, John G. Galaty, an anthropologist at McGill University in Toronto who studies ethnic conflicts, arrived in northern Kenya to question them.
In a study in The International Journal of Impotence Research, Dr. Campbell also found that Ariaal men with many wives showed less erectile dysfunction than did men of the same age with fewer spouses.
Dr. Campbell's body image study, published in The Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology this year, also found that Ariaal men are much more consistent than men in other parts of the world in their views of the average man's body and what they think women want.
Dr. Campbell came across no billboards or international magazines in Ariaal country and only one television in a local restaurant that played CNN, leading him to contend that Ariaal men's views of their bodies were less affected by media images of burly male models with six-pack stomachs and rippling chests.
To test his theories, a nonresearcher without a Ph.D. showed a group of Ariaal men a copy of Men's Health magazine full of pictures of impossibly well-sculpted men and women. The men looked on with rapt attention and admired the chiseled forms.
"That one, I like," said one nomad who was up in his years, pointing at a photo of a curvy woman who was clearly a regular at the gym.
Another old-timer gazed at the bulging pectoral muscles of a male bodybuilder in the magazine and posed a question that got everybody talking. Was it a man, he asked, or a very, very strong woman?
On the invention of headphones
An Unlikely Trendsetter Made Earphones a Way of Life
By LARRY ROHTER
SÃO PAULO, Brazil
IN the late 1960's, Andreas Pavel and his friends gathered regularly at his house here to listen to records, from Bach to Janis Joplin, and talk politics and philosophy. In their flights of fancy, they wondered why it should not be possible to take their music with them wherever they went.
Inspired by those discussions, Mr. Pavel invented the device known today as the Walkman. But it took more than 25 years of battling the Sony Corporation and others in courts and patent offices around the world before he finally won the right to say it: Andreas Pavel invented the portable personal stereo player.
"I filed my first patent a complete innocent, thinking it would be a simple matter, 12 months or so, to establish my ownership and begin production," he said at the house where he first conceived of the device. "I never imagined that it would end up consuming so much time and taking me away from my real interests in life."
In person, Mr. Pavel seems an unlikely protagonist in such an epic struggle. He is an intellectual with a gentle, enthusiastic, earnest demeanor, more interested in ideas and the arts than in commerce, cosmopolitan by nature and upbringing.
Born in Germany, Mr. Pavel came to Brazil at age 6, when his father was recruited to work for the Matarazzo industrial group, at the time the most important one here. His mother, Ninca Bordano, an artist, had a house built for the family with a studio for her and an open-air salon with high-end audio equipment, meant for literary and musical gatherings.
Except for a period in the mid-1960's when he studied philosophy at a German university, Mr. Pavel, now 59, spent his childhood and early adulthood here in South America's largest city, "to my great advantage," he said. It was a time of creative and intellectual ferment, culminating in the Tropicalist movement, and he was delighted to be part of it.
When TV Cultura, a Brazilian station, was licensed to go on the air, Mr. Pavel was hired to be its director of educational programming. After he was forced to leave because of what he says was political pressure, he edited a "Great Thinkers" book series for Brazil's leading publishing house in another effort to "counterbalance the censorship and lack of information" then prevailing.
In the end, what drove Mr. Pavel back to Europe was his discontent with the military dictatorship then in power in Brazil. By that time, though, he had already invented the device he initially called the stereobelt, which he saw more as a means to "add a soundtrack to real life" than an item to be mass marketed.
"Oh, it was purely aesthetic," he said when asked his motivation in creating a portable personal stereo player. "It took years to discover that I had made a discovery and that I could file a patent."
MR. PAVEL still remembers when and where he was the first time he tested his invention and which piece of music he chose for his experiment.
It was February 1972, he was in Switzerland with his girlfriend, and the cassette they heard playing on their headphones was "Push Push," a collaboration between the jazz flutist Herbie Mann and the blues-rock guitarist Duane Allman.
"I was in the woods in St. Moritz, in the mountains," he recalled. "The snow was falling down. I pressed the button, and suddenly we were floating. It was an incredible feeling, to realize that I now had the means to multiply the aesthetic potential of any situation."
Over the next few years, he took his invention to one audio company after another - Grundig, Philips, Yamaha and ITT among them - to see if there was interest in manufacturing his device. But everywhere he went, he said, he met with rejection or ridicule.
"They all said they didn't think people would be so crazy as to run around with headphones, that this is just a gadget, a useless gadget of a crazy nut," he said.
In New York, where he moved in 1974, and then in Milan, where he relocated in 1976, "people would look at me sometimes on a bus, and you could see they were asking themselves, why is this crazy man running around with headphones?"
Ignoring the doors slammed in his face, Mr. Pavel filed a patent in March 1977 in Milan. Over the next year and a half, he took the same step in the United States, Germany, England and Japan.
Sony started selling the Walkman in 1979, and in 1980 began negotiating with Mr. Pavel, who was seeking a royalty fee. The company agreed in 1986 to a limited fee arrangement covering sales only in Germany, and then for only a few models.
So in 1989 he began new proceedings, this time in British courts, that dragged on and on, eating up his limited financial resources.
At one point, Mr. Pavel said, he owed his lawyer hundreds of thousands of dollars and was being followed by private detectives and countersued by Sony. "They had frozen all my assets, I couldn't use checks or credit cards," and the outlook for him was grim.
In 1996, the case was dismissed, leaving Mr. Pavel with more than $3 million in court costs to pay.
But he persisted, warning Sony that he would file new suits in every country where he had patented his invention, and in 2003, after another round of negotiations, the company agreed to settle out of court.
Mr. Pavel declined to say how much Sony was obliged to pay him, citing a confidentiality clause. But European press accounts said Mr. Pavel had received a cash settlement for damages in the low eight figures and was now also receiving royalties on some Walkman sales.
THESE days, Mr. Pavel divides his time between Italy and Brazil, and once again considers himself primarily a philosopher. But he is also using some of his money to develop an invention he calls a dreamkit, which he describes as a "hand-held, personal, multimedia, sense-extension device," and to indulge his unflagging interest in music.
Recently, he has been promoting the career of Altamiro Carrilho, a flutist whom he regards as the greatest living Brazilian musician. He is also financing a project that he describes as the complete discography of every record ever released in Brazil.
Some of his friends have suggested he might have a case against the manufacturers of MP3 players, reasoning that those devices are a direct descendant of the Walkman. Mr. Pavel said that while he saw a kinship, he was not eager to take on another long legal battle.
"I have known other inventors in similar predicaments and most of them become that story, which is the most tragic, sad and melancholic thing that can happen," he said. "Somebody becomes a lawsuit, he loses all interest in other things and deals only with the lawsuit. Nobody ever said I was obsessed. I kept my other interests alive, in philosophy and music and literature."
"I didn't have time to pursue them, but now I have reconquered my time," he continued. "So, no, I'm not interested anymore in patents or legal fights or anything like that. I don't want to be reduced to the label of being the inventor of the Walkman."
On homosexuality and Christianity in Africa
Nigerian Anglicans Seeing Gay Challenge to Orthodoxy
By LYDIA POLGREEN
ABUJA, Nigeria - At one end of town on a fall Saturday morning, in a soaring cathedral nestled in a tidy suburb, dozens of Nigeria's most powerful citizens gathered, their Mercedes, Porsche and Range Rover sport utility vehicles gleaming in a packed parking lot. The well-heeled crowd was there to celebrate the Eucharist with the leader of Nigeria's Anglican Church, Archbishop Peter J. Akinola.
At the other end of town, in a small clubhouse behind a cultural center, a decidedly more downscale and secretive gathering of Anglicans got under way: the first national meeting of a group called Changing Attitudes Nigeria. Its unassuming name, and the secrecy accompanying its meeting - the location was given to a visitor only after many assurances that it would not be revealed to anyone else - underscored the radical nature of the group's mission: to fight for acceptance of homosexuals in the Anglican Church in Nigeria.
"We want to tell the bishop that it is our church, too," said Davis Mac-Iyalla, a 33-year-old former teacher who founded the group, which claims to have hundreds of members. "They do not own the word of Jesus. It belongs to all of us."
The worldwide Anglican communion of 77 million people faces a serious possibility of schism over the issue of homosexuality. Anglican leaders from the developing world, led in large part by Archbishop Akinola, have objected bitterly to the 2003 ordination of an openly gay bishop by the Episcopal Church of the United States of America, and to the Anglican Church's blessing of same-sex marriages in Canada. Many church leaders from Africa, Asia and Latin America think that tolerance of gays is a repudiation of biblical orthodoxy, seeing it in light of a series of disputes with the Western arms of their faith over the last 35 years, notably the ordination of women.
National churches in Africa, Asia and Latin America have severely limited contact and cooperation with their North American counterparts. Archbishop Akinola argues that the churches of the "global south," as the Christian population of the developing world is often called, are standing up for orthodoxy in the face of increasing liberalism in the West, where homosexuality is less taboo. "It cannot be supported by scripture, it is against reason," Archbishop Akinola said. "It is against nature. So we in the global south stand against it."
The Anglican debate has largely played out as one between traditional African values and what many people call the decadence of the West. As one Anglican, Chimae Ikegwuru of Port Harcourt, put it: "Homosexuality is a Western thing. In Nigeria we don't condone it, we don't tolerate it."
Nigeria's gay men and lesbians regularly face harassment and arrest, gay activists here say. The criminal code bans acts "against the order of nature," and imposes sentences of up to 14 years for those convicted. In practice, gay men are often arrested and jailed until they can bribe their jailers to let them go. In areas of Nigeria that adhere to Islamic law, Shariah, the sentence for homosexual acts is death.
Yet homosexuality is relatively common, particularly in the military, which dominated the country's politics for decades, said Dare Odumuye, founder of Nigeria's first gay rights organization, Alliance Rights Nigeria. "It has always been in our culture in Nigeria," he said.
Still, in a country riven by corruption and strife, and perpetually perched on the edge of chaos, deeply conservative religious beliefs and literal readings of not only the Bible but also the Koran offer certainty and stability otherwise unavailable.
"The Bible and the creeds don't lend themselves to any variation over time," said Oluranti Odubogun, general secretary of the Anglican Church of Nigeria. "They don't subject themselves to cultural changes. They are guidance given for human existence from age to age." But that desire for certainty and absolutism has run up against another powerful force, the wider struggle for self-determination, particularly among young people in Africa.
"There is a growth in identity-based movements, and there is an impact of the global gay identity where people throughout the world are seeing themselves as part of a larger global movement," said Cary Alan Johnson, senior specialist for Africa at the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. "But the movement is embattled. The more people say, 'This is who we are,' the more governments have a tendency to want to crack down."
Indeed, in October, Mr. Mac-Iyalla and several other members of Changing Attitudes Nigeria were arrested after their first meeting, which drew several dozen people, after police officers found literature for the meeting in their car. Mr. Mac-Iyalla said he was kicked in the head by one of the officers, and he spent several days in jail without being charged or taken before a judge, although that is not unusual for people arrested in Nigeria. "There was no reason to arrest us other than that we were openly gay," he said.
Mr. Mac-Iyalla said he started the group after being fired from his job as a teacher at an Anglican school when the principal learned he was gay. "I have loved the Anglican Church all my life," Mr. Mac-Iyalla said. "The church leaders can try to claim that we don't exist, but we gay Anglicans of Nigeria will stand up to say we are here."
With the exception of South Africa, whose Constitution provides protections for gay men and lesbians and whose courts recently ruled that gays must be permitted to marry, gay people in many African countries are forced underground by social taboos and laws. Many African countries have laws against sex between people of the same sex. In Cameroon, 11 men have been in jail for seven months on sodomy charges and may be forced to undergo a medical examination to determine whether they engaged in anal sex. Human rights groups say such exams are humiliating and inhumane.
On interracial relationships
In-Laws in the Age of the Outsider
By BENEDICT CAREY
SHE was in the kitchen trying to bond with her boyfriend's mother and help prepare the food when the older woman made a remark that effectively shut the conversation down.
"I asked to try one of the chicken wings she was cooking, and she says, 'Oh, these might be a little too spicy for what you're used to,' " said Serene Hammond, 25, of Washington, recalling a cookout she attended five years ago.
Ms. Hammond said she felt odd at the time, and later, insulted. Her father is Haitian, her mother Irish, and she is fair-skinned. The boyfriend's family is black.
"The way I took that comment was, 'Well, this is too hot for what y'all white people eat,' " said Ms. Hammond, who since founded a group called the National Advocacy for the Multiethnic, a clearinghouse for multiracial education. "I said, 'No, I'm from Louisiana.' " She added, "I think a lot of white women who date black men get some of that treatment."
Whether innocent or intentional, even a casual remark or gesture can turn a rainbow holiday feast into a version of "Meet the Parents" or "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" - without the laughs and tearful hugs.
According to Census data, the number of mixed families and couples is increasing each year, from 4.4 percent of all marriages in 1990 to 6.7 percent in 2000. Fully a third of marriages involving Hispanics are interracial, ditto for Asian marriages, and the rate among black Americans is now about 13 percent, and among whites 7 percent, Dr. William Frey of the Brookings Institution concluded from a further analysis of the data.
Many families are delighted or unfazed by having an outsider join them. But many others know another reality: the imminent arrival of a new spouse or girlfriend who is a cultural foreigner almost always amplifies the anxiety they already feel as they try to live up to the holiday-card photos they send out with everyone hugging the Irish setter, or gathered around the tree, psychologists say. It is hard not to resent having to play ambassador when routine domestic relations themselves are tense, when it's hard enough to keep dad and junior from coming to blows at Thanksgiving, say, or to ease the awkwardness between sisters who are not speaking.
Artful entertaining, psychologists say, requires some understanding of both the traps inherent in hosting a cultural outsider and the opportunities.
Most obviously, the new person can buffer or distract from simmering family problems by acting as an outside witness of the family's behavior and an obligatory conversation partner, family therapists say. When a new person enters any closed group, whether in business, sports or in a family, sociologists have found, there is a tacit agreement that the newcomer initially take a place on the margin: often literally, by sitting against the wall, say, a few chairs away from the insiders. Typically, in a family gathering, people take turns approaching the new arrival and opening communication, which can divert attention away from the usual jealousies and grudges that are inflamed in the family's usual rituals.
"Particularly if this person is interesting, he or she can become an attraction," said Dr. Calvin Morrill, a sociologist at the University of California at Irvine who studies group interaction.
A guest who has suffered personal hardship, as an immigrant for instance, might also serve to shrink, at least temporarily, the more petty claims of unfairness that swirl around the table at any family gathering.
Psychologists who study interracial marriages have found that two things are particularly divisive and troublesome to these couples. One concerns children. In-laws almost by definition have strong opinions about their grandchildren or future grandchildren - about how they should be raised and where, and how they might be treated by peers. This topic is best left for another time.
"This issue may be most volatile when the husband is black and the wife is white - white wives' parents sometimes reject the offspring and reject the black husband simultaneously," said Dr. Stanley Gaines, a senior lecturer in psychology at Brunel University in England, in an e-mail.
The second problem is the tendency of people to resort to racial stereotypes - when conflict arises, "even if the conflict initially had nothing to do with race per se," Dr. Gaines added.
The bottom line, psychologists say, is that holiday gatherings are perhaps the worst time to try to settle longstanding disputes. Racial stereotyping does not go down well with gravy, no matter how justified the underlying conflicts.
Smaller misunderstandings are almost unavoidable, therapists say. "I think you have to expect that there's going to be some discomfort, some awkwardness when you're entertaining this new person, and to prepare for that" and weather it, said Dr. Constance Ahrons, a psychologist in San Diego and author of the book, "We're Still Family."
When possible, she said, prepare other family members beforehand as well, by informing cousins, aunts and uncles as much about the new spouse or boyfriend as possible. "You may find that some family members decide not to come at all, because they're uncomfortable with the situation," she said. If one of those people came, it might be asking for worse trouble, she said.
Entertaining a guest of a different race or religion can also provide an excuse for one of the most effective strategies to soothe and preempt family discord: structured activities.
In a study of how family reunions affect personal relationships, Dr. Laurence Basirico, dean of international programs at Elon University in Elon, N.C., interviewed 566 readers of Reunions Magazine, a journal for planning reunions of all kinds. Those surveyed included families across the country who attended large gatherings. In his analysis, Dr. Basirico found that the most satisfying reunions were those that were highly planned, with scheduled events each day that were mostly optional.
If the new visitor is a fundamentalist Christian who objects to watching a Harry Potter film, or a Muslim who would rather skip the late-night drinking, they are warned and have an out.
"They simply take a pass, and there are no conflicts over these small decisions about what we should do and when, which can turn into big arguments, especially if you don't know what some of the underlying cultural differences may be," Dr. Basirico said in an interview.
Keep in mind, too, that it is not only the hosts who are worried and plotting. Dr. Ahrons recently had as clients a gay couple, one black and the other white, who, she said, spent weeks preparing for a visit to the white man's family, who was very uncomfortable with the relationship. The pair role-played a bit, and did some of their own scheduling. And they had their own plan for defusing trouble.
"One thing they planned was simply to get out of the house regularly," she said. "They would just excuse themselves at a certain time and off they went to get a drink."
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no subject
Date: 2005-12-23 08:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-23 03:19 pm (UTC)By the time the Egyptians were burying people in Saqqara, they probably had similar views of homosexuality as their neighbors did. As in, it's not that big a deal.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-23 03:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-23 03:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-23 07:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-23 08:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-23 03:19 pm (UTC)By the time the Egyptians were burying people in Saqqara, they probably had similar views of homosexuality as their neighbors did. As in, it's not that big a deal.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-23 03:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-23 03:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-23 07:19 pm (UTC)