Word: anthropologist
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...spread of savannah, swamps and crocodile-infested rivers on the northeastern tip of the Northern Territory, remains one of the wildest. A handful of settlements dot its 95,000-sq.-km area, and the unsealed 750-km road that crosses it is passable only in the dry season. When anthropologist Donald Thomson, whose writings on this enigmatic region will be republished this month in Donald Thomson in Arnhem Land (Miegunyah Press; 264 pages), arrived there just 70 years ago, it was also feared by many whites, who had heard stories of its ferocious nomadic tribes...
Thomson was born in Melbourne in 1901, the year in which the new nation decided not to include indigenous people in its population counts. Thirty years later, a white man who liked them was, he wrote, "regarded as an eccentric." By then the young anthropologist was seeing official attitudes to Aborigines up close on Cape York. In 1932 he photographed three Aboriginal men chained neck to neck, sentenced without trial by a mission superintendent to lifelong exile on Palm Island. The image, reproduced in Thomson, shows them beginning a 380-km walk with police riding behind them. As desolate...
...nursing can be a utilitarian business, with wobbly-legged newborns standing up to drink from Mom as if she were a spigot. Human nursing, by contrast, requires flesh-on-flesh cuddling. What's more, a mother's metabolism ensures that this contact occurs more or less all day long. Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, professor emeritus at the University of California at Davis, points out that human beings produce very dilute breast milk, which necessitates frequent nursing sessions and therefore provides loads of opportunities for mother and child to touch...
...even at this unsophisticated stage of sexual maturation, there's more going on in kids than simply developing an exquisite reproductive itch and learning the wonderful ways it can be scratched. "More and more in our field, we don't even talk about sex anymore," says anthropologist Gil Herdt, director of the Program in Human Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University. "We talk about sexuality. It's something that involves the entire person, the whole life course, not just the sexual acts...
...worries about kids barging into the bedroom--older couples have much less reason to be uptight about sex. They are also much more likely to be adept at pleasing each other, knowing where and how to arouse. Some sex counselors report that they see quite a bit of what anthropologist Margaret Mead called PMZ (post-menopausal zest). "Indeed, some women begin to have orgasms for the first time as they grow older," write Dr. Robert Butler and his wife, psychotherapist Myrna Lewis, in The New Love and Sex After 60 (Ballantine Books; 400 pages), the latest edition of their classic...