Category: Anthropology

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Pink diaper bag

As a male, I am supposed to be emasculated by wearing pink or having such colored things. They signal my effeminate nature? Or homosexuality? Something like that. Of course, the same men upset about it wear the pink shirts their spouses make them wear.

Fleur has a couple diaper bags.

  • Justice League backpack with Batgirl, Wonder Woman, and Supergirl symbols. It is pink and blue.
  • Solid pink messenger bag.

Occasionally, people make comments about how much I must hate it being pink. Not at all.

First, we have them because they represent Fleur. We want to teach her to be a hero by standing up for truth and justice. The bag is sized for a child not much older than her. We carry it as a diaper bag until the time when she can wear it herself. (She has expressed interest in wearing.)

Second, the solid pink bag would be better if it were purple, but the loot crate service that sent it went with pink. It is a great bag outside the color. And, pink is a good clue to her being a girl. (A woman told me purple is not a girl’s color. Only pink is.) Her hair curls up on top, giving her a fauxhawk haircut. Plus, she is as tall as older boys.

Finally, in my archive of family photos is one of my uncle carrying his granddaughter’s pink diaper. This is from a dozen years ago. I don’t remember anyone commenting on this when it happened. It only stood out to me lately when looking through my photos. It seems like the most trivial of details that a male carried something of a singular unallowable specific color. And it only stood out because of late people seem to want to comment on it.

Apparently, there are men out there bothered to have a girly baby carrier or diaper bag. For them, there is tacticalbabygear.com so they can spend a $100 cajones tax.

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Kindness over achievement

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

This is another thing to add to tracking my responses to Fleur’s behavior. I know she monitors my behavior, so it is important to behave in the way I want her to model. But, also to what I respond matters. From an article:

Kids learn what’s important to adults not by listening to what we say, but by noticing what gets our attention. And in many developed societies, parents now pay more attention to individual achievement and happiness than anything else. However much we praise kindness and caring, we’re not actually showing our kids that we value these traits.

Well, that puts on the pressure. But, I already thought that I need to be the person I want her to emulate.

 

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Prehistoric Baby Bottles

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Some researchers are claiming artifacts discovered in Bavaria are ancient baby bottle. They have very narrow spouts, residue confirmed to be ruminant milk, and were found in child graves.

From one of the project partners:

Bringing up babies in prehistory was not an easy task. We are interested in researching cultural practices of mothering, which had profound implications for the survival of babies. It is fascinating to be able to see, for the first time, which foods these vessels contained.

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Toddlers are cats

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  • Both have an insatiable curiosity.
  • Both rail about the indignity of being handled against their will.
  • Both like to knock things off tables.
  • Both give you betrayed looks when you take a photo before letting them out of a predicament.
  • Neither willingly allow you to inspect their face for whatever ended up on it.
  • Pet names.
  • Both look at you confused when you ask why they are making the crying sound.
  • They have the same entertainment. Things that rattle. String toys. Chase the red dot. Kitty TV (a window they can look out).
  • They enjoy the same food. Cheese, veggies, pretzels.
  • They both want to sleep on you.
  • And both want to establish their place above the other in the social pecking order.
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Personal Cherry Picker

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“08_26_09” by jcbonbon is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Fleur wants things that are put out of her reach. She often comes to me to ask my help in picking her up to get closer to them. Most commonly, she wants to look at the photographs on the mantle. She usually does this when we are home alone and points and says, “Mama!” (I much prefer this to her screaming.)

She also wants to be lifted closer to the pottery collection.

The bathroom counter with Mama’s lotions, hair clips, and other tools of the beauty trade is another destination.

All these directing to someplace is where pointing often comes into play.

Impatience about not getting to touch above things is where the Daredevil climbing comes into play.

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Civilization Is Built on Code

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Photo by Markus Spiske temporausch.com on Pexels.com

How did we humans manage to build a global civilization on the cusp of colonizing other planets?
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Maybe it’s our unique capacity for complex language and story-telling, which allow us to learn in groups; or our ability to extend our capabilities through technology; or political and religious institutions we have created. However, perhaps the most significant answer is something else entirely: code. Humanity has survived, and thrived, by developing productive activities that evolve into regular routines and standardized platforms—which is to say we have survived, and thrived, by creating and advancing code.

As a technologist, this article was written to attract my attention. In a nutshell, code, aka the instructions for describing a process is in everything humanity creates. From RNA in the cell interpreting DNA to make the proteins that are the building blocks of life to the 0s and 1s in binary data telling computers how to draw the text in this blog, code is everywhere. Our technology going back to making stone tools and fire is built on creating and refining processes.

The concept of the unit of knowledge passed along through culture is the meme. The idea was based on the concept of the gene passing along hereditary behavior. The meme has been co-opted to mean a funny picture spread over the Internet.

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Storytelling as behavior modification

On how the Inuit control anger starting with young children.

Across the board, all the moms mention one golden rule: Don’t shout or yell at small children.

Traditional Inuit parenting is incredibly nurturing and tender. If you took all the parenting styles around the world and ranked them by their gentleness, the Inuit approach would likely rank near the top.

The culture views scolding — or even speaking to children in an angry voice — as inappropriate, says Lisa Ipeelie, a radio producer and mom who grew up with 12 siblings. “When they’re little, it doesn’t help to raise your voice,” she says. “It will just make your own heart rate go up.”

Traditionally, the Inuit saw yelling at a small child as demeaning. It’s as if the adult is having a tantrum; it’s basically stooping to the level of the child.

Where the article gets really interesting is the use of storytelling. They have oral stories passed down ever generations that are designed to shape behavior to prevent bad behavior. So, instead of raising your voice, you seed their imagination that they are going to suffer if they do the bad thing and softly remind them about this potentiality. Or perform satire of the bad behavior to make the perpetrator of it appear childish.

I also love how this ties into the traditions of storytelling. I view blogging as the modern equivalent: a medium of passing along information for the social group. Bloggers are modern griots. A tribe’s storyteller holds a prized position in the group, which is due, I think, to how our brains are wired to better understand information in the form of a story.