Chatter That Matters

Chatter That Matters

[introductory music]

Voice 1: What makes us human?

Voice 2: A very beautiful day.

Voice 3: Little termite farm.

Voice 4: Things that create wonder.

Voice 5: Social media.

Voice 6: Forced migration.

Voice 1: What makes us human?

Voice 7: Stone tools.

Voice 8: A hydropower dam.

Voice 9: Pintura indígena.

Voice 10: Earthquakes and volcanoes.

Voice 11: Coming in from Mars.

Voice 12: The first cyborg.

Voice 1: Let’s find out. SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human.

Eshe Lewis: Hello fellow SAPIENS. Here at SAPIENS magazine, we focus on just about everything human. Behind each feature on our site is the work of a small and mighty group of staff dedicated to sharing anthropology with the world.

Today I’m going behind the scenes to bring you the voices of two of my colleagues, Bridget Alex and Emily Sekine, the developmental editors of SAPIENS magazine. Bridget edits archaeology and biological anthropology pieces. Her background is in studying long-dead human relatives, like the Neanderthals. Emily is the assistant managing editor and sociocultural and linguistics developmental editor. Like me, she’s a cultural anthropologist, and she mostly studies people’s relationships with nature and the environment. I met with both of them for a conversation about one of our favorite human activities: gossip.

So I really like to ask anthropologists what they do in the world of anthropology and then what your family thinks you do.

Bridget Alex: Well, my research focused on understanding how Homo sapiens like us spread successfully across the world after 60,000 years ago, while other human groups, like Neanderthals, went extinct. And how these different types of humans might have vibed together, interacted, thought of each other, where and when they met. For the past almost 10 years, I’ve been writing about all this for the public. And it’s pretty wonderful when I hear my dad explain things back to me like, “Oh, Bridget, I saw your article, and it was about this, this, and this.” So, yeah, at this point, my family actually does know quite well.

Emily Sekine: So for my research, I really focused on how people deal with the uncertainties surrounding earthquakes and volcanoes in a part of Japan where, for about 50 years, people have been told that an earthquake is imminent, that it could happen at any moment. And so they’ve been preparing like that, as if an earthquake could occur in the next minute. So I looked at how that affects people’s daily lives when they’re living with that kind of looming disaster: how they plan around that, how it affects things like politics, how it affects urban planning or things like spiritual practices, religious beliefs, all sorts of stuff.

So I would say my family … Yeah, I think I agree with Bridget. Once I started writing more about my research in an accessible way, I think that they came to understand more what it meant. And it was also through connecting it to my own life and family—because I’m half Japanese, my dad’s from Tokyo—that I navigated being both an insider and an outsider, as an anthropologist in Japan, and trying to figure out what were the things that struck me as different from growing up in the U.S. and in the ways that people related to nature and thought about the environment.

Eshe: I love asking anthropologists that question. So SAPIENS is all about exploring what makes us human. And so I’m going to propose that we switch gears and talk about gossip for a bit. And, of course, I’m proposing a very professional discussion about it because we are anthropologists, and our discipline actually takes gossip pretty seriously because gossiping, it turns out, is a very human activity. So how does this sound?

Bridget: Love it.

Emily: Love. Yeah.

Bridget: We love to talk about us.

Emily: Yeah.

Eshe: OK. Good. Me, too. I am secretly thrilled that you are into this. So I’ve been trying to figure out how to define gossip so that people know what we’re talking about. And I think a solid description would be talking about people when they’re not there. But it doesn’t always have to be negative, which is probably why anthropologists find it so interesting? I feel like linguistic anthropologists might focus on the structure of language and gossip. Cultural anthropologists would probably be more interested in the form that it takes and what it does to communities and societies. Does that definition sound right to you?

Emily: I think the only thing I would add is that it can also be gossip about nonhuman entities [laughs]. So you could be gossiping about an animal or, in my case, a phenomenon like an earthquake. So I think it’s any entity that is part of a community, and those could include nonhumans. But I agree that it is about exchanging reputational information about them.

Eshe: So, Bridget, I’m going to bounce us back to you because you know a lot about human evolution. And I’m wondering if you know anything about how humans have evolved to transmit gossip and what’s its function.

Bridget: Well, when we’re thinking about the evolution of gossip worldwide in all humans, it is one of the traits that is probably a cultural universal that in every society you go to, you’re going to find gossip exists because in every society we’ve ever documented, people do gossip. And I would extend that as far back into the past as language existed. As soon as humans were talking, I think they were talking about each other.

And biological anthropologists, or people who study human evolution, are interested in gossip because it addresses two big questions about humans. One relates to language—this major, unsolvable question of when and why did language evolve: millions of years ago or 400,000 years ago? [It was] sometime in our evolutionary past, probably before we were fully modern Homo sapiens. And there’s some fun hypotheses out there that were put forth in the ’90s, particularly by an evolutionary psychologist named Robin Dunbar, who’s still around. And this was called the vocal grooming hypothesis.

So if you look to all the other primates who are around today, if they’re living in groups, they have to get along with each other. I mean, yeah, they fight. But, in general, you need to get along with your group mates as a social primate, like a monkey or a lemur or an ape. One way they do this is they groom each other. So they come up to another individual, and they pick through their fur—through their pelts—and they pick out little bugs and leaves and debris. And, yes, it’s hygienic, but you could also do that to yourself. So doing it to someone else is kind of a massage, it’s kind of social, it’s “I pat your back, you pat my back.” And it helps ease tensions.

They’ve measured endorphins and feel-good hormones, like oxytocin, and they know that primates like to groom each other. It helps them bond with each other. And the idea with the vocal grooming hypothesis was, as human ancestors’ brain size increased, the group size increased; eventually we’re living in these groups that are so big, maybe over 100 individuals, that it would take you all day to groom everyone. I would be picking ticks out of Emily’s hair, and then I have to go pick some leaves out of Eshe’s hair, and it’s just taking all day, and I don’t have time to find food or make tools or whatever.

So the idea was to simultaneously socialize. We started singing, and our language capacities evolved, and we were able to gossip and talk. So that was the whole idea: Instead of physically grooming, we started vocal grooming and bonding, and from that arose language and gossip. But I don’t think we’ll ever really be able to test that idea. And the problem is, if you look to other primates, there’s a lot of other factors about how much time they spend grooming. How dirty are they getting? How much fur do they have? Conspicuously, Homo sapiens don’t have a lot of fur, or we have some hair and a few patches on our body and then very thin hair through the rest of it. So, probably, the vocal grooming hypothesis is fun to think about, but it’s not in favor with a lot of anthropologists.

But the other big question that language gets at is these problems of free riders. If you’re living in a group, everyone has to contribute to the group success. In the past, everyone hunted and gathered, meaning there were foragers who subsisted on wild plants and animals that had to be [killed]. You had to go out each day and get them and bring them back to camp and share them with your group. So there’s always, in all human societies, been the problem of what if somebody is not really pulling their weight.

I’ve done it. In college, I’ll admit I was in a sorority, and they would have parties, and we’d have to clean up after, and I would just go in and push around a broom but not really do any work. But it looked like I was working. Or I would pick up cups but pick them up so slowly … [and then] maybe I’m looking for the broom in the closet. It’s very easy to be a free rider. But if you can gossip, and someone can say, “Bridge, it’s not really cleaning,” my reputation goes down.

So across evolutionary biologists, biological anthropologists, most would say that gossip is essential so that you can share information about individuals, make sure that people aren’t cheating the group norms, the expectations, the standards, and that everyone is doing their fair share. And even today, right? What do I gossip about most? You know, it’s oftentimes information: Who I do want to hang out with? Who do I want to work with?

Eshe: Emily, do you know anything about why anthropologists might be interested in gossip?

Emily: Well, I have to first just say one of the things that I kept picturing was people at public baths because a very big part of Japanese culture is going to the public baths. And what I witnessed was groups of women going in together, and they would groom each other. Basically, you help each other wash hair. You’ll sometimes use a scrubber to scrub each other’s back. And the whole time you are sitting there gossiping; that’s why you go.

And people call it “skinship”; that there’s something that happens when you’re naked in a room together, where you can really let down your other defenses. And in Japan, there’s a lot of hierarchy and ways of establishing who’s the in-group and who’s the out-group. So I think, in general, I would say anthropologists care about gossip.

I guess the way that I think about it is when I was doing my first fieldwork, I was trained to think about, to triangulate between, what people say, what they do, and what they say about what they do. Usually, the gaps between those three things are where the gossip emerges. So “They said that they were going to bring shampoo for us all to share at the bathhouse, but then she didn’t actually bring it, and she only used it for herself.” That’s obviously a silly example. But it’s when people don’t do what they’ve said [or] when people feel that they’re being lied to or that something just isn’t right with a situation is often where gossip emerges. And at the level of a small group, like a family or a community, it can often be about establishing who’s in and who’s out.

But if you scale it up, and you look at how that occurs at a wider level—so at the level of a society, for example. It might be people talking about things that they feel their government leaders said that they were going to do, and then they haven’t; they’ve failed to do, or things that they learned in school: some kind of a narrative that a teacher taught them about how the world isn’t panning out in their real lives.

So I think that there’s a lot of layers to it that are on a continuum with other sorts of speculative knowledge that people share, like rumor, misinformation, or conspiracies. So it can be both positive and negative. But I think looking at those gaps is where anthropologists thrive [laughs] because it’s really trying to figure out what is actually going on in a place that you can’t get from reading an official narrative about that place.

Eshe: Something you and Bridget are both saying is that there’s an element of social control there, too, that I think anthropologists are really fascinated with, right? I think anthropologists are interested in gossip because it also points out what social norms are; what you’re supposed to do. Nobody gossips about someone doing what they’re supposed to be doing. So gossip is a way of figuring out—or you can use gossip, rather, to figure out—what is expected of someone, and then what is a rule that you break, and how you break a rule. And that’s your way that you establish your in-group and out-group, like “Those people break rules, and those are the people we talk about because they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing. So if you don’t want us to talk about you, then get in line. Don’t be a freeloader. Get the shampoo and come back like you said you were going to.”

I think, for me, as someone who works on gender violence, I obviously see the negative side of gossip. But I think I also see the way that gossip can be used as a tool for people to create a whisper network and tell other people something about someone else that you can’t necessarily say out loud. And I think, particularly working with people who are marginalized in a number of different ways, it allows you a certain amount of anonymity. If you share gossip or you share information that might actually be about yourself but in a way that hides your own identity, then you’re getting the information out while also maintaining your status or your reputation in a way. And so I see it in some ways as a way that people can try to take care of each other by offering relevant information that someone can then use to make a decision about who they might want to partner with or who they might want to avoid.

And anthropologists tend to be called gossips. I remember my first anthropology class. I had a professor who said, “Anthropologists are frequently referred to as gossips. They’re professional gossips. We always want to know what’s going on.” When you go into a town or you go into a city, you’re trying to keep your ear to the ground and listen and figure out what people are talking about because that’s where you figure out the contentious issue. What is it that people want to know?

I’m going to share more about how gossip became part of my research in Peru. But first, a quick break.

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Eshe: I think gossip really became part of my research in a way. I have now been working in Peru for 13 years, I guess. And so, at the beginning, there’s all this, “Who is this new person?” I’m Black, like the people I work with, but I’m not like the people I work with because I am from North America. But I’m Black, so I’m not really a gringo, and I speak Spanish, and my family’s from the Caribbean. So there’s all this talking about where I fit in. And then also there’s always that pause because I think a lot of communities are war-weary about anthropologists showing up.

I think over my time there, I started seeing people who would show up, do an interview, disappear, never to be heard from again. And then somehow you’d find out that they published a book about these people, and they were like, “Yeah, well, you know, I could tell when they came in here that we weren’t going to …” And I was like, “OK. That is my lesson.” Or it’s more like a reinforcement, like, “Don’t be that person.” And while I did spend a lot of time wondering what people were saying about me, more so out of curiosity than anything else, I think because I was working on gender violence, which is a taboo subject among Black women in Peru—which people are still doing, I would argue, with a lot of invisibility.

And there’s a lot of very harmful stereotypes about Black women that really stymie conversations about violence in general. I ended up learning about violence against Black women through gossip. People saying, “I know this woman” or “This happened to a friend of mine or so-and-so,” and I just one day said, “Is this something that needs attention?” And people went, “Yeah.” And then that’s how I ended up doing my work. But also a lot of the knowledge that the women I worked with had—a lot of what is community consensus and no knowledge—is not taken seriously because it’s told by women, and it’s informal in that it’s not written down. And that’s enough for it to just kind of be sometimes brushed off as “It’s gossip.” Like what people do when they’re bored, or it’s seen as this social ill. But it really made me think a lot more about why this should be taken seriously. Just because it isn’t written down and it’s talked about by this segment of the population, it’s discarded. And there’s a lot of really important information there. And when people write that down in books, they get accolades for having published it. And it’s stuff that people knew about that all of a sudden is now valuable.

So I think it gave me a lot to think about in terms of not doing what I’m taught, which is to dismiss these stories. I mean, sometimes they are a little ridiculous, right? And they can be tremendously hurtful. But there’s a lot that you can take from it. And I think with patience and good analysis, there’s a lot you can learn from there.

Does gossip play a role at all in helping you determine what you want to write about in your own writings externally or in your work at SAPIENS?

Bridget: So, unlike if I worked for the New York Times or the Washington Post, I don’t have to cover every single science story that comes out in my field. I can be selective. So I’m not just doing the work of a reporter: “Oh, this big new study came out. We must report it.” And I am personally choosing to write about research that I think is cool and done by people who are at least neutral [laughs]. And if I do personally know gossip about an author of a study, I’ll often not interview that person. I don’t want to elevate their voice anymore if it’s negative gossip, of course.

Emily: Yeah, I would agree. I do look at what anthropologists are gossiping about in the field. So things like the American Anthropological Association community pages, which are a hot mess often. But it is a place where people gossip. They share all sorts of thoughts; sometimes really hot takes on issues. Sometimes it’s real messy. I love to just sit and observe what’s going on in those pages. And it is information that is helpful [for] an editor who’s trying to understand what the state of the field is and what parts of the debates that are going on within anthropology have relevance outside of the field for the general public.

I think it is often issues around social justice–type questions. And some of what it means to decolonize the field. These issues around sexual harassment and power abuse that go on in the field. Those sorts of things, I feel like, are where my little gossipy heart picks up and it’s like, “Ooh, this seems like a story. Is there a way that we can cover this? Who is looking into this?” Because I do think it matters that often those things that aren’t “official knowledge” is because the officials don’t want that knowledge to get out. There is some power dynamic there that gossip can have a role in challenging and exposing. So I think you’ve got to stay on the pulse of what’s going on professionally.

Eshe: Professionally, of course.

Emily: Of course, yeah [laughs]. And also at anthropological conferences, and probably at most academic conferences, people always say that the real work is not actually going to the sessions and listening to the talks. It’s about having drinks at the hotel bar and chatting about what’s actually going on.

I had a friend who was talking about how things had changed during the pandemic, when things went remote, and students who were coming into the department were missing a lot of key information about how to succeed in the department. And they realized it was because they weren’t gossiping. So they weren’t getting all the info about, you know, “Oh, it says in the handbook that you need to take this many classes, but actually if you go and get a waiver from so-and-so in the admissions department, you can get around that.” All that type of information that seems really mundane is part of what it is to be socialized in a certain community and culture. So if you don’t have the ability to do that, you’re going to struggle.

Eshe: Creating spaces for gossip. I feel like more people need to take up that torch. Emily and Bridget, as editors, you review a lot of anthropological content, and I’m wondering, on a more general level, what secrets about humans you might have learned that you think we should all know.

Bridget: All right. I would say that there are so many ways to be a human across time and space and cultures, and subcultures within cultures and societies, and there’s no best one. And it would be so bland if we were all homogenous and the same and eating the same things and wearing the same things and with the same color [of] hair. So I think the secret of humans is that … actually, biologically, our genomes are pretty similar compared to other species. We don’t have much biological diversity, but we are so rich in cultural diversity, and we should keep that up.

Emily: Yeah, that’s very well said, Bridget. What secrets have I learned? I think I would agree that basically anything that you imagine is weird or unlikely has probably happened or is happening in the world. Someone’s doing the thing that you find really weird or that you’re curious about or that you’ve never thought about. So, yeah, we gotta make space for all of that beautiful weirdness.

Bridget: I’ll add that, evolutionarily speaking, not everything we evolved to do is always necessarily a good thing. We have many evolved habits that aren’t necessarily good for your health or happiness. Gossip seems to be a cultural universal that you find in every society, and that doesn’t mean it’s good or bad. It depends on context. In some cases, gossip can save your life. In other cases, it could make you cry. So use it appropriately. Enjoy it. It’s neither good nor bad, but it is something you can act with once you have it.

Emily: Yeah, I want to put in a plug for more gossip about the environment and nature. I think it’s really fascinating how people use gossip to navigate uncertainty about the place where they live, especially in a time when climate change is making the Earth even more unpredictable. So I think when you pay attention to how people talk about those changes, how they try to make sense of them, it can show us a lot about what they value and what they see as under threat with these kinds of changes.

So I think taking that seriously is important, and it can also just be really interesting. I think that it can lead down very fun roads. For example, in Japan, earthquake gossip often leads to talking about supernatural phenomena, monsters, and all sorts of strange animal precursor behavior, strange clouds, strange weather, things that as a scientist, you would dismiss because they aren’t scientifically valid ways of predicting earthquakes. If you think about it anthropologically, that tells me that people have this intimate relationship with their environment; that they’re observing it; that they’re trying to understand it.

And I think that’s actually a really beautiful kind of starting point for thinking about what it means to love the places that you live and want to understand it. So looking at gossip in that way—what people care about, what they choose to pay attention to, and what they choose to talk about—shows a lot about what they value.

[music]

Eshe: For eco-gossip, I am on board with this. Emily Sekine, Bridget Alex, thank you so much for chin-wagging with me.

Emily: Thank you, Eshe.

Bridget: Thanks for having us.

Emily: It was fun.

Eshe: This episode was hosted by me, Eshe Lewis, featuring Bridget Alex and Emily Sekine. Bridget is the archaeology and biological anthropology developmental editor at SAPIENS magazine. Emily is the cultural and linguistic anthropology developmental editor at SAPIENS magazine.

SAPIENS is produced by House of Pod. Cat Jaffee and Dennis Funk are our producers and program teachers. Dennis is also our audio editor and sound designer. Christine Weeber is our copy editor. Our executive producers are Cat Jaffee and Chip Colwell. This episode is part of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program, which provides in-depth training for anthropologists in the craft of science communication and public scholarship.

SAPIENS is an editorially independent podcast funded this season by the John Templeton Foundation with the support of the University of Chicago Press and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. SAPIENS is part of the American Anthropological Association Podcast Library. Please visit SAPIENS.org to check out the additional resources in the show notes and to see all our great stories about everything human. I’m Eshe Lewis. Thank you for listening.