April 2008 • Anthropology News

55

s e c t i o n n e w s

imagine part of a diamond necklace wrapped around a smile.

where did grills come from, and when did they become so popular?The popularity of grills can be traced to the early 1980s, when they became fashionable among hip hop artists and professional athletes in the south. Eventually, the trend gained momentum nationwide, even earning its own addictive hip hop single; in 2006, Paul Wall’s “Grillz” became a number one hit in just ten weeks.

Like other forms of fashionable jewelry, grills are not cheap. Typically, they are priced anywhere from a few hundred dollars to several thousand and may be custom made to fit an individual’s mouth. They can be permanently affixed to the teeth or made to be removable. They come in gold, silver and platinum, and may be adorned with diamonds, rubies, emer-alds and other expensive gemstones. Thus, it should come as no surprise when the media unhesitatingly interprets grills as symbols of wealth and identity.

While the grills we are familiar with are a relatively recent phenomenon, the practice of ornamenting or altering one’s teeth is neither new nor unique to the present. Dental modifi-cation has been practiced in many areas of the world throughout human history, and evidence for it can be seen in the form of filing, banding, staining, chipping and incrustation. Though it is often explainable in terms of status and identity, dental modification is also recogniz-able as a form of beautification. Sometimes, the processes involved are quite painful and require much skill. The Iban of Borneo, for example, reportedly blackened and filed their incisors, drilled holes in them, and then affixed a brass stud to each tooth (Gomes’s Seventeen Years among the Sea Dyaks of Borneo, 1911). The Moi of Vietnam chipped and ground their incisors down to the gum line using a stone, a purport-edly necessary procedure in order to enter into adulthood (Frank’s East of Siam, 1926). Recently, clear evidence of dental modification in the form of skilled filing was for the first time found in the dental remains of Viking Age men of Europe (Arcini in American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 128(4):727-33).

Perhaps one of the most well-known exam-ples, however, is that of the Post-Classic Maya, who distinguished themselves by inserting disks of jade, turquoise, gold and pyrite into the fronts of their teeth (eg, Williams and White in Ancient Mesoamerica, 17:139-51). You might have noticed such inlays in Mel Gibson’s 2006 film, Apocalypto, in the mouths of the wealthiest of the Mayan ladies. Two summers ago, while collecting dental enamel samples for stable isotope research from 2000-year-old burials housed in a renovated monastery just outside of Oaxaca City, Mexico, I had the opportunity to hold several teeth that contained dental inlays quite similar to those of the Maya (see photo in next column).

Indeed, people in many cultures around the world have altered their smiles in various (if

not much more agonizing) ways throughout history, and they have done so in pursuit of beauty, wealth and status. Thus, the study of dental modification has broad relevance for cultural anthropologists, archaeologists, and even biological anthropologists such as myself. What will dental modification look like a hundred or even a thousand years from now, I wonder. Will grills be a short-lived trend or a long-lasting pop culture image? Most impor-tantly, will berry-flavored versions still be available in video stores? Only time will tell.

Have something to say? Write for this column! Contact Jenny Chio (jenny.t.chio@gmail.com) with ideas and suggestions.

Section for Anthropological SciencesStephen Lyon, Contributing editor

Everyone should by now have received infor-mation about AAA elections by email, so I would like to remind all SAS members to cast their ballots in these elections. Certainly SAS members will want to vote in SAS elections, but it is equally important to participate in every other election for which you are entitled to vote. Obviously, this column is not the place to suggest how anyone should vote, and I will not attempt to do so, but I would encourage the membership to use the listserv and the website to provide any additional useful information about candidates that might assist others in making informed decisions.

I would also like to draw attention to a recent issue of Structure and Dynamics (http://reposito-ries.cdlib.org/imbs/socdyn/sdeas/), which is based on papers from a symposium at the February 21–24, 2007, General Meeting of the Society for Anthropological Sciences in San Antonio, Texas: “Formalization as a Tool for Empirical Research: What It Buys Us and What It Doesn’t” (Guest Editor David Kronenfeld, UC Riverside). The following is the abstract of the special issue (slightly adapted by Michael Fischer, U Kent):

The papers in this issue are concerned with “formalization” why it is important, what it can buy us, but also what may be pertinent limita-

tions and how sometimes we can be misled by even a good formaliza-tion. We take a minimalist defini-tion of “formal”: explicit definitions and operations. But the important part concerns formal models and theories. The goal here is threefold: (1) to get out on the table the range of kinds of formalizations that pertinent people have in mind, (2) to address the uses (the “what it buys you”) of their chosen approach and (3) to address what one or another good formalism still does not do (but that people sometimes speak as if it does). Pertinent issues concern: (1) the rela-tionship between analytic goal, assumptions one is willing to make and the resulting formalization and (2) the relationship between a formal repre-sentation of some empirical phenomenon (such as process or set of relationships) and the on-the-ground reality that one actually experiences.

Please send your comments, questions and news to Stephen Lyon at s.m.lyon@durham.ac.uk.

Society for Anthropology in Community CollegesLLoyd MiLLer, Contributing editor

Virtual RealityWhen American Anthropologist Editor-in-Chief Tom Boellstorff invited section editors to participate in the Virtual Campus he created for AA, I forwarded the invitation on to some of my SACC colleagues. It sounded both wonderful and intimidating to me, but as a retiree seeking to simplify my life, I found it mostly overwhelming. Tom is keenly inter-ested in exploring virtual worlds or “Second Lives” and has just completed a book on the subject, due out in March. In a part of his Virtual Campus, he has created and will maintain free of charge kiosks for each of the section journals, and he offers some sugges-tions for exploration and experimentation.

SACC members’ responses reflected both enthusiasm and caution for use of the new site and for involvement in high tech virtual reality itself. According to Brian Lynch (Quinebaug Valley Community C):

There are some pretty amazing things in Second Life (just including the environment itself); there are virtual museums and meeting spaces, virtual classrooms, concerts are held where “avatars” can gather and watch live video streams of events from other places; someone told me recently about a world-music site where you can enter a virtual space where you (your avatar) can pick up various percussion instruments from various cultures, learn about them, and even “play” them to hear how they sound … [There] is nothing necessarily liberating, nor necessarily oppressive about the [Internet]; it will all depend on what we do with it … I would suggest that what holds for this life of ours holds also for Second Life, and how eventually anyone might come to use it. The “good” of it is not a given.

Dental inlay in Oaxaca, Mexico, summer 2006. Photo courtesy Sarah R Taylor