Sexual Selection in the Wodaabe Tribe

Perhaps human aesthetics emerged through runaway sexual selection, with aesthetic tastes evolving as part of female mate choice. In this view, some female hominids just happened to have certain tastes concerning male ornaments. The artists best able to fulfill these tastes inseminated more aesthetic groupies and sired more offspring, who inherited both their artistic talent and their mothers' aesthetic tastes. Something like this still happens among the Wodaabe people (also known as the Boro...

 Piracy Preserves Data and Media that Otherwise Wouldn't b...

In Nigeria as elsewhere, piracy creates new kinds of archives inconceivable outside of this mode of media reproduction. In markets specializing in wholesale tape duplication, sellers have sprung up specializing in the storage and preservation of different music forms. These sellers maintain substantial archives of Indian film songs, traditional Hausa singers such as Mamman Shata and Musa ‘Dan Kwairo, and new music forms such as bandiri, a religious music that takes tunes from Hindi films an...

 Vonnegut on Ibo Extended Family

I met a man in Nigeria one time, an Ibo who had six hundred relatives he knew quite well. His wife had just had a baby, the best possible news in any extended family. They were going to take it to meet all its relatives, Ibos of all ages and sizes and shapes. It would meet other babies, cousins not much older than it was. Everybody who was big enough and steady enough was going to hold it, cuddle it, gurgle to it, and say how pretty or how handsome it was. Wouldn't you have loved to be...