Tag: anthro

Who Gets to Be a Hero?

The Anthropology of Prestige In World War 2

Hello all, and welcome back to my blog! After a busy summer, there should finally be more posts on the way, so stay tuned for more soon.

I recently finished the very well-written nonfiction book A Higher Call by Adam Makos (and it is highly recommended). In this book, Makos writes of the lives of pilots during the Second World War, describing famous missions and the strategic failures that eventually led to the collapse of the Third Reich. A Higher Call deals heavily with the themes of honor and morality in war, two values that were tested in the skies above Europe and Africa.

Reading this book, I was impressed by the number of aerial victories scored by many of the famous German Aces (known as Experten). Erich Hartmann, the highest scoring pilot of all time, took down 352 planes over 1,404 combat missions. Adolf Galland, commander of the famous JV-44 wing, scored 104 victories. Richard I. Bong took down 40 enemy planes in his P-38 fighter. All of these men were known as “Aces”. I’ve read a number of articles about these talented fighters, and one thing I noticed is that many of them hail from Europe or the United States. While the massive scale of aircraft production as well as the range of fighting in the European theater are obvious reasons for this, the trend of Western countries producing the largest numbers of recognized aces is something that I found interesting.

The Mythic “Ace” Status

Hailing from the French word used to describe someone elite, a flying ace is a military pilot credited with shooting down five or more enemy aircraft in air-to-air combat. Though it was a far more attainable status during WWII, when targets were in abundance, it has always been a prestigious title only held by the most skilled aviators. During the Second World War, estimates indicate that there were over 4,000 aces globally, with Nazi Germany and the United States producing the most. Due to the impressive nature of this status, wartime ministries on all sides aggressively cultivated the mythos of the ace to put a heroic face on the otherwise anonymous and industrialized slaughter of World War II.

At this point in the article, you may be wondering why I have gone on about fighter planes and propaganda on an anthropology blog. The prestige surrounding aerial victories is precisely where anthropological themes come into play, though. In an earlier article, I explained the theme of collectivism vs. individualism, but I will briefly describe it here. Collectivist cultures prioritize the needs of the group, and the role of the individual often contributes to the functionality of their group. Individualist cultures, on the other hand, prioritize the individual. In these cultures, individuals often pursue their own goals instead of working towards group goals. During World War II, the collectivist-individualist spread of belligerents was as follows:

Nazi Germany	Traditional Individualist
United States	Strongly Individualist
United Kingdom	Strongly Individualist
Australia & Canada	Strongly Individualist
Soviet Union	Ideologically Collectivist
Republic of China	Strongly Collectivist
Empire of Japan	Strongly Collectivist
Fascist Italy	In-Group Collectivist

The Highest Honor

The individualism-collectivism theme had an important role in how different countries’ pilots were honored. Nazi Germany is the most prominent example of an individualist prestige system during the war. Extreme hierarchical rewards characterized the “cult of aces” promoted in the Luftwaffe. Pilots earned medals in a preset order that required one to obtain every medal in a preset sequence. After receiving two Iron Cross medals, the Honor Goblet of the Luftwaffe, and the German Cross in Gold, pilots who scored 20 aerial victories had the ultimate honor of wearing the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. Earning the Knight’s Cross instantly transformed any Jagdflieger into a national hero. The pilot’s name and achievements were blasted across the nation through the daily Armed Forces Report radio broadcast, turning anonymous servicemen into household names overnight. The Nazi state printed millions of postcards and collector’s cards featuring images of pilots wearing their medals, and the propaganda magazine Signal regularly featured high-profile pilots on its cover. From there, aviators could earn milestone additions to their Knight’s Cross; oak leaves, swords, diamonds, and golden oak leaves were added, in that order, to the Knight’s Cross for additional victories. The achievement of these milestones, like the Cross, was highly publicized.

^{Knights Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds}

Pilots who earned these honors were portrayed not as soldiers fighting under the Wehrmacht leadership, but as romantic, individualistic “knights of the air”. Emphasizing the pilots’ Aryan traits and devotion to the regime, the German propaganda machine was able to use these men to inspire the mass purchase of war bonds and maintain high civilian morale. Additionally, when the tide of the war turned and the Defense of the Reich campaign began, newspapers began to run stories detailing how single ace pilots “saved” cities by shooting down several Allied bombers in single nights. This served to counter the growing demoralization in the German public.

While sometimes promoting shared credit and teamwork, the United States held the same individualistic values as Nazi Germany in terms of its pilots and propaganda. American propaganda was far less centralized than that of Germany, as most was produced through cooperation with Hollywood or other commercial entities. Still, top aces like Richard Bong (40 victories) and David McCampbell (34 victories) were brought back to the United States at the peak of their fame to be used as public relations assets. These national heroes were the faces of the War Bond system, travelling to cities and factories to sell government war bonds.

^{Some interesting American Ace propaganda}

While aerial victories meant everything to pilots in America, Germany, Canada, Britain, and Australia, the situation was far different in collectivist countries, especially Japan. The Imperial Japanese Navy and Army Air Forces supported group-only victory credits. When an aerial victory was achieved, it was officially recorded in the air group (sentai) logbook not as an individual victory, but as a victory for the entire group. Rather than emphasize individual victories like Germany, Imperial Japan placed no emphasis on personal accomplishments. According to the popular Warbird’s Forum, except for high-ranking officers, the only medal awarded to Japanese soldiers was one that was awarded upon a pilot’s death. One aspect of the war unique to Japan that perfectly reflects the empire’s collective ideals is the Kamikaze. Rather than relying on skill to win dogfights, the Kamikaze program relied on the ultimate collective spirit of Japanese pilots. Erasing the role of the individual completely, a Kamikaze pilot’s sole purpose was to guide explosive-laden planes into enemy targets. In this display of ultimate devotion to the empire (the collective group), the individual was entirely unprioritized in order to benefit the survival of Japan.

The contrast between the prestige systems of collectivist and individualist belligerents in the Second World War is stark. While the core values of individualist nations were reflected in their use of aces as heroes and knights, collective countries removed all focus from the individual. Such a difference shows just how deeply the cultural values and traditional beliefs of a nation and its people impact the development of political, social, and economic institutions.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s post about something new! Stay tuned for another article soon.

09.08.2026

The AI Bias Problem: Ethnocultural Discrimination and Asthma

Hello all, and welcome back to another post! This is the third article in a series about folk illness and medical anthropology, but it will go more in-depth on the subject than the previous articles have. Shifting from a focus on Latin American cultures and popular folk illnesses in their cultures, this article will focus on a range of ethnic groups and how they describe asthma symptoms.

Introduction

You may be asking yourself, why asthma? Asthmatic symptoms can be induced by methacholine, a drug used in the methacholine challenge test. Working as a non-specific cholinergic agonist, the drug stimulates muscarinic receptors in the lungs to narrow, or “bronchoconstrict”, the airways in a way similar to asthma. In the classic methacholine challenge, a patient’s standard lung function is measured before they are administered increasing doses of methacholine through a nebulizer. The doses stop once the patient’s airways begin to narrow, and if one’s lung functionality drops 20% during the low-dosage phase, the individual likely suffers from asthma due to airway hyperresponsiveness. In a number of the studies I will reference, methacholine is used both in the methacholine challenge test to test for asthma and as a simulator of asthmatic symptoms. Due to its simulatability with this medication, asthma is the perfect sickness to measure cultural differences in illness description.

Research on Patient Reporting Styles

A multitude of studies looking into the phenomenon of different reporting styles have been conducted over the years. Firstly, a study conducted by Gemma et al. induced asthma symptoms in a population of White and African American participants in Northern California using the methacholine challenge to study the manner in which they would report symptoms. The results show that African Americans used upper-airway word descriptors such as “tight throat”, “scared-agitated”, “voice tight”, and “itchy throat”, among others. Conversely, White participants tended to use lower airway and chest-wall descriptors such as “deep breath”, “light-headed”, “out of air”, and “hurts to breathe” (Gemma et al.). Before interpreting these results, it is important to note that African Americans required a significantly lower dose of methacholine to achieve a 30% drop in cardiovascular function, meaning that their group could experience asthma with less provocation than other ethnic groups. The disparity in the levels at which the disease is experienced means that other differences, such as how the condition is experienced, could affect reporting styles. Another similar study conducted by the same team (Gemma et al.) examined the effects on a more ethnically diverse population, including Hispanic, Asian-Pacific, White, and African American individuals. The results of this study were similar, showing that African Americans and Asian-Pacific Islanders used upper-airway descriptors, Hispanic individuals used both upper and lower airway descriptors, and Whites used only lower airway descriptors (Gemma et al.). Overall, these studies demonstrate the diverse reporting styles across ethnic groups and the significant differences between these styles.

Unintended Discrimination

A quick search on the popular LLM-powered clinical support tool OpenEvidence tells physicians that the top symptoms of asthma are wheezing, cough, and shortness of breath. Problems arise when considering the differences between semantics of illness in the context of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered diagnostic tools. If you are not familiar with new developments in medical AI technology, you can read about them here. In brief, AI-powered medical care is rapidly advancing, but to ensure that new intelligent assistants can serve all patients equally, misdiagnoses must be prevented. I previously conducted a small-scale hypothesis-generating study that revealed semantic differences in illness descriptors across cultural groups, but it did not use an actual illness simulation to collect them.

The reviewed studies reveal that semantic differences still exist when symptoms are simulated. Training of medical AI models must be thorough as a result; failure to train a model on responses typical to multiple different ethnic groups can result in structural violence in the form of misdiagnoses.

If African American individuals consult medical AI programs that were trained on the data of white patients and describe their asthma in the typical style of the African American ethnic group, the AI could misinterpret the symptom reports as a different illness. Such an issue has been observed before in AI programs designed to expedite the process of hiring at large companies. A prime example of this is the company Amazon; its AI hiring assistant had to be shut down after it discriminated against women in the hiring process due to training cases being primarily those of males (Chen, np). With a multitude of factors that could each lead to the development of structural discrimination, companies developing AI-powered medical tools must take into deep consideration the culturally bound reporting styles of different ethnocultural groups.

In conclusion, awareness about ethnocultural divides in patient-provider communications is key. A perfect solution to this heaping issue has not been found, but awareness is the first step to developing a system that treats every individual equally.

References (MLA)

Hardie, Gemma, et al. “Ethnic Differences in Methacholine Responsiveness and Word Descriptors in African Americans, Hispanic-Mexican Americans, Asian-Pacific Islanders, and Whites with Mild Asthma.” Journal of Asthma, vol. 47, no. 4, 2010, pp. 388–396. PubMed, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20528591/. Accessed 22 May 2026.

Hardie, Gemma E., et al. “Ethnic Differences: Word Descriptors Used by African-American and White Asthma Patients during Induced Bronchoconstriction.” Chest, vol. 117, no. 4, 2000, pp. 935–943. PubMed, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10767221/. Accessed 22 May 2026

Chen, Zhisheng. “Ethics and Discrimination in Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Recruitment Practices.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, vol. 10, 2023, article no. 567, Springer Nature, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02079-x. Accessed 27 May 2026.

27.05.2026
Cheese!: The Implications of a Simple Smile Across Cultures

If you’ve read my blog before, there is a very real chance that you’ve seen me use the term “across cultures” to the point of sounding a bit trite. However, this time, I feel as if I have found a use of the term that is worth its incessant repetition.

An occurrence that has always attracted my curiosity is the smile. Given thought, it is a truly fascinating thing that we in the United States are smiling to express their happiness at ages as young as six to twelve weeks. When pondering this, I began to wonder: ‘Is smiling innate? Do Japanese babies also smile to show happiness? Do German babies also smile to show happiness? Do Brazilian babies also smile to show happiness? Would the act of curving your lips upwards still signal your contentment to others if you were 5,000 miles away?’. These are all questions that I hope to find answers while I compose this week’s brief but hopefully rewarding post.

^{Image Credit: Unsplash}

What Does a Smile Mean in Different Cultures?

For the lack of a need to introduce the act of smiling (a phenomenon with which you are hopefully acquainted with at this point), I will dive right into the interpretations of a smile around the world. While smiling in America is common and widely accepted as an expression of happiness, people identifying with the Japanese culture typically do not feel the same way. In Japan, individuals have a different relationship with self-expression that tends to be less accepting of it than in America. In fact, their interpretation of expression of happiness lies more so in the look one gets in their eyes when experiencing cheerful or pleasant emotions. In a study published by Yuki, Maddux, and Masuda, researchers found that Japanese participants felt that Kaomoji [i.e. (^_^) & (T_T)] were more representative of their emotions than emojis frequently used by Americans [i.e. 🙂 & :-(]. Japan isn’t the only country that differently interprets smiling, however; smiling at someone in Russia may arouse their suspicion, while you may be surprised to find a very fearful person flashing all 32 shiny white teeth at you on your family trip to Thailand. In conclusion, a smile carries different meaning all around the world, whether it be in Japan, Russia, or America.

The “Why”

It is known that the smile is something interpreted differently around the globe, but what lies at the root of this phenomenon? There are many theorized reasons as to why we perceive smiles the way we do. I will use the difference between WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) cultures and East Asian cultures as the primary example here, as the difference between these cultures tends to be fairly drastic. Variations in cultural values—specifically between the individualistic West and the collectivistic East—may shape how happiness is expressed(Saskatchewan Polytechnic). This can play into different cultural models of self, and studies have shown that, when asked to complete the sentence “I am ____” 20 times, Japanese students tended to fill in the blank with social roles (i.e. cousin, daughter, student) as opposed to American students, who preferred to describe themselves with sociopsychological attributes (i.e. friendly, outgoing) (Cousins, 1989). These studies demonstrate a different relationship with emotion and its expression in individuals on other sides of the globe. Additionally, one theory postulates that countries composed of individuals with different cultural backgrounds tend to smile more due to the fact that their diverse cultural composition (individuals with different values and language coming together) requires nonverbal communication to be used as a cue more frequently. In contrast, relatively homogenous nations such as Japan may not require the same level of nonverbal cues, as the country’s language is uniform throughout.

Knowing that smiling is not the norm for emotional expression in every part of the world, how do people from different cultures express their contentment and cheerfulness? Body language, tone of voice, social harmony behaviors, laughter, and “eye expressions” are all different ways that people around the world show their happiness.

22.11.2025