Mark Tracy's List: Anthropology

• The consequence was a certain interesting contradiction in White's work. (I've written about this in some detail in Culture and Practical Reason.) At the same time that White was, as I say, a technological determinist, he would also argue that an axe was basically an idea, symbolically ordered in its production, its transmission, its functions, its place in the division of labor, as property, and so on. White developed a symbolic ontology of culture that became basic for me. It was quite different from the anthropologists, mainly British-inspired, who took society as their object, and most notably different from social anthropologists for whom "culture" floats above society as it were, as the ideological-and historically accidental-means of maintaining it. For them, social relations were the true anthropological object-even the "reality" as Radcliffe-Brown said, whereas culture was an "abstraction". But social relations are symbolically constructed, and in my anthropology they are cultural phenomena, no less than any other. Motherhood, kingship, Omaha kin relations, patrilocal extemded families, lineages-these are symbolically defined and ordered relationships.
• The effect is that the peoples and their cultures get lost, and Anthropology risks mimicking in intellectual practice what neoliberalism would do in imperialist practice, insofar as both perceive the people as manipulatable victims.

  • The trappings of modern anthropology
• Postmodernism had the effect of a frontal lobotomy on too many students, to the extent that they wouldn't or couldn't put two things together for fear that Professor X or Y would get down on them for being essentialists or totalizers. Instead the best conclusion was indeterminacy.

  • Sahlins on Postmodernism
• When I studied anthropology, we were necessarily in a field that had biological anthropology in it, and the problem of distinguishing humanity from other primates was real. The problem of distinguishing primates' societies and human societies was an issue. Hence the importance of the symbolic construction of human worlds for my generation of middle-western anthropologists. But later anthropologists have put the concept of culture in doubt, at least in part because the cultures as they knew them were no longer in the same form. Anthropologists no longer had to deal with traditional "anthropology-cultures": with distinctive communities sitting out there on some island of the Pacific waiting for an ethnographer to describe their pristine condition.
• Now there were new and unprecedented cultural formations, some with totally different space-time coordinates, like the Oaxacan villages that extend over thousands of miles-from Oaxaca to Chicago. Here are transnational cultural orders, involving the circulation of persons, money and ideas, often along the lines of traditional relations of kinship and community, between distant rural homelands and metropolitan centers-in which, incidentally, the old flow of resources from rural to urban has been significantly reversed. Then there are all the "alternative modernities' or "indigenizations of modernity."
• For one thing, the American war policy is based upon a certain ethnocentric notion of human nature. There was a line in the film Full Metal Jacket that went something like "underneath every 'Gook" there's an American waiting to come out." Underneath every Iraqi, there's an American waiting to come out. If we could just get rid of their idiosyncratic culture, we'd get down to the basic love of freedom and free enterprise that's in everybody.

  • On american attitudes about culture pertaining to iraq.

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• In 1965, the average man spent 42 hours a week working at the office or the factory; throw in coffee breaks, lunch breaks, and commuting time, and you're up to 51 hours. Today, instead of spending 42 and 51 hours, he spends 36 and 40. What's he doing with all that extra time? He spends a little on shopping, a little on housework, and a lot on watching TV, reading the newspaper, going to parties, relaxing, going to bars, playing golf, surfing the Web, visiting friends, and having sex. Overall, depending on exactly what you count, he's got an extra six to eight hours a week of leisure—call it the equivalent of nine extra weeks of vacation per year.

  For women, time spent on the job is up from 17 hours a week to 24. With breaks and commuting thrown in, it's up from 20 hours to 26. But time spent on household chores is down from 35 hours a week to 22, for a net leisure gain of four to six hours. Call it five extra vacation weeks.

• The lead author is Rolando Gonzalez-Jose, from the Patagonian National Centre at Puerto Madryn, Argentina. It seems like the thesis of this paper is that facial traits do not appear out of the blue but result from continuous change. Ahh, sounds like a punctuated equilibrium debate. He argues that, specimen that have relatively minor changes in features as compared to others should not be automatically held up as representing a new species. Well, no duh.

   

  In order to establish this, Gonzalez-Jose used a new analytical approach on 3D images of 17 hominid species, with a gorilla, chimp and modern human thrown in. The approach focused in on measuring the similarities and differences on a particular set of fundamental yet long-term changes in skull shape. Using computational methods, the skulls were compared on four variables,

   
   
  1. The roundness of the skull
   
  2. The base of the skull
   
  3. The protrusion of the jaw
   
  4. The facial retraction, or in other words the position of the face relative to the cranial base
   
   

  Organizing the outcome of the measurements into a phylogenetic tree, reportedly reveals a clearer view on the evolutionary history of humans and their ancestors.