on cultural determinism [scrapbook]

Benedict, in Patterns of Culture ” Society in its full sense […] is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it. No individual can arrive at even the threshold of his potentialities without a culture in which he participates. It is largely because of the traditional acceptance of a conflict between society and … Read more

A game from 3000 years ago

I came across this great paper today*: CONNAUGHTON, S. P., TACHÉ, K., & BURLEY, D. V. (2010). Taupita: A 3000-year-old Shell Game in the Lapita Cultural Complex of Tonga. Journal of Social Archaeology, 10(1), 118-137. DOI:10.1177/1469605309354400  [link] Abstract: Recent excavations at the archaeological site of Nukuleka on Tongatapu in the Tongan Archipelago have yielded the largest Lapita … Read more

JPS online!

That’s the Journal of the Polynesian Society, if you were wondering. It’s been a sad wrench for me at UCL, browsing the e-journals list of our library and always feeling a little empty spot in my heart right here: The Society is only up to the 1930s, but seeing as the really good ethnographic stuff … Read more

new site: bad archaeology

In the spirit of Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science site (who linked to this), Bad Archaeology: Bad Archaeology is the brainchild of a couple of archaeologists who are fed up with the distorted view of the past that passes for knowledge in popular culture. We are unhappy that books written by people with no understanding of … Read more

bob, was it not enough to organise a rock concert?

This makes me cringe: Bob Geldof and the BBC have unveiled plans for a website and television series that aim to record every human society. The Dictionary of Man website and an eight-part television series, The Human Planet, will be made with help from BBC Worldwide, the BBC’s commercial arm. Crews will travel the world … Read more

the two cultures revisited (ad nauseum)

A short while ago I attended one of a series of talks set up to create some dialogue between evolutionary and interpretive approaches in archaeology. I was only able to attend the last of the series, but others who attended earlier talks reported that the presentations themselves (one from each of the two “styles”) were interesting and informative, but that the discussions that took place afterwards, where, ostensibly, the dialogue was to get into full swing, were quite fraught, full of misunderstandings and tense “science versus post-modernism” exchanges.

Which is, as always, a shame. I think to most scientifically-minded archaeologists and anthropologists–indeed anyone in the social sciences who appreciates the scientific method–the lack of useful dialogue, collaboration, and proper communication with our colleagues who have other approaches is felt as a keen deficit. From afar, we can observe the wealth of rich material (dare I say “data”?) collected by social anthropologists (for instance). More importantly, we can observe their ability to contextualise, interpret and suggest new or alternative hypotheses for what we, with the necessity of abstract or simple models, are sometimes missing in our approaches.

However, after attending the last talk, I don’t think that they (“they” being in this case those in the social sciences who probably prefer the term humanities) really feel any keen need for such dialogue in the other direction. I could be (and would be delighted to be) very wrong about this. I got the sense of a lamentable misunderstanding how science as applied to human affairs. Misunderstanding the scientific method is of course a more general malady, from the sub-editors at the Evening Standard right on through to nutritionists with dodgy qualifications.

But at this talk there were some SHOCKERS.

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tracking the “bongo-bongo” meme

(Should I put meme in quotes too? I leave that as an exercise for the reader.) Browsing an old review by Eric Alden Smith (ref below) I came across the following: I do not advocate the venerable but ultimately sterile anthropological practice of countering every generalization with an exception located somewhere at some time (a … Read more

is this thing on?

Er, so I’m writing up still. End is in sight! Back to blogging sometime in February! For now I just wanted to post this quote for posterity, although no doubt I will find someplace to jam it in the conclusion. On comparative linguistics and ethnography In conducting diachronic research on a language that existed five … Read more

lucy’s baby

In a rare fit of openaccessmindedness, Nature have left the content about Baby Lucy, the latest hominid (hominin? am bad anthropologist and never keep up with this renaming thing) find from Ethiopia. She’s dated at 3.3 million years, and is a 3 year old Australopithecus afarensis skeleton, mostly skull but with a rare amount of … Read more

working, you say?

Some days I would like to re-animate George Peter Murdock and have a beer with him. G.P., I’d say, after shaking his hand vigorously (although not too hard, because, you know, zombie corpse) G.P., you would have really liked the concept of the computer database, and maybe if you’d had one, you mighta got out … Read more