A few of us here at Savage Minds have rolled around the idea of doing more Open Threads every now and again. So I figured we’d try one out today and see what happens. So here goes: This is a place to post your anthropologically-related links, comments, questions, and so on. If there’s an issue that you think we Savage Minds need to know about, post it. If you have heard of some new fascinating research, post it. If there are some world events that you think speak to anthropology, post away. If you went to a garage sale and found a vintage book by Franz Boas, I want to hear about this. Also, if you have been a long time SM reader, but have never dared post a comment, this is a good place to get your digital feet wet. Try it out. It’s fun.
Ok, let’s see what happens. Post away! In the mean time, I’ll leave you with a few odds and ends from the “news and other stuff at least tangentially-related to anthropology” file just to break the ice here a bit.
First, check out this article about some of the election protests in Mexico. I’m posting this because I am in Mexico so it’s important news around these parts–although Mexico City is really where things are in an uproar. Tens of thousands out in the streets contesting the results of last Sunday’s elections.
Second, according to the Huffington post, it appears that the world is not coming to an end.
Third, a question: How many of you out there have participated in adding content to the anthropology page on Wikipedia? Just wondering.
Finally, I think we should end with a little humor. Who is this guy?:
…and why do language professors hate him so much? Does anyone out there know? Because I am NOT going to click on that link (don’t worry, the image here is a screen shot, so there’s no link). More importantly, though, do sociolinguists and anthropological linguists hate him too, or do they take a more relativist approach to whatever it is that he is doing?
Maybe most savageminds readers already now, but just in case, at archive.org, you have a lot of anthro goodies, free to access and download. Check this out, 100 books and articles by Franz Boas.
Just look at these facial paintings of the Indians of Northern British Columbia.
Oh ya, I meant to put this in the main post. Cultural Anthropology’s “virtual issue” on finance:
http://culanth.org/?q=node/561
Good stuff. Definitely have a look.
I know I have corrected crashingly inaccurate information on the Kinship and Lewis H. Morgan pages more than once. I honestly don’t know if I have ever even looked at the Anthropology page!
OK, I’ll bite. I posted a full length book on the Internet last year. It’s free and it’s exactly the sort of thing that, in principle, should interest any and all anthropologists. If you read the Introductory chapter you’ll see why. Since I’ve made it available, however, it’s been met with almost total indifference from most in this field (though not all). Apparently anthropologists are no longer interested in “this sort of thing,” and I’m wondering why.
http://soundingthedepths.blogspot.com/
This has happened to me before. I post a message on this blog and for some reason it disappears. Usually it’s when I include a link. Is there some law against that? I thought we were being invited to post links.
I’m giving this one more try, only I’m omitting the link to my book, which can be accessed anyhow by clicking on my name, above. Here’s my original message:
OK, I’ll bite. I posted a full length book on the Internet last year. It’s free and it’s exactly the sort of thing that, in principle, should interest any and all anthropologists. If you read the Introductory chapter you’ll see why. Since I’ve made it available, however, it’s been met with almost total indifference from most in this field (though not all). Apparently anthropologists are no longer interested in “this sort of thing,” and I’m wondering why.
Victor, I can only describe my own encounter with your book. It looks fascinating, but (1) it is distant from my own current projects, social network analysis and Japanese advertising and the history of business anthropology in Japan and (2) requires a grasp of technical issues in ethnomusicology that I simply don’t have. Since I have a long and growing list of things I want to read, it keeps getting pushed further back down the queue. The fact of the matter is that anthropology has fractured into what is, in effect, a scattered clustering of esoteric hobbies. To attract the attention of those with different hobbies and author must invest a considerable effort in outreach, determining where their own interests overlap with others and finding seductive ways to draw them across the overlap. The mere assertion, “This is important” is too feeble, in a world overwhelmed with ideas and causes all claiming to be important.
Anyway, that’s my two cents.
Interesting read over livinganthropologically:
The Headline We Should be Reading: Anthropology Changed Everything
http://www.livinganthropologically.com/2012/07/08/should-be-reading-anthropology-changed-everything/
@MTBradley:
I have checked out the anthro page on wikipedia a few times, and thought about adding some things here and there. Anyway, I was just wondering if any other SM readers have contributed.
@Victor:
I know some comments will get held up if they have a lot of links. But I don’t see anything of yours that appears to be stuck. Let me check into this.
@Carlos:
Thanks for posting that. Jason is making a good point with that one. Here’s another related post:
http://anthropologyreport.com/in-memoriam-michel-rolph-trouillot-1949-2012/
None of my comments seem to be appearing. Have I been blocked, by chance?
Testing, testing
Ah. Apparently not. But the filter seems to dislike my blog. Fair enough!
I use wikipedia all the time – every time I’m near my computer, probably – and I’ve found it to be generally quite accurate and up-to-date about more things. Better than any other encyclopedia ever produced, I think. Anthropological topics seem to be exceptions, especially kinship topics. I’m glad there are people like MTBradley out there to remedy these problems, though.
I remember coming across the article on “Politics” a while ago and my jaw dropping in dismay at reading the overview of the subject. It was like reading an anthropology textbook from 1910. This is roughly what it looked like.
Hey Al,
No, you haven’t been blocked! I think certain links doom comments to getting eaten up in our spam filters. The strange thing is that I don’t see any of your comments in the spam queue. So I am looking into this to see what’s going on. Sorry about that.
Re: Wikipedia. Ya, I actually use it pretty often as well, and a lot of the content is quite good. I also really like reading through some of the talk pages to see the debates from different authors about what should or should not be included on the page. It adds another layer to the whole thing. It’s interesting that the anthro stuff isn’t as good as it could be…maybe more of us should try to pitch in every now and again?
Al, Victor, and John…I found and rescued a few of your comments from the spam filters. John and Al there were a couple that were on other threads, so those should show up now. Let me know if you run into other issues with the filters. In general you can run into problems if you post more than a couple of links per comment. But definitely let me know if there are any other problems. Thanks!
-ryan
The guy at the end is an ad for Pimsleur, a riff on those stupid “doctors/lawyers/whomever hate this person” for their “one stupid/easy/simple tip”. It’s kind of funny in an annoying way.
I’m fairly certain that’s an actual picture of the guy who founded the company/method
Ryan,
Thanks a lot! Efficient help indeed.
I use wikipedia to plug small holes in my knowledge. It’s surprisingly good on philosophy (although, of course, not perfect), and due to the average Wikipedian’s nerdish penchant for internet debating, it also seems to have great stuff on logical fallacies and things like that. I’ve only been tempted to edit when I haven’t found what I was looking for, but by the time I’ve found it (usually in a book, article, or another site), I’m not all that bothered to edit the page. Not very civically minded, I admit.
It’s really frustrating to spend time posting here only to see that nothing has gotten through. So this is a test. Let’s see if this one gets posted.
Responding to John McCreery: Thanks for the feedback, John, and the good advice. I certainly understand about the backlist of things to read. I have one too. And I realize very well that my book is only one of many that might or might not be of interest to anthropologists.
However, think of why you developed an interest in anthropology in the first place and try to forget what happened later. My book is about recreating the earliest history of modern humans and their culture. And yes I’ve actually managed to develop a strategy that has enabled me to speculate meaningfully along such lines, thanks to some remarkable musical clues, supplemented by certain revolutionary findings in population genetics.
As for the technical issues that so often discourage anthropologists from considering musical evidence, the very few technical terms are clearly explained, and there are many musical examples that make their point simply through listening.
So far I have not been able to get a single anthropology journal interested in reviewing the book, nor have I had a response of any kind from any of the review editors I’ve contacted. When I suggested to someone involved in this blog (whose name I can’t recall) that it be reviewed or at least discussed here, I was told it would be considered, and that’s the last I heard. I got a similarly cold response on the Open Anthropology site. You, John, were in fact one of the very few to show any interest at all, for which I’m grateful.
Maybe the powers that be are hoping it will simply go away so they won’t have to be bothered with it and can happily return to their narrow (and often boring and irrelevant) specialties.
@Victor
Just a thought. Perhaps beating your head against the wall of professional indifference in anthropology isn’t the way to find your audience. You’ve got a big story to tell, one that resonates with all sorts of currently popular themes—music, evolutionary psychology…. I think of the guy who wrote Your Brain on Music and how much publicity he has gotten. Heck, if I were you, I’d try talking up the book to someone at Rolling Stone. Pull off a Jared Diamond and people here will start paying attention to you.
Victor Grauer,
Your book sounds very interesting, and I shall put it on my amazon wishlist (I tend to read these days on my way to work and in the garden, so I like a hard copy). I’ve paid a small amount of interest to Lomax in the past, and I was favourably disposed to a talk by Jerome Lewis (of UCL) that I attended in which he connected the polyphonic hocketing (I think it was) of BaYaka people in central Africa to their loose, egalitarian social structure. I had some qualms with it, but it was an intriguing idea. So the idea of musicology clearing up problems in the evolution of humans is reasonably appealing to me.
That said, I have a gigantic reading list, just like everyone else. I’m rocketing through David Anthony’s The Horse, The Wheel, and Language, about the origins and spread of Proto-Indo-European. I’ve got a social psychology textbook to go through, two books on recursion in human cognition, books VII-IX of Herodotus, Lizot’s Tales of the Yanomami, and a collection of Gordon Childe’s essays to go through before tackling anything else. All unrelated leisure reading. Anthony’s book, by the way, is easily one of the best things I’ve read all year, and this has been a year of incredible books.
Thanks for the feedback Al. What you write about Jerome Lewis interests me. I must admit I wasn’t aware of his work — but I am now, thanks. Anthony’s book interests me as well, especially since a chapter of my book is devoted to essentially the same history (http://soundingthedepths.blogspot.com/2011/03/chapter-thirteen-europe-old-and-new.html).
I don’t expect everyone to drop what they’re doing and dive into my book. But I don’t want to see it ignored either. I take your point, John, but I have in fact tried to get the attention of more mainstream publications but without any result. Maybe I should hire a public relations firm. In any case, it’s especially important to me that I get feedback, including meaningful criticism, from those best suited to evaluate it. While I draw very liberally on musical evidence, it’s the anthropological aspect that’s most important, and most in need of thorough critique.
Victor,
Here are a few small criticisms that occur to me:
The archaeological cultures of pre-Indo-European Europe are extremely diverse, and archaeological cultures are normally less numerous than the language groups that left them. That indicates that Old Europe was not one culture, or even one coherent set of cultures, but much more of a crazily diverse mix. That might raise a few problems when suggesting the pre-Indo-European ancestry of polyphonic singing in Europe.
I’d also suggest that Gimbutas’ ideas about Indo-Europeans introducing “patriarchy” into Europe are a little suspect, to say the least. The notion that Indo-European speakers were horse-mounted patriarchal warriors, where the Old Europeans were gentle matristic folk, appears to be quite incorrect. Many finds indicating a measure of human sacrifice have been recovered from pre-Indo-European sites throughout Europe, and that they were friendlier to women doesn’t necessarily follow from the worship of goddesses.
There’s nothing wrong with using hunting weapons to kill people; the absence of specialised weapons for killing humans indicates the lack of a specific class or generation of individuals responsible for warfare, not warfare’s absence. I can also call to mind a few studies where weapons (like stone maceheads) have been found in pre-Indo-European sites in southeastern Europe, but I’ll have to do some searching to find them for you.
It’s also unlikely that Proto-Indo-European speakers migrated wholesale into Europe, pushing Old Europeans into less fertile land. What happened was likely more akin to recruitment of Old Europeans into an Indo-European society where prospects for social advancement were greater than in the Old European world – hence the clear evidence of a wide spread of language and chariot-technology by the Indo-European pastoralists and much less evidence for the spread of genes from their homeland in the Pontic-Caspian steppe. David Anthony uses an ethnohistorical example, of the expansion of Luo-speaking Acholi in east Africa, to make this point, but there are any number that could be used. This model fits much better with the archaeological data than the conquest model.
It’s odd of Gimbutas to claim that Lithuania was “50% pagan”. It may be true, but the pagan religion of the Baltic shows startling similarities to Vedic (or Indo-Iranian) religion, not to pre-Indo-European beliefs, whatever they happened to be.
I also doubt that songs from Kyrgyzstan will help unravel problems in Indo-European studies (such as whether narrative songs are Indo-European/”Kurgan” or not), as the Kyrgyz people speak a Turkic language, unrelated to PIE. There is a voluminous literate on Indo-European rhythm and poetics, including two excellent recent works – How to Kill a Dragon by Calvert Watkins and Indo-European Poetry and Myth by Martin Litchfield West. I highly recommend both. Indo-European studies as a whole has generated an incredible literature.
I hope you find this critique helpful.
I wrote a short critique of your Kurgan chapter, but it seems to have been swallowed up here, so I posted it on your page instead.
Thanks Al. I guess your critique finally got through after all. I’ll be posting a detailed response on the blog, but for the moment just want to thank you for your very helpful comments, exactly the sort of thing I hoped for when I decided to use the blog format, so I’m glad you posted there as well. All I’ll say for now in my defense is that my chapter deals only with a limited number of apparent interconnections that I found interesting and relevant, and should not be read as a theory of Indo-European origins. If you read it that way, then certainly it represents a gross oversimplification of a complex process. But if you take another look you’ll see that it is frankly speculative, more of a probe than anything else.
A little late, but I have an open thread question — what coding programs do you guys use, and do they incorporate password protection?
I have a lot of old notes that I’d like to begin coding, and they’re currently in password-protected word files, zipped with another password. But I think that to code, I need to take them out of protection in Atlas.ti, and I’m not comfortable doing that, as I’ll still be in and out of the field with my main computer. Any thoughts?