Comments on: Ethnoscience: Being Scientific with Computers

By: Jacob Lee

Jacob Lee — Sun, 01 Jun 2014 04:18:03 +0000

Considering that formal modeling of kinship terminological systems was once dismissed by a commenter on this blog as not really anthropology, I appreciate Nick’s comment here.

By: John McCreery

John McCreery — Tue, 27 May 2014 01:06:16 +0000

Nick, my pleasure. Looking forward to the next installment in this series.

By: npseaver

npseaver — Mon, 26 May 2014 18:23:53 +0000

Thanks, John. I’ve been appreciating your responses to these pieces! At my home institution, UC Irvine, we’ve got the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, which popped up as the more ethnoscience-like (cog anthro, mathematical anthro) folks left the anthropology department. It’s very important to realize that a lot of the paradigms that mainstream cultural anthropologists think of as “vanquished” haven’t actually disappeared — they’ve just shifted around institutionally, and in many cases, they’ve moved into far more influential spots than “we” occupy. That suggests that we need new, less progressivist/teleological ways to think about our methodological critiques: we are not on some trajectory towards ever better explanations or descriptions (cf. Geertz: “What gets better is the precision with which we vex each other”), and, to snag a line of Latour’s I really like, “the past is not surpassed but revisited, repeated, surrounded, protected, recombined, reinterpreted, reshuffled.” Of course, contemporary folks working in ethnoscience-like disciplines would not like the idea of being called “the past,” and the banishing of other epistemologies to the past should make us think about anthropological critiques of allochronism.

All that is to say that the history of computational approaches in cultural anthropology raises some of our central disciplinary questions and paradoxes, even though formalisms are often dismissed quite casually by contemporary ethnographers.

By: John McCreery

John McCreery — Fri, 23 May 2014 04:18:13 +0000

Ethnoscience may be out of fashion. But the movement of which it was part lives on, albeit off the radar of “mainstream” anthropology. While attending the annual Sunbelt conferences of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA) I have had the opportunity to meet Russ Bernard (http://nersp.osg.ufl.edu/~ufruss/cv.htm). At the last Sunbelt conference, the keynote speaker was anthropologist Jeffrey Johnson (http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cas/soci/jeffrey-johnson.cfm), who spoke on the need to stay close to the data used by social network analysts.