Structuralism: Thinking with Computers

This post is part of a series on the history of computing in sociocultural anthropology.

In his foundational 1955 article “The Structural Study of Myth,” Claude Lévi-Strauss outlined the program for a structuralist, cross-cultural study of mythology. The basic premise is prototypical structural anthropology: to analyze myths, one must decompose them into their constituent units (or “mythemes”). Thus decomposed, hidden mythical patterns can be made evident. These patterns are the real “content” of myths, according to Lévi-Strauss — they persist across different tellings of the same myth, and they reflect the inner structures of the mind. More important for the structuralist project, they recur in different myths, cross-culturally, reflecting the psychic unity of mankind.1

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Album Art for Anthropology

Shortly after I bought my wife a Kindle and started moving all my iTunes stuff over to Amazon Cloud Player I discovered that ACP had captured a bunch of podcasts I’d forgotten I had subscribed to. Maybe they were off of iTunes U or something, I don’t know. I listened to four or five and got into something else. In the meantime iTunes went on dutifully downloading them and I went on ignoring their existence.

Anyway, I have ACP import all my iTunes stuff it grabs these lectures and gives them all random cover art. The results are pretty weird.

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Carl Hoffman > Jared Diamond

Carl Hoffman is a travel writer who has recently turned his attention to New Guinea, where he produces grisly stories of cannibalism, murder, and The Smell Of Men. Jared Diamond is a scientist with decades of experience visiting New Guinea whose books attempt to humanize the people who live there. As an expert on Papua New Guinea, I was really surprised  to find that I was much more impressed with Hoffman’s understanding of Melanesia and its people than I was Diamond’s. So how could I like a cannibalism-obsessed journalist more than a scientist who admired Papua New Guinean’s parenting skills? Continue reading →

Computers and Sociocultural Anthropology

Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Nick Seaver.

The fundamental requirement of anthropology is that it begin with a personal relation and end with a personal experience, but […] in between there is room for plenty of computers.
– Claude Lévi-Strauss, epigraph to The Use of Computers in Anthropology 1

Recent years have seen the growth of what we might call “alternate universe anthropology.” People with little or no training in anthropology are taking on big sociocultural questions, and they’re doing it with computers. We find PhDs in Electrical Engineering trying to algorithmically define musical genres, computer scientists modeling family ties in social networks, and autodidact software developers designing “content discovery” apps around their own theories of cultural influence and flow. If sociocultural anthropology didn’t already exist, people might reasonably assign the name to this stuff.
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The Anthropologist as Scholarly Hipster, Part IV: Authenticity and Privilege

In this guest blog series, Savage Minds has provided me with a space to unpack some of my thoughts on how looking at the cultural trope of the “hipster” might be helpful for thinking through the “anthropologist.” Part I focused on defining terms, Part II drew parallels between hipsters and anthropologists in terms of their marginal position, and Part III focused on image and brand. In this fourth post, I examine the endless search for authenticity.  For those of you who are patient and interested, a fifth post will wrap up the series.

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What happened at the Fuentes-Wade Webinar

On 5 May 2014 The American Anthropological Association hosted a webinar in which Ed Liebow, the Executive Director of the American Anthropological Association, hosted a debate between Augustín Fuentes and Nicholas Wade. Fuentes is a professor of anthropology at Notre Dame, and Wade is a science journalist and author of A Troublesome Inheritance. This post describes what happened there, for people who don’t want to stream the whole thing. Our fearless intern Angela transcribed the webinar, and I double-checked the transcription in key places where the recording was difficult to hear. I’ve occasionally cleaned up speech, but the quotations here are as direct as we could manage — indeed, this post is designed to let people hear the participants speak for themselves. Continue reading →

Anthropologists as Scholarly Hipsters, Part III: The Anthropological Brand

In this guest blog series, Savage Minds has provided me with a space to untangle and unpack some of my recent thoughts on anthropologists, hipsters and such. My first post focused on defining terms, and my second post drew parallels between hipsters and anthropologists in terms of their position at the margins. In it, I wondered what the implications were for producing an anthropologist who could be a celebrity or public intellectual. In this third post, I want to take a brief moment point to what we wear and the images we cultivate.

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Some Questions Only Seem Reasonable Because You Don’t Know The Answer

As scholars and/or scientists, we believe that no question is out of bounds. Is the bible a literal description of the creation of the universe? Does owning guns make people safer? Scientists think these questions can and should be investigated by anyone who feels like doing so. We disagree, then, with the people who think that some questions should be off limits. There are many reasons why: they seem so unintuitive they couldn’t possibly be true; they challenge existing authorities; the truth is not in the interests of the powerful, and so forth.

But scholars also believe that certain questions are not worth asking. Sometimes, its for the same reasons that I’ve listed above — after all, academics are people too. But there is another reason that scholars and scientists roll their eyes when certain questions get asked, or certain answers are proposed: history.

People have been asking questions for a long time, and have been coming up with good answers for just as long. Specialists in a field remember this history: we were taught it as students, and we make it as researchers. We’ve seen answers to questions come and go — often after the real answers are more or less established.

Consider, for instance, the settlement of Polynesia. How did all of those islands in the Pacific get populated when they were in the middle of the ocean? Polynesian voyaging is one of the great triumphs of our species, and the prehistory of the Pacific is now relatively well understood. But that doesn’t stop people from asking the question afresh. A few years ago I was talking to someone about their recent trip to Morocco, where they noted that Berber languages sounded suspiciously like Hawai‘ian. Could Polynesians have migrated from the old world?

Sure they could have. Or they could have migrated from the Americas — Thor Heyerdahl proved that the voyage was possible. In fact, it was once a going theory that they migrated from Egypt. So if you are a non-academic and google for Polynesian origins in the Middle East, you will in fact find books on this subject.

It’s just that those books are out of date and wrong. Polynesians could have come from Egypt or Morocco. However, they did not. And as for similarities in language, well, with a little ingenuity, and given languages with reasonably compatible phonologies, you can find a ‘cognate’ between two unrelated languages about once out of every two words you try.

Isn’t the earth obviously flat? Couldn’t vaccines be dangerous? Why do people ignore the clear evidence the Bible gives us about the creation of the world? People ask these questions all the time, and feel slighted when professors respond by rolling their eyes and assigning remedial reading rather than taking them seriously.

Sure, we could be wrong. Our explanations could be mistaken, and it takes people being mavericky to shake us up from time to time. But — let’s face it — most of the time when people start demanding new answers to settled questions, this demand only seem reasonable to them because they don’t know how good our established answer is. When we dismiss new answers to old questions, we are not abandoning the fundamental tenet of open inquiry. We just want to get back to doing research on problems without good answers. Is complacence and self-certainty a danger? Yes. Is reinventing the wheel in the name of open mindedness a scientific virtue? No.

Get ready for Nicholas Wade’s “A Troublesome Inheritance”

Nicholas Wade’s new book, A Troublesome Inheritance, drops on Amazon today. Wade, a science writer for the New York Times, has been critical of cultural anthropology in the past — and the feeling has pretty much been mutual. Inheritance is set to create a ground swell of indignation in the anthropological community because it is one of the most biologically reductionist writings to come out in years. The AAA has, to its credit, been on top of the issue and has hosted a showdown between Wade and Augustín Fuentes. Expect more coverage from us, including a couple of guest blogs, in the next couple of months.

Anthropologists of a critical bent take deep personal satisfaction in denouncing racism and reductionism wherever they find it. These days, its rare for something as blatant as Wade’s book to appear with the blessing of a major press. So… yeah. I’m guessing that it’s going to be on.

I personally prefer to use claims, reasons, and evidence to criticize authors. When books like this appear, however, its easy for passions to get inflamed and for people to make personal attacks: Jared Diamond’s comb-over is ugly, Charles Murray’s male pattern baldness makes him look like Princess Leia, etc. We also tend to make arguments of guilt from association: Madison Grant was wrong and so are you. Both of these rhetorical maneuvers don’t do justice to the uniqueness of an author’s position or engage its particulars directly — and thus are unanthropological.

As this moves forward I hope people punch above the belt. It shouldn’t be hard, since Wade is such an easy target.

Who Majors in Anthropology? An Infographic and a Request

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A little irked by the tone and skepticism with which some ask the question, “What can you do with a degree in anthropology,” I’ve decided to address the quandary with an infographic. Often, I’m confronted with the assumption that after finishing my Bachelor’s in Anthropology, I would find myself behind a bar or waiting tables. From my perspective, my question is “What can’t you do with a degree in anthropology?” I’ve taken at stab at answering this question here (after the jump), but I want help from Savage Minds’ readers to find lesser-known examples of influential former-anthropology students. Continue reading →

Anthropologists as Scholarly Hipsters, Part II: Critiques from the Margins

In this guest blog series, the Savage Minds folks have been kind enough to provide a space for me to untangle and unpack some of my recent thoughts on anthropologists, hipsters and such. In my first post, I took the conventional path of defining my terms. In this second post, I focus on a common characteristic that is both productive and frustrating for anthropologists and hipsters alike: their position at the margins.

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Anthropologists as Scholarly Hipsters, Part I: What is a Hipster?

Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Alex Posecznick.

I am an anthropologist. Four simple words, but they capture a complex process of becoming that was hardly simple. Despite the very human desire to impose order on chaos, the processes through which people become acquired by such categories are usually quite complex. Like many anthropologists, I’ve done my share of navel-gazing – reflecting both on the role I’ve come to inhabit and the process through which I’ve come to inhabit it.

I am not a hipster – at least, I do not think I am. This is not entirely helpful as most hipsters I have met don’t think of themselves as hipsters either. Nonetheless, the parallels between anthropologists and hipsters have been on my mind. My observations are frankly exacerbated by my appointment in a School for Education, where my anthropological roots make me (at least in my own head) something of a “cool” kid. In contrast, in anthropological circles, my ties to education mark me as “uncool.” My present position in the structure as permanent and non-tenure further marginalizes me in any academic circle, pushing me to a periphery which some consider beneath notice at all. Can looking at the hipster tell us something about the anthropologist and the academy, I wonder? These observations about the social tension (and structural food chain) within academia naturally presuppose other critical questions: what precisely is a “hipster” and does it actually exist as a meaningful category?

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Around the Web Digest: Week of April 27

Ladies. Gentlemen. I’ll be your host today, as we navigate some of last week’s most interesting pieces that the internet has to offer – to anthropologists anyway. Today, our selection is about 50% larger than usual. I can’t offer one article that stands above the rest, but like last week, there is a small selection: Pay special attention to the works of Janelle Taylor, Todd Meyers, and Adrienne Strong.

If you’ll allow me a moment of a reflexivity: I’m starting to notice a trend in my own posts – race, gender, reproduction – and I thought that perhaps I should move away from those topics as a way to provide a better, well-rounded digest…and then I decided that if you wanted something different, you’d tell me or find another digest – of which there are many. (And yet, there is no metadigest. Someone should get on that.) Anyway, if you have a blog post or news item that you think I should mention in my digest, please let me know by email (richard.powis@gmail.com) or via Twitter @dtpowis.

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