Golublog: An Anthropology Blog » anthropology

The nurturing of young when upside down

Alex — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:35:26 +0000

“I have dwelt on Léry and Herodotus because so much in them reminds me of my father. Their naïve curiosity, combined with a highly sophisticated intelligence seeking pleasure in the systematic organization of dispersed empirical data (the more idiosyncratic the better), brings Alfred Kroeber to mind. Once when I was in the Navy I visited my parents with a sailor friend, who, when we were back on the bus, asked me, ‘‘Is there anything your father doesn’t get interested in?’’ I remember from an earlier time when a family of bats took up residence in vines near the front door of our home on Arch Street, Alfred immediately became intrigued with how little he understood bat sexuality and the nurturing of young when upside down. Curiosity, I judge from him, is essentially immediate, a response to the specific: What goes on here? How does this work? Curiosity is wonder at a material fact suddenly observed, or about an idea that has just occurred in thought or conversation. Curiosity borders on nosiness because it begins with and never turns away from the physical world in its full sensuousness, even though curiosity expands most fully when penetrating into intellectual activity. True curiosity seeks an explanation for oneself: one satisfies one’s own curiosity, not somebody else’s. This accounts for its link both to prying into what is none of your damned business and to its childlike innocence. Children seek explanation for themselves alone—as I need not remind any survivor of parenthood. There is the grace of humility in curiosity, since it begins with being unashamed of ignorance.

It would be fair to plagiarize from a great aesthetician the judgment that anthropology’s disciplinary youth is its oldest tradition, but I have thought it more useful to suggest that the practice and personality of Alfred Kroeber dramatizes what your youthfulness consists in: good-humored greediness for knowledge, intellectual expansiveness, restless eagerness for novel ways to make what is past or different accessible and freshly meaningful, naïve transgressing of any mental boundaries in the service of no religious or ideological cause beyond the pleasure (in and for itself) of discovering the diversity of forms by which human individuality has been realized.”

-Karl Kroeber, Curious Profession: Alfred Kroeber and Anthropological History.

Rorty

Alex — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 22:29:46 +0000

I think I am finally getting old enough to appreciate Richard Rorty. I spent a leisurely morning reading some of the essays in Consequences of Pragmatism and enjoyed them — particularly this long quote from “Method, Social Science, Social Hope”, which cuts through several tangles of anthropological ethics:

I said that… it was a mistake to think of somebody’s own account of his behavior or culture as epistemically privileged. He might have a good account of what he’s doing or he might not. But it isnot a mistake to think of it as morally privileged. We have a duty to listen to his account, not because he has privileged access to his own motives but because he is a human being like ourselves. Taylor’s claim that we need to look for internal explanations of people or cultures or texts takes civility as a methodological strategy. But civility is not a method, it is simply a virtue.

Yeah page 202 of Consequences of Pragmatism!

One thought

Alex — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 22:55:59 +0000

Bureaucracy is the ice-nine of social organization.

Note to self: Christian Alan Anderson

Alex — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:13:43 +0000

Somehow I’ve become embroiled in Taiwan-as-Austronesia. Here is someone who has written about this:

“Christian Alan Anderson”:http://omnivoyage.org/about_chris.htm

Includes publications. Note to self, note to self, note to self.

More PNG blogs

Alex — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 08:03:26 +0000

Ther PNG blogosphere is actually pretty active although I have to admit that I don’t follow it as much as I should. Two new recent blogs by anthropologists working on PNG are worth noting, however — “Politics of Nature”:http://politicsofnature.wordpress.com/ by Jamon Halvaksz and “The Melanesian”:http://themelanesian.org/ by Andrew Moutu. Jamon’s has been around for a year or so while The Melanesian is much more recent and (in its two posts so far) has been the place where debates about the Frieda mine have spilled out of The National and onto the Internet, which is great. So check it/them out.

Future elegant riff on trees, leviathans, Weber, and gold

Alex — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 06:03:27 +0000

This semester I’m teaching Weber’s essay on objectivity and social policy. It has been years since I read it — I can tell because all of my marginal notes are littered with references to Habermas, Horkheimer and Adorno. One passage stood out to me:

“The fate of an epoch that has eaten from teh tree of knowledge is that it must know that we cannot learn the _meaning_ of the world from the resutls of its analysis, be it ever so perfect; it must rather be in a position to create this meaning itself”

How much better a quote to use to discuss modernity than the one from Habermas’s lectures in _Philosophical Discourse of Modernity_. Better not only because it comes from a classical figure (and less likely to raise the hackles of someone who refuses to accept my definition of modernity because, for instance, they disagree with his use of Kohlberg or something) but also because of the invocation of the image of the tree of knowledge, which dovetails with not only my own interest in using the image of the Leviathan as it stretches back in times before Hobbes but also — and I somehow missed this earlier — because it also inadvertently references Ipili myths of the end of the world/start of gold mining, which begins when “birds from all over the world will come to eat the fruit of the tree at Warukari”.

I’ll have to be sure to riff that one out nicely in my book.

Locating Cultural Creativity

Alex — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 19:26:39 +0000

I’ve thought a lot about locating cultural creativity, and then by chance the other day I found it — its call number is GN453!

Furniture chewing down under

Alex — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 06:28:34 +0000

I have always known, deep in my heart, that John Burton had the heart and soul of a blogger. But his recent blog, despite the occasional entry that is “incomprehensible”:http://rspas.anu.edu.au/blogs/rmap/2007/10/29/frightenstein-drives-stake-into-sinking-atolls/#more-529 (at least to those of us who are not aging commonwealthers) are “furniture chewing”:http://rspas.anu.edu.au/blogs/rmap/2007/10/26/cross-cultural-misunderstanding-and-4wds/ at “its very best”:http://rspas.anu.edu.au/blogs/rmap/2007/10/31/hacks-move-decimal-point-again/.

Emma Baulch on alternative music in Bali

Alex — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 18:47:29 +0000

Sounds like interesting work — here a potted literature review.

“Making Scenes”:http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=978-0-8223-4115-4 — the forthcoming book from Duke

“The dissertation”:http://library.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?Search_Arg=baulch%2C+emma&SL=None&Search_Code=NALL&PID=Uc18Fq64z00WiEseC5ZRb8VTD&SEQ=20071025044256&CNT=20&HIST=1 at Monash Uni in Australia

“Gesturing elsewhere: the identity politics of the Balinese death/thrash metal scene”:http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessionid=F12901585295FC895B531E67A2479BF0.tomcat1?fromPage=online&aid=163351

“Creating a scene: Balinese punk’s beginnings”:http://ics.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/5/2/153

“The McDonaldisation of Bali”:http://www.sustainability.murdoch.edu.au/casestudies/Case_Studies_Asia/bali_2/csmcdon.htm

“‘Post Imperial’ Globalization and Balinese Alternative Music”:http://web.mit.edu/cms/Events/mit2/Abstracts/Baulchpaper.pdf

“Alternative music and mediation in late New Order Indonesia”:http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a713768254~db=all~order=page

“Punks, rastas and headbangers: Bali’s Generation X”:http://insideindonesia.org/edit48/emma.htm

Dog genetics!

Alex — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 23:56:56 +0000

Here’s “a potential resource for teaching”:http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/55869?fulltext=true — often times when I begin to ask my students about race and genetics one or two in the class will analogize human racial difference to dog breeds. At first I thought this was shocking, but over time I found it was a useful response — most students imagined dog breeds, like human racial difference, to be the result of evolution. But in fact variation in dog size is a classic example of culture shaping biology and not the other way around. Canine sexual reproduction is culturally organized (i.e. by breeders) just as human reproduction is shaped by cultural forces, and the incredible variation in size and shape of dogs dates only to the Victorian. And as “Rebecca Cassidy”:http://books.google.com/books?id=A-QYXw9Wl9YC&dq=sport+of+kings+rebecca+cassidy&pg=PP1&ots=DCnV7PcL2z&sig=iPNyFJAq1a6QuFm66w054CSIhQA&prev=http://www.google.com/search%3Fq%3Dsport%2Bof%2Bkings%2Brebecca%2Bcassidy%26ie%3Dutf-8%26oe%3Dutf-8%26aq%3Dt%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26client%3Dfirefox-a&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title has shown, ‘breeding’ is a culturally-specific preoccupation which cuts across species, class, and (of course) ‘race’.