Clean Anthropology Thread

DannyinJapan

DannyinJapan

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"My beef is with those who felt it necessary to impose their own ideas of the way things are upon the process of finding out what exists, at the expense of really finding out something."

That is a basic problem for us. (And probably all sciences)
IF we apply a "paradigm", then we affect our own observations.

If we dont apply a paradigm, then we have no basis to analyze the data.
We just have data.

Yeah, "just data" is ok, thats what National Geographic is all about.

To get your PhD, however, you have to PROVE something. That requires a paradigm and a theory.

aye, there's the rub.
 
I've always found anthropology interesting, but true, it is annoying when someone (Marvin Harris, Napoleon Chagnon, Jared Diamond, even Margaret Mead) imposes their theories on things.
Many "primitive" cultures get glorified, some get vilified. For example, some tribes of the Amazon practice infanticide. This was never talked about, because anthropologists wanted charity and funding to save the Amazon land for the Yanomamo tribes, and it would be "bad PR."
Another example is the !Kung San, long glorified as a model non-violent culture where very little work was needed to get by, as hunter-gatherers. Well, it turns out that their violence level isn't much better than average. Oops.
I respect other cultures, I find them fascinating, but it irks me when an anthropologist trims his or her commentary to attack western culture.
 
but I think that a lot of things are effected by perspective, it is the framework that we all are forced to work in. We are the servants to our perceptions, finding alternative perceptions is probably one of the hardest things to do, we must think outside of the accepted (personally, professionally and culturally , you name it) and still use some form of logic to justify. It is a slippery slope.

From my understanding , the pardigms ( you mention) just be a different persepectives, that could be effected by essentially what you expected to find, what was convient to find or maybe even what somebody thought was important to find. Could this "pardigm progression" just be a natural progression from idea to idea that leads to a better understanding in the long run?

It would seem to me that in a field like anthropolgy, unlike a" harder science" that this would be the only way to make progress, create new perspectives to understand the data that is there, that is unless you got new data , your pretty much stuck with that.

I can also see the abuses, I would think that current political ideas would muddy the waters quite a bit, especially since the politics control the money for research. I would guess that political agenda defines culture currently and current culture is affected by the perception of the past. In this sense, I think a lot of political people would like to make anthropoligy in to mythlogy, and label the whole thing as fact, it serves political purpose. If you had a political agenda, social ideal, you were trying to push or even just believed in , it is a way to do it.

Could it be that some people just saw things that way
from their individual perspective with no manipulative intent ? It's possible.

If your not a political type I can understand your misgivings. What a sticky
swamp that would be to wade. I think it a good arguement ,to disengage
politics from research ( like that was ever going to happen).

Ok I have wasted enough time , back to work ...........now my head hurts though.... :confused:
 
Ahhh.....tales of the Yanomamo and the !Kung tribes.....takes me back. Did anybody read the "20 years after" report on the Yanomamo? Oops! :rolleyes:
 
yeah, they re-named themselves the "Yo! Mama's" and opened up a HUGE pachinko parlor on their sacred land.
They're all stinking rich and have bling-bling.
 
Wow, I wonder if I could be ethnically and culturally diversified, heck I'm
isolated now..... and The perks look good.....
 
Whenever I hear the word "paradigm" I think of Thomas Kuhn's book, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." It's a great work that describes how scientists REALLY do their work. I highly recommend it. Normal scientists mainly fill in missing observations and help flesh out existing paradigms. It's along the lines of sequencing genes or developing a new vaccine, as opposed to coming up with the idea that germs cause diseases rather than evil spirits.

I'm uncertain about anthropology. It seems like it could be too subjective.

If I measure a Khuk and tell you its weight, length, thickness, etc. I tell you a fair amount about the Khuk. It's objective. If I launch into more subjective things like is it attractive, comfortable, etc., I'm still telling you stuff about the Khuk, but I'm also saying things about myself.

Now this might be quite interesting, sometimes even very useful.

As for Margaret Mead, I know people who are irritated that she'd show up, hang out only a couple of weeks, and then head out and start writing books claiming to be an expert. Bah. Never learned the language or anything.
 
brantoken said:
From my understanding , the pardigms ( you mention) just be a different persepectives, that could be effected by essentially what you expected to find, what was convient to find or maybe even what somebody thought was important to find. Could this "pardigm progression" just be a natural progression from idea to idea that leads to a better understanding in the long run?
Click to expand...
to paraphrase from memory;
'it is from the clash of differing opinions
that the spark of truth is made manifest'

Very applicable to all areas;
But the differing opinions need to be expressed for it to work.


<>call me 'Dean' :)-FYI-FWIW-IIRC-JMO-M2C-YMMV-TIA-YW-GL-HH-HBD-IBSCUTWS-TWotBGUaDUaDUaD
<> Tips <> Baha'i Prayers Links
 
'it is from the clash of differing opinions
that the spark of truth is made manifest'

oh I like that , can keep and use it later ....?
 
There was a time when I would be right in the middle of this type of discussion. I would thoughtfully stroke my beard, lean forward on the leather elbow patches of my tweed sport coat, draw deeply on my pipe full of Borkum Riff, and as I slowly exhaled I would utter some profound obfuscation that wouldn't mean a thing, but would leave my students and fellow intellectuals in awe of my vast knowledge and intellectual development.

That was then. Now my beard has turned to white stubble that usually contains remnants of my previous meal, I don't own a sport coat, nor wear a pipe, and I don't even remember what "paradigm" means.

It took a long time and lot of work to arrive at this position in life, but I have finally made it to where I can concentrate on the really important issues like making it into the bathroom before I pee my pants.
 
DannyinJapan said:
"To get your PhD, however, you have to PROVE something. That requires a paradigm and a theory.
Click to expand...

Several friends in the Anthro. Masters dept. had Prof. that didn't agree / support their thesis.....made academic life miserable. One finally gave up and wrote about what the Prof. wanted just to get it over with.
 
Ben Arown-Awile said:
It took a long time and lot of work to arrive at this position in life, but I have finally made it to where I can concentrate on the really important issues like making it into the bathroom before I pee my pants.
Click to expand...
Yep the important things ;) :D
 
Here's a nice site I found that has a nice summary of the various "paradigms".

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORIES:
A GUIDE PREPARED BY STUDENTS FOR STUDENTS

Many of them, I was unfamilar with.

Others I recognize as ideas and theories taken from areas like political theory, economics, biology, and philosphy.

While it can be well-argued that anthropology is the study of people, their societies and culture, that such things belong in a theory or paradigm of anthropology, I don't really see justification for strongly emphasizing one theory or paradigm from one of these areas and saying that it should be applied to all of anthropology.

I said this:

"Just don't get a lot of that "post-modern stuff". It seems like following some of the postulates to the full, you just end up with a bunch of isolated narcissists void of any common experience except that they are isolated narcissists. How much is that to study? Peer review seems pretty trivial too."

Now, the page that I linked may not provide a nutshell view of the various paradigms that all would agree with, but I truely see no ultility at all for something like the below, which is what I was addressing in the above comment.

Skeptical Postmodernists- They are extremely critical of the modern subject. They consider the subject to be a “linguistic convention” (Rosenau 1992:43). They also reject any understanding of time because for them the modern understanding of time is oppressive in that it controls and measures individuals. They reject Theory because theories are abundant, and no theory is considered more correct that any other. They feel that “Theory conceals, distorts, and obfuscates, it is alienated, disparated, dissonant, it means to exclude, order, and control rival powers” (Rosenau 1992: 81).

Affirmative Postmodernists- Affirmatives also reject Theory by denying claims of truth. They do not, however, feel that Theory needs to be abolished but merely transformed. Affirmative are less rigid than skeptics. They support movements organized around peace, environment, and feminism (Rosenau 1993:42).

This seems derived from the philosophical notion that all perception is subjective, everyone perceives everything differently, there is no objective outside world, only a multitude of different, unique percieved worlds inside the head of each person. For each person, the postulate that they are the only mind in existance, and everything else is an illusion seemingly would have as great a weight as any other postulate.

If this is the case, what is the point of two such anthropologists even holding a discussion, let alone collecting, categorizing, analyzing data or writing papers? Agreement, disagreement, everything that requires more than one mind seems impossible. Heck of a paradigm to apply to the study of groups of people if you ask me.

If the what is on the site accurately protrays "post-modernism", and from what else I have seen of it, the site does, (Though I must confess that I've not read a whole book advocating it, because it seems so utterly pointless and useless), I stand by my statement above.

Or I could just adopt "post-modernism" myself and then none of it would matter, as far as I can see.
 
if your really want to open a Can of worm
look into " Political Science"( hahahaha) :rolleyes: .

Naw it does sound kinda weird, like philosophy instead of a science , but then
again I'm not the expert. Who knows how many "trade terms " there are tucked away in there. Things may not be what they seem, can't tell you how many time that has bitten me.

Also consider that anything dealing that much with people would get a little weird. Humans tend to vary rather eratically (BF) from time to time. Larger groups do even weirder things. Just look at what each culture considers food.

Every consider that science takes faith, as no matter how smart your are
or how much education ( specialization) you got , you just can't know it all.

Eventually you have to believe an expert in one scientific field/area or another, belief is faith bud.... :eek: Does that still make it science? Because
they use methods that your are not familiar with mean that they don't have some value? How could you tell, especially if your not an expert in the particular field ?
 
Not really freaked, the apparent vacuousness of some of this stuff does astound me.

"Naw it does sound kinda weird, like philosophy instead of a science , but then again I'm not the expert. Who knows how many "trade terms " there are tucked away in there. Things may not be what they seem, can't tell you how many time that has bitten me."

You may have a point on the "trade terms", but it certainly appears the intent is to specifically ovoid being scientific, or even disprovable. The point seems to be to ensure that whatever the promogulators may produce has by definition no less "validity" and "value" than anything else that has been or ever will be produced. So why bother to learn or do anything at all?

For what it is worth I do see considerable merit in some of the other paradigms at that site, in particular, the one Danny has espoused, "cultural materialism".

Here is a interesting (and amusing) item:

Reinventing Modernism: Lacanist obscurity in the works of Spelling

B. Hans Porter
Department of Sociolinguistics, Cambridge University

These excerpts follw the brief article:

"The essay you have just seen is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodernism Generator. To generate another essay, follow this link."

"More detailed technical information may be found in Monash University Department of Computer Science Technical Report 96/264: "On the Simulation of Postmodernism and Mental Debility Using Recursive Transition Networks". An on-line copy is available from Monash University.

How this program fares RE Turing's test, I really can't say, all considered.

I endorse the site author's following reccomendation:

"If you enjoy this, you might also enjoy reading about the Social Text Affair, where NYU Physics Professor Alan Sokal's brilliant(ly meaningless) hoax article was accepted by a cultural criticism publication."

The ruckus that followed the unveiling of the hoax is well documented in the site linked immediately above, it is Prof. Sokal's own site.

For those mildly or hardly interested, the title of the article was:

"Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"
This is the original "parody" article, published in Social Text #46/47, pp. 217-252 (spring/summer 1996).

For those more interested, clicking on the title will take one to the text of the hoax article.
 
Probably not to the point, but...


Some years ago, I got it into my head that "all things are the same thing." I didn't know where the thought came from, nor on what level, if any, I thought it to be true. I did kind of keep chewing on it from time-to-time.

Like the theorum that "most people, when faced with a choice between changing their minds, or proving there is no need to do so--get busy looking for the proof," I poked around life just noticing some stuff.

In physics, the particle accelerators whip thingies around, then cause them to collide with other thingies, and at the point of impact, look to see what they can see about the properties of the collided thingies. It is the point of impact at which they may see new thingies. (sorry Firkin, I know I make you cringe.)

In Zen koans, it is the collision of inquiry to response wherein 'illumination' is supposed to occur. That is to say, an apparently non-sensical response to an inquiry forces the mind to explore the meaning of the response and the question, and thus develop a new insight.

In humor, the closest workable definition I could come up with after years of performing improvisation was that: "It is the unanticipated juxtaposition of dissimilar elements." That is, the audience is following along one intellectual path which then "collides" with another (e.g., the punchline) which startles the mind into laughter (or finding humor.)

As I said, not sure there is a point to this...but interesting to me is that in a science, a philosophy, and an examination of a (perhaps unique) human behavior, it is the 'collision' point at which we learn.

Perhaps succinctly put: It is by the friction in our lives that we find out how we are polished.


Dunno.

If this is a hi-jack, sorry.


Kis
 
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