Food for thought for skeptics

DannyinJapan

DannyinJapan

Joined
Oct 9, 2003
Messages
5,594
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can
change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

-- Margaret Mead, anthropologist

She said that 50 years ago.
I think it is even more true today...
 
Maybe, but a small group of thoughtful, committed aliens in their UFOs armed with death rays could REALLY change the world! :D
 
someday ants will rule the world.



:p
 
Daniel Koster said:
someday ants will rule the world.



:p
Click to expand...
maybe in coexsitence with the cockroaches or maybe the cockroach will be the end survivor of everything. Do you suppose the cockroach will eventually evolve into an intelligent alien?:rolleyes: ;)
 
Even one "thoughtful, committed" person can make a difference, at least for a time.

Margaret Mead could be said to an example.

The question is what kind of difference?

Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman ...and the Samoans

...In 1983, Derek Freeman published his own study of Samoa titled, "Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking
of an Anthropological Myth"(1983a.).

Derek Freeman read Mead's "Coming of Age in Samoa" soon after it was published. Enthralled, he became a regular visitor to the islands, learned the language, customs, and even became a participant local village politics as a full-fledged member of the community. He is recognized by his peers, and by the Samoans themselves, as an authority on Samoan culture. In his text, which is actually a refutation of Mead's work, Freeman takes particular umbrage at Mead, and claims that she was, or may have been, duped in regard to her conclusions. Freeman's work in Samoa encompassed the same area of Mead's, yet with quite different results.

What emerges through Freeman's detailed research is the somewhat troubling possibility that what was published by Mead in 1928 could not have been what she observed during her fieldwork in 1925/26.

On Margaret Mead's "Coming of Age in Samoa", Dr. Martin Orans, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside, opens his book "Not Even Wrong" (Harvard University Press, 1983), thusly;

"Occasionally a message carried by the media
finds an audience so eager to receive it that it
is willing to suspend all critical judgment and
adopt the message as its own. So it was with
Margaret Mead's celebrated 'Coming of Age in
Samoa.'" [1(a)]

Dr. Orans also did fieldwork in Samoa and compiled his book using Margaret Mead's actual fieldnotes, loaned to him by her
daughter. He states that he carried "Coming of Age in Samoa" on his required reading list for the anthropology classes that he taught over the years. He then seems to lament this deed by waxing thus:

"The greatest fault lies with those of us like myself who understood the requirements of science, but both failed to point out the deficiencies of Mead's work and tacitly supported such enterprise by repeatedly assigning it to students." [1(b)]

Derek Freeman, on the other hand, revels in no such remorse at the possible tarnishing of Margaret Mead, an anthropological legend. In fact, throughout his book he goes for the throat, so to speak;

"It is with the scientific adequacy of Mead's picture of Samoan society that I shall be concerned with from now on, for to the extent that this picture is defective, Samoa ceases to be a negative instance and Mead's central conclusion that culture, or nurture, is all-important in the determination of adolescent and other aspects of human behavior is revealed as ungrounded and invalid."
(Freeman, 1983a: 83)..."


Pacifist Hoax
Margaret Mead’s reputation, which has taken a professional beating in the last twenty years, has just received another body blow. In the current issue of The American Anthropologist, Jim Roscoe, a specialist in New Guinea and a professor of anthropology at the University of Maine, returns to Mead’s famous claim that the Mountain Arapesh were a people innocent of warfare...

...Should we care whether a tribe of yam gardeners who eked out a marginal existence on the serrated edges of some mountains fought wars?

One reason to care is that Margaret Mead remains an influential figure in American life. Sex and Temperament itself remains in print and is studied in college courses around the country—and not just as a demonstration of fanciful stories masquerading as scholarship. Mead’s writing continue to seduce students into an ideology that combines cultural relativism with a view that sex roles and gender are arbitrary social constructions. The Mountain Arapesh’s supposed pacifism plays a crucial part in that ideology...

Margaret Mead

That experience came back to me when I read Martin Gardner's essay on Margaret Mead in his excellent new collection, Weird Water & Fuzzy Logic (Prometheus Books). I report on that essay in this, my annual acknowledgment of April Fool's Day.

Dr. Mead's initial reputation as an anthropologist was founded on her extremely popular text, Coming of Age in Samoa, published in 1928 and based largely on her interviews with two young Samoan women, Fa'apua'a Fa'amu and Fofoa. At the time of her visit to Samoa, Mead, a graduate student, was only 23 years old, scarcely older than the interviewed "girls" whom she called her "merry companions."

Gardner describes what probably happened, "Embarrassed and offended by Mead's constant questions about sex, a taboo topic in Samoa, the two...decided to play on Mead what they thought would be a harmless joke.... The two girls had no inkling that Mead was an anthropologist who would go home and write a book about what they told her. To them she was just a young, naive, meddlesome tourist.

"The two merry companions told Mead everything she wanted to hear. Yes, adolescents had complete sexual freedom, moving
stress-free from childhood to adultery. Samoans were a happy, free-love people. Poor Mead bought it all." And not only did she accept the wild stories of the young women, but so too did the general public and the anthropological community. Mead's book was not only a best seller, fueling a sexual rebellion among young people, but it was widely adopted as a university text in anthropology. Clearly social scientists then were less critical than were those who counseled Terry Percainte.

When in 1983 Australian anthropologist Derek Freeman exposed the story in Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, he was vilified by his colleagues and American Anthropological Association members formally denounced his book as "unscientific."

Unfortunately for Freeman's critics Fa'apua'a Fa'amu remained alive and in a 1991 interview the elderly grandmother confirmed everything that Freeman had said. "Samoan girls," she confessed, "are terrific liars when it comes to joking. But Margaret accepted our trumped-up stories as though they were true. Yes, we just fibbed and fibbed to her."

Gardner quotes philosopher Karl Popper's reaction to the Freeman critics: "Many sociologists...believe in a relativist theory of truth. That is, "truth is what the experts believe.... In fact, they could prove that you were wrong simply by taking a vote at a meeting of experts. That clearly settled it. And your facts? They meant nothing if sufficiently many experts ignored them, or distorted them, or misinterpreted them."

Margaret Mead died before her reputation was compromised. During her lifetime she remained one of our most honored scientists, despite her beliefs in psychic phenomena and aliens observing us from flying saucers. But how fickle is fame. Her name does not even appear in my 1996 encyclopedia...

Why do I think is important to point out the considerable contradictions to and seeming refutations of Mead's writings? Part of it is in the excerpts above.

On this page can be found some more discussion on the issue. Including a link to a piece defending Mead against Freeman's criticism that is from a publication known as "Skeptical Inquirer".

For something really scary read:

Thought Reform 101
The Orwellian implications of today's college orientation

If this article is accurate, from Danny's descriptions of Japan, it looks like we're turning Japanese.
 
firkin said:
...it looks like we're turning Japanese.
Click to expand...
Great! :grumpy:

Now I'm going to have that song in my head the rest of the evening.....:(






:footinmou
 
Now that's scary :grumpy: (refering to Firkins suggested reading)
 
Regardless of the modern opinions of her books, (relevancy?) which were based on an infant science, her statement is very very true.

When I read it, I was thinking of the hijackers on 9-11.

Even Hitler made some pretty profound statements.
 
When I read the phrase, I thought of the people that the last link in my post is about.

Some of this "sociobiology" stuff is damn scary when people try to apply it. Espoecially when done by a "small group of thoughtful, committed people" that seem to lack any oversight or questioning by countervailing ideology.

Edit:

When a book such as Mead's first book on Samoa is used as text by a couple of gererations of college students who are told that it is scientific support for the "culture, or nurture, is all-important in the determination of adolescent and other aspects of human behavior" theory", and those so go on to formulate social policy and political policy, it should be matter of some interest when it is called into question or discredited. Political, social, and personal agendas, easily get mixed into this kind of field. Just vist any college campus. It is no less scary than large-scale application of B.F. Skinner's conditioning methods.

Anthropology has just been through another one of these messes, quite a bit nastier, regarding studies of the Yanomami Indians, that live along the border of Brazil and Venezuala. Some may have seen the Nova special on them.

This is a complicated ugly story replete with horrible accusations, academic infighting, politics, you name it.

Here's one take on it. It is a bit long, perhaps hyperbolic in parts, but seems to touch on both sides of most the issues which many articles don't. There are a lot of issues.

This site has a lot of articles and stories on the mess.

Yvsa, don't read this stuff if you have high blood pressure.

------------------

To get back on topic, I bet on the cockroaches too. Just hope they don't learn to work together like ants!
 
Lion's Roar said:
I thought cockroaches only evolved into politicians?


Sorry, best I can do w/o coffee.
Click to expand...

Almost right. If they make substantial progress, politicians could evolve into cockroaches.

Steve
 
"For years native groups across the world with stories of the depredations of anthropologists have been eager to tell them to anyone interested."

Please.
Chagnon's book was not the ONLY book we read.

Be careful not to believe such sweeping generalizations and grandiose exaggerations. Do you guys think I would poison children to get my Ph.D. ?
If you are unfamiliar with anthropology, please dont make any judgment about it based upon this one, highly questionable novel.

The book was written and published and the purpose of publishing is profit.
So, there is obviously some sensationalism involved.
That said, there may very well have been some bad judgments. I don't know, this all happened 40 years ago.

the modern science of Anthropology really didnt even exist until the 30's, and even then we were just baby steppin. Many of the pionneers such as Margaret Mead and Lous Kroeber were doing stuff for the first time ever and had no backgound, no preparation, and they were working with people who represented the last of their kind.

I am aware that some anthropologists were spying for the CIA in Thailand in the 60s and 70s (the so called "thailand controversy") but we dont do that stuff anymore.

Mead wrote many books and contributed greatly to social science.
As did Chagnon.

I dont know what "sociobiology" is. In 8 years of study, I never heard that word before.
It sounds like some ancient, pre-modern "anthropometry" term.
 
DannyinJapan said:
...I am aware that some anthropologists were spying for the CIA in Thailand in the 60s and 70s (the so called "thailand controversy") but we dont do that stuff anymore...
Click to expand...
Are you sure about that? My daughter, a cultural anthropologist, was given a big grant to learn the language of one of those countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union. I forget the name of it, Kazookastan, or something like that. It's over there near Afghanistan. The money was fronted by some "World Language Organization", but everyone knows it was really the CIA.

Besides the language, the course taught her that was the last place in the world that she wanted to be, not only because the Muslim wars are going on there, but because she couldn't see herself having to wear one of those Arab booty bags over her head when she went out in public.

Instead she went to an island in the Caribbean to do research. This was much safer and a lot nicer environment. They actually like Americans there. Of course she did fall off a cliff and break her leg, but at least nobody tried to chop her head off.
 
Ben,

Kazakhs are a Turkic people, not Arab. Neither they nor the majority of Arabs wear hijab/purdah anymore. As a fashion writer, I feel the need to point that out.
 
ruel said:
...Kazakhs are a Turkic people, not Arab. Neither they nor the majority of Arabs wear hijab/purdah anymore...
Click to expand...
True. The area was modernized under the Soviet Union, but now that they are independent, and Fundamental Islam is on the rise, many of the old traditions are being revised.

Look at Iraq. Under Saddam's secular regime, it was one of the most progressive nations in the area when it came to the position of women in society. Now, with the collapse of the government, and the rise of Muslim Fundamentalism, the majority of women are afraid to go out in public except in traditional dress.
 
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