Glazed brick from Khorsabad in Iraq, the ancient capital city of Assyrian King Sargon ii (721-705 B.C.).
[Louvre Museum, Paris]
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Glazed brick from Khorsabad in Iraq, the ancient capital city of...
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Open Access Journal: De Rebus Antiquis
[First posted in AWOL 20 December 2011. Updated 6 February 2014]
De Rebus Antiquis
ISSN 2250-4923
De Rebus Antiquis
ISSN 2250-4923
DE REBUS ANTIQUIS es la publicación electrónica del Proyecto de Estudios Históricos Grecorromanos (PEHG) del Departamento de Historia de la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Políticas y de la Comunicación de la Universidad Católica Argentina. Esta revista ha nacido con el objeto de dar marco institucional para la publicación de todas aquellas investigaciones de especialistas en esta área del conocimiento y gestar así un ámbito de debate en las temáticas y líneas de investigación más novedosas del tema que nos convoca. Hemos elegido el formato electrónico para garantizar el ágil acceso a sus contenidos a cualquier especialista interesado como un rápido alcance nacional e internacional a sus articulistas. Asimismo, desde la perspectiva histórica, convocamos el aporte de otras áreas del conocimiento como la Ciencia Política, la Antropología, la Sociología, la Economía, las Letras, la Filosofía, etc., que son bienvenidos a participar y nos ayudarán a satisfacer las exigencias que implica el conocimiento interdisciplinario.
Año I, Núm.1 / 2011
Año II, Núm. 2 / 2012
Año III, Núm.3 / 2013
See the full List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies
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Strange Fruit
This past Sunday in church, my pastor showed this powerful video, produced by folks from the SALT Project, which is based here in Indianapolis.
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Ancient Egyptian Astronomy
Ancient Egyptian Astronomy
This site is a repository of information about astronomical documents from the pharaonic period of ancient Egypt. In particular, the site aims to provide an up-to-date, accessible, and scholarly commentary to the astronomical texts and tables previously described in Neugebauer and Parker's three-volume work Egyptian Astronomical Texts published in the 1960s. The site currently only contains data on diagonal star tables, corresponding to the first volume.In order to view all the information on this site, you will need to have a transliteration font installed. You can download the font here.
To familiarize yourself with the conventions used on this site, you can see a list of conventions here.
In order to view all the information on this site, you will need to have a transliteration font installed. You can download the font ↧
Apostelretabel Sint-Dimpnakerk Geel op Topstukkenlijst
Op initiatief van Vlaams minister van Cultuur Joke Schauvliege is het ‘apostelretabel’ van de Sint-Dimpnakerk in Geel definitief opgenomen op de Topstukkenlijst, een lijst met het roerend cultureel erfgoed van de Vlaamse Gemeenschap dat een bijzondere bescherming geniet. Het apostelretabel is veruit het oudst bewaarde Vlaamse retabel in gepolychromeerde natuursteen. Met de opname van het retabel bevat de Vlaamse Topstukkenlijst nu 398 individuele stukken en 38 verzamelingen.
Met zijn streng hiërarchische indeling is het apostelretabel een bijzonder zeldzame 14de-eeuwse voorganger in steen van het vooral tussen 1380 en 1450 gebruikelijke type in albast of gepolychromeerd hout. Het retabel heeft een belangrijke ijkwaarde voor de ontstaans- en ontwikkelingsgeschiedenis van het vleugelretabel in de Nederlanden.
Het Topstukkendecreet (2003) regelt de bescherming van cultuurgoederen die omwille van hun uitzonderlijke archeologische, historische, cultuurhistorische, artistieke of wetenschappelijke betekenis voor de Vlaamse Gemeenschap bewaard moeten blijven. Meer informatie over de Topstukkenlijst vind je op topstukken.be.
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Carved bones at the National Museum of Anthropology,...
Carved bones at the National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico.
Bone shown in the first photo:
This bone shows fine incisions outlined in black, with the image of the god “9 Wind”, the creator of wisdom and the wind. In Mixtec mythology he is the ancestor of the rulers and gives them power and is recognized by his attributes — the cut shell and the conical hat and mouth mask.
The bones in the second photo have been made into musical instruments:
Carved in a human femur is a xylophone, ke’e, and carved in wood is a noise maker, having two parts to strike on to produce sound. The use of these instruments was only done during religious ceremonies and they were typically carving a depiction of mythological scenes and symbols.
Courtesy & currently located at the National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico. Photos taken by Travis S.
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Cups 1st-2nd Century AD Meroitic The so-called ‘Meroitic...
Cups
1st-2nd Century AD
Meroitic
The so-called ‘Meroitic period’ was the last major phase of the history of the kingdom of Kush in Nubia. The term is used to cover the approximate period 300 BC-AD 350. The earlier date roughly marks the date when the kings began to be buried at Meroe, which had already been functioning as a capital city for some time. The highpoint of this phase was in the first century BC and first century AD, and pottery was one of its most outstanding products. There is definite variation in products from various parts of the kingdom, suggesting the existence of local ceramic centres, particularly in the north (Faras and Karanog). However, the range of types and decoration has made the creation of an internal chronology rather difficult. Two examples are given here to illustrate two of the principal types: those with mostly figured decoration in red and black on white, and a decorative style mostly in black on an orangeish ground, with floral and some figured decoration.
(Source: The British Museum)
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Telling Stories of Today: Collecting Native American Material Culture in the 21st Century
A lot is going on in the American Section of the Penn Museum as we make our final preparations to open our newest exhibition, Native American Voices: The People – Here and Now, on March 1. The exhibition explores contemporary Native America, and though Penn Museum has its share of older Native American material culture (over 160,000 objects!), we actively do our best to expand the collections a little bit each year by purchasing new Native American objects of today.
Native Americans today make up hundreds of North American communities in both urban and rural settings. Material culture remains one of Native America’s most distinctive and enduring legacies, and we need to continue to collect it today.
Recent purchases for our new exhibition give voice to contemporary concerns and experiences in the Native American community. One of my favorites is by Jason Garcia (aka Okuu Pín), an artist from Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico. Jason shapes and paints his ceramic tiles using all natural materials from his home region. His amazing graphic art combines traditional Pueblo scenes with popular culture and comments on events happening in his community now. His piece “Grand Theft Auto Santa Clara Revisited,” is inspired by the popular video game of the same name.
In his own words…
GRAND THEFT AUTO SANTA CLARA REVISTED—L19
The piece is inspired by the video game series Grand Theft Auto, the game is set in a fictional city named San Andreas. I appropriated the box cover art and made some minor and major changes to it. The vignettes reflect my upbringing and observations of Santa Clara Pueblo or Kha’Po Owinge’-“Rose Path village,” this is the Tewa name and refers to wild roses that grew along the water ways of the Santa Clara Creek and the Rio Grande River, when the Pueblo was settled in the 1300s after a major drought forced our ancestors to move from the Pajarito Plateau to seek closer water sources.
The back of the piece has various codes that are a specific succession of buttons that when entered can change different variables of the game play. The codes that are on the back are:
| R2 X L1 L1 L2 L2 O | STORMY |
| R2 X L1 L1 L2 L2 L2 X | FOGGY |
| R2 X L1 L1 L2 L2 L2 ☐ | CLOUDY |
| ↓ X ← → ← R1 ← ↓ ↑ Δ | INFINITE HEALTH |
The codes that are entered reflect the ceremonial songs and prayers that are incantations for rain, prosperity, and long life.
Key to vignettes:
A—Puje Cliffs and Village is the Ancestral home of Santa Clara Pueblo. Puje= “where rabbits gather,” the Tewa name of our ancestral home. It refers to the ancestors who referred to themselves as P’u Towa or ‘rabbit people.’ Puje is said to have been a major gathering place for many villages that were spread out among the Pajarito Plateau.
B—This vignette is directly lifted from the game cover art, in that it shows a main character of the game. The background shows a silhouette of Pueblo homes in the background and the street signs show the location of where I grew up. On the corner of Agoyo and Nava Alley. Agoyo meaning “star” and Nava meaning “field” both in the Tewa language.
C—The image of the girl is directly appropriated from the cover art.
D—The red polished carved pot represents the strong pottery traditions that have and continue to remain a part of Santa Clara Pueblo’s identity and culture. The water serpent carved is a symbol of water. This image was inspired by a pot created by the late Teresita Naranjo.
E—The table games/blackjack player represents the economic development efforts made by Santa Clara Pueblo. Currently the Pueblo operates a casino in Espanola, the neighboring town, called The Santa Claran Hotel and Casino. Casino and gaming enterprises offer financial security for some Tribes/Pueblos, but also offers many social problems as well.
F—The vignette shows the Jemez Mountains experiencing a catastrophic forest fire. In 1998/Oso Complex Fire and 2000/Cerro Grande Fire burned over 8,500 acres of the Santa Clara Canyon. In 2011, the Las Conchas burned 16,000+ acres of the Santa Clara Canyon which included the upper watershed of the Santa Clara Creek leading to major erosion and closure of the Santa Clara Canyon to visitation.
G—This vignette shows the Summer moiety kiva at Santa Clara Pueblo, which I belong to. The kiva is the ceremonial building in which many Pueblo ceremonies take place. This kiva was built in the mid-2000s and was part of the Pueblo’s efforts to build new kivas and renovate old kivas after the Cerro Grande Fire. This is a representation of how strong Pueblo cultural traditions are and how they will be continued into the 21st century for many generations to come.
F—The Corn Maiden holds a flip phone that is taking a photo or recording a video. This is a representation of technology’s role in the continuance and destruction of a culture. Technology can be a tool to save and promote cultural ideals/languages/etc. But it can also be detrimental as well. The Corn Maiden is also a symbol in my work that represents Mother Earth and how we care for her in our actions and inactions.
Grand Theft Auto, 2013-14-2 front and back. Jason Garcia (Okuu Pin), 2010, photograph by Lucy Fowler Williams
Museums are pretty amazing places and in this setting, Jason’s tile is preserved for future generations who will one day look back on 2014. How would you choose to tell your story?
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Comment on Discussing the New Sappho poems by David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist
That there is “documented legal provenance” and that provenance is not being revealed despite repeated requests for same from various sources casts strong suspicions on it. It genuinely appears that the folks dealing with this don’t want provenance to be known — and probably questioned — before publication. It seems to be among the things that killed the formal publication of the Gospel of Jesus Wife (so called). When a similar misunderstanding surfaced a few years ago over the reported “discovery” of bits of Epicurus’ per physeos via multispectral imaging, Dr Obbink did post a message to the papy-l list clarifying matters as reported in the press. I don’t find that this recent TLS piece serves the same function …
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Major Grant Awarded to U. of Maryland for Project on Washington and Ancient Rome
The National Italian American Foundation (NIAF) is pleased to announce today a $500,000 grant from the late Ernest L. Pellegri, one of the Foundation's donors, to the University of Maryland's Department of Classics.
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Archives Photo of the Week: Dancers
North African couple/dancers, traditional jewelry and clothing.
Penn Museum Image #152496
Working in an archives has its definite perks. One of those perks is working with the collections. Here at the Penn Museum, I particularly enjoy working with the photographic collections (hence my weekly blog contribution). This week, we had a Penn class in and the archivists were pulling images for them to view. I had the opportunity to delve in to a collection of images by the photographers Rudolf Lehnert (1878–1948) and Ernst Landrock (1880–1957). Lehnert and Landrock, as they were known, operated a photography studio in Tunisia from 1900 to 1914 and Cairo from 1914 to the 1920′s. This particular image of theirs is a photogravure of two dancers from northern Africa. Despite the age of their images, the Lehnert and Landrock photographs stand out with phenomenal depth and clarity. I count myself lucky to be able to work with treasures like these everyday.
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Beveren Onderste Boven
In hun jaarlijkse tentoonstelling belichten de Vereniging voor Oudheidkundig Bodemonderzoek West-Vlaanderen (V.O.B.o.W.) en de Werkgroep Archeologie Roeselare (WAR) dit jaar de Roeselaarse deelgemeente Beveren. Diverse vuursteenvondsten van Christ Naert belichten de prehistorie in Beveren, terwijl een gereconstrueerde kruikamfoor de Romeinse periode illustreert en het onderzoek van een Karolingische waterput en enkele afvalkuilen het middeleeuwse verhaal vertellen.
De tentoonstelling ‘Beveren Onderste Boven’ loopt tot eind 2014 en kan gratis bezocht worden tijdens de openingsuren van dienst Cultuur (Zuidstraat 3, 8800 Roeselare): maandag van 8u30 tot 12u & van 14u tot 18, en dinsdag tot vrijdag van 8u30 tot 12u.
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More from the University of Massachusetts Digital Archaeology Practice Workshop
These are just some photographs of the lovely University of Massachusetts as we get ready for the first sessions at the Digital Archaeology Practice Workshop.
If you want to check out a live stream of the conference today go here.
Campus looks great under a new layer of snow and with dramatic blue skies in the background.
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NEWS: New evidence for Amenhotep III and Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV) coregency found in Asasif?
(Source: MSA Press Release).
“The Minister of Antiquities, Dr. Mohammed Ibrahim declared the
discovery of architectural remains (of walls and columns) in the
tomb of the Vizier Amen-Hotep Huy No. 28 in Asasif Area – Luxor.
Some of these remains carry scenes showing both Amenhotep III
and Amenhotep IV (father and son) in the same space, and one
following the other. The remains also show hieroglyphic inscriptions
of the names of both kings beside each other. The importance of this
discovery, Dr. Ibrahim says, is that it presents the definitive evidence
of the co regency between Amenhotep III and Amenhotep IV because
it dates exactly at the beginning of the first Heb-Sed of Amenhotep II,
in the 30th year of his reign.
(Source: MSA Press Release).
Dr. Francisco J. Martin, the Field and
Scientific Director of the Spanish Mission working in the Asasif
Project said that the project started in 2009 with a study and
examination of the architectural elements of the tomb and managed
to discover a number of ceramic and structural findings that are now
being graphically recorded” – via EEF.
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Comment on Discussing the New Sappho poems by Richard Rawles
I have no insider knowledge whatsoever, but I think it is unlikely that Dr Obbink would have said “documented legal provenance” if he did not believe that he could back it up. From what is said in the TLS piece, it appears that one factor is that the owner of the papyrus did not want to be personally identified.
There are perhaps interesting questions here about the way in which pre-prints should be handled (they are after all rather uncommon in the humanities compared with the natural sciences). In the normal way of things, what might have happened might have been that information about the papyri would have been shared informally among a small group of people associated with the first editor, there would have been some rumour among a larger group of people associated with papyrology or Greek poetry, and then ZPE 189 would have come out and we would all have seen the full publication (with photo, etc.). It would doubtless have been at this stage that it made it into the print media, blogs, etc. (as happened with the previous “new Sappho” i.e. the Köln papyrus).
What has happened this time is that a clearly very partial draft of the publication has been pre-circulated on open web, and has resulted in very extensive coverage online and in print media prior to full publication. The response to this has featured demands that *all* relevant information (effectively, almost full publication) should be released tomorrow, this minute, maybe yesterday. Yet we know that it takes time to get something in a proper state for full publication, and it is perhaps not too surprising that, in the context of a huge amount of sudden interest a scholar may be slow with email or may prefer to release information in a systematic way rather than in all directions in pieces. Impatience is understandable, since there are genuinely important questions at stake. Repeated assertions that perceived delays in the release of further information are evidence of bad faith seem to me rather more unfair and unfortunate.
As far as I am aware, it is about a month since the pre-print was first circulated; the broader media caught on more recently and the recent flush of accusations has been happening over little more than a week. In the greater scheme of things, this is perhaps not really all that slow. If there has been a bit of a mismatch between the kind of speed of response associated with scholarly communication on such a matter and the blogosphere’s demand for much faster information flow, there is an interesting question whether that *should* be dealt with by slicker, faster news management by scholars, or by other people recognising that not everything has to happen at twitter speed. However, that does not need to entail the assumption that slow information management is evidence of dishonesty.
Any chance of more discussion of the poems?!
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Grace
Click here to view the embedded video.
I mentioned previously that, challenged with coming up with a list of the core beliefs of my church, the members basically only agreed on one word: grace. And so I am grateful to Dănuţ Mănăstireanu for drawing my attention to the fact that U2 have a song with the title “Grace,” which I’ve shared above.
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Open Access Archaeology Digest #325
Get your Open Access (free to read) archaeology fix:
A Note on Dame Dorothy Selby and the Gunpowder Plot
http://bit.ly/19JLaFg
Portages
http://bit.ly/1g7d9Og
Oxford Masons, 1370-1530
http://bit.ly/13UCQQ5
Account of the Exploration of a Cairn at Craigbirnoch, New Luce, Wigtownshire.
http://bit.ly/YZmM7i
The great hall of the Bishop’s Palace at Hereford
http://bit.ly/10UuNA0
A Note on Dame Dorothy Selby and the Gunpowder Plot
http://bit.ly/19JLaFg
Portages
http://bit.ly/1g7d9Og
Oxford Masons, 1370-1530
http://bit.ly/13UCQQ5
Account of the Exploration of a Cairn at Craigbirnoch, New Luce, Wigtownshire.
http://bit.ly/YZmM7i
The great hall of the Bishop’s Palace at Hereford
http://bit.ly/10UuNA0
Learn more about Open Access and Archaeology at: http://bit.ly/YHuyFK
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A Reply to "Rosemary85" who Knows More About Papyrology than me
Some blogger (I bet she's a classicist) called "Rosemary85" ["Moderator Archaic Greek Literature"] has a few views about what I wrote, but I saw what she wrote only after she'd "moderated a bit of unjust language", perhaps just as well. She seems defensively infuriated that there has been critical discussion about a recent discovery.
At least she gives me credit for being the first (really?) to raise the issue of the lack of mention by the publisher of a newly-surfaced papyrus with some Sappho on it of the all-important issue of where it came from. Regretfully, she takes an elitist view and lumps me in with the "people who don't know much about papyrology" (which is true enough), and therefore classifies me as "an untalented amateur" She therefore merely dismisses my comments as "a very foolish blog post by Paul Barford". It's "laughable" to express doubts, she says and she regrets "the fact that other bloggers have been citing Barford's idiocy approvingly and unironically". My idiocy Ms Rosemary - what was there before you 'moderated your language' I wonder? I was of course not discussing the -ology of papyri, but the archae-ology of an artefact, which IS my field (and I have been to the funerals of enough colleagues recently to give me a pretty good statistical chance of being at what I do a bit longer that this anonymous whatever-she-is from wherever (but I stand to be corrected). At least I write under my own name.
I am no palaeo-malacologist either, I can't tell the zonitidae from the gastrodontidae. What I do know is if someone presents me with a report on a "Roman snail assemblage from somewhere (sic)" without describing where the samples came from, how they were collected and prepared, and what relationship they have to the deposits they came from (integrity, taphonomy etc), then the report is incomplete. That is precisely the issue I raise about the presentation of this freshly-surfaced find.
The woman suggests I "presume bad faith in everything" connected with the dugup antiquities trade, which I do. I think we all, buyers, collectors, observers and academics, should. There is a lot of dodgy stuff floating round and a lot of people trying to persuade us to take it all in good faith (no-questions-asked). I disagree. How else, except asking searching questions, are we going to combat the trade in illicit antiquities, to establish the authenticity and licitness of the source material?
I think the legitimacy of such a significant piece as this needs to be established upfront and not presumed, or the question simply ignored as it was in Obbink's initial draft of his proposed publication.
"Rosemary85" rants on that I was "accusing Obbink of being a Brit (which he isn't) as one of his crimes". What? I wrote "UK academic" in the text's title. As far as I am aware Christ Church College of Oxford is in the UK. I do not think anybody thinks being English (or anything else) is a "crime". What an absurd idea - and one lacking any support whatsoever in what I wrote. She then proceeds to state that I was "calling him [Dr Obbink] a "no-questions-asking looter-financing Philistine"...". What I think is that before poisonously tapping something like that out on her keyboard, "Rosemary85" might do herself the favour of checking what I DID actually write, so as to avoid coming over as, at best, a careless scholar. For goodness' sake.
I think we should strive to make a publication of something, anything, communicative. Jargon may make the ivory tower expert feel some satisfaction that he knows something the hoi polloi layman, or specialist from other fields does not, but it is not communication. I find therefore her criticism wide of the mark when she says:
He also seems to think the fact that a non-specialist can't understand everything in Obbink's article shows that it's the article that's dishonest ("Dr Obbink notes that the fragment he discusses was in the same handwriting as something called 'P. GC. inv. 105', but what that piece of papyrological jargon means for the context of discovery I could not say").The article is uncommunicative about the aspect (and the only aspect) that interests me, the context of discovery of the fragment being discussed, which has its cognitive aspects too, it might have bearing on discussions of the reception of Sappho in later antiquity (for example). Where was "P. GC. inv. 105' (whatever it is) discovered, what is its relation to the findspot of the new (unnumbered and unprovenanced) Sappho papyrus? Obbink does not develop that topic, which means he's not interested in addressing that aspect. I am not sure where "Rosemary85" adduces that I think (for I certainly do not say) this is "dishonest", I think it is rather she who is "presuming bad faith in everything".
In that discussion "deadaluspark" assumes I am "a STEM major" who would "reject traditional intellectual authority in favor of Wikipedia, and are certainly happy to jump on any bandwagon where they can "discredit" a professional who has spent their life studying and researching a subject they are toothlessly unfamiliar with". I really think he or she's missing the point (I made no comment whatsoever on Dr Obbink's specialism). But the point comes out very well in what "balathustrius" says just below (after a very metal detectorish suggestion about "professional jealousy"):
What's the general consensus about revealing the owner of such an artifact? I suppose there's a conflict of interests - on one hand, you don't want to shame the guy if he obtained it unethically - or get him into trouble if he obtained it illegally. That would encourage other private collectors with similar artifacts to never come forward.Well, it could not get plainer than that. What kind of scholarship is that to even contemplate handling unethically obtained or illegally obtained material? We come back to my "idiotic" analogy with the stolen laptops, don't we? Rosemary85 casually continues the theme: "And once you start doubting everything anyone says, you're abandoning any hope of pursuing research". I would say that academic enquiry consists above all of questioning what is said. It also would do well to note what is not being said when it should.
I would say it was up to scholars who according to his devoted fan "Rosemary85"is "one of the best [....]ing papyrologists on the planet, and definitely the most famous one" to be setting the standards, rather than simply ignoring the issue of the integrity of the source.
An endrocrinologist pal has been telling me that there has been a lot of interesting medical data produced in a certain Asian country which cannot be published in the West because they come from experiments conducted on prisoners, political prisoners among them. Similarly I know that Mendele's Auschwitz experiments produced useful data that cannot be obtained from other sources. They will never be used by ethical doctors today, because to do so would be to acknowledge that what this monster was doing to his victims was in some for legitimate "science". I know that coineys (and it seems now papyrologists) will protest that knowledge is everything, overriding all other considerations. I personally wonder whether that is always the case, even in the situation where we have archaeological material belonging to the category of "addressed sources" (made to convey information) when it is obtained at the cost of trashing other information. Surely if the Sappho papyrus does not for some reason fit into that category, then all the more reason for Dr Obbink to begin his publication with stating that fact.
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I regret studying social anthropology.
I regret studying social anthropology. It was, on reflection, a waste of my time, money, and abilities. I learned some very interesting things, but those came almost entirely from books I would have read anyway, and from my tutor, whose apparently unfashionable views about kinship and society - views that are entirely sensible and defensible - did not make it as far as the anthropology exam papers. I made some good and interesting friends while studying, and doubtless learned something good from them. But I don't think that quite justifies the time and expense of the thing.
If you're considering studying socio-cultural anthropology, make sure you know what it's about. Most of my reading before attending Oxford had been about culture history, prehistoric cultural inheritance, kinship, non-state social structure, magic, religion - the stuff anthropology concerned itself with almost in its entirety until about thirty years ago, before such topics were denounced as romantic and conservative. I thought that the continental garbage side of things was in a minority in anthropology departments, and that the kind of comparative Austronesian ethnology and formal kinship-based social structural analysis that I wanted to do would find a comfy home in the department at Oxford. This turned out to be the inverse of reality. No substantive arguments were presented as to why this was the case, or why studying marriage alliance is inherently conservative and backward. Regardless, such things never came up in exams and were clearly regarded as peripheral to what anthropology now is - hangers on from a former age.
I don't think it had anything to do with Oxford specifically, and more to do with socio-cultural anthropology as a whole. I regret studying it, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who dislikes obscurantism and sanctimonious anti-scientific pseudo-epistemology. If I could go back and do it again, I would definitely have taken linguistics instead, where continental philosophy is not dominant, where real problems are solved, where a set of real and powerful methods are taught and employed, and where no one really cares whether or not you call it 'a science'.
I want to emphasise that I am not in any way a political conservative and I don't oppose the social and political aims that have become entrenched parts of anthropology departments. But I don't think those aims are what anthropology is about, I don't think obscurantist pseudo-philosophy is a good way to achieve them, and I don't think writing obscure academic texts about how humans are now trans-human feminist cyborgs empowers minority groups or the working class, or achieves any worthwhile aim in any sphere of human activity.
UPDATE: This post has aroused a small amount of attention on reddit, so I thought I'd answer a few of the points raised there.
First, I want to affirm that I am not on the right politically. Not that that has anything to do with anything.
carlyb24 wrote:
It is no wonder anthropology graduates are the least employable of all degree holders given that they learn no real skills in anthropology departments. And it's not that there are no skills to learn: why not try teaching or studying the methods of historical linguistics, population genetics, and archaeological interpretation?
masungura wrote:
I should point out that I had a brilliant tutor. It's just that my brilliant tutor was of retirement age and was being pushed out of the department by the sanctimonious march of continental thought.
Urizen wrote:
Problems in the sociology of non-industrial, non-state societies (e.g., societies with segmentary systems, bridewealth, asymmetric marriage alliance, etc) are very interesting problems, as are the intricacies of human history and prehistory that generated 'tribal rituals' and 'tribal relations', and there is no reason whatsoever to ignore them. If you find them boring, then a couple of decades ago it would have been feasible to suggest studying something other than anthropology. Now, even anthropologists don't study them, so people (like me) interested in doing so have nowhere to go.
The fact that anthropologists no longer teach students to understand societies like that has two important consequences. First, anthropology departments no longer do what anthropology departments once did, which is to make sense of human societies not directly connected to one's own and to understand humans in a wide range of socio-cultural milieux. Second, if anthropologists aren't studying or teaching these issues anymore, then nobody is studying or teaching these issues anymore. What that means is that entire areas of human life are no longer considered the purview of the academy, and that happens to include - I don't think it's accidental - people who don't live like us, who don't have any of the same fundamental values as us, who aren't or weren't wholly integrated into neo-liberal systems or the world economy.
hammey wrote:
That may be so. But that isn't what I meant by 'real problems'. I think mathematicians study real problems - real things in the world that need to be solved because solving them is interesting. They have tools that they can apply to their problems, and those tools are useful and powerful in a range of different applications, but mostly those tools are useful for solving mathematical problems.
Applying things in the real world isn't always the point. Anthropologists used to study real problems in making sense of non-state and non-industrial human societies. They used to apply some good, sensible tools to the analysis of societies unlike our own, as you'll know if you've ever been to a part of the world where, say, patrilineal descent groups are still important features of the social landscape. This wasn't especially useful, and it has become even less useful in the modern world as these kinds of societies have disappeared. But being 'useful' was never the point. Understanding humans in all of their variety and environments was the point.
Finally, I want to say that I'm not disillusioned with the academy in general. I just think that anthropology departments are kind of useless, and I certainly wouldn't recommend studying anthropology to anyone interested in rigour, reason, analytic philosophy, science, or prehistory. I should also point that I've been given a PhD offer in an excellent art history and archaeology department to do exactly what I want to do, and that I don't bear a grudge against any department or individual, as my life really isn't so bad.
If you're considering studying socio-cultural anthropology, make sure you know what it's about. Most of my reading before attending Oxford had been about culture history, prehistoric cultural inheritance, kinship, non-state social structure, magic, religion - the stuff anthropology concerned itself with almost in its entirety until about thirty years ago, before such topics were denounced as romantic and conservative. I thought that the continental garbage side of things was in a minority in anthropology departments, and that the kind of comparative Austronesian ethnology and formal kinship-based social structural analysis that I wanted to do would find a comfy home in the department at Oxford. This turned out to be the inverse of reality. No substantive arguments were presented as to why this was the case, or why studying marriage alliance is inherently conservative and backward. Regardless, such things never came up in exams and were clearly regarded as peripheral to what anthropology now is - hangers on from a former age.
I don't think it had anything to do with Oxford specifically, and more to do with socio-cultural anthropology as a whole. I regret studying it, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who dislikes obscurantism and sanctimonious anti-scientific pseudo-epistemology. If I could go back and do it again, I would definitely have taken linguistics instead, where continental philosophy is not dominant, where real problems are solved, where a set of real and powerful methods are taught and employed, and where no one really cares whether or not you call it 'a science'.
I want to emphasise that I am not in any way a political conservative and I don't oppose the social and political aims that have become entrenched parts of anthropology departments. But I don't think those aims are what anthropology is about, I don't think obscurantist pseudo-philosophy is a good way to achieve them, and I don't think writing obscure academic texts about how humans are now trans-human feminist cyborgs empowers minority groups or the working class, or achieves any worthwhile aim in any sphere of human activity.
UPDATE: This post has aroused a small amount of attention on reddit, so I thought I'd answer a few of the points raised there.
First, I want to affirm that I am not on the right politically. Not that that has anything to do with anything.
carlyb24 wrote:
I am quite familiar with a number of cultural anthropologists in the US that are absolutely engaged in trying to solve "real problems" (what ever that is supposed to mean).I know quite a few anthropologists who are interested in solving interesting problems and as far as I'm aware, they do so quite competently. But my point is that solving problems is not taught on anthropology courses. No formal skills are taught on anthropology courses at all; there is no standard method that tells you how to solve particular problems. I understand that this is because anthropologists think their problems are peculiar and unresolvable, but students are given no real skills at all when they study anthropology, which means that they have few skills to transfer to, say, a job. Linguists, on the other hand, are given some seriously powerful tools for making sense of language, even while recognising that the phenomena they are studying are enormously complicated and difficult to solve.
It is no wonder anthropology graduates are the least employable of all degree holders given that they learn no real skills in anthropology departments. And it's not that there are no skills to learn: why not try teaching or studying the methods of historical linguistics, population genetics, and archaeological interpretation?
masungura wrote:
Disciplines change, you can't keep doing the same thing for years and years.I think you can: physicists are still engaged in solving fundamentally the same problems as Newton, biologists are still engaged in the same pursuit as Darwin and Wallace, and mathematicians are still making sense of the same problems as Euclid. These disciplines have moved on by making empirical advances (assuming mathematics is empirical, anyway) rather than by turning the discipline away from what it originally did. I keep hearing that anthropology has moved on, but I have yet to hear a cogent justification for the direction in which it has moved. All I hear is the genetic fallacy over and over again. The discipline has changed, it's moved on, it's no longer a tool of the imperialist pigdogs, etc.
To me this article comes off as "I wanted to be a stick in the mud and thought of all the places to do that Oxford would be it but even they won't let me, WOE".I thought that Oxford would be a good home for what I wanted to do because I researched the department first. I saw that there were at least two researchers interested in the same things as me. I simply didn't realise that they a) were about to retire and b) had no clout within the department, and that my degree would be based on things entirely different to what I wanted to study. I was accepted on the basis of a personal statement that talked entirely about historical linguistics, prehistory, non-state social structure, cognitive psychology, and other features that I had reason to believe are part of anthropology departments - and which in many cases actually are - but which did not feature in exams and barely featured in course content, except the personalised content provided by my (excellent) tutor. It's not that I thought Oxford was a backward department, and I was aware that continental philosophy had become the norm in many departments. It was more that I thought the balance was tipped less in favour of continental thought than it actually proved to be.
I should point out that I had a brilliant tutor. It's just that my brilliant tutor was of retirement age and was being pushed out of the department by the sanctimonious march of continental thought.
Urizen wrote:
I think this view is based on a kind of chauvinism that treats people in non-state societies as less than people in states and post-industrial societies. It's not racist, but when you're saying that the lives, rituals, and 'relations' of people in 'tribal' societies are 'boring', you might want to think about why you find their lives dull and yours so interesting and exciting. But I'm glad someone came out and said it: they prefer anthropology today because it's not concerned with those boring tribals anymore.
Admittedly, old school anthropology concerned with tribal relations and tribal rituals is boring. Modern cultural anthropology is amazing.
Problems in the sociology of non-industrial, non-state societies (e.g., societies with segmentary systems, bridewealth, asymmetric marriage alliance, etc) are very interesting problems, as are the intricacies of human history and prehistory that generated 'tribal rituals' and 'tribal relations', and there is no reason whatsoever to ignore them. If you find them boring, then a couple of decades ago it would have been feasible to suggest studying something other than anthropology. Now, even anthropologists don't study them, so people (like me) interested in doing so have nowhere to go.
The fact that anthropologists no longer teach students to understand societies like that has two important consequences. First, anthropology departments no longer do what anthropology departments once did, which is to make sense of human societies not directly connected to one's own and to understand humans in a wide range of socio-cultural milieux. Second, if anthropologists aren't studying or teaching these issues anymore, then nobody is studying or teaching these issues anymore. What that means is that entire areas of human life are no longer considered the purview of the academy, and that happens to include - I don't think it's accidental - people who don't live like us, who don't have any of the same fundamental values as us, who aren't or weren't wholly integrated into neo-liberal systems or the world economy.
And changing culture is how you change the world.That may be so. But how did 'changing the world' become the objective of anthropology? It certainly wasn't even a couple of decades ago. This is a recent development. The only thing this 'anthropology' has in common with anthropology before the 1980s is the name. And I see no reason to completely do away with the basic premise of anthropology before the prescriptive/continental turn, which was a) to understand human societies cross-culturally, including language, thought, prehistory, etc, and b) to make sense of non-state and non-industrial human societies, with sociology's role being to make sense of state, industrial, and post-industrial ones. Sociology is where you learn to use all kinds of research methods - useful tools that help you to find a good job or solve difficult empirical problems - to make sense of the dominant modes of life on earth today. Anthropology is the smaller, less culturally-important discipline devoted to those societies that aren't this way.
hammey wrote:
I'm studying medical anthro right now and what I've learned so far seems 100% applicable to the real world
That may be so. But that isn't what I meant by 'real problems'. I think mathematicians study real problems - real things in the world that need to be solved because solving them is interesting. They have tools that they can apply to their problems, and those tools are useful and powerful in a range of different applications, but mostly those tools are useful for solving mathematical problems.
Applying things in the real world isn't always the point. Anthropologists used to study real problems in making sense of non-state and non-industrial human societies. They used to apply some good, sensible tools to the analysis of societies unlike our own, as you'll know if you've ever been to a part of the world where, say, patrilineal descent groups are still important features of the social landscape. This wasn't especially useful, and it has become even less useful in the modern world as these kinds of societies have disappeared. But being 'useful' was never the point. Understanding humans in all of their variety and environments was the point.
Finally, I want to say that I'm not disillusioned with the academy in general. I just think that anthropology departments are kind of useless, and I certainly wouldn't recommend studying anthropology to anyone interested in rigour, reason, analytic philosophy, science, or prehistory. I should also point that I've been given a PhD offer in an excellent art history and archaeology department to do exactly what I want to do, and that I don't bear a grudge against any department or individual, as my life really isn't so bad.
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New Thoughts on Corn Domestication
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Today, the ancestor plant of modern corn has many long branches tipped with tassels, and its seeds mature over a period of a few months. But when cultivated in a greenhouse under the environmental conditions of 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, teosinte grows into a something recognizable as a corn plant. “Intriguingly, the teosinte plants grown under past conditions exhibit characteristics more like corn: a single main stem topped by a single tassel, a few very short branches tipped by female ears and synchronous seed maturation,” Dolores Piperno of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History told Science Daily. The Holocene climate, recreated in the greenhouse, was two to three degrees Celsius cooler than today’s temperatures, and the carbon dioxide levels were approximately 260 parts per million. Current carbon dioxide levels are 405 parts per million. “When humans first began to cultivate teosinte about 10,000 years ago, it was probably more maize-like—naturally exhibiting some characteristics previously thought to result from human selection and domestication,” she said. Piperno and colleague Klaus Winter of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute add that past environmental conditions should be taken into consideration by scientists researching evolutionary change and the process of domestication.
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