Author: schrisomalis

Anthropologist, Wayne State University. Professional numbers guy. Rare Words: http://phrontistery.info. Blog: http://glossographia.com.

Screws, hammers, and Roman numerals: An allegorical complaint

Let’s imagine that you have a toolbox in your garage, full of all sorts of different useful things, and I’m your annoying neighbor.  One day I drop by while you’re working.  I rummage around, pick up a screwdriver, and say to you, “Gosh, that’s not a very good hammer, is it?”  Naturally, you protest that it isn’t a hammer at all.  Next, I hold the screwdriver by the head instead of the handle and say, “Well, of course, you could use it like this to bang in nails, but it would be very cumbersome.”  You look at me, wondering whether I didn’t hear you properly, and say, “No, really.  It’s not a hammer. I have a hammer, but it’s in the trunk of my car, and that’s not it.”  I turn to you and say, “Well, I’ve never seen your hammer, and it would really be a lot easier if you just used the handle of a screwdriver to bang in nails.  Except that it’s no good for that.”

Now let’s turn from this surreal Pythonesque world to another scenario.

You’re an epigrapher and you find some inscriptions with some Roman numerals.  You look at them and say, “Gosh, those things aren’t very good for math, are they?”  Of course, the writer is dead, so he/she doesn’t say anything.  Next, you fiddle around with the numerals and think to yourself, “Well, look at that!  You could use those for arithmetic if you wanted to, but it would be very cumbersome.”  Again, the writer is not around to protest, although as it turns out, someone else dug up an abacus a few kilometers away.   You think of that, though, and say, “Well, it would really be a lot easier if they had just used numerals to do arithmetic, except that their numerals are no good for that.”

So this is the world I live in, and this is the battle I fight.

The problem is a cognitive and ideological one. We are so attached to the idea that numerals are for arithmetic that it’s very hard to stop and ask whether number symbols were actually used for doing calculations in a given society.  There’s essentially no evidence that Romans or anyone else ever lined up or computed with Roman numerals on papyrus or slate or sand or anything else, while there’s abundant evidence that they used an abacus along with finger-computation.  This should give us pause, but our cognitive bias in favour of the numeral/math functional association overpowers it.    For almost all numerical notation systems used over the past 5000 years, there’s precious little evidence that numerals were manipulated arithmetically.  You might have a multiplication table, or you might write results, but you wouldn’t line up numbers, break long numerals into powers to work with them, or anything of the sort.   And since we don’t know that much about abaci and other arithmetic technologies, even though they were obviously used for arithmetic, we assume (wrongly) that they certainly could never be equally good as written numbers.  And thus we conclude (finally, wrongly, again) that Romans were hopeless at arithmetic.   We might even blame their (purported) lack of mathematical proficiency on their lack of a ‘good’, ‘efficient’ numeral system.

It’s a casual, all-too-easy ethnocentrism, and hard to detect.  It’s not the nativistic, “our ways are good, your ways are bad” ethnocentrism that we mostly know to avoid.     Because arithmetic as it is presently taught almost everywhere relies on the structure of the positional decimal numerals, lined up and manipulated as needed, it takes on a naturalness that is deceptively difficult to untangle.   Yes, the Roman numerals are quite difficult to use if you presume that the way to use them is to break them apart, line them up, and do arithmetic in something like the way we were taught.   This isn’t to say that the functions of technologies aren’t relevant, but if we decide in advance what their functions must be, we are likely to miss out on what they actually were, and our judgements will be compromised.

To hammer the point home: if we do that, we’re screwed.

Ninilchik Russian in Alaska

There’s an interesting news reports from a couple of weeks ago on the Russian dialect spoken in Ninilchik, Alaska, a community about four hours’ drive southwest of Anchorage.  Founded in 1847 in what was then Russian America (on this map from 1860, it’s near where the X for ‘Fort Georgievsk’ is placed) in an area mostly populated by Dena’ina (Athabaskan) speakers, Ninilchik today is a community of about 900 people, mostly English speaking but with a small remnant of elderly speakers of a Russian dialect that has been developing independently from other Russian varieties for over 100 years.  The Ninilchik Russian website provides quite a bit of information, including several research papers, recordings, and other information.  My only quibble, which is a small one, is that we need to be careful in calling Ninilchik Russian ‘isolated’ – isolated from other forms of Russian, yes, but as a whole, no – obviously it has been in contact with English, with Athabaskan languages, and with Alaskan Eskimo languages over the past century, which is part of the reason it is so interesting.

Martin Bernal (1937-2013)

I heard the sad news today that Martin Bernal, the political scientist/historian/classicist and ‘humanist’ in every relevant sense of the word, passed away on Monday at the age of 76 (follow the link for his obituary in the Ithaca Journal).  At the time of his death, he was Professor Emeritus of Government and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell.  One can only imagine that he was, and will be, the only figure to hold simultaneous professorships in these two fields.  He was also a genial, considerate scholar, and it was my honour to have worked with him.

Bernal is, of course, best known for his three-volume Black Athena (Bernal 1987, 1991, 2006), a massive attempt to show the indebtedness of classical civilization to Egyptian and Phoenician influences and that Greek civilization was only secondarily Indo-European but principally an African and Near Eastern civilization which, due to racism among European early modern scholars, was not recognized as such.  To say that it was controversial is a gross understatement – few claims in the study of the ancient world have attracted as much scorn, including an entire edited volume dedicated to its refutation.  The scholarly consensus today is that Bernal’s linguistic, archaeological and historical evidence is too rough-and-ready and that he was too willing to take coincidence as evidence when considering similarities in the languages and symbolic lives of Greeks and Egyptians.  The Greek pantheon is not simply a set of African deities with a European veneer, any more than the Greek language is some sort of bizarre mixed language full of Semitic and Afro-Asiatic roots.

These are serious problems, and to his credit, Bernal did attempt to address them, not always successfully. I do not, however, agree with the assessment of some that he was credulous.  Rather, I view his work as a conscious attempt to provide a counterpoint to mainstream views, even when – or especially because – the ideas he was proposing were so challenging. He was unafraid to be wrong if the alternative was to be silent.  Unlike, say, Erich von Daniken, to whom he has been most unjustly compared, Bernal’s work was meticulously thorough in its citation, and rather than simply postulating massive conspiracies, asking ridiculous rhetorical questions, and dishonestly ignoring all contrary evidence, he was a very serious scholar, sometimes out of his depth, but never out of his mind.

I corresponded with Martin over the past five years (we never met in person) during the preparation of Human Expeditions: Inspired by Bruce Trigger.  His chapter in that volume, ‘The Impact of Blackness on the Formation of Classics’ (Bernal 2013) will surely prove to be one of his final published works.  I do not know if he had an opportunity to read the entire volume prior to his death, but I want to echo the remarks I made in the introduction: there is enormous value in Bernal’s demonstration of the role of implicit and explicit Eurocentric biases in shaping the course of classical scholarship from the 17th century to the present day.  His chapter expands on his earlier work by addressing the role of some key scholars, such as James Bruce, in shaping views of Greece and of Africa, and their interrelations.   He insists that postulating links between societies does not stigmatize borrowing: “I do not accept that hybridity leads to sterility; a culture is not a mule!” (Bernal 2013: 14).  Throughout the process of editing and revision and production, Martin was cheerful, thoughtful, and open, responsive to editorial comment and a true professional.

I wrote Bernal to invite him to participate in the volume, knowing full well that Trigger had been publicly quite critical of Black Athena and its revisionist assertions.  Indeed, that was part of the point.  Bernal exemplified an unflinching willingness to spend decades on an extreme version of a position that, over time and with much refinement and revision, has come to limited acceptance in some scholarly communities, at the cost of great scorn from others.  You might count this in the ‘loss’ column, if scholarship were measured in wins and losses.  But this was never the point.  The point is the process, and both Bernal and Trigger exemplified the principled willingness to present a point of view regardless of its conformity to some present orthodoxy.  In my view, too much anthropology and archaeology, and quite a lot of linguistics, lack this principled willingness to challenge, to doubt even when doubting has costs, to publish the unpublishable – a luxury his position afforded him, but alas, too few of us today enjoy such freedom.

In 2002, when I was just finishing my PhD and writing my first published article, ‘The Egyptian origin of the Greek alphabetic numerals’, I un-courageously felt the need to distance myself from Bernal in writing, “This theory is a further contribution towards delineating the economic and intellectual transfers between Egypt and Greece in antiquity, though of course at a later date and with a more secure contextual foundation than that found in Bernal’s (1987) analysis of the subject.” (Chrisomalis 2003: 58).  It’s a true statement, but at the time, what I failed to recognize is that I could not have had my hypothesis considered fairly without the sort of framing that Bernal’s body of scholarship afforded me.  I am grateful, a decade later, to have had a chance to know the man and return the favour.

Bibliography

Bernal, Martin. 1987. Black Athena : the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization. Vol. 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Bernal, Martin. 1991. Black Athena : the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization. Vol. 2: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Bernal, Martin. 2006. Black Athena : the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization. Vol. 3: The Linguistic Evidence. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Bernal, Martin. 2013. The impact of blackness on the formation of classics.  In S. Chrisomalis and A. Costopoulos (eds.), Human Expeditions: Inspired by Bruce Trigger, pp. 12-30.  Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Chrisomalis, Stephen. 2003. The Egyptian origin of the Greek alphabetic numerals. Antiquity 77 (297): 485-496.

AAA presidents red-linked

In my brief research for the previous post, I happened upon the Wikipedia page for the American Anthropological Association and its list of presidents, and was shocked to see the number and importance of individuals who were ‘red-linked’ (i.e. had no page of their own).  Irving Rouse basically built Caribbean archaeology.   There’s a page for the Goldschmidt Thesis but not for Walter freakin’ Goldschmidt himself?  I bet that Francis Hsu was the first Asian American to chair an American academic department.   Yolanda Moses has been president of basically … everything.     So step up, people!  Somebody’s got to be running a history of anthropology course where they can get their students to write up basic biographies.

A serendipitous Benedict-ion on scientific humanism

Every once in a while, I read something serendipitously that I have no idea why I’m reading.  The proximate cause of my reading Ruth Benedict’s 1948 article, “Anthropology and the Humanities” was that it was in my electronic pile of PDFs to read this summer, and it was next on the list.   But why was it there?  The file’s creation/download date was 02/27/13, which was right after I got back from the Society for Anthropological Sciences meeting in Mobile, which suggests that someone there mentioned it in a talk, but I can’t for the life of me remember who or in what context.  Ah well, that’s the great thing about serendipity: ultimate causes are irrelevant.

The article is a revised version of the Address of the Retiring President that Benedict gave in December 1947 to the AAA, and which was published in late 1948 shortly after her death.  The article is available as a free PDF download along with a large number of other older AAA journals, so you can go download it and read it right now.  Go on, I’ll wait.  It’s only nine pages.  …   All right then.

The first thing that struck me is that in 1947, in stark contrast to today, Benedict needed to make the case for anthropology’s alliance  with the humanities – so obvious, she felt it to be, that anthropology was scientific that it was the opposite proposal that needed to be defended.    She suggests, interestingly, however, that the scientific ascendancy of anthropology was a historical contingency – because, in the late nineteenth century when the discipline was founded, Science was ascendant, anthropology’s allegiances became fossilized.     She invites us to imagine an alternate history where anthropology was founded a century earlier and had become profoundly humanistic.   (For instance, we could have looked to classics as such a field.)

But also note that the sort of humanism she is talking about, and to which she appeals, is not a sort of hopeless particularism or methodologically sterile navel-gazing, but a rigorous, thoughtful humanism that is no less empirical than social or natural science.  Everyone will have their own figures they think of at this juncture in their own field – for me, I suppose I would look to Walter Ong or G.E.R. Lloyd or Alexander Goldenweiser.  Benedict was no dogmatist and was not trying to fight the sorts of battles one would have seen fifty years later.   This isn’t about science vs. anti-science, or a crude critique of ‘scientism’.  To wit:

“My point is that, once anthropologists include the mind of man in their subject matter, the methods of science and the methods of the humanities complement each other. Any commitment to methods which exclude either approach is self-defeating. The humanists criticize the social sciences because they belabor the obvious and are arid; the social scientists criticize the humanities because they are subjective. It is not necessary for the anthropologist to be afraid of either criticism, neither of belaboring the obvious, nor of being subjective. The anthropologist can use both approaches. The adequate study of culture, our own and those on the opposite side of the globe, can press on to fulfillment only as we learn today from the humanities as well as from the sciences.” (Benedict 1948: 593)

And this is really the question, isn’t it, that Benedict leaves for us in some of her last scholarly words: how do we make this work?  What does it mean, other than platitudes and an occasional nod in the hallway, to be a scientifically informed humanist (or vice versa)?  Granted that there are epistemological gaps, how can they be fruitfully and productively resolved and integrated?