Author: schrisomalis

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

Oard 2008: Re-entering an age of orality?

I’m in the middle of end-of-term panic, including two simultaneous job searches in my department and a harried effort to get my book manuscript off to the publisher, but I thought I’d pop my head up to mention a fascinating post by Mark at The Ideophone about a brief and ridiculous little note in Science from a couple of months ago that I should have seen at the time, but apparently didn’t. In it, Douglas Oard (2008) re-invents the well-worn argument that modern humans began as an oral species, made a great leap to literacy, and now with new media are returning to orality. This claim is related to the assertions of theorists in ‘media ecology’ such as Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Edmund Carpenter, Harold Innis, Jack Goody, David Olson, Jacques Derrida, Robert Logan, Julian Jaynes … oh, I could go on, but Oard’s doesn’t cite any of this expansive literature, which limits its utility as a study of changing ways of information storage – a very important subject in literacy studies. But all of this also reminds me of another post that I have been long overdue in making, and which I desperately hope to get to this weekend.

Works cited

Oard, Douglas W. 2008. Unlocking the Potential of the Spoken Word. Science 321, no. 5897 (September 26): 1787-1788.

What I’m reading

frontispiece

Sometimes you can learn so much about a book just from its front matter.

Public lecture: Montgomery McFate

The Institute for Information Technology and Culture (IITC) presents a continuation of
“This is Dangerous Territory: Social Research Out of Bounds”
with its final presenter:

Montgomery McFate, Ph.D., J. D.
Friday, December 12, at 4 p.m.

McGregor Memorial Conference Center
Wayne State University

Refreshments to follow the presentation.

Montgomery McFate is a cultural anthropologist who works on defense and national security issues and is currently the Senior Social Scientist for the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS). The U.S. Army developed HTS to study social groups, currently in Iraq and Afghanistan, by using anthropologists to provide military commanders with information about the population in order to help reduce military and civilian conflict. This lecture tries to put HTS in context, by describing the transformation that has occurred within the Department of Defense over the past few years, of which HTS is a small, but significant part.

To say that Dr. McFate is a controversial figure in anthropological circles would be a gross understatement, not only because of her current work but her past association with her mother’s security firm. The circumstances under which the HTS does its work in conjunction with direct military objectives raises enormous ethical issues, and I have grave misgivings about the way in which this sort of work has been done in the past and the present. Does she nonetheless deserve a hearing? Yes, of course: the sort of skeptical, rigorous attention to which any scholar’s work must be subjected. I am pleased that my institution will be hosting her talk, and I plan to be there.

Jargonicity, circa 1870

http://wondermark.com/?p=2911
Source: http://wondermark.com/?p=2911

Preach it!

Doorworks 3: Paleolithic numerical marks

Pl. LXXV
Lartet and Christy 1875: Pl. LXXV

As early as the 1860s, archaeologists began to realize that Paleolithic humans were very different from their modern counterparts. These Upper Paleolithic notched bone and antler artifacts from the Dordogne in France were identified by the archaeologist Rupert Jones as arithmetical notations, tallies, or calendars. Jones’ identification was speculative, based on their appearance alone, and many of these may just as plausibly be simply decorative marks. Later work on Paleolithic numeration and arithmetic has focused on experimental and cognitive approaches to these artifacts (Marshack 1972, d’Errico and Cacho 1994). How might you determine what their true function was?

Works Cited

d’Errico, Francesco and Carmen Cacho. 1994. Notation Versus Decoration In The Upper Paleolithic – A Case-Study From Tossal-De-La-Roca, Alicante, Spain. Journal Of Archaeological Science 21 (2): 185-200.
Lartet, Edouard and Henry Christy. 1875. Reliquiae Aquitanicae, being contributions to the archaeology and paleontology of the Périgord. Edited by Rupert Jones. London: Baillière.
Marshack, Alexander. 1972. The Roots of Civilization. New York: McGraw-Hill.

(See also: Paleolithic Notation Bibliography)