Category: Anthropology

Obituary: Willard Walker

I learned some sad news today from the very small field of Native American writing systems and literacy studies. The linguistic anthropologist Willard Walker, whose prominent work on the Cherokee syllabary is the most serious scholarly study on the subject, passed away late last month. Dr. Walker, who was a professor emeritus of anthropology at Wesleyan University and was one of that department’s founders, was 82.

One of the more remarkable facts about literacy in colonial and pre-modern North America is the extreme paucity of independently developed writing systems and numerical notations. In contrast to West Africa, where there are dozens of examples of individuals creating indigenous scripts after being exposed to the Roman or Arabic scripts, there are relatively few indigenous North American scripts, and of these, the Cherokee syllabary (in which each sign encodes a syllable rather than a single phoneme) has been one of the most successful. Walker’s work was an effort to explain the development of Cherokee writing that was respectful to Sequoyah (George Guest), the script’s inventor, while steering clear of ‘great man’ fallacies and attempting to understand the sociocultural context of the script’s invention and acceptance (Walker 1969, 1984a, 1984b, 1985; Walker and Sarbaugh 1993). A major part of his life’s work was comparative, showing the ways in which Cherokee interest in literacy contrasted with grave ambivalence about the practice of encoding oral traditions in written texts among many other peoples of the Americas.

Over the years I’ve been asked numerous times to name my favourite numerical notation system. At first I thought that was just a bizarre question, but then, I figure that people in film studies must get asked what their favourite movies are all the time, and that people are just looking for a way into my subject area, a hook, if you will. So for the past couple of years, I’ve told them about the Cherokee numerals. My story here, which is one that Walker touched on only briefly, is that where the Cherokee syllabary thrived (and continues to thrive today), the numerals that Sequoyah developed were never accepted. While the syllabary is well-suited for writing the Tsalagi (Cherokee) language, the Western numerals sufficed for writing numbers, so the Cherokee council voted not to adopt them. They survive only in two documents in the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma – the only evidence we have for the creation of an indigenous North American numerical notation. Unfortunately, none of the standard texts on numerical notation currently published (ahem) mention them.

The other really neat thing about the Cherokee numerals is that they display a remarkable structural resemblance to the system of numerals used by the Jurchin of northeastern China, who developed a script in the 12th century, and who were later known (famously) as the Manchu when they ruled China. If you follow that link you see that the Jurchin system has special signs for 1-19, then every decade from 20-90, then signs for the higher powers of 10. There is no possibility that Sequoyah knew of this system – really, no one in the Western world did until the 1890s – but the Cherokee system parallels it in nearly every detail – although of course the signs are entirely different. If I were to make the case for cognitive constraints interacting with cultural and linguistic variability to produce remarkable and unexpected parallels, this would be a good example. Theoretically, then, the Cherokee numerals are extremely important even though no one actually used them, as far as we can tell.

I always thought that I might contact Dr. Walker to talk to him about the numerals, which he discussed only in passing. Certainly I would have been thrilled if he read the few pages of my book that I devoted to the subject and had anything to say about them. Alas, that will never happen now.

The clock in my office bears Cherokee numerals – some innovative person sells them through Cafepress. It is the only ‘text’ with the numerals readily available to anyone today. Tomorrow, in honour of the work of Dr. Walker, it will be silent.

Walker, W. 1969. Notes on native writing systems and the design of native literacy programs. Anthropological Linguistics: 148-166.
———. 1984a. The Design of Native Literacy Programs and How Literacy Came to the Cherokees. Anthropological Linguistics: 161-169.
———. 1984b. Literacy, Wampums, the Gúdabuk, and How Indians in the Far Northeast Read. Anthropological Linguistics: 42-52.
———. 1985. The Roles of Samuel A. Worcester and Elias Boudinot in the Emergence of a Printed Cherokee Syllabic Literature. International Journal of American Linguistics: 610-612.
Walker, W., and J. Sarbaugh. 1993. The early history of the Cherokee syllabary. Ethnohistory: 70-94.

Warning: long and meta

A recent post by Alun Salt at Archaeoastronomy entitled ‘Blogging and Honesty’ has re-inspired me to think about a subject that had its genesis at the IMC at Kalamazoo a few weeks ago. I had the pleasure of attending a session on weblogs and the academy, specifically on the topic of anonymity / pseudonymity and issues of identity. organized by Shana Worthen and Elisabeth Carnell, which led me to a set of not-new-but-new-to-me insights about this crazy medium. I urge you to read the liveblog post that gives a very good sense of what was said at the panel.

I decided a long time ago that I would make no effort to conceal my identity online. Basically, I don’t trust that anything I say anonymously will remain anonymous, so rather than say something that could later come back to bite me, I’d rather self-censor ‘at the source’, and just not say anything. Obviously this has the disadvantage that there are certain things I just can’t or won’t talk about publicly, which means that I have to find other ways to get them off my chest. Fortunately I have the Growlery, which is also public, but which I can filter and lock away from eyes not meant to see certain things. It’s just what works for me. When I started this blog, the distinction was not between ‘pseudonymous’ and ‘non-pseudonymous’ but between ‘academic’ and ‘non-academic’.

But this does raise some significant issues of identity, because what exactly constitutes my ‘academic’ work? When I look out my office window and see a funny-looking sign, why is this ‘academic’? Or when I write extensively researched posts about particular aspects of English etymology, is this ‘non-academic’?

I may not have mentioned this before, but this blog was a present to myself upon attaining my present academic position. I had always had an interest in academic blogging, but I never felt I had the time or the energy while I was still working contingently. I am very fortunate that in my previous workplace I had enormous academic freedom that not all of my peers enjoyed, and I don’t think that the fear others have, of losing a job or saying something that affects a tenure decision, played a significant role, because by last year I’d been blogging for six years already, and had lots of practice with not saying stupid things that I would later regret.

I think one of the most important reasons why I started an academic blog under my own name, though, was to serve as a public voice for my discipline, my sub-disciplines, and my own crazy point of view. As Kristen Burkholder pointed out in the panel, medievalist bloggers can’t rely on pseudonyms to maintain their identity because the field is specialized. Well, let me tell you, anthropologists who study numerals are significantly more specialized than that, so unless I wanted to avoid any discussion of my actual research, pseudonymity wasn’t an option. I also see this place as a venue for sorting out ideas before they’re ready to publish, and announcing things that I actually do publish. So there’s that.

But as Julie Hofmann pointed out very rightly in her paper, there may well be issues of privilege involved here, because I am a white male, and have less to worry about my colleagues disparaging my blogwork as less than professional. And from what I can see, that’s true for medievalists – but perhaps less so for other disciplines. In linguistics, for instance, the existence of the big collaborative Language Log, which has been running since 2003 and whose non-pseudonymous authors are practically a Who’s Who of the discipline, almost certainly helps budding linguists and linguist-oids such as myself to make the leap without fear of repercussions. LL is authoritative, clearly the top of a hierarchy of linguistics blogs, and sets the gold standard. I don’t know of any linguistics blogger who’s unfamiliar with it.

By contrast, anthropology bloggers are more fragmented, partly due to the fragmentary nature of the discipline, and less prominent within the field. Yet there are also fairly few anonymous anthropology blogs. I’m not sure exactly why that should be. I wonder whether part of it is that anthropologists spend a lot of time in the field, in situations where their research is unique or nearly so. Weirdly enough, while being one of a small coterie of medievalists may encourage pseudonymity as a form of protecting one’s identity, being unique may encourage one to simply be ‘out there’ or risk not being able to say anything professional at all.

So, yeah, identity. Probably the paper that hit me the hardest in the panel was Janice Liedl’s on issues of identity. Because I spend a lot of time and mental energy thinking about how I’m going to come across to others. My dissertation supervisor once phoned me up during my first year of my PhD to tell me what a large superego I had (thanks, I think?). Of course my own persona here is constructed, and is different in subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways from my persona over at my other public place on Livejournal – even though both are public. But I also think you could figure out a lot about my personality from hanging around here long enough, even though this is a professional blog meant for an audience interested in the sort of work I do.

And part of all of this being ‘out’ is about a public display of my identity as a scholar and as a professional – hopefully not narcissistically so, but rather, as a model for other scholars, and also for my students. A couple of the panelists pointed out the usefulness of blogging as a model for other scholars, for instance, what it’s like to be a professional, or what kinds of challenges academics face, and I think that’s right. And one of the only regrets I have about not being pseudonymous is that there are those things that I just can’t blog about here, because it would be grossly inappropriate on a professional level. Even though I agree most of the time with Dr. Crazy over at Reassigned Time, for instance, regarding how to relate socially with excellent students or unexcellent colleagues, she can say publicly things that I can’t.

And this is perhaps another difference: there aren’t too many linguistics OR anthropology blogs that take a strongly personal approach. Hofmann argues, rightly, that ‘academic life’ blogs that focus on the day-to-day goings-on in a professional’s life tend to be pseudonymous and written by women. But it seems to me that there are whole blogging cultures (roughly disciplinary in nature) that tend towards one voice or another. And so yeah, I think we need more anthropology blogs, period, but we also need more blogs that deal with the daily realities of anthropological life, not just research findings. We owe it to one another to engage in the sorts of discussions that serve not only as a model to our peers, but also to our junior colleagues – the students who will form the next generation of bloggers. Without wanting to imply any direct causation, I find it noteworthy that several of my former students from McGill have started their own blogs over the past six months – good ones, too! By blogging (pseudonymously or otherwise), we are engaging in a process of cultural transmission, akin to yet different from the face-to-face mentorship we take on in the classroom and the office (and, let’s be honest here, the bar).

Okay, maybe that sounds pretentious, and maybe it is pretentious. Hell, while we’re on the subject of identity, you don’t think my pretentions only exist here in the blogosphere, do you?

Up to 11, up to 100

On the weekend my wife and I took the opportunity to rewatch the finest rock/mock-umentary ever made, This is Spinal Tap (sorry, Unicode still hasn’t got around to n-diaeresis). We’re going to see the boys from Spinal Tap / every other Christopher Guest movie ever made, unwigged and unplugged, in concert in Detroit on the 29th, so this was sort of preliminary research.

As you know if you’ve been reading for a while, or at least if you’ve been reading and paying attention, I study cultural aspects of numbers and mathematics, and so today I’d like to talk to you about one of the greatest phrases coined in the past quarter-century, ‘up to eleven’ – check out this strikingly long list of pop-cultural references as evidence of its ubiquity, or just so you know what I’m talking about here if you’re unfamiliar with the movie. The core idea is that a higher number represents more (in this case, more volume –> better!), rather than simply being a more fine-grained division of a continuum (i.e., 1 to 10 –> 1 to 11 –> … 1 to 100, etc.).

Okay, it’s hilarious, and I’m making it sound all technical and such, but I have a point here. It’s an example of what I call conspicuous calculation, the use of (often unnecessarily) large numbers for discursive effect. This is highly prevalent in Western societies, but is by no means limited to them – one of the earliest pieces of Egyptian text, the Narmer mace-head, contains a set of numerals ranging into the millions boasting of a large quantity of livestock and people taken as plunder. Particularly in state societies that have a focus on quantification and enumeration, numbers can become a tool to overawe, manipulate, and obfuscate. The argument is longer (and still in development), but you get the idea.

But in one of those fantastic serendipities, a fascinating article came out in the New York Times a few days ago, ‘Confused by SPF? Take a Number‘ by Catherine Saint Louis. It’s a fascinating look at how an objective measurement (Sun Protection Factor / SPF: the measured ratio of the time it takes to burn with sunscreen on to the time it takes to burn without it) can be used as part of a rhetorical advertising war and can exaggerate the actual protection you are receiving. Although dermatologists are aware that there is little practical difference between SPF 30 and SPF 100 – and that far more significant factors include how much sunscreen you use, and how thoroughly you apply it – the numbers war has significant effects, as discussed in the article:

“It captures the consumers’ attention, the high SPF,” said Dr. Elma D. Baron, an assistant professor of dermatology at Case Western Reserve University who sees patients at hospitals in Cleveland. “Just walking down the drugstore aisle and seeing a SPF 90 or 95, they assume, ‘This is what I need.’ ”

and

When told of Neutrogena’s 100+ lotion, Ms. Bigio worried that the sunscreen she always wears when rock climbing and bicycling to work isn’t enough. “It makes me feel like SPF 45 is inadequate,” she said.

Now that there is such a thing as SPF 100, there is a real danger that 100 will be interpreted as complete protection. Living in a decimal society permeated by scientific discourses, we tend to associate 100 with 100%. It’s no coincidence that the new Neutrogena product is advertised as SPF 100+, not SPF 104 or SPF 106.4. In contrast no one would advertise SPF 25 as ’20+’. The spurious roundness of the number allows the consumer to associate 100 with completeness and thus to be confident of full protection. But SPF isn’t a measure of the percentage of the sun’s rays blocked, and it doesn’t have an upper limit.

When I was a kid, we had SPF 6 or SPF 8 around the house, and we rarely wore it (even though I’m pretty pale for someone of partially Mediterranean heritage, and one half of my family is particularly burn-prone). Was I well-protected? Probably not. I also should have been wearing a hat (still to this day I am a non-hat person). Today you can’t even find such low SPFs anywhere, and you will find people who think that putting anything less than SPF 30 on your child is tantamount to abuse. But make no mistake: this is a discursive battle as much as it is a scientific one, one ultimately governed not by laboratory practice but by the need of an industry to outmanoeuver competitors, literally, by outnumbering them.

Medieval anthropology

At the International Medieval Congress this past weekend, I had the very unusual experience of being (as far as I am aware) the only representative of my discipline at a conference with over 3000 attendees (although there were plenty of linguists around, and at least some medieval archaeologists). A good time was had by all – well, at least by my wife (an actual medievalist) and myself and our friends. My paper (longer discussion to follow) was very well attended and well received, and initiated some interesting discussions.

My work on numerals is hyper-specialized, to say the least. There are maybe five or eight living anthropologists, worldwide, whose work is centrally about numerals, and perhaps a couple of dozen linguists on top of that. Of course there are people who have written about numerals other than these, but they are not specialists in the topic. But while my core research is hyper-specialized, I think of myself, by contrast, as a polymath. I have graduate-level training in cultural anthropology, history (both ethnohistory and history of science), archaeology, cognitive science, and linguistics. And it makes me very, very happy to have this breadth. So there really aren’t too many situations where I feel extraordinarily out of place in humanities and social science-type conferences, and this one was no exception. If the opportunity arose to present there again, I would jump at the opportunity – despite the fact that by all rights, I don’t really belong there.

On Saturday I attended an excellent roundtable entitled ‘Medievalism across Time and Space’ hosted by my friend Julie Hofmann, which dealt with the definition of the medieval both in scholarly discussions of different time periods and different regions, as well as in how the public perceives and understands ‘the medieval’. Ambitious, no? Also really fascinating stuff. In the middle of this discussion, someone made a comment that made me realize that of all times and places, North American anthropology really excludes ONLY the medieval from its purview. There are dozens of archaeologists trained jointly in anthropology and classics departments, and/or who teach interdisciplinarily in both fields. Hundreds of classical archaeology students every year get their archaeological training primarily in anthropology departments. Similarly, there are hundreds of early modernists in anthropology: people who focus on Spanish colonialism in the New World, for instance, or world-systems theorists, or people interested in Atlantic World / diasporic studies. But the medieval is almost entirely out of our grasp.

This is an odd gap, to say the least, for a discipline that purports to be a holistic comparative study of human behaviour. At the panel it was noted that in many small (and not-so-small) history departments, medievalists get the honour (???) of teaching Western civilization courses that start with Sumer (anthropological archaeology has numerous specialists) and end with the twentieth century (which the vast majority of cultural anthropologists have expertise in). And it’s not at all that I think that somehow this means I, or any other anthropologist, would do a better job than a medievalist would of teaching such a course, nor that I would want to do so. But if I were going to construct a ‘world survey’ anthropology course, it would be very challenging to come up with relevant material written by anthropologists or anthropologically-trained archaeologists that focuses on the millennium of history in which medievalists specialize. But I can’t think of any valid conceptual or methodological reason to exclude the medieval from the anthropological.

But it also occurs to me that, despite it not being a formal part of my training, I do have a lot of experiences, skills, and knowledge pertinent to medieval studies. I have two years of Latin. My wife is a medievalist and through osmosis, I know almost as much about her area of specialty as she does about mine. The first paper I ever wrote in grad school was on the historical ecology of the early Icelandic state, and I even once thought seriously about looking at the post-Roman archaeological record in Britain from the perspective of postcolonialism as my dissertation (little known secret, until now!). About 10% of my book (at least) deals with medieval Europe and the Middle East, and if you count the rest of Asia in there, more than that. And of course, I spout off about the late medieval transition from Roman to Western numerals at virtually any possible occasion, because so many people think they know why it happened, and are so very, very wrong.

One of the central ideas tossed around in the roundtable was that ‘the medieval’ is a nebulous object, subject to both scholarly and popular imposed definitions that satisfy no one. It was noted by many that ‘medieval India’, ‘medieval Japan’, ‘medieval Islam’, etc. all refer to very different social configurations and chronological periods, and I chimed in that of course if there were a chronological definition then one really needed to include New World societies as well – recognizing fully that no one is happy with such a definition in any case.

So in my copious (ha!) spare time over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to put together a working bibliography of ‘medieval anthropology’: scholarly publications in social/cultural, linguistic, or archaeological anthropology that have as one of their central objects the Old World between roughly 500-1500 CE. Because I do know they’re out there, at least in limited quantities, and it seems like a real gap. The only things I want to exclude are a) physical anthropology; b) medieval archaeology as written by non-anthropological archaeologists, i.e. almost anyone trained in Europe.

So how about it: any anthropologists in the audience know of any material I should be including?

Edit (2010/01/31): I have now created this bibliography which can be found here.

Language and Societies

The students in my graduate-level linguistic anthropology course, Language and Societies, have written extended abstracts of their research papers, which we have now published at a new blog, Language and Societies. Both I and they would greatly appreciate any comments, questions, or suggestions you have regarding their projects, several of which go well beyond this course and will form the basis for ongoing research leading towards advanced degrees in linguistics or anthropology, and/or (one hopes) peer-reviewed publication. Please comment on the specific posts at the Language and Societies blog. Thanks!