Category: Anthropology

CFP – Society for Anthropological Sciences – Albuquerque, NM – Mar 18-22/14

Call for Papers

Society for Anthropological Sciences Annual Meeting

March 18 – 22, 2014

Albuquerque, New Mexico

The Society for Anthropological Sciences (SAS / SASci) will be holding its 10th annual meeting from March 18 – 22, 2014, at the Hotel Albuquerque at Old Town, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  We invite scholars from any subdiscipline of anthropology, or from allied social sciences, to submit abstracts for papers, posters, or full sessions on any topic in anthropological science, broadly conceived.   

The Society for Anthropological Sciences, as both an independent organization (SaSci) and a section of the American Anthropological Association (SAS), promotes the scientific understanding of humanity through comparative, cognitive, quantitative, and evolutionary approaches. The Society seeks to fulfill the historic mission of anthropology to describe and explain the range of variation in human biology, society, and culture across time and space.  You may join SAS through the AAA website as a section along with your membership, or if you are not a member of the AAA, visit http://anthrosciences.org/csac/signup.xsp to join SaSci for $10 / year.

This year the Society will be a co-sponsoring organization in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA).  SAS/SaSci allots 30 minutes including discussion for each oral presentation.  Registration for the conference must be done through the SfAA site at https://www.sfaa.net/sfaa2014/2014instruct.html , and includes access to all activities at the conference.  Abstracts should be 100 words maximum and should similarly be submitted through the SfAA online system.  The deadline for online registration and submission of abstracts through the SfAA site is October 15, 2013.  When registering for the conference and submitting an abstract or session proposal, it is critical that you select SAS as the co-sponsoring organization to ensure that your proposal is reviewed by our program committee.   

(Note: I am an executive of SaSci and a member of the program committee – please feel free to comment, or email me, if you have any questions.  We especially want to welcome submissions from new members and from students.)

 

 

 

Selfishness in language and culture

Well, with regard to the study of California language diversity I talked about a few days ago, my students rightly think that using contemporary satellite images of California vegetation overlaid with potentially-unreliable  colonial-era ethnolinguistic data is probably not a good way to figure out why people 12,000 or 8,000 or 1,000 years ago moved where they did.  And I haven’t even taught them anything about the perils of glottochronology yet.    Also worth noting: no linguists were involved in the writing or evaluation of that paper at any stage, as far as I can tell.

So for those of you following along at home, on Thursday in class we’re going to be tackling yet another rather dubious piece of scholarship (and scholarly reporting) from last month: Patricia Greenfield’s research using the Google Ngram Viewer to study trends in personality in British and American societies as expressed through word frequencies; the study is ‘The Changing Psychology of Culture from 1800 to 2000‘ from Psychological Science and the news article is “Language in books shows how we have grown more selfish” from the Telegraph.   Advance feedback in comments is welcome.

Explaining Californian language diversity

A recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, summarized in a Los Angeles Times news article, argues that there is a strong correlation between the linguistic diversity and ecological diversity of various parts of prehistoric California.   Using satellite images of plant growth in different areas of the state and comparing it with known or hypothesized distributions of linguistic groups, the authors, Brian Codding and Terry Jones, argue that to understand the density of languages in some areas of the state and the relative sparseness of languages in others, ecological variables such as environmental productivity need to be taken into account.   Specifically, they argue that waves of migration to ecologically attractive areas produce dense areas of language diversity, whereas ecologically unproductive environments are less diverse.

Now, I should say right up front that I’m not convinced by this study or by the media account of it.   I’m not going to go into all the reasons here (yet), because my students and I are going to talk about this study on Tuesday.  I think it embodies some of the more serious problems with studies of the language-culture intersection, and some of the more serious problems with science reporting.   Figuring out how to ask relevant analytical questions about material like this is, I believe, a critical step in advancing not only anthropology in the media, but the science as a whole.

Human Expeditions: Inspired by Bruce Trigger

small title imageHuman Expeditions: Inspired by Bruce Trigger

Stephen Chrisomalis and Andre Costopoulos, editors

Human Expeditions: Inspired by Bruce Trigger, which was published recently by the University of Toronto Press, is a book that Andre Costopoulos and I envisioned shortly after the death of our friend and mentor Bruce Trigger, who was my dissertation supervisor.  In helping to sort through his papers, we became aware that he had developed, over several decades, a network of eclectic and important scholars, including many of his own students, whose work did not fit into conventional theoretical or disciplinary categories or whose serious ideas had not received adequate attention.  We also were reminded of how unconventional much of Trigger’s own work was, with articles such as ‘Brecht and ethnohistory’ and ‘Akhenaten and Durkheim’ among his eclectic works.  But the book was created not as a sterile memorial to Trigger, but rather, as a way to think about scholarship that is, “unfinished, unbegun, or even unthinkable, in the present intellectual climate”.

Human Expeditions is a decidedly ‘unfashionable’ book, and we are proud of that fact.  We identified people whose work is poorly characterized by ‘isms’, and asked them to share work that filled gaps in present thinking.  The contributors to the volume come from the philosophy of science, history, and Egyptology as well as anthropology and archaeology.  The result, we hope, will give greater depth to anthropological insights and greater conceptual breadth to the humanistic social sciences.  A number of contributors are very senior figures in their fields, but we believe it is just as critical to include contributions from early-stage scholars, including several who were students of Trigger in his final years.  At minimum, we want to provide immediate venues for important scholarship that lies outside disciplinary norms.  At its most utopian, Human Expeditions allows us to envision, “an alternate history of the social sciences in which conformity to convention is not an expectation,” and to think about different configurations of disciplines than those currently in fashion.   We think that Trigger would have approved heartily.

Plants (humans?) are incredibly cool, but don’t do math

There’s a fascinating article on BBC News today, about a really interesting study that proposes that an internal mechanism in the Arabidopsis thaliana plant (which is used widely in scientific experiments as a model organism) regulates starch consumption in the absence of sunlight in a way that requires the plants to be able to mathematically “divide” the numbers of two different types of cells.  Now I’m not a botanist and I can’t say whether the result is correct, but I do take issue with the claim that “They’re actually doing maths in a simple, chemical way”.  The last quote from the article is more accurate: “This is not evidence for plant intelligence. It simply suggests that plants have a mechanism designed to automatically regulate how fast they burn carbohydrates at night. Plants don’t do maths voluntarily and with a purpose in mind like we do.”

All sorts of natural processes can be modelled using mathematics – so, for instance, Fibonacci patterns appear in a variety of plants in the operation of phyllotaxis (the arrangement of leaves on stems).    We don’t say that these plants ‘do math’.    And the same principle applies above to the new finding above.  It’s incredibly cool that these mathematical patterns emerge, and it’s a very interesting question why they emerge biochemically.  But that raises an even more interesting question: what do we mean when we say that humans ‘do math’?

Humans are organisms and thus part of the physical world, and so lots of the things they do unconsciously or without explicit reflection can thus be modelled mathematically.    But this is not the same as saying that all humans do mathematics.  This seems to be what is being suggested in the last quotation: that ‘doing math’ involves conscious, explicit, purposeful reflection on the mathematical aspects of reality.    Being able to throw a curveball is not ‘doing mathematics’; being able to model the trajectory of a curveball is.  And the overlap between the sets of humans able to do each task is minimal.

Let me give another example related to the plant study above.  A child has a pile of 23 candies and wants to divide it among some gathered group of five kids including herself.  She starts to her right giving one candy to each friend, continuing to pass them out until they’re all gone.    When the process is complete, each child will have 4 candies and the three to the right of the distributor will have 5 each.  We could, if we wished to, define ‘division’ as ‘the process of dividing up a group of objects among another group’ and then say ‘thus, the kids are dividing 23 by 5 and getting 4 with a remainder of 3’.  But I think most of us would be reluctant to argue that the first child understands division, or knows how to divide.    Even though distributing the candy is a conscious decision, and even though it requires some general process (one candy to one child), it does not require that the child be able to do mathematics.

For the same reason, I sometimes have some skepticism when my colleagues in ethnomathematics describe the mathematics of some human activity in terms of fractal geometry or the Fibonacci series.   It is, of course, possible that people have some awareness of the processes behind their activities, and ethnographically, when they can talk about that, it is very interesting.   For instance, if the child above says “Well, I know I have 23 candies and so they won’t go evenly, so there are going to be some left over at the end,” then we do indeed know that the child has some explicit knowledge of division.    I worry, in fact, that because so many natural processes result in such sequences, that we confuse the result with the conscious awareness of the process.  In doing so, we fail to investigate the explicit mathematical knowledge that humans do actually encode in all sorts of things they do, and we falsely attribute a sort of explicit consciousness to activities that have no explicitness underlying them (in humans, animals, plants, and even in nonliving things).