Paleography at KCL

Over the last week there has been a groundswell of action in opposition to the decision to eliminate the paleography program at King’s College London, most significantly the position of the Chair of Paleography, Professor David Ganz, which is the only such position in the UK and perhaps in the English-speaking world. Paleography, the science of manuscripts and handwriting, lacks the direct economic and political impact of other fields but has enormous influence on work throughout the historical disciplines. My new book relied significantly on Professor Ganz’s co-edition/translation of Bischoff’s Latin Paleography. More broadly, the notion that any scholar’s research should be narrowly dictated by budgetary considerations – that evaluations of scholarly merit ought to be conducted on the grounds of immediate financial impact – is anathema to the principles of academic freedom.

A Facebook group and an online petition have already been organized to oppose this misguided bureaucratic decision. I encourage any of you who may be concerned about the impact of this decision to become involved through these or other means. A parallel effort has been organized opposing the firing of several KCL philosophers.

Medieval anthropology: a working bibliography

Back in May I discussed the curious absence of anthropological research on the Middle Ages or ‘medieval anthropology’, and made wild and obviously false promises to produce a bibliography of this hemidemisemidiscipline.

– I’ve excluded material that is strictly bioarchaeological / forensic / epidemiological in nature; biological anthropologists do all sorts of interesting work on the Middle Ages but it’s a different sort of thing than I’m talking about here.
– Similarly, medieval archaeology is an enormous field but generally the archaeology of medieval Europe falls outside of anthropology. Where there is neither a comparative nor a holistic element to the work, I’ve excluded it.
– Material written by historians with an interest in anthropology is excluded, not because I have complaints about its quality but because my aim is to discuss the particularly anthropological literature on the Middle Ages.
– By chronology alone, large parts of New World archaeology and epigraphy (Maya, Aztec, Inka) can only reasonably be defined as ‘medieval’. The exclusion of the New World civilizations from the ‘medieval’ world may be pure ethnocentrism, but including it would dwarf all the other material by at least two orders of magnitude, and would defeat my purposes.
– I’ve tried to be relatively thorough but this is, as the title suggests, a working bibliography only. Contributions are welcome!

The bibliography currently has around 40 items, of which several authors have multiple publications each, and there is very little from the past decade. Despite the prominence of several of these figures (Kroeber, Goody, Turner, Appadurai, Macfarlane), I would almost be willing to stake the claim that they could get away with talking about the Middle Ages because their prominence allowed them to flout disciplinary conventions. Others (Hodgen, Naroll, Hewes) were eminent but little-known outside their own small circles. The bibliography roughly groups into several distinct categories; a) Icelandic studies; b) studies of medieval family / marriage using anthropological work on kinship; c) matter on religion and ritual using medieval Christianity as analogue or as comparative material; d) comparative-civilizational scholarship; e) formalistic material in cross-cultural studies.

Anderson, R. T. (1971). Voluntary associations in history. American anthropologist, 73(1), 209-222.
Appadurai, A. (1988). The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge Univ Pr.
Asad, T. (1983). Notes on body pain and truth in medieval Christian ritual. Economy and Society, 12(3), 287-327.
Asad, T. (1986). Medieval heresy: an anthropological view. Social History, 11(3), 345-362.
Asad, T. (1987). On ritual and discipline in medieval Christian monasticism. Economy and Society, 16(2), 159-203.
Boone III, J. L. (1986). Parental investment and elite family structure in preindustrial states: a case study of late medieval-early modern Portuguese genealogies. American anthropologist, 859-878.
Brown, D. E. (1988). Hierarchy, history, and human nature: The social origins of historical consciousness. Univ of Arizona Pr.
Bullough, D. A. (1969). Early Medieval Social Groupings: The Terminology of Kinship. Past & Present, 45(1), 3.
Carneiro, R. L. (1969). The measurement of cultural development in the ancient Near East and in Anglo-Saxon England. Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, 31, 1013-23.
Cohn, B. S. (1980). History and anthropology: the state of play. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 22(2), 198-221.
Durrenberger, E. P. (1992). The dynamics of medieval Iceland: political economy & literature. Univ of Iowa Pr.
Geary, P. J. (1994). Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages. Cornell Univ Pr.
Gellner, E. (1992). Plough, sword, and book: the structure of human history. University of Chicago Press.
Goody, J. (1977). The domestication of the savage mind. Cambridge University Press.
Goody, J. (1983). The development of the family and marriage in Europe. Cambridge University Press.
Hastrup, K. (1985). Culture and history in medieval Iceland: an anthropological analysis of structure and change. Oxford University Press, USA.
Hastrup, K. (1990). Island of anthropology: studies in past and present Iceland. Coronet Books Inc.
Herzfeld, M. (1989). Anthropology through the looking-glass. Cambridge University Press.
Hewes, G. W. (1981). Prospects for More Productive Comparative Civilizational Studies. Cross-Cultural Research, 16(1-2), 167-185. doi:10.1177/106939718101600109
Hodgen, M. T. (1945). Glass and Paper: An Historical Study of Acculturation. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 1(4), 466-497.
Hodgen, M. T. (1950). Similarities and Dated Distributions. American Anthropologist, 52(4), 445-467.
Hodgen, M. T. (1952). Change and History. A Study of the Dated Distributions of Technological Innovations in England, New York: Wenner-Green Foundation for Anthropological Research.
Hodgen, M. T. (1964). Early anthropology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Univ of Pennsylvania Pr.
Hodgen, M. T. (1974). Anthropology, history, and cultural change. Univ of Arizona Pr.
Hsu, E. (2007). The experience of wind in early and medieval Chinese medicine. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS), 117, S134.
Kroeber, A. L. (1919). On the principle of order in civilization as exemplified by changes of fashion. American Anthropologist, 21(3), 235-263.
Kroeber, A. L. (1945). The ancient Oikoumene as an historic culture aggregate. Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 9-20.
Kroeber, A. L. (1958). Gray’s epicyclical evolution. American Anthropologist, 60(1), 31-38.
Kroeber, A. L. (1951). Is Western Civilization Disintegrating or Reconstituting? Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 95(2), 100-104.
Kroeber, A. L. (1966). An anthropologist looks at history. University of California Press.
Macfarlane, A. (1977). History, anthropology and the study of communities. Social History, 2(5), 631-652.
Macfarlane, A. (1978). The origins of English Individualism: some surprises. Theory and Society, 6(2), 255-277.
Macfarlane, A., & Sharpe, J. A. (1999). Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: a regional and comparative study. Routledge.
Moreland, J. (2006). Archaeology and Texts: Subservience or Enlightenment. Annual Review of Anthropology, 35, 135-51.
Naroll, R., Bullough, V. L., & Naroll, F. (1974). Military deterrence in history. SUNY Press.
Symonds, L. (2009). Death as a Window to Life: Anthropological Approaches to Early Medieval Mortuary Ritual. Reviews in Anthropology, 38, 48-87. doi:10.1080/00938150802672949
Turner, V. W., & Turner, E. (1995). Image and pilgrimage in Christian culture. Columbia University Press.
Van Gerven, D. P., Sheridan, S. G., & Adams, W. Y. (1995). The health and nutrition of a medieval Nubian population: the impact of political and economic change. American Anthropologist, 97(3), 468-480.

More on paleo-Basque writing

Back in November 2008 I wrote a post, ‘Debunking and de-Basque-ing‘ talking about the general state of Basque paleolinguistics and epigraphy, with specific reference to claims that a set of inscriptions from Iruña-Veleia were not the best evidence we have for the early use of a Basque ancestral language but in fact a ridiculous hoax. I didn’t think about it much since that time, but it seems that the debate rages on. Maju at Leherensuge asserts this week that many of the more extreme claims of hoaxing were grossly exaggerated (thanks to Julien at A Very Remote Period Indeed for pointing this out in the latest edition of Four Stone Hearth). You can also see a large number of the Iruña-Veleia inscriptions on this flickr stream. I’m still pretty dubious about the inscription on the linked post; I can see how it might be read as MISCART[…] but I don’t see it as obviously more correct than DESCART[…]. And, given that it comes after the names Socrates and Virgil, why would the name Miscart (an apparently unattested or new variant of Melkart, a Punic version of the god Mercury) be there at all? But I’m not a Basque epigrapher and wouldn’t claim any particular expertise here. The existence of one (possibly joke?) inscription wouldn’t automatically negate the validity of the rest, some of which (from the flickr site) I see no particular reason to doubt. And I don’t find it preposterous at all that there should be Paleo-Basque inscriptions in the regions where Basque is spoken today. But do remember that this region has a particularly hoax-ridden and pseudoarchaeologically-inclined inscriptional history.

Discount numerals! V for the price of IV!

The excellent people at Cambridge have provided me with a downloadable flyer for Numerical Notation: A Comparative History which can be redeemed online, by phone or by mail for a 20% discount off the list price ($76 US instead of $95). This offer is good until the end of May.

Citation anxiety

I am always very careful to indicate, in guidelines for essays and papers, that I don’t care what bibliographic or citation format my students use. APA, MLA, AAA, NWA … I always say that as long as they pick one format and use it consistently, they’ll be just fine. I have a soft spot for Chicago style (author-date) but I certainly don’t ask anyone to use it. Yet every term, I get at least one student who speaks to me or emails me in concern about bibliographic or citation format. Even after I insist that I have no preference, they just can’t quite be convinced that I won’t deduct grades for failure to conform with an arbitrary set of guidelines, including things like whether to capitalize every word of book titles, or whether to put parentheses around dates. They can’t quite believe me, either, when I tell them that many journals and presses use minute variations of the major styles, so that whatever I do as an author will eventually require professional attention.

Everywhere I’ve taught, I’ve seen this phenomenon, again and again. I also see, again and again, students who are apparently indifferent to serious writing or analytical problems but still get stuck on fine points of some style guide. What gives? Is it really the case that most professors are such sticklers for formatting issues that it is rational for students to be so concerned? Maybe, but I’m not convinced. Alternately, maybe citation style is something that seems more objective than other, more significant aspects of paper-writing. When you’re unsure of other issues, or know you have problems with them, hanging on to the one thing that you know you can get just right is a security blanket. Whatever else may be wrong with your paper, at least you got the citations right. I don’t know about this either, though – if it were really true, wouldn’t more students actually use a single style correctly and consistently, even after inquiring?

So, colleagues and students, what do you think? Is citation anxiety ubiquitous? If so, is it reasonable? And what can be done about it?