Posts Tagged ‘anthropology’
“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently”*…
As a new collection of his writing is published, Rebecca Solnit remembers her friend David Graeber, the late activist and anarchist who believed ordinary people have the power to change the world…
David Graeber was a joyful, celebratory person. An enthusiast, voluble, on fire with the possibilities in the ideas and ideologies he wrestled with. Every time we met – from New Haven in the early 00s to London a few years before his death in 2020 – he was essentially the same: beaming, rumpled, with a restless energy that seemed to echo the constant motion of his mind, words tumbling out as though they were, in their unstoppable abundance, overflowing. But he was also much respected in activist circles for being a good listener, and his radical egalitarianism was borne out in how he related to the people around him.
He was always an anthropologist. After doing fieldwork among traditional peoples in Madagascar, he just never stopped, but he turned his focus to his own society. Essays such as Dead Zones of the Imagination: On Violence, Bureaucracy, and ‘Interpretive Labor’ and his book Bullshit Jobs came from using the equipment of an anthropologist on stuff usually regarded as boring, or not regarded at all – the function and impact of bureaucracy. His 2011 bestseller on debt reminded us that money and finance are among the social arrangements that could be rearranged for the better.
He insisted, again and again, that industrialised Euro-American civilisation was, like other societies past and present, only one way of doing things among countless options. He cited times when societies rejected agriculture or technology or social hierarchy, when social groups chose what has often been dismissed as primitive because it was more free. And he rejected all the linear narratives that present contemporary human beings as declining from primordial innocence or ascending from primitive barbarism. He offered, in place of a single narrative, many versions and variations; a vision of societies as ongoing experiments, and human beings as endlessly creative. That variety was a source of hope for him, a basis for his recurrent insistence that it doesn’t have to be this way.
As Marcus Rediker wrote in his review of David’s posthumous book Pirate Enlightenment, “Everything Graeber wrote was simultaneously a genealogy of the present and an account of what a just society might look like.” He was concerned about inequality of all kinds, including gender inequality in this society and others, and the violence that enforces inequality and unfreedom, as well as how they might be delegitimised and where and when societies might have escaped them. He focused, in short, on freedom and its impediments…
…
… The way that, as he wrote, “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.” If you truly believe that, if you perceive a world that is constructed according to certain assumptions and values, then you see that it can be changed, not least by changing those assumptions and values.
We have to recognise that ideas are tools that we wield – and with them, some power. David wanted to put these tools in everyone’s hands, or remind them that they are already there. Which is part of why he worked hard at – and succeeded in – writing in a style that wasn’t always simple but was always as clear and accessible as possible, given the material. Egalitarianism is a prose style, too. Our mutual friend the writer, film-maker, and debt abolitionist Astra Taylor texted him: “Re-reading Debt. You are such a damn good writer. A rare skill among lefties.” He texted back that August, a month before his demise: “Why thanks! Well at least I take care to do so – I call it ‘being nice to the reader,’ which is an extension of the politics, in a sense.”
In order to believe that people can govern themselves in the absence of coercive institutions and hierarchies, anarchists must have great faith in ordinary people, and David did. A sentence Lyndsey Stonebridge wrote about Hannah Arendt could apply equally well to him: “To fixate on her exceptional mind is to miss something that is important about her lessons in thinking: thinking is ordinary, she teaches; that is its secret power.”…
An edited extract from Solnit’s foreword to The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World by David Graeber: “‘It does not have to be this way’- the radical optimism of David Graeber,” from @RebeccaSolnit in @guardian.
* David Graeber
###
As we promote possibility (and remember that on this date in 1973 then-President Richard Nixon averred in a speech that “I am not a crook”), we might send never-ending birthday greetings to August Möbius; he was born on this date in 1790. An astronomer and mathematician, he studied under mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss while Gauss was the director of the Göttingen Observatory. From there, he went on to study with Carl Gauss’s instructor, Johann Pfaff, at the University of Halle, where he completed his doctoral thesis The occultation of fixed stars in 1815. In 1816, he became Extraordinary Professor in the “chair of astronomy and higher mechanics” at the University of Leipzig, where he remained for the rest of his career.
While he was an influential professor, he is best remembered for his creation of the “Möbius strip.”
“What a piece of work is a man”*…
The estimable Samuel Arbesman on the path dependency of our fundamental ideas about ourselves…
Awhile back I wrote about AI and human distinctiveness: basically my argument was that we should be less concerned by whether or not AI can do we what we can and care more about what we want to be doing. In other words, focus on what is quintessentially human, rather than what is uniquely human.
But perhaps some of these concerns are simply Western preoccupations, rather than universal human concerns?
In the recent book Fluke (which is fantastic! [your correspondent heartily agrees]), Brian Klaas noted the following provocative point about differences between Western and Eastern thinking—and their views on human distinctness—and how it might have been due to the ecological milieu that each one arose from:
In this vision of a world humans are distinct from the rest of the natural world. That felt true for the inhabitants of the Middle East and Europe around the time of the birth of Christianity. Camels, cows, goats, mice, and dogs composed much of the encountered animal kingdom, a living menagerie of the beings that are quite unlike us.
In many Eastern cultures, by contrast, ancient religions tended to emphasize our unity with the natural world. One theory suggests that was partly because people lived among monkeys and apes. We recognized ourselves in them. As the biologist Roland Ennos points out, the word orangutan even means “man of the forest.” Hinduism has Hanumen, a monkey god. In China, the Chu kingdom revered gibbons. In these familiar primates, the theory suggests, it became impossible to ignore that we were part of nature—and nature was part of us.
This is almost a Guns, Germs, and Steel-kind of approach, but for ideas. At the risk of creating too much determinism here, it’s intriguing to explore the path dependence of ideas and concepts that organize how we think about the world and ourselves.
This reminds me of other research that examined how small historical distinctions can still affect our modern world, even if they are no longer relevant. For example, there is research that looks at how certain locations betray their histories as portage sites—places where boats or cargo were transported over land, allowing travel between more traversable waterways—despite this being obsolete. And yet it still has a certain long-term effect, as per this paper “Portage and Path Dependence”:
And returning to ideas, there is a paper entitled “Frontier Culture: The Roots and Persistence of ‘Rugged Individualism’ in the United States” that explores whether or not certain differences in location—areas considered the “frontier”—affect the geographical variation of ideas and beliefs in the United States.
In the end, simply being more aware of the ideas and history that suffuse our thinking—rather than taking them for granted—is something important, whether or not we are trying to understand humanity’s place in the world, how technology should impact humanity, or why cities are located where they are…
From his marvelous newsletter, Cabinet of Wonders: “Human Distinctiveness in Different Cultures,” @arbesman.
Pair with his earlier piece: “Archaeology of Biology and Software.”
And for a(nother) taste of Brian Klaas (@brianklaas), see “Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
* Shakespeare, Hamlet
###
As we ruminate on the roots of our (received) realities, we might recall that it was on this date in 3 BCE that a planetary conjunction of Jupiter and Venus was visible… and may have been the Star of Bethlehem mentioned in the New Testament.
In this pre-dawn, “morning star” conjunction, the two planets appeared very close to each other in the sky (a mere 0.07° apart as viewed from Earth). It occurred when the planets were in the last degrees of the zodiacal sign of Cancer which was the concluding sign for interpreting that astrological year. The same two planets met again just ten months later (June 17, 2 BCE), even more closely, almost touching (0.01°), in an “evening star” conjunction in the first degrees of Leo, the beginning sign of the new astrological year. These two unions of Jupiter and Venus might well have been interpreted as the close of one age in history and the beginning of another age in 2 BCE.
For more on these conjunctions and other potential candidates for “historical Star of Bethlehem” (and an explanation of how/why the astronomers/astrologers who sighted the star became Magi/Wise Men in Church teaching) see here.
“A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!”*…
The horse transformed human history—and now, as Christina Larson reports, scientists have a clearer idea of when humans began to transform the horse…
Around 4,200 years ago, one particular lineage of horse quickly became dominant across Eurasia, suggesting that’s when humans started to spread domesticated horses around the world, according to research published [recently] in the journal Nature.
There was something special about this horse: It had a genetic mutation that changed the shape of its back, likely making it easier to ride.
“In the past, you had many different lineages of horses,” said Pablo Librado, an evolutionary biologist at the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona and co-author of the new study. That genetic diversity was evident in ancient DNA samples the researchers analyzed from archaeological sites across Eurasia dating back to 50,000 years ago.
But their analysis of 475 ancient horse genomes showed a notable change around 4,200 years ago.
That’s when a specific lineage that first arose in what’s known as the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, a plains region that stretches from what is now northeastern Bulgaria across Ukraine and through southern Russia, began to pop up all across Eurasia and quickly replaced other lineages. Within three hundred years, the horses in Spain were similar to those in Russia.
“We saw this genetic type spreading almost everywhere in Eurasia—clearly this horse type that was local became global very fast,” said co-author Ludovic Orlando, a molecular archaeologist at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France.
The researchers believe that this change was because a Bronze Age people called the Sintashta had domesticated their local horse and begun to use these animals to help them dramatically expand their territory.
Domesticating wild horses on the plains of Eurasia was a process, not a single event, scientists say.
Archaeologists have previously found evidence of people consuming horse milk in dental remains dating to around 5,500 years ago, and the earliest evidence of horse ridership dates to around 5,000 years ago. But it was the Sintashta who spread the particular horses they had domesticated across Eurasia, the new study suggests…
People had domesticated other animals several thousand years before horses—including dogs, pigs, cattle, goats and sheep. But the new research shows that the shrinking genetic diversity associated with domestication happened much faster in horses.
“Humans changed the horse genome stunningly quickly, perhaps because we already had experience dealing with animals,” said Laurent Frantz, who studies the genetics of ancient creatures at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and was not involved in the study.
“It shows the special place of horses in human societies.”…
“Scientists have traced the origin of the modern horse to a lineage that emerged 4,200 years ago,” from @larsonchristina in @physorg_com.
* Shakespeare, Richard III
###
As we mount up, we might recall that it was on this date in 1878 that Eadweard Muybridge took a series of photographs to prove that all four feet of a horse leave the ground when it runs. He had been retained by former California Governor (and university founder) Leland Stanford to help settle a bet. While Muybridge was best known in his own day for his large photographs of Yosemite Valley, he did seminal early work on motion picture projection, and the approaches he developed for the study of motion are at the heart of both animation and computer analysis today.
“The purpose of a system is what it does”*…
Via Patrick Tanguay and his wonderful newsletter, Sentiers. Tanguay observes, “diagnosing what’s going on in society right now, how our multiple systems function and the issues that emerge from that, is not an easy task. It’s probably unfair then to also expect solutions from one article, but that’s what I was hoping for by the end of this one,” by Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier…
Technology was once simply a tool—and a small one at that—used to amplify human intent and capacity. That was the story of the industrial revolution: we could control nature and build large, complex human societies, and the more we employed and mastered technology, the better things got. We don’t live in that world anymore. Not only has technology become entangled with the structure of society, but we also can no longer see the world around us without it. The separation is gone, and the control we thought we once had has revealed itself as a mirage. We’re in a transitional period of history right now.
We tell ourselves stories about technology and society every day. Those stories shape how we use and develop new technologies as well as the new stories and uses that will come with it. They determine who’s in charge, who benefits, who’s to blame, and what it all means.
Some people are excited about the emerging technologies poised to remake society. Others are hoping for us to see this as folly and adopt simpler, less tech-centric ways of living. And many feel that they have little understanding of what is happening and even less say in the matter.
But we never had total control of technology in the first place, nor is there a pretechnological golden age to which we can return. The truth is that our data-centric way of seeing the world isn’t serving us well. We need to tease out a third option. To do so, we first need to understand how we got here.
When we describe something as being abstract, we mean it is removed from reality: conceptual and not material, distant and not close-up. What happens when we live in a world built entirely of the abstract? A world in which we no longer care for the messy, contingent, nebulous, raw, and ambiguous reality that has defined humanity for most of our species’ existence? We are about to find out, as we begin to see the world through the lens of data structures.
Two decades ago, in his book Seeing Like a State, anthropologist James C. Scott explored what happens when governments, or those with authority, attempt and fail to “improve the human condition.” Scott found that to understand societies and ecosystems, government functionaries and their private sector equivalents reduced messy reality to idealized, abstracted, and quantified simplifications that made the mess more “legible” to them. With this legibility came the ability to assess and then impose new social, economic, and ecological arrangements from the top down: communities of people became taxable citizens, a tangled and primeval forest became a monoculture timber operation, and a convoluted premodern town became a regimented industrial city.
This kind of abstraction was seemingly necessary to create the world around us today. It is difficult to manage a large organization, let alone an interconnected global society of eight billion people, without some sort of structure and means to abstract away details. Facility with abstraction, and abstract reasoning, has enabled all sorts of advancements in science, technology, engineering, and math—the very fields we are constantly being told are in highest demand.
The map is not the territory [quoth Alfred Korzybski], and no amount of intellectualization will make it so. Creating abstract representations by necessity leaves out important detail and context. Inevitably, as Scott cataloged, the use of large-scale abstractions fails, leaving leadership bewildered at the failure and ordinary people worse off.
But our desire to abstract never went away, and technology, as always, serves to amplify intent and capacity. Now, we manifest this abstraction with software. Computing supercharges the creative and practical use of abstraction. This is what life is like when we see the world the way a data structure sees the world. These are the same tricks Scott documented. What has changed is their speed and their ubiquity…
… Data structures dominate our world and are a byproduct of the rational, modern era, but they are ushering in an age of chaos. We need to embrace and tame, but not extinguish, this chaos for a better world…
…
As [Lewis] Mumford wrote in his classic history of technology, “The essential distinction between a machine and a tool lies in the degree of independence in the operation from the skill and motive power of the operator.” A tool is controlled by a human user, whereas a machine does what its designer wanted. As technologists, we can build tools, rather than machines, that flexibly allow people to make partial, contextual sense of the online and physical world around them. As citizens, we can create meaningful organizations that span our communities but without the permanence (and thus overhead) of old-school organizations.
Seeing like a data structure has been both a blessing and a curse. Increasingly, it feels like it is an avalanche, an out-of-control force that will reshape everything in its path. But it’s also a choice, and there is a different path we can take. The job of enabling a new society, one that accepts the complexity and messiness of our current world without being overwhelmed by it, is one all of us can take part it. There is a different future we can build, together…
A fascinating and important piece: “Seeing Like a Data Structure,” @schneierblog @BelferCenter. Eminently worth reading in full.
See also: “Empty Innovation“
###
As we reframe, we might send free birthday greetings to Matthias Ettrich; he was born on this date in 1972. A computer scientist interested in Linux and open source software, he Ettrich founded KDE in 1996 to create (as he put it on Usenet) “consistent, nice looking free desktop environment” for Unix-like systems using Qt as its widget toolkit– to which end, he has developed LyX. A German, operating in Berlin, Ettrich was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit for his contributions to free software.
“God has no religion”*…
For the last 15 years, the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) has done quantitative and qualitative research on religious values in the U.S. A recent study has generated a number of headlines, most focusing on a single issue– a good example: “People say they’re leaving religion due to anti-LGBTQ teachings and sexual abuse“… which is in fact a significant finding, but only one finding in a wide range of other interesting– and important– observations that emerge…
America encompasses a rich diversity of faith traditions, and “religious churning” is very common. In 2023, PRRI surveyed more than 5,600 adults across the United States about their experiences with religion. This report examines how well major faith traditions retain their members, the reasons people disaffiliate, and the reasons people attend religious services. Additionally, this report considers how atheists and agnostics differ from those who say they are “nothing in particular.” Finally, it analyzes the prevalence of charismatic elements as well as prophecy and prosperity theology in American churches and the role of charismatic Christianity in today’s Republican Party…
[Among the major areas explored…]
- “Unaffiliated” is the only major religious category experiencing growth…
- Catholic loss continues to be highest among major religious groups; white Evangelical retention rate has improved since 2016…
- While most disaffiliate because they stop believing, religious teachings on the LGBTQ community and clergy sexual abuse now play a more prominent role…
- The religiously unaffiliated are not a monolith…
- Most unaffiliated Americans are not looking for a religious or spiritual home…
- Church attendance among Americans is down and fewer Americans say religion is important; most Americans who attend religious services do so to feel closer to God…
- Exploring the prevalence of charismatic elements in American churches…
- Prophetic and Prosperity theological beliefs are more common among Republicans and African Americans…
- Religion and the MAGA Movement: The Role of Charismatic Christianity and Prophecy/Prophetic Beliefs in the Republican Party…
The state of faith in the U. S. and what it can tell us about our society: “Religious Change in America” from @PRRIpoll.
Apposite: “Ufologists, Unite!“– Nathaniel Rich‘s review of two books by D.W. Pasulka, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington who (to oversimplify only slightly) sees the growing devotion to UFOs/UAPs as a new religious movement… one not considered in the PRRI study.
* Gandhi
###
As we contemplate celestial conviction, we might recall that it was on this date in 1506 that the cornerstone of the current St. Peter’s Basilica was laid. (It was completed in 1626.) Located in Vatican City, an independent microstate enclaved within the city of Rome, it was initially planned in the 15th century by Pope Nicholas V and then Pope Julius II to replace the ageing Old St. Peter’s Basilica, which was built in the fourth century by Roman emperor Constantine the Great.
Designed principally by Donato Bramante, Michelangelo, and Carlo Maderno, with piazza and fittings by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, St. Peter’s is one of the most renowned works of the Italian High Renaissance. It is the largest church in the world (by interior measure). And while it is neither the mother church of the Catholic Church nor the cathedral of the Diocese of Rome (these equivalent titles being held by the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran in Rome), St. Peter’s is regarded as one of the holiest Catholic shrines. The pope presides at a number of liturgies throughout the year both within the basilica or the adjoining St. Peter’s Square, liturgies that draw audiences numbering from 15,000 to over 80,000 people.
You must be logged in to post a comment.