Arquivo da tag: Antropologia

Study underscores complexity of geopolitics in the age of the Aztec empire (North Carolina State Univ.)

31/03/2015UncategorizedAntropologia, Arqueologia, Aztecas, Méxicorenzotaddei

25-MAR-2015

IMAGE: HERE IS A VIEW TO THE WEST FROM THE HEIGHTS OF TLAXCALLAN. THE ACTIVE VOLCANO, POPOCATEPETL, IS VISIBLE IN THE BACKGROUND. CREDIT: LANE FARGHER

New findings from an international team of archaeological researchers highlight the complexity of geopolitics in Aztec era Mesoamerica and illustrate how the relationships among ancient states extended beyond warfare and diplomacy to issues concerning trade and the flow of goods.

The work was done by researchers from North Carolina State University, the Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional-Unidad Mérida, El Colegio de Michoacán and Purdue University.

The researchers focused on an independent republic called Tlaxcallan in what is now central Mexico, about 75 miles east of modern Mexico City. Tlaxcallan was founded in the mid-13th century and, by 1500, was effectively surrounded by the Aztec Empire – but never lost its independence. In fact, Tlaxcallan supported Cortés and played a critical role in the Spanish Conquest of Mexico in the 16th century.

The new research focuses on where the people of Tlaxcallan obtained their obsidian in the century before the arrival of Cortés. Obsidian is a volcanic glass that was widely used in everything from household tools and weapons to jewelry and religious objects. But Tlaxcallan did not have a source of obsidian within its territory – so where did it come from?

“It turns out that Tlaxcallan relied on a source we hadn’t expected, called El Paredón,” says Dr. John Millhauser, an assistant professor of anthropology at NC State and lead author of a paper on the work. “Almost no one else was using El Paredón at the time, and it fell just outside the boundaries of the Aztec Empire. So, one question it raises is why the Aztecs – who were openly hostile to Tlaxcallan – didn’t intervene.”

One possible explanation is that the Aztecs didn’t intervene because it would have been too much effort. “Obsidian was widely available and was an everyday good. It probably wasn’t worth the time and expense to try to cut off Tlaxcallan’s supply of obsidian from El Paredón because other sources were available,” Millhauser says.

The finding drives home how complex international relations were during the Aztec Empire’s reign.

“The fact that they got so much obsidian so close to the Aztec Empire makes me question the scope of conflict at the time,” Millhauser says. “Tlaxcallan was able to access a source of household and military goods from a source that required it to go right up to the border of enemy territory.”

At the same time, the research makes clear that there was an economic rift between Tlaxcallan and the Aztecs. Previous research shows that more than 90 percent of Aztec obsidian came from a source called Pachuca, further to the north. But the new research finds that only 14 percent of the obsidian at Tlaxcallan was from Pachuca – most of the rest came from El Paredón.

For this study, the researchers systematically collected artifacts from the surfaces of stone-walled terraces at the site of the pre-Columbian city of Tlaxcallan. A representative number of the artifacts were then analyzed using x-ray fluorescence. This information was compared with samples from known sources of obsidian in the region to determine where the obsidian artifacts came from.

“All of this drives home the fact that geopolitics mattered for the economies of ancient states,” Millhauser says. “Political stances and political boundaries influenced everyday behavior, down to the flow of basic commodities like obsidian. The popular conception of the Aztec Empire as all powerful before the arrival of Cortés is exaggerated. The region was a politically and culturally complicated place.”

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The paper, “The Geopolitics of Obsidian Supply in Postclassic Tlaxcallan: A Portable X-Ray Fluorescence Study,” was published online March 25 in the Journal of Archaeological Science. The paper was co-authored by Dr. Lane Fargher of the Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional-Unidad Mérida; Dr. Verenice Heredia Espinoza, of El Colegio de Michoacán; and Dr. Richard Blanton, of Purdue University.

The research was done with support from the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, the Elemental Analysis Facility of the Field Museum of Natural History, The Grainger Foundation, Purdue University, the Colegio de Michoacán, FAMSI, the National Geographical Society (under grant number 8008-06), and the National Science Foundation (under grant number BCS-0809643).

On Reverse Engineering (Anthropology and Algorithms)

31/03/2015UncategorizedAntropologia, Cultura material, Engenharia reversa, Mediação tecnológica, Netflix, Tecnologiarenzotaddei

Nick Seaver on Jan 27, 2014

Looking for the cultural work of engineers

The Atlantic welcomed 2014 with a major feature on web behemoth Netflix. If you didn’t know, Netflix has developed a system for tagging movies and for assembling those tags into phrases that look like hyper-specific genre names: Visually-striking Foreign Nostalgic Dramas, Critically-acclaimed Emotional Underdog Movies, Romantic Chinese Crime Movies, and so on. The sometimes absurd specificity of these names (or “altgenres,” as Netflix calls them) is one of the peculiar pleasures of the contemporary web, recalling the early days of website directories and Usenet newsgroups, when it seemed like the internet would be a grand hotel, providing a room for any conceivable niche.

Netflix’s weird genres piqued the interest of Atlantic editor Alexis Madrigal, who set about scraping the whole list. Working from the US in late 2013, his scraper bot turned up a startling 76,897 genre names — clearly the emanations of some unseen algorithmic force. How were they produced? What was their generative logic? What made them so good—plausible, specific, with some inexpressible touch of the human? Pursuing these mysteries brought Madrigal to the world of corpus analysis software and eventually to Netflix’s Silicon Valley offices.

The resulting article is an exemplary piece of contemporary web journalism — a collaboratively produced, tech-savvy 5,000-word “long read” that is both an exposé of one of the largest internet companies (by volume) and a reflection on what it is like to be human with machines. It is supported by a very entertaining altgenre-generating widget, built by professor and software carpenter Ian Bogost and illustrated by Twitter mystery darth. Madrigal pieces the story together with his signature curiosity and enthusiasm, and the result feels so now that future corpus analysts will be able to use it as a model to identify texts written in the United States from 2013–14. You really should read it.

A Māori eel trap. The design and construction of traps (or filters) like this are classic topics of interest for anthropologists of technology. cc-by-sa-3.0

As a cultural anthropologist in the middle of a long-term research project on algorithmic filtering systems, I am very interested in how people think about companies like Netflix, which take engineering practices and apply them to cultural materials. In the popular imagination, these do not go well together: engineering is about universalizable things like effectiveness, rationality, and algorithms, while culture is about subjective and particular things, like taste, creativity, and artistic expression. Technology and culture, we suppose, make an uneasy mix. When Felix Salmon, in his response to Madrigal’s feature, complains about “the systematization of the ineffable,” he is drawing on this common sense: engineers who try to wrangle with culture inevitably botch it up.

Yet, in spite of their reputations, we always seem to find technology and culture intertwined. The culturally-oriented engineering of companies like Netflix is a quite explicit case, but there are many others. Movies, for example, are a cultural form dependent on a complicated system of technical devices — cameras, editing equipment, distribution systems, and so on. Technologies that seem strictly practical — like the Māori eel trap pictured above—are influenced by ideas about effectiveness, desired outcomes, and interpretations of the natural world, all of which vary cross-culturally. We may talk about technology and culture as though they were independent domains, but in practice, they never stay where they belong. Technology’s straightforwardness and culture’s contingency bleed into each other.

This can make it hard to talk about what happens when engineers take on cultural objects. We might suppose that it is a kind of invasion: The rationalizers and quantifiers are over the ridge! They’re coming for our sensitive expressions of the human condition! But if technology and culture are already mixed up with each other, then this doesn’t make much sense. Aren’t the rationalizers expressing their own cultural ideas? Aren’t our sensitive expressions dependent on our tools? In the present moment, as companies like Netflix proliferate, stories trying to make sense of the relationship between culture and technology also proliferate. In my own research, I examine these stories, as told by people from a variety of positions relative to the technology in question. There are many such stories, and they can have far-reaching consequences for how technical systems are designed, built, evaluated, and understood.

The story Madrigal tells in The Atlantic is framed in terms of “reverse engineering.” The engineers of Netflix have not invaded cultural turf — they’ve reverse engineered it and figured out how it works. To report on this reverse engineering, Madrigal has done some of his own, trying to figure out the organizing principles behind the altgenre system. So, we have two uses of reverse engineering here: first, it is a way to describe what engineers do to cultural stuff; second, it is a way to figure out what engineers do.

So what does “reverse engineering” mean? What kind of things can be reverse engineered? What assumptions does reverse engineering make about its objects? Like any frame, reverse engineering constrains as well as enables the presentation of certain stories. I want to suggest here that, while reverse engineering might be a useful strategy for figuring out how an existing technology works, it is less useful for telling us how it came to work that way. Because reverse engineering starts from a finished technical object, it misses the accidents that happened along the way — the abandoned paths, the unusual stories behind features that made it to release, moments of interpretation, arbitrary choice, and failure. Decisions that seemed rather uncertain and subjective as they were being made come to appear necessary in retrospect. Engineering looks a lot different in reverse.

This is especially evident in the case of explicitly cultural technologies. Where “technology” brings to mind optimization, functionality, and necessity, “culture” seems to represent the opposite: variety, interpretation, and arbitrariness. Because it works from a narrowly technical view of what engineering entails, reverse engineering has a hard time telling us about the cultural work of engineers. It is telling that the word “culture” never appears in this piece about the contemporary state of the culture industry.

Inspired by Madrigal’s article, here are some notes on the consequences of reverse engineering for how we think about the cultural lives of engineers. As culture and technology continue to escape their designated places and intertwine, we need ways to talk about them that don’t assume they can be cleanly separated.

There is a terrible movie about reverse engineering, based on a short story by Philip K. Dick. It is called Paycheck, stars Ben Affleck, and is not currently available for streaming on Netflix. In it, Affleck plays a professional reverse engineer (the “best in the business”), who is hired by companies to figure out the secrets of their competitors. After doing this, his memory of the experience is wiped and in return, he is compensated very well. Affleck is a sort of intellectual property conduit: he extracts secrets from devices, and having moved those secrets from one company to another, they are then extracted from him. As you might expect, things go wrong: Affleck wakes up one day to find that he has forfeited his payment in exchange for an envelope of apparently worthless trinkets and, even worse, his erstwhile employer now wants to kill him. The trinkets turn out to be important in unexpected ways as Affleck tries to recover the facts that have been stricken from his memory. The movie’s tagline is “Remember the Future”—you get the idea.

Paycheck illustrates a very popular way of thinking about engineering knowledge. To know about something is to know the facts about how it works. These facts are like physical objects — they can be hidden (inside of technologies, corporations, envelopes, or brains), and they can be retrieved and moved around. In this way of thinking about knowledge, facts that we don’t yet know are typically hidden on the other side of some barrier. To know through reverse engineering is to know by trying to pull those pre-existing facts out.

This is why reverse engineering is sometimes used as a metaphor in the sciences to talk about revealing the secrets of Nature. When biologists “reverse engineer” a cell, for example, they are trying to uncover its hidden functional principles. This kind of work is often described as “pulling back the curtain” on nature (or, in older times, as undressing a sexualized, female Nature — the kind of thing we in academia like to call “problematic”). Nature, if she were a person, holds the secrets her reverse engineers want.

In the more conventional sense of the term, reverse engineering is concerned with uncovering secrets held by engineers. Unlike its use in the natural sciences, here reverse engineering presupposes that someone already knows what we want to find out. Accessing this kind of information is often described as “pulling back the curtain” on a company. (This is likely the unfortunate naming logic behind Kimono, a new service for scraping websites and automatically generating APIs to access the scraped data.) Reverse engineering is not concerned with producing “new” knowledge, but with extracting facts from one place and relocating them to another.

Reverse engineering (and I guess this is obvious) is concerned with finished technologies, so it presumes that there is a straightforward fact of the matter to be worked out. Something happened to Ben Affleck before his memory was wiped, and eventually he will figure it out. This is not Rashomon, which suggests there might be multiple interpretations of the same event (although that isn’t available for streaming either). The problem is that this narrow scope doesn’t capture everything we might care about: why this technology and not another one? If a technology is constantly changing, like the algorithms and data structures under the hood at Netflix, then why is it changing as it does? Reverse engineering, at best, can only tell you the what, not the why or the how. But it even has some trouble with the what.

“Fantastic powers at his command / And I’m sure that he will understand / He’s the Wiz and he lives in Oz”

Netflix, like most companies today, is surrounded by a curtain of non-disclosure agreements and intellectual property protections. This curtain animates Madrigal’s piece, hiding the secrets that his reverse engineering is aimed at. For people inside the curtain, nothing in his article is news. What is newsworthy, Madrigal writes, is that “no one outside the company has ever assembled this data before.” The existence of the curtain shapes what we imagine knowledge about Netflix to be: something possessed by people on the inside and lacked by people on the outside.

So, when Madrigal’s reverse engineering runs out of steam, the climax of the story comes and the curtain is pulled back to reveal the “Wizard of Oz, the man who made the machine”: Netflix’s VP of Product Innovation Todd Yellin. Here is the guy who holds the secrets behind the altgenres, the guy with the knowledge about how Netflix has tried to bridge the world of engineering and the world of cultural production. According to the logic of reverse engineering, Yellin should be able to tell us everything we want to know.

From Yellin, Madrigal learns about the extensiveness of the tagging that happens behind the curtain. He learns some things that he can’t share publicly, and he learns of the existence of even more secrets — the contents of the training manual which dictate how movies are to be entered into the system. But when it comes to how that massive data and intelligence infrastructure was put together, he learns this:

“It’s a real combination: machine-learned, algorithms, algorithmic syntax,” Yellin said, “and also a bunch of geeks who love this stuff going deep.”

This sentence says little more than “we did it with computers,” and it illustrates a problem for the reverse engineer: there is always another curtain to get behind. Scraping altgenres will only get you so far, and even when you get “behind the curtain,” companies like Netflix are only willing to sketch out their technical infrastructure in broad strokes. In more technically oriented venues or the academic research community, you may learn more, but you will never get all the way to the bottom of things. The Wizard of Oz always holds on to his best secrets.

But not everything we want to know is a trade secret. While reverse engineers may be frustrated by the first part of Yellin’s sentence — the vagueness of “algorithms, algorithmic syntax” — it’s the second part that hides the encounter between culture and technology: What does it look like when “geeks who love this stuff go deep”? How do the people who make the algorithms understand the “deepness” of cultural stuff? How do the loves of geeks inform the work of geeks? The answers to these questions are not hidden away as proprietary technical information; they’re often evident in the ways engineers talk about and work with their objects. But because reverse engineering focuses narrowly on revealing technical secrets, it fails to piece together how engineers imagine and engage with culture. For those of us interested in the cultural ramifications of algorithmic filtering, these imaginings and engagements—not usually secret, but often hard to access — are more consequential than the specifics of implementation, which are kept secret and frequently change.

“My first goal was: tear apart content!”

While Yellin may not have told us enough about the technical secrets of Netflix to create a competitor, he has given us some interesting insights into the way he thinks about movies and how to understand them. If you’re familiar with research on algorithmic recommenders, you’ll recognize the system he describes as an example of content-based recommendation. Where “classic” recommender systems rely on patterns in ratings data and have little need for other information, content-based systems try to understand the material they recommend, through various forms of human or algorithmic analysis. These analyses are a lot of work, but over the past decade, with the increasing availability of data and analytical tools, content-based recommendation has become more popular. Most big recommender systems today (including Netflix’s) are hybrids, drawing on both user ratings and data about the content of recommended items.

The “reverse engineering of Hollywood” is the content side of things: Netflix’s effort to parse movies into its database so that they can be recommended based on their content. By calling this parsing “reverse engineering,” Madrigal implies that there is a singular fact of the matter to be retrieved from these movies, and as a result, he focuses his description on Netflix’s thoroughness. What is tagged? “Everything. Everyone.” But the kind of parsing Yellin describes is not the only way to understand cultural objects; rather, it is a specific and recognizable mode of interpretation. It bears a strong resemblance to structuralism — a style of cultural analysis that had its heyday in the humanities and social sciences during the mid-20th century.

Structuralism, according to Roland Barthes, is a way of interpreting objects by decomposing them into parts and then recomposing those parts into new wholes. By breaking a text apart and putting it back together, the structuralist aims to understand its underlying structure: what order lurks under the surface of apparently idiosyncratic objects?

For example, the arch-structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss took such an approach in his study of myth. Take the Oedipus myth: there are many different ways to tell the same basic story, in which a baby is abandoned in the wilderness and then grows up to unknowingly kill his father, marry his mother, and blind himself when he finds out (among other things). But, across different tellings of the myth, there is a fairly persistent set of elements that make up the story. Lévi-Strauss called these elements “mythemes” (after linguistic “phonemes”). By breaking myths down into their constituent parts, you could see patterns that linked them together, not only across different tellings of the “same” myth, but even across apparently disparate myths from other cultures. Through decomposition and recomposition, structuralists sought what Barthes called the object’s “rules of functioning.” These rules, governing the combination of mythemes, were the object of Lévi-Strauss’s cultural analysis.

Todd Yellin is, by all appearances, a structuralist. He tells Madrigal that his goal was to “tear apart content” and create a “Netflix Quantum Theory,” under which movies could be broken down into their constituent parts — into “quanta” or the “little ‘packets of energy’ that compose each movie.” Those quanta eventually became “microtags,” which Madrigal tells us are used to describe everything in the movie. Large teams of human taggers are trained, using a 36-page secret manual, and they go to town, decomposing movies into microtags. Take those tags, recompose them, and you get the altgenres, a weird sort of structuralist production intended to help you find things in Netflix’s pool of movies. If Lévi-Strauss had lived to be 104 instead of just 100, he might have had some thoughts about this computerized structuralism: in his 1955 article on the structural study of myth, he suggested that further advances would require mathematicians and “I.B.M. equipment” to handle the complicated analysis. Structuralism and computers go way back.

Although structuralism sounds like a fairly technical way to analyze cultural material, it is not, strictly speaking, objective. When you break an object down into its parts and put it back together again, you have not simply copied it — you’ve made something new. A movie’s set of microtags, no matter how fine-grained, is not the same thing as the movie. It is, as Barthes writes, a “directed, interested simulacrum” of the movie, a re-creation made with particular goals in mind. If you had different goals — different ideas about what the significant parts of movies were, different imagined use-cases — you might decompose differently. There is more than one way to tear apart content.

This does not jive well with common sense ideas about what engineering is like. Instead of the cold, rational pursuit of optimal solutions, we have something a little more creative. We have options, a variety of choices which are all potentially valid, depending on a range of contextual factors not exhausted by obviously “technical” concerns. Barthes suggested that composing a structuralist analysis was like composing a poem, and engineering is likewise expressive. Netflix’s altgenres are in no way the final statement on the movies. They are, rather, one statement among many — a cultural production in their own right, influenced by local assumptions about meaning, relevance, and taste. “Reverse engineering” seems a poor name for this creative practice, because it implies a singular right answer — a fact of the matter that merely needs to be retrieved from the insides of the movies. We might instead, more accurately, call this work “interpretation.”

So, where does this leave us with reverse engineering? There are two questions at issue here:

Does “reverse engineering” as a term adequately describe the work that engineers like those employed at Netflix do when they interact with cultural objects?
Is reverse engineering a useful strategy for figuring out what engineers do?

The answer to both of these questions, I think, is a measured “no,” and for the same reason: reverse engineering, as both a descriptor and a research strategy, misses the things engineers do that do not fit into conventional ideas about engineering. In the ongoing mixture of culture and technology, reverse engineering sticks too closely to the idealized vision of technical work. Because it assumes engineers care strictly about functionality and efficiency, it is not very good at telling stories about accidents, interpretations, and arbitrary choices. It assumes that cultural objects or practices (like movies or engineering) can be reduced to singular, universally-intelligible logics. It takes corporate spokespeople at their word when they claim that there was a straight line from conception to execution.

As Nicholas Diakopoulos has written, reverse engineering can be a useful way to figure out what obscured technologies do, but it cannot get us answers to “the question of why.” As these obscured technologies — search engines, recommender systems, and other algorithmic filters — are constantly refined, we need better ways to talk about the whys and hows of engineering as a practice, not only the what of engineered objects that immediately change.

The risk of reverse engineering is that we come to imagine that the only things worth knowing about companies like Netflix are the technical details hidden behind the curtain. In my own research, I argue that the cultural lives and imaginations of the people behind the curtain are as important, if not more, for understanding how these systems come to exist and function as they do. Moreover, these details are not generally considered corporate secrets, so they are accessible if we look for them. Not everything worth knowing has been actively hidden, and transparency can conceal as much as it reveals.

All engineering mixes culture and technology. Even Madrigal’s “reverse engineering” does not stay put in technical bounds: he supplements the work of his bot by talking with people, drawing on their interpretations and offering his own, reading the altgenres, populated with serendipitous algorithmic accidents, as “a window unto the American soul.” Engineers, reverse and otherwise, have cultural lives, and these lives inform their technical work. To see these effects, we need to get beyond the idea that the technical and the cultural are necessarily distinct. But if we want to understand the work of companies like Netflix, it is not enough to simply conclude that culture and technology — humans and computers — are mixed. The question we need to answer is how.

Here’s Why Companies Are Desperate To Hire Anthropologists (Business Insider)

20/03/2015UncategorizedAntropologia, Capitalismo, Etnografia, Métodos de pesquisa, Mercadorenzotaddei

DRAKE BAER

MAR. 27, 2014, 4:22 PM

red associates talking

ReD Associates. A Red Associates staffer consults with a client

At a time when we’re debating the value of majoring in the humanities, major companies are increasingly hiring anthropologists.

Google, for example, hired an ethnographer to ferret out the meaning of mobile. Intel has an in-house cultural anthropologist, and Microsoft is reportedly the second-largest employer of anthropologists in the world.

So the question becomes: Why are giant corporations now seeking cultural expertise?

While most execs are masters of analyzing spreadsheets, creating processes, and pitching products, anthropologists — and other practitioners of applied social science — can arrive at customer insights that big data tends to gloss over, especially around the role that products play in people’s lives.

That information is more valuable than you might think. What customers want from a product and what companies think they want can be totally different, but it can take an anthropological lens to learn why.

Take Adidas, for example. The brand has always been associated with elite performance: Jesse Owens, Muhammad Ali, and Zinedine Zidane all wore the brand. Founded by cobbler and athlete Adi Dassler in 1948, the assumption within the company had been that people bought athletic gear to gain a competitive edge. But in the early 2000s VP James Carnes noticed something strange: He kept running into people who were jogging around the city, headed to the gym, or on their way to yoga.

While they led the active lives of potential customers, these people weren’t training for a competition. “Is yoga a sport?” Carnes asked in an offsite meeting in 2003.

Trying to figure out the disconnect, he brought in a consultancy called Red Associates, which has a client list that includes Intel, Samsung, and Carlsberg, the European beer giant. Unlike elite consulting firms such as McKinsey, Red isn’t in the business of big data and management science. Instead, it focuses on arriving at insights that can only be found through the applied liberal arts, or what it calls “the human sciences,” a strategy that is detailed in its new book “Moment of Clarity: Using the Human Sciences To Solve Your Toughest Business Problems.” That’s why most of the Red’s 70-some employees aren’t MBAs; they come from disciplines like philosophy, sociology, and anthropology.

When Red collaborated with Adidas, it trained members of Adidas’s design team in conducting anthropological research. Design staffers spent 24 hours straight with customers, eating breakfast with them, joining them on runs, and asking them why they worked out. As detailed in the Economist, a Red staffer sent disposable cameras to customers, asking them to take a picture of the reason they exercised. Thirty women responded, and 25 of them sent a picture of a little black dress.

A little black dress is quite different than a marathon finish line or gold trophy.

To use a favorite word of Red partner Christian Madsbjerg, the little black dress shows an “asymmetry.” The traditional thinking at Adidas was that people bought their gear to help them win. But after observing their behavior through the lens of anthropology, it became clear that customers wanted products to help them lead healthy lifestyles, not win competitions.

Christian Madsbjerg red associates

Christian Madsbjerg, a Red Associates partner

How had Adidas misunderstood its customers for so long? Because Adidas executives thought they understood their customers’ motivations and lives, but they had never observed them closely enough.

Running, mountain biking, hitting the gym, going to yoga — people did these things to live healthier lives. But these “urban sports” weren’t like the traditional competitions that the company was originally organized around.

That was Carnes’s realization: His consumer’s definition of “sport” had changed, and his company had to change along with it. As described in “Moment of Clarity”:

If urban sports are on par with basketball or soccer, Adidas must then deliver on products with functionality, aesthetics, and quality. Adidas must lead, not copy in this whole new category of lifestyle sport …

The company went from being a sports brand exclusively for athletes … to becoming an inclusive brand inviting all of us to join a movement of living a healthier and better life. It went from creating corporate credos aimed at high-performance sports aficionados, such as “Impossible is nothing,” to sending democratic, yet aspirational message like “All In.”

With the help of Red, Adidas was able to understand the world of its customers. Interestingly, it’s the human sciences — literature, arts, anthropology — that allow for understanding the unique worlds that people live in. By observing people’s daily lives and the ways in which they interact with products, consultancies like Red are able to discern what products mean to customers in a way that big data can’t determine.

Why literature helps you understand customers

“If you look at launches of a new product, most of them fail,” Madsbjerg says. “That’s because people don’t understand the worlds in which we operate.”

The problem with standard corporate research, Madsbjerg says, is that it’s incredibly difficult to get around your own preconceptions. Even if your analytics are fresh, you’ll read old assumptions into them. By applying the humanities, however, you can get around them.

Say, for instance, you read an epic novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In doing so, you’re not just processing words on a page, you’re beginning to understand a character’s world in Russia in a specific place, specific time, and from a specific perspective. To hear Red tell it, making an empathetic understanding of a character in a novel is very much like trying to understand a customer — Ford, after all, would be immensely interested in the world of someone buying a car.

It’s anthropological research, like Red helped the Adidas design team with, that allows for understanding the customer’s world.

This is different from the approach of most corporations, which rely on measures like surveys and focus groups. The problem with those is that people have a terrible time reporting their own preferences, Madsbjerg says. In one Swedish study, for instance, everyone reported that they were an exceptional driver, which is obviously impossible. By the same token, asking customers to tell you why they like a particular vodka doesn’t necessarily reveal their motivations.

That’s why Red emphasizes ethnographic interviewing, where you interview a subject again and again and observe them in a range of environments, looking for patterns of behavior. The long-form, in-depth research helps to reveal the worlds that people live in and their real motivations. Major insights follow — that little black dress told Adidas way more about their customers’ world than a survey ever could.

Finding an industry’s need

In another case, Red consulted for a leading pharmaceutical company specializing in diabetes. Back in the day, it was common practice for sales reps to use a “frequency and reach” strategy, talking to as many doctors as possible and pushing a brand message. The sales reps would get the time with doctors by giving them free flights and concert tickets. But then the law changed, and giving swag to doctors was made illegal. All of a sudden what was once a long courtship turned into a 90-second phone call.

In order to sell drugs in this new situation, they needed to recalibrate the conversation.

During the course of interviewing physicians, Red discovered a major concern that most doctors shared: “How do I get my patients to understand their conditions? How do I change their lifestyles?” Medication, it turned out, was the third most important aspect of treating diabetes — diet and exercise were much more vital.

As a result, Red’s associates worked with doctors to find different ways to help people change their diets, and they worked with sales reps to present that info to doctors. Since so many of the diabetes patients didn’t know how to cook, basic meal preparation became part of the sales material. Correspondingly, the pharmaceutical company became way more resonant: By understanding the world of the doctor, the brand saw a 15% increase in key indicators, like doctors’ trust.

The secret was to understand the world of the physicians and to give them what they needed, even if they didn’t consciously realize it yet.

Did a Volcanic Cataclysm 40,000 Years Ago Trigger the Final Demise of the Neanderthals? (Geological Society of America)

20/03/2015UncategorizedAntropoceno, Antropologia, Antropologia física, Desastre, Extinção, Geologia, Neandertaisrenzotaddei

19 March 2015

Boulder, Colo., USA – The Campanian Ignimbrite (CI) eruption in Italy 40,000 years ago was one of the largest volcanic cataclysms in Europe and injected a significant amount of sulfur-dioxide (SO2) into the stratosphere. Scientists have long debated whether this eruption contributed to the final extinction of the Neanderthals. This new study by Benjamin A. Black and colleagues tests this hypothesis with a sophisticated climate model.

Black and colleagues write that the CI eruption approximately coincided with the final decline of Neanderthals as well as with dramatic territorial and cultural advances among anatomically modern humans. Because of this, the roles of climate, hominin competition, and volcanic sulfur cooling and acid deposition have been vigorously debated as causes of Neanderthal extinction.

They point out, however, that the decline of Neanderthals in Europe began well before the CI eruption: “Radiocarbon dating has shown that at the time of the CI eruption, anatomically modern humans had already arrived in Europe, and the range of Neanderthals had steadily diminished. Work at five sites in the Mediterranean indicates that anatomically modern humans were established in these locations by then as well.”

“While the precise implications of the CI eruption for cultures and livelihoods are best understood in the context of archaeological data sets,” write Black and colleagues, the results of their study quantitatively describe the magnitude and distribution of the volcanic cooling and acid deposition that ancient hominin communities experienced coincident with the final decline of the Neanderthals.

In their climate simulations, Black and colleagues found that the largest temperature decreases after the eruption occurred in Eastern Europe and Asia and sidestepped the areas where the final Neanderthal populations were living (Western Europe). Therefore, the authors conclude that the eruption was probably insufficient to trigger Neanderthal extinction.

However, the abrupt cold spell that followed the eruption would still have significantly impacted day-to-day life for Neanderthals and early humans in Europe. Black and colleagues point out that temperatures in Western Europe would have decreased by an average of 2 to 4 degrees Celsius during the year following the eruption. These unusual conditions, they write, may have directly influenced survival and day-to-day life for Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans alike, and emphasize the resilience of anatomically modern humans in the face of abrupt and adverse changes in the environment.

FEATURED ARTICLE
Campanian Ignimbrite volcanism, climate, and the final decline of the Neanderthals
Benjamin A. Black et al., University of California, Berkeley, California, USA. Published online ahead of print on 19 March 2015; http://dx.doi.org/10.1130/G36514.1.

Inuits do Canadá: uma longa jornada de volta (Estadão)

04/03/2015UncategorizedAntropologia, Índios, ciência, Colonialismo, História, História da ciência, Inuit, Museus, Patrimôniorenzotaddei

The Economist

04 Março 2015 | 03h 00

Esqueletos foram descobertos há pouco tempo em um museu francês, mas caminho para repatriá-los não é fácil

Em agosto de 1880, oito Inuits da costa nordeste do Canadá aceitaram viajar para a Europa a fim de serem exibidos em um zoológico humano. Pouco depois, morriam de varíola, antes de retornar ao seu lar. Os esqueletos de Abraham Ulrikab e da maior parte dos seus companheiros foram descobertos há pouco tempo, montados completamente nos depósitos de um museu francês para serem exibidos. Os anciãos Inuits querem que os restos mortais de seu povo, até mesmo dos que morreram longe dos territórios de caça do Norte, nos séculos 19 e 20, voltem para o seu país. Mas isso levará muito tempo.

O governo de Nunatsiavut, uma região Inuit do norte do Labrador criada em 2005, já recuperou restos humanos de museus de Chicago e da Terranova. David Lough, vice-ministro da Cultura de Nunatsiavut, não sabe ao certo quantos outros há para serem reclamados. Mas ele acredita que, em 500 anos de contato entre o Labrador e o mundo exterior, muitas pessoas e artefatos foram parar do outro lado do oceano. Nancy Columbia fez parte de um grupo encarregado de apresentar a cultura Inuit na Feira Mundial de Chicago, e chegou a Hollywood, onde estrelou filmes western como princesa americana nativa.

The New York Times

Governo procura descendentes para definir o que será feito

Até pouco tempo atrás, os museus resistiam a devolver restos humanos, em nome da ciência e da preservação da cultura. As múmias egípcias do Museu Britânico e as tsantsas (cabeças encolhidas) do Amazonas, do Museu Pitt Rivers de Oxford, são as peças mais importantes de suas coleções. Mas, pressionados por grupos indígenas, começaram a ceder. A Declaração sobre os Direitos das Nações Indígenas da ONU, adotada em 2007, consagra o direito de reclamar restos humanos, assim como a legislação em Grã-Bretanha, Austrália e Estados Unidos (mas não a do Canadá). Dezenas de museus (incluindo o Museu Britânico e o Pitt Rivers) elaboraram políticas de repatriação e códigos éticos sobre o tratamento a ser dado a restos mortais. O Museu do Homem da França, onde os esqueletos de Abraham Ulrikab e seus companheiros estão guardados, pretende devolvê-los, afirma France Rivet, autora de um novo livro sobre a saga do grupo. “Eles aguardam apenas uma solicitação do Canadá”, afirma.

A solicitação não chegou, diz Lough, em parte porque “os Inuits querem que todos sejam consultados”. A frágil situação das comunidades Inuit torna isso difícil. Hebron, terra natal da família Ulrikab, foi fundada por missionários da Morávia. Mas o assentamento foi abandonado em 1959, quando a missão fechou; os descendentes da família se dispersaram. Eles deverão ser encontrados para ajudar a decidir onde os restos deverão ser sepultados e o tipo de cerimônia que será realizado. Nakvak, local de origem de outros integrantes do grupo original, agora fica no Parque Nacional das Montanhas Torngat, e existem obstáculos burocráticos para utilizá-lo como local de sepultamento.

Somente depois que os Inuits decidirem o que fazer com os restos mortais as negociações poderão começar entre os governos do Canadá e da França a respeito de sua devolução e do pagamento dos custos da repatriação. Em 2013, Stephen Harper, primeiro-ministro do Canadá, e o presidente da França, François Hollande, concordaram em colaborar para a repatriação. Mas a África do Sul esperou oito anos por Saartjie Baartman, a “Vênus hotentote”, depois que Nelson Mandela solicitou seu regresso, em 1994. Para Abraham Ulrikab e seus amigos, pelo menos, a jornada de volta começou.

Physics’s pangolin (AEON)

23/02/2015UncategorizedAntropologia, ciência, Complexidade, Física, Linguagem, Mary Douglas, Matemática, Paradigmasrenzotaddei

Trying to resolve the stubborn paradoxes of their field, physicists craft ever more mind-boggling visions of reality

by Margaret Wertheim

Margaret Wertheim is an Australian-born science writer and director of the Institute For Figuring in Los Angeles. Her latest book is Physics on the Fringe (2011).

Theoretical physics is beset by a paradox that remains as mysterious today as it was a century ago: at the subatomic level things are simultaneously particles and waves. Like the duck-rabbit illusion first described in 1899 by the Polish-born American psychologist Joseph Jastrow, subatomic reality appears to us as two different categories of being.

But there is another paradox in play. Physics itself is riven by the competing frameworks of quantum theory and general relativity, whose differing descriptions of our world eerily mirror the wave-particle tension. When it comes to the very big and the extremely small, physical reality appears to be not one thing, but two. Where quantum theory describes the subatomic realm as a domain of individual quanta, all jitterbug and jumps, general relativity depicts happenings on the cosmological scale as a stately waltz of smooth flowing space-time. General relativity is like Strauss — deep, dignified and graceful. Quantum theory, like jazz, is disconnected, syncopated, and dazzlingly modern.

Physicists are deeply aware of the schizophrenic nature of their science and long to find a synthesis, or unification. Such is the goal of a so-called ‘theory of everything’. However, to non-physicists, these competing lines of thought, and the paradoxes they entrain, can seem not just bewildering but absurd. In my experience as a science writer, no other scientific discipline elicits such contradictory responses.

In string cosmology, the totality of existing universes exceeds the number of particles in our universe by more than 400 orders of magnitude

This schism was brought home to me starkly some months ago when, in the course of a fortnight, I happened to participate in two public discussion panels, one with a cosmologist at Caltech, Pasadena, the other with a leading literary studies scholar from the University of Southern Carolina. On the panel with the cosmologist, a researcher whose work I admire, the discussion turned to time, about which he had written a recent, and splendid, book. Like philosophers, physicists have struggled with the concept of time for centuries, but now, he told us, they had locked it down mathematically and were on the verge of a final state of understanding. In my Caltech friend’s view, physics is a progression towards an ever more accurate and encompassing Truth. My literary theory panellist was having none of this. A Lewis Carroll scholar, he had joined me for a discussion about mathematics in relation to literature, art and science. For him, maths was a delightful form of play, a ludic formalism to be admired and enjoyed; but any claims physicists might make about truth in their work were, in his view, ‘nonsense’. This mathematically based science, he said, was just ‘another kind of storytelling’.

On the one hand, then, physics is taken to be a march toward an ultimate understanding of reality; on the other, it is seen as no different in status to the understandings handed down to us by myth, religion and, no less, literary studies. Because I spend my time about equally in the realms of the sciences and arts, I encounter a lot of this dualism. Depending on whom I am with, I find myself engaging in two entirely different kinds of conversation. Can we all be talking about the same subject?

Many physicists are Platonists, at least when they talk to outsiders about their field. They believe that the mathematical relationships they discover in the world about us represent some kind of transcendent truth existing independently from, and perhaps a priori to, the physical world. In this way of seeing, the universe came into being according to a mathematical plan, what the British physicist Paul Davies has called ‘a cosmic blueprint’. Discovering this ‘plan’ is a goal for many theoretical physicists and the schism in the foundation of their framework is thus intensely frustrating. It’s as if the cosmic architect has designed a fiendish puzzle in which two apparently incompatible parts must be fitted together. Both are necessary, for both theories make predictions that have been verified to a dozen or so decimal places, and it is on the basis of these theories that we have built such marvels as microchips, lasers, and GPS satellites.

Quite apart from the physical tensions that exist between them, relativity and quantum theory each pose philosophical problems. Are space and time fundamental qualities of the universe, as general relativity suggests, or are they byproducts of something even more basic, something that might arise from a quantum process? Looking at quantum mechanics, huge debates swirl around the simplest situations. Does the universe split into multiple copies of itself every time an electron changes orbit in an atom, or every time a photon of light passes through a slit? Some say yes, others say absolutely not.

Theoretical physicists can’t even agree on what the celebrated waves of quantum theory mean. What is doing the ‘waving’? Are the waves physically real, or are they just mathematical representations of probability distributions? Are the ‘particles’ guided by the ‘waves’? And, if so, how? The dilemma posed by wave-particle duality is the tip of an epistemological iceberg on which many ships have been broken and wrecked.

Undeterred, some theoretical physicists are resorting to increasingly bold measures in their attempts to resolve these dilemmas. Take the ‘many-worlds’ interpretation of quantum theory, which proposes that every time a subatomic action takes place the universe splits into multiple, slightly different, copies of itself, with each new ‘world’ representing one of the possible outcomes.

When this idea was first proposed in 1957 by the American physicist Hugh Everett, it was considered an almost lunatic-fringe position. Even 20 years later, when I was a physics student, many of my professors thought it was a kind of madness to go down this path. Yet in recent years the many-worlds position has become mainstream. The idea of a quasi-infinite, ever-proliferating array of universes has been given further credence as a result of being taken up by string theorists, who argue that every mathematically possible version of the string theory equations corresponds to an actually existing universe, and estimate that there are 10 to the power of 500 different possibilities. To put this in perspective: physicists believe that in our universe there are approximately 10 to the power of 80 subatomic particles. In string cosmology, the totality of existing universes exceeds the number of particles in our universe by more than 400 orders of magnitude.

Nothing in our experience compares to this unimaginably vast number. Every universe that can be mathematically imagined within the string parameters — including ones in which you exist with a prehensile tail, to use an example given by the American string theorist Brian Greene — is said to be manifest somewhere in a vast supra-spatial array ‘beyond’ the space-time bubble of our own universe.

What is so epistemologically daring here is that the equations are taken to be the fundamental reality. The fact that the mathematics allows for gazillions of variations is seen to be evidence for gazillions of actual worlds.

Perhaps what we are encountering here is not so much the edge of reality, but the limits of the physicists’ category system

This kind of reification of equations is precisely what strikes some humanities scholars as childishly naive. At the very least, it raises serious questions about the relationship between our mathematical models of reality, and reality itself. While it is true that in the history of physics many important discoveries have emerged from revelations within equations — Paul Dirac’s formulation for antimatter being perhaps the most famous example — one does not need to be a cultural relativist to feel sceptical about the idea that the only way forward now is to accept an infinite cosmic ‘landscape’ of universes that embrace every conceivable version of world history, including those in which the Middle Ages never ended or Hitler won.

In the 30 years since I was a student, physicists’ interpretations of their field have increasingly tended toward literalism, while the humanities have tilted towards postmodernism. Thus a kind of stalemate has ensued. Neither side seems inclined to contemplate more nuanced views. It is hard to see ways out of this tunnel, but in the work of the late British anthropologist Mary Douglas I believe we can find a tool for thinking about some of these questions.

On the surface, Douglas’s great book Purity and Danger (1966) would seem to have nothing do with physics; it is an inquiry into the nature of dirt and cleanliness in cultures across the globe. Douglas studied taboo rituals that deal with the unclean, but her book ends with a far-reaching thesis about human language and the limits of all language systems. Given that physics is couched in the language-system of mathematics, her argument is worth considering here.

In a nutshell, Douglas notes that all languages parse the world into categories; in English, for instance, we call some things ‘mammals’ and other things ‘lizards’ and have no trouble recognising the two separate groups. Yet there are some things that do not fit neatly into either category: the pangolin, or scaly anteater, for example. Though pangolins are warm-blooded like mammals and birth their young, they have armoured bodies like some kind of bizarre lizard. Such definitional monstrosities are not just a feature of English. Douglas notes that all category systems contain liminal confusions, and she proposes that such ambiguity is the essence of what is seen to be impure or unclean.

Whatever doesn’t parse neatly in a given linguistic system can become a source of anxiety to the culture that speaks this language, calling forth special ritual acts whose function, Douglas argues, is actually to acknowledge the limits of language itself. In the Lele culture of the Congo, for example, this epistemological confrontation takes place around a special cult of the pangolin, whose initiates ritualistically eat the abominable animal, thereby sacralising it and processing its ‘dirt’ for the entire society.

‘Powers are attributed to any structure of ideas,’ Douglas writes. We all tend to think that our categories of understanding are necessarily real. ‘The yearning for rigidity is in us all,’ she continues. ‘It is part of our human condition to long for hard lines and clear concepts’. Yet when we have them, she says, ‘we have to either face the fact that some realities elude them, or else blind ourselves to the inadequacy of the concepts’. It is not just the Lele who cannot parse the pangolin: biologists are still arguing about where it belongs on the genetic tree of life.

As Douglas sees it, cultures themselves can be categorised in terms of how well they deal with linguistic ambiguity. Some cultures accept the limits of their own language, and of language itself, by understanding that there will always be things that cannot be cleanly parsed. Others become obsessed with ever-finer levels of categorisation as they try to rid their system of every pangolin-like ‘duck-rabbit’ anomaly. For such societies, Douglas argues, a kind of neurosis ensues, as the project of categorisation takes ever more energy and mental effort. If we take this analysis seriously, then, in Douglas’ terms, might it be that particle-waves are our pangolins? Perhaps what we are encountering here is not so much the edge of reality, but the limits of the physicists’ category system.

In its modern incarnation, physics is grounded in the language of mathematics. It is a so-called ‘hard’ science, a term meant to imply that physics is unfuzzy — unlike, say, biology whose classification systems have always been disputed. Based in mathematics, the classifications of physicists are supposed to have a rigour that other sciences lack, and a good deal of the near-mystical discourse that surrounds the subject hinges on ideas about where the mathematics ‘comes from’.

According to Galileo Galilei and other instigators of what came to be known as the Scientific Revolution, nature was ‘a book’ that had been written by God, who had used the language of mathematics because it was seen to be Platonically transcendent and timeless. While modern physics is no longer formally tied to Christian faith, its long association with religion lingers in the many references that physicists continue to make about ‘the mind of God’, and many contemporary proponents of a ‘theory of everything’ remain Platonists at heart.

It’s a startling thought, in an age when we can read the speed of our cars from our digitised dashboards, that somebody had to discover ‘velocity’

In order to articulate a more nuanced conception of what physics is, we need to offer an alternative to Platonism. We need to explain how the mathematics ‘arises’ in the world, in ways other than assuming that it was put there there by some kind of transcendent being or process. To approach this question dispassionately, it is necessary to abandon the beautiful but loaded metaphor of the cosmic book — and all its authorial resonances — and focus, not the creation of the world, but on the creation of physics as a science.

When we say that ‘mathematics is the language of physics’, we mean that physicists consciously comb the world for patterns that are mathematically describable; these patterns are our ‘laws of nature’. Since mathematical patterns proceed from numbers, much of the physicist’s task involves finding ways to extract numbers from physical phenomena. In the 16th and 17th centuries, philosophical discussion referred to this as the process of ‘quantification’; today we call it measurement. One way of thinking about modern physics is as an ever more sophisticated process of quantification that multiplies and diversifies the ways we extract numbers from the world, thus giving us the raw material for our quest for patterns or ‘laws’. This is no trivial task. Indeed, the history of physics has turned on the question of whatcan be measured and how.

Stop for a moment and take a look around you. What do you think can be quantified? What colours and forms present themselves to your eye? Is the room bright or dark? Does the air feel hot or cold? Are birds singing? What other sounds do you hear? What textures do you feel? What odours do you smell? Which, if any, of these qualities of experience might be measured?

In the early 14th century, a group of scholarly monks known as the calculatores at the University of Oxford began to think about this problem. One of their interests was motion, and they were the first to recognise the qualities we now refer to as ‘velocity’ and ‘acceleration’ — the former being the rate at which a body changes position, the latter, the rate at which the velocity itself changes. It’s a startling thought, in an age when we can read the speed of our cars from our digitised dashboards, that somebody had to discover ‘velocity’.

Yet despite the calculatores’ advances, the science of kinematics made barely any progress until Galileo and his contemporaries took up the baton in the late-16th century. In the intervening time, the process of quantification had to be extracted from a burden of dreams in which it became, frankly, bogged down. For along with motion, the calculatoreswere also interested in qualities such as sin and grace and they tried to find ways to quantify these as well. Between the calculatores and Galileo, students of quantification had to work out what they were going to exclude from the project. To put it bluntly, in order for the science of physics to get underway, the vision had to be narrowed.

How, exactly, this narrowing was to be achieved was articulated by the 17th-century French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes. What could a mathematically based science describe? Descartes’s answer was that the new natural philosophers must restrict themselves to studying matter in motion through space and time. Maths, he said, could describe the extended realm — or res extensa.Thoughts, feelings, emotions and moral consequences, he located in the ‘realm of thought’, or res cogitans, declaring them inaccessible to quantification, and thus beyond the purview of science. In making this distinction, Descartes did not divide mind from body (that had been done by the Greeks), he merely clarified the subject matter for a new physical science.

So what else apart from motion could be quantified? To a large degree, progress in physics has been made by slowly extending the range of answers. Take colour. At first blush, redness would seem to be an ineffable and irreducible quale. In the late 19th century, however, physicists discovered that each colour in the rainbow, when diffracted through a prism, corresponds to a different wavelength of light. Red light has a wavelength of around 700 nanometres, violet light around 400 nanometres. Colour can be correlated with numbers — both the wavelength and frequency of an electromagnetic wave. Here we have one half of our duality: the wave.

The discovery of electromagnetic waves was in fact one of the great triumphs of the quantification project. In the 1820s, Michael Faraday noticed that, if he sprinkled iron filings around a magnet, the fragments would spontaneously assemble into a pattern of lines that, he conjectured, were caused by a ‘magnetic field’. Physicists today accept fields as a primary aspect of nature but at the start of the Industrial Revolution, when philosophical mechanism was at its peak, Faraday’s peers scoffed. Invisible fields smacked of magic. Yet, later in the 19th century, James Clerk Maxwell showed that magnetic and electric fields were linked by a precise set of equations — today known as Maxwell’s Laws — that enabled him to predict the existence of radio waves. The quantification of these hitherto unsuspected aspects of our world — these hidden invisible ‘fields’ — has led to the whole gamut of modern telecommunications on which so much of modern life is now staged.

Turning to the other side of our duality – the particle – with a burgeoning array of electrical and magnetic equipment, physicists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries began to probe matter. They discovered that atoms were composed from parts holding positive and negative charge. The negative electrons, were found to revolve around a positive nucleus in pairs, with each member of the pair in a slightly different state, or ‘spin’. Spin turns out to be a fundamental quality of the subatomic realm. Matter particles, such as electrons, have a spin value of one half. Particles of light, or photons, have a spin value of one. In short, one of the qualities that distinguishes ‘matter’ from ‘energy’ is the spin value of its particles.

We have seen how light acts like a wave, yet experiments over the past century have shown that under many conditions it behaves instead like a stream of particles. In the photoelectric effect (the explanation of which won Albert Einstein his Nobel Prize in 1921), individual photons knock electrons out of their atomic orbits. In Thomas Young’s infamous double-slit experiment of 1805, light behaves simultaneously like waves and particles. Here, a stream of detectably separate photons are mysteriously guided by a wave whose effect becomes manifest over a long period of time. What is the source of this wave and how does it influence billions of isolated photons separated by great stretches of time and space? The late Nobel laureate Richard Feynman — a pioneer of quantum field theory — stated in 1965 that the double-slit experiment lay at ‘the heart of quantum mechanics’. Indeed, physicists have been debating how to interpret its proof of light’s duality for the past 200 years.

Just as waves of light sometimes behave like particles of matter, particles of matter can sometimes behave like waves. In many situations, electrons are clearly particles: we fire them from electron guns inside the cathode-ray tubes of old-fashioned TV sets and each electron that hits the screen causes a tiny phosphor to glow. Yet, in orbiting around atoms, electrons behave like three-dimensional waves. Electron microscopes put the wave-quality of these particles to work; here, in effect, they act like short-wavelengths of light.

Physics is not just another story about the world: it is a qualitatively different kind of story to those told in the humanities, in myths and religions

Wave-particle duality is a core feature of our world. Or rather, we should say, it is a core feature of our mathematical descriptions of our world. The duck-rabbits are everywhere, colonising the imagery of physicists like, well, rabbits. But what is critical to note here is that however ambiguous our images, the universe itself remains whole and is manifestly not fracturing into schizophrenic shards. It is this tantalising wholeness in the thing itself that drives physicists onward, like an eternally beckoning light that seems so teasingly near yet is always out of reach.

Instrumentally speaking, the project of quantification has led physicists to powerful insights and practical gain: the computer on which you are reading this article would not exist if physicists hadn’t discovered the equations that describe the band-gaps in semiconducting materials. Microchips, plasma screens and cellphones are all byproducts of quantification and, every decade, physicists identify new qualities of our world that are amendable to measurement, leading to new technological possibilities. In this sense, physics is not just another story about the world: it is a qualitatively different kind of story to those told in the humanities, in myths and religions. No language other than maths is capable of expressing interactions between particle spin and electromagnetic field strength. The physicists, with their equations, have shown us new dimensions of our world.

That said, we should be wary of claims about ultimate truth. While quantification, as a project, is far from complete, it is an open question as to what it might ultimately embrace. Let us look again at the colour red. Red is not just an electromagnetic phenomenon, it is also a perceptual and contextual phenomenon. Stare for a minute at a green square then look away: you will see an afterimage of a red square. No red light has been presented to your eyes, yet your brain will perceive a vivid red shape. As Goethe argued in the late-18th century, and Edwin Land (who invented Polaroid film in 1932) echoed, colour cannot be reduced to purely prismatic effects. It exists as much in our minds as in the external world. To put this into a personal context, no understanding of the electromagnetic spectrum will help me to understand why certain shades of yellow make me nauseous, while electric orange fills me with joy.

Descartes was no fool; by parsing reality into the res extensa and res cogitans he captured something critical about human experience. You do not need to be a hard-core dualist to imagine that subjective experience might not be amenable to mathematical law. For Douglas, ‘the attempt to force experience into logical categories of non-contradiction’ is the ‘final paradox’ of an obsessive search for purity. ‘But experience is not amenable [to this narrowing],’ she insists, and ‘those who make the attempt find themselves led into contradictions.’

Quintessentially, the qualities that are amenable to quantification are those that are shared. All electrons are essentially the same: given a set of physical circumstances, every electron will behave like any other. But humans are not like this. It is our individuality that makes us so infuriatingly human, and when science attempts to reduce us to the status of electrons it is no wonder that professors of literature scoff.

Douglas’s point about attempting to corral experience into logical categories of non-contradiction has obvious application to physics, particularly to recent work on the interface between quantum theory and relativity. One of the most mysterious findings of quantum science is that two or more subatomic particles can be ‘entangled’. Once particles are entangled, what we do to one immediately affects the other, even if the particles are hundreds of kilometres apart. Yet this contradicts a basic premise of special relativity, which states that no signal can travel faster than the speed of light. Entanglement suggests that either quantum theory or special relativity, or both, will have to be rethought.

More challenging still, consider what might happen if we tried to send two entangled photons to two separate satellites orbiting in space, as a team of Chinese physicists, working with the entanglement theorist Anton Zeilinger, is currently hoping to do. Here the situation is compounded by the fact that what happens in near-Earth orbit is affected by both special and general relativity. The details are complex, but suffice it to say that special relativity suggests that the motion of the satellites will cause time to appear to slow down, while the effect of the weaker gravitational field in space should cause time to speed up. Given this, it is impossible to say which of the photons would be received first at which satellite. To an observer on the ground, both photons should appear to arrive at the same time. Yet to an observer on satellite one, the photon at satellite two should appear to arrive first, while to an observer on satellite two the photon at satellite one should appear to arrive first. We are in a mire of contradiction and no one knows what would in fact happen here. If the Chinese experiment goes ahead, we might find that some radical new physics is required.

To say that every possible version of their equations must be materially manifest strikes me as a kind of berserk literalism

You will notice that the ambiguity in these examples focuses on the issue of time — as do many paradoxes relating to relativity and quantum theory. Time indeed is a huge conundrum throughout physics, and paradoxes surround it at many levels of being. In Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe (2013) the American physicist Lee Smolin argues that for 400 years physicists have been thinking about time in ways that are fundamentally at odds with human experience and therefore wrong. In order to extricate ourselves from some of the deepest paradoxes in physics, he says, its very foundations must be reconceived. In an op-ed in New Scientist in April this year, Smolin wrote:
The idea that nature consists fundamentally of atoms with immutable properties moving through unchanging space, guided by timeless laws, underlies a metaphysical view in which time is absent or diminished. This view has been the basis for centuries of progress in science, but its usefulness for fundamental physics and cosmology has come to an end.

In order to resolve contradictions between how physicists describetime and how we experience time, Smolin says physicists must abandon the notion of time as an unchanging ideal and embrace an evolutionary concept of natural laws.

This is radical stuff, and Smolin is well-known for his contrarian views — he has been an outspoken critic of string theory, for example. But at the heart of his book is a worthy idea: Smolin is against the reflexive reification of equations. As our mathematical descriptions of time are so starkly in conflict with our lived experience of time, it is our descriptions that will have to change, he says.

To put this into Douglas’s terms, the powers that have been attributed to physicists’ structure of ideas have been overreaching. ‘Attempts to force experience into logical categories of non-contradiction’ have, she would say, inevitablyfailed. From the contemplation of wave-particle pangolins we have been led to the limits of the linguistic system of physicists. Like Smolin, I have long believed that the ‘block’ conception of time that physics proposes is inadequate, and I applaud this thrilling, if also at times highly speculative, book. Yet, if we can fix the current system by reinventing its axioms, then (assuming that Douglas is correct) even the new system will contain its own pangolins.

In the early days of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr liked to say that we might never know what ‘reality’ is. Bohr used John Wheeler’s coinage, calling the universe ‘a great smoky dragon’, and claiming that all we could do with our science was to create ever more predictive models. Bohr’s positivism has gone out of fashion among theoretical physicists, replaced by an increasingly hard-core Platonism. To say, as some string theorists do, that every possible version of their equations must be materially manifest strikes me as a kind of berserk literalism, reminiscent of the old Ptolemaics who used to think that every mathematical epicycle in their descriptive apparatus must represent a physically manifest cosmic gear.

We are veering here towards Douglas’s view of neurosis. Will we accept, at some point, that there are limits to the quantification project, just as there are to all taxonomic schemes? Or will we be drawn into ever more complex and expensive quests — CERN mark two, Hubble, the sequel — as we try to root out every lingering paradox? In Douglas’s view, ambiguity is an inherent feature of language that we must face up to, at some point, or drive ourselves into distraction.

3 June 2013

Kurt Vonnegut graphed the world’s most popular stories (The Washington Post)

10/02/2015UncategorizedAntropologia, Cultura, Gráficos, Kurt Vonnegut, Literatura, Modelagemrenzotaddei

By Ana Swanson February 9

This post comes via Know More, Wonkblog’s social media site.

Kurt Vonnegut claimed that his prettiest contribution to culture wasn’t a popular novel like “Cat’s Cradle” or “Slaughterhouse-Five,” but a largely forgotten master’s thesis he wrote while studying anthropology at the University of Chicago. The thesis argued that a main character has ups and downs that can be graphed to reveal the taxonomy of a story, as well as something about the culture it comes from. “The fundamental idea is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads,” Vonnegut said.

In addition to churning out novels, Vonnegut was deeply interested in the practice of writing. The tips he wrote for other writers – including “How to write with style” and “Eight rules for writing fiction” — are concise, funny, and still very useful. The thesis shows that Vonnegut’s preoccupation with the nuts and bolts of writing started early in his career.

Vonnegut spelled out the main argument of his thesis in a hilarious lecture, where he also graphed some of the more common story types. (Vonnegut was famously funny and irreverent, and you can hear the audience losing it throughout.) He published the transcript of this talk in his memoir, “A Man Without a Country,” which includes his own drawings of the graphs.

Vonnegut plotted stories on a vertical “G-I axis,” representing the good or ill fortunes of the main character, and a horizontal “B-E” axis that represented the course of the story from beginning to end.

One of the most popular story types is what Vonnegut called “Man in Hole,” graphed here by designer Maya Eilam. Somebody gets in trouble, gets out of it again, and ends up better off than where they started. “You see this story again and again. People love it, and it is not copyrighted,” Vonnegut says in his lecture. A close variant is “Boy Loses Girl,” in which a person gets something amazing, loses it, and then gets it back again.

Creation and religious stories follow a different arc, one that feels unfamiliar to modern readers. In most creation stories, a deity delivers incremental gifts that build to form the world. The Old Testament features the same pattern, except it ends with humans getting the rug pulled out from under them.

The New Testament follows a more modern story path, according to Vonnegut. He was delighted by the similarity of that story arc with Cinderella, which he called, “The most popular story in our civilization. Every time it’s retold, someone makes a million dollars.”

Some of the most notable works of literature are more ambiguous – like Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” which starts off bad and gets infinitely worse, and “Hamlet,” in which story developments are deeply ambiguous.

In his lecture, Vonnegut explains why we consider Hamlet, with this ambiguous and uncomfortable story type, to be a masterpiece:

“Cinderella or Kafka’s cockroach? I don’t think Shakespeare believed in a heaven or hell any more than I do. And so we don’t know whether it’s good news or bad news.

“I have just demonstrated to you that Shakespeare was as poor a storyteller as any Arapaho.

“But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.

“And if I die — God forbid — I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, ‘Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?’”

Anthropologists Release Statement on Humanity and Climate Change (AAA)

09/02/2015UncategorizedAAA, Antropoceno, Antropologia, Mudanças climáticas, Teoria socialrenzotaddei

February 9, 2015

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) adopted a strong and clear statement on Humanity and Climate Change on January 29, 2015. The statement, based on the final report of the Association’s Global Climate Change Task Force, reveals eight ways anthropologists attack the problems of climate change from an anthropological perspective. The document recognizes climate change as a present reality and an intensifier of current underlying global problems; the markedly uneven distribution of impacts across and within societies; and the fact that humanity’s decisions, actions and cultural behaviors are now the most important causes of the dramatic environmental changes seen in the last century.

“Anthropologists focus on several aspects of climate change research that other scientists do not fully address, specifically the disproportionately adverse impacts on vulnerable populations, the extent to which our current challenges stem from culture and cultural choices on a societal level; and the value of the long record of human development and civilization that can inform our choices for the future,” said Shirley J. Fiske, Ph.D., Chair of the American Anthropological Association Global Climate Change Task Force.

The statement affirms that the global problem of climate change is rooted in social institutions and cultural habits. Solutions and social adaptations therefore require knowledge and insight from the social sciences and humanities. “Resilience and adaptation can be best addressed locally and regionally, by enabling communities to provide knowledge and social capital to construct viable solutions,” said task force member Ben Orlove, Ph.D. While climate change will have a global impact, the impact will fall unevenly; and as climate impacts intensify, public expenditures needed for emergency aid and restoration will escalate.

“It is crucial that we attend to the statement’s message that climate change is not a natural problem, it is a human problem,” said AAA President Monica Heller, Ph.D. in a recent statement. “Anthropologists play a vital role solving this human problem and the AAA is eager to continue to support the work of our members in this area.”

Task force members are Drs. Susan Crate, Carole Crumley, Shirley Fiske, Kathleen Galvin, Heather Lazrus, George Luber, Lisa Lucero, Anthony Oliver-Smith, Ben Orlove, Sarah Strauss and Richard Wilk. Read the entire statement and learn more about the AAA Global Climate Change Task Force at http://bit.ly/1At4qnn.

Clive Hamilton: Climate change signals the end of the social sciences (The Conversation)

02/02/2015UncategorizedAntropoceno, Antropologia, Ciências sociais, Crise, Desastre, Filosofia, Mudanças climáticas, Teoria socialrenzotaddei

January 24 2013, 7.24pm
Clive Hamilton

Our impact on the earth has brought on a new geographical epoch – The Age of Humans.AAP/Damien Shaw

In response to the heatwave that set a new Australia-wide record on 7 January, when the national average maximum reached 40.33°C, the Bureau of Meteorology issued a statement that, on reflection, sounds the death knell for all of the social sciences taught in our universities.

“Everything that happens in the climate system now”, the manager of climate monitoring at the Bureau said, “is taking place on a planet which is a degree hotter than it used to be.”

Eminent US climate scientist, Kevin Trenberth, made the same point more fully last year:

The answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question. All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.

Trenberth’s commentary calls on us to reframe how we think about human-induced climate change. We can no longer place some events into the box marked “Nature” and some into the box marked “Human”.

The invention of these two boxes was the defining feature of modernity, an idea founded on Cartesian and Kantianphilosophies of the subject. Its emergence has also been tracked by science studies in the contradiction between purified science and the messy process of knowledge creation, leading to Bruno Latour’s troubling claim that the separation of Human and Nature was an illusion, and that “we have never been modern”.

Climate science is now telling us that such a separation can no longer be sustained, that the natural and the human are mixed up, and their influences cannot be neatly distinguished.

This human-nature hybrid is true not just of the climate system, but of the planet as a whole, although it would be enough for it to be true of the climate system. We know from the new discipline of Earth system science that changes in the atmosphere affect not just the weather but the Earth’s hydrosphere (the watery parts), the biosphere (living creatures) and even the lithosphere (the Earth’s crust). They are all linked by the great natural cycles and processes that make the planet so dynamic. In short, everything is in play.

Apart from climatic change, it is apparent that human activity has transformed the Earth in profound ways. Every cubic metre of air and water, every hectare of land now has a human imprint, from hormones in the seas, to fluorocarbons in the atmosphere and radioactivity from nuclear weapons tests in the soil.

Each year humans shift ten times more rock and soil around the Earth than the great natural processes of erosion and weathering. Half of the land surface has been modified by humans. Dam-building since the 1930s has held back enough water to keep the oceans three centimetres lower than otherwise. Extinctions are now occurring at a rate 100 times faster than the natural one.

So profound has been the influence of humans that Earth scientists such as Will Steffen have recently declared that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch, an epoch defined by the fact that the “human imprint on the global environment has now become so large and active that it rivals some of the great forces of Nature in its impact on the functioning of the Earth system”. Known as the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans, it marks the end of the Holocene, the 10,000-year period of remarkable climatic stability and clemency that allowed civilisation to flourish.

The modern social sciences — sociology, psychology, political science, economics, history and, we may add, philosophy — rest on the assumption that the grand and the humdrum events of human life take place against a backdrop of an inert nature. Only humans have agency. Everything worthy of analysis occurs in the sealed world of “the social”, and where nature does make itself felt – in environmental history, sociology or politics – “the environment” is the Umwelt, the natural world “over there” that surrounds us and sometimes intrudes on our plans, but always remains separate.

What was distinctive of the “social sciences” that emerged in 18th-century Europe was not so much their aspiration to science but their “social-only” domain of concern.

So the advent of the Anthropocene shatters the self-contained world of social analysis that is the terrain of modern social science, and explains why those intellectuals who remain within it find it impossible to “analyze” the politics, sociology or philosophy of climate change in a way that is true to the science. They end up floundering in the old categories, unable to see that something epochal has occurred, a rupture on the scale of the Industrial Revolution or the emergence of civilization itself.

A few are trying to peer through the fog of modernism. In an epoch-marking intervention, Chicago historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that the distinction we have drawn between natural history and human history has now collapsed. With the arrival of the Anthropocene, humans have become a geological force so that the two kinds of history have converged and it is no longer true that “all history properly so called is the history of human affairs”.

E.H. Carr’s famous definition of history must now be discarded:

History begins when men begin to think of the passage of time in terms not of natural processes — the cycle of the seasons, the human life-span — but of a series of specific events in which men are consciously involved and which they can consciously influence.

From hereon our history will increasingly be dominated by “natural processes”, influenced by us but largely beyond our control. Our future has become entangled with that of the Earth’s geological evolution. As I argue in a forthcoming book, contrary to the modernist faith, it can no longer be maintained that humans make their own history, for the stage on which we make it has now entered into the play as a dynamic and capricious force.

And the actors too must be scrutinised afresh. If on the Anthropocene’s hybrid Earth it is no longer tenable to characterise humans as the rational animal, God’s chosen creatures or just another species, what kind of being are we?

The social sciences taught in our universities must now be classed as “pre-Anthropocene”. The process of reinventing them — so that what is taught in our arts faculties is true to what has emerged in our science faculties — will be a sustained and arduous intellectual enterprise. After all, it was not just the landscape that was scorched by 40.33°C, but modernism itself.

Antropologia renovada (Cult)

30/01/2015UncategorizedAntropologia, Índios, Teoria social, Viveiros de Castrorenzotaddei

Jan. 2015

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro é reconhecido por ter renovado o pensamento antropológico

Juvenal Savian Filho e Wilker Sousa
Fotos: Lucas Zappa

“Viveiros de Castro é o fundador de uma nova escola na antropologia. Com ele me sinto em completa harmonia intelectual.” Essas palavras são do antropólogo e pensador francês Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) a respeito da obra do brasileiro Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Professor de antropologia do Museu Nacional da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, ele é reconhecido nacional e internacionalmente por seus estudos em etnologia indígena – o ensaio “Os Pronomes Cosmológicos e o Perspectivismo Ameríndio”, publicado em 1996, recebeu traduções para diversas línguas e foi incluído em duas antologias britânicas de textos-chave da disciplina, a primeira centrada na antropologia da religião, a outra dedicada à teoria antropológica geral. Em 2009, publicou na França o livro Métaphysiques Cannibales, no qual resume as implicações filosóficas e políticas de suas pesquisas entre os povos indígenas brasileiros. No Brasil, seu livro mais conhecido é A Inconstância da Alma Selvagem, publicado em 2002, que reúne estudos escritos ao longo de sua carreira até então. Uma segunda coleção, trazendo seus ensaios mais recentes, está em preparação, devendo ser publicada pela editora CosacNaify em 2012, sob o título A Onça e a Diferença.

Seu currículo inclui atividades intelectuais em âmbito mundial. Foi professor-associado nas universidades de Manchester e Chicago e ocupou a cátedra Simón Bolívar de Estudos Latino-americanos da Universidade de Cambridge. Foi diretor de pesquisas no Centro Nacional de Pesquisa Científica, em Paris, tornando-se membro permanente da Equipe de Pesquisa em Etnologia Ameríndia. Ainda na França, foi agraciado em 1998 com o Prix da La Francophonie, concedido pela Academia Francesa.

Aos 59 anos de idade, construiu uma obra potente e irretocável. Viveiros de Castro recebeu a reportagem da CULT em sua sala no Museu Nacional, no Rio de Janeiro, e falou sobre seu trabalho, a atual política indigenista, a crise ambiental e a inserção do Brasil na economia mundial.

CULT – Como se dá seu trabalho de campo e com que regularidade o senhor visita as comunidades indígenas?
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro – O principal de minhas pesquisas de campo com os povos indígenas da Amazônia fez-se entre os anos 1975 e 1988. Estive por breves períodos entre os Yawalapiti do Parque do Xingu, em Mato Grosso (hoje o estado deveria ser chamado de Mato Ralo), os Kulina do Rio Purus, no Acre, os ianomâmis da Serra de Surucucus, em Roraima, e finalmente entre os Araweté do Igarapé Ipixuna, no Médio Xingu, Pará. Apenas entre os Araweté realizei o que se pode chamar de uma pesquisa etnográfica, que requer uma convivência demorada com o povo estudado, o aprendizado da língua nativa (no meu caso, bem incipiente) e o envolvimento emocional e cognitivo – o compromisso existencial – com as questões e preocupações da vida da comunidade que generosamente aceitou receber o antropólogo. Minha estada com os Araweté não foi tão longa quanto deveria: morei no Ipixuna por cerca de dez meses, entre 1981 e 1983, quando precisei deixar a área por motivos de saúde (malárias repetidas). Depois voltei algumas vezes, em visitas curtas, perfazendo 14 meses até 1995. Isto é, na melhor das hipóteses, a metade do que se precisa para fazer um bom trabalho de campo. Mas cada um faz o que pode. Há quem aprenda mais depressa, outros precisam de mais tempo. Além disso, há povos que demandam muitos anos de convivência até que as coisas comecem a fazer sentido para o pesquisador, e outros que são mais abertos e mais diretos. Por fim, tudo depende daquilo que se quer estudar. De qualquer maneira, não me vejo como um grande pesquisador de campo. Sou um etnógrafo apenas razoável.

Há cerca de um mês, após 15 anos de ausência, voltei ao Ipixuna para uma rápida visita. A desculpa para uma ausência tão demorada, a rigor indesculpável, foi que a vida me levou para longe da Amazônia: ensino, família, períodos de residência no exterior, o lento trabalho da escrita, o peso da idade… Isso para não mencionar algumas dificuldades que acabei tendo com a autoridade indigenista local, em Altamira (PA), por causa das empresas evangélicas que queriam se instalar entre os Araweté. Aos olhos desses missionários, eu era uma espécie de Satã que estava ali entravando a almejada conquista espiritual dos índios. Assim que parei de ir com mais frequência ao Ipixuna, esses missionários conseguiram se insinuar nas aldeias, com a complacência da administração indigenista. O estrago que causaram, até agora, ainda não parece ter sido grande demais. O mérito, naturalmente, é dos próprios Araweté.

Retornei a convite dos Araweté – não foi o primeiro que me fizeram, nesses 15 anos – e da nova administração da Funai em Altamira, com quem tenho a firme intenção de colaborar, nessa fase histórica tão difícil que se abre agora para os povos indígenas do Médio Xingu, com a construção do Complexo Hidrelétrico de Belo Monte. Está na hora também de passar o bastão e apresentar alguns de meus estudantes do Museu Nacional aos Araweté, para que possam continuar o trabalho.

O senhor concorda que, nas últimas duas ou três décadas, os “índios” têm aparecido mais no debate político e nos veículos de comunicação? Por que isso demorou tanto tempo?
Em seu livro Tristes Trópicos, Lévi-Strauss conta uma anedota reveladora. Era o começo dos anos 1930, ele estava de partida para o Brasil, onde ia ensinar sociologia na USP. Lévi-Strauss encontra o embaixador brasileiro na França, Luiz de Souza Dantas, em um jantar de cerimônia, e lhe pergunta sobre os índios brasileiros, que já então muito lhe interessavam. Ao perguntar ao embaixador como deveria proceder para visitar alguma comunidade indígena, este lhe respondeu: “Ah, meu senhor, no Brasil há muito tempo não há mais índios. Essa é uma história muito triste, mas o fato é que os índios foram exterminados pelos portugueses, pelos colonizadores, e hoje não há mais índios no Brasil. É um capítulo muito triste da história brasileira. Há muitas coisas apaixonantes a serem vistas no Brasil, mas índios, não há mais um só…” Lévi-
-Strauss conta que, naturalmente, quando chegou ao Brasil, descobriu que não era bem assim.

Isso não quer dizer que o embaixador (cuja aparência física, diz maliciosamente Lévi-Strauss, indicava uma óbvia contribuição indígena) estivesse mentindo deliberadamente, procurando negar uma realidade vergonhosa mas sabida. De fato, o embaixador não sabia que havia índios no Brasil; o Brasil que ele representava diplomaticamente não continha índios. O Brasil era um país desesperado para ser moderno, então não havia, porque não podia haver, mais selvagens aqui. Outro fato curioso: em 1970 (portanto, 40 anos depois do diálogo de Lévi-Strauss com o embaixador), o censo indígena da Funai indicava, para o estado do Acre, a notável população de “zero indivíduo”. Oficialmente, não havia mais índios no Acre. Aí começam a abrir as estradas por lá, a derrubar a mata, a botar boi, e eis que começam a aparecer índios a atravancar a expansão dos pastos e a destruição da floresta. (Junto com índios, como se sabe, começaram também a aparecer os seringueiros, que se imaginava como mais outra “raça” em extinção. E bem que se tentou extingui-los naquela época – lembrem-se de Chico Mendes.) Ora, índios sempre houve lá no Acre, todo mundo no Acre sabia que eles estavam lá, mas eles não existiam em Brasília, ou melhor, para Brasília. Agora sabe-se e aceita-se que o estado do Acre abriga, atualmente, 14 povos indígenas, alguns de significativa expressão demográfica, como os Kaxinauá e os Kulina. O Acre é um estado profundamente indígena, dos pontos de vista cultural, histórico e demográfico. Na verdade, ele é hoje o principal exportador de práticas e símbolos indígenas (mais ou menos transformados) para o Brasil urbano atual.

A que mais se deve essa redescoberta dos índios nas últimas décadas?
Tudo começou com uma iniciativa fracassada do governo militar, em 1978, que visava extinguir os índios, entenda-se, acelerar o processo de desconhecimento da população indígena, consagrar seu não reconhecimento como um componente diferenciado dentro da chamada “comunhão nacional”. Completar o processo de “assimilação”, isto é, de desindianização, que se entendia como inexorável e desejável ao mesmo tempo. O governo propôs um projeto de lei para “emancipar” os índios, isto é, extinguir a tutela oficial do Estado que os protegia. O verdadeiro objetivo da medida era liberar as terras indígenas, terras públicas, de domínio da União, inalienáveis, para que entrassem no mercado fundiário capitalista. Ao declarar que esta ou aquela população indígena não “era mais” índia, porque seus membros falavam português, ou usavam roupa etc., o que o projeto de lei pretendia era entregar as terras públicas de posse dos índios nas mãos dos interesses proprietariais particulares. Simplesmente se queria tirar os índios da frente do trator do capital: em vez de índio, que venham o gado, a soja, os madeireiros, o latifúndio, o mercado de terras, a mineração, a estrada, a poluição e tudo que vem junto. E que muitos chamam de “desenvolvimento”.

Mas, naquele momento, os idos de 1978, quando estava se consolidando a resistência organizada à ditadura, muito da insatisfação política da classe média, dos intelectuais principalmente, se cristalizou em torno da questão indígena, como se ela fosse uma espécie de emblema do destino de todos os brasileiros. É também nesse momento que tomam ímpeto o movimento negro, o movimento feminista, a politização ativa da orientação sexual, a emergência de diversas minorias, diversas diversidades por assim dizer: étnicas, locais, sexuais, ocupacionais, culturais etc. A luta de classes assumia cada vez mais o caráter de uma integração parcial de uma série de diferenciais traçados sobre outros eixos que a economia pura e simples (as relações de produção). Começam a surgir outros atores políticos. É o momento da especulação e da experimentação generalizadas: outras práticas do laço social, outras imagens da sociedade, que não se reduzem ao par Estado-classes sociais, mas que envolvem outras formas de vida, outros territórios existenciais. Os índios foram importantes por sua força exemplar, seu poder de condensação simbólica. Eles apareceram como portadores de outro projeto de sociedade, de outra solução de vida que contraprojetava uma imagem crítica da nossa.

“O Brasil é o maior exportador de “água virtual” do mundo”

Mas, desde o século 16, a vida indígena aparece como uma imagem crítica da vida “ocidental”.
Sim, sem dúvida. Há uma frase de um jovem filósofo que eu admiro muito, Patrice Maniglier, um grande especialista em Lévi-Strauss, aliás: “A antropologia nos devolve uma imagem de nós mesmos na qual nós não nos reconhecemos”. É por isso que ela é importante, porque nos devolve algo, ela nos “reflete”. Mas a gente vê essa imagem e não se reconhece nela. “Então nós, humanos, somos assim também? Podemos ser isso? Somos isso, em potência? Temos em nós a capacidade de viver assim? Essa é uma solução de vida ao nosso alcance, como espécie?” Em suma: “É possível ser feliz sem carro, geladeira e televisão?”. Isso nos dá um susto, um susto com valor de conhecimento. Os índios, desde o século 16, desempenharam essa função para a reflexão político-filosófica ocidental (para uma muito pequena parte dela, na verdade). E essa mesma função, mas modernizada, especificada e tornada mais evidente pelo fato de que os índios brasileiros da década 1970 – a década que inicia a ocupação destrutiva em larga escala da Amazônia – eram nossos conterrâneos e nossos contemporâneos, eles nos ensinavam algo não só sobre nós mesmos como sobre nosso projeto de país, o Brasil que queríamos, e que não era certamente o Brasil que tínhamos. Então, foi em torno das sociedades indígenas como diferença emergente que se constituiu a resistência contra o projeto de emancipação: uma resistência contra o projeto de privatização econômica, o branqueamento político e a estupidificação cultural do Brasil.

Os antropólogos, nesse contexto, começam a se organizar como categoria, aliando-se aos índios como atores políticos. Houve, é claro, antropólogos que tiveram um papel importantíssimo na história não só da causa indígena, mas da própria República, como Roquette Pinto ou Darcy Ribeiro, antes de (e durante) essa época. Mas naquele momento, no fim da década de 1970, os antropólogos se constituem como corporação para interpelar o governo e se opor ao projeto de emancipação. Essa mobilização sensibilizou a sociedade, entenda-se, outros intelectuais, militantes políticos de outras causas, advogados, juristas, artistas, e também as camadas médias urbanas, os estudantes… Ao mesmo tempo, e muito mais importante, os índios como que “acordaram” para seu poder de intervenção nos circuitos nacionais e internacionais de comunicação. Eles deixavam ali de ser um elemento do folclore nacional, de um passado vago e distante, e passavam a atores políticos do presente, signos críticos e urgentes de uma ultracontemporaneidade: signos do futuro, na verdade.

Enfim, é nesse momento, fim dos anos 1970, que ganha vulto todo o movimento de auto-organização de coletivos que não são mais redutíveis nem aos partidos nem aos sindicatos: a célebre “sociedade civil organizada”. É então também que começam a aparecer figuras indígenas individuais com destaque político. A primeira delas foi Mário Juruna, um deputado que foi tratado folcloricamente pela imprensa, mas que teve um papel estratégico para a emergência dos índios no cenário político-ideológico nacional e internacional (lembremos do Tribunal Russell). Juruna, que marcou presença por alguns gestos muitos simples, de grande “pega” midiática, ficou famoso com seu gravador – um edificante signo do poder da “tecnologia” nas mãos de um “selvagem”; melhor ainda, e agora de verdade, um dispositivo que preservava a potência e a imediatez da oralidade, o registro semiótico em que os indígenas se sentem completamente em casa – que armazenava as promessas e declarações de autoridades e políticos. Depois, promessa quebrada, declaração falseada pelos fatos, Juruna tocava seu gravador na frente da “otoridade” e dizia: “Mas não foi o contrário que o senhor falou?” “O senhor não havia prometido isso?” Depois de Mário Juruna, o protagonismo indígena, coletivo e individual, proliferou: associações, federações, líderes de grande expressão como Ailton Krenak e David Kopenawa.

Qual o papel da Constituinte de 1988 nesse processo?
Esse processo do fim da década de 1970 culminou em 1988, com a Constituinte e a Constituição, que tiveram um papel fundamental para formalizar a presença dos índios dentro da comunhão nacional. É aqui que se começa a reconhecer direitos coletivos, coisa que, salvo engano, mal existia no Brasil: direitos difusos, direitos coletivos, comunidades sujeitos de direito, índios, quilombolas. Uma vitória imensa, atestável no ódio que a Constituição de 1988 desperta na direita, sempre à espreita de uma oportunidade para “reformar” a Constituição, isto é, para desfigurá-la, e sempre eficaz na protelação da indispensável regulamentação de diversos artigos constitucionais.

O senhor vê com bons olhos as políticas de proteção dos direitos indígenas na era Lula?
Houve grandes conquistas, a mais importante, sem dúvida, o reconhecimento da terra indígena Raposa Serra do Sol. Mas manteve-se, ou mais, acentuou-se o projeto de governo baseado na equação falaciosa entre desenvolvimento e crescimento, em uma ideia de crescimento a qualquer preço e, nesse sentido (eu sublinho: apenas nesse sentido), o governo Lula manteve sua continuidade com todos os governos anteriores, pelo menos até Vargas e incluindo os governos da ditadura. Uma ideia de que é preciso conquistar o Brasil, ocupá-lo, civilizá-lo, modernizá-lo, desenvolvê-lo, implicando com isso a ideia de que os índios não são brasileiros, não estão lá, não vivem em suas terras segundo seus próprios esquemas civilizacionais, não possuem uma cultura viva e eficaz. Tudo isso se baseia em um modelo cultural falido, a ideia de modernidade.

E qual é esse modelo?
É o modelo de industrialização intensiva, poluente, de exportação maciça de matéria-prima, monocultura, agronegócio, transgênicos, agrotóxicos, petróleo… Ele bate de frente com os interesses das populações indígenas e, arrisco-me a dizer, com as perspectivas de toda a população do país e do planeta. O que precisamos é imaginar uma forma econômica com algum futuro, capaz de assegurar o suficiente para todos, uma vida que seja boa o bastante para as gerações vindouras. Então, eu tenho sérias restrições não à política indigenista do governo Lula – aliás, o atual presidente da Funai [Márcio Augusto Freitas de Meira] é um colega que admiro e respeito –, mas o problema é que essa política indigenista sempre teve de se dobrar aos imperativos de uma geopolítica nacional e internacional ambientalmente desastrosa. Toda vez que algum setor do governo ameaçou criar dificuldades para essa geopolitica desenvolvimentista, foi obrigado a entrar na linha, ou sair de cena. Veja Marina Silva. No caso da Funai, a tendência foi seguir os limites estreitos de manobra deixados pela Casa Civil e seu implacável desenvolvimentismo.

Qual seria, então, a alternativa a esse modelo?
O Brasil tem a oportunidade única de ser um dos poucos lugares da Terra onde um novo modelo de sociedade e de civilização poderia se constituir. Somos um dos poucos países do mundo que tem recursos suficientes para inventar outra ideia e outra prática de desenvolvimento. Parece que aprendeu muito pouco com a história recente do mundo. Quando se exporta soja e gado, está se exportando o quê? O solo, a água do país. Para fazer 1 quilo de carne, são necessários 15 mil litros de água; para 1 quilo de soja, são necessários 1.800 litros. O Brasil é o maior exportador de “água virtual” do mundo. Isso para não falarmos nos insumos venenosos: hormônios para o gado, fertilizantes, agrotóxicos… O Brasil é o maior consumidor de defensivos agrícolas do planeta. Imagine o risco sanitário a que estamos expostos. Todas essas maravilhas que tanto aumentam a produtividade agrícola (e ao mesmo tempo baixam a qualidade e a segurança dos alimentos) são-nos enfiadas garganta abaixo por grandes companhias transnacionais como a Monsanto, cuja ficha ambiental e política é mais que suja, é imunda.

E está em curso a polêmica sobre a construção da hidrelétrica de Belo Monte. Quando se fala em hidrelétricas, bem, de fato talvez seja melhor do que a energia nuclear – em princípio, uma vez que a questão do lixo nuclear está bem longe de ser resolvida, além dos problemas de segurança –, mas quais são as implicações do ponto de vista, por exemplo, do abastecimento de água? E, aliás, para quem vai o principal da energia elétrica que é produzida por uma grande hidrelétrica como Tucuruí, ou Belo Monte? Vai para a população ou para as fábricas de alumínio, os projetos de extração e processamento de cobre e níquel da Amazônia? O que fazem essas fábricas de alumínio? Latas de saquê e cerveja, principalmente. Por que as fábricas de alumínio estão aqui? Por que países como o Japão não querem gastar uma imensa quantidade de energia para mover as cubas eletrolíticas onde se funde o alumínio? É melhor que um país grande, periférico e perdulário detone seus rios. A usina de Tucuruí, concebida durante o regime militar, significou 2 bilhões de reais de subsídio para as indústrias de alumínio, como constatou um especialista recentemente. O destino real da energia produzida pelo Complexo Hidrelétrico de Belo Monte ainda é uma espécie de segredo de Estado. Mas parece que essa energia virá principalmente para o Sul e o Sudeste, ou servirá para alimentar novas indústrias eletrointensivas – cobre, bauxita, níquel – no Norte, algumas aliás
não nacionais (a direita vive falando no perigo de uma invasão estrangeira da Amazônia; ela já aconteceu, mas como é uma invasão do capital, parece que pode…). Os benefícios para a população, e especialmente para a população local, são muito duvidosos.

Como se deu seu contato com o pensamento de Lévi-Strauss?
Meu contato com Lévi-Strauss antecede meu contato com a antropologia. Foi enquanto eu fazia ciências sociais, em um curso de teoria literária dado por Luiz Costa Lima. Foi ele quem me aconselhou a fazer antropologia. Isso foi nos idos de 1969, 1970. Naquele momento, o estruturalismo antropológico estava penetrando em diversas áreas das ciências humanas, como a psicanálise e a crítica literária, então o Costa Lima, professor de literatura e grande teórico da área, resolveu dar um curso sobre As Mitológicas na sociologia da PUC-Rio, onde eu estudava.

O senhor poderia apresentar-nos o conceito do perspectivismo indígena?
Esse é um assunto sobre o qual hesito um pouco em falar, porque o termo “perspectivismo indígena” se tornou excessivamente popular no meio antropológico, e a ideia que ele designa começa a sofrer o que sofre toda ideia que se difunde muito e rapidamente: banalização, de um lado, despeito, de outro. Passa a servir para tudo, ou a não servir para nada. De qualquer forma, não fui eu quem inventou sozinho a teoria do perspectivismo indígena; foi um trabalho de grupo, em que se destaca a colaboração formativa que mantive com minha colega Tânia Stolze Lima. Tomamos emprestado do vocabulário filosófico esse termo de perspectivismo para qualificar um aspecto marcante de várias, senão de todas, as culturas nativas do Novo Mundo. Trata–se da noção de que o mundo é povoado por um número indefinidamente indeterminado de espécies de seres dotadas de consciência e cultura. Isso está associado à ideia de que a forma manifesta de cada espécie é uma “roupa” que oculta uma forma interna humanoide, normalmente visível apenas aos olhos da própria espécie ou de certos seres transespecíficos, como os xamãs. Até aqui, nada de muito característico: a ideia de que a espécie humana não é um caso à parte dentro da criação, e de que há mais gente, mais pessoas no céu e na terra do que sonham nossas antropologias, é muito difundida entre as culturas tradicionais de todo o planeta.

O que distingue as cosmologias ameríndias é um desenvolvimento sui generis dessa ideia, a saber, a afirmação de que cada uma dessas espécies é dotada de um ponto de vista singular, ou melhor, é constituída como um ponto de vista singular. Assim, o modo como os seres humanos veem os animais e outras gentes do universo – deuses, espíritos, mortos, plantas, objetos e artefatos – é diferente do modo como esses seres veem os humanos e veem a si mesmos. Cada espécie de ser, a começar pela nossa própria espécie, vê-se a si mesma como humana. Assim, as onças, por exemplo, se veem como gente: cada onça individual vê a si mesma e a seus semelhantes como seres humanos, organismos anatômica e funcionalmente idênticos aos nossos. Além disso, cada tipo de ser vê certos elementos-chave de seu ambiente como se fossem objetos culturalmente elaborados: o sangue dos animais que matam é visto pelas onças como cerveja de mandioca, o barreiro em que se espojam as antas é visto como uma grande casa cerimonial, os grilos que os espectros dos mortos comem são vistos por estes como peixes assados etc. Em contrapartida, os animais não veem os humanos como humanos. As onças, assim, nos veem como animais de caça: porcos selvagens, por exemplo. É por isso que as onças nos atacam e devoram, pois todo ser humano que se preza aprecia a carne de porco selvagem. Quanto aos porcos selvagens (isto é, aqueles seres que vemos como porcos selvagens), estes também se veem como humanos, vendo, por exemplo, as frutas silvestres que comem como se fossem plantas cultivadas, enquanto veem a nós humanos como se fôssemos espíritos canibais – pois os matamos e comemos.

E o que é o humano?
É essa capacidade de socialidade. Antes, tudo era transparente a tudo, os futuros animais e os futuros humanos, vamos chamar assim, se entendiam, todos se banhavam num mesmo universo de comunicabilidade recíproca. Lévi-Strauss tem uma definição muito boa, dada numa entrevista. O entrevistador pergunta: “O que é um mito?”. Lévi-Strauss responde: “Bom, se você perguntasse a um índio das Américas, é provável que ele respondesse: ‘Um mito é uma história do tempo em que os animais falavam’”. Essa definição, que parece banal, na verdade é muito profunda. O que ele está querendo dizer é que o mito é uma história do tempo em que os homens e os animais estavam em continuidade, se comunicavam entre si. Na verdade a humanidade nunca se conformou por ter perdido essa transparência com as demais formas de vida, e os mitos são uma espécie de nostalgia da comunicação perdida.

Essa é de fato uma noção universal no pensamento ameríndio, a de um estado originário de coacessibilidade entre os humanos e os animais. As narrativas míticas são povoadas de seres cuja forma, nome e comportamento misturam atributos humanos e não humanos, em um contexto de intercomunicabilidade idêntico ao que define o mundo intra-humano atual. O propósito da mitologia, com efeito, é narrar o fim desse estado: trata-se da célebre separação entre “cultura” e “natureza” analisada nas Mitológicas de Lévi-Strauss. Mas não se trata aqui de uma diferenciação do humano com base no animal, como é o caso em nossa mitologia evolucionista moderna. A condição original comum aos humanos e animais não é a animalidade, mas a humanidade. Os mitos contam como os animais perderam os atributos herdados ou mantidos pelos humanos; os animais são ex-humanos, e não os humanos ex-animais. Se nossa antropologia popular vê a humanidade como erguida sobre alicerces animais, normalmente ocultos pela cultura – tendo outrora sido “completamente” animais, permanecemos, “no fundo”, animais –, o pensamento indígena conclui ao contrário que, tendo outrora sido humanos, os animais e outros seres do cosmo continuam a ser humanos, mesmo que de modo não evidente.

Se tudo está impregnado de humanidade, quais são as consequências disso para o modo de vida indígena?
Se tudo é humano, nós não somos especiais; esse é o ponto. E, ao mesmo tempo, se tudo é humano, cuidado com o que você faz, porque, quando corta uma árvore ou mata um bicho, você não está simplesmente movendo partículas de matéria de um lado para o outro, você está tratando com gente que tem memória, se vinga, contra-ataca, e assim por diante. Como tudo é humano, tudo tem ouvidos, todas as suas ações têm consequências.

Stefan Helmreich on Waves: an anthropology of scientific things (The Anthropo.scene)

19/01/2015Uncategorized4S, Antropologia, ciência, Mediação tecnológica, Ondas, STS, Tecnologiarenzotaddei

JANUARY 19, 2015 BY JEREMY SCHMIDT

A newer video on Stefan’s latest project, which looks fascinating. For those interested in reading, HAU has put the transcript of the video is here.

Stone Age humans weren’t necessarily more advanced than Neanderthals (Science Daily)

17/01/2015UncategorizedAntropologia, Antropologia física, Evolução, Homo sapiens, Neandertaisrenzotaddei

Date: January 14, 2015

Source: Universite de Montreal

Summary: A multi-purpose bone tool dating from the Neanderthal era has been discovered by researchers, throwing into question our current understanding of the evolution of human behavior. It was found at an archaeological site in France.

The tool in question was uncovered in June 2014 during the annual digs at the Grotte du Bison at Arcy-sur-Cure in Burgundy, France. Extremely well preserved, the tool comes from the left femur of an adult reindeer and its age is estimated between 55,000 and 60,000 years ago. Marks observed on it allow us to trace its history. Obtaining bones for the manufacture of tools was not the primary motivation for Neanderthals hunting — above all, they hunted to obtain the rich energy provided by meat and marrow. Evidence of meat butchering and bone fracturing to extract marrow are evident on the tool. Percussion marks suggest the use of the bone fragment for carved sharpening the cutting edges of stone tools. Finally, chipping and a significant polish show the use of the bone as a scraper. Credit: University of Montreal – Luc Doyon

A multi-purpose bone tool dating from the Neanderthal era has been discovered by University of Montreal researchers, throwing into question our current understanding of the evolution of human behaviour. It was found at an archaeological site in France. “This is the first time a multi-purpose bone tool from this period has been discovered. It proves that Neanderthals were able to understand the mechanical properties of bone and knew how to use it to make tools, abilities usually attributed to our species, Homo sapiens,” said Luc Doyon of the university’s Department of Anthropology, who participated in the digs. Neanderthals lived in Europe and western Asia in the Middle Paleolithic between around 250,000 to 28,000 years ago. Homo sapiens is the scientific term for modern man.

The production of bone tools by Neanderthals is open to debate. For much of the twentieth century, prehistoric experts were reluctant to recognize the ability of this species to incorporate materials like bone into their technological know-how and likewise their ability to master the techniques needed to work bone. However, over the past two decades, many clues indicate the use of hard materials from animals by Neanderthals. “Our discovery is an additional indicator of bone work by Neanderthals and helps put into question the linear view of the evolution of human behaviour,” Doyon said.

“The presence of this tool at a context where stone tools are abundant suggests an opportunistic choice of the bone fragment and its intentional modification into a tool by Neanderthals,” Doyon said. “It was long thought that before Homo sapiens, other species did not have the cognitive ability to produce this type of artefact. This discovery reduces the presumed gap between the two species and prevents us from saying that one was technically superior to the other.”

Luc Doyon, Geneviève Pothier Bouchard, and Maurice Hardy published the article “Un outil en os à usages multiples dans un contexte moustérien,” on December 15, 2014 in the Bulletin de la Société préhistorique française. Luc Doyon and Geneviève Potheir Bouchard are affiliated with the Department of Anthropology of the Université de Montréal. Maurice Hardy, who led the archaeological digs at the Grotte du Bison, is affiliated with Université Paris X — Nanterre.

Be the Street: On Radical Ethnography and Cultural Studies (Viewpoint Magazine)

15/01/2015UncategorizedAnarquismo, Antropologia, Etnografia, Manifestaçõesrenzotaddei

Gavin Mueller

September 10, 2012

The man who only observes himself however never gains
Knowledge of men. He is too anxious
To hide himself from himself. And nobody is
Cleverer than he himself is.
So your schooling must begin among
Living people. Let your first school
Be your place of work, your dwelling, your part of the town.
Be the street, the underground, the shops. You should observe
All the people there, strangers as if they were acquaintances, but
Acquaintances as if they were strangers to you.
—Bertolt Brecht, Speech to the Danish Working-Class Actors on the Art of Observation (1934-6)

“Anthropology is the daughter to this era of violence,” Claude Levi-Strauss once said. Poetic as that statement is, I prefer the more precise and less gendered words of esteemed anthropologist and Johnson-Forest Tendency member Kathleen Gough: “Anthropology is a child of Western imperialism.” Much like Catholic missionaries in the Spanish Empire, anthropologists examined indigenous groups in order to improve colonial administration, a tradition that continues into the present day with the US military’s Human Terrain Project in Iraq and Afghanistan. Often, this colonial imperative has fed a racist disrespect of the subjects under study. It was not uncommon, for example, for researchers to draw upon colonial police forces to collect subjects for humiliating anthropometric measurements.

According to Gough, at their best, anthropologists had been the “white liberals between conquerors and colonized.” Ethnography, the method in which researchers embed themselves within social groups to best understand their practices and the meanings behind them, had only mediated this relationship, while Gough, a revolutionary socialist, wanted to upend it. Writing in 1968, she urged her discipline to study imperialism and the revolutionary movements against it as a way to expiate anthropology of its sins. Gough later attempted this herself, travelling throughout Asia in the 1970s. Although she lacked a solid university connection due to her political sympathies, she managed to conduct fieldwork abroad, analyzing class recomposition in rural Southeast India during the Green Revolution, and detailing the improvement in the living standards of Vietnamese peasants after the expulsion of the United States.

Years later, anthropologist Ana Lopes sees fit to ask, “Why hasn’t anthropology made more difference?” The problem is not that anthropologists are reticent to contribute to ending imperialism. Indeed, there are probably more radical and critical anthropologists now than during Gough’s time, and certainly the discipline takes anti-racism and anti-imperialism incredibly seriously. Gough herself articulated some difficulties:

(1) the very process of specialization within anthropology and between anthropology and the related disciplines, especially political science, sociology, and economics; (2) the tradition of individual field work in small-scale societies, which at first produced a rich harvest of ethnography but later placed constraints on our methods and theories; (3) unwillingness to offend the governments that funded us, by choosing controversial subjects; and (4) the bureaucratic, counterrevolutionary setting in which anthropologists have increasingly worked in their universities, which may have contributed to a sense of impotence and to the development of machine-like models.

None of these plague anthropology today. Anthropologists are often incredibly deep knowlege about multiple disciplines (I have an anthropologist friend I consult on any questions of structural semiotics, Marxism, 19th century literature, or gambling); they have examined culture within large industrial and post-industrial societies; they have been involved in all sorts of radical issues, from unionizing sex workers to analyzing the securitized state; and while the university may remain a bureaucratic, counterrevolutionary setting, anthropologists have largely abandoned machine-like models. So what gives?

One issue is how anthropology chose to atone for its complicity in racism and imperialism. Instead of making a direct political intervention into imperialist practice, ethnography attacked imperialist hermeneutics. A deep critique of the Enlightenment subject, the source of anthropology’s claims to science and objectivity as well as metaphysical ground for Western notions of superiority, became a major target of the discipline. Thus rose critical ethnography, deconstructive in spirit. According to Soyini Madison, critical ethnography “takes us beneath surface appearances, disrupts the status quo, and unsettles both neutrality and taken-for-granted assumptions by bringing to light underlying and obscure operations of power and control.”

This functions at the level of the method itself: critical ethnographers should be self-reflexive. Rather than assuming an omniscient authoritative viewpoint, they should highlight their own positionality in the field by emphasizing it in the written account, thereby deconstructing the Self and its relation to the Other whenever possible. In an attack on Enlightenment pretensions to universality, accounts became partial and fragmentary, a way to head off potentially demeaning totalized portrayals at the pass.

However, ironically enough, by performatively questioning one’s own research, the figure of the ethnographer risks becoming the central figure in the study, rather than the social group. Even as it produces an often-engrossing literature, critical ethnography can undermine its own political thrust by drastically limiting what it permits itself to say. While Marxist sociologist Michael Burawoy, who shoveled pig iron for years in the name of social science, claims that with excessive reflexivity ethnographers “begin to believe they are the world they study or that the world revolves around them,” I’d counter that this isn’t so much professional narcissism as a product of the very real anxiety surrounding the ethics of representation. How best to fairly, but accurately, portray one’s subjects? How can one really know the Other? I’ve struggled with this in my own work, and I know colleagues who have been all but consumed by it. Writing about oneself seems, at the very least, safer. But this abandons scientific rigor in its reluctance to make any generalizable claims.

My own experience in ethnography came from a study of popular culture. I had grown tired of scholarly textual analysis: it seemed like more of a game for the commentators, where we critics bandied about speculative assessments of books and films and TV shows, trying to one-up each other in novelty and jargon. These interpretations said more about our positions as theory-stuffed graduate students eager to impress than they did about the putative “audiences” for the texts. Our consciousness of the objects in question had been determined by our material lives as critics-in-training. I felt pulled further away from cultural phenomena, when I wanted to get closer in order to better understand its significance. So I revolted against the rule of thoughts, starting to learn the methods that got closer to the matter at hand: ethnography,

In cultural studies, ethnography (or as a fully-trained anthropologist would probably write, “ethnography”) is most closely associated with audience reception and fandom studies. Textual analysis tells you only what a critic thinks of the work; in order to discover how “average” consumers experience it, you have to ask them. This way you avoid the totalizing, top-down generalizations of someone like Adorno, where a reified consciousness is determined by the repetitive, simplified forms of the culture industry.

This was Janet Radway’s goal when she studied female readers of misogynist romance novels. She found out that readers cared more about having private time away from domestic duties than the borderline-rape occurring in the books. However, she was forced to conclude that romance novels worked as compensatory mechanisms, securing women in capitalist patriarchal domination – in other words, she took the long way around and ended up in the same Adornoian conclusion: we’re fucked and it’s our mass culture that makes it so.

My chosen topic helped me get on a different path, one that I believe has more relevance to radical politics than haranguing the choices of hapless consumers. I wanted to study independent popular music instead of romance novels. This meant I was well positioned to examine music from the standpoint of production, rather than just surveying audience members, a technique that always felt too speculative and a bit too closely aligned with market research.

Not that market research was totally off base. Popular music exists in the form of commodities. Its form, as Adorno rightly points out, is dictated by the needs of the culture industry. If the music industry was a factory, then musicians were the workers, banging out products. A peculiar factory, to be sure, where operations spread to the homes of the workers, the machines were pirated software, and the products were derived from unique creative labors, becoming objects of intense devotion among consumers.

You can run into resistance when you define art in this way – it seems to cheapen it, as if you can’t call a song a “commodity” without implicitly sticking a “mere” in there, just as referring to artists as workers seems to demean their abilities. But this resistance comes almost entirely from music fans, who commit their own Adornoian blunder by placing music on that archaic crumbling pedestal of Art. The producers and DJs I spoke to in Detroit didn’t see it that way. They saw themselves as creative workers; at best, as entrepreneurs. One DJ talked about remixing songs in the morning over coffee. “You know how some people check their email or read the newspaper? Well, I’m making a remix of the new Ciara song during that time.” He took pride in his work ethic, but never romanticized his occupation.

There wasn’t much to wax romantic about in the Detroit music scene at that time. The culture industries were undergoing a restructuring for the immaterial age. Vinyl was no longer moving. Local radio and local music venues had gone corporate, squeezing out local music. DJs who wanted local gigs had to play Top 40 playlists in the suburban megaclubs instead of the native styles of electronic music that had given Detroit mythic status around the world. Many had given up on record labels entirely. Everyone looked to the internet as the saving grace for record sales, promotion, networking – for everything, practically. Some of the more successful artists were attempting to license their tracks for video games. Almost everyone had other jobs, often off the books. For critically acclaimed Detroit producer Omar-S, music is his side job, in case his position on the factory line is eliminated.

I wasn’t embedded within this community, as an anthropologist would be. Instead, I made the 90 minute drive to Detroit when I could, and spent the time interviewing artists in their homes or over the phone. I attended some events, participated and observed. And still, I could have written volumes on my subject-position and how it differed from many of the musicians: I was white, college-educated, not from Detroit (the last one being the most salient difference). But my goal was to go beyond self-reflexive interrogations, in spite of their importance as a starting point. I aspired to write something that would in some way, however minor, participate in the implicit political projects of musical workers.

I can’t say I succeeded in this goal. But while I may have done little for the political fortunes of Detroit musicians, I had started to think about how to revolutionize my theoretical tools. The point was not to efface or undermine my role in my research, but to identify the structural antagonism the artists were dealing with and describe it from a partisan perspective. Beyond the self-reflexive analysis of the ethnographer’s subject-position was the possibility of picking sides.

Deciding to pick sides is the difference between militant research, of the kind Kathleen Gough practiced, and purely scholastic exercises. Burawoy argues that this is a fundamental element of Karl Marx’s “ethnographic imagination”: Marx rooted his theories – not just of how capitalism functioned, but how best to destroy it – in the concrete experiences of workers, as relayed to him by Engels and others. Kathleen Gough is an exemplary figure in this respect, remaining a firm materialist in her studies. As Gough’s friend and colleague Eleanor Smollett puts it in a special journal dedicated to Gough’s legacy,

she did not arrive in Vietnam with a checklist of what a society must accomplish to be ‘really socialist’ as so many Marxists in academia were wont to do. She looked at the direction of the movement, of the concrete gains from where the Vietnamese had begun… Observing socialist development from the point of view of the Vietnamese themselves, rather than as judged against a hypothetical system, she found the people’s stated enthusiasm credible.

After studying material conditions and foreign policy in the socialist bloc, Gough decided that the Soviet Union, while certainly no workers’ paradise, was a net good for the workers of the world – heresy for anyone trying to publish in the West, let alone a Trotskyist.

Analysis is important, but the really explosive stuff of ethnography happens in the encounter. Accordingly, ethnographers and others have increasingly turned towards the methods of participatory action research (PAR). In these studies, a blend of ethnography and pedagogy, the anthropologist takes a partisan interest in the aspirations of the group, and aids the group in actively participating actively in the research. Members of the group under study become co-researchers, asking questions and articulating problems. The goal is to tease out native knowledges that best aid people in navigating difficult circumstances while mobilizing them to create political change.

But participatory action research has returned to the same old problems of imperialist anthropology. In the hands of radical anthropologist Ana Lopes, PAR led to the formation of a sex workers’ union in Great Britain. But in the hands of development scholar Robert Chambers, PAR is a tool to better implement World Bank initiatives and govern populations by allowing them to “participate” in their subjection.

The point, then, is to realize that ethnography has no political content of its own. Politics derives not from the commitment or beliefs of the researcher, but from engagement with wider social antagonisms. Ethnography enables Marxism to trace the contours of these antagonisms at the level of everyday life: a militant ethnography means Marxism at work, and functions not by imposing models of class consciousness and radical action from above, but by revealing the terrain of the struggle – to intellectuals and to workers – as it is continually produced. Ethnography can contribute in just this way, as a method where researchers listen, observe, and reveal the now hidden, now open fight for the future.

Gavin Mueller is a graduate student in Washington, DC.

Do we need “the Anthropocene?” (Inhabiting the Anthropocene)

05/01/2015UncategorizedAntropoceno, Antropologia, Ecologia, Geologia, Mudanças climáticasrenzotaddei

Zev Trachtenberg | January 5, 2015 at 7:00 am

As 2014 came to a close I received a wonderfully provocative e-mail from my friend and colleague in the Environmental Political Theory community John Meyer. He wrote that he has been led to

ask — out loud — a question that may seem either naive or cynical, but is not meant as either: so what’s the big deal about the Anthropocene? . . . To be clear, I get why it’s a big deal in geological terms. But what I’m wondering is: in what ways does it alter our understanding/approach/argument as philosophers, political theorists, political ecologists, environmental humanists, etc., that have already been working on environmental/sustainability concerns?

Does it add to or modify established critiques of “nature”? Does it convey an urgency that might otherwise be lacking? Does it alter our sense of human/more-than-human relations? Is it primarily a vehicle that might convey a set of concerns to a broader public? I know that none of these questions are original, but I pose them b/c I’m fascinated with the explosion of attention to the concept over the past couple years and yet genuinely struggling to make sense of the impetus/es for it.

This strikes me as a really good question. So as 2015 begins, here are some (I hope) seasonally appropriate reflections–not direct answers to John–on whether speaking about the Anthropocene adds some distinctive value to preexisting conversations about anthropogenic environmental change.

An immediate issue has to do with the status of the word as a term in Geology; in that context of course the Anthropocene is a proposed period in the geological time-scale, and it is an open question as to whether or not it will be formally adopted by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (the “ICS”—the decision is anticipated in 2016; here is the website for the working group handling the proposal). But the “explosion of attention” John mentions is due to the usage of the term in an informal way to refer to the massive transformation of Earth systems by human beings. Reference to the Anthropocene lends a kind of scientific prestige; it may be that work in the Humanities (my own area) is particularly prone to the urge to bolster its relevance and credibility by affiliating itself with a scientific endorsement of the project of discussing human-induced environmental change. And that appeal (made explicitly or implicitly) to Geology seems to vindicate the sense that anthropogenic change is really happening.

There is, no doubt, a degree of “wow factor” to the idea that humanity has become a force of nature, akin to geological phenomena like volcanoes and earthquakes, and potentially just as cataclysmic. Reference to the Anthropocene seems to ground this amazing thought in the sober authority of dispassionate geologists attuned to processes that shape the Earth itself. To speak of the Anthropocene is thus to hitch one’s claims to a fundamental understanding of nature, which can help justify one’s own demands on one’s audience for belief, and for action. It is not impossible, therefore, that we are experiencing a bandwagon effect–that the term “Anthropocene” is functioning as a buzzword in what will turn out to be a passing wave of academic fashion. Its passage might be accelerated if people find that, after all, adding the term to studies of particular examples of anthropogenic environmental change does not in fact add any value. And I can’t help but wonder what would happen if the ICS ends up rejecting the term next year. Will that deflate an academic bubble? Or will there be an intensification of C.P. Snow’s split between two cultures?

My own sense is that the “buzzier” sense of “Anthropocene” in fact does have some value—though I want to acknowledge that it is probably not be the best word for the job I want to approve. As a geological term “Anthropocene” refers to a hypothesized condition or set of facts about the Earth; it is the task of the ICS to decide whether that hypothesis is, in it sbest scientific judgment, true. But the informal usage of the word seems to connote a meaning over and above the idea that the present condition of the Earth has been profoundly shaped by human activity. On this additional meaning the word refers not to a condition, but to a broad intellectual approach. In this sense “Anthropocene” can be taken to name something like a paradigm: an intellectual framework which provides a consistent way for understanding diverse phenomena. The framework brings together a range of ideas and outlooks which harmonize around the theme that human activity has led to a distinctive condition of the Earth; it might therefore be called “Anthropocenism.” Thankfully I’ve not see that word before—and hope never to again. But the absence of a viable name leaves the imprecise usage—of the name for the condition—in place as the label for the approach, i.e. for the cluster of views that overlap by attending to anthropogenic environmental change.

In other words, the recent “explosion of attention” to the Anthropocene John notices might reflect the emergence of a consensus across a fairly wide range of disciplines on how to think about the relationship between human beings and the physical environment. The concept may not add any new information to any given field—many of which have well established traditions of examining that relationship. But, by redescribing ideas that are already available it facilitates the recognition that disparate fields indeed address a common theme. The shared term holds out at least the potential that researchers with profoundly different interests can see in each other’s work ideas that can advance their own. At the risk of sounding Pollyannaish, I believe that the possibility that the Anthropocene proposal might facilitate disciplinary cross-fertilization means that the value it adds to existing work is not negligible.

What I’ve said so far is pretty general; I have not given much detail about the content of the “paradigm” I’ve suggested the term the Anthropocene should be taken to name. One hope for this blog is that that content might emerge out the readings we are presenting in our reading posts. But I will conclude with a highly compressed (and too general) statement of what I take to be the core notions.

As the name of an outlook, the Anthropocene articulates the idea that human beings are natural: human life is embedded in the natural world. I draw two key implications from this starting point. First, while it is a commonplace of environmental thinking that our embeddedness means that human beings are essentially dependent on the causal processes at work in natural world, embeddedness equally means that human actions have effects in the natural world; this fact is also essential to our status as natural beings. The causal continuity here points to a systemic understanding, whereby there is no clear conceptual distinction between human and natural domains. Second, the humancharacter of the causal processes by which human beings affect the world is associated with technology. An image from the beginning of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 conveys my point here. The proto-human creature becomes human by using a tool—the bone it uses as a weapon. It then tosses the bone in the air, and we next see a space craft. But the human character of human causality is at the same time social—and technology can only be understood in terms of the social and economic structures and processes through which it is developed and deployed.

As a matter of shorthand I interpret the Anthropocene (in the precise sense of a condition of the Earth) as the consequence of these two implications of naturalism: the socially organized deployment of technology so amplifies and concentrates human causal power that human activity can redirect or disrupt planetary-scale Earth system processes, yielding a state of the system best characterized by reference to human influence. But I am suggesting that we also use the term Anthropocene in a less precise way, to point to something like a paradigm. In that sense it gathers together empirical research that describes and explains the socially and technologically mediated effects human beings have on the world. Within this paradigm the project of understanding observations involves interpreting them in terms of the traces of human causal influence they might reveal. And that is why, I believe, this paradigm can successfully link normative inquiries to descriptive ones. For, by attending centrally to the structure and dynamics of human causal power within the natural world, it keeps in clear focus the issue of moral responsibility.

Gregory Bateson: the centennial (Edge)

22/11/2014UncategorizedAntropologia, Gregory Bateson, Teoria socialrenzotaddei

About Bateson

by John Brockman [11.19.04]

Introduction

November 20, 2004 — In 1974, in honor of my friend Gregory Bateson’s 70th birthday, I asked him if he would give his blessing to a book I was planning about his work. He agreed, and the result was About Bateson, a volume of original essays about his work and ideas by interesting thinkers in various fields bracketed by my Introduction and his Afterword, both of which follow below.

Gregory Bateson was one of the most important and least understood thinkers of the twentieth century. Bateson originated the double bind theory of schizophrenia, was the first to apply cybernetic theory to the social sciences, and made important biological discoveries about such nonhuman species as the dolphin. His book, Steps To An Ecology of Mind, published in 1972, attracted widespread attention. We met in April, 1973 at the AUM Conference (“American University of Masters”) at Esalen in Big Sur, where we immediately became friends, and where he convinced me to become an agent. Within a month I had founded Brockman, Inc. and sold his book The Evolutionary Idea (ultimately published under the title Mind In Nature).

While Gregory was very much alive, with his blessing and mentoring, I conceived of, and edited, a book entitled About Bateson, a book which featured seven substantial essays by eminent thinkers in their own right-containing their own interpretations of and reactions to Bateson’s work.

In the 250-page volume, Mary Catherine Bateson discussed her father’s treatment of the concept of wisdom and love-the “lucid” computations of the heart”; Ray Birswhistell analyzed Bateson’s unique methodology; David Lipset provided a short biography of the thinker’s wary years; Rollo May discussed Bateson’s humanism; Margaret Mead explored his effect on cross-cultural analysis (Groegory her 2nd husband); Edwin Schlossberg contributed a piece on consciousness, social change, and cybernetics. As editor, I wrote the introductory essay. The book concluded with Gregory Bateson’s own original 12-page Afterword, in which he presented his latest thinking on his life’s work. Also included was a 2-page CV and a Bibliography page of his book.

At that time, Bateson contended that as a result of advances in cybernetics and fundamental mathematics, many other areas of thought have shifted. In The Evolutionary Idea, a proposed new book, he planned to gather together those new advances to present an alternative to then current orthodox theories of evolution. This alternative view was to stress the role of information, that is, of mind, in all levels of biology from genetics to ecology and from human culture to the pathology of schizophrenia. In place of natural selection of organisms, Bateson considered the survival of patterns, ideas, and forms of interaction,

“Any descriptive proposition,” he said, “which remains true longer will out-survive other propositions which do not survive so long. This switch from the survival of the creatures to the survival of ideas which are immanent in the creatures (in their anatomical forms and in their interrelationships) gives a totally new slant to evolutionary ethics and philosophy. Adaptation, purpose, homology, somatic change, and mutation all take on new meaning with this shift in theory.”

Bateson had an endless repertoire of concepts and ideas to talk about. A typical conversation might be about metaphor versus sacrament, schismogenesis, metaphysics, explanatory principles, heuristic versus fundamental ideas, the value of deduction, steady state society, metapropositions, deuterolearning, cybernetic explanation, idea as difference, logical categories of learning, mental determinism, end linkage, and on and on.

While his ideas did take hold in some fields (schizophrenia, family therapy, among others), the natural audience for his work, the evolutionary biologists, had little interest in him. The mainstream thinkers in that field believed his ideas were muddled. This is one of several reasons why he ultimately abandoned the The Evolutionary Idea, which was to have been the first major restatement of evolutionary theory in half a century. Based on his previous experience, he was worried about the difficulty of getting across his ideas. The implications of the theory are based on acceptance of a radical new order of things, a worldview totally alien to our traditional Western way of thinking.

Aspects of this worldview derived from his association in the 1940s with Warren McCulloch, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, and Norbert Wiener et al, who were all present at the creation of cybernetic theory. It was the radical epistemology behind these ideas seemed to inform a lot of this thinking. “The cybernetic idea is the most important idea since Jesus Christ.,” he once told me.

And this is where we connected, as my book, By The Late John Brockman, which was very much on the radar screen at that time, was nothing if not a radical epistemological statement on language, thought, and reality. I had written the trilogy that ultimately comprised the book with no reference to Bateson as I had not read him and had barely heard of him until I was invited to the AUM conference in 1973 (my late invitation was sent when the organizers, John Lilly and Alan Watts, both strong supporters of my book, found out their keynote speaker, Richard Feynman, was ill, and they needed a replacement. Only when I arrived at the conference did I find out what I was walking into.)

“Evolutionists are an anxious, conservative, and spiteful bunch,” Bateson said. “In fact, they kill each other.” Bateson was referring to the famous affair involving his father, William Bateson, the preeminent British scientist of his day who, picking up on the work of Mendel, coined the word “genetics” and began the field, and William Kammerer, the Austrian biologist. Kammerer, a Lamarckian, committed suicide over research involving the inherited characteristics of the midwife toad. “I don’t think they will like this book very much,” Bateson said, realizing that he will be straying far from the traditional debate of natural selection versus inherited characteristics. “I shall not write the book. I am too old and too sick to fight the fight”.

But he was always willing to travel, to interact with all kinds of people in order to present his ideas. This would lead him into strange surroundings, where the participants had no idea of what to expect and were not prepared for his depth and erudition. “Why do you bother?” I ask in reference to this particularly moribund gathering. It is clear that few here have any inkling of what he is saying. “One simply keeps going,” he says gently, “and leaves the name behind.” It wasn’t easy making a living as an epistemologist, he noted.

Yet, he did receive recognition. Charles Roycroft, British psychoanalyst, was quoted in the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Issue of the Times Literary Supplement as saying that Gregory Bateson was the most underrated writer of the past seventy-five years.

Bateson is not easy. The only way to “get” Bateson is to read him. To spend time with him, in person or through his essays, was a rigorous intelligent exercise, an immense relief from the trivial forms that command respect in contemporary society

—JB

GREGORY BATESON: THE CENTENNIAL

(JOHN BROCKMAN:) It is March 1973 in Big Sur. California. A diverse group of thinkers are assembled to spend ten days together exploring the work of British mathematician G. Spencer Brown. Alan Watts and John Lilly, the coorganizers, are billing the event as “The AUM Conference.” shorthand for The American University of Masters.

They have gathered together intellectuals, philosophers, psychologists, and scientists. Each has been asked to lecture on his own work in terms of its relationship to Brown’s new ideas in mathematics. C. Spencer Brown lectures for two days on his Laws of Form. Alan Watts talks of Eastern religious thought. John Lilly discusses maps of reality. Karl Pribram explores new possibilities for thinking about neuroscience. Ram Dass presents a spiritual path. Stewart Brand lectures on whole systems. Psychologists Will Schutz, Claudio Naranjo, and Charles Tart are in attendance. Heinz von Foerster holds forth on cybernetic modeling. My own topic is “Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein, and Frankenstein.”

Perhaps, of all the “Masters” present, Gregory Bateson, at sixty-eight, is at once the best known and the least known. Among his assembled peers, his reputation is formidable. At the AUM Conference, stories of his profound effect on postmodern thinking abound. Yet few outside the relatively small circle of avant-garde thinkers know about him or his work.

There is valid reason. Bateson is not very accessible. His major book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, is just being published. It is a collection of essays he has written over a thirty-five-year period.

Bateson begins lecturing in the conference room. Clearly he is held in awe by his colleagues. Nothing in his imposing presence detracts from his reputation. He is a large man with a deep rich voice imbued with an unmistakable English accent. There is an air of authenticity about him.

Nora Bateson, Gregory Bateson, John Brockman at Aum Conference, 1973

His talk is filled with brilliant insights and vast erudition as he takes us on a tour of subjects that include zoology, psychiatry, anthropology, aesthetics, linguistics, evolution, cybernetics, and epistemology’. “The point,” he says, “is that the ways of nineteenth-century thinking are becoming rapidly bankrupt, and new ways are growing out of cybernetics, systems theory, ecology, meditation, psychoanalysis, and psychedelic experience.”

As he talks I look through a paper he has left for us as we entered the room. “Form, Substance, and Difference” is the nineteenth Korzybski Lecture, delivered by Bateson in 1970. In it he points out that he’s touched on numerous fields but is an expert in none. He’s not a philosopher, nor is anthropology exactly his business. This doesn’t help me much. All I know about him is that he has an anthropological background, was once married to Margaret Mead, and was a prime mover behind the important Macy Conferences in Cybernetics in the 1940s.

His theme in the Korzybski Lecture was the same as his theme today: “the area of impact between very abstract and formal philosophic thought on the one hand and the natural history of man and other creatures on the other.” His ideas are clearly of an epistemological nature. He asks us to do away with our Newtonian language, our Cartesian coordinates, to see the world in terms of the mind we all share. Bateson presents a new approach based on a cybernetic epistemology: “The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in the pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem. This larger mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by ‘God,’ but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology.”

“Very few people have any idea of what I am talking about,” Bateson says as he picks at a piece of fish in a Malibu restaurant. We are having dinner and discussing his plans for a new book concerning evolutionary theory. It is June 1973. (At the AUM Conference in March, I had been pressed into service as a literary agent.)

Bateson defies simple labeling, easy explanation. People have problems with his work. He talks of being an explorer who cannot know what he is exploring until it has been explored. His introduction to Steps states: “I found that in my work with primitive peoples, schizophrenia, biological symmetry, and in my discontent with the conventional theories of evolution and learning, I had identified a widely scattered set of bench marks as points of reference from which a new scientific territory could be defined. These bench marks I have called ‘Steps’ in the title of the book.”

But this is where Bateson gets difficult. Just what is this new scientific territory’? Most people look for the next place, the next piece of knowledge. Instead, Bateson presents an epistemology so radical that as one climbs from step to step, the ground supporting the ladder abruptly vanishes. Not easy, this cybernetic explanation of Gregory Bateson. Not comfortable. Not supportive. Not loving. The center dissolves, and man is dead; and in his place we have the metaphysical “I”. So dismiss yourself; let go: There’s nothing lost.

Bateson’s readers often find it difficult to grasp that his way of thinking is different from theirs. His students believe that he is hiding something from them, that there’s a secret behind his thinking that he won’t share. There’s something to this. Bateson is not clearly understood because his work is not an explanation, but a commission, As Wittgenstein noted, “a commission tells us what we must do.” In Bateson’s case, what we must do is reprogram ourselves, train our intelligence and imagination to work according to radical configurations. Heinz Von Foerster points out that “the blessed curse of a meta-language is that it wears the cloth of a first-order language, an ‘object language.’ Thus, any proposition carries with it the tantalizing ambiguity: Was it made in meta or in object language?” Nobody, knows and you can’t find out. All attempts to speak about a meta-language, that is, to speak in meta-meta-language, are doomed to fail. As Wittgenstein observed: “Remain silent!” But Bateson cannot remain silent. His childlike curiosity, his intellectual vigor and strength compel him to continue exploring new ground.

Yet he is hesitant about writing his new book. The Evolutionary Idea will be the first major restatement of evolutionary theory in half a century. Based on his previous experience, he is worried about the difficulty of getting across his ideas. The implications of the theory are based on acceptance of a radical new order of things, a worldview totally alien to our traditional Western way of thinking.

“Evolutionists are an anxious, conservative, and spiteful bunch,” he says. “In fact, they kill each other.” Bateson is referring to the famous affair involving his father, William Bateson, and William Kammerer, the Austrian biologist. Kammerer, a Lamarckian, committed suicide over research involving the inherited characteristics of the midwife toad. “I don’t think they will like this book very much,” Bateson says, realizing that he will be straying far from the traditional debate of natural selection versus inherited characteristics.

Bateson contends that as a result of advances in cybernetics and fundamental mathematics, many other areas of thought have shifted. In The Evolutionary Idea, he will gather together these new advances to present an alternative to current orthodox theories of evolution. This alternative view will stress the role of information, that is, of mind, in all levels of biology from genetics to ecology and from human culture to the pathology of schizophrenia. In place of natural selection of organisms, Bateson will consider the survival of patterns, ideas, and forms of interaction,

“Any descriptive proposition,” he says, “which remains true longer will out-survive other propositions which do not survive so long. This switch from the survival of the creatures to the survival of ideas which are immanent in the creatures (in their anatomical forms and in their interrelationships) gives a totally new slant to evolutionary ethics and philosophy. Adaptation, purpose, homology, somatic change, and mutation all take on new meaning with this shift in theory.”

It is the morning after our dinner discussion about the new book. Bateson, about forty other people, and I are together for a two-day seminar to explore “Ecology of Mind.” Most of the people have paid one hundred dollars to hear Bateson talk. The auspices are an institute for humanistic development. The audience appears to be interested in self-help and personal awareness. This is the first opportunity I have had to hear him speak before a general audience. After the excitement surrounding his performance at the AUM Conference, I am preparing myself for another memorable experience.

Bateson slowly guides us through his endless repertoire of concepts and ideas. He talks about metaphor versus sacrament, schismogenesis, metaphysics, explanatory principles, heuristic versus fundamental ideas, the value of deduction, steady state society, metapropositions, deuterolearning, cybernetic explanation, idea as difference, logical categories of learning, mental determinism, end linkage, and on and on.

After a few hours, the attention of the group begins to wander. Many appear to be bored. By the end of the first day, at least one-third of the people have left. Bateson is unperturbed. Many people seek him out for the wrong reasons: for entertainment; for answers; as a guru. He explains that his receptions vary from the extreme boredom of this day to the excitement of the Macy Conferences of the 1940s. Still, he is always willing to travel, to interact with all kinds of people in order to present his ideas. “Why do you bother?” I ask in reference to this particularly moribund gathering. It is clear that few here have any inkling of what he is saying. “One simply keeps going,” he says gently, “and leaves the name behind.”

Christmas time, 1973. I am about to approach a publisher to sell rights to The Evolutionary Idea. I had phoned Bateson requesting a biographical sketch. His letter arrives:

“John Brockman suggests that I write you a personal letter telling you who I am. I enclose an outline curriculum vitae,* to which I will add as follows.

“My father was William Bateson, F.R.S., geneticist, a fellow of St. John’s College, and first director of the John Innes Horticultural Institute, which was and still is a large genetical research institute.

“Boyhood was mainly devoted to natural history: butterflies and moths, beetles, dragonflies, marine invertebrates, flowering plants, etc.

“Cambridge was mainly biology until I got a chance to go to the Galapagos Islands, where I realized that I did not know what to do with field natural history. In those days, biology, both in field and lab, was mainly taxonomy, and I knew that was not what I wanted to do. So, on return to Cambridge, I took anthropology under A. C. Haddon, who sent me out to the Sepik River, New Guinea, to study historical culture contact between the Sepik and the Fly River peoples. This was the equivalent in anthropology of taxonomy in biology. The result was two field expeditions, groping very unhappily for what one could do to establish some theory in anthropology. The final product was Naven, a book which was then very difficult for people to read but is gradually coming into almost orthodoxy. Levi-Strauss has worked on some of the problems of cultural structure which I raised then, and I think he’s done a good deal to make my stuff readable and ‘safe’ for anthropologists.

“After that, field work in the Dutch Indies, in Bali, with my wife Margaret Mead. Then I did an elaborate photographic study of personal relations among the Balinese, especially interchange between parents and children. This was published with about 700 photographs as Balinese Character.

“Not much of my period of fellowship at St. John’s College was spent in Cambridge. I was mostly in New Guinea and Bali. But of course it was an important piece of my life, and there were important people-L. S. B. Leakey, Harold Jeffries, Claude Guillebaud, Reginald Hall, Teulon Porter, Sir Frederick Bartlett, and others.

“In those days I was on the sidelines of the anthropologically famous battles between Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski. I’d taught under Radcliffe-Brown in Sydney and learned a great deal from him, some of which got built into Naven (the hook-up with French anthropology came down to me from Durkheim and Mauss through Radcliffe-Brown, who was a great admirer of them). I enjoyed Malinowski very much, loved him, but thought him a lousy’ anthropological theorist. Most of my colleagues (other than his students) hated his guts but were dreadfully afraid that he was a great theorist.

“In World War II, I came running back to England in September 1939 while Margaret was having a baby* in New York. I was promptly advised to return to America to help America join England. The Japanese finally did that for us. And I went through the war with the American Office of Strategic Services as a psychological planner. I don’t think I helped the war much, but we did run four issues of an underground newspaper behind the Japanese lines in Burma.

(* Mary Catherine Bateson)

‘Oh yes, before I went overseas I had a job analyzing German propaganda films in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, and just before going overseas, I had met Warren McCulloch and Bigelow, who were all excited about ‘feedback’ in electronic machinery. So while I was overseas, and mostly bored and frustrated, I occasionally comforted myself by thinking about the properties of closed self-corrective circuits. On arrival back in New York I went straight to the Macy Foundation to ask for a conference on these things. Fremont-Smith said, ‘McCulloch was here a week ago with the same request, and he’s going to be the chairman.’ Membership in those conferences, with Norbert Wiener, John Von Neumann, McCulloch, and the rest, was one of the great events in my life. Wiener coined the word ‘cybernetics’ for what it was we were discussing.

“I was gently dropped from Harvard because a rumor got around, ‘Bateson says anthropologists ought to be psychoanalyzed.’ I did not say this, and I don’t think I even believed it, but if they thought this was a good reason for dropping me, then I was probably lucky to be dropped. I was immediately picked up by Jurgen Ruesch for his research project in the Langley Porter Clinic, a psychiatric institution. This was the beginning of fourteen years of association with psychiatry, where I did my best, again, to bring formal theory into a very unformed Augean stable. The result was the so-called double bind hypothesis, which provided a framework for the formal description of schizophrenic symptoms and the experience of the schizophrenic in his family. I think this held up and still holds up pretty well in the face of a lot of misunderstanding and a little criticism. I am still pretty sure that something like the double bind story is an essential part of the phenomenon called ‘schizophrenia.’ In England my chief admirer in this field is Ronnie Laing. (By the way, you will probably run into rumors that Ronnie got too many of his ideas from me. I don’t think this is really true. He certainly got some, and it is after all the purpose of scientific publication to spread ideas around, and I don’t think he could at all be accused of plagiarism. I, too, have benefited by reading his stuff.)

“Enough mental hospitals and schizophrenic families is after a while enough, so I went off in 1963 to study dolphins, first under John Lilly, and then in Hawaii with the Oceanic Institute. A fascinating but terribly difficult animal to study. But they forced me to straighten out my contributions to learning theory and what’s wrong with B. F. Skinner. But alas, the Institute went broke.

“So here I am, corrupting the minds of the youth in the University of California at Santa Cruz. And also the minds of the faculty. I have a class for seventy students called ‘The Ecology of Mind.’ For this I have six section leaders, who are fully grown-up professors, a molecular biologist, an astronomer from Lick Observatory, a tidepool zoologist, a historian, a literary bloke, and a self-unfrocked Jesuit. What I mean is that my stuff is relevant and sometimes difficult for all sorts of people. On the whole, the students get more out of it than the grown-ups.’

Fifty-odd pages of The Evolutionary Idea have arrived. It is April 1974. The material is dense and difficult. I have responded with faint praise and well-intentioned criticism, urging Bateson to open it up, be more chatty, try to include the human, the anecdotal, and so forth. I have asked if the format of a metalogue between a father and a young daughter is necessary. Why can’t the ideas be presented in a more traditional form? Bateson’s letter is biting:

“I have now your letter of April 16th, your long-distance telephone call of the day before yesterday, and some pieces of telephone talk in New York. All these tend in the direction of ‘please be more prolix.’ I tossed the first two chapters in the wastepaper basket at four o’clock this morning and shall probably do so again tomorrow. I think the real difficulty is that some readers (et tu, Brute?) just do not believe that I mean what I say. I suspect they think it is all a sort of entertainment and hope to come out at the end feeling refreshed. Believe me, John, that is not at all what it is about. Anybody who really reads and notices what is said and after several readings be gins to understand it, will come out in despair and nearer to tears than laughter.

“In any ease, my colleagues writing in the same field, whether terse or prolix, are incredibly difficult. The ideas which we deal with are difficult, painful, and foreign ideas. If you doubt this, I suggest a dose of Immanuel Kant as an example of the prolix, or a dose of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as an example of the terse. Honestly, I believe Kant is the more difficult.

“There are good and serious reasons why one party in the metalogues has to be in the period of sexual latency. This is not just in order to be cute; it is in order to be acute.

“For the rest, I will try not to let your remarks disturb me. I am, alas, too liable to let that sort of thing enrage me.

“There is a cute story going around about Picasso. A gent wanted him to paint things in a more representational manner, ‘like this photograph of my wife. It is really like her.’ Picasso looked at it and said, ‘She is small, isn’t she? And fiat.'”

New technology equals new perception. The English biologist J. Z, Young points out that man creates tools and then molds himself in their image. Reality is manmade. An invention, a metaphor.

“The heart is a pump” is a statement we all accept as a truism. “The brain is a computer” is a statement that usually brings forth cries of humanistic horror. We seem to forget that the first statement is a creature of Newtonian mathematics. Newton created a mechanistic methodology. We invented ourselves in terms of its descriptive language.

We don’t say the heart is like a pump. The heart is a pump. The metaphor is operational.

Although many of us are not ready for it, within a few years we will all recognize that the brain is a computer. This will be a result of the cybernetic ideas developed by such men as Gregory Bateson, Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, Cordon Pask, Ross Ashby, John Von Neumann, Heinz Von Foerster, and John Lilly, to name a few. New technology equals new perception. The words of the world are the life of the world. Nature is not created. Nature is said.

We are just now beginning to recognize the new order resulting from the development of the science of cybernetics. Bateson believes that the cybernetic explanation is the most important fundamental intellectual advance of the last two thousand years. It tears the fabric of our habitual thinking apart. Subject and object fuse. The individual self decreates. It is a world of pattern, of order, of resonances.

Bateson is special. He is the only living person fully equipped to construct a bridge between the world of nineteenth-century science and the cybernetic world of today. He has lived on both sides of the bridge. On one side, the solid world embodied by his father, William Bateson, on the other side, the undone world of Gregory Bateson, a world of language, communication, and pattern.

Bateson is sitting in my living room in May 1974. Today is his seventieth birthday. As we prepare for a big party, I suggest the possibility of organizing a hook in his honor. “I hope that if there were such a book that it focus on the ideas and what they are doing to us,” he says.

We talk and plan. Bateson gives his blessing to the project. Steps to An Ecology of Mind is by no means an easy or popular presentation of the core problems he has addressed himself to. We decide to invite a number of his friends and colleagues to contribute original essays, using Steps as a springboard, something either to disagree with or to take off from. Bateson writes a letter for the invitees. In the letter he suggests:

“Possible angles which the authors might cover include: changed perceptions of the Self; changed concepts of responsibility; changed feelings about time; money; authority; attitudes toward environment; sex; children; family; control and law; city planning; biological bases for human planning and ethics; the seeking of optimal and homeostatic goals rather than maxima; population control; changes in the balance between ‘feelings’ and ‘intellect’; changes in educational methods; new horizons in psychiatry; etc., etc.

“The possible field is very wide, but in sum what I would like to see would be a thoughtful forum on the subject of what you all (and I, too) are doing to the premises of civilization.”

Eight people, myself included, will contribute to the book. Mary Catherine Bateson (anthropologist and the daughter of Bateson and Margaret Mead), Ray L. Birdwhistell (expert in kinesics and communication), David Lipset (Bateson’s authorized biographer), Rollo May (humanistic psychologist), Margaret Mead (anthropologist and Bateson’s first wife), Edwin Schlossberg (physicist and environmental designer), and C. H. Waddington (geneticist). Unfortunately, Waddington dies before his piece is completed.

Other invited people are too busy with their own work or have problems with Bateson’s ideas. His insistence on strict, as opposed to loose, thinking is most apparent with regard to his attitude toward his close friends and colleagues. It is December 1974, and I have just received his correspondence with a famous psychologist and author (who is not represented in this book). The psychologist plans to write about energy. “Everybody talks about it and nobody knows what it means,” he says.

Bateson’s response typifies the rigor of his precise thinking.

~

“You say ‘energy’ and qualify the word by saying that neither you nor anybody knows what it is.”But that (the qualifying comment) is not quite true, because, after all, we (scientists) made up the concept and therefore know (or should know) what we put into it.

“What is on the other side of the fence, of course, we do not know. But we made the concept to cover what we thought was ‘out there’ and gave the concept what we thought were appropriate characteristics. These latter we know, because we put them where they are, inside that word ‘energy.’

“I am strongly of the opinion that these well-known characteristics are not appropriate to the sort of explanatory principle which psychologists want to make of the concept.

“1) ‘Energy’ is a quantity. It is indeed rather like ‘mass,’ which is another quantity. Or ‘velocity.’ None of these is a ‘substance’ or a ‘pattern.’ They are quantities, not numbers.

“2) ‘Energy’ is a very tightly defined quantity, having the dimensions ML(2)/T(2) (i.e., (mass X length X length) ÷ (time X time), or, more familiarly, mass X velocity (2)).

“Now the rub is that no quantity can ever generate a pattern, and to assert that this can occur is precisely the entering wedge of the new supernaturalism, for which Freud, Marx, and Jung are much to blame. (They ‘could’ have known better.)

“Quantity, of course, can and often does develop and intensify latent difference but never creates that difference. Tension may find out the weakest link in the chain but it is never the explanation of how that particular link came to be the weakest (Indeed the characteristic called ‘being weakest’ is not inherent in that link but precisely in the relation between that link and the others. ‘It’ could be ‘protected’ by filing one of the others!).

“3) The next step in supernaturalism alter the invocation of ‘energy’ is the belief in Lamarckian inheritance and ESP. After that the next step is the assertion that man contains two real existing principles, viz., a Body and a Soul. After that, any sort of tyranny and oppression can be rationalized as ‘good’ for the victim.”

“So there is a slot in our proposed book for arguments in favor of ‘energy’ as an explanatory principle, but such arguments in that context will necessarily be controversial. I urge you to treat ‘energy’ as a controversial issue, not as a ‘matter-of-course.’

“Personally I have never been able to see or feel why this very ‘mechanical’ metaphor (‘energy’) appeals to especially humanistic psychologists. What are the arguments for this metaphor rather than ‘entropy’ (which is still a sort of quantity)? What characteristics of the original concept (energy or entropy) are to be carried over when the concept is used metaphorically to explain action or (?) anatomy?

“Are you familiar with Larry Kubie’s paper,* long ago, in which he neatly and (I think) completely exploded the whole Freudian ‘economics’ of energy? It was that paper that earned him his place at the Macy Cybernetic conferences. But he never contributed anything there. I guess they slapped his wrist for heresy.

(* “Fallacious Use of Quantitative Concepts in Dynamic Psychology,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 16 (1947): 507-18.)

“Finally, believe me that the intensity of passion and care spent upon this letter is a function of both my esteem for you and my hatred of the principles which hide behind the use of ‘energy’ (and ‘tension,’ ‘power,’ ‘force,’ etc.) to explain behavior.”

It is January 1977. The publisher has called. The book is overdue. The pieces have been written, discussed, and edited. They provide an excellent entry into areas of Bateson’s thought. The contributors have measured his work in terms of its effect, in terms of information.

I call Bateson in Santa Cruz to discuss the introduction. Before we get down to business, he tells me that Governor Brown has just named him to the Board of Regents of the University of California. Also, Charles Roycroft, British psychoanalyst, is quoted in the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Issue of the Times Literary Supplement as saying that Gregory Bateson is the most underrated writer of the past seventy-five years.

I would like to interview Bateson for the introduction, but this proves logistically impossible. Thus I must edit my thoughts, notes, and our correspondence to present him to the reader. The present piece, I realize, is hardly a comprehensive introduction to the man and his work. But, as Bateson might say, it is a “step.” It is important that readers realize that although this book is an introduction to Gregory Bateson, the only way to “get” Bateson is to read him. Study him. Editing this book has been, for me, most important. I found it necessary to force myself to sit quite still for many, many hours and study (not read) Steps to an Ecology of Mind, a rich, exhilarating experience. Roycroft is correct. Bateson is the most underrated writer of the century. To spend time with him, in person or through his essays, is rigorous intelligent exercise, an immense relief from the trivial forms that command respect in contemporary society.

I ask Bateson to write an afterword to the book. “What do you want me to write about?” he responds. I am most interested in his ideas on cybernetic explanation and epistemology. While pondering his question, I remember a conversation with cultural anthropologist Edward T. Hall, who pointed out to me that the most significant, the most critical inventions of man were not those ever considered to be inventions, but those that appeared to be innate and natural. To illustrate the point, he told a story of a group of cavemen living in prehistoric times. One day, while sitting around the fire, one of the men said, “Guess what? We’re talking.” Silence. The others looked at him with suspicion. “What’s talking?” one of them asked. “It’s what we’re all doing. Right now. We’re talking!” “You’re crazy,” another man replied. “Who ever heard of such a thing?” “I’m not crazy,” the first man said, “you’re crazy. We’re talking.” And it became a question of “who’s crazy?” The group could not see or understand because “talking” was invented by the first man. The moment he said “We’re talking” was a moment of great significance in the process of evolution.

A modern-day descendant of Hall’s caveman is Gregory Bateson. He is busy inventing something, an invention so profound that once fully propounded, it will seem always to have been “natural.” The full impact of Bateson’s thinking is so radical that, yes, I have doubts that he fully believes in his own ideas. This is the way it has to be. He has entered no man’s land. He is trying something new. “We’re talking.”

AFTERWORD

by Gregory BatesonDear John

When you first suggested this volume and undertook to put it together, I said, “Don’t let it be a Festschrift,” and we agreed that you would ask your authors rather for some work and thinking of theirs that might have developed out of or alongside some part of my work. You would ask not for praise or criticism, but for some original material of theirs. So let me thank them, and then become, myself, one of your authors. Rather than replying to the other authors, let me tell you where I stand today and what, for me, came out of all that work in New Guinea and Bali and, later, with schizophrenics and dolphins.

As you know, the difficulty was always to get people to approach the formal analysis of mind with a similar or even an open epistemology. Many people claim to have no epistemology and must just overcome this optimism. Only then can they approach the particular epistemology here proposed. In other words, two jumps are required of the reader, and of these the first is the more difficult. We all cling fast to the illusion that we are capable of direct perception, uncoded and not mediated by epistemology. The double hind hypothesis, i.e., the mental description of schizophrenia—was itself a contribution to epistemology, and to evaluate it was an exercise, if you please, in a sort of metaepistemology. Epistemology itself is becoming a recursive subject, a recursive study of recursiveness. So that anybody encountering the double bind hypothesis has the problem that epistemology was already changed by the double bind hypothesis, and the hypothesis itself therefore has to be approached with the modified way of thinking which the hypothesis had proposed.

I am sure that none of us in the 1950s realized how difficult this was. Indeed, we still did not realize that, if our hypothesis was even partly correct, it must also be important as a contribution to what I have sometimes called the “fundamentals” our stock of “necessary” truths.

So what I have to do now is to tell you how, for me, an epistemology grew out of ethnographic observation and cybernetic theory, and how this epistemology determines not only double bind theory and all the thinking that has followed in the field of psychiatry but also affects evolutionary thinking and the whole body-mind problem.

I have to present here a description of an epistemology, and then I have to fit the double bind hypothesis and thoughts about evolution into that epistemology. In a word, I have to invite the reader to come in backward upon the whole business.

From time to time I get complaints that my writing is dense and hard to understand. It may comfort those who find the matter hard to understand if I tell them that I have driven myself, over the years, into a “place” where conventional dualistic statements of mind-body relations—the conventional dualisms of Darwinism, psychoanalysis, and theology—are absolutely unintelligible to me. It is becoming as difficult for me to understand dualists as it is for them to understand me. And I fear that it’s not going to become easier, except by those others being slowly exercised in the art of thinking along those pathways that seem to me to be “straight.” My friends in New Guinea, the Iatmul, whose language and culture I studied, used to say, “But our language is so easy. We just talk.”

So in writing about evolution—in trying to write about it—a second book has started to appear. It became necessary to tell the reader a number of very elementary (as it seemed to me) things which he certainly ought to have learned in high school but which Anglo-Saxons certainly do not learn in high school. This book, budded from the first, larger book, I called, tentatively, What Every Schoolboy Knows, an ironic quote from Lord Macaulay. what the good gentleman really said was, “Every schoolboy knows who imprisoned Montezuma and who strangled Atahualpa.”

Let me start by trying to characterize my epistemology as it has grown under my hands, with some notable influence from other people.

First, it is a branch of natural history. It was McCulloch who, for me, pulled epistemology down out of the realms of abstract philosophy into the much more simple realm of natural history. This was dramatically done in the paper by McCulloch and his friends entitled “What the Frog’s Eye Told the Frog’s Brain.” In that paper he showed that any answer to the question “How can a frog know anything?” would be delimited by the sensory machinery of the frog; and that the sensory machinery of the frog could, indeed, be investigated by experimental and other means. It turned out that the frog could only receive news of such moving objects as subtended less than ten degrees at the eye. All else was invisible and produced no impulses on the optic nerve. From this paper it followed that, to understand human beings, even at a very elementary level, you had to know the limitations of their sensory input.

And that matter became part of my experience when I went through the experiments of Adelbert Ames, Jr. I discovered that when I see something, or hear a sound, or taste, it is my brain, or perhaps I should better say “mind”—it is I who create an image in the modality of the appropriate sense organ. My image is my aggregation and organization of information about the perceived object, aggregated and integrated by me according to rules of which I am totally unconscious. I can, thanks to Ames, know about these rules; but I cannot be conscious of the process of their working.

Ames showed me that I (and you), looking through our eyes, create, out of showers of impulses on the optic nerve, images of the perceived that appear to be three-dimensional images. I “see” an image in depth. But the way in which that image is given depth depends upon essentially Euclidian arguments within the brain and of which the perceiver is unconscious. It is as if the perceiver knew the premises of parallax and created his image in accordance with those rules, never letting himself know at any conscious level that he has applied the rules of parallax to the shower of impulses. Indeed, the whole process, including the shower of impulses itself, is a totally unconscious business.

It seems to be a universal feature of human perception, a feature of the underpinning of human epistemology, that the perceiver shall perceive only the product of his perceiving act, He shall not perceive the means by which that product was created. The product itself is a sort of work of art.

But along with this detached natural history, in which 1, as an epistemology, describe the frog or myself—along with that natural history goes a curious and unexpected addition. Now that we have pulled epistemology down from philosophy and made it a branch of natural history, it becomes necessarily a normative branch of natural history. This study is normative in the sense that it will chide us when we ignore its strictures and regularities. One had not expected that natural history could be normative, but indeed, the epistemology which I am building for you is normative in two almost synonymous ways. It can be wrong, or I can be wrong about it. And either of those two sorts of error becomes itself part of any epistemology in which it occurs. Any error will propose pathology. (But I am the epistemology.)

Take the statement in a previous paragraph, The organism builds images in depth out of the shower of impulses brought to the brain by the optic nerve. It is possible that this statement is incorrect, that future scientific study of the act of perception may show that this is not so, or that its syntax is inappropriate. That is what I mean by being in error in the first way. And the second way of possible error would be to believe that the images that I see are in fact that which I am looking at, that my mental map is the external territory. (But we wander off into philosophy if we ask, “Is there really a territory?”)

And then there is the fact that the epistemology I am building is monistic. Applying Occam’s Razor, I decline to pay attention to notions—which others assert to be subjectively supported—that mind or soul is somehow separable from body and from matter. On the other hand, it is absolutely necessary, of course, that my epistemology shall allow for the natural history fact that, indeed, many human beings of many different cultures have the belief that the mind is indeed separable from the body. Their epistemology is either dualistic or pluralistic. In other words, in this normative natural history called epistemology there must be a study of errors, and evidently certain sorts of error are predictably common. If you look over the whole span of my work, starting with the notion of schismogenesis, or starting even with the patterns in partridge feathers and going from that to schismogenesis in New Guinea to end linkage in national character, to the double bind and to the material we got from the porpoises, you will see that up to a certain date my language of report is dualistic.

The double bind work was for me a documentation of the idea that mind is a necessary explanatory principle. Simple nineteenth-century materialism will not accept any hierarchy of ideas or differences. The world of mindlessness, the Pleroma, contains no names, no classes.

It is here that I have always in my thinking followed Samuel Butler in his criticisms of Darwinian evolution. It always seems to me that the Darwinian phrasings were an effort to exclude mind. And indeed that materialism in general was an effort to exclude mind. And therefore, since materialism is rather barren, it was hardly surprising to me as an epistemological naturalist to note that physicists, from William Crookes onward, have been prone to go to mediums and other tricksters. They needed solace in their materialism.

But the matter was always difficult. I could not tolerate the dualism seriously, and yet I knew that the narrow materialistic statement was a gross oversimplification of the biological world. The solution came when I was preparing the Korzybski Lecture, when I suddenly realized that of course the bridge between map and territory is difference. It is only news of difference that can get from the territory to the map, and this fact is the basic epistemological statement about the relationship between all reality out there and all perception in here: that the bridge must always be in the form of difference. Difference, out there, precipitates coded or corresponding difference in the aggregate of differentiation which we call the organism’s mind. And that mind is immanent in matter, which is partly inside the body—but also partly “outside,” e.g., in the form of records, traces, and perceptibles.

Difference, you see, is just sufficiently away from the grossly materialistic and quantitative world so that mind, dealing in difference, will always be intangible, will always deal in intangibles, and will always have certain limitations because it can never encounter with Immanuel Kant called the Ding an Sich, the thing in itself. It can only encounter news of boundaries—news of the contexts of difference.

It is worthwhile to list several points about “difference” here,

1. A difference is not material and cannot be localized. If this apple is different from that egg, the difference does not lie in the apple or in the egg, or in the space between them. To locate difference, i.e., to delimit the context or interface, would be to posit a world incapable of change. Zeno’s famous arrow could never move from a position “here” in this context to a position “there” in the next context,

2. Difference cannot be placed in time. The egg can be sent to Alaska or can be destroyed, and still the difference remains. Or is it only the news of the difference that remains? Or is the difference ever anything but news? With a million differences between the egg and the apple, only those become information that make a difference.

3. Difference is not a quantity. It is dimensionless and, for sense organs, digital. It is delimited by threshold.

4. Those differences, or news of differences, which are information, must not be confused with “energy.” The latter is a quantity with physical dimensions (Mass X the square of a Velocity). It is perfectly clear that information does not have dimensions of this kind*; and that information travels, usually, where energy already is. That is, the recipient, the organism receiving information—or the end organ or the neuron—is already energized from its metabolism, so that, for example, the impulse can travel along the nerve, not driven by the energy, but finding energy ready to undergo degradation at every point of the travel. The energy is there in advance of the information or the response. This distinction between information and energy becomes conspicuous whenever that which does not happen triggers response in an organism. I commonly tell my classes that if they don’t flu] in their income tax forms the Internal Revenue people will respond to the difference between the forms which they don’t fill in and the forms which they might have filled in. Or your aunt, if you don’t write her a letter, will respond to the difference between the letter you do not write and the letter you might have written. A tick on the twig of a tree waits for the smell of butyric acid that would mean “mammal in the neighborhood.” When he smells the butyric acid, he will fall from the tree. But if he stays long enough on the tree and there is no butyric acid, he will fall from the tree anyway and go to climb up another one. He can respond to the “fact” that something does not happen.

(* But, of course, a difference in energy (not itself of the dimensions of energy) can generate news of difference.)

5. Last in regard to information, and the identity between information and news of difference, I want to give a sort of special honor to Gustav Fechner, who in the 1840s got a whiff of this enormously powerful idea. It drove him almost mad, but he is still remembered and his name is still carried in the Weber-Fechner Law. He must have been an extraordinarily gifted man, and a very strange one.

To continue my sketch of the epistemology that grew out of my work, the next point is recursiveness. Here there seem to be two species of recursiveness, of somewhat different nature, of which the first goes back to Norbert Wiener and is well known, the “feedback” that is perhaps the best-known feature of the whole cybernetic syndrome. The point is that self-corrective and quasi purposive systems necessarily and always have the characteristic that causal trains within the system are themselves circular. Such causal trains, when independently energized, are either self-corrective or runaway systems. In the wider epistemology, it seems that, necessarily, a causal train either in some sense dies out as it spreads through the universe, or returns to the point from which it started. In the first case there is no question of its survival. In the second case, by returning to the place from which it started, a subsystem is established which, for greater or less length of time, will necessarily survive.

The second type of recursiveness has been proposed by Varela and Maturana. These mathematicians discuss the case in which some property of a whole is fed back into the system, producing a somewhat different type of recursiveness, for which Varela has worked out the formalisms. We live in a universe in which causal trains endure, survive through time, only if they are recursive. They “survive”—i.e., literally live upon themselves—and some survive longer than others.

If our explanations or our understanding of the universe is in some sense to match that universe, or model it, and if the universe is recursive, then our explanations and our logics must also be fundamentally recursive.

And finally there is the somewhat disputed area of “levels.” For me the double bind, among other things, as a phenomenon of natural history, is strong evidence that, at least in the natural history aspects of epistemology, we encounter phenomena that are generated by organisms whose epistemology is, for better or for worse, structured in hierarchic form. It seems to me very clear and even expectable that end organs can receive only news of difference. Each receives difference and creates news of difference; and, of course, this proposes the possibility of differences between differences, and differences that are differently effective or differently meaningful according to the network within which they exist. This is the path toward an epistemology of gestalt psychology, and this clumping of news of difference becomes especially true of the mind when it, in its characteristic natural history, evolves language and faces the circumstance that the name is not the thing named, and the name of the name is not the name. This is the area in which I’ve worked very considerably in constructing a hypothetical hierarchy of species of learning.

These four components, then, give you the beginnings of a sketch of an epistemology:

1. That message events are activated by difference.

2. That information travels in pathways and systems that are collaterally energized (with a few exceptions where the energy itself in some form, perhaps a light, a temperature, or a motion, is the traveling information). The separation of energy is made clear in a very large number of eases in which the difference is fundamentally a difference between zero and one. In such eases, “zero-not-one” can be the message, which differs from “one-not-zero.”

3. A special soft of holism is generated by feedback and recursiveness.

4. That mind operates with hierarchies and networks of
difference to create gestalten.

I want to make clear that there are a number of very important statements that are not made in this sketch of an epistemology and whose absence is an important characteristic. I said above that, as I see it and believe it, the universe and any description of it is monistic; and this would imply a certain continuity of the entire world of information. But there is a very strong tendency in Western thinking (perhaps in all human thinking) to think and talk as if the world were made up of separable parts.

All peoples of the world, I believe, certainly all existing peoples, have something like language and, so far as I can understand the talk of linguists, it seems that all languages depend upon a particulate representation of the universe. All languages have something like nouns and verbs, isolating objects, entities, events, and abstractions. In whatever way you phrase it, “difference” will always propose delimitations and boundaries. If our means of describing the world arises out of notions of difference (or what G. Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form calls “distinction” and “indication”), then our picture of the universe will necessarily be particulate. It becomes an act of faith to distrust language and to believe in monism. Of necessity we shall still split our descriptions when we talk about the universe. But there may be better and worse ways of doing this splitting of the universe into nameable parts.

Finally, let me try to give you an idea of what it felt like, or what sort of difference it made, for me to view the world in terms of the epistemology that I have described to you, instead of viewing it as I used to and as I believe most people always do.

First of all, let me stress what happens when one becomes aware that there is much that is our own contribution to our own perception. Of course I am no more aware of the processes of my own perception than anybody else is. But I am aware that there are such processes, and this awareness means that when I look out through my eyes and see the redwoods or the yellow flowering acacia of California roadsides, I know that I am doing all sorts of things to my percept in order to make sense of that percept. Of course I always did this, and everybody does it. We work hard to make sense, according to our epistemology, of the world which we think we see.

Whoever creates an image of an object does so in depth, using various cues for that creation, as I have already said in discussing the Ames experiments. But most people are not aware that they do this, and as you become aware that you are doing it, you become in a curious way much closer to the world around you. The word “objective” becomes, of course, quite quietly obsolete; and at the same time the word “subjective,” which normally confines “you” within your skin, disappears as well. It is, I think, the debunking of the objective that is the important change. The world is no longer “out there” in quite the same way that it used to seem to be.

Without being fully conscious or thinking about it all the time, I still know all the time that my images—especially the visual, but also auditory, gustatory, pain, and fatigue—1 know the images are “mine” and that I am responsible for these images in a quite peculiar way. It is as if they are all in some degree hallucinated, as indeed they partly are. The shower of impulses coming in over the optic nerve surely contains no picture. The picture is to be developed, to be created, by the intertwining of all these neural messages. And the brain that can do this must be pretty smart. It’s my brain. But everybody’s brain-any mammalian brain—can do it, I guess.

I have the use of the information that that which I see, the images, or that which I feel as pain, the prick of a pin, or the ache of a tired muscle—for these, too, are images created in their respective modes—that all this is neither objective truth nor is it all hallucination. There is a combining or marriage between an objectivity that is passive to the outside world and a creative subjectivity, neither pure solipsism nor its opposite.

Consider for a moment the phrase, the opposite of solipsism. In solipsism, you are ultimately isolated and alone, isolated by the premise “I make it all up.” But at the other extreme, the opposite of solipsism, you would cease to exist, becoming nothing but a metaphoric feather blown by the winds of external “reality.” (But in that region there are no metaphors!) Somewhere between these two is a region where you are partly blown by the winds of reality and partly an artist creating a composite out of the inner and outer events.

A smoke ring is, literally and etymologically, introverted. It is endlessly turning upon itself, a torus, a doughnut, spinning on the axis of the circular cylinder that is the doughnut. And this turning upon its own in-turned axis is what gives separable existence to the smoke ring. It is, after all, made of nothing but air marked with a little smoke. It is of the same substance as its “environment.” But it has duration and location and a certain degree of separation by virtue of its in-turned motion. In a sense, the smoke ring stands as a very primitive, oversimplified paradigm for all recursive systems that contain the beginnings of self-reference, or, shall we say, selfhood.

But if you ask me, “Do you feel like a smoke ring all the time?” of course my answer is no. Only at very brief moments, in flashes of awareness, am I that realistic. Most of the time I still see the world, feel it, the way I always did. Only at certain moments am I aware of my own introversion. But these are enlightening moments that demonstrate the irrelevance of intervening states.

And as I try to tell you about this, lines from Robert Browning’s “Grammarian’s Funeral” keep coming to mind.

Yea, this in him was the peculiar grace . . .
That before living he learned how to live.

Or again,

He settled Hoti’s business—let it be! —
Properly based Oun—
Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,
Dead from the waist down.

And again, there is the misquotation that is going the rounds today,

A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a meta for?

I’m afraid this American generation has mostly forgotten “The Grammarian’s Funeral” with its strange combination of awe and contempt.

Imagine, for a moment, that the grammarian was neither an adventurous explorer, breaking through into realms previously unexplored, nor an intellectual, withdrawn from warm humanity into a cold but safe realm. Imagine that he was neither of these, but merely a human being rediscovering what every other human being and perhaps every dog—always instinctively and unconsciously —knew: that the dualisms of mind and body, of mind and matter, and of God and world are all somehow faked up. He would be terribly alone. He might invent something like the epistemology I have been trying to describe, emerging from the repressed state, which Freud called “latency,” into a more-or-less distorted rediscovery of that which had been hidden. Perhaps all exploration of the world of ideas is only a searching for a rediscovery, and perhaps it is such rediscovery of the latent that defines us as “human,” “conscious,” and “twice born.” But if this be so, then we all must sometimes hear St. Paul’s “voice” echoing down the ages: “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.”

I am suggesting to you that all the multiple insults, the double binds and invasions that we all experience in life, the impact (to use an inappropriate physical word) whereby experience corrupts our epistemology, challenging the core of our existence, and thereby seducing us into a false cult of the ego—what I am suggesting is that the process whereby double binds and other traumas teach us a false epistemology is already well advanced in most occidentals and perhaps most orientals, and that those whom we call “schizophrenics” are those in whom the endless kicking against the pricks has become intolerable.

GREGORY

CURRICULUM VITAE
Gregory Bateson

Born May 9, 1904, Grantchester, England, son of William Bateson, F.R.S. Naturalized U.S. citizen February 7, 1956.

1917-21
Student, Charterhouse, England.

1922-26
Cambridge University. Entrance Scholar St. John’s College, 1922, Foundation Scholar, 1924; Natural Science Tripos, first class honors, 1924. Anthropologist Tripos, first class honors, 1926.
B.A., 1925, Natural Science.
MA., 1930 Anthropology.

1927-29
Anthony Wilkin Student of Cambridge University. The period of this studentship was spent in anthropological fieldwork in New Britain and New Guinea.

1931-37
Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge.
1931-33, Anthropological fieldwork, New Guinea, financed jointly by Fellowship and by the Royal Society.
1934, Visit to the United States. Lectured at Columbia and Chicago.
1936, Married Margaret Mead (divorced, 1950). One daughter.
1936-38, Anthropological fieldwork, Bali.

1938-39
Anthropological fieldwork, New Guinea.

1939
Brief fieldwork, Bali.

1940 Entered the United States as a resident.

1941
Film analysis with the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

1942-45
Office of Strategic Services of the U.S. Government. Overseas in Ceylon, India, Burma, and China.

1946-47
Visiting Professor, New School for Social Research, New York.

1947-48
Visiting Professor, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1947
Guggenheim Fellow.

1948-49
University of California Medical School. Research Associate with Dr. Jurgen Ruesch.

1949-to date
Ethnologist at Veteran’s Administration Hospital, Palo Alto, California. Engaged in teaching and research on the borderline fields of anthropology, psychiatry, and cybernetics.

1951-to date
Part-time Visiting Professor, Stanford University, in the Department of Anthropology.

1952-54
Director, Research Project on the Role of the Paradoxes of Abstraction in Communication, under a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

1954-59
Director, Research Project on Schizophrenic Communication, under a grant from the Josiah Macy, Jr., Foundation.

1959-62
Principal Investigator, Research in Family Psychotherapy, under a grant from the Foundation’s Fund for Research in Psychiatry.
Part-time Professor, California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, California.

1961
Frieda Fromm-Reichmann Award for research in schizophrenia.

1963-64
Associate Director, Communication Research Institute, St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands.

1964
Career Development Award, National Institute of Mental Health.

1965
Associate Director for Research, Oceanic Institute, Waimanalo, Hawaii.

1972
Visiting Professor, University of California at Santa Crux, Santa Cruz, California.

1976 Member, Board of Regents, University of California.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
of the Works of Gregory BatesonAngels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. Gregory Bateson & Mary Catherine Bateson. New York: Bantam, 1988.

Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis. Special Publications of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 2. New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1942. With Margaret Mead.

Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry. New York: W. W. Norton, 1951. With Jurgen Ruesch.

Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Bantam Books, 1980; Hampton Press, 2002.

Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1936. 2d ed., with “Epilogue 1958.” Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1965.

Perceval’s Narrative: A Patient’s Account of His Psychosis, 1830-1832, by John Perceval. Edited with an Introduction by Gregory Bateson. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1961.

A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991.

Steps to An Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972; University of Chicago Press, 2000.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
of Selected Works about Gregory Bateson

About Bateson. Edited by John Brockman with an Afterword by Gregory Bateson. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977.

Our Own Metaphor: A Personal Account of a Conference on the Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation. By Mary Catherine Bateson. New York: Harper Collins, 1972; Hampton Press, 2004.

Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist . By David Lipset, Boston: Beacon Press, 1982.

With a Daughter’s Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, by Mary Catherine Bateson. New York: Harper Collins, 1984/2001.

Beyond Edge

Gregory Bateson: The Institute for Intercultural Studies

Greogory Bateson@100: Mutiple Views of the World

People Mentions:

Mary Catherine Bateson

Worlding Anthropologies of Technosciences? (Blog.castac.org)

16/11/2014Uncategorized4S, Antropologia, Buenos Aires, Mediação tecnológica, STS, Teoria antropológicarenzotaddei

October 28th, 2014, by Luis Felipe R. Murillo

The past 4S meeting in Buenos Aires made visible the expansion of STS to various regions of the globe. Those of us who happened to be at the 4S meeting at University of Tokyo four years ago will remember the excitement of having the opportunity to work side-by-side with STS scholars from East and Southeast Asia. The same opportunity for worlding STS was opened again this past summer in Buenos Aires.

In order to help increase diversity of perspectives, Sharon Traweek and I organized a 4S panel on the relationships between STS and anthropology with a focus on the past, present, and future of the exchange among national traditions. The idea came out of our conversations about the intersections between science studies and the US anthropology of the late 1980’s with the work of CASTAC pioneers such as Diana Forsythe, Gary Downey, Joseph Dumit, David Hakken, David Hess, and Sharon Traweek, among several others who helped to establish the technosciences as legitimate domains of anthropological inquiry. It was not an easy battle, as Chris Furlow’s post on the history of CASTAC reminded us, but the results are undeniably all around us today. Panels on anthropology of science and technology can always be found at professional meetings. Publications on science and technology have space in various journals and the attention of university publishers these days.

For our panel this year we had the opening remarks of Gary Downey who, after reading our proposal aloud, emphasized the importance of advancing a cultural critique of science and technology through a situated, grounded stance. Quoting Marcus and Fischer’s “Anthropology as Cultural Critique” (1986) he emphasized that anthropology of science and technology could not dispense with the reflection upon the place, the situation, and the positioning of the anthropologist. Downey described his own positioning as an anthropologist and critical participant in engineering. Two decades ago Downey challenged the project of “anthropology as cultural critique” to speak widely to audiences outside anthropology and to practice anthropology as cultural critique, as suggested by the title of his early AAA paper, “Outside the Hotel”.

Yet “Anthropology as Cultural Critique” represented, he pointed out, one of the earliest reflexive calls in US anthropology for us to rethink canonical fieldwork orientations and our approach to the craft of ethnography with its representational politics. Downey and many others who invented new spaces to advance critical agendas in the context of science and technology did so by adding to the identity of the anthropologist other identities and responsibilities, such as that of former mechanical engineer, laboratory physicist, theologian, and experimenter of alternative forms of sociality, etc. These overlapping and intersecting identities opened up a whole field of possibilities for renewed modes of inquiry which, after “Anthropology as Cultural Critique”, consisted, as Downey suggested, in the juxtaposition of knowledge, forms of expertise, positionalities, and commitments. This is where we operate as STS scholars: at intersecting research areas, bridging “fault lines” (as Traweek’s felicitous expression puts it), and doing anthropology with and not without anthropologists.

The order of presentations for our panel was defined in a way to elicit contrasts and parallels between different modes of inquiry, grounded in different national anthropological traditions. The first session had Marko Monteiro (UNICAMP), Renzo Taddei (UNIFESP), Luis Felipe R. Murillo (UCLA), and Aalok Khandekar (Maastricht University) as presenters and Michael M. J. Fischer (MIT) as commentator. Marko Monteiro, an anthropologist working for an interdisciplinary program in science and technology policy in Brazil addressed questions of scientific modeling and State policy regarding the issue of deforestation in the Amazon. His paper presented the challenges of conducting multi-sited ethnography alongside multinational science collaborations, and described how scientific modeling for the Amazalert project was designed to accommodate natural and sociocultural differences with the goal of informing public policy. In the context of his ethnographic work, Monteiro soon found himself in a double position as a panelist expert and as an anthropologist interested in how different groups of scientists and policy makers negotiate the incorporation of “social life” through a “politics of associations.”

Similarly to Monteiro’s positioning, Khandekar benefited in his ethnographic work for being an active participant and serving as the organizer of expert panels involving STS scholars and scientists to design nanotechnology-based development programs in India. Drawing from Fischer’s notion of “third space”, Khandekar addressed how India could be framed productively as such for being a fertile ground for conceptual work where cross-disciplinary efforts have articulated humanities and technosciences under the rubric of innovation. Serving as a knowledge broker for an international collaboration involving India, Kenya, South Africa, and the Netherlands on nanotechnology, Khandekar had first-hand experience in promoting “third spaces” as postcolonial places for cross-disciplinary exchange through story telling.

Shifting the conversation to the context of computing and political action, Luis Felipe R. Murillo’s paper described a controversy surrounding the proposal of a “feminist programming language” and discussed the ways in which it provides access to the contemporary technopolitical dynamics of computing. The feminist programming language parody served as an entry point to analyze how language ideologies render symbolic boundaries visible, highlighting fundamental aspects of socialization in the context of computing in order to reproduce concepts and notions of the possible, logical, and desirable technical solutions. In respect to socioeconomic and political divisions, he suggested that feminist approaches in their intersectionality became highly controversial for addressing publicly systemic inequalities that are transversal to the context of computing and characterize a South that is imbricated in the North of “big computing” (an apparatus that encompasses computer science, information technology industries, infrastructures, and cultures with their reinvented peripheries within the global North and South).

Renzo Taddei recasted the debate regarding belief in magic drawing from a long lasting thread of anthropological research on logical reasoning and cultural specificity. Taddei opened up his take on our conversation with the assertion that to conduct ethnography on witchcraft assuming that it does not exist is fundamentally ethnocentric. This observation was meant to take us the core of his concerns regarding climate sciences vis-à-vis traditional Brazilian forms of forecasting from Sertão, a semi-arid and extremely impoverished area of the Northeast of Brazil. He then proceeded to discuss magical manipulation of the atmosphere from native and Afro-Brazilian perspectives in Brazil.

For the second day of our panel, we had papers by Kim Fortun (RPI), Mike Fortun (RPI), Sharon Traweek (UCLA) and the commentary of Claudia Fonseca (UFRGS) whose long-term contributions to study of adoption, popular culture, science and human rights in Brazil has been highly influential. In her paper, Kim Fortun addressed the double bind of expertise, the in-between of competence and hubris, structural risk and unpredictability of the very infrastructures experts are called upon to take responsibility. Fortun’s call was for a mode of interaction and engagement among science and humanities scholars oriented toward friendship and hospitality as well as commitment for our technoscientific futures under the aegis of late industrialism. “Ethnographic insight”, according to Fortun, “can loop back into the world” through the means of creative pedagogies which are attentive to the fact that science practitioners and STS scholars mobilize different analytic lenses while speaking through and negotiating with distinct discursive registers in the context of international collaborations. Our assumptions of what is conceptually shared should not anticipate what is to be seen or forged in the context of our international exchange, since what is foregrounded in discourse always implicates one form or another of erasure. The image Fortun suggested for us to think with is not that of a network, but that of a kaleidoscope in which the complexity of disasters can be seen across multiple dimensions and scales in their imbrication at every turn.

In his presentation, Michael Fortun questioned the so-called “ontological turn” to recast the “hauntological” dimensions of our research practices vis-à-vis those of our colleagues in the biosciences, that is, to account for the imponderables of scientific and anthropological languages and practices through the lens of a poststructural understanding of the historical functioning of language. In his study of asthma, Fortun attends to multiple perspectives and experiences with asthma across national, socioeconomic, scientific and technical scales. In the context of his project “The Asthma Files”, he suggests, alongside Kim Fortun, hospitality and friendship as frames for engaging instead of disciplining the contingency of ethnographic encounters and ethnographic projects. For future collaborations, two directions are suggested: 1) investigating and experimenting with modes of care and 2) designing collaborative digital platforms for experimental ethnography. The former is related to the scientists care for their instruments, methods, theories, intellectual reproduction, infrastructures, and problems in their particular research fields, while the latter poses the question of care among ourselves and the construction of digital platforms to facilitate and foster collaboration in anthropology.

This panel was closed with Sharon Traweek’s paper on multi-scalar complexity of contemporary scientific collaborations, based on her current research on data practices and gender imbalance in astronomy. Drawing from concepts of meshwork and excess proposed by researchers with distinct intellectual projects such as Jennifer McWeeny, Arturo Escobar, Susan Paulson, and Tim Ingold, Traweek discussed billion-dollar science projects which involve multiple research communities clustered around a few recent research devices and facilities, such as the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in France. In the space of ongoing transformations of big science toward partially-global science, women and ethnic minorities are building meshworks as overlapping networks in their attempts to build careers in astronomy. Traweek proposed a revision of the notion of “enrollment” to account for the ways in which mega projects in science are sustained for decades of planning, development, construction, and operation at excessive scales which require more than support and consensus. Mega projects in the technosciences are, in Traweek’s terms, “over-determined collages that get built and used” by international teams with “glocal” structures of governance and funding.

In his concluding remarks Michael M. J. Fischer addressed the relationship between anthropology and STS through three organizing axes: time, topic, and audiences. As a question of time, a quarter century has passed for the shared history of STS and anthropology and probing questions have been asked and explored in the technosciences in respect to its apparatuses, codes, languages, life cycle of machines, educational curricula, personal and technical trajectories, which is well represented in one of the foundational texts of our field, Traweek’s “Beamtimes and Lifetimes” (1988). Traweek has helped establish a distinctive anthropological style “working alongside scientists and engineers through juxtaposition not against them.” In respect to the relationships between anthropology and STS, Fischer raised the question of pedagogies as, at once, a prominent form of engagement in the technosciences as well as an anthropological mode of engagement with the technosciences. The common thread connecting all the panel contributions was the potential for new pedagogies to emerge with the contribution of world anthropologies of sciences and technologies. That is, in the space of socialization of scientists, engineers, and the public, space of the convention, as well as invention, and knowledge-making, all the presenters addressed the question of how to advance an anthropology of science and technology with forms of participation, as Fischer suggests, as productive critique.

Along similar lines, Claudia Fonseca offered closing remarks about her own trajectory and the persistence of national anthropological traditions informing our cross-dialogs and border crossings. Known in Brazil as an “anthropologist with an accent”, an anthropologist born in the US, trained in France, and based in Brazil for the most part of her academic life, she cannot help but emphasize the style and forms of engagement that are specific to Brazilian anthropology which has a tradition of conducting ethnography at home. The panel served, in sum, for the participants to find a common thread connecting a rather disparate set of papers and for advancing a form of dialogue across national traditions and modes of engagement which is attentive to local political histories and (national) anthropological trajectories. As suggested by Michael Fortun, we are just collectively conjuring – with much more empiria than magic – a new beginning in the experimental tradition for world anthropologies of sciences and technologies.

Latour on digital methods (Installing [social] order)

10/11/2014UncategorizedAlgoritmos, Antropologia, Computação, Etnografia, Latour, Mediação tecnológica, STSrenzotaddei

1 November 2014 by Nicholas

In a fascinating, apparently not-peer-reviewed non-article available free online here, Tommaso Venturini and Bruno Latour discuss the potential of “digital methods” for the contemporary social sciences.

The paper summarizes, and quite nicely, the split of sociological methods to the statistical aggregate using quantitative methods (capturing supposedly macro-phenomenon) and irreducibly basic interactions using qualitative methods (capturing supposedly micro-phenomenon). The problem is that neither of which aided the sociologist in capture emergent phenomenon, that is, capturing controversies and events as they happen rather than estimate them after they have emerged (quantitative macro structures) or capture them divorced from non-local influences (qualitative micro phenomenon).

The solution, they claim, is to adopt digital methods in the social sciences. The paper is not exactly a methodological outline of how to accomplish these methods, but there is something of a justification available for it, and it sounds something like this:

Thanks to digital traceability, researchers no longer need to choose between precision and scope in their observations: it is now possible to follow a multitude of interactions and, simultaneously, to distinguish the specific contribution that each one makes to the construction of social phenomena. Born in an era of scarcity, the social sciences are entering an age of abundance. In the face of the richness of these new data, nothing justifies keeping old distinctions. Endowed with a quantity of data comparable to the natural sciences, the social sciences can finally correct their lazy eyes and simultaneously maintain the focus and scope of their observations.

A reader’s guide to the “ontological turn” – Parts 1 to 4 (Somatosphere)

28/10/2014UncategorizedAntropoceno, Antropologia, Filosofia, Ontologias, Teoria antropológica, Teoria socialrenzotaddei

January 15, 2014

A reader’s guide to the “ontological turn” – Part 1

Judith Farquhar

This article is part of the series: A reader’s guide to the “ontological turn”

Editor’s note: In the wake of the discussion about the ‘ontological turn’ at this year’s American Anthropological Association conference, we asked several scholars, “which texts or resources would you recommend to a student or colleague interested in the uses of ‘ontology’ as an analytical category in recent work in anthropology and science and technology studies?” This was the reading list we received fromJudith Farquhar, Max Palevsky Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Answers from a number of other scholars will appear as separate posts in the series.

In providing a reading list, I had lots of good “ontological” resources at hand, having just taught a seminar called “Ontological Politics.” This list is pared down from the syllabus; and the syllabus itself was just a subset of the many useful philosophical, historical, and ethnographic readings that I had been devouring during the previous year, when I was on leave.

I really like all these pieces, though I don’t actually “follow” all of them. This is a good thing, because the field — if it can be called that — tends to go in circles, with all the usual suspects citing all the usual suspects. In the end, as we worked our way through the course, I found the ethnographic work more exciting than most of the more theoretically inclined writing. At the other end of the spectrum, I feel quite transformed by having read Heidegger’s “The Thing” — but I’m not sure why!

Philosophical and methodological works in anthropology and beyond:

Philippe Descola, 2013, The Ecology of Others, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

William Connolly, 2005, Pluralism. Durham: Duke University Press. (Ch. 3, “Pluralism and the Universe” [on William James], pp. 68-92.)

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, 2004, “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation,” Tipiti 2 (1): 3-22.

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, 2012, “Immanence and Fear: Stranger events and subjects in Amazonia,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (1): 27-43.

Marisol de la Cadena, 2010, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual reflections beyond ‘politics’,” Cultural Anthropology 25 (2): 334-370.

Bruno Latour, 2004, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 225-248.

A dialogue from Common Knowledge 2004 (3): Ulrich Beck: “The Truth of Others: A Cosmopolitan Approach” (pp. 430-449) and Bruno Latour: “Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics? Comments on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck” (pp. 450-462).

Graham Harman, 2009, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: Re.Press. (OA)

Isabelle Stengers, 2005, “The Cosmopolitical Proposal,” in Bruno Latour & Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, pp. 994-1003.

Martin Heidegger, 1971, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought (Tr. Albert Hofstadter). New York: Harper & Row, pp. 163-180

Graham Harman, 2010, “Technology, Objects and Things in Heidegger,”Cambridge Journal of Economics 34: 17-25.

Jane Bennett and William Connolly, 2012, “The Crumpled Handkerchief,” in Bernd Herzogenrath, ed., Time and History in Deleuze and Serres. London & New York: Continuum, pp. 153-171.

Tim Ingold, 2004, “A Circumpolar Night’s Dream,” in John Clammer et al., eds., Figured Worlds: Ontological Obstacles in Intercultural Relations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 25-57.

Annemarie Mol, 1999, “Ontological Politics: A Word and Some Questions,” in John Law, and J. Hassard, ed., Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 74-89.

Terrific ethnographic studies very concerned with ontologies:

Mario Blaser, 2010, Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Eduardo Kohn, 2013, How Forests Think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Helen Verran, 2011, “On Assemblage: Indigenous Knowledge and Digital Media (2003-2006) and HMS Investigator (1800-1805).” In Tony Bennet & Chris Healey, eds., Assembling Culture. London & New York: Routledge, pp. 163-176.

Morten Pedersen, 2011, Not Quite Shamans: Spirit worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

John Law & Marianne Lien, 2013, “Slippery: Field Notes in Empirical Ontology,” Social Studies of Science 43 (3): 363-378.

Stacey A. Langwick, 2011, Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Judith Farquhar is Max Palevsky Professor of Anthropology and Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Her research concerns traditional medicine, popular culture, and everyday life in contemporary China. She is the author of Knowing Practice: The Clinical Encounter of Chinese Medicine (Westview 1996),Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China (Duke 2002), and Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing (Zone 2012) (with Qicheng Zhang), and editor (with Margaret Lock) of Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life (Duke 2007).

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January 17, 2014

A reader’s guide to the “ontological turn” – Part 2

Javier Lezaun

This article is part of the series: A reader’s guide to the “ontological turn”

Editor’s note: In the wake of the discussion about the ‘ontological turn’ at this year’s American Anthropological Association conference, we asked several scholars, “which texts or resources would you recommend to a student or colleague interested in the uses of ‘ontology’ as an analytical category in recent work in anthropology and science and technology studies?” This was the answer we received from Javier Lezaun, James Martin Lecturer in Science and Technology Governance at the University of Oxford.

Those of us who have been brought up in the science and technology studies (STS) tradition look at claims of an ‘ontological turn’ with a strange sense of familiarity: it’s déjà vu all over again! For we can read the whole history of STS (cheekily and retroactively, of course) as a ‘turn to ontology’, albeit one that was rarely thematized as such.

A key text in forming STS and giving it a proto-ontological orientation (if such a term can be invented) is Ian Hacking’s Representing and Intervening (1983). On its surface the book is an introduction to central themes and keywords in the philosophy of science. In effect, it launches a programme of research that actively blurs the lines between depictions of the world and interventions into its composition. And it does so by bringing to the fore the constitutive role of experimental practices – a key leitmotiv of what would eventually become STS.

Hacking, of course, went on to develop a highly original form of pragmatic realism, particularly in relation to the emergence of psychiatric categories and new forms of personhood. His 2004 book, Historical Ontology, captures well the main thrust of his arguments, and lays out a useful contrast with the ‘meta-epistemology’ of much of the best contemporary writing in the history of science.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves and disrespecting our good old friend Chronology. The truth is that references to ontology are scarce in the foundational texts of STS (the term is not even indexed in Representing and Intervening, for instance). This is hardly surprising: alluding to the ontological implies a neat distinction between being and representing, precisely the dichotomy that STS scholars were trying to overcome – or, more accurately, ignore – at the time. The strategy was to enrich our notion of representation, not to turn away from it in favour of higher plane of being.

It is in the particular subfield of studies of particle physics that the discussion about ontology within STS developed, simply because matters of reality – and the reality of matter – featured much more prominently in the object of study. Andrew Pickering’s Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics (1984) was one of the few texts that tackled ontological matters head on, and it shared with Hacking’s an emphasis on the role of experimental machineries in producing agreed-upon worlds. In his following book, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (1995), Pickering would develop this insight into a full-fledged theory of temporal emergence based on the dialectic of resistance and accommodation.

An interesting continuation and counterpoint in this tradition is Karen Barad’s book, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007). Barad’s thesis, particularly her theory of agential realism, is avowedly and explicitly ontological, but this does not imply a return to traditional metaphysical problem-definitions. In fact, Barad speaks of ‘onto-epistemology’, or even of ‘onto-ethico-epistemology’, to describe her approach. The result is an aggregation of planes of analysis, rather than a turn from one to the other.

Arguments about the nature of quarks, bubble chambers and quantum physics might seem very distant from the sort of anthropo-somatic questions that preoccupy readers of this blog, but it is worth noting that this rarefied discussion has been the terrain where key elements of the current STS interest in ontology – the idioms of performativity and materialism in particular – were first tested.

The work that best represents this current interest in matters of ontology within STS is that of Annemarie Mol and John Law. Their papers on topologies (e.g., ‘Regions, Networks and Fluids: Anaemia and Social Topology’ in 1994; ‘Situating technoscience: an inquiry into spatialities’, 2001) broke new ground in making explicit the argument about the multiplicity of the world(s), and served to develop a first typology of alternative modes of reality. Mol’s ethnography of atherosclerosis, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (2003), is of course the (provisional?) culmination of this brand of ‘empirical philosophy’, and a text that offers a template for STS-inflected anthropology (and vice versa).

One distinct contribution of this body of work – and this is a point made by Malcolm Ashmore in his review of The Body Multiple – is to extend STS modes of inquiry beyond the study of new or controversial entities, and draw the same kind of analytical intensity to realities – like that (or those) of atherosclerosis – whose univocal reality we tend to take for granted. For better and worse, STS grew out of an effort to understand how new facts and artifacts enter our world, and the field remains attached to all that is (or appears to be) new – even if the end-result of the analysis is often to challenge those claims to novelty. The current ‘ontological turn’ in STS would then represent an effort to excavate mundane layers of reality, to draw attention to the performed or enacted nature of that that appears old, settled or uncontroversial. I suspect this manoeuvre carries less value in Anthropology, where the everyday and the taken-for-granted is often the very locus of inquiry.

The other value of the ‘ontological turn’ is, in my view, to recast the question of politics – as both an object of study and a mode of engagement with the world. This recasting can take at least two different forms. There are those who argue that attending to the ontological, i.e., to the reality of plural worlds and the unavoidable condition of multinaturalism, intensifies (and clarifies) the normative implications of our analyses (see for instance the genealogical argument put forward very forcefully by Dimitris Papadopoulos in his article ‘Alter-ontologies: towards a constituent politics in technoscience’). A slightly different course of action is to think of ontology as a way of addressing the intertwining of the technological and the political. Excellent recent examples of this approach are Noortje Marres’s Material Participation: Technology, the Environment, and everyday Publics (2012) and Andrew Barry’s Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline (2013).

In sum, and to stake out my own position, I think STS is best seen as a fairly tight bundle of analytical sensibilities – sensibilities that are manifested in an evolving archipelago of case studies. It is not a theory of the world (let alone a theory of being), and it quickly becomes trite and somewhat ritualistic when it is transformed into a laundry list of statements about what the world is or should be like. In this sense, an ‘ontological turn’ would run counter to the STS tradition, as I see it, if it implies asserting a particular ontology of the world, regardless of whether the claim is that that ontology is plural, multiple, fluid, relational, etc. This sort of categorical, pre-empirical position smothers the critical instincts that energize the field and have driven its evolution over the last three decades. Steve Woolgar and I have formulated this view in a recent piece for Social Studies of Science (‘The wrong bin bag: a turn to ontology in science and technology studies?’), and a similar argument been made often and persuasively by Michael Lynch (e.g., “Ontography: investigating the production of things, deflating ontology”).

Javier Lezaun is James Martin Lecturer in Science and Technology Governance and Deputy Director at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the politics of scientific research and its governance. He directs the research programme BioProperty, funded by the European Research Council, which investigates the role of property rights and new forms of ownership in biomedical research. Javier is also currently participating in research projects on thegovernance of climate geoengineering, and new forms of consumer mobilization in food markets.

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February 12, 2014

A reader’s guide to the “ontological turn” – Part 3

Morten Axel Pedersen

This article is part of the series: A reader’s guide to the “ontological turn”

Editor’s note: In the wake of all the discussion about the ‘ontological turn’ at this year’s American Anthropological Association conference, we asked four scholars, “which texts or resources would you recommend to a student or colleague interested in the uses of ‘ontology’ as an analytical category in recent work in anthropology and science and technology studies?” This was the reading list we received fromMorten Axel Pedersen, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen.

As someone who has, for a decade, participated in discussions about ‘ontology’ at various European anthropology venues and departments, I share the sense of déjà-vu noted by Lezaun in Part 2 of this Reader’s Guide. In fact, it is surprising just how much interest and enthusiasm, not to mention critique and aversion, has been generated by the recent introduction of this discussion into mainstream US anthropology. Arguably, the ontological turn now faces the risk of becoming the latest ‘new thing’, so critique is inevitable, necessary and welcome. Indeed, students and scholars from some of the same institutions that spearheaded anthropology’s turn to ontology are now questioning its most deeply held assumptions and cherished arguments. That, of course, is precisely how things should be. And hopefully, the part-repetition in the US of debates that are now losing steam in Latin America, Japan and Europe will provide a new framework for experimentally transforming and productively distorting anthropology’s engagement with ontology, and thus avoid the ever lurking danger of it becoming just another orthodoxy.

What follows here is a list of predominantly anthropological readings, which does not cover the creative interfaces between STS and anthropology explored by scholars in Copenhagen, Manchester, Osaka, and elsewhere. The list is not intended to be exclusive. Indeed, many scholars who figure on it may well not consider themselves part of the ontological turn and may be critical of part or all of it. The reason why they are nevertheless included is that they all have, in my view, played a role in making the ‘turn’ what it is today.

Books

Blaser, Mario. 2010. Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Trans. J. Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Kohn, Eduardo. 2012. How Forests Think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Krøijer, Stine. Forthcoming. Figurations of the Future: Forms and Temporality of Left Radical Politics in Northern Europe. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Maurer, Bill. 2005. Mutual Life, Limited. Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Miyazaki, Hirokazu. 2013. Arbitraging Japan: Dream of Capitalism at the End of Finance. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rio, Knut Mikjel. 2007. The Power of Perspective. Social Ontology and Agency on Ambrym Island, Vanuatu. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Scott, Michael W. 2007. The Severed Snake: Matrilineages, Making Place, and a Melanesian Christianity in Southeast Solomon Islands. Durham NC: Carolina Academic Press.

Stasch, Rupert. 2009. Society of Others. Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Strathern, Marilyn. 2004. Partial Connections (Updated Edition). Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira.

Swancutt, Katrhine, 2012. Fortune and the Cursed: The Sliding Scale of Time in Mongolian Divination. Oxford: Berghahn.

Wagner, Roy. 1975. The Invention of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Willerslev, Rane. 2007. Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism and Personhood amomg the Siberian Yukaghirs. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2009. Métaphysiques cannibales. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France

Edited volumes/sections

Jensen, C. B, M. A. Pedersen & B. R. Wintereik, eds. 2011. “Comparative Relativism”, special issue of Common Knowledge 17 (1).

Jensen, C. B. & A. Morita, eds. 2012. “Anthropology as critique of reality: A Japanese turn“. Forum in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (2): 358-405.

Candea, Matei & Lys Alcayna–Stevens, eds. 2012. “Internal Others: Ethnographies of Naturalism“, Special section in Cambridge Anthropology30(2): 36-146

Henare, A., M: Holbraad and S.Wastell, eds. 2007. Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artifacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge. (Here’s a pre-publication version of the Introduction).

Pedersen, M. A., R. Empson and C. Humphrey, eds. 2007. “Inner Asian Perspectivism,” special issue of Inner Asia 9 (2) (especially papers by da Col,Holbraad/Willerslev and Viveiros de Castro)

Articles engaging explicitly with “ontology”, also critically

Alberti, B., S. Fowles, M. Holbraad, Y. Marshall, C. Witmore. 2011. ‘Worlds otherwise’: Archaeology, Anthropology, and Ontological Difference forum.Current Anthropology 52(6): 896-912

Blaser, Mario. 2013. Ontological conflicts and the stories of peoples in spite of Europe: toward a conversation on political ontology. Current Anthropology54(5): 547-568.

Course, Magnus. 2010. Of Words and Fog. Linguistic relativity and Amerindian ontology. Anthropological Theory 10(3): 247–263.

De la Cadena, Marisol. 2010. Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics’. Cultural Anthropology 25 (2): 334-70.

Hage, Ghassan. 2012. Critical anthropological thought and the radical political imaginary today. Critique of Anthropology 32(3): 285–308

Heywood, Paolo. 2012. Anthropology and What There Is: Reflections on “Ontology”. Cambridge Anthropology 30 (1): 143-151.

Holbraad, Martin. 2009. Ontography and Alterity: Defining anthropological truth. Social Analysis 53 (2): 80-93.

Holbraad, Martin. 2011. Can the Thing Speak? OAP Press, Working Paper Series, Article # 7.

Laidlaw, James. 2012. Ontologically Challenged. Anthropology of This Century, vol. 4, London, May 2012.

Laidlaw, James and Paolo Heywood, 2013. One More Turn and You’re There.Anthropology of This Century, vol. 7, London, May 2013.

Nielsen, Morten. 2013. Analogic Asphalt: Suspended value conversions among young road workers in Southern Mozambique. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (2): 79-96.

Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2001. Totemism, animism and North Asian indigenous ontologies. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7 (3): 411-427.

Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2012. Common nonsense. A review of certain recent reviews of the ‘ontological turn.’ Anthropology of This Century, 5.

Salmon, Amira. 2013. Transforming translations (part I):“The owner of these bones”. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(3): 1-32.

Scott, Michael W. 2013. The Anthropology of Ontology (Religious Science?).Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (4): 859–72.

Venkatesan, Soumhya et al. 2010. Ontology Is Just Another Word for Culture: Motion Tabled at the 2008 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, University of Manchester. Critique of Anthropology30 (2):152-200. (The papers can also be downloaded here).

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2002. And. Manchester: Papers in Social Anthropology.

Viveiros de Castro, E. 2013 “The Relative Native” by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(3): 473-502.

Finally, there are some recent and ongoing dialogues in France between anthropologists and philosophers concerning issues of metaphysics and ontology, which may be of interest:

“Métaphysiques Comparées: La Philosophie à L’épreuve de L’anthropologie.” Summer 2013.
“Practiques & Ontologies” Séminaire de philosophie et d’anthropologie contemporaines, 2013-2014, Paris Ouest

Morten Axel Pedersen is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. His publications include Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia (2011). He is also co-editor, with Martin Holbraad, of Times of Security: Ethnographies of Fear, Protest, and the Future(2013). A new book co-authored with Lars Højer, Urban Hunters: Dealing and Dreaming in Times of Transition is forthcoming.

* * *

March 19, 2014

A reader’s guide to the “ontological turn” – Part 4

Annemarie Mol

This article is part of the series: A reader’s guide to the “ontological turn”

Editor’s note: In the wake of all the discussion about the ‘ontological turn’ at this year’s American Anthropological Association conference, we asked four scholars, “which texts or resources would you recommend to a student or colleague interested in the uses of ‘ontology’ as an analytical category in recent work in anthropology and science and technology studies?” This was the answer we received fromAnnemarie Mol, professor of Anthropology of the Body at the University of Amsterdam. Answers from Judith Farquhar, Javier Lezaun, and Morten Axel Pedersen appear as separate posts in the series.

The point of the use of the word ‘ontology’ in STS was that it allowed us not just to talk about the methods that were used in the sciences, but (in relation to these) also address what the sciences made of their object. E.g. rather than asking whether or not some branch of science knows ‘women’ correctly, or instead with some kind of bias, we wanted to shift to the question: what are the topics, the concerns and the questions that knowledge practices insist on; how do they interfere in practices; what do they do to/with women; etc. At first this was cast in constructivist terms as ‘what do various scientific provinces make ofwomen’. But then we began to doubt whether ‘making’ was such a good metaphor, as it gives some ‘maker’ too much credit; as it suggests a time line with a before and an after; and materials out of which x or y might be made. So we shifted terminology and used words like perform, or do, or enact. Here we widened the idea of the staging of social realities (e.g. identities) to that of physical realities.

The idea was that there are not just many ways of knowing ‘an object’, but rather many ways of practising it. Each way of practising stages – performs, does, enacts – a different version of ‘the’ object. Hence, it is not ‘an object’, but more than one. An object multiple. That reality might be multiple goes head on against the Euroamerican tradition in which different people may each have their own perspective on reality, while there is only one reality – singular, coherent, elusive – to have ‘perspectives’ on. To underline our break with this monorealist heritage of monotheism, we imported the old fashioned philosophical term of ontology and put it in the plural. Ontologies. That was – at the time – an unheard of oxymoron.

Crucial in all this was the work of Donna Haraway (even if she did not particularly use the word ontology). Read it all – or pick out what seems interesting to you. Here, now. But if you don’t quite know where to start, plunge into Primate Visions.

Crucial, too, was earlier STS work on methods that had recast these as techniques of staging a world (not just of objects, but also of tools, money, readers, investors, etc.). Here Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law worked in ways that later fed into the ‘ontology’ stream. See for that particular history: Annemarie Mol, “Actor-Network Theory: Sensitive Terms and Enduring Tensions.”

The branches of STS from which studies into ontology grew, took themselves as shifting the anthropological gaze from ‘the others’ to the sciences, scienced that staged themselves as universal, but weren’t. They were variously situated techno-science practices and making them travel was hard work. “Show me a universal and I will ask how much it costs,” wrote Bruno Latour, (in Irréductions, the second part of The Pasteurisation of France) Hence, going out in the world to study ‘others’ while presuming ‘the West’ (or at least (its) science) was rational, coherent, naturalist, what have you – seemed a bad idea to us. The West could do with some thorough unmasking – and taking this to what many saw as pivotal to its alleged superiority, its truth machines, seemed a good idea (even if a lot later some of the techniques involved were highjacked by climate change deniers… ).

But there were also always specific relevant interventions to be made. For instance, if ontology is not singular and given, the question arises about whichreality to ‘do’. Ontology does not precede or escape politics, but has a politics of its own. Not a politics of who (who gets to speak; act; etc.) but a politics of what(what is the reality that takes shape and that various people come to live with?) See: A. Mol, “Ontological politics. A word and some questions,” (in Law & Hassard, Actor Network Theory and After).

For a longer and more extensive opening up of ontologies / realities (in the plural), well, there is my book The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice(Duke University Press 2003) – that lays it all out step by step… Including the difficult aspect of ontological multiplicity that while there is more reality than one, its different versions are variously entangled with one another, so that there are less than many. (As Donna Haraway put it; and as explored by Marilyn Strathern in Partial Connections)

For an earlier use of the term ontological that makes its relevance clear and lays out how realities being done may change over time: Cussins, Charis.“Ontological choreography: Agency through objectification in infertility clinics.” Social studies of science 26, no. 3 (1996): 575-610. Later reworked in Thompson Charis, Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies.

For an early attempt to differentiate the semiotics involved from the symbolic interactionist tradition and its perspectives see: Mol, Annemarie, and Jessica Mesman. “Neonatal food and the politics of theory: some questions of method.” Social Studies of Science 26, no. 2 (1996): 419-444.

The politics at stake come out very well in Ingunn Moser: “Making Alzheimer’s disease matter. Enacting, interfering and doing politics of nature.” Geoforum39, no. 1 (2008): 98-110.

And for the haunting question as to what/who acts and/or what/who is enacted, see: Mol, Annemarie, and John Law. “Embodied action, enacted bodies: the example of hypoglycaemia.” Body & Society 10, no. 2-3 (2004): 43-62.

If you like realities as they get tied up with techniques, this is an exciting one, as it multiplies what it is to give birth: Akrich, Madeleine, and Bernike Pasveer.“Multiplying obstetrics: techniques of surveillance and forms of coordination.”Theoretical medicine and bioethics 21, no. 1 (2000): 63-83.

Remember, the multiplicity of reality does not imply its plurality. Here is a great example of that, a study that traces the task of coordinating between different versions of reality in the course of an operation: Moreira, Tiago.“Heterogeneity and coordination of blood pressure in neurosurgery.” Social Studies of Science 36, no. 1 (2006): 69-97.

But if different versions of ‘an object’ may be enacted in practice, this is not to say that they are always fused at some point into ‘an object’ – they may never quite get to hang together. For a good case of that, see: Law, John, and Vicky Singleton. “Object lessons.” Organization 12, no. 3 (2005): 331-355.

And here an obligatory one for anthropologists, as the ‘object’ being studied – and multiplied – is a ‘population’ as defined by genetics in practice: M’charek, Amâde. “Technologies of population: Forensic DNA testing practices and the making of differences and similarities.” Configurations 8, no. 1 (2000): 121-158.

Oh, and I should not forget this troubling of ‘perspectives’ that went beyond realities to also include appreciations: Pols, Jeannette. “Enacting appreciations: beyond the patient perspective.” Health Care Analysis 13, no. 3 (2005): 203-221.

More recently, there was a special issue of Social Studies of Science to do with ontologies. It has a good introduction: Woolgar, Steve, and Javier Lezaun. “The wrong bin bag: A turn to ontology in science and technology studies?.”Social Studies of Science 43, no. 3 (2013): 321-340. In it, you may want to read: Law, John, and Marianne Elisabeth Lien. “Slippery: Field notes in empirical ontology.” Social Studies of Science 43, no. 3 (2013): 363-378.

And if you are still hungry for ontologies, then there is (with the example of eating and with norms explicitly added to ‘onto’): Mol, Annemarie. “Mind your plate! The ontonorms of Dutch dieting.” Social Studies of Science 43, no. 3 (2013): 379-396.

All of which is not to say that I would want to argue for such a thing as a ‘turn to ontology’ in anthropology or anywhere else. In the branch of the social studies of science, technology and medicine that I come from this term, ontology, has served quite specific purposes. It has helped to put some issues and questions on the agenda. But of course, like all terms, it has its limits. For it evokes ‘reality’ better than other things deserving our attention – norms, processes, spatialities, dangers, pleasures: what have you…

Annemarie Mol is professor of Anthropology of the Body at the University of Amsterdam. In her work she combines the ethnographic study of practices with the task of shifting our theoretical repertoires. She is author of The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice and The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice.

Antropoceno, Capitaloceno, Cthulhuceno: o que caracteriza uma nova época? (ClimaCom)

28/10/2014UncategorizedAntropoceno, Antropologia, ciência, comunicação científica, Geologia, Haraway, Mudanças climáticasrenzotaddei

28/10/2014

A proposta de formalização de uma nova época da Terra levanta questões sobre utilidade, responsabilidade e formas alternativas de narrar a história do mundo em que vivemos

Por Daniela Klebis

Os impactos das ações humanas sobre o planeta nos últimos 200 anos têm sido tão profundos que podem justificar a definição de nova época para a Terra, o Antropoceno. No último dia 17 de outubro, a Comissão Internacional sobre Estratigrafia (ICS, na sigla inglês), reuniu-se em Berlim para dar continuidade às discussões sobre a formalização dessa nova época terrena, cuja decisão final será votada somente em 2016. A despeito dos processos burocráticos, o termo já foi informalmente assimilado por filósofos, arqueólogos, historiadores, ambientalistas e cientistas do clima e, nesse meio, o debate segue, para além da reunião de evidências físicas, no sentido de compreender sua utilidade: estamos prontos para assumir a época dos humanos?

A história da Terra se divide em escalas de tempo geológicas, que são definidas pela ICS, com sede em Paris, na França. Essas escalas de tempo começam com grandes espaços de tempos chamados éons, que se dividem em eras (como a Mezozóica), e então em períodos (Jurássico, Neogeno), épocas e por fim, em idades. Quem acenou pela primeira vez a necessidade de definir uma nova época, baseada nos impactos indeléveis das ações humanas sobre a paisagem terrestre foi o químico atmosférico Paul J. Crutzen, prêmio Nobel de química em 1995. Cutzen sugeriu o termo Antropoceno durante o encontro do Programa Internacional de Geofera e Biosfera (IGBP, na sigla em inglês), no México, em 2000. O evento tinha por objetivo discutir os problemas do Holoceno, a época em que nos encontramos há cerca de 11700 anos,desde o fim da era glacial.

A hipótese sustentada pelos defensores da nova denominação baseia-se nas observações sobre as mudanças iniciadas pelo homem sobre o ambiente desde 1800, cujas evidências geológicas possuem impacto a longo prazo na história da Terra. E quais são as evidências que podem justificar a adoção do termo Antropoceno? “O que nós humanos mais fizemos nesses dois séculos foi criar coisas que não existiram pelos 4,5 bilhões de anos da história da Terra”, denuncia o geólogo Jan Zalasiewicz, presidente do grupo de trabalho sobre o Antropoceno da ICS, em colóquio em Sidney, na Autrália, em março deste ano.

antropoceno1

Minerais sintéticos, fibras de carbono, plásticos, concreto, são alguns exemplos de novos elementos criados pelo homem. O concreto, um material produzido pela mistura de cimento, areia, pedra e água, vem se espalhando na superfície de nosso planeta a uma velocidade de 2 bilhões de quilômetros por ano, conforme aponta o geólogo. Abaixo da superfície, escavações em busca de minérios e petróleo já abriram mais de 50 milhões de quilômetros em buracos subterrâneos.

Além das mudanças físicas, a emissão exagerada de dióxido de carbono e outros gases de efeito estufa, resultantes da ação humana, provocam mudanças químicas na atmosfera, como aquecimento global, descongelamento de calotas polares e acifidificação dos oceanos. A biosfera é também analisada, já que mudanças resultantes da perda de habitats, atividades predatórias e invasão de especies também provocam mudanças na composição química e física dos ambientes.

As evidências do impacto da ação humana,que vêm sendo consistentemente apontadas em estudos climáticos, foram reforçadas pelo 5º. Relatório do Painel Intercontinental de Mudanças Climáticas (IPCC), publicado no início do ano, com um consenso de 97% dos cientistas. Mais recentemente, no dia 30 de setembro, um relatório publicado no publicado pela WWF (World Wildlife Fund, em inglês), em parceria com a Sociedade Zoológica de Londres, apontou ainda que, nos últimos 40 anos, 52% da população de animais vertebrados na Terra desapareceu. Ao mesmo tempo, os seres humanos dobraram em quantidade. “Estamos empurrando a biosfera para a sua 6ª. extinção em massa”, alerta Hans-Otto Pörtner, do Instituto Alfred Wegener de Pesquisa Marinha e Polar, em Bremerhaven, Alemanha, e co-autor do capítulo sobre ecossistema do relatório do IPCC publicado nesse ano. Pörtner refere-se às cinco grandes extinções em massa registradas nos últimos 540 milhões de anos, caracterizadas por palentólogos como períodos em que mais de 75% das espécies foram extintas do planeta em um curto intervalo geológico.

“Há 200 anos, a coisas começaram a mudar o suficiente para visivelmente impactar o planeta: a população cresceu, assim como as emissões de CO2”, destaca Zalasiwicz. Segundo ele, o uso de energia cresceu 90 vezes entre 1800 e 2010, e já queimamos cerca de 200 milhões de anos de fósseis, entre carvão, óleo e gás. “Os humanos correspondem a 1/3 de todos os vertebrados da terra. Mas a dominação sem precedentes sobre todos os outros seres vivos, faz dessa a er a humana”, conclui.

Eileen Crist pesquisadora do Departamento de Ciências e Tecnologia na Sociedade, no Virginia Tech, no EUA, desafia a escolha do termo, defendendo que o discurso do Antropoceno deixa de questionar a soberania humana para propor, ao contrário, abordagens tecnológicas que poderiam tornar o domínio humano sustentável. “Ao afirmar a centralidade do homem – tanto como uma força causal quanto como objeto de preocupação – o Antropoceno encolhe o espaço discursivo para desafiar a dominação da biosfera, oferecendo, ao invés disso, um campo técnico-científico para a sua racionalização e um apelo pragmático para nos resignarmos à sua atualidade”, argumenta a pesquidadora em um artigo publicado em 2013.

O Antropoceno, dessa forma, entrelaça uma série de temas na formatação de seu discurso, como, por exemplo, o aumento acelerado da população que chegará a superar os 10 bilhões de habitantes; o crescimento econômico e a cultura de consumo enquanto modelo social dominante; a tecnologia como destino inescapável e, ao mesmo tempo, salvação da vida humana na Terra; e, ainda, o pressuposto de que o impacto humano é natural e contingente da nossa condição de seres providos de inteligência superior. Crist aponta que esse discurso mascara a opção de racionalizar o regime totalitátio do humano no planeta. “Como discurso coeso, ele bloqueia formas alternativas de vida humana na Terra”, indica.

antropoceno2

Relacionalidade

Donna Haraway, professora emérita da Universidade da Califórina em Santa Cruz, EUA, comentou, em participação no Colóquio Os Mil Nomes de Gaia, em setembro, que essa discussão é um dos “modos de buscar palavras que soam muito grandes, porém, não são grandes o suficiente para compreender a continuidade e a precariedade de viver e morrer nessa Terra”. Haraway é também umas das críticas do termo Antropoceno. Segundo ela, o Antropoceno implica um homem individual, que se desenvolve, e desenvolve uma nova paisagem de mundo, estranho a todas as outras formas de vida: uma percepção equivocada de um ser que seria capaz existir sem se relacionar com o resto do planeta. “Devemos compreender que para ser um, devemos ser muitos. Nos tornamos com outros seres”, comenta.

Para Haraway, épreciso, problematizar essa percepção, e endereçar a responsabilidade pelas mudanças, que está justamente no sistema capitalista que criamos. Este sim tem impulsionado a exploração, pelos homens, da Terra: “A história inteira poderia ser Capitaloceno, e não Antropoceno”, diz. Tal percepção, de acordo com a filósofa, pemite-nos resistir ao senso inescapabilidade presente nesse discurso, como Crist mencionou acima. “Estamos cercados pelo perigo de assumir que tudo está acabado, que nada pode acontecer”, diz.

Haraway aponta, entretanto, que é necessário evocar um senso de continuidade (ongoingness,em inglês),a partir de outras possibilidades narrativas e de pensamento.Uma delas, seria o Cthulhuceno, criado pela filósofa. A expressão vem de um conto de H.P.Lovecraft, O chamado de Cthulhu, que fala sobre humanos que têm suas mentes deterioradas quando, em rituais ao deus Cthulhu – uma mistura de homem, dragão e polvo que vive adormecido sob as águas do Pacífico Sul – conseguem vislumbrar uma realidade diferente da que conheciam. No início da história, o autor norte-americano descreve o seguinte: “A coisa mais misericordiosa do mundo, acho eu, é a incapacidade da mente humana de correlacionar tudo que ela contém”. A partir desse contexto, Donna Haraway explica que é necessário “desestabilizar mundos de pensamentos, com mundos de pensamentos”. O Cthulhuceno não é sobre adotar uma transcendência, uma ideia de vida ou morte: “trata-se de abraçar a continuidade sinuosa do mundo terreno, no seu passado, presente e futuro. Entretanto, tal continuidade implica em assumir que existe um problema muito grande e que ele precisa ser enfrentado. Devemos lamentar o que aconteceu, pois não deveria ter ocorrido. Mas não temos que continuar no mesmo caminho”, sugere.

In Amazon wars, bands of brothers-in-law (University of Utah)

28/10/2014UncategorizedAntropologia, Índios, Chagnon, Discriminação, Evolucionismo, Ioanomami, Racismo, Sociobiologia, Teoria antropológica, Violênciarenzotaddei

[Chagnon is restless.Gosh]

27-Oct-2014

Contact: Lee J. Siegel

How culture influences violence among the Amazon’s ‘fierce people’



		IMAGE: In this mid-1960s photo, men from two Yanomamo villages in the Amazon engage in nonhostile combat to determine the strength and fighting prowess of potential alliance partners. A new study… Click here for more information.

SALT LAKE CITY, Oct. 27, 2014 – When Yanomamö men in the Amazon raided villages and killed decades ago, they formed alliances with men in other villages rather than just with close kin like chimpanzees do. And the spoils of war came from marrying their allies’ sisters and daughters, rather than taking their victims’ land and women.

Those findings – which suggest how violence and cooperation can go hand-in-hand and how culture may modify any innate tendencies toward violence – come from a new study of the so-called “fierce people” led by provocative anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and written by his protégé, University of Utah anthropologist Shane Macfarlan.

Macfarlan says the researchers had expected to find the Yanomamö fought like “bands of brothers” and other close male kin like fathers, sons and cousins who live in the same community and fight nearby communities. That is how fights are conducted by chimpanzees – the only other apes besides humans that form coalitions to fight and kill.

Instead, “a more apt description might be a ‘band of brothers-in-law,'” in which Yanomamö men ally with similar-age men from nearby villages to attack another village, then marry their allies’ female kin, Macfarlan, Chagnon and colleagues write in the study, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study provides a mechanism to explain why Yanomamö warriors in a 1988 Chagnon study had more wives and children than those who did not kill.

“We are showing these guys individually get benefits from engaging in killing,” Macfarlan says. “They’re getting long-term alliance partners – other guys they can trust to get things done. And they are getting marriage opportunities.”

Since his 1968 book “Yanomamö: The Fierce People,” Chagnon has been harshly criticized by some cultural anthropologists who claim he places undue emphasis on genes and biology as underpinnings of human violence, based on his 1964-1993 visits to the Yanomamö. Defenders such as Macfarlan say Chagnon takes a much more balanced view, and that “it’s never a genes-versus-culture argument. They operate in tandem.”

Chagnon got what was seen as vindication in 2012 when he was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. The new study, with Macfarlan as first author and Chagnon as senior author – is Chagnon’s inaugural PNAS article as a member.

Macfarlan joined the University of Utah faculty this year an assistant professor of anthropology. He worked as Chagnon’s postdoctoral fellow at the University of Missouri from January 2013 to June 2014. Chagnon and Macfarlan conducted the study with two Missouri colleagues: anthropologists Robert S. Walker and Mark V. Flinn.

Models of Warfare

The Yanomamö – hunters and farmers who live in southern Venezuela and northern Brazil – once gained social status as “unokai” for killing.

Up to 20 Yanomamö (pronounced yah-NO-mama, but also spelled Yanomami or Yanomama) would sneak up on another village at dawn, “shoot the first person they saw and then hightail back home,” Macfarlan says. Some Yanomamö men did this once, some up to 11 times and some never killed. (Data for the study, collected in the 1980s, covered somewhat earlier times when spears, bows and arrows were the primary weapons.)



		IMAGE: University of Utah anthropologist Shane Macfarlan, shown here, is first author of a new study with provocative anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon about the Yanomamo, or so called ‘fierce people’ of… Click here for more information.

Macfarlan says the classic debate has been, “does warfare in small-scale societies like the Yanomamö resemble chimpanzee warfare?” – a theory known as the “fraternal interest group” model, in which bands of brothers, fathers, sons and paternal uncles all living in the same community fight other similar communities.

The new study asked whether Yanomamö killing follows that model or the “strategic alliance model,” which the researchers dub the “band of brothers-in-law” model. This model – supported by the study’s findings – indicates that Yanomamö men form alliances not with close kin from the same community, but with men from other communities. After killing together, a bond is formed and they often marry each other’s daughters or sisters and move into one or the other’s village or form a new village.

“When we started off this project, we all assumed it would be the chimpanzee-like model. But in human groups we have cultural rules that allow us to communicate with other communities. You certainly don’t see chimpanzees doing this.”

Is the study a retreat from what Chagnon’s critics see as too much focus on genetic and biological underpinnings of violence? Macfarlan says no, that Chagnon “has never been as all-biology as people have painted him. Most of his published research shows how unique cultural rules make the Yanomamö an interesting group of people.”

Earlier research suggested that for chimps, warfare is adaptive in an evolutionary sense, and that it also benefits small-scale human societies. The new study asked, “If warfare is adaptive, in what way do the adaptive benefits flow?” Macfarlan says.

“Some people, myself included, said, to the victor goes the spoils, because if you conquer another territory, you might take their land, food or potentially their females.”

But the new study indicates “the adaptive benefits are the alliances you build by perpetrating acts of warfare,” he adds. “It’s not that you are taking land or females from the vanquished group, but for the Yanomamö, what you acquire is that you can exchange resources with allies, such as labor and, most importantly, female marriage partners.”

The study’s findings that the Yanomamö form strategic alliances to kill suggest that “our ultracoooperative tendencies tend to go hand-in-hand with our ultralethal tendencies,” Macfarlan says. “We show a relationship between cooperation and violence at a level unseen in other organisms.” That may seem obvious for allied nations in modern wars, but “we’re saying that even in small-scale societies this is the case.”



		IMAGE: Men from one Yanomamo village in the Amazon ‘dance’ in a neighboring village to show off their military prowess, weaponry and group cohesion after they were invited to a… Click here for more information.

How the Study was Conducted

The new study analyzed data collected by Chagnon in the 1980s, when about 25,000 Yanomamö lived in about 250 villages ranging from 25 to 400 people.

The study examined 118 Yanomamö warriors or unokai who had killed a total of 47 people by forming raiding parties of two to 15 men. The researchers analyzed the relationships between every possible pair of men in those raiding parties. Among the 118 unokai men, there were 509 possible pairs. Macfarlan says the findings revealed surprises about the relationship between co-unokai – pairs of men who kill together:

Only 22 percent of men who kill together were from the same lineage.
Only 34 percent of co-unokai pairs were from the same place of birth. “Guys who come from different places of birth are more likely to kill together.”
Among co-killers known to be related, a majority were related on their mother’s side rather than their father’s side – more evidence of forming alliances beyond the immediate paternal kinship group. In Yanomamö culture, true kin are viewed as being on the paternal side, while maternal relatives are seen as belonging to another social group.
The Yanomamö preferred forming coalitions with men within a median of age difference of 8 years. “The more similar in age, the more likely they will kill multiple times,” Macfarlan says.
Of the 118 unokai, 102 got married in a total of 223 marriages to 206 women. Of married killers, 70 percent married at least one woman from the same paternal line as an ally in killing. And “the more times they kill together, the more likely they are going to get marriage partners from each other’s family line,” Macfarlan says.
As a result, “The more times the guys kill together, the more likely they are to move into the same village later in life, despite having come from different village.”

The study found allies-in-killing often are somewhere between maternal first and second cousins, Macfarlan says. Under Yanomamö rules, a man’s ideal marriage partner is a maternal first cousin, who would be the offspring of your mother’s brother. He says Yanomamö rules allow marriage to a maternal first cousin, but not a paternal first cousin.

Despite debate over the biological roots of deadly coalitions in chimps and humans, the new study shows how culture can make it “uniquely human” because if Yanomamö men “kill together, they are plugged into this social scene, this marriage market,” Macfarlan says. “They are playing the game of their culture.”

“Forum: Archaeology of the Anthropocene” (AAA Blog)

27/10/2014UncategorizedAntropoceno, Antropologia, Arqueologia, Geologia, História, Mudanças climáticasrenzotaddei

“Forum: Archaeology of the Anthropocene”

by Asa Randall

CITATION:

Edgeworth, M., Benjamin, J., Clarke, B., Crossland, Z., Domanska, E., Gorman, A. C., Graves-Brown, P., Harris, E. C., Hudson, M. J., Kelley, J. M., Paz, V. J., Salerno, M. A., Witmore, C. & Zarankin, A. 2014. Forum: Archaeology of the Anthropocene. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 1,1, pp. 73-132.

ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:

DOI: 10.1558/jca.v1i1.73

ABSTRACT:

What role will archaeology play in the Anthropocene – the proposed new geological epoch marked by human impact on Earth systems? That is the question discussed by thirteen archaeologists and other scholars from five continents in this thought-provoking forum. Their responses are diverse and wide-ranging. While Edward Harris looks to archaeological stratigraphy for a material paradigm of the Anthropocene, Alice Gorman explores the extent of human impact on orbital space and lunar surfaces – challenging the assumption that the Anthropocene is confined to Earth. Jeff Benjamin investigates the sounds of the Anthropocene. Paul Graves-Brown questions the idea that the epoch had its onset with the invention of the steam engine, while Mark Hudson uses Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects to imagine the dark artefacts of the future. Victor Paz doubts the practical relevance of the concept to archaeological chronologies, and Bruce Clarke warns archaeologists to steer clear of the Anthropocene altogether, on the grounds of the overbearing hubris of the very idea of the Age of Humans. Others like Jason Kelly and Ewa Domanska regard the Anthropocene debate as an opportunity to reach new forms of understanding of Earth systems. André Zarankin and Melisa Salerno ground significant issues in the archaeology of Antarctica. And Zoe Crossland explores the vital links between the known past and the imagined future. As a discipline orientated to the future and contemporary world as well as the past, Chris Witmore concludes, archaeology in the Anthropocene will have more work than it can handle.

The archaeological imagination is the ability to conceive of a past through encounters with old objects, substances, or places (Thomas, 1996, p. 63-64). In a sense, the archaeological imagination meshes the past with the present, as ancient objects are animated with contemporary concerns. Imagining a past and even empathizing with ancient actors likely has its roots in early modern humans (Gamble, 2008, p. 1-2). That is, everyone has an archaeological imagination. Archaeologists in particular have spent a fair amount of time honing their scientific toolkits and theoretical frameworks to create informed narratives about the past. Much archaeological effort has been oriented towards elucidating patterns and processes in deep time, although archaeologies of modern rubbish disposal or ruination (e.g. Rathje and Murphy, 2001, p, Dawdy, 2010, p.) have coexisted with studies of the more ancient. Indeed, archaeology’s focus on the material world—or human entanglements with it—provides relevant viewpoint in which to engage with, critique, or document the Anthropocene.

In the inaugural issue of the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, Edgeworth and colleagues turn their archaeological imagination towards the “anthropocene” and ask what does an archaeology of the Anthropocene look like, how do today’s practices create tangible (or even acoustic) traces, and what might the Anthropocene’s archaeological record look like in the future? The collection of short papers emerged from the 2013 Theoretical Archaeology Group meeting, and there is much to digest here. Of the contributions in the forum, those by Edgeworth (“Introduction”) and Witmore (“Archaeology, the Anthropocene, and the Hypanthropocene”) provide useful discussions of the themes, controversies, and contributions. Broadly speaking, the forum participants engage with the ways in which the Anthropocene destabilizes disciplinary boundaries and makes complex the relationship between time scales (human versus geological) and the spatial scale(s) of human activity in the world. These same sorts of themes echo ongoing debate regarding the Anthropocene as a precise “thing” whose identity is controlled by Geologists, or one that invokes or necessitates many viewpoints.

Of particular interest to me were those contributions that highlighted ways in which aspects of Anthropocenic habitation extend or unsettle traditional archaeological imaginations. For example, Hudson (“Dark Artifacts: Hyperobjects and the Archaeology of the Anthropocene”) considers from an archaeological perspective what Morton (2010, p.) refers to as “hyperobjects.” Paraphrasing Hudson, hyperobjects are characterized as massively distributed such that they are physically and conceptually viscous, of a particular phase but of great durability, nonlocal (i.e. not typical of any one place), formed from interactions, and often “dangerous”. Cited examples include Styrofoam, radionuclides, or plastiglomerate (so, too, the rebounding landscapes described by Ingo Schlupp may qualify); the spatial distribution, small size, or virtual character of hyperobjects makes them difficult to visualize or even comprehend. Not only do hyperobjects resist easy interpretation due to their lack of being of a particular place, their durability means that they lack life-cycles that are intelligible within a human framework of hundreds or thousands of years (that is, they will co-exist with many different kinds of societies in the future). While hyperobjects are of human agency, they reside in a strange state between cultural and natural whose ubiquity does not neatly sit in the localized or humanized imagined pasts that we are accustomed to thinking through, and which may ultimately lead to indifference towards them.

In a related vein, Crossland (“Anthropocene: Locating Agency, Imagining the Future”) considers the ways in which narratives about the Anthropocene can warp time and agency. To paraphrase Crossland, by restricting the Anthropocene to the industrial era (replete with dangerous hyperobjects), a teological arrow is held fast between the past and the present, such that only a dystopic future is possible. On the other hand, relocating the Anthropocene to the ancient world (the so-called Paleoanthropocene) may promote continuity between present and past (and redistribute the responsibility for it globally), but “the power of the imagery is undercut, and the ability of the concept to shock people and governments into change seems to be weakened” (p. 125). Crossland suggests a third route for our archaeological imaginations in the Anthropocene, which is to accept that at any point in time futures are open ended, and that “traces of the past therefore provide the ground for imagining the future” (p. 127). While preexisting conditions are important, traces of the past are really collaborations between the past and the present. We can avoid historical narratives that are arranged as progressive change with dystopian futures by envisioning that presents (in the past and our own) had many potential futures. Kenneth Sassaman (2012, p.) has similarly argued that the relationships between past/present/future are never stable, and that communities in the past likely planned for their own alternative futures.

I’m not certain that the concept of hyperobject does anything for us, particularly as a marker of the Anthropocene. It is likely that other “pre-modern” objects or technologies have been equally influential but we do not reflect on them either. Furthermore, the time and space bending properties of the archaeological imagination are not easily translated into a world dominated by progressive thinking. But, Hudson and other papers in this contribution challenges us to think about how the categories of objects and substances we are creating today—and the methods we use to interrogate them—can influence how we think about time, culture, and even social justice. In this regard, I suspect the upcoming “Anthropocene Slam: A Cabinet of Curiosities” forum (which will apparently be streamed live) will provide much food for thought. According to the forum’s description, each contributor has provided an object of study, ranging from substances such as concrete to room thermostats, through which we might visualize or imagine the relations between pasts and futures and different ecologies.

What will a future archaeological imagination make of the anthropocene? Time will certainly tell. Yet, perhaps thinking about how we are creating an archaeological record of our own may make us more keenly future oriented.

FURTHER READING:

Dawdy, S. L. 2010. Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity. Current Anthropology, 51, 761-793. DOI 10.1086/657626. Dawdy explores the ways in which creative uses of and experiences with the past in contemporary times undermines easy separations between modern and premodern.

Gamble, C. 2008. Archaeology: the basics, New York, Routledge. This is an easy to read introductory text on Archaeology and interpretation.

Morton, T. 2010. The ecological thought, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press. Morton considers what interconnectedness means, particularly when we acknowledge that all things have relations.

Rathje, W. L. & Murphy, C. 2001. Rubbish!: the archaeology of garbage, Tucson, AZ, University of Arizona Press. This popular book provides insights from archaeological examinations of modern refuse disposal practices.

Sassaman, K. E. 2012. Futurologists Look Back. Archaeologies, 10.1007/s11759-012-9205-0, 1–19. 10.1007/s11759-012-9205-0. Sassaman argues that the wall that is often erected between modern and premodern communities is minimized if we allow ancient communities to have imagined and acted upon their own futures (so called futures past).

Thomas, J. 1996. Time, Culture and Identity: An Interpretive Archaeology, London, Routledge. Thomas introduces the concept of the archaeological imagination.

Um soco na arrogância da visão seletiva supostamente intelectual (ou, Carta Aberta ao antropólogo Roberto DaMatta) (Marcio Valley)

10/10/2014UncategorizedAntropologia, Corrupção, Debate eleitoral, Eleições, Roberto DaMattarenzotaddei

quinta-feira, 9 de outubro de 2014

Roberto DaMatta, li, ontem (08/10/2014), o seu texto “Um soco na onipotência”, onde você defende que o PT seja “defesnetrado do poder” e revela ter sentido a angústia diminuída ao ver Aécio chegar ao segundo turno dessas eleições. Na sua visão, Aécio, tendo “achado o seu papel e o seu tom”, e “com sua tranquilidade”, irá proporcionar ao Brasil a “descoberta da soma e da continuidade”.

Senti uma enorme tristeza ao término da leitura. Sempre respeitei você e seus pensamentos. O seu texto para mim significou, de fato, um soco de alto teor destrutivo, porém não na onipotência do PT, mas na imagem do antropólogo Roberto DaMatta, que nunca imaginei pudesse abdicar da inteligência para defender uma causa.

Participo pouco do Facebook, mais para divulgar meus textos. Isso porque percebo nas redes sociais uma enorme carência de discussão inteligente e racional dos problemas políticos brasileiros. Trata-se de mera gritaria irracional, com repetição de memes e de conteúdo absolutamente raso. É nessas discussões adialéticas, onde não é possível o contraponto, visto como ofensa, e cuja pretensão é somente a de fazer prevalecer a própria visão e de repelir agressivamente todo pensamento que contrarie essa ótica, que vejo comumente serem usadas essas expressões de mera injúria como “petralhas”, “tucanalhas”, “privataria”, “coxinhas” e, vejam só, “lulopetismo”, a mesma utilizada por você, um intelectual.

Nas redes sociais, busco relevar o mais possível o uso dessas palavras de ordem, fundamentalistas e estimuladoras da divisão e do acirramento, porque não sou insensível ao fato de que esse uso, em geral, surge da falta de oportunidade de acesso a uma cultura de discussões de alto nível. Entretanto, quando percebo que esse mesmo estilo, digamos, “literário” é manipulado por pessoas que deveriam ser o farol a seguir no que concerne à inteligência e à razão, dói no coração e a sensação de impotência no enfrentamento e solução dos problemas públicos cresce na alma. Discussões baratas conduzem a resultados igualmente baratos.

Como um intelectual pode se unir à grita da corrupção generalizada petista assim, de forma tão leviana? Sem o adensamento das causas? Sem uma perspectiva histórica? Sem analisar o sistema legal que proporciona tais desvios? Sem uma análise comparativa? Sem qualquer pronunciamento sobre a existência ou não das ações de combate? A corrupção inexistia no Brasil pré-PT ou nasce a partir da assunção desse partido? A malfadada governabilidade no Brasil – e seus filhos diletos, o fisiologismo e o patrimonialismo – é uma pré-condição do exercício do poder ou somente foi e será praticada pelo PT, mas não por outros partidos que eventualmente venham a conquistas o governo? Em outras palavras, é possível a qualquer partido governar sem se render aos clamores e anseios de sua inexoravelmente necessária base de apoio?

DaMatta, a tristeza que me doeu, ao ler seu texto, veio-me da constatação de que, mesmo um formador de opinião como você, com enorme capilaridade na divulgação através de organismos gigantes como “O Globo”, e que, na condição de intelectual, possui ou deveria possuir capacidade de análise crítica dos fatos presentes e de, a partir dessa capacitação, também de intuição sobre o futuro que poucos podem se arvorar de possuir, ainda assim arrisca-se em relação à própria reputação e biografia ao escrever textos supostamente analíticos, mas cujo conteúdo é exclusivamente panfletário e demonstração de exercício do mais puro e, diria mesmo, infantil “wishful thinking”. De fato, custo a crer, perdoe-me, que você acredite no que escreveu.

Sei que você sabe (ou deveria saber) que um dos primeiros atos de Fernando Henrique Cardoso (desse mesmo PSDB que você agora tão calorosamente articula em favor), assinado somente dezoito dias depois de tomar posse, através do Decreto nº 1.376/1995, foi extinguir a Comissão para Investigar a Corrupção, comissão que havia sido criada em 1993 por Itamar Franco.

Lula, no dia 1º de janeiro de 2003, primeiro dia de seu governo, a partir da antiga Corregedoria-Geral da União, assinou a MP n° 103/2003 (depois Lei n° 10.683/2003), criando a Controladoria-Geral da União e atribuindo ao seu titular a denominação de Ministro de Estado do Controle e da Transparência, o que implicou elevar o status administrativo da pasta e sinalizou aos subalternos o norte a ser orientado.

Nos oito anos de governo do PSDB, com FHC, a Polícia Federal realizou um total de 48 (quarenta e oito) operações, ou seja, uma média de seis operações por ano.

Nos doze anos de governo do PT, essa número saltou para cerca de duas mil e trezentas, o que dá uma média de mais de 190 (cento e noventa) por ano.

Ao assumir, o governo do PT encontrou cerca de cem varas federais. Agora já são mais de quinhentas.

Como você sabe, ou deveria saber, são as operações da Polícia Federal e as varas da Justiça Federal que, no âmbito federal, investigam, combatem e julgam os crimes de corrupção.

Durante o governo do PSDB, havia Geraldo Brindeiro, o “engavetador geral da república”.

Durante o governo do PT poderosos membros do governo em exercício foram investigados, denunciados pelo Procurador Geral da República (não mais um “engavetador”), julgados, condenados e presos por corrupção. Você pode não apreciar a famosa expressão do Lula, “nunca antes na história desse país”, mas, quanto a esse fato, é possível desmenti-la? Quando e em que circunstâncias isso, antes, ocorreu?

De que forma, DaMatta, esses fatos (que você facilmente encontrará em sites idôneos da internet) se coadunam com a sua afirmação de “corrupção deslavada do PT”?

DaMatta, o comum do povo, desprovido dos mesmos mecanismos de acesso à informação e ao conhecimento, pode não saber, como você sabe, que não existem administrações, privadas ou públicas, imunes à prática de ilícitos. O que diferencia uma boa administração de uma ruim é como se lida com os infratores. Há liberdade para as instituições funcionarem, investigando e eventualmente punindo, ou tudo é conduzido para debaixo do tapete por diligentes engavetadores?

Mexa no formigueiro, DaMatta, e isso aumentará o número de formigas visíveis. Você sabe disso, é o “efeito percepção”. Concluir que, porque não se viam as formigas antes, elas não existiam, é exercício da mais perfeita idiotice, desculpável somente aos ignorantes, não aos cultos.

DaMatta, todo o suposto prejuízo do mensalão (não vou entrar no mérito da existência do crime, que já foi julgado pelo STF, mas você sabe que se discute bastante se o dinheiro supostamente “desviado” não se encontra nos cofres da Globo, da Folha, do Estadão e de outros órgãos da imprensa, de forma lícita, através de contratos legítimos de publicidade), não chega a 75 (setenta e cinco) milhões de reais. Sem questionar a validade das privatizações realizadas pelo FHC, há estudiosos do assunto, idôneos, que alegam que o prejuízo com as vendas das estatais, a partir do uso das “moedas podres” e outros “incentivos”, pode ter chegado a cerca de 2 (dois) bilhões e 400 (quatrocentos) milhões de reais. Isso mesmo, entregamos o patrimônio todo e, longe de reduzirmos o déficit público, ainda acrescentamos essa montanha de dinheiro à nossa dívida pública. Porém, muita gente ficou multimilionária a partir das privatizações do PSDB.

Esse valor, DaMatta, corresponde a mais de trinta e duas vezes o valor do mensalão, em valores não atualizados (se atualizar passa fácil de cinquenta vezes). Claro, na sua percepção você não deve considerar isso corrupção, não é mesmo?

Ou, quem sabe, DaMatta, talvez você tenha algo a dizer sobre as privatizações tucanas, sobre a atuação de José Serra em conjunto com sua filha Verônica e seu genro Alexandre Burgeois, sobre Daniel Dantas e sua filha, também Verônica, sobre Ricardo Sérgio de Oliveira no Banco do Brasil (agindo “no limite da irresponsabilidade”), sobre André Lara Rezende e as operações de câmbio, a família Jeressaiti e a aquisição da Telemar, sobre o Banestado.

Só o Banestado, DaMatta, ocorrido em pleno governo FHC, causou um prejuízo de mais de 19 (dezenove) bilhões de dólares, que foram ilegalmente remetidos para os Estados Unidos.

Começo a concordar, DaMatta, que os petistas são incompetentes, pelo menos no quesito “desvio de dinheiro público”.

Enfim, retorno à indagação que fiz acima: a corrupção é uma característica do PT? Se não, onde estão os condenados por corrupção do período do PSDB no governo federal?

E Aécio, DaMatta? Está ele livre de indícios de corrupção em sua passagem pelo governo mineiro? Você bem sabe que Minas Gerais, com o PSDB, foi o berço do mensalão tucano, gerido pelo mesmo indivíduo, o publicitário Marcos Valério, cujos tentáculos se espraiaram em direção ao governdo federal do PT. Além disso, você sabe que Aécio é réu, acusado de improbidade administrativa, em ação civil pública movida pelo Ministério Público Estadual, em razão de desvio de 4 (quatro) bilhões e 300 (trezentos) milhões de reais da área da saúde em Minas, não sabe? E o aeroporto construído com dinheiro público em área desapropriada de parte da fazenda de seu tio, em Minas, ouviu falar sobre isso?

Bom, tudo isso eu relato, DaMatta, em função de sua visão estreita e seletiva sobre a corrupção do PT, olvidando-se (de forma proposital?) daquela oriunda dos quadros tucanos. Em princípio, não me parece o papel de um intelectual. Passável para uma pessoa comum, para redatores de Facebook, essa visão reducionista é, no meu entender, vergonhosa para um erudito.

Até compreendo que existam na mídia os “experts” (substitutos de segunda linha dos verdadeiros intelectuais) vendendo suas falsas expertises a soldo, uma para cada gosto, mas não acredito que seja o seu caso. Prefiro acreditar num ato menos pensado, numa torcida apaixonada, passional, talvez resultado de algum elemento pessoal por mim desconhecido, como, por exemplo, ter sido prejudicado individualmente pelo PT de alguma forma ou possuir relação estreita com alguém do PSDB. Ainda assim, não há justificativa para a edição de um panfleto tão raso, tão ao gosto da Rede Globo, da Folha e do Estadão e da revista Veja. Você, DaMatta, um intelectual cujo respeito não será por mim perdido por um deslize, infelizmente pôs-se ombro a ombro com o nível de um Reinaldo Azevedo ou de um Augusto Nunes. Tornou-se um Jabor. Se insistir nessa linha, será nivelado, torço para que isso não ocorra, a um Merval Pereira, o imortal da coletânea única.

DaMatta, retorne à sanidade intelectual. Não para infalivelmente apoiar o PT, mas para, se for o caso, rejeitá-lo pelos motivos lógicos e racionais corretos, ou seja, fundamentando sua contrariedade à linha econômica petista; ou à forma como ocorre, hoje, o enfrentamento da questão social; ou, ainda, pelas teses de relações internacionais atualmente defendidas pelo Itamaraty; ou por qualquer outra que você, livremente e como cidadão, considerar não ser adequada ao seu pensamento.

O que não dá é para alcunhar o PT de “dono espúrio de um Brasil que é de todos nós”, uma frase de efeito cujo único objetivo é o aplauso fácil. Ou de falar em “aparelhamento do Estado”, um mantra que pode ser considerado bonitinho para aqueles que ignoram as formas pelas quais se materializam os processos políticos, mas que se torna ridículo se proferido por um intelectual ciente de que o aparelhamento do Estado faz parte do processo democrático, uma vez que todo partido que chega ao poder preenche os espaços de indicação política existentes no governo justamente como meio de oferecer aos eleitores a direção política que eles escolheram através da eleição livre. Ou você, DaMatta, acha que o PSDB não “aparelhou” o governo federal, quando lá esteve, ou, atualmente, não nomeou todo e cada um dos cargos políticos de livre nomeação no Estado de São Paulo durante esses vinte anos de seu governo (algo a dizer sobre a “perpetuação no poder” em São Paulo?).

Vamos nos ater à discussão política, então. Vamos falar de economia, de saúde, de segurança pública, de educação e de quem consideramos mais apto a enfrentar esses enormes desafios. Porque, no tema corrupção, DaMatta, e estou afirmando algo que sei que você de antemão sabe, somente existem telhados de vidro.

Não desça ao nível dos tabloides. Você é maior do que eles. Ainda acredito e torço por você.

Do seu leitor, Marcio Valley.

Firelight talk of the Kalahari Bushmen (University of Utah)

23/09/2014UncategorizedAntropologia, Cultura, Evolucionismo, Fogorenzotaddei

22-Sep-2014

Lee J. Siegel

Did tales told over fires aid our social and cultural evolution?



		IMAGE: A !Kung Bushman, sporting a Calvin Klein hat, tells stories at a firelight gathering in Africa’s Kalahari Desert. University of Utah anthropologist Polly Wiessner has published a new study of… Click here for more information.

SALT LAKE CITY, Sept. 22, 2014 – After human ancestors controlled fire 400,000 to 1 million years ago, flames not only let them cook food and fend off predators, but also extended their day.

A University of Utah study of Africa’s Kalahari Bushmen suggests that stories told over firelight helped human culture and thought evolve by reinforcing social traditions, promoting harmony and equality, and sparking the imagination to envision a broad sense of community, both with distant people and the spirit world.

Researchers previously studied how cooking affected diets and anatomy, but “little is known about how important the extended day was for igniting the embers of culture and society,” anthropology professor Polly Wiessner writes in a study published online today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“There is something about fire in the middle of the darkness that bonds, mellows and also excites people. It’s intimate,” says Wiessner, who has studied the Bushmen for 40 years. “Nighttime around a fire is universally time for bonding, for telling social information, for entertaining, for a lot of shared emotions.”

Wiessner’s study, which she calls “exploratory,” analyzed scores of daytime and firelight conversations among !Kung Bushmen – also known as Ju/’hoansi Bushmen – some 4,000 of which now live in the Kalahari Desert of northeast Namibia and northwest Botswana. (The exclamation, slash and apostrophe symbols represent click sounds in their language.) They are among several groups of Kalahari Bushmen.

Why study the campfire tales of Bushmen?

“We can’t tell about the past from the Bushmen,” Wiessner says. “But these people live from hunting and gathering. For 99 percent of our evolution, this is how our ancestors lived. What transpires during the firelit night hours by hunter-gatherers? It helps answer the question of what firelit space contributes to human life.”

She writes: “Stories are told in virtually all hunter-gatherer societies; together with gifts, they were the original social media.”



		IMAGE: !Kung Kalahari Bushmen in Africa sit in camp. A University of Utah study of nighttime gatherings around fires by these hunter-gatherers suggests that human cultural development was advanced when human… Click here for more information.

From the Workaday World to Nights of Bonding and Wonder

In her study, “Embers of Society: Firelight Talk among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen,” Wiessner says archaeological evidence indicates human ancestors had sporadic control of fire 1 million or more years ago, and regularly used it after 400,000 years ago.

“Fire altered our circadian rhythms, the light allowed us to stay awake, and the question is what happened in the fire-lit space? What did it do for human development?” asks Wiessner, who earlier this year was among three University of Utah researchers elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Wiessner says !Kung Bushmen hold firelight gatherings most nights in groups of up to 15 people. A camp has hearths for each family, but at night people often converge at a single hearth. She analyzed only conversations involving five or more people.

Firelight stories deal with topics such as past hunts, fights over meat, marriage, premarital customs, murder, bush fires, birth, getting lost, interactions with other groups, truck breakdowns, being chased by animals, disputes and extramarital affairs. And there also are traditional myths.

For her study, Wiessner analyzed two sets of data:

Notes she took in 1974 (initially for another purpose) of 174 daytime and nighttime conversations at two !Kung camps in northwest Botswana. Each conversation lasted more than 20 to 30 minutes and involved five to 15 people.
Digital recordings, transcribed by educated Bushmen, of 68 firelight stories Wiessner originally heard in the 1970s but came back to have retold and recorded during three visits in 2011-2013 to !Kung villages in Botswana and Namibia.

Wiessner found daytime conversations differed much from firelight discussions. Of daytime conversations, 34 percent were complaints, criticism and gossip to regulate social relationships; 31 percent were economic matters, such as hunting for dinner; 16 percent were jokes; only 6 percent were stories and the rest were other topics

But at night, 81 percent of the conversations involved stories, and only 7 percent were complaints, criticism and gossip and 4 percent were economic.



		IMAGE: A group of !Kung Bushmen in Africa’s Kalahari Desert work together to transcribe and translate a recorded firelight conversation into a written text. Such translations were used by University of… Click here for more information.

Bonding with People Near and Far – and with the Supernatural

Wiessner found how conversations reinforced major !Kung social institutions and values: arranged marriages, the kinship system, a social structure based on equality, the sharing of food during times of hardship, land rights, trance healing and xaro, a system of exchange that involved pledges of mutual assistance, including housing and food, in troubled times.

“What I found was a big difference between day and night conversation, the kinds of information transmitted and the use of imaginary thought,” Wiessner says.

“Day conversation has a lot to do with economic activities – working, getting food, what resources are where,” she says. “It has a lot to do with social issues and controls: criticism, complaints and gripes.”

“At night, people really let go, mellow out and seek entertainment. If there have been conflicts in the day, they overcome those and bond. Night conversation has more to do with stories, talking about the characteristics of people who are not present and who are in your broader networks, and thoughts about the spirit world and how it influences the human world. You have singing and dancing, too, which bonds groups.”

Healers dance and go into trances, “travel to god’s village and communicate with the spirits of deceased loved ones who are trying to take sick people away,” Wiessner says.

She says nonhuman primates don’t maintain mutually supportive ties outside their group: “We are really unique. We create far-flung ties outside our groups.”

Such extended communities allowed humans “to colonize our planet because they had networks of mutual support, which you see expressed today in our capacity for social networking” she adds. “Humans form communities that are not together in space, but are in our heads – virtual communities. They are communities in our heads. For the Bushmen, they may be up to 120 miles away.”

Wiessner suggests that firelight stories, conversations, ceremonies and celebrations sparked human imagination and “cognitive capacities to form these imagined communities, whether it’s our social networks, all of our relatives on Earth or communities that link us to the spirit world.” She says they also bolstered the human ability to “read” what others are thinking – not just their thoughts or intentions, but their views toward other people.

What Has Electricity Done to Us?

Examining how firelight extended the day prompted Wiessner to wonder about modern society, asking, “What happens when economically unproductive firelit time is turned to productive time by artificial lighting?”

Parents read stories or show videos to their children, but now, “work spills into the night. We now sit on laptops in our homes. When you are able to work at night, you suddenly have a conflict: ‘I have only 15 minutes to tell my kids a bedtime story. I don’t have time to sit around and talk.’ Artificial light turned potential social time into potential work time. What happens to social relations?”

Her research raises that question, but doesn’t answer it.

A gaiatologia por vir (Partes sem um todo)

01/09/2014UncategorizedAntropoceno, Antropologia, Filosofia, Gaia, Mudanças climáticas, Viveiros de Castrorenzotaddei

Publicado em 27 de agosto de 2014 por Alexandre Nodari

Sobre Há mundo por vir? Ensaio sobre os medos e os fins, livro de Déborah Danwoski e Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

Segundo Bruno Latour, a catástrofe ambiental em curso faz com que “nos sintamos transportados de volta para o clima do século XVI. Uma outra Era do Descobrimento”: “nos encontramos exatamente em uma Era similar àquela de Colombo, quando sua viagem encontrou um continente inteiramente novo”. E como o “problema”, a “solução” também lhe parece semelhante: tratar-se-ia de estabelecer um novo “Nomos da Terra”, nome cunhado por Carl Schmitt para designar a ordem jurídica mundial estabelecida com a Conquista (o “descobrimento”), e que consistiria na divisão do mundo em duas zonas: a Europa, em que vigeriam as regras do direito de guerra, ou seja, o espaço de normalidade; e o mar e as zonas “livres” – o Novo e Novíssimo Mundo –, que podiam ser simplesmente apropriáveis pelas potências europeias e sua “superioridade espiritual”, espaço de excepcionalidade em que não haveria mitigação da guerra. Nesse sentido, se há algum Nomos da Terra que se avizinha, este parece ser a ordem (de pânico) que Isabelle Stengers visualiza no horizonte: a formação de uma espécie de governo de caráter global (espaço normal), legitimado a agir excepcionalmente (isto é, a intervir) sobre países e coletivos sob o imperativo da urgência da crise. É evidente que Latour toma o conceito do “tóxico” Schmitt com pinças, buscando uma outra idéia de Nomos, mas será que é possível fazê-lo, tendo como ponto de partida a analogia com o “descobrimento”? Será que é possível no cenário atual retomar a oposição amigo-inimigo schmittiana, oposição narcisista em que o inimigo é definido como “negação existencial” do amigo, isto é, seu mero negativo, sem consistência própria? Os Terranos (amigo?) de que fala tão belamente Latour seriam apenas a negação dos Humanos (inimigo?)?

A questão maior talvez seja a do ponto de vista: Nós quem, cara pálida?, parecem perguntar ao seu principal interlocutor, de modo sutil mas provocante ao longo desse ensaio, Déborah Danowski e Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, os quais, americanos não-atacados pela síndrome de Estocolmo como grande parte da esquerda, rejeitam a posição universalista que o Ocidente se adjudicou a si e insistem a todo momento em colocar o dedo na ferida: quem é esse nós (o “sujeito” que se vê novamente na Era do Descobrimento, o mesmo “sujeito” do Descobrimento), quem é o anthropos do Antropoceno? E quem são os outros, quem são esses “nós-outros” que estavam do lado de lá (de cá) do Descobrimento, para os quais este foi uma Conquista, um primeiro – de muitos – fim de mundo?Há mundo por vir? Ensaio sobre o medo e os fins, ao passar em revista algumas formulações – estéticas, filosóficas, etc. – da mitologia contemporânea em torno do fim do mundo, tornada realidade tangível (a “mitofísica” contemporânea, pra usar uma expressão genial dos autores), não adota a posição do demiurgo criador da ordem (Nomos), mas do deceptor que confunde as divisões (amigo-inimigo), que divide as divisões, que desobedece as hierarquias: um exercício de bricolagem em que se encontram os Singularitanos e os Maya, formulações de Meillassoux e um mito aikewara, Melancholia e Chiapas, Gaia e Pachamama. O encontro promovido pela “descoberta”, lembra Oswald de Andrade, não era apenas do europeu com um “continente inteiramente novo” a ser apropriado, mas com uma “humanidade inteiramente nova”, isto é, “uma humanidade diferente da que era então conhecida” pelos europeus – e a expressão máxima de tal encontro seriam as Utopias, resultado da percepção sensível da contingência das formações político-econômico-metafísicas ocidentais, isto é, a possibilidade de um outro mundo, de outros mundos possíveis, incluindo aí, uma outra concepção do homem. Se o Nomos representou uma “saída” (pra que tudo continuasse igual) do beco-sem-saída da mitigação da guerra, as Utopias significavam, por sua vez, uma linha de fuga. E são justamente linhas de fuga (e não identidades e oposições) que Danowski e Viveiros de Castro apresentam a partir desses encontros de fins de mundo: a possibilidade (e talvez a necessidade) de um “bom encontro” da nossa (?) mitologia com a ameríndia, para se contrapor ao “mau encontro” da Descoberta (o genocídio americano, mas também a polícia mundial que a nova Era pode trazer). Não se trata, porém, de um encontro pacífico, mas cheio de faíscas, beligerante, mas não de uma guerra narcísica, e sim de uma guerrilha de resistência, contra o Estado, contra a forma-Estado de pensamento. O que se questiona é a própria oposição binária (o princípio da não-contradição) das identificações: o que está em jogo é um exercício de descentramento, em que o “ser-enquanto-outro” do pensamento ameríndio permite repotencializar também aqueles momentos do pensamento ocidental em que o Ocidente difere de si mesmo (Deleuze e Guattari, a monadologia panpsiquista de Gabriel Tarde, a cosmologia de Peirce – e, eu acrescentaria, talvez mesmo a oikeiosis estóica, já que estamos falando de ecologia), em que a alteridade deixa vestígios erráticos que são roteiros de um mundo por vir. E um desses roteiros talvez seja a biografiade Thoreau – o qual dizia ser apenas “um hóspede da Natureza” –, sobre quem Virginia Wolff pergunta se sua “simplicidade é algo que vale por si mesmo” ou seria “antes um método de intensificação, um modo de pôr em liberdade a complicada e delicada máquina da alma, tornando-se assim seus resultados o contrário do simples?” Pergunta retórica, evidentemente: Thoreau, como poucos (ocidentais), soube limitar o limite, isto é, viver a partir do limite, mas no limite, isto é: convertendo o limite, de impedimento extensional, em via de acesso à intensidade. Para dizê-lo com uma expressão de Viveiros de Castro: soube viver/fazer a “poesia do mundo”. Nesse sentido, se “É difícil saber”, como afirma Wolff, “se devemos considerá-lo o último de uma linhagem mais antiga de homens, ou o primeiro de uma ainda por vir”, índio ou moderno, isso se deve ao fato de que o agenciamento, a composição de Thoreau inopera o binarismo: é um velho que devém jovem, um moderno que devém índio. Dito de outro modo: os Terranos de Danowski e Viveiros de Castro não são uma identidade ou uma essência ou uma substância, mas um devir: são aqueles que, segundo Juliana Fausto, dizem, com Bartleby, I would prefer not, e que devêm, eu arriscaria afirmar, nesse gesto e enquanto dura esse gesto, gaiatos. De fato, há mundo por vir parece apresentar como ciência por vir nesses tempos sombrios de homens sombrios isso que poderíamos chamar de “gaiatologia”, a feliz ciência não do homem, mas do gaiato, não dessa espécie envelhecida e que envelhece o planeta, mas daquele ainda por vir jovem habitante de Gaia, a ciência do bricoleur, da gambiarra (conceito tomado a partir de Fernanda Bruno, e que tem um lugar de destaque ao final do livro, enquanto técnica de agenciamento natural-cultural). O mundo está acabando, mas a alegria continua a ser a prova dos nove.

Uma (in)certa antropologia

An (un)certain anthropology

Arquivo da tag: Antropologia

Study underscores complexity of geopolitics in the age of the Aztec empire (North Carolina State Univ.)

On Reverse Engineering (Anthropology and Algorithms)

Here’s Why Companies Are Desperate To Hire Anthropologists (Business Insider)

Finding an industry’s need

Did a Volcanic Cataclysm 40,000 Years Ago Trigger the Final Demise of the Neanderthals? (Geological Society of America)

Inuits do Canadá: uma longa jornada de volta (Estadão)

Esqueletos foram descobertos há pouco tempo em um museu francês, mas caminho para repatriá-los não é fácil

Physics’s pangolin (AEON)

Kurt Vonnegut graphed the world’s most popular stories (The Washington Post)

Stefan Helmreich on Waves: an anthropology of scientific things (The Anthropo.scene)

Stone Age humans weren’t necessarily more advanced than Neanderthals (Science Daily)

Be the Street: On Radical Ethnography and Cultural Studies (Viewpoint Magazine)

Do we need “the Anthropocene?” (Inhabiting the Anthropocene)

People Mentions:

Worlding Anthropologies of Technosciences? (Blog.castac.org)

Latour on digital methods (Installing [social] order)

Antropoceno, Capitaloceno, Cthulhuceno: o que caracteriza uma nova época? (ClimaCom)

In Amazon wars, bands of brothers-in-law (University of Utah)

“Forum: Archaeology of the Anthropocene” (AAA Blog)

Um soco na arrogância da visão seletiva supostamente intelectual (ou, Carta Aberta ao antropólogo Roberto DaMatta) (Marcio Valley)

Firelight talk of the Kalahari Bushmen (University of Utah)

A gaiatologia por vir (Partes sem um todo)