Anthropology Times

The Changing Role of Women in Models of Human Evolution
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 15: 25-66 (Volume publication date October 1986)
L M Fedigan
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Letters to My Tutor…

My dear, kind Madame,

Reading Linda Marie Fedigan’s “The Changing Role of Women in Models of Human Evolution,” I was again struck with the thought that women in academia are more attuned to academic bias which is, I suppose, as one would expect.  Much the same as when reading the review for “Groups That Don’t Want In: Gypsies and Other Artisan, Trader, and Entertainer Minorities,” there was an undertone of “Here’s the state of the literature…such as it is,” and justifiably so.  In American schools there is this pretense that academia is more independent than it is; that there is some raison d‘être other than support of the state and the status quo.  There is a sense that new and innovative and pragmatic thinking will be appreciated, but it is a false sense for the most part.  It seems that many American academics like to believe that they love Plato Socrates when really they are just as Aristotelian as the rest of the Western world.

In an essay on Americans (Philosophical Writings (Beauvoir Series)), you write that the existentialists believe that the realness of freedom lies in pursuing some end and effecting some real change upon the world and this is why you “approve, to some extent, the American way of judging a man by what he has done.”  A man is not simply the product of his birthright, but more the product of his accomplishments.  I believe that your observation is true, that this is a real ideal in American culture.  And I believe that it is this ideal that requires the pretense of appreciation of the novel in American academia.  If a man is what he does, there is a different valuing and definition of “doing” than what one finds in other Western cultures.   Birth is given to the notion that hard work based on skill or knowledge or facts is always rewarded.  However, this ideal is much more real in American folklore than can be found in actual practice.  Conservatism in academia has a much longer and deeper history than American pragmatism.

As to some of the specifics of the review, there seemed to a consistent narrative in the literature reviewed that cast women’s reproductive abilities in a negative light.  The fact that women had babies held them back and made them dependent on men for protection and sustenance.  Fedigan writes that the prevailing ideology as far as who gets to reproduce is not only a matter of selecting for desirable male traits, but also a matter of men choosing which women should be so lucky as to serve as incubators for the genetic stuff of the superior males.  She writes: “…Darwin helped to pioneer what I call the ‘coat-tails’ theory of human evolution: traits are selected for in males and women evolve by clinging to the mean’s coat-tails.”  Female reproduction is a hindrance or at most an aside.  Male reproduction, on the other hand, is the stuff that builds and sustains.

Thinking more modernly, we have these notions of the world in crisis because women are having babies; overpopulation will be the death of us all.  Damn those women!!  I remember this being a particular gripe of my first anthropology professor, “Women having babies is not the problem,” she often cried out.  I didn’t love my first anthropology professor in that way that many women often love their first anthropology professors, but on this we agreed.  The world in crisis couldn’t have almost entirely to do with the consumption and output of modern societies, could it?  It seems these narratives of how women having babies is a problem for women, for cultural development, for the health of the planet are deeply embedded in modern human societies.  I think it would make for interesting study to look at them all.

Men laid claim to their own bloody and violent birthing schemes.  I think the popularity of “Man the Hunter” comes from a desire to take ownership of an ability natural to women.  The blood and guts and endurance and bonding that comes from hunting is much more important to how human cultures evolved and developed than any contribution of women.  Men can be tough, too!  I think the popularity of looking to other primates or modern day hunter-gatherer societies for clues into the development of early human cultures does much to support male-dominant schemes of early cultural development in that doing so limits the type and scope of questions asked even when those questions would tend to look more favorably on female contributions.  I think the focus on the tangible and easily measurable leads to significant shortcomings; it’s so easy to misinterpret or ignore significance in these comparisons.  Things that look the same across cultures may not have the same significance, may not have the same mind applied to the thing.

I’ve always thought that women giving birth was the key to understanding early human cultures and the development of cultures and the male desire to dominate in culture as well as the methods he uses to do so or claims to have done so.  I’ve always believed that early cultural traditions and rituals surrounding the importance of women giving birth are key to understanding the prevalence of misogyny across modern cultures.  I’m not sure of the influences that lead me to this place, but I’ve thought this since I was very young.  I believe there was much Marxist thinking floating around in rural Mississippi.

OK, it’s getting late again.  Reading Fedigan, I feel very encouraged to read more of Friedrich Engels.  I agree with him that it seems that women played a more significant role in early human cultures and that that role fell into decline.  I am interested to know more of the details of his thinking.

Yours in mind and spirit,
S.

The Caribbean Region: An Open Frontier in Anthropological Theory
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 21: 19-42 (Volume publication date October 1992)
Michel-Rolph Trouillot
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Letters to My Tutor…

My dear, sweet Simone,

I don’t know that it makes sense, but I feel a small happiness at the thought that I was on Earth breathing at the same time that you were on Earth breathing. The small pleasures make for a deeper and more secure happiness, n’est-ce pas? I find that I miss my recently deceased friend the most during the small pleasures. Often times characters in movies speak of missing a deceased loved one during big life events like graduations or weddings or promotions, but those are the types of experiences that have the support of shared culture. The thing I miss is that my friend would have recognized the significance of little changes and little moments in my life. It’s strange how the little changes in life, the little ups and downs, are the most pervasive, but at the same time it’s harder to share the little joys and sorrows of them; we all have them, but it takes a familiarity to share in them. I found that at about the six-month mark, my grief was smaller in many ways, but more impactful. By then it was more clear that the whole world wasn’t upside down, only mine. By then others are less likely to treat you as if you’re in grief–no polite silences when you enter the room, no light brushes to the shoulder, no speaking to you in hushed tones. By then, others in your circle of acquaintances may have experienced a similar loss… which in a way makes you feel less alone, but at the same time makes your loss seem more real because others are experiencing that same loss. I think less now about the reality of my friend’s death and more about how I miss him.

I do believe that I was to say a bit more on Trouillot’s review. Staying on the subject of family structure from Monday, Trouillot writes that when R.T. Smith coined the word “matrifocality,” he did not mean female-headed, but rather he meant to underline the role of women as mothers. That word was definitely used as a cattle prod for misogyny in my little corner of Mississippi. Trouillot notes that Smith might despair at this misuse of the “notion of matrifocality.” I remember hearing as a child that the female-headed household was a major problem for black families and for black men. I believe this had a profoundly negative effect on how black men viewed black women and women generally. I saw it with my father and others. My grandmother had been married, but her husband died. And although my father maintained a respectful and admiring attitude towards his mother, I think anger at the notion that he couldn’t be quite right having grown up in a female-headed household was transferred to women generally. The same goes for non-black men who grew up in similar households.

Also, the notion that female-headed households was a problem was explicitly used to encourage submissiveness among women in more “traditional” nuclear family households. Subservience to the man in the household was necessary for the healthy development of the children present. While I think this had some measure of success in black communities, it may have impacted non-black communities even more given that there was a higher expectation of conformity to this ideal in those communities. I had a culturally diverse mix of friends growing up and I know the issue of matrifocality was discussed in various types of households.

Going back to Smith’s notion of matrifocality as a term that underlines the role of women as mothers, I see how this might be a point of focus for black families in the Americas. What must it have been like for a young black woman who had been recently freed from slavery to give birth? Certainly the specter of children born with price tags on their toes didn’t disappear overnight. Something to ponder at a later date. Also, I don’t know what the current thinking on matrifocality in black families in the Americas is among social scientists and the like.

I started on a new, paying project this week, so I didn’t get as much reading in as I had hoped. The days since Monday have been a blur. I need more of your voice in my head. Perhaps I should set a weekly minimum number of pages to read?

Your ever gracious pupil,
Moi-même

The Caribbean Region:An Open Frontier in Anthropological Theory
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 21: 19-42 (Volume publication date October 1992)
Michel-Rolph Trouillot
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Letters to My Tutor…

My dear lady,

I’ve been thinking this week that I haven’t been Americana enough, haven’t maintained the upbeat-enthusiastic-everything-is-possible attitude.  I’m not sure I ever was a good representative of that mindset, though I’ve been chastised for it in the past by friends who were ever more fatalistic.  I’ve been away from reading this week, and with every missing page, my sadness grew and grew; and with thoughts of all the pages in all the books, my sadness grew and grew.  But I worked at making money, so that gives me the right to live a little longer, to be a proper person.  If one does not make money, then one should pay the world a kindness and just die… that’s how it seems.  I will read more tonight and work for money tomorrow and work for pleasure the next day.  I did go for volunteering tonight; that was a pleasure, but once again I find myself in a rush to write to you.

I felt an instant recognition in reading about anthropology in the Caribbean.  I could not stop thinking of home and childhood.  When Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote of Caribbean culture being born out of genocide and colonialism and slavery, I felt that he was describing my world growing up in the Mississippi Delta.  There’s such a shared history and circumstance.  But as time is limited, I will write of one specific thing for now, and perhaps more later in the week?

Trouillot wrote that some officials “saw Afro-Caribbean families as ‘deviant’ simply because they did not fit the nuclear folk-model of Western consciousness.  Just as in the United States, these bureaucrats’ views were echoed by social scientists who wanted to explain–or explain away–such ‘abnormalities’ as ‘missing fathers.'”  I grew up with this discussion swirling, this label of my family life as being deviant.  I’ve written many times of how I greatly prefer the family structure I knew as a kid to the “nuclear folk-model.”  I had this enormous, enveloping extended family experience.  I knew the intimacy that comes with mundane interaction with respect to  great-grandparents on both sides of my family.  I shared a household with a great-grandparent.  Did I ever share a household with my father?  No.  Were my mother and father ever married?  No.  However, speaking with people who grew up in the nuclear unit, I’ve come to believe that I shared something more with my father than what many experience after spending their entire childhood in a home with mom-dad-sibling.   Since I had intimate access to the same people who shaped my father growing up, I think I “know” him in a deeper and more significant way than those in many non-“deviant” families.  I may not know his favorite cereal or the way his takes his coffee, but I know the types of information that would allow me to decide whether I could be friends with him;  times when I’ve spoken to him about his views on women or “race” or religion, I had a near instant understanding of milieu from which those views were born.  I understood him.  Many had “present” fathers who were a lot more “missing” than mine.

This is not to say that I would not have preferred the physical presence of my father along with the other that I did have.  I just grew up in a culture where the value of knowing and being around your “people,” your extended family, was greater than the value of knowing or being around any one or two particular family members.  This “way” may have been born in part as a result of slavery where knowing and being around particular family members may not have been an option due to sales concerns;  it could also be part of an older tradition.  I think there is a wonderfulness to it that was often overlooked by “bureaucrats” and “social scientists.”

OK, now, I will post this while it is still officially Monday in my land.  I will read more of your letters and your work this week.  I must also finish some of the books that have been stacked on my desk for longer.  I read a couple of your letters just this night.  When you chastised Nelson (Algren) for not being a good French student, I felt the sting as well.

Devoted as ever,
S.

Directions in the Anthropology of Contemporary Japan
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 20: 395-431 (Volume publication date October 1991)
William W. Kelly
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Kelly writes separately of Shinto and ancestor worship.  My memory from elementary school is that I was taught that the two were almost synonymous.  W. G. Aston writes that this error of belief came about due to statements by Captain Francis Brinkley, and quotes Brinkley as saying, “Ancestor worship is the basis of Shinto.”  I didn’t have access to Aston’s whole article…sigh.  When I wrote on Monday that Kelly noted some things about Shinto that helped me better understand the connection I felt when first learning of Shinto, what I really should have said was that Kelly noted some things about ancestor worship.  Here’s what he wrote:

[Ancestor worship] expresses a concept of a life continuum in which the household comprises a circulation through, and mutually dependent relationships among, the yet-unborn, the recently born, the “fully” living, the recently deceased, and the long departed (252).

Kelly goes on to say that the term “ancestor worship” is doubly misleading as the practice is not limited to direct ancestors and worship does not give proper attention to the notion that “the living and deceased are linked in reciprocal flows of assistance and dependence.”  The “concept of a life continuum” as described above was very much alive in the rural Mississippi town of my childhood.  Recently, I’ve been thinking more specifically on the way my family life encouraged a connection with the “yet-unborn.”

Speaking with friends and acquaintances with very young children, I’ve made casual notice of the increasing level of parent-to-child attachment from birth.  It appears takes many people at least a couple years to reach the level of attachment that seemed present at birth in my extended family.  I had a nickname before I was born; this was common practice.  At the earliest stages of womb implantation, the anthropomorphizing of the fetus began.  The fetus was talked to and talked on behalf of in full baby-speak.  There were full-on, two-way conversations.  For example, if my pregnant aunt were eating, she might say in baby-speak, “Ooh, Mama, I like that food!”  Someone might respond (to the fetus), “Do you really?  I’m gonna get more of that for your Mama.”  Or, if she were sewing something or shopping for something in anticipation of the birth, she might ask the opinion of the fetus.  The interactions were plentiful and, perhaps, more robust than my examples.  And while fetus-speak might originate with the mother speaking “the mind” of the fetus, others would start to do so more and more as time went on.

The recently deceased were talked about as being present in guiding what a person might say or guiding a person to a beneficial opportunity.  A long-deceased person might be present in the fact that a tree grew in a odd way, maybe leaning to one side in similar fashion to the deceased person.  Both the recently deceased and long deceased might help with acquainting the fetus with family life and the like.

I haven’t read enough about ancestor worship in Japan to have a clear idea of whether the things I remember about the “life continuum” from my hometown are similar to how that concept is expressed in Japan.  I look forward to fleshing this out more.

Small Facts and Large Issues: The Anthropology of Contemporary Scandinavian Society
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 18: 71-93 (Volume publication date October 1989)
M Gullestad
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

“Small Facts and Large Issues:  The Anthropology of Contemporary Scandinavian Society” is a good start on the type of cross-culturalism that I had hoped to infuse into my self-study of anthropology. Marienne Gullestad begins the review with talk of the need for more cross-cultural studies, more specifically the need for Americans and Europeans to study their own cultures in similar fashion to how they have studied “other” cultures, and the need to look more at how anthropologists and social scientists in those “other” cultures view them and themselves.  Perhaps this would be the path to creating something better that just an understanding that exotic is a relative concept?  Horace Miner’s “Body Ritual of the Nacirema” comes to mind.  I remember a similar discussion of “us” versus the “other” from “Anthropologists View American Culture.” I didn’t get a chance to revisit that review, but I hope to do so as there were several similar discussions.

Comparing the discussions of what anthropologists study when they study “at home,” I again was left with the sense that Scandinavians are less nationalistic than other Europeans and Americans.  When Gullestad discussed community studies versus national studies, I was left with a sense that community studies or other types of studying-part(s)-to-understand-the-whole studies had a wider margin of preference in Scandinavian culture studies than in American ones.  I first got a glimpse of this reduced nationalism when reading the blog of Norwegian anthropologist Cicilie Fagerlid living in France and noting how proclamations of French nationalism stood out to her.

Gullestad also discusses how it may be that Scandinavians view “equality” as “sameness” and how having this view is not necessarily at odds with valuing individualism.  I was much reminded of that same discussion from “Anthropologists View American Culture” and how that informed my thinking of what it means to be “post-racial” in the United States.   Edited to add:  Looking  more specifically at how New York Times Columnist Matt Bai seemed to define post-racial–the idea that as long as there is the appearance of the same religion, style of name (in that case Anglicized), social views, etc.,  then differences in skin color or ethnicity wouldn’t matter so much–Gullestad seemed to echo the same:

The Norwegian egalitarian tradition involves not necessarily actual sameness but ways of under-communicating difference during social encounters… In their personal lives, Norwegian men and women like to “fit in with” friends, neighbors, and relatives.  Two people define each other as alike by being accessible to each other.  Inaccessibility, on the other hand, is a sign of perceived dissimilarity.  Social boundaries between classes and groups do not disappear but become subtler and more hidden through graded distancing and avoidance.

Picking up on the idea of being more hidden and “graded distancing and avoidance”… this is similar to Matt Bai’s assertion that when minority political candidates in the US downplay their ethnic backgrounds to be more accessible, they may, in the end, also be less knowable.  Ethnic distinctions don’t go away; they are downplayed. All and all, there’s a lot to go back and compare and contrast.

Apart from the similarities, I was happily introduced to names I don’t remember hearing before this.  And who knew one could write a review of anthropological literature without once mentioning the name “Franz Boas.”  I took particular notice of Gullestad’s discussion of the work of Thomas Højrup.  Gullestad’s summary follows:

Højrup sees society as composed of a number of contrasting “life-modes” that cannot be defined independently of each other.  The three main types are the self-employed, the ordinary wage-worker, and the career oriented life-modes.  A fourth type, the bourgeois life-mode, is not analyzed.  These life-modes are fundamentally different in terms of their place in the economic and political structure, and each has its own outlook on life.  Their interrelationship is one of opposition, competition, and mutual misinterpretation.

Google books has a preview of Højrup’s book, “State, Culture, and Life-Modes: The Foundations of Life-Mode Analysis.”  Or if you prefer the book in Danish, Google has a preview of that, too.  Gullestad gave enough of an introduction and critique to pique my interest.  I’ve added the title to a list.

Professional Responsibility in Public Archaeology
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 12: 143-164 (Volume publication date October 1983)
T F King
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

A couple years ago I took an archaeological fieldwork class for which the site was located in a federal park.  Reading  “Professional Responsibility in Public Archaeology,” I was left with an even greater appreciation of the outstanding job the fieldwork professor did as far as creating awareness of and stimulating depth of thought about ethical concerns in public archaeology.  And he managed to do this without at all dampening the excitement of getting to dig and sift and catologue and record.  Looking back, I’m amazed at the smooth, seamless integration of classroom lectures, firsthand accounts of experiences in public archaeology and personal conduct during the course of the class; there was a truly holistic experience of an on-the-job course in responsibilities in public archaeology.  My mind had been thoroughly engaged regarding all the issues Thomas King discusses in “Professional Responsibility in Public Archaeology.”

King organizes his discussion along the lines of asking to whom the archaeologist is responsible.  He states that the lack of consensus regarding ethical concerns is generally based on disagreements over the object(s) of responsibility.  He describes six objects:

1. The Resource Base: responsibility to archaeological sites.
2. Companions-in-Arms: responsibility to colleagues.
3. Research: responsibility to the advance of scholarship.
4. Clients: responsibility to those who pay the tab.
5. The Law: responsibility to legal and contractual obligations.
6. The Living: responsibility to nonarchaeologists with interests in archaeological sites or data.

King says that some archaeologists become “true believers” in a particular object.  I started to think about my own experience in the field class and wonder which object was supreme in my mind.  Briefly speaking….

With consideration to (1) The Resource Base, decisions about where to excavate during my field class involved discussions about where the most gain could be had with the least destruction to what could be valuable data.  Given the excavation methods and techniques available, excavation in area A seemed productive whereas it might be best to leave area B unexcavated with the thought that the future might bring better excavation techniques that result in greater data recovery with less destruction.  It’s one thing to hear this discussion and it’s another to witness the self-restraint involved in making a decision to preserve a site.  As regards (2) Companions-in-Arms, other archaeologists who had worked in the area were brought in to guest lecture.  A walk-through of a site with an archaeologist who has different interests and different areas of expertise was such a good lesson in how data can have varying levels of significance depending on the research design.  With (3) Research, the importance of keeping good records that followed industry standards for the benefit of other scholars was emphasized.  For (4) Clients, personal accounts of working with a wide variety of public archaeology clients gave perspective to the more sheltered experience of working in a federal park.  For (5) The Law, classroom discussion of laws were reinforced with fieldwork examples of situations in which those laws came into play such as when there was a need to determine whether bone found at the site were human remains.  For (6) The Living, the professor was great at talking to people who wandered by to ask questions; he told personal stories that showed a respect for the concerns of living people with a “cultural and genetic connection,” as King puts it, to the site.

Well, that’s quite fast and incomplete, but the experience in the class gave me a lot to think about when reading King’s article.

Philosophy of Science in Anthropology
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 13: 25-39 (Volume publication date October 1984)
A Kaplan
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

“Philosophy of Science in Anthropology” reads as though the scholars were gathered in a room after an exceedingly enjoyable dinner party.  The discussion is lively, organic.  There’s not the clearly defined introduction and conclusion of other reviews that I’ve read.  It instead has the circular organization of a neatly wrapped short story.  It begins and ends with commentary on methodology.  With this review I feel the most driven to read more.  I want to continue this conversation.  I’m reminded of childhood learning… of the conversations with authors of books and characters in books that I took up (in my mind) to entertain myself.

I could picture myself in that room of wood and leather and smoke, brightly colored fan in one hand and well-tailored wool under the other rested lightly on the arm Abraham Kaplan as we moved in and out of intertwining conversations… the joy of having a person tutor.   Can anthropology be science?  Should it try to be?  Is science just a matter of employing the right methods? I was disappointed to learn that he was deceased.  My local library has several of his books and I look forward to reading them.

Groups That Don’t Want In: Gypsies and Other Artisan, Trader, and Entertainer Minorities
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 15: 307-330 (Volume publication date October 1986)
S B Gmelch
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

As I read “Groups That Don’t Want In: Gypsies and Other Artisan, Trader, and Entertainer Minorities” I became increasingly disheartened and disappointed. Sharon Bohn Gmelch gave ample warning of the limited nature of the subject matter covered in the review, but still I had hoped for more. Gmelch writes that gypsies were “relegated to the status of unintegrated social and economic marginals” and as such “ignored or regarded as barely legitimate subjects for serious study.” She indicates that there wasn’t an abundance of scholarly literature to be found and that from that already limited pool she would further limit the review “primarily to anthropological works published in English.” It’s not as though I haven’t been aware that I’m currently engaged in a very Westernized (particularly Americana) study of anthropology. It’s not as though I haven’t been aware that sometimes anthropological works only have the appearance of an emic-informed discussion. I just recently encountered a discussion of the possibility and effects of this type of bias and misrepresentation while reading “India: Caste, Kingship and Dominance Reconsidered.” Maybe it’s just hard to prep for what early “academic” study and literature is often like; it seems to take a long while to sift out bias, particularly in culture studies. Gmelch makes no pretenses that the literature discussed is necessarily fair, balanced or objective. The review seemed more an organized discussion of how artisans, traders and other entertainer minorities deviated from the “norm” as opposed to a discussion of the culture of those groups. I had hoped for the latter. The review was published in 1986; I’ll have a look around for more recent work on the subject. The review was published in 1986; I’ll have a look around for more recent work on the subject.

Reading this review, I have reassessed my decision to push reading “Regional Studies” to a later date outside my current yearlong survey of anthropology. At least some of the reviews in the “Regional Studies” category in the Annual Review of Anthropology are written by locals. I’m gaining a clearer understanding that I need to incorporate these sooner rather than later. Academia, in similar fashion to the wider culture, seems so given to reproducing bias that it is imperative to counter-act this tendency as aggressively as possible.

Advances in Evolutionary Culture Theory
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 19: 187-210 (Volume publication date October 1990)
William H. Durham
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Reading “Evolutionary Culture Theory,” I started thinking more about my own ideas of how cultures emerge and develop.  I relate well to the presented premise that all cultures sprang forth from a common ancestral culture.  Durham concisely explains evolutionary culture theory (ECT) during his concluding remarks:

Evolutionary culture theory is based on the premise that, however else [cultures] may be related, all cultural systems are related by descent.  In other words, a long and unbroken chain of cultural transmission connects each of the world’s extant cultural systems with a single common ancestor; however remote and obscure the ties may be,all cultures have “descended with modification” from this one original culture.

Durham states that the main questions in ECT have to with why so many cultures, more than 4000, have branched from the one culture and with the pace and mechanism with with that change occurred.  Durham labels these as questions of differentiation and transformation respectively.  In writing about differentiation Durham asks why so many cultures instead of “simply one global human culture.”  This question struck a nerve with me as I’ve often toyed with the idea of whether we’re moving in the direction of having one global culture.  I then started to think of culture development in terms of the Big Bang.

What if cultures developed along the lines of the development of the universe?  Think of cultures being galaxies exploding forth from one dense, concentrated ancestral culture.  The galaxies/cultures move apart from each other, but there is within-culture cohesion.  Maybe new cultures form in like fashion to the formation of new galaxies.  My first Internet searches with the words “Big Bang” and “culture” turned up a lot of links on the TV show, “The Big Bang Theory,” and then with a bit of refining I can across a post by Howard Bloom titled The Big Bang And The Birth Of Culture in which he describes the Big Bang as a social event:

The story of how culture emerged way, way back when begins with the Big Bang. Culture is a social thing. And this has never been a cosmos of loners. From the git-go 13.7 billion years ago it’s been a social universe, a cosmos of tight, intimate bunches, of massive mobs, and of huge communities. The Big Bang was profoundly social.

Edward Blair Bolles critiques an article by Ian Tattersall in the American Museum of Natural History that speaks of Speech’s Big Bang:

[Tattersall] argues that the use of symbols was an invention, the fruit of some insight, that led to an eruption of cultural behavior — the production of rock art, creation of decorative beads, etc. Although it would be a long time before speech would become written language, language is assumed to have been born when symbols were invented.

More and more I think that will have to study linguistics whether I want to or not.  Anyway, in thinking of culture and the Big Bang, I mostly thought of the idea of one global culture and how that may relate to scenarios that predict that the universe would expand for a while before collapsing back to its original state which lead me to think of human technological advancement as being driven, moved, directed by innate demands to coalesce back into one culture… roads, vehicles, telecommunication, boats, planes, the Internet, the types of ideas captured in art and literature all working toward forming this one global culture.  This is a line of thinking to which I definitely wish to return.  I believe that this model could be helpful to my understanding and I look forward to investigating and developing it more.

I’ve been playing a deductive reasoning game aimed at children as brain stimulation and to gauge my mental acuity (if my game play goes downhill, I know I’m tired).  I’ve played this game several times a day for the past couple months.  I’ve discovered that once I recognize a pattern, I find it more difficult to walk through the steps that helped me recognize that pattern.  So I’m left with the sense of knowing the right choice without knowing how I know it.  I wonder whether this type of thing is part of the reason why it can be difficult to change a certain pattern of thinking.  We may have the skills to walk it through step by step in order to recognize an error, but the brain says, “Hey, I recognize this pattern; I’ve already made the call on this so I don’t have to go through those steps anymore.”  I’m reminded of Gestalt theory, but maybe there is something more on the nose?  Here’s what I wrote in an offline notebook on September 26 about playing the game:

I am having a problem with understanding.  “Understanding” may not even be the right word.  More and more as I recover cognitive functioning, I find that I can produce a correct answer to a question or provide a correct solution to a puzzle, without easily being able to explain how I arrived at the thing.  I’ve been playing this collection of children’s games that are included with Windows Vista, Purple Place.  Yes, I play them all, even the cake-making game.  One of the games, though, is of a type I especially enjoyed as a kid and still do as an adult.  In this game (Purple Shop) there are five features (hat, eyes, nose, mouth and clothes) and five colors (red, purple, yellow, blue, green).  Each turn of the game, the player chooses a color for each feature and gets back totals for  “right color-right feature” results and “right color-wrong feature” results.   So, if the eyes are blue, but the player chooses blue for the nose instead, then blue would be a “right color” but on the “wrong feature” resulting in one (1) “right color-wrong feature” result.  Say that in the course of guesses and results, it becomes clear to me that the nose has to be blue.  It comes to me and there’s a certainty of belief.  I know that the nose has to be blue.  Then I stop to explain how I’ve come to that conclusion and there’s confusion where there used to be clarity.  Why is my conscious mind fighting me?   I’ve played the game slower several times, and that seems to help with the confusion.  I can work out the solution step by step, but it’s like chewing nails.

I played these types of games a lot as a kid, so I imagine that I had some pattern recognition early on while playing Purple Shop and that is why working out the solution step by step left me feeling so uncomfortable (mental motion sickness).  I don’t remember having the same level of confusion that I do now at explaining my decision making in detail… probably because I wasn’t trying as much to explain all the steps every time as I have been more recently.  I think something about the process of regaining cognitive function has made certain things about how I learn more clear to me.  Here’s an example of what I’m talking about  (Note: I’ve been playing the game at the “advanced level” with five colors and five features in which the player has to X out his/her own impossible options.  In less advanced levels, there are fewer choices and the game automatically Xs out impossible options.) :

Each of the panels represent a turn during which I have made selections and gotten the results off to the right in each panel.  Looking at the fourth panel outlined in red, there is one “right color — wrong feature” result (the number “1” is in red indicating this result).  The Steps: This result has to refer to the purple hat.  From a previous panel, I know that at least two of the features are purple, so the purple is definitely a “right color”.  If the color blue were on a wrong feature then there would be two “right color-wrong features” and not just one.  The only way for the color blue to be a right color, but on a wrong feature would be for the hat to be blue since every other feature is blue already.  So, if blue were wrong, the blue would be replacing the purple meaning that the purple would also have been on the wrong feature thus resulting in two(2) “right color–wrong feature” results.

Now, when I see a panel that’s similar to this one, I know that purple (in this case) is the “right color-wrong feature” choice without thinking about it and I also know that that feature cannot be blue.  Here’s a similar panel:

This time the focus is on red and yellow.  Purple is there, too, but I know from a previous move that the purple is definitely a “right color–right feature” so it’s out of consideration.  Looking at red and yellow, I’m presented with the same pattern as above.  There is one red colored feature, all the rest are yellow, and there is one (1) “right color–wrong feature” result.  So, I know that the mouth cannot be red and it cannot be yellow.  Looking one panel over to the second panel, in which the clothes are red and everything else is purple, there is an example of the situation where the clothes have to be purple since there are two(2) “right color–wrong feature” results in contrast to the very first example with only on “right color–wrong feature” result.  If purple is on the wrong feature, then the clothes are the only “right feature” left since everything else is already purple.

As I’ve said, in the beginning it was a lot easier for me to slow down the game play and walk through my thinking for every step, but I found that process got harder and harder to do as I recognized more patterns.  I wasn’t always recognizing these patterns on a conscious level.   I just got the result.  My brain seemed to like seeing things in patterns and resisted my conscious mind challenging the pattern recognition.  I started to feel physically uncomfortable when I slowed down to ask why I arrived at a certain result.

Looking again at the original picture, by the fourth panel, it’s also clear that the hat has to be green:

Panel 1 — I learn that none of the items are colored red.
Panel 2 — I learn that two of the items are colored purple.
Panel 3 — I learn that none of the items are colored yellow, because the results add up to two and I know that the “two” result has to do with purple since two of the items are purple.
Panel 4 — I learn that the hat can’t be purple and it can’t be blue.

All the four other colors are eliminated, so the hat has to be green.  Even when I play the game quickly, I find that I may arrive at the conclusion that the hat has to be green without a conscious awareness of how I got there.  Looking slowly over the panels, the answer is clear, but I believe that I sometimes recognize patterns over several moves without being aware of that on a conscious level.

This is all well and fine for a game, but I wonder whether I and others do this for social “truths” as well.  If I decide or further still, if I’m instructed at some point that females are less good at math than males, would my brain resist going through the steps to challenge that thought?  Might I trust that there is a pattern that shows that males are better at math than females and therefore close off thinking that might show otherwise?  And what then for more complicated social “truths”?

Find instructions and links for downloading the Purple Place games here is you don’t have them already.