Anthropology Times

Trends in the Study of Later European Prehistory
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 16: 365-382 (Volume publication date October 1987)
S J Shennan
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

Reading “Trends in the Study of Later European Prehistory” I felt a poke in the direction of actually getting caught up on current events. And lucky me, I have several great newspapers on my desk at the moment. I tend to prefer thinking in terms of trends and types, but it’s good sometimes to take note of the current particulars.

A comment about the thinking of Gordon Childe seemed to me a commentary on current trends in Western cultures or at least U.S. culture. The comment contrasts cultures of the Near East with then emerging European cultures: “The Near East was the ultimate source of innovations and ideas; but after the growth of civilization, Near Eastern society became stagnant and oppressive; superstition ruled technology and suppressed innovation; society became totalitarian. European society, however, was open. Technological innovation was not subject to social control…” This type of thinking sticks out to me as something to toss around when viewing trends in the interactions between politics and academia in America as well the changing relationship between West and East, but I don’t feel that I have a lot of particulars to which to point

Is there some relationship between bursts of technological advancement and growing desires to turn to superstition and oppression? Will stagnation in one part of the world encourage innovation in another part of the world, and will that encouragement lead to greater freedom in that part of the world? Thinking of the West as a declining power and the East as an emerging power… Are declining powers more suspicious of innovation because they are afraid that new technologies will bring further decline, while emerging powers are more welcoming of innovation because they believe that new technologies will bring further progress? And how does all this work itself out culturally?

The article speaks of applying new approaches (in this case, structuralism, French neo-Marxism and German critical theory) to data and to fields of study (in this case data and archaeology having to do with later European prehistory). The discussion speaks to the fact that it’s so easy to highlight information that fits a certain theoretical framework while ignoring significant information that doesn’t happen to fit. I find sometimes that the purest fun can be had by tossing around ideas within the framework of some debunked theory. There’s no obsession with “rightness” or “truth.” There just the fun of bringing a new perspective to familiar ideas and seeing what new thoughts spring from that.

I’ll end with that.

S.

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.

Conversation Analysis
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 19: 283-307 (Volume publication date October 1990)
Charles Goodwin and John Heritage
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

I chose to read “Conversation Analysis” in part because I’ve gotten a little behind in my reading and I thought that I would have quick, easily produced comments given that I had bumped into the subject of conversation analysis while reading “Language and Dispute.”  I came across an Introduction to Conversation Analysis by Charles Antaki while reading the latter article.  The site has a brief description of the field as well as a tutorial with audio and video, sample transcriptions, instructions on making notations, and sample analyses.  The site provides a gentle introduction to some of the same names and sources mentioned in the review article and seen on the Wikipedia page on conversation analysis.  The site is fun and light and assumes no specific prior knowledge of the field.  The review article wasn’t quite so fun and light, but that was to be expected. Reading “Conversation Analysis” I wasn’t particularly drawn toward the quick, easily produced commentary I had in mind (a glossy overview of a specific conversational interaction).

What I most noticed when reading “Conversation Analysis” was that the authors didn’t seem to have the same angst about descriptive vs. theoretical concerns as the author in “The Archaeology of Equality and Inequality.”  The data of conversation analysis consists of audio or video recordings of real life interactions, not laboratory productions and the analyses are very descriptive.  Conversation analysts seem very comfortable with that type of work being of real value.  Goodwin and Heritage write the following:

[Conversation analysis] seeks to describe (my emphasis) the underlying social organization–conceived as an institutionalized substratum of interactional rules, procedures, and conventions–through which orderly and intelligible social interaction is made possible.

I expected to find discussions along the lines of how the length of a pause before an audible response to a question might say something about the nature of the response and that’s what I found:

An initial finding is that different kinds of responsive actions (e.g. agreements/ vs disagreements) are performed in markedly different ways.  While agreements are usually performed promptly and in intensified form, disagreements are delayed and mitigated in a variety of ways.

While Goodwin and Heritage did discuss some of the theoretical underpinnings and disciplinary exclusions that gave birth to the field of conversation analysis, they manage to keep that discussion within the limited context of giving background information.  That discussion doesn’t take over and shape the whole review.

Why not close on a joke?  In similar fashion to the analysis of pause before agreement/disagreement above, Jerry Seinfeld tells a joke describing the relationship between the length of a pause after asking for a favor and the size of the favor:

There’s two types of favors, the big favor and the small favor.  You can measure the size of the favor by the pause that a person takes after they ask you to ‘do me a favor.’  Small favor, small pause.  Can you do me a favor, hand me that pencil?  No pause at all.  Big favors are, ‘Could you do me a favor…’ (huge pause, followed by closing credits.) (link)

The Archaeology of Equality and Inequality
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 18: 369-399 (Volume publication date October 1989)
R Paynter
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

“The Archaeology of Equality and Inequality” wasn’t the article I expected it to be based on the title.  I didn’t have detailed expectations, but when I read the one paragraph that spoke to how analysis of skeletal remains, burial practices, styles on ceramics, variances in structures could be used to study relations of equality and inequality, I recognized this subject matter to fit my expectations.  In place of a discussion of artifacts and remnants of structures and the contents of burials was a discussion of archaeological theory.  I gained insight as to why the discussion went the one way instead of the other while reading an earlier review written by Bruce Trigger, “Archaeology at the Crossroads:  What’s new?:”

By the 1950s, a growing number of archaeologists were smarting from the charge that their discipline was descriptive rather than theoretical in orientation and that they were the not very intelligent playboys of anthropology.

Given that there is a struggle regarding archaeological theory, I understand why Paynter organized his discussion of the study of equality and inequality in the context of neoevolutionism and criticisms of neoevolutionism.  I found various particulars of the discussion interesting and I will return to some of them later in the week.  Earlier last week I came across the following resource and found it helpful:

A free lecture at iTunes U, “Theories in Anthropology(#16 on the list once you click to the overview page),” provides a good overview of the development of anthropological theory (Evolutionism, Historical Particularism, Structural Functionalism, Neoevolutionism, Post-modernism, Feminist Perspectives…).  The lecture is provided by the School of Human Evolution & Social Change College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Arizona State University.