Retirement!

 So the SASW Department gave me a retirement send off yesterday. Very relaxed and informal, and with kind words. They know I like primates, so they gave me what appears to be a Spider Monkey and donated a brick in my name to the Jax Zoo. Little do they know I’ll be around a lot, cleaning 32 years of experience out of my office. Thanks, Everybody!

Grades are in!

Grades are in. I had 19 students for my last (?) Introduction to Anthropology class. The course was presented over Zoom for six weeks from mid-June to last July 30. We met on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:00am to 12:30pm. I typically gave us a 15-20 minute break at around 10:30.

I tried to cover a couple of topics each meeting, although that didn't always work out. I used the first three weeks to cover biological anthropology, and saved culture and language for the last three. Throughout, I used videos from the old Faces of Culture series as well as a film on documenting endangered languages and a segment from David Mayberry-Lewis's Millennium series.

Lectures were supplemented with Powerpoint slides. Generally I use the slides as bullet points; only if there's an especially worthwhile quote do I include it on the slide, for example this from Teddy Roosevelt:

In lecture, students were exposed to all the things wrong with TR's worldview.

The class average was in the B range and lowest grade was a C. I would have preferred face-to-face, obviously, but still they were a pretty good group.

Needed: "cynical knowledge"

What people call "Critical Race Theory" should, in my view, be a component of a larger program of what Chomsky calls "intellectual self-defense." Or, if you prefer, what a professor of mine (r.i.p. Robert Lawless) called "cynical knowledge." This is a realization, developed through scientific observation and analysis of the facts of US history, that the pablum we are fed from almost all sides of our culture about how gloriously wonderful and beneficent the US has always been is no more than the "propaganda" and "mind control" that we deride when we see it in other nations.

We only have to look at the people jumping on Rep. Ilhan Omar for suggesting that the US has done bad things to realize that we desperately need this kind of knowledge. Otherwise, we just keep doing bad things, like ripping little kids away from their parents at the border, surely a Crime Against Humanity.

"Tribal" again, encore

Still thinking about the popular use of "tribal" in referring to political or actual conflict.

Journalists and others call it "tribal" I think because they've learned somewhere that the societies we anthropologists think of as tribal (mostly small-scale horticulturalists and pastoralists) are always warring against each other, which of course they rarely do except in very special circumstances. Steven Pinker has exacerbated the problem by bleating about how much more peaceful we are now that we have large nation-states to keep our demons under control.

For me, "tribal" yields an admittedly somewhat fuzzy set of social and cultural features which set these sociocultural "systems" apart from larger-scale systems of the sort that Friedman was referencing. Maybe one of the most important is the distinction between small-scale shamanistic/communalistic religious cults and the larger-scale ecclesiastical cults at the center of mideastern conflict. Social fusion/fission plays a part in these conflicts. This is suggested by violence between Christian cults (Northern Ireland), islamic cults (Middle East etc.), and so on all over the place. They had fusion forced on them by external colonial powers, now they're striving for fission to preserve what they see as their identity.

So maybe the Social Imperative is at the heart of it all. SI promotes fusion, but too much fusion provokes crowding stress, and SI responds with fission?

Incidentally, I feel the same way about the gross misuse of "theory." This past year I actually heard Ira Flatow on NPR's Science Friday ask a physicist "when does a theory become a fact?" I meant to email him but never did....

"Tribal" again

 Tom Friedman was just on CNN pushing the “tribal politics” meme to describe our problems. Where is the Anthropolgy Word Police Squad?

"Neanderthal Thinking"

Holy coprolites, the work of anthropologists is never done!

We are being told that President Biden has charged the governors of Texas and Mississippi with "Neandertal thinking" (don't get me started on the spelling!) for their decisions to drop Covid-related restrictions.

How do we get through to him that any random Neandertal (early European Homo sapiens) almost certainly had more empathy, more concern for the members of their community, than these two troglodytic governors combined? Why? Because without doubt as children they were dependence-trained and thus sensitive not just to what their society owed them, but what they owed to their society reciprocally. Not independence-trained like these selfish, socially irresponsible "modern" USAniacs.

Restarting

I've been off the blog, really pretty much just off, for most of the last presidential term.  Every time I thought of writing about something, before I could get my thoughts collected something else happened that knocked the first thoughts off the road.  Now that we have a new, slightly more boring (i.e. "normal") president, maybe there will be time to think and write a little between events.

News: I have now received my two doses of the Pfizer vaccine.  My age (75 and counting) qualified me for an early vaccination.  Tomorrow (Feb 25) will mark two weeks since my second dose, so I should be able to go out the house without being terrified.

So, my thought for this first post of 2021:

Now over half-a-million dead from the virus! I still want to see the former president and his enablers indicted, possibly for negligent homicide although that almost seems too lenient. It could be genocide, since they seemed to lose interest when they learned that Black and Brown populations were the most susceptible to the worst effects of the virus.