Social Anthropology Quotes

It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

If two people stare at each other for more than a few seconds, it means they are about to either make love or fight. Something similar might be said about human societies. If two nearby societies are in contact for any length of time, they will either trade or fight. The first is non-zero-sum social integration, and the second ultimately brings it.

[T]here are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses.

The world's most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.

A little hypocrisy and a little compromise oils the wheels of social life

Marriage," "mating," and "love" are socially constructed phenomena that have little or no transferable meaning outside any given culture. The examples we've noted of rampant ritualized group sex, mate-swapping, unrestrained casual affairs, and socially sanctioned sequential sex were all reported in cultures that anthropologists insist are monogamous simply because they've determined that something they call "marriage" takes place there. No wonder so many insist that marriage, monogamy, and the nuclear family are human universals. With such all-encompassing interpretations of the concepts, even the prairie vole, who "sleeps with anyone," would qualify.

A revolution on a world scale will take a very long time. But it is also possible to recognize that it is already starting to happen. The easiest way to get our minds around it is to stop thinking about revolution as a thing — “the” revolution, the great cataclysmic break—and instead ask “what is revolutionary action?” We could then suggest: revolutionary action is any collective action which rejects, and therefore confronts, some form of power or domination and in doing so, reconstitutes social relations—even within the collectivity—in that light. Revolutionary action does not necessarily have to aim to topple governments. Attempts to create autonomous communities in the face of power (using Castoriadis’ definition here: ones that constitute themselves, collectively make their own rules or principles of operation, and continually reexamine them), would, for instance, be almost by definition revolutionary acts. And history shows us that the continual accumulation of such acts can change (almost) everything.

If you have the power to hit people over the head whenever you want, you don’t have to trouble yourself too much figuring out what they think is going on, and therefore, generally speaking, you don’t. Hence the sure-fire way to simplify social arrangements, to ignore the incredibly complex play of perspectives, passions, insights, desires, and mutual understandings that human life is really made of, is to make a rule and threaten to attack anyone who breaks it. This is why violence has always been the favored recourse of the stupid: it is the one form of stupidity to which it is almost impossible to come up with an intelligent response. It is also of course the basis of the state.

Human's intrinsic nature manifest in it's misunderstandings

All social interactions require some loss of freedom.

The single most important human insight to be gained from this way of comparing societies is perhaps the realization that everything could have been different in our own society – that the way we live is only one among innumerable ways of life which humans have adopted. If we glance sideways and backwards, we will quickly discover that modern society, with its many possibilities and seducing offers, its dizzying complexity and its impressive technological advances, is a way of life which has not been tried out for long. Perhaps, psychologically speaking, we have just left the cave: in terms of the history of our species, we have but spent a moment in modern societies. (..) Anthropology may not provide the answer to the question of the meaning of life, but at least it can tell us that there are many ways in which to make a life meaningful.

Nowhere else in the whole range of life on earth, is this degradation found--the female capering and prancing before the male. It is absolutely and essentially his function, not hers.

The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement. […] It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the ‘true spirit’ of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force. The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does’, and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.

I find that some philosophers think that my whole approach to qualia is not playing fair. I don’t respect the standard rules of philosophical thought experiments. “But Dan, your view is so counterintuitive!” No kidding. That’s the whole point. Of course it is counterintuitive. Nowhere is it written that the true materialist theory of consciousness should be blandly intuitive. I have all along insisted that it may be very counterintuitive. That’s the trouble with “pure” philosophical method here. It has no resources for developing, or even taking seriously, counterintuitive theories, but since it is a very good bet that the true materialist theory of consciousness will be highly counterintuitive (like the Copernican theory--at least at first), this means that “pure” philosophy must just concede impotence and retreat into conservative conceptual anthropology until the advance of science puts it out of its misery. Philosophers have a choice: they can play games with folk concepts (ordinary language philosophy lives on, as a kind of aprioristic social anthropology) or they can take seriously the claim that some of these folk concepts are illusion-generators. The way to take that prospect seriously is to consider theories that propose revisions to those concepts.

I am an anthropologist who lost faith in her own method, who stopped believing that observable activity defined anthropos.

The body is given meaning and wholly constituted by discourse. The body vanishes as a biological entity and becomes instead a socially constituted product which is infinitely malleable and highly unstable.

From an anthropological perspective, identities are neither fixed nor inherent, but are created and reproduced continuously through social practice and in interaction with others.

Studying anthropology tends t change the way you look at the world. It leaves a distinctive chip in your brain, or lens over your eye. Your mind-set becomes instinctive: wherever you go to work, you start asking questions about how different elements of society interact, looks at the gap between rhetoric and reality, noting the concealed functions of rituals and symbols, and hunting out social silences. Anyone who has been immersed in anthropology is doomed to be an insider-outside for the rest of their life; they can never take anything entirely at face value, but are compelled to constantly ask: why?

Anthropology provides Archer with terminology to expose the ferocity and, more important, the hypocrisy characterizing his prosperous, upper-class social community.

The technology is the independent variable, the social system the dependent variable. Social, systems are therefore determined by systems of technology; as the latter change, so do the former.

When a disease insinuates itself so potently into the imagination of an era, it is often because it impinges on an anxiety latent within that imagination. AIDS loomed so large on the 1980s in part because this was a generation inherently haunted by its sexuality and freedom; SARS set off a panic about global spread and contagion at a time when globalism and social contagion were issues simmering nervously in the West. Every era casts illness in its own image. Society, like the ultimate psychosomatic patient, matches its medical afflictions to its psychological crises; when a disease touches such a visceral chord, it is often because that chord is already resonating.

the freedom of individuals has – we may presume – an anthropological foundation. This is admittedly a doctrine which cannot be proved or disproved in the normal sense of the word ‘prove’. And yet our hope that freedom is not going to be ultimately destroyed by the joint pressure of totalitarianism and of general bureaucratisation of the world and indeed our very readiness to defend it depend crucially on our belief that the desire for freedom, for sovereign individual self-assertion in free choice, is not an accidental fancy of history, not a result of peculiar social conditions or a temporary by-product of specific economic life forms, of market mechanisms, but that it is rooted in the very quality of being human.

Of all the modern social sciences, anthropology is the one historically most closely tied to colonialism, since it was often the case that anthropologists and ethnologists advised colonial rulers on the manners and mores of the native people.

Perhaps this is what a state actually is: a combination of exceptional violence and the creation of a complex social machine, all ostensibly devoted to acts of care and devotion. There is obviously a paradox here. Caring labour is in a way the very opposite of mechanical labour: it is about recognizing and understanding the unique qualities, needs and peculiarities of the cared-for – whether child, adult, animal or plant – in order to provide what they require to flourish. Caring labour is distinguished by its particularity. If those institutions we today refer to as ‘states’ really do have any common features, one must certainly be a tendency to displace this caring impulse on to abstractions; today this is usually ‘the nation’, however broadly or narrowly defined. Perhaps this is why it’s so easy for us to see ancient Egypt as a prototype for the modern state: here too, popular devotion was diverted on to grand abstractions, in this case the ruler and the elite dead. This process is what made it possible for the whole arrangement to be imagined, simultaneously, as a family and as a machine, in which everyone (except of course the king) was ultimately interchangeable. From the seasonal work of tomb-building to the daily servicing of the ruler’s body (recall again how the first royal inscriptions are found on combs and make-up palettes), most of human activity was directed upwards, either towards tending rulers (living and dead) or assisting them with their own task of feeding and caring for the gods.

Everyone will tell you that genealogy serves two purposes: self-knowledge and social status, some sort of pedigree divined from names, locations, and achievements of eminence. However, there is nothing quite like an anomaly to suck attention away from the droning census records. A suicide hinted at emotion and thought. A closet door was flung open and daylight flooded a skeleton.

Virchow was the perfect role model for anyone who wanted to change the world, or at least lessen the inequality between the rich and poor. One of Farmer’s favorite Virchow quotes was “The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and the social problems should largely be solved by them.” Virchow viewed the world in a way that made sense to Farmer, his vision a comprehensive one that included pathology—the study of disease—with social medicine, politics, and anthropology. Farmer,

The fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature. Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or evil. Man is thus reduced to a series of social relationships, and the concept of the person as the autonomous subject of moral decision disappears, the very subject whose decisions build the social order. From this mistaken conception of the person there arise both a distortion of law, which defines the sphere of the exercise of freedom, and an opposition to private property. A person who is deprived of something he can call “his own,” and of the possibility of earning a living through his own initiative, comes to depend on the social machine and on those who control it. This makes it much more difficult for him to recognize his dignity as a person, and hinders progress towards the building up of an authentic human community.

The oils we used on our torches and in our lamps have kept the darkness of night and predators at bay in our corporate and singular lives. Residual oil was even found in our ancestors’ campfires that were most likely from a meal shared in common around said fire. Oil was in one sense a residual and sign of community and social and cooperative sharing.

It ain't that he's not interested in, like, persuasiveness, get me? He's interested in it. Like something in a jar.

A person can spend every day of his life finding examples of our spectacular oddness, and if that's what he likes to do, then his life is destined to be full and rich.

In genealogy you might say that interest lies in the eye of the gene holder. The actual descendants are far more intrigued with it all than the listeners, who quickly sink into a narcoleptic coma after the second or third great-great-somebody kills a bear or beheads Charles I, invents the safety pin or strip-mines Poland, catalogues slime molds, dances flamenco, or falls in love with a sheep. Genealogy is a forced march through stories. Yet everyone loves stories, and that is one reason we seek knowledge of our own blood kin. Through our ancestors we can witness their times. Or, we think, there might be something in their lives, an artist’s or a farmer’s skill, an affection for a certain landscape, that will match or explain something in our own. If we know who they were, perhaps we will know who we are. And few cultures have been as identity-obsessed as ours. So keen is this fascination with ancestry, genealogy has become an industry. Family reunions choke the social calendar. Europe crawls with ancestor-seeking Americans. Your mother or your spouse or your neighbors are too busy to talk to you because they are on the Internet running “heritage quests.” We have climbed so far back into our family trees, we stand inches away from the roots where the primates dominate.

Virchow would write, ‘My politics were those of prophylaxis, my opponents preferred those of palliation.’ He had a knack for aphorism. ‘Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine on a large scale.’ ‘It is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation.’ ‘Medical education does not exist to provide students with a way to make a living, but to ensure the health of the community.’ ‘The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and the social problems should largely be solved by them.’ This last was Farmer’s favorite. Virchow put the world together in a way that made sense to Farmer. ‘Virchow had a comprehensive vision,’ he said. ‘Pathology, social medicine, politics, anthropology. My model.

Introduce an alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene.

Ethnography of course means many things. Minimally, however, it has always meant the attempt to understand another life world using the self - as much of it as possible - as the instrument of knowing.

Makers?" said Toby. Jaysir nodded. "We're not loners, you know. There just weren't any on Wallop. We love to get together, we just refuse to engage in social relations that are based on material inequity.

neither we nor our planet enjoys a privileged position in Nature. This insight has since been applied upward to the stars, and sideways to many subsets of the human family, with great success and invariable opposition. It has been responsible for major advances in astronomy, physics, biology, anthropology, economics and politics. I wonder if its social extrapolation is a major reason for attempts at its suppression.

Relatedness - whether imagined or lived out face-to-face - is a social fact, and it is not limited to "kinship" as mapped in the traditional genealogical chart. It is precisely the term's flexibility that makes it so analytically useful.

The impact of philosophical pluralism on Western culture is incalculable. It touches virtually every discipline—history, art, literature, anthropology, education, philosophy, psychology, the social sciences, even, increasingly, the “hard” sciences—but it has already achieved popularity in the public square, even when its existence is not recognized. It achieves its greatest victory in redefining religious pluralism so as to render heretical the idea that heresy is possible.

We are social animals, and we don't usually find and eat food alone, so we associate it at an emotional level with people, events and circumstances. Eventually a food becomes embedded with meaning, allowing anthropologists to asks questions like: 'Do pies mean anything?

I believe that it is the task of social science to produce nuanced and people-centered forms of knowledge, correcting asymmetries of information and helping to promote, to the best of our ability, informed consent, human protection, and safety in medical and research settings.

Economics [...] maximizing models are really arguing is that “people will always seek to maximize something,” [...] All they really add to analysis is a set of assumptions about human nature. The assumption, most of all, that no one ever does anything primarily out of concern for others; that whatever one does, one is only trying to get something out of it for oneself. In common English, there is a word for this attitude. It’s called “cynicism.” Most of us try to avoid people who take it too much to heart. In economics, apparently, they call it “science.

As you know, the public conversation about the connection between Islamic ideology and Muslim intolerance and violence has been stifled by political correctness. In the West, there is now a large industry of apology and obfuscation designed, it would seem, to protect Muslims from having to grapple with the kinds of facts we’ve been talking about. The humanities and social science departments of every university are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars—deemed to be experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other fields—who claim that Muslim extremism is never what it seems. These experts insist that we can never take Islamists and jihadists at their word and that none of their declarations about God, paradise, martyrdom, and the evils of apostasy have anything to do with their real motivations.

Difference for difference's sake, though, is not the point of anthropology. If it was, we would indeed be dazzled, even blinded. While anthropology wants to document difference - and often be a witness to it - it also wants to make sense of those differences. Anthropology seeks to explain.

Ha sido evidentemente por aquello que llamamos responsabilidad que el primate se convirtió en humanao, en sujeto de derecho o sujeto moral que debe asumir las consecuencias de sus actos y ser, por lo mismo, objeto de castigo o de recompensa, de repudio o de estima social, de desprecio o de respeto.

The entire destiny of modern linguistics is in fact determined by Saussure's inaugural act through which he separates the ‘external’ elements of linguistics from the ‘internal’ elements, and, by reserving the title of linguistics for the latter, excludes from it all the investigations which establish a relationship between language and anthropology, the political history of those who speak it, or even the geography of the domain where it is spoken, because all of these things add nothing to a knowledge of language taken in itself. Given that it sprang from the autonomy attributed to language in relation to its social conditions of production, reproduction and use, structural linguistics could not become the dominant social science without exercising an ideological effect, by bestowing the appearance of scientificity on the naturalization of the products of history, that is, on symbolic objects.

I am not speaking strictly of slavery here, but of that process that dislodges people from the webs of mutual commitment, shared history, and collective responsibility that make them what they are, so as to make them exchangeable--that is, to make it possible to make them subject to the logic of debt. Slavery is just the logical end-point, the most extreme from of such disentanglement. But for that reason it provides us with a window on the process as a whole. What's more, owing to its historical role, slavery has shaped our basic assumptions and institutions in ways that we are no longer aware of and whose influence we would probably never wish to acknowledge if we were. If we have become a debt society, it is because the legacy of war, conquest, and slavery has never completely gone away. It's still there, lodged in our most intimate conceptions of honor, property, even freedom. It's just that we can no longer see that it's there.

Yes, it is true that one generally needs to speak to the members of the key audience for a product or service. But as we are not trying to plumb an individual psyche for psychological motivation, but are rather trying to elucidate the relevant symbolic cultural meanings and practices, information garnered from those who do not like something is also relevant to understanding the cultural picture. In fact, contestation between points of view and meanings is a crucial aspect of the social dynamic. These nodal points of disagreement and different points of view can be precisely the most intriguing domains of cultural movement and thus new opportunities.

REVIEW: Like a master artisan, Weisberger weaves together threads of anthropology, botany, ecology and psychology in an inspiring tapestry of ideas sure to keep discerning readers warm and hopeful in these cold and desolate times.Unlike other texts, which ordinarily prescribe structural (ie. social, political, economic) solutions to the global crisis of environmental destruction, Rainforest Medicine hones in on the root cause of Western schizophrenia: spiritual poverty, and the resultant alienation of the individual from his environment. This incisive perception is married to a message of hope: that the keys to the door leading to promising new human vistas are held in the humblest of hands; those of the spiritual masters of the Amazon and the traditional cultures from which they hail. By illumining the ancient practices of authentic indigenous Amazonian shamanism, Weisberger supplies us with a manual for conservation of both the rainforest and the soul. And frankly, it could not have arrived at a better time.

They are also difficult to reconcile with archaeological evidence of how cities actually began in many parts of the world: as civic experiments on a grand scale, which frequently lacked the expected features of administrative hierarchy and authoritarian rule. We do not possess an adequate terminology for these early cities. To call them ‘egalitarian’, as we’ve seen, could mean quite a number of different things. It might imply an urban parliament and co-ordinated projects of social housing, as with some pre-Columbian centres in the Americas; or the self-organizing of autonomous households into neighbourhoods and citizens’ assemblies, as with prehistoric mega-sites north of the Black Sea; or, perhaps, the introduction of some explicit notion of equality based on principles of uniformity and sameness, as in Uruk-period Mesopotamia. None of this variability is surprising once we recall what preceded cities in each region. That was not, in fact, rudimentary or isolated groups, but far-flung networks of societies, spanning diverse ecologies, with people, plants, animals, drugs, objects of value, songs and ideas moving between them in endlessly intricate ways. While the individual units were demographically small, especially at certain times of year, they were typically organized into loose coalitions or confederacies. At the very least, these were simply the logical outcome of our first freedom: to move away from one’s home, knowing one will be received and cared for, even valued, in some distant place. At most they were examples of ‘amphictyony’, in which some kind of formal organization was put in charge of the care and maintenance of sacred places. It seems that Marcel Mauss had a point when he argued that we should reserve the term ‘civilization’ for great hospitality zones such as these. Of course, we are used to thinking of ‘civilization’ as something that originates in cities – but, armed with new knowledge, it seems more realistic to put things the other way round and to imagine the first cities as one of those great regional confederacies, compressed into a small space.

Faced with an ecological crisis whose roots lie in this disengagement, in the separation of human agency and social responsibility from the sphere of our direct involvement with the non-human environment, it surely behoves us to reverse this order of priority. I began with the point that while both humans and animals have histories of their mutual relations, only humans narrate such histories. But to construct a narrative, one must already dwell in the world and, in the dwelling, enter into relationships with its constituents, both human and non-human. I am suggesting that we rewrite the history of human-animal relations, taking this condition of active engagement, of being-in-the-world, as our starting point. We might speak of it as a history of human concern with animals, insofar as this notion conveys a caring, attentive regard, a 'being with'. And I am suggesting that those of us who are 'with' animals in their day-to-day lives, most notably hunters and herdsmen, can offer us some of the best possible indications of how we might proceed.

Human agency is far more plastic and heterogeneous than rational choice allows. Rational choice fails to explain human behavior because it does not grapple with the range of possible meanings that motivate human life. In the rush to establish a universal, scientific anthropology, this theory neglects human beings’ distinguishing feature: their ability to embody meanings.

Rasa has two primary meanings: 'feeling' and 'meaning'. As 'feeling' it is one of the traditional Javanese five senses - seeing, hearing, talking, smelling and feeling, and it includes within itself three aspects of "feeling" that our view of the 5 senses separates: taste of tongue, touch on the body, and emotional 'feeling' within the 'heart' like sadness and happiness. The taste of a banana is its rasa; a hunch is a rasa; a pain is a rasa; and so is the passion. As 'meaning', rasa is applied to words in a letter, in a poem, or even in common speech to indicate the between-the-lines type of indirection and allusive suggestion that is so important in Javanese communication and social intercourse. And it is given the same application to behavioral acts generally: to indicate the implicit import, the connotative 'feeling' of dance movements, polite gestures, and so forth. But int his second, semantic sense, it also means 'ultimate significance' - the deepest meaning at which one arrives by dint of mystical effort and whose clarification resolves all the ambiguities of mundane existence(...) (The interpretation of cultures)

The incompatibility here [between some anthropologies] rests with basic attitudes toward cultural others, which in turn rests on fundamentally different understandings of history. The one sees the Other as different and *separate,* a product of its own history and carrying its own hitoricity...The second sees the Other as different but *connected,* a product of a particular history that is itself intertwined with a larger set of economic, political, social, and cultural processes to such an extent that analytical separation of "our" history and "their" history is impossible. In this view, there are no cultures-outside-of-history to be reconstructed, no culture without history, no culture or society "with its own structure and history" to which world-historical forces arrive.

Indeed ethnography and theory resemble nothing so much as the two arcs of a hyperbola, which cast their beams in opposite directions, lighting up the surfaces, respectively, of mind and world. They are back to back, and darkness reigns between them. But what if each arc were to reverse its orientation, so as to embrace the other in an encompassing, brightly illuminated ellipse? We would then have neither ethnography nor theory, nor even a compound of both. What we would have is an undivided, interstitial field of anthropology. If ethnographic theory is the hyperbola, anthropology is the ellipse. For ethnography, when it turns, is no longer ethnography but the educational correspondences of real life. And theory, when it turns, is no longer theory, but an imagination nourished by its observational engagements with the world. The rupture between reality and imagination—the one annexed to fact, the other to theory—has been the source of much havoc in the history of consciousness. It needs to be repaired. It is surely the task of anthropology, before all else, to repair it. In calling a halt to the proliferation of ethnography, I am not asking for more theory. My plea is for a return to anthropology.

war is not inevitable. Nor has it always been with us. War is a human invention—an organized, deliberate action of an anti-social kind—and in the long span of human life on Earth, a fairly recent one. For more than 99 percent of the time that humans have lived on this planet, most of them have never made war. Many languages don't even have a word for it. Turn off CNN and read anthropology. You'll see. What's more, war is obsolete. Most nations don't make war anymore, except when coerced by the United States to join some spurious "coalition." The earth is small, and our time here so short. No other nation on the planet makes war as often, as long, as forcefully, as expensively, as destructively, as wastefully, as senselessly, or as unsuccessfully as the United States. No other nation makes war its business.

Now there is a modern-day anthropology* for the criminal type: a great number of so-called 'born criminals' have pale faces, large cheekbones, a coarse lower jaw, and deeply shining eyes. How can one not recall this when one thinks of Lenin and thousands like him? How many pale faces, high cheekbones and strikingly asymmetric features mark the soldiers of the Red Army and, generally speaking, also of the common Russian people - how many of them, these savage types, have Mongolian atavism directly in their blood! They are all from Murom, the white-eyed Chud. And it is precisely these individuals, these very Russichi, who gave us so many 'daring pirates', so many vagabonds, escapees, scoundrels and tramps - it is precisely these people whom we have recruited for the glory, pride and hope of the Russian social revolution. So why should we feign surprise at the results?

Since the late 1990s, scholars in disciplines as diverse as literary studies, anthropology, sociology, museum studies, and marketing have raised collective eyebrows at hoarding’s pathologization. Together they concentrate on the diagnostic politics of material deviance, the social constructions of an aberrant relationship with your things. One finds extreme accumulation to be “a psychiatric concern with deviance in terms of material culture.

Studying the mining industry requires a healthy dose of skepticism and perhaps even a measure of cynicism, especially in relation to the promotion of the virtuous discourses of sustainability and corporate social responsibility. In contrast to the anthropological tradition of suspending one’s disbelief when conducting ethnographic research, I have declined to give the mining industry the benefit of the doubt: its track record demands a higher standard of proof.

People who have made comparative studies of many different societies, know that when status is ascribed, rather than achieved, individual efforts towards excellence are not directed through any form of innovation; rather, the enhancement of status occurs only through the realisation of a previously well defined role position. It is only with social change, or when some form of continual dynamic disequilibium occurs in a society, that we begin to observe the development of achievement motivation in its modern form.

The whole concept of European culture as a cornucopia from which things are freely given is misleading. It does not take a specialist in anthropology to see that the European “give” is always highly selective. We never give any native people under our control – and we never shall, for it would be sheer folly as long as we stand on the basis of our present Realpolitik – the following elements of culture: 1. The instruments of physical power: fire-arms, bombing planes, poison gas, and all that makes an effective defence or aggression possible 2. We do not give out instruments of political mastery [i.e. sovereignty or voting rights] 3. We do not share with them the substance of economic wealth and advantages…. Even when under indirect economic exploitation… we allow the native a share of the profits, the full control of the economic organization remains in the hands of Western enterprise. 4. We do not admit them as equals to Church, Assembly, school, or drawing room… Full political, social and even religious equality is nowhere granted.

Political economist and sociologist Max Weber famously spoke of the “disenchantment of the world,” as rationalization and science led Europe and America into modern industrial society, pushing back religion and all “magical” theories about reality. Now we are witnessing the disenchantment of the self. One of the many dangers in this process is that if we remove the magic from our image of ourselves, we may also remove it from our image of others. We could become disenchanted with one another. Our image of Homo sapiens underlies our everyday practice and culture; it shapes the way we treat one another as well as how we subjectively experience ourselves. In Western societies, the Judeo-Christian image of humankind—whether you are a believer or not—has secured a minimal moral consensus in everyday life. It has been a major factor in social cohesion. Now that the neurosciences have irrevocably dissolved the Judeo-Christian image of a human being as containing an immortal spark of the divine, we are beginning to realize that they have not substituted anything that could hold society together and provide a common ground for shared moral intuitions and values. An anthropological and ethical vacuum may well follow on the heels of neuroscientific findings. This is a dangerous situation. One potential scenario is that long before neuroscientists and philosophers have settled any of the perennial issues—for example, the nature of the self, the freedom of the will, the relationship between mind and brain, or what makes a person a person—a vulgar materialism might take hold. More and more people will start telling themselves: “I don’t understand what all these neuroexperts and consciousness philosophers are talking about, but the upshot seems pretty clear to me. The cat is out of the bag: We are gene-copying bio- robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe. We have brains but no immortal souls, and after seventy years or so the curtain drops. There will never be an afterlife, or any kind of reward or punishment for anyone, and ultimately everyone is alone. I get the message, and you had better believe I will adjust my behavior to it. It would probably be smart not to let anybody know I’ve seen through the game.

Nowadays anthropology is busy with the gathering of chips of stones and of long-forgotten and buried remnants, in order to reconstruct the history of human, physical and social development. Much more important than those remote periods and than the material world, is the history of our intellectual development, to gather all the chips of the human genius, scattered and buried under the ruins of old literatures, and hidden in the popular literature. The youth of the human mind and the poetical reflection of the surrounding world are embodied in these tales and legends.

Where religious doctrines exist, for example, they can only become real to the extent that there exist concrete semiotic practices by which they can be enacted, embodied, experienced, and transmitted. But those practices will be subject to such factors as logistics, aesthetics, economics, or prior history, that are independent of the logical, political, or emotional demands of and constraints on doctrine itself. [...] Even textual forms as relatively autonomous, portable, and durable as written scriptures depend for their persistence and power on social dynamics surrounding contextualization and entextualization.

Seen this way, the ´origins of farming´ start to look less like an economic transition and more like a media revolution, which was also a social revolution, encompassing everything from horticulture to architecture, mathematics to thermodynamics, and from religion to the remodelling of gender roles. And while we can´t know exactly who was doing what in this brave new world, it´s abundantly clear that womenś work and knowledge were central to its creation; that the whole process was a fairly leisurely, even playful one, not forced by any environmental catastrophe or demographic tipping point and unmarked by major violent conflict. What´s more, it was all carried out in way that made radical inequality and extremely unlikely outcome.

First of all, we should not forget that the concept of fascism has frequently been used even after World War II, and not only in order to define the military dictatorships of Latin America. In 1959, Theodor Adorno wrote that ‘the survival of National Socialism within democracy’ was potentially more dangerous than ‘the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy’.2 In 1974, Pier Paolo Pasolini depicted the anthropological models of neoliberal capitalism as a ‘new fascism’ compared to which the regime of Mussolini appeared irremediably archaic, as a kind of ‘paleofascism’.3 And in even more recent decades, many historians seeking to provide interpretations of Berlusconi’s Italy recognized its intimacy—if not its filiation—with classical fascism

The outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropological research is that man's economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. He values material goods only in so far as they serve this end. Neither the process of production nor that of distribution is linked to specific economic interests attached to the possession of goods; but every single step in that process is geared to a number of social interests which eventually ensure that the required step be taken. These interests will be very different in a small hunting or fishing community from those in a vast despotic society, but in cither case the economic system will be run on noneconomic motives.

for instance, the theories and practices of art and photography with anthropological theory and practice (e.g. Edwards 1997a; da Silva and Pink 2004; Grimshaw and Ravetz 2004; Schneider and Wright 2005). The interdisciplinary focus in visual methods has also been represented in Theo van Leeuwen and Carey Jewitt’s Handbook of Social Research (2000) and Chris Pole’s Seeing is Believing (2004) both of which combine case studies in visual research from across disciplines. The idea that visual research as a field of interdisciplinary practice is also central to Advances in Visual Methodology (Pink 2012a) and is demonstrated by the work of the volume’s contributors, as well as by the recent SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods (Margolis and Pauwels 2011). Likewise the interdisciplinary journal Visual Studies (formerly Visual Sociology) provides an excellent series of examples of visual research, practice, theory and methodology.

My hypothesis is mimetic: because humans imitate one another more than animals, they have had to find a means of dealing with contagious similarity, which could lead to the pure and simple disappearance of their society. The mechanism that reintroduces difference into a situation in which everyone has come to resemble everyone else is sacrifice. Humanity results from sacrifice; we are thus the children of religion. What I call after Freud the founding murder, in other words, the immolation of a sacrificial victim that is both guilty of disorder and able to restore order, is constantly re-enacted in the rituals at the origin of our institutions. Since the dawn of humanity, millions of innocent victims have been killed in this way in order to enable their fellow humans to live together, or at least not to destroy one another. This is the implacable logic of the sacred, which myths dissimulate less and less as humans become increasingly self-aware. The decisive point in this evolution is Christian revelation, a kind of divine expiation in which God through his Son could be seen as asking for forgiveness from humans for having revealed the mechanisms of their violence so late. Rituals had slowly educated them; from then on, humans had to do without. Christianity demystifies religion. Demystification, which is good in the absolute, has proven bad in the relative, for we were not prepared to shoulder its consequences. We are not Christian enough. The paradox can be put a different way. Christianity is the only religion that has foreseen its own failure. This prescience is known as the apocalypse. Indeed, it is in the apocalyptic texts that the word of God is most forceful, repudiating mistakes that are entirely the fault of humans, who are less and less inclined to acknowledge the mechanisms of their violence. The longer we persist in our error, the stronger God’s voice will emerge from the devastation. […] The Passion unveiled the sacrificial origin of humanity once and for all. It dismantled the sacred and revealed its violence. […] By accepting crucifixion, Christ brought to light what had been ‘hidden since the foundation of the world,’ in other words, the foundation itself, the unanimous murder that appeared in broad daylight for the first time on the cross. In order to function, archaic religions need to hide their founding murder, which was being repeated continually in ritual sacrifices, thereby protecting human societies from their own violence. By revealing the founding murder, Christianity destroyed the ignorance and superstition that are indispensable to such religions. It thus made possible an advance in knowledge that was until then unimaginable. […] A scapegoat remains effective as long as we believe in its guilt. Having a scapegoat means not knowing that we have one. Learning that we have a scapegoat is to lose it forever and to expose ourselves to mimetic conflicts with no possible resolution. This is the implacable law of the escalation to extremes. The protective system of scapegoats is finally destroyed by the Crucifixion narratives as they reveal Jesus’ innocence, and, little by little, that of all analogous victims. The process of education away from violent sacrifice is thus underway, but it is going very slowly, making advances that are almost always unconscious. […] Mimetic theory does not seek to demonstrate that myth is null, but to shed light on the fundamental discontinuity and continuity between the passion and archaic religion. Christ’s divinity which precedes the Crucifixion introduces a radical rupture with the archaic, but Christ’s resurrection is in complete continuity with all forms of religion that preceded it. The way out of archaic religion comes at this price. A good theory about humanity must be based on a good theory about God. […] We can all participate in the divinity of Christ so long as we renounce our own violence.

The overwhelming consensus is that egalitarian social organization is the de-facto system for foraging societies in all environments. In fact, no other system could work for foraging societies. Compulsory sharing is simply the best way to distribute risk to everyone’s benefit: participation mandatory. Pragmatic? Yes. Noble? Hardly. We believe this sharing behavior extended to sex as well. A great deal of research from primatology, anthropology, anatomy, and psychology points to the same fundamental conclusion: human beings and our hominid ancestors have spent almost all of the past few million years or so in small, intimate bands in which most adults had several sexual relationships at any given time. This approach to sexuality probably persisted until the rise of agriculture and private property no more than ten thousand years ago. In addition to voluminous scientific evidence, many explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists support this view, having penned accounts rich with tales of orgiastic rituals, unflinching mate sharing, and an open sexuality unencumbered by guilt or shame.

Here we immediately face the danger of slipping into another but equally untenable romanticism, namely a call for humans to be humble and come to terms with or appreciate their finitude. The acknowledgement of the inherent lack of unity in the metabolism of humans and the rest of nature should not lead us to conceive of humans as fragile, vulnerable and ontologically homeless creatures destined to remain caught in opaque mediations. Such a way of thinking amounts to a secularisation of the religious demand for humans to display their submissiveness and obedience to God. One finds examples of this in existentialist philosophies of the Heideggerian variant or in Arnold Gehlen's conservative philosophical anthropology, according to which the natural incompleteness of human beings justify the call for stable social institutions (i.e., the shepherd-God is replaced with the shepherd-State). The key to avoid such an ideology of finitude is to recall that it is the very fragility and porosity of the human metabolism which has made humans so evolutionarily successful. Human corporeal organisation is the source of an immense flexibility and has enabled this animal to "break out of a narrow ecological niche". Far from being the sign of an inherent finitude of the human being, the loss of immediacy at the centre of its being is rather a sign of its infinity in the sense that it enables humans to socially mediate their relation to the rest of nature in an infinite number of ways.

Palo Mayombe is perhaps best known for its display of human skulls in iron cauldrons and accompanied by necromantic practices that contribute to its eerie reputation of being a cult of antinomian and hateful sorcerers. This murky reputation is from time to time reinforced by uninformed journalists and moviemakers who present Palo Mayombe in similar ways as Vodou has been presented through the glamour and horror of Hollywood. It is the age old fear of the unknown and of powers that threaten the established order that are spawned from the umbra of Palo Mayombe. The cult is marked by ambivalence replicating an intense spectre of tension between all possible contrasts, both spiritual and social. This is evident both in the history of Kongo inspired sorcery and practices as well as the tension between present day practitioners and the spiritual conclaves of the cult. Palo Mayombe can be seen either as a religion in its own right or a Kongo inspired cult. This distinction perhaps depends on the nature of ones munanso (temple) and rama (lineage). Personally, I see Palo Mayombe as a religious cult of Creole Sorcery developed in Cuba. The Kongolese heritage derives from several different and distinct regions in West Africa that over time saw a metamorphosis of land, cultures and religions giving Palo Mayombe a unique expression in its variety, but without losing its distinct nucleus. In the history of Palo Mayombe we find elite families of Kongolese aristocracy that contributed to shaping African history and myth, conflicts between the Kongolese and explorers, with the Trans-Atlantic slave trade being the blood red thread in its development. The name Palo Mayombe is a reference to the forest and nature of the Mayombe district in the upper parts of the deltas of the Kongo River, what used to be the Kingdom of Loango. For the European merchants, whether sent by the Church to convert the people or by a king greedy for land and natural resources, everything south of present day Nigeria to the beginning of the Kalahari was simply Kongo. This un-nuanced perception was caused by the linguistic similarities and of course the prejudice towards these ‘savages’ and their ‘primitive’ cultures. To write a book about Palo Mayombe is a delicate endeavor as such a presentation must be sensitive both to the social as well as the emotional memory inherited by the religion. I also consider it important to be true to the fundamental metaphysical principles of the faith if a truthful presentation of the nature of Palo Mayombe is to be given. The few attempts at presenting Palo Mayombe outside ethnographic and anthropological dissertations have not been very successful. They have been rather fragmented attempts demonstrating a lack of sensitivity not only towards the cult itself, but also its roots. Consequently a poor understanding of Palo Mayombe has been offered, often borrowing ideas and concepts from Santeria and Lucumi to explain what is a quite different spirituality. I am of the opinion that Palo Mayombe should not be explained on the basis of the theological principles of Santeria. Santeria is Yoruba inspired and not Kongo inspired and thus one will often risk imposing concepts on Palo Mayombe that distort a truthful understanding of the cult. To get down to the marrow; Santeria is a Christianized form of a Yoruba inspired faith – something that should make the great differences between Santeria and Palo Mayombe plain. Instead, Santeria is read into Palo Mayombe and the cult ends up being presented at best in a distorted form. I will accordingly refrain from this form of syncretism and rather present Palo Mayombe as a Kongo inspired cult of Creole Sorcery that is quite capable

As you know, the public conversation about the connection between Islamic ideology and Muslim intolerance and violence has been stifled by political correctness. In the West, there is now a large industry of apology and obfuscation designed, it would seem, to protect Muslims from having to grapple with the kinds of facts we’ve been talking about. The humanities and social science departments of every university are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars—deemed to be experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other fields—who claim that Muslim extremism is never what it seems. These experts insist that we can never take Islamists and jihadists at their word and that none of their declarations about God, paradise, martyrdom, and the evils of apostasy have anything to do with their real motivations. When one asks what the motivations of Islamists and jihadists actually are, one encounters a tsunami of liberal delusion. Needless to say, the West is to blame for all the mayhem we see in Muslim societies. After all, how would we feel if outside powers and their mapmakers had divided our lands and stolen our oil? These beleaguered people just want what everyone else wants out of life. They want economic and political security. They want good schools for their kids. They want to be free to flourish in ways that would be fully compatible with a global civil society. Liberals imagine that jihadists and Islamists are acting as anyone else would given a similar history of unhappy encounters with the West. And they totally discount the role that religious beliefs play in inspiring a group like the Islamic State—to the point where it would be impossible for a jihadist to prove that he was doing anything for religious reasons. Apparently, it’s not enough for an educated person with economic opportunities to devote himself to the most extreme and austere version of Islam, to articulate his religious reasons for doing so ad nauseam, and even to go so far as to confess his certainty about martyrdom on video before blowing himself up in a crowd. Such demonstrations of religious fanaticism are somehow considered rhetorically insufficient to prove that he really believed what he said he believed. Of course, if he said he did these things because he was filled with despair and felt nothing but revulsion for humanity, or because he was determined to sacrifice himself to rid his nation of tyranny, such a psychological or political motive would be accepted at face value. This double standard is guaranteed to exonerate religion every time. The game is rigged.

Finally, there are assuredly diversities of gifts pertaining to diverse breeds of men; and unless we are all reduced to the dull dead level of socialism, and perhaps even in that case, for the sake of relief, we shall continue to stand in need of all these gifts. Let us hope, then, that blue eyes, as well as brown eyes, will continue to beam on our descendants, and that heads will never come to be framed all upon one and the same pattern.

For a useful and concise introduction to ethnography, the book Social & Cultural Anthropology by John Monaghan and Peter Just (2000) is a good start.

We don’t do superstars in our Tough Mudder world—but if we were to, it would be hard to ignore the claims of Amelia Boone, an athlete who now features regularly on the cover of Runner’s World and who has been the women’s champion at World’s Toughest three times. An in-house lawyer for Apple in Silicon Valley, Amelia is among the only competitors to keep running for twenty-four hours in the desert without a rest. She keeps coming back not for the glory of “winning” but because, she says, “you will never find a race like World’s Toughest Mudder—where you are technically running against other people but where you will still see the leader out there stopping to help people up over walls or out of the water. It is just this unwritten rule; no one questions it, that is how it is.” Amelia studied social anthropology before she became a lawyer, with an interest in the way that social norms and gossip were used by indigenous tribes to create and maintain healthy and coherent cultures. Tough Mudder, she suggests, is the closest she has come to seeing that tribal spirit in action in the contemporary world. “If I am out for a run and I see someone wearing a Tough Mudder headband or T-Shirt, there is always a big smile and a nod of recognition between us,” she says, as if she is speaking of a pair of Yanomami natives coming across each other on a forest trail. It’s a nod, she suggests, that communicates a great many things—not only shared philosophies and kinship but also the recognition that “I may well have pushed your wet ass over a wall at some point last year.

Change in society, social change, routinizes a key concept in sociology. Everyone knows what it means. Change brings a characteristic future of modernity into focus, namely permanent transformation, while basic concepts and the certainties that support them remain constant. Metamorphosis, by contrast, destabilizes these certainties of modern society. It shifts the focus to ‘being in the world’ and ‘seeing the world’, to events and processes which are unintended, which generally go unnoticed, which prevail beyond the domains of politics and democracy as side effects of radical technical and economic modernization. They trigger a fundamental shock, a sea change which explodes the anthropological constants of our previous existence and understanding of the world. Metamorphosis in this sense means simply that what was unthinkable yesterday is real and possible today.

Sexual differentiation begins approximately six weeks after conception, when in male children the gonads are formed and begin to manufacture male hormone, which has a profound effect on the future development of the embryo. In the female, on the other hand, the ovaries are not formed until the sixth month, by which time the greater size, weight, and muscular strength of the male is already established. This is the biological basis of the sexual dimorphism apparent in the great majority of societies known to anthropology, where child-rearing is almost invariably the responsibility of women, and hunting and warfare the responsibility of men. These differences have less to do with cultural `stereotypes' than some fashionable contemporary notions would have us believe. While it is true that at all ages males and females have far more in common than they have differences between them, there can be no doubt that some differences exist which have their roots in the biology of our species. Jung was quite clear about this. Again and again, he refers to the masculine and the feminine as two great archetypal principles, coexisting as equal and complementary parts of a balanced cosmic system, as expressed in the interplay of yin and yang in Taoist philosophy. These archetypal principles provide the foundations on which masculine and feminine stereotypes begin to do their work, providing an awareness of gender. Gender is the psychic recognition and social expression of the sex to which nature has assigned us, and a child's awareness of its gender is established by as early as eighteen months of age.

In the American colonies, the first laborers were European indentured servants. When African laborers were forcibly brought to Virginia beginning in 1619, status was defined by wealth and religion, not by physical characteristics such as skin color. But this would change. Over time, physical difference mattered, and with the development of the transatlantic slave trade, landowners began replacing their temporary European laborers with enslaved Africans who were held in permanent bondage. Soon a new social structure emerged based primarily on skin color, with those of English ancestry at the top and African slaves and American Indians at the bottom. By 1776, when “all men are created equal” was written into the Declaration of Independence by a slaveholder named Thomas Jefferson, a democratic nation was born with a major contradiction about race at its core. As our new nation asserted its independence from European tyranny, blacks and American Indians were viewed as less than human and not deserving of the same liberties as whites. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the notion of race continued to shape life in the United States. The rise of “race science” supported the common belief that people who were not white were biologically inferior. The removal of Native Americans from their lands, legalized segregation, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II are legacies of where this thinking led. Today, science tells us that all humans share a common ancestry. And while there are differences among us, we’re also very much alike. Changing demographics in the United States and across the globe are resulting in new patterns of marriage, housing, education, employment, and new thinking about race. Despite these advances, the legacy of race continues to affect us in a variety of ways. Deeply held assumptions about race and enduring stereotypes make us think that gaps in wealth, health, housing, education, employment, or physical ability in sports are natural. And we fail to see the privileges that some have been granted and others denied because of skin color. This creation, called race, has fostered inequality and discrimination for centuries. It has influenced how we relate to each other as human beings. The American Anthropological Association has developed this exhibit to share the complicated story of race, to unravel fiction from fact, and to encourage meaningful discussions about race in schools, in the workplace, within families and communities. Consider how your view of a painting can change as you examine it more closely. We invite you to do the same with race. Examine and re-examine your thoughts and beliefs about race. 1

Biomedicine locates sickness in a specific place in an individual body: a headache, a stomachache a torn knee, lung cancer. Medical anthropologists instead locate sickness and health in three interconnected bodies: the political, the social, and the physical. The prevailing political economy impacts the distribution of sickness and health in a society and the means available to heal those who are sick. For example, poor individuals worldwide are more exposed to toxins that make them sick, while the rich stay healthier. The social body constructs the meanings and experiences surrounding particular physical states. It determines the ideal physical body, legitimizing biomedical practices like plastic surgery to attain it. The social body also determines the boundaries of the physical body. Some cultures locate sickness not in individuals but instead in families or communities. As any caregiver knows, we live the sickness too. And while biomedicine can cure diseases it flounders with permanent hurts, troubles of the mind, states present from birth or that are incurable or progressive. In biomedicine, these states are stigmatized and feared. We medical anthropologists have a term for this: social death.

A los académicos les encanta la teoría de Foucault que identifica conocimiento y poder y que insiste en que la fuerza bruta ya no era un factor primordial en el control social. Les gusta porque les favorece: es la fórmula perfecta para aquellos que quieren verse a sí mismos como políticos radicales aunque se limitan a escribir ensayos que apenas leerán una docena de personas en un ámbito institucional

Neoliberalism must be grasped as an individualist social philosophy whose main locus of attention is the self, and whose main anthropological assumption, as Aschoff argues, is that ‘we are all independent, autonomous actors meeting in the marketplace, making our destinies and in the process making society. The consequence of neoliberalism was a widespread collapse of the social in favour of the psychological.

It took me more than a decade to work my way through the landscape. I owe my liberation from it to the work of geographer David Lowenthal and social critic Marshall McLuhan. Their writing convinced me that the world-as-picture was, on one hand, geared to the superficiality of taste and, on the other, an outcome of a Renaissance mathematical perspective that tended to separate rather than join. Walter Ong's essay "The World as View and the World as Event" convinced me that this distinction between the visual and the tactile was more than ideological. The landscape was an inadequate nexus. It was only a twist in the idea of the co-option of the earth. Indeed, such ideas depended as much on unconscious perception as on intellectual or artistic formulations. I began to feel that something still more biogenic, yet common to humankind, which yet might take partic­ular social or aesthetic expression, held the key to an adequate human ecology. “Over the next decade I read anthropology and child psychology. During that time a meeting of anthropologists took place in Chicago that resulted in the publication of Man the Hunter. I began to think that the appropriate model for human society in its earth habitat may have existed for several million years. If Claude Levi-Strauss were to be believed, nothing had been gained by the onset of civilization except technical mastery, while what had been lost or distorted was a way of interpreting in which nature was an unlimited but essential poetic and intellectual instrument in the achieve­ment of human self-consciousness, both in evolution and in every genera­ tion and individual human life. I knew such an idea would be ridiculed as a throwback to the discredited figure of the noble savage, but when it was considered in light of Erik Erikson's concept of individual development as an identity-shaping sequence I found it irresistible.

I view science as the priceless legacy of humanity's search for understanding of the material world. But in an unequal economic system, science cannot avoid being stained by prevailing prejudices and bigotry - not only social sciences, like anthropology, but the so-called hard sciences like biology.

The Omo peoples of Ethiopia are a huge favorite on social media for their astounding body art and rituals, such as the famous clay lip-plates of Mursi women. But most people looking at those pictures and videos have no clue about this incredible struggle going on behind the scenes.

I have the greatest respect for conservation biologists. I care very much about conserving the rain forest and the wildlife in Indonesia, but I also found it disheartening. It often feels like you are fighting a losing battle, especially in areas where people depend so heavily on these natural resources for their own survival. After graduation, I decided to return to the original behavioral questions that motivated me. Although monogamy—both social and genetic—is rare in mammals, social monogamy is the norm in birds. Plus, birds are everywhere. I figured that if I turned my attention to studying our feathered friends, I wouldn’t have to spend months on end trying to secure research permits and travel visas from foreign governments. I wouldn’t even have to risk getting bitten by leeches (a constant problem in the Mentawais*). Birds seemed like the perfect choice for my next act. But I didn’t know anyone who studied birds. My PhD was in an anthropology department, without many links to researchers in biology departments. Serendipitously, while applying for dozens of academic jobs, I stumbled across an advertisement for a position managing Dr. Ellen Ketterson’s laboratory at Indiana University. The ad described Ketterson’s long-term project on dark-eyed juncos. Eureka! Birds! At the time, her lab primarily focused on endocrinology methods like hormone assays (a method to measure how much of a hormone is present in blood or other types of biological samples), because they were interested in how testosterone levels influenced behavior. I had no experience with either birds or hormone assays. But I had spent the last several years developing DNA sequencing and genotyping skills, which the Ketterson lab was just starting to use. I hoped that my expertise with fieldwork and genetic work would be seen as beneficial enough to excuse my lack of experience in ornithology and endocrinology. I submitted my application but heard nothing back. After a while, I did something that was a bit terrifying at the time. Of the dozens of academic positions I had applied to, this felt like the right one, so I tried harder. I wrote to Dr. Ketterson again to clarify why I was so interested in the job and why I would be a good fit, even though on paper I seemed completely wrong for it. I described why I wanted to work with birds instead of primates. I explained that I had years of fieldwork experience in challenging environments and could easily learn ornithological methods. I listed my laboratory expertise and elaborated on how beneficial it could be to her research group, and how easily I could learn to do hormone assays and why they were important for my research too. She wrote me back. I got the job.

Ethnomethodology, largely the creation of Dr. Charles Garfinkle, combines the most radical theories of modern anthropology and phenomenological sociology. Recognizing social realities (plural), which it calls emic realities, ethnomethodology shows how every human perception, including the perceptions of social scientists who think they can study society “objectively," always contains the limits, the defects and the unconscious prejudices of the emic reality (or social game) of the observer.

Intellectually, the Enlightenment gave birth to the disciplines of political science, economic theory, anthropology, sociology, and modern philosophy—disciplines which still form the basis of how we attempt to understand life in the twenty-first century. The Enlightenment can be understood as a direct challenge to the status quo at a time when intolerant and superstitious religious beliefs dominated most people’s lives. Set free from the restraints of the Church, the state, and the monarchy, according to the Enlightenment, human beings would be able to improve society by focusing on developing the quality of material and social life.

…popular and populist writers, journalists, and on-air personalities do not so much engage in meaningful examination of controversial issues as reproduce simplistic and long-cherished notions about social and cultural evolution, biological determinism, the timelessness of traditional society, and the intractable character of ethnic and religious animosities… Seemingly outside this process, well-known pundits and public intellectuals – agents of political, economic, and cultural establishments – are mythmakers who persuade by providing their positions with the veneer of scientism: an elite discourse in which readers are invited to participate and which offers sure cognitive “satisfaction” by virtue of its paint-by-numbers explanations.

This view of a single, overarching science of culture, unified around a Darwinian evolutionary framework and incorporating anthropology, archaeology, economics, history, linguistics, psychology, and sociology, may seem naive. Anyone who has studied a social science subject at university level will probably be aware that there is little theoretical common ground, or even communication, between many of the different branches of the social sciences.

Sacred…is itself a social construction. There is nothing inherently sacred or profane in the world. A place, a symbol, or a personality becomes sacred because it is socially classified as sacred.

Thanks to cultural evolution and technological progress, humans have gained unprecedented power to alter their social and physical environment but, in doing so, have also created enormous opportunity for evolutionary mismatch.

In modern societies, for example, the media expose people to a relentless stream of images of unrealistically attractive "competitors" -an artificial, evolutionarily novel kind of social stimulus. It has been hypothesized that such exposure hyperactivates the evolved mechanisms that regulate female competition for attractiveness and status, thus contributing to the rising incidence of eating disorders.

To the extent that psychological mechanisms rely on information acquired through learning, they are vulnerable to maladaptive outcomes owing to the intrinsic limitations of learning processes. Indeed, the massive capacity for individual and social learning required to exploit the cognitive niche may contribute to explain our species' seemingly unique vulnerability to mental disorders.

Although sex is a biological urge, it is rarely experienced in the same way by people everywhere; it is differently practiced and felt depending on the social and cultural settings in which it occurs.

Cooking deserves its place as one of the great revolutionary innovations of history, not because of the way it transforms food—there are plenty of other ways of doing that—but because of the way it transformed society. Culture begins when the raw gets cooked. The campfire becomes a place of communion when people eat around it. Cooking is not just a way of preparing food but of organizing society around communal meals and predictable mealtimes. It introduces new specialized functions and shared pleasures and responsibilities. It is more creative, more constructive of social ties than mere eating together. It can even replace eating together as a ritual of social adhesion.

Apparently, if you look at how many numbers we're likely to store in our mobile phone, or how many names we're likely to list on a social networking site, it's rare even for city dwellers to exceed a couple of hundred. Social anthropologists delightedly point out that this is the size of the social group we would have had to handle in a large Stone Age village. According to them, we're all trying to cope with modern big-city life equipped only with a Stone Age social brain. We all struggle with anonymity.

Most importantly, I believe one is left with the question of how Smith’s own work to understand the existence and operation of what he calls ecological rationality, in contrast to the constructivist rationality that has been primary in giving shape to the modern “public-private partnership” between social science and the administrative welfare state, might help shape a philosophical anthropology that makes human beings out to be unique, dignity-bearing, moral persons capable of response to the call of God.

I think it is necessary to educate the new generations in the value of defeat. In not being a social climber. In this world of vulgar and dishonest winners, of false prevaricators, in the face of this anthropology of the winner from afar I prefer the one who loses.

Is the mimetic mechanism the original sin? Yes, of course. The original sin is the bad use of mimesis, and the mimetic mechanism is the actual consequence of this use at the collective level. Usually, people don’t see the mimetic mechanism, even when they can identify all sorts of rivalries which are at the base of the development of this very mechanism. The mimetic mechanism produces a complex form of transcendence, which plays a very important role in the dynamic stability of archaic society and therefore one cannot condemn it from an anthropological and sociological standpoint, because it is necessary for the survival and development of humanity. It can be defined as the ‘social transcendence’ in Durkheim’s terms, or the idolatrous transcendence from the point of view of the Judaeo-Christian perspective. It is an illusory and idolatrous form of sacred that, nonetheless, can protect the archaic human community from greater and more disruptive forms of violence. It is what Paul says also regarding powers and principalities,6 meaning the secular powers of this world: they are doomed, and they are going to disappear very quickly, but he doesn’t condemn them in a self-righteous way, he does not demand that they are destroyed with violence, and one has simply to submit to their authority.7 The archaic sacred is ‘Satanic’ when there is nothing to channel it and to keep it at bay, and social institutions are there to do precisely this job, until the Kingdom of God will finally triumph.

It wasn't that he seemed at all violent - rather, he had a peculiar unhinged intensity that told her that to challenge him would mean hearing him defend his hypothesis for the next forty minutes.