A Hot Cup of Joe

Courtesy www.whale-images.com

Yeah, I’ve slacked. Grad school, new job, family…. you’ve heard it all from other bloggers.

But like any sleeping bear, the blogger who chooses pseudoscience and skepticism as a topic of discussion is occasionally poked. And I’ve been poked by someone posing as an attorney and a judge no less!

When I first started A Hot Cup of Joe, the blog was hosted at blogspot/blogger and, among my first posts, was a critique of Kevin Trudeau’s Natural Cures. That critique is still there, but it also resides here, at ahotcupofjoe.net.

Nevertheless, Google seems to favor its own blog platform over my private domain and the original post still gets lots of search hits. Thus, it still gets its fair share of comments. The most recent comment comes from an anonymous poster who goes by infinito and he attempts to dismiss Trudeau by acknowledging his greed but also suggesting that “big pharma” is the real evil one. Infinito makes little attempt to deal with the issue at hand, which is the pseudoscientific nature of Trudeau’s deceptive claims and the danger these claims present to those who are desparate for health attention and assistance; those who are hopeful and, thus, exploited by Trudeau.

Instead, our anonymous interloper choses to attack me (without any real success) and focuses on my August 2006 dialog with a seventeen year old commenter. Here’s infinito’s comment in full:

Mr Feagan, your a bully and although I am not a fan of Kevin Trudeau the substance of your writing reflects that of a pseudo-intellect, I notice you like that word pseudo. If your goal is to discredit Trudeau it certainly won’t be accomplished by the ramblings of someone who is inexperienced in the art of research and writing, far more probative if your inability for any sort of abstract thought. You did not address the more substantive issues nor undermine his credibility. You quote a lot from Quack Watch, your only regurgitating what some other skeptic has said and it doesn’t take a great deal of intellect to know they have an agenda. While I may agree that he is highly motivated by profit and some of the modalities are suspect, there still is some probative information that resonates with many readers who are not satisfied with our current medical sysmtem. Your treatment of the 17 year old young man is reprehensible, I am 53 and have been both a prosecutor and a judge most of my professional life. In addition I am a graduate of Oxford University and a member of Mensa, that doesn’t mean a lot except I know a wanna be intellect who does not know which end is up. You lack basic manners and I am only glad that one of my children have not crossed your path. Most real intellects agree that things are not as black and white as your purport, that is for those that are less evolved intellectually, emotionally and in your case mentally. It doesn’t surprise me your a 40 year old student. You owe the young man you bullied an apology, you are judgmental about people, places and things you really know nothing about. If you want to research me Mr. Feagans than please do, I also graduated from Harvard Law School and wrote for the Law Review, so I have some ability for critical thinking. I had two of my associates read your ramblings and all agree it is nothing more then rambling. To quote my associate “he ought to have his ass kicked for being such a bully to that young man”. I understand that you really believe you posses some measure of intellectual ability Feagan but the truth of the matter is you should stay in school. Bobby

Okay, so infinito isn’t completely anonymous. He’s one of the thousands of “Bobbys” on the internet on the afternoon of Nov. 18, 2008.

At first, I thought maybe Bobby/infinito’s criticism had some merit. I read it first in my email inbox rather than in the context of the original blog post, so I didn’t have the “17 year old young man’s” original comment to look at. And, I remembered going through a brash phase where I was quick at riposte and less so at tolerating and humoring woo-woo’s and nuts (however old they are).

But, the more I thought it over, the more skeptical I began to get. That blog post had over 30 comments. Why focus on a single comment of a 17-year old (who is now 19 at least)? What’s this kid to an alleged 53-year old?

Then I reviewed the 17-year old’s comment. I wasn’t that unfair. Nor should I be expected to be nice. The harshest thing I said to him was, “In the end, your little 17-year old misspelled rant is nothing but the anger of someone whose belief is being challenged by critical thought.” I joined the U.S. Army when I was 17. If he can’t handle that then what’s he going to do when he’s cut off by a driver on the freeway on his way to school? How about when his girlfriend/boyfriend dumps him? There are truly worse offenses than a middle-aged grad student questioning his spelling and accusing him of being angry!

But the comment that infinito made that should have started the bells ringing: “…I am 53 and have been both a prosecutor and a judge most of my professional life. In addition I am a graduate of Oxford University and a member of Mensa…”

Right. Either infinito is lying or he’s telling the truth. If its the former, then infinito *is* the 17-year old anonymous poster from 2006 -now a 19-year old. Each of the “facts” he reveals about himself above serve, then, to create a fictive dominance over me: older, more important, better school, wiser, etc. The choice of 53 appears random, but I recall reading somewhere that people often unconsciously choose odd numbers over even when they want ‘random.’ In his mind: ten years my senior gives our 19-year old friend’s ego some sort of dominance. Alleging to be a “prosecutor” reflects the aggression he feels. Claiming to be a judge positions his ego to be in a justified position of fictive righteousness. Claiming to have a “professional life” reinforces the need he feels to be right rather than angry as I accused him 2 years ago. Claiming to be a graduate of Oxford University is a gambit since (probably not knowing which university I attend now) it probably isn’t as elite as the elite-of-elites. And claiming to be a member of Mensa…. well… Sometimes a cigar isn’t a cigar at all.

Of course, its possible that infinito really is a 53-year old Oxford alumni, former prosecutor and judge with Mensa-pains but, if so, then his case is truly sadder than the one I outlined above.

I mean, I wrote this because I was bored, realized I hadn’t posted in a while, and was thouroghly amused by infinito -the “old judge!” But what would motivate him to write a paragraph that large on a post that was two years old, in response to a comment just as old, on a blog that’s moved twice in the last two years?

Instead of masturbating your ego, infinito/bobby, why don’t you try actually engaging in some intellectual discourse on the subject at hand: Kevin Trudeau and the pseudoscientific nonsense he peddles as “natural cures?” Assuming you aren’t actually the original anonymous coward, why hide behind some pretense of affrontment and debate the real issues: the efficacy of so-called complimentary and alternative medicines.

Here’s a challenge for you: use your blogger ID and create a blog that positions your arguments and I’ll debate you. Lets drop the ad hominem and straw man issues between us and deal with the claims head-on. You were pissed at me 2 years ago and keep seeing the same post come up again and again in Google. I get that. So do something about it that’s constructive rather than pretending to be someone your not.

Matt Damon on Sarah Palin. Regardless of what you think about celebraties using their notoriety to make political statements, I think Matt Damon nails her.

So to speak.

Sorry about the political post -I don’t usually stray that way, but I *do* write here about skeptical topics and Palin and her narrow-minded beliefs on the age of the planet as well as evolution are skeptical topics, so….

Back in 2005, ABC’s Primetime aired a special on UFOs.

Tonight, they aired another special -same topic; same title.

There’s a companion website, Could So Many UFO Witnesses Be Right?

The very title of the site reveals an appeal to popularity, but the question is still one that probably seems intuitive to most people. Obviously the term UFO stands for unidentified flying object and thus there’s no assumption of space aliens or extraterrestrials. Observers who state they witnessed a UFO are simply stating they saw something that appeared to fly which they cannot identify.

A Flying Assumption

There are some other assumptions inherent to the term UFO beyond “unidentified.” The “flying” part of “unidentified flying object” assumes that what was observed was “flying,” which is to say “traveling through the air.” This assumption, if taken at face value, would eliminate extraterrestral phenomena like planets, the Moon, the Sun, other stars, satellites, etc. By “extraterrestrial,” I mean not currently on Earth or in the atmosphere.

An Object?

A final assumption found in the term “UFO” is that the observed phenomenon includes one or more “objects.” This assumption would seem to exclude reflections of light, gaseous explanations, chemical reactions, hallucinations, hysteria, delusion, hoaxes, lies, etc. (though, technically, I suppose one could refer to photons and molecules of light, gases, chemicals -even if in the brain- as “objects).

Space Aliens?

That having been said, the colloquial form and expectation of “UFO” is one that equates or is related to “extraterrestrial craft” and the extraterrestrial hypothesis as an explanation for unexplained sightings. The natural tendency of humans to look for significance and mystery -perhaps our curious nature- seems impair our abilities to think critically and rationally. Fantastic and outlandish explanations become favored over the mundane and more prosaic.

Some of the Show’s Sightings

One of the first sightings the program discussed was the recent Stephenville, TX sighting. What the witnesses described was consistent with military maneuvers. Of course, the witnesses included various hyperbole like “they flew off toward the President’s house [in Crawford].” Crawford is about 70 miles from Stephenville. Nothing described by the witnesses cannot be explained by Air Force jets chasing each other in a military exercise using anti-missile countermeasures, which are flares. The airspace around Stephenville and the surrounding region has been used for training for decades.

The next sighting discussed was the Phoenix Lights (Phoenix, AZ). Again, there was witness after witness offering unfettered hyperbole. The witness that shot the video can be heard saying, “Ahh, you tell me what it is.” They were flares dropped on parachute, probably by an A-10 Warthog on the Goldwater Test Range near Phoenix. Nothing the described by the witnesses cannot be explained by military aircraft on exercises, flying in v-formation and then dropping flares on a military test range.

Another sighting covered in tonight’s episode was the St. Clair County, IL sighting of “a giant craft with multiple bright lights moving silently across the sky at a very low altitude” witnessed by many people, including five police officers, in different towns back in 2000. Nothing the witnesses described was inconsistent with a blimp. Such blimps are used often in baseball and football games on both the collegiate and professional levels. They move slow and relatively silent, have various exterior lights for illumination, and have to travel long distances to and from games.

That’s not to say a blimp is the only explanation, I just found it to be the first thought that came to mind based on their descriptions and it is the one that introduces the fewest new assumptions about what we know about the universe today.

What About ‘Credible’ Witnesses?

From that point, it seemed that the program focused on sightings that were from “credible” eyewitnesses rather than just people. They mentioned pilots, soldiers, airmen, etc. The appeal to authority was obvious, as was the assumption that pilot training, military servicemen, police officers, etc. are somehow infallible, better observers, less prone to deceit or desire for attention, etc.

There is some intuitive merit to this, since we expect such people to be better trained and experienced in ways that improve their critical observation skills, reliability and overall knowledge of things that fly. But the fallacy arrives in two ways:

1) People are moved by the mysterious and not all things we observe can be readily explained. There are plausible explanations for many things which for which we cannot be 100% certain of. The reflection of light in the bedroom down the hall was probably headlights of a car since that window faces the road, but I didn’t actually see the car. I’m reasonably sure, it was a car, however. When I observe something that has no analog -nothing I can say with experience is a plausible cause- I’m left with a mystery. It would matter not how experienced a pilot I was, the first time I witnessed a parhelic circle or halo from above, reflected on clouds below, I’m going to wonder what it was.

2) People lie and seek attention, going to extremes in so doing. Even highly-trained, skilled, and experienced people of high stature lie. The story in the news last year about the astronaut that put on a diaper and drove from Florida to Texas to attempt the kidnapping of Colleen Shipman drives that point home well.

The Bentwaters case was discussed on the program. Briefly, two airmen allegedly encountered a “craft” one night and others, including a Colonel, joined a search the following night. The key things are that the fewest witnesses actually saw the alleged “craft” up close. Close enough to allegedly touch. That was the two airmen. The other witnesses, the following night, only saw some lights in the woods and a cleared space that was alleged to be the “landing site.” Nothing the witnesses described was inconsistent with a hoax by the two airmen. Nothing. There simply is no good reason to accept an extraordinary explanation when a very mundane, and probable explanation already exists that introduces the fewest new assumptions about what we know: the two airmen lied and possibly planned a hoax.

The rest of the program focused on “alien abductions” and the “Roswell incident.” Should I really bother with the rest?

Welcome to the 49th edition of the Four Stone Hearth, a blog carnival that specializes in anthropology in the widest (American) sense of that word. Here, anthropology is the study of humankind, throughout all times and places, focusing primarily on four lines of research:

• archaeology
• socio-cultural anthropology
• bio-physical anthropology
• linguistic anthropology

Each one of these subfields is a stone in our hearth.

I’ve hosted the FSH several times, but this will be the first time hosted at my new domain. If you haven’t noticed, A Hot Cup of Joe is no longer at Wordpress (or blogspot, if you remember my first home). Here’s this edition’s roundup of great blogging on Anthropology:

Aardvarchaeology
First up is Aardvarchaeology where Martin Rundkvist has a Book Review: Alsdorf, auf den Spuren. In this review, which is a fascinating read, Martin discusses Dietrich Alsdorf’s book, Auf den Spuren des “Elbe-Kommandos” Rammjäger (2001). The topic is the Sonderkommandos who flew German planes which the used to “hunt” (jäger is “hunter”) Allied bombers they would then ram into. Visit the link, read the review, and see how it all relates to archaeology!

Neuroanthropology
Next is a set of posts from all three of the bloggers at Neuroanthropology, a collaborative weblog that “encourage[s] exchanges among anthropology, philosophy, social theory, and the brain sciences.”

• Is Evolutionary Psychology Really Rational Choice Theory?, by Greg Downey
• Foxy Evolution, by Daniel Lende
• Learning Evolution, by Paul Mason

A Very Remote Period Indeed
The only other submission I received this edition was from Julien Riel-Salvatore titled, Surveying Surveys. Julien is back from the field and, we’re all happy to see, blogging again! His post this edition is a review of a set of three reports of separate archaeological sites of the same general period. What’s interesting is the methods each site employs to obtain knowledge of the past. Read how Julien compares and contrasts their methods and get some insight into the process of surveying a site.

A Hot Cup of Joe
I’m going to add my own submission since it was a short carnival. A few days ago I posted The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Reviewing and Ethnography. I typically write about archaeology, but I subscribe to the Binfordian view that archaeology is anthropology and it’s necessary to understand ethnography and cultural anthropology to truly reveal the Truth of past cultures. In this essay, I review Ruth Benedict’s famous ethnography as well as two other essays praising and criticizing her.

You’ve Been Stoned!
If your blog post falls under this list, its because I noticed it and thought it would fit well with this edition of the Four Stone Hearth. Hope you don’t mind the link love!

• Neanderthals, Brain Size and Maturation [Afarensis]
  Peopling Of The Americas: Eva de Naharon, A 13,600 Year Old Skeleton Found Near Tulum, Mexico [Anthropology.net]
• Ometepe Archaeological Project: Field Work in Focus [About.com:Archaeology]

That’s it for this edition of the Four Stone Hearth. If you’re an anthropology blogger and want to participate, see below. If you’re an anthropologist or a student of anthropology that doesn’t have your own blog but interested in sharing your thoughts in anthropology, drop me a line (cfeagans@ahotcupofjoe.com). I’m interested in having the occasional guest-blogger and it can be a one-time thing or regular.

The next Four Stone Hearth, #50, is in two weeks at Yann Klimentidis’s Weblog. See you there!

************************

Four Stone Hearth is published bi-weekly, Wednesdays in odd-number weeks. If you would like to host the carnival, please write to Martin Rundkvist.

If you would like to submit content to the next issue of the carnival, please write to the keeper of the blog in question or to Martin. You are encouraged to submit other bloggers’ work as well as your own.

The Four Stone Hearth is tomorrow and I’d like to have it posted on time, so if you have any late submissions please get them to me no later than 11pm CST to cfeagans@ahotcupofjoe.net

This is part of an on-going series dealing with the theft, sale, and trade of artifacts and archaeological finds that are abruptly removed from their contexts, destroying valuable data that can be gleaned and sold to the highest bidder for profit at the expense of ever improving our understanding of cultural heritage and history.

S. Heather Duncan, a reporter for Macon.com (Macon, GA) writes a fascinating article on the stolen artifacts market that suggests that the monetary gain of trafficking in illegal artifacts is significantly higher than even I would have thought.

She begins by describing the efforts of a a special investigator for the Georgia state Department of Natural Resources who was dealing in illegal goods. Initially, the investigation was about illegal wildlife products but it eventually encompassed guns and drugs then ancient human remains.

Duncan’s article is worth reading, particularly if you’ve never considered the impact looters have on cultural resources in the United States.

She discusses the legal issues of looting in the state of Georgia:

With written permission from the landowner, it’s legal to search for artifacts on private land in Georgia. But digging archaeological sites without permission, or on state and federal land, is illegal. On federal land, such as the Ocmulgee National Monument or Oconee National Forest, it can be prosecuted as a felony. And the penalties only get worse if burials are involved.

And a sidebar to the article goes into detail with regard to Georgia state and federal laws.

Another interesting part of her article reveals the damage looters have done to several mound sites in Georgia, including the nation’s only spiral mound, where looters have broken through fences and dug holes in the mounds to remove artifacts for subsequent sale.

Duncan cites Rick Kanaski, a regional archaeologist and historic preservation officer for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service who points out that there are three types of looters:

1. Solo diggers collecting for themselves
2. history buffs involved in larger trading networks, and
3. those involved in criminal networks, who may cash in artifacts for drug money

Apparently the third type is a significant player in the trade of stolen artifacts. “I can’t tell you how many calls I’ve gotten from sheriff’s departments asking why they find what they call ‘Indian rocks’ when they bust meth labs,” said Charles Louke of the Dept. of Homeland Security. This, it would seem, is why he claims stolen artifacts trade amounts to between $5-6 billion industry.

Further Reading:

Tomb raiding: illegal artifacts trafficking is a $5 billion to $6 billion business. [Macon.com]

The next edition of the Four Stone Hearth Blog Carnival will be hosted here at A Hot Cup of Joe on Sept. 10th, 2008. Please send your submissions to cfeagans@ahotcupofjoe.net by Tuesday, Sept. 9th.

The Fourth Stone Hearth is a blog carnival that specializes in anthropology in the widest (American) sense of that word. Here, anthropology is the study of humankind, throughout all times and places, focusing primarily on four lines of research:

• archaeology
• socio-cultural anthropology
• bio-physical anthropology
• linguistic anthropology

Each one of these subfields is a stone in our hearth.

As always, if you’re an blogger and would like to host the Four Stone Hearth, send an email to Martin Rundkvist.

You need not be a blogger that specializes in anthropology to host or participate, but the posts submitted should relate to some aspect of anthropology.

I recently had the pleasure of reading Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, an ethnography done in an experimental style just at the end of World War II in 1946. Benedict studied anthropology under Franz Boas and was the friend (and lover, I believe) of Margaret Mead. There’s plenty I could go one to say about Benedict, but I wanted to share my reflections of her book, Chrysanthemum, as well as an article written by anthropologist Sonia Ryang, Chrysanthemum’s Strange Life: Ruth Benedict in Postwar Japan, which is critical of Benedict. I’ll also briefly discuss an essay written by Barbara Babcock, which is appears as a book chapter in Women Writing Culture (1996), titled Not in the “Absolute Singular: Rereading Ruth Benedict”.

I’ve listed each of these at the bottom of this post for those interested.

Each of the readings dealt in some way on the nature of experimental ethnography. Benedict necessarily made use of it, perhaps due in part to her deafness, but primarily because the culture she was tasked with examining was an enemy state at the time she began collecting and analyzing data. She presented her conclusions in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword in a narrative well-suited for popular audiences and drew both criticisms and praises for her efforts, which seems, ironically, to parallel her characterization of “but also’s” mentioned on the book’s very first page.

According to Benedict, the Japanese were variously described as “unprecedentedly polite, but also insolent and overbearing.” They were “incomparably rigid in their behavior,” but also willing to adapt to new innovations. According to Ryang, Benedict’s Chrysanthemum was variously reviewed as admirable but also propaganda; “anthropologically valid” but also without “academic value.”

During my reading of Chrysanthemum, I found myself thinking skeptically of Benedict’s methods. How was she able to make the various conclusions she did based on documentary and literary materials and personal interviews of informants removed from the culture? Where these perceptions skewed by an occidental lens of examination and did Benedict rely, consciously or unconsciously, on data that supported her expectations, assigning other data to mere anomaly or ignoring it altogether? As an archaeologist, I tend to take a very empirical and positivist approach to data. Still, the experimental nature of Benedict’s approach to ethnography appealed to me and I found her narrative compelling.

While not entirely abandoning my skepticism, I eventually found myself siding with Benedict’s point of view, trusting her perspective and insight. I read Chrysanthemum with an intent to keep in mind the context of the its contemporary issues: the end of a brutal war with an enemy hated by many Americans; the understanding that Japan was, at that time, a surrendered nation -defeated by an enemy it swore to fight to the bitter end; and the reality that the Japanese people would need to rebuild and press on in a post-war world. I considered that Benedict wasn’t merely a disinterested and objective observer, but that she could also have been propagandizing a case for an Americanized or westernized post-war Japan. I also considered that Benedict was romanticizing Japanese culture, as there was no shortage of entertaining and interesting anecdotes, which related to some aspect of wartime Japan that was otherwise mysterious, alien, or otherwise unexplainable under western or occidental terms.

In spite of my natural skepticism, I couldn’t, however, see Ryang’s point of view with regard to Chrysanthemum. To me, Benedict was making an attempt to understand the beliefs, values, and culture of a nation that differs drastically from her own. To do this, she focused, in my mind, appropriately on gender, class and childhood rearing. As example, this passage seems to illustrate her intent:

The arc of life in Japan is plotted in opposite fashion to that in the United States. It is a great shallow U-curve with maximum freedom and indulgence allowed to babies and to the old. Restrictions are slowly increased after babyhood till having one’s own way reaches a low just before and after marriage. This low line continues many years during the prime of life, but the arc gradually ascends again until after the age of sixty men and women are almost as unhampered by shame as little children are. In the United States we stand this curve upside down. Firm disciplines are directed toward the infant and these are gradually relaxed as the child grows in strength until a man runs his own life when he gets a self-supporting job and when he sets up a household of his own. The prime of life is with us the high point of freedom and initiative. Restrictions begin to appear as men lose their grip or their energy or become dependent. It is difficult for Americans even to fantasy a life arranged according to the Japaneses pattern. It seems to us to fly in the face of reality.

Do you see both points of view?

Benedict acknowledges the differences between American and Japanese cultures with regard to child rearing, and, seemingly without judgment of which is better or worse, remarks on the difficulty Americans would have even imagining life as a Japanese. Perhaps a passage like the one above can be viewed in much the same way as the illusion of the vase which can also appear as two people facing one-another depending on the mental perspective of the observer.

Ryang certainly seems to see an aspect of the image Benedict illustrates that I do not since she notes at the outset of her paper and again later that her chief criticism is Benedict’s failure to acknowledge “Japan’s colonial and imperial history before 1945.” Had Benedict taken this approach, surely Chrysanthemum would have been a very different book: perhaps more history of a nation and less an ethnography of a culture. Ryang was also critical of Benedict for not discussing Japan’s need to acknowledge its former colonies or even pay them reparations. Again, such an economic or political discourse would seem outside the scope of what Benedict seemed interested in accomplishing. Moreover, one wonders what amount of insight, expertise, or understanding of Asiatic politics would have allowed Benedict to effectively or accurately comment on such matters when one considers Chrysanthemum published just a few scant months following the war’s end.

Babcock presents to the reader, through her work “Not in the Absolute Singular: Rereading Ruth Benedict” (written several years prior to Ryang’s), quite a different picture from Ryang of Benedict. Instead of the propagandizing member of a victorious nation, Babcock describes a Benedict that accepted Franz Boas’s emphasis on empiricism and scientific method in anthropology but also willing to apply a certain measure of abstraction to her data in order to make her ethnographies more palatable to the reader.

Throughout Chrysanthemum, Benedict cites Japanese literature and stories, often including passages to which she offers her own commentary to tie the work in with her conclusions. The stories, along with her distinctive literary style, serve to bring the narrative to life, give it interest, and present an ethnography in a way that it becomes accessible to the average reader and not just the academic. An example of Benedict’s use of Japanese literature is her retelling of the children’s story about Hachi, the cute dog.

Hachi is a cute dog. As soon as he was born he was taken away by a stranger and was loved like a child of the house. For that reason, even his weak body became healthy and when his master went to his work every morning, he would accompany him (master) to the street car station and in the evening around the time when he (master) came home, he went again up to the station to meet him.
In due time, the master passed away. Hachi, whether he knew of this or not, kept looking for his master every day. Going to the usual station he would look to see if his master was in the crowd of people who came out whenever the street car arrived.
In this way days and months passed by. One year passed, two years passed, three years passed, even when ten years had passed, the aged Hachi’s figure can be seen every day in front of the station, still looking for his master.

Benedict uses this story to document both the nature of on, which she refers to as a type of debt or obligation and to also point out that from the time they are children, Japanese are taught their places in the hierarchies of family and society. And it allows her to introduce the concept, as she saw it, of the Japanese obligation to the Emperor.

On is always used in this sense of limitless devotion when it is used of one’s first and greatest indebtedness, one’s ‘Imperial on.’ This is one’s debt to the Emperor, which one should receive with unfathomable gratitude.

This concept of on as a form of obligation or debt is a topic central to Benedict’s desire to demonstrate the hierarchical nature of Japanese society. Ryang comments on this point as she cites some of the sources she used, but, for me, it only served to provide an interesting question about on as a concept.

Folklorist Yanagita Kunio takes a similar line as Minami, although Yanagita is more detailed in counter-examples that are drawn from linguistic data. For example, Yanagita points out that the term on that plays a central part in Benedict’s understanding of hierarchical human relations in Japan is in fact not part of daily language in today’s Japan; the term originated in China. Yanagita suggests that Benedict misunderstood the term on used in state-engineered propaganda as a term used by ordinary people, another point that had already been made by Tsurumi, Kawashima, and Minami. He attributes the cause of Benedict’s misunderstanding to the false self-representation that the Japanese state disseminated to the world through prewar and wartime propaganda.

The questions Ryang’s point gives rise to is what then, truly becomes the significance of on? If the Japanese government borrowed this from China, when and why was it done? Was this accepted by the Japanese citizenry? If we accept that the cause is changed, is the effect still the same?

Other questions that came to mind during these readings had to do with empirical results and positivist approaches to obtaining data. I found that Babcock’s essay reinforced my trust in the information Benedict was providing through her ethnography. This was due mainly to the understanding of how she came to be an anthropologist studying under Franz Boas. I still found, however, that I wanted to know more about the data. What documents did Benedict use to gather information from? What data did she discard, ignore, or find to not useful in her research? What informants did she rely on? What were their backgrounds and qualifications as informants? What biases did the informants have?

Bibliography

Babcock, Barbara (1996). “Not in the Absolute Singular.” In Behar and Gordon (eds.) Women Writing Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Benedict, Ruth (1946). The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Boston: Houghton Mifflen.

Ryang, Sonia (2002). Chrysanthemum’s Strange Life: Ruth Benedict in Postwar Japan. Asian Anthropology. 1(1): 87-116

Wednesday, August 27, 2008 will mark the next edition of the Four Stone Hearth which will be hosted at Tangled Up in Blue Guy. This is his first time hosting the FSH, so give him your support and send some cool stuff.

The next slot was vacant, so I sent Martin an email volunteering for it. I figure that’ll be a good housewarming party for the new digs here at my own domain.

Hmmm…. I might just have a theme there….

Neanderthals probably weren't stupid

It has long been thought that one of the reason Homo sapiens eventually dominated the hominid line, colonizing Africa and Europe beginning at around 40,000 years ago and eradicating or out-competing the Neanderthals, was that they were technologically advantaged. The idea was that because H. sapiens had better stone tool technologies, they had the edge, so to speak, on their Neanderthal cousins who already occupied the lands H. sapiens were migrating into.

This sort of explanation, perhaps, is easily believed whether one wants to accept it or not since H. sapiens are us and we do, after all, have a not-so-proud history of simply taking the lands we need from those less advanced or capable.

The Dim-Witted Cave Man?

I ♥ My ♣

It’s also been a common preconception that Neanderthals = “cave men,” which carries the cultural connotation of being stupid or of diminished wit, bringing to mind the humorous television commercials produced by Geico and the thousands of magazine and newspaper cartoons over the years that depicted cave men in various antics, the most prevalent theme being, perhaps, clubbing a cave woman over the head and taking her home.

However, new information has come to light with a study published today in the Journal of Human Evolution in which researchers in experimental archaeology spent three years producing flakes, stone tools created through the process of flintknapping in which cores of stone are shaped through percussion and pressure to manufacture tools like blades, axes, scrapers, and points.

The production of three years worth of flakes and blades, the former used by Neanderthals and the latter by Homo sapiens, allowed the researchers to gather statistical data on the quantities of tools, amounts of produced cutting-edges, durability of cutting-edges, and efficiency of the tools. The empirical data allowed the researchers to conclude that the difference in stone tool technology used by the H. sapiens vs. the Neanderthals offered no technological advantage.

The lead author of the paper in the J. of Human Evolution, Metin Eren of the University of Exeter, remarked:

Our research disputes a major pillar holding up the long-held assumption that Homo sapiens were more advanced than Neanderthals. It is time for archaeologists to start searching for other reasons why Neanderthals became extinct while our ancestors survived. Technologically speaking, there is no clear advantage of one tool over the other. When we think of Neanderthals, we need to stop thinking in terms of ’stupid’ or ‘less advanced’ and more in terms of ‘different.’

The University of Exeter in the U.K. offers the only degree in Experimental Archaeology in the world. The other researchers on the project were from Southern Methodist University and Texas State University as well as the Think Computer Corporation.

I’ve been watching for the article, but it doesn’t seem to have made it to online publication just yet even though it’s slated for today. It’ll be interesting to see just what, specifically, the differences are between cutting edges of flakes versus blades.

Regardless, this sort of research is always great since it eliminates assumptions, which, when wrong, are bad since they lead archaologists down the wrong path. If blade technology wasn’t the clear advantage H. sapiens had over Neanderthals, then the question becomes, “what, then, caused the Neanderthals to go extinct and why were H. sapiens more adapted to deal it? Or could H. sapiens simply not have faced the same pressures at all?”