Script typology and print-capitalism

But these varied idiolects were capable of being assembled, within definite limits, into print-languages far fewer in number. The very arbitrariness of any system of signs for sounds facilitated the assembling process. (At the same time, the more ideographic the signs, the vaster the potential assembling zone. One can detect a sort of descending hierarchy here from algebra through Chinese and English, to the regular syllabaries of French or Indonesian.)

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2006), pp. 43-44

I’ve been rereading Anderson for the first time in at least a dozen years, and found this little gem which has bearing on much of the work I do (which requires that one replace ‘algebra’ – a technique – with ‘numerals’ – a representational system). Here he’s asserting that the process of standardization that accompanies the rise of capitalism and printing is most invasive where the script being printed is more ideographic rather than more phonetic. Numerals, being thoroughly trans-linguistic, should spread as widely as possible. One central argument of my forthcoming book holds that the present domination of Hindu-Arabic (Western) numerals is largely not a product of technological ‘natural selection’ but is dependent on a set of social processes accompanying the rise of the world-system in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

But I’m still dissatisfied with Anderson’s proposition, because it goes beyond his detailed consideration of early modern social, economic and technological processes (which he calls ‘print-capitalism’) and postulates a generalization (dare I say ‘law’) about the role of script type (and orthographic-phonetic correspondence) generally correlates with the tendency of script traditions to become standards across wide regions. This may be intuitive, and invites evidentiary justification, but is, as it stands, ‘not proven’ in the Scottish legal sense. As far as I know, no one has actually attempted to demonstrate Anderson’s proposition (which is, if not central to his thesis, certainly not incidental), but it is this sort of empirical work, unifying the technical study of writing systems with the sociopolitical interests near and dear to Anderson’s heart, and mine.

Review: Archaeoastronomy

Archaeoastronomy, the subdiscipline, is the study of the relationship between ancient material culture and ancient beliefs and behaviours with respect to phenomena in the sky. Archaeoastronomy, the blog, is the web presence of Ph.D candidate Alun Salt, who is a classical archaeoastronomer (Salt and Boutsikas 2005) and in my opinion, one of today’s finest public thinkers on matters related to ancient science. I’ve never met him nor even corresponded with him, but the Archaeoastronomy blog (in its various incarnations over the years) has been a regular source of interest for me for some time.

The trick about archaeoastronomy is that it is really an effort to reconstruct prehistoric cognition, which is a very tricky task given the limitations of the archaeological record. It is thus generally a part of the broader subfield of cognitive archaeology (Renfrew and Zubrow 1994) and cognitive anthropology (d’Andrade 1995), of which I consider myself to be a part. It is practically self-evident that the cross-cultural study of astronomy and the cross-cultural study of mathematics have much in common. The central issues of cognitive archaeology are epistemological in nature. How do we reliably obtain knowledge of ancient astronomical concepts given only the record of megalithic architecture, pictographic star-charts, and (if we are very fortunate) ancient (but easily misinterpreted) texts? And how do we, as fallible scientists, distinguish patterns that were meaningful to ancient peoples from the archaeological equivalent of Rorshach tests, patterns constructed by the archaeologist out of random noise? Establishing that the alignment of a particular archaeological feature with a particular astronomical event was intentional and meaningful is exceptionally difficult, which is one of the reasons why archaeoastronomy is more heavily burdened with pseudoscientific nonsense than practically any other endeavour.

This, I think, is why the Archaeoastronomy blog is so timely: it doesn’t retreat from this challenge, but instead helps the reader to see how the act of interpretation is fraught with peril, and yet it can be done. Alun Salt’s description of the field is perhaps the clearest I’ve ever read. Beyond this, it illustrates the political and social dimensions of interpretation in a field where attributing great works to one’s putative ancestors is part of keeping the public’s interest. And beyond that still, it’s a well-written and sometimes hilarious blog that neither sinks to the lowest common denominator nor appeals only to the specialist. It hasn’t been as active lately as one would like (something about finishing a dissertation, I hear …) but it is an extraordinary and fascinating resource.

Posts of interest
Monet the astronomer
The Antikythera Mechanism
Inspired by Nebra

Works cited
Aveni, A. F. 2001. Skywatchers. University of Texas Press.
D’Andrade, R. 1995. The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. Cambridge University Press.
Renfrew, C., and E. B. W. Zubrow. 1994. The Ancient Mind: Elements of Cognitive Archaeology. Cambridge University Press.
Salt, A., and E. Boutsikas. 2005. Knowing when to consult the oracle at Delphi. Antiquity 79, no. 305: 564-572.

Oard 2008: Re-entering an age of orality?

I’m in the middle of end-of-term panic, including two simultaneous job searches in my department and a harried effort to get my book manuscript off to the publisher, but I thought I’d pop my head up to mention a fascinating post by Mark at The Ideophone about a brief and ridiculous little note in Science from a couple of months ago that I should have seen at the time, but apparently didn’t. In it, Douglas Oard (2008) re-invents the well-worn argument that modern humans began as an oral species, made a great leap to literacy, and now with new media are returning to orality. This claim is related to the assertions of theorists in ‘media ecology’ such as Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Edmund Carpenter, Harold Innis, Jack Goody, David Olson, Jacques Derrida, Robert Logan, Julian Jaynes … oh, I could go on, but Oard’s doesn’t cite any of this expansive literature, which limits its utility as a study of changing ways of information storage – a very important subject in literacy studies. But all of this also reminds me of another post that I have been long overdue in making, and which I desperately hope to get to this weekend.

Works cited

Oard, Douglas W. 2008. Unlocking the Potential of the Spoken Word. Science 321, no. 5897 (September 26): 1787-1788.

What I’m reading

Sometimes you can learn so much about a book just from its front matter.

Public lecture: Montgomery McFate

The Institute for Information Technology and Culture (IITC) presents a continuation of
“This is Dangerous Territory: Social Research Out of Bounds”
with its final presenter:

Montgomery McFate, Ph.D., J. D.
Friday, December 12, at 4 p.m.

McGregor Memorial Conference Center
Wayne State University

Refreshments to follow the presentation.

Montgomery McFate is a cultural anthropologist who works on defense and national security issues and is currently the Senior Social Scientist for the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS). The U.S. Army developed HTS to study social groups, currently in Iraq and Afghanistan, by using anthropologists to provide military commanders with information about the population in order to help reduce military and civilian conflict. This lecture tries to put HTS in context, by describing the transformation that has occurred within the Department of Defense over the past few years, of which HTS is a small, but significant part.

To say that Dr. McFate is a controversial figure in anthropological circles would be a gross understatement, not only because of her current work but her past association with her mother’s security firm. The circumstances under which the HTS does its work in conjunction with direct military objectives raises enormous ethical issues, and I have grave misgivings about the way in which this sort of work has been done in the past and the present. Does she nonetheless deserve a hearing? Yes, of course: the sort of skeptical, rigorous attention to which any scholar’s work must be subjected. I am pleased that my institution will be hosting her talk, and I plan to be there.

Jargonicity, circa 1870

Source: http://wondermark.com/?p=2911

Preach it!

Doorworks 3: Paleolithic numerical marks

Lartet and Christy 1875: Pl. LXXV

As early as the 1860s, archaeologists began to realize that Paleolithic humans were very different from their modern counterparts. These Upper Paleolithic notched bone and antler artifacts from the Dordogne in France were identified by the archaeologist Rupert Jones as arithmetical notations, tallies, or calendars. Jones’ identification was speculative, based on their appearance alone, and many of these may just as plausibly be simply decorative marks. Later work on Paleolithic numeration and arithmetic has focused on experimental and cognitive approaches to these artifacts (Marshack 1972, d’Errico and Cacho 1994). How might you determine what their true function was?

Works Cited

d’Errico, Francesco and Carmen Cacho. 1994. Notation Versus Decoration In The Upper Paleolithic – A Case-Study From Tossal-De-La-Roca, Alicante, Spain. Journal Of Archaeological Science 21 (2): 185-200.
Lartet, Edouard and Henry Christy. 1875. Reliquiae Aquitanicae, being contributions to the archaeology and paleontology of the Périgord. Edited by Rupert Jones. London: Baillière.
Marshack, Alexander. 1972. The Roots of Civilization. New York: McGraw-Hill.

(See also: Paleolithic Notation Bibliography)