Truth, webcomic style

April 8, 2009 at 2:12 pm (Anthropology)

Today’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is more or less true. This is how I behave when faced with more or less any unusual behaviour, or, you know, anything. Ask me about all the stop signs I’ve run while driving over the past year, due to paying too close attention to the wear or vandalism. Or ask my extremely patient wife. I’m going to ignore all the various ethnocentrisms (though the skin tone of the characters is noteworthy), and instead wonder whether the reason the anthropologist is writing with his left hand is that he’s actually left-handed or because of the spear through his right shoulder.


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To grad or not to grad

March 27, 2009 at 8:44 pm (Academia, Anthropology)

There’s been a lot of handwringing lately among academics interested in the academic job market over the question of whether one should advise anyone to go to grad school in humanistic disciplines (presumably including the humanistic social sciences like anthropology). To be sure, the job market has been terrible for the past 40 years and this year’s offerings have been mediocre at best, as the financial crunch has (at minimum) decimated endowments and produced an extremely wary attitude among state legislators responsible for public funding. There have been a couple of rather mediocre, although not entirely wrong, articles in the New York Times of late, bemoaning the academic job market and the prospects for graduate students.

But I want to talk about a couple of articles entitled ‘Just Don’t Go’ by Thomas Benton, a regular columnist in the fantastic Chronicle of Higher Education Careers section, which are of interest to me because they are written by a working, tenured academic in the humanities (links here and here). Benton argues that the only honest thing for faculty to tell prospective graduate students in the humanities is not to go to grad school; the prospects are simply too dim, and the waste of effort and of human productivity so immense, that the best thing to do is to give blanket advice not to go. He knows, of course, that many (most?) students who receive this advice will still apply to grad school, because they are drawn to intellectual life.

It’s unsurprising that such advice would become more pertinent in a down job market, where grad school might seem like a safe haven to ride out the economic maelstrom. Benton nevertheless notes that this is not just about this year, but about a general trend in academic employment over many decades. He’s absolutely right: academic employment is sparse and not about to improve dramatically anytime soon, possibly ever. Many people who complete a PhD will never work full-time as tenure-track faculty. And so he is also quite right that discouragement is a rational strategy for faculty confronted with multiple students interested in pursuing the doctorate.

Nevertheless, I find it intellectually dishonest and generally unwise to advise interested students, ‘Don’t go to grad school’. First, because to do so would be the height of hypocrisy, and would be perceived by many as a statement that I (as someone who ‘made it’) don’t think that my students have what it takes to make it. Second, because I think that if you gave every student that advice, some students would take it who shouldn’t, and others wouldn’t who should, with the potential result that the next generation of scholars would consist of those too foolish not to listen to their professor’s good advice. Third, because telling someone anything is less desirable than giving them good information and allowing them to make their own decision.

I do think that there are far too many PhDs in anthropology, and indeed in most of the humanities and social sciences. At the very least, there are too many degree-holders on the job market in comparison to the number of jobs available. While the number of jobs available in academia fluctuates, in most disciplines it has increased modestly over the past 20 years, while the number of candidates has increased dramatically. This Malthusian logic dictates that one’s chances of getting a job are not that great.

The reality is that approximately 50% of PhD graduates in anthropology will eventually end up on the tenure track somewhere (most often within five years of obtaining the degree, after which your chances decrease as you are perceived rightly or wrongly as ‘damaged goods’). Another 25% will end up in professionally-appropriate positions in the public or private sector (this is particularly relevant for anthropologists, for which there are well-defined non-academic yet professional jobs), while the rest end up somewhere else – but very few end up unemployed altogether. Are these chances good enough for you?

They might be. Of course, up to 50% of people who start the degree do not finish, and so saying that 50% of PhDs will hold a tenure-track job eventually is incomplete, because it does not account for the many students who never finish the degree. Now, virtually no one admitted to a doctoral program ‘fails out’ in the sense that they lack the intellect to complete the degree. By far the most common reasons, in my experience, for people not finishing the PhD are a lack of money or a lack of motivation.

Motivation is not just about ‘having the will to persist’, although that’s important. It’s about developing a network of social relationships, especially with mentors but also with peers, that allow you to feel good about continuing in the program, to be intellectually rewarded and validated, and to remain on track. I was particularly blessed, as a student, to have some top-notch mentorship, but I regret to this day that my peer group was neither as large nor as close as I would have liked it to be. And I know plenty of people who had or have situations less congenial than mine, and who found themselves stranded without any meaningful support. This problem only gets worse if you are underfunded. The reality is that while persistence is the key, persistence can only be realistic when you have a lot of support. So I think it’s worth telling students to research programs as thoroughly as possible, and to find schools where they can plausibly work with multiple people.

Similarly, money really is central, and is one of the reasons why, even though I don’t advise students, “Don’t go to grad school” outright, I do advise them not to go to grad school if it means taking on substantial debt, and realistically, only to go where they have funding. For some students who can achieve admission to a top PhD program right out of a BA, or for others who can find a funded MA program, they are in good shape to move forward. For others, though, an MA means taking on tens of thousands of dollars of debt only to go into a PhD that may only be poorly or partially funded. To finish the PhD you may need to take on a lot of extra non-professional work or go even deeper in debt, possibly taking longer than your peers because of demands on your time. If you have sources of income to allow you to do an unfunded MA, more power to you.

And what happens when you’re done? For an indeterminate period, you will likely be underpaid and underemployed, while paying back student loans and trying to find a job. If I had had any substantial student debt at all, I simply could not have afforded to work in academia for the four years following the completion of my degree. I could not have supported my family, and I would have left the discipline, not out of a lack of ability, but simply out of a lack of funds to continue the search in a tight job market. And the market is ALWAYS tight.

Another factor influencing post-degree success on the market is institutional prestige. It is a sad fact that academic disciplines are, and always have been, hierarchical in a way that is rarely recognized by most undergraduates. To demonstrate this, you need only go to a faculty list from a department and see where the faculty got their PhDs. You will find that the vast majority of tenured and tenure-track faculty got their degrees from the top 50 or so institutions in the world (for that discipline), with the top 10-20 schools being very well represented indeed. Not coincidentally, these institutions have the highest degree of student financial support for PhDs (although not always the highest degree of emotional, psychological, and other forms of support). It may be true that only 50% of PhDs in humanistic disciplines ever hold TT jobs, but nevertheless, if you attended a high-ranked institution, your individual odds may be much better.

So, if you have the good fortune and ability to attend one of those programs, then you will find that your chances of employment after completion are very great. If not, well, your chances will be less. What’s more, you should prepare for the fact that even if you do get a PhD, you will probably work at a less prestigious institution than the one you graduated from. Everyone can think of exceptions, but that’s just what they are – exceptions to an overwhelming statistical probability. And because many smaller and less prestigious institutions don’t even have anthropology departments (as opposed to, say, biology or psychology), attending a less well-known institution can harm your opportunities for finding academic employment at all. Unfortunately, few departments provide detailed information about where their graduates end up after completion, and those with poor records have the least incentive to do so.

Now Benton wants to argue that the solution to this is to develop/train/find/invent/construct graduate students who do a PhD with no expectation of an academic career. And I think at some level it’s good advice to students that they need to prepare for the possibility of a non-academic career, not only psychologically but also in terms of the skills they obtain. This is particularly true in disciplines like anthropology which do have significant (although not always obvious) professional outlets where PhDs earn a decent living outside of academia.

But more to the point, I think that the sorts of people who should be considering graduate school are those for whom the actual process of going to grad school is enjoyable and rewarding for its own sake (despite its struggles). One thing I do tell my students is to ask themselves, “If I spend six years in grad school, even if I never get a job, will it still have been worth it?” If they can honestly answer yes, that the process of learning and intellectual exploration is worth it for its own sake, then they should do it; if not, then they shouldn’t. And again the money comes into play – if one has to go into massive debt to do it, then it’s certainly less likely to be worth it.

And even further, I worry that while Benton is right about the job market, and right about the need to inform students of the realities of the market, he’s asking more of academics than anyone would ask of other professionals. We don’t tell artists not to do art, and the chances of financial success as an artist are far, far dimmer than the prospects for an academic. We don’t tell baseball players not to try out for the minor leagues just because the chances of them ever playing major league ball are minuscule. (The baseball analogy is one that a friend of mine mentioned to me some years ago and that I have been using ever since to talk to non-academics about the model under which academic employment works.)

And finally, I despair that Benton, while laudably promoting the vision of the grad student who doesn’t have the least expectation of a tenure-track job and expects to work outside academia, unrealistically imagines a world where anybody cares about the PhD outside of academia. It is a sad reality that PhDs who work outside of their fields completely (not just outside academia, but outside any profession where their disciplinary training is relevant) often have to conceal the fact that they hold an advanced degree in order to find work – the PhD actually serves as a deterrent to employers. Without denying that there can be a role for a ‘public intellectual’, I do deny that there is room for public intellectuals who are divorced entirely from the academic world and its own peculiar economy. Benton is imagining a world that simply does not exist, never has existed, and for which no plausible means exists by which we might bring it into existence.

My feeling is that of course we should apprise our undergraduates that their chances of success are not 100% or perhaps not even 50%, and then we should take every possible step necessary to ensure that the best and brightest students who are going to go to grad school anyway, regardless of what we say, have the maximum chance possible to have the sort of productive career that we ourselves enjoy.

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Why is archaeology anthropology?

March 14, 2009 at 9:30 pm (Anthropology, Archaeology)

A recent post over at The Blogaeological Record, a new archaeology blog run by my former student Lars Anderson, has got me thinking about this crazy discipline of which I am a part. Lars has strong opinions, and is not afraid to state them, and is in the process of formulating his thoughts on anthropological archaeology in a public forum. So you should all head over there and welcome him to the community of anthropology bloggers.

In a recent set of posts, Lars has been talking about Kent Flannery’s now classic allegorical article, “The Golden Marshalltown” (Flannery 1982). Rereading this remarkable article for the first time in over a decade has got me thinking about some general issues in anthropology, in terms of the interaction of methods and theory, and the ‘proper’ relationship between archaeology and anthropology. In ‘Marshalltown’, Flannery, a renowned Mesoamerican archaeologist, invokes both empiricism and disciplinary holism as central to the survival of anthropology as a discipline, and of archaeological anthropology as a part of it.

The collection of more data (regardless of the source) is always a fundamental part of what we do as scholars. Flannery was writing against the tendency, always present in social science and sporadically in archaeology, to give pride of place to theoretical formulations ahead of basic day-to-day science. It’s not that he is anti-theory, but rather that he recognizes that theory without data is empty twaddle. For the archaeologist the gold-plating of his Marshalltown trowel in Flannery’s allegory is equivalent to the athlete hanging up his sneakers. While for the rest of us, there is nothing quite so symbolic, the idea that what we are doing as scholars is constantly asking new questions and finding data to help us answer them is persuasive. The notion that there can be such a thing as ‘just a theorist’ is abhorrent to me and should be to any social scientist, regardless of field.

The second criterion, disciplinary holism, is trickier to negotiate. Archaeology is a set of methods as well as an academic discipline, and those methods (survey and excavation foremost among them) can be employed in the service of many disciplines other than anthropology: medieval history, or classics, or Egyptology, etc. A well-known proverb among North American archaeologists, is that “archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing”. But in fact the original quotation from Philip Phillips was that “New World archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing.” (1955: 246-7), later revised to “American archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing.” (Willey and Phillips: 1958: 2).

In either form, this is an odd statement to make that just gets odder the more you think about it. It’s arguing that there is something fundamentally different about the New World that makes its study anthropological, whereas presumably some aspects of Old World archaeology can be anthropological, or not. But the criteria on which this is to be decided seem to me entirely arbitrary. In the latter form, it is giving a nod to different disciplinary practices in Europe, where cultural anthropology stands apart from archaeology. But to define a regional tradition of archaeological practice in this way is hopelessly parochial and essentialistic. It also raises all sorts of problems when anthropological concepts and units are used uncritically to analyze phenomena where the temporal or spatial scale does not permit such facile analogues. In a now-famous article, Martin Wobst (1978) notes that the ‘tyranny of the ethnographic record’ has led some archaeologists to mis-interpret aspects of the record of hunter-forager prehistory precisely because the units defined by ethnography have no direct relationship with material recovered archaeologically.

In ‘Marshalltown’, Flannery is, I think, not really concerned with this division – rather, he is concerned with the alternative perspective that ‘archaeology is archaeology is archaeology’ (Clarke 1968): that archaeological theories should not be dependent on insights from other disciplines. Flannery instead wants to insist on the robustness and utility of the anthropologically-derived culture concept for a vigorous anthropological archaeology. And I certainly have no beef with that (although if you talk to 100 anthropologists you will get at least 110 definitions of culture). But Flannery’s formulation is that of a New World and American archaeologist, and I think it is far too narrow.
I do not want to deny that the link between archaeology and anthropology is fundamental, and that the link must go both ways: social (and linguistic, and any other sort of) anthropology must learn from archaeology, and vice versa. The problem as I see it is that anthropology is not ambitious enough, and that both archaeology and cultural anthropology must conceptualize themselves as part of a broader human science if they are to remain useful. And in place of pronouncements about where archaeology fits within the Great Chain of Disciplinary Being, we ought to ask why certain formulations might (or might not be useful).

Throughout his career, my mentor Bruce Trigger worked tirelessly to bridge the gaps between Egyptology and anthropological archaeology, with some success, but ultimately most Egyptologists even today have little anthropological training, and when a few of them do make efforts to expose their work to anthropologists, they are received with some skepticism. Even though fundamental techniques like seriation and stratigraphy developed in Egyptological contexts, primarily through the work of scholars like Flinders Petrie, Egyptology remains distinct from archaeological anthropology, and to this day is part of ‘Near Eastern studies’, a historical/archaeological/literary discipline defined regionally, whereas Maya, Aztec, and Inka archaeology are linked to anthropology (as with the prehistoric archaeology of both the New and Old Worlds). This is methodologically unjustified, potentially ethnocentric, and theoretically timid (2).

An example: One of my favourite Egyptological papers is John Baines’ ‘Color terminology and color classification’ (Baines 1985), which is an attempt to integrate cognitive-anthropological work on colour terminology (e.g., Berlin and Kay 1969) with Egyptian art history. Published in American Anthropologist, it is also an effort to expose anthropologists to Egyptological work and to demonstrate that Egyptology is capable of being theoretically highly sophisticated. Baines points out that while the ancient Egyptian language has a paucity of colour words, the colour palette used in art has a greater variety of basic colours, and one that increases over time. Baines uses this to support the Berlin/Kay theory of a patterned development of colour terms along a universal framework while pointing out that there may not be a simple correspondence between the linguistic ‘palette’ and the artistic one. Because Egyptology has access to both linguistic (textual) and archaeological (art) evidence throughout several thousand years, it is possible to directly verify (and to complicate) an evolutionary sequence that can only be inferentially reconstructed using ethnography.

I should be clear that I don’t really blame archaeologists for any of this; to be treated (as it is by many cultural anthropologists) as a ‘kid brother’ subdiscipline that can at best borrow from other fields is a gross injustice. Virtually every archaeologist is expected to be at least moderately familiar with the techniques, theories, and concepts of cultural anthropology in North America, while the converse is not even remotely true except at a very few institutions. I am one of a small minority of non-archaeologists who has read and taught widely on archaeological subjects. I’m certainly not saying that everyone should have done what I did – for instance, it clearly hurt my career to be ‘hard to define’ subdisciplinarily. But I think that having people who are trained as generalists, as polymaths, and as interdisciplinary scholars even while maintaining a core disciplinary allegiance, can only be to the benefit of the human sciences, which are (or ought to be) hard to delineate in such clear ways.

I’m a synthesist by nature; I love finding hidden connections between fields of study that otherwise don’t have any obvious connection, like evolutionary anthropology and the history of mathematics, or Assyriology and developmental psychology, or (as with Baines) Egyptology and cognitive anthropology. I worry that by defining anthropology too narrowly as ‘ethnography’ or ‘ethnology’, archaeologists miss real opportunities for contributing to a broader framework of social and historical theory. No one is arguing that archaeologists should gild their Marshalltowns, but to define themselves methodologically rather than conceptually would be an even greater mistake. But even more importantly, anthropologists of all sorts are missing an opportunity to frame themselves as the holistic core of an integrated mosaic of human sciences.

Notes
(1) For those of you who may not know, Marshalltown is the largest and most prominent manufacturer of archaeological trowels, and is iconic among American archaeologists.
(2) The same is true to a greater or lesser extent of Assyriology, classics, Sinology, medieval history, and Indology, which conceptualize archaeology as part of history rather than as part of the cross-cultural enterprise currently exemplified by anthropological research.

Works Cited
Baines, J. 1985. Color terminology and color classification: Ancient Egyptian color terminology and polychromy. American Anthropologist 87: 282-297.
Berlin, B., and P. Kay. 1969. Basic color terms. University of California Press Berkeley.
Flannery, K. V. 1982. The golden Marshalltown: A parable for the archeology of the 1980s. American Anthropologist 84: 265-278.
Phillips, P. 1955. American archaeology and general anthropological theory. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 11: 246-250.
Willey, G.R. and P. Phillips. 1958. Method and Theory in American Archaeology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wobst, H. M. 1978. The archaeo-ethnology of hunter-gatherers or the tyranny of the ethnographic record in archaeology. American Antiquity: 303-309.

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Sciencing up the place

February 23, 2009 at 2:38 pm (Anthropology, Archaeology, Linguistics, Numerals)

I got back late Saturday from the SaSci/SCCR conference in Las Vegas, to be greeted in Detroit by several inches of new-fallen snow … oh joy! Although I hardly had the time or inclination to do any serious gambling while away, I did win modestly at the airport slots due to my flight being delayed for half an hour. My talk was sparsely attended but nonetheless well-received, and it looks like as a result of these discussions, I’ll be presenting next year at the same conference as part of a session on anthropology and numerical cognition (in other words, exactly my field). In general, discussions about methodology in cognitive anthropology have led me to think quite a bit about my upcoming work this summer working with Detroit middle school students and learning about mathematical concept formation. A real challenge in the anthropology of mathematics is that there aren’t very many anthropologists working on mathematics, and because mathematics is a weird sort of domain where referents are often abstract, our methodologies aren’t extremely well developed, as opposed to, say, the study of kinship terms or ethnobotanical knowledge. So I have been spending the past few days thinking a lot more seriously about elicitation tasks and what exactly a mathematics-oriented ethnographic interview ought to look like and how on earth I can/should apply any of the highly theoretical knowledge I have acquired to this very grounded situation. Of course, I won’t really have the slightest clue what I’m doing until I actually start doing it, and possibly not even then.

But more generally, and despite receiving other, unrelated good news while away, it’s hard to be back from this particular conference feeling unmitigatedly positive about my discipline and my particular orientation within it. I’ve always been an oddball (and usually proud of it) in that I refuse to define myself within the usual four-field subdisciplinary taxonomy (physical, archaeological, cultural, and linguistic anthropology) common for the past century. I just don’t see any point, insofar as most of what ought to distinguish archaeologists from cultural anthropologists (e.g.) is methodological rather than conceptual. But then inevitably we get caught up in what is versus what ought to be, and the ways in which methodologies affect all other aspects of our work, and then we end up yellling at one another instead of being productive.

On top of that, you add the division between anthropology-as-humanism and anthropology-as-science, where I lean rather heavily towards the latter perspective even though as a ‘labelled’ linguistic anthropologist most of my attributed subfield leans the other way. The Science Wars had enormous fissioning effects on anthropology, such that some departments actually split administratively between humanistic and scientific wings, but some of that fissioning exists at a subdisciplinary level as well: you would be hard-pressed to find a physical anthropologist who rejects the label ’scientist’, for instance. The Society for Anthropological Sciences is both a symptom of and a potential solution to these issues: it reflects a profound dissatisfaction with the humanistic bent of most cultural and linguistic anthropology, but at the same time by organizing itself in opposition to those trends, does little to convince any non-scientific anthropologists of the merits of the perspective.

For my part, I’m quite happy to use humanistic approaches when relevant, which is often. A lot of the empirical work underlying my forthcoming book, Numerical Notation: A Comparative History, examines the social, cultural, and political contexts under which particular numerical systems arose, spread, and declined. Lots of the work is essentially epigraphy as applied to numbers, and the scholars I relate to are linguists, historians, classicists, etc. In terms of much of my analysis, historians would surely recognize it as akin to what they do, even if, by the nature of the subject, it tends to underemphasize the individual personalities involved.

But I can’t escape the feeling that all this humanistic analysis acquires greater relevance when embedded in the broader search for patterns, and within anthropology the analysis of social processes and the comparison of social systems. I am thrilled that the structure of the book retains the basic structure of my dissertation, which has two separate analytical chapters, one cognitive, the other social, neither of which stands alone. But ultimately it is a comparative history, one which seeks to transcend the particular and get at something pan-human underlying it all. For an anthropologist today to admit to being a comparativist, outside of a very small number of venues, is like admitting you’re a cannibal, it seems sometimes. I do think I see some glimmers of hope that the field is becoming methodologically and theoretically more inclusive than when I was a grad student. I guess we’ll see, when the book is out, whether the reviewers agree.

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What happens in Vegas

February 18, 2009 at 4:08 pm (Anthropology, Evolution, Numerals)

In a couple of hours I’m off to Las Vegas for the 2009 Society for Anthropological Sciences conference, where I’m presenting a paper entitled, “Frequency dependent biases in the transmission of communication technologies”. If any of my readers are going to be there (unlikely though that may be), it’ll be … well, it will be more compelling than the abstract that follows below makes it seem:

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Frequency dependent biases in the transmission of communication technologies

Frequency dependent bias is a form of horizontal cultural transmission bias in which the frequency of a cultural trait influences the likelihood that others will adopt it. Previously seen as a unitary phenomenon, frequency dependence in fact consists of three separate types, each involving distinct decision-making processes and having different patterns of acceptance, retention, and abandonment. In particular, communication technologies, whose popularity determines their utility, exhibit unusual characteristics of cultural transmission. A brief case study from the phylogenetic history of written numerals demonstrates the usefulness of considering the different effects of frequency for the adoption of new communication technologies. More broadly, the prevalence of frequency dependent phenomena in various cultural evolutionary contexts suggests the need to evaluate decision-making processes more rigorously when evaluating the adoption and retention of cultural traits.

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I’ll try to put together something interesting in the way of a blog post while I’m away, provided I don’t get sucked in by the charms of the city. Catch you on the flipside!

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Happy Birthday, Mr. Darwin

February 12, 2009 at 9:53 am (Anthropology, Evolution, Linguistics)

As you probably know if you are reading this blog, today is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, FRS (1809 – 1882), probably the finest naturalist of his age and the originator of the theory of evolution by means of natural selection. In my evolutionary anthropology and history of anthropology classes I always start by asking how many people have heard of Darwin – of course every student raises their hand – and follow that up by asking how many of them have actually read Darwin, at which point the crickets start chirping. For the anthropologist, The Origin of Species isn’t especially interesting, given that Darwin only alludes to the probability of human evolution in the final pages of that expansive volume. For me, the more interesting text is The Descent of Man (1871), which neatly adumbrates virtually every significant debate in evolutionary anthropology, including many in linguistic anthropology. This is not to say that Darwin was always right, or that nothing has happened in the past 125 years. But he was asking the right questions, many of the same questions with which we still struggle, and I can think of no better tribute than to discuss his work in the context of those questions. I present a selection of quotations from the Project Gutenberg e-text of the 1874 second edition of the Descent, followed by questions and citations to recent literature dealing with these issues.

One can hardly doubt, that a man-like animal who possessed a hand and arm sufficiently perfect to throw a stone with precision, or to form a flint into a rude tool, could, with sufficient practice, as far as mechanical skill alone is concerned, make almost anything which a civilised man can make. The structure of the hand in this respect may be compared with that of the vocal organs, which in the apes are used for uttering various signal-cries, or, as in one genus, musical cadences; but in man the closely similar vocal organs have become adapted through the inherited effects of use for the utterance of articulate language.

- What is the relationship between tool manufacture and the use of language? (Stout et al. 2008)
- To what extent is ape vocalization a precursor to, or analogous to, human speech? (Arbib et al. 2008)

The formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel. But we can trace the formation of many words further back than that of species, for we can perceive how they actually arose from the imitation of various sounds. We find in distinct languages striking homologies due to community of descent, and analogies due to a similar process of formation. The manner in which certain letters or sounds change when others change is very like correlated growth. We have in both cases the reduplication of parts, the effects of long-continued use, and so forth.

Languages, like organic beings, can be classed in groups under groups; and they can be classed either naturally according to descent, or artificially by other characters. Dominant languages and dialects spread widely, and lead to the gradual extinction of other tongues. A language, like a species, when once extinct, never, as Sir C. Lyell remarks, reappears. The same language never has two birth-places. Distinct languages may be crossed or blended together.

- How closely can the analogy between linguistic and biological change be drawn? (Chater et al. 2009)
- To what extent is linguistic change phylogenetic? (Gray et al. 2009)
- Should language change and language death be seen as parallel to biological extinction? (Mufwene 2004)

From the fundamental differences between certain languages, some philologists have inferred that when man first became widely diffused, he was not a speaking animal; but it may be suspected that languages, far less perfect than any now spoken, aided by gestures, might have been used, and yet have left no traces on subsequent and more highly-developed tongues. Without the use of some language, however imperfect, it appears doubtful whether man’s intellect could have risen to the standard implied by his dominant position at an early period.

- What is the relationship between the evolution of language and the evolution of modern human cognitive capacities? (Coward and Gamble 2008)
- What is the nature and structure of ‘proto-language’? (Botha 2008)

With respect to perfection, the following illustration will best shew how easily we may err: a Crinoid sometimes consists of no less than 150,000 pieces of shell, all arranged with perfect symmetry in radiating lines; but a naturalist does not consider an animal of this kind as more perfect than a bilateral one with comparatively few parts, and with none of these parts alike, excepting on the opposite sides of the body. He justly considers the differentiation and specialisation of organs as the test of perfection. So with languages: the most symmetrical and complex ought not to be ranked above irregular, abbreviated, and bastardised languages, which have borrowed expressive words and useful forms of construction from various conquering, conquered, or immigrant races.

- Is it possible to classify languages according to principles of regularity or purity, and is it worthwhile to do so? (Hoffman 2008)
- What is the role of migration, warfare and cultural contact in understanding the evolution of languages? (Nichols 2008)

One can only imagine that Darwin would be pleased to see such active and interesting research being done so long after his own seminal efforts. Happy birthday, Mr. Darwin.

Works cited

Arbib, M. A., K. Liebal, S. Pika, M. C. Corballis, C. Knight, D. A. Leavens, D. Maestripieri, J. E. Tanner, M. A. Arbib, and K. Liebal. 2008. Primate Vocalization, Gesture, and the Evolution of Human Language. Current Anthropology 49, no. 6: 1053-1076.
Botha, R. 2008. Prehistoric shell beads as a window on language evolution. Language and Communication 28, no. 3: 197-212.
Chater, Nick, Florencia Reali, and Morten H. Christiansen. 2009. Restrictions on biological adaptation in language evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 4 (January 27): 1015-1020.
Coward, F., and C. Gamble. 2008. Big brains, small worlds: material culture and the evolution of the mind. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 363, no. 1499: 1969-1979.
Gray, R. D., A. J. Drummond, and S. J. Greenhill. 2009. Language Phylogenies Reveal Expansion Pulses and Pauses in Pacific Settlement. Science 323, no. 5913 (January 23): 479-483.
Hoffman, K. E. 2008. Purity and Contamination: Language Ideologies in French Colonial Native Policy in Morocco. Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 03: 724-752.
Mufwene, S. S. 2004. Language birth and death. Annual Review of Anthropology 33, no. 1: 201-222.
Nichols, Johanna. 2008. Language Spread Rates and Prehistoric American Migration Rates. Current Anthropology 49, no. 6 (December 1): 1109-1117.
Stout, D., N. Toth, K. Schick, and T. Chaminade. 2008. Neural correlates of Early Stone Age toolmaking: technology, language and cognition in human evolution. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 363, no. 1499: 1939-1949.

and of course …

Darwin, C. 1871. The Descent of Man. London: John Murray.

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Textbooks redux

February 2, 2009 at 7:17 pm (Academia, Anthropology)

Welcome to all the new readers who have arrived here from Savage Minds, where my anti-textbook rant was linked yesterday. For further (non-anthropological) evidence for my case, my wife has provided some choice gems from her graduate-level library science text. Prepare to be shocked.

In the spirit of immediate but generalized reciprocity, I should note that Savage Minds discusses a very interesting report on where PhDs in anthropology work five years or more after their degree. I was surprised at the high percentage (over 60%) who are in tenure-track jobs, given the new prevalence of non-academic (but still professional) work in the field. The report has more good news than bad for those thinking about an academic career. It’s worth noting, however, that anthropology PhDs who drop out of professional life entirely are unlikely to respond at high rates to such surveys, producing a significant potential source of bias.

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Textbooks, schmextbooks

January 27, 2009 at 10:54 pm (Academia, Anthropology)

Let me be forthright: I loathe the academic textbook industry. I loathe it with a fiery passion that burns in the depths of my soul. I loathe everything about it, and here’s why:

I actually care about pedagogy. My father was an educator and somewhere along the line I picked up the astonishing notion that a teacher ought to engage students and demand that they work to improve their thinking. This morning I was in a meeting and a colleague remarked to me that he didn’t understand how anyone needed time to prepare for lectures; after all, you prepare the course once and then just teach it over and over again! I just stood there, blinking, unsure whether I had really heard what I had just heard. You see, I’m a damn good teacher – it’s probably the thing I’m the best at, of all the things I do, and I’m a damn good researcher and administrator too – and I actually give a damn about my students, and their lives, and whether I am serving them well with the course material I am presenting. Pretty much every course I run these days has both a knowledge component and a skills component (particularly writing, but also bibliographic research, critical thinking, reading, quantitative methods … you get the idea). And I think that the most valuable thing I can do, as a professor mentoring junior scholars (whether grad students or undergrads) is to model academic behaviour for them: to show them how we reason, how we work, and how we interact with one another.

And so, yeah, textbooks. I get the temptation. Pick one book that covers some body of material in enormous detail, go through it chapter by chapter, structure your course to follow the book. You don’t need to be an expert on every part of the field, because the text will cover recent developments of importance for you, and as long as you can keep a chapter or two ahead of the class, you’re set. If you’re especially lazy, you can use the instructional CD that came with the instructor’s copy to develop quizzes and exam questions. But my only relationship with the academic textbook industry these days is to sellers whatever copies may end up in my hands to the various book buyers who troll the hallowed halls of Wayne.

It’s not the price that bugs me about textbooks, or not primarily. I can easily see assigning six or eight ethnographies in a graduate seminar, which could easily put you at $200 or more. I’ll admit part of it is a value thing: I find that textbooks are so overpriced as books, that you’re shelling out $100 or more for a glossy book with a CD insert (usually) that you’re never going to use and that isn’t a classic, and that isn’t even going to be resellable for anything like its original price, since they’re just going to come out with a new edition next year anyway, rendering the old one obsolete. But the money is only the beginning.

My wife, who is studying library science, currently has the misfortune to have been assigned what I can only describe as the most inane textbook I have ever read. It’s as if the authors were being paid by the cliché. It seems also that they failed to employ the services of even a modestly competent fact-checker, instead relegating that task to some sort of small nocturnal goblin. The intended audience for this pathetic text cannot possibly have been students in a graduate professional program. I suppose I should count my blessings that it only cost $60 for a softbound 250-page text.

In the vast majority of my classes over the past few years, I use only PDF articles, downloadable for free at my institution and most others. Why on earth would I ask students to pay money for a textbook when a better option is available at no cost (or rather, embedded in the tuition they have already paid)? Not only that, but using PDFs allows me to be much more flexible in planning my course, and changing it midstream if I so desire. I do use books (but not textbooks, you see): in Evolutionary Anthropology, they read Darwin’s The Descent of Man; in Methods, they read On Bullshit and How to Lie with Statistics (yeah, good times). But I see these basically as ‘big articles’, and I assign them because they are meant to challenge, rather than to inform.

When it comes down to it, what bugs me most about textbooks is that they are designed to convey information efficiently to students. Because I don’t want my students to idly absorb some set of facts presented just so, cookie-cutter format, because I don’t think they learn anything that way. I don’t want them to look at the discussion questions at the end of a chapter; I want them to think up their own discussion questions. I want to give them academic articles that are intended for professional anthropologists, and see what they make of them. I want to make them think about why an argument was constructed this way, rather than that way. I want them to read articles from 40 years ago, and think about the historical context of the information they are working with – that last phrase is carefully chosen. I want them to learn the skill of wrestling with information for which they are not the intended or immediate audience. And when they’re done, I want them to be better anthropologists for having done it.

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An unshort answer to an unsimple question

January 26, 2009 at 7:30 pm (Anthropology, Linguistics, Literacy and writing, Numerals)

I have not been as diligent as I should have been in completing a post that I’ve been thinking about for well over a month now. As her prize for successfully deciphering the unusual Wayne StatE UniversitY public inscription I posted back in September, my colleague Katherine Tong earned the right to ask a question relating to the subjects of this blog. Katherine asked me a question that is seemingly simple and yet highly complex. She would like me to address the question of in what ways computers (or by extension, other technologies) may have affected the way we use language. In particular she would like to know whether the morpheme ‘un-’ has become more common (and more productive linguistically) since the advent of information technologies that allow operations to be readily reversed. I’ll deal with the broad issue first, followed by the more specific one.

This topic is broadly part of media ecology, whose anthropological proponents include such luminaries as Edmund Carpenter and Jack Goody, but which is better known through the work of people like the Canadian public intellectual Marshall McLuhan (Carpenter 1973, Goody 1977, McLuhan 1962). I was first introduced to these ideas through my teacher Christopher Hallpike at McMaster in the mid-90s, expanded my knowledge of them during my Ph.D. under Bruce Trigger (Trigger 1976), who was influenced by ‘Toronto School’ thinkers like Harold Innis in the 1950s, and most recently was influenced by the work of the developmental social psychologist of literacy, David Olson (Olson 1994).

The Media Ecology Association website defines the field as ‘the idea that technology and techniques, modes of information and codes of communication play a leading role in human affairs’ (http://www.media-ecology.org). In this fairly broad conception, virtually every social scientist is a media ecologist. More narrowly construed, it is the idea that differences in the way that information is represented and communicated affect our perception and cognition of that information. It ranges from studies of Paleolithic art to text messaging – very broad, nonetheless.

Now, Katherine is asking about the effects of information technology and media on language, and this is a tricky issue. Perhaps the trickiest of all is establishing any sort of causality. How do we know, for instance, that any particular linguistic change is the direct result of a change in medium? But beyond that, there is the question of what non-trivial effects media have on language. There are obvious changes, such as the introduction of new lexical items: blog, spam, blogspam, blogosphere, Internet, web, intarwebs … the list could of course be expanded virtually indefinitely, without telling us very much about how people categorize and perceive the world. But I’m a cognitive anthropologist, so establishing meaningful links between language and non-linguistic behaviour is what I’m really interested in. So what about it?

So let’s look at ‘un-’. One of the fascinating things about this morpheme is that it was actually more heavily used in Old English (prior to the Norman Conquest) than after. The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that “the number of un- words recorded in OE [Old English] is about 1250, of which barely an eighth part survived beyond the OE period.” This reduction came about as many of the artificial constructions attested in Anglo-Saxon poetry ceased to be used, words which would never have been used in everyday usage but which were coined for specific metrical purposes. This is media ecology par excellence: the medium (poetic oral presentation) influenced output, and when the medium disappears, so do the linguistic forms.

One of the odd things about ‘un-’ words is that a number of Anglo-Saxon negations survive even where the positive versions of the word have disappeared. Michael Quinion, author of the brilliant site / e-newsletter World Wide Words, has a fascinating article on ‘unpaired words’ such as unwieldy, unruly, and disgruntled, all of which formerly had positive counterparts, but which have now disappeared. But what’s important to note here is that the loss of these terms was not predictable from any sort of social or technological change, and that despite these gaps in our lexicon, we seem to get along quite fine with synonyms, or with multi-word phrases.

Important for this discussion is the word *uncleftish, which doesn’t exist, and never existed until the publication of ‘Uncleftish Beholding‘, science fiction author Poul Anderson’s fascinating account of atomic theory using only words and morphemes of Anglo-Saxon origin. Despite the fact that chemical jargon is filled with Greek and Latin terminology, it is possible (though not simple) to construct an understandable discussion of atomic theory using words like ‘uncleftish’ for ‘atomic’ (both mean ‘indivisible’). I’ve used this essay to get students to think about how language affects thought (linguistic relativity), most recently on my devilishly fiendish Language and Culture take-home exam last term, but also in my Evolutionary Anthropology class at McGill. It’s worth noting though that while you don’t need the word atomic to express the concept of indivisibility, nor indeed any Greek or Latin roots whatsoever, Anderson does need to coin uncleftish out of three existing morphemes, un-, -cleft-, and -ish.

The most famous ‘un-’ neologism is the Orwellian ‘ungood’, a classic example of the form of linguistic relativity known as doublethink. “If you have a word like ‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well – better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not.” (Orwell 1949: 53). Pace Orwell, ungood has a long history in English, going back to Old English and attested sporadically thereafter right up until Orwell’s writing, at which time, of course, the word took on a far more sinister meaning, and acquired a very different connotation.

But despite the obvious media-ecological implications of the quotation, there is no reason why ‘ungood’ requires a cognitive gap of ‘bad’, or that the absence of the word ‘bad’ has any cognitive implications whatsoever. I’m a humanist of generally left-ish political persuasion, and a great admirer of Orwell’s novels and short fiction, but his essay, ‘Politics and the English Language‘ (Orwell 1950) is not one of his best pieces of thinking, and falls prey to this sort of muddle-headed thinking, equating the products of thought (in this case, written language) with the thoughts themselves. This is a form of linguistic relativity to which few if any linguists or anthropologists subscribe. I criticize this view in my short little humorous article, ‘The perils of pseudo-Orwellianism’ (Chrisomalis 2007); without denying that good writing is easier to understand than poor writing, it simply isn’t sustainable that the use of jargon, or buzzwords, or neologisms, or clumsy phrasing, inexorably leads to laxity of thought, or to particular political positions. The literature in the use of metaphor in linguistics is less reductionist, and far more sophisticated, than Orwell’s pronouncements, and requires that we understand, cognitively, exactly how words are used by human beings (e.g., Lakoff 1987). Shocking, I know.

In fact, there’s pretty good evidence for non-linguistic concept formation, which means that we have access to cognitive resources other than language to allow us to sidestep or ignore the cognitive frameworks that our particular language(s) might encourage. From my own narrow research perspective, I’m fascinated by the differences between linguistic and non-linguistic representations of number, with the implication that there are structured patterns of thought which follow from the use of particular graphic numerical systems, regardless of the structure of the number words of its users’ languages. Numerical notation is a visual technology for communicating numerical information: does it matter that we write 238 instead of CCXXXVIII? And if so, how so? In a couple of weeks I’m going to be giving a talk here at Wayne where, in part, I discuss the effects of the Western (Hindu-Arabic) numerals on the grammar of English numeral words, using telephone numbers as an example domain. For instance, if your phone number is 639-4625, you most likely pronounce it ’six-three-nine-four-six-two-five’, and certainly not ’six hundred and thirty nine, four thousand six hundred and twenty-five’. For a user of Roman numerals, the pronunciation of digits as distinct lexemes would be nonsensical, but for users of Western numerals, this is commonplace.

But now we are back to the effects of technology on language. I do think there are effects, but specifying where and when those effects will occur is tremendously complex, domain-specific, and (unfortunately) not predictable in any obvious way. Some people do in fact say ‘LOL’ and the verb ‘to lol’ may actually be achieving some currency; this of course is an acronym derived from ‘laugh(ing) out loud’ and emerged from online communication. LOL exists as a social lubricant, mediating online text-based communication in a medium that denies its participants the ability to see each others’ expressions and other nonverbal cues. But could we have *predicted* that LOL would emerge? I don’t think so. (Incidentally, I just used asterisks to indicate emphasis on ‘predicted’ – another media-ecological effect on language. In a Facebook chat conversation with a friend last week, she inquired about this usage, which was non-standard for her, but to me, indicates stress WITHOUT QUITE RISING TO THE LEVEL OF YELLING, WHICH REQUIRES ALL CAPS). Having both these tools in my repertoire of online communication techniques – as well as the emoticon :o – gives me choices that wouldn’t otherwise be available.

You may have noted my use of the term ‘intarweb’, which emerged out of Usenet newsgroups in the early 90s as a means of gently mocking the ‘noobs’ – the new users of the Internet whose mastery of online lingo was sub-par and indeed mock-worthy. Of course, people have been blending words for as long as there have been words, probably, but this particular coinage reflected a particular moment in the history of electronic technology, in which terms like ‘internet’, ‘web’, ‘online’, ‘e-’ ‘Information Superhighway’, and ‘Information Age’ (cue laughter from those of my readers in on a particular inside joke) were well-known in the public sphere but where knowledge of how to deploy these terms was less well-developed. But again, we can explain this phenomenon only in historical and sociocultural terms, rather than as a known effect of the new technology itself.

This is why, in my opinion, media ecology is most profitably practiced today through linguistic anthropology, which has as its central goal the comparative study of patterns of relationships between communication and culture. If we ever hope to get beyond the recitation of media-ecological anecdotes, we need a comparative framework within which to examine similarities and differences among communicative situations. Of course, I’m talking about a linguistic anthropology informed by biological and cognitive constraints on human communicative capacities, and which includes archaeological and historical as well as ethnographic data as its sources. But only if we make this endeavour will we truly be able to answer Katherine’s unassuming and unfoolish question.

Works cited
Carpenter, E. S. 1973. Oh, what a blow that phantom gave me! Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Chrisomalis, S. 2007. The perils of pseudo-Orwellianism. Antiquity 81: 204-207.
Goody, J. 1977. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge University Press.
Lakoff, G. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. University of Chicago Press.
McLuhan, M. 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. University of Toronto Press.
Olson, D. R. 1994. The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge University Press.
Orwell, George. 1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four. A novel. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.
Orwell, George. 1950. Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays. London: Secker & Warburg.
Trigger, B. G. 1976. Inequality and Communication in Early Civilizations. Anthropologica 18.

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Oard 2008: Re-entering an age of orality?

December 10, 2008 at 10:15 am (Anthropology, Literacy and writing)

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.

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