What is anthropology about?
- Details
- Rita Astuti
- Tuesday, 01 March 2011
- Blog Rita's blog
In a comment just appeared in Nature Adam Kuper and Jonathan Marks give a brief account of how it happened that anthropologists have lost the ability to agree on what their discipline is about – a fact that they regard as much more shocking than the recent elision of the word science from the AAA mission statement (as discussed in the ICCI blog). Kuper and Marks argue that interdisciplinary research across the biological-cum-evolutionary-cum-cognitive and the cultural-cum-social-cum-interpretative divide is imperative, but they also warn against easy short cuts, such as “parachuting into the jungle somewhere to do a few psychological experiments with the help of bemused local interpreters, or garnishing generalizations with a few worn and disputed snippets about the exotic customs and practices.”
On essentialism
- Details
- Rita Astuti
- Sunday, 03 August 2008
- Blog Rita's blog
In a letter in the July issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Paul Bloom and Susan Gelman recount the selection procedures used to identify the 14th Dalai Lama. The then 2-year old boy was presented with objects that had belonged to the 13th Dalai Lama together with inauthentic items that were either very similar or identical to the authentic ones. When the boy succesfully and with no hesitation chose the authentic ones, he was chosen to be the 14th Dalai Lama. Bloom and Gelman present this story as cross-cultural evidence of the existence of essentialist beliefs: for the Tibetan bureaucrats that devised the selection procedure, the objects that belonged to the 13th Dalai Lama had come to possess an invisible essence that could only be discerned by the special powers of the 14th Dalai Lama. I wonder, however, whether this story really illustrates the belief in the existence of invisible essences in the objects presented to the little boy, or whether it illustrates the belief in the essential identity of the person of the Dalai Lama in his 1st, 2nd, 3rd... 13th and 14th manifestation.
Another possible alternative explanation for IFT
What's wrong with "intentional stance"?
Possible alternative explanation for IFT
Crushing a dispute with a smile (ahem, a bared-teeth display)
Impartial intervention, or pragmatic intervention?
Not fairness, not mutual interest ... cognitive dissonance maybe
A couple of references
Emotions as regulators of social behavior
Women are not allowed by social group to own their bodies
"Rigtheous" women and "promiscuous" men