Spiritual "reconstruction"
Hi Goesh,
Quote:
Originally Posted by
goesh
It would be interesting to see some longitudinal studies on the duration of the conversion to non-violent conflict resolution techniques in their personal and collective lives.
I agree, it would be interesting. Theatre, and especially "religious" or "ritual" theatre, has an interesting history in large parts of Africa as a form of dealing with political conflict.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
goesh
Implicit in my concept of conversion is the assumption of a desire to not again take up arms for a cause once having been able to recapture parts of their lost childhood and times of normalacy.
Hmmm, certainly something to test out. Honestly, though, I doubt that there is so much a desire to not take up arms again as there is to "place" the experiences within a coherent and comprehensible framework. In many ways, the very action of "conversion" may increase the likelihood of taking up arms, depending on the symbol system used to comprehend the original events.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
goesh
Spirituality may or may not be shown to be as decisive a factor in all of this as say a decent job and peaceful communities in which to reside. Fat bellies and steady paychecks can go a long ways you know and I am not denigrating anything ritually spiritual that can and does assist in this process. However, having known a number of old WW2 Vets who after all the years of living the 'good life' still had regular nightmares, suffice it to say PTSD from combat is a strange psychological beast that is really not understood to this day.
It's an interesting problem that, I believe, works both ways: a lack of food and security motivated many of the Palestinian terrorist groups and, today, many of the al-Qaida people are recruited from middle class families because of a "spiritual poverty". On the PTSD issue, I agree. You might want to take a look at some of the work by WHR Rivers from WW I - he had some interesting takes on PTSD back when it was first being diagnosed as Shell Shock.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
goesh
With regards to the Sierra Leone kids you mention, we can quite possibly thank Executive Outcomes for the quick disruption that has set them hopefully on a better path - at least for the boys that were up in the diamond fields if Singer's assertions are correct. It would be an interesting Academic aside to see if and how many of the boys most into theatre-as-salvation were actually up in the diamond fields when EO hit that area and freed it in record time.
I certainly agree with that! EO did a really good job in Sierra Leone. And you are righyt, it would be interesting to find out. I'll try t remember to email the author and see if she knows.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
goesh
Easy come, easy go as they say and the ol' Bible or ju-ju IMHO may or may not recapture lost youth as easily as we may desire, particularily in volatile 3rd world environments. If in looking at the mau-maus for instance, we see spirituality played a crucial role in working the lads up for some real butchery, the correlative opposite of what is happening in Sierra Leone with these kids.
Certainly. Ritual is really about changes in perception more than anything else, and those changes can lead in any number of directions.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
goesh
It is gratifying to see Academics such as yourself having a genuine interest and making contributions to things Military and Security related when so many of your peers eschew said vital matters. Good day to you, sir.
Thank you, sir. As to my peers and their opinions, well you are, unfortunately, correct.
Marc
Comments on Marc T's article in Vol 7
If you haven't read Marc's article in the new issue of the magazine, I recommend it to you all. As a political scientist with enough courses for a graduate minor in anthropology, I learned much. Marc develops the theme of conflict between card carrying anthropologists and the "military" in a way that demands a dialogue - although how you have a dialogue with those who do not want to talk to you, I don't know.
The only quarrel I have with Marc is regarding his comments on Project Camelot - a study of political instability in Latin America in the 1960s sponsored by the US Army and conducted by the Special Operations Research Office at American University. The lead investigator was a political scientist, not an anthropologist. My quarrel, then, is that by confining the discussion to anthropolgy Marc doesn't show that the problem extends to nearly all the social sciences to a greater or lesser extent.
I would close these comments on two humorous notes:
1. Some have said that the last refuge for Marxist-Leninists is the American university.
2. Several years ago, a retired Army Col and FAO at the Army War College, Don Boose, created what he called the Malinowski Cultural Sensitivity Award. It was based on the fact that cultural anthropoligist Bronislaw Malinowski's 1930s studies of the Trobriand Islanders were marvels of cultural sensitivity. However, when his field notes surfaced some 30 years later in the 1960s, they were scathing and scatological comments on the customs and culture of those same people. In recognition of this human failing Don created the award to be given to that individual who, despite knowing better, makes a truly stupid and culturally insensitive remark. Needless to say, the majority of the recipients have been Army FAOs!
Savage Minds and Silent Lambs
Dr. Tyrrell referenced the Savage Minds blog. I browsed and read for a couple of months from Savage Minds about a year ago and I remember thinking to myself, "there is a fair amount of morality being injected here." I find the cited comments by Paul McDowell and Gerald Sider to be somewhat alarming, beyond disconcerting. I can't help but wonder what in their heart-of-hearts McDowell and Sider would truly have to say about the tactics of ELF and PETA for instance, in light of their blatant efforts to politicize their Discipline(s). Indeed! "We're trying to do something against mealy-mouthed policies that don't hold responsible those scum with Ph.D.'s who stand beside torturers" (Gerald Sider) This is the language of disciplined, objective, professional science and highly paid Academics? It sounds more Marxist avant-garde.
McDowell bemoans the poor, exploited Natives with this bitter polemic cited by Dr. Tyrrell:"Like the Government and its military, corporations don't give a rat's posterior about so-called target populations." Fine, but where was his voice and the voices of others like him when the poor Natives were being exploited by the likes of Ward Chruchill out of the Universtiy of Colorado? Here was a Prof. on the fast tenure track who not only fabricated and misrepresented information on Native Americans, he also plagarized and misrepresented himself as being an Indian. Boas wouldn't like that now would he? What I call the silence of the lambs on not only the part of Anthropologists but Academics in general over this fiasco and unprofessional product associated with a male bovine's posterior, can be directly attributed to the politicizing of Academia. In short, Ward Churchill was blatantly anti-American, anti-Government and a Bush hater, which is all that saved him from being publically and vigorously castigated. In fact, some universities, like Wisconsin, paid him to come and give a presentation. Talk about savage minds, Churchill actually had the audacity to claim heritage from a couple of different tribes and to this day, I am not aware of any outrage expressed over this from the Academic community. A number of Native Americans have spoken out over this of course but one would have expected at least some outrage coming from the Anthropology camp.
Post-modernism and other psychoses
Hi Steve,
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Steve Blair
We see this in history as well, Marc, especially with the rise of the post-modernist mafia.
"Mafia" - a good description :wry:. Personally, being an individualist, I've always tended to refer to the extreme post-modernist crowd as suffering from Post Modernist Syndrome (PMS); a psychological syndrome characterized by occasional outbreaks of ego-maniacal paranoia, irrational assaults, and the adoption of psychotic forms of reality occasionally accompanied by command hallucinations (e.g. "Foucault has said that...") .
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Steve Blair
I actually had an article come back with "feedback" saying that I wasn't telling enough of the Native American perspective. The article, by the way, was an analysis of the operation patterns of a cavalry regiment. It had more to do with where companies were stationed and their patterns of activity as opposed to any sort of battle history. In fact, there really was no Native American side to show.
I've had the same thing happen, both from the PMS crowd and from Marxist-Leninist true believers. What always bothered me about the Anthro PMS crowd was their habit of disregarding anything pre-Geertz (~1970). Their rejection of the older works in the discipline didn't come from actually reading them but, rather, from the assumption that they were flawed. Certainly some of them were, but their automatic rejection of all works that didn't meet their "purity laws" meant that they also neglected all of the insights available. Since this included all of the core philosophical assumptions behind the post-modernist movement, many of which had been in Anthro from the 1920's, I was frequently left feeling that the pomos were acting like people who, having just reinvented the wheel, were trying to prove to the world that they were the first to come up with it :rolleyes:.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Steve Blair
On the other hand, I've seen plenty of articles dealing with the Frontier Army period that will dismiss the Army out of hand and go on to focus on the NA perspective or some such. I like balance in my history, but when you start seeing forced "perspective" then I get a little touchy...:wry:
Too true! I have no problems with biases since they are inevitable. Still and all, I think that biases should be stated - e.g. "This article is concerned with cavalry tactics" - or an attempt should be made to present all sides involved. A forced perspective, and maybe we should translate that as a PC perspective that valorizes "victims", is a travesty that, to my mind, erodes core scientific values. As you can tell, I get a bit "touchy" as well :D.
Marc
Maslow Today - What was he on ?
My Psychology professor on our first day circa 1982: "According to Maslow, an individual is ready to act upon the growth needs if and only if the deficiency needs are met. The biggest human tragedy is that most people simply do what they are told."
He continued: "This form of reduced maturity is dangerous when coupled with authoritarianism and dominance, as we have learned from Saddam, Hitler, and others."
Marc, does Maslow have a point in this thread ?
Of grooves, manifolds and things that go bump in the night
Hi 120mm,
Quote:
Originally Posted by
120mm
Dalmas, like a few other Science Fiction writers, only write "fiction" because the money is better and you don't have to be as diligent with your references, imho.
Could well be, I don't know the man, although I would love to sit down and drink a couple of pints with him.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
120mm
I'm also a big fan of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". I especially like Pirsig's attack on The Dialogs. It also explains why I distrust "metrics" and people who need them in order to function. I implicitly trust "The Groove" and "Gut Feelings". I suppose if you broke it down, you could demonstrate, in tangible terms, how "The Groove" works. As in the Combat Tracking thread, Tracking is just Terrain Forensics and could be demonstrated scientifically, but would that be a worthwhile expenditure of time and effort?
Actually, it's already been done by psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow. For Csikszentmihalyi, being "in the groove" is a balance between skill and challenge in a particular "game field" (i.e. a bounded, rule ordered set of tasks with clear win-lose settings). I've used his work to explain how certain types of ritual activity effect behaviour patterns such as looking for work.
One of the things I have been interested in doing is looking at the relationship between Flow states and basic forms of social relationships. I haven't had the chance to put that down on paper yet, though <sigh>.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
120mm
Which brings us to Marc's continual hinting about Anthro's pathological fear of mathematics. I have been dying to hear some examples of how one could apply math into Anthropology. Oddly enough, though I trust my "Gut", I see Mathematics as the highest form of Science. On one hand, it is a powerful tool to demonstrate reality. On the other, it is a powerful demonstration of the "rightness" of the world.
"Hinting"? Nah, I'll make it an outright statement - many Cultural Anthropologists are terrified of any mathematics more complex than descriptive statistics. I've seen this fairly consistently for the past 10 years or so, and I suspect that a lot of people entered Cultural Anthropology so hat they wouldn't have to do any mathematics.
I find it interesting that you see "Mathematics as the highest form of Science". Personally, I would say that Mathematics is a collection of languages for describing particular components of reality and not a science at all :D.
If you want an example of how Anthropology could use mathematics, let me give you one that I have been struggling with for several years (I still don't have it right because I am mathematically illiterate in the applicable dialects :wry:). I have been trying to use set theoretic topology to examine how "perception space" is created within a culture based around basic forms of social relations (they are five of them, including the null set). Now, it strikes me that each of these basic forms is fairly "stable"; probably rooted in evolved neuro-psychology, as are some of the transformation sequences between forms (e.g. Turner's Rites of Passage theory). I suspect, although I can't offer a mathematical roof, that these basic social forms are also extensible though multiple dimensions in the same way as the Platonic Solids are extensible.
This type of idea, call it a form of "cultural geometry", is really fairly old - the original versions of it were used to analyze kinship patterns in the 1920's, and Tylor used it to analyze cultural institutions back in 1888. But, in part due to the tide of Marxist and Post Modernist thought in the discipline, these works aren't being taught any more, so they are not part of the "received heritage" of many new Anthropologists. When you add in the institutional reality of getting degrees today, you also have to remember that no one who wants to go to graduate school can afford to take classes where they wil get poor marks. This is even worse in graduate school where you can be kicked out of your program for getting less than a B-. So, the end result is that intellectual exploration is not encouraged and you cannot afford to try and get the tools that are needed.
Marc