Anthropology (catch all)

[marct]

Hi 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.

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>.

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 .

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 ). 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