Skip to main content

Home/ gcanth103cspring2013/ Group items tagged research

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Michael Savery

What are the major questions concerning the Darness in El Dorado controversy? - 72 views

I think the whole point of the article was to not only bring attention to Chagnon and Neel's flawed vaccination program but bring to light potential atrocities that other anthropologists have commi...

questions

started by J Scott Hill on 31 Jan 13 21 follow-ups, last by Michael Savery on 07 Feb 13
J Scott Hill

Code of Ethics - 0 views

www.aaanet.org/...Code-of-Ethics.cfm

ethics AAA research

shared by J Scott Hill on 07 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Approved February 2009 I. Preamble Anthropological researchers, teachers and practitioners are members of many different communities, each with its own moral rules or codes of ethics. Anthropologists have moral obligations as members of other groups, such as the family, religion, and community, as well as the profession. They also have obligations to the scholarly discipline, to the wider society and culture, and to the human species, other species, and the environment. Furthermore, fieldworkers may develop close relationships with persons or animals with whom they work, generating an additional level of ethical considerations. In a field of such complex involvements and obligations, it is inevitable that misunderstandings, conflicts, and the need to make choices among apparently incompatible values will arise. Anthropologists are responsible for grappling with such difficulties and struggling to resolve them in ways compatible with the principles stated here. The purpose of this Code is to foster discussion and education. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) does not adjudicate claims for unethical behavior. The principles and guidelines in this Code provide the anthropologist with tools to engage in developing and maintaining an ethical framework for all anthropological work.
  • Download the Code of Ethics (PDF)
  • J Scott Hill on 07 Feb 13
     
    The AAA Code of Ethics provides a thought provoking and informative look into some of the responsibilities Anthropologists have to their research subjects, the community of anthropologists, and the wider public.   The nature of anthropological fieldwork is particularly fraught with ethical conundrums.  
Michael Daly

Perspectives on Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado - 2 views

www.jstor.org/...320007

Violence Yanomami measles Chagnon

shared by Michael Daly on 07 Feb 13 - No Cached
J Scott Hill liked it
  • Michael Daly on 07 Feb 13
     
    "This would be unfortunate, for the book offers a controversial account of the impact of Western research on an indigenous population that should urge us to think hard about our work. Even before its publication, Darkness in El Dorado became a Janusfaced text that in calling attention to methodological and ethical shortcomings of scientific research in the Amazon also brought attention to faults in its own production. This should not obscure its contribution or make us forget that the central issue in this drama, after all, should be the Yanomami" "At the books heart is a twostranded argument concerning the work among the Yanomami by the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and the geneticist James Neel. One strand follows their involvement in a complex set of medical practices centering on the collection of blood samples and a measles vaccination campaign. The other traces Chagnons spectacular career as the creator of the Yanomami as anthropologys wellknown fierce people. While Tierneys focus is on individuals, his book locates them in two relevant contexts: the cold war and the Vietnam War, during which currents of evolutionary genetics, sociobiology, and cultural anthropology claiming that aggression plays a positive role in human evolution found broad support, and the Venezuelan petrostate culture of clientelism, which fostered a network of corrupt politicians and businessmen with interests in the Yanomami and their territory for reasons of profit and power. His discussion argues that the work of Chagnon, Neel, and other scientists brought the Yanomami neither empowerment nor wellbeing but fragmentation and destruction" "The first strand of the book, which occupies less than onetenth of Tierneys text but has received the most public attention, argues that Neel and Chagnon collected blood samples for the Atomic Energy Commission to compare mutation rates in populations contaminated by radiation with those in one uncontaminated by it and at the same time carried out
J Scott Hill

Food For Thought: Meat-Based Diet Made Us Smarter : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...eat-based-diet-made-us-smarter

evolution human thought food diet

shared by J Scott Hill on 29 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Our earliest ancestors ate their food raw — fruit, leaves, maybe some nuts. When they ventured down onto land, they added things like underground tubers, roots and berries.
  • "You can't have a large brain and big guts at the same time," explains Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist and director of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City, which funds research on evolution. Digestion, she says, was the energy-hog of our primate ancestor's body. The brain was the poor stepsister who got the leftovers.
  • "What we think is that this dietary change around 2.3 million years ago was one of the major significant factors in the evolution of our own species," Aiello says.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • cut marks on animal bones appeared
  • that could have been made only by a sharp tool.
  • But Aiello's favorite clue is somewhat ickier — it's a tapeworm. "The closest relative of human tapeworms are tapeworms that affect African hyenas and wild dogs," she says.
  • Besides better taste, cooked food had other benefits — cooking killed some pathogens on food.
  • It breaks up the long protein chains, and that makes them easier for stomach enzymes to digest. "
  • collagen is very hard to digest. But if you heat it, it turns to jelly."
  • starchy foods like turnips, cooking gelatinizes the tough starch granules and makes them easier to digest too. Even just softening food — which cooking does — makes it more digestible. In the end, you get more energy out of the food.
  • J Scott Hill on 29 Jan 13
     
    Interesting audio piece on cooked food, meat, and the evolution of our big brains.
J Scott Hill

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 1 views

en.wikipedia.org/...ture_of_Scientific_Revolutions

Kuhn science philosophy paradigm revolutions

shared by J Scott Hill on 29 Jan 13 - Cached
  • The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn, is an analysis of the history of science, published in 1962 by the University of Chicago Press. Its publication was a landmark event in the history, philosophy, and sociology of scientific knowledge and it triggered an ongoing worldwide assessment and reaction in—and beyond—those scholarly communities. In this work, Kuhn challenged the then prevailing view of progress in "normal science". Scientific progress had been seen primarily as "development-by-accumulation" of accepted facts and theories. Kuhn argued for an episodic model in which periods of such conceptual continuity in normal science were interrupted by periods of revolutionary science.
  • What is arguably the most famous example of a revolution in scientific thought is the Copernican Revolution. In Ptolemy's school of thought, cycles and epicycles (with some additional concepts) were used for modeling the movements of the planets in a cosmos that had a stationary Earth at its center. As accuracy of celestial observations increased, complexity of the Ptolemaic cyclical and epicyclical mechanisms had to increase to maintain the calculated planetary positions close to the observed positions. Copernicus proposed a cosmology in which the Sun was at the center and the Earth was one of the planets revolving around it.
  • Copernicus' contemporaries rejected his cosmology, and Kuhn asserts that they were quite right to do so: Copernicus' cosmology lacked credibility.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • One of the aims of science is to find models that will account for as many observations as possible within a coherent framework. Together, Galileo's rethinking of the nature of motion and Keplerian cosmology represented a coherent framework that was capable of rivaling the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic framework.
  • In any community of scientists, Kuhn states, there are some individuals who are bolder than most. These scientists, judging that a crisis exists, embark on what Thomas Kuhn calls revolutionary science, exploring alternatives to long-held, obvious-seeming assumptions. Occasionally this generates a rival to the established framework of thought. The new candidate paradigm will appear to be accompanied by numerous anomalies, partly because it is still so new and incomplete. The majority of the scientific community will oppose any conceptual change, and, Kuhn emphasizes, so they should. To fulfill its potential, a scientific community needs to contain both individuals who are bold and individuals who are conservative.
  • Those scientists who possess an exceptional ability to recognize a theory's potential will be the first whose preference is likely to shift in favour of the challenging paradigm. There typically follows a period in which there are adherents of both paradigms. In time, if the challenging paradigm is solidified and unified, it will replace the old paradigm, and a paradigm shift will have occurred.
  • Chronologically, Kuhn distinguishes between three phases. The first phase, which exists only once, is the pre-paradigm phase, in which there is no consensus on any particular theory, though the research being carried out can be considered scientific in nature. This phase is characterized by several incompatible and incomplete theories.
  • If the actors in the pre-paradigm community eventually gravitate to one of these conceptual frameworks and ultimately to a widespread consensus on the appropriate choice of methods, terminology and on the kinds of experiment that are likely to contribute to increased insights, then the second phase, normal science, begins, in which puzzles are solved within the context of the dominant paradigm. As long as there is consensus within the discipline, normal science continues.
  • Over time, progress in normal science may reveal anomalies, facts that are difficult to explain within the context of the existing paradigm. While usually these anomalies are resolved, in some cases they may accumulate to the point where normal science becomes difficult and where weaknesses in the old paradigm are revealed. Kuhn refers to this as a crisis. Crises are often resolved within the context of normal science. However, after significant efforts of normal science within a paradigm fail, science may enter the third phase, that of revolutionary science, in which the underlying assumptions of the field are reexamined and a new paradigm is established. After the new paradigm's dominance is established, scientists return to normal science, solving puzzles within the new paradigm.
  • SSR is viewed by postmodern and post-structuralist thinkers as having called into question the enterprise of science by demonstrating that scientific knowledge is dependent on the culture and historical circumstances of groups of scientists rather than on their adherence to a specific, definable method.
  • SSR has also been embraced by creationists who see creationism as an incommensurate worldview in contrast to naturalism while holding science as a valuable tool.[7]
  • J Scott Hill on 29 Jan 13
     
    Good highlights of Kuhn's book and the notion of Paradigm shift in science.
craiglindsley

On Reflections on Darkness in El Dorado - 0 views

www.jstor.org/...338288

philosophy AAA Yanomami Commission 60 books humans violations

shared by craiglindsley on 07 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • craiglindsley on 07 Feb 13
     
    "However, some important points are mistaken or missing. Contrary to Alan Fix, research on Yanomami began not in the 1960s but as early as 1800. Now there are more than 60 books, albeit of widely varying quality, on aspects of Yanomami. Sufficient literature exists to recognize a field of specializationYanomami Studies or Yanomamology. It is possible to identify points of agreement and disagreement among the numerous and diverse writers who have published on Yanomami and draw conclusions" "None of some 60 books previously published on the Yanomami ever drew attention to the violations of professional ethics and abuses of human rights by anthropologists in the ways and to the extent that Tierney does. Not one of those books was subjected to a panel discussion and open forum at any AAA convention, any forum in a journal like CA, investigations in three countries, discussions in international media and cyberspace, etc" "Tierney exposed the ugliest affair in the entire history of anthropology. It cannot be summarily dismissed by a vocal minority as simply a matter of personal animosities, turf war, postmodernist critique of science or scientism, objectivist versus activist, differing interpretations of Yanomami aggression, sensationalist or tabloid journalism, etc. As Susan Lindee recognizes and contrary to Raymond Hames, not all of the fundamental claims made by Tierney have been discussed, let alone refuted."
Maeve Couzens

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Whorf? Crosslinguistic Differences in Temporal Language and... - 0 views

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/...full

shared by Maeve Couzens on 21 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • The idea that language shapes the way we think, often associated with Benjamin Whorf, has long been decried as not only wrong but also fundamentally wrong-headed.
  • which language influences nonlinguistic cognition, particularly in the domain of time
  • [T]he famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism, stating that people's thoughts are determined by the categories made available by their language, and its weaker version, linguistic relativity, that differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of their speakers […] is wrong, all wrong. (p. 57)
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The idea that thought is the same as language is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity[
  • The idea that language shapes thinking seemed plausible when scientists were in the dark about how thinking works, or even how to study it. Now that scientists know how to think about thinking, there is less of a temptation to equate[thinking]with language. (pp. 58–59, italics added)
  • Experimental work since Whorf's time has suffered several additional problems. Pinker noted that some apparent behavioral differences between language groups have turned out to be artifacts of clumsy translation.
  • Chinese speakers are less capable of reasoning counterfactually than English speakers because Chinese lacks subjunctives, which serve as counterfactual markers in English
  • The Orwellian idea that people think (mostly or entirely) in the medium of natural language, and therefore that language can be equated with thought, is unsupported empirically and is also problematic in principle, given what is known about language and about thought
  • Languages differ in the extent to which they describe duration in terms of distance as opposed to amount of substance.
  • Is this conflation of distance and duration universal to humans, or does it depend in part on the conflation of distance and duration in language?
  • Why should we continue to do Whorfian research? One possible reason is that cataloging crosslinguistic cognitive differences could be a step toward charting the boundaries of human biological and cultural diversity
  • crosslinguistic cognitive differences could be tools for investigating how thinking works and, in particular, for investigating the role of experience in the acquisition and representation of knowledge: If people who talk differently form correspondingly different mental representations as a consequence, then mental representations must depend, in part, on these aspects of linguistic experience. If discovering the origin and structure of our mental representations is the goal, then crosslinguistic cognitive differences can be informative even if they are subtle and even if their effects are largely unconscious. Whether or not they correspond to radical differences in speakers' conscious experiences of the world, Whorfian effects can have profound implications for the study of mental representation.
1 - 8 of 8
Showing 20▼ items per page