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Michael Daly

eHRAF World Cultures - 0 views

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    Slave society was stratified into three castes: a small number of Whites, a smaller number of "free people of color" (generally mulattoes), and a huge Black slave population. White-minority rule led to the development of a "white bias": European phenotypic and cultural traits were more highly valued than their African or Creole counterparts. With Emancipation, the castes were transformed into classes, but the White bias persisted, resulting in a "color-class pyramid": a White upper class, a "Brown" middle class, and a Black lower-class majority. The addition of Chinese, East Indian, and Lebanese immigrants, who did not have a clear place in the color-class pyramid, made stratification more complex. Color and ethnicity still influence social interactions, but the White bias and the color-class pyramid have become less evident since the mid-twentieth century. Nevertheless, Jamaica is still highly stratified by wealth; it has a very small, prosperous upper class, a small middle class, and a huge, impoverished lower class. In the mid-1960s Jamaica had the highest rate of income inequality in the world.
Michael Daly

eHRAF World Cultures - 0 views

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    In a recent definitive statement of Oirat identity, Oirat ethnogenesis is linked to original Mongols (yazguuriin Mongol) (Ochir 1993). The author redefined the term Nirun, suggesting that it means 'back' of a body (nuruun). He related it to the legend in the Secret History that, after the death of her husband, Alan Goa, the legendary ancestress of the Mongols, gave birth to three sons from her back (nuruun), claiming that she had been touched by a heavenly light. Ochir used the term butach (illegitimate children) to refer to the three sons who became the ancestry of the Chinggisid golden lineage (altan urag). Most interestingly, he pointed out that the supposed 'heavenly light' that impregnated Alan Goa was in fact a servant called Malig Bayat, who was the ancestor of the Bayat subgroup of the Oirats. It is thus established that it was an Oirat who fathered the illegitimate children of Alan Goa, who in turn became the ancestors of the Mongol aristocrats!
Michael Daly

eHRAF World Cultures - 1 views

  • mbly until the peasant uprising at Morant Bay in 1865. This event ignited fear among the White oligarchy that democracy would lead to Black rule; so the British abolished the assembly in
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    Slave society was stratified into three castes: a small number of Whites, a smaller number of "free people of color" (generally mulattoes), and a huge Black slave population. White-minority rule led to the development of a "white bias": European phenotypic and cultural traits were more highly valued than their African or Creole counterparts. With Emancipation, the castes were transformed into classes, but the White bias persisted, resulting in a "color-class pyramid": a White upper class, a "Brown" middle class, and a Black lower-class majority. The addition of Chinese, East Indian, and Lebanese immigrants, who did not have a clear place in the color-class pyramid, made stratification more complex. Color and ethnicity still influence social interactions, but the White bias and the color-class pyramid have become less evident since the mid-twentieth century. Nevertheless, Jamaica is still highly stratified by wealth; it has a very small, prosperous upper class, a small middle class, and a huge, impoverished lower class. In the mid-1960s Jamaica had the highest rate of income inequality in the world.
Michael Daly

eHRAF World Cultures - 0 views

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    The family was the basic social unit through which wealth and status were transmitted in Roman society. The perpetuation of the aristocracy, the possibilities for social mobility, the distribution of landed wealth, and other matters depended fundamentally on patterns of family behavior (Garnsey, 1987: 126). The Latin terms familia and domus for family and household did not have the same semantic range of emphasis in Roman times as they are used today (2006) in referring to a father, mother, and their children. The Romans used familia to refer to all individuals under the father's power ( patria potestas), including the wife, children, the sons' children, and adopted children, all agnates (those related through the male line who derive from the same house - a lineage, but excluding a daughter's children or a mother's blood kin, all related through males to a common ancestor who shared a common name (i. e., the clan or gens, and the slave staff. The term domus in the sense of household was more frequently used in reference to the family, and generally covered a larger group than is associated with the family today (2006), encompassing husband and wife, children, slaves, and others living in the house including relatives linked through women.
Michael Daly

eHRAF World Cultures - 0 views

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    Slave society was stratified into three castes: a small number of Whites, a smaller number of "free people of color" (generally mulattoes), and a huge Black slave population. White-minority rule led to the development of a "white bias": European phenotypic and cultural traits were more highly valued than their African or Creole counterparts. With Emancipation, the castes were transformed into classes, but the White bias persisted, resulting in a "color-class pyramid": a White upper class, a "Brown" middle class, and a Black lower-class majority. The addition of Chinese, East Indian, and Lebanese immigrants, who did not have a clear place in the color-class pyramid, made stratification more complex. Color and ethnicity still influence social interactions, but the White bias and the color-class pyramid have become less evident since the mid-twentieth century. Nevertheless, Jamaica is still highly stratified by wealth; it has a very small, prosperous upper class, a small middle class, and a huge, impoverished lower class. In the mid-1960s Jamaica had the highest rate of income inequality in the world.
J Scott Hill

Scientific racism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

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    This page, while it has some problems, highlights the history of scientific racism and how these ideas have been used by politicians and the public to justify genocide, ethnocide, slavery, segregation, etc.  It also should give some idea of how these deeply entrenched attitudes linger in our society and continue to have some effect on continuing inequalities.
J Scott Hill

A Family Tree in Every Gene - 0 views

  • Who speaks of "racial stocks" anymore? After all, to do so would be to speak of something that many scientists and scholars say does not exist. If modern anthropologists mention the concept of race, it is invariably only to warn against and dismiss it. Likewise many geneticists. "Race is social concept, not a scientific one," according to Dr. Craig Venter—and he should know, since he was first to sequence the human genome.
  • But now, perhaps, that is about to change
  • The dominance of the social construct theory can be traced to a 1972 article by Dr. Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist, who wrote that most human genetic variation can be found within any given "race." If one looked at genes rather than faces, he claimed, the difference between an African and a European would be scarcely greater than the difference between any two Europeans.
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  • Three decades later, it seems that Dr. Lewontin's facts were correct, and have been abundantly confirmed by ever better techniques of detecting genetic variety. His reasoning, however, was wrong. His error was an elementary one, but such was the appeal of his argument that it was only a couple of years ago that a Cambridge University statistician, A. W. F. Edwards, put his finger on it.
  • Genetic variants that aren't written on our faces, but that can be detected only in the genome, show similar correlations. It is these correlations that Dr. Lewontin seems to have ignored. In essence, he looked at one gene at a time and failed to see races. But if many—a few hundred—variable genes are considered simultaneously, then it is very easy to do so. Indeed, a 2002 study by scientists at the University of Southern California and Stanford showed that if a sample of people from around the world are sorted by computer into five groups on the basis of genetic similarity, the groups that emerge are native to Europe, East Asia, Africa, America and Australasia—more or less the major races of traditional anthropology.
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    "A Family Tree in Every Gene By Armand Marie Leroi Published on: Jun 07, 2006 Armand Marie Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist at Imperial College in London, is the author of Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body." This Article is a fairly sensible, nuanced, defense of the race concept based on recent genetic analyses of hundreds of genetic variables at a time.   
J Scott Hill

RACE - Are We So Different? :: A Project of the American Anthropological Association - 0 views

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    This cite is mentioned in Kottak's text...it has a lot of good information about Race.
J Scott Hill

Welcome - 0 views

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    To understand the genetic basis of human genetics and the limitations of race concepts describing that variation...I encourage you to read some of the essays attached to this page.  If you find something of interest, highlight it and share it to our class page.
J Scott Hill

'Ten Commandments' of race and genetics issued - science-in-society - 17 July 2008 - Ne... - 0 views

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    This is a short list of good points to be made about Genetics and the concept of race.  I find that it is often difficult for students to wrap their heads around genetic variation and race.  I will try my best to explain it in the coming week.
Maddi Pescatore

Relativism > The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) - 0 views

  • Many thinkers have urged that large differences in language lead to large differences in experience and thought. They hold that each language embodies a worldview, with quite different languages embodying quite different views, so that speakers of different languages think about the world in quite different ways. This view is sometimes called the Whorf-hypothesis or the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, after the linguists who made it famous. But the label linguistic relativity, which is more common today, has the advantage that makes it easier to separate the hypothesis from the details of Whorf's views, which are an endless subject of exegetical dispute (Gumperz and Levinson, 1996, contains a sampling of recent literature on the hypothesis).
  • There are around 5000 languages in use today, and each is quite different from many of the others. Differences are especially pronounced between languages of different families, e.g., between Indo-European languages like English and Hindi and Ancient Greek, on the one hand, and non-Indo-European languages like Hopi and Chinese and Swahili, on the other.
Maeve Couzens

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

  • 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)
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  • 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.
Maeve Couzens

ScienceDirect.com - Cognition - Learning to express motion events in English and Korean... - 0 views

  • English and Korean differ in how they lexicalize the components of motion events
  • English and Korean differ in how they lexicalize the components of motion events
  • English characteristically conflates Motion with Manner, Cause, or Deixis, and expresses Path separately
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  • Korean, in contrast, conflates Motion with Path and elements of Figure and Ground in transitive clauses for caused Motion, but conflates motion with Deixis and spells out Path and Manner separately in intransitive clauses for spontaneous motion.
  • sensitivity to language-specific patterns in the way they talk about motion from as early as 17–20 months.
  • learners of English quickly generalize their earliest spatial words — Path particles like up, down, and in — to both spontaneous and caused changes of location and, for up and down, to posture changes, while learners of Korean keep words for spontaneous and caused motion strictly separate and use different words for vertical changes of location and posture changes.
  • suggest that they are influenced by the semantic organization of their language virtually from the beginning.
Maeve Couzens

ScienceDirect.com - Cognitive Psychology - Does Language Shape Thought?: Mandarin and E... - 0 views

  • Does the language you speak affect how you think about the world?
  • English and Mandarin talk about time differently—English predominantly talks about time as if it were horizontal, while Mandarin also commonly describes time as vertical
  • Another study showed that the extent to which Mandarin–English bilinguals think about time vertically is related to how old they were when they first began to learn English.
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  • In another experiment native English speakers were taught to talk about time using vertical spatial terms in a way similar to Mandarin.
  • language is a powerful tool in shaping thought about abstract domains and
  • one's native language plays an important role in shaping habitual thought (e.g., how one tends to think about time) but does not entirely determine one's thinking in the strong Whorfian sense.
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

craiglindsley

On Reflections on Darkness in El Dorado - 0 views

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    "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."
J Scott Hill

Code of Ethics - 0 views

  • 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)
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    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

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    "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

Michael Shermer: What Is Skepticism, Anyway? - 1 views

  • Consider global warming: Are you a global warming skeptic? Or are you skeptical of the global warming skeptics? In this case, I used to be a global warming skeptic, but now I'm skeptical of the global warming skeptics, which makes me a global warming believer based on the facts as I understand them at the moment. The "at the moment" part is what makes conclusions in science and skepticism provisional.
  • Thus, science and skepticism are synonymous, and in both cases it's okay to change your mind if the evidence changes. It all comes down to this question: What are the facts in support or against a particular claim?
  • Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.
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  • Skepticism is not "seek and ye shall find," but "seek and keep an open mind."
  • Skepticism is the rigorous application of science and reason to test the validity of any and all claims.
  • Typically pseudoscientists will make statements that are unverified, or verified by a source within their own belief circle.
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    This Article highlights the connection between skepticism, science, and belief.  This dovetails with our discussion of paradigm shifts and how scientific results gain credibility through the peer review process where the data and methods are scrutinized along with the truth claims by qualified peers.
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