The Books of My Life: The Dawn of Everything

 

Social scientists over the years have conceptualised societal evolution in a number of ways. In the late 19th and into the 20th century many social scientists argued (and many ethnocentrically inclined amateurs still do) that all human societies evolved from hunter-gatherer societies to horticultural societies to agricultural societies and finally to modern industrial technological societies in succession. For polemicists wedded to this approach it was the last societal form, the industrial, that was the zenith and pinnacle of human and human societal evolution, a conclusion not surprising given that those who made such claims lived in “modern” societies and saw their own modern industrial societies, modern technological societies, and modern political societies as the best of all possible societal worlds (without any of the irony associated with such a statement). Those still engaged in hunting and gathering, horticulture, and agriculture were seen, in this linear conception of societal evolution, as remnants of societal worlds gone by and as possible guides as to what humans and human societies were like the the past before writing evolved (the ethnographic analogy, a metaphor or allegorical that still underlies a lot of bioanthropological studies of prehistoric humans past). 

Given the criticism that the linear model of societal evolution was too ethnocentric, too imperial, and too unilinear many later social scientists ditched the unilinear model of societal evolution for others that were regarded as less unilinear and more, at least theoretically anyway, multilinear. One model of societal evolution that has become popular in historical sociological and historical circles is one that hypothesises that human societies have evolved from the hunter-gatherer society form to the agricultural society form (small scale and large scale), to the modern society form, and to the postmodern society form. In this model, it is argued, all of these societal forms and subforms within societal forms, which can still be found across the globe, were, in Darwinian fashion, adaptations to specific environments. So, it was maintained, no one societal form was or is any better or superior to any other. With this assumption the proponents of this view believed they had conquered human ethnocentrism (Icarian hubris).

Both the unilinear model of societal evolution and the multilinear model of societal evolution held that  societal evolution was driven primarily by economic change. In both models the change from hunting and gathering, to agriculture, to industry, and finally to a service and retail economy is conceptualised not only as driving societal change but also, as a consequence, the driving force behind demographic change (though it is often admitted that demographic change can and often does simultaneously drive economic change), political change, cultural change, and geographic or environmental change. 

Though it still dominated societal evolution discourse the hunter-gatherer/agriculture/modernity/postmodernity model is not the only model of societal evolution, change, or development out there in social science land. There is another model of societal change that is less tied to changes in economic modes of production than the hunter-gatherer, agriculture/modernity/postmodernity paradigm. This alternative model of societal evolution, one that is particularly prevalent in anthropological circles, focuses on kinship structures and political forms and sees the latter, in particular, as the driving force of societal evolution or development. In this approach to societal development it is held that there have been four forms of human societies: band societies, tribal societies, and chieftain societies. Sociologists and political scientists might add monarchical societies, authoritarian societies, autocratic and totalitarian societies, and democratic societies into the mix since they, historically speaking, have been more interested in “modern" and "postmodern” “complex” societies than have anthropologists traditionally.

In this politics oriented model band societies are those societies which engage in hunting and gathering, which are demographically small consisting of 20 to 40 members, and which are largely egalitarian. Tribal societies, in this model, are seen as those societies which engage in horticulture, which farm often with ploughs but which do not engage in irrigation projects. Tribal societies in this model are seen as largely egalitarian but only for the in-group, the in-kin group which is defined on the basis of lineage or totemic identity, save when it comes to age and gender. Tribal societies, so the story goes, generally live in more permanent settlements and are characterised by Big Men who sponsor and create the conditions for those in the in-group to engage in rituals and feasts. Ritual specialist roles and craft specialist roles in tribal societies are generally part-time “positions”. Demographically, tribal societies are larger than band societies. Chieftain societies, in this theoretical model, are grounded in conceptions of kin identity as well but chieftain societies are characterised by hierarchical ranks and greater inequality compared to band or tribal societies. This is because, so the argument goes, they live in permanent communities and engage in agriculture which produces a surplus that can be expropriated from the peasants by the few elites who  dominate ranked or hierarchical chieftain societies. Many chieftain societies, polemicists for this model claim, are also often characterised by slavery. 

In their comparative anthropological history The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Picador, 2021) cultural anthropologist David Graeber and comparative archaeologist David Wengrow, argue that all of these models of societal evolution are problematic for a variety of reasons. They are all, Graeber and Wengrow argue, too ethnocentric, too teleological, too technologically reductive, and too lacking in empirical support. Though the proponents of the multilinear and anthropological models, argue Graeber and Wengrow, claim that they are not teleological and are multilinear rather than unilinear, they still, if more subtly perhaps than the proponents of the unilinear societal and human evolution, continue to assume that their society is the culmination of societal evolution, something that makes these models the kissing cousins kin of the unilinear models of economic (e.g., Rostow) and political (e.g., Fukuyama with his shades of Hegel) evolution that were prominent in Western intellectual culture in the 1950s and 1960s and in the immediate aftermath of the-Cold War in the “modern” West.

The problems with this approach should be obvious anyone with a college education but far too often is not. Empirically speaking, not every society is part of the core, the rich industrial and postindustrial “democratic" nations of the West, which are implicitly and sometimes explicitly regarded, by Western promoters of the models of societal evolution we have been discussing, the best of all possible economic, political, and technological worlds, a notion that is, of course, inherently ethnocentric and inherently teleological (“natural" landmarks on the road to the radiant future). Additionally, the models of societal evolution we have been discussing tend to either elide or forget the fact that Western imperialism, Western geographic imperialism, Western political imperialism, Western economic imperialism, and Western cultural imperialism, and the power and authority associated with all of those forms of imperialism and the globalisation of that power, have played in remaking large parts of the globe in the Western image via coercion or force and convincement, something that can take many forms including the use of loans and aid to promote Western political, Western economic, and Western cultural forms. Finally, these models of societal evolution forget or elide the fact that the archaeological record does not, as Graeber and Wengrow point out, show a straight line from foraging to agriculture to an increase in inequality to the rise of the city to the advent of the state and later nation-state, to the rise of private property and to the advent of writing. In fact, as Graeber and Wengrow point out, there is ample archaeological evidence for the intentional abandonment of states and the inequalities and abuses of power that have often characterised them.

While Graeber and Wengrow give readers an excellent summary of the current state of the art of the archaeological record, a summary that undermines all linear and teleological models of societal evolution, from the stone age to the bronze age, it is their conception of freedom and power and the relations between the two that is perhaps the most interesting, innovative, and enlightening aspects of their book. Graeber and Wengrow argue that there are and have been, historically speaking, three elementary or primal forms of freedom which have existed in human communities since the beginning, the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey. and the freedom to create new social realises, all of which humans have engaged in for millennia via migration and through schismogenesis, a concept they borrow from anthropologist Gregory Bateson. As Graeber and Wengrow note, early humans could and did create societies that were intentionally different from those of their neighbours. If, for example the neighbours of one cultural group were hierarchical and rent through by power imbalances and hierarchical authority structures, the other culture could and did, as they did in the culture regions of Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, for instance, create societies that promoted greater equality and greater freedom of choice. 

Over time, Graeber and Wengrow argue, these three elementary forms of freedoms could be and sometimes were curtailed by the three elementary forms of power they delineate: sovereignty, bureaucratic power, and charismatic power, all different forms of power that have different historical roots, a fact that problematises the social evolutionist claim that with large scale agriculture came larger numbers of people and, as a consequence big men who were often considered to have some relationship to the divine, who thus were able to dominate, control, and expropriate surpluses from those they ruled along with bureaucracies that helped big men dominate, control and expropriate the surpluses of their populations.

Needless to say, those of us who live in the core nations today with their vast inequalities, their vast expropriations, their vast and supposedly impersonal bureaucracies, their vast surveillance apparatuses, their vast militaries, their vast border patrol militaries, and their passports have lost the freedom to move with ease (something corporate driven globalisation policies do as well), much of our freedom to disagree, given the prominence and success of their socialisation for conformity, a socialisation for conformity aided and abetted by media bureaucracies and educational bureaucracies, and the police-surveillance apparatuses that almost all core nations now have in order to, at least in part, control their populations. In a message of hope Graeber and Wengrow argue that despite these powerful forms of social control we humans still have the freedom, the potential freedom, to be creative and to escape from the golden and gilded cages that trap us. But can we? Will we? I am not so sure. Stay tuned.

The Dawn of Everything is an important and impressive synthesis of anthropological, sociological, and archaeological evidence melded to social theory. It is, a book that is sure to be one of the classics of comparative history and wholistic anthropology. I can’t recommend this sure to be seminal book enough. It is a must read for anyone interested in history, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, human evolution, political science, and social change, and represents, along with the works of Noah Yuval Harari, Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker—all of whom Graeber and Wengrow critique for their teleologism—and others a much needed return to the grand historical and theoretical sociology, anthropology, and history of Karl Mark, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim. Essential.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Hannah Stoddard and Latter Day Mormon Apologetics and Polemics

 

YouTube is a wonderful mirror into the mentalities of modern and postmodern humans. It tells us, for example, something about the ways people read television shows. It tell us something about the ways people read classic rock and roll songs. It tells us something about how contemporary Mormon apologists and polemicists interpret the history of Mormonism, the history of the United States, and the history of the world.

Recently, I have been exploring the videos Mormon “traditionalist" Hanna Stoddard and her Jospeh Smith Foundation have produced and posted on YouTube and the YouTube videos in which Stoddard appears as a guest star. These videos, to pick a few examples, condemn the works of “progressive" Mormon historians like Leonard Arrington and Richard Bushman, condemn Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, celebrate those Mormon celebrities like Joseph Fielding Smith, Bruch McConkie, Boyd Packer, and Ezra Taft Benson who Stoddard and her fellow travellers regard as saints, and condemn modernity with its materialistic approach to history and its contextualism (history as the longue dureee product of economic, political, cultural, biological-demographic, and geographic factors).

Stoddard’s discourse has all the hallmarks of Mormon polemics and apologetics of the past, to Protestant Fundamentalist apologetics and polemics of the past, and to right wing Christian nationalist apologetics and polemics of the present. Like all apologetics since the beginning of apologetics time Stoddard’s apologetics are grounded in the assumption that “we", “us", however we and us are defined, and it is defined selectively by Stoddard, have the fullest essence of the truth. Stoddard assumes that Mormonism, her particular Mormonism, is true (she does admit that echoes of the truth can be found in other religious cultures). She believes that god exists, that the devil exists, that some people are inhabited by devils, and that there are evil witches out there in human land. She believes that the Mormon prophets are prophets of god. She believes the Mormon doctrine that America is a promised land and hence exceptional. She believes that the LDS Church is in danger of apostasy thanks to indoctrination by conspiratorial Mormon “progressives” (who are, in her mind, little better than devils and witches, Marxists and liberals) like Leonard Arrington and Richard Bushman (her apparent bete noirs along, echoing Benson, with Karl Marx, who, in an uncredited answer to what the teaching of class in the BYU Sociology Department on the Stoddards' Latter-day Answers (aka LDS Answers), refers approvingly to a book that accuses Marx of being a satanist, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, John Dewey, John Maynard Keynes (all amongst Benson’s “antichrists” in “A Plea to Strengthen Our Families”, a document often cited by right wing Mormons but not apparently emphasised by the contemporary Church) and the “Darwinists" and “socialists” at contemporary BYU, the, in common LDS parlance, “Lord’s University").

Not surprisingly, these assumptions, assumptions that are grounded in Stoddard’s religious “testimony” (a Mormon term for spiritual guidance) provide the bedrock and foundation for Stoddard’s polemics. She claims that only true believers or the faithful can write quality history (faith history) not only of Mormonism but of America, Europe, the ancient Near East, and the world. Joseph Smith, Stoddard clams, could not have been a treasure hunter, someone who engaged in the occult, because the Mormon prophets said he wasn’t and those who say he was are secularists like the new Mormon historians or anti-Mormons, who the new Mormon historians draw on extensively claims Stoddard, and who can’t, as a consequence of the fact that they are anti-Mormons, be trusted. She claims the earth has only been around for around 6000 years and that Noah’s flood actually occurred globally because the Bible tells me so and god’s prophets, god’s real prophets, tell me so.

Like all apologists and polemicists Stoddard is selective. She condemns new Mormon history materialist contextualism but she is a contextualist too. She assumes, for example, that the context of the Book of Mormon is ancient Near Eastern history and ancient American prehistory and history. She is selective in that she applies the canons of critical history to what she regards as the mythhistory of the new Mormon historians but she doesn’t apply them to her faith history, an actual mythhistory since it is grounded in ideological assumptions rather than empirical evidence, something that makes her kin to Sandra Tanner, someone who also doesn’t apply the analytical strategies she applies to Mormonism to her Christian faith. She sometimes seems to conflate the critical new Mormon history with anti-Mormonism. She is selective in the evidence she uses. She, for example, far too often bases her dismissal of evidence that does not line up with her ideological assumptions because of the supposed character defects of the person from whom the evidence originates (the ad hominem strategy). She, for example, dismisses evidence about Smith on the basis that the person making the claim is someone left the Church while, at the same time, claiming that any analysis of evidence must be grounded analysis rather than assumed "analysis". She selectively dismisses evidence on the basis of it being taken down after the fact except when that evidence comes from those she regards as prophets and true religious authorities. She downplays differences among the Twelve. She ignores the fact that the LDS Church and its revelations have changed over the years. See plural marriage or polygamy and Blacks and the priesthood.  She uses inductive analysis for deductive purposes. All one has to do, Stoddard’s logic demands, is simply “verify” what god and his prophets say and bingo, you’ve got it. All of this makes Stoddard an apologist and a polemicist and only kind of an historian, one that plays in the clays of mythhistory more than real history. And this is why Stoddard is a kind of intellectual demagogue, a kind of anti-academic intellectual, and a kind of anti-intellectual intellectual since, for her, once god speaks all the thinking that needs to be done is done. That is dogma and dogmatics not history or social science.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Rubbish In, Rubbish Out

 

You always know what you are going to find on social media. You know that you are going to find a lot of lowest common denominator nonsense about the usual suspects, for example, films, television, women (some scantily clad for the “adolescent” male gaze), politics, sports (including fabrications related to Caitlin Clark), banal and mundane sensationalist and melodramatic clickbait for fun and profit, and music. You never know, however, how low the rubbish you find on social media will go. I was reminded of this fact yet again while I was looking at books by Warren I. Cohen on Amazon, one of the lowest of lowest common denominator social media sites on the world wide web given its poor search engine, its limited and I suspect mostly bot curation of its comments page, a curation that looks for certain hot button words and phrases, and the limitations it places on actual scholarly reviews. Amazon seems to prefer “reactions” that are reflective of the widespread reality of attention deficit disorder in postmodern America and large parts of the core nation world.

I am familiar with Cohen, a specialist on American foreign policy retired from the University of Maryland Baltimore County  and author of introductory books on American foreign policy, including his excellent and aptly titled A Nation Like All Others: A Brief History of American Foreign Relations published by Columbia, his introductory work on US and USSR relations published by Cambridge University Press in its four volume history of American foreign relations series, America in the Age of Soviet Power, 1945-1991, and studies of Asian-American foreign relations, which is why I went to Amazon to see what other books he had written.

What I also found and found as interesting as the other books Cohen had written, were the comments on his book America in the Age of Soviet Power, 1945-1991. Two of the four comments—the fact that there were only four tells you a lot about the contemporary core nation world—on the book were favourable. The other two comments, however, were negative.  Of course, you are going to invariably find negative comments on almost any critical history and analysis of American foreign policy because you are inevitably going to step on the toes and draw the ire of the many faithful churchgoers of the Church of America who believe in the dogma of American exceptionalism.

One of these negative comments, that by Josh, was more “substantive” than the other, that by Sol D. Josh’s “reaction" to the book—I hesitate to call it a review since it really isn’t a review as is the case with most posts on scholarly books on Amazon—whinged about what he believed was Cohen’s New Dealism and his supposed belief that the New Deal was the best of all possible American worlds. He complains that Cohen interprets American post-WWII militarisation and the rise of its national security state as something other than a response to Soviet imperialism. He whines about Cohen's book being too much of an introductory text, something the book, in fact, is.

Sol D’s “substance” is also a statement of faith. Sol D’s faith is more clearly than that of Josh that hybrid mix of Christianity and America that has long been prominent in American culture and American life. He spends his reaction whining about Cambridge histories being the product of apologists and polemicists for “butt kissing atheist-Marxist tyrannical dictatorship”, a dictatorship, he claims, killed 200 million of its own citizens (today, of course, any self respecting empiricist would have to number many of the corporate and entrepreneurial elite, particularly in places like the Silicon Valley and Austin, amongst the tyrannical dictatorship of the mediocretariat). He ends his diatribe by stressing his devotion to his lord and saviour Jesus Christ.

Both of these comments reveal, as I noted, a faith in America, a faith some theologians would argue is a form of heresy and blasphemy. The faith of both is ultimately grounded in metaphysical and metaphysical manichean presuppositions that some humans are good guys, generally the group, clique, community, state, or nation, in this case the United States of America, that one belongs to, and that other humans are bad guys, that other whoever the goods mark themselves off against, the USSR in most of the mid-to late twentieth century, and, after the fall of the USSR, those liberals and “New Dealers” who are seen as “commies” and, paradoxically, fascists, by many and are categorised as “commies” and fascists by demagogues looking for leverage to gain political, economic, and cultural power. They are grounded, in other words, in the notion that some humans are good and some humans, them, are evil. They are grounded in the dehuhamisation of these others.

And this last—dehumanising the other—is one of the fundamental problems with these manichean politically and ideologically correct ways of seeing. Contrary to such manichean faiths humans, to varying degrees, are characterised by their better angels and their less better angels Humans, real humans, be they Hitler, Stalin, those who ordered bombs dropped on civilian targets in the name of victory, or true believers in monotheistic religious inquisitions, are, as history shows, complex and contradictory. They are neither inhuman incarnations of pure evil or cliched and stereotyped incarnations of pure goodness. Those who see the world in such manichean hues, of course, can’t admit the fact that humans, particularly those humans in positions of power (the power corrupts prover ), are the same every where and at every time for if they did they would have to admit that Cohen and other empirically grounded analysts like him are right and that both American and Soviet powers that be are neither evil incarnate of good incarnate and that humans can and do make mistakes and, of course, they can be socialised for moronic ethnocentric conformity. Cognitive dissonance, as it often does, however, in these cases, often ends up making the faith of true believers  even stronger than it was despite empirical facts to the contrary because in so many cases fiction, created reality, trumps, as it does with Trump and his ilk, real reality.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: In the Kingdom of Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest?...

 

I should know by now that every time humans seem to take one step forward in the development of “new" communications technologies and technologies in general that there is, for the most part, no corresponding step forward in the use of those technologies by the masses. In fact, it often seems instead that most humans take several steps backwards when technological change occurs. I was reminded of this indisputable fact yet again today.

This morning I was looking at the 2017 Penguin Classics deluxe edition of Anne of Green Gables by the Canadian author L.M. Montgomery. I try to take a look at any new critical editions of Anne because Anne of Green Gables remains, long after I first read it in my youth, one of my favourite and most treasured books. Perhaps that is one of the joys or one of the curses for anyone who grew up, if in my case only in part, in English Canada. 

It actually took me several searches on Amazon to find the Penguin Classics edition of Anne. After several unsuccessful attempts—something that is quite common when searching for books or classical music CD's on Amazon these days—I finally found the book but only by going to the Penguin Random House page for the book and clicking on their link to Amazon. 

I must admit that I was rather disappointed in the new Penguin Classics edition of Anne. I was hoping that it would be more like the rival Broadview Editions and Norton Critical Edition editions of the book, but it wasn’t. The editor of the Penguin Classics Anne, Benjamin Lefebvre, a L.M. Montgomery specialist who directs the online L.M. Montgomery site on the world wide web, according to the Penguin classics author blurb, did write an introduction to the book, did write a textual note to explain his editorial decisions regarding the text of the book, and did provide suggestions for further reading on Montgomery and Anne for those interested in doing further research on the book and its author just as do the editors of the Broadview and Norton critical editions of Anne. However, the Penguin Classics Anne does not, as do the Broadview and Norton editions of the text which are also edited by Montgomery specialists, Cecily Devereux of the University of Alberta for Broadview and Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston of the University of Guelph, home of one of the important archives for Montgomery Studies, for Norton, offer annotated notes that provide essential context for the book. Given this, I won’t be purchasing the Penguin Classics edition of Anne of Green Gables.

The unfortunate limitations of the Penguin Anne wasn’t the only thing that I found interesting on the Anne of Green Gables Penguin Classics page on Amazon. Below in the “comments” section I happened upon a “review”of the Penguin Anne, a “review” that is actually a “reaction” rather than a review, something posters on Amazon and on YouTube, confuse and conflate, which I found even more interesting than the edition of the book itself. In this “review” "Laura from Spain" complains that the pages of the Penguin Deluxe Edition of Anne were not properly cut claiming, as a consequence, that the book was bad. 

"Laura from Spain’s” reaction—a “reaction that parallels most of those I have happened across on social media—to the Penguin Anne points up the fact that “Laura" was unaware of three empirical facts. First, she appears to be blissfully ignorant of the history of books and the history and variations in how book pages have been cut across time and space. Second, she appears to be blissfully ignorant of the fact that all Penguin Classics Deluxe editions, which are done by Penguin US, have pages that are intentionally cut that way, that are cut in deckled fashion. See also the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Third, she seems blissfully unaware of the history of the deckled style of book pages, something she could have ascertained very easily by letting her fingers do the walking on the world wide web.

Ron once again shakes his head in disbelief...

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Google, the Skanky Cookie Monster

When I decided to start blogging, writing essays on various subjects in various shapes and sizes on the World Wide Web in 2011, I chose to go with Blogger instead of WordPress. Blogger, which went online in 1999 and was purchased by Google in 2003, and WordPress, which was founded in 2003, were the only two blog sites I was familiar with at the time and sad to say I chose Blogger not for political or economic reasons but for cultural reasons. I preferred its look to that of WordPress. Yes, like all humans I too can sometimes be shallow.

I still don’t know much about WordPress and how it works since I don’t use it. But I do know something about Blogger and knowledge as it sometimes does, has tarnished the aesthetic sheen and the reputation of this blog site for me.

 In the last couple of months the sheen has really began to wear off gilded Blogger for me. Google now requires, when I upload an image from my computer on to Blogger, that I allow them to use cookies, tracking cookies, in order to access and utilise information about me that they can presumably pass on (Google as Big Big Big Big Brother) and sell (Google as Big Big Big Big Corporation) to interested others. That is, after all, one of the ways that Google makes money and like many global postmodern megacorporations these days they will use every means, regardless of how small and seemingly petty, to make monies. 

And this is just one of the reasons why Google is one of the several skamky cookie monsters we sadly have to live with today. Beware of the skanky cookie monster whose ABC’s are actually dollar signs, pound signs, and Euro signs. The World According to Mammon.

 

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Dangerous CBC Reds Are Under our American Beds

 

Poor Canada. It is North America’s Poor Edith. Canada, particularly through its public broadcaster the CBC, has, over the years, produced some excellent and stimulating television shows. Hardly anybody within and outside of Canada, however, watches them. When people do watch them in significant numbers it is often a cause for at least some Canadian national celebration. 

There are several Canadian television shows that come to mind when I think about fine Canadian television. There is the excellent and very Canadian Due South, a cop show that explores, with humour, wit, and sometimes even sarcasm, Canadian and American ideologies of exceptionalism. There is Cold Squad, a show about usually cold murder cases from the files of the Vancouver constabulary which the US ripped off in the form of Cold Case. There is DaVinci’s Inquest, a show which superbly explores the dark realities at the heart of policing and politics in Vancouver. There is Slings and Arrows, the best show, in my opinion, ever produced on the theatre and theatre life in which each season centres around two Shakespeare plays and, in the third series, a musical comedy instead of another Shakespeare play, and a show which some regard as the finest TV show ever made. There is Heartland, a family saga set on an Alberta ranch that recalls excellent US family fare like The Waltons though with a Canadian twist and in which its American distributer, particularly in the early seasons, blurs out Alberta licence plates for presumably moral reasons—the dangers of Hot Ash licence plates?—or national reasons—it doesn’t want us to know that it is Canadian? There is the wonderful absurdist comedy Twitch City that precedes and foreshadows similar British comedies like The League of Gentlemen and the work of Julia Davis. And there is Murdoch Mysteries, a show about the Toronto constabulary in the Victorian and Edwardian era that reminds one of great British cop shows on ITV. All of these shows I have enjoyed immensely and been given much to think about as a result of watching them.

Well presumably some Canadians were intrigued to learn that someone, namely American diplomats stationed in Canada, were watching CBC commissioned shows. They were watching The Border (2008-2010), a show that reminds me less of 24 (2001-2010, 2014), a connection some commentators have claimed to see, than to the BBC’s spy, crime, and action-adventure show Spooks (2002-2011) with which The Border has a lot in common including an indebtedness to John le Carre. This last, by the way,  means that The Border, like Spooks, has a lot of reality in it. They were watching the excellent Intelligence (2005-2007), a show about the messy realities of the cross border drug and crime “trade" between British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest and the American and Canadian intelligence and surveillance agents involved in tracking and trying to stop them, brought to us by the same person who created the superb DaVinci’s Inquest, a show that preceded and parallels much in the very realistic US TV show The Wire. They were watching H2O (2004), a drama about an American plan to steal Canadian water co-written by Paul Gross. And they were watching Little Mosque on the Prairie (2007-2012), a situation comedy with an occasional bite centring on Canadian Muslims living in a fictional town in the prairie province of Saskatchewan. 

How do we know American diplomats and American agents stationed in Canada were watching these shows? Well in 2010, during the Barack Obama presidency and the prime ministership of ex Reform and new Tory pro-American Stephen Harper, it came to light, thanks to the Canadian national newspapers the National Post and Globe and Mail, and thanks particularly to Wikileaks, which had gotten hold of thousands of US secret diplomatic “cables”, that some bureaucrats in the US diplomatic corps who had watched these three shows reported in cables dated 2008 that they thought they were “anti-American”. These diplomatic and perhaps not so diplomatic missives accused these four CBC shows of stereotyping Americans via emotion laden “anti-American” melodrama. They claimed that that while these shows, produced with Canadian governmental aid, hardly constituted a diplomatic crisis between the two now close neighbours, they did reveal that the CBC, Canadian pubic television whose remit, in particularly, was to make Canadian television, twisted current events in order to feed Canadians negative images of the United States (ah there is that old saw of Canadian identity being a product of Canada and Canadians marking themselves off against Americans). They asserted that these shows reflected a Canadian nationalism that counterpointed Americans engaged in all sorts of “nefarious" actions while Canadians tried to stop them and even sometimes opposed them, shows that all too often counterpointed American black hats to Canadian white hats. 

The controversy that resulted over these cables, some of if gosh this is what American tax dollars are paying for variety, when they were released by the Canadian national press and Wikileaks was such that the American ambassador in Ottawa was forced to confess that while he had never seen any of these shows he doubted that any of them were “anti-American” while a spokesman for the US State Department in Washington emphasised the close friendship between the two countries and claimed that no one knows us, the US, better than Canada, a comment that opens up the Pandora’s box of double edged swords. What he also neglected to note is that these “anti-American” not “anti-American" television shows were also shown in the US on retro channels, if often late at night and in the wee hours of morning. Can US TV be "anti-American" too? 

Speaking of being an anti-, The Border one of whose creators was Lindalee Tracey of Not a Love Story fame, also sometimes skewers the Russians, the Chinese, two nations regularly skewered on US TV, the British and the Canadians, the last two often for good reason. MI6, the British not so secret spy and sureveillance agency and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, CSIS, in particular, come in for criticism, the latter quite regularly, making The Border, perhaps, at least for those Canadian politicians and nationalist Canadian historians—you know, the Canadian politicians and historians who think that only they are the only real Canadian patriots and who seek a more militant Canada with greater military, surveillance, and intelligence ties to the US—a prime candidate for the epithet “anti-Canadian”. Can Canadian TV be “anti-British” and “anti-Canadian” too?

Of course, what is never interrogated and never analysed empirically in this claim that something is “anti-American"is why and how something is “anti”  Now I will grant you that comments such as America sucks and Americans are dicks, that Israel sucks and Israelis (not Jews) are pricks, that Iceland sucks and Icelanders are sicks, and that evil Russkies suck and Russkies and dicks, pricks, and sicks (a common ideologically driven malady in the US which is used to great effect by the military, industrial, governmental, and university complex) are ill considered, if intellectually considered at all, lowest common denominator nonsense perhaps not even worthy of a seventh grade or first form mind. What I will not grant is that claims that the US is an imperial power, that it often throws its weight around, including in Canada way too often, that it regards itself as the chief policeman of the “civilised" world, that it has an increasing divide between the haves and have nots, and that it has had and continues to have racial problems, to name a few, is "anti-American". All of those critiques are valid empirical critiques of real America and, save in the minds of manipulating demagogues or polemicists and apologists and the socialised for conformity manipulated masses is not "anti-American". They are simply descriptions of reality. 

One can, of course, extend this point to other “antis". The differentiation between emotion grounded lowest common denominator schoolyard criticism versus empirical and analytical criticism can be applied to Israel as well given that Israel, empirically speaking, is a regional imperial power, thanks particularly to the US, with all that entails in terms of policing, surveillance, violence, and power, and where some Jews and many Muslims and Christians are second class citizens and experience segregation and violence. A lot of the same empirical criticism made of the US can also be made of Russia, including the observation that it is an imperial power, with the caveat that Russia is a second or third rate great power compared to the US (and certainly isn’t a threat to world domination and even if they were surely 007 or his American counterpart would be able to stop them single handedly as always) and so one’s empirical criticisms of that state’s power ambitions—all great powers including the US and Israel have power ambitions, of course—have to be adjusted accordingly in order to more accurately fit the Russian case. 

That so many of the socialised for conformity masses who are easily and readily manipulated by demagogues, by polemicists and apologists strategising for ideological and hence political advantage through the use of  emotional appeals, fall for the spurious rhetoric and discourse that even empirical and empirically verifiable criticisms of the US and Israel and Russia are the same as lowest common denominator “antiism" tells you a lot about the life of the mass mind in the modern and postmodern world and about how cultural and ideological power works in the modern and postmodern world. And who says that human life is not inherently absurd?

Read the cables here…https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/28/world/20101128-cables-viewer.html#report/canada-08OTTAWA136

Let He Who is Without Sin Cast the First Stone: Musings on Human Hyporcrisy

 

I first heard the story orally when I was in college. It is a story, however, or so I am told, that is as old as the stone age. It is a story that may be so old it was spoken before it was written down.

The story that I heard that day in class goes something like this. One day the Christian god-man Jesus was in Jerusalem drawing figures in the sand. All of a sudden a crowd appeared within Jesus’s eye and ear sight. They were physically pushing and pulling a woman along in front of them. Soon the crowd formed a circle around the frightened and disheveled woman each member of the mob picking up a stone to throw at the woman who, it turns out, was caught in adultery, adultery, well female adultery being a capital crime at the time. The adulterer, of course, was no where to be found. Before the members of the crowd cast the first stone, however, one of those who was part of the mob noticed Jesus and went over to him. “Rabbi", he said to Jesus, "we caught this woman in adultery. What should we do with this criminal". Jesus quickly responded to his inquisitor, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone". The mob heard the rabbi’s word and they stopped and contemplated what Jesus said. Suddenly, however, an elderly woman that was part of the mob let a stone fly at the adulteress hitting her squarely in the chest in the process. As mobs always do after someone does something they too began casting stones at the poor woman. Soon the adultress was dead. After most of the crowd left Jesus went over to the woman who had cast the first stone and said "mother, sometimes you make me so angry.”

This story, a story with a message that is ignored by most including those who consider themselves right thinking Christians, are like many stories and tales of this ilk. This tale, like those others, is a wonderful existentialist allegory of the human condition. The crowd represents most humans since no human is a saint and all humans are, in some way, shape, or form, sinners. Jesus represents that rarity in human life, the voice of sympathetic, empathetic, and compassionate reason. The adulteress symbolises not only human hypocrisies but human double standards. Mother symbolises holier than thou human beings who can’t see the mote in their own eyes and, for those in on the parody and satire of the story, the Christian Orthodox and Roman Catholic Mary who both have turned into a saintly virgin without sin and without children despite the fact that Mary was human and Jesus had siblings, or so the New Testament claims.

Those of us alive and living with a functioning critical brain are aware of the hypocrisies of the human species every hour of every day. Some of us revel in the absurdity of pots calling kettles black, of Republicans whinging and whining about liberal violence while ignoring the violence and violent discourse in their own midst, of sinners casting stones at Joss Whedon, or Alice Munro, or Robert F. Kennedy Jnr.. while ignoring the fact that other sinners would be, in this course of ideological affairs, fully justified at casting stones at them, of Donald Trump and Joe Biden whinging and whining about violence when they engage in selective violence, mental and physical, everyday, of whinging and whining out of both sides of their mouths US Supreme Court theocratic authoritarians claiming to be republicans, of political and ideological correcties whinging and whining about the political and ideological correctness of others. There are so many human hypocrisies out there in humanland that it would take more than two hundred lifetimes to list them. As I only have one lifetime I will simply point out that humans are and forever will be hypocrites. Isn’s that pathetic and ain’t that a shame?

Musings on the Culture of the Nacirema

I have long been interested in and carried out ethnographic fieldwork and historical investigations amongst the Kunac, the Eissua, the Iwik and, if much more limitedly, on other tribes beyond these three tribes. Despite my interest in all of these social and cultural groups most of my ethnographic, historical, and ethnological work has been done amongst that most exotic of tribes, the Nacirema. 

 

The Nacirema, as others who have studied the body rituals of this exotic tribe with its holy sticks and its magical substances which are rubbed and dabbed on their physical bodies and which they believe gives them cultural, including gender culture, magical power, and those who have assayed the ethnocentrisms of the Nacirema, with their grounding in a messianic, self-satisfied, and self-righteous sense of self and tribe, to note just a few, are fascinating. 

 

These body rituals and this messianic sense of chosenness and mission of the Nacirema are, of course, not peculiar to the Nacirema if we look etically and comparatively at human cultures and societies. They are also characteristic of the Kunac, the Eissua, and the Iwik and of human groups in general. What makes the sense of messianic chosenness among the Nacirema different from the similar messianisms of the Kunac, the Eissua, the Iwik, and most other human identity groups, however, is the linking, in Nacirema culture and society, of this messianism to large demographic size and to, as a consequence, immense economic, including technological, political, including military, and cultural power and imperial practise, whether of the economic, political, cultural, or geographic variety.

 

Recently I have been studying the cultures of the Nacirema's two dominant political totemic groups, the Tarcomed and the Nacilbuper. While the members of each of these totemic subtribes proclaim their difference from each other and assert emically that they are radically and irrevocably different from each other, they really aren't that different when one looks beyond a rhetoric whose function is group identity construction, group identity replication, and group boundedness. 

 

Both subtribes, for example, and despite somewhat changing demographics and ideology across time and space, share a common sense of messianic chosenness and mission, if with slight differences in meaning attached to the symbols, rituals, and language of both social and cultural groups. Both, for example, have long supported the imperial mission of the larger tribal group of which they are a part. Additionally, both share common and similar practises of social and cultural amnesia, in both their oral and literate forms, which paint not only their own subtribe as innocent, good or righteous, and on a holy mission from the divine, however they conceptualise the divine other, but also their tribe in general as innocent, good, and on a divine mission both on the home front and abroad. Finally, both, while claiming to be working for the common good, largely work for the good of the oligarchs who dominate the political, economic, and cultural life and social domains of Nacerimadom.

 

This rhetoric of emic cultural difference and the reality of etic cultural similarity, of course, is not peculiar to the Nacirema as I noted earlier. One also finds it, as I noted earlier, among the Kunac, the Eissua, and the Iwik. One, in fact, finds it among humans in general be they hunter-gatherers, small scale agriculturalists, large scale agriculturalists, industrialists, or postmodernists. It is, of course, this cultural similarity of humans groups despite the rhetoric of cultural difference that ethnologists explore and ferret out. And they do it despite the fact that most of the masses don't care about the scientific and comparative work they are engaged in because they, the socialised, demagogued, and propagandised masses, are inscribed in and magically enthralled by their culturally manufactured emic "realities". Sometimes, the seduced masses even demonise social scientists for doing their important scientific work because they perceive it as politically and ideologically incorrect profanation of the sacred myths they hold to be holy and true. And the human world turns.

 

 

 

The Books of My Life: Intertwined Lives

Once upon a time I was an anthropology student. As an undergraduate I took several courses in anthropology including Introduction to Anthropology, an Economic Anthropology class, and a graduate level anthropology course on "Names and Labels" for which I wrote an essay on Punk symbology and names. I also took, during my undergraduate years,  a graduate level course in the related discipline of folklore, specifically a course on Folklore and Religion. I, with my social science bent, liked them all, particularly the Folklore course which was one of the best classes I ever took during my long sojourn as a college student. I also came to like and admire the idea and practise of ethnology with its cross-cultural and inductive emphasis, things I came to see as essential if we are to fully understand humanity, that I applied for and was admitted into a doctoral programme in anthropology.

Like most anthropology students in the United States my postgraduate programme in anthropology mandated that all students, regardless of their emphasis in the discipline, take proseminar courses in all of the four subdisciplines of anthropology: cultural anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and biological anthropology. Like many of my colleagues at the time, I wasn't completely taken with the four subdiscipline mandate though I appreciate it much more now in retrospect. Nor was I taken with what I saw as anthropology's limited emphasis on broad social theory. I found anthropological theory too anthropological and too little sociological. Additionally, I was concerned with what I saw as anthropology's far too limited emphasis on history. I thought at the time, and I still think this today, that all of the social sciences and humanities needed to make use of the method of historical analysis. In fact, I would argue today that history should be less of an academic discipline than a necessary social sciences and humanities methodology.

Two of the people we talked about in ethnographic theory in the 1980s were, of course, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, both students of who some would call the totemic father of American cultural anthropology, Franz Boas. Lois Banner's Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and their Circle (New York: Knopf, 2003) explores the intertwined lives of Benedict, Mead, and those around them, including Reo Fortune, Gregory Bateson, and Ruth Landes, to name a few. Banner, who made use of recently opened archival material on Benedict and Mead, takes us into Benedict's and Mead's friendship and friendships, loves, competitions, social and cultural influences including Victorianism, romanticism, and modernism, descriptive and normative cultural relativism that critiqued a variety of fetishisms, the anti-racism movement that critiqued the hierarchy of races ideologies that emerged in the wake of Darwin, and professional lives, including their fieldwork experiences, theoretical legacies, and activisms.

At the time and still today, as Banner notes, Boas and his students Benedict and Mead were important because they shifted the empirical and theoretical terrain of cultural anthropology from unilinear evolutionism and biological determinism to the role culture played in human evolution, human societies, and in human personalities. One of Benedict's most famous and influential works then and now, Patterns of Culture, argued that different cultural forms gave rise to different personalities and behaviours. Mead argued in her equally influential and impactful writings on South Pacific cultures that different cultures gave rise to different sexual cultures, different sexual personalities, and different sexual behaviours and that these different sexual cultures, sexual personalities, and sexual behaviours varied across space. And while Benedict's and Mead's emphasis on nurture has not ended the debate over the relative impact nature and nurture have on human personalities and behaviours--it will likely go on until the end of time--they did provide a template for the debate that remains prominent even today in anthropology, sociology, and pyschology.

I enjoyed Banner's book even though I would like to have seen a greater and tighter focus on Benedict's and Mead's theoretical and ethnographic legacies and a more critical exploration of Benedict's and Mead's work for the American government during and after WWII. Recommended for those interested in American Studies, the history of gender, the history of bisexuality, intellectual history, the history of the social sciences and anthropology, and the history of academe.

Never Was a Cornflake Girl: Thomas Bender, Community, and Identity

I wrote this essay for a seminar on community at SUNY Albany in 1996. As someone interested in the social and cultural construction of reality I have long been interested in community, identity, and the social and cultural construction of community and identity. As someone interested in social movements like Mormonism and Quakerism I have long been interested in how identity construction and community construction are at the heart of the construction of social movements. At the heart of social movements, of course, is a cultural and ideological core. This paper interrogates most of these long term theoretical concerns of mine.

Thomas Bender's Community and Social Change offers us social and cultural theory fleshed out with history. More than anything else Bender’s book takes to task the tendency in social science theories of community to read the famous gemeinschaft/gesellschaft distinction of the influential German theorist Ferdinand Tonnies in geographical and evolutionary terms.

For Bender, it was the influential University of Chicago sociologist Louis Wirth who popularised the notion that face-to-face rural communities (gemeinschaft) were declining in the face of the growth of urban industrial societies (gesellschaft). For Wirth, and others who followed his lead, urbanism, operationalised in terms of demographic variables, specifically, increasing population, increasing population density, and increasing heterogeneity, undermined traditional communal ways, and gave birth to new urban lifeways, new lifeways that replaced these earlier primary forms of social interaction with secondary social contacts, weakened kinship bonds, and undermined the traditional bases of social solidarity.

Bender takes exception to Wirth’s geographical and evolutionary conception of the community/society binary. Instead he argues that Tonnies conception of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft was both geographic-evolutionary and, the aspect which Wirth ignores, behavioural, He argues that it is this behavioural aspect of the community/society split that allows us look at community and society historically rather than evolutionarily.

Bender explores American community history from colonisation to the twentieth century to foreground how important this behavioural understanding of community and society is. According to Bender it was in the late eighteenth century that America experienced a bifurcation in lifestyles. After the ratification of the Constitution two different lifeways, local lifeways arose in the United States, one local in form and grounded in face-to-face interaction and characterised by “consensus”, and another, national in form and characterized by conflict and the idea of majority rules.

There is something to be said for Bender's volleys against the geographic-evolutionary conception of the community/society binary popularized by Wirth. Bender’s attacks on theories of community like those of Wirth, approaches which are grounded in unilinear assumptions, assumptions which posit the straight line movement from gemeinshaft to gesellschaft, from traditional to modern communities, from rural to urban forms, assumptions which continue to impact the contemporary intellectual and academic mind.

Bender is not the first theorist to raise questions about unilinear models of the evolution of community and society which posits that community had been replaced by society, that face-to-face interactions had been replaced by secondary ones. Unilnear models in general, unilnear models which were prominent not only in community theory but in the understanding of the evolution of humans and human life in general, came under serious attack in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s in the writings of Franz Boaz and Julian Steward and by the 1960s had lost its dominant place in anthropological theory. So, to some extent, Bender provides us with yet another example of someone critiquing a social science paradigm that had already gone out of style by the time he criticised it.

Timing apart Bender does offer a systematic account of the problems with the geographical-evolutionary model of community and proffers a behavioural model in its place. But what he doesn’t offer us is an exploration of that historical, social, and cultural phenomena that manufactures community, identity and its social, cultural, and historical construction.

In recent years anthropologists have begun to focus a significant amount of attention on the nature of identity construction. Cultural Anthropologist John Comaroff, for instance, distinguishes between two major identity forms, the totemic and the ethnic. Comoroff sees the former as an identity structured on the belief in a common ancestral origin, in a common ancestry traced to some animal or plant in the natural environment. Totemic identity structures, claims Comaroff, are less likely to demonise the others whom they mark themselves off against than is that other form of identity type Comaroff delineates, ethnic identity structures. Ethnic identity structures, like totemic, are grounded in ideologies of common ancestry. They are generally geographical in nature, tied to soil, and they are often biological in form, tied to blood. Ethnic identities are generally grounded in a distinction between "us" and "them", with the "them" oftentimes characterised in very negative almost demonic terms.

While Comoroff's distinction is very interesting and helpful it does not go far enough. Identity can be defined in a variety of ways, biologically, economically, politically, geographically, ideologically, culturally, ecologically, religiously, historically, and so on. In the modern West with its complex social and cultural formations, for instance, identity can even be defined in terms of all of these above simultaneously. From 8am to 5pm on weekdays we may define ourselves as an employee of Wal-Mart. From 10am to 10:05am on Election Day we may define ourselves in terms of ones political party. From 11am to 3pm on Sunday we may define ourselves as a devout ward going Mormon. In the first few weeks after an attack on our nation we may define ourselves as a patriotic lets respond to the attack citizen of the United States. If we are a student at the University of Utah we may define ourself as a "Ute" and mark ourself off against that evil "Cougar" other of BYU to our south. When with parents we may define ourselves in biological terms, as a daughter of the Demerest family. When trying to get into Harvard we may attempt to define ourselves in minority categories that have been constructed in the nation in which we live. Clearly, identity and thus community, which is built on the broad shoulders of identity, are very complex phenomena and require further systematic study. And it is certainly far more than just a behaviour. It is a culture and a complex of meanings.

One last criticism of Bender's work, like many classic works in early American religious history, works which often place Puritans at the centre of their narrative tales--yet another unilinear academic tale--Bender place New Englanders and their communities in the very centre of his analysis. He asserts that the similarities between New England, the Middle Colonies, the Chesapeake, and the South were more significant than their differences. Even he has to admit that the differences were significant as well, however, particularly when he deals with the differences between the American North and the American South. Nevertheless, he asserts that the back country areas of the South were as locally oriented as the New England colonies and states. But the question remains whether they were locally oriented in the same way? Bender really does need to develop a cultural notion of community in addition to his behavioural notion for if he did he might see that the behavioural similarities are no less important than the cultural variations.

Sources:
Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1978)
John Comaroff, "Of Totemism and Ethnicity: Consciousness, Practise, and the Signs of Inequality"; unpublished paper in possession of the author
Julian Steward, Evolution and Ecology: Essays on Social Transformation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978)
Julian Steward, Theory of Cultural Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990)

Little Boxes Made of Ticky Tack: Musings on Academic Disciplinarity

One of the problems, in my opinion, with academia and, as a result, academic culture as it has evolved, developed, devolved, choose your poison, is the division of the social sciences and the humanities into disciplinary territories with names like History, Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, Economics, Folklore, English, and so on and on and on.

It is interesting to compare academic times present with intellectual times past. In the nineteenth century, before the development of academic disciplines and before social science and humanities fossilised or hardened into what they are today, the interdisciplinary and totalistic and wholisic intellectual life was actually treasured and rewarded. Some of those who engaged in the grand interdisciplinary and wholistic enterprise, in fact, became the totemistic godfathers of the biological sciences, Sociology, and Anthropology and remain very much so today. Charles Darwin, for instance, in his Origins of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871) pointed out that all species, including man, humans, were the products of the interaction between biology and environment. He called it adaptation. Karl Marx in his various writings, polemical and "scientific", explored the prehistory and history of human economic activity from hunter-gatherer societies through agricultural feudal societies to industrial capitalist societies. Max Weber explored in great detail and depth the question of why capitalism arose in the West by focusing on variety of factors that contributed to the development of modern capitalism in the West including Western Calvinism. Emile Durkheim analysed how societies made themselves into objects of their own transcendental desire and how modern societies differed from pre-modern societies

The development of academia into disciplines claiming special knowledge over a particular territory of human knowledge in the late 19th and early 20th century has been all for the bad, in my opinion, when it comes to understanding human life in all its shapes, forms, and sizes particularly when compared with the comparative interdisciplinarity of the 19th century. On the historical and sociological level the disciplining of academia is a reflection of the same specialisation of labour processes that have occurred in other sectors of the modern world thanks to such things as capitalism, industrialisation, centralisation, professionalisation, and bureaucratisation. On the sociology of knowledge level this specialisation has had a particularly deleterious effect because, if we really want to understand humankind in all of its historical and cultural forms, we have to look at humans through the broad lenses of biology, economics, culture, politics, and geography rather than through the narrowly focused nearsighted lenses of academic disciplines. We have to do this because, as Darwin recognised over a hundred years ago, human life is the product of both nature (biology, genetics, demography) and nurture (economics, culture, politics, and geography). For this reason dividing knowledge into little or not so little territorial boxes, as academia has done, does not help us understand human life and human culture in general. In fact it actually hinders us.

American Anthropology recognised this when it subdivided itself into Biological or Evolutionary Anthropology, Cultural or Social Anthropology, Linguistics, and Archaeology, as it bureaucratised. What sounds great in theory has not proved as wonderful in practise, however. The various strands of academic Anthropology, like academia in general, have developed their own specialised knowledges, their own bureaucratic practises, and their own distinct languages, making discourse between all four branches difficult if not impossible and not always desirable to Bioanthropologists, Ethnographers and Ethnologists, Linguists, and Anthropological Archaeologists with distinct senses of self and collective identity. Moreover, American Anthropology as practised has long had another problem. Cultural and Social Anthropology has tended to focus on so-called pre-modern societies and cultures leaving the moderns to Sociology, while Anthropological Archaeology has little if anything to do with Ancient and Classical Archaeology thanks to disciplinary territorial boundaries. So, even the one discipline that attempted in theory to be wholistic and which made sacred the collection of materials from around the world on every hunter-gatherer, pastoral, agricultural, and water based societies and cultures for their Human Relations Area Files, hasn't really been engaged in this necessary and essential interdisciplinary and comparative work in practise. And while this may be partly due to increasing human complexity and the increasing size of the Western world in particular, it also has something, a large something in my opinion, to do with Western specialisation, centralisation, professionalisation, and bureaucratisation.

I regard this little fable about the failures of wholistic Anthropology, by the way, as the proverbial canary in the coal mine warning us that the notion that all disciplines working together will produce a general understanding of and knowledge of the world we live in in all its glory is an illusion if not a hallucination. Specialisation generally leads to the development of separate (but not equal) academic disciplines and "distinct" academic knowledges, academic knowledge specialisation (the higher education bureaucracy's version of the division of labour), and languages or discourses. It leads, in other words, to academic little boxes rather than to interdisciplinary interaction or a broad understanding of the world and the humans who live in that world.

Thankfully interdisciplinary and comparative explorations of human life and human culture in all their complexity is not yet dead as the writings of Jurgen Habermas, Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, and others show. Such interdisciplinary attempts to get at humans, human society, and human culture are, however, anomalies in an academic disciplinary context that rewards specialisation rather than interdisciplinarity, and which penalises unorthodoxy and heresy. And that, dear unreaders, is a tragedy of immense dimensions and that is why I am no longer sure academia really works or functions as much more than an bureaucracy for the accumulation of social capital, cultural capital, and economic capital by the few.