The swashbuckling anthropologist: Henrich on The Secret of Our Success

In The Secret of Our Success, Joseph Henrich claims that human beings are unique—different from all other animals—because we engage in cumulative cultural evolution. It is the technological and social products of cumulative cultural evolution, not the intrinsic rationality or ‘smartness’ of individual humans, that enable us to live in a huge range of different habitats, and to dominate most of the creatures who share those habitats with us. We are sympathetic to this general view, the latest expression of the ‘California school’s’ view of cultural evolution, and impressed by the lively and interesting way that Henrich handles evidence from anthropology, economics, and many fields of biology. However, because we think it is time for cultural evolutionists to get down to details, this essay review raises questions about Henrich’s analysis of both the cognitive processes and the selection processes that contribute to cumulative cultural evolution. In the former case, we argue that cultural evolutionists need to make more extensive use of cognitive science, and to consider the evidence that mechanisms of cultural learning are products as well as processes of cultural evolution. In the latter case, we ask whether the California school is really serious about selection, or whether it is offering a merely ‘kinetic’ view of cultural evolution, and, assuming the former, outline four potential models of cultural selection that it would be helpful to distinguish more clearly.     

The historical unreality of the proletariat as an ethnographic subject in Mexican anthropology

Dialectical Anthropology - At the beginning of the twentieth century, the anthropological field became one of the main means of integrating indigenous populations utilized by the Mexican State in...     

The evolution of visual processing and the construction of seeing systems

This paper is concerned with the evolution of visual mechanisms and the possibility of copying their principles at different levels of sophistication. It is an old question how the complex interaction between eye and brain evolved when each needs the other as a test-bed for successive improvements. I propose that the primitive mechanism for the separation of stationary objects relies on their relative movement against a background, normally caused by the animal's own movement. Apparently insects and many lower animals use little more than this for negotiating through a three-dimensional world, making adequate responses to individual objects which they 'see' without a cortical system or even without a large brain. In the development of higher animals such as birds or man, additional circuits store memories of the forms of objects that have been frequently inspected from all angles or handled. Simple visual systems, however, are tuned to a feature of the world by which objects separate themselves by movement relative to the eye. In making simple artificial visual systems which 'see', as distinct from merely projecting the image, it is more hopeful to copy the 'ambient' vision of lower animals than the cortical systems of birds or mammals.     

How Malinowski sailed the Midnight Sun: the academic conference as ethnographic performance

Anthropology's scope is broader than its public, often limited to other anthropologists, while those who share their knowledge in the field with the ethnographer are too often cut off from anthropological debates about that knowledge. The anthropology conference, seen as research practice, proves successful in readmitting ethnographic subjects into anthropological dialogues. A symposium held in 2015 in Alotau, Papua New Guinea, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Malinowski's arrival in the Massim region, demonstrates how Massim peoples transcend anthropologists’ discursive presentations by using images, objects, and performances, diluting, along the way, anthropology's hierarchical control.     

Beyond authenticity: The discourse of tourism in ethnographic and experimental film

This paper explores the relationship between postmodern ethnographic and experimental filmmaking. Recent shifts in both modes of film praxis away from modernist paradigms of anthropology and aesthetics have disclosed a rich field of nonscientific, non‐visionary common ground. Theoretical issues that help to define this inter‐penetration of film modes include allegory, tourism and intertextuality. Films by Jonas Mekas, Trinh Minh‐ha, David Byrne and Paula Gaitan are discussed with the aim of indicating the scope, the potential and the problems of postmodern ethnography.     

The turbulence of images: On imagery,media and ethnographic discourse

As the anthropological theory of politeness has put it, people have universally two kinds of social want. They wish to be close to others, liked and accepted, but they also want some distance, freedom from imposition and respect of mutual difference. These wants, which one may also call basic human rights, are however often violated, and images play an important role in this.

Images are ultimately generated in the human mind and may find verbal as well as written and pictorial representation. Tyler [1978] has proposed a typology of mental images based on criteria of conscious control, completeness, abstraction, media and autonomy. These criteria also prove useful when probing into prototypical usages of intrusive imagery such as cursing, blessing, magic, witchcraft and the evil eye. Also the criteria help one understand the subtle process by which imagery can lead to the articulation and even discovery of peoples’ selves.

Ethnographic discourse has always been to a large extent about images, but until recently the ethnographer stood between his or her audience and the people of whom he or she was speaking or writing. Now, as sound recordings, film and video have arrived, this allows for richer varieties of cooperation where the non‐literate counterparts of the ethnographer can make more expressive and coherent contributions than before.

Also it seems that in the face of suppression people welcome the new media as a support in their ongoing battle for a recognition of their cultural and social worthiness.     

Pest problems: The view of the New Zealand conservation authority

Abstract

The New Zealand Conservation Authority was established 3 years ago by the Conservation Law Reform Act 1990. Its functions include the provision of advice on conservation issues of national importance to Government and to the Department of Conservation (DoC). It has a statutory role in the approval of management plans for national parks and other important areas of the conservation estate. It advises the Minister and the Director-General of Conservation annually on priorities for the expenditure of money.     

PATIKA: an integrated visual environment for collaborative construction and analysis of cellular pathways

MOTIVATION: Availability of the sequences of entire genomes shifts the scientific curiosity towards the identification of function of the genomes in large scale as in genome studies. In the near future, data produced about cellular processes at molecular level will accumulate with an accelerating rate as a result of proteomics studies. In this regard, it is essential to develop tools for storing, integrating, accessing, and analyzing this data effectively. RESULTS: We define an ontology for a comprehensive representation of cellular events. The ontology presented here enables integration of fragmented or incomplete pathway information and supports manipulation and incorporation of the stored data, as well as multiple levels of abstraction. Based on this ontology, we present the architecture of an integrated environment named Patika (Pathway Analysis Tool for Integration and Knowledge Acquisition). Patika is composed of a server-side, scalable, object-oriented database and client-side editors to provide an integrated, multi-user environment for visualizing and manipulating network of cellular events. This tool features automated pathway layout, functional computation support, advanced querying and a user-friendly graphical interface. We expect that Patika will be a valuable tool for rapid knowledge acquisition, microarray generated large-scale data interpretation, disease gene identification, and drug development. AVAILABILITY: A prototype of Patika is available upon request from the authors.     

Discourse and power: On the limits of ethnographic texts

Dialectical Anthropology -