A couple of things caught my eye this week in the world of anthropology.
The first concerns a couple of very ancient ceramics. Rosemary Joyce provides a nice discussion of the challenges of trying to properly understand the role of such ancient technologies without succumbing to teleology. Particularly because the same basic technologies are used later in transformational cultural periods. You can read a quick blog post by one of the archaeologists involved about one of these finds in Croatia.
The next story I followed that had an anthropological flair to it was the mini-controversy surrounding some of Mitt Romney's comments about Palestinian peoples that he made on his recent foreign trip. In particular, he references the book, Guns, Germs and Steel by quasi-anthropologist Jared Diamond as contributing to his perspective. Diamond's main point is that geography matters in understanding which particular groups of people have come to politically and economically dominate the planet today.
Diamond responded in a New York Times op-ed yesterday arguing that Romney missed his whole point. Jason Antrosio, an anthropologist critical of both Romney and Diamond offered his take on why even if Romney missed Diamond's point, it's a bad point.
No comments:
Post a Comment