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OT question about anthropology for isaacullah
OT question about anthropology for isaacullah
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Andrew
1076 posts
Jul 11, 2010
11:27 AM
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Sorry to go OT, and sorry to chase you, Isaac, I asked this the other day, but I think I chose a bad time of day and it dropped off the bottom of the board.
I've read a couple of anthropology primers, and the two things that I'd like to read a bit more about are the anthropology of illness and the anthropology of mathematics. If you can suggest any books, I'd be grateful.
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Andrew,
gentleman of leisure,
noodler extraordinaire.
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isaacullah
1058 posts
Jul 11, 2010
1:23 PM
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Well, there are two fields in anthropolgy related to illness. Medical Anthropology studies disease and health in modern societies. Those who study disease and the evolution of diseases are more in the Physical anthropology camp, while those that study the social effects of disease or health are in the social anthropology camp. A good book in the social realm is "No Aging In India" by Lawrence Cohen. A good book in the physcial realm is "Diseases and Human Evolution" by Ethne Barnes.
The other field is Bioarchaeology, which is more the analysis of skeletal matter from archaeological sites for disease and health markers. The best introductory textbook is by Jane Buikstra (who is here at ASU), called "Bioarchaeology: The Contextual Analysis of Human Remains".
As for the anthropology of Mathematics, I don't know exactly what you mean. Do you mean anthropological studies of mathematicians or how math is taught or used in modern society? Or do you mean the development/use of math in history/prehistory? I'd have to do a library catalog search for you to find specific references for both subjects, but there is unlikely to be a general textbook on the anthropology of math.
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Andrew
1077 posts
Jul 11, 2010
2:35 PM
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Do you have an email address, Isaac? It's quite a long time since I last read a book on anth, so I might want to revise.
Basically I'm interested in how one learns from one's society how to be ill - where do we place our response to the pathogen on the spectrum that goes from the purely physical symptom to the purely psychosomatic?
In the case of maths, I'm basically interested in the different requirements from maths of different societies, resulting in the different developments of mathematical theory in those societies, I think. In other words, maths as subjective rather than maths as objective.
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Andrew,
gentleman of leisure,
noodler extraordinaire.
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Stickman
370 posts
Jul 11, 2010
4:20 PM
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Fascinating stuff Andrew. Like how the number zero was" invented/discovered" and who did it first. As an Art teacher this is fascinating that someone realized that you needed "something" to represent "nothing" this is very abstract thinking. It is my understanding that while the Europeans wallowed in their despair during the dark ages, Muslims in the middle east developed a algebra, which is taught in throughout our country as the standard in math.
I wonder how other cultures used complex math to build the pyramids at Giza. Geometry must have been used by the Polynesians to cross the Pacific Ocean or by the Aztecs who built the El Caracol observatory at Chichen Itza. I believe math played an important part of human development. So I suppose the question for Isaac is what he thinks math's influence was the development of the human species.
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The Art Teacher Formally Known As scstrickland
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isaacullah
1061 posts
Jul 11, 2010
4:39 PM
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Andrew: e-mail me at iiullah at yahoo dot com. Your first interest falls squarely within the socio-cultural field of Medical Anthropology, and your second is within the standard field of socio-cultural anthropology. I'd have to do some targeted searching through the anthro article catalogs, so all info about your interests in those topics you can provide for me will aid my search. Do you have access to a university library and/or online access to journal repositories? If so, I can pass references to you, and you can download pdf's yourself. Otherwise, I'd be happy to download a few choice pdf articles for you and host them on my webspace until you've downloaded them.
@Stickman: My sense of it, as an archaeologist who specializes in prehistoric peoples, is that humans certainly have an innate mathmatical sense. I think a lot of math we think of as "complex" can actually be estimated fairly accurately by simple means. Much geometry doesn't even require numbers to do. You can do it with a length of string and some twigs of various lengths. (I'm totally serious about this). The concepts are still abstract, but one doesn't even really need to know e.g. pythagora's theorem to make a perfect square. Seriously, to make a perfect square, all you need is four nails or pegs and some string.
Anyway, I think probably that we developed an ability to understand and process complex mathematical concepts pretty early on in our evolution, and that's one of the factors that separate us from Chimps and Gorillas, etc. But that "math" as we know it didn't really develop until after the Neolithic, when cultural continuity and cultural evolution allowed for the explicit generation of mathematical hypotheses. The invention of writing didn't hurt either.
But I'm no expert on this stuff... I bet there's a good book out there on it somewhere's!
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Andrew
1078 posts
Jul 12, 2010
3:28 AM
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Pyramids are kind of interesting, maybe, but not part of the question I'm asking really. Pi comes into their ratio, but this is a fertile area for pyramidiots. You get things like "The great pyramid measures 400m around its base and it's 127.32359443125423 metres high" and the ratio of these is pi to 10 decimal places. Wooo, aliens built it!
Someone who's awake though can see that "127.32359443125423 metres" isn't a measurement, the conman has just divided 400 by Pi. The reality is that the height, as measured, might be 127 metres, which is close enough to Pi, but the instrument used to design it was just a simple compass, or even two sticks tied together by a piece of string.
Rant over.
Stickman, you paint a bemusing picture of Europeans in despair because they haven't invented the number zero!
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Andrew,
gentleman of leisure,
noodler extraordinaire.
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Andrew
1079 posts
Jul 12, 2010
4:02 AM
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In my first year as an arts undergraduate, we did a course unit which included an examination of the history of science and we looked at two theories:
1. The two-track model
2. Contextuality
The two-track model says "there was always a correct track and there was an incorrect one; which one are you on?"
And the current scientific response to the world's ideological fury is "we're on the correct track, everyone else is on the incorrect one", but I suspect the dubious implications of this are not clear to the nerds who think Richard Dawkins is cooler than Captain Picard.
You can probably guess that I favour the contextuality camp!
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Andrew,
gentleman of leisure,
noodler extraordinaire.
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Stickman
371 posts
Jul 12, 2010
4:29 AM
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@Andrew-maybe "wallowing in despair" was not the best wording. I was referring to the Muslim Golden Age as juxtaposed with the European Dark Ages.
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The Art Teacher Formally Known As scstrickland
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Andrew
1080 posts
Jul 12, 2010
4:32 AM
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I know, I was just teasing you!
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Andrew,
gentleman of leisure,
noodler extraordinaire.
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Andrew
1081 posts
Jul 12, 2010
5:26 AM
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Thanks, Adam, you've hit a lot of nails squarely on the head there. I worked for the Office for National Statistics for 24 years (previously known as the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys), and this phenomenon: "specific ways in which patients are asked to tell their stories--the stories of their symptoms, their illness--makes a huge difference in diagnostics." correlates 100% with asking leading questions and thus skewing the results of a survey.
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Andrew,
gentleman of leisure,
noodler extraordinaire.
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Andrew
1082 posts
Jul 12, 2010
5:32 AM
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On a totally prosaic level, when an Englishman gets a cold he keeps a stiff upper lip, gets on with his job and ignores it, because he's been told to. When a German (or maybe a Frenchman) gets a cold, he goes to bed, takes loads of drugs and doesn't get out of bed until it's over, because he's been told to. Neither is right and neither is wrong: Englishmen spread a lot of germs, lol! In Walkabout an Australian Aborigine dies of a common cold. I haven't read it since I was 15, and I have no idea what message the author intended to convey (it's easy enough to guess) or whether the common cold can even be fatal.
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Andrew,
gentleman of leisure,
noodler extraordinaire.
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isaacullah
1062 posts
Jul 12, 2010
11:13 AM
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Andrew, I e-mailed you with a bunch of references to check out.
Cheers,
Isaac
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