Apr 2, 2018 07:34 PM
How did the First People get to Australia?
https://theconversation.com/island-hoppi...alia-93120
EXCERPT: The First Australians were among the world’s earliest great ocean explorers, undertaking a remarkable 2,000km maritime migration through Indonesia which led to the discovery of Australia at least 65,000 years ago. But the voyaging routes taken through Indonesia’s islands, and the location of first landfall in Australia, remain a much debated mystery to archaeologists. Our research, published earlier this year in Quaternary Science Reviews, highlights the most likely route by mapping islands in the region over time through changing sea levels....
MORE: https://theconversation.com/island-hoppi...alia-93120
Conjuring Anthropology’s Future
http://www.publicbooks.org/conjuring-ant...ys-future/
EXCERPT: . . . if anthropology was invented to bring the full force of modern rationality to bear on “primitive” societies and cultures, and this under conditions in which the division between the modern and the primitive was most concretely based in the division between reason and magic, what happens to anthropology once the hard division between magic and reason is undone (as it is here), and in the same breath the hard division between “primitive” and “modern” (once again) crumbles?
In this situation, anthropology itself, rather than being a vehicle of universal rationality, becomes an expression of a particular society and culture and, indeed, a performance somewhat like a magic performance in which partial, more or less ritually produced statements are passed off and sanctioned as legitimate objective knowledge.
This difficulty cannot be bypassed just by directing the “ethnographic gaze” indifferently toward all kinds of institutions and lifeways, “modern” or not, nor even by anthropology’s avowed acceptance that it too participates in the societies it studies rather than merely observes them. After all, what is ultimately in question is anthropology’s claim to be in Bernard Williams’s sense “truthful” and not simply performative, not simply expressive, not just something like a dignified and discursive form of secular magic. If, as [Graham M.] Jones’s book seems to suggest, anthropology finds it hard not to see itself as anything except analogous to a form of secular magic then it is hard to see how it can remain anthropology, thought of as a social scientific pursuit, at all.
The solution to this problem, as Jones’s book [Magic’s Reason] also allows us to suppose, is to move away both from the discipline’s Boasian transformation and from Latour’s emphasis on hybridity and de-purification, so as to imagine it differently. We are to think of anthropology not as grounded in reason/magic and modern/primitive oppositions or analogies, and thus endlessly and fruitlessly driven to overcome and apologize for them à la Boas and Latour, but rather—let me here speculate some—to think of it more skeptically as (for instance) an institutionally/bureaucratically based structure of action, attention, and feeling as well as a discursive archive and register....
MORE: http://www.publicbooks.org/conjuring-ant...ys-future/
https://theconversation.com/island-hoppi...alia-93120
EXCERPT: The First Australians were among the world’s earliest great ocean explorers, undertaking a remarkable 2,000km maritime migration through Indonesia which led to the discovery of Australia at least 65,000 years ago. But the voyaging routes taken through Indonesia’s islands, and the location of first landfall in Australia, remain a much debated mystery to archaeologists. Our research, published earlier this year in Quaternary Science Reviews, highlights the most likely route by mapping islands in the region over time through changing sea levels....
MORE: https://theconversation.com/island-hoppi...alia-93120
Conjuring Anthropology’s Future
http://www.publicbooks.org/conjuring-ant...ys-future/
EXCERPT: . . . if anthropology was invented to bring the full force of modern rationality to bear on “primitive” societies and cultures, and this under conditions in which the division between the modern and the primitive was most concretely based in the division between reason and magic, what happens to anthropology once the hard division between magic and reason is undone (as it is here), and in the same breath the hard division between “primitive” and “modern” (once again) crumbles?
In this situation, anthropology itself, rather than being a vehicle of universal rationality, becomes an expression of a particular society and culture and, indeed, a performance somewhat like a magic performance in which partial, more or less ritually produced statements are passed off and sanctioned as legitimate objective knowledge.
This difficulty cannot be bypassed just by directing the “ethnographic gaze” indifferently toward all kinds of institutions and lifeways, “modern” or not, nor even by anthropology’s avowed acceptance that it too participates in the societies it studies rather than merely observes them. After all, what is ultimately in question is anthropology’s claim to be in Bernard Williams’s sense “truthful” and not simply performative, not simply expressive, not just something like a dignified and discursive form of secular magic. If, as [Graham M.] Jones’s book seems to suggest, anthropology finds it hard not to see itself as anything except analogous to a form of secular magic then it is hard to see how it can remain anthropology, thought of as a social scientific pursuit, at all.
The solution to this problem, as Jones’s book [Magic’s Reason] also allows us to suppose, is to move away both from the discipline’s Boasian transformation and from Latour’s emphasis on hybridity and de-purification, so as to imagine it differently. We are to think of anthropology not as grounded in reason/magic and modern/primitive oppositions or analogies, and thus endlessly and fruitlessly driven to overcome and apologize for them à la Boas and Latour, but rather—let me here speculate some—to think of it more skeptically as (for instance) an institutionally/bureaucratically based structure of action, attention, and feeling as well as a discursive archive and register....
MORE: http://www.publicbooks.org/conjuring-ant...ys-future/