[Paleopsych] Edge: An Epidemology of Representations: A Talk with Dan Sperber
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An Epidemology of Representations: A Talk with Dan Sperber
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How do the microprocesses of cultural transmission affect the macro
structure of culture, its content, its evolution? The microprocesses,
the small-scale local processes I am talking about are, on the one
hand, psychological processes that happen inside people's brains, and
on the other hand, changes that people bring about in their common
environment-- for instance the noise they make when they talk or the
paths they unconsciously maintain when they walk--and through which
they interact.
Just as the human mind is not a blank slate on which culture would
somehow imprint its content, the communication process is not a xerox
machine copying contents from one mind to another. This is where I
part company not just from your standard semiologists or social
scientists who take communication to be a coding-decoding system, a
transmission system, biased only by social interests, by power, by
intentional or unconscious distortions, but that otherwise could
deliver a kind of smooth flow of undistorted information. I also part
company from Richard Dawkins who sees cultural transmission as based
on a process of replication, and who assume that imitation and
communication provide a robust replication system.
AN EPIDEMIOLOGY OF REPRESENTATIONS [7.27.05]
A Talk with Dan Sperber
Dan Sperber Edge Video [10]Broadband | [11]Modem
Introduction
Dan Sperber is a French anthropologist who has focused on the more
cognitive, more naturalist, approaches linked to evolution. "For a
long time," he says, "my ideas were not very well received among
anthropologists. They've been discussed a lot, but I found myself
spending too much time with my fellow anthropologists arguing the
basics of the field rather than moving forward in research. I got
involved in linguistics, experimental psychology, philosophy of
science, evolutionary biology, and lots of fascinating topics--and
continuing also the conversation with anthropologists. Anthropology is
a discipline that has been in crisis all my life."
Dan Sperber's parents were both eastern-European Jews; his father,
Manes Sperber, a famous novelist, was born in Galicia, grew up in
Vienna, then moved to Germany. He met his mother, who came from
Latvia, in France in the 30s . Manes Sperber was a Communist, was very
active in the party, but left the party at the time of the Moscow
trials. Sperber was born in France. "That's my culture," he says. "I
am French. Still, there are French people who are much more French
than I am. They have roots as they say, but the image of roots has
always made me smile. You know, I'm not a plant."
The reason he gives for having become an anthropologist is that he was
raised an atheist. There was no god in the family. His father, Manes
Sperber, was from a Jewish family, had refused to do his bar mitzvah,
and he transmitted zero religion to his son, but at the same time, he
had deep respect for religious people. There was no sense that they
are somehow inferior. This left the young Sperber with a puzzle: how
can people, intelligent decent people, be so badly mistaken?
Sperber is known for his work in developing a naturalistic approach to
culture under the name of "epidemiology of representations", and, with
British linguist Deirdre Wilson, for developing a cognitive approach
to communication known as "Relevance Theory". Both the epidemiology of
representations and relevance theory has been influential and
controversial.
He is also known for his early work on the anthropology or religion,
in which he tried to understand, in a generalist manner and in a
positive way (i.e. without making them into idiots), why people could
be religious. He took part in classical anthropological studies but he
also argued from the start that you have to look at basic innate
mental structures, which, he argued, "played quite an important role
in the very possibility of religious beliefs, in the fact that, more
generally, beliefs in the supernatural fixate in the way they do in
the human mind, are so extraordinarily catching".
Sperber's "catchiness", a theory he has been exploring for a
generation, connects with Malcolm Gladwell's idea of a "tipping
point". "I've never met Gladwell, " he says, "but when his book came
out, many people sent me the book, or told me to read it, telling me
that here's the same kind of thing you've been arguing for a long
time. Yes, you get the kind of epidemiological process of something
gradually, almost invivibly spreading in a population and then indeed
reaching a "tipping point." That's the kind of dynamic you may find
with epidemiological phenomena. Still, I don't believe that Gladwell
or anybody else, myself included, has a satisfactory understanding of
the general causes of the dynamics of cultural distribution."
" Now, if I could just write with the slickness of Gladwell, and coin
one of his best-selling titles such as Blink! or The Tipping Point. .
. but I guess I would also have to give up trying to convey much of
the hard substance of my work. Oh well..".
Edge is pleased to present An Epidemiology of Representations: A Talk
with Dan Sperber.
-- [12]JB
DAN SPERBER, Directeur de Recherche au CNRS, Paris, is a French social
and cognitive scientist. He is the author of Rethinking Symbolism, On
Anthropological Knowledge, and Explaining Culture. He is also the
co-author, (with Deirdre Wilson) of Relevance: Communication and
Cognition.
Sperber holds a research professorship at the French Centre National
de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, and has held visiting
positions at Cambridge University, the British Academy, the London
School of Economics, the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Princeton University, the
University of Michigan, the University of Bologna, and the University
of Hong-Kong.
[13]DAN SPERBER's Edge Bio Page
_________________________________________________________________
AN EPIDEMIOLOGY OF REPRESENTATIONS
[DAN SPERBER:] What I want to know is how, in an evolutionary
perspective, social cultural phenomena relate to psychological mental
phenomena.
The social and the psychological sciences,when they emerged as
properly scholarly disciplines with their own departments in the
nineteenth century took quite different approaches, adopted different
methodologies, asked different questions. Psychologists lost sight of
the fact that what's happening in human minds is always informed by
the culture in which individuals grow. Social scientists lost sight of
the fact that the transmission, the maintenance, and the
transformation of culture takes place not uniquely but in part in
these individual psychological processes. This means that if what
you're studying is culture, the part played by the psychological
moments, or episodes, in the transmission of culture should be seen as
crucial. I find it unrealistic to think of culture as something
hovering somehow above individuals -- culture goes through them, and
through their minds and their bodies and that is, in good part, where
culture is being made.
I've been arguing for a very long time now that one should think of
the evolved psychological makeup of human beings both as a source of
constraints on the way culture can develop, evolve, and also, of
course, as what makes culture possible in the first place. I've been
arguing against the now discredited "blank slate" view of the human
mind--now splendidly laid to rest by Steve Pinker--but it wasn't
discredited when I was a student, in fact the "blank slate" view was
what we were taught and what most people went on teaching. Against
this, I was arguing that there were specific dispositions, capacities,
competencies, in the human mind that gave rise to culture, contributed
to shaping it, and also constrained the way it can evolve -- so that
led me to work both in anthropology--and more generally in the social
sciences--,which was my original domain, and,more and more, in what
was to become cognitive sciences.
In those years, the late 60s, psychology was in the early stags of the
"cognitive revolution." It was a domain that really transformed itself
in a radical manner. This was, and still is, a very exciting
intellectual period in which to live, with, alas, nothing comparable
happening in social sciences, (where little that is truly exciting has
happened during this period in my opinion). I wanted the social
sciences to take advantage of this revolution in the study of
cognition and I've tried to suggest how this could be done.
How do the microprocesses of cultural transmission affect the macro
structure of culture, its content, its evolution? The microprocesses,
the small-scale local processes I am talking about are, on the one
hand, psychological processes that happen inside people's brains, and
on the other hand, changes that people bring about in their common
environment--for instance the noise they make when they talk or the
paths they unconsciously maintain when they walk--and through which
they interact.
Just as the human mind is not a blank slate on which culture would
somehow imprint its content, the communication process is not a xerox
machine copying contents from one mind to another. This is where I
part company not just from your standard semiologists or social
scientists who take communication to be a coding-decoding system, a
transmission system, biased only by social interests, by power, by
intentional or unconscious distortions, but that otherwise could
deliver a kind of smooth flow of undistorted information. I also part
company from Richard Dawkins who sees cultural transmission as based
on a process of replication, and who assume that imitation and
communication provide a robust replication system.
A good part of my work has been to study, in large part with British
linguist Deirdre Wilson, the mechanisms of human communication and
show that they're much more complex and interesting than is generally
assumed, and much less preservative and replicative and more
constructive than one might think: understanding involves a lot of
construction, and not just reconstruction, and very little by way of
simple replication.
When you are told something, the simple view of what happens would be:
'ah! These are words, they have meaning,' and so you decode the
meaning of the word and you thereby understand what the speaker meant.
A more realistic and, as I said, also a more interesting idea is that
the words don't encode the speaker meaning, they just give you
evidence of the speaker's meaning. When we speak we want our audience
to understand something that's in our mind. And we have no way to
fully encode it, and trying at least to encode as much as possible
would be absurdly cumbersome. Linguistic utterances, however rich and
complex they may be, cannot fully encode our thoughts. But they can
give strong richly structured piece of evidence of what our thoughts
are.
From the point of view of the audience, a speaker is providing rich
pieces of evidence, which we interpret in a context of shared
background knowledge, drawing on the common cultural, on the local
situation, on the ongoing conversation, and so on. You construct a
complex representation helped by all these different factors. You to
end up with something which will have been strongly guided, sometimes
guided in an exquisitely detailed manner, by the communication, by the
words used by the speaker, but which end up being a thought of your
own, relevant to you, a recognition, to begin with, of what the
speaker meant, from which you extract what is relevant to you.
We're not that interested when we try to comprehend what others say,
in getting in our minds a copy of what they had in mind, we're
interested in getting that which is of use and of relevance to us, and
we see what others are trying to tell us as a source of insight and
information from which we can indeed construct a thought of our own.
The same is true of imitation; rarely are you concerned when you
imitate other people's behavior in copying them exactly. What you want
when you see others doing something that you think is worth doing, for
instance, cook a soufflé, it's not to copy the exact gestures and the
exact souffle that you saw, with its qualities, and also maybe its
defects, your goal is to cook a good soufflé, your good soufflé. The
goal of these partly preservative processes of communication and
imitation is not to copy per se, but to take advantage of information
provided by others in order to build thoughts of our own, knowledge of
our own, objects of our own, behaviors of our own, for which we take
part of the responsibility. The process is constructive in that sense.
Communication is a very broad notion --one should ask whether it makes
sense to look for a general theory of communication, given that the
notion covers such a variety of processes -- processes of
communication among machines; biologists talk about communication
among cells; by "animal communication" biologists mean also
unitentional deception as when the viceroy butterfly has wings
mimicking the pattern found on the poisonous monarch butterfly, so as
not to be eaten by predator birds, and so on.
All these form of communication and many others are communication in a
very broad sense where some information--in some broad sense of
information too--is provided by one device or organism, and is used by
another. There are some commonalities linked to this general
definition of communication, and indeed, Shannon and Weaver for
instance were interested in such a very basic notion. But if we think
of communication in biological terms, it is not clear that we have the
subject matter of a useful general theory. Think of locomotion. How
much can you get from a general theory of locomotion, even sticking to
the biological domain and leaving aside artifacts, airplanes, cars,
bicycles. I doubt that there is much to get from a general theory of
locomotion that would cover fish swimming, birds flying, snakes
crawling, us walking, and so on.
If you're studying human locomotion, then you look at the specific
organs, the way, for instance, we do it, why we do it, what
evolutionary pressure have selected our particular way of doing it.
Even more--much more--than human bipedal upright walking, human
communication is very special, it's quite unlike the communication you
find in other animals. Not just because of language, which indeed has
no real equivalent among other species, but also because of another
reason which is also quite remarkable but that has not been stressed,
and on which Deirdre Wilson and I have been doing a lot of work,
namely that if you look at human languages as codes -- which in a
sense they undoubtedly are -- they are very defective codes! When say,
vervet monkeys communicate among themselves, one vervet monkey might
spot a leopard and emit an alarm cry that indicates to the other
monkeys in his group that there's a leopard around. The other vervet
monkeys are informed by this alarm cry of the presence of a leopard,
but they're not particularly informed of the mental state of the
communicator, and they don't give a damn about it. The signal puts
them in a cognitive state of knowledge about the presence of a
leopard, similar to that of the communicating monkey -- here you
really have a smooth coding-decoding system.
In the case of humans, when we speak we're not interested per se in
the meaning of the words, we register what the word means as a way to
find out what the speaker means. Speaker's meaning is what's involved.
Speaker's meaning is a mental state of the speaker, an intention he or
she has to share with us some content. Human communication is based on
the ability we have to attribute mental state to others, to want to
change the mental states of others, and to accept that others change
ours.
When I communicate with you I am trying to change your mind. I am
trying to act on your mental state. I'm not just putting out a kind of
signal for you to decode. And I do that by providing you with evidence
of a mental state in which I want to put you in and evidence of my
intention to do so. The role of what is often known in cognitive
science as "theory of mind," that is the uniquely human ability to
attribute complex mental states to others, is as much a basis of human
communication as is language itself.
I am full of admiration for the mathematical theory of information and
communication, the work of Shannon, Weaver, and others, and it does
give a kind of very general conceptual framework which we might take
advantage of. But if you apply it directly to human communication,
what you get is a mistaken picture, because the general model of
communication you find is a coding-decoding model of communication, as
opposed to this more constructive and inferential form of
communication which involves infering the mental stateof others, and
that's really characteristic of humans.
I have been developing my own approach to culture under the general
heading of "epidemiology of representations". The first thing to do,
of course, is to take away the negative connotation of epidemiology --
it's not the epidemiology of diseases -- epidemiology is the study of
the distribution of certain items or conditions in the population. One
can study the distribution of particular pathological conditions, but
you can also study the distribution of good habits, or thoughts, or
representations, artifacts, or forms of knowledge.
I'm not assuming that culture is good -- I don't want to have a
cultural epidemiology to be on the side of the angels, as opposed to
medical anthropology on the side of the demons. What's I like about
epidemiology is that it's the one social science that is truly
naturalistic in studying what happens in populations, typically in
human populations, and it explains the macro phenomena at the level of
population such as epidemics, by the aggregation of the micro
processes both inside individuals and in their interaction. I believe
that the cultural and the social in general should be approached in
the same manner.
Of course I'm not the only one to do that, a number of people, mostly
coming from biology, like Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, Marcus W. Feldman, E.O
Wilson and Xharles Lumsden, Richard Dawkins, Bill Durham, Robert Boyd,
and Peter Richerson, have developed different conceptions which in
this broad sense are epidemiological, or, another way to put it: they
are forms of "population-thinking" applied to culture. You take what
happens at the population level to results from the microprocesses
affecting individuals in the population. Dawkins, who is particularly
clear and simple in a good way in his approach, offers a contrast to
my approach.
For Dawkins, you can take the Darwinian model of selection and apply
it almost as is to culture. Why? Because the basic idea is that, just
as genes are replicators, bits of culture that Dawkins called "memes"
are replicators too.
If you take the case of population genetics, the causal mechanisms
involved split into two subsets. You have the genes, which are
extremely reliable mechanisms of replication. On the other hand, you
have a great variety of environmental factors -- including organisms
which are both expression of genes and part of their environment --,
environmental factors that affect the relative reproductive success of
the genes. You have then on one side this extremely robust replication
mechanism, and on the other side a huge variety of other factors that
make these competing replication devices more or less successful.
Translate this into the cultural domain, and you'll view memes, bits
of culture, as again very strong replication devices, and all the
other factors, historical, ecological, and so on, as contributing to
the relative success of the memes.
What I'm denying, and I've mentioned this before, is that there is a
basis for a strong replication mechanism either in cognition or in
communication. It's much weaker than that. As I said, preservative
processes are always partly constructive processes. When they don't
replicate, this does not mean that they make an error of copying.
Their goal is not to copy. There are transformation in the process of
transmission all the time, and also in the process of remembering and
retrieving past, stored information, and these transformations are
part of the efficient working of these mechanisms.
In the case of cultural evolution, this yields a kind of paradox. On
the one hand, of course, we have macro cultural stability -- we do see
the same dish being cooked, the same ideologies being adopted, the
same words being used, the same song being sung. Without some
relatively high degree of cultural stability--which was even
exaggerated in classical anthropology--, the very notion of culture
wouldn't make sense.
How then do we reconcile this relative macro stability at the cultural
level, with a lack of fidelity at the micro level? You might think: if
it's stable at the macro level, what else could provide you this macro
stability apart from the faithful copying at the micro level? It's the
only possible explanation that most people think of. But that's not
the only one, and it's not even a plausible one.
Dawkins himself has pointed out that each act of of cultural
transmission may involve some mistakes in copying, some mutation. But
if that is the case, then the Darwinian selection model isunlikely to
apply, at least in its basic form. The problem is reconciling this
macro stability with the micro lack of sufficient fidelity. The
answer, I believe, is linked precisely to the fact that in human,
transmission is achieved not just by replication, but also by
construction.
If it were just replication, copying, and there were lots of errors of
copy all the time, then nothing would stabilize and it's unlikely that
the selective pressures would be strong enough to produce a real
selection comparable to the one you see in biology. On the other hand,
if you have constructive processes, they can compensate the limits of
the copying processes.
What happens is this. Although indeed when things get transmitted they
tend to vary with each episode of transmission, these variations tend
to gravitate around what I call "cultural attractors", which are, if
you look at the dynamics of cultural transmission, points or regions
in the space of possibilities, towards which transformations tend to
go. The stability of cultural phenomena is not provided by a robust
mechanism of replication. It's given in part, yes, by a mechanism of
preservation which is not very robust, not very faithful, (and it's
not its goal to be so). And it's given in part by a strong tendency
for the construction -- in every mind at every moment-- of new ideas,
new uses of words, new artifacts, new behaviors, to go not in a random
direction, but towards attractors. And, by the way, these cultural
attractors themselves have a history.
Dawkins, of course, is only one of the people who have proposed new
ways of modeling cultural evolution. He's important because he brings
it down to the simplest possible version -- there's a great merit in
simplicity. He sees cultural evolution at the same time as being
analogous to biological evolution, and as being an evolution almost
independent from biological evolution: it has just been made possible
by the biological evolution of homo sapiens, which has given us the
mind we have, and which, so the story goes, makes us capable indeed of
endlessly copying contents. We are supposed to be imitation machines,
"meme machines" to use Susan Blakemore's phrase, and this explains
that.
Dawkins, in a strange way, presents something very similar to the
blank slate view of the mind. The blank slate view, as I was taught it
in anthropology, says the human mind is capable of learning anything
-- whatever content would be provided by culture can be written on the
blank slate. Well, the general imitating machine does more or less the
same thing. It's capable of imitating just whatever type of content it
is presented with, and the relative success of some contents against
others, has to do with the selective forces. The idea that the human
mind is such a kind of universal imitation machine is hardly better
psychology, in my view, than the blank slate story.
Others, E.O Wilson and Charles Lumsden, Rob Boyd and Pete Richerson,
have asked to what extent the evolved dispositions that both constrain
and make possible culture are, in return, affected by cultural
evolution itself so as to yield a kind of gene-culture coevolution.
Instead of having two evolutionary scenarios running in parallel, one
biological evolution, the other cultural evolution, you get some
degree of interaction, possibly a strong interaction, between gene and
culture. The general idea has got to be correct. The details, in my
opinion, are still very poorly understood.
For a variety of reasons, I believe that memes are not the right story
about cultural evolution. This is because in the cultural case,
replication is not very successful in explaining cultural stability. I
also believe that among the factors we need to take into account to
explain cultural attraction of which I was talking before, are evolved
aspect of the human psychology. The one type of scholarship and
research that has to be brought into the picture, in my view, is
evolutionary psychology, as defended in particular in the work of Leda
Cosmides, John Tooby, Steve Pinker and taken up in more critical ways
by a growing number of developmental psychologists and of
philosophers. To understand culture, we have to understand the
complexity of the psychological makeup of human beings. We have to go
to really deep psychology, understood both in a richly cognitive
manner and with a proper evolutionary perspective, to put start
explaining cultural evolution. We need a representation of a human
mind that's complex in an appropriate manner, true to the empirical
data, and rich enough indeed to explain the regularities the,
stability, and the variability of culture.
This is them a different story, but it's still a Darwinian story. It's
a Darwinian story in the sense that it's an application of population
thinking, which tries to explains the macro phenomena in terms of a
micro processes and properties, and which doesn't assume that there
are types or essences of macro cultural and social things. Macro
regularities are always the outcome of distribution of micro features,
evolving all the time.
In this Darwinian story however, instead of causal processes in
culture as split between robust replication devices and a variety of
selection factor, we have a much more promiscuous form of causality.
Cultural causality is promiscuous. Constructive processes always
interfere with preservation processes. So we need to build models
different from standard Darwinian models of selection, in order to
arrive at the right way to draw on Darwinian inspiration with regard
to culture, that is, we must generalize Darwin to the cultural case,
rather than adjust it in a way which twists the data well beyond what
is empirically plausible.
~~
The idea of God isn't a supernatural idea. If the idea of God were
supernatural, then religion would be true. The idea of God, the idea,
the representation of something supernatural is not itself
supernatural. If it were, then we would be out of business. Precisely
what we're trying to explain is, to quote the title of a book by
Pascal Boyer, the "naturalness of religious ideas," explain, in other
terms, how these ideas of the supernatural can occur in the natural
beings we are, in human brains and minds and culture, and have the
kind of success that they have, in spite of the fact that you can't
explain them in the way that you explain so many human ideas, such as
ideas that are acquired through experience of the things they are
about.
We humans have ideas about plants and animals because we experience
plants and animals in a special way with the brain we have. We don't
experience God, or goblins or witches, because there are no such
things. Nevertheless, we have rich complex ideas about them, a
richness in many ways comparable to the ideas we have about plants,
animals and the natural things around them.
How is that possible? The issue is what makes these kind of ideas
psychologically, cognitively attractive -- "catching", such that they
stay with you in your head and you may want to communicate them and to
guide your behavior on their basis. And also: which of them, among all
the unrealistic unsupported ideas that are possible in infinite
variety, are going to be so "catching" as to achieve cultural success,
in the manner of the many religious ideas that has been around for
centuries?
It's not like any blatantly false idea will somehow make it to a
cultural success -- far from it. Most of them don't stand a chance.
What's special about ideas of the supernatural? I argued long ago that
it had to do with the fact that they are rooted in our cognitive
dispositions, in the way we approach the natural world. Instead of
departing from our commonsense ideas so to speak at random, they're
like direct provocation -- they have always an aspect of going
directly against what should be the most intuitively obvious.
So for instance it's part of our common sense knowledge of of living
forms, that an animal can't be both a dog and a cat, but the
supernatural is full of creatures like dragons that typically belong
to several species simultaneously. It's part of our common sense
knowledge of the physical world that an entity cannot be in two places
simultaneously, but ubiquity is a distinctive trait of supernatural
beings. It's kind of again commonsense, in our commonsense psychology
which we deploy in everyday interaction with one another, that one's
visual perceptions are limited to what's present in front of one's
eyes. Supernatural beings typically can see the past, the future, and
things on the other side of earth. So supernatural beings are kind of
provocations to commonsense. They are really deeply counterintuitive.
That's an idea I suggested a long time ago and that Pascal Boyer has
developed and enriched in a remarkable fashion, and which I think is
one of the cognitive ingredients that helps explain the success of
religious ideas. Of course, it's only one little fragment of a kind of
complex picture.
~~
I started as an anthropologist. Precisely because they were more
cognitive, more naturalist, more linked also to evolution than most,
for a long time, my ideas were not very well received among
anthropologists. They've been discussed a lot, but I found myself
spending too much time with my fellow anthropologists arguing the
basics of the field rather than moving forward in research. I got
involved in linguistics, experimental psychology, philosophy of
science, evolutionary biology, and lots of fascinating topics--and
continuing also the conversation with anthropologists. Anthropology is
a discipline that has been in crisis all my life.
When I started the crisis was linked to the end of the colonization.
Anthropology had developed during the period of colonization, as a
kind of ancillary science for colonial enterprise. At the same time so
many anthropologists were actually active in anti-colonialist
movement, and that was also one of the reasons I came to anthropology.
But, the decolonisation, anthropology lost this kind of historical and
sociological context. Anthropologists in the 60s, 70s, were asking
about their political role, about whether or not we were on the right
side.
Anthropologists started studying themselves and trying to reflect on
their own situation. It was a kind of reflective anthropology, which
had a number of interesting aspects. I certainly don't think it was
useless although it became a bit obsessive. Parallel to these
developments, were the post-structuralist and then post-modernist
movements in the humanities and the social sciences, the development
of "cultural studies," and many anthropologists felt at ease in these
movements.
This produced a new kind of discourse, taking the study of other
cultures as much as a pretext as a subject matter to be investigated
in a standard scholarly manner. Again, some of the products of this
appraoch are of genuine interest, but on the whole more harm has been
done than good. While this was happening, others, in part in reaction
against this turn toward the literary in anthropology, moved on the
contrary toward a more naturalistic anthropology. They became
interested in social biology, in biological anthropology.
What you find now in anthropology departments is that people can't
talk to each other. Some universities have now had two anthropology
departments. So anthropology is stilll in crisis, even if it is not
the same crisis. You can look at such a crisis from an institutional
or from an intellectual point of view.
Universities as we know them emerged in the nineteenth century and
unerwent major changes, in particular after World War II. It does not
make sense to project this short past into an indefinite future. In
fact, universities are evolving, transforming themselves beyond
recognition. The biggest changes are will be due to new communication
technology. There is also now a big and blatant gap between the
structure of departments in universities, which have to do with
institution of transmission of knowledge, and which seem to define
stable domains such as psychology, anthropology, sociology, and the
real ongoing research which is structured in new ways -- in the form
of creative, or dynamic, research programs, that may fall within a
traditional discipline, or, more often, across several traditional
disciplines. Depending on the productivity of such dynamic programs,
they are can go on for ten years, 20 years, 30 years, or more.
It is these dynamic research programs that interest me; I've been
involved in several, and that's what I find to be intellectually
exciting. When we say anthropology is in crisis we're talking about
anthropology as defined by academic institutions. And it doesn't
matter. It deserves to be in crisis; it deserves to explode, let it do
so.
References
10. http://www.edge.org/video/dsl/sperber.html
11. http://www.edge.org/video/56k/sperber.html
12. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/brockman.html
13. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/sperber.html
14. http://www.edge.org/documents/summerbooks2005/books.html
15. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/brockman.html
16. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/weinberger.html
17. mailto:editor at edge.org
18. http://www.edge.org/about_edge.html
19. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/sperber05/sperber05_index.html#top
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