``Our universities have sunk to such a low state in almost all respects that they appear beyond fixing. If anyone can offer me a hopeful sign, I'd love to hear it.'' Michael Yates
``This sucks, re: Churchill. But when were the universities riding high? When William Graham Sumner ruled the roost?'' Doug
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I pretty much accepted the above wisdom, mainly because it corresponds with my own dower image of academia as fallen and empty form, or the content free university.
Then since I have time, I went looking around for top graduate programs in philosophy, linguistics, and anthropology. My theory is that if you want an education, you better be willing to fight over it, cause nobody is going to hand it to you.
I am about fifty pages in Christine Kenneally's The First Word, thanks to shag for sending a copy---and have a running counter theory to just about all of it. The critique that CK isn't `real' science is wrong. She works roughly in the Scientific American level. What she presents is a survey of current arguments and background, something like Gould used to do in his writing. And the effect is to bring what appears to be an hidden academic debate into the public view.
What I was looking for in acdemia was a university program that would support research in language and culture from a more theoretical perspective. UCB up the street ranks well in philosophy at 10th. Its anthro department, depending on which survey ranks about 3rd below Michigan and Chicage which tie for first, or 5th in current national standing (assessment on public outreach). Chicago has a giant antro museum attached to it---where the old ANS list was housed. Berkeley only has Kroeber, but most of its field work is in Latin America and Asia and is intimately involved in analysis of the political economies of those regions. Here's the survey I used:
http://www.publicanthropology.org/ProgramsAndPeople/a-results-a.php
I went looking into the anthro department and found a wildly diverse and interesting set of courses and people, mostly carrying on research in just about every topic mentioned on LBO in terms of politics, power, neoliberalism, globalization, destruction of traditional cultures, environment, outrageous injustice, and so forth and so on. Here is an interesting paper by one of the current faculty at UCB:
http://anthropology.berkeley.edu/briggs/Linguistic%20Magic%20Bullets,%20AA.pdf
For those interested, it contains an outline summary of Franz Boas' work (which originated with von Humbolt in Germany. This is important to me, because von Humbolt was often cited by Ernst Cassirer).
The article is essentially an attempt to re-construct Boas from his postmodern demise. In doing so, the article provides a quick introductory course in classical modernist cultural anthropology. If you're not interested in the background, you can skip to the section titled, ``Magic bullets and the erasure of noncannical constructions'' This section begins a brief analysis of noncannical work in linguistics and culture beginning with some of the usual suspects like Whorf and Sapir and moves on to later developments. This section is followed by ``Reinserting linguistics into a critical anthropology''. The section argues that anthro needs linguistic analysis as part of its base, and needs the critical perspective on language that can be provided, more or less as a corrective measure for hidden culturally determined presumptions.
It's apparent to me, cultural anthropology needs a theory of knowledge before it needs linguistics. Such a theory needs to be explicit prior to assembling a research project. Of course I've got one {from Cassier] and it helps a great deal in organizing thought and study. Along these lines, Briggs tells us that Boas collections of native language texts and his method of notation for its phonetics does a very important service by making what was a private knowledge, public. Briggs makes the analogy with Robert Boyle's experiments with the glass blown vacuum chamber. So shared public knowledge can be argued, debated and confirmed or refuted---directly from what is on the lab table.
Just a side point. Culture is already objectified in its physical artifactual record in everything from its symbolic worlds that compose viaually documented forms and its allied technologies and practices. We can use our own visual domain of the mind to find the correspondences between known and objectified word-forms and visual artifactual correlatives. Together these sorts of comparative studies reveal various insights that may not be available in either form, as an independent realm. In other words art history has its uses---chuck's version does at anyrate.
There is I think, an evolutionary aspect to culture in terms of a theory of knowledge that maybe found from such comparative studies say from linguistics and the visual `arts'. What impresses me most is also reflected in our own cultural history. We somehow at the dawn of our history began with a much more unitified concept of the world where our modern distinctions between say logic, metaphysics, applied mechanics, engineering, art, design, folklore, relgion, and moral justifications for class strata were all much less distinct and differentiated worlds. The material forces of our historical development driven by divisions of labor specialization and needs of production, has led us to a series of specializations have broken the organic unities we began with. I think many religions for example promise a return to some prior state of unity, and that this promise is also an expression of the same concept.
I think you can see this kind of atomization of thought and practice by studying children, their language development, and their play. I saw a remarkable demonstration two weeks ago. I handed my visiting grandchildren some colored drawing chalks and drawing pads to play with while us grown-ups were free to talk with little interruption. I noticed that my granson, age three was making circles over and over with different colors. Meanwhile my grandaughter four going on five was drawing a picture of a landscape with various items positioned in roughly their `correct' spacial order, i.e. the red box house `rested' on the green ground. He was still in what I would call a unitary frame of mind with respect to drawing, while she had already undergone a system of differentiation of space and its ordering principles. Their language skills followed suit. The boy seems slow but within normal ranges, the girl seemed more advanced than her age grade and ready to argue anybody down as to whether or not she intended to bash her brother's brains in, or if from her alternative hypothesis, it was just an accident. The basic causal relationship between crime and punishment could be circumvented by the universal political principle of lying.
I think I could support the argument that this process from unity to differentiation is a universal process of development. The reason is that you can find a vast collection of children's art from all over the world, where this process is revealed and reproduced. There are many consequences. For example the apparent unity of mind, is more properly a gestalt or dialectic of mind and world, and a casual winnowing of what works and what doesn't. Thereby the metaphysical can be said to piggy back on the concrete knowledge of how the world works. The justification here is the only univesal constant in people and history which is the physical world where physics assures us, some of these principles have not changed since the beginning.
You can also consult a language development chart for early childhood and see the same process from a kind of organic unity in the world of names and nouns, towards increasing differentiation that distinguishes between static and dynamic words and relevant `transformative' like operators, where verbs for example arrive later in the game. Here is one such chart:
http://www.childdevelopmentinfo.com/development/language_development.shtml
I've been enjoying my so-called retirement by returning to my former occupation as student at large, which I greatly enjoyed.
This is written as words of encouragement for Michael Yates and others. Whatever the beauty of the world, it is available and it sure beats the alternative which is oblivion.
CG