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Re: The "Great Synthesis"Ralph L Holloway (rlh2@COLUMBIA.EDU)Sat, 27 Apr 1996 12:16:25 -0400
talking about? Tell me where it is published so I can read about it. I hope it isn't some paper that has finally discovered that brains have something to do with behavior, and that "culture" has something to do with how brains operate, and that the two are interdependent in many ways...yawn... or that Psychology has gotten as far as the "D's" and discovered Darwin. What the hell, even I wrote a "synthesis" back in 1967 between the complexity of cultural behavior and neural complexity that was so popular that it was rejected by the anthropological journals and finally ended up in General Systems, volume 12, pages 3-19, I think . Now there's a journal for you, who have any interest in synthesis... Meanwhile, Columbia, Papa Boas' home for a h(w)olistic anthropology is in the process of revitalization, and might even hire a linguist, maybe one archaeologist, and no biological anthropologist out of maybe ten souls. Real progress there. Great synthetic possibilities... There is no great synthesis. Only a growing awareness that the less holistic we become, the greater the likelihood of never achieving the GS. It's not synthesis that's happening, but more and more fragmentation, more and more biological anthropologists climbing the goddamn walls in soc/cultural departments where almost anything goes, and trying to secure niches elsewhere. Ditto archaeologists and linguists. Synthesis my touckas (sp?). You want a synthesis? Then start from the position that we are simply another species of animal, like a chimp, dog, aarvaark, zebra, whatever, and that we differ from all of the others by a simply preposterous adaptation, cultural behavior, that allows us to categorize and classify the world according to whatever arbitrary symbol-mediated schemes we can think up and IMPOSE upon ourselves and others. The only thing that makes it all liveable is our basically unquenchable curiosity about IT ALL. Who knows, maybe "intelligence" has (had) something to do with human cultural behavior. I've watched thread after thread on this list often with fabulous discourse (as on most of the power thread) that seems almost impossible to connect to experientially, in which these things have a life of their own. This comes about because of our brains and how they get programmed, and as far as I can tell, it seems to have only a little bit to do with the size of that organ. Ignore this organ and there will never be any GS, but to study it, you must note how it varies and how it operates, and whether there are any causal links between the variability in brains and behavior. And frankly, we are not up to it, thanks to the racist past we've endured AND the dampening effects of political correctness that makes it sinful to study variation. How many more times during my lifetime am I going to have to see crap about Samuel Morton's crania and Gould's depiction of his thumb? As far as I can tell, the biggest threat to most of social "science" IS a GS...or, so I sometimes wonder. R.Holloway
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