The trouble with truth: Anthropology's epistemological hypochondria

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the AAA meeting in November 2003, in a panel on 'Anthropological evidence and its uses', sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation. My thanks to Jane Cowan, Nigel Rapport and an anonymous reviewer for their comments.     

Incisions,breakages and charring,some probably man-made,in fossil bones from Mammoth Cave,Western Australia

Two small patches of richly fossiliferous deposit in Mammoth Cave, excavated early this century, yielded tooth-bearing and post-cranial material. We have studied a notched tibia, various broken femurs and charred bones, many of which are attributable to extinct taxa, and have concluded that deliberate action by Aboriginals is the most probable explantation for their condition.

The age of one of the deposits, and probably also of the other, is in excess of 37,000 years.     

POLICY ANALYSIS AS ARGUMENT

Numerous authors have attested to the incompleteness of most policy arguments. Until now, however, the machinery has not been available for dealing with complex and open-ended policy arguments. This paper synthesizes and extends recent developments in the logic of argumentation and symbolic logic to create a methodology for treating complex arguments.     

Towards a Theory of Santa: Or,the Ghost of Christmas Present (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This account of the cultural phenomenon of Santa/Father Christmas draws on the polarities that attend the rituals of Santa/Christmas: secular/religious; commodity/gift; sacred/profane; material/spiritual etc., while also arguing that these dichotomies act together, rather than as simple oppositions. The account also draws on empirical work by the authors and a wider group of practitioner‐researchers on how young children construct and reason with Santa. We then discuss the threat to Santa from the audit culture, which involves an inversion of his benign characteristics in terms of suspicion and surveillance. Our conclusion is that Santa is more of a religious figure than he is often given credit for being, and is felt by ‘believers’ to be superior in terms of ‘delivery’, as current systems of accountability might put it. But he is threatened by an audit culture for which he is almost the epitome of Stranger Danger. ‘Santa’, after all, is an anagram of ‘Satan’.