The new Hippocratics

In this guest editorial the authors look at the association of four blood types with four Hippocratic personality types in Japan and in matching lovers through dating services in the West.     

From the Grassroots: Bernard Narokobi and the Making of Papua New Guinea's Constitution

ABSTRACT

Bernard Narokobi's concept of the Melanesian Way was influenced by a variety of factors, including his own childhood in the village, his religion, and the understandings of the people around him. He also drew inspiration from his exposure to the views and opinions of the many Papua New Guineans who contributed to the work of the Constitutional Planning Committee (CPC) between 1972 and 1975 when he served as a consultant to the committee. He shared the belief in a specifically ‘Melanesian’ way of social organization and cosmological understanding with the others who took part in the CPC's work, most prominently its de facto chairman, Father John Momis. With Momis he drew on the people's contributions to formulate PNG's National Goals and Directive Principles, which, at least in part, embody Narokobi's understanding of what it is to be Melanesian.     

The critique of ethnocentrism in retrospect

This article opens with a review of the origins of the term ‘ethnocentrism’ as the linchpin of modern anthropology despite the discipline's background in the colonial past. The author is stimulated by Step Stuurman's The invention of humanity: Equality and cultural difference in human history (2017) to ask to what extent the critique of ethnocentrism, which gradually gathered strength in the West, has had parallels in non-Western civilizations. His conclusion is that the astonishing sophistication of a Persian and a Chinese polymath in studying cultures alien to their own does not seem, according to records available, to have influenced their respective civilizations in the same way that modern ‘anthropological intelligence’ (to borrow Gillian Tett's term) was extensively foreshadowed in Europe. Counter-ethnocentrism as a principle has now become indispensable to all the social sciences that aspire to be cosmopolitan, though it still has to compete with the baleful legacy of scientific racism.