No Angst and All Play: Postmodernism and the Humanities

Abstract

There is widespread disagreement about Tocqueville's conception of human nature, some going so far as to say that Tocqueville possessed no unified conception of human nature at all. In this paper, I aim to provide the essential principles of Tocqueville's conception of human nature through an examination of the way in which he describes the power of human circumstances, such as physical environment, social state, and religion, to shape human character by extracting the principles underlying these transformations. There is no “natural man” or man “in the state of nature” but instead a set of psychic operations that reveal a picture of human nature in which human freedom, or the ability to initiate action in pursuit of important objects, lies at the heart of human life.     

Field anthropology: application to burial contexts in prehistoric Southeast Asia

The context of burials in archaeological sites, that is whether the body was inhumed, wrapped, or in a coffin, is an aspect of mortuary ritual that has been missing from English-language publications on the subject. This is despite the development and use in France over at least the last two decades of methods of determining the context under the rubric ‘l'Anthropologie de Terrain’, or Field Anthropology. This paper briefly reviews the methods and applies them to prehistoric burial samples from two sites in Southeast Asia. This shows that burials at the Bronze Age site of Ban Lum Khao were either in coffins or wrapped. The practice of coffin burial appears to have been abandoned later, as all burials at the nearby Iron Age site of Noen U-Loke were wrapped.     

Part and Whole Numbers: an ‘Enumerative’ Reinterpretation of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits and its Subjects.

ABSTRACT From the starting point that concepts of number can contain within them a representation of a society's overall cosmology, reinforcing and strengthening its reality in logical terms through practice (a process I call enumeration), this paper charts the meeting of two systems of enumeration. As such systems are constantly changing, we concentrate on a particular point in time and space: the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits (CAETS) in 1898. Here a nineteenth century anthropology obsessed with reinforcing its position as science through the mathematicalisation of its methods met a Melanesian enumerative system bound to materiality and pattern. The conflict between intentionally abstractive and intensely material enumerative systems generated perplexing results which throw their underlying cosmologies into greater relief.     

科学发展观的人学思想研究综述

党的十六届三中全会以来,尤其是有关科学发展观和人学理论的几个全国性学术研讨会召开之后,科学发展观的以人为本思想得到较为深入、全面、系统的研究。在此过程中,学术界对其形成的哲学基础、内容、特点和意义,尤其是对以人为本的本质内涵和价值理念等诸方面不乏深刻见解,但也有不少需要继续深入研究之处。     

Eugenics ideals,racial hygiene,and the emigration process of German-American neurogeneticist Franz Josef Kallmann (1897–1965)

ABSTRACT

Biological psychiatry in the early twentieth century was based on interrelated disciplines, such as neurology and experimental biology. Neuropsychiatrist Franz Josef Kallmann (1897–1965) was a product of this interdisciplinary background who showed an ability to adapt to different scientific contexts, first in the field of neuromorphology in Berlin, and later in New York. Nonetheless, having innovative ideas, as Kallmann did, could be an ambiguous advantage, since they could lead to incommensurable scientific views and marginalization in existing research programs. Kallmann followed his Dr. Med. degree (1919) with training periods at the Charité Medical School in Berlin under psychiatrist Karl Bonhoeffer (1868–1948). Subsequently, he collaborated with Ernst Ruedin (1874–1952), investigating sibling inheritance of schizophrenia and becoming a protagonist of genetic research on psychiatric conditions. In 1936, Kallmann was forced to immigrate to the USA where he published The Genetics of Schizophrenia (1938), based on data he had gathered from the district pathological institutes of Berlin’s public health department. Kallmann resumed his role as an international player in biological psychiatry and genetics, becoming president (1952) of the American Society of Human Genetics and Director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute in 1955. While his work was well received by geneticists, the idea of genetic differences barely took hold in American psychiatry, largely because of émigré psychoanalysts who dominated American clinical psychiatry until the 1960s and established a philosophical direction in which genetics played no significant role, being regarded as dangerous in light of Nazi medical atrocities. After all, medical scientists in Nazi Germany had been among the social protagonists of racial hygiene which, under the aegis of Nazi philosophies, replaced medical genetics as the basis for the ideals and application of eugenics.     

考古学的定位和有关问题

考古学是一门独立的科学,往往被历史学、人类学或古器物学所包括。事实上它以田野工作为基础,以遗迹、遗物的实证为前提,其方法论是其它学科所无法代替的。     

Panel regression formulas for estimating stature and body mass from immature human skeletons: a statistical approach without reference to specific age estimates

Anthropologists require methods for accurately estimating stature and body mass from the human skeleton. Age-structured, generalized Least Squares (LS) regression formulas have been developed to predict stature from femoral length and to predict body mass in immature human remains using the width of the distal metaphysis, midshaft femoral geometry (J), and femoral head diameter. This paper tests the hypothesis that panel regression is an appropriate statistical method for regression modeling of longitudinal growth data, with longitudinal and cross-sectional effects on variance. Reference data were derived from the Denver Growth Study; panel regression was used to create one formula for estimating stature (for individuals 0.5–11.5 years old); two formulas for estimating body mass from the femur in infants and children (0.5–12.5 years old); and one formula for estimating body mass from the femoral head in older subadults (7–17.5 years old). The formulas were applied to an independent target sample of cadavers from Franklin County, Ohio and a large sample of immature individuals from diverse global populations. Results indicate panel regression formulas accurately estimate stature and body mass in immature skeletons, without reference to an independent estimate for age at death. Thus, using panel regression formulas to estimate stature and body mass in forensic and archaeological specimens may reduce second stage errors associated with inaccurate age estimates.     

Colonial ethnology and political rationality in french west Africa

This article explores the circular and mutually reinforcing relationship between professional anthropology and new technologies of administration that emerged after the First World War in French West Africa. Local administrators wrote fieldwork monographs that were formative for metropolitan science, while new native policies concerned with protecting yet improving indigenous social institutions incorporated the methods and insights of professional ethnologists. Together they created a shared field of colonial ethnology, a scientific‐administrative complex through which practical science and scientific administration constituted one another, whether deliberately or despite actors' self‐understanding. The goal is neither to dismiss anthropology as tainted by colonial history nor to accuse individual anthropologists of supporting colonial violence. Instead, this article analyzes how ethnologists' (contradictory) characterizations of African social relations and (contradictory) native policies were intrinsically related to, and did not simply influence, one another. These administrative and scientific imperatives constituted colonial humanism, a doubled and contradictory political rationality, even as they were its products. The French administration thus produced terms and data taken up by French ethnology that then shaped policies, which fueled administrative ethnographies that generated metropolitan scholarship and vice versa.