Category: Musings

(Originally posted: 3/17/2013)

Last week, I was teaching kinship systems in my cultural anthropology class, and as usual students were as interested in learning how our own kinship system works as they were in learning the systems used by other cultures.  Everyone is pretty clear on grandparents and great-grandparents, but the cousins are confusing.  It seems that, in the last few generations, Westerners have become increasingly haphazard in teaching their children how cousins work.  Everyone knows that there are second cousins who are closer to you than third cousins, and everyone knows that there’s something about “once removed” and so on, but very few people seem to really understand how to calculate these things anymore.  So, as a public service, I thought I’d explain it all.  Click through for the full story. Continue reading “Counting Cousins”

(Originally posted: 1/15/2012)

To complete my ideas about how our government might be reformed to operate better, in this post I’ll consider how the organization and business of of Congress itself might be changed.  Click through for my thoughts. Continue reading “Applied Anthropology, Part 3: Congress”

(Originally posted: 1/10/2012)

In the last post, I suggested that one of the reasons that Congress (and the government in general, but especially the legislature) seems to have so much trouble getting anything substantial done is its sociopolitical organization. In this post and the next, I’ll suggest some changes to the political process to fix that. Click through to the full story for my ideas. Continue reading “Applied Anthropology, Part 2: Elections”

(Originally posted: 12/23/2011)

It seems like, once again, our nation has survived a showdown in Washington.  Legislators came together yesterday to agree on a tax-cut extension that everyone agreed from the beginning was a good idea.  Even so, they bickered and argued with one another until virtually the last possible instant, each party blaming the other for the dysfunction.  Even the president noted publicly that the dysfunctional factionalism in Congress has become a major problem for the country.

Well, anthropology is either of use in fixing society’s ills, or it is nothing but intellectual navel-gazing.  I’ll use this post, and a few more in coming weeks, to explore how an anthropological perspective on government might help to shake out some of the wrinkles.  Click through to the full article for my thoughts. Continue reading “Applied Anthropology, Washington style”

(Originally posted: 8/3/2011)

This misconception is something that I’ve touched on already in other posts.  Its is also more debatable, since there are schools of thought that disagree with my position.  However, I think the best way to think about what science is and what it tries to do is to give up on the idea of proving anything, and I also think most scientists who’ve thought about the issue would agree with me.  An explanation follows the jump. Continue reading “Misconception 3: Scientists prove things”

(Originally posted: 6/27/2011)

After too long a break, I’m returning to the promised theme of thing about science that even scientists get wrong.  This time, I’ll be discussing the relationship betwene theories and hypotheses.  Full comments after the jump. Continue reading “Misconception 2: Hypotheses become theories”

(Originally posted: 5/3/2011)

Unlike a lot of scientists, I take the philosophy of science very seriously. Every anthropology class I teach begins with a day or two devoted completely to understanding what science is, what it does, and how it does it. I’m not sure that many other scientists–anthropologist or not–can say that. It is true, of course, that for the daily functioning of any scientific enterprise, a deep understanding of epistemology and metaphysical paradigms is not necessary, but it is also true that as theoretical structures become more complex and sophisticated, that deep understanding becomes more important. So, in an attempt to right some wrongs, over the next couple weeks I’ll be making a series of posts that explore widespread popular misconceptions about science. Some of them are more widely known as misconceptions than others, but all of them are dangerous ideas that can lead the non-scientific community to misunderstand scientists, and lead unwary scientists to draw incorrect conclusions. Click through to the full story for Misconception 1. Continue reading “Things about Science that Even Scientists Get Wrong”

(Originally posted: 4/8/2011)

Recently, someone asked me what me dissertation research was about.  That isn’t a particularly unusual question for any scholar, but the truth is my research was complex enough that I suspect many archaeologists wouldn’t understand it without actually looking at large chunks of the 400+ pages.  Nevertheless, in trying to explain the questions I’d asked and the approach I’d taken, I also began thinking about some more intricate issues about how I and other archaeologists construct arguments.  Follow through to the whole story for my thoughts. Continue reading “Coherence Arguments in Archaeology”