So to recap last week in a nutshell: we went over Phylogeny and Evolutionary Psychology, as well as Chainmail Bikinis.
Now for some musings:
Wayne Maddison’s talk on the pheneticist’s pessimism that it was impossible to reconstuct the tree of all biodiverity reminded me of a similar pessimism in Anthropology.
This pessimism is what led to “Salvage Anthropology,” the idea of recording all the variance before it “disappeared.” Cultures were static entities that needed saving or else they would go extinct. Now we look back and laugh at the idea of cultures dying, unless you are someone who has suffered from this pessimism and want your culture back.
During the early 20th century, when Social Darwinism and the idea of Unilinear Evolution was at its highest, Frans Boas was critiqued for studying his “Historical Particularism,” which is that not all effects have the same causes–we ought to examine particular case studies and history to understand how a particular society came to be as it is, not assume all societies were at different stages which culminated at Victorian Civilization (and the end of History, or Utopia, if you will). Boas disliked generalizations (based on cherry-picking evidence to support an already established assumption) but his opposition thought that if you were to study all the case histories in the world, that everyone has their own (proximate?) reasons for doing things, it would be ultimately atheoretical–there was nothing to reveal, no overarching insight to be gained. What was the point of having a large collection of descriptions if you did no comparison work? How does that answer the big questions?
I think you need both generalizations and support from particulars: theory has to be grounded. There is nothing more practical than a good, working theory.