Diogenes articles from December 1999

Diogenes archives from December 1999

Refutable Anthropology and Falsified Science.
December 22, 1999... Is anthropology a science? To put the question today amounts to a reply in the negative. The representatives of the `true' sciences are not alone in suggesting a conjunctural or crippling lacuna which would preclude membership by right of the...

Material Culture, Cultural Material.
December 22, 1999... `I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.' Samuel Johnson, A...

Our Genius for the Equivocal.
December 22, 1999... `... un genie de l'edquivoque qui pourrait servir a definir l'homme.' Merleau-Ponty Anthropology: plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state?(1) In 1987, Sir Edmund Leach, the most influential British social anthropologist of his...

Hope Against Hope.
December 22, 1999... Poor ethnology never where it should be! One could almost believe that in the intellectual comedy it is always condemned to play the role of the incorrigible blundering fool. Take a different view. Thirty years ago it was used for any job...

Structure and `Details'.
December 22, 1999... `Concerning all these observations, it may now be concluded that, although on the one hand the two concepts of the individual and of society are very distinct for the purpose of analysis, and although in practice these concepts correspond to...

Anthropologists Facing the Collapse of Yugoslavia.
December 22, 1999... In extreme situations such as war, genocide or refugee crises, anthropologists, who are usually closer to afflicted people than other scholars, face the crucial questions of the utility and responsibility of anthropology. However,...

Anthropologia Incognita: Teaching and Learning Anthropology in Europe Today(1).
December 22, 1999... During the last thirty years both the social sciences and humanities in many countries have experienced a huge increase in student numbers, often directly related to national policies aimed at enlarging access to higher education for the...

Anthropology: Science and Philosophy.
December 22, 1999... Postulating anthropology as a science Boas, according to Harris, put the matter very succinctly: `Anthropology is a science, but science is history'.(1) Malinowski sought a scientific definition of culture in his turn. In a posthumous text...

True or False Cures?
December 22, 1999... Problems of effectiveness During the last century procedures for distinguishing between `human sciences' and `natural sciences' have seen a number of changes. Currently, the pre-eminence of the scientific-naturalist paradigm, which led the...

Les Chairs de la mort.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Louis-Vincent Thomas, Les Chairs de la mort, Collection `Les empecheurs de penser en rond', Paris: Institut d'Edition Sanofi-Synthelabo, 2000 `The dead have never left us...' This idea from the Senegalese novelist Birago Diop, which is...

Images of the Sky (A Chronicle).
December 22, 1999... Does living on Earth not also for human beings mean being open to the sky?(1) Watching day alternate with night, relying on the seasonal cycle, finding their way according to the position of the stars, humans have always been aware of their...