I am a cultural anthropologist (Ph.D. University of Oregon, 1974). Anthropologists by and large tend to be a pretty academic bunch (me included), but I spent most of my own professional career outside of academia. I worked primarily for Indian nations on real-world issues relating to how large scale industrial projects like coal mines and power plants affect Indian cultures and societies, and on issues relating to identifying and protecting sacred sites and other cultural properties (see the about me page in this blog). More on that later, perhaps. It’s not primarily what this book and blog are about.
I also tried to keep up with my more “academic” interests. These connect with the real world too, but in other kinds of ways. That’s why the quotation marks. I don’t want you or anyone to think that “academic” means irrelevant. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Science is our way of knowing who and what we are as human beings on this Earth. It is how we get credible, reliable, shareable, workable knowledge about ourselves and the world around us. It shapes our own self-image, and with our self-image we shape ourselves. Sometimes it takes a while—decades, generations even—but our understanding of ourselves, based in the science of the time, literally becomes the basis for how we live. That has been so since we forged ahead out of the Dark Ages and into the modern world. It is a large part of what it means to be “modern.” It is a key part of the culture of modernity.
What is happening now, today, in academic science is unprecedented. Early social scientific knowledge that became a largely taken-for-granted foundation for our whole way of life, now is being recognized as questionable, very limited, or just plain wrong.
Based on more recent experience, observation, and research from different human communities around the world, along with other broad advances in our understanding of ourselves and our world, we are coming to a new view of human beings and human nature that is quite different from the reductionist “scientific view of man” that motivated our ancestral social and political thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What we recently (over roughly the last century) have been finding out about us shines new light on our present society, culture, economy, and on who we are as human beings in the universe. Today’s cultural theory about ourselves can be just as disorienting for us today, as the discovery of the solar system was to our Medieval forbears.
Our way of life was substantially built on scientific ideas from earlier eras. But quite recently as such things go, we are taking understanding of the universe, of ourselves, of science itself, well beyond those early ideas. Meanwhile everyday institutions and patterns of life that were built up around what are now becoming quite dated ideas remain in place. Supported by powerful entrenched interests, by habit, by deeply held values, by all the things that give durability and resilience to a culture, we just “keep on truckin.'” No matter the fate of the underlying ideas that initially made sense of what we’re doing as new understanding of ourselves and the universe comes on the scene. And no matter, also, the increasingly evident destructiveness and unsustainability of a way of life based on ideas we now can see more clearly as being as limited or wrong.
That growing gap between what we know and how we live is the central topic of this blog.