How is this relevant to the poster? This just feels like your own pet peeve tacked onto the parent comment. I don't think we really need to start the culture wars on an article looking at anthropological records and a post about historical misconceptions.
It could be cited in a manner that more clearly signals "There are limits to what we know about them, but our limited knowledge includes this historic stuff."
You know, if you listen to people on the internet from various cultural backgrounds, they routinely roll their eyes at how mainstream media presents them. I'm making the same sort of observation here: That it aggravates me the way we implicitly signal our assumed superiority to older/other cultures.
That aggravation is not based on a single article. It's based on noticing patterns typically seen in such articles.
It aggravates me in part because I think it harms our scientific understanding. I think you need context to properly understand things and we generally do a poor job of recognizing that we lack that context.
If you want to be acknowledged as a scholar, then act like one instead of making suspicious statements about your opponents' demographics. It has been discussed ad nauseam at this point that the article provides a history lesson, but the suggestions are illogical or unactionable. It is just not that interesting or relevant.
You mean people who are interested in analysis of history?
You don't want to consider it. That's fine...oh wait...what about:
> Some argue the separation of church and state can be traced back to the bible
Some people argue people rode Dinosaurs. That's about as compelling, as well. For the most of the cultures that contributed to writing portions of the Bible, religious text was law.
> remind people that things were less than perfect in the past
The point is about intent, which is relevant. "less perfect" or whatever that's supposed to mean to you, is irrelevant. This is history, not a relative comparison of ideals.
> You cannot judge people of the past by the standards of today.
Sure you can. Confusing Moral analysis and Contextual analysis is noise.
> the need to character assasinate
Characters are caricatures (incomplete) if you ignore known qualities. Interestingly enough, while you are objecting strongly to the characterization you could have noted that bladegash might have been wrong about the Patrick Henry quote.
Maybe spend more time researching, instead of emotionally posting.
It's really sad that the author feels the need to be so defensive.
Apparently the idea that ancient Europeans, "Oldest Dead White European Males", had a massive contribution to culture is somehow considered wrong and offensive today.
I hope that the author is overreacting and not responding to a real intellectual retardation prevalent in academia.
I think a big part of the author's issue is the focus on current anthropological "study" rather than historical anthropological science – both when it comes to the things studied (their issue with the talk you mention) but also when it comes to priorities, e.g. caring too much (my impression of author's opinion) about whether or not something is sacred / etc.
Clearly the author is a person that likes anthropology for what it can tell us about history and the past and prefers to do this in a way that is as strongly scientific as possible (read: falsifiable). Whether or not her version of anthropology is the right one is up to the reader.
As with a lot of modern science there is a lot of jockying for funding, and Weiss is potentially venting frustration that such things are getting funding in place of work she finds more important / productive.
Honestly, this blog post reads just like really whiney culture war "pc culture has gone amok!" than an actual attempt at criticising academic history.
Refusing to even engage in the slightest with the theories and methodologies and doing the equivalent of standing with your hands on your hips and saying "its just wrong!" is lame.
Stuff like this:
>> But, c’mon. To state the obvious - and it seems we must - there were vanishingly few black people in London in the mid-fourteenth century ... I haven’t been able to find hard data/evidence on non-white people in London in the fourteenth century. I think the consensus is there were only a handful. David Olsuga’s history of black Britons doesn’t mention any.
Okay, so you feel confident enough that you build up this claim about "having to state the obvious" but then end up with afootnote of "oh yeah so, cant find anything to back this up but uhhh like...I think consensus is this.".
or even more egregious, stuff like this:
>>Look, I haven’t carried out a full investigation of this paper
>>It is just obviously bullshit
>>As for “African cosmologies” - I don’t know, and I suspect they don’t either.
Really just highlights how much the blogger here cares about actually engaging with the scholarly work and how much he's more interested in just playing up the culture war nonsense for viewership.
Getting all snarky about esoteric jargon in a field and claiming its "all bullshit" really just highlights ones disdain for having even the slightest bit of humility and maybe finding out what it means.
One Google search and you can find a lengthy Encyclopedia.com article about African cosmologies, explaining the concept and what it means. Rolling your eyes at technical jargon you don't understand is really childish.
> I simply don't buy this "cleaner" (and incorrect) history argument.
Incorrect how? Incorrect in that it doesn't reflect the exact way that history was constructed locally? Spoiler: it rarely does. Every —amend, every usage of a queue (MQ, Quilt, …), every patchbomb sent to a mailing list means the history recorded won't exactly reflect the way it was created. And that's for the better: history should be crafted for sense, not for useless historical correctness.
>Presumably it's laity interested in the humanities. So wouldn't they already know this?
Why would they? Did you know anything about any field and at any age? What if they're starting out with history xkcd.com/1053/ style?
Not to mention that tons of people read history (historical accounts, biographies, etc.) as a hobby, and take what thet read at face value, not understanding the inherent biases.
And of course, the article also gives examples, puts the issue in a general perspective, explains some issues associated with it, etc.
It looks like you've only considered the title, as if the post begins and ends at that.
>Which actually makes this empty virtue signaling, regardless of truth value.
I think this is more true of this comment, than of the article.
Agreed. I was going to point that out as well but a few other comments addressed the dating of the sources so I instead just wanted to address the people who read the title and were ready to jump into the comments to beat a dead horse.
I think it is annoying because it's so arrogant. Ok fine technically you can say anything is humanities past in the sense that it's in the past, but it's presumptuous to act like we have ownership of something so wildly broad. I think it would still be presumptuous to connect it to us even if it was about the history of our own sun or to pre homo-sapien geology, this is just even more so.
It was not at all my intention to critizise research about population movements in the past. To the contrary, I find it extreemly fantastic what modern science can find out here. What annoyed me in this particular case was the fact that a particular statement was given a headline that I could not help but call an aberration. It is an example of a not so uncommon narrative in popularized history that is not only naïve, but can become dangerous if it becomes dominant, such as in present-day Russia.
Perhaps people may find my complaint about this headline a bit nitpicking. But as a sort of historian by profession, such observations force themselves upon me, and I hope that HN is a place where at least a couple of people feel some affinity with a nerdy scholar.
> The thesis of the article isn't the point of the article? What?
Kind of like how an article whose "thesis" is that we should eat children probably isn't actually suggesting we literally should eat children, even while making a vigorous argument for its thesis.
Or are you also flabbergasted when someone suggests "A Modest Proposal" wasn't an actual proposal?
What the author did in this piece wasn't exactly satire, but it is using hyperbole to make a point about a form of bias in historical writing (cultural exceptionalism).
> If you're the author
I am not. But I enjoyed that article on its own merits, and seeing a nice piece of work trampled over by people who completely missed the point of the piece angers me.
>...but making broad claims about history...
The point of the piece is not to make broad claims about history, but rather to critique the sorts of broad claims that are often made when history is written from the perspective of a culture that views itself as exceptional. The fact that the claims are so hyperbolic as to make people angry is... kind of the point -- c.f. modest proposal.
I thought that was patently obvious from the tone and content of the piece.
I also found it odd how every cultural reference pointed (usually unhelpfully) to the corresponding wikipedia article. Didn't hurt the content of the post, it was just kinda.. odd.
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