I am reminded how I do violence when I try to 'set people straight.'
Usually, I am just trying to rephrase what they have said in 'my words,'
as a way of retaining my authority, especially when their source(s) may
be as or more knowledgeable than mine. Thanks for example.
Molly
Jay Lemke wrote:
> In reply to Mike's last ....Yes, archeological analysis is one way to
> go ... but data is sketchy I think. Another is via anthropology, not
> on the old assumption that less differentiated societies of recent
> times are the same as ancient ones, but on the "back-breeding of
> maize" analogy, that we find some alternative lineages descended from
> the same precursors if we look not just across cultures in general,
> but specifically across those that have incorporated urbanization,
> long chains of sociotechnical translations, etc. to different degrees
> or in radically different ways.
>
> At this point I am looking for leads and suggestions, not yet for
> definite answers ...
>
> On the other recent topic:
>
> I don't think the human brain is likely to have changed
> physiologically over the timescale of historical changes in culture.
> That's not plausible evolutionary biology; even today literacy skills
> barely make a difference in reproductive fitness (of individuals; it's
> different if we are talking about group selection, but those are
> weaker effects that take even more generations ...) and there is only
> a tiny fraction of the species population that has been literate in
> the last few thousand years ... negligible. I won't try here to
> anticipate the various arguments around pre-adaptation and gender
> differences in brain evolution. Maybe there is something interesting
> to discuss there ...
>
> It just strikes me as strange that people are always looking for some
> genetic, physiological, or evolutionary basis for culture-shaped
> behavior and cultural change. This is a really odd fetish ... What is
> it in our current dominant culture that is so drawn to biological
> determinism? Did we jettison racial/eugenics theory too soon? before
> it had run its course? What is the ideological driving force for this
> line of reasoning? I think this is a really important question for
> contemporary cultural studies. Is it some deep reflex of the culture's
> fear of sexuality? or of middle-class repression of anxiety over the
> vulnerability of our bodies to pain? Is there a meta-Freudian analysis
> of the Will to Bio-determinism? (Sigmund did start out as a
> bio-determinist himself, and this tension between what one might call
> the appeal to the body and the appeal to a more culturally shaped
> psyche stays all the way through.) I think the relative behavioral
> significance of the cultural veneer on our primate heritage is often
> exaggerated ... but so is the potential impact of that heritage on
> variability in the veneer.
>
> What is more credible to me is that the brain has all along had
> incredible plasticity and that _use patterns_ can "wire in" various
> sorts of dispositions and structures that make some things easier than
> others ... this is consistent with Edelman's arguments in _Neural
> Darwinism_, and there has long been evidence (reviewed in an
> interesting and overlooked book by E. Milner ... hmm still in a box
> somewhere ...) that the gross plasticity is still being shaped well
> past adolescence, likely into our mid-30s. Could this have correlates
> with gender-specfic aspects of enculturation? possibly .... with
> hemispheric specialization? seems less relevant, but also possible ...
> though I agree with Mike that the correlation between gender roles and
> literate vs. say pictorial facility in and across cultures seems too
> weak to be very plausible ... for one thing, you need a very
> sophisticated understanding of the relations between spoken and
> written language to develop such arguments (also a weakness in some of
> David Olson's literacy and culture arguments in _The World on Paper_).
> Gender-role enculturation certainly gives women in our society a
> strong disposition to verbal fluency and effectiveness in situations
> defined more as social than political, more as private than public
> (though these categories are themselves a bit ridiculous and
> incoherent even within our present dominant culture) ... and the
> differences there vs. literate forms of semantic construction, and
> their supporting dispositions, while significant, are still rather
> slight on the scale of differences in brain-processing or hemispheric
> differentiation. It would hardly be adaptive to have hemispheres,
> even in post-natal ontogeny, become specialized to such fine-grain
> variations in discourse pragmatics.
>
> Of course we could always do brain-scans, and maybe even invasive
> cortical-structure probes, on post-operative transsexuals ... do you
> think John Ashcroft would have a problem with that ??
>
> JAY.
>
>
> At 08:46 AM 12/20/2002 -0800, you wrote:
>
>> Lets hear from the historians of ancient Summerian schooling, Jay. I
>> have
>> only read a few books on Ancient schooling, and not nearly enough on the
>> evolution of city-states to be able to contribute to a discussion of the
>> emergence of schools in the middle east. China is another, very
>> important,
>> locale. Perhaps in Goody's work or work he points to?
>> mike
>
>
>
> ---------------------------
> JAY L. LEMKE
> Educational Studies
> University of Michigan
> 610 East University
> Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
> http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke
> ---------------------------
>
>
>
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