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- Convenors:
-
Alessandro Lutri
(University of Catania)
Alberto Acerbi (Eindhoven University of Technology)
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- Format:
- Workshops
- Location:
- 533
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 August, -, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Ljubljana
Short Abstract:
The aim of the workshop is to re-considering the relationship between nature/culture, focusing the painstaking empirical investigations about the relationship between structural factors and social and cultural factors.
Long Abstract:
From the epistemological point of view the anthropology has been always in balance between the aspiration to define itself as a scientific discipline -with a statute similar to natural sciences-, or as an individual understanding closer to humanistic knowledge.
This condition in most cases brought anthropologists to underline the elements of discontinuity and division between what has been conceived as the specific domain of human kind -the culture-, and what has been conceived as the specific of other animal kinds -the nature. This tendency to underline the discontinuity between the human kind and the animal kind generated the culturalism that characterize most of the anthropological knowledge of XX century. This tendency generated in the common and scientific sense a dualistic vision of reality, considered as separated in two different entities, the culture and the nature.
This ontological dualism reflects what is assumed to be an essential characteristic of human beings: the absence of any kind of constraints on their social and mental behaviours.
The aim of the workshop is to stimulate a debate about some key concepts of social and cultural anthropology, like "natural", "innate", and "humanity", reflecting upon the difficulties of a discountinuist conception that to divide human beings, more than join them. The workshop would to re-considering the relationship between nature/culture, focusing the painstaking empirical investigations about the relationship between structural factors (neurophysiological, biochemical, biological, etc.) and social and cultural factors (cultural, social, political and ideological).
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 August, 2008, -Alberto Acerbi (Eindhoven University of Technology)
Paper short abstract:
Naturalistic approaches to cultural behavior are not necessarily bound to a commitment on a universal - fixed - human nature. In my contribution I will try to point out how is possible to conciliate a strong naturalistic commitment with the acknowledgement of the human behavioral variability.
Paper long abstract:
In general, naturalistic research programs are not, up to now, particularly widespread in anthropology. One reason that can explain this state of affairs is that, in most cases, the approaches to human sciences that presented themselves as naturalistic (e.g. sociobiology, evolutionary psychology) tended to underline the universality and the commonness of the human behavior and to deny, or give less importance, to the diversity.
However, from a comparative point of view, the variety of human behavioral patterns can not be compared to the variability present in other species and it is worthwhile to argue that this variability has to be explained in terms of the importance that social learning dynamics (culture) have among human beings.
In my theoretical contribution, I will try to point out how is possible to conciliate a strong naturalistic commitment (and I will try to explain what is required to fulfil such a commitment) with the acknowledgement of the human behavioral variability. In particular, I will refer to three different, but conciliable, research paradigms: (1) the empirical study of social learning in comparative psychology, (2) the gene-culture coevolutionary modeling, and (3) the so-called embodied cognitive science.
Joel Candau (University Côte d'Azur)
Paper short abstract:
The aim of this paper is to advocate that if anthropology wants to embrace its « raison d'être » entirely, it must demand membership in both the historical sciences and the natural sciences.
Paper long abstract:
In the « Sidney W. Mintz lecture » delivered November 13, 2002, in The John Hopkins University's, Immanuel Wallerstein called for a reconstruction of the Social Sciences. Wallerstein argued that the 19th century division of academiae into the various disciplines « has outlived its usefulness and is today a major obstacle to serious intellectual work ».
While confining my remarks to the state of Anthropology, I shall quickly outline this current crisis and then propose a definition of our discipline that can help us to resolve this crisis.
On the basis of my research on memory and smell, I advocate that if anthropology wants to embrace its « raison d'être » entirely, it must demand membership in both historical sciences and natural sciences.
I shall insist on the necessity of the historical sciences membership through three arguments: i) obligation to work only on remains of the past, ii) impossibility of dissociating our observations from particular socio-historical contexts, iii) necessary incorporation in our analytical frameworks of the specifically human aptitude of Mental Time Travel.
My argument relating to the membership in the natural sciences will also be developed through three points: i) challenge of the hypothesis of Blank Slate, ii) importance in cultural phenomena of cognitive and emotional processes of which we are not entirely aware, iii) effects of secondary altriciality and epigenetic factors on humans being.
In fine, I shall argue that it is scientifically justified to maintain Anthropology as the sole constituted discipline capable of conceptualizing the interconnectivity between the individual and the universal.
Alessandro Lutri (University of Catania)
Paper short abstract:
The aim of this paper is discuss the epistemological validity of the hypothesis of the universal propensity to naturalize several domains of human knowledge, particularly the way to organize the knowledge of the identity group. Moreover the paper want discuss the idea of human nature underlying this naturalistic hypothesis.
Paper long abstract:
The contemporary naturalistic approaches about the folksociology (the way to organize the knowledge about the identity group) have hypothesized a universal propensity to naturalize both the living kinds (folkbiology) that the human kinds (folksociology).
This paper want discuss the hypothesis about the human kinds founded on the constraints of the phylogenetic properties of the human mind.
I think that the hypothesis of innate conceptual content in the domain about the human kinds perpetuate the anthropological vice to emphasize and to reify the differences about the identities of social groups supposed as naturals. A judgement founded on the fact until today no one empirical evidence has been show about that this kind of relevant concepts emerge early in development irrespective of widely different input conditions.
Differently by this naturalistic hypothesis and by most mainstream anthropologists founded in the hypothesis of a "Unconstrained Learning", on the basis of my ethnographic research I will show: the conceptual content of identity group is socially and culturally constructed because their construction and acquisition are in no way constrained by the philogenetic properties of the human mind.
At the contrary I think that the identity group is most constrained by practicing certain activities, or by adopting distinctive ways of doing and being, more that by the philogenetic cognitive properties,
therefore if the anthropology would understand how the people form their knowledge about themselves, it should see both inside the actor's mind and in the social praxis hand on every day.
Tommaso Sbriccoli (University of Siena)
Paper short abstract:
The aim of this paper is to present how the relationship nature/culture is structured in the indian thought and practice. I will then analyze how the cultural difference is treated in this context and how this leads to the reification of power relationships.
Paper long abstract:
The caste system in India is not only a social and religious structure, but implyes also a biological and cultural theory. Presenting the caste system as composed of jati ("caste", but litteraly "species") and the theory of karma and reincarnation, in which animal and human worlds are thought in a continuum rather than in a dychotomic way, I will try to show how the attitude toward the cultural differences is, paradoxically, one of tollerance. In a system in which culture is deeply linked to supposed biological and cosmological differences, cultural difference is thought as "natural" and put on a gerarchical scale. It becomes a function of status rather than being considerated as a super-organic entity. This vision leads to the substantialization of the diversity and so to the reification of power relationships, in what has become in common sense the symbol of social inequality, the caste system. But culture being a symptom of biological differences, this leaves an open space in which it is possible for people in some circumstances to better their own status (biological as well as social and religious) changing their cultural traits. Through the presentation of ethnographic material on a Rajsthan village I will try to substantiate this point and to link it to the new political debate of the hindu nationalism.
Sabrina Tonutti (University of Udine)
Paper short abstract:
The aim of this paper is to reconsider the role played by the human/animal divide in our cultural context, and specifically the use of cultural categories and euristic tools (such as taxonomies and forms of systematization) as natural entities.
Paper long abstract:
The aim of this paper is to reconsider the role played by the human/animal divide in our cultural context, and specifically the use of cultural categories and euristic tools (such as taxonomies and forms of systematization) as natural entities.
This shift from the level of contingency to one of necessity is central in the anthropological discourse about the relationship between nature and culture, humans and (other) animals.
A topic which will be discussed is the use of the term "culture" in the anthropological tradition (from Boas onwards) as a key concept leading to the divorce of culture from nature and of humankind from animal kind.
As a result of this approach, the study of culture has become a deterministic form of "culturology", opposed to any possible contamination with naturalistic views and perspectives on humanity.
The human body, the phylogenetic evolution of humankind and its kinship with other primates, the strict relationship between "innate" and knowledge acquired through experience, and the presence of culture in other animals are some of the subjects which fall beyond the discipline boundaries. These issues and the implications of the reluctance to take them into account within the anthropological field will also be addressed.
Georgeta Marghescu (University Politechnica, Bucharest)
Paper short abstract:
This paper concerns the contemporary tendency of reconsidering the human nature and its consequences both for the understanding of the boundary between humans and animals and on the ways in which the animals are represented and used.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropology is still far from having said its last word concerning the natural nature or the cultural nature of human beings. In solving this problem anthropology is indebted to anthropocentric modern rationalist paradigm according to which man's uniqueness is assumed. Its corollary is the relegation of animal to machine; assuming their sovereignty over all others creatures, humans used them solely as means to debatable human ends. Culture was opposed to nature in order to explain the man's peculiarities.
Nature and human nature became, in the last decades, subject of reflection and research. Namely, the inviolability of the boundary between humans and non-humans beings is questioned and the extent of other animals' capacity for language, morality and, generally, for culture is debated. We are witnessing, in consequence, the changing conception concerning the relation between human and non-human beings and, thus, the reconsideration of what it means to be fully human. A tendency of re-naturalization of humans is obvious in both these processes.
Our paper concerns this tendency of human's re-naturalization in defining the human nature and its consequences both for the understanding of the boundary between humans and animals and on the ways in which animals are represented and used. In order to achieve this goal, the theoretical approach will be associated with the consideration of traditional and modern understanding of the relation between what means to be truly human and the way in which animals are viewed in the Romanian culture.