Whether Mahatma Gandhi Was Misinterpreted Through the Dilemma of Irrelevant and Relevant Philosophies?

In one of the articles published in Current Anthropology way back in 1973, David G. Mandelbaum talked about two approaches to understand the life of an individual. For him, to observe the lifestyle of a person or gain the knowledge about a lifestyle of a person, social scientists always succumb to two main approaches: life passage studies and life history studies. Life passage studies understand the contribution of society about the socialization and enculturation of their young ones, whereas life history studies emphasize the personified experiences and requirements of the individuals and how the individual copes up with the society. Here I have adopted the means of life history study to see some of the facets of Gandhiji’s life and its influence in the society. I shall do it by looking at some of his philosophies on health, food, sexual life, rather than going into the details of his whole life history. I shall do it without perplexing my own way of understanding “Mahatma” and linking sometimes my own life experiences that had been influenced by the philosophies of Gandhiji. I shall be carrying out an autoethnography by perceiving the virtues of Gandhiji in my own life. Nevertheless, it will rather be a futile exercise to describe his philosophies in a single paper and that too with a minimum experience on his whole life.

Number Concepts Are Constructed through Material Engagement: A Reply to Sutliff, Read, and Everett

I respond to three responses to my 2015 Current Anthropology article, “Numerosity Structures the Expression of Quantity in Lexical Numbers and Grammatical Number.” This study examined the categorical and geographical distribution of lexical numbers, also known as counting numbers, and grammatical number, the ability to linguistically distinguish singular and plural. Both these features of language conform to the perceptual experience of quantity, which consists of subitization, the ability to rapidly and unambiguously identify one, two, and three, and magnitude appreciation, the ability to appreciate bigger and smaller in the numerical quantity of groups when the difference lies above a threshold of noticeability. My reply to Sutliff disagrees with her contention that mathematical ideas are mentally innate on the grounds that this ignores their explicit construction through the interaction of human psychological, physiological, and behavioral abilities with materiality. My reply to Read expands on the idea that language obscures cross-cultural conceptual variability in number concepts because everything that translates as “three” does not necessarily have the same numerical properties. Finally, my reply to Everett notes that investigating numerical origins means discarding the deeply entrenched assumption of linguistic primacy on the grounds that material forms make numerical intuitions tangible, visible, and manipulable in ways that language cannot and, moreover, provide an alinguistic bootstrap mechanism that accounts for the emergence of both concepts of number and words for the concepts.

On the Nature of Numerosity and the Role of Language in Developing Number Concepts: A Reply to Everett

We respond to Caleb Everett’s (2013) critique of our 2012 Current Anthropology article “Numerosity, Abstraction, and the Emergence of Symbolic Thinking.” We refute Everett’s criticisms, including his claim that we overemphasized paleoanthropological evidence in our argument, noting that recent experimental research in numerical cognition comprised 60% of our references. We also identify two key misunderstandings by Everett, first, the idea that numerosity is not uniform in extant Homo sapiens (we believe that experimental findings, including those of Everett himself, demonstrate that quantity perception is cross-culturally uniform) and second, the idea that language necessarily shapes human numerosity (in fact, the two are largely independent cognitive processes, and the evidence shows that numerosity, as a perceptual primitive, precedes language, not the other way around as argued by Everett). We note our focus on the fundamental question of how discrete quantities emerge out of the undifferentiated ‘many’, given numerosity, and reiterate our 2012 suggestion that the answer lies in the interaction of quantity appreciation with material scaffolds.

Expanding Horizons in the History of Science

This book challenges the common assumption that the predominant focus of the history of science should be the achievements of Western scientists since the so-called Scientific Revolution. The conceptual frameworks within which the members of earlier societies and of modern indigenous groups worked admittedly pose severe problems for our understanding. But rather than dismiss them on the grounds that they are incommensurable with our own and to that extent unintelligible, we should see them as offering opportunities for us to revise many of our own preconceptions. We should accept that the realities to be accounted for are multi-dimensional and that all such accounts are to some extent value-laden. In the process insights from current anthropology and the study of ancient Greece and China especially are brought to bear to suggest how the remit of the history of science can be expanded to achieve a cross-cultural perspective on the problems.

Perspectivas antropológicas sobre las formas de (ganarse la) vida

La reflexión sobre las maneras en que las personas producen formas de garantizar aquello que consideran una vida digna ha cobrado relevancia en los estudios antropológicos, especialmente a la luz de las transformaciones del capitalismo contemporáneo de las últimas décadas. En el norte global, especialmente en Europa, esta reflexión tomó especial dinamismo con la crisis financiera de 2008, que puso en evidencia procesos de más largo aliento vinculados al desmantelamiento del estado de bienestar y las formas de precarización de la vida de amplios sectores de la población. La literatura antropológica buscó así elaborar categorías analíticas que permitieran abordar las formas en que las personas hacen frente a estos procesos. Una de las reflexiones más sugerentes en esta dirección fue formulada por Susana Narotzky y Niko Besnier en un número especial de Current Anthropology publicado en el año 2014, cuya traducción al español abre este número temático de la Revista Cuadernos de Antropología Social. Allí, elaboran una propuesta programática que, sorteando los límites de los modelos abstractos, nos posibilita “repensar la economía” al colocar la mirada en las continuidades y transformaciones de los sistemas colectivos que permiten sostener la vida. Esto incluye, desde su perspectiva, las posibilidades y necesidades objetivas y subjetivas de las personas para proyectar su vida futura. Recuperan para ello contribuciones de la economía política, la economía moral y la economía feminista, y proponen en su articulación una perspectiva que apuesta a formular una teoría antropológica de la reproducción social en el capitalismo actual.

The culture problem: How the honor/shame issue got the wrong end of the anthropological stick

The honor/shame issue is an important topic in mission, as portrayed in Georges’s The 3D Gospel for example. Proponents of the shame–guilt distinction draw on the popular culture concept of the early 20th century by assuming that cultures are objects that we can easily grasp and demarcate from one to another. Culture thus becomes a convenient idea to understand difference by generalizing and simplifying the unfamiliar and submitting it to one’s own way of thinking. Current anthropology, however, rejects such a reifying and essentializing approach. Rather, culture is seen as an expression of how humans think, act, and live in the world, and is thus complex, fuzzy, and dynamic. In dealing with the honor/shame issue, we need to get hold of the other end of the stick by starting with humans and treating honor and shame as cultural traits. Accordingly, honor and shame are encountered to different degrees and in different ways across humanity. A vertical and categorical classification and demarcation of cultures thus needs to make room for a more dynamic and horizontal spread of cultural traits. This allows us to account better for human diversity, while simultaneously maintaining humanity’s commonality as cultural beings. To study honor and shame we need to focus on how relationships work in various real-life situations. Such an ethnographic approach builds on observation, participation, and sharing in other people’s lives. It also asks what words and notions people use to express the values that shape their relationships.

Mental Imagery and Iconic Imagery: The Art of the Origins between Neuropsychology and Shamanism

L’art pariétal du Paléolithique supérieur présente, à côté d’un extraordinaire répertoire animalier bien diversifié, un grand nombre de signes qui ne trouvent pas d’équivalents dans la perception de la réalité sensible. Tandis que les images des humains ou des créatures mi-humaines mi-animales sont très rares, ces formes aniconiques, souvent géométrisantes et aisément classifiables, sont globalement plus nombreuses que les animaux. Si saisir l’intentionnalité qui a poussé les premiers artistes à peindre sur les parois représente un défi pour nos compétences interprétatives, les « signes » constituent l’aspect le plus énigmatique de ce défi. Il y a trente ans, en 1988, dans la revue Current Anthropology, a été publié un article de James D. Lewis-Williams et Thomas A. Dowson, « The Signs of All Times. Entoptic Phenomena in Upper Paleolithic Art », ouvrant une nouvelle perspective sur l’origine des signes. En appliquant le modèle neuropsychologique à l’imagerie bidimensionnelle de l’art des grottes, il est possible d’identifier à des signes à valeur universelle, selon les auteurs, les apparitions entoptiques présentes, avec leurs diverses modalités combinatoires, dans l’art rupestre de « tous les temps ». Cette interprétation de l’art des sociétés préhistoriques, qui resitue la naissance des images dans les territoires visionnaires des cultures chamaniques, a soulevé en France des perplexités et des polémiques innombrables, parfois acerbes. Il est prioritaire alors de voir si le modèle neuropsychologique est effectivement en mesure d’offrir un cadre explicatif des données archéologiques des grottes ornées et de ses « constructions symboliques », en mesure d’intégrer tous les indices disponibles dans une construction théorique cohérente.