Class Outline

• Technology: possibility and determination?
• (Ethno-)Methodology for (de)constructing human production
• Human (dis-)abilities: expansions through tools and institutions
• Hoes, plows and familial strategies
• Irrigation: Power and social structure
• The power of the printed word
• Possibilities in print: Play and control
• Industrialization I: The imagination of the machines
• Industrialization II: The experience of machines
• Living with the bomb
• The body and the machine
• Further reading

Readings

• Goody, Jack Production and Reproduction New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976 (Chapters 1-5)

Discussion

• Marion asked what the main difference is between the social sciences (i.e. psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc.)
• Possibly someone should expand Cremin's article on Wikipedia
• Professor Varenne brought in brought in a Newsweek article on people who have hacked the Wii; example of how people appropriate technology

Class notes

Marx

• revisiting Marx's argument: "Men begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistance... The form of the intercourse of individuals with one another is again determined by production." - The German ideology
• production refers to all practical actions necessary for survival (see Professor Varenne's website)
• intercourse refers to the overall organization of people
• determination refers to how people are organized for production; a problematic term because it pushes deterministic interpretations
• Marx's key focus was on the role of the modes of production in society
• how to people reproduce themselves in society? they cannot do it by themselves; they require a collection of people to exist
• Marx gets us to think in very concrete and practical terms
• not all leftist views hold deterministic views
• May Day commemorates May 1st riots at Haymarket in Chicago
• all states (or societal systems) have a contradiction

Goody

• seems to have Marxist views although doesn't refer to him a whole lot
• wrote deterministic works that does cross-cultural comparisons of technologies, such as plows and literacy
• did large-scale studies that generalize across all societies
• wrote about sibling terms that differ in other societies, and how it relates to marriage types, inheritance of resources, permissibility of premarital sex
• inheritance includes not just what children receive after parents die, but all kinds of resources, including gifts, dowries (in more modern terms, who pays for college, whether they moved to an area for its schools
• devolution of resources also affect marriage because it affects who you might marry
• looked at who does what to whom at what point in their lives: who farms, type of agriculture, and political structure
• Goody argues that hoes and plows are different tools that affect the types of differentiated wealth in society
• also believed that there are deterministic reasons against premarital sex; distinguishes sub-Saharan agriculture from others from Ireland to Japan, all of whom have similar kinship systems, views on pre-marital sex (especially girls)
• against Mead's view that a cultures just find different ways of doing the same thing
• Goody's view seems to resemble Jared Diamond argument that views the key role that agriculture plays in determining the outcomes of human societies; they do have different takes though, from what I know (I haven't read this book yet, but plan on doing so - Aaron Hung 14:57, 9 June 2008 (EDT))
• wanted to emphasize role that technology affects marriage systems
• for the children who survive, parents have to think about what happens to children after the parents die
• spouse of child is important because it affects grandchildren's access to land
• in post-industrial age, parents focus more on giving children access to best education
• pre-marital sex affects marriage terms
• these seem to even impact the imagination of literature, producing Romeo and Juliet type stories across history and societies

Criticism of Goody

• there are many exceptions to Goody's view that violates his principles
• great variation within each societies
• people in plow societies who do not have access to plows will create variations within the societies
• cultural anthropologists would argue that it does not explain enough the variations found in different societies
• there are parts of agriculture that can use plows
• Goody doesn't look at it in terms of feedback loops

Anthropology

• Mead, as a younger female anthropologist in Samoa, was assigned to live with adolescent girls
• wrote a book that rejected traditional psychology's views of adolescent puberty
• social sciences often focus on identifying cause and effects
• difference between correlation and causality
• entities can co-evolve together

Links

• Diamond, J. M. (1997). Guns, germs, and steel: The fates of human societies (1st ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Co. ISBN 0393061310