Anthropologists From The United States

"In David Anthony’s pithy phrase, ‘The Rig Veda was a ritual canon, not a racial manifesto. If you sacrificed in the right way to the right gods, which required performing the great traditional prayers in the traditional language, you were an Aryan, otherwise you were not.’"

"The rise, fall and recovery of migration models is partly embedded in paradigm shifts in archaeological theory, with all the socio-political factors of academic competition that are entailed. The insistent clamour of the homeless, the migrant and the refugee is rarely still and we cannot but face its consequences on an academic as well as a human level."

"Thus, it seems clear that intelligent design should be considered a religion for First Amendment purposes."

"The actual point of the peppered moth example—that it illustrates how camouflage, a common adaptation that appears designed, can evolve through a simple natural process—is always completely ignored."

"Three of intelligent design’s most damaging constitutional problems: its singling out of evolution education for reform, its explicitly religious background, and it status as unsuccessful science."

"ID advocates complain that their views are rejected out of hand by the scientific establishment, yet they do not play by normal rules of presenting their views first through scientific conferences and then to peer-reviewed journals and then in textbooks."

"Significantly, the first publication to use the phrase intelligent design was not a theoretical paper but a high school textbook, Of Pandas and People! Ordinarily, one does the research first and then produces the textbook."

"To a biologist, the “it’s just microevolution” argument is painfully obtuse."

"The first problem with this argument (“teach the controversy”) is that there is no scientific controversy about evolution, and the second problem is that intelligent design doesn’t qualify as a scientific theory."

"In special creationism, living things do not share common ancestry….common ancestry is the fundamental difference between special creationism and evolution."

"In the creationist concept of created kind—and the creationist demand to “Show me macroevolution”—we have a classic example of the movable-goalposts strategy for winning. Any amount of evolution that can be demonstrated to the creationists’ satisfaction is effectively by definition microevolution within a kind. No matter how extensive the documented change is, the macroevolution goalposts are always out of reach. The inviolable biblical kind is protected with strategic vagueness."

"The proponents of the latest tactical assault on evolution simply invent a new spin to describe their position or find new legal attacks. The rhetoric is designed to cover up the unquestionably religious motivation they have."

"Creation science argues that there are only two views, special creationism and evolution; thus, arguments against evolution are arguments in favor of creationism. Literature supporting creation science is based on alleged examples of evidence against evolution, which are considered not only proof against evolution but also positive evidence for creationism. Understandably, there is nothing in the creation science canon providing a positive scientific case for the sudden emergence of the universe in its present form at one time, let alone for its specific doctrines a six-thousand-year-old Earth and universe, the occurrence of a worldwide flood responsible for the fossil record and geological features such as the Grand Canyon, and the impossibility of evolution except within sharp limits."

"ID, like creation science, has goals that are primarily religious."

"The critiques of evolution offered in such ID literature, however, is recognizable as a proper subset of the critiques offered by creation science literature, and they are no more valid."

"To anyone familiar with the history of the antievolution movement, the attacks on evolution are perhaps the most obvious link between ID and earlier forms of creationism."

"Dogma doesn’t build better medical devices; good science does."

"To be scientific in our era is to search for solely natural explanations."

"The objections to evolution are not serious scientific arguments; they are superficially investigated and poorly reasoned talking points."

"Important to note is that Johnson is not trained as either a scientist or a theologian, nor has he ever practiced either discipline. His analysis of evolution is therefore based upon his own reading of the lay literature to which he has access and the interpretation on the scientific literature by popularizers. As a result, neither this book (Darwin on Trial) nor his subsequent ones provide a satisfactory scientific critique of biological evolution. Nor does it break new ground theologically. Nonetheless, its publication led to a large following, and he has had an active career on the lecture circuit as a result."

"By now it should be clear that “teaching the controversy” is not about the concern for good pedagogy but about advancing the antievolution agenda."

"Undoubtedly the priests of the Roman Catholic Church did many unjust things during the period of Spanish domination in the New World, but the number of good and noble deeds done by them (deeds the bulk of which is unrecorded) completely dwarfs the evil."

"She was warning me that the persuasiveness of one’s writing should not deflect or disguise leaps in logic and/or insufficient evidence."

"Sally’s work in legal anthropology was anchored in the idea of social life as process, the idea that social orders are never whole, never complete, always multiple, always under construction, and always being altered, undone, and remade. Sally understood law as, essentially, social projects to fix the present or form the future, and she understood that, whatever the range and variety of laws’ effects, laws would never wholly fix the present or form the future. By studying these social projects over time, using tools of ethnography and history, she showed, we can learn both about the realities of law and, also, about the larger social processes in which legal efforts are embedded. Sally was remarkable for combining a sensitive, finely tuned sense of the utter complexity and, to some extent, unknowability of social life with a supreme and infectious confidence in our ability to actually gain some real understanding of social life; as she put it: “[T]he question must be asked”. It’s hard not to think that a key reason that Sally’s questions, concepts, methods - the sheer power of her thinking - remain so sharp and vital is because they were forged in relation to the ongoing tumult of the world in various key locales (New York City, Wall St, Nuremberg, Kilimanjaro) rather in relation to the various academic contests of the times. This is not to say that she did not situate her work within those academic contests; she painstakingly analyzed massive bodies of work in anthropology and law alongside the presentation of her own ideas. But she had been a Wall Street lawyer at 21 (learning what lawyers do to serve commercial interests and wealth) and a Nuremberg prosecutor at 22 (delving into the business files of the company that manufactured the gas used in the genocide)."

"As a lawyer in the Nuremburg trials, she worked on the prosecution of senior industrialists who contributed to the Nazi war effort. She asked for that assignment because she thought they must have had more choice in what they did than many others in Nazi Germany. It was hard to respond adequately to the horrors of Holocaust and war by blaming either individuals or a country. Those on whom she focused as a prosecutor led the corporate giant IG Farben, employer of slave labor and manufacturer of the gas used in concentration camps. Her investigations were impeded by the firm and by an American officer who didn’t believe in prosecuting industrialists. What Sally took home from her Nuremburg experience was a lesson in the ways power and property impinged informally on the formal workings of the law."

"Her recognition that the personal was political was intuitive and preceded the feminist motto."

"When I came to Harvard Law School from Ethiopia, I never thought that I would find someone with first-hand knowledge of life in a village of East Africa. Our first conversations were like conversations with someone who had left my village a little earlier than me and just needed a little updating on how things have stood since then."

"Sally was an elegant woman: a classical beauty and with exquisite manners. Given the challenges of being a woman of her generation in the legal world and in academia — someone hard-nosed, strong-willed, and determined — it would be unfortunate if she went down into history as delicate."

"You (Sally Falk Moore) demonstrated that seeking to think well is a quality of life issue, and that intellectual honesty is an essential form of courage and a basic human need. You expressed this beautifully in the paper, “Some Political Trials in Africa”. It was about human rights lawyers bringing cases they thought they would probably lose. They wanted to leave a record for the future, to say: “We were here, we cared, and we tried.”"

"I remember telling her I thought psychedelic drugs would transform society. Wrong pill, she suggested. Contraceptives would matter more."

"They [female primates] tolerate other breeding females if food is plentiful, but chase them away when monogamy is the optimal strategy."

"As a university professor I sell what I know."

"There are 63 officially recognized indigenous languages in Mexico, but there are at least 282 indigenous languages spoken in Mexico...We see the different languages in these families referred to as "varieties" or “dialects” in the literature. Nobody would think today of calling Spanish, Romanian, Catalan, French and Portuguese "varieties" of Latin."

"The extinction of language is nothing new...What is new today is the rate and extent of extinction of languages."

"Teaching people to read primers and Bibles does not produce authors; it produces readers. Printing presses and publishing houses produce authors. This rule is no different today for nonliterate languages than it was in late medieval times in Europe."

"Weren't humans domesticated by the requirements of the plants and animals themselves?"

"It is not necessary to argue that language diversity caused the evolutionary success of humans. We need only recognize that the knowledge generated by all those successfully adapting cultural groups over the millennia is stored in all those thousands of languages now spoken around the world."

"Computers will not preserve cultures. But they can be used to foster cultural pluralism and to provide people everywhere with the power to make their own bilingual educational materials, or to print pamphlets on how to grow better rice, or to record for future generations the customs and lore of those now alive."

"Research is a craft. I’m not talking analogy here. Research isn’t like a craft. It is a craft. If you know what people have to go through to become skilled carpenters or makers of clothes, you have some idea of what it takes to learn the skills for doing research. It takes practice, practice, and more practice."

"Languages have always come and gone. Neither the language of Jesus nor that of Caesar are spoken today. But languages seem to be disappearing faster than ever before."

"I see nothing useful or charming about remaining monolingual .. if that results in being shut out of the national economy."

".. most people think of science as technology and engineering—life-saving drugs, computers, space exploration, and so on... It is less commonly understood that social and behavioral sciences have also produced technologies and engineering that dominate our everyday lives. These include polling, marketing, management, insurance, and public health programs."

"In her new book, “Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas,” Raff beautifully integrates new data from different sciences (archaeology, genetics, linguistics) and different ways of knowing, including Indigenous oral traditions, in a masterly retelling of the story of how, and when, people reached the Americas. While admittedly not an archaeologist herself, Raff skillfully reveals how well-dated archaeological sites, including recently announced 22,000-year-old human footprints from , are . She builds a persuasive case with both archaeological and genetic evidence that the path to the Americas was coastal (the ) rather than inland, and that was not a bridge but a homeland — twice the size of Texas — inhabited for millenniums by the ancestors of the . Throughout, Raff effectively models how science is done, how hypotheses are tested, and how new data are used to refute old ideas and generate new ones."

"The maintain that their ancestors were a seafaring people who have lived in since the dawn of history. This discovery of this man, whom the Tlingit called , was consistent with that they descend from an ancient, coastally adapted people who engaged in long-distance trade."

"... Getting the science wrong has very real consequences. For example, when a community doesn’t vaccinate children because they’re afraid of “toxins” and think that prayer (or diet, exercise, and “”) is enough to prevent infection, outbreaks happen."

"Anthropological geneticists should participate in because of the complexity of their work, its implications for human health and societies, and its tendency to be co-opted for particular political or social agendas. They are positioned to offer important contributions to public conversations on issues of race, genetic identity, history, and conflict. There are multiple avenues to public outreach for academics; among them, is a powerful, underused tool."

"During two trips to Jamaica in the winter of 1922 and the spring of 1924 I secured the names of 136 plants used for medicinal purposes among the colored peasantry, with the method of preparation and the use to which each was put. ... Brief as the list is, I believe it to be representative of present practice in Jamaica. I had it from three parishes and from such diverse informants a - and -men, accredited government midwives, house-maids and small settlers; from the isolated settlement of and from a flourishing town of white residents like . All were ready and even pleased to contribute information. Most of the plants were picked from the door-plot or beside the road as we walked ..."

"Much in the psychology of the Polynesian has been shown to resemble closely that of the prehistoric civilizations which grouped around the Mediterranean. The taste for riddling is a minor but no less interesting example of this parallelism in mental habit and training, and the part played by the riddling contest in Hawaiian story is directly comparable with that which it plays in old European literary sources like the Scandinavian or the Greek tale of and the . ... In some Hawaiian stories of the ancient past, the contest of wit is represented as one of the accomplishments of th chiefs, taking its place with games of skill like arrow-throwing or checkers, with tests of strength like boxing or wrestling, and the arts of war such as sling-stone and spear-throwing as a means of rivalry. It is played as a betting contest, upon the results of which contestants even stake their lives."

"Beckwith herself ... has compared the and the , but this was a comparison of poetic splendor and artistic worth. The two differ basically in theme, she pointed out, with the Kumulipo more reminiscent of Greek than of Hebrew origins."

"The ', in its ancient and classical form, is analogous to the Japanese and to other like institutions throughout the South Sea Islands. It was conventionalized into a real school of dramatic art. ... A hula performance consisted in a series of dramatic dances accompanied by song, sometimes by rhythmical instruments. It was given under the patronage of a chief, often to celebrate some event, like the birthday of a son. It was dedicated to some god, generally to , the goddess of co-ordinated movement, and was bound under a strict decorum to rigid ceremonial conventions. ... The hula company might consist of several hundred persons, men and women, boys and girls, with a retinue of followers to secure and prepare the food-supply."