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Posts tagged “anthropology”
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Racing on Carbon Fiber Legs: How Abled Should We Be? 

One Olympic swimmer has a D-cup breast size. From a physiological standpoint, she’s at a disadvantage to a swimmer who’s an A-cup. If she amputated her breasts to become more streamlined, would we consider her crazy, or worse, a cheater?
The Amazons, after all, amputated their left breast so it wouldn’t impede their skill in archery. Though athletes have taken some truly crazy stuff to have an advantage, nobody’s gone so far as elective amputation.
I’ve spent the better part of my lifetime trying to get out from under an idea of being “disabled,” and the baggage that comes with that label. (Look it up in a thesaurus if you want a taste of what I mean.) As of yet, the best prosthetic available is not as efficient and not as capable as what Mother Nature gives us—or, what she was supposed to give me, and South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius. The revolutionary design of the woven carbon-fiber Cheetah Leg, nicknamed for its design inspiration, has been in existence for nearly 15 years—and after my initial triumphs with them in the mid 1990s, it has been the leg of choice for nearly all elite amputee sprinters. But in one instant, after Pistorius entered a summer 2007 track meet in Rome and placed second in a field of runners possessing flesh and bone legs, he and I were deemed tooabled.
Commence the comical nightmare of being told that we now possess an “unfair advantage” in wearing prosthetic limbs to run. The scores of amputee sprinters who had competed with the limbs for the previous 13 years—and were still comfortably categorized as “disabled”—were virtually ignored. What is fascinating is the immediate shift in society’s regard of a disabled athlete as an “inspiration” (cue the patronizing “awwwww”) to a legitimate threat to other athletes (“Uh, what the hell do we do now?”).

Wow. Aimee Mullins is guest editing at Gizmodo this week and she just knocked it out of the park. This is essential reading for any anthropologist or linguistic. Donna Haraway would be proud.

Aimee runs through the tricky issue of human modification in sports, chronicling the blurred border that defines the space. Just go read this now. (Via Gizmodo)

RIP Claude Lévi-Strauss. From his introduction to Myth and Meaning: I never had, and still do not have, the perception of feeling my personal identity. I appear to myself as the place where something is going on, but there is no ‘I’, no ‘me.’ Each of us is a kind of crossroads where things happen. The crossroads is purely passive; something happens elsewhere. There is no choice, it is just a matter of chance. I don’t pretend at all that, because I think that way, I am entitled to conclude that mankind thinks that way too. But I believe that, for each scholar and each writer, the particular way he or she thinks and writes opens a new outlook on mankind. And the fact that I personally have this idiosyncrasy perhaps entitles me to point to something which is valid, while the way in which my colleagues think opens different outlooks, all of which are equally valid. I’ve always been intrigued by that passage as it’s written by the man who invented structuralism. Written ahead of his ordered thoughts, it acknowledges the situated knowledge movement that would come into anthropology (especially at Santa Cruz) while allowing room for him to make sweeping statements. After all, he saw the world as himself. Lévi-Strauss was certainly pragmatic.

RIP Claude Lévi-Strauss.

From his introduction to Myth and Meaning:

I never had, and still do not have, the perception of feeling my personal identity. I appear to myself as the place where something is going on, but there is no ‘I’, no ‘me.’ Each of us is a kind of crossroads where things happen. The crossroads is purely passive; something happens elsewhere. There is no choice, it is just a matter of chance.
I don’t pretend at all that, because I think that way, I am entitled to conclude that mankind thinks that way too. But I believe that, for each scholar and each writer, the particular way he or she thinks and writes opens a new outlook on mankind. And the fact that I personally have this idiosyncrasy perhaps entitles me to point to something which is valid, while the way in which my colleagues think opens different outlooks, all of which are equally valid.

I’ve always been intrigued by that passage as it’s written by the man who invented structuralism. Written ahead of his ordered thoughts, it acknowledges the situated knowledge movement that would come into anthropology (especially at Santa Cruz) while allowing room for him to make sweeping statements. After all, he saw the world as himself. Lévi-Strauss was certainly pragmatic.

“ The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize ‘inconvenient’ facts—I mean the facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions. ”

Max Weber

Sapir-Whorf and Hackers

From Wikipedia:

In linguistics, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (SWH) (also known as the “linguistic relativity hypothesis”) postulates a systematic relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it. Although known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, it was an underlying axiom of linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir and his colleague and student Benjamin Whorf.
The hypothesis postulates that a particular language’s nature influences the habitual thought of its speakers: that different language patterns yield different patterns of thought. This idea challenges the possibility of perfectly representing the world with language, because it implies that the mechanisms of any language condition the thoughts of its speaker community. The hypothesis emerges in strong and weak formulations. 
Are their any linguists out there who have applied to this to hackers? Can we get some formal thinking on the predilections of a RoRs guy vs. a PHP dev? I’d like to put out a call for papers…
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