Showing posts with label anthropology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anthropology. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Science and the Self

From watching a documentary on dude of the day, Bronislaw Malinawski..

For all his attempts at scientific objectivity, Malinowsky was - like everyone of us, - a prisoner of his own time and culture, with all its prejudices.

This perception of Malinowsky came about his M's diaries were released. Indeed, he was a person different from his science, and somewhat conformist to his society, not in forward, but in regressive thought which united him with the prevalent cultural notions (or more specifically, to the negatives contained therein).

That psychological sciences followed, and proved it so, only gives a credence to his psyche as one derived from socio-cultural experiences, which saw it detached from the findings it was making later on in life. The detachment of M is clear in the state of selective focusing on the abject or the profane his psyche often resorted to, despite deducing and reforming from active experience. He could be possessed by the same "demons" as the tribes eschwed, and in a guilt over not being able to exorcise them as effectively, which I believe wasn't helped by a closed "aristrocratic" (which he so aspired to meet) Victorian society.

Now, a read of "A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term" ensues. It seems available in the public domain.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Life Averages

Divine Comedy begins at the halfway junction of Dante's life, which, guess what, is not 50, but 35 years. This comes from the biblical life expectancy figure, that was 70 years (Psalms 90:10).
Since childhood, we've been led to believe the commonality of 100. People turn 100, then they die. Can't understand where the dumb figure of 100 came from - is it our decimal number system?, or were we brought up on an overtly-simplified treatise on life (100 sounds way more exciting than, say, 72, or 99)?

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Your closest friend is yet to arrive


250,000 years back, in the Pleistocene Era, evolution decided to fix the limit to our social relationship capacity - the radius of people and relationships that we could keep a track of. 25 years back, the nuances of genetics further narrowed the same capacity for me. 18 years back, research put these facts public, and their observation on our social dynamics further limited and cleaved the extents of our relationships within those capacities.
So it happens that our neocortex volume determines that capacity, which averages to about 150 for us human primates (mine should be lower, as empirically observed). A mesh of 150. Among these, a narrower - say, 50 - that hang dearly; 20 that stick close; and a mere 5 or 6 that resonate at our exact frequencies and talk our talk, whom we call our closest friends.

Even if we stretch our limits, or you claim to have a larger Neo-cortical region than I do, you could take your active social relationship limit to 250. Beyond that, new relationships are either futile, or end up displacing the existing ones. But even that calculation is weak, as we never know whom we might bump into and find endearing one of these days of our remaining lives, and have the need for inclusion in our nexus. That one person could potentially be your life partner. Or your best friend. Or your idol. Or your second-born's Godfather. Or even your third life partner, if you've divorced twice. Or your fourth, if after your third marriage you realise you really have an affinity to the same sex which is why your earlier commitments failed... you get my point.

Henceforth, how do we even begin to reserve space for our future relationships that would blossom, sans the guilt of pushing another to an inferior level, and also one on the fringes of that 250 limit completely outside? We need a 'Tatkal' quota - where one could just find a seat in our Neo-cortical Garib Rath.

The mention of our railways brings the fact to mind that this is India, where the great Indian art of 'adjust' has had the people cram their social lives with faces and more faces and the warmth of a thousand handshakes that they would never remember. Everybody claims to know every third person in a social setup, which makes their claim all the more dubious, or only hints at how degraded they assume a human social bond to be. More likely that person's just bluffing; their claims would fail on the mere premise of the time budgeting problem involved in maintaining anything like that monstrous social circle - we could be spending up to 42% of our lifetime in mere Social Grooming, which is highly disadvantageous in today's post-tribal societies. Imagine the drudgery when you find it all wasn't worth. "The lesser the merrier" seems to be apt for this age. I don't wonder why I respect my reclusive friends, who maintain a narrow social group - its only an appreciation of their humbling and evolved mean gene strategy. Everything else is petty subsistence.