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I've seen a few memes around lately that are all humor based on the idea that anthropologists and archaeologists don't know what they're talking about and and don't pay attention to the people they're working with. The three that come to mind are:
*One about archaeologists who can't figure out what certain leatherworking tools are until a modern leatherworker happens to see the tools and explains their use.
*An anthropologist who is tricked into thinking that four stone stacks that an indigenous person is using to mark out the parking space for their car are some kind of ancient ritual markers.
*Archaeologists who fail to consider a practical though tradtionally feminine use for a discovered artifact (using Roman dodecahedra for knitting) and have decided that many thousands of artifacts must be religious or ceremonial just because they can't figure out what they're actually used for even though a modern "Youtube grandma" could have told them.
None of these memes are consistent with the way this kind of research works and that bothers me. A big part of why they bother me is that they feel like a sort of insidious anti-intellectual propaganda purporting to come from a woke perspective. Sort of like the memes that criticize the "left" for "erasing" Aunt Jemima from history through making the company change the product name. That criticism is misguided at best, and I believe these other memes are as well. I have finally written about my thoughts on them. Those thoughts, copied from a response elsewhere, follow:
---
I'm going to write a lengthy reply here, because this kind of meme is troublesome in ways that are not obvious, but that bother me personally. I know that some people take this kind of long reply as indicative of anger, but I'm really not angry! I just think it's important to respond to memes that suggest that academics and the practice of science is disconnected from reality, and that's what I think that this meme is, at its heart.
There are other memes like this one too, most notably one about some particular stone tools made for leatherworking purposes that archaeologists were supposedly unable to determine the use of until they asked someone who does modern leatherworking and who could immediately clarify the purpose of said tool to the confused archaeologists. That meme is also bogus.
As someone with an anthropology degree and who knows working anthropologists/archaeologists, the problem with these memes is the implication that anthropologists specifically, and I think academics in general, don't know what they're talking about. That they are living in an ivory tower, blissfully disconnected from the realities of the lives and culture they are working with. That implication is simply false. There may have been something to it in the past, when archaeologists were mostly British aristocrats who sat on their verandas and had indigenous people brought to them to interrogate, but that was a long time ago, thank geraniums.
Anthropological method revolves around participant observation. They embed themselves within the cultures they are studying for years at a time to get as close to an inside perspective as possible. (This can't be done perfectly, but we try really hard!) Archaeologists, obviously, can't do participant observation, but they get as close as they can by trying to fully understand a vast number of threads of culture interwoven among the people and places they are researching.
Part of what some archaeologists do is called experimental archaeology. They try to think of how and why various things could be made or used, and then they try to replicate those methods. Success isn't proof that that's how things were done, but at least it verifies that they *could* have been done that way. The Youtube video showing someone knitting with a dodecahedron is a beautiful example of this kind of experimental method! It's really cool!
Part of that process of figuring out how things *could* have been done is listening to people in the present who do things or use things related to the historical or prehistorical stuff that the archaeologists are studying. Archaeologists who aren't arrogant adherents to a vanishing ideology of Western imperialism (and there really don't seem to be many of those left anymore, thank heavens) have a huge amount of respect for the lived experience of others and do their best to incorporate such experience in their work. That would include anybody with skills that might be related to the objects they are studying, even if they are from different cultures. The person using the dodecahedron to knit would certainly fit that description, and I'm sure that archaeologists whose area this is are familiar with the suggestion. A lot of anthropologists even talk about the people they work with not as "subjects" or similar, but as collaborators or coauthors. It's the people who the anthropologists are working with who know this shit: we're just trying to understand as best we can and share that understanding with others.
I'm not bothered by the suggestion that these were used for knitting. I'm bothered by the implication that knitting is *clearly* what these were for and that academics don't know what they're doing and wouldn't consider asking anybody else for help. That is the opposite of the way that good academics work. I'm bothered by the implication that academics lack some kind of "common sense" that would provide an easy answer to their questions if they would get their head out of the clouds, learn some humility, and ask everyday people. That is also not how the academic process of learning and discovery works.
The thing about the Youtube video "proving" the actual use of these things reminds me a little bit of Thor Heyerdahl and the Kon-Tiki. Was Thor Heyerdahl able to sail an unpowered raft from South America to Polynesia? Sure. Does that prove that Polynesians were descendants of South American people? Not at all.
There's a discussion here about these dodecahedrons and their uses. I tend to agree that, based on the rarity and complexity of the devices, use as a knitting form doesn't seem to fit the data, but nothing else really fits the data either. Culture is super complicated.
https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/gzrmwk/in_which_the_galloroman_dodecahedra_are_used_for/
There's a particularly relevant thread in this discussion where people are discussing *exactly* my problem with this kind of meme. Here's an excerpt:
"Woke anti-intellectualism" is a really weird trend and historians always seem to be the ones targeted.
I'm sure there is still a problem of historians discounting the possibility that an artifact could have a traditionally feminine function, or that two women buried together could have been lovers rather than sisters, but so much literature since the 70s has been all about correcting these blindspots."
One person in that thread pointed out:
"The internet really doesn't help since a lot of the up to date material is behind paywalls while older stuff is often easier to access. Meaning that people either see the old racist, sexist etc. stuff or they get to the criticism of that but not anything newer not realizing that it has been incorporated into the discipline for decades."
And I think that's certainly part of the problem. People in general have an outdated idea of what humanities researchers think and do, and it's really hard to communicate the updates. I mean, Miriam's dad told me that it was a "historical fact" that indigenous North Americans had no widespread systems of government that could be called nations. That is fundamentally wrong, but it's what a lot of the older adult population was being taught in school. Even if they have personally gotten past those false ideas, they don't necessarily know that the systems that put those ideas in their head have similarly moved on. There has been so much work in every field in the humanities, reexamining things from feminist perspectives, queer perspectives, disabled perspectives, minority perspectives. Even in the library science program I was doing, these perspectives that intentionally de-center white male Western abled cishet perspectives are present and powerful. The humanities has really changed over the past decades!
So I want to be a part of spreading that knowledge. The current generation, and probably even most of the previous generation, of anthropologists do not think like this anymore. We really do care about the people we are working with and learning about. We really do listen to their life experiences and do our best to respectfully understand and share them. We certainly don't think we know everything. It was made very clear to me, in my anthropology degree, that when I'm working with a culture I don't know, I know *nothing.*
I hope what I'm saying makes sense and that, again, I don't sound angry. I just feel like this kind of meme is part of a sort of insidious anti-intellectualism, and there's just too much of that in the air these days for me to not say something about it.
*One about archaeologists who can't figure out what certain leatherworking tools are until a modern leatherworker happens to see the tools and explains their use.
*An anthropologist who is tricked into thinking that four stone stacks that an indigenous person is using to mark out the parking space for their car are some kind of ancient ritual markers.
*Archaeologists who fail to consider a practical though tradtionally feminine use for a discovered artifact (using Roman dodecahedra for knitting) and have decided that many thousands of artifacts must be religious or ceremonial just because they can't figure out what they're actually used for even though a modern "Youtube grandma" could have told them.
None of these memes are consistent with the way this kind of research works and that bothers me. A big part of why they bother me is that they feel like a sort of insidious anti-intellectual propaganda purporting to come from a woke perspective. Sort of like the memes that criticize the "left" for "erasing" Aunt Jemima from history through making the company change the product name. That criticism is misguided at best, and I believe these other memes are as well. I have finally written about my thoughts on them. Those thoughts, copied from a response elsewhere, follow:
---
I'm going to write a lengthy reply here, because this kind of meme is troublesome in ways that are not obvious, but that bother me personally. I know that some people take this kind of long reply as indicative of anger, but I'm really not angry! I just think it's important to respond to memes that suggest that academics and the practice of science is disconnected from reality, and that's what I think that this meme is, at its heart.
There are other memes like this one too, most notably one about some particular stone tools made for leatherworking purposes that archaeologists were supposedly unable to determine the use of until they asked someone who does modern leatherworking and who could immediately clarify the purpose of said tool to the confused archaeologists. That meme is also bogus.
As someone with an anthropology degree and who knows working anthropologists/archaeologists, the problem with these memes is the implication that anthropologists specifically, and I think academics in general, don't know what they're talking about. That they are living in an ivory tower, blissfully disconnected from the realities of the lives and culture they are working with. That implication is simply false. There may have been something to it in the past, when archaeologists were mostly British aristocrats who sat on their verandas and had indigenous people brought to them to interrogate, but that was a long time ago, thank geraniums.
Anthropological method revolves around participant observation. They embed themselves within the cultures they are studying for years at a time to get as close to an inside perspective as possible. (This can't be done perfectly, but we try really hard!) Archaeologists, obviously, can't do participant observation, but they get as close as they can by trying to fully understand a vast number of threads of culture interwoven among the people and places they are researching.
Part of what some archaeologists do is called experimental archaeology. They try to think of how and why various things could be made or used, and then they try to replicate those methods. Success isn't proof that that's how things were done, but at least it verifies that they *could* have been done that way. The Youtube video showing someone knitting with a dodecahedron is a beautiful example of this kind of experimental method! It's really cool!
Part of that process of figuring out how things *could* have been done is listening to people in the present who do things or use things related to the historical or prehistorical stuff that the archaeologists are studying. Archaeologists who aren't arrogant adherents to a vanishing ideology of Western imperialism (and there really don't seem to be many of those left anymore, thank heavens) have a huge amount of respect for the lived experience of others and do their best to incorporate such experience in their work. That would include anybody with skills that might be related to the objects they are studying, even if they are from different cultures. The person using the dodecahedron to knit would certainly fit that description, and I'm sure that archaeologists whose area this is are familiar with the suggestion. A lot of anthropologists even talk about the people they work with not as "subjects" or similar, but as collaborators or coauthors. It's the people who the anthropologists are working with who know this shit: we're just trying to understand as best we can and share that understanding with others.
I'm not bothered by the suggestion that these were used for knitting. I'm bothered by the implication that knitting is *clearly* what these were for and that academics don't know what they're doing and wouldn't consider asking anybody else for help. That is the opposite of the way that good academics work. I'm bothered by the implication that academics lack some kind of "common sense" that would provide an easy answer to their questions if they would get their head out of the clouds, learn some humility, and ask everyday people. That is also not how the academic process of learning and discovery works.
The thing about the Youtube video "proving" the actual use of these things reminds me a little bit of Thor Heyerdahl and the Kon-Tiki. Was Thor Heyerdahl able to sail an unpowered raft from South America to Polynesia? Sure. Does that prove that Polynesians were descendants of South American people? Not at all.
There's a discussion here about these dodecahedrons and their uses. I tend to agree that, based on the rarity and complexity of the devices, use as a knitting form doesn't seem to fit the data, but nothing else really fits the data either. Culture is super complicated.
https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/gzrmwk/in_which_the_galloroman_dodecahedra_are_used_for/
There's a particularly relevant thread in this discussion where people are discussing *exactly* my problem with this kind of meme. Here's an excerpt:
"Woke anti-intellectualism" is a really weird trend and historians always seem to be the ones targeted.
I'm sure there is still a problem of historians discounting the possibility that an artifact could have a traditionally feminine function, or that two women buried together could have been lovers rather than sisters, but so much literature since the 70s has been all about correcting these blindspots."
One person in that thread pointed out:
"The internet really doesn't help since a lot of the up to date material is behind paywalls while older stuff is often easier to access. Meaning that people either see the old racist, sexist etc. stuff or they get to the criticism of that but not anything newer not realizing that it has been incorporated into the discipline for decades."
And I think that's certainly part of the problem. People in general have an outdated idea of what humanities researchers think and do, and it's really hard to communicate the updates. I mean, Miriam's dad told me that it was a "historical fact" that indigenous North Americans had no widespread systems of government that could be called nations. That is fundamentally wrong, but it's what a lot of the older adult population was being taught in school. Even if they have personally gotten past those false ideas, they don't necessarily know that the systems that put those ideas in their head have similarly moved on. There has been so much work in every field in the humanities, reexamining things from feminist perspectives, queer perspectives, disabled perspectives, minority perspectives. Even in the library science program I was doing, these perspectives that intentionally de-center white male Western abled cishet perspectives are present and powerful. The humanities has really changed over the past decades!
So I want to be a part of spreading that knowledge. The current generation, and probably even most of the previous generation, of anthropologists do not think like this anymore. We really do care about the people we are working with and learning about. We really do listen to their life experiences and do our best to respectfully understand and share them. We certainly don't think we know everything. It was made very clear to me, in my anthropology degree, that when I'm working with a culture I don't know, I know *nothing.*
I hope what I'm saying makes sense and that, again, I don't sound angry. I just feel like this kind of meme is part of a sort of insidious anti-intellectualism, and there's just too much of that in the air these days for me to not say something about it.
