andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1947 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins writes : When native Australians or New Guineans say that their totemic animals and plants are their kinsmen – that these species are persons like themselves, and that in offering them to others they are giving away part of their own substance – we have to take them seriously, which is to say empirically, if we want to understand the large consequences of these facts for how they organise their lives. The graveyard of ethnographic studies is strewn with the remains of reports which, thanks to anthropologists’ own presuppositions as to what constitutes empirical fact, were content to ignore or debunk the Amazonian peoples who said that the animals they hunted were their brothers-in-law, the Africans who described the way they systematically killed their kings when they became weak, or the Fijian chiefs who claimed they were gods. My first thought was . . . wait a minute! Whazzat with “presuppositions as to what constitutes empirical fact”? That a
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1 Whazzat with “presuppositions as to what constitutes empirical fact”? [sent-7, score-0.247]
2 That animal is or is not your brother-in-law, right? [sent-8, score-0.071]
3 They’re either doing inter-species marriage in Amazonia or not, no? [sent-9, score-0.123]
4 But Sahlins does have something reasonable to say, and it’s relevant to my own research in political science. [sent-10, score-0.106]
5 We thus discover a society the opposite in principle of the bellicose state of nature that Hobbes posited as the primordial condition – an idea which is still too much with us. [sent-12, score-0.359]
6 Of course the native Australians have known injurious disputes, most of them interpersonal. [sent-13, score-0.143]
7 Yet instead of a Hobbesian ‘war of every man against every man’, each opposing others in his own self-interest, here is a society fundamentally organised on the premise of everyone giving himself to everyone. [sent-14, score-0.483]
8 The human scientist is not in a relation of a thinking person to a mute object of interest; rather, anthropologists and their like are of the same intellectual nature as the peoples they study: they are our alters and interlocutors. [sent-16, score-0.826]
9 He then goes on to make some statements, with which I disagree, on the topic of natural science. [sent-20, score-0.082]
10 As a political scientist studying public opinion, I have certain tools and academic experiences. [sent-23, score-0.191]
11 But I am fundamentally the same kind of object as the people I am studying. [sent-24, score-0.249]
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