The Muse of History and the Science of Culture
Posted on: Saturday, 5 February 2005, 03:00 CST
Robert L. Carneiro. The Muse of History and the Science of Culture. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2000.
"Is history more than 'a mere chronological series of remarkable events'? Does it have a pattern? Is it fraught with 'meaning'? Can we discern its trends? What determines its course? In short, we will be asking, 'Is there a substantial and coherent philosophy of history that offers an answer to there questions?'"
In chapter one of this book, Robert L. Carneiro, curator of South American Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History, adjunct professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, and the invited speaker for the 2005 Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture, announces his intention to explore the questions above.
Carneiro, a professional anthropologist, brings the insights of anthropology to his work. For example, in a chapter titled "The Great Men and Ideas as Prime Movers," Carneiro writes, "Simply put, we can say that in explaining social changes, great or small, anthropology places much more emphasis on the generative power of culture than on the strivings of great individuals."
In a chapter titled "How to Turn History Into Science," Carneiro asserts "In contrast to the ways of conventional history, anthropology widens the arena of study - widens it immeasurably. It encompasses the cultures of the entire planet, of the Fuegians as well as the French, of the Paiute as well as the Persians. And it deals not just with a few millennia of culture history, but with the full two million years of it."
In the book's concluding chapter, titled "Proposed Laws of Culture," Carneiro proposes original anthropological perspectives, which include quantitative formulations toward developing a science of culture.
The Muse of History and the Science of Culture is an ambitious, compelling, and well-researched compendium that merges various ideas on how to interpret history with intriguing anthropological analysis. I highly recommend it.
Copyright International Society for General Semantics Jan 2005
Source: et Cetera
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