Day: April 22, 2008

Savage Minds & Department of Defense’s Plan for Academia

Savage Minds, the blog of “notes and queries in anthropology,” has an important post on “Camelot Revisited: The Department of Defense’s New Plan for Academia.” Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense and former university professor, wants to buy our research and shape it to military uses.

As the post says, “His goal is not to further the overall body of knowledge within academic disciplines, but to increase the military’s stock of knowledge about ‘the countries or cultures we [are] dealing with.’ And by ‘dealing with’, he doesn’t mean tourism.”

Why object? Besides the pernicious skewing of free inquiry (funding matters to researchers and university administrators alike), there is a more important argument: “it treats humans—their lives, their culture, their behavior—as means to an end. This is not knowledge for knowledge’s sake, not by a long stretch. It’s not knowledge for the betterment of humanity. It’s not even knowledge for the satisfaction of human curiosity. It’s knowledge for the achievement of strategic goals—goals that are set and grow out of particular political interests, not the priorities of anthropology and the other social sciences. Goals that take a particular status quo—US imperialism, to put a blunt point on it—as desirable, necessary, and even natural.”

Don’t think the military will do such a thing? They certainly are learning how to work the media, as the New York Times reports in Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand. Now they have a plan for academia too.

A Times Trifecta

Well, actually a double trifecta. The Science and the Health sections online (Tuesday publication) are all neuroanthropolicious.

John Schwartz’s article The Body in Depth covers the work of David Bassett, professor of anatomy and dissection. Even better, we get an online sampling of his dissections on human cadavers, Body Works but without the hype. eHuman will have the entire Bassett collection online (pay to download), with a sample and some accompanying audio here.

Christine Kenneally writes When Language Can Hold the Answer, describing a new way to the old Sapir-Whorf debate: “In stark form, the debate was: Does language shape what we perceive, a position associated with the late Benjamin Lee Whorf, or are our perceptions pure sensory impressions, immune to the arbitrary ways that language carves up the world?” Kenneally points to the role of objects, to brain function and color perception, and spatial processing as new ways to attack the old debate. One nice quote: “By giving us a framework for marshaling our thoughts, language does a lot for us,” Professor Gentner said. “Because spatial language gives us symbols for spatial patterns, it helps us carve up the world in specific ways.”

John Tierney’s piece This Time He’ll Be Breathless covers the magician David Blaine’s physical and mental training in his soon-to-be-successful attempt to break the world record for holding one’s breath. Even without moving and having breathed pure oxygen, 16 minutes sounds like a lot to me! Tierney describes well the mental approach and the embodied expertise, familiar themes for this blog, in accomplishing such a feat.

At 60, He Learned to Sing So He Could Talk is a great story by Karen Barrow on Harvey Atler’s recovery from a stroke. Using “melodic intonation therapy,” Atler learned to draw on the language/musical parts of his right brain after damage to the Broca area in his left hemisphere. In other words, singing helps the brain adapt after a stroke, recapturing language skills.

Continue reading “A Times Trifecta”