movie reflections

Pluto is not a planet. Pluto is a planet.

Signs carry

constative connotative performative

forces in a linguistic and cultural field

The earth moves around the sun is a statement of

power/knowledge.

SIGN signifier cat power/knowledge Signified ???

From signs to statements to discourse

power/knowledge puissance/connaissance

pouvoir/savoir

power/knowledge

can-do-it-as-this/know-it-as-this

From signs to statements to discourse

Humans are apes. Humans are ex-apes.

are statements in a discourse of

“There is a battle ‘for truth,’ or at least ‘around truth’-- it being understood once again that by truth I do not mean the ensemble of truths which are to be discovered and

accepted, but rather the ensemble of rules according to which the true and the false are separated and

specific effects of power attached to the true.” --Michel Foucault

Humans are apes. Humans are ex-apes

The discourse of evolutionary theory contains the ensemble of rules by which these statements can be judged true or false

From signs to statements to discourse

can-do-humans-as-apes/know-humans-as-apes

can-do-humans-as-ex-apes/know-humans-as-ex-apes

Humans are apes. Humans are ex-apes Anthropologists of science don’t ask which is true and which is myth,

but ask: What do these different signs, made into different statements, mean

and do in the discourse of evolutionary theory? By what rules are they judged true or false, science or myth, and what performative force do

those judged-truths exert?

I am not talking about human evolution; I’m talking about how we talk about human evolution.

Moreover, the power of science often lies in revealing not so much what nature is, as in helping us to make sense of what nature is like.

Bones need narrative.

Bones need narrative.

And of course we know that those accurate narratives invariably encode narratives of gender and race and power. Nor is it a particular embarrassment; it simply comes with the territory. After all it would be nice to not be humans studying humans, which precludes objectivity, and to be able to study ourselves as one would study fruit flies, where there is nothing at stake. Which is why Thomas Huxley invented the “pretend you’re an alien” trope.

It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that there are two problems here. The first is, obviously, the substitution of science fiction for science in this argument, as if you know what Martians would do better than I know. But more importantly, if there is one thing anthropologists have learned, it’s that just on earth, systems of classification are culture-bound, and people classify for diverse reasons and according to diverse criteria. The idea that anybody else out there would necessarily hit on phylogenetic classification as the best system because you have, is a hell of an ethnocentrism.

the great paradox at the heart of anthropological science, namely that we are humans studying ourselves and there is no way out of that reflexive loop. Pretending to be a Martian is not part of the canon of scientific protocols.

what we’re doing is identifying and correcting the biases of earlier generations, so that even though our own work can never be value neutral, its embedded values can at least be more subtle and benign than those of earlier generations

[I]t’s Science Studies 1a, the nature of scientific storytelling, and we don’t teach it in science classes because it goes against the master narrative that science is entirely data-driven. And for those of you who are experimentalists, let me suggest a fun bit of empirical ethnographic research. Go up to a molecular biologist and explain that there is no genetic code literally, it is a metaphor thought up by a physicist in the 1940s. My hypothesis is that they will look at you like you just killed their puppy, and then after composing themselves, they’ll call you anti-science. And in exactly the same vein, when I say evolution is a sacred narrative, if you don’t believe me, just go up to a biologist and deny it, and you’ll quickly find out how sacred it is.

We have racists rejecting our scientific narrative of who we are, and creationists rejecting our scientific narrative of where we come from. But they’re not interested in the races of Drosophila or in its evolution. The point is that unlike other sciences, this one is engaged in a two-front culture war, and taking as our model the natural sciences is not going to help us, because they aren’t engaged in a struggle over who gets to compose the authoritative scientific story of our natures and our origins. This is our special science.

although we are constructing mythological stories about the ancestors, ours is not just a made-up story, it is constrained. But the data that constrain it are points, they’re dots, and of course the dots come from somewhere, and have to be connected. Storytelling is not an appendage to human evolution. It is human evolution, and the reason it is human evolution is that it is human nature, to the extent that anything can be said to be human nature.

Storytelling is human nature. There is no human nature (outside of culture).

And even though this illustration, or its even worse revision, did not make it into the widely-read English translation of the work, The History of Creation, there was no ambiguity, as the English text faithfully presented the continuity between what Haeckel called “the lowest woolly haired races and the highest manlike apes.” Now we know that origin narratives carry political weight. We know that archaeology is routinely utilized in the service of nationalism, and there is politics in deep history as well. Haeckel created continuity between human and ape where there in fact isn’t any, and dehumanized most of the peoples of the world in the service of bashing the creationists. And in so doing, he incurred a debt that serious students of human evolution will have to be paying off forever. And that debt is to be responsible stewards of the sacred narrative; or in less relativistic terms, to maintain an engagement with ethical and humanistic issues while we engage with the science of human evolution.

Another way of imposing continuity is to redraw the playing field, so that instead of linking us to the apes, we declare ourselves to be apes. Maybe gussied up a bit; maybe naked, but we are apes of some sort. That is our identity. “We are apes.” Take that, creationists! And that, says the modern fruit fly geneticist Jerry Coyne (2009:192), is an indisputable fact.

analyzing “science” in terms of

power/knowledge is more complex, messier, more difficult than

science or ideology

but it better recognizes the actual complexity of a natural/cultural world of meaningful signs

and the actual complexity of

reflexive sciences

Why are there rarely lines of continuity connecting

(ex-ape) humans to genetically similar (ape)

bonobos?

Feminist politics/analysis can be better for producing

power/knowledge statements in evolutionary theory because it

● focuses on real phenomena that escaped the attention of

(mostly male) scientists ● re-orders frames of analysis

and meaning informed by different gender systems

power/knowledge science/narrative

nature/culture sex/gender

must be different/can’t be different

SCIENCE MYTH SCIENCE RELIGION SCIENCE IDEOLOGY SCIENCE FOLKLORE SCIENCE POLITICS FACTS INTERPRETATION RATIONALITY IRRATIONALITY KNOWLEDGE POWER INTELLIGENCE EMOTION KNOWLEDGE BELIEF REASON SUPERSTITION NATURE NURTURE NATURE CULTURE HARD SOFT SEX GENDER MASCULINE FEMININE MEN WOMEN

Semiotic system (i.e. cultural system) of pure oppositions within and through which “science” becomes meaningful

SCIENCE MYTH SCIENCE RELIGION SCIENCE IDEOLOGY SCIENCE FOLKLORE SCIENCE POLITICS FACTS INTERPRETATION RATIONALITY IRRATIONALITY KNOWLEDGE POWER INTELLIGENCE EMOTION KNOWLEDGE BELIEF REASON SUPERSTITION NATURE NURTURE NATURE CULTURE HARD SOFT SEX GENDER MASCULINE FEMININE MEN WOMEN

valued (unmarked, normal)

devalued (marked, abnormal)

Different dominants for making human “nature” meaningful in

Evolutionary theory p/k system1 evolutionary theory p/k system2

continuity emergence DNA nature/culture system apes ex-apes

competition cooperation aggression empathy

reasoning storytelling intelligence prosociality