Word: anthropologists
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Sacks' latest book should not be lost in the commotion. An Anthropologist on Mars is still another collection of wide-ranging essays that he calls "neurohistories," an anecdotal form that combines science, sympathy and old-fashioned storytelling. Where most clinicians study at arm's length a case of amnesia, say, or autism or agnosia (inability to recognize a word or a shape), the British-born physician tries to see through the eyes of the patient. "The study of disease," says Sacks, "demands the study of identity, the inner worlds that patients, under the spur of illness, create...
...Mexican anthropologist Roger Bartra sees ``a revolution in the way the Mexican views the gringo.'' In the past, he says, ``the ruling classes emphasized our acute differences with the Anglo-Saxons in order to affirm our separate identity. But now hundreds of thousands of ordinary Mexicans have built bridges to the U.S. The frontier has become but a minor inconvenience. Perhaps it is utopian, but I look forward to its disappearance.'' From south of the border, at least, Mex-America beckons...
There are problems with either scenario, however. "The pattern is puzzling," observes anthropologist Randall White. "One of the most common forms of body adornment in Western Europe during this early period is canine teeth from carnivores, drilled with holes and worn as dangling ornamentation. And damned if in Australia, some 35,000 to 40,000 years ago, this isn't exactly what they're doing too." It might seem like an unremarkable coincidence-after all, carnivores must have loomed large in every culture. But anthroplogists have learned that such coincidences are actually quite rare. If art did spread around...
Part of the difficulty lies in the very definition of art. As anthropologist Margaret Conkey of the University of California, Berkeley puts it, "Many cultures don't really produce art, or even have any concept of it. They have spirits, kinship, group identity. If people from highland New Guinea looked at some of the Cro-Magnon cave art, they wouldn't see anything recognizable"-and not just because there are no woolly rhinos in New Guinea either. Today we can see almost anything as an aesthetic configuration and pull it into the eclectic orbit of late-Western "art experience"; museums...
...Chauvet cave, and more intensive study of existing sites, are constantly giving archaeologists more information to work with. Also, dating techniques are becoming more refined. It used to be that scientists needed to test a large sample of paint to pinpoint its age. And, says anthropologist Margaret Conkey, "no one was willing to scrape a bison's rump off the wall." Now it takes only a tiny sample. French prehistory expert Arlette Leroi-Gourhan estimates dates by using pollen particles preserved on cave floors...