Some mod­ern Ket men.

Back in the mid-1980’s, I became very inter­ested in the native cul­tures of Siberia, part­ly because they have many sim­i­lar­i­ties with the native cul­tures of north­ern Cana­da. I went so far as to cor­re­spond with sev­eral peo­ple in Siberia, some­thing which was just then begin­ning to be pos­si­ble. This was nec­es­sary, because there was then very lit­tle infor­ma­tion avail­able in Eng­lish or French about this region, most of which had been sealed off by the Com­mu­nist regime for most of the cen­tury. Some very nasty things hap­pened there, not the least of which was the whole­sale sup­pres­sion and destruc­tion of native cul­tures. I dug up the small num­ber of rel­e­vant books and arti­cles that I could, but there wasn’t much to be found. Read more »

I’ve been read­ing every­thing I can find on this sub­ject for months, now, and this is by far the best book I’ve seen. It is mod­i­fy­ing some of my views, and re-enforc­ing oth­ers. It will take me some time to absorb and reflect on the mate­r­ial, here, so I will not leap to a con­clu­sive judg­ment until it has been well-mulled. What­ever your views on the sub­ject of the neolith­ic tran­si­tion to agri­cul­ture, this book is essen­tial read­ing. It brings togeth­er the main blocks of evi­dence (from archae­l­og­y, lin­guis­tics, genet­ics, pale­o­cli­ma­tol­ogy, skele­tal anthro­pol­ogy, plant and ani­mal biol­ogy) in a bal­anced and sys­tem­atic way. In most cas­es, Bell­wood lets the evi­dence speak for itself, and draws con­clu­sions only when they seem com­pelled by the facts. I think he is miss­ing a major the­o­ret­i­cal ele­ment, if my hunch­es remain con­sis­tent with the evi­dence as it stands. But I think this will require more sat­u­ra­tion in the exist­ing lit­er­a­ture, before I start mouthing off. I’m an ama­teur and an out­sider. This can be an advan­tage, in cer­tain cir­cum­stances, as the his­tory of sci­ence has shown, but it is also very easy for an ama­teur to drift into crankery — which I hope nev­er to do.

This is a very well-writ­ten study of the role of the Eng­lish con­dot­tieri who were the Hal­ibur­ton Gang of four­teenth cen­tury Italy. It focus­es on the char­ac­ter of John Hawk­wood, a minor Eng­lish knight who rose to lead­er­ship among the mer­ce­nary armies that were cast loose on France and Italy, when the Hun­dred Years War entered a lull. Saun­ders’ prose is excel­lent, and evoca­tive, her grasp of the evi­dence is strong, and she has a com­mon-sense vision of the real life behind the doc­u­ments. Read more »

15976. (Tim­o­thy Find­ley) Famous Last Words
15977. (Richard E. Michod) Evo­lu­tion of the Indi­vid­ual [arti­cle]
(W. H. Wills & Robert D. Leonard) The Ancient South­west­ern Com­mu­ni­ty ― Mod­els and 
. Meth­ods for the Stu­ry of Pre­his­toric Social Organization:
. . . . 15978. (W. H. Wills & Robert D. Leonard) Pref­ace [pref­ace]
. . . . 15979. (Ben A. Nel­son) Approach­es to Ana­lyz­ing Pre­his­toric Com­mu­ni­ty Dynamics
. . . . . . . . [arti­cle]
. . . . 15980. (Eliz­a­beth A. Brandt) Egal­i­tar­i­an­ism, Hier­ar­chy and Cen­tral­iza­tion in the
. . . . . . . . Pueb­los [arti­cle]
. . . . 15981. (Dean J. Sait­ta) Class and Com­mu­ni­ty in the Pre­his­toric South­west [arti­cle]
. . . . 15982. (Kather­ine A. Spiel­man) Clus­tered Con­fed­era­cies: Sociopo­lit­i­cal Organization 
. . . . . . . . in the Pro­to­his­toric Rio Grande [arti­cle]
. . . . 15983. (Bar­bara J. Mills) Com­mu­ni­ty Dynam­ics and Archae­o­log­i­cal Dynam­ics: Some 
. . . . . . . . Con­sid­er­a­tions of Mid­dle-Range The­o­ry [arti­cle] Read more »

Both com­pact and com­pre­hen­sive, this is the first book you should read to enter into the inter­est­ing sci­ence of cog­ni­tive ethol­o­gy. Bekoff sum­ma­rizes the reduc­tion­ist stric­tures that ethol­o­gists had to con­front when the field began to form, and intel­li­gent­ly dis­cuss­es the moral and social impli­ca­tions of the sci­ence. The book, in effect, pro­vides a case study of the cult of “sci­en­tism”, which often infect­ed sci­ence in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. This occurred when fake pos­es of objec­tiv­i­ty, spu­ri­ous quan­tifi­ca­tion, and epis­te­mo­log­i­cal con­fu­sion led to non­sen­si­cal, but irri­tat­ing­ly tena­cious ortho­dox­ies.

Hawthorne’s alle­gor­i­cal short sto­ries were, in some ways, the ances­tors of some of the grim­mer Twi­light Zone episodes. This col­lec­tion includes sto­ries writ­ten between 1832 and 1851, and includes the most famous ones, “Young Good­man Brown” , “Ethan Brand”, “Rap­pac­cini’s Daugh­ter”, and “Dr. Hei­deg­ger’s Exper­i­ment”. All fine sto­ries, but the one that tick­led my fan­cy was the less well known “The May­pole of Mer­ry Mount”. It’s a sort of 1836 ver­sion of The Wick­er Man, except that the Puri­tans, not the Pagans, tri­umph. It is all the more inter­est­ing because Hawthorne seems to have been well aware of things that would not be part of com­mon knowl­edge until James Fraz­er pub­lished The Gold­en Bough. Read more »

This was Tim­o­thy Findley’s fourth nov­el, and it attempts to get into the mor­bid world of the celebri­ties and intel­lec­tu­als who cosied up to the Nazis and the Ital­ian Fas­cists. This was iden­ti­cal, psy­cho­log­i­cally, to the coterie of celebri­ties who cosied up to the Com­mu­nists. It was a loath­some time, in which there were very few voic­es who spoke for any­thing good. Every­one was some kind of sleazy creep. Ezra Pound, the Duke and Duchess of Wind­sor, Har­ry Oakes, Rudolf Hess, and von Ribben­trop appear as char­ac­ters, among oth­ers, all seen through the eyes of a fic­tional Hugh Sel­wyn Mauber­ley (the per­sona of some of Pound’s poems), whose frozen corpse is found in an Alpine hotel, with a tes­ta­ment scrawled in pen­cil on the walls of three rooms. It’s a good and intrigu­ing read, but the absence of any char­ac­ter that one can feel any sym­pa­thy for left me feel­ing worn out by the end. But that has always been my response to the intel­lec­tual world between the two World Wars. Frankly, I don’t care about the fact that peo­ple like Ezra Pound of Bertolt Brecht were tal­ented writ­ers — they were dis­gust­ing lit­tle pieces of shit, and no amount of clev­er­ness or artistry makes them admirable. The Nazi-Com­mu­nist-Fas­cist men­tal­ity was the low­est ebb of the human mind, when genius­es degrad­ed them­selves into moron­ic sav­ages. There is prob­a­bly no way to write about it, or read about it, with­out feel­ing ill. We are still suf­fer­ing the after­ef­fects of that intel­lec­tual holocaust.