I'm thinking of taking some courses at UNM as part of their non-degree program. I got the idea first from Molly Padgett, who is otherwise not a warehouse of ideas. It seems that I may know what to go to grad school for, and it's something I would never have thought of: Anthropology, probably either Biological Anth. or Archaeology. It seems I'm fascinated by the reconstruction of human history and origins. It seems I might want to check this out with some courses.
This started, as my interests normally do, with regression. I was reading Arthur Toynbee's A Study of History when I realized that he wasn't ever going to slow down and tell me what that history was, so I looked for supplementary books. The library isn't very expansive in this field, for obvious reasons (hint St. John's doesn't study history and wants to suppress it hint), but I was able to find a reasonably thorough history of world civilizations. It was written in the early 70's, before some important dating techniques were discovered, but it would do. The first chapter was on prehistory; it contained mostly idle speculation about the mesolithic, and some moderately more informed speculation about the origin of agriculture. Since this is a period I know very little about, and it seemed that, whether or not this book thought so, it would give important insight into the origins of civilizations, I looked in the bibliography for that chapter. The library had a few of the books listed there, and the most general looked like Back of History, by William Howells.
Now Howells, as I was later to learn, was primarily a physical anthropoligst, specializing in prehumanity. And so he devoted more than half of the book to the question of human origins. Now, this book was written in 1953, practically at the beginning of our understanding of human origins. The "Piltdown Man" had only recently been revealed to be a hoax. There was still a different name (indeed multiple names) for each specimen of what is now called Homo Erectus that had been found (e.g. "Java Man", "Sinanthropus", "Pithecanthropus Erectus"). The !Kung San, who were described rather uncritically, were still referred to as Bushmen. Every stone tool was still assumed to be a weapon.
Despite all of this, the book made me realize that there's a hell of a lot I don't know about human evolution and prehistory. So I got a book by Richard Leakey; then one by DonaldJohanson, who discovered Lucy; then a 25-year-old collection of Scientific American Articles; then finally I received the interlibrary loan I'd requested, an up-to-date standard introductory textbook to Anthropology, Patterns in Prehistory.
Perhaps, since I've been studying these things for less than a month, I should wait to say that I might go to grad school for them. But I am certainly looking into non-degree classes at UNM in Anthropology, regardless.
5 comments:
can i help you carry your books to class gregsford? we can walk underneath wide, shady trees, and I'll try to catch the sun reflecting off your hair, but I'll drop the books in my excitement and you'll feign anger at me, I'll stick my tongue out at you and throw bright green leaves in your eyes, mixed with dogwood flowers, blossoming right besides your nose.
why can't you two just secretly hook up behind my back is all i want to know really
Very cool. And I was worried you were going to become some pansy literary type. Anthro is badass. You should definitely take some classes, dude.
SJC "wants to suppress" history? This might be a tad of an overstatement. It's not what we do, for philosophical reasons, some of which might in certain hands have political implications, but I think you go a little far there in saying we "suppress" it.
buchanan is pretty strident in his proclamations that OMG HISTORY WILL DESTROY US ALL AND OUR SOULS AND EVERYTHING, so it's not that off the mark, if you look back at the Program's birth. it is a weakness of the curriculum to so divorce writings from their contexts, and to basically ignore a whole bunch of history. then again, i'm not really sure how one could wedge in history in there and still have the school do what it does. so.
Well, it's a weakness and it's not. I'd say most of my friends who went to liberal arts colleges other than SJC were handed some kind of (more or less sophisticated) historicism and/or relativism from their professors, and accepted it. The only ones who were likely to question it were the ones who studied philosophy--who were trained to think and broadly educated enough to have the tools to do so.
Too many of my friends read Derrida, Foucault, Bakhtin, and Marx, but no Aristotle, Augustine, or Plato--and that's a far more vast omission than the fact that we don't study texts "in context." All they got was context--and that is doubtless worse.
St. John's gives you an opportunity to philosophically question a lot of ideas that are taken more or less for granted in large parts of the academy (and the world). It's a worthwhile thing to enable people to do this, and I think it's far less deceitful overall than a lot of other kinds of "liberal" education out there.
It's disorienting and alienating, but eminently liberating as well, to be given a chance to question assumptions that one has received--if one is open to it. A very real openness is cultivated at St. John's, and I really want to drive this point home: one of the things SJC can give people is an ability to not just see political implications everywhere, if only because it helps to bestow a certain patience that is often lacking in contemporary society.
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