Archive
-
Love: A New Model
Love: a new model Unpacking “Love” and Loves Positive emotions tend to get lumped as “love” in English and many other languages. The great cognitive psychologist Jerome Kagan (2006) admonishes us to unpack simple cover terms for psychological states, and see their full complexity. If we do this with the English word “love,” we […]
-
Basic Human Nature: needs and individuals
Theory 1: Needs and Wants Basic Biology of Knowledge “[T]he economy, social structure, and beliefs of a historical era, like the fence restraining a baboon troop at a zoo, limit each person’s understanding of the world to a small space in which each day is lived” (Jerome Kagan 2006:253; cf. pp. 195-196). The simile […]
-
Chickens and Millet: Early Agriculture in China
Paper delivered at Society of Ethnobiology annual conference, Santa Barbara, CA, May 2015 Chickens and Millet: The Significance of New Findings in Chinese Food Archaeology Recent findings in archaeology have considerably pushed back the dates for domestication of chickens, millets, rice, pigs, and other domestic life forms of eastern Asia. North China has taken […]
-
Anthropology and the Arts
Anthropology and the Arts With Special Attention to Music N. Anderson “[T]o take an immediate interest in the beauty of nature…is always a mark of a good soul…it at least indicates a frame of mind favorable to the moral feeling…He who by himself…regards the beautiful figure of a wild flower, a bird, an […]
-
Methodology
Methodology N. Anderson, 2014 Introduction Anthropology has developed some excellent methods over time, and so have other social sciences. Not using these is comparable to an astronomer using a spyglass instead of computer-integrated information from modern telescopes, or an anatomist using a paleolithic handaxe instead of a scalpel and microscope. There is simply no […]
-
scientific name usage
Scientific Name Usage Non-biologists, including highly trained scientists in other fields, often get confused by scientific names and their usage. This posting is intended to help. Take a familiar plant, the tomato. The name you usually see is Lycopersicon esculentum Miller. This means that the genus—the general category of similar, very closely related plants, […]