froboz

Not in the US. As far as I know it is one of the very few forms of debt that cannot be discharged due to bankruptcy. If you're rich, you can run business after business into the ground and use bankruptcy to avoid paying your debts. Just want an education? Sorry, chum, you're on the hook forever.

I'm fairly certain my first up-close-and-personal experience with a computer was when my dad brought home a Commodore VIC-20 in 1981 when I was seven years old. He was a (now-retired) aerospace engineer and Star Trek fan, so buying a home computer for himself was a dream come true. Of course, I used it far more than he ever did. He picked up a Commodore 1-button joystick and a tape drive as well, and we hooked it up to the family TV in the basement. While I didn't launch into a lifelong hacking career, I did have a lot of fun playing games (Omega Race and a Pac-Man clone called Snak-Man were favorites), along with messing around with simple BASIC programs and creating mock-ups of elaborate game screens using the graphics key functions on the VIC-20.

Maybe they joined to order pot? Several non-techie acquaintances of mine popped up last year on Signal all of a sudden, and in each case it was to contact their dealers. Granted, that may say more about my social circle than yours…

I agree completely with you that some anthropological knowledge can be useful in any number of fields, but then as a cultural anthropologist I'm more than a little biased. That being said, I'd argue that sociology isn't a necessary accompaniment to anthropology to understand/analyze contemporary Western cultures. I earned my doctorate studying World of Warcraft guilds (believe it or not), so I can vouch for the discipline's ability to address "modern" concerns.

Well, Harris has been out-of-date for decades in anthropological circles, I'm afraid. He's a fun read, but I wouldn't take his books too seriously at this point. It's pretty well understood now that a strict economic materialist framework doesn't explain why people do what they do (humans are _not_ rational actors, by any stretch of the imagination), but he was never able to allow himself to think outside his Marxian box.

Granted, I've only had a cursory look at Bennenson, Ryan, and Jetha, but they're a couple of psychologists and a medical doctor, none of whom seem to have a deep background in cultural anthropology. Unsurprisingly, their works appear to fall back on the usual just-so stories taken from sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.

TL;DR: I respectfully disagree with the implication that these sources are strong counterarguments to the article's thesis.

Thank you for pointing out the wider context for this debate, you beat me to it. The level of hypocrisy on view in Brazil regarding this issue is breathtaking: implicit acceptance of what amounts to genocide on the one hand, while prosecuting its victims on the other. Given the attitude that Brazil has had historically toward its indigenous population, one would think they would be _encouraging_ infanticide -- it saves mining and lumber companies the cost of ammunition to shoot folks, after all.

The best option here would be to employ applied anthropologists in partnership with anthropologically-aware medical practitioners and demonstrate that disabled children can be cared for, in ways that are culturally compatible with local belief systems. However, this would need to be part of a multi-pronged campaign to recognize the equality and autonomy of native peoples, things which so-called "civilized" populations seem incapable of grasping.

This isn't an either/or issue; "culture" should not be misunderstood as some sort of monolithic edifice that you either accept or reject. There's room for debate and compromise on everything, and the dissent reported within tribes regarding infanticide is emblematic of this. As long as medical practices are presented in ways that respect local communities, it is surprising how well partnerships can be forged between "Western" and indigenous customs. These cultures don't have to "stop," and its clear from the text that not every member of these communities agrees with the practice of infanticide. Approach people with respect, provide information in a manner that fits into their perspective of the world rather than imposing one's own, and work together to find a compromise position that doesn't require killing children. Change is a basic ingredient in all cultural systems. Easy? Of course not, but it can be done.

And to those explicitly or implicitly stating that Amazonia peoples are cruel, barbaric, inhumane, and don't deserve to exist because of the way disabled children are treated, as an American I can point to the way in which my own culture allows children to suffer and die of malnutrition or poor health. Heck, look at how much Michigan's state government cared about children in its territory drinking leaded tapwater. At least the tribespeople described in the article give "inconvenient" children a relatively quick death, rather than letting them linger with life-long brain damage and other maladies as we do here [1].

[1] Hyperbolic Swiftian analogy. Author does not endorse killing people in general, let alone killing children, okay?

"Civilization" is not a _bad_ word so much as it's a badly _mis-used_ one (same as "culture"). My point was perhaps unclear; the issue is how it's been implemented politically that's the problem. I happen to think one _can_ use it in a scholarly context as a broad brushstroke reference, but only with care and discretion and an understanding of its historical use.

Labelling a community as "barbaric," however, has been a handy excuse for taking land and killing people for millenia. White settlers came to view Native Americans as barbaric, and that was reason enough for attempted genocide. A case could be made that trying to systemically eliminate an entire population might perhaps count as barbaric. "Barbarism," like "civilization," is in the eye of the beholder.

Being natives within a large-scale, organized, literate society, it's only natural to assume this is the best of all possible worlds, but one could make a counter-argument that this society leaves its members weak, alienated, and anomic. There's also the matter of poverty, large-scale warfare, oppression, and pollution that contemporary societies contribute. I must say, my digital watch is pretty neat, though.

As a scientist myself, I certainly place a great deal of value in science as a process of inquiry and understanding. However, science is just a tool, and like a hammer it can be used to cause harm as well as create. It all depends on the person wielding it.

I think the problem is that the term "culture" is generally misdefined by most people, and the term "civilization" is incredibly problematic in the post-colonial world.

Contemporary anthropologists tend to shy away from even using "culture" these days because of it's mis-use by laypeople (or other social sciences, for that matter). These days anthropologists tend to think of it simply as referring to a vaguely distinctive system of meanings and practices, with emphasis on the practice portion (Pierre Bourdieu ftw!).

"Civilization" historically refers to what we Westerners consider social systems that resemble our own: centralized, hierarchical states with explicit labor specialization. The term is often used punitively against non-Western societies (portrayed as "uncivilized"), hence why anthropologists try to avoid it like plutonium.

Responding to your comment, on these terms culture is absolutely necessary for civilization to exist, as culture is necessary to even be human. It's culture that allows us to conceive of a need for public works, and form labor groups to construct them. It's culture that provides language, which in turn provides written scripts. It's culture that creates a set of shared meanings and practices that provides a sense of collective identity in order for social groups to cohere in the first place. None of these things, in fact, necessarily even need a strong, centralized government (i.e., "civilization") to occur.

Now, whether or not a culture produces what we would consider "civilization" is entirely subjective and bound up with what we see as particular markers of complexity. Heck, there are a lot of archaeologists that scoffed until very recently at the notion that the Classic Period Maya constituted a state-level "civilization" simply because Maya cities were much more dispersed over the landscape in comparison to Aztec urban centers (which were much more similar in form to Western cities, if much larger).