Social theory for everyone!

"Of the mistakes regularly committed by historians the most important is the ignorance of the laws governing the transformation of human society." Ibn Khaldun, 1377.

The learning Chinese craze

Lots of people these days seem to cherish this vain, media-inspired hope that they will crack world's largest market once they've mastered Chinese. Warning: I am about to burst your bubble a bit. To get to the level when your Mandarin is credible and functional for business will take at least 4-5 years of sustained daily effort, given you're linguistically inclined. On top of that, to be accepted and trusted by your Chinese partners, you need to be well versed in the culture and ways that are radically different from your own. The Chinese are relationship-oriented even in business, they need to know you personally well enough before they embark on doing business with you. In real life, outside fad-peddling magazine articles, most trade with China is done by Overseas Chinese.

The chances that sending your offspring to a weekly Chinese lesson will land him/her a high-rolling job by the time they finish university are close to the odds of getting struck by lightning. Besides, by then, the flavour of the year will be Turkey, or Peru, or Nigeria, definitely someplace you have never even thought about,  so all your investment and the best years of your child's life will have been wasted.

I remember back in the 80s, when Japan was all craze, everyone was flipping through their kanji flashcards and drag their children to Japanese classes. Then the bubble burst and two "lost decades" ensued, with next to none Japan-related jobs on the market, save teaching English positions, in a profoundly xenophobic society still as impenetrable to foreigners as ever. Only those who went through all the trouble of learning the language and culture for love of Japan eventually did well. The rest got retrenched back into the mobile work force of post-industrial capitalism, hapless victims of media fads.

My advice would be to learn Chinese only if you or your progeny are genuinely interested in the people and the culture. That way you are completely guaranteed against any whims of the market, and if you are also business-minded, you may just struck that mother-lode with China. Otherwise, mind your own business, literally and figuratively, and if you're good enough, the Chinese come and knock on your door themselves.

Greece cradle Western civilisation fallacy

That the concept of Western civilisation is a social construct is well known by some social scientists. However, this ambiguous to the point of fallacy notion seems to retain its powerful grip on the minds of about everyone else.

In his book The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth, M.L. West uses his encyclopaedic knowledge of Ancient Greek poetry to prove beyond any doubt that Ancient Greece culturally belong to the Near East, rather than to the West, which both symbolically and materially arose two thousands years later. 

The re-appropriation of Ancient Greece as the cradle of the Western Civilisation kicked off during the Renaissance.

Studying religions and spirituality

I remember my first Anthro lecturer told me that studying spirituality is a no-go grey area. I told her that studying religions without having spiritual experience yourself is like studying a TVset without ever having watched a programme. Naturally, we never saw eye to eye.

This is what Roy Willis of Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology has to say on the subject:

"Inspired in some case by the controversial works of Carlos Castaneda, which introduced readers to the ‘separate reality’ supposedly known to the Yaqui Native Americans of the Mexican Highlands, certain anthropologists have written of magical phenomena as objectively real, even if inexplicable in terms of Western scientific knowledge. An early example is Michael Harner’s account of the magical world of Conibo and Jivaro *shamans of South America. Other recent examples of this school are the works of Stoller and Olkes, de Surgy and Edith Turner, all based in African field experience. Michael Jackson, another anthropologist of Africa who also adheres to this approach, has dubbed it ‘radical empiricism’.

A further notable contribution to this postmodern rehabilitation of magic is Jeanne Favret-Saada’s ([1977] 1980) study of ‘magic force’ in a community in rural France. Taking issue with Evans-Pritchard (1937), Favret-Saada states her aim of taking magical forces seriously, and not being content to describe it as ‘a logical error, or someone else’s belief. 

A more recent study (Luhrmann 1989) describes the apparent ‘conversion’ to belief in Renaissance-style ritual magic of a group of prosperous middle-class English people in the town of Cambridge. Luhrmann identified four ways in which these converts rationalized to themselves, and to outsiders, the validity of their practices. One category she calls ‘realists’, those who argue that there are precepts and assumptions that differ from those recognized by orthodox science, but which can be empirically proven to be valid. Others argue for the existence of ‘separate realities’, physical and spiritual, which are governed by different laws. Another category are the ‘relativists’, who argue that there are different ways of knowing the same underlying reality, with no one way having absolute worth. Yet others, who espouse ‘metaphorical’ explanation of their magical practices, emphasize the subjective value of their experiences rather than their objective validity.

The recent shift in anthropological approaches to magic has been summarized by Winkelman (1982). The ‘traditional’ assumption has been that magical beliefs are empirically untenable and that there can be no such cause-and-effect relations as these beliefs imply. An impetus to the reformulation of theories of magic that takes account of their possible empirical validity has come from laboratory research in parapsychology. This research, Winkelman says, has produced support for some of the phenomena claimed by magical traditions. Thus, it has been shown that human beings can exercise psychokinetic influence on radioactive decay, on computerized random number generators, on the growth rate of plants, fungi and bacteria, and on healing in animals.

Other commentators draw attention to the apparent congruence between traditional magical philosophy which posits an organic universe in which human beings play an actively creative role and theories of the New Physics on the unity of mind and nature (Roney-Dougal 1991)."

As a teenager I was also profoundly impressed by Carlos Castaneda's revelations just as reading Freud's essays on religion shattered my fledgling religious inclinations.

historical mythical times difference

Non sequitur

This is a glaring example of nonsequitur (illogical nonsense): just because two things happened at the same time does not mean that one caused the other. This kind of argument widely occurs in  areas unconcerned with epistemology: journalism, election propaganda and actually even in academic disciplines unable to see the whole  sky from inside their epistemic well (e.g. explaining the social exclusively through economy).

In reality, all those wonderful things (with exception of Communism downfall and the Internet, which happened 3 decades later) happened not because of the high taxes but because there was room for the economy to expand. Bloating finance with fake money (aka credit extension), newly gained access to raw materials and markets, population growth were also major factors that cannot be replicated again.

Now developed economies can only grow by kicking the dead cat: dot.com, green technologies, financial derivatives, etc. The famous marketing technology of Super-Size Me is another example of how consumerist needs can be artificially stretched way beyond natural needs, to detriment of those on the receiving end of such a ploy (re. the obesity epidemic). Spurring economy into constant growth is the same phenomenon as cancer, uninhibited growth of cells. Sticking with such a carcinogenic model will only keep causing problems.

The market is saturated, growth-based economy is done, time to learn to get on with it.

Post-colonialism theory principle analysis methodology

Post-colonialism as a principle of analysis.