Archaeoogists, anthropologists, and armchair compilers of catalogs of religion like The Golden Bough...(p.10)Just to be clear whom the reference intended:
James Frazer, the greatest of all armchair anthropologists (p.123)
But besides the passing swipe at literary giants (who often can use the cutting-down-to-size), the book was rather good as seen in this bit from the conclusion:
In other ways, too, the human sciences have returned to late nineteenth-century form. In the last couple of decades the assumption that human history should be understood as little more than an extension of natural history has come roaring back. Retrospective prophecy has once again entered a grandiloquent phase, opening up great swathes of the human condition to the narratives of historical reconstruction. "Evolutionary pressures on our hunter-gatherer ancestors" provides the explanatory framework for all aspects of our putatively natural selves. The double helix of DNA is celebrated as a bioarchaeological record of each individual organism's evolution. The search is on for reductive neurological explanations for our complex social behaviors. It seems that the sciences from which Nietzsche derived his dark philosophy have returned with all the force of the long repressed. (pp.232-3)
No comments:
Post a Comment