Cultural appropriation

I’ve been reading The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David W. Anthony. (It was on my birthday wish list!) I may write a review when I finish, but it has reminded me of one of the worst cases of cultural appropriation in history.

As we all have heard, the Nazis used to go on about being “pure-blooded Aryans,” but where did the word “Aryans” come from? The story starts in India in 1786. Sir William Jones, a British judge serving in Bengal, had been learning Sanskrit so he could read the local laws in their original language. He had already learned Persian and had written a grammar of Persian and translated a fair amount of its poetry into English. As an educated European he of course also knew Greek and Latin, and as a native of Wales he spoke both Welsh and English. As he studied Sanskrit too, he couldn’t help but notice all the things it had in common with these other languages, more than could be merely coincidental. He realized that the most reasonable explanation was that some prehistoric language had been ancestral to all these languages, and so identified what is now called the Indo-European family of languages. Its branches include the Indo-Iranian languages of Iran, northern India, and surrounding areas, the Slavic languages, Baltic languages, Germanic languages, Celtic languages, Italic languages (only the descendants of Latin still survive in this branch) and Greek.

Anyway, most of these groups arrived in the areas that had writing (and thus history) from the north, so German nationalists like the Nazis decided that as the northernmost branch they must be the original Indo-Europeans. (The book I’m reading basically lays out the linguistic and archeological evidence that the ancestral Indo-European language community lived in the Pontic-Caspian steppes of southern Russia and Ukraine, including many of the areas that they’re fighting over today.)

What about “Aryans”? Well, this was the name that the tribes of the Indo-Iranian branch used for themselves—“Iran” is a variation on “Aryan”—but the German nationalists appropriated it (and the swastika, which also comes from these groups) for themselves and their fantasies of racial superiority. There’s never been any evidence that any of the other branches ever used it.

In reality, being a real Aryan had little or nothing to do with race, it was a linguistic and religious category. If you spoke the Aryan language and performed the Aryan rituals to worship the Aryan gods, you were Aryan, whatever your skin color or ancestry.

The amazingly ironic thing is that the Germanic family is linguistically the least “pure” of the Indo-European languages. It has a lot of non-Indo-European vocabulary and many peculiarities in its sounds and grammar. Linguists have determined that the most likely explanation is that at some point, most likely around 600–500 B.C., a significant group of people speaking a different language joined the community speaking the language ancestral to the Germanic family. And just to show how off-base the Nazis were, that other language almost certainly belonged to the Semitic language family.

Moroni

Tonight is the 200th anniversary of Moroni’s first appearance to Joseph Smith. I add my witness of the truthfulness and historicity of the Book of Mormon, the existence of which Joseph Smith first learned about from that visit.

Award season

It’s September, so it must be time to find the winners of this year’s Ig Nobel prizes and the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest. (The Ars Technica coverage describes the Ig Nobel winners in more detail than the official site.)

Anyway, if you’ve ever wondered what the average number of nose hairs in a human nostril is, or whether if a teacher acts bored the students will be bored too, this year’s Ig Nobel prizes include the answers.

I’d thought about copying some of my favorites from the Bulwer-Lytton contest, but decided to just let you read them for yourself.

Cargo cults

I’ve always thought of Richard Feynman as a hero and a role model, but although I have often seen mention of this talk and even some quotes from it, I had never read the whole thing: Cargo Cult Science. It seems more relevant today than it was back in 1974 when he gave this talk.

Some quotes:

But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe?  (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.)  So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate.  There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you’ll see the reading scores keep going down—or hardly going up—in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods.  There’s a witch doctor remedy that doesn’t work.  It ought to be looked into: how do they know that their method should work?  Another example is how to treat criminals.  We obviously have made no progress—lots of theory, but no progress—in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.

Yet these things are said to be scientific.  We study them.  And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience.  A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way—or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one.  Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn’t do “the right thing,” according to the experts.

I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call Cargo Cult Science.  In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people.  During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now.  So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land.  They’re doing everything right.  The form is perfect.  It looks exactly the way it looked before.  But it doesn’t work.  No airplanes land.  So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

…

Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they’re missing.  But it would he just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea Islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system.  It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones.  But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in Cargo Cult Science.  That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school—we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation.  It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly.  It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards.  For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them.  You must do the best you can—if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong—to explain it.  If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it.  There is also a more subtle problem.  When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

The whole thing is worth reading; in fact, I think everyone who deals with science—and public policies based on science—should probably read it at least once a year.

Book reviews 2

Today I’ll talk about three series by the same author, Alma T. C. Boykin. One of the things that often annoys me about a lot of science fiction and fantasy is that, however imaginative the author is about science or magic or whatever, he or she is not imaginative at all about cultural matters: all the characters have the values and attitudes of contemporary Americans, or at least Westerners. This criticism does not apply to this author.

The first series is The Colplatschki Chronicles. These books take place on a planet settled by humans, but shortly after the settlement a series of Carrington events has destroyed most of their technology and forced them back technologically into the middle ages, with appropriately medieval culture and attitudes.

The second is Merchant and Empire, fantasy stories in a culture roughly modeled on the Hanseatic League.

The third (that I’ll mention, since I haven’t read much else by this author) is Shikari. These books take place on a planet ruled by a human empire but also inhabited by an indigenous alien race, the Staré. The world-building is based on India during the British Raj (the author explicitly identifies Rudyard Kipling as a major influence) and the people have delightfully Victorian attitudes.

If you’re tired of reading books where all the characters could have come from a Hollywood movie, check these out.

First book review

I’ve been thinking that, since I’ve been reading a lot of books using Kindle Unlimited, I should post some reviews or recommendations on this blog. So here we go.

I’ll start with a series I recently completed, Space Station Noir by Arthur Mayor. As you might have guessed from the title, it takes place on a space station. In this case, the station in question was built and is run by a kind of aliens known as “hissers”, and humans are very definitely second-class citizens. The protagonists are a human named Gunther (usually called Gunny) and his hisser partner Clive, two low-level crooks trying to survive in the station’s underworld. The books are basically non-stop action with engaging characters. (Clive is hilarious.) The world building is pretty good too. I found it very engrossing, and I recommend it to anyone who likes action science fiction.