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E-book From primitives to primates : A history of ethnographic and primatological analogies in the study of prehistory

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Penilaian

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Let us retreat from this narrative. This is not a history of the Tervuren museum after all, no matter how much such a study deserves to be written (but see Luwel 1960; Wynants 1997). The history of Belgian institutions, and even of Belgian science in general, is not the scope of this book. If I present such sketches from the museum’s centennial existence, it is because, more than any other place I know, it has been an exemplary locus of the changing discourses on primitives and primates that I wish to study. The late nineteenth-century belief in contemporary savages as living ancestors, the growing interest for great apes during the Interbellum, the quest in postwar primatology for the extant species which gave the best hominid model, the recent critique of such modelling exercise, and the distrust of straight-forward ethnographic parallels in modern archaeology, all these ideas, at some point, were articulated in Tervuren. From the spectacle of Congolese savagery to the silent measurement of dusty bones, these ideas centre on one theme: what are legitimate sources for enhancing our image of prehistoric humanity? Archaeological and palaeoanthropological data are almost by definition im-perfect. Even if depositional conditions were always mint, excavations exhaustive, and hominid fossils abundant, in such empirical Walhalla the data would still be insufficient to answer all our questions. Archaeologists and palaeoanthropologists wish to reconstruct past behaviour—in the widest sense of the term: from early hominid locomotion to Upper Palaeolithic rituals—and it is a truism to state that behaviour itself does not fossilize. There is, therefore, an important epistemologi-cal gap between the formal object of the disciplines (reconstruction of behaviour) and their material object (material culture, fossils). As a corollary, archaeological and palaeoanthropological interpretations are always underdetermined by the data; a leap must be made to cross the gap between what we see and what we say. It is here that the use of external sources becomes of paramount importance. Analogies, parallels, comparisons, models, and metaphors are all devices which purport to bridge the gap. In general, the procedure is to invoke a more famil-iar instance to clarify one which is less familiar to us. In historical sciences like archaeology, palaeoanthropology and also geology, this comes mostly down to looking at the present where processes are still at work to explain the past where we find only mute patterns, the result of such processes. Analogies thus explain the unknown in terms of the known, the past patterns in terms of the present processes. Analogies are powerful instruments to disentangle complex problems, but risk to obfuscate the original issue when it is substituted by the more familiar instance. Whereas a certain amount of analogical reasoning is useful, too much reliance on it can blur the issue.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

930.1 VAN f

Penerbit

Belgium : .,

Deskripsi Fisik

388 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9789088900952

Klasifikasi

930.1

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

Archaeology

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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