[Stones] scholarship

[ewc]

Hi Merryn

Thanks for the link to the NG article - I agree it's an interesting piece, 
for popular consumption. Was amused to find MPP got the 'mad professor slot - rambling about 'squishy babies' or some such.

My concern here are not about this sort of thing - more that the new 
Stonehenge project is a prestigious affair and I am concerned at the sort of 
strands in archaeology that are being elevated by association with it. Lets 
turn aside from MPP and take a look at some of the others - like Julian 
Thomas and Christopher Tilley.

I think it was in 'Death, identity and the body in Neolithic Britain' where 
JT advanced three separate matters I had trouble with

1) His notion that the move from communal to individual burial at the end of 
the British Neolithic was evidence for the (psychological) development of 
individual awareness - writing as if he had substantive evidence that 
Neolithic man was somehow not self aware - when he has none

2) His notion that heightened self awareness is particular to modern Western 
cultures, and was/(is?) lacking in the orient. This showed a gross ignorance 
of oriental history imo.
3) Brow beating the reader by unexplained reference to the philosopher 
Heidegger

The arguments lacked substance, thus seemed to me to represent, not 
scholarship, but a disturbing desire to undermine the rational objective 
tradition.

My posts here are really put up to ask the question - are there others out 
there disturbed by these developments? To me they seem little better than a 
form of charlatanry - and to judge from my conversations with modern 
undergraduates, the deceptions, perpetrated by an academic elite - have been 
depressingly successful

To deal briefly with Tilley - here we have a French style, rather than a 
German, attack upon critical objectivity - advancing the sort of cultural 
relativism reminiscent of Levi-Strauss. I recall particularly his attempt in 
the eighties to adapt Quine's radical translation arguments to support a 
culturally relativist program - another attempt at brow beating - undermined 
for me by the fact that imo Tilley did not understand the ultimate 
conclusion of Quine's arguments. These intellectual swindles are of course 
very complex - but successful swindles are usually complex, are they not?

best

rob

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Rob, I came across the National Geographic article that accompanies the
TV epic Stonehenge Decoded.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/06/stonehenge/alexander-text/1

Worth a read, perhaps? I am comforted by the fact that NG articles are
rarely referenced in academic bibliographies. Not so far as I know. This
is popular archaeology. Isn't it?

Merryn