On deep history and pyschotropy.

Abstract

Four field anthropology, often considered as a lesser form of anthropology done in backwater departments, is in fact a serious endeavor in its own right. It requires one to let down the narrow boundaries of one’s sub-disciplinary assumptions and see the forest of the human species through the trees of different epoch, areas, geographies, cultures, social structures, and political regimes. It takes certain mixture of naivety, and ambition to attempt such an undertaking. Or more likely, someone outside the field. If you want to see what such a four field anthropology might look like, you can find it in Daniel Smail’s Deep History and the Brain. Smail, dissatisfied with the traditional perspective of the historian, which he finds increasingly narrow and time bound, attempts to find a principle by which he can survey all of human history, from the origin of the species to the origin of civilization to the origins of our own modern age. What factor, you ask, could possibly unite the cultural change apparent over such depths of time, not to mention the cultural diversity evident in different parts of the world? If you have been reading our species’ self-generating press clippings, it is our large brain. The brain that is the seat of the intelligence that has created the technology that changes our physical environment and generates the social structures that accommodate us to those new environments. In other words, our brain is the one thing that remains the one apparently identifiable biological factor common to all of the tremendous variety of ways in which we human live. Not surprising then that Smail would look to the brain to find a new explanatory principle by which to write history. And in the process stumbles upon what has been considered the purview of four field anthropology. Smail contrasts his focus on the brain with the old ways of writing history, including a focus on documents and the belief that human history did not begin until civilization. The former point may be novel for historians in practicing their craft, (though surely some have accepted oral