Materialist Models Research Articles

The Case of Theaetetus

AbstractAny comprehensive interpretation of the Theaetetus has to provide answers to, among others, two very general questions concerning that dialogue: "What is Plato's relation to the problems faced in the Theaetetus?" and "What is the significance of the absence of the Forms from the discussion of the Theaetetus, given their undoubted relevance to the topic of the dialogue, i.e. knowledge?" Predominantly, the answer given to the first question in the literature has been that the problems are those that Plato is trying to tackle and the one to the second question, when it has been addressed at all, that the Forms are left out of the discussion because Plato no longer thought them relevant, either for having abandoned or seriously revised them, by the time of writing the Theaetetus. In this study of the Wax Block and the Aviary models of judgment that occur in the second part of the Theaetetus as part of its discussion of the problem of false judgment, I argue that the problems faced there actually arise because of the neglect of Forms. The discussion of the second part is, I contend, carried out on a materialist ontology, an ontology assumed because it suits the definition of knowledge as true judgment which inaugurates that part of the dialogue, an ontology in no way subscribed to by Plato. The Wax Block is, I explain, a materialist model and fails in the case of judgments about numbers for treating them on a par with material subjects, ignoring their intelligible status. In particular, it fails to distinguish judging 5 and 7 to be 11 from judging 12 to be 11 because of its neglect of Forms; Plato would distinguish those judgments by distinguishing 5 and 7 from 12 with help from his part-whole analysis, to which the Forms are essential.

Literature at War, 1914-1940: Representing the "Time of Greatness" in Germany (review)

Book Reviews le Maghreb. Les voix que nous entendons dans Fugues de Barbarie sont avant tout celles du Maghreb, bien que Breton fasse tout de même de nombreuses incursions dans le texte. Il est difficile de se passer de lui, même quand on cherche à le démystifier. Malgré son originalité, le volume (et les lecteurs!) aurait sans aucun doute bénéficié d'un travail editorial plus soigné. Certaines imprécisions de style, de format et d'organisation (souschapitres du chapitre trois par exemple), et des analyses à certains moments un peu rapides rendent la lecture quelque peu "hasardeuse". Mais le hasard est la mère de bien des découvertes. Ce n'est pas Breton qui contredirait l'auteur de Fugues de Barbarie. Martine Guyot-Bender Hamilton College Wolfgang G. Natter. Literature at War, 1914-1940: Representing the "Time of Greatness" in Germany . New Haven: Yale UP, 1999. Pp. 280. $35. German "war literature" of 1914-1918, according to Wolfgang Natter, was "almost exclusively a male genre" whose legitimacy was spatially defined. The conflation of "war" with the combat zone, and therefore with men, is a familiar premise. It has been contested by feminist critics who argue that the world war constituted a vast economy, and who reassess the concept of authenticity used to exclude women's writings from the canon. Thus convention long depicted the occupiers of a war zone as engaged in "combat," but excluded from consideration the occupied, the civilian inhabitants subjected to physical and economic violence. Natter presents the German case in a way suggestive for the evolution of German thought and literary developments in the twenties and thirties, and for our understanding of wartime literary production in general. It is the great merit of Natter's study that he brings together archival evidence about the military control of textual production and dissemination, along with unpublished publishers' records about the selection and censorship of writings about the war. By examining the collaboration of the state with publishing houses and the military in forging a unified national spirit, he shows that war literature is not the "unmediated expression of any given author's 'experience ' of the war." Rather, he underscores the institutional dimension of authorship. Despite claims to represent actual front experience through the voices of combatants (and dead heroes were even more marketable than live ones), the literature of the war in Germany, as elsewhere, was framed by the legacy of Homer, Greek pastoral elegy, the Bible, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and long-forgotten writers. German war literature followed paradigms set before the war by second-rate writers such as Walter Bloem and Thea von Harbou, whose national BiIdungsroman aimed to create a unified state through images of comradeship at the front and of soldiers ' idealistic self-sacrifice for the larger whole. Tacit in this literature (explicit after 1918) was an anti-republican, anti-civilian ideology that opposed deeds to words and army to parliament, and that located the enemy not beyond the Rhine or Urals but at home. The military, publishing houses, academics, and leaders of the popular-instruction movement all agreed that they faced a Kulturkrieg: not only a war of German culture against a materialist (French) model of civilization, but a propaganda war to be waged through the Word. Thus the pseudonymous Cincinnatus proclaimed in 1916, "More than any other conflict hitherto, this is a war of words and with words, a war which is about the power of words." From the outset of the war, the state of siege permitted censorship of violence, despair, or any critique of strategy, as well as a "conscious strategy of deception" that perpetuated, e.g., the heroic myth of Langemarck (where soldiers were slaughtered by friendly fire). When Ludendorff and Hindenburg came to power in 1915, they instituted a proactive Vaterländische Unterricht (Patriotic Instruction) system on the home front and at the battle front. They set up military centers for the collection of news reports and distribution of communications, took control of soldiers ' newspapers, created libraries and bookstores at the front in collaboration with selected pubVol . XL, No. 2 103 L'Esprit Créateur lishers, and thoroughly censored all publication until October 15, 1918. A...

Naive Physics Reasoning: A Commitment to Substance-Based Conceptions

A good deal of research has addressed the topic of naive physics knowledge, with a focus on the physics domain of classical mechanics. In particular, it has been proposed that novices enter into instruction with an existing, well-defined knowledge base that they have derived from their everyday experiences. Most relevant initial knowledge will be substance based, in the sense that it represents the novice's understanding of how material objects and other types of substances behave in the course of everyday life. Our position is that novices make every effort to assimilate new physics knowledge into their initial knowledge structures. Thus, abstract physics concepts will tend to be attributed with properties or behaviors of material substances. For example, force is considered by many novices to be a property of moving objects. Novices also appear to draw on their substance knowledge when they are asked to reason about other abstract concepts, such as light, heat, and electricity. Many researchers have explored naive conceptions of these concepts to the extent that a fairly broad view of the literature is now accessible. This article opens with a discussion of naive knowledge of material substances (including objects) and presents a broad theoretical framework called the substance schema, which is used throughout the article to refer to any generalized knowledge of material substances and objects. It must be noted that the term schema is used loosely in reference to any existing generalized knowledge; no arguments are presented concerning the actual "structure" of conceptual knowledge. Misconceptions of the concept of force are first briefly reviewed, followed by more extensive reviews of research concerned with naive conceptions of light, heat, and electricity. These reviews provide support for the claim that naive conceptions often reflect an underlying commitment to existing knowledge of material substances. The article closes with a discussion of the use of materialistic models by physicists and implications for instruction.

David Mura's Poetics of Identity

In 1989 interview, David Mura said that everything I write, except for certain pieces of criticism, reflects outlook which is conditioned by my being Japanese-American ... (265). But for Mura, being Japanese-American used to be a source of shame or inferiority, and he sought to minimize his attachment to any minority group, for fear that he would be labelled minority poet, whose poetry, as seen from much of American literary establishment, was crude, unschooled, and untalented, filled understandable but regrettable cliches of oppression. He felt that to be taken seriously writer, he must associate himself canonized White male poets, rather than unskilled, anonymous minority (Intellectual Biography 37, 40). However, he came to find that none of those poets' works reflected his own life he recognized conflict in his position poet who denies his own ethnic and experience.(1) When he eventually began to confront and accept his ethnic identity, Mura realized that his identification poets such Robert Lowell and John Berryman was similar to his parents' identification the middle class whites of America. We come to so identify ourselves, says Mura, with Victors, rulers, that we denied our own (Intellectual Biography 41-42). In confronting his ethnic and Japanese-American Mura opens up new areas of inquiry and new artistic challenges and possibilities for his poetry. Evoking James Baldwin's remark that No true account really of black life can be held, can be contained in American vocabulary,(2) Mura argues in essay on diversity of Asian American poetry that Any poet who wants to describe [minority Americans'] experience must somehow violate accepted practice of language, must bring into language alien vocabulary and syntax, rhythms that disrupt, images which jar, ideas which require totally new relationship to language and reality it contains. (Asian American Poetry 171-72) However, Mura finds that critical readings of Asian American poetry have not adequately dealt Asian American poets' experimental poetics. In same essay, Mura raises questions about critics' tendency to read Asian American poetry solely from social/historical model, and to insist that it delineate representative reality or experience. As example, he cites from Mayumi Tsutakawa, co-editor of The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology (1989), who writes that in process of selecting manuscripts for anthology, they had to bypass some manuscripts reflecting experimental forms, and some which did not carry recognizable Asian voice.(3) Mura notes that such critical models reduce complexity of language and our experience, therefore, he stresses need to fight against urges to simplify field of Asian American poetry (Asian-American Poetry 172-73). Garrett Hongo has made similar critical remarks about reductive models of reading Asian American poetry. In his introduction to The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America (1993), Hongo contends that critics' categorical dismissal for literary qualities in Asian American poetry results from an unconscious assumption that what was essentially Asian American was given work's overt political stance and conformity to sociological models of Asian American (xxxv). He suggests that it is such rigid constructions of ethnic identity that have led to reductive interpretations of Asian American poetry and to exclusively materialist models of our experiences (xxxvi-xxxvii). Such models may help reinforce kind of bias toward minority poetry Mura referred to, and may even inadvertently help perpetuate reductive treatment of ethnic literature ethnography rather than art, Bonnie TuSmith has pointed out in her provocative essay, Opening Up Theory (69). …

Why do Daughters Leave School in Southern Africa? Family Economy and Mothers' Commitments

By focusing on the family economy and its capacity to mediate broad economic developments, sociologists are beginning to move beneath macrostructural forces to better explain parental demand for schooling and children's attainment. This materialist model focuses on the explanatory power of contextual labor demand and resources internal to the family. Parents' social preferences and commitments, antecedent to “choosing” between work or school for their children, are presumed to covary with economic factors. In contrast, research on family practices within impoverished settings reveals that parents' social commitments linked to child development or schooling can vary independently of the family's economic circumstances. Applying these alternative theories to family behavior in southern African, we assess the relative influence of mothers' economic demands and social commitments on their daughter's probability of staying in school. We find that the risk of daughters leaving school is more strongly influenced by mothers' social commitments than by household economics. Maternal influences do interact with selected family-economy indicators and are conditioned by the level of discretionary time afforded to daughters.

Why Do Daughters Leave School in Southern Africa? Family Economy and Mothers' Commitments

By focusing on the family economy and its capacity to mediate broad economic developments, sociologists are beginning to move beneath macrostructural forces to better explain parental demand for schooling and children's attainment. This materialist model focuses on the explanatory power of contextual labor demand and resources internal to the family. Parents' social preferences and commitments, antecedent to “choosing” between work or school for their children, are presumed to covary with economic factors. In contrast, research on family practices within impoverished settings reveals that parents' social commitments linked to child development or schooling can vary independently of the family's economic circumstances. Applying these alternative theories to family behavior in southern African, we assess the relative influence of mothers' economic demands and social commitments on their daughter's probability of staying in school. We find that the risk of daughters leaving school is more strongly influenced by mothers' social commitments than by household economics. Maternal influences do interact with selected family-economy indicators and are conditioned by the level of discretionary time afforded to daughters.

History, Power, Ideology: Central Issues in Marxism and Anthropology (review)

294 Book Reviews Note 1. See, for example, Paul B. Henze, The Horn of Africa: From War to Peace (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991); David A. Korn, Ethiopia, The United States, and the Soviet Union (London: Croom Helm, 1986); Marina Ottaway, Soviet and American Influence in the Horn ofAfrica (New York: Praeger, 1982); and Bruce D. Porter, The USSR in Third World Conflicts: Soviet Arms and Diplomacy in Local Wars, 1945-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). History, Power, Ideology: Central Issues in Marxism and Anthropology Donald L. Donham Cambridge: Cambridge University Press/Editions de Ia Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, Cambridge/Paris, 1990. 242 pp. Rarely could so much intellectual brilliance and meticulous scholarship have been expended to such stultifying effect as in the debates of the 1970s about the "relevance" of Marxism to the analysis of "noncapitalist social formations." The trouble lay in what the debate took for granted: the validity of the capitalist/noncapitalist dichotomy. This, of course, was just one of many versions of the "us and them" categorization of the world on which anthropology was founded. It is only now beginning to confront this problem as it attempts to overcome "otherness "—the tendency to define "them" as residual to "us"—while preserving difference. In this book, Donham has attempted a truly anthropological critique of Marxism, with the aim of constructing a relevant and defensible historical materialism. His critique consists, essentially, in showing that Marxism has been encumbered with the concepts and categories of the very capitalist system which it has sought to demystify. Such a task requires comparison; it requires gaining a perspective on capitalism (and, therefore, Marxism) from a safe distance. Donham finds this distance in his ethnographic study of Boia, a settlement of 500-odd households in Maale, southwestern Ethiopia, which he has already reported on in his book Work and Power in Maale, Ethiopia (UMI Research Press, 1985). Book Reviews 195 He begins, in Chapter 1 (which first appeared in Man, 1981, pp. 515-41, under the title "Beyond the Domestic Mode of Production") by gaining a perspective on neoclassical models, applying Chayanov's dependency ratio theory and Sahlins's revision of it (still, according to Donham, essentially neoclassical) to household production in Bola. While neither theory accounts for the observed facts, they do lead to a "more rigorous and fine-grained analysis" (p. 46) which in turn reveals the general limits of neoclassicism: its "helplessness before histOTy" and its "lack of analysis of domination" (p. 48). This is where a historical materialist model is needed, but it cannot simply be found, or unearthed , in the works of Marx; it has to be constructed "not only from Marx's works but from those of his critics" (p. 51). This is attempted in Chapter 2, a beautifully clear exposition of recent discussions in Marxist theory, focusing particularly on how inequalities in relation to production ("productive inequalities" in Donham 's terminology) are regularly reproduced, and on what we should understand when it is stated that productive inequalities "determine" the superstructure ("reproductive schemata"). Donham follows G. A. Cohen's functional reading of determination—a certain set of productive inequalities select a certain set of reproductive schemata because they are consistent with (i.e., have positive consequences for) that particular set of inequalities. In this sense, the superstructure helps to explain the continuance of productive inequalities as weU as being explained by them. Of course, there are always functional alternatives to any particular set of reproductive schemata; one can only examine what did happen at a particular place and time, not what had to happen (p. 136). Thus Donham is led back, in Chapters 3 and 4, to Bola. Chapter 3 is an attempt to use Marxist theory to reveal the processes that reproduce household inequalities over time. The key concept here is fertility: Whereas in reality the success of men and women in accumulating wealth and in bearing children depended on their own productive and procreative powers, the way that labour was organised in Maale made it appear as if that success depended on other people's fertility: that of the king and chiefs in the first place, that of de- 196...

Communications, Time and Power: An Innisian View

AbstractIn 1946, after visiting Russia, Harold Innis remarked that the time had come to broaden the range of political economy by studying, first, the struggle for social supremacy between states, churches and commerce; and, second, the related competition between languages, religions, cultures and communications media. This, I argue, is what Innis accomplished. His early studies of Canadian economic history transcended conventional economics and laid the groundwork for a later political theory of communications. It expressly took up the 1946 challenge to address competing monopolies of knowledge and power, hence manipulating the space and time-binding properties of communications media. Innis' work reflected a materialist model of communications, a social ecology, a soft determinism or philosophic naturalism and it linked knowledge, freedom and power. Finally, I conclude, these insights permitted Innis to transcend bias and to search for a balanced culture.

The Land As Body: An Essay on the Interpretation of Ritual Among the Manjaks of Guinea‐Bissau

Although neo‐Marxism informed the author's fieldwork on the therapeutic effectiveness of rituals among the Manjaks of northwestern Guinea‐Bissau, the explanatory value of materialist models turned out to be limited. Far from collapsing under the impact of capitalism because of migrant labor to Senegal and France, Manjak society retains an intact symbolic order. Migrants continue to interpret their physical and mental disorders in local terms and to participate in expensive rituals that absorb their capitalist earnings. Thus they submit to the gerontocratic order, restoring their roots in a cosmology in which the orificeless Perfect Body is ultimately the ancestral land itself. Spatio‐temporal belonging, filiation, domestic kinship power, and bodily functions merge, influencing many aspects of illness behavior and its expression in ritual and everyday life. Neo‐Marxism, epistemologically linked to societies under capitalism, scarcely explains this repertoire of symbols, yet helps us to pinpoint its unexpected vitality.

Ideology and the Materialist Model of General Evolution: A Cross-Cultural Test of Subsystem Relationships

The reappearance of general evolutionary theory in sociology and anthropology has been accompanied by a marked interest in materialism. The materialist model of general evolution proposes that the sociocultural system is composed of three basic and interrelated subsystems: the material or technological system, the social structural system, and the ideological system. Following the evolutionary materialism of Marx and Morgan, many current evolutionary presentations propose that these subsystems will, in general, evolve together. While empirical studies have supported the evolutionary relationship between technological development and social structural differentiation, the ideological subsystem has been given little if any direct attention. Employing a cross-cultural sample of 60 sociocultural systems drawn randomly from Human Area Files Quality Control Sample Universe, this research offers support for the evolutionary thesis of subsystem relationships. Theories concerned with the general evolution of society and culture have been a part of the sociological and anthropological milieu since the inception of these disciplines in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, criticisms of general evolutionary models had turned scholars of society and culture to other concerns. Predominant in this criticism of general evolutionary theory were the historical or cultural particularists. Centered around the writings and teachings of Franz Boas ([1896] 1948), these critics concluded that the uniqueness of human sociocultural units prevented the discovery of general laws and relationships that would unite diverse experiences (see Harris 1968, 1979; Kaplan and Manners 1972; White 1969). Largely as a result of

Ideology and the Materialist Model of General Evolution: A Cross-Cultural Test of Subsystem Relationships

Ideology and the Materialist Model of General Evolution: A Cross-Cultural Test of Subsystem Relationships

Notes of a Reformed Materialist

This is a testimony of conscious evolution. Dr Korngold was a confirmed believer in the primacy of matter over mind, the philosophy which many of us were fed as we were growing up. It was culturally accepted, and seemed to explain most phenomena. Limitations did crop up challenging this world view. Concepts like spirit, energy, and cosmos expanded Dr Korngold’s understanding of the function and potential of mind. He found more creative solutions to knowing the world, by turning his materialist model upside down, and working with the holistic notion of mind over or within matter. This article outlines the ‘seven universal laws’ he has found to be true. He was a visiting ‘luminary’ to the one year enquiry on ‘Holistic Medicine’ conducted by the British Postgraduate Medical Federation in 1982 which preceded the birth of the BHMA.

V. Gordon Childe 25 Years After: His Relevance for the Archaeology of the Eighties

AbstractThis is a review article of three monographs published recently about v. Gordon Childe, who was Europe's most eminent prehistorian from 1925–1957. The article draws attention to the fact that there seems, especially in Great Britain, to be a re-emergence of Childe's popularity after a relative inattention in the last 20 years. There is a possible explanation of this phenomenon as part of the reactionary trend of European, and especially British, archaeology to the American New Archaeology and as part of the development of strongly history-oriented theoretical models of social and economic change. The article focusses on the theoretical and philosophical background to Childe's writings, especially on his ideas of progress, historical theory, and his use of historical materialist models of prehistoric cultural change.