Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, May 2020

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to say anything about architectural history, or anthropology.

C. E. Stalbaum, The Last Goddess

Mind candy: Wily Thieves get embroiled in politico-religio-magical machinations in Fantasyland.

Sonia P. Seherr-Thoss, Design and Color in Islamic Architecture: Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey (Photographs by Hans C. Seherr-Thoss, introduction by Donald N. Wilber)

This is a gorgeously-illustrated photo book of outstanding architectural monuments from those countries, more or less ending with the Timurids and Ottomans. It shows its age (1968) primarily in the assumption that a western reader might hope to visit most of these magnificent buildings.

(Thanks to my parents for a copy.)

Elsa Hart, City of Ink

Mind candy historical mystery: continuing adventures of a mild-mannered early-Qing-dynasty scholar who keeps having to unravel murders when all he really wants to do is quietly pursue his implacable revenge. I love these and just wish Hart would write faster.

Julia Spencer-Fleming, Hid from Our Eyes

Nth (9th?) volume in a mystery series in set in upstate New York. Spencer-Fleming's weird hybrid of clerical mystery, police procedural, and portrait of small town life continues to work much better than it ought to.

Pascal Boyer, Tradition as Truth and Communication: A Cognitive Description of Traditional Discourse

This is an interesting-but-weird one, making a kind of poverty-of-stimulus argument about "tradition". Boyer is an anthropologist, and draws a lot of examples from his West African field-work. He's not interested in traditions like foodways, vernacular architecture, or even genealogies. Rather, he's interested in traditions like oral epics, initiation rites, and divination, and magical cures or curses. Anthropologists have tended to explain these as expressions of shared traditional world-views. Boyer denies that such shared traditional world-views exist. The shaman, or epic bard, or initiation, has not learned a fuller, more articulated version of the world-view shared by other members of the community. Rather, they have seen examples from predecessors, and deploy them opportunistically ("anthills are a sign of witchcraft", except for all the anthills which aren't). The results of divination rituals, etc., are supposed to be believed because they are supposed to directly connect the diviner with the object of inquiry. The secrets revealed to initiates can be trivial because the real point is just having been initiated. (*)

Boyer would, I think, allow that some shamans, bards, etc., might induce a coherent world-view out of their individual experiences of tradition discourse and rites, but would ask why we'd expect those different shamans' inductions to point in the same direction, towards a shared world-view. He would say it's psychologically strange if they did, and what other evidence do we have of this shared world-view? It's something anthropologists posit to explain traditions and rituals, not something they ever directly encounter evidence for. I think these are strong arguments, though not perhaps decisive ones. I called this a "poverty-of-stimulus" argument, and that phrase was of course introduced by Chomsky to name the following line of reasoning:

1. The examples of language children are exposed to are not informative enough to uniquely pick out the grammar (syntax, morphology, etc.) of their native language. (Grammar induction done on these stimuli could return all sorts of languages.)
2. But all normal children do learn the same grammar of their native language (**);
3. Therefore they must have an innate language-learning capacity which, presented with these impoverished stimuli, will return a grammatical language, and will return the same grammatical language from different stimulus sets. (As I've intimated before, Chomsky's "universal grammar" is basically a regularizer for an ill-posed inverse problem.)

Boyer's point (in these terms) is that there isn't an innate world-view-learning mechanism, so bards, shamans, lay-people, etc., will not acquire the same or even very similar world-views.

N