Lost in Translation
Just because you think you're a scientist doesn't mean you are. The 5 August 2005 number of Science magazine discusses this in an article about the decline of infallibility in forensic "sciences" (whose main defense seems to be, as Homer Simpson said when he got himself and Flanders into bigamy in Vegas, "Blame me if you must, but don't ever speak ill of the Program! The Program is rock solid! The Program is sound!").
Several pages earlier in that same number there are three brief items from an Assyriology conference. One is about the philological NIMBY reaction to archaeologists' recommendation that cuneiform tablets looted from Iraq (where looting has increased by orders of magnitude during the occupation) not be given scholarly recognition. Archaeological integrity and context is, on the strength of that argument, manifestly irrelevant to (some) philologists, so why should their field suffer for being less rigorous than archaeology? I'll tell why: the Nazi "medical experiment" data are forbidden not just because of what they are, but – probably more to the point – because of how they were gotten. I'm not saying that using looted tablets makes you no better than a Nazi; I am saying that some data have no business being studied. The Tuskegee syphilis data are similarly tainted. You use any of them, you're sleazy at best.
Anyway, the immediately previous news item just provides another example of how silly philologists can be, along with the pseudoscientific pretensions of archaeologists. It's about an uproar over the interpretation of a burial excavated at Ur in 1934 by Woolsey. It had all the trappings of the typical royal burial: stone tomb, weapons cache, seal bearing the word translated as "king" or "ruler". Annoyingly for Assyriologists, it also contained some feminine artifacts (hair and clothing ornaments), and the skeleton was sexed as female. The main justification, it seems to me, for such annoyance is that this is the first woman ruler suggested for ancient Assyria. The special pleadings all hypothesize about how a woman got into what is obviously a man's tomb. Unfortunately, we can't reëvaluate some data because, like the good scientist that he was, Woolsey "discarded" the skeleton (I really, really hope the facts behind that statement reveal a little more dignity; archaeological arrogance is offensive enough as it is). But then, see, this grad student – GRAD student, for chrissakes! – suggested that, y'know, maybe it really was a woman ruler. The word on the seal meaning "ruler" was only translated as "king," it seems, because only kings (i.e., males) had theretofore been found — I infer from the article that the word for 'ruler' itself is gender-neuter. But, say the philologists, there's another word translated as 'female consort of a male ruler' (hmm — d'you think they determined the "female" part of the definition the same way they determined the "male" part?), so if there were a female ruler, that's what they could have called her. I mean, it's what we do in English, right? Kings marry queens, queens marry royal consorts. Translation, people, translation. Words are not isomorphic with thought and practice, and different languages are – well – different. Just because you think you know what an ancient word means doesn't mean you do. Theory is supposed to be a tool that you discard when it's no longer useful, not a mold into which you cram the real world.
And yet, this kind of garbage continues to appear in, to receive the imprimatur of, Science.
Since it's still within the theme, let me bring this up, too: the word "gender" was given common currency as a social (rather than linguistic) term referring to sex-specific attributions of social and cultural characteristics. Sex was somatic, gender was extrasomatic. But even in Science, the word gender is now used where sex should have been. I'm not sure what relative importance to grant my hypotheses, but I think this is because of (1) latent American prudery, and (2) the naturalization of social & cultural difference by coöpting a word for the latter and applying it to the realm of the former.
[N.B. I'm in a shitty mood today. That doesn't usually affect my opinions, but it does affect how I express them.]
Several pages earlier in that same number there are three brief items from an Assyriology conference. One is about the philological NIMBY reaction to archaeologists' recommendation that cuneiform tablets looted from Iraq (where looting has increased by orders of magnitude during the occupation) not be given scholarly recognition. Archaeological integrity and context is, on the strength of that argument, manifestly irrelevant to (some) philologists, so why should their field suffer for being less rigorous than archaeology? I'll tell why: the Nazi "medical experiment" data are forbidden not just because of what they are, but – probably more to the point – because of how they were gotten. I'm not saying that using looted tablets makes you no better than a Nazi; I am saying that some data have no business being studied. The Tuskegee syphilis data are similarly tainted. You use any of them, you're sleazy at best.
Anyway, the immediately previous news item just provides another example of how silly philologists can be, along with the pseudoscientific pretensions of archaeologists. It's about an uproar over the interpretation of a burial excavated at Ur in 1934 by Woolsey. It had all the trappings of the typical royal burial: stone tomb, weapons cache, seal bearing the word translated as "king" or "ruler". Annoyingly for Assyriologists, it also contained some feminine artifacts (hair and clothing ornaments), and the skeleton was sexed as female. The main justification, it seems to me, for such annoyance is that this is the first woman ruler suggested for ancient Assyria. The special pleadings all hypothesize about how a woman got into what is obviously a man's tomb. Unfortunately, we can't reëvaluate some data because, like the good scientist that he was, Woolsey "discarded" the skeleton (I really, really hope the facts behind that statement reveal a little more dignity; archaeological arrogance is offensive enough as it is). But then, see, this grad student – GRAD student, for chrissakes! – suggested that, y'know, maybe it really was a woman ruler. The word on the seal meaning "ruler" was only translated as "king," it seems, because only kings (i.e., males) had theretofore been found — I infer from the article that the word for 'ruler' itself is gender-neuter. But, say the philologists, there's another word translated as 'female consort of a male ruler' (hmm — d'you think they determined the "female" part of the definition the same way they determined the "male" part?), so if there were a female ruler, that's what they could have called her. I mean, it's what we do in English, right? Kings marry queens, queens marry royal consorts. Translation, people, translation. Words are not isomorphic with thought and practice, and different languages are – well – different. Just because you think you know what an ancient word means doesn't mean you do. Theory is supposed to be a tool that you discard when it's no longer useful, not a mold into which you cram the real world.
And yet, this kind of garbage continues to appear in, to receive the imprimatur of, Science.
Since it's still within the theme, let me bring this up, too: the word "gender" was given common currency as a social (rather than linguistic) term referring to sex-specific attributions of social and cultural characteristics. Sex was somatic, gender was extrasomatic. But even in Science, the word gender is now used where sex should have been. I'm not sure what relative importance to grant my hypotheses, but I think this is because of (1) latent American prudery, and (2) the naturalization of social & cultural difference by coöpting a word for the latter and applying it to the realm of the former.
[N.B. I'm in a shitty mood today. That doesn't usually affect my opinions, but it does affect how I express them.]
posted by Dr. Bubbles at 10:54
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