Dr. Charles F. Urbanowicz / Professor of Anthropology
California State University, Chico / Chico, California 95929-0400
530-898-6220 [Office: Butte 317]; 530-898-6192
[Department: Butte 311]; 530-898-6143 [FAX]
e-mail: curbanowicz@csuchico.edu
/ home page: http://www.csuchico.edu/~curban
[This page printed from http://www.csuchico.edu/~curban/TripleADC2005.html]
21 March 2005 [1]
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© [All Rights Reserved.] Placed on the World Wide Web on 21 March 2005, as a submission to Dr. Douglas A. Vonich (SETI Institute, Mountain View, CA) for consideration for the 104th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (with the overall theme of "Bringing the Past into the Present"), Washington, D.C., November 30-December 4, 2005. |
ABSTRACT
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) seeks evidence of advanced technologies beyond Earth, looking for electromagnetic signals produced by hardware of the sort humans can imagine. However, SETI scientists have given little attention to notions of technology that emphasize its basis in culture and communication, rather than hardware. The current paper examines the value of these concepts of culture and communication for SETI, exploring changing views as both anthropology and SETI have developed as disciplines. In reviewing the history of these ideas, I reflect on responses to my paper, "Evolution of Technological Civilizations: What Is Evolution, Technology, and Civilization?," which I presented at a 1977 NASA-sponsored SETI symposium.
Trained as an anthropologist, with fieldwork in the Pacific and an interest in the history of the discipline, I subscribe to the assumption that "evolution" is the foundation theory of modern anthropology. Lee and Flannery discussed "The Evolution of Technical Civilizations" in Sagan's 1973 volume entitled Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and they developed three "tools" to analyze communication: evolutionism, historical materialism, and uniformitarianism. Wisely, they did not equate "tools" with technology. La Barre's 1954 The Human Animal pointed out that technology exists within the human mind. This paper builds on Hall's view that "communication constitutes the core of culture and indeed of life itself" (The Hidden Dimension, 1969:1), a view that Hall traced back to Boas. I conclude that both SETI and the search for Terrestrial Intelligence could benefit from an increased emphasis on the role of culture and communication.
(1) © [All Rights Reserved.] Placed on the World Wide Web on 21 March 2005, as a submission to Dr. Douglas A. Vonich (SETI Institute, Mountain View, CA) for consideration for the 104th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (with the overall theme of "Bringing the Past into the Present"), Washington, D.C., November 30-December 4, 2005.
[~462 words] } 21 March 2005
to California State University, Chico.
[This page printed from http://www.csuchico.edu/~curban/TripleADC2005.html]
Copyright © 2005; all rights reserved by Charles F. Urbanowicz |
21 March 2005 by cfu |