Why We Question Collapse and Study Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire
Why We Question Collapse and Study Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire
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为什么我们质疑崩溃并研究人类的复原力、生态脆弱性和帝国的后果
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发表时间：
2009
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
N. Yoffee
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
P. Mcanany;N. Yoffee
学者们——尤其是历史学家、考古学家和社会人类学家，这些章节的作者——都是奇怪的动物。历史学家花费大量时间在尘土飞扬的档案中辛勤劳作，考古学家在地下挖掘以寻找过去发生的事情的线索。社会文化人类学家经常生活在语言、食物、房屋、衣服和信仰与我们截然不同的民族中。成为一名医生或律师不是更容易、更赚钱吗？尽管我们不是心理学家，但我们致力于弄清楚过去社会是如何相处的，或者在全球化同质化力量的影响下，如此丰富的民族多样性如何在今天继续存在，原因之一似乎是我们喜欢讲故事。我们也喜欢谜题，了解如何找到信息（数据）并从这些信息中构建一幅图片（散文），这将使其他谜题玩家相信我们的故事“击中要害”。这是一种古老而明显的人类愿望，即讲述一个故事并讲好它。作为学者，我们还希望我们的故事能够更广泛地说明我们的人类同胞过去如何生活，以及人类在环境相互作用方面的各种经历。我们乐观地相信，对他人生活的审视可能会让我们更好地了解我们今天的生活方式。但一路走来，我们面临这样一个事实：我们的故事并不容易构建，更难向对我们所做的事情感兴趣的公众讲述。收集的信息甚至可能（而且经常）
Scholars – especially historians, archaeologists, and social anthropologists, the authors of these chapters – are strange animals. Historians spend lots of time toiling in dusty archives, and archaeologists excavate in the ground to discover clues to what happened in the past. Sociocultural anthropologists often live among peoples whose languages, food, houses, clothes, and beliefs are very different from our own. Wouldn’t it be easier and much more lucrative to become a doctor or lawyer? Although we are not psychologists, it seems that one reason why we dedicate ourselves to figuring out how societies got along in the past, or how such a rich diversity of peoples continues to exist today despite the homogenizing forces of globalization, is that we like to tell stories. We also like puzzles, how one finds pieces of information (data) and from the pieces constructs a picture (in prose) that will convince other puzzle players that our story has “hit the nail on the head.” This is an ancient and distinctly human desire, to tell a story and to tell it well. As scholars, we also want our stories to make a larger point about how our fellow humans lived in the past and about the variety of human experiences in reference to environmental interaction. We believe optimistically that an examination of the lives of others may lead to better understanding of how we might live today. But along the way we face the fact that our stories are not easy to construct and even harder to narrate to a public that is interested in what we do. Information collected may even (and often does)