JOST A MON

Well, me hearties, here's a bit of foodiness from Chandrahas Choudhury's neat little short story Dnyaneshwar Kulkarni Changes His Name (PDF alert):

He put his head down and began to eat, tasting everything quickly. The fish was excellent–salty and crisp on the outside, succulent on the inside. One of the little bowls was a chickpea curry; the second yielded a small piece of a second kind of fish in a sharp, piquant gravy; and the curious lotus-pink liquid inside the third turned out to be a tangy kadi made from kokum, excellent as a digestive. The thick chutney, into which he dipped a piece of onion, was made of garlic. He mixed the rice and the gravy, and ate it with bites of fried fish, onion and chutney without even raising his eyes from the table once. After he had taken the edge off his hunger he slowed down and began to draw out the rest of his meal. Truly, what food one got in every little nook of Mumbai city! The throbbing in his temples went away, and the centre of his being seemed to shift from his head to his stomach. A wave of contentment slowly washed over his senses.

In 1572, a massive supernova lit up the sky, outshone Venus, and stayed visible during the day. Tycho Brahe recorded it in his Stella Nova, a compendium of new stars. Contemporary astronomers (the European ones, at least) were stunned by the event as it contradicted their long-held theories of the immutability of the stellar sphere.

Although Copernicus' treatise on the heliocentric universe had already appeared thirty years earlier, he too had thought that the stars were equidistant from the Sun, fixed with respect to each other, and moving at a constant speed in an enormous solar orbit. It took a Member of Parliament from Wallingford, England, named Thomas Digges, to postulate an idea of differing stellar distances ¹.

"In 1573 Digges published Alae seu scalae mathematicae, a work on the position of the new star which is often called Tycho Brahe's supernova of 1572 since Brahe also observed the star and determined its position accurately. Digges' work includes observations of the position of the 'new star' and trigonometric theorems which could be used to determine the parallax of the star. The observations are particularly impressive making Digges one of the ablest observers of his time." ²

The appearance of a new star, while disturbing enough, was less worrisome than its gradual disappearance. Why did it begin to dim? Digges' foster-father, a natural philosopher called John Dee, suggested that the star had brightened as it approached the Earth, and dimmed as it retreated. This thesis alone put a spoke through the idea of an equidistant and unchanging shell of stars.




An illustration of the Copernican universe from Thomas Digges' book (Wikimedia Commons)

 Digges published an English version of Copernicus' treatise in 1576 (Perfit Description of the Celestiall Orbes) with some additions and elucidations of his own. His own contribution was the startling one of an infinite universe (crystallised into this one diagram), and possibly the first statement of what later came to be known as Olbers Paradox:

Clearly, if the universe was infinite and had an infinite numbers of stars, and had lasted for an infinity, every line of sight from Earth would end up in a star, and so the night sky should be completely lit up. Equally clearly, it isn't. Why?

Digges was unable to propose an entirely satisfying resolution to the problem. No shame falls to him, however, as it took nearly 350 years for the answer to emerge. With the discoveries of Edwin Hubble of the expanding universe, it became clear that the universe was not, in fact, infinite, and it hadn't existed forever, and that there were stars far out in the deep field whose light still hadn't had time to reach us.

And so we have the dark night sky.

References

1. Jim Al-Khalili, Everything and Nothing, BBC.
2. J J O'Connor and E F Robertson, Thomas Digges, MacTutor Biography.

That day it feels unaccountably oppressive to replace an office with a cavernous basement. It is a gloomy day and yet the gym does not appeal. I decide to take a walk to Stepney. There's not a lot going down in Stepney, I don't think, but there is Nicholas Hawksmoor's great church of St George in the East, and that seems as good as any destination.

(My walk takes me from the Bank intersection on King William Street to Eastcheap, to Great Tower Street, to Tower Hill, to Royal Mint Street, to Cable Street, detour to Ensign Street, left onto Wellclose Square, left onto Fletcher St and back to Cable Street, to Library Place, and right onto the gardens of St George in the East. I then walk around the building, get onto Cannon Street Road, turning right onto the Highway and a brief walk up to St Paul's Church and back on the Highway, past St Katherine's Docks to St Katherine's Way, and then onto the Thames Path by the southern end of the Tower of London, back to Tower Hill. The loop is complete and it is a matter of backtracing my steps to Bank, but I prefer to wander off sideways to Lower Thames Street, and up on Monument Street and Pudding Lane and past the Monument to Cannon Street, right onto St Swithin's Lane and left onto St Stephen's Row, and I am suddenly back at the Bank intersection.)

There's always something happening at St-George-in-the-East.

In Victorian times there was a story about a monkey that snatched the vicar's hat at the church. Investigation revealed that it had escaped from a menagerie nearby. This was not entirely surprising - trade in exotic animals was a local specialty. Another time, a Royal Bengal tiger escaped from the menagerie and snatched a boy. The boy was later rescued unharmed - and thereby hangs a tale.

In Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie, the tiger has escaped from Jamrach's, and Jamrach - to make recompense to the boy for his troubles - employs him at his concern. Jamrach's menagerie did exist - it was on the Highway that I walked on earlier. Jaffy grows up to be a responsible and honest animal-keeper, and Jamrach comes to depend on him, and sends him overseas in search of a dragon lizard.

What else happened at St George's? Well, the nearby parochial school - eponymous, of course - is where E.R. Braithwaite taught. You may remember him from To Sir, With Love.

St George's has been in the crosslines of religious and sectarian war for centuries. In 1859, it was the centre of the ritualism riots: local mobs protesting then novel aspects of worship. These days, those rituals would probably appear commonplace - to the few Christians in the area, of course. The church lies in predominantly Bangladeshi Tower Hamlets. There's a lumpen element that prefers the church to be a mosque. A vicar was attacked a few years ago by stoned Muslim youths. In 1936, when there was a large Jewish population in Stepney, the British Union of Fascists under Oswald Mosley organised a rally through the area. Anti-fascists sent in counter-protestors.

Here's yet another example of why, despite living in London for several years, I'm still as distant from local dialect as I was living elsewhere in the world.

Say cockney fire shooter, we bus' gun
Cockney say tea leaf. We just say sticks man.
You know dem have wedge while we have corn
Say cockney say be first my son! we just say gwan!
Cockney say grass we say informer man
When dem talk about iron dem really mean batty man
Rope chain and choparita me say cockney call tom
Cockney say Old Bill we say dutty Babylon

This is a stanza from a 1984 hit song "Cockney Translation" by Smiley Culture, a reggae musician who grew up in South London, and died recently under rather bizarre circumstances. Clearly even at the time there was some divergence between Cockney and Jamaican-inflected slang, and so he needed to translate to show that, underneath, there was little difference between the world-views of the two communities.

According to Johnson, the Economist's linguablog from where I got this (and which you ought to read if you don't understand the lyrics either), youths in Brixton these days are far more assimilated into each other's cultures. I'm fairly certain, though, that any current slang will be as impenetrable to me as 1984. So am I jiggy wid it? No, I ain't.

A little while ago, the most emailed article on the BBC News website was one about Indian men and condom sizes. In a world obsessed by dimensions, this story was less than flattering to desis. Imported 'regular' sized condoms were too big for the average Indian, said the story.

The comments below that piece were revealing. Many people thought it was a funny story, some thought it exposed yet another deficiency of the subcontinental, and others claimed - as expected - that size was less important than what one did with it. After all, quipped one fellow interviewed in the article, to have the second-largest population in the world meant the men were doing something right.

(Clearly the man confused quantity for quality, but that's an entirely different argument.)

Meanwhile, a recently published book by J. C. Davies (I Got the Fever: Love, What's Race Gotta Do With It?) thumped bruised male egos further into the mud. After bonking men of several 'races', ex-Goldman Sachs employee J. C. Davies decided to write a comparative analysis of their abilities. She claimed that black men like to talk about basketball more than about Al Sharpton; Asian (I presume East Asian) men were materialistic, buying things more for bragging rights than for utility, and rubbish in bed to boot; and Latinos were possessive and obsessed by dancing and music.

Not having read the book, I can't reveal if all Indian men are well-versed in the Kama Sutra, however. Maybe you can find more details at Davies' blog?

[Cross-posted at Sundry Translations and Other Tangentialia. This is a translation of the Malaspina 1789 page on the Spanish National Research Council's website on the 2010 oceanographic survey, circling the globe in the wake of Alessandro Malaspina’s 1789-1794 exploratory voyage.]

In October 1788 King Carlos III approves the plan submitted by the naval officer Alejandro Malaspina with the intention of making a scientific and political trip around the world. Here begins the most daring naval exploration of those sponsored by Carlos III, which becomes known as the Malaspina expedition.

Two naval corvettes are put into service of the expedition: the Discovery and the Bold, commanded by Alexander and José Bustamante y Guerra. Preparations were made in record time. In less than a year, the boats are made ready, the crew recruited, naturalists hired, equipment purchased, and officers trained. On Thursday July 30, 1789 the ships moor in the port of Cádiz, the crew nervously anticipating their imminent departure.

Fifty-one days later, America is in sight. On September 19, the ships anchor in the harbour of Montevideo. Large streams, beautiful trees, and vast pastures with grazing cows and horses surround a city whose streets are dirty and badly paved. The Sugar Loaf Mountain overlooking the west side is turned into a magnificent botanical garden adorned with tiny hummingbirds.

From Montevideo, the expedition leaves the Atlantic Ocean to begin its reconnaissance of the Patagonian coast and the Falklands, skirting Cape Horn. In Pacific waters, Concepción, Valparaíso, Coquimbo and Arica are the ports of call for the expedition. The region has dazzling deposits of silver, gold, copper, and mercury, attracting the attention of the Crown.

At the end of May, the expedition arrives at the port of Callao. The impending bad weather provides an excuse for rest and recuperation. During this time, too, the ships are repaired, provisions are made for food and scientific equipment, and the local region explored. On 20 September, the expedition begins the next stage of its journey, this time along the coasts of Guayaquil, Panamá y Nicaragua, which are adorned with magnificent volcanoes. In order to speed up the survey of the region, the ships split up. They will rejoin later at the port of Acapulco, to be followed by the exploration of the Northwest Coast. They intend thence to seek the Northwest Passage between the oceans, which was described in 1588 in an apocryphal document by Ferrer Maldonado. It will turn out that the passage does not exist.

While the corvettes explore the icy waters of the North Pacific, the naturalists have been enjoying the hot weather in Mexico. They have explored Petaquillas, Chilpancingo, Tasco, Cantarrana, Mochitlan, Méjico, Cuernavaca, Guadalupe, Puebla. When the corvettes return, the expedition regroups and begins preparations ahead of their journey to the Marianas Archipelago and the Philippines, where they will stay during the monsoon season. Later, they will head for New Zealand and New Holland, and enjoy some rest in the Friendly Islands, entertained by the natives.

Check out these images of the drawings made by one of the expedition's illustrators at the Friendly Islands.

On the first of July, 1793, the ships hoist sails for the long return to Spain. After an extensive hydrographic survey of the American coastlines, they arrive at the port of Montevideo in the middle of February 1794. In anticipation of French attack, they join the frigate Gertrude to protect the homebound convoy from Lima. France and Spain are at war. Five years since their departure, the Discovery and the Bold dock at the harbour of Cádiz on 21 September 1794. They haven't circumnavigated the world, but they have conducted an ambitious and extensive exploration of the Americas, Oceania and the Pacific.

(For Alessandro Malaspina, the end proved dramatic. In view of his merit, he was raised to the rank of brigadier in 1795, but soon thereafter, his influence and achievements earned him the enmity of Manuel de Godoy, then Foreign Minister in the Spanish court. Accused and convicted of revolutionary conspiracy, Malaspina was sentenced to ten years imprisonment in the fortress of San Anton. In 1803, the sentence was commuted to exile, and he moved to Genoa. He died in Pontremoli on April 9, 1810.)

I have learned over the years that what is amusing to one person is far from amusing to another. This is not surprising. Many people - some as young as five years old (see yesterday's post) - have told me that what I find interesting is less than crudworthy to them. Neither trivia nor humour really translates well.

And I do not even mean translating from one language to another. In a recent paper on an algebraic formula for the computation of p(n), the number of partitions of an integer n (a partition of n being any non-increasing sequence of positive integers that add up to n) - by all accounts a major development in number theory, having been an open problem for nearly 80 years - the authors write "We give an amusing proof of the fact that p(1) = 1."

When I saw the proof, I laughed. Hollowly. Here it is (following the statement of their main theorem, for which, see original paper):

In this case, we have that 24n - 1 = 23, and we use the G₀(6)-representatives

The corresponding CM points are

Using the explicit Fourier expansion of P(z), we find that

Using these numerics, we can prove that

We have that Tr(1) = 23, confirming that p(1) = Tr(1)/23 = 1.

Quod bloody erat freakin' demonstrandum.

The other day, I was trying to explain odd and even numbers to the boy. After some playing around with coins to explain how pairs are formed, the little chap appeared to understand the concept. Carried away by the breakthrough, I said:

"Hey, can I tell you something else that's interesting?"

"I don't think it will be interesting," said the boy.

"What!" I said. "Didn't you think odd and even numbers were interesting?"

"Ye-e-es," he said, somewhat doubtfully. "But I don't think whatever else you'll tell me is interesting."

The measurements themselves were copious and exhaustive, incorporating - for the head alone, for example - such characteristics as cephalic index, head length, head breadth, nasal length, nasal breadth, and nasal index. Simple statistics such as the average and the standard deviation were clearly not sufficient to distinguish between one group and another, particularly when the measurement error alone resulted in overlapping values for two classes. In a brilliant series of papers published in a new journal called Biometrika, Karl Pearson and associates showed there were multidimensional measures whereby anthropological data could be analysed. More specifically, they could be used to 'assess similarity or dissimilarity between two populations' ¹.


An example of a prevalent question at the time was whether Ancient Egyptians had any social affinity with Hindus. Some researchers had claimed that the physical resemblance between the two peoples implied a partial colonisation from one country to the other. Karl Pearson introduced the coefficient of racial likeness, or CRL, to analyse this issue, 'one of the first quantitative procedures to measure the admixture proportions, or the proportions which 'hybrid' populations derive from their various ancestors'².


Given two populations of size n and n', with the mean of the ith measurement in the first population m_i, and that in the second population m'_i, and s_i² the pooled variance in the ith measurements, the CRL C is given by:





Almost immediately, the CRL was used by M. L. Tildesley in her analysis of Burmese craniums in 1921³. Shortly thereafter, critiques of the methodology began to appear in the literature - not only by anthropologists but also statisticians. A chief criticism was that the method assumed that the various metrics (e.g. head length, head weight, nose length) were independent of each other, a rather generous assumption. Another complaint was that the CRL was dependent on the sample size of observations, and that it provided only a degree of certainty that there was divergence between the groups, but could not quantify exactly how much divergence there was.


In 1925, an Indian statistician named P. C. Mahalanobis began an investigation into the question of racial differentiation in his native state of Bengal. He looked at the results of an anthropometric survey of Anglo-Indians (people of mixed European and Indian ancestry) conducted in 1891 to answer (in his words) the following questions:

How are these 200 Anglo-Indians in Calcutta related to the different caste-groups in Bengal? Are they more closely allied with the Hindus or the Mohammedans? Do they show a greater affinity with the higher castes of Bengal or with the lower castes? ... ⁴

In order not to be swayed by size differences in the various characteristics he used, Mahalanobis computed standardised values for them.

The characteristics differed by scale and variability. That is, Mahalanobis might have considered a half-inch difference in nasal length between two groups of skulls a significant difference whereas he considered the same difference in head length to be insignificant. Mahalanobis normalized differences in each characteristic by the characteristic’s standard deviation and then squared and summed the normalized differences, thus generating one composite distance measure that was invariant to the variability of each dimension. ⁵

This first Mahalanobis metric suffered from the same defect as Pearson's as it didn't consider the correlation between the various characteristics. In 1936, he introduced his famous concept of statistical differentiation that came to be known after him, the Mahalanobis distance.


If the human skull can be described by n characteristics that are measurable, an individual's skull can be represented as an n-dimensional vector. Now take a set of measurements belonging to one anthropological unit (say, Calcutta Brahmins), and compute its centre, or mean vector m, and its covariance matrix S. Then, if we want to classify a hitherto unclassified skull measurement y, what we do is compute its Mahalanobis distance D from the Calcutta Brahmin set's centre:




And we compute the distance against the centres of other classes, say, Calcutta Muslims or lower castes, and we decide that our unknown skull falls into that class from which it has the least distance D.


To simplify, assume that a skull can be characterised by two metrics, skull length and skull breadth. Then each skull can be represented by a point in two-dimensional space. If we plot our data of Calcutta Brahmin skulls and Calcutta Muslim skulls, we might find (if these are indeed two distinct anthropological classes) that our graph has two distinct clusters in it (Figure 1 from Kritzman and Li (reference below)):


In Kritzman and Li's words, then:

Suppose we compare a skull of unknown origin, represented by the square in Figure 1, with the two groups and categorize it. In terms of Euclidean distance, it lies closer to the center of Group 2 than to the center of Group 1. The Mahalanobis distance, however, would consider this skull more similar to Group 1 because its characteristics are less unusual in light of the more inclusive scatter plot of Group 1’s characteristics.

So what did Mahalanobis conclude from his investigation? First of all, he said, the Anglo-Indians in his sample derived (on the Indian side) from Biharis, Lepchas (of Sikkim), possibly from the Punjab, and none at all from the Northwest Frontier or the Chotanagpur tribals. He also noted that they seemed to derive from unions of higher-caste Indians and Europeans, adding that 'cultural status evidently played a large part in determining Indo-European Union.'


From a broader investigation into the anthropological classes of Bengal, Mahalanobis was able to arrive conclude: 

Summing up we find that intermixture within Bengal, i.e. intra-provincial intermixture has varied with the degree of cultural proximity, so that for Brahmins the amount of intermixture with other castes has been in proportion to the social standing of the caste concerned. Influence from outside Bengal, i.e., inter-provincial intermixture has followed two well-defined and clearly distinguished streams, one from the castes of Northern India (chiefly from Bihar and the Punjab) and the other from the aboriginal tribes of Chotanagpur. The influence of the Northern Indian castes decreases and that of the aboriginal tribes of Chotanagpur increases as we go down to the social scale... . None of the castes analysed here show much resemblence with any of the aboriginal tribes of the east... . Mohammedans (also) show a highly mixed character. They appear to be originally largely derived from Bihar but have intermixed extensively in Bengal; they do not show any resemblance with the Punjab Pathans. ⁶

As it happens, not all the anthropological conclusions of that 1925 paper are held valid today. Mahalanobis was correct in his assertion that Bengal Brahmins resemble other Bengal castes more than Brahmins elsewhere in India. However, later datasets have invalidated his claim that only the Brahmins among the people of Bengal have admixtures from the Punjab. 'Moreover, as far as the Anglo-Indian community is concerned, it is now believed that Mahalanobis had probably confined his study to a sample from the upper stratum of the community, and hence his conclusion of resemblance to upper caste Hindus is applicable to the upper class Anglo-Indians only'. ⁷


These days, Mahalanobis is venerated by many people not for his anthropological research or its conclusions; rather, it is the methodology he developed that is considered his greatest contributions to the sum of human knowledge. Even today, the Mahalanobis distance is part of the armoury of every scientist who needs to classify multidimensional data. As you can probably infer from the reference list, this includes not just statisticians, but also anthropologists, social scientists, and financial engineers. 


Quite a lot of good, in short, has come out of what once was eugenics research.


References


1. S. Dasgupta, "Evolution of the D²-Statistic of Mahalanobis", Sankhyā: The Indian Journal of Statistics, 1993, Special Volume 55, Series A, Pt 3, p 442.
2. M. Tapper, In the Blood: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
3. M. L. Tildesley, "A First Study of the Burmese Skull", Biometrika, 13, 1921, 247-251
4. P. C. Mahalanobis, "Analysis of Race-mixture in Bengal", Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 23, 301-333.
5. M. Kritzman and Yuanzhen Li, "Skulls, Financial Turbulence, and Risk Management", Financial Analysts Journal, 66(5), 2010.
6. S. Dasgupta, as above, p 447.
7. J. K. Ghosh, "Mahalanobis and the Art and Science of Statistics: The Early Days", Indian Journal of History of Science, 29(1), 1994.

How deliciously Charles Dickens treats such a quotidian thing as serving up bread-and-butter. In his Great Expectation, the young Pip and his brother-in-law Joe have differing approaches to snaffling the stuff, and each is concerned that the other does not bolt the food down so quick that he needs to be purged. But look at the way Pip's sister prepares the meal:

I hoped to redeem some self-respect at a recent quiz organised by one of our counterparties. A colleague organised the team outing, and five of us hied to the venue determined not to come last. A quick poll amongst us revealed that one of us had some expertise in sport facts, another in nature facts, a third in film, a fourth in music, and myself in nothing in particular.

Just how deep my ignorance (or, to be more precise, lack of recall) was, was amply demonstrated in the very first round. We were to identify famous people from their pictures, extract their names from anagrams, and decipher famous expressions from off-tangent clues. From among the fifteen pictures, I was able to identify only Ian Duncan Smith and Snoop Dogg; after years of drools over Kim Basinger, I couldn't recognise her, or Patsy Kensit; worst of all was Forest Whitaker, who I recognised at once as the actor in The Last King of Scotland but whose name just wouldn't occur to me. The film expert insisted his name was Laurence something, and when long last I remembered it, he said, 'Well, Forest does sound a bit like Laurence.'

It was more or less downhill after that. By the time the first buzzer round came up, we had each of us downed so much beer and wine that it proved impossible even to locate the button on the buzzer. Questions such as 'Which country is bigger - Kuwait or Qatar?' baffled us, and 'Identify the concocted name from among 'Stiletto Snake', 'Dog Faced Water Snake', and 'Umbilical Snake' was beyond the nature-lover. 'What were the decades of Jesse James's life?' fell by the wayside, as did 'Who was England's goalie in the 2006 World Cup?' - much to the discomfiture of the sports fanatic.

Did I answer any questions? I'm happy to say I did - not that they mattered in the end. I knew the year of the Wright Brothers' first flight (1903), and I knew the easternmost country in the European Union (Cyprus). After that brief burst of brightness, the candle flickered out.

The winning team was cunningly named 'Your Mum'. They won paper crowns. The team that placed last got chicken hats. The hats were far better than the crowns.

We came joint fifth - out of eight teams. Small mercies there.

(PS: Whose diabolical mind is able to figure out that the phrase XMASCARA can be deciphered as 'Kiss and make up'? If it's yours, please shout. If it's not, please don't.)

There is some preoccupation with food and drink in Lewis Carroll's works on Alice, and it has been surmised that this is due to general fears of malnutrition in Victorian England. Of course, Carroll puts a humorous spin on these ruminations, but where his imagination really gets going is as he puts himself into Alice's mind, and limns every little child's favourite food, all mixed up. Here's an excerpt from the first chapter of the gorgeousAlice's Adventures in Wonderland:

While I claim no particular expertise in history or historiography, archaeology or archaeolography (or indeed ethnology, graphology or game theory), I am grateful indeed to Elke Rogersdotter's recent doctoral dissertation (Gaming in Mohenjo-daro) for providing a small eye-opener. In her rich survey of relevant literature, she has covered why people find the study of games fascinating. The variety of questions that can arise in such study has piqued my interest.

Sticking to board games, as Elke Rogersdotter does, we face a veritable cornucopia of detail. A plenitude of material. We can classify these games not merely on the basis of chance versus skill. There are war-games (chess), hunt-games (goat and tiger), race-games (ludo), and others.

We can study their origins. Dice, that famed game of Indians (recall Yudhishthira's fateful obsession with it in the Mahabharata), have been documented over millennia. The ancestry of other games is more difficult to trace. Not having obvious inventors, and being easily portable from one culture to another, there are no self-evident roots to any particular game. Also, as Rogersdotter states, not all games required equipment of permanence: boards could be drawn on the ground; their provenance thus is fleeting and their origins murky.

(Here's an example that pops up in my head: In today's globalised world, it is not surprising that something like poker finds adherents across race and creed and geography. The Indian game teen patthi might be precursor to poker, given that there are some claims that poker itself derives from a Persian game As Nas. Or it might be an offshoot of poker. Who knows? Has anyone studied the linkage? I suspect a nice Master's thesis can come out of this question.)

We can analyse the reasons for game play. Besides that obvious one of fun, there's also learning, and religion, and divination, and instruction.

We can study the gaming material: the boards themselves, or the moving pieces, or any of their accoutrements and embellishments.

We can investigate the gaming rules.

In short, there's enough scope for any budding game theoretician to get stuck into.

A doctoral thesis invariably is filled with technical jargon such as to stymie even the brightest denizen of Lake Wobegon. One section of it, however, provides an invaluable service, and that is its survey of relevant research. This section is usually compact, exhaustive, and conveys a sweep of information in somewhat comprehensible terms. Best of all, it provides byways and side-alleys for those with attention deficit disorder to pursue. An excellent examplar in the recent thesis (highlighted by the indefatigable Varnam) of Elke Rogersdotter, titled Gaming in Mohenjo-daro - an Archeology of Unities.


Examine first, if you will, the following passage from the abstract:

The study tests its way along different paths. The mode of procedure builds on a modified form of grounded theory. In this form, emphasis has been put on the concept of abduction in the version of Bateson. Stress has also been laid on Simmel’s description of the process of understanding. With this reasoning, the researcher’s self is accentuated as an integrated component in the process. The consequence of the modifications is a model in the shape of a grid – a working grid – where the different rows, internally divided up into compartments representing stages of work, constitute different, autonomously working ways. The empirical investigation is based on a critical reading of older excavational documents. Rather than aiming at a systematic division between what is game-related and what is not game-related, the reading is undertaken with the aim of seeing whether this kind of material can be studied despite the problematic appearance of the sources. Through a practical application of the working grid, the bearing capacity of the materials is tested from different angles. In the following theoretical discussion, the grid is utilized in a more theoretical manner in order to reach different aspects of play. The most successful approach builds on the discernment of autonomously working unities in the studied materials. This is based on Simmel’s division between form and content, as well as on the emphasis by Bateson on autonomously working systems.

Wiser minds than mine are probably stumped by 'abduction', 'discernment of autonomously working unities', and the like. The technical aspect of the dissertation continues in this vein. A non-specialist will remain nonplussed.


Note, however, this passage in the survey of literature:

Leaving aside the research history on earlier works, one of the first publications constituting something of a synthesis of board games was the work of Thomas Hyde in the seventeenth century (Finkel 2007b:2). Taking a long step forward, the extensive work undertaken by the ethnologist and anthropologist Stewart Culin (1858-1929) must be mentioned. He was a curator in the Museum of Archaeology and Paleontology, University of Philadelphia, and in the Brooklyn Museum. His large amount of collected information on different kinds of games represents one of the classics in the field (Finkel 2007b:3; Freeman-Witthoft 2007:270; see e.g. Culin 1895, 1992/1907a). His collections included games from Europe and the Orient and from North American tribes. Together with Frank Hamilton Cushing his initial plan was to outline “…the skeleton of aworld-wide panorama of gaming with evolutionary trees going back to common roots in Upper Palaeolithic times” (Freeman-Witthoft 2007:270).

How clear! How crystalline! How much treasure there is in this one paragraph!


I learn immediately that there has been a scholarly tradition of boardgameology. Both anthropologists and historians have been interested in multifarious aspects of games. The Brooklyn Museum has a collection of these artefacts (note to self: go to Brooklyn Museum again). There has been a systematic phylogeny of gaming boards going back to the Stone Age. It is possible to unify the study of board games into some kind of synthesis. And, best of all, I can look up the references should I be interested in pursuing any detail, however ephemeral my interest.


Now that's what I call a good survey of the relevant literature.