HESBURGH LECTURE SERIES 2013 Program - Alumni Association ...

James O. Bellis, Ph.D.
Associate Professor Emeritus, Anthropology
Biography
James Bellis is an associate professor of anthropology and has been on the faculty of Notre
Dame since 1970. His research specialization is the art history and archaeology of West Africa,
and his field research in Ghana was sponsored by the Ford Foundation and U.S. governmental
grants. His duties at Notre Dame, in addition to teaching and research, have included directing
the African Studies Program, chairing the Department of Anthropology, and establishing an
archaeological field school. In 1986, the College of Arts and Letters honored him with its annual
Charles E. Sheedy Award for Excellence in Teaching. After teaching human evolution for three
decades, he has noticed some interesting patterns in certain preconceptions that students have
already developed when they arrive at the University. His topics explore some of the patterns
of understanding and misunderstanding that exist in our culture at large, and how they are
present in the pop culture of our student body. Bellis completed his graduate studies at Indiana
University.
Lectures
Are We Really Slipping Back to the “Stone Age?”
10 The Hesburgh Lecture Series, 2013 Program
Categories
Art/Architecture, Ethics,
Family, History, Social
Concerns
I seem to hear this sort of comment more and more frequently of late. I think I know what is meant. I can remember when
on occasion the president of our university would share his suspicion that some of our students were “returning to the days
of a Neanderthal ‘grunt’.” I think we intuitively know what is meant by that sort of reference, but I think it is a self-deception,
something like ethnocentrism (i.e. the notion that one’s own culture is superior to all others…). One constant theme in the history
of my discipline, anthropology, is the pervasive presence of ethnocentrism in all human cultures. It is one of those “cultural
universals” found in every culture. Examples of other cultural universals would be technology, religion, aesthetics, language, etc.
I have come to wonder if this use of life in a remote part of the past is not the same sort of phenomenon. This lecture will strive
to use the data accumulated in anthropological and archaeological research and to compare it to modern life, to see if this is
reasonable…or not. In this lecture I will explain why I have always had a rather high regard for our Neanderthal ancestors.
The Rest is History, All 0.1 Percent of It!
Anthropology, like many academic studies, seeks to understand the human condition. With the insights of its sub-field,
prehistoric archaeology, anthropology has the longest chronological perspective of any of these other academic disciplines. Our
earliest known ancestors lived in Africa more than 4,000,000 years ago. It is staggering to realize that, of this vast amount of time
on earth, we lived the first 3,995,000+ years without writing, cities, or many of the other characteristics most humans share today.
As they say, “the rest is history.” It is the contention of this lecture that this long neglected 99.9 percent has much to contribute to
our understanding of, and perhaps contains solutions for, some of the world’s most pressing modern problems.