Processual Archaelology and Whiteheadian Process Philosophy

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Whiteheadian process philosophy is an integral philosophy of everything. It is how the world works; how the world developed; and how humanity came to be as birthed within a processual cosmology. In a far looser context specific to process systems themselves it will be noted that all sciences - including that of evolutionary and archaeological studies - are taking into their accounts of creation and human development the ideation of "processual systems" and how those entangled matrices have impacted one another.

The science-filled descriptors of "processual evolution" may not be exactly Whiteheadian in nature but are Whiteheadian by reference and observation to the processual creation we are bound to and how it morphs and gleans over-and-over-and-over, again-and-again-and-again, moment-by-moment. It is how the world works.

So then, by way of illustrating Whitehead's processual observations at work in a non-Whiteheadian processual context - that of science - let us briefly review the obtuse discussion below watching how it reflects how science might interact with the constructs of latent and dynamic processual systems as observed by Whitehead in the 1920s and 1930s.

R.E. Slater

November 15, 2022

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https://prezi.com/dyy52z9kue9i/processual-archaeology/

https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cYXledM5qJ

What is the ‘process’ in cultural process

and in processual archaeology?

article link

Posted on May 15, 2020 by sooteris kyritsis

(continued from 12/03/19)

SHIFTING MEANINGS OF CULTURAL PROCESS

I suspect that what made the concept of cultural process difficult to discuss in the 1970s and 1980s was that it was a ‘vogue word’ – a word that was used to show that the user had acquired the term and all the supposed intellectual accessories that went with it (Service, 1969). M. Johnson (1999: 188) correctly suggested that conceptual ambiguity was exacerbated because the term process could be ‘used by an author in one sense and read in quite another’. This ambiguity allowed an unremarked shift in the meaning of the term over time.

Binford (1968b; see also Binford and Binford, 1968b) not only recognized the difference between the category of processes comprising the synchronic operation family and the diachronic evolution family, but he also noted that the archaeological record had been created by human behaviors, among other processes, and that the creation processes comprised a different category (Figure 2). He argued that an archaeologist must distinguish between explaining the archaeological record – a modern static phenomenon –and an extinct cultural system – a past dynamic phenomenon.

A processual archaeologist seeks to understand ‘processual relationships among various classes of material items in the dynamics of cultural systems’, but such understanding can only come after one has explained observations made on the archaeological record [which] necessarily involves coping with problems of process. We attempt to explain similarities and differences in archaeological remains in terms of the functioning of material items in a cultural system and the processual features of the operation or evolution of the cultural systems responsible for the varied artifact forms, associations, and distributions observable in the ground. (Binford, 1968b: 273)

In the last quoted sentence, the wording before the second ‘and’ refers to behavioral processes that create the archaeological record; the words after that refer to the dynamic cultural processes (both synchronic operational and diachronic evolutionary) at work when the culture existed.

The distinction is made by an archaeologist interested in contributing to anthropological theory (Binford, 1962). It, along with Schiffer’s (1976) more detailed discussion, ultimately led to refocusing the processual approach not on what might be thought of as the ultimate goal of identifying category 2 processes – those involving the operation and evolution of dynamic cultural systems – but on the more archaeologically proximate goal of category 1 processes – what became known as processes that result in the formation of the archaeological record (Schiffer, 1987). (I use 1 and 2 merely to signify order of analysis.) By the middle 1980s, for example, the text of an edited book entitled Structure and Process in Southeastern Archaeology, comprising 14 chapters authored by 16 archaeologists (Dickens and Ward, 1985), hardly mentions category 2 (cultural) processes and instead focuses nearly exclusively on category 1 (formation) processes.

Schiffer (1988) highlighted the distinctiveness of the two categories when he distinguished between ‘reconstruction theory’ (concerning category 1 processes) and ‘social theory’ (concerning category 2 processes). In her introduction to the recent volume Processual Archaeology, A.L. Johnson (2004) suggests that processes involve how a cultural system operates and also how the archaeological record is formed.

Additional evidence that formation processes usurped the priority of cultural processes is found in recent perspectives on Wauchope’s dilemma. Keegan (1991) suggests that at least some processes of interest are the behavioral processes that created the archaeological record, and others are the cultural processes or dynamics of an existing culture. Following Terrell (1986), Keegan (1991: 186–7) indicates that ‘cultural processes are the unfolding patterns of variability through time in conformity with nomothetic principles’. Terrell (1986) seems to have skirted Wauchope’s dilemma by suggesting that repetitive archaeological patterns were the results of predictable types of patterned human behavior. Echoing Kroeber (1948), Cunningham (2003: 391) indicates that ‘causal processes interact and combine in the creation of material patterns’.

This results in three things:

First, a particular pattern ‘can be created by entirely different sets of causal processes’ (2003: 392); this is equifinality (Lyman, 2004).

Second, analytical reconfiguration of processes allows one to ‘explain behavior that may differ substantially from any modern situation’ (Cunningham, 2003: 394). And,

Third, different processes and combinations thereof create different patterns in the material record (2003: 395).

Identifying which processes and combinations thereof create which patterns is not only the goal of formation process studies (Schiffer, 1987) and middle range research (Cunningham, 2003), but it is, seemingly, now of importance equal to that of identifying the cultural, social, and behavioral processes that processual archaeologists originally sought.

DISCUSSIONS OF CULTURAL PROCESS BY PROCESSUAL ARCHAEOLOGISTS

Eisenberg (1971) argued that Deetz’s (1965) analysis exemplifies processual archaeology because it adopts the view of a culture as a system and seeks to understand the role of kinds of artifacts (in Deetz’s case, ceramic decorations) in a cultural system. It was in fact a systems-theory perspective that produced the two most detailed discussions of cultural processes by archaeologists of which I am aware. One was by David Clarke; the other was by Frank Hole and Robert Heizer.

Clarke (1968: 22) wrote that the ‘primary processes are those of inevitable variation, multilinear development, invention, diffusion and cultural selection. Combined in many permutations and circumstances these processes give rise to such complex processes as acculturation, and cultural growth, decay and disintegration’. He explicitly defined a process as ‘a vector which describes a series of states of an entity or system undergoing continuous change in space or time’ (Clarke, 1968: 42, 668). Clarke (1968:43) believed that a ‘general system model . . . should be representative of cultural processes at several levels within a sociocultural unit’. He sought ‘a model for archaeological processes – archaeological entities changing as special kinds of dynamic systems, susceptible to analysis in terms of general systems theory’ (1968: 72). He indicated that ‘We should not expect the processes that operate upon cultures or culture groups to be the same as those that operate upon artifact attributes, although since the former entities are compounds of the latter elements we might expect the processes appropriate to higher entities to integrate the simpler processes as well’ (1968: 409). The first part of the immediately preceding sentence echoes Wauchope’s dilemma, and the last part concerns the magnitude and scale of processes.

Clarke (1968) lists various processes and provides a detailed and relatively lengthy

statement on category 2 (cultural, behavioral, social) processes that he thought operated on or within most sociocultural entities. He specified three ‘general processes’ ontogeny, migration, interaction – and then suggested that each was manifest in various ways by development of variants, decrease of variety, increase of variety, and transformation of variety of cultural elements (Clarke, 1968: 409–10). The problem, Clarke thought, was to derive a ‘nested hierarchy of socio-archaeological processes’ – processes that linked sociocultural change to change in artifacts of whatever scale (Clarke, 1968:411); this is an effort to resolve Wauchope’s dilemma. Each process Clarke listed is a general kind that includes more specific kinds of processes. Many of his processes fall within the diachronic evolutionary family.

Changes in Hole and Heizer’s multi-edition introductory textbook capture the growing importance of culture processes in archaeology. There is minimal mention of culture processes in the first two editions (Hole and Heizer, 1965, 1969), but the 1969 edition contains a discussion of the importance of systems theory to understanding cultural dynamics. The third edition (Hole and Heizer, 1973: 439) discusses cultural processes explicitly. 

The term ‘process’ or ‘processes’ crops up frequently in the writings of scientific archeology, and it is also used in history, in manufacturing, and in analysis. As we understand the term colloquially it refers to the sequential set of operations that lead from A to B . . . [Given examples in history, manufacturing and research one] can readily see that process means two quite different things. First, it may refer to a sequence of events. Second, it may refer to the causes of the sequence of events. In both meanings, process is conceptually linked with the states or conditions of the things under observation at different times. As process is used in archeology, it refers to an analysis of the factors that cause changes in state.

[I will suggest that Alfred North Whitehead's titled work, "Process and Reality" goes into the state of processual relationships in a far, far deeper manner than what is gleaned here in this article. - re slater]

The authors provide the same discussion in an abridged version of their book (Hole and Heizer, 1977: 358), where they also define ‘process’ in the glossary as ‘the operation of factors that result in a change of culture’ (1977: 387). Note that Hole and Heizer indicate that a process can be a simple description of a sequence of events, or it can refer to cause(s) of that sequence. Given processual archaeology’s hopes to explain the archaeological record rather than just describe it (Lyman and O’Brien, 2004), a reasonable inference is that processualists sought to identify causal processes that operated prehistorically.

One of the alleged benefits of archaeologists adopting systems theory was that ‘questions phrased in terms of [systems] concepts direct our attention away from institutions and events and toward processes, away from efforts to discover the first appearance of particular cultural practices and toward efforts to understand their gradual evolution,and away from constructions of these events that are relatively hard to define in terms of archaeological observations toward ones that are more sensitive to the data with which we deal’ (Plog, 1975: 215). Plog is unclear, but I suspect he hoped to identify dynamic cause(s) rather than describe static events in temporal terms. Thus perhaps Plog was concerned with how a cultural system operates. Salmon (1978: 175), after all, pointed out that ‘anthropologists were engaged in analyzing social and cultural systems long before the advent of modern systems theory’ (see for example Kluckhohn’s [1951] discussion of Linton [1936]). This is particularly evident if one is aware of the structural–functional approaches in anthropology early in the 20th century, and also of the typical definition of a system as the relationships (mechanical, structural, functional)between entities comprising the system (Hill, 1977; Maruyama, 1963; Plog, 1975;Salmon, 1978). Systems theory seems to be preadapted to studying the dynamic operation (static state of being) of a cultural system.

When Clarke wrote his magnum opus, he modeled his recommendations for archaeological research on systems theory. But he did so with the following explicit and emphatic caution:

"It would be all too easy to take systems theory as our model for archaeological [that is, sociocultural] processes and the cultural entities that generate them, without isolating precisely the kind of system these entities represent. This would simply extend systems theory and its terminology as yet another vague analogy of no practical potential." (Clarke, 1968: 39)

Because in Clarke’s (1968: 39) view, anthropologists were ‘only just beginning to analyze social systems in [systems theory] terms’, he devoted the majority of the nearly 700 pages of Analytical Archaeology to building a model of culture, including artifacts, as a system. He used systems theory concepts and terms such as ‘feedback’ and ‘homeostasis’ in his modeling efforts, but his cultural processes were not categorized by him as the generic deviation counteracting ones of the first cybernetics meant to study stasis nor the deviation amplifying ones of the second cybernetics meant to study change (Maruyama, 1963). Rather, they were ‘technocomplex repatterning’, ‘culture group repatterning’, ‘acculturation’, ‘diffusion’, ‘invention’, and the like (Clarke, 1968: 410–12). Flannery (1968, 1972), on the other hand, categorized the cultural processes he identified (seasonality, scheduling, centralization, segregation) as either one or the other of these two general categories (deviation counteracting or amplifying), and he, like Clarke, identified and named specifically cultural processes.

A significant influence on processual archaeologists’ focus on cultural processes was Maruyama’s (1963) discussion of the second cybernetics, or ‘deviation-amplifying mutual causal processes’ (see Flannery, 1968, 1972; Hill, 1977; Plog, 1975 for an introduction). In his 16-page article, Maruyama used the term ‘process’ 40 times, or 2.5 times per page. What Maruyama means by the term is never explicit. I suggest that he meant several things, including dynamic causes, relationships (mechanical, functional) between variables or entities, and influences of one variable or entity on another. Perhaps because it is unclear whether he meant static mechanical relations or causally dynamic ones, to this day some authors define a cultural process such as ‘centralization’ as ‘the degree of linkage between the various subsystems and the highest-order controls of a cultural system’ (Spencer, 1997: 215). This definition does not identify a dynamic cause though it does imply some kind of mechanical or functional relationship between phenomena. The name of a process has been applied to both a dynamic cause and its result. This seems to be the way that Maruyama (1963) used the term process, and his use likely influenced archaeologists.

(to be continued)

R. Lee Lyman

University of Missouri-Columbia, USA

Carl Glen Henshaw - Simple Acts of Kindness

Simple Acts of Kindness

by Carl Glen Henshaw

The worst college class I ever took was a literature class on short stories. One notable memory from that class was a story we read about a group of kids who conspire to destroy the house of an old man. They befriended the man so they could get into the house, and while there slowly cut through the beams holding the walls up. They did this for weeks and weeks; when they were done, they ran a cable around the house, got the man into the yard, and pulled it down with him watching.

The instructor asked us to write a piece on the story with the topic of “creative destruction”.

At the time, this struck me as deeply wrong, and I refused to write the report the way the instructor wanted and got marked down as a result, which is representative of my entire undergraduate experience. But I didn’t have the wisdom or skill to really say *why* it was wrong.

Now I do.

Shortly after 9/11, Stephen Jay Gould wrote a column about the day drawing on his background as a biologist who studied complex systems. Complex systems tend to be interconnected and somewhat fragile. In order for a complex system to function, nearly all of the parts have to do their jobs. If the system suffers a significant injury, all of its parts have to work in unison to knit it back together.

Society, Gould said, is a complex system, and had just suffered a significant injury. Offsetting this injury took the collective efforts of many. Gould wrote:

“Good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one. The tragedy of human history lies in the enormous potential for destruction in rare acts of evil, not in the high frequency of evil people. Complex systems can only be built step by step, whereas destruction requires but an instant. Thus, in what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible as the ''ordinary'' efforts of a vast majority. We have a duty, almost a holy responsibility, to record and honor the victorious weight of these innumerable little kindnesses, when an unprecedented act of evil so threatens to distort our perception of ordinary human behavior...

I will cite but one tiny story, among so many, to add to the count that will overwhelm the power of any terrorist's act. And by such tales, multiplied many millionfold, let those few depraved people finally understand why their vision of inspired fear cannot prevail over ordinary decency. As we left a local restaurant to make a delivery to ground zero late one evening, the cook gave us a shopping bag and said: ''Here's a dozen apple brown bettys, our best dessert, still warm. Please give them to the rescue workers.'' How lovely, I thought, but how meaningless, except as an act of solidarity, connecting the cook to the cleanup. Still, we promised that we would make the distribution, and we put the bag of 12 apple brown bettys atop several thousand face masks and shoe pads.

Twelve apple brown bettys into the breach. Twelve apple brown bettys for thousands of workers. And then I learned something important that I should never have forgotten -- and the joke turned on me. Those 12 apple brown bettys went like literal hot cakes. These trivial symbols in my initial judgment turned into little drops of gold within a rainstorm of similar offerings for the stomach and soul, from children's postcards to cheers by the roadside. We gave the last one to a firefighter, an older man in a young crowd, sitting alone in utter exhaustion as he inserted one of our shoe pads. And he said, with a twinkle and a smile restored to his face: ''Thank you. This is the most lovely thing I've seen in four days -- and still warm!''”

---

I also study complex systems. Unlike Gould, my systems aren’t natural; they’re engineered. But my experience mirrors Gould’s. Engineered systems are even more fragile than natural ones. Every piece has a part to play.

Gould’s point, and mine, is that we do not counteract immense acts of evil through immense acts of good. We counter them through hundreds, thousands, millions of small acts. Bringing someone grieving a hot dinner. Comforting a child. Helping someone change a flat. Planting a garden and giving away the produce.

Those of us who try to follow Jesus of Nazareth should understand this, although too often we act like we don’t. Goodness doesn’t lie in enormous sacrifices (although those do occur). It lies in the small things, in how you live your everyday life.

Because this is not rare, it is often thought of as banal. But it isn’t. Destruction, evil, no matter how grand the scale, no matter how carefully planned, is not creative. It cannot be. Destruction is the ground state of the universe. Entropy gets everything in the end. No matter how it is carried out, it is evil that is banal. All evil does is speed up what the universe will do sooner or later anyway.

It is quiet acts of goodness and kindness that are transgressive, revolutionary. It is loving your neighbor as yourself, it is visiting the sick, tending to the injured, being a peacemaker, showing your love of God through seeing His image in the countenance of the guy in front of you in the grocery store, or the immigrant the next street over, or the screaming toddler kicking your seat on the airplane.

We often mark 9/11 by tipping our caps to the first responders, to the kids who signed up at the Marine recruiting office and went off to fight terrorism overseas, to the passengers who fought back. And this isn’t wrong, but it’s far from complete. We must also remember every kind act, every apple brown betty baked and given away, every hug, every phone call checking in on loved ones — and every one of the million, billion, trillion caring acts since. Because it is those acts that build and rebuild society, that fight against the dying of the light. So when you think about how to best commemorate the day, consider:

The act most alien to evil is kindness.

- Carl Glen Henshaw

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“In the Resurrection, the power of Love overcomes all evil."
Easter Letter of the Minister General, 2017

The Power of Love Overcomes All Evil

https://ofm.org/blog/easter-letter-2017/

Posted at April 15, 2017 in

Featured, Letters, Letters & Homilies,

Minister General, News

“If, then, we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. We know that Christ, raised from the dead, dies no more; death no longer has power over him” (Rom 6: 8-9)

My dear Brothers and friends,

Alleluia! In our Easter commemoration, we celebrate the events of the life, suffering, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Like the faithful women who stood by Jesus in death and who were the first witnesses to the resurrection, we too recognize in these paschal events the dawning of a new hope for the life of the world, a world torn apart by divisions and conflicts, a world God has chosen to love unconditionally (Jn 3:16). In the resurrection, the power of love overcomes all evil.

We stand as believers and followers of Jesus giving witness to an alternative vision of life, an alternative way of living in this world, guided by the Spirit of God. We recall that it is this same Spirit of God who is present at the moment of the creation of the world. This same Spirit is present in the events of the annunciation of the birth of the Messiah to Mary, the Mother of Jesus. It is the Spirit who accompanies Jesus throughout his life on earth, inspiring his preaching and teaching, his simple acts of kindness and love. It is the Spirit who accompanies Jesus along the road to Golgotha, witnessing Jesus’ suffering and humiliating death on the cross. It is the Spirit of God who remains with Jesus through death and burial, demonstrating unwavering love for the only beloved Son who gives his live in love in order that the world might be reconciled to itself and to God. And it is the Spirit who raises the Son to life anew (Rom 8:11).

This Holy Spirit who was present in every moment in the life of Jesus, from life to death and to new life, is also present in our world today. The resurrection is the definitive sign of God’s fidelity to the Son, to each of us, and to all of creation. We have need of this message today more than ever: God loves us, is walking with us, healing our wounds, calling us to live reconciled lives with all people, called to be messengers of love, mercy, and peace.

The Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead continues to carry on the work of the Father and the Son, reminding us that divisions, violence, hatred, destruction, and death do not have the final word; they are not the victors. In the resurrection of Jesus, we receive the final confirmation that love and only love is the final victor, and the ultimate vocation to which we are called. I witnessed this in the lives of our brothers and sisters living in Damascus, Aleppo, and Latakia in Syria these past days. In the midst of death and destruction on a cataclysmic scale, the Christians of Syria who have lost loved ones, homes, and livelihood refuse to submit to the temptation of abandoning God, their faith, and their commitment to pursue a path towards reconciliation and reconstruction. They stand with Mary Magdalene before the empty tomb; they search for meaning in the total absence of all that might seem rational and human; they run to the community of faith where they share stories of discouragement and despair, hope and love, and where in the Eucharist they discover, as did the disciples of Emmaus, the presence of the risen Lord Jesus who never abandons them, never abandons those who have been called into relationship with Him.

My dear brothers and friends, let us take to heart the words from the Sequence, Victim paschali laudes:

“Christians, to the Pascal Victim offer sacrifice and praise. The sheep are ransomed by the Lamb and Christ the undefiled, hath sinners to his Father reconciled. Death with life contended: combat strangely ended! Life’s own Champion, slain, yet lives to reign. Tell us Mary: say what thou didst see upon the way. The tomb the Living did enclose; I saw Christ’s glory as he rose! The angels there attesting; shroud with grave-clothes resting. Christ, my hope, has risen: he goes before you in Galilee. That Christ is truly risen from the dead we know. Victorious king, thy mercy show! Amen! Alleluia!”

He is truly risen! His love and mercy are victorious!

A blessed and joy-filled Easter to all!

Fraternally,

Bro. Michael A. Perry, OFM

Minister General and Servant

Rome, 15 April 2017

Vigil of Easter

Forums for Diversity - The Challenge for Birding Societies Everywhere

The racist legacy many birds carry

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2021/bird-names-racism-audubon/

The birding community faces a difficult debate about the names of species connected to enslavers, supremacists and grave robbers

By 

Darryl Fears

June 3, 2021

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Corina Newsome is a Black ornithologist, as rare as some of the birds she studies.

When she joined Georgia Audubon last year, the group’s executive director called her hiring a first step to “begin working to break down barriers” so that people from all communities can fully enjoy birding and the outdoors.

But overcoming those barriers will be daunting. As with the wider field of conservation, racism and colonialism are in ornithology’s DNA, indelibly linked to its origin story. The challenge of how to move forward is roiling White ornithologists as they debate whether to change as many as 150 eponyms, names of birds that honor people with connections to slavery and supremacy.

The Bachman’s sparrow, Wallace’s fruit dove and other winged creatures bear the names of men who fought for the Southern cause, stole skulls from Indian graves for pseudoscientific studies that were later debunked, and bought and sold Black people. Some of these men stoked violence and participated in it without consequence.

Even John James Audubon’s name is fraught in a nation embroiled in a racial reckoning. Long the most recognized figure in North American birding for his detailed drawings of the continent’s species, he was also an enslaver who mocked abolitionists working to free Black people. Some of his behavior is so shameful that the 116-year-old National Audubon Society — the country’s premier bird conservation group, with 500 local chapters — hasn’t ruled out changing its name. An oriole, warbler and shearwater all share it.

“I am deeply troubled by the racist actions of John James Audubon and recognize how painful that legacy is for Black, Indigenous and people of color who are part of our staff, volunteers, donors and members,” interim chief executive Elizabeth Gray said in a statement in May. “Although we have begun to address this part of our history, we have a lot more to unpack.”

For Newsome, community engagement manager for Georgia Audubon, the pain is real. When she first wore her organization’s work shirt, “I felt like I was wearing the name of an oppressor,” she said, “the name of someone who enslaved my ancestors.”

She and other ornithologists of color deal with added layers of discomfort while doing research. Alex Troutman, a Black graduate student at Georgia Southern University, says he goes out of his way to smile and wave at every White passerby when he’s in a marsh or field “to appear as least threatening as possible” and ease suspicions that he shouldn’t be there.

Corina Newsome, an ornithologist and community engagement manager for Georgia Audubon, is pushing to make her profession more diverse and inclusive. (Nydia Blas for The Washington Post)

Ornithologist Olivia Wang, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, says her field’s troubling, racist past must be addressed. (Michelle Mishina for The Washington Post)

Offensive eponyms compound that sense of not belonging. Despite professional and amateur birding groups’ declared commitment to diversity, only two names have been discarded.

The Townsend’s warbler and the Townsend’s solitaire still invoke John Kirk Townsend, whose journals detail his exploits in traditional Native Americans burial grounds in the West. Townsend, a Philadelphia-born ornithologist in the early 1800s, dug up and collected skulls for studies that sought to prove the inferiority of Indigenous people.

The Wallace’s owlet and five other birds honor Alfred Russel Wallace, a British naturalist, explorer and anthropologist credited, along with Charles Darwin, for conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection. Wallace’s writings frequently used the n-word, including in reference to the “little brown hairy baby” he boasted about caring for after fatally shooting her mother during an 1855 trip to the Malay Archipelago. Some historians believe they were orangutans.

Three birds, including the crimson Jameson’s firefinch, are named after another British naturalist involved in a heinous act committed against a young girl he purchased as “a joke” in 1888 during an expedition in Africa. James Sligo Jameson wrote in his journal that the girl was then given to a group of natives described to him as cannibals. He drew sketches of the child being stabbed and dismembered.

“Conservation has been driven by white patriarchy,” said J. Drew Lanham, a Black ornithologist and professor at Clemson University in South Carolina, “this whole idea of calling something a wilderness after you move people off it or exterminate them and that you get to take ownership.”

Lanham views the issues as part of a much larger historic pattern, one connected to the White enslavers who renamed Africans kidnapped from that continent’s West Coast. “They renamed an entire people” — cancel culture on a global scale, he noted.

In Honolulu, ornithologist Olivia Wang is equally harsh. She regards the honorifics that birds carry with disdain.

“They are a reminder that this field that I work in was primarily developed and shaped by people not like me, who probably would have viewed me as lesser,” said Wang, an Asian American graduate student at the University of Hawaii. “They are also a reminder of how Western ornithology, and natural exploration in general, was often tied to a colonialist mind-set of conquering and exploiting and claiming ownership of things rather than learning from the humans who were already part of the ecosystem and had been living alongside these birds for lifetimes.”

Indeed, White explorers, conservationists and scientists who crossed the world conveniently ignored the fact that birds had been discovered, named and observed by native people for centuries before their arrival.

To the Cherokee, eagles are the awâ'hili and crows are kâgû. The English common name for the chickadee is a butchered translation of the Cherokee name, tsïkïlïlï. Similar-sounding names for other birds that English speakers renamed or mispronounced are scattered throughout East Coast tribes.

Europeans named birds as though they were human possessions, but American Indians regard them differently. The red-tail hawk in some languages is uwes’ la’ oski, a word that translates to “lovesick,” because one of its calls sounded like a person who lost a partner.

“A whole lot of Native people, in thinking about birds, don’t open a book of science. Their book of science is in the knowledge possessed by people in generations before them, the elders,” said Shepard Krech III, a professor emeritus at Brown University and author of “Spirits of the Air.”

Bird lovers have agitated to change eponyms linked to racists for several years but have encountered resistance.

It would cause confusion in the profession and among casual birders, opponents said. Books and ledgers would have to be revised, and people would have to learn new names. Only twice have such objections been overcome and the American Ornithological Society approved a switch. The first was for the oldsquaw, a species of waterfowl now known as the long-tailed duck. And last summer, the McCown’s longspur became the thick-billed longspur — the first time a name with a Confederate past was dropped.

By then, a confrontation in New York City had linked race and birding in an ugly way. In May 2020, Christian Cooper, a Black birder in Central Park, was falsely accused of threatening behavior by a White woman who called police on him after he asked her to leash her dog.

An expedition to Africa in the late 1880s, during which a young girl was cruelly killed, forever stained naturalist James Sligo Jameson's reputation. (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

John James Audubon, long the most recognized figure in American birding, is now being reconsidered for his abhorrent views and actions against Black people during the early 1800s. (Bettmann Archive)

For the leaders of Audubon, the American Ornithological Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, among other groups, systemic racism had hit home.

At the same time, activists in the ranks were growing more aggressive in opposing the eponyms. One of the loudest voices was that of Jordan Rutter, a White co-founder of Bird Names for Birds. She wanted to upend the society committee that names a species and reconsiders historic names.

“White people are credited for discovering [the birds]. White people were the ones to name the birds after other White people. And White people are still the folks that are perpetuating these names,” Rutter said in a recent interview.

A decade ago, that same committee unanimously refused to rename the Maui parrotbill, criticizing the proposed kiwikiu as “contrived,” ridiculous and hard to pronounce. As part of last year’s awakening, activists sought an actual transcript of the debate but were denied. “I called out the AOS and NACC for censoring some racist and offensive comments the [committee] made when discussing the … proposal,” Wang said, referring to the American Ornithological Society and its North American Classification Committee.

The society has since publicly apologized for those and other insensitive comments.

It is clear that leaders in the profession are listening more closely to the protests — and preparing to act. Audubon and the American Bird Conservancy, where Rutter works, have looked inward at their near-total lack of diversity and vowed to change. The American Ornithological Society pledged to “redoubl[e] our efforts toward making ornithology, birding, and access to the natural world equitable and inclusive.”

This spring, society president Mike Webster announced that the internal group responsible for bird names will now be guided by an advisory committee composed of people of different backgrounds — although 13 of the 17 advisers are White and the ethnicities of the four others have not been identified.

The new panel is “not just because we want to feel good about ourselves,” said Webster, who is White. “We see it [as] critically important to understanding and conserving birds. It’s critically important that we have a diversity of people out there doing it.”

A virtual panel discussion took place in April. Every major birding organization was represented, and 535 people joined from around the country as a majority of the panelists — nearly all of them White — agreed that it was time to move beyond racist eponyms.

Jeff Gordon, president of the American Birding Association, stressed that North America lost 3 billion birds over the past 50 years and that saving what’s left will need people of every ethnicity and background to be involved. “The biggest threat birds face … [is] being ignored to death,” he said. “Not enough people know and not enough people care.”

There is no timeline for decisions about the worst eponyms, but the discussion seems unlikely to wane, given participants such as Rutter and Newsome. Within days of the incident in Central Park last year, Newsome helped organize a very public declaration dubbed Black Birders Week — an event that quickly became a viral movement. By happenstance, it took place amid nationwide demonstrations and calls for racial justice following George Floyd’s death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer.

The 28-year-old again took part in this year’s Black Birders Week, which began last weekend. She is encouraged by ornithology’s increasing focus on diversity and racism. She hopes it will soon extend to what the National Audubon Society and its chapters call themselves. “I believe they should both absolutely change the name. It feels wrong to enter African American communities … celebrating [Audubon’s] name,” she said. “It’s a reality I am wrestling with constantly.”

Yet far more progress is needed. Heads still turn when Newsome is in the field, observing birds. “I’m always questioned, in a seemingly friendly way, ‘Oh, what are you doing out here?’ ”

On urban and rural trails, she quickly lifts her binoculars when she sees White people do a double-take. In a scorching Georgia marsh where she slogs through muck to study a seaside sparrow, she shifts heavy equipment to the side of her body that faces the roadway so suspicious White motorists “won’t think I’m doing something illegal and make trouble for me.”

Across the muddy water is the Brunswick neighborhood where Ahmaud Arbery, a Black jogger, was chased down and fatally shot in February 2020. Three White men have been indicted in the case. Newsome remembers driving past the neighborhood after the killing as she again headed toward the marsh.

“I felt like my soul couldn’t take being there anymore,” she said. “Like a Black person can’t even be what they’re called to be without encountering such violence.”

CORRECTION

An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the location of an 1855 expedition by Alfred Russel Wallace as Africa; it was the Malay Archipelago. In addition, some historians believe that the mother and baby Wallace wrote about in demeaning human terms during his trip were orangutans. The story has been corrected.

About this story

Story editing by Susan Levine. Photo editing by Olivier Laurent. Copy editing by Carrie Camillo. Design and development by Leo Dominguez.

Bird photos by iStockphoto/Getty Images.

Darryl FearsFollow

Darryl Fears is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter on the national staff who covers environmental justice. Over more than two decades at the Post, he has covered the Interior Department, the Chesapeake Bay, urban affairs and race & demographics. In that role, he helped conceptualize a multiple award-winning project, "Being A Black Man."