Tag Archives: anthropology

by | November 25, 2008 · 2:46 pm

SOUND OF PLAY

I was dumping audio from my Zoom H4 digital recorder, and, lo-and-behold, there was an environmental recording on it etched from placing my backpack with the recorder in it next to the chain link backstop on the Freeplay softball diamond. I blogged in November about that endeavor.

What’s neat is how the recording captures lots of aural evidence that supports the hypothesis of the Kolb’s paper. This is expected, yet the reduction of the life world of the softball game for the sake of research is one thing, with its data set drawn from interviews and recollected impressions, whereas the capture of the aural environs is altogether more directly related to the real time life world!

(This reminded me that ethnographic documentation is drawn from the more robust “multi-sensorial” analog direct experience of the participant-observer.)

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by | May 5, 2008 · 4:08 am

PROCESS OF CIVIC LOVE

The Heights Observer, like the Lakewood paper, is written by citizens, who use AGS’s web-based program to upload stories and photographs onto a server. Volunteer editors read the content, post stories to the paper’s web site and design newspaper pages, all via the Internet.

The volunteers and low overhead will allow the Heights Observer to keep costs low, said Deanna Bremer Fisher, executive director of FutureHeights, a nonprofit dedicated to improving life in Cleveland Heights. (May 5th, Crain’s Cleveland Business, Citizen-produced Observer catching on With three new editions on tap, company’s publisher envisions an edition “in every town’ Chuck Soder)

The Lakewood Observer is vigorously seeding its model. Leveraging creative and executive intelligence along with Lakewood’s innovative publishing software, other communities are taking up the task of building civic chops* via the model of volunteer journalism and voluntary engagement.

  • civic chops::creative, cognitive, artistic, emotional, disciplinary, abilities and capacities–focused upon the development of community self-knowledge, self-awareness, and knowledge creation.

I rode with the Lakewood Visionary Alignment for its, as I see it, second chapter. From my anthropological-adult learning perspective the interesting aspect I’ll continue to track is how–overall– journalistic reports will tend to either accentuate or mitigate knowledge creation, and, how does reportage deeply ramify civic engagement.

All sorts of challenges crop up on the path toward realizing civic self-knowledge. The central cross purpose comes up in the flux between the wish to elevate the positive “brand,” and the more veracious wish to uncover whatever knowledge might find its way into the, so-called, Civic Open Source.

  • Civic Brand::attractive community identity; in terms we developed, thus the brand is the civic persona presented as the face of the civic imago–the imago then is the source of manifest collective identity and identity in-potentia.
  • Civic Open Source is a coinage::knowledge is radically democratized, made accessible, is shared, and is freely subject to re-configuration and re-use.

I noted in 2005 that well intentioned civic-promotion (in Lakewood,) would surely clash with the inspirational desire to achieve civic self-knowledge and community awareness. This follows simply from recognition of those aspects of civic life that form the undercurrent of the civic shadow; manifested as the Other, constituting alterity at the scale of community.

The point of inspiration was predicated on unleashing community researchers into both the lit up and darkened corners of the community, and then allowing any findings to stream through the uncensored process. Much of this thrust followed from having a core group turned on by the idea of a city coming to know its self better than any other. And, I knew going into it, that cross purposed desires would be compelled to negotiate and self-organize accomodation along the way.

How it sorts itself out has everything to do with the implicit group relations that contextualize the psychological negotiation of points of emphasis. In this sense, the community newspaper is, every time its published, the fruit of such negotiation. This is a fascinating underlay because in this group arise learning processes. At the end of the day to sustain civic chops is to nurture capacity in the context of the group and via the group’s various and variable intentions, desires, and labors of love. Praxis.

Along with this comes the prospect of securing better civic engagement and cohesion by virtue of, in effect, self-selected journalists and researchers, working, acting ‘on the city.’ Given my prejudices, this could effect re-personalization; a term of Paolo Freire having to do with a socially unified critique of the givenness of the social environment causing transformations of awareness stood against de-personalization. With respective to this, collective action is aimed to liberate, and so the negotiation between boosting of and boasting about the given, and, critically conscious confrontation with the received functions and facilities of the extant given communitas deeply explicate the variance in hope and hazard between sustenance of this given, and, disruptive transformative learning.

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by | April 20, 2008 · 12:12 pm

FOLK ETHNOGRAPHY

Just as there is the term folk psychology, meaning the subjective psychological assumptions and models individuals deploy to navigate the interpersonal universe, there could be the term folk anthropology to designate the subjective assumptions each of us deploys to understand the human universe.

Mr. Obama got himself in a lot of hot water recently when he waxed ‘anthropologically’ in just such an informal, subjective mode.

He answered a questioner with these now infamous remarks:

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

The offered stereotype probably does fit some people, but the error in anthropology, (Aside from the tactical error,) was described neatly by Obama, his choice of words was “inartful.”

My experience is folk anthropology is almost always at least inartful, artless. The reason is that there really isn’t any presumptive method other than what kinds of descriptions can be made to hang together out of both experience and other received data. And, it gets kicked along uncritically and often prejudices and biases and logical faults of attribution bang one’s findings into new and oft ridiculous shape.

A higher order folk anthropology would remain subjective but would be leavened by a critical sensibility. My sense is this is a skills set that can be taught and I’ve done so, yet lacking even an ability to focus on rich data rather than surface data, it is no surprise poor data gets reduced to stereotypes.

Although Obama has been advised by hundreds that, next time, his social analysis should be expressed as a matter of empathy, I’d go farther and suggest that any anthropological insights be rendered in as rich and nuanced a description as possible given the context.

His faulted remarks don’t exist at the vaunted level–in a negative sense–of the truly cynical and condescending anthropological musings of the pundits. They, to a man and a woman, are always standing up for, “Joe Six Pack.”  I’m confident the descriptions underneath this term would be appallingly incorrect. I see no evidence that the punditry has even the slightest clue about what’s going on with most people outside the pundit’s obvious bubble. Bubbles. Elitist bubbles.

As soon as Obama was taken to task for calling people bitter, the punditry weighed in with what these same people were going to feel in response to being called bitter. At least Obama has some data to go on! But the punditry traffics in all sorts of “ur-stereotypes” and so it was both not surprising and shocking to hear almost every cable commentator, and Mrs. Clinton, repeat Obama’s mistake by suggesting they knew how the subject in fact ticks. B.S.

The crucial practice of informal anthropology is careful inquiry unhooked from any of the biases which can be identified and ‘put away’ prior to the inquiry. The point is to reduce the influence of the filtering grid one normally interposes in an informal inquiry, i.e. how one comes to know by coming to ask. Any worthwhile inquiry done over 10 to 30 minutes will reveal the human subject to almost always be complicated in affect, cognition, and overall configuration. The point of a focused inquiry is to discern and differentiate particularity and then piece together the human operations and higher levels of order and at larger scales.

This is too much to ask of politicians of course. Still, most tossed-away ‘ethnography’ in the commons and in public discourse is worse than Obama’s attempt to highlight an actual socioeconomic predicament and its affectual and routine consequences.

As for elitism, it’s not so simple; J.K. Galbraith wrote in 1971:

Among all the world’s races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong.

 

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by | March 8, 2008 · 12:16 pm

COULD A COMMUNITY BE AN ART FORM?

City Poem

community poetry

Having intended to get a clear shot unencumbered by glare or rain, I still missed out clearly capturing this sign in the window of the library annex in Cleveland Heights.

Could a community be an art form?

I believe it it could be. Even better, with the deployment of intention, chops, communal creativity and spontaneous poetics fused to curiosity and critical consciousness, and vitalized by intrepid community ‘street researchers,’ a city could begin the adventure of knowing itself anew.

Lo and behold: the example of Lakewood, Ohio presents itself three years down this path. There the Visionary Alignment informs the Lakewood Observer project. I’ve written here on occasion about this; see the topic entries for civic intelligence.

Lo and behold redux, in the land of my family, Cleveland Heights, from which I bounce and bounce back, the observer aesthetic has been planted. How interesting, “how worth observing” says the transformative anthropologist to himself.

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by | December 11, 2007 · 8:54 pm

CIRCULATORY DYNAMIC

Gandy’s last paragraph trails a terrific, dare I suggest, essential, paper in urban Geo-Anthropology. Gandy is a Geographer.

Under the twentieth-century discourses of scientific urbanism and technological modernism we find that the hydraulic conceptions of the modern city were extended and consolidated to produce a highly sophisticated model of urban space as an efficient machine. In reality, however, the evolving dynamics of urban space from the middle decades of the twentieth century onwards became increasingly difficult to subsume within the technocratic assumptions of the bacteriological city. A combination of political, economic and social developments, which gathered accelerated momentum in the wake of global economic turbulence of the 1970s, contributed towards the emergence of a set of new configurations between space, society and technology. The role of water within this process of urban restructuring reveals a series of tensions between the abstract commodification of space and the continuing centrality of material interactions between human societies and technological networks. By focusing on the flow of water through urban space we can begin to disentangle the nexus of social and technological structures that constitute everyday life in the modern city and the creation of a viable public realm. What is clear, however, is that the relationship between the development of urban infrastructure and a functional public realm is a fragile and historically specific phenomenon. The need to connect policy deliberation over water infrastructure with the establishment of effective and legitimate space promoted by political and economic elites.
CITY, VOL. 8, NO. 3, DECEMBER 2004 Rethinking urban metabolism: Water, space and the modern city
Matthew Gandy

Some of his very thought provoking work is available here. I also recommend from this index, Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City.

More, from: The Drowned World. J. G. Ballard and the Politics of Catastrophe;

The paradox for the contemporary city is that only incessant inputs of energy, materials, and human labor can sustain complex technological networks, yet these maintenance activities require far-reaching governmental interventions that conflict with the neoliberal impetus toward the corporate disavowal of the public realm. Under a postsecular urbanism, the public realm persists as a fragile anachronism and potential threat to the hubris of transcendental capitalism. Where no collective imaginary exists, the arguments for any kind of coordinating role for the state lose their political legitimacy, so that society is little more than an amalgam of individuals linked by fear and self-interest. In 21st-century America, we encounter a postrational political discourse that rejects evidence or reason: the Bush administration had forced deep cuts in the budget appropriation for the maintenance of the New Orleans flood defenses—in part to fund the war in Iraq—and had disregarded expert advice on the scale of the risk even to the extent of claiming that the event could not have been foreseen. More bizarre still, the now discredited director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown, had claimed 4 days after the flood that he was unaware that thousands of people were trapped in the city’s convention center (despite images being broadcast throughout the world).

The case of New Orleans reveals the fragility of the postindustrial public realm: the city presents a starker illustration of this than many other U.S. cities because of its pervasive poverty, social segregation, and moribund municipal government. In the wake of the city’s inundation, New Orleans was effectively abandoned and then transformed into a militarized zone through the colonization of inner urban areas once inhabited by the poor, while wealthy suburbs were quickly cordoned off by a plethora of private security firms to produce social exclusion zones. These security firms present the first wave of a “disaster capitalism” to be followed by companies such as Kellogg Brown & Root (a subsidiary of Halliburton) and other specialists in posttrauma reconstruction who began winning “no bid” contracts within days of the flooding. Like a militarized gentrification process, the real estate developers have followed the civil engineering companies, so that “trauma capitalism” has become a tool of urban redevelopment not unlike the role of riots in Indian cities: what fire achieved in Ahmadabad, water performed in New Orleans.

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by | November 30, 2007 · 6:39 pm

HEAVY-TAILED

I’ve added Three-Toed Sloth to the blogroll. It’s written by Cosma Shalizi, a professor at Carnegie Mellon. His research interests don’t at all dovetail with my own; to whit: “Information theory; nonparametric prediction of time series; learning theory and nonlinear dynamics; stochastic automata, state space and hidden Markov models; causation and prediction; large deviations and ergodic theory; neuroscience; statistical mechanics; complex networks; heavy-tailed distributions.”

From November 30, Shalizi wrote:

Science is systematic and cumulative inquiry into what the world is like and how it works, and by and large one that succeeds in producing increasingly reliable and refined knowledge about the world. This is marvelous and inspiring, but it’s still a social process implemented by East African Plains Apes [and some of their tools], and it’s wise to be realistic about the implications of this fact.

Here Dr. Shalizi does dovetail nicely with my anthropological sense. He contributes a pointer to another example of behavior tending to square information processing, interpretation and problem-solving application. I’ve pointed out elsewhere in reply to others’ philosophizing about Intelligent Design and Science how the antecedents to scientific behavior are proto-scientific behaviors. These require no apriori commitment to axiomatic naturalism. They do require cognitive functions and in turn the basis seems to be retention and interpretation, manipulation, response, to retained data.

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by | September 10, 2007 · 5:13 am

THEN THERE WAS THE TIME WHEN IT COULDN’T EXIST

Found via Chris Harrison’s Interrogating Nature

Religion’s evolutionary landscape:
Counterintuition, commitment,
compassion, communion

Scott Atran
CNRS–Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, France and Institute for Social
Research–University of Michigan
Ara Norenzayan
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia

1. Introduction
In every society,1 there are
1. Widespread counterfactual and counterintuitive beliefs
in supernatural agents (gods, ghosts, goblins, etc.)
2. Hard-to-fake public expressions of costly material
commitments to supernatural agents, that is, offering and
sacrifice (offerings of goods, property, time, life)
3. Mastering by supernatural agents of people’s existential
anxieties (death, deception, disease, catastrophe, pain,
loneliness, injustice, want, loss)
4. Ritualized, rhythmic sensory coordination of (1), (2),
and (3), that is, communion (congregation, intimate fellowship,
etc.)
In all societies there is an evolutionary canalization and
convergence of (1), (2), (3), and (4) that tends toward what
we shall refer to as “religion”; that is, passionate communal
displays of costly commitments to counterintuitive worlds
governed by supernatural agents. Although these facets of
religion emerge in all known cultures and animate the majority
of individual human beings in the world, there are
considerable individual and cultural differences in the degree
of religious commitment. The question as to the origin
and nature of these intriguing and important differences
we leave open.
This theoretical framework drives our program of research.
2

full paper

Many times I have suggested to discussants to imaginally step back into time one step at a time to that point when their favored religion, philosophy, metaphysical system, ontology, did not likely exist, even could not have existed. One doesn’t have to step back too far even if the stream of evidence itself disappears into the archaeological record. I’m okay with the speculative posit that any symbolic artifacts may well imply existential thoughtfulness.

But, then, the symbolic disappears.

I’m never surprised when I learn people haven’t thought about the historical problem of, (my terms,) cognitive genesis of systematic belief. This problem lurks to encumber the creation myths and folk psychological prejudices of all sorts of unrelated fundamentalists and quasi-fundamentalists, folks like religionists, Jungians, integralists, and esotericists.

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by | May 27, 2007 · 6:31 am

FOLK ANTHROPOLOGY

Lakewood Ohio’s Visionary Alignment often finds its grip on the Observation Deck of the Lakewood Observer, the city’s all volunteer community newspaper. A thread there, unfolding since May 12, Race, Courage and the Future of Lakewood exemplifies the spirit of deep inquiry that is one of the core facets of this project.

The Visionary Alignment is about marshalling citizen-centric inquisitive resources for the sake of developing community understanding. When I was a part of the project close to its inception in 2005, I suggested that if a community implemented enough informal anthropological capability, its energetics would be transformed and, over time, the deep processes of relationship between and among residents, institutions would also change. A second supposition is: this would also alter the ecology of the city’s socio-cultural and economic and political economies.

This long discussion is extremely important and worth close attention. It is possible that Lakewood is among the very few communities in the US with the chutzpah and commitment and devotion to proceed to dialog openly and with a certain genius about some of the most difficult issues post-industrial suburbs are faced with today.

Back in 2005, we dreamed about how processes of inquiry could be designed and implemented by non-professional investigators. At the time, it seemed such a folk anthropology would require training investigators in how to make inquiries, document them, and interpret data without infecting any part of the process with too much pre-conceived prejudice, cognitive biases, and impulsive agendas. One thing we put on the table was the possibility that high school students could lead the effort.

This remains an excellent idea and I’m reminded how valuable a little bit of training in anthropological method and in social cognitive psychology could be.

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by | April 18, 2007 · 4:51 am

NIGHT COLOR MUSIC

The Gnawa are a syncretic sect inflected by elements of Mystical Islam and North African local religious themes. In the West they have become well known for their public music, based in rugged hypnotic pentatonic vamps played on the guembri, a kind of proto-lute with a rubbery twang, and accompanied by percussion, singing and the clatter of metal clappers called krakebs.

It’s literally entrancing music. Gnawa music is embedded in holistic cultural practices but the Gnawa have also hit the road to great acclaim, playing ensemble music for audiences worldwide. The American jazz musician, the musical and physical giant Randy Weston has integrated Gnawa music in his own compositions. I first heard the Gnawa sound via Weston, and also had the great pleasure of hearing him lecture on the Gnawa. After the lecture we shared a moment talking about the picture of trance music in North and South Africa. This made for a memorable afternoon and set me off to investigate the musical culture of North Africa and the Sahel.

There are lots of good resources on the web. Number one is Gnawa Stories

Shamanic practitioner Nicholas Breeze Wood provides a concise overview of the Gnawa music ceremony in Acrobat form.

I’ve incorporated a section on Berber and Gnawa music in my Rhythm River programs.

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by | April 14, 2007 · 9:20 am

OPEN EYE IN LAKEWOOD

I had occasion to contribute some thoughts to the Observation Deck of the Lakewood (Ohio) Observer, a all-volunteer, community newspaper. I was briefly and memorably involved in early efforts to develop civic intelligence there. Lakewood remains one of those special urban places. Snug againt Cleveland proper and Lake Erie, Lakewood is still the most densely populated city between New York and Chicago, even as its population has dropped significantly over forty years.

This comment doesn’t require its context because it drifts away from the original context. Still, for the first time I offer here a sketch of one of my core conceptions, Transformative Anthropology.

We did an experiment in the summer of 2005 where folk anthropologists were briefly trained to go out into the community and listen to Lakewood’s human lifestream.

Three functional phases were implemented:

(1) Inclusive — to take the lifestream as it naturally arose from sidewalk, venue, backyard, back door, etc. The ordinate for this was not to pick and choose; thus it was to include, be inclusive, take it in as it presented itself.

(2) Receptive — to be open and present to this lifestream, so as to navigate the human universe attentively, and to defer filtering and interpretation.

(3) Culmination — (or integration) To substantiate the moment of interaction as a deep play of consciousness upon consciousness.

(These three phases constitute the somewhat oxymoronic, novel, open source, Transformative Anthropology.)

The frame of reference for this was/is: the community coming to know itself. The bar was raised very high too. This was visualized at the time as the city come to know itself better than any other.

Only in retrospect, after having harshly deactivated myself, do I step back and–yet–continue to recognize how audacious this founding, rapturous conceit is. The LO carries this effort forward. It remains out of the ordinary for any community to deploy its intelligence for the sake of really knowing itself.

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by | December 9, 2006 · 10:44 am

ZEITGEIST

With exquisite timing, Google today released its year-end Zeitgeist report, revealing “our collective consciousness” as expressed through our searches. The list of our top-ten news searches of the year provides a delightful preview of what we can expect when those dastardly news editors finally stop filtering the news and let “us” decide what we need to know:

1. paris hilton
2. orlando bloom
3. cancer
4. podcasting
5. hurricane katrina
6. bankruptcy
7. martina hingis
8. autism
9. 2006 nfl draft
10. celebrity big brother 2006

via Rough Type

This itemization has caused many commentators some dismay. With my anthropologist’s beanie on, I find this top ten to simply represent a very concise slice about where attention is directed. This means it’s interesting for what it overtly shows and what is tacitly underneath.

The ten pieces here are at turns lurid, idealized, sad, fatalistic, personal and trivial. It doesn’t seem to me to be a very profound comment on the Zeitgeist to be dismayed at the shallowness implicit in the averaging factor of a google top ten! Although a top one thousand would be more to the point, this thin slice shows the Zeitgeist to be summarily conflicted about matters of youth, identity, fate, and mortality. Good Jungian take with a puella/puer in the top two spots.

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by | December 5, 2006 · 4:37 am

UP UP AND AWAY

Wouldn’t you like to ride in my beautiful balloon
Wouldn’t you like to ride in my beautiful balloon
We could float among the stars together, you and I
For we can fly we can fly
Up, up and away
My beautiful, my beautiful balloon
The world’s a nicer place in my beautiful balloon
It wears a nicer face in my beautiful balloon
We can sing a song and sail along the silver sky
For we can fly we can fly
Up, up and away
My beautiful, my beautiful balloon
Suspended under a twilight canopy
We’ll search the clouds for a star to guide us
If by some chance you find yourself loving me
We’ll find a cloud to hide us
We’ll keep the moon beside us
Love is waiting there in my beautiful balloon
Way up in the air in my beautiful balloon
If you’ll hold my hand we’ll chase your dream across the sky
For we can fly we can fly
Up, up and away
My beautiful, my beautiful balloon
Balloon…
Up, up, and away…..
-Jimmy Webb

I find fundamentalisms to be amusing. They are so whether they are religious, Bright-minded and hyper rationalistic, or psychologically systematic. I have been fortunate (or cursed,) to have a lot of exposure to the weird and the wonderful and the unexplicable, yet, about absolute matters and both first and final things, I am agnostic. Any opinions I have are tentative, but my prejudice does favor a minimal capability enabled to understand what is demonstrably and reasonably widely applicable and what is, surely, not known to be certainly universal.

When I was 21 I had dinner with a friend and his wife and another couple. This second couple was literally led by the husband, a twenty-something Navy officer several years out of Annapolis. He worked as a weapons coordinator at Portsmouth naval shipyard. He also was a dominionist. He laid it all out how a Christian God stood, for him, firstly over everything including history itself, so-to-speak. I thought nothing of it except that the only proof he spoke of us was the truth of the bible. And, he told us it would end badly for the infidel and, just maybe, the US Navy might have to weigh in on the side of the about-to-return, sword bearing, Jesus. He sure hoped he might get a chance to rain some hellfire on the unsaved.

Scroll forward through many other encounters, each one characterized by the same “proof”. Such intellectual silliness is hardly worth challenging. For example, intelligent design proffers not even a single coherent contest of evolution. And it’s whole primary frame is supernaturalistic expicalicreationist. Heck, the other morning on the local NPR station a minister stated that evolution could not be true because nobody was around to observe it. I thought it was a delicious moment of solipsism, but the caller on the line fumbled the golden opportunity to shoot fish in the barrel.

I have friends and colleagues who are much more anxious about Jesusmanic religious fundamentalism, 21st century revival-style. Not me. The problem with the prospect for a theocracy is demographic and generational. A friend of mine is the son of pentacostals and he chose sex over snakes at 15. Doh.

This week I watched Jesus Camp, (official site,) a movie mostly about a crazed youth minister, Becky Fischer. Her game is to indoctrinate 5-15 year old kids and make them into Christian warriors in the Manichean war of saved Jesus peeps against unbelievers. Among many chilling sequences are two that leap out. The first is when she expresses envy of Islam because the Muslims, according to Fischer, have the kiddie indoctrination process down cold. The second is when she forthrightly admits that the end game of God’s design isn’t compatible with democracy.

But what the theocrats are up against is the increasing plural and cosmopolitan character of the U.S. As well, the generation galvanized to fearfulness by free love and freely chosen spirituality and freaks and, heck, the enlightenment, are aging. Ask any twenty-year-old about the counterculture of the sixties and how it has impacted them.

Sure, there is a wedge strategy to take over South Carolina, and, evidently, some of the suburbs of Colorado Springs have already ‘fallen,’ yet, over the next decade or so, the aging evangelical babyboomer, (see the red and blue political maps for 1972 and 2004,) and the generation X evangelical will go into fast decline. Fischer will not be able to create her warriors fast enough to war against culturally tolerant, hedonistic generations Y & Z.

Rapture gallery time.

Ask the aces question of any fundamentalist of any heuristic stripe: “Is your God, model, system, view, knowledge, required to also be my God (etc.)?” See if you’re forced to point out that something held to be truly universally applicable can only be true if it is truly universally applicable.

If my intuition is wrong and I end up in hell for eternity, so be it. If hell is good enough for Ronald Reagan and JFK –if there be a hellish there, there–it’s good enough for me.

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by | November 2, 2006 · 6:59 am

NATIVE GONE

The anthropologist Clifford Gertz has left us. He’s another of my main guys etched prominently in my own investigations on the heels of Richard Halliburton (a popularizer, read as a twelve year old,) and later Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, Joseph Campbell, Claude Levi-Straus, Ruth Simpson, Jack Goody, and many others.

One of the key baseline points of cultural anthropology is its synthesis of neutral categories at the same time  the very biases that impinge on the construction of neutrality are carefully factored. I don’t know why today, but this is the reflection that arises when I think of Gertz and the anthropology I favor and am deeply influenced by.

Gertz: Know what he [the anthropologist] thinks a savage is and you have the key to his work. You know what he thinks he himself is and, knowing what he thinks he himself is, you know in general what sort of thing he is going to say about whatever tribe he happens to be studying. All ethnography is part philosophy, and a good deal of the rest is confession. (Interpretation of Cultures)

Geertz wrote a series of articles on Islam over the years for the New York Review of Books. They are timely precisely because he articulates, long before and against the reduction of Islam now fashionable in popular lay interpretations, the extremely rich weave of Islam and its cultural-historical development.

from his review of Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Vol. 1: The Classical Age of Islam, December 11, 1975, NYR:

So Hodgson’s book ends with the end-of-Islam, exce t for its legacy of moral aestheticism. He foresees an Islamle s Islamicate that can coexist, in the modern “technicalistic” world, with the religionless Christianity so popular “in so vieux jeu circles” when Hodgson was writing, and so vieux jeu now in those same circles, which now are fascinated by popular beliefs and festal celebrations. Perhaps such a view is the final outcome of trying to inflate Sufism into a comprehensive interpretative category with neither well-drawn edges nor a well-located center. The diversity of Islamic religious viewpoints remains; Qaddhafi’s desert camp fundamentalism and Sadat’s Cairene eclecticism do as much to divide as connect them. And, though it is not much more attractive to me than it is to Hodgson, the great power of Shariah legalism persists. So too does the diversity of institutions and cultural traditions within Islamdom: the Berbers and Malaysians both regard their sharply different social systems as properly Islamic.

One might be in a better position to understand and evaluate such phenomena if one’s idea of what Islam is and has always been were closer to Wittgenstein’s notion of a “family resemblance.” We think we see striking resemblances between different generations of a family but, as Wittgenstein pointed out, we may find that there is no one feature common to them; the resemblance may come from many different features “overlapping and crisscrossing.” This sort of approach seems more promising than one that sees the history of Islam, as Hodgson’s does, as an extended struggle of a gentle pietism to escape from an arid legalism. A picture of the Islamic venture derived from “overlaps” and “crosscrosses” would be less ordered and less continuous, a matter of oblique connections and glancing contrasts, and general conclusions would be harder to come by. But it could leave us with a history less orchestrated than Hodgson’s, and more immediate.

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by | September 8, 2006 · 4:10 pm

HUME. FLUX AND REFLUX OF POLYTHEISM AND THEISM

It is remarkable, that the principles of religion have a kind of flux and reflux in the human mind, and that men have a natural tendency to rise from idolatry to theism, and to sink again from theism into idolatry. The vulgar, that is, indeed, all mankind, a few excepted, being ignorant and uninstructed, never elevate their contemplation to the heavens, or penetrate by their disquisitions into the secret structure of vegetable or animal bodies; so far as to discover a supreme mind or original providence, which bestowed order on every part of nature. They consider these admirable works in a more confined and selfish view; and finding their own happiness and misery to depend on the secret influence and unforeseen concurrence of external objects, they regard; with perpetual attention, the , which govern all these natural events, and distribute pleasure and pain, good and ill, by their powerful, but silent, operation. The unknown causes are still appealed to on every emergence; and in this general appearance or confused image, are the perpetual objects of human hopes and fears, wishes and apprehensions. By degrees, the active imagination of men, uneasy in this abstract conception of objects, about which it is incessantly employed, begins to render them more particular, and to clothe them in shapes more suitable to its natural comprehension. It represents them to be sensible, intelligent beings, like mankind; actuated by love and hatred, and flexible by gifts and entreaties, by prayers and sacrifices. Hence the origin of religion: And hence the origin of idolatry or polytheism.

But the same anxious concern for happiness, which begets the idea of these invisible, intelligent powers, allows not mankind to remain long in the first simple conception of them; as powerful, but limited beings; masters of human fate, but slaves to destiny and the course of nature. Men’s exaggerated praises and compliments still swell their idea upon them; and elevating their deities to the utmost bounds of perfection, at last beget the attributes of unity and infinity, simplicity and spirituality. Such refined ideas, being somewhat disproportioned to vulgar comprehension, remain not long in their original purity; but require to be supported by the notion of inferior mediators or subordinate agents, which interpose between mankind and their supreme deity. These demi-gods or middle beings, partaking more of human nature, and being more familiar to us, become the chief objects of devotion, and gradually recal that idolatry, which had been formerly banished by the ardent prayers and panegyrics of timorous and indigent mortals. But as these idolatrous religions fall every day into grosser and more vulgar conceptions, they at last destroy themselves, and, by the vile representations, which they form of their deities, make the tide turn again towards theism. But so great is the propensity, in this alternate revolution of human sentiments, to return back to idolatry, that the utmost precaution is not able effectually to prevent it. And of this, some theists, particularly the Jews and Muslims, have been sensible; as appears by their banishing all the arts of statuary and painting, and not allowing the representations, even of human figures, to be taken by marble or colours; lest the common infirmity of mankind should thence produce idolatry. The feeble apprehensions of men cannot be satisfied with conceiving their deity as a pure spirit and perfect intelligence; and yet their natural terrors keep them from imputing to him the least shadow of limitation and imperfection. They fluctuate between these opposite sentiments. The same infirmity still drags them downwards, from an omnipotent and spiritual deity, to a limited and corporeal one, and from a corporeal and limited deity to a statue or visible representation. The same endeavour at elevation still pushes them upwards, from the statue or material image to the invisible power; and from the invisible power to an infinitely perfect deity, the creator and sovereign of the universe.

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by | August 17, 2006 · 7:04 pm

DELICATE TURNS

Arthur M. Young wrote two little read albeit influential and (to me) essential books, both published in 1976: The Geometry of Meaning and The Reflexive Universe. Along with the alchemical writings of C.G.Jung, they are the most important contemporary books about quaternity and ‘anthropo’ process. Young/Jung’s research inform SQ1’s model of exploratory learning; this is implicit in my use of quaternistic matrices and integral oppositions in tool designs. The Arthur Young web site provides much to investigate. The essays there are all excellent; for starters: “The Four Levels of Process“.

Grove International, one of my favorite visionary ‘schematicists,’ has published a terrific poster A Theory of Process putting Young’s little known and important work in graphical summary form.

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by | August 11, 2006 · 8:34 pm

DREAMS OF BEAVERS AND BONOBOS

The essence of Mithen’s cathedral metaphor — that closed-off sectors of mental life became open to integration, cumulative speculation, and enthusiastic discovery — is most compelling. It surely describes a quantum leap in the flexibility and scope of consciousness that does, indeed, make sense of the cultural explosion of the period 40k to 10k, B.P. One aspect of his theory, however, appears unacceptable in light of the material we have collected, namely that there was ever a time when our ancestors had only general intelligence and no mental modules or archetypes to organize their experience. On purely logical grounds, it makes no sense to think that evolution had to start all over with Homo sapiens and create entirely new archetypes. Our brain is an advanced primate brain, and when we began to walk upright and assemble in larger and larger numbers, we must have had mental modules which were variations on those inherited by our closest relatives among the primates. But even if we set logic aside, the evidence tells us that we share fundamental structures of mind with bees, blackbirds, beavers, and bonobos. excerpt

Archetypal Memory and the Genetic/Darwinian Paradigm (John Ryan Haule)

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by | July 22, 2006 · 5:38 am

RED AND BLUE

Eshu Elegba tale discovered at Tim Boucher’s Pop Occulture

Eshu was walking down the road one day, wearing a hat that was red on one side and blue on the other. Sometime after he departed, the villagers who had seen him began arguing about whether the stranger’s hat was blue or red. The villagers on one side of the road had only been capable of seeing the blue side, and the villagers on the other side had only been capable of seeing the red half. They nearly fought over the argument, until Eshu came back and cleared the mystery, teaching the villagers about how one’s perspective can alter a person’s perception of reality, and that one can be easily fooled. In other versions of this tale, the two tribes were not stopped short of violence; they actually annihilated each other, and Eshu laughed at the result, saying “Bringing strife is my greatest joy.

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by | July 12, 2006 · 3:55 pm

NO DO-OVER

Found under Blackfoot Creation and Origin Myths at D.S. Ashiliman’s brilliant, indexed resource of folklore.

Order of Life and Death

There was once a time when there were but two persons in the world, Old Man and Old Woman. One time, when they were traveling about, Old Man met Old Woman, who said, “Now, let us come to an agreement of some kind; let us decide how the people shall live.”

“Well,” said Old Man, ” I am to have the first say in everything.”

To this Old Woman agreed, provided she had the second say.

Then Old Man began, “The women are to tan the hides. When they do this, they are to rub brains on them to make them soft; they are to scrape them well with scraping tools, etc. But all this they are to do very quickly, for it will not be very hard work.”

“No, I will not agree to this,” said Old Woman. “They must tan the hide in the way you say; but it must be made very hard work, and take a long time, so that the good workers may be found out.”

“Well”, said Old Man, “let the people have eyes and mouths in their faces; but they shall be straight up and down.”

“No,” said Old Woman, “we will not have them that way. We will have the eyes and mouth in the faces, as you say; but they shall all be set crosswise.”

“Well,” said Old Man, “the people shall have ten fingers on each hand.”

“Oh, no!” said Old Woman. “That will be too many. They will be in the way. There shall be four fingers and one thumb on each hand.”

“Well,” said Old Man, “we shall beget children. The genitals shall be at our navels.”

“No,” said Old Woman, “that will make childbearing too easy; the people will not care for their children. The genitals shall be at the pubes.”

So they went on until they had provided for everything in the lives of the people that were to be. Then Old Woman asked what they should do about life and death.

Should the people always live, or should they die? They had some difficulty in agreeing on this; but finally Old Man said, “I will tell you what I will do. I will throw a buffalo chip into the water, and, if it floats, the people die for four days and live again. But, if it sinks, they will die forever.”

So he threw it in, and it floated.

“No,” said Old Woman, “we will not decide in that way. I will throw in this rock. If it floats, the people will die for four days. If it sinks, the people will die forever.”

Then Old Woman threw the rock out into the water, and it sank to the bottom.

“There,” said she, “it is better for the people to die forever; for, if they did not die forever, they would never feel sorry for each other, and there would be no sympathy in the world.”

“Well,” said Old Man, let it be that way.”

After a time Old Woman had a daughter, who died. She was very sorry now that it had been fixed so that people died forever. So she said to Old Man, “Let us have our say over again.”

“No,” said he, “we fixed it once.”

Source: Clark Wissler and D. C. Duvall, Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians (New York: Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 1908), v. 2, part 1, pp. 19-21.

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by | June 20, 2005 · 8:09 am

MORE PATHWAYS

Juan Cole highlights an interesting story about primal genetics and the history (of what I term,) the genetic tribes. This subject interests me and has so ever since Abdullah Ibrahim (The South African composer and pianist,) delineated on a napkin the migration of musical form along ancient pathways.

History and Genetics in Madagascar

Genetics and history have joined forces to explain the origins of the people of Madagascar (the world’s fourth largest island, off the coast of East Africa). Early Muslim chronicles speak of the peopling of Madagascar from the islands to its far east, i.e., Indonesia. Geneticists have found that about half of the island’s people have Y chromosomes or mitochondrial DNA that most resemble that of the people of Borneo. Note that all the people in Madagascar by now have Indonesian ancestors and lots of genes from there. The other half of the markers go to East Africa. There must, however, also be an Arab heritage. Some 7 percent of the inhabitants of Madagascar are Muslim, and Muslim chronicles speak of several waves of immigration from places like Yemen.

Historical linguists have long been convinced that Malagasy is an Austronesian language (other members of the family include Malay and Bahasa Indonesia, but also Hawaiian). Since historical linguistics is by now a firmly grounded science, there really was no doubt about this. Malagasy also has some Bantu words and phrases, and the people of Madagascar use East African material culture. Africa is so much closer than Borneo (20 times) that it is incredible that this big group of people emigrated across the Indian Ocean beginning around AD 400-700, and that relatively few Africans ever ventured over in comparison.

[snip]

(Geneticists focus on the Y chromosome and the mitochondria because they do not divide in each generation and so do not change very quickly, allowing comparisons among populations long separated. A lot of us are afraid that this distinction will be lost on the general public and that they will take mitochondria or Y chromosomes as markers of “race.” All human beings are descended from most people who lived 50 generations ago, it is just that we may by now only have an infinitesimal genetic heritage from some of them. There are statistical aggregations of genes, just because some lineages are more likely to intermarry, but there are no “races” in the Romantic European sense of pure bloodlines. Y chromosomes and mitochondria are a tiny, tiny part of the human genome, and they just accidentally freeze a certain narrow kind of ancestry; they tell relatively little of the whole story. The whole story, of course, is that we all go back to a common origin in South Africa only about 100,000 years ago; we’re a very young species and haven’t had time to differentiate much except with regard to stupid little things like amount of melanin in our skin.)

Juan Cole Informed Comment

Science Daily:Human Inhabitants Of Madagascar Are Genetically Unique

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