Candide a lui Voltaire trimite salutari.
With luck and persistence, you will be able to claim the rewards promised you at the beginning of time–not just any old beauty, wisdom, goodness, love, freedom, and justice, but rather exhilarating beauty that incites you to be true to yourself; crazy wisdom that immunizes you against the temptation to believe your ideals are ultimate truths; outrageous goodness that inspires you to experiment with boisterous empathy; generous freedom that keeps you alert for opportunities to share your wealth; insurrectionary love that endlessly transforms you; and a lust for justice that’s leavened with a knack for comedy, keeping you honest as you work humbly to liberate everyone in the world from ignorance and suffering.
everybody’s bloggin about da wall.
as usual, i will follow suit. historic footage here for you youngsters. are we still working out the consequences of this day?
[insert exclamations of how time passes. boring.]
i also give you this ‘testbild’, something that has been irrecoverably lost on TV, methinks.
circles.
it’s been quite a rollercoaster to come back. not only did many people die in the village, but people seemed more destitute than two years ago in a weird way. of course, this is hard to assess in only two weeks, but this is the impression i got. what a horrible country. Part of me cannot wait to get away from here, and I can soothe my anger in some moments with the idea that I will leave in a months time. I am not sure what to think of that, but I just feel things are going quite wrong on all kinds of levels. And my anthropological hat doesn’t seem to fit at the moment. It’s itchy and I tend to fling it across the room or at a passing car, then picking it up and brush off the dust.
I still get quite emotional and everything affects me, but, strangely, I am no longer up for letting it make me stressed up to the point of illness. May be that makes me a bad anthropologist. I don’t know. The thing is that I’d much much rather be doing something that would make more sense to more people than anthropology. Trouble is now I have acquired (or well, will do sometime in 2010) this training for academia, and I didn’t focus on any other work for 4 years. So I feel like I am at a breaking point, as this still hasn’t been resolved. I am not sure if I am up for the race of 4-5 years spent in 5 different places.I think my health and sanity would break for good.
So I am thinking of moving to a place and then getting a job… but it’s all a bit much to deal with at the moment. I am not the best person for this job, as I’d much rather have my routine and my proper diet, and proper exercise possibility. I hope it will be ok. I am adamant I will keep my sanity this time. I cannot sacrifice everything for this job, this time round, like I did during my doctoral fieldwork.
pictured: stanley henry morton with pithhelmet (a kind of archetypal anthropological hat)
leaving scotland.
Leaving Scotland before the driech of November is difficult. I have come to love the crisp clarity of early autumn that many writers have taken as all that is most beautiful before it dies, all that is ripe before it is decaying. It is the point of balance that we all want to capture at its peak and prolong to infinity. We are desperate to learn about how the apex of maturity forms and builds up. We are less keen on experiencing how the coating on the shiny, tough edges start to peel. As rust builds underneath the surface, we may pass off the minor changes in skin texture as mere tiredness.
I miss you too much and the autumn mornings cannot soothe.
permaculture-education business.
i think i have accidentally hit on what i want to do post-phd. it feels right. my heart is racing just now.
it would combine major interests of mine: food, sustainable future, development/radical education.
it would also get me out of the desk-bound lifestyle i am leading now.
ideas?
joyful friday.
lots of reasons to be happy. what a ride it’s been this week. been to the depths of sadness and elated, inspired and bored and angry and playful. geeez. evening it all out? nae too sure about that at the moment.
i miss you already and look forward to your return. i hope the mountains are kind to you. i’ll get the burnt rice ready love.
this song accompanies me just now.
connections between people travel across meadows and cities. they’re what matters.
economics, and why it’s forgotten history.
Came across the following in my wrestling with the Introduction. Geoffrey Hodgson seems to be doing interesting and timely work. However, as an economist (not that it matters in the aim for critical scholarship) I feel that he should read more anthropology. Hehe.
Disciplinary fences, again…
ephemerality.
This moved me this morning.
From the point of view of the nonlinear dynamics of our planet, the thin rocky crust on which we live and which we call our land and home is perhaps its least important component. Indeed, if we waited long enough, if we could observe planetary dynamics at geological time scales, the rocks and mountains which define the most stable and durable traits of our reality would dissolve into the great underground lava flows of which they are but temporary hardenings. Indeed, given that it is just a matter of time for any one rock or mountain to be reabsorbed into the self-organized flows of lava driving the dynamics of the lithosphere, these geological structures represent a local slowing-down in this flowing reality. It is almost as if every part of the mineral world could be defined by specifying its chemical composition and its speed of flow : very slow for rocks, faster for lava.
Similarly, our individual bodies and minds are mere coagulations or decelerations in the flows of biomass, genes, memes and norms. Here too we would be defined both by the materials we are temporarily binding or chaining into our organic bodies and cultural minds, as well as by the time scale of the binding operation. Given long enough time scales, it is the flow of biomass through food webs that matters, as well as the flow of genes through generations, and not the bodies and species that emerge in these flows. Given long enough time scales, our languages are also momentary slowing-downs or thickenings in a flow of norms that can give rise to a multitude of different structures.
[Manuel de Landa, entire text of 'The Geology of Morals' here]
yeah!
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
