thesis&i.

2 strategien fir mat der thèse emzegoen tëscht deenen ech am moment zimlich hin an hierpendelen:

1. léif kleng thèse, ech froen dech heimat ganz héiflich an matt ‘wann ech glift draga’ als hannergrondmusik fir deng frëndlichst mattaarbicht sou dass mer eis kontraktuell zesummenaarbicht geschwenn op en enn brengen an matt eise béider liewen weiderfuere kënnen. merci dass du hei nit domm gëss.

2. kleng domm houer, wanns du nit paréiers, da schécken ech déch do wu de peffer wiisst, an do kanns de dann frecken an vermuuschten. mech huet na nie een sou gelangweilt matt senge ville gescheite wierder di ech amfong nit wierklich verstin, an et huet na nie ee mech esou op de baam gedriwwe iwwer eng däermosse laang zäit wi’s du. verstan?

grommel.

GROMMEL.

will it ever end?

end of melodrama, back to work… GROMMEL.

image rippled from here.

walls/membranes.

Faith pours from your walls, drowning your calls
I’ve tried to hear, you’re not near
Remembering when I saw your face
Shining my way, pure timing
Now I’ve fallen in deep, slow silent sleep
It’s killing me, I’m dying

To put a little bit of sunshine in your life

Soleil all over you, warm sun pours over me
Soleil all over you
Warm sun

Now this slick fallen rift came like a gift
Your body moves ever nearer
And you will dry this tear
Now that we’re here, and grieve for me, not history
But now I’m dry of thoughts, wait for the rain
Then it’s replaced, sun setting

And suddenly you’re in love with everything

Soleil all over you, warm sun pours over me
Soleil all over you
Warm sun

(by badly drawn boy, listen to it here)

norman borlaug.

the father of the ‘green revolution’ in agriculture died last sunday.

reflections on his legacy here.

abstraction.

rippled from here. i am not sure how ‘conceptuality’ is different from ‘abstraction’. in all fairness, i am trying to do something else here.

[from the OED]

1. The act of withdrawing; withdrawal, separation or removal; in modern usage euphem. secret or dishonest removal; pilfering, purloining.

1549 Compl. of Scotl. (1873) i. 19 He dois chestee them be the abstraction of..superfluite. 1660 R. COKE Power & Subj. 122 I say, Justice must have..abstraction from all affections of love, hate, or self-interest. 1794 PALEY Evid. (1817) II. ii. 65 Amongst the negative qualities of our religion..we may reckon its complete abstraction from all views of ecclesiastical or civil policy. 1818 FARADAY Exp. Res. vi. 13 He there states its production to be dependent on the abstraction of ammonia by the atmosphere. 1823 LAMB Elia (1865) Ser. II. vii. 284 He robs nothing but the revenue,an abstraction I never greatly cared about. 1848 MILL Pol. Econ. 5 (1876) A wrongful abstraction of wealth from certain members of the community.

2. ‘Abstraction, in chemistry, denotes the drawing off, or exhaling away, a menstruum from the subject it had been put to dissolve. Some also use the word as synonymous with distillation or even cohobation.’ Chambers Cyc. Suppl. 1753.

3. The act or process of separating in thought, of considering a thing independently of its associations; or a substance independently of its attributes; or an attribute or quality independently of the substance to which it belongs.

1647 H. MORE Poems 126 Next argument let be abstraction, When as the soul with notion precise Keeps off the corporal condition. 1710 BERKELEY Hum. Knowl. I. §5 Can there be a nicer strain of abstraction than to distinguish the existence of sensible objects from their being perceived. 1782 PRIESTLEY Mat. & Spir. I. x. 113 Mr. Locke..observed..that abstraction is nothing more than leaving out of a number of resembling ideas what is peculiar to each. 1855 BAIN Senses & Intell. (1864) III. iv. §17. 606 The first in order of the scientific processes is Abstraction, or the generalizing of some property, so as to present it to the mind, apart from the other properties that usually go along with it in nature. 1859 SIR W. HAMILTON Lect. on Metaph. II. xxxiv. 285 Abstraction is thus not a positive act of mind, as it is often erroneously described in philosophical treatises,it is merely a negation to one or more objects, in consequence of its concentration on another.

4. The result of abstracting: the idea of something which has no independent existence; a thing which exists only in idea; something visionary.

1644 MILTON Educ. (1738) 136 They present their young unmatriculated novices at first coming with the most intellective abstractions of logic and metaphysics. 1818 HAZLITT Eng. Poets (1870) ii. 44 Death is a mighty abstraction, like Night, or Space, or Time. 1850 GLADSTONE Gleanings V. lxxvi. 218 Laws are abstractions until they are put into execution. 1851 ‘L. MARIOTTI’ Italy in 1848, i. 4 They can see nothing in it, save only an idle, chimerical abstraction. 1878 G. A. SIMCOX in Academy 605/3 Science, strictly speaking, is an abstraction, and is not and never can be adequate to the whole, even of our experience.

5. A state of withdrawal or seclusion from worldly things or things of sense.

1649 JER. TAYLOR Great Exemp. (1653) 124 Lifted up by the abstractions of this first degree of mortification. a1744 POPE Let. (J.) A hermit wishes to be praised for his abstraction.

6. The state of mental withdrawal; inattention to things present; absence of mind.

1790 BOSWELL Johnson (Rtldg.) xxiv. 215 As he [Johnson] could neither see nor hear at such a distance from the stage, he was wrapped up in grave abstraction. 1848 L. HUNT Jar of Honey iii. 31 Sir Isaac Newton carried abstraction far enough, when he used a lady’s finger for a tobacco-stopper.

7. In the fine arts, the practice or state of freedom from representational qualities; a work of art with these characteristics.

1915 Forum (N.Y.) Dec. 662 Sheeler..fears to take the final leap into abstraction, not feeling sufficiently sure of his desires. 1921 A. HUXLEY Crome Yellow xii. 117 Soon, he says, there’ll be just the blank canvas. That’s the logical conclusion. Complete abstraction. 1948 R. O. DUNLOP Understanding Pictures iv. 44 Cubism was a half-way house on the road to pure abstraction. 1954 WYNDHAM LEWIS Demon of Progress in Arts I. vii. 29 It is usually those of very little talent who furnish the little crowds of people painting empty abstractions.

8. Comb. abstraction-monger, one who deals with visionary ideas.

1860 R. A. VAUGHAN Ho. w. Mystics (2 ed.) II. 95 His philosophy is never that of the abstraction-monger.

kantian or huttonian? why?

i am rereading ingold (1986: 130) on time as my last chapter surprisingly turns out to be about both illicit stills and time. i am not sure how that happened, but i have accepted this oddity. What do you think of this? The context of the excerpt is a discussion of Darwinian evolution and structuralist accounts of culture, and their deployment of time/temporality/progressive change, etc:

For Kant the Creation was not a one-off event, but a directed, evolutionary process that is continually going on. It did indeed begin at one point, but it will never cease. The order of nature is forever coming into existence, but at no point can we stand back to contemplate its completion. Thus in the cosmos in general as in life in particular, time is the very essence of becoming. Hutton’s view of the Creation, to the contrary, was strictly Newtonian. There was a moment, we know not how far remote as it left no trace, when everything was put in its place as part of an ordered, steady-state system… From that moment on, the order of nature – perfect and complete – has ticked over like a clock destined to run for all eternity.

tracks n traces.

Happy new year! The blog is almost a year old, so i would encourage you to visit often in the next week or two (and i promise exciting-inspired moments) so it can have a birthday present of 10,000 hits. how about that?

i almost forgot how to post things here over the last few weeks. didn’t miss it a bit ;o)! odd how we make tracks that then need to be walked on, hey?

This morning I had a conversation about a piece of writing I am trying to get to stick together (it’s oddly shaped at the moment). The idea came up that sophisticated anthropological arguments usually stand in the way of effective political activist agendas, because they’re just not going the distance.

In ‘sophisticated’ arguments anthropologists tend to use an analytical language that we misrecognise because we have learnt to see things with it, rather than with other jargons. We’ve just become very familiar with it! If anything, Aberdeen has made me a sometimes reluctant second-nature Ingoldian. I breathe ‘relational’ and get a little bit upset when it does not work very well. Now that’s worrying. So maybe some things do speak for academic job mobility, at least. Hmpf.

The silly thing about anthropology is that it wants to be so popular (populist?), radical and non-mainstream but it does not achieve that. At least I have not seen one single shred of evidence in that direction.

I think my place is in the NGO sector. I still want to be an activist. Sadly, I have no proper skills yet that help me in that direction, but a complete openness to meeting people on their terms and, perhaps, some left-leaning critical luggage. and some anger. Will it do? For starters, perhaps.

On a more practical note, I am finally beginning to let go and learning to look at my thesis in a way that doesn’t affect me as much. hooray! greeeni might have had a point saying that academic writing was different, less emotional.

i’m gettin the hang of this phd stuff, people!! ;o)

areyouspeakingmy?

in a discussion (it felt more like i was refusing to have the discussion, actually) with greeeni i found myself saying something like ‘there is no language’ and had to laugh at my own utterance. geez, nutshell! what are you on about?

‘t was not actually what i meant.

what i wondered about is the following idea:

familiarity with various clusters of language that different groups of people use every day, i.e. the ’speech communities’ however temporary or contestable they may be of civil servants, anthropologists, dock workers, mothers, Fort McPherson Gwichin, Russian Israeli, people from one village…

+

the way in which the evocation of specific words trail a whole lot of others with them, both denoting and connotating. so the image this conjured up in my head was the following: word rings your door bell. as you answer you find not just that word has arrived, but with him/her/it an entire clan tucked in a caravan, with various objects dangling from either side, and drawn by a supersized penguin. this has all kinds of effects on different people.

+

i wonder then how it is possible bar in philosophy or linguistic seminars [which are highly specialised speech communities] to speak about something called ’semantics’ – and i still don’t buy the idea that context is considered here – that purports to be universal knowledge. and the thing is that it is circular: to understand it you have to submit to it, which makes you understand it, which in turn makes you part of the speech community, up to some degree. notwithstanding whether saussure and structural linguistics are pretty exceptional cases.

or am i just brainwashed by anthropology? which defeats the point in arguing with me anyways.

i think i need some sun to get these thoughts in boots to lighten up and dance naked.

i also need some convincing that it is entirely unnecessary for me to read up on the entire history of western philosophy since parmenides in order to be able to finish this chapter. no violence please.

reckoning.

december crept up on me, and made me think about the year. I’ve been wondering for a few days what it has done to me and whether I’ve made proper decisions and whether I have been kind enough to others. In the process it has run home also all the inadequacies and the paths I still need to walk and the discipline I need to find to be a more equanimous, calm, concentrated, focused kind of being. Less concerned with the things that matter only to some degree, and less shaken by situations that I have not expected, without losing the powers to be astonished when I can, and in awe, and finding a centre in the dance.
at the same time I have been glad about some of the things that happened this year, and some of the achievements that have come upon me.
I need to attend more to the present’s challenges.

photo rippled from here for colm.

meta meta meta things.

On the weekend, an architect commented on the way in which anthropologists are an arrogant bunch (and I think he meant it in the nicest possible way ) in an arrogant discipline, in that they conceive of their discipline as a meta-discipline. It struck me as oddly correct, and I wondered what the implications of this claim were.

any ideas?

do you agree?

welcome to modernity.

dat as wi ech mer et firstellen wann ech texter liesen di vun dem absolutten ‘break’ tescht dem mettelalter an der modernzait schwetzen.

1600 am bulli.

d’sonn geet op iwwer engem klengen duerf iergendswou a metteleuropa.

den hunn kreit. kikerikiiiiiiiiii…

iergendwann enker as den jhempi erwaecht.

as dunn am laf vum moien bis an d’duerf getreppelt wou en de mett fanne wollt fir em eppes ze proposeieren.

wou en laanscht de kiirficht goung, as em de mond opstoe bliff, an en huet gegrommelt ‘nondidjoe’.

du hung ee grousse stofftene panneau gespaant tescht der kiirch an dem aeppelbaam op deem, op heckebelsch an latengesch stung: ‘wellkommen an der moderner zeit – si fenkt nexte mettwoch un’.

de probleem war just dass de jhemp nit vill fir d’liesen iwwrich hat…

wei geet d’geschicht weider?