elinor ostrom.

something i forgot to mention when it happened. this is slow news station, welcome, earthling.

her work should be more widely read, although her (and williamson’s) reception of the nobel prize in economics has not been well-received by the community of economists. bad practice not to read outside of your own discipline and saying that she’s not a ‘real economist’ anyway. here  she is presenting some of the ideas her work is based on. her work on common property, cooperation, and trust is a fundamental contribution to studies of institutions and is highly relevant for anthropologists similarly interested in how ordinary people organize themselves to manage their shared resources.

ach, to graze only within your disciplinary boundary means to be condemned to specialist narrowmindedness. geoff hodgson has collected the admittedly very mature reactions to the news of her and williamson’s prize here. more available – email me.

just as a reminder that anthropologists have something to say to the world, in general. we just have to find ways in which to present this, and not be afraid of our expertise. (thanks sophie)

photo: reuters

it’s in your power, says hobbes.

i’ve been psyching myself up to believe the following:

i’m supergirl who finishes thesis without grumbling. grrrrrr…. hear me roar.

it’s in my power to FINISH the thesis entirely. i just have to actually get uncomfortable and deal with it. motivate myself again and again that it’s actually a pleasure finishing it, not a high ordeal. this is difficult in the november uniform grey.

it’s really strange how fast i become disconnected from the things i write that then are oh-so- disappointing. writing is such an incomplete technology, i should draw more – i think that captures more of the process.

i am all about written communication now, though. conveying my point clearly, ruthlessly deleting what is less to the point and making it a beautiful clean sculpture that is compellingly beautiful and true. hehehe.

and banishing all irrelevant meanderings to this place.

i’m sure no one will notice for it is teeming with them already.

above a draft of lincoln’s proclamation for emancipation…

norman borlaug.

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

reflections on his legacy here.

personality types.

due to my prospective job-seeking position, i’ve taken an interest in meyers-briggs personality types.

here’s what i am: INFJ, the least common personality type. more here. just like garfield, hehe.

fully realising the limitations of such instruments of categorisation, i am nonetheless curious what ‘type’ you represent, dear reader.

so if you have some time on yer hands, let me know. ) perhaps we could learn something in the process.

solaris.

wow. just emerged from solaris. that just ate me whole and it was amazing.

any more adventures of this kind? mind and matter issues and love and identity ones too? recommendations here.

wow.

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]

writing a thesis

[still writing, rewriting, rigging, shaking]

It isn’t easy to define a pebble.
If you’re satisfied with a simple description you can start out by saying that it’s a form or state of stone halfway between rocks and gravel.
But this already implies a concept of stone that must be validated. So don’t blame me for going even further back than the flood.

Francis Ponge

saturday afternoon musings.

“[S]ome evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution? They do, to be sure, but we make a different point. In natural history, all possible things happen sometimes; you generally do not support your favored phenomenon by declaring rivals impossible in theory. Rather, you acknowledge the rival but circumscribe its domain of action so narrowly that it cannot have any importance in the affairs of nature. Then, you often congratulate yourself for being such an undogmatic and ecumenical chap. We maintain that alternatives to selection for best overall design have generally been relegated to unimportance by this mode of argument.”

— The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm, Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 205 (1161): 585.

Came across Stephen Jay Gould in my wanderings on biology and evolution. Great stuff, but how on earth can I incorporate it into the article. Hope to figure that out next week.

The article will be something on history and anthropology…

Stay tuned for exciting developments. Muhahahaha.

determination.

i will continue along my path. might not be your path, or the easiest one indeed, might not even be the wisest one, and i might curse it at times.

but i will continue along my path.

this, for instance, might be a cause for hope.

but i’d go also without that. what are political promise like this one to someone like me?

To The Book

Go on then
in your own time
this is as far
as I will take you
I am leaving your words with you
as though they had been yours
all the time
of course you are not finished
how can you be finished
when the morning begins again
or the moon rises
even the words are not finished
though they may claim to be
never mind
I will not be
listening when they say
how you should be
different in some way
you will be able to tell them
that the fault was all mine
whoever I was
when I made you up

—W. S. Merwin