Heather, you and Bret are almost the only academics that I still respect. Your fieldwork in some pretty unforgiving environments has grounded the two of you in a way that VERY few academics are, and it shows in the way you seem to dig deeper than superficialities in a manner that is as rare as it is welcome.
This piece makes me want to watch Jacques Tati's "PlayTime." A 1967 overlooked masterpiece which sardonically observes the folly of modernism and urban planning. https://www.criterion.com/films/651-playtime
Sometimes I think technogy was the perfect vehicle for post modernism. The frenetic pace of development and communication leaves no time for saturation or contemplation or detail. Post modernism as a framework for interacting with an increasingly low resolution world is attractive. It lures us out of the complexity of the biological world into the sterile information world with the promise of control.
Yes indeed. The postmoderns took our (human? modern?) inclinations towards control, reductionism, and hubris and turned them up to 11. Simultaneously, over in science-ish land, pseudo-quantification took hold, eagerly grabbed by those who prefer easy answers over difficult questions, and find uncertainty appalling, and hypothesis too difficult to comprehend. The two cultures, if you will, have now met, doing equally appalling work. Neither of those cultures are honorable, though. Actual thinkers from all intellectual domains--those who engage in analysis, and creativity, and try to figure out where they're (we're) wrong, be they scientists or anthropologists or historians or literary theorists or economists or whatever--are barely if at all represented in the modern university, or in the modern culture wars.
Wow, well said. I wonder how much of covid was a reaction/bottom up phenomena - one that could be explained by the 'easy answers over difficult questions' crowd? And how much was top down intervention?
Is it possible, given where we are at in academia and politics, to infuse the better ethic that might innoculate us to hysteria?
I know that I think clearer, and more reasonably for having spent so much time here and with DH. The question is can it be deployed at scale in time to avert the next disaster?
Woman after my own heart! Fortunately, living in Alaska in two tiny cabins and outside chores makes this sensibility remarkably easy (it also helps that I’m half hobbit). Folks, if you live in sterile environments, do what you can to escape those spaces often. If you are actually in a position to design your life, do it in a way that lets life encapsulate and enter often…
One of the great joys of life is leaving the house, without a plan and without the armor you so carefully describe, to just see what happens. And then returning home to indulge is some comfort & reflect on the day.
I especially love doing this in cities that are new to me (made more perfect if you have a comfortable home, even a temporary one, to which to return). I have explored Latin American cities the most, but also some in many parts of Europe, plus Egypt, Turkey, and Madagascar. And while living on an island makes this a bit more difficult (it's rather more finite than the mainland), one of my regularly recurring "to do" list prompts is "take a walk somewhere I've never been."
Yesterday, on the equinox, my wife and I watched the sunrise blazing through the window at The Temple of the Seven Dolls at Dzibilchaltun. Then a roll in the sand and a swim in the gulf.
You and Bret found peace from Portland in the San Juans, we escaped from Vancouver WA. to the Yucatan.
Oh what bliss. I feel at home in the landscape of the Maya. I have not been to Merida since the early 1990s, but over Christmas 2016 Bret and the boys and I explored many of the Mayan sites further south on the Yucatan (while constantly trying to get yet more distance from Cancun and all that it has wrought). On Christmas morning, on our way to Bacalar from some inland forest I can't remember the precise location of, we found ourselves at Chacchoben, which was miraculously open. We were the only ones there. It was magical.
Once again you articulate so eloquently what needs to be said. I've been wanting to share the following with you since reading A Hunter Gather's Guide to the 21st Century and today this post just lines up with it.
I'd be honored if after watching, and please do watch until the verry end, if you'd let me know what you, and others on this comment section, think.
Thank you for sharing. I watched it. It's...I want to say gruesome, but I'm afraid that sends the wrong message. Startling and stark and too true at many levels, perhaps many more than I have yet understood. Hard to look away from. It feels a bit like poetry to me, and in that vein I will admit that I know that I do not understand all of what is being conveyed. (I often feel that way with poetry.) I am curious how the ending is interpreted by others.
Well, you've just made my day, thank you so much. The concept was inspired by a photograph of a group of school kids at The Louve in front of the Mona Lisa and none of them were looking at the painting, they were looking at their phones. The composer has been asked many times about the overall concept of the song and video and he said that while technology is a wonderful tool, it's not a tool we should allow to rule our lives. The ending was a call and reminder to get outside, don't be trapped by technology to the point that we forget to engage with nature and people. It also highlights that we often put our "best selves" online and rarely share our darker selves or moments, but we're willing to capture bad behavior by others for online clout.
Tuomas Holopainen, the lyricist and composer, has said that had music not worked out, he would have pursued a career as a marine biologist. His writing style is poetic in nature and encourages listeners to ask what, does this piece mean to you.
So it’s okay if my house is a running fur factory (2 dogs), I have comfy chairs, there are bills, books, DVDs on various surfaces, and I live in the country? I have a stash of yarn to knit, weeds fighting the grass, moles or something making tunnel in my front and back yard and sonic looks like it is open again (I’m in Texas, its the local burger joint). You know I am content. Wish we had more water but hey it’s good now. Call me content.
I like open floor plans too, under some circumstances. Having no or few walls in the "public spaces" of your home, so that it is easy to talk between the kitchen and the living area, for instance, can be lovely.
I have been lucky to never have to try to work in an open floor plan, however, and am quite certain that I would not (work, it would not work, something about it would definitely not work). To some degree, that's going to come down to both what kind of work is being done, and also the personalities of those doing it.
Oh wait--I did have a job once with an open floor plan. Summer between my first and second years of college, for reasons that have been lost to my memory, I took a job utterly unsuited to me: cold calling businesses to sell them fax paper, in an un-windowed basement room filled with 50 other people doing the same thing. Seriously. Job started at 5am on a Monday. Before 8am that first day I was outside, blinking in the bright LA morning, considering how to find a new job (my Summer jobs that year became a series of strange stories, as it turned out...).
Right. I love the openness of my kitchen/living room/dining room area, but I recently created an office within the separate guest bedroom and have become much more productive since.
I have seen someone function well within an open area, but I would certainly attribute that to her specific personality. I wouldn't be able to do it, and don't think many others could either.
Sounds like a horrible environment indeed. Maybe you could turn those strange stories into a substack, you've peaked my interest. The topic is reminiscent of Bukowski's book Post Office.
We definitely don't have to embrace all that nature throws at us.
I have never had to live among fire ants. I hear it is an ongoing struggle. I have however sometimes lived among army ants. When they're on the move, they are a force to content with. But they can also be useful to humans, if you know what to do. At a small family-run field station in the Sarapiqui region of Costa Rica, during my first field season doing research, I saw this first-hand. We came to understand that the army ants were coming, and were told to clear out anything they might want that we didn't want them to take away (anything remotely edible, basically). Everyone left the building as they approached--there's really nothing to be done to stop them if you are in their path--and they...cleaned it. They scoured it out, went into every nook and cranny and crevice, and left the place spotless. Ants as cleaning crew. Far better than dealing with fire ants (or bullet ants, which I *have* had the misfortune to encounter).
Oh, that must have been something to see! Be nice if they came weekly or so, to tidy up :-)
The fire ants are vicious. Won't use chemical solutions, since they also kill the bees and the dragonflies. I'd rather just fight the hills with Dawn and orange oil. It sometimes works. Charcoal is a great solution to fire ant bites; works wonders even if bitten many times.
Two summers ago my daughter (who was then an Urban Studies major at UT Austin) & I read aloud the Tom Wolfe book (at my suggestion). As someone whose own taste runs toward Frank Lloyd Wright, she LOVED Wolfe’s take down of modernism.
Off topic, but, if you haven’t seen this poem read by Tess Lawrie yet, it’s powerful. Mistakes Were Not Made, by Margaret Anna Alice: https://www.bitchute.com/video/nwZvDNcEwEgm/?
I grew up in Northern Minnesota and, still farther North, we had a cabin on a lake. That rustic, three-room cabin has since been replaced with a comfortable home now that my parents are retired. The new "cabin" has its perks - a sauna, climate control (as my parents age they are less able to cope with extreme heat), a big kitchen - but we often lament what was lost when the old cabin made way for the new. The old cabin had much more permeable boundaries with the outdoors. My brother and I tracked in plenty of sand on our bare feet, and the dog contributed her fair share. Attempts were made at sweeping, but it was never a sterile environment. An odd assortment of mismatched hand-me-down furniture meant that we didn't worry about flopping down to have a snack in our bathing suits before heading right back out the door and into the lake. When we tumbled into bed at the end of the day my parents opened huge screened windows to cool us with the lake breeze. Our little escape would never have been featured in any design magazine (no "cabin p0rn" here!), but it was a wonderful place to grow up healthy in body, mind and spirit.
Heather, you and Bret are almost the only academics that I still respect. Your fieldwork in some pretty unforgiving environments has grounded the two of you in a way that VERY few academics are, and it shows in the way you seem to dig deeper than superficialities in a manner that is as rare as it is welcome.
I love this. We are part of nature. Let's revel in it.
This piece makes me want to watch Jacques Tati's "PlayTime." A 1967 overlooked masterpiece which sardonically observes the folly of modernism and urban planning. https://www.criterion.com/films/651-playtime
Recommendation received! I have not watched it, but it's now on my list.
Sometimes I think technogy was the perfect vehicle for post modernism. The frenetic pace of development and communication leaves no time for saturation or contemplation or detail. Post modernism as a framework for interacting with an increasingly low resolution world is attractive. It lures us out of the complexity of the biological world into the sterile information world with the promise of control.
Yes indeed. The postmoderns took our (human? modern?) inclinations towards control, reductionism, and hubris and turned them up to 11. Simultaneously, over in science-ish land, pseudo-quantification took hold, eagerly grabbed by those who prefer easy answers over difficult questions, and find uncertainty appalling, and hypothesis too difficult to comprehend. The two cultures, if you will, have now met, doing equally appalling work. Neither of those cultures are honorable, though. Actual thinkers from all intellectual domains--those who engage in analysis, and creativity, and try to figure out where they're (we're) wrong, be they scientists or anthropologists or historians or literary theorists or economists or whatever--are barely if at all represented in the modern university, or in the modern culture wars.
Wow, well said. I wonder how much of covid was a reaction/bottom up phenomena - one that could be explained by the 'easy answers over difficult questions' crowd? And how much was top down intervention?
Is it possible, given where we are at in academia and politics, to infuse the better ethic that might innoculate us to hysteria?
I know that I think clearer, and more reasonably for having spent so much time here and with DH. The question is can it be deployed at scale in time to avert the next disaster?
Woman after my own heart! Fortunately, living in Alaska in two tiny cabins and outside chores makes this sensibility remarkably easy (it also helps that I’m half hobbit). Folks, if you live in sterile environments, do what you can to escape those spaces often. If you are actually in a position to design your life, do it in a way that lets life encapsulate and enter often…
One of the great joys of life is leaving the house, without a plan and without the armor you so carefully describe, to just see what happens. And then returning home to indulge is some comfort & reflect on the day.
Yes.
I especially love doing this in cities that are new to me (made more perfect if you have a comfortable home, even a temporary one, to which to return). I have explored Latin American cities the most, but also some in many parts of Europe, plus Egypt, Turkey, and Madagascar. And while living on an island makes this a bit more difficult (it's rather more finite than the mainland), one of my regularly recurring "to do" list prompts is "take a walk somewhere I've never been."
So true.
Essence of Taurus. I love it. I must admit I avoid discomfort these days, but at 79 I shamelessly pull the old lady card.
Yesterday, on the equinox, my wife and I watched the sunrise blazing through the window at The Temple of the Seven Dolls at Dzibilchaltun. Then a roll in the sand and a swim in the gulf.
You and Bret found peace from Portland in the San Juans, we escaped from Vancouver WA. to the Yucatan.
Yes, go outside and be free. And keep writing.
Oh what bliss. I feel at home in the landscape of the Maya. I have not been to Merida since the early 1990s, but over Christmas 2016 Bret and the boys and I explored many of the Mayan sites further south on the Yucatan (while constantly trying to get yet more distance from Cancun and all that it has wrought). On Christmas morning, on our way to Bacalar from some inland forest I can't remember the precise location of, we found ourselves at Chacchoben, which was miraculously open. We were the only ones there. It was magical.
Once again you articulate so eloquently what needs to be said. I've been wanting to share the following with you since reading A Hunter Gather's Guide to the 21st Century and today this post just lines up with it.
I'd be honored if after watching, and please do watch until the verry end, if you'd let me know what you, and others on this comment section, think.
https://youtu.be/LczGSoibRe8
Thank you for sharing. I watched it. It's...I want to say gruesome, but I'm afraid that sends the wrong message. Startling and stark and too true at many levels, perhaps many more than I have yet understood. Hard to look away from. It feels a bit like poetry to me, and in that vein I will admit that I know that I do not understand all of what is being conveyed. (I often feel that way with poetry.) I am curious how the ending is interpreted by others.
Well, you've just made my day, thank you so much. The concept was inspired by a photograph of a group of school kids at The Louve in front of the Mona Lisa and none of them were looking at the painting, they were looking at their phones. The composer has been asked many times about the overall concept of the song and video and he said that while technology is a wonderful tool, it's not a tool we should allow to rule our lives. The ending was a call and reminder to get outside, don't be trapped by technology to the point that we forget to engage with nature and people. It also highlights that we often put our "best selves" online and rarely share our darker selves or moments, but we're willing to capture bad behavior by others for online clout.
Tuomas Holopainen, the lyricist and composer, has said that had music not worked out, he would have pursued a career as a marine biologist. His writing style is poetic in nature and encourages listeners to ask what, does this piece mean to you.
So it’s okay if my house is a running fur factory (2 dogs), I have comfy chairs, there are bills, books, DVDs on various surfaces, and I live in the country? I have a stash of yarn to knit, weeds fighting the grass, moles or something making tunnel in my front and back yard and sonic looks like it is open again (I’m in Texas, its the local burger joint). You know I am content. Wish we had more water but hey it’s good now. Call me content.
I feel personally attacked, I like open floor plans:). Nonetheless, point received. Beautiful writing.
I like open floor plans too, under some circumstances. Having no or few walls in the "public spaces" of your home, so that it is easy to talk between the kitchen and the living area, for instance, can be lovely.
I have been lucky to never have to try to work in an open floor plan, however, and am quite certain that I would not (work, it would not work, something about it would definitely not work). To some degree, that's going to come down to both what kind of work is being done, and also the personalities of those doing it.
Oh wait--I did have a job once with an open floor plan. Summer between my first and second years of college, for reasons that have been lost to my memory, I took a job utterly unsuited to me: cold calling businesses to sell them fax paper, in an un-windowed basement room filled with 50 other people doing the same thing. Seriously. Job started at 5am on a Monday. Before 8am that first day I was outside, blinking in the bright LA morning, considering how to find a new job (my Summer jobs that year became a series of strange stories, as it turned out...).
Right. I love the openness of my kitchen/living room/dining room area, but I recently created an office within the separate guest bedroom and have become much more productive since.
I have seen someone function well within an open area, but I would certainly attribute that to her specific personality. I wouldn't be able to do it, and don't think many others could either.
Sounds like a horrible environment indeed. Maybe you could turn those strange stories into a substack, you've peaked my interest. The topic is reminiscent of Bukowski's book Post Office.
Thanks Heather
Your article made me think of the title of Milan Kundera‘s book
„The Unbearable Lightness of Being“
Experience different ways to be in our brief experience of being
It brings a smile to my lips and a bounce in my step reading your articles
All of this! Every day! Except maybe the fire ants. I have an ongoing war with them.
We definitely don't have to embrace all that nature throws at us.
I have never had to live among fire ants. I hear it is an ongoing struggle. I have however sometimes lived among army ants. When they're on the move, they are a force to content with. But they can also be useful to humans, if you know what to do. At a small family-run field station in the Sarapiqui region of Costa Rica, during my first field season doing research, I saw this first-hand. We came to understand that the army ants were coming, and were told to clear out anything they might want that we didn't want them to take away (anything remotely edible, basically). Everyone left the building as they approached--there's really nothing to be done to stop them if you are in their path--and they...cleaned it. They scoured it out, went into every nook and cranny and crevice, and left the place spotless. Ants as cleaning crew. Far better than dealing with fire ants (or bullet ants, which I *have* had the misfortune to encounter).
Oh, that must have been something to see! Be nice if they came weekly or so, to tidy up :-)
The fire ants are vicious. Won't use chemical solutions, since they also kill the bees and the dragonflies. I'd rather just fight the hills with Dawn and orange oil. It sometimes works. Charcoal is a great solution to fire ant bites; works wonders even if bitten many times.
Two summers ago my daughter (who was then an Urban Studies major at UT Austin) & I read aloud the Tom Wolfe book (at my suggestion). As someone whose own taste runs toward Frank Lloyd Wright, she LOVED Wolfe’s take down of modernism.
Off topic, but, if you haven’t seen this poem read by Tess Lawrie yet, it’s powerful. Mistakes Were Not Made, by Margaret Anna Alice: https://www.bitchute.com/video/nwZvDNcEwEgm/?
You mean live like a human being? What a novel concept..❤️ We are not meant to be a collective of "perfect" sterile automotons.
❤️💯👌
I grew up in Northern Minnesota and, still farther North, we had a cabin on a lake. That rustic, three-room cabin has since been replaced with a comfortable home now that my parents are retired. The new "cabin" has its perks - a sauna, climate control (as my parents age they are less able to cope with extreme heat), a big kitchen - but we often lament what was lost when the old cabin made way for the new. The old cabin had much more permeable boundaries with the outdoors. My brother and I tracked in plenty of sand on our bare feet, and the dog contributed her fair share. Attempts were made at sweeping, but it was never a sterile environment. An odd assortment of mismatched hand-me-down furniture meant that we didn't worry about flopping down to have a snack in our bathing suits before heading right back out the door and into the lake. When we tumbled into bed at the end of the day my parents opened huge screened windows to cool us with the lake breeze. Our little escape would never have been featured in any design magazine (no "cabin p0rn" here!), but it was a wonderful place to grow up healthy in body, mind and spirit.