Archive for September, 2008
discovering Seoul
Saturday, September 27th, 2008Thoreau quote
Thursday, September 25th, 2008Ah, Thoreau. A person could spend many years (I’ve spent a few) walking through these pages, following the meandering streams and shadowy forests trails around Walden Pond. But for now, this seems like an appropriate passage… especially for such an unfashionable person as myself, surrounded as I am these days by literally millions of extremely fashionable and extremely fashion-conscious (I won’t say fashion-obsessed) people…
A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet — if a hero ever has a valet — bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to soires and legislative balls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not? Who ever saw his old clothes — his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.
from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, “Economy”… see also Walking and Civil Disobedience.
more Seoul photos
Saturday, September 13th, 2008Beautiful park… the Jongmyo Royal Ancestral Shrine
and Birds! at the Cheonggyecheon Migratory Bird Protection Area
cosmic serpents versus “junk DNA”
Sunday, September 7th, 2008 Why do the cosmologies of so many diverse and distant cultures feature snakes (or serpents, dragons, etc.)? And why are twin creator-beings also so widespread? What if the information received from the natural world in shamanic and/or hallucinogenic states was actually valid? And what does any of this have to do with actual science?
Jeremy Narby’s book The Cosmic Serpent is the product of many years of working with some of South America’s many native peoples. This work includes the study of both shamanism and ethnopharmacology, as well as seeking equitable legal claims to indigenous land, and financial compensation for indigenous people’s extensive botanical knowledge. A multilingual educator, Narby works with native peoples to help them retain their traditional cultures, and at the same time to better fit into the global marketplace.
In the search for ethnographical and ethnobotanical knowledge, Narby is something of an iconoclast. He is not squeamish, for example, about revisiting “unfashionable” scholarship such as comparative studies of world mythology (i.e. Campbell and Eliade); nor is he afraid to associate himself with writers (like Michael Harner) whose work has been questioned or discredited by others in the field. In my humble opinion, this is anthropology as it should be.
“During this investigation, I became familiar with certain limits of the rational gaze: It tends to fragment reality and to exclude complementarity and the association of contraries from its field of vision. I also discovered one of its more pernicious effects: The rational approach tends to minimize what it does not understand.
Anthropology is an ideal training ground for learning this. The first anthropologists went out beyond the limits of the rational world and saw primitives and inferior societies. When they met shamans, they thought they were mentally ill.
The rational approach starts from the idea that everything is explainable and that mystery is in some sense the enemy. This means that it prefers pejorative, and even wrong, answers to admitting its own lack of understanding.
The molecular biology that considers that 97 percent of the DNA in our body is ‘junk’ reveals not only its own degree of ignorance, but the extent to which it is prepared to belittle the unknown. Some recent hypotheses suggest that ‘junk DNA’ might have certain functions after all. But this does not hide the pejorative reflex: We don’t understand, so we shoot first, then ask questions. This is cowboy science, and it is not as objective as it claims. Neutrality, or simple honesty, would have consisted in saying ‘for the moment, we don’t we do not know.’ It would have been just as easy to call it mystery DNA, for instance.
The problem is not having presuppositions, but failing to make them explicit. If biology said about the intentionality that nature seems to manifest at all levels, ‘ we see it sometimes, but cannot discuss it without ceasing to do science according to our own criteria,’ things would at least be clear. But biology tends to project its presuppositions onto the reality it observes, claiming that nature itself is devoid of intention” (139-140).
Narby, Jeremy. The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1998.