[lit-ideas] Physics? Biology? How about field geology?
- From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Anthro-L List <ANTHRO-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Lit-Ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Kate Glynn <kathryn.m.glynn@xxxxxxxxx>, Ruth McCreery <rsm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 4 Mar 2009 11:29:35 +0900
History and philosophy of science are two of my hobbies, and I spend a lot
of time thinking about how doing anthropology fits into science and
scholarship as a whole. Thanks to our Christmas trip to Yellowstone Park, I
have been reading John McPhee's *Rising from the Plains*, a biography and
celebration of field geologist David Love and the Wyoming landscape in which
he grew up and to the understanding of which he has devoted his life. I find
myself thinking that when I compare anthropology to other sciences, I
habitually turn to physics or biology for models. Now I wonder if it
wouldn't make more sense to model ourselves on field geology and on David
Love, in particular. Here are three passages that stimulated this thought.
p. 26 Wyoming geologist
>
> "A geologist who grew up in Wyoming could not ignore economic geology,
> could not ignore vertebrate paleontology, could not ignore the narrative
> details in any chapter of time (every period in the history of the world was
> represented in Wyoming). Wyoming geology would above all tend to produce a
> generalist, with an eye that had seen a lot of rocks, and a four-dimentional
> gift for fittin gthem together and arriving at the substance of their
> story--a scenarist and lithographer of what geologists like to call the Big
> Picture."
>
> p. 104 Intellectual modesty
>
> "As a graduate student, he had to advance his reading knowledge of German,
> which he did over campfires on summer field work in the mountains of
> Wyoming. One book mentioned an inscription above a doorway at the German
> Naval Officers School, in Kiel—an unlikely place for a Rocky Mountain
> geologist to discover what became for him a lifelong professional axiom. As
> he renders it in English: "Say not 'This is the truth' but 'So it seems to
> me to be as I now see the things I think I see.'"
>
> p. 136 The Field
>
> "For David Love, the defining word is "field." Whereas all geologists were
> once like him, they are no longer, and his division of the science is field
> geology. He is the quintessential field geologist--the person with the rock
> hammer and the Brunton compass to whom weather is just one more garment to
> wear with his thousand-mile socks, the geologist who carries his
> two-hundred-gigabyte hard disk between his ears. There are young people
> following in his steps, people who still go out to scuff their boots and
> fray their jeans, but they have become greatly outnumbered by their
> contemporaries who feed facts and fragments of the earth into laboratory
> machines--activity that field people describe as black-box geology...
>
> "Black-box geologists--also referred to as office geologists and laboratory
> geologists--have been known to say that fieldwork is an escape mechanism by
> which their colleagues avoid serious scholarship...Some laboratory
> geologists, on the other hand, are nothing less than eloquent in expressing
> their symbiosis with people of wide experience out in the terrain. "I spend
> most of my time working on computers and waving my arms," the geophysicist
> Robert Phinney once said to me, adding that he required the help of
> someone's field knowledge as a check and without it would be in
> difficulty...When I meet them, I chat them up like the guys at the corner
> store, because what I do is conceptual and idealized, and I'd like to know
> that it relates to what they have seen. These people are generally above
> fifty. Their kind is being diminished, which is a major intellectual crime.
> It has to do with the nature of science and what we are doing. Reality is
> not something you capture on a blackboard."
>
John
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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