[lit-ideas] Re: Physics? Biology? How about field geology?
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 4 Mar 2009 06:53:21 EST
A Field Trip To Geary
In a message dated 3/3/2009 9:30:01 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx writes:
>History and philosophy of science are two of my hobbies.
You should be pleased by Quine's quip, then, "Philosophy of science is
philosophy enough". R. Paul and I wholeheartedly disagree. I'm surprised you'd
agree, too, seeing that your PhD was on magic (granted, you were not upskirting
your Daoist master).
>and I spend a lot of time thinking about
>how doing anthropology fits into science
>and scholarship as a whole.
I never liked the idea of scholarship. In England, Grice was one 'a
scholarship boy' from the provinces (in Oxford) and forever laughed at that!
I find 'anthropology' to general a science. In Greek 'anthropos' was the
_third_ way to refer to 'man'. The first was
aner ---- ADULT MALE (as opposed to younger, 'ephebe', or
older, 'geron' -- cfr. gerontology).
arran --- MALE -- MASCULINITY Studies in the present age.
---- 'Anthropos' sounds too abstract to me.
>Thanks to our Christmas trip to Yellowstone Park, I
>have been reading "Rising from the Plains",
>a biography and celebration of
>David Love and the Wyoming landscape
>and to the understanding of which he has devoted his life.
--- Yes, it is quite a task to get totally identified with some _other_
landscape, but not impossible. Witness S. Ward: he was born in Bedfordshire, I
write extensively on Woburn Abbey (the family 'see' of the duke and marchess of
Tavistock). He blatantly ignores that. His landscape was Sussex
(incidentally, where in Sussex did you live, I wonder -- SW), and now
Dartmoor.
--- Myself, I would think I could devote mylife to the field geology of the
River Plate, only it tends to be too slimey! Sir Anthony Hopkins was recently
filming down there, in "The House in the Arsehole of the World" or some such
-- but it's a beautiful ranch location on the water -- beautiful birds,
marginal jungle, lots of lovely things --. I don't think I can identify with
any
other field geology, except Celle Ligure: That city (or village) is what's
written on my Italian Passport as marking my 'procedence' -- so I wouldn't
feel
so much of a foreigner there, and the geology of that area _is_ fascinating
-- especially as it is in the middle of Herculean Road that connected Rome
with Gibraltar (as S. Ward was talking of the excellent Roman Road systems).
McCreery:
>I find myself thinking that when I compare
>anthropology to other sciences, I habitually turn
>to physics or biology for models.
As opposed to ... computer science?!
>Now I wonder if it wouldn't make more sense to model
>ourselves on field geology.
>Here are three passages that stimulated this thought.
>"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-
>dimensional gift for fitting them together and arriving at the
>substance of their story--a scenarist and lithographer of
>what geologists like to call the Big Picture."
I agree. If I'd start with geology of River Plate, I'd mention Borges's quip
-- yet another decadent plain -- he thought London and Gomorrah and Sodomah
were decadents. It's not uphill geology that Washington favoured.
The bit about 'having gone through all the periods of history' is a bit
otiose. It would be spectacular if it didn't -- But I trust S. Ward will
identify
with your field geologist. I would think Dartmoor is the richest plot,
geologically.
The economic geology well applies to the River Plate. It's called 'pampa
humeda' (humid pampa), without which no Buenos Aires -- no cattle, no meat
export to England, no nothing. No Dartmoor ponies, no nothing nothing.
>"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
I think I've heard of it. [witness Chris Bruce]
>—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.'"
Okay. I'll have to translate:
Sage nicht, "Das ist der (die, dass?) Verheit" aber
"Ich glaube mir sein, als ich sehe der (den) Dingen, dass ich sehen
glaube"
cfr. Tweety: "It seems to me that I'm seeing a
cute little cat before me".
etc. -- Should say that Kapitaen at Kiel was a philosophical soul. Talking
of navy officers, Grice was one (RN, second world war services, operations in
north atlantic theatre; and so is a rear admiral who's buried at St. Mary, in
Walkhampton -- life beautifully recounted by our very own S. Ward.
>"For David Love, the defining word is "field."
Well, I'm not surprised of your model, J. McCreery, since 'field
anthropology' is a, er, field, of its own.
>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
the suffix -work spoils it for me. Should be field-trip.
>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...
Yes, it's like writing on sexology but relying on 'the team' for the
protocols.
>When I meet them, I chat them up like the guys at the
>corner store, because what I do is conceptual and idealized,
In philosophy we say "ex cathedra".
>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."
Nay, it's plain _board_ now, with good, oh so good, dry erasers!
But Ursula is right. I teach Wagner, and -- we teach this with Geary -- we
have two practicums. The first Geary
gives, on "Wagner's Music Is Better Than It Sounds". This part is totally
abstract. Geary
goes through the score of "The Flying Dutchment" in total silence. And would
eventually
tap a student's shoulder to surprise him. He explains,
"The idea of having to listen to Wagner's music to appreciate
it is fallacious. La Stupenda, Joan Sutherland, used to say,
when asked about her rehearsal techniques. 'Oh, most of the
rehearsal is _mental_'. And that's precisely what we do."
The second part of the seminar I conduct myself. We play Wagner with a view
of confirming Geary's dictum, that it _is_ better than it sounds. But _more_
fun? Mabbe.
Most of Geary's research on field geology concentrates on the drainage of
the Mississippi. He thinks 'geology' is a misnomer when applied to 'rivers' --
'since it's more liquid than, er, terraceous.'
Bruce Chatwin was fascinated with the field geology of my part of the world
and spent quite a few hours in the La Plata Musem of Natural Sciences to
examine the prehistoric remains that led him to ... Punta Arenas, in Chile.
There
is even 'laboratory' bibliography on his field trips now.
Cheers,
J. L. Speranza
Buenos Aires, Argentina
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