My Framework

Alright guys, hopefully next week I will be able to turn my time back towards Japan and 3/11 but yet again after discussion in class this week, I am left feeling uncomfortable and would like to use this space to sort out my thoughts.

In talking with other people casually about the way the world works and even our own discussions in class I am beginning to realize the extent in which I have internalized one of the first steps in being an anthropologist: suspension of judgement. So much so that I’m beginning to think that I don’t even pass judgement/have an opinion about different cultural practices because it is so easy for me to see or slip into a mindset where they could be seen as perfectly normal and acceptable. Obviously extreme relativism has its downsides so I am still one to say that killing another human being without reason is unacceptable. However, my limits only really seem to work at the absolute extremes so in contrast, it’s usually okay to kill someone in order to protect yourself.

That is why this week was difficult for me because I already see the world as a series of intertwining stories or narratives. I also often imagine the stories or lives of people that I see in order to humanize them. This is due to past failings in my character that I have actively sought to redress. This means that even though there’s a girl walking on campus wearing exposing yoga pants, talking loudly about how wasted she was last night with enough vocal fry to sound like a 50 year old smoker may automatically be annoying to me, I have to keep in mind that she is still a daughter, possibly a sister or aunt, and that even these seemingly annoying habits serve some sort of function in her life. Whether or not I agree with those functions (e.g. expensive clothing as a display of economic and social capital), I can easily imagine a world in which those things make sense and that world is the same one I live in.

This means that whether or not an objective reality exists is a moot point. Whether it exists outside of us, the moment we begin to perceive and interpret it, it becomes inherently social. It becomes woven into the stories that we tell about ourselves and our lives. Like we saw in Years of Living Dangerously where Katharine Hayhoe’s husband(?) says, “a thermometer is not republican, a thermometer is not a democrat,” it doesn’t matter that the thermometer “objectively” states that the room is 86°F. It only gains meaning when we begin to think “gee, it’s a bit warm in here isn’t it?”, when we begin to incorporate what this data means into the frameworks we know and understand.

(While searching for this imagine I made my stomach hurt laughing at this. Not for the faint of heart.)

I think this is one way to have a “more than two” approach to thinking about the world. Like we talked about in class about the affordance of a particular environment to physically different beings. While I understand we could easily fall into anthropocentrism (which I think is even more difficult to grasp for most people because it violates everything they have ever known about the world), it is impossible to think about something without framing it into something that is already known to us. However, what we know and how we think is highly plastic if we allow ourselves. It makes me think of the adage “tastes like chicken” when eating something that is clearly very unlike chicken. By comparing it to something familiar (even comically), we can begin to make sense of it and later expand upon and deepen that knowledge, maybe even coming to a new place of understanding.

So when we say natureculture, nature/culture, nature vs. culture, etc. it is useful for thinking about but like the question of an objective reality, maybe not so applicable. I am the advocate for “well, it depends….” because each history is unique and these stories can come together in predictable but also unforeseen and unpredictable ways.

This last Wordle is made from Ingold's Globes and Spheres chapter

You may be wondering at this point too, how could this possibly be analytically useful? I can’t plug stories into my algorithm to come up with an answer. As a linguistic anthropologist I would beg to differ. While it of course isn’t perfect, we can still make generalizations and make sense out of these complex histories and lives that surround us. And again, this isn’t to say throw the baby out with the bathwater in the natureculture debate, but to instead include it as one of the many stories people are telling each other and themselves.

This is of course related to Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome which I don’t have the expertise to fully explain. However, looking at the image above you can imagine that everything is in an interrelated web without any real center or beginning or end. Everything is contingent. And there are emergent properties although not hierarchical.

This is the reality that I live comfortably within. This doesn’t mean having all of the definitive answers, it means being plastic in my way of thinking and having the potential ability to understand something completely new and foreign to me. It means being comfortable with being uncomfortable in my own skin. And even now I see its shortcoming because I have a hard time pretending to stand on solid ground where only dichotomies exist, even if only for the sake of learning.