the breaking of the shell

le blog est mort...

2008-01-23T10:14:00.000+02:00

we could do a little singalong to the melody of 'le coq est mort' now of course... or we could just meet at the new writing place and leave the singing to the confinement of the shower or to those who know how to sing...
so long!
your nutshell

Ieselsbrécken, Eddisoen, an ee Stéck vum Gléck.

2007-12-29T19:57:00.000+02:00

“How shall I go in peace and without sorrow? Nay, not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city. Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls, and long were the night of aloneness; and who can depart from his pain and aloneness without regret? Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets, and too many are the children of my longing that walk naked among these hills, and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache.
It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands. Nor is it a thought I leave behind me, but a heart made sweet with hunger and with thirst.
[…]
Shall the day of parting be the day of gathering? And shall it be said that my eve was in truth my dawn? And what shall I give unto him who has left his plough in midfurrow, or to him who has stopped the wheel of his winepress? Shall my heart become a tree heavy-laden with fruit that I may gather and give unto them? And shall my desires flow like a fountain that I may fill their cups? Am I a harp that the hand of the mighty may touch me, or a flute that his breath may pass through me? A seeker of silence am I, and what treasure have I found in silences that I may dispense with confidence?”
[…]
“You give much and know not that you give at all.”
(K. Gibran)

“Stay or leave
I want you not to go
But you should
It was good
As good goes
Stay or leave
I want you not to go
But you did
(…)
Making plans to change the world
While the world is changing us” (DMB)

I am not Almustafa. I don’t have any advice, poetic or pragmatic, to give to those I leave behind. I did not stay 12 years. My absence will be a lot less noticeable. I did, however, learn to love this place. I lost a bit of my heart here. I learnt the purity of its forms by heart. I had to do hard decisions. I still draw the shapes of its inhabitants, the lines on the ground, the crevasses in the buildings. I still carry the wind in my ears, I hear the steps of the horses, and I feel the sun set, and the rain shake the leaves. Four seasons have come and gone, in the middle of the fifth I am going away. I can theoretically envisage it, but do not comprehend it as yet. In the hope not to forget, I take with me a thousand mnemonic devices. Fieldwork as a multitude of moments that I refuse to synthesise and analyse yet. How can a time like this possibly fit into 5 neat chapters? It don’t and it won’t. Happiness, sadness, aches of various kinds, fury, elation, irony, exhaustion, desperation, peace, quietness, euphoria, and others were close friends in this year. Of course, along with the people I met, learnt to respect, to care for, and to love, and whose friendship I will hopefully honour. I am very grateful to them in the first place.
Thanks also to you, dear reader, for having been part of the journey.
This weblog ends here, the (PhD and other) journeys go on. There may be other weblogs in the future. Information forthcoming here...
Happy New Year!
Your seeker of the silences

Being (how is that for a pompous title? ;o))

2007-12-29T19:55:00.000+02:00

“Life, and all that lives, is conceived in the mist and not in the crystal. And who knows but a crystal is mist in decay.
[…]
Is it not your breath that has erected and hardened the structure of your bones? And is it not a dream which none of you remember having dreamt, that built your city and fashioned all there is in it? Could you but see the tides of that breath you would cease to see all else. And if you could hear the whispering of the dream you would hear no other sound.”
(K.Gibran)

I guess this kind of thinking makes clear the point about the limits of agency, and could make clear how Plato came to think about eternal shadows of being that we can know only through a glass, darkly.

Modernist Rain

2007-12-29T19:51:00.000+02:00

Bombs drop, watch them go: a ballet of blossoming fire flower dots
From Xtate with Love?
The scorched earth will stun the terrorists, communists, oppositionals
Of any kind. Call them what your time demands.
The guerrilla fighters cannot be seen from up here
What are these particular ones demanding?
Separation? Rights? End of oppression?
Insert your favourite political project please.
Planes spray defoliant to reveal, displace, disable, cripple
Those civilians below for generations; Agents Oh?
Radiating smiles would be the other irony.
If not this rain, choose the new pollution
Acid carried by the clouds over mountains, state borders and
Across the sea to reach you via airmail.
Your lungs already pussed with other garbage.
Sometimes the rain may be torrential, celebrities are air-lifted out
Presidents descended by helicopters, not staying long enough
To really get an idea of the stench and the rough.
Beam me up pilot! For I need to return to my office
To govern this or another country and my freedom-loving citizenry
More likely I will pay a visit to my oil, gold, freedom machines
That make me so different from my filthy subjects and others not worthy.
Thank God as pecunia non olet forever.

‘Sie verstehen nichts von Realpolitik, die Armen.’

2007-12-20T16:21:00.000+02:00

Allow me to copy-paste the following brilliant Kurt Tucholsky text about power, compromise and leaving ideals behind ‘naturally’ while being heaved up the ladder of privilege, politics and… filth. This was written around 1920, and you need only change a few terms and you get a pretty good contemporary picture. Des weiteren would I like to encourage reading the rest of Tucholsky’s oeuvre, because a lot of it is very funny in a very dark way. Besser driwwer ze laachen wi ze kräischen? Satire darf, wie bekannt, alles. I want to add to this that satire keeps its quality only if people are not disgusted in their country/politics/economics. If, like in Romania, where desperation has crept up on even the last idealist-cum-activist, satire becomes bad. Simultaneously, all news becomes satire, and hope becomes frail. It is not a pretty sight. Merry Christmas, for crying out loud...
I write this in the light of the most recent outrage surrounding the Minister of Transport, Ludovic Orban (PNL), who ran over a teenage girl on the zebra crossing with his large car, who tried to hush the story down with bribe-silence money paid to the family of the girl (3000 euro first instalment). The police omitted from their report that there had been a girl run over. Orban lied in public, to the press, about there having been only one victim, himself, that he had just touched a car that was parked, and who insisted the press should stop the ‘mediatic lynching’. In the emergency call made by a bystanding citizen, police (giving precisions about the location) encumbered the ambulance services by telling the operator that ‘Nothing happened. He only got her on the hood!’ Orban also made, under the influence of alcohol, a threatening phone call to one journalist named Robert Turcescu (who I admire greatly for his analytical clarity, and, his integrity) who had made a few reports on Realitatea TV about the case. The same journalist received a further threat call full of insinuations from someone who identified himself as the ‘godfather’ (nasul) of Orban. Minciuna continua!
This is a country where it is really hard to try to move things, and true political opposition is suffocated right from its conception. It makes me go nuts. I would prefer this environment to be less educational, and with more possibilities for change. As Mircea Badea puts it: ‘Traim in Romania si asta ne ocupa tot timpul’ (we live in Romania and this keeps us occupied all the time).

DIE VERRÄTER

Na, Verräter eigentlich nicht. Ein Verräter, das ist doch ein Mann, der hingeht und seine Freunde dem Gegner ausliefert, sei es, indem er dort Geheimnisse ausplaudert, Verstecke aufzeigt, Losungsworte preisgibt... und das alles bewußt... nein, Verräter sind diese da nicht. Die Wirkung aber ist so, als seien sie welche, doch sind sie anders, ganz anders.

Da wird man vom Vertrauen der Parteigenossen ausgesandt, mit dem bösen Feind zu unterhandeln, sozusagen die Arbeiter zu vertreten, die ja inzwischen weiterarbeiten müssen. Und die erste Zeit geht das auch ganz gut. Geld... ach, Geld... wenn die Welt so einfach wäre. Geld ist zunächst gar nicht zu holen. Der Arbeiterführer bleibt Arbeiterführer; leicht gemieden von den Arbeitgebern, merkwürdiges Wort, übrigens. Nein, nein, man bleibt ein aufrechter Mann. Aber im Laufe der Jahre, nicht wahr, da sind so die langen Stunden der gemeinschaftlichen Verhandlungen an den langen Tischen: man kennt einander, die Gemeinsamkeit des Klatsches eint, und es wird ja überall so viel geklatscht. Nun, und da stellt sich so eine Art vertraulicher Feindschaft heraus.
Kitt ist eine Sache, die bindet nicht nur; sie hält auch die Steine auseinander. Zehn Jahre Gewerkschaftsführer; zehn Jahre Reichstagsabgeordneter; zehn Jahre Betriebsratsvorsitzender - das wird dann fast ein Beruf. Man bewirkt etwas. Man erreicht dies und jenes. Man bildet sich ein, noch mehr zu verhüten. Und mann kommt mit den Herren Feinden ganz gut aus, und eines Tages sind es eigentlich gar keine Feinde mehr. Nein. Ganz leise geht das, unmerklich. Bis jener Satz fällt, der ganze Reihen voller Arbeiterführer dahingemäht hat, dieser infame, kleine Satz: „Ich wende mich an Sie, lieber Brennecke, weil Sie der einzige sind, mit dem man zusammenarbeiten kann. Wir stehen in verschiedenen Lagern - aber Sie sind und bleiben ein objektiver Mann..." Da steckt die kleine gelbe Blume des Verrats ihr Köpfchen aus dem Gras - hier, an dieser Stelle und in dieser Stunde. Da beginnt es.

Der kleine Finger ist schon drüben; der Rest läßt nicht mehr lange auf sich warten. „Genossen", sagt der Geschmeichelte, „man muß die Lage von zwei Seiten ansehn..." Aber die Genossen verstehen nicht recht und murren: sie sehn die Lage nur von einer Seite an, nämlich von der Hungerseite. Und was alles Geld der Welt nicht bewirkt hätte, das bewirkt jene perfide, kleine Spekulation auf die Eitelkeit des Menschen: er kann doch die vertrauensvollen Erwartungen des Feindes nicht enttäuschen. Wie? Plötzlich hingehn und sagen: Ja, die Kollegen billigen das nicht, Krieg muß zwischen uns sein, Krieg und Kampf der Klassen, weil wir uns ausgebeutet fühlen...? Unmöglich. Man kann das unmöglich sagen. Es ist zu spät.

Und dann geht es ganz schnell bergab. Dann können es Einladungen sein oder Posten, aber sie müssen es nicht sein - die schlimmsten Verräterein auf dieser Welt werden gratis begangen. Dann wird man Oberpräsident, Minister, Vizekönig oder Polizeipräfekt - das geht dann ganz schnell. Und nun ist man auch den grollenden Zurückgebliebenen, die man einmal vertreten hat und nun bloß noch tritt, so entfremdet - sie verstehen nichts von Realpolitik, die Armen. Nun sitzt er oben, gehört beinah ganz zu jenen, und nur dieses kleine Restchen, daß sie ihn eben doch nicht so ganz zu den Ihren zählen wollen, das schmerzt ihn. Aber sonst ist er gesund und munter, danke der Nachfrage.
Und ist höchst erstaunt, wenn man ihn einen Verräter schilt. Verräter? Er hat doch nichts verraten! Nichts - nur sich selbst und eine Klasse, die zähneknirschend dieselben Erfahrungen mit einem neuen beginnt. –

Photo: Melbourne, Australia, January 2006

Meeeeeeeh...

2007-12-15T19:52:00.001+02:00

Disciplined–Trapped versus Disciplined–Enabled

2007-12-15T19:50:00.001+02:00

I also came across the following in reading about corruption, and it really got stuck in my mind, because it rings so true. I read here that it is about disciplinary constraints, thematic hierarchies, and current trends that influence how research is done and what constitutes its object.
‘However much we may prize our intellectual freedom, our professional academic minds are as constrained as the bureaucrat’s.’ (Robertson 2006: 9)
What are the criteria for good research? What do we want to achieve with research? Who does it speak to? How do we break the limits that we work with if we are bound to the medium of writing? And: are we able to untangle ourselves from this very medium while remaining acceptable and intelligible to the mainstream?

Reference
Robertson, A.F. (2006) ‘Misunderstanding Corruption’ Anthropology Today 22 (2): 8-11.

(Fara) Spaga

2007-12-14T17:55:00.000+02:00

While in Romania corruption may be more visible, I want to stress the point that corruption is not just happening ‘elsewhere’, as have shown big-time recent fraud scandals in Western countries, in both the political and commercial spheres. When I was at a Ministry a few weeks back, I noticed some posters saying something along the lines of information is a right, not a privilege, and that public servants have the obligation to do their job. It is probably not for the first time that campaigns like this are started in the media and government institutions. As AF Robertson (complete source available on request) has recently noted, there is little doubt that the ultimate purpose of ‘anti-corruptionism’ as a global movement is to make the citadels of commerce safer for international capital, rather than to make life fairer for the world’s poor.
I think that the DNA (National Anti-Corruption Agency) is doing a lot of work, and maybe, if you persevere in taking people out of office, you may end up with some person with integrity there. At the top, however, the issue of corruption is deeply entangled with political power struggles. Legislation is permissive and constantly changing, and in front of the law, some animals are definitely more equal than others here. Accusations that will eventually make the corrupt ones go away, or no smoke without a fire? Probably both. I just know this manoeuvring at the top (we are at present without a Minister of Justice again, in Agriculture the Minister got changed 4 times during my fieldwork, see youtube for the famous video from the last Minister’s public bribe reception) from the media, who are clearly swept along with the strong desire to become European, to denounce the stealing politicians, to speak about what happens in this country, and to mark progress towards their own posited ‘Europeanness’. Press information is a good thing, although within the ranks of the press many have enriched themselves through shady businesses (example: Chireac, an editorialist I quoted once mainly for his vileness a few weeks later left the paper because it turns out he had business in his back that no one in the paper presumably had known about…believable?).
One of the problems is the lack of information. People do not know about their rights, and get no information. One the one hand, (political) institutions are not good at sharing information, and making it reach more people. People also just want to get on with their lives and make a living, which is here quite more difficult than in Western Europe – we elect them to govern for us, right? – and have a difficult heritage of ‘the state will take care of it’ of socialist times, and ‘the state doesn’t give a damn’ of postsocialism, so this often gives rise to a ‘bloody politicians, they are thieves, only themselves is who they know’ and ‘what are we to do?’ resignation. Some people would call this ‘lack of civil society’, but I am reticent to put it like that for a number of reasons. There is a definite fracture between the governors and the governed, but in some ways, because of this fracture, corruption persists. Also corruption is not perceived, by your average person, as something very different from stealing, and is usually grouped into this larger category.
Put in the situation of your child/spouse/parent/cousin getting seriously ill, you go to the hospital and you take a bribe for the doctor (if you are unfortunate enough not to have a powerful name or access to private care) if you want him to have a good look. People die because they are not examined, because they did not bribe appropriately, especially if they have the misfortune to get ill on the weekend. Say you are living in a village, and the policeman stops you, you have some money already tucked into your documents that you hand over. You say you want to stay out of trouble, and he might just see that, actually your tyres are crap and there’s something wrong with your lights. He will find something. You want your child to get a job in your own country, you do not want them to leave like all their siblings, so you pay to get him or her into the army, the police, anything where the boss is open to bribing. You do not take the breeching of a property border to court, because you know your opponent is a powerful man, and justice will not be quite as blind as it should be. I am reminded of a friend who gets enraged about how people drive (aggressively, unpredictably – only last weekend 18 people died in traffic accidents, including 2 people from my village, while 46 more got seriously injured), because they get their driving licences without practice (with money), the police is not efficient, the roads are crap, and people are reckless, and, as we drove through this town on the main road, about 20 metres in front of us, a pickup sped out of a side road on the right without caring about priority, and then veered to the left realising they could not stop in this rain, so that we had to manoeuvre around him and it was lucky that no one came from the other side). He started cursing like a pirate, and said then: ‘no wonder people start making the law themselves, and beating people up. Romania is the jungle. You try to conform to the law, and you’re apparently an idiot.’ A similar thing happens to people who have a medium-size company and try to do everything white. They are bound to fail, because they compete with a black system that runs a lot better, because fiscal evasion is easy, and also here bribing is possible, if you run into some trouble.
I am entirely in agreement that while it is easy to love the sinner (in a lot of cases), the game remains condemnable for many reasons.
Corruption reinforces inequalities. ‘They’ build their villas with your money, while you pay double at least.
Corruption does not produce incentives for people to work for a ‘public good’, and does not help to work towards a meritocracy, where the best people are also the most skilled and not just those within networks of nepotism (did you know that the term makes reference to illegitimate sons of popes who were privileged ‘nephews’? aber das nur am Rande). Corruption hinders reform of encumbered bureaucracies, even though it is not the opposite of bureaucracy, as far as I can think today.
One battle does not win the war, but gives a ray of hope: the European Commission has been nagging Romania to get rid of the excessively high matriculation tax that the government introduced at the beginning of 2007 (EU accession, remember), while it had just got rid of the import and internal acquisition taxes. This new tax of course had nothing to do with several people in government being involved in car sale business at the time. Be that as it may, the law violated the acquis communautaire, and if Romania does not change it within two months after having been warned, it will be taken to the European Court of Justice. One citizen from Arad, Ilie Iluna has taken the state to court and won his individual case. The head of the Timisoara finance department is considering to ask for the tax back himself. But now the government has decided to rename the tax (environment), and efforts to contest may be vain. The story goes on!
I know in this post I conceptually mix corruption (the abuse of public office for private gains according to one definition) and differential application of legislation, but I think you cannot, for the Romanian context, consider them separately.

What about Tolerance? or: All The S**** They Print

2007-12-06T18:07:00.000+02:00

I should stop reading the papers. Emotional contents outweigh informational value. I came across an interview with a Romanian band. Let me give you some of the statements these guys make about one piece on their new album called ‘Message for Europe’, and the journalist point out to them that due to their vile attack against gypsies [word used in the text, see also my post on Giovanna Reggiani for more on vocabulary] and gays, a lot of people think that they are racist and homophobic.
My comments to their entire answer are in [square brackets] and I reproduce the entire bit of text, the rhetoric jumps are not my addition:

[?] = I can’t believe they printed this
[sic] = hard to believe hm?
[repetition] = absolute lack of logical reasonableness

”Why are we not allowed to say what we believe? Why do we need to protect the ideas of a minority as much as we do? Why, if you say a thing that annoys you, are you catalogued as racist? We do not have a problem with the colour of their skin. For us, everything is reduced to culture and attitude [culture here in line with the civilisation thinking so widespread in this part of the world I would guess]. Racism is a new thing, invented 50 years ago [sic]. And now those who open their mouths and say something that should not be said are considered right-down racist and xenophobe. It is a global rule [sic] for the moment. Why are we not allowed to say something against gypsies without being labelled racist [repetition]? We refer strictly to what is happening in Europe, where [sic] Romanians are looked upon as gypsies. We don’t like this. Does this transform me into a racist [repetition]? It disturbs me that Romanians who speak three languages receive offers to carry the garbage in Amsterdam [?]. We have entered Europe on our knees and now we need to suck their ****s to be their brothers [?]. So they want to integrate gypsies[?]. We have reached age 30 and we respect ourselves. We are honest [?]. Would I need to get down to their level and live in a tent and go stealing in Europe that I would not be considered racist? I can also put the problem in this way. And I am not ashamed, this is my favourite piece on the album.”
About homosexuals, and believe me, this is a very widespread opinion here, going right across the board:
“I do not want to raise my children among men who kiss in their presence. It is my right to say that…We have a problem with homosexuals who go onto the street and shout out what they do [?]. What they do at home is their business.”
And:
“We are not stupid [I beg to differ obviously]. It is very simple: why do I need to see two transvestites [sic] who ostentatiously kiss on the street? And this really happens. For me, as part of the sexual [-orientation] majority, it is not obligatory to accept this. From my point of view I am under attack. My rights as part of the majority are no longer respected from the moment in which it is imposed upon me to respect the wishes of a sexual [-orientation] or any other minority.”

Maybe I should just ignore stupid opinions of people that show, by every further word they utter, how low their rhetoric, how little their understanding, how common their arguments. But I cannot. They get to me. I think they are indicative of some of the problems here (but not only here, I’d venture to add), including an overemphasis on personal rights, and convenient forgetting of various truths (e.g. since when was racism invented 50 years ago?), the true meaning of tolerance ignored, and essentially, bigotry all the way down. Yes, Romanians have an image problem, but you certainly do not help to improve it. No, you cannot say anything you want just because you want to. Yes, politeness is part of the message. I thought those two last points had been made to all of us by the time we reached age nine…
Yours furiously, rage-shell, and, though fuming, hopefully a moderate voice…

mandarines

2007-12-06T18:05:00.000+02:00

My best friend the hedgehog
Has got a toothache
Two days ago it started with a dull throb
It will pass he said to me
His optimism is most exemplary
Cheek swollen, sleepy from medication
That does not help as much as it should
Walks around and have not known him
As liquid somehow
Apparent dejection through pain induced
Eats very little
Speaks but when he laughs it hurts him
The enamel is not as strong as it should be
Acidity and sweetness in time
It will pass do not worry please
Still
I wish I could do more than feed him
Mandarines and tell stories about
Chickens and having one’s hair
Disentangled

Leo Tolstoi, Anna Karenina, chapter 2

2007-12-06T18:03:00.001+02:00

‘There was no solution, but that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day--that is, forget oneself. To forget himself in sleep was impossible now, at least till nighttime; he could not go back now to the music sung by the decanter-women; so he must forget himself in the dream of daily life.’

Do you agree?

Pig, noun

2007-12-06T17:56:00.000+02:00

An omnivorous domesticated hoofed mammal with sparse bristly hair and a flat snout for rooting in the soil, kept for its meat. Here, pretty much every household has at least one pig, fattened with maize, wheat and general-leftover broth for about a year. Note that industrial fattening takes about 3 months now, and new orientations of taste with health concerns have definitely changed how pigs should be in other regions of Europe (and even in the big farms here, e.g. maximum of 12% fat), those bred in individual households should have a proportion of at least 40% fat. They should not lack ‘sunca’, the subcutaneous fat that will be turned into ‘untura’ (Lux: Schmalz – is there a special word in English?… I am tempted to say ‘blubber’ but I am sure that’s only for sea mammals’ fat…). Over a thousand pigs will be ‘cut’ from now until Christmas in the village. The black market in a neighbouring town is flourishing in this period of the year, unhampered by a smiling vet inspector (encountered in a different part of the official part of the market) who probably gets his own Christmas feast-pig from there. You can get pigs quite cheaply there (about €90 for a carcass with 120 kg meat, dead weight). There are all kinds of colourful pigs there, because people here have old breeds, not the ‘modern’ hybrids recommended/prescribed for industrial farming. I like colourful pigs. There was one black pig with a lot of hair on the market screaming as if it was being slaughtered already, because someone had tied it with its hind leg to the back of the truck, and it really did not like that, and wanted to escape. The vet inspector used to go and threaten with fines, in the summer, making the market dissociate at once in a cloudy moment of dust and noise, everyone getting their pigs in the car or horse-wagons and taking off. The man probably decided probably it was to no avail, given that every Sunday morning, the market was recreated under his nose.
Generally the issue is not (yet?) about whether raising a pig is profitable. It has become a lot more difficult lately to give your pig away, but it is still possible. Prices have hit rock bottom. If EU standards will be enforced, it will be more difficult to keep pigs in the backyard. For now, people know that no money is to be made in the pig business for small producers, but they are still holding on to their eating practices, and what it means to have a good household.
People here say that they should be killed on Ignatius day on the 20th December, but this is not respected in the region. The cutting of the pig is an important event, uniting families, neighbours, friends and attracting guests into the courtyards. I was told that from now on I would hear screaming pigs every morning. The pigs are slaughtered the traditional way. Even though people are vaguely aware of the (considered, and so-called Occidental) EU prescription to ‘anaesthetize’ pigs (through electroshock, shot…) before cutting their throat, they do not put this into practice. The pig is cut through an incision to the throat, which immobilises it immediately, but which kills very slowly. The pig is transported to a makeshift table, usually with a ladder. When it is dead, it is scorched black with a massive burner, removing the hair, and the outside of the hooves. The pig is washed, cleaned, and its head cut off. Then the actual cutting into pieces begins, and it takes some skill to do this properly. The times I have witness this event, a lot of discussion was going into various, and differing opinions of expertise on how to cut, where, when, and what. The carcass steams in the cold December air. Despite variations there is a rough prescribed order of cutting, and at this time, pieces of ‘sorici’, pig skin, are offered to guests and participants, along with salt and coffee. The cutting up proceeds from the outside to the inside, and the guts are dealt with lastly. The pig needs to be turned from being on its side first, to sitting on its belly. Every bit is used (apart from the gall bladder and the bladder), including the bones. After the cutting, more work awaits, because most people do not have freezers! Preservation methods include the ‘untura’ that I mentioned. Much of the meat is smoked, but not entire hindquarters, as is done in North-Western Europe. The meat is cut into manageable pieces and smoked with a slow woodchip fire in a small room. The organs and lower quality pieces are minced and made into ‘toba’ (a kind of pate) and ‘carnatoi’ (a kind of sausage). Pofta buna!

A Long December (I hope) and A Question

2007-12-01T18:15:00.000+02:00

I have been trying to think about this question of what my favourite business/technological innovation is... and, for the life of me, I cannot seem to think of anything plausible.
What is yours? Why?
Yours hectically, nutshell

what's the relationship between kittens and a rabbit?

2007-11-20T16:54:00.000+02:00

here's a story that happy families are of _all kinds_ (contra all conservative comments)- let us hope the friendship lasts... story brought to you via luqman here. being in the field makes me an unkeen newsreader. that's my excuse anyway.

adulthood

2007-11-20T16:46:00.000+02:00

I had a dream where we buried someone. They were put into a white coffin. I arrived to the ceremony mid-way, and did not see whose funeral this was. It had been an unnatural death, and in people’s faces I not only read bereavement, but deep shock also. I awoke with a startling grief weighing me down, and the stark vision of candles lit remained with me for days. It was a youth that died. Youth itself may well have been put to its grave, who knows? The youth of my project?
If a project grows like a person, mine has just reached adulthood. How do you define that? Making decisions that you would have rejected earlier in your life, and accepting the consequences, instead of being raging of Sturm and Drang. Doing the job even though the initial enthusiasm has gone. Sticking to the promise despite a million ambivalences. Tuning down expectations to realistic levels. Loving the person despite your own and their own weaknesses. But being a bit disappointed sometimes, mostly of myself and my own limitations. Being a bit self-ironic in one’s momentary, slightly shameful admission that this is how it is even though it should not be. And of course I am only talking about my project.
and as a reply to aaron: i do a lot of silly things all the time... it seems that i am sometimes very solemn on my blog, but that's just a cover...my relationship to writing is the following: once i have written it, i conveniently forget all about it, and it helps me cope with everyday life. well it is a kind of oblivion that is semi-permanent.

3 a.m. (like the matchbox 20 song)

2007-11-13T18:37:00.000+02:00

As a consequence of sleeping pretty much all day to get my fever down and keep my head from exploding, I am wide awake now. I am headacheless through seventeen-hour-sleepy-spontaneous-remission-therapy. Monica and me spent time drinking tea and nibbling biscuits until well after midnight. We talked research, writing, people. I am actually so highly awake that my thoughts are racing. Everything is potentiality. I think in the dark and I imagine the entire neighbourhood population of socialist blocks around me fast asleep. I like the calm of the dead of the night. It is the time for second chances, a time with so much space it makes you feel little. I feel my stomach tingling. I turn on the light. I write, again.
I really feel fieldwork ending. Lots to do before the end of the year. I will cross the gates to the Orient, as they say here, then return home. Life takes me back to Scotland, and I will start writing the actual thesis. I may have reconciled myself with that thought. I have lots of material, I have lots of ideas, it is ‘merely’ a matter of putting them into a coherent, rigorous, beautiful fashion. Sayeth she, but little did she know.
And then, maybe, hopefully, slowly, I will get, like Aino said, to the more important things in life. I am not sure how it will work out, leaving here is the first step. I will get there in the end. Sayeth she, and tried to look at the stars, failing, for being in the city, in a flat, surrounded by concrete. Can we wish upon the stars if we do not see them? Course we can. Sayeth Paul Eluard:

‘La nuit n’est jamais complète.
Il y a toujours, puisque je le dis,
Puisque je l’affirme,
Au bout du chagrin
Une fenêtre ouverte,
Une fenêtre éclairée,
Il y a toujours un rêve qui veille,
Désir à combler, faim à satisfaire,
Un coeur généreux,
Une main tendue, une main ouverte,
Des yeux attentifs,
Une vie, la vie à se partager.’

Sayeth she: here’s another reason to start a new day in a few hours. Bonsoir. Bonne nuit.

Two Parrots at the Fair

2007-11-09T20:25:00.000+02:00

We stopped in our slow walk through the packed, muddy fairground where we had gone because it was the day of the archangels Michael and Gabriel, and people were taking it a bit easier on these kinds of days of special saints. We had bought a gogoasa each, a wonderfully simple sweet baked in oil, and were eating them, having a look at the vegetable stand nearby, and planning what else we needed to buy from there. Suddenly I noticed a guy walking around with a little wooden tray that had a little high-seat for two green little parrots. On the bottom of the tray was a kind of file system, holding tiny folded papers. As I looked at him, and turned to ask my friends about what he was all about, he was already coming our way. He said, hello, are you married? It immediately dawned on me that it was about the future somehow. Of immense naivety, I was still curious about the function of the parrots. I saw they were real and I noticed they also had a little corner on the tray where some bird food was spread out for them. He said, come on only two lei, I will tell you the future, what zodiac are you? My friends were already interjecting, we do not wish to be tricked, we do not give money for nothing. Noticing us having our gogosi, he said, looking at me, because I was obviously more fascinated, ok… for you one lei, because I also want to buy myself a gogoasa. What star sign are you? Returning to the hopeless manoeuvre of wooing my friends, he said, and maybe if you all get one, I can also take a car home. He was completely open about his money making scheme, and the way in which it worked: I tell you what you want to hear and you give me some money. I was amused, and said, ok I will give you one lei. So he just gave me a piece of paper, no longer insisting on what starsign I was. I was a bit ashamed of my own gullibility, and put it in my purse until I was by myself to read it. Let me tell you it was not the biggest revelation of my life, but I just like horoscopes, even the plumpest ones. The function of the parrots: good marketing tools. If at least they had been ventriloquists and sung the horoscope to me. That would have impressed me. Where did all the ventriloquists go? Why are fairs no longer about wonder, but merely about monkey-making? What are the new sites of wonder? Are they muddy? What is your favourite site of wonder?

Giovanna Reggiani

2007-11-05T18:26:00.000+02:00

On TV, the funeral of Giovanna, the story around an Italian woman (47) murdered by a Romanian rrom/gypsy (24) has dominated news reports of the last few days. Images: the grief-stricken husband is held by two friends while the coffin is moved into the church. Lots of politicians and notabilities attend the funeral service. In Bucharest, Realitatea TV has made a panel for Prayers for Giovanna, where people leave flowers, candles, and write messages on a whiteboard. Romanian officials react. Italian people make comments. The Romanian Foreign Ministry gives statements. On the outskirts of Rome bulldozers flatten the quasi-shantytowns built by Romanian rromi/gypsies. The rromi/gypsies in Italy are in distress because they may be expelled, and their dwellings destroyed. The Romanian premier accuses the Mayor of Rome of exploiting the events for his own purposes.
Populist, racist and moderate voices all shout at each other. As usual, the media does not just make the news, but is an arena for more engrained views, giving a (very specific) perspective. I think there are plenty of reasons, all not very flattering to ‘Europeans’, for which this story broke.

In Romania, discrimination against rromi/gypsies is a daily encounter. The word used in everyday speech is ‘tigan’. Never have I heard anyone use, in a non-parodyings way, any other word. Mass media (opportunistic and relatively emotional and populistic) uses a mixture. It is admitted that there are also ‘tigani cuminti’ (nice, well-behaved rromi/gypsies) who do not display any criminal behaviour, but they’re exceptions to the rule. Romanian Romanians who break laws are not criminals (except if they’re politicians), but they merely are resourceful (se descurca) or they are clever (destepti). Please note the hypocrisy inherent in this view denouncing a high degree of nationalist-exclusive sentiment-conviction.
I am routinely confronted with statements combining the following: dirty gypsies/they cannot do any work properly, they are bad craftsmen/they steal/they have made our nation a gypsy nation in Europe/they are not civilised/they refuse to work/they refuse to send their children to school/we know what it is really like to live with gypsies, not like those people in the EU who accuse us of discrimination/if we are not careful, we are going to be a minority in our own country, because the gypsies are still making children, even though they are too poor to raise them/go and have a look in X (insert village with majority of gypsies here), I was shocked, I thought this cannot be Romania, this must be Zimbabwe/………/
This type of attitude goes right across gender, age, class, and level of education.
The rrom/gypsy is, as others have pointed out too, the incarnation of a very hierarchical viewing of society, and it is pretty much equivalent with foreigner of the worst kind. You cannot get much more alien than being a gypsy.
I keep forgetting how much racism there is in large parts of any population.

The Gândul of Friday 2nd November contains an editorial by Bogdan Chirieac that renders the Romanian angle very well. This newspaper is not a tabloid. I read this, I understand all the words, and yet, I think, this is weird. Back to the rhetoric that I still strive to understand. The article in question is entitled ‘The punishment of Romania for Rrominia?’
I’ll translate it entirely.
“A raping criminal, of Romanian citizenship, of rrom ethnicity, has horrified Italy again. To the horrible crime against a woman of 47 years of age, committed by this man, can be added other frightening crimes committed in the last months of other Romanian citizens of rrom ethnicity. Rome’s government, assembled in an emergency meeting, as happens only in the case of war or natural disaster, has taken the firm decision to expel foreigners. The word ‘Romanian’ is not pronounced in the decree. But three quarters of arrests in Rome this year – 2700 persons – are Romanian citizens. All the Romanians commit 37 percent of thefts of Italy and over 15 percent of the murders [rendered as: asasinate]. The Italians, and, along with them, the French, Spanish, British, German, have every right to be angry. In their home, citizens of an Eastern state admitted at the limit into the European community affect their way of life in a concerning way: they steal from them, they plunder them, they kill them.
The Europeans have every right to be angry, but not the right of making the mistake of condemning the Romanian people [popor= people] in its entirety, for the mode of life of rrom minorities. The preservation of the rights of minorities, the encouragement of their respective languages and cultures are European values. Romania was judged harshly during the entire process of EU integration, for the fact that it discriminates against the rromi, that it does not respect their laws and traditions. Today, Europe is confronted with the problems of the rromi that were, until now, hidden from view. In the name of political correctness, Europe hesitates to describe things as they are. The gypsies (tiganii) are nomadic populations throughout Europe, not only in Romania. The way of life of some of them severely affects the European model. Stealing is learnt at the same time as walking, the children are not let to go to school, the little girls are married and even give birth when they are 10-11 years old. The gypsies live in tents, horse carriages, and, more modern, in caravans. There is a parallel justice system with an immediate carrying out of the sentence. The social integration is, as such, refused under all aspects in relation to education, family planning, medical assistance, professional development. These are the traditions of some gypsy populations of Europe. Does the EU want to preserve this way of life? If yes, then the public opinion needs to be prepared and informed in this direction. If not, the solution is not, under no circumstances, neither the condemnation of the Romanian people, nor the deportation or isolation of gypsies at the margins of the cities, as has been proposed by Mister Gigi Becali [Party of the New Generation and owner of Steaua Bucharest, a shepherd who got fantastically rich after 1990, known for his populist ‘policies’ consisting largely in money donations to deprived people to catch votes and for his lack of a programme] in Romania. The solution can only be found in the passing from an NGO policy priority to a European strategy, similar to the process of integration of the other minorities of the EU. The results will not be, however, spectacular or fast. In France, the integration of Maghreb minorities is a half-failure. The brother of the French Justice minister, Mrs Rachida Dati, of Moroccan origin, are or have been in prison. In the last years, the ‘garbage’, as Sarkozy has called them, of the peripheries of Paris have lit up, in a revolt, over 10000 cars. In strong and rigorous Germany, the integration of the Turks has not happened even after 40 years. The Turkish quartier of modern and cosmopolitan Berlin looks like an ill-famed suburb of Istanbul, and a lot of its inhabitants do not speak German, even if they were born and raised here.
The simple truths known by any police officer of Europe are not told by the politicians except by whispering and in the absence of TV cameras. President Basescu, for whom gypsies are ‘stinking’, does not have the courage to tell Europe that in the nomad tribes having a bath is not a normal tradition, and that people smear tallow over their bodies for protection from illnesses and charms. The Romanian people can be called thieving, raping and criminal, but this will not bring peace and security to the streets of Rome, Paris or Madrid. This is only possible by the recognition of the problems of the gypsies and their solving through a European way [pe cale europeana].”

A lot could be said about this piece. I do not question that integration is a delicate and difficult topic, but I am personally concerned with the increasingly restricting legislation as far as migrants are concerned. I think as far as internal migration within the EU is concerned, it is wrong to impose restrictions. I see it as a consequence of an increase of xenophobia, in an increasingly unstable economic environment, and, let me put it this way, I might be left-wing, but not entirely opposed to necessary reforms as far as work is concerned, as long as certain conditions are fulfilled. But this is an entire discussion for which there exist better arenas than this post.
Let me keep the comments brief, all in the line of ‘deux poids, deux measures’ really…

- Note the exhortation not to confuse Romanians and gypsies, juxtaposed with the conflation of Europe and the EU
- Note the conflation of EU accession and integration in the case of Romanians, and the rhetorically empty use of ‘integration’ meaning assimilation
- Note the value-laden, and spatially differentiating descriptions of the progressive West and the backward, unmodern East (epitomised by the Turks). Note, in the same vein, the juxtaposition of the EU as a torchlight of progressiveness, and that will solve Romania’s national problems as well as every other country’s
- ‘The solution can only be found in the passing from an NGO policy priority to a European strategy, similar to the process of integration of the other minorities of the EU’ – what on earth does he want to say? As far as I
- Note how the Europeans are, collectively, angry at the rromi
- There is a lurking feeling that it is the gypsies’/Turkish immigrants/Maghrebians fault that they are at least poorer than average (note that this does not enter the discussion), and that it is because of inherent deficiencies (e.g. weird, unprogressive traditions)
- As usual, I have a high level of mistrust in the way in which the Romanian press uses statistics, and gives sometimes distorted information that results from lack of rigour and/or overgeneralisation, e.g. the bit where gypsies are universally characterised as living in horse carriages, marrying off their children early, etc.
- The non-integration of gypsies is viewed as a refusal, but the engrained, interiorised views on gypsies (at least in Romania) do not help ‘integration’ in the best possible way because even key people like teachers or priests have these kinds of views…
- It does raise questions about certain aspects of political correctness that may, at first, be used to gloss something that might be unchanged in practice, but that might change over time, just by giving it a new frame and vocabulary, attitudes to follow shortly. In other words, Wilde’s phrase that the truth is rarely pure and never simple holds true, and I believe that even while there may be proportionally more gypsy criminals in Italy, I do not think that someone has done the statistics how many of the Romanians citizens arrested by Italian police were, actually, ‘of rrom ethnicity’. I have a hard time imagining Italian carabinieri asking the suspect, ‘please fill in this ethnicity questionnaire, thank you very much, Sir’. And I find it funny how police officers are transformed, suddenly, in a country where the police force is known for their lingering corruption and violence, in the keepers of the truth
- Hopefully the discussion will mature a little…

My apologies for exceeding normative post word count.

Absence, of Myself, from Myself, from the World

2007-11-05T18:24:00.000+02:00

This week it has been hard to justify, even to myself, im stillen Kämmerlein, what the use of anthropology is, and what its methodological advantages, if any, are, in relation to a project like mine. I find it hard to see what I should be doing for the little time I have got left on the field, and I find it enormously difficult to face people in this state of being. I alternate between hitting the wall with my head to think clearly, and giving up, watching films I never wanted to see. Part of me just wants to hibernate, preferably until 2009. Another part just wants to live, in the here and now, and not always think, oh need to remember this as it happens, to write it down. The PhD gets in the way of living, for now.
All this is enormously destabilising, and makes me bite my nails and curse my consequential re-fledgling shyness. It feels like social life around me has no interest at all, goes (more than ever) into all directions. What is worse, it cannot capture my being, for the moment. Life-as-lived-here would need to ‘get to me’, but I feel my brain is woolly, I am more passive than I’d like to, I cannot seem to find the questions that would need to be voiced. I avoid. I hate my phone. I stare at the page, and forget to note down millions of things. I do not understand my scribbles. I am unsure about what words I need to use in English to express what I mean. I wonder about things that I cannot solve here and now, theoretical framework, structure of argument, number of chapters. I cannot take in what happens. I fail to discern the events that matter. Consequently, there is little eventfulness, of consequence, on the surface. My daydreams tell me otherwise, but when I rush to note it down, it is gone. I feel under- and overstimulated simultaneously.
I went to the mountains to get my concentration back. To think in the quiet, with only the fire and the wind rustling my thoughts. I walked and the regular pace of the steps eased my breathing. I even felt happy. On return I found, however, that my focus was still gone, and that I wanted to do anything but attend to the confusion. I told David that I was becoming world class at procrastination, then I went to my neighbour and broke down crying for no real reason in the middle of a conversation. As a consequence I felt ashamed of my own weakness, and my obsession to emulate no less than a supergirl, and the way in which les tout petits soucis seemed, at that moment, life-threatening. Who can I tell here, without shame of my own privilege, my position, my self-imposed project of little importance?
Neither has there been an obvious, event-like reason for this ‘wholesale’ questioning. If I try to give it some perspective: it is true that something like it has accompanied me for the entirety of the PhD project, but it peaks at certain times. Why now is a difficult question, and to be quite frank, I have no idea. Again I can feel myself being much less of an actor than I want to be, much more a product of personal history, enriched by circumstances, moods of season, acts of bacteria and exposure to northern breeze. I read somewhere that postgrads have stress levels similar to soldiers in battle, which I find entirely plausible. I shall learn to manage them better. I find we should have gotten some proper training for this, not just classroom-based, but practical. Furthermore, I think lone anthropology should be abolished. It would be much better to have teams of people, I think the dynamics (of all kinds) would be much better both for the project and the researchers involved, especially beginners.

Stress
ORIGIN Middle English (denoting hardship or force exerted on a person for the purpose of compulsion): shortening of distress , or partly from Old French estresse ‘narrowness, oppression,’ based on Latin strictus ‘drawn tight’ (see strict )

quiz....

2007-11-03T16:51:00.000+02:00

first one to guess to the most precise degree where these places are is a winner!

‘Stii ce mai face copilul tau?’ and Structural Violence

2007-10-25T14:52:00.000+02:00

In Romania, the economic pressures ‘produce’ children that are without a lot of perspectives, especially in rural areas. Not only is there very little support to ensure that the children can finish secondary school, so that for some, 8 classes effectively mean the end of the possibility of schooling. Reasons: the secondary schools are further away, and the options of commuting or staying at a family are too expensive.
Children are also the big losers of the race for jobs abroad (4 million Romanians abroad is an estimation, total population 21 million). They are left to the care of family, grandparents, or older siblings, while their parents do slave labour in Italy or Spain. There are families who are getting on better, and who do white work abroad, who have been gone longer, but those who have gone more recently, who do black work are more precarious. Of course, the parents being stressed to make a living also affects the children, and I would like to suggest that the degree to which this is happens here is higher than in the UK, for instance, even though child poverty as far as I remember is highest in Scotland as far as Western Europe is concerned.
Juxtaposition: one of these mornings, I read in the newspaper (Gindul 22.10.07) that some NGOs with programmes aimed at children in need (protection of the child I think is the technical term) had ‘lost’ billions. The National Authority for the Protection of the Child works with two main NGOs (SERA, Pentru Copii Nostri), and they were supposed to finish building, until 2006, 16 day care centres for abandoned children. In August 2007, a report showed that 4 of these were functioning. The rest do not exist, are being constructed, or have the buildings finished but without utilities. One case in Ilfov: here sheltered housing was supposed to be created for children with special needs. The building is illegal (the land not being properly put into possession), 75% of the money has been spent, and the houses are no more than a few walls, and a foundation. The responsibilities are pushed from one authority to the other…
At the moment, on private TV channel has a campaign is on entitled ‘do you know how your child is getting on?’. It is I guess aimed at sensitising people that children suffer a lot: from abandonment generally, growing up in rural areas where there are two or three children left in a village, being under considerable psychological stress, and having their options effectively limited even more. When I see these children, I get really sad and angry. You can see that they are uncared for, neglected, possibly subjected to violence, their hands are like hands of adults, rough and overworked, they don’t go to school often because they are sent to work, helping with the sunflower harvest, for instance.
I met one girl (6) who was upset all the time. You could see her anger in her face and every move she made. She had stopped speaking to everyone, including her grandmother who she lived with her during her mother’s absence. Her mother had been in Italy for a long time, and then ended up coming home having spent most of the money earned there on living.
Another girl (5) told me that children are easy to make, but difficult to raise. She said, I go to bed very late, and I cannot fall asleep without the TV. Her parents have a combined income of 60 euros. This pays just about the electricity and the firewood.

Let me go home…

2007-10-21T16:54:00.000+02:00

“Another autumn day has come and gone away”
In case of overdose consult your cliche-doctor.
Sun with teeth. Corn and cabbage and carrots.
Wood clippings. Blades. Clouds.
Cold clothes dry slowly now.
I ate a walnut and thought of you.

It must be the time.
The age of wanting a home of one’s own.

Momentarily I feel heavy of decisions to be made.
Trece timpul. Zboara mintea. Trece timpul.
My mantra for the slow hours.
Constancy. Change. Constancy. Choice.
Take your pick. Autumn sale is on.
Hurry, hurry, for you might miss the deal.
Calm down your life is in your hands.

Is it? Alternative scenarios told daily.
Let us presume that
Tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possible.
Imi linisteste sufletul idea aceasta pana dimineata.
Adorm mai bine cu tine in gind.

I prepare the awkward homecoming dance.
M-intorc singura.

P.S. For fellow postgrads, compulsory reading here.

Burden

2007-10-21T16:51:00.000+02:00

I am still, every day, absolutely humbled by people’s generosity. I have accumulated so many debts that I better find a way to deal with the obligation incurred. But how? Those people chose to help me, even though I was and remain a stranger, they decided to include me in their activities, some of them gave me time to ask them all kinds of silly questions even though they had no direct gains from this, and, God knows, they have better, and more necessary, things to do everyday. They patiently listened to my pseudo-Romanian babble, and tried hard to understand what on earth I wanted to say. They forgave my rashness and a certain note of insistence in my voice when I forgot how little importance my project held for them. They recognised much better than I did when it was time to stop working, lest I lose my sanity. They took me to the mountains, they drank tea with me. They circulated rumours about me so I should not forget certain things about people. They gave me apples, cheese, lifts, and all kinds of other things, material and otherwise. What did I give back?
Some of them are in a precarious livelihood situation, some of them have no real other option than to emigrate. I am of precious little help to them in this regard. Questions of relevance of my work arise (again).
I find it very hard to deal with the duplicity involved in social research. People do all kinds of things with all kinds of interests. Me most of all. I better put the stuff I learnt to good use and honour the friendship I was given.

correspondances

2007-10-18T14:34:00.000+02:00

to correspond = to pledge (spondere) + together (co) + again (re) [from medieval Latin]

Pledge
verb
1 [ trans. ] commit (a person or organization) by a solemn promise
• [with clause ] formally declare or promise that something is or will be the case
• [ intrans. ] solemnly undertake to do something
• [ trans. ] undertake formally to give
2 [ trans. ] Law give as security on a loan
3 [ trans. ] promise to join (a fraternity or sorority)
4 [ trans. ] archaic drink to the health of.

ORIGIN Middle English (denoting a person acting as surety for another): from Old French plege, from medieval Latin plevium, perhaps related to the Germanic base of plight

Plight
noun
a dangerous, difficult, or otherwise unfortunate situation

ORIGIN Middle English : from Anglo-Norman French plit ‘fold.’ The -gh- spelling is by association with plight

verb [ trans. ] archaic
pledge or promise solemnly (one's faith or loyalty).
• ( be plighted to) be engaged to be married to.

ORIGIN Old English plihtan [endanger,] of Germanic origin; related to Dutch plicht and German Pflicht ‘duty.’ The current sense is recorded only from Middle English, but is probably original, in view of the related Germanic words

isn’t that beautiful?

Network of Concerned Anthropologists

2007-10-18T14:32:00.000+02:00

Here.
Mandatory readings.
also, in relation to this 'weaponised anthropology' graul...

Wave-particle duality (don’t expect any answers here…)

2007-10-16T14:33:00.001+02:00

I was thinking about the difference between light and sound, and Ingold’s argument about the senses, light, manifestations of light, and objects, on the one hand, and sound perception on the other. Please note that I live under a regime of scarce documentation possibilities, and these are largely unaccompanied, possibly uninformed cogitations of the lone fieldworker-woman-nutshell.
I was wondering whether the fact that light, being a dual phenomenon presenting properties of both wave and particle, makes for the asymmetry I will try to explain. Sound, on the other hand, I believe has the properties only of wave, and here there is no such asymmetry.
Ingold is actually talking about things that we really compare all the time, in terms of senses of perception, but that are not actually comparable. We hear sound, but we see in light, as he put it. There is no one to one equivalence here. Vision is equally mediated than hearing, or, let me put it this way: perception is not direct, unlike some eighteenth century philosophers tried to suggest.
Three things spring to mind:
1. With our senses something is odd, as we see objects but we hear sound. I suggest this is bullshit. We see in light (medium), but we label afterwards (categorisation).
2. If you have a skilled ear, you don’t just hear sound, but categories, expressed most commonly on a scale (C, D, E, F sharp, etc). We hear in air (medium), and we label if we can (categorisation). If not, we just listen, at best, ignore, at worst. We do not have such an extensive skilling-education of the ear happening as a rule in school.
3. It shows us that we need to be careful what we are talking about. And also that Peirce and Eco got it right as far as semiotics are concerned. Yeah! My heroes never die…
Note that I haven’t solved anything as far as wave-particle duality is concerned, but that theory might be an expression of how we feel towards light. I’d love to hear what you think about this!

Everyday Threads

2007-10-16T14:30:00.000+02:00

Imagination is a beautiful, faithful, constant companion. It is maybe not the best word to describe what I mean: it is about making present what is not immediately visible to the eye. Which does not mean it does not interact with that which is visible, is moved by it, away from it. It works also, I believe, in some psychological states, independently from it. It helps to maintain connections between things and persons not present in the visible environment, being temporarily or permanently departed. It helps to build pasts and presents through memory. It can be propelled into activity through singing, dancing, talking, being quiet. The movement of beginning awareness (unreflected most of the time) can happen on the outside, the passing of a bird, the sound of a steam liner, the touch of a cat’s fur; or it happens interiorised, a memory triggers another one, seemingly unlinked to the world of perception. This is what happens in dreams. In a daydream, a funeral, desire, a fat snake moving semi-underground, coloured like a fire salamander (I kicked it, and it turned into a dog…), an army of children, and family. These were the elements (of course, also post-conceptualised). On waking up, I spun the threads and turned them into narrative, telling them to my friend. I gave them some cake to give to someone who had fixed my bike. Someone’s voice wandered over the fence, and called for Tio, who came and went to make hay with her niece the next day. She was reminded of the time she got married, years back, to a good man she learned to respect but never loved. They passed the chapel along the road, crossed themselves, thought, briefly, of those departed, and mumbled a prayer for the living.
I got used to this place. It feels like I have been here for all time, and I agree with Aino: I cannot imagine myself anywhere else either. I will miss it immensely. I followed the challenge to be tamed, for better or worse. I am still working out the implications. One thing is certain, however, despite these flights of the imagination, I will leave, in a little over three months. I am also still working out the implications of that (bloody researchers… never finished, never concluding…). Yours in all happy vagueness, fx-shell

Chassez-vous des tigres?

2007-10-16T14:19:00.000+02:00

Come to think of it, a lot remains unexplained in Saint-Exupéry’s Petit Prince. Maybe the allegorical quality of the work makes it so timeless. This Canadian author has written a beautiful reply to the (hopefully autobiographical!) narrator’s exhortation to tell him if you hear from the prince. In the original, the title is Le Petit Prince retrouvé. Jean-Pierre Davidts characterises the traveller from the planet with the arrogant-loving rose, three volcanoes, and baobab seeds, and his pointed questions and requests ‘dessine-moi un mouton’, so well that you are really happy and warm at heart to hear from the little guy. He does talk quite a bit more than in the original. Davidts continues the story by creating a homage of kindness, in his own voice, but without forgetting how much he owes to the original. He meets, among others, an ecologist and a statistician. You will be happy to know, I am sure, that the sheep is doing well, too. Not all shall be revealed here. The work is not as much serious literature (being so dependent on intertextuality?), but it is a fitting description of our times’ madness.

1947-1957

2007-10-08T12:53:00.000+02:00

Sorry for the suboptimal picture. The reason for the shrubbery in the foreground was a muddy quasi-vertical wall that was beyond my climbing powers (nu sunt capra!). Some people took me to this place in the forest where the last five people of the anti-communist were hiding until they were arrested. This resistance was powerful, but never managed to get international connections, and it mainly involved people hiding in the mountains in various places in Romania, lasting almost ten years, which is not a trifle, given the conditions. Four men and a woman were arrested on this spot, there was guns firing on that day, the militians were well-trained, and the resistors were mostly put into prison. The woman gave birth in prison. A lot of other people died, who were ‘innocent’ or not. Dej’s regime was more repressive than Ceausescu’s as far as number of arrests, deportations and the extent of torture were concerned. The narrative I was told was mixing historical events of the time of resistance, myth, and current events of a female lawyer having disappeared in September and being feared dead. The current twist on events is that she has been killed by her husband, some kind of rich guy with connections to mafia worlds. In this forest, I was told a story of how the resistance is remembered by some locals. You could not see the cave anymore where the people in the 1950s were hiding, because erosion has pretty much brought down part of the sandy stone, and like in so many areas in the valley, a kind of land slide has made history just a bit more silent. Back in the village, my attention is drawn to a cross in a walled garden, that has been put in memory of the resistance, and which was not received well in the village of origin of some of the last ‘partizani’. Some people there threatened to throw it in the lake, and so it was not put up in that village, but in the neighbouring ones.

Icon

2007-10-08T12:51:00.000+02:00

emotions

2007-10-04T13:10:00.000+02:00

Strong emotions, I think, do not leave us, once we have gone through them. They remain. They never fade. They are merely backgrounded, to be reactivated on occasion. This is why they can appear so scary. ‘When the truth is, I miss you.’
We are all wrestling with the fractures we carry with ourselves. Nothing out of the ordinary. Life in all its messiness. Like Peter Panter (Kurt Tucholsky) has said:
“Nicht nur du allein. Nicht nur ich allein. Jeder hat, um es mit einem Wort zu sagen, die unaufgeräumte kleine Schublade, auf die jeder so stolz ist, als habe er sie ganz allein.” (Uhu, Jg. 7, Heft 9, Juni 1931, S. 72-76)
I am feverish again today, after a long time of feeling good. It blows all emotions out of proportion; it makes me fragile and wishing I was not here. I will sleep it off.

Going West again. Fiat lux!

2007-09-29T17:25:00.000+02:00

This week’s general impression was that I could not finish anything. I meandered, I wandered, I strayed, and I was not able to do anything with a lot of directed vision. This after-the-fact evaluation did not lessen my enjoyment.
Voyage voyaaaage, plus loiiiin que la nuit et le jour… voyage. Did you recognise the song? Villa-City was hard to leave because of the festival and general influx of Friday afternoon traffic of stressed Bucuresteni looking for peace. The taxi driver played elaborate word games with colleagues on the radio involving ‘pastrama de caini’ which I found hilarious. Leaving prematurely is not made easier by leaving in the evening, with the train, all clichés about train-sentimentality are, hehe, true. I love seeing settlements from the back, from the train perspective.
We passed so many construction sites I was reminded of the man doing tourist information in Villa-City who painted such a concise picture of the way in which present-day capitalism creates patchy development, because it is oriented towards growth too much. 500000 tourists per year in Sinaia, and a lot more in the valley at large, and with a land price ten times higher than in the village I work in. He was bright-eyed and fervently telling us about how some people managed to overcome every regulation to build their villa. His stories were underscored by accompanying, generous arm gestures and mimics adding to the rhetorical effect. I asked, somewhat fake-naively, how come? He made a grimace telling something like, come on girl, open your eyes, and said, you cannot imagine what kind of money some people have. How come? They just do, and they do what they want. Every person, he said, can be bought. He told us about the environmental pressures on the valley as blocks of flats were being built, about the pressure on the natural park to recede in favour of development, and I am still kind of curious about his own life story.
Stopover to see the almost-full moon over Kronstadt-la-belle, then I travelled back towards the village, via Bran and Rucar. I kept thinking of the therapeutic soothing value of looking at landscapes travelling past the bus window, and of chatting to fellow travellers about the apple harvest, nephews, and industry. I paid attention to how the fences change when you cross from Brasov into Arges this time, following Finnish Kati’s advice. The diamond-shapes slowly give way to elaborate ornamental, mostly round and flowery wrought iron motifs. The walnut trees were radiant with the greatest colour, golden-yellow, against the blue sky. The beeches were dipped in browner shades. All that is most beautiful before it dies. I was asking myself what makes the brightness of what is actually autumnal decay. When a pot plant dies, it is not really nice, just sad. Maybe it is the mass of the leaves and the puffiness of the forests seen from further away. But then again, the beauty does not disappear when you consider a single yellow leaf. I ask you scientists how it is that this process creates such bright colours (crimson, red, orange, light-bright-brown, yellow)? I came to the (hasty, probably) conclusion that it might be about the light, and thought of the implication of thinking the world not in terms of discrete things, but appreciating it in its wholeness, and this implies, in most cases, an issue of light. And the cool seasons of spring and autumn do display a special quality of light. But the issue is light itself. Ingold has said this a lot better than I could:
[t]he objects of vision, we suppose, are not sources or manifestations of light but the things that light illuminates for us. The objects of hearing, on the other hand, are not things but sounds or sources of sound. (Ingold 2000: 244)
This kind of ecological thinking
forbids us to conceive of vision as an operation of thought that would set up before the mind a picture or a representation of the world, a world of immanence and of ideality. Immersed in the visible by his body, itself visible, the see-er does not appropriate what he sees; he merely approaches it by looking, he opens himself to the world. And on its side, this world of which he is a part is not in itself, or matter. (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 162)
This is the porous subject that I am so intrigued by, still. It is what happens if you talk to someone, and you are really immersed in what they are saying. You intermingle not just with minds, but with personality (ok,ok,… used naively!) and individual being-in-the-world. Intersecting lifeworlds? I am such a Durkheimian in some ways, but I happen to think ‘intersubjectivity’ is not a good term to speak about what happens. ‘Inter’ does not describe the relationship. We need a more practical term.

References

Ingold, Tim (2000) The Perception of the Environment. London: Routledge.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1964) The Primacy of Perception and other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. J. M. Edie (ed) Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Jaeger und Sammler

2007-09-22T14:49:00.000+02:00

I am of the gatherer kind. It happens to me naturally. Even as a kid some things, especially scissors, paper and sticky tape used to always end up in my room.

- ‘Nutshell, have you seen xyz?’
- ‘Of course not…’
- ‘Please have a look anyway…’
- ‘Mmmmh… ok… ‘

You could be sure it was somewhere in my room, even though I had no idea how it had got there. I have never acquired and kept a lasting collecting phase, bar for the time in 1991 Petz joined the Timbreclub, and I found I could channel my grandfather’s affection a little better by taking up this hobby. I soon found out though that I was not at all suited for the precision it requires, and, puberty intervened, too, called for or not. I had a fad for seashells for a while, but they gathered dust. I remember owning a lot of cacti at one moment too, and quite a large family of guinea pigs (never resort to gather anything that reproduces!). At one point I bred snails, and frogs, like most kids I suppose, and I am not sure if animals count in this kind of categorisation. As a teenager, I also liked to make obscure shrines of holiday crushes and crashes, in an attempt to preserve memories like marmalade that has long gone off.
Generally, though, I am much too practical as far as normative room decoration is concerned to be an avid ‘collector’. I have seen (true stories!) displays of thousands of perfume samples, beer cartons, porcelain plates, eggcups, moths, and, shockingly, duel pistols. To me the effect is nauseating, because there is too much in too little space. I like the idea of collecting things from the past, antique books and drawing, or furniture that can be used (Danielito drew my attention to this – like so many other areas of experience I had not given it a single thought in my life before someone put my nose into it).
One difference between the gatherer and the collector lies in whether one likes to display things or archive them. I like to have dossiers of stuff I can take out sometimes and look at, change, and hide away again. I like unique things if they have a function around me other than gathering dust. I like books, whether old and beautiful or cheap and good-to-read, it is as easy as that. JosÈe wrote this magnificent story about someone who is addicted to laughs. It is somewhat a comparable case, and I think it has to do with pleasure, not easily explained in words, and usually something academics and other middle-class people frown at.
At the moment, I gather people’s stories, not taking them away from them, but listening to, remembering and inscribing their memories, being interested in their experiences, and having my experience entangling with theirs for a moment. What a fine job I have.

In Light Of…

2007-09-22T14:47:00.000+02:00

‘Gilles Deleuze (1995) has suggested that contemporary societies are no longer disciplinary, in the sense identified by Foucault – they are societies of control. Where discipline sought to fabricate individuals whose capacities and forms of conduct were indelibly and permanently inscribed into the soul – in home, school or factory – today control is continuous and integral to all activities and practices of existence. In the field of health, the active and responsible citizen must engage in a constant monitoring of health, a constant work of modulation, adjustment, improvement in response to the changing requirements of the practices of his or her mode of everyday life. These new self-technologies do not seek to return a pathological or problematic individual to a fixed norm of civilised conduct through a once-off programme of normalisation. Rather, they oblige the individual to engage in constant risk management, and to act continually on him or herself to minimise risks by reshaping diet, lifestyle and now, by means of pharmaceuticals, the body itself. The new neurochemical self is flexible and can be reconfigured in a way that blurs the boundaries between cure, normalisation, and the enhancement of capacities. And these pharmaceuticals offer the promise of the calculated modification and augmentation of specific aspects of self-hood through acts of choice.’
(Rose, Nikolas – Becoming Neurochemical Selves, p. 28)

Utopian-Sized Irritation

2007-09-22T14:45:00.000+02:00

I was reading this book that I need to review. It made me a little bit mad, being yet another one of those books that goes on and on about ‘potential’ for change, to be found in some elitist practice or other. This practice (or: ‘set of practices’) supposedly leads naturally to a new way of perceiving, usually now rendered through the very fashionable categories of ‘arts of the self’, ‘technologies of the self’ or ‘enchantment’, and then – oh l‡ l‡… siehe da, fiat lux, and change just happens magically. Lacking imagination, I am not sure how we get from the ‘potential’ to actuality, and no one even loses a sentence about this. It is like having a talent for violin-playing, nurtured between the age of 8 and the onset of teenagerhood, and selling oneself as the world’s greatest revelation on the classical violin. You will agree it takes a bit more.
The larger context was, and here is why I thought the book might be interesting, that our choices of consumption and our loyalty and, yay, ‘activism’ (entre guillemets) to certain causes and organisations will change both (behold!) the (survival) problems medium-sized agricultural/food producers face both in the north and the south (not to speak of the excessive power the food industry has gained), and the environmental problems industrial agriculture is causing. The book proceeded to avoid mentioning just how this is done for this respective organisation, and circled around the consumer’s need for (listen to this) heightened pleasure in her life, trailing a whole array of great thinkers’ opinion on pleasure. Grrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
Call me an old cynic in the wrong place (a village in Romania, in case you forgot) for even considering political change as needing a bit more than that– I think I may have said to some of you, I got the fieldwork I deserved: with my obsession of the state, and politics, I ended up in a place where this has not so much importance not so much as a good in itself, but with reference to the question as to how to best circumvent the laws that emanate therefrom, in the light of them lacking enforcement and control of a (relatively) inefficient (some would say, corrupt) state (this is the rage-shell writing, and she gives a f*** about style and won’t apologise about it!).
Call me middle class, but I keep believing quite in spite of myself sometimes in some kind of public sphere that is not collapsing into private interests all the time, and from which somehow people can manage to find, if not consensus, the law of the strongest, or, lacking fist power, the boring majority. And thus, I find considerations that seek change separated from the legislative body, or, at least, involving some non-governmental lobbying body that respects itself, irritating, especially if they use a fizzy quasi-new age vocabulary. I also find Habermas and critical theorists irritating, mind you!
Call me a never-quite-happy cow, but I find that a lot of academics are too much in this kind of vocabulary and they annoy me a lot, especially if they call themselves anthropologists (which, to be fair, the people from the review did not). I am excited about the many ways in which I will break this promise I now make to myself in my thesis and in the long string of books to follow thereafter, haha. No-nonsense anthropology is the ultimate goal, not self-titillation.
And no, I will not tell you the title of the book, because you will laugh at me for agreeing to review it… hehe! And like any academic-en-herbe, I do not like to be laughed at, especially at moments of scepticism as far as my proposed career path is concerned. No, I do not want to really be an academic, I am just doing a PhD because I like the immediacy of its returns! Honestly. Yours, rant-shell, still really interested in how social change works, and secretly laughing at how worked up she can get over books about utopia…

P.S. I ended up being a lot nicer in the review and a bit overly aware of my attitude of rejection. Not a good way to read an argument if you’re already against everything they’re going to say, just because you don’t like a certain bit of their framework…

Branza de Burduf

2007-09-15T16:55:00.000+02:00

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Pangolins, Carcajous and Other Monsters!

2007-09-15T16:52:00.000+02:00

I came across this looking up 'kink' (it has both dodgy and undodgy meanings I was honestly entirely oblivious of until today) in my (electronic) dictionary. I thought this might be interesting for some of you cultural historians (especially those working on Montagnais). What white people asked the natives, and then some explorer person going and starting to call entirely different species the same exotic name! You be a kinkajou! You be a kinkajou too!
I like to think that the Montagnais were not completely serious in (some of ) their interactions with whites with regards to labelling animals, so that the whites would call this kind of animal 'carcajou' unawares that this means 'I am a silly white frog' in the Montagnais language...

kinkajou
noun
an arboreal nocturnal fruit-eating mammal with a prehensile tail and a long tongue, found in the tropical forests of Central and South America. • Potos flavus, family Procyonidae.
ORIGIN late 18th cent.: from French quincajou, alteration of carcajou .

carcajou
noun
another term for the North American wolverine .
ORIGIN early 18th cent.: from Canadian French, from Montagnais kwāhkwāčēw (compare with kinkajou).

wolverine
noun
1 a heavily built short-legged carnivorous mammal with a shaggy dark coat and a bushy tail, native to the tundra and forests of arctic and subarctic regions.
• Gulo luscus of North America and G. gulo of Europe, family Mustelidae.
2 ( Wolverine) Informal a native or inhabitant of Michigan.
ORIGIN late 16th cent.(earlier as wolvering): formed obscurely from wolv-, plural stem of wolf

And look at the beautiful etymologies of (the word denoting) this Australian beastie, and of the legendary pangolinus maximus...

echidna
noun
a spiny insectivorous egg-laying mammal with a long snout and claws, native to Australia and New Guinea. Also called spiny anteater . • Family Tachyglossidae, order Monotremata: two genera and species, in particular Tachyglossus aculeatus.
ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: modern Latin, from Greek ekhidna ‘viper,’ also the name of a mythical creature that gave birth to the many-headed Hydra; compare with ekhinos ‘sea urchin, hedgehog.’

pangolin
noun
an African and Asian mammal that has a body covered with horny overlapping scales, a small head with elongated snout, a long sticky tongue for catching ants and termites, and a thick, tapering tail. Also called scaly anteater . • Family Manidae and order Pholidota: genera Manis ( three species in Asia) and Phataginus (four species in Africa).
ORIGIN late 18th cent.: from Malay peng-guling, literally ‘roller’ (from its habit of rolling into a ball).
(photo taken from here

handwriting

2007-09-15T16:15:00.000+02:00

Căluş

2007-09-12T15:45:00.000+02:00

Liz and Nick have written about the Calus here. Unesco has something to say too. Gail Kligman has also written about the ritual side of the dance. Best, of course, if you can watch it sometime! Beautiful and dynamic!

Encounter of Little Consequence

2007-09-12T15:11:00.000+02:00

I fell in love with this lovely female puppy today. She has one of her ears cut like a lot of the shepherd dogs around here. It is supposed to make them more evil. But is she not beautiful? She travelled with me, and despite some lingering shyness, entered with me into a court of a villager. She even barked at the pig when it came towards her. I was sad when she had disappeared after I had finished drinking coffee with someone in the village. In return for my teasing her, she gave me some fleas. Those violent ones that bite to suggest the track they travelled – presumably jumping – on your skin, but in the meantime they have disappeared too. After fieldwork, I will fulfil two points of my three-point plan…

The Fall. Reprise.

2007-09-01T10:46:00.001+03:00

[caption on photo: Rumaenische Bauern vor ihrer Huette - postcard from the interwar period i would guess, maybe earlier]
In interviews I have recurrently encountered a certain kind of story about the ‘sat romanesc’, the Romanian village, as well as the Romanian peasant. It is a story remindful both of Christian mythology such as the Fall, where the taint of sin remains, and portrayals of the ‘noble savage’ where the subject in question oscillates back and forth between being pure, being fallen, and needing to be saved.
As in other mythical stories, this typological village is presented, despite numerous pieces of evidence to the contrary, like a unit that has existed since the beginning of time, where there have been no substantial changes since recently. Of course… Define recently. Define change. Define beginning of time.
But let us consider the grounding of the hypothesis for a moment. It is a story of innocence, corrupted, of eternity, interrupted, of paradise, lost, of angels, fallen. ‘Vesnicie s-a nascut in sat’ (eternity was born in the village). I dramatise to make the point, which is allowed. Example: ‘People have made cheese in this way for thousands of years’.
A presumed horizon of permanence is invaded with a sense of change, spiced up with loss, confusion and the shifting of boundaries and moralities. ‘Back in the days, we used to have ‘hore’, none of these discos, where no one is supervising’. ‘People have always made cheese like this and now they’re saying we’re not allowed anymore’. ‘… and now the eternity has been ended by us/them’.
One old guy tells me, well you know, this modern lifestyle isn’t very healthy, look at how many people are ill! There’s never been so many illnesses around. If this argument is made, it is often omitted that, actually, life as a peasant is pretty rough, because the state, the emperor, the landlord were never particularly forthcoming vis-à-vis this category of people. More cake for the peasants! More life span! More medication! (I just wrote a typo ‘meducation’, which screams for a post of its own… passons!)
When you look at nineteenth century sources (from Durandin 1995), despite agrarian reforms, people were not doing so well in the countryside. The rural idyll, in close-up, is lessened. Modernity plays in cities, not on the fields.
‘Les temps où l’on disait: “si vous voulez voir un type d’homme bien portant, allez dans les campagnes” sont passés. Sur toutes les physiognomies, enfants, vieillards, on ne lit que fatigue physique, langueur, chloroanémie, ils sont vieillis avant l’âge et one le moral très abattu. J’ai tâché de connaître la cause, et partout j’ai vu la misère. Tous ont tant de dettes qu’ils ne savent comment les payer’ (p.165).
A study of the ‘Economic and Social Situation of the Peasant in Romania’ (much like those published by the European Commission these days… ;-)) published in 1895 has a bit of statistics that tell ofs the physical state of the peasantry.
‘Reprenant les résultats des recencements des années 1869, 1874, et 1879, il indique qu’en 1869 un tiers des conscripts n’atteignent pas la taille de 1,57m requise pour le service; en 1879, un tiers se situent au-dessous de 1,54m. Il déplore aussi la multiplication des cas d’idiotisme [linked to lack of iodine, and thyroid dysfunction from birth] et de syphilis’ (p.165).
Agrarian revolts were never mentioned in the interviews, even though a lot of them happened in Romania in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and one particularly violent one in 1907. We are at the limits of narrative life-story methodology, because it does not go back far enough in time to appreciate, and so history books and historical sources are important supplements to go back further in time than 70 years at most. This spans, at best, a bit of time before communism was established. The horizon of reference of the interviews can be communism – post-communism. The nationalist, populist, and fascist politics of the turn of the century and anything earlier do not get an appreciation, also taking into account the way in which history education under communism had its own twist, legitimating the regime in place.
A few points emerge:
In Romania a complicated mythology exists around people’s historical origins, usually to be found in the countryside. Livelihoods: peasantry, agricultural work, commerce.
This mythology is both appropriated by the people left out by the recent changes in legislation due to European Union demands, and national policy, to affirm that the conservative, traditional elements have a value, and that they need to be protected, without, however, having much leverage power to put this into practice on their terms.
It is also appropriated not only by people representing the authorities, but also by people living in the countryside who are not peasants (who may consider themselves ‘intellectuals’ or city people who have worked in industry) that the people in question (‘peasants’) are inappropriate, that they need to modernise, to change, to adapt, in order to profit. They are considered backward, uncivilised, uneducated.
Funnily enough, the people who fall into the second category are also arguing for the salvation of the Romanian village, because it is the seat of the traditions, of popular music, poetry, architecture and dance. What exactly is there ‘to save’? So we save the traditions in a purified form and we discard the peasants? To me it sounds a bit like fission that removes the characteristics of the original substance and creates something else altogether. If, that is, substance is the right word to use here.
There is, it seems, nothing new under the sun. The French-educated historian Nicolae Iorga, who played a role in creating nationalist sentiments in pre-Balkanic-wars-Romania, directs, from 1903, the periodical ‘Samanatorul’, which promotes a socially and morally engaged national literature. In it, rural values are celebrated: the peasant is the vector of continuity, of collective memory and of respect of tradition. He is the figure of resistance against decadence, foreign pollution, and the anonymity and misery of the cities.
I am reminded of Justin Kenrick’s lectures and the idea of closure, that it had to be either idealist and pure, or materialist and wicked. I want an appreciation not centred on these opposites begetting opposites begetting opposites and not much light, though I understand that people want to make one argument, not the other. I have the anthropology illness, of not wanting to decide for one side… doesn’t make me a good interviewee as I recently found out… ;-)

Vegetarian Sarmale (Cabbage Rolls) with Mushrooms.

2007-09-01T10:40:00.000+03:00

2 heads of cabbage
1 cup of rice
3 big onions
2 carrots
100 g raisins
400g mushrooms (tinned)
0.5 l of tomato juice or 3 tbs of tomato paste
spices: dill, parsley, savory fresh if possible, one bundle of each
stock (the kind of stuff we used for soup at the fair trade café, yellow powder), salt, pepper, two potatoes

Clean the potatoes and cut them into rounds. Unmake the cabbage leaves and clean them, cut them into small pieces and leave them in cold water along with the potatoes. Put the rice into cold water. Cut the onion into small pieces, clean the carrot and grate it, cut the mushrooms and drain the juice. In a pot put some oil and fry the onion, the carrot and the rice, with a little bit of salt, adding a bit of water after a while. Stir often. After 20 minutes, put the mushrooms and the raisins. Leave it to boil 10 minutes and put the tomato juice/paste diluted with water. After 15 minutes, add the spices, finely chopped, and put the pot to cool down. Take the cabbage leaves and the middle bits, pressing them in your palms so as to drain the water. You no longer need the potatoes and the water. In every leaf of cabbage put, with a teaspoon, of the mixture, roll the leaf and fold in the ends so the rice doesn’t come out. Don’t make the roll too tight because the rice will still grow during the cooking process. Put the sarmale on a platter and turn the oven on. The remaining leaves and the middle bits you chop very finely, and you put the juice on them and with them you cover the bottom of the pot in which you want to put the sarmale. Put a row of sarmale, put the cimbru and continue with the sarmale until you finish. On top you put the rest of the cabbage that was left over. Leave the pot until it boils on the cooker, then put the lid and put it into the oven. They need to stay there two hours, on low fire, after which you try to cut one sarma with a fork, and if you can cut it, they’re ready to be eaten….
Pofta buna!

Out of Season

2007-08-31T12:09:00.001+03:00

Autumn is coming. I can feel it with the nights becoming chilly, and there is a quality of the air that comes with the cold mornings that makes me very happy. The fruits are ripe, and falling off the trees, hitting the ground with a thump. People are talking about a mushroom that grows on the hills about this time of the year. Firewood is being collected, cut and stored. The sheep will come from the mountains in a few weeks, and the cows will be back at home soon too. I like this colour of sky, just before night has fallen entirely. Does it remind me of northern skies? I was also reminded of a line in a song ‘clouds are stalking islands in the sky, I wish I could buy one, out of season’. My memory might have failed me though! It occurred to me that fieldwork does not last forever.

home

2007-08-31T12:06:00.000+03:00

Here my mother caught a moment of laughter on camera. Given that she usually does not deal with the photographic family documentation, unfortunately Mumu’s head was half out of the frame. Siblings can have very different laughs. Whose laugh do you like/dislike? What do you think about your own laugh? Do you laugh loudly often? How many times have you laughed out loud today, for instance?
Home. I miss it, and I keep thinking about what home is, what it means and represents.

Das Wehen des postindustriellen Windes im Minett

2007-08-24T09:49:00.000+03:00

Oder so hätte der Titel auch sein können... nun ja, grosse deutsche Literatur hat man ja noch nie in Luxie schreiben wollen können. Oder etwa doch? Das ist hier auch Nebensache... das Hauptereignis ist das Sprengen zweier Kühltürme in Differdange, einer der Städte im Süden unseres Marienlandes, im sogenannten 'Minett', wo bis kürzlich Eisen und Stahl abgebaut wurde. Die Region, so sagt man, hat viel zum Wohlstand unseres Ländchens beigetragen. Globalisationsprozesse jedoch haben den Abbau weniger profitabel gemacht, Arbeitsplätze wurden abgebaut, unsere Ökonomie restrukturiert, und die Eisenindustrie wurde erst von Arcelor, dann von Mittal gefressen (ich sag das hier ganz ungeniert, hab aber meine Recherche nicht sehr gründlich gemacht... Ich bin schon zu lange weg aus dem Land, das soll an dieser Stelle meine Entschuldigung sein... ;-))

'Nur noch wenige Stunden überragt der große Kühlturm des Arcelor-Profil-Luxemburg-Werks Differdingen die Silhouette der hundertjährigen Stadt. Am Samstag um 8.35 Uhr, nach zwei Alarmtönen und einer Kette von kleineren Explosionen, werden die beiden Stahlbeton-Türme für immer in einer Staubwolke verschwinden. Ein Teil der Differdinger Industriegeschichte findet sein Ende.' (Luxemburger Wort, 24.08.07)

bells and flowers

2007-08-23T22:39:00.000+03:00

Today I got lost in other people’s stories, on waking my head was light from having fought mosquitoes during the early hours of morning. I walked around the tarmac-ground softened from the heat and wobbly like sand, and thought of everyone far away I love. One man greeted me and I was amazed. Have a good day, Sir, you mistake me for somebody else. I crossed the iron footbridge over the Basarab railway station and looked down through the gaps that remained, stubbornly, square, in the smoothly worn brown-red iron trodden by many feet over a long period of time, each soft step taking with them a molecule or two. What I was looking at was mizerie, smelly garbage. I was half expecting to discover the body of a decaying dog. I did not. An old woman was complaining about the dust, and it settled on my body like a silky surface, mixed with the transpiration (that word choice should make my status of ‘ladyship’ quite obvious), and later on could be rubbed off like flaky skin. I could not stand the sight of one child standing at a crossroad and breathing into a bag. The world is too loud, too indifferent. One big man sat on the same spot as yesterday, talking to a quartier neighbour, an old lady with white hair elaborately strung together in a bun, carrying many shabby plastic bags. I had an acute sense of loss on Calea Grivitei, walking past a curtained shop window that a billboard with the opening times in these kinds of stick-on plastic letters, and a basket with a stuffed white cat plus several kittens with scary stary eyes. Looking through the ruins of one once majestic corner building, I could see through the holes the twinkling sign of a hotel, newly risen into the sky. Another project of modernity, only the context, this time, being capitalism. This environment, momentarily an extension of my self, decaying just like my body, and would not remain until I return. A fragment ‘il y a longtemps que je t’aime jamais je ne t’oublierai’ rhythmed my heart. It rung in my head like the church bells in the village, with the characteristic tierce that render them so distinctive. ‘… each hung bell's [Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name’ (G.M.H.). It made me understand separation, time, and nostalgia. A moment of lucidity in a fog, rhyming, producing consonance, while working towards that project-of-little-importance. In the meantime has become the work I do, because that’s what I get up for in the morning. My dreams, however, were flying off with the ceiling, I found myself looking at the stars. I dreamed I am going to explode, and I held my arms in readiness. I was certain of the cause: a flower was growing in my stomach, and I sat down near the piano and waited. I think I was smiling.

Ahr yeh? (Scottish transcription)

2007-08-14T19:56:00.003+03:00

Discovered one evening in Bucharest, as we were hanging out at Cartaresti (possibly the best bookshop in Romania’s beautiful capital), waiting for our reservation time at the restaurant to come around, this really became the question of the day. I did not find out for certain what the firm was trying to advertise, but I suspect it is all about… clothes. Three things I hope you will think about, even for just a minute, after you have laughed heartily at the funny woman and this (very modern, I admit and I am yellow of envy) T-shirt that is showing the shoes she may own (or covet?). What kind of expression is that supposed to be on her face? Can modernity be summoned, desired, beckoned, arrived at, or is the question of an altogether different order? How would you answer the question? Do you consider yourself ready? (photo: k ruskola)

Plums, prunes and tuica

2007-08-14T19:56:00.001+03:00

Now for a lovely example about words expanding or compressing their meaning when introduced into a foreign language. Linguistically, the origins of the word ‘prune’ are to be found in the Middle English period, from Old French, via Latin from Greek prou(m)non. In Latin ‘pruna’ denotes the genus of the actual plum tree, but today, in English, prune merely denotes the plum ‘preserved by drying, having a black, wrinkled appearance’. Further, it has the secondary, metaphorical meaning of an ‘unpleasant or disagreeable person’. Plum, on the other hand, signifies the fruit, the tree, the colour, and, informally, as an adjective, ‘a highly desirable attainment, accomplishment, or acquisition, typically a job’. This word is recorded in the dictionary as coming from Old English plume (with a line on the u), from medieval Latin, pruna. So this word existed earlier in the English language. In Romanian, which is the Romance language that has kept the most Latin forms, the word is, unsurprisingly, pruna, plural prune. How about for a historically unverifiable (? I put my faith in you historians out there) question: since when have people made brandy and jams and what not? What was on a medieval food table – of the wealthy, let us say, to leave more scope? All answers, albeit speculative, welcome.
People here are picking plums at the moment. They go for days and days, because it is a year with a lot of plums. There are more than 100,000 plum trees in this valley, mostly planted during communism, and not a penny has been invested in the orchards since the revolution at least... Part of the neighbouring comuna’s territory was a state farm of fruit trees, mainly functioning by unpaid labour, recruiting students into so-called Praktika, and the army into agricultural labour. People were considered chiaburi if they owned a still, because they could apply the custom of asking for a tax amounting to a tenth of the production of people who would use the still in the village. The plums are delicious, and will be mostly end as the traditional brandy, tuica (pronounce: tzuica, because of the , below the t that I cannot reproduce on the internet). For this end, they are kept in wooden casks for a while until they have fermented. Then, through a distillation process, the alcohol is separated from the fruit, and the wash remains for fodder purposes. The first bit that seeps out of the still is very strong and I recommend waiting… (one coughing, cursing anthropologist-wimp will result otherwise, in my own experience). I am very curious whether and how the new EU regulations will be applied in this regard, and whether a new return to secret brandy making will happen, just like in communist times (for the Aberdonians: Illicit Stills will multiply in the village…). In the spring, when there was some distilling going on in the other valley, people were arguing that, in fact, the legislation of last year needed to be applied to these plums (and apples) because the harvest was from 2006. I feel this discourse is on the brink of changing (it don’t take no clairvoyant to predict this… ;-P). Noroc!

Contingency–Intimacy

2007-08-14T19:52:00.000+03:00

The most interesting details about how people navigate their life-worlds, appreciate their social relationships, and evaluate how persons and self are and should be, during my fieldwork, have revealed themselves in very contingent ways. They have not magically arisen out of any formalised methodology, but they were in fact originated by the fact that I did engage, with all of my heart, with people I learnt to appreciate in their difference and similarity to my being. Just after David asked me about concepts of friendship, I got taught an important lesson. I thought the term for ‘friend’ (prieten) was somewhat more extended, but I do not think it is, and I had not considered it carefully. David said that in Polish there are only two or three people who would make the first category of friends, and then there were two other terms that designated people one could have drinks with. In Anglophone contexts, the category of friend, to me, is very flexible and large. It is a term easily used. One (semi-serious) example I think are the ‘friends’ on webpages like MySpace, for instance, where one click gets you an additional friend. In Luxembourgish, the term is almost absent, and is replaced by Kolleech (colleague), who is more of a buddy. It does exist more, I’d say, in the female version. In Lux, as in other Germanic languages, there is a certain amount of ambiguity because of the identity of boyfriend/girlfriend and friend, and it depends on the article used (possessive or indeterminate) to determine. In Romanian, this does not really work to differentiate (but to explicitly say ‘suntem doar amici’ – we are just friends), and some euphemisms exist, like in most languages, to talk about a romantic relationship (e.g. ‘they talk to each other’, ‘they are going out’, ‘they are dating’, ‘they go together’…).
But I divagate. Previously, I had gathered through an argument that I had with a friend that friends need to be respected, and this left me in a tricky situation later on. We went for a drink (juice) in a newly-built pension (foreign investment from Bucharest), and some of the people we went with were talking in ways about women that made me react in my stomach, even if I tried to stay calm. Now, given how I am, and my normative attitudes about politeness, I did not want to stop them there and then, but listened, waited for it to end, and, in due course, found myself getting very angry. Later on, I barked at the friend who I had taken me, and we started to discuss this. The argument went like this: I don’t like how these guys talk about women and you didn’t do anything to stop them. I didn’t say anything because they’re your friends, and I want to respect them like I can. They’re not my friends just because we go for drinks together. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on at least? Because I am polite, I am telling you now, not then.
All the assumptions you make about people’s relationships when you get to a village… man! Difficult to parse. At home, I would not take people for drinks if I was just living in the same place as them. You may take them if they work with you. The more I think about it, the more I believe that it is also something that splits among gender lines, and even along class lines. I would also argue it happens less in cities, where social networks are a lot more limited, because you can just avoid interacting with people who you may not share a lot of things, and this ‘sharing’ may be an important criterion for some. Even in my home village, it may happen more likely in situations of hanging out with people from a music ensemble (or two – but this is related to a common interest, music…) and so forth, it has never happened since I am away. I do admit, that as teenagers I used to hang out with people who were not particularly close, but maybe that is a different story, and shows of the lack of adult-social-life depth I have had in my native village. What do you think? Who is your friend?

Singularity

2007-08-11T15:56:00.001+03:00

As I sit and wait for the thunderstorm to pass over my head and the village, in the absence of electricity, in the smell of the rain and the sounds of cars wheezing through puddles and the tapping on the corrugated iron roof, the most complete singularity wraps itself around me. It makes my stomach turn and my head spin. I long for detachment from this world, but I would not have it if it was thrust upon me. Being is full of contradictions that seek conclusion, choices that fuel the burning of old wounds and long-lost memories, and moments needed for waiting, healing, interiorising. The thunderstorm resembles a point d’orgue in music. A lot can happen during that time, when the rhythm fleetingly becomes suspended, and a solo breaks into the space, with moments of silence weighing down on the audience like love on a heart-in-waiting.

soft symmetry secure love

2007-08-05T16:03:00.000+03:00

“try to catch the deluge in a paper cup” (crowded house)

the rains have come back and it smells like winter mid-august the summer ended
we have been walking in the dirt and your presence evened my frustration
romania is complicated every sentence requires too much application excavation
I think of scotland my lack of concentration is apparent in every skin cell
why scotland it is not that which I left – a mere figure in a set cast of cowardice
the returning question of why love-labours wax and wane
when I truly long for them to remain how can I align my desires with my past
I wish I could still believe human lives were made of permanence and stability
I drift tepid gazing faraway where does my work end and life begin
thoughts of other times and place weighing on this room this belly
lingering by my side you feel me as though you had known me all your life
you ask why I am not present
I want to be there fail and am nowhere with all my heart

Evolution Take 2? Summerlach Take 3?

2007-07-30T20:19:00.000+03:00

What the seagulls are up to in Aberdeen now. This one is probably the ame seagull that stole a noodle pie out of my hand in the centre of Aberdeen, and flew away with it. I still hold a grudge against it. As you can see, no good will come of this, now they've become truly Scottish and eat crisps for lunch...
(found by Luqman)

Academic correctness

2007-07-30T19:58:00.000+03:00

This is a professional deformation that leads people to put too much weight on the academic truth content of what it being said. It is something most regular people don’t really care about all that much, though there may be variations. I sometimes get upset too quickly about the things that I research, when, in my opinion, people are talking out of their a***. These are things I value, things I have put in all my effort to get at a subtle understanding of how things work with all their complications and reservations and exceptions. I shouldn’t put too much weight on people not directly involved in the research, and who, for some reason think they can just patronise me for one reason or another. Recently I met one man who drove a BMW X3, had an extremely young girlfriend/wife, and who was being evasive when I asked him what he did in Sibiu, and how it was to live there (so much for my impression – the context was a breakfast table of a former Mayor of the village, a friend of my friend had suggested we pop into his courtyard before meeting the others in the morning of the dance, on the occasion of my accompanying the cultural formation of the village I live in to a festival in the mountains near Sibiu in a shepherd village). When I explained what I did in Romania, said: oh, I’ll tell you what European integration means for animal husbandry: a fall in the animal population. And he threw around numbers that were just taken out of the air. For him that was the end of it. How do you react to that usefully? What do I do with this encounter? Is it to be included in my research? Why? Why not?
People say things for all kinds of reasons and these may include the following: you say what you say because you want to or because it is your deep conviction or because you want to impress the conversation partner, or you want to say it because you want to assume a certain position in the discussion, the previous bit of the conversation forces you to say this, you want to make a point, you are being stroppy or stubborn or obnoxious or pleasant or chatty, you haven’t told anyone what you are really feeling about a certain person, you are gossipy by nature, you want to get a certain reaction or some other ‘gain’ from the conversation, you want to tease out a bit of detail that interests you and that has remained hidden in the conversation, you are bored and want to fill time with talk, you think this is what they want to hear, you want to cover up something else and think that noise about something else will do the trick, you are tired and you made a mistake, retrospectively, you seek closure in the conversation they initiated, because you think that it does not go anywhere if you pursue it on your own terms and that it will exclude most people around the table. With this guy, I politely sought closure and asked the host about the stuff she was serving.
How on earth are we supposed to do meaningful research with people and expect, as an outcome, to have even a grain of dust to stand on and say ‘what I say here is correct’. It is a dead end, because it undermines the anthropologist’s expert status which is highly valued in the world and brings up all kinds of awkward questions related to the value of our own research. Despite all efforts of so-called ‘collaborative’ methodology and what not, in the end you write the damn thing all by yourself, sign it, and are examined on correctness of argument, details and interpretation. And then, who is going to look at and read what we write about? I am working so the answer will not be: two anthropology students, one in London who was interested in the keyword ‘Romania’, the other in Stirling, she made a mistake with the catalogue; three family members, because they felt they needed to; and two bookworms in the British Library, because they liked the taste of the paper. They didn’t like the interpretation because it was not post-structuralist enough.

programm um fernseeh

2007-07-24T15:27:00.000+03:00

jo su ee block ass dach awer multifonctionnell. haut den owend anscheinend heim ins reich um fernseeh. meidozou hei .

dreaming

2007-07-21T20:01:00.001+03:00

I have noticed that I appear to dream less on fieldwork, which is probably related to my level of tiredness. I more generally seem to dream less as I get older, passing, however, through phases where I sleep shakily and dream my anxiety.
In my new village, I sleep a lot at the moment. Romania is on a heat wave, and, due to some kind of flu, I am on antibiotics. When my feverish body temperature coincides with that of the environment, it is impossible to think, let alone to go out and meet people. Because my thoughts are so hazy, and my concentration patchy, I have a hard time following what they are saying, let alone participating in the conversation in a meaningful way. I had a nap in the afternoon to make it through the hottest hours of the day. On waking up I still remembered my dream, which has not happened in a long time. The visuality of this dream takes my breath away. How could I have dreamt this up if I could never paint it? I was in a car made only of windows with my family. We were on a beautiful journey through high mountainous lands in the clouds with the sun painting very stark colours, and long shadows, and, somewhat in contradiction, the landscape was made up of lush vegetation of fruit trees, flowers, bushes and age-old trees, haystacks, and little houses crowded in the valleys. You could almost taste this landscape. It was wonderful to drive the winding roads and see the shepherds. It was like the perfect idyll until someone said that my former clarinet teacher had a house down one of the roads. Picture: Isle of Skye, spring 2005

how do you call a cat?

2007-07-21T19:59:00.001+03:00

As in: how do you attract its attention?
Pisipisipisi (Romania)
Kittykittykitty (UK)
Muuusmuuusmuuus or Muussi (Luxembourg)

I forget the Finnish version… maybe someone would like to remind me… any catcalling in other languages? Especially interested in Armenian, various Scandinavian languages, Caribbean creoles, Turkish, and Japanese.

How do you call a dog?
Catel (prounounce: Ketzel – the first e being one of those phonetic upside down e’s), often repeated as in: kzkzkzkzkz (Romania)
Doggie? (UK)
Muppi or Muppeli (Luxembourg)

This loveliness of a kitten we met in the Village Museum in Bucharest, and we became friends immediately.

chronicle in stone

2007-07-21T19:57:00.000+03:00

Written by Ismael Kadare, it won the 2005 Booker Prize. I stumbled across it thinking I had not read enough about the Balkans. To be more precise, Albanian literature in my world is summarised by a few brief translated poems. The world in a city entirely made of stone that, in the course of the book, becomes sick, and bombarded, and rained on, seen through the eyes of a boy who (rightly) thinks that adult talk is boring, and strange (‘Italy is showing its claws’), and who at first likes fighter planes, even if they bombard other cities over the clouds. He also wants to read Jung because ‘he writes about magic’. It contains a description of an air raid that is more than amazing. It tells of women who stay indoors for years and years and of rain smiling secretly. It has sequences of sentences that we all dreamed about: ‘I looked at my hands. They were more nervous than I was. I put them in my pockets.’
The protagonist spends long days with his friends dreaming and wandering:
'His voice was deep and soothing, and as I leaned against the chaise longue, I dreamed of the magic of tobacco and tried to figure out how much I would smoke and how many books I would have to read in Turkish before my time to die would come. The thick books lay in the trunk, piled one on top of the other, an endless swarm of Arabic letters waiting to carry me off and reveal secrets and mysteries, for only Arabic letters knew the path to the mysteries, just as ants know the holes and fissures underground. '
‘Babazotti,’ I asked, ‘can you read ants?’ He chuckled softly and patted my tousled hair.
‘No, boy, you can’t read ants.’
‘But why not? When they’re all piled up together, they look just like Turkish letters.’
‘It only seems that way, but it’s really not true.
‘But I’ve seen them’, I insisted one last time.
As I drew on my cigarette, I wondered what ants were for if you couldn’t read them like books.
He then reads his first book (Macbeth), does not want to stop and then dreams about the letters:
‘You sleep, I’m going to read.’
‘No’, she said, ‘we don’t have enough kerosene.’
I couldn’t go to sleep. The book lay nearby. Silent. A thin object on the divan. It was so strange… Between two cardboard covers were noises, doors, howls, horses, people. All side by side, pressed tightly against one another. Decomposed into little black marks. Hair, eyes, legs and hands, voices nails, beards, knocks on doors, walls, blood, the sound of horseshoes, shouts. All docile, blindly obedient to the little black marks.
He swears at his puppy love and then has a crush on the woman who steals and who shows him a falling star:
To tell the truth, a star falling from the sky made about as much impression on me as a button falling off a coat, for Margaritas’s thick hair was spread across my neck and her hair, her whole body, had a subtle fragrance I had never noticed on Mamma, Grandma, or any of my aunts. Nor was it like any of the other smells I liked best, including the aroma of my favourite dishes.'
I haven’t used my ‘a book about xyz’ sentence yet and I would hate not to be up to your expectations. A book about writing, about pain, about magic and witchcraft, about permanence and transitoriness, about resilience and death.

une vache peut en cacher une autre

2007-07-21T19:55:00.000+03:00

a visit to bucovina

2007-07-16T11:00:00.001+03:00

Rage, rage against the dying of the light

2007-07-06T23:37:00.000+03:00

A nice epitaph no more no less
Are these your thoughts in your temporary anger?
You ask what the title is? Add ‘I have come on invitation
Of a friend Would not mind a summary’
The title resembles something along the lines of romantic tale
Meets real life meets expectations of youth
The kind of thing you have heard about before
Curtain call
The plot is filled with details that have meaning
Only to the actors Dialogues of no universality
You ask what good it does? And the point?
So they think and carry on their play
Till it gets serious and obstacles arise
Battles are fought compromises made
And the end is yours to imagine You say
You are divided between experience and hope and love
The chapters are not numbered anymore
The story grows painfully dull and embarrassing
For all outsiders like you and you turn around in
Your seat saying ‘I am leaving see how my wife is keeping
Thank you for the play I cannot stay it is not mine’
The protagonists carry on for it makes sense to them
Their serious play advances and the plot finally (?) thickens
They take it in their own time what do they care about unity
They both do rage against the dying of the light
That they cherish more than anything
The ending is not written
It lies between what will happen and what might
You leave the theatre to hurry back to your beloved
Who needs you more than anything in her age, her fragility
You are the strong one now
And her who you need so, her tenderness, her beauty
The love you share and keep rekindling
The play goes on in its own way the outcome is up to you
What will you do? What is your ending?

Life as a Tiger...

2007-07-02T11:31:00.000+03:00

this instinct for truth makes me want to be a tiger... ;o)

Turtle-Shell and Thyroxine

2007-06-30T19:24:00.000+03:00

For about four years, I’ve had a problem with my thyroid. Before that, I didn’t even know I had anything with such an ugly name in my body. It is a gland located in the neck, and in close interaction with the hypothalamus and with other glands. The thyroid, like any gland that respects itself, releases hormones. Hormones (the word comes from Greek horman ‘to impel, to set in motion’) act as regulatory substances and are transported in tissue fluids such as blood or sap to stimulate specific cells or tissues into action. Hormonal systems are very complex, but this is as much as I have understood. The thyroid regulates the body’s metabolism very broadly. When shocked due to environmental or emotional factors, my thyroid reacts by becoming infected. Because this is a very sensitive thing, afterwards the full working capacity is reduced, because the infection has permanently damaged some of the tissue. This has happened a few times now, and I keep thinking that my metabolism gets slower and slower and I am turning into a turtle-shell.
When I went to my host to ask her advice about me seeing a specialist about my thyroid and cholesterol problems in Bucharest, she said to me, yes this is a good clinic, and yes, I will put in a word with my friend so you get an appointment with full attention (Romanian style). Thank you. But, she said, I will also offer my opinion. I don’t think you should solve this problem with medication. What you really need is to find your place in your life, settle down, found a family and until you don’t do that, your body is going to continue being haywire. You need to find a man and learn to be tolerant with them. This will make you happy. I found myself in full agreement with her, silently listening and nodding. Anyone heard of a hormone that sets this process in motion…?!?

Anthropologie, rhétorique et limitations du milieu ambiant

2007-06-30T19:21:00.000+03:00

L’individu incertain (1995) d’Alain Ehrenberg est un ouvrage dont la thèse centrale soutient que la responsabilité accrue exigée de l’individu contemporain représente à la fois une libération aussi bien qu’un fardeau. L’auteur soutient que, pour alléger ce poids et pour faciliter les capacités d’agir nos sociétés offrent les possibilités suivantes. Il distingue entre moyens d’action sur soi de la pharmacologie (drogues licites et illicites, anxiolytiques, antidépresseurs), et entre les mises en scène de soi des technologies de la communication (interactivité, reality-shows, cyberespace).
C’est un ouvrage qui s’inscrit dans le même champ d’intérêts que d’autres publications qu’a réalisées Ehrenberg (ouvrages qui incluent les enjeux plus larges, notamment Le culte de la performance qui traite le sport dans la « société contemporaine », La fatigue d’être soi portant sur la dépression, ainsi qu’une série d’ouvrages qu’il a dirigés portant sur la maladie mentale et la consommation de drogues). L’ouvrage perpétue, malheureusement, quelques-unes des faiblesses des autres livres-Ehrenberg. L’Individu incertain n’arrive pas à sortir du domaine théorique, et, par conséquence, présente trop peu de liens réels entre l’argument et des études de cas. Bien que son orientation se veut sociologique, il relève plutôt du domaine de la philosophie. Il cherche à s’inspirer de démarches anthropologiques, dont il qualifie néanmoins les instruments d’enquête inadéquates et inadaptées pour l’étude de ‘collectivités… bien entendu trop grandes et trop complexes’ (p.27). Dommage que les sociologues et les anthropologues ne cherchent toujours pas à vraiment à se comprendre mutuellement et d’apprendre les uns des autres…
Pour moi, portant volontiers mon fardeau ( ?) d’éducation anglo-saxonne, l’argument académique à la française, si vous me permettez un peu de caricature, m’embête, ressemblant, trop souvent, à un marmonnement soutenu, gonflé de généralisations exagérées qui perdent toute signification en cours de route. Souvent sous-tendu, une arrogance latente mais persistante qui surgit dans des interjections telles que ‘bien entendu, il n’en est pas ainsi…’ et dans des formulations qui ne sont pas destinées à jeter une lumière nouvelle sur un argument, mais à faire allusion à la culture générale e-x-t-r-a-o-r-d-i-n-a-i-r-e de son auteur. Si ces jeux rhétoriques resurgissent trop souvent, je me fâche. Le génie réel ne dépend pas de publicité (voir littératures, poésie de première classe, par exemple…). Je me souviens de ces modèles atomiques, au cours de chimie au lycée, qui faisaient référence à des « nuages électroniques » un flou indéterminé qui correspond à la situation des électrons à un moment donnée. Je vois devant moi un professeur qui tient un discours à un institut académique français quelconque et j’écoute, sans pouvoir cerner vraiment à quoi bon toutes ces gesticulations, tout ce brouhaha et tout cet indéterminisme. Allez – qu’on prenne le chat par la queue, qu’on arrête de circuler comme des lâches autour du Bräi (voilà les luxembourgismes tant attendus !). Ce qui ne revient pas à dire qu’il faut succomber à un populisme souvent senti dans l’espace académique anglo-saxon. Je ne soutiens non plus que « vulgarisation » et « populisme » sont identiques. Il revient à admettre que, mon habitus (voilà encore un terme à perdre beaucoup de temps de discussion – un autre jour si vous insistez) engendre des difficultés à cerner et à bien comprendre la structure des arguments en français. Ils manquent de densité et qu’ils ne répondent pas aux enchaînements rhétoriques attendus, tout en présentant souvent un excès de zèle stylistique ainsi que cette propriété qui me suffoque tel un milieu ambiant rempli d’ouate, d’une viscosité encombrante.
Or, vu son originalité d’approche et d’analyse, il faut voir plus loin que ces faiblesses largement dues à l’enracinement de l’auteur dans un milieu académique français. Ehrenberg sait inspirer et il fait preuve d’une intuition fantastique de « vérité scientifique ». Avec son flou habituel, il trouve le moyen de condenser, dans une toute petite phrase banale, ce que les anthropologues peinent à voir uniquement après de longues périodes de terrain, d’innombrables interviews et un nombre hallucinant de cafés pris ensemble avec les gens. Il dit ainsi, en conclusion :
« parce que nous nous appuyons de plus en plus sur nos ressorts internes, elle [la politique] est la condition pour ne pas être prisonnier d’une subjectivité dont les deux risques sont l’apathie dépressive qui multiplie les risques d’autodestruction, et la non-limitation des rapports de force qui rouvre grande la porte à toutes les dominations des forts sur les faibles et à toutes les violences qui peuvent en découler. Le manque de politique dans une démocratie avancée, c’est le risque d’implosion par le bas. »
La manière de procéder des anthropologues (ces populistes en herbe ?!) est inverse. Elle part d’un tel constat et le traite comme une boîte noire. On l’ouvre pour voir ce qu’il signifie lorsqu’il est mis en rapport réel avec la vie de tous les jours des Hommes, ou, plus exactement, les habitants d’une certaine localité située dans tel et tel pays dans une telle conjonction économique, politique, sociale, religieuse, et à un tel moment de l’histoire. C’est une question d’instances spécifiques, de détails, de commentaires assez peu réflexifs et très réflexifs, de rapports sociaux concrets. A l’horizon, cependant, on n’oublie jamais que ces personnes avec qui ces anthropologues travaillent sont aussi des Hommes, surtout dans leurs rapports réciproques. Qu’en pensez-vous ?

LÈif Matbierger vun Lucilinburhuc,

2007-06-23T15:09:00.000+03:00

Once upon a time in 963, one guy exchanged some properties in Germany for a small rocky place in the heart of Europe: Lucilinburhuc, the little castle. 1044 years later, we’ve come a long way…
On the occasion of a purely conventional Groussh‰erzogsgebuertsdag, your arguably most unpatriotic Lux representative, her Silliness Nutshell-in-exile, would like to say a few words. The upside is that my speech will not be delivered in Luxembourgish with a French accent, but in English with a Luxembourgish accent.
What do I miss about Luxembourg? Of course, all those dear persons that I call my friends and family - but this is hardly the place to reminisce about such personal matters. My J’accuse does not exclude me, for I am not free of influence of the place I have grown up in.
I miss its hills, the lake, and EislÈk more generally, the Belgian border at Colpach, its farm houses, its chapels along the road, its cleanliness, its city walls and high cliffs, its castles and secret passages. It is a place full of different languages, reservation and Muttergottesstatuen. My dreams about it are filled with winding roads and cow stables. It is a beautiful place, like a village with too much money, blown up out of proportion. It has suffocating elements that provoke migraines and bursts of anger in me. It rests on a conservative mentality that screams ‘mir wÎlle bleiwe…’ and on citizens who accusingly point fingers ‘quo vadis…’ in stylistically awful / rhetorically inane, often content-free Briefe and die Redaktion. Luxembourgers abroad tend to complain about running taps, soft mattresses, and food that is inadequate for their bowels. They miss their daily dose of obituaries (the country is so small all of those can be put on a few pages of newspaper) and work out the cause of death from the wording of the announcement. Marriage and birth announcements are studied in detail, with extensive excursions of kinship and place ‘oh look, isn’t this the nephew of Muller from Siewebueren, on the mother’s side, you know the one who worked at the Schmeltz for a while and then had this car accident with Wampach from Wecker, he has a child with the Eller widow’s daughter’. Our territory was made smaller in the mid nineteenth century, but we were transformed from being a Duchy to being a Grand-Duchy. That was our consolation, and has left us with a Fuerz am Kapp. We are marked by being occupied twice in the wars of the twentieth century. We are not German, we say, grinding our teeth, just before adding that we are not nationalist. We really took the post-war welfare state seriously. Steel industry was ours before Mittal’s time. The country’s post-industrial state of wealth is reflected in its prettier-than-fairytale urban spaces: impressive museums with a lot of marble, paved plazas, renovated mansions, flowers planted in subtle arrangements of to-the-millimetre exactitude, sanitised, every microbe removed. The property prices in the city do not add to the liveliness of the place, as your average person cannot afford to live here, not even in the smallest of cupboards. The Pafendall is the place I would choose to live in, had I unlimited funds and patience (natiirlich och wÈinst dem Numm). Architectural wonders of centuries of occupation: Vauban, the Spanish, the Austro-Hungarians and Pei (more recently) have left traces. I walk down Grand’-rue with ever changing upper crest boutiques that add to the flavour of wealth. Identities made and remade in a frenzy through consumption goods and luxury articles: cars, jewelry, upmarket restaurants, cosmetics, culture. I walk on and count the banks. Geld stÈnkt nit, they say. I walk on past William the Second of the Netherlands, the only Dutch ruler who bothered to visit his Luxembourgish colony. Full of gratefulness we made him a statue. I can smell the earth of the flowers of the market, as they watered them in the morning breeze. I buy some vegetables. Markets for city people, once a week. I walk down past our national fox, Renert, who sits, head bowed (?), listening to the chimes of the cathedral. The beautiful empty cathedral of ours: Maryland how I love thee. Note to self: buy a black party card one of these days, just for the hell of it. The boulevard Roosevelt, rich of symbols, and entrance to one set of the underground casemates that smell like urine and mould. I nod in direction of the public service canteen (another convent converted) and walk past Disneyland meets Hellege Geescht (crimes of an urbanist nature are also committed in the Grand-Duchy…). In hiding a view of the Gronn that is one of my favourites and that shows the converted male and female prisons where detainees used to glue bags (a detail that fascinated me as a child…), and a convent that is beautifully renovated and now hosts cultural events. I return to the boulevard and cross that bridge (having come to it) that spans across lush green depths of park valley where the Alzette and the PÈtrusse flow. God built his church on a rock and called it Luxembourg. The quartier Gare has a more lively mix of architecture, but you need to look up. Here, too, the same boring shops that you find in any European city now have taken over. The Fischer-mafia has sucked up most of the bakeries (but in Biekerich remains, without exaggeration, the best baker in the world… I would give a lot for one of his frangipanes now, too bad I have high cholesterol…), but Journal cafÈ has remained. There is little interaction in the city, people live far from each other, but not in distance. Nothing touches me is the curse, reversed, that I carry with myself: everything touches me. Every now and then you run into someone who is the opposite. The smallness makes that people consider that half an hour’s drive is far away. Everything is small: the train station, the airport, the Autobunnopfaarten, my village. My village, Redange-les-Bains (well, we have a river originating in the Ardennes…) has, among other things less remarkable, a Kropemann, a Cactus, a water reservoir that looks like a Roman villa, and a swimming pool that has much changed since I was a kid. I want to go back to the time I enjoyed playing in the local Harmonie, and when I helped organise scouts for kids on the weekends. I longed to leave even then. When or if I return I will remember how privileged the place is I grew up in, and fight against attitudes of pettiness, envy, delusions of grandeur, and nagging that sometimes take it over. Maryland mon amour – Smallville ma peine – vive de Grand-duc, vive d’Grand-duchesse... Et kinnt een hei theoretesch nach Leit derbeiflÈcken mat deene LÎtzebuerg sech bretzt: vive de Victor Hugo, vive de SchanKloot, vive de Robert Schumann, vive de Generol Patton, vive de Superjhemp, etc. mee et ass e wÈinich pÈnibel… allez, vive LÎtzebuerg!

june

2007-06-20T15:59:00.000+03:00

Taking Care

2007-06-20T15:58:00.000+03:00

I met this beautiful eighty-year-old woman. It had been her birthday the day before. She lives in a two-bedroom house with a terrace, and some painted outside walls. She has a well and a garden that she still works in. The strawberries were twinkling between the green leaves, and the orange fire flowers had grown almost a metre high. She told me how her husband had died thirty years ago, and how life now was not good anymore, because she could not do anything anymore. Take no decisions and not enough action. She was showing me all her crafted blankets, of wool, and cotton, and the costumes she had sewn. She told me her daughter was unhappy about her wearing torn jumpers, because she did not understand what she was keeping the good clothes for. She did not want to dress up because she did not leave the house. Her loom showed a piece of cloth in the making that was white, with the occasional stripe pattern. She was working on the finely-grained cotton towels that are used on the occasion of orthodox burials. She was not angry at her life, or bitter, but when it would be time for her to leave, she would be ready.

302

2007-06-16T09:28:00.000+03:00

That’s the number which has woken me up. It stands for the total cholesterol levels in my blood. Cholesterol (C 27 H 45 OH) is a compound of the sterol type found in most body tissues, including the blood and the nerves. Cholesterol and its derivatives are important constituents of cell membranes and precursors of other steroid compounds, but high concentrations in the blood (mainly derived from animal fats in the diet) are thought to promote arteriosclerosis. My cholesterol levels are double of the maximum it should be, despite a diet that is relatively low in animal fats, and despite moving about quite a lot. The price to pay for the stress of the phd? It means I will try to be a vegan for a while, and see what that changes. It worries me a bit, but it is strange how a number like that tells you about what happens inside your body. I feel angry about how this body of mine, that, since my early twenties, has been letting me down repeatedly. I am not sure what this cholesterol implies, but I have so many plans in my life that I need to pay heed to it...

Place and Season

2007-06-11T15:17:00.001+03:00

I have left to Bucharest for a week. Upon leaving I find myself looking at everything again, in the hope to remember everything, should I not return. As much as I want to leave at times, I have grown very attached to the place. One woman told me that she was like salcam, that she could put her roots anywhere and feel well. I wonder to what extent that is true for me?
The lushness of those trees and all the climbing plants on the houses make me want to have very special drawing abilities that could capture all the windings and shadings and colour shades perfectly. They even have vines, despite the altitude at which we are. I am forever amazed by the way in which seasonality still makes sense in the village I have now been staying at for about four months. The products correspond to certain times. Winter was the time of nuts and onions and cabbage. We had salcam honey, then the apple trees started to flower. Now soc is in bloom, and people prepare a kind of pancakes with these flowers that I find absolutely gorgeous. The garden is full of salad, spring onions and the tomatoes are starting to grow. The prune trees are full of little green bulbs that stick into the air. While I got more cascaval in early spring, now I get strawberry jam and honey. Soon we'll have cherries, and I cannot wait...

Unfolding

2007-06-07T15:44:00.001+03:00

"It is the direction that decides whether we are being released from the centre in a movement that is ever freer or whether we are becoming more and more attached to a centre that will ultimately destroy us: the question means nothing less than life and death".This is what Paul Klee had to say about the spiral. We are developing in ways that cannot be reduced to the point of origin. Time is a creative force in itself and sweeps through us, and we love and leave and werkeln and build and pray and hope and sing and feel our way through the dark patches of the sun.
What, they asked again, for the umptieth time, does it take for love to remain? You are drawn to each other, strangers, and yet you can recognise their humanity in an instant. You may have grown up differently, with different values, religions, interests, tastes, preferences, priorities. You can tell kindness. You can feel truthfulness, groundedness, lightness in the palms of their hands. The petals can poison you just as they can make you whole. You discover patches of each other, you talk, you disagree and get upset, you find the common ground back, you laugh, you are touched, moved, rocked, spiralling into attraction of a different kind. You take risks with willingness and eagerness and impatience. You wait for the other because they have filled your soul with crystals of honey. You learn how to make compromises, and to understand what the other one is saying, not just what you thought you wanted to hear. You learn to live with what you thought you could never accept. Things take time. That’s love.
I have been able to let go a bit of my tightly structured actions and started to enjoy living here. It is easier with the summer. The trouble is that this way of being makes me wonder how much of pulling-together and disciplining-to-the-extremes it takes to get the phd done, and how much I am allowed to live. It is thoroughly enjoyable though to swing with the rhythms that surround me rather than being in full dissonance following those rhythms not grounded in the present landscape. So I will dance a bit more. Let us see how long I can get away with it. kitty-gritty

O Lume Minunata

2007-06-07T15:36:00.001+03:00

What comes to mind when you see this kitchen? What does it do to your imagination? How would it be a different experience if you had been in the kitchen, met the woman in the picture, smelled the food she was preparing and heard the rain coming down the mountains? How would it be the same? What features did you concentrate on and what memories did they recall for you? How would it feel if you had lived there all your adult life? What about childhood? The reconciliation of worlds, even if just for a moment, happens all the time. That is the most important lesson I learnt ever so recently.

Angels

2007-06-07T15:30:00.001+03:00

I know that really they’re people. They appear and offer their help. They show me kindness. They make my cynical self blush and hide in a corner. They are genuinely interested. They say hello to me on the street. They tell me about their own encounters with strangers. They take me with them to the mountains to relax. They restore my suflet. They give me strength. They make me speak about what I feel and ease my homesickness. They make me laugh and dance. They make everything worthwhile.

Toes

2007-06-07T15:21:00.000+03:00

I hit my little right toe against a wooden object that jumped into my way. Yes, it is the same toe that greatly handicapped me during the first months of my Masters year, causing some people only to inquire about the wellbeing of my toe (pars pro toto). However, it is not quite as bad, I think, the coloration is (as yet) not quite as extensive and beautifully blue… though it made me think about this particular toe that I had completely forgotten about for the last year and a half. I think our feet are not well designed. I think they should be much tougher, like horse hooves, so we could walk barefoot and not have a problem. It would serve a lot of different purposes. Even saying, I will give you a kick in the a*** would have entirely different connotations (I abhor violence). You could step on cow’s hooves, for a change. Pedicure would be interesting, so would football. I am afraid Pike Aer would also be around in this kind of world with these kinds of feet, offering tattoos for hooves, feet-painting and all kinds of cushiony stuff to fix below the hoof to improve jumping power. It would also be good for insulation, and I think one could have reduced the problem of cold feet, wet socks and ensuing pneumonia and fever. Now I am a limp-shell, slightly slower, but still moving, hopefully.

…and it will be my last…

2007-05-29T12:47:00.002+03:00

I am listening to Bach’s Wohltemperiertes Klavier. Today it has the same effect on the pace of my heartbeat and my soul as the first time I really listened to it, as a ten-year-old in one of my piano lessons. I still see my piano teacher’s allure at the piano. She did mark me a lot, but I was a bit young to emotionally grasp some of her lessons back then. I went to this music and folkdance event today, on occasion of the sheep having gone to the mountains in the village across in the next valley. It made me happy to listen to the music and see the dancing, and sad because I have been neglecting this need within me, and I know that part of my stress could be greatly reduced by making more music. I remember living at home and playing for no reason. The piano just drew me in and I just played for a while, and during that time, I did not worry. It is a different kind of concentration than the one mostly used in writing work. In this village, I did not get the opportunity to practice an instrument. I have found myself taking notes, though, and starting to sing, in the silence of my room. Bursting into song. I misunderstood fieldwork. I got it wrong. I am so stressed I forget to breathe and I am surprised that I suffocate. It is true that fieldwork is not exactly a normal life situation, and this is what makes it harder. Yet, I cannot merely bet on its transitory nature, just like I cannot be content with the transitory nature of life itself. I cannot keep it all locked up, and think that typing it up will provide enough emotional release. I want to live more fully again, and spend time with people my age, and be somewhat relieved by their youth and their jokes and their mischief and their willingness to embrace life. I’d like to think that I am an optimistic person with a dark sense of humour, but with a lot of need for joking around, but I have been so caught up with all kinds of other things. This being-bottled-up makes my body receptive to all kinds of ailments. Being happy is often easier than I think. Worry less. Enjoy more. Do not take it so personally. Remember Kahlil. Be content with the ways in which it is not up to me. Wear down my clarinet like this accordeon I saw at the festival today.

Fill the air with more music. For no reason at all. And try to remember that tune that I heard played by the Vienna Art Orchestra. It’s called ‘Everything Has Its Own Time’. Truth of the year, quite possibly. Yours musically, beat-shell

Ishq and Mushq

2007-05-29T12:47:00.001+03:00

I spoke to a friend on the phone. We had agreed ealier to go to the mountains that day. He said he would be a bit late, when I had been waiting all morning for the crystallisation of a time, having asked for that the evening before, but not having been granted a time-appointment. Having learnt to be more patient with people’s troubles and lives, I did not get angry, just a little anxious. I said ‘what is a bit?’ (I should have said, what does it mean for you, ‘a bit’…). He said, well ‘a bit’, using a synonym. He thought my problem was the word. It wasn’t, as you might have guessed. I merely wanted to stabilise all this flexibility. He then got it, and said, well a bit, between 10 minutes and an hour. How much this collates with reality, I have not found out yet. However, I thought this was an answer that presupposed some knowledge of how I work. But consider long-term relationships (like family relationships and friendships and romantic relationships) and all the misunderstandings that go along with time. I have another reading for you that brilliantly conveys this, and a lot more. A story about a twice-migrant family (India to Kenya/Uganda to Britain) who, like any family, have a lot of things covered up in silence, and make a fuss about details, and refuse to forgive, and keep those grudges under rattling pressured lids. The opening sentence is: ‘remember there are only two things in the world you cannot hide: ishq and mushq’ (smell and love). Further to that Binsenweisheit, it is about ordinary sorrows and the emotionality of cooking. The author manages to build sentences that are at the same time beautiful, true and funny. I was surprised by the fact that this author is only three years older than me. I think, with me, it is the old problem that Danielito pointed out: too much information, not enough wisdom. But then again, wisdom may be overrated, too. I would ask for complete and permanent empathy if I had the wish granted. On the risk of being looked upon as a weirdo… ;-)

Petits plaisirs

2007-05-29T12:44:00.000+03:00

1. The sounds of a thunderstorm just above one’s head. Standing on the doorstep and listening to the rain fall, focusing on different depths and sounds on different materials. Reaching out with one’s fingers, catching some huge drops, and thinking of someone very intently. Watching the lightening and letting the time and the tempest pass.
2. Cool sheets and a fast-paced hardback after a long day. Feeling sleep come over one’s entire being during the brief pleasure of reading and abandoning the story just before falling asleep, knowing it will remain for the next evening. Not really wanting to finish the book because it consists of perfect sentences and quirky characters and everything in-between.
3. Running on soft, sandy ground and getting a feeling of being-in-movement back. Smelling the damp ground and the forest. Stretching afterwards and feeling liquid because of the heat and the endolphins swimming in the blood.
4. Dinner in a proper Indian restaurant with someone who knows how to have conversations and laughs. Creating a little universe that consists merely of two people momentarily interrupted by a waiter with so much politeness it hurts.
5. Strolling through a market and observing everything to the smallest minute detail. Smelling everything and listening to random snippets of conversation while moving about. Speaking to people without the slightest intention of buying anything, and then getting involved with sympathies. Buying in the end all kinds of vegetables that take too long to cook, cloth that might become, one day, a pair of trousers, and flower seeds.

to whisper in the morning

2007-05-21T14:27:00.000+03:00

sheep and coos

2007-05-21T14:17:00.002+03:00

The PhD.

2007-05-21T14:17:00.001+03:00

At times, it is hard to wake up every morning and believe in what you are doing. Today I’d much rather take the next bus and get out of here. Often I feel like my life has been suspended, and that my personal life has shrunk to a ridiculous dwarf size. The project takes over all aspects of my life, including dreams and walks. I stopped being wired, because, after six months of that, I was going crazy, and I just did not have the strength to go on being a rattling, jittery, nervy insomniac. I now realise how destabilising indifference can be. I have never been indifferent to what I do, but it seems to be a side effect of the exhaustion. It is also related to the intensity of emotions I need to face when working with people, both those that are breaking down crying during my interviews, and those that do not care about what arrangements we have made. I cannot help those who were not very lucky in their lives, and my questions precipitate tears. I feel inadequately trained to relate to them successfully, and some of the asymmetries will remain, and make me feel sick. The thought crosses my mind: all this adds up to is possibly just another degree for yours truly. I have never been bored with my studies, but it seems that I am saturated of them now. The thing is, I cannot find an excuse good enough to leave, even though my heart is not entirely (or should I say, at all) here at the moment. I chose this, I am the agent of this mess, so I better sit it out, and try to work against the exhaustion and the feeling that (it’s all a lot of oysters but no pearls) I am not in my pool here and slightly out of my depth. Hopefully it will change again, and I will find the pleasure back, and I will get rid of the anxieties that are deeply buried in my lungs and that burst into the open in the form of carbohydrate cravings. What if it will not? Eight months is a very long time to be spent with all the annoyances and frustrations of fieldwork. We get into things so easily and we change so much over the course of time, so that what once has occupied our whole mind changes so much that even the formerly most fundamental premises stop making sense. If I change so much in the course of six months, how likely is it that I will still be interested by anything academic in my thirties? I am frightened and bored by the idea of having an academic career, particularly by the stress, the mobility and the singularity (not to say loneliness?) it may entail.Here I am on the road a bit further away from a naďve starting point. Even one of my most powerful symbols of quest, that of the Warrior of the Light, has been appropriated by some artist in relation to Gigi B. I was deeply offended, but I suppose I needed to realise that my spiritual quest is superficial and driven by the consumption-desire of one particular best selling Brazilian’s oeuvre, among other highly eclectic modernist narratives of development, growth and improvement. Der Bildungsroman in all new shapes and sizes. It did hit a nerve at the time, but growing up disappoints, corrupts, deceives, and draws up new obsessions, replacing old obsessions, of equally dubious quality. Some desires remain the same, unfulfilled. Sincerely, still, and hopefully still learning, growing, yours, Candide-Nutshell, in a moment of Endeavour-Lost

In the well

2007-05-21T14:16:00.000+03:00

I devoured yet another Murakami. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle accompanied me on my journey back to the field. It contains the usual strange combination of a beautiful language that retains some of its exotic appeal even in translation, of a story full of magic and desire, of metaphors out of the ordinary. The boy goes down a well to think and is able to perceive the stars better from there. He later on goes through the walls of this well, deep down, and gets to a hotel room in an attempt to bring back his wife. The dream narrative is, at times, stronger and more appealing than the real one, and progressively both get entwined in twisted ways. It is a story of pain and torture, of being in one’s skin and being skinned and being within the mind, and of being inadequate and set into patterns of being-together, and of being restless and alone and of the tinkling of spoons on metal in clean, modern kitchens in the expectation of guests. It is a story about the powers that move people and cats. I was disappointed of but one thing: not enough love story here, as the wife is mainly absent and prostitutes of the mind are too eerie to be considered, meaningfully, partners. I am not sure, however, whether the Chronicle is the best way into Murakami-Land. For that, I recommend Sweetheart Sputnik or Norwegian Wood.

Inner life of a blog

2007-05-21T14:11:00.001+03:00

I never would have thought it would develop its own dynamics. As you have noticed, I have not mentioned a lot of Romania lately, bar to upload some photos. I’m still here though, working on my topic, interviewing people, trying to be as little awkward as possible. I’m doing a lot of thinking and writing about that to myself, and in view of the future, so I feel less of a need to speak about it here. While you may have gotten the idea that I am having a hell of a time, let me just say: not quite. It is very difficult to be here, and do the kind of work I attempt to do at the moment. But it is not all bad, and I am not unhappy, although I am complaining a lot and often get discouraged: some things are beautiful, some things make me happy, I try to be less tired, and more productive, and ready to learn more every day. People are hospitable, and sweet and friendly to me, and I enjoy the mountains. Two things I have not managed to accommodate myself with, and they are both related to politeness. I know, writing this, that this is something I need to overcome, and that it is related to very deep-seated ways of thinking about yourself and how one has come to act towards the world. First: I would like to say that it ain’t so, but I feel I really cannot rely on a majority of people. I know they have a lot of problems of their own, and are busy to make a living and a life, but why then do they promise things so lightly? And then break the promise and an ever so slight bit of my heart? I’ve come to expect very little when a promise is made to me, and yet it still affects me. Second: people in the village are not used to foreigners and do not give them much of a chance beyond superficialities. It makes me think about the times I possibly have made someone feel like I have given them no chance, and just put them into the ‘weird’ or ‘boring’ category and walked off without giving it a second thought. I sometimes have very little to say, given the language when no opening is made, and it is all highly internal talk. And my being in Britain for so long has made me too accommodating and for some reason makes me come across as insincere and indifferent in Romania. There is something about the rhetoric and how it works around here that I still haven’t understood or learnt.

Twisted Texts

2007-05-21T14:07:00.000+03:00

As those who have known me longer surely remember, I have been harbouring this utopia for years. To be able to write a text so that it exactly tells what you intend it to tell, and so it works like superimposed layers of stories, each authentic, meaningful, fragranced, paced, and beautiful in its own right, but all working together, like an orchestra-as-text. Like the real-time counter part of a musical score composed of text, and, once opened, flowing like a rain of flowers and voices and enveloping your whole being. I am saying score, because this conveys the superpositioning, and the commingling in a certain degree of harmony, but it does not adequately survey the connectedness inherent in each voice, the relations existing between characters. It would be like a painting evolving in time, but I think it would be very unlike a movie, because the focus could change a lot better, and it would work in more emotional ways, as only words, carefully whispered, can. In any case, all metaphors fall short to describe what it is that I dream of, thereby making the point all the same. My attempts at writing,… well… let us say that the same aspiration is sustained in the intention but never even hinted at in the creation. Academic writing is a bitch, more especially so at the beginnings of PhD writing (well what else can I say? I haven’t been anywhere at the end yet… ;-)). After reading around the topic way over the boundaries, you finally resort yourself to start writing the real thing, not just notes. Stop reading, start writing, my supervisor tends to say to me when I have explored a bit too much again. You sit down and after some time, you just write.You’ve written it, and after some time it collapses into fractals. Beyond the simplest word you used in your writerly-excited flow open up ambiguities, universes in Orion’s belt and monkey symphonies that remain unaccounted and ignored. This is the period during which you become separated from the text, to see it, truly objectified, as if someone else had written it (usually translated into: ‘did I write this shit? I don’t remember any of this…’). This is difficult, because you know it will not feel the same as in-the-process-of-writing and you will become overly conscious of your huge limitations as a writer and as a person. You see how ineffectively you have caught and described the situation, how muddled your thoughts are on certain notions, and how you thoughtlessly collapsed things that were not meant to be ever confounded. You think that you may be making a lot of very little, and at the same time you are so concerned about proper representation, that you really get down to the last dot on the last i. And spend some sleepless nights in the text’s presence, pondering it. Then, tearing the whole text down, and rigging it, shaking it, fixing it, thereby creating something entirely different. By this time you may alternate burning with emotional connectedness and experiencing the most complete indifference to the text and its origins within a realer-than-real social life. You are almost tempted not to leave it lying because it might just collapse again, but you know you need to let it rest at the same time. Let it sediment. You need to work to such a different standard having to take into consideration fieldwork. Nothing like writing essays here, about books that remain stable in what their sentences have sedimented into. Ingold does not like the word ‘complexity’, but in its current usage meaning, this is exactly what it is. All social situations are so damn unstraightforward. Less so if you are going for a drink for an hour (but then again…) and more so if you want to write about them in a non-tendentious, rigorous, academically and disciplinarily valid, and, at the same time, beautiful and suggestive way. It takes a lot of time to get there, a lot of discipline and a lot of intellectual and writing work. Overwhelmingly much so (sentences like that also make the point). My problem that I cannot nail it yet, it is too twisted, and too much is trying to be there and yet fails to cohere and run like a smooth narrative should do. So this particular piece I am working on at the moment spawns comments like: you need to focus more, you need to be less ambiguous, you need to make this and that explicit, and take a lot less for granted. And yet, I know that, in the week I have until my deadline, it will not sort itself out. It will remain a thick knot of rope and pink lace and some bits of hay attached to it. It is a colourful corner of an impressionistic painting done by a mad surrealist who wanted to put her whole life into one single canvas, but then got sidetracked by the cat’s hunger pangs. And then went for a walk in the rose garden, caught the train to Moscow and discovered the snowflakes in the Red Square. Woke up two hours later back in her own bed thirsty and still sleepy. Dreamily reached out for her lover who had gone to work, felt the empty sheets, turned the radio on, got up to put the washing up, and water the flowers.

something silly

2007-05-15T09:56:00.000+03:00

Monkeys on TV

2007-05-15T09:38:00.000+03:00

Home is where you speak your mind. In one weekly magazine in Lux, they used to have this naked cartoon couple (believe me, it was not in the least indecent! Just cute…) and it used to say Love is… on the top and something or other on the bottom. Hence the first sentence. I am not a person you can hope to get to know fast. I admire people who can just speak to strangers about what really matters to them. I feel awkward when I happen to be that stranger. When I live with someone for some time, I will open up eventually. Not guard and censor everything I say, and rather shut up than destroy the harmony, and just start to tell what is on my mind. It takes some time, as I say, though, and I think it coincides also with me not bothering to get up earlier than the other person all the time. My host and me get along well most of the time. She is a wonderful woman, actually. We both hate monkeys on TV, and we will squeal and zap until they go away. We both pretend to get mad at the dog when she steals food, but actually we are just proud of her intelligence. We like to wonder at all kinds of every day things, ask a lot of speculative questions, and like to give even more speculative answers. She has a wicked sense of humour, self-deprecating, ironic and sharp. We both like good food, but we have a radically different conception of what that means for each of us. She likes really meaty and fatty things. When I make pasta she considers it hospital food. Chicken to me is just about acceptable as meat for me, but she thinks it is tasteless. She actually said this, and I almost felt offended, until she said ‘no it’s not about the cooking, it’s the meat itself’. Ah, that’s a relief! She made me think about a lot of materials around the house, and she is always interested in ‘how it works’. She can deal with all things around the house, including electricity, and I am very impressed by that. No, she can not just fix a light bulb, she replaces fuses, fixes cables, installs thermostats, repairs electric radiators, knows about AC and DC current and so forth in practice. I can just draw some diagrams, and if there is anything in the world I am afraid of, it is electricity. She managed to get me interested in plants. Before I came to live here, I was always someone who would love animals, hate plants [vegetarian too (though only outside of Romania), yes I remember the joke!]. Now I am tempted to buy some land, and make a garden with roses, spring onions, garlic, Sauerrampel, strawberries and tomatoes. Maybe I am just getting old! She is very diplomatic, and you notice that she disagrees only if you pay a lot of attention to an ever so slight change in her voice, or to a silence that you did not expect. But if you ask her opinion, she will tell you. She does not get angry for no reason, because she considers it a waste of energy. Probably lives a lot better that way. But as Ms Hausemer used to say, c’est une question de tempérament! One day when I was feeling down, she drove me to the place I needed to meet someone. On the way there, I gave some directions. We were supposed to turn right, up the hill. She stopped, looked left, and I noticed she thought something for herself, I said, turn right here, and she started turning left. I said, no, no, the other right. We laughed for at least half an hour about this. She had got it in her mind that it might be easier downhill. We both watch the horoscope and tell the other one about it if they missed it. She likes language and explains all the meanings of words to me carefully and slowly, and finds me kind of funny if I wonder about some weird word that reminds me of another one, entirely unrelated. Today the headline of the paper read: “sobolanul rozaliu” sare la “betivul transpirat”. She said, oh did you know guzgan means the same as sobolan. A sari means to jump, to skip, or, here, to attack. Betivul you know, it comes from a bea, to drink. Rozaliu is pink, of course. So: the pink rat attacks the sweaty drunkard. They are talking about Viorel Hrebenciuc, man with fingers in all kinds of (money) cakes, and Traian Basescu, president with suspension. Over and out. Your faithful insomniac, nutshell-the-cat

The Anthropologist-Hero

2007-05-09T15:43:00.000+03:00

Did I tell you about how I encountered a bear and bit its ear off? I was walking along in the mountains toward the next sheepfold, where I was supposed to meet up with yet another person useful for my research, and, who, in the meantime had become a friend of mine (great when that happens). I was minding my own business, swinging my walking stick, thinking about the village gossip and whistling some tune that had stuck in my mind. As I lost altitude (like a plane – I did not say jumbo jet there, so be careful what you have just read into this!), I came into an overgrown area of hedges, and bushes, flowering away nastily as they do in the spring, to the great distress of allergic persons (not me though). When I walked around a bend in the narrow path, right in front of me, I discovered the backside of a bear. Sadly, the front was attached to it. He or she, I am not a biologist, remember, was apparently scanning the ground in front of it (the gender compromise) probably in search of truffles or something along those lines. I tried to step past as quietly as possible. I seriously had no interest in disturbing the animal. Of course, I stepped on a dry wood branch as you do (in cartoons, for instance), and the bear’s attention got attracted from truffle to trophy. I said hello, smilingly, because not only did I happen to be an anthropologist-hero, I am also of the polite kind (this would be the moment in the cartoon when the hero has gone off the cliff but has not begun its fall yet – in Disney films often supplemented by the character waving to the audience with a kind of stupid expression on its face – I am defying gravityyyyyyyy). The bear didn’t happen to be of the polite kind, and did not answer. It stood and waited, perfectly aware of its superior strength in near combat and stamina in pursuit, whether on land or on water (for the bear was also a surfbear, you know the kind). It was just curious to see how fear would creep into me suddenly, as my face turned from red to green to white-as-a-sheet in entertaining ways (given the lack of cable TV in bear communities). However, I refused to be scared (until now). I took off my anthropologist-hero-backpack (made by Camel, I am ashamed to admit) and was looking for my sword to cut its head off (still not scared). Of course, it had been forgotten somewhere. The backpack merely contained a microphone, a voice recorder, a notebook full of illegible, incoherent, but highly entertaining (for any other occasion than bear-encounters) scribble, some batteries (I wish I were McGyver, I could probably blow up the teddy), some mineral water bottle and… and… some home-made cakes. Let the negotiations begin. I give you these cakes and you get out of my fieldwork site, and we call it even (no I didn’t blow myself up like some kind of toad, I just put on my authoritative face and tone of voice – those who know me will picture it immediately). Cakes? You have to be kidding. Do you know how long the winter of my food discontent was and that I cannot stand the look of anything vegetarian, let alone berries in the widest possible sense (that is one hell of a rhetorical question my dbear). I’d rather have one of your ears, as an entrée, with truffles, and then your liver as a main menu. Sorry to disappoint you, but my liver doesn’t grow back, and is awfully loaded with the remains of the local rachiul. The drawbacks of fieldwork in rachiu-land. What about your legs? You won’t need those as a desk-bound academic. Ever heard of orange peel? Yeah! Life as a woman-anthropologist-hero is even harder. I am sure they taste awful. Arms? Come on! I seriously need my arms if I want to be a self-respecting writer… This charade went on for a while, and in this time cunning-as-a-nutshell was multitasking and looking out for the nearest shelter, or any kind of separation wall between me and mitts the size of tennis rackets and a will hellbent on the original sense of food (bloody traditionalists and revivalists!). But, let’s take it slowly, let’s not get too intimate too quickly, your Beariness: good to meet you, it needs to be celebrated somehow, before we proceed, and decide which bit of me is kosher for you… how to win time in a duel that is unfair from the start and which you didn’t really instigate! Toast to the health of your respective king or sultan or wife or whatever comes to a mind rushing with adrenaline. Due to lack of champagne I offered the contents of my mineral water bottle. When in Romania, never expect bottles to contain what they say they do on the label. Contained within was the strongest available rachiul of the blackest black market of Carpathia. The bear took a sip and started coughing, eyes red and tearful. I took the moment of confusion and phlegm to bite the busy bear’s ear (just for fun) and consequently make a run for the sheepfold my little eye had spied in the meantime. Definitely rekordverdächtig: at no time before has an anthropologist-hero jumped over fences so quickly and so unelegantly. When the bear got over the bittersweetness of high-percentage alcohol, it noticed the absence of its almost-for-sure-you-are-mine protein source, and accepted the cakes that I had left behind with a certain amount of thankfulness as frustration sweets. So if you see a bear with half a missing ear, it was the work of one desperate-and-cornered, though customarily vegetarian, anthropologist-hero.
Subtitle of this story: Baronesse von Münchhausen aka Nutshell-Kit gets a long long nose from telling absolute bearfiction-bonkers. Or: Schreiben Sie einen Aufsatz über eine gefährliche Begegnung und wie Sie aus dem Schlamassel wieder heraus kamen.

manicure

2007-05-09T15:39:00.000+03:00

If you have some spare time, take the metro in Bucharest and watch the women. Perfectly groomed: hair done up, impeccable makeup, the longest possible eyelashes, high definition lipstick, high heels. Aware of the fact that they are stunningly beautiful, but not making a fuss about it. I will not even mention the kinds of sizes they wear, suffice it to tell that I had a hard time finding a winter jacket in the autumn that fitted me. Sure enough, I chose a Men’s Size S to have the adventure end sooner rather than later. As I said to my American friend: I feel like part of my femininity is lost here, gender limbo is upon me, and I am half boy, half girl. Not that this bothers me more than usual… My host took me to a beauty salon today, and I had a French manicure. It took about half an hour, the person who did it was very kind with the foreigner. I was very curious about the process, and it did not hurt at all. I wonder if she noticed that I had never done a manicure. After it was done, and had dried, I looked at my hands. It felt like they belonged to someone else. They were true alien bodies. When I put on my jacket, I damaged the first nail, because it was not 100% dried. It will never last on me. Hence the picture of a perfect illusion. But is it not beautiful…

happiness is a mat that sits on your doorway

2007-04-30T11:02:00.000+03:00

you'll have recognised the line by the counting crows.
aberdeen was full of movement. a lifetime crammed into a week resembling a poem by william carlos williams (no it is not pathethic to write that!). only after opening the fridge in bucharest and seeing the very same milk tetra packs that remained from when i left did i realise that i have only been gone a brief while. friends found back, scottish and salsa dancing, indian food, discussions, a flying spaghetti monster with mobile eyes, walks and seagulls. beats with my brother, coffee with mum. it was a magical time, with people materialising when i thought of them, and with sensitivity heightened to the extent that i could feel people better again. after some time i didn't need to explain about the last six months anymore. we had arrived in the same world again. flying north when flowers are starting to fade also means you get to see more blossoming. i found back the pleasure of reading and learnt about the enclave of gorazde, and the wind-up bird chronicle (still recommenging murakami for anyone who needs a journey of dreams and stories resembling a silk garment). real sadness came over me when the plane came down over english patterned fields, windsor castle and a lake with little dinghies. leaving to less comfortable places in the hope of learning. i miss you already.

Ukommen a Schottland

2007-04-26T10:52:00.000+02:00

Di Saach mat de Fliijeren ass jo sou, dass dat alles ze seier geet. Et kennt een dann och un ouni Probleem, an ech war sou frou fir zreck dass ech schon Deeg firdrun nit mi schlofe konnt, an ech war matt mengem ganzen Etre ‘poised’ wi dat joi su schein heescht op Englesch fir rem heihinner. Ech war benzich, well hei ass di Plaatz di mech an de leschte puer Joer vill geformt huet, an wou ech frou war. Fir d’eischt war ech einfach nemmen iwwerrascht an iwwerwaelticht vun all den Autoen hei, vun de Stroossen, dem groen Himmel, dem Granit. Nee wi propper ass et. Nee wat hun di all ee komeschen Accent wann se Englesch schwetzen. An si sin sou frendlich. Mee ech war gefaang an enger Art Nervositeit gekoppelt matt extremer Middichkeet, an ech war liicht desorienteiert vun dem Gejaitzs vun de Meiwen moies frei. 6 Auer moies, ech sin hellwaakrich, an ech konnt neischt iessen vun lauter Elektrisiteit. Firwat get et hell matzen an der Nuecht? Firwat reent et vun alle Seiten? Firwat hun ech emmer di falsch Kleeder un? Ei, d’Sonn hei pickt mech nit. Ech war dann och opgereecht fir jiddfereen hei ze gesin an normal Saachen ze maan, wi an de Kino ze goen an vleicht bei den Inder. Ech hun dat remfonnt wat ech vermesst hun, an d’Freijoer hei ass genial. D’Faarwen an d’Klorheet vun der Atmosphere am Norden hu mech wierklich bereiert.
No e puer Deeg Gefill wi Insomnia matt pickichen Aan an Nerven aus Chinapabeier sin ech dann elo ganz ukomm… an muss an 60 Stonnen rem meng Valisse paken.

Forthcoming...

2007-04-20T07:31:00.000+02:00

Here, the news about the forthcoming World Development Report that - almost surprisingly - acknowledges the damages made to agriculture and other sectors by deregulation policies and laissez-faire to the point of abandonment. You may have heard it all before, but it needs to be remembered and made present more often. Still a third of humanity lives in absolute poverty, still the gap between rich and poor rises, with rural areas in the "third world" at the bottom of the bottom rungs. Quote from Le Monde: "Bien que l'agriculture ne soit pas le seul instrument capable de les sortir de la pauvreté, c'est une source hautement efficace de croissance pour y parvenir." An important sentence after all these years during which agriculture has been devalued, underpaid and the consequences remained little considered.
I wonder what impact the following strategy will have on the world and how exactly the World Bank will re-orient its policies for what Le Monde says may be 20 years...
"L'accélération du changement climatique, l'imminence d'une crise de l'eau, la lente adoption des nouvelles biotechnologies, et le bourgeonnement de la demande de biocarburants et d'aliments pour le bétail créent de nouvelles incertitudes sur les conditions dans lesquelles la nourriture sera disponibles dans l'économie mondiale".

Mitschmatsch

2007-04-19T15:28:00.000+02:00

I'm in Bucharest and I have the luxury of internet access. Attentive followers of this blog may have realised that it is not updated in real time. I write stuff in my offline-village in the Carpathians and post it in bulk whenever I get the chance to be wired.
So among the trivialities that captured my attention were:
The president of Romania has been suspended and will take his hat. There was a big pro-Basescu demonstration on University Square. The question that crossed my mind was: what is this going to change? Democracy works in great ways here (and elsewhere). This did not make the news much in the Anglophone world, and in France, I guess, it got blanked out by election craze. To me it appears like just another scene in a political play with lots of acts and revirements and bilete and interestedness and messiness. All for the good of the people of course.
I found the architectural imgatination displayed by the 3D graphist artists here exceptionally beautiful. If I could go through a career training again, it would be IT and graphic design programming. No kidding.
The self-proclaimed salvator of Romania, Gigi Becali, has a TV station now, airing 'religious ceremonies and Steaua trainings'. This is exactly what the world needed. From Cotidianul more.
Today's Wortchen features the linguistically elegant title of ' Vier Tage lang den Geist der Bücher aufsaugen'. Is this how you motivate people to read or attend festivals? I am unsure about the strategy...
Aberdeen has a summer archaeology school and I wish I was not on fieldwork...
Still up for primitive humour:

So go and give them love, you're spending too much time with the computer anyway!

nutshell pulling faces on fieldwork...

2007-04-18T13:45:00.002+02:00

In random order:
a. attentive and quite interested in whoever is sitting across from me and/or what they are telling me

b. letting it all out: how can one single valley annoy me so much?

c. content and slightly amused by the thought of one old villager I met on the road and who told me a joke on his way to the fountain

d. upon discovering that an interview has been postponed or cancelled by the work of “higher forces”

e. smiling aggressively in a (more or less failed) attempt to be funny

f. mischievous and imagining all the things I feel like doing instead of walking around in a valley asking silly questions

g. worried to the point of exhaustion and/or having just heard an awful piece of news

h. a bit annoyed sitting across from some guy who is being racist, sexist or otherwise inappropriate, and not wanting to be shouting at him, because I should be professional… and I just grind my teeth, fiddle with my pen, say da-da, hm-mh, and my belly is full of anger

i. dreamily thinking of all the good, soothing, exciting, strange and beautiful things that have happened in my life: happy memories

j. enjoying the sun tickling my nose and being completely absorbed in mostly happy thoughts

k. trying to crack the latest anthropological or personal problem but actually getting side-tracked by trivialities, which already makes for more lightheartedness

l. appearing to be very sad, absolutely worthy of attention, and offering that look that hopefully will melt hearts, minds and, if need be, steel (Letzebuergesch: eng Schëpp = literally, a shovel, viz shape of the subject’s mouth)

m. something in my world has definitely caught my attention (speak to C.S. Peirce about this)

n. mocking and taking on a slightly superior stance and showing that what is inside is what counts

Movements

2007-04-18T13:45:00.001+02:00

Why is it that, now that I am leaving for a bit, I notice all these things I have not done, and yet, at the same time, my mind is already bouncing off Edward Wright building and walking up College Bounds. My vision of the present becomes more acute, I am perceiving people and things intensely emotionally, as if for the first time. Threat of absence makes impressions stronger. Yet I am already preparing my luggage in my mind, when I should be focusing on what is at stake here. When I am in one village, I think about all the people who might be home in the other one, and when I walk to the other one, I remember what I forgot to do at home. The issue is closely connected to my needing to remain flexible, because people resist being nailed down to an hour and a place, and so I need to learn differently, and ‘be like a running brook’ (K. Gibran) that seizes opportunities and passages, and forgets about those that cannot be. Insistence is vain because it does not work that way, time has a different quality, and there are a lot of routes through the mountains. Yet, it is hard not to lose one’s bearings at times, with all the noise, the randomness, the stories, another kind of importance stressed, the deferring of time and the insistence on things that I had neglected. Why all this tugging of my being to be with my family, who are in one place, with my friends, mainly in a second place, when I am in a third one. Why all this being longing. Why all this being fragmented. Why all this time spent thinking about the other, having the feeling that time rushes with all this occupation, and, also, waiting for movements coming together.
16.04.07

Into My Arms

2007-04-18T13:31:00.000+02:00

Sometime in the Easter Week, moved by all the hope, I decided to be happier, less anxious. Yet another scheme of growing up and shaping of how I am. So here I am, on fieldwork, another week has rushed by, I have Nick Cave in my ears, a blanket to hide under, and I am not thinking the creepily usual self-commiserating whining. Truly. I could be complaining about a lot of things, but something tells me it will not make it easier. I have this tendency sometimes to think the worst, and wake up thinking I have not a lot to live for, but, in fact, this is a matter of perspective. Not having a tight schedule which gives me the luxury to wake up slowly and ponder, generates a lot of space for thought and, indeed, creativity. I try to see it this way, though, I admit, it is not always easy to be your own master. Today, the yellow dog that I met as a puppy (and fell in love with) in November and who was my neighbour then, but who has since moved to another family, accompanied me to my field visits all day. I was amused by his opportunism, and flattered that he did not follow the first person who we encountered on the road to the next village. First, I told him to go home, then I told him not to be afraid of the other dogs, and then I told him not to walk in the muddy ditch (also serving as canalisation). I was so happy he was there. It was a bright day, and I did not care that he caused the whole dog population of the ulita mare to make a hell of a noise, announcing this traveller. I knew I would not find too many people at home, because they were all busy planting potatoes and labouring in their gardens on the hills, but I did not take it personally (for once). I sat for ages with the woman that has blue eyes and runs one of the little shops and listened to her explain about giant frogs, vinera izvorilor, local versus national politics and oameni vazuti. I walked back and recognised some people in cars coming my way and saying hello, waving, flashing lights. People’s Hristos a inviat, and I love the moment when you can decide whether you want to get involved in a conversation. My mother made me laugh on the phone. I shouted at an obviously hard of hearing old man who had his back turned to me and talked to some sheep across the fence. He eventually turned around, noticed me, came closer across his garden, and said, what are you saying, love? I am a bit deaf… How can you not smile at that? Of course I did not just shout at him for fun, I actually wanted to know whose sheep they were.

Spring, Easter and Tuica

2007-04-11T08:50:00.004+02:00

Lighting a Candle, Kissing An Icon, Singing His Praise.

2007-04-11T08:50:00.003+02:00

I never really understood religious practice until recently. It may seem pretty ludicrous considering anthropology deals a lot with religion, but it is true. It does not mean I never learnt about religions in the widest possible sense of the word. It does not mean I never tried to understand. It does not mean I never wanted to be part of a religious ‘community’. I wanted to be Catholic at times. I was, furthermore, like a lot of teenagers, fascinated by Eastern spirituality, meditation discipline and the ability to shape and lead one’s person through all kinds of ritual and everyday practices and habits. I felt strongly about the topic from quite early on, and I loved Schwëster Céline’s example of religious teaching in first and second grade, as well as another Katechet’s in fourth grade. It was about stories conferring what it means to be a good person, some historical teaching about the origins of Christendom (probably highly biased), and a lot of singing. I was fond of various aspects of mass, especially the phrase Herr, ich bin nicht würdig dass Du eingehst unter mein Dach, aber sprich nur ein Wort, so wird meine Seele gesund. I do not think I understood a lot, but I also liked the Credo, and, of course, the Hostie that used to stick to the top of my mouth.This is the origin story of my subsequent aversion to Catholicism. In 1991, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, one priest (Dächen) who had never even heard the word pedagogics but who was teaching us two hours a week, had us pray that the Third World War would not begin with this event. I went home in a panic. I was scared of his inappropriate stories of dying people he visited to give the last rites. He told us elatedly that his very dear friend had just been made bishop (about a year later, this bishop was responsible for our confirmation and said to me that I was wearing a nice dress, which had me puzzled – it has remained the only words I have exchanged so far with a bishop). We were eleven-year-olds under the madness lessons of a jumping, screaming priest who made the floorboards shake, and who dictated about the sacraments the rest of the time. The memories are brought back to me even today most vividly as I walk my dogs on a hill neighbouring the village when the wind carries the melody of those church bells to me. I was scared, and attempted to conform as well as I could. I strongly disliked the regime of punishment that happened in primary school when we missed out on certain masses. Some children got ‘gifts’ for attending, while the others… well, got scolded. I found unacceptable and stressful to the point of vomiting (but that is another story that will be spared to those I have not yet shared it with…) that a different teacher could pray with us every day and yet treat us blatantly and randomly differential by throwing large bundles of keys at our faces, and screaming at us. I was protective of my brother and did not like him being terrorised by the urging of various teachers and priests to follow a strict regime of Sunday mass, otherwise Hell would be unavoidable. Whatever happened to the merciful new God, a definite improvement on the avenging God of the Old Testament? How strictly the dogma is to be applied also depends on the willingness of people to accept it, but children, I think, should be protected from this kind of power games, and demonstrations of oh so little minds. Stëchwierder: divorce, deadly sins, the holy trinity, going to mass X times a week versus nasty gossip, judgementality, hypocrisy, conflict-eagerness, narrow horizons and boredom not channelled into positive creativeness. Following my father’s words, and developing an inclination to seek truth in philosophy, literature and history books as an arrogant, self-absorbed teenager, I decided that the church as an institution had to be condemned for all its wrongdoings and partiality throughout time. This would help to get things right in the future, which I imagined, of course, as secular as possible. I would argue this with teachers of religion. I would show complete disrespect to them, which makes me feel ashamed even now. I would argue this, defending laďcité, the Enlightenment, and all the rest of secular Western values. I failed to consider to a large extent, with all my concern on the failings of people working for churches, what religion means for people on a daily basis. I never came to agree with the rationale(s) behind Catholic celibacy, Catholicism’s obvious privileging of men, and its stance on birth control, the infallibility of the pope, nor can I empathise with certain kinds of US Protestantism or the complicated reasons behind religious extremism, when religion is uncannily closely allied with politics, hatred and identity. I will still today argue for the validity of secularism, but with some necessary qualifications. As I grew older, I became less radical – a real softie! A few things happened: first, I came to think about morality a lot. Second, I went through the process of coming to hold very dear some people who were believers of various kinds. I admired, respected, and, possibly failed to emulate their moral stamina and way of embracing the world. Third, the question of how you can reconcile your own views, perspectives and fundamental beliefs with others, who are seeing this world in very different terms, became more and more pressing as I learnt more about anthropology. Tanya Luhrmann has worked on a related question. In order to get into someone’s skin, it is not enough to learn the discourses. To summarise her work in North America very superficially, she is looking into the topic of how people become religious, and why certain people are more likely to have religious experiences (e.g. speaking in tongues, apparitions, etc.) than others. Why I was saying that I never understood religious practice until recently is because I never had an approach that was any other than led almost purely by my mind, by what I considered rational. I had no way of experiencing religion in emotional terms, except, possibly, through singing and playing instruments. I had no need to communicate through God with those I was worried about, because I was working in ways that were very self-centred and individualist. I may have had difficult moments, but I was always able to get help from other people: I was never on my own, yet I thought I could resolve anything with my head. I despised a lot about the village I grew up in because of its confessed religiosity and its multiple expressions of the contrary. It is a particularly apt example of a modernist vision of the world. I think it is the realisation that not everything is up to your own person that makes people like me, who have not been habituated as much with the religious disciplines of the person from early childhood, slowly comprehend with all your senses, all your ways of perceiving and understanding that churches can be places of comfort. Churches are buildings of peace, of recollection, of memory, of contemplation, of communication, of clarity. While I definitely had been in awe of churches as buildings before (Notre Dame de Paris, Chartres, Reims, Sevilla, Cordoba, Avila, Salamanca, Florence, Aachen, Sainte Gudule, Glasgow Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s, Iona Cathedral, St Machar’s, Sagrada Familia, Cathédrale de Luxembourg, Sfantul Iosif Bucharest, to name but a few), and while I had sought them out for reasons that were unclear to me, I did not consider the links between architecture, aesthetics and emotions. Here, as in other architectural examples, orientation in space and time, and ordering of space comes close to an ordering of the cosmos, an ordering of the self in time. What it means to a person to light a candle for a dear person who has passed away, is to establish and make present the memory of all time spent together. It is to create, or highlight an emotional connection that has never been severed. It is to find hope and relief in a moment of silence and to take courage again to face everything else. What else is communion?I’ve always been a bit slow to understand certain things, especially those defying the kind of logic I am tending towards (or should I say ‘find easier to deal with’?). But I get there eventually…[After I had a long conversation with one of the priests here, I find that my idea of Christian religion is not in line with the hierarchical thinking of the more traditional elements of supposedly not just the Orthodox church. I have a problem with being told what to do, and so I am not sure if I will ever feel the need to go beyond that and submit to these kinds of demands of acceptance]03.04.07

‘It’s always been like this’

2007-04-11T08:50:00.001+02:00

I will try to express to you how much I dislike this kind of explanation. Variants of it may be the following: ‘humankind is like this’, ‘the mentality here has always been like this’, ‘people are x,y or z’. I realise that it is often understood that I need to describe and analyse what is going on and what people are saying to me and not take sides. Write it all down, as it was put to you. I confess that sometimes I am an anthropologist who doesn’t shut up. My usually very calm, bordering-on-indifferent attitude to certain people making arguments with which I couldn’t disagree more gets disrupted at times. I lose my temper with some people, and I forget about politeness, and cannot just say to myself, let it go, you need not pay attention to this silliness. I have been trained to be sensitive to the world, due to my job, and the boundaries are permeable. I am involved in this world.I especially dislike when authoritarian males are trying to teach me about this, that or the other do not give me any credit, or think it needs convincing that they are the man for me, … just because they have made up their mind that I am a combination of a.young, b.female, c.foreign, d.blonde. I need to speak up against the cynical views so prevalent here that people have always been thieves, opportunists, and that politicians have always been out to get their own share by means of the office they occupy. I need to disagree with the idea that there have always been differences between people and that this is a good thing in the face of (and entirely ignoring) widening and deepening relative and absolute inequalities in a global economy that continues to be labelled ‘capitalism’. I need to hack at aristocratic pretensions and the ideas that some people are necessarily, by birth, masters or servants. I need to believe that the world is getting readier for meritocracy. I need to disagree with local bureaucrats who tell me bullshit about laws, public office and maps. I need to show a reaction to lies, excuses and lack of good will. I need to scream in the face of biological determinism and ‘it’s in our genes to be like this, that or the other’. I need to speak up against views that assert that men are more violent than women and have always needed, in situations like wars, to rape women. I need to shut out drunkards who interrupt me in my conversations with other people and who patronise me like I know nothing about the world and the language I have been living in for the last six months. I need to speak my mind about the casualness with which is mentioned the following: ‘I do not beat women’. I want a world in which this is impossible to even think. I need to encourage women who ask me whether I am not frightened to be alone, and to walk and live among strangers. I need to at least assert what I think (sometimes), even if I have no power to change any/much of it. Mentalities and people can change very quickly, and I refuse to believe that the people are all bad. I have a lot of faith, though I may lose courage and temper sometimes. This is why I fight.09.04.07

FLOUR, noun

2007-04-11T08:43:00.000+02:00

A powder obtained by grinding grain, typically wheat, and used to make bread, cakes, and pastry
ORIGIN Middle English: a specific use of flower in the sense ‘the best part’, used originally to mean ‘the finest quality of ground wheat’. The spelling flower remained in use alongside flour until the early 19th century.
Willst du einen Kucken backen musst du haben sieben Sachen…. Butter und Schmalz, Zucker und Salz, Eier und Mehl, Safran macht den Kuchen geeeehl. Remember? My Tata Nin used to make me recite that. Along with Eia Popeia, and Bim Bam Biren… remember those, fellow Luxembourgers? Much too gruesome to be in my innocent little blog…
For those who did not know, I love making and sharing cakes…
CAKE MAKING. The messiness is great. First thing: I turn on the oven. I like assembling all ingredients, gathering them on the kitchen workbench. If you do not care to get first class ingredients, do not even bother to start. Here, the chickens are very kind (and happily walking around in the courtyard, with a caring rooster that gets upset if they make it over the fence, but not back again – they are good chickens but they are not very clever). They provide really healthy eggs without stress hormones, antibiotics, and the results of 24-hour artificial lighting. Those egg yolks are as yellow as it gets. The vagueness of recipes that do not really exist but in your head is something fitting with my philosophy of cooking. I had an argument with my high school chemistry teacher, who insisted cooking was a science. I still disagree, although I think I could take his point now without getting in a fight, quietly. You pour the wet things, the dry things and it mainly takes the will to improvise and use your powers of quick decision. The decision of mixing either with a fork or with a machine depends on what you want to prepare. As in most things I do, I do them impulsively-fast and without any show of patience and delicacy (though the intention might be present…). I may not know what I am doing but it is a lot of fun. I usually need a security radius of three metres, because I spill, the sugar leaks, and the flour scatters (here I wanted to write ‘poofs’, because this is what it does, but I was afraid of being misunderstood. Where are verbs like stëppsen when you need them in the rich English language?) in all directions, and I accidentally turn the mixer on maximum, spraying the cupboards with a snowy sweet substance. Then, after staining my front with flour, egg white and doughy stuff, I can finally get my hands dirty. I knead the dough and decide whether it is still too wet, taste briefly what it may need in addition, grease the pan quickly, and then put the mass of cholesterol-laden deliciousness into the shape, proceeding depending on the kind of cake you are making: layers, bottom, all-mixed-together kind. Let it get some heat (not too much at once, it will burn on the outside and be somewhat liquidy on the inside – not a pretty ending for a cake), and set your alarm clock. Go away and do not peer into the oven every three minutes. Cakes need their privacy. After your alarm has rung, you can go poke the golden sunrise with a knife. When ready, do not serve immediately, you fool. You will get sick, all your teeth will fall out, and you will miss out on the full enjoyment.
A WORD OF WARNING. When I was seventeen and on exchange in Australia, I wanted to impress everyone by making a cake. I found all kinds of ingredients in large, unlabelled glass jars. I mixed, worked, stirred, and tasted the ready dough. Damn. Salty as hell. How come? After a few more failed attempts, my hostmum came home from work, found a very messy kitchen and a desperate, stubborn teenager, and asked what on earth I was trying to do. I weakly offered to make something for the dogs out of the dough (stupid idea). Then she introduced me to one of the secrets of her household (or maybe of Australia – I cannot be so sure at the moment). Here sugar was brown, not white. Everything that was white was, in fact, salt. Yeah! A cake with 100 pinches of salt… yummy! So be sure what you are using is safe… or you will end up like that baker Mulles Mieltuut who was baking Mourekäpp on one of the Fausti tapes. He became paranoid they might contain washingpowder (Sääfepollefer), and tasted them one by one, until he became a huge Mourekapp himself… not a happy ending!
CAKE SHARING. It is an essential part of my research methodology. People give me all kinds of things: interviews, tuica, cheese, apples, time, laughs, coffee. I give them cakes in return. It is the least I can do. Cakes may also be given away as entirely free gifts, of course, and not only on birthdays. I miss my anthropology and history office and campus mates to give cakes to (of course only expecting kindness in return…).
OTHER REASONS FOR MAKING CAKES. It is a fun creative effort and takes less than an afternoon. Great for procrastinating, because it keeps your mind occupied and you will not have feelings of guilt in the process. Quick results, too, much unlike PhDs…
FINAL REMARKS. Of course I am resistant to bribes, but propositions welcome. Maybe I will be seduced, who knows, after all I live in a country where bribing is part of the deal (of course, only until they joined the EU… wait a moment… never mind). Should you ever wish to make a cake for me, be aware that chocolate cake is not really my favourite. In fact, I have had my decade of chocolate already. I am in the decade of cheese, just in case you were wondering. Here, given all the apples in the basement, I also deal with fruits. After that I will be ready to move on to something else. Life is full of surprises.
06.04.07

The Little Sunbeam

2007-03-29T13:32:00.003+02:00

I had asked to interview his parents about their ‘traditional produce’ initiative. They led me into a chilly ‘best room’ and said, there is a problem with the other room, because their little son had a problem with his legs and this is why a teacher came everyday to give him lessons at home. He would have to have this plaster on both legs for about one and a half years, because there was a major problem with his bones. At the level of both his feet, the plaster was attached to a kind of wooden stick of about 70 cm. False diagnoses had caused that this had not been remedied when he was a toddler. I asked what he was doing with his time. They told me: watching TV, reading a bit, playing with his brother and with friends that come to visit. So later on it got too cold in the first room, and the teacher had finished for the day, so I got to meet this child. He was an energy bundle, very loveable, and apparently very happy. He asked to see the world map to determine where Britain was, and Luxie and thought it was very far away. He asked how I had come, with the plane or with the boat. His next question was whether I had read the paper in the plane. He was a bit disappointed to hear that I usually sleep in planes (yes, some kind of narcolepsy confined to pressure cabins, and, more generally, but less reliably so, public transport of various kinds). He wanted to know how many engines the plane had and whether I had paid for the petrol. He asked me what I was doing here anyway, and I attempted to explain. And then he made my heart melt, saying: ‘How do you say Alexandru in Luxembourgish?’

The Ending of Regimes

2007-03-29T13:32:00.001+02:00

I finally dared asking the question about the ending of regimes. When did it first occur to you that communism might not be forever? To me, it is a hard question. It was answered to me in the following way by someone I appreciate a lot:
‘Summer of 1989. My father was saying that Ceausescu’s regime was not going to last past the year. I didn’t know. I realised that things were happening in Berlin. Then we had a meeting of the UTC (Union of Young Communists) at work. It was a regular thing, an ideology meeting, a kind of advanced course. One guy was speaking and I was sleeping with my eyes open. I must have been one of the older people there, I was around thirty. Something he said woke me up, and I reacted to it. He said that only with Communism, History had come, before Communism there had been no History. I said f*%& that, what on earth do you mean? I was astonished that no one else reacted, but they were either not listening, like me, or they were a lot younger. What happened then was even stranger. He made his excuses and left in the middle of the course. I was expecting to get into trouble by the security, but I did not. I started to believe my father was right.’
1989 was a long time ago. I was nine years old. I remember the Berlin pictures on TV, the classrooms I was in that year, and I remember my communion. It was so stressful the day ended with a headache (possibly brought on by the impossibly tight weave the hairdresser had created on the top of my head), the ice-cream lamb was crying, and it was cold and beautifully bright outside. Last weekend someone (male, around 35, married, one child, wealthy) was visiting who wore a communist emblem T-Shirt under his white jumper. You know the kind, red background, white hammer and sickle. Strange choice despite the period that has passed…

And think not...

2007-03-29T13:31:00.001+02:00

...that you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
(Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet)

How does this statement correlate, firstly, with a certain existing, dominant understanding of self-made, individual-driven realisations of the modern, separate, rational self, and, secondly, with ideas of self as carried by forces, impinged upon by all kinds of wonders and disasters? Two disclaimers/premises. A. Allow me to caricature. B. Presuming one has a certain amount of choice to start with, dependent from location, economic and social status, sex, age, etc.
The question: is it more desirable, easy, comfortable, ‘good’, morally convincing to see one’s self as a closed container with thoughts, emotions and a past, striding on a path he (I am choosing this pronoun here as the archetype of male modernity, if I may…) has chosen, rationally, with premeditation, with amassed former knowledge?
Ensuing questions which still mesmerise me: What makes this so? Who decides this? In whose interest is it? What are the problems with this conception?
How does he include other people in his choices? How does he include irrationality in his choices? How can he deal with unconscious desire, fear and complex proclivities? How does he get involved with people if he does not let them into his being? If we take this further, how does he subsist if he does not get involved, a social being raised by others, educated by others, influenced by others, helped by others all the way to the present and into the future?
Note that I am very unknowledgeable about psychoanalysis (see below the result of a test I took a while ago with ZEIT online), but willing to be educated about it…

24.03.07

Poverty and Precariousness

2007-03-29T13:30:00.000+02:00

Someone pointed out to me that poor people on the countryside fare better than people in the city. The comment precipitated a lot of thought on the matter, because part of me at first rejected it entirely (always fascinating to see how we react to certain engrained assumptions qualified). Then I conceded that I had been wrong about certain things in this regard.
Not only two or three people here get twenty-five (25) euro pension per month. Some households are constituted of three generations, sharing one salary, and one of the said pensions. I have been wondering about the difference between the poverty here, and the poverty in Western Europe. It may be not just a question of difference in degree, but also a question of difference in kind. I take into account that a difference exists between the kind of poverty found in cities and the one found (here) on the countryside. People here get credit at the local food shop to buy bread (one bread costs 0.7 RON = 0.2 EURO – the shopkeeper explained to me that they had to have a sign saying ‘no credit here’, but that it was not possible to stick to this in practice). The people that have a pension, no matter how minuscule, do not get social benefits, apart from one-off money for fire wood (only heating source around here with very few exceptions). From what I hear from the Lux context, people do get enough money to cover their basic needs. And, speaking about basic needs, I do not think there is anyone in Britain or Lux who does not have access to running water, a bathroom, and electricity. There are a lot of people here who do not have number one and two, and a few who do not have number three. The reason elderly people hold as many animals as they can work is because they cut food bills and enrich staple diets. You can also (at the moment of writing: still) somehow sell the cheese you make, the eggs your chickens lay, and the meat of the spring lamb that your ewe has had. This helps, to some degree. Of course, the facts that communism collapsed and left a whole generation on terribly small pensions (who is to blame that they did not pay contributions to a fund then?), and that incomes are up to ten times lower than in some Western European countries needs to be taken into account in any characterisation of the kind of poverty here.
On the other hand, the kind of misery in Western Europe I mean may resemble the urban kind. It can mean a combination of the following: high debts, forms of social exclusion that include lack of access to education, to secure and fairly-paid jobs, to a secure, healthy living environment, and so forth.
I think one of the most important differences is that in the countryside here, people live without major debts, but in the cities, people have debts because they have commodities, too. In the cities, people may make more plans for the future to face uncertainty, but here, uncertainty is levelled out by minimising the risk in the present, because they do not have the resources to act otherwise. I am not sure how it is with risk deferment: people commit to take out mortgages and pay in health and pension cover, but what kind of percentage can still commit to this kind of responsibility in societies rapidly increasing in inequality, say, in ten or fifteen years’ time? Furthermore, there may be more of temporary poverty because the job situation can change quickly. The welfare state being under siege from various internal and external forces, I am not sure anymore in how far we can and should still speak about it. So these are my embryonic thoughts on the matter, and I am sure a lot has been written about it. I just need to find time to read all that.