Going West again. Fiat lux!

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

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…

‘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

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

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Pangolins, Carcajous and Other Monsters!

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

Căluş

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

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.

[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.

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!