Friday, May 29, 2015

Running through the jungle

I've blogged before about the prescription narcotics I sometimes use, when I'm trapped in a New Zealand winter, to deal with an old nerve injury, and about the recurrent and very detailed - sometimes vividly detailed, sometimes tediously detailed - dreams that these drugs give me. In 2012 I watched Alfred Hitchcock show a curious movie at the University of Auckland's School of Business; the year before that I flew from the mountains of the South Island to an island that resembled Hawai'iki, stopping for a drink on the way in Northland.

Here's my latest recurring dream. As usual, my subconscious is behaving oddly: it has connected Napoleon Chagnon, a man I detest, with Margaret Mead and Marshall Sahlins, two scholars I admired, or at least thought I admired. (This superb article by David Moberg describes Sahlins' long and righteous battle against Chagnon, and explains why Chagnon's ideas about indigenous peoples are dangerous for the West, as well as for the Third World). The banyan forest in my dream comes from 'Eua, the Tongan island that James Cameron reputedly turned into a moon called Pandora.

The Fierce People

After dinner, on the lounge room
couch, I run through a banyan forest,
pursued by a noisy tribe
of anthropologists.
I don't turn my head
but I know, because I have studied the secondary literature,
that Napoleon Chagnon is waving a spear
as sharp as a syringe, and tipped
with syphilis; that sweat has melted
Jared Diamond's facepaint;
that betel juice dribbles out
Margaret Mead's puffing mouth.

"You will not find refuge
in any impenetrable forest"
I hear Marshall Sahlins explaining,
in his best lectern voice.
"The impenetrable forest
is a colonialist fantasy
abolished by ethnobotanists.
You must surrender
to analysis."

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

61 Comments:

Blogger Richard said...

Interesting for sure, good poem. I actually liked reading Mead (a long while ago, as well as such as Leakey (I know the Leakeys aren't social anthropolgists as such but anthropology such as theirs helps us understand our past somewhat) and some other socio-anthropologists. I know Mead has been knocked around by the PC brigade. I didn't know much about Diamond although I picked up a large book by him about history and why humans create their own problems I think it is. It was about a dollar in an op shop so why not! But I don't know that rather intense fellow. He's taken this idea to extremes. But that we are shall we say, ultimately driven by our 'selfish gene' has some force. However, taken to far the other obvious factors of human society: the need for cooperation AS WELL or SIMULTANEOUS WITH as competition is clearly a reality.
In fact "reality shows" where there are endless competitions of many kinds are, I don't think, either very healthy psychologically, or in fact do they quite reflect the whole truth shall we say. In addition they are tedious. The cooperative aspect of human society is vastly more important. In fact if we were ALWAYS at war, not much progress would ensue. We are not.
But the connection of the science society with warmongering doesn't surprise me. Science has been misused by scientists and governments. The military industrial complex in fact.


10:36 pm  
Blogger Richard said...

Your dream poem is good.

I was looking to see what poetry books of John O'Connor I had as he died recently (see Jack's Blog) and I have two. A little further on the shelf were some books of Morrissey's. I had got some about 1990 but one I didn't recognize, I know Morrissey sent some to me via his erstwhile friend Ted Jenner...it was called 'Dreams'.

The poems in 'Dreams' are extraordinary! I think they are good. Written probably leading up to 1981 (published then) they are a tour de force of the dream genre of poetry. Amazing. Not like his drier 'A Case of Briefs' which are good in their own way. Reading them it is not clear how 'true' they are to Morrissey's own dreams but it is a fantastic result for sure.

There is no obvious underlying 'message' (obviously there are I just read through the whole book, it is strange and comical by turns, so certainly it is one of the more engaging books of poetry by any New Zealander I have seen for some time)...but there are themes and connections.

Smithyman also utlizes dreams which I have probably said on here before.

10:45 pm  
Blogger Paul Janman said...

Interesting poem Scott. I still love this great film on the subject of Chagnon's iniquitous assaults on Amazon peoples - "Secrets of the Tribe": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnBxNDb_w7Q It turns the camera on the secrets of 'the tribe of the anthropologists'.

9:41 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Discussion of the Chagnon controversy: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/magazine/napoleon-chagnon-americas-most-controversial-anthropologist.html?_r=0

10:23 am  
Anonymous Scott said...

Thanks Richard. The dream genre of writing is fascinating, to be so sure: it's so easy to do badly. I like Graham Greene's book of dreams, which proceeds almost guilelessly, but also like Borges' and Smithyman's self-conscious, almost scholarly accounts of their dreams.

I don't think it is liberals so much as religious conservatives who have taken on Mead. Derek Freeman, who has tried to take apart her research on sex and adolescence in Samoa, is a retired clergyman who seems uncomfortable with the liberatory implications of Mead's findings.
Freeman hasn't, so far as I can tell, won over most observers.

10:57 am  
Anonymous Scott said...

Interesting 2013 piece from the Atlantic on the Mead-Freeman controversy:
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/02/sex-lies-and-separating-science-from-ideology/273169/
I think there is a perception that Mead's work had been discredited, when in fact most experts haven't accepted Freeman's points.

Of course there are other aspects of Mead's life and work that have also been challenged. Her relationship with the tragic NZ anthropologist Reo Fortune has recently been examined in this brilliant essay, which is unfortunately hidden behind a firewall: https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/histories_of_anthropology_annual/summary/v006/6.dobrin.html

11:04 am  
Blogger Richard said...

My friend James 'The Ant' Dollimore, a bibliophile himself, had a raging (if friendly!) argument re Mean when we saw a book by her re Mead. He then pointed to the book that 'refuted' her. But I doubt he has even read a word she has written. May have as her books were around in the 70s or possibly earlier. 'Coming of Age' made sense to me. I have books by or about her. My ex wife did Anthro and History so I read some of the texts and so on. There was a lecturer, mid to late 70s, who died in her efforts to research in (I think it was New Guinea). She contracted some kind of virus that local doctors couldn't save her from (in NZ).
There is always a problem when the researcher is not a part of the life itself which you, Paul and Echo Janman somewhat covered in Tonga. But there is still a residual sense of being intruders. That said I think some good work is done.

I didn't know that book by Greene. Have always liked his 'Power and Glory' and I re-read it: it didn't affect me as much as when a teenager but it was and is good. I have some bios and books about and by Greene but not that one! But I have no doubt it is part of Dr Ross's vast pantheon of untouchable tomes...

Re dreams. If you get time, those poems by Morrissey are quite different to his other work. I suppose one can only do so much of it. My poem 'Holy Night' started with the first line "In the rumours of the lost rooms" that came to me as I was falling asleep. I had to get up and write it down. It was like a voice that spoke to me and like a dream it seemed urgent in its meaning. (As do many of the strange dreams of Morrissey's in his book.) The the rest of the poem came.


Holy Night

In the rumours of the lost rooms
And the passages of the ice aged
Heart of the old young world,
Confusion heaps on confusion.
He is a subtle postman comes,

-----------------

And it goes on.

12:29 pm  
Blogger Richard said...

Re Mead that should be of course....

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