OK, Stackers. You’re here for longform, right? Right? I once teased Paul, who I have known for many a year, about the length of his essays. On second thoughts perhaps his work is too short rather than too long.
Yes, I read it all. Of course I did. Outwith the distractions of the tell-lie-vision and the consumption of endless snacking on near-food and the knocking on the door of uninvited and bored people seeking company and entertainment - to whom I only grant access when I welcome them - I have time enough to read.
I have much sympathy with Paul’s argument and yet I am not an academic or a don or even an intellectual, although perhaps one of the latter; the amateur, the autodidact, a headful of thoughts and a fistful of sausage rolls. Some of this flies above my head, as it should and is perhaps supposed to.
An anthropologist of the daily half-hour trudge to work and half-hour back, my head full of babble from the call centre which puts curry on the table, but still with senses and heart open, alert. Always a cat along the way to stop awhile, speak with, and stroke, never to be seen again. Always the different same in this small town, litter-blown and neglected. Always the people on the pavements passing. We greet and nod, I observe and, like Malinowski, take notes, but the difference is that, unlike the accredited anthropologists, the object and subject is indistinguishable.
Through the streets and pubs and restaurants and parks, the shopping centres and supermarkets and pound shops and big box retailers, through the detritus of a slow collapse I wander, taking it all in. On the phones I listen and, again, take it all in. Malinowski has nothing on me with his tent and pith helmet and notebook.
Believe me, working on the phones in this place and time would turn any thoughtful person into a street anthropologist or a philosopher manqué.
Within Academia, is the map the territory?
A few extracts:
Bohemians, explorers and mavericks are close to the ‘ordinary’ person; while an artist sits at the crossroads: ideas are important, but these are ideas embodied in the actual and the now; in mood, in object, in man and woman, in symbol, and in the material they use to represent them. Like you and me, dear reader, bohemians are not keen on officials, with their aura of authority and that iron suit of self-belief. The Malinowski lot are not your standard campus type. Malinowski, Audrey, Meyer Fortes, not to mention Edmund Leach, Jack Goody, Stephen Hugh-Jones, are closer to Sixties Soho than their LSE colleagues, with an eye on County Hall and Parliament Square.
[…]
Once we were organisms, animals with a touch of the divine. Then for a few centuries there was a war between organisms and machines. The machine won. Today humans are an engineering problem; a malfunctioning cog in an otherwise efficient contraption. Each one of us is socially constructed: I’d dissolve tomorrow, if the institutions went out of business. Organisation Woman.
[…]
A concept is a poor foundation on which to build a personality. Weak and wobbly, it is liable to idea-slides and fashion-quakes. Easy to attack, requiring constant maintenance, you are never quite safe from the enemy. Castles whose walls are polystyrene not stone.
[…]
We think an idea explains things. That they explore, they discover. But what if concepts are filters, whose purpose is to secure our mental universe not make it sensitive or acute? An intellectual adventure is to think in a continuous flow; with its oxbow lakes and trickling streams, those mad crashing rapids: ‘watch out the Schloss, you’re sliding off a waterfall!’ A concept makes the world known. Let me shuffle my pack of metaphors: our mind a steelworks, where the end-product is our sensibility; concepts its waste product. We put knowledge before, make it more important than, the growth of a person’s mentality. It is our great error, mistaking slag for precious metal.
Haven't I seen you in Skoob in pith helmet and pipe?
And the notebook. Don’t forget the notebook.