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Part II: Learn how to Learn/ Recursive Epistemology

10/21/2013

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...“apprehending the world is not a matter of construction but of engagement, not of building but of dwelling, not of making a view of the world but of taking up a view in it” (Ingold 1996, 121; Poirier 2004, 61). 
Picturehttp://art-educ4kids.weebly.com/aboriginal-art-and-patterning.html
The idea of statue consecration revolutionized my  own relationship to the Buddha. It invokes what Poirer and others have called a "relational ontology" though not quite as they intend it. This  links Henny to  Gotama  so we should investigate it further - open our own eyes - before returning to the Buddha's likenesses. 

Our entanglement with technology has revolutionized the way social theorists reflect on human relationship to things.  

One of the best full investigations of this is via archeology, a field devoted to interpreting things.
In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects by Bjørnar Olsen  painstakingly theorizes how through mass culture and manufacturing, critical theorists called for a rejection of things and now have reconciled human relationships to things by de-centering the human. 

This central argument is a material-semiotic relationship among humans and non humans in which what is real is reliant on its relationship, an actor network in which all elements of the network are actors - or rather actants to replace the assumption that humans were the only agents of any event.  Latour argues that action is ‘not a property of humans but of an association of actants’ (Latour, 1999: 182; emphasis in original). 
  
As Latour, Cellon and Law describe what has been called Actor Network Theory (ANT), relationships as a central feature of a cosmological upturn - humans, animals, objects assembled to create an event or action. Latour should be credited with turning objects as ‘matters-of-fact’ into uncertain and disputed ‘matters-of-concern’ (Latour, 1996a; 2000; 2002)

Folding 

Bringing a thing to life
So, then, who or what - brings a thing to life?

Anthropologists have long encountered indigenous community's theories of being, but recently there has been a stronger trend to take these ontologies as a challenge to the substantive Western notion of being.  

What methodologies help us encounter worlds unlike ours in their relationship to the unseen? These Others are usually aboriginal, or poor and "superstitious" or variously "non-rational."  They are historically an irresistible target for economic integration,  educational assistance and civilizational uplift. 

Deborah Rose Bird's reflexive epistemology allows her to be open to Other intersubjectivities.  Rose Bird is one of a number of ecologically reflective ethnographers  who have studied aboriginal communities in Canada and Australia.  Goulet and Miller as editors of Extraordinary Anthropology: Transformations in the Field propose that anthropologists move out of their "taken-for-granted body of knowledge (academically and worldy) and truly enter the realm of the Other's lifeworld."  Bird Rose's article is among the  contributors in this volume who refer to "extraordinary" experiences that shook their original skepticism. These occurred as religious conversions, in visions, often in dreams. Goulet and Miller are not concerned with "becoming native," a charge intended to discipline anthropologists who have lost perspective of their project and are no longer "objective."  More often than not, the anthropologist's  "extraordinary" experiences in the field do not appear in their monographs.  In this sense, this collection and Goulet's earlier Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters (1994) refuse to "reverse the charge" as we used to say in the old days when there were collect calls. (For millennials this means a phone call that you bill to the people you are calling.)  They take responsibility for their engagement - often unbidden- in someone else's world.  Bird Rose's reflection on recursive methodology is one of many (often referring to Fabian's Out of our Minds)  who are changed by encounter.  

Deborah Bird Rose's work among Australian Aborigines promotes an ethical ecological anthropology.  She argues that an epistemological transformation was a necessary aspect of her learning process as an ethnographer.  But one must "learn how to learn."  For this, she cites Bateson's call for "detero-learning,"  a reflexive process of participant observation that requires one's whole being.  "This openness leads to an anthropology that is dialogical, reflexive, and attentive to process, and that ex- tends beyond the human and into the lives of plants, animals, and all manner of extraordinary beings and modes of communication." (89) 

For Bird Rose, a recursive epistemology is a "situated connectivity," a process of knowledge production that occurs when both knower and known are mutually embedded in an encounter and knowledge is exchanged and changes both parties.  She defines it via Bateson as 

...events continually enter into, become entangled with, and then re-enter the universe they describe” (Harries-Jones 1995, 3). Recursions are iterations and entanglements; they are “rampant” in ecological systems (Harries-Jones 1995, 183) within which human societies are embedded. ...The anthropologist’s thought is shaped by her teachers as her life shifts more deeply into relationships with people, places, and concepts that become increasingly constitutive of her own thought and being. While fostering porous proximities, a recursive epistemology does not lead toward homogeneity. Rather, it works productively with difference, change, and exchange.  (91-92)
Picture
http://bluehawk.monmouth.edu/~rclayton/web-pages/s11-503/recursion.jpg

This photo is clever trick on the nature of recursion, but it does not express the rich connectedness that Rose Bird via Bateson describes.  Recursion in this case is an important feature of computer programming. (You notice that the regress will continue unless you direct it to STOP.)  But in Bateson's  cybernetics,  recursion is not so geometrical.1   It is "entangled" and the knowledge one gains informs the knowledge one gleans. This requires an openness to mystery, and a responsibility to what we learn. 

Rose Bird situates this in Northern Territory of Australia and "friend and teacher Jessie Wirrpa." Already, then, the "informant" is the teacher.  Jessie's world included the dead, the living, and other creatures. On a walkabout, Jessie "called out" to her ancestors, 

“Give us fish,” she would call out, “the kids are hungry.”.... When the cockatoos squawked and flew away, Jessie laughed because they were making a fuss about nothing. When the march flies bit us, we knew the crocs were laying their eggs, and Jessie began to think about taking walks to those places....The world was always communicating, and Jessie was a skilled listener and observer. (91)

Bird Rose speaks to root principles that involve an acceptance of a world of patterns, filled with both human and non-human sentience based on an "ethic of intersubjective attention in a sentient world where life happens because living things take notice." This "taking notice" is the most important part of her work as a participant observer who is learning to learn.  And ask Bird Rose "takes notice," the questions, perceptions, hypothesis she came with transform. (92)

In time, Jessie dies, and Bird Rose tries to act on the practices she has learned. She wants to visit a river to honor Jessie, but the first times she goes, she does not "call out". Only later, when she visits a river that she and Jessie visited together, can she "call out" with clarity. When she reflects on this, she believes it is because the  "world at that time was not just a place, it was a presence. I could hear awareness, and so I could call out." (94)

But this profound moment, ironically made her feel voiceless in the academy. 

These boundaries, these limits to what is sayable, are made evident primarily by being breached, and that rarely happens, so usually it may not be apparent that in an academic context that is founded in seminars, lectures, letters, articles, books, and coffee breaks, there are actually some terrible silences.

For Rose Bird,  recursive epistemology has transformed her way of noticing and being.  Normative anthropology's reductionist approach to other worlds is now a double death.  She continues to argue from here to the ways this double death leads to the devaluation of the environment.  This process then, is not only epistemological. It is an ethical response to the other, and a method that changes one's positionally altogether.  What began as a doctoral study becomes an call for engagement. The hidden anthropologist's hand is now visible and sometimes it is not clear who is writing whom, Jessie or Deborah. But this work on epistemology - on knowing - has shifted of late to ontology, being. And we shall take the figures Rose Bird invokes at the start of her article when we consider relational ontology. 


Endnote
1. Norbert Weiner defines cybernetics as the control and communication in the animal and machine; it is a study of how systems function through feedback and control.

Cited
Bird Rose,  Deborah. Recursive Epistemologies and an Ethics of Attention, In Extraordinary Anthropology. Transformations in the Field, Eds Jean-Guy  Goutlet and Bruce Granville Miller,  University of Nebraska Press, 2007, 88-102

Bird-David, Urit

Harries-Jones, P.  A recursive vision: Ecological understanding and Gregory Bateson. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1995

Poirer, Sylvie, Reflections on Indigenous Cosmopolitics - Poetics, Anthropologica, Vol 50, No. 1, L'experience et la problematique de la (de)colonisation: Autour de l'oeuvre d'Eric Schwimmer. (De)colonization as Experience and Field of Enquiry: The Work of Eric Schwimmer (2008), pp 75-85 

Schwimmer, Eric, John Clammer, Sylvie Poirer, Figured Worlds, Ontological Obstacles in Intercultural Relations 2004,  Tim Ingold 2000: 149

Wiener, Norbert, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Paris, Hermann et Cie - MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1948
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In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas/ corpora

10/16/2013

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Metamorphosis (n.) 
 "Change of form or shape," especially by witchcraft, from Latin metamorphosis, from Greek metamorphosis, "a transforming, a transformation," from metamorphoun "to transform, to be transfigured," from meta- "change" (see meta-) + morphe "form" (see Morpheus). Biological sense is from 1660s. As the title of Ovid's work, late 14c.,Metamorphoseos, from Latin Metamorphoses (plural).

PictureAntonio del Pollaiolo, Apollo & Daphne
META-MORPHOSIS

Metamorphosis offers us a way to figure the slippage (or assertion) of ontological categories.  So Ovid tells us in the opening sentence of Metamorphosis.  He will write  "Of shapes transformed to bodies strange." 

In a world where all things seemed less solid, Ovid, the Roman poet is ready for this trickery. He flips Greek myths, importing them into the Roman pantheon.  So we learn how the river nymph Daphne transforms into a bay laurel tree or  Arachne becomes a spider and Cygnus, the swan constellation.

As he mourned, his voice became thin and shrill, and white feathers hid his hair. His neck grew long, stretching out from his breast, his fingers reddened and a membrane joined them together. Wings clothed his sides, and a blunt beak fastened on his mouth. Cygnus became a new kind of bird: but he put no trust in the skies, or in Jupiter, for he remembered how that god had unjustly hurled his flaming bolt. Instead, Cygnus made for marshes and broad lakes, and in his hatred of flames chose to inhabit the rivers, which are the very antithesis of fire (Metamorphoses II 374-382).

Don't we already know about morphing? We feast on these "fairy tales" that now Disney has sapped of their early terrors: beasts become princes, mermaids grow legs, a girl's hair is magic, a witch fattens up two lost children.  The Grimm brothers canvassed the German old folk for these old tales,  and child psychologist Bruno Bettleheim showed us in Uses of Enchantment, how these tales were dreamlike codes for psychological development (Try Ann Sexton's Transformations for her wry perverse take on these tales. Much better than Wicked.)

But what can we learn about these shifting ontologies centuries apart?

Kelly and Keil take Metamorphosis and Brother's Grimm fairy tales to track the trajetories of the changes.  In both sets of  stories, they found that more than half of the gods and humans were transformed into animals, ten percent to plants, and a little more than ten percent became inanimate objects, another five percent became liquids. In Ovid, three conscious beings become events. Birds are the most popular metamorphosis (Kelly and Keil, 1985, cf in Czachesz, p 219ff).  They show that in Ovid, the animate (gods, humans) do not often become inanimate  (trees, mountains, caves).  Czachesz notes, "Metamorphoses do not normally change people into chairs, or hammers into gods." (219) Kelly and Keil argue that this indicates the stability of ontological categories: sentient, object. 

Imagine all the talking animals we love who now speak English - pigs who learn to herd sheep, dogs on TV who convince us to buy their brand,  cats in costume dancing on stage, lion kings, woolly mamoths, sloths, donkeys in love with dragons.  The world is bursting with overlapping "kingdoms." And I have not yet considered a world saturated with cyborgs as action figures, wolf men, and zombies.  The horror of those enlisted in these transformations is detailed in Kafka's Metamorphosis. We will turn to this much later.  

For now, I return to these studies to underscore that Ovid, Grimm and most transformations of the western world are only "skin deep." The bodies in their new shapes take on human traits.  We anthropomorphize. 

This allows me to consider Bruno Latour's comment in We Have Never been Modern that humans  “analogy machines.”

The expression ‘anthropomorphic’ considerably underestimates our humanity. We should be talking about morphism. Morphism is the place where technomorphisms, zoomorphisms, phusimorphisms, ideomorphisms, theomorphisms, sociomorphisms, psychomorphisms, all come together. Their alliances and their exchanges, taken together, are what define the anthropos. A weaver of morphisms—isn’t that enough of a definition?

Picture
CHRISTIAN TRANSFORMATIONS

Following these analogies, consider these incredible illuminated manuscripts as a feast of ecclesiastical bestiaries.


So how does the theme of metamorphosis affect Christian renderings of bodily transformations? How does the mortal body transmogrify into the divine? Or return to something else (note this version!) 

I have been reading Metamorphoses : resurrection, body and transformative practices in early Christianity   See review here 
Which revives a tired New Testament studies for me. 

Jorunn Økland takes on resurrection and its transformations in his interpretation of 1 Cor 15 and 2 Cor 12:1–7 and materialist theories of the self.  All these scholars examine the ancient conception that a human body or self in light of Christian and Jewish cosmologies. Denise Kimber Buell's study of  interspecies transformation moves from human to divine where human selves are sites of contest between human and nonhuman forces.  

A number of the articles focus on I Corinthians 15 chapter on transformation at conversion and the resurrection. Troels Engberg-Pedersen is known for his work on the Stoic's influence on Paul, and so his piece here is less interesting than others on the Stoic notion of  "soma" and how this differed from contemporary readings of "flesh" as body. One might ask what metamorphosis occurs at conversion?  How is this 'consummated' at the resurrection? Feminist Vigdis Songe-Møller considers Paul's narrative on the resurrection in light of Plato’s theory of change. For Plato, who relied on the permanent world of Forms, change was a problem.  He ultimately argues that change must happen instantly, outside of time, outside of the ideal world of reason. I love how Vigdis Songe-Møller refers to this:

 As a non-place it is an abyss, lacking a form, and as not belonging to any time, the instant has neither a before nor an after. It is not what we call ‘now’, or the present. In a way the instant does not exist, it just happens. Or rather: change happens, as an inexplicable event.

While Plato and Paul understand bodily transformation quite differently, they are not so far apart when it comes to this particular change of resurrection.  It has both a continuity and a discontinuity, it occurs in a "moment" and atoma which in Greek, Songe-Møller tells us is the smallest possible unit.  It is, then a mystery and so it is one of Paul's moments of ecstatic poetics:

Behold, I show you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed
– in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. 
For the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, 
and we shall be changed. Form this corruptible must put on incorruption,
 and this mortal must put on immortality.
(1 Corinthians 15, 51–53; 21st Century King James Version) 

This edited collection also includes analysis of the letters of Ammonas from fourth-century Egypt and the letters of Antony that emphasize restoration through mystical heavenly ascents and visions. John J. Collins focuses the  Qumran community’s joining with angels in heavenly worship as an expression of heavenly, angelic realities in Jewish writings.

Metamorphosis opens up more malleable sense of our modern selves. As we say in the PCUSA, I am seeking more light. (Note: the Norwegians gathered some intriguing musings on  the resurrection. See here.)

Cited
Czachesz, Istvan., The Grotesque Body in Early Christian Literature: Hell, Scatology, and Metamorphosis (Habilitationsschrift; Heidelberg, 2007) 127–210.Gilhus, I...Animals, Gods and Humans: Changing Attitudes to Animals in Greek, Roman, and Early Christian Ideas (London: Routledge, 2006) 
Kelly, M.H. and F.C. Keil, The More Things Change...: Metamorphosis and Conceptual Structure," Cognitive Science 9 (1985), 403-16.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter,Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993, 137.
Nguyen, Henry T. Review of Metamorphoses : resurrection, body and transformative practices in early Christianity 
Songe-Møller,Vigdis. "With what kind of body will they come ?" : metamorphosis and the concept of change : from platonic thinking to Paul's notion of the resurrection of the dead,  In Metamorphoses : resurrection, body and transformative practices in early Christianity / edited by Turid Karlsen Seim and Jorunn Økland. - Berlin ; New York : Walter de Gruyter, cop. 2009. - p. 109-122
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    Kathryn (Kerry) Poethig 

    I teach Global Studies in California, study feminism, religion and peacemaking in SEAsia,  I've taken on this Invisible Aid project and decided to blog it as I go.  This work sits in the intersection of political, metaphysical and personal imaginal worlds.

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