Prof. Ron Crocombe (1930-2009)

http://www.islandsbusiness.com/news/index_dynamic/containerNameToReplace=MiddleMiddle/focusModuleID=130/focusContentID=15711/tableName=mediaRelease/overideSkinName=newsArticle-full.tpl

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.

Lo duca e io per quel cammino ascoso 
intrammo a ritornar nel chiaro mondo; 
e sanza cura aver d’alcun riposo, 
salimmo su, el primo e io secondo, 
tanto ch’i’ vidi de le cose belle 
che porta ‘l ciel, per un pertugio tondo. 
E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle. 

My guide and I came on that hidden road 
to make our way back into the bright world; 
and with no care for any rest, we climbed 
he first, I following until I saw, 
through a round opening, some of those things 
of beauty Heaven bears. It was from there 
that we emerged, to see once more the stars.

Dante, Inferno, Canto IV

Taken from a blog post written up by David Seal, Cassini Mission Planner.

No profound thoughts or reasons, I just really really enjoyed what he had to say and am sharing it here.

Swine flu, beyond the headlines

For now, there is just one thing I feel I have to add to the avalanche of net related comments regarding the suspected swine flu outbreak in Mexico, and that is the immensely confused, and largely uninformative (in a few cases even misinformative) nature of most of what I have seen in the mass media, both within Mexico and abroad. With few exceptions, almost nobody has even bothered to send their reporters to clinics and hospitals in order to get straightforward and first person information from doctors on the front line. I most certainly do not suspect conspiracy, but I do find it very disappointing, and symptomatic of the low standards to which most newspapers and sources seem to work.

On the other hand, while I certainly think this is serious, and am serious myself about preventive measures, I have happily stumbled into a few select sites or reports that seem to favour common sense and rational thinking over screaming headlines. Herewith a quick and dirty selection of a few that I found enlightening. 

The Economist on swine flu

Aetiology

EffectMeasure

I may or may not be back with further comment tomorrow, mostly regarding my impressions of the suddenly quiet tempo of Mexico City.

EDIT: Another useful comment I just ran into:

NYT Op-ed

And a very useful Q&A from The Independent:

Q&A

Comparing ritual worlds: Sacrifice and reciprocity in Melanesia and Mesoamerica

Here it is folks. For all of those who have been waiting to finally see some substance behind the grandiloquent hints at grand comparativism between both culture regions. Upcoming seminar talk for tomorrow (Thursday 5 March, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, UNAM):

Rituals of transformation and shifting ontologies:

Rethinking sacrifice and reciprocity in Mesoamerica and Melanesia

Carlos Mondragón (ColMex) & Johannes Neurath (INAH)

 

This paper offers a discussion about the plurality of ontological principles as manifested in key rituals of reciprocity and sacrifice in two different societies – namely, the Huichol of North West Mexico and the people of the Torres Islands in Maritime Melanesia. Our aim is to problematise the assumption that while ritual practices and regimes of value have been considered processual, fluid and diverse, they ultimately rely on stable value systems. Ontologies, by any other name. By analysing new ethnographic data regarding rituals of existential transformation – specifically, the vision quest of the Huichol and the tamate ceremony – in Mesoamerica and Melanesia, we arrive at the conclusion that the problem is not a diversity of ritual forms, but of principles of existence. Throughout the ritual sequence, the participants in these events generate contrasting, and indeed incompatible, models of sacrifice (asymmetrical exchange) and idealised reciprocity (symmetrical exchange) that point to the open-ended and creative potential of the ontologies on which ritual action is grounded. The principle aim of the paper is to compare how two societies that draw on seemingly coherent “wholes” (Mesoamerican cosmologies, Melanesian principles of exchange) actually deploy multiple templates for ritual action which make manifest the contradiction of taking “ontology” for granted.

 

 

Sunday mornings with the LRB

These are the unexpected little gems that, every so often, I really like waking up to on a quiet, sunny Sunday morning over coffee:

High in the Pyrenees, early in the fifth century, a knot of Roman soldiers huddled together over the saddest kind of duty. A comrade-in-arms had died young, after just two years under the standards. They buried him with the honours he deserved, in his best uniform and his shining metal belt – the cingulum that was every fighting man’s pride, the sign that he was a soldier. No headstone would mark his grave – there was no one for miles to do the carving and, besides, headstones had been falling out of fashion for centuries. Only the memory of the young soldier would remain, fixed in the minds of onlookers by the spectacle, by the precious things deposited with the body, vanishing for ever as the earth fell on it. Without a headstone, we can’t know this young soldier’s name. In that, as in the manner of his burial, he is typical of thousands of fifth-century soldiers whose graves have been excavated. Or typical save in one respect: the dead Pyrenean soldier was a monkey, an adolescent macaque from the coast of North Africa, a thousand kilometres from where he died. (LRB, 31:3, pg. 22)

That hooked me. And the review article (by Michael Kulikowski) did not disappoint. Another gem, towards the end of his text:

A year rarely goes by without a new version of the Attila story, whether told in its own right or as part of the story of Rome’s fall. Given that all the thorny historical problems were worked out decades ago, each new version differs from the last mainly by way of emphasis, artistic colour, and the author’s competence as a historian. Kelly’s well-told and reliable account is the best to have come along in years, showing a judicious approach to archaeological evidence that one could wish more widely imitated. Its subtitle and some of its conclusions, however, stand rather too close to a revenant ‘it were the Huns wot done it’ school of analysis: no Huns means no Goths means no fall of the Roman Empire. The revival of this external catastrophist model, last popular immediately after the Second World War, is no doubt a response to the rose-tinted, EU-inspired interpretations of the 1990s, which at their height could construe the fall of the empire as a Mediterranean break from which the barbarian holidaymakers forgot to return. Yet I suspect that barbarian hordes have come back into vogue because they are, in their way, a comforting explanation. If only the aliens had been kept out, if only the empire had had the sense to strike back in time, then Rome wouldn’t have fallen. In a Western world that feels itself increasingly under assault from mystifying outside forces, from multiculturalism where once there was monoculture, and from Islamism where once there were colonies, the model of barbarian invasion spares us having to contemplate a far queasier proposition: the worrying capacity of an entire society to collapse, and a whole culture to disappear, through stupidity, greed, indifference and the weight of its own unsustainable contradictions.

The  sideswipe at the petits fonctionnaires of the EU might be contrived, or cheap, but does not really concern me here. I’m just enjoying my coffee and a little more decent reading than that which is provided by the national (Mexican) press’s morbid, flat and otherwise philistinic headlines and editorial pages day in and day out (hmm, philistinic + comatose = philistose…good enough portmanteau for me, in this context!).

Ex post facto: Ecology, ethnoastronomy and time-systems across the Pacific Rim

Greetings, o ye faithful. 

I’m back. This is a post I should have written three or four weeks back. But oh well. If someone can give me the recipe for revising four postgrad dissertations before 8 March, while taking on the main role in the museum research necessary for a major exhibit only 5 months prior to opening night – with not a single research assistant in sight, prepare two weekly seminars for this term, keep three simultaneous deadlines for different journal editors before the end of February AND participate as co-organizer of this workshop, involvinga dozen participants and international travel, all at the same time…and still find the time to remember to post a proper blog entry, I’ll pay good money for your multitasking recipe.

sigh. The truth is that I do sometimes find myself unable to organize my blogging.

Anyway, on to the post at hand. We – myself and Prof. Fred Damon, UVa, recently held a really fun workshop at the UVa campus. It all started with informal chit chat between Fred and I regarding the state of calendrical studies in the Pacific, and how there is a constant failure to account for long-term ecological fluctuation in these studies. Sound esoteric enough yet? It got worse. Or better. After a year of bouncing ideas around, we managed to enthuse a number of participants from the unlikeliest places and, after much hard work undertaken mostly by Fred (for once, I had the luxury of not being resident in the host institution and country), who managed to pull off a major coup by securing just over 16,000 USD from the NSF and the Vice-Prez for Research at the UVa, it happened.

Herewith an abridged version of programme, participants and themes:

Ecology and Time Systems in Australasia and the Americas:

New approaches to value systems and calendrical transformations across the Pacific Rim

Sunday, Feb 1, PUBLIC LECTURE 1  Clive Ruggles “Encompassing the sky: the last two decades of ‘cultural astronomy’”.

Monday, Feb 2: Session 1: Frederick H. Damon—Melanesia: “‘GO ASK THEM WHAT THE NAMES ARE!’ Structuring Knowledge and Production in the Calendrical Systems of the Northern Arc of the Kula Ring”

Betty Faust –Mayan Yucatan: “Cycles, climate shifts and saints’ days in Pich, Campeche, Mexico”

Johannes Neurath –Northwest Mexico: “THE PRODUCTION OF HUICHOL (RITUAL) TIME—Refocusing Mesoamerican calendrics”

PUBLIC LECTURE 2: Helmer Aslaksen, “The Chinese Calendar for the Humanities and the Social Sciences”

PUBLIC LECTURE 3 Steve Lansing, “Perfect Order: Cyclical Time in Bali”

Tues, Feb 3, Session 2: Erik Pearthree – “Modeling the Settlement of Remote Oceania”

Steve Lansing – “Forwards and Backwards in Time:  Simulated Agents in Love, coalescent models and social life in eastern Indonesia”

Adam Harr –Flores—Eastern Indonesia: “Agricultural time-reckoning in Flores: A comparative overview of systems for an ecologically and ethnolinguistically diverse island in eastern Indonesia”

Session 3:  Xueting Liu— “Acting in the Rhythms of Collective Fortune:  Temple Oracles and Fortune-telling Practices in Southeast China”

Gary Urton—Peruvian Andes: “Ritual and Administrative Calendars in the Andes: Can We Tell Them Apart?  How and Why Were They Different?”

Wed, Feb 4, Session 4: Paul Geraghty —Fiji, “Central Pacific Calendrical Systems” 

Carlos Mondragón –  Eastern Melanesia, “‘Without kava, there is no kastom’”: Long-term seasonal variability and cultural linkages across a Melanesian/Polynesian borderland.

Session 5: Helmer Aslaksen—“The Indian and Chinese Calendars Compared, An Introduction”

Henry Chan— “The Punan Vuhang Calendar Synchronized with the Rainforest Environment in the Malaysian State of Sarawak”

Clive Ruggles— Hawaii: “Kahikinui, Maui: interpreting Polynesian temples in their landscape.”

People of the Torres Islands

This is a post I’ve been wanting to construct for some time now. They are recent images of some of the people I hold dearest and closest, and my thoughts go out to them at this time of calendrical endings and beginnings. (I will deliberately leave their names out for a day or two, so that viewers can concentrate on faces and images rather than categories of people; but eventually I will put them in, along with brief bio information that I think may be of interest.)