From Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil by the renowned anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes.
- "Specific forms of consciousness may be called 'Ideological' whenever they are invoked to sustain, legitimate or stabilize particular institutions or social practices."
I first read this book in undergrad, it was my first dip into the waters of Medical Anthropology, which is the radical notion that there are factors other than disease causing agents that have a massive impact on peoples health and wellness. How they understand 'health' and 'disease.' How they relate to life and death. What they choose to attribute to disease or divine judgement or just pure bad luck. Who they go to for aid when they are unwell.
This book sparked an understanding within me that there is an emerging institutional interest in understanding sick people, not just in understanding sickness itself. It allowed me to conceptualize a world where I could have a meaningful impact in the lives and measurable outcomes of patients without having to put on the white coat and stethoscope, which I had known was not my path. This quote in particular stood out to me when I first read it, and stands out to me now because it illustrates that most of what constitutes our 'reality' is consensus.
Pinging everybody who participated in the last one
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I just want to add that, historically, this thread was looking for quotations from something you had been reading recently. It's not "favourite quotes" but more an introduction to your current and immediate inner life via your reading. I just looked back at the #quotesporn tag and it is notable in its spontaneously arising volunteer moderators.
“Eating is an agricultural act,' as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world - and what is to become of it. ― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
I don't think you'd miss anything substantial. He does a good job of telling the history and (I think) avoiding the assumption that the reader has with them a deep cultural knowledge of how americans eat now and in the past. Rather, for each of the four meals he follows he asks "How does the food chain underlying this meal work? Why is it here?". When I say it's American centered, I mean that the answers to these questions are very intertwined with government policy and location. So for the first meal he talks about Corn a lot because america grows a shit ton of it, but the story he's trying to tell is that of industrial mono cultures. The story about mono culture is interesting in it's own right. But the path he takes to it is local to me. I live in the middle of the systems and ecology and people he is describing. When he talks about field runoff from the chemicals needed to make a corn mono culture work, he's talking about something that directly impacts me. I've swam in those waterways. I've fished in them. They're where my tap water is drawn from.
A Kurt Vonnegut quote, by way of Derek Sivers via the "Tools of Titans:" "There's this beautiful Kurt Vonnegut quote that's just a throwaway line in the middle of one of his books, that says, "We are whatever we pretend to be."
What do you think of Tools of Titans? And that quote gets at something. For the aspirational among us, it speaks to the faking until making. But I don't know if the quote applies to the lazy or listless. Do they pretend to be anything?
It's fine as a coffee table book. It's not narrative, so it's not something I would suggest "reading" cover to cover. It's more of a "tool." -You can read on a topic, where you need assistance. It's a fine collection of anecdotes and suggestions/insights.
Karl Gottlob Küttner on the Irish language: - from Poor Green Erin: German Travel Writers' Narratives on Ireland from Before the 1798 Rising to After the Great Famine, edited and translated by Peter Lang. I remember Death Without Weeping. I actually read very little of it; it's quite a tome, and I can only hate Nestle so much. On a more serious note, I did very much enjoy some of Nancy Scheper-Hughes' work on the illegal organs trade. She came to the Anthropology Association of Ireland convention back in 2012 while I was doing my master's; she was tiny but really nice, and gave me some recommendations about what I was studying at the time. Man, that was a long time ago. I should read some anthro work again.It is very guttural, even more so than the Zürich dialect, and quite unpleasant to the ear.
You've MET Scheper-Hughes? I'm in awe, she's one of my idols. Death Without Weeping was an emotionally weighty read for me the very first time, and that was true the second time too. Anthropology writing in general makes me super happy. So far, the ethnographic re-telling has been the best way I've found to understand a people in a place without going there. Apropos, of nothing, New York City wasn't much of a surprise to me in any way, because I'd read so much about it for so many years.
Ack, I only chatted to her for a few minutes, but she was really nice. If you ever meet her I don 't think you'll be disappointed. I might have to give DWD a second chance. Yeah. That's what I used to love about anthropology - getting a sense of a totally different world or way of life. And what it can teach us about ourselves. I used to love anthropology; I dunno what happened.
Joseph Roth, The Bust of the EmperorFor it is one of the greatest mistakes made by the new -- or as they like to call themselves, modern -- statesmen that the people (the 'nation') share their own passionate interest in world politics. The people in no way lives by world politics, and is thereby agreeably distinguishable from politicians. The people lives by the land, which it works, by the trade which it exercises and by the craft which it understands. (It nevertheless votes at free elections, dies in wars and pays taxes to the Ministry of Finance.) Anyway, this is the way things were in Count Morstin's village of Lopatyny, and the whole of the World War and the complete redrawing of the map of Europe had not altered the opinions of the people of Lopatyny.
I've been catching up on my early Christian writers, and just started St. Augustine's Confessions (written over 3 years from 397-400). Like many of the others, there's a lot about being wary of "worldly" things or those "of the flesh." This is still something I'm trying to figure out -- I'm not a hedonist by any means, but I'm wary of too much self-denial as well. To say nothing about how much modern Christianity has gone off the deep end when it comes to things like sex. As with all things it's a balance. But I'm suspicious of many modern churches' views on this topic; the early church seems to have had somewhat different views on this point (and was certainly not monolithic). But Augustine gets a bad rap, as the introduction by the translator of my edition explains:The mind commands the body and is obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance.
Against the Manichees he upheld the essential goodness of the procreative impulse. The Pelagian controversy, however, led him to see the process of reproduction as the transmitter of the irrationality and egotism that infects the sexual urge. By his stress on 'concupiscence' (uncontrolled desire) he set the West on the path to identifying sin with sex; that was not his intention.
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night. When I share my later science, sitting humbly at his feet; He may know the law of all things, yet be ignorant of how We are working to completion, working on from then to now. Lacking only certain data for your adding, as is meet, And remember men will scorn it, 'tis original and true, And the obloquy of newness may fall bitterly on you. You have laughed with me at pity, we have joyed to be forlorn, What for us are all distractions of men's fellowship and smiles; What for us the Goddess Pleasure with her meretricious smiles! But they must not waste repentance on the grizzly savant's fate. Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night. You will need them, mine observer, yet for many another night. I leave none but you, my pupil, unto whom my plans are known. You “have none but me,” you murmur, and I “leave you quite alone”? There has been a something wanting in my nature until now; I can dimly comprehend it, – that I might have been more kind, Might have cherished you more wisely, as the one I leave behind. Calmest coldness was the error which has crept into our life; But your spirit is untainted, I can dedicate you still To the service of our science: you will further it? you will! To be sure that your deductions will be logical and true; And remember, “Patience, Patience,” is the watchword of a sage, Not to-day nor yet to-morrow can complete a perfect age. But if none should do my reaping, 'twill disturb me in my sleep So be careful and be faithful, though, like me, you leave no name; See, my boy, that nothing turn you to the mere pursuit of fame. Draw the curtain back for Venus, ere my vision grows too weak: It is strange the pearly planet should look red as fiery Mars,– God will mercifully guide me on my way amongst the stars. - Sarah WilliamsThough my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;
The Old Astronomer Reach me down my Tycho Brahe, I would know him when we meet, Pray remember that I leave you all my theory complete, But, my pupil, as my pupil you have learned the worth of scorn, You may tell that German College that their honor comes too late, What, my boy, you are not weeping? You should save your eyes for sight; Well then, kiss me, – since my mother left her blessing on my brow, I “have never failed in kindness”? No, we lived too high for strife,– There are certain calculations I should like to make with you, I have sown, like Tycho Brahé, that a greater man may reap; I must say Good-bye, my pupil, for I cannot longer speak;
I've been reading Oliver Kamm's Accidence will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English (2015) - or move over Miss Grundy. Here are some of the passages I have highlighted: Whatever is in general use in a language is for that reason grammatically correct.
(This is a quote from an 1892 English grammar book.)The reason for speaking and writing in Standard [English] forms isn't to show refinement; it is to make us at home in the world.
Show me a style guide and I'll show you preferences smuggled in and depicted as rules.
Prohibitions on the passive voice, on conjunctions at the beginning of sentences, on prepositions at the end of them and on much else besides have nothing to do with good grammar.