I am posting this for our class on February 9th. Please email me if I am supposed to be submitting this elsewhere. Thank you!
For whatever reason I find myself really drawn to the philosophic and artistic aspects discussed in the readings. I am not completely finished but I wanted to make a few comments and then maybe return to establish a new thought or just bring it to class with me. While reading the piece by Lynch and Law I was really struck by the discussion of what a word or title means in the context of how people find themselves relating to “it”. I realize as a class we have touched on this but find it so relevant to what the most integral parts of museums are- if these things weren’t important and did not have names, if humans could not make a connection to them they simply would not exist. This really gave me a fresh perspective with the taxidermy topic because I really think holding something still not only is scientifically beneficial but gives humans time to process what it is and what it means to us. Blunts piece seemed like a really ironic pairing. As a statement not addressing anyone in particular, I really take no offense to taxidermy in any context. Animals are extraordinarily abused in much more horrific ways on a conventional level that taxidermy’s “cruelty” really doesn’t hit me as important.
I was really struck by the Lynch and Law piece as well. I've been thinking about how a lot of cultural struggle is really an argument of symbols and meanings. For one particular group a cultural symbol (an idea, word, artifact) could mean one thing, but compared to another’s it could mean something else entirely. This is a strange paradox considering we create meaning based on comparison (you can’t understand up unless you understand down). This creates a strange responsibility for the anthropologist, which has to decipher these symbols while understanding their own subjective nature. I find with the museum that most visitors get in the habit of reading the displays as text. By that I mean insinuating their own interpretation of an object based on their subjective comparison. I think this process is very different from an anthropologist who reads the object on its own terms, because they’re not down playing the significance of an artifact be claiming it’s a primitive parralel of something in our society. In general many of these readings are getting at this tension between the power of understanding, and the idea of absolution in their definition.
In regards to Pictures, Texts, and Objects: The Literary Language Game of Bird-Watching, I don’t think that the author, Michael Lynch and John Law were knocking down the bird watching community in any way. I think that they were trying to highlight the potential flaws of naturalistic classifications and that no nature guide should be the “end all, be all.” The authors dissected three nature guides, the “classic,” A Field Guide to the Birds of the Eastern and Central North America (Roger Troy Peterson), and the newer Audobon Society (Udvardy) and National Geographic (Kastner). Lynch and Law simply took apart the basic components of all these guides and showed their pros and cons. The shining example of the pros and cons of these guides was their illustrative presentations. Plates, photographs, and paintings are all vital points of reference for the bird watching community but all are arguably subjective and precise at the same time. North America’s plates are a dreamy, and yet almost meticulous point of reference. Audobon’s pictures are nice but can be inaccurate. And National Geographic’s photographs are a rare site for a novice to capture out in the wild. All ways of avian appearance are exemplary on an aesthetic level but should also be taken with a grain of salt. The constant theme of the nature guide contradicting itself positively and negatively is a major point in this article. Some readers may seek to discredit their critique as pessimistic or a negative view on a simple, albeit nerdy, hobby. Some may even dismiss this study altogether because it isn’t technically a science. However, I interpreted the analysis of bird-watching a metaphor for field guides and classifications in the “official” science world. Law and Lynch are simply saying that natural categories aren’t perfect, because they are constantly being added to or revised and shouldn’t be taken for the gospel. But at the same time they ought not to be so loose that they mislead people from fact, such as the examples of the different types of pictures. The three bird-watching guides are a guise for museums. Museums are huge natural guides they are just housed and presented differently from a glossy book. To exchange North America, Audobon, and National Geographic for places like the Simsonian, Field Museum, and AMNH is to state that these institutions aren’t infallible and should take care to walk the tight rope between actuality and flexibility.
The readings for this week, Pictures, Texts and Objects, by Michael Lynch and John Law along with The Compleat Naturalist: A Life of Linneaeus by Wilfrid Blunt do much to point out not only the extremely detailed amount of research that went into creating categories of botanical classification, but also the extreme rigor necessary to accurately observe species in the wild. These works are richly exhaustive and provide a detailed history of how classification came about, as well as clean guidance and detail as to how to best observe and record any matter of living species. They provide an excellent background in how classifications were decided upon, the rigorous observation and the immense (seemingly overwhelming) amount of detail that has to be taken into account when a decision is being made. They are all about the powers of observation, but they are boring to read. In contrast to the article Dinosaurs in the Attic, which provided an interesting overview of how the AMNH came to be, these two articles provide a sense of the humdrum, painstakingly comprehensive work that has to be done to assign the classification to an object. They provide the background on the necessary but dull rules and regulations that need to be followed to define and distinctly separate species. This describes what ethnography is all about; the detail required to historically document the origin and filiations of races and cultures, be they human or animal, flora or fauna. The article Pictures, Texts and Objects makes the point of discussing how there is no single approach that best defines how to depict pictures of what a bird watcher should look for. Although both the Audubon and Peterson’s guides are meant to provide guidance on how categorize observations to reach an end result, there are major distinctions between what they view as important textual and pictorial elements as to what to look for when classifying and identifying species. That is a critically important and underlying tenant to the field of ethnography. For me, the goal of the authors of this work was to impart to the beginning student of classification how important it is to gain first hand observations and descriptions of the world around us, because it is only through careful and thoughtful observing and recording of those observations that we can define and categorize our amazing surroundings.
The Lynch and Law article discusses the different methods that birding field guides use to provide visual demonstrations of different types of birds; mainly whether to use illustrations or photographs, and how detailed the illustrations should be. This discourse--as well as the technical classification discussed in the Blunt article--reminded me of the 'type specimen' brought up in the opening pages of 'Dinosaurs in the Attic.' All of these articles present a desire to set down objective categories of living things, and then to determine an archetypal example of these categories. This natural stereotyping interests me because it actually conflicts with the natural world--whatever standards are agreed upon, there will always be outliers. The need to break down the complex, varied natural world into simple, easily-memorized categories brings to mind Baudrillard's ideas about classification as a means of asserting dominance. Flora and Fauna are exceedingly complex; however, if we can decide that certain characteristics are the 'most important' characteristics, then we can make an impossible task (total knowledge of the infinite natural world) much more manageable.
To add some diversity to responses I will discuss chapter three of Pickled Heads which introduces ideas of taxonomy. This chapter is well complimented by the others, especially the piece on Linnaeus categorization. When looking at these histories of taxonomy, it’s amazing to explore how humans have evolved with this need to box everything. The way that these ideas began was with the simple need for a subject, and its negation, like the “categories ‘dog’ and not-dog.’” This system of ordering permeates through all aspects of human existence. For instance, this system is how our neurons function as an on/off switch; also, our genes are either in a form of expression or non-expression. Furthermore, we have modeled our machines in this way, in our effort to make machines as close to human thought as possible. During the older forms of taxonomy, the public had to trust the scientist’s ability to observe an object accurately, although the images and ideas were always religiously charged, displaying God’s diversity but only to then show human superiority. Besides the idealized renditions of reality that were taking place, the words that were used along with the images I found to be very loaded, like the term “freak” that Aldrovandi used to describe chickens and roosters. The public will automatically form judgments when a term like freak is used to describe something. Besides the term “freak,” the drawings themselves are obviously over exaggerated and unrealistic. This period of time embodies the era before science took a major turn toward accuracy and objective observation. In this older time period of idealized nature, people could contract a disease by making God angry or communicating with the Devil. Although science has changed a great deal, it amazes me how much religion still dictates scientific inquiry today.
I particularly liked the pairing of the Asma and Lynch and Law pieces in that they focused on the difficulties of rendering reality in media, both for the purposes of analyzing and making it understandable and for relating it to others. Asma recounts early naturalists' efforts to seek out the "essential character" of objects and their subsequent realization that we perhaps simply may not be equipped to discover what makes a particular thing that thing. Immediately, for me, I imagine that, in the vast and inconceivable scope of all the things that comprise (or may comprise) 'reality', the apparatuses with which we are equipped can likely only detect a very small fraction of that. This is at first, for me and perhaps for the naturalists that realized this as well, rather discouraging. How are we supposed to make sense of the entire landscape what is around us when we're looking at it through the drinking straw that is our senses? The important resolution to this, I feel, is to understand that, as Asma paraphrases Locke, "boundaries... [are], according to Locke, simply agreed-upon human conventions... Chihuahuas and Great Danes are classed together because we say so" (111). Our perception of the universe is very likely extremely limited and distortive, but this by no means invalidates it. It is simply what we have to work with, and with that knowledge we can (and have) set about ordering our reality in ways that make sense to us. The key to this is honesty and flexibility; acknowledging, for instance, as Amber has mentioned, that certain scientific 'facts' are only things as we understand them at this point in time, under specific conditions, and is subject to change as our narrow field of perception changes. Being candid about the challenges of ordering the natural world, I think, provides a more meaningful experience to the person viewing the information and observations presented, in that it humanizes the endeavor.
The articles for this week provided interesting viewpoints on the issue of classification. What comes to mind immediately are the two, almost wholly different, approaches to taxonomic classification put forth in the Lynch and Law article versus that of Blunt. Lynch and Law have, at the center of the inquiry, a desire for a practical form of field bird identification, or birding. In taking this vein of examination, they are seeking to classify avian species not by what similarities they bear, as Linnaeus did, but by their distinctions. To these authors, a field guide is a certain type of taxonomic order, distinct from the binomial nomenclature, in that it is designed to be as immediately, and intuitively, navigable while making direct observation in the field. Therefore, their greatest concern is in a guidebook’s faithful representation of species, but not necessarily on the level of detail that can be reached with intricate study of an individual. It is Linnaeus who concerned himself more with the little details that betrayed genetic kinship. Linnaeus was not nearly as concerned as the problems that could arise as a result of different artistic interpretations of the same species; rather, he sought to remove interpretation, and attempts at objective, pictorial representation, in lieu of what he considered a more universal classification system: that of binomial nomenclature in what was essentially Medieval Latin. This system takes a far different bent in pursuing a universal identification scheme, as it not as concerned with an essence of wieldliness: while possible to use in the field, it is far more suited to the times pre-and post- field trip. In the distinctions between these two systems, it clearly emerges that no one system of identification is supreme, as it relies entirely upon the context in which it is to be applied. Therefore, as we examine studies in class, it will be interesting to first examine the standards, or classifications, that are being used in each instance, and to use those systems as a starting point for further delving into anthropologic study.
I found Pictures, Texts, and Objects, by Michael Lynch and John Law, to be reinforce some ideas, or themes, that have been discussed in class—the attachment of knowledge to nature and our need, as humans, to find order in a disordered world. The “how” and “why” of classification, which Asama also looks at in Taxonomic Intoxication. Through our ability to label and categorize what we see in a naturalistic or aesthetic manner (or observe, as Sherlock Holmes would say), we are unintentionally creating labels and categories that are exclusive while trying to be inclusive. Or, in other words, our systems of classification are attempting to eliminate the “either-ors,” but end up creating “either-ors.” We would like to classify things as the law of noncontradiction states, “A or not-A,” but the meaning assigned to things can vary among people and cultures.
I guess what I am trying to say (since this is meant to be a comment on the texts) is that the problems that arise from classification, or the application of knowledge, are ones created from meanings and linguistic inconsistencies/misunderstandings among people. Having one word mean various things to various people makes it nearly impossible to name or classify something (Is it bison, urus, bonasus, or bubalus?). Anthropologists face problems in finding the importance and meaning in what they observe and learn, and in being able to make their knowledge universally understood. If you wrote down the world’s accumulated knowledge in a book, and all life is wiped out in a nuclear holocaust, does that knowledge still exist if nothing can understand it? (I apologize for my comment’s cheesy-ness).
I am posting this for our class on February 9th. Please email me if I am supposed to be submitting this elsewhere. Thank you!
ReplyDeleteFor whatever reason I find myself really drawn to the philosophic and artistic aspects discussed in the readings. I am not completely finished but I wanted to make a few comments and then maybe return to establish a new thought or just bring it to class with me. While reading the piece by Lynch and Law I was really struck by the discussion of what a word or title means in the context of how people find themselves relating to “it”. I realize as a class we have touched on this but find it so relevant to what the most integral parts of museums are- if these things weren’t important and did not have names, if humans could not make a connection to them they simply would not exist. This really gave me a fresh perspective with the taxidermy topic because I really think holding something still not only is scientifically beneficial but gives humans time to process what it is and what it means to us. Blunts piece seemed like a really ironic pairing.
As a statement not addressing anyone in particular, I really take no offense to taxidermy in any context. Animals are extraordinarily abused in much more horrific ways on a conventional level that taxidermy’s “cruelty” really doesn’t hit me as important.
I was really struck by the Lynch and Law piece as well. I've been thinking about how a lot of cultural struggle is really an argument of symbols and meanings. For one particular group a cultural symbol (an idea, word, artifact) could mean one thing, but compared to another’s it could mean something else entirely. This is a strange paradox considering we create meaning based on comparison (you can’t understand up unless you understand down). This creates a strange responsibility for the anthropologist, which has to decipher these symbols while understanding their own subjective nature. I find with the museum that most visitors get in the habit of reading the displays as text. By that I mean insinuating their own interpretation of an object based on their subjective comparison. I think this process is very different from an anthropologist who reads the object on its own terms, because they’re not down playing the significance of an artifact be claiming it’s a primitive parralel of something in our society. In general many of these readings are getting at this tension between the power of understanding, and the idea of absolution in their definition.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to Pictures, Texts, and Objects: The Literary Language Game of Bird-Watching, I don’t think that the author, Michael Lynch and John Law were knocking down the bird watching community in any way. I think that they were trying to highlight the potential flaws of naturalistic classifications and that no nature guide should be the “end all, be all.” The authors dissected three nature guides, the “classic,” A Field Guide to the Birds of the Eastern and Central North America (Roger Troy Peterson), and the newer Audobon Society (Udvardy) and National Geographic (Kastner). Lynch and Law simply took apart the basic components of all these guides and showed their pros and cons.
ReplyDeleteThe shining example of the pros and cons of these guides was their illustrative presentations. Plates, photographs, and paintings are all vital points of reference for the bird watching community but all are arguably subjective and precise at the same time. North America’s plates are a dreamy, and yet almost meticulous point of reference. Audobon’s pictures are nice but can be inaccurate. And National Geographic’s photographs are a rare site for a novice to capture out in the wild. All ways of avian appearance are exemplary on an aesthetic level but should also be taken with a grain of salt. The constant theme of the nature guide contradicting itself positively and negatively is a major point in this article.
Some readers may seek to discredit their critique as pessimistic or a negative view on a simple, albeit nerdy, hobby. Some may even dismiss this study altogether because it isn’t technically a science. However, I interpreted the analysis of bird-watching a metaphor for field guides and classifications in the “official” science world. Law and Lynch are simply saying that natural categories aren’t perfect, because they are constantly being added to or revised and shouldn’t be taken for the gospel. But at the same time they ought not to be so loose that they mislead people from fact, such as the examples of the different types of pictures.
The three bird-watching guides are a guise for museums. Museums are huge natural guides they are just housed and presented differently from a glossy book. To exchange North America, Audobon, and National Geographic for places like the Simsonian, Field Museum, and AMNH is to state that these institutions aren’t infallible and should take care to walk the tight rope between actuality and flexibility.
The readings for this week, Pictures, Texts and Objects, by Michael Lynch and John Law along with The Compleat Naturalist: A Life of Linneaeus by Wilfrid Blunt do much to point out not only the extremely detailed amount of research that went into creating categories of botanical classification, but also the extreme rigor necessary to accurately observe species in the wild. These works are richly exhaustive and provide a detailed history of how classification came about, as well as clean guidance and detail as to how to best observe and record any matter of living species. They provide an excellent background in how classifications were decided upon, the rigorous observation and the immense (seemingly overwhelming) amount of detail that has to be taken into account when a decision is being made. They are all about the powers of observation, but they are boring to read. In contrast to the article Dinosaurs in the Attic, which provided an interesting overview of how the AMNH came to be, these two articles provide a sense of the humdrum, painstakingly comprehensive work that has to be done to assign the classification to an object. They provide the background on the necessary but dull rules and regulations that need to be followed to define and distinctly separate species. This describes what ethnography is all about; the detail required to historically document the origin and filiations of races and cultures, be they human or animal, flora or fauna.
ReplyDeleteThe article Pictures, Texts and Objects makes the point of discussing how there is no single approach that best defines how to depict pictures of what a bird watcher should look for. Although both the Audubon and Peterson’s guides are meant to provide guidance on how categorize observations to reach an end result, there are major distinctions between what they view as important textual and pictorial elements as to what to look for when classifying and identifying species. That is a critically important and underlying tenant to the field of ethnography. For me, the goal of the authors of this work was to impart to the beginning student of classification how important it is to gain first hand observations and descriptions of the world around us, because it is only through careful and thoughtful observing and recording of those observations that we can define and categorize our amazing surroundings.
The Lynch and Law article discusses the different methods that birding field guides use to provide visual demonstrations of different types of birds; mainly whether to use illustrations or photographs, and how detailed the illustrations should be. This discourse--as well as the technical classification discussed in the Blunt article--reminded me of the 'type specimen' brought up in the opening pages of 'Dinosaurs in the Attic.' All of these articles present a desire to set down objective categories of living things, and then to determine an archetypal example of these categories. This natural stereotyping interests me because it actually conflicts with the natural world--whatever standards are agreed upon, there will always be outliers. The need to break down the complex, varied natural world into simple, easily-memorized categories brings to mind Baudrillard's ideas about classification as a means of asserting dominance. Flora and Fauna are exceedingly complex; however, if we can decide that certain characteristics are the 'most important' characteristics, then we can make an impossible task (total knowledge of the infinite natural world) much more manageable.
ReplyDeleteThis is Ellery's response....
ReplyDeleteTo add some diversity to responses I will discuss chapter three of Pickled Heads which introduces ideas of taxonomy. This chapter is well complimented by the others, especially the piece on Linnaeus categorization. When looking at these histories of taxonomy, it’s amazing to explore how humans have evolved with this need to box everything. The way that these ideas began was with the simple need for a subject, and its negation, like the “categories ‘dog’ and not-dog.’” This system of ordering permeates through all aspects of human existence. For instance, this system is how our neurons function as an on/off switch; also, our genes are either in a form of expression or non-expression. Furthermore, we have modeled our machines in this way, in our effort to make machines as close to human thought as possible.
During the older forms of taxonomy, the public had to trust the scientist’s ability to observe an object accurately, although the images and ideas were always religiously charged, displaying God’s diversity but only to then show human superiority. Besides the idealized renditions of reality that were taking place, the words that were used along with the images I found to be very loaded, like the term “freak” that Aldrovandi used to describe chickens and roosters. The public will automatically form judgments when a term like freak is used to describe something. Besides the term “freak,” the drawings themselves are obviously over exaggerated and unrealistic. This period of time embodies the era before science took a major turn toward accuracy and objective observation. In this older time period of idealized nature, people could contract a disease by making God angry or communicating with the Devil. Although science has changed a great deal, it amazes me how much religion still dictates scientific inquiry today.
I particularly liked the pairing of the Asma and Lynch and Law pieces in that they focused on the difficulties of rendering reality in media, both for the purposes of analyzing and making it understandable and for relating it to others. Asma recounts early naturalists' efforts to seek out the "essential character" of objects and their subsequent realization that we perhaps simply may not be equipped to discover what makes a particular thing that thing. Immediately, for me, I imagine that, in the vast and inconceivable scope of all the things that comprise (or may comprise) 'reality', the apparatuses with which we are equipped can likely only detect a very small fraction of that. This is at first, for me and perhaps for the naturalists that realized this as well, rather discouraging. How are we supposed to make sense of the entire landscape what is around us when we're looking at it through the drinking straw that is our senses?
ReplyDeleteThe important resolution to this, I feel, is to understand that, as Asma paraphrases Locke, "boundaries... [are], according to Locke, simply agreed-upon human conventions... Chihuahuas and Great Danes are classed together because we say so" (111). Our perception of the universe is very likely extremely limited and distortive, but this by no means invalidates it. It is simply what we have to work with, and with that knowledge we can (and have) set about ordering our reality in ways that make sense to us. The key to this is honesty and flexibility; acknowledging, for instance, as Amber has mentioned, that certain scientific 'facts' are only things as we understand them at this point in time, under specific conditions, and is subject to change as our narrow field of perception changes. Being candid about the challenges of ordering the natural world, I think, provides a more meaningful experience to the person viewing the information and observations presented, in that it humanizes the endeavor.
The articles for this week provided interesting viewpoints on the issue of classification. What comes to mind immediately are the two, almost wholly different, approaches to taxonomic classification put forth in the Lynch and Law article versus that of Blunt. Lynch and Law have, at the center of the inquiry, a desire for a practical form of field bird identification, or birding. In taking this vein of examination, they are seeking to classify avian species not by what similarities they bear, as Linnaeus did, but by their distinctions. To these authors, a field guide is a certain type of taxonomic order, distinct from the binomial nomenclature, in that it is designed to be as immediately, and intuitively, navigable while making direct observation in the field. Therefore, their greatest concern is in a guidebook’s faithful representation of species, but not necessarily on the level of detail that can be reached with intricate study of an individual. It is Linnaeus who concerned himself more with the little details that betrayed genetic kinship. Linnaeus was not nearly as concerned as the problems that could arise as a result of different artistic interpretations of the same species; rather, he sought to remove interpretation, and attempts at objective, pictorial representation, in lieu of what he considered a more universal classification system: that of binomial nomenclature in what was essentially Medieval Latin. This system takes a far different bent in pursuing a universal identification scheme, as it not as concerned with an essence of wieldliness: while possible to use in the field, it is far more suited to the times pre-and post- field trip. In the distinctions between these two systems, it clearly emerges that no one system of identification is supreme, as it relies entirely upon the context in which it is to be applied. Therefore, as we examine studies in class, it will be interesting to first examine the standards, or classifications, that are being used in each instance, and to use those systems as a starting point for further delving into anthropologic study.
ReplyDeleteI found Pictures, Texts, and Objects, by Michael Lynch and John Law, to be reinforce some ideas, or themes, that have been discussed in class—the attachment of knowledge to nature and our need, as humans, to find order in a disordered world. The “how” and “why” of classification, which Asama also looks at in Taxonomic Intoxication. Through our ability to label and categorize what we see in a naturalistic or aesthetic manner (or observe, as Sherlock Holmes would say), we are unintentionally creating labels and categories that are exclusive while trying to be inclusive. Or, in other words, our systems of classification are attempting to eliminate the “either-ors,” but end up creating “either-ors.” We would like to classify things as the law of noncontradiction states, “A or not-A,” but the meaning assigned to things can vary among people and cultures.
ReplyDeleteI guess what I am trying to say (since this is meant to be a comment on the texts) is that the problems that arise from classification, or the application of knowledge, are ones created from meanings and linguistic inconsistencies/misunderstandings among people. Having one word mean various things to various people makes it nearly impossible to name or classify something (Is it bison, urus, bonasus, or bubalus?). Anthropologists face problems in finding the importance and meaning in what they observe and learn, and in being able to make their knowledge universally understood. If you wrote down the world’s accumulated knowledge in a book, and all life is wiped out in a nuclear holocaust, does that knowledge still exist if nothing can understand it? (I apologize for my comment’s cheesy-ness).