Obviously, in studying the so called "prehistory" my interest was never a descriptive one – to know how “they were in the past”, to tell a story, or the stories that make history in its traditional sense – but when I was young I was fascinated by the mythical problems of “origins” so typical of our culture. Origins of humans, origins of art, origins of thought, origins of architecture and the transformation of landscape, etc.
I know that this historical matrix is mythical – in the sense that there are no "origins" (except in very limited senses), but a continuous unfolding of new things.
Prehistoric archaeology took me very early to a drive into anthropology. I always felt that I needed to get a distance from my own "culture", a Roman-Greek tradition, which functions as a screen to "prehistoric times". "Before the Romans"... it was my field of search - a search of the unknow, of the totally different.
Since the beginnings of the 90’s I have read several papers by Tim Ingold, now Professor at Aberdeen University, Scotland.
Then his book on "The Perception of the Environment" (Routledge, 2000 – pb 2002) appeared, and it was a revelation for me. Ingold is very much in the line of phenomenology, and in the ecological psychology (James Gibson, etc.). Indeed, this is fascinating, because he is changing anthropology entirely.
For instance, the famous distinction from mind and body, from experience and thought, are dissolved. But he goes very much beyond that, because he even proposes a dissolution of the boundaries of biology and psychology, etc. He is envisaging a new synthesis, in a certain way (see his contribution to the book "Cycles of Contingency", ed. by Susan Oyama and others, The MIT Press, 2001).
Of course the very idea of thinking is to get rid of dogmas, whatever they may be, and to be cautions of any fixed set of ideas, even when we admire very much something or some thought. To think is like living in general - to compare, to get and conserve and to discard, to pick from here and there and to try to find your own way.
I do not trust text books, superficial readings, things that I do not have the time to examine carefully by myself. Or, tragically, life does not afford us that availability of time to study anything conveniently, when you are not only domestically concerned with your own “field” - so to speak your cell, or your prison, in fact. To get out of “prison” and "feel free", but not becoming "fool" (taken by a sort of autism), lost, is indeed a very difficult task. Many do not take these risks... It is also a very lonely experience. There is no team work possible in this auto-definition... Although “daily life” forces us to be connected to a multiplicity of experiences.
In 2006 I found the work of Slavok Zizek, a very known author, whose work I completely missed until last April. Here in Portugal, a small country, everything is very difficult to get. Though 5 books of him have been translated into Portuguese that year, after I had his book “On Belief” (Routledge). He is a Lacanian and in a certain way a Hegelian, too.
He has a strange capacity to fly over the entire field of thought and to bring together things that seem to come from very different experiences. Indeed, he his fascinating.
I have bought recently in the UK his last book, "The Parallax View" (MIT Press, 2006), where, among many other things, he refers to the Portuguese specialist of the brain Antonio Damásio.
And at a certain point (p. 227) Zizek writes:
“(...) what am I? I am neither my body (I have a body, I never “am” my body directly, in spite of all the subtle phenomenological descriptions à la Merleau-Ponty that try to convince me to the contrary) (...)”
Probably the question with this (indeed rich and provocative) line of thought is that it is too tied to the old Western opposition between body and soul. Traditional Africans, Amazonians, etc, do not (or did not) make this kind of distinctions.
Probably that was always the problem with all the “psy” ways of knowledge, including psychoanalysis, since Freud. It is a fantastic and imaginative modern construction, which opened an entire new landscape, but... it is a very difficult and diversified field, subject to continuous dispute. Just think of Jacques Lacan, for instance... the revolution that he provoked!
But the crossing between psychoanalysis and anthropology was never an easy one, in spite of the importance that the anthropological knowledge of the time had in the very elaboration of Freud's explanations.
The basic question (I guess) persists: do we need, to start thinking, or simply to think, to imagine some "black holes", some invisible areas, in order to comprehend the visible? The unconscious could be one of those "black holes" or "boxes". Something hiden, but in spite of it, a fundamental mover...
I mean, after all, that even if we may think that Marx, or Freud, or Darwin were wrong in many aspects, their thought was obviously a fantastic construct, that made us enter into a completely new way of feeling and thinking. It is crucial to read them, not just to read small introductions on them...
It is through these great visionaries that we can make some steps ahead. They turn on lights, and, in doing so, at the same time they open around them an enormous field of interrogations, of indeterminations, of "invisible".
Anyway, to desire to change everything into the clear and the visible would not be a ridiculous and supreme reductionism? This sounds so much to the typically Western privilege of sight...
Let us keep searching..."truth" is like a seductive woman (sorry for the androcentric point...), a specialist in playing games. But without games life would be just boring. "Games for adults", if available...
Source of photo: http://www.mdx.ac.uk/rescen/
archive/catalyst204.html
I know that this historical matrix is mythical – in the sense that there are no "origins" (except in very limited senses), but a continuous unfolding of new things.
Prehistoric archaeology took me very early to a drive into anthropology. I always felt that I needed to get a distance from my own "culture", a Roman-Greek tradition, which functions as a screen to "prehistoric times". "Before the Romans"... it was my field of search - a search of the unknow, of the totally different.
Since the beginnings of the 90’s I have read several papers by Tim Ingold, now Professor at Aberdeen University, Scotland.
Then his book on "The Perception of the Environment" (Routledge, 2000 – pb 2002) appeared, and it was a revelation for me. Ingold is very much in the line of phenomenology, and in the ecological psychology (James Gibson, etc.). Indeed, this is fascinating, because he is changing anthropology entirely. For instance, the famous distinction from mind and body, from experience and thought, are dissolved. But he goes very much beyond that, because he even proposes a dissolution of the boundaries of biology and psychology, etc. He is envisaging a new synthesis, in a certain way (see his contribution to the book "Cycles of Contingency", ed. by Susan Oyama and others, The MIT Press, 2001).
Of course the very idea of thinking is to get rid of dogmas, whatever they may be, and to be cautions of any fixed set of ideas, even when we admire very much something or some thought. To think is like living in general - to compare, to get and conserve and to discard, to pick from here and there and to try to find your own way.
I do not trust text books, superficial readings, things that I do not have the time to examine carefully by myself. Or, tragically, life does not afford us that availability of time to study anything conveniently, when you are not only domestically concerned with your own “field” - so to speak your cell, or your prison, in fact. To get out of “prison” and "feel free", but not becoming "fool" (taken by a sort of autism), lost, is indeed a very difficult task. Many do not take these risks... It is also a very lonely experience. There is no team work possible in this auto-definition... Although “daily life” forces us to be connected to a multiplicity of experiences.
In 2006 I found the work of Slavok Zizek, a very known author, whose work I completely missed until last April. Here in Portugal, a small country, everything is very difficult to get. Though 5 books of him have been translated into Portuguese that year, after I had his book “On Belief” (Routledge). He is a Lacanian and in a certain way a Hegelian, too.
He has a strange capacity to fly over the entire field of thought and to bring together things that seem to come from very different experiences. Indeed, he his fascinating.
I have bought recently in the UK his last book, "The Parallax View" (MIT Press, 2006), where, among many other things, he refers to the Portuguese specialist of the brain Antonio Damásio.
And at a certain point (p. 227) Zizek writes:
“(...) what am I? I am neither my body (I have a body, I never “am” my body directly, in spite of all the subtle phenomenological descriptions à la Merleau-Ponty that try to convince me to the contrary) (...)”
Probably the question with this (indeed rich and provocative) line of thought is that it is too tied to the old Western opposition between body and soul. Traditional Africans, Amazonians, etc, do not (or did not) make this kind of distinctions.
Probably that was always the problem with all the “psy” ways of knowledge, including psychoanalysis, since Freud. It is a fantastic and imaginative modern construction, which opened an entire new landscape, but... it is a very difficult and diversified field, subject to continuous dispute. Just think of Jacques Lacan, for instance... the revolution that he provoked!
But the crossing between psychoanalysis and anthropology was never an easy one, in spite of the importance that the anthropological knowledge of the time had in the very elaboration of Freud's explanations.
The basic question (I guess) persists: do we need, to start thinking, or simply to think, to imagine some "black holes", some invisible areas, in order to comprehend the visible? The unconscious could be one of those "black holes" or "boxes". Something hiden, but in spite of it, a fundamental mover...
I mean, after all, that even if we may think that Marx, or Freud, or Darwin were wrong in many aspects, their thought was obviously a fantastic construct, that made us enter into a completely new way of feeling and thinking. It is crucial to read them, not just to read small introductions on them...
It is through these great visionaries that we can make some steps ahead. They turn on lights, and, in doing so, at the same time they open around them an enormous field of interrogations, of indeterminations, of "invisible".
Anyway, to desire to change everything into the clear and the visible would not be a ridiculous and supreme reductionism? This sounds so much to the typically Western privilege of sight...
Let us keep searching..."truth" is like a seductive woman (sorry for the androcentric point...), a specialist in playing games. But without games life would be just boring. "Games for adults", if available...
Source of photo: http://www.mdx.ac.uk/rescen/
archive/catalyst204.html
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