Dry Season

Dry season is a bit of a misnomer, actually. Even in dry season there are still things moving and growing and living and dying.

On that thought maybe dry season is an appropriate description of my current itation. It is easy to become disheartened with a seeming lack of results or much vaunted progress, particularly when not institutionalised in some academic field. So instead I guess I'll have to turn back here and write what's been on my mind of late in that direction.


Seven Names for the Bellbird
I met a visiting ethnoorinthologist, who suggested this book on conservation geography. I must say that I do not think it is the most captivating book, but similar to "Behind the Smile" discussing Bajan tourism, the author has definitely been trotting around and taken some degree of insight into the situation. I wonder about this caliber of ethnography, which I find difficult to think of as particularly noteworthy, but is technically sound and not unpleasant to read. What distinguishes it from higher calibre works? I guess perhaps the value of conclusions and the way that they are presented. The narrative tone is delicate: too little and the work seems mechanical and boring, whereas too much and it seems like a thinly disguised travelogue.

At the same time it makes me think, and it makes me look for the historical continuum of texts that any further discussion should be versed in when it comes to "Caribbean and Central/Latin/South America" and the social sciences. Of particular concern is the analogue in another setting: for instance a book on fish markets and the centre/periphery economic movement in Tokyo, and one in Mwanza. How can one find all the precedents without painstaking research and sometimes dumb blind luck? It further begs the question, what is good writing? How does the author construct a new text within the established framework that any scholar must pay at the very least lip service to?


Moshe Feldenkrais
My first reading was a work of his on judo, where the technical section was prefaced by an extraordinarily articulate argument for the study of judo as an educational method. So I decided to read his "Awareness of Movement" and promptly got struck. Have not finished yet.

Suddenly I'm looking at something (the later developed Feldenkrais Method) that is eerily reminiscent of RMA breathwork, with reasonable axioms for motion such as efficiency over effort, and changing the relationship between the individual and their self-image to overstand chronic pain, poor structure, etc.

But it is the reasoning that he lays out that makes me believe the man is a serious character. In very simple language he outlines social theory as related through human movement and awareness of movement with such candor that I kept checking to make sure I wasn't reading a social sciences manuscript.

I understand that there are practitioners. I think some might be in the same city. Time and resources permitting, I am genuinely intrigued.