one thing leads to another...always, fortunately or unfortunately

I belong to a generation that cannot read or hear “Dinka and Nuer” without thinking “Evans-Pritchard,” probably because the only core-course lectures on anthropology we heard had to do with Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard (lectures that led some of us to be delighted when we encountered the line from the Fugs’ song “Nothing,” “social anthropology, a heckuva lot of nothing”).

Having long since left behind Evans-Pritchard and his ilk (though his student Mary Douglas’ Natural Symbols was one of those books we swore by rather than at in my youth), I was shocked to learn from the Wikipedia entry that Evans-Pritchard’s youthful fieldwork among the Nuer and the Dinka had begun as recently as 1930. The difference is less than two decades, but I had vaguely placed him with the generation of Malinowski, legendarily stranded in New Guinea as an obviously harmless enemy alien, unable to return to England but allowed by the Australian colonial authorities to potter about with the Trobriand natives. (Incidentally, how many great moments of modernity depended on would-be humdrum intellectual careers being blocked by war and shunted off in different, more consequential directions? I can think of several, but that would be a monumental digression.)

Instead, Evans-Pritchard belongs to that generation of the colonial ’30s that then had intriguing adventures with folks whose descendants also show up in more recent history (he was an administrator in British-occupied Cyrenaica, where he wrote about the Sanusi resistance to Italian colonization, and before that, he had been facilitating guerrilla activity with the Anuak people of South Sudan against the Italian occupation forces in Ethiopia).

“They do say that all things are connected,” goes the line in a traditional teaching story, and although many of the connections are ridiculously inconsequential, some are not.

I cringe at the thought that the Guinea worm eradication program is being put in jeopardy by the mass migration of refugees in Mali and South Sudan, just at the point when eradication seems possible. A few freshly contaminated bodies of water in the adjoining countries, and the disease is off and (almost literally) running again.

authors and the impossible

As I mentioned, I'm looking forward to tackling D. Fox Harrell's Phantasmal Media for its perspectives on how things can or cannot be changed for the better, and by whom and under what circumstances. (The relationship to such movements as Afrofuturism is a side topic of the larger issue, which I state as baldly and stupidly as possible.) Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby's Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming approaches the same problem from the direction of design rather than digital media, and with less awareness of the perspectives of specific ethnic communities; but part of the point is that those perspectives are altering with increasing speed in advanced digital society, anyway. Part of the problem is that those perspectives are being reinforced in other quarters by the dislocations created by advanced digital society, as it is presently constituted. (Joe Nocera's summation, in his January 7 New York Times column, of Jaron Lanier's Who Owns the Future? cites Lanier's point-blank observation that corporations have engaged in technological activities that result in the impoverishment of their own customer base—never mind whether the bottom-rung employees still left are being paid fairly for their services, which is a separate issue from whether there will be enough bottom-rung jobs to keep the potential employment pool from scrambling in desperation to have them. Whether Lanier's core idea makes sense—that of renewing the middle class by paying people for clicks on such things as essays like this one—is a side issue, however important. And discussing how corporations maintain their own sustainability in the face of dwindling demand by investing capital in financial transactions and decreasing employment is most decidedly a side issue en route to where I am going.)

Dunne & Raby may be hopeless utopians in their insistence that keeping imaginative alternatives in play is itself an activity that makes possible a different future. That leads back into some of the questions Harrell is dealing with in Phantasmal Media, and a good many other questions.

What brought me up short, early in the book, was their offhand discussion of defining possibility by showing how little is genuinely impossible, rather than merely improbable. Citing a book (and previous TV series) by Michio Kaku, they state that scientifically, there are only two genuine impossibilities: perpetual motion and precognition. Either one would require a complete reformulation of our present knowledge, whereas some of the most impossible-seeming of other eventualities would not.

Dunne & Raby may well have misconstrued what was meant as an observation meant to grab the attention of a mass audience, but the claim sheds a different light on any number of topics I have written about previously, from the chequered legacy of Ernst Bloch's Das Prinzip Hoffnung to Jeffrey Kripal's attempts to revalorize the only presumptively impossible.