The term origin does not mean the process of becoming of that which has emerged, but much more, that which emerges out of the process of becoming and disappearing. The origin stands in the flow of becoming as a whirlpool. .. .
-Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic DramaLike nature, culture, and its glamorous sibling global, local is one of those deeply compromised words our language will not relinquish. So central to so many anthropological projects, it is unlikely to be transcended; instead it continues to be both fought over and reinvigorated. In this article, I imagine the topography of what we might call a methodology of locality. In trying to understand how we can do our thinking about the local, I begin with a disarmingly transparent question: How, in all its specificity, does this place that holds our attention come into being? Pursuing this puzzle provokes ripples of association that shape interpretation like contour lines on a map, destabilize naturalized binaries, and shadow the unruly series of concentric circles through which a place is tied into multiple worlds.The most proximate circles are also, as Walter Benjamin suggests, immediate sites of danger and confusion. One finds, for example, a dark confluence of whirlpools at the very heart of the story of Igarape Guariba, the small place in the Amazon estuary I describe in what follows (see Figure I). 1 There is, for one, the giddying vortex of Brazilian national politics during the 1960s, a trauma that produced the regional dislocations of modernist highway construction, the violating histories of land conflict and expropriation, and the eventual fluorescence of international deforestation discourse.
In this article, I examine the life and career of Henry Walter Bates, both for its intrinsic interest and in an effort to understand some of the scale-making activities through which Amazonia became a region. Bates, a distinguished entomologist who spent the years 1848-59 in the Amazon basin, returned to Britain to write the most famous of the 19th-century accounts of regional life. Examining Bates's intellectual and philosophical formations, his fieldwork experience in the context of a turbulent Amazonian politics, and his relationships with metropolitan and colonial natural scientific institutions, I offer a thick history of practice as a strategy for analyzing the complex productivities of Victorian traveling science. [Amazonia, collecting, colonialism, fieldwork, natural science, region, space] History begins at ground level, with footsteps.- Michel de Certeau (1985:129) American Ethnologist 28M):51 3-548.
The environment itself is full of free and nonteleological energies-trade winds and storms, oceans streaming over three-fourths of the planet, drifting continental plates, cordilleras of the deep that erupt in volcanic explosions, and miles-deep glaciers piled up on Antarctica that flow into the sea and break off in bobbling icemountains. How can the passions of penguins, albatrosses, jaguars, and humans not lift their eyes beyond the nests and the lairs and the horizons? How can these passions not sink into volcanic rock and the oceanic deserts?-Alphonso Lingis 1 Twenty-five years is a long time. Long enough for a book to sediment and fossilize. Long enough to assess its seismic impact on the discipline. Long enough to absorb the aftershocks. 2 That's 25 years in human time. In geologic time, it's only the slightest breath. 3 The vastness of geologic time is simultaneously incomprehensible and banal. When I began writing about stone, I imagined the relation between geologic and human time as a question of scale. But now, after a year's immersion in stone's vibration, I'm more attuned to the movements of minerals, protons, and photons, to the build-and-decay-and-uplift-and-assimilation, and realize that what preoccupied me occupies me too. Scale is only a small question in this question.
Antisemitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness. In just the same way, antisemitism, for us, has not been a question of ideology, but a matter of cleanliness, which now will soon have been dealt with. We shall soon be deloused. We have only 20,000 lice left, and then the matter is finished within the whole of Germany.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.