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Claire from New Orleans here. I finally read this last night on my way back to NOLA from ‘away’, and I spent a good part of my drive back into New Orleans thinking about it.

Actually, I thought about it at a point in the drive when I was in the middle of two huge weather fronts. It’s very common down here to have a beautiful day with a horrendous storm front blow through. The rain is torrential, but it’s duration is usually short. As I drove into that meeting point between the fronts I thought about something you wrote in The Power of the Between that has stuck with me:

“Multiple realities exist within distinct and permeable universes of meaning. From a phenomenological perspective your experience is the key to reducing distances between universes of meaning. As experience expands with time, the boundaries of the universes may begin to intersect, creating an arena of shared space and interpretation.”

My own experience in the Gulf region, particularly in rural Acadiana, has led me to understand that the BP oil spill has been a meeting of two fronts: the creeping crisis of environmental degradation and the very unsustainable dyad of oil and fishing, both central ways of life here for almost 100 years. Like your multiple universes, and my weather fronts, this disaster has brought an expedited realization of a very slow crisis… at least in these parts.

I remember having brunch with some folks down here right around the time you wrote this post. Of course we were talking about the spill and one woman said something that caught me: “We don’t even know how to make meaning of this. We just can’t understand it in any way.” What she meant was that we didn’t yet have a cognitive structure to make this crisis fit into our way of knowing disaster or the world.

Which is why we need to send in the scholars! Particularly the anthropologists. Now that the journalists and politicians are gone (except for our particularly pernicious local variety- big like the cockroaches), it is time for the long slow look at what this disaster means. What does this magnitude of environmental damage mean? What does it mean when you pack it on top of so many others, with others looming near in the future? The Gulf coast is really a physical place where we are being forced to see the outcome of our structured manipulation of the natural world… and the picture is ugly. This is a story that is unfolding, even as it recedes from the front of the news wire.

After the spill a lot of people asked me if I wasn’t interested in researching the affect of the oil spill on culture in Acadiana, instead of food in New Orleans Post-K. I thought about that and realized that my work in New Orleans on food after Katrina was in the slow, “boring” stage for most folks. The cameras were gone and people were sick of hearing about poor New Orleans.

All the more reason to study it. That disaster is not over here, and the new crisis only compounds it, makes it more complex. I think that is what ethnographers do, and what makes them so valuable, they stick around and tell the story as it unfolds in time. As those two fronts meet and new realities of meaning open up not just for individuals but for whole societies.

Anyway, that’s my life’s work… in no small part, thanks to you. I look forward to seeing you in New Orleans and hope to show you at least a bit of my world here.

Peace in your travels,

Claire

I have been thinking about the virtuality of the western world some time ago. Your post reminds me of an issue I lived in Munich, at the ethnology and africanistic institute. I remember there was a group of students discussing about what they could do, to help X country in Africa that was suffering form civil war. I asked them, if they knew or talked to the stewards from the institute’s kitchen. They nodded, although they had seen them. They where immigrants from Africa, who got asylum in Germany. I found funny that they where thinking about helping a whole country, thousands of Km away from Germany, but where unconscious of the people near them, the ones they could talk with, or help… or at least to hear THEIR point of view of the situation. But that’s too difficult. One (especially ethno/anthropo-logists) needs cognitive humbleness; the courage to accept, that one could be wrong about the idea of the world… specially if it’s nourished by the media. Most people seem to wanna change the world, but, if the world is a description, a cultural reality… wouldn’t it be more easy to change our perception of it?

Great post! Tkx for posting!

Mateo Kupstys Chica

I’m a Colombian ethnologist, interested in crosscultural communication, and ethnology of the senses. Studied ethnology in Munich-Germany for 5 years (unfortunately couldn’t end it).
I find your work majestic and inspiring. It’s difficult to get your books here, so this blog is a great source for me.

Congrats, keep the good work and thank you very much for sharing your knowledge with the world!

Mateo Kupstys Chica

Fascinating that you bring this up, because part of the paper about you which I indicated I am writing (strangely enough, on the same day you made your first post in a year)addresses information culture & how information arrives pre-verified and presumably totalized and totalizing, creating an unearned assurance of mastery for the reader or viewer. As you know, information–which Derrida treats in his essay The Principle of Reason (Eyes of the University) and Benjamin on his essay on Storytelling–and expedience are inseparable.

Interesting also, I was actually just thinking about the oil spill in the context of addressing globalization in my paper. I couldn’t agree more with your statements.

My professor and mentor for my current studies (I am still extremely fresh to all this!) on critical theory and Africa is Dr. Christopher Wise at Western Washington University. He indicated that he once corresponded with you.

Thank you for your thoughts. I will read loyally as you continue writing.
Mara