A dream from the other night: *friend's cat butts head and affectionately rubs against my hand while sprawled out in front of me*
I'm curious about what prompted the sudden affection.
"Tell me the different words you know for love."-cat named Kitty Smalls looking intently with eyes wide open
*me, surprised the cat is literally talking to me--? But, try to be present and make the most of the occasion to engage*
"Well, huh there's amorous, romance, tüng in Vietnamese, gizaagin in Anishinaabemowen, and a bunch of words in Greek and latin that I can try to name off. Like philae, a love from hardship, solidarity and camaraderie; ludos, the playful kind of love like when kindly teasing or dancing and joking with someone. Eros which is a sort of physical/romantic love which I think can apply to platonic cases too. Pragma--practical love through actions; storge, familial love like when you appreciate a sibling or cousin; agape for humanity which I think is a bit like the African concept of Ubuntu in maybe Zulu. I think that's most of what I know… ?"
Kitty Smalls: looks with a pause, head angled staring at me, still mostly upside down before "speaking" with great confidence as it resumes writhing with contentment.
"Ah, you see--I don't know anything about those words. But not knowing them doesn't diminish the fact that I want to express something and that it all means the same thing to me. How would it be fair if I had to know any of them to love someone?"
…
I guess the set up to the dream was quietly about wanting to know why the cat wanted to give affection to me.
In waking life, we all kind of know about the idea that love is love etc. and depending on how I feel, I'd probably get a bit agitated that someone were telling me what I already know.
But no explanation is really needed for being present with kindness from anyone, even yourself. Ever. And that can be really challenging to trust and accept at times. Hope that helps for whoever needed to hear this.
I don’t think it should be controversial if there’s honest accountability for what the colonization of names entailed. How often are overdue but sincere apologies controversial among people who are interested and willing to do the right thing?
Decolonizing the name of a place is often a step toward acknowledging the cultural genocide imposed on the people who originally live/d there considering how often erasure of a language and culture is tied to the negation and dehumanization of people.
On many nations, the names of places are sacred in that they often connect people to sense of purpose and cosmology — it’s not just the name of a person, it might be part of their creation story, or the language is a form of inductive reasoning once you learn the context to its words.
While Western Science is premised on process for discerning replicable truths mostly through deductive reasoning, several languages embed ways of knowing or looking at the context for existence into the meaning of their words — the language is often a direct device for inductive scientific reasoning, not just a means to deducting how things come to be, behave, or are.
I wish I knew enough Vietnamese etymology and linguistics to point to my own heritage but I can point people to consider Ojibwemowen which is one of the indigenous languages spoken where I live — gichigami tends to refer to “big water” or “fresh water sea” as I understand it and is suffixed to the name of our various Great Lakes. Linked you’ll see a map of the Great Lakes from an Ojibwe point of view — the map is East Facing in accord with their creation story.
Apparently Gaa-zhigaagowanzhigokaag (At the Place Abundant with Skunk-grass) describes what most of us now know as Chicago, IL; Gaa-zhigaagowanzhigokaag even in a simplified translation says a lot about the potential soil, ecology, and climate conditions in ways that Chicago, IL does not.
If we think about how invasive species disrupt an ecosystem from ecological point of view as analogous to colonizing names for places, there’s an apt parallel: the connections that often uphold a community in name, relationship, and refined experiences that become reliable truths over time are often severed.
The word for Autumn, Dagwaagan, has been translated by some as “the time for bending trees”
As I think of it: in many places throughout the NE United States, you can find bent trees that often served as major trail markers or sign posts pre and post colonization by native people.
Bend a tree in the spring and the growth spurts throughout the season can rupture part of the tree just like how tomatoes will burst with stretch marks when there’s too much rain after a drought. But in the fall, a tree is on its way to dormancy and the various growth hormones do not come into play until after the winter subsides into springtime. It’s reasonably the best time of year to bend a tree without risking great harm to it.
Granted these are a few examples gleaned by a non-native learner from an entire language — it’d be a logical fallacy to claim one word or name represents everything so do what you want if you feel the data is insufficient.
If I could dig up the Radiolab episode for an optical phenomenon (Zimulski effect? some Russian name) that Arctic indigenous people used as a way to gauge shifts in climate I’d link it here as an example also.
But on the whole, I think it’s important to consider decolonization as a process for recognizing and acknowledging that there’s intrinsic value and context for people and different epistemological methods beyond the Western approach.
I’ll add that decolonizing the sciences like Geology likely makes it easier to tackle abstract issues like Climate Change and even defending science-based guidance.
From a scientist’s point of view: Localizing contexts to different ways of validating certain realities that don’t require the kind of institutional resources climate and air quality data we normally use (which is still important).
But beyond that, the kind of social + public engagement necessary to connect, respect, and learn or reconcile different epistemological and cultural approaches is sorely needed.
In a society where we can hardly communicate basic public health, medical, and epidemiological scientific guidance for safety with residents (and government officials[!]) who are vulnerable to mis/dis-information and obfuscating rhetoric — consider the US President and much of his supporting base, not to mention low-income people or the MANY people living in places where fundamental education for scientific literacy and climate science are non-existent.
Navigation for most “wicked problems/processes/systems” like climate change or COVID-19 eventually boil down to cultural, social, and behavioral challenges — the scientists and other technical professionals tend to figure out the answer or at least good guidance earlier on than what the public (including the politicians who “represent” them) is willing and able to accept.
In large part it’s because most scientific findings are disseminated piecemeal and haphazardly with little guidance on how to process or embrace what it means and how dynamic the prescriptive approaches tend to be.
The information yielded is often imposed in ways that the public has no meaningful stake in aside from dependency on a small population of trained professionals and their institutions. Those institutions were never designed for public engagement — and the media has little to no incentive for accurate and precise scientific communication reporting when most results are really about “risks” and putting nuanced disclaimers for “statistical significance” [very important, but rarely to the media] and a call for “further research needed” to validate a study.
“Citizen”/”Community” Science initiatives like Project Budburst (phenology which potentially points to climate change — budburst.org for those who want to check it out; this is probably the best time of year to get involved if so!) provide a glimmer of hope and are a step in a positive direction. It can potentially scale out scientific inquiry and learning much faster than we’re used to seeing from academia.
But more often than not, the average participant tends to be used as a data funnel for scientists rather than being given the literacy and agency to shape actual experimentation or study at a local level.
Taking the deliberate path to decolonizing (and maybe even re-indigenizing) science eventually leads us to a more robust range of capabilities for addressing what we need so long as we’re willing to look at the skills embedded in the endeavor beyond the compatibility of expected outcomes and epistemic paradigms.
While I was in college, a band featuring a Khmer lead vocalist (Cambodian retro-psychadelic pop) called Dengue Fever -- and the most haunting tune on their featured album was one called "Sleepwalking on the Mekong"
As a language among Asians, Vietnamese is supposedly described as the most melodic -- and from a pure tonal linguistic point of view, I can agree as it's got numerous nuances to tone and inflection in ways that can differ even from some Chinese languages and dialects (though I'll note it's not necessarily the smoothest in flow compared to something like Shanghainese).
So starting from a musical frame of mind, Khmer is easiest to distinguish from Vietnamese (at least to me as a relatively foreign listener) by the hard constonant gracenotes at the beginning of certain words and phrases. At a glance, attempting to pronounce the Cambodian capitol, Phnom Penh, might be the most visible example-- the "P" sound runs directly into the "n" right away. So to an English speaker, it sounds a bit like like a stutter between two consonents.
Vietnamese however tends to be pretty straight forward and feels relatively simplistic in its conciseness--one starting consonant per syllable. No rhythmic complexity at the start of any words.
ANyhow, I brought all this up to highlight some interesting similarities (and my sort of sibling-like love for what little I understand about the Khmer language, culture, music, and people) because there are a few South Vietnamese songs from the 1960s-70s that shares a very similar cadence to Dengue Fever's song "Sleepwalking on the Mekong" and I wanted to put the two here side by side for us to listen and compare as they share some interesting similarities in aesthetic and maybe composition too if not by aesthetic.
[will post links here later when I'm not supposed to be sleeping]
As a far off side note: I was curious about Baltimore's (greetings from the region) incinerator and assumed that they had the situation quietly under wraps--it turns out the state of Maryland recently came down on the operators and require it to reduce emissions by 1/5th as recently as August of 2018 haha
With the newly elected governor and other officials in Michigan's executive and legislative branch, I suspect we'll have new advocacy opportunities that might sway how we can shift the landscape of air pollution in communities afflicted by it (especially in Detroit).
Gretchen Whitmer, Garlin Glichrist, and Stephanie Chang here we come! Save us a slot in your calendars for a phone call or meeting won't you please?
Imagine a friend hands you a bundle of knotted thread and you smile without breaking eye contact as you "read" what it says without looking. This is what the Incan knot system, qhipu, likely let people do--you could "read the threads" by looking, and probably "read" simpler threads by feel too.
It's also why it's silly to judge others and assume "written language" and "thinking in words" is the only form of tangible or abstract path for communication or the only way to think. A good chunk of the time, people often make hasty calls choosing convenience over learning the nuances -- only to live in the irony of their own arrogance when time makes its final call.
"English is the first form of programming most of us learn."-Onyx Ashanti
Language is the first form of programming that people learn, and it often reveals a lot about how people tend to think, how they organize, and what governance tends to look like too. We can only infer, but from the article it sounds like the government and economy functioned very similarly to the way the qhipu is made and organized: federalized with a control economy, much like how one core thread serves to anchor lots of other pieces in place.
When you look at how English (and likely other Western, especially Romance, languages) is written and constructed, much of it points toward consolidation and objectification--about 70% of the language exists as nouns --"people, places, or things" -- relationships are frequently couched in transactional terms, and how we refer to non-people also lends it to "thingness".
i.e. "Who owns that dog?" remains reflexive vs. "Who leads that dog?"
We're still in an age that, for most U.S. Americans, comfortably refers to other living things from a frame of ownership -- just a few percentage points away in DNA from chattel slavery.
In an excerpt from the book, Braiding Sweetgrass, the author notes that Potawatomi (an Aanishinaabemowen language -- so related to Ojibwe and shares some common roots with Algonquinaak* [the name for the Algonquin language?] ) is comprised of about 75% verbs. Lots of the things we consider as things in their noun-form are described in states of being. The rock is being, a river is being, etc.
So imagine referring to a trail or road as a noun and verb at the same time--"I MichiganAvenued [to] work today." would mean you drove on Michigan Avenue, which might imply all of its potholes, construction, and traffic patterns that are typical of the avenue for where you live. The place and thing has its own dynamicism while maintaining a degree of specificity to it that doesn't need to become an abstract geographic fact to memorize disconnected from the rest of its social and physical context. One beauty of a language with this orientation offers is that it suddenly puts almost everything we engage into context as a relationship--things suddenly have a degree of action, dynamicism, and maybe even agency to them.
Verbs are the grammatical abstraction of a relationship -- it's an action which implies cause, consequence, and something or one as a party to initiate or orient around the action. Relationships invite the opportunity for more nuanced ethical consideration -- we're literally called to reckon how an action to a relationship might affect an entity that's likely connected to its own set of behaviors and relationships.
There are more examples which you can read from the Braiding Sweetgrass book or hear at a discussion from Dylan Atminer who introduced it to many Detroiters this year, but for now let's return to news about the quipu and the research connected to it.
What's also exciting about this research that helps us relearn the literacy and thinking behind the quipu is that the techniques for decrypting it likely translate well into physical gestures too--know how to communicate using common syllables, words, or general concepts and you can assign them to physical movements. That's something my friend Onyx is playing with as he develops his own sono-cybernetic system.
From http://ciencias.pe/sites/default/files/styles/slide_principal/public/field/image/quipu-wari.jpg?itok=vPsFV8mw
NOTE: this post was edited part way on Nov. 30th when I realized I forgot to finish a sentence that actually connected to an entire section about other languages hehe . References:
Clarifying an ambiguous concept; co-opting a common word
There's a video floating on the internet from a woman who contends she doesn't need feminism and thoughtfully explains why:
What she really highlights is a problem about how nuanced academic concepts get lost in public advocacy--her arguments apply more to feminist advocates and organizations.
To many, she still qualifies as a feminist. Specifically because she's pointing out injustices which men experience that people don't hear. I'll explain:
Feminism (in academia) at the core is about power inequality (doesn't matter for what gender or group of people), and by questioning the way we tend to look at power dynamics [1]. Feminism focuses on prevailing oppression and the injustice that an oppressed/minority group tends to suffer in situations that could be resolved ethically.
Unfortunately, the way the language is used, feminism sounds like it dismisses all the other realities that men face.
It's a lot like how #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter hashtag users run into dispute, or when scholars/social justice practitioners talk about "blackness/whiteness" without giving appropriate context and room for the public to take ownership of a word that seems like it had a common definition.
It sounds divisive because the labels seem to focus on the issues on face (black people and white people--similar to the way feminism comes across as 100% a divide between females and males), rather than the dynamics of the relationship that makes one group dominant or oppressive.
Lauren (the woman in the video) brings great perspective from the practical/advocacy side of things--all the stats and her arguments work, she takes ownership of the word "feminism" from a different (valid) perspective.
I'm willing to guess the core group of people who really drive the "movement" for feminism (or even the racial justice movements) have yet to recognize or acknowledge how the name "feminism" can lead to confusion to someone new to the idea don't realize it can cover more than just the genders implied by the name.
It's a severe flaw in the way we use "fuzzy" language, or when a group of people take ownership of ideas that seemed to have common appeal and understanding.
After this becomes public understanding, developing guidelines with peoples' "rights and responsibilities" for common language seems like the next step for people to take.
The fundamental ethical (and practical) question revolves around asking:
"how much right do individuals, or a significant population of people have for taking ownership of a common word or phrase's meaning?"
Today, conservatism and progressivism exemplify very specific political ideologies and histories in the U.S. Conservatism rarely if ever means including land conservation to a politician unless they want to appeal to the "outdoor sportsman" (AKA Hunting/Fishing) community. Progressive now gets stigmatized with government-sponsored care programs, rather than government policy that breaks out of political gridlock and actually functions to serve the people it's supposed to serve. It's frighteningly easy to associate
[1] Feminism, see it in action here! Julie Nelson's critique about how most economists avoid ethics in their considerations, what it means for making "objective" interpretations, and how feminism applies to it. http://scholarworks.umb.edu/econ_faculty_pubs/32/
Tragedy of the Commons: http://college.usatoday.com/2015/07/17/psychology-professors-tricky-extra-credit-question-goes-viral/
Real-life Tragedy of The Commons examples:
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/ten-reallife-examples-of-the-tragedy-of-the-common.html
Beating the Tragedy of the Commons: http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/bitstream/handle/10535/8104/Elinor_How%20Communities%20Beat%20the%20Tragedy%20of%20the%20Commons%20(Slides).pdf?sequence=1
I just realized that blues music has its own lexicon. A singer isn't necessarily limited to these words, but hearing words like "rollin'", "crossroads", and "river" is a lot more comforting in familiarity than words like "transcend". Yet if you do it right, you can slip a few words that we don't always find among the usual company of words.
Keep on rollin'
You know that we can all transcend time.
If only I knew solfège or the chords to what's in my head well enough to convey the tune in writing...
. . .
Also, again "Industry does not behoove humanity..." I had a remarkably productive day, but if asked whether I enjoyed it, I know I barely settled in enough to savor its many bright moments. That's disappointing, you can say to yourself: look at all of these things I've checked off a list! How industrious of me! Yet at day's end, when you've calmed yourself just enough to start to appreciate the day, you realized you've lost something. It's the humane side of things that warms the memory of a day.
Drawing from the public's attention on the violence of recent events (particularly talk of escalation between Israel and Palestine, the shootings at Sandy Hooke, and a shooting I was in), I wrote a note to colleagues encouraging them to familiarize themselves with the emergency procedures, and to begin developing a department-specific emergency plan. However, I still think the best thing we can do comes from being kind and sincere in our encounters with people.
This year I've been around malicious gunfire that was so close I could taste the gunpowder shortly after the aroma reached my nose. The incident I was in happened between extended family members, and it didn't surprise me to see and hear it happen. Violence swiftly escalated from language into physical pushing, shoving, and punching which eventually turned into gunshots and a brutal beating in response to the shooter.
I suspect the notion of love is antithetical to this situation. I understand compassion, it's been illustrated in tremendous experiences for me this year. Yet what if people don't know love? I appreciate peace, but similarly, what if most people actually don't know peace? Despite popular assertions that they can be found in simple expressions, peace and love are complicated concepts to substantiate, and it's almost inconceivable for those who lived much of their lives with an oppressive and abusive environment. If anything, we human beings fundamentally understand the notion of hope before we understand the nature of peace and love.
I'll say it again: More people probably understand hope better than they do love.
Truly, not everyone knows what love is or grew up with meaningful exposure to it and therefore, more people lack meaningful understanding of it than we’d assume or wish. People do, however, recognize compassion and reprieve from hostile situations on a more frequent basis.
Look at international relations as an example of a similar misunderstanding between war (analogous to hate) and peace (analogous to love):
Reprieve from dire hostility (i.e. war/sectarian violence, etc.) becomes labeled improperly (and thereby assumed/presumed understood) as “peace”; similarly, peace-keeping forces (actually security forces) designated by the UN aren’t actually an authentic indication of peace, they provide a crucial opportunity for fostering authentic peace by creating a more secure environment.
Hostility, and hatred, both still allow for hope—a special kind of opportunity with positive possibilities, at least for a particular individual or group of entities who carry the same hope(s).
Hatred is a choice to engage in certain behaviors present within our nature, but does not constitute our nature in its entirety. Hatred operates upon unreasonable hostility, and a deep inclination for humans (and other species) to reciprocate perceived behaviors tit-for-tat.
[War: communication and artificial environment (creates structure) Hatred: unreasonable consciousness/mindset/worldview that perpetuates the circumstances necessary for war.] For local examples of environments and histories that have strong influence over how an individual perceives their choices and behaviors:
A few friends of mine confessed to me that they had seriously considered suicide in the past, or present. One of them considered it out of shame, the other out of frustration in knowing that his intimate partner only wants the relationship to satisfy her physical desires. The first lived in a neighborhood of Detroit where the average lifespan of his friends and family was about 35 years old due to systemic violence. The other also grew up in Detroit, and has a family history of suicide, bipolar disorder, and/or manic depression. Those are real questions: will I need to accept the legacy of the place I grew up in or family I come from as the trajectory of my own life?
In retrospect, both of them are the first in their families in several generations to leave the area they grew up in, graduate high school or earn a G.E.D., they're also the first of their families to attend a University.
I considered the same and share the same question too, though I know I'm about 8 steps ahead thanks to a few friends who've astutely pointed out that: you are not your family. Similarly, we, as individuals, aren't our cities or communities. We have choices and new opportunities While I'm not vigorously trained in the physical aspects of the martial art known as aikido, I strive to live its principles. In aikido, one acknowledges and embraces an assailant's momentum to direct it elsewhere for a mutually favorable outcome. It's a profound alternative to traditional thinking in fighting and conflict resolution: normally the only way to end a fight is to prevent it or combat power with power to win. That's how war and most fights start to devolve until threats are eliminated.
We have choices and new opportunities now. Let's start with the hope we'll create peace for everyone involved.
