"This is due in large measure to the photographic images produced by scientific projects such as the Créqui-Montfort Expedition".
The above quotation ends the paragraph that, like many academic paragraphs do, leeches significance from the broth of life. I wonder what of life is not significant? More specifically, how many assumptions of relevance might be made before an academic article feels right? I've come to the paper by Gabriella Zamorano who is working out of El Colegio De Michoacán. Frankly, I only now read the name of the writer/analyst. I only now found the name of their institution. Only now identified that this school is likely in a Latin American country, that the scholar is female. I didn't consider either identifier until I looked more closely at the title page. I didn't think it significant. Now I do. I haven't yet decided in what way.
It feels wrong to me to assume to what measure Zamorano's identity plays in the analysis of the knowledge presented (and left out) of this academic paper. I'm realizing now that the academic genre is an important one to this blog entry. I've highlighted this specific genre both in talking about paragraphs and now in a paper. This distinction of writing being academic has significance to me as I am writing. So much so, that I wrote it and then noticed I wrote it. In my mind I had used this term a few times up to now. I stopped writing to count. I found only two instances and considered fining a way to edit in the term another time or two. Then I thought this would be dishonest. It would be too contrived, even for an academic blog.
I am not particularly interested in Zamorano's identities. Like with narratives of other kinds, I most enjoy those that subvert genre. I certainly want to recognize something as a narrative. I certainly have favored forms of narrative. I don't much like poetry and sitting to read a play (especially a poetic play) is largely tedious. So, genre hold significance to me. Once I am familiar with a genre, I like the kinds that play with the form. The same will hold true with the human genre. And now I suspect otherwise... Perhaps I am not so open to unfamiliar genres. Either that or I don't quite like many of the immature genres of human. Certainly not the ones that want the world to conform to their inexperience. Not all articles are publishable.
Back to Zamorano and her identity. Do I care that she has a female name? I do now, but in what way? Do I care that she is working in a Latin American institution? I do now, but in what way? Do I care that her family name has morano in it. Does it signify anything about her family history? Of course it does, but in what way? As an anthropologist, an I expected to know the ways in which these all impact her as an individual? If so, in what way am I supposed to know it? Should I be highlighting her name? Is she married? Is this her husband's family name or the one she was born to. This may hold importance if I want to know something about the possibility that the morano in her name signifies that she comes from a family with Jewish history. I don't know that this ever has, in the history of last names under Spanish influence, has this ever happened that Morano Jews marked themselves thus? What might the Za part of the name signify? What does my interest in this detail signify about what I am trying to accomplish in this blogpost. What does it signify about my own patterns of being?
I want to talk a little more about significance and what I think about when I read Zamorano use the term "in large measure". I have a large pot in my kitchen. It is filled. The second part of this statement is only true if one wants to count the atmosphere. Here is part of the point. There are conditions under which counting the atmosphere would matter. So, lets get back to the pot filled with vegetables in my kitchen. It is filled with water, as well. Yes, vegetables have water in them. So, need I make it clear that the water I am writing of is both water that the vegetables bring to the pot and water I put in the pot? There is more. The vegetables are all from my garden. Ok, I don't really have a garden. There is no space where I live that I have turned into a grow space. I buy my vegetables from a store and I don't know much about soil aside from having experienced the differences soil can make to the flavor of the foods growing in them. California soil tends to taste pretty good. Soil in the southern parts of France do as well... anyway... My pot is boiling and the vegetables in there are celery, carrots, onions and olives. There are green chili peppers, zucchini, ochre, and squash. Also leeks, potatoes and bay leaf, salt, and cilantro. Imagine the flavor. Imagine. Do it... I did all the work of selecting the significant aspects of what is in the broth. Taste it, smell it, sense the warmth. What are you drawing from to imagine this pot. Do you recall my grandmother's vegetable soup? No? You recall yours? That is not the significance to draw from this description. I want you to imagine my life, my significance, my meaning. Do it!
But no I do not. I am interested in something else. See, the onions from my garden, that aren't really from my garden, I used five of them and cut them into about a centimeter squared pieces. Same with the carrots and the celery but I wait with those. This is where the olives come in. These are olives pressed into oil. I didn't grow the olives, nor press them. I bought a nice extra virgin olive oil that says its from Tuscany. Trader Joes sells the oil. They also sell the salt and bay leaves. So, olive oil is heated with four bay leaves and then I put in the onions. I leave those in long enough to brown. The smell changes in the room. Something like a BBQ smell, a little smokey and grilled comes out from the pot. That is when I add salt. I let the pot brown with the onions and then I toss in the carrots and celery. I stir and let it sit on the heat. When these brown I throw in two green chilies whose stems I remove and slice though once but keep whole. The chili browns and that is when I add wine. Again, this is from Trader Joes. I use a red wine and let it cook off. Then I added water. Its a large broth pot and I put in two gallons of water. I let this cook off as well, adding salt to taste. Meanwhile I cut up the zucchini, ochre and squash. I cut up potatoes and add those as well. I cut these into two inch squared pieces. Of course I washed everything before putting them in the pot. I let the broth cook down in half before adding the larger vegetables. When they soften I take out the bay leaves and then blend the soup before putting them back into the pot. My garden is in the pot. My grandmother too.
What is significant here? Is it the flavor? Is it the smell. Is it my grandmother? Is the soil significant to any of this? Is the water? What of the air that is in the actual pot as I write rather than the water that is not? This all goes back to Zamorano and her assertions of meaning in the Créqui-Montfort Expedition. Is that expedition specifically typical of other expeditions? In what way. What soil did that expedition grown from. Was it European soil, or was it a specific region of Europe, a region of a European country? What schools, what technologies? The photographic evidence that Zamprano is analyzing was produced under a technique set by Bertillion, a director of the identification system in France, Paris police more specifically. Bertillion was used as an exert witness in the Dreyfus case. The most famous public reaction against the Dreyfus case was by Emile Zola. Zola was a novelist who viewed his novels as fictions that act as social experiments. His novels are unironic in their use of the ideas that Bertillion's photography and the expedition was hoping to catalog. The idea that cranial features, the face, complexion and other physical markers speak to, perhaps are predictive of, behavioral features of an individual these were the cutting edge of inquiry of the day. Right or wrong, academically minded folk were inquiring of this concept in the world. Today we have mostly stopped this inquiry. such inquiries are, rightly or not, considered disproven, crude and even insulting.
I am not yet done reading the article and I find this connection to Zola significant. I do not know if the article will share the information I have and if similar significance will be given. Reading Zola one sees that the features looked for in the people of the Americas on the expedition were seen by Zola in the his France. Might that not hold significance in complicating the concept of race as seem during Zola's time. He is an example of that kind of thinking. What Zamorano, as a scholar of her time and place, of her identity and how her time and place relates to her identities, how she herself relates to them at the time of her writing; these have all situated the significance of what she writes. Like the broth, real or not, the significance of where it was grown and who it reminds me of will change according to what meaning I am hoping to make from the narrative of soup. How does this narrative of soup sustain me in the world? How is the sustenance different when I consider it as something I have inherited from the soil, from my grandmother, from Trader Joes? What on earth is significant about the broth? Did it matter how I cut the onions or what I was anticipating from them as they cooked? Why did Zamorano flavor her academic paper with a mention of the Nazis? To me it poisons the well. But, I have written all this and still haven't finished the article. Perhaps I will see Zola there. Perhaps I will see Latin America? Perhaps I will see Sephardi Jews. I depends on what I deem significant and that will be in large part defined by the argument (and the soup) I want to make.
The above quotation ends the paragraph that, like many academic paragraphs do, leeches significance from the broth of life. I wonder what of life is not significant? More specifically, how many assumptions of relevance might be made before an academic article feels right? I've come to the paper by Gabriella Zamorano who is working out of El Colegio De Michoacán. Frankly, I only now read the name of the writer/analyst. I only now found the name of their institution. Only now identified that this school is likely in a Latin American country, that the scholar is female. I didn't consider either identifier until I looked more closely at the title page. I didn't think it significant. Now I do. I haven't yet decided in what way.
It feels wrong to me to assume to what measure Zamorano's identity plays in the analysis of the knowledge presented (and left out) of this academic paper. I'm realizing now that the academic genre is an important one to this blog entry. I've highlighted this specific genre both in talking about paragraphs and now in a paper. This distinction of writing being academic has significance to me as I am writing. So much so, that I wrote it and then noticed I wrote it. In my mind I had used this term a few times up to now. I stopped writing to count. I found only two instances and considered fining a way to edit in the term another time or two. Then I thought this would be dishonest. It would be too contrived, even for an academic blog.
I am not particularly interested in Zamorano's identities. Like with narratives of other kinds, I most enjoy those that subvert genre. I certainly want to recognize something as a narrative. I certainly have favored forms of narrative. I don't much like poetry and sitting to read a play (especially a poetic play) is largely tedious. So, genre hold significance to me. Once I am familiar with a genre, I like the kinds that play with the form. The same will hold true with the human genre. And now I suspect otherwise... Perhaps I am not so open to unfamiliar genres. Either that or I don't quite like many of the immature genres of human. Certainly not the ones that want the world to conform to their inexperience. Not all articles are publishable.
Back to Zamorano and her identity. Do I care that she has a female name? I do now, but in what way? Do I care that she is working in a Latin American institution? I do now, but in what way? Do I care that her family name has morano in it. Does it signify anything about her family history? Of course it does, but in what way? As an anthropologist, an I expected to know the ways in which these all impact her as an individual? If so, in what way am I supposed to know it? Should I be highlighting her name? Is she married? Is this her husband's family name or the one she was born to. This may hold importance if I want to know something about the possibility that the morano in her name signifies that she comes from a family with Jewish history. I don't know that this ever has, in the history of last names under Spanish influence, has this ever happened that Morano Jews marked themselves thus? What might the Za part of the name signify? What does my interest in this detail signify about what I am trying to accomplish in this blogpost. What does it signify about my own patterns of being?
I want to talk a little more about significance and what I think about when I read Zamorano use the term "in large measure". I have a large pot in my kitchen. It is filled. The second part of this statement is only true if one wants to count the atmosphere. Here is part of the point. There are conditions under which counting the atmosphere would matter. So, lets get back to the pot filled with vegetables in my kitchen. It is filled with water, as well. Yes, vegetables have water in them. So, need I make it clear that the water I am writing of is both water that the vegetables bring to the pot and water I put in the pot? There is more. The vegetables are all from my garden. Ok, I don't really have a garden. There is no space where I live that I have turned into a grow space. I buy my vegetables from a store and I don't know much about soil aside from having experienced the differences soil can make to the flavor of the foods growing in them. California soil tends to taste pretty good. Soil in the southern parts of France do as well... anyway... My pot is boiling and the vegetables in there are celery, carrots, onions and olives. There are green chili peppers, zucchini, ochre, and squash. Also leeks, potatoes and bay leaf, salt, and cilantro. Imagine the flavor. Imagine. Do it... I did all the work of selecting the significant aspects of what is in the broth. Taste it, smell it, sense the warmth. What are you drawing from to imagine this pot. Do you recall my grandmother's vegetable soup? No? You recall yours? That is not the significance to draw from this description. I want you to imagine my life, my significance, my meaning. Do it!
But no I do not. I am interested in something else. See, the onions from my garden, that aren't really from my garden, I used five of them and cut them into about a centimeter squared pieces. Same with the carrots and the celery but I wait with those. This is where the olives come in. These are olives pressed into oil. I didn't grow the olives, nor press them. I bought a nice extra virgin olive oil that says its from Tuscany. Trader Joes sells the oil. They also sell the salt and bay leaves. So, olive oil is heated with four bay leaves and then I put in the onions. I leave those in long enough to brown. The smell changes in the room. Something like a BBQ smell, a little smokey and grilled comes out from the pot. That is when I add salt. I let the pot brown with the onions and then I toss in the carrots and celery. I stir and let it sit on the heat. When these brown I throw in two green chilies whose stems I remove and slice though once but keep whole. The chili browns and that is when I add wine. Again, this is from Trader Joes. I use a red wine and let it cook off. Then I added water. Its a large broth pot and I put in two gallons of water. I let this cook off as well, adding salt to taste. Meanwhile I cut up the zucchini, ochre and squash. I cut up potatoes and add those as well. I cut these into two inch squared pieces. Of course I washed everything before putting them in the pot. I let the broth cook down in half before adding the larger vegetables. When they soften I take out the bay leaves and then blend the soup before putting them back into the pot. My garden is in the pot. My grandmother too.
What is significant here? Is it the flavor? Is it the smell. Is it my grandmother? Is the soil significant to any of this? Is the water? What of the air that is in the actual pot as I write rather than the water that is not? This all goes back to Zamorano and her assertions of meaning in the Créqui-Montfort Expedition. Is that expedition specifically typical of other expeditions? In what way. What soil did that expedition grown from. Was it European soil, or was it a specific region of Europe, a region of a European country? What schools, what technologies? The photographic evidence that Zamprano is analyzing was produced under a technique set by Bertillion, a director of the identification system in France, Paris police more specifically. Bertillion was used as an exert witness in the Dreyfus case. The most famous public reaction against the Dreyfus case was by Emile Zola. Zola was a novelist who viewed his novels as fictions that act as social experiments. His novels are unironic in their use of the ideas that Bertillion's photography and the expedition was hoping to catalog. The idea that cranial features, the face, complexion and other physical markers speak to, perhaps are predictive of, behavioral features of an individual these were the cutting edge of inquiry of the day. Right or wrong, academically minded folk were inquiring of this concept in the world. Today we have mostly stopped this inquiry. such inquiries are, rightly or not, considered disproven, crude and even insulting.
I am not yet done reading the article and I find this connection to Zola significant. I do not know if the article will share the information I have and if similar significance will be given. Reading Zola one sees that the features looked for in the people of the Americas on the expedition were seen by Zola in the his France. Might that not hold significance in complicating the concept of race as seem during Zola's time. He is an example of that kind of thinking. What Zamorano, as a scholar of her time and place, of her identity and how her time and place relates to her identities, how she herself relates to them at the time of her writing; these have all situated the significance of what she writes. Like the broth, real or not, the significance of where it was grown and who it reminds me of will change according to what meaning I am hoping to make from the narrative of soup. How does this narrative of soup sustain me in the world? How is the sustenance different when I consider it as something I have inherited from the soil, from my grandmother, from Trader Joes? What on earth is significant about the broth? Did it matter how I cut the onions or what I was anticipating from them as they cooked? Why did Zamorano flavor her academic paper with a mention of the Nazis? To me it poisons the well. But, I have written all this and still haven't finished the article. Perhaps I will see Zola there. Perhaps I will see Latin America? Perhaps I will see Sephardi Jews. I depends on what I deem significant and that will be in large part defined by the argument (and the soup) I want to make.
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