I have a feeling that history will see this as a seminal event, not because any revolutionary new ideas were postulated, they were not, nor because we managed to come up with any great solution for the re-integration of humanity with nature nor a pat solution to the imminent problem of total environmental catastrophe, we did not.
It was very important for these reasons:
• That this event was held at all.
• That it asked the right question.
• That so many delegates came.
• That these delegates covered a wide cross section of persons, not all academics, or persons involved in the sustainable development 'business', or 'creative industry' professionals, or the natural heritage 'industry' but representatives of all of these and more.
• That just perhaps the ends of a few clues of twine were revealed to lead us from the labyrinth.
Like others I suffer from the human failing of forgetting that the world I live in is not always the world everyone else lives in. My intellectual life has long been focused at a nexus point between: philosophy, visual arts, anthropology, natural history and other science. My working life has involved direct contact with the land and recently I have been involved in working on several SD related projects where the demands of the given realities of the environment confront the human constructs of economics and politics. In the course of my life long practice of ancient practical disciplines, intellectual activities and modern technology dependent activities, I long ago had to resolve any apparent contradictions between the rationalist, logical, deductive perception/description of reality and the shamanistic, 'religio-magical', visionary perception/description of reality. In short I have been in the conceptual 'place' that the symposium occurred most of my life. It is not surprising then that I felt no great moment of revelation or transfiguration as a result of the ideas of the speakers, most of which concepts I had encountered many times before. The revelation came in realising that there were many to whom these concepts were novel.
Non Verbal Narrations
Words and their meanings have been prostituted and debased by political and commercial propaganda, nowhere is this more obvious than in the field of the ecological crisis. I am therefore not being at all factious when I say the most cogent arguments of the event were made by more tangible non-verbal realities:
• The food
• The artwork by Dalziel+Scullion
• The student multiples
• The music
• The buildings
• The town
• The ironic commentary that was unintentionally created by the contradiction of what the speakers had just said and the practical requirements of organisation of a formal symposium as well as the practicalities of getting the speakers and delegates to Inverness.
• And in some ways most important of all the running commentary supplied by the river Ness.
The Food
Like the ideas the food by Dede MacGillivray was not dissimilar to what I often have at home (hi days and holy days). Scots vernacular in style, it was simply presented to showcase the ingredients. Four of the sacred beasts of Celtic culture were represented: wild boar, cattle, deer and salmon, joined by nephrops norvegicus (aka prawn, langoustine etc. due to its inaccessible habitat it is not one of our totemic ancestors but it does taste good. In 1995 it was discovered to have a symbiot, Symbion Pandora, that is not only a previously unknown species but the first discovered member of a new phylum). There were also artisanal breads and cheeses, clapshot, cabbage with juniper and garlic (not enough garlic), potatoes (Pink Fir Apple, Sarpo, Lady Balfour, and Charlotte), a barley dish with parsnip and kail, that thing unknown to most of the catering industry a proper salad and at the breaks cakes and biscuits that drew inspiration from the time when Scotland could be referred to as "the land of cakes" without anybody sniggering.
So what did the food say? To understand you only had to look across the road to McD's with its spurious promise of cheap oral gratification. It pointed out the real cost in pleasure, nutrition and carbon emissions of the globalised food trade and the commercial strategy that marketers cynically call "apparent choice" (as where the supermarket offers the same basic product, for example bread made by the Chorleywood Bread Process with the same basic ingredients chosen to optimise profit, at a bewildering variety of apparent, prices, appearances and brand names).
The coffee as ever was not so good.
The artwork by Dalziel+Scullion
D+S huge photo piece is located high up on the wall of the atrium of the SNH headquarters, Great Glen House; it constitutes in fact a large part of the wall. It perfectly sums up the kind of circumstances, mostly of our creation, that are threatening so many of the planet's other species. It is also technically superb in terms of photography, post photographic editing and printing. As Mathew acknowledged it is a collaborative achievement that utilised the skills and knowledge of many, from the Lepidopterist who identified, explained and introduced the artists to the habitat shown, to the installers who seamlessly fitted it to the building's structure with many others in-between. Some credit must also go to the creators of the hired Hasselblad 39 megapixel camera used to produce the original digital files.
The images show a small patch of cliff and scree with the sea in the background, a small area where the sloping rocky topography creates a higher mean temperature than the average for the immediate surroundings. The foreground of the image is populated with many individual rare Slender Scotch Burnett moths (Zygaena loti scotica a sub-species of Z. loti confined to a few colonies on islands of Mull and Ulva. Colonies are known to have become extinct on Morvern and at two sites in northern Mull.) and the other flora and fauna occurring in their habitat. This includes cotoneaster an alien species that poses a threat of competition to the moth larvae's food plants chief amongst which is the birdsfoot trefoil Lotus corniculatus L. Another threat where grazing has been relaxed is bracken invasion. These isolated 'island' habitats are in turn on actual islands, increasing the difficulty for the habitats' native species in migrating out of any future unsupportable changes in environmental conditions. The work makes us aware of the nature of an ecosystem.
Ecosystem is a concept that many of the general public seem to find it very hard to grasp, perhaps because they are no longer daily forced to realise their own dependence on one. At the level of immediate survival needs most of us now live in a situation analogous to a captive animal like a pet dog or lab rat, we perform a task and food, water and shelter are provided. This lack of understanding has been exacerbated by some of the populist and more sentimental conservation initiatives that have focused on cuddly or charismatic species like tigers, whales and pandas. Often using publicity that blatantly anthropomorphises individual animals. If a fraction of the efforts put in to futile attempts to save beached whales from their natural destiny was focused on protecting the marine ecology we might get somewhere and so might the whales.
Multiply
I found these student works somewhat predictable (in the establishment conceptual genre) too many of them required me to read the label before I could appreciate their point. There were some however that did make very apt points once I had got a grip on what I was looking at.
The Music by Lau
I had not heard this band before, they were very good. Their music could be classed as contemporary céilidh a genre that again I encounter regularly but I suspect many of the delegates do not, there was much wild dancing at the front by a small number of the fit and uninhibited amongst us.
The message as with the food, local and traditional is not necessarily synonymous with mediocre, old fashioned or stagnant.
Great Glen House SNH headquarters, Keppie Design.
Finished on May 15 2006, SNH completed the process of moving its staff into the building in July 2006, but I still found a taxi driver who did not know where it was. The Scottish Natural Heritage HQ was voted best corporate workplace in UK at BCO Awards 2007, named 'Sustainable Building of the Year' in 2006. It looks good and while it is a very large building it has none of that desire to intimidate the individual that so many large governmental and corporate structures from the classical to the modernist have.
The building boasts solar thermal panels producing the building’s hot water, desk-side recycling bins, furniture made from recycled materials, and a sedum turf roof that retains heat better and is a home for insects, plants and birds.
The Town House
Inverness Town House, on the corner of Castle Street and High Street. Built between 1878 and 1882 by the architects Matthews and Lawrie. It is an OTT Victorian Gothic extravaganza that appropriates the language of feudal power for the use of bureaucracy. The building was the scene of an historic meeting of the British Cabinet in September 1921. This was the only cabinet meeting of the British Government ever held outside London.
The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, was on holiday at Gairloch in Wester Ross when he discovered that Ireland had rejected the King and Empire. He decided to call the cabinet at Inverness, rather than travel back to London, as his deputy was at Beaufort and King George V at Moy. Out of this meeting arose the 'Inverness Formula' which created the basis of the discussions at the seminar where the Treaty creating the Irish Free State was agreed. It is on the same site as the Old Town House which was originally built in 1708 as the town house of Lord Lovat, in 1716 it became the Burgh Town House.
A speaker from the floor stated that the building was where Màiri Mhòr was imprisoned. This would have been impossible as it was not built till ten years later. I don't know where in Inverness she was actually held but she is important in areas that related to this symposium: conflicts on land usage and property rights between cultures with conflicting perceptions of the environment and what it should be for, cultural oppression and oral traditions. Màiri Mhòr nan Òrain (Big Mary of the Songs), (AKA Mary Macdonald, Màiri Nighean Iain Bhàin, Mrs. Mary Macpherson (1821 - 1898), a famous Gaelic songwriter and supporter of land rights, during the Highland land war, its "Bob Dylan" so to speak. , In 1872 she was imprisoned, for theft in Inverness, almost certainly unjustly. It was this experience when she was an impoverished, 51 year old, widowed mother of four that provoked her into song composing. Like many Gaels of her time she could probably write in English but not in Gaelic as a result only those of her songs that others transcribed survive. Although her emotional focus was on her native Skye she actually lived in Inverness from 1848-72 and worked in Glasgow as a nurse from 1872-82, where much of her oeuvre was created, she returned to Skye for the rest of her life. She is said to also to have known approx 18,000 lines of poetry by other authors.
The Town
A poignancy is added to the despoiled town centre of Inverness by the beauty of its setting and its past charms still just visible. What is wrong with us and our planning committees? Almost every town in Britain has these main shopping streets with the same dreary shops selling very little that is beautiful, meaningful or useful, and even when useful, how many mobile phones can we each really need? Why so many places selling coffee but nobody who can make it. Its not rocket science Arabica to drink Robusta is for bio-fuels, the water should not be boiling and it does not keep. If your going for a 3,000% mark up on something for which the grower was paid below production cost at least have the grace to bother to do it right. Why do we allow corporate branding to so disregard place? If it had to have a shopping mall that looks like it is a facility descended from space in order to convert the population to cyber men why put it slap bang in the middle of the old town. Why do we want to go out and still be inside anyway? Why are we so messy? Townspeople love to criticise the mess of traveller camps don't they see their own litter blowing down the streets like tumbleweed.
The River
Ness chanted ceaselessly as she roared to the sea. Her water inseparable from all of the World's water as the blood in my little finger is from all my blood. It lapped high up on the grassy banks that engineers had constructed to constrain her to a course we deem proper. She sang a song of contempt at our childish overestimation of our own power. She only needs to shrug her shoulders to be rid of the irritation.
Human power and natural power may both kill you just as dead, but where the language of one is usually comic (think of Putin with his shirt off) the language of the other is always awesome.
The words
All the speakers were skilled and extremely entertaining, to my mind a little too entertaining, there was just a bit too much of the book tour or after dinner speaker at times. For me this was a symposium on very important issues and a little bit more serious looking for possible actions would not have been amiss. Also I felt that some of the speakers while arguing for a non-linear, non- urban perception were a bit stuck in one. I was also slightly concerned that so much of the speakers' attention was focused on the far-away, at times the event was bordering on a 'luv-fest' for the world's nomads but there was no mention of any of the nomadic cultures of western Europe let alone Invernesshire.
Ruth Wishart, broadcaster and journalist, chairperson
She was an efficient and funny chair with a pawkie wit that greatly enlivened the event. She started by wishing us all a happy St. Andrews day. Many of her jocular one line asides were more apt than others' whole paragraphs.
Andrew Thin, Chairman of SNH.
Andrew skilfully and hospitably fulfilled his hosting role, speaking briefly at both events to contextualise them.
Michael Russell MSP, Minister for Environment, opening remarks
I am told Michael Russell is an honourable man, "one of the good guys". I am happy to believe it. However I have huge doubts about his role. Our structures of power, whether street gangs, mafias, political parties, corporate and religious hierarchies, state governments or military and civil bureaucracies, have evolved over millennia to participate in the group conflict dynamic. They are so well conditioned and adapted to operating in and by, conflict and competition with similar rival entities that I have extreme doubt that they can ever change sufficiently to address the real problems of the present day. I was loitering in the car park when Mike Russell arrived (stoking my nicotine level to avoid withdrawal symptoms), so I entered the building just behind him. This gave me a rare opportunity to see the body language of power, the sweep in, the rehearsed facial and verbal expressions and the entourage. The three aides were young men but of types as old as history (fighter, fixer, fetcher), as they moved down the corridor they casually fell in to the 'close protection' formation around the leader that is also as old as contested power.
What is power about? It is very easy to define what it is. It is the removal of autonomy from the many, whether by voluntary surrender, coercion, bribery, threat, induced fear, actual force or usually a mixture of all the above. It is the delegating of decisions and control over resources to a tiny minority. The harder question is what is it for. It can serve many benign functions such as: co-ordinated management of a symposium, it could potentially create a fairer distribution of resources than a free for all, and has been necessary for efficient protection from the aggression of other organised groups. The old cliché that power corrupts and intoxicates those who hold it may sometimes be true, but at least they will die. I am more concerned by the way in which the institutions of power take on a dynamic of their own. As entities criminal gangs, corporations and states can be remarkably similar, in behaviour. On reaching a critical size their participating members lose control over them, their utility to subordinates is lost. The entity of power then exists with only the motivation of perpetuating itself and growing. It competes with other such entities to control more and more resources. As it grows it becomes ever more paranoid and must increase the totality of its control over subordinate individuals either by violence or by conditioning. So how can institutions that in many ways are primary causes of the syndrome we were discussing, who have contributed to a society with an infantile dependency on being fed and looked after, how do they change radically enough to be a part of a solution?
Enough anarchist ranting, I hear, what did the man say?
He was a brilliant rhetorical speaker. Started by defining that our subject was "who we are v what we are". He quoted from The Epistles of Seneca the Younger, (Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, born Córdoba c. 4 BC – died AD 65 suicide to avoid execution) "all art is imitation of nature", Michael pointed the connections between artistic and scientific method, observation, description, interpretation. He stated his belief in the importance of intimacy with nature, working relationship/involvement with the land. More contentiously he postulated that the ecology, language and cultures of western Europe were all linked by a common temporal origin at the end of the ice age, (contentious because the evidence actually suggests that most of us descend from people who were already here, with some kind of pre-existing culture, while unless you are Basque/Berber your language was not and unless you are Sami or other Sub-Arctic resident your ecology was not).
He quoted at length from several Scottish poets, and spoke of strength in diversity. He referred to the role of Linda Fabiani (MSP, Minister for Europe, External Affairs and Culture), in relation to the need to apply to strategic policy smarter and greener economic objectives.
He called upon delegates to engender an intellectual and an emotional response to the issues the symposium was to address.
There were no hard commitments; there was no acknowledgment of the vast body of legislation that runs contrary to the ideals he expressed or which have impacted adversely on all those who do have an "intimate involvement with the land".
He left at the next break. I would very much have liked to ask his position on, 'The Protection of Wild Mammals (Scotland) Bill 2002' and on how the police are using it to attack and criminalise nomadic and other minority cultural groups. I have read he perceives it to be a bad and unjust law. I would have liked to have confirmed this and asked what he intends to do about it. However at such events politicians come without an in-channel.
I was born and bred with the Scots sitting room blood-sport of "trump quote duelling". At the advanced level the rule is the parry and riposte must cite the same source as the thrust, so I cannot resist giving back another two from the Epistles of Seneca "….cruelties are practised in accordance with acts of senate and popular assembly, and the public is bidden to do that which is forbidden to the individual" and also "Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue."
Mark Lynas author of ‘High Tide: News from a Warming World’,
Global warming our great opportunity.
This was the most traditionally scientifically orientated of all the speeches. He started with a series of statements of fact and statistic. That our culture had evolved during 10,000 years of atypical climactic stability. That we are now entering the first single species affected geological era 'the Anthropacy'. That we are in the course of the 6th mass extinction event in the geological record. That our species appropriates for its own use 40% of planetary bio-bulk resource. That this is enabled by our use of fossil fuel. That this fossil fuel can be described as stored sunshine. Mark made some statistical comparisons as our usage of this stored sunshine being at a rate of 90 tons per gallon of liquid fuel. Our total human annual usage per year equalling 1,000,000 years of stored past solar output. It takes 127 calories of energy to move one calorie of lettuce from the USA to the UK etc.
Citing 'Gaia theory' he described carbon sequestration as how the planet had controlled its temperature in the past when too hot and stated that we were basically putting that heat back all at once.
Mark stated how past global maximums, involving mass extinction events with 95% species loss, had occurred when temperature changes equal to those expected in the present century had occurred over a period 10-20,000 years, and drew the obvious implications of this difference in time span.
He remarked on those 'millenarian ecologists' who are looking forward to the destruction of humanity, who want it to happen to destroy the human impact and pointed out that the first thing to be destroyed will be the bio-sphere.
Mark is a believer in carbon trading/offsets he sees this as the only possible hope for tropical and other forests given the financial pressure in favour of logging and other land use, raising the issue of 20% of current emissions resulting from de-forestation.
Mark then turned to the optimistic part of his thesis. This is that we now have an opportunity and motivation toward low-carbon development which could potentially create a better life for most. Commenting on our tendency as environmentalists to stress the negative he pointed out how this can simply cause reactions of denial or hopeless apathy. We should stress the positive especially of action at a local level in terms of gains in community spirit, health etc. He cited his own village community with several examples of positive actions a community can autonomously initiate. He then called for us to work toward a mobilisation of the citizenry of the world; he believes that it is only a mass campaign by ordinary people that will bring about the critical mass necessary to create regulation at a global scale needed to save the life of the planet.
Jay Griffiths author of Wild: An Elemental Journey,
The Wildness of the Human Spirit
Jay spent 7 years researching her recent book travelling to almost every continent to visit nomadic and gatherer societies searching for the quality of wildness. What she refers to as "the demand of our feral angel to take flight" she states "Our primal allegiance is feral in pheromone and intuition". She is a brilliant master of metaphor and description. She accuses the west of an intellectual apartheid, stating that: our imperialistic claim for the dissemination of knowledge has in fact a contrary effect of curtailing the totality of knowledge available to us. She reserves a particular animosity for fundamentalist missionaries (not without cause) citing them as one of the four great eco threats to isolated communities. They have caused the death by disease of many through first contacts carried out with a blatant disregard of safety of those contacted, justifying this with the argument that it is more important to save damned souls than bodies. She tells a hilarious story from Papua of the death and attempted cannibalism of two of these missionaries. She had confronted a female missionary to challenge the actions of her group, in mitigation this woman referred to the 'martyrdom' by cannibals of two of her groups members some decades ago. Later Jay realised she was in the community referred to, ironically her informant was the priest for they had since been converted by less extreme Christians. The priest told how these large white creatures had suddenly appeared without warning causing the entire village to panic and flee for the hills, this was repeated several times until their anger out weighed fear and they turned and fought what they perceived as monsters. "But did you eat them" Jay asked. "We tried to" said the priest "but they were so fat and tasted so bad we ended up using one of them for firelighters". Jay was also critical of corporations and state forces (also guilty of spreading fatal micro organisms) and the learned enforcement of the cash economy that was inflicted on previously autonomous communities.
I found most interesting her description of the differences between the nature of song re: Papua, Australia and Amazonia. She described her guides in Papua singing the days travel in the evening, where the Australians' songlines serve the functions of religious myth/GPS/map/survival manual, the Papuan was less formal more like a day's log and to my mind even had a touch of the bothy ballad. Australian songlines are as it were horizontal to the earth's surface but she perceived some Amazonian shamanistic song as operating in a vertical plane, creating a map of their tropical forest bio-sphere where the vertical dimension is significant in a way it is not in the desert.
Jay believes "deeply wild is deep order" She gave a paean to freedom and called upon us to defy order as imposed by authoritarianism. She quoted an Inuit man, Jimmy Echo, "violence comes from being outside nature".
The man sitting next to me, with the typical Scots disdain for a "paper minister" complained she quoted too extensively from her book. Not having read it this did not bother me so much. Although for the most part I found myself agreeing with Jay as regards the need of all of us to acknowledge our true nature and on the virtues of nomadic society and its knowledge base, I found myself parting intellectual company with her when she began to fall into crude dichotomies. Toward the end of her speech she was exhibiting dualistic thinking of the very kind she condemned in missionaries. She talked of how the white, male, heterosexual, settled, rigidly ordered world hated the brown, feral, nomadic one. She sited as circumstantial evidence how in English many words suggestive of movement are used pejoratively and to describe disapproved of sexual or other behaviours, tramp, vagrant, loose etc.
Philosophically rather than use the terminology of 'wild' v 'tame' I would call these properties biological and cultural conditioning, they are potentially in conflict in all of us Papuan gatherer and missionary alike. Obviously the more constraining a culture is and if, like ours, its mores are often diametrically opposed to our biological conditioning then the worse the conflict within us may be. Nonetheless it is ridiculous to deny that there have been and are some very violent nomadic and gatherer cultures (where intense competition for available resources exists) and some primitive cultures that have themselves caused ecological disasters. At times Jay came close to the concept of the 'noble savage' as first promulgated in the 17th century, this helps neither us nor them. I agree state, church and other bureaucracies always hate nomads, they are too difficult to tax, forcibly enlist or force to be employed in uncongenial labour. They do not make a profit for those who control capital. The solution to this is however not to re-run the Comanche wars. It is for us all to challenge the idea, dear to our leaders, that people exist for the benefit of economics rather than that economics are a mutable construct for the convenience of people.
John Lister-Kaye naturalist and conservationist. served prominently in the RSPB, the Nature Conservancy Council, Scottish Natural Heritage and the Scottish Wildlife Trust owner of Aigas Field Centre, founded in 1977, A Natural Inclination.
His premise that the influence of childhood on our relationship with Nature, early encounters long reverberating into adult life, that we have a latent propensity which only needs awoken, is both obvious and extremely strong (of course we have a latent propensity to respond to our own habitat perhaps we should be asking, as Jay Griffiths did, how it gets suppressed). I felt he could have been a bit more succinct in expanding some of his arguments. Also at times he irritated me with an excess of literary romanticism.
John listed his 5 personal pet hates.
1. Economic justification of the environment.
2. Cheque book conservation which he felt was not sufficiently imaginative, he is pro stewardship, people being paid for caretaking but against people being paid not to destroy.
3. He bemoans the lack of specific basic environmental education within the school curriculum, calling for basic knowledge of thing such as the carbon and nitrogen cycles, solar input (that all energy ultimately comes from the sun) to be made universal.
4. He dislikes the obsession with management, believing the environment can take care of itself if allowed to.
5. The suburbanisation of nature, he sees this as a response to urban fear of nature and listed things like: isolation of small pockets of natural environment, signing up, paths, boardwalks, bridges and similar access infrastructure (he feels visitors to the wild should be prepared to cope with wet feet and uneven surfaces), signboards, rangers etc. Why do we need nature to be interpreted for us by an official?
Courageously (although the Minister had I think departed) John spoke of how pleased he was at the message being sent by Aberdeenshire in refusing Donald Trump's planning application. He felt it sent the right message even if the decision was later overturned. He dismissed claims much repeated by the media at of how much wealth the proposed development would create pointing out that the main beneficiary of any such wealth would be Donald Trump. There was much loud and spontaneous applause, if most of the public support this development they were not represented in the hall. As I write it is on the TV news that the Scottish government is intervening in the 'national interest' a 'parcel of rogues' of our day? The media is making a great deal of the local support for Trump, why is it that so many people who would tell their children not to take sweeties from strangers are being so naive about taking them themselves.
John spoke of the Herero who are a people belonging to the Bantu group, originally nomadic pastoralists most of this language group have been heavily influenced by western culture and their cultural identity altered, while the Kaokoland Herero and those in Angola have remained relatively isolated and are still pastoral nomads, practicing limited horticulture. John described this as a choice, however having just done a bit of reading on their history to check (it includes an uprising against German colonial rule. and an attempt at retaliatory genocide by the Germans from 1904-07) I think it would be more accurate to say the different lifestyles of different populations of this language group are more to do with historical circumstance. John described flying over their temporarily abandoned kraals and being impressed by the total absence of detritus other than the hut frames and other basic structures made from the natural materials of the place. Returning to his main argument John gave an account of travels with his daughter Hermione, particularly an expedition to the Kalahari (with Laurens van der Post, born December 13, 1906 – died December 16, 1996). He recounted her lack of fear with scorpions which she described as rather sweet.
David Abram, cultural ecologist and philosopher, author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World, Earthly Intelligence.
David Abram was in many ways the best speaker but I was strangely disappointed. Because of what others had said to me I was expecting a shaman, a magician, he has been described as one of a hundred visionaries currently transforming the world. I did not feel that was quite what I got. He has certainly encountered and learned many of the techniques of traditional story tellers. Here I am again spoilt by my past experiences; my contacts with traditional oral masters of the ilk of Stanley Robertson and the late Duncan Williamson make me a demanding audience. At one or two points on issues I feel are of great significance I believe he is just plain wrong.
David started with a quote again from an Inuit individual, "Long ago men could become animals, animals could become men, it was all one. That was when words were magic". He began by discussing the importance and magic of words. He postulated that some ways of speaking closed down the senses. He gave as example his own less sensuous perception of birdsong as a result of his academic studies where it was described as genetically programmed behaviour.
In the traditional story teller's manner he gave a very funny account of an adventure he had in Alaska. While in a kayak following an eagle between two islands, hearing a strange cacophony, coming too close to a group of Steller sea lions, (Eumetopias jubatus), then singing a loud guttural chant to discourage their approach then having a Humpback Whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) erupt right beside him after which the sea lions jump in the water and come straight at him he dances swaying his arms above his head they move back and forth following his movements till he can back off. You had to be there. I laughed and smiled in all the right places but afterwards I felt this was 'primary one' hunting magic taught by the student teacher.
Dr. Abram then moved on to the whole issue of the significance of oral culture and how writing impacts the sense of language and meaning.
He enumerated the vast quantity of data a hunting/gathering culture must retain and transmit, ethno botanical/zoological/topographical/genealogical etc. He asked how this was achieved and gave the answer of oral transmission. (In my opinion important as oral transmission undoubtedly is doing is often more important. If you are a child with dysentery and granny cures you with Tormentil showing you the plant first, you will not forget that Tormentil cures dysentery, nothing need be said).
David then asked the rhetorical question of how oral narrative was remembered, stating that it was not by frequent repetition, citing tale cycles traditionally recited at long intervals, up to once a century. He then established the link between narrative and landscape with many references particularly to Australian songlines.
At this point he postulated the landscape as mnemonic for narrative and that if people were removed from place the narrative was lost. Here I felt he had it completely the wrong way round (it is nearer truth to say the narrative is the mnemonic for the properties of the landscape), and had totally underestimated the mnemonic ability of trained tradition bearers to simply hold huge amounts of verse in their head (see Màiri Mhòr nan Òrain above who had thousands of lines of verse related to Skye in her head while her body was in Glasgow, in the Gaelic tradition there were those charged with memorising genealogies who did not even have the advantage of a plot to aid memory but could retain thousands of A's begat B's). David then went on to contrast oral with written narrative stating that books were not tied to place and that therefore the abandonment of oral in favour of written caused a loss of connection with the environment and therefore a loss of the essential knowledge base.
He was in the wrong place to make this argument! Scotland has had cross-fertilising oral and written traditions for at least 1,500 years. (Stanley Robertson is an accomplished published writer with no apparent detriment to his ability to memorise thousands of oral narratives). I have enough personal experience in three fields of traditional activity to be aware of the vastness of my ignorance in comparison to some of my great and great-great grandparents, these are: hunting for food without a gun, medicinal and other uses of plants and utility horsemanry. In all these fields a major collapse of the skills/knowledge base took place in Scotland during the period subsequent to World War Two, not a period noted for its vast increase in literacy, what knowledge survives is often because somebody thought to write it down. The most significant factor was that people stopped engaging in the activities that the traditional knowledge related to, for example; the National Health Service and commercial pharmaceuticals removed most peoples' need to use ethno-botanical medical knowledge.
Logic and Magic
To be fair to both Dr Abram and Jay Griffiths they were both trying to do something impossible. To convey, in an hour or less, to an audience, most of whom were only trained in the rationalist deductive tradition, what it felt like to experience the world as a hunter/gatherer.
Male-Female, Black-White, Hot-Cold, Wet-Dry, Good-Evil, we all make dichotomies every second of the day and they are always false. At least I have yet to encounter one that is not. Given that, I am very loath to say that there are two ways our mind can work. However there is as with all the examples above a spectrum of possibilities. I am stuck for neutral words to name opposing specific places on that spectrum of conscious action/perception. I will use the terms 'logic' and 'magic' with the proviso that 'magic' should be logical and 'logic' is magical.
Most of the time, all of us, whether, hunter, farmer or office worker hardly consciously act at all, we rather react to stimulus in accord with our conditioning not much 'logical' or 'magical' thinking takes place. When, as individuals, we need to radically impact on our environment we need to utilise conscious action. I have often puzzled at my own apparently radically different states of consciousness when engaged in different activities and why it should be that I cannot use the same 'me' to paint a picture, break in a horse, or catch a hare, as I would use to write a paper or to do my accounts. The differences can seem so extreme; one kind of behaviour takes place in a world full of spirits and an apparent lack of direct causality the other is bounded by math, matter, reason and direct observable cause and effect. To bring together these apparent poles I have only a metaphor. The action of a bow and arrow is easily described by the laws of mechanical physics, but that is not how it was invented nor is it how a great archer shoots.
'Logic'-'magic', which is used when and to what degree? I see this as a function of probability over time. Art is inherently improbable, of all the infinite possible sequences of sounds in time very few are going to be 'music'. Hunting is likewise extremely improbable in the sense that large animals worth eating are rare and they are usually much better equipped by nature to avoid being found and killed than we are to find and kill them "first catch your hare". The hunter must overcome the lack of probability of success on a regular basis or die. Picasso's dictum "I do not seek I find". Farming on the other hand relies on higher probabilities as in if you plant seed in fertile ground, in a place where rain falls, then protect it from grazing beasts you will probably get a crop. Most Europeans/North Americans now live in circumstances of contrived very high probabilities, if you turn up for work, move stuff or words and numbers about they will almost always pay you and you expect there to be a shop, and you expect it to have food to sell, and for them to sell it to you, all with only a slight degree of fear it may not happen. When sufficient man hours are available we can achieve the improbable, sending a man to the moon, by many tiny incremental steps of the probable.
All this is of extreme relevance to our alienation from the environment and impending ecological catastrophe. One of the greatest of ironies of the 'logical' deductive mindset is that it requires the assumption of an imagined externality of self to other. This for many of us is such a persistently made assumption that it has become a widespread delusion. The 'magical' mindset in contrast requires the realisation of integration of self with other, the hunter knows where his prey is because there is no point (temporal or spatial) at which he is actually separate from it as there is no point at which river stops being river and becomes sea. I would also argue that we are at the point where avoiding the destruction of human culture and most biological life is becoming highly improbable. We need both 'logic', 'magic' and all points in between to be focused on the problem.
You probably want me to tell you how to do the 'magic'. Like the speakers I am sorry but I cannot. The answer is in "the word" with more than a nod of apology to Dr. David Abram I have to say I cannot write it down. This is not just because someone might be daft enough to "cut out my heart with a horseman's knife" it is also because it would be pointless. It just does not work written down and must be learned in the body before it can be remembered in the brain.
