When I was (briefly) at the anthropology department at Kent for my PhD, I ended up in a seminar called 'Thinking Like a Cheese.' I had been talking to a lecturer about methods to ask local people in Vietnam about saola when she suddenly said "I have to go to the departmental seminar now. You should come along, it's about local knowledge." I'd seen the title but thought it would be a metaphor - that 'thinking like a cheese' might mean 'thinking with holes through it' or something.
I went in early and the room filled up around me. There was no way to sneak out and I found myself thinking "I am stuck in a seminar about cheese." 'Cheese' is just one of those words that are inherently silly. And, after a while, the whole thing became about me trying not to laugh every time he said 'cheese.'
I remember coming up with a 'theory of mongery' with an anthropologist in the pub (iron, war and cheese and fish) and just thinking that it showed up anthropology as a game in mad connections. How could there be any possible relevance to my work.
The seminar compared the enterprise of Greg Schneider (?) creating 'Stitchelton' as a non-pasteurized version of Stilton (Stilton is defined as a pasteurized cheese) with a traditional cheesemaker in France who used a generations-old wooden forme.
So, my reaction to this is something like 'oh, back here again.'
Ha, well, serves me right for using an anthropology joke as a title!
I heard someone on a Long Table call recently express some... I don't know, weariness? ...with the kind of talk about multispecies storytelling and the like that goes on in certain academic and artistic circles. "I want to hear about 'thinking like a snail' from someone who actually has to deal with snails in her garden!" was the gist of it.
For me, the examples I'm writing about here are grounded in a way that's a bit of an antidote to that academic/cultural genre. (And, if I may carry on offering sweeping generalisations, the lack of groundedness of the genre has a lot to do with how far "culture" and "agriculture" have come out of joint. That's a whole other essay.)
An awareness of the potential silliness of any commentary that we layer upon the lives of the people Max is working with seems necessary for sanity's sake. There's a bit in one of Max's pieces, where he's visiting Catherine Richard, who makes the Bleu de Termignon cheese that's pictured at the top of this piece, and he's keen to show her the film that he made on his previous visit, a year earlier:
"After one minute of film, confused Catherine turns to me with concern, and in her hushed Savoyard accent, dropped on me one of life's great clangers that will stay with me forever. 'But Max, I don't understand. Why are you showing me this? This is what I do every day.'"
I had to cut the bit from this essay where I'd written about the continuities between Max's work and Berger's stories of his peasant neighbours in the Haute Savoie, but that moment with Catherine gives a hint. With good reason, these traditional knowledge carriers are likely to be unimpressed by, if not outright suspicious of, the layers of representation and theory that outsiders sometimes want to wrap around their lives. And despite the difference in standpoint, perhaps there's an overlap between these reactions and the natural scientist's reaction to "thinking like a cheese". I'm thinking now of a passage in Berger's essay, 'The Storyteller', where he writes about the "traditional realism" of the way people in his village tell stories:
"Professional realism, as a method chosen by an artist or a writer like myself, is always consciously political; it aims to shatter an opaque part of the ruling ideology, whereby, normally, some aspect of reality is consistently distorted or denied. Traditional realism, always popular in its origins, is in a sense more scientific than political. Assuming a fund of empirical knowledge and experience, it poses the riddle of the unknown. How is it that…? Unlike science it can live without the answer. But its experience is too great to allow it to ignore the question."
Well I guess I sounded more critical than I meant to. As usual.
I think the Thinking Like a Cheese seminar was quite good, really, in retrospect. At the time, I couldn't see the point. I could only see Cheese as being relevant if it was some sort of geometric metaphor.
Actually the speaker had a pretty straightforward story to tell and, at the end, all the senior figures were proposing various theoretical lenses that seemed unnecessary to most of us... but not to them.
It also seems every rabbit hole that I dive down into in my life always leads back to these microbes, working with methods to "control rot" which I think was the way Sandor described it. Not only in the practical sense but also in the metaphorical sense.
I wonder if Leroi-Gourhan's misreading of the work on the walls is a clue to the doorway into an accompanied realism closer to traditional than professional but even more entangled. He was closer than the "everything hunting magic" business (animals are good to eat) that came before him but I think the user notice on the sign at well at world's end might be animals are good to be, as in both a return to peer relation and a reapproach to shape-shift.
I guess either you think the discussion in actually closed and all this remains primate speaking grand monologue in the black or its is potentially a listening to some one(s) who can actually inform/teach/compliment our lack for reals. One is language as a closed loop subject to the entropy unto an un-Worded despair, the other is an Open plenum at the mercy of poetry and the rigors/entry fees of translation.
Thinking along those well-known neolithic footprints of a torch bearing young human intermingled with those of the dog companion I wonder what sort of barriers we live and wish within were unimagined in that night that made the languaging between the both and many less easily tipped into the lesser realisms.
Having seen what can be built and done with ease by a humanity whose majority knows that cheese and snails and rats and fire as closer to beings of Problem-to-solve than Word-to-translate you will maybe forgive the madness that would like to see what a torch bearing child-likeentanglement of wolf and human who isn't so sure that rind has nothing to say about the thresholding of culture. And by rind saying I don't mean as metaphor calling from inside the house but as the people of its own world on embassy. I guess you choose your kingdom of foolishness, Faerie or Hiroshima doesn't seem as hyperbolic on examination as it might sound off the cuff.
Obviously I loved this post, Dougald. I have been trying to hear in the way the beavers deal with flow and breach something of how to make theology and such. Rind seems like another voice worth sifting for word back as well. Scientifically speaking, I have been up a bit sleepless in small hours thinking about what sort of note be most appropriate to leave for the rats we have been negotiating terms with this last season. Full disclosure regarding madness and the university of the easily dismissed.
What a gift of a comment, Andrew. All the moreso because it landed just as I'd gone down the rabbithole of a paper from Danny Nemo, 'Getting high with the most high: Entheogens in the Old Testament', which ends by offering a choice between neurotheology and theoneurology, echoing this:
"I guess either you think the discussion in actually closed and all this remains primate speaking grand monologue in the black or its is potentially a listening to some one(s) who can actually inform/teach/compliment our lack for reals."
The kind of "realism" that is past its use-by date is the kind that sees itself as confidently located on one side of such a choice, as though there is a default-in-the-absence-of-faith – as in the "subtraction" theories of secularisation that Charles Taylor takes aim at – rather than a matter of which way to leap, between two kingdoms of foolishness, as you say.
Your mention of the neolithic footprints makes me think of Alan Garner's Stone Book Quartet and Boneland, both of which you would dig.
Great writing, great 'food for thought', thank you Dougal. Yes, everything alive must stay in relationship with everything else alive, otherwise it will forget the steps of the dance...🌹
When I was (briefly) at the anthropology department at Kent for my PhD, I ended up in a seminar called 'Thinking Like a Cheese.' I had been talking to a lecturer about methods to ask local people in Vietnam about saola when she suddenly said "I have to go to the departmental seminar now. You should come along, it's about local knowledge." I'd seen the title but thought it would be a metaphor - that 'thinking like a cheese' might mean 'thinking with holes through it' or something.
I went in early and the room filled up around me. There was no way to sneak out and I found myself thinking "I am stuck in a seminar about cheese." 'Cheese' is just one of those words that are inherently silly. And, after a while, the whole thing became about me trying not to laugh every time he said 'cheese.'
I remember coming up with a 'theory of mongery' with an anthropologist in the pub (iron, war and cheese and fish) and just thinking that it showed up anthropology as a game in mad connections. How could there be any possible relevance to my work.
The seminar compared the enterprise of Greg Schneider (?) creating 'Stitchelton' as a non-pasteurized version of Stilton (Stilton is defined as a pasteurized cheese) with a traditional cheesemaker in France who used a generations-old wooden forme.
So, my reaction to this is something like 'oh, back here again.'
Ha, well, serves me right for using an anthropology joke as a title!
I heard someone on a Long Table call recently express some... I don't know, weariness? ...with the kind of talk about multispecies storytelling and the like that goes on in certain academic and artistic circles. "I want to hear about 'thinking like a snail' from someone who actually has to deal with snails in her garden!" was the gist of it.
For me, the examples I'm writing about here are grounded in a way that's a bit of an antidote to that academic/cultural genre. (And, if I may carry on offering sweeping generalisations, the lack of groundedness of the genre has a lot to do with how far "culture" and "agriculture" have come out of joint. That's a whole other essay.)
An awareness of the potential silliness of any commentary that we layer upon the lives of the people Max is working with seems necessary for sanity's sake. There's a bit in one of Max's pieces, where he's visiting Catherine Richard, who makes the Bleu de Termignon cheese that's pictured at the top of this piece, and he's keen to show her the film that he made on his previous visit, a year earlier:
"After one minute of film, confused Catherine turns to me with concern, and in her hushed Savoyard accent, dropped on me one of life's great clangers that will stay with me forever. 'But Max, I don't understand. Why are you showing me this? This is what I do every day.'"
https://uptherethelast.substack.com/p/bleu-de-termignon-part-1-haute-maurienne
I had to cut the bit from this essay where I'd written about the continuities between Max's work and Berger's stories of his peasant neighbours in the Haute Savoie, but that moment with Catherine gives a hint. With good reason, these traditional knowledge carriers are likely to be unimpressed by, if not outright suspicious of, the layers of representation and theory that outsiders sometimes want to wrap around their lives. And despite the difference in standpoint, perhaps there's an overlap between these reactions and the natural scientist's reaction to "thinking like a cheese". I'm thinking now of a passage in Berger's essay, 'The Storyteller', where he writes about the "traditional realism" of the way people in his village tell stories:
"Professional realism, as a method chosen by an artist or a writer like myself, is always consciously political; it aims to shatter an opaque part of the ruling ideology, whereby, normally, some aspect of reality is consistently distorted or denied. Traditional realism, always popular in its origins, is in a sense more scientific than political. Assuming a fund of empirical knowledge and experience, it poses the riddle of the unknown. How is it that…? Unlike science it can live without the answer. But its experience is too great to allow it to ignore the question."
That is a funny story.
Well I guess I sounded more critical than I meant to. As usual.
I think the Thinking Like a Cheese seminar was quite good, really, in retrospect. At the time, I couldn't see the point. I could only see Cheese as being relevant if it was some sort of geometric metaphor.
Actually the speaker had a pretty straightforward story to tell and, at the end, all the senior figures were proposing various theoretical lenses that seemed unnecessary to most of us... but not to them.
It also seems every rabbit hole that I dive down into in my life always leads back to these microbes, working with methods to "control rot" which I think was the way Sandor described it. Not only in the practical sense but also in the metaphorical sense.
I wonder if Leroi-Gourhan's misreading of the work on the walls is a clue to the doorway into an accompanied realism closer to traditional than professional but even more entangled. He was closer than the "everything hunting magic" business (animals are good to eat) that came before him but I think the user notice on the sign at well at world's end might be animals are good to be, as in both a return to peer relation and a reapproach to shape-shift.
I guess either you think the discussion in actually closed and all this remains primate speaking grand monologue in the black or its is potentially a listening to some one(s) who can actually inform/teach/compliment our lack for reals. One is language as a closed loop subject to the entropy unto an un-Worded despair, the other is an Open plenum at the mercy of poetry and the rigors/entry fees of translation.
Thinking along those well-known neolithic footprints of a torch bearing young human intermingled with those of the dog companion I wonder what sort of barriers we live and wish within were unimagined in that night that made the languaging between the both and many less easily tipped into the lesser realisms.
Having seen what can be built and done with ease by a humanity whose majority knows that cheese and snails and rats and fire as closer to beings of Problem-to-solve than Word-to-translate you will maybe forgive the madness that would like to see what a torch bearing child-likeentanglement of wolf and human who isn't so sure that rind has nothing to say about the thresholding of culture. And by rind saying I don't mean as metaphor calling from inside the house but as the people of its own world on embassy. I guess you choose your kingdom of foolishness, Faerie or Hiroshima doesn't seem as hyperbolic on examination as it might sound off the cuff.
Obviously I loved this post, Dougald. I have been trying to hear in the way the beavers deal with flow and breach something of how to make theology and such. Rind seems like another voice worth sifting for word back as well. Scientifically speaking, I have been up a bit sleepless in small hours thinking about what sort of note be most appropriate to leave for the rats we have been negotiating terms with this last season. Full disclosure regarding madness and the university of the easily dismissed.
What a gift of a comment, Andrew. All the moreso because it landed just as I'd gone down the rabbithole of a paper from Danny Nemo, 'Getting high with the most high: Entheogens in the Old Testament', which ends by offering a choice between neurotheology and theoneurology, echoing this:
"I guess either you think the discussion in actually closed and all this remains primate speaking grand monologue in the black or its is potentially a listening to some one(s) who can actually inform/teach/compliment our lack for reals."
The kind of "realism" that is past its use-by date is the kind that sees itself as confidently located on one side of such a choice, as though there is a default-in-the-absence-of-faith – as in the "subtraction" theories of secularisation that Charles Taylor takes aim at – rather than a matter of which way to leap, between two kingdoms of foolishness, as you say.
Your mention of the neolithic footprints makes me think of Alan Garner's Stone Book Quartet and Boneland, both of which you would dig.
Hey Buddy. That Nemo paper popped up in my suggestions and who couldn't read on after that title. Vague memory of it, maybe a rerun today.
I recently, on your heels, listening to Weirdstone of B. on audible. Will look for this Stone and Bone business.
To be continued.
Great writing, great 'food for thought', thank you Dougal. Yes, everything alive must stay in relationship with everything else alive, otherwise it will forget the steps of the dance...🌹