Near Fatal Fieldwork Flaws An Excavated Essay, Current Designation Former Professor, JNU

Fatal fieldwork flaws To be a good social anthropologist, one must be ready to live life to the extreme. I would often tell my students at Jawaharlal Nehru University, of the time that Michelle Rosaldo fell off into a ravine, and died while studying the Illongot tribes in the Phillipines. It used to distress them and me, but we understood the nature of the craft, the exacting definitions of being objective social scientists, inspite of the dangers and the risks. My own experiences in the “field” have been marked by placidity except for occasional turbulence. Physical discomfort is ofcourse a byword for the sociologist at work. Insect bites have been frequent, though I must admit it was surreal when a scorpion climbed up my leg in the vice-regal lodge, IIAS, Shimla while I was researching on Lord Dufferin. Then there were also handbells that rung all through the night without reason and I could make no sense of it, since I was the only person occupying that particular wing of the mansion that night, and pages need not be written on the matter, so long as the technical data collected in the fields or the archives is relevant. The first time I went to the “Field” I was 23 years old, and while I was quite despondent at traveling alone for the first time in my life, my uncle met me at the station. It was four a.m in the morning, it was pouring rain and my compartment was so far out from the main station hall, that all my books and my typewriter ( my father’s Remington) got soaked. The next day, I swore independence, and set out with my luggage to catch a bus by myself. The porter put my luggage in the bus, and it took off without me, while I was paying the auto driver. We chased the bus, with me yelling myself hoarse, and luckily, a police van passing by, with fiercely mustached officers, stopped the bus, and I got in. The conductor sternly castigated me for being slow. Recently while traveling in Kerala over potholes which delayed our journey by three hours, a similar conductor asked my sister and me, paternally whether we were not in the habit of reading newspapers. There were only four passenger in the Pallakad Trichur section, others not daring to go by road after the monsoon had destroyed the metalled roads!(“Paper Vayakathillae?”) We also climbed one hour up a mountain in the night and then came down for the plain reason that no passenger was waiting for the bus at the top. A huge plaster of paris imitation of Michael Angelo’s Pieta was visible from various sides of that hill. The driver was efficient and taciturn and drove at break neck speed, refusing to answer our diffident query, “How much longer?” The most startling of travel episodes was when my uncle dropped me to the station to catch a train to Katpadi in 2005. He was now twenty seven years older and so was I, since my first field trip in 1980. At that time, he had said laughingly, “You must have committed some grave sin to be caught in such a down pour at 4 o’clock in the morning!” He had, since then, spent many years in the Gulf, and was accustomed to fast cars eating up the distance, so he told my aunt and me, that we needed just six minutes to get from their home to the station. Since all my life, he had always turned up to meet the trains I was on, and had waited hours at stations for my children and me to disembark, I believed him, though I was a little anxious. However out of courtesy to my father’s brother, I waited for him to finish his phone calls. My train was at 5.40 p.m. He started the car at 5.30 p.m, and we reached the station at 5.36 p.m. He said “ I’m 70 now, so I’ll walk with your suitcase a little slowly, you climb the bridge and wait for me on the platform.” Since he is grand- patriarch to all of us since my father died, and I’ve always obeyed him, I shot up the bridge and came down in nervous haste, idly wondering how he would come. Platform ticket and a suitcase...maybe he knew some short cut. Just then a train came in, and I thought it was mine. I was carrying my handbag which had everything significant in it like tickets and money. I got into the train. The whistle blew. My uncle appeared with my suitcase. It was now 5.37 p.m. The train began to move, my uncle said, “But that’s not your train!” I can still remember the expression on his face, puzzled and annoyed just like it used to be when I was five and did not count in sequence...Ofcourse being a local resident of Alwaye, he knew that trains are usually late, and had never imagined I would jump into the first one that chugged in. The train picked up speed and kind Malayali men going to Bangalore (which was where the train was headed, not to Katpadi where I was going!) begged me not to jump off. Any way there was no point, since it was a Superfast. In minutes we had crossed the Periyar river.We could not find the chain to pull either, so I gave up, and rang my aunt,on my mobile for advice. My uncle had already told her on his mobile what to tell me if I called, which was to get off at Trichur and catch the right train this time. On my next field work trip I collected my suitcase from my aunt and uncle, remembering gratefully that the previous time, when my uncle had met me at the busstop on the road outside his house and taken my suitcase from me he had laughed and said, “Travelling Light?” That’s what I do. The sequence of events which terrify me when I think about it,( which is not often,) is the time, when I had with many professional commitments behind me, gone to a book launch and then caught the 10 o’clock train to the South. It was on Sufi Inayat Khan’s daughter, a resistance warrior in France during the second world war. I bought a copy of the book, and was looking forward to reading it on the 36 hour journey. My taxi dropped me at the station, and I sat down to wait two hours for the train, which can be so boring unless one is truly tired, like I often am, and then it is quite therapeutic.. Atlast the train trundled in. I waited for the lights to come on in the cabin. They did not. Everyone was busy putting their luggage in. So I did too, in the pitch dark, with only the station lights for illumination. My bag was next to me on the seat. I was shifting my luggage under the seat, when I felt a slight presence behind me but I thought it was someone putting his luggage on the berth above. Then suddenly I looked, and my hand bag was no longer next to me. So I leapt out of the train, and looked, sure enough there was a man running. I ran after him, and he jumped into the next compartment. There were two army jawans who barred his way as he tried to disappear into the aisle. He was holding my hand bag clutched against his chest. I took it from him, saying “Why did you steal my bag?” and he replied “I did not!” and kept repeating it in a staccato tone. I felt sorry for him, he was such a weevil, a drug addict with runny eyes and very small (generations of starvation there) and hungry and mean. Immediately people appeared from nowhere and started beating the man. I said, “Don’t beat him, call the police!” but the citizens wanted to teach New Delhi Station train- robbers a lesson, and just kept on beating him. The train attendants and the police guards and the ticket checker stood there with odd expressions on their faces. Why were the cabin lights not turned on? Why did the Railway police not act? Why did the attendants look bemused? I went back to my compartment, none of the other passengers seemed to have noticed that I had been gone ten minutes. The only time that I went by bus to Tiruvannamalai from Kerala was also very traumatic. I had longed to miss that three a.m disembarkation which is one’s lot if one goes by train from Kerala, and which is so exhausting, though I must admit that as a station Katpadi is very safe. I had presumed that the lovely tarred roads from Chennai to Thiruvannamalai would be found everywhere else. Alas the truth is that the peasantry is served awfully by the most demented pothole roads. In the next installment I will describe that journey. 11 I caught a bus from Pallakad, a lovely town on the border of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. I got to Coimbatore in comfort, in an express bus. I presumed that it would be connected to Thiruvannamalai, but I am disappointed. I must travel to Salem. In Salem the bus was rolling along well enough through the congested city, where suddenly the bus stopped. Tyre puncture. Fortuitously, or was it intentional? The bus stopped directly near a tyre puncture repair shop. The driver and conductor had been setting off on a five hour journey, without a stepney or a spare tyre apparently. So we all got off. And there we stood helplessly in the sun. Finally it was fixed and we took off again. We passed the most marvelous forests, mainly bamboo, which were dark and sullen and in some odd way, pristine and prickly. I’d never seen forests like that before and the Annamalais rolled into view with the lovely agricultural land around it. Tamil villages are verdant in winter with rice and fruit and flowers and vegetables riotous in the fields, amassed in the markets. Half the population goes to build roads in metropolitan towns, and the other half grows food. At Harur, some three hours from Tiruvannamalai, and 50 kms from Salem, the road was piled with granite, rubble and full of potholes, and the tyre which had been patched up with water and glue and spit and hope, gave up again. Once more we were close to a tyre repair shop. Clearly, punctured tyres are great business in small hamlets. Immediately a mechanic came, efficiently unplugged the huge tyre and rolled it off. We sat in front of a locked- up temple, dedicated to Durga and ate our lunches. The bus- driver put us in a country bus and with difficulty we all got into an already packed bus. I put my carry- all bag on top of a sack of rice blocking the alleyway. Two hours down the road, the rice merchant picked up his sacks, roaring at every one in the way, and in the melee, threw out my bag as well. I clambered off the bus and got it back. Frightened to death I sat quietly next to the sweet faced swami, ancient and creased in his new white clothes, going to Arunachala temple for the first time. The bus went on for hours, since country buses have no fixed route. And atlast at 6 p.m when it was night, and all the lights of the temple town were lit, we got off at Arunachala temple. All the people struggling in these over packed buses, what do they hope to achieve? The theorists of pilgrimage have always argued that the journeying is the most important ritual. To me it seemed that losing my bag was a moment of sheer fear, (loss of identity). I love carnival and market, and much of my work in the last twenty seven years has been marking these in descriptive terms, first for a Christian hamlet, and now for Hindu ones in Tiruvannamalai and Pallakad. However there are elements of this carnival space in ritual towns which can be quite disquieting. I will close this reminiscence with one such encounter. When I first visited ‘Thiru’, as it is called by frequent visitors to the town, it was a “small” town. Now it has burgeoned by the influx of pilgrims (5000 visit the temple every day, according to the local chemist who has a shop next to the Arunachala Temple ) and the numbers multiply geometrically as the years pass. It seems to have become the hub of priestly and commercial activities. Television has contributed much to the missionising appeal of Saivism. The descriptions of market, temple and pilgrims remain fairly constant in the anthropological literature whether it be Christian, Muslim or Hindu. Religion and Commerce, with the possible yeast of politics, makes a town what it is. In Tiruvannamalai, there is faith, but fortunately no communalism. To me as a theoretician of dialogue between religions, non-dualism is the answer to varieties of discord which we see as everyday occurrences in a globalised world. Non- dualism is the space in which everyday pluralism surfaces. It is an existential quality, which allows the myriad nature of the world to be ever present. As individuals we enter a space of communitas, as Victor Turner argues, and this involves both respect and sharing. On the other hand, technological imperatives (such as the megaphone) can be very rude interruptions in the quiet and sacred spaces that Nature allots us, and which is confirmed by cultural or theological formulae. Tiruvannamalai, eleven years after my first visit in 1996, provides such a sense of shock and rupture. Trucks bringing agricultural produce and other merchandise, buses bringing pilgrims by the hundreds veer through a traditional street with enormous noise in its wake. The Gods during carnival time are taken around in tractors which spew the most horrible smoke. The pollution levels, because of diesel and firecrackers during festival occasions has to be seen to be believed. In December 2006, the sound of firecrackers and megaphones disturbed ashramites so much that being present in that hallowed spot seemed to be a mistake which only says something about one’s nerves and not one’s ability to transcend or record. The woman in the room next to mine was a publisher’s wife from Germany, who had come to visit Ramanasramam in memory of her husband who had been a devotee of Ramana and whose works on Ramana were well known to the Librarian. Yet within three days, inspite of commitment to theology and her nostalgia for her first visit decades before, she left looking for a quieter room. The previous nights neither of us had slept, having been kept awake by a megaphone, where a piping child’s voice yelled continuously for hours and hours “Pathu rua Pathu rua pathu rua!!” a cry which never stopped. “What are they saying?” she asked me the next morning, looking haggard. She wanted to know if it was a political speech. “Ten rupees.” I said. It’s the cost of a packet of puffed rice and dates which the merchant wanted pilgrims to buy before setting off on the circumambulation around the Holy Hill. On the third night, my patience having worn thin, and fearing a nervous breakdown, I went downstairs at eleven O’clock. The ashram’s inner compound was dark and silent, only one pilgrim was returning from the circling of the hill. “That noise! Can’t anyone do anything?” “What to do?” I went and accosted the merchant. ”Put that off!” He nodded smilingly. He had not heard a word of what I had said. His ear was next to the megaphone. “Is money the only mantra you have?” I yelled. He still could not hear, and smilingly, serenely pointed me to his assistant who was packing the dates and puffed rice. “It’s illegal to have a megaphone in a residential street. I’ll call the police tomorrow.” The word ‘police’ seemed to penetrate, and he lowered the volume, so that he could hear me. “I’m from Delhi, and megaphones are illegal, and you must switch it off!” He smiled and nodded and agreed. It went off that night, and Beatrice was relieved, “I was praying and praying that you would go, since you know the language, and could speak to him!” she said in the morning. For her it was a miracle of Ramana Maharshi, that I had gone off, coincidentally, just then to bellow at the merchant. Next day however the megaphone was on again, and consequently Beatrice found a room far away from the main commercial road on which Ramansramam is now located. From being part of a jungle to being now in a road lined with gemshops, hippy clothes, junk and fastfood, foreign currency-changing shops, ticket offices, inter- net offices; it’s a very great change. The rustic road with its local shops of bananas and tea and newspapers has now been replaced by the kitsch and mélange of the post modern and the traditional. And every day is a festival in this ancient town, because every day is a holy day. Every day brings to pilgrims, honours and rewards, both material and spiritual. And who can be exluded? The numbers only increase. As a result there are problems of discipline and order. Residents of the Ramana asramam are forced to become aggressive bouncers who keep the crowds at bay, using only their eyes, linked arms or speech to keep the crowds from hurting each other or damaging the shrines. But I’ve resolved the dilemma about crowds by telling myself that each person in the crowd thinks the “other” makes up the crowd, but indeed, I too am part of the crowd. Susan Visvanathan Professor of Sociology, JNU

Rachel Carson The Sea and Homology with Robert Park on The City

Rachel Carson’s The Sea sets up a vast canvas where she looks at evolutionary theory in terms of geological time capsules. This is useful for us as categorization of sea creatures, birds of the air and mammals (bats can fly, so the categories are malleable in nature) provide us with a time dimension. Space and time interlock to give us geological epochs where disruption is key, but so also is abstraction and variation. Much of how we deal with the past, in Sociology, negates this huge quantam of time, and geological disruption as beyond our interest. We remain with the key categories of tribal, peasant and industrial time which are occupationally specific, but also symbiotic. By looking at cataclysm as event, Carson shows us that the very nature of geological time is beyond our immediate comprehension and left to speculation. As the ocean is dredged it provides us a glimpse of its depths, and the cycle of being rests on being ‘eaten’ or ‘escaping’ or in turn eating lesser beings, whether plankton or mammal. In this sense Carson creates a homology between the biography of fish, stories of birth, survival and death, and that of humans. Here, the school of fish provides a matrix of sociability and received practices but on their own, they must escape the angler or the octopus. There is a certain nonchalant acceptance of time as neutral to the existence of humans. Events such as geological and geomorphological structures can be read, but there is also arbitrariness to the existence of the universe. This reading of the symbolism of geomorphology is true for Octavio Paz who suggests to us that the earth appears to us in terms of images. He writes, “Geographies, too, are symbolic: physical spaces turn into geometric archetypes that are emissive forms of symbols. Plains, valleys, mountains: the accidents of terrain become meaningful as soon as they enter history. Landscape is historical, and thus becomes a document in cipher, a hieroglyphic text. The oppositions between sea and land, plain and mountain, island and continent, symbolize historical oppositions: societies, cultures, civilizations. Each land is a society: and a vision of the world and the otherworld. Each history is a geography and each geography is a geometry of symbols.” (Paz 1985:293) While Carson is concerned with the boundaries of the sea held in check by the moon tides, Paz looks at how territorial boundaries defines the existence of humans. We know that boundaries collapse with war and colonialism, so what happens to the people who flee. Who are the conquered people and where do they go? American anthropology, thanks to Robert Redfield was invested in understanding the Yukatan as a syncretistic world of adaptation, where Spanish and indigenous cultures wove their tapestry as masters and slaves. For Paz. the resilience of Mexico, to the colonial domination of Spanish and/ or American civilization. was the return to ritual, the ability to absorb victimhood through a process of translation. Interpretation and translation which are inextricably tied together. We do not understand our actions, but the past is recurrent as it surfaces in our thoughts, memories and cultural legacies (ibid 292). It is this familiarity with the past that helps us to understand the present, incomprehensible at present though it may seem.. He writes, “The masks of Hitler and Stalin are now succeeded by an incorporEal reality we cannot even name and execrate. To name it, we have to know it – and only thus can we defeat it” (ibid 281). Paz describes the usefulness of the moebius strip, where otherness is internalized. “Duality is not something which is added, artificial or exterior: it is our constituent reality. Without otherness, there is no oneness. And what is more, otherness is oneness made manifest, the way in which it reveals itself. Otherness is a projection of oneness; the shadow which we battle in our nightmares. And conversely, oneness is a moment of otherness, that moment in which we know ourselves as a body without a shadow – or as a shadow without a body. Neither within or without, neither before nor after: the past reappears” (ibid 289 To this end, he describes history writing as a combination of elements, a montage. It is similar to biological processes, and forms of representation such as family lineages, the writing of poetry, cinematic emblems and juxtaposition (ibid). Pliny the Elder (historian, naturalist and militart commander) had left evidence of the harrowing days after the eruption of Mount Vesuvious. As Rome’s naval commander he was stationed at Micenum 50 kms from Pompei. When his sister Marcella pointed out the cloud of smoke spiraling in the shape of the top of a pine tree (a mushroom cloud) into the sky, he wished to sail closer to the site for scientific purposes of validation and description. He had before being summoned by his sister, enjoyed the sun in the garden, had a cold bath and a light lunch and had gone back to his books. Marcella’s son, Pliny the Younger who was about 17 years old, was absorbed in a book, so he did not accompany his mother’s brother who was around 56 years old and a very powerful representative of the Roman Empire. The volcanic eruption took place in 79 A.D. Twenty five years later, Tacitus asked Pliny the Younger to send him an account of his uncle’s voyaging out to rescue his friends in the last days of Pompei. (These letters are reproduced in the website Pompeii,org,uk which has an archaeologist and tourist guide as administrator.) The enormous detail that Pliny the Younger brings to these two letters is evidence of the relation between the oral and literate. The relation between volcanic eruption and the tsunami that followed are graphically described. Stones, ash, smoke, pumice rubble and terror all bestow themselves on the survivors and the dead. In the case of Pliny the Elder, he had rescued his friend Rectina and her family who had asked for his help, but at Stabiae, where he went to rescue his friend Pomponianus, they were besieged by misfortune. Pliny himself had behaved very normally to comfort his friend, all his actions were without panic or anxiety, and his nephew reports that being a corpulent man with difficulty in breathing, his soldiers could hear his “heavy and sonorous breathing” when he slept at night. However, they had to wake him up, and they left with pillows tied to their heads, their only protection against the falling rocks which were being hurled from the top of the mountain. When they reached the sea, they saw that the sea was very violent and that they could not getaway by boat. Then, Pliny died because he was suffocated by the toxic fumes that surrounded them, and in death he looked like he was asleep, and he had no injuries on him. In a second letter written 25 years after the cataclysmic event, Pliny the younger describes the sea, “The sea seemed to rollback upon itself, and to be driven from the banks by the convulsive motion of the earth, it is certain atleast the shore was considerably enlarged, and several sea animals were left upon it.” This act of witnessing and the ability to reflect upon the moment of gravest danger in such a way that Pliny the younger communicates the presence of mind of his uncle, and reflects his own ability to record what he had heard in the intensity of voice, that travels through the centuries. This is what witnessing is about: the self awareness that makes the litterateur experience the moment in an inter related way, so that autobiographically speaking he/she cannot separate himself or herself from the environment that he writes about. As the keeper of Pliny the Elder’s monumental work Historia Naturalis which survived till the 16th century and beyond, though the rest of his other work did not, we see that the ordinary task of documentation and dissemination are a legacy which Pliny the Younger saw as his primary obligation to a much loved uncle. Ofcourse, in this history writing and record keeping, the distinctions between myth, legend and history were hard to distinguish. Pliny the Elder had been to India in 77 C.E and this formalizes our understanding of the monsoon winds which brought ships to India from Rome in search of spices, ivory, nard (perfumed ointment) linen, and corals and pearls. Pliny the Elder prefaces his Naturalis Historiae with a plea to his patron the Emperor Tacitus to endorse his work. Yet, he knows that he must put his case before his patron in a way by which the latter will be intrigued. “…Emperor! Why do you read these things? They are written only for the common people, for farmers or mechanics, or for those who have nothing else to do; why do you trouble yourself with them? Indeed, when I undertook this work, I did not expect that you would sit in judgement upon me. (9)”(www. Perseus Tufts Digital Library/edi Historia Naturalis.’ Further he exhorts his readers, “Most of us seek for nothing but amusement in our studies, while others are fond of subjects that are of excessive subtlety, and completely involved in obscurity. My object is to treat of all those things which the Greeks include in Encyclopedia (17) which however, are either not generally known or are rendered dubious from our ingenious conceits. And there are other matters which many writers have given so much in detail that we quite loathe them. It is indeed, no easy task to give novelty to what is old, and authority to what is new, brightness to what is tarnished, and light to what is obscure, to render what is slighted acceptable, and what is doubtful worthy of our confidences, to give to all a natural manner, to each its peculiar nature. It is sufficiently honourable and glorious to have been willing even to make the attempt, although it should prove unsuccessful.. And indeed, I am of the opinion that the strides of those are more specially worthy of our regard, who, after having overcome difficulties, prefer the useful office of assisting others to the mere gratification of giving pleasure, and this is what I have already done in some of my former works.” The pleasure of knowledge and its dissemination kept this commander of the Roman navy busy at night, and during the day, he carried out his official duties to the empire, delegating and taking decisions. 36 books with 20,000 entries and one book which forms the introduction, preface and contents have been passed on to us by the familiar routes of the “love for learning”. Detachment was one of the principles. He had been master of many occupations, and staying awake to write the Encyclopedia was subsumed in the aphorism “”for life properly consists in being awake…” This theme of curiosity about the earth, voyages made by sea, and the classification of knowledge in terms of collation, according to subject, had as its its two poles, the subjective and the objective. Methodologically these are placed in well known biographies as central to the task of collation itself. In Quest for an American Sociology: Robert E.Park and The Chicago School, Fred H Matthews says that, for Robert Park, facts and it collection were the tasks of the historian, statistics was the work of the statistican, and the search for meaning is what made the sociologists carve out a dialectic of empathy and detachment. “To Park himself, the self understanding of the individual or milieu was the first step in a two stage process of research: the student must combine empathy with ecology, and trace the evolution and significance of attitudes and values within a broader context of instititutional position and social authority”(Matthews 1978:115). As Pliny defined the purpose of conquest of peoples for the Roman Empire was for reasons of loot and trade in which knowledge production was necessary, so also Park himself saw this detachment as a methodological link between the trader and the sociologist. He felt that anonymity was integral to this transaction, essential to avoid emotional attachment, easier to be objective if one kept a distance, and the reason why being an outsider helped. He genuinely felt that objectivity was the secret of academic success, and detachment its secret (ibid 116) Any ‘compulsive’ ideology would remove the ability to view social relations or actions in a detached and empathetic view, just as ‘sympathy’ could be an obstacle to understanding reality. He did not believe that sociology was a call for crusaders, and their role as scholars was to be “the calm detached scientist who investigates race relations with the same objectivity and detachment with which the zoologist dissects the potato bug” (ibid). The passion for observation and description made litterateurs like Pliny (uncle and nephew) and Rachel Carson stand out in their preoccupation to document. In doing so they were interdisciplinary, using their skill as polyphonic interrogators to create fantastical worlds, where the preoccupation for detail was primary. Robert Park believed that in the city, the terrifying aspects of nature had recreated itself, ‘the urban jungle’ being what it is, while outside the city, nature had become domesticated. The city represented the terrifying aspects of both threat and decay, while outside the city, it became gentle, nurturing and inspiring (ibid 122). He believed that city people could organize and represent themselves, that the great crowds had an ability for mass movements and action. The human personality deftly represented itself in this mass aggregation. Here there was “ethnic diversity” and “clustering” (ibid 126). Using the detailed ethnographic work of their students, Park and Burgess wanted to explore the dynamic between the individual personality and the State, mediated by ethnicity and race (ibid 127). They used maps to show co relations between a variety of indices, attempting to bring a correspondence between time, space and human mores and values (ibid 128). Erle W Young drew huge maps to show that railways and roads criss crossed the city, connecting ware houses and industrial establishments, while residences were located around parks, fountains and boulevards, showing their elevated class and status locations (ibid 128). The ecological aspect depended on certain determined aspects, while the cultural aspects were dependent on choice and variation. The ecological aspect would highlight population segregation, and therefore occupational variation. Here lay many of the corresponding dilemmas of the relation between race, ethnicity and occupation which brought the Chicago School into tension with the later statisticians who dominated Sociology. Yet the insights of the Ecological School were varied, and centred around the place of the individual and the cultural stereotype, both being fragmented by the methods of generalization in philosophy and archetypicalisation in social psychology ( ibid 129). Film culture between 1938 and 1958 represented the many ways in which the Chicago School’s preoccupation with the Hobo, the Boss, Gambling and Saloon Culture, Workers, Police and Politicians became a type of given/ or ascribed roles to be analysed. Women were either socialites or domestic servants, or singers in cafes, or dependent on capitalists as wives or whores. The central question that Park’s students asked was, is mobility possible for these marginalized or ascending groups? As someone who had been an acolyte and collaborator of the great educationist Booker Washington, Park was able to effect potential symbiosis between the marginalized black community with its history of slavery, and the aspirations of poor whites. For him, The City, in a Simmelian methodological format became the way that the human heart could be deciphered ( ibid 30). Rachel Carson attempts to study the geomorphological structure of crustacean evolution and its remnants in the sea-bed as symbols of the long history of the microcosmic development of sea creatures and plants. The history of corals and co equivalently their death by climate change and pollution is another way of telling time. Coral reefs are resplendent in their colours when alive, they seethe with an amazing vitality. When they die their intricate structure are finger like skeletons which then have ossified and demean us with their troglodyte presence. As humans the wonder of the visuality of natural splendor becomes part of the ancient world, we are frightened by its death and the skeletal remains. Human beings then decide that they must leave the planet. Carson’s words describing the intricate relationship between infinitely tiny sea creatures and their continuously transforming environment (the sea washes them into inlets and then drives them back with the tides, and their notion of time, sustenance, neighbourhood and procreation are all instinctively defined in terms of what they must do. Describing the serpulid tube wor, she says. “The fact that the tube worms have managed to live in the intertidal zone for millions of years is evidence of a sensitive adjustment of their way of life, on the one hand to conditions with in the surrounding world of the rockweeds, on the other to vast tidal rhythms linked with the movements of earth, moon and sun (Carson:1991:458). This idea of adjustment is central to evolutionary expansion and devolution. It is this perhaps that makes us understand her work in terms of implicit homologies between fish and humans, though we might as well consider the homo;pgy between fruitflies and us. By presuming that the code of similarity is not the same as identification, or static notions of totemic identity, we can move to learning from the animal or plant world. This abstract notion of the one ness of the life force always reduced to symmetry and the concept of the One, is useful only for advancing our experience of the design of the universe. Experientially we only see multiplicity and endless grandeur and mutation, and that too is significant. We cannot count on “Fate” or Moira as the Greeks called it, when in the Anthropocene we name our culpability and delineate our future responsibility. The meteors still glance past planet earth and our destiny is writ in this ‘firmament of time’ as Loren Eiseley called it. There were so many disasters in the 19th century, including the eruption of Krakatoa, that the Comteian immutable laws of Physics became an anomaly. Yet, since ideological fetters are hard to drop, the organic metaphor for Sociologists still remained within the frame of slow evolutionary principles. How long, for instance, did it take to ‘drop the tail’ to building cities? Homologies are satisfying because we see in the instinctive response of termites, bees and ants very similar responses to calamity: they must run and hide, or they must die. So the myth of Antaeus who loses his power when he is removed from the power of Mother Earth is a very telling myth. How will we behave if we are separated from Earth, when gravity is all that we have known? The coexistence of time in the relational sense is about memory and instinct. The past conveys itself to us in our extraordinary dream life, our archetypes, and our involuntary behavior in crises. It is then we recognize our kinship with the ecological dilemma that knits the sea and shore. Like the fish who are suddenly uplifted by the tides, floating in extended marshes and then without their volition the tides throw them into the sea. They are dazzled by their fate not knowing of the presence of the sea birds that waited for them at the edge of the shore, so many thousands of these migrants never made it “past the portals of the sea” (Carson 1991:255). She describes their habitations with reference not just to time and seasons, but in relationship to levels of access to light. Predators lurk at every turn, and whether she gives them names, species identity markers. or refers to them as schools, she is engaging us to see how life in the sea, however tiny or massive is characteristically unique. With her, through dramatic prose compositions we begin to see the translucent nature of eels, their coming of age and their demise, both consequentially as life cycle moments but also of interlocked moments of concomitant variations as with old eels and newly spawned ones. “As the time approached for them to lose the leaflike form of the larva and become rounded and sinuous like their parents, the impulse to seek fresher shallowing waters grew. Now they found the latent power of unused muscles, and against the urging of the wind and current they moved shoreward. Under the blind but powerful drive of instinct, every activity of their small and glassy bodies was directed unconsciously towards the attainment of a goal unknown in their own experience – something stamped so deeply upon the memory of their race that each of them turned without hesitation towards the coast from which their parents had come” (Carson 1991 361-362). The old eels ofcourse die and become part of the sea, but more complex is her representation of the relation between river and sea in this continuous dialectic. “And as the eels lay offshore in the March sea, waiting for the time when they should enter the waters of the land, the sea, too, lay restless awaiting the time when once more it should encroach upon the coastal plain, and creep up the sides of the foothills, and lap at the bases of the mountain ranges. As the waiting of the eels off the mouth of the bay was only an interlude in a long life filled wih constant change, so the relation of sea and coast and mountain ranges was that of a moment in geologic time. For once more the mountains would be worn away by the endless erosion of water and carried in silt to the sea, and once more all the coast would be water again, and the places of the cities and towns would belong to the sea” (ibid 364). How does one study the changing landscape that comes about with floods and the calamities of war? Robert Park had a hard time decoding the pleasures of philosophy to his post war students, who didn’t want to deal with words, but preferred maps and indexes, ushering the next phase of hyper objective sociological analyses (Matthews 1977:128). Why do people live in areas which are known to be dangerous? The stockyards and factories had been replaced with the face of the gangster, the friendly shark who opened his mouth and let the fish enter his belly. Chicago was dangerous, and films and ethnographers tried to bring it into the view of the hapless resident. Born on the wrongside of the tracks meant that one could not enter the elite institutions or be part of the upper echelons of the hierarchy. Yet, Chicago had energy. Floyd Dell writing of Robert Herrick’s fiction wrote that Chicago was a ‘condition’ not a city ( 127). By looking at migrants and their life styles the Chicago school in the 1930s was preoccupied with the culture of African origin migrants, pr the Polish. the hobo and the dance hall, the ghettos and the bohemias (ibid). The visual aspect of writing and describing was typical of Park and his students, there had to be a tactile quality which was superimposed upon the writing of sociology and depended on memory and history. Park and Burgess quote from Wendelband who gave a lecture in the University of Strassburg in 1894, that the historian tires to ‘revive and call up into the present, in all its particularities an event in the past. His aim is to do for an actual event precisely what the artist seeks to do for the object of his/her imagination. It is just here that we discern the kinship between the historian and the writer of literature” ( Park and Burgess 1969:8). It seemed crucial to emphasize the abstract nature of science, and the concrete method of representation in history, literature and narrative production in social science. This is why Rachel Carson’s determination to reach out to a lay or common reader become texts of long lasting beauty. It would be centrally as texts published in newspapers and journals encouraging readers to look at the riveting beauty of the ocean. Park describes this concern with the unique, and the preoccupation with mobility, as central to the methodologies of the 1930s of which both were so much a part. “Consider how quickly our appreciation is deadened as some object is multiplied or is regarded as one case in a thousand. “She is not the first” is one of the cruel passages in Faust. It is the individuality and the uniqueness of an object that all our sense of value has its roots. It is upon this fact that Spinoza’s doctrine of the conquest of the passions by knowledge rests, since for him knowledge is the submergence of the individual in the universal, the “once for all” into the eternal”(ibid 10). The concern is for Park, the relation between criminal/civil/moral law which is an old Durkheimian preoccupation of The Division of Labour. This brings us to the rights of groups and individuals in the time of the Anthropocene. Tracey Skillington argues that rising seas, green house gases and climate change are questions of everyday concerns, and policy makers must take into account the intergenerational responsibilities of planning for the future. By focusing on questions of the youth and their right to livelihood, it is possible to think about what we leave on planet earth for generations not yet born (Skillington in Wallenhorst and Wulf 2022 :819) Hajo Eichoff, a cultural historian from Berlin argues that in the 12000 years of settlement in food gathering and growing, the word culture emerged from culturare or care of the earth. It is this earth which is now languishing as war and technology deplete resources faster than they can be rejuvenated. He takes the example of the mobile phone which combines camera, word processor and recorder and leaves behind not just images, but a trail of destruction of waste dumps which cannot be recycled, and are poison fields for later generations to handle. As there is no balance between biomass and the waste that humans leave the future is increasingly bleak (Eichoff in Wallenhorst and Wulf 2022:1133). However, human preoccupation remains with the idea of security, which word has its origins in ‘no worry’. Alejandro Cerreata in Sea Level Change shows us that 7000 years ago a certain stability allowed for humans to occupy coastal belts. Now that global warming has entered a phase which may go on for hundreds of years, leading to oceans rising and heating, the earth would not be much affected by any manoeuvre to bring down temperatures. This statistical and chronological analyses of geological phases such as ice ages due to cooling, and entropy due to heating, are understood over huge swathes of time. There are two options, one is to move from coastal areas, the other is to build architecturally adaptive structures which keep out the sea. Given the population density of coastal towns and villages, reviving the marshlands or associated rivers and canals, is one temporary solution, but finally as humans we have to accept what Eiseley showed us so magnificently that the ‘firmament of time’ is not a geological concept merely, it is how humans deal with their fate, and the aesthetics of it. References Carson, Rachel: The Sea (A Trilogy;Under The Seawind; The Sea Around Us; The Edge of the Sea.) Paladin, London, 1991 Cearetta, Alejandro: 2022 Sea Level Change in in Nathanell Wallenhorst and Christoph Wulf 2022: Handbook of the Anthropocene: Humans Between Heritage and the Future Springer Nature (1124-1127) Eichof, Hajo: 2022 Security in Nathanael Wallenhorst and Christoph Wulf 2022: Handbook of the Anthropocene: Humans Between Heritage and the Future Springer Nature (1128-1134) Eiseley, Loren: 1960 The Firmament of Time, Nebraska, Bison Books. Matthews, Fred H. 1977: Quest for an American Sociology:Robert E.Park and The Chicago School McGill Queen’s University Press, Montreal and London Park, Robert E and Earnest W, Burgess 1969: The Science of Sociology Chicago: Chicago University Press. Paz, Octavio: 1985, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings, New York: Grove Weidenfeld Skillington, Tracey: 2022 Intergenerational Justice in Nathanael Wallenhorst and Christoph Wulf 2022: Handbook of the Anthropocene: Humans Between Heritage and the Future Springer Nature pgs 819-822 Wallenhorst, Nathanel and Christoph Wulf 2022: Handbook of the Anthropocene: Humans Between Heritage and the Future Springer Nature Susan Visvanathan, Formerly Professor, CSSS/ JNU