wk4 {cosmovisión+fieldwork}
In the mountainous jungles of Nepal, there are villages that collect red honey-so-called “mad honey”- that contains the poisonous grayanotoxins of the Rhodendron flower, eating it by the teaspoon for it’s mildly inebriating and purported aphrodisiac and restorative powers. They carefully select a hive that meets their criteria for harvesting, make a ceremonial offering to bless the endeavor, and go about their apiarian fieldwork using handmade ropes, smoke baskets, and various filters for separating the honey from the comb.
Centuries ago, an army of Rome led by Pompey, marching through Asia minor along the Black Sea, was defeated by Mithridates, whose soldiers left pots of red honey behind as they escaped the trailing enemy; the tired and hungry Romans devoured the honey, and as they became inebriated, unconscious, or convulsed and expired right on the spot, Mithridates turned his army around and easily conquered them.
Local knowledge can be helpful.
4 out of 4 interviewees from Saturday indicated difficulty in planting at the right time, and despite living here for several years, most of them were just beginning to get their timings right for planting and harvesting. They also had varying degrees of difficulty in acquiring meaningful information or instruction on the subject. The question of missed opportunities (Brown and Wyatt) begins to have currency in situations like these, where activists/designers can help address concerns that have been overlooked by engaging clients directly and determining their needs in an open, conversational way. Immediately, the idea of a “New Texas Farmer’s” almanac sounds useful, and whether it manifests in some sort of solar/astronomical clock on the farm site, or as a well-translated booklet or website, there is an immediate potential for design to improve yields, crop health, and techniques in general.
Perkes is absolutely right in suggesting that design can find non-traditional, alternative routes to improve clients’ quality of life. I am attracted by the potential of the designer-client relationship to be something more than the sale of a highly specialized, one-time custom object, and instead as a shared experience that involves the knowledge and desires of all parties, and taps into each participants greater ambitions for their communities, their lives, and society in general. We haven’t had time to immerse in our MRC clients’ lives, but already, I feel something different than the usual dread of impending deadlines and harsh juries... something like camaraderie, or at least mutual respect and an emerging common goal.
We have a great opportunity to build community from “the inside out” (Anderson). I learned from this weekend’s interviews that I have a lot to learn as a designer; every interviewee had a different perspective, a different goal for themselves and different dreams about the future, and all had their own relationship with gardening and nature in general. It was incredibly uplifting to hear how, despite overcoming a lot of obstacles in the past, and enduring a long and difficult journey, each was optimistic in their own way, and each was active in trying to make the best of their new lives. Each interviewee was interested in (or had already invented) new gardening techniques, tools, and technologies, and it seems like we’ll have a lot of potential paths to take when we start designing for the MRC. As a community, there is already a great deal of collaboration and cooperation, which will make it all the more important to consider the MRC as a broad social network with a substantial shared body of knowledge.
I can’t think of a better set of circumstances in which to design, but maybe that’s just because we’re so far into our work that it seems ridiculous not to want to do this. It’s good to be modern in Hale’s sense- to see the worth in finding a plural way of living, to acknowledge the value of our differences and find constructive ways of harmonizing them and building upon them.
“Within an academic setting, the case for activist research can only be made in rigorous academic terms. To state this in the concrete terms of the case at hand, activist research in support of the Awas Tingni trial and aligned with broader struggles for indigenous land rights must be justified by the claim that it yields privileged scholarly understanding. It must generate new knowledge and theoretical innovation on questions of identity politics, on the problems of using the law to advance indigenous rights, and more broadly, the challenges of such struggles in the face of neoliberal multiculturalism. Outside academia, however, activist research will be judged in starkly different terms: what is its potential contribution to the political struggle underway? At the end of the day, activist scholars must embrace two quite distinct sets of objectives and forms of accountability, and they must negotiate the often considerable tensions between them.” (Hale, “Activist Research v. Cultural Critique...” )
