Myth - History - Geography

Today I learned about myth.

Tolkien, J.R.R. 1937. "The Hobbit; or, There and Back Again." New York: Del Rey.

Myth is a story told to make sense of something that otherwise would pass us by in life without notice or meaning. Religions do this. Folk tales do this. Science fiction and fantasy novels do this. When put through a geographical lens, myth allows us to look at landscapes and tell stories about them and their constituent parts that make us feel like we are in a narrative that is bigger than our own lives (Drake, 2008). While donning this lens, the world is seldom dull, for our wishes, fears, and actions become the arms of stories, and are marked in what we see around us at any given moment. The stories grant us a gap between our emotions and our actions, so that we are never alone with what we feel (Limburg, 2009); everything is normalized and placed in the world. This can be powerful and dangerous, of course, as in the case of blind devotion to a story, and the subsequent feigning of loss of control over one's own intent and thought. It can also be powerful and liberating, however, if the stories one tells analog to the present world in a way that does neither harm nor injustice.

Reading The Hobbit has crystallized this lesson for me. Learning, knowing, finding, or even inventing a hidden layer of meaning to the places we inhabit, and the spaces we move through, is a move toward the aesthetic - they become matters of taste and distinction. Bordieu says that the ultimate test for an aesthete is if they can translate the method of distinction to things in life that have not yet been distinguished - can they, in other words, apprehend things that were thought to be generic into the realm of thought, classification, and meaning. In The Hobbit, things, people, situations, sights, sounds - all become known and are given a history of their own that holds a lesson for the moment. Every place is perfect (Morrow, 2008). Every landscape is part of a narrative that is the unfolding of the human drama of which we are both puppets and puppeteers. The Hobbit itself, of course, is intensely geographical. Besides the fact that there is a map at the beginning of the book, it is the sense of wonder and creativity in moments of challenging encounter that make the book what it is. Everything has its place and knows what it's doing there. The Giant Spiders in Mirkwood are ferocious, but only if you enter their territory. The protagonist is learning to be a cosmopolite - to cross territory - in a world where cosmopolitanism has not yet been invented, and where territoty is bounded with iron. Where it does exist, it is reserved for the most enlightened and magical beings, the Wizards.

I realized just today that writing a dissertation is not about putting the puzzle together correctly in order to find the right answer. Rather it is about asserting what I think about a situation or set of facts. Anyone can relate a tale. This week I've been doing archival research at Loma Linda University, the main Seventh-day Adventist university and medical school. I've found that the archivists there are able to relate an enormous number of facts about certain topics related to my research about the Kellogg cereal enterprise, nearly in unison with each other, as historians are wont to do. I wondered 'what do I have to add to this, then? The story is known and complete.' Yet their story was lacking. For someone not affiliated with the religion or interested in the history of Kellogg's, actually, I would say their collection of facts was downright boring. What is it that turns a set of facts into something compelling? It relates a bigger significance. The information I'm collecting is nothing more than the scaffolding for the bulk of the dissertation. What I make of the bits I've collected is what people really care about.

A very low number of facts can reproduce a myth, but there is no number of collected facts that can create a myth. For that is the job of the myth-maker, the author.

Geography Shop

Today I learned about the Michigan State Agricultural College.

Twenty-Seventh Annual Report of the Secretary of the State Board of Agriculture of the State of Michigan. 1888. Lansing, MI: Thorp & Godfrey.

The Agricultural Experiment Station employed professors from a number of departments at the College, signaling that the scientific division of knowledge was well encoded by 1888. It was the first year that the experiment station, a product of federal government funding (the Hatch Act) to increase the efficiency of agriculture, was underway at the Michigan College. Experiment stations have a more detailed story, and will be covered in another reading. Suffice it to say that they were part of state agricultural schools, and that their introduction - in practice and theory - was imported from Germany at around this time.

The office of the experiment station in this year employed:

Agriculturalist: Samuel Johnson
Horticulturalist: Liberty Bailey
Chemist: Robert Kedzie
Entomologist: Albert Cook
Botanist: William Beal
Veterinarian: E. Grange

When I visited Michigan State University in October, 2008, I saw many of the original buildings where each of these department were housed. The Agricultural College also had a Forestry Commission and a Weather Service. It was, by all accounts, a place of intense examination of the living and natural world - a geography shop. Of course the great contribution of geography is that it aims to synthesize and connect these divisions in order to say something more abstract about the environment we create and live in.

The farm department had accounts for a labor team, a farm house, cattle, sheep, swine, grain, produce, implements, wood, and fertilizer.

The horticultural department had accounts for a labor team, grounds, vegetable garden, fruit garden, orchard, implements, and ice. An immediate observation here is that there were separate gardens for fruit and vegetables - a separation based on botanical classification. This is an example of the spatial arrangement of a knowledge structure on the acrage of the agricultural college. The separations were made for the sake of life science specialists, and for the sake of specialized knowledge, as opposed to synthetic knowledge which had been the norm until the scientific revolution. Specialization was important because detailed reserach led to precision about the natural world. Precision gained the status of credible when it was observed that manipulation could occur at the invisible scales of the molecules in the soil.

The infrastructure of the college farm and park consisted of the following (not a complete list):

chemical laboratory
botanical laboratory
mechanical laboratory
veterinary laboratory
horticultural laboratory
farm house
herdsman's house
ten barns at professor's houses
horticultural barn and shed
cattle barn and shed
sheep barn
horse barn
piggery
corn house
green house, dwelling and stable
feed barn
grain barn
tool house
bee house
boiler house
observatory

water works
artesian well and connections
steam works

Annual report from Samuel Johnson, the professor of agriculture.
The College acquired a vacant nearby farmhouse to be used as a makeshift hospital. The Freshman class was adjourned 2 weeks early from their spring semester in light of a contagious disease.
Johnson attended a number of conferences, including the State Dairymen's Association, where he presented a paper on silos; the Michigan short horn breeders association, the Michigan merino sheep breeders, Teachers of agriculture and horticulture association; and he wrote a bulletins on steer nutrition, and one on experiments with potatoes and oats.
New implements included an Apsinwall potato planter (Three Rivers, MI), a clover and grass seeder (Ypsilanti, MI), a fertilizer sower (NY state), and a corn cultivator (Marseilles, IL).
The new silo: "the ensilage was most excellent, largely made from corn cut when the ears were in the milk." It held 150 tons.

The experiment station, having just begun, was focusing on trips to and observations of other experiment stations. Of particular curiosity was Johnson's trip to Iowa, where he learned about the success of Russian varieties of fruit in the cold climate. Of the Iowan horticultural professor Halstead: "the ocular demonstration he gave us in the shape of well formed, vigorous trees that had withstood the severe winters of Iowa and were ready to blossom, while the native varieties were generally killed." Here it is worth pausing to consider that the native plants are made to seem foreign, or out of place. Organisms were given a place by people in the natural world based on their usefullness: a Landscape of Utility was being created through the professionalization of agriculture.

The crop list for 1887 is presented by field number (plots).
field #3 - 23 acres - nothing
field #3 - 13 acres - meadow - 18 tons
Field #3 - 10 acres - experimental crops - roots & potatoes
Field #5 - 20 acres - nothing
Field #5 - 5 acres - meadow - 4.5 tons
Field #5 - 15 acres - wheat - 363 bushels
Field #9 - 23 acres - oats - 1208 bushels
Etc.

Elaborate Mapping of the Body

Today I learned about circulation.

Valencius, Conevery Bolton. 2002. The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land. New York: Perseus Books.

In the middle of the 19th century, movement between body parts - often without making explicit exactly what was moving - was of great concern. As the responsibility of health care was changing locations from the household to the hospital, notions of how the inside of the body functioned was also changing. The mid 19th century, however, was still before the professionalizaiton and scientization of medicine, still before germ theory, and still before the probing of the stethoscope and surgery. Valencius points out that Americans on the frontier in this period "inhabited not simply the geographic surroundings we might easily, and wrongly, identify as the sum of their environment; they lived also in a complicated interior geography of sensation, movement, and flow...understanding their bodies, their inhabited and hidden selves, is a central task of understanding their more accessible, visible world of stream, swamp, mountain, and pasture" (p. 53).

Following the movement of disease and sensation through the body, and the fact that this was the most trustworthy means of diagnosis, means that people had an awareness of their bodies and a way to express physical sensation. This means that place names must have matched up with an internal geography. "Many ailments assailed specific body parts or locations, which were identified by an elaborate mapping of the body." Knowing how diseases traveled through the body's interior geography was integral to a healing process that relied on balance, the removal of congestion, and the increase of flow.

Human Body Shops

Today I learned about hospitals.

Starr, Paul. 1982. The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The rise of a sovereign profession and the making of a vast industry. New York: Basic Books.

It was not until the 1870s when hospitals and doctors had anything to do with one another. The function of a human body shop - a place where ones goes when something is wrong with the body - used to be accomplished by a traveling doctor who would make house calls. The demands of increasingly concentrated populations, however, along with a growing culture of professional specialization and technical competency, made hospitals places of medical collaboration and of hope for cure instead of places of certain death. When the power of science met the beuracratic efficiency of cities, almshouses that served the role of social welfare up until this period began to morph into the function of what we now know as hospitals. As Starr puts it, "the rise of hospitals...offers a study in the penetration of the market into the ideology and social relations of a precapitalist institution." Max Weber made the distinction between communal relations and associative relations. Communal relations are the bond of families and other ties of personal loyalty, no party having necessarily the same beliefs or ends. Associative relations involve economic exchanges, mutual benefit, and shared interests or ends. The transition of almshouses to hospitals in the late 19th century marked the transition from communal relations of healing - the home - to associative relations of healing - going to a building of professional specialists-strangers.

Interest and success in practices of surgery rose precipitously in the same period. The first use of anesthesia (ether) in 1846 by Morton at Massachussets General Hospital allowed for slower and more careful surgeries to take place. Before anesthesia, doctors needed to be strong, fast, and have the ability to psychologically calm the patient. Penetration of major body cavities began when doctors were able to make people unconscious. Near the turn of the century, the main field of surgical interest and invention was the abdomen. This gives us a clue that there were many problems associated with that part of the body.

John Kellogg was a prime example of someone in the center of this social milieu. The Battle Creek Sanitarium encompassed the transition to a place of healing, where patients entered a business relationship with their caretakers, and where Kellogg pressed the boundaries of penetration into the internal abdominal cavities of the body.

The Geographical Flavoring of Foods

Today I learned about taste.

Goldstein, Jenny. 2009. "The Rapid Rise of the Rwandan Specialty Coffee Industry: Localizing taste through global commodity markets." Unpublished Manuscript; Los Angeles, CA.

The terms "symbolic value" and "material value" can be thought of as the two constituent parts that define the concept of taste. Colloquial use of the word taste suggests this. One can have good taste, or even acquire good taste, as in "limburger cheese is an acquired taste." Taste, in this case, however, need not be related to oral sensation or food; it can be towards any aesthetic moment, and a learned person often claims to have taste in all aesthetic moments: he or she knows "the best of" for any given situation. It takes good taste to decorate a room. In this "symbolic value" part of the definition, taste must fit into cultural and classed norms. Taste, then, becomes a mechanism by which distinction is made between people or groups of people. There is no inherent value that one taste or aesthetic style has over another, but prestige is attached to certain tastes and styles by groups of all classes. Thorstein Veblen has perhaps articulated this notion of conspicuous consumption most eloquantly in his book "The Theory of the Leisure Class," written in the early 20th century.

Taste is also used colloquially to refer to the body sensation that happens on the tongue when it meets foreign objects and organisms. This is the "material value" of taste. To use the coffee bean as an example, it is comprised of shape, color, size, odor, texture, chemistry, and place of origin. We have words to describe physical taste, like bitter, sweet, sour, etc.

When people speak of "terroir" they generally refer to the qualities of the landscape from which a food product came. Landscapes impart irreproducible material value to food objects. But in accordance with the complexity of "landscape" that geographers have demonstrated, terroir (the geographical flavoring of foods) cannot be divorced from a culturally-specific process that guides the material value of a plant-grown-in-place into a food object with symbolic value. For example, roasting coffee beans is a cultural process, but adds to the material value of a coffee bean from X soils on Y hillside with Z amount of rain. This, then, is the first geographical experience of food consumption: understanding how the growth, harvesting, and processing of plants - i.e. the transformation from plant to food product - relies on natural and cultural attributes through and through.

The second geographical experience of food consumption is taste. In the same way that material food products must be understood in relation to their hybrid nature-culture, "landscape" history, taste must also be understood in this way. The sensation on the tastebud - the assignment of "yummy" - of a food can never be separated from the social structure that gives "symbolic" value to those "material" sensations. Yet it is a trap to think that symbolic value is simply added on top of material value, like a layer. This detracts too much from physical sensation on the tongue. Sensation helps create symbolic value, and they are co-constituted. This is to me the cornerstone of geographical thought, and the discipline's most pressing quandry: how can we understand physical sensation (materiality/nature) and symbolic value (culture/belief) as one event instead of two? Taste gives us an inroad to study this question.

Examination

Today I learned about examination.

Foucault, Michel. 1995 [1975]. Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison. Translated by A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.

Examination of the body uses a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to classify bodies and to create solvable problems. In order to enact a cure, a problem must be drawn from a pool of known problems that have known solutions. The act of examining uses vision to differentiate and to judge. Kellogg did this with his patients by performing an entrance examination upon their arrival at the sanitarium. When guests checked in, they muddied their role as guests into the role of a guest-patient with a problem. The economy of the sanitarium relied on the existence of a problem: if one were not diagnosed immediately, they would have to be sent home, their fee refunded. Kellogg's examination techniques probed the internal invisible geography of bodies - a mass of organs, flesh, and food cum poision - by measuring and quantifying the dimensions and weights of the internal objects of the digestive system. Examination is highly ritualized in two ways: the ceremony of power performed by the doctor, and the potential for experiment. Healing takes the form of experiment because, from the doctor's point of view, the solution to each labeled problem will have a different outcome. Again, from the doctor's point of view, this is the treadmill of progress. At the moment he thinks that all problems can be aligned with a reliable solution, in comes a person with a new problem, or for whom the old reliable solution does not work. Hence, the ritual of experimentation, and the never-ending process of reclassification of bodies and cures.

The Hospital as an examining apparatus.
The ritual of the visit.
The old form of inspection in the 18th century was irregular and rapid. The doctor in this period was one of many visitors to an ill person. This was transformed into "a regular observation that placed the patient in a situation of almost perpetual examination."

The Geographical Embryo

Today I learned about the anatomy of the digestive system.

McMinn, R.M.H., and M.H. Hobdell. 1974. Functional Anatomy of The Digestive System. New York: Pitman.

Under normal conditions, the workings of the digestive system comprise a larger part of our consciousness about our own bodies than other bodily systems. Diurnal cycles of hunger and defecation mean that we notice the circulation of food through our bodies - part of the invisible internal geography - more than say, the circulation of blood.
The digestive system has been thought of by medical professionals as a tube with a number of gates and openings, but only two to the outside world: the mouth and the anus. We think of these two openings as distant and disconnected, yet at 27 days-old, a human embryo mouth and gut just begin to separate from the same piece of matter. This early development of the digestive system perhaps suggests that bodies prioritize the apparati that allow them to assimilate the outside world: the geographical embryo.
Much like there is a geography to bacterial ecosystems in and on the body, the "epithelial lining" of the digestive tube is modified in different "regions" of the invisible internal geography for different functions of digestion. As food moves through the body in what McMinn calls an "ordered sequence," it exits and enters different places of chemical transposition: from plants and animals to human bodies.

1. Mouth
2. Pharynx
3. Esophagus
4. Stomach
5. Small intestine (duodenum, jejunum, and ileum)
6. Large intestine (Caecum, Colon, Rectum, and Anal canal)
7. Anus

Chemistry begins in the stomach with an acidic homogenizing function that essentially makes mush. Most of the absorption then takes place in the small intestine, where food is moved into the vascular and lymphatic systems. The large intestine absorbs water, and its lower part (the anal canal) acts as a "storage organ" for feces.
That nourishment and poison are separated by two openings of one invisible internal geographical system is astounding. Much like chemistry is the study of change (history) at the molecular scale, gastroenterology is the study of change at the human scale - the making and remaking of bodies, ever-connected to external landscapes.

Invisible Internal Geography

Today I learned about pain and diagnosis.

"The Body in Pain: The making and unmaking of the world," by Elaine Scarry, 1985.

The difficulty of expressing pain, especially physical pain, to others leads to questions about the nature of material and verbal expressibility, or, the nature of human creativity.
This means that physical pain and human creativity are related.
Physical pain usually has no voice, but when it finds a voice it begins to tell a story. This story is related to expressibility and creativity.
Listening to a description of another's physical pain is entering into an invisible geography of another's body. According to Scarry, this description of pain has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible surface of the earth.
Pain could be inches away from us, but unknown to us if it's in another's body.
Pain cannot NOT be grasped if it's in your own body, that is, you can't ignore it. But there is an astonishing freedom to deny the existence of other's pain. Deriving from this, then, having pain means having certainty, and hearing about pain means having doubt.
Pain is resistant to language, and destroys language because it brings about a state anterior to language, one of sounds and cries.

Of this reading I am most interested in the ideas of 1) an invisible internal geography, and 2) the possibility for a proximity of pain that can never be known. The distance between what others feel and what we sense is far, even if they are in the same geographical place. This second one, then, questions the homogenaity of geographical place, and even the connections between subjects and objects that make a place like a thick web. Pain is an example that not everything can be connected in a place - that some things lie invisible, internal, yet have their own geography in the body-prison of expression.
This begs a general question about diagnosis, and a specific one: how did Kellogg diagnose patients in the sanitarium? He went inside, requiring geographical knowledge of the invisible. His method of diagnosis was to make the invisible quantifiable and measurable.