Sirûş. Revelation.

A quote from Foucault on our ahistorical views about monarchy and law...something I thought was interesting that I reread recently to prepare for a new class: "There is, perhaps, a historical reason for this. The great institutions of power that developed in the Middle Ages- monarchy, the state with its apparatus-rose up on the basis of a multiplicity of prior powers, and to a certain extent in opposition to them: dense, entangled, conflicting powers, powers tied to the direct or indirect dominion over the land, to the possession of arms, to serfdom, to bonds of suzerainty and vassalage. If these institutions were able to implant themselves, if, by profiting from a whole series of tactical alliances, they were able to gain acceptance, this was because they presented themselves as agencies of regulation, arbitra- tion, and demarcation, as a way of introducing order in the midst of these powers, of establishing a principle that would temper them and distribute them according to b...

The palimpsestic commentary-like  pieces of writing that I am sharing here on Elena, as a process in itself, show me how generative her whole life seems to be for so many people. It's so much the case, that with only a few mentions of her name, her story, or a blog post, people start to bring their own ideas, comments, their memories of her, or connections they have made to traditional knowledge systems that parallel my experiences with Elena. I feel the need to keep underlining that this has all been about relationship. Elena always emphasized that working with a genuine curandera was cocreative work, something very personal and relational. This was also what she pointed out as an element of modern biomedicine that had mostly died out. So, it fascinates me that even at a meta level, as I go about working through this material years after her death, her life story tends to magnetize a great deal of interpersonal exchange and relationship building. That's unsurprising,...

Years ago I started a process of writing about the contributions of Elena Avila, the author of a unique book on curanderismo called,'Woman Who Glows in the Dark.' In this process, two different pieces of writing emerged: One is more typically academic and the other is more descriptive. Here I am going to share a bit of the second, more descriptive version. This one is focused mostly on interviews and has some auto-ethnography, based on principles I work with from the indigenous research paradigm of Shawn Wilson. In that way of thinking, I must situate myself and my relationship to Elena and the subject because knowledge doesn't stand alone and without relationship. In the journal article I am resubmitting right now, most of this material is lost, which I thought  was unfortunate, and so now we have these two different approaches to the same subject. In the whole inquiry the basic question has been to try and look at what was unique about Elena. In this piece there is a ...

So there has been an intention with this blog to share more about the process of native and non-native people working together in education and the kinds of indigenous knowledge that emerge in my classroom. Without getting too theoretical at this point, I would share that I find the writing of indigenous scholars Shawn Wilson and Gregory Cajete to be the most interesting on this front. Two discussions in my anthropology classes over the last months have stuck out, particularly about indigenous knowledge in the classroom as something very practical that emerges in a dialogical way while studying material, rather than the more clumsy banking method (As Freire refers to it). While, as a non-native person I cannot claim to be decolonized, as such, I do feel that I am recognizing what happens when there is a democritization of knowledge in the classroom, particularly in an environment of historical inequality. Almost all of my students come from families touched by the boarding school kid...

When I began this blog, it was intended to focus on traditional medicine/healing practices that I had done ethnographic work on over the last few years, especially in Turkey, a place not often associated with this subject in the same way as, say, Peru or West Africa have been. And, in my writing process, I am still working on that subject. Now, the second part of the blog's intention had been to write about "real life" and to rub the edges around what is truly "field work," what is "fiction" and what is real life - a typical subject in what has emerged as a postmodern ethnography/anthropology since the late 80s/early 90s. I intended to write about this using a language of interest and accessible to both experts and people new to the subject, so relatively jargon-free. Since September of 2016, I have been working in the tribal education system, a form of university and college level pedagogy that is funded and maintained by the US federal governme...