一贯正确的数据清洁工

高兴了写两句,不高兴了写五句。
正文

excerption of a book - 1

(2005-03-13 22:22:25) 下一个

setting out -- part 1

I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions. But how long it has taken me to make up my mind to do so! It is now fifteen years since I left Brazil for the last time and all during this period I have often planned to undertake the present work, but on each occation a sort of shame and repugnance prevented me making a start. Why,  I asked myself, should I give a deteailed account of so many trivial circumstances and insignificant happenings? Adventure has no place in the anthropologist's profession; it is merely one of those unavoidable drawbacks, which detract from his effective work through the incidental loss of weeks or months; there are hours of inaction when the informant is not available; periods of hunger, exhaustion, sickness perhaps; and always the thousand and one dreary tasks which eat waway the days to no purpose and reduce dangerous living in the heart of the virgin forest to an imitation of military service... The fact that so much effort and expenditures has to be wasted on reaching the object of our studies bestows no value on that aspect of our profession, and should be seen rather as its negative side. The truths which we seek so far afield only become valid when they have been separated from this dross. We may endure six months of travelling, hardships and sickening boredom for the purpose of recording (in a few days, or even a few hours) a hitherto unknown myth, a new marriage rule or a complete list of clan names, but is it worth my while taking up my pen to perpetuate such a useless shred of memory or pitiable recollection as the following: 'At five thirty in the morning, we entered the harbour at Recife amid the shrill cries of the gulls, while a fleet of boats laden with tropical fruits clustered round the hull'?

Nevertheless, this kind of narravtive enjoys a vogue which I, for my part, find incomprehensible. Amazonia, tibet and Africa fill the bookshops in the form of travelogues, accounts of expeditions and collections of photographs, in all of which the desire to impress is so dominant as to make it impossible for the reader to assess the value of the evidence put before him. Instead of having his critical faculties stimulated, he asks for more such pabulum and swallows prodigious quantities of it. Nowadays, being an explorer is a trade, which consists not, as one might think, in discovering hitherto unknown facts after years of study, but in covering a great many miles and assembling lantern-slides or motion pictures, preferably in colour, so as to fill a hall with an audience for several days in succession. For this audience, platitudes and commonplaces seemto have been miraculously transmuted into revelations by the sole fact that their author, instead of doing his plagiarizing at home, has supposedly sanctified it by covering some twenty thousand miles.

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小无 回复 悄悄话 数据J你修人类学啊?好,好。
小贝过河 回复 悄悄话 谢谢数据。作者的确有眼光!很久以前我上本科时努力去看文学理论的文章--总是半
懂不懂得。现在看了LEVI STRAUSS,更有感触些。
笑语轻声 回复 悄悄话 觉得作者很有点愤世嫉俗,很有点鲁迅的味道. 不同的是多了点科学家的傲慢. 我瞎说一下,请多多包涵.:-)

我还是会来看你选的章节的.
数据清洁工 回复 悄悄话 小贝好啊。这是从《忧郁的热带》那本书里摘出来的,作者是了Levi Strauss。书的原名是Tristes tropiques。Strauss是结构主义的创始人之一。

这本书不单是学术著作,还有些杂感与见闻在里面,所有从哪个角度都能看到些好东西。
以后我还会敲一些章节上来,欢迎你随时来看。
小贝过河 回复 悄悄话 这是谁写的。写的很有见地!
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