{"id":4220,"date":"2020-09-10T10:34:16","date_gmt":"2020-09-10T14:34:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/?p=4220"},"modified":"2020-09-10T10:34:16","modified_gmt":"2020-09-10T14:34:16","slug":"on-exactitude-in-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/on-exactitude-in-science\/","title":{"rendered":"On Exactitude in Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you’ve ever been in an anthro class with me, you’ll know that I am obsessed<\/em> with discussing the ever-confusing distinctions and interactions between “reality” and “representation.” I thought this Mitchell reading built nicely on Geertz’s piece, applying this notion of “Winks upon winks” to how we venture into the ethnographic field subconsciously searching for a “picture” or a “pictorial order” of things. It’s so engrained in our methods of observation that we don’t even notice! I mean, this is precisely how I approached my thesis research this summer- hoping to capture a full picture of the filmmaking culture in Hollywood- and Mitchell’s piece has now really allowed me to reflect on how the way in which we organize information or tell stories, even, is marked by a certain line of thinking.<\/p>\n

One of my favorite writers, Jorge Luis Borges, has written a lot on the impossibility of truth and on the destructive capacity of words- “writing as an erasing machine,” as anthropologist Michael Taussig would say. (Fun fact, the movie\u00a0Interstellar\u00a0<\/em>is loosely based on Borges’ short story\u00a0“The Library of Babel”…how could you not love this guy??) Borges wrote a short story- honestly I would say it’s more of a paragraph- called “On Exactitude in Science” about a map of the world so big and so accurate that it was the actually the size of the world itself. I think this speaks really well to Mitchell’s paradox of representations; you want them to be as “real” as possible, but at the same time only “real” to the point that it is still distinguishable as a representation. Borges’ story goes on to describe how as soon as perfect accuracy was achieved, the map was deemed useless by its creators and the discipline of cartography as a whole was abandoned. “What matters about this labyrinth [of exhibition],” Mitchell says, “is not that we never reach the real, never find the promised exit, but that such a notion of the real, such a system of truth, continues to convince us.” Knowing that the absolute best ethnography we can do will always only be a representation at best, I constantly wonder if I should think of myself as more of a creative writer or an artist…it makes me dizzy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you’ve ever been in an anthro class with me, you’ll know that I am obsessed with discussing the ever-confusing distinctions and interactions between “reality” and “representation.” I thought this Mitchell reading built nicely on Geertz’s piece, applying this notion of “Winks upon winks” to how we venture into the ethnographic field subconsciously searching for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1625,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-post-production"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1625"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4220"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4221,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4220\/revisions\/4221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}