Michael Agar
Ethknoworks LLC

Web page tune-up New Year 2012

The pictures? Most people looking this page have probably heard of the Las Conchas fire, the monster this summer in the Jemez Mountains on the west side of the plateau that Santa Fe sits on. There was a lot of national press when it licked its fiery lips in the vicinity of Los Alamos. Radioactive stuff? Nah, it's perfectly safe, said the official Lab spokesman, that meaning in the logic of modern life that there was reason to believe we were all soon going to glow in the dark. That fire lit the Western sky at night like a long dancing line of bright orange spirits. Haven't seen anything like it since my brief but meteoric career fighting fires during my Greek island period in the 1980s.

So a couple of months ago, after the fire and then the floods that inevitably follow, we wondered about Bandolier National Monument, our traditional first backpack trip of the season, a spot we send visitors to, one of our favorites in the area. You can't go wrong, a WPA headquarters building, an ancient Pueblo village, a hike that drops you down to the Rio Grande, and our favorite, a hike back into the canyon between walls of compressed volcanic ash--tuff they call it--sculpted like a Gaudi building in Barcelona.

The fire did hit the canyon but spared the headquarters building at its mouth. An intern told us the wind came up and blew the fire through quickly so the canyon burned but wasn't reduced to an ash desert. The floods were another story. Frijoles Creek, the water that washes down into the canyon from its source a few miles above, stripped foliage, funneled torrents towards the Rio Grande and sent boulders taller than we are rolling along like marbles.

So we drove up to hike in "our" canyon once the park was re-opened, duly warned that we would have to scramble--trails washed out, debris everywhere, but it's pretty hard to get lost in a canyon. Many stories to tell about what we saw and how it felt to be there. The pictures give some idea.

The peculiar thing was, we went in to learn something new about nature in a destructive mood. One thing you learn living in a Southwestern desert is that nature has no respect for human utopian fantasies. So much for Bambi and birds singing while perched on the head of a smiling coyote. The "environment" could care less about your human needs, physical or psychological. Nature red in tooth and claw and all that. It's good to remember that the Spaniards were ready to split after the conquest but the priests made them stay because they'd already converted some Indians.

I've grown to like the take it or leave it spirit of nature around here. A fire and a flood were another strong slap in the face of human delusions of control. We wanted to take a closer look.

The pictures give an idea of what we found. Too much to write about on a web page, but unbelievable beauty, destruction and renewal, scrub oak sprouting at the base of shape-shifting trees and a kaibab squirrel checking out the possibilities, but mostly amazement at the power of fire, wind and geological shape.

What bothered us as we hiked back out to the WPA built headquarters and the parking area was, everyone we talked with acted like they were in mourning. Understandable of course. It was a beautiful canyon. But the problem we had with the humans' attitude? It still is. We're looking forward to watching it change when we hike back in again in the Spring.

As I wrote last time, I'm still in book editing mode. I met with Mitch Allen at the anthropology meetings, he being the jefe at Left Coast Press. Someone took a picture at their booth and put it on their Facebook page. I'll paste it in below, mostly to prove to the IRS that I was there when I deduct the expenses of the trip, even though they may be skeptical because in the picture it looks like I missed my morning meds. My friend at U New Mexico, Jennifer Averill, runs something called the "Qualitative Cafe," and she let me come in and talk the book to her group. The Chapter One from the book on the web page is an even newer draft than it was last time I posted this page. It's a lot of unpaid work, writing this thing, because the pieces aren't data or stories but rather entire systems of thought, any one of which could fill volumes, and have in the past. I worry some that I'm being too hard on the long tradition of "behavioral and social science" as the quantitative test of narrow hypotheses derived from discipline internal theory, but then as usual in the q/​a at UNM younger folks always ask, how can I get my (supervisor, departmental committee, funding agency, journal editor, etc) to accept good research that doesn't look like a clinical trial?" I'm not attacking individuals, but rather the political domination of a tradition that destroys the possibility of data from ordinary human social life before it even recruits its sample. I'm tired of being diplomatic. The first forty years were fun, but enough already. If ever there was a time when we need to understand in a profound way how the human social world works, and doesn't, it's now, and there are ways to do that that don't look like a 19th century physics lab.

On the previous home pages I wrote a fair amount about current work. I'm still in the middle of it so I've left it off this time. There will be stories to tell about both projects soon. In the meantime, I had this weird experience with Facebook that I couldn't resist writing about, so I added that as a new item on the Blog page. It will cause younger readers to shake their heads in wonder at the digitally illiterate follies.

Last summer I participated in a workshop in the UK about "methodological innovation" in the social sciences. The organizers decided to put together a special issue of a journal and dragged me, screaming and kicking, into writing up my presentation. I was screaming and kicking because--though several people told me the show was good--I'm not sure there's much in there that's helpful in answering the question. And I wrote it like I talked and academic journals have gotten to be more of a pain in the keyboard about writing style than ever before. But, in spite of it all, it looks like it's close to publication, so I'll put it in the left hand column near the top should anyone want to take a look. It's called "Method to my Madness."

Next week I'm heading back to Austin to consult with Rick Perry on communication style. If you believe that I really need to work on my public image. I can't watch U.S. political news anymore without contemplating a gallon jug full of Jamesons. I'm actually going to Austin for another session with the complexity/​modeling group who work at the VA hospital to improve training and patient care. The article from our earlier work is coming out in JASSS, the social science/​modeling journal, and I'll post the URL when it appears. It's a luxury to work with people like them, smart, problem oriented, with the authority to implement results.

In spite of the fact that the world appears to be coming to an end, or maybe because of that, life is interesting.