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leftie norwegian rappers gatas parlament [parliament of the street] set up a website to collect money for a prize on george w. bush's head. the website, killhim.nu [the suffix .nu is archaic high norwegian for 'now'] has been shut down by the police, after complaints by the american embassy. the group might be facing up to 12 years in prison.

not saying I necessarily think this was a very bright idea, but the response does raise the old point about the state monopoly on legitimate violence or, in this case, on social technologies of [incentivation of] assassination.

have been feeling thoroughly dispirited and bored for a couple of days. onset of winter brings increasing darkness, biting cold and still no noticeable activity in the fences. spend an unpleasant amount of time rehearsing familiar arguments in the literature and watching films. and, I've still got some 30 negative degrees to go before things hit rock bottom...

still, despite escalating inactivity I decided not to undertake the journey to alta this weekend just for the animal rights flea market, as I'm going in two weeks' time anyway for a presentation on reindeer number policy for herders, and it's a needless expense to spend the weekend in alta when all official offices and bodies are closed down for the weekend anyway. call me thrifty.

one item of cheerful news is that one of my informants got in touch with me today to get mailing details, she's sending me a gift she made for me because I helped her skin reindeer legs and cleave skulls in the fence.

wow! I've been metafiltered [indirectly, in a comment, but still...].

today: contacted two animal rights organizations to get their local/national angle on animal welfare issues in reindeer herding. this follows up an idea I had around christmas last year, as the bizarre (*) PETA UK campaign to boycott john lewis was entering into its final stages ["give rudolph the gift of life this christmas!"], to use animal rights lobby group influence as an entry-point into herding-related globalization issues. now the animal welfare discourse has turned out to be interesting for a number of other reasons: central to arguments about excess reindeer numbers, for example, and to the debates surrounding use of the curved knife for stunning.

the people at the central offices of NOAH were willing and helpful, I arranged to drop by and have a chat to them next time I'm in Oslo. the local chapter of the animal protection league, Finnmark Dyrebeskyttelse, called me back at 10pm after I'd left a message and invited me to a flea market in Alta this weekend - 6 hours' drive west - where I could get to meet the entire organization. perfect. just when I was wondering what to do this weekend, I get the chance to drive 500km through snow and sleet to talk kitty welfare at a flea market in a secondary school...

(*) I say bizarre with no hesitations whatsoever. the campaign was essentially a blatantly exploitative, ill-conceived high-profile media stunt. to put it in the starkest terms: PETA argued for the elimination of reindeer herding for the benefit of reindeer. if reindeer herding was abolished, territories currently used by reindeer would immediately be snatched up by state, military, local government and private interests. the only reason reindeer are allowed to migrate through these extensive areas is that the people who herd them have established a human right to the territories. no herders, no reindeer. rudolph would be driven off and shot. simple as that. this is leaving aside the numerous other contradictions with the campaign, such as the fact that by attacking the international market for non-meat products, the campaign was in practical terms forcing reindeer herding away from broad utilization patterns, and towards dependency on monocrop meat production, which in turn requires larger herd sizes, more extensive and mechanized herding, and intensified industrialization. all of which are factors that adversely affect animal welfare. hell-oooooo, anyone home?

drove down to varangerbotn to read newspapers and try to get hold of a sami parliament politican who works with windmill parks and territorial interventions, but all was busy busy, meetings and more meetings. had a chat to the female ex-anthropologist from tromsø that works there. she's friendly but I think I scared the poor soul a bit - initially relieved at finding a fellow anthro, I lapsed straight into the casual, self-satirizing, relatively high-powered theoretical anthro-jargon I'm used to from cambridge. now she seems a bit nervous around me - laughs a lot, says 'oh yes, like that, ha ha', rubs her pregnant belly, and in general overcommunicates some kind of unclear message that I think has to do with her having a partner, a steady job, several children and a past as an anthropologist, having left 'all that' behind...

anyway. instead of pursuit, I bought some food and rented three films (eight-legged freaks, may and irreversible) from tanabru, and sat down to let my unconscious mull over something an informant said yesterday, about sami ethnopolitics being a 'politics of suspicion'. fits in nice contrast with a point I remember helander and kailo making in a mutual interview in their 1998 'no beginning, no end', about the sami cultural critique being grounded in a 'metaphysics of suspicion'... but while H & K make this sound positive, the politics of suspicion as my informant understood it yesterday was an obstacle to collective mobilization, a politics of jante(*) where all agents even sami are automatically suspect, assumed to possess obscure and unpleasant motives...

(*) one day someone has to write a cultural history of the 'law of jante', if only to let non-Nordics (and Nordics - until recently I thought it was a viking saying...) understand what is meant by the term. meanwhile, you might want to try googling it.

as a reiki principle says.

birthday! turned 27 today. 27. when I was in secondary school I thought I'd be dead by now. no celebratory plans, unless taking a trip over to varangerbotn talk to a politician in the sami parliament about the ecological impact of windmill parks counts.

maybe I prefer to delay the moment of reckoning when I start taking stock: no capital; no fixed abode; no settling plans; no marriage plans; no wish for babies or a fixed life; no idea what to do after my money runs out, except apply for more money; no clear life plans, though plenty of shapeless ambition. stated in positive terms, I live my life as an apophatic theology. progressive mystical rejection: neti, neti. as the hindus say. 'not this, not this'. and oooh what's this? ah well, not this either...

according to the hostess, I'm a bit ahead of my time with a foot in the new coming paradigm of acquarius, when people will shift and flow like water and needed money will pour from the skies like manna... meager comfort.

slept late today, after sitting at the door of a gamme-dance at the farm last night. kept having to physically disentangle myself from a tubby, clinging, middleaged, hideously drunk blondine with with highly mobile if uncoordinated hands, alcohol-induced childhood regression [two words: "polymorphous perversity". you may not remember it, but...] and no inhibitions whatsoever, who kept wrapping herself around me "provocatively", breathing in my ear and trying to kiss me as I sat at the door. disgusting - my dormant misanthropic impulse rekindled just around the fourth time I had to shove her off brusquely, and I went to bed feeling like a soiled blanket.

then had a strange dream in which, seeking initiation, I found myself in the amazon, standing on a thick rainforest tree-branch, 50 metres above a gigantic ritual basin made from carved stone and filled with water. I had a black and white braid the thickness of a man's arm, a hundred yards long, tied to my ankles and a piece of the flesh from some amazonian psychedelic fruit in my mouth. my two children [!?] would be looking after me during the coming ordeal- I assume the black and white braid was to pull me up from the water if things went wrong. the fruit would sustain me without breathing in the water of the basin while it tripped my skull and my soul open. as I consumed the fruit i would gradually rise back to the surface.

what to do but jump in? so I did.

the water was lukewarm and received me more gently than you'd expect after a 50-metre fall, and I sank into the depths. I found I could breathe - that is, my lungs were moving in and out regularly in a medium that felt neither like water nor air. ether, maybe, but there was no need for breathing, the fruit sustained me. I opened my eyes and saw a strange hyperreal vista of sharply-contoured gray and yellow shapes- confusing, not what I expected to see but something completely different. alien but not hostile. couldn't work out what it was all meant to be because my perspective was fucked, but before I could understand it I grew afraid that I was drowning and swam quickly to the surface, aborting the ceremony.

up on land I met an old friend from back home and explained what had happened, speculating like a 19th-century theosophical scientist about reduced oxygen consumption during yogic meditation states etc. then my two children explained the two ways of eating the fruit on land - I don't remember the exact procedures, but one was raw and one was cooked [yes! levi-strauss is not dead, he lives on in my dreams...] - saying each of them would choose one of the ways. then I was shown an old 1920s-style book [by someone, I guess. no idea who] - you could tell its age from the texture of the black-and-white photographs - with stories and pictures of german explorers on llamas and alpacas in the andes mountains, phonetic transcriptions of a a number of pagain deity names and a section featuring a discussion of el diablo [the devil, in spanish].

no idea what this is all about. I'm going to ignore whatever potential subliminal meaning it has and chill out with a book on reindeer herding co-management strategies and a cup of coffee. sunday, after all...

capitalising on my gasoline funding to act as a chauffeur- this morning farm-mistress woke me up to ask whether I could drive her consort to vadsø to pick up a car. i stumbled out of bed, got dressed, had a cup of coffee while he left his girlchild at her uncle's - girlchild is three and I've been teaching her to throw snowballs, but she keeps eating them - and off we drove. conversed broadly on a number of topics in the car - including the miraculous bone healing powers of reindeer: he works at the processing plant in tanabru - the one owned by the guy who doesn't want anything to do with me - and says he's seen spectacularly fractured bones healed in lumpy but functional ways, legs, ribs and even spines on the carcasses that pass him on the conveyor belt. also chatted about fishing and car maintenance. learning more about car engines and practical life in the wild than anyone who knew me as a kid would ever have thought...

earlier, skimming throguh a rare published norwegian ethnography of food habits in a small community in østfold left me with a slightly sour aftertaste. i read with a cannibal eye to the text - constantly looking for what i can use and appropriate. either in terms of material, or in terms of technique, theory, style and execution. that is, what i can put in a book, and how i should write it. in this case, the example was mostly negative - the writer obscured the most interesting part to me, that is his actual fieldwork practice in a norwegian community, in favour of a line of analysis that i found highly problematic.

his local material was interesting, but it was diffuse, constantly interlaced with extraneous stuff - citations from the geocities homepages of frustrated teenyboppers in oslo, articles from cosmopolitan- in such a way that the local material appeared to be principally illustrative of a more holistic phenomenon or matrix, implicitly some kind of national-level 'culture', an aspect of 'norwegianness'. he seemed to conflate the oslo teenybopper and the local informant in østfold unproblematically as participants in 'the same' culture, without systematically differentiating their positions. to some degree fair enough - im not saying there is no such thing as 'norwegianness', but this can hardly be treated as a transparent unmediated phenomenon independent of local articulation, is it? i brake when what an oslo teenager says on the internet about pølser is bracketed uncritically with what an old woman in østfold says when she serves you dinner - the implication is too holistic for my fragmented, poststructurally indoctrinated mind.

to me, the analysis sacrificed a sustained coherent focus on local practice and local articulation, distinguished from national and extra-local discourses and phenomena to and against which it more or less self-consciously relates itself, in favour of a blurred hodgepodge of the two. the result of this lack of differentiation was that neither the local nor the extra-local material seemed particularly persuasive, grounded as they were in what i consider to be an invalid cultural metaphysic. I'll have to reread it more carefully to work out whether this is correct or not.

right now im about to finish my coffee and go buy a record [!]. i think last time I did this was two years ago, when i bought the shakira album...

secured another rucksackful of books in the vadsø public library. joyful prospect for the weekend - my pressing-down-on-the-scanner arm still aches from several hundred repeat operations yesterday.

weather remains liminal - the heavy rain when I left vadsø turned to moderate snow by the time I got to varangerbotn half an hour later - so no reindeer in the fence. in this time of waiting, "fieldwork" is turning into a very loosely circumscribed domain - the only part of today that might qualify involved a hectic race at a 120 across the finnish border with the brother of the woman who runs the farm - knock knock; huh?; "hurry hurry get your keys we've got 8 minutes to get to finland!!" - to get to the vodka outlet at 7:57 finnish time, literally 3 minutes before closing time. he was buying good cheer for a friend with an injured leg who lives nearby. then, three hours watching friday night national broadcasting channel tv [NRK... some of you will realize what this involves, karaoke-wise...] with the two of them while they poured coffee in their vodka and reminisced about their days in the army. the thesis relevance is unclear, but it's a funny feeling the first time I hear anecdotes I've told people here being told in turn to others.

spent the day scanning hard-to-find books and documents from local libraries while watching films: cowboy bebop [excellent] and the mothman prophecies [not quite so excellent].

a psychic healer-girl I know here received a spontaneous channelling about me and my spiritual condition this morning - a rather positive one. enough for her to wander around all day with a sort of semi-worshipful expression, grinning at me. I have the 'transmission' written out sheet of paper, but won't tell you what it says because I'm shy. and because I prefer to keep my megalomania in the closet. let's just say no one's ever said that about me...

today: chatted to an anthropologist who works for the sami parliament in varangerbotn for an hour. friendly, she suggested a guy at the museum I should talk to about the consequences of the projected varanger peninsula windmill park, which is going through preliminary treatment in the departments at the moment. this particular park is part of a large-scale government project to produce sustainable ecofriendly energy along the northern norwegian coast, particularly in finnmark. laudable, but it interferes seriously both with local use of the land, and with "my" herders' summer pastures. hmmm. 

also discovered that my new scanner came bundled with optical charater recognition software - it recognizes text characters in image files and turns them into editable chunks of microsoft-formatted prose. to my aged eyes - miraculous! similar experience of technological obsolescence to the one I underwent when I discovered my last laptop had voice-to-text recognition software. I could talk to my machine! mentioned this to someone five years younger than me, and they just looked at me. like, so what...  I feel old sometimes...

after frying my brain for 7 hours in the wireless zone, downloading work-related junk, I've reached my quota. heading back to the gjestegård, after some purchases of food and other necessaries.

the weather remains in not-winter/not-not-winter limbo, which means no reindeer in the fence - sudden precipitation, melting and ensuing night-frost would lead to serious bambi-on-ice conditions, which are a lot less pleasantly amusing and a lot more bone-crunching when you're dealing with adult, not particularly cartoony reindeer - and in practical terms very little for me to do. except scanning newspapers, rehearsing slaughter legislation and going through the field abattoir officialese correspondence: heaps of fun, particularly the latter.

on a tangent, I've signed myself up for a residential reiki 1 and 2 initiation in the beginning of november, along with 11 complete female strangers whom I'll be practicing healing and laying-on-hands with for the duration, as well as regurgitating intimate secrets and existential pain with to facilitate opening up to the reiki force. by the end of the ordeal, however, I will have received a number of "attunements", had permanent auric surgery in the form of symbols burned into etheric self, have learned a number of semi-secret hand gestures and sounds... and be one more double initiation away from reiki masterhood and the right to initiate others.

fear me, yoda.

interesting point concerning this is the pricing. most reiki initiation pricing schemes I've come across rise exponentially, to astronomic levels - talking a whole year's full wages, in one case... up here, for who knows what guerilla marketing reason, you can get reiki 1, 2, 3 and master initiations for less than a third of what even the cheapest initiation, reiki 1, would cost you down south, in oslo. very curious - if nothing else, I'll get to talk to the instructor and find out whether it's idealism, ideology or simple supply and demand mechanisms that keep the prices so low up here.

ok. a temporary arrangement - but do tell me how slow/fast/otherwise remarkable the site works now. I know there's a .css problem with the right margin, but frankly I can't be bothered to fix it right now... there should be some added functionality, such as nested comments, due to an upgrade of my framework - this requires me to tinker with the templates and crap, and I just cannae be bothered to work it out right now...if nothing works, leave comments on the livejournal site, which is here.

stuck in tanabru, going on my fifth hour, waiting to have my summer tyres changed to winter ones that actually make the car stop when you brake, rather than sliding uncontrollably for about 20 yards whenever you try decelerate. first day of open garage after the weekend snowfall, so the queue is absurdly long. have whiled away the long hours with a coffee at the tanabru grill-bar, then a milky and frankly not very coffee-like latte at the local cafe. three tables, you've gotta admire some people's tenacity.

not much one can do without the ability to drive, around here. frustrated with the lack of material on the everyday discursive reifications of the state, I started thinking this morning about the market in similar terms - much more fruitful, in terms of what people talk about, as well as a theoretical domain quite completely unknown to me. what are the properties, qualities, qualifiers and modes of engagement with the market that people employ locally? in general, in norway the market is situated within dense discourses of national identity, social welfare, the "scandinavian model" etc. in sami terms, the market's implicit other is the state, and the state has a historical janus role as colonial bogeyman and welfare benefactor. in more general terms, the market itself is a bit of an interesting item - on the one hand, its ideological enmeshedness with cold-war ideologies, thatcherism, free-market liberalism, on the other hand its ontological status and conditions of existence as an object of knowledge. how is it possible to acquire knowledge about 'the market', and how are these forms of knowledge about the market structured by local conditions of engagement with it? eg. knowledge of 'the market' from being unable to meet demand of named and specific individuals coming to the fence to ask for meat, is quite distinct from knowledge of 'the market' produced through statistical surveys and commercial market analyses. not only in scope, but qualitatively.

in john law / anne-marie mol's terms, the market is a bit of a multiply decentered / fractionally coherent object. methodological question is, is 'the market' cohesive, that is ontologically unified, or are there multiple markets constructed through multiple practices of engagement that construct the market as a meaningful object of attention, which can then be intervened upon and modified through equally multiple practices of engagement? perhaps the practices of construction/engagement are just as much the practices of intervention, too.

this feels like an interesting approach, quite similar to what I had in mind doing with the state, but the state has turned out to be a) unproblematically and unquestionably divided, multiple and incoherent - therefore not that interesting; b) not at the center of people's attention, nor something the people I've talked to at least talk about a lot - hence the problem of forcing the discussion in the direction I want it to go, if I keep insisting on the state... so I kind of feel like turning my third eye to someting more interesting / locally relevant. not abandoning the state, but...

the fact that my expectations regarding the centrality of the state have been thwarted, or at least derailed, is itself an interesting observation I can reify and discuss in relation to the centrality of the state in Paine's 1994 monograph Herds of the Tundra, which is based on fieldwork in the 50s and 60s, a much earlier period when the state was establishing itself as a regulating presence within herding, prior to the 1978 Herding Act etc. at least one generational shift has occurred since then - perhaps the presence of the state has been naturalised to a much greater extent in the intervening time period.

I need to consider this quite a lot further.

I have six gmail invitations and no one in particular to give them to - any people I know reading this, feel free to ask.

otherwise, have spent the weekend locked up, reading. just finished aksel sandemose's 'a refugee crosses his own trail' [my translation] - a searing indictment of the norwegian culture of conformity through fear of the collective. the book that coined the famous term janteloven, or the law of jante. very good book. now planning to... erm. not sure really.

derrida is dead. last night, of pancreatic cancer.

how strangely apt that he of all people should fall to the uncontrolled proliferation of multiplying cellular meanings.

nevertheless, the list of people I regret never having seen alive while I could keeps growing. pierre, bourdieu, octavio paz, allen ginsberg. not to mention the other dead ones I never had a shot at. telling you, I'm about this far from setting out in a car come next summer and just keep going til I've got smiling mugshots and handshakes out of every significant at-risk figure out there in the Wasteland that I know of - baudrillard, zygmunt baumann, anthony giddens [well, yeah, he's not that old but if I was al-Quaeda I might consider targeting him...] etcetera. all I need is a sponsorship deal for some intellectual salvage voyeurism, or a contract to do the 'rough guide to dying european intellectuals'.

here's a question for those who read this thing: who do you think monkey should include on his list of soon-to-be-dead academicians?

I've seen some magnificent heavens in my time. in paraguay once, I sat on a terrace next to the jungle and watched two separate storm systems flashing lightning at each other across miles and miles of empty space. but last night takes the biscuit.

I was sitting in the gamme to myself, reading a biography of jens bjørneboe - had some fundamental thoughts and observations I needed to correlate and write out, but I was too tired, so I sought refuge in a sheltering book. around midnight I decided to go check on the weather, because I thought it might be snowing properly. when I came out on the porch the skies were naked, clear and milky with stars, and vast translucent ribbons of bright green light were shifting, floating, gliding across them, miles and miles and miles up on surface of the atmosphere. where to my mind the stars had been before there were now huge tenuous glowing veils, and through them I could see the stars. a new incredible distance opened up above and beyond the aurora, out to the stars - infinitely much further away than I had ever felt them. of course one realizes that the stars are infinitely far away - but to feel it, abruptly and directly, is something quite different. I thought I had had that experience, but evidently I hadn't.

I'm clumsy and I really don't know how to put words to this, except to say that all the other skies I've ever seen suddenly seemed like they had been painted on a ceiling, and suddenly someone had taken away the ceiling and I was just staring into an unfathomable, incomprehensible magnitude of space, littered with all the stars I suspected might be up there. orders of magnitude removed from the pale and insignificant sheltering skies of before.

I've never felt so exposed - looking up was a feeling of vertigo, like any moment gravity might release its frail hold and I plummet into the immensity above. it was almost unbearable. after a few minutes I had to go back inside, into the warm glow, and huddle with my book. amazing. absolutely amazing.