From thunder gods to serpent slayers, scholars are reconstructing myths that vanished millennia ago. How much further can we go-and what might we find? I read George Eliot's "Middlemarch," sometimes hailed as the greatest British novel, in a rain forest in western Indonesia. I was there as a graduate student, spending my days slogging through mud and interviewing locals about gods and pig thieves for my dissertation.
It emerges as an unusual book and the author methodically worked to a formula throughout this piece, writing on the geographical details of most, perhaps all, of Europe's states as well as many lands in the Near East, the Caucasus region and lands bordering the Mediterranean and Black seas. He commented briefly on the size and common foodstuffs of each of these lands, covering a vast swath of the known world in a relatively short work.
Bruno Latour is an intriguing person. He first caught global attention with his (and co-author Steve Woolgar's) 1979 book Laboratory Life. In this work, Latour and Woolgar observed laboratory scientists ethnographically. Meaning, they'd follow scientists similar to how primatologists would follow chimpanzees in the wild. White coats were investigated in their natural habitat. This way, Latour thought he could analyse the behaviour of scientists and verify how discussions, negotiations, and rivalries shape what becomes "knowledge."
This way, Latour thought he could analyse the behaviour of scientists and verify how discussions, negotiations, and rivalries shape what becomes "knowledge." After his inquiries, Latour concluded that scientists apply an awful lot of personal biases and human behaviours to so-called factually correct scientific research. For Latour, "facts" gain authority through social processes, institutional validation, and consensus-building. Not just through "objective" discovery.