My husband and I bought our son a new bike for his birthday yesterday. We’re not bike people, so it was a learning experience of what it’s like to buy a trail bike that has been specialized for terrain and mountainsides. It’s an enormous upgrade from the one we got him two years ago: dual suspension brakes, tubeless tires, stomp-on pedals, and many more details that quickly went over our heads. We’re at best casual bikers—we relied on bikes with studded tires for transportation when we lived in Norway in the 1990s. But now we’re generally the occasional bike path ride enthusiast. But it’s fun to see our son embrace something he found he loved himself.
As we waited an hour for the tires to be sealed and pedals attached at the bike shop, we walked across the street to browse a hunting and outdoor gear shop. A small building of makeshift rooms full of drab olive, khaki, brown and grey clothing and gear—punctuated by the occasional blaze orange, arising like small campfires amidst the brush layers of brown. I was met by a sweet, bulky, aging yellow lab who wandered the store slowly to sniff each visitor. I laughed when I looked over for M and saw how well his clothes fit in—khaki and a version of olive and tan—exactly in line with the rest of the store landscape. His clothes often blend into the outdoors, but it was amusing to see him in a place where he blends into the indoors.
I walked further back and found a small alcove full of black bear skins, wolf skins, marmot skins, and a large taxidermy collection of Dall sheep, brown bear, caribou, wolverine. It was quite something—a hidden natural history assemblage of trophies and skins awaiting the visitor who explored the backrooms. I looked at the details of the black bear skins, but stopped at the wolf. While I’ve lived here for nearly 20 years, I’m still not comfortable seeing animals displayed like that (and I wondered what the dog thought walking around them). It’s such a normalized scene, casual trophies that proclaim—or reassure—that we’re still near the threatening, teeming wild.
Walking back to wait for the bike, M told me that our friend—a new acolyte to hunting who hadn’t grown up with it—had gone in that hunting store recently and was quickly sized up and was barely given attention. They knew he was only learning, that he wasn’t the type of guy who grew up hunting. Not someone who could share tips, hint at locations they hunted in. It was like he was a pretender to hunting culture, not the real deal. M told me of another friend who hates it when other hunters talk gear—that he knows they’re in it for the wrong reasons. I told M that it makes sense—because hunting is a cult. I can see it when he talks with hunter friends, the ones that have grown up hunting their whole lives and it’s a part of who they are. And the difference in the eager but newly anointed hunter friends—they still thrill in the cosplay of the gear, and might accidentally reveal a favorite hunting area to someone else (strict blasphemy) in their enthusiasm for the next hunt. It’s a cult of who is grandfathered in and who has paid their dues.
As we watched the activity at the bike store—it was the first day above 50F in Anchorage and people are so ready to be out—I wondered if all specialization becomes a cult. The technical terms, the right gear for the right conditions, the taking apart of every detail and putting them back together one by one—like the myriad bike components you now have to purchase to make the bike work once you’ve purchased it. You can’t just buy a bike, or just buy skis. There’s a whole language and culture and gear around it that some people delight in getting to know, to find what works best and why, the recipes it takes to get it just right.
I thought about how we bought bikes in Norway in the 1990s. At the risk of sounding like a whingey middle-aged woman lamenting how different things are, I’m curious about when the esoteric and specialized became the way—where it becomes more about the technical knowledge, devotion to the object, the many pieces dissected from the whole to learn how to make the experience even better, to know the technical language and treatments. It’s a bit like fandom, becoming a part of a community that builds identity through a shared vocabulary and esoteric knowledge. Skiing has been that way for a long time, especially downhill and backcountry. And then there is the world of wine that seeped into how we think about coffee, micro-brews, distilleries, chocolate, and countless other examples—the artisanal has grown into the optimal way to experience life. Mini-cults that we become apprenticed to, and then later, become initiates. There’s pride in the activities and interests we take up, and the sense of connection one feels to their identity, connection to a community, and the knowledge gained in the finer mechanics of their interests.
There’s no simple answer—whether it’s better to understand the world on a macro scale or a micro—of why it can’t be a process of both: 1 + 1 = 3. There are so many things to invest in that I personally feel a bit scattered by it all—and yet I happily give my time and interest to esoteric works on Scottish early medieval archaeology and early women’s writing (ha!). Maybe I’m in my own dark academia cult. Maybe it’s more a matter of which cults you invest in being initiated into.
We crave specialty, the selected knowledge that makes us an expert. Academia has shepherded us into this route as the primary way to become a Master or a Doctor of a certain subject, and there is of course something rewarding in mastering a certain subject with narrow detail. John Burroughs wrote about this approach to understanding nature, particularly, in his essay “The Art of Seeing Things:”
Human and artificial sounds and objects thrust themselves upon us; they are within our sphere, so to speak: but the life of nature we must meet halfway; it is shy, withdrawn, and blends itself with a vast neutral background. We must be initiated; it is an order the secrets of which are well guarded.
The secrets of the order are well guarded, we must be initiated. Burroughs wants us to revel in the minute, to examine the details, to know the micro secrets of the world that make up the macro—then we might be initiated into the cult science of the natural world. The western approach to natural science has been doing this and naming each and every living thing since Linnaeus. Burroughs further writes:
In the field of natural history, things escape us because the actors are small, and the stage is very large and more or less veiled and obstructed. The movement is quick across a background that tends to conceal rather than expose it…By a close observer I do not mean a minute, cold-blooded specialist…
He then proceeds to write about an episode of loving the close observation of a species of solitary bee:
…I waited for a sign of life. Presently I saw here and there a bee hovering about over the mounds [of dirt]. It looked like a honey-bee, only less pronounced in color and manner. One of them alighted on one of the mounds near me, and was about to disappear in the hole in the center when I caught it in my hand. Though it stung me, I retained it and looked it over, and in the process was stung several times; but the pain was slight.
Was the pain slight for the bee? He then writes:
I saw it was one of our native wild bees…Then I inserted a small weed-stalk into one of the holes, and, with a little trowel I carried, proceeded to dig out the nest….at the bottom of it I found a little semi-transparent, membranous sac or cell, a little larger than that of the honey-bee; in this sac was a little pellet of yellow pollen—a loaf of bread for the young grub when the egg should have hatched. I explore other nests and found the same. This discovery was not a great addition to my sum of natural knowledge, but it was something.
I thought of the casual trophies of animals and skins we had seen in the shop earlier; how many trophies are needed in a hunter’s life? And if Burroughs’ discovery wasn’t a great addition to his sum of natural knowledge, whose or what knowledge did the lives of those bee larvae serve?
Burroughs earlier in the essay writes:
…the specialties of the sportsman: he was the first to see the hare’s eyes as she sat in her form, and he knew the ways of grouse and pheasants and trout. The ideal observer turns the enthusiasm of the sportsmen into the channels of natural history, and brings home a finer game than ever fell to shot or bullet. He too has an eye for the fox and the rabbit and the migrating water-fowl, but he sees them with loving and not with murderous eyes.
I understand the point Burroughs is making, but I can’t ignore the irony—I’m not sure the bees he dug up and eggs he destroyed felt they were seen with loving and not murderous eyes. It made me think about how we gain knowledge and what we do with it—can it only be gained by picking apart, by destroying the whole in order to know the details and mechanics of an animal or machine? How does that knowledge then get shared with others—how do we share expertise beyond the cult?
Several years ago we were having drinks with a friend and his new girlfriend, both biologists. She had worked on the northern coast of Alaska, observing whale migrations and the variety of populations that traverse the coastal waters there. She was relaying a story where she and her colleagues were working with the local Indigenous whaling community to help learn about and identify patterns of whale migration. But she was amazed the local she spoke with didn’t know the species names. She relayed that she’d ask “what’s this one?” and they’d relay the name of the whale by the Iñupiaq name translated into English, essentially. The Indigenous names often refer to the different attributes of the whale and the environment, like which season it appears in—whether the October or early summer runs—or other markers that have been handed down for generations. She was falling into the trap of the cult; believing that the only true way to know something is through the western scientific language she has been initiated into. She was surprised that the elders “didn’t know” the species around them, but she couldn’t see that the ways of knowing reach multi-dimensionally across time and space. The expertise of the community was manifold around them.
Do we miss the whole when we dissect and name the components that make up a whole? Can we see the whole if we don’t understand the details?
Emily Dickinson wrote of this:
Split the Lark—and you’ll find the Music—
Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled—
Scantily dealt to the Summer Morning
Saved for your Ear when Lutes be old.
Loose the Flood—you shall find it patent—
Gush after Gush, reserved for you—
Scarlet Experiment! Sceptic Thomas!
Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?
This poem haunts me. Like learning of the violent aspects of Fairy Tales, its violence—of a Lark on the dissection table to find where its music comes from—is what renders it immediately powerful, that mix of beauty and terror that becomes sublime. Why would someone think to split the lark? Can we not be satisfied with its music—that we love so much we want to know the alchemy of it? Can we accept what is, or do we need to know it inside and out, dig up the nest and kill the egg, pin the insect in legions of collections. Is this the only way?
I don’t know the answer. As an archaeologist working for the state in Oregon in the 1990s, I shut down an archaeological excavation site I was overseeing because human remains had been uncovered, and the affiliated Tribe wished to have them remain in place and reburied. The white principal archaeologist I was managing at the site, needless to say, was not of the same opinion. He felt he had a right as a scientist to study the remains, to determine age, how they lived, what they ate, what it might tell us of the site. Because western science is more important than culture, more important than a reckoning with a history of genocide, racism, and the need to heal. This is the danger of the cult: exclusion and destruction as a price for knowledge.
I’ll never forget the look he gave me when I told him that I was shutting it down, that we’re reburying the remains in place at the request of the Tribal government we were working with, to honor and respect their authority on their tribal homeland. He thought, working the field much longer than me, that he was being stopped—that science was being stopped—by a young girl (I was 28 at the time). The reality is that the Tribes have every right to request repatriation, and I was happiest in my job when I could support that view.
I loved archaeology for the antiquity of it, of learning of objects that have travelled through time, to hold objects that were a part of the lives and stories that came before us. It was the best way—the only way, really—that I could time travel, which to me held an almost spiritual fascination. But the community of the past is as important as the present—which is why reburial is a human rights issue. The dead are not here for us to dissect. I’m always amazed at the response people have of their own ancestors being excavated or otherwise moved or desecrated. Why do we allow science to perpetuate and sanction the destruction of another’s culture, the destruction of the very lives and objects we seek to learn from? I cannot understand doing that at the expense of anyone living now, and I can’t do it to the lives who lived before us. That’s not the way. Archaeology has been working to reckon with its racist, colonial past, and work with Indigenous communities in understanding the history of the lands we live and work on. But there are always setbacks—including a particularly ugly one this week at the Society for American Anthropology (SAA) conference—and it continues to be a fight dressed in a new language, or even in the old. I decided to leave archaeology in the 2000s. I didn’t want to dissect only to destroy, to set the micro over the macro of history and culture. To split the lark, only to no longer find the music can never again be played.
I went back to Burroughs, thinking about how he struggled to define this duality. I don’t agree with much of what he writes in his essay, but he does begin with this:
To know is not all; it is only half. To love is the other half.
In this sense, perhaps the specialization of everything around us is part of the love—it begins with something we love, that we are curious to see or do or learn more of. The danger of the cult comes in if we forget the love and only rely on what we understand as “knowledge.”
Everything is everything. ❤️