The Lass of Augrim sings Pangur Ban

The inward light:
The simple point of this chapter is this: Interpretation matters. It is the inward light that illuminates the nature of something we find in the world of experience. But the notion of interpretation is anything but simple. Consider the plight of Gabriel Conroy in the following example.
Gretta on the Stairway:
Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta are preparing to leave a party at the house of his elderly maiden aunts. A visiting musician is singing a simple Irish air as Gabriel is saying his good-byes. It is late December in Dublin, and the weather is cold. We are in the middle of the last story of Dubliners, by James Joyce. The story itself is a long and famous piece called "The Dead."
In my current paperback edition of Dubliners (1914/1999), the scene starts on page 180. Here we see Gabriel as he watches Gretta, who herself stands at the top of the shadowy stair landing and strains to hear the voice of the singer:
"Gabriel had not gone to the door with the others. He was in a dark part of the hall staring up the staircase. A woman was standing near the top of the first flight, in the shadow also. He could not see her face but he could see the terra-cotta and salmon-pink panels of her skirt which the shadow made appear black and white. It was his wife. She was leaning on the banisters, listening to something. Gabriel was surprised at her stillness and strained his ear to listen also. But he could hear little save the noise of laughter and dispute on the front steps, a few chords struck on the piano and a few notes of a man's voice singing (p. 180)."
Gretta is pensive, and Gabriel teases her. When they finally get back to their hotel room, Gretta reveals to her husband that when she was a mere girl, she had fallen in love with a frail lad by the name of Michael Furey. She was sent off that fall to convent for her education, but on the night before she left, Michael stood outside her window in the pouring rain and sang "The Lass of Augrim" to proclaim his love for her. She found out, soon after she left for the home, that he died of pneumonia caught perhaps on that very evening.
It is as if Gabriel’s world is completely reoriented by this long-hidden revelation. As Gretta drifts into sleep, Gabriel stares at her (Joyce, 1914/1999: 190):
“Gabriel, leaning on his elbow, looked for a few moments unresentfully on her tangled hair and half-open mouth, listening to her deep-drawn breath. So, she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think what a poor part he, her husband, had played in her life. He watched her while she slept as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife. His curious eyes rested long on her face and on her hair: and, as he thought of what she must have been then, in that time of her first girlish beauty, a strange friendly pity for her entered his soul. He did not like to say even to himself that her face was no longer beautiful but he knew it was no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved death.”
And finally, as Gabriel turns to look out the window , Joyce finishes the story and the epiphany (Joyce, 1916/1966: pp. 191-192):
“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His souls swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
Epiphanies:
Joyce himself said that his writing was about epiphanies, and this is certainly true about the last 12 pages of "The Dead." Gabriel Conroy is at first astounded, and then transformed, by what he comes to learn on this fateful night.
What is an epiphany? The concept is first grounded in Greek tragedy, as the moment when a heavenly messenger arrives and informs the audience which Olympian myth is being played out by the drama on-stage. As a Christian term, it refers to the experience of the Three Wise Men, or the Three Kings from the East, after they made their pilgrimage to Bethlehem and the crib of the baby Jesus. The Feast of the Epiphany, celebrated on the 6th of January, commemorates this arrival.
So what did the Wise Men find they came upon the crib in the manger? At one level, they found a perfectly ordinary scene. A newborn infant was asleep in a crib lined with hay, tucked in a manger alongside sheep and donkeys and other livestock. Had they been in a hurry, they might well have walked by and bothered to peer inside. After all, what would they see there, that they could not see in countless other villages and hamlets scattered about the area?
But they were not in a hurry. They were looking for something special. And according to biblical legend, they found it. They found nothing less than the Cosmic and the Universal, shining like a bright light through the mundane trappings of the nativity scene. This experience of seeing the cosmic, the divine, or the universal in the fleeting passage of the ordinary, is what Joyce meant by an epiphany.
Joyce lays out a stunning epiphany in the final pages of "The Dead." When I finally finish reading the passage to my class, there is an inevitable and powerful silence. My students are almost afraid to speak, to break the extraordinary spell that Joyce's words have woven upon us. He does not merely bring us to look at an epiphany. He locates us within it, so that we take it on and feel its power for ourselves.
Epiphanies and other meanings:
But it is not our purpose, however pleasant or significant it might be, to seek out insight, spiritual or otherwise, from works of literary genius. After all, we are empirical researchers and we are striving to learn qualitative empirical methods.
Therefore, we need to link our efforts to procedures for the systematic empirical inquiry into meaning. Currently, there are three broad models for dealing with meaning in qualitative research. Let us take a brief look at each.
Becoming a meaning maker:
Here we find various forms and shades of constructivism (von Glaserfeld, 1984), social constructionism (Gergen, 1994), social constructivism (Duffy & Cunningham, 1996), cultural psychology (Vygotsky, 1934/1987, Cole, 1996), and the like. Most models of constructivism operate by taking a stand towared one or both of two fundamental assumptions.
The first fundamental constructivist assumption is that the world is meaning poor. By this, they mean that there is no meaning per se in the world. As a consequence, any system of meaning that we have for ourselves is constructed. We, as people living in the world, must then get our meaning from other sources. We either do the constructing ourselves, or we let other people make our meaning for us.
The second fundamental assumption is that meaning is always derived from what we take as knowledge. In other words, meaning is an act we finally use to organize a body of knowledge. In fact, we cannot really say that we have knowledge until we have this larger meaning frame in place. For this reason, many constructivists essentially use the concepts of knowledge and meaning as if they were interchangeable. As with meaning, the question is who does our constructing of knowledge? Do we passively accept the knowledge claims and systems of others, or do we construct our own?
One extremely common mistake we make, according to many constructivists (e.g., Duffy & Cunningham, 1996), is thinking that any piece of knowledge should be sought for as part of some predetermined body of knowledge. This piece of knowledge or even body of knowledge can then be transmitted via some act of instruction or by some instructor, to us. We then assimilate this transmitted knowledge into our existing picture of the world.
The preferred alternative, and the basis for the existence of constructivist approaches, is the notion that we should construct our own knowledge, and thereby our own systems of meaning. In this way, we are not dependent upon the whims or agendas or motives of others, when it comes to making sense of the world. And because the world itself is meaning poor, the only other systems of meaning we have to deal with are those created by other persons or institutions. So we do not really have to worry about our own system of meaning clashing with any "natural" meaning system.
Very few constructivists, however, argue that this sort of knowledge acquisition as meaning making is strictly a private or individual act. Instead, they talk about the "co-construction" of meaning.
Constructivists look upon the action of creating meaning as a form of research. In other words, the meaning making is the research. Sometimes, though, they are also interested in how to make the meaning making process more effective and/or more efficient. In that case, they would pay attention to conditions and factors that affect the meaning making process. Finally, they might also focus on the consequences of particular acts of meaning making. Predicting or documenting these consequences then becomes part of the research process.
Becoming a meaning accountant:
Here we find approaches like grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1990), discourse analysis (Silverman, 1993), content analysis (Krippendorf, 1980), and the like. The basic assumption of these models is that circumstances and interactions contain meanings that are organized and related in systematic ways. The role of research then becomes to uncover these relations and patterns, document them, and demonstrate how these parts of meaning are organized into a larger and more comprehensive picture.
It is really not important to meaning accountants to explain how meanings are formed, or what their basic natures are. Those issues do not really impact the methods used. In a sense, these methods are neutral toward the ultimate source of meanings. Are they constructed or do they exist in the world? It really does not matter, so long as they can be shown to be present in certain documents or interactions. These methods, then, deal with how meanings are used, and not so much with what they are.
We have a two stage process. First, we find meaning units. Meanings are assumed to be present in discrete self-contained quanta called meaning units. If the research is being done on, say, a transcript, then the researcher reads the transcript carefully and brackets each and every meaning unit. Importantly, once the meaning unit identification process is completed, each and every word of the transcript must, in principle, be shown to belong to one, and only one, meaning unit. Whether or not the assignment to meaning units is actually done with this sort of thoroughness depends on the method, and the reasons for doing the research. But it is important to remember that, even if a particular text is not broken down completely, the methods allow for the possibility that it could be, if such a total process were needed.
Different forms of accountancy research deal with meaning units in different ways. Content analysis and conversation analysis apply the calculus of their respective methods to the meaning units, to determine what sorts of meanings they are. Paulos (1998) in an interesting turn in this direction, has argued for the analysis of mathematical patterns in stories and other forms of narrative.
Becoming a meaning reader:
Here we find the various shapes and forms of hermeneutical methods. The term "hermeneutics" comes from the name of Hermes, the messenger of the Greek gods. Hermes, who was known as Mercury to the Romans, was famed for his fleet winged feet and the quickness of his mind and his wit. Not always serious, he was a distant cousin in that regard to the Norse god Loki, and even that quintessential trickster from Native American lore, Coyote.
For most practitioners, though, hermeneutics is fairly serious business. We only see its playful side when we look upon contemporary postmodern hermeneutic variations such as deconstruction. We will look at these sorts of postmodern initiatives in one of our final lessons, but for now we need to retreat a bit historically.
For all intents and purposes, hermeneutic inquiry was born in biblical study. Biblical scholars believe that these religious texts were given to us as an act of direct revelation from God. Since they were revelation, then by definition they must be true. But here is the rub. Sometimes, these texts don't seem to make that much sense, or even at times they seem to have been contradicted by history.
To someone who views biblical text from a strictly historical perspective, the presence of historical error, for example, is easily explained. The Bible turned out to be wrong. It got its facts wrong, or it made predictions that did not come true.
For a scholar who believes in the revelatory character of the Bible, however, the task at hand in the face of such contradiction is much different. As early as the fifth century AD, we have Augustine turning his formidable intellect to this problem. Augustine argued that all reading involved four simultaneous processes -- we read literally, we read allegorically, we read morally, and we read anagogically (or, in such a way as to lead to the salvation of our souls). When a text appears to be erroneous, it is only so literally. We must then assume that the text was never meant to deliver its message of revelation in a literal fashion. We are instead to look at its content from an allegorical, or a moral, or a spiritual perspective. Often, these messages were "tucked away" beneath the apparently simple surface of the literal message, and their true depth and significance did not appear until the careful reader worked his or her way through these surface meanings to the core underneath.
The allegorical reading tradition, in particular, had a rich history for Augustine to draw upon. Scholars from the Hellenistic era of Alexandria and its surrounds in the second century AD, and in particular such thinkers as Origen and Philo, honed their allegorical reading skills to a fine art. And, as a later scholar such as Augustine might argue, did not Jesus himself reveal his deepest and most profound truths not as prescriptions, but as parables?
Contemporary hermeneutical scholarship has evolved quite a distance from its biblical roots. At the outset of the modern era, things still look pretty much as they have for centuries (Grondin, 1991/1994):
"Since its emergence in the seventeenth century, the word hermeneutics has referred to the science or art of interpretation. Until the end of the nineteenth century, it usually took the form of a theory that promised to lay out the rules governing the discipline of interpretation. Its purpose was predominantly normative, even technical. Hermeneutics limited itself to giving methodological directions to the specifically interpretive sciences, with the end of avoiding arbitrariness in interpretation as far as possible(p. 1)."
With the onset of the modern era, and in particular the phenomenology of Heidegger, we have the emergence of modern hermeneutics. In Dilthey and Schliermacher early on, and in Gadamer and Ricouer later, we have a shift in the focus and purpose of hermeneutics. Gadamer, the most important contemporary voice in hermeneutics, took the following stance against method per se and especially propositional thinking in favor of the "natural" power of language (Grondin, 1991/1994):
"The privileging of method is clearly connected to the privileging of propositions in Western and especially modern consciousness, for the idea of method draws its power from the fact that certain objects and processes can be experimentally isolated and thereby controlled. Such isolation does violence to language, however. Specifically, understanding what is said cannot be reduced to a cognizing subject's intellectual comprehension of an objectivizable, isolable content; understanding results just as much from belonging to an ongoing, continuing tradition -- that is, to a dialogue in the context of which everything that is said becomes meaningful and logical for us. In his observations on language, Gadamer brings to a climax the objections against modernity's privileging of method which he had first problematized in the context of the human sciences. This privilege is perfectly obvious because method promises the domination of things that it has isolated, made repeatable and reusable, and thus put to our disposal. It is an open question, however, whether such isolation every succeeds in the case of language or one's own understanding. Do we understand if and to what extent we control? Isn't this a case of finitude explaining itself away? The hermeneut answers that we understand, rather, because something speaks to us from a tradition to which we -- more or less loosely -- belong (pp. 118-119)."
Grappling with these sorts of issues, of the relation of meaning to language and tradition and method, cannot be really accomplished without taking at least a cursory look at phenomenology. Gadamer explicitly draws upon Heidegger, for instance, and the issues of language and consciousness and history via tradition cut to the heart of phenomenological thinking.
The canvas of phenomenology:
One of the most confusing things for a budding qualitative researcher is that the term "phenomenology" and "phenomenological" seems to be tossed around fairly regularly, but there does not seem to be any clear sense to what it really means.
For instance, each of the three approaches discussed above have been described as being "phenomenological." How right and how wrong are those characterizations? Is there some broader sense of the term that we can talk about, and then see how it applies to the various ways it is used in the field of qualitative research?
In an earlier lesson we compared phenomenology to Impressionist painting, in order to contrast it with positivism. Now, let us dig deeper into that metaphor to see if we can tease out the major strands of phenomenological thought that inform contemporary qualitative inquiry.
Consider the Impressionist revolution in art. Impressionists, from Cezanne to Van Gogh, were wrestling with the same problem. The science of their times told them that we do not see objects directly. Instead, we see the play of light upon those same objects. So, as painters, they were interested in capturing on their canvases, this very same representation of light on the surfaces of things. In other words, they were abandoning the task of painting Things for the more subtle yet more experiential task of painting Light upon Things.
It is a very short step from the notion of Light upon Things in art, to the notion of Consciousness upon Things in phenomenology. That is, the phenomenologist, from Husserl to today, has realized that our experiences are experiences of the play of our consciousness (and for other thinkers, the consciousness of others) upon the "objects" of the world.
Husserl, who was the founder of phenomenology, was committed to the notion of the Thing beneath the Play of Consciousness, which he called the "thing in itself" or the "transcendental object." For Husserl, phenomenology was a method based on acknowledging the ubiquitous presence of the play of consciousness, but which further strived to "bracket" or hold still that conscious perception by an ongoing act of introspection. All of these procedures were seen as a means to an end, namely, of being able finally to come into contact with the Thing in Itself.
Heidegger was the second major force in phenomenological thinking. Let me say at the outset that I am quite aware of the controversy that swirls around Heidegger to this day. His refusal to quit the Nazi party during the 1930's and 1940's has stained his personal reputation possibly beyond repair. My personal take is that I suspect Heidegger's stance toward Nazism was due as much to his personal political indifference as it was to anything else, but of course I respect the views of those who claim otherwise.
Heidegger moved phenomenology away from a technical method to a means for living and understanding one's life. He agreed with Duns Scotus that the essence of existence is being qua being. For us human beings, it means that we experience our lives as if we are thrown into an existence that is already in full swing and running by its own rules. When have a choice, then: we can choose to live inauthentically, or to live authentically. When we live inauthentically, we go along with the crowd, or avoid serious questions, or immerse ourselves in the minutae of everyday life and lose sight of the bigger picture. Only when we exercise our fundamental freedom and choose to try to find our relation to things in themselves, are we being truly authentic. In a sense, Heidegger took Husserl's model for inquiry and made it into a model for the conduct of the thoughtful life.
Other phenomologists wanted to get beyond the personal and psychological and introspective dimensions of phenomenology, and to use the basic tenets of the method in a more scientific way to understand the play of consciousness as an objective fact in the world. Alfred Schutz, as we saw earlier, was committed to this perspective, and his legacy was picked up and extended by such psychological phenomenologists as Giorgi and Moustakas. Mousakas (1994) describes this process succinctly:
"The empirical phenomenological approach involves a return to experience in order to obtain comprehensive descriptions that provide the basis for a reflective structural analysis that portrays the essences of the experience.... The human scientist determines the underlying structures of an experience by interpreting the originally given descriptions of the situation in which the experience occurs (p. 13)."
Sometimes, it looks as if interpretation is all about the creation and exchange of ideas from one set of minds to another. But there are definitely physical dimensions to interpretation. To see this clearly, let us wander off to a completely different cultural milieu.
Singing the Songlines:
In the last chapter, I looked at Carlos Castaneda. In this lesson I'm about to use Bruce Chatwin. Do I have something against serious field researchers? Do I have some personal predilection for controversial and, arguably, off base cultural chroniclers? I hope not. I want to remind you not to accept each and every thing that Castaneda or Chatwin says as the gospel truth. In fact, one of the reasons that I want to use Chatwin here is because his work is an example, in an important way, of something you should not do. See if you can figure out what I mean as you read over his account.
Now that I have warned you about Chatwin, who was he anyway? Bruce Chatwin was not an anthropologist or sociologist. He was not really a journalist, or even a travel writer. He was a restless soul, and his restless appetites eventually brought about his early demise. But in his short lifetime, he managed to craft several unique accounts of places Far Away. My personal favorite was his uneven but fascinating look at the Songlines of Australia (Chatwin, 1987).
Chatwin tells his story through the eyes of Arkady Volchok, a 30 year old Australian citizen and son of a Cossack. Volchok had the task of mapping Aboriginal sacred sites for the railroad. He lived alone, even though he was married and had a family, and often wandered "out bush" like the peoples he was trying to represent.
In one early meeting, Chatwin confesses that he has come to Australia to learn firsthand about the fabled Songlines. He and Volchok struggle to comprehend what soon become alien notions:
"A man's 'own country', even an empty stretch of spinifex, was itself a sacred ikon that must remain unscarred.
"'Unscarred, you mean, by roads or mines or railways?'
"'To wound the earth,' he answered earnestly, 'is to wound yourself, and if others wound the earth, they are wounding you. The land should be left untouched: as it was in the Dreamtime when the Ancestors sang the world into existence (p. 11)."
When the Ancestors sang the world into existence, they started the process of creating the Songlines:
"To get to grips with the concept of the Dreamtime, he said, you had to understand it as an Aboriginal equivalent of the first two chapters of Genesis -- with one significant difference.
"In Genesis, God first created the 'living things' and then fashioned Father Adam from clay. Here in Australia, the Ancestors created themselves from clay, hundreds and thousands of them, one for each totemic species.
"'So when an Aboriginal tells you ,"I have a Wallaby Dreaming,' he means, 'My totem is Wallaby. I am a member of the Wallaby clan.'
"'So a Dreaming is a clan emblem? A badge to distinguish 'us' from 'them'? 'Our country' from 'their country'?
"'Much more than that,' he said.
"Every Wallaby Man believes he was descended from a universal Wallaby Father, who was the ancestor of all other Wallaby Men and of all living wallabies. Wallabies, therefore, were his brothers. To kill one for food was both fratricide and cannibalism (p. 12)."
So far, what we have is fairly straightforward anthropology. But the scenario starts to grow a bit stranger:
"'Any species.' he said, 'can be a Dreaming. A virus can be a Dreaming. You can have a chickenpox Dreaming, a rain Dreaming, a desert-orange Dreaming, a lice Dreaming. In the Kimberleys they've now got a money Dreaming....'
"He went on to explain how each totemic ancestor, while traveling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints, and how these Dreaming-tracks lay over the land as 'ways' of communication between the most far-flung tribes (pp. 12-13)."
Chatwin now takes us deeper into this exotic view of the world. All of a sudden, what at first seemed to be fairly innocuous descriptions of totems and tribal identity markers take on genuine practical dimensions. That is, these patterns of interpretations draw from the physical world, and in turn play on that same world to allow the Aborigines to accomplish feats that would defy our culture:
"'A song,' he said, 'was both map and direction-finder. Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across country.'
"'And would a man on 'walkabout' always be traveling down one of the Songlines?'
"'In the old days, yes,' he agreed. 'Nowadays, they go by train or car.'
"'Suppose the main strayed from his Songline?'
"'He would be trespassing. He might get speared for it.'
"'But as long as he stuck to the track, he'd always find people who shared his Dreaming? Who were, in fact, his brothers?'
"'Yes.'
"'From whom he could expect hospitality?'
"'And vice versa (p. 13).'"
Just how powerful and effective a means of communication these Songlines could be, Chatwin found out later on from a former Benedictine priest named Flynn:
"The next point, he said, was to understand that every song-cycle went leap-frogging through language barriers, regardless of tribe or frontier. A Dreaming-track might start in the north-west, near Broome; thread its way through twenty languages or more,; and go on to hit the sea near Adelaide.
"'And yet,' I said, 'it's still the same song,'
"'Our people' Flynn said, 'say they recognize a song by its 'taste' or 'smell'... by which, of course, they mean the 'tune.' The tune always stays the same, from the opening bars to the finale.'
"'Words may change,' Arkady interrupted again, 'but the melody lingers on.'
"'Does that mean,' I asked, 'that a young man on Walkabout could sing his way across Australia providing he could hum the right tune?'
"'In theory, yes,' Flynn agreed ( pp. 58-59)."
Given the potential importance of the Songlines and the Dreaming-lines for any form of communication or trade, Chatwin was not surprised to find just how ubiquitous these lays were in ordinary life:
"In theory, at least, the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score. There was hardly a rock or a creek in the country that could not or had not been sung. One should perhaps visualize the Songlines as a spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys, writhing this way and that, in which every 'episode' was readable in terms of geology.
"'By episode, ' I asked, 'you mean 'sacred site?''
"'I do.'
"'The kind of site you're surveying for the railway? ...'
"'And the distance between two such sites can be measured as a stretch of song?'
"That,' said Arkady, 'is the cause of all my troubles with the railway people (pp. 13-14).'"
The railway people were trying to find the best route to lay track without disturbing sacred sites in the process. But they carried with them the Western interpretation of "sacred site." For them, a sacred site was a church or a graveyard or a place where some religious significant event had occurred. How was Arkady to bridge the vast gulf of interpretation between the two cultures, especially when that very gulf fostered types of communication for the Aborigines that had no parallel to the West?
"It was one thing to persuade a surveyor that a heap of boulders were the eggs of the Rainbow Snake, or a lump of reddish sandstone was the liver of a speared kangaroo. It was something else to convince him that a featureless stretch of gravel was the musical equivalent of Beethoven's Opus 111 (p. 14)."
So we have the interesting of two cultures who can achieve things in the physical world that the other cannot, because of the differences in the ways that the cultures interpret that same world. We take leave of Chatwin and Volchok as they explore the consequences of this puzzling state of affairs:
"By singing the world into existence, he said, the Ancestors had been poets in the original sense of poesis, meaning 'creation.' No Aboriginal could conceive that the created world was in any way imperfect. His religious life had a single aim: to keep the land the way it was and should be. The man who went 'Walkabout' was making a ritual journey. He trod in the footsteps of his Ancestor. He sang the Ancestor's stanzas without changing a word or note -- and so recreated the Creation....
"Aboriginals could not believe the country existed until they could see it and sing it -- just as, in the Dreamtime, the country had not existed until the Ancestors had sung it.
"'So the land,' I said, 'must first exist as a concept in the mind? Then it must be sung? Only then can it be said to exist?'
"'Yes....'
"'Then I suppose these three hundred miles of steel, slicing through innumerable songs, are bound to upset your 'old men's' mental balance?'
"'Yes and no,' he said. 'They're very tough, emotionally, and very pragmatic. Besides, they've seen far worse than a railway.'
"Aboriginals believed that all the 'living things' had been made in secret beneath the earth's crust, as well as all the white man's gear -- his aeroplanes, his guns, his Toyota Land Cruisers -- and every invention that will ever be invented; slumbering below the surface, waiting their turn to be called.
"'Perhaps,' I suggested, 'they could sing the railway back into the created world of God?'
"'You bet,' said Arkady (pp. 14-15)."
What Chatwin did wrong:
Chatwin spends a great deal of time introducing us to the way that the aboriginal people have created and developed the songlines. We can see a culture which seems to zig everywhere our own culture zags, and which looks at meaning not as some mental phenomenon, but as part and parcel of the apparently empty and featureless landscape of the Outback.
So what did Chatwin do wrong? Through this whole complex introductory exposition, he forgets to talk to any real actual native aboriginals. He is filtering everything he presents through the words of Volchok and Flynn. How do we know that these two second-layer informants really do understand what the aboriginals mean by songlines? And if they do, how can we be sure that Chatwin himself got their stories straight? Chatwin tells a fascinating story, but how much of it can we believe? Believing primary informants is sometimes risky, but setting your stock in informants of informants is exponentially more hazardous.
Since Chatwin was a journalist and not an anthropologist, I suppose he could excuse his method by saying that he was really doing a story about Arkady Volchok and not the songlines, even though The Songlines is the title of his book. But as field researchers, we would have no such excuse. Our informants are not the people who know about the people we are interested in, but the people we are interested in themselves. We can go to folks like Arkady as a check to see if we, as Westerners, are seeing things the way a Westerner who is more used to the situation would see it. But that is no substitute for direct experience and direct information. Don't try to interpret interpreted data.
Lest we feel superior, and say smugly that we would never fall into this sort of trap, let me ask you a question. When you get interested in a method or approach to research, do you go to the primary sources to see what the creators of the method have to say, or do you rely on what someone else has to say? I'm glad you are reading this book, and I hope it helps you build a framework for understanding. But what I have to say about, say, phenomenology or grounded theory or hermeneutics or even Castaneda and Chatwin, for that matter, is second hand stuff filtered through my way of thinking and understanding. If a method of interpretation or research really resonates with your purposes, run, don't walk, to the primary sources.
A cat named Pangur Ban:
The complexity that surrounds interpretation seems almost too much to interpret itself. As researchers, we need to make commitments to directions for interpretation, and to honestly and openly share those commitments with others as we do and describe our work.
In fairness, then, let me begin with myself. My favorite strategy for interpretation combines the quest for epiphany as heralded by Joyce with the careful attention to actual detail that characterized the travelers along the Australian songlines. In one apparently simple piece on stalking and fulfillment, I would like to display my favorite model of the interpreter in the empirical world.
I am speaking of the nameless Irish monk who was the master of Pangur Ban. Pangur Ban, which is Welsh for "white cat" is the subject of one of the most famous poems in early medieval history. As near as we know, it was written sometime in the 9th century, which makes it a contemporary of that other masterpiece penned by an anonymous Irish monk, namely Beowulf.
First, courtesy of that ubiquitous medieval codicologist, James Marchand (20 March 1996, private communicaton), we have Pangur Ban transliterated from its original Gaelic (sh = s with a dot over it, / = virgule = long mark):

"Messe ocus Pangur Ba/n

Messe ocus Pangur ba/n,
cechtar nathar fria shainda/n:
bi/th a menmasam fri seilgg,
mu menma ce/in im shaincheirdd.

Caraimse fos, ferr cach clu/
oc mu lebra/n, le/ir ingnu;
ni/ foirmtech frimm Pangur ba/n:
caraid cesin a maccda/n.

O/ ru biam, sce/l cen sci/s,
innar tegdais, ar n-o/endi/s,
ta/ithiunn, di/chri/chide clius,
ni/ fris tarddam ar n-a/thius.

Gna/th, hu/araib, ar gressaib gal
glenaid luch inna li/nsam;
os me/, du-fuit im li/n che/in
dliged ndoraid cu ndronche/ill.

Fu/achaidsem fri frega fa/l
a rosc, a ngle/se comla/n;
fu/achimm che/in fri fe/gi fis
mu rosc re/il, cesu imdis.

Fa/elidsem cu nde/ne dul
hi nglen luch inna ge/rchrub;
hi tucu cheist ndoraid ndil
os me/ chene am fa/elid.

Cia beimmi a-min nach re/
ni/ derban ca/ch a che/le:
maith la cechtar na/r a da/n;
subaigthius a o/enura/n.

He/ fesin as choimsid da/u
in muid du-ngni/ cach o/enla/u;
du thabairt doraid du gle/
for mu mud ce/in am messe."

As musical as the Gaelic is phonetically, its meaning is completely mysterious to me. Given that I have absolutely no skills or knowledge when it comes to medieval Gaelic, I am again indebted to Jim for the following literal translation (Marchand, 20 March 1996, personal communication):

"The Scholar and his Cat

I and White Pangur, each of us in his special craft. His mind is set on
hunting; my mind is on my special subject.

I love resting (better than any fame) at my book, with diligent
understanding; White Pangur is not envious of me; he loves his childish craft.

When we are (tale without tiredness), in our house, being alone, we have an endless sport, a thing to which we may apply our skill.

It is usual, at times, by feats of valor, that a mouse sticks in his net.
As for me, there falls into my net, a difficult rule with hard meaning.

He points fiercely against an enclosing wall his eye, bright, perfect. I
myself direct against the keenness of knowledge my sharp eye, though it be quite weak.

He is happy with swiftness of movement upon a mouse sticking in his sharp paws. Which I understand a difficult pleasant problem, as for me, I am happy, too.

Though we may be indeed (like this) at any time, neither disturbs his
partner; good to each of us is his art, each rejoices in them.

He himself is master of it, the work which he does every day. To bring clarity to difficulty, I am at my own work."

The mysterious scribe:
Absolutely nothing of a personal historical nature is known about the anonymous 9th century Irish monk who was the author of this poem. He was, however, almost certainly one of the Vagrantes, or wandering Irish monks from the turn of the previous millennium who had helped keep the works of Western civilization alive during those times.
His poem was found in the margins of a manuscript in a monastery in Austria. I like to think that he had finished his copying task, which usually involved writing as the original manuscript was being read in the scriptorium by the master of the scribes, and he jotted down this poem as he waited for his less nimble fellow copyists to finish writing their renditions.
The most popular modern English version of Pangur Ban, and the one that best captures the musical lyricism of the original Gaelic, is the Robin Flowers translation (Murphy & MacKillop, 1987, pp. 22-23):
"I, and Pangur Ban, my cat,
‘Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men
‘Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill will,
He too plies his simple skill.

‘Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur’s way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.

‘Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
‘Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our tasks we ply,
Pangur Ban, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.

Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light."


Seven messages from Pangur Ban:
True to the spirit of the author, we will turn to this poem as a source of "messages" about the art of stalking meaning in the world. These messages about interpretation are, of course, themselves interpretations. We will use a version of the poem which was translated from the original Gaelic by W.H. Auden, and was used as the lyrics for Samuel Barber, op. 29, Hermit’s Song VIII. A Monk and His Cat (1980):
Pangur, white Pangur, how happy we are
Alone together, scholar and cat
Each has his own work to do daily;
For you it is hunting, for me study.
Your shining eye watches the wall;
My feeble eye is fixed on a book.
You rejoice, when your claws entrap a mouse;
I rejoice, when my mind fathoms a problem.
Pleased with his own art, neither hinders the other;
Thus we live ever without tedium and envy.
Message #1: Searching the margins:
Our first message is derived from a historical and cultural look at the poem. We know very little about this work, which is arguably the most beloved poem of medieval Irish literature. We do know that it was “found in a miscellany of notes on grammar, astronomy, and Latin poetry in the monastery of St. Paul.... (Murphy & MacKillop, 1987; p. 22).” The copy was apparently made in this monastery in Carinthia in southern Austria sometime in either the Eighth or Ninth Century AD.
According to Walsh (1942), the author was most likely a wandering Irishman. These wanderers, or Hibernici exules, played an important role in the dissemination of learning throughout Europe during this period (Walsh, 1942; pp. 40-41). As Murphy & MacKillop (1987) further point out, “the monk-poet must have been a kindred spirit to the monk-scribe whose playful white cats arrest their own mice on the Chi-Rho page of the Book of Kells (p. 22).” Pangur is a Welsh name, and Ban is Welsh for white. This is all we know of the author and his Celtic roots.
The copying of manuscripts was a major activity for many medieval monasteries. As LeClercq (1961) pointed out, the scriptorium was a central place in the medieval monastery not just for its intellectual, but also for its spiritual role: “The task of the copyist was an authentic form of aestheticism....It was work that was both manual and intellectual (p. 122).”
Often in these copied documents, we find extensive marginal notes. Writing in the margins was a common act for medieval scribes. There were two primary forms of marginalia. The first consisted of glosses. These are similar to the margin notes that many members of the scholarly community employ to this day in their own books. But Pangur Ban was most likely the second kind of marginalia. While there is no hard evidence to support the following claim, it makes some sense to think that this second form of marginalia was composed by copyists who were working in group copying sessions.
In these group sessions, an older and senior copyist would “lecture” (from the Latin lectio, meaning to read), that is, read the main text, while the other scribes would make copies from the oral rendition. It stands to reason that the smartest and most adept copyists would often wait for their slower comrades to catch up. Was our Hibernici exule one of these bright copyists who, while waiting for the others, composed the poem as a subtle tribute to his homeland and as a way to describe himself as a scholar and a person with a thirst for learning and understanding?
If so, then can we allow the whole poem to stand as an allegory for all those learners who sit and wait for others to catch up and who, in their thirst to know and understand, reflect upon their lives and their intellectual desires?
Does this long dead monk speak to the bored and disaffected student of today who, having grasped the snail’s-paced curricular lessons, sits in his or her desk and dreams of what it would be like to be able to really learn, to stalk learning and ideas like Pangur Ban, instead of waiting in a desk for someone to dole out bits of learning that are not only approved by a curricular process, but which the student must absolutely demonstrate a grasp and learning of under penalty of bad grades and the removal of social privileges that attend to good grades?
How well does the margins of a medieval manuscript speak to the student who is marginalized by his or her own brightness and lack of interest in playing the curriculum game?
Now, I want to move to the lines from the poem itself. I would like to couch the following messages as answers to questions raised by our active reflection upon the lines.
Message #2: “Pangur, white Pangur, how happy we are...”
What sort of world was the medieval world of the mind? How could they have been happy there? What can we learn from this about our ways of understanding research?
The monk says that he and Pangur are happy. This is a much different sense of happiness than we are accustomed to nowadays. What makes the scholar of today happy? In short, to have support for his/her work. That support comes in the form of grant money, release time, space in the journals to publish his/her work, time to read papers at conventions and meetings, book contracts, invitations to lecture, fellowships, consulting contracts, or even just a steady academic position, hopefully with tenure. In the pursuit of any and all of these forms of support, the contemporary academic finds himself/herself in competition with other scholars. All of the resources listed above are scarce resources, and the academic must compete with others for these resources. At stake are all of the rewards of the academic system. More often than not, in order to succeed the academic has to view his/her work as a commodity whose value needs to be enhanced in the academic and larger marketplace. The happy academic of today is the extremely lucky individual who finds that his/her work is viewed as a hot commodity, and that he/she can just go about doing his/her work without worrying about how to market it or package it so that things like jobs, grants, promotions, tenure, contracts, and fellowships are forthcoming. Such an academic would find himself/herself quite at piece with this age.
Our medieval scholar is quite different in his happiness. Promotion of himself or his ideas are the farthest thing from his mind. Instead, he sees himself as part of a chain of scholars, reaching back to classical Athens itself. His happiness is more of a contentment. He is working as a scholar and a monk because that is his role to play in his society. As a copyist, he is working to preserve ideas that can be preserved in no other way. The ongoing existence of the ideas that ground his culture are maintained by monks such as himself. But it is more than just maintenance. Within the boundaries of preserving the structure of culture, these medieval scholars were quite prolific. Medieval monks wrote a variety of original materials, from the treatises in logic and philosophy of an Aquinas to the epic Beowulf, which was apparently written by an Irish monk of the Tenth Century AD.
Message #3: “Alone together, scholar and cat...”
What is the sense of kinship that the monk felt with the cat? How is this a metaphor for the life of a researcher?
Our monk celebrates the time he has to himself to pursue his learning, keeping company with only his cat. Does this mean our monk is a recluse? Probably not. Instead, like all contemplatives, he relishes the time he can spend away from the demands of others, to seek out his interior voice. Interior guidance was incredibly important for medieval scholars, since they held their work accountable to moral, as well as intellectual, standards. That is, a work of scholarship was not only a repository of information and a theoretical account of nature or culture, but also a guide for understanding the meaning of life and a lesson for how to refine and improve one’s own life.
The presence of moral imperatives such as these in scholarly works make us nervous today, since most moral guides we see are either exclusionary, or puritanical, or both. Such was not the case for the medieval scholar. These scholars were inclusive and humanistic in their outlooks. An excellent example of this can be found in the Gesta Romanorum (Swan & Hooper, 1876/1959). These tales collected from the Mediterranean, India, Persia, the Middle East, Scandinavia, and elsewhere, and they tell tales of kings, queens, magicians, thieves, and countless others. At the end of each tale, no matter how entertaining or apparently worldly, the allegorical elements were explicated and a moral lesson was drawn. In the end, it was perfectly acceptable for an act of scholarship to delight and inform the reader, but it was held as especially important for the scholar to offer a path for moral guidance.
Message #4: “ Each has his own work to do daily; For you it is hunting, for me study...”
How can using the act of hunting serve as a useful metaphor for understanding the act of research?
Cronin (1941) argues that the role of inquiry into the natural world by the medieval scholar has been seriously misunderstood by those of us today. When we think of the Middle Ages as being a time of theological, or at best perhaps logic al, inquiry, we assume that the medieval scholar is not interested in the natural world per se. Cronin counters this claim:
"They... were not intent upon losing sight of this world in order to gain an understanding of the next; rather, it was their problem to acquire an
understanding of the next world through the proper interpretation of the
present visible world. The centuries from the sixth to the twelfth may have been dark for the history of scientific observation, but it is a mistake to interpret this fact as evidence of contempt for the content of science (p. 194)."
The medieval researcher was just as likely to look inwardly as outwardly for guidance in understanding the natural world. These directions were seen as complementary, and not in competition with each other. Therefore, it is perfectly legitimate, in his view, to focus upon the ins and outs of the act of hunting, not for itself, but to act as a way to illuminate and discover aspects of learning that might not be as apparent from another perspective.
Message #5: “ Your shining eye watches the wall; My feeble eye is fixed on a book...”
Why does the monk draw a keen distinction between Pangur’s keen eye and prowess, and his own feeble senses?
Animals played an important symbolic role to the medieval scholar; witness the incredible importance of bestiaries and the like. In this poem, the symbolism of Pangur Ban the hunter is meant to be drawn out clearly to the reader. As Rowland (1973) points out, animal symbolism is a crucial aspect of exegesis, precisely because of its universal appeal and power:
While many of today's symbols are strictly contemporary and some are
esoteric, relying on a private code which only the initiated can interpret, most animal symbols are traditional, belonging to the mythology of everyone, eternally present in the collective unconscious memory and in the dream world where everything is a symbol (p. xviii).
Symbolism for the medieval scholar is not a matter of ornamentation. The drawing out of the hunting metaphor by the poet was not a literary conceit. Instead, as Ladner (1979) illustrates, the physical skill of the feline hunter is meant not to stand as a contrast to the intellectual skill of the human hunter, but these skills are meant to illuminate each other:
(For the Middle Ages) ...the universe was an exemplarist and anagogical as well as analogical, a hierarchical as well as a gradualistic multiverse; it was in no way a structure of irreducible opposites (p.230).
Therefore, Pangur Ban and the monk are not in any sort of competition with each other, but each are manifesting his own way of being in the world, to the advantage of each. And neither should envy the other; instead, they serve as models for proper conduct, be they feline or intellectual.
Message #6: “You rejoice, when your claws entrap a mouse; I rejoice, when my mind fathoms a problem...”
What is the role of joy in research? How can this inform us?
The joy of research was part of the joy, commonly felt by medieval scholars, of stalking hidden meanings and occluded symbol systems for the sake of the greater cultural good. These scholars looked upon their efforts as part of the collective consciousness of their age, as Ladner (1979) documents:
It was one of the fundamental character traits of the early Christian and medieval mentalities that the signifying, symbolizing, and allegorizing
function was anything but arbitrary or subjective; symbols were believed to represent objectively and to express faithfully various aspects of a universe that was perceived as widely and deeply meaningful (p. 227).
There is a common misconception that the people of the Middle Ages saw their human lot as one of suffering and dismay, and that their efforts were strictly channeled into the task of setting themselves up for the next world. Actually, this is a modernist misreading of the medieval world view. In fact, this treatment of human experience as a product to be refined for heavenly acceptability is far more a modernist than a medieval concept. As our monk scholar plainly tells us, the pursuit of learning and knowledge was not just something done as a means to an end, but something which gave him great pleasure as an end in itself. This joy of learning was fostered partially by the pursuit of knowledge itself, and partially by the fact that the scholar knew that he was doing something, and living a life, which had a clear and meaningful place in his culture.
Message #7: “ Pleased with his own art, neither hinders the other; Thus we live ever without tedium and envy.”
How is the life of a researcher a life affirming task? How can blend our models of research with the need to live a rich and fulfilling life? How can our lives as researchers be at one time a calling, and at another time a part of a larger project to move our cultural understanding further along?
I think these questions deserve to stand alone, to be addressed by each of us in our own ways.

The Simple Point:
Interpretation matters.
The Judgment:
Good researchers learn how to make the strange familiar.
Great researchers learn how to make the familiar strange.