My next round of teaching begins in a fortnight. I will be teaching across a whole mixture of programmes, including half of a course for a group on exchange from the American Midwest. These students are second-, third- and fourth-years, and I’m looking forward to being able to extend my ideas and material rather further than I usually get to with my preparatory students.
But before then there’s resources to be gathered and lectures for the new course to be written. The unknown has been giving me steady spikes of adrenalin all day, pushing me to new feats in locating material and using the photocopier (today I scanned some documents!), among other superheroics. At the same time, today’s humidity has given me hives. I am twitchy and scratchy.
My first unit will be on theories of Polynesian migration. The fact I’m not going to spend the whole week looking at the conspiratorial and the crackpot shows, I think, that my postmodernism isn’t completely bankrupt. (I don’t know about your Celtic ancestors, but mine never set eyes on the southern hemisphere until the late-nineteenth century.) Besides which, the bona fides in that narrative are, I think, more interesting.
February 11, 2008 at 10:01 pm
Yay, Polynesian settlement of the Pacific must rank as one of the greatest stories there is. You have the amazing achievement of setting up island populations that not managed to populate the some of the most isolated spots on earth but managed to navigate between them, set up trade routes and even have empires. Then you have the amazing way linguistic, archaeological, and genetic evidence (both from the people and the chickens, rats gourds and Kumara that travelled with) combined with traditional stories can let us understand how it all happened.
I’m sorry, I’ve gone at got my science all over your literature.
Good luck with the teaching, I couldn’t agree with you more, there is so much more in the real story than in the, usually more than a little racist, idea that the Pacific was colonised by some very lost Celts.
February 12, 2008 at 11:58 am
Science and literature? Don’t mind at all. I was saying to colleagues earlier this morning that the question of Polynesian settlement of the Pacific (or PSP, if one wishes) is a great project by virtue of the fact that it draws together pretty much all the disciplines, and is one where we can work in harmony rather than tearing our hair out at epistemological and methodological differences.
Those who cleave to the Celtic alterna-nonsense should preoccupy themselves with a far greater achievement of potentially lost Celts, and that’s the things they brewed when they found themselves on the western isles. (Real historians will excuse my fictitious conflation of migration patterns and tribal chronologies for the sake of a cheap shot.)
February 13, 2008 at 11:18 am
Cheap shot? Have you __been__ to Whisky Galore lately?
February 13, 2008 at 11:59 am
Oh, but the cheap shot is solely metaphorical, and consists of implying the Celts were lost when they got to the western isles, whereas spiritual histories (of the imbibable kind) and migratory patterns suggest they knew what they were doing and what they were going to brew when they got there.
Señor Mojito and I walked past Whisky Galore the other night. I do not reveal too much if I say he pressed his face against the glass mournfully.