In between battling with E (I don't know what has gotten into that boy, but everything is a constant battle right now), I have been trying to get through some key secondary literature for my book. I read Christian Norberg-Schulz's Nightlands: Nordic Building, which I thought I'd love based on my deep admiration for Christopher Alexander et al.'s wonderful A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (on my short list for desert island reading). I hated it. It's so phenomenological that it just melts into thin air. I've got a book of his essays too, and I'm hoping that I'll find something of interest there, but this one was a real disappointment. And nary a word about cabins!
Nina Witoszek's Norske naturmytologier. fra Edda til økofilosofi, however, is anything but disappointing. It is one of the most exciting books I've come across in a long time. She circles around so many issues that are central to my cabin book project. So far I've only read the introduction, and I've taken so many notes on it that it's clear I need my own copy. I've already ordered it! She starts out by introducing Richard Dawkins' concept of the meme, and it struck me that this is the perfect approach to the cabin in Norway. I've been thinking all along of using Michel Foucault's notion of the heterotopia as a way of describing how the cabin functions, but that has turned out to be a bit of a dead end, since Foucault doesn't really take the concept very far theoretically. The meme, on the other hand seems to encompass so much of what I want to explore with the cabin. Here's the classic quote from Dawkins:
What, after all, is so special about genes? The answer is that they are replicators. [...] I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.
The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'.
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: '... memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.'Here's how Witoszek paraphrases Dawkins, which is the passage that got my ideas rolling:
Kort sagt er memer karismatiske bilder, fortellinger, melodier og ritualer som forplanter seg gjennom flere generasjoner i forskjellige kulturelle tekster, former og genrer. De kan bli skapt anonymt a et samfunn, en gruppe eller en skoleretning, eller av en enkelperson. (14)That may not seem very useful to you, but to me it's thrilling because it accounts for how things like cabins signify and how their signification can change over time, as well as the ideological and identity-building work they do within a culture. The funny thing is, I've been hearing about this "meme" thing a lot on the internet over the past year, without really understanding it, or its implications for my research. I guess that means I'm not particularly open to receiving memes?
