#folk knowledge

page 441 - there is an olde Economian story told of a giant, a creature incredibly long and skinny, as if made from curves of the largest data set the world has ever seen. Perhaps THE data set, the first data set, from which all other data sets draw their data. He lived in the cove, blah blah, dismissal of indigenous and folk knowledge, blah blah, stories are useless unless commodified and owned, endlessly repackaged and placed in front of the public, a simulacra of culture and meaning, a thin gift from corporate owners to an increasingly starved culture.

page 367 - elevations are most easily read with the naked eye when they synchronize with the clouds. Few outside the Lapp School of economics have ever seen this occur, and only a few within the Lapp School know how cloud-elevation synchronicity can be used to make decisions about how many reindeer to plant, etc. Most contemporary economic thinkers dismiss Lapp school followers as quaint and antiquated, while everyone else is confused about the planting reindeer bit.

His suggestion really tickled my fancy; using folk knowledge to find out more about these monkeys seems, well, obvious. But to go out and prove the people's knowledge is another. It's not about proving anyone right or wrong but about finding out more. Essentially, this is what our whelk study is. That monkeys crack and eat whelks is somewhat like an urban legend here. Everytime we mention it, we are met with chuckles but not necessarily disrespectful chuckles. We want to see if and how this works in a laboratory setting. I'm thrilled at the prospects, especially since I've identified the work as something that fits into what ethnoprimatology could be.