Cob: RE: oh, no, & what an eight year old knows

[Michael Fitzgerald]

Donna sweetie;

Your picture is wonderful. You obviously know this too or you wouldn't have
posted it to an international list. If there is one medium that is difficult
to work in its Crayola crayon. You are quite talented and from what I can
see in your writing for the past few weeks you are a passionate and
enlivened human being. Welcome to the list. I have been so busy building
that I have not had the time to reply to any of your questions and comments.
As for being flamed, please don't take it too hard. That's just Darrel, he
does that sometimes. He really is quite knowledgeable and committed to earth
building. He can and will help you with many aspects of learning to build
with earth. I can only guess, but you might have accidentally hit a nerve
when you said that an eight year old with a cookbook could put up an earthen
structure. Darrel is real serious about this stuff and is living in Japan
where teaching and pedagogy are very different from western practice. Eight
year olds have much to learn from a master mason, and forty five year olds
working on their first wall haven't learned much. Spend some time in the
archives and you will see that you are not the first to be Darrel-flamed and
you will also see how much he has contributed. We all wish he wouldn't do
that.

As for reading vs. practica. There is a very nice classic study by Walter
Ong entitled, "Orality vs. Literacy". In this study  Ong illustrates the
power of literate societies and their ability to pass on information with a
high degree of fidelity. It is a long book and I won't say much else about
it here except that he mentions one of the key works of our modern era which
was Diderot's Encyclopaedia. Published in the middle of the eighteenth
century it was one of the largest works to attempt to describe trade
practices such as how to make a barrel, or build a mud house, or curry a
beaver pelt to make a felt hat. At first Diderot was persecuted for having
published trade secrets. With time the trade guilds found that it really
didn't make a difference. Reading was not the same as doing. Knowledge was
not the same as ability. 250 years later in our post modern era, I know
plumbers who love when Do-it-yourself plumbing shows come on the TV. In ten
minutes they show six hours of work. These plumbers know that soon some guy
who didn't understand the difference between knowledge and ability will be
calling them in for an emergency repair. In this book Ong makes some general
statements about the storage of knowledge and the superiority of literate
societies that I take issue with.

I have studied many societies and I have found that non-literate societies
store their knowledge in many places. Their religion, their songs, dances,
etc. ad nauseum, are all places in which information is encoded, stored and
decoded by other individuals. This is especially true in two aspects of all
cultures. These are how we work and how and where we live. Craft industry
and process as well as architecture are human expressions that are
culturally specific. In their normal expression they are contained within
the parameters of a culture and are governed by the aesthetics proscribed by
cultural tradition. For instance: In Adjarra, a small village in Benin, West
Africa, an eight year old girl will go to the river and carry back water.
She will carry 5 gallons of water on her head (about 50 pounds!) and she may
do it well without spilling. However she cannot compare with her thirty
year-old mother who can carry the water and a baby, and tell a story while
chastising her son for something he did that she couldn't possibly have
seen. That woman can carry water with a grace and ability rarely seen in our
American society. There is much we can learn by training our bodies and
using our hands that we cannot know through reading. I recently read an
article about teaching heart surgeons their craft. It was entitled "By our
hands we will know." The medical fields are learning what cobbers are
learning, that to master a craft, one must grasp it. And so one day I asked
the girls to teach me how to carry water. They giggled and felt
uncomfortable but thought that it might be fun. We spent an hour at it
before I could take many steps without spilling. But they would not let me
carry water into the village. They where embarrassed for me that I would do
something that is for women only. Later I taught my daughter to carry things
on her head. She thinks it is great. However her cousin saw here carrying a
bowl on her head and told her to, "Stop it! that's not the way we do things
here."

These are some of the reasons we have workshops. So that people can see,
hear, touch, taste, feel, and know that there are really people out there
who build with mud. We do workshops so that people feel supported and can
move out against the aesthetics and traditions that say that "We don't build
with mud around here." Finally we do workshops to begin to train the body,
the hands and the mind to work together. In a singularly God-like act we
take mud and breathe life into it. We express our humanity. The more we do
it, the better we get at it. Reading is only the beginning.

Hope to have some pictures of my new dog house in a couple of weeks.

Michael Fitzgerald
Anthropologist/Woodcarver/Puppetmaker