擁擠的樂園裡的超限戰

一個禮拜，漸漸感覺被淹沒在這個城市裡。剛回來的時候還保存著一點從遠方帶回的悠閒，一個禮拜之後，這感覺完全被淹沒。為了尋找在家的工作空間，尋找可以讓人呆得下去的溫度，尋找節奏合拍的地點。一直要抗拒許多混雜的感覺。這種感覺最主要的是，城市裡的人（也許是這整個國家）都在打超限戰。不論時間，不論地點，關於工作，關於賺錢，關於八卦，關於其他人的瑣碎的生活如何的被媒體餵養，關於媒體如何吃觀眾和受訪者的豆腐，關於觀看如何被塑造成一種過度發達但不需其他感官以及心靈結合的過程。

潛藏在這個超限戰裡的氣味，還有關於時尚的追趕，關於理性的脆弱，關於他者的消失，關於M型社會的消費，水密桃阿媽的堅強與楊儒門的格格不入。

好個混雜而超限的樂園阿。

The sense of Time

前兩天跟Tanya去書店喝咖啡，突然講到時間感。處在學期之後，又已經站在懸崖邊準備跳下去做田野之前，對於時間的感覺似乎有種模糊的焦慮。因為在田野裡可能會碰到什麼樣的事情，沒辦法預期，於是時間的感覺就不像在學期中那樣地有節奏，但是卻又不能沒有任何時間的感覺，因為大致上一年左右要有個收尾。當時在寫任何proposal的時候都把時間切割得很好看，實際上開始做的時候，大概會碰到不知道該做什麼的狀況，如果又呆在自己已經熟悉的環境裡裡，那種虛幻的漂流感會更強烈。

Tanya提到之前在做PT時的時間感也很怪異，作為PT，會希望被治療的小朋友有進展，但是許多腦性麻痺小患者其實能夠改善的時間是很緩慢的。這時治療師如果出現期待進步的焦慮和情緒，小朋友以及家長都會很容易感覺到感覺到，必須把時間（此時的時間似乎跟進步連在一起了）的感覺放在心裡。

這幾天在RB家，過著時間感完全模糊的生活。美國的夏日時光像是被放在砧板上不斷被桿的麵皮一樣，一直拉長，一直拉長...

而轉換到另一個時空的日子已經是這麼近了....

Dame Mary Douglas (1921-2007)

最近一直在整理文件，有些public email並沒有仔細看。結果剛剛才發現，Mary Douglas日前過世了。我認為他跟Clifford Geertz（2006年10月辭世）是英美兩個區域裡兩個代表性的人類學家，兩人在這一年之內都相繼過世了。以下是The Guardian對她的訃文：
（之前沒有特別注意到是因為，她的頭銜Dame讓我以為是其他人，實際上的意義是A female rank equivalent to a knigh，大概可以翻成女爵？）


Richard Fardon
Friday May 18, 2007
The Guardian

Dame Mary Douglas, who has died aged 86, was the most widely read British social anthropologist of her generation. If she had to be recalled for a single achievement, it would be as the anthropologist who took the techniques of a particularly vibrant period of research into non-western societies and applied them to her own, western milieu. Within her lifetime, this was so far accepted within British anthropology as to become almost lost to view. Posterity should restore most of the credit to her, and remember her as an innovative social theorist and for her contributions particularly to the anthropological analysis of cosmology, consumption and the analysis of risk perception.

She was born in San Remo, Italy, the first child of Phyllis Twomey and Gilbert Tew. Her parents had stopped off en route to home leave from Burma, where her father served in the Indian civil service. Mary and her younger sister, Patricia, lived with their mother's parents in Totnes, Devon, until they were old enough to become boarders at the Sacred Heart Convent, in Roehampton, south-west London. After the early death of her mother, closely followed by that of the maternal grandfather to whom she was devoted, Mary found a sense of security in the relatively hierarchical, secluded and safe world of school. Her Catholic commitments and social preferences were set for life.

School was followed by wartime Oxford, where she read philosophy, politics and economics, and then by war service in the Colonial Office, where she met the social anthropologists. Intrigued by the subject, she returned to Oxford in 1946, initially to take a two-year conversion course, and then to register in 1949 for her doctorate in anthropology. The postwar re-establishment of the institute of social anthropology by Professor (later Sir) EE Evans-Pritchard was one of the major events in the development of the discipline; it educated an extraordinarily high proportion of Tew's generation, who went on to redefine the nature of contemporary anthropology. None, however, made a greater contribution to this than she did.

She undertook her fieldwork (1949-51 and 1953) in the Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It eventuated in both a DPhil in 1952 and a monograph, The Lele of the Kasai, published in 1963. Her description of the matrilineal Lele, their gerontocracy, complex marriage arrangements and cults - most memorably that of the pangolin, or scaly ant eater - became a minor anthropological classic, but would not by itself be the reason for her fame. Civil war prevented further fieldwork, and Douglas did not return to the country, known from 1971 to 1997 as Zaire, until 1987. For all that she was a gifted field researcher and ethnographic writer, her wider renown was never based on her reputation as a fieldworker or on her ethnographic writings, although these established her competence within the profession.

In 1951, after a brief appointment at Oxford, she married James Douglas. Like her, he was a Catholic and had been born into a colonial family (in Simla, while his father served in the Indian army). James joined the Conservative party research department just as Mary took up an appointment at University College London (UCL), where she was to remain for a quarter of a century, and was professor of social anthropology from 1970 to 1977; a distinguished fellowship followed in 1994. If James was considered to be academic for a party official, and Mary unusually immersed in matters close to home for an anthropologist, an invitation to the Douglas dinner table soon dispelled any mystery.

In 1966, Douglas published her most celebrated work, Purity and Danger: an Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. This book is best remembered for its stylish demonstration of the ways in which all schemes of classification produce anomalies: whether the pangolin for the Lele, or the God incarnate of Catholic theology. Some of this classificatory "matter out of place" - from humble house dust in her Highgate house to the abominations of Leviticus for the Hebrews - was polluting, but other breaches of routine classification had the capacity to renew the world symbolically.

In Natural Symbols (1970), Douglas began to answer the question that arose from this: what kinds of society are best able to support the complex symbolism that makes the best society possible? The book took exception to some 1960s cultural trends - notably the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council and student revolts - and presented the first of many attempts to correlate features of institutional organisation with patterns of belief and morality. Her conclusion - that differentiated, hierarchical and bounded institutions provided the most condusive environments for complex thinking and symbolism - remained the same, whatever changes her theories underwent.

From 1977 until the mid-1980s the Douglases took up a variety of appointments in the United States. This period coincided with the publication of Mary's work most explicitly concerned with contemporary society. Her collaborative research on British consumers, The World of Goods (1979) with Baron Isherwood, was a pioneering work of the contemporary anthropology of consumption. In it, she argued both that contemporary consumption had ritual aspects that defined lifestyles, and that the increasing emphasis on individual consumption threatened a crisis in collective provision. If consumption was a form of communication, then those individuals who consumed less also communicated less.

While at the Russell Sage Foundation, New York (1977-81), with the late Aaron Wildavsky she co-authored Risk and Culture (1982), an analysis of risk perception and critique of alarmist environmental groupings that sparked a feeding frenzy among reviewers. At Northwestern University, Illinois, she occupied a chair jointly in anthropology and religious studies (1981-85, and then as professor emeritus), and published a string of articles on contemporary religion and social commitments.

On her return to Britain, back at UCL Douglas continued to publish a volume of her collected essays or a new book every few years, while being showered with professional honours and other recognitions, including a CBE in 1992 and a DBE this year. While a new generation of anthropologists might have forgotten how late this recognition came, Douglas, who had a particular fascination with the sociology of forgetting, did not. It was only in 1989 that, returned from the US, she was elected a fellow of the British Academy. Before her emigration, many in the anthropological establishment had considered her work marginal to the mainstream tradition, an indication in itself of how much the discipline changed during her career.

Two preoccupations were particularly apparent in Douglas's later work: refinement of her theoretical statements, notably in How Institutions Think (1986) and Missing Persons (1998), and a return to the analysis of the Old Testament that had been an important feature of Purity and Danger. This became the particular fascination of a trilogy that engaged her for two decades: 1993 saw the publication, after unusually protracted labours by the standards of Douglas's productivity, of In the Wilderness, a meditation on the literary construction and social context of the Book of Numbers; Leviticus as Literature followed in 1999, revising ideas about the Jewish dietary codes that Purity and Danger had made famous; and in 2004 Jacob's Tears completed the series, asking who had edited the Pentateuch, and how their aims might explain its textual form.

An invited lecture series allowed Douglas to collect her ideas about the poetics of ring composition, the technique in which texts are formed in circular patterns, in what she described as a summation: An Essay on Ring Composition appeared to her delight earlier this year. Aside from seeing her father's collected essays on fishing into print (they are promised soon), and hoping to collaborate with Congolese Lele scholars on a book using her 1950s photographs of material culture, she had completed all the work she felt she had in her.

Douglas's theoretical commitments to stability, loyalty and completion were evident in her own life: one marriage (from 1951 until James's death in 2004); one family home (from 1956 until she moved to a flat in Bloomsbury a year ago); leaving aside her American sojourn, half a century of service to UCL; and a lifetime of practising Catholicism. A similar singlemindedness was evident in her espousal and refinement of the theories she developed from her Oxford years, and her advocacy of the social policies that flowed from them.

As a colleague she could be intransigent in what she considered matters of principle, and she never dissembled her estimation of others. Her sense of humour was acute and in later years she enjoyed playing to her own reputation, gleefully recalling just how objectionable she had made herself to some American colleagues whose political correctness irked her, and accepting academic honours with mild irony, given what she recalled as her years in the wilderness. A wide circle of friends outside anthropology, and the like-minded within, will remember her capacity for encouragement and support of younger colleagues, an enthusiasm and curiosity that age only accentuated, and her boundless energy. She inveighed against exclusion; her hospitality was genuine and her home open to so many visitors that only the self-discipline of her work habits and her writing facility allowed her to achieve so much.

She is survived by her three children, Janet, James and Philip.

· Margaret Mary Douglas, anthropologist, born March 25 1921; died May 16 2007

How to grill a steak

昨天太晚回家，想要去吃任何餐廳的時候都已經關了。只好匆忙的跑到Wholefood，本想買一些簡單的熱食，但是在打烊前十分鐘，連熱食也都沒有了。買了一點熟食蔬菜之後，友人Weiling說，要不要吃牛排？挖哈，牛肉通常是我的最愛，再加上Weilling這個美食家，當然OK！

於是她選了12 ounce 的Aged Beef。我問為何用Aged Beef？聽起來有點噁心...她說，Aged Beef會放在恆溫恆濕箱裡，當水分被蒸發之後，肉的美味就會更為濃縮（有點像醃，但是沒有其他的味道；或者是作souce出現reduction的效果）。原來她想要找薄一點的牛排，但是在那個時候看到的牛肉都是厚片的。well，不管了，我們都很餓了。就買回來想辦法。

回到住處，她找出鹽和胡椒。鹽用海鹽，胡椒是coarse grounded，兩者都和她的意。在覆上橄欖油。她說現在時間不夠，只能大概等個十分鐘，不然通常需要等至少兩小時。做完簡單的醃製之後，先把牛肉用大火煎期中一面，但鍋子裡不能灑油！大約一分鐘，之後放到450度的烤箱裡烤（因為買來的牛排比較厚），烤上六七分鐘（厚度大概是1.25inch），之後拿出來翻另一面煎，同樣約一分鐘。之後用這一面放烤箱同樣時間。如此得到的熟度大約是medium rare。之後取出，需要讓肉rest並且吸收肉汁。此時有個重要的小秘訣，需要在肉底下墊上一個東西（也許是小盤子，或者是叉子），讓肉可以被稍微墊起；這樣肉才不會浸泡在自己的肉汁裡，變的「血肉模糊」。外面在覆上錫箔紙，保溫並且讓水分可以從旁邊散出。等待約三分鐘，牛排取出後，滴下的肉汁可以和高湯以及煎鍋理殘餘的肉汁（有個特殊的法文名稱）一起煮成醬汁（我們這次煮有加蕃茄醬，如果有紅酒當然也不錯）。

簡單的幾個步驟，但是卻很重要，半個小時之後，就有比美Long Star的牛排上桌了。

（簡單記錄先，小技巧可以立大功）