"When change reaches a certain pace, reference works become impossible." -William Reddy, The Structure of a Cultural Crisis: Thinking About Cloth in France Before and After the Revolution, 1986

BATTLE HYMN OF THE RESEARCH EXPERTS

Some talk of race relations, and some of politics,
Of labour and migrations, of hist'ry, lice and ticks,
Investments, trends of amity
And patterns of behaviour
Let none treat us with levity
For we are out to save 'yer.

When seated in our library-chairs
We're filled with righteous thought’ho,
We shoulder continental cares
Tell settlers what they ought to,
We'll jargonize and analyse
Frustrations and fixations,
Neuroses, Angst and stereotypes
In structured integration.

Strange cultures rise from notes and graphs
Through Freud's and Jung's perception
Despite your Ego's dirty laughs
We'll change you to perfection,
We've read Bukharin, Kant and Marx
And even Toynbee's stories
And our dialect'cal sparks
Will make explode the Tories.

Rhodesians hear our sage advice
On cross-acculturation,
On inter-racial kinship ties
And folk-way elongation,
On new conceptual frame works high
We'll bake your cakes of custom,
And with a socialising sigh
We'll then proceed to bust 'em.

Our research tools are sharp and gleam
With verified statistics,
Our intellectual combat team
Has practiced its heuristics
From value judgments we are free,
We only work scientific
For all-round global liberty
and Ph.D.s pontific.


-anonymous, Northern Rhodesia Journal, 1959

"In order to escape the realism of the structure...it is necessary to pass from...statistical regularity or algebraic structure to the principle of the production of this observed order, and to construct a theory of practice, or, more precisely, the theory of the mode of generation of practices, which is the precondition of establishing an experimental science of the dialectic of the internalization of externality and the externalization of internality..." -Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice

"Souls are mixed with things; things with souls. Lives are mingled together, and this is how, among persons and things so intermingled, each merges from their own sphere and mixes together. This is precisely what contract and exchange are." -Marcel Mauss, The Gift, 1923

"The truth of any event is predicated on the addition...of that invisible part of every fact, and it is this part, therefore, which the historian has to add. Regarded in this way, he does become active, even creative – not by bringing forth what does not have existence, but in giving shape by his own powers to that which by mere intuition he could not have perceived as it really was. Differently from the poet, but in a way similar to him, he must work the collected fragments into a whole." -Wilhelm von Humboldt, On the Historian's Task, 1821

"...Western notions of occularcentrism and the primacy of the visual in thinking about photographs has elided the sensory and emotional impact of photographs as things that matter. I use the world 'matter' intentionally for it suggests the emotional and the sensory ...As such, it might be said to explore photography beyond the visual: photography whose social meanings are not necessarily dictated exclusively by the visual but also by their perception as objects through which the visual is performed and understood."-Elizabeth Edwards, Photographs and the Sound of History, 2006.

"In fact matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing and that is all we want of it... Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable." -Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1859