Journal Entry 11.4.23

Megan Biesele writes in Once Upon a Time is Now: A Kalahari Memoir, that Claude Lévi Strauss observed “that doing fieldwork is like [pyscho]analysis. In the sense that trying to make contact with strangers is like the frustration generated by confronting a nondirective analyst, creative contact with one’s own self is fostered. The rules of social interaction are not understood, only groped for, in both situations, and one is thrown back wholly upon one’s own resources…”

I think there is a great deal in common between fieldwork, psychoanalysis, making art, and Buddhism. All four “philiosophies” require a long term commitment to being fully present and in doing so, looking deeply at one’s self through the act of observation and the reflection of the self from the world around you. They all require a suspension of ego in order to discover the illusion of self. One is thrown back on the fundamental parts of ourselves: observation, presence, and action. There is no hiding in any of these fields, not if one desired to engage fully in what each has to offer.