Huon pine figures among the few materials in the world that have come to define a place. The stories linked to it run very deep in Tasmania and only some have been told. In the vernacular, there’s just so much stuff linked to this wood.
The history of how this wood was harvested and used is more fascinating than the timber. The stores focus attention upon fascinating histories still hidden in what is thought to be Tasmania’s most important tree. Some of this has been published but much more remains hidden.
The early exploitation of it for boat timber and furniture, to its present day statues as a rare and expensive wood where anything made from it becomes a kind of treasure that in turn have all kinds of information buried within them.
The call is now out for those who have something to offer a publication project set against this background.
Please contact the initial project facilitators via Treva Alen treva.alen@bigpond.com ”
HUON PINE AND DEEP HISTORIES
Looking at history/histories from a standpoint of anthropology it is said that it “reveals a discipline driven by fission and fusion”. Such an approach sets the scene for something that might be described as ‘deep history’ and as an example of what might be achieved if ‘anthropology’ is permitted to inform critical discourse along the road of fusion rather than continue with the atomised interrogation of what’s known, unknown, believed, understood, whatever.
It might well illustrate a pathway towards examining a kind of fusion involving an ‘ethic of interdisciplinaryism’. That is an idea encapsulated in the concept of something that might be understood as a ‘social brain’ of a kind.
By placing social imperatives at the heart of ‘historical understandings’ we might find a common ground of a kind upon which various fields of thinking – history, geography, cultural theory, anthropology, etc – might profitably come together. Here we may have the opportunity to set a new agenda.
Our ‘social brains’ work in accord with deep as well as shallow histories towards it uniting experimental and historical sensibilities. A ‘musingplace’ might be a ‘place’ from which to launch such an endeavour as intimated here.
Looking at history/histories from a standpoint of anthropology it is said that it “reveals a discipline driven by fission and fusion”. Such an approach sets the scene for something that might be described as ‘deep history’ and as an example of what might be achieved if ‘anthropology’ is permitted to inform critical discourse along the road of fusion rather than continue with the atomised interrogation of what’s known, unknown, believed, understood, whatever.
It might well illustrate a pathway towards examining a kind of fusion involving an ‘ethic of interdisciplinaryism’. That is an idea encapsulated in the concept of something that might be understood as a ‘social brain’ of a kind.
By placing social imperatives at the heart of ‘historical understandings’ we might find a common ground of a kind upon which various fields of thinking – history, geography, cultural theory, anthropology, etc – might profitably come together. Here we may have the opportunity to set a new agenda.
Our ‘social brains’ work in accord with deep as well as shallow histories towards it uniting experimental and historical sensibilities. A ‘musingplace’ might be a ‘place’ from which to launch such an endeavour as intimated here.
