Laughing at the spirits

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61261/laughing-at-the-spirits-in-north-siberia-is-animism-being-taken-too-seriously/

Joking and other types of ridiculing discourses about spirits play a prominent role in the everyday life of hunters, but not because they entail resistance to or subversion of the dominant cosmological values of the sharing economy. Virtually all Yukaghirs ascribe to the spirit world and the demand sharing principle, and they regard both as immutable and morally just. However—and this is the key point—they are well aware that this system must never become total. For the Yukaghirs, this would stand for “death,” as it would give the spirits the moral right to consume them in a series of divine predatory attacks. To avoid this, hunters must constantly steer a difficult course between two moral realities, transcending the official animist rhetoric of respect and sharing through equally animistic forms of theft, seduction, and deception.

westray whale

https://soundcloud.com/royalanthropologicalinst/2016-huxley-memorial-lecture-by-margaret-lock

Eileen Agar

stones bones conchology

anthropometry

 

NEGENTROPY

Willard Gibbs’ 1873 available energy (free energy) graph, which shows a plane perpendicular to the axis of v (volume) and passing through point A, which represents the initial state of the body. MN is the section of the surface of dissipated energy. Qε and Qη are sections of the planes η = 0 and ε = 0, and therefore parallel to the axes of ε (internal energy) and η (entropy) respectively. AD and AE are the energy and entropy of the body in its initial state, AB and AC its available energy (Gibbs free energy) and its capacity for entropy (the amount by which the entropy of the body can be increased without changing the energy of the body or increasing its volume) respectively.

In a note to What is Life? Schrödinger explained his use of this phrase.

“

[...] if I had been catering for them [physicists] alone I should have let the discussion turn on free energy instead. It is the more familiar notion in this context. But this highly technical term seemed linguistically too near to energy for making the average reader alive to the contrast between the two things.

”

Indeed, negentropy has been used by biologists as the basis for purpose or direction in life, namely cooperative or moral instincts.