Similarly, people's skin, once glossy and soft,turns rough and irritated when they drink from and bathe in streams polluted•by pesticides, fertilizers, and sludge. The lively permeability of human andother-than-human bodies is subverted by lethal transfections in this murky,abu-abu, milieu, where invisible toxins gnaw at the skin and fluids of humansand their forest kin
The skin reflects how healthy one's life is and also reflects their personal hygiene.
A goodmother grows into a richly eutrophic old woman, knowing that her workdoesn’t end until she creates a home where all of life’s beings can flourish.
this idea of how women have a very important role in society to create a nurturing home for her family, but not in a way that is misogynistic, is really refreshing. I think by thinking that a mother never stops working to nurture is a really lovely image/belief.
Today, Onondaga Lake has the dubious reputation of being oneof the most polluted lakes in the country. The problem at OnondagaLake is not too much life, but too little. As I dredge up another heavyrakeful of slime, I feel also the weight of responsibility. In one short lifewhere does responsibility lie?
the mental battle of feeling like you are just one person, helpless when it comes to doing large scale improvements is definitely apparent here.
Potawatomi people
Native American people of the western Great Lakes region, upper Mississippi River and Great Plains
into what looks like a greenfishnet stocking—a fine mesh network like a drift net suspended in thewater. This is Hydrodictyon
The extensive nets or mats of Hydrodictyon serve as important refugia for aquatic invertebrates such as cladocerans, leeches, snails, and some beetle larvae.
mong the Nandi an occupational definition of time evolved coveringnot only each hour, but half hours of the day - at 5-30 in the morningthe oxen have gone to the grazing-ground, at 6 the sheep have beenunfastened, at 6-30 the sun has grown, at 7 it has become warm, at7-30 the goats have gone to the grazing-ground, etc. - an uncom-monly well-regulated eco
the introduction of time and the invention of clocks allowed people to schedule tasks to happen on a daily basis. This also allowed them to figure out how much time it takes to do certain tasks.
econdary education, employers tended to raise their screening requirements for job applicants, not becaus«_= of_ ~ducatio~al needs but simply because of the mass ava1lab1hty of high school graduates. Herbert Bienstock, New York regional director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, described this trend in these words: "The completion of a high school education has become an important requirement for entry into the labor market of today. Employers, finding persons with high school diplomas becoming more available in a peri~d of rising educational attainment, have come to use the diploma as a screening device, often seeking people with higher levels of education even when job content is not necessarily becoming more complex or requiring higher levels of skill. This has been true in many of the rapidly growing job c
The abundance of high school graduates looking for work, ultimately made employers have to raise the bar for what they were looking for in new hires.
which now replaces the socialization through farm, family, community, and church which once took place in a predominantly rural setting
People who lived in rural settings are now being forced to assimilate to the urban lifestyle.
ose trammg. has been spread over several years and is formally . recogmzed outside an individual firm; a semi-skilled worker 1s one who, during a limited period of training, usually ~tween two ~nd twelve weeks, has acquired the manual dextenty or mecha~1cal knowledge needed for his immediate job, and ~~ unskilled worker is one whose job requires no formal trammg of any kind.7 If w
classification of what is a craftsman, semi-skilled, and unskilled worker.
Craftsmen continued to be called skilled workers and laborers "unskilled"; operatives were now called "semi-skilled." But it must be noted that the distinction between the skills of the two latter categories was based not upon a study of the occupational tasks involved, as is generally assumed by the users of the categories, but upon a simple mechanical criterion in the fullest sense of the word
Interesting how the laborers were seen as "unskilled" workers, while craftsman where considered to be "skilled. The use of these terms implies a negative connotation to the laborers of society at the time.
Neuropsychologists now believe that the physical and cognitive capacity to release underlies the ability of people to let go of a 152 CRAFT fear or an obsession. Release is also full of ethical implication, as when we surrender control our grip-over others
Another interesting idea, does the ability to not let go of problems or obsessions, have to do with someone's hand technique? I think it is definitely a possibility, but how much you can use that to be an reason for obsessive behavior, not so sure.
Darwin, Charles Bell published 150 CRAFT The Hand. 2 Bell, a devout Christian, believed the hand came from God the Creator perfectly designed, a fit-for-purpose limb like all of his works. Bell accorded the hand a privileged place in creation, using various experiments to argue that the brain receives more trustworthy information from the touch of the hand than from images in the eye-the latter so often yielding false, misleading appearances
This is an interesting theory, because I could see how a practicing Christian would think that God creates all in the image and likeness of himself. The image of the human eye being misleading is very interesting as well, because with vision, our surroundings can be perceived, but sometimes optics can play tricks on us.
Despite Ledoux's idealisation of the factory shedas a sublime evocation of production, its windowsbelching thick "Egyptian" smoke as if from someprimitive funereal pyre, working conditions werevirtually insufferable. The thick steam, mingledwith the acidic vapours and smoke from the fur-naces, together with the intense heat, madebreathing difficult; ventilation was non-existent.
I take back my comment prior to this one, this place is in IDEAL place to live-work, but in all reality it was not a safe place to work with the architecture not being designed to properly ventilate spaces.
Ledoux believed in the civilising effectof his spaces: "it is in these charming placesthat everything is enjoyment; it is there that lovehas set down its fidelity, there it is that man isstill arrayed in his innocence." I 1101The workers' buildings would, he hoped, become "preferredplaces," wherein life would be lived according to"natural laws."
Ledoux wanted his spaces to be enjoyed by people. The worker's buildings should be a place where workers want to inhabit, especially after a long days of work.
Ledoux's answer to the complicatedsystem of administrative control, of work andof worker behaviour, demanded by the codes ofthe Salines Royales: "The eye easily oversees theshortest line; the work crosses it with a rapidstep; the burden of the passage is lightened bythe anticipation of a swift return. Everythingobeys the scheme that perfects the law of move-ment."
Ledoux was designing purposefully, but in a way that law is enforced by movement and how one moves through the site. I think this idea is really interesting, especially because law enforcement is guided by the architecture, something that is a more subtle move.
Thewings of thegatehouse contained a fresh water reservoir,bakery, apartments for the guards and porters,a room for the visiting judge and a pnson cellfor temporary detention. The coopery and the carpenters' shops to the west, and the sm thy andforge to the east flank this monumental gate-house.
This plan sounds like a really ideal place to live, especially given the context of the time and the program of the site was for, a workplace.
n between, to either side, were apartments forthe workers, arranged around central fireplaces,and across the front elevation stretched theadministrative offices. The entire factory, sur-rounded by kitchen gardens for the workers tosupplement their salaries, and a high wall seemedto mirror the almost monastic regime of the traditional Colbertian factory.
A typology for live-work housing, something that will continued to be developed as a popular typology, especially during the Industrial Revolution.
"NABOBS
a Muslim official or governor under the Mogul empire
It was not just that the sugarcane merited the planter's attentive cultivation, but chat thisforeign transplant was co signify the planter's technologically superior cultivation andculture.
this new type of sugar cane was a symbol to show how there was a superior force that was taking over these lands, choking out the native sugar cane literally and figuratively.
"habitation," chat is, making che terrain habitable for the installationof the sugar plantation, or sucrerie,entailed "defrichement." This term, meaning to turnfallow ground into a cultivated field, was a euphemism for what was actually done tothe environments of the French Caribbean colonies. The process of felling trees, cuttingand digging up low-lying vegetation, and the burning of all roots made of an over-whelming percentage of the island of Saint-Domingue, for example, the virtual tabularasa demanded by arguments for the right of possession that the French, like the British,adopted from the Roman legal principle of resnullius.6
These Caribbean landscapes were destroyed in order to create a "paysage" where the landscapes were repurposed after being cleared to fit the needs of the plantations and their agricultural needs.
The French colonial plan-tation system of the Caribbean did not merely unite field and factory, as Sidney Mintzhas explained, 62 but disindigenated, transplanted, and hybridized ics island possessionsinto landscape machines that would appear as enlightened utility, that is, as so necessaryand advanced as to be irreversibly transformed.
Seems as though the French colonial plantation system started to break away from the traditional idea of what a plantation looked like in other countries/colonies.
paysage
rural scene depicted in landscape paintings
. Focusing not on the island Eden or the claimed voyageof"discovery" but the already colonized sites, the sugar plantations of the French Antillesand specifically Saint-Domingue, allows us to see colonial landscaping's devices of dis-avowal and displacement for what they are.
I think this is important to note because often times native landscapes are described mostly by what colonizers did to change the landscape, not how the native landscape functioned prior.
One visitor said of the men that their numerous candlestwinkled in the thick obscurity like stars on a gloomy night,marking out their figures here and there in dark profile whilethey flung about their brawny arms - all this, together with thefrequent explosions and the fumes of gunpowder, 'conveyingno contemptible idea of some infernal operation in the regionof Pluto'.
I really like this image of the thousands of candles burning in the darkness of the tunnels, almost makes it seem like a beautiful image. When in all reality, being in a dark tunnel with barely any light is a very scary image especially when dealing with gunpowder and explosions.
navvies
a navvy is someone who is employed in the excavation and construction of a road, railroad, or canal.
All this was done with navvies and horses.
It is hard to believe that all these railroad lines where created by men and horses and that is it. It is hard to fathom what the work of human hands extends to.
The transportation revolution drastically altered the speed and directionof trade, as well as the cost of shipping. In precanal times the produce ofMi~western farmers was shi~q.East first by wagon to the shores of theOhto and then on mlboats' 6o\-nthe Ohio and Mississippi to NewOrleans for transfer to sailing ships bound for the chief ports of theAtlantic coast. Goods needed by Ohio Valley farmers were moved for aHousehold to Factory 23short time from the East by wagon across the Allegheny Mountains, ajourney=~· ~s.
The United States was changing rapidly due to the Industrial Revolution, especially the transportation of goods across the country. Railroads increase the speed at which products could be shipped and reach their destination. This change happened faster in the North than it did in the South, leaving southern farmers out of the economy.
From a distance, the scene is toylike and wholesome. Upclose it is neither. The men sweat freely; the cane chokes offthe breeze, and the pace of cutting is awesome. The men'sshirts hang loose and drip sweat continuously. The hair ofthe cane pierces the skin and works its way down the neck.The ground is furrowed and makes footing difficult, and thesoil gives off heat like an oven.
The lives of the workers in Jauca have a set routine everyday that consists of very hard work harvesting sugar cane. The rest of the world depends on this men to wake up everyday and do their jobs, those jobs involving horrible conditions of being out in the hot sun all day.
Work is a positive, creative activity. The standard bywhich work is measured - i.e. time - naturally does not depend onits productivity. The measure consists of a unity, whose aliquotparts express a certain quantity.
Marx sees work as a positive experience for people, something that unites the working class. Unlike Smith, who sees labor as a sacrifice people must make in order to thrive. Marx also says that work is measured by how united the workforce is, and how much people enjoy creating products.
This great increase 1of1 the quantity of work, which, 1in consequenceof the division of labour/ [12] the same number of people are capableof performing, " is owing to three different circumstances; first, to theincreaseof dexterity in every particular workman; secondly, to the savingof the time which is commonly lost in passing from one species of workto another; and lastly, to the invention of a great number of machineswhich facilitate and abridge labour, and enable one man to do the workof many.1
The quantity of work has been attributed to 3 things: 1. workmen have been able to increase their dexterity, resulting in more product being made. 2. They can save time by just focusing on one thing and performing that task for the work day. 3. Machinery has been able to save a lot of time and effort- doing the work of many men in half the time.
One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it,a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head ; tomakethe head requires [8) two or three distinct operations; to put it on,is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade byitself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making apin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations,3which,in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, thoughin others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them
Smith is explaining how the idea of labor and manufacturing has been broken down into specializations. A person focuses on one skill and becomes good at that particular skill. This makes factories more well-rounded and able to do more tasks in the same facility.
I began to see how everything was so wrong. When growers can have an intricate watering system to irrigate their crops but they can't have running water inside the houses of workers. Veterinarians tend to the needs of domestic animals but they can't have medical care for the workers. They can have land subsidies for the growers but they can't have adequate un-employment compensation for the workers. They treat him like a farm implement.
This quote describes how disposable migrant workers are viewed in farming. These workers are treated almost as they are less than the earth, because they are not provided services that are basic for good health.