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Zerubavel, E. (1991). Islands of meaning (p. 5-20). The great divide
(p. 21-32). In _The fine line: making distinctions in everyday
life_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Description of how people turn the natural world into a social world
by making distinctions amongst things and events. The first chapter
describes the chunking of things. The second chapter describes the
gaps between the chunks and how those gaps inform social proceedings.
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"Most of the fine lines that separate mental entities from one another
are drawn only in our head and, therefore, totally invisible. And yet,
by playing up the act of "crossing" them, we can make mental
discontinuities more "tangible." Many rituals, indeed, are designed
specifically to substantiate the mental segmentation of reality into
discreet chunks."
My 11th grade physics teacher once described genius as the ability to
draw connections between apparently dissimilar concepts. A friend of
mine (who gained a 1600 on the SAT) once demonstrated insanity as the
ability to draw connections between everything.
There's a fine line, then, as has always been said, between genius and
madness. The genius crosses over Zerubavel's great divides and discover
that mass and energy are intimately associated, the frame of stuff and
not stuff dissolving in a tasty bit of math that violates
expectations. The mad stand admist a scatter of many things seeing,
understanding, knowing the arbitrary nature of frames, granting
reality to connections that violate norms.
The teacher was able to show that interdisciplinary knowledge creates
context from which new, potentially life-changing, knowledge can be
born. The friend was unable to choose any path, unable to distinguish
what priorities should attain action in the face of knowing that with
enough thought any frame was permeable, any perspective available and
valid.
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