How Sweet the Ground: The Metaphysical Vision of Michael Marker

Authors

  • Samuel Rocha UBC

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.20355/jcie29589

Abstract

Through this essay, Rocha seeks to describe and honour Michael Marker’s signature notion of the “metaphysical demand” within his more well-known historical and anthropological work on the agentic notion of place. The essay begins by noting the difficulty of this essay due to the “unwritability” of Marker, in allusion to Mellvile’s character, Bartleby, and Garcia Marquez’s
sense of Latin America’s solitude. Then, after hermeneutic clarifications that resist reading this essay as a eulogy, the essay proceeds biographically reaching the intimate friendship between Rocha and Marker. These biographical confessions lead to Marker’s ideas, rooted in (and progressing from) Vine Deloria Jr’s critical understanding of the Indigenous philosophy of space, which proceed into a record of correspondence where Marker shares his idea of the metaphysical demand. The essay closes in a series of impressionistic anecdotes that contain key elements in Marker’s approach to his life and thought. A key element is Marker’s practice as a folk musician and his collaborative work with the author in the improvised composition of a track on claw-hammer and bluegrass banjo. From these memorial movements, Marker’s notion of the metaphysical demand of place, a voice that speaks through a calcified and
layered modern reality, is left unfinished, as he left it, to be heard and continued in work to follow.

Downloads

Published

2023-12-24

Issue

Vol. 18 No. 2 (2023): Indigenous Historiographies, Place, and Memory in Decolonizing Educational Research, Policy, and Pedagogic Praxis: Special Issue in Honour and Memory of Professor Michael Marker (1951-2021)

Section

Articles

License

Copyright for this journal is vested with the author under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms: a. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. b. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process.