In our occasional Second Look feature, contributors reconsidered an article in a previous edition of Magonia. Here Robert Morrell looks at John Harney’s 'The Galileo Myth' which appeared in Magonia 21.
In analysing human societies, anthropologists have often found it useful to study the interaction between human beings and wild nature. They have chosen to call these two realms ‘habitat’ and ‘wilderness’. A term such as ‘habitat’ implies far more than a geographical settlement: it is the ‘fenced in’ [1] zone of rational, ordered life; the domain under the control of human reason and ingenuity – the known, the familiar, the ordered and tame. It is the world of “daylight reason and commonsense”.
The new ‘folk devil’ of the dope fiend or the glue-sniffer carries on the tradition of the demoniac: the addict is ‘possessed’ by the drug and thence radically marginalised; he becomes the embodiment of all those anti-structural indecipherable aspects of the human, which we do not publicly display. The dope-fiend/demoniac is in Turner’s terms in a state of chronic hyper-liminality and closely associated, in many people’s eyes, is the stereotyped ‘brainwashed’, zombie cult member.
