Masons, tricksters and cartographers | Book review

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9 September 2022

The pacific ocean is one of the greatest spaces in our planet: 25,000 islands and 165 million square kilometres – an area larger than all the world’s landmass.

Indigenous Pacific Islanders have navigated this immense body of water since at least 1,000 BC, in a way that allowed for the regular flow of goods and people. Western civilisations have been marvelling at this ability for centuries. In 1778, British explorer Captain James Cook considered “how shall we account for this nation spreading itself so far over this vast ocean?”.

For 200 years, those seeking to answer Cook’s question could produce no good answers. The main stumbling block, David Turnbull argues in Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers, was the inability to see past Western methods, to understand alternative frameworks of knowledge.

How shall we account for this nation spreading itself so far over this vast ocean?”

A Western analyst working backwards starts with what they see as the keystone of navigation: chart-based computation. In essence, using a map and spotting landmarks. This is a knowledge system grounded in calculation and abstract representations. Without sophisticated tools – sextants, scales and chronometers – how could the Pacific be navigated systematically?

With the etak. This is a mental map of sorts, the basis for the navigation system of the Pacific Islanders. Embedded in oral tradition, the system combines information about clouds, winds, ocean swells, stars and the flight paths of birds. It is an analogue process, not a digital one.

Western analysts were approaching the problem with the wrong framework. Rather than focusing on calculation, those seeking to answer Cook’s question should have considered orientation. These different knowledge systems can sit side by side. Both types of voyager can get across the ocean.

Sources of wisdom

Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers is about the sociology of science and the ‘unplanned and messy’ nature of knowledge and knowledge systems. Turnbull explores, in rather turgid prose, differing ways of producing knowledge across cultures. From a diversity of disparate systems, he finds figures that crop up time and again.

His prime example is The Trickster – the spirit of disorder and an enemy of boundaries. Most cultures have one: Loki in Scandinavia, the spider in Africa, the coyote in America, the Jester in Europe. Tricksters are the ones stepping over boundaries. They ask the questions, mock the answers and hold others to account for their folly. The Court Jester is safe when mocking the king.

Beneath the surface, these subversive characters are important sources of wisdom. Turnbull encourages us to remind ourselves of the role of the Jester “in order to avoid taking our knowledge for truth – thus becoming victims of our own folly”.

Precisely wrong

In investing, confusing calculation with orientation is usually dangerous, as is depending on a single map. It can be helpful to shun the spurious accuracy of sextants and navigate the water with eyes open to the ocean swells. As Carveth Read put it in his book on logic, better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong.

The Trickster too, can be a helpful role to adopt when navigating the markets. Novel forces such as negative interest rates, algorithmic trading and passive investing have created new kinds of perverse incentives and distorted behaviours. A good Trickster would rail against the sophists selling volatility for yield and challenge the financial engineers devoted to leveraged buybacks.

Motley works

Turnbull likens our mapping of the world to the clothing of a Jester: a motley patchwork of colours. Because there are many ways to assemble knowledge, our guiding belief systems are contingent and constructed. Knowledge is shaped by the experimental and local; what constitutes authority is often self-defined.

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Book review – Masons, tricksters and cartographers