The Garden of Eden must have been in northern New Mexico. In early Christian iconography Adam and Eve were always depicted buck-naked: no fig leaves. As anyone knows, there are no fig leaves in New Mexico---and in fact, covering one's private parts with pine needles is painful to even contemplate---hence, the nudity of the first couple is easy to explain. They lived in Northern New Mexico and Bethlehem is a little south of Albuquerque. With that insight, tongue in cheek, anthropologist Charles Carrillo began his New Year's lecture in Santa Fe.
On two occasions in my life I have heard lectures that were completely structured around a series of stories. Only two! That's quite remarkable when you consider I have lived long enough to hear literally thousands of lectures.
The first occasion was shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the country opened its doors to tourists. There, on a ship floating down the Volga River, I heard a lecture from a Russian government tour guide who told us about her country through a series of stories. She believed she could best capture the spirit and essence of her homeland with tales from the past. I was not only captivated by her stories, but also intrigued by the method of conveying information. I have often reflected upon this approach to teaching.
The second occasion was right after New Year's. I happened to be in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at a luncheon meeting. The speaker for the day was an anthropologist, Charles Carrillo. Although he had gained his Ph.D. at the University of New Mexico, he was making his living as a santero, carving and painting icons of Christian aaints.
As a Hispanic who could trace his ancestry back to the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors, he had long been impressed with the fact that anthropologists had oft analyzed Indian pottery, but the Hispanic ceramic tradition had been virtually neglected. This was a source of distress to him and ultimately led to his dissertation and the inspiration for his life as a santero. His lecture was about three unassuming pots--a bean pot, a coffee mug, and a tiny cosmetic pot. But before that he had to tell us of St. Anthony and the chicken poop.
Holding a small statuette of St. Anthony of Padua, Carrillo told us that he had discovered it was made by a santero in the early 1800s. Although apparently carved of wood, he had discovered using X-rays that only the core of the statue was made of wood and that layers of gypsum had been applied on top of the wood to build up the features of the saint. This discovery was to serve as part of his Ph.D. thesis.
To his sorrow, the statue was missing a tiny figurine of the baby Jesus, who traditionally was held in the arms of the saint. Carrillo related how he had discovered a solitary Christ child figurine in an antique shop in California. There, lying in a forgotten corner of a doll collection, was the baby Jesus. Careful examination revealed it had come from the same santero's workshop where his St. Anthony had been crafted. It looked like a perfect fit. Perhaps it was not the missing Jesus, but it made a nice story and became another part of his thesis.
I doubt that the chicken poop story got into his thesis. Carrillo told us that Hispanic homes invariably had saint statuettes. St. Anthony was clearly his favorite for familial reasons, if no other. His grandmother revered St. Anthony because he had figured significantly in her life.
Chili peppers are a staple of every meal in Hispanic households. Even during the Thanksgiving dinner, turkey, cranberries, and pumpkin pie are garnished with green and red chilies. Good Hispanic families of New Mexico raise their own crop of chilies. The best are raised with a rich mixture of manure.
The recipe in Grandmother Carrillo's time consisted of a pail of chicken poop with an equal amount of cow dung and adding to that a bit of water to make a slurry. Then dried seeds of chili peppers were added. The housewife would take the concoction and, stepping through the garden, poke a hole in the ground. With three fingers she would reach into the mixture to obtain a pinch of seeds and manure. One year as Grandma was following the ancient tradition, stooping to the earth and depositing the seed and manure mixture time on step at a time, she discovered that a terrible thing had happened. She had lost her wedding ring! Somewhere in the garden the ring had slipped from her finger.
What to do? Like any God-fearing woman of the 1930s, Grandma went back to the house for her St. Anthony. Returning to the garden with the statuette in hand she implored St. Anthony to find the ring. The petition was totally appropriate, for the Roman Catholic Church depicts St. Anthony as "a finder of lost objects" and reveres him as a patron saint of miracles. Grandma Carillo needed a miracle for sure. She placed St. Anthony in a hole in a nearby tree overlooking the garden, admonishing him that he would not gain reentrance to the house until the ring was recovered.
There St. Anthony stayed day after day. But this year the usual dry conditions familiar to residents of the Southwest didn't come to pass. No, this was the best growing season in memory. The rains came frequently. The chilies grew profusely. With each rain not only was the soil moistened, but also water dripped steadily on St. Anthony's head, wearing away his plaster countenance.
One day, as Grandma was tending the garden, she looked in on St. Anthony. She discovered to her dismay that the water had worn away his head. Realizing the futility of leaving St. Anthony to suffer further climatic indignities, she retrieved the statuette from the tree. After all, St. Anthony no longer had eyes to search for the ring, and "What good is a man without a brain, anyway?" she reasoned.
As she lifted St. Anthony from the tree she got the surprise of her life: there, sticking to the bottom of the statuette's feet, was her ring. St. Anthony had indeed produced the demanded miracle! Thanks be to God. A family legend was born, one that would be told for generations of Carrillos.
What good are such stories of pots and saints?
Carillos answered it this way: Stories are a way to connect to the past--to hold on to the memories of what we were and are. He admonished his audience to "Go home and write about yourselves, not just your genealogy, but your personal history and where you come from."
I have often been struck with how little scientists care about history. It is today that matters. Indeed, researchers' publications seldom note a reference more than 10 years old. This same temporal provincialism exists in Americans collectively, for we seldom know or care much about our ancestors prior to Grandpa or Grandma. Surely, there is more to know. After all, our lineage stretches back over 3.5 billion years.
Scientists are as fond of stories as the next person. Experimentalists tell them all of the time, though they are stilted tales of lab and field studies in journal articles of research. They are still stories. Astronomers, paleontologists, and evolutionary biologists spin grand Homeric tales of the universe and the earth. Yet, in spite of our obvious concern that "history matters," we seldom convey this connection to our students. Where are the stargazers, the lab workers, the diggers of fossils in our classroom lectures? A Charles Darwin or Richard Feynman gets a pat on the head, but the rest of our "artwork" is unsigned.
It is often said that the field of science is impersonal and objective. That is its strength, we are told. We scientists are out to seek and reveal "truth," which is independent of the observers. This has led to the god-awful writing style that has permeated our journals for decades where the use of the personal pronoun "I" is shunned and the use of the passive voice is praised. We scientists are to remain in the background, above the fray--mere observers and recorders, scientific voyeurs; peeping toms, prying out nature's secrets.
As teachers, we scientists are supposed to just deliver "the facts, ma'am, just the facts" (as Joe Friday in TVs Dragnet was fond of saying). As a result, we have sucked the life out of science, as a student of mine recently said to me about a professor who was teaching ecology. I wouldn't have believed it possible to have done that to ecology--a field filled with wonderful tales of adventurous discoveries. But it happened because the teacher filled each lecture with non-stop equations, modeling this and that. What a shame. Now this may appeal to some types of learners, but certainly not to most. I have nothing against equations and models. I can appreciate the argument that it is a sign of maturity when a field of science can express its principles mathematically (even though, as is the case of ecology, most of these heuristic models have little empirical basis). But to have reduced the personas of the lynx and the snowshoe hare to nothing more than squiggles on graph paper or symbols in a Lotka-Vollterra equation is indeed sucking the life out of the field.
Storytelling even in the field of science is not entirely dead. Jane Goodall and other notable field biologists (many of whom are women) studying animal behavior have chosen to present many of their findings in narrative form. The life in their science is still there--vibrant and alive. We do still see the scientist as a human being even as we can see the abstract architecture of their science. Compelling stories do that for us.
Donald McCloskey, professor of economics and history at the University of Iowa, made some interesting comments several years ago in an essay in the February 1995 issue of Scientific American. Economics has trod its own path away from the narrative style of Adam Smith to become extraordinary mathematical and abstract. He points out that "the notion of 'science' as divorced from story telling arose largely during the last century. Before then the word--like its French, Tamil, Turkish, and Japanese counterparts-- meant 'systematic inquiry.' The German word for the humanities is Geistewissenschaft, or 'inquiry into the human spirit,' as opposed to Naturwissenschaft," which is our inquiry into nature.
McCloskey goes on: "Most sciences do story telling and model building. At one end of the gamut sits Newtonian physics--the Principia (1687) is essentially geometric rather than narrative. Charles Darwin's biology in the Origin of Species (1859), in contrast, is almost entirely historical and devoid of mathematical models. Nevertheless, most scientists and economists among them hate to admit to something so childish-sounding as telling stories. They want to emulate Newton's elegance rather than Darwin's complexity. One suspects that the relative prestige of the two methods has more to do with age than anything else. If a proto-Darwin had published in 1687, and a neo-Newton in 1859, you can bet the prestige of storytelling versus timeless modeling would be reversed."
Storytelling in science is largely verboten. We seldom hear of the passion, emotion, or personal matters of a Newton, Einstein, Lavoisier, Lyell, or Pasteur--such things are regarded as asides or diversions from truth, the grand structure of the universe that exists separate from the observer. So many students sit in class waiting for the suffering to be over, or they change majors to other more human-centeredfields where the subjective elements, the individual, matters.
Some years ago, I read about someone who was asked what one thing they would most like to keep in his possession if he had to fly off to another planet to start another civilization--a copy of Newton's Principia, Darwin's Origin of Species, Einstein's papers on relativity, or Shakespeare's plays. He answered, Shakespeare's plays. All of the other works could be regenerated. They were objective. Other scientists would duplicate them. Only Shakespeare's plays were unique and personal.
Even if we accept that science is objective, must we suck the life out of our teaching by neglecting our roots? James Conant, chemist, science advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt, and eventually president of Harvard University, thought we must not. He pioneered the use of storytelling case studies within the lecture method framework. He built an entire course around this approach, which he described in his book, The Growth of the Experimental Sciences (1949).
Case study teaching, whether it is done via the lecture method, the discussion method, or small group problem-based learning method, puts a human face on science. It is not that case teachers deny the ultimate reality of the universe or refuse to accept that the universe will some day be described by a set of mathematical models. But the case study approach using stories gives us a context within which to learn.
Not only are stories captivating, it is easier to learn and recall facts, figures, and yes, equations. Moreover, stories tell us who we are as a people--the problems we face, the values we cherish, the barriers we must surmount, whether personal or societal. They help tie us with an umbilical cord of DNA to our heritage--to those who have gone before us or to those who struggle in today's world in ways we would not otherwise know.
So what value are pots and saints? They represent the mundane and the spiritual. They can put the life back into teaching, where it was sucked dry before.
This article originally appeared in the Sept./Oct. 1999 issue of the Journal of College Science Teaching (pp. 13-26). It is reprinted here with permission from NSTA Publications, Journal of College Science Teaching, 1840 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, VA 22201.
