“Conspiracy theories,” writes Clare Coffey over at the estimable New Atlantis, “obsesses [sic] over human history and insist that it can be known, not as a collection of data points and mass social tendencies through time, but on a human-sized stage with real human actors.” She goes on:
Cryptozoology taps into a tradition of natural history in which nature is wild, and jealous of her secret oddities. Its amateurism and eagerness towards all phenomena distinguish it from science, but it is precisely in those qualities that its riches lie. It does not assume an enchanted world, precisely, but a world that has never lost its edges, where discovery has never ceded precedence to technical tinkering.
Speaking for myself, I think she’s right. I kind of want there to exist a “large, hairy, bipedal non-human primate” lurking in the same woods I frequent. I mean, sure, yay science and all that, but “secret oddities” are kind of cool, too.
by spimbi