Watching from inside ...

From DT....Special Contributor to BrainBlenders, master observer, and I think he has nailed the concept of guerilla:

First thought...and the basis for everything I do - LOOK where others look, but SEE what they do not see. Said another way...by Jerry Garcia by way of Jimmy Buffett.  "Once in awhile you get shown the light...in the strangest places...if you look at it right"

Guerilla starts with being still and observing, participating, not measuring, predicting, assuming, and forecasting.
Guerilla is from within, not from afar.  It's anthropology vs. demography.
Guerilla is about insights, patterns in chaos, not patterns readily visible.

Try this on for size... (from new show - NUMB3RS on CBS).
From the position of a rotating lawn sprinkler, you can not predict the exact impact point of any drop of water coming from the sprinkler head, there are simply too many variables - droplet size, velocity, wind, etc.
However, if you know the exact impact point of  several of the water droplets, you can accurately predict the exact location of the sprinkler.

Don't stand behind the sprinkler predicting the drops (classic research approach), stand among the water drops and find the sprinkler!
That's guerilla!!

Comments

[a.brain]

Yeah, love the 'play on apes' from Tom. But the truth is that we are all outside "a system, some sytem, at any given time" from one direction or another...the ability to watch, or live within that system and recognize differences between it and ours, without changing the nature of the system being inhabited but not lived in is KEY.

In short the ability to MAINLY watch without completely altering the flow is geurilla...and not usually possible without some connection to the source.

[cancer]

Tom, did you mean to make a play on words by comparing an article about being "guerilla" with a person who lived among "gorillas"?

Anyway, we probably have postmodernity to thank for articles like this one. The very notion that we can "objectively observe from outside a system" is fallacious in nature. In some sense, there is nothing but "guerilla" in the way it is defined here. The trick, I suppose, is being willing to see that. That is, the difficulty is recognizing our lack of perspective and objectivity in the first place, and from there, opening our eyes to the paradigm. Again, in a different way, the shift is not from observer to participant (or from sprinkler to "among the drops"), but from "thinking I'm observing the drops from the sprinkler" to "realizing I've always been among the drops"...

[tom delong]

First person that comes to my mind is famous primatologist, and conservationist Jane Goodall, who lived with chimpanzees for a quarter of a century. She watched, and learned from within.