We watched Fire of Love last night a movie about Katie and Maurice Krafft, a husband and wife pair of volcanologists. The movie shares the videos and photos from their archives telling the story of their adventures watching unique lava flows and splatterings around the globe. It’s a good movie, I recommend it.
At one point Maurice mentioned the ‘abusive categorizations’ thrusted upon volcanoes by scientists that strip volcanoes of their identities and deprive a meaning behind studying them. For instance volcanoes are often simply shown to be either ‘red’ or ‘gray’ volcanoes with the color categorization signifying whether the earth’s fault at the rupture point is either diverging (red) or converging (gray) making for bespoke rupture characteristics. But a volcanoe’s story goes much deeper than this categorization as Maurice eludes to. Its even mentioned how the speed and magnitude of a rupture we still cannot measure beforehand.
So Maurice proposes a relational orientation that inspires his work and peaks the interest of all volcano enthusiasts. He reveals how categorization is only useful to a point and that you must go beyond them echoing Piaget.