From the Department of Sad but True, another example of the depressing truth about my employment prospects.
On the other hand, that’s a truly excellent blog, and this one always cheers me up.
Monthly Archive for June, 2008
Confessions of an Anthro major: the concerted efforts my more established co-scholars are currently making to re-establish public anthropolology (book awards for which I am sadly ineligible, etc.) are probably more closely tied than they admit to the wish, expressed by many of the anthropologists I know, that the public would just get the heck over Margaret Mead already. (In certain cases, the wish that the public would just get the heck over Jared Diamond already is also a motivating factor.)
I’ve mentioned before that it’s bad for public image of the discipline that “the Anthropologist You Are Most Likely To Be Asked About By The Person Sitting Next To You On The Plane” (as Rex of Savage Minds puts it) comes from an era in anthropological history that most in the discipline today are uncomfortable with at best. But unfortunately, ignoring Margaret won’t get her to go away, and I’m increasingly convinced that allowing her reputation to stand prevents new public anthropologists from breaking in on their own terms, because in the public eye they can only lay claim to an identity as anthropologists insofar as they’re doing the “Margaret Mead thing” (comprehensive fieldwork in Melanesian societies that deliberately tries to ignore the effects of modernity, etc.)
Obviously, this wouldn’t be as frustrating if Mead had done her fieldwork properly; but really, she didn’t. So I’m thrilled to do my part to dismantle her legacy by urging you to read this article that examines how Mead’s preconceptions and approach shaped her eventual conclusions (again, h/t Savage Minds); to quote authors Ira Bashkow and Lise Dobrin, ” in many ways the situations that anthropologists experience in the field are ones that they themselves have played a role in shaping.” If methodological criticism isn’t what turns you on (even clear, concise, enlightening methodological criticism), read it because it uses a love triangle as an explanatory factor and comes very close to saying “Fieldwork: ur doin it wrong.”
Yes, the concept of “wrong” does exist in anthropology, though it loses much of its resonance and respectability when applied to contemporary work as opposed to that of the Benighted Past; we too are suckers for our own progressive narrative. But the continual eye-rolling and hand-wringing over Mead indicates that in the absence of being able to judge our subjects with impunity, anthropologists tie the reputation of the discipline to holding our methods to very high standards; some would say this is in the name of science, but I (loath to lean on the term “science” for credibility) think it’s really just necessary to good scholarship. And I hold out a little bit of idealistic hope that if the avatar for the anthropological profession weren’t a woman whose methods were so loosey-goosey and unrigorous, pundits et al wouldn’t be so quick to affix the word “anthropological” to any cock-eyed analysis that happened to mention the word “taboo.”
After all, real anthropologists need those jobs. We have precious few enough as it is.
When I talk about “standards,” I don’t mean a political-sciencey Scrupulous Standardization of the Gathering of Facts. That’s impossible to do in anthropology, and even if it weren’t it would certainly lead to the impossibility of any pop anthro — up to and including most of my contributions to print media thus far, and arguably some of my contributions to this blog as well. I mean a constant interrogation of the role one’s own outlook plays in filtering information, and a refusal to present one’s conclusions as uncolored by those filters.
Because if Helen gets to link to anthropology blogs, I get to link to movie reviews.
I’m sure I’ve gotten more of a kick reading merciless reviews of The Happening than I possibly could have by watching the movie itself, and Chris Orr’s non-review review obviously takes the cake. But Anthony Lane, taking advantage of the mini-time-warps of print media (the review is published weeks after the movie comes out? Bizarre!), engages in a meta-review of both movie and reception, and in the process manages to turn M. Night Shyamalan into something like an Old Testament prophet:
he is trying to reinsert the fear of death into a moviegoing culture that would prefer to think of it as laughable, dismissible, or gross. People around me in the cinema were cackling…the same audiences who go tense and quiet on the rare occasions when, as Shyamalan did in “The Sixth Sense,” he makes sombre and controlled use of the same anxieties.
It’s an interesting read on his career: a cautionary tale against trying to be Buckley’s “man who stands athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’” by means of shock therapy. Because shock is just another peculiarly modern thrill.
Meanwhile, Sudes’ review of Wanted (which is thoroughly great) wins for the image of the week:
my dog-eared copy of Summer Action Movies: Theory and Practice (eds. Joel Silver & Jerry Bruckheimer).
Not least because the second edition of said book would totally include my as-yet-unwritten essay on why Iron Man is the first truly postmodern action movie.
I haven’t even ordered a copy of Grand New Party to read yet. (I know, I know, shame on me. It’s fourth in my mental queue of books to read on Minneapolis buses. The Bible is third, though, and if I bump it back any further it’ll break the hearts of those nice ladies who proselytized me in Brooklyn Center the other day.) So I’m assuming that the reason the second half of today’s David Brooks column hasn’t received the attention the first half has is that Brooks is just recapping Ross and Reihan’s points.
But Brooks can still turn a phrase inimitably, so I’d be surprised if this line weren’t entirely his own invention:
Self-conscious maternalists like Eleanor Roosevelt and Frances Perkins ensured that New Deal programs were biased in favor of traditional two-parent families.
I’m tickled pink by “self-conscious maternalists,” and not just because it’s an adorable phrase (which may or may not have been appropriated for the “Political Views” box in my Facebook profile). The point about being a “self-conscious” maternalist, rather than a “deliberate” maternalist, is that it distinguishes between advocating for the maintenance of convention and being conventional oneself. Eleanor Roosevelt herself was hardly a role model for the sort of “traditional” family she espoused — “well-behaved women rarely make history,” and all that. But she understood that she didn’t need to become what she sought to protect: tradition for her was policy, not performance. Certainly Eleanor wouldn’t have been able to make any respected claim to caring about families today, when the accumulation of “everyday person” (read: good old boy) cred is tracked as scrupulously as that of donor dollars, when candidates establish traditionalism by becoming avatars of it rather than imagining policies to protect it.
It’s not just the ideas of the young conservatives that are heterodox, but their personalities. The blogger vanguard isn’t afraid to be, well, vanguardy. (Caveat: my perception of Brooks’ Crew of Babycon Worthies may well be skewed by the charismatic pull of Reihan’s music videos and James’ sideburns.) If much of what the conservative movement inculcated in its acolytes was the ambivalence surrounding a “Beltway conservatism” that valorized local wisdoms, one of the best side effects of the new breed’s heterodox trajectories is that it’s allowed them to realize that the idea-pushers don’t have to be everything they propose. (If I weren’t a postmodernist, I’d be using the phrase “be themselves” right about now, but from where I stand it’s much more a question of which self they’re being: not a solely public one.)
This isn’t to say that I hope Grand New Party drums the performativity out of politics: that’s technocratic, heartless and insane. But the wonderful thing about performative politics is that it enables the politician to adopt different roles depending on the situation, while the obsession with performing traditional values led to immobility and finally caricature. A man who performs his own platform isn’t necessarily authentic or consistent so much as he is a slave to identity politics.
I got a phone call this morning: “Did you see the Times? Read the David Brooks column — Will’s in it!”
On further inspection, this turned out to be Will Wilkinson, not Will Wilson (more famous, less my boyfriend), but the point of the column remains: the unconventional young writers are the future of intellect in American conservatism.[1]
…most of these writers did not rise through the official channels of the conservative or libertarian establishments. By and large, they didn’t do the internships or take part in the young leader programs that were designed to replenish “the movement.” Instead, they found their voices while blogging. The new technology allowed them to create a new sort of career path and test out opinions without much adult supervision.
As a consequence, they are heterodox and hard to label. These writers grew up reading conservative classics — Burke, Hayek, Smith, C.S. Lewis — but have now splayed off in all sorts of quirky ideological directions.
There are dozens of writers I could put in this group, but I’d certainly mention Yuval Levin, Daniel Larison, Will Wilkinson, Julian Sanchez, James Poulos, Megan McArdle, Matt Continetti and, though he’s a tad older, Ramesh Ponnuru.
…now excuse me while I add some blogs to Google Reader.
[1] It would be egotistical for me to suggest that, were he sixty years younger, William F. Buckley would probably have been part of the Yale Mafia. In other news, I love paralipsis.
You heard it here first (well, unless you subscribe to email updates from the Yale Daily News): Aliza Shvarts’ work will be presented at the Tate Modern.
Not the piece that got her in so much trouble in April, mind you, and not on display; she just created “two seconds” (according to a curator) of a two-hour presentation at the Tate about the media. A Yale faculty member invited her to include her work under the rationale that “she seemed to be more affected by the media than most of us are in our whole lifetimes…I thought she would have some reaction to how the media manipulates stories and truths.”
Well, sure. But will two seconds of an event called “Grammaphones, Films, Typewriters” during a two-day celebration of the work of “German media theorist Friedrich Kittler” (who?) really get to the depth of that? More likely, it seems that one of two rationales were used: either the Tate just wants to gain access to Aliza Shvarts, the controversy, without having to open itself up to criticism of Aliza Shvarts, the artist; or the Tate, unlike almost everyone who passed judgment on the controversy this spring, recognizes that — regardless of whether this is what Shvarts is trying to do with her art — she’s at her most compelling as a performance artist who forces the public sphere to recognize its own tendencies toward the farcical. The hysteria, the gullibility, the breathless search for the New Big Controversy — the Tate seems to have brought Shvarts on less as a documenter or analyst of these things, but as a lightning-rod artifact of them.
Good for the Tate. There is no easy way to collect a performance artist, especially one whose medium is news cycles. Using her only for a few seconds — name-checking her, really — seems like the right way to recognize what she does best.
(While we’re on the topic of gullibility, Yale College Dean Peter Salovey finally admitted to the YDN that “we could never determine unambiguously what she did.” So much for the readily-believed explanation that it was a “fabrication” all along, eh?)
If you want to be more like me — and why wouldn’t you? — you should read the following books.
- Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson.
- American Gods, by Neil Gaiman.
- The Vorkosigan series, by Lois McMaster Bujold. (Start with Cordelia’s Honor, then Young Miles.)
- The Principia Discordia, by Malaclypse the Younger.
- Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut.
You may have noticed that all five (well, six) are science fiction or fantasy. This is entirely appropriate, because it’s in the realm of speculative fiction that we can best explore the cultural and philosophical implications of our society.
American Gods explores our spiritual desolation:
“This is a bad land for gods,” said Shadow. As an opening statement it wasn’t Friends, Romans, countrymen, but it would do. “You’ve probably all learned that. The old gods are ignored. The new gods are as quickly taken up as they are abandoned, cast aside for the next big thing.”
Cat’s Cradle is a parable on emptiness and the absurdity of love:
Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely.
“Everything must have a purpose?” asked God.
“Certainly,” said man.
“Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God.
And He went away.
The Principia Discordia responds with both mysticism and a call to chaos:
“Gentlemen,” he said, “why does Pickering’s Moon go about in reverse orbit? Gentlemen, there are nipples on your chests; do you give milk? And what, pray tell, Gentlemen, is to be done about Heisenberg’s Law?” He paused. “SOMEBODY HAD TO PUT ALL OF THIS CONFUSION HERE!”
Snow Crash offers a stateless dystopia full of metaphysical confusion and low-level heroism:
“Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?”
Juanita shrugs. “What’s the difference?”
The Vorkosigan books give us whole worlds, with vastly different human cultures, but always return to backwards, neo-feudal Barrayar, a planet the Nisbetcons should love:
“Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself. Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.”
There’s far more to all of them than this, of course, and if you are unconvinced I’d be thrilled to discuss at length.
The Personal Democracy Forum was, unsurprisingly, awesome. Highlights:
- Larry Lessig (now high on my list of favorite people for punning about “GNU politics”) signing my copy of Code.
- The line “power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”
- My growing addiction to Twitter.
- The purchase of a bumper sticker reading “RIP DRM LOL.” It’s for a friend, I swear.
- Randomly accosting Julian Sanchez — again.
- …and a lot of cool stuff about technology and politics, which I’ll write about when I’m not plotting the messy death of a national rail system. (I hate Amtrak. So much.)
In other news, I have engaged in single combat with PHP and CSS. After my victory in our epic battle, I bring you the blog’s new look.
If you have any suggestions or things that you’d like changed, shoot me a comment. Or an e-mail. Or whatever other form of electronic communication floats your seastead.
I know my duty to my American friends. Name: Kate, Identity: British, Sole purpose: provide olde worlde curios, with a smile and charm (much like a trained monkey dressed as a court jester - that’s what they call being “Greece to America’s Rome”) reminding the audience of the quainter side of the Atlantic. So you can expect me to keep you updated with titbits from the motherland.
Some melodrama almost on a par with student politics. I don’t know if an American congressman or senator has ever resigned his seat because he refused to be a member of a House that could pass a particularly piece of legislation. I’d be interested if anyone could tell me. Yet David Davis, the senior Conservative MP responsible for all internal policy, recently stormed out onto the steps of the Houses of Parliament, and announced that he would be calling a special election in his constituency as a protest against the Labour Government’s bill to increase to 42 days the time terror suspects could be held without access to a lawyer. (Think of it as our own little Patriot Act). It’s a real mark of the realignment of British political ground, as Left becomes authoritarian and the Right more concerned with conserving traditions of privacy and liberty. The government appears to have the support of the public on this issue if nothing else, but didn’t have that of its own MPs who had actually studied the legislation - 36 out of 351 of its MPs voted against its own bill, which meant that it had to rely on promises of pork to the nine Northern Irish MPs from the minority Irish party the DUP. Result? Labour won the vote by exactly nine votes. By forcing a special election, Davis wants to create a media storm over the issue big enough to educate the public on the issue, and, he hopes, change public opinion. The election campaign will be the public debate, the special election will be fought on that one issue alone, and the verdict of the polls will be public statement on the issue.
Obviously, Davis’ vision of a glorious triumph isn’t quite working out as he expected. First, he comes from a fairly solidly Conservative area, so no local Conservative victory can really be spun as a statement of support on this one single issue. Secondly, it’s clearly not representative of the nation as a whole. Thirdly, Labour won’t play ball, and are refusing to put up an opposing candidate.
The really sad thing is how incapable the British public now seems of believing that any politician could act on a point of principle. Leading newspapers and Internet mutterings all suggest that Davis must be in the throws of a nervous breakdown, trying to steal the limelight from his party leader, or in someone’s pay. The cause is a phenomenon that ought to worry Democrats. Ten years ago, a messianic forty-something man with a young family and more brash wife, the centre of a Cult of Personality whose fervent Christian faith found its expression in calls for social justice, who claimed to be on the Centre-Left but was such a media baby that one was never sure what was spin and what was substance, was swept to power in a wave of national adulation. He vowed that his administration would be the breath of fresh air in the capital city that banished the political elite’s casual corruption and instead would be “whiter than white”. Yet ten years later, the man who made us believe that conviction politicians existed has turned the public into a population to whom the word politician means “corrupt liar”. It’s not just Iraq that has baptised the Prime Minister “Bliar” - it’s still entirely plausible to believe, as I do, that Blair searched his soul and did what he believed right - but the constant allegations that donations to the Labour Party resulted in peerages, contracts and even legal exemptions being granted to the donors.
There is no country now more convinced than America that conviction-politicians can be saints. On the morning of Blair’s victory in 1997 there was no country more convinced than Britain. If Rezko/Auchi proves to be the tip of the iceberg of funding scandals, or if, as is more likely, it is beyond Obama’s powers to do much for the lives of African-Americans in office, the disillusionment will give rise to a cynical backlash not just against Obama, but against all in public life. And that level of public bitterness ain’t fun for anybody.
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