Savage Minds seems fairly willing to follow the Los Angeles Times in anointing Christian Lander, of Stuff White People Like, a “satirical ethnographer.” (The Times also calls him a “grassroots anthropologist” — would someone please tell them that’s more or less the only kind there is?) I appreciate the willingness to connect anthropology to cultural criticism, of course, but if it were actually anthropology it’d be funnier.
The key to this particular style of observational humor is the defamiliarization it accomplishes, which dovetails, SM notes, with “the idea that anthropologists cleverly reveal the deep structure of the seemingly close at home or obvious.” But the reason that Lander’s site is neither anthropological nor really that funny is that defamiliarization is stylistically tougher than it looks. It’s not just a matter of zooming out and noticing that all of these self-styled individualists that populate the hipster class (a class which Lander admits includes himself) are just the same, but pointing out that their everyday preferences and practices are completely ridiculous. The former gives you one joke, perhaps two; the possibilities of the latter are as limitless as the conventions and neuroses of the culture itself. But in order to properly achieve this kind of critical distance, the way in which the humorist leads his audience toward the subject — themselves — has to jar them out of their own skin: defamiliarization. (The best example I can come up with of humor that embodies this without being at all anthropological is Breakfast of Champions-era Vonnegut.)
The problem that I have with Lander isn’t that he’s unwilling to look beyond his own social circle for content (not even “lifting a Google,” to borrow a cringeworthy phrase from the Times piece). The subculture he’s describing is small and uniform enough that it works. My problem is that, at the end of the day, he doesn’t bother to disguise the fact that he knows he’s writing for them, too — or at least for people familiar with them — so he needs to do no more than point out an item on a list for his readers to start with the ironic smiles and knowing nods.
When he does continue to the “anthropological” analysis in the second part of the post, he continues to rely on the shared point of reference. Tying a phenomenon that the audience understands completely into an unfamiliar framework is about as jarring as tying an ornament to a Christmas tree. It’s not defamiliarization if they get it from the beginning. This is especially true on a blog, where any paragraph over two sentences has a drastically lower chance of actually getting read — especially if it’s not the first or last. (Lander’s less unfunny when he breaks with form, such as the post on scarves which opened with the assertion that “White People’s body temperatures do not operate on logical or consistent levels…”)
The result is that Lander doesn’t write about white people anthropologically — he’s not actually writing about them at all. He sticks quite faithfully to the name of the blog, less an ethnographer than a curator.
If you want to read a more effective (if dated) defamiliarization of the American bourgeois, check out another of my guilty-pleasure favorites of classic anthropology: Horace Miner’s “Body Ritual among the Nacirema.” In fact, I’d strongly recommend it. Holiday weekends are as much for reflection as for anything else, after all, and the Fourth — despite our continued narcissism over our origin myth — isn’t just about a moment but about the people, or peoples, to whom it gave a name.
Incidentally, when we read the Nacirema piece in my twelfth-grade English class, I was the last person to get the joke. Then I went off and became an anthro major. Funny, that.
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