Course Readings

Most Helpful/Interesting Readings

Adorno
Wonderfully thought-provoking critique

Warner
Really useful in thinking about audiences and community

Anderson
Situates print capitalism as important historical development with widely-felt repercussions

Kassabian
Problematic in certain ways but interesting new idea of subjectivity

Appadurai
Dense but good perspective about globalization


At present, I'm having trouble coming up with a bottom 5. I genuinely liked most of the readings, and it's hard to differentiate the ethnographic ones in terms of helpfulness. If I come up with a clearer idea, I'll post it.

Media and the American Holiday

Being immersed in the delights of Thanksgiving for the past few days, I was struck by how much even this ostensibly turkey- and family-centered holiday is profoundly enmeshed in media. The media involvement in Christmas is pretty obvious--"holiday" music on the radio, Christmas-themed ads on television, coverage of the White House Christmas tree selection, etc.

Thanksgiving, however, seems comparatively a much less commercialized and therefore less mediated holiday. But as became clear over the weekend, this distinction cannot be made so neatly. Watching football on television, for instance, has become one of the traditions of Thanksgiving and the following Friday; similarly, the same handful of NFL teams usually play every year. A newspaper article I read recently described watching football (I'm paraphrasing) as being basically as American and central to the day as turkey and dressing. I'm not sure why this first became a trend, but it probably endures in part because Thanksgiving is generally supposed to be a day about spending time with one's family and/or close friends, and watching sports together fosters a certain sort of camaraderie for many people. The Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, probably the most widely watched parade in the U.S. each year, also embodies a sense of TV-mediated Thanksgiving tradition.

In addition, Thanksgiving has television ads somewhat analogous to those surrounding Christmas. Grocery stores herald foodstuffs likely to ensure a foolproof, crowd-pleasing meal, and retail stores advertise "Black Friday" shopping as an essential part of the holiday. Television shows and even newspapers have food segments promoting the best way to cook a turkey or creatively use leftovers. In these ways, it seems that Thanksgiving--while still certainly about food and family--has become characterized by media representation.

Anthropologists as Activists

In the articles for Tuesday, it seems like the authors' potential biases lurk much more prominently. Turner brings video cameras to villages and emphasizes the Kayapo-ness of the videos Tamok and others produce. "Representation, far from being an exclusively Western project foisted on the Kayapo through the influence of Western media, is as Kayapo as manioc meat pie" (84). But as an avowed videographer, who obviously already believes in the medium enough to bring cameras with him in the first place, can Turner really make such a determination with any sort of impartiality? As an anthropologist, doesn't he have to believe that he is not some sort of cultural imperialist, that he is not imposing problematic new methods of self-representation on the Kayapo? Similarly, Prins has a clear role in political activism and the use of video technology among the Mi'kmaqs. In both these cases, it seems like the anthropologists assume--indeed must assume--the virtues of video use by the indigenous groups with which they work. They take for granted that such technology coheres with the Kayapo and Mi'kmaqs needs and world view because they are its purveyors and supporters.

Trobriand Cricket

Watching Trobriand Cricket last week got me thinking about Appadurai and global cultural flows. In the film, British cricket has obviously been indigenized by the Trobrianders with new rules of play and colorful rituals, as Jerry Leach's commentary explicitly states.

But does this flow run in the other direction, specifically in the realm of sports? In North America, we have lacrosse, a Native-American game that has been adapted for general recreation. But lacrosse, though its supporters laud its rapid growth, still lacks the ubiquity of American sports like football, basketball, and baseball and, worldwide, the universal appeal of soccer. Its influence remains relatively limited. In the U.S., we also have professional sports teams with names and mascots loosely derived from indigenous peoples: the Cleveland Indians, the Atlanta Braves, the Washington Redskins, etc. But this seems completely different from Trobriand cricket or lacrosse. The potentially offensive nature of Cleveland's red-skinned caricature of a mascot aside, this brings us back to Harindranath's reminder about the problematic implications of the word "globalization": it masks the fundamentally unequal relations between developing countries and the West. Given these circumstances, the flow of media and culture does seem blatantly unequal. The indigenous influence on American sports comes in the form of commodified stereotypes: tomahawk chops and Redskins paraphernalia.

Mr. Warner

One summer afternoon three years ago, I heard a lecture by Michael Warner as a largely clueless high-school student. And I remember very little of the experience. I can visualize what the room looked like, a big lecture hall with theater-style seating (but that memory might have come from another lecture, since I heard several others in that same room). I remember Michael Warner basically reading from a paper, looking down and flipping through the pages, with an occasional symbolic raised glance to signify that he wished to engage the audience. Most vividly, I remember my teachers telling me in advance how part of his appeal was due to his resemblance to a young Michel Foucault.

Most strikingly, I do not remember a word of what Mr. Warner said. I have no idea even what his lecture was about, except that it related to critical theory (the subject of the lecture series). Yet according to "Publics and Counterpublics," I am nonetheless part of that lecture's public, it seems, by the simple fact of my attention, "the mere fact of active uptake" (61). My lack of recall (or admittedly, even comprehension at the time) is perhaps no different from the person watching television while vacuuming that Warner mentions. But this seems awfully inadequate to me, putting too much emphasis on the facts of discourse and too little on the character of the audience, though it does admittedly make more sense in the context of written works. Doesn't intelligibility matter, or is that assumed?

Cannibal Tours and the Anthropological Sneer

I've been thinking about our discussion of Cannibal Tours on Thursday, how it's easy for us as anthropologists to simply shudder or roll our eyes at the horrific remarks made by gauche European and American tourists. We have heard their narrative of pristine, prehistoric natives before and know we're supposed to react this way. But is there, as Rebecca asked, any room for sympathy?

I think there has to be. These people became enamored with the "primitive" and the "unspoiled" largely because of the exoticizing heritage of colonialism and the media's similar obsession. These tourists are our parents or grandparents and there, but for the grace of educational enlightenment, go we. Films like Apocalypto and the continuing popularity of the National Geographic-style gaze show that these tourists are not alone.

Anderson's Historical Narrative

First, I must say that I really enjoyed the few chapters we read from Imagined Communities. I appreciated Anderson's attempt to explore nationalism as a certain kind of cultural artifact, both in terms of a historical "how" and a perhaps an interdisciplinary "why" (4).

But I am struggling with one of Anderson's points vis-a-vis the development of the media. To a certain extent, I understand the importance of a sort of lingua franca print language in creating a territorially and linguistically bounded community of readers, "the embryo of the nationally imagined community" (44). But since these people are still not actually talking to each other, anyway, especially the ones living in more rural settings, why is this connection through print media so important? Why couldn't the primordial imaginary community be a connection through something else? Couldn't a French farmer feel himself a part of a community of other French farmers who do the same kind of work and live similar lives, though he will never meet them? Admittedly, thinking of himself as a "French farmer" might be a bit anachronistic, but I still don't see why language here is privileged over, say, residing within the same territorial boundaries. I feel like I'm missing something big here, but why is this community of readers so special, so different?