I was recruited for a baseball game in Connecticut recently, a “plastic bat and ball” operation that scales the game down for kids and back yards. It was the kids who wanted to play. But while I was out in centre field, ready to sprint to the “warning track” of the neighbor’s drive way in my flip-flops, I couldn’t help noticing kids were doing cartwheels, getting gum off their mitts, examining their shoes with a surgeon’s curiosity, and otherwise entranced by anything but the game at hand.

This pretty much explodes the convention. Normally, sports demands all our attention and then some. The point is to be utterly focused, hyper-naturally alert to what happens next. But these kids were playing the game as something that just happened to be happening while they were otherwise engaged.

Little League, by contrast, looks like a conspiracy, a way of conscripting the young into adulthood. We create a little wedge, marked off by chalk, wire, uniforms, and lots and lots of rules. Then we take 9 year olds and try to get them to pay attention. To test them fully, we devise a game that contains long periods in which nothing much happens. We tempt them with dreaminess. Naturally, the kids oblige by mooning about, especially the outfielders who can frequently be seen facing in the wrong direction, wearing their gloves on their heads.

But we made one small error. We so engineered the bat and the ball that, when combined, they create an auditory cue capable of summoning even the original space cadet. Or maybe this was deliberate. Kids being kids, it’s possible that without the “crack of the bat” every Little League game would end 110-95. Without the crack of the bat, outfields would engage only when the ball actually bounced of their mitts and succeed only when the ball actually fell into it.

Plastic bats and balls make a different sound, a satisfying “whomp” that credits the batter with prowess he/she does not have, but this works perfectly to call the kids back. Cartwheels stop, gum is abandoned, shoes are forgotten, someone screams, and the game resumes. For a moment. And then it comes apart again, in a slow dissolve that leaves you thinking, “what a beautiful afternoon. Is that gum on my mitt?”

Baseball is where some of us learned to pay attention. But summer baseball is where, ironically, we return to the childhood pre-baseball, to that unfocused, unvigilant, mooning, sublime-seeking reverie the soul cannot do without. We have to “pay” attention to get into adulthood, but summers and baseball, these we get to come back to. In about 10 months from now.

Carolyn Parrish is a Member of the Parliament of Canada.  Last year, she called Americans "bastards."  On Wednesday, she called them "idiots."   

Ms. Parrish offered her recent slur while commenting on a missile-defense treaty.  In the words of the National Post, she believes that "participating in missile defense [with the US] would make Canada a terrorist target.”" 

May I take this opportunity to apologize to American friends and readers?  I am guessing the typical reaction is, first, "What?"” and, then, "Whatever.”"  And indeed Ms. Parrish deserves the dismissal we reserve all for kooks and cranks.  The trouble is that there are millions of like minded kooks and cranks in my fair country. 

Anti-Americanism is rampant.  Many Canadians now make free with the most derogatory comments about their southern neighbors.  They are pleased to call Americans stupid, aggressive, and vulgar.  They are quick to say that Bush is a moron.  (And here I have to bite my tongue to keep from saying, "well, he may not be Stephen Hawking but he is almost certainly smarter than you.”")  Want an easy laugh at a gathering of Canadians?  Say something anti-American.  No sooner have you spoken than the room is awash in self congratulation.  American bashing is now a Canadian pastime, as passionately pursued as road hockey and Tim Horton do-nuts. 

Indeed, I have not heard prejudice as unabashed as this since I spent a summer in the south of France and listened to locals let fly with anti-Semitic sentiments.  (I do not mean to compare anti-Americanism to anti-Semitism, but merely the unapologetic ease with which both sentiments are, in this case, offered.)  Canadians pride themselves on being open minded and cosmopolitan.  But here they are stupid, aggressive, and vulgar. 

This is a classic "clique effect,"” according to which the members of a comparison set who are judged and found wanting have two choices: to accept the judgment or to cultivate values that release them from the comparison.  This is a kind of "you can’t judge me, I march to a different drummer"” strategy. 

In some ways, this is apt.  Canada is a country trembling on the verge of Second World status.  Its health care system is crumbling.  Its economy is underpowered.  Its education system, merely ordinary.  Its contribution to global culture, modest.  But let’s take the most immediate case in point, the Olympics.  So far, Canada has a score of 9 in the medal race.  The Netherlands, with a population of 16 million (Canada has 25 m.) is well ahead with 21.  (Naturally, everyone is thrilled we continue to outpace Estonia which has 3 medal points.)

Really, there is no comparison.  The US leads in scientific accomplishment (see Nobel lists and patents awards), athletics (see Olympic wins), education (see Ph.D.s produced), business innovation, technological innovation, and cultural innovation.  Oh, Canada.  Poor Canada.  Your neighbor outstrips you on every dimension.

But I have never heard a Canadian admit to admiration or even acknowledgement of this difference.  Instead, the strategy is to claim moral superiority.  Canadians are better, they suppose, because they have better social programs, pay more taxes, and do not go to war.  Why is that, I wonder?  The reason that Canada does not go to war is because it lives within the protection of the US.  This is the reason it has an Armed Force that would be hard pressed, if transplanted to Eastern Europe, to defend itself from an attack by Estonia. 

And this brings us to the question of terrorism and Ms. Parrish’s conviction that a missile defense treaty with the US would expose Canada to an attack.  It is hard to know whether this is naiveté or cowardice.  But it certainly smacks of ingratitude.  To accept American protection and then, in the American hour of urgency, to refuse to do what little we can, is wrong. 

It compounds the error made by former Prime Minister Chrétien when he refused to send Canadian troops to Iraq.  Chrétien claimed that there was insufficient evidence of weapons of mass destruction.  What in God’s name prompted him to think this was the point?  Plainly and simply, our neighbour needed us to close ranks, show solidarity, and present a single face to the dithering world community.  If friendship was not enough, surely the opportunity to repay the "protection" debt” should have been.  If you can’’t act from honor, you might at least think about acting out of reciprocity. 

Ms. Parrish calls Americans "bastards”" and "idiots"” because she would otherwise be obliged to accept a pressing reality: that Canada is no longer the "sleeping giant"” but a continental embarrassment, the little brother who turns out to be slow at learning, bad at sports, incapable of protecting himself, inclined to incoherent outbursts, and, in spite of this, insufferably smug, self important, and ungrateful.  Ms. Parrish, please, for the love of God, just shut up. 

References

Curry, Bill. 2004.  Liberal Insults U.S. Again.  National Post.  August 26, 2004.

As friends of this blog have pointed out, there is a good deal of work left to do on the gaze economy. So far we haven’t said anything about the exchange of words and gestures that sometimes pass between strangers.

There is lots of variation here. Southerners are more inclined to offer greetings to perfect strangers than Northerners. I was surprised to see women in Atlanta grace me with greetings I would never receive in the North. They were not flirting, they were just being gracious. Rural people are more inclined to offer hellos than city dwellers. The former will even put a sign on the lawn so that no passer-by goes unacknowledged. “Jenny and Johnny Robinson welcome you!” I never expect to see a New York brownstone so adorned. I’ve noticed that men over 35 are inclined to nod when passing (a kind of highly abbreviated bow) and men under 35 are inclined to lift the head upward (as if saying, or while saying, “zup”).

But something tells me that while these exchanges enter into the economy they are more formal, ritualized and governed by rules of reciprocity than gazes are. These are what we owe the perfect stranger and to this extent we are less free to choose what we give, and less able to draw conclusions from what we get. Greetings are like exchanges in a traditional economy, governed more by trust than incentive. They are, as Granovetter would say, imbedded in a larger set of social rules. What makes gazes interesting is precisely that they operate much more like a Smithian economy. This makes them more dynamic. They are more revealing of achieved than ascribed standing. They are more revealing of emergent value than fixed values.

The follow-up strategy here is to wonder whether the gaze economy resembles more conventional ones. Does the gaze economy, to the extent that we understand it, help illuminate things about the conventional economy? Does the conventional economy give us new ways of thinking about the gaze economy? But I am short on time and this will have to wait.

One note in closing. Remarks from Ennis today and Sarah yesterday made me think we could expand this treatment of the gaze economy to include the outliers.

Guys who wear “wife beater” t-shirts (a singlet preferred, perhaps, because it exposes bulging muscles) are a case in point. Somebody must find this look attractive, but the term “wife beater” suggests most of us regard it with disdain. Punks (see the post below) take this a step forward by violating the rules of self presentation. Bobby pins, Mohawks, leather, spiked neck collars and wrist bands, tattoos, are designed to outrage our expectations. Both confront us with an act of visual intimidation. Both would have us look away.

These players make it clear that they are not soliciting our gaze. The simplest strategy here is to simple withdraw or as Hirschman would say “exit” the economy. But, perhaps because exit is not possible, or because they have deeper intentions, both parties go a step further and say, “advert your gaze.” In effect, they force exit upon us.

In the process, they drive us out of the economy, as it has to do with them, and leave themselves in a zone in which they cannot be judged. Clique theory says that minorities within a culture that are judged and found wanting have two choices. They can accept the judgment, or they can cultivate a new set of values that approves their minority position and scorns the majority one. In this case, they are more proactive, actually destroying the exchange on which their value would otherwise be set. They make us look away. Thus does one form of commerce help create and enable one form of culture.

Thoughts only.

Post script:

Congratulations to Fouroboros for the funniest line on this blog. See his comment on yesterday’s post.

Yesterday, I treated the foundational work with which bloggers can document contemporary cultural in a Pepysian way. Today, some final observations on a more opportunistic method from the anthropological “play book.”

I had the good fortune once to sit with Marshall Sahlins (above), the great anthropologist at the University of Chicago, as he read one of my essays. In the tutorial tradition of Oxbridge, he was sharing his reactions to my essay by audibilizing them. It was a little depressing to hear how effortlessly he dispatched the passages of which I was most proud, and how quickly and remorselessly he identified the ones I had struggled to get right. Sahlins picked both up on the fly, approving and more often disapproving as he went.

The best moments occurred when this “beautiful mind” found something that did not effortlessly submit itself to comprehension. Sahlins came to a dead stop. All fluidity ceased. And now the audible was “why is that, I wonder?”

This was, I have to tell you, breathtaking. It was no credit to me. It was not that I had written something especially interesting or intelligent. No, what caught Sahlins’ attention was a stray remark and what stopped him cold was that the stray remark would not herd. A lesser mind would have assimilated the passage to an existing category on a kind of “close enough is good enough” basis. But Sahlins stopped. What he was doing was allowing counter-expectational data work back upon his expectations. (At least, this is what I think he was doing. You are listening to a minor talent making assumptions about a major talent.) I thought I could hear Sahlins thinking, “why can I not think this? What would I need to think to think this?”

This seems to me the first order of business for an anthropologist, especially one working in his or her own culture. The problem here is that we know our own culture “down to the ground.” It operates in us invisibly, shaping our understanding the world, supplying the large and small rules of social interaction, and otherwise making the world make sense. (We discover what the world is like without this cultural intervention when we visit other places and interact with other people.) To see our culture, we must wait for the world to resist it. We must wait to be surprised.

Surprise is a good indicator of a blogging opportunity. We have been poking along in the world, and suddenly we encounter something stray, the observation that will not herd. I was at the vet yesterday. Molly my kitten needed shots. The vet, newly graduated and in her late 20s, was talking about flea medicine, because, as she put it, fleas are a “bummer.” My surprise device went off with a little ping. “Bummer?” I thought, “since when does a twentysomething use terminology minted in the 1960s?”

The blog is half done. That there is generationally specific lingo does not surprise me. (In the perfect Sahlinsian instance, it would.) We all know that generations have their own lingo, but we know it without much thinking about it or, more to the point, blogging about it. But “bummer” from a twentysomething throws the lingo thing into relief. Suddenly, a little piece of culture breaks free and comes swimming into view.

Now it’s time to round up the usual suspicions. Has there always been generationally specific lingo in Western societies. I am pretty sure Victorians did it. How about the 18th century? Are some generations more inventive than others and why? Do we see an intensification of this phenomenon? Is the present day more or less inventive than say the 50s or the 80s? Is there an intensification of lingo happening within generations? And, at the limit, could we someday see a time that is so linguistically inventive that generations must struggle to communicate across the generational divide and perhaps even within a single generation? Chances are we don’t have answers to these questions, but anthropological blogging is often about raising questions, and, in the process, giving us a chance to make culture swim into view.

In short, the blog entry begins with that little ping of surprise that comes from the stray remark that will not herd, the datum that defies expectation, the observation that does not fit. Most of the time, most of us let this slide. There is no ping of surprise, because we are dumb as posts. Or there is a ping but we don’t do what Sahlins did: stop and ask “what just happened. How did the world just resist my expectations?”

For the anthropological blogger, pattern recognition begins with variation recognition. This is our warning system that says something in the world is not quite right. But we may use it as an internal editor ever eager to identify a new “story idea.”

post script:

just got a comment from Nigel Mellish on the “pre fab culture” post (December 8, 2002) on clams. Nigel supplies a nice ethnographic observation:

Saturday Night Live, at it’s prime, was the worst distributor of clams. I recall in middle school how, on Monday morning, everyone would attempt to be the first to use the newly introduced (or semi-cleverly recycled) clam into conversation. Nothing was worse than picking the wrong sketch “clam” that you thought was particularly funny but no one else found humorous. I guess that was a “bad clam”?

It strikes me this is a great way for us to begin building a common body of data and observation. Each of us posts an anthropological entry and then all of us weigh in with observations like the one from Nigel. A hundred years from now the historians will stumble upon our cash of data, our message in a bottle. Pepys status for all!

post script II:

There is a great post by Brian at Redbird Nation in which he gives a very nice grammar of baseball “voice over” commentary by analyzing the things that announcers do wrong. This is not quite the anthropology of every day life, but it is a great treatment of the great institution of baseball, and historians in 100 years will use it direct the eye and deepen their analysis.

Yesterday, I raised the topic of anthropological blogging as an unexplored opportunity. For want of better blogging, many of the most telling details of contemporary life disappear without a trace and historians will someday be obliged to reconstruct the details by watching The King of Queens.

I am calling this anthropology but it is something like an archeology, as the blogger digs down into the details of every day life and unearths cultural assumptions and practices. The trick is to proceed with precision and perspective. We need to set the focal plane first on macro and then on infinity. We want to see everyday life close up and as if from a long way off.

We could begin anywhere, but let’s begin working by the light of a 5 watt bulb. I mean, of course, the fridge. We want a thorough documentation, both photographic and written. We begin with our fridge as it exists right now (no tidying up, or cleaning out, for posterity). We photograph both the outside (all those fridge magnets, notes to self, a post card from friends in Mozambique). Now the inside: wide shots and close ups.

We want to document each item in the fridge with photos. This means taking everything out and photographing it front, back and sides. (I know you’ve been looking for an excuse to give the place a good cleaning.) Now, a “bio” of each product. Recently, I switched from flavored to plain yogurt. Why? Someone told me that “refined sugar” is a bad thing. Do I know what “refined sugar” is? Not really.

I need to dig as deep as I can.. From whom did I get the news about refined sugar? Why and how did it make sense to me? As I begin to examine my assumptions, I can report that I believe that food is better for me the closer it is to its natural state. (Someone told me the food chain is poisoned and the higher up the chain we eat, the higher the concentrations of toxins.) As a 53 year old, I am old enough to remember another regime that said that food was better when transformed by processing and the “miracle of science” (Tang!). I can also say that I first heard this notion being resisted in the 1960s (thank you Adele Davis) and that my shift away from processed food has been taking place since then (but is still underway). This puts me in a position to report a relative distrust of the big food manufacturers and a new sense of vigilance about what I eat. In the process, I will reveal what I think a “body” is, what I think “health” is, how I think food works, and the larger web of assumptions that makes my world make sense. Now we are beginning to capture the overall cultural trends that shape my beliefs and practices concerning food.

Some of you will be asking, “What in God’s name is the point of recording this man’s half baked notions about health? Surely, the biology texts will survive and suffice.” In fact no one but the medical and a small part of the scientific community embrace the definitive view. For anthropological purposes, what matters is the common place one. Some years ago Sellar, Reatman and Muir had the bright idea of asking the English men and women to recount their national history, and reported the outcome in a book called “1066 & All That.” The results are funny because some of these people have only a vague idea of the details, and what they don’t know they make up or fill in (with airy phrases like, “You know, 1066 and all that.”) Funny it may be, but it is also grist for the anthropological mill because it reveals history as a living thing.

There are plenty of other topics that will emerge from our reflections. Eventually, we will end up noticing and commenting on the notions of “comfort food,” food as a nutriceutical, food as a source of fear, eating and cooking as a solitary activity, eating and cooking as a social activity, “grazing,” brand loyalties, brand disloyalties, fridge magnets, family communications, shopping habits, waste, recycling, and a glimpse of the gods of influence: The Joy of Cooking, Julia Child, Martha Stewart, Nigella Lawson, Emeril, Adelle Davis, and so on.

As I performed my study, I begin to think of my fridge as an American town. I have the standard package of things I have eaten for ages. I have relative new comers who have been in place for a decade or so. And I have an immigrant population struggling to find and sustain a place there. This dynamic set is driven by deep cultural convictions that do not change, the advent of trends that came and stayed, and the various but continual gusts of changing fashion. Properly documented, my fridge is an illuminating manuscript, an entire world enameled, ready to tell its story even after it has been carted off to the dump. Our blog gives the historians a chance to see the advent of these trends by other measures, but now they’ll have something like a “real time” opportunity to see them in the context of a single life. I know that it seems like a lot of work, but these historians will confer on you the Pepys’ reward: immortality

We could perform this study for the other centers in the household: the closet, the home entertainment center, the desk and work area, the living room and so on. Always the method is the same: document the option most particularly and then “dolly back” to the larger assumptions and practices that make it make sense to us. (This latter process can be performed by asking ourselves the question “why is that?” every time we offer an assertion about an object. These can be posted in pieces and eventually bound together for presentation for the Smithsonian. You think I’m kidding. The Smithsonian would be droolingly grateful to receive such a document.

One last point: every so often I search the web for blogs that have undertaken this process of documentation. So far, no luck. Please, if you hear of something good, let me know. I will give it a place of honor in the margin to the right.

References

Sellar, W.C. R.J Reatman, and Frank Muir. 1997. 1066 & All That: A Memorable History of England. London (?): National Book Network.

Steve Portigal tells me that the Pepys diary is now on line at http://www.pepysdiary.com
(Thank you, Steve, very much.)

How to blog like an anthropologist

Blogging about blogging is a self absorbed activity and normally I avoid it.  But there is, I think, a substantial opportunity that has not yet been well explored.

Blogs are a great medium for the anthropological study of our culture.   This is especially so because anthropologists themselves have not used the conventional media of books and articles.

Certainly, there has been a little work on the topic of contemporary culture.  Lloyd Warner did a magnificent study of Yankee City (Newburyport, MA, I think) and Evon Vogt did a little study of a tiny town in Texas (see post below). 

But the most of the work here has been preoccupied with culture on the margin.  Anything ‘transgressive” gets lots of attention.  The mainstream, that endlessly restless experiment in cultural invention, gets almost nothing at all.  Much of this is now unrecorded and lost. 

Here today and truly gone tomorrow.  It is the fine details of lived experience that are most precious to our understanding of a cultural moment, and it is these details that are now systematically lost as we move briskly away from the present.

Someone has to write things down, and why not bloggers?  The hero here is Samuel Pepys, the 17th century Londoner who won immortality for himself by keeping a detailed record of his life.  We have a pretty good understanding of the Great Fire of London from various documents.  But nothing captures the power and the panic of this event like the entry in Pepys. 

Too often bloggers offer us “dear diary” entries: went to the bank, bought a new album, phoned my friend and went for coffee.  This is not just dreary, it is, for anthropological purposes, not very illuminating.  What we need, or what the future historical will need, is something much more detailed.

More tomorrow when we will discuss how to document your fridge.  (Sorry, internet access is been restricted.  Appear now to be back in business.)

Last night, I was channel hopping, my version of “arm chair anthropology.” This was a 19th century term of derision for anthropologists who studied culture from the comfort of the study, leaving fieldwork (and ethnographic fact finding) to more intrepid colleagues.

But the 21st century anthropologist can learn a lot from his TV, especially now that it has 300 channels and a bathoscopic ability to drop us into otherwise inaccessible cultures and subcultures (all Bass fishing, all the time!). Channel hopping is a little like Olympic island hopping. In our La-Z-boys, we are as gods.

Bathoscopic television is particularly useful when it comes to fuller disclosure about public figures. Last night I had a chance to watch Elliot Spitzer on McEnroe and Maureen Dowd on Jon Stewart. (For those who have been off-planet for the last 10 years, Spitzer is the Attorney General of the State of New York and Dowd is a columnist for the New York Times.)

McEnroe can’t conduct an interview to save his life. (Why is it that talk show hosts so rarely can?) But with Spitzer, he didn’t have to. For Spitzer turns out not to be the avenging angel of the financial pages, the man before whom grown corporations and Martha Stewart herself now tremble. No, he’s a big, happy, Labrador of a man, so pleased with himself that he offers himself as a gift to one and all. This self congratulation manifests not as vanity, but generosity. “Aren’t you lucky I’m me? Let us now rejoice.” In the place of gravitas, there was mostly bonhomie.

It is hard not to like a man who thinks so well of himself. But it is hard to think of him as the scourge of wrong doing. Superheroes are supposed to be troubled, conflicted, a little dark. Most of them spend part of their lives living under the cover of an assumed identity. Self congratulation would give the game away. (“I am Clark Kent!”) But I think there is also a “it takes one to know one” notion at work here. Unless the superhero contains trace elements of moral confusion, he/she cannot hope to vanquish the likes of Lex Luthor or the Penguin.

You could imagine CEOs around the country staring at the screen in disbelief. “This is the man who threatens us with penalty and jail time? This is the man who haunts me in my dreams? He’s a Labrador puppy! Get the lawyers on the phone. We can take this guy.” The McEnroe interview had a Wizard of Oz element to it, revealing a man less threatening than we thought. And this 5 minutes of fame, an anticipation of Spitzer’s run on the state house, will have set the AG team back by a decade or two. Full disclosure on TV will discourage full disclosure on Wall Street.

Maureen Dowd on Stewart was another story altogether. She was as uncomfortable before the camera as Spitzer was self congratulatory but she still managed to give off a vanity of her own. I have read her columns with pleasure, admiring her rhetorical skills. But now she came across is as too small in moral stature to render the political and moral judgments that are her specialty. Gravitas? Not a trace. Instead, she engaged in the cheapest trick of celebrity culture: building her own celebrity by speaking ill of others. With Stewart goading her (he does this well, at least) she even managed to say indiscrete things about her colleagues, making Thomas Friedman sound, as Stewart gleefully put it, “like a temp.”

“Ok,” I thought from the majesty of my La-Z-boy, ‘this person is not fit for office.” I guess I expect people who render judgment to show a little dispassion, maturity, depth. But Dowd seemed merely mean, not in the contemporary sense of the term, but in the Victorian one: too small, too little.

This changes the ‘takes one to know one” calculation. The Dowd of Jon Stewart appeared to contain not too little moral “complexity,” but too much. She turns out to have the very qualities she mocks in others. A superhero, no more.

TV can be as exacting as a good ethnographic interview. Interviewees may run but they cannot hide. Whatever impressions they mean to create, eventually the camera will find them out. The camera may put on 10 pounds, but it is also, apparently, pretty good a stripping away 20 IQ points, to say nothing of the carefully cultivated illusions of the public person.

I wasn’t keen on The Bourne Supremacy, but I was impressed by the performance of Joan Allen who manages with a few minutes of screen time to solve a problem that has been vexing Hollywood and the rest of us for some time now.

In a feminist era, women have power and they exercise it in the world. Hollywood has hustled to catch up by giving us portrayals of powerful women on the screen. We have had some good performances (Sigourney Weaver in Alien, for instance and Holly Hunter in anything) but more often we have bad ones. Women on cop shows are especially bad at assuming the symbolism of power.

Terry Hatcher is a particular case in point. It’s not just that Terry is a bad actress (though she probably is that). It’s that power has traditionally been a male idiom. Most women have not grown up with the opportunity to watch older women with power. Generally speaking, they have been obliged to learn the symbolism of power from men.

Here’s where the problem comes in. When you are observing from a cultural distance, and you do not know the code, you are inclined only to see the most obvious markers of power. And who is most likely to show these off? Men who are not altogether persuaded of their right to power, men, that is, who are inclined to swagger and bluster. Terry imitated the wrong men, the pretender men.

The problem is a necessary one, call it the problem of cultural proximity. The farther we are from a social type, the more crudely we imitate it. Here, the problem of cultural proximity means that women end up imitating men who are in effect imitating other men. It is not very surprising that they are unconvincing. They are at two removes from the real performance, doing a bad imitation of a bad imitation, as it were. (To be fair, some may be doing a good imitation of a bad imitation, but the original “signal” is still corrupted.)

Naturally, feminism has enjoyed some success inventing a new language of power, one that is peculiarly female, and not borrowed from men at all. In the late 80s I saw this happening at the New York office of Saatchi and Saatchi. The most powerful woman in the room, also the most powerful person in the room, sat extremely low in her chair. In fact, she virtually lounged. “Weird,” I thought, “is this a power signature?” And sure enough, the moment she left the room, the newly most powerful woman in the room slid down to assume the power position. I don’t think this ‘took” as a cultural innovation, and a good thing too. But there is stuff happening here and I don’t mean to suggest otherwise.

Back to Joan Allen in The Bourne Supremacy. Her character is an executive of some standing in the CIA (or maybe it’s the FBI). She has power and she is called upon to exercise it. Nothing in this performance is forced or imitative. We “get” that she holds power as a simple, defining attribute of her personality. There is no trace of effort or show, and no compromise of her femaleness. We see that she has power the way we notice the color of her eyes. It is just something she has, someone she is.

We know that one of the early handbooks of power symbolism was Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier and we know that one of the chief pieces of advice here was the notion of sprezzatura, the art of concealing art. Here in the Renaissance beginnings of male power symbolism was a note of caution. Adopt the language of power, but then render subtle and discrete. Many men, especially pretender men, have evidently not read their Castiglione. (Too busy beating up kids at school, possibly?) They believe they can show power only by overstating it. For a moment in the history of feminism, the sprezzatura rule was ignored by women as well.

Thank goodness for Joan Allen. Great actresses don’t just import from life, with performances like this one, they export as well. This does our culture sometimes invent itself, on the screen.

References

Castiglione, Baldassarre. 1967. The book of the courtier from the Italian, done into English by Sir Thomas Hoby, anno 1561, with an introd. by Walter Raleigh. Tudor Translations, 23. New York: AMS Press.

I interviewed a woman in Boston recently who had attended Franconia College, a small, experimental, liberal arts college that existed in New Hampshire from 1963 to 1977.

Visiting the college website, Margaret (not her real name) was stunned to see the number of her alums who had died tragically. The “memoriam” page gives a summary cause of death and some of these are gruesome: “murdered at home by unknown person,” “jumped or was pushed off roof,” “alcohol poisoning,” “suicide,” “murdered by FBI(?)”, “overdose,” “after accidentally eating water hemlock, while collecting and eating water cress.” Most poignant perhaps is the entry for Robert Silver: “died of being Robert Silver and all that entailed.” I don’t have sociological details on the people who attended Franconia, but this is not the kind of thing that usually happens to graduates of a liberal arts college.

This reminded me of my own “window” on the costs of the counter culture. In 1964, I happened to know one of Vancouver’s first hippies, Barb. It was thrilling to visit the “hippy house” in which Barb and her friends lived. To a 13 year old, these people seemed glamorous. They were, I thought, pioneers, the first to take up full-time residence in the new ideologies of the moment.

This experiment ended tragically. Barb and her house mates moved from daily LSD consumption to speed to heroin and finally, to pay for the heroin, to prostitution. (This is not altogether different from the ethnographic portrait of the eldest daughter in the Gordon family painted by Donald Katz in his remarkable book, Home Fires.)

Each cultural trend brings benefit and we have a deft way of hanging on to these benefits even as the trend itself recedes. But we do not calculate the costs. In the case of the counter-culture the costs were high, and wouldn’t it be interesting to have a full quantitative rendering of what these costs were? But we don’t, as far as I know. We have several thousand books and articles on the music of Bob Dylan, and almost nothing on the costs of the world this pied piper helped create. Let us put this down to a willful, collective amnesia that resembles the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. In our case, it’s “don’t reckon, don’t remember.”

Other trends are costly, too. The “Studio 54” disco era was spectacularly wasteful of careers and lives. The “alternative” moment in the 1990s created many casualties of the 60s kind. (Kurt Cobain was only the most conspicuous.) But even when the costs are not spectacular, they are still expensive. One thinks of all those kids who worked in used record stores rather than for ‘the man.” These are costs, as well.

We are a little like the hunters and gatherers who looked for foodstuffs everywhere by eating everything. Many died, but the rest got fed. Substitute “culture” for “nature,” and there we are. We try everything and damn the consequences. Driven now by a cultural imperative, we are ceaseless in our exploration. Some will pay, all will profit.

This is, in our case, a classic emergent system, driven by individual decisions, not collective objectives. No individual sees herself as a heroic figure or a sacrificial offering. Barb did not spin into tragedy that the counter culture might flourish and that our world might be transformed. She was, now to use the term from a couple of posts ago, following her “bliss.”

What difference would it make if we had a systematic account of these costs? There are no “policy implications” here. We do not want to discourage cultural innovation on the grounds that it is dangerous. But surely a sharper understanding of who we are and how we work is not out of the question. We could, for instance, work out the “commit and release” paradox (see last post) by which we participate in new trends. Some people commit and won’t or can’t release, even when the personal costs are astronomically high. We could get better at “commit and release.”

But the larger issue is pretty straight forward. It is time to put aside cultural amnesia, and to create a more sophisticated book keeping and a closer eye on the debit side.

While we are at it, why not ask the largest question: what is that cultural imperative? Why does the culture ‘that has everything” prove to be so restless, experimental, and ready to take risks? Hunters and gatherers would get the self sacrifice. But they would be a little astonished to see where we now put the bet. “You do this to change?” they might exclaim. “This is the kind of thing we do to stay the same.”

References

Franconia college “memorial” page

Katz, Donald R. 1992. Home fires: An intimate portrait of one middle-class family in postwar America. New York: Aaron Asher Books.

I was in Starbucks recently, and sitting on the table was a little promotion for an event Starbucks is sponsoring with T-Mobile: Road Trip Nation.

Apparently, Starbuck’s is sponsoring 4 college kids in a used RV as they tour the nation to “host them along their journey and be part of a movement that is inspiring people everywhere to break tradition, resist conformity and do what they love.”

Printed on the promotion was this quote from Jill Solloway, writer-director for HBO’s Six Feet Under:

Forget about what sells, forget about what is going to make you famous, write what you like, what makes you feel good, and what makes you happy–and success will follow.

My head spun. What are the chances, I thought, that people who take this “career advice” will profit from it. Surely, if we are becoming a more pluralistic and various, the chances that my bliss will be your interest are slim. Some people will follow their bliss to glory. The rest will miss the target and head for deep space.

Naturally, there is something to this advice. To be on the cutting edge of culture, it is necessary to follow inspiration, not the marketplace. (If you are following the market place, you will necessarily arrive too late.) But this is something like a tournament model: many are called, few are chosen.

There is something else to this advice. It reflects that new age, child like confidence that the universe is a benign place and that if you are “true to yourself,” everything else will take care of itself.

I thought the reason we lived in an emergent culture is that everyone keeps on eye on the main chance. We all flock roughly in the same direction. This is how an emergent culture emerges, taking collective shape out of millions of individual decisions that all miraculously end up in more or less the same place.

But I guess it is also true that the way a culture like ours guarantees a steady stream of very novel innovation is by persuading some people to break off and follow their bliss. This way we get many innovations and can rally around the ones that speak to the moment.

What happens to the lottery losers? They add to our multiplicity, to be sure, but they must do so from the aimless, airless discomfort of a used RV.

I know this sounds judgmental. I mean only to highlight one of the many contradictions in contemporary culture.

last note: I am on assignment for the next three days. If I can post, I will post.

Roadtrip Nation

Hotels are tidal pools. Staying at the Westin hotel in Kansas City, I saw the tide come twice. (One of these days, someone will do a portrait of America based on lobby ethnography alone. I am deeply happy to say it won’t be me.)

The first was the Jack and Jill Association of America. The Westin lobby and elevators filled with magnificently dressed and appointed women. It was from their patient, disengaged, short suffering husbands at the bar that I got the details. Jack and Jill is designed to help African American families stay in touch with their roots, and one another, as prosperity takes them to the suburb.

One of the pressing questions: how to keep kids in touch with their culture even as they are firewalled against the siren call of the gangsta pose (and posse). It sounds like a tough piece of parenting. Suburban kids may well be vulnerable to the accusation that they have compromised their blackness. What better way to redress the balance than hip hop swagger (and swag)?

This task will be complicated, I’m guessing, by a collision of consumption styles. The move to the suburbs is traditionally a move towards a consumption style that is muted. Kids find this cautious and uninteresting in any case. But it must be stupefying compared to bling. What happens when bland meets bling?

The second was the FBI National Academy. A different crowd entirely. Now it was husbands who were the key actors, and wives who sat patiently in the bar. The Academy was originally known as the “Police Training School of the FBI” and it is designed to help Police Chiefs improve their law enforcement methods.

One of the pressing questions: what to do about methamphetamines? One Academy guy was kind enough to give me a detailed account. Methamphetamines are apparently cheap to make and they can be manufactured in rudimentary facilities by people who have no real training. Finally, they can be manufactured in the US. On all these counts, closing down distribution is tough.

Addiction is formidable, much more formidable than cocaine, with recovery programs taking several weeks. Addicts sign on for the long term. Criminals high on methamphetamines are exceedingly dangerous, so they are difficult and dangerous to collar.

Abundant supply has not lowered prices very much, and interestingly, one of the chief sources of income for the methamphetamine addict is identity theft. This is less violent than street crime, clearly, but the consequences for the victim are still severe. It can take people years to sort out the blot on their credit history. (Is this symmetry? Addicts give their identities to a drug and take identities from victims.)

This is another symptom of our dynamism. Intoxicants come and go: heroin, marijuana, angel dust, cocaine, crack cocaine, and now methamphetamine. It is as if we are seeing a disintermediation even here. Production and distribution is now decentralized. In any case, the Academy is dealing with wave after wave of new drugs, lots of different drugs, and they must come up with new solutions for each of them. So much for the small town sheriff who mostly had to deal with a handful of drunks and a couple of punks. Thank God for the FBI National Academy.

There is not much in common here, except that both groups are dealing with the effects of dynamism. They come to the Kansas City Westin to learn to manage change. They come to learn to live with a continually changing problem set. They can’t expect simple answers, just make shift solutions. And they are not here for stately deliberation. They are grappling with problems that demand that they respond in real time right now. The response will be fleeting. Before next year’s convention, the world and the challenge will have changed again.

The thing I like most about real tidal pools is that they are so easy to think. The ocean has given you a little aquarium, one star fish, a handful of barnacles, a minnow, some things that dart, some things that skim. Finally, you think to yourself, an ocean made manageable. This I can think. I am guessing that these two conventions gave their participants a ‘tidal pool” moment. But, living in a culture of constant turmoil, they can’t have had any doubts. They know that respite is fleeting and that next year they are going to have to do it all over again.

A note from the ethnographer’s note book in Kansas City, written in 2004.

1.  First thing this morning in the hotel lobby, I am standing beside a little girl and her mom.  The mom looks exhausted by life and, to judge by appearances, she was not the brightest spark to begin with.  Her little girl, about 9, is staring out a window.

“Mom?””

“What?””

“The Western Auto sign.””

“Yeah?””

“It’’s more right when it’s off than when it’’s on.””

Her mother stares at her dully.

“At night, when it’’s lit up, two letters are missing.””

Her mother stares at her dully.

“What do you know?”” I think to myself, “one of the smart ones.””

I felt I should reward this splendid little observation.

“Hey, that’’s pretty smart.””

The little girl beams and rocks up on her toes with pleasure: finally someone gets what she gets.

2.  Later in the day, I go to interview a man who is 50-something and living in a suburban home.  He is cautious, articulate, smart, and not very forthcoming.  We sit at his dining room table.  The chairs are elaborately carved and upholstered in faux leopard skin.  There is a very large curio beside us filled with old fashioned glass wear.  Behind me is an immense African mask of great sculptural authority.  Virtually all the art is ancient Egyptian in theme, the sort of thing we have from Pharaoh’’s tombs.  Behind the couch in the living room is a set of golf clubs.

3.  Still later in the day, I go to another interview.  My taxi driver is suspicious of the neighborhood and the house before us. It is immense with a vast stone foundation and 3 stories of badly painted wood, the architecture originally stolid but grand.  A hundred years of neglect has put paid to the grandeur. The place now has an embarrassed air of a gentleman who catches you catching him in diminished circumstances.  This place has “urban decay”” written all over it.

The cabbie says, “I’’m going to wait here till they open the door.  Come back if you want.  Run if you have to.””

I climb the stairs.  The big door opens as if the Munsters have been expecting me.  Standing there was a woman dressed entirely, head to toe, in white.  On her head is a kind of turban and in the middle of the turban was a badge of some kind.  I do not run down the stairs, but for a moment I wrestle with the idea that this might be a tremendously good idea.

“Come in,”” she says without smiling.  As the door closes, I hear the taxi pull away.

I take these data points as proof that America is the greatest country on the face of the earth.

The suburban dweller is an African American man who accepts and now lives the Black Athena argument.  Some of us in the academy are inclined to mock this argument as identity construction of the most revisionist and community aggrandizing kind.  But I am sure you would not want to tell my respondent this, —not because he is a tough guy, though he looks like a pretty tough guy, —but because he is fully formed and fully credible and not by any stretch of the imagination a mere visitor at the all-you-can-eat smörgåsbord of American spirituality.  This guy lives Black Athena.  It works for him.  It makes this world make sense.  See what you will about the book.  This is the life.

The women in white proves to be—, and this was of course my first guess—, a classical yoga devotee with an MBA in accounting.  This big house is a place that she teaches spiritual development and her husband practices an alternative medicine.  She proves to be lucid, calm, interesting and quietly revelational.

Both these people have put down roots in ideas that were, 20 years ago, so fringe, at least in America, they did not give real purchase.  You could not live them.  Twenty years later, Black Athena and classical yoga are habitable worlds, fully realized, fully scripted, fully furnished and capacious; —mobile homes, perhaps, but homes all the same.

This is an America culture that is first extensive, adding new cultural space, and then intensive, working this space till people can actually live there.  At first, the space is so new and untried, it sustains only pioneers.  But in a very short time (and this is in ethnographic scheme of things, time-lapse rapidity) the space attracts and sustains settlers.  And eventually, the space sustains people who can’’t imagine living any other way; it is now a fully formed world unto itself.  People in Kansas may not get my haircut (see last post) but that’’s because some of them are busy with innovations of their own.

The little girl.  She’’s the wild card, isn’’t she?  There’’s a good chance that she goes to a school so bad that there is no system in place to spot, engage, and advance her talent.  Kids half as smart will get twice the resources.  She will always be smarter than her mom and smarter than the worst of her biographical alternatives.  But that’’s not good enough, is it?  And here America very suddenly ceases to look like the greatest country on the face of the earth.

References

Bernal, Martin. 1987. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization.  New York: Rutgers University Press.

Boy, is my hair wrong for this assignment.

I have really, really short hair. When the Hollywood studio heads got scalped, I knew it was only a matter of time before I followed suit. In matters of personal grooming, Jeffrey Katzenberg, above, is my God.

But short hair doesn’t work here in Kansas City. Matrons are giving me a wide berth at the mall. Kids stare at me. Security guards are giving me hard stares. This hair cut worked ok in Boston and Seattle but here it is some kind of flag of protest, or confession of imbalance. Let’s keep an eye on this one, the locals say. Plainly, he’s a nut bar.

It reminds me of research in Shanghai about 10 years ago. Every time I turned around, I would catch a woman checking me out. In this case, the object of their attention was my clothing. Shanghai was once and is once more the style center of China. Women there are happy to gather fashion news from any source, even a slightly geeky Westerner. I was happy to be a “diffusion agent.” They also serve, who merely get dressed and go out. And frankly Shanghai is one of the few places on the planet where an anthropologist can serve at all.

But in Kansas City, I am apparently too far ahead of the curve, too “out there.” This is not the Shanghai of America but the Cheng Du, happy to wait a little longer to get the news. Here my Hollywod hair is just plain odd.

For God sake, someone tell Jeffrey.

Sorry, sorry, sorry. 

I haven’t posted the last couple of days because I am in Seattle and doing ethnographic interviews.  The project is for a capital markets company and the objective is to see why people invest in mutual funds.

I can’t remember a project more fatiguing than this.  I am so tired I can hardly see.  For some reason, the interviews take everything I’ve got and then some.  I end up in that state where you find yourself wondering whether you can make it from the hotel lobby to your room without having to sit down for an hour or two.

The interviews are free wheeling and designed to be as opportunistic as possible.  At this point, the client doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, as it were.  At this point, it isn’t sure what to ask.  This is when you send in the anthropologist.  My job is to listen carefully and see the basic terms of references with which an investor sees themselves, their world, and investing.

So every question casts the net wide.  Let’s see what they say.  And follow up.  Let’s be prepared to go where they take us.  Let’s let the respondent design the interview so that we capture how they see the world, and not how the anthropologist or the client imagines they see the world.

Once the interview and the respondent is launched, I greet each question with the Letterman-Schaeffer question: Is this remark something or is it nothing.  The trick is to find the frame that makes it something…if you can.  I am asking myself, "what do I have to think to see the point of this?  Where can this answer take me?  What view corridors does it open up?  Does it allow me to see into the world of assumptions and beliefs that make this world make sense?  As I say, the trick is to shuffle interpretive frames fast enough to ‘hear’ what I’ve have just been told, before the rules of conversation oblige me to ask another question."

Ok, let’s say it is something.  Now I have to decide which follow-up question will open the something up.  I have a thought about where this might take us.  But I can’t flat out ask.  Because the second rule of this method is: never supply terms of reference.  If I give the respondent a way to fashion their response, they may well use it.  Then the interview has become a kind of mirror.  In a sense, I am listening to myself. 

So, I ask something that encourages them to keep going and suggest in a non directive way which way to go.  Sometimes, the thing dies.  But sometimes we are away to the races.  We have a gusher.  The respondent has let me into the way they see the world.  My job now: write like a demon.

Eventually, the interview begins to fill up with key terms and the interpretive possibilities.  I want to be as precise as I can about what these are, without being so precise that I am foreclosing my opportunity to see new definitions and relationships.  I end up with a large contingency table.  All these things may go together like this, or this, or this.  And more data is pouring in.  And the set changes as I entertain, promote or abandon my interpretive frames.

There are mechanics to keep track of in all of this.  Where are we in the interview?  Have I covered all the possibilities raised by this particular answer?  Have I covered all the things I must ask about in the course of the interview.  Given this respondent, and these answers, what is the best way to get these questions in?  How should they be phrased and in what order?

It ends up being a little like air traffic control except that you have to keep reshuffling the stack even as you wonder whether you have correctly posited the principles of lift and flight that apply in this particular air space.

Yesterday, I had two quite different interviews.  The first was with a guy who writes educational gaming software for children.  He was smart, but deeply cautious.  He would answer every question very carefully and then bring the interview to a dead stop.   With every question, I would have to get out the paddles and see if I could restart the interview. 

The second interview was much easier.  A woman from the arts who spoke with great ease and wonderful figures of speech.  I could see into her easily.  She lived in a glass house and never closed the drapes.  Lots of momentum here.  She saw where I was going, she saw where she was going, she saw where we might both go.  In this case, the task is to offer direction that was small, precise, and, I hoped, on target, and then write like hell to capture the profusion of data that resulted. 

A couple of days I did an interview with a guy who looked a little Dennis Hopper and talked like him too.  Smart but circuitous.  Just when you would think, "damn, this is going nowhere," he would say something that was remarkably interesting.  My job: to ask a question that Dennis would ignore and then wait patiently for him to wander into  illumination. 

My point, and I do have one, is that I think this interview process has something in common with contemporary culture to the extent that both of them demand that we "shift frame" with greater constancy and skill.  By "shifting frame" I mean that we find ourselves in situation where our favorite and customary assumptions do not apply.  Nor can we see what assumptions do apply.  We are obliged to nose into this world and respond nimbly in real time, and work out what to think and how to act as the data is forthcoming. 

The anthropological conclusion?  This is hard.  It demands a special elasticity.  And too much of it induces a particular inelasticity.  The cosmopolitan becomes a zombie.  Anyhow, think of this post as a "note from my doctor" or at least an excuse why I have been blogging infrequently.  Thanks for your patience.

I live in Montreal, in a neighborhood where everyone is noisy all the time: soccer fans, college kids, street people, muscle cars, good drivers honking at bad drivers, bad drivers sobbing uncontrollably, kids playing the street. Just about everyone makes a joyful sound. Only junkies on the nod in the park withhold their contribution from the city’s din. I live in Bedlam where the moon is always full.

Take a plane and a train and I am in a suburban Connecticut. This world has free standing homes with commanding entrances, color coordinated gardens, trees that reach for the sky, and lawns that roll on and on. There is some noise: birds, lawn movers, houses ceaselessly renovating themselves. But all this happens so far away, it might as well be happening in another county. The only blight on this landscape is the Cris Craft someone has left at the far end of their property. This is Connecticut’s idea of an eyesore.

Even on the weekend, people are well appointed, beautiful, rested. They are genial and say hello to strangers. But then everyone here does have something in common: they have won one of life’s lotteries. Actually, you can’t live here unless you have won most of life’s lotteries: intelligence, beauty, ambition, determination. The little local store looks like a film shoot, with everyone from central casting. The women are more interesting than Stepford wives but not less beautiful.

Montreal in the post war period was a little like Cape Canaveral. My neighborhood was all Jewish families preparing kids for lift off. Fifty years later, these kids now help run Canada, serving as distinguished jurists, university presidents, top surgeons, politicians, lords of capital, architects and writers, Mordicai Richler among them. This is that urban neighborhoods are good at, mixing raw talent with urban opportunity. Houston, we have ignition.

By contrast, the suburb is the place that ideas and ideators are supposed to come to die. Softened by self indulgence, lulled into a sense of complacency, stupefied by good fortune, things coast to a stop. Before you know it, your career is a Cris Craft sitting at the end of the garden. Every so often you think, “we really should take that out for a spin.” And then you don’t, again today.

This is in any case what the intellectuals tell us. The suburban paradise is a trap. It is the worst place for something who has taken orders in the University of Chicago priest hood. The instructions are clear: renounce the world, refuse distraction and blandishment, indulge the idea, not the ideator. And particularly: do not live in a leafy suburb!

Hmmm. But has anyone actually done an empirical test of the proposition that suburbs are bad for the life of the mind. Shouldn’t someone actually do a participant observation?