For any number of reasons, my wife Susan and I went to see Divergent last Friday. We were, by far, the oldest people in the theater. I was, about, the only male (except for a few fathers perhaps). Everybody else was a 12(+-2)-year-old girl.
If you have no idea what I am talking about, then you are not into Hollywood generated mass popular culture, or middle-brow cultures concerned with “gender” either. If “divergent” means to you something that it did not mean a few weeks ago then, as an intellectual adult (one of my readers, as I imagine them), I assume you also know that it is, among other things, the second (after The Hunger Games) of Hollywood responses to the accusation that there were no big budget, action adventure movies with girls as heroines. So, in the kind of brief synopsis that start this kind of commentary, Divergent is about a 16-year-old girl who violently restores a threatened order and then moves on into the wilderness—and 12-year-old girls know about that.
Continue reading Dreaming of diverging →
I am experimenting here with a blog that would relate to a class I am currently teaching. This Spring 2009, I am teaching Communication and Culture. It will mostly consist of thoughts than came to me after finishing a lecture. It is often the case that, while walking home, I wonder whether this or that point needed to be made more systematically.
For example, after the class on Saussure, and partially in response to a question about change and education, it came to me again that, at this point, it is what he started when emphasizing the arbitrariness of the sign is most relevant to the future of anthropological theory about culture and education, along with what he had to say about syntagms. Of course, I take arbitrariness much beyond where Saussure stopped, and will include all matters of classification (including the classification of human beings) as well as matters of processes (e.g. schooling as a means of socialization into participation). By direct implication, this means that arbitrariness unfolds in time and involves a possibly very large number of persons. It also implies that the very arbitrariness of the process will reveal itself continually to participants and so that they will have to keep telling each other what to do next (or what they should have done, etc.). This then directly ties to the major concern of ethnomethodology with ordering as an ongoing process.
Continue reading more on arbitrariness →
Musings about possibilities in the scholarly life of a professor of education and anthropologist