Category Archives: America

America, on 'culture', pattern, structure, system, popular culture

Familiar Things

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I did not think I would write about Stranger Things. I had watched the first season, kind of enjoyed it, and did not think further about it until I started readings in the New York Times how popular it had been and how excited many people were about the upcoming finale.

So I watched the whole thing again from the first to the last season. Again, I kind of enjoyed thing and, of course, started doing anthropology when things got slow.

I will assume that Wikipedia (like ChatGPT) is a good enough source to get a mostly non-controversial consensus about something like a popular culture product. Wikipedia says that “The show combines elements of horror, science fiction, mystery, coming-of-age, and drama.” It also gives statistical evidence about its success with various audiences. I imagine most of those who watched it “kind of enjoyed it” even when the initial wonder about the premise and conceit became obvious. I knew from the beginning that the monster would be vanquished, but found interesting the way the writers took us there.

I am not going to write about the obvious: horror, fantasy, science fiction. I am generally a sucker for the latter but there is not much of this after the first season. I generally pass the other two genres.

What I focus on, today, is on the way Wikipedia develops the “coming-of-age” trope by noting that the writers tell us that the action happens “in a town where nothing ever happens.” This town, “Hawkins,” is located “in Indiana. Locating it in Maine, Wyoming, Alabama, California, locations would probably have required other site-setting cliches. In any event, Hawkins appears mostly as homes, a research lab, and above all, the School. The School (middle and high) brings together the heroes and sets one of the central tensions of the show: the relationship between friends playing Dungeon & Dragons who are identified as “freaks” and bullied by a caricatural posse of “jocks.” The friends will save the world threatened by adults who are either evil (researchers, the military, the State) or just clueless (parents, teachers, administrators). And the friends are led by an ultimate outsider, a person without a name (“El”), who leaves after the victory against the human and non-humans demons. She leaves, alone and to the sorrow of all, because her staying would trigger again what she started, unwittingly.

funeral, town and mountains
The friends, the town, and the range

I am, of course, accentuating certain aspects of this epic, to stress its familiarity, and to wonder about the stability of the tropes and conceits. In that vein, Stranger Things could be taken as remake of Shane, and many other products of the American imagination as proposed by corporations (Hollywood, Netflix) and widely enjoyed. For those who do not know the novel/movie Shane it is a story about a group of new friends settling themselves in conflict with an evil entity who wants to evict, or kill, them all. They fight back led by a man with just one name (“Shane”), no past he will mention, and who leaves at the end, after the victory, because his staying (after killing the evil ones) would threaten the future peace of the friends

Let’s return to the “coming of age” trope. It is, of course, a very common one that is developed in many ways. It may appear as tragedy (as in Dreiser’s American tragedy), or drama as in Pretty in pink. It might be treated on a comic mode as in movies like Ferris Buehler’s day off. Or it may be treated more ponderously as in movies like American Graffiti or The last picture show. The list is long! I might even include Divergent (high school student fighting cliques to transform the world), or even Barbie and, why not Legally Blonde or even the much older movie Pillow talk which plays off one of the not so minor theme in Stranger Things: the off (at the start) and on (sometimes), and off again, romances.

The high point in the coming of age saga is, of course, high school graduation and, not so rarely, the valedictorian speech that summarizes it. The one in Stringer Things is wonderfully … familiar

Principal Higgins:
And then, it is my please to introduce someone who truly excelled during their time here
Henderson:
[Over the past years] there was a lot of bad … and a lot of good but but chaos can bring innovation, change, and this school, frankly it needed to change because we were so divided into the jocks, the nerds, freaks and in the chaos all these wall broke down and I made new friends. I made friends who were never even supposed to be my friends. And this was not just me. I saw this happen with so many others. And when you get to know people who are so different from you, you begin to learn more about yourself, you change, you grow. I am a better person now because of them, because of my friends. So I am not pissed off anymore but I am worried that, because now the chaos is over, Principal Higgins and every square like him is gonna do their damnedest to put everything back in order and I don’t want order

I have highlighted all the indexes (as I would now write about them) that led me to title my dissertation “Individualism, community, and love”:

  • “I am a better person [who] learned about myself” (individualism)
  • We are “friends who were never supposed to be my friends” (community)
  • “walls that broke down … and we made new friends that were not supposed to be our friends” (love).

In the dissertation, and the book that followed, a book I would now title “Together in America” rather than “Americans Together” (1978), I failed to face the critique of the State that is also inscribed in the speech (and in the script of Divergent, Barbie, or, prototypically, Shane)

The anthropological mystery in all this concerns the stability of what Lévi-Strauss might have called a “structure” (or what Propp called a “form,” or what AI uses to generate products that look more than right). One might focus on what may have changed over the years: the most visible might be the interracial romance, the gay and lesbian characters or the principal’s use of “their” to introduce the male hero.

These differences may actually help us understand the stability not in terms of “enculturation,” or “habitus,” but rather in term of the kind of corrective instruction that concerned Garfinkel when he wrote what I now consider should be the foundation of all theories of order: “when you screw around, then you get instructed.” So, I would interpret Netflix’s casting and scripting as responding to a fear of corrective instruction by voices inside and outside the corporation telling them: “why no black characters?! “why no gender diversity?!” voices that the producers of Shane would not have to worry about (though they probably had to worry about the overt critique of State and Economy that made them project into a mythical valley the struggle trade unions were conducting against the dominant corporations, mention of which might have led to be branded “communists”—a very dangerous things at the time).

 

 

America, of processes, on 'culture', on identity

Change and order in American modes of address and modes of reference

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Once upon a time, during my first two decades at Teachers College (in the department of, at first, Home & Family Life later reconstituted as Family & Community Education), I was addressed as “[FIRST NAME]” by colleagues and students alike. Twenty years, as I entered the programs in anthropology, I was addressed, like all my colleagues, as “Professor [LAST NAME].” In neither case did I have much of a choice (except to use these practices, changes and stabilities, to think further about poetry and constraints, culture and power—as well as resistance (“oddity,” “ignorance,” “agency”?).

Note that I only have evidence about the generality of the practices as they concerned “modes of address” in relatively public settings I have less evidence for “modes of reference” used by colleagues and students. Most of this evidence come from my own use in mostly private settings when I kept (and keep) referring to colleagues (and students) as [LAST NAME] (no honorific). Early in my career, I was once corrected by the president of Teachers College who had heard me refer to him as “Cremin” when I should have said “Larry.” So now I “learned,” or, rather, got into the habit of referring to colleagues as [FIRST NAME] when in company with colleagues (while continuing to refer to them as [LAST NAME] in other settings.

Here is everything that led Durkheim to write about “social facts” that are also “total” (as Mauss developed it) as well as “immortal”(as Garfinkel later put it). Wondering about naming practices must lead to something like what Durkheim, Mauss, Garfinkel (and many others) proposed since what might appear as only “habit” (if not habitus, or water for the fish) is accompanied by complex discourses that are triggered at any time when some challenge the practice (or ignore it).

The recent interest in language “ideologies” that is discourses about what language to use, how to do it, write it, etc., belongs to the same concerns.

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America, pattern, structure, system, popular culture, production of culture

“Factions” AND their critique as an American total social fact

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I concluded my earlier post (April 28, 2025) with a challenge: Should anthropologists continue to report all evidence of class (what I refer to here as “factions” based on race, genders, orientations, etc.) in the United States as an “American Dilemma” (Myrdal 1944), or as a conflict between “Dream and Reality” (Warner 1953; and passim in the literature), or, as I would suggest, constitutive of each other? Any answer is so heavily loaded in, precisely, America that anthropologists should maybe walk away from the questions and simply (!) provide the detailed, and theoretically well grounded, descriptive accounts that only they can produce. How the work may then be used for political purposes should remain a separate issue.

I had started by noting how Francis Hsu (1972) interpreted the emphasis on dilemmas and tensions as evidence of the unquestioned grounding of American social science in the core American ideological apparatus. Actually, Louis Dumont had made an even more radical point starting with his “Caste, Racism and ‘Stratification'” ([1961] 1980) and continuing in his exploration of the rise of individualistic discourses in Europe and then across the Atlantic ([1983] 1986). Both made the fundamental anthropological point that comparative evidence suggests that the emphasis on (in-)equality is a very American (Western?) thing.

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America, on anthropological theorizing, pattern, structure, system

Class, culture & America (or Culture, class & America, or America: Culture and class): Ethnography and interpretation(s)

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The earliest anthropologists were certain that they could use their methods and theories to understand “America.” Some (M. Mead, L. Warner) did, directly, and then soon many more have been certain that they could contribute to some understanding of the United States (its problems, futures, etc.). In this century-old and ongoing conversation some things have remain surprisingly stable. Over the generations ethnographers have reported observing, or hearing, very similar things. Not surprisingly, they have greatly differed in their interpretation of what they observed. I muse today about the implications of the tension between the perennity of observations and the shifting of the interpretations.  Where might anthropologists go from here?

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America, Gender, on language and expression, popular culture, proposing research

Barbie and their people

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[ORIGINALLY POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 3, 2023]

I would probably not have gone to see Barbie (the movie) if I had not read so much about it over the past few weeks. So, here is another take, including a take on the takes.

In brief, I was entertained by what might have been intended, by movie makers, their financiers, and above all Mattel as a little bit of fluff that would make careers and money. I knew that this was not a movie for most of my sections (the list would be long)—except perhaps for one: after all I am an anthropologist of America and this movie is an event in the history of the United States, a performance that triggered many other performances (particularly by my peers in the American intelligentsia). So, in the spirit of ethnography I will first focus on aspects of the film as object, and then ponder about what future anthropologists might do with this total social fact.

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America, Culturings, on 'culture'

Race Consciousness, Racism (and race?): Contradictions with consequences (culture!)

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From the time when I played “les coboilles et les indiens,” 70 years ago, in the streets of small Southern village, I have experienced something, that is, precisely, a “thing” that stood in my way, that I could play with, or fear. This was called “America” by French politicians (etc) as well as five year old boys. “It” (its armies, myths, festivals) was awe-inspiring and also mysterious. After many years establishing myself as an anthropologists of ‘America,’ I would now say that that which still fascinates me is not exactly the kind of object archaeologist might find in some jungle. America, as any other culture I’d say, is more of a set of dilemmas and contradictions that move conversations-with-practical-consequences—and thus, through their consequences do make things that trigger more conversations and things.

Case in point: The recent conversations about what to do (“ask applicants,” “take into consideration,” and other speech acts) when involved in evaluating students for admission into elite colleges.

Like many in these colleges, I have been reading several documents all written by people born, raised, and schooled in the United States (natives?). I read the “Opinion” (certainly not a description of the actual speech act!) by that most bizarre (cross-culturally) of institutions: the Supreme Court of the United States. I read the Opinion, some of the concurring statements, some of the dissenting statements, and many editorials and such summarizing the Opinion and telling what it “really” meant. And so I am left contemplating the ongoing production/construction of a culture (America) that continues to fascinate me as an emergent, and now someone jaded, Franco-European(-American?). Continue reading Race Consciousness, Racism (and race?): Contradictions with consequences (culture!) →

America, on 'culture', on community, on identity

While crossing Manhattan on 14th Street

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Half a century ago, when I searched for a catchy title for the book building on my dissertation (1972), I came up up with Americans Together (1978). I am not sure what I then meant by “Americans”—though I am sure that, from the time when I proposed the research (in 1970), I had been looking for a “pattern” or “structure” as I interpreted Benedict, Lévi-Strauss, or Dumont, to have done. But I may also have accepted that the plural “AmericanS” somewhat referred to a plurality of individuals. And thus I fell to American (patterned) common sense.

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Actor-Network, America, on 'culture'

On culture, free speech, and America

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Once upon a time culture was everything, even the kitchen sink (Tylor [1871] 1958). And then culture became a “value-concept” (Weber [1897] 1994) or a “system of symbols” (Schneider 1980). And then the word all but disappeared from serious theorizing, to be replaced by words like “epoch,” “episteme,” habitus, paradigm, and now “ontology.” But few, over the decades, have approached what “culture” attempted to capture, at least in the Boasian tradition, the way Latour did when he wrote:

‘Culture’ … word used to summarize the set of elements that appear to be tied together when, and only when, we try to deny a claim or to shake an association … No one lives in a ‘culture’ … before he or she clashes with others … People map for us and for themselves the chains of associations that make-up their sociologics. The main characteristics of these chains is to be unpredictable–for the observer” (Latour, author’s italics. 1987:201-202)

I have been clear about this since, at least, 1987 and this has guided my work with McDermott.

I am very comfortable with this way of putting what I have been trying to say, throughout my career about “America.” I have always written that I am not concerned with “everything that can be found in the United States” and even less with “what individual Americans believe”

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America, consciousness and knowledge, popular culture

High tech creationism?

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One of the many after effects of Trump’s election has been an altogether astonishing flowering of high fallutin exercises in cultural analysis.  I particular enjoy those who play with popularized (populist?) deconstructionism.  So, let’s join the (deep?) play.

Most of my own intellectual education has been plagued by the fundamental mis-readings of Saussure and Lévi-Strauss led by Derrida ([1967] 1978) and others.  In various ways if have tried to write against deconstructionism, sometimes specifically (1994),
and mostly by implication.  And yet, I have also felt party to many of these debates, particularly when they involve plays with “facts” and fiction, truth and relativism, history and narratives, and indeed the nature of reality (ontology?).

So, when the New York Times, as it regularly does, plays with “truth … that is always changing” (NYT, “How to fix the Met,” 3/1/2107) I could not resist tweeting and playing with the Times nemesis (and vice versa)—the author of the wonderfully truthy “truthful hyperbole.” Continue reading High tech creationism? →

America, on anthropological theorizing, social facting

on maintaining order in difficult spaces

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After 40+ years of American Anthropological Association meetings, I cannot pretend that they are not familiar.  I registered  in the same booths the association has used for many years.  And as I walked I recognized sounds, topics, physical styles, rhythms.

My own rhythms, by now, are anything but not familiar.  As I mentioned before (December 16, 2015), I play “session roulette”: I open a door to a session room without checking printed title, sit down at the back, and listen.  I continue to recommend this to students as a way to, one hopes, making serendipity work.  Sometimes I stay.  but, mostly, I leave as it sounds all too familiar, including phrases and jargon that would surely appear strange to perhaps every human being on the planet—except perhaps professional anthropologists (“this post-neo-liberal moment”?!?!!).  “Ontology” has replaced “post-modernism” which had replaced. … and …., but pretentious obfuscation of limited ethnography remains.  The tribal order remains even as name tags get bigger (they are now the size of small bibs!), last name are obscured and American communal individualism gets reproduced in symbolic practices even as the multiple hierarchies that move people in and out of anthropology remain (as any one concerned with job applications well knows).

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