[this was drafted in August 2024 but could not be posted at the time]
« Un spectacle extraordinaire, unique au monde et dans l’histoire des Jeux qui, je crois, a rendu nos compatriotes extrêmement fiers. » Emmanuel Macron ne tarit pas d’éloges sur la cérémonie d’ouverture des Jeux olympiques de Paris 2024, qui s’est déroulée sur la Seine vendredi 26 juillet. Ce samedi, le président de la République s’est réjoui du « formidable spectacle […] que les artistes et les athlètes ont donné ».
(published in various French newspapers in late July 2024)
As many noticed, the opening ceremonies to the Olympic games in Paris have been the occasion for much commentary. They will probably remain one of the most remembered ceremonies. I did not notice any cultural anthropologist weighing in and so, as I prepare to teach my first introductory course in the discipline, I thought I would write something and, given some of my critics who say I am not concerned enough with “power,” I will start with the paradoxes of governmentality.
Continue reading powerful representations of a culture →
[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.
Continue reading Barbie and their people →
The double scare quote marks should index my puzzlement. I am not wondering about “memes” but about what my puzzlement should be about. Genetics? Popular culture? Some polity (with boundaries policed by various agencies)? These questions are also indexes to my ignorance, and actually to my discovering, again, that I am ignorant of something “every one else” appears to know. “Every one” includes all those who use the word “meme” without quote marks, as something that does not require explanation or teaching. I will assume that some of those are quite sure they know what “memes” are about (for example those who coded a “meme generator”), and, of course, those who do not know but, for one reason or another do not mention their ignorance, perhaps hoping that no one will notice and make fun. As for me, I started noticing the word in the New York Times. For a while I could not quite figure what they were talking about though it seemed to be about social media, the young and cool, … and the readers of the paper to whom the editors did not explain what a “meme” might be. I was irritated, and also amused by my irritation since the whole experience confirmed for me how the media educates: by shaming readers into accepting whatever new conventions the editors deem necessary for everyone to accept as proper.
Continue reading What am I to do with “”memes”“ →
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 →
Musings about possibilities in the scholarly life of a professor of education and anthropologist