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Index of posts [term_name]
- “Factions” AND their critique as an American total social fact (May 15, 2025)
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…
- Class, culture & America (or Culture, class & America, or America: Culture and class): Ethnography and interpretation(s) (April 28, 2025)
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…
- Teachers College and “Family” (March 15, 2025)
From Arts (practical), to Life (psychological), to Education (social) in the attempts to understand and analyze, in order to educate about, perennial concerns with the settings in which men, women, and children meet most intimately and extensively over the course of their lives—in a word “in families.” For a new…
- about ethnoethnography (February 13, 2025)
I am always viscerally skeptical of fads in anthropology. Often, they disappear after only a few years, or move back into obscurity (“ontology”?) and I can ignore them. Others, like “identity” become mainstream and take over the discipline—as I discovered while playing “session roulette” at the AAA meetings over the…
- powerful representations of a culture (December 6, 2024)
[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…
- The ultimate ignorant school master? (November 9, 2024)
[ORIGINALLY POSTED ON FEBRUARY 17, 2024] One of our doctoral students, Ms. Mako Miura, recently challenged me with a question I had never entertained. We were discussing Jean Lave’s model for learning through participation (1991). We were focusing on some of the examples Lave mentions that point to the asymmetry…
- Barbie and their people (November 9, 2024)
[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…
- Race Consciousness, Racism (and race?): Contradictions with consequences (culture!) (July 28, 2023)
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)…
- The end of Corona (May 6, 2023)
I first mused about the end of the Corona epoch (a.k.a “COVID-19") two years ago. I did it again a year ago. In both cases I took into account both my (lived?) experience in the various polities I usually and more or less regularly inhabit (family, church, shops, university), as…
- While crossing Manhattan on 14th Street (February 6, 2023)
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…