Category Archives: pattern, structure, system

History, critique and developments on an old, difficult, intuition about life

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

Familiar Things

February 9, 2026 Herve Varenne Leave a comment

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 [partner_blg path=”?p=799″]Divergent[/partner_blg] (high school student fighting cliques to transform the world), or even [partner_blg path=”?p=2521″]Barbie[/partner_blg] 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, pattern, structure, system, popular culture, production of culture

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

May 15, 2025 Herve Varenne Leave a comment

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)

April 28, 2025 Herve Varenne Leave a comment

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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on anthropological theorizing, pattern, structure, system

on pattern recognition by humans and machines

September 19, 2022 Herve Varenne Leave a comment

September 16, 2022

“Pattern recognition”: inevitable though fragile (and necessarily dis-…ing?) productions on which to base some future action—or not.

Two recent pieces in the New York Times triggered my anthropological imagination. The first is an enthusiastic review of recent developments in “Artificial Intelligence” (“We Need to Talk About How Good A.I. Is Getting,” Kevin Roose, Aug. 24, 2022). Would you believe that you can ask, in text, for a “Black-and-white vintage photograph of a 1920s mobster taking a selfie” and you get an image that makes sense, to an aging professor and apparently many others in 2022? Roose’s piece mentions in passing that AI generated representations could be politically problematic. They have already been. A day earlier, another piece had been published that gives a sense of what can happen next when AI is let loose. That piece was titled “Capitol Drops ‘Virtual Rapper’ FN Meka After Backlash Over Stereotypes.” The piece was about “a virtual ‘robot rapper’ powered partly by artificial intelligence, who boasts more than 10 million followers on TikTok” (Joe Coscarelli, Aug. 23, 2022). As some critics wrote the robot rapper is built on “an amalgamation of gross stereotypes, appropriative mannerisms that derive from Black artists, complete with slurs infused in lyrics.”

In other words the critics recognized the image as that of a Black rapper and thereby accredited that the AI algorithms had indeed caught what in other AI contexts is called a “pattern.” This recognition confirms Roose’s evaluation about “how good A.I. is getting.” Whether this pattern should be used to produce something (not so) new is another thing altogether.

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Corona, on anthropological theorizing, pattern, structure, system

on “Corona”

April 14, 2020 Herve Varenne Leave a comment

Again, C19 may kill you, Corona closes restaurant. (March 28, 2020)

So, what is “Corona”? In my younger days, I might have meant it as the word (Saussurian signifier) pointing to an object (Saussurian signified). This may still be common sense, even after the “ontological turn” in anthropology which, as I understand it, is meant to make us consider the “thing-ness” of a possible entity such as “Corona.” The question is actually a classical one in anthropology: when talking about something social (“social structure”) are we talking about an object or about a model built by observers to manipulate? This was the core of the debate between Radcliffe-Brown and Lévi-Strauss (1953). For Radcliffe-Brown, the matter was common sensical. He had made it simple in a foundational text:

If I visit a relatively stable community and revisit it after an interval of ten years, I shall find that many of its members have died and others have been born; the members who still survive are now ten years older and their relations to one another may have changed in many ways. Yet I may find that the kinds of relations that I can observe are very little different from those observed ten years before. The structural form had changed little. ([1940] 1965: 192-3)

We could translate it into Corona (from my experiences in Wyoming and New York City:

As I drove 2100 miles, none of the people that I met, directly or indirectly in Jackson, Wyoming moved with me. In a small Jackson grocery story, a table had been put between the cashier and the customers to increase the distance between them. In New Rochelle, another such table had been set up in a small bakery. The structural form was the same.

The problem, as Lévi-Strauss saw it, is that the “structural form,” what we might now call the product of a social construction of reality, is actually not accessible to the anthropologist’s senses. Quite before Geertz told us that what anthropologists actually do is “write,” Lévi-Strauss told us that what they must do is make a model (a form of writing) based on observations (including observations of the models participants might have themselves made of their relations). That is the anthropologist-as-scientist must do something similar to what the biologists investigating C19 are doing, that is transform what they get to see using a massively cultural machinery (electron microscope and all that they entail) into something they can manipulate (for example by coloring various parts). In other words, biologists must ‘write’ C19 to manipulate it.

Given all this, what is to be modeled by an anthropologist investigating the social response to C19 that made a total institution (in Goffman’s sense) for 6.8 billion people, and its consequences?

The simple, negative, answer is: I am not going to model a “social structure” or “system.”

Anthropologists of my generation suspected that this was the case and, to a large extent, nobody writes about “social structures” any more, though some are tempted to re-introduce the concept, for example those investigating “structural racism.” Those who know my work also know that I always resisted Geertz’s pessimism (encouraged by Derrida’s ‘deconstructionism’): it is NOT all words. If something is a “social construction,” then it is VERY real, an object that stands in the way of the human beings who bump into it. In my work with McDermott we traced what makes schooling a problem by focusing on the consequences that something made to serve all children so that “none are left behind” actually identifies 50% of all children as “below average,” in need of identification, help and remediation (Successful Failure 1998). Schools in the United States and around the world are determinedly made up (cultural, artificial, arbitrary). McDermott and I summarized all this by writing about the “School” (capitalized) as a “thing,” made up of ongoing events of some sort, for example the School is set up to weigh human beings on all sorts of statistical scales. How could that be? McDermott and I responded that it had to do with “America” in the School that it made over the past centuries.

Ten years later, Jill Koyama (2010), quite rightly criticized Successful Failure for not tracing the mechanisms that keep re-producing the School. Pointing at America without specifying the mechanisms is insufficient, and possibly dangerous if it leads some to assume that America is made by … encultured, habituated, Americans.

To make her point, Koyama followed a subset of another one of the major pieces of the many legislations which, over the past centuries were aimed at revitalizing the public school. She looked at the life of “Supplemental Educational Services,” a small part of an act to ensure that “No Child [is] Left Behind.” Rather than “deconstructing” the act, she followed its life for some of those who could not escape it: corporate chiefs, mayors, principals, teachers, parents for whom the act was either resource to use (particularly for the large corporations that were contracted to “deliver” the services) or obstacle to navigate. Koyama was inspired in this analysis by Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory, and particularly by that aspect of the theory that insists that a “network” is never closed. A network is not a system or a structure. A network is not even really a “thing” so much as a set of pathways through which the stuff that happens, particularly government decrees, travel though a population and activate something in them.

In that perspective, “America” is an actor-network. So is Corona in my writing. That is, when I write “Corona can close restaurants,” I am asking social scientists to look for the linkages along which a governor’s decree move, as well as all the sub-decrees that various people in the network have to enact so that this restaurant here at this time is indeed closed.

Modeling Corona (in one or another of its instances) can then allow us to compare it to other such events in human history—say the School.

Patterns of culture in America

June 14, 2012 Herve Varenne Leave a comment

I have been imagining titles for a possible book where I would bring together my papers of the last few years, though perhaps with a new twist as I continue to re-read Boas, and some of the Boasian, as if he was a precursor of ethnomethodology, and thereby reconstruct ethnography as fundamental to any social science.

Thus I am tempted by a title that directly echoes Ruth Benedict (1959 [1934]) where “[PoC] in America” stands for the implicit “PoC [in human history]” where “in human history” could be said to be the “sub-title” of the Boasian call for acknowledging the local and historical aspects of any anchorings of human beings in particular times and places. But, of course, I read Benedict’s title without the connotation that each pattern is a positive entity of some sort. I would argue that what is sometimes labeled a “unit” in the book (e.g. in Boas’s introduction 1934) should be understood more as a “model” in Lévi-Strauss’s sense (or an “immortal fact” in Garfinkel’s sense). But more on that some other time.

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of poverty, on anthropological theorizing, pattern, structure, system

pathos, policy, and the culture of poverty

June 8, 2012 Herve Varenne 2 Comments

The shanty is black within and without … A black woman sits on a log, with half-a-dozen small specimens of humanity about her, and of all shades of black, brown, and yellow… ‘Where is your husband?’ … ‘Dunno, missis, don’t care, he may go to de debbil for I know and cares.’” (E. B. Emery Letters from the South, on the Social Intellectual and Moral Condition of the Colored People (Boston, 1880: 9-10) – as quoted by E. F. Frazier 1966 [1939]: 256)

Thus opens Chapter XVII of one of the most powerful book of the 20th century—as far as family and poverty policy is concerned at least.. Frazier uses here a classic anthropological rhetorical trick many anthropologists continue to use (and which I try to discourage among my students): He quotes a long extract from some text to introduce (illustrate? prove? enlighten?) some analytic statement. At the end of the paragraph following the quote, Frazier tells us “of course, such cases … are not typical” (1966 [1939]: 257). So why start in this manner a chapter discussing uncertain statistics about “illegitimacy among Negroes”? And why should it appear directly after the statement possibly most quoted by people like Moynihan who, twenty years later, expanded on Frazier to make a “Case for National Action’ “to strengthen the Negro family so as to enable it ro raise and support is members as do other families” (Moynihan 1967 [1965]: 93)? Frazier had written: “Family desertion among Negroes in cities appears, then, to be one of the inevitable consequences of the impact of urban life on the simple family organization and folk culture which the Negro has evolved in the rural South” (1966 [1939]: 255)I went back to Frazier and then Moynihan as Ray McDermott and I have been discussing the roots of the “culture of poverty” argument and the failure of the anthropological critique of this argument to have the long term impact we were sure, when we were in graduate school in the early 70s, it would have. In the late 70s and 80s, it was almost too easy to teach the critique. To students, it was simple, Frazier and Moynihan were “racist” and that settled that. Students were often surprised to learn that Frazier was one of the first PhD’s granted by the University of Chicago to Blacks. But learning this did not change much.

What strikes me now is how much the culture of poverty made sense for the most liberal of concerned sociologists and anthropologists, as it had made sense to ladies from Boston such as the “Miss E. B. Emery” (as her name is listed on the title page of her Letters from the South) whose book must have moved Frazier. Like her, they sought and brought out the most pathetic of experiences to justify any analysis of the “roots of the problem” (as Moynihan calls them). It made sense because, as I imagine their political contexts, Emery’s letters, like Frazier’s book (and the dissertation on which it was based), like Moynihan’s Report, are attempts to convince policy makers (from activist women in Boston, to the Congress in Washington) that “we must do something.”

This missionary urge still moves students, like it moves policy makers, and blinds them to the dangers of unanalyzed pathos—particularly when it becomes the opening statement in a long chain of “if/then” argumentation: if the women had seven husbands (“small speciments … of all shades”) then there is something wrong with her; if there is something wrong with her it is because of her social conditions (cue here any version of socialization theory you prefer); given that there is something wrong with her, simply changing social conditions will not be enough to prevent her children from being wrong in the same way as she is wrong; thus, “we” must create programs to help her; but first we must diagnose what exactly is wrong with her… [TO MY READERS: if someone would try their hand at transforming this progression into the kind of cartoon Latour drew for the double helix, I would be most thankful!)

This argumentation can produce volumes of “research,” both fundamental and applied, and policies upon reformed policies along with endless “empirical research” providing “evidence based” suggestions about what “really works.” But what if there is nothing wrong with the woman Emery met? What if her very survival through many men, pregnancies, labors and deliveries, childhood diseases and death, etc., suggest complex strategies involving many people and many modes of acting? I am thinking here of Scheper-Hughes’s portrayal of Brazilian women (1992) and of her acknowledgment of the process that led them her pathos (leading to the urge to help) to understanding. The women were suffering but there is nothing wrong with them and we should not burden them with our pathos. We do not need to develop complex diagnostic tools, and the accompanying enormous bureaucracy, to help the women. As far as the kind of diseases that afflicted many of the children of the Brazilian women, clean water was all that was needed.

The best anthropological response to the culture of poverty argumentation was the accumulation of stories of survival, including the production of local patterns. I am thinking here of Carol Stack’s justly famous All our kin. But, as we found out, these stories are not enough. They get dismissed as “anecdotes,” “just so stories,” and altogether irrelevant to “the problem.” At worst, anthropologists can be accused to undermine policies. One of our student, Karen Velasquez, told me of her dismay when she was accuse of insensitivity to the plight of Mexican migrants in New York City, when she told the wonderful story of a mono-lingual Mexican man learning how to read bar codes in order to stock shelves in a Korean grocery.

In other words, it is not enough to publish alternate “letters from the South” (like Gundaker has done, 1998). We must also justify again why tales of “suitable” adaptation to difficult ecological conditions (to expand on Boas as Michael Scroggins and I have done recently) are necessary for interventions that are sensitive to local conditions unimaginable in their detail. The point of careful ethnography is not only to tell “what other shepherds have said” (Geertz 1973) but, more importantly, when the work is conducted in our own valleys, to help those who would help so that they do not make things even more difficult.

ethnomethodology, on anthropological theorizing, pattern, structure, system, production of culture

On studying “dynamic changes”

May 26, 2012 Herve Varenne 1 Comment

A quote for the day, from Boas:

In short, the method which we try to develop is based on a study of the dynamic changes in society that may be observed at the present time. We refrain from the attempt to solve the fundamental problem of the general development of civilization until we have been able to unravel the process that are going on under our eyes. (1940 [1920]: 285)

The genealogy of ethnomethodology in ethnography has sometimes been told to me as passing through Hymes and Labov to Malinowski. I have been wondering about Boas, and found this quote.

I am reading this analogically to the work we have been conducting within “societies” (e.g. the United States). I am arguing for transforming what might be called the units of critique from civilization/society to society (in the sense of hegemonic pattern of institutions) /family (in the sense of any local polity of practice).

So, in the spirit of Lave and McDermott (2002), here is a draft rewrite of Boas’s quote:

In short, the method we try to develop is based on a study of the dynamic changes in a family (community, local polity) that may be observed at the time of the observation. We refrain from the attempts to solve fundamental problems of the general correlations between social structure and individual behavior until we have been able to unravel the process that are going on under our eyes.

Boas challenged the “grand theorists” of humanity when they tried, for example, to correlate “economic life and family organization” (1963 [1911]: 168). We must now challenge the waves of theorists, particularly in sociology and economics, when they relate generalize plausible correlations between type of condition (poverty, disability) and type of local organization. Like Boas, we must ask for research demonstrating the actual linkages and, given our experience that these linkages will not be found, then provide the systematic ethnographic evidence that families (etc.) are not (any more) predictable in their local arrangements (than the “societies,” e.g. Kwakiutl, etc., that were used as units of analysis in late 19th century anthropology).

So, let’s read this quote analogically again:

A constant relation between loosely connected [aggregated for statistical analysis] or entirely disconnected aspects of culture is improbable when the differences between the activities are great and different groups of individuals participate in the activities involved. (1963 [1911]: 167)

This may allow us to rephrase the critique of the “culture of poverty” (more on that soon).

[The initial quote also echoes the rationale for philology in the 19th century when some linguists decided to eschew grand theories of language and its origin in order to actually understand human languages as they were observable and changed. This movement towards history did lead to Saussure and his relatively successful search for synchronic processes. Similar movements by Boas’s students may have been premature. Hymes and his students generally think that Saussure was similarly premature.]

America, Culturings, disability, pattern, structure, system

Moral order, moralizing, and making it a bad day (the American way)

November 26, 2010 Herve Varenne Leave a comment

In my earlier post about some of my experiences at the 2010 meetings of the American Anthropological Association, I talked about the elevators with a parenthesis about students from our programs at Teachers College. I am now opening the parenthesis to develop something that came to me when listening to the paper by Linda Lin. Right after listening to her paper, I introduced the session Gus Andrews and Sarah Wessler organized and that they titled “The dark side of legitimate peripheral participation.” The continuity was striking. Of course, I liked a title that evoked both Jean Lave and Darth Vader making it a bad day for a galaxy, far, far away (that is the galaxy right around the corner from Teachers College (Columbia University)–if not Teachers College itself.

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