One of the most remarkable documents we encountered during the past two weeks immersed in the British colonial archives was the 1988 All India Anthropometric Survey, North Zone : Basic Anthropometric Data. Why, in 1988, did the late K. S. Singh oversee the publication of an anthropometric survey, full of tables listing the skull sizes and other features of the various “peoples” of India? Anthropometry has a long history in India, especially with regards to the “Criminal Tribes” we were investigating; but why was India still producing such documents in 1988?

One answer is that this was simply the last gasp of a colonial legacy. The anthropometric data was collected in the 1960s. No new data was collected for this survey. In an article explaining the survey, Singh explains that the survey was set up during the last days of British rule:

The Anthropological Survey of India was set up in December 1945, barely 20 months before the transfer of power. The reason for this has to be sought in the intensive lobbying by administrator-anthropologists – including J.P. Mills, J.H. Hutton, W.V. Grigson, W.G. Archer with anthropologists like Verrier Elwin and C. von Furer-Haimendorf – over 15 years to create a special dispensation for the tribes under the Government of India Act of 1935 and through various suggestions and proposals including those for the creation of a Crown Colony in the North East and a protectorate for the tribals.

Their special interest in the tribes derived from a romantic tradition that presented the tribes in pleasant contrast to castes, the ‘unravished’ hills and plateau where they lived which reminded the colonial rulers of their homeland, and from their appreciation of the strategic location of the tribes and the enormous resources that their lands contained. However, these proposals were shot down by the home office which felt that the British regime would be much too impoverished after the Second World War to commit its meagre resources to such ventures.

But I’m not sure Singh can get off the hook so easily. In the last chapter of her excellent book Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality and Colonialism in South Asia Clare Anderson points out several ways in which the survey relied upon unreliable colonial ethnography in its analysis. Indeed, Singh’s more recent Peoples of India from 1995 seems to rely almost entirely upon highly questionable colonial sources for its chapters on the various Denotified Tribes (former “Criminal Tribes”).

There is a significant literature on the tremendous confusion (and corresponding need to maintain the illusion of certitude) that pervades colonial ethnography in India. In later posts I will write more about this (as I begin to read through this literature myself), suffice to say that much of what we read in these documents seemed more akin to cheap detective fiction than to ethnography. One document would say that a particular group ate jackal and that their women tended to be faithful to their husbands, whereas another would say the opposite about the same group (even when seemingly relying on the former document). We never learn on what basis this information is gleaned. But more than simply inaccurate, I would not even consider a listing of ethnic “traits” as ethnography in the first place.

So why was the Indian government still giving credence to such materials as late as the 1990s? Is it simply colonial ethnography on auto-pilot, or might it be that such forms of knowledge production are still seen as a useful means of legitimating certain kinds of state interventions amongst indigenous populations, many of which remain “troublesome”?

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It has been a little while since antropologi.info pointed out the open access journal anthropology of food but it is just now that I had the time to look through the journal. It is very French in that unique way that makes French people bad at rock and roll but able to turn the concept of milk into a charming idea for a theme issue of a journal. My favorite is the special theme issue crispy, crunchy… a dream of consistency which is even more mellifluous in French. Who can’t love an anthropology which raises crispiness to the status of a universal concept?

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Like kinship studies, semiotics can encompass vastly different sorts of analysis and description. Both veer between the logical and literary, sometimes in competing schools, sometimes across the corpus of the same writer, and sometimes in the very same text (e.g., The Elementary Structures of Kinship). Compare Barthes and Greimas. Anthropologists of kinship can get caught up in a severe (rigorous or obscure) formalism, although the sort of analysis that yielded insights from the imaginative working out of the permutations of structure(s) has been out of favor for a while—as we keep hearing. Analysis of kinship often relies on a special technical vocabulary that many anthropologists of my generation (educated in the 1990s) have not mastered (quick: what’s the difference between ‘descent’ and ‘filiation’?).

Likewise, semiotics can be tough-going for the uninitiated. Fortunately, philosophers at Helsinki University have put together a dictionary of one of the founding fathers of semiology, C. S. Peirce. Their handy site is copiously citationed and nicely put together. Readers thumbing through the pages of Fame of Gawa, for example, might find some of the entries convenient:

“As it is in itself, a sign is either of the nature of an appearance, when I call it a qualisign; or secondly, it is an individual object or event, when I call it a sinsign (the syllable sin being the first sillable [sic] of semel, simul, singular, etc); or thirdly, it is of the nature of a general type, when I call it a legisign.” (A Letter to Lady Welby, SS 32, 1904)

”... a Qualisign is any quality in so far as it is a sign. Since a quality is whatever it is positively in itself, a quality can only denote an object by virtue of some common ingredient or similarity; so that a Qualisign is necessarily an Icon. Further, since a quality is a mere logical possibility, it can only be interpreted as a sign of essence, that is, as a Rheme.” (‘A Syllabus of Certain Topics of Logic’, EP 2:294, 1903)

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I’m teaching fieldwork methods this fall, for the third time. As some who know me by my works might well suspect, this is unusual because I have never been trained in so-called fieldwork methods in anthropology. I was raised by anthropologists, but also by historians and sociologists, an engineer and one architect who worked for DARPA; so this is an odd role for me. I’m looking for other experimenters to compare and contrast with. If you teach methods, especially this fall, or you know someone who is trying to experiment with this kind of class, I’d love to know about it.

My class is structured roughly around the idea of the architecture studio—students are expected to work together, but on individual projects, and to present regularly and receive criticism from other students. I think of it as more fieldwork tactics than fieldwork strategy (or fieldwork techniques rather than fieldwork design), because I don’t expect students to actually do an ethnographic project in a single (albeit unfairly long) semester. Nonetheless I think students can learn a lot by trying out various things (observations, notes, interviews, audio, video, archives and public sources, transcriptions and codings and annotations, and collaborative writing and so on). I usually have them end the semester with a mini-AAA panel, in which students are responsible both for presenting their own research, and for actually writing something about a classmate’s project as well.

I am avowedly obscurantist about this class, because I don’t want it to be mistaken for a qualitative methods class that deals with inference, small-N issues and other problems of generalizability and representativeness. These are valid concerns for those who want to do qualitative survey research, but they don’t do justice to the difficulty of treating ethnographic fieldwork as an epistemological encounter. I teach ethnography as if it were a tool for testing and re-framing concepts and methods—not only for collecting data. I would much rather challenge students to come in with some familiar anthropological canard and use the ethnographic encounter to de-canardize it (to coin a term) by turning it into a concept that allows students to communicate across diverse topics, sites, areas, or problems. If students can figure that out, then I let them worry about N.

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Although Anna Tsing’s book is called Friction I feel it should really have been called Traction. This is a much less sexier title but did, I thought, capture what that book was about—the fact that ‘global’ forces are always realized in particular situations and it is the nature of these particulars that let them exert influence in the world. Of course, the contact of ‘global’ forces in ‘local’ situations always has unanticipated consequences (that is to say, ‘friction’) it is also efficacious—that is, it gives them the contact that allows them to move, giving them traction and making the world tractable for them.

My dissertation was a little bit about this. I called it ‘Making The Ipili Feasible.’ In it I played around with the idea of ‘feasibility’ that my informants used in the course of their fieldwork. The difference between a body of ore and a functioning mine is ‘feasibility’—a mine is feasible in a way that an ore body is not if the costs of getting the gold out of the ground is less than it costs to sell it. This cost is not just the result of ‘world gold prices’ or ‘operation costs’. While ‘building a mine’ involves the creation of a complex infrastructure, ‘constructing’ a mine, I argued, involved creating a complex social network of actors and institutions, contracts and payment schedules and agreements, of which the physical infrastructure of a mine is only an excresence.

‘The Ipili’ it seemed, had to be made ‘feasible’ in the same way that the mine was—the situation in my fieldsite was such that everyone agreed that there had to be an ethnic groups called ‘the Ipili’ to whom compensation could be paid for the land destroyed by mining. This group also had to have a certain form—for instance, it had to have a small number of legitimate representatives that could negotiate (and sign contracts) on its behalf, it had to ‘own land’ in certain way, and so forth. So my story was in some sense one of ethnogenesis—the creation of an ethnicity in a way that it didn’t exactly exist before, an old theme in the literature that goes back to, among other things, Morton Fried’s The Notion of Tribe. The flipside of this is that these requirements, along with some other more straight-forward military and political-economic factors, made the Ipili ‘feasible’ in another sense—they seized the opportunity given them and became efficacious political actors who squeezed every last cent that they could out of the mine and government. (more…)

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I love looking at, talking about, walking through and around new buildings. Usually I like new ones more than old ones. At the risk of revealing possibly bad taste: Paris is full of pretty buildings; oddly, my favorite is La Grande Arche de la Defense. The building is usually regarded as a failure (e.g., here mentioned along with a bunch of supposed architectural mistakes). Yet, I’ve always thought the way that it completes Paris’s monumental central axis is sublime.

Modernist buildings—especially in combination with modernist urban planning—have not infrequently received sustained criticism over the years as abjectly inhumane. In particular, modernist projects of urban renewal were reviled for the way that they tore up the textured fabric of cities in favor of highly rationalized, functionalist “machines for living.” San Francisco’s Western Addition was subject to post-war urban development in the 1950s and 1960s. Many there still lament the loss of blocks and blocks of the neighborhood’s precious Victorians, especially in a city that only 50 years before had suffered the cataclysmic destruction of the 1906 earthquake and fire.

The memory of that loss, and of the mistakes of redevelopment, still governs San Franciscan attitudes toward modern architecture. Unfortunately, that means that San Francisco now seems to consider its Victorians sacred. No urban project is ever announced in SF without facing the opposition and wrath of neighborhood activists. So rather than a modern city at the hub of one of the world’s most important centers of technological innovation (the Bay Area, yo), it can sometimes seem like a theme park complete with unique and thrilling rides. SF’s modern gay and lesbian center was forced to accomodate the demands of preservationists, and instead of an important piece of architecture on its main axis, it has this:

Modernist city planning, the anthropologist James Holston writes in The Modernist City, was based on a utopian ideal and a revolutionary program. In the mid-twentieth-century, more than one developing nation embraced the progressive ideals embodied in modernist planning as a means to hasten social and economic ‘advance.’ But, as Holston points out, the results were not infrequently mixed to negative. The city was radically defamiliarized and ‘de-natured’ in the new designs: not an organism but a machine. A new book connects up the development of modernist architecture to training in new engineering and manufacturing techniques. Transparency of materials (think glass) and monumental public spaces were thought to materialize a critique of private property. The ostensible equality of city residents was one goal.

Holston focuses his ‘anthropological critique’ on Brasilia, the now-legendary Ur-modernist capital of Brazil, and here he finds that the revolutionary program of the city’s planners failed, in part because the city’s inhabitants actively resisted it in their everyday lives and forms of dwelling. And we have become accustomed to such critiques. Imagine the surprise, then, of Tapiola, a suburban development on the outskirts of Helsinki.

You can learn about Tapiola in minute historical, cultural, and architectural detail at Tapiola 50, a website celebrating the development’s 50th anniversary. Tapiola was, to my knowledge, constructed under exactly the same design principals that other mid-20th-century urban developments were. I have lived in Tapiola for less than a month. And far from a modernist dystopia, the place seems like Le Corbusier’s Valhalla. Families roam clean and crisp public squares pushing distinctively Finnish super-strollers (most are equipped with huge wheels, the better for pushing through snow I’m told): SUVs for babies. Clusters of intelligently designed apartment buildings are seperated by birch glens and walking paths. Public buses, bikes, pedestrians, and cars co-exist. The overall impression is youthful, fair-skinned, orderly, and pleasant.

I can assure you that this is exactly what the place looks like in real life (minus the pixelation). It raises a question: is the modernist aesthetic in fact appropriate to particular sorts of ethos? A Finn might respond (and some have, when I asked a few) that Finns are not in fact predisposed to the Mediterranean life of the street that might be more characteristic of a Brazilian/Portuguese mode of dwelling. Perhaps, then, the modernist aesthetic ‘works’ in some places more than others. Perhaps the emphasis on ‘organic’ cities versus ‘denatured machines’ needs to take account of places like Tapiola, where modernist design appears to exist in felicitous harmony with a style of living. Or perhaps I haven’t lived here long enough to know where the fissures and dissatisfactions lay.

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Reading Gupta and Ferguson’s article Spatializing States (free PDF from Gupta’s excellent website, where there are many more) what I find so naggingly dissatisfying about it is not the project but the language. “Taking the verticality and encompassment of states not as a taken-for-granted fact, but as a precarious achievement,” they write, “it becomes possible to pose the question of the spatiality of contemporary practices of government as an ethnographic problem.” Exactly. Yet it seems to me the language of ‘spatializing the state’ helps obscure some key analytic points in how we might go about analyzing these practices. Although, to be sure, it is probably a lot sexier than the language that I am about to propose.

At root, ‘spatializing the state’ refers to metaphors for space used by people to describe the state’s relationship to its subjects. Thus the state is ‘above’ the people, it’s agents are ‘everywhere’ watching you, and so forth. These metaphors, when taken as texts which orient people to action, enable the coordination of action across time and space and produce congeries of behavior that eventually are attributed to a ‘state’ in whose name all of this action is attributed. Thus we might want to talk about the two related by distinct meanings of how ‘spatialization’—on the one hand a very familiar symbolic-anthropological (Fernandez or even Geertz) notion that there is a ‘metaphorical space’ of images of the state which can be described and explored on the one hand, and on the other an analysis of action across space carried out in the name of, or at the bequest of, ‘the state.’ The second, clearly, is related by the first

But what is the nature of that relation? That, it seems to me, is the question that an anthropology of the state must post. To do so it would have to work between the crack of these two meanings of ‘spatialization’. We as social scientists can demonstrate that the self-accounts of state agents are actually very poor descriptions of the complex relationship between cultural logics of the state-cum-organizing metaphor and how they are actually instantiated in (as it were) reality. This is most clear in the case of ‘weak states’ where ‘corruption’ blurs the line between actions carried out qua individual and qua office holder. But in ‘strong states’ where the seam between state imagery and state practice is stronger we can still see that, as it were, the glue holding them together might not be what they thing it is. Managing the complex reflexivity of all this is a difficult task, however, and I fear that language like ‘spatializing the state’ may make it harder rather than easier. (more…)

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Wow. I’m super psyched to see the latest issue of The Contemporary Pacific is out. It’s a special issue on ‘Melanesian Mining Modernities’ edited by my colleagues Paige West and Martha MacIntyre. The reason that I’m super-psyched is that one of my articles, “Who is the ‘original affluent society’?” is in it. The table of contents and abstracts are available on Project Muse and if you subscribe to Project Muse then you can also download them all, including mine. The abstract for my paper—which I apparently wrote at some point, tho I have no memory of it now!—goes like this:

The idea of the “ecologically noble savage” once linked environmental activists and indigenous people. Today the concept is increasingly seen as problematic. In the Porgera district of Enga Province, Papua New Guinea, Ipili people confront massive social change brought about by the presence of a large gold mine. This paper explores how Ipili people find some aspects of global consumer culture to offer utopian possibilities for change, while others present dystopic inversions of their own culture. In doing so, it compares Western attempts to understand Ipili as noble or ignoble savages with Ipili attempts to make sense of the material culture and mores of outsiders. It concludes that both Ipili and westerners have unsettling insights into each other’s culture.

Of course after I wrote this piece I immediately discovered Affluence and Cultural Survival ed. Richard Salisbury and Elisabeth Tooker, which I should have added to my biography. Also, although I cite it, I didn’t have a chance to read Ira Bashkow’s excellent new volume The Meaning of Whtemen, which I know of only in dissertation form. But anyone who has ever submitted anything to Contemporary Pacific knows that they do not just publish any old thing—I’m amazed at the rigor and scrutiny of the review process there and my article is much better (although much more exhausting to write!) because of it. They even let me use the phrase “Johannine phenomenology”! So if you are looking for state of the art ethnography on mining in Melanesia, look no further.

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Today is the first day of teaching for me at my new university and as I am plunged back into the world I find myself reading articles on the Intatweb about how to give effective lectures ten minutes before I start lecturing (as if this will somehow help!) So I revisited On The Discussion Class by James Redfield, which is actually about the joys of lecturing. This is one of my favorite essays on teaching of all time. It works for me mostly because I am a product of the University of Chicago and Hyde Park, although not nearly to the same degree that Redfield is (he is Robert’s son). But I also love the deeply learned, eloquent, and very humble tone of it, and the deep sensitivity and amount of thought that gets packed into what is, after all, a very short piece.

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The latest issue of Ethnography (I should say, latest in my slow world, its from March of 2006) is a special issue (SAGE publications) on ethnography of Journalism, edited by Dominic Boyer and Ulf Hannerz. For those of you who long for a meatier analysis of contemporary journalism than “blogs are destroying conventional journalism” or “journalism is dead, long live journalism” then this might be it. One of the great virtues of it is that it has a wonderful mix of fieldsites across the various articles; it reads kind of like a SciFi World Cup 2012: Sweden v. India; Palestine vs. Ghana; EU vs. WTO.

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This summer marked the passing of a birthday of sorts, the 25th anniversary of the first identification of AIDS in the United States. Although there is conclusive and still-emerging evidence that people died of AIDS at least as early as the mid-twentieth-century in Africa, it was the appearance of a rare form of pneumonia in otherwise healthy young men in Los Angeles that began to concern the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in 1981. National attention focused on “AIDS at 25,” as for example on the cover of Newsweek.

In San Francisco’s legendary Castro neighborhood, year 25 of the epidemic was recognized by community organizers with a banner mounted on the side of a Bank of America building at the corner of 18th and Castro. (The same site became a make-shift memorial to Princess Diana when she died; it was also the site of a little noticed memorial to both Jacques Derrida and Rodney Dangerfield the week that they died.) Organizers created large papier mache flowers that drooped over the Castro for a week or so. But though the gay community was ‘officially’ remembering this tragic event in its history, no one I know in my clique of thirtysomething denizens of the gay ghetto actually talked about it. The flowers just hung there and then went away.

HIV/AIDS is in the public eye again, in part because of the 2006 international AIDS conference in Toronto, which just ended. Reports from the conference indicate that the big ‘Double Bill’ session, featuring two of the world’s most famous and powerful men—Bill Gates and Bill Clinton—was standing room only. News is hopeful: antiretroviral drugs have dramatically transformed the disease from a terminal syndrome to something like a manageable chronic illness. These drugs reduce fatality, they can reduce infection, and they are very expensive. Massive funding will be needed to get these medications to the people in poor places who badly need them, and these include parts of the United States. Controversy swirls around whether or not U.S. initiatives aimed at Africa are constrained by the moralistic and inefficacious imperatives of the Bush regime. The consensus appears to be that because the means to hasten an end to the epidemic are now available, there is now a collective moral burden to make these means available to those whose lives they could save.

Meanwhile, in the United States, recent developments in HIV, law, and public health may be of interest to social anthropologists, especially those who work at the interstices of government, public health, medical technologies, and kinship. Reasons are manifold (AIDS disproportionately affects marginalized people, policy sometimes depends on knowledge of sexual practices and social networks that ethnographic methods uniquely reveal, the epidemic of its very nature mobilizes complex inter-connected/sometimes fractious social relations of vastly different orders [between sex partners, between ‘North’ and ‘South’]). I am am presently trying to think through some aspects of HIV/AIDS from a social perspective. I am interested in how different kinds of persons and publics are summoned by HIV. An example:

This image is from a pervasive social marketing campaign in the United States. You can see it, and similar ads, on the sides of buses or trams, in subway stations, on billboards, all over major urban areas. This year, I noticed several of these advertisements in San Francisco that were timed to coincide with National HIV Testing day. Here is an abundantly happy couple: attractive, apparently quite in love. The ‘know’—knowledge of HIV status—the campaign assures us, is ‘spreading,’ to my mind an unfortunate metaphor in the context of an epidemic. Who is hailed in this call to gain self-knowledge? What indeed does this couple know? What is implied about the relationship between them? What does the advertisement ask its viewers to do? What does it promise them?

In upcoming posts, I will hazard an analysis of some current U.S. HIV prevention strategies, paying attention especially to ways that they construct ‘the public’ and its good. Recent emphasis on individual HIV testing, combined with legal decisions that criminalize the transmission of HIV between persons (and that problematize the status of one’s self-knowledge in the context of HIV), raise vital questions about individual agency and community responsibility. A provocation: suppose the person who responds to the “Know HIV/AIDS // No HIV/AIDS campaign” tests positive for HIV. How will this advertisement and ones like it frame the experience, its meanings, its psychological effects, its social entailments?

In an era in which biomedical interpellation is a pervasive and over-riding fact of life, the means and meanings of medical testing bear ethnographic inspection and social reflection.

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Wow. Strong’s last post was our five hundredth. According to our Word Press dashboard we have 500 posts and 3,883 comments. This means that we not really 133t be we are ‘soo ebbe’. But still. It’s a great milestone, and the comments to posts ratio is wonderful sign of the vibrant community that has grown up around Savage Minds. So congratulations to everyone who has visited the site—the anthropology blogosphere wouldn’t be the same without you!

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I just ran into a site called www.droppingknowledge.org which will be sponsoring a giant ‘round table’ conference in Berlin in September, bringing together 112 of the “world’s biggest thinkers” to answer pressing questions facing people today. It’s a groovy site with a cool graphical sensibility, though, upon my cursory review of the site and its projects, it seems rather utopian. Like other internet initiatives, it raises the question: What will the social effects of massive connectivity and ease of information distribution be? One thing is for sure, these people think size matters. They are building the “world’s biggest table” and the site seems quite fond of elaborating just what a massive project they are putting together.

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(I’ve been thinking lately about anthropology as sapiential text (more on this later) and recently revisited On Intellectual Craftmanship. I was amazed how clearly the reasons why scholars blog were laid out in the opening paragraphs. In what follows I have changed none of Mills’s original language except for replaced ‘journal’ and ‘file’ with ‘website’ and ‘blog’. Clearly Mills didn’t envision the files he advocates as public documents, but other than that the parallels are uncanny)

It is best to begin, I think, by reminding you, the beginning student, that the most admirable thinkers within the scholarly community you have chosen to join do not split their work from their lives. They seem to take both too seriously to allow such dissociation, and they want to use each for the enrichment of the other. Of course, such a split is the prevailing convention, deriving, I suppose, from the hollowness of the work which people in general now do. But you will have recognised that as a scholar you have the exceptional opportunity of designing a way of living which will encourage the habits of good workmanship. Scholarship is a choice of how to live as well as a choice of career; whether aware of it or not, the intellectual worker forms his or her own self in working toward the perfection of craft; to realise personal potentialities, and any opportunities that come his or her way, such a person constructs a character which has as its core the qualities of the good workman.

What this means is that you must learn to use your life experience in your intellectual work: continually to examine and interpret it. In this sense craftsmanship is the center of yourself and you are personally involved in every intellectual product upon which you may work. To say that you can “have experience,” means, for one thing, that your past plays into and affects your present, and that it defines your capacity for future experience. As a social scientist, you have to control this rather elaborate interplay, to capture what you experience and sort it out; only in this way can you hope to use it to guide and test your reflection, and in the process shape yourself as an intellectual craftsman. But how can you do this? One answer is: you must set up a web site, which is, I suppose, a sociologist’s way of saying: – keep a blog. Many creative writers keep blogs; the sociologist’s need for systematic reflection demands it. In such a website as I am going to describe, there is joined personal experience and professional activities, studies under way and studies planned. In this blog, you, as an intellectual craftsman, will try to get together what you are doing intellectually and what you are experiencing as a person. Here you will not be afraid to use your experience and relate it directly to various work in progress. By serving as a check on repetitious work, your blog also enables you to conserve your energy. It also encourages you to capture “fringe- thoughts”: various ideas which may be by-products of everyday life, snatches of conversation overheard on the street, or, for that matter, dreams. Once noted, these may lead to more systematic thinking, as well as lend intellectual relevance to more directed experience.

You will have often noticed how carefully accomplished thinkers treat their own minds, how closely they observe their development and organise their experience. The reason they treasure their smallest experiences is that, in the course of a lifetime, the modern individual has so very little personal experience and yet experience is so important as a source of original intellectual work. To be able to trust yet to be sceptical of your own experience, I have come to believe, is one mark of the mature worker. This ambiguous confidence is indispensable to originality in any intellectual pursuit, and the file is one way by which you can develop and justify such confidence.

By keeping an adequate blog and thus developing self-reflective habits, you learn how to keep your inner world awake. Whenever you feel strongly about events or ideas you must try not to let them pass from your mind, but instead to formulate them on your blog and in so doing draw out their implications, show yourself either how foolish these feelings or ideas are, or how they might be articulated into productive shape. The blog also helps you build up the habit of writing. You cannot “keep your hand in” if you do not write something at least every week. In developing the file, you can experiment as a writer and thus, as they say, develop your powers of expression. To maintain a blog is to engage in the controlled experience.

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That our possessions encode and elicit our identities as persons seems both a commonplace and a fancy observation. For example: notions of ‘taste’ and ‘style,’ in the U.S., Japan, or wherever, reflexively link up practices of adornment and comportment with expressions of self. I love reading fashion blogs for the way they analyze self-presentation through clothing, often with refined understandings of cultural history. Slate compiles several excellent ‘street style’ blogs, many of which are urban micro-ethnographies of what people are up to in places like London or Helsinki. This on-going satire and serious critique of celebrity fashion contains some of the sharpest writing and analysis I have read, whilst also being super funny. Where contemporary usages of ‘style’ seem to me to emphasize creativity and individual expression, ‘taste’ points to perduring differences of a structural sort, most obviously those of class. Could you call these categories a metapragmatics of dress?

Clothing is easy. Here’s another easy one: pharmaceuticals. It’s not that hard to find examples of cultural projects that re-create materially what we human beings are. Pharmaceutical projects and products redefine the horizons of possible human being. Docility in body, docility in mind: fascinating new work is uncovering means through which mood is medicalized and controlled in consequential ways. And the corporate appetite for research subjects demands careful tracking and attention even as we read today that in the U.S. a federal panel is recommending a relaxation of regulations concerning the use of prisoners in pharmaceutical testing.

Accounts of the intermediation of the material and the symbolic or the corporeal and the social can include the lighthearted (tracking the category of ‘formal shorts’ over time) or something a bit more serious (noting disparities in access to life-changing drugs whilst criticizing a medical model that would reduce people to their molecular components). Current critical attention to ‘biopolitics,’ to the social processes and effects of science, to emergent digital worlds, and the like is exploding. We’ve grown accustomed to the claim that ‘nature’ has been superceded as either a symbolic construct grounding human affairs or the ‘world’ in itself ‘before’ our activity on it. Again, these notions can be given robust philosophical genealogies, or they can be illustrated with the rather obvious. Global warming grabs the headlines, but it’s worth remembering that the entire biosphere was also transformed by the atomic testing programs of states like the U.S. over the course of the twentieth century.

After all, we all inhabit worlds that contain and evince the traces of human activity in the past. And I don’t just mean the accumulated junk in my apartment. A visitor to highland New Guinea might be chagrined to learn that the grasslands of its valleys are largely anthropogenic. But once you realize that those valleys also contain traces of the radioactive activity of states on the other side of the planet, scaled observation (my apartment, a valley in New Guinea, the whole atmosphere) is rendered almost irrelevant because nature/culture encompasses all of them. Even Peter Day’s Global Business program today reflects on how people are nothing if not creatures who remake themselves via ‘the tool’—whether the tool is a grass fire to clear land for gardening or a personal fabrication device.

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