Friday Funnies: Paris Hilton, Situationist?

I subscribe to a ‘director’ at YouTube called ‘visualanthropology.’ A video popped up in the feed recently of some guys sitting around riffing off Paris Hilton and coming up with the idea that she is a Situationist. I thought the notion rather absurd and for some reason felt motivated to write a comment — and am now having a funny/serious discussion about ‘reading’ pop culture with someone who claims to have claimed that Paris Hilton is an anthropologist. Silly, but it’s Friday.

Strong is Thomas Strong, lecturer in the department of anthropology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He has previously held teaching and/or research posts at the University of Helsinki, the University of California, San Francisco, the University of Wisconsin, and (oddly enough) the American Academy of Ophthalmology. His publications include essays on the symbolism of blood and body in the U.S. and elsewhere, new cross-disciplinary work on kinship, and ideas of culture loss and bodily detumescence amongst the Dano-speakers of Papua New Guinea's eastern highlands province. His on-going research in PNG concerns transformations in sociality, gender relations, and personhood following the mid-twentieth-century repudiation of the traditional men's cult in the upper Asaro valley. His other interests include 'brand' as an ethnographic and analytic concept, HIV/AIDS (especially in the U.S. gay male community), and celebrity/fame.