Observing the locals

In a weird followup to Spengler’s Asia Times Obama piece which Strong wrote about on Sunday, Maureen Dowd (who was mentioned in Strong’s piece) seems to have picked up the “Obama profiles Americans the way anthropologists interact with primitive peoples” meme in her latest NY Times column:

His mother got her Ph.D. in anthropology, studying the culture of Indonesia. And as Obama has courted white, blue-collar voters in “Deer Hunter” and “Rocky” country, he has often appeared to be observing the odd habits of the colorful locals, resisting as the natives try to fatten him up like a foie gras goose, sampling Pennsylvania beer in a sports bar with his tie tight, awkwardly accepting bowling shoes as a gift from Bob Casey, examining the cheese and salami at the Italian Market here as intriguing ethnic artifacts, purchasing Utz Cheese Balls at a ShopRite in East Norriton and quizzing the women working in a chocolate factory about whether they could possibly really like the sugary doodads.

Even though she acknowledges that Obama “did not grow up in cosseted circumstances,” Dowd seems to feel that Obama’s elite academic upbringing (anthropologist mom included) makes it difficult for him to connect with ordinary folks. This is strange because Obama’s success as a grassroots community activist was widely remarked upon as one of his defining features until this new meme started last week.

Personally, I’m inclined to agree with Bob Herbert, who thinks his inability to connect with rural voters in Pennsylvania is about something other than “elitism.” You know … like the fact that he’s black? But that’s what got me thinking. Maybe that’s why the anthropology meme is so powerful. It allows people like Spengler and Dowd to avoid openly addressing the racial undertones of their own commentary. It highlights his alienness without directly invoking race as a factor. If anything, it is his unusual multi-ethnic elitist upbringing. But definitely not the fact that he is black.

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10 thoughts on “Observing the locals”

  1. John Kerry had the same problem connecting with “ordinary” Americans last time, and he wasn’t black.

    I’ve anticipated that Obama would become construed as the exotic outsider, “not one of us,” but I didn’t suspect that he’d construe himself as a hack anthropologist submitting his report explaining rural America to the San Francisco moneybags. That one surprised me.

  2. Obama is just a typical old style politician–kiss babies, shake hands, back slap (though I haven’t seen him do that), and dress the part for whatever crowd is on the agenda. But Obama’s success rests on being different, and that difference is the image of a new style politics. And so the press has to dig up a new vocabulary/story about the man. What better than this “anthropology” background. Almost Freudian with its emphasis on mother-influence, absent father (through divorce), the background of childhood playing out in the present and unconsciously guiding future actions. In the end its a double edged sword: on the one hand the emphasis on the otherness of Obama does set him above Hillary, who seems to sink into the ordinariness of politial diatribe; while at the same time if that otherness becomes too unfamiliar, it may alienate Obama from the general voting public. Certainly you can couch the issue of race in this framework.
    By the by, my own take on Obama is he is American and a politician. I don’t expect too much. Then again, he may be another John Kennedy. (On the whole though, I think the Democrats are lining up for another Chicago 1968).

  3. The anthropology::race connection had not occurred to me, but it seems a good possibility. Two points:

    The ‘bitter’ comment that set off the current round of commentary was similar to Frank’s _What’s the Matter with Kansas_ in tying ‘explosive’ cultural values to broad political trends. Socio-cultural anthropology is vaguely relevant to this culturalist-versus-(Marxist) structuralist view of politics.

    Second, though _anthropology_ does not actually mean _non-white_ in any semantic sense, the two terms are in a related semantic field. See, for example, this on-line glossary of terms in primatology:
    “anthropology : the study of the races, physical and mental characteristics, distribution, customs, social relationships, etc. of mankind: often restricted to the institutions, myths, etc. of primitive peoples”
    http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/Canopy/3220/NewGloss.html

  4. I’m enjoying the Obama stuff (and don’t have time to comment it at the moment), but what’s up with the “meme meme lately on sm? You guys going all Dawkins cultural evolution-y on me?

  5. I think what most of the articles are referring to when the word ‘meme’ is used is actually closer to the idea of a literary trope, that is, a repeatedly observed pattern of relationships between subjects, actions, and settings within a body of narrative. When disseminated through the internet, picked up by new writers, and reproduced in new articles, then they become memes.

  7. Um, I think it would be unfortunate if this thread were hijacked into discussion of ‘meme’ instead of discussion of the on-going attempt by conventional media and the US right-wing to slime Obama by calling him a Marxist (Kristol), Marxian (Rove), anti-American (Spengler et al), and so on, and in particular discussion of their attempt to throw anthropology into the mix. The open red-baiting now occurring in the States is shocking; it’s especially shocking to me that this discourse is not being slammed down by the Democratic party and is in fact being reproduced in part by Mrs. Clinton. The Clintons, Pelosi, Gore, and other Democratic leaders should be speaking out forcefully against this stuff and naming it what it is.

    I think Frank’s assessment above is pretty accurate, but my own access to the mediasphere of US culture is limited (I feel terribly uncertain without access to CNN or Fox News).

    Anyway, my usual sources tell me that the debate last night exhibited new lows in US political discourse. Meanwhile: you know, like, Iraq, financial meltdown, global food supply problems, global warming…

  8. “Meme” is common internet slang (in wide use on blogs) to refer to the viral spread of an idea, literary trope, or even a cultural practice. I was not using it as an “analytical tool,” so much as implying that this trope was spreading without the help of any vast right-wing conspiracy, as evidenced by the Dowd column. For more information, Google the word The fact that such a search results in 247,000,000 hits hints at how wide-spread the informal use of the term is. There are even websites like thedailymeme.com which attempt to track popular memes.

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