Comments on: Ethnicity, kinship, and… progress?

By: Colin Danby

Colin Danby — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 10:35:17 +0000

There’s a Schutzian lit in Austrian Economics, and he turns up in a lot of places — I don’t know what his standing is in anthro but he seems consistent with a lot of recent cultural anthro. This book:

Smith, Dorothy. 1987. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

contains come interesting critical comments. It’s still not clear to me how helpful Schutz is for the kind of stuff the Bourdieu calls habitus. But I’ve also found him a wee bit hard to get through, and I keep getting the sense that the real insights are in whichever Schutz book I’m not reading.

By: des von bladet

des von bladet — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 18:35:06 +0000

From a man who recommends gritting it out until you acquire a taste for Max “Chuckles” Weber’s dainty aphorismes, hem hem, that’s a caveat and a half, for sure. I’ll think I’ll have to stick with B&L until I have a rainy decade, since I am currently more than quite somewhat busy with Other Stuff.

Digital Genres, though, I rejoice to probably be able to fit in somehow.

By: Rex

Rex — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 18:20:19 +0000

I’ve been using Schutz over at digitalgenres.org to explore the nature of semiotic technologies.

Given my interests I often have to specify Alfred rather than Heinrich. A lot of people read Schutz, although the history of his reception in English is kind of weird. One piece of Schutziana not everyone gets to but which is very worthwhile is his essay “Making Music Together”, which is one of the best descriptions of making music I’ve ever read (Schutz played at a near-professional level, apparently). I’ve not read it, but it looks like Michael Barber’s “The Participating Citizen”, the recently released biography of Schutz, is better than Wagner’s earlier one. In fact, all of Barber’s stuff looks very interesting.

The big problem with Schutz is that his writing style is so stultifying — the ponderous German mandarin style is simply impossible to get through, even if you find what he’s saying so interesting.

By: des von bladet

des von bladet — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 16:12:41 +0000

Schutz! Are you just being enigmatically well-read with the Schutz shout out or do persons actually read him these days? I am currently reading Berger and Luckmann’s _The Social Construction of Reality, Man_ AKA Schutz Lite(TM) AKA the best book in the whole world ever if you’re me right now, so I am currently very much a Schutzian, for sure.

By: Kerim

Kerim — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 14:31:12 +0000

In Taiwan, the role of “place” in shaping identity has been intimately linked to the processes of state formation (in the late nineteenth century), and the rise of identity politics (in the late twentieth century). The initial rise of the state led to people abandoning their place-of-origin based ethnic identities as they became subjects and (later) citizens. More recently, place has become important again, as a new form of place-based multiculturalism was imported from Japan in order to counter the previous era’s Chinese nationalism.