I take it the OP/ckelty is North American and the persons above are all North American? Perhaps what Lander is doing is a bit “too close to home” to really notice what he’s up to. Your media pulls the same trick all the time.

He sets up all sorts of little traps which I think those predisposed to “North American thinking” might be unawares of; Lander’s “ethnography” (if you dare call it that) is laced with rhetoric.

Are people here familiar with Ian Hacking’s work? “Making up people”, etc (http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/hacking02.htm)?

Lander’s work is a work of fiction – he holds a degrees in Media Studies and Film Studies. He is NOT, I repeat, NOT an Anthropologist. His work becomes a “reality” due to people’s reaction to the work – Hacking’s “looping effect”. We – me, you, and most especially, the media – including blogs like this – are creating these fictive “white people”.

Anyone thought about it in these terms yet?

Here I would suggest that a book set in Papau New Guinea, Ira Bashkow’s _The Meaning of Whitemen: Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World_ is helpful for understanding what is going with “. Bashkow argues (p. 244) that

bq. race is constructed not only in persons and groups, but also in objects, institutions, activities, and places which are interpreted as having racial characteristics. Raced objects provide an illusion of clarity that the actual complexity of racial categories of persons does not support, and so we find that it is primarily through objects that racial characteristics that racial categories find confirmation in people’s lives.

Bashkow goes on to argue that way Orokaiva categorize objects racially reveals the way they think about the world-both in the sense of a conceptual scheme and in the sense of a set of moral values.

I think this applies to the “Stuff White People Like” website. I had been hoping to find the time to go through some of the list items in more detail, but the Friday deadline approaches and I haven’t, so let me make a claim about the whole: the objects in the list are all in various ways about the contradictions of being a politically progressive member of what Barbera Ehrenreich dubbed the PMC—the Professional Managerial Class.

PMCer’s are members of an insecure elite whose status depends on education and achievement and whose class reproduction depends on instilling a set of values (hard work, self discipline, certain kinds of status consumption) into their children. As a culture, we commonly talk about these values in terms of whiteness, though in fact we are NOT talking about the white working class (whose cultural designation as “white trash” is another reflection of the way class is raced in this country). Sherry Ortner has some good work on many aspects of this stuff, including how it is also gendered, how it orders relations between parents and children, and how this all works differently for middle and working class peoples.

Let me save space by putting the rest of this in bullet form.

* One consequence of the PMC economic insecurity is an intensification of the cultural importance of “success.” (But in ways that also draw on longstanding myths about mobility. Elizabeth’s Traube’s work on 80’s Hollywood movies is god on this.)

* This striving for success (and their whole elite status) is uncomfortable for people who identify as politically progressive even as it is deeply ingrained in their psyches.

* One consequence of this is an embrace of cultural things that signify a rejection of mere materialistic striving. This covers a wide variety of things:
(a) racial/cultural otherness (#2 religions their parents don’t belong to, #11 asian girls, #42 sushi and many, many, many other items on the list))
(b) “nature” (# 6 organic food)
(c) various forms of consumption-as-connoisseurship that attempt to belie SIMPLE versions of consumption as status (#1 coffee, #34 architecture, #40 apple products)
(d) hipness ((which is a subset of “c”)

One could go on here, and this would be the substance of a real ethnographic analysis (and why it is different from swpl): it would look at how each of the list items signifies within the broader terms it suggest give them context.

* Finally, all the cultural things that get embraced as a way of coping with the contradiction between striving and progressivism themselves become cultural capital in Bourdieu’s sense of “what you need to know to fit in with the elite.”

That last fact is (I think) where the humor comes from.

And if this is really successful, hopefully, I’ve achieved Kate’s goal of being offering some insight even to native members of the group in question (of which academics are central, definitional, members).

This is the difference between objectivity understood as representativity and reference to a specific, nameable social entity, and objectivty of the sort Weber taught us about: “not the ‘actual’ interconnection of ‘things’ but the conceptual inter-connection of problems…” The latter is a form of objectivity that transcends the questions about qualities of a social entity, and tends more towards questions about the significance of different qualities across different social entities.

SWPL actually does neither of these things, but kind of swims in the middle distance, a kind of metonymic theory in which the description of an act of consumption gives rise to an image of a consumer with implied qualities that that same consumer would never cop to directly (or proudly), and which therefore designate him/her as a member of “white people.” Just to be clear, since the discussion in the other runaway thread I started this week seems to suggest that clarity is in short supply: SWPL is not theory, it is not ethnography and it is not anthropology, it’s just the same button pushed over and over again, a button with a vague label like “anxieties experienced under late late late global capitalism by people with disposible income, a sense of irony and a desire to do good.” Ironically, SWPL the book will of course be one of the things SWPL.

writing unnecessarily long commments when one should be on vacation is also SWPL.

I have to give Chuk maximum style points, but disqualify the entry on the basis that it doesn’t promote anthropology… the principle reason being that it contains a grain of truth 😉 Seriously, the idea that an anthropologist takes longer to do what Lander did in months, is similar to the concern about what separates anthros/sociologists from journalists. When I read a really good NYT Mag piece that’s well researched and jauntily written, I often wonder what more an anthropologist might add… often I can figure it out by asking what I still don’t understand, and whether I can imagine a way to find out. Conversely, too much attention to detail would make SWPL unfunny, and hence unprofitable.

Comet Jo and gretchen’s answers come closet in my mind. I would even shorten the answer:

“Lander, an anthropologist? Cute, but a real anthropologist would be talking about WHY they like that stuff.”

And the answer would have to point to something concrete about the conceptual instability (as well as the concrete social situation) that exists in the morass of race and class in North America today.

As far as L.L. Wynn (and to some extent gretchen’s answer), I would argue that it is not central to anthropology that the people be “real”– Lander is employing a version of vulgar ideal typical analysis to get his point across, and I buy that. Appealing to real people is similar to appealing to sampling in statistics–it’s an important methodological point, but it’s not the heart of the matter; it can invalidate an argument, but it can’t prove one. I can imagine a very good ethnography that refers only to generic types and celebrities–the challenge would be to make them ideal typically specific, not real per se…

So I think Gretchen and Comet jo are tied in the lead. Any other takers? Enter as often as you want, voting closes friday. I intent to make my decision as arbitrary and unjust as possible 🙂

(This may be a more concrete version of Gretchen’s)

A little long, but hey, my standards for anthropology are reasonably high.

and a bonus, this time shorter (though it sets the bar higher):

Lander, an ethnographer? Cute, but a real ethnographer would surprise the reader with his/her findings, even if the reader belongs to the group being studied!

Lander, apparently, has discovered a more novel way to get paid for this practice than the rest of us—only he’s just joined the cabal. Call it a short cut to the top (maybe we hate him because he’s sooo nouveau riche). Give him ten years of talking and thinking as he is now (remember, all of the time—like us), and eventually he’ll sound like us too (or maybe the material will become so bland, analytic, and esoteric that popular culture will just spit him out).

“Lander the anthropologist? Cute, but a real anthropologist would still be doing this in ten years.”

“the challenge is reducing it to enough of a sound bite that we might say “Lander the anthropologist? Cute, but a real anthropologists would…”

“perhaps I should turn this into a contest. Best answer wins a complimentary copy of my new book… a real one”

ckelty, are you reserving the right to withdraw your offer if you only get one contest submission, or is the prize committed, regardless of how lame the submission(s)?

Just in case the latter holds, here’s my entry:

“Lander the anthropologist? Cute, but a real anthropologist would actually mention real people rather than generic types and celebrities.”